If India had offered asylum to Julian Assange

On August 22, 2012, dna carried a piece — “India should challenge the West and offer Assange asylum” — setting out why India should be the refuge of choice for the persecuted founder of WikiLeaks, and that it would be natural for India to provide him political and diplomatic protection.

At that time the author of the commentary had no inkling that Julian Assange had, indeed, approached our high commission (HC) in London with a request for asylum. Sometime after the dna piece, a senior Ministry of External Affairs (MEA) official referred to it and asked me, “What have you heard?”

Only now, some 10 months later, the penny dropped: dna being the only paper to carry such a piece, the official was probing whether, or how, I knew of Assange’s request. But, I had no clue.

On June 12, Assange said that India never responded to his repeated requests for asylum. Although the HC had received a hand-delivered letter on Assange’s behalf and issued a receipt for it on May 24, 2012, the government not only kept it a secret, but persists with denials even when there is incontrovertible evidence to the contrary.

Assange’s revelation of New Delhi ignoring his plea for asylum came in the course of an interview in which he said that India should give asylum to Edward Snowden, who blew the lid off cyber snooping by the US. It was because of Snowden — now in Hong Kong under China’s protection — that India learned how it was as much a victim of “intrusive intelligence gathering” by US authorities as China or other countries.

Snowden, a former employee of the CIA and the US’ National Security Agency (NSA), not only ferreted out top secret data from the NSA’s highly secure and sophisticated computer systems, but exposed how US surveillance programmes posed the gravest threat to other countries (including India) and to American democracy and freedom.

It is ironic that Snowden, who is hiding in Hong Kong, should have reposed such faith in the Chinese territory’s law to protect him from US persecution. No state — be it China, the US or India — believes in total Internet freedom. However, posturing by the US, and some of its companies like Google, projects Washington as a champion of Internet freedoms. If it really was a champion of such freedom, the US would not be hounding Brad Manning, Assange and Snowden.

The issue here is not whether China is a “champion of freedom”, but of power play in the matter of cyber security. It is a question of who will call the shots in the cyber world, where the US power is unchallenged. Since 2010, the US has been aggressively targeting China in the name of Internet freedoms. Now, China has captured a prize with which it can force the US to rewrite the rules governing cyber security of nations.

Snowden is China’s trump card. Now the US and China are the powers, a so-called G-2, engaged in striking a bargain over cyber security and related issues of sovereignty. Had India, instead of tiny Ecuador, given asylum to Assange, then Snowden, too, may have followed suit; and, India may have gained a say in drafting the terms of a global internet data regime. Besides, New Delhi would have scored one against Washington for the US spiriting away RAW agent Rabindra Singh.

Instead, India has been reduced to a spectator while the US and China negotiate a deal in one more game of global management that serves the interests of the G-2, and reinforces their role and power as G-2.

It is hardly surprising then that Indian foreign policy, if not the MEA itself, is perceived to be overtly aligned to Washington even where Indian interests are at stake.

The author is an independent political and foreign affairs commentator