Shadow Warrior

This was published in the New Indian Express on May 7th at

http://www.newindpress.com/NewsItems.asp?ID=IE720080506230543&Page=7&Title=TheOped&Topic=0

Here’s my original copy, as it was very slightly edited by them:

Air travel as metaphor

By Rajeev Srinivasan

Something odd is happening in the friendly skies these days: It may well be more pleasant now to take a flight in India than in the US! That would sound like sacrilege to those accustomed to the customer-friendliness, so to speak, of the erstwhile Indian Airlines, but a little de-regulation has gone a long way in India. Airlines are actually competing on the basis of providing value to passengers, not ‘rationing’ scarce seats.

On the other hand, high fuel costs, excessive competition, a lax regulatory environment, and the burden of aged equipment and high health-care and pension obligations are forcing American airlines to cut back on customer amenities. Not to mention on required aircraft maintenance. The result is delays, inconvenience, and general passenger frustration. The annual Airline Quality Survey this year gave a minus 2.16 score to the airlines, the worst in two decades.

This, in a way, is a repeat of what has happened in telecommunications. Arguably, cellular telephony is better, cheaper and more leading-edge than in America: Once again, in India, a little deregulation has removed the dead hand of socialist central planning, enabling entrepreneurs to provide a real service and make some money.

Airlines in the US have been cutting corners; this led to the cancellation of 3,000 American Airlines flights in April citing safety concerns. Several airlines have folded, including Aloha, Skybus and ATA, thus reducing flights to Hawaaii.

The actual experience of air travel in the US is made worse by the ordeals in the airports themselves. The security check is a nightmare, as you are forced to take off your shoes (even those worn by infants), your belt, every other item containing any metal, your jacket, your laptop from your carry-on bag, and put all these in plastic bins.

This would be half-tolerable if it weren’t for the thugs, also known as Transportation Safety Administration employees or contractors, who chivvy you along and bully you with barely-concealed disdain. In Newark airport, I was in line behind an old Indian woman and her daughter, who were shouted at and forced to take off every item of gold jewelry, including thin gold chains, bangles and rings, which obviously startled them.

Indian customs officials are infamous for being obnoxious, but these security people are a cut above. There was an infamous prison experiment at Stanford by Professor Zimbardo, wherein he randomly assigned a few students to be prison guards and others to be prisoners. Surprisingly soon, they took to their roles with gusto, and the guards became totalitarian bullies. This psychology may be in action here too.

Once you get on the plane, the torment does not end. I have sat on the tarmac in a tiny Embraer for two hours for a one-hour flight from Washington, DC to Newark. Congestion, the lack of well-trained air-traffic controllers, all this takes a toll. Fortunately for me, I wasn’t one of those who sat for ten hours on some tarmac last year on a Jetblue flight after a winter storm played havoc with their schedules.

The in-flight experience, too, is nothing to write home about. Leg-room is minimal; and if you are unfortunate enough to be wedged next to a large person, you (and they) can hardly breathe. I had a colleague who was forced by an airline to buy a second seat because he was grossly fat. He went to court, and the court agreed with the airline, no doubt pitying the passenger forced to sit next to him.

In-flight service on American airlines (United, Continental, American, Delta) has been pathetic for a long time. The food (including some kind of mystery meat not found anywhere else on earth) is deplorable; if you opt for vegetarian, you get singularly unappetizing boiled vegetables and quantities of cardboard-like lettuce. Fortunately, most airlines have now dispensed with food altogether. The only problem is that people bring on board large salads and sandwiches which they consume throughout the five-hour coast-to-coast flight.

The less said about the flight attendants the better. I once had a neighbor who was senior cabin crew on the San Francisco-Tokyo route for United. She was a battle-axe, and I dread to think of the poor passengers she was supposed to be helping. A lot of it has to do with age, and she was in her late forties. Without being age-ist, it is obvious that the body cannot take the wear-and-tear of being constantly on one’s feet, endemic jet-lag, and being professionally nice, unless one is about twenty-three.

Realizing this, Southeast Asian and East Asian airlines (Singapore, Thai, Korean, Japan) have long competed on in-flight service using young, attentive cabin crew. The Arabs are emulating this: Emirates, Qatar and Etihad hire Asian girls. And finally, India’s airlines have gotten the idea as well. Kingfisher and Jet seem to have found large numbers of attractive and smart young women as cabin crew. Jet has already created a reputation for good service on its international routes. I do hope they keep it up.

The decline in the standards of air travel in the US and the corresponding rise in India is a metaphor for the shifting fortunes of the two nations, and their trajectories. Civil engineering, once America’s pride and joy, is now under-funded. The great highways are neglected (a bridge in Minnesota collapsed recently), and the airports are tired and obsolete.

India’s advantage, once again in parallel with telecommunications, is that it is not saddled with old infrastructure. If India builds better airports (and, remembering Bangalore Airport, proper roads to reach them), the increasing numbers of air travelers will help the airlines grow. That story is true in many other fields: Banking and financial services, retail, real estate. India’s “demographic dividend” of an increasing number of young, working, upwardly-mobile people will drive internal demand for some years to come. The Asian Century is well on its way; and this is only as it should be, because up until 200 years ago, Asia dominated the world, as it will in future.

The Pioneer has published this on May 3rd as

http://www.dailypioneer.com/indexn12.asp?main_variable=EDITS&file_name=edit3%2Etxt&counter_img=3

They edited my copy slightly. Here’s my original:

The Obama Campaign Implodes?

By Rajeev Srinivasan

That giant sucking sound you heard, with apologies to Ross Perot, was probably the sound of Barack Obama’s campaign going down the toilet. In the quaint phrase used by the Indian media, he was “hoist by his own petard”. His relationship with a dubious ‘spiritual advisor’, one Jeremiah Wright, whose church he has attended for many years, has seriously hurt Obama’s credibility and electability.

The Democratic nomination for the US Presidential election is now wide open, even though Obama leads Hillary Clinton by a substantial margin in delegate count. But Clinton, wife of the famous ‘Comeback Kid’ Bill Clinton, may have demonstrated that Obama’s major claim to fame, his ‘inclusiveness’, is a myth. Not only that, he looked decidedly un-Presidential in his handling of the Wright episode, to the extent that his honeymoon with the media may just have ended.

Wright has been an extreme advocate of black power, harboring anti-Jewish and anti-white sentiment, as well as colorful conspiracy theories. He contends, for instance, that America brought 9/11 upon itself by practicing terrorism abroad; and that the US government had infected blacks intentionally with the AIDS virus. None of this goes down well with the average American voter, so Obama was forced to distance himself from Wright.

But this issue will not go away. Obama suffered a major defeat in Pennsylvania in April, where working-class white voters showed a clear preference for Clinton. If he had managed to beat Clinton, her back-to-the-wall campaign would have ended then and there. And he did pour his resources into the fight, spending twice as much as Clinton. The take-away is that he does not resonate with lower-income whites, a large constituency.

Obama did not help himself with his naive remarks suggesting that small-town working-class voters, affected by job losses, were gun-toting, bitter racists obsessed with religion. His exact words were, “… they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them.” Rather elitist for an ‘inclusive’ person, wouldn’t you say?

Given this string of negative news, the word that springs to mind is “greenhorn”. Obama is inexperienced, and it shows, and this puts a big question mark on his ability to be the Commander-in-Chief. The Wright episode is the biggest crisis in his short political life, and he has mishandled it rather badly.

