Just the other day a friend was telling me how one major business house (starts with a B) used to give freebies to one of India’s prime ministers (starts with a N). N would be hosted and feted by B, and in exchange, N made sure that B got licenses for steel or some such commodity, and was protected from market competition.

That’s crony capitalism. The cronies are usually leftist politicians and big businesses. N got the game started and with time, the rot has spread.

India has suffered immeasurably from it. There’s of course the direct loss which arises from mis-allocation of resources, and under-utilization of capacity. Given protection from domestic and foreign competition, firms end up producing high-cost shoddy goods. The consumers lose in terms of quality and quantity.

India has been DUPed. DUP is an acronym for “directly unproductive profit-seeking” activities, authored by the venerable Jagadish Bhagwati (in a 1982 paper). Here’s a bit from his book “Political Economy and International Economics.” (MIT Press, 1991.)

Directly unproductive profit-seeking (DUP) activities are defined as ways of making a profit (i.e., income) by undertaking activities that are directly (i.e., immediately, in their primary impact) uproductive in the sense that they produce pecuniary returns but do not produce goods or services that enter a conventional utility function or inputs into such goods and services.

Typical examples of such DUP (pronounced appropriately as “dupe”) activities are (1) tarrif-seeking lobbying that is aimed at earning pecuniary income by charging the tariff and therefore factor incomes, (2) revenue-seeking lobbying that seeks to divert government revenues towards oneself as recipient, (3) monopoly-seeking lobbying whose objective is to create an artificial monopoly that generates retns, and (4) tariff-evasion or smuggling that that de facto reduces or eliminates the the tariff (or quota) and generates returns by exploiting thereby the price differential between the tariff-inclusive legal and the tariff-free illegal imports.

While these are evidently profitable activities, their output is zero. Hence, they are wasteful in their primary impact, recalling Pareto’s distinction between production and predation: they use real resources to produce profits but no output.

The above quote is (laboriously) copied from the google book cited above.

We have to keep in mind that perhaps it all starts innocently enough. Well-meaning people who are seriously ignorant of the basic nature of the world make policies that they believe will benefit society as a whole. Businesses soon enough realize that more profits can be made by gaming the system than by actually producing value and generating wealth. With time, the waters get sufficiently muddy that DUP activities become hidden from public view and finally entirely disappear from public consciousness.[1] The economy slides into poverty.

The world used to be divided into largely independent domestic markets. Now, however, with increasing globalization, DUP activities are international in character. One of the most profitable is the global arms market. The US arms businesses prowl around the world selling multi-billion dollar deals to Third World countries.

Rediff.com reports that the US government

has launched a concerted and aggressive campaign on behalf of United States’s fighter aircraft manufacturers to push for the ‘mother of all deals’– the $11 billion medium multi-role combat aircraft deal for 126 fighter aircraft for the Indian Air Force. The deal could give the ailing US economy a major boost in terms of both exports and thousands of jobs.

[Thanks to Yoga Saripalli for the link.]

These are truly weapons of mass destruction, as I have been saying for a while. The true weapons of mass destruction are the guns and fighter planes and subs and ships that are routinely sold. A few squadrons of fighter planes send millions to an early grave — not as dramatic as a mushroom cloud but more painfully through chronic starvation and disease.

Here’s a bit from a post from April 2009, “The War and the Circus.”

Perhaps most humans are congenitally belligerent and can be reasonably expected to get into fights. But it takes institutionalized big businesses to create a war machine that raises ordinary human belligerence to levels of superhuman insanity. The war machine — and one can argue that indeed there is only one such thing but with a global reach, even though its components are multinational in the sense that people from various nations participate in their creation and maintenance — is so pervasive that it seems to be as natural, unchangeable, and logical as the seasons. Like the seasons, the war machine dictates how people carry on with their lives unquestioningly. People generally accept the war machine as naturally they do the seasons.

But if one stops to think about it, unlike the seasons, the war machine is entirely man-made. The men (and they are overwhelmingly men, regardless of the color of their skins or their eyes) in charge of the military-industrial complex create the war machine for their own amusement and aggrandizement. They have the power to create ever more lethal, ever more expensive components of the war machine, and that power extracts ever more resources from the global economy to ratchet up the destructive power of the machine monotonically. The machine almost literally sucks up life out of the people who have no power over it but who eventually pay for it with their blood, sweat and tears. The men controlling the machine, however, get more of what motivates them — raw, naked, unimaginable power.

Every nation on earth is involved in this insanity, directly or indirectly. The desperately poor third-world nations starve their own people to buy ever more expensive weapons from the advanced industrialized countries. By keeping these nations fighting amongst themselves, the advanced industrialized countries achieve two goals. First, income.

The desperately poor third-world nations pay the advanced industrialized countries for weapons they cannot afford. If one side of a particular conflict involving two desperately poor third-world countries is unable to afford the weapons, the advanced industrialized countries give out “aid” to prop it up so that it does not lose and thereby end the conflict. The other side, to maintain balance, then has to become a paying customer and buy an equivalent set. This is a source of income for the advanced industrialized countries, and more damagingly, a transfer of wealth from the desperately poor to the amazingly prosperous.

Go read that post when you have time. It is depressing as all hell, even if I say so myself. And if you want more, go check out this old post, “Wars, Opium, Powerful Governments and Weak Nations” which is from December 2005.

Before I let you go, here’s another one on the same topic from long ago which I recommend. “Benefits of Weapons Trade” July 2005.

The US had passed its age of being a subsistence economy for a long time before it started on its path to developing weapons of mass destruction. Its agriculture was booming, it had a huge manufacturing base, its people were literate and educated, it had a massive stock of housing, its institutions were mature, and so on. Given that foundation, it could afford the luxury of going into the research and development of weapons, and built the most advanced and expensive military hardware in world. The unfortunate part is that there are countries like India which have hundreds of millions of people stuck in the subsistence phase of development. And the leaders of these under-developed countries eye the expensive military hardware and salivate. They are forced to attempt to keep up with their neighbors in their competition to get as many shiny nuclear-tipped missiles as possible.

If I was made the global dictator temporarily, and was given the power to make only one absolutely binding and enforceable global law, it would be to ban weapons trade altogether. If neither India nor Pakistan could buy nuclear subs and missiles, fighter jets and bombers, the ordinary people of these countries might have a better shot at a human existence.

From this point of view, the tragedy of the world is not so much that there are so many poor countries, but that there are those rich countries that have surplus resources to devote to developing weapons that ultimately starve the poor. And the leaders of these poor countries fall all over themselves in praising the foresight and the wisdom of the leaders of the rich countries for giving them the opportunity to buy these weapons.

Mark Twain had unusually praiseworthy words for India. He would have been pleased by the increased tries between India and the US. But I am sure that he would have been saddened by the irony in the celebration of some in India at the chance to buy American weapons.

NOTES:

[1] Go read “You can’t trust the Tatas, they are worse than others,” a post by Girish Nikam at “Indias Report.” (Thanks to Dinesh Dharme for the link.) Murky business. Who knows what’s going on in one of India’s most respected business houses. But we should not be surprised.

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.

Note “reduce barriers to business and clean up corruption.” Reduce business barriers? OK, the government erects them; only it can remove them. But it does not have an incentive to do so because those in power actually gain from them while the country loses. The story is the same with corruption. Sure the average smalltime crook is into corruption. But for massive multi-tens-of-thousands of crores corruption, you have to be in government. The high level corruption eventually trickles down and gives support to the petty corruption that the average person encounters daily.

I think a reasonable case can be made that the biggest enemy of India is the government of India. It began with the British, and the job was eagerly taken over by FNehru, and from then on, with only a short few breaks, the FNehru clan has presided over the destruction.

I repeat that here because it bears repeating: The Indian government is the greatest barrier to India’s development.

