Is there an emergent people’s medium in India?

A version of the following was published by DNA on jan 12th, 2011 at http://www.dnaindia.com/opinion/column_india-is-finally-seeing-the-birth-of-alternative-journalism_1493314, and the PDF is at http://epaper.dnaindia.com/epaperpdf/12012011/11main%20edition-pg16-0.pdf

An emergent people’s journalism finally in India?

Rajeev Srinivasan on how a spontaneous movement of neutral, patriotic, non-professional citizen journalists and commentators on the Internet may be rewriting norms in media

Some journalists get confused and start believing they make the news, rather than just report it. This, and journalistic groupthink, has led to a grotesquely skewed discourse: India’s supposed ‘centrists’ would be considered ‘far Left’ elsewhere. Their conventional wisdom is curiously anti-national as well.

“All the news that is fit to print” simply isn’t printed in India, only that which supports a particular viewpoint. Besides, those who do not toe the line are blackballed: you cannot get published, period. Several people have told me about their personal experience of being excluded for their views.

This perverted system engenders a persistent anti-India bias in international media, too. When in India, foreign correspondents interact primarily with Delhi’s insular, incestuous journalist-sling-bag-wallah nexus that sneers at middle India; their endemic prejudices infect the foreigners.

At least Western media pays lip service to being non-judgmental. In India, there is an obvious industrialist-politician-journalist axis. They ‘manufacture consent’. But they were caught red-handed, Watergate-style, in the Radia tapes incident. Thereupon the entire media closed ranks, and simply buried the story, hoping it would go away: this tactic has always worked in the past. Unfortunately for them, this time it didn’t work, because Internet readers, especially Twitterati (those using the instant, SMS-like, 140-character Twitter social network), reflected popular outrage, and kept the issue alive.

Self-important scribes became concerned about their image on Twitter. When they were not given fawning adulation, they began abusing Twitterati as cave-dwelling illiterates or “Internet Hindus”, showing their habitual scorn for the ‘little people’. One even threatened people with IPC 509, “insulting the modesty of a woman”, simply for questioning her dogmas.

But the Twitterati, mostly middle-class, urban, young, tech-savvy Indians both in India and abroad, were not browbeaten, and responded in kind – and in this level-playing-field medium, they had exactly the same access as any high-and-mighty journalist. The latter, accustomed to being little tin-pot dicators, and to being able to say ‘off-with-their-heads’ and censor any opinions and retorts they didn’t like in their media, were quickly put on the defensive.

And this developed into a sort of dependency: the scribes desperately want love, or at least respect, from the Twitterati! Not surprisingly, Twitterati have utter contempt for the journos, and say so in no uncertain terms. The Twitterati – some influential commentators include @atanudey, @barbarindian, @sandeepweb, @swathipradeep2 – are the very upwardly-mobile cohort that the English-language media craves, but they are clearly not buying the same old anodyne Kool-Aid that is dished out.

One more thing began to happen: the western media picked up what bloggers and Twitter people were saying. This hit the uppity journos where it hurts the most. They fulfilled their greatest ambition – getting the coveted fifteen minutes of fame in the NY Times or Washington Post; but, alas, it was via a commentary on their (lack of) journalistic ethics and on the harsh judgment of Internet readers.

As a result, Vir Sanghvi for all practical purposes fell on his sword, shutting down his impugned column. Barkha Dutt tried the opposite tack: brazening it out and proclaiming innocence. This did not work; NDTV’s credibility is damaged and her ratings have plummeted (according to TAM data for December). An attempt at self-defense on TV boomeranged: she appeared shifty and guilty as charged, Nixon-like. She may have committed journalistic hara-kiri.

Furthermore, the IBN network, also viewed with derision as #IBNlies, was caught by @preeti86 ham-handedly fabricating fake tweets (messages) from non-existent identities in an effort to inflate support for their positions.

Pathetically, the scribes and their sock-puppets (planted supporters) are attempting to paint themselves as victims of a conspiracy among Twitterati. But this snake-oil is not selling. One of the sock-puppets, some minor Bollywood type screeching #stopabuseontwitter, showed himself a hypocrite by making crude sexual suggestions to a woman online, and then running for cover when someone brought up IPC 509.

Fed-up Internet mavens have long complained that the media in India is corrupt, sold out (#paidmedia and #dalalmedia are popular terms) and anti-national. It appears that Twitterati have finally created an alternative, uncensored, independent channel for news and commentary.

This is as subversive as the samizdat underground press in the erstwhile Soviet Union was. Even more ominously for the powerful, there is the example of OhmyNews in Korea. This little paper, initially a one-man effort, became so wildly popular that eventually it was instrumental in toppling an elected regime in 2002.

Will the emergent people’s media in India play a similar role? That would be poetic justice – he who corrupts the media falls to its new, web-enabled incarnation. The establishment, naturally, will fight this: a new push to monitor Internet usage may lead to a Great Firewall of India, stifling the new medium.

Rajeev Srinivasan is a management consultant.

825 words, 11 Jan 2011

Conversion mafia behind attacks on Hindu leaders

I wrote this initially for publication in a newspaper, but on second thoughts decided they would have too hard a time with it. Hence I decided to just post it here. I omitted to add a bunch of other information I had because of the word limit, but it would be useful to think of:

a) how the media and the State always suppress information about the misadventures of Christist godmen: the Sister Abhaya case has been essentially shelved because the Supreme Court (how conveniently!) decided that narco-analysis was not acceptable, just in time for the perps nun Seffi and godmen Kottoor and Puthrukkayil to escape

b) how large-scale conversion has turned not only the Northeast, but most of Kerala and parts of Tamil Nadu and Andhra Pradesh into Xtist-majority areas where Hindus are oppressed

c) how land-grab is one of the major objectives: the tribals are converted, and their land is simply taken over by the Xtists. The entire Western Ghats in Kerala, formerly tribal and public land, has been captured by Xtists

d) how Xtists are expropriating Hindu cultural artifacts and claiming them to be their own, eg. bharatanatyam, mohini attam, yoga, karnatic music

e) how Hindu leaders and Hindu children are being abducted in Pakistan (especially in Baluchistan) and there is not a peep from the Government of India about it. Most recently, the most revered Hindu monk, an 80-year-old, was abducted and hasn’t been heard from since — we should presume he has been murdered

f) how Xtist icons have started appearing with State benediction. The crosses on official Indian coins are clearly Xtist idols.

I did not have space to go into these, but they are worth considering.

Here’s the original article:

Is there a powerful mafia working tirelessly to convert Hindus?

Rajeev Srinivasan wonders if there is a malevolent design behind how Hindu leaders are consistently subjected to brutality by the State

What do Aseemanand, Lakshmananda and the Kanchi Swami have in common? They were all making things difficult for missionaries to meet their conversion targets, and they paid for that ‘sin’. There is a sinister pattern – if you stand in the way of the conversion mafia, they will liquidate you.

Aseemanand’s social and educational work for decades in the tribal Dangs district of Gujarat has been highly appreciated by the tribals themselves. But he has been jailed on flimsy charges, likely tortured, and what sounds suspiciously like a ‘confession-at-the-point-of-a-gun’ has been wrung out of him.

Lakshmananda, the octogenarian monk who worked for thirty years in Orissa’s tribal areas, was the subject of many death threats; he was physically assaulted; and finally he and others in his ashram were gunned down with AK-47s.

The Kanchi Swami was humiliated – tejovadham – on trumped-up charges; he was jailed like a common criminal (as though house arrest were unknown in India), in a deliberate effort to damage the prestige of the Kanchi Sankara Matham. The Kanchi Swami’s ‘crime’? He has been active among the scheduled castes in Tamil Nadu, ensuring their inclusion in what had long been criticized as an upper-caste institution.

The list is endless: there is the Bangalore monk Nityananda – wasn’t it quite amazing that minutes after his allegedly compromising videos were flashed on TV, there was a self-organizing ‘irate mob’ available to burn down his ashram? After all the righteous indignation, when the alleged woman in the video – actress Ranjitha – said that the whole thing was fabricated by a missionary, who is also issuing death threats against her, that was blanked out by the pliant media.

Possible reason for the wrath against Nityananda: the charismatic, lower-caste monk was seen as a role model, and was attracting large numbers of young followers from the lower castes.

Then there were the persistent allegations against the Sai Baba of Puttaparthi regarding pedophilia – it turned out that when challenged in court, the accusers simply had no leg to stand on.

There have been many attempts to damage the prestige of the Sabarimala shrine. The possible reason: there has been a lot of conversion among lower castes, especially in Tamil Nadu, by the judicious use of a Madonna cult. This appeals to the Indian weakness for mother-and-child memes (as in the baby Krishna imagery), and resulted in a rather good harvest. The growth of the Sabarimala pilgrimage halted this particular conversion juggernaut.

First, there was the attempt to physically wipe out the shrine – although that could be attributed to more mundane motives, such as encroaching on the forest land nearby. Some time in the 1950s, before the pilgrimage became popular, Christians actually set fire to the temple.

Then there was the attempt to manufacture a historical Christian presence at Nilakkal, on the route of the pilgrimage. Allegedly, a 2000-year-old wooden cross, installed by the famous Saint Thomas, was unearthed intact. That would have been a genuine miracle – 2000-year-old wood does not survive buried in Kerala’s humid earth; and Thomas had never even come to India (he died in Ortona, Italy, as certified by the Vatican). But it was a good try.

Third, there was the ‘compromising photographs’ ploy. The chief priest of Sabarimala was invited to an apartment in Cochin, where he was coerced into compromising positions, and photographed, by some Christians.

Fourth, there was the “I went to Sabarimala and touched the deity” scam by a film-extra. She claimed that, contrary to custom that women of child-bearing age do not visit the shrine, she had gone there in her twenties, and in the crush of pilgrims, had fallen in the sanctum and touched the murti by accident, thus polluting it. All of which turned out to be untrue. No surprise that she is married to a Christian.

If you put two and two together, it can be seen that there is a Vietnam, or a South Korea, developing in India. These Buddhist-dominated nations were rapidly Christianized in the post-war period; Buddhist monks were seen self-immolating in South Vietnam, in self-sacrificing protest against religious oppression at the hands of Catholic tyrants like Madame Nhu.

Similarly, South Korea, for long a Buddhist-majority nation, was turned in five decades into a Bible-thumping country. In India’s northeast, of course, converted Nagas now demand a separate Christian Naga nation. Violent Christian terrorist groups massacre Hindus – Shanti Tripura, a Hindu monk, was shot dead (ah, the signature AK-47 again) in his temple. The same with Bineshwar Brahma, Hindu Bodo leader and litterateur. Then there are the Hindu Reang tribals, 45,000 of whom were ethnically cleansed from Tripura for refusing to convert.

This pattern of abuse suggests that there is indeed a systematic, sinister plan in action.

Rajeev Srinivasan is a management consultant.

825 words, Jan 8, 2011

Corruption is killing Indians

A version of this was published by DNA on 28th Dec 2010 at http://www.dnaindia.com/opinion/column_corruption-is-damaging-the-value-of-brand-india_1486981

Here is the original content:

The wages of corruption

 

Rajeev Srinivasan

 

The staggering loot in this year’s headline scams benumbs us to the massive human tragedy that underlies them: as Stalin once said, “The death of one man is a tragedy. The death of millions is a statistic.” Still, there is a price to pay. One reason for tribal insurgencies is lack of development. And there are mercy killings and suicides. There is a direct correlation among these: people die, or live stunted lives, because of larceny by the rich and powerful.

 

The story of thalaikoothal in Virudhunagar was reported by Tehelka magazine (“Mother, shall I put you to sleep?”, Nov 20^th). Apparently impoverished people in Tamil Nadu are ritually murdering their aged parents for a simple, rational reason: they cannot afford to support them.

 

This story reminds me of a powerful film, “The Ballad of Narayama” (1983), set in 19^th-century Japan. It deservedly won the Grand Prize at Cannes in 1983. Set in a poor mountainous area where the land has limited carrying capacity, it illustrates a ritual called ubatse. Every time a child is born, an old person has to die, for they cannot afford to feed that extra mouth.

 

In effect, it means that at the age of 70, every old person will be taken to the snowy peaks and left there to die of starvation and exposure. In the film, an iron-willed matriarch resolves that when her time comes, she will go of her own will, not be dragged kicking and screaming. She methodically arranges her affairs, and then forces her grief-stricken, unwilling son to carry her to the mountaintop, where she will die.

 

It is an indictment of the failure of India’s leadership that something from pre-industrial Japan 200 years ago finds echoes in today’s India. But this is merely a particularly graphic illustration of the fact that the systematic siphoning off of funds from India is, literally, killing its people. In this, India is similar to some resource-rich countries, which have borne the ‘curse of oil’: the vast wealth from petroleum has often led to more, not less, misery for the people.

 

The Economist argues (“The paradox of plenty”, Dec 2005) that the reasons are massive corruption, weakened institutions, and lack of competitiveness in other industries. And just plain disdain for the masses: in the oil-rich Niger delta, it appears there has been massive environmental damage and pollution, which is suffered by the locals who have got nothing to show for the billions dug up from under the ground.

 

India’s principal wealth is in agriculture and human resources. These were enough in historic times to make India the wealthiest nation in the world, as per Angus Maddison (The World Economy: A Millennial Perspective, OECD, 2001). It was massive capital transfers by the British and the systematic dismantling of light industry by them that have caused enduring misery.

 

The underpinnings of corruption in India were also created by the British. Their buccaneer John Company types were given poor salaries, and were expected to make their fortunes through means fair or foul; most chose foul. Robert Clive, when impeached by the British Parliament in 1676, disclosed that his net worth was 401,102 pounds sterling. His annual salary had only been between 1,000 and 5,000 pounds sterling, according to P J Marshall (East Indian Fortunes: The British in Bengal in the Eighteenth Century, Oxford, 1976).

 

Nevertheless, India is an economy that still generates large amounts of surplus, especially now that its GDP is growing rapidly. This has given an impetus to corruption and the disappearance of funds to offshore accounts and into things like religious conversion. Instead of enabling the poor to claw their way out of poverty, the surplus is skimmed off. Money that could have built roads, ports, schools, hospitals and world-class universities has been swallowed by private individuals.

 

A recent report from Global Financial Integrity program at the Center for International Policy, Washington DC (The Drivers and Dynamics of Illicit Financial Flows from India: 1948 to 2008, Nov 2010) estimates that $462 billion has been stolen in sixty years, and that this accelerated to $16 billion per year towards the end of the study period. Undoubtedly, with the scams that are now coming to light, this decade’s loot will be exponentially higher: the CWG and 2G scams alone add up to $60 billion in vanished wealth.

 

The nation is turning into a banana republic. Not only politicians, but also the media, the judiciary, the armed forces and even the Vigilance Commission, are being drawn into this web of kickbacks and payoffs. In addition to human misery, it has economic consequences. A recent Stanford study (Corruption and International Value: Does Virtue Pay?, Nov 2010) suggests that firms in corrupt countries suffer a loss in market value. Surely, those corrupt countries suffer the same: Brand India is hurting.

 

Rajeev Srinivasan is a management consultant

 

819 words, 25 December 2010

 

The curse of obsequiousness

A version of the following was published by DNA on 14th dec 2010 at http://www.dnaindia.com/opinion/main-article_why-we-are-the-world-s-worst-bunch-of-kowtowers_1480850 under the title” Why we are the world’s worst bunch of kowtowers”.

The curse of endemic obsequiousness

 

Rajeev Srinivasan wonders whether Indian officials’ refusal to grow a backbone is an unfortunate national trait

 

The incident in Mississippi was startling: the Indian Ambassador to the US, Meera Shankar, clad in a sari, was pulled out of the security line at an airport and subjected to a humiliating pat-down, apparently because of Transportation Safety Administration guidelines about ‘voluminous clothes’.

 

This, despite the fact that the ambassador produced her diplomatic papers. I suppose one could argue that the Mississippi officers were just doing their job, although it is possible that a little xenophobia, if not a little racism, was thrown in. Somehow I can’t imagine them patting down a white woman in a voluminous bridal dress.

 

But worse, the Indian Embassy tried to hush this incident up. It turns out this is not the first time it has happened to Meera Shankar. The embassy would have done nothing this time too if a local paper hadn’t carried shocked observations by the ambassador’s hosts, who felt she had been humiliated by the pat-down in full public view.

 

It appears, sadly, that the first instinct of Indian officialdom is to swallow insults and to, if possible, insist on not having any semblance of a backbone.

 

Consider that other countries do not ‘go gentle into that good night’, but they ‘rage, rage’. When China felt that the Nobel Peace Prize was an affront to them, they simply instituted a competing Confucius Peace Prize, laughable though it may be. When the US introduced intrusive fingerprinting rules for visitors, Brazil retaliated in kind. When the US creates non-tariff barriers, others retaliate.

 

But India, oh, that’s a different matter. There seems to be a built-in level of obsequiousness. Are Indian diplomats eyeing post-retirement sinecures in the World Bank etc.? But why are diplomats from other countries willing to stand up for their national interests?

 

Perhaps it is because India has never explicitly stated what those national interests are. The late C K Prahalad once wrote an essay on ‘strategic intent’ – that is, a long-range plan with a stretch goal: difficult at the moment, but not impossible if one worked assiduously at it. It is now accepted in business circles that firms that do not have a ‘strategic intent’ are more likely to fail, because there’s nothing like a worthy goal to rally the troops.

 

The Americans have strategic intent: it was paraphrased some years ago as something to the effect of “having 8% of the world’s population, and enjoying 50% of its resources”. China similarly has a strategic intent: they want to be Numero Uno in everything: wealth, military power, soft power. And what is India’s strategic intent? To be a toady to some great power? Can’t India see that it can be more than a banana republic, it can be a great power itself? It can be the bride, not only the bridesmaid.

 

On the contrary, I find a supreme lack of self-confidence. I understand that when the Chinese once sent a demarche to the Indian Embassy past midnight – in diplomatic terms a gross insult – instead of waiting till the next day, the woman ambassador showed up at the Chinese Foreign Office at 2 am! The Chinese would have considered that to be kowtowing.

 

But when a rude Chinese diplomat claimed in Mumbai that India had no business in Arunachal Pradesh, India did not immediately declare him persona non grata and give him 24 hours to clear out of the country. Instead, he was allowed to hang around and make more offensive statements!

 

A Chinese strongman is due to visit India shortly – and some suggested that India should refrain from the Nobel ceremony in case it would jeopardize the Wen Jiaobao visit! Why this walking on eggshells? The gent is not visiting for India’s benefit. If he doesn’t come, it will make no difference – they will continue the dam on the Brahmaputra, their army’s incursions over the LOC, and proliferation to Pakistan.

 

There is no consequence to them for misbehaving with India. We should ensure there some pain to China, and others, for insulting India. That gains respect.

