At first glance, it appears that it must have been said by some astute observer of contemporary India. The “every dominant interest” could refer to the interests of the Congress political party. Actually, that statement was made by Jawaharlal Nehru in 1961 in an interview he gave to Norman Cousins. The Indian masses have not come all that far in the nearly 50 years since that assessment. I wish I could argue otherwise.

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?

If the Indian Army advanced within 60 miles of Islamabad, you can bet Pakistan’s army would be fully mobilized and defending the country in pitched battles. Yet when the Taliban got that close to the capital on Friday, pushing into the key district of Buner, Pakistani authorities sent only several hundred poorly equipped and underpaid constabulary forces.

Well duh! The Indian Army and the Taliban are not exactly cats of the same breed, are they? The former is a foreign army (of a kafir state, at that) and the latter is an Islamic army — the purest of the pure — fully nourished and cared for by the Islamic state of Pakistan. The Taliban represents the best of the Islamic tradition, a tradition that Pakistan fully, unconditionally, proudly, and strenuously adheres to. Naturally then the Pakistani state’s response to the Taliban would be different from how it would have reacted to a foreign army. Why the editorial writer finds it remarkable is a bit of a mystery.

The editorial continues with

Pakistanis don’t have to look far to see what life would be like under Taliban rule. Since an army-backed peace deal ceded the Swat Valley to the militants, the Taliban have fomented class revolt and terrorized the region by punishing “un-Islamic” activities like dancing and girls’ attending school.

OK, here’s a clue: dancing and girls attending school are prohibited by Islam. It’s a fact. It is un-Islamic. There is no need to put scare-quotes around un-Islamic as if it were not really so but merely mistakenly alleged to be so.

Just by the way, I find it interesting that on the one hand, some people are vehement in their insistence that Islam is a “religion of peace” and on the other hand they are scared shitless when the “religion of peace” is actually followed as advertised. Cognitive dissonance or just plain hypocrisy? Both are troublesome. I lean towards the hypocrisy explanation.

The Taliban is the love child of the sordid affair involving the US and Pakistan. It was not a virgin birth because Pakistan was no immaculately conceived. The US participated the creation of the Taliban vigorously and with pleasure. For the pleasure, the US paid hard cash and trained a generation of jihadists. The jihadists loved the training, the Islamic manuals, the guns and the ammo. After they were done with the Russians, the jihadists turned their sights on other matters, such as flying planes into tall buildings. The chickens, as the saying goes, eventually come home to roost.

The editorial again:

And — most frightening of all — if the army cannot or will not defend its own territory against the militants, how can anyone be sure it will protect Pakistan’s 60 or so nuclear weapons?

Still pretending, are we? Pretending to be stupid? Or is it not pretense at all? It is high time the world understood that Pakistan is an integrated ideological deal. It is not as if the Taliban are strangers in a strange land. They are sons of the soil and are the most committed to the ideology that motivates Pakistan. Expecting Pakistan to do anything other than follow where the Taliban is leading them is retarded. We all know about the military-industrial complex. Pakistan does not have the industrial bit. It has the military-america-mulla-allah complex (the “Mama” complex.)

The writer is frightened. Finally. What took you so long? Did you really think that the $12 billion the US gave to Pakistan in just the last few years as aid was meant for the Amish community in Pakistan?

Anyway, the US still has not learned the lesson. As the editorial notes, “Congress is mulling two different bills increasing aid to Pakistan.” The generous explanation is that the US is being idiotic. The more accurate explanation is that the US knows that the weapons that Pakistan buys with the aid will be used to kill Indians and does it deliberately. That is what is scary.

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.

The second goal of the advanced industrialized countries (AIC) is the disposal of obsolete weapons. Weapons age and become useless to the original developers. Instead of scrapping them, they are sold to the desperately poor third-world countries. (As the saying in Hindi goes, “आम के आम, गुत्लियो के दाम!”) This provides them the space and the funds required to develop the next round of more expensive weapons — which when the time comes, will similarly be sold to the desperately poor third-world nations.

In effect, to a large extent the poor of the desperately poor third-world countries fund each round of successive advanced weapons development. Of course, the poor of the DPTWC (shortened now since I have repeated “desperately poor third-world countries” enough times to get the idea across) often cheer when their leaders buy these weapons. Their jubilance at what grinds them into further poverty arises out of the same attitude that dragged them into poverty in the first place: an astounding stupidity that is matched only by the immorality of the venal bastards in power.

