Left Adventurism: time to call the bluff!

The Left has really become a pain in the neck. The time has come to call its bluff. It is blackmailing the UPA government almost from day one. It imagines it has the key to unlock the world. Or, to the world’s wisdom!
Such is its self-imagined arrogance that it doesn’t think it owes a duty to the country and the people when it comes to its own acts of obstruction to a democratically constituted government.
With all its limitations, the UPA has been doing its job according to its light.

One can find fault on many of its details but one can’t find fault with its basic approach. It is a liberal democracy with a liberalisation economic agenda and the Indo-US nuclear deal was not just a one-day wonder. It has been there for a long time. India is a nuclear power in a way, we have exploded our nuclear devices, and it is almost like a nuclear weapons capability country.
The fine details needn’t concern us.

It is the right thing to go for the nulcear deal. Given the concerns over our energy needs nuclear power is one option. We are not alone. There is a nuclear ‘reanissance’. So, we have to adhere to the trends in the world.

Now, the Left’s objection is that by signing the deal India would tie itself with the USA strategically. Now, what is the strategical tie-up? Yes, it is co-operation in nuclear power and technology exchange and also to further develop our capabilities in the latest technologies. Will it amount to military tie-up? Without mincing words, yes, we would get some advantages, why even enormous advantages.

The China factor is not mentioned by everyone concerned. Yes, China is our neighbour and it will be there with all its pinpricks. China is not a completely friendly. It has its own perceptions. Let them have them. But it is a fact that China need to be restrained in its current penchant for nibbling at our territory. We are not strategic experts. But we have enough common sense to see that China should also know that we are stronger in our resolve to stand up to its current, rather in a manner that is not mature and not statesman-like in its behaviour with us, a big neighbour.
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Government of India must have conferred the Bharat Ratna

Even on his deathbed, he deserved the highest honour!

Sam Bahadur as he was lovingly and with much indulgence called by one and all is no more. Salute to his memory. He would be remembered for a long time to come.

It is nice to remember that he chose to live his retired life in the beautiful Nilgiris and Wellington and he now rests in Udhagamandalam (Ooty in the Parsi graveyard along with the side of his beloved wife, Silloo who died seven years ago.

What a life he lived! By any standards it was remarkable and a testimony for man’s innate qualities of head and heart, to deploy a cliche!

Yes, there are so many nice things being said of his soldierly qualities and that will be discussed and retold in all military lores.

What has now come out in print and what is not mentioned are very noteworthy.
First, his life was unique. He chose a field in which he reached the ultimate recognition.

Second, his unique way to deal with very difficult situations. The way he handled a difficult Indira Gandhi. His reasons for delaying the launch of attack against the then East Pakistan in November instead of June was very wise. A military genius can’t compromise with a hurrying politician.

That part of the story need to be told and retold many times for public enlightenment.
Then, comes the way he was overlooked by that another politician of big ego, V.K.Krishna Menon. He was overlooked and the fooly B.M.Kaul (I briefly met him once in London along with his boss, Thapar when one of Tahpar namesake, my Oxford friend took me to see them in a London Hotel in Mayfair) was promoted.

Third, the way he was honoured by the then British Commander, D.T.Cowan when Sam was wounded and almost died. Cowan, it is now written, saw traces of life in Sam, quickly pinned his own Military Cross Ribbon on to the chest of the barely alive soldiers. Military Crosses are not awarded to dead soldiers. This soldier, says a writer, lived to become the Army Chief in 1969 and India’s first Field Marshal in 1973!

There is much to write about Sam and his sense of humour and his very earthiness and humility and last of all what we, seeing from a distance the style and flair  he brought to an otherwise seen as a dull and colourless life of an average army man.

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PSBs badly managed! Inefficient, wasteful of customers’ time and resources!

You can’t but revamp the co-operative credit institutions if you are serious about saving the farmers! Serving the farmers’ long-term interest!

The Finance Minister must revamp a whole lot of banking and financial institutions!
The debt waiver scheme is okey but not the end of the road. It is not even the beginning of the road towards what the Indian government must be doing in order to reach out to the farmers.

The PSB banks first are not the right vehicle to help the farmers. Already their track record is not that encouraging. They never bothered to stick to any targets in priority sector lending. The Prime Minister never once in his lifetime seemed to had any interest in the agri sector. That we have to keep in mind why he ,as the Prime Minister, before that as Finance Minister and even before that as the Governor of Reserve Bank of India had done anything the country would care to remember, as far as reforming the banking sector.

