Gaza, Ukraine, Hypocrisy

How much of rage and resentment can one fit into the smallest possible space?

Since the so-called 'Al-Aqsa Flood' of 7 October, 2023, I have been trying to understand why a few hundred young men would barge into homes, kill, rape and kidnap children, women and the elderly, and then brace themselves for the bloody retribution that would inevitably follow.

Seen from this part of the world, the disputed land, which each side accuses the other of being an 'occupier', is amazingly small. Israel is half the size of Kerala, one of the smallest states in India, while the Gaza strip, a thin sliver of coastal land within Israel, is just about 6km wide and 41km long! - less than a marathon run, a land area 0.6% the size of Delhi NCR.

While Israel may seem like a Goliath compared to tiny Gaza, the comparison flips when you see how the jewish country is placed within a sea of Islamic nations. Whichever way you look at the historical events that led up to the latest carnage it is fact that this region has a disproportionate influence on global geo-politics. Life and death in this part of the world matters much more than in, say, East Asia, Africa or LatAm. 

Today is day-611 of Russia-Ukraine war and  day-22 of the Israel-Gaza war. Two weeks ago an article was published in the Atlantic titled, Israel is Walking into A Trap. Sure enough this seems to be playing out as predicted. Gaza is being reduced to rubble, hundreds are getting killed every day and a right-wing Israeli government is unable to draw back from its own rhetoric, to think beyond its own self-image of an uncompromising, muscular Zion.

Having once exchanged Gilad Shalit, a PoW for 1027 Palestinian prisoners, will it  release 6000 more to get back its ~200 kidnapped citizens?  

One of the most balance interviews I have come across on this topic is one with Dominique De Villepin, former Prime Minister of France on RMC. Thanks to @RnaudBertrand we have the English translation which is worth reading in full : 

"Hamas has set a trap for us, and this trap is one of maximum horror, of maximum cruelty. And so there's a risk of an escalation in militarism, of more military interventions, as if we could with armies solve a problem as serious as the Palestinian question. There's also a second major trap, which is that of Occidentalism. We find ourselves trapped, with Israel, in this western bloc which today is being challenged by most of the international community. [Presenter: What is Occidentalism?] Occidentalism is the idea that the West, which for 5 centuries managed the world's affairs, will be able to quietly continue to do so. And we can clearly see, even in the debates of the French political class, that there is the idea that, faced with what is currently happening in the Middle East, we must continue the fight even more, towards what might resemble a religious or a civilizational war. That is to say, to isolate ourselves even more on the international stage. This is not the way, especially since there's a third trap, which is that of moralism. And here we have in a way the proof, through what is happening in Ukraine and what is happening in the Middle East, of this double standard that is denounced everywhere in the world, including in recent weeks when I travel to Africa, the Middle East, or Latin America. The criticism is always the same: look at how civilian populations are treated in Gaza, you denounce what happened in Ukraine, and you are very timid in the face of the tragedy unfolding in Gaza. Consider international law, the second criticism that is made by the global south. We sanction Russia when it aggresses Ukraine, we sanction Russia when it doesn't respect the resolutions of the United Nations, and it's been 70 years that the resolutions of the United Nations have been voted in vain and that Israel doesn't respect them. [Presenter: Do you believe that the Westerners are currently guilty of hubris?] Westerners must open their eyes to the extent of the historical drama unfolding before us to find the right answers. [Presenter: What is the historical drama? I mean, we're talking about the tragedy of October 7th first and foremost, right?] Of course, there are these horrors happening, but the way to respond to them is crucial. Are we going to kill the future by finding the wrong answers... [Presenter: Kill the future?] Kill the future, yes! Why? [Presenter: But who is killing whom?] You are in a game of causes and effects. Faced with the tragedy of history, one cannot take this 'chain of causality' analytical grid, simply because if you do you can't escape from it. Once we understand that there is a trap, once we realize that behind this trap there has also been a change in the Middle East regarding the Palestinian issue... The situation today is profoundly different [from what it was in the past]. The Palestinian cause was a political and secular cause. Today we are faced with an Islamist cause, led by Hamas. Obviously, this kind of cause is absolute and allows no form of negotiation. On the Israeli side, there has also been a development. Zionism was secular and political, championed by Theodor Herzl in the late 19th century. It has largely become messianic, biblical today. This means that they too do not want to compromise, and everything that the far-right Israeli government does, continuing to encourage colonization, obviously makes things worse, including since October 7th. So in this context, understand that we are already in this region facing a problem that seems profoundly insoluble. Added to this is the hardening of states. Diplomatically, look at the statements of the King of Jordan, they are not the same as six months ago. Look at the statements of Erdogan in Turkey. [Presenter: Precisely, these are extremely harsh statements...] Extremely worrying. Why? Because if the Palestinian cause, the Palestinian issue, hasn't been brought to the forefront, hasn't been put on stage [for a while], and if most of the youth today in Europe have often never even heard of it, it remains for the Arab peoples the mother of all battles. All the progress made towards an attempt to stabilize the Middle East, where one could believe... [Presenter: Yes, but whose fault is it? I have a hard time following you, is it Hamas's fault?] But Ms. Malherbe, I am trained as a diplomat. The question of fault will be addressed by historians and philosophers. [Presenter: But you can't remain neutral, it's difficult, it's complicated, isn't it?] I am not neutral, I am in action. I am simply telling you that every day that passes, we can ensure that this horrific cycle stops... that's why I speak of a trap and that's why it's so important to know what response we are going to give. We stand alone before history today. And we do not treat this new world the way we currently do, knowing that today we are no longer in a position of strength, we are not able to manage on our own, as the world's policemen. [Presenter: So what do we do?] Exactly, what should we do? This is where it is essential not to cut off anyone on the international stage. [Presenter: Including the Russians?] Everyone. [Presenter: Everyone? Should we ask the Russians for help?] I'm not saying we should ask the Russians for help. I'm saying: if the Russians can contribute by calming some factions in this region, then it will be a step in the right direction. [Presenter: How can we proportionally respond to barbarism? It's no longer army against army.] But listen, Appolline de Malherbe, the civilian populations that are dying in Gaza, don't they exist? So because horror was committed on one side, horror must be committed on the other? [Presenter: Do we indeed need to equate the two?] No, it's you who are doing that. I'm not saying I equate the faults. I try to take into account what a large part of humanity thinks. There is certainly a realistic objective to pursue, which is to eradicate the Hamas leaders who committed this horror. And not to confuse the Palestinians with Hamas, that's a realistic goal. The second thing is a targeted response. Let's define realistic political objectives. And the third thing is a combined response. Because there is no effective use of force without a political strategy. We are not in 1973 or in 1967. There are things no army in the world knows how to do, which is to win in an asymmetrical battle against terrorists. The war on terror has never been won anywhere. And it instead triggers extremely dramatic misdeeds, cycles, and escalations. If America lost in Afghanistan, if America lost in Iraq, if we lost in the Sahel, it's because it's a battle that can't be won simply, it's not like you have a hammer that strikes a nail and the problem is solved. So we need to mobilize the international community, get out of this Western entrapment in which we are. [Presenter: But when Emmanuel Macron talks about an international coalition…] Yes, and what was the response? [Presenter: None.] Exactly. We need a political perspective, and this is challenging because the two-state solution has been removed from the Israeli political and diplomatic program. Israel needs to understand that for a country with a territory of 20,000 square kilometers, a population of 9 million inhabitants, facing 1.5 billion people... Peoples have never forgotten that the Palestinian cause and the injustice done to the Palestinians was a significant source of mobilization. We must consider this situation, and I believe it is essential to help Israel, to guide... some say impose, but I think it's better to convince, to move in this direction. The challenge is that there is no interlocutor today, neither on the Israeli side nor the Palestinian side. We need to bring out interlocutors. [Presenter: It's not for us to choose who will be the leaders of Palestine.] The Israeli policy over recent years did not necessarily want to cultivate a Palestinian leadership... Many are in prison, and Israel's interest - because I repeat: it was not in their program or in Israel's interest at the time, or so they thought - was instead to divide the Palestinians and ensure that the Palestinian question fades. This Palestinian question will not fade. And so we must address it and find an answer. This is where we need courage. The use of force is a dead end. The moral condemnation of what Hamas did - and there's no "but" in my words regarding the moral condemnation of this horror - must not prevent us from moving forward politically and diplomatically in an enlightened manner. The law of retaliation is a never-ending cycle. [Presenter: The "eye for an eye, tooth for tooth".] Yes. That's why the political response must be defended by us. Israel has a right to self-defense, but this right cannot be indiscriminate vengeance. And there cannot be collective responsibility of the Palestinian people for the actions of a terrorist minority from Hamas. When you get into this cycle of finding faults, one side's memories clash with the other's. Some will juxtapose Israel's memories with the memories of the Nakba, the 1948 catastrophe, which is a disaster that the Palestinians still experience every day. So you can't break these cycles. We must have the strength, of course, to understand and denounce what happened, and from this standpoint, there's no doubt about our position. But we must also have the courage, and that's what diplomacy is... diplomacy is about being able to believe that there is light at the end of the tunnel. And that's the cunning of history; when you're at the bottom, something can happen that gives hope. After the 1973 war, who would have thought that before the end of the decade, Egypt would sign a peace treaty with Israel? The debate shouldn't be about rhetoric or word choice. The debate today is about action; we must act. And when you think about action, there are two options. Either it's war, war, war. Or it's about trying to move towards peace, and I'll say it again, it's in Israel's interest. It's in Israel's interest!"

