Corruption in India - 1

Does anyone expect the Lokpal to make any real difference?

Suppose Civil Society gets its entire wishlist and we end up with an unaccountable supra-governmental body with wide-ranging powers to accuse, investigate, prosecute and more or less prescribe punishment for the people it decides are corrupt.

In which of the following situations (all in the headlines in the last few days) will it be able to make a dent?

1.      Widespread smuggling and sale of rice meant for distribution to the poor.

2.     “Ghost workers” receiving funds from the National Rural Employment Guarantee scheme.

3.     The hundreds of illegal mining operations under way in a number of states.

4.      The widespread illegal quarrying of rock, with some operations threatening archeological heritage sites.

5.      The widespread illlegal "sand mining"  from beaches and watercourses.

6.      Widespread use of child labour

7.      The resort to gender-related abortions by educated, middleclass people that is causing an increasing tilt in the male/female ratio of the Indian population.

8.      The private theft and public "seizure" of land belonging to the poor in all parts of the country. While private gangsters make no bones about their motive -- profit -- public officials make a grand pretence: the POSCO steel mill on tribal land in Orissa, the nuclear power station on tribal land in Maharashtra, and the Delhi-Agra highway in UP, are all for that distant god, "Development." .

9.      The bribery of voters by political parties. According to the Chief Election Commissioner all political parties tried to corrupt voters during the recent state elections, using  clandestine contributions from corporations.

10.  The thievery of public goods by the wealthy curled darlings of the nation. The government's auditor, the Comptroller and Accountant General (CAG), has just reported that when Murli Deora was Minister for Petroleum, he did all kinds of favours for Mukesh Ambani's Reliance Industries Ltd (RIL), causing massive but unquantifiable losses to the public exchequer. (Younger brother Anil Ambani, is already neck-deep in the 2G auction scam and has two of his senior aides cooling their heels in Tihar Jail.) The CAG noted that the Ministry had allowed Reliance (and Cairn India, the subsidiary of a well connected British firm extracting oil in Rajasthan), to hold onto areas they should have forfeited because of failure to drill. That prevented the government from re-auctioning the areas, depriving it of potentially massive revenues.

11. The $7.2 billion deal Reliance Industries made in February to sell a 30 percent stake in its offshore gas fields (acquired under the abovementioned questionable contract) to BP, the British oil giant. In June, the Home Ministry issued a terse one-page security clearance  necessary for BP to proceed with the purchase. The Ministry noted that BP was already in the Indian market, selling lubricants. Selling grease is significantly different from owning a sizeable chunk of the country's strategically important energy sector, but that didn't seem to count with the biggies at Home. Nor did it seem to matter that BP has the worst safety and environmental records of any of the oil majors. Or even that it has a long history as an imperial arm of the British government, and had a notorious role in destroying Iran's homegrown democracy and manipulating it into its current miseries. (Would the Lokpal be able to take cognizance of the fact that the current Home Minister, P. Chidambaram, was in charge of the Finance Ministry when it cleared the contracts the CAG has faulted? Or that he is a former corporate lawyer who represented Enron in India and sat on the board of Vedanta, the company owned by the predatory Anil Agarwal, a Mumbai scrap metals trader who morphed into a British billionaire with a stinking human rights record?)

12.  The reported oversize loans the State Bank of India made in contravention of ReserveBank rules to Reliance Industries, Indian Oil Company and BHEL.

13.  The reported provision of an entire telephone exchange of unlisted high-speed lines by BSNL Chennai ,to benefit the television station run by the brother of Dayanidhi Maran, who held the Telecommunications portfolio in the central cabinet before A. Raja, who emceed the 2G spectrum auction.

14.  The reported routine use of torture by Police all over the country to extract information from suspects.

15. The brazen daylight murder of a prominent investigative journalist in Mumbai, and the revelation of connections among foreign-controlled gangsters, high level Police officers and Mumbai businessmen.

16.  The rotting of hundreds of thousands of tons of food grains lying exposed to monsoon rains in states across India because storage facilities were inadequate for a bumper crop.

