Modi: India, Indians and its economy

The new idea of India is here. The 2014 Lok Sabha elections have really changed many usual musings of social scientists in India and abroad, of course for the betterment of India and Indians. During the announcements of the elections results its always very interesting to listen people who have bothered to utter something before the elections and now match with the change if their mind and muddles.

Here are the reactions of some liberals in India:

Towards Economic Freedom

Seven Thoughts on Modi’s Mandate

Modi’s moment alone

The dying light of freedom

We are moving beyond the politics of social arithmetic

What has nearly ended is communist politics. The Left parties managed to obtain only 10 seats, half their 2009 number, and ended their masquerade as a national party.

Congressmen such as Gokhale, Gandhi, Nehru and Patel took the party (and country) beyond sectarian divides

Let's READ them now!

Free of political dynasties and caste-based legacies The big joker........Mani Shankar Aiyar

Its too good to loose and still be stupid!

Its all about AAP and BJP

Not just Article 370 but all such special status articles must go

"shake off the looming institutional crisis"

"The prime minister is honest, we will hear. But never before has someone been so thoroughly compromised through abdication. Sonia Gandhi stands for the poor. Never before have the poor been so brazenly used to cover a multitude of sins; and never before has so much emphasis been on policy that will condemn the poor to poverty." More here.

"a country with the oldest stock exchange in Asia but at the earlier stages of economic reform; perhaps the only nation to grant complete political freedom to its citizens but little economic freedom"

"Keynes himself was to a large extent responsible for giving this criticism of his work currency"

"So long as the central government continues to rely on mutually insulated bureaucratic silos, which prevent the convergence of more than 150 centrally sponsored schemes, and the Planning Commission fails to enforce its own circulars and manuals for planning, there can be no participation of people in programmes meant for their welfare development."

Blinking links

school talk is often just an oblique way of hinting at pedigree

Basic knowledge of economics has become a prerequisite to enter any sector of the economy

"Last year I wrote, “... the seas east of Singapore hold the key to the lands west of the Indus.” I should have added that the rules made on the banks of the Yamuna hold the keys to those seas."

"Between them Pranab Mukherjee, Manmohan Singh and P Chidambaram have presented 18 of the past 30 budgets. The UPA also has in its Cabinet nine former chief ministers of whom four are two-time chief ministers. This Government has set up over 90 committees, so there is no dearth of ideas either. Which begs the question why the UPA cannot get its act together on fixing inflation that has dogged voters and the economy since 2004?"

Measure growth at individual level

Mani Shankar Aiyar writes: 

• ...........at a function where S Tendulkar the Chief Economic Advisor to the Prime Minister, drew attention to the Presidential Address of Simon Kuznets - the greatest authority the world has ever seen on national income - to the American Economic Association, where he said, “…all growths lead to widening inequality and therefore the higher the growth rate the wider is the chasm that grows between the better off and less well off.” He argued that this inequality does not amount to any lack of equity because the processes of growth raise the living standards of all. I think, statistically it is impossible to deny this. The only thing is that it does not apply to any one generation of people. It takes 250 years in historical terms for levels of living to be raised in society as a whole to render questions of inequality as being beyond the pale of democratic politics. 

• In India we ought to recognize that we are doing something that is historically without precedent: creating a full-fledged democracy before embarking on the processes of growth. In the USA, the constitution proclaimed the right of all to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness but denied it to those who were the indigenous people of the USA. Perhaps some of the worst expropriations of other peoples land without the payment of any compensation and with death inflicted as punishment for refusing to part with land was in the same USA. It was quite late that the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness was in theory granted to an entire people who had been stolen from another continent and transported across the Atlantic Sea to provide the manpower for the economic development of North America. After the proclamation of the emancipation of the slaves in 1863, it then took another 101 years till 1964 for the Civil Rights Bills to be passed to enable the American Black to enjoy the same civic political rights as others in his country.

• In the United Kingdom, democracy took approximately 1,000 years to evolve from being a matter of the rights of the Barons vis-à-vis the King which is what the Magna Carta was about, to women getting the Right to Vote in 1928. In France, they had a revolution in the name of ‘liberty, equality, fraternity’ and because fraternity means fraternal relations between brothers, half the population of France - the women - did not get the vote until after Hitler had been defeated in 1945. It is not surprising that the first feminist was a French woman called Simone De Beauvoir and her most celebrated book is called the ‘Second Sex’. Trade union rights, which are a phenomenon of the second or third century of the industrial revolution in developed democracies, had been enshrined in our Constitution and our law approximately 25 years before we even began our industrial revolution. So, as a result of 60 years and more of unbridled democracy, we have created a class consciousness among people that doesn’t require a dictatorship of the proletarian. These people, who have exercised political rights, are today asking themselves increasingly the question ‘what is in it for us’? What profits us if Bangalore becomes the IT capital of the world? What profits us if in pharmaceuticals the Indian industry is unbeatable? Curiously, the question becomes more and more serious as you go down the social hierarchy for it is by the most poor, the most deprived, the most exploited and the most discriminated-against segment of the Indian population, namely the tribals, that this very disturbing question is being put to the Indian State.