I should note here that the venal bastards in power are not men of any specific skin or eye color. The VBiP occur in all nations — whether in DPTWCs like India and Pakistan or in AICs like the US and Russia. All these VBiP have their incentives aligned and act accordingly. They are the politicians, the generals, captains of the military-industrial complex, and weapons dealers. They are found in Washington, DC, New Delhi, Moscow, Islamabad, Beijing, and other such fine places that the poor of the DPTWC do not inhabit. The names of the politicians are all over the newspapers and their faces on TVs and magazines: Bush, Clinton, Putin, Manmohan Singh, Sharif, Mugabe, . . . The generals, CEOs of the military-industrial complex, and weapons dealers are not usually household names but they are there from all parts of the world, rich or poor.

Talk of poverty, inequality, development, and such have been all the rage for the past so many years. There are those who are convinced that entrepreneurship and innovation will solve these pressing problems. Some lean heavily on hi-tech gizmos and declare that One Laptop Per Child is the obvious answer to poverty; some others flog the horse of micro-finance mercilessly convinced that it will pull the poor out of poverty; some high-mindedly declare that taxing the rich and re-distributing the proceeds to the poor will be best (whilst all the while handling the money with very sticky fingers); some others believe that the only way out of any problem is killing sufficient numbers of bystanders through suicide bombing in accordance with their religious beliefs; the nuttiest argue that globalization, capitalism, and the market are the real villains and the best way out of poverty is to prevent any sort of industrialization, and so on. The notion that perhaps the poverty of the poor in the DPTWCs is related to the weapons (that the AIC build, operate and sell, and which the powerful in the poor countries so eagerly buy) is not advanced frequently, if at all.

I am conflicted when I consider this issue. Is it the stupidity of the poor, or is it the greed of the rich and powerful that is the primary source of this state of affairs? Perhaps it is a tango and both have to be involved for the dance to happen. Whatever it is, though, it is all karma. Or as they say, you makes your bed, you perforce has to lie in it.

Anyhow, now that I am done with the preface, here are some items (in no particular order) which may be relevant in the context.

Item: The Acorn ponders “the absurdity of giving Predator drones to Pakistan.” Ostensible reason: for Pakistan to fight the Al-Qaeda and Taliban. Yeah right! Pakistan gave birth to them and nourishes them. Why would it want to kill its own babies? Real reason that the US continues to gift weapons to Pakistan has to do with what I wrote above.

I reproduce below the comment I made at The Acorn:

The absurdity of the situation is resolved if you consider that the military-industrial complex of the US is involved in a simple dollar auction.

Briefly, the US gives Pakistan drones under some pretext. Since Pakistan is broke, it cannot pay for them. So the US gives military assistance to Pakistan to buy the drones with. Which basically means that the US pays its weapons manufacturers for supplying the Pakistanis. That’s the first-order effect of military aid to Pakistan: US weapons manufacturers continue to be in business.

The second-order effect follows predictably. India now has to match Pakistan’s weapons. India pays the US to buy drones. This means more business for US weapons manufacturers.

The war on terror has to continue because that’s what allows the machinery of the military-industrial complex humming away. The US is a military superpower and any day of the week it actually wants to, it can totally wipe off global Islamic terrorism. That it chooses not to do so is simple: its weapons industry will hurt like hell. Sure the US exports a lot of stuff other than weapons. But the politicians who make the policies are in the pockets of the weapons manufacturers.

Allow me to quote from an essay I wrote many years ago, “Dollar Auctions and Deadly Games.”

In a recent op-ed piece, “Stopping America’s Most Lethal Export,” in the New York Times, winner of the 1997 Nobel Prize Oscar Arias wrote: “While the arms industry profits, people throughout the world suffer… the true weapons of mass destruction are the jet fighters, tanks, machine guns and other military exports that the United States ships to non- democratic countries–a record $8.3 billion worth in the 1997 fiscal year, the last year for which figures are available.” Aside from anything else, the incontrovertible fact is that war is costly for all except for weapons manufacturers.

Moving on, let’s consider another example of DPTWCs buying useless junk from AICs.

