Can EVMs subvert elections? full post

Reposting on wanderlust’s suggestion. The full text is appended below, and here is a link to where the pdf can be downloaded from: http://rajeev.posterous.com/can-electronic-voting-machines-subvert-electi

This was a survey as of Jun 20th, and subsequent revelations have been explosive: someone actually has demonstrated a Trojan Horse as described here, on Jul 3rd. There is virtually no doubt that EVMs can be mucked with. Whether they were mucked with is the subject of further research.

Happy American Independence Day, indeed

Can Electronic Voting Machines subvert elections?

By Rajeev Srinivasan[1]

“The right of voting for representatives is the primary right by which all other rights are protected. To take away this right is to reduce a man to slavery.” – Thomas Paine, Dissertation on First Principles of Government, 1795

“Those who cast the votes decide nothing, those who count the votes decide everything”

“The first stage of fascism should more appropriately be called Corporatism because it is a merge of State and corporate power” – Benito Mussolini

1. Abstract

Are India’s election results an accurate reflection of the will of the people? Or is it possible that the Electronic Voting Machines (EVM) that are deployed in large numbers in India’s elections can be manipulated to subvert the voters’ intent? If that is the case, it would be a serious matter, because that would reduce India’s democracy, of which most Indians are so proud, to a charade. In this essay, we consider the ways in which EVMs could have been used to defraud the Indian voter in 2009. We emphasize that this essay is only about the possibility of fraud; it is beyond the scope of this note and will take further analysis and research to demonstrate actual fraud, if such existed.

1. Introduction

A number of elections around the world have been condemned for various levels of fraud, misdemeanor and felony over the years. Undoubtedly, some of the criticism is well-deserved (for instance, the routine instances of 100% voter turnout in certain totalitarian countries). In some cases, it appears elections were “stolen” though manipulation of the vote tally, thus, in effect, perverting the “will of the people”, that cornerstone of a genuine democratic, republican regime.

Although some of the most egregious examples have been in developing countries, for instance Zimbabwe in 2008[i] and Mexico in 2006[ii], the one that has got the most attention was the US Presidential election in 2004, and there is a website[iii] devoted to the idea that John Kerry was defeated by George W Bush through explicit and subtle fraud[iv]. It is also widely believed that Al Gore was defeated in 2000 through manipulation and fraud. It is ironic that the Americans, who lecture everyone else about free and fair elections, should have – if the critics are right – suffered some of the worst outrages against democracy. Intriguingly, this has made them more, not less, allergic to EVMs.

Let us now fast forward to 2009. The recent elections in Iran, which allowed President Mahmoud Ahmedinejad to retain power, have been roundly condemned by the western media[v] as fraudulent, although they have not explained how the alleged fraud was committed: it is not known if it involved EVM fraud. Most of the criticism is based on two factors: a) the extraordinary margin of victory (two-thirds majority, when all the opinion polls had predicted a tight race), and b) the massive public protests.

While the western media’s desire for democracy is admirable, their moral indignation would probably have been far more muted if their preferred candidate, Mir-Hossein Moussavi, had won. Iranians with long memories remember the CIA-engineered coup that overthrew the legitimately-elected Mohammed Mossadeq in 1953 in order to control Iran’s oil.

The allegations in the western media that there was ‘fraud’ in the Iranian elections [vi],[vii] are based on circumstantial evidence – that “it was a landslide”, and “opposition polls suggested that he [Mr. Moussavi], not Mr. Ahmedinejad, was the one with the commanding lead.”

This is in interesting contrast with India’s April-May 2009 general election. The entire spectrum of local media had projected a tight race, and given the UPA a narrow lead. But in the event the UPA was declared a landslide winner; this discrepancy was not commented upon with the same fervor by the western media. This leads to the conclusion that their preferred candidate won, and therefore the military-industrial-media complex in the west saw no reason to complain.

Remarkably, however, a UPA minister, Glubam Nabi Azad, Congress general secretary in charge of Orissa, has alleged that there was voting machine fraud in that state.[viii] This raises the question:  if Orissa suffered, why would the rest of the country not have been subject to fraud as well?

Circumstantial evidence suggests that there might have been a limited number of constituencies in which fraud was perpetrated. For instance, some MPs had victories that were practically miraculous: exit polls suggested they would lose, they were trailing badly during the counting, but there was a last-minute reprieve for them. In other cases, areas that were strongholds for one party mysteriously chose the other side. In some other cases, the losing parties could not account for the erosion of their committed support, wherein tens of thousands of their loyal votes apparently failed to materialize. Admittedly, none of this is proof of actual EVM fraud, however, unless further research demonstrates it.

Regrettably, the history of voting machines has been checkered at best. The fundamental problem is twofold: one, that there is no easy way of formally verifying and certifying them, and two, that there are increasingly resourceful hackers who can circumvent any simple-minded security schemes implemented by election officials. It is suicidal to repose an absurd amount of trust in them, as seems to be the norm in India.

1. EVMs around the world

There is a veritable tsunami of negative reports about Electronic Voting Machines from all over the world. There is no country in which EVMs have been welcomed so enthusiastically as they have been in India, and perhaps this is with good reason. Hardly any major developed country uses EVMs to any extent: indeed, despite the fuss over “hanging chads” and other arcana in their 2000 elections, even Americans who are partial to technological solutions have resisted the siren-song of voting machines after due consideration.

Here is a sample of the concerns raised about EVMs from a variety of perspectives:

• United States (data from www.electionfraud2004.org and others as indicated):
  • 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.[ix]
  • In the 2004 Presidential elections, in Gahanna, Ohio, where only 638 votes were cast, Bush received 4,258 votes to Kerry’s 260
  • 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
  • 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
  • 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[x]. Diebold, now Premier Election Systems, is the largest US manufacturer of EVMs
  • In 2006, computer scientists[xi] 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)
  • The Federal Constitutional Court of Germany declared EVMs unconstitutional[xii]
• The Netherlands (2006)
  • 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”[xiii]. 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)
  • The Supreme Court declared invalid the results of a pilot electronic vote in three municipalities.[xiv]
• United Kingdom (2007)
  • The Open Rights Group declared it could not express confidence in the results for the areas that it observed[xv]. Their report cites “problems with the procurement, planning, management and implementation of the systems concerned.”
• Ireland (2006)
  • Ireland embarked on an ambitious e-voting scheme, but abandoned it due to public pressure[xvi]
• Brazil (2006)
  • There were serious discrepancies in the Diebold systems predominantly used in Brazil’s 2006 elections[xvii]
• India
  • 2004 General Elections: allegations that good old booth-capturing was taking place[xviii] in Bihar, even with the spanking-new EVMs
  • 2009 General Elections: Subramanian Swamy alleged in April 2009 that a group of people who had been convicted in the US for hacking bank accounts and credit cards had been recruited by a certain political party to possibly rig the elections.
  • The Shiv Sena alleged that EVM malfunction caused its candidate Mohan Rawale to lose in South Mumbai. Said Rawale: “I wonder how I got only 5 votes from an area that is a Shiv Sena stronghold”[xix]
  • Journalist Cho Ramaswamy discussed how in MDMK leader Vaiko’s constituency, Virudhunagar, Tamil Nadu, “while counting, the votes increased by 23,000 more than the polled votes”[xx]
  • An ongoing debate and additional new information is posted on S Kalyanaraman’s live blog[xxi] which is updated often; a detailed analysis is at Senthil Raja’s blog[xxii] of May 24th

A report[xxiii] in Newsweek magazine provides more details about how people around the world are rejecting electronic voting. The Open Rights Group has provided many examples and more details about some of the above in its paper “Electronic Voting: A challenge to democracy?”[xxiv]. Their conclusion: “E-voting threatens the integrity of our elections and we oppose its use in our democracy.”

1. Possible ways of manipulating EVMs

Are EVMs particularly bad, compared to the old paper ballot box? The answer has to be a resounding “yes”. The reason is that paper ballots, despite their many flaws[xxv], have one sterling characteristic: there is an audit trail, an actual piece of paper exists, and a recount, while laborious and time-consuming, is possible.

EVMs have the great advantage of quick tabulation of results. But the problem is fundamental: trust. Since the vote cast does not result in anything palpable, but only creates a digital impulse, it is hard to verify the accuracy of the result, and therefore it is hard to trust.

Digitized data is malleable and easily manipulated: indeed, this is one of its principal attractions in ordinary computing. For instance, a digital photograph can be enhanced, edited, color-corrected, cleaned-up, brightened, the background changed, and otherwise modified in ways that a traditional analog (most film is analog) photograph cannot be. Unfortunately, this very malleability is a problem when it comes to voting, because it is hard to *prove* that the voting data has not been tampered with. It would be hard to detect any manipulation unless expensive and thorough preventive steps are taken.

Data can be manipulated at almost every step on the way: during vote, in transit, or during counting. None of this is easily detected because the EVM is presented to the user as a typical “black box” which is deemed unalterable and tamper-proof. In other words, the hardware and software installed, are deemed trustworthy by edict, and not based on formal verification by a third party.

This trust is misplaced. Embedded systems – that is computers that run just their installed programs (for instance in a watch or a microwave oven), rather than a computer like a PC which an end user can add programs to and run in a manner he pleases – are notoriously prone to error, which is why the Y2K bug was considered so dangerous: there was concern that embedded systems in planes, banks, electric utilities, transportation systems, etc. would fail catastrophically. This is the reason why some critical systems (eg. control systems for nuclear power plants) continue to be electro-mechanical rather than digital.

There are several technical reasons why embedded systems are tricky: one is that the software used in these systems (which have limited memory, unlike capacious PCs) is tightly-written machine-language code, which is hard for humans to comprehend, unlike code that is written in a high-level language such as Java or C++.

Secondly, the software may not be adequately tested taking into account the various extreme cases of data it might encounter. This can be compared to a 1994 problem with Intel’s Pentium chips[xxvi]: they were found to produce erroneous results in some simple arithmetic calculations. When unanticipated data is entered, the system may behave erratically.

The above examples pertain to inadvertent errors; similarly, manufacturing faults in the hardware may result in malfunctions. More sinister issues arise from malicious and intentional tampering. The programs used are proprietary and not open for inspection, unlike, say, open source programs which any individual can test out.

There are several ways in which the fraud can be perpetrated with EVMs[xxvii]:

• Tampering with the software to add malicious code to alter vote totals or favor any candidate
• Tampering with the hardware of the machine to alter vote totals or favor any candidate
• Intentional mis-configuration of the ballot design to misidentify a candidate’s party
• Abusing the administrative access to the machine by election officials might also allow individuals to vote multiple times

The most obvious way to add malicious code is to create a Trojan Horse[xxviii], a program that has an undocumented back-door entry, known only to the writers of the program. Under normal circumstances, the program will function as specified, in this case correctly capturing the voter’s choice. However, the Trojan Horse can be triggered off by some specific mechanism, such as by pressing a particular sequence of buttons on the EVM. Before or during the voting process, some individual can trigger off the Trojan Horse, which becomes active. This individual could well be a party cadre who is a legitimate voter in that constituency.

The Trojan could then work some algorithms – for instance, it could assign every twelfth vote to the desired party, regardless of which blue button the voter pressed. Algorithms can be quite sophisticated, giving a percentage of the vote that is not suspiciously high (90%) but plausible – say 42% in a constituency with a multi-cornered contest.

Furthermore, the Trojan Horse could be programmed to erase itself when the EVM is turned off at the end of the day’s voting. It may leave no trace of its erstwhile existence. Trojan Horse programs are well-known among the hacker community, and are not particularly difficult to write. But they are fiendishly difficult to find and eradicate.

How does the Trojan Horse program get embedded in the machine in the first place? One of the objections to this scenario is the question as to how the malicious code is introduced into the EVMs in all 828,804 polling stations? Wouldn’t this level of tampering require the connivance of hundreds of thousands of people in the polling booths?

In fact, no. This can be done at a single point, in the factory, where an innocuous ‘update’ of the software can be infected with the rogue add-on. Only one or two people need to ever know about this, if they are well-placed within the factory[xxix] or in the election machinery. In this context, the previous UPA government’s selection of Naveen Chawla as Chief Election Commissioner, despite allegations of bias against him[xxx], looks dubious.

A startling new revelation suggests how this not-so-innocent ‘update’ could have been performed in 2009. Writing in the blog taragana.com[xxxi] on June 19^th, Azera Rahman provides the following information from Amol Newaskar, general manager of BEL in Bangalore. Here is the quote, verbatim:

“However, the ones manufactured from 2007 onwards have improvised [sic] features like in-built clocks which record the exact time a ballot is cast” Newaskar said. “Not just that, the EVM also records the exact time when the whole balloting process starts and when the last vote is cast. It gives an hourly update of the number of votes cast, and if there is any unusual trend in the process, it can be easily detected. Thus, the whole process becomes tamper-proof”, he added… The Election Commission, according to Newaskar, placed an order for 182,000 EVMs to BEL for the 2009 general election – all of which were supplied by January. The other company authorized by the Election Commission to manufacture EVMs is the Hyderabad-based Electronics Corporation of India (ECIL) that has supplied 78,000 machines with the improvised [sic] features…”

This could well be the smoking gun. The ‘improvised’ code in the 260,000 new EVMs could well hold the key. Exactly what was changed? Does this possibly have an embedded Trojan? Has any independent verification authority certified the new code? Doesn’t this new code invalidate the Indiresan Committee report of 2006? Can the instances of suspected fraud be correlated with polling stations where the new EVMs were deployed? Is the new data collected as described above stored in a non-reprogrammable and permanent manner? How can researchers get access to it?

A second objection[xxxii] is procedural: how is the Trojan Horse triggered? The assignment of the buttons to parties is done late in the game, so that it would require at least one person to keep track of the buttons and trigger the Trojan Horse in each of the 800,000+ polling stations – and it is hard to keep a secret that so many people know. Once again, the answer is a no. First of all, there is no need to subvert every one of the polling stations, it would be sufficient to concentrate on only a few constituencies and the associated polling booths.

Second, another possibility is that the Trojan is the norm, and it will run by default *unless* the triggering is done, in which case it will become dormant. More alarmingly, there is the possibility of remote control, by substituting radio-aware chips for the normal chips in the voting machines. According the Election Commission’s[xxxiii] FAQ, “the microchip used in EVMs is sealed at the time of import. It cannot be opened and any rewriting of program can [sic] be done by anyone without damaging the chip.” This implies that the chip is “imported” from somewhere, and any number of manufacturers especially in China have mastered the art of making fake chips. Why isn’t there transparency about the chip and its manufacturers?

Imagine that the new chip that was swapped in has a radio capability. That means it can be controlled by a cellular signal or other radio signal. For instance, it might be possible to send a signal via a standard GSM or CDMA cellular handset, if the chip is compatible. Thus, it may be possible for a single person to drive around to all the polling booths in a constituency, and, from outside, trigger the Trojan Horse. This drastically reduces the number of people who need to be involved! It does not have be a low-level party cadre, it can be the district head, for instance. Thus, if only 50 constituencies were tampered with, only 50 highly trusted people need to know about the whole operation.

Radio-aware chips are common, especially now that RFID (radio-frequency identity tagging) is becoming widespread. There is the interesting case of the Iraqi Air Force and its Hewlett-Packard printers. Unbeknownst to the Iraqis, American officials swapped out the standard printer chips with chips that were additionally GPS-aware and could broadcast their location. When the printers ended up in Iraqi anti-aircraft batteries, a GPS satellite passing by overhead could accurately pinpoint the location of the printers, allowing warplanes to target them. HP has also announced[xxxiv] another chip “the size of a grain of rice” that can store 100 pages of text and swap data via wireless.