The point is that Obama looks like a hypocrite. He has been associated with Wright’s church for twenty years, and for him to claim that he has never heard any of the incendiary, racist hate-speech that Wright has been infamous for, sounds disingenuous, a bit like Bill Clinton claiming he didn’t inhale marijuana. It appears as though Obama stuck with Wright’s church to be able to gain a political base among Chicago’s blacks.

Clearly, Obama had not found it opportune to distance himself from Wright in the past: The title of his second book and the theme of his entire campaign are taken from Wright. Wright baptized Obama’s children, helped kick off and participated in his campaign until aides warned Obama of the possible negative impact on white voters.

Thus Obama has begun to look like just another ordinary politician, one who lies and who has ‘marriages of convenience’. That should knock him off his pedestal, and dent the mythology of ‘change’. The whole ‘change’ chorus has been mostly make-believe, anyway, but lots of people had begun to believe in the rhetoric, and Obama has become a Messiah of sorts. Or, frighteningly, a Pied Piper.

What is the change he’s going to bring in? Is Obama going to immediately pull out of Iraq and Afghanistan? Is Obama going to bring in universal health care? Is Obama going to single-handedly rescue the recession-bound American economy? Is Obama going to change American foreign policy so that the US stops supporting dictators like Pakistan’s Musharraf? Is Obama going to immediately reverse the decline in American education and competitiveness?

Is Obama going to move away from depending on Saudi petro-dollars? Is Obama going to make the plight of oppressed racial minorities in America much better? How is Obama going to rein in rampaging China and resurgent Russia? Is Obama going to reduce global warming by America dramatically?

None of these are amenable to quick fixes. It is, therefore, not entirely clear exactly what Obama is going to change. Obama may be able to beat Clinton based on all this rhetoric, but McCain may not be quite so easy. Republicans are rather good at negative campaigning, remember Karl Rove?

All this means it is likely that Obama will not win against McCain. Recent polls show him losing to McCain (although Clinton wins against McCain). This is generally disastrous for the Democrats, who had the deck loaded in their favor to begin with: a deeply unpopular Republican President in a time of war, the economy in deep distress. Pundits had given the Republicans no chance whatsoever. But with the internecine battles between Clinton and Obama, and with Obama’s self-inflicted wounds, the prize may slip away. This will also affect many other Democratic candidates, as the Presidential coat-tails usually drag along candidates for local and national office.

It may well be “Bye-bye Obama, Hello McCain”, come November’s election. An Obama-Clinton or Clinton-Obama ticket is still a theoretical possibility. But it’s not that that any of this makes much of a difference to Indian interests. None of the candidates is going to do much for India, except that Democrats tend to be worse non-proliferation ayatollahs than Republicans. And both Democrats are protectionists, too.

There is another distant possibility, though: the Democratic Convention may draft Al Gore. This has happened before, when an undeclared but electable non-candidate was drafted by the party bosses: examples include Franklin Roosevelt and Adlai Stevenson. A Gore-Obama candidacy may work, as I doubt Gore-Clinton would excite Al very much. This may also stand a better chance against McCain.

But there’s no question that Obama’s chances have been hurt, perhaps fatally, by his ex-mentor.

1000 words, May 1, 2008

This was printed in the Pioneer, April 8th

http://www.dailypioneer.com/archives2/default12.asp?main_variable=oped&file_name=opd1%2Etxt&counter_img=1&phy_path_it=E%3A%5Cdailypioneer%5Carchives2%5Capr808

Here’s my original, which has been slightly edited by the Pioneer. I made a factual error: Moscow was the 1980 Olympics, not 1984.

Are Tibet and Kashmir the same?

Rajeev Srinivasan on how China’s fifth-columnists are exculpating genocide

There has lately been a slew of articles and editorials in India’s English-language media about China’s inhuman genocide and reign of terror in Tibet. Some of these supported the state-perpetrated terrorism against oppressed Tibetans.

The media is merely reflecting the failings of the self-proclaimed “intelligentsia” in India. Their discourse is so distorted that what would be considered lunatic-fringe leftist in the real world is considered “centrist” in India. A true centrist would be, and is, deemed a lunatic-fringe right-winger, and is instantly demonized as a fascist and Nazi.

Therefore the usual perorations of the media can be taken with a large pinch of salt. A number of them support the Chinese, either out of an exaggerated sense of awe about China, or out of loyalty built up through boondoggle Potemkin trips or cold, hard cash.

But they attempt to intimidate people with a logical fallacy: they suggest that Indians have no right to comment on someone else violating human rights. Wrong. The fact that the Indian government may be violating human rights somewhere does not preclude any Indian individual from commenting on, or condemning, what the Chinese are doing. Evil has to be resisted.

Here are a couple of apt quotations: “All that is necessary for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing”, attributed to Edmund Burke, a Briton.

“First they came for the Communists,
- but I was not a communist so I did not speak out.
Then they came for the Socialists and the Trade Unionists,
- but I was neither, so I did not speak out.
Then they came for the Jews,
- but I was not a Jew so I did not speak out.
And when they came for me, there was no one left to speak out for me.,”

attributed to Martin Niemoller, a German, speaking about the Nazis.

Therefore, it is absolutely proper for anyone to speak out against gross human rights violations. Those who use rhetorical devices to try and shut people up are bullying and censoring others. They should be ignored and laughed at.

But I found something a little more outrageous in the perspectives of a few China hands, including the editor of a newspaper infamous for reprinting Xinhua propaganda verbatim, and a retired diplomat.

These worthies made the assertion that India must not say anything about Tibet because Tibet is just like Kashmir. This merits attention. In fact, they are right, amazingly enough, although for entirely the wrong reasons. Consider the analogies:

In Tibet, a bunch of outsiders, Han Chinese, invaded and are oppressing local Tibetans.

In Kashmir, a bunch of outsiders, Mohammedans, invaded and oppress local Hindus.

In Tibet, Han Chinese are murdering and ethnically cleansing Tibetans.

In Kashmir, Mohammedans have been murdering and ethnically cleansing Hindus.

In Tibet, Han Chinese are practicing civilizational genocide.

In Kashmir, Mohammedans are practicing civilizational genocide.

In Tibet, a Semitic belief (Communism) is wiping out an Indic faith (Tibetan Buddhism).

In Kashmir, a Semitic faith (Mohammedanism) is wiping out an Indic faith (Hinduism). Therefore, nobody is bothered, as it is the defined job of Indic faiths to be wiped out by Semitic faiths.

With these parallels, there is an exact match between Tibet and Kashmir. The media mavens are absolutely right. And just as the Congress government stood by and watched the ethnic cleansing and genocide of Hindus in Kashmir, the UPA government will stand by and watch the ethnic cleansing and genocide of Tibetans in Tibet. Therefore, on five points out of five, the match is perfect.

There is one difference. Tibetan Buddhism was created in the first place by the few monks who fled Nalanda with their lives when Mohammedan invader Bakhtiar Khilji burned the university to the ground circa 1192 CE (which in itself was a crime against humanity because of the knowledge lost), and beheaded every one of the Buddhist monks he found. Hinduism, specifically Kashmir Shaivism, on the other hand, was the faith of the region from times immemorial.

Ironically, the job was started by Bakhtiar Khilji is being completed by the Han Chinese. This is another example of the Communist/Han-Mohammedan axis, also seen in the A Q Khan Nuclear Wal-Mart. It appears Communists are irresistibly drawn to Mohammedans (although the reverse is not true: the latter liquidate the ‘godless’ Communists as soon as they cease to be ‘useful idiots’). There is an ‘understanding’ between China and Pakistan to keep the lid on Uighur nationalism and separatism.