17.  The involvement of some top Army officers in the illegal construction of a multistory residential building on property owned by the Defence Department in Mumbai.

18.  The flow of foreign institutional investment into Indian stock markets primarily from “tax havens” where “shell companies” hide the identity of the real owners of the money. Over 40 per cent of the flow comes from a single source, Mauritius, with which India has a three-decade old treaty preventing double-taxation. Negotiated to encourage bilateral economic ties before Mauritius became a tax haven, the treaty now serves as a cover for “black money” to enter the Indian economy.

19.  The tax avoidance of Vodafone, the British telecommunications giant, which moved funds from a Caribbean tax haven in 2007 to buy the Indian interests of Hong Kong-based Hutchinson Whampoa (then in partnership with the Essar Group in India). Vodafone is contesting the Indian government’s demand for over $2.5 billion in taxes on that deal, arguing that it was between two off shore entities (itself and Hutchinson Whampoa) and thus outside Indian jurisdiction!

20.  The gullibility of millions of people from whom the late lamented “Sathya” Sai Baba extracted the treasure trove he left behind in his private room and in his fabulously wealthy "Trust."  

That list does not include India’s enormous burden of preventable infant and maternal deaths that results from grossly disordered political priorities and multi-layered negligence. It omits the massive toll of misery exacted by discrimination and violence from poor women, the cases of child marriage, payment of dowry, and of blatant and even murderous caste prejudice that are all deep-rooted social corruptions not even acknowledged in the current debate. Even with those exclusions, the list makes clear that “corruption” in India is not a simple phenomenon centred on the culpability of bureaucrats and politicians. It has strong social, economic and political components, and we must understand them in order to take effective action. Without a strategic sense of the nature and origin of corruption in Indian society (to be taken up in the next posting), it is futile to think a watchdog body will make the slightest bit of difference.

(By the way, shouldn't it be Logpal? Lokpal makes it sound as if the institution is out to save the world.)

Phobotherapy

Phobotherapy is the use of fear to effect a cure.

When you startle a person out of hiccuping that's phobotherapy.

In modern multilateral diplomacy phobotherapy has become a sophisticated art. It usually consists of issuing an expert report predicting something really scary. The report gets wide media attention because editors are patsies for anything that will frighten people into reading (or listening to) what they put out. Once that happens the phobotherapist's goal is achieved, for the experts who make government policy dare not ignore something widely covered in the media and will at least pretend to do something official to avoid the projected scary scenario.

The problem with these efforts to scare the world into particular courses of action is that they seldom push for balanced or appropriate responses to the problem.

Those who first sounded the alarm about the "population explosion" wanted "population control" imposed by governments through prevention and termination of pregnancies.

The environmental crises facing the world have brought forth policies to deal with symptoms: pollution standards, emission controls, and bidiversity preserves.

The problem of drug trafficking led governments to adopt prohibitionist policies that raised the prices of illicit drugs and made traffickers (and their government protectors) fabulously rich men.

In each case, the phobotherapists diverted attention from real problems and solutions to matters important to their own clientele. The population controllers were frank about their concerns that the poor dark skinned races were growing too fast. Those who prescribed the currently fashionable "environmental programmes" diverted attention from the fact that the basic problem is industrial civilization, and that no amount of norm-setting will make it sustainable. It must be fundamentally reoriented. The forces that have pushed a losing and futile "war against drugs" have quite successfully frightened people away from the only sensible option, to legalize drugs and treat it as a problem of addiction. That would remove the criminal engagement in drug trafficking and make the problem mainly medical.

Having painted in that background, let me come to the latest effort at phobotherapy. It is a joint report from the Food and Agriculture Organization in Rome and the Brussels-based Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD).

The two organizations warn of a 30 per cent increase in food prices -- by 2021. The causes? Slower growth in major food crops and continued growth of world population, expected to reach 9.2 billion by 2050. (The use of different time horizons to present a magnified danger is typical of phobotherapists.)

The report wants action against speculators, and "strict rules" to govern factors that "distort" world food trade. The next meeting of the G-20 is expected to take those matters in hand and bring "regulation" to the world food market.

