Cannon-Fodder Raj

Cannon-Fodder Raj: The Treason of the Learned

In the outpouring of anguish and anger, now that Islamic terrorists have struck at the iconic and internationally interesting five-star restaurants, lounges and bedrooms of the powerful; a significant dogma of the Liberal and the Left has still been left intact.

This is not surprising, because the same dogma has been promoted relentlessly, and been taken advantage of, by, among others, Pakistani and Bangladeshi terrorist organisations and their local supporters over nearly five bloody years of UPA rule.

When Osama Bin Laden, the global Grand Master of terrorism, declared that America and its NATO Allies, Israel and India were the principal enemies of the Islamic World, it was perhaps inevitable that only India, with its innate callousness, would not take the threat seriously and stay vulnerable, even in the face of near continuous attack.

But the key reason for this disgraceful vulnerability is not gross intelligence failure, sluggish response, logistical inadequacy, ill-equipped constabulary or a less than high-tech armed force, but that same debilitating dogma that saps our political will. And in a functioning democracy, political will is of paramount importance. It is political will and firm direction that has kept terrorist strikes in the singular-and-never-again category in the UK and America. And it is the lack of this self-same political will that is responsible for the frequent gouging of India’s soft underbelly.

That dogma is the notion that the porous national security situation is a fair consequence of a bungled “heart and minds” matter at the root. Therefore, Islamic terror is, understandably, its natural consequence. Ergo, Islamic terror cannot rightfully end until the hearts and minds of brazen and perverse killers, ignorant, near illiterate adherents of medieval madrassa-fed shibboleths, and their supporters, as well as the much-deprived community they belong to; is assuaged.

Thus, implies this particular Lib-Left dogma, if we, the rest of the Indian people, want to live in peace, we must appease and satisfy our tormentors. And the preferences shown and affirmative actions taken are no more than reparations for the original stack of sins of design, omission and commission.

And, say this dogma’s adherents, similar wrong-doings need to be made good by the international community too. That is why they have been specifically targeted in this latest instance. That is why Israelis, British, Americans, other Europeans, the Japanese, Australians were killed and maimed for drawing closer to India.

But the West is not sentimental at the expense of its security. For it, one attack is more than enough. It is not confused about the difference between ordinary, law-abiding Muslims and the Islamic Jihadi, who must, of course, be neutralised. And to make this distinction between wheat and chaff, it does not hesitate to suspend certain civil liberties, including very strong preventive detention and interrogation practices. It does not consider aggressive monitoring of all affairs Islamic intrusive, and swiftly applies the fullest penal rigours of its laws where necessary.

But India, particularly a ruling alliance seen to be largely dependant on Muslim vote banks, including those created by the infusion of illegal Bangladeshi immigrants, and a country that allows the Indian Muslim to live outside the embrace of a uniform civil code, clearly is confused when it comes to the imperatives of national security.

Nevertheless, this must be why Prime Minister Manmohan Singh announced with ringing clarity that India’s largest minority had the first right to the nation’s developmental resources. He did not see the irony or the unfairness in his pronouncement even if most Indian Muslims are both poor and uneducated, because, naturally, there are others too. And that must also be why the Lib-Left intelligentsia that supports the UPA alliance, conveniently expects, quite without basis, the new African-American president-elect of the United States, born to a Muslim father, to take a soft line on the “root causes of terror”.

The UPA version of twisted reality demands all Indians to shoulder their responsibility towards this permanently aggrieved minority community, even as it harbours, aids, abets and cheers terrorism in mosque, chaupal and home alike. We should simply mop up the blood of innocents, bury and cremate the dead, mouth platitudes for those martyred in our defence, used up like so much cannon-fodder, and then return to normality without demur. And wait for the next round of retribution from justifiably angry Jihadis.

This kind of apologist thinking is what the French call “la trahison des clercs” or the treason of the learned. It is a dangerous conceit that has positioned this country on the edge of the precipice. It threatens to destroy the morale of the bureaucracy and a unified military, para-military and police force. It divides us with its injustices and political calculations. We are so ill-governed that we can be roiled by less than a score of well indoctrinated and trained teenagers on the ground and their controllers in Karachi..

In the aftermath, scapegoats in the form of the Home Minister, the National Security Adviser and the Maharashtra Chief Minister are in the process of being offered up in this current season of ongoing Assembly and forthcoming General Elections. Their successors, such as they are, can hardly do worse.