It is amazing that when it comes to Chinese oppression of Mohammedan Uighurs, Pakistan somehow forgets that it is the owner of the “Mohammedan Bomb”. That, of course, may be because Pakistan’s Bomb is in fact a screwdriver job supplied by China.

Similarly, I look forward to my favorite media mavens’ dilemma when China starts to beat up on Uighurs, who, allegedly, are plotting terrorist attacks the Olympics. Who will said mavens support – Hans or Uighurs, Communists or Mohammedans? Surely they’ll support the hand that feeds them.

The proper solution to both the Kashmir and Tibet problems is the same: the perpetrators of oppression must be made to realize in no uncertain terms that you cannot get away with ethnic cleansing and genocide. Therefore, it must be made clear to the Mohammedans that India will never relinquish Kashmir. Similarly, it must be made clear to the Han Chinese that they will never be able to extinguish the spirit of the Tibetans.

Today, the Chinese look impregnable, and they are using the 2008 Olympics as a coming-out party, just as Japan and Korea did with theirs. But there is a difference: those nations were not oppressive empires at the time, just as India is not. Democracy has a way of dealing with conflict, which is not available to imperialists. It is quite possible that this is in fact the zenith of the Han empire, and that it is downhill from here on.

Let us remember that the historic independent nation of Tibet, which includes the Amdo and Kham regions, accounts for fully one-third of the land-mass controlled by the Han Chinese today. In fact, 60% of that entire land-mass is land that belongs to ethnic minorities. Han Chinese control could collapse, just as the Soviet Union’s Russian domination collapsed.

There are a couple of interesting historical parallels. In 1936, at the height of the self-glorification of the Nazi State, the Berlin Olympics were held. But in ten years, Nazism was dead and buried. In 1984, the Moscow Olympics were held when the Soviet Union looked like an invulnerable empire. In seven years, that empire imploded suddenly. In 2008, when the Han Chinese look, in turn, like masters of the universe, brutalizing others like Manchurians, Mongols, Uighurs and Tibetans. It will be interesting to see where they will be in ten years.

That is another way in which Tibet and Kashmir differ: Tibet may well lead to the unraveling of the Han Communist empire, while Kashmir is not going to affect the fabric of the Indian nation.

1170 words, April 3, 2008

The Final Solution

Rajeev Srinivasan on the all-out assault on Indic ideas

The current violent oppression of Tibetans by the Communist Chinese is only the latest incident in the crime against humanity that has been going on there for fifty-seven years. According to Tibetan activists and human rights workers, at least two thousand Tibetans have been murdered in the incidents in March, with many of them cremated or buried in unmarked graves. The official Chinese numbers of those killed – in the few hundreds – is total eyewash.

The genocide and war crime in Tibet is aimed at completely extinguishing the Tibetan people and culture. It is intended as a Final Solution, much like what the Nazis envisaged for ‘inferior’ peoples like Jews and Gypsies: their total annihilation so that the ‘master race’ (in this case the Han Chinese) can take over their lands and property and culture.

There are also the fifth columnists of the Chinese spewing vitriol and mouthing Xinhua propaganda in the Indian media: the lunatic-fringe editor of a once-proud newspaper is the worst culprit.

This is typical Communist behavior. After all, it is not long since they brutalized and massacred many in Nandigram and Singur, virtually declaring open season on non-Communists. There too, eyewitness and aid worker accounts suggest, there were more than two thousand casualties, including many “disappeareds”, a standard part of the modus operandi of fascist regimes (also see my column “Communism as Fascism”). Independent estimates suggest that Communists have managed to murder 100 million people worldwide.

The Communists’ most recent dance of death in Malabar has caught the attention of the national media only because of a ruckus in Delhi. Normally, large-scale murder by them is treated as a routine, uninteresting matter by the media, as though the Communists have a prerogative to murder anybody they do not like, especially any apostate who has converted out of Communism. In Kannur alone, a thousand people – all Hindus – have been murdered by Communists in the last few decades, in a systematic terror campaign.

There were three other recent incidents in India that were somewhat milder forms of state-sanctioned terror and oppression: nobody was killed, but the message was loud and clear that fascism is the order of the day. Two came from Tamil Nadu. One was the incident at the great temple at Chidambaram, where a number of the temple priests were arrested on ridiculous charges. The second was the attack on history and freedom of speech, when the organizers of a perfectly legal and impeccably historically accurate exhibition on Aurangazeb were assaulted and jailed.

A third was the shameful incident in which author Taslima Nasrin, a woman and a refugee, was exiled from India after assaults by Communist and Mohammedan fundamentalists, and prodding by a government that obviously has no principles whatsoever. This, in an India which has for millennia been the refuge of last resort for the oppressed and the dissident – the original destination for the “huddled masses”.

All of these episodes point to one fact: a clash of civilizations. This is slightly different from what Samuel P. Huntington talked about. Here it is a clash between two different world views, one the “ideologies of the desert” and one the “ideologies of the forest”. Alternatively, they may be called Semitic and Indic, because the Semitic belief systems do have a lot in common, and they are indeed of the West Asian desert. Similarly the Indic belief systems are of tropical rainforest Asia, whence the “aranyakas”, for instance.

There is a fundamental difference imposed by geography: the desert is masculine, harsh, cruel and unforgiving, and you have to live by a few simple rules, which you violate at your peril. For instance: store water; carry food; do not stray from the beaten path; stick with the crowd; show no sympathy to the sick and weak who might slow down your march. Interestingly, in the lush forests of India and further east, none of these rules matters, because the forest is feminine, abundant, bountiful and forgiving; you can afford to take a few risks; you can bend the rules and still survive.

These differences are clearly reflected in the ideologies that arose in their respective areas: the Semitic ones are masculine, harsh, cruel and unforgiving; the Indic ones are feminine, abundant, bountiful and forgiving. Apparently geography is truly history.

All four incidents I have recounted above are reflections of conflicts between the Semitic and the Indic. The Semitic belief systems are more numerous, and can be classified into a taxonomy based on their antiquity:

• Paleo-Semitic: Zoroastrianism, Judaism
• Meso-Semitic: Christianism, Mohammedanism
• Neo-Semitic: Communism, ‘Dravidianism’, Dalitism, and innumerable other isms that are invented every day

There are a few characteristics all Semitic ideas have: one is a Manichean good-evil, ingroup-outgroup, dichotomy, and hence the necessity to have a hated Other. Another is that they demand unquestioning faith: no skepticism is allowed, you have to believe what you are told. A third is a tendency towards intolerance and bigotry. Another is usually a rigid hierarchy, where the unwashed masses are controlled by an establishment of insiders who claim direct hotlines to the objects of reverence.

What you see in all the incidents described above is a struggle between a Semitic ideology and an Indic, where the Indic has been demonized and Other-ized, all the better to effect its liquidation. After all, nobody weeps for the demonized. And demonizing the enemy is a standard tactic in warfare.

The very language used by the Communists against the Indic Buddhists of Tibet (and especially against the Dalai Lama) clearly indicates their intent to demonize: “Nazi”, “feudal”, “splittist”. In exactly the same way the Communists of Malabar denounce the Indic Hindus as “RSS”, “Gandhi-killers”, “bourgeois”, “capitalist”. (Shades of the Nazis demonizing Jews as “Jesus-killers”, of course.)

Similarly the ‘Dravidians’, whose ideology is the Machiavellian divide-and-rule invention of a Christian padre named Caldwell, have their own patented words that they spit out with venom: “Brahmin”, “oppressor”, “casteist”, the irony being that in fact it is the so-called ‘Dravidians’ – the middle-castes of Tamil Nadu – who are, have been, and will be, the main oppressors of the lowest castes.