Now what could be the secret agenda of this particular bit of phoboherapy? It is, surprise, surprise, to protect the interests of transnational agrobusinesses. The report says nothing about the fact that the existing "global market" for food is a highly energy-intensive system that is enormously wasteful of food. Corporate farming of mega tracts is environmentally destructive and always less productive than family run farms. The treatment of animals subjected to "factory farming" is cruel beyond belief and also environmentally disastrous because so much consumption and waste are concentrated in such small areas.

Nor does the report mention that "speculators" would have no handle on the world's food economy if we cut out the big corporations and promoted the development of local, national and regional food economies. Such systems are far more efficient, would employ millions more workers and could easily feed the projected world population and more. At present, about a third of the world's agricultural production is not consumed; it is lost to rot, pests and other forms of wastage. Merely decreasing that percentage should take care of inflation.

UN's Ban Gets 2nd Term

Ban Ki-moon, the Secretary-General of the United Nations is to get a second term.

His announcement of interest in staying on was made on Monday, 6 June, followed two days later by an endorsement from the White House. (It is possible that the State Department was not on board with that decision if we are to read the tea leaves in the report that surfaced immediately afterwards that Hilary Clinton had asked to be nominated to head the World Bank.)

Internationally, all the ducks fell quickly into a row. On 10 June the Security Council met informally (behind closed doors) and decided to endorse Ban as their single candidate for the post for the 2012-2017 period. It is scheduled to meet on 17 June to act formally on the recommendation. The General Assembly is set to rubber stamp that decision a week later.

Ban's second term is proof yet again that nothing succeeds like failure at the UN. Under him the Organization has slid into almost total irrelevance, for where his predecessor Kofi Annan was a consummate diplomat, he has been, as they say at the UN, a bull carrying his own china shop. Almost everything he has touched has blown up into an embarrassment. (A keyword search of this blog will bring to light some of the choicer ones.)

The fact that governments have decided to give Ban a second term without even considering rival claimants for the job is probably an indication that there is little chance of a smooth transition. The international situation is so rife with rancorous tensions that an effort to change the leadership could freeze even its minimal (but essential) functionality.

Ban's second term will begin with two Indian diplomats at supposedly key spots in the UN hierarchy. Ambassador Vijay Nambiar has been his Chef de Cabinet for the last five years, and last month Atul Khare (First Secretary at the Indian Mission to the UN a decade ago), was moved from his post as Assistant-Secretary-General in the Department of Peacekeeping Operations to take over as pointman for UN reform. (In charge of "change management" in the current management babble.) In the real-life (rather than organigram) pecking order of the UN neither post has much clout.

A number of top-level changes are expected after Ban's second term begins on 1 January 2012. Stay tuned.

Ilyas Kashmiri: The Trend

Now that another key al Qaeda henchman, Ilyas Kashmiri, is reported to have followed Osama bin Laden into the realms of the Djin, it is clear that something more structural than luck has changed in Pakistan. It seems as if the ISI has, at long last, decided that it can no longer afford to run with the hinds and hunt with the hounds.

That is an almost unbelievable paradigm shift, for the factors keeping the ISI invested in its double game were weighty with reasons of history, strategy and profit.

Historically, Pakistan's military spy agency was created expressly to serve as Britain's handle to manipulate Pakistan, the proxy it created in South Asia when quitting India in 1947. The man who created it was an Australian-born British Army officer, Major-General Walter Joseph Cawthorn, who stayed behind as the Deputy -Chief of Staff of the new Pakistani Army (1947-1951). He created the ISI to fight a guerrilla war against India in Kashmir, an aim the agency has maintained as one of its highest strategic priorities ever since. Because of the support from Britain, Pakistan has felt entirely comfortable in pursuing what would otherwise be a suicidally foolish policy against a much more powerful neighbour. Since Afghanistan became the main source of the world heroin trade in the 1980s, the top brass of the Pakistani military has also had the huge additional incentive of profits from trafficking narcotics.

