I am embarrassingly uneducated about the region. Please help me be slightly less ignorant.

  • pooh [she/her]
    ·
    4 months ago

    It's bad. Basically a CIA coup: https://asiatimes.com/2024/08/bangladesh-as-color-revolution-on-indias-doorstep/

    • ButtBidet [he/him]
      ·
      4 months ago

      I'm not saying that it isn't a CIA coup, but the level of proof that this article gives is weak as feck:

      From whatever I have pieced together, it appears that adequate funding has been provided to the Jamaat-linked individuals operating in Bengal since at least last year and there had been some speculation that the US had funded a number of Islamist politicians who stood (and mostly won) during the Indian elections, opposing the candidates of India’s ruling BJP.

      Honestly maybe it is a CIA coup, I guess time will tell. As I stated in the last thread about this, I just don't trust non-leftist authors making such unsourced judgements about things.

      • pooh [she/her]
        ·
        edit-2
        4 months ago

        I don’t think you’re going to find a smoking gun here, but there are plenty of signs and also a larger pattern in the region for this sort of thing. This is from a great Vijay Prishad article posted elsewhere here:

        Over the course of the past decade, South Asia has faced significant challenges as the United States imposed a new cold war against China. Initially, India participated with the United States in the formations around the US Indo-Pacific Strategy. But, since the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, India has begun to distance itself from this US initiative and tried to put its own national agenda at the forefront. This meant that India did not condemn Russia but continued to buy Russian oil. At the same time, China had—through the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI)—built infrastructure in Bangladesh, Nepal, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka, India’s neighbors.

        It is perhaps not a coincidence that four governments in the region that had begun to collaborate with the BRI have fallen, and that their replacements in three of them are eager for better ties with the United States. This includes Shehbaz Sharif, who came to power in Pakistan in April 2022 with the ouster of Imran Khan (now in prison), Ranil Wickremesinghe, who briefly came to power in Sri Lanka in July 2022 after setting aside a mass uprising that had other ideas than the installation of a party with only one member in parliament (Wickremesinghe himself), and KP Sharma Oli, who came to power in July 2024 in Nepal after a parliamentary shuffle that removed the Maoists from power.

        • ButtBidet [he/him]
          ·
          4 months ago

          Seems reasonable enough. (sorry for the brief reply, I'm a bit busy atm)

      • Barx [none/use name]
        ·
        4 months ago

        The term is often used for all semis clandestine for operations of the US government. The CIA itself has had various open spinoffs that continue to operate. For example, the National Endowment for Democracy, to which a few interim government functionaries have ties, is a CIA cutout.

        The backgrounds of those in the interim government body are... conspicuous. One must ask why those people and not others. Why no trade unions. Why those students. The military leaders responsible for the coup, leveraging the student and labor protests to do it, are of course proximally making these decisions, but their absurdly pro-American appointments mean taking orders from the US. Those connections would not be new.

        It has the trappings of a color revolution, which is proper CIA territory. The title of the article uses this term.

      • pooh [she/her]
        ·
        4 months ago

        I take it you’re not familiar with what color revolutions really are. Which part of the US government do you think would be involved in pushing regime change like this?

        • EmmaGoldman [she/her, comrade/them]M
          ·
          4 months ago

          A field trip for the kids at Camp Dropshot, a counterrevolution themed CIA childrens outreach program jointly funded by generous donations from Berkshire Hathaway and JPMorganChase that focuses primarily on teaching children how to be compradors and to spin civil unrest into regime change.