The examples above only consider the possible fraud before and during voting; similar scenarios can be developed while the machines are in transit, and while the counting is going on. These possibilities merely scratch the surface; undoubtedly, resourceful minds have come up with even better ways of doing the deed. Here are in fact some of the specifics discovered in the Brazil case:

Problems from the Brazil case referred to above:

1. 1. The boot system may be modified by software
   2. It is possible to modify the internal programs by external digital methods
   3. The OS (Windows CE) does not possess strong resources of security
   4. The system of physical seals is insufficient and the case is easy to open, without destroying anything
   5. It is possible to reconfigure the security resources by means of jumpers on the motherboard
   6. There exists an internal socket for multimedia memory cards
   7. The external button labeled “battery test” can be used for attacks set off by a voter

A query to a computer science researcher in the US produced the following response which I quote in its entirety:

Shipping bug free software is proven to be impossible and it is found that in practice it is significantly harder to produce software without any security holes than it is to find and exploit a bug[xxxv]. This raises significant questions about reliability of electronic voting machines. Malicious logic can be easily hidden by a “company insider” within the code, such that the machine records votes incorrectly to favor one candidate over another. While a study conducted by the researchers at the Rice University elucidated the ease with which voting systems could be infected by a Trojan horse[xxxvi], it is found that the Web sites and databases of major corporations are regularly hacked. Often a well-designed Trojan horse can tell when it’s being tested and they may appear only for brief instants of time, while completely disappearing at other times[xxxvii]. A number of methods for hiding Trojans in voting machines have been suggested ranging from as simple as misleading documentation to burying the malicious code deep in subroutines, macro expansions, header files, conditional compilations or making changes directly to object or machine code thereby bypassing the human readable source code completely[xxxviii].

Is it possible to reduce the probability of EVM fraud? Yes, one way is through deep testing, although that is still not entirely foolproof:

• Parallel testing, where an independent set of results is compared against the original machine results. During election, Statistically significant numbers of voters need to verify that their intended vote matches the electronic and paper votes
• Statistically significant number of voting machines can be randomly selected from polling stations and used for testing. This can be defeated by Trojan Horses
• Logic and accuracy testing before elections
• Independent software verification and certification. Can use code signatures to ensure software is identical. Open source may also be a good idea

1. Process improvements needed

At the heart of the problem is a system issue: the EVMs are a useful technology that has been thrown into the chaotic election process without due thought, understanding or introspection. They are like guns: they can be used well or they can be used badly. Throwing technology at a problem does not solve it. On the contrary, the EVM makes the process more opaque and more easily subverted. A full system review needs to be done before India continues with EVMs in future elections.

Writing in the IEEE Computer magazine of May[xxxix] 2009, respected computer scientist and networking expert Andrew Tanenbaum suggested that it is necessary to take “a system view, incorporating a trustworthy process based on open source software, simplified procedures, and built-in redundant safeguards that prevent tampering.”

Tanenbaum outlines a nine-step process that he believes is necessary as an adjunct to EVMs, and necessary to make the process fool-proof. These are quite elaborate, with fool-proof encryption, and in summary they are:

1. 1. Generate and distribute precinct master keys (for cryptography)
   2. Create voter registration records
   3. Mail proof of registration to voters
   4. Prepare voting machines (by hashing the voting list with the precinct’s public key[xl] and writing onto a read-only medium)
   5. Assemble key pairs at precinct (for decryption of the voting list)
   6. Check in voters (they have to bring in the card they received in the mail)
   7. Have voters cast their votes
   8. Tabulate votes
   9. Publish results

It is clear that in the Indian case, none of the essential cryptography was done, and as per Tanenbaum, that would mean the EVMs are not likely to produce reliable results.

1. PILs in Indian courts

There have been a number of cases (usually Public Interest Litigation) filed in Indian courts about the possibility of EVM fraud. Retired computer science professor Satinath Choudhary[xli] claimed that “producing doctored EVMs is child’s play” as early as 2004. The Linux Journal[xlii] at the time suggested that the fact that details of the hardware and software in the EVMs had not been published and the source code not made available meant citizens “could not be assured of the fairness of the EVM”. According to Choudhary, the Supreme Court had ruled in his PIL as follows: “Heard the petitioner, who is appearing in-person. In case the petitioner files any representation, the Election Commission may consider his suggestions. With the observations made above, the writ petition stands disposed of.” However, the Election Commission did nothing to take into account his concerns and suggestions. In his followup, Choudhary suggests a number of steps that should be taken.

Banwarilal B. Purohit vs. Election Commission of India was filed in 2004 in the Maharashtra High Court at Nagpur. The deposition of Ravi Visvesvaraya Prasad, an electrical and computer engineer, provides substantial insight into the ways in which EVMs can be manipulated.[xliii]

Shailendra Pradhan filed a PIL in 2009 in the Madhya Pradesh High Court at Jabalpur, with the Election Commission and the manufacturers as respondents, suggesting that the lack of a voter-verifiable audit system made EVMs faulty and that there was no basis for the belief that the embedded programs are tamper-proof, among other claims. [xliv]

The PMK, which suffered a shock defeat in Virudhunagar constituency, has filed[xlv] an appeal to the Election Commission and will file a PIL if the appeal to the EC fails.

The DDMK has filed a PIL in Madras High Court against EVMs.[xlvi]

1. Next steps

In order to give voters and observers a certain sense of comfort that they can indeed depend on the EVMs, a number of steps need to be taken urgently. First of all, there is the Expert Committee Report[xlvii] on EVMs. The report considers a number of possible fraud scenarios, including the tampering of various parts of the system. In all the cases considered, the report found that the EVM has sufficient safeguards to ensure fair polling. But the Report does not go beyond a ‘black box’ analysis, and does not give any information about the reliability or otherwise of the operating system used, the circuit boards, or the chipset, not to mention the embedded software. This report also does not necessarily respond to all the concerns raised by Tanenbaum, Choudhary and Prasad above, it would be a good first step to analyze the EVMs in light of this new set of concerns.

Secondly, the new and ‘improved’ 2009 EVMs reported by Newaskar are obviously outside the ambit of the 2006 report, and so it is necessary to constitute a new Committee to investigate them.

Thirdly, the 2006 report says on Page 4: “a log is maintained of all key presses”. This is intended as a permanent record of all activity on the EVM itself, and it is claimed that the record is tamper-proof and cannot be erased electronically and that it is available for an extended period.

Therefore, researchers should acquire via a Right-To-Information petition the complete logs of all EVMs (including the time-stamp data Newaskar refers to with the new EVMs) in at least one sample constituency where they suspect fraud. If the log is a permanent and tamper-proof record as claimed, a painstaking analysis of the log using data-mining techniques should indicate the presence or absence of fraud. If this exercise is done over the entire constituency, not on a sampling basis but on a survey basis, it would be possible to get a complete picture of whether the EVMs functioned as advertized.

Once this step is completed, if suspicions persist, a random sample of the logs from a statistically valid sample of EVMs from around the country needs to be taken, and the same kind of detailed data-mining analysis performed on them to see if there are any suspicious patterns of keystrokes emerging: for instance, are there sequences that look like triggers for Trojan Horses? Are there suspiciously uniform patterns of voting?

The next step would be to scrutinize the actual source code of the software that is installed in the systems. Given the gravity of the function performed by them, there is no room for opaqueness: the public has a right to know exactly what the code contains, and the manufacturer should be forced to reveal it. The code, and its embedded version, must be given to independent labs for thorough testing to see if there are anomalies. The same is true of the hardware, including the chip as well as the schematics of the EVM itself.

Another, parallel, step would be to build an actual proof-of-concept on the EVM of how a Trojan Horse can be implemented with the kinds of characteristics described above. The manufacturers of the EVM should provide complete technical details of the chips, along with any firmware and software used, as well as sample chips and EVM devices to independent testing labs so that they could demonstrate Trojan Horse on the actual EVM devices.

In light of all of the above, it is clear that there is reasonable doubt about the reliability of EVMs. A PIL should be filed in the Supreme Court to postpone any further use of EVMs until a proper audit and verification has been performed on them.

Finally, the kinds of procedural checks and balances recommended by Tanenbaum and other experts need to be incorporated into the system before another election in India that depends entirely on EVMs.

1. Conclusion

Given the poor experience with Electronic Voting Machines worldwide, it is difficult to believe that India’s EVMs are somehow far superior to those used elsewhere, and somehow immune to fraud. This has to be demonstrated. A priori, the evidence suggests that India’s EVMs are susceptible to fraud in a number of dimensions.

It appears that both technical and procedural measures must be put in place to allay the concerns about the reliability, or lack thereof, of electronic voting machines.

It is entirely possible that the election machinery has taken every possible step in good faith, but that clever criminals have subverted the system for their own ends. Improved transparency, and public scrutiny of the system, including an analysis of ways in which it can be made more secure are urgent and imperative before any future elections.

---

[1] Rajeev Srinivasan is a management consultant in strategy, innovation and energy. He has spent over twenty years in the computer industry, mostly in the Silicon Valley, in engineering and management roles. His columns appear in rediff.com, The Pioneer, The New Indian Express and Mint. He also teaches periodically at various IIMs.

---

[i] “Opposition vows to fight Zimbabwe election fraud”, Reuters, Sun Mar 23, 2008 http://www.reuters.com/article/worldNews/idUSL236998620080323

[ii] “Fraud video claim in Mexico poll”, BBC, Tue Jul 11, 2006

[iii] www.electionfraud2004.org, which the opening quote from Thomas Paine has been taken

[iv] “Was the 2004 Election Stolen?”, Robert F Kennedy Jr, Rolling Stone, Jun 1, 2006

[v] “Landslide or Fraud? The Debate Online Over Iran’s Election Results”, New York Times, June 13, 2009 http://thelede.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/06/13/landslide-or-fraud-the-debate-online-over-irans-election-results/

[vi] “Neither Real  nor Free”, Editorial, New York Times, Jun 15, 2009

[vii] “Iran Elections: Mahmoud Ahmedinejad and Hossein Mousai both claim victory”, UK Telegraph, Jun 12, 2009

[viii] “EVMs ‘manipulated’ in Orissa polls, claims Azad, Union Health Minister”, IANS, 18 Jun 2009

[ix] Wikipedia entry on “Electronic voting”

[x] Wikipedia entry on “Electronic voting”

[xi] “The Diebold Bombshell”, OpEdNews.com, 23 July 2006

[xii] German Federal Constitutional Court, Press Release No. 19/2009, of 3 Mar 2009

[xiii] “Dutch government scraps plans to use voting computers in 35 cities including Amsterdam”, AP, 30 Oct 2006

[xiv] Wikipedia entry on “Electronic voting”

[xv] “ORG Election Report highlights problems with the voting technology used”, 20 Jun 2007

[xvi] “Are electronic voting machines tamper-proof?” Subramanian Swamy, The Hindu, 17 Jun 2009

[xvii] “Brazil: The Perfect Electoral Crime”, James Burk, Portland Indymedia Center, 21 Oct 2006, quoting Amilcar Brunazo Filho, www.votoseguro.org

[xviii] “On New Voting Machine, the Same Old Fraud”, New York Times, 27 Apr 2004

[xix] “Sena alleges EVM malfunction in South Mumbai”, Rediff.com, 16 May 2009

[xx] “Rahul could become a desirable leader”, Rediff.com, 19 May, 2009

[xxi] http://sites.google.com/site/hindunew/electronic-voting-machines

[xxii] http://psenthilraja.wordpress.com/2009/05/24/remote-controlling-evm-manufacturing-election-results/

[xxiii] “We Do Not Trust Machines”, Evgeny Morozov, Newsweek, 1 Jun, 2009

[xxiv] http://www.openrightsgroup.org/wp-content/uploads/org-evoting-briefing-pack-final.pdf

[xxv] According to the faq by the Election Commission at //eci.nic.faq/EVM.asp the great advantage of the EVM is speed of tabulating the results

[xxvi] “Ideas and Trends: The Chip on Intel’s shoulder”, New York Times, 18 Dec, 1994

[xxvii] Wikipedia entery on “Electoral fraud”

[xxviii] Obviously named after the mythological – and malicious — Trojan Horse the Greeks gifted to Troy. See the Wikipedia entry on “Trojan Horses”

[xxix] In the case of India, it is the BEL in Bangalore and ECIL in Hyderabad which produce the EVMs

[xxx] The outgoing Chief Election Commissioner made a suo moto recommendation that Naveen Chawla, Election Commissioner, should be removed, based on a report by the Shah Commission investigating the Emergency that indicted Chawla for having been ‘authoritarian and callous’ and for gross misuse of power. It declared that he was “unfit to hold any public office which demands an attitude of fair play and consideration for others”

[xxxi] “Electronic voting machines – the leitmotif of Indian democracy”, AzeraRahman, http://blog.taragana.com/n/electronic-voting-machines-the-leitmotif-of-indian-democracy-86599/

[xxxii] http://theoverlord.wordpress.com/2009/05/19/the-indian-electronic-voting-machines

[xxxiii] Ibid. eci.nic.faq/EVM.asp

[xxxiv] “Tiny wireless memory chip debuts”, BBC, 17 Jul, 2006

[xxxv] Bannet, J.; Price, D.W.; Rudys, A.; Singer, J.; Wallach, D.S., “Hack-a-vote: Security issues with electronic voting systems,” IEEE Security & Privacy, vol.2, no.1, pp. 32-37, Jan.-Feb. 2004.

[xxxvi] D. S. Wallach, “Electronic voting: Accuracy, accessibility and fraud.”, Report for Democratic National Committee. www.democrats.org/pdfs/ohvrireport/section07.pdf

[xxxvii] P. G. Neumann, “Security criteria for electronic voting,” 16th National Computer Security Conference, September, 1993

[xxxviii] Barbara Simons, “Who gets to count your vote? Computerized and internet voting,” talk at Spatial Cognition Research Center, 2003

[xxxix] “Trustworthy voting: from machine to system”, Nathanael Paul and Andrew S. Tanenbaum, IEEE Computer, May 2009

[xl] Public-key private-key systems of cryptography are essentially tamper-proof

[xli] “Winning elections made easy”, Satinath Choudhary, Indian Express, 19 Apr 2004. He was president, Better Democracy Forum, The Bronx, New York.

[xlii] “India’s electronic voting faces lawsuit over accountability”, Linux Journal, 3 May, 2004

[xliii] www.scribd.com/doc/15745499/EVMs-Supporting-Documents

[xliv] www.samarthbharat.com/files/evmpetition.pdf

[xlv] “PMK to move court against EVMs”, The Hindu, 14 Jun, 2009

[xlvi] “PIL to ban use of EVMs in future elections admitted in Madras High Court”, 26 May, 2009

[xlvii] www.scribd.com/doc/6794194/Expert-Committee-Report-on-EVM has the report dated Sep 2006, retrieved under RTI

Can EVMs subvert democracy?

To appear in ‘Eternal India: A New Perspectives Monthly’. Will post the full article when it is published.

Can Electronic Voting Machines subvert elections?