But as for getting tough with Pakistan, nothing the UPA does is likely to be even remotely retaliatory. Because short of conventional warfare, despite the mayhem routinely caused here by the ISI and its cohorts, India simply has no covert strike capabilities extant.

But we may have to lose our innocence after all. The oft quoted “secular” narrative, said to be at the core of the very idea of India, needs to be updated. The Congress Party was formed to secure Indian independence, but as a unified, multi-ethnic, multi-religious country. The formation of Islamist Pakistan simultaneously was its first failure, acknowledged by no less a personality than Mahatma Gandhi. Later, the gratuitous liberation of Islamist Bangladesh also went badly. And now, self-serving dogma or not, it is clearly futile to fly in the face of a Jihadi menace. Being deliberately soft on terrorism makes no sense.

It is time to end this Cannon-fodder Raj that uses up its heroes to no purpose. It is time to hit back hard with the requisite political will. And if the UPA does not have a stomach for this fight, it might have to be replaced by those who do.

(1,050 words)

30^th November 2008

Gautam Mukherjee

Published in The Pioneer as "Treason of the learned" on the OP-ED Page on Tuesday, December 2,2008 and online at www.dailypioneer.com. Also archived at www.dailypioneer.com under Columnists.

Of Free Lunches and Dutch Uncles

Of Free Lunches and Dutch Uncles

On Indian television recently, the venerable Mr. Henry Kissinger was asked if he saw the possibility of America ceding power to Asia in deciding matters of global finance. The News Channel interviewing Kissinger alluded to the manner in which old Europe ceded substantial decision-making power to America after World War II. Kissinger blandly replied that if India, or China, or indeed all of Asia, are able to do for America what America did for Europe during and after the War, then the answer would be yes.

But, as the saying goes, there are no free lunches. Even if there are indeed times you really can’t pay for lunch. So what if the meals cost rather more in the end? Dire straights give you a ferocious focus on essentials. Particularly, when even going Dutch is a no-can-do. And tough, advice-giving Dutch Uncles smoking Meerschaum pipes are anyway hard to come by. But thankfully, they’ve metamorphosed, like Kafka’s spider, into paternalistic governments instead.

Governments are today’s institutionally constituted mater and pater familias. They can feed you for sustained periods with their inexhaustible pantries and indefatigable kitchens. They have their social securities, doles, free medical schemes, subsidies, and occasionally, loan waivers too. And the full-bellied you can go about minus that squirmy sense of obligation or guilt. After all, it has generally been the other way around. The Government fed off you. You paid your taxes, direct and indirect, but it was the Hukumat that gave the orders, and you did the obeying. So now if it takes care of a mountain of your bills gone bad, why worry?

As things unfold home and abroad, it is evident that it will take trillions and trillions of US dollars to take up the slack from a stack of financial and real economies de-leveraging from multiples of forty and even seventy. This puts this money game outside the scope of private players. You need the ability to lend and issue credits against sovereign guarantees, the ability to grow your deficits as necessary, and the keys to the country’s legitimate currency presses, to deal with this.

And if this fever is to break, we all have to set to. All governments must pump-prime every enterprise and institution in need of funds. The action cannot falter or grow weary. But still, there is no need to feel cheated. The governments don’t have to give anything away to floundering corporations, mountebanking banks and swindling insurance companies. They can requisition, take-over and nationalise instead. They can kick out failed managements to the general applause of the humble. They can nurse what they’ve bought on-the-cheap back to health. They can use altogether different sets of honest drivers. Later, when all is well, they can sell off the fattened calves to new owners at a substantial profit.

President-elect Obama has already said he will do “whatever it takes” for the economy. It is fortunate, given the circumstances, that Mr. Obama is a Democrat. And with a Democratic Party majority in Congress and a near majority in the Senate, and an aggressive Chief of Staff in Mr. Rahm Emmanuel, Mr. Obama should indeed be able to move swiftly and surely after his inauguration on January 20th 2009.

But the real restructuring will take much more time. Take for instance the fact that General Motors already has USD 48 billion in debt even as it asked for a USD 25 billion bailout. It is widely known that without radical surgery and brutal changes, General Motors cannot survive anyway. That they have been sent packing to rework their pitch is entirely to the Bush government’s credit.

