Interesting musings by one Frenchman who is normally a Chinese shill on the current US planted hit-pieces in WaPoo, in particular the "Indian interference in Maldives elections" one
View: https://x.com/RnaudBertrand/status/1873934609765065173
posting the relevant bits
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How on earth would WaPo journalists have access to any of this? This was obviously leaked by intelligence services.
Which intelligence services? It doesn't take a genius to figure it out: which intelligence services would have "surveillance records of phone calls and meetings held by [a] RAW official" who is posted in "New Delhi’s embassy in Washington"? Or the capability to track "an Indian military aircraft with its transponder turned off"?
And for this we can only hypothesize and notice that it comes in the context of a striking deterioration of the relationship between the U.S. and India versus just a couple of years ago. You had the recent criminal indictment in the U.S. of Adani (a key Modi ally). You had the whole scandal around the assassinations and attempted assassinations of Khalistani separatists by India in Canada and the U.S. You just had the whole public debate around H-1B visa for Indian nationals. And you of course had the recent warming of relations between India and China (with notably the consensus to manage their border disputes) which ought to have profoundly displeased Washington.
Or it could simply be a warning shot to India by Washington, showing the depth of their penetration and surveillance capabilities of Indian operations with the implied message "we know everything you guys do and can expose much more so don't f*ck with us."
Again, we don't know... But if I were a betting man, I'd wager that far from intimidating India and creating friction in the relationship with China, this will more likely have the exact opposite effect.
Indian policymakers aren't naive; they can read between the lines of such stories and may conclude that an "ally" who surveils their diplomats and leaks sensitive intelligence to embarrass them isn't much of an "ally" at all...
At the end wha
t this story reveals isn't so much India's interference in the Maldives, but Washington's violation of other countries' sovereignty with its surveillance capabilities and its playbook of using its media outlet as geopolitical weapons. In a multipolar world where countries are increasingly wise to these tactics,
such moves tend to backfire and push nations who resent them closer together in an “alliance of the aggrieved.”
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I like this term "Alliance of the Aggrieved", very apt.