By Rajeev Srinivasan

“The right of voting for representatives is the primary right by which all other rights are protected. To take away this right is to reduce a man to slavery.” – Thomas Paine, Dissertation on First Principles of Government, 1795

“Those who cast the votes decide nothing, those who count the votes decide everything” – Joseph Stalin

“The first stage of fascism should more appropriately be called Corporatism because it is a merge of State and corporate power” – Benito Mussolini

1. Abstract

Are India’s election results an accurate reflection of the will of the people? Or is it possible that the Electronic Voting Machines (EVM) that are deployed in large numbers in India’s elections can be manipulated to subvert the voters’ intent? If that is the case, it would be a serious matter, because that would reduce India’s democracy, of which most Indians are so proud, to a charade. In this essay, we consider the ways in which EVMs could have been used to defraud the Indian voter in 2009. We emphasize that this essay is only about the possibility of fraud; it is beyond the scope of this note and will take further analysis and research to demonstrate actual fraud, if such existed.

1. Introduction

A number of elections around the world have been condemned for various levels of fraud, misdemeanor and felony over the years. Undoubtedly, some of the criticism is well-deserved (for instance, the routine instances of 100% voter turnout in certain totalitarian countries). In some cases, it appears elections were “stolen” though manipulation of the vote tally, thus, in effect, perverting the “will of the people”, that cornerstone of a genuine democratic, republican regime.

… deleted

The center cannot hold

To appear on rediff.com. When it is published i will provide the full text:

The center cannot hold

The incidents in Lalgarh, West Bengal, have clarified that the writ of the Government of India does not hold sway in certain parts of the country. There is the dismissive story of how the last Mughal Emperor was sovereign of only a few square miles in Delhi by 1803, while the rest of the country was ruled by others. In all fairness, the Central Government today does control more territory than did Bahadur Shah.

… deleted

Beware of another oil shock

This was published in mint.com on Jun 26th:

http://www.livemint.com/2009/06/25215141/Beware-of-another-oil-shock.html

After hitting a low around $32 last December, the price of a barrel of oil has risen to the $70+ range. While the net effect of this will lead to renewed inflation and hit our wallets, what is the medium-term outlook for oil? All predictions are risky, but it is likely that prices will go right back up into the $100 range,  resulting in many  attendant problems for the world economy.

If you look at the really big picture, global energy futures are complex. On the one hand, the world probably will not run out of oil (and oil-like substances, including shale, tar sands, liquefied natural gas, liquefied coal, etc.) in the immediate future. Besides, according to the fundamental laws of physics, there is plenty of energy available in the current known reserves of various sources.

Research by Harvard University  suggests, for instance, that the world’s conventional oil and gas alone contains 1,000 terawatt-years worth of energy; coal has another 5,000; the amount of solar energy falling on the earth every year is another 30,000; and our total current use worldwide is only 15 terawatt-years per year. The trick, of course, is in converting this potential into actual available energy.

On the other hand, there is increasing concern about greenhouse gas emissions and global warming.

As a result of conservation and greater efficiency, it is possible that energy demand growth may decline. Nevertheless, conventional energy sources will continue to predominate and renewables will not be a major factor even in twenty years’ time.

For instance, the Organization of Economic Co-operation and Development’s (OECD) International Energy Agency, in its World Energy Outlook 2008, sees “more of the same: a vision of a laisser-faire fossil-energy future.” It considers a reference scenario, which suggests that world energy usage will grow from 11,730 million tons of oil equivalent (mtoe) to 17,010 mtoe in 2030, an increase of 45%.

An immediate implication of this reference scenario is that oil prices will rise again. The recent volatility of oil prices was unexpected (from $147 last July to $32). Oil prices plunged as the result of a recession-induced collapse in worldwide demand for goods, and thus for trade and shipping.  But with oil plumbing new lows, many people went back to their profligate use of energy. The lessons of the last oil shock were not internalized, demand simply rose again.

Furthermore, it is quite clear that the producing countries have great incentives to ensure a much higher “normal” or “base” price, because they have become addicted to the windfall transfer of trillions of dollars to them, courtesy high prices. The breakeven prices required by members of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC), according to the Wall Street Journal Asia, are as follows: Iran $90, Bahrain $75, Oman $77, Saudi Arabia $49, Kuwait $33, Qatar $24, UAE $23.

While the actual cost at the well-head of oil may be lower (some experts say that it costs Saudi Arabia $1-$2 a barrel to dig oil out of the ground), the budgetary price that OPEC countries live by is much higher, and they will not be able to sustain their spending below a certain minimum price. Thus OPEC will observe production quotas until the desired pricing level is reached.

Observers such as the IEA suggest that the “natural” price of oil is around $85-$100 (in 2009 dollar terms), and that prices will reach this equilibrium level in the near future. The extreme volatility in prices, according to them, is acting as an inhibitor to investment in OPEC countries, and therefore most likely will lead to supply reductions in the long-run, as existing oil wells get exhausted.

They argue that the era of peak-oil has not arrived, contrary to Cassandra-like predictions (called “Hubbard’s Peak”). OPEC dismisses these concerns by saying “Resources are plentiful”. Oil company officials suggest that new oil supplies will continue to come online. Therefore, they do not see a fundamental constraint to oil availability from the supply side, although actual future capacity to deliver may be affected in future by failure to make investments today.

The world is not running short of oil or gas just yet, they say, and there is no oil bust. Incidentally, experts concur that OPEC members will dominate supply, and that non-OPEC (such as Russian) oil will have limited impact.

There is still a significant amount of recoverable oil, including extra-heavy oil, oil sands and oil shale, although the cost of recovery and of downstream products may be high. However, field-by-field declines in oil production are accelerating and barriers to upstream investment could constrain global supply. This is one of the arguments made about the ultimately harmful effects of oil prices being “too low”: major projects are being cancelled or put on hold.

Thus, barring some extraordinary breakthroughs in renewables, oil prices will go right back up to the $100 range soon as soon as demand recovers. We had better be prepared for more sticker-shock.

Swine flu: Policies behind pandemics

Published on mint on 5/26/09:

http://www.livemint.com/2009/05/26210249/Policies-behind-pandemics.html

It appears that the swine flu pandemic has been averted for the moment due to some quick thinking and action. The tenor of news reports has changed from panic to the smug feeling that it is under control. The World Health Organization and the American Centers for Disease Control probably deserve kudos for helping contain the problem. But as with previous episodes of disease, it may well recur: the Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) and avian flu have appeared more than once, as have Ebola and Legionnaire’s disease.

After the counting and other stories

Published on Rediff on May 17th

http://election.rediff.com/column/2009/may/17/loksabhapoll-after-the-counting-and-other-stories.htm

The great fabulist O V Vijayan had a collection of short stories – and some of the best were based on the Emergency — titled “After the hanging and other stories”. I could stretch the point and suggest that democracy was hanged in India, but perhaps that is too dramatic. Democracy was already a walking wounded in India. It had been a zombie for years, with paraphernalia such as elaborate elections, but it is merely form, not substance. What passes for a democracy in India is make-believe. It is, to paraphrase that old racist Churchill, about as real as the equator.

Nevertheless, it is a little sad to see a people committing collective suicide. For, this year’s election is a point of inflexion, coming as it does at a point when the unipolar world of the recent past is clearly unraveling. There is a power vacuum, as the dominant power of the previous century, the United States, is clearly suffering from imperial over-reach. Much as other imperial powers have done in the past, America is also realizing that there are limits to its power to compel others.

Since nature abhors a vacuum, a new power is stepping into it: China. They have amassed, as is well known, a war chest of $2 trillion. They are making noises about replacing the US dollar as the reserve currency, and economist Nouriel Roubini (known as ‘Dr. Doom’ for his Cassandra-like warnings about the economic crisis) wrote in the New York Times about the ‘almighty renminbi’ possibly replacing the almighty dollar.

This was India’s chance to also make it to the top, but of course it won’t with the UPA at the helm. The UPA and its coterie of leftists have a congenital inferiority complex, and they simply cannot imagine that India in fact has the potential to be one of the poles in a multi-polar world. Their imaginations have been stunted by all the dogma of non-alignment they have mouthed for decades – and they can only imagine being a pawn and a supplicant to some superior power.

The fact is that an unfettered India which defends its interests had a very good chance of being not only one among the top ten global powers in its economic, military and innovation capability. India, if it played its cards right, would have had a non-trivial chance of being Number One, the biggest power in the world. If the intrusive Indian government did not interfere, the native genius of Indians would naturally enable the nation to flourish, as was demonstrated in sector after sector after 1991. Indians have thrived despite the government, not because of it.

The problem the Americans face is that, despite their vast continental resources, they are a waning power, as they reached the zenith of their empire in the 1950s and 1960s, and it has been downhill ever since, except for a brief moment when they became the sole hyperpower. The Chinese, on their part, have tremendous problems because, despite the acknowledged entrepreneurial capacities of its citizens, Chinese history shows that it can only do well when there is a strong imperial government. Eventually, the Communist dictatorship will collapse.

India would have had a chance, but not with the UPA in power. An old gentleman, whom I have no reason to disbelieve, once told me of an incident with a Communist leader in Kerala, who opposed prohibition. In a private conversation, this person questioned the minister about the obvious fact that the consumption of liquor by men was impoverishing their families and preventing them from rising up to the middle class. Whereupon the leader told him, in effect: “We don’t want to end poverty. If there is no poverty, who needs us?” This accurately reflects the UPA’s beliefs as well. Their slogans will have no takers unless there is a large, hopeless underclass.

The UPA has demonstrated that it can only think of India as a vassal state throughout the last five years of craven behavior towards the US (“India loves you, Mr. Bush”, said the PM). The opaque manner in which the nuclear deal was rammed through was preposterous.  India will pay tens of billions of dollars for nuclear fission reactors from the US and its allies, and will go into ‘cap, rollback and eliminate’ mode as it is blackmailed into the NPT, CTBT and FMCT. In the meantime, the Americans are giving billions to the Pakistanis, in effect supporting their new plutonium reactors, as reported by MSNBC on May 15^th (“Pakistan expanding its nuclear capability”) http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/30648446/

It would be ironic if the Americans are taking the very same billions coming from India and giving those to the Pakistanis. That would be, as Karl Marx said, history repeating itself as tragedy: British imperialists, it may be remembered, coerced money from Indians to build the infrastructure to oppress Indians.

The energy issue is just one of many in which the UPA has not looked after India’s interests. Consider China – now that energy prices have fallen, the Chinese have locked up long-term contracts for oil and gas by waving their bankroll around, in places like Venezuela, Russia, and Angola. The UPA has done nothing, apparently complacent that Uncle Sam will ride to the rescue with uranium. The UPA couldn’t even get Bangladeshi or Myanmarese gas, which the Chinese snatched up. That is nothing short of criminal.

In fact there are several reasons why the last five years of UPA rule have been disastrous. I am reminded of Ronald Reagan’s famous jibe: “Are you better off than you were four years ago?” Absolutely not, in area after area:

• Economy: because of disastrous populist policies, the budget deficit is around 13-15%, one of the highest in the world. Inflation of up to 12% has permanently pushed up the prices of most essential goods by a factor of 1.5 to 3x, and it will return with a vengeance because of the high deficit
• Foreign Policy: India’s ‘near-abroad’ is a disaster, as India’s sphere of influence has shrunk, and China’s has grown. Nepal is now controlled by friends of China; Sri Lanka is massacring Tamils, and has leased the Hambantota naval base to China; terrorist infiltration via Bangladesh and Nepal continues apace; the Pakistani Taliban are only some 200 kilometers from Delhi
• Security: Terrorists attack Indian cities at will; the invasion of Mumbai has already been forgotten by the UPA, which only has a long memory when certain privileged people are killed
• Corruption and Money-laundering: Gigantic amounts of money appear to be stashed away in numbered Swiss accounts – enough to pay off the national debt; the ill-gotten gains of the Italian Quattrochi have tacitly been given to him. This makes the already corrupt Indian system even worse
• Opaqueness: The UPA lied continuously to the Indian people and Parliament about the details of the nuclear accord, which turns out to be far less attractive than was advertized; the libel, perjury and defamation by certain NGOs about Gujarat have gone completely unpunished; and the huge bags-of-cash-for-votes scandal has been swept under the carpet.

The Indian voter is not stupid, and is exquisitely sensitive to things that affect his wallet. Therefore it is a little surprising that the average voter drank the UPA’s Kool-Aid.

There is, of course, the possibility that the average voter did not in fact fall for the UPA’s charms, and that this election was subject to massive fraud. I am talking about Electronic Voting Machines (EVMs). Having spent many years in the high-tech world, I do not trust computers, especially embedded systems. Researchers in the US have shown how easy it is to break into EVMs, which is why they have not adopted them. They have realized how important it is to have a paper audit trail, hanging chads and all.

It would not be extraordinarily difficult to install a program with a Trojan Horse in it. To outward appearances and to ordinary testing, the program would appear normal. However, when it is fed a sequence of keystrokes by the agent of the party committing the fraud, the Trojan Horse wakes up, and then, regardless of what buttons the voter actually presses, it can assign a certain (non-suspicious-looking) percentage (i.e. not 90% but, say 45%) to the preferred party. The Trojan Horse can even be programmed to quietly delete itself when the voting is over. Nobody would know any better, as there is no paper trail.

Let me emphasize that I do not have any evidence that this happened in 2009, but it is worth investigating. There were too many surprising – almost miraculous – victories by certain candidates whom the casual observer would have written off. By Occam’s razor, the simplest explanation is fraud. I would like to note in passing that in 2004, expecting the NDA to commit fraud, an Indian Communist in the US had prepared a suit alleging EVM fraud. Therefore it is clear that the thought has occurred to various people that there could be EVM fraud.

In any case, the 2009 elections, I repeat, were an inflexion point or a tipping point, which will mark the rapid decline of India. Looking back, historians will identify this election as the precise moment that India as a nation and a civilization began unraveling. It is fairly likely that India would have become a dismembered state by 2025, thus fulfilling a long-felt need in certain hostile quarters – one in which both the Communists and the West see eye to eye – to break up India.

Endgame and tragedy in Sri Lanka

Published by the Pioneer on May 4:

http://www.dailypioneer.com/173668/Triumph-and-tragedy-in-Sri-Lanka.html

The news and the images coming out of Sri Lanka are horrendous: 100,000 Tamil civilians trapped on a tiny beach, where cadres of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) are making their last stand . The LTTE are using the civilians as shields (according to the Sri Lankan government); and government troops have shelled hospitals and killed thousands of non-combatants this year (according to The Economist quoting human-rights groups and the UNHCR).

The photographs of long-suffering Tamil refugees fleeing the war with nothing more than the clothes on their backs remind us of the curse of the Indian subcontinent: religion- and ethnicity-based conflict, generally leading to the genocide of Hindus. We saw this in 1947 and 1971. Millions of Hindus were ethnically cleansed from Pakistan and Bangladesh then, and the handful remaining are now fleeing newly-Talibanized territories; now they are being driven out of Sri Lanka’s Jaffna and the Eastern Provinces at the fag-end of a brutal civil war.

The LTTE certainly did not expect to fade into oblivion, their leader Velupillai Prabhakaran a fugitive. Only a couple of years ago, the Tigers were rampant, scoring victories on land and sea, and terrorizing Colombo with their makeshift air force. What turned things around? Probably much covert aid from governments, including India’s, wary of the Tigers’ penchant for redrawing boundaries by force (and China’s, fishing in troubled waters).

That, and internal dissension. The turning point was the defection in 2004 of ‘Colonel’ Karuna Amman, formerly LTTE commander in the Eastern Province. The LTTE ran a tight ship, and defectors generally were liquidated, but Karuna – as reported by the Wall Street Journal last year — thrived, and has become a minister, although he is at loggerheads with his erstwhile protégé and now-Chief Minister of the Eastern Province, Pillaiyan.

