Take SOPA, the “Stop Online Piracy Act,” a bill introduced in the United States House of Representatives last October (and its counterpart bill in the US Senate, called “Protect IP Act”, PIPA.) They are supposed to protect intellectual property. But opponents to the bills argue that it will have a chilling effect on free speech, that it violates the First Amendment of the US constitution (which guarantees freedom of expression to US citizens and is the first of the Bill of Rights), and that it amounts to internet censorship.

To protest SOPA and PIPA (remember that they are bills and are not yet enacted into law), prominent groups and companies are planning on taking action. Google will have something on their main page; Wikipedia will be off-line for 24 hours on Jan 18th; reddit is going down for 12 hours to protest SOPA and PIPA. That all is going on in the US. What’s going on in India?

India is an interesting case. Like that of the US, the government of India depends on a compliant citizenry: people who do as they are told, and to shut up when they are told to STFU. Of course, this is not all that difficult since a majority of Indians have been brainwashed into the belief that the government is a benevolent agency — mai baap — which hands out goodies to favored groups and therefore has to be obeyed. The trouble is (from the government’s point of view) that some people are not very cooperative and insist on exposing the government’s lies. This simply would not do. These people write stuff and say things that could be damaging to the government’s case.

The government has a two-pronged approach to this problem. First, do something about the “demand side.” If people cannot read and write, they are unlikely to be exposed to the truth. The way is therefore to control the education sector and make it dysfunctional enough that even after more than 60 years post independence, about half a billion Indians are illiterate. Destroying the future of the people just to keep them in the dark is one of the greatest crimes that the governments of India have committed against India. The Congress party has directly and indirectly held the reins of government for around 50 years, and mass illiteracy is one of their enduring legacies.

The Indian government has censored news reports, banned books and movies, and made it illegal for people to discuss current affairs on radio. That’s what I call the “supply side” of the matter: make sure that the supply of information is limited to what the government likes. But then came the new threat: the internet and with it access to the world wide web of information.

As long as the internet was just text based, the government was not too worried. What scared them into action was that the internet became multi-media. Not just text, you could watch videos and listen to a variety of opinions, and you did not have to be literate to do so. That, as you can imagine, put a spanner in the carefully designed works of the government to keep the people uninformed through illiteracy.

So here we are. The country is being run by a bunch of crooks, headed nominally by the most despicably dishonest man, the appointed prime minister, Dr Manmohan Singh. His master is an Italian woman who rules her minions with an iron hand. Among her hand maidens is one Kapil Sibal, a man who is roundly despised and is perhaps a cretin. Sibal is in charge of internet censorship. He regularly tells internet firms to censor content that will damage the carefully built images of his master and her family.

The Center for Internet & Society has an informative article, “Invisible Censorship: How the Government Censors Without Being Seen” by Pranesh Prakash (dateline Dec 15, 2011.) Here’s an extended excerpt:

Government Has Powers to Censor and Already Censors

Currently, the government can either block content by using section 69A of the Information Technology Act (which can be revealed using RTI), or it has to send requests to the Internet companies to get content removed. Google has released statistics of government request for content removal as part of its Transparency Report. While Mr. Sibal uses the examples of communally sensitive material as a reason to force censorship of the Internet, out of the 358 items requested to be removed from January 2011 to June 2011 from Google service by the Indian government (including state governments), only 8 were for hate speech and only 1 was for national security. Instead, 255 items (71 per cent of all requests) were asked to be removed for ‘government criticism’. Google, despite the government in India not having the powers to ban government criticism due to the Constitution, complied in 51 per cent of all requests. That means they removed many instances of government criticism as well.

‘Self-Regulation’: Undetectable Censorship

Mr. Sibal’s more recent efforts at forcing major Internet companies such as Indiatimes, Facebook, Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft, to ’self-regulate’ reveals a desire to gain ever greater powers to bypass the IT Act when censoring Internet content that is ‘objectionable’ (to the government). Mr. Sibal also wants to avoid embarrassing statistics such as that revealed by Google’s Transparency Report. He wants Internet companies to ’self-regulate’ user-uploaded content, so that the government would never have to send these requests for removal in the first place, nor block sites officially using the IT Act. If the government was indeed sincere about its motives, it would not be talking about ‘transparency’ and ‘dialogue’ only after it was exposed in the press that the Department of Information Technology was holding secret talks with Internet companies. Given the clandestine manner in which it sought to bring about these new censorship measures, the motives of the government are suspect. Yet, both Mr. Sibal and Mr. Sachin Pilot have been insisting that the government has no plans of Internet censorship, and Mr. Pilot has made that statement officially in the Lok Sabha. This, thus seems to be an instance of censoring without censorship.

Backdoor Censorship through Copyright Act

Further, since the government cannot bring about censorship laws in a straightforward manner, they are trying to do so surreptitiously, through the back door. Mr. Sibal’s latest proposed amendment to the Copyright Act, which is before the Rajya Sabha right now, has a provision called section 52(1)(c) by which anyone can send a notice complaining about infringement of his copyright. The Internet company will have to remove the content immediately without question, even if the notice is false or malicious. The sender of false or malicious notices is not penalized. But the Internet company will be penalized if it doesn’t remove the content that has been complained about. The complaint need not even be shown to be true before the content is removed. Indeed, anyone can complain about any content, without even having to show that they own the rights to that content. The government seems to be keen to have the power to remove content from the Internet without following any ‘due process’ or fair procedure. Indeed, it not only wants to give itself this power, but it is keen on giving all individuals this power.

So what are we going to do about it? We, if we care, should make sure that Manmohan Singh and his cohorts like Kapil Sibal, and their master the Italian Antonia Maino aka Sonia Gandhi, and her puppy are stopped from destroying the nation. Let’s vote them out.

• First Basic Law: Always and inevitably everyone underestimates the number of stupid individuals in circulation.
• Second Basic Law: The probability that a certain person be stupid is independent of any other characteristic of that person.
• Third (and Golden) Basic Law: A stupid person is a person who caused losses to another person or to a group of persons while himself deriving no gain and even possibly incurring losses.
• Fourth Basic Law: Non-stupid people always underestimate the damaging power of stupid individuals. In particular non-stupid people constantly forget that at all times and places and under any circumstances to deal and/or associate with stupid people always turns out to be costly mistake.
• Fifth Basic Law: A stupid person is the most dangerous type of person.
• Corollary to the Fifth Basic Law: A stupid person is more dangerous than a bandit.

I am sure you have questions. Who are the stupid? How can we identify them? Are they a heterogeneous or a homogeneous bunch? What can be done to help them? All excellent questions and we should address them.

Most certainly someone must have come up with the taxonomy of the stupid but I am too lazy to look it up on them internets. So as a public service, I will do the hard work of figuring out a taxonomic scheme of my own.

• First Order Stupid: Plain old garden variety stupid. The cause of the stupidity is basic ignorance. This can be cured with knowledge. Pre-requisite: must be at least of average intelligence and have an open mind.

• Second Order Stupid: Not just ignorant of the facts but what is worse that the head is filled with patent nonsense and falsehoods. As with First Order Stupidity, this can be cured but it requires the additional step of erasing before writing. Pre-requisite: as in the previous category and the ability to change one’s mind.

• Third Order Stupid: Not only having wrong information but even when presented with the correct information, the inability to recognize the need to re-evaluate the situation and change one’s mind. Therefore it is nearly impossible to fix this kind of stupid.

For expositional purposes only, here’s an example. (The persons mentioned below are entirely fictitious and any resemblance to any person living or dead is quite likely coincidental. Or perhaps not so coincidental. You decide.)

• Meet Ashok. Ashok does not know anything about a man (loosely speaking, of course) named Dr Manmohan Singh. He assumes that Dr Singh is about average when it comes to integrity. He is essentially ignorant of the fact that Dr Singh is a despicably dishonest person, but when presented with the facts, readily admits that Dr Singh is a spineless toady and astonishingly dishonest. Ashok is 1st Order Stupid.

• Meet Basanti. Basanti is the gullible sort. She reads newspapers which claim that Dr Singh has personal “integrity.” If you ask her why, she will tell you because “everyone says so.” She’s not incorrigible, though. You first explain to her that she’s totally mistaken. Given the evidence, she updates her beliefs and correctly believes that Dr Singh is a despicably dishonest person. Basanti is 2nd Order Stupid.

• Meet Chandan. Chandan is convinced that Dr Singh is competent and honest. His mind is made up and no amount of evidence about Dr Singh’s dishonesty is going to make the least difference to him. You can present all the damning evidence till the cows come home but he will steadfastly refuse to alter his belief and insist that Dr Singh is honest. Chandan is incorrigible. He is 3rd Order Stupid.

Moving on to a related matter. In a comment reader Mallikarjuna writes,

Our current PM, comes with impressive integrity, but is not a man, who can “Get it Done”.

Either I have totally misunderstood the meaning of the word “integrity,” or the current appointed PM is as far as one can get from integrity while still being in the same galaxy. I wish I could talk to someone who believes in the PM’s integrity. I want to know what their definition of the word is in the context of that man. Does integrity mean “the character trait that makes a person incapable of judging right from wrong; the total lack of moral conviction; the absence of all and any ethical considerations in one’s actions; devoid of all sense of fairness and justice” to them?

I would seriously like to know.

Janata Party president Subramanian Swamy has said that it would not be possible to stop terrorism till P Chidambaram is home minister.

“He is a traitor and the most corrupt minister in the UPA government. There are proofs of his anti-national activities, which I have placed before court. He has Rs 50,000 crore in foreign banks,” Swamy said in response to a query at a ‘Meet the press’ programme held at Indore Press Club on Sunday.

Elaborating, Swamy said Chidambaram as finance minister manipulated the stock market, doctored its rise and fall for vested interest. As finance minister, he insisted on buying paper used for printing Indian currency notes from a London (UK) firm, which also supplied it to Pakistan.

This posed the risk of Pakistan intelligence agency ISI circulating fake currency notes in India. “Similarly, he introduced participatory note cash that was another threat to Indian economy. There are seven to eight large scams, if unearthed, would confine him to jail for rest of life,” he said.

The article concludes with the Dr Swamy’s insinuation that Dr Singh’s boss is next on the list of people who will be hosted in the Tihar jail. “Cooks at Tihar jail are learning to make idli-sambar for south Indians A Raja and others. I told them they would [sic] soon have to make pizza and spaghetti,” says Swamy.