I am quite sure that this realization is not novel and certainly I am not unique in having it. Scores of able observers before yours truly have noted it. The great Milton Friedman is one of them. In a talk he gave in India in 1963 — nearly half a century ago — he said:

[Westerners] think in terms of the large, modern corporation, of General Motors, Genera Electric, and other industrial giants. But it was not firms like this that produced the Industrial revolution; they are, if anything, its end products. The hope for India lies not in the exceptional Tatas or similar giants, but precisely in the hole-in-the wall firm, in the small and medium size enterprises, in Ludhiana not Jamshedpur; in the millions of small entrepreneurs who line the streets of every city with their sometimes miniscule shops and workshops. If the tendencies so evident in Ludhiana could be given full rein, and not hampered and hindered in every direction by governmental interference and control, India could achieve a rate of growth that would exceed today’s fondest hopes.

As this final remark suggests, the correct explanation for India’s slow growth is in my view not to be found in its religious or social attitudes, or in the quality of its people, but rather in the economic policy that India has adopted; most especially in the extensive use of detailed physical controls by government. {Emphasis added.}

Nearly half a century later, the government still exerts its baleful control over the economy. Why does the Indian government use “detailed physical controls” that are evidently so damaging to India? Because that’s the way to expropriate part of the wealth the economy produces. It engineers shortages by controlling the supply. Shortages raise prices significantly above costs which end up as profits for the controllers. This is typical monopolistic behavior.

The higher the degree of control, the greater the profits. The greater the profits, the greater is the incentive to become the controller. If being the controller affords, say, $10 billion in profits, then it is worth spending a few billion to become the controller. Also, since these profits can only be had if one is criminally dishonest, it stands to reason that it will attract the most corrupt and indeed that in the competition for control, the most criminally corrupt will emerge victorious.

So here’s the whole sordid story in outline. Certain misguided ignorant people (who need not be named here) got control of the government when the British let go of their control. The new bunch was led by one particular guy who is notable for his hubris (that he knew what’s best for everyone in every sphere) and his ignorance of his own incomprehension of how an economy works. Between the father who commanded unquestioned obedience and the uncle who thought he knew it all, India was screwed.

Hubris and ignorance among the powerful is a potently destructive mix and a sure recipe for disaster. The outcome is the disaster we see today. They set up the command-control-license-permit-quota raj. It is the best way known to humanity to retard economic development.

But what’s worse is that it set up the conditions for attracting criminals to politics. Mid last century, the degree of corruption in Indian politics was high but compared to what is the norm today, it was as if the politicians of the past were veritable saints.

It’s a downward spiral. Reports of corruption in the tune of billions of dollars have lost their power to shock and surprise. At the highest levels of the government there are criminals, and the general public just takes it as business as usual. Fact is that most people are totally unaware that those billion-dollar corruption deals affect their wellbeing, and theft of public money is coming right out of their pockets.

There is a significant middle-class educated population which is capable of actually comprehending the connection between the corruption and government control. But having the capacity to comprehend is not the same as actually comprehending. Trouble is that they have not had this connection actually explained to them. The education system does not clue them in. Then of course they are too distracted by bread and circuses (or pizza and cricket, if you please) to figure it out. But even if some of them have figured it out, they are a minority and worse still, a minority that does not bother to express its outrage.

The story becomes even more dismal when you consider what the criminals do to remain in power. They tax the productive sector of the economy and hand out largess to the unproductive sector in exchange for their votes. As the saying goes, robbing from Peter to pay Paul will always ensures Paul’s support.

To summarize: Control of the economy does two things. First, it reduces economic activity and consequently growth. Second, it gives rise to rent, which then attracts the most criminally corrupt to gain control of the government. Rent-seeking rather than good governance becomes the sole aim of those in government. The criminally corrupt are not competent to make good policy given that it was not their public policy brilliance that brought them to power. Besides, good policy generally entails a reduction in government power and control of the economy. So why would they do it even if they were advised by others who know better.

This does not have to be a counsel of despair. The reason I keep harping on this is because I believe that comprehension precedes positive change. We must first admit that there is a problem, then we have to understand the causes of the problem, then we have to figure out how to address those causes, and then do what is required.

To my mind, we have to reach, teach and breach. Reach those good citizens who are fed up of the rot, teach them the causes of the rot, and together breach the bulwark behind which the criminals govern India.

Related Posts:

The Congested-Shortage Economy. April 2010.

Manufactured Shortages and Corruption. June 2006.

From Nehru and the Indian Economy (. . . Why is India Poor?)

The last posting, Why is India Poor?, has drawn sufficient attention that there needs to be a follow-up addressing some of the points raised in the comments.

It is interesting to note that the arguments against my view of Nehru and his failed economic policies are generic. I will repeat them and my counter-arguments here.

My argument. Economic policies matter. If you have sound economic policies, you get commensurate economic performance. India’s economic performance sucks. It performs dismally in any sort of ranking of human development and economic performance tests. Half the illiterates of the world call India their home. A third of all global poverty is in India. All things considered, India has been a colossal failure so far.

Why has India been a failure? Are Indians collectively stupid? Unlikely.

Did GOD decree it? I asked him and he categorically denied it.

Did nations around the world gang up and rape India for the last 60 years? Not that I know of.

I am left with the hypothesis that perhaps India’s economic policies sucked chrome off a bumper of a pickup truck parked at 400 yards.

Who makes economic policies? You? I? No, economic policy is made by the so-called leaders and visionaries of this sainted land. Who were the most powerful leaders of this land since its independence from Britain? Nehru and his descendants. He dictated policy—economic, foreign, domestic, you name it. The most charitable way of putting the matter is to say that Nehru was clueless.

He wasn’t just clueless about this or that. His cluelessness was all encompassing. He was clueless about foreign policy, military strategy, domestic development — you name it and he is the greatest screw-up that India has ever produced.

Then come the rebuttals which often start with the admission that Nehru was clueless but . . .

. . . but during his time, many others–including a few people one cannot dismiss as being clueless thought that Central planning was beneficial for countries like India. These included Nobel winner Gunnar Myrdal (Asian Drama, an Inquiry into the Poverty of Nations) and Mahalanobis.

The argument above says that it wasn’t the man, it was the circumstances. By that logic, everything is justifiable. Every crime can be explained away as the result of compelling circumstances and hence there can be no accountability.

Take, for instance, the WorldCom and Enron cases where executives committed theft on unprecedented and unimaginable scale. One could point to the fact that other companies were also doing shady accounting, that the internet boom was going strong, that the economy was very strong, that the GAAP was being followed. All those explanations would also paper over the fact that the crime arose out of the greed of the perpetrator. Given all the circumstances but absent the greed of the executives, the grand theft would not have taken place.

Now back to Nehru: even if one were to grant all the circumstances that you cite above (but only for the sake of argument), the fact remains that central planning was personally very convenient for the Cha-cha.

The children of Imperialism are not weaned on the milk of humility; they are brought up on heady diet of hubris. Nehru was an imperialist who believed that his destiny was to rule the brown masses and he continually rejected sane advice. Look deeply into any problem that India faces and you will see Nehru’s finger-prints all over it.

Take Kashmir. Who was it who let the matter get out of hand? Nehru with his idiotic insistence that the UN be called to mediate the dispute. Talking of the UN, who was it who rejected the proposal that India take a seat in the permanent security council? Nehru. There is not enough space here to go into all the horrendous mistakes.

Then there is the argument that says, “Don’t blame Nehru for the screw-up that India is. We, Indians, are to blame.” That line is similar to the one Niket made in the comments in the last post.