An interesting news story in this context, which slays all sorts of holy cows, talks about the threat by large numbers of middle-caste-convert Christians to return to Hinduism because of conflicts with low-caste-convert Christians (“20,000 Christians threaten to revert to Hinduism”, New Indian Express, 28^th March)
http://www.newindpress.com/NewsItems.asp?ID=IET20080327234008&Page=T&Title=Southern+News+%2D+Tamil+Nadu&Topic=0 Hello! Isn’t a big part of the propaganda for conversion the claim that there is no caste discrimination in Christianity? Aren’t the ‘Dravidian’ middle-castes the best friends of the Harijans? So much for that all that bull-hickey!

The simple fact is that the Semitic ideas have been for a couple of millennia on the march against the Indic ideas, and they fully intend to extinguish the latter by fire, sword, cultural expropriation, ethnic cleansing, and whatever other means available.

The old religions that held sway around the world three millennia ago – those which have been demonized as “pagan” and “heathen” – were feminine, in fact female-dominated, as, for farming communities the fertility of the earth, as symbolized by the feminine, was of paramount importance. Of these, only the Indic faiths remain, battered but still standing.

Even though it was Zoroastrianism that initially articulated the Manichean dichotomy and the concept of absolute good and absolute evil, it was Christianism that took this idea to heart, and which destroyed native ideas wherever it went. In fact, the padre was as important for propaganda, brainwashing, and thus ease of conquest as the soldier was. Later Semitic ideologies have continued with gusto down this path.

The objective of the Communists (and other neo-Semitic ideologies) is to destroy Buddhism, Hinduism and other Indic faiths. In this, they seek to ally themselves with the meso-Semitics. The irony is that this is not exactly a clever strategy. Even if the meso-Semites come to power with the help of Communists, they liquidate the latter ruthlessly, and this should be considered poetic justice. This is why there are no Communists in Bangladesh, or Afghanistan. This is why the Vatican collaborated with the Americans to wipe out Communism in Eastern Europe.

The problem is monoculture (as reflected in monotheism and other such mono-manias). Each of the Semitic belief systems considers itself the one and only answer to all the problems of mankind. Therefore their Final Solution is to wipe out all other possible answers. From the point of view of those being wiped out, who undergoing “cultural genocide”, as the Dalai Lama put it, this is understandably a life-and-death matter. From the point of view of humanity as a whole, monocultures (remember the potato blight) are susceptible to catastrophic failure, and diversity is necessity for the system to evolve and respond to unforeseen events. Thus monocultures are not good for homo sapiens or the environment.

This is why it is deeply disturbing that the UPA government is so obviously on the side of the Semitics. It has demonstrated utterly craven behavior, imposing restrictions on refugee Tibetans and exiling Nasrin, as well as turning a blind eye to Communist and ‘Dravidian’ violence and oppression of Indic beliefs. Indic tolerance has been turned into dhimmitude.

Let us contrast this with what Swami Vivekananda said on September 11^th, 1893 (yes, exactly 108 years to the day prior to 9/11) at the Parliament of Religions: “I am proud to belong to a nation which has sheltered the persecuted and the refugees of all religions and all nations of the earth. I am proud to tell you that we have gathered in our bosom the purest remnant of the Israelites, who came to southern India and took refuge with us in the very year in which their holy temple was shattered to pieces by Roman tyranny. I am proud to belong to the religion which has sheltered and is still fostering the remnant of the grand Zoroastrian nation”. There is nothing to be proud of, only shame, in UPA-ruled India.

There is another point to ponder: consider all the divided nations that came into being a few decades ago: Germany, Vietnam, Korea, India. Germany and Vietnam have been re-united, and Korea will be, soon. But India will never be able to reunite the land masses of Pakistan and Bangladesh. Why? Those have become subject to a clean Final Solution of Semiticization: the Indics have been extinguished.

Final Solutions have worked for Semitics in many other places too before: they wiped out the native civilizations of Latin America, North America, Europe, West Asia, Central Asia, the Philippines, Australia, and so on. They are in the process of doing so in Korea and in the Indian Northeast. Theirs is not an idle threat; those who are in the gunsights of the Semites need to realize this is possibly the end of the line for them. They need to resist: no point going like lambs to the gas chamber. Resistance, armed and violent if necessary, is the only answer. There is no point in chanting the Vedas to a raging bull. Pacifism leads to extinction.

Tibet’s torture is a continuation of an earlier attempt Final Solution: circa 1192 CE, Bakhtiar Khilji wiped out Nalanda, burned the great library, and beheaded all the monks he could find. The handful who escaped with their lives established Tibetan Buddhism. It is ironic but not surprising that the Han Chinese Communists, a millennium later, are attempting to wipe out Tibetan Buddhism. This fits into a broad Communist – Mohammedan axis.

The rest of us Indics cannot stand by idly and let this happen. For, it is Tibetans today, it is the rest of the Indics once Tibet has been completely taken over. We have to rage, rage against the fading of the light; we cannot go gentle into that good night.

March 31, 2008

The nuclear deal: reconsidering it from first principles – Part I

Rajeev Srinivasan on the deal that refuses to die

The discussions about the proposed nuclear deal between India and the United States are much in the news because of several reasons:

• the apparent preparations being made by the UPA to sign the treaty
• the continuing ritualistic mating dance between the UPA and the Communists about “will they pull support, won’t they?”, and noises being made by the UPA about general elections
• the increasing urgency on the American side, which went so far as to declare that it would be satisfied by an endorsement by a minority/caretaker government in India!

The deal has been analyzed to death in India over the last three or four years, and so you, gentle reader, may legitimately wonder why I write about it yet again. The reason is that the situation is so complex, with the impenetrable Hyde Act and the 123 Agreement, and the inflexible positions taken by so many experts, that I felt it was appropriate to step back and look at the thing from first principles.

In my humble opinion, there are three aspects to the deal:

1. Energy security. High interest for India, moderate interest for the US
2. Non-proliferation and weaponization. Non-proliferation of high interest to the US; weaponization of high interest to India
3. Strategic partnership. Moderate to high interest for both countries

After considering these three in turn, I have come to the unfortunate conclusion that India does not gain an advantage in any of them individually if it proceeds with the so-called deal. Therefore it is beyond comprehension how, mysteriously, when you put all three negatives together, you get a wonderfully positive overall deal.

The complexity of the deal and the interminable Hyde Act and 123 Agreement tend to obscure what India actually gains. Add to this the opaqueness with which the UPA government has tried to shove it down the throats of the Indian public – the secrecy implies they have a lot to hide.

The skeptical observer is left with the inescapable conclusion that something stinks. It is a bad deal for India, period.

1. Energy Security

This is an extremely important issue for India. Given the large and growing – and very young — population, India needs to maintain a growth rate like the 8+% real growth rate of the past couple of years. This is the only way the rising aspirations of the middle and lower classes can be maintained. There is surely a lot of momentum, even though prosperity is yet to reach a large segment of the citizenry.

All this growth, of course, consumes a lot of energy. Oil and natural gas are the most easily consumed, but India is short of hydrocarbons on its own territory, and therefore has to import some 80% of its needs. Given current consumption trends and the near-certainty that the world is close to ‘peak-oil’, India is in urgent need of doing one or more of the following:

1. attempt to acquire the hydrocarbons it needs
2. improve the efficiency and effectiveness with which it uses energy
3. seek non-traditional sources of energy
4. live with reduced growth

First, India’s fitful attempts to enter into long-term agreements with major hydrocarbon producers, both in petroleum and natural gas, have met with only partial success. This is partly because of a lack of ruthless focus (compare to the Chinese who have wooed nations like Angola and Sudan – despite human rights issues). The other part is geographical and geo-political: Bangladesh and Burma have both declined to provide gas; and pipelines like the Iran-Pakistan and Turkmenistan-Afghanistan-Pakistan links are fraught with political risk for India.