Related Posts:

Here are a few posts on the appointed unelected prime minister, for the record:

May 2010: Manmohan Singh is a Despicably Dishonest Man.

Only the Bad and the Ugly.

June 2010: Manmohan Singh is really and truly a despicably dishonest man.

October 2010: An Open Letter to Manmohan Singh.

December 2010: We need a Paradigm Shift regarding Dr Manmohan Singh.

Pratap Bhanu Mehta Hauls MMS & SG Over the Coals for a Well-deserved Roasting.

Jan 2011: Dr. Manmohan Singh is Pitiable.

Feb 2011: Dr Manmohan Singh is a Despicably Dishonest Man.

The Ventriloquist’s Dummy Will Address a Press Conference.

March 2011: Manmohan Singh Will be Remembered for His Venality.

July 2011: Manmohan Singh is a Seriously Despicably Dishonest Spineless Toady Who Will Pay for his Crimes Against India.

Alright, let’s quote Kishwar:

People attribute his pliability to the fact that the prime minister was appointed and not elected. He has never won a Lok Sabha election. But that cannot be used as an excuse to justify overlooking such gross mismanagement and loot as well as the political drift one witnesses even in areas involving national security.

In fact, his defeat in the one and only election he ever fought is related to his lack of personal integrity. He was defeated in the predominantly middle-class South Delhi constituency because people in general and Sikhs in particular were enraged when Manmohan Singh denied the role of the Congress in the 1984 anti Sikh carnage and instead attributed the 1984 massacre to the RSS. The RSS may well be guilty of many other communal riots but the ” credit” for the 1984 massacre goes entirely to Congress politicians, including Rajiv Gandhi who even justified the killings saying: “when a big tree falls, the earth is bound to shake.” The Congress Party also ensured that those who masterminded and executed the 1984 pogrom did not get punished.

Manmohan Singh is a crook par excellence. The perfect criminal is one who commits a crime that is not even known to have occurred. Manmohan Singh is a great criminal since he is not even a suspect in the on-going crimes against India.

A PM who compromises national interest, as in Kashmir, just to indulge the personal fancy of the PM in waiting, a PM who looks the other way while his Cabinet colleagues brazenly loot public funds and get away with extorting thousands of crores by way of kickbacks, a PM who is widely perceived and lampooned as a “rubber stamp” does not merit being called “an honest man” or a “man of integrity” because integrity in his job demands putting national interest above partisan politics and personal loyalties. Integrity also involves taking full responsibility for all his acts of commission and omission which have earned UPA II the dubious distinction of being publicly named as the most corrupt and rudderless government in post independence India

Wake up, India, and realize that Manmohan Singh is a criminal who is helping the other criminals (his bosses) loot India.

[Hat tip: Raja Sekhar Malapati for the link to the Kishwar article.]

[Hat tip: Santosh.]

When will Indians wake up and boot the stupid thieving lying corrupt retard out? When will the media understand that we need a paradigm shift regarding the most dishonest politician in India? He is a pitiable man. He’s responsible for the “governance deficit“. He prefers to betray the country and not his boss. He has presided over corruption and enabled others to loot from the public.

The man epitomizes the dirtiest, sleaziest, most repulsive and repellent characteristics of money-grubbing politicians that India is becoming infamous for around the world. He will be remembered for two things: for being an appointed prime minister and for his venality.

The Ventriloquist's Dummy and the Puppet Master

So if you had any doubts whether Dr MM Singh was a dummy, doubt no more. He is. He has been kept quiet for so long. Now his handlers have decided to put him on show. The sheer excitement of him appearing before a live press conference only speaks to the astonishing spectacle of a ventriloquist performance.

Just think about it. The prime minister of a country should not have to have a rehearsed, scripted, press conference to deal with a matter that has attracted world-wide attention and opprobrium. Indians should hang their heads in shame that he continues to be the prime minister. If they had any shame, they would have dragged the guy out of his office and demanded that he answer questions — questions which are out there in the open and which he should have answered years ago.

Dr Manmohan Singh is arguably the most despicably dishonest person in India, which is saying something considering that there are some in India who have stolen tens of billions of dollars from India.

{Thanks to Sudipta for the link where the photo above is borrowed from.}

Incredible as it may seem, this sorry bunch of sycophants actually gets to rule the nation. Here’s what the Telegraph of Calcutta reports:

Jaipur, Feb. 9: Pratibha Patil became President because she cooked and washed for Indira Gandhi when the Prime Minister was thrown out of power in 1977, a Congress minister in Rajasthan has suggested.

Panchayati raj minister Amin Khan, who was addressing party workers in Pali district near Jodhpur yesterday, said Patil had sought nothing in return for her service to the first family.

Her patience and dedication paid off when Sonia Gandhi suddenly named her the party’s choice for President in 2007, Khan said. At the time, Patil was serving as the governor of Rajasthan.

Pratibha Patil has been around the block a few times. Or as the saying goes in Hindi, bahut papad bay-lay hain.

Reading the Pratibha Patil story was like deja vu all over again (as Yogi Berra put it.) Three years ago, in Nov 2007, I had a post on “Loyalty Pays.”

A man who has been a cook to the Nehru-Gandhi family for decades has been rewarded for his loyalty by the Nehru-Gandhi family — his son has been given a Congress ticket.

But wait, there’s another story that appeared nearly seven years ago. Here’s a bit from a post from April 2004, “Democracy in India.”

Just as the market is a great organizing principle in the economic sphere, so also democracy is a great and noble organizing principle in the political sphere. Democracy works, provided its pre-conditions are met. The necessary conditions include at a minimum: full information, accountability, economic freedom, institutional memory, and so on. Democracy cannot work when the electorate is nearly totally uninformed, where there are strong vested interests, where the notion of accountability is non-existent, where voters can be intimidated and bribed, where the culture is steeped in feudalism, and where illiteracy, superstition and corruption is the norm.

India’s democracy is at best a cargo cult democracy. Here is a brief news item from today’s The Times of India page 3. The Maharashtra Congress Committee vice-president Anant Gadgil plans to switch to the Shiv Sena because he did not get a ticket for contesting the elections. He wrote to the chief Sonia Gandhi and said:

Our family is known for its loyalty to the Nehru-Gandhi family, and to the Congress since independence. We always remember the recognition given by Indira and Rajiv Gandhi to my father for his utmost loyalty. Please let me know whether loyalty has no meaning left in the Congress party.

If those words don’t epitomize what Indian democracy is all about, I don’t know what does. Here is a person who wants to represent the will of the people, his constituency. And all he has to show for his qualifications for that task is his loyalty to a particular family. He does not plead that he has served the people of his constituency competently, he does not point out that he is capable of helping his society do better, he does not say that he understands the problems that his people face and that he has solutions, etc. Most likely he has not done any service nor is he capable of doing anything for the people. In keeping with the prevailing customs of the political parties in India — especially that of the Congress Party — all that he has to show is that he and his father have always been loyal lap-dogs of the of the ruling family.

Mr. Anant Gadgil may be an ignorant wanna-be. But he is not alone. His sentiments are shared by practically all “leaders” of the Congress party, from Messers Manmohan Singh and Narasimha Rao to the lowliest party worker. All they have to demonstrate is unquestioned loyalty to the Nehru-Gandhi family and they will get the nod. As self-interested rational individuals their stance cannot be faulted. The tens of millions of ignorant illiterate voters will vote for the Congress party simply because they recognize the Gandhi name. Therefore all Gadgils and the Singhs and Raos have to do is to plead their loyalty and they will get a ticket and therefore get elected.

To Anant Gadgil: Yes, loyalty still trumps everything else for the Congress party. Sorry that your nose doesn’t appear brown enough, though.

India has a cargo-cult democracy because it appears to be a democracy on the surface. Like a movie set, the facade presents a reasonable facsimilie of the real thing, but behind it, there is little substance. The hundreds of millions go through the motion of expressing their preference. But uninformed preference expressed haphazardly in a system that is corrupt to the core is not a receipe for a system of governance. It is no wonder that India ends up with “leaders” such as Rabri Devi and Laloo Yadav and Sonia Gandhi.

Democracy does not work in India. That is not to say that the fault lies with the idea of democracy. As a system of governance, there are few alternatives, just as markets are the best way to organize economic activities. But markets are prone to failures if its pre-conditions are not met. So also, democracy does not work in India because its necessary conditions are not met.

Back to the Pratibha Patil story. The minister is being asked to resign. Whiskey Tango Foxtrot. In India, telling the truth is not without its penalties. The man reported that Pratibha Patil worked as a kitchen maid for Indira Gandhi — but he was saying it approvingly and as an ideal to be emulated by all those who wish to climb up the power ladder by sucking up to the Nehru-Gandhi family.

Now the poor sod is being asked to resign. And — wait for this — the idiot BJP is asking that he be sacked.

Earlier in the day, the BJP had seized the opportunity to mock the Congress’s “culture of subservience” and demanded the minister’s resignation.

BJP state president Arun Chaturvedi said the comment about the President was “unacceptable” and the chief minister should immediately ask for Khan’s resignation.

If you have ever wondered why the BJP is not in power, wonder no more. It is packed to the brim with idiots.

Between the party of brown-nosers and the party of idiots, India is royally screwed.

It’s all karma, neh?

{This post has been brought to you by the generous support of my friend Sanjiv and his family in New Delhi — and by readers like you. Thank you.}

Dr Manmohan Singh betrays the country because he cannot afford to betray Antonia Maino. Betraying his boss will cause him to lose his job; betraying the country causes immense harm to millions but he will not lose any sleep on that. Not having a conscience or any moral compunctions affords that advantage to him.

Veer wrote:

The book and its foreword clearly point to Nehru being a Communist in disguise. It explains the ideological origin of large, dominating, controlling, big-brother government and its overall structure in India.

And I think Indira proved to be a worthy successor of Nehru’s totalitarian / communist-state legacy, which she nurtured and grew.

You have to keep in mind that this Spratt review is dated October 1963. Nehru was then the prime minister. The bitter fruits of his misguided policies were yet to ripen. The fruit of his loins was not the powerful dictator she was to become. His grandson, Rajiv Gandhi, was 19. Antonia Maino, an Italian whom Rajiv later married, was 17 at that time. Currently she is the puppet-master of the appointed prime minister of India, Dr Manmohan Singh.