 

Is there a genetic problem among Indians? Are we so used to obsequiousness that it has become the way we think? Perhaps. Going back to the airport security issue, maybe you have seen the lists in Indian airports of those exempt from security checks: the President, the Chief Justice Supreme Court, the Speaker of the Lok Sabha, and so on…, and, Robert Vadhera!

 

Yes, this person who holds no public office is the only one specified by name as being exempt from frisking. In all fairness to this gent, I am told he didn’t ask for it, and it was the work of overzealous flunkeys. If that groveling is the prevailing pattern in India, then perhaps it is only fair that Meera Shankar was patted-down.

 

Rajeev Srinivasan is a management consultant.

 

823 words, 11 Dec 2010

 

 

 

The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner

A version of this was published by rediff.com on 2nd Dec 2010 at http://www.rediff.com/sports/column/column-rajeev-srinivasan-celebrates-indias-asian-games-glory/20101202.htm

The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner

Rajeev Srinivasan wonders about India’s quest for Olympic glory

 

The most vivid moment for me at the Asiad was on the first day of the track-and-field events, when unheralded Preeja Sreedharan and Kavita Raut delivered a magnificent 1-2 finish in the grueling 10,000 meters, taking gold and silver with personal best timings. They followed up later with silver and bronze in the 5000 meter run.

 

As I scoured the news for the next few days, it was a pleasant surprise that there were a number of golds in track events: Sudha Singh won the 3,000 meters steeplechase, Ashwini Akkunji and Joseph Abraham won the women’s and men’s 400 meters hurdles in an unprecedented sweep; and the women’s team in the 4×400 meter sprint, defending champions from 2002 and 2006, won again.

 

I remember the agony and ecstasy of the wins and losses of P T Usha a generation ago, and I have been a fan of track events since then. There is something inherently thrilling about a race: it is the primal sporting event. It is electric, immediate, and direct: there is nothing but raw human talent out there on display. No devices, no second chance, nothing – it’s man-to-man, or woman-to-woman.

 

I wonder if it is a cliché to suggest that running perhaps brings out something primitive in us – the racial memory of trying to outrun a saber-toothed tiger or chase down a woolly mammoth. Incidentally, science suggests that long-distance running is a human specialty – we can keep going at a steady trot for hours because of our efficient cooling systems, whereas the sprint kings of the animal world overheat quickly: they have no stamina.

 

But the sprint events in particular are the glamour events of the games. Even the field events don’t quite come close, because there is the delay – for instance, in the jumps, each individual does their thing, then comes back for another try. Somehow, the foot-race is far more thrilling. The spectator’s adrenaline is pumping: and you are jumping up and down and screaming like an idiot, cheering like there is no tomorrow for your countryman or woman. This is what makes for true fan-dom.

 

And there’s nothing to beat the sprints for high drama. Did anybody watch the women’s 4x400m relay at the Commonwealth Games? It was thrilling, with the first two legs going neck and neck, but then Ashwini Akkunji put on a fine spell of acceleration to blow past a surging Nigerian runner, and anchor Mandeep Kaur made no mistake. Even though I watched the video after I knew the result, I was on my feet, cheering. That was the first athletics gold for India in the Commonwealth after Milkha Singh’s 440 yard win in 1958 – a long wait indeed.

 

I believe the Asiad saw a repeat of the same modus operandi, with the tall Ashwini reprising her heroics in the third leg. I have not yet been able to find a video, but I heard Ashwini powered ahead of the Kazakh runner Margarita (the 800 meters gold medallist), giving Mandeep a cushion to fend off the Kazakh anchor, Olga, the 400 meters gold medallist.

 

For my money, that makes Ashwini Chidananda Akkunji from Udupi, Karnataka, the best athlete of the games: two golds, and excellent teamwork. There is only one other double gold winner for India, Somdev Devvarman in tennis singles and doubles. And Preeja Sreedharan missed a long-distance double gold by a whisker, ending up with one gold and one silver.

 

But how come these athletes are not household names? Why are they not lionized, and how come they do not earn millions appearing in advertisements? I had barely heard of Preeja even in the Malayalam media. These are truly unheralded, unsung heroes. Preeja, I found, works for the Indian Railways. Joseph Abraham is in the Army.

 

Why is that only the Railways and the Armed Forces (they have an Operation Olympics, which is beginning to pay dividends) are the only sponsors of anything other than cricket? Why this disproportionate support for cricketers, who make a thousand times what a track-and-field medallist makes? There is no question this national obsession with cricket is strangling the growth of all other sports. Money talks, and if a gold medal brings in Rs. 1 crore, that will motivate athletes all the more.

 

There was the sad story of a Kerala girl, a nationally ranked rower, committing suicide last year because she could not afford to train. There is also the story of P T Usha’s sports school, which is languishing from lack of monetary support. My good friend Rajan, once on a photography tour through Kerala, just dropped in on the former star athlete, and although she was a gracious hostess, he could tell that she was worried about the school (www.ptusha.org ). One of Usha’s protégés, Tintu Luka, did win a bronze at the Asiad, although more was expected of her. They are now looking at the 2012 Olympics.

 

There is nothing inherently wrong with Indian youth in its sports potential that money and attention will not fix. Communist countries – from East Germany to China – have shown how this will work wonders. The trick is to catch them young, and also to concentrate on events wherein India might have a competitive advantage. For instance, train strapping lads and lasses for boxing, wrestling and weight-lifting: and we already have clusters of excellence in these events.

 

Chess – even though the Asiad finish of just two bronzes was greatly disappointing – is something that India should excel in (after all, we invented it). And let it be said that a lot of the credit for popularizing chess in India goes to just one person – Viswanathan Anand. Other heroes, other sports – for instance Saina Nehwal and Sania Mirza are inspiring others to follow in their footsteps.

 

There are a few events in which brute strength and bulk may go against Indians, who may be smaller and lighter than competitors: this was seen in field hockey when rule changes and new surfaces made the Europeans more competitive. But the young generation of Indian athletes, especially if identified early and trained, may not be physically inferior specimens.

 

And it is true that junior Indian teams do quite well in almost all events around the world. But they do not live up to their promise. I remember years ago when there was talk in the tennis world of the “ABC Powers”: Amritraj, Borg and Connors. The latter went on to great heights, but Vijay Amritraj just faded away.

 

That might be because of an even bigger hurdle: mental toughness and the killer instinct. I have always been astonished by this bromide casually thrown around in India: “The important thing is not to win, but to participate.” This is so utterly ludicrous that I don’t know whether to laugh or to cry when I hear this. Wake up, folks, you are the only people in the world who believe this! Everyone else goes to the Olympics strictly to win.

 

Somehow this dumb socialist idea has taken firm root in India, perhaps India has been so mediocre in everything that we could simply not believe Indians could be world-beaters. In particular, it has been a failure of leadership. India’s leaders have aspired to make India “one among the top ten” or whatever, never to make India Number One. But being Numero Uno is the only goal worth pursuing! Sure enough, since we aspired to too little, was are number ten. Isn’t it shameful that India is only sixth in the Asiad?

 

I don’t think Preeja Sreedharan and Kavita Raut and Vijender Singh went to the Asiad just to participate. They went to win, and more power to them! That’s the attitude that needs to be cultivated, or else our long-distance runners – and others – are going to be lonely indeed: no fans, no cheers, no guts, no glory.

 

The title of this column comes from an excellent short story by the British author Alan Sillitoe. The protagonist, who speaks in the first person if I remember right, is a rebellious teenager who is put in prison school (borstal). There his talent at running attracts attention, and that is his ticket to freedom. But on the day of the big race, when he is far ahead, he deliberately stops just short of the finish line, in a declaration of contempt for the entire system.

 

Fortunately, India’s athletes are not so alienated. Not yet. But they will be, if they continue to be ignored and abused by an uncaring system. They do have a way out: they can, and they will, emigrate to more welcoming lands.

 

1400 words, 30 Nov 2010

 

 

 

 

Chinese proxies N Korea and Pak bamboozling US

A version of the following was published on Nov 30th by DNA at: http://www.dnaindia.com/opinion/column_china-s-proxies-pak-and-n-korea-are-bamboozling-us_1474172

America is bamboozled by China’s proxies, North Korea and Pakistan

 

Rajeev Srinivasan contends that instead of throwing in its lot with a declining America, it should aspire to be one of the G3 great powers

 

There is a fin-de-siecle feeling in the air, of a change of guard. America’s self-confidence is at a low, and its strategists and policymakers are conceding the world stage to China. Caught in two nasty and difficult-to-win wars, it suffers from imperial overstretch, and there are parallels between the rapid decline of Britain in the 20^th century and a likely diminution of American power in the 21^st.

 

Several incidents in the recent past suggest that American power may diminish even more precipitously than British power. Consider America versus the insurgent, China.

 

In three major wars since 1950, Chinese proxies have faced Americans. In Korea, Chinese allies fought the Americans to a standstill; the North Vietnamese (then friends of China) defeated the Americans; in Afghanistan, Chinese ally Pakistan is humiliating the Americans after getting $25 billion in largesse from them. In other words, score: China 3, America 0.

 

It is clear that China uses Pakistan and North Korea as force-multipliers. It is a safe first-cut assumption to believe that everything these two rogue nations do is intended to advance Chinese interests, as they are virtually on Chinese military and diplomatic life-support.

 

Take the recent North Korean artillery barrage against a South Korean island. This is not an isolated incident, nor is China an innocent bystander by Zbigniew Brzezinski (“America and China’s First Test”, Financial Times, Nov 23) claims. Cold Warriors are still fighting the last war in Europe against the Soviets: they labor under the misconception that China is benign.

 

On the contrary, chances are that North Korean belligerence is an indirect Chinese response to US President Obama’s recent Asia swing, wherein he appeared to be building a coalition – India, Indonesia, Japan, South Korea – to thwart China’s soaring ambitions.

 

China has been a consistent proliferator of missiles to North Korea, and nuclear weapons to Pakistan; the two swap technologies as well, with plausible deniability for China. Via the AQ Khan nuclear Wal-mart, these weapons were hawked to rogue regimes everywhere.

 

A while ago, saber-rattling North Korea launched long-range ballistic missiles to threaten Japan. So it is not surprising that a couple of weeks ago, North Korea amazed visiting American scientists by demonstrating its advanced weapons-grade uranium enrichment program. The Pakistan model, whereby China supplies screwdriver-ready nuke components, may well be at work here too.

 

Then there was the North Korean torpedo sinking a South Korean ship a few months ago; the sudden shelling of the South Korean island is part of marking out a zone of Chinese influence in the Yellow Sea. This fits into their recent aggressive behavior, bullying neighbors and declaring in effect that the South China Sea is a Chinese lake.

 

The most recent Pakistani incident is even more intriguing. It has been obvious for some time that the CIA is entirely clueless in the region, and is being led by the nose by the ISI – which surely receives advice and materiel from China. In 2001, the siege of Kunduz demonstrated how the ISI bamboozled the CIA into letting them airlift a thousand alleged Taliban officers (in reality Pakistani Army/ISI brass) besieged by the Northern Alliance.

 

A few months ago, seven CIA officers including their station chief in Afghanistan were blown up when a Jordanian double agent, presented as a senior al Qaeda insider, detonated explosives hidden in a suicide vest.

 

Now it turns out that an alleged top-level Taliban leader, who the Americans and Afghans were negotiating with, was a total impostor: he was in it for the big bucks from the gullible Americans. This demonstrates painful realities: the Americans lack decent intelligence on the ground, and being desperate to withdraw, they will clutch at straws. The clever ISI will, accordingly, manufacture various straws on demand and extract more billions from the CIA.

 

This latest Pakistani exploit reminds me of Graham Greene’s wickedly funny “Our Man in Havana” where an underpaid spy (and sometime vacuum cleaner salesman) sends fanciful details of an advanced Cuban/Soviet doomsday machine back to his bosses who are awed; only these were photos of the insides of a vacuum cleaner!

 

If this is the level of the competence of the almighty CIA, then I fear for America. And I fear even more for India, which seems to have a drop-dead, unerring instinct for allying with countries that are in terminal decline: first it was the Soviets, now it is the Americans.

 

Unfortunately, the idea that it need not ‘align’ with anybody does not even occur to India’s mandarins, as a result of an institutionalized inferiority complex. India, with its Hanuman Syndrome of not recognize its own strength, does not, alas, aspire to the creation of a G3: India, China, America, in that order.

 

Rajeev Srinivasan is a management consultant

 

825 words, Nov 26th

After the Kool-Aid: Notes from the Obama visit

A version of the following was published by rediff.com on Nov 11th at http://www.rediff.com/news/column/obama-visit-column-is-non-event-says-rajeev-srinivasan/20101111.htm

After the Kool-Aid: Notes from the Obama visit

 

Rajeev Srinivasan asks where the substance is in the just-concluded jamboree

 

A casual observer, the proverbial Martian, would have concluded from the breathless media coverage during the Barack Obama love-fest that this was a visit of the King-Emperor of India’s colonial master. The pageantry and pomp and circumstance hid the sad fact that the emperor had no clothes, that is to say, there was precious little of substance in evidence. Lots of style, though: an Obama trademark.

 

But then Indians love a good party, and this was like a Big Fat Punjabi Wedding: plenty of dancing, much drinking, and everyone nursing a hangover the next day. Naturally, nobody wanted to bring up anything serious or embarrassing. As usual, Indians were taken in by flattery and vague words about “global power” and “rightful place in the world”.

 

There was one major meta-theme: Obama was in India hat in hand, beginning his re-election campaign. After the self-confessed ‘shellacking’ he received in the mid-term elections, and given that anyway he is more comfortable campaigning than governing, this should not be much of a surprise. The 2012 presidential elections are not that far off; the Republicans may contrive to shoot themselves in the foot; and so the grim prospect of “four more years” of Obama cannot be underestimated.

 

If you take the election issues out, the Obama visit was much like the visit of British Prime Minister Cameron a few weeks prior (and he’s doing the same in China now). Cameron was disarmingly candid – he was a salesman, doing a hard-sell of his wares. India clearly has “buyer power” –  as per strategy guru Michael Porter – that is, India, being a major purchaser of all sorts of goods, has influence over sellers.

 

Obama did his selling more subtly, partly because he could get a lot of mileage out of his black-man-inspired-by-Gandhi-and-King trope – Indians are suckers for this sort of sentimental pabulum, although in reality 99% of American blacks have never heard of Gandhi, and have no particular sympathy for Indians as fellow-sufferers from white oppression; if anything, they may view Indians in the US as benefiting unfairly from the affirmative action programs they won with their blood, sweat, and tears.

 

Was the visit a success? Perhaps it was, from the American point of view. Obama did sell $15 billion worth of goods and generate 54,000 American jobs. And he didn’t give away the store, or anything at all. Incidentally, there is a meme among hostile Americans about how Dubya Bush “gave away the store” to India – the New York Times in particular harps on this theme often – in relation to the so-called ‘nuclear deal’.  On the contrary, it is India that gave away the store by giving up its – pitiful though it might be – nuclear deterrent capability.

 

Surely Obama didn’t give much away. He got misplaced, but thunderous, applause from Indian parliamentarians when he talked about welcoming India into the UN Security Council – they did not realize he was talking about the non-permanent membership that India has just won. The prospect of a full veto-wielding permanent membership is, alas, just as far as it always has been, thanks to the supreme folly in refusing it when offered in 1955 – in favor, of all countries, China! Go figure!

 

Obama’s rhetorical flourishes about the Security Council membership were full of fine phrases, but there was the distinct absence of an action verb: such as ‘support’, ‘commit’, or ‘endorse’. I am reminded of a Doonesbury cartoon about Ted Kennedy, wherein the orator makes fine, emphatic statements, which, sadly, all consist of nouns, and the commentator says, “A verb, Senator, we need a verb!”

 

All President Obama said was the following, verbatim: “In the years ahead, I look forward to a reformed UNSC that includes India as a permanent member”. What he did not say was that his country strongly supported the idea and that it would throw its weight behind India’s candidacy, as it has for Japan. Without a time-bound statement of intent, it was mere fluff, a pious platitude. In any case, Obama knows full well that China will veto Japan’s, and India’s, aspirations.

 

Furthermore, Obama immediately imposed conditions – that India should toe the US line on Iran, human rights and nuclear non-proliferation. All of these are suspect – not that I am a big fan of Iran, but India has regional interests that suggest it engage Iran, for instance for access to Afghanistan, and for hydrocarbons. In fact, it would be a good idea for India to lecture the US that the latter should ally with Iran so that it is not dependent on Pakistan’s ISI for transit of its war materiel to Afghanistan.

 

By carping on human rights (code for Kashmir) and non-proliferation (code for India signing the NPT), Obama was addressing his pals in the ISI and in the non-proliferation-ayatollah-dom that permeates the Democratic ranks in the US. What about extensive proliferation and human rights violations by Pakistan and China, Mr. US President? How come you have no fine words to say to those allies of yours? What about the human rights of Afghans, so trampled on by the ISI?

 

All in all, whatever the ELM spin-doctors say, Obama gave much less than a ringing endorsement of India’s aspirations for the Security Council. It is clear that the P5 are not going to dilute their stranglehold on the UNSC, or on nuclear weapons – if India ever gets on the UNSC, it will be as a non-veto-holding member, and it would have signed the NPT. This is no different from the way things were two weeks ago, so I ask: “Where’s the beef?”

 

Naturally, unfriendly pundits from the New York Times and others passed it off as “Countering China, Obama Backs India for UN Council”. No, Virginia, read his lips. That’s not what he said. The LA Times correctly identified it as “only a step” in that direction. The Wall Street Journal quoted William Burns, an official, who refused to say whether the US would support a veto-bearing status for India. Bingo!

 

But Obama demonstrated that he does know how to use verbs when he spoke about Aghanistan. He said, “We will not abandon the Afghan people”. Fine words, but it is hard to reconcile this with his actions, in particular his insistence on pulling out troops in 2011, which has emboldened all the warlords into a waiting game.

 

Furthermore, the official Obama Administration stand on Afghanistan is predicated on India making sacrifices to appease Pakistan. The standard line was articulated in a particularly inane op-ed in the Washington Post on Nov 8^th by one David Pollack, in an article headlined “Our Indian Problem in Afghanistan”, which could have been written by the ISI, so well did it articulate their position.

 

No, David, the issue is not India’s presence in Afghanistan, which goes back centuries, and is mostly humanitarian. Let us also remember that Afghanistan was the nation that opposed Pakistan’s entry into the UN – they had good reason to do so, because half of the natural territory of Afghanistan is occupied by Pakistan.

 

The problem is the Durand Line. The Afghans have never recognized the Durand Line, an artificial boundary that was imposed by force on them in 1893 by the British; in any case that treaty expired in 1993. The Pathans on either side of the line are unnaturally divided by the line.