Item: In January 2004, India signed a deal to buy the antique and obsolete 1980s-design Russian aircraft carrier Admiral Gorshkov. Originally the deal was for $1.5 billion but the Russians later said that the retrofitting will take an additional $2 billion. The heap of prettied-up scrap will be delivered to India sometime in 2012, and it will be accessorized with 16 matching MiG-29Ks. The deal was made by the Congress-led UPA government. Pranab Mukherjee and lots of other people got lots of foreign trips out of the deal. The Indian navy big bosses must be looking forward to having another floating deck to strut about on.

Meanwhile, however, aircraft carriers have become sitting ducks. Gary Brecher writes, “THIS IS HOW THE CARRIERS WILL DIE”

I’ve been saying for a long time that aircraft carriers are just history’s most expensive floating targets, and that they were doomed.

But now I can tell you exactly how they’re going to die. I’ve just read one of the most shocking stories in years. It comes from the US Naval Institute, not exactly an alarmist or anti-Navy source. And what it says is that the US carrier group is scrap metal.

The Chinese military has developed a ballistic missile, Dong Feng 21, specifically designed to kill US aircraft carriers: “Because the missile employs a complex guidance system, low radar signature and a maneuverability that makes its flight path unpredictable, the odds that it can evade tracking systems to reach its target are increased. It is estimated that the missile can travel at mach 10 and reach its maximum range of 2000km in less than 12 minutes.” That’s the US Naval Institute talking, remember. They’re understating the case when they say that, with speed, satellite guidance and maneuverability like that, “the odds that it can evade tracking systems to reach its target are increased.” [1]

I believe that a large part of the answer to the persistent and pervasive poverty of the DPTWCs lies in the insanity of modern war. And the answer is that until the people realize what is going on, they are unlikely to move a finger to change the system. But then that requires an understanding of what is going on, an understanding that in our case we don’t have given the dismal state of our educational system. Indeed, one could cynically argue that the educational system is deliberately not allowed to function because otherwise the people may become smart and stop feeding the machine. Cynical but perhaps closer to the truth than what those in power want you to believe.

Meanwhile, the poor will continue to be distracted from the real issues by the routinely staged three-ring circus called “democratic elections.” Let the circus begin. Because the least one can give them in exchange for their blood, sweat and tears is some entertainment.

NOTES:

[1]. You should go read that article for more but I cannot resist quoting a bit more from it because I like the way he puts it:

The lesson here is the same one all of you suckers should have learned from watching the financial news this year: the people at the top are just as dumb as you are, just meaner and greedier. And that goes for the ones running the US surface fleet as much as it does for the GM or Chrysler honchos. Hell, they even look the same. Take that Wagoner ass who just got the boot from GM and put him in a tailored uniform and he could walk on as an admiral in any officer’s club from Guam to Diego Garcia. You have to stop thinking somebody up there is looking out for you.

Remember that one sentence, get it branded onto your arm: “Ships currently have no defense against a ballistic missile attack.” What does that tell you about the distinguished gentlemen with all the ribbons on their chest who’ve been standing up on carrier bridges looking like they know what they’re doing for the past 50 years? They’re either stupid or so sleazy they’re willing to make a career commanding ships they know, goddamn well know, are floating coffins for thousands of ranks and dozens of the most expensive goldplated airplanes in the history of the world. You call that patriotic? I’d hang them all.

[Return.]

One evening last week in Mumbai, a friend said that it was remarkable that the financial crisis was the work of a handful of extremely greedy and immoral people. These people personally gained enormously but the cost that they imposed on the rest of the world was many magnitudes higher. The negative externalities, as economists would say, amount to trillions of dollars. These handful of people were white men.

To me, all this talk of white men causing all the trouble in the world feels a bit like the “man bites dog” situation. I have nothing against white men (and hastily add that some of my friends are white males.) Indeed, I have nothing against any group — white, brown, men, women, Hindu, Muslim, Christian, Jews, whatever — because to me, individuals matter not groups.

The global financial crisis in the US and the resulting on-going global economic crisis can be laid at the feet of a few white men. The operative word is few because it is always a few that are responsible. Look around you and you will notice that everything we enjoy or suffer has been brought about by a few. The modern world we inhabit is manifestly created by the genius (both for good as well as for the bad) and the actions of a few. More often than not, the modern world is influenced overwhelmingly by white males — most of them dead. Dead white males did it.