Who is this Antonia Maino aka Sonia Gandhi? According to reports, her father, Stefano Maino, was a volunteer to the Nazi army and was taken as a prisoner of war by the Russians. I did a google search on “stefano maino fascist”. Read this page.

1. During Nehru’s time Indira Gandhi might have been on the payroll of KGB. Later as per U.S. Congressional hearing records Indira Gandhi’s family most likely Rajiv and Sonia, were on the payroll of the Pakistani Banker the late Agha Hassan Abedi, who founded the Bank known as Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI). BCCI was a drug money laundering outfit finally owned by the ruler of Abu Dhabi, Sheikh Zyed.

Mr. Manmohan Singh when he was the governor of Reserve Bank of India was advised by RAW not to issue license for opening the ISI bank BCCI in Bombay as BCCI was funding spying in India and was also funding the Pakistani nuclear programme. Yet Manmohan simply approved it. BCCI was used even by Reliance for its hawala transactions. (BCCI had grown as a result of it running a supply centre for ‘Pakistani minor girls’ to Sheikh Zyed and other leading Sheikhs in the Gulf. Naturally Sheikh became the leading share holder of BCCI. These details are available in the US senate reports.) The BCCI also known as the cocaine bank collapsed with a loss of $ 16 billion.

All that Manmohan got was a scholarship for his daughter, but his main benefit turned out to be that the congress party immediately inducted him to the party. Many details are available in our parliamentary proceedings when the collapse of the BCCI was discussed.

Sonia had connections to the Vatican Bank which was active in Europe and America drug market where as BCCI specialized in the Asian drug market. Abedi’s reach extended to the U.S. also. He even had the former Secretary of Defense Clark Clifford as his lobbyist for a fee of nearly $100 million. All this was exposed in U.S. Congressional hearings.

2. KGB might have murdered Indian Prime Minister Lal Bahadur Sastri, in Tashkent, by poisoning so that Nehru family can come back to power. Following the India-Pakistan War of 1965, Shastri met in Tashkent with President Ayub Khan of Pakistan and signed a “no-war” declaration. He died the next day Jan 11, 1966. The story put out by KGB that a Muslim cook with Lal Bahadur Sastri’s entourage had poisoned him in Tashkent and escaped to Pakistan may be a cover-up for what KGB had done.

3. Sonia Gandhi was groomed and presented in front of Rajiv Gandhi by KGB, to hook Rajiv which was successful. Subsequently Rajiv marries Sonia.

4. KGB may be involved in the plane accident of Sanjiv Gandhi and might be pure murder to eliminate Sanjiv and to bring in Rajiv as the successor to Indira Gandhi. This paved the way for Rajiv Gandhi to become PM, who is married to KGB agent Sonia.

5. Rajiv Gandhi was killed by the Sri Lankan terrorist group LTTE which is totally supported and financed by christian organizations abroad. Rajiv Gandhi was blown up in Tamil Nadu on May 21, 1991 by a Roman Catholic female suicide bomber Dhanu, 24, whose real name was Kalaivathi. Once Rajiv was killed the external spy agencies might have worked behind the scenes to promote Sonia Gandhi.

Potential threats to Sonia’s leadership were one by one eliminated in excellently planned natural accidents which are a KGB specialty. All the deaths of potential future contenders of congress presidency were killed in accidents on Sundays. Sunday murders are a specialty of Christians and this is well proven in India’s North Eastern states where the Christian terrorists murder Hindus mostly on Sundays. Muslims generally carryout terrorist killing of Hindus on Fridays.

Rajesh Pilot died in a road accident on Sunday, Jitendra Prasada died of brain hemorrhage on Sunday and Madhava Scindia was killed in a place crash on Sunday. Kamal Nath, another prominent young Congress leader narrowly escaped when a small plane he was traveling in crashed, killing some others on board.

On Sunday 30th September. 2001 Madhavrao Scindia who was deputy leader of the Congress in the Lok Sabha and one of its senior-most members, and who was also one of the boyfriend of Sonia in London, was killed along with seven others. They were charred beyond recognition in a plane crash. Seventeen minutes before the plane was due to land in Kanpur, the Air Traffic Control in the city lost contact with it. The plane caught fire in mid-air and became a ball of fire by the time it hit the ground. Mystery shrouds the circumstances under which the aircraft crashed near Motta village in Mainpuri district. The Beechcraft C-90 aircraft used by Mr. Scindia belonged to Jindal Strips and was maintained by India International Aviation Ltd. In June 2000 the senior Congress leader Rajesh Pilot met with the fatal accident in the highway on a stretch between Jaipur and Dausa.

On the KGB connection, Dhar writes: “My painstaking research and intelligence penetration had succeeded in identifying four Union ministers (of Indira Gandhi’s Cabinet) and over two dozen MPs who were on the payrolls of KGB operatives. Some of them are still around… But the most surprising area of penetration of the KGB was the ministry of defense and those layers of the Armed Forces which were responsible for procurement of military hardware. My list of these galactic stars did not amuse my bosses and I was advised to `secure that information’ (sic) in my archive. No one at the top had the gumption of illuminating the government with the identity of the Soviet targets… The most interesting case was that of a member of Parliament who regularly received a pay packet from the Soviet embassy for covering certain segments of the kitchen cabinet of Indira Gandhi.”

Go read it all. Now at last we may be slowly getting an understanding of what evil schemes have brought India to this state. Now we are starting to get glimpses of who is behind India’s descent into a state ruled by the morally corrupt and intellectually bankrupt. The pieces are falling into place and soon enough we will know the names of those who have looted India for their personal gain.

All is not lost but we have to wake up. People like Goel saw this coming 50 years ago. Go read the entire foreword by Spratt to Goel’s book. Here’s the concluding bit from Spratt.

Nehru’s Communism is revealed in the extraordinary favour he shows to the Communist Party, as contrasted with his marked coolness towards the socialists who put democracy first, like the PSP. He allows the Russian Government, and apparently the Chinese too, to subsidise them. It has been admitted in Parliament that the Home Department knows about some of these foreign funds. No other ruler in the world tolerates this kind of thing. Why does Nehru?

His Communism has been clearly revealed in his foreign policy. He cannot go wholly over to the Communist bloc, but he will not take the protection of the free countries, so India remains defenceless. China’s big attack came a year after Goel’s articles, and fully bore out his warning. It even moved Nehru for the moment, but he quickly went back to the policy which made the attack possible.

His Communism is also shown in his economic policy. Its deficiencies in Russia and China have become generally known in recent years, but he still persists with it. He is not even disabused of collective farming, despite its spectacular failure everywhere. This over-centralised, one-sided, state-controlled economy is building up a great vested interest, political and bureaucratic and indeed capitalistic, which he doubtless relies upon to keep it going when he has stepped down.

Ten years ago the Congress Party was by no means socialistic. When the resolution on the socialistic pattern was passed at Avadi, an important Congressman compared it to the Emperor Akbar’s Din Ilahi. Socialism, he said, is Nehru’s personal fad, which will quickly be forgotten when he passes from the scene. It seemed a shrewd judgement at the time, but it overlooked the attraction of socialism for a ruling party of hungry careerists. The experience of socialism in the nine years since than has won many Congressmen over. But there are still many who oppose it, and its continuance in the future is not yet assured. That, I take it, is the real inwardness of the Kamaraj Plan. The purpose of the current goings-on is to arrange the succession to Nehru in such a way that the pro-communists retain control.

The dispute over this question is of the greatest importance for India’s future. But the partisans on both sides are still afraid of speaking plainly, and many of the public are still unaware of what it is all about. Goel’s book helps greatly in making clear what the groups in the Congress are fighting over. It is really whether India shall continue to be ruled by a Government of usurpers, who will go on pushing the country against its will towards Communism, or the Government shall follow a policy which genuinely commends itself to the majority of the public.

Bangalore
October 25, 1963

How can a land so full of promise and potential become so pathetically poor? How did it come to be ruled by the most venal, self-serving, myopic, criminal leaders? There has to be a reason and most likely the answer lies in the personal histories of those who have become its leaders.

Ashok Mitra laments for a cog in the machinery of the GREAT RENOUNCER and asks, “Does the prime minister matter?” in The Telegraph, Calcutta India.

Is it not egregiously irrelevant in such a situation to wax eloquent over the prime minister’s integrity? For consider the goings-on during the 2G spectrum episode. Were nothing known of the prime minister’s correspondence with his minister as well as of the Radia tapes, two alternative assumptions are still possible: either that the prime minister was aware of the irregularities that were being plotted but was unable to do anything about it, or that he was totally ignorant of what was happening.

In case the prime minister knew that large scale larceny was taking place within the portals of government, the natural question to ask is, why did he not put his foot down instead of accepting the developments philosophically — in other words, why did he agree to go along with corruption? Is he not, technically, an accessory after the fact? Cross over to the second hypothesis: while the prime minister was a man of first-class integrity, he was not aware of the shady things happening within his premises. If a prime minister does not know what is transpiring within the ambit of his authority, does it not reflect on his efficiency and, therefore, his suitability for occupying the position?

It was, after all, the personal decision of the individual who is prime minister to accept the position in full awareness of the overwhelmingly important conditionality attached, namely, that he must abide the preferences, prejudices and inclinations of the Great Renouncer. If the prime minister is feeling humiliated by the snide comments swirling at this moment around his person, he can only lay the blame at the door of the decision he took in 2004 to be a cog in the dynasty’s wheel. It is for him to ruminate whether tending his private garden would not have been a superior choice.

While there’s life, there’s hope. A man always has a chance. A man can resign and beg for forgiveness for the mistakes he made. But Dr Singh can’t. Only a man can, not a cog in some stupid wheel. So rather than contempt, I lean towards pity for him.

Actually, Dr Singh’s main qualification for being the appointed prime minister appears to be his ability to listen to orders to shield his boss and the boss’s family from public scrutiny. It’s his questionable moral character that made him suitable for that post. The story is the same as with the president Ms Pratibha Patil. She too has sufficient skeletons in the cupboard that she can be easily manipulated by those who appointed her.

Anyhow, getting back to brilliant writers who tell it like it is. Read Pratap Bhanu Mehta, president of the Centre for Policy Research, Delhi in today’s Indian Express. His column is titled, “He Said, She Said.” Don’t mind the disastrous formatting of the column. I read it very slowly to savor every well-crafted sentence.

I would have quoted the whole column but for copyright limitations. So here are some excerpts, for the record.