Yes, in fact, we are to blame. Indians are basically collectively a bunch of clueless retards. They collectively elect leaders who are clueless retards and these clueless retards choose policies that keep the country of hundreds of millions of people in abject poverty. No argument there. A country deserves the leaders it gets, especially so in a so-called democracy. I agree that Bihar deserves and gets Rabri Devi and Laloo Prasad Yadav.

So if the collective is to blame, why is Nehru elevated to the position of a demi-god? Not just that, anyone associated with his family is elevated as well. With very rare exceptions, everything in India which has a personal name associated with it is named after the Nehru-Gandhi family. The Borivali National Park close to my abode is named “Sanjay Gandhi National Park”. All sorts of educational institutions are named after the members of a family that collectively have fewer educational achievements than yours truly.

Allow me to repeat that: The entire Nehru-Gandhi family — Cha-chaji, Indira, Rajiv, Sonia, Sanjay, Rahul, Prianka – collectively haver fewer educational qualifications than I (an average person) do. If I am not mistaken, they don’t have one solitary single college degree among the whole lot of them.

I later learned that I was wrong about the educational qualifications of the Nehru-Gandhi clan. It appears that Nehru did graduate. So they do have one educational certificate from a genuine institution.

In conclusion, the time is ripe when people started getting to know about Nehru the Nabob of Cluelessness. In the age of the internets, it will not be long before it all comes out. Sometimes it appears as if the truth will never come out — but eventually it does.

The wheel of dharma turns very slowly but it turns very surely. Or as has been noted before, karma is a bitch.

Pick up the newspaper any day of the week and you will see some revelation or the other related to the Nehru-Gandhi clan’s mis-governance.

Today the papers are reporting how Rajiv Gandhi allowed the Union Carbide chief to escape from India 25 years ago. Those who aid and abet criminals must be called criminals as well.

I approve of @barbarindian ’s tweet:

I hereby propose renaming the Bhopal disaster as Rajiv Gandhi Gas Leak Yojna

Winston Churchill.

Oh sorry, not him.

“There being no vacancies at Eton, in 1905 he (Motilal Nehru) packed 15-year-old Jawaharlal off to Harrow, determined that the boy grow up a proper English gentleman. He succeeded beyond his wildest dreams; and years later, at Cambridge, Jawaharlal wrote his father asking permission to transfer to Oxford: ‘Cambridge is becoming too full of Indians.’”

[Source: Koenraad Elst writing about Nehru as a student in England.]

Prime Minister Nehru categorically ruled out any proposal for appointing a high power tribunal to enquire into and investigate charges of corruption against Ministers or persons in high authority, for the main reason that, in India, or for that matter any other country where there was a democratic set-up, he could not see how such a tribunal could function. The appointment of such a tribunal, Mr. Nehru felt, would “produce an atmosphere of mutual recrimination, suspicion, condemnation, charges and counter-charges and pulling each other down, in a way that it would become impossible for normal administration to function.” More than half the time of the Press conference was devoted by Mr. Nehru to deal with this question of appointing a tribunal to enquire into cases of corruption as recently urged by India’s former Finance Minister, Mr. C.D. Deshmukh.

The original item was published exactly 50 years earlier in the Hindu: January 9, 1960: Enquiry into charges

Remember that Nehru’s Congress party and his progeny have been at the helm of affairs which has led to India to become one stinking filthy heap of corruption. Corruption cannot be eradicated from Indian politics as long as that fact does not change. (Hat tip: Sri.)

The setting is in Brooklyn, New York, a few weeks after Nehru’s death in 1964. Someone asks the guru Prabhupada what he thought became of Nehru after his death. The writer of the article recounts Prabhupada’s answer. Read on.

The question was a loaded one, I thought. In fact, I had the misgiving that Prabhupada might refuse to answer. But then, I was wrong. I had not yet known Prabhupada so well. He was undaunted by any question and his reply came forth instantly. Quite clearly Prabhupada knew Nehru like the palm of his hand; it was us who knew so little of the man, thanks to all the well executed suppression of details of Nehru’s private and personal life by the GoI and the Indian media. For instance, even today, some half a century after Nehru and his family took over the reins of Indian government, we do not know who indeed was Indira’s father-in-law!

Prabhupada started his discourse. He said that Nehru was re-born almost immediately after his death, a thing that happens only to the most sinful people. He did not even have a short-lived taste of heaven before he was born again. What was worse, is that Nehru was born this time in the form of a dog. He was a dog in a small town of Sweden. His master had another dog before the dog-Nehru was acquired by him and so the dog-Nehru had to share the love of his master with another dog.

Prabhupada explained that to be born as a dog, after having been born as a Kashmiri Brahmin in India, is a big fall. It indicated that Nehru had led a vile life, a very vile life, during his existence as a man in India. Also, Nehru’s hatred for anything vaishnava did not make things any easier for him.

That Nehru was a meat-eater, specially beef-eater, a regular wine-drinker, made things even worse for him. On top of that, Nehru was (a fact which we did not know then and learnt later, much later, only after having read M.O. Mathai’s treatises on Nehru; Mathai should know for he was the Catholic private secretary for Nehru for a decade or so) a notorious womanizer. It was not only Mrs. Mountbatten that he slept with on a regular basis while our jawans were dying on battle fields in the north-east and in Kashmir; he used to sleep with each and every woman he could lay his hands on. Thus, he had left a chain of bastards one of whom had been delivered in a Catholic nunnery in Bangalore. In the mean time, his sidekick, one Krishna Menon, became the Minister of Defense. First thing he did was dismantle the Ichhapore Gun Factory and turned it into a coffee making machine factory. He was a communist and he loved the Chinese more than he loved Indians.

Prabhupada was quite discreet; we know now, for he did not divulge to us at the time that Nehru finally died of syphilis (exactly like the communist leader Lenin of Russia) and not a bullet wound on the battle front. Prabhupada, however, told us in detail all the harms Nehru did to the Hindus of India, all the insults that he had heaped on them during his reign.

Nehru used to brag of his non-Hindu upbringing. He used to say openly that he was brought up as a Mohammedan, educated as a westerner; it was only by accident that he was born a Hindu. It is now known that he was born in a house in the red-light district of Allahabad, where his father Motilal used to ply a brothel-keeper’s trade. No one wants to talk of this dark side of Nehru’s upbringing. On the other hand, it is said openly, wrongly of course, that he was born in the Anand Bhavan, which was not even owned by Moti Lal at the time Nehru was born.

However, the few little details that we learnt from Prabhupada opened our eyes and I returned home very depressed. I was even more depressed to think that our people in India were singing all kinds of fulsome obituaries for this man who was worse than a traitor to the Hindus, the overwhelming majority of India. What was wrong? The next few years showed us all that was wrong! His daughter, in order to create differences between the Hindus and the Sikhs, the fighting arm of the Hindus since generations, attacked the sacred temple at Hari-Mandir Sahib in Amritsar. She had to pay for the crime with her life and event-ually, as we have all seen, our gods saw to it that the dynasty was totally destroyed for the sins of Nehru, now a dog in Sweden!

Re-incarnation is a lot of content-less nonsense, in my opinion. I don’t think that there is any abiding self, or soul, that migrates from living being to living being. What tickles me is the really fanciful notion that the man responsible for the Himalayan Blunder (and scores of other blunders) ends up as a dog in Sweden. Why Sweden? What sin has Sweden committed? Why not Pakistan? I don’t know. Maybe that Swedish dog continued to be reincarnated and finally ended up as Musharraf’s pet in Pakistan.

BTW, the book, Himalayan Blunder by Brigadier John P. Dalvi was banned by the Indian government when it was published in 1969. Thankfully in the age of the internets (or should that be the interwebs?), censorship and banning is meaningless. “Satya Meva Jayate” — Truth Alone Prevails — is India’s motto. The Internet is helping significantly in making that happen.