Manis mantra: “uninterrupted and uninterruptible dialogue”

• Should the Pakistan government assist the Indian government in this manner to return to the negotiating table, then the first task would be to consolidate the gains of the 13-year old Composite Dialogue. Irrespective of whether progress on the back-channel is acknowledged or not, the official position of the two governments has grown so much closer to each other's than ever before that even by returning to the front table and taking up each component of the Composite Dialogue, including, above all, issues related to Jammu & Kashmir, we could dramatically alter the atmosphere in which to pursue the outstanding matters.

• In such a changed atmosphere, it would be essential to immediately move to the next phase of what I hope and pray will be an “uninterrupted and uninterruptible” dialogue. Let me place before you, in outline, what I envisage as the essential elements to be structured into an “uninterrupted and uninterruptible” dialogue: One, the venue must be such that neither India nor Pakistan can forestall the dialogue from taking place. Following the example of the supervision of the armistice in Korea at Panmunjom for more than half a century, such a venue might best be the Wagah-Attari border, where the table is laid across the border, so that the Pakistan delegation does not have to leave Pakistan to attend the dialogue and the Indians do not have to leave India to attend.

• Two, as in the case of the talks at the Hotel Majestic in Paris which brought the U.S.-Vietnam war to an end, there must be a fixed periodicity at which the two sides shall necessarily meet. In the Hotel Majestic case, the two sides met every Thursday, whether or not they had anything to say to each other. Indeed, even through the worst of what were called the “Christmas bombings” — when more bombs were rained on Vietnam than by both sides in the Second World War — the Thursday meetings were not disrupted. In a similar manner, we need to inure the India-Pakistan dialogue from disruption of any kind in this manner.

(From Way forward in India-Pakistan relations by Mr.Mani Shankar Aiyar)

Boliticos: Dirty learning or dirtily doing?

From Shekhar Gupta’s Dirty Business:

• Those running the three main chambers — CII, FICCI and Assocham — would never admit it, but their power is now at its lowest point since 1991. The prime minister rarely, if ever, talks to corporate India. Government representation at the CII-World Economic Forum annual showpiece, the India Economic Summit, has rapidly declined over the UPA’s six years. In fact, the edition last month was the poorest of all. The prime minister of course gave it a pass; Pranab Mukherjee made a brief visit to speak in his stead, and then most of the top ministers stayed away. This year’s summit had probably the poorest levels of interest ever, sometimes presenting empty halls to reasonably serious panels. Similarly, under the UPA, official Indian representation at Davos has steadily declined. At the January 2011 Davos conference India is again the theme, for a rare second time in five years; and yet CII and the World Economic Forum are struggling to get senior ministers to represent the government. It is a strange paradox: 

• And this when almost everyone, from Raghuram Rajan to The Economist to Newsweek rank crony capitalism as the biggest threat to the India story. 

• India’s new billionaires come not from conventional manufacturing, IT or finance businesses, but from infrastructure, real estate and mining, where the state — and politicians — still hold arbitrary powers and, therefore, arbitrage. One land deal can produce more money than a dozen top members of India Inc, so why bother about them any more? This is the economic reason why corporate India feels so lost now. The political reason is simple. It is rooted in the Congress party’s faulty reading of the 2004 verdict as being against the BJP’s India Shining, and therefore against anything and anybody that represents that “fraudulent” idea. The logic being: poor farmers vote us to power, not fund managers. The question we need to ask is: what goodies can you take to the poor farmer, what rights to food, jobs, education, loan waivers if corporate India is not giving you growth, taxes, fiscal space, millions of new jobs? The top leadership of the Congress has to rectify this. It cannot take growth for granted. Particularly not when, disillusioned with policy flip-flops and fearful of a new backlash from New Delhi’s dreaded and now rejuvenated Bhavans, the biggest and finest Indian entrepreneurs are now moving their investments overseas. Tata now has nearly 60 per cent of his turnover overseas; almost all of Mukesh Ambani’s big investments over the next decade ($12 billion) are committed to America. Aditya Birla, Anand Mahindra, Essar, Bharti, are all looking outwards. It would be perilously complacent to mistake this flight of capital for globalisation of Indian enterprise. This is more a case of traditional corporates voting with their feet while the new billionaires of the crony capitalism of land-natural resources-politics get entrenched, hand-in-glove with the many Rajas of our scary new politics.

