Not Cricket - 2

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In 2011, when the Indian cricket team on a tour of Britain a few weeks after winning the World Cup lost every single match, I expressed the fear that the hosts were not playing fair.

Events since then, and research into what dark arts might have been used, have strengthened that belief.

I think the Brits are cheating in sports in a big way, using infrasound to disable opponents.

Infrasound has a wavelength too low to be heard by the human ear. It occurs naturally (sea surf, thunder and earthquakes all generate it), and many species of animals, elephants and whales most spectacularly, use it for long range communications.

Whales also use it to stun prey, including giant squid: at lower amplitudes infrasound can vibrate and even explode matter.

Human beings subjected to even mild exposure to those frequencies suffer a range of negative effects, including elevated heart rate and blood pressure, the release of endorphins and the adrenaline surge that triggers the "flight or fight" response.

Initial exposure can make a person feel energized and happy but within a few minutes there is loss of physical coordination that can last for hours or even days. For a champion athlete that means complete loss of form. Remember how the 2011 Indian World Cup team in Britain seemed suddenly unable to bowl, field or bat? By the fourth test Gautam Gambhir was so bereft of basic skills he sustained a concussion trying to take a catch.

The most dangerous effects are caused by infrasound between 1 and 10 Hz (a Hertz is a one-second wave cycle). People exposed to those levels suffer "complete neurological interference" and have difficulty breathing, start coughing, suffer muscle cramps, and feel nauseated. They are disoriented, lose their sense of balance, have blurred vision and slur speech; they experience fear and panic, and have difficulty making decisions.

At 7 Hz, said to be the natural resonant frequency of human organs, infrasound can have life-threatening effects.

Scientists in several developed countries have reportedly weaponized infrasound. A rifle that fires "sonic bullets" is said to exist.

Experimenters at Cambridge University in 2003 successfully generated fear and panic in crowds by broadcasting infrasound; there is said to be technology to disorient and disable enemy soldiers.

Whether infrasound can cause cancer is not known. Yuvraj Singh did develop a very rare form of it after the 2011 World Cup. He might actually have become a target several years earlier, after smashing an unprecedented six sizers in one over against Britain in the 2007 T-20 World Cup.

There is reason to suspect that infrasound has been used in other sports as well.

Andy Murray's path to the Men's Singles gold medal at the London Olympics and to victory at the US Open championship was probably smoothed by weakening key opponents.

The Guardian said in reporting Murray's straight sets Olympic victory over Roger Federer that the Swiss champion, who had easily won their face-off a month earlier at Wimbledon, seemed "strangely anxious" and committed an unusual number of unforced errors, including a very rare double fault.

At the United States Open a few weeks later Murray defeated number one seed Novak Djokovic, who suffered wholly uncharacteristic leg cramps during the match. (The authors of his misfortune might have taken oblique credit by arranging to have Sean Connery, the original James Bond, in Murray's box during the match. The two had never met before but the Press were told they had a natural affinity as Scots.)

Why on earth would MI6 be interested in match fixing?

The flag-waving talk of a "new Britain" after the country ranked third in the Olympic gold medal tally points to the answer. There is a desperate need to rally a nation depressed not only by austerities brought on by the greed and mismanagement of the political elite but by the slime trails of their notorious corruptions.

The use of sports to divert people from elite corruption goes back famously to Caligula, and there is no denying that the British need diversion now.

They have been skunked by an almost unimaginable string of outrageous scandals. A short list includes:

• Parliamentarians stealing from the public till; 
• Politically well connected media big wigs in league with the London Police to hack private phone conversations, even those of bereaved families; 
• The country's most trusted bankers exploiting widows, orphans and old people by manipulating interest rates (charities were the prime victims of the LIBOR scandal); 
• Massive laundering of drug-money by HSBC, the country's largest bank; and 
• A long reign of pederasts at the BBC.