Meanwhile, China, has smartly announced a fiscal stimulus of about USD 600 billion. All of it to be spent on its domestic infrastructure in the next two years to hold the economy steady at 8 per cent growth, in place of the erstwhile double digits. India too hopes to grow its economy at between 6 and 8 per cent in this fiscal and the next, the projections based overwhelmingly on its domestic consumption and on the strength of its infrastructure building. That is what makes them realistic on the one hand. But India, on its own, does not have the resources for its infrastructure build-up, estimated at a minimum of USD 500 billion, and is staring at substantial back-sliding, without outside financing.

In any case, India and China cannot, as Mr. Kissinger pointed out, rescue America, Europe, Japan and the others from their recessions. But in a world of economies posting minus growth figures, they do stand out, and can be of help. Brazil and Russia, the other major emerging nations, could also make a contribution. David Rothkof, a visiting scholar at the Carnegie Endowment, says a full 75 per cent of growth in 2009 will come from the BRIC countries.

India and China can make their infrastructure development plans inclusive and open their doors to imports of infrastructure-building materials and machinery. India could, in addition, accelerate its civilian nuclear programme and its defence purchases, thereby boosting American, European, Israeli, Australian, Japanese and even Russian exports, while securing much tied credit and finance via US influence at the World Bank and the IMF and those of the Japanese and others at other lending agencies.

India could also encourage urgent foreign direct investment in its road, power, port, petroleum exploration, space programme development, climate control initiatives, and even railway modernisation and development; but without the red tape and suspicion that have always marked our dealings with others.

Note that we could put the Arabs also in as partners, because, notwithstanding their well capitalised Sovereign Funds looking for lucrative investments, they have money going forward too. Because, even at USD 50 per barrel of crude oil says McKinsey, The Gulf will collectively earn USD 4.7 trillion every year from now till 2020.

Bottom-line: we have a chance, as the second largest growth story in the world after China, to make a difference both to ourselves and others at this time. If we take it, we might truly earn a bigger say on the Boards of the IMF and the World Bank and even get ourselves a Security Council Seat at the UN. And all of this while truly growing at the 9 and 10 per cent per annum that we routinely dream about these days.

(1,055 words)

21st November 2008
Gautam Mukherjee

Published in The Pioneer as "Bailing out the rich" on Tuesday, November 25th, 2008 on the OP-Ed Page and online at www.dailypioneer.com. Also archived under Columnists at www.dailypioneer.com

Wish I had his money

Wish I had his money

There’s a 21st century trendiness to this latest economic crisis that all the reams of analysis seems to have ignored. It is about the preference for the fashionably chimerical presence of the straw house that one can actually huff and puff and blow right down. It is also known as a financial economy, divorced from demand and supply economics, grown globally to be many times the size of the real one. In America, it was a holographic forty times the size of the real economy till recently, puffed up on borrowed money.

It makes the solidity of the old brick and mortar real construct look positively prehistoric on a good day when it is delivering bumper returns, even though such a day may now be a long time coming.

John Lennon, during the eight, largely private years in New York, living in the very solid, very Gothic Dakota Building, used to take his young son Sean out on walks. They would go to the park and play-ground, to eat ice cream, to the shops, just like any other regular father and son. If anybody recognised the ex-Beatle, telling him he looked like John Lennon, he would always reply, “I wish I had his money”, garnishing the remark with a suitable leer.

There’s universality in that thought, like a lot of Lennon’s thoughts, and transference too. But it is an old fashioned, working class, everyman-must-work-for-his-pay notion from a more innocent world that has been given a go by for some time now.

In the 21st century, and more so lately, the financial wizards have shown the world that you don’t really need to have money to spend money. You merely borrow it. And in case being spendthrift is not your pleasure, you can build assets with borrowed money too. But it’s not “Go West Young Man” or East, or to The Gulf, or Bollywood, to “make your fortune”, as one did in the 20th C. It’s learn “leverage” instead. The basic point being that you don’t have to hold back your ambitions and their gratification just because you can’t afford them.