Unfortunately, India has been fixated on pipelines, instead of developing the more expensive but supplier-neutral mechanism of liquefied gas and ports capable of handling it. Pipelines are co-specialized assets that tie India to the supplier; whereas LPG terminals enable the import of gas from any supplier.

Second, another issue – which never gets much consideration – is that of improving the system so that the massive waste is reduced. These are policy issues that will have a long lead-time but also long-term value. For one thing, building codes in India (even when they are enforced) are utterly inadequate; most Indian structures are copies of glass-skinned Western buildings. These are grossly inappropriate for India’s climate as they let in enormous amounts of heat which then has to be removed via air-conditioning. It would be worthwhile to bring in by fiat a requirement that ‘green’ technologies be used to reduce energy usage. Similarly, the mandatory manufacture and use of compact fluorescent lamps could conserve electricity.

The other major loss comes from congestion. India’s burgeoning population of motorized vehicles, and the congestion caused by both poor implementation of road rules as well as the lack of adequate roads leads to an extraordinary wastage of fuel. Gridlock at junctions based simply on poor prosecution of rule violators is one such problem.

The building of good roads and interchanges has significant benefits, although these have to be well-designed for the smooth flow of traffic. The title of the world’s most bizarre interchange must go to one at Richmond Circle in Bangalore where you drive up a flyover ramp, stop, wait for cross traffic to pass, and then proceed. I thought the whole point of the overpass was that you did not have to wait for cross-traffic!

Whereas the elected leaders of the country should set an example, they are in fact the worst offenders in profligate waste of fuel. Particularly egregious is the use of motorcades by politicians. A single politician on a trip may bring along a fleet of 50 cars; this is not for security, but for show. A rule that puts a ceiling on this sort of ostentation would go a long way.

Third, renewable energy sources such as solar and wind have enormous potential. Given India’s climate, once solar energy becomes viable – even if it is in niches such as for household electricity use – it would be of enormous benefit. Indian should be putting billions of dollars into research into solar (and other alternative) technologies, as they are on the verge of becoming viable, pending one or two technical breakthroughs.

In addition, what would India’s billions buy if spent on American reactors? Not a single reactor has been built in the US since Three Mile Island blew up in 1979. On what basis is India thinking of buying nuclear reactors from the US? What guarantees can they provide that these things are not a) obsolete designs, b) untested new designs that will melt down and kill Indians and destroy the countryside a la Chernobyl? Oh, and what about the possibility that all this radioactive stuff will easily be stolen by terrorists? Not to mention the problem of disposing of radioactive waste?

Fourth, there is a fundamental question that seems to have fallen by the wayside: What is the consequence of not having enough energy sources? What is the worst-case scenario? Can India live with it? What will happen if, heaven forbid, this were to come true?

The worst-case scenario is one in which GDP growth slows from the current 7+%, to, say 3-4%. This would be a disaster, especially as the Indian economy is at the take-off stage. On the other hand, India has endured slow growth for fifty years as a consequence of foolish political and economic decisions (the Nehruvian Rate of Growth of 2-3%); therefore, the Congress Party are past masters at dealing with meager growth. They know there is not going to be a revolution: the urban elite will grumble, but nothing much else will happen. Shouting a few slogans about the “common man” and “remove poverty” and “bread, clothing and housing” will suffice to keep the masses quiescent.

Finally, does nuclear fission really give India energy security? Alas, it does not, at all. The most optimistic estimates are that 7% of India’s energy needs will come from nuclear fission. What about the other 93%? Instead of being held hostage only by the hydrocarbon-rich (OPEC, Russia, Iran, etc.), India will just be held hostage by the uranium-rich (Australia, US, etc.) as well. Thorium-based fast-breeder technology would be an exception to this, as India has 31% of the world’s reserves, but the technology is far from being commercially viable.

Thus, the nuclear deal is not going to give India the much-touted energy independence. Even if the nuclear deal were to be signed, that still leaves a very large gap between supply and demand. And, given past experience with uranium suppliers (eg. the US reneged on its treaty obligations to supply India with fuel for Tarapur, Australia’s China-friendly Labor government has declared that it would never sell India uranium unless it signs the NPT), it is hard to treat them as dependable.

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

1450 words

End of Part I.

The nuclear deal: reconsidering it from first principles Part II

Now let us consider the other two legs of the triumvirate of reasons posited to justify the deal.

2. Non-proliferation and weaponization

In an ideal world, there would be no nuclear weapons, and no nuclear powers. Unfortunately, such a world doesn’t exist, so India has to deal with the reality of two bellicose nuclear-armed predators in its vicinity: China and Pakistan. The entire edifice of American non-proliferation, remarkably enough, has winked at the ongoing and massive proliferation between China and Pakistan, and the related A Q Khan nuclear Wal-Mart that has offered all sorts of nuclear goodies to every dangerous nation in the world.

For some unfathomable reason, the Americans have been hell-bent on denying India nuclear weapons. It may well have something to do with their annoyance with all the past posturing and holier-than-thou NAM sermons, which India did in full measure in the 1950s and 1960s. In any case, almost all the nuclear weapon-related multilateral treaties have targeted India as a special case: the NPT, the CTBT, the FMCT, etc. This is especially ironic considering that China, which is far more belligerent, has had a free ride.

By grandfathering the NPT to its 1960’s cutoff date, India has been deliberately singled out to be a non-nuclear power in perpetuity. The (rather circular) argument goes: you have not signed the NPT, therefore we cannot co-operate with you. But if you want to sign the NPT, sorry, you did not become a weapons power before the cut-off date, so you have to give up your weapons. Fortunately, Indian diplomats have resisted this facile argument for a long time. But the resistance appears to be breaking down.

A major portion of the resistance among a section of India’s analysts has been focused on the fact that the nuclear deal in essence gets India to de-nuclearize in perpetuity and be the one major world power that does not have nuclear weapons. All others, such as the US, Russia, and China, and some European nations, have nuclear weapons. This would be an unacceptable situation from India’s security perspective.

There is the legitimate fear that an India that is thus defanged is a sitting duck for China or Pakistan. The only thing that will deter China from running rampant in Asia, doing things like diverting the Brahmaputra, is the threat that India could cause it some real damage with its own nuclear weapons and missiles: ie the famous “credible deterrent”. Given China’s cavalier attitude to its own citizens, “real damage” would be defined as killing 100 million Chinese; that would make China “lose face”; anything less would be considered a mere pinprick. To do this, India needs to have an arsenal of 1,000 warheads and sound delivery vehicles like ICBMs and IRBMs.

To see the logic behind this, consider: would the Americans ever have dropped a nuclear bomb on Hiroshima if Japan had the capability to retaliate in kind? Of course not.