Many of the great schemes and dreams have remained on paper. The creation of a National Agriculture Bank, National Agricultural Co-operative Bank. The great many veteran co-operators have all been sidelined in the new scheme of things. There is not even any mention of the role of the co-operative institutions in the agriculture credit delivery scheme or the debt waiver.

We visited one PSB bank recently and found the regional office busy with the visit of the Executive Director from Mumbai for what? To supervise the preparation of the debt waiver list!

Yes, the Finance Minister then followed the same route. The Finance Minister came to Bangalore, to visit the Vijaya Bank and the Canara Bank and what he did? He also scrutinised the debt waiver list!

Is this the job of the Finance Minister of the country? And see what the FM had understood of the way to go about implementing the debt waiver scheme.
He relies on the PSBs alone, it seems.

Already experts like Raghuram Rajan and other finance experts have expressed the view that the way the debt waiver scheme is implemented would not encourage a positive impact but would only lead to further credit default culture.

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Elusive Terrain: culture and literary memory
By Meenakshi Mukherjee, 200 pages, OUP, 2008

Now and then, it is nice to read a book by specialist on topics like literature and culture. Meenakshi Mukherjee is a veteran academic specialising in contemporary Indian literature. Both in the Indian languages and that is more important than just talking about the Indians writing in English. This is what she has done and enjoyed reading the essays compiled into a book.

Some of the topics might interest many readers. Indian films in English, Internal Diaspora, Hindi to Bangla, Literary debates in India in the last half century, Narrating a nation and history and imagined history etc.

The book stirs our thoughts and kindles our imagination. A very pleasant read, indeed.
Almost all the topics interested me, English in an uneven land, that is the way the English language  has come to occupy a central place in the lives of the privileged and the less privileged. There is now widespread learning and the use of this language and now a new India, those living in the USA and UK and making a new life of comfort and exile, yes, the word exile catches the reality, though the use of the word, Diaspora, I found repelling! At least for me! So, readers would find my use of English a bit old-fashioned, old-fashioned I remain in many other aspects as well, in holding on to my own views of  what English language means to me and also how I hold others who write and make a living  abroad.

As I live in India and committed to the success and failure of what India means and I still see the exiles as a class apart from the native Indians.

I give weight more for the native Indians than for others like V.S.Naipaul who have their own bees in their bonnets.

I am not going into the very specific points raised by the author and that is interesting but the point I want to make here is that still, that is even now, after Britain had departed from the Indian shores, there is this perception that in Britain they don’t seem to have come to recognise the Indian literary successes, like Salmon Rushdie and Naipaul as mainstream writers, there is the classifications and categories as black literature, colonial literature etc. There is this racial perception and it seems it is hard to go. She quotes Susan Sontang for writing in the Times Literary Supplement (13 June 2003) saying that English had contributed to the disappearance of many “lesser” languages of the world. I am glad to find Ms.Mukherjee criticises this view. Slave trade first, (for 3 centuries) then, the indentured labour migration saw, Africans and Indians migrate in large numbers and the result is the current race and religious intolerance we noticed in UK and France, to cite just the two advanced countries. There is also the shift in the use of English in India by the new generation to displace jobs in the USA and elsewhere and also the English publishing that sees more English books published in India but not bought by the West but mainly for the domestic readers. She cites a book by Pascale Casanova, The World Republic of Letters (2004) which profiles the racial and other factors that discriminate against writers and literary activities taking three forms, linguistic, literary and political, the last taking on an economic cast.
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Almost more than double the size of food grains!

What is the secret of the high Chinese farm production and productivity? We have so many experts and so many travellers to China. They must bring back some useful insights into the Chinese farming development strategy.

It looks there is a heavily subsidised farming practice, there seems to large scale farms and also a great deal of large-scale operations, being procurement, logistics and the payment of subsidies.

Chinese agricultural authority has expressed confidence in the summer harvest has almost been finished at the end of the month. Major grain production areas are poised to sustain a bumper harvest for the fifth year in succession. Summer crops in China are mostly rice and wheat and these two crops constitute about 23 per cent of the country’s annual grain harvest. The grain production in that country has been growing in a systematic way and for the past four consecutive years it has recorded 501.5 million tonnes in 2007, almost the level of the country’s annual consumption.

In India we talk of self-sufficiency in food production. This goal is reached in China; it seems easily, every year for the past few years.