I think one easy test of whether a society is free or not is to check whether there is freedom of expression. Can you say, read or write what you please? More importantly, can you say, read or write what you please without being hauled off to some gulag? How does India figure on this test. Not very well, I am afraid.

Radio and TV in India, until very recently, were controlled by the government to the extent that those were totally owned by the government. Add to that, the entire education system was (and still is to a disturbing degree) controlled by the state. That made it very easy to brainwash the kids and raise the next generation of obedient citizens who knew nothing other than the party line. The government routinely censors movies, bans books, and fails to protect writers who are unpopular with specific vote banks.

No, India does not epitomize the free society, although it is most certainly not at the bottom of the barrel. For real oppressive government, one has to look to India’s neighbors. In any case, considering that India is tom-tommed as a democracy (the largest in fact, although how that is supposed to impress one is not clear), it could have been a freer society.

But now it does not matter any more. Censorship was a technical problem and it is technology that has crippled the once-powerful state’s ability to control what people talk about and consequently how people think. Let me take a concrete example. Cha-cha Nehru.

I like to call him “Cha-cha” (uncle) rather than “pundit” (learned scholar). Cha-cha sits better on the man. His policies were paternalistic. His syle dictatorial, like that of a strict uncle towards his rather dissolute nieces and nephews. Besides, calling him a “learned scholar” would be stretching the term beyond any recognition.

Indians who were brought up on a steady diet of state-approved educational content have no idea that Nehru was a petty tyrant and his policies really were pretty harmful. Of course, I can only judge his economic policies to be brain-dead. But others with varied expertise have judged his other policies and come up aghast. Books have been written about them but those are the types of books you don’t get to hear much about in school or in the popular press.

Thanks to the internet, though, now it is all coming out. I am doing my bit of course by recording my opinion of Nehru. (See Was Nehru a Dictator? on this blog and the category Jawaharlal Nehru.)

Recently Vipin on his blog First Principles wrote a piece on “Respecting Tyrants?” which brought out a few comments in defense of Mr Nehru. I would surmise that the dissenting views are from people of the previous generation. Vipin’s blog is definitely recommended.

It did not require meticulous research, but just some serious reading, to know that Jammu’s troubles had begun soon after the monarch of J & K, Maharaja Hari Singh, from the Dogra community of Jammu, chose to sign his princely state’s accession to India, rather than to Pakistan, in October 1947 under the British Parliament’s Indian Independence Act, 1947. The troubles emanated from Sheikh Abdullah, the towering National Conference leader from the predominantly Muslim populated Kashmir Valley, who, for reasons as yet unclear, was the pet of Jawaharlal Nehru, our first Prime Minster among several Congress ones who believed that the Hindu community was a danger to free India. It was just a matter of time therefore that Nehru coerced Maharaja Hari Singh to hand over the reins of the J&K state to the interim government of Sheikh Abdullah and his National Conference Party — the first time that Muslims, not Hindus, became the rulers in J&K.

That is from Arvind Lavakare’s article “It’s Jammu vs Kashmir — finally“. Here’s the full article below the fold, for the record. It is a must read if one wants to understand how the dead hand of the Nabob of Cluelessness continues to strangle India and squeeze the life out of the nation.

When several of our mainline English dailies recently splashed what they thought was the novel headline, “Jammu vs Kashmir”, on account of the unprecedented angst and anger in the Jammu region of J & K state over the denial of land to the Amarnath Shrine Board, I was amused.

I was amused because as many as seven years and 11 months ago a major web portal had posted an article of mine bearing the headline “It could finally be Jammu vs Kashmir”. My forecast then was not based on astrology or prescience but on a study of the past agonies of Jammu that had run over into the present. And study is something that current bred of “Breaking News” journalists hardly do, if at all.

It did not require meticulous research, but just some serious reading, to know that Jammu’s troubles had begun soon after the monarch of J & K, Maharaja Hari Singh, from the Dogra community of Jammu, chose to sign his princely state’s accession to India, rather than to Pakistan, in October 1947 under the British Parliament’s Indian Independence Act, 1947. The troubles emanated from Sheikh Abdullah, the towering National Conference leader from the predominantly Muslim populated Kashmir Valley, who, for reasons as yet unclear, was the pet of Jawaharlal Nehru, our first Prime Minster among several Congress ones who believed that the Hindu community was a danger to free India. It was just a matter of time therefore that Nehru coerced Maharaja Hari Singh to hand over the reins of the J&K state to the interim government of Sheikh Abdullah and his National Conference Party — the first time that Muslims, not Hindus, became the rulers in J&K.

So enamoured of Sheikh Abdullah was Nehru that while he had left the integration of 561 princely states either into India or Pakistan to his deputy and Home Minister, Sardar Vallabhai Patel, he chose to deal with J & K himself. And so crafty and cunning was Sheikh Abdullah that he got Nehru to agree to include in the Constitution of India,1950, the Article 370 that gave J & K a special status that no other state of India has ever enjoyed. And even as J & K was allowed to draft its own State Constitution (separate from the Indian Constitution), Abdullah was permitted to hold the position of the state’s Wazir-e- Azam, or Prime Minister and the J&K state was permitted to have its own flag.

The supreme dominance of the Kashmir Valley and its Muslims over Jammu & Kashmir state had begun. The suppression of Jammu and the state’s third region, Ladakh (predominantly Buddhist) had begun.

And the first opposition to this monopoly over the state of J&K was started more than half a century ago. Ironically, it was started by Nehru’s ministerial colleague, Dr Shyama Prasad Mookerjee. The Bengal tiger staked his life in his effort to (i) secure the integration of J&K with the rest of India and (ii) save the Dogras of Jammu from Sheikh Abdullah’s actions that were reportedly described by a former central intelligence chief as a bid at ethnic cleansing.

In a speech at Kanpur on December 29, 1952, Dr Mookerjee had made the grave charge that, “Mr Nehru and Sheikh Abdullah have jointly decided to carry on a ruthless policy of repression in Jammu.” He had referred to “an impression gaining ground that with our blood and money we are carving out a virtually autonomous state for Sheikh Abdullah.” Therefore, he proclaimed, “Jammu and Ladakh must be fully integrated with India according to the wishes of their people.”

Dr Mookerjee categorically stated that while he did not want the partition of J&K, it had become a matter of Hobson’s choice: Kashmir Valley could be made a separate state with all necessary subventions desired by the Sheikh and his advisers, but Jammu and Ladakh must not be sacrificed.

Dr Mookerjee died on June 23, 1953, under suspicious circumstances while under house arrest in an abandoned cottage on a hill outside Srinagar, with no telephone or medical facility within miles, without Nehru meeting him there even once during his 40-day detention. His soul must surely be astir now with talk gaining ground about the revived call for a separate Jammu and a separate Ladakh.

Contrary to the allegations of the pseudo-secularists, this separatist drive and the present anger in Jammu over the Amarnath land are not based on the Hindu-Muslim divide. Instead, it is entirely based on the economic deprivation and political despotism exercised by the Abdullah clan and its kith and kin from Srinagar. The charges against the Kashmir Valley clique are many. Writing in the May 2000 issue of Voice of Jammu Kashmir magazine, J N Bhat, retired judge of the J&K high court, alleged that:

1. Thousands of plots carved out in the suburbs of Jammu have been allotted to Kashmiris, all the beneficiaries belonging to one particular community.
2. In some localities of Jammu city, water is supplied after a gap of three to four days, and not even enough of it to quench the thirst of the people. Obviously, funds got for development get misused.
3. In the Jammu region, the Hindu minorities of Doda and Poonch districts have been tortured and many of them have found, according to sources, conversion the only option, though they prefer death to forced conversion.