MI6 skulduggery to cheat at sports is, of course, more evidence of moral rot, but the ends are probably seen as justifying the means. Fallen media mogul Conrad Black in a published piece summed up the political end, hailing the record haul of Olympic gold as proof that Britain was still a "serious country."

The obverse of that belief is that a country failed by its top athletes is not serious. As I have noted a good many times in this blog, that has been the long-standing theme of British propaganda about India. It began in colonial times and has continued unbroken for over six decades after Indian independence.

The Indian failure in the test series in Britain was followed immediately by a reversal of roles in the subsequent British tour of India and we have gone on to perform well elsewhere. But Sachin Tendulkar has continued to struggle.

As the most outstanding cricketer of his generation Tendulkar is an icon the British have envied and targeted for a long time. British sportswriters coined the "Little Master" title when he was a 16-year old but its continued use now is an obvious racist reference to his height (which is exactly the same as that of Don Bradman). British proxies in the Indian media have participated in the anti-Tendulkar campaign and are now making unseemly calls for his retirement.

Tendulkar might not be alone in James Bond's sonic gunsights.

Judging from their sudden loss of form at the London Olympics several outstanding Indian sports stars were also targets of infrasound attack:

• Beijing Olympic gold medal sharpshooter Abhinav Bindra crashed out in the qualifying round with a miserable 594 total and finished 16 of 47.
• The world's top ranking woman archer, Deepika Kumari, lost in the first knockout round to her unknown British opponent. "I don't know what happened" she told journalists in a state of shock over a score that did not include a single ten pointer.
• Asian Games gold medalist Sushil Kumar made it to the finals but was "hit by a stomach bug" that had him running to the bathroom six times before his bout. He had ranked top in the qualifying process.
• Ronjan Sodhi, who holds the World Cup in trap shooting did well in the first round at the Olympics but his scores tumbled inexplicably in the second and third rounds.

Is there is any defense against infrasound attack?

There seems to be none, at least on the basis of what I could unearth. The sound waves are unaffected by material barriers.

But at least it should be possible to detect and monitor their existence. The web site at http://www.infiltec.com/Infrasound@home/ tells how that can be done.

The BCCI should also urgently establish hormonal base levels for all members of the Indian team and monitor them before and after games.

The International Olympic Committee should be approached to do the same for all athletes competing in its events. Obviously, chemical doping is no longer the only means to cheat at sports.

China: Impending Disaster or Hope of the World?

China has the world’s oldest written record of national governance.

Unfortunately, its leaders also have the longest record of inability to learn from the past.

Consider the abuse of intellectuals.

It began with Shi Huangdi, the First Emperor who united the warring kingdoms at the north-eastern edge of what is now China. He had 800 Confucian scholars buried alive. Those he did not kill he drove into exile. Their books he burned.

Fast forward more than two millennia to the last of the monarchic dynasties, the Manchu: it too burned books, jailed intellectuals, tortured and executed them.

The dynasty Mao Zedong established in 1949 has burned more books and tortured/oppressed/murdered more intellectuals than all others over two millennia.

Three decades of Westernizing post-Mao “reforms” have not ended that record of oppression. Intellectuals who dare to oppose the regime are still being buried alive (in prisons instead of graves), tortured, killed on the sly and driven out of the country.

The rulers of China have been unable to see in all their long history that dissent has a valuable role in society, that those who combine intellect, integrity and courage are the treasures of their race.

Another issue on which experience has made no dent on the attitudes of Chinese rulers is national security.

From early days the Han people, who constitute about 90 percent of the Chinese population, have spent enormous treasure and labor to build walls to keep out marauding Mongol nomads. The walls never stopped the invasions but successive generations continued to build them until there was a single enormous structure stretching some 1500 kilometers. That did not stop the Mongols either; in the 17th Century they not only conquered the whole Han heartland but continued far beyond it to Taiwan in the south and Tibet in the west. (Tibet was made to pay tribute, which it did for less than 50 years; on that flimsy ground Mao claimed sovereignty over a land Beijing had never ruled directly.)