According to strategic affairs expert Brahma Chellaney, who has consistently and with considered arguments opposed the ‘deal’ from the beginning, there are several constraints that would in effect kill off India’s strategic independence. Chellaney says in an article in the Asian Age, March 15^th, “The truth Talbott hides”,
http://www.asianage.com/presentation/leftnavigation/opinion/op-ed/the-truth-talbott-hides.aspx

that these are the four constraints:

1. A permanent test ban (which is CTBT by other means)
2. Restraint on fissile-material production (FMCT by other means; and India has already, and unilaterally, committed to shut down the Cirus research reactor)
3. Strategic restraint (limits India’s missile capability and encourages dependence on America. In other words, no ICBMs and no teeth against foes like China: sort of where the Americans now have the British, a weak and dependent power)
4. Export controls (permanent vassaldom to the NSG and the MTCR)

In short, with these, India is forever constrained to be a second-rate military power. In addition to the above, there is the back-door accession to the NPT, not only as a non-nuclear-weapon-state, but one that is “blessed” with the Additional Protocol, which means India is more constrained than rogue states like North Korea, Pakistan, Libya, China, and Saudi Arabia. How very thoughtful of the UPA government to enter into voluntary servitude!

In anticipation of the thrilling prospect of this nuclear slavery, the UPA government has already agreed to subject 35 Indian reactors to intrusive inspection (note that all the P-5 powers put together only allow 9, out of several hundred, of theirs to be inspected), and have made massive cuts already in the budgets of the Department of Atomic Energy (“Allocation for N-programme cut sharply”, Times of India, March 24^th, thanks to reader San for the pointer – from Rs. 2,333 crore last year to Rs. 889 crore this year, surely to wild cheers of applause from the Americans. If this is happening during the courtship, then we can expect far more along these lines after the deal is consummated.

Thus, the so-called deal not only does nothing for India as far as its national security is concerned, it actively hurts its ability to defend itself. It certainly achieves the goal of the nuclear non-proliferation ayatollahs of the US, which explains their eagerness to complete the deal.

3. Strategic Partnership

There is a good question whether America, given its perilous economic situation, is worth getting into a partnership with at all. The entire financial system is hanging by a thread, and the country is an inch away from a full-scale panic (see the desperate rate-cutting, that too on weekends, by the Federal Reserve) and a possible Great Depression. Is this the time to enter into any partnership with them? After all, the Indian economy is booming, and therefore the longer India waits, the greater its bargaining power is going to be. So delay, India’s usual tactic anyway, may actually be the right answer here.

Maybe that is too negative a view. So what about the real benefits of an Indo-US strategic partnership?

It would be wonderful if, as the marketing brochures and the photo-opportunities suggest, India and the US, two large democracies, become like estranged brothers re-discovering each other; of course they will walk off hand-in-hand into the sunset. Unfortunately, this is not the case if you read the fine print.

As pointed out by A N Prasad, former BARC director and former member of the Atomic Energy Commission, (“Nuclear Dilemma: The Road Ahead” on rediff.com, March 14^th), http://www.rediff.com/news/2008/mar/14guest3.htm the accession to the 123 Agreement makes India subject to domestic American laws. This is a grossly one-sided situation to be in, because India can be held hostage to the whims and fancies of the party in power in the US. This is not an idle threat: it happened in the case of the Tarapur reactor – Americans weaseled their way out of their international treaty obligations with India by claiming that new domestic legislation overruled it.

Furthermore, the nuclear deal does nothing about the various embargos imposed on Indian scientists and engineers in a whole variety of other fields, including aerospace. Thus the Americans, despite all their rosy assurances, are not really letting India enter into meaningful co-operation with them. Apartheid continues.

As a particularly egregious example, the fine print (“US clauses restrict India from using warship”, IBNlive.com, March 15^th – thanks to reader Mita for the pointer)
http://www.ibnlive.com/news/us-clauses-restrict-india-from-using-warship/61288-3.html?xml

in the Indian purchase of the US amphibious warship Trenton, now renamed Jalashwa, says that it is not to be used for “offensive purposes”, plus it allows that American favorite, “intrusive inspections” (remember Iraq and the alleged WMDs, anyone?)! As reader Ramesh commented, a warship meant for delivering troops for amphibious assaults on foreign shores, if it is not to be used for ‘offensive purposes’, will end up being a glorified cruise ship for UPA bigwigs!

Along the same lines, despite all the nice talk, America shows no intention of letting go of their “international condom”, as Tariq Ali once called Pakistan – a country that is used and then discarded by America. Only this time the use seems to be going on and on and on, and it is not entirely clear who’s using whom. Given that the Pakistanis’ murky role in 9/11 certainly does not exonerate them, they have been remarkably clever to milk something like $26 billion from the US since the World Trade Center was attacked.

Similarly, China, despite large-scale and explicit proliferation of missile and nuclear parts to North Korea and Pakistan – and there is plenty of evidence that this was done with the full knowledge if not blessings of American security agencies – continues to be treated as a respected ally, whereas India is being bullied into all sorts of tight spots.

These are India’s most immediate threats, both predatory and dangerous nations. America’s coziness with them does not lead the neutral observer to believe that America is serious about a strategic alliance with India. These are not the acts of someone who is proceeding in good faith.

In addition, there are the strong-arm tactics used by sundry Americans just in one month from Feb 10^th to March 10^th. These are the kinds of shake-down techniques used by Al Capone and friends in Chicago, where they offer you “protection” for a fee. Consider:

1. Feb 10. Ambassador Mulford says “it is now or never”
2. Feb 20. Senators Biden, Kerry and Hagel tells Manmohan Singh that the deal must conclude by May. Or else
3. Feb 26. Defense Secretary Gates warns that “the clock is ticking”
4. Feb 28. Retiring Under Secretary of State Burns says “the IAEA agreement must be made within a week or so”, so that “India is to be given this great victory” [sic]. Victory against what Burns was not clear about
5. Mar 1. Former Deputy Secretary of State Strobe Talbott says that the BJP government would have been prepared to accept “half” of what Bush is offering the UPA
6. Mar 3. State Department spokesman Casey says the US wanted the agreement “concluded as quickly as possible.”
7. Mar 4. Assistant Secretary of State Boucher arrives in India to mount further pressure

This, in just four weeks, and the waltz has continued well into March, with more worthies crawling out of the woodwork and offering their advice. Where have you seen this sort of high-pressure sales tactics before? Normally among snake-oil salesmen. Does this sound like the kind of thing you’d do to a friend? Not at all, this is the moral equivalent of “I’ll break your knees if you don’t do xyz”.

I wish all these dignitaries who are so touchingly concerned about India getting great “victories” had shown this level of interest in India when the Pakistanis were invading Kargil. Since they didn’t, it is really hard to believe that they have anything other than America’s interests in mind.

Indians have an unfortunate tendency to be easily flattered and the Americans are using that to the hilt. All the American nostrums about how the deal would suddenly lead to a new Millennium, and how India would be “an important power in the 21^st century”, and how this deal would be “India’s passport to the world” – this is just lip service. As in the movie, Jerry Maguire, “Show me the money!” first. Yeah, then we can talk.

I wouldn’t put it past the Indian government to walk into this honey-trap with its eyes open. India’s netas have done worse before. But let us be clear about it: this is no strategic partnership, it’s eternal servitude that India is signing up for.

America wants India to be its flunkey as a way of containing China. There is a price for such a thing; the Americans figure that they can get this without paying the price. They should remember those great mantras: “There’s no such thing as a free lunch”. Or, “if you throw peanuts, you get monkeys”. A relationship based on deceit is worth little.

Thus, from the point of a strategic relationship too, the deal doesn’t do anything good for India.

Conclusions

Taking three bad things and packaging them together and saying it suddenly and miraculously becomes a good thing – that is really a little hard to believe. The alternative therefore is likely to be true: this is a disaster for India. As in the case of Tibet, where India signed away its substantial treaty rights in exchange for nothing more than vague noises about brotherhood, we may be seeing another huge debacle in the making: a strategic surrender. In perpetuity.