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LINKS & REFERENCES

* Ibish, Hussain (2023), The Atlantic - https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2023/10/israel-hamas-war-iran-trap/675628/

* X @RnaudBertrand - https://x.com/RnaudBertrand/status/1718201487132885246

Ukraine & Sy Hersh

 It is now one year since the Russia-Ukraine war began.

All through the murder and mayhem, the wanton destruction of cities and displacement of people that has been happening since 24 February, 2022, one thing has become increasingly clear - the whole thing is what we suspected it to be: a set-up. It is the people of Ukraine who are getting played by its 'friends and allies'. 

The current situation reminds us of the African proverb  - 'When elephants fight, it is the grass that gets trampled'. The trampling is happening not only in Ukraine but also on the rest of continental Europe. And yet, the amazing thing is that not one newspaper or magazine from the so-called 'free-world' had the guts to speak truth to power, and provide a platform to the most celebrated investigative journalist of our times, Seymour Hersh. 

A few years ago the New Yorker had refused to carry Hersh's story on the truth behind the killing of Osama Bin Laden - it was picked up by the London Review of Books. This time even the LRB chickened out out, so he had to publish it as a blog-post titled, "How America Took Out the Nord Stream Pipeline".

Thanks to this one journalist we now have a better understanding of how this whole tragedy played out. How the US ignored its own tacit agreement with Russia while expanding NATO; how it positioned nuclear missiles closer and closer to Russian cities until it created a situation for an 'unproved aggression'; how it resented Europe's closer economic ties with a rival to a point where it ganged up with Norway to blow up under-sea gas pipelines that belonged to its own close allies! 

Now USA is in a happy situation where it (along with Norway) can sell overpriced fuel to its hapless European allies while at the same time, ramping up its own arms export export industry. Sell energy, sell guns, and go laughing all the way to the bank. So what if a few million Ukrainians and Russians die in the bargain?

Ever since this story came out I have been poring over articles, YouTube videos - anything to understand more about the life and work of Seymour Hersh. What an amazing life!

The United States of America redeems itself - to some extent - by not harming this journalist, and by letting him carry on with his work.

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REFERENCES & LINKS

Substack blog - How America Took Out the Nord Stream Pipeline (2023) - https://seymourhersh.substack.com/p/how-america-took-out-the-nord-stream

NY Public Library (2018) - https://youtu.be/JRvXx-H0b-Y

The Killing of OBL (2016) - https://youtu.be/yyISsqHShlM

LRB Interview (2016) - https://youtu.be/R_zk5b7v9M0

The Power of One

This is one obituary that refuses to leave my mindspace.

It is not often that we see touching, personal tributes to politician who passed away but E. Chandrasekharan Nair seems to have been a very unusual politician indeed. He is being refered to as the driving force behind Kerala's public distribution system which is not just functional (an usual thing in India), but also super efficient in delivering essential provisions (grains, fuel) to those who need it the most.

My own mother is a big fan of ECN. For a citizen who is not below the poverty line (BPL), even she can get 2kg of raw rice, 2kg of chemba (red) rice, 2kg of wheat atta and 0.5L of kerosene - all for just INR 100. "Where else in the world can you walk into a PDS shop and get so much for INR 100?" she asks, "Folks with BPL cards can get foodgrains at INR 1/kg!...even migrant labourers from other states are eligible for this facility!"

In most other states, foodgrains meant for the PDS is regularly siphoned off to private millers who, in turn, package it and sell it as branded stuff. How did one politician manage to fight off the usual lobbies and pressure-groups to put in place a welfare system that actually works?

The key to building an efficient PDS apparantly lies in the government agency that runs it. In this case, ECN was responsible for implementing key reforms as the minister in charge of  Kerala's Department of Food and Civil Supplies, for three long stints (1980-81, 1987-91 and 1996-2001).

Under this department, a public company, Kerala State Civil Supplies Corp Ltd (SupplyCo) runs a vast machinery for efficiently procuring foodgrains directly from the farmers at minimum support prices, of getting the grain processed in contracted mills, and, finally, getting them distributed through 14 district depots, 56 taluk depots and around 1500 retail outlets (Maveli Stores). The sales turnover of this company was nearly INR 4000 crores in 2015-16!