To break the ISI loose from that strong foundation it took a threat to the integrity of Pakistan that could not be ignored, and it came in the unlikely form of a short Media Note on 15 April from the United States State Department in Washington. Issued by the Office of the Spokesman, it said:

"On April 13, 2011, the United States and the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (KP) Police signed a Memorandum of Understanding on the provision of over $17 million in vehicles, communications, and other equipment. These vehicles and equipment funded by the US will support the KP Police – including the Elite Force – in their mission to protect the local population.

"State Department Assistant Secretary for International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs, Ambassador William R. Brownfield and the Inspector General of KP Police Fiaz Toru presided over the ceremony. Also in attendance were U.S. Acting Consul General Constance C. Arvis and Embassy Islamabad Narcotics Affairs Section Director Garace Reynard.

"The US supports civilian law enforcement in Pakistan through equipment, training, refurbishment, and construction of new police facilities. Last year, the United States committed $102.6 million for civilian law enforcement assistance. This year, the United States will continue to supply the KP Police with approximately 440 additional vehicles, including trucks, armoured vehicles and personnel carriers, ambulances, and motorcycles, as well as other equipment vital to the execution of its critical mission.

"The signing of this agreement is another example of ongoing American support and is a symbol of the continuing close cooperation between our two countries."

Although the Press release mentioned the "two countries" it made no mention of any role that Islamabad had in the event. In fact, it was clearly a transaction between Washington and the Khyber Pakhtunwala police, and that political development must have sounded like a thunderclap in the Pakistani capital.

The Khyber Pakhtunkhwa police are in charge of territory where the Pathan tribes of Afghanistan have traditionally staked their claim to independence on a large chunk of Pakistan's border region. It is the area where the old North-West Frontier Province once was a stronghold  of the Indian National Congress under the redoubtable Khan Brothers. In the most intensely Islamic area of Jinnah's "Muslim nation" (minority communities were less than 2 per cent), that was a "bastard situation," as Mountbatten's Chief of Staff Lionel Ismay put it. The violence and chaos of Partition helped stampede the tribesmen of the NWFP into Pakistan, but once things cooled off, the realities set in. The older of the Khan brothers was allowed to share power for a while, but then he was tossed into the wilderness and did not survive. His younger sibling, the great Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan spent 15 years in Pakistani prisons. (The British had kept him behind bars for only 12.) Popular resentment in the region against Pakistan's ruling Punjabi coterie has grown steadily ever since.

What Washington's mild Media Note did was heat up that old flame. It signalled clearly to Islamabad that unless the ISI played ball, Pakistan would have to redefine its Western borders radically. It was no idle threat. The Afghan and Punjab elements of Pakistan have had a rancorous relationship from the very beginning, and given the insurrection already blossoming in Baloochistan, a Pakhtoon uprising would spell disaster for the country. Quite suddenly, the weight of the British in keeping Pakistan on the old narco-terrorist tracks was neutralized, and it was, as they say in America, a whole new ball game.

Expect the terrorists in Pakistan to continue suffering major setbacks.

     

Dim Wit Yogi Alarm

 If alarm bells were not already ringing all over India about Baba Ramdev, his 3rd June speech at the Ramlila Grounds in Delhi would be reason enough to sound them.

But before I get to the speech, let me remind people who the guy is.

He was born Ramkishan Yadav in a village in Haryana in 1965, attended school nearby until the 8th Standard and then went to study Yoga (and supposedly Sanskrit) at a "gurukul" in Khanpur, Haryana.

After school he set himself up in business teaching yoga and selling herbal cures and did very well. So well, in fact, as to be able to pay Aasthana Television, one of the first Indian "religious channels" to begin broadcasting (in 2000), to schedule his yoga show early in the morning. That show got him a cult following not only in India but in many places where the diaspora got used to watching him.

Despite controversies -- Brinda Karat accused him in 2007 of mixing animal products with his supposedly vegetarian potions, and every now and then someone accuses him of claiming to cure cancer, diabetes and AIDS -- Ramdev has continued to do well.