I think that when pointing fingers at a few white men (with or without blue eyes) for all that is wrong with the world, we should spare a thought for the other few white men who did a lot of good things. The science and technology, not to mention the institutions, which defines the modern world is for the most part the work of a few people — mostly men and mostly white. I cannot go into why this is so but it is an empirically verifiable fact. Mr da Silva has not met a black banker. But neither has he met a black person who has invented anything we so routinely use and take for granted.

We are prone to a special myopia when it comes to pointing fingers at others, particularly at those who are more successful than us. Perhaps it arises out of envy and jealousy. But at its root must lie basic ignorance. Not just people, entire systems are considered worthless and totally flawed when viewed with blinkered ignorance.

The global economic system is slowing down. The cry goes out, “Globalization has failed. The market system is bad. Capitalism is evil.” Yes, the market system is not perfect. After all, it is man made, not handed down from on high by an omniscient being. It has its faults just like any other human artifact. It does not always function well — but compared to what? Certainly the market system performs magnificently compared to socialist or communist command and control systems. The market system only appears to be bad when you compare its occasional failures relative to its long-run successes.

If we take the long view of it all, we cannot fail to notice that for most of human history, the world barely changed over hundreds of years. With the invention of markets and capitalism came the astonishing rate of change, most of it for the better. States that failed to recognize the power of markets and capitalism, stagnated and lost ground. The US, to take an example, rapidly developed in the 20th century and increased its per capita income seven-fold in a matter of a generation and a half. The US evokes envy among economies that made the wrong choices — but the fault lies not with the US but with the envious others. Even now it is not too late for some economies to take a long hard look at reality and recognize that karma — actions — matter and it is no good pointing fingers at others for their own failures.

Globalization has its discontents. But that is not sufficient reason to blame globalization. Perhaps the fault lies with the discontented and not with globalization. After all, one can refuse to be part of the global economy. India under Nehruvian socialist dispensation did precisely that, and ended up not surprisingly underdeveloped and abjectly poor.

India can still go back to its autarkic post-independence stance and get back to its dismal 2-3 percent Nehruvian rate of economic growth. No one is forcing India to become a developed economy. It can continue to keep the majority of its people imprisoned in small villages, barely scratching out a subsistence living. It can continue to keep its archaic labor laws and insane industrial policies that guarantee low productivity and low production. It has the liberty to do that and its people are free to vote for such policies. And most likely they will shortly.

It’s strange how it is fashionably PC to point fingers at white men over there but damnably un-PC to point fingers at brown sahibs on our own side. These brown bosses — few of them in this case as well — have dug us a hole from which we the unwashed masses may never ever climb out of. Thank god for the dead white men, for without them, we would have never even known that another way of living was even possible.

NOTES:
[1] President da Silva said:

“This is a crisis that was caused by people, white with blue eyes. And before the crisis they looked as if they knew everything about economics. Once again the great part of the poor in the world that were still not yet [getting] their share of development that was caused by globalisation, they were the first ones to suffer.

“Since I am not acquainted with any black bankers, I can only say that this part of humanity that is the major victim of the world crisis, these people should pay for the crisis? I cannot accept that. If the G20 becomes a meeting just to set another meeting, we’ll be discredited and the crisis can deepen.”

[Return.]

Here, for the record, is an excerpt from Keith’s recent observations.

It has not been a breakdown of the basics of the market system that has caused the present crisis. Nor will it have been the greed of the bankers. Everybody is as selfish as everybody else and can be as potentially greedy — for cash, status goods, security, food, what-have-you — as anybody else. You might as well blame the next person you meet on the street who maybe has a debt of £2,000 on his credit card as the bankers.

What ought to be pilloried is stupidity and/or lack of courage by bankers and governments alike — those who tell us they are financial experts and those who say they are protecting us. The Bank of England knew in 2002 that there was something badly wrong with what the banks and other financial institutions were doing. Even before then there had been serious doubts and this is why the Financial Services Authority had been set up — spineless though it’s been. If these bodies didn’t know what was going wrong they should have investigated. And if they did know, then the politicians should have acted in order to protect the financial system and, in turn, the public. Similar suspicions must have been rising in all the countries of the Western world but they were smothered because politicians didn’t dare stop the spending spree that was also going on.