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REFERENCES / LINKS

- Obituary (NewsMinute) - http://www.thenewsminute.com/article/ex-kerala-minister-e-chandrasekharan-nair-architect-maveli-stores-passes-away-72372
- Obituary (The Hindu) - http://www.thehindu.com/news/national/kerala/e-chandrasekharan-nair-passes-away/article21095877.ece
(2000) - Interview - http://www.frontline.in/static/html/fl1719/17190980.htm
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E._Chandrasekharan_Nair
Maveli Stores - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maveli_Stores
SupplyCo, Kerala - http://supplycokerala.com/

When History Repeats Itself

Each time I read a book by William Dalrymple, I wonder why our country does not produce such engaging scholar-storytellers. The book, "Return of a King" is no exception. It is meticulously researched and weaves a story that blends the contrasting versions of the victorious and the vanquished, into one 500-page, eminently readable tome.

In this book, the author also has is also a personal angle tucked away in the story. Dalrymple's great-great-grand uncle was an active participant in the Afghan wars, first as a bureaucrat in Punjab, and then as a soldier and prisoner-of-war in Afghanistan. So it also serves, to some extent, as the family history of a Scottish Highlander.

The book describes a period is spread across three centuries, from the time of Nadir Shah's invasion and plunder of Delhi in 1739 to the entry of British and US forces in the 1980s,  with the proclaimed intent of "fighting terror" and "restoring democracy" in what had become the stronghold of Osama bin Laden and his band of Arab fighters.

At the time of Nadir Shah, it was his Shiite Persian followers - the Qizilbash - along with his former soldiers, who formed the ruling elite of Afghanistan. The Sadozai clan was formed by a soldier named Ahmad Shah Abdali/Durrani who was to defeat the Maratha forces in the Third Battle of Panipat in 1761, while the Barakzai clan arose from a gunner is Nadir's army named, Haji Jamal Khan.

While the central theme is politics, intrigue and power-struggles between these two clans, the book makes you wonder about the Afghanistan that would have existed long before it was taken over by Islamic soldiers of fortune, and of the times when fighting "Jihad" against "Infidels" was not the rousing war-cry that destroyed a rich cultural heritage.

It offers glimpses of economic linkages cultural traditions that persisted even until the last century -- of Shikarpuri merchants whom kings approached to fund their war-efforts; of Nepali pilgrims visiting the remains of Hindu holy sites in the mountains; of regular raids that took place across the Khyber Pass into the plains; slave traders who flourished in the markets of Kabul, Khulm and Balkh, all the way to Bukhara.

You wonder what a different world it would have been a few thousand years ago, when Princess Gandhari of Mahabharata moved out of Khandahar to marry a king in the Gangetic plains, and then went on to blindfold herself and listen to a courtier's commentary of the internecine war that destroyed her dynasty.

Later, did Alexander's army too wreak vengeance on villages just as the British army did in the early 1840s? Did they also plunder and rape, torch villages and cut down all fruiting trees, just as the British did in the Jalalabad valley and in villages like Istalif, the Shomali plains (which is today home to the USAF base at Baghram)?

What thoughts would have crossed the minds of the thousands of people who were taken away as slaves - so many that an entire mountain range is now called the Hindukush ("Hindu Killer") where most perished? In this context, some of the narratives make you cringe, such as the one by Josiah Harlan that describes how Uzbek slave-traders sewed their captives to their horse-saddles:

"To oblige the prisoner to keep up, a strand of coarse horse-hair is passed by means of a crooked needle, under around the collar-bone. a few inches from its junction with the sternum; with the hair a loop is formed which they attach a rope that may be fastened to the saddle. The captive is constrained to keep near the retreating horse-man, with his hands tied behind his person, is altogether helpless" 

This story revolves around the return of a king, and yet, it reads like a play that has been performed many times over on the same stage. The costumes change, religious leanings change from Hindu and Buddhist to Islam; languages switch from maybe Kharoshti/Prakrit, Pali, and Sanskrit to Persian, Pashto, Dari and English, but the same tragedy gets repeated over and over again.

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LINKS & REFERENCES

* GoodReads - "Return of a King" - https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/13454654-return-of-a-king
* Istalif village - http://www.istalif.com/

The Not-so-Holy Buffalo

The lunatic fringe in India now has a new avatar - "Gau Rakshaks" - the self-appointed cow-protectors who patrol our roads and highways like the thugee of yore, seeking out the weak and the meek to bully, intimidate, and kill.

Yesterday night they set upon a Gujjar family in Jammu, pulled down a police picket in which they had taken shelter and beat them up for plying their trade. Last week another mob attacked a truck suspected of transporting cows to slaughterhouses, and after beating up the driver, found out that their cargo was not cows but buffaloes.  A clear case of mistaken identity but how does one explain that to a mob targeting muslims?

What explains this sudden touchiness for the well being of cows? In the North Indian Gangetic belt, life has evolved around a pastoral economy. Wealth was measured by the number of cows you owned; Gods were created from iconic cowherds and much loved stories woven around their adventures with the "Gopikas" on the banks of the Yamuna; communities and intra-caste divisions were based on "Gotras"...and yet, even when the cows were pivotal to life in ancient India, our scriptures (eg. Taitriya Brahmana) say that beef was a special treat reserved for honored guests.

The problem with inconvenient truth's is that they lack the emotional appeal, and the political power that can be squeezed out of it. Consider this screenshot of recent tweet. Cows qualify as "harmless, giving animals", but, not other farm animals!

The mobs - and their puppeteers - choose to ignore the face that times have changed. Cows are being rapidly replaced by buffaloes on Indian farms. Compared to cows, buffaloes are a lot more valuable now the north Indian farmer for the simple reason that they provide a higher RoI. The water buffaloes do not carry the cultural baggage of "holiness" associated with cows in North India. So they are treated like the usual farm animals - valuable when they are lactating or pulling carts but easily sold off to the nearest abattoir the moment they cease to be useful on the farm.

So it comes as no surprise that buffaloes provide more than 55 per cent of the milk that Indians consume. They are also the backbone of India's thriving meat export industry. One single company - The Allana Group, processes no less than 7000 buffaloes a day. Last year, we exported about 1.2 million tons of "carabeef" worth INR 23,646 Cr (USD 3.6 billion)!

Despite being one of the original homes of the water buffalo, why is it that in India this animal considered less holy, less worthy of any of the sentiments associated with the cow?

Mythology provides some pointers and clues.  One of the many villains in Indian mythology is "Mahisasura", that unseemly combination of a demon and a water-buffalo who is ultimately slain by Durga, the celebrated Mother Goddess. In many temples there is nothing irregular about offering animal sacrifice, and the buffalo tops the list of blood offerings. At the famous Kalibari temple in Kolkata I remember being taken aback by the sudden sight of severed buffalo heads in the sanctum. Ditto for temples in the Kathmandu valley and the Kamakshi temple at near Gauhati, Assam.

Perhaps the only place where I have seen buffaloes raised to an iconic status is at the Achaleshwar Mahadev Temple in Mount Abu, Rajasthan.

On the banks of the temple pond, stand three stately buffaloes, overlooking a herd of their real-life brethren cooling off in the muddy waters. As with most historical places in India, there are no plaques telling you who took the trouble of putting up the statues, and for what reason. The tourist-guides, will, as usual, tell you some cock-and-bull story that fits the contemporary bias against buffaloes.