After sama (negotiations) and dana (give-aways) failed, bheda (creating dissent) worked, and now the Sri Lankans are applying the last of the four tactics of classical Indian stagecraft, danda (punishment). This is an object lesson for India’s pusillanimous politicians who advocate sweet-talk and appeasement of terrorists; and for Obamistas, advocating land-for-peace (India’s land, that is, to be given to Pakistan, so that the ISI would leave the Americans in peace). Pandering does not work, the iron fist does. Crush the terrorists first, then talk to real people.

There is a startling silence in India about the plight of the Sri Lankan Tamils. This has to do with two factors: one is that most of the shrieking banshees in the human-misery cottage-industry do not care about the human rights of Hindus, and Sri Lankan Tamils are about 85% Hindu. Second is that the killing of Rajiv Gandhi by the LTTE, and the incessant noise by the DMK in their favor has genuinely turned off many people. The LTTE’s idea of its Tamil Eelam (they have taken down the maps on their website showing this) consists of north and eastern Lanka, all of Tamil Nadu and Kerala and parts of Karnataka and Andhra: in other words, most of South India. This is comparable to the jihadi wet-dream of a ‘Mughalistan’ consisting of most of North India.

It further appears that this ‘Eelam’ was meant to be a Christian-stan, in fearsome symmetry with ‘Mughalistan’. Let us note in passing that at Partition, missionaries had demanded a Christian-stan consisting of the Northeast, tribal areas of the Central Provinces (Chota Nagpur), and Travancore. Clearly, they have not given up the idea of territorial gains through any means.

The church has a well-known modus operandi. In Rwanda, the church fomented genocide by dividing Hutus and Tutsis – who, to the casual observer, and to the geneticist, appear identical – through claiming that the former were short and dark, and the latter were tall and fair, and that Tutsis were oppressing Hutus. Several Christian godmen and godwomen have been convicted of crimes against humanity for their direct role in massacres of Tutsis.

In India too, the church has fabricated a divide between the alleged ‘Aryans’ and ‘Dravidians’ – tall and fair vs. short and dark, oppressor, oppressed, sound familiar? – which was initially the handiwork of a white padre named Caldwell. It remains an interesting but little-known fact that churchman Max Mueller who invented the entire ‘Aryan’ fiction recanted in later years, admitting he was wrong.

The church has had a dubious role in Sri Lanka too. It is surely curious that most of the famous cadres of the LTTE are Christians (examples include Prabhakaran himself who is a Methodist, Anton Balasingham, the suicide-bomber Dhanu who killed Gandhi). Senior non-Christians in the LTTE, remarkably, have been captured, have died in battle, or been liquidated.

And the LTTE has wiped out all other groups representing the Tamil cause. The very ruthlessness of the LTTE is an indicator of its Semitic thought-process. Buddhists and Hindus have always co-existed peacefully all over Asia – in India, Indonesia, Afghanistan, etc. – until West Asian ideologies appeared. The church, and the LTTE, had no use for moderates or for negotiation.

There is another party with ill-intent in all this: China. As part of their ‘string of pearls’ strategy, they previously supported violent Communist insurgents, but these were wiped out by the Sri Lankan government. Now the Chinese are supplying heavy equipment, including planes and artillery to the army. Their likely objective: the prized deep-water port of Trincomalee, which would help them control shipping in the Indian Ocean, not to mention be a serious problem for India in its own backyard.

But with the apparent demise of the LTTE, the Sri Lankan government should be able to negotiate from a position of strength. Tamils can see that militancy and terrorism has achieved nothing but catastrophe for them. The Sinhalese, if they are wise, will deal magnanimously with their Tamil fellow-countrymen and reconcile with them. They must recognize that Tamils have genuine grievances arising from bumiputra-style discrimination against them for decades. They need to appreciate that the LTTE are not synonymous with Tamils. Then Sri Lanka can become the success story of the subcontinent with its superior health and education record.

My dilemma with Shashi Tharoor

Posted on rediff on Apr 13th (jallianwallah day):
http://election.rediff.com/column/2009/apr/13/my-dilemma-with-shashi-tharoor.htm

Triage as winning strategy for the BJP

Published on rediff on April 8th

http://election.rediff.com/column/2009/apr/08/-a-winning-strategy-for-the-bjp.htm

The concept of triage first arose in field hospitals, where doctors had to decide what to do with large numbers of war wounded and very limited resources. Over time, they developed an empirical method of optimization, by dividing up incoming patients into three groups: those who were hopeless, those who could wait for attention, and those who could only be saved if they got immediate care.

The medical staff would pursue appropriate methods with each of these groups. The hopeless cases they would give painkillers to, make them comfort, and let them die in peace. Those who were lightly wounded they would give first aid to and prepare them for further care, not immediately, but as soon as feasible. The last group, for whom emergency surgery could mean the difference between life and death, they would prioritize and operate on immediately.

This rough-and-ready method has been proved to be rational, in a utilitarian way – it provides the maximum benefit to the maximum number of people. Many companies have also adapted this principle, because it turns out that there is a natural ordering in rough triads – one third of the people agree with an arguable decision, a third oppose it, and another third can be convinced either way.

UPA’s report card on the economy: D-

Published on rediff at:

http://business.rediff.com/column/2009/mar/25/upa-will-cost-india-economic-superstardom.htm

The current global crisis is potentially an inflection point that marks the transition from an Anglo-American dominance to an Asian dominance in world economic affairs. Certainly, there is a startling turnaround in the fact that China holds $2 trillion in US Treasury securities and therefore lectures the Americans about running their economy – it feels like only yesterday when the shoe was on the other foot. Another indicator is China’s aggressive fire-sale purchases of commodities, including oil, copper, iron ore etc. from all over the world. “Have money, will buy” is their mantra.

But where is India in this “Asian century”? Alas, India has once again fumbled a golden opportunity to rise to economic superstardom. Given the profligate spending of the UPA and its self-proclaimed galaxy of economic geniuses, India now sports perhaps the highest deficit of any country: about 13%, a far cry from the 5% that the UPA has been promising us all along. Yet again, the Congress has successfully brought India back to the verge of the “Nehruvian Rate of Growth” of 2-3%, which is an economic crime against humanity, imposing abject poverty on 250 million people. After sixty years of Congress misrule, India has most of the world’s poor people, and some of the worst health and nutrition indicators, even worse than much poorer sub-Saharan Africa (see the NYTImes “As Growth Soars, Child Hunger Persists” http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/13/world/asia/13malnutrition.html?_r=2&ref=world ). This is truly a crime and a national shame.

On diplomatic theater and strategic depth

Published by rediff at  http://news.rediff.com/column/2009/mar/10/guest-not-cricket-just-the-isi-gaining-strategic-depth.htm

Not cricket, just the ISI gaining strategic depth

Rajeev Srinivasan

Sri Lankan cricketers were shot at, and injured, by a group of young men in Lahore. Meanwhile, the Pakistani state signed a treaty with a fundamentalist group in the Swat region to impose sharia on the area. The real ruling power in Pakistan, the spy agency ISI (Inter-Services Intelligence), is putting on a bit of a show in the first instance, and erasing the Durand Line (which anyway expired in 1993 according to the 100-year-old Afghan-British treaty) in the second instance.

The end of the immigration boom

This was published by the Pioneer, India Abroad and Rediff, and was picked up New American Media, from which a number of others also published it. Here are a few links:

Rediff

http://www.alternet.org/immigration/130818/econopocalypse_bringing_an_end_to_the_immigration_boom/

http://news.newamericamedia.org/news/view_article.html?article_id=15416e585b84cc13386b63fe900ca38c&from=rss

Pioneer

The end of the immigration boom

Rajeev Srinivasan considers the impact on India

The relatively free movement of labor across borders for the last few decades has generally had a positive impact on many countries because of the large remittances sent home by expatriates. In India, Kerala has been the biggest beneficiary, its relative prosperity sustained by its sons and daughters toiling away in West Asia or in hospitals around the world. But it looks like the global recession is beginning to seriously hurt international migration, and many migrants are forced to go home again.

… deleted

Why the TAPI and IPI pipelines are a terrible idea

Published by mint on feb 9th at:

http://www.livemint.com/2009/02/08221218/Beware-of-energy8217s-robbe.html?h=B

Reflections on “Slumdog Millionaire”

Reflections on Slumdog Millionaire

Rajeev Srinivasan

Despite the hoopla in some circles about Slumdog Millionaire, I find it a disturbing film: empty-headed in one way, and malicious in others. A number of reviewers (for instance, the London Times’ Alice Miles http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/columnists/alice_miles/article5511650.ece ) have called the film “poverty porn” – a prurient voyeurism focusing on the suffering of others, especially of children. I agree.

There is nothing wrong about portraying poverty. Some of the greatest films of all time, for instance the magnificent Pather Panchali, focused on the troubled lives of the poor. But they treated their poverty-stricken protagonists with sensitivity and caring. Slumdog Millionaire treats the poor as disposable cartoon-characters to be ill-treated and tortured; of course, they also break into song at convenient moments.

 

There have also been very good films focusing on the nasty, brutish and short lives of street children in Mumbai and Sao Paolo respectively: Salaam Mumbai and Pixote. Neither was easy to watch: it is never easy to see children being brutalized. But there was a certain air of truth to them; and beyond any hackneyed saccharine endings, there was the feeling that at least some of these children would survive and thrive.

 

There is no such redeeming virtue in Slumdog, which is unapologetic about graphic violence. There is a harrowing scene where a young child has his eyes burnt out with acid. There is a similar scene in Pier Paolo Pasolini’s masterpiece Salo, or the 120 Days of Sodom, set in fascist Italy, where a handsome young man’s eyeball is gouged out. Salo is one of the most brutal and horrifying films ever made: and it was intended to be so, in a Brechtian way – the viewer was supposed to be horrified at man’s capacity for evil.

 

Salo was set in an Italian castle, to which four aging libertines – the Duke, the President, the Magistrate, and the Bishop — kidnap a group of absolutely beautiful young men and women. These youths – no more than teenagers – are put through the most gruesome physical, mental and sexual tortures imaginable, including brutal and public rapes, tongues ripped off, nipples burned with candles, violent sodomy, the forcible eating of feces, and so on.

 

Salo was a meditation on the nature of evil, with the four men, representing four pillars of society, bringing to life Dante Alighieri’s vision of the medieval Christian hell, along with a dash of violence straight out of Marquis de Sade. Pasolini, a homosexual and a leftist, probably intended this as an indictment of fascism.

 

Perhaps Danny Boyle imagines he is following in Pasolini’s footsteps when he portrays Mumbai as a living hell. Is this film, similarly, an indictment of India? Is there more to the film than an exercise in artistry? Is it purely coincidental that it carries an eerie echo of the official position of the British government, as recently articulated by their Foreign Minister David Miliband, on a visit to India?

 

Let us be charitable and assume that Boyle wanted to condemn whatever it is in India that has caused this abject poverty to happen and continue. Who were the culprits? Ironically, it was British imperialists who beggared a hitherto prosperous India by “borrowing” capital that is worth $10 trillion — yes, trillion — in today’s terms. Besides, tens of millions of Indians were starved to death by uncaring British imperialists, as graphically described in Mike Davis’ Late Victorian Holocausts: El Nino and the Making of the Third World. Perhaps this would be a good time to ask Britain for reparations?

 

And who has kept 250 million Indians in poverty even after the imperialists left in 1947? Why, the Congress, and the Communists! Through mind-numbingly idiotic schemes whose main result was the large-scale transfer of public wealth to private hands, the Congress and the Communists, through sixty years of their rule, have successfully prevented a large number of Indians from rising from poverty. So Boyle is targeting the true villains.

 

If only this were the case! But we all know it is not. Danny Boyle’s target – everybody’s soft target, because it does not retaliate with violence – is Hinduism, as Kanchan Gupta suggested in the Pioneer (“Slumdog is about defaming Hindus” http://www.dailypioneer.com/152164/Slumdog-is-about-defaming-Hindus.html). This is similar to how Deepa Mehta and Shabana Azmi dissembled about their use of the names “Sita” and “Radha” – names pregnant with meaning for Hindus – in the over-rated film “Fire”, as I pointed out ten years ago on Rediff.com (“The problem with Fire” http://www.rediff.com/entertai/1999/jan/11fire.htm )

 

There is a tendency among the British to stereotype and demonize Hindus in particular and Indians in general. For some reason, this is welcomed with nothing short of rapture by a section of the media and the self-proclaimed “intelligentsia” of New Delhi. There is, for instance, a second-rate historian who routinely thunders against Hindus. The level of his incompetence was exposed in a BBC film where he suggested that the Christian apostle Thomas “could have” come to India. Well, he didn’t – and history is generally about what happened, not what “could possibly have” happened.

 

Another example is the local stringer for a magazine. He arrived in India after a stint in Pakistan, and he declared at the time that he liked Pakistanis, whom he “could sit around with, and wonder what the heck was going on.” On the contrary, he condemned Indians as “prickly nationalists”, for whom he obviously felt distaste. Unfortunately, his declaration has vanished from the website, but he backs up his assertion in each and every one of his dispatches. His prejudices are there for all to see.

 

Why do they do this? I have a few theories. One is that the British always found it easier to relate to Mohammedans, because both thought of themselves as natural conquerors. British rule was also heavily influenced by the Church, as is documented in Suhash Chakravarty’s brilliantstudy The Raj Syndrome: A Study in Imperial Perceptions. The Christian British found Hindus incomprehensible, and this 

continues to this day.

 

The other theory is based on the decline of Britain. The New York Times carried a story (“Falling Pound Raises Fears of Stagnation” http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/22/business/worldbusiness/22pound.html?_r=2&ref=world ) that suggests Britain is going to be very severely affected by the global downturn. This must increase the urgency with which the British – after all, branded a “nation of shopkeepers” by no less a personality than Napoleon Bonaparte – need to seek economic help. The most obvious donors are Arabs, with their stockpiles of cash; therefore it makes sense for the British to appease their sentiments, never mind the cost to India.

 

Whence, for instance, the Miliband statement, which, taken to its logical conclusion, suggests that India should simply hand over Kashmir to Pakistan. No skin off their British noses, I suppose. This sentiment is widespread among British politicians, who are also influenced by the vote-bank-appeasement politics (alas, so familiar to Indians!) because of their Mirpuri and Pakistani constituents who tend to live in compact urban ghettos, unlike Indians who have dispersed into the suburbs.

 

The British will make all sorts of compromises for the sake of trade. This was demonstrated some time ago when, annoyed at something the British said, Malaysia’s then-Prime Minister Mahathir Mohammed abruptly cancelled all British contracts. The alacrity with which the British apologized, nay, crawled abjectly, was a wonder to see.

 

Therefore bad behavior is expected from the British. It is not with the Indians involved – the writer (an Indian diplomat named Vikas Swarup – this is how Indian diplomats present India?) or the actors, or, in particular, A R Rehman. It is disappointing that Rehman has collaborated in such a venture, demeaning and demonizing Hindus and Indians.

 

For several reasons. One, that he is a master artist. I was listening to his songs from Roja the other day, and they are marvelous, especially the one titled “Choti si asha”. I was reflecting how the Tamil original was better than the Hindi version, and the irony of me, someone whose Hindi and Tamil are both pretty rusty, still being able to appreciate them. And the film itself was wonderful, a patriotic and beautifully told tale that emphasized the civilizational unity of India.