 

This human rights issue – the oppression of the Pathans since 1947 by the largely Punjabi Pakistani Army and the ISI – is the root cause of the Afghan problem. There is a simple geographic solution to the Afghan problem – let the Pathans merge southern Afghanistan and the western part of Pakistan into a Pashtunistan, their long-standing demand.

 

That would immediately solve the Afghan problem, and Obama can take his boys home. Leaving the Pathans in charge of their own destiny will prevent the Pakistanis from abusing them by proxy – it is Pakistani ISI and Army personnel who put on baggy pants and grow beards and call themselves the Taliban. And consort with Al Qaeda.

 

Northern Afghanistan, dominated by Tajiks, Uzbeks, and Hazaras, and base of the erstwhile Northern Alliance, could be administered as a peaceful nation, protected by NATO forces. Even today, the Panjshir Valley (home of national hero and military genius Ahmed Shah Massoud, assassinated by the Taliban a day before 9/11), Mazar-e-Sharif, etc. are not so troubled. Why, they even have a tourist agency in Bamiyan which, I am told, brought 800 tourists this year to the site of the magnificent Buddha statues that the Taliban blew up.

 

Selig Harrison, writing in the LA Times on 8^th November, in a piece titled “Pakistan divides US and India”, got the facts right – the problem is the Punjabi-dominated Pakistani army, which in effect has colonized the Baluchi, Sindhi, and Pathan populations of Pakistan, all of which are restive. The dissolution of Pakistan is the only answer to the problem. And this is the one thing that Obama is unwilling to countenance. Therefore he is not serious about solving the Afghan problem, he merely wants a face-saving way of exiting Afghanistan.

 

Given that these are life-and-death issues for India, and that other major issues, such as agriculture and education, got short shrift, from an Indian point of view, it is fair to say that the Obama visit was not a success. The most positive thing I can say is that the feared ‘November surprise’, a signing-over of Kashmir to the ISI, did not happen. At least, it did not happen in public.

 

Otherwise, stripped of all the glad-handing and the huzzahs, the Obama visit to India was a major non-event. India got practically nothing out of it. But then, India’s leaders do not know what their goals are, so avoiding utter disaster, I suppose, is a victory. Of sorts.

 

1600 words, Nov 9^th, 2010

 

Greater India: The Indian Ocean Rim is a natural hinterland

A version of the following was published by DNA on Nov 16th at http://www.dnaindia.com/opinion/column_pax-indica-indian-ocean-rim-is-our-hinterland_1467184 and the pdf is at http://epaper.dnaindia.com/epaperpdf/16112010/15main%20edition-pg16-0.pdf

Greater India: The Indian Ocean Rim is a natural cultural hinterland

 

Rajeev Srinivasan on why “look East” should be more than a slogan

 

While the Obama visit occupied the entire mind-space of the Indian media, it seems life did not exactly come to a grinding halt elsewhere. Indians didn’t hear much about the volcano in Indonesia that blew up, for instance, but they should pay a lot more attention to Indonesia and its region.

 

Southern Java’s Yogyakarata, the old cultural capital of Indonesia, is close to the remarkable monuments at Borobudur and Prambanan. Yogya has an ominous presence in the background – just 30 kilometers away lies the dangerous Mount Merapi (‘meru’ + ‘api’ – mount of fire).

 

Indeed, Merapi’s most recent eruptions in late October and early November created a death of toll of several hundred people, some buried in fine volcanic ash –with scenes reminiscent of Pompeii – and others killed by fast-moving pyroclastic flows. They had to shut down the airports in Yogya and nearby Solo.

 

Merapi is within 40 kilometers of both Borobudur and Prambanan. Borobudur, the massive Buddhist monument from the 9^th century CE, is the largest man-made structure in the Southern Hemisphere: a giant stupa, a sculptured hill covered with hundreds of seated Buddhas with enigmatic smiles and mudras of blessings. The structure represents various levels of the Buddhist universe.

 

Prambanan, less well-known, is the Hindu equivalent of Borobudur, and from roughly the same time period. They are stylistically polar opposites: Borobudur is powerful and muscular, whereas Prambanan (a suggested etymology is ‘brahma-vana’) is tall, slender and ethereal. Indeed, another name for Prambanan is ‘slender maiden’. It consists of three temples, one each to Brahma, Vishnu and Siva. The Siva temple is the tallest and the best preserved. In an earthquake in 2006, Prambanan was severely damaged. A big eruption of Merapi may altogether doom it.

 

Indonesia shows the power of Indic ideas – as Tagore remarked, wherever you go in the country, you are reminded of India, because of familiar cultural signals. Even the languages – old Javanese and Balinese – look much like Indian scripts, and children still chant “a, aa, e, ee”. A large number of cultural memes in Indonesia are imported from India, including in traditional dance, puppetry, music, even in the name of the national airline, ‘Garuda’.

 

In the middle of a large square in Jakarta, there is a giant sculpture of the Gitopadesa. On a full moon night, I have watched Javanese Muslim dancers perform the Ramayana Ballet outside Prambanan . There is the Hindu island of Bali, where the Hindus fled when a Javanese king of the Majapahit dynasty converted to Islam.

 

Hindu and Buddhist ideas from India made their way to the Indonesian archipelago around the second to fourth century; they thrived for a thousand years, not through conquest but because the ideas themselves were useful and good.

 

There was in fact an Indian military invasion – although that was later. Circa 1017, Rajendra Chola sent a huge expeditionary force clear across the ocean to defeat the Srivijaya Empire in Sumatra. It was possibly the largest naval fleet ever assembled before the advent of steamships in the 19^th century, quite likely bigger, and certainly more successful, than the Spanish Armada.

 

Unfortunately, unlike the big claims the Chinese are making – and these grow with every retelling – of their Admiral Zheng He and his alleged naval adventures, India has been noticeably reticent about the glorious maritime exploits of the Cholas. This needs to change, purely out of necessity: India needs to provide a counterweight to China.

 

An intriguing article in the New York Times of November 12^th by Robert Kaplan (“Obama takes Asia by sea”) applies Spykman’s ideas about “rimland” and “heartland”, suggesting that rimland India and Indonesia will influence the strategic future of Asia, whereas the interior powers of Russia and China are handicapped by being landlocked. The Great Game was about Russia’s desired access to warm-water ports, and now China, with its ‘string of pearls’ is trying to build a network of friendly naval bases.

 

The US is now exhorting India to no longer just “look east”, but become a presence in East Asia. With China’s increasing aggressiveness in the South China Sea, in Tibet and Kashmir, it is necessary to ‘contain’ China with a web of relationships, such as with Vietnam and Japan.

 

India has so far fumbled its connections with Southeast Asia, which was traditionally known as Greater India. Invited to join ASEAN at its founding, India haughtily declined to: yet another Himalayan blunder. The cultural legacy is a link that India should use to engage with increasingly SE Asia. Going by the rapid rise of Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand and Indonesia, this region is where the future is. It may yet be the century not of the Pacific, but of the Indian Ocean. A Pax Indica or an Indian Ocean Rim Community is a possible dream.

 

820 words, 12 November 2010

 

India should exit the Commonwealth pronto

A version of the following was published by DNA on Oct 19th at: http://www.dnaindia.com/opinion/column_it-s-time-for-india-to-exit-the-british-commonwealth_1454635

India should exit the Commonwealth altogether

Rajeev Srinivasan looks at the lessons to take away from the games

The Commonwealth games – admittedly not the world’s most exciting sporting contest – are finally over, and they should have put paid to any vanities that India had about holding the Olympics any time soon. The Olympics were a coming-out party for Japan in 1964, South Korea in 1988, China in 2008; but it would be unwise for India to rashly attempt to emulate them.

I must admit that there were moments of epiphany: for instance, the brilliant running of Ashwini Akkunji in the third leg of the 4x400m womens’ relay – she caught up with a surging Nigerian, and enabled anchor Mandeep Kaur to pull away to an unexpected, and well-deserved, win. This was a moment when I, too, held my breath, cynical as I am, and despite the fact that I watched the video later on youtube after I knew India had won.

But such sublime moments were few and far between. The persistent images that remain are the collapse of the foot overbridge just days before the event started, and the muddy pawprints of a dog on the mattress in the athletes’ village. The question is, how long do you actually expect these structures – built at such great expense – to survive? The answer: not very long.

There are several questions: why was India able to hold the 1982 Asian Games – a much bigger and more significant event – with less fuss and more competence? That was at a time when India was sort of hermit-like, insulated from the world, yet it wasn’t a fiasco. Why was it so much worse in this globalized era?

Speaking of the Asian Games, the Chinese, who are going to run the next edition in Guangzhou, have already handed over the entire infrastructure to the games committee some three months ahead of the actual start of the games. Whereas in Delhi, they were still repairing things the day of the opening ceremony.

It is not the case that emerging nations cannot, or should not, run large sporting events. South Africa, by many measures worse off than India, did a splendid job with the FIFA World Cup in 2010. Brazil will host both the soccer World Cup 2014 and the Olympics in 2016. Russia will host the 2014 Winter Olympics. I expect all of these to be done much more professionally than Delhi 2010.

Is there tangible economic value to hosting such major events? The Olympics in Barcelona in 1992 did much for Spain’s economy; but Los Angeles in 1984 just about broke even, and it is believed the Athens in 2004 almost caused Greece’s subsequent near-bankruptcy. These games are risky: no wonder there are only three bidders for the 2018 Winter Olympics.

In Delhi’s case, estimates are that Rs. 70,000 crore (about $15 billion) were spent, and the official claim is that the games will have an ‘impact’ of $5 billion. Note, it is ‘impact’, not ‘profit’. In other words, $10 billion vanished! That’s the difference between the 1982 Asiad and the 2010 C’wealth Games: the professionalization of theft.

Furthermore, given past experience, it is likely that the construction has been so shoddy (materials and techniques would have been much below specifications, and corrupt officials would have siphoned off the money) that the chances of these facilities being re-usable are fairly slim. It is money simply stolen and wasted.

And it is money that this country could ill afford to waste. The new Global Hunger Index suggests that India – 67^th in the list – is worse off than eight of the poorest African nations, including Guinea-Bissau, Togo, Burkina Faso, Sudan, Rwanda and Zimbabwe. How many schools, universities, and kilometers of road could Rs. 70,000 crore have built? Where is the government’s touching concern for the alleged aam admi?

In a sense, the absurdity of India’s so-called ‘hybrid economy’ is in full view: the uneasy synthesis of capitalism and socialism that the usual suspects laud as revolutionary. It is no such thing, and in fact it combines the worst elements of both – crony capitalism and the dead hand of central planning, with neither the exuberant vigor of the one or the discipline of the other.

There is more: a combination of large-scale corruption and incompetence. This is the true downside of the ‘mixed economy’, that wonderful brainchild of the left. People will tolerate corruption if there is competence – for instance, China is very corrupt, but they do get things done. India is unique in being extremely corrupt, and extremely inefficient at the same time.

The inefficiency and incompetence have become systematized in the celebration of things like ‘jugaad’, that is ingenuity in the face of obstacles. But this is not innovation, because it comes with a guarantee of inefficiency and lack of scale, repeatability, institutionalizability and measurability – all the things that have made Toyota’s manufacturing advances so formidable.

In fact, jugaad is the enemy of progress, because it lulls you into a false sense of complacency. It is the equivalent of pulling an all-nighter on the eve of the exam, while the more organized student would have systematically finished their studies earlier and got a good night’s sleep. Yes, the all-nighter person may get good grades, but that is still a big risk – what if, as is often the case, the power fails?

The last-minute heroics may make for good copy, but it is an efficient use of resources, and will lead to burnout. I have seen this in the Indian IT industry, where not only do people try to do superhuman things at the eleventh hour, they don’t tell others about problems early on – on the day the delivery, they confess that the work is three months late. This the customer cannot deal with: if you had told them three months prior, when you knew it, they could have dealt with it much easier.

The inability to plan is endemic in India. It is a clear result of the one notable lacuna in India: the lack of leadership. And it leads to panic and non-optimal outcomes. For instance, the government for years ignored the serious problem of the lack of energy security. Then, one fine day they woke up to find that China had locked up energy supplies all over the world.

In their panic and new-found enthusiasm, they decided, non-optimally, that the answer would be nuclear energy. Hence the whole sorry saga of the so-called ‘nuclear deal’ with the US, which has turned out to be the worst-case nightmare scenario: nothing useful has come out of it, nor will it ever; and India has surrendered its puny nuclear deterrent – no wonder China is running rampant all over the region, and extending its tentacles into Kashmir.

This is what comes of not having a systematic planning process, combined with a  clear set of objectives or strategic intent. Unfortunately, the strategic intent displayed by many is their own personal enrichment, with the resultant accumulation of wealth in numbered Swiss and other offshore accounts. Observe the noticeable reluctance on the part of the government to pursue holders of these numbered, secret accounts, even when the Swiss have in fact said they have no objection.

This is at the core of the issue: British imperial rule has been replaced by the rule of brown sahibs who are as adept at looting India as the whites were. India, as always, continues to be a cash-generating machine, thanks to its hard-working and dirt-poor people and its highly productive land. As invaders have always noted, expropriating this surplus is highly profitable for them. This is why it makes a weird sort sense for India to continue in the British Commonwealth: the empire continues, except that the dramatis personae have changed.

Otherwise, there is a good question as to whether India should be in the Commonwealth at all. It is, after all, a club that celebrates perhaps the most brutal empire the world has ever seen: it is astonishing how callously the British caused 30 million famine deaths in the 1890’s (see Late Victorian Holocausts: El Nino Famines and the Making of the Third World by Mike Davis) or several million famine deaths in the 1940’s (see Churchill’s Secret War: The British Empire and the Ravaging of India During World War II by Madhusree Mukherjee).

Why on earth would India want to be part of this club, when we were victimized the most by this empire? India, which used to account for 25% of the world’s GDP just before the Battle of Plassey brought British inroads, ended up accounting for perhaps 0.5% of the world’s GDP by 1940 (see The World Economy: A Millennial Perspective by Angus Maddison). By being part of the Commonwealth we are accepting this massive loot. Intriguingly, almost all of Britain’s ‘wealth’ is the loot from India – they otherwise produce almost nothing the world wants to buy, other than Scotch whisky and plummy British accents, along with some supercilious journalism.

Why does India need this club at all? India has other connections with many of the major countries there. Britain, after World War II, counts for increasingly little: it is a non-entity. Canada is important for its mineral wealth, so is Australia, but let us note that both are refusing to provide uranium for India’s misbegotten nuclear plans.

South Africa is a potential great power, but India is already engaged with them in the South-South palavers. Then, going by the medals table at the CWG, there’s Nigeria, Kenya, Malaysia, Singapore, Scotland, Samoa. Surprisingly, no New Zealand? Anyway, several of these are already engaged with in the Group of 77. It is not necessary to have the Commonwealth to be friends with them.

There is a school of thought that India needs to ally itself with other Anglophone nations (well, India is sort of Anglophone). This makes better sense than associating with the assorted banana republics of the late lamented Non-Aligned Movement: that much I admit. On the other hand, does India need these Commonwealth countries, or do they need India more?

In any case, the major white countries in the Commonwealth have a different relationship with Britain – genes and blood ties. They are populated largely by people of British origin, and right there, India cannot help being an outsider. Besides, given India’s bewildering complexity, India is unlike any other country – there has to be a recognition of Indian exceptionalism: it is truly a unique country.

Woody Allen quoted Groucho Marx once: “I would not wish to be a member of any club that would have me.” India has clearly outgrown the Commonwealth; the only club that India needs to belong to is the G3: the US, China and India. Which eventually India needs to turn into, in order of GDP: India, China and the US.

Even the UN Security Council is not all that desirable. Many Indians are ecstatic that India has been elected to a non-permanent, rotation slot by a massive margin of 187/191 votes. But one could argue that these 187 countries are giving India a big message – that they only view India as deserving of the non-permanent seat. How many of them would vote for India to get a permanent seat? Not many, I fear. Or it would be for a diluted type of seat, a permanent seat with no veto. Some years ago, when the seat was offered, India, in a fit of misguided generosity, suggested that it be given to China! Which it was, with disastrous consequences for India.

However, I have to give credit to the Financial Times, which, some time ago, suggested that the British seat be given to India, and the French seat be given to the European Union, to better reflect realities – the British and the French are increasingly marginal.

All in all, the very idea of India willingly embracing an empire which treated it most brutally is abhorrent. It is time to exit the Commonwealth: India gains little from it. Moreover, it is time the government stopped wasting taxpayers’ money on quixotic projects that end up merely fattening the offshore accounts of the well-connected. It is time to demand accountability and performance, not mere slogans, from the government.

2000 words, 15^th oct 2010

The November surprise

A version of the following column was published on rediff.com at:

http://www.rediff.com/news/column/column-barack-obama-is-no-friend-of-india/20101029.htm

They made some copy-editing changes to the original which did not necessarily add value.

 

The November Surprise

 

Rajeev Srinivasan on why the Obama visit is likely to be a disaster for India

 

Bitter experience has convinced me to be wary of dignitaries’ state visits – usually no good comes of them. I was terrified that Manmohan Singh’s so-called First State Visit  would culminate in something negative. Fortunately nothing much happened. Now I am extremely worried that Barack Obama’s visit to India in November is likely to end up in a major setback for India’s national interests.

 

There is a tradition of ‘October surprises’ in the US: just before the biennial November elections, one of the parties (usually the incumbent) is accused of coming up with some ruse – often a crisis – that enables it to come out smelling of roses, thus swaying public opinion in its favor, and thereby winning the elections.

 

This year, indications are that Obama and the Democrats will lose their majority in the House of Representatives (the lower house) and possibly in the Senate (the upper house) as well. It appears there is no ‘October surprise’ this time. Just in time for his India visit, Obama will be seen as a lame-duck with little chance of getting his agenda through a hostile US Congress (the parliament).

 

Obama’s record has been less than stellar, belying certain great expectations in the first flush of an amazing love-fest. In domestic matters, his handling of the financial crisis has been pedestrian, and there is severe job-loss and economic pain; his one victory, in healthcare, may yet be Pyrrhic. The ‘change’ and ‘hope’ and all that simply haven’t come to anything.

 

In foreign affairs, too, there’s nothing of great import. The Americans have declared victory in Iraq and begun their pull-out; but the picture on the ground, especially in light of the dramatic WikiLeaks data that came out recently, is that the place is a mess, and that it is not a job well-completed. Instead of a thriving, peaceful democracy, it is a broken country; the Americans are simply running for their lives.

 

The same, or worse, is true in Afghanistan. The recent spectacle of the closure of Pakistani border crossings, the arson on NATO supply trucks, and the abject apology by the Americans for their killing of some Pakistani troops – this points to a hapless America that has been bamboozled by Pakistan’s army and its spy agency, the ISI. The ISI is running with the hares and hunting with the hounds most successfully.