It is a sad sign of out times that political revival of the 'Hindu Identity' is being built on regressive, shallow symbolism.

If the celebrated Polish artist, Pawel Kuczynski,  turned his attention to contemporary India, he might have replaced the cat in this painting with a cow, and added a few people (bearded, skull-capped) into the barn! :/

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LINKS

* ENS (2017): Where Indian Meat Exports Go -- http://indianexpress.com/article/explained/where-indian-buffalo-meat-exports-go-4609512/

* Damodaran, Harish (2012): Cow Belt or Buffalo Nation? http://www.thehindubusinessline.com/opinion/columns/harish-damodaran/cow-belt-or-buffalo-nation/article3328532.ece

- More than 55 per cent of the milk that Indians consume now flows from the udders of buffaloes, which are neither born holy nor have holiness thrust upon them.- buffaloes constituted 34.6 per cent of the country's total bovine animal population (male plus female) as per the latest 2007 Livestock Census- An average Murrah buffalo produces 2,000-odd litres over a 300-day lactation period, which is more or less what comparable elite indigenous cattle breeds such as Sahiwal yield. But buffalo milk also fetches higher price, as it contains 7-7.5 per cent fat – almost twice that from cows.- In 2010-11, 7.1 lakh tonnes of buffalo meat, worth Rs. 8,413 crore, was officially shipped out from India.

* Bovidae Family - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bovidae
* Devdatt Pattnak: In Defense of the Buffalo - http://devdutt.com/articles/indian-mythology/in-defence-of-the-buffalo.html

* Allana Group - http://www.allana.com/proteins/
- 57% of total buffalo population of the world, India is considered as the home track of some of the finest breeds of buffaloes

Who is Lily Thomas?

The answer to this question lies in an old, familiar story:

Once upon a time, politicians in India were public-spirited freedom fighters and nation-builders. Then came a generation of midgets who made up for their lack of real public support by using criminals to intimidate voters, stuff ballot boxes and bully the opposition. One fine morning, the midgets woke up to discover that their pit-bulls had taken over the podium. Instead of remaining as mere sidekicks, the criminals donned the politicians white costume, and got themselves elected to the parliament and state assemblies.

The old story had, by now, become a real nightmare. In 2012, more than 25 percent of the sitting Members of Parliament (MPs) faced criminal indictment. In State Assemblies, the number hovered around 20 per cent. The public remained largely apathetic -- except for occasional howls of protest from NGOs. So the political parties, already struggling to fund election campaigns, continued to put up candidates who had been flitting in and out of courthouses and jails.

Then, on 10 July 2013, something unusual happened. A Supreme Court bench of justices A K Patnaik and S J Mukhopadhaya held that, "The only question is about the vires of section 8(4) of the Representation of the People Act (RPA), 1951 and we hold that it is ultra vires and that the disqualification takes place from the date of conviction".

Behind all the Latin and legalese, this simply meant that, henceforth, convicted criminals could no longer sit in the Indian parliament, or in the state assemblies.

Who had prodded the Supreme Court to come to this wonderful conclusion? --- An old lady named Lily Thomas.

Lily is one of oldest advocates practicing at the Supreme Court of India.  In 2005, she had filed a writ petition in the apex court along with Satya Narain Shukla, challenging a provision (Section 8.4) of the Representation of the People Act, 1951,  which protects a convicted lawmakers against disqualification if they just filed an appeal. It took her eight years to win this fight.

Now around 85 years old, she was of the earliest women to get an LLM degree in India. She began and  her practice in the Madras High Court. In 1960, she moved to Delhi to do a PhD but discovered that she was not really cut out for academia. “I realized that I was not competent to do research,” she says, “so I started practicing in the Supreme Court”.

The criminals in our parliament will surely rue the day she started 'practicing'!

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REFERENCES & LINKS

* Kalra, Aparna (2013): Lily Thomas: 87-year-old crusader against 'tainted' legislators, Sify-BS, 14 July 2013 -- url -- http://www.sify.com/news/lily-thomas-87-year-old-crusader-against-tainted-legislators-news-national-nhoanwbhjgj.html
* PTI (2013): MPs, MLAs will be disqualified on date of conviction: SC, New Indian Express, 10Jul13 -- url -- http://newindianexpress.com/nation/MPs-MLAs-will-be-disqualified-on-date-of-conviction-SC/2013/07/10/article1676988.ece
* Heroes who have sent politicians scurrying for cover, Mumbai Mirror, 17 July 2013 -- http://www.mumbaimirror.com/news/india/Heroes-who-have-sent-politicians-scurrying-for-cover/articleshow/21048175.cms ]
* Bar & Bench article (17 July 2013) -- http://www.barandbench.com/content/%E2%80%9C-have-criminals-politicians-insult-our-parliamentary-system%E2%80%9D%E2%80%93-lily-thomas#.UfEBlI3EKSp
* Vaishnav, Milan (2011): THE MARKET FOR INDIA'S CRIMINAL POLITICIANS, The Hindu Business Line, 2011http://www.thehindubusinessline.com/opinion/the-market-for-indias-criminal-politicians/article2893232.ece

* The Representation of the People Act, 1951 -- url -- http://lawmin.nic.in/legislative/election/volume%201/representation%20of%20the%20people%20act,%201951.pdf

Boneless Wonder

"Where have I heard that before?"

This is the thought that crossed my mind when I read the following passage from a Private Member's Bill tabled in the Indian Parliament today:

(viii) Panchayati Raj continued on paper and Sarpanches got elected without any attendant charter of responsibilities and the financial powers that could have rendered their duties effective and meaningful;
(ix) despite the detailed enumeration of allocable functions to Panchayats in Eleventh Schedule (article 243 G) of the Constitution, the devolution of financial powers to make these enumerated functions meaningful and the non vacation of administrative space by concerned government departments, has resulted in rendering the Panchayati Raj a boneless wonder;

It turns out that the original expression comes from a circus advertisement that was used by Winston Churchill to flame Ramsey MacDonald in the 1930s. He is the original quote -

"I remember when I was a child, being taken to the celebrated Barnum's Circus, which contained an exhibition of freaks and monstrosities, but the exhibit on the program which I most desired to see was the one described as "The Boneless Wonder". My parents judged that the spectacle would be too demoralizing and revolting for my youthful eye and I have waited fifty years, to see The Boneless Wonder sitting on the Treasury Bench."
Winston Churchill On Ramsay MacDonald

It seems Ramsey M found himself quite often at the receiving end of Churchill's barbs. Here is another one -

"[Ramsey] MacDonald has the gift of compressing the largest amount of words into the smallest amount of thoughts."

For a wider sample of barbs & quotes, look here.

Visualizing India's Electorate

Data visualizers are now turning their attention to Indian politics!

Here is an interesting presentation by S. Anand of Gramener.com --

Visualising politics from gramener

Not all slides are communicate  clearly but, on the whole, one does get a flavor of the complications involved in Indian electoral politics.