The responses of Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and Congress President Sonia Gandhi to the extraordinary crisis generated by the 2G scam are exhibiting a brazen indifference to our predicament. . .

In their responses, they have not missed a trick. But they have missed the point. . .

It has to be said at this point that, with all due respect, “Prime Minister, you are central to governance: you constitute the governance deficit.” . . .

Can there be any greater denigration of the office when the prime minister does not appear to be in charge of government? . . .

But the leader of the ruling party does not have the luxury of an academic discourse on corruption. The shrinking moral universe is not a fact of nature; it is a consequence of decisions taken by leaders. . .

Did the prime minister and the cabinet endorse Raja’s actions? If they did, what was the rationale? If they did not, what did they do for two years to curb actions that they knew to be wrong? Answering these questions does not require an inquiry. It will take the prime minister no more than 10 minutes to set the record straight on these questions. The Congress is asking us to look into the depths because it does not want to look us in the eye. . .

. . . the simple fact is that the prime minister’s demeanour has consistently undermined the authority of Parliament. . .

The Congress president also made reference to the fact that her government does not want to “undermine established institutions, such as the PAC and the CBI”. There is something deeply disconcerting about this for two reasons. Why does a JPC undermine existing institutions? At the very least it does not do it any more than new institutions like the National Advisory Council undermine line ministries. . .

The references to the CBI are also disconcerting. It is time to ask the government what steps it has taken to restore the credibility of the CBI in the eyes of the public. There is not even a glimmer of acknowledgement that citizens are deeply worried about the CBI. There is not even the slightest concession to the fact that almost every single institution in government now carries an odour of conspiracy. Our law enforcement institutions are beginning to resemble an indiscriminate melange of arbitrary powers, randomly exercised. . .

The appeal to the CBI would be more credible if the government had spent the last few years restoring probity to the functioning of these institutions. It is often said that a measure of corruption is not just the exchange of money. It is the distance and dissimulation rulers exhibit in relation to their own governments. On that measure we have indeed reached a low point. The fourth element in this rhetorical strategy is to hide behind the poor — or worse still, allow other Congress leaders to flirt with the communal card. The Congress leadership has to get over the idea that just because it has promulgated a few schemes for the poor, it can be absolved of the larger structural crisis they have produced in the economy. . . What pro-poor policy can explain that it has become nearly impossible to be an honest businessman in this country? The Congress president is insulting the country by implicitly suggesting that the sense of moral crisis and betrayal large numbers of citizens feel is entirely a product of opposition politics. . .

As for the prime minister: his worst failing may not be corruption, it may not even be standing idly by. His worst failing will be that by not coming clean he has undermined any reason to trust so-called good men.

Go read it all.

It is worth asking where this excessive and mind-numbing focus on Modi is headed. Whether one likes his politics or doesn’t, believes he is India’s best chief minister or isn’t, considers him a future prime minister or too much of a hot potato for BJP allies, the fact remains that he needs to be viewed through a conventional political prism and not one of a fevered imagination.

Consider examples. One, it has been clear for a long time that there is no legal case against Modi for the 2002 violence and he is not guilty of acts of deliberate commission. With even the Supreme Court appointed Special Investigative Team (SIT) said to have to come to the same conclusion, Modi haters — who range from Mumbai-based celebrities to a retired police officer still settling bureaucratic scores — have begun to denounce the SIT and are approaching the UN Human Rights Commission.

Two, the WikiLeaks cables reveal that western intelligence agencies believe the Lashkar-e-Tayyeba threat to Modi is clear and present and did not die out with the elimination of Ishrat Jehan and her accomplices. Jehan, a Mumbai student who fell into Lashkar’s grip, was killed in an encounter with the Gujarat police in 2004. Modi’s opponents insist she was innocent and the Laskhar plot a concoction. Perhaps now they will argue Modi wrote the WikiLeaks cables.

How long can this continue? If any other Indian politician was found to be mentioned as a Lashkar target in the cables, it would have had the media engrossed. Not with Modi; it’s almost as if he’s fair game. As for the Union government, it wants to fight terrorists — but not terrorists whom the Gujarat police have found. It’s so cynical; those 60 Indian Mujahideen men in Ahmedabad must be laughing.

In the Western tradition, the idea that the sun revolves around the earth — geocentrism — is known as the Ptolemaic model. It was a notion that led people to explain astronomical observations such as the movements of planets with convoluted arguments and constructs. In 1543 Copernicus provided an alternative hypothesis — heliocentrism — which placed the sun at the center of the solar system, and was later confirmed in 1610 by Galileo Galilei. From geocentrism to heliocentrism was a “paradigm shift” (a term much abused in the modern day.) That shift in perspective allowed people to think correctly about the Solar system.

Some people in India need a paradigm shift when thinking about Dr Manmohan Singh, the unelected (and unelectable) but appointed prime minister of India.

Currently we have what I call the “integritism” model — the conjecture and assumption that Dr MM Singh is a man of honesty and integrity. I coined that term based on what the Wiki describes as “integrity“:

Integrity is a concept of consistency of actions, values, methods, measures, principles, expectations and outcomes. In ethics, integrity is regarded as the quality of having an intuitive sense of honesty and truthfulness in regard to the motivations for one’s actions.

Integritism and Hypocritism

Working under the integritism model, people come up with astonishingly stupid statements. It leads them into convoluted arguments to explain why Dr Singh appears to behave paradoxically. The equivalent of epicycles and complex mechanisms are pulled out of the bin to show that while he appears to be dishonest, he is actually not. Take for instance this article, “Why did the 2G scam occur right under Manmohan Singh’s nose,” which starts off with

Amid the growing bewilderment among all sections of the people about the succession of corruption cases tumbling out of the cupboards of the Government, one question remains an enigma, about the 2G spectrum scam. How did the admittedly and inarguably the most honest and humble Prime Minister India has seen, preside over such brazen actions of then Telecom Minister A.Raja? {Emphasis added.}

Admittedly? By whom? And inarguably? That argument has not been made ever in the Indian media. Argument by assertion is no a valid form of argument.

It is an assertion that MMS is honest, an assertion not borne out by facts. Widely known and accepted facts? Yes, the author of that article goes on at length to state facts that enormous sums have been stolen by people whom MMS directly controls. And yet the author, in contradiction to the facts that he or she presents, continues to write absolute nonsense by asserting a proposition that is contradicted by evidence. This is what is called “cognitive dissonance” in polite company, and in honest company simply called stupidity.

But all is not bleak, I think. Some people are beginning to bring about the revolution that India needs in thinking about Dr Singh. I call it the paradigm shift to “hypocritism” — from Wiki,

Hypocrisy is the state of pretending to have beliefs, opinions, virtues, feelings, qualities, or standards that one does not actually have. Hypocrisy involves the deception of others and is thus a kind of lie.

Let’s take an example of someone who has recognized the problem with integritism. Madhu Purnima Kishwar writing in Outlook in an article titled “Honestly Speaking” starts off with

I fail to understand why almost every commentator, every TV anchor, every editorial writer feels compelled to pay ritual obeisance to the “personal honesty and integrity” of Dr Manmohan Singh while dealing with the scandals emanating from his cabinet colleagues. They do so even when there is clear evidence that the Prime Minister was well aware of various shady deals, as in the case of Telecom scam, and that he did nothing to stop the brazen economic crimes indulged in by his ministerial colleagues over the last 6 years.

Corruption is not only about personally accepting monetary bribes and stacking them away in hidden bank accounts overseas, buying benami properties or accepting diamond sets for your wife. Corruption can come in insidious avatars, such as knowingly turning a blind eye to the misuse the entire machinery of governance to serve private ends of a few individuals, even to the point of endangering national security. For example, not a single person has been punished thus far for supplying sub standard bullet proof jackets to the police handling the 26/11 terrorist attack in Mumbai. Not surprisingly, we are right now witnessing yet another scam involving sub- standard bullet proof vests.

You must read Kishwar’s article to remind yourself of the laundry list of absolutely despicable corrupt acts that Dr Singh has enabled. Enabling corruption, condoning corruption, helping shield the corrupt from the consequences — that too is corruption.

The paradigm shift — pardon me for using that term — India needs is from integritism to hypocritism. The moment you posit that “Dr Manmohan Singh is a despicably dishonest man,” you can explain why scams amounting to billions of dollars are routine under his watch. It no longer is a mystery. In another country where the people are vigilant and care about truth, honesty and integrity, he would have been impeached and locked up. Well, if not locked up, he would have been tarred and feathered.

Taking Credit under False Pretexts

I was asked the other day when did I reached the conclusion that perhaps Dr Singh was indeed a truly despicably dishonest man. It was years ago that I had heard from absolutely reliable sources that when he was the finance minister in P.V. Narasimha Rao’s government, he had brought to PVNR a budget that was just a re-hash of the socialist nonsense that previous governments had been following. PVNR took a look at it and told Dr Singh that it was garbage and he should frame one which will liberalize the Indian economy.

Dr Singh, the unimaginative bureaucrat that he was (and is), did as he was told. So essentially the liberalization of the Indian economy was PVNR’s idea, not Dr MM Singh’s. I did not care either way: liberalization was good and I was happy that at least India became a somewhat liberalized economy. But as time went on, I noticed that Dr Singh started taking credit for something that he probably did not even support, leave alone being the author of. I realized that he lacked integrity. The Copernican Revolution had happened in my mind. What was missing was Galileo’s telescope to see the evidence.

That started coming out. Scam after scam and Dr MM Singh was there to oversee them all. Yes, it was clear that he was truly a despicably dishonest man. Proof that he had fancy little to do with liberalization aside from taking dictation is also there if only we care to see. He has not done one bit of liberalization. In fact quite the contrary. Look around and see.

Dr Brown Nose

I cannot imagine a less honest person. He follows orders. And he is the master of brown-nosery. I recall reading what he said about the “National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme” — that was “Sonia Gandhi’s gift to the country.”

WTF-ery does not get more acute.

NREGA is a income-distribution scheme. Our incomes are taxed and then the government spends it on giving money to people for getting their votes. Where does Antonia Maino aka Sonia Gandhi come in? Does all the tax money go into her personal bank account and become her personal property? And then she takes a few billion from her personal account in a Swiss bank and pay for NREGA? WHISKEY. TANGO. FOXTROT.