No one can possibly forecast what is going to happen in the coming months — even in the most general of terms. But I’m pretty certain about one thing. The present sort of episodic electoral democracy that we have now is going to have to change. We already had one warning of this when a German Nazi government was voted in by entirely democratic procedures in the 1930s — and brought us World War II as a result.

While many of our present type of politicians are honest and conscientious, they, as a generality, are largely untrained and inexperienced in important matters of the real world. We live in a world of business yet hardly any politicians have any experience of business at all. Our business today, and economic prosperity, is mainly based on science and technology yet hardly any politicians have any clue about science. Our present governmental institutions, as always throughout history, are at least one generation, and more like two or three, away from the real world that is actually working beneath them, around them and paying for their existence.

Pakistan’s economy is in a tailspin. Since the second last thing that the international community wants in Pakistan is an economic meltdown, Friends of Pakistan are coming together to provide emergency foreign aid.

The “Friends of Pakistan are “Britain, France, Germany, the United States, China, the United Arab Emirates, Canada, Turkey, Australia and Italy plus the United Nations and the European Union.” Among these are nations — US, China, the Arab states, France, Britain — that give aid to Pakistan. The military component of the aid is what Pakistan uses to initiate and fight bloody wars with India. India, a desperately poor country, cannot afford these costly wars but it has to fight them because the Friends of Pakistan want that India bleeds. Pakistan is the instrument.

I can see the reason why the economic meltdown of Pakistan is certainly not in the interests of the Friends of Pakistan. The biggest dagger stuck in India’s rib would be pulled out and with it will disappear the prospects of selling arms to India, of keeping India engaged in 1,000-year jihads which Pakistan regularly declares against India. The Friends of Pakistan more certainly do not want Pakistan to fail. You too would get worried if the pit bull you have trained for years to attack suddenly is in danger of dropping dead.

The Friends of Pakistan have an interest in keeping the conflict between India and Pakistan alive. Why do I say that? I use the revealed preference argument. Basically it says that by freely choosing something, you reveal what you prefer. If you have the power to choose a “Pakistan Friendly to India” but instead choose a “Pakistan as a Sworn Moral Enemy of India”, you have revealed that you prefer that. I take it is obvious that the Friends of Pakistan could have easily enough told Pakistan that it should stop its belligerence towards India and concentrate on economic development. But they do not and that is why I believe that they have an interest in keeping Pakistan dependent on their money because Pakistan does their bidding.

Absent the conflict, the Indian subcontinent will develop differently and could in fact become economically prosperous and consequently exert an independent influence on the world. That independent influence could potentially alter the current power structure. As it is, controlling China is out of the question. They have had to make space for China. But they will be damned if India also becomes powerful.

Here’s how I imagine the Friends of Pakistan reasoning:

“Sure, there is a lot of talk in India about India becoming a ’super power.’ (snigger, snigger.) We are fine with India deluding itself into thinking that it is an economic superpower just because it has a lot of software coolies and call center operators. Good for them. It keeps them distracted.

“We have plied Pakistan with lots of military hardware. The economic collapse of Pakistan would be disastrous because the same hardware in the hands of the factions within Pakistan would be totally useless against India. It bloody defeats the bloody purpose. That cannot be allowed to happen.”

So yes, I do understand why Pakistan’s economic meltdown is not a good thing for the Friends of Pakistan. But is it good for India?

Now, India is not an enemy of Pakistan, as far as I can tell. From Mohandas to Jawahar to Inder to Atal to Manmohan (the sweetest name of all), they have been kissing Pakistan’s behind to make nice. Sadly, they all got knifed in the back for all their kissy-kissy.

Pakistan defines itself in opposition to India and has made India its mortal enemy. That is nothing that Pakistan has much of a choice over since it is the most important part of the ideological foundation upon which Pakistan was created. The moment Pakistan decides that it wants to be friends with India, it commits ideological suicide. That is not permitted although a battle against an infidel state in which Pakistan itself dies is ideologically permitted. Suicide bombers and those who get killed in battle against infidels do go to paradise.

Anyway, so back to the question: Is the meltdown of Pakistan good for India? My thesis is that it is. It will weaken the state that has sworn to destroy India — and if it cannot do it in one fell swoop, it will do it with a war of a thousand cuts (over a 1,000-year jihad, I presume.) So if Pakistan were to stop existing as an entity and fracture into a number of small warring states, it would be good for India.