Another eminent person who has made more serious accusations is Hari Om, professor of history in Jammu University, and a member of the Indian Council of Historical Research (ICHR). In a newspaper article — eight years ago, mind you — the professor complains that:

1. Though Kashmiris constitute roughly 22 per cent of the state’s total population, the delimitation mechanism cleverly devised by Sheikh Abdullah’s National Conference Party in 1951 enables it to capture nearly half of the total assembly and Lok Sabha seats. The trick lies in 46 assembly segments having been created in the small Valley as against 41 segments combined in Jammu and Ladakh regions that are far bigger and more populated than the Valley. This mechanism is apparently contrary to the rules framed under the Indian Parliament’s Representation of People’s Act and those under the relevant State Act of 1957.

2. Kashmiris hold over 2,30,000 positions out of a nearly 2,40,000 positions in government and semi-government organisations in the Valley. In addition, they corner nearly 25 per cent of the jobs in the regional services of Jammu and Ladakh.

3. All the professional and technical institutions, universities and all the big public sector industrial units like HMT, the television, telephone and cement factories located in the Valley are the sole preserve of the Kashmiris. Besides, they manipulate for themselves more than 50 per cent of the seats in Jammu’s ill-equipped and under-staffed medical and engineering college and in the Agricultural University in R S Pura. No such institution exists in Ladakh.

4. The Kashmiris control trade, commerce, transport and industry, and own big orchards as well as landed estates. None of them is without a house. Likewise, the per capita expenditure on woollen clothes in Kashmir is perhaps the highest in the world. Till date, no one in Kashmir has, unlike in UP, Bihar and Orissa, died either of hunger or cold.

5. Interestingly, yet not surprisingly, a vast majority of the Kashmiris don’t pay even a single penny to the state in the form of revenue due to it. It is Jammu and Ladakh that contribute over 90 per cent to the state exchequer, but a major part of this money is spent not in the extremely backward and underdeveloped Jammu and Ladakh but in the highly prosperous and developed Kashmir Valley.

As a result of the above, professor Hari Om says, “It is Kashmiris and Kashmiris everywhere and all others in the state exist nowhere.”

The dismal scenario above has apparently prevailed for so long that even editors of our national daily newspapers refer most casually to J&K merely as “Kashmir”, forgetting the fundamental fact that “J&K” is not Kashmir and that “Kashmir” is not J&K.

Sheikh Abdullah and his National Conference cabal created that scenario with the connivance of Nehru and his Congress dynasty. Today, the Mufti clan has added fuel to the fire. It has all become perpetuated because Pakistan’s cross border terrorism has struck New Delhi with cowardice, denying them the courage to fight against the Kashmiriyat clan for the rights of the meek and the oppressed, the Jammuites and the Ladakhis who too have been demanding freedom from the tyranny of the rulers from the Valley.

The coming months will show whether the Jammuites have finally stopped turning the other cheek. If Jammu’s old political outfit, the Praja Parishad Party, can take re-birth as it were and join hands with the Ladakhis, Buddhists and all, the ongoing Jammu vs Kashmir battle will add another page of history to J&K and India.

Why is India poor? As some have argued, India is poor by choice. I will explore that idea a bit here.

Of course, that does not mean that every poor Indian has chosen to be poor. Someone else in a position of power made choices whose consequences are evident. India’s leaders – past and present – have consistently made choices that have had, and are having, a disastrous effect on the lives of hundreds of millions of human beings. What motivates these people is a question that directly follows from any attempt to answer the question of why India is poor. Nehru epitomizes the class of people that have through their choices doomed India to being an almost irrelevant nation of one billion humans.

To better understand the source of the great screw ups that Nehru is responsible for, I think we need to examine the primary personal motivation of the man. My contention is that the primary motivation was that he wanted absolute personal power. Note he had acquired power in the years preceding India’s independence. But it was the old story being retold: power corrupting and that corruption leading one to seek absolute power, and that absolute power corrupting absolutely.

Why did Nehru decide to not align India with the victorious Western nations and instead chose that India should be non-aligned? I believe that it is instructive to examine what the Maharaja of Jammu and Kashmir did at the time of India’s independence.

Following the withdrawal of the British from India and the creation of Pakistan, the Princely States had the option to align themselves with either the union of India or with the Islamic nation of Pakistan, or remain ‘independent.’ Kashmir chose to be independent. Or more accurately, the Maharaja of Kashmir chose to be independent. It is important to recognize that it was the leader who chose, not the people.

How the existence of J&K as an independent state could be contemplated by any sane person is difficult to understand unless one posits that the Maharaja was not entirely sane. How can a sane person think that the territorial avariciousness of the newly formed Islamic nation would not extend to a beautiful state with nearly half its population Muslims?

I think that Maharaja Hari Singh was insane.

The Maharaja was suffering under a grand delusion — the goal of personal power blinded him to reality and led to his disastrous mistake for which hundreds of millions are paying today. The Maharaja refused to align Kashmir with India until after the Pakistanis invaded. Then he suddenly realized that he wasn’t as great and mighty as he had imagined himself to be. That is when he turned to India to save his sorry ass. Maharaja Hari Singh’s story is the story of Nehru played out on a smaller stage.

There are certain parallels between the actions (or rather the inaction) of the Maharaja during 1947-48, and the actions of the leaders of independent India. The Maharaja, by acceding neither to India nor to Pakistan, wanted to be non-aligned and be independent. In attempting to do so, he failed miserably and ended up being a dhobi ka kutta, na ghar ka, na ghat ka.

India too followed that same policy with equally disastrous results. I lay the blame on Nehru. I believe that his idealism was the result of arrogance rather than wisdom. He saw the world as he wanted it to be rather than seeing the world as it was. Being a pukka Britisher was more important to him than being realistic. So in his attempt to be more British than the English, to do what was ‘cricket,’ he bought into what the British themselves don’t buy.

This is pure conjecture of course but I think that Nehru wanted to be the monarch of an independent India. He could not countenance being the monarch of an India that was certainly going to be a junior partner in any coalition had he aligned India with on either side of the Cold War. In this sense, Nehru was merely following the same impulses that forced Jinnah to demand a separate nation to be the monarch over. They all — from Hari Singh to Jinnah to Nehru — wanted to be king. They were arrogant but their arrogance was not supported by sufficiently powerful armies. Perhaps Nehru should have read and understood Machiavelli at least, even if he was too much of a Pukka Sahib to read Kautilya’s Arthashastra. He should have paid attention to this part of Machiavelli’s The Prince:

A prince is further esteemed when he is a true friend or a true enemy, when, that is, he declares himself without reserve in favour of some one or against another. This policy is always more useful than remaining neutral. For if two neighboring powers come to blows, they are either such that if one wins, you will have to fear the victor, or else not. In either of these two cases it will be better for you to declare yourself openly and make war, because in the first case if you do not declare yourself, you will fall a prey to the victor, to the pleasure and satisfaction of the one who has been defeated, and you will have no reason nor anything to defend you and nobody to receive you. For, whoever wins will not desire friends whom he suspects and who do not help him when in trouble, and whoever loses will not receive you as you did not take up arms to venture yourself in his cause.

Reality intrudes into the lives of even the most able dreamers. So the ideal of non-alignment was shelved from time to time and Nehru repeatedly cast his lot (and more tragically, the lot of India) with the wrong side of the Cold War. The Chinese read their Sun Tzu’s Art of War quite diligently. They understood it too:

War is a matter of vital importance to the state; a matter of life or death, the road either to survival or to ruin. Hence, it is imperative that it be studied thoroughly.

Clearly Nehru was no match for the Chinese who must have been amused by Nehru’s naivete. I am sure that Chou En-lie must have been contemptuous of Nehru and pitied India to some extent.