Did the Indian media ever ask Dr Singh what he meant by saying that Sonia Gandhi gave it as a gift to India? No. The main stream Indian media has great people like Vir Sanghvi and Barkha Dutt (ach Poo!).

Dr Divide and Rule

Dr MM Singh is a despicably dishonest person. His is the politics of divisiveness. He is dividing the country along religious lines just to keep his Muslim vote bank intact. He addresses the nation not as “My dear fellow Indians” but as “My dear Hindus, Muslims, Sikhs, Christians” etc. What a fucking (pardon my French) douchebag.

Now if you will excuse me, I will have to end this as I feel nauseated just talking about MMS. I have to go and throw up — which is a pity since I had a good breakfast and now it will all go down the tube. It is a pity that India had a lot of promise but MMS has flushed it down the tube.

Related Posts:

1. Manmohan Singh is a Despicably Dishonest Man. May 2010.

2. Manmohan Singh is really and truly a Despicably Dishonest Man. June 2010.

Smacks of a soft Hindutva hardliner or a BJP spokesperson, desperately trying to hide under the guise of a cool, ‘pro-progress’ image.

You are sharp, aren’t you? Can’t get anything past you, can I? OK, you got me fair and square. I try very hard not to show that I am a “soft Hindutva hardliner” (as opposed to, say, a hard hindutva hardliner — H3 in short). And to conceal that fact, I consistently write against the Congress party and how it has under the control of the Nehru-Gandhi dynasty, brought India to its present dire straits (malnourished children, grinding poverty, illiteracy, a soft target for Islamic terrorists, unable to stand up to the failed Islamic states flanking it), and now under their misgovernance is teetering on the verge of a massive collapse.

But you have seen behind the facade and noted my true colors. Congratulations. (OK, end of sarcastic reply.)

Sudhir posits a hypothetical situation:

I meet some youngsters and then bombard then with anti-India ideology. Say that they have been oppressed by India and they have to kill Indians in return (just using my freedom of speech). Finally these youngsters pick up the gun and go on a rampage. So am I culpable in the crime or I can hide behind freedom of speech .

I am a free speech fundamentalist. You are allowed to say whatever your heart desires. Say what you will — and be prepared to defend the truth of your assertions if challenged. That’s the first bit. The other bit is that I hold people responsible for their actions. That means, if A does the shooting and killing, A is responsible. Not B who may have convinced A to do the shooting.

How about holding both A and B responsible? I don’t think so. Only A. Because regardless of what B had said, it’s A’s action that caused the harm. If A had not acted, B’s words would give rise to no harm.

Arundhati Roy can say whatever her tiny little brain wants her to say. But if you kill someone (whether because of what Roy said, or because of what Allah said), you are guilty of the crime. As for Roy, the response to her speech should be speech. If she is wrong, contradict her through words, not by gagging her.

Moving on, I am a bit surprised to see the comments regarding my calling Arundhati Roy a “house-nigger.” For example, Sumitra writes

Did you really have to use the word ‘house-N’? You’ve lived in the US for two decades, and didn’t get what that derogatory word stands for?

He is a little puzzled. Jay’s displeasure surfaces as sarcasm:

house n****r? thanks for keeping it classy bro!

Can’t say for sure but the refusal to even type out a word in full could be indicative of some neurosis. ” . . . …anxiety, irritability, mental confusion, behavioral symptoms such as phobic avoidance, cognitive problems such as unpleasant or disturbing thoughts, . . .”

A bit sad really. The inability or the phobic avoidance to name aspects of reality is sad. Slavery was a reality in the US (and unfortunately still is in many other places including India.) The slaves were Negroes (from “negro” meaning black.) Some of the slaves worked in the house, as opposed to the fields. They were called house-negroes, or house-niggers.

The notion of house-niggers is very useful to understand the dynamics of a heterogeneous world of rich and poor people, of power and powerless, and those who mediate between them.

Here, let Malcom X, self-proclaimed field-negro explain it. Listen to him and ask yourself if he is not describing Arundhati Roy when he is talking about house-negroes.

Arundhati Roy (and others like her such as Pankaj Mishra, Aakar Patel) are house-niggers. Calling them that is not an insult to Negroes as a group. The phrase “house-nigger” describes them precisely because they do what the house-negroes did. The field-niggers held the house-niggers in contempt. They were powerless but still had their dignity, but the house-niggers had sold theirs.

Speaking truth to power — that a field-nigger can do. So you could describe me as a field-nigger. I live my life without kowtowing to those who have unearned power over me. Dr Manmohan Singh is a house-nigger. He takes his orders, and whether he likes to do what he is told to do or not, he has to do it because otherwise he will be kicked out of the basement of his master’s house and will have to toil in the fields. He’s sold his dignity for the kitchen scraps from His Master’s House.

Pulkit, when he grows up, is not likely to be a field-nigger. He will try to be a master, and failing which, as far as I can tell from his comment, be content to be a house-nigger.

Last weekend, I learnt about an incident in 2007 involving an anonymous IAS officer from the Karnataka cadre, prime minister Manmohan SIngh, home minister Chidambaram and The Dear Eternal Neta ™ Jawaharlal Nehru. I don’t remember it being covered on your blog, but here is what happened.

This anonymous IAS officer wrote an open letter to the Prime Minister that got published in The Mint. It was a succinct and accurate charge sheet of Manmohan’s utter ineffectiveness betraying a lack of both spine and leadership. (A link to the letter in its entirety is available here.) The BJP raked up the issue and ultimately Chidambaram exhorted in parliament: “… I have read the article. I do not know whether the name of that author given in that article is a true name or a pseudo name. I do not know whether he is an IAS officer. All I know is either he is a disloyal officer or a coward or both. If he had the courage, he should write the letter, sign in his own name and send it to the Prime Minister….”

The editor of The Mint did not let Chidambaram get away with it. He had a brilliant response, which included a reminder to the Home Minister: “In November 1937, the Modern Review, then India’s most well-regarded journal of opinion, published an article on Jawaharlal Nehru written by Chanakya, an obvious pseudonym. The author hit out at Nehru’s latent dictatorial tendencies and his “intolerance for others and a certain contempt for the weak and inefficient”. Its author warned: “Jawaharlal might fancy himself as a Caesar.” There were howls of protest from loyalists until it was revealed much later that Nehru himself was the author of this piece.” That caused Chidambaram and his cronies to shut-up on the matter.

Thanks to you, Chanakya Deux, now I am even more convinced that Manmohan Singh is the most pathetic prime minister of India ever — and that is saying something considering the horrors that we have had before such as Weepy Singh. But even the worst of the lot had some popular support as evidenced by their contesting and winning at the Lok Sabha polls (regardless of how the elections may have been fixed.)

MM Singh does not dare to stand in an election. But then he does not stand for anything much anyway, if you were to go by his record. Let me quote bits from the open letter Chanakya Deux refers to above.

The letter is written by “Athreya” who is an IAS officer. (Note: The letter is dated Dec 10, 2008.)

Mr Prime Minister, you were selected, not elected by the people, for just one reason, that you posed no threat to anyone in the Congress party. . . You were considered the least of all evils. . .

I think that all references to Manmohan Singh should be “appointed Prime Minister.” It is common practice to point out, say, in corporations that someone is “Acting CEO” or “Interim Chairman of the Board” to indicate that it is a make-shift and temporary appointment till someone else is found to take on the job.

News reports could then say, “The appointed Prime Minister Dr Manmohan Singh said that he is powerless to do this that or the other . . . ”

Back to the open letter to the appointed prime minister:

Today, after four years in office and after India has witnessed an act of war on its own soil, your government has lost all credibility with the people, and the buck stops with you.

Here I disagree with the IAS officer. If there’s one thing that most Indians are united about, it’s the apathy and disinterested they exhibit towards matters of governance. If the Indian public had any interest in the matter, they would have lynched the politicians the first time they misgoverned — and that would have been the last time the politicians would have misgoverned.

Let’s move on:

You are scared to even name Pakistan in your speeches in spite of the so-called irrefutable evidence you claim to have; nay, in fact, each time you say something publicly about this now, it sounds like a condolence message, not something that inspires confidence.

What strikes me the most is how pathetically the appointed prime minister whines. He does not even pretend to have any power at all. For example, he whines about corruption — as if he were a stay-at-home invalid writing letters to the editor of a newspaper complaining about how the government does not do anything about the corrupt politicians.

Economic reforms stopped long ago, for your allies didn’t want them; there are many ministers in your cabinet who have perfected Wal-Mart’s cash-and-carry model and you can’t do a damn about it.

The list of stupid, wacky, unhinged from reality beliefs that Indians generally hold is fairly long. At the top of this list is the belief that Manmohan Singh was the prime agent behind the economic reforms. The fact is that it was PV Narasimha Rao as the prime minister who forced the reforms on a reluctant Manmohan Singh who was Rao’s finance minister.

Manmohan Singh had come up with the usual socialistic bs budget. PVNR rejected the nonsense and told Manmohan Singh that the economy has to change tack. Manmohan Singh followed Rao’s orders.

The appointed prime minister Manmohan Singh’s appointers are happy to erase PVNR’s name and want their prime minion to take the credit — which he does as he is ordered to do.

You have failed on all counts as a leader. So, at least now, when India is under attack on its own soil, please act. And if you can’t act, please get out of the way and allow someone more effective to run the country.

In any district, where there is any act of violence, normally the district magistrate and the superintendent of police get shifted out. As PM, can you not sack or transfer your national security adviser, the Intelligence Bureau chief, the Coast Guard director general, the navy chief—can you or can you not get rid of your entire top brass and send a signal down the line? The signal you are now sending with your inaction is: don’t bother doing your job, for even if the country gets attacked, we won’t touch you.

You have personally demonstrated integrity, but what use is that alone, when almost every key minister in your cabinet is treating every file as an opportunity for cash flows? Are you telling us you don’t know that your telecom, environment and shipping ministries are the home of organized mafias looting the exchequer? What use is it telling us, “Look, I am personally honest, but I’m presiding over a band of dacoits, murderers and thugs. I am only the prime minister and can’t do anything about it”?

What use is it to head a government, Mr PM, when you can’t even protect your citizens from terror, which is the first function of any government? When you can’t act against incompetence or organized corruption in your own cabinet? Is the PM’s job so important beyond the call of your conscience that you want to hang on to it at any cost? Sir, may I remind you that you are holding a trust, not just an office.