When individuals borrow, they sign papers labelled “credit” or “loan” or “mortgage”. When banks do it and take risky bets with the proceeds, it’s called “investment banking”. When companies do it, and apply it to expansion of capacity or to buy another company, it’s called “growth”, both “organic” and “inorganic”, and there are experts in mergers, acquisitions, bridge-financing, long-term financing, initial public offerings, private equity and so on, to help them do it. And when countries do it, using the proceeds on anything the politicians deem fit, but hopefully spending at least some of it on public works, it’s called “deficit financing”.

But, all of it predicates on the earnings of the morrow in advance, and is conjoined at the hip in a daisy chain of debt. So the individual borrower and the sovereign are connected in their owing, often reckoned and trotted out on digital tickertape that announces the national debt per every individual in the nation in a minute to minute fashion.

And the tickertape tab doesn’t even include the individual’s personal debt, nor the global interfaces of debt in a shrinking world. But real experts, worth their mounds of considerable salt, count their expertise in the sheer amounts of borrowed money they can generate.

And the inevitably sad fact of it is, not everyone who borrows has the resources to pay the instalments due, let alone the entire sum borrowed. In hindsight it becomes clear that neither should such people borrow, nor should they be lent to. But, whom do you blame and how does the blame game help you make recoveries when it comes down to it?

So inevitably, some profligate individuals go under, financially speaking, insolvent but largely unrepentant, because insolvency is essentially sympathised with, at the individual level, and not treated as that much of an offence, let alone a crime. Witness the court restraints on debt recovery agent bullying.

But the mood changes to outrage when viewing the institutional level because the problem does not stop at the collective, only becomes very much bigger. Highly trusted and respectable banks and mortgage companies also default on their debts. But more often than not, they qualify for rescue and are often deemed too big to “fail”.

And sometimes, incredibly, it applies also to little fishing and farming countries like Iceland, population 300,000, gone wild in a multiple year orgy of borrow and spend, before going bankrupt.

Such current economic horror stories from around the world may not be India’s fate but they have exposed our woeful lack of room to manoeuvre because India too is struggling with a huge current account and fiscal deficit hovering at the 10 per cent of GDP mark from years of refusing to balance its books. So, if we weren’t growing, we’d be sunk.

It makes it all the more ironic because till the other day this present government was doing everything it could to curb this very growth in an attempt to rein in the runaway inflation, brought on, not by our growth but imported via high oil prices of a few months ago.

But as we slow down, with companies sacking staff and staggering production, we have very little money to throw at our problems. And, the frantic loosening of our monetary stays will take some months before they show favourable results. We cannot use the stock markets either because, in the global mayhem and sharp FII withdrawal of resources, our financial markets have shrunk to half as big as our real economy.

China is using her considerable reserves of over a trillion US dollars to stimulate its domestic economy by building up its infrastructure. They are throwing half of it into the fray. India’s rulers are contenting themselves with reassurances that they will do “the needful as and when needed” with their usual flair for inanity. But what might that be? Do we use our 250 billion US dollar reserves to prop up our imports or to provide fiscal stimulus to infrastructure? Like John Lennon masquerading as a man in a street, our powers that be must be wishing that that they had Hu’s money- that’s President Hu Jintao to you, and please don’t go writing him a letter like Aravind Adiga.

(1,055 words)

12th November 2008
Gautam Mukherjee

Published in The Pioneer on Monday, November 17th, 2008 as "You don't need money" on the OP-ED Page and online at www.dailypioneer.com. Also archived online under Columnists.

Lone Star in the rear-view mirror

Lone Star in the rear-view mirror



Barack Obama, just days before his landslide victory, said: “I’m trying to do this in an environment where the media narrative is already set up in a certain way. So it is hard not to be dropped into a box.” In the end, Barack Obama managed to get out of that restrictive box to become the 44th president of the United States.

Calling the outgoing President George W Bush facile neocon names would also be such unfortunate pigeonholing. It is unfair to a man who had the courage to take bold decisions and take the flak for them. So let’s see him another way. It is George W Bush, looking shy, with a ploughshare over his right shoulder in classic ryot/rakhal fashion. It was taken at an Andhra Agricultural University when he visited in March 2006. Why the newspaper put it in, next to one of actor Josh Brolin, as the about-to-be-released “W”, is something to ponder.

Perhaps it is for the reader to sift fact from biopic. Or maybe it is to underline the glamorisation that a Brolin, looking tanned, tantalising and sinuously Hollywood, can bring to “W”. It is the story of George W Bush, the East Coast patrician camouflaged as an aw shucks Texan, who made so good that he stormed the citadel!