Nehru fancied himself to be a student of history. But he never learnt the lessons of history himself. History tends to repeat itself, however imperfectly. He could have learnt the lessons directly following from the actions of the Maharaja and seen the disastrous consequences of non-alignment. In the end, Nehru must have started believing his own whitewashed version of history in which high principles triumph over strategic realities. He refused to form strategic alliances and instead chose to have a ’swadeshi’ attitude towards defense, much as the economic policy he advocated. Both are, admittedly in hindsight, failed policies.

Contrast this failed non-aligned policy with that of Pakistan’s. Pakistan played both sides of the fence while India decided to sit on the fence. In doing so, Pakistan won the gratitude of both sides while India was regarded contemptuously. Running with the hares and hunting with the hounds is a trick Pakistanis have been perfecting for long enough that it has become second nature to them. Without batting an eye-lid they can now simultaneously fight the war against terrorism and give support and comfort to the terrorists of every stripe. And for doing this, the Western countries are immensely grateful to Pakistan.

Back to Kashmir. If Nehru had not screwed up, the UNCIP would have expeditiously concluded that Pakistan had been the aggressor in sending an army into an independent Kashmir and that the Maharaja had been right in acceding to India.

The Kashmir conflict is sufficiently complex for it to be resolved in multiple ‘right’ ways. Whatever be the facts, they can be interpreted differently by powerful interests depending on the global environment. India was sufficiently large and thus potentially significant that its actions could create the environment in which the issue was embedded. Pakistan, on the other hand, could not materially affect that environment. It was therefore not Pakistan’s being ‘right’ that caused the UN to take the stance that it took; it was India that defied the powerful and created an environment in which the West saw it fit to punish India for its arrogance.

I take that back: It was not India at fault, it was Nehru, the Nabob of Cluelessness, who was at fault. India merely paid, and is continuing to pay, the price of his cluelessness.

Minor dimwits are basically harmless; but when dimwits gain absolute power, they become capable of unleashing great disasters. The US will point to George W Bush as an illustration of that point; in time to come, Indians will point to Nehru.

[The above is from nearly five years ago. An article by N Rajaram about India's interest in Tibet. "The monks and the dragon" (The Pioneer, April 6th, 2008), prompted the repost. I post Rajaram's article in its entirety with my emphasis.]

Tibet and Jammu & Kashmir offer striking examples of a self-absorbed leadership placing personal glory ahead of national interest. India is still paying the price for these blunders by being the only country of its size without a recognised border with its giant neighbour. The failure is not just geopolitical, but also one of morality and even identity of India as a nation. It is an unhappy fact that Indian leaders gave no clear vision of national identity: instead, what they gave and followed were personal fetishes like ahimsa and Panchasheel that have cost the country dear.

Indian leaders have avoided taking morally forthright stands over international issues like Tibet and Hungary as well as over domestic issues like the Shah Bano affair and jihadi terrorism. For this India has earned the label of being a ’soft’ state. By supporting the Tibetan people, India could send a clear message to the world and to its own people that it stands for some values that it holds sacred. But this calls for political courage that has been missing so far.

The Tibetan uprising has brought to light some uncomfortable facts which Nehruvians would like to see removed from history books. There is an attempt to whitewash the Chinese occupation of Tibet as a reaction to a CIA conspiracy to turn Tibet into a Western colony with the Dalai Lama as a puppet; one ’secular’ writer has even compared him to Osama bin Laden!

This creative rewriting cannot obscure the fact that it was Jawaharlal Nehru’s pursuit of international glory in Korea that led to his giving up India’s rights in Tibet. As China appeared on India’s doorstep by occupying Tibet, the Jawaharlal Nehru Government made a strenuous effort to gain international recognition for Mao’s China at India’s cost. It is not widely known that India was offered a UN seat as a permanent member of the Security Council, which Nehru rejected insisting that China be admitted first.

In 1950, as Chinese troops were invading Tibet, India’s Ambassador in Beijing KM Panikkar went so far as to claim that protesting the Chinese occupation would be an “interference to India’s efforts on behalf of China in the UN”. Nehru concurred: “Our primary consideration is maintenance of world peace… Recent developments in Korea have not strengthened China’s position, which will be further weakened by any aggressive action (by India) in Tibet.”

Deeply disturbed by these developments, Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel complained to Nehru that Panikkar “has been at great pains to find an explanation or justification for Chinese policy and actions”. India got nothing in return from China. At the very least India could have demanded settling its border with India for its support. But Nehru gave up India’s diplomatic rights in Tibet by closing down missions in Lhasa and Gyangtse.

An argument is now being made that Nehru had no choice because India was not strong enough to challenge China in Tibet. Nehru himself never made this dubious claim, then or later. China, just coming out of the civil war was overcommitted in Korea and was vulnerable in Tibet. Tibet also had international support.

The highly influential English publication The Economist echoed the Western viewpoint when it wrote: “Having maintained complete independence of China since 1912, Tibet has a strong claim to be regarded as an independent state. But it is for India to take a lead in this matter. If India decides to support independence of Tibet as a buffer state between itself and China, Britain and the US will do well to extend formal diplomatic recognition to it.”

India would have lost nothing by protesting and gained much in goodwill, but Nehru’s infatuation with Communism made him blind to the gross immorality of allowing a peaceful neighbouring people being enslaved. Nehru covered this moral obtuseness with self-righteous arrogance. He saw the spiritual civilisation of Tibet as primitive that could benefit from a dose of socialism administered by the Chinese occupiers. (“A very large dose,” said the Dalai Lama.)

Sixty years after independence, it is time for Indians to re-examine their recent history and see how they have been misled by self-righteous rhetoric and posturing leaders pursuing personal glory at the cost of national interest. This has also weakened the country’s moral fibre, leaving it without a national vision. It is time India came out of this moral stupor by taking a forthright stand on the side of the oppressed people of Tibet. At the very least there should be no second betrayal.

Soon after Independence, the first commander-in-chief of the Indian armed forces, General Sir Robert Lockhart, presented a paper outlining a plan for the growth of the Indian Army to Prime Minister Nehru.

Nehru’s reply: ‘We don’t need a defence plan. Our policy is non-violence. We foresee no military threats. You can scrap the army. The police are good enough to meet our security needs.’

He didn’t waste much time. On September 16, 1947, he directed that the army’s then strength of 280,000 be brought down to 150,000. Even in fiscal 1950-51, when the Chinese threat had begun to loom large on the horizon, 50,000 army personnel were sent home as per his original plan to disband the armed forces.

After Independence, he once noticed a few men in uniform in a small office the army had in North Block and angrily had them evicted.

Soon after Independence, he separated the army, navy, and air force from a unified command and abolished the post of commander-in-chief of the armed forces, thus bringing down the status of the senior most military chief.

He continued to demote the status of the three service chiefs at irregular intervals in the order of precedence in the official government protocol, a practice loyally continued by successive governments to the benefit of politicians and bureaucrats.

During the 1947-48 war with Pakistan in Kashmir, Nehru interfered with purely military decisions at will which delayed the war and changed the ultimate outcome in Pakistan’s favour. He developed a precedent to violate channels and levels of communications at that time. His penchant for verbal orders to the various army commanders, of which he kept no records, violated the chain of command.

The army thereafter reversed this trend. [Emphasis mine.]

If it looks like a duck, walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it is in all likelihood a duck.

[Previous part: Was Nehru a dictator?]

Just as it is wrong to blame the United States for Pakistan’s failure, it is wrong to credit Nehru with India’s relative success. Assessing Nehru’s role in India’s development requires the space of several books. But one would think it reasonable to credit several hundred million ordinary people of India for doing little things right that contributed to their country being where it is. It is also reasonable to blame a small number of people for doing big things wrong that left India much behind what it could have been.