27 March 2008

This was published recently on Rediff

http://rajeev2007.wordpress.com/2006/11/21/the-sacrifice-of-tibet-extraordinary-delusions-and-temporary-insanity/

This is an old article I just found while searching for something else. I guess I wrote it for Rediff, which for some reason didn’t run it. Well, perhaps it’s a little rude towards a sub-section of Indian women. But let me hasten to add that I am a *huge* fan of Indian women. Really. I have said so many times before, including on Rediff. I personally find Indian women on average much more straightforward than American women, and not into game-playing and self-aggrandizement. They are also, in my personal opinion, far more attractive and sexy as well. So it’s not *all* Indian women whom I aim this broadside at, but a tiny minority of harpies amongst them.

Well, perhaps it’s a little relevant considering the ‘historic’ battle between a woman and black man in the US, as well.

Enjoy!

Surpanakha’s Daughters

Rajeev Srinivasan on the ill-effects of thoughtless ‘feminist’ legislation

That was the name of a dance-drama choreographed by Mallika Sarabhai: the title, and the performance, were meant to tell modern Indian women to no longer look to the traditional Hindu role-models, such as the pancha-kanyas: Ahalya, Draupadi, Kunti, Tara and Mandodari (see the illuminating monograph by Pradip Bhattacharya http://www.boloji.com/hinduism/panchkanya/pk01.htm ). No, these are passé, retrogressive figures, and today’s with-it Indian woman should rather emulate a lust-crazed Titan/Asura woman who relentlessly pursued a married man who showed no interest whatsoever in her! A very fine exemplar indeed!

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Rajeev Srinivasan on the Obama candidacy

There certainly is a buzz around Barack Obama. His string of ten straight victories over Hillary Clinton in the Democratic primaries has startled both pundits and average voters. I am yet to be bewitched by Obama’s oratorical flourishes, but those who have heard him appear to be enraptured. The extravagant comparisons to John Kennedy’s fabled Camelot, the enthusiastic youngsters who mob him everywhere, the immense fund-raising he has managed – all this suggests that Obama’s momentum is unstoppable.

That would lead to an interesting outcome: a telegenic and charismatic, younger, black man selected as the candidate of the Democratic Party. It was not so long ago that Democratic presidential hopeful George Wallace of Alabama swore something about “segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever”. Indeed, the South of racism and the good ol’ boy and Mississippi Burning (the story of two Jewish and a black civil rights workers murdered by whites) was solidly Democratic a generation ago.

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Well, alas, Rediff never bothered to post this even though I sent it to them at the end of 2007, and reminded them several times.

The limits to Hindu tolerance: The story of 2007

Rajeev Srinivasan on how the UPA is out of touch with young India

There is a second reason for why there is a sea-change in the political scenario: the public’s recognition of endemic betrayal of Hindus by the Congress and the Left. There are plenty of other damning reasons why the current the UPA dispensation has proved itself in 2007 to be the very worst government this country has ever seen; I shall list some of them, but then let it pass, for I wish to concentrate on the assault on Hindus:

1. raging inflation. The official figures are a magical 3%, but the price of essential goods like vegetables (remember the famous ‘onion crisis’ that the media moaned about?) has gone up by about 20-40%. Real inflation if probably 10+%.
2. rampant fascism and oppression. The Communist allies of the UPA have been on the warpath, raping, killing and cremating in unmarked graves hundreds of people in Nandigram. The UPA is unable to protect the famous ‘aam admi’
3. virtual loss of sovereignty. One third of the country’s districts are wracked by violent Communist terrorism, and the UPA is playing footsie with this non-State actor surely funded by the Chinese
4. loss of buffer State Nepal. Though the good offices of various vested interests, Nepal has been swallowed up by a violent Communist theocracy, and become a safe haven for Mohammedan and Christian terrorist targeting India
5. attempt to make India a vassal of the US. The so-called nuclear deal with the US, in its current form, relegates India forever to second-class status in matters nuclear, and rolls back its deterrent capability
6. surrender to terrorism. In an apparent attempt to shield its bigwigs from possible Mohammedan terrorist attacks, the Congress has virtually declared an amnesty. Repealing POTA, refusing to obey the Supreme Court ruling regarding hanging Afzal Guru – the signal to terrorists is: you can do anything in India and get away with it. The UPA will support you
7. pork-barrel policies. The much-ballyhooed rural employment guarantee program, it turns out, is accomplishing exactly what it was meant to do: transfer money from the State to party cadres and middlemen. Hardly anything is reaching the poor. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/low/south_asia/7005985.stm The least corrupt in this scheme, as the BBC notes, are BJP-ruled Rajasthan, Chattisgarh, Madhya Pradesh! Obviously – fewer UPA middlemen in action there.

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To be posted when published by Rediff. This is part I

On this Winter Solstice, I am a Gujarati

Rajeev Srinivasan on how the Gujarat elections mark a high point in the year’s news
The Gujarat election results were announced on a very appropriate day: the day after Winter Solstice, the beginning of the movement of the Sun towards the north. Uttarayanam is auspicious, a time of new beginnings; this is the time for which the aged Bhishma waited, in excruciating pain on the sara-sayya, bed of arrows. If we are lucky, we will be seeing a new beginning in the Indian political scenario as well.

John Kennedy said famously in cold-war-era, besieged Berlin after the Wall was built: Ich bin ein Berliner. He meant to say, “I am, metaphorically, one of you Berliners, and I stand by you”. Today, the Gujarati feels besieged by an unrelenting barrage of negative propaganda that portrays them all, collectively and individually, as monsters. All decent people must stand by Gujaratis, because unprincipled rogues are demonizing them willy-nilly.

This demonization is a major reason why Gujaratis turned out in droves to elect Modi; the second reason is the UPA’s obvious antipathy towards Hindus, which is coming back to haunt them.

…. deleted

Any comments on http://www.rediff.com/news/2007/nov/05rajeev.htm can be posted here.

Democracy, subcontinent-ishtyle

Rajeev Srinivasan on what passes for democracy in these parts

I hear that General Musharraf has won the post of Pakistan’s President in a landslide victory. I haven’t followed the Musharraf extravaganza closely, I must admit, because I am not obsessed with Pakistan. Despite its being a serious nuisance, I don’t think Pakistan matters. It is a failing State with no self-image, or reason for existence, other than being ‘not-India’. They exhibit this periodically by destroying yet another bit of Indian civilization, most recently by blowing up a three-meter-high 7^th century CE Buddha in Swat http://www.thenews.com.pk/top_story_detail.asp?Id=10395

So it is immaterial if Musharraf remains in power or not, given the history of Pakistan’s civilian rulers (e.g. Zulfikar Ali Bhutto who famously promised to even “eat grass” to get his country nuclear weapons). I am not enthused about Nawaz Sharif or Benazir Bhutto. I am reminded of Salman Rushdie’s cutting portrayal of Benazir Bhutto (he called her character “Virgin Ironpants”) in what may be his most insightful book, the under-appreciated “Shame”, about the absurdity of Pakistan.

Sharif was dour and the ISI kept him in the dark about what was really going on. Benazir, on the other hand, has always been colorful. Charming and shrill by turns, she ran circles around the pallid and stuffy old men in Delhi last time around, and they would be no match for her if she comes back to power again.

It is even possible that Musharraf is better from an Indian perspective than these mercurial civilian characters. Musharraf is a dependable, single-minded, and known, villain. Besides, Musharraf he has done a great deal for his country under trying circumstances. He has run with the hare (the Taliban) and hunted with the hound (the Americans) in a breath-taking display of sleight-of-hand. He has managed to turn a serious situation (Richard Armitage threatening to bomb Pakistan “into the Stone Age” after 9/11) into a cornucopia of American and Saudi largesse.