Anand's blog is also very cool: http://www.s-anand.net/

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REFERENCES / LINKS

* Four Color Theorem - (1976) by Kenneth Appel and Wolfgang Haken. It was the first major theorem to be proved using a computer. Wiki -- http://www.s-anand.net/

Yet Another Summit Meeting

The Japanese Prime Minister, Noda, visited India this week. As usual, there was much talk about boosting trade, technology transfer and maintaining high levels of ODA assistance for infrastructure projects. Despite all the special reports, exclusive interviews and sound-bites, there seems to be little evidence of any real change in the bilateral equation.

When the dust settles down one hard fact will still remain: Japan-India trade stands at $15 billion while Sino-Japan trade is chugging on at $340 billion per year.

Why is there such a huge gap between the rhetoric and reality? A part of the answer perhaps lies in the completely unrealistic expectations with which Indian's approach the Japanese. Take for instance, India's desire to obtain advanced technologies from Japan. On 28 Dec., an Indian Express report on bullet trains headline said, 'Japan Says Will Provide Latest Technology'. The crux of the report was a quote by one Toshihiro Yamakoshi, Director, Office of Project Development, Japan's transport ministry, who is aparantly stated, 'Japan would be offering the necessary technology' for the six corridors that India is planning to develop.

A transport ministry offers technology that does not belong to it and the report claims that Japan 'will provide latest technology'. This might have made some sense if the reporter was quoting a Soviet official in the erstwhile USSR. But Japan is not USSR and neither companies not technologies belong to the government to do as they please.

The Chinese officials understood this simple fact a couple of decades ago and focussed their attention, not on the MITI officials, but on Japanese companies that needed cheap labor and access to markets. They delivered what was promised in meetings, played transnationals against each other and, over the years,  built-up their own companies as formidable competitors.

At the end of this prime-ministerial visit, Indian politicians and bureaucrats will no doubt pat each other on the backs and hope that the private sector will  take a cue from the high-level discussions and "do the needful" - until the next summit meeting.

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REFERENCES / LINKS

• Dashtidar, Avishek G and Shubhajit Roy (2011): JAPAN SAYS WILL PROVIDE LATEST TECH, Indian Express, 28 Dec 11, p7
• Garia, Nikita (2011): What They Said: Japanese Prime Minister's Visit, 31 Dec. 2011, URL -  http://blogs.wsj.com/indiarealtime/2011/12/31/what-they-said-japanese-prime-ministers-india-visit/
• Edit IE (2011): LIFTING THE GAME, IE 28 Dec 11, p10
• ENS Bureau (2011): JAPAN MAY INVEST $4.5bn IN DELHI-MUMBAI CORRIDOR, IE 28 Dec 11 p16

* Joint Forum of Indian and Japanese CEOs - Joint Report (28 December 2011) - http://www.keidanren.or.jp/english/policy/2011/116.html

Formula-1 in the Fields of Dankaur

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The race is over. Vettel won.

Mayavati, representing the 'head of state', has handed over the gleaming trophies while the ministers of the central government have been acting like petulant children, claiming that they were not invited and threatening tax raids at the same time. Given their handling of the Commonwealth Games, its a small mercy that they were not directly involved!

The English newspapers and TV channels have been going on and on about the success of India' first Formula 1 Series. There are breathless descriptions of the assorted celebrities studding the stands; of the roar of engines and incredible speeds.

However, but I have been looking for the more mundane details :

• First of all, who conceived the plan for transforming a sleepy Delhi suburb into a world-class F1 circuit facility?
• Why is it that Mayavati's Uttar Pradesh succeeded while the big boys of Mumbai and Bangalore threw in the towel and fell by the wayside?
• How did the Jaypee Group engage the best international expertise to design and implement a project of this scale?

Some information that has emerged -

Project cost: Jaypee spent $200m for the construction and paid another $200 as license fees to F1
Key Player: Vickey Chandok, President, Federation of Motor Sports Clubs of India (FMSCI)

I am yet to come across a story that ties all these loose threads. The search continues...

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REFERENCES & LINKS

Will F1 put economy on fast track? - V. SUMANTRAN (Business Line, 2 Nov., 2011)

Formula 1: India GP to 'Break-Even in Four Years (ET, 1 Nov., 2011) -

Wikimap of Dankaur, Noida

Protecting the Corrupt

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During the past few weeks, the UPA government has been making a grand display of its incompetence. Faced with mounting public anger over the issue of corruption and black-money it seems have really lost it. Here are some excepts from the press that reflect my own frustration and angst:

* Editorial, BusinessLine (2011). DO PEOPLE MATTER? The Hindu BusinessLine, 8 June 2011

- The main takeaway for the people is that this government will go to any lengths to protect the corrupt. The mistakes have been well chronicled but it is the ingenuous arguments that now stand out. One is that groups of well meaning citizens cannot be allowed to hijack legislative agenda; the other is that the RSS is behind the anti-corruption movement.
- The first argument - that citizens should not drive the legislative agenda - is intellectually identical to what colonial and Soviet style authoritarian governments tend to use: we know what's good for you... This is sheer effrontery.

- It is the Congress party that has created the National Advisory Committee (NAC), chaired by its President. If it is fine for the (unelected members of) NAC to recommend legislation, why is it not all right for Anna Hazare and Ramdev to do likewise? As Shekesphere said, it is surely a tangled web they weave when they seek to deceive.

* Raghavan, B.S (2011). WILL, NOT MAGIC WAND, IS NEEDED. OpEd The Hindu BusinessLine, 8 June 2011

- All we are getting...from Dr. Singh is alibis and excuses: His helplessness because of coalition compulsions, the imperative need to adhere to legal niceties, the inadvisability of second-guessing ongoing investigations and court proceedings, the inability to take action on allegations pending proof to the hilt; the difficulty in dealing with foreign governments in regard to black money.
- Dr. Singh bends over backwards not to hurt perpetrators of serious crimes but is so very quick in unleashing the Delhi police...on peacefully sleeping men, women and children who had come to join the fight against corruption and black money.

* Mehta, Bhanu Pratap (2011). SECOND TIME AS FARCE. Indian Express, 8 JUne 2011

- The UPA government continues to defy all norms of rationality, morality, commonsense and good judgement. These days it is difficult to make sense of what the government is thinking, if it is thinking at all. But on every measure, the midnight raid on Baba Ramdev and his supporters was an act of wilful perversity. The government may have thought its raid was a show of authority. Instead it made the state look like a set of thuggish weaklings: conducting raids on peaceful congregations in the middle of the night.
- The Congress started with cravenness, then descended to impunity. Then it made the mistake of treating citizens like idiots.
- First, no one claims responsibility for anything (“the party had nothing to do with it”)...Second, there is the consistent threat to use state power to intimidate opponents...Third, there is constant dissimulation. Ramdev is a legitimate interlocutor one minute, he is Satan the next...Fourth, there is the old RSS canard...Fifth, the Congress simply does not get it. Its core problem is a crisis of credibility.What is it about the Congress party that repeatedly produces an intellectual culture that turns intelligent people into self-destructive political animals? It has performed the miracle of turning a moment of great hope for India into a moment of political despair.