What about the nukes? Did you know that the US was not born yesterday. Sure it did not actually give Pakistan the nukes as a Christmas gift. It merely allowed Pakistan to have them. And Pakistan’s possession of the nukes is at the pleasure of the US. Anytime that the US doesn’t want Pakistan to have them, it will bloody well take them away.

What having a big destabilized country on India’s western borders? Well, to begin with, India is not exactly having a fun time with a “stable” Pakistan, is it?

But I want to know how can one tell the distinction between a “stable” and an “unstable” Pakistan from an Indian point of view. Is it that a stable Pakistan wages wars against India once every 10 years and an unstable Pakistan wages wars every 10 months? How is one sure that a “stable” Pakistan is not more dangerous for India?

So back to the point that The Acorn raised. Should India liberalize trade with Pakistan? My answer is no. Not just that, my answer is that India should have NO trade with Pakistan. Trade with Pakistan is not practical, it is immoral, and last but not the least it makes no economic sense.

I should explicitly state that I have the greatest sympathy for the people of Pakistan. Caught between the devil (an ideology) and the deep blue sea (the powerful advanced industrialized countries who use it as a tool), they have little hope of escaping pain and misery. No wonder so many are willing to die and kill for the promise of a virgin-filled paradise. I wish it were otherwise but such is life.

It’s all karma, neh?

Related posts:
Dollar Auctions and Deadly Games.

The Looking Glass War.

It begins:

SOME stray voices in the media have been questioning, with surprising nonchalance and lack of depth, the wisdom and expediency of retaining Kashmir as a part of India. This matters not because such voices reflect any growing view in our country but because they play into the hands of enemies of the nation. Their suggestions embolden subversive forces both within and outside the country, and encourage our adversaries to entertain the hope that with a little more effort, Kashmir will secede from India.

OK, so there are “stray voices” that do not represent the mainstream view, and they give hope to Kashmiri secessionists. If that is so, I agree it is not a good thing. Further down in the piece they write:

India has successfully overcome all secessionist threats faced by it. No responsible government can ever compromise India’s territorial integrity by even contemplating the secession of Kashmir.

This is not a trifling issue. If the Indian state is seen as weak enough to let Kashmir go, other states and disaffected groups within India will only get emboldened, leading to the unraveling of India.

So it appears that even “contemplating the secession of Kashmir” would lead inexorably “to the unraveling of India.” Which means that the fabric of India is rather tattered. One day you merely contemplate (not actually do anything) Kashmiri secession and soon enough “other states and disaffected groups within India” will want out and India unravels.

The tacit admission by the group that India is built on very shaky foundations — that there are groups all around that want to get out of the union — is pretty interesting. Perhaps they should sit down as a group and contemplate the matter and answer clearly whether there are so many groups tottering on the verge of secession that letting Kashmir go would immediately push them over the edge, and if so, why.

If there are so many disaffected states and peoples, then clearly the “stray voices” in the media alluded to earlier are articulating a problem that needs to be addressed. It appears to me that the writers of that op-ed are not so concerned about the underlying reality of the problem (if indeed there is a problem and I am not saying that there is) as they are concerned about talking about it.

“Let’s not mention the 800-lb gorilla in the room,” said he, “because if anyone does mention it, we will have to deal with it. We cannot deal with it and so if no one acknowledges the gorilla, we can all pretend that it does not exist and we will not have to fight it. We would lose the fight if it came to it. So let’s not go there.”

Their solution is to stifle voices that question the correctness of holding on to Kashmir.

India is a free and democratic country with a vibrant media and we are proud of it. But freedom of expression does not mean unbridled licence to flout the law of the land by airing or fanning seditious views.

Really now? So one has freedom of expression but only if the views expressed are officially welcome? We are not merely importing stuff from China, it would appear.

Such views also do a disservice to the people of Kashmir. We call upon the intelligentsia that has the power to shape public opinion to use their power with wisdom and maturity.

Ah I just so love the implicit assumptions and implications of the above. The implicit assumption that the people of Kashmir do not want secession. It may have been true 50 years ago but it is certainly no longer true. The ethnic cleaning of the Kashmiri pundits and the radicalization of the Muslim Kashmiris — thanks to Pakistan-mediated Saudi money and a bit of indirect help from the US — leaves very little room for the notion that the people living in Kashmir now want to be part of India.