This is much more than can be said of India’s ruling politicians. None of them has done anything for India so far as I can see. Anything positive that happens in India is despite the so-called leaders: wherever they have ceased to interfere, Indians have done well. There is a clear ‘Leadership Penalty’ which is a continuing variant of what I once called the ‘Nehruvian Penalty’ http://www.rediff.com/news/2004/jan/14rajeev.htm . For the latest example of pork-barrel politics, see the BBC’s September 26 report “India job scheme ‘disappointing’” http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/7005985.stm on how the much-ballyhooed rural employment scheme is a huge waste of money.

India suffers mightily from lousy leadership. A strutting Musharraf, short-sighted and tactical commando though he might be, is doing far more in his national interest than the politicians in India are in theirs. So maybe Musharraf deserved to win his election. After all, who are his biggest opponents? Lawyers! Surely Shakespeare had a point when he suggested, “The first thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers”. (Note to the humor-impaired: I am not suggesting any violence, merely quoting the bard.)

Or maybe Musharraf used some good old strong-arm tactics. Perhaps he pulled out more of that make-believe stuff that he has copyrighted (see my column “Musharraf’s Theater of the Absurd” http://www.rediff.com/news/2007/jul/10rajeev.htm ). Anyway, I guess we may be in for some more years of Musharraf. India’s journalists must be pleased, especially the guy who promised Musharraf a few years ago that he and his fellow journalists would deliver a government in India that would be to Musharraf’s liking.

Over in Dhaka, the military rulers are still rather popular, as they have put an end to the Two-Begum Circus. Both of them were extremely corrupt, and in the case of Begum Zia, a fundamentalist bigot. Being rid of two such characters is, not surprisingly, a relief to the person on the street.

In Nepal, the Communists are carrying on with their usual little charades: pretending to be interested in elections, just so they can buy time to build up their armed power to eventually take over, line up their opponents and shoot them, just as all Communists have done whenever they came to power anywhere.

Now let’s move to that other stronghold of democracy in the Indian subcontinent, Bangalore. If Musharraf is a Three-Ring Barnum and Bailey Circus, namma own Deve Gowde is a most innovative Cirque du Soleil. The man is brilliant at coming up with new and unusual excuses for not vacating the chair. I particularly admire his chutzpah and epidermal fortitude. Most rhinoceroses would be put to shame.

The fact, to not put too fine a point on it, is that the JD(S) simply reneged on its agreement with its coalition partner, which they had done previously too. There must have been a number of calculations behind this behavior – and I can only conjecture about them. One is that Deve Gowda expected to get into an alliance with the Congress and continue to rule Karnataka. Another is that he expects to do well in a mid-term poll.

The third is that Deve Gowda is merely thumbing his nose at the BJP, telling them in so many words that they are paper tigers who can be betrayed at will. This should be cause for concern for the BJP, for such a perception, if it is widespread, spells ruin for it in various elections to come, including a possible national general election.

The final, and most damaging, possibility is that Deve Gowda expects that there will be no negative consequences to his actions because the public is an ass. Such a person who cavalierly abandons any commitment expects to brazenly go to the hustings and make promises galore. This implies complete contempt for the intelligence, not to speak of the memory, of the masses. This level of derision is a very poor advertisement for the peculiar animal known as ‘democracy’ that prevails in India.

The UPA has been especially responsible for the perversion of democratic ideals in India. I am beginning to forget the list of elections they have messed with: Jharkhand, Goa, Bihar… There is a sense that the Congress’s definition of “democracy” is close to a dictatorship, just as its ally the Communists have defined “democracy” as “one man, one vote, one time”. Add to the volatile mix regional parties which often have a single-point agenda: of hijacking the national interest for their own, narrow, regional interests.

India, and its neighbors, are giving democracy a bad name. Or maybe not. In none of these nations has democracy been anything more than a charade and a hoax. The correct name for what goes on is “kleptocracy” – rule by thieves. Or perhaps it is even “kakistocracy” – rule by the very worst possible people.

Reflections on Gandhi’s relevance

Rajeev Srinivasan on the value of Gandhian ideals today

Every year, on October 2^nd, a few images of Mahatma Gandhi are trotted out, pious homilies are delivered by the usual suspects, “raghupathi-raghava-rajaram” is chanted desultorily by bored schoolchildren, and that’s that. For the other 364 days, Gandhi quietly gathers dust in a closet. This must be the fate of prophets, except for the few lucky ones: they are turned into little tin gods, and they turn over in their graves, so to speak, as everything they held dear is perverted by scheming camp-followers.

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Rediff took out my little dig at those crass ‘Dravidians’: so I’ve put in crossout what they deleted. Here is what I originally sent to Rediff, in its entirety.

The purely scientific case for Rama’s Bridge

Rajeev Srinivasan on the unintended consequences of messing with the seas

In these days when we worry about global warming, it takes great chutzpah or ignorance, or both, to proceed with a plan to induce major environmental changes, with uncertain consequences. Fortunately, India’s politicians are amply blessed with both chutzpah and ignorance. When combined with first-class greed, you get black comedies like the Sethu Samudram Project for destroying the remnants of the ancient land-bridge, known as the Rama Sethu or Rama’s Bridge, connecting India and Sri Lanka.

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To be published by Rediff.

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Independence, Freedom, Democracy and other such myths

Rajeev Srinivasan is disappointed by India’s trajectory.

The usual suspects made the usual speeches on August 15^th, 2007, mouthing the usual pure cant. But the sad fact remains that sixty years after the grasping imperialists left, India has comprehensively under-achieved on all fronts; all that has changed is the skin-color of the looters. Ten years ago, I was far more optimistic, and wrote about the coming Indian century; today, despite the obvious progress made on the economic front, I am overwhelmed by a sense of disappointment.

I have been discouraged by what I have observed in the last ten years. The loss of heritage. The disdain for autochthonous civilization. The perversion of the discourse in the country by Stalinist ‘intellectuals’. The regular terrorist attacks that cheapen Indian lives. The total non-reaction by government to oppression of people of Indian origin abroad.

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Presidential peccadilloes: Obama’s macaca and the UPA’s chutzpah - 1

There was a mild flap when Senator Barack Obama, candidate for the US Presidency, exhibited his own “Macaca Moment”. Obama’s team displayed the ugly edge of racism behind the blow-dried billing-and-cooing of a campaign, even that of a supposedly liberal black man. It also demonstrated yet again that it is safe for anyone to bait and malign Indians: there are no consequences; indeed, Obama’s people are out there flashing million-dollar smiles at $500-a-plate Indian-American fund-raisers for their candidate.

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Posted at rediff today. I wrote it before the Lal Masjid was attacked by troops.

http://www.rediff.com/news/2007/jul/10rajeev.htm

Actually, the copy editor messed up the structure and introduced a few errors. Here’s the original as I sent it to rediff:

Musharraf’s Theater of the Absurd: In which he sings for supper and lives to fight another day

Rajeev Srinivasan on the make-believe that is Pakistani politics

After years of observing the deft General Musharraf, I must admit a sneaking feeling of admiration for the way he has navigated the minefields of, to mix metaphors wildly, dancing with three elephants: Saudi Arabia, the United States, and China. He is simply peerless in his ability to put on diplomatic theater, and he has an unerring instinct for how to induce the willing suspension of disbelief that is the centerpiece of all theater.

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Appeared in the Pioneer May 30th.