Brolin has an actor’s glamour and wears his Brioni with an élan that is unburdened by the cares of office. That kind of load might make a man a little stiff, put wrinkles on his forehead and snow on his roof. It would also probably have him wearing American, not Italian, for political correctness.

Which brings me once more to that blue-shirted picture of the original. It is similar to another blue- shirted picture, of Clinton, from his own presidential visit, with a tilak on his head, dancing with village women. Nothing came of that visit except goodwill atmospherics. Did he set the stage for the Bush tilt towards India? Very unlikely, because most American presidents can’t break away from orthodoxies of policy even though they have the most powerful job in the world. And it goes badly for them personally, if they do.

In Bush’s blue-shirted India smiley picture, maybe he’s thinking of all the seeds Americans can sell to our farmers. He is wearing a belt with a horse-shoe shaped buckle with a single star on it. It is from Texas, that belt, because Texas is known as the Lone Star State. But maybe that lone star describes Bush very well.

Oliver Stone, who directed the masterfully investigative JFK (1991), did not ask Bush before making “W”. Because, he too marches to his own drummer, much like his new subject. In JFK, he suggested a grand conspiracy, trashing the lone gunman acting alone conclusions of the Warren Commission and earned his share of controversy, but also a couple of Oscars.

And now, from all preview accounts, “W”, the film, is a sympathetic portrayal of a hard-Right President, intriguingly made by a Liberal, Left-leaning American Director. It is unusual also that Stone picked out his subject, a two-term president, still in office, albeit with less than a 100 days to go.

But then, “Dubya” is an unusual man. He started out as an East Coast “Yaley” and also earned an MBA at Harvard, irrefutable evidence that he is not dim. He was born into an illustrious political family in July 1946. His father, George Herbert Walker Bush, was CIA Chief, Vice-president under Ronald Reagan for his two terms, and then President on his own, for one.

But the early Dubya was famously unpromising. He failed as an Oil Man in Texas and was, at the time, a hard-boozing party animal. The turning point came when he went on to marry a quietly determined Librarian in 1978.Then began the transformation of George. He fathered twin daughters, found God as a born-again Christian, became a teetotaller, saved his teetering marriage, took to regular and strenuous exercise, and firmly turned the page on his life. He was about forty years of age. After that, he never looked back. He ran successfully for political office, becoming Governor of Texas for five years in 1995, and then President of the United States, for eight.

And as President, he wrote his own rules. It has been instructive to witness Dubya’s Wyatt Earp style. It is very much that of the Sheriff, wearing his star on his belt, but just as determined to rid “Dodge City” of all its “varmints”. He has been unilateral, pre-emptive, even imperial - unafraid to take the big decisions that cost him his popularity. But fortunately, he has no difficulty going it alone, even in the face of withering criticism. In time, Bush the Younger will go down in history for his “War on Terror”. And for his historic tilt towards India, which may turn out to be as significant as Nixon’s tilt towards China.

But Dubya seems immune to both 90 per cent domestic approval ratings (the highest ever), that he received at one point of his presidency, and 24 per cent (the lowest ever), at another. Undaunted, he speaks of “spending” his political capital to do what he feels he must. And he felt compelled to try and destroy Islamic militancy. He has certainly not succeeded in full measure, but he has set a security agenda that no successor can afford to ignore.

India, on its part, freely acknowledges its collective debt of gratitude for the exceptionalism of the civilian nuclear deal. We have recently given Dubya an approval rating of 66 per cent, and had our prime minister professing love for him in front of the world’s news cameras.

But soon it will be time for Bush to go. Dubya didn’t come to Washington from his beloved sage and brush farm at Crawford those eight years ago. He came from the Governor’s Mansion at Austin. But now, it is to Crawford he will go, and get on with his brush clearing, pond digging and his dirt-bike riding.

Sheriffs either die in gun battles on Main Street or ride off into the sunset. So, playing second fiddle at Charity or Commerce, or begging history for a favourable verdict wouldn’t do it for this Lone Star. But a little private time communing with his soul just might.

(1,054 words)

5th November 2008
Gautam Mukherjee

Published in The Pioneer as "Lone Ranger who did India well" as EDIT Page Leader on November 6th, 2008 and online at www.dailypioneer.com. Also archived there under "Columnists".