What Mrs. Modi's RTI Filing Implies

Jashodaben Modi’s RTI application to find out what she would be entitled to in the event of the assassination of her husband means only one thing, that people more politically savvy than her, perhaps the Prime Minister himself, has warned of a looming threat.

Where would that threat emerge from and why?

If my conspiracy theory about what happened before the last general elections is right, it is a safe bet that it is linked to Britain’s disappointment at not getting the expected dividends from funding the BJP through Baba Ramdev. 

Since the election, Ramdev has been quietly shown the door in Delhi and London has probably seen the appointment of Manohar Parrikar as Defence Minister as definite indication that its hopes for rich Indian arms contracts will not be realized. General V. K. Singh continues to languish in the outskirts of power and recently had to suffer the humiliation of not being allowed to address an RSS gathering because he had arrived late.

Ramdev’s recent visit with the Prime Minister and the “Z” level security cover he now has, should be seen as confirming this threat analysis.

There is also a larger scenario to keep in mind.

The increased security threats to India dovetail with those to the United States, which has warned that ISIS could get a nuclear weapon.

American peace activists have labeled this “war mongering” and asked who could give ISIS a nuke.

Pakistan would seem the most obvious candidate but Islamabad has little to gain from such a move. The only circumstance that might lead to such action is prompting from London, which created Pakistan as a political/military proxy in 1947 and has controlled it ever since through the ISI, also its creation.

Unlike Islamabad, London has multiple reasons to be interested in a surreptitious nuclear body blow to the United States. Not only has Washington led a punishing campaign against banks engaged in money laundering, Britain’s core business, American shale oil production is a primary cause of the current plummeting price of crude oil, affecting another vital British interest. Britain’s efforts to undermine the global reserve role of the American dollar by promoting the international use of the Chinese Yuan is the most open of its attempts to retaliate.

However, that move has almost no chance of success, given that China’s once booming economy now faces the collapse of a massive real estate bubble fed in the last three years with $6.8 trillion in unproductive investment. (According to a report by two Chinese economists Xu Ce and Wang Yuan published in the state-run Shanghai Securities Journal.)

For the British power elite, the last straw was probably the announcement that president Obama would be Chief Guest at India’s Republic Day celebration, a move that heralds a shift in the Asian strategic balance that will deeply affect its narco-terrorist interests in Afghanistan and Pakistan.

In such a situation, slipping ISIS a nuke and assassinating the Indian Prime Minister might appear to desperate power brokers in London as the only way to break an irreversible decline. 

The least that India and the United States can do in the current situation is to make clear that such initiatives will expedite a British decline rather than offset it.

It is also critically important for Indians to note that that Mrs. Modi’s RTI filing specifically expresses concern that the assassins will emerge, as they did in the case of Mrs. Gandhi, from within the Indian security establishment.

This should underline the urgent need to bring our intelligence agencies under constitutional control and put in place checks and balances within the system.

How to Revive the Congress Party

As the Congress Party reels from defeat to defeat in national and state elections it must address urgently – and frankly – the issue of what must be done for its political revival.

 

From my outsider vantage point the following four steps are essential to revival:

• Set out clearly a set of political and social values that appeal to people all over the country. That means setting aside mincing calculations of community and caste and returning to the original big tent concept that made the old Indian National Congress a powerhouse.
• Learn from the BJP-Modi success in articulating an aspirational agenda for an electorate hungry for leadership. This does not mean using social media and the cunning manipulation of communal hostilities; it means setting out a vision that people all over the country can identify with and convincing them that Congress will live by it. 
• Take on the task of political opposition not just in legislative bodies but in social and political processes on the ground. This will attract to the Congress those who the BJP offends and alienates; it will give the party strong roots in local politics.
• Promote every kind of political excellence within its ranks regardless of communal-caste calculations. The Indian electorate has shown time and again that it can recognize and will support merit in its leaders, regardless of identity politics.

The overall success of this effort will depend entirely on the vision and quality of the people who lead it.

 

If the Congress sticks to Rahul Gandhi and his coterie for leadership it has no hope of success, for they have shown themselves to be without political capacity. At the very least, the party should give Priyanka Vadra a far more visible leadership role while trying to distance her from Robert Vadra's problematic reputation.

 

Ideally, the party should put its most attractive leaders in the limelight and give primacy to those with the best political track record.  

  

 This approach can energize all those not enamored by the BJP, and could create a “Congress wave” when the incumbency factor begins to work in its favour.