 

Obama has been clear from day one about Afghanistan – his plan has always been simple: surge, bribe, declare victory and run like hell. The surge has happened, but it has apparently had no impact, as in places like Marjah. Now Obama is running up against his ill-advised 2011 deadline for pulling out troops.

 

The only option Obama has on hand is to bribe – that is, to bribe the ISI. Even the Afghan government has concluded that the Americans will flee, leaving them to the tender mercies of the Taliban, the Haqqani network, Gulbuddin Hekmatyar and other warlords. So Obama has been showering largesse on the ISI, a billion here and another billion there, and surely more as per their latest Strategic Dialog last week.

 

But money doesn’t seem to be doing it – the $25 billion that America has poured into Pakistan since 9/11 has sated the general’s greed for the moment. They want a bigger prize – their strategic intent – the dismemberment of India and the creation of their pet fantasy, Mughalistan, an emirate controlling the Indian subcontinent.

 

And that is the carrot that Obama is likely to offer them as part of his India trip. That will be the ‘November surprise’ for India. It is highly likely that when Obama is in India, Manmohan Singh will announce a new ‘package’ which would, shorn of marketing verbiage, hand over either all of J&K or just the Vale of Kashmir to the stone-throwers and other separatists who are fifth-columnists of the ISI.

 

The stage has been set for this for some time. Witness how American military men like General Petraeus, as well as assorted grandees from the European Union have been stressing that Pakistan would be much more helpful if only they were ‘not worried about India’. In other words, India should sacrifice its territorial integrity for the benefit of the Americans, with no benefit to itself. Sounds fair, doesn’t it?

 

Obama has demonstrated categorically that he is no friend of India, despite pious pronouncements by many Indians and Indian-Americans. In addition to everything else, the Obama administration’s attitude is evident from recent disclosures about David Headley (aka Daood Gilani) and the likelihood that the US authorities may have had prior warnings about 11/26 that they did not share with the Indians.

 

The exertions of the Americans (and the Chinese, too) on behalf of the alleged rights of Kashmiris to secede would play a lot better if they had tolerated separatism in their country. Some might remember that the Americans actually went to war (it is called the Civil War) to keep their country from fragmenting. And we also have seen the tenderness exhibited by the Chinese towards ‘splittist’ Tibetans and Uighurs.

 

But then, the Indian government has implied in many fora that it is willing to accept Pakistani demands – witness astonishing statements in Sharm-al-Sheikh, Havana, Thimphu. More recently, its hand-picked interlocutors to the separatists are talking openly about ‘azadi’ and about amending the constitution to accommodate them. The possibility that this will encourage other separatists, and that hate-mongering ethnic-cleansers and terrorists are being rewarded for crimes against humanity, do not seem to unduly worry these worthies.

 

Ominously, Pakistani Prime Minister Gilani declared on October 16^th (as reported in The Economic Times) that “there will be good news about Kashmir soon”. What else could Gilani possibly mean other than Obama’s November surprise?

 

And in the middle of all this comes the nihilistic histrionics of famous one-horse novelist Susan Arundhati Roy. This is someone who can always be relied upon to support any cause that is anti-India. This reminds me of the possibly apocryphal story about how the US application for citizenship once used to ask people if they would advocate the overthrow of the US by violence or sedition. It seems most people chose ‘sedition’! If Roy were given that choice regarding India, I suspect she would insist on answering, “Both”.

 

Roy reminds me of the novel “The Man Without a Country”, about an American who renounced his country during a treason trial and declared that he hated it so much he never wished to see it or hear the word again. The Americans obliged, and put him on a naval brig, whereon he spent the rest of his life out at sea. If India were a normal country, its leaders would offer Roy the choice of fine accommodation on a naval brig in international waters, or domicile in her favorite nations, Pakistan or China. There is just one small problem with the latter – in a few short days, Messrs Kayani or Hu Jintao will offer to surrender to India on a single condition: that India take the shrill Susan Arundhati back.

 

Be that as it may, Roy is merely a side-show. The real danger is that the Americans – who demonstrate daily that they have no leverage over Pakistan – seem to have some kind of a hold over India’s leaders, and the stage has been set for a grand bargain wherein India exists J&K. Obama will then be able to declare victory in Afghanistan and take his boys home.

 

In the feverish minds of many, this is considered a good outcome, and it will be sold as such to the Indian public, thanks to the known ability of the Indian media to manufacture consent. A fait accompli is in the works, which naturally will solve nothing. The ISI will then demand Assam, Malabar, and Hyderabad.

 

 

1300 words, 28^th October 2010

 

 

The Roma are the unsung victims of European racism

A version of the following was published in DNA on 21 sept at: http://www.dnaindia.com/opinion/main-article_the-roma-are-the-unsung-victims-of-european-racism_1440809

Gypsy or Roma: unwept, unsung victims of European racism

Rajeev Srinivasan questions why the oppression of Roma for centuries does not excite the human-rights-wallahs

A number of events recently point to a massive backlash building against immigrants in Europe. Some of this is predictable – in times of economic trouble, rich white countries look for scapegoats, and immigrants usually fit the bill, especially if they are non-white, as we see in the fierce battles in the US over illegal immigration from Mexico.

There is also the little-expressed European fear of being swamped by culturally alien, demographically fearsome, and demonstratively religious Muslim populations that have burgeoned on their continent. There is a fear of Eurabia — white Europeans, with their comfortable welfare states, their decadent lifestyles, their disdain for their church, worry about being overwhelmed by what they imagine as Muslim hordes imposing their muscular cultural mores.

This has led to the controversy over the French ban on the female veil or hijab, the Swiss ban on minarets, and perhaps more subtly the recent success of Geert Wilders’ determinedly anti-Muslim party in the laid-back Netherlands, and, in a surprise just this weekend, in the entry of a far-right party into the Swedish parliament, with the possibility of them offering key support to a minority government in a hung parliament.

The far-right in Europe has gained a new legitimacy, far removed from the earlier antics of the likes of Enoch Powell in Britain and Jean-Marie Le Pen in France, both of whom were considered gadflies with no particular chance of influencing the government. Today’s right-wing, anti-immigrant parties are serious contenders for power. The tide is apparently turning, and Europe, which has a nasty history of intolerance, is reverting to norm: racism, religious animosity, and strife.

The obvious target of all this anger is the increasing numbers of Muslims especially in ghettos like the inflammable banlieus of France. On the other hand, European are also quite conscious that Muslims are not to be messed with: the lessons of 9/11, the British subway bombings, and the uproar over the Danish cartoons have all convinced Europeans that it is best to treat Muslims with kid gloves.

Therefore, they have chosen the usual suspects to victimize: the Gypsy or Roma. There is no fear of retaliation because the Roma are powerless. The other favorite victims in Europe, Jews, have now acquired their own State, and will not tolerate abuse.

So the Roma are left to take the brunt of the hatred. They have been the chosen victims of racism and large-scale oppression for centuries. Ironically, they have been victimized over and over again. The Roma are not originally from Egypt – which mistaken impression is whence the name ‘gypsy’ came about – but from India. It is clear that they are the remnants of formerly Hindu Indian migrant groups, some of which were enslaved and sold by Muslims invaders such as Mahmud of Gazni. There are similarities – both genetic and cultural – with some itinerant tribal populations in India.

Thus the Roma have been doubly unfortunate: enslaved and/or uprooted first, then dispersed as marginal, despised populations throughout much of Europe (the typical adjective used for them is ‘thieving’; also remember the gypsy girl Esmeralda in The Hunchback of Notre Dame: she did not have too many rights). Later, they were among the groups targeted for genocide by the Nazis, and large numbers of them perished in death camps and gas chambers.

There have been continuous pogroms against Roma for centuries. There was Roma slavery in Romania until 1855. Ten thousand Roma were rounded up in Spain in 1749. In the 18^th century, the Austro-Hungarian Empire banned Roma marriages and forcibly took away Roma children. Fascists in Italy in 1926 ordered the expulsion of all Roma. 19,300 Roma were killed in Auschwitz, and 90% of the Roma in areas such as Lithunia that Nazis took over.

The contemporary situation for Roma is none too good. There was a recent act by the French State, which decreed that it was deporting many Roma to Romania (despite the similarity, the words are not related, it just so happens that these particular people were indeed immigrants from Romania). This has brought out a lot of concerns, condemnations, and charges of discrimination everywhere.

There is a feeling of déjà vu in all this. We in India have heard about how poorly Harijans are treated in India. Loudmouthed vested interests equate casteism with racism, and condemn Hindu society. Much of this is instigated by conversion-focused churches. But  when Christians in Europe who belong to these very same churches are brutalizing Roma, where are the voices of righteous indignation? This just goes to show the extent of hypocrisy among Europeans and churchmen. They, as it is said, “see the mote in their brother’s eye, but not the beam in their own”. NIMBY, right, not in my back yard? Amnesty International, anyone?

825 words, 20 September 2010

Rajeev Srinivasan is a management consultant.

 

Election Commission flunks on EVMs

A version of the following was published in the DNA on sep 7th: http://www.dnaindia.com/opinion/main-article_election-commission-flunks-the-openness-test-on-evms_1434122

Are Electronic Voting Machines reliable?

Rajeev Srinivasan wonders whether EVMs as they are today are a fundamental threat to India’s democracy

I am doubtful about electronic voting machines based on a healthy engineering skepticism. The touching faith we repose in computers is misplaced, because they are vulnerable to errors and tampering. It is a good idea to have a low-tech backup mechanisms for embedded systems, which run devices such as refrigerators, microwaves, ATMs, etc. For instance, braking problems that led to Toyota’s massive recalls are almost certainly due to software-based systems. This is the reason why critical systems like nuclear power plants often have electro-mechanical controls, not computer controls.

As embedded systems, Electronic Voting Machines are inherently risky. Admittedly, they have advantages: for one, it is not possible to do physical ‘booth-capturing’. Besides, votes are converted into digital impulses so that counting can be lightning-fast; and statistical data collection, analysis, etc. are much easier.

Unfortunately, that strength is also, ironically, the Achilles heel of EVMs. Since there is no physical audit trail of the vote, once you have cast your vote, you cannot verify that it is honored. It is a relatively minor task for a software-savvy criminal to fix an election. A paper trail – much like an ATM – is sorely needed to prevent this and provide validation.

There are two major aspects to making such systems more secure – human factors and processes. We have evolved fail-safe mechanisms that require co-operation of several individuals believed to be highly reliable. These people are vetted via security clearances. And processes need to be put in place that can prevent intentional or accidental errors.

The technical systems, human factors, and process issues need to work in perfect synchronicity for a complex system to work correctly. However, in several cases around the world, EVMs have been found wanting, and this has led to bans in, among others the US, Germany, and the Netherlands. The Germans found that EVMs violated their constitution, because the system is obliged to prove to the voter that his vote is registered as per his intent, and EVMs cannot guarantee that.

It is in this context that we need to see the recent arrest of an Indian EVM researcher, Hari Prasad.  The Election Commission of India (ECI) has claimed that their EVMs are “foolproof”, “perfect” etc. But Hari and fellow-researchers put together a proof-of-concept and demonstrated a hack on some other hardware. The EC pointed out, fairly, that this was not on one of the Indian EVMs. But when the researchers requested that the EC provide them with an actual EVM, it appears the EC refused access.

 

The EC has also emphasized how secure their processes are, how the machines are sealed in high-security currency-quality paper with wax and secured in warehouses in the custody of reliable officials. Alas, a system based on string and sealing wax sounds positively primitive.

 

Sure enough, the researchers acquired an EVM from one of the EC’s warehouses, and demonstrated several ways of tampering with it, including the use of radio-aware chips that would enable a Bluetooth-based cellphone outside a booth to manipulate the machines. The vaunted process of the EC was, however, not even aware of the missing machine for several months!

 

Computer security experts are not convinced, either. I listened carefully to the podcast of a session at the recent USENIX conference recently wherein this was debated, with representatives from both sides making their case. I was disappointed to heat that the foolproof measures that the EC is so proud of boil down ‘security by obscurity’ – that is, a complex process that is expected to be hard to break into – and faith in a small number of software people at firms the EC did not identify.

 

Instead of lauding Hari Prasad as a well-intentioned white-hat researcher whose suggestions for improvement should have been welcomed, the EC sought to demonize him and terrorize him. This is counter-productive.

 

Thus, on several counts, including constitutionality, the reaction to whistleblowers, and the implications for Indian democracy, this is a fascinating case, and the EC did not cover itself with glory.

 

Distressingly, another other pillar of society did not distinguish itself. It is the media. So far as I can tell, the entire English-language media chose to bury this story, although a few stray op-eds have been written. This is a dereliction of the media’s duty as the watchdog of society. If an election is fixed, it is a bloodless constitutional coup. The fact that the media is not asking awkward questions and forcing the government to respond raises questions about its integrity and ethics.

 

Thus, two of the independent institutions in India that should impose checks and balances on the executive branch have abdicated their responsibility. This is a cause for extreme concern; this is a sign of a State whose machinery is breaking down. And that is the crux of the matter in l’affaire EVM.

 

825 words, 3 Sept 2010

 

The real issue with Electronic Voting Machines

A version of this appeared on rediff.com in two parts on Sep 1 and Sep 2, 2001.

http://news.rediff.com/column/2010/sep/01/the-real-issue-with-electronic-voting-machines.htm and

http://news.rediff.com/column/2010/sep/02/evm-row-shooting-the-messenger-wont-help.htm

The real issue with Electronic Voting Machines

Rajeev Srinivasan on how EVM problems are much bigger than technology or politics

I have been doubtful about electronic voting machines for quite some time based on what one might call a healthy engineering skepticism. To put it bluntly, I don’t trust computers. This comes from, at a point in the past, working with operating system innards and security. Since operating systems are the software that we implicitly trust to run most mission-critical systems, I have noticed that we are basically just one or two bugs away from disaster.

Even though there are rules of thumb and safety factors in software development just as there are in other engineering disciplines, software is still an art, not a science. And even the more mature engineering areas, much closer to science, like civil engineering, are still not perfect – the occasional bridge does collapse, albeit rarely.

Therefore the touching faith we repose in computers – and this is especially true in India – is misplaced. It would be a really bad idea to not have a backup mechanism that is not computer-based, especially when we are talking about embedded systems, the relatively primitive machines that run all sorts of devices such as refrigerators, microwaves, ATMs, etc. This, of course, was the rationale behind the famous Y2K panic, as people worried about whether planes would fall out of the sky as the result of an obscure software practice – years were coded in two digits, not four (ie. 48, not 1948).

Looked at from first principles, then, Electronic Voting Machines are inherently not the most reliable systems available. Nevertheless, they have undisputable advantages: for one, it is not possible to do physical ‘booth-capturing’. Besides, votes are converted into digital impulses that can be manipulated easily, so that all sorts of things can be done with them – counting can be lightning-fast; and statistical data collection, analysis, data mining, and so on can all be done with great facility.

Unfortunately, that strength is also, ironically, the Achilles heel of EVMs. Since there is no physical audit trail of the vote, once you have cast your vote, you cannot verify that your choice of candidate has been honored. It is a relatively minor task for a software-savvy criminal to fix an election, with nobody being the wiser.

I made a primitive demonstration of this sort of activity when I ran an Internet poll on my blog about who India’s best prime minister was. 300 people voted, and there was a clear winner, and some others got very few votes. But I found that if I took the real results, and applied a simple algorithm to it: that is, such as diverting 1/3^rd of each person’s votes to a third candidate, I could at will have anybody ‘win’, even someone who got just 1 vote. And the pattern of votes ‘gained’ did not look particularly suspicious.

Furthermore, in an eerie reminder of the way real electronic voting works, even after the poll ‘closed’ with 292 votes, it still accepted 8 more votes. I have no idea how or why it did that, and since I do not have the source code, there is no way I could figure it out, either. That is another important problem – unless third parties are able to verify beyond reasonable doubt that the system is trustworthy, in effect the system is completely untrustworthy.

There is one major aspect – the human factor. Related to it is a process issue – what are the checks and balances to ensure that human error or malfeasance will not have catastrophic effects? In many critical systems, we have evolved elaborate fail-safe mechanisms that ensure it takes the co-operation of several individuals believed to be highly reliable. There are ways of vetting people to ensure that deserve the highest level of trust – this is the theory behind security clearances for access to sensitive information, and so we have people with TOP SECRET clearances whom we trust with extremely confidential information and the ability to perform critical acts.

We have seen in innumerable Hollywood films (for instance “The Hunt for Red October”) how the order to launch American nuclear missiles from a submarine has to be authorized independently by two very competent people, who each carry one of the keys needed. If they do not agree, the missile is not launched. Even in a more mundane setting, the safe deposit box in India, typically a bank manager and the customer each has to insert their keys simultaneously for the locker to open.

Thus, technical systems, human factors, and process issues need to work in perfect synchronicity for a complex system to work in ways that are provably correct.

Now let us move from the abstract to the concrete. How do electronic voting machines do on some basic measures of correctness of technology, human factors and processes? The track record, alas, is not that great. In 2009, I did a survey of the literature: EVMs had been found severely wanting in case after case, and several counties had ceased to use them. I am sure there is more information since about a year ago, but here is an excerpt from my essay which was published in “New Perspectives Monthly”:

• United States (data from www.electionfraud2004.org and others as indicated):

o        In April 2004, California banned 14,000 EVMs because the manufacturer (Diebold Election Systems) had installed uncertified software that had never been tested, and then lied to state officials about the machines. The machines were decertified and criminal prosecution initiated against the manufacturer.

o        In the 2004 Presidential elections, in Gahanna, Ohio, where only 638 votes were cast, Bush received 4,258 votes to Kerry’s 260

o        A study by UC Berkeley’s Quantitative Methods Research Team reported that irregularities associated with EVMs may have awarded 130,000 – 260,000 votes to Bush in Florida in 2004

o        There have at least the following bills in the US legislature, all of which were the result of perceived problems with EVMs. (It is not known if any of them has passed; HR = House of Representatives, the lower house, and S = Senate, the upper house):

§         HR 550: Voter Confidence and Increased Accessibility Act of 2005

§         HR 774 and S 330: Voting Integrity and Verification Act of 2005

§         HR 939 and S 450: Count Every Vote Act of 2005

§         HR 533 and S 17: Voting Opportunity and Technology Enhancement Rights Act of 2005

§         HR 278: Know your Vote Counts Act of 2005

§         HR 5036: Emergency Assistance for Secure Elections Act of 2008

o        In 2006, a team of Princeton University computer scientists studied Diebold Election Systems EVMs, and concluded that it was insecure and could be “installed with vote-stealing software in under a minute”, and that the machines could transmit viruses from one to another during normal pre- and post-election activity. Diebold, now Premier Election Systems, is the largest US manufacturer of EVMs

o        In 2006, computer scientists from Stanford University, the University of Iowa and IBM suggested that Diebold had “included a ‘back door’ in its software, allowing anyone to change or modify the software… A malicious individual with access to the voting machine could rig the software without being detected”

• Germany (2009)

o        The Federal Constitutional Court of Germany declared EVMs unconstitutional

• The Netherlands (2006)

o        The ministry of the interior withdrew the licenses of 1187 voting machines because it was proven that one could eavesdrop on voting from up to 40 meters away. The suit was brought by a Dutch citizen’s group named “We Do Not Trust Voting Machines. This group demonstrated that in five minutes they could hack into the machines with neither voters nor election officials being aware of it.