I do not know how many of you read the Self-Marxist Mr.Aiyar’s 1997 article. If not do read it now. Of course the motive writing of all these stories, yet merely stories have their own motives and purposes. I am posting some excerpts (it’s a must read one!!) from his article:

• We now have a tricameral legislature: the Lok Sabha, the Rajya Sabha and the Confederation of Indian Industry. So it was entirely proper for Inder Kumar Gujral to have sought a vote of confidence from the CII before submitting himself to the House of the People. He was merely acknowledging the growing role of the business lobby in determining the nation's destiny.

• The business politicos (or boliticos, if I may coin a term), like their counterparts in the real game of politics, are a divided lot. They hide their identity behind a welter of acronyms leaving the layman (that is, you and me, dear reader) a little perplexed about who they are, what they stand for, and what distinguishes the one from the other.

• There are three main business lobbies: CII, ASSOCHAM and FICCI. You know what CII stands for. ASSOCHAM is the Associated Chambers of Commerce, and FICCI is the Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industry.

• What distinguishes one from the other is not that one is a confederation, the other no more than a federation, and the third a mere association. The rift runs deeper. CII speaks English, ASSOCHAM Indish while FICCI speaks Marwari. (ASSOCHAM also speaks ZEEndi).

• CII went to Harvard; ASSOCHAM stayed at home; FICCI believes degrees are superfluous since accounts are to be carried not digitally but in the head.

• CII uses state-of-the-art computers; ASSOCHAM uses state-of-the-mart typewriters; FICCI makes do with khatas.

• CII wears designer suits; ASSOCHAM wears patriotic bandgalas; FICCI wears dhotis, tucking most of it, like their accounts, out of sight.

• FICCI is Indian in origin. ASSOCHAM was British until the Brits went away. And CII has completed the voyage begun by Christopher Columbus in 1492. Five hundred years late, the Americans have found, through the CII, the route to India -- or, at least, the route to CII.

• As a 60s socialist, I learned to see the CIA's hand in everything. As a 90s socialist, I am learning to see the CII's hand in everything. CIA stands for Central Intelligence Agency. CII stands for Chidambaram's India Inc.

• What unites all three is that they believe the business of business is the business of the nation. CII is downright ashamed of the state of the nation. FICCI funded the freedom struggle and is vaguely proud of it. ASSOCHAM is still making up its mind.

• Therefore, it is the CII which is the favoured son of the first finance minister we have ever had who is ashamed of his nation. Our twice-born finance minister chose the very month in which India should have been (but was not) celebrating the first Asian Relations Conference convention in New Delhi (March, 1947) to announce his life ambition of making India Asian!

• Hacks being hacks, and as such made up, for the most part, of chaps who failed to get clerical jobs at FICCI, perhaps misheard ASEAN as Asian -- I don't know. At any rate, CII applauds the finance minister's decision to make India Asian or ASEAN, whatever, so long as he does not persist with the foolishness of keeping India Indian. They have no use for 5,000 years of identity. What they are looking for is cash in the till. And they have got themselves a finance minister who says he's gonna give it to them.

• Oh! he will, attaboy, he will. For, after all, he went to Harvard.

• "And how will he?" you, as a non-member of CII, ask.

I would have redesignated Manmohan Singh as Minister of Poverty Creation -That fateful midnight

Here in India, we did win the Independence. And this week we have entered the…………..years, after Independence, our country seems consumed by disillusionment over what we have done with Independence and doubt over what to do next. Where at the dawn of freedom there was a kind of national consensus on what we should do to build our modern nationhood, that consensus now lies fragmented. ………Freedom has been heralded with a fractured electoral verdict that has put ……..regional satraps at the helm of the nation. There is no government of the Union. Is this the tryst we sought with destiny when freedom came at midnight?

Wrote Mani Shankar Aiyar in 1996 in The Indian Express, and what a better time than this after the recent Bihar election and its No Proof Required failure of Congress Nut.

“Has the Congress outlived its utility? Is it in terminal decline? Should it be assisted to the grave?” asked Mr.Aiyar than and should ask now!! The very same questions!! Isn’t so?