 

Two, I was watching a video on youtube about IIT Madras, and there was a professor saying “There was a marvelous keyboard player named Dilip from Loyola College who used to come for Mardi Gras in the 1980’s. Of course he is now known as A R Rehman”. Rehman converted to his new religion a few years ago, and no Hindu objected. He must know that Hindus are not running around slicing Mohammedan women’s throats on a whim or burning them alive. If anything, it is the opposite – the Sabarmati Express in Godhra, Radhabai Chawl in Mumbai.

 

Three, Rehman has sung passionately about the nation in his best-selling arrangement of “Vande Mataram”, which may well have aroused some negative comment among his new co-religionists. Someone who has that feeling of pride in India should not have collaborated with Danny Boyle in this abomination.

 

Yes, I am disappointed in Rehman, despite my very great respect for his artistic genius.

 

Danny Boyle, on the other hand, doesn’t matter. He may get his Oscar, and he may make his next film about the man, somewhere in the US, who kidnapped a teenage hitchhiker, raped her, cut off both her hands, and left her to bleed to death. The girl, somehow, survived. Or about the man in Austria who kept his daughter captive in his basement for twenty-four years, raped and impregnated her repeatedly, and fathered seven children with her. Or about those teenage-runaway-junkie-hookers in San Francisco’s Tenderloin district, who accost passers-by with a drug-dazed “Wanna party?” Their lives are unlikely to be better than what the New York Times reports about teenage prostitutes in Cambodia http://www.iht.com/articles/2009/01/01/opinion/edkristof.php . There are many depraved people, and equally depraved voyeurs will never run out of subjects. And if Boyle ever wants to make a quiz show a metaphor for a culture, he would do well to study Robert Redford’s intelligent and provocative Quiz Show, a minor masterpiece.

The Satyam scandal: now what?

Posted at rediff at http://www.rediff.com/money/2009/jan/09satyam-scandal-now-what.htm

Like most of us, I am shocked at the enormity of the scam. And disappointed.

I supported Satyam and the promoters on principle: when an Indian company looks like it is doing good for its employees and for its shardholders; when it appears that the company has prospered by the sweat of its brows, then I support it. This is exactly what I did when I wrote the previous article.

Now that I know there was bad faith and fraud, I certainly cannot support the promoters.

I am also not particularly impressed by white people’s accolades or pats on the back, nor am I impressed when they make noise about others’ malfeasance.

In defence of Satyam

Oops, I was a little slow in posting this, and Rediff put it up on their Business pages rather sooner than I expected.

http://www.rediff.com/money/2009/jan/02guest-in-defence-of-satyam.htm

I generally find hypocrisy quite entertaining. When everybody is dumping on poor Satyam — ignoring the business about “let he who hath not sinned cast the first stone” — I do believe it is only fair to provide an alternative perspective.

Towards a failed State – Ghori, Jaichand and friends redux

rediff published this with some fairly significant edits at http://www.rediff.com/news/2008/dec/08mumterror-are-we-heading-to-being-a-failed-state.htm — to some extent the piece was rendered toothless — and so here is the original copy I sent them.

Towards a failed State – Ghori, Jaichand and friends redux

Rajeev Srinivasan on the attack on Mumbai

The invasion of Mumbai by Pakistani terrorists – and undoubtedly local collaborators – is but a replay of times past: the periodic and predictable arrival of barbarians over the Khyber Pass, laying waste to the countryside, and wreaking untold damage on a long-suffering populace. The only crime that the average Indian committed was to focus on the creation of wealth; of course, the barbarians came because of the wealth. Today, once again, India is generating capital, and the intention is to thwart its economic rise.

Then, as now, the rulers failed the populace. There is an implicit contract between the rulers and the ruled: you pay the taxes, obey the rules, and we ensure that your life, liberty and pursuit of happiness are unhindered. India’s ruling class failed signally to honor this contract – they never did figure out that the simple expedient of defending the Khyber and Bolan passes would be enough to save the plains, because Nature had been kind enough to build the impregnable Himalayas all around India.

I have never got a satisfactory answer to the question as to why we didn’t build the Great Wall of India. The Chinese built a 1,500-mile wall; Indians could surely have built a 15-mile wall and kept the marauders out. But there was clearly a failure in leadership and in strategic thinking. Time after time, the barbarians would pour in through the passes, march to Panipat or Tarain, and there, in a desperate last-ditch battle, the Indians would lose, again and again. The result: disaster.

Furthermore, there were traitors in-house, too. They would collude with the invaders to the detriment of their fellow-Indians. Jaichand, during the Second Battle of Tarain in 1192 CE, turned the tide of the battle by allying with Mahmud of Ghori against Prithviraj Chauhan, with the result that Northern India suffered 700 years of Mohammedan tyranny – it was a clear tipping point. Or take the battle of Talikota that ended the magnificient Vijayanagar empire: it was their own troops that betrayed them.

Fast forward to today. India is under withering attack on all fronts. To the east, there is the demographic invasion by Bangladeshis, including unhindered infiltration by terrorist elements. The entire Northeast is in danger of secession, given both the narrow and hard-to-defend Chicken’s Neck that connects the area to the Gangetic plain, as well as the Christian fundamentalism and terrorism that is on the verge of turning into a move to secede on religious and ethnic grounds, a la East Timor.

The northern frontier is restive, with Nepal, a former ally and buffer state transformed into hostile territory, with its porous borders turned into a way of infiltrating Mohammedan terrorists and Communist terrorists into India, with the declared intent of capturing the “Pasupati-to-Tirupati corridor”, in other words, most of the eastern half of the country.

China is making increasingly belligerent noises about Tawang and all of Arunachal Pradesh. They are gambling that, despite the summit that just took place in Dharmasala, the steam has gone out of the Tibetan resistance movement. They have been emboldened by the fact that Tibetans were not able to disrupt the Olympics, and the more immediate betrayal by the British (International Herald Tribune, “Did Britain Just Sell Tibet?” http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/11/25/opinion/edbarnet.php) , who declared, contrary to all the historical evidence, that Tibet was always a part of China. Besides, the Chinese fully intend to move forward with the diversion of the Brahmaputra, which is in effect a declaration of war against the lower riparian State, India.

It is likely that the Chinese will march into Tawang – there is a lot of chatter in Chinese circles (see, an analysis by D S Rajan at the Chennai Center for China Studies http://www.c3sindia.org/strategicissues/419) about a “limited India-China war”, a replay of 1962. The Chinese have, in addition to pure geopolitics, another reason to do this, as was pointed out by strategy expert Brahma Chellaney – as in the years preceding 1962, the world is now once again hyphenating India and China. By handing India a sharp conventional military defeat, China would like that hyphenation to be removed decisively, as it surely would be. India will once again be seen as the loser it has been during the entire 1947-2000 period.

In the Northwest, Kashmir burns. The population clearly views India as a colony – they want Indian money, but they are not willing to make the slightest concessions to Hindu sentiments. It is very convenient for them to have the cake and eat it too – there is the little-known fact that J&K has practically nobody under the poverty line (2% and falling), as compared to the average of some 20% in the country as a whole. Kashmiris have prospered mightily despite – or is it because of? – the brutal ethnic cleansing of 400,000 Pundits now languishing in refugee camps.

In the traditionally quiet Peninsula, there is evidence of tremendous terrorist activity. In Kerala, it has been reported widely in the Malayalam media that 300 youths have been hired, trained and dispatched to Kashmir with explicit instructions – kill Indian soldiers and support Pakistani intrusions. Terrorism is just another job. Sleeper cells exist in every town, sometimes in the guise of “Kashmiri emporia”. The Konkan and Malabar coasts are dotted with safe harbors, where weapons, counterfeit currency and contraband are cached. The preferred mechanism – bomb blasts to inflict maximum damage. Logistics, safe houses, surveillance, forged documents, etc. are provided by a wide network.

In the tribal lands of central India, the Northeast and in Orissa, Christian terrorists are joining hands with Communist terrorists. In fact they often are one and the same, as confessed by an alleged Communist leader on TV. Their preferred weapon – liquidation of inconvenient people, as they did in the case of Swami Lakshmananda, the 84-year-old monk that they attacked with AK-47s.

The fact is that all these threats are overwhelming the security apparatus in the country, such as it is. It is quite likely that the Intelligence Bureau and the Research and Analysis Wing and the Anti-Terrorism Squad had some inkling of something big being planned, including the movement of small arms on the Ratnagiri coastline, and the logistics-related activities of known suspects. It is unclear why they didn’t take preventive action.

There is a terrifying possibility – that they in fact had no idea this was going on. There is an aphorism that you cannot stop all terrorist activity, but in India the situation is such that no terrorist activity is stopped – they strike at will, and the populace is left to pick up the pieces of broken lives. This is no way to run a country.

The frightening possibility is that the Jaichands have in fact taken over the State. In which case, we can anticipate the total dismemberment of India – possibly preceded by an interregnum where it is failed State – in the near future.

There is one other possibility – that the Army will have to take over. It is a remote possibility, for two reasons – the Indian Army has been determinedly apolitical; and the State has continually striven to weaken it. Someone once made the ridiculous statement that India really didn’t need an army, only a police force, and it appears the entire political class and bureaucracy have internalized this slogan.

See also http://in.rediff.com/news/2002/nov/19rajeev.htm

From 1962 – as always, on November 18^th I silently saluted the martyrs of the Battle of Rezang-La, where C Company, 13^th Kumaon died heroically to the last man – when the ill-equipped troops froze to death on the Himalayan heights, to the refusal to increase military salaries when the bureaucrats awarded themselves 300% increases recently, the State has told the military that it doesn’t value them. All the Services are starved of funds. The recent open attack on Lt. Col. Purohit is another signal that the State despises the military . As Ashok Malik pointed out in the Pioneer (“A Hindu Dreyfus Affair?” http://www.dailypioneer.com/135567/A-Hindu-Dreyfus-Affair.html ), this is a near-repeat of the celebrated Dreyfus case in France, and alas, we have no Emile Zola to cry “J’accuse!” .

See also http://indiaabroad.com/news/1998/jul/23rajeev.htm

One possible outcome is that the Indian military forces will gradually wither away and die, thus making the statement about India not needing an army a self-fulfilling prophecy. There is another possibility – that of a military coup d’etat. Normally, the prospect of a military takeover – given that they all end up badly – from a democracy is not something one would welcome. But then India is not a democracy – it is a kakistocracy, rule by the very worst possible people – which has the trappings of a democracy but not the substance, so I wonder if military rule could possibly be any worse.

But the chances are getting increasingly good that the Indian State will collapse, just like Pakistan already has. A recent risk assessment by the World Economic Forum and CII (“India@Risk 2008”) considers the economic, energy, food/agriculture and national security that face India. The report is more concerned about the first three items, assuming that India is secure enough as a nation.

I hope they are right, but this invasion of Mumbai – so daring and audacious – makes me wonder. I have considered a nightmare scenario of Chinese battleships arriving in triumph at the Gateway of India, to be welcomed with marigold garlands by the Jaichands, but I have to admit I never thought a motley crew of Pakistani terrorists would invade. The very future of the Indian State, suddenly, is in question. And it is mostly from self-inflicted, avoidable wounds. The failure of leadership is causing India to cease to exist.

Nomenclature terrorism

Nomenclature terrorism

Rajeev Srinivasan on the fuss about “Hindu terrorists”

The recent fuss about alleged “Hindu terrorists” has entertained me hugely because all the usual suspects played their expected roles to perfection. The pseudo-secular media had a field day insinuating that Hindu terrorism is as major a problem in India as is Mohammedan and Christist terrorism. The UPA forgot its axiom that “terrorism has no religion”, and joyously crowed about “Hindu terrorists”. The BJP was apoplectic in its attempts to distance itself from the alleged “Hindu terrorists”.

Meanwhile, some actual – not imagined — terrorism activity has been going on in Kerala, where at least 300 people have been recruited by Mohammedan fundamentalists to wage war on the Indian State. Newspaper reports suggest that at least 96 young men from Kerala, who were given military training by SIMI, are at large. 16 of them are in Kashmir, the others in Bangalore or Kerala, according to Intelligence Bureau reports. Apparently there are special instructions in Malayalam in SIMI jungle camps held all over the country, for the poor dears are not so proficient in Urdu/Arabic.

These young men were dispatched to Kashmir with simple instructions: kill Indian soldiers and facilitate infiltration by the Pakistanis. Terrorism has now become just a job. So much so that so-called “spiritual advisers” (“paymaster” may be a more accurate designation) are out there recruiting known gangsters, converting them and sending them off to Kashmir. A particular gang of Christist criminals in Cochin has apparently supplied several converts who made the trek to Kashmir: including one Verghese aka Yasin who took a bullet in his head from the Indian Army and had to be identified from his fingerprints.

All this is ironic: Kerala has long been a supplier of manpower and womanpower – first it was the clerks and petty shopkeepers all over India, as well as a lot of soldiers; then it has been nurses, next construction labor and professionals for the Persian Gulf and America, and most recently, Christist padres and nuns for the conversion industry and as gastarbeiter for the shrinking seminaries of Europe.

I guess it is but a small step to terrorism as a profession. As Adi Sankara said in a slightly different context some centuries ago, “udara nimittam bahu krta vesham” (one wears various roles to satisfy that despotic stomach). It is said that in parts of Malabar, the UAE dirham, the Saudi riyal, and the US dollar are almost as much legal tender as the Indian rupee: there is so much of that stuff floating around. Not to speak of absolutely authentic-looking Pakistani-made Indian rupee notes. A while ago, an entire ocean-going container full of Rs. 500 and Rs. 1000 counterfeit notes – from Pakistan with love via Dubai – was intercepted in Kerala. That is a boatload of money, indeed.

And then there’s the news about serial blasts in Manipur and – as I write this – in Assam, that have killed large numbers of innocent people. There are all the other blasts – there have been so many we begin to lose count – in Ahmedabad, Bangalore, Delhi, etc. etc. etc. – where the perpetrators unambiguously let it be known that they were Mohammedans inflamed by religious fundamentalism and jihad.

Christist terrorists have been running rampant in the Northeast for some time: their modus operandi is a little different – they prefer the AK-47 and they generally target specific individuals. They have ethnically-cleansed 45,000 Reang tribals from Mizoram for refusing to convert; they shot respected litterateur and patriot, Bineshwar Brahma in Guwahati; they shot Hindu priest Shanti Tripura in his own temple; and most recently, they shot Swami Lakshmananda in Orissa (let’s not kid around about this: even the alleged Communist terrorist who was trotted out, suitably incognito, on TV to exonerate Christists admitted that most of his flock were Christists).

Not to mention that almost the entire top echelon of the dreaded Tamil Tigers are Christists, and the non-Christists mysteriously suffer “accidents” or are captured by the Sri Lankan Army or “commit suicide”. Velupillai Prabhakaran, Anton Balasingham, et al are all Christists. So was Dhanu, the suicide bomber who blew up Rajiv Nehru Gandhi. There is reason to believe that the so-called Maoists in Nepal are also crypto-Christists, especially some of their top brass.

Of course, none of this qualifies for the “religious terrorism” moniker as far as the lovely English-Language Media and the UPA are concerned. Their sound and fury is reserved for some poor Hindu nun who is, by the power of “truth by repeated assertion”, subjected to an electronic lynch, deemed a terrorist and subjected to tejovadham. This is to be expected, as the ELM and the pseudo-seculars in India have a sworn duty: that of cultural extinction of the native civilization of this country. Once you understand this axiom, their baffling acts are self-consistent in a certain bizarre frame of reference.

Whether the pseudo-seculars do this for money, or they have been brainwashed by the predatory State, is not entirely clear. But then it doesn’t matter, does it, since the end result is the same?