• Finland (2009)

o        The Supreme Court declared invalid the results of a pilot electronic vote in three municipalities.

• United Kingdom (2007)

o        The Open Rights Group declared it could not express confidence in the results for the areas that it observed. Their report cites “problems with the procurement, planning, management and implementation of the systems concerned.”

• Ireland (2006)

o        Ireland embarked on an ambitious e-voting scheme, but abandoned it due to public pressure

• Brazil (2006)

o        There were serious discrepancies in the Diebold systems predominantly used in Brazil’s 2006 elections

Based on precedents elsewhere, it is hard to believe that Indian EVMs, alone, through some extraordinary luck or brilliant planning – do I detect shades of some ‘Indian exceptionalism’ from people who otherwise are rather unimpressed with India and Indians? – are immune to these problems.

In particular, the German criticism is telling. The German courts have struck EVMs down because they discovered that current EVMs do not allow a voter to be certain that his choice has been registered. This is a constitutional issue, because the will of the voter is considered sacrosanct in democracies. If there is reasonable doubt that the voter’s choice may not be reflected in the results emitted by the EVM, it violates the constitution. This is as true of India as it is of Germany. The wise thing would be to ban the use of EVMs until they can be proven to be constitutional, and the onus should be on the EVM manufacturers – which is precisely what the German Supreme Court did.

It is in this context that we need to see the recent arrest of an Indian EVM researcher, Hari Prasad, on August 21^st. In the Indian case, things are slightly worse. Instead of challenging the EVM manufacturer to demonstrate that the machines are, in fact, trustworthy, the constitutional authority, the Election Commission of India (ECI), has acted as the spokesman of the EVM manufacturers. The ECI has claimed on several occasions that EVMs are “foolproof”, “perfect” and so on, as though this were self-evident.

Hari and fellow-researchers put together a proof-of-concept, wherein they demonstrated a hack on some other hardware. The EC, correctly, pointed that this was not on one of the Indian EVMs, and therefore not quite applicable. But when the researchers, reasonably, requested that the EC provide them with an actual EVM, it appears the EC refused, or insisted that they tamper with the EVM without actually touching them, a feat of magic which, alas, software developers are unable to pull off.

The EC has also emphasized over and over again how secure their systems and processes are, how the machines are sealed in high-security currency-quality paper, sealed with wax and kept under lock and key in warehouses all over the country in the custody of reliable officials.

Which is quite interesting, considering that the researchers got an EVM from one of the EC’s warehouses, and were able to hack it and demonstrate several ways of tampering with it, including the use of radio-aware chips that would enable a Bluetooth-based cellphone outside a booth to manipulate the machines. The vaunted process of the EC was, however, not even aware of the missing machine for several months! If was only by looking at the serial number on a videotape of the hacked machine that the EC identified which warehouse that EVM came from. This puts in doubt the physical security of the devices.

In any case, the fact that a gentleman named Telgi was allegedly able to copy high-security stamp paper to the tune of tens of thousands of crores, the fact that high-quality counterfeit Indian currency printed in Pakistan has been intercepted in containerloads, and the fact that an entire shipment of currency inks is ‘missing’, it is hard to feel comforted that paper-based measures would be entirely foolproof.

Computer scientists, especially those in the area of security, are not convinced, either. I listened carefully to the podcast of a session at the recent USENIX conference recently wherein two representatives of the ECI, Professor P V Indiresan, and Dr Alok Shukla, a deputy EC, squared off against GVLN Rao, an election forecaster, and Dr Alex Halderman, a computer science professor at the University of Michigan. The EC folks were bested in the discussions, which were attended by well-known security researchers.

I was disappointed to hear from Messrs Indiresan and Shukla that the foolproof measures that the EC is so proud of boil down to some kind of ‘security by obscurity’ – that is, a complex process that is expected to be harder to break into – and faith in a small number of software types at firms that the EC did not identify, and which may not even be Indian, and thus beyond the ken of Indian law.

There is a remarkable case study available on the Internet, about “Gunfire at Sea”, a chronicle of how the US Navy bureaucracy stonewalled and pooh-poohed a very interesting suggestion for improving the accuracy of naval guns, some time in the 19^th century. I’m afraid that the EC’s reaction seemed much like the US Navy’s: bluster, misplaced confidence in their abilities, and a tendency to shoot the messenger.

Instead of lauding Hari Prasad as a well-intentioned white-hat researcher whose suggestions for improvement should have been welcomed with open arms by the EC, the latter seeks to demonize him, terrorize him, and book him so that they could worm from him the identity of the person who had passed on the EVM to him for research. This is counter-productive.

Thus, on several counts, including constitutionality, the reaction to whistleblowers, and the large-scale implications on the country’s democracy, this is a fascinating case, and the EC should redeem itself by working with these researchers. The next set of people who break into the EVMs may not be quite so well-intentioned. (In passing, there is the interesting parallel story that the American responsible for the recent WikiLeaks publication of 92,000 confidential documents has been accused of rape in Sweden, and then the charges were dropped; he claimed he had been warned the Pentagon was ‘after him’. Clearly, whistleblowers have to watch out these days.)

Very distressingly, there is another other pillar of society that did not distinguish itself in this whole EVM fracas. It is the media. So far as I can tell, the entire English-language media has chosen to bury this story: no anchor or editor is excited about it, although a few stray op-eds have been written. It has certainly received less attention than the hoo-haa over some Sri Lankan cricketer doing something unsportsmanlike. This is a serious dereliction of the media’s presumed duty as the watchdog of society. If an election is fixed, it is in essence a bloodless constitutional coup, and the media should be on the trail of this story like bloodhounds. The fact that the media is not doing so implies something serious about its integrity and ethics.

Thus, two of the independent institutions in India that should impose checks and balances on the executive have abdicated their responsibility. This is a cause for extreme concern; this is a sign of a State whose machinery is breaking down. And that is the crux of the matter in l’affaire EVM.

External references:

Usenix Panel Discussion on EVMs in India (audio podcast) https://www.dropbox.com/s/k0b2vib2mc1k6sy/indian-evm-panel-evtwote.mp3

Letter from Usenix Panel to the ECI, 12^th August 2010, http://www.useRajeevnix.org/events/evtwote10/final-letter-eci.pdf

P V Indiresan, “Too much loose talk on EVMs”, The Hindu Business Line, 23^rd August 2010, http://www.thehindubusinessline.com/2010/08/23/stories/2010082350480800.htm

Devangshu Datta, “EVMs are tamper-proof, eh?”, Business Standard, 28^th August 2010,

http://business-standard.com/india/storypage.php?autono=406109

Sandeep B, “Democracy Imperiled”, The Pioneer, 26^th August 2010, http://www.dailypioneer.com/278669/Democracy-imperilled.html

Video from IndiaEVM.org on several ways EVMs can be tampered with http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZlCOj1dElDY

The researchers’ website indiaEVM.org

Rajeev Srinivasan, “Can Electronic Voting Machines subvert elections?”, September 2009, “Eternal India: A New Perspectives Monthly”, http://rajeev.posterous.com/can-electronic-voting-machines-subvert-electi

Elting E Morison, “Gunfire at Sea: A case study of innovation”, MIT, 1966, http://www.cs.gmu.edu/cne/pjd/TT/Sims/Sims.pdf

2600 words, 28^th August 2010

The splendid incongruity of Onam

A version of the following appeared in DNA on 24th August at http://www.dnaindia.com/opinion/report_the-magnificent-incongruity-of-onam-in-declining-kerala_1427765, and the pdf is at:http://epaper.dnaindia.com/epaperpdf/24082010/23main%20edition-pg10-0.pdf

The magnificent incongruity of Onam

Rajeev Srinivasan laments that the festival has been reduced to a travesty of its true self

The ten days of Onam arrived with multifarious splendors: flower arrangements in courtyards, maidens resplendent in off-white, gold-bordered two-piece saris, grand multi-course vegetarian meals served on banana leaves, boat races, sensuous tiruvatira-kali dances, and new clothes, ona-kodi, for all. The skies cleared post-monsoon, the beginning of the Malayalam year with the month of Chingam/Leo and the land is green and fertile, freshly-washed.

On the tenth day, thiruvonam, August 23^rd this year, everyone dressed up to greet the legendary King Mahabali, of whose splendid reign the gods themselves became jealous, so that he was consigned to the underworld, whence he visits his beloved subjects on just this one day.

That is the theory. I wish this were still true in Kerala, but this native son is saddened by the reality. Onam is less and less relevant with each passing year. For starters, it is a harvest festival where there is almost no rice cultivation, or harvests.

Secondly, the old gods are eclipsed. Mahabali may have been compelling in a simpler time, but the post-modern denizens of Kerala may find him naïve: who allows himself to be tricked by a dwarf?

Thirdly, the landscape itself is changing. The infinite vistas of paddy fields are gone;  once-free-flowing, perennial rivers – the envy of those not so blessed – are now constrained ribbons in the sand in lean times. What looks like untouched wilderness in the High Ranges is a green desert of monoculture: plantation tea or rubber; it is no rainforest storehouse of genetic variation.

Fourth, despite all the talk of the Kerala model – anthropologist and environmentalist Bill McKibben once wrote stirringly about how Kerala mirrors the US in various indices, at one-seventh the income – the quality of life has deteriorated sharply. It now leads in suicides, alcoholism, and almost certainly in hypocrisy and crimes against women. The matrilineal joint family, a masterful social construct, has fragmented into nuclear families.

And almost all of this deterioration is man-made. While one must not, Canute-like, futilely order the waves to retreat, what has happened in Kerala in just a couple of generations is the very opposite of progress.

Let us remember that this is the fabled Spice Coast, whose riches, especially black pepper, caused the Roman senator Pliny the Younger to complain imperial treasuries were being drained. “Quinqueremes of Nineveh” used to sail to the great ports of Ophir and Muziris, modern-day Poovar and Kodungallur.

British surveyors arriving in Kerala in the 1800s were astonished at the clever use of agricultural implements and techniques such as sowing with a drill plough, crop rotation and propagation from cuttings. This tiny state, watered by 41 rivers, has some of the most fertile and well-watered land in the world. Abandoning agriculture there is a tragedy of the highest order.

The reason there is no rice cultivation in Kerala is that, in an example of the principle of unintended consequences, socialists hiked up agricultural wages. They did it to ensure laborers got a decent wage, but farming became inherently loss-making, and large acreage now lies fallow. Ironically, the farm laborers became destitute, as their jobs simply disappeared. Kerala subsists on rice, vegetables and other produce trucked in from neighboring Tamil Nadu.

As for the old gods of the land, they have been superseded by just one: Mammon. Kerala people hold nothing more precious than their wallets. In fact, Kerala is a cargo-cult, like those South Seas islands in the Pacific, which, after World War I,I became so dependent on goods imported from the US that they literally worship the ships bringing them.

Keralites worship Electronic Fund Transfers, because that is what keeps the state afloat. There is no mysterious ‘Kerala model’ of development: it is a money-order economy surviving on remittances from its sons (slaving away in the deserts of West Asia) and its daughters (slaving away as nurses everywhere).

The very flora and fauna are changing, too. The endemic thumba, celebrated symbol of purity and humility in Malayalam literature, has virtually disappeared. Flowering plants like the ixora and hibiscus yield much less; temperatures have risen. Traditional species of fish are disappearing from the catch both in lakes and the sea.

This once magnificent land, proud of its traditions, has changed beyond recognition. A little ditty, originally written about my father’s ancestral village, is appropriate for all of Kerala today:

Keralam mahadesam

Nerukedinuravidam

Annam nasti, jalam pushti

Madyapanam mahotsavam.

Kerala is a great land,

The origin of untruth.

No rice, lots of water,

Drunkenness is the big festival.

And oh, the tight-fitting cotton two-piece sari, the set-mundu, a delight on shapely local lasses, has lost out to particularly ill-tailored, polyester salwar-kameez. The set-mundu is only trotted out on festive occasions; it, like Onam, and the local culture that gave us kathakali and the Sanskrit koodiyattam, is fast becoming a museum piece.

The Empire strikes back

A version of the following appeared in DN&A on Aug 10th, 2010 at http://www.dnaindia.com/opinion/comment_britain-needs-to-show-contrition-about-the-raj-s-depredations_1421101.

A pdf of the page is at http://epaper.dnaindia.com/epaperpdf/10082010/9main%20edition-pg10-0.pdf

The Empire strikes back

The Cameron visit reflected realities, but we must not forget imperial barbarity: never again!

The recent India visit of UK’s prime minister David Cameron got less attention than it deserved. Cameron was clear that his intent was to build up business ties, reflecting the relative importance of the UK and India in the global economy. Cameron was explicit that he was speaking to India on equal terms; some might even say, to be dramatic, that he was a supplicant with a begging-bowl.

Cameron also made a statement about Pakistan’s role in terrorism in the Indian subcontinent, which, to any impartial observer, was justified by the evidence, especially the recent uncovering of 92,000 secret US Army documents. Cameron merely observed that Pakistan must be not be allowed to, well, speak with forked tongue, and export terror, which it seems to do quite happily today.

Besides, India refused to even talk of British poverty-reduction aid. But what was more interesting was the reaction of the British media to what they perceived as the humiliation of the British nation when it has to beseech India to increase trade with it.

India is waxing, and the UK waning. India’s economy will overtake the British economy even in nominal (it already has in PPP) terms soon. I have asked a number of Britons what exactly their core competence is – and the inevitable answer is “financial services”. Yes, that makes sense, because after all Britain manufactures practically nothing anybody else wants.

Britain has come full circle in that regard. When they appeared at the imperial Chinese court circa 1750, seeking trade, the Chinese told them they needed nothing of British origin. Of course, thereupon clever Brits introduced opium, which did make the addicted Chinese open up their purse-strings. Which opium (or in Marx’s terminology, opiate), I wonder, do the Brits have in mind now for India?

Intriguingly “financial services” is a euphemism for “the interest earned on the money we looted from your country”. I did a little accounting of the systematic loot by Britain, based on estimates by contemporary scholars such as William Digby and  Dadabhai Navroji, and later historians. The number is astronomical, not less than $1 trillion, and possibly as much as $10 trillion in today’s money. For comparison, US GDP is about $13 trillion. They don’t have much else: they have even pawned the East India Company and other family jewels. Hard times, indeed.

Not surprisingly, there was an outburst in the UK Daily Mail titled “Stop saying sorry for our history: For too long our leaders have been crippled by a post-imperial cringe”. This was from an obvious Blimp-type named Dominic Sandbrook who clearly felt peeved that Indians preferred independence.

What apologies? The British have never apologized for empire, nor have they given any reparations. Compare this to the decent Japanese, who, the Chinese have learned, can be made to cough up billions just by jumping up and down and screaming “Rape of Nanking”.

Even if there were no apology, an acknowledgment of mala fide would help. Instead, the visit of the British Queen and her husband a few years ago produced the black comedy of their insensitivity to the horrors of imperial rule. It appears the husband, Prince Phillip, is one of those upper-class people immortalized by PG Wodehouse (think Bertie Wooster, Gussie Fink-Nottle).

Phillip had the audacity to go to Jallianwallah Bagh and declare that there were really not that many casualties there. When asked to substantiate this startling statement, he airily said General Dyer’s son had told him. And who is General Dyer? Why, merely the guy who had ordered the firing at Jallianwallah Bagh. Talk of conflict of interest!

Sandbook’s broadside was followed by another by Nirpal Dhaliwal titled “Britain has no need to make an apology for Empire…”. I beg to differ. Britain, at the very least, needs to apologize for Jallianwallah Bagh – you know, defenseless crowd in a walled garden with no access, 1675 bullets, 1579 casualties?

And how about the horrifying famines circa 1890, which left upto 20 million Indians dead? The classic account of this, “Late Victorian Holocausts: El Nino Famines and the Making of the Third World” by Mike Davis should be made compulsory reading in Indian schools. So should “The Raj Syndrome: A Study in Imperial Perceptions” by Suhash Choudhary, a brilliant expose of the belly of the beast.

We need to know that under British rule there were 31 major famines in 200 years, as opposed to 17 in the preceding 2000 years.

We need to know history so the healing can begin. Those wronged deserve apologies. The West is pretty bad at contrition. Every year, on August 5^th and August 9^th, there is no American repentance about the atomic bombs it dropped. I have been to Nagasaki’s peace park, close to Ground Zero. There are solemn memorials there from many countries, but not the US.

825 words, Aug 8, 2010

Errata: It is Suhash Chakravarti, not Suhash Choudhary, who wrote the outstandingly brilliant ‘The Raj Syndrome’

Debate on religious terror in DNA

A version of the following appeared in DN&A on Aug 4th as a debate between one Ram Puniyani and me at http://epaper.dnaindia.com/epaperpdf/04082010/3main%20edition-pg12-0.pdf as a follow-up to my column of the previous week on the alleged “Hindu terrorism”, an oxymoron (click here)

Here is my side, as originally written. DNA edited it to some extent:

Ram Punyani’s assertions are a textbook example of the classical “charvita charvanam” – literally, chewing the cud, or metaphorically, “truth by repeated assertion”. Apparently “progressives” in India are incapable of a single original thought or insight – they specialize in recycling bromides of vintage circa 1950, courtesy the London School of Economics.

The fact is there is a history of Semitic/Abrahamic faiths all of which accept the dichotomy between Good and Evil. They are paleo-Semitic: Zoroastrianism and Judaism; meso-Semitic: Christianity and Islam; and alas, neo-Semitic: Communism, Fascism, Nazism, and various violent, nasty little quasi-religions. You know what they are in India.

There is a vast gulf between Indic religions and these religions of the desert. The former are fundamentally accepting of diversity, while the latter declare their allegiance to a “jealous god”. Communism falls squarely into that category – after all, like in the Crusades and Jihad, Communism too has sacrificed a hundred million people to its own jealous god. Just look at Cambodia for an example.

Communism, stripped of propaganda, is identical in structure to the Christian church. It too has its traditional church – the Soviet one (although sadly eclipsed now) and the Protestants (the Chinese church). It has its schism, its scriptures (Marx’s and Mao’s works); its martyrs (Che Guevara), its missionaries (all those comrades), its blind faith in dogmas with little basis in reality (“the state shall wither away”).

Besides, whenever a new religion is created, it does not consider itself a religion, merely “the way”, just as Communism does. But it has to differentiate itself from all incumbent religions for marketing purposes. Thus Christianity’s differentiation from the existing pagan religions – “thou shalt not worship graven images”.