* Editorial (2011). THE UPA's POLITICAL BANKRUPTCY. The Hindu, 6 June 2011

- India's black & dirty money...has been analyzed powerfully in Nicholas Shaxson's book, Treasure Islands: Tax Havens and the Men Who Stole the World (The Bodley Head, London, 2011)
- Beleaguered by a multitude of corruption scandals dominated by the 2G-spectrum allocation, (the UPA) has earned the reputation of being the most corrupt dispensation independent India has seen.

* Varadarajan, Siddharth (2011). A WEAKNESS BORN OF BAD INTENT. The Hindu, 6 June 2011

- Corruption was an integral part of the "license-permit raj" of Nehruvian socialism. But it has grown into frightening proportions in our liberalized free market economy.
- The case of a Delhi Minister, Raj Kumar Chauhan, who sought to interfere with tax inspectors even as they conducted a raid at the premises of a private establishment. A complaint filed by a senior IAS officer, Jala Shrivastava...and indicted by Justice Sarin. But nothing was done by the UPA government...The protection afforded to the Delhi minister...shows the extent to which the "system" is programmed to circle its wagons at the first signs of trouble.

Ownership of Egypt

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The amazing 18-day showdown in Egypt is finally over today: Hosni Mubarak has quit.

Of all the reports, opinions and commentaries on this issue, one of my favorites has been a column by Thomas Friedman in the New York Times.

Quoting the aphorism that “in the history of the world no one has ever washed a rented car”, he has written about an unfamiliar scene in developing countries -- a group of student volunteers cleaning up the garbage in Tahrir Sqare:

I went up to one of these young kids on garbage duty — Karim Turki, 23, who worked in a skin-care shop — and asked him: “Why did you volunteer for this?” He couldn’t get the words out in broken English fast enough: “This is my earth. This is my country. This is my home. I will clean all Egypt when Mubarak will go out.” Ownership is a beautiful thing.

It is just the kind of attitude which seems to be missing in much of middle-class India today...

Volunteerism, a sense of ownership... can it only come out of thirty years of pent-up frustration?

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LINKS

• Out of Touch, Out of Time, Thomas L. Friedman, NYT / IHT (February 10, 2011) - http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/11/opinion/11friedman.html?_r=1&ref=thomaslfriedman
• Also Postcard From a Free Egypt (Feb 11, 2011) - http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/11/opinion/11-web-friedman.html?ref=thomaslfriedman

Victims, Tormentors & Schools

What is it that turns erstwhile victims into tormentors? This is a question that has often crossed my mind whenever I read about caste-politics or the Hindutva diatribe in India, the treatment of Palestinians by Israel or the Roma`s in Europe.

In India there seems to have emerged an entirely new `super` class of people who, having benefited from the affirmative-action policies for over 50 years, are not only loath to give up their privileges but also actively discriminate against communities that are worse off than their own. Similarly, the Israel-Palestine problem seems less of an international dispute than a caste-conflict that blew out of control. Once you get what you always wanted, its your turn to kick the ladder and prevent others from climbing up.

The irony here is that the erstwhile victims - the new `super` castes in India, Jews of pre-war Europe and Russia, Romanians & Bulgarians freed from Nazi occupation - employ exactly the same methods used by their former tormentors. Pick a label that suits your convenience - `thiefs`, `vermin`, `rats`, `traitors` - and then use it to tar an entire group of people, then push them to the `other` side. Once they are living out of sight beyond high walls, in restricted quarters or cramped ghettos, deprive them of  basic necessities until they fit your label of choice and then, the only final solution that remains, is to get rid of them all.

In the book `Maus`, Art Spiegelman illustrates the harrowing story of his father, a Polish jew, during the second World War. Forced out of his comfortable middle class existence into ghettos first and then into the death camps of Auschwitz/Birkenau, he manages to survive it all and then migrate to USA. And once there, he has no qualms about viewing American blacks exactly the same way the Nazis saw the Jews - only the label is different. To him every colored guy is a `Shvartser`, fit to be treated as thieves and scoundrels.

Perhaps a part of the answer to this question lies their renewed insecurities and a desperate instinct for survival. To an erstwhile victim, their own survival is proof enough that nobody is to be trusted. To quote Prof. Amos Oz, a self-proclaimed Judeo-Nazi:

I want to survive. And my intention happens to be that my children will survive, too. With or without the blessing of the Pope and assorted Torah sages from the New York Times. If anyone raises a hand against my children, I'll destroy him - and his children - with or without your vaunted 'purity of arms.'. And I don't give a damn if he's a Christian or a Moslem or a Jew or a pagan. Throughout history, anyone who thought he was above killing got killed. It's an iron-clad law.


Tell me yourself, do the bad guys really have it so bad in the world? Do they lack for anything? If anybody tries to lay a finger on them, they cut off his arms and legs. And sometimes they do the same for people who haven't even tried anything. If they feel like eating something, and they can catch it and kill it, that's what they do. And they don't suffer an upset stomach afterward or any divine retribution. So from here on in, I want Israel to be a member of this club. Congratulations! Maybe the world will finally begin to fear me instead of feeling sorry for me.


...When you're fighting for survival, anything goes. Even what's forbidden is allowed...a people that let itself be slaughtered and destroyed, a people that let its children be made into soap and its women into lampshades, is a worse criminal than its tormentors. Worse than the Nazis. To live without fists, without fangs and claws, in a world of wolves is a crime worse than murder.


...It's a crying shame - we could have put all that behind us and by now become a normal nation with prissy values, with humanistic neighborly relations with Iraq and Egypt, and with a slight criminal record - just like everybody else. Like the English and the French and the Germans and the Americans - who've already managed to forget what they did to the Indians - and the Australians, who almost totally eliminated the aborigines. They've all done it. What's the big deal? What's so terrible about being a civilized people, respectable, with a slight criminal past? It happens in the best of families.

The rhetoric is disturbing...but  it makes some sense when you examine it in the context of  New York 9/11 and Mumbai 26/11. Yet, it makes you wonder if the problem is being blown out of proportion. After all, how far you can push this siege mentality across generations? What would have happened if Mandela too was convinced that it was a crime to `live without fists, without fangs and claws, in a world of wolves`?

Any which way you look at it, the only long-term solution to divisive politics seems to be the vigorous implementation of an Ethnic Integration Policy, as is being done by Singapore Housing & Development Board. Children of diverse backgrounds, who grow up together, seem a lot less likely to join the ranks of suicidal jihadists, jingoists and other assorted, disgruntled radicals.