And this deliberate use of nomenclature terrorism – the use of insinuation to demonize and to create defensiveness – is a purely Goebbelsian propaganda tactic. I tried a little experiment on the pseudo-seculars some years ago by returning the favor. I started referring to their ideology as Nehruvian Stalinism. Their immediate knee-jerk reaction was to label me a Hindu fundamentalist, Hindu fascist etc. Which I was prepared for: I told them, fine, maybe I am all that, but you, you are Nehruvian Stalinists.

I got the reaction I expected: when the tables were turned, the pseudo-seculars did exactly what they expect others to do under their attacks. They got defensive, they labored to explain why they were not Stalinists, and how different Nehru was from Stalin. They grew increasingly exasperated as I kept insisting that Nehru was a lot like Stalin: the personality cult, the imperiousness, the purges, the heavy-industry fetish, etc., and how Jawaharlal was merely a little less effective in his ruthlessness.

Happily, I got a few pseudo-seculars into an absolute tizzy denying these allegations; they practically foamed at the mouth. I had succeeded – I had got them to play on my terms, on the playing field I defined; instead of protesting that I was not a fascist, I had changed the terms of reference and forced them to defend their cherished shibboleths. It was good to watch them squirm.

That, I submit, is the way to play this game. Hindus should not bother to try and prove that they are not terrorists. We should say “Yes, there must be Hindu terrorists, just like you guys are Communist terrorists, or Christist terrorists, or Mohammedan terrorists. Any questions?” If they continue to blather, one might hint darkly of caches of AK-47s and RDX.

It is evident that the pseudo-seculars are cowards and bullies, and this will shut them up. Only, gentle reader, I suggest you be careful in your choice of words, just in case somebody has a hidden camera – make veiled threats, where you cannot be pinned down to anything specific. And occasionally mutter knowingly about some atrocity perpetrated by the Christist or Communist or Mohammedan terrorists, and insinuate that you have certain “friends” and you know where the pseudo-seculars live. You know, the kind of thing the Mafioso say in those gangster movies.

Nomenclature terrorism is a game two can play, and the sinister Nehruvian Stalinists can be – as in the quaint phrase they use – hoist on their own petard.

N-deal could be a huge thorn in the flesh

Published by the New Indian Express on 9th Sept 2008 as an op-ed

Who lost India?

By Rajeev Srinivasan

One of these days, the New York Times will run a story titled “Who lost India?” Pundits will pontificate about what caused India to be irretrievably ‘lost’ – that is, it no longer functions as a viable and friendly ally of the West, particularly of America. Though they will never admit it, the Indo-US Nuclear Agreement currently being shoved down India’s throat would have been the tipping point that did India in.

Given the parlous security situation in the neighborhood, as well as the various separatist movements gaining strength from external sources, this may well be the first step in the unraveling of India. That would be a disaster not only for India and Indians, but also for America, because India is just about the only friend it has in that giant arc from East Africa to Southeast Asia, full of failed and failing states. Adding India to that list is not going to help anyone.

What is not known to most Americans is the extraordinary goodwill that ordinary Indians have towards America. At a time when the US is regularly pilloried as anywhere between monstrous and appalling by large numbers of people, India is demonstrably the country where the average person on the street has the most positive perception of America. A Pew Trust survey on global attitudes in 2006 showed this: Indians were the most pro-American, far more so than Chinese, Saudi Arabians, and Pakistanis, to pick a few American allies.

Perhaps that’s not such a big deal to Americans accustomed to basking in the sunshine of admiration and envy from all quarters, based on both hard and soft power. But consider this: India, with all its problems, is no banana republic. According to the widely followed reports from Goldman Sachs, India may well overtake the US as the world’s second largest economy by 2050.

Besides, odd as it might sound when you hear it for the first time, India is a lot like America. That is my gut feel after having spent half my life in India and the other half in America. There are many similarities, but the most striking one is the openness and friendliness of the people. Whatever you may think of their respective governments, it is a fact that the people of America and of India are warm, friendly and hospitable. This carries over into many things: plurality, tolerance for different ideas, innovativeness.

In fact, I’d be so bold as to claim that India’s core competencies are quite like America’s: fertile land, soft power, innovation. What India has lacked is the financial resources of a vast virgin continent and what’s been termed ‘strategic intent’ by management guru C K Prahalad – the ability to imagine itself as Numero Uno, and to act accordingly.

There are historic reasons to believe that superpowerdom for India is not a wet-dream. India was, throughout most of recorded history, the richest country in the world, astonishing as this may seem. According to economic historian Angus Maddison, India was the world’s largest economy from 0 CE to 1500 CE; China was its closest competitor towards the end of that period. Then the land was ravaged by colonialism, which destroyed many of the wealth-generating systems that had emerged over millennia, notably the innovative small businesses in textiles and light engineering goods.

Indian prowess in intellectual property is not given due credit: some of the greatest inventions in history came from there, including the Indian numeral system, the cornerstone of all mathematics; the context-free grammar of Panini from 500 BCE, which underlies all computing; the infinite series of Madhava from 1300 CE, which provides the underpinnings of the differential calculus and thus of the Industrial Revolution.

But these are in the past, one might say. What has India done lately? That is fair criticism. I am forced to ask you to take it on faith that, just as India appeared out of the blue in high-technology, it has the intellectual capability to be a partner in the knowledge economy of tomorrow. Sociologist Joel Kotkin remarked that “engineering is the oil of the 21^st century”; and that is what Indians are strong at.

There are the ingredients, then, of a successful rapprochement between India and the US. Why hasn’t this worked for so long? There are many who share the blame; some of it can be attributed to the knee-jerk anti-Americanism of the Nehru dynasty which lectured the US and propped up the comical non-aligned movement. America’s explicit support of Pakistan has also been an irritant; so has the derision made most explicit in the Nixon Tapes.

Those days are past, though, and there are the glimmerings of a beautiful relationship. But the so-called Nuclear Deal has the potential to be a huge thorn in the flesh. The deal is a bad one. It is such a bad deal for India, and it is being railroaded through with such deceit and opaqueness by the Manmohan Singh administration, that it will almost certainly be revoked unilaterally by a future Indian government. Given the contours of the NSG waiver, this will invite serious punitive sanctions on India.

The problem is that India is being sold a bill of goods. The deal is being sold to Indians as a guarantee of energy security and a harbinger of close co-operation with America. But it is obvious that this is neither; it is about non-proliferation, and about the bringing to heel of the one big nation that has challenged the apparently divinely mandated monopoly the P-5 have arrogated to themselves. India is being conned into signing the NPT as a non-weapons-state, with no guarantee that anybody will supply uranium for the obsolete fission reactors India will buy at, undoubtedly, vastly inflated prices.

Losing its small nuclear arsenal is not an option for India, which is threatened by two bellicose nuclear-armed neighbors: China and Pakistan. China has almost certainly proliferated nukes and missiles to Pakistan. And Pakistan’s nuclear Wal-Mart is well-known.

Being unable to deter China in its adventurism, India will not also be able to adequately deter its proxies Pakistan, Bangladesh or Nepal. The result of this is could even be a extinction of the India nation, as Bangladesh pursues its lebensraum, China pursues the diversion of the Brahmaputra, Pakistan pursues the death by a thousand cuts, and Nepal’s newly emboldened communists pursue their Pasupati-to-Tirupati corridor.

This is no way to treat a partner and an ally. In the long run, the US faces China, an implacable and ruthless foe. To subjugate the one nation in Asia that can match and counteract China, just to satisfy a bunch of non-proliferation fundamentalist Cold Warriors, and for the benefit of GE and Westinghouse, is not sensible. If I may be so bold as to say so, America doesn’t want to lose India.

Rajeev Srinivasan is a management consultant. His blog is at http://rajeev2007.wordpress.com

We have energy security in our time. Praise the Lord!

Published by rediff.com on 8th Sept 2008 at http://www.rediff.com/news/2008/sep/08rajeev.htm

We have energy security in our time. Praise the Lord!

Rajeev Srinivasan on the misinformation campaign about the nuclear deal

There have been hosannas and hallelujahs aplenty about the fact that the Nuclear Suppliers’ Group has decided to provide a waiver of sorts to India. The fine print is yet to be deciphered, but already the usual suspects are taking credit for having brought about “energy security in our time”.

I am reminded of Neville Chamberlain, a British prime minister (his other claim to fame was his ever-present umbrella) returning to the UK from a conclave in Munich, where he had participated in appeasing Germany by giving away the Sudetenland. Chamberlain said:

“My good friends, for the second time in our history, a British Prime Minister has returned from Germany bringing peace with honour. I believe it is peace for our time…
Go home and get a nice quiet sleep.”

He said this on September 30^th, 1938. Alas for him, on September 1^st, 1939 Germany invaded Poland, and two days later, Britain declared war on Germany. Famous last words, indeed.

But I am being unfair to poor Chamberlain. He honestly believed that he had achieved something for his country. Not so with the bigwigs of the UPA. It has been abundantly clear for a very long time that the so-called nuclear deal stinks to high heaven, and that interests wholly unrelated to India’s energy needs are driving it. The UPA knows what they are getting into, and they have been lying continuously to the Indian people.

It would be unseemly for me to name names (not to mention unwise, given the propensity of the UPA to cry ‘libel’ at the drop of a hat – fortunately, a New Jersey court just threw out a wholly frivolous case filed by overseas acolytes of the UPA, who I do hope will get slapped with large punitive damages), but circumstantial evidence suggests that Jaswant Singh was not far off the mark when he talked about American ‘moles’ high up in the Indian government.

The confidential letter from the US State Department to the House Foreign Relations Committee, as publicized by Rep. Howard Berman, is refreshingly candid about the real facts behind the deal: to use pithy Americanisms, the Indians are being taken to the cleaners. Being sold a bill of goods. Led to the slaughter. Being totally sold snake-oil, with the active connivance of their leaders.

Perhaps the apt historical analogy is not Chamberlain, but the East India Company. Or better yet, the capitulation to China over Tibet. India gave away its substantial treaty rights in Tibet to China in return for… vague promises of brotherhood. Here India is giving away its hard-won nuclear deterrent, the one thing that prevents the Chinese from running rampant in Asia, in return for… honeyed words from the Americans about strategic partnership!

I exaggerate, of course. There must be more. Nehru, being naive, believed in the bhai-bhai thing with China. But today’s leaders are hard-boiled, and are doing this for other, very good reasons. What these reasons are, we shall never know, notwithstanding the Right To Information Act. The Indian government is extremely good at obfuscation.

What is being celebrated as a Great Victory (over what I am not sure) at the NSG is a little puzzling. I hate to be the little boy who asked about the Emperor’s new clothes, but what exactly is India getting? After all the huffing and puffing, India has now been granted the privilege of spending enormous amounts of money – absolute billions – to buy nuclear fission reactors and uranium? This is a good thing? Let us remember that the NSG was set up in 1974 as a secret cabal to punish India for its first nuclear test.

There is an old proverb in Malayalam about spending good money to buy a dog that then proceeds to bite you. India is now going to spend at least $50 billion to buy all these dangerous fission reactors from the US and France and Japan, only to be left with the possibility of Australians and Americans holding the Damocles’ Sword of disruptions in uranium supplies over us? This is better than being held hostage by OPEC over fossil fuels?

And if all goes well, India will be left holding the bag for mountains of extremely dangerous and long-lived (10,000 years, say) radioactive waste, which we will not be allowed to reprocess lest we extract something useful out of it. Of course all the reactors and the radioactive waste must be making our friendly neighborhood terrorists rub their hands with glee in anticipation. Did I mention something about giving someone a stick to beat you with?

I think it should be obvious by now that India has been coerced into de facto accession to the NPT, the CTBT, the FMCT, and all the other alphabet-soup treaties that were set up to keep India muzzled. America’s non-proliferation ayatollahs, barring a last-minute reprieve like the US Congress voting down the 123 Agreement (I am tempted to chant “Berman saranam, Markey saranam”, etc.) have accomplished ‘cap, rollback, and eliminate’.

The letter leaked by Berman, as well as the fact that Article 2 of the 123 Agreement explicitly states that “national laws” (read: the Hyde Amendment, with the clever little Barack Obama Amendment – yes, Virginia, Obama did get his fingers into this pie too) govern the 123 Agreement, clarify that India is at the mercy of any US administration that sees fit to unilaterally abrogate the thing. Remember Tarapur? There was a similar little artifice of domestic legislation that was used by the US to weasel out of a binding international treaty. The 123 Agreement is really not worth the paper it’s written on.

Let us note that of the other hold-outs to the NPT, nobody is putting any pressure on Israel to sign anything, and they are getting all the fuel they need from sugar-daddy America; and Pakistan gets everything, including their bombs and their missiles, from their main squeeze China, while minor sugar-daddy America beams indulgently.

The sad part is that none of this does a thing for the only issue that matters, India’s energy security. While the rest of the world has, rightly, looked upon the nuclear deal as a non-proliferation issue, the propaganda experts and spin-meisters in India have sold it to the gullible public as a way of gaining energy independence. Alas, this is not true at all.

Here are a few facts about energy. I am indebted to, among others, the Center for Study of Science, Technology and Policy (STEP) in Bangalore for this information.

Present world energy use: 15 terawatt-years per year

Potential availability of energy from different sources (in terawatt-years) [Source: Harvard]

• Oil and Gas: 3000
• Coal: 5000
• Uranium (conventional reactors): 2000
• Uranium (breeder reactors): 2,000,000
• Solar: 30,000 (per year)

Do note that last two numbers. One, solar energy accessible per year far exceeds the sum total energy available from fossil fuels and uranium-fission reactors in toto, ie. by completely exhausting all known oil and gas and uranium. Two, breeder reactors can leverage thorium (turned into uranium-233) endlessly by creating more fuel than is exhausted, but the technology will take time.

Now, take a look at the amount of energy India generates, and how it is used up [Source: CSTEP and Lawrence Livermore Labs]

Total consumption: 5,721 billion kwh, of which:

• Lost energy: 3,257 billion kwh
• Useful energy: 2,364 billion kwh

Generation is from:

• Hydro: 84
• Wind: 5
• Solar: 0
• Nuclear: 58
• Bio-fuels: 1682
• Coal: 1852
• Natural Gas: 225
• Petroleum: 1645

Usage is by:

• Unaccounted electricity: 99
• Agriculture: 301
• Residential: 1511
• Commercial: 132
• Industrial: 1548
• Light Vehicles: 132
• Heavy Vehicles: 330
• Aircraft: 65
• Railways: 43

I believe the data is for 2005. What is startling is the enormous amount of wasted energy: more than the amount of useful energy. Besides, unaccounted for electricity is almost the same as the amount of energy used up by all air and railroad traffic in India! Thus, the very first thing that can pay huge dividends would be to get better accounting for energy use and to reduce wastage (as for example due to traffic congestion in cities).

Consider the capital costs of various types of energy: [Source: CSTEP]

• Natural Gas: $600/kW with 4-10cents/kWh in fuel costs
  • Plus cost of pipelines and LNG terminals
• Wind: $1200/kW
  • Plus cost of transmission lines from windy regions
• Hydro: n/a
• Biomass: n/a
• Coal: $1135/kW and 4c/kWh in fuel costs
  • With CO₂ cleanup: $2601/kW and 22c/kWh in fuel costs
  • Plus cost of railroads and other infrastructure
• Solar Thermal: $4000/kW
• Solar Photovoltaic: $6000/kW
• Nuclear Fission: $3000/kW and 8c/kWh in fuel costs
  • Plus cost of radioactive waste disposal
  • [Source: World Nuclear Association, “The Economics of Nuclear Power”]

It can be seen that the cost of nuclear power is very high, even if the costs of waste management are discounted: and this number is from the cheer-leaders of nuclear energy. In addition, there has to be a substantial risk premium for the fact that the raw material is in short supply and is under the control of a cartel. A “uranium shock” can be far more painful than the recent oil-shock, because it will simply mean the shuttering of a lot of the expensive plants acquired at extortionate prices.