The comments to the post are interesting, as I said before. Here’s a bit from Pragmatic:

Obviously, Nehru made mistakes, huge ones, and they can’t be condoned. But let us give credit where it is due. Also, can we name any other country except India, where the leaders who fought for independence from colonial masters didn’t become dictators. And I have personally heard this from guys from all third-world countries, who wish that they had a leader like Nehru. Even Pakistanis and Bangladeshis talk about it in private.

I have never quite understood the claim that Nehru was not a dictator. I did not know the man personally, but I am told that he was quite the authoritarian. After all, he was from a rich family and was used to having his way around. Joining the struggle for political freedom is not inconsistent with a desire to be the ruler. In fact, the powerful natives in India had to have the desire to rule the natives as much as the foreigners must have had. It is the desire to rule, to control, to wield power over others that motivates people to colonize others. And it is that same desire that motivates the powerful among the natives to get the incumbents out of their thrones because they want to get on. I am not entirely sure that to the low man on the totem pole it makes any difference as to what the color of the skin or the national origin of the ruler is. In either event, they are the ruled. Further evidence for this is easy to find in India. A significant section of the Indian population is quite happy to have a white-skinned Italian-born woman as the ruler of India.

I consider Nehru as a faux-British and I am reasonably sure that he considered himself to be British. He was continuing to shoulder the white-man’s burden, so to speak. Mr Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, aka the Mahatma, elevated Nehru to be the ruler of India. A happy transition of power from the white sahibs to the brown sahib — though mind you, Nehru was not as brown as the average Indian. I have a sneaky feeling that if Nehru was really dark, he would not have been the blue-eyed boy.

Anyway, back to Pragmatic’s claim that Nehru did not become a dictator. I wonder. You know, if I had 99 percent of the people bowing and scraping in front of me, and doing my bidding without question, I don’t think I would have to impose a dictatorship. It is costly to maintain an army to control a population — which is what a dictator is forced to do. So why bother being a dictator when you can easily enough win any “election.”

The true test would have been if Nehru had lived long enough and if his popularity had dwindled to the point where he had lost an election. Then we could have judged whether he was a true believer in democracy or not. But alas, the good die young. Or at least they don’t live long enough for people to figure that they were not so good after all.

Nehru’s daughter, however, did live long enough to validate my conjecture above. As long as her popularity won her elections, she was happy to be a democratically elected leader. Lost one election and BANG! the immediate transformation into a dictator. Ascribing superior moral motives to Nehru’s not becoming a dictator is a hasty conjecture. Operationally, one cannot distinguish the actions of one who has almost absolute power democratically from one who is a dictator whose power flows from the barrel of a gun. I would rather be the average person who lives in a functioning economy, than be the average person who lives in a “democracy” ruled by well-meaning but intellectually challenged morons who run make it impossible for me to feed and educate my children.

Another commenter, Oldtimer, says:

I don’t give Nehru credit for our democracy. I’d say that dictatorship does not work on Indian soil — for long, at any rate. Indians might not have understood freedoms as post-Enlightenment Europe understood them, but they resisted oppression for centuries.

Indians resisted oppression? Really now. You could have fooled me! Indians have been subjugated for centuries. And that too by forces far weaker than themselves. At the height of British power, there were hardly any British in India. Perhaps maybe one British for 10,000 Indians. Indians resisting oppression is a joke. If the Indians wanted, they could have had the British for breakfast one morning and still felt hungry. But they meekly went about being the subjects of Britain for nearly a century. The British were not even pushed out; they left because the cost of colonization was not worth the benefits any more.

Anyway, Nitin responded to some of the comments and added:

It is not so much about dictatorship vs democracy. It was about clear-headed, purposeful policies vs wrong-headed, muddled ones. Democracy shouldn’t be used as an excuse to condone bad leadership.

I will write about why democracy fails in India (and works in many other places) separately, as I had promised at the end of my last post. It is too often that one has to hear the lame excuse for India’s dismal economy: it’s because India is a democracy. Wait, so is the US and many other prosperous European countries. But they are not desperately poor. So why drag democracy into it?

Moving on, Rahul Bajoria wrote, “Yes, India under Nehru followed a socialist path, which would not have worked for long. But his ideas were on the lines of industrialization, which itself were not completely flawed.” That is wrong. Wronggity wrong wrong wrong.

Nehru’s industrialization was completely flawed. First is was import substitution industrialization. ISI was bad for India and it is bad for any country (including the different ISI in our neighboring country.) I will not go into that here. Industrialization is good. But state controlled industrialization is a foxtrotting disaster. It has to be from first principles, and it is in practice. Yes, the USSR is a shining example of that sort of thing.

Industrialization which occurs naturally in an economy where the people are economically free leads to prosperity. The US did not have state controlled industrialization and precisely because of that became the greatest industrialized economy the world has ever seen.

Until India wakes up to the fact that Nehruvian socialism and Nehruvian industrialization have been unmitigated disasters, India is not going very far along the road to development. Even now the government has not realized that state control is inconsistent with and antithetical to growth and development.

Even though the [Indian] economy’s annual growth rate has been 8% to 9% for the last five years, India’s peaceful rise hasn’t led to unease over the country’s future. Instead, Americans, Japanese and western Europeans are keen to invest in India, ride on its growth and help develop another heavyweight country.

He contrasts that with the apprehension associated with China’s rise:

Why has China’s peaceful rise, however, raised apprehensions? Is it because India is a democracy in which numerous political forces are constantly at work, making for an internal system of checks and balances? Most probably, yes–especially as India’s governments have tended to be made up of large coalitions of 10 to 20 parties.

“Internal system of checks and balances” reminds me of a joke. At a particular seaport, they were unloading shipments of live crabs in crates from various countries. The crates from all countries, except those from India, had lids on them to prevent the crabs from escaping. The Indian exporter explained that the Indian crabs have internal checks and balances: if some crabs try to escape, the others pull them down and therefore those crates don’t need to have lids.

Lee Kuan Yew continues:

One example of India’s “checks and balances” at work was the suspension of its talks on a U.S. nuclear power deal. Although this deal is manifestly in India’s interests, 60 communist MPs–part of the Congress Party-led coalition government–opposed the deal. Subsequently, the Communists allowed negotiations to resume, reserving their position on the outcome. India’s development will, from time to time, run into domestic obstruction.

The Indian communists do the job of keeping a lid on the Indian economy and prevent it from escaping the crate of Nehruvian socialism. But the communists are not the problem — they are a symptom of a deeper problem with India. In the broadest terms I think it is Indian culture. Saying this exposes me to all sorts of charges. But unpalatable though it is, it is an inescapable conclusion. LKY goes on:

The speed of China’s change and the thoroughness, energy and drive with which the Chinese have built up their infrastructure and pursued their goals spring from their culture, one that is shared by the Koreans, Japanese and Vietnamese, who adopted the Chinese written script and absorbed Confucian culture. The Chinese are determined to catch up with the U.S., the EU and Japan. Fast-forward 20 to 30 years and the world will have to accommodate a more technologically advanced and economically more sophisticated China, whether under a single- or multiparty system.

The drive to excel derives from a knowledge of one’s place in the larger context, an understanding of one’s own worth, a certain confidence and pride in one’s heritage. At least in the Indian policy-making circles, this is impossible as they all Macaulay’s children.

LKY states what India needs to do simply:

India does not pose such a challenge–and won’t until it gets its social infrastructure up to First World standards and further liberalizes its economy. Indeed, the U.S., the EU and Japan root for India because they want a better-balanced world, in which India approximates China’s weight. [Emphasis added.]

So what is social infrastructure and what does “liberalize the economy” mean? I think social infrastructure is the set of rules that govern society. Do the rules allow individuals freedom or do they make the individual subservient to the group? Is discrimination institutionalized in the legal and civil code? Does the system create incentives for groups to fight against other groups?