The writers are essentially asking the “intelligentsia” (which I presume includes the ones with those “stray voices”) to use their power wisely and well. A clear admission that the people are sheeple (that is, they can be herded and believe anything that is told to them by an authority figure.)

The next lines leave no doubt that the writers have all but used the branding iron on the sheeple.

Irresponsible slogans do immense damage in open and democratic polities and can mislead people to take partisan positions without understanding the grave implications. We also urge the media to exercise restraint and show responsibility in the larger national interest.

For me the most puzzling line in the op-ed is this: “India is a free and democratic country with a vibrant media and we are proud of it.”

That line is inconsistent with pretty much the rest of the piece. If India is a free country, then why are people not free to express their opinions? And what is all this talk of “democracy” about? Is it a good thing or a bad thing? If democracy means what it is popularly understood to mean, should not the people have a say in what they want to be a part of? How does one square the idea of a “vibrant media” with the idea that only those views that don’t rock the boat are welcome?

My perspective is that the problem of Kashmir is not new at all. It fits in quite consistently with the pattern that was very clearly and forcefully demonstrated with the division of India into two parts in 1947. What was the primary motivating factor? Whether one’s “secular” sensibilities likes it or not, that factor was that Islam forbids Muslims from co-existing with kafirs (kuffars, or non-believers, idol worshipers.)

India was divided not along some political, linguistic, or ethnic lines but along strictly Islam and non-Islam lines. That distinction cannot be wished away without questioning the very definition of what Islam is all about. Islam divides humanity into the good (the Muslims) and the evil (the non-Muslims) and divides all lands into Dar-ul-Islam (the land of Islam) and Dar-ul-Harab (the land of War). Pakistan is in the former and India is the latter.

Cut it any which way you want, Islam does not allow non-Muslims equality with Muslims. That is why when the occasion arose, Pakistan was formed. That is why numbers of non-Muslims in Pakistan (and Bangladesh) have dropped consistently. That is why the Pandits have been driven out of Kashmir. That is why the Muslim Kashmiris will not want to be part of India.

My recommendation

All things considered, I am disappointed by the op-ed but I am heartened that at least it was written. It is a good beginning and perhaps they would consider a resolution something along these lines.

India was partitioned once and the division of land between the Good (Pakistan, the Land of the Pure) and Evil (India, the land of the Filthy Unbelievers) was largely fair (with the Good naturally getting a better deal), in my opinion. Populations moved and people decided which side of the border they wanted to be on. I am glad that India was divided. One should not have as one’s neighbors people who consider one evil and unclean.

Now that partition should be read as done and over with. No more division of land and no more bitching about how co-existence with kuffars is a pain.

Now if someone — anyone, not just Kashmiris — don’t like it within the present day borders of India, they are free to leave. India should not behave like the former East Germany and prevent people from leaving India. Indeed, India should have a fund which subsidizes the travel for people who wish to take a one-way trip out of India. Not just that, India should make it mandatory for people who wish to not be part of India that they take a one-way trip.

I think that Kashmir is part of India and therefore Kashmiris are Indians, regardless of their religion. But if any Kashmiri wants to be a Pakistani instead, I think he or she should be encouraged to go to Pakistan.

I think that a referendum would be a great idea. Let them decide if they want to be a part of India or part of Pakistan. If they vote to be part of Pakistan, let them pack up and leave without delay. I am sure that the Kashmiri Pandits would be delighted to have their land back and not have to get ethnically cleansed.

I think what India (and by that I mean the people, the press, the “intelligentsia,” the government, and all) needs to do is to declare that the borders are non-negotiable but the people are free to go wherever they want to go. After that, let’s talk about Kashmir or any other part of India. Most of all, let’s not stifle stray voices. They add entertainment.

NOTES: Please visit The Acorn and check out the excellent discussion “On psywar and sedition.”

Thomas Paine’s pamphlet, Common Sense, is what kept me busy. Reading Paine is an intellectual delight for me because I keep marveling how closely my ideas mirror his. I was hooked from the first line in the introduction to the pamphlet:

Perhaps the sentiments contained in the following pages are not yet sufficiently fashionable to procure them general favor; a long habit of not thinking a thing wrong, gives it a superficial appearance of being right, and raises at a formidable outcry in defense of custom. But the tumult soon subsides. Time makes more converts than reason.