Despite the overwhelming evidence that walls do not ensure security China’s rulers still continue to build them: today they have the Great Chinese Firewall to keep out the Internet and the Worldwide Web.

Another critically important lesson repeatedly borne in by experience is that Chinese society needs a procedure for orderly political change; but it has not made a dent in the thinking of the country’s ruling elites. Fearful of the alien, idolizing the imagined gold standard of Confucian stability, every Chinese dynasty has ruled until unseated with brutal violence.

The country’s response to Western dominance and oppression was typically unreflective. Unlike India, where there has been a continuing effort to understand the nature of the Western challenge and meet it through imitation, adaptation, reform and peaceful opposition, China has never understood that it must mobilize its own genius. The mandarins of the Manchu dynasty hoped to transplant Europe's superior technology into an unchanged Chinese society; they considered social reform both unnecessary and dangerous. When that failed, Mao Zedong went to the opposite extreme and tried to rebuild Chinese society according to the ideology of a long dead German ideologue.

That long record of boneheaded elite attitudes to change played out again last week as China’s Communist Party transferred power to a new set of leaders. After a year of murky horse-trading, paranoia and intrigue, amidst the lurid fall from grace of Bo Xilai, the top “Leftist” contender for a share of power, Xi Jinping, replaced Hu Jintao as the head of the Party’s apex Standing Committee.

Despite strident calls for political reform from the departing Hu the new composition of the Standing Committee was solidly stick-in-the-mud. Four of its members, including Xi, are privileged “Princelings,” sons of Mao’s close cohort. One is a propagandist who helped shape the Great Chinese Firewall. Another brings to governance an economics degree from North Korea. A third is best known for not acknowledging an outbreak of SARS that killed thousands. Another worthy, considered a reformer, led the campaign to hide the spread of HIV infection to a million people by official blood banks.

This sorry team is now in charge of a country increasingly incensed by the corruption and arrogant anti-people policies of a Party that has little popular support. Land grabs by government functionaries, imposition of poisonous industries on populous areas, the impunity of corrupt officials and rampant abuse of power have provoked even the stoic steel of China’s people to mounting protest. The number of “mass incidents” (as the regime terms public protests) has increased rapidly in recent years; in 2010 there were 180,000. China Daily, an official paper, has reported that environmental protests are increasing 29 percent yearly.

To prevent any of this outrage from becoming visible during the carefully stage-managed political transition the Beijing regime went to great lengths. Stores were ordered to put away kitchen knives. Ping pong balls that could be imprinted with anti-Party slogans also became hard to buy. Cab drivers were told to remove the roll-down handles of rear windows to prevent passengers from throwing out protest pamphlets. Access to the Internet slowed glacially in Beijing. Hundreds of foreign reporters who congregated in Beijing for the event found themselves in a strange limbo, prevented from asking questions at many Press conferences and often left with no official guidance about events. A thousand of them who gathered to witness the formal introduction of the new Standing Committee were kept waiting in a long corridor until the whole function was over. Multiple security cordons stalled access to the official celebrations in Tiananmen Square; ordinary Chinese were told to go back home and watch on television.

President Hu Jintao in his farewell speeches identified corruption as the primary danger to the State and Party but did not say how exactly they should be addressed. There is little chance of effective action for things are too far gone, and the entire system now facilitates corruption. The Banking sector is an example. Interest rates are kept much lower than the real cost of credit, ostensibly to promote domestic consumption; but all it has done is allow those with privileged access, including bank staff, to take out cheap loans and either lend out the money themselves at market rates or speculate in real estate. The result is an entirely unregulated alternative banking system that undermines the formal sector; it has inflated apartment prices far beyond the reach of most ordinary Chinese and millions of units now lie unoccupied.