His early investment in potions has paid off handsomely, and now there is a Patanjali Ayurveda College, a Patanjali Chikitsalaya, a Yoga Gram (village), Go-Shala (cow shelter), a Patanjali Herbal Botanical Garden, and an Organic Farm, all operating under the aegis of the nonprofit Patanjali Yog Peeth. The group's publication, Yog Sandesh, is said to have a million readers in 11 languages.
In the summer of 2009 the Peeth was was given Trust status in Britain too; it took control of a small island off Scotland bought for £2 million by two of his fans, Sam and Sunita Poddar. No one seems to have been curious enough at this enormous act of generosity to look into where exactly the money came from; going by Press reports, the Poddars run nursing homes.

Less than a year later, in March 2010, after repeatedly denying for many years that he had any political ambitions, Ramdev announced his intention to set up a political party to contest every seat in the Lok Sabha. He named the party Bharat Swabhiman Andolan and its aims were set out as follows: 

100% voting

100% nationalist thought,

100% boycott of foreign companies and adoption of swadeshi,

100% unification of the people of the nation and

100% yoga-oriented nation.

That isn't  Ein folk, ein land, ein Fuhrer" but close enough, especially as the support crew for Ramdev's "fast unto death" ostentatiously includes the RSS with its bully staves and khakhi-shorts. It should also be mentioned that the ideologue who partnered wih Ramdev to launch Bharat Swabhiman Andolan, Rajiv Dixit, upped and died of an apparent heart attack a few months later. He was 43. Hindutva types seem to think he was murdered. My own conspiracy theory about the situation is that someone is trying to get an all-India fascist movement started using the dimwit Swami as tool. Who might that someone be? The Scottish island seems to point to the involvement of our old pals at MI-6. Ramdev without his ideological mentor should be easy for them to control, for he seems to grasp reality at the level of painting by numbers. The 3 June speech at the Ramlila Grounds should settle any doubts about the level of his IQ. Excerpts (from a translation posted by IBN.live.com):

"Today America is a superpower, UK, Germany and France are superpowers…but we forget that all these countries are in crores of debt. What does this mean? This is actional tax. (sic) They have gained this money by exploiting poor countries like India. All the corrupt people in India who have not been faithful to 'Bharat Mata' will not want black money to come back.  … If black money is brought back in this country, no one will go hungry, no one will be without a livelihood. Our currency will be stronger than the dollar or pound. I want to see that day soon… the currency should stand at $1=Rs 50. I want to see an India like that. When we bring back black money, this will be possible. Our country's pride will rise. … "

Okay, turn on all alarms now, also the flashing lights.

That Slow Train Wreck ...

The slow train-wreck of the world economy is progressing like one of those Peckinpah Westerns, each step slowed, bloodied, shown close up and then again from another angle, until the mind forgets what it is watching and is fascinated just by the blood and spilling guts.

When will the bodies start falling? I figure they're already falling. But as Buzz Light-Year put it, "falling with style."

Who will hit the ground first? My bet is it's going to happen in Europe. There's no way Greece is going to pay up. Or can pay up. Nor will Ireland. These were countries where the politicians "saved the banks" by taking on their debt. The people were not consulted. Marching to some Warsong of the Valkyries sound-track the politicians pledged their people's welfare for the banks and would you know it, they ended up holding the empty kitty!

So now oridnary Europeans are facing "austerity measures" -- like doing without jobs (unemployment's over 20 per cent in important parts of Europe), public services and social security. Part of the reason they're doing it is to "Save the Euro." The Germans are fighting that battle, giving out their taxpayer's money to keep Europe with a single currency. What's the bet that the Germans will tire of that eventually and chuck it?

If Europe falls, of course, there is no saving China. Even the Brits with their multi-trillion global blackmarket funds won't be able to salvage the Kung Fu Hustle we'll have there. China, by the way, seems to be headed for a perfect storm of drought, corruption, economic mismanagement. political folly -- and a real estate bubble.