All things considered, including the environmental impact and the carbon footprint, solar is the most sensible route for India. The capital costs for solar will come down significantly as new thin-film technology reduces the manufacturing cost, and conversion efficiency rises – 40% has been accomplished in the lab. Besides, if you look at the fully loaded cost, that is taking into account the gigantic public outlay already incurred for fossil fuels (as an example, there is a pipeline running 20 km out to sea at Cochin Refineries so that large tankers can deliver oil without coming close to shore), solar is currently not very overpriced.

And of course, you cannot beat the price of fuel: free, no need to get any certificates from the NSG, available in plenty for at least 300 days of the year. If large solar farms are set up in a few places (they may be 10km x 10km in size, and surely this can be put up in arid areas like the Thar Desert), then solar energy is likely to be attractive. Besides, there will be economies of scale in manufacturing once demand is seeded by subsidies and tax breaks. Large-scale solar plants are becoming a reality: two giant solar farms, totally 880 MW, have just been approved by Pacific Gas and Electric in California: this is a huge step considering the largest solar plant in the US now is just 14 MW.

In addition, there are technological breakthroughs just around the corner in solar energy, as venture money is flowing into alternative energy. If only India were to invest in solar research and subsidies the billions that the UPA wants to spend on imported white elephant fission technology, India will truly gain energy independence.

The entire nuclear deal is a red-herring and a diversion. It is a colossal blunder; and when this is coming at such an enormous cost – loss of the independent nuclear deterrent and intrusive inspection of the nuclear setup, which happy proliferator China is not subject to – this is perhaps the worst act any government has taken since independence. The UPA is subjecting India to colonialism. The beneficiaries are China, Pakistan, and the US.

This deal may well mark the tipping point that causes India to collapse: without a nuclear deterrent, India is a sitting duck for Chinese blackmail including the proposed diversion of the Brahmaputra, for Pakistani-fomented insurrections, and Bangladeshi demographic invasion. India must be the very first large State in history that has consciously and voluntarily decided to dismantle itself.

Comments welcome at my blog at http://rajeev2007.wordpress.com

2000 words, September 6, 2008

Olympic Machismo

Published by the New Indian Express at http://www.newindpress.com/NewsItems.asp?ID=IE720080806012039&Page=7&Title=TheOped&Topic=0

Olympic machismo: The tale the medals tell

Rajeev Srinivasan on the pathetic failure of Indian sports

I am always embarrassed by India’s wretched showing in the Olympics, which is a metaphor for the two things that haunt India – lack of a strategic intent, and lack of leadership. It is not that Indians are physically weak or incapable of competing at Olympic levels: in many sports at the junior level, Indians do very well indeed. The failure is in developing that early promise. This is like that devastating remark about Brazil that it is condemned to always be the country of the future.

One failure is in identifying an overarching goal: that of being the best in the world. This is an implicit assumption made by Americans: that America is the best of the best. Similarly, China has historically viewed itself as the Middle Kingdom and the center of civilization, deeming all others to be barbarians. But Indians have been content to be second-best, the sporting losers. We apparently do not believe we can win.

In India people actually say, and with conviction, “What is important is participating, not winning.” My jaw almost hit the floor the first time someone assured me of this. They ignored my protests that the only thing that counts is winning, good sportsmanship be damned. The Indian contingent genuinely does go to the Olympics to form part of the scenery. I remember On the Waterfront, and failed and betrayed boxer Marlon Brando saying, “I coulda been a contender. I coulda been somebody, instead of a bum”. Indians are happy to be nobodies.

The second failure is in leadership. No political or business leader takes any interest in Olympic sports. For instance, track queen P T Usha’s school, intended to produce Olympians, is struggling for funds. Promising sportspeople have to scrounge for jobs and small stipends so that they can feed themselves and buy the equipment they need.

A Kerala girl who was a member of the national rowing team committed suicide because she simply couldn’t afford to train. Contrast this with the Chinese rowing team. A New York Times story on them showed how the Chinese zeroed in on rowing, which has a lot of medals, to increase their possible medal tally. They paid handsomely to get the world’s best coaches and training facilities, and national team members are genuine heroes.

China is a particularly good example of a certain Olympic machismo and corresponding State patronage. The Chinese are obsessed with demonstrating to the world that they are better than anybody else. In sport after sport, starting with swimming, Chinese athletes have been systematically discovered in childhood through country-wide sporting events, carefully nurtured in sports academies, plied with whatever steroids and hormones they can get away with – and they do get caught sometimes – and turned into world-class athletes with the mental and physical toughness needed to win.

There is no reason why Indians cannot do something like this; undoubtedly, among a billion Indians there are potential champions who are today condemned to be like the “full many a flower [that] is born to blush unseen”. Somehow, promising Indians fade away from lack of… something, perhaps a killer instinct, perhaps self-confidence, perhaps sponsors. I am reminded of what was in tennis dubbed the “ABC powers”: Amritraj, Borg and Connors, all of whom appeared on the scene as youngsters at the same time. Yet Amritraj faded, while the others became champions.

There is a failure in India to encourage fresh blood, and to tell the famous to retire when their time is up. Rusty old war-horses become dogs-in-the-manger, not good enough in a sporting world where youth is at a premium, yet unwilling to yield the limelight. This is exemplified by a track and field athlete who has never been higher than some tenth in the world. Bizarrely, the media and sports establishment lionizes and trots her out as a ‘medal hope’ in all major meets; she regularly manages to be seventh in a field of eight, humiliating herself, yet refusing to bow out gracefully. Do go “gentle into that good night”, please! That also applies to many others past their prime.

There is yet another failure in India, the stranglehold cricket has on the imagination. Billions are spent on cricket, but all other sports starve. Case in point: India’s once-mighty field-hockey team, which once upon a time bestrode the Olympics like a colossus, failed to even qualify this time. India, one-seventh of humanity, will probably win a bronze in shooting – that’s all – in Beijing 2008, but cricket fans are blithely unaware and uncaring. Tragic, isn’t it?

If you step back and look at the big picture, there is a valid question as to whether there is any correlation between a country’s medal tally and its quality of life. Should the ranking of countries be based on total medals or medals per million population? If you choose the latter, according to the Economist, the Athens 2004 list is dominated by the Bahamas, Cuba, Estonia, Slovenia, Jamaica etc. – a motley crew indeed, and not exactly the most desirable places to live in – not the US, Russia, or China. Australia is the only country that shows up in the top 10 under both criteria. Yes, Australia does have a fairly good quality of life.

But the counter-example is regimented Communist States that produce good athletes: who can forget, for instance, the muscular, slightly mustachioed East German or Soviet female athletes of yore? The reasons are clear: they had a pathological obsession with winning, and treated the Olympics as a major prestige issue. It had little to do with quality of life and a lot to do with paranoia and one-up-manship. So yes, it is possible to go to extremes for medals while ignoring ground realities.

Nevertheless, a large Olympic haul does show that a nation can imagine, plan and execute. This has implications for strategy, and indeed, survival. After all, the original Greek Olympics were set up as a bloodless substitute for war. Olympians are our samurai, our alter-egos, fighting on our behalf.

Comments welcome at http://rajeev2007.wordpress.com

999 words

Who lost India?

Who lost India?

By Rajeev Srinivasan

podcast at http://rajeev.posterous.com/podcast-of-who-lost-india-arti

One of these days, the New York Times will run a story titled “Who lost India?” Pundits will pontificate about what caused India to be irretrievably ‘lost’ – that is, it no longer functions as a viable and friendly ally of the West, particularly of America. Though they would deny it, the Indo-US Nuclear Agreement currently being shoved down India’s throat would have been the tipping point that did India in.

Given the parlous security situation in the neighborhood, as well as the various separatist movements gaining strength from external sources, this may well be the first step in the unraveling of India. That would be a disaster not only for India and Indians, but also for America, because India is just about the only friend it has in that giant arc from East Africa to Southeast Asia, full of failed and failing states. Adding India to that list is not going to help anyone.

What is not known to most Americans is the extraordinary goodwill that ordinary Indians have towards America. At a time when the US is regularly pilloried as anywhere between monstrous and appalling by large numbers of people, India is the country where the average person on the street has the most positive perception of America. A Pew Trust survey on global attitudes in 2006 showed this: Indians were the most pro-American, far more so than Chinese, Saudi Arabians, and Pakistanis, to pick a few American allies.

Perhaps that’s not such a big deal to Americans accustomed to basking in the sunshine of admiration and envy from all quarters, based on both hard and soft power. But consider this: India, with all its problems, is no banana republic. According to the widely followed reports from Goldman Sachs, India may well overtake the US as the world’s second largest economy by 2050.

Besides, odd as it might sound when you hear it for the first time, India is a lot like America. That is my gut feel after having spent half my life in India and the other half in America. There are many similarities, but the most striking one is the openness and friendliness of the people. Whatever you may think of their respective governments, it is a fact that the people of America and of India are warm, friendly and hospitable. This carries over into many things: plurality, tolerance for different ideas, innovativeness.

In fact, I’d be so bold as to claim that India’s core competencies are quite like America’s: fertile land, soft power, innovation. What India has lacked is the financial resources of a vast virgin continent and what’s been termed ‘strategic intent’ by management guru C K Prahalad – the ability to imagine itself as Numero Uno, and to act accordingly.

There are historic reasons to believe that superpowerdom for India is not a wet-dream. India was, throughout most of recorded history, the richest country in the world, astonishing as this may seem. According to economic historian Angus Maddison, India was the world’s largest economy from 0 CE to 1500 CE; China was its competitor towards the end of that period. Then the land was ravaged by colonialism, which destroyed many of the wealth-generating systems that had emerged over millennia, notably the innovative small businesses in textiles and light engineering goods.

Indian prowess in intellectual property is not given due credit: some of the greatest inventions in history came from there, including the Indian numeral system, the cornerstone of all mathematics; the context-free grammar of Panini from 500 BCE, which underlies all computing; the infinite series of Madhava from 1300 CE, which provides the underpinnings of the differential calculus and thus of the Industrial Revolution.

But these are in the past, one might say. What has India done lately? That is fair criticism. I am forced to ask you to take it on faith that, just as India appeared out of the blue in high-technology, it has the intellectual capability to be a partner in the knowledge economy of tomorrow. Sociologist Joel Kotkin remarked that “engineering is the oil of the 21^st century”; and that is what Indians are strong at.

There are the ingredients, then, of a successful rapprochement between India and the US. Why hasn’t this worked for so long? There are many who share the blame; some of it can be attributed to the knee-jerk anti-Americanism of the Nehru dynasty which lectured the US and propped up the comical non-aligned movement. America’s explicit support of Pakistan has also been an irritant; so has the derision made most explicit in the Nixon Tapes.

Those days are past, though, and there are the glimmerings of a beautiful relationship. But the so-called Nuclear Deal has the potential to be a huge thorn in the flesh. The deal is a bad one. It is such a bad deal for India, and it is being railroaded through with such deceit and opaqueness by the Manmohan Singh administration, that it will almost certainly be revoked unilaterally by a future Indian government. Given the contours of the IAEA agreement, this will invite serious punitive sanctions on India.

The problem is that India is being sold a bill of goods. The deal is being sold to Indians as a guarantee of energy security and a harbinger of close co-operation with America. But it is obvious that this is neither; it is about non-proliferation, and about the bringing to heel of the one big nation that has challenged the apparently divinely mandated monopoly the P-5 have arrogated to themselves.

There has been a full-court press on India to accept the deal as the best and last deal India will ever get. This in itself is laughable, not to mention the assurances from many American worthies that this deal is “good for India” – as though they cared about India’s interests. It is clear that the champions of “cap, rollback and eliminate” who have lingered in Foggy Bottom through the Clinton and Bush administrations has now figured out, via a pliant Indian government, how to get the deed signed and delivered.

India is being conned into signing the NPT as a non-weapons-state, with no guarantee that anybody will supply uranium for the obsolete fission reactors India will buy at, undoubtedly, vastly inflated prices. India would be far better off investing its billions in emerging energy technologies, most notably solar, which is on the verge of a breakthrough. And India is nothing if not rich in sunshine. To give up its nuclear deterrent in the pursuit of a vague fission-based energy security is totally quixotic.

There really is no energy security in the proposed treaty. The version of the agreement that has been made public:

• Does not give India any unique status, but is identical to the agreement with non-nuclear weapons states; thus India is treated on par with rogue states like Pakistan and North Korea
• Does not guarantee fuel supply, but guarantees perpetual IAEA inspections
• Does conform to US domestic legislation like the Hyde Act
• Does not allow India, unlike the P-5, to unilaterally withdraw its facilities from intrusive inspections
• Does not specify what “corrective steps”, if any, India may take in case of supply disruptions; to wit, there are no corrective steps

The net result of all this is that India will lose its strategic independence in terms of seeking a credible deterrent. Losing its small nuclear arsenal is not an option for India, which is threatened by two bellicose nuclear-armed neighbors: China and Pakistan. China has proliferated nukes and missiles to Pakistan. And Pakistan’s A Q Khan and his nuclear Wal-Mart, proliferating to Libya, Syria, Iraq, Iran, and North Korea, are well-known.

Being unable to deter China in its adventurism, India will not also be able to adequately deter its proxies Pakistan, Bangladesh or Nepal. The result of this is could even be an extinction of the India nation, as Bangladesh pursues lebensraum and detaches India’s Northeast as its fiefdom, China pursues the diversion of the Brahmaputra, Pakistan pursues the death by a thousand cuts, and Nepal’s newly emboldened communists pursue their Pasupati-to-Tirupati corridor.

This is no way to treat a partner and an ally. In the long run, the US faces China, an implacable and ruthless foe. To subjugate the one nation in Asia that can match and counteract China, just to satisfy a bunch of non-proliferation fundamentalist Cold Warriors, and for the benefit of GE and Westinghouse, is plain folly. I don’t think America wants to lose India.

Rajeev Srinivasan considers San Francisco and Kerala his two homes.

1400 words, July 13, 2008

A conspiracy behind the nuclear deal?

Published on rediff as http://www.rediff.com/news/2008/jul/22rajeev.htm

Oh tangled web: a conspiracy behind the Nuclear Agreement?

Rajeev Srinivasan remains skeptical of the much-ballyhooed Indo-US deal

Oh what a tangled web we weave,
When first we practise to deceive! – Sir Walter Scott

It is worth asking once again whether the Indo-US nuclear deal is beneficial to India. Not being a subject-matter expert on the minutiae of the IAEA agreement, I read the published views of a many commentators. It appears that the verbiage is so ambiguous that it has not changed anyone’s minds: those who opposed the deal before have not been convinced that it is the greatest thing since sliced bread; those who liked it before continue to like it.