Undetermined billions of Yuan embezzled from public institutions are also being used by corrupt officials for real estate speculation, so any sharp fall in prices will throw many local governments into crisis and wreck pension funds and insurance companies. The rapidly slowing economy is making the mess increasingly difficult to hide.

The new Standing Committee has few options to revive the economy. The banks have gone through two rounds of massive recapitalization to optically reduce their holdings of non-performing loans, and no one knows what their real situation is. China’s massive foreign reserves could be used to further shore up its banks but that would ignite an unwelcome level of inflation. Chinese manufacturers are suffering from a deadly combination of recession in their main foreign markets and growing labour militancy. Millions of migrant workers without residential permits in major cities are facing unemployment and have no social security. Educated unemployed youth are now again a major problem after years of booming economic growth, and there is intense competition among over-qualified candidates for low level but secure government jobs.

Foreign investment continues to be high (over $100 billion in 2012), but is down from last year. The continued high level of investment, both foreign and domestic, is not a positive factor when it is too high a proportion of GDP and at a time of falling manufacturing and exports; the result is inescapably inflationary. A broad effort to increase domestic consumption by increasing the minimum wage has also been inflationary and any large-scale government spending now, no matter what the aim, could send the cost of living into an irretrievable danger zone.

China has faced hard economic crises before. Mao initiated the Great Leap in an effort to cope with one. It caused a famine that killed between 30 and 46 million Chinese. There was no breakdown in political order then because the People’s Liberation Army, which serves the CPC not the nation, was firmly under Mao’s control. That control is long gone. Hu reportedly faced overt discontent at some meetings of the Military Commission, and the Party leadership now cannot take the PLA for granted. Reports say there is talk within the officer cadre of the need to “nationalize” the PLA – i.e. remove it from the authority of the Party and put it under the umbrella of the State. A move in that direction would be a political coup and signify the end of the current regime in all but name.

Complicating the picture within China is the grossly warped economic relationship the country has developed with the world since the 1997 “two systems one country” deal for the return of Hong Kong after its 99 year development under the British. With that deal China’s leaders bought into the empire of corruption Britain has built as its formal imperial structures were dismantled. Having Hong Kong as a sluice for the proceeds of corruption has gutted the Chinese regime in a weird replay of what happened in the 19th Century as Britain foisted the opium trade on the country. According to Washington-based Global Financial Integrity the country has lost an estimated $3.7 trillion in outflows to the global black market since 2001. That staggering figure indicates more than economic loss; it means key players in the Chinese power structure are in league with the most unscrupulous and manipulative of foreign interests.

The level of their cooperation can perhaps be seen in the murky downfall of Bo Xilai, a “Princeling” whose vocal campaign against corruption had made him a popular candidate for inclusion in the Standing Committee. The timing of his fall and its cause – the murder of a “British businessman” who was both an MI6 operative and a money-launderer – suggest a set up. Was the murder provoked by a blatant effort to cheat Bo and his wife of their foreign holdings? What led the local Police Chief (now given amnesty) to advertise the murder internationally by fleeing for asylum to the American consulate in Chengdu?

Such questions will surely be exercising the minds of the 25 members of political Bureau to which Xi’s 7-member Standing Committee reports. Unlike its apex body the Bureau is not dominated by conservatives and it could rehabilitate Bo Xilai much as it did Deng Xiaoping, who Mao tried to discredit and destroy. We can read that possibility into the unexplained decision to select only seven of the nine members of the Standing Committee. If Bo’s supposed show-trial exonerates him the cat would be among the pigeons, especially if he is inducted into the Standing Committee along with another reform candidate who was excluded. Xi himself could easily swing into the reform camp, for he has shown himself to be pragmatist. (It is possible his mysterious two-week disappearance from public view in September was spent reassuring last-minute doubters in the conservative camp and ensuring that he could take over chairmanship of the Military Commission at the same time as the top Party job.)