When Communism was invented, the only differentiation left was to say “there is no god”. So they did say exactly that. However, it is interesting that new religions generally violate their own dicta – thus Christianity treats the bible and the cross as sacrosanct idols; similarly, Communists invented a jealous, vicious little god called “Dialectical Materialism” or “Historical Imperative”.

Furthermore, Punyani’s claim that the various shades of Communism are vastly different is laughable – they are all intent on seizing political power, and their differences are either over personalities or about hair-splitting theological arguments, like medieval Christian monks argued about the number of angels that could dance on the head of a pin. Punyani’s understanding of Communism is either naïve or meant to obfuscate.

Punyani segues cleverly into the Moral Equivalence tap-dance favored by India’s “progressives” – claiming crusades, jihad and dharma-yuddha are the same. Not true. The concept of “just war” inheres in all cultures, and is religion-agnostic. In the case of Hinduism, it was never used as an excuse to attack those of other religions.

India’s “eminent historians” keep claiming that there are innumerable instances of Hindu kings fighting religious wars against Buddhists and Jains. However, when pressed by Arun Shourie for actual evidence, they were only able to come up with two examples, after much huffing and puffing. One, Pushyamitra Sunga, whom Punyani dutifully trots out. The other was a Kashmiri king. Well, it turns out that the Kashmiri was influenced by Muslim generals into looting both Buddhist and Hindu shrines.

Some researchers believe that Pushyamitra Sunga attacked Buddhist shrines. But consider this: here is the lone example of a Hindu king, in 5,000 years of Hinduism, having attacked a rival for religious reasons. Did someone say something about the exception that proves the rule?

Puniyani’s grand finale is the blanket assertion that all religions support terrorism, and therefore there is no such thing as religious terrorism. Pretzel logic, and wrong again. Hinduism does not support religious terrorism: here is nothing in Hindu scripture that asks its followers to indulge in holy war. Even the much-maligned caste system has no scriptural authority, only the support of a dyspeptic medieval monk.

But in the case of Christianity, there is the clear edict that “the sons of Shem shall rule over the sons of Ham”. Conveniently, various groups, especially blacks, were declared to be “the sons of Ham” and oppressed. The Dutch Reformed Church in South Africa and various Southern churches in the US used this very idea to justify apartheid and slavery. The Jewish genocide had similar sanction.

Similarly the bits about “killing the idolaters wherever you might find them” in the Koran are well known. No, Punyani, the US media and the CIA did not invent this.

In both cases, there is an explicit injunction in their books to go out and convert all infidels to their faith; this justifies crusades and jihad. There is nothing comparable in Hinduism. Krishna advises Arjuna about the need for war only after all other avenues, samam, danam, bhedam, that is, negotiation, concessions, and attempts and division, have failed. This strikes the impartial observer as rather fair. Appeasement at all costs is a self-defeating proposition.

Punyani valiantly aired many red herrings, clichés (half-baked platitudes like vasudhaiva kutumbakam) and diversionary tactics. This sort of dissimulation is a thriving cottage industry in India.

815 words

Alleged Hindu terrorism: “truth by repeated assertion”

A version of this appeared in Daily News & Analysis on 27th July at http://www.dnaindia.com/opinion/main-article_hindu-terrorism-doesn-t-exist-but-do-we-want-one_1415107 and the pdf for the same is at http://epaper.dnaindia.com/epaperpdf%5C27072010%5C26main%20edition-pg14-0.pdf

Truth by repeated assertion

Rajeev Srinivasan on the motivated campaign about alleged ‘Hindu terrorism’

Joseph Goebbels pithily described propaganda thus:

If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it. The lie can be maintained only for such time as the State can shield the people from the political, economic and/or military consequences of the lie. It thus becomes vitally important for the State to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth is the greatest enemy of the State.

By this measure, there appears to be a conspiracy in India to propagate a certain set of views, and in Noam Chomsky’s words, to “manufacture consent”. Like the military-industrial complex in the US which allegedly controls what its citizens think, there is a media-State nexus in India, whereby the mass media unquestioningly regurgitates the State’s perspective.

A recent example is the fuss about a new Indian ‘laptop’ for $35. It is virtually impossible to get a large portable display for less than $50, and with the electronics and packaging, even if the software is free, there is no way the bill of materials can be less than $100. Yet the media swallows this story whole.

This is far from the most egregious example. Bafflingly, the media repeats the government’s anodyne, statements that inflation will subside “in the next six months”. This is ludicrous and has no rationale, yet mandarins mouth it regularly. But it is never challenged by the media; meanwhile, food inflation is galloping at over 20%.

But the cravenness of the media is most evident when it comes to that pet project of the State, known as ‘secularism’. The actual meaning of the term, which emerged in the context of the continuous interference of the Catholic Church in the affairs of the State in medieval Europe, is that the State is fully indifferent to religion.

However, in India, so-called ‘secularism’ means precisely the opposite – the State looks upon every individual primarily based on his religion. For instance, the Prime Minister made the statement in December 2006 that Muslims should have first rights to the resources of the country. This violates the Constitution, but it has become part of the accepted ethos through repeated assertion.

The most blatant example of this propaganda is the current feeding frenzy about ‘Hindu terror’. The fact is that there is practically no history of Hindu terror. Religious terrorism has traditionally been the monopoly of the Abrahamic traditions, including Communism. Monotheists by definition divide the world into ‘us’ and ‘them’, and demonize the Other, probably a necessary condition for terror.

Communist terrorists regularly massacre people in Central India, West Bengal and Kerala. There was Jewish terrorism – the Stern gang in Palestine, which had as a member Yitzhak Shamir, later Prime Minister of Israel, comes to mind. There are many historical examples of Christian religious terrorism, going back to the liquidation of the Albigensians and other heretics around 345 CE, the horrors of the Spanish Inquisition (and especially the version in Goa), all the way to assassinations by radical anti-abortionists in the US.

The National Liberation Movement of Tripura is an explicitly Christian terrorist group, forcibly converting people. The National Socialist Council of Nagaland has unleashed terrorism in its pursuit of “Nagalim for Christ”. The assassination of Swami Lakshmananda in Orissa, when his major ‘sin’ was that he was defending Hindu tribals against the depradations of Christian missionaries, is another example.

But clearly Islamic terrorism is the biggest example of religion-based terrorism today. Suicide bombings, the fatwas on Salman Rushdie and others, 9/11 and 26/11, the periodic bombings in many parts of India, college professor T J Joseph’s hand getting sliced off as retaliation for alleged blasphemy, all these are instances of Islamic religious terrorism. The terrorists themselves take pains to point out that their acts have religious sanction.

Compared to all this, there is no evidence whatsoever that there is Hindu terrorism. The so-called Malegaon blast case and other alleged instances of Hindu terrorism languish because of lack of evidence, although, those accused such as Sadhvi Prajna are also rotting away in jail. If there are incidents of Hindu violence, these are almost inevitably reactions to terrorism imposed on them.

The moral equivalence drawn between the Abrahmics’ inherent tendency to violent terrorism and the non-existent Hindu or Indic terrorism is abhorrent.

There is the Panchatantra story about the man with the goat and the three rogues. The rogues convince the gullible man, via the ruse of repeatedly telling him that he is carrying a dog, to abandon the goat, which of course was their original intent. The rogues in the media and the State are, through repeated assertion, convincing people of the ‘fact’ of Hindu terrorism. Do we want to make it a self-fulfilling prophesy?

820 words, 25^th Jul 2010

Moving beyond the Indo-Pak ‘peace talks’, as the Afghan end game nears

A version of the following appeared on rediff.com on July 21st at http://news.rediff.com/slide-show/2010/jul/21/slide-show-1-rajeev-srinivasan-on-moving-beyond-the-indo-pak-peace-talks.htm

Moving beyond the Indo-Pak ‘peace talks’, as the Afghan end game nears

Rajeev Srinivasan on how apportioning blame for the failure of the talks misses the big picture on the ground – the Great Game is afoot

I am always amused at the great expectations that some Indians harbor about India-Pakistan palavers, contrary to sense and prior experience. I suspect nothing will ever come of any Indo-Pak talks, because the dominant Pakistani ethos, indeed the very raison d’etre of that State’s existence, is based on being not-India and anti-India.

In particular, Pakistan is a State owned by an Army, and the Army would have no reason to exist if peace were, by some miracle, to break out with India. Survival instinct alone, therefore, suggests that the Pakistani Army could not possibly afford peace. After all, the continuous state of covert war sustains a very comfortable living for the generals – a story in the New York Times on July 19^th talked about how parts of Islamabad look like a tidy, affluent Los Angeles suburb.

However, I am overwhelmed by déjà vu, because I could repeat verbatim what I wrote in June 2001, in a column titled “Because it’s their nature, their custom: Why the Indo-Pak summit is doomed”, [http://www.rediff.com/news/2001/jun/18rajeev.htm] about the much-ballyhooed 2001 talks with General Musharraf. I offered several analogies, including one with two sets of Polynesian islanders with widely differing visions of what ‘peace’ might be – absolutely appropriate in the India-Pakistan context.

I concluded with the following, and in hindsight I was wrong in assuming that India could drive Pakistan to bankruptcy with an arms race, much as the Americans had done to the Soviets:

“It is clear that Pakistan — or, to be precise, their ruling military establishment — wants, or needs, war. We can oblige: India can continue to bear the cost of war better than a much smaller, economically stagnant Pakistan which is liable to collapse under its own internal contradictions and runaway religious terrorism.”

Of course, this was before 9/11, and I did not anticipate then that the Pakistanis would get the Americans (and the Chinese) to underwrite their war against India, and that the Indian government would be so unwilling to or incapable of deterring Pakistan by imposing costs on misadventures. Instead, Pakistan is convinced that India does not have the guts to stand up to them.

Pakistanis are justified in believing this: for all practical purposes, the Mumbai attack in 2008, 11/26,  has been forgotten, and this so-called ‘peace process’ is proceeding from the Indian side as though the humiliation of that frontal attack on India’s financial nerve-center never happened. The small matter of 180 Indians being massacred, and India’s inept response to the crisis, both broadcast live around the globe, are forgotten.

Indeed, the name of the game today in India is finger-pointing: mandarins are running around trying to find a scapegoat to blame for the ‘failure’ of the talks. They have found a good candidate in Home Secretary G K Pillai, who is now the fall guy for having dared to mention some unmentionables.

A news item suggests that the Prime Minister is unhappy with Pillai for having aired David Coleman Headley’s confessions about the involvement of the ISI and the LeT in the Mumbai invasion. It seems the Prime Minister would have preferred it if this minor detail were swept under the carpet! What were the talks about, if they were to ignore the Pakistani establishment’s culpability in cross-border terrorism?

Where do the ‘concessions’ end? Wasn’t it enough that the Government of India quietly handed over 25 Pakistani terrorists – with no reciprocity – as  a ‘goodwill gesture’ to apparently smooth the way for the talks? And why didn’t the ever-vigilant English Language Media utter a word about this rather strange, and servile, way of engaging a foe?

There is also a basic flaw about the coverage of the talks – the issue is not whether the talks were successful. The issue is whether there is any progress made in the larger issue of protecting India’s national interests. Once again, we are losing the forest for the trees – the talks are tactical, the pursuit of national interests is strategic.

Several distinct but related events have shown that India’s alleged Pakistan policy is either non-existent or self-defeating. First, there is the all-but-complete transfer of two 635-megawatt Chinese nuclear reactors to Pakistan, which will allow the latter to build 24 more nuclear bombs every year in addition to their existing stockpile of 70-90, already bigger than India’s.

Second, recent violence in Jammu and Kashmir is a direct result of the decision by the GoI to withdraw 30,000 troops a few months ago. Third, the apparent willingness by Afghan President Karzai to cooperate with the intensely anti-India Haqqani network implies the total failure of India’s efforts to be a stakeholder in that nation.

China has simply ignored the pro-forma noises that the US made at the Nuclear Suppliers’ Group regarding likely weapons proliferation because of the new reactors being transferred to Pakistan. Selig Harrison, writing in the Boston Globe, pointed out how proliferation is part of Pakistani national policy. Despite this, and despite all the GoI’s exertions to ram the so-called ‘nuclear deal’ down India’s throat, America has no qualms about the Pakistani stockpile.

Thus the dubious nuclear deal has had the effect of strengthening Pakistan’s hand, while constraining India’s own puny efforts at building a deterrent against China, almost exactly as opponents of the deal said, while the GoI proceeded with it in a haze of lies and subterfuge.

It appears the sudden upsurge of violence in Jammu and Kashmir is almost certainly a calibrated and calculated ratcheting up of tension by the ISI. Intercepted phone calls suggest that the ISI and pals like the LeT are paying ‘rage-boys’ to indulge in stone-throwing and other violence, expecting to induce over-reaction by the stressed-out paramilitary troops and police. This, then, can lead to manufactured ‘martyrs’.

The ISI has reason to believe it is on a winning track. Successive statements by the Prime Minister in Havana, Sharm-al-Sheikh and Thimphu have all implied that, succumbing to American pressure, India is willing to cede Kashmir to Pakistan, the only issue being how to market such a climb-down to the Indian public.

The coded talk of ‘creative solutions’ and ‘trust deficit’ have been interpreted by them as a ‘deficit of will’, and the likelihood that they can make J&K simply too expensive for India to hang on to. The proximate cause is the withdrawal of 30,000 troops. To the ISI, this spells “we have the Indians on the run”. So why, they ask reasonably, should they negotiate, when they are winning?

Intriguingly, this is almost exactly the same feeling that the ISI has about the Obama administration after its disastrous declaration of a timetable for withdrawal from Afghanistan. They, and their proxy the Taliban, feel that all they have to do is to wait things out – the Americans have no will to fight, or stay on. Apparently President Karzai implicitly believes this – witness his alleged overtures to the Taliban and the Haqqani Network.

Karzai, Taliban and Haqqanis are all Pashtuns. Pashtuns account for only about 40% of the Afghan population, along with large groups of Tajiks, Uzbeks, and Hazaras. India has traditionally had good relationships with the Pashtuns but even better ties to the Tajiks, who, under the charismatic military genius Ahmed Shah Massoud of the Northern Alliance, held off the Soviets and then the Taliban.

Now all the blood and treasure – hundreds of millions of dollars – that India has poured into reconstruction efforts in Afghanistan seem to be in jeopardy because Pakistanis have convinced Americans and others that India has no business whatsoever in Afghanistan. India was excluded from previous talks about that nation, and now seems to be grudgingly included.

The irony is that the Pashtun issue is one of Pakistan’s key weaknesses – the Durand Line arbitrarily divides Pashtun territory into Afghanistan and Pakistan. Pashtuns themselves have never recognized it, and given a chance, would create an independent Pashtunistan on both sides of the line. Pashtun parts of Afghanistan, and the erstwhile North-West Frontier Province and parts of the Federally Administered Tribal Areas of Pakistan would be its component parts.

This, of course, would be a disaster for Pakistan, as it would induce restive and oppressed Baluchis and Sindhis to secede as well, leaving just a rump Pakistani Punjab, which would be too small to cause much damage to anybody but itself.

In fact, some analysts suggest just such a Balkanization to solve the Pakistan problem. (There are clearly potential problems for India, too – perhaps there will be pressure to create a separate Kashmiri State; similarly Iran may end up losing its Baluch province of Sistan/Baluchistan to an independent Baloch State).

Somehow, the enterprising ISI has turned this weakness into a strength, by hijacking the Pashtun elements into their proxy Taliban. Similarly, the ISI, which faced the wrath of America after 9/11 with its peremptory warning to President Musharraf to behave, or else, has turned it into a $25 billion bonanza. Ironically, the Americans are in effect subsidizing the Pakistani purchase of Chinese reactors!

Instead of containing Pakistan with a pincer movement with one front in Afghanistan, India is now in the unenviable position of confronting the ISI’s ‘strategic depth’, which it has always craved. Uncertain about its goals and ever-eager to appease, India has allowed a failing State one-seventh its size to checkmate it. Lack of strategic intent has led to dismal failure yet again.

There is only one small silver lining in this cloud, and it is based purely on geography and demography. That silver lining is that the ISI may have been too clever for its own good, and that its ‘victory’ in Afghanistan may well be Pyrrhic, if it results in the unraveling of the country. There are those in India who say that a ‘stable, prosperous’ Pakistan is in India’s best interests. Hardly. On the contrary, a weak, balkanized Pakistan is.

Pakistan has made a career out of running with the hares and hunting with the hounds. It was obvious as long ago as the siege of Kunduz in 2001 and the ensuing ‘Airlift of Evil’ that the so-called Taliban officers are serving or retired Pakistani Army and ISI brigadiers and colonels wearing baggy pants and beards and turbans. The ISI has had a great run with the fiction that the Taliban is distinct from itself.

With luck, this may be coming to an end. Former US Ambassador to India Robert Blackwill endorsed a formulation of a de-facto partition of Afghanistan, with the northern portion (including Kabul) to be under an American-NATO umbrella, and the southern, Pashtun, portion, to be left to the tender mercies of the Taliban/ISI. This is surely a trial balloon from the US Administration.

In effect, this would mean the old Northern Alliance would be re-constituted, with the US/NATO supporting it and keeping the Taliban at bay, as it was before 9/11, the only difference being that ten years have passed and $300 billion has been spent, a fair bit of which has spirited away by the ISI and friends. And Massoud has been assassinated.

If this is the final end game in Afghanistan, India had better be prepared to play an active role. Otherwise, in the new Great Game being played on the fringes of Indian territory, it will end up just a spectator. India should be looking to parlay its long tradition of relations with Afghanistan to establish strong commercial linkages, especially now that it turns out the country is chock-full of minerals.

The Indo-Pakistan ‘peace process’ is merely a ritualistic sideshow, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. The real strategic imperative is a plan for India in a post-Pakistan scenario, especially to prevent China and America from dividing up the Af-Pak region into their spheres of influence. With some luck, Pakistan may yet implode without any help from India. India should look beyond its obsession with Pakistanis strutting about, and pursue its national interests.

2000 words, 20^th July 2010

India’s strategic blunders help Pakistan

A version of the following appeared in Daily News & Analysis on Jul 13th, 2010 at http://www.dnaindia.com/opinion/main-article_india-s-strategic-blunders_1408958, and a PDF version of the page is at http://epaper.dnaindia.com/epaperpdf/13072010/12main%20edition-pg12-0.pdf

Strategic blunders hurt India

Rajeev Srinivasan on how Pakistan has outsmarted India through clever foreign policy

Several distinct but related events have shown that India’s alleged Pakistan policy is either non-existent or self-defeating. First, there is the all-but-complete transfer of two 635-megawatt Chinese nuclear reactors to Pakistan, which will allow the latter to build 24 more nuclear bombs every year in addition to their existing stockpile of 70-90, already bigger than India’s.