The real estate market in the country is still rising. An average home in April rose in value to 8,773 yuan ($1,351) per square meter from 8,738 ($1,345) in March. The figures are estimates, for the government scrapped its national property price index in January. The Party mandarins just couldn't take the stress of reporting it any more. Another revealing detail: according to a study released last month, 80 per cent of all home-grown millionaires in China are planning to emigrate or have already established residence abroad.

What's grimly funny about this situation is that Pakistan's political leadership has taken just this moment to voice loud faith in China's enduring support. Its Prime Minister on a visit to Beijing exclaimed that China and Pakistan were "one nation but two countries." He thought Pakistan's "Islamic socialism" was just like the free market communism of the comrades of the CCP. No doubt to celebrate the kinship, the Chinese gave Pakistan 50 fighter aircraft. Just clean gave it to them . However, it is to be delivered in a year or two. Takes time to work out the kinks in free market communism.

Meanwhile, Beijing has been vigorously denying various political messages from Islamabad about how close ties are between them. For one thing, it denied that China would consider an attack on Pakistan as on itself. Then it said there was no question of taking over Gwadar Port in Baluchistan and developing it as a naval outpost. (The port is the middle of nowhere, surrounded by an active insurrection, with no infrastructure on the landward side, so it's easy to see why.) Then the mandarins declared that the aid demanded by Pakistan as an outright grant could not be given, for such gifts were never made.

The outcome of all this is not funny at all. We should, like Kubla, hear from afar, ancestral voices propheseing war. And not that far off either.

The "Undefeated Left"

A statement issued under the signature of five “Left” figures is making the rounds of e.mail lists. It seeks to garner support for the sentiment that the recent electoral defeat of the communist-led coalitions in Kerala and West Bengal does not mean “the end of the Left in India.” The five – Dilip Simeon, Jairus Banaji, Sukumar Muralidharan, Satya Sivaraman, Rohini Hensman – argue that “the Left in India is not the Left parties alone and therefore the defeat of the Left parties does not mean the defeat of the Left.” They say that there “are many cultural and political groups ... that have never identified or associated with the politics and the peculiar left traditions of the CPI(M) that are still largely moulded by the discredited legacies of Stalinism.” In their view there is an undefeated “Left” of “organisations, movements and forms of struggle” ranging from “hundreds of left-wing trade unions ... that are essentially independent of party control” to “dozens of popular campaigns and the organisations connected with them.”  

They credit this unstructured and ad hoc “Left” with a range of accomplishments:

·         “fighting the displacement of people by large scale government and corporate projects (the Hirakud and Koel Karo dams, the Baliapal missile range, the Sardar Sarover scheme, mining and industrial ventures by POSCO, Vedanta, Jindals, the Tatas, Ambanis, and so on).

·         the “grassroots campaigns for the Right to Information (RTI) and for rural employment schemes.”

·         campaigning “against communal violence and for justice for the victims of the violence that politicians have repeatedly instigated, notably, the horrific massacres in1984 (Delhi), 2002 (Gujarat) and 2008 (Kandhamal in Orissa).”

·         and fostering “movements of resistance to the hideous injustices and violence of the caste system; to the oppression of women; to homophobia; and against the forcing of millions of children into wage-slavery.”

Even if we overlook the fact that the courts, the government, and even political parties (the Trinamool C in Bengal), have been prime movers in some of these so-called “Left” achievements, the whole proposition reeks of clutching at straws. The statement indicates more clearly than the electoral defeat of the communists the intellectual bankruptcy of the “Left” in India. The concept of a political  "Left," originally borrowed from 19^th Century Europe, has never taken root Indian soil, and it is now like a crude Mumbai knock-off of a Hollywood film, embarrassing not only in its lack of cultural originality but in its display of technical incompetence. Just as the denizens of the world’s largest film industry are content to be described as “Bollywood,” "Tollywood," "Kollywood" and so on, members of the Indian “Left” seem to be completely unaware that their imitative imported conceptualization and terminology put on display a fundamental lack of self respect. There is no inkling in it that the granddaddy of all “Left” politicians was Mahatma Gandhi, who rang down the curtain on the colonial era and initiated the global movements for racial equality, universal human rights, and rural development.