No matter how these circumstances play out, the anti-reform cast of the Standing Committee might be short-lived, for five members will reach the mandatory retirement age of 70 in the next few years; it is unlikely that 86-year old former president Jiang Zemin, who marshaled the conservatives this time around, will be able to decide on replacements. However, such prognostications could be immaterial, for the Chinese economy faces a disastrous prospect. If it suffers a crash the effects will be global and could easily tip the region, and indeed, the world, into war.

If ever there was a time for Chinese leaders to internalize the lessons of their national history it is now. Those lessons are clear. Security lies not in walls but in promoting the creativity and genius of their own valiant people. Dissent is not a weakness but an invaluable good in any society. The strength of a nation is not in the oppression of the weak but in their happiness and wellbeing. The corruption and criminality of the outside world are indeed dangerous but they are counterbalanced by a great fund of goodwill that China can mobilize if it changes policies founded in arrogance and dishonesty.

The normal run of State policies will not allow such a change in mindset; it will require a fundamental reassessment of the country’s existential situation and a decision to change it. Fortunately, the rich spiritual tradition of Chinese Buddhism offers the basis for such a change. To suggest that the regime allow the revival of that tradition might seem unrealistic but it is no more than a reversal of the ugly change that Mao Zedong engineered. It would transform the scene within the country and recast all problems in a hopeful light. It could save not just China but the world from disaster.

Laugh Out Loud Television News

Indian television provides many laugh out loud moments.  

Headlines Today could easily be repackaged as a News version of Woody Allen's "What's Up Tiger Lily!" (In case readers don't remember, that dates back to the time when Chinese films were a novelty and Allen, then still funny, provided his own riotous subtitles to one.)

Any interview by Prannoy Roy, especially on foreign affairs or economics, is usually rich in laughs. His most recent outing, on the US election, did not disappoint for its premise was that the world's most disciplined under control democracy is on the verge of becoming "ungovernable." He seems to have fallen for the "deeply divided electorate" line that US television anchors resort to when voting patterns get too mind-numbingly predictable.
 
Arvind Kejriwal's Press Conference on HSBC bank accounts was comic in a refreshingly new way. It showed broadcasters in the role of Wily Coyote who in his heyday was always running off cliffs and remaining airborne until he looked down and saw there was no ground under his feet.

Anticipation was high before the show, with excited reporters speculating on what was about to be revealed. Once it began, there was an almost visible deflation. Moments after Mukesh Ambani's name was mentioned as one of the account holders Headlines Today began noting it as a "faux pas" by Kejriwal: a crawler said HSBC had apologized to the Mumbai billionaire. Another noted that his account had "zero balance."

Kejriwal evidently realized he was not on a good wicket right away and a look of gloom settled in under the high cap. He was quite clearly completely at sea about the information he was divulging, and seemed to think the HSBC accounts are all hawala arrangements. Most are probably the proceeds of trade mispricing.

Luckily for him, there were few questions. The journalists present exhibited no curiosity at all about any aspect of the revelations.

In contrast to Indian television, the BBC provides few occasions for laughter.

Only a grammarian would crack a smile at the shop-girlish exchanges of "Thank you very much indeeds!" by anchors who seem not to know the uses of an adverb. (I live in dread of the day one of them will sing out "Hello Indeed!")

So, while we are on the subject of HSBC, it is probably appropriate to mention that the BBC's coverage of the bank's black accounts story -- back when it broke this summer -- had one laugh out loud moment.

The story this summer was that investigators in New York had found HSBC routinely laundering drug/terrorist money and were threatening to take away its license. (They seem to have settled for a billion dollar fine.)

The humor came from one of BBC's inimitably fustian financial analysts who waved away the concerns about British ethics expressed by Business News editor Sally Bundock. HSBC's long-running criminality he said, was an "amazing lapse of concentration."

Anyone who thinks he was being droll should read the testimony of HSBC officials before a United States Senate subcommittee last July. Every single one of them took the line that the money laundering was the result of managerial oversight. Now that the Americans had brought it to their attention, things would change, by God!