Second, the violence in Jammu and Kashmir is a direct result of the decision by the GoI to withdraw 30,000 troops a few months ago. Third, the apparent willingness by Afghan President Karzai to cooperate with the intensely anti-India Haqqani network implies the total failure of India’s efforts to be a stakeholder in that nation.

China has simply ignored the pro-forma noises that the US made at the Nuclear Suppliers’ Group regarding likely weapons proliferation because of the new reactors being transferred to Pakistan. Selig Harrison, writing in the Boston Globe, pointed out how proliferation is part of Pakistani national policy. Despite this, and despite all the GoI’s exertions to ram the so-called ‘nuclear deal’ down India’s throat, America has no qualms about the Pakistani stockpile.

Thus the dubious nuclear deal has had the effect of strengthening Pakistan’s hand, while constraining India’s own puny efforts at building a deterrent against China, almost exactly as opponents of the deal said, while the GoI proceeded with it in a haze of lies and dissimulations.

It appears the sudden upsurge of violence in Jammu and Kashmir is almost certainly a calibrated and calculated ratcheting up of tension by the ISI. Intercepted phone calls suggest that the ISI and pals like the LeT are paying ‘rage-boys’ to indulge in stone-throwing and other violence, expecting to induce over-reaction by the stressed-out paramilitary troops and police. This, then, can lead to manufactured ‘martyrs’.

The ISI has reason to believe it is on a winning track. Successive statements by the Prime Minister in Havana, Sharm-al-Sheikh and Thimphu have all implied that, succumbing to American pressure, India is willing to cede Kashmir to Pakistan, the only issue being how to market such a climb-down to the Indian public.

The coded talk of ‘creative solutions’ and ‘trust deficit’ have been interpreted by them as a ‘deficit of will’, and the likelihood that they can make J&K simply too expensive for India to hang on to. The proximate cause is the withdrawal of 30,000 troops. To the ISI, this spells “we have the UPA on the run”. They perceive a ‘backbone deficit’ and lack of will.

Intriguingly, this is almost exactly the same feeling that the ISI has about the Obama administration after its disastrous declaration of a timetable for withdrawal from Afghanistan. They, and their proxy the Taliban, feel that all they have to do is to wait things out – the Americans have no will to fight, or stay on. Apparently President Karzai implicitly believes this – witness his alleged overtures to the Taliban and the Haqqani Network. Karzai, Taliban and Haqqanis are all Pashtuns.

Pashtuns account for about 40% of the Afghan population, with large groups of Tajiks, Uzbeks, and Hazaras among others. India has traditionally had good relationships with the Pashtuns but even better ties to the Tajiks, who, under the charismatic military genius Ahmed Shah Massoud of the Northern Alliance, held off the Soviets and then the Taliban.

Now all the blood and treasure – hundreds of millions of dollars – that India has poured into reconstruction efforts in Afghanistan seem to be in jeopardy because Pakistanis have convinced Americans and others that India has no business whatsoever in Afghanistan. India was not even invited to talks about that nation.

The irony is that the Pashtun issue is one of Pakistan’s key weaknesses – the Durand Line arbitrarily divides Pashtun territory into Afghanistan and Pakistan. Pashtuns themselves have never recognized it, and if given a chance, would create an independent Pashtunistan on both sides of the Durand Line. This, of course, would be disaster for Pakistan, as it might induce restive Baluchis and Sindhis to secede as well. In fact, some analysts suggest just such a Balkanization to solve the Pakistan problem.

Somehow, the enterprising ISI has turned this weakness into a strength, by hijacking the Pashtun elements into their proxy Taliban. Similarly, the ISI, which faced the wrath of America after 9/11 with its peremptory warning to President Musharraf to behave, or else, has turned it into a $25 billion bonanza. Ironically, the Americans are in effect subsidizing the Pakistani purchase of Chinese reactors!

Instead of containing Pakistan with a pincer movement with one front in Afghanistan, India is now in the unenviable situation that the ISI has achieved the ‘strategic depth’ it has always craved. Uncertain about its goals and ever-eager to appease, India has allowed a failing State one-seventh its size to smother it. Lack of strategic intent has led to dismal failure yet again.

825 words, 10 Jul 2010

Losing the new Great Game in Afghanistan

A version of this appeared in Daily News & Analysis on June 29th. Here is the URL: http://www.dnaindia.com/opinion/comment_losing-in-afghanistan_1402597

and the pdf of the page can be found here: http://epaper.dnaindia.com/epaperpdf/29062010/28main%20edition-pg12-0.pdf

Losing the new Great Game in Afghanistan

America has gotten itself into an unholy mess thanks to Pakistani duplicity

The news from Afghanistan is not good for the US, nor for India. US President Obama dismissed the commander of his troops in Afghanistan, General Stanley McChrystal, ostensibly because of rude comments he made in a magazine article, but in reality because a scapegoat was needed for the increasingly inept war efforts there. The same fate befell his predecessor too.

The facts on the ground indicate that Obama’s announced plan – surge, bribe, declare victory, and run like hell – is not working. The current thinking is no longer about winning, but about spinning a face-saving retreat. Says the Washington Post, “[the] administration is looking for a decent, negotiated exit. The Pakistani intelligence service would act as a surrogate (and guarantor) for the Taliban… The deal might leave the Taliban in control of large parts of Afghanistan…  ”

In other words, Obama is explicitly outsourcing the war to Pakistan’s ISI. This would be a questionable choice anyway. But given that the Taliban are basically ISI in baggy pants and beards, an instance of diplomatic theater (after all, it is astonishing that these alleged theology students suddenly started driving tanks and flying planes), the policy is suicidal. A recent report from the London School of Economics and Harvard University emphasized the links between Pakistan’s government, ISI and the Taliban.

This report, “The Sun in the Sky: The relationship between Pakistan’s ISI and Afghan insurgents”, indicts the ISI, which, it says, “orchestrates, supports and strongly influences” insurgents. It “provides huge support in training, funding, munitions and supplies”, which is “official ISI policy”, not the work of some rogue elements. Furthermore, it claims Pakistani president Asif Ali Zardari promised to release jailed Taliban leaders if they kept quiet about it. This amounts to “collusion with the Taliban by an enemy state [Pakistan]”.

A New York Times report suggests further that “Pakistan is presenting itself as the new viable partner for Afghanistan to President Hamid Karzai, who has soured on the Americans. Pakistani officials say they can deliver the network of Sirajuddin Haqqani, an ally of Al Qaeda who runs a major part of the insurgency in Afghanistan, into a power-sharing arrangement.”

The Haqqani network and the warlord Gulbuddin Hekmatyar are among the ISI’s assets. Ironically, Hekmatyar, now a sworn enemy of the US, received over half of the billions that the CIA lavished on the war against the Soviets, thanks to his friends in the ISI.

It is remarkable that the ISI has hoodwinked the Americans to such an extent. ISI protégés are killing Americans, while the ISI and the Pakistani Army pretend to be fighting on the side of the Americans. In other words, the Americans are fighting people whom they are indirectly funding! It is as though, in Vietnam, they were funding not only the South Vietnam Army, but also the Viet Cong guerillas.

When the history of the Afghan war is written, historians may pinpoint the exact moment the Americans lost it. That was the siege of Kunduz in 2001. The rampaging Northern Alliance had much of the top brass of the Taliban corralled at the fort in Kunduz. Unbelievably, the CIA authorized an airlift by the Pakistanis (now called “Airlift of Evil”). At least a thousand of the Taliban were spirited away – and the open secret is that they were mostly midlevel Pakistani Army and ISI officers in turbans. That singular event sealed the fate of the entire campaign.

It is high time that America recognized that the problem is not Afghanistan, but Pakistan’s scheming Army and ISI.

The ISI has also put about an interesting theory, that Afghanistan is per se not conquerable. That is not quite true: Greeks, Persians, Mongols, et al, did conquer. Yes, the British were routed. That was because, despite propaganda, the British were poor warriors: they were able to win victories in India only because of a disastrous Indian habit of betrayal. There are Mir Jafars aplenty in India; but Afghans do not betray their own to foreigners.

When properly handled, Afghanistan can be conquered and held, as Maharaja Ranjit Singh’s Sikh Empire demonstrated not too long ago. The reason most conquerors left Afghanistan is that it is stark, inhospitable territory with no apparent value: the returns were not worth the cost of holding it. Of course, that may change now that they say the country holds trillions of dollars worth of strategic minerals: that may encourage Americans to hold on.

But a comprehensive American defeat in Afghanistan would be strategically bad for India too. It would encourage triumphalist fundamentalists, who could now reasonably claim to have defeated both the Soviets and the Americans. Worse, it would mean that China, through its proxies, has defeated the Americans yet again: this would be number three in a row, after Korea and Vietnam. Imagine their hubris!

825 words, Jun 26, 2010

A U-turn in Afghanistan? US to stay on?

A version of this appeared on rediff.com on Jun 21st at http://news.rediff.com/column/2010/jun/21/rajeev-srinivasan-on-americas-afghan-plans.htm

A U-turn on Afghanistan?

Rajeev Srinivasan wonders whether the US is making a mid-course correction on Afghanistan

These are not good times for US president Obama. Hailed as a savior if not a messiah just eighteen months ago, he is now reeling from several crises. The BP oil spell has left him looking incompetent and uncaring. The $1 trillion stimulus package may have avoided a Great Depression, but unemployment hovers near 10%. His big achievement, healthcare reform, has left a sour taste with almost all sections of society.

But most of all, the Afghanistan quagmire is getting worse. Just this week, seven US soldiers were killed in a single day; the public is getting tired of body bags and elusive promises of success. Maybe there’s a re-think. A series of unexpected events took place recently that, if put together, may signal a mid-course correction by the US:

1. A report from the London School of Economics and the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University that emphasized the very high level of co-operation between Pakistan’s government, ISI and the Taliban
2. A major story in the New York Times about the discovery of large mineral deposits in Afghanistan
3. Severe ethnic riots, resulting in a breakdown of normal activity, in the republic of Kyrgyzstan, where an important US air force supply base in Manas is used to support the war effort
4. The resignations of Afghanistan’s interior minister and security chief, among other things, taking responsibility for an attack on a loya jirga, but also suggesting a hardening of ethnic differences
5. Reports that the Afghan President Karzai has lost faith in the ability of the NATO forces to actually win the war
6. Reports that the much-anticipated counter-insurgency surge in Marjah, which was hailed at the time as momentous, has bogged down and that the rebels are gaining strength

All these have to be seen in the context of Obama’s policy of increasing the number of soldiers on the ground first, and then beginning to wind down the US war effort and withdrawing troops in 2011, just in time to declare victory and use the halo effect to effortlessly win the 2012 presidential elections.

That dream is, to put it mildly, in some jeopardy now. The Obama plan was to surge, bribe, declare victory and run like hell. They have done the surge part, and are in the process of bribing (usually the ISI and its pals), but it’s not going well. The bribees are not acting as expected – Afghans seem to be taking the bribes and merrily continuing what they were doing anyway.

The US’s intent to declare victory and leave requires someone to be the ‘keeper’, as it were, of Afghanistan. The ISI has volunteered itself for this role. This is why it is intriguing that the LSE/Kennedy School report has come out at this time. The Kennedy School is close to the US government, and so it is a fair conjecture that the US administration wants to put the screws on someone.

At first glance, if you read the litany of things in this report, “The Sun in the Sky: The relationship between Pakistan’s ISI and Afghan insurgents”, it sounds like a damning indictment of the ISI which is quite transparently the prime motivator, financier, and provider of cover to the Taliban and related groups.

The ISI, says the report, “orchestrates, supports and strongly influences” them. It “provides huge support in training, funding, munitions and supplies”, which is “official ISI policy”, not the work of some rogue elements. Furthermore, it is not just the ISI, it claims that Pakistani president Asif Ali Zardari promised to release jailed Taliban leaders if they kept quiet about it. This amounts to “collusion with the Taliban by an enemy state [Pakistan]”, the bracket in the original. Interesting that an American is calling Pakistan an enemy state, not the trademarked “major ally in the war on terror”.

Unfortunately, the author, Matt Waldman, has the standard simplistic solution to all this: the way to end the ISI’s cooperation with the Taliban “is to address the fundamental causes of Pakistan’s insecurity, especially its latent and enduring conflict with India”. Of course, if only India were to give Kashmir to Pakistan, the ISI would stop arming the Taliban, and Americans can go home. Simple! QED.

The answer, therefore, is for India to give more: which might explain the Indian PM’s offer to ‘walk the extra mile’ and the latest euphemism, ‘creative solutions’ to the Kashmir problem. India must give up territory so that Americans can exit Afghanistan, in return for… exactly what? Eternal love and fellowship? Just like India sacrificed Tibet and got eternal love and friendship?

Well, be that as it may, it is also possible that finally the US is recognizing the obvious: the ISI has been running with the hares and hunting with the hounds from day one. Maybe the judicious leak is a way of putting the ISI on notice that it had better ratchet things down to some extent. Maybe the Obamistas are actually planning to stay for a while.

Such an eventuality would explain why the NY Times, also known to the close to the US government, made such breathless noises about newly-discovered minerals in Afghanistan (“1 trillion worth!” “Might fundamentally change the war!”). Perhaps Obama has decided that it is not such a good idea to exit in 2011, possibly handing the terrorists a morale-boosting victory.

This story about minerals is not new – months ago, I heard about this from the intrepid foreign policy analyst who goes by the name Pundita. She suggested this meant Americans would stay on: there was no way they would leave all this loot to the Chinese, who have already snapped up a giant copper mine. Perhaps the NYT minerals story is a red herring to divert attention away from the real issue of American failure in Afghanistan.

That failure is evident in the subdued talk about Marjah now; instead of the cocky self-assurance then, there is grim talk now of the difficulty in clearing the area and keeping in clear. No wonder it appears Karzai has lost faith in American staying power – and even in their military tactics; and he is also probably tired of being painted as the villain and blamed for the failure of American plans.

In this context, the resignations of the interior minister Hanif Atmar and the security chief Amrullah Saleh sent ominous signals. In particular, Saleh, an ex-aide of the assassinated military genius and commander of the Northern Alliance, Ahmed Shah Massoud, appears to have been one of the most competent ministers. And as an ethnic Tajik, his departure may signal increasing ethnic fractures in the Afghan government.

It is easy to underestimate the impact of ethnic divisions in Central Asia. There are differences of opinion between the Pashtuns (Karzai is one and so are the Taliban) and the smaller Tajik, Uzbek and Hazara minorities. Sometimes these break into open warfare – the Taliban, for instance, massacred Hazaras, and that was partly because the latter were Shia, so the Shia-Sunni religious divide can also be potent.

A case in point about ethnic divisions is the sudden outburst of rioting and killing in neighboring Kyrgyzstan, where the Kyrgyz are apparently killing Uzbeks (which may be normal in Central Asia where majorities severely oppress minorities). This has an impact on the US – if Manas air support base becomes less available for operations, it increases the US’s dependence on Karachi and the ISI that much more.

Thus, nothing seems to be going according to plan, and a gloomy headline in the NY Times suggesting that “Setbacks cloud US plans to get out of Afghanistan”. No kidding. The Americans may have to accept they are in it for the long term: Afghanistan may not be another Vietnam, but a tar baby. They simply cannot cut and run. They have to clean up this unholy mess of their own making.

It is time that America recognized that the problem is not Afghanistan, but the chimera Pakistan, an imaginary homeland. The very existence of Pakistan – a state with no raison d’etre, is the root cause. The random Durand Line, that slices the Pashtun nation into Afghan and Pakistani areas, was never taken seriously by Pashtuns, and the British-brokered treaty that created it expired in 1993. Until a united Pashtun nation is created including the appropriate areas of Afghanistan and Pakistan, this problem is going to fester: tribal loyalties run supreme in those mountains.

The Americans may be thinking of contracting the running of Afghanistan’s mineral wealth to the ISI, much as the latter have been exploiting the mineral wealth of Baluchistan while severely oppressing, and occasionally massacring, native Baluch. It is not clear that this tactic will work with the Afghans.

Instead of giving the ISI the ‘strategic depth’ they crave by allowing them run rampant in Afghanistan, the answer would be to create a Pashtun nation, a Baluch nation (part of it is in Iran), a Sindhi nation, leaving the rump of Pakistani Punjab too small to do too much damage to anybody but themselves.

If this has finally dawned on the Americans, the $300 billion that they have already poured down the endless money-pit of this war can be chalked up to experience. Otherwise, they would, in Talleyrand’s memorable indictment of the French monarchy, have “learned nothing and forgotten nothing”. Unfortunately, the most likely outcome is that they will press India to give in to the ISI, or, equally disastrously, ask for Indian troops to join them in Afghanistan.

1550 words, June 15, 2010

India must press for a relationship of equals with the US

Versions of the following appeared on rediff.com and India Abroad. The rediff.com version from June 16th is at http://news.rediff.com/column/2010/jun/16/rajeev-srinivasan-on-indias-relationship-with-america.htm

India needs a relationship of equals, and the US will not offer that

Rajeev Srinivasan on the poor prospects of an Indo-US rapprochement

The just-concluded ‘Strategic Dialog’ between India and the US certainly sounds important. The big question is whether there is any substance behind the rhetoric. Going by past history, it is likely that this will be yet another false dawn in Indo-US relations. An incisive analyst, Brahma Chellaney, summed up Indian skepticism in a tweet:

“The US has realized the simple way to keep Indians happy: An occasional ego-massage. After Obama’s eulogy, Indians will stay content for a while.“

It is true that the oratory emanating from Obama administration, both from under-secretary William Burns and from president Obama himself, has been honeyed, but then pretty speechifying is Obama’s forte. However, there isn’t any steak behind the sizzle: just two weeks ago the US silently acquiesced to the Chinese giving Pakistan, with no strings attached, a nuclear deal which is as good as the ‘deal’ India got at great strategic cost to itself.

Furthermore, Indians have not forgotten that India’s prime minister was not in the list of twenty world leaders Obama telephoned after his accession to the presidency; there was the plan to make Richard Holbrooke a mediator on Kashmir; the appointment of Ellen Tauscher, arch-non-proliferation-ayatollah and harsh critic of India, as under-secretary for arms control; and most of all, the hard-to-defend hedging on letting Indian officials interrogate David Coleman Headley, suspect in Mumbai’s 11/26.

There are plenty of large reasons why the hurrahs about an alleged Indo-US rapprochement are premature. First, even the Bush-era friendship was narrowly-focused – Indian leaders, for unknown reasons, plumped for a hard-to-justify nuclear-based energy future. Indian eagerness was exploited by Americans to strait-jacket India into non-proliferation regimes that severely constrain its strategic options.

Second, the other Bush objective, to build India up as a counterweight to a rampant China, fell by the wayside with the Obamistas’ clear preference for a G2, suggesting that a China-US duopoly is inevitable, and conceding to China the role of hegemon in Asia, the Indian Ocean, and the western Pacific Ocean, and explicitly in the Indian subcontinent.