 

 

The Reality of the Kali Yuga

The transmigration of individual souls, long derided as the most fantastic of Hindu beliefs, has in the last century been made irrefutable by the scientific discoveries of the matter-energy continuum and the genetic code. When a person dies the indestructible energy pattern of the body floats free and transports the unique soul to a new material form, much as a radio wave carries a human voice to a rightly tuned antenna around the world.

That leaves only one fundamental belief of Hinduism without a publicly argued rational explanation: the long four-stage moral cycle from a Golden Age of virtue to the dank corruption of the Kali Yuga.

This lack of argument should be seen as part of our general cultural amnesia, for our ancients never postulated anything without reason. Indeed, it does not require much analysis to reveal the rationale for the four yuga cycle.

The first phase, when virtue is “firmly founded on four feet,” harks back to the time when humanity was part of Nature and cultural behavior closely reflected the instinctive. Ideas of the “Noble Savage” and “primitive communism” reflect somewhat similar thinking in the West. This was the time when the Saptarishis, seeking peace among the many tribes of India, assembled all their sacred lore into the Vedas, thereby underlining large commonalities among the groups and creating a common object of veneration.

The second phase of reduced but still excellent virtue was the time of the Upanishads, when rishis in their forest abodes agreed on the existence of a Paramatma universally immanent as the Eternal Law (Sanathana Dharma). The idea that a firm and unbreakable chain of karmic causality controlled individual destiny countered the tyranny of the tribe and gradually reduced groups to vague caste identities associated with specialized functions in an interdependent society. 

As hunter gatherer tribes settled into agricultural existence a protective monarch became necessary; the Ramayana captured and promoted the ideal of that new political reality. The change caused a drop in virtue from the previous era because the concentration of political power and land ownership inevitably introduced a considerable measure of negotiation and thus guile into social relations.

The third era, the time of the Mahabharata, saw the lust for power explode into great imperial conflict. Sri Krishna, acknowledged as the only “purnaswaroop” of Vishnu’s incarnations, set right the growing imbalance of the age and, in the Bhagavad Gita, instructed the virtuous how to endure the Kali Yuga to come.

That final age of overweening corruption can be seen rationally as the shadow of material progress in the preceding Yugas.

The specialized division of labor and the freedom of individuals to make moral and economic choices – a combination that Adam Smith in 18th Century England would describe as the essential attributes of a wealth-creating free market – had made India an immensely rich country. Its luxurious products, ranging from spices that preserved food to fine cotton cloth and diamond jewelry, attracted traders from the far ends of Eurasia and further added to the country's fabled wealth.

As imperial power had corrupted older ideals of governance, so wealth and luxury undermined the spiritual value system founded on the teachings of the Upanishads. 

The tamasic qualities of greed, jealousy and anger unmoored “practical” men and women from the fine concern with the truth founded in concern for karmic consequences. As that phenomenon grew it led to a larger closing of the Indian mind, preventing the society from perceiving and responding to internal and external threats. The ineffectiveness of leadership resulted in things falling apart at the slightest challenge; every invader found Indian allies and collaborators.

Interestingly, India did not attract invaders just with its wealth; its religious concepts -- or rather, incomprehension of them -- were key factors stirring them into action.

Within India, the concept of a Universal Spirit was firmly anchored in the concepts of Dharma and Karma, both preventing any individual or group from setting rules on behalf of the Almighty. Those anchors were lost as monotheism made its way from India to the philosophy of Plato. and then into the first Greek translation of the Jewish Bible three centuries before the advent of Jesus.

Within the Jewish fold the loss of constraints on the concept of God had little negative effect because of the belief in Israel’s exclusive covenant with YAHWEH; but as the messianic faiths of Christianity and Islam advanced exclusive claims on God that delegitimized each other and all other religions, the result was unending conflict.

The economic and political fallout was heavy. As Islamic conquests around the Mediterranean cut off Christian Europe’s access to the Indian spice trade it inspired an ongoing search for alternate routes to India. Marco Polo skirted north of Muslim lands to China, and his book describing a return to Europe via India, gave Christopher Columbus the idea that another path to the Orient might lie across the Atlantic. Meanwhile, an old Phoenician legend recounted by Herodotus that Africa was an island led the Portuguese to explore a southward sea route. 

Six years after Columbus made landfall at Hispaniola, Vasco da Gama rounded the southern cape of Africa and a Gujarati pilot took him across the Indian Ocean to Calicut. A later Portuguese expedition to India was blown far off course by a storm off the western coast of Africa and landed up in Brazil. Within a matter of decades Europeans moved from belief in a flat earth to circumnavigating the globe.