Go read the entire piece. And keep a copy on file for future reference:

. . . Your home minister kept combing his hair and did nothing more as India reeled under attacks and you tolerated him because loyalty to a family was more important than the blood of innocent people.
. . .
. . . Can you not ensure simple reforms in the criminal justice system (which scores of committees such as Malimath have outlined) to ensure certainty of punishment for any offence from pickpocketery to terror? Can you not lead legislation to keep criminals out of politics and try to stem the flow of illegal money into campaign funding?

If not, then what use is it being a prime minister if, even after reaching the very top, you can’t do a damn in an hour of national crisis? Soon, all this will be forgotten and it will be back to business as usual. But then, history will judge you. If you have some conscience left, please do something. Don’t forget, “mind without heart, intelligence without conduct, cleverness without goodness are all tools, but only for mischief”.

In my opinion, as I have written before, Manmohan Singh is really a despicably dishonest man. (Previously I had written, “Manmohan Singh is Despicably Dishonest Man” May 2010, and “Manmohan Singh is really and truly a despicably dishonest man“, June 2010.)

He is dishonest to a degree greater than average. The average dishonest man does not conduct his thievery behind a facade of totally perfect personal integrity. People are lulled into trusting someone who is widely proclaimed as an honest man. The reputation is not earned through action but instead achieved through repeated assertion of honesty and integrity — against all contrary evidence — by self-serving media.

The appointed prime minister Manmohan Singh gets a free pass, for now. Truth eventually will out since reality persists while delusions pass.

It’s all karma, neh?

Mohan Murti’s article is an exception to the fashion that holds that Dr Singh is a nice man. I have been saying for a while that Manmohan Singh is a despicably dishonest person. Wake up, India, and see the rot that infests the nation. The greatest enemies of the nation are those who rule the country and they are stealing your and your children’s future.

Here are a few excerpts from Murti’s article, which is a must-read:

One German business daily which wrote an editorial on India said: “India is becoming a Banana Republic instead of being an economic superpower. To get the cut motion designated out, assurances are made to political allays. Special treatment is promised at the expense of the people. So, Ms Mayawati who is Chief Minister of the most densely inhabited state, is calmed when an intelligence agency probe is scrapped. The multi-million dollars fodder scam by another former chief minister wielding enormous power is put in cold storage. Prime Minister Manmohan Singh chairs over this kind of unparalleled loot.”

An article in a French newspaper titled “Playing the Game, Indian Style” wrote: “Investigations into the shadowy financial deals of the Indian cricket league have revealed a web of transactions across tax havens like Switzerland, the Virgin Islands, Mauritius and Cyprus.” In the same article, the name of one Hassan Ali of Pune is mentioned as operating with his wife a one-billion-dollar illegal Swiss account with “sanction of the Indian regime”. [The Indian regime presided over by Manmohan Singh -- AD]

A third story narrated in the damaging article is that of the former chief minister of Jharkhand, Madhu Koda, who was reported to have funds in various tax havens that were partly used to buy mines in Liberia. “Unfortunately, the Indian public do not know the status of that enquiry,” the article concluded.

“In the nastiest business scam in Indian records (Satyam) the government adroitly covered up the political aspects of the swindle — predominantly involving real estate,” wrote an Austrian newspaper. “If the Indian Prime Minister knows nothing about these scandals, he is ignorant of ground realities and does not deserve to be Prime Minister. If he does, is he a collaborator in crime?”

The Telegraph of the UK reported the 2G scam saying: “Naturally, India’s elephantine legal system will ensure culpability, is delayed.” [Emphasis added.]

It is worth recalling why Manmohan Singh is the prime minister. He is pliable, as he lacks a backbone. He follows orders without questioning, since he lacks any sense of decency, ethics, and morality. His master gives him orders and he meekly goes about doing what he is ordered to do. He’s a rubber stamp. Anyone else with even an iota of shame and humanity would long have quit that dishonorable position. But not he. He is blissfully unaware of the low status he holds.

Not one but scores of mega scams pass unnoticed by him. Corruption is so rampant in India under his “leadership” that people have become inured to it and the next multi-billion dollar scam does not even evoke the mildest surprise. Practically all the news channels and agencies in India drink deep from the well of corrupt money that the politicians have. They are complicit in the rape of India that Manmohan Singh and his cohorts are engaged in.

But this cannot last. As Lincoln said, you can fool some of the people all the time, and all the people some of the time, but not all people all the time. The Italian and her Indian lackeys will pay a price for the rape of the land. It is up to us to see that the day of reckoning is not too far.

Arun Jaitley, the Leader of the Opposition in the Rajya Sabha, in an interview he gave to rediff.com said that “it was evident that Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has the capacity to damage institutions to remain in power.” Not a very nice thing to say. But then, when talking of not nice people, one cannot say very nice things. Actually, Jaitley understates — perhaps deliberately — how despicably Mr Singh has behaved. Mr Singh has clearly overused his capacity to do damage.

I am repeating myself here but it bears repetition: Mr Manmohan Singh is a Despicably Dishonest man. I wrote that before the King of Telecom Scams were revealed.

The picture above shows the heavy weights of the UPA. Note that of the trio of “Good, the Bad, and the Ugly”, only the Bad and the Ugly are shown. Good never had a chance.

Dr Manmohan Singh -- Pitiable

Chandan Mitra writes in today’s The Pioneer, “All the Lines on this Route are Blocked” —

Given Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s unimpeachable record of probity even his own party leaders are dumbfounded by his palpable helplessness in acting against a Minister who is lampooned day in and day out by the Opposition and media with hard evidence of brazen corruption. It is widely known that Mr Manmohan Singh made an attempt to rid himself of this man when constituting the UPA 2 Cabinet around this time one year ago. Mr A Raja’s shenanigans had been exposed much earlier and it seemed the Prime Minister had decided to use the opportunity of restructuring his team in the wake of the Congress’s enhanced strength after the 2009 poll. Cabinet formation was delayed by at least three days apparently because Mr Singh insisted on giving the telecom portfolio back to Mr Dayanidhi Maran who held it till he fell from Mr M Karunanidhi’s grace mid-way through UPA 1, although he made a comeback after the pre-election patch-up in the Kalaingar’s family. [emphasis added]

“Singh’s unimpeachable record of probity”? Where the hell does that come from? Like the emperors new clothes?

I think that Manmohan Singh is dishonest. Last year in May I wrote:

PM Manmohan Singh is a dishonest man and is a disgrace to the proud and noble Sikhs, a disgrace to India, a disgrace to the worthy economics profession. He lacks pride in his own self. He’s a toady — one who flatters in the hope of gaining favors. A sycophant. He is what we call in Hindi भाड़े का टट्टू, a horse for hire. Granted that he is basically a civil servant and is trained to follow orders. But surely, he could have been his own man after being appointed the prime minister. Or perhaps he was appointed precisely because of his flexible morality and his ability to follow orders.

I wonder how long it will take before the average Indian voter understands this critically important fact that Mr Singh is as thoroughly corrupt as it is humanly possible to be? Would a person with even the least bit of honesty continue to hang on to his position — where he was placed by his masters — despite repeatedly being called out by the media month after month, year after year?

This May we have reports of the telecom scam. Rewind one year and here’s last May’s story (May 6th in ExpressBuzz titled “It’s the Bofor’s ghost again.”):

. . . on the eve of the elections the CBI, under instructions, has withdrawn the Interpol notice against him and the Italian friend of Sonia Gandhi is a free man. This has been done during the elections, after it has become increasingly clear that the Congress might not be able to form the government.

And everyone knows that in case a government here is able to get Mr Q to justice he will squeal. And that could be worrisome for some.

. . . The Congress has been defending the decision on the record, but privately Congressmen tell critical reporters, “what do you expect us to do, we have to defend this or we will lose our job”. Of course Priyanka Vadra and Rahul Gandhi do not see what the fuss is about, but obviously they know the answer for if there is no need to fuss, there was no need to prime the CBI to save the Italian businessman. It has been a shameful deed, a gross violation of the law, and while there is sufficient information to damn the CBI, the fingers are now pointing very directly at those who are in power and in control. Prime Minister Manmohan Singh is amongst those responsible. He makes a penchant of honesty; this is the time for him to explain these murky developments.

The Indian leaders are not known for their vision, intelligence, humanity, or wisdom. What they are known for is their infinite venality and abysmal corruption. That some Indians persist in their insistence that Manmohan Singh is not corrupt in the face of mountains of evidence to the contrary reveals one of two things: they are morally blind and they are remarkably stupid.

It is time to own up to one undeniable fact: Indians are so morally bankrupt that they are absolutely comfortable with corrupt leaders. If it were otherwise, they would not only not vote for them, they would actually lynch them for destroying the country. Or perhaps they are not morally bankrupt but only spineless cretins afraid that they will “lose their jobs” if they stand up and tell Manmohan Singh that he is a despicably dishonest man.

Now if you will excuse me, I have to go throw up — I do every time I read that Blue Turban is an honest man.

[The little picture of the little man was lifted from here.]

The three — corruption, nepotism and the Congress party — form India’s most enduring triumvirate. It is hard to think of one without thinking of the others because they characterize India’s politics and political landscape like nothing else conceivably can. The Congress party is the fiefdom of one family — being part of that confers the inalienable right to be the boss. Nepotism gains a whole new meaning in the hands of the Congress. Chronic, acute and pervasive corruption at the highest levels of governance India could only have been engineered by the political party which has held the reins of power for practically all of India’s existence since 1947. So it was with incredulous wonder that I read two news items yesterday.

The Times of India reports that there “is a wave of resentment in the Congress against sons and daughters of leaders jockeying for party tickets to contest the October 13 assembly elections.”

Maharashtra Pradesh Congress Committee (MPCC) general secretary Hussein Dalwai confirmed that there was large-scale anger among the rank and file of the organisation. “The workers are asking if their job is to only stick posters. They are opposed to the growing trend of `gharanashahi’ (family rule) in the state. The central leadership has been apprised of the sentiments of party cadres, ” Dalwai added.

What is the world coming to when Congress workers are questioning the value of nepotism — the key defining characteristic of the Congress party! What next — question the right of the Nehru-Gandhi family to rule India into perpetuity?

The irony meter has overloaded and crashed. That’s a pity because how would we now measure the degree of irony embedded in this other news flash: “Corruption retarding India’s growth, says Indian PM” (Telegraph.co.uk).