Which Congressman?

A couple of days ago I voiced the suspicion that someone in the Intelligence Establishment was leaking copiously to Arvind Kejriwal.

He told the Press on Friday that the source was a "senior Congressman."

Not a single reporter present asked who. More interesting, no one (at least none that I watched) tried later to guess who it might be.

The opportunities to do so were ample, for the Congress top brass convened as if on cue for a day-long retreat.
 
It was as if Someone Up There had arranged a game of Clue. Was it the Finance Minister in the Library with an Axe? The Minister for Human Resources with a Rope? 
It could be the former Home Minister. After all, he was a former lawyer for Enron. And he did try to sneak in a central police force that could have gutted constitutional structures and Indian democracy. Also, if the challenge to his last election in Chennai goes wrong, he could be headed for the exit anyway.

But I doubt it. My bet, purely on a hunch and a bizarre exchange on Headlines Today, is the Human Resources Minister, bushy-browed verse-monger Kapil Sibal.

Which of the numerous bizarre exchanges on Headlines Today?

The one in which Rahul Kanwar, talking to Sibal in the immediate aftermath of Kejriwal's allegations about Robert Vadra, said to him in high glee words to the effect: "So what now for you? Prime Minister?"

Sibal, also in high spirits, stayed silent but cackled like a hen.

Now, it could be I was tripping on too much soda water and imagined the whole thing, but I swear that's what came down the pike.

It set me wondering. Does HRD cover Intelligence? If it does, could my speculation be right after all?

The Point of Malala Day

The point of "Malala Day" is not Girl's Education. It is not to get Malala a Nobel Prize. It is nothing that makes you feel warm and gushy.

The point of Malala Day is to focus like a laser on what happened to her and why.

She was shot because she wanted an education.

The Taliban wanted her dead because she threatened them.

She questioned their version of "Islam."

She challenged their right to deny her an education.

She was the most dangerous person to their world: a thinking, feeling, lively, super cute Muslim.

Why are the Taliban hung up on their dank murderous version of religion?

It helps hide what they do for a living: run drugs.

They run $60 billion worth of opium and heroin out of Afghanistan.

The freak-show part of the Taliban doesn't see that money of course.

Their bosses, a handful of Haqqanis, a couple of Mullahs, and the big shots of the ISI and the Pakistani government get about two percent of the total take.

The rest seeps away into HSBC accounts, "tax havens" like the Cayman Islands and Mauritius, and millions of "shell companies."

After fast-as-light laundering the black money emerges free of the blood of many Malalas.

It flows into hedge funds that keep the price of oil above $100 a barrel amidst what economists are calling The Great Recession.

It flows into the secret kitties of the lords and ladies of Britain.

In countries around the world it keeps politicians cooperative, bankers purring at their bonuses and journalists silent (alive and dead).

On this Malala Day and on every day that follows remember what the occasion is meant to commemorate: a brave girl and the great corruption that tried to shut her up.

Mao's Ghosts Walk Again in China

Cheng Li of the Brookings Institution in Washington has interpreted the decision of the Beijing regime to put fallen “Princeling” BoXilai on public trial as an “outstanding result” of political reform. He sees it as a gain for the rule of law in China that the top political leadership of the country did not settle the matter internally.

Bo was the influential Communist Party Chief of Chongqing, widely seen as one of the country’s top future leaders. Then his wife murdered a British money launderer and his police chief fled to an American consulate asking for asylum. Earlier this year his wife pleaded guilty to murder and was given a long prison sentence; now Bo is on public trial.

I think it is a mistake to see this as an advance for the rule of law. I doubt if those of us looking in from outside, or indeed, most Chinese, will take any comfort from the fact that “200,000 registered lawyers now have a voice and many of them are calling for improved rule of law and constitutionalism.”.