And there are few senses and more of nonsense in rest of his article but it seems to be to me that he had feared the decline of Congress Nut what it now appears. What he concluded was the below.

“If the Congress is able to rejuvenate itself ideologically, the country will itself discover how much India needs the Congress; if we remain stuck in old grooves or abandon ideology for expediency then, perhaps, the fate of the Liberals will -- should? -- overtake us.”

"three dangers facing the people of India"

Is the “GDP, per capita growth rates and national poverty line” according to Congress Nut Leader and Socialist Politician.

And more:

• "GDP growth rate is no index of what is happening in our country. The per capita growth rate, derived from the GDP growth rate, is also a wholly, not inadequate, wholly misleading index of what is actually being attained in terms of progress by the people of India,"

• "designed to pull wool over your eyes because it gives them easy way of describing how poverty alleviation is taking place when in fact it's hardly, barely taking place".

• "real enemy of the Indian people" ……… "higher and yet higher GDP growth rates means an increasing squeezing out of national resources from areas where people needed to areas which will boost growth"

Political economics = boom boom shakalaka…..

Mani Shankar Aiyar on PESA: Government's sheathed weapon

Few excerpts:

• “To avoid making this an issue of Centre-state relations, all the National Development Council (NDC) has to do is take up the unanimous report of the Empowered Sub-Committee on Panchayati Raj submitted all of two years ago to an unbelieving Planning Commission which has refused these last 24 months to even bring the report to the NDC, largely because a sceptical deputy chairman cannot bring himself to believe that state governments would willingly commit themselves to the report's conclusions!

• Moreover, PESA had provided that within a year — that is, or was, by December 1997! — all legislation not in conformity with PESA be amended to bring it in line with PESA provisions (in letter, of course, but also in spirit).

• This could broadly be interpreted to mean that the two principal colonial causes of tribal disaffection — the failure to recognise community propriety rights over land of tribal communities in the Indian Forests Act, 1927 and the many glaring oppressive features of the 19th century Land Acquisition Act — could and should be amended to bring them in line with the letter and spirit of PESA which stresses the role of the tribal community in matters affecting the land they live on and the duty of gram sabhas in Fifth Schedule areas to ensure that tribal land is not alienated except with their consent.

• While “consultation” with gram sabhas is mandatory only with regard to “minor” mineral and forest produce, the right to prevent alienation of tribal land without due consent clearly means that POSCO, NDMC and other corporate predators cannot make free with other people's property and certainly not in collaboration with state agencies, as is clearly happening.”

Life, Ideas, Belief and Preach (LIBP)

In the course of learning I have learned to muse about the uncommon ideas, unfolding belief and pundits preach in public life.

Life is a two parts one is private another one is public yet there is no concrete separate line between these two.

However, many the so called adult pundits believe and preach in different ways. They are three ways at least to my mind:

• First, people who learn the ideas and analysis it and thought through in depth and believe it then preach in appropriate way without vulgar words,
• Secondly, people who learn the ideas and never analyse independently nor thought through in deep sense but mistakenly believe in it and preach always,
• Thirdly, people who learn the ideas and analyse it and thought through it squarely and believe in it but preach way of their believed ideas.

The starting point of my learning is the nature which is as great place to learn as well as a dangerous one mislead you.

Let’s turn why I write these ideas.

‘Every political life ends in failure’ says Mani Shankar Aiyer in a interview to the Indian Express. He was defeated in the 15^th General Election. To my mind he is good learner and believer and wrong preacher. Further, he says “I got exposed to Karl Marx and was very impressed with his value system, which said “from each according to his ability and to each according to his need”. It seemed to me a far greater spiritual injunction than the ten commandments. I could not see how believing in unreason could be reconciled with unscientific beliefs.”

More importantly and interestingly he agrees and believes that “the only pro-American element in my whole being is that I agree with them when they say that happiness lies in the pursuit of happiness. The pursuit of happiness is the purpose of life. And happiness is about successfully overcoming challenges.”

The rest is history but if you are a regular reader of his writings you can guess what I trying to say.

The silent Women revolution in India is they?

Mani Shankar Aiyar says “Over 40% women in local self government reflects a silent revolution in India”

Then what is striking was “As many as 58 percent of the women representatives are now taking their own decisions to contest elections. 60% of the women respondents said they faced no gender discrimination in their work. 60-64% said their interaction with local officials had significantly increased since their election. And as many as 94% said they found no restrictions on their raising issues and making their comments in meetings of the local bodies and the Parliament of the People”.