So, the world would heave a sense of relief at the China’s food production success, as the world food crisis is mainly a crisis triggered by the major countries like China and India with huge populations. So, China’s this year’s farming success has led to a sense of relief in the international community.
Food safety is now a national goal, as in many countries, also in India. But how the current year’s Indian bumper harvest also gives some hope that the world food crisis would be managed by the world community, given the record harvests in China and India.

What is China’s agricultural policy impetus for grain production?
Our agri experts must somewhat explain this to the Indian farmers and others in the policy drawing entourage.

If we are to understand the Chinese jargon, the subsidies for the grain procurement seems to have been raised from 2 per cent to 7 per cent in some major grain producing regions in order to facilitate the easy procurement and reach the targets.
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Congress party must become more democratic.

If you live in Delhi, perhaps, you might become immune to any new winds of change. May be you would be a government servant or a politician, even a minister or an MP, from outside Delhi from one of the states. Or, otherwise, you might be one of those small-time businessmen.

Yes, the big ones are from outside Delhi, either in Mumbai or from Bangalore. For those from Bangalore, Delhi is really a very distant place. The IT success stories are still very remotely reaching Delhi; the big money from the IT capital has no use in Delhi. Thanks from the IT industry being totally free from government control, much of the online and Internet based businesses operate from outside the reaches of the bureaucracy.

Thus, I found in Delhi that it is the Mumbai based businessmen, the big and small, are all very much in Delhi, and either directly or through their well-oiled middlemen, the so-called lobbyists is all everywhere. In a way, how one NGO calls these men and women are part of the “legalised corruption” ring in getting things done.

Yes, New Delhi government is a big disappointment, if you imagine that it is an open government, your ideal of an open governance and where the rightful people can get the government listen to you.

In Delhi, no one in the scheme of things, the high Constitutional functionaries, the PM or the party President Sonia Gandhi want to receive you.
There are rings and rings around them. The most discouraging thought is that the Prime Minister in Dr.Manmohan Singh has come to symbolise all that is holding up the functioning of the government as an ideal democratic government.

Since he is not elected or is he a politician or a political figure, he had almost reduced the government to one more layer of the functioning bureaucracy. The Prime Minister of India is doing his job as a 9-5 job! This is the most terrible thing that had befallen the Indian governance mechanism.
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The great humbug of democratic power devolution!
The rural poor continue to be neglected!

Luckily, the West Bengal’s long-time claims of fame for its ideological purity stands exposed. The Left managed to brainwash a whole generation or two about its real intentions.

It has never been a patriotic front. The CPI was better. The CPI (M) became the real villain from day one. By a process of long-term suppression and oppression by the socio-economic forces we see today rural Bengal a pathetic picture of decay and demoralisation. For miles and miles you won’t see any sign of modernity. Except for the National Highways that run through the state you don’t find even a decent tea shop to stop and sit. The very many outfits you see dotted on the wayside are all so dirty and unhygienic that you have either to shut your eyes or prefer to drive on with a hungry stomach.

All these years, again by a process of sheer intellectual dishonesty or otherwise, the state’s many intellectuals who are all spread out in far off lands, in the USA or UK, from such mighty names like Amartya Sen to Suhgata Bose (a nephew of the great Nethaji Bose) have chosen to pursue their own career under some cushy surroundings, rather than take up arms on behalf of their poor Bengali brethren!
In a recent book I came to see how even Amartya Sen (I quote here just to show that if even Sen could dodge such sensitive issues, as he had done) then what chance is there for others to come out in the open. Mr.Uadayan Namboodiri, a journalist, has exposed the humbug (Bengal’s Night without End, India First Foundation,2006)that is both West Bengal government as well as the humbug that is the Bengali bhadralok hypocrisy.`

On page 420 of this book Mr.Namboodiri actually meets Sen and confronts him with some uncomfortable questions. Says he: “Amartya Sen is an embodiment of this denial system. No previous icon of the Bengali people Netahji, Tagore or Satyajit Ray moved millions by their work but Sen is read by few and understood by fewer”. When he won the Nobel Prize for Economics in 1998, he became known and the Marxists who suddenly found a kindred soul in Sen and the Left found an organic relationship between their ideology and his theories. The author met Sen at a Seminar in New Delhi at Teen Murthy Bhavan and the subject was riot victims in Gujarat.” Nobel Prize or no Nobel Prixe, Sen was one of the most prominent cheerleaders of the Kolkatta Marxists. He was their greatest trump card and he fell in line whenever they were in desperate need of a favourable article on their rogue panchayats or phoney development model. He reminded me of Maxim Gorky, that intellectual whore who had even visited a gulag at Stalin’s invitation and returned to praise the excellent conditions under which dissenters were housed”(page 421).
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And a Chinese scholar who hasn’t visited India to lead the research team?