I have described in an earlier post the horrendous consequences of European expansion for the people of the newly discovered regions. In India the European intrusions were preceded by those of Arabs, Turks and Afghans occurring as it were, in slow motion over the period of a millennium. There was no concerted response even though Guru Nanak went throughout the country seeking to spark a renaissance. It took the mass murder and dire poverty inflicted by the British to bring his efforts to fruition four centuries later.

As the country now looks to a period of sustained economic growth it is well to remember that the path out of the Kali Yuga must be essentially spiritual and that enormous challenges face us. Our political elite is sodden with corruption, our policing authorities are wolves, the intellectual leaders who should be helping India recover its true self are in the pay of our most bitter enemies, and even some of the leaders of our fighting forces, men who should value honor above life itself, have sold their integrity for that most pitiable of rewards, money.

I firmly believe that our exit from the Kali Yuga is unstoppable. The power of the bhakti of the great mass of Indians – certainly the only thing that has kept the country on an even keel through the worst disasters – will ultimately cleanse the elite. However, there is no predicting the pace of change. It will depend entirely on the moral conduct of younger generations. If they are committed above all else to personal integrity and sacrifice in the service of the country India can recover itself swiftly. If not, we could linger for generations in the current bewildered and weakened state at the mercy of brutal foreign forces.

There are many signs those forces are strengthening. The latest is the announcement of an Indian chapter of Al Qaeda, which has from its inception been under British control. I take it as an indication that the British incubus is readying like some real life Voldemort to return from the realm of the undead.

As with the evil Lord of the Harry Potter stories, Britain has a range of allies awaiting the return, from corporate leaders, media houses and poisonous advertising agencies to openly anti national A-list film stars and of course, the corrupt in every field with black money under British management.

Also, a slow coup d'etat seems to be gathering strength from within the civil service that runs everything from elections to our unconstitutional and out of control Intelligence Bureau. The death of a popular BJP politician in a car accident in Delhi, the fall that put another outspoken leader into a coma in Rajasthan, the attempt to tar the most active environmental activists in the country, and now the bid to bring the judiciary under bureaucratic control, are not incidental straws in the wind. .

They should put everyone on alert. In fact, everyone should be prepared for a 9/11 type attack that will justify declaration of an Emergency and suspension of civil rights and procedures.

What Now for India?

I was dead wrong about the outcome of the elections, but not in my trepidation about what is happening in India.

A great flood of money has washed through our electoral system, empowering forces that are rooted in the divisive communal politics the British introduced during the colonial rule and have fostered through proxies since independence.

Where that money has come from and what it will require the new government to do should be of acute concern to Indians.

All indicators signal that we are headed for a period of undisguised crony capitalism that will see foreign interests in the driving seat, acting through major Indian corporations.

Those alliances are by no means secret, and some are notorious, especially RIL's hookup with BP that has given the most predatory of the energy majors a role in the pricing of our sovereign natural gas resources.

The association of the TATAs with British interests dates back to the opium trade era of colonial rule, and its diversification in recent decades seems to have included, most obviously in the controversy over the allocation of 2-G spectrum licenses, a shadowy role in launching the corruption scandals that tarred the UPA government in its final years.   

The Ruia Brothers of ESSAR and the Vedanta-Cairn India combine also have an earned notoriety.

Beyond the interests of these usual suspects, we can definitely expect the new government to push for foreign/private investment in the Defense Sector, and the forging of an Indian "military-industrial complex."

Such a combination of forces first emerged in the United States after WW-II, and during the Cold War it spread to all major industrial countries, including supposedly "Socialist" countries.

Once created, the arrangement has proved impervious to democratic control, for it thrives on creating and manipulating violent international confrontations, using intelligence agencies subverted from their legitimate roles. "National security" is used to trump all efforts at democratic control. 
 
On the social front, we can expect to see big business profit from an unprecedented alienation of land from small farmers and inattention to environmental concerns.

The outlook overall is thus grim indeed for India, unless by some miracle Narendra Modi in power jettisons those who financed his rise and implements a truly democratic and indigenous agenda. 

The Congress in Opposition

The prospect described above offers the decimated Indian National Congress a golden opportunity to rebuild itself as a broad-based representative of national interests.

If a BJP government follows the negative trajectory described above, it will have to step rough-shod over the interests of millions of Indians, especially small farmers and the economically powerless. It will have to misuse the intelligence and police services.

If the Congress sets out to give a voice to those injured by such policies, it can expect to reap a rich dividend at the next general elections.

To do that, it will have to organize a national network to report on what is happening, and perhaps start its own media organizations to provide fair coverage.

At the very least it should have a website to publicize what is happening in the country.