Manmohan Singh, the Indian prime minister, has said that corruption is the single greatest threat to the nation’s economic prospects.

In a speech given to an anti-corruption corruption (sic) in New Delhi, Mr Singh described the damaging effect that bribes, extortion and fraud have on all levels of life in India.

He said that graft meant infrastructure projects were late, over-budget, and often poor quality, while labeling India’s opaque business practices “a fertile breeding ground for the evil of corruption.

“The pervasive corruption in our country tarnishes our image [and it] discourages investors who expect fair treatment and transparent dealings with public authorities,” he said.

See what I mean — how on earth can you measure the irony. He’s a public official in charge of all the other public officials in the country, and he moans and bitches that the public officials under him are corrupt and that corruption is the biggest threat to the economy’s prospects. Is he blatantly admitting his absolute spinelessness and ineptitude or is he not?

This is par for the course for him. He has no idea that the position he holds is powerful enough to fix the problem which he speaks so pitiably about. It is true that he was appointed to that position for his loyalty to the ruling family (loyal lapdogs do get to sit around in the living room) but he could have at least pretended to be his own man once in a while. At the very least, he should stop drawing attention to his ineffectiveness and spinelessness. But no, the man does not have that basic sense.

Anyhow, Mr Manmohan Singh is apparently not smart enough to have figured out what the genesis of India’s corruption is: governmental control and mismanagement of the economy. Perhaps Gareth Price, head of the Asia programme at Chatham House, a foreign policy think tank, could clue him in. Here’s what Price is quoted to have said in the Telegraph piece:

“The fastest growing sector of their economy is IT and that is the only sector that is completely outside the government’s control.”

He said that the history of graft in India was the product mainly of three things. “Firstly, the British bureaucratic legacy to the subcontinent. The British created so many rules that anyone could be shut down if, say, a factory inspector found that a bucket of sand was missing, making the place a ‘fire hazard’. So the inspectors would be bribed simply not to shut the place down.

“Secondly, after Independence India had a Soviet-style system of quotas, in which the licences that you received permitting you to produce a quantity of something basically determined how profitable you would be. So the government would be bribed to hand out licences.

“And the third thing is that the tax system is extraordinarily complex and condusive to corruption. Recent attempt to simplify it met with resistance mainly from business who were afraid they’d end up paying more rather than less.”

The mind simply boggles that the prime minister of India displays publicly his complete and utter lack of comprehension of a matter that is so crucial. Granted that he cannot fathom the issue but could he not pay attention to what others who have pondered the matter at some length are telling him?

Here I list a few things that the government should do:

* Dismantle the legacy bureaucratic system that the British created. Their objective was to extract and exploit the economic system. They put those controls into place. The government of a politically independent India must not have the same objective as that of a colonial power.

* Punish the corrupt — starting at the top of the heap. There is no point in going after lowly milkmen or lecturing little kids about the evils of corruption.

Start at the top — because that is where the rot starts. Criminals are over-represented in India’s legislative bodies. They make laws. Criminals making laws is beyond mortal comprehension.

Heed T.S.R. Subramanian, who retired as India’s most senior civil servant in 1998. Beckett quotes from TSR’s book, “GovernMint in India”: ” “Since no part of the Establishment has an interest in punishing corruption, trying for a more sweeping solution quickly leads into the realm of blind hope.”

Suspend politicians facing criminal charges, as civil servants are suspended pending trial. Establish a fast-track court just for government officials so that cases are resolved expeditiously. Persuade judges to make an example of a few political wrongdoers as a public flogging for the rest.

[Link: Solution to India's Greatest Failure. ]

I too approve of public flogging of high public officials. (Near the end of a pretty long October 2005 piece, titled “The Ownership Society“, I argued why.) You have to hit them where it hurts — their dignity. I am happy to note that Kautilya had a similar view. According to this March 2006 article in the Economist:

Kautilya, writing 2,300 years ago, offers a helpful observation: as punishment for the theft of public property by government servants, he recommended smearing the offenders with cow dung and ashes.

Anyway, corruption in India is here to stay as long as the corrupt rule the roost. India is corrupt because the people choose to elect the criminally corrupt. That you can lay at the doorstep of democracy as practiced in India. The only hope of reforming India lies in reforming Indian democracy. But more about that later.

* There have been four acts of mass casualty terrorism since 1981. All the four were carried out when the Congress (I) was in power in New Delhi.

* There have been three instances of targeted attacks on foreigners since 1991—-two in J&K and one in Mumbai. All the three were carried out when the Congress (I) was in power.

* There have been seven acts of ISI-sponsored aircraft hijackings since 1971. Six of them were carried out when the Congress (I) and one when the BJP was in power.

* There has been one instance of an Air India plane being blown up in mid-air killing over 250 persons. This took place when the Congress (I) was in power.

* The LET was banned by the Musharraf Government as a terrorist organization through a Gazette notification on January 15, 2002. The Manmohan Singh Government has not been able to get the JUD banned by the Zardari Government through a Gazette notification even nine months after the Mumbai attack.

* Indira Gandhi was assassinated when the Congress (I) was in power in New Delhi. Rajiv Gandhi was assassinated when an ally of the Congress (I) was in power in New Delhi and another ally in Chennai.

* The Indian Mujahideen came into existence when the Congress (I) was in power.

* The first commando-style complex terrorist attack in Indian territory by a group of terrorists, all hailing from Pakistan, has taken place when the Congress (I) is in power.

Now it is true that B Raman in his extremely detailed piece (54 bulleted paragraphs, no less) lists instances after instances of the absolutely incomprehensible incompetency of Dr Manmohan Singh in dealing with the terrorist state of Pakistan and the terrorism that it unleashes on Indians. But as I keep saying, Dr Singh cannot be held responsible for reasons of incompetency. I believe courts routinely refuse to punish murderers if it is determined that the murderer is mentally incompetent. Dr Singh does not deserve any less.

For the record, here are items 16 and 17 from Mr Raman’s paper:

16. The inexorable result of Dr. Manmohan Singh’s failure to act: The commando-style attack by 10 Pakistani terrorists of the LET, trained, armed and equipped in Pakistan on two hotels, a Jewish religious-cum-cultural centre and other public places in Mumbai, which started on November 26, 2008, and continued till November 28, 2008.It was an army-style operation involving the use of hand-held weapons, explosives, sophisticated communication equipment and modern internet telephony facilities, which shocked the world and created feelings of anger and outrage in India.

17. The enormity of the public anger against Pakistan forced Dr. Manmohan Singh to freeze the composite dialogue process without disrupting the normal diplomatic relations between the two countries. He did so not because he was convinced that his earlier policy of appeasement of Pakistan had failed, but because he and his Congress (I) party were worried that if they did not give the impression of taking strong action against Pakistan, it might affect the party adversely in the elections of April-May, 2009, to the Lok Sabha, the lower House of the Indian Parliament. The resumption of the composite dialogue was made conditional on Pakistan acting strongly against the LET, its operatives based in Pakistan who had planned and got executed the terrorist attack in Mumbai and its terrorist infrastructure in Pakistani territory.

If you continue to support a political party that consistently screws you over decade after decade, impoverishes you, and treats you like a retard, you might be a third world country.

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Why do they do that? That’s the biggest puzzle, perhaps second only to the puzzle in the Mahabharata.

(In the Mahabharata, someone asks, “Of all the wonders of the universe, which is the most wondrous of all?” It is one of those occasional geniuses who replies, “Man sees death and mortality all around him all his life. But he is never quite fully persuaded of his own mortality.”)

* * *

The Bofors gun kickback story is as well known as it is old. To refresh your memory, see Seema Mustafa’s short piece of May 6th in ExpressBuzz titled “It’s the Bofor’s ghost again.”

Bofors is a story that will just not go away. It cannot for reasons that Congress president Sonia Gandhi cannot fathom. And the reasons are many. It was the first case where kickbacks in a defence deal were confirmed. It was the first case that the Indian media pursued in great detail, and with tremendous enthusiasm.

It was the first case that actually established a trail between middlemen, high flying ‘foreign’ connections and the Nehru- Gandhi First Family of India. It was the first case that brought down a government, that astounded not just the middle class but also the villagers, and that assumed a dynamics of its own that is still able to generate heat during an Indian election.

It is a story where the middlemen might be dead but the Italian businessman Ottavio Quattrocchi, a close friend of Sonia Gandhi, is alive and kicking. During his days in Delhi he told this columnist on more than one occasion that he was not really such a good friend of Sonia Gandhi, at a time when his was one of the few names to have been cleared for free entry into then Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi’s residence. Quattrocchi has subsequently changed his tune, and now when he is actually not such a good friend of Sonia Gandhi, he makes it clear to any reporter who manages to meet him abroad that they are great friends, and know each other extremely well. Obviously, in saying so the wily Italian businessman has managed to make it clear that he knows a lot more than he is saying, and that if the Indian government does manage to get his head into the noose, he will talk. And talk happily.

. . .
The result is that in the intervening years the CBI was unable to collect evidence, although it is available in plenty, to pin Quattrocchi down in courts abroad; he himself evaded the law and the supposedly vigilant Indian machinery to get back to Italy; his accounts in London that had been frozen as these could establish the trail to the kickbacks were released as the Indian government sat back and deliberately let the reminders lapse; the money was withdrawn by him almost immediately; and then when he was arrested by Argentina under an Interpol notice issued at the time of the Bofors case, the government ensured that the case was completely botched up and Quattrocchi was able to walk out a free man.

And now to complete the circle, on the eve of the elections the CBI, under instructions, has withdrawn the Interpol notice against him and the Italian friend of Sonia Gandhi is a free man. This has been done during the elections, after it has become increasingly clear that the Congress might not be able to form the government.

And everyone knows that in case a government here is able to get Mr Q to justice he will squeal. And that could be worrisome for some.

The BJP has made some valiant noises on the deal but has not been able to explain why it did not pursue the case with the same vigour as the V P Singh government had. The Congress has been defending the decision on the record, but privately Congressmen tell critical reporters, “what do you expect us to do, we have to defend this or we will lose our job”. Of course Priyanka Vadra and Rahul Gandhi do not see what the fuss is about, but obviously they know the answer for if there is no need to fuss, there was no need to prime the CBI to save the Italian businessman. It has been a shameful deed, a gross violation of the law, and while there is sufficient information to damn the CBI, the fingers are now pointing very directly at those who are in power and in control. Prime Minister Manmohan Singh is amongst those responsible. He makes a penchant of honesty; this is the time for him to explain these murky developments.