Third, Obama has stated unequivocally that he intends to cut and run from Afghanistan. He believes he needs a Pakistani fig-leaf to claim victory in the face of a humiliating defeat and a head-long retreat like Saigon in 1975. Therefore, he leans on India to give ‘concessions’ to Pakistan: it costs him nothing.

Fourth, there is a history of American duplicity. American promises of eternal, undying love are pure theatrics. Bitter experiences with reneging on treaty obligations for fuel for Tarapur, a slew of nuclear treaties such as NPT, CTBT, FMCT, etc., all aimed at India in particular, and the decades-old acceptance of Chinese nuclear proliferation to Pakistan, suggest American bad faith.

Fifth, the fundamental premise behind an Indo-US relationship is flawed. There is an underlying assumption that the world will remain unipolar and American-dominated, with at best China being a secondary, less appealing second pole, and that therefore it is incumbent on India to align with the US lest it be left out in the cold.

The facts on the ground do not support this assumption. America is waning. Yes, it will continue to be the biggest world power for a while yet, but the US in 2050 will be much less dominant than in 1950. In 1950, America bestrode the world like a colossus, intact in a World-War II-ravaged world. In 2050, China and India will be nipping at its heels.

India can never ally with imperialist China, which seeks to dominate Asia, if not the world. They leave no room for a rival, and systematically undermine all potential competitors. It appears that, after a series of reverses, it has dawned on the US that the alleged G2 – although favored by unreconstructed cold-warriors like Zbigneiw Brezezinski and apologists for empire like Niall Ferguson – is of greater advantage to China than to itself.

This may explain the sudden interest in India by the Obamistas. The Democrats’ natural instinct is intensely anti-India. This is standard ‘liberal’ hypocrisy, wherein they pay lip service to democracy and freedom and other motherhood, but secretly admire fascist thugs, despots and dictators – such as those in China, Pakistan and Iran, all the targets of Obamista overtures.

There is also the pragmatic reason that India’s economy is growing rapidly. Much like the 19^th-century British, Americans seek markets. China, the other large market, is difficult, and extracts its pound of flesh, as seen in Google’s troubles. Especially as India will invest in buying armaments, aircraft and other big-ticket items where the US still has a competitive edge, it is a tempting market. That’s good for the US.

But these are not reasons for India to ally itself with the US. In fact, there has been little improvement in scientific, technical or other ties. The Indian space effort remains cut off by law from much American technology. In other ways too, India is treated as a pariah by the US government, on par with dangerous, failing states. There is also the perennial litmus test – when will the US unambiguously endorse India for a veto-holding permanent seat in the UN Security Council?

No relationship can survive when the benefits are one-sided. Therefore, India will be better-off not tying itself to a waning power, at a time when it is itself on the rise. An America beset with financial problems, with receding self-confidence, and with the Gulf oil-spill as metaphor for its decline, is not worth allying with. At least, not unless India gets concrete, and massive, benefits in return. Time favors India.

There is no point in being a satellite to a sinking, unreliable America – instead, India should strive to establish itself as a pole in a multi-polar world consisting of, perhaps, a G3 or G4 – including itself and the EU. Better to live two days as a tiger than two hundred years as a sheep, a quote attributed to Tipu Sultan.

1000 words, 6 Jun 2010

The parlous state of Hindu temples in India

A version of this appeared in DNA on Jun 15th at:

http://www.dnaindia.com/opinion/main-article_parlous-state-of-temples_1396426

and here’s the pdf for the full page:

http://epaper.dnaindia.com/epaperpdf/15062010/14main%20edition-pg12-0.pdf

The parlous state of Hindu temples in India

Rajeev Srinivasan believes government has no business running temples into the ground

There was shocking news recently about the collapse of the raja-gopuram of the Sri Kalahasti temple near Tirupati. This is no ordinary temple – it hosts one of the five important Saivite jyotir-lingas, each associated with one of the elements (earth, wind, fire, air and ether). The gopuram was built by Krishnadeva Raya of Vijayanagar in 1516 CE, although the shrine itself is a millennium or two older. Most nations would treat such ancient monuments as a treasured part of its cultural heritage, but not India.

The 150-foot tower, a typical Southern-style vimana with intricate carvings, was damaged by lightning some years ago, yet absolutely nothing was done by the authorities. After the collapse, to add insult to injury, a report by a commission said the tower had “outlived its life”. Would this same logic apply to, say, the Taj Mahal – has that outlived its life? It is the business of the State to maintain its cultural heritage and artifacts. There are reports of similar damage to other temple towers, eg. at Srirangapatna near Mysore.

Then there was the news that the Kerala High Court lambasted the Travancore Devaswom Board for being corrupt and inefficient. The Court observed that Hindu temples are struggling“orphanages”, poorly maintained and falling apart; Hindus are orphans.

Furthermore, a Cochin Devaswom Board official got drunk and vomited within the temple precincts at the Siva temple at Vaikom, necessitating elaborate purification ceremonies. This is also no ordinary temple – a major Saivite shrine, it is also historically important. It was the Vaikom Satyagraha in 1924 that led the way to the dramatic Temple Entry Proclamation in Travancore in 1936. And the official’s ‘punishment’? He was promoted to Vigilance Officer!

All these events point to an abomination in the allegedly secular Indian State – there is no separation of Church (meaning religion) and State, as is the norm in modern nations. The State must be indifferent to religion, and it should not allow religious sentiments to color its actions — the true definition of the term ‘secularism’.

A Devaswom Board is an oxymoron. There should be no involvement of the State in religion, which should be left to individuals and religious groups. In fact, that is so with non-Hindu religions in India – they can run their own affairs with no interference from the government, except for largesse – such as Haj subsidies for Muslims, and Andhra’s own subsidies for Christians to travel to Palestine/Israel on pilgrimage.

On the other hand, Hindu temples are under the control of an interfering State, with disastrous results: they are being destroyed systematically by the rapine and pillage of the malign State. On the one hand, temple offerings are expropriated by the State; yet, the State does not even perform basic maintenance. The offerings, amounting to crores, from large shrines such as Tirupati or Sabarimala, are simply treated as general government revenue, and are not recycled to small, poor temples.

Traditionally, temples were the centers of the community, running cultural events, acting as a focal point for efforts such as water conservation, drought relief, famine avoidance, and so forth. This is in the racial memory of Hindus – and so we contribute whatever we can afford to the temple. The State has found it convenient to appropriate these funds. The pittance that a poor believer donates is grabbed and diverted by the Government!

The malice is obvious in Kerala where the State controls most of the temples through the Devaswom Boards, which, it is said, are infiltrated by atheists and anti-Hindus. It can be seen in the difference between Board temples and others. The latter, private temples belonging often a joint family, are thriving, while the Board-controlled temples are impoverished, falling apart, and finding their lands stolen.

I found this to my chagrin at my own family’s centuries-old temple, which we had handed over to the Travancore Devaswom Board about a hundred years ago. On my previous visit, about five years ago, the temple, while old, was thriving. Today, it is on the verge of being abandoned, thanks to indifference and possibly even malice on the part of the Board: an alleged renovation has been totally botched.

This is, amazingly, a continuation of a colonial-era crime – a British Resident named Munro, a missionary bigot, forced the Maharani of Travancore circa 1819 CE to commingle temple lands with government lands, with the result that a lot of those lands, essential to the income and running of temples, were alienated. Consequently, the 10,000+ temples in Travancore then have now been reduced to a mere 2,000.

Governments have no business interfering in religion. It is a crime against the people of India for the government to ruin these cultural treasures, a common heritage of this nation.

815 words, June 12, 2010

The fine art of punching below one’s weight

A version of this appeared on rediff.com on Jun 2nd at http://news.rediff.com/column/2010/jun/02/rajeev-srinivasan-on-why-india-is-not-taken-seriously.htm

The fine art of punching below one’s weight

Rajeev Srinivasan on how India has managed to make itself much smaller and less important in the world’s eyes than it really is

Several events in the recent past have been emblematic of the problems that India faces: on the one hand, India gets no respect from anybody. On the other hand, it may well not deserve any – any Rodney Dangerfield fans out there?

Pakistan’s Supreme Court found Hafiz Saeed, founder of the Lashkar-e-Toiba and suspected chief instigator of the 11/26 attacks on Mumbai, innocent of all charges. Startlingly, a few days later, India released 25 jailed terrorists (members of the LeT, Jaish-e-Mohamed and Hizbul Mujahideen) and returned them to Pakistan.

Second, some low-level official in Canada’s embassy in India has been, it turns out, telling Indian armed forces members that they are violent terrorists and therefore ineligible for a visa – this has been going on for two years.

Pakistan’s behavior in exonerating Hafiz Saeed – the Supreme Court must be influenced by their government’s, and army’s wishes – suggests that they do not take India seriously. All the fine warlike words uttered by the GoI after 11/26 (and after the every blast in the past six or seven years), that there would be a stiff price to pay for any further mischief and so on, turn out to be total bluster. India has metaphorically thrown in the garbage-bin the 200 or so victims of 11/26. It is safe to kill Indians, and there are no consequences whatsoever. (Communist terrorists and their sponsors are taking note, which explains the 150 ordinary, apolitical, normal Indians massacred due to rail sabotage in Bengal).

Pakistan has called India’s bluff. They have observed that the Indian establishment is laboring under the illusion that there are only two things that can happen between the two countries – “peace talks” [sic] or war. Pakistanis like the so-called peace talks because that means India will continuously make unilateral concessions to keep the alleged dialog going – after all, this is exactly what India has done for 28 years with China, with China escalating its demands on Indian territory all the time and never giving an inch in the discussions.

Pakistanis also believe that Indians are too cowardly to actually go to war, and that anyway sugar daddy American can always be called upon to put pressure on India. Astonishingly, Indian planners do not comprehend that there are shades of gray – it is not a binary affair between war and talks. There are other ways of imposing costs on a recalcitrant foe – it is not for nothing that the aphorism goes “diplomacy is the continuation of war by other means”.

There are other means India has at its disposal, for instance monkeying with water supplies to the lower riparian Pakistan (once again, the clever Chinese have shown how to do with downstream states for rivers originating in occupied Tibet by building dams and even using river-bombs such as those in the Sutlej when they suddenly release massive floods). Trade sanctions are also possible – instead of which India gives generous Most Favored Nation status to Pakistan with no reciprocity. Covert operations, including judicious interference, are also used by all nations as part of their strategy.

But the bottom line is that the original end — peace and cooperation in exchange for stopping terrorism – has fallen by the wayside. The means – the so-called peace talks – have become the end, and the UPA cannot see beyond them. Pakistan has realized that the UPA will appease them and give peace, cooperation and all the trade they want, and there is no penalty to them for continuing their terrorist attacks on India.

In Afghanistan as well, Pakistan has got its way. The world at large sees India as superfluous in Afghanistan, despite the highly-lauded humanitarian and infrastructure-building activity that Indians have pursued there at significant cost in blood and treasure. India was conspicuously excluded from talks on Afghanistan. Pakistan has convinced the world that India is a liability and a hindrance to Obama’s plans to declare victory and run like mad from Afghanistan.

The release of the 25 captured terrorists, in the very wake of Hafiz Saeed’s exoneration, sends a startling message. Orders came from the Home Ministry (See the Daily Excelsior, May 27^th: “Let, HM ultras among 25 Pakistanis freed from 8 jails”) apparently as a peace offering prior to the Home Minister’s and External Affairs Ministers’ visits to Pakistan. How come no Indians in Pakistani prisons are being released in return? What about Sarabjit Singh, falsely accused, on death row, and continually harassed in Pakistan?

Why does Pakistan not feel the need for “goodwill measures”? Because it is India that is desperate to continue the charade of the “peace talks”. That confuses the impartial observer – it is Pakistan which needs that fig-leaf. So whose interests are being protected here? Pertinently, who is pulling the strings?

Second, the Canadian mess is a metaphor for the fact that India has no credibility. After all, Canada (like Australia and Britain) are generally mere appendages for the US. They tend to have little individual clout, but follow the US’s policies. For instance, it is Australia that has been the loudest in threatening India with bloody murder if it didn’t sign the NPT. It is not for nothing that the word ‘poodle’ is sometimes used in this context.

Now comes Canada with a sterling act of friendly diplomacy. The fact that this insulting of serving and retired Indian army and police officers has been going on for two years is simply astonishing. Why wasn’t the low-level flunkey accused of doing this declared persona non grata and given 24 hours to leave, bag and baggage? Why wasn’t the Canadian ambassador summoned and given a demarche? These are the things real countries do – let us remember how the noxious Chinese, in a gratuitous insult, woke up Indian ambassador Nirupama Rao at 2am to deliver a complaint.

It is particularly ironic coming from Canada. I wrote a few years ago in the Pioneer (“Justice denied: the Kanishka bombing of 1985”, May 22^nd, 2007) about how Canada had been criminally negligent in ignoring warnings about the events that led to the bombing of Air India’s Kanishka aircraft, with the loss of 329 lives. Furthermore, their investigation – still incomplete after 25 years – shows racism, incompetence, callousness, dilatory tactics and virtual State compliance in terrorism.

Indians are afraid – of what I do not know – to give uppity foreigners a dressing-down. In fact, this would be highly salutary. If India had immediately expelled the obnoxious Chinese diplomat who said that Arunachal Pradesh was part of China, the Canadians would have been more circumspect.

In that vein, it appears US president Obama is going to make another totally empty gesture, which will give goose-bumps to the usual suspects. It seems he is going to ‘drop in’ on the External Affairs Minister’s discussions with Hillary Clinton. And why, pray, is this significant, unless he is actually bringing David Coleman Headley along (thanks, B, for that insight)? It’s style over substance – let us remember how the Indian PM was not among the world leaders that Obama telephoned when he first took charge, but there was the nonsense of the First State Visit ™ over which the Indian media and officialdom went ga-ga. Nothing whatsoever came of that, other than that a good time, and biriyani, were had by all.

The world has taken its measure of India, and found it to be a second-tier nation. Hence they will continue to insult it subtly and openly. There is no consequence. India does not realize that it is, at least as an economic entity, a desirable partner, and that when the world is in the depths of a financial crisis, the threat of withholding access to the Indian market would immediately encourage snooty Canadas and Australias and Britains to fold. We have seen how the British absolutely groveled a few years ago when Malaysia’s prickly Mahathir Mohammed cancelled orders with British companies when the British said something rude. I have never seen such kowtowing and mea culpas and brown-nosing.

India is a heavyweight acting like a featherweight. There may be a Hanuman Syndrome in effect here: a country not knowing its true worth. On the other hand, I am afraid it’s worse – the rulers do not pursue India’s national interests to the best of their ability, despite their solemn oath to do so.

1400 words, 31^st May, 2010

Financial inclusion for the rural poor: Rural Post Office Life Insurance

A version of the following appeared in DNA on June 1 at the following URL:

http://www.dnaindia.com/opinion/main-article_inclusion-of-the-rural-poor_1390325

Here is a PDF version of the same; DNA provided an absolutely fabulous photograph to go with it! inclusion of the rural poor jun 1

Financial inclusion for the rural poor: Rural Postal Life Insurance reaches out

Rajeev Srinivasan

Experts agree that bringing financial services to the rural masses is generally desirable. Significant value can be generated (both for individuals and for the nation) through providing services to the disadvantaged – for instance, the World Bank’s Christine Qiang estimates that national GDP grows by 0.8% for every 10 percentage-point increase in mobile telephony in emerging economies. Similarly financial services, such as micro-finance, can have a multiplicative effect on the unbanked.

The definition of ‘financial inclusion’ concerns the provision of financial services at an affordable cost. Both State-mandated interventions and market-driven efforts by the banks themselves have been tried. However, this has still left many strata of society under-served: a 2004 survey showed that there were only 59 deposit accounts for every 100 adults in the population. This also masks regional differences – from 17 in Manipur to 187 in Goa.

Most policymakers like some sort of dole – pensions, subsidies, etc., with the latest example being the NREGS scheme which guarantees 100 days-worth of wages to poor laborers. But these schemes are riddled with leakage. Subsidies are not sustainable in the long term, being most appropriate for short-term emergencies; they do not deal with underlying problems. Besides, the public sector has a reputation for callousness.

This is why it is all the more amazing that an innovative public sector initiative has had the effect of reaching many of the previously excluded in a short time. A conversation with the India Post Board member who dreamt up the program, Dr. Uday Balakrishnan, revealed two intriguing facts – one, the ability of the public sector to re-invent itself, and two, the willingness of poor cohorts to marshal their small savings and engage themselves in financial markets. It makes for a fine case study.

India Post is an underutilized player for financial inclusion, because it has reach and credibility. Given the 500,000 employees stationed in 155,000 outlets around the country, it is well placed as a distribution channel; it is the main payment conduit for 50 million NREGS participants. There is also trust in the institution, so that people are willing to incorporate it into their financial planning. As many as 200 million people hold Post Office Savings Bank (POSB) accounts.

It appears that India Post has been offering rural life insurance since 1995, but never emphasized it as a major line of business. When it began to focus on it recently, the results have been impressive: they empowered employees to think creatively and to innovate. A change management effort that also streamlined processes has enabled them to meet stiff targets. It is heartening that even staid government entities, with proper motivation, can be nimble.

Within a few months, some 12 million rural people have taken policies, with a majority of them opting for micro-insurance – for instance, life insurance policies that insure for up to Rs. 10,000, at a very affordable premium of one rupee a day. Larger policies are available for the price of a pack of beedis (Rs. 6) a day. The Post Office has become the largest player in this segment, covering more than twice as many people as all the other insurance companies put together, adding a million-plus new insurants a month.

Why have people opted to buy this level of insurance? Interviews suggest that the best reason is that the poor are aware of the opportunities that exist for their children, if only they could afford a decent education – in other words, there is an aspiration out there that the next generation must do better, and people are willing to sacrifice today’s consumption for children’s education tomorrow.

What is remarkable is that people are voluntarily spending their own tiny savings to buy this social security mechanism. Most of us think the great Indian public looks to the maa-baap government for everything, and that therefore doles, loan forgiveness, etc. are inevitable. It turns out the masses are willing to invest their small savings for the guarantee that a death in the family does not stunt their children’s future.

Once they hold this basic, fungible (if not liquid) financial asset (a life insurance policy), they use it as collateral to get loans from banks; that is, they are included in the system, and they become credit-worthy. In fact, the next thing they want is crop insurance, medical insurance, etc. – they are acting as rational economic players.

Furthermore, as a result of the law of unintended consequences, they are players in the broader financial market. Part of the premium (a prudent percentage, but still 1000s of crores)fs is invested in the market, and, over time, this should bring them better returns than those from the government-securities market.

The late C K Prahalad would be proud of them. The three billion at his ‘Bottom of the Pyramid’ are at last clawing their way out of poverty.

816 words, May 26, 2010