Intelligent use of social media -- which it seems to have not done at all this time around -- should help the rebuilding process.

The Long View

In the long view of history, the particulars of who, what and why of this election are likely to disappear in the face of one overwhelming fact: a single political party has once again become the representative of the nation as a whole. 

The fact that regional caste-based politics have been shown the door is a major positive development. 

The end of the myth about a "Muslim vote bank" is also something to applaud. 

Perhaps that will begin the process of bringing to an end the regressive idea that religion can be the basis for electoral politics, allowing organizations such as the RSS to reinvent themselves and become truly national in identity and purpose.

 

BJP, Congress or Aam Admi?

As any writer who is not independently wealthy I write for hire. Not as a journalist but as an expert consultant.

My specialty for many years has been international cooperation for development, a field at once richly satisfying -- because it is about hope and aspiration -- and deeply disheartening in the venal cynicism of its theorists.

Consider, for instance, the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) adopted as an afterthought by the summit-level meeting of the UN General Assembly at the cusp of the 21st Century.

Advertised as measurable targets for “development,” they were actually little more than a diversion, drawing attention away from such grim realities as the global black market that sucks out ten times more from poor countries than they get as "aid." 

“Halve poverty levels by 2015” was the lead MDG.

It did not say how that should be done, or at what cost.

In China, which has made the most rapid progress in reducing poverty, it was done by massive foreign investments that made the country the “workshop of the world.”

But the costs have been terrible.

A team of Chinese scientists reported earlier this year that air pollution in the country had become so bad that it was blocking out the sun and reducing plant growth. They compared it to “nuclear winter,” when the debris thrown into the atmosphere by atomic bombs is projected to make photosynthesis impossible.

And that’s not the worst of it.

China’s progress has been built on sand.

When the financial crisis of 2008 and the “Great Recession” that followed in Europe and North America threatened to collapse its export driven economy, Beijing spent half a trillion dollars to prop up growth.

Most of the money went to build infrastructure.

They built highways, bridges and tunnels with few users, a pricey super-fast railway and huge airports with little air traffic.

Most of all, they built housing. There is now an apartment for every family in China. But most are unoccupied, for they are priced too high and are in areas where there is no economic activity to support an urban population.

All across China now there are not only millions of unoccupied buildings, there are entire ghost cities.

Even that is not the worst of it.

China’s booming “development” created a crony capitalism that allied predatory wheeler-dealers with the Communist power structure. They took land forcibly from poor farmers, forcing millions to become migrant workers in factories thousands of miles away from their homes.

There are now over 200 million migrant workers living on slave wages in urban areas. While the workers languish in poverty, Party flacks and their business cronies grew enormously rich.

China's growing army of millionaires and billionaires are estimated to keep much of their wealth in other countries and some 80 per cent are reported to have established foreign residency rights.

Narendra Modi is a votary of this model of “development,” and it has enamored Indian Big Business.

It has blinded business leaders to his violent communal record, bully-boy rhetoric and capacity to corrupt and misuse the Intelligence and Police services. One of them hailed him as "King of kings" at a recent conclave that was an unmitigated abomination in a democracy.

Quite obviously, no Indian in her right mind should vote for the Modi-led BJP.

Congress is a better choice in that it is not openly communal and is more aware of the poor and middle class. But in seeking to woo Big Business away from Modi, will it offer – has it offered – the same kind of crony capitalism?

Despite the rhetoric of its election platform, there is little reason to believe that the Congress has a view of development much different from Modi's. Its much touted Land Bill will raise the cost of appropriating land, but will do no justice to the farmer.

Expropriating land to benefit the rich will very quickly begin to destabilize the balance of castes in rural areas that is the bedrock of Indian political stability. It will feed and expand the insurrections that now ravage tribal areas. The country could quite easily slip into the state of general civil war that preceded colonial rule.

Is there a way to avoid this prospect?

Yes, but to see the way the Indian political elite must heed the first teaching of the Hitopadesa and let fall the veil of greed that now prevents them from seeing the true wealth of the country, its people.

“Development” does not mean highways and dams and skyscrapers, and flashy dressers calling each other “Dude;” it means that everyone in the country is fed, educated and profitably employed.

Can we have that without industrialization and Big Business?

Yes. In fact, the technology of the Information Age is making Big Business obsolete.

The capacity to identify and cater to niche markets through the World Wide Web has the potential to make small scale artisanal production competitive with mass produced goods. That will destroy the primary reason for the mass market and giant corporations.

The nature of industrial production is also undergoing fundamental change. The combination of off-grid renewable energy and 3-D printing has revolutionary implications.