Clearly there are problems, and Bofors will not go away from media memory just because the Nehru-Gandhi family wishes it so. They should also realise that by misusing the official machinery to save Quattrocchi from the long arm of the law, over and over again, guilt and not innocence has been established. And in the public perception this is enough to keep the Bofors ghost alive. And the favourite pastime of ghosts, as we know, is to haunt.

PM Manmohan Singh is a dishonest man and is a disgrace to the proud and noble Sikhs, a disgrace to India, a disgrace to the worthy economics profession. He lacks pride in his own self. He’s a toady — one who flatters in the hope of gaining favors. A sycophant. He is what we call in Hindi भाड़े का टट्टू, a horse for hire. Granted that he is basically a civil servant and is trained to follow orders. But surely, he could have been his own man after being appointed the prime minister. Or perhaps he was appointed precisely because of his flexible morality and his ability to follow orders.

Talking of criminals brings me back to the question which I asked right at the top: what will the UPA government not do to protect the criminally corrupt? Quattrocchi is one famous case. Another case involves one Mr Hassan Ali Khan, a sometime resident of — of all places — Pune, the city where I unpack my bags.

You may be familiar with Mr Khan and his reported around $8 billion in some foreign bank. In case you want the relevant facts, please read Mr Arun Shourie’s press statement of May 12th, “The Predictable Scandal.”

That this [UPA] Government, the Government that has let Ottavio Quattrochi take away the money that had been frozen on orders of the courts; this Government which then used the CBI to let the man off the hook completely; this Government in which corruption has reached levels that were unheard of till now; this Government which has been consistently soft on terror, that this Government should now have stooped so low as to help an operator like Hassan Ali Khan by sending forged documents to a foreign Government is entirely in character.

Based on what they have been told by officials of intelligence agencies as well as of the Enforcement Directorate, the media have reported that Hassan Ali Khan

• Has been known to be connected to Dawood Ibrahim
• Has been known to have been channeling very large amounts from unknown sources into the Indian stock market
• Has had 8 to 9 billion dollars in the UBS and other banks of Switzerland
• Has been responsible for hawala transactions of over Rs. 35,000 crore through Swiss banks.

Go read it all.

The most basic rule of the social contract between the government and the people is that the government is not willfully criminal in intent and action. That contract has been repeatedly and severely violated. That the government did so and still continues to expect support from the people speaks to how enormous its contempt for the people is.

Here’s Shourie once again:

Once again, the country is being held up to ridicule – once again, the world is being shown how the Government of India will bend our laws and institutions to help the worst sorts of criminals and their associates, exactly as banana republics do.

The biggest puzzle for me is whether the people of India deserve the contempt that the Congress government holds them in. That puzzle will be solved within the week — if the UPA comes back to continue its rape of India, the people would have demonstrated that they deserve the contempt that the Congress party has for them.

PS: You may have guessed from this rant that I am very very upset. That happens. You may wish to read “Of Kakistocracies, Principals, and Agents” to understand where I am coming from.

Gurumurthy concludes with

Manmohan Singh today does what Sonia wants like Narasimha Rao did then what she wanted. Yet, there is a difference between how the two obliged her. Rao felt shy to do what she wanted. So he did it stealthily. Singh does what she wants openly and shamelessly. Even, a Sonia family retainer like H R Bharadwaj feels shy to own up the shameless withdrawal of the Red Corner Notice on Q; but the PM owns it proudly. Singh is shameless about what Rao used to feel shy. Why? Unlike Rao, Singh is not an elected prime minister but a nominated one; he is not chosen by democratic process, but selected by the dynasty; he is not backed by the people, but backed by the family. So the shift from shyness to shamelessness, from Rao to Singh .

Fortunately, Mr Singh is a Sikh and does not have to shave. He does not have to face himself. But one does wonder how he shows his face in public, though. Perhaps he minimizes his public expose. That could explain why he never contests elections. At some level, the sadness one feels for him is mixed in with heaps of contempt and pity.

Still I find it hard to believe that people actually vote for a party which has him as a member. What does it say about those voters? Some things are best not delved into too deeply.

Post script: Please do read “A Self-confessed Slave” — a post about Mr Manmohan Singh.

I have an excerpt from the piece below the fold. I agree with the particulars that Sally (who is director of the European Centre for International Political Economy) mentions supporting the argument that Manmohan Singh is a singular disaster but I cannot agree with the title of the piece.

The Congress party has been in power for decades, an order of magnitude longer than any other party. India is in dire straits, never mind the hype to the contrary. The Congress party brought it about. But they were not thrust upon India by divine intervention or providence. The people of India exercising their democratic right repeatedly voted them into power. A certain segment of Indians in their wisdom (or crass stupidity, depending on how you look at it) have determined that anyone, no matter how demented or retarded, as long as they had the last name Gandhi, was divinely ordained to rule India and have exercised their choice in voting for the Congress party. They will most likely do so again, sickening though the thought is.

The Congress party can be blamed for a lot of things but they are not exceptional in their greed for power. That is common to the human lot. If blame has to be assigned at all, it must surely lie within the Indian public. Regardless of whether the Congress deserves to win or lose, the sad fact is that the Indians deserve the Congress. That’s just deserts.

And now for the extended excerpt from Razeen Sally.

The government’s response to the present global economic crisis was to introduce further market-distorting restrictions, including higher tariffs, anti-dumping duties and assorted non-tariff import barriers.

Finally, the Congress party entered the general election campaign with pledges to expand its hugely wasteful rural employment guarantee programme and increase food subsidies.

The government has squandered the boom years, left the country more vulnerable to malign global economic conditions and compromised prospects for a healthy recovery. But Manmohan Singh and his “dream team” have been given an easy ride: they have escaped blame, especially outside India. The conventional excuse is that their hands are tied by Sonia Gandhi and her Congress coterie, and by coalition politics.

This explanation just does not wash. Mr Singh has impeccable academic credentials and is by all accounts incorruptible. He deserves credit for his performance as finance minister in the 1990s – although credit should also go to Narasimha Rao, then prime minister, who took the tough decisions.

But Mr Singh has proved a hopeless decision-maker as prime minister. Sadly, he proves the rule that academics should generally be “on tap” but not “on top”.

The whole reform programme relies on the prime minister himself. Mr Rao and A.B. Vajpayee proved their mettle, despite heavy political constraints. Mr Singh has failed; he should bear much of the blame. The Congress party does not deserve to be re-elected and the dream team does not deserve to continue in office. An alternative BJP-led government may do better if it has a decisive leader with a core of able reformers. It will not if its leader follows the dictates of short-term opportunism and messy coalition politics.

Nevertheless, the failures of the Congress-led government should be put into a larger institutional context. The Indian state, led by a venal political-bureaucratic elite, remains unreformed. State institutions – the political class, political parties, parliaments, the bureaucracy, the judiciary – have got worse at both national and state levels. Since the late 1980s, “stealth” reforms have taken place outside the state. But India cannot be expected to grow fast with such shaky foundations. The upshot is that much-needed market reforms cannot continue to skirt round the reform of the state itself. Politically, that is the hardest nut to crack.

It’s all karma, neh?

The article is a must-read. Punj points out that Dr Singh is deliberately kept directly unelected. “Even during the five years that he has been the Prime Minster, the party chose to play safe and again got him in through Assam. Was that deliberate to keep him weak lest he gets elected directly and challenges the family’s heirloom?”

As an intellectual descendant of Diogenes, the cynic, I see the motives of the governments of India to be what they are: the blatantly odious manipulation of the population by pandering to the basest desires of people to gain advantage over others. Vote bank politics taken to absurd extents that destroy the cohesion so necessary for not just economic growth but social development as well.

The latest outrage of the Congress-led UPA government of Sonia Gandhi is its attempt to divide the Indian armed forces along religious lines. I am so livid with rage that I cannot even think straight, leave alone compose a fitting response. So I will have to lean upon Nitin Pai and let him take it from here. He wrote in The Acorn that there is absolutely no reason to politicise the religious composition of India’s armed forces:

One of the most dangerously irresponsible acts of the India’s Congress party-led government is the setting up of a high-level committee to prepare a report on the demography and ’socio-economic situation’ of Muslims in India. The terms of reference are broad on one hand, and go into specific details on the other. Although the government won’t admit it explicitly, the objective of the entire exercise is to pave the way for reservations for Muslims in education and employment. The manner in which the terms of reference have been framed leaves no doubt as to their intended purpose.

…

The Acorn has previously argued that Dr Manmohan Singh’s government will be remembered for having entrenched a culture of entitlement that will undermine India’s economy and deepen the divisions of its society without doing anything better for the supposed beneficiaries of the reservation policies. Vote-bank politics, of course, will receive a boost. Not content with having sliced and diced the myriad castes and communities its Hindu population, the Congress party has turned its attention towards India’s Muslims. And lest you ask, all this is by the way of secularism, of which the Congress party is a staunch supporter.

What is absolutely unforgivable is the UPA government’s decision to drag in the armed forces into this web of cynical political calculus. The armed forces are the one place where religious and communal divisions are not institutionalised. As Gen J J Singh, the chief of the Indian army says, “it is not the Army’s philosophy to discriminate or maintain such information. We are equal-opportunity employers. We strive to take people on certain standards after which only merit takes them forward. We do not bother about where they are from, their faith or their language”. There is no reason at all to investigate the ethnic and religious composition of the armed forces, let alone to do this with a view to ensure the ‘adequate representation’ one particular religious group. The Indian government has no grounds at all to question how the armed forces select, appoint or place their personnel based on their religious affiliations. As Gen Singh pointed out, collecting and keeping such data is the thin end of the wedge. Putting such data in the hands of a political class hell-bent on creating pockets of entitlement is a recipe for undermining the morale and the espirit de corps without which armies cannot even begin to fight their wars, let alone win them. And then there are those who want to use such data to make the loyalties of Muslim soldiers the subject of innuendo — there can be nothing more unpardonable than this. And lest you ask, all this too is by way of secularism, to which the UPA government is committed.

The UPA government stinks. And that’s putting it very mildly. There can be nothing but contempt for those who are running India to the ground. [Emphasis added]

Is Dr Manmohan Singh so powerless as to agree to such morally depraved and socially dangerous policies?