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REFERENCES

• Interview with a distinguished Israeli -Amos Oz. Dialectical Anthropology Volume 8, Numbers 1-2, 173-179, DOI: 10.1007/BF00249049 - http://www.springerlink.com/content/vh8qw51m6h10874h/
• Spiegelman, Art (1986). Maus - A Surviver`s Tale
• Loo Lee Sim,Shi Ming Yu & Sun Sheng Han (2003). Public housing and ethnic integration in Singapore. Habitat International 27 (2003) 293–307
• Singapore Housing Development Board - http://www.hdb.gov.sg/

Tech Capability Gaps

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Sometime back, while commenting on the BlackBerry encrypton controversy, Saubik Chakrabarti (IE 11 Aug.2010) had pointed out :

"...not all Big Brothers are equally capable. Some tech observers say BlackBerry does not pose a problem to some major countries because their security agencies are in the masterclass of decryption...


"This raises a question for India — a middling power with a self-narrative of technological capability. To what extent are India’s security services’ anxieties a reflection of their less-than-stellar technological capabilities? Do India’s espiocrats sound slightly desperate sometimes because at the high end of the national security business we have a capability gap just as we do at the low end (fighting Maoists with ill-equipped, lowly-paid forces)?"

This thought keeps coming back to me again and again, whenever I read something about India's efforts at absorbing technology, or when I compare it with the proactive way in which Chinese soak in advanced technology. While our neighbor is busy "digesting" foreign technology to create its own high-tech industries - aerospace, high-speed railway networks, communications and logistics - we seem to be busy tying ourselves in knots.

And now Obama is coming to help us with another knot - its called the End Use Monitoring Agreement (EUMA).  This may effectively bar us from retrofitting and adapting equipment to our own needs without the Original Equipment Manufacturers' (OEMs) consent and participation for the entire duration of its service, which, in the case of the U.S. has almost never permitted.

This brings us back to Saubik's point about India's self-narrative about technological capability. For decades fooled ourselves into believing that our bureaucrats knew all there is to know about "indigenous expertise". Along the way we have stifled and red-taped not only public organisations like HAL and DRDO but also our best engineering schools.

And now its time to pay the price - in royalties and license-fees -  for our delusions and day-dreams.

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REFERENCES & LINKS -

Berry, berry complicated (Saubik Chakrabarti, Indian Express, 11 Aug.2010)
http://www.indianexpress.com/news/berry-berry-complicated/658879/0

Threat to innovative fix-dependent system (Rahul Bedi, The Hindu, 3 Nov. 2010)
http://www.thehindu.com/opinion/lead/article865356.ece?homepage=true

Chinese Superlatives

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Over the past ten days, there has been yet another deluge of Chinese superlatives:

The Biggest, Most Expensive World Expo Ever: Shanghai Expo attracted about 73 million visitors over six months; built at the cost of $ 45 billion

World`s Fastest Train: The high-speed railway link between Shanghai and Hangzhou now covers the 200-km distance in just 45 minutes (av. speed 350kmph)

World`s Fastest Computer: The Tianhe-1A supercomputer at NCS-Tianjin performs 2.5 Peta-flops is about 50% faster than its closest US rival.

Yet, the Western media seems to be busy underplaying these achievements on one hand and feeding that frenzy about the Yuan valuation on the other. It makes you wonder if such a response is out of petulance, resentment, fear, paranoia...or all of the above!

So it was interesting to see the paragon of American enterprise & ingenuity, Bill Gates, take a contrarian position. In an interview to UK`s Financial Times (30 Oct 2010), this is what he had to say about the speed and energy with which China is developing:

“If all you care about is the US or the UK’s relative strength in the world, then it’s particularly scary...In the US case, 1945 was our relative peak. Since then other countries from Europe to Asia have rebuilt and become more prosperous...but I guess I’m just not enough of a nationalist to see it all in negative terms.”

And he reserved his sarcasm for those who complain about rising Chinese energy use –

“I mean, these Chinese are actually using as much energy per capita as the average in the world today, how dare they! How did that happen? The US uses four times the average and the Brits double. But now these Chinese are trying to use the average.”

Here is another rare columnist who prefers not to play the Blame China Game - Zachary Karabell in Time (30 Oct., 2010) - `Blaming China Won't Solve the U.S.'s Economic Woes`

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LINKS

Lunch with the FT: Bill Gates (Gideon Rachman, FT, October 30 2010)
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/67672314-e2e0-11df-9735-00144feabdc0.html

Breaking records, Shanghai Expo closes doors (Ananth Krishnan, The Hindu, 31 Oct 2010)
http://www.thehindu.com/news/international/article861294.ece

China unveils world's fastest train (Ananth Krishnan, The Hindu, 26 Oct., 2010)
http://www.thehindu.com/news/international/article850925.ece

China Claims Supercomputer Crown (BBC 28 Oct 2010)
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-11644252

China Unveils Powerful, 2.5-petaflop Supercomputer (PCWorld 28 Oct 2010)
http://www.pcworld.com/businesscenter/article/209022/china_unveils_powerful_25petaflop_supercomputer.html

`Blaming China Won't Solve the U.S.'s Economic Woes` (Zachary Karabell, Time, 30 Oct., 2010)
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,2025568,00.html

The Mess in Kashmir

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Over the past few months, as the civic unrest in Kashmir went from bad to worse, it had become increasingly difficult to find Indian opinion-leaders with a sense of proportion.

Is it morally justified for security forces to gun down stone-throwers?

All the news channels seemed uniformly nonchalant, flippant and even irresponsible, in their commentary. Only the Hindu  (especially Siddharth Varadarajan) seem to have taken a meaningful position. And now there are two more Voices of Reason - Madhu Kishwar and  Prem Shankar Jha in Tehelka-

BP vs. Bhopal

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"It is the squeaky wheel that gets the grease"

This familar adage is taking a new meaning for those who have been comparing the recent BP oil leakage with the Bhopal gas tragedy of 1984.

The comparison presents interesting insights into the relationship between MNCs and governments in developed countries, and of the difference in the way MNCs respond to their blunders in developed vs. developing countries.

The possibility of a squeaky wheel getting greased does seem to depend more on the importance of the wheel than on the loudness of the squeaks...

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RELATED ARTICLES

After 26 Years, Shekhar Gupta (IE), 8 June 2010
http://www.indianexpress.com/news/after-26-years/630789/

How British (Really) Is BP?, KARL E. MEYER and SHAREEN BLAIR BRYSAC, NYT, 16 June 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/17/opinion/17iht-edmeyer.html

Remember Bhopal, PHILIP BOWRING, IHT, June 16, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/17/opinion/17iht-edbowring.html

TNT Redux

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What a coincidence:  the Two-Nation Theory shares its acronym with an all-time-favorite explosive compound...Both are the fruits of human ingenuity but the damage caused by the former, political TNT surpasses anything that can be produced in the labs.

Take the tragedy unfolding right now in Kyrgyztan. Over 200,000 Uzbek minorities are being hounded out of the Ferghana valley in southern Kyrgyztan. Seeds of yet another long-drawn conflict are being sown and a relatively peaceful region will soon be exchanging notes with Tito`s Yugoslavia, Paul Kagame`s Rwanda, Saddam`s Iraq, Suharto`s Indonesia and, of course, British India.