How can we build social infrastructure if we are stuck with governments that insist on dividing and ruling? Can we at least have an argument about this?

Sayeth Desai:

If instead of the Hindu rate of growth of 3.5 per cent, India had achieved 6 per cent in 1950-80, we would have been twice as rich as we are today. But we have lost even more in terms of distribution of growth than of growth itself. We would have been even richer in terms of consumer goods. We would have worn better and cheaper clothes, and owned more white goods that take the daily toil out of people’s lives. Our villages would have received cheaper and more widely available electricity; with that electricity and their labour, they would have produced consumer goods at a fraction of the present cost. There would have been far more non-agricultural employment in rural areas. Instead of 5 per cent, we would have generated 25 per cent of world trade; all the nations of the Indian Ocean would have been closely tied to us by trade and investment. All we have to boast about today is our democracy; if we had been liberal for sixty years, we would have been a world model for lifestyle.

Quite a fine piece of analysis. Marred by the idiotic characterization of India’s dismal growth rate of 3.5 percent per year as the “Hindu rate of growth.” It was Nehru, Chacha Nehru and his band of clueless retards, that imposed socialistic state planning that doomed India to its retarded growth rate. Neither Nehru nor his bunch of moronic cabinet drew their inspiration from Hindu scriptures or Hindu ideology. The rate of growth of India during the Congress rule was not enforced by Hindu thought or Hindu philosophy. Hinduism is not an economic school of thought and it does not speak to state planning nor does it advocate socialism. The “Nehru rate of growth” has nothing to do with Hinduism or any other religion for that matter other than the religion of socialism.

Piece I have said my.

Reading someone who has lived through events that define our past is a learning experience. Lieutenant General M L Thapan, Param Veer Seva Medal, has just added an important bit to my very limited understanding of India’s recent history. He’s seen most of the last hundred years, being 89 years old. Long before most of us were born, he was fighting wars. Ramanand Sengupta spoke with him, Rediff.com reports:

He fought in two major campaigns in World War II.

After Independence, his division was ‘two-and-a-half km from Sialkot when the ceasefire whistle blew in (the second India-Pakistan war) 1965.’ And in 1971, he faced enemy fire again when he was asked to clear one of the three sectors into which East Pakistan had been marked out by India’s Eastern Command.

Here are some of his words, for the record.

On the 1971 war with Pakistan: “When the country was divided in 1947, the people of East Bengal decided to opt for East Pakistan. That was a decision taken by them, and 25 years later, they found that the authorities in West Pakistan were not favorably disposed towards the east.

“To put it crudely, they should have stewed in their own juice. “

On the spinelessness of Indian leadership: “In 1971, our forces paid with lives to help liberate Bangladesh. In April 2001, New Delhi was seen as passive after 15 BSF men were killed and strung up like animals by the Bangladesh Rifles. What has changed over the years?”

On fragmenting India along secterian lines: “Look what is happening with all this nonsense with the caste and community and things. It is all because of getting votes.

“He said the only answer to this whole business is to abolish caste, say it will not be referred to at all in any form. In which case then we are all Indians.”

The man speaks his mind. And why not? He owes nobody anything. He has laid his life on the line more times that most of us have had hot meals. Listen to him: “[The war with] China, where I was not involved, in 1962, was a disgrace. Again, we can blame our own people. Then prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru, then defence minister V K Krishna Menon. Menon most of all, Nehru for being naive and ingenuous. These chaps had closed minds.

“I think it was (India’s second President Dr (Sarvepalli) Radhakrishnan, who later made the point that this man [Nehru] was living in a world of his own. And he listened to odd-balls like Krishna Menon.”

I fall down and kiss the feet of the God who oversees the World Wide Web. For our textbooks don’t tell us anything. Finally I am getting an education.

It is interesting to note that the arguments against my view of Nehru and his failed economic policies are generic. I will repeat them and my counter-arguments here.

My argument. Economic policies matter. If you have sound economic policies, you get commensurate economic performance. India’s economic performance sucks. It performs dismally in any sort of ranking of human development and economic performance tests. Half the illiterates of the world call India their home. A third of all global poverty is in India. All things considered, India has been a colossal failure so far.

Why has India been a failure? Are Indians collectively stupid? Unlikely.

Did GOD decree it? I asked him and he categorically denied it.

Did nations around the world gang up and rape India for the last 60 years? Not that I know of.

I am left with the hypothesis that perhaps India’s economic policies sucked chrome off a bumper of a pickup truck parked at 400 yards.

Who makes economic policies? You? I? No, economic policy is made by the so-called leaders and visionaries of this sainted land. Who were the most powerful leaders of this land since its independence from Britain? Nehru and his descendants. He dictated policy—economic, foreign, domestic, you name it. The most charitable way of putting the matter is to say that Nehru was clueless.

He wasn’t just clueless about this or that. His cluelessness was all encompassing. He was clueless about foreign policy, military strategy, domestic development — you name it and he is the greatest screw-up that India has ever produced.

Then come the rebuttals which often start with the admission that Nehru was clueless but . . .

. . . but during his time, many others–including a few people one cannot dismiss as being clueless thought that Central planning was beneficial for countries like India. These included Nobel winner Gunnar Myrdal (Asian Drama, an Inquiry into the Poverty of Nations) and Mahalanobis.

The argument above says that it wasn’t the man, it was the circumstances. By that logic, everything is justifiable. Every crime can be explained away as the result of compelling circumstances and hence there can be no accountability.

Take, for instance, the WorldCom and Enron cases where executives committed theft on unprecedented and unimaginable scale. One could point to the fact that other companies were also doing shady accounting, that the internet boom was going strong, that the economy was very strong, that the GAAP was being followed. All those explanations would also paper over the fact that the crime arose out of the greed of the perpetrator. Given all the circumstances but absent the greed of the executives, the grand theft would not have taken place.

Now back to Nehru: even if one were to grant all the circumstances that you cite above (but only for the sake of argument), the fact remains that central planning was personally very convenient for the Cha-cha.

The children of Imperialism are not weaned on the milk of humility; they are brought up on heady diet of hubris. Nehru was an imperialist who believed that his destiny was to rule the brown masses and he continually rejected sane advice. Look deeply into any problem that India faces and you will see Nehru’s finger-prints all over it.

Take Kashmir. Who was it who let the matter get out of hand? Nehru with his idiotic insistence that the UN be called to mediate the dispute. Talking of the UN, who was it who rejected the proposal that India take a seat in the permanent security council? Nehru. There is not enough space here to go into all the horrendous mistakes.

Then there is the argument that says, “Don’t blame Nehru for the screw-up that India is. We, Indians, are to blame.” That line is similar to the one Niket made in the comments in the last post.

Yes, in fact, we are to blame. Indians are basically collectively a bunch of clueless retards. They collectively elect leaders who are clueless retards and these clueless retards choose policies that keep the country of hundreds of millions of people in abject poverty. No argument there. A country deserves the leaders it gets, especially so in a so-called democracy. I agree that Bihar deserves and gets Rabri Devi and Laloo Prasad Yadav.

So if the collective is to blame, why is Nehru elevated to the position of a demi-god? Not just that, anyone associated with his family is elevated as well. With very rare exceptions, everything in India which has a personal name associated with it is named after the Nehru-Gandhi family. The Borivali National Park close to my abode is named “Sanjay Gandhi National Park”. All sorts of educational institutions are named after the members of a family that collectively have fewer educational achievements than yours truly.

Allow me to repeat that: The entire Nehru-Gandhi family — Cha-chaji, Indira, Rajiv, Sonia, Sanjay, Rahul, Prianka – collectively haver fewer educational qualifications than I (an average person) do. If I am not mistaken, they don’t have one solitary single college degree among the whole lot of them.

{To be continued.}