It means we can have top quality industrial products made in remote rural areas. When the best educational services and cultural products are also available online in rural areas, the pressures now causing rapid urbanization will disappear. As rural development accelerates, population growth will decelerate very rapidly, and that will change all other economic projections.

We are facing a future when there will be no reason for massive energy and raw materials supplies to be concentrated at points of production. There will be nothing to drive predatory exploitation of natural resources. The corporations of the future will be flat networks of entrepreneurs, each grounded in his/her own community and meeting real human needs.

The rather confused vision of rural development set out in Arvind Kejriwal’s book Swaraj could help bring such a future to life – if the Aam Admi Party can convince the Indian voter that it is capable of governing.

Coverage of Sunanda Pushkar's Murder

The Press coverage of Sunanda Pushkar’s murder was pretty much obliterated on television by the Aam Admi Party’s shenanigans in New Delhi.

For the most part, the story was reduced to television crawlers highlighting a statement by the victim's 21-year old son that his mother was too strong to commit suicide and that he did not think Shashi Tharoor could have harmed her.

In print, the coverage was decidedly odd.

On 21 January, a Zee News story by Sushmita Dutta had the following lead: “Hours after the autopsy report of Sunanda Pushkar was out and given to the Sub-Divisional Magistrate Alok Sharma by All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS) stating drug overdose may have caused her death, Minister of State for Human Resource Development Shashi Tharoor got a clean chit into the matter based on a witness testimony, police sources said on Monday.”

A Reuters story on the 22nd put the story in the following context: “The drama around Tharoor comes after a series of scandals that have dented the idea of a rising, confident India. The image of an economic juggernaut was undermined last year when growth fell to its lowest in a decade. Politicians have been dogged by allegations of corruption on a spectacular scale, and a grisly gang rape in Delhi at the end of 2012 that sparked huge protests has marred the "Incredible India" slogan meant to draw tourists from around the globe. Even a former Supreme Court judge has been probed over alleged sexual harassment and one of India's most powerful journalists was arrested last month in another sexual assault case.”

The story (without a byline as published), said that “Tharoor may survive politically. He has received backing from the leader of the ruling Congress party, Sonia Gandhi, and sympathy from many politicians. One TV channel called him the "Comeback Kid" for his ability to bounce back from reverses.”

Also on the 22nd, a PTI story was headlined “Shashi Tharoor inseparable, no question of resignation: Congress.” It noted earlier reports that the BJP's Kerala unit had demanded Tharoor’s resignation and that Congress ally NCP had said he should keep away from his ministerial responsibilities until the investigation was over. Congress spokesman Randip Surjewala had told reporters the NCP suggestion “could be personal opinion of NCP leader D P Tripathi. ... Tharoor is in a responsible ministerial position. He is also an inseparable part of Congress. There is no question of his resignation.”

Neither Reuters nor PTI mentioned in those stories what the Economic Times noted in the penultimate paragraph of its small take on the 22nd: that the autopsy report submitted to the investigating magistrate “mentioned more than a dozen injury marks on Pushkar's hands and a minor bruise on her left cheek which could be due to the use of ‘blunt force’". Citing “poisoning” as the cause of death, the magistrate had “asked Delhi police to further investigate the case, including the possibility of suicide and murder.”  

It seems to me the injuries sustained by the victim -- lacerations on the wrists and bruises on her upper body and neck -- are conclusive proof of murder. 

Much of the Press coverage seems to be avoiding that and looking towards a swift finding of accidental drug overdose that will allow business as usual. 


I have known Shashi since he was a child and find it hard to believe that he is capable of murder; but there is no escaping the conclusion that Sundanda Pushkar was forced to ingest the two dozen anti-depressent pills and alcohol that ended her life. 

There are two pointers for those investigating the case. 

One is the Pakistan angle -- his wife thought Tharoor had been having a "rip roaring affair" with Lahore-based journalist Mehr Tarar. Both the principals have denied this, but clearly there was some to and fro across the border. Was the murder to blot out any possibility of an embarrassing security leak? If so, the murderers would be under the authority of the Home Ministry, which is reportedly seeking to hurry the investigation to an end.

The second lead is the fact that  Sunanda Pushkar was preparing for tell-all television interviews about her involvement in the IPL scandal that led to her then boy-friend Tharoor's resignation from the External Affairs ministry. The couple had hotly denied reports they cleared some $15 million from that deal. Whose ox would have been gored if she had revealed another reality?

All this should make quite clear that the investigation into the murder cannot be rushed to a conclusion, and that an independent inquiry is essential.

Pending a resolution it is indefensible for Tharoor to continue in a position of influence in the government.