How is it that TNT gets so easily replicated? Some folks like to blame the former imperial powers for creating `artificial` boundaries that disregard cultural and ethnic differences. The origins of the ongoing Indo-Pak conflict are traced to the `divide and rule` policy instituted during the British Raj; the problems of Africa are linked to the European imperialism and the problems in central Asia are called Stalin`s Harvest.

Perhaps it is easier to seek the simplistic comfort of blaming others - especially when the bitter truth lies somewhere within.

Take the case of the festering Indo-Pak conflict, where the K-issue is merely an excuse for a battle of ideologies - one that stands on TNT and another that denounces it. 

I have often wondered how the Pakistanis explain to themselves the obvious contradictions of TNT while trying to explain the vicious sectarian and ethnic conflicts within their own country. Ali Sethi has recently come up with an interesting article in the New York Times, titled `One Myth, Many Pakistans`.

Sethi starts off with a school-essay he once wrote on TNT, and of learning a completely different account of TNT in `a secluded college library in Massachusetts` -

Here I learned that it was devised in the 1930s by a group of desperate Muslim politicians who wanted to extract some constitutional concessions from the British before they left India.


The Muslims of India, these politicians were saying in their political way, were a “distinct group” with their own “history and culture.” But really, the book told me, all they wanted was special protection for the poor Muslim minorities in soon-to-be-independent, mostly Hindu India.


But the politicians’ gamble failed; they were taken up on their bluff and were given a separate country, abruptly and violently cut-up, two far-apart chunks of Muslim-majority areas (but what about the poor Muslim minorities that were still stuck in Hindu-majority areas!) that its founders (but it was a mistake!) now had to justify with the subtleties of their theory.


It was like a punishment.


...But the idea was kept alive and made useful: first by a set of unelected bureaucrats, then by generals, then by landowners, and then by generals again.


...The Two-Nation Theory, confined so far to political slogans and clauses in the Constitution, now went everywhere: it was injected into textbook passages (the ones I would reproduce, with new words and emotions, in my exam) and radio shows and programs on the one state-run TV channel. And it branched out, becoming anti-Communist (to attract American money), anti-Shiite (to attract Arab money, given for cutting Iran’s influence in the continent), anti-woman (to please the mullahs) and still more anti-Ahmadi (to enhance the pleasure and power of the mullahs).

The Two-Nation Theory was dynamic, useful, lucrative.

There seems to be a method to this madness -- first the power-brokers nurture `distinct groups with their own history & culture`, and then watch helplessly as the Frankenstein`s shove their creators aside and stomp out of control.

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LINKS / REFERENCES -
 
One Myth, Many Pakistans - Ali Sethi, New York Times, June 11, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/13/opinion/13sethi.html?pagewanted=1

Stalin's harvest - What lies behind the violence in Kyrgyzstan, The Economist Jun 14th 2010
http://www.economist.com/node/16364484?story_id=16364484&source=features_box_main

Seichel

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An interesting new word - Seichel.

It is Yiddish for wisdom, but it means more than that: It connotes ingenuity, creativity, subtlety, nuance.

According to Jeffery Goldberg,“Jews have always needed seichel to survive in this world; a person in possession of a yiddishe kop, a ‘Jewish head`, is someone who has seichel, someone who looks for a clever way out of problems, someone who understands that the most direct way — blunt force, for instance — often represents the least elegant solution, a person who can foresee consequences of his actions.”

After the recent botched raid on Mavi Marmara, the very notion of seichel lies in shambles.

However, the good news is that amidst the throng of jingoistic Israeli`s celebrating the widely denounced military action in international waters, there are sensible folks out there who foresee the wider repercussions of this blunder...

It is such a relief to see contrarian views coming from Israel itself, as well as the Jewish diaspora worldwide -


`GAZA FLOTILLA DRIVES ISRAEL INTO A SEA OF STUPIDITY`, Gideon Levy, Haaretz

On the Disappearance of Jewish Wisdom, Far Out at Sea, Jeffery Goldberg, The Atlantic, 31 May 2010

`CHOSEN, BUT NOT SPECIAL`, Michael Chabon, New York Times, 4 June 2010

LOST TRIBE - Are Israel`s Battles Costing the Country its Soul? , Ehud Eiran, Newsweek, 5 June 2010

Banking & Finance: The Tide Turns...

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For a long now it had been assumed in the English-language media that the word "world" was a synonym for the so-called Western-democracies. As mentioned in a previous note, it had become so commonplace to refer to all the other regions in the world with reference to this self-proclaimed "center" that it seems difficult to imagine that the Middle East, East and Far East could also have an opposite, Asia-centric reference.

When the bully-pair of Uncle Sam and his poodle needed an excuse for taking over the oil-fields of Iraq, they declared that "the world would not tolerate WMDs in the hands of a tyrant like Saddam Hussain".

For decades now it was assumed that this "world" had all the right answers to problems being faced by the rest of humanity. Institutions created under the Bretton Woods Agreement - IMF, World Bank and the UN - would coax, nudge and bully countries into making Structural Reforms which would speedily 'privatize and liberalize' their basic institutions - banking &　finance, health-care, education, public utilities. It was, of course, an unmitigated disaster for many poor countries in Asia, Africa and Latin America. A group of countries that acted contrary to the IMF & WB  "reforms" were to be feted later as Asian Tigers who emerged from the East Asian Miracle!

More recently, When the sub-prime mortgage crisis in USA unraveled the banking and financial system in USA and Europe, financial papers kept referring to it as the "Global Economic Meltdown" until a little bird pointed out that absolutely no crisis - let alone a meltdown - in the Emerging Markets.

The latest Economist now points out that the banking and finance sector from these markets have moved from the bantam-weight to the heavyweight category. China's two largest banks are also the largest in the world; Companies from Russia, Brazil and India are fast closing in on the largest Western financial firms; demand for credit is growing much faster than GDP; domestic savings is driving investments..."these counties were all on a journey where the ultimate goal was a fully privatized system that looked like banking in America or Europe. The crisis has changed everything dramatically...now governments are playing a proactive role to ensure that money keeps flowing into the economy"...

The tide is slowly turning...and I'm lovin' it!


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REFERENCES:

* The Economist, May 2010: Special Report - Banking in Emerging Markets
http://audiovideo.economist.com/?fr_story=7c085acd0bd7831f642ee311d3d5c1bb9d737abd&rf=bm

* Democracy Now, April 1, 2009: Noam Chomsky on the Global Economic Crisis 

Chomsky explains the double-standards quite nicely - 

It is striking to see the difference between the advise that the Westerners are following and compare it with the instructions being given to the third world -

1. First pay off your debts (to us)
2. Privatize (so that we can pick up your assets on the cheap)
3. Raise interest rates (to slow down the economy)
4. Let the population suffer (to pay us back)

The USA does just the opposite...we lectured the third-world on free-trade and we choose to nationalize (the too-big-to-fail principle). It nothing but protectionism. Here is the instructions for you, the poor people, and here are the policies for us - the rich people.