Oxford University is doing some innovative programmes on India, it seems. We should wlecome it in India for such innovative programmes, planned and run from far off, from a vantage academic background must surely give us, in India in particular some rare insights.

First, the programme. It is named after an Indian academic, Sanjay Loll who worked at Merton College and he is supposed to be an expert on Indian development and globalization challenges. Fine.

Now, the head of the team chosen for the Indian programme is a Chinese academic, Xiaolan Fu, a Chinese Indologist who was trained under an Indian economist but who hasnt yet seen India. The progamme is too mouthful, Programme for Technology and Management for Development. Rather too many issues, into too narrow a focus, we feel.

And, another topic thrown in is the “digital divide”! What is this? Someone must have got this idea by reading nor even closely looking at India’s emergence as a software giant? It looks like that.

First, the digital divide is not such a big divide as on date. The “e-service for farmers” is again a too early topic, we feel. We, at Vadamalai Media are working at such an issue for long. So, we must be knowing! Agriculture is  also a vast and also a complex issue if we are to bring in the “e-service”. “E-governance”, yes, is a greater and a more relevant issue at the moment and the TCS is doing a programme.

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Not long ago on a visit to Delhi, I chanced upon Jaswant Singh, the former foreign minister under Vajpayee at the India International Centre, on the Lodi Road. It was nice to see a very urbane and erudite man, I thought. I had read his books, the latest being his deeply moving autobiography and I said so to him.

I don’t know whether I had praised him sky-high or offended him when I said: “You first chapter is a minor classic, worth prescribing as a text for students. While the rest seemed to have just assembled into a book form”. Anyway, a gentleman he is he was courteousness personified and he acknowledged my opinion so graciously and I would always be thankful for such a personality.

Yes, I  had first heard of him from my long time friend, the late Romesh Thapar, the founder of Seminar monthly and though Jaswant Singh belongs to the BJP I always thought he was different and an asset to the party whose many basic premises are still causing concern for all enlightened  people.

So, I now read in the newspapers that at a recent national executive of the party its president, Rajnath Singh gave a new meaning (or new meaninglessness?) to the interpretation of secularism in our Constitution. Thank god, the BJP president doesn’t speak English, I bemoaned!

If he did, then it must have given rise to a first class ugliness to the otherwise Queen’s tongue. So, I ignored what the BJP president said when he gave a new interpretation. Mercifully, it was in Hindi, I presumed it was a bit Sanskritised Hindi! The more the better for ignoring it.

But can I do the same when our respected friend, Jaswant Singh, put a gloss to what the BJP president did when he (Jaswant Singh) said that “sanathana dharma” is secularism!
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India must have its own well-defined foreign policy!
India must have its own well-defined self-perception!

China will always be our troublesome neighbour and big brother
Mr.Pranab Mukerjee, our foreign minister made a recent visit to China. What did he do there and what did he achieve?

Not much. There are criticisms in the press that he went almost uninvited and in a way snubbed by his hosts, the Chinese Premier absented himself for four days when Mukerjee was there and in fact, the foreign minister had to put up with some more new demands from his Chinese hosts about claims to Indian territory, this time territory in Sikkim! Yes, there are Chinese incursions in recent times, they are increasing all along the long border and also the Chinese don’t seem to care to be polite with its neighbour or don’t seem to display any long-term thinking in dealing with India.

Unfortunately, our government can’t do anything; almost we have kept quiet and don’t seem to take any initiative except to some polite diplomatic claims that are, said to be misleading.

Only one senior Indian leader, George Fernandes, has been quite outspoken, calling China India’s number one enemy!

Unfortunately, even China seems to think that the Indian government under Dr.Singh is the weakest, so it doesn’t care a damn.

There are now new books on the rise of Asian countries. Even some fancy talk like “de-Westernisation” is taking place! One Singaporean diplomat and academic Kishore Mahbubani, once president of the Un Security Council, has lots of new things to say. This he said in a new book and also in a discussion on the BBC. Much of what he says is admirable and must kindle the pride of Asians like us.
But on a closer reading there are certain aspects which might not appeal to India. One significant point that won’t go down well with Indians is the argument that we, Asians needn’t accept the Western conception of democracy and freedom. Also, he quotes, more than once the Chinese leader Deng and also others to say that it is “myth of Western Superiority”. This is a bit to go off track.

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