It appears to me, based on the above, that the agreement:

• Does not give India any unique status, but is identical to the agreement with non-nuclear weapons states, and quite different from one with the P-5
• Does not guarantee fuel supply, but guarantees perpetual IAEA inspections
• Does conform to US domestic legislation like the Hyde Act
• Does not allow India, unlike the P-5, to unilaterally withdraw its facilities from intrusive inspections
• Does not specify what “corrective steps”, if any, India may take in case of supply disruptions; to wit, there are no corrective steps

None of these is desirable. These justify my concerns about this exercise as expressed in several previous columns: The deal that refuses to die, http://www.rediff.com/news/2008/apr/23rajeev.htm , That hoax called non-proliferation, http://www.rediff.com/news/2006/oct/12rajeev.htm , Bushwhacked: Why the nuclear deal is (still) a bad idea, http://www.rediff.com/news/2006/apr/06rajeev.htm , That Obscure Object of Desire: Nuclear Energy

http://www.rediff.com/news/2005/oct/24rajeev.htm

It is useful to remember what the deal is supposed to be all about from the Indian point of view: it is about one tangible outcome – the acquisition of energy security; and about one intangible outcome – the cooperation and support of the US in making India a major strategic power. However, it is not clear that either of these outcomes is a given. There are no guarantees being given by anybody that they will ensure the supply of uranium to India in perpetuity in exchange for India opening up its civilian facilities to intrusive inspections by the IAEA. And the US is certainly not giving India the status of one of its close allies, like those in NATO.

Therefore, it appears that the agreement is all about satisfying the American point of view – which is almost entirely about non-proliferation, and about bringing India under the ambit of a number of treaties. It is strictly about India signing the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty as a non-nuclear-weapons state, which leads to what American non-proliferation fundamentalists have been pushing all along: “cap, rollback, and eliminate”.

In addition, India is also signing the CTBT through the back door, possibly the FMCT, and putting many of its facilities under intrusive inspections by the IAEA (the same IAEA, we note in passing, that conveniently reported that Iraq had nuclear weapons.)

The problem with all this is that, far from assuring India’s energy security and helping it become a top-notch military power, this agreement merely guarantees that India will be a sitting duck for Chinese and Pakistani nuclear blackmail. This may have disastrous consequences.

Being unable to deter China in its adventurism, India will not also be able to adequately deter its proxies Pakistan, Bangladesh or Nepal. The result of this is could even be a extinction of the India nation, as Bangladesh pursues its lebensraum, China pursues the diversion of the Brahmaputra, Pakistan pursues the death by a thousand cuts, and Nepal’s newly emboldened communists pursue their Pasupati-to-Tirupati corridor.

It is unclear why the Americans are going along with this agenda, except that they may still be suffering from Cold-war-itis. The Americans are obviously considering this a coup for themselves, and I speculate they have several objectives, none of which is good for India:

1. mercantilist: to support companies like GE and Westinghouse (http://www.rediff.com/money/2008/jul/21bweek.htm) which will benefit from the sales of reactors
2. strategic: to keep India militarily weak as a precursor to prying loose the Northeast in an operation similar to how East Timor was detached from Indonesia
3. tactical: to ensure that India continues to be as dependent on uranium suppliers as it has been on oil suppliers, which means outsiders have their hand on India’s jugular, and the spigot can be turned on or off to keep India docile and obedient
4. just plain opportunistic: to strike while the iron is hot, while their good friend controls the Indian government

The fact that the Americans are up to no good is evident from the heavy-duty pressure tactics they have been up to, including the snake-oil-salesman techniques bordering on a “protection racket” a la the late lamented Al Capone – something you would see in a film-noir with its betrayals and double-crossings: I am reminded specifically of the brilliant Chinatown, where an unsuspecting Owens Valley is relieved of all its water. India is similarly being relieved of its right to protect itself.

And what is China’s angle in all this? An India defanged as a forever inferior non-nuclear State is good news for China, as it can pursue unfettered imperialism in Asia. In that case why have China’s proxies, India’s Communists, been so loud in their opposition to the deal? Maybe China has only been pretending to oppose the deal as a rhetorical ploy?

Call me a conspiracy theorist, but I am beginning to wonder if this isn’t a great example of collusion between the US and China. If so, the two have played the Good Cop-Bad Cop routine to perfection. At the end of the day, India would have been hoodwinked into permanently giving up any hope of escaping from banana-republic-dom. This is a Himalayan blunder for India, but just perfect for the US and China.

The Chinese made all the proper noises about how they hated the deal, and their acolytes the Communists were strident in their opposition to it. To their credit, they did not mince words: they said it would hurt China. This convinced many in India who subscribe to the axiom that anything the Communists like is bad for India; conversely, something they dislike must be good for India. Only, in this case the truism didn’t hold good, but Indians, Pavlovian-fashion, rushed in, to mix metaphors wildly.

Besides, the mega-propaganda campaign unleashed by the UPA recently has been a great success. There is no news about inflation; nor about terrorists continuing to lob grenades at Amarnath pilgrims http://afp.google.com/article/ALeqM5gZI3q6edKoFk9v5vUpHNPoc3-KSw ; or anything else at all, other than the unseemly circus in Parliament. Tremendous diversionary tactics, indeed!

The net result is that the Americans (and possibly the Chinese) have pulled off a coup. It’s Tibet redux: India gave away its substantial treaty rights in Tibet to China in return for absolutely nothing, prodded by an imperious prime minister. A member of his dynasty has now engineered the giving away of India’s strategic independence in return for nothing. India is being sold a bill of goods. Yet again.

For once, Marx was right: history is repeating itself, once as tragedy, next as farce.

1180 words, 21st July 2008

After the rhetoric, a certain realism

This was printed in the New Indian Express dated 10th Jun 08:

http://www.newindpress.com/NewsItems.asp?ID=IE720080609222650&Page=7&Title=TheOped&Topic=0

Here’s my original copy.

The fallout from the Olympic torch relay

By Rajeev Srinivasan

The Olympic torch relay was completed in China recently. and this was followed by the horrendous earthquake that leveled parts of Szechuan province. Apart from the human tragedies associated with both (including the protests that dogged the torch relay based on the genocide of Tibetans), the way the Chinese State has responded to both show some inklings of the way things work behind the Bamboo Curtain.

First, the Communists in charge of China pay enormous attention to symbols and pride, what East Asians call “face”. The Olympics are clearly their coming-out party, and they intend to impress the entire world with their new-found wealth and their march towards super-power-dom. Just as their neighbors in Japan and Korea announced their arrival on the world stage by staging the Olympics, China wants to host a perfect event, and they will stop at nothing to ensure this.

This is why the Chinese were so keen on ensuring that the torch relays went perfectly everywhere, and this explains their anger at disruptions in France and Britain. Interestingly, the only stop in the US, in San Francisco, was stage-managed through subterfuge: the torch took an unannounced path, so that protesters were fooled.

The Chinese State views the torch relay as the equivalent of an aswamedha yaga, wherein the emperor’s horse is free to wander as it pleases, and anyone who hinders it does so at the peril of facing his wrath. The vassal kings naturally pay obeisance. Thus, all the nations where the torch relay took place without incident are vassals of the Chinese King Emperor.

It is not surprising that the Indian government chose to bend over and kowtow to Chinese imperiousness. But the right thing for India to do once the violence in Tibet had commenced would have been to cancel the torch’s arrival in India altogether, citing security reasons. This would have been a painful snub to China, and quite appropriate to India’s role as the home of the Tibetan nation in exile. That would have got India respect.

Similarly, San Francisco was chosen – not New York, not Los Angeles – for the US appearance for good reason. It is because San Francisco was where the majority of Chinese coolies arrived. They built the railroads, and were discriminated against via the Asian Exclusion Act, which prevented them from owning property, marrying white women, or bringing Chinese brides. Thus the parading of China’s might where they were humiliated once upon a time.

Those who monitor the Chinese newsgroups on the net, or callers to talk shows, know how ultra-jingoistic Chinese people are. They are brought up on a steady diet of myths about great glory and great humiliation (by white imperialists) in the past. They cannot tolerate even the mildest criticism of their State or their country. The Communists are betting that by creating this new idol of nationalism they can stitch a large nation – well, actually an empire – together.

In this mythology, the Chinese State is remarkably similar to the German State between the two world wars. That too had memories of great Prussian glory, and the reality of great humiliation (by the victors in World War I). This led to a national psychosis, especially when mixed up with the idea of the Master Race. The same seems to be happening with China as well, with their vanity of being the Master Race (or Middle Kingdom) and their racist derision for all gwailo, foreign devils.

That brings up an interesting historical parallel: the Berlin Olympiad of 1936, which was intended to be the celebration of the ‘Aryan’ Master Race. Which it didn’t quite turn out to be, thanks to the black American runner Jesse Owens and others. Unless the Chinese win all the gold medals in Beijing, some ultra-nationalists will be upset.

But what is even more interesting is the parallels with both Berlin 1936 and Moscow 1980. Both were held when their respective empires were at their zenith. But by 1945, the Nazi empire was defeated; by 1990, the Russian empire had imploded. One possible future for China’s empire, then, may well be its collapse within the next ten years. After all, 60% of the land currently held in their iron grip by the Han Chinese belongs to Tibetans, Mongols, Uighurs, Manchus et al, who are not enamored of being second-class citizens in a Han-dominated land.

Of course, the other comparison is with Japan and Korea, both of which thrived. But there is a major difference: those other East Asian States had moved much further towards openness and democracy by the time they held their Olympics. China, as a one-party, totalitarian dictatorship is inherently unstable: they are playing a dangerous game encouraging ultra-jingoism, because that may well turn against the dictatorship itself.

But there are encouraging signs of realism on the part of the Chinese Communists. Although they have railed against His Holiness the Dalai Lama, using their customary unparliamentary language against him, nevertheless they are continuing a dialog with him. This is because they realize that there is considerable world opinion in support of the Tibetan cause. China’s modus operandi is to constantly test the limits; as soon as they get some push-back, they withdraw. China is not immune to world pressure.

Similarly, after the earthquake, China been remarkably open about the damage as well as the casualties. They have admitted that 10,000 have died. This is in marked contrast to their past behavior: in the 1970’s a dam burst and killed 100,000 people; the news was suppressed for thirty years. Similarly, they pretended that SARS and avian flu did not exist. There might be two reasons for this new-found candor: the demand for accountability from a more demanding population; and the darker possibility that this is an “Olympics Special”, and they intend to return to regularly scheduled opaqueness later.

If the Chinese State is on the way to becoming a more normal entity, and not a pathological misfit bent on imperialism, then that would be a good thing for all of Asia.

990 words, May 13, 2008

The sad story of Maya Nand: thrice betrayed by history

This appeared in the Pioneer of 28th May at http://www.dailypioneer.com/archives2/default12.asp?main_variable=oped&file_name=opd2%2Etxt&counter_img=2&phy_path_it=D%3A%5CWebSites%5CDailyPioneer%5Carchives2%5Cmay2808

Here is my original copy:

Thrice betrayed: how Maya Nand was executed by an American prison company

Rajeev Srinivasan on human rights violations by Homeland Security in the US

Maya Nand had the misfortune to be on the wrong side of history three times: and so he died, shackled, untreated for diabetes, in a prison cell in Arizona. (“Family struggled in vain to help suffering detainee”, International Herald Tribune, May 5, 2008 http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/05/05/america/05detainnand.php). He, a legal immigrant or Green Card holder, made the mistake of applying for US citizenship. This was rejected on a technicality (a misdemeanor charge about domestic violence), and he fell into a Twilight Zone of the penal system. Without recourse to due process, he was incarcerated and essentially subjected to judicial murder in a privately-run prison.

This is startling because it seems like a huge miscarriage of justice, which legal immigrants to the most open and free society in the world should not be subject to. But there are three other aspects that stand out: that poor Maya Nand must have been especially cursed to be so violated by history, three times over; that on the fringes of the legal system of the US there are so many dark corners where people can become non-persons, to be brutalized at will; and that, yet again, the Indian State pays no attention to the oppressed amongst its diaspora.

For, Maya Nand’s ancestors were indentured laborers from India taken to work as near-slaves in the sugar-plantations of Fiji by the British. Nand himself must have suffered from serious discrimination from the indigenous Fijians and therefore moved to the US as a refugee. Finally, with no opportunity to defend himself, he was killed. This is an outrage.

But more alarmingly, it appears legal protections US citizens take for granted are not available to legal immigrant and residents. There are gray areas in the US judicial system that take away the fundamental rights of the individual, including habeas corpus, the right to a fair hearing in court. And the famous ‘Miranda’ rules available to even hardened criminals: “You have the right to remain silent, to an attorney, etc.”

The story of Maya Nand, and a related story about European visitors (“Italian’s Detention Illustrates Dangers Foreign Visitors Face”, New York Times, May 15^th, 2008 http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/14/us/14visa.html?em&ex=1210996800&en=659393fd425fbf2d&ei=5087%0A ), show there are constructs that put non-citizens into a Kafkaesque No-Man’s Land where they are legally not on US soil even though they physically are; and therefore normal US laws do not apply to them, even those that apply to illegal immigrants! Therefore, they can be held indefinitely without being charged, and there is no way that anxious relatives can even get reliable information about them.

In a strange way, this is the mirror-image of the rationale for the post-9/11 terrorist holding facility in the US naval base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. That is another fiction where the base is not quite considered to be on US soil, and detainees are not considered either enemy combatants or prisoners of war, whereby the Geneva Convention doesn’t apply to them (let me hasten to add that I make no assumptions about the innocence or otherwise of those detained in Gitmo, I am merely observing the legal loophole used).

I must admit being shocked when I first read these stories. Accustomed as most of us are to the frequent proclamations about the US being the “home of the free and the land of the brave”, I could not believe such things could happen to holders of the coveted Green Card. (Although, in passing, I know some people who lied about their existing Communist Party affiliations – a big no-no – in their Green Card applications. I am sure they worry someone will bring this little subterfuge to the attention of those grim Homeland Security types. Green Cards, and citizenship, can, and have been, revoked – ask the Indian immigrants who were stripped of citizenship in the early 1900s for being Caucasian but not white).

To some extent these excesses may be over-reactions to 9/11 and the real threat to America from terrorists abroad. But there is a totalitarian streak in the country, which explains how Japanese-Americans were put into concentration camps during World War II. There is also a tendency to apply the harshest methods to non-whites. But then, America has a violent history, including the genocide and cultural extermination of the Native American.

Why does India does not stand up for the rights of its diaspora and demand that the record be set right on historical wrongs? Four years ago, Indian-origin Sikh priest Khem Singh, 72 years old and crippled, was starved to death in another American prison in Fresno, Calif. Before that, there was Charanjit Singh Aujla, shot to dead by plainclothes policemen in Jefferson, Miss. And Navroze Mody, beaten to death in Hoboken, NJ, by racists chanting “dot-head”, an epithet against Indians.

Then there have been the many incidents of oppression, religious and economic, against Indian-origin people in Fiji; they have had no option but to flee. There was violence against Indians in Uganda, Kenya etc. in East Africa, again turning many into refugees; and even before that, Indians were ejected from Burma.

The Indian government has never raised its voice in support of its diaspora in any of these cases. Perhaps that was acceptable when India was a starving banana republic, holding out a begging bowl. But this is not acceptable when India aspires to be a major power.

Then there was the event that showed Indians that the British imperialists were truly evil: April 13^th, 1919, Jallianwallah Bagh. The Indian government has never demanded reparations or even an apology from the British for this crime against humanity: 1650 bullets, 1579 casualties.

The Canadians recently decided to make a belated apology for the shameful Komagata Maru incident of 1914 when they denied Indian refugees succor (“Canada to apologize for Komagata Maru”, The Times of India, 13 May 2008, http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/World/Komagata_Maru_Canada_to_apologise_/articleshow/3034298.cms ). More such apologies must be demanded.

India deserves a government that is proud of the nation and leaves no stone unturned in protecting its citizens and its diaspora.

990 words, 15 May 2008