The public trial is necessary because international publicity made it impossible to hush up the matter and Bo has a “Leftist” following unlikely to accept his quiet disappearance.

So what to do with a demagogue whose popularity – not his criminal use of power – made the corrupt billionaires leading the Party uncomfortable?

Have a show trial.

Instead of Red Guards screaming invective and assaulting the victim, have “lawyers” go through the motions of prosecution, defense and conviction. Only the form has changed; the whole thing is a scripted drama for public edification.

Other ghosts of Mao’s time might also come alive.

China-born Cheng Li says there is “a heated discussion” going on among Chinese top brass “about the current risk of revolution in the country.” In that context, “conservative hardliners within the Communist Party leadership may ultimately decide to resist political reform at all costs.” That could make policy differences and personnel appointments “contentious” and even cause “factional infighting to spiral out of control.” Far from signaling a new political maturity of the Chinese leadership, the Bo trial may “polarize Chinese society and enhance the risk of socio-political unrest rather than build momentum for legitimacy enhancing reforms.”

For China's neighbors none of this is good news. It is very likely that a major political crisis in China could lead the endangered leaders to create a diversionary foreign crisis; that could easily spill into regional war.

The Implications of Scandalmania

Indian "elite media" have been so engrossed in the obsessive coverage of corruption allegations that no one has had the time to reflect on what exactly is happening. Here are a few of the implications that people should think about:

1. Someone in the Intelligence Establishment is leaking like a sieve. Kejriwal is a jhoolahwalla ditz who couldn't walk and chew pan at the same time, much less unearth the stuff he is revealing. Subramaniam Swamy is smart but he too is being fed the information he publicizes. Where the information is coming from should be a matter of urgent speculation in view of the second implication:   
2. Somebody wants to delegitimize and destabilize the Indian political system. It goes beyond wanting the UPA out in mid-term polls. Whoever is spreading the muck wants the country leaderless.
3. Our "elite" media seem to be following a destroy-India script almost with glee. Headlines Today is way out front in that regard. It led the clumsy charge against Salman Khurshid, and after he rebutted the charges, went into a five hour paroxysm during which it did little more than urge his dismissal from the cabinet. HT was clearly trying to prevent Khurshid's elevation to the Foreign Minister's job.      

What does all this point to? We have to look at the world situation to understand.

With China on the skids (the recent "good news" from Beijing is unbelievable), the big guns of the multi-trillion dollar global black market want a place to invest their money free of bothersome things like environmental standards and social impact. They want India in the charge of a man dishonest enough to boast of "good governance" in the face of riot and death under his watch and a minister in prison for contributing to it. Hence London's sudden "normalization of relations" with Narendra Modi, followed by an India Today cover story pumping him up.

Why would our "elite media" cooperate in preparing the country for the rapists?

Consider who controls them.  

Headlines Today/India Today is under Aroon Purie, a bean counter trained in Britain who got into journalism to provide business for the large printing press set up in Delhi by his secretive "financier" father in partnership with "Lord Thompson of Fleet," the British newspaper magnate.

The patriarch of the Jain family that owns the  Times of India group also got rich wheeling and dealing under the British. He got into journalism after his father-in-law was sent to prison by India's first independent government for embezzling the funds used to buy the flagship newspaper.

The NDTV organization is owned by Prannoy Roy, also a British-trained accountant, whose father worked for a UK multinational corporation and married an Englishwoman. NDTV got its start as a news program for Doordarshan which sued Roy after it went commercial. (It is interesting that Booker Prize winner Arundhati Roy is Prannoy's cousin.)

If the owners of our "elite" media are loyal to any country it is the one that controls the global black market.

 What of the Intelligence Establishment leak?

My guess is that some high-level suit has been suborned from abroad or has political ambitions and is trying to manipulate his own political ascent by destroying those who stand in the way. Whatever the cause, the current situation has highlighted the need for our Intelligence agencies to have a constitutional framework and systems for external oversight and internal accountability.