Upon reading that, I immediately thought of the system of education in India. We have been accustomed to thinking that the system is not wrong. Upon further reflection I realized that the education system is just a small (though important) part of the larger system. Even the system of governance is faulty. What is the foundation upon which the system rests? Undoubtedly it has to be the constitution. I guess is that the constitution of India is flawed.

It is easy to dismiss my opinion as that of a person who is not an authority on constitutions. True enough. But what would you say to the village idiot who witnesses the spectacular blowing up of a huge complicated machinery — a device that he could not ever have designed or created — and exclaims, “The guy who designed it is an idiot”? The problem with the machine is revealed unquestionably by the failure of the machine. One does not have to be a genius to observe the effects of faulty design.

Time indeed makes more converts than reason. One can reason with people till the cows come home but it will not sway them one bit if the present conditions favor them. Those who hold power in today’s government will be crazy to let go of something that they find so personally rewarding.

Moving on, here are the first bits of Common Sense:

Some writers have so confounded society with government, as to leave little or no distinction between them; whereas they are not only different, but have different origins. Society is produced by our wants, and governments by our wickedness; the former promotes are happiness positively by uniting our affections, the latter negatively by restraining our vices. The one encourages intercourse, the other creates distinctions. The first is a patron, the last a punisher.

Society in every state is a blessing, but government even in its best state is but a necessary evil; in its worst state an intolerable one; for when we suffer, or are exposed to the same miseries by a government,which we might expect in a country without government, our calamities is heightened by reflection that we furnish the means by which we suffer. . .

A very topical example: the government funds jihad from the taxes it extracts from me.

Who was the man Thomas Paine whose pamphlet had such a profound effect on the colonists that they actually struck out for independence from England instead of continuing to be a colony? An Englishman born in 1737, he came to America in 1774. As late as end of 1775, the mood in the thirteen colonies was one of reconciliation with England. Common Sense was published in January 1776 and it was instrumental to a large degree in changing the mood of Americans. The declaration of independence was made on July 4th, 1776.

Here’s more from Paine:

I draw my idea of the form of government from a principle in nature . . . that the more simple any thing is, the less liable it is to be disordered, and the easier repaired when disordered; and with this maxim in view, I offer a few remarks on the much boasted constitution of ________. That it was noble for dark and slavish times in which it was erected is granted. When the world was over-run with tyranny the least remove therefrom was a glorious rescues. But that it is imperfect, subject to convulsions, and incapable of producing what it seems to promise, is easily demonstrated.

That last sentence is so accurate about the Indian constitution that one would think that Paine was referring to India. He was talking about England. Here’s the continuation of the segment quoted above:

Absolute governments (tho’ the disgrace of human nature) have this advantage with them, that they are simple; if the people suffer, they know the head from which their suffering springs, know likewise the remedy, and are not bewildered by a variety of causes and cures. But the constitution of England is so exceedingly complex, that the nation may suffer for years together without being able to discover in which part the fault lies, some will say in one and some in another, and every political physician will advice a different medicine.

I think it is appropriate that a book titled “common sense” altered the course of history. I think the success of the US is attributable to basic common sense — which in our case we have not got.

The essential difference between the Indian and the US constitution (in my opinion, and I am not a constitutional expert) is that the former empowers the government relative to the people, while the latter empowers the people and puts restrictions on the power of governments. I attribute that difference to the difference in the value-systems of the people framing the constitutions. The Indian framers were setting themselves up as the rulers of the people of India; in the US case, they were aiming to take power away from the government and vest it in the people.

Related post::

The First Amendment

The Tangles Web–Part 4

Still laboring under serfdom

ADOLF HITLER IN GOOD COMPANY

My Lawyer friend Nick Mephisto took me out for a celebration lunch yesterday, which worried me.

He is a Devil’s advocate, the infernal version of a Queen’s Counsel. What he likes to celebrate usually appalls any normal person.

‘It’s the 45th anniversary of Adolf Hitler’s death,’ Nick explained. “My client has been hosting him-and roasting him-since April 30, 1945.’

‘I suppose your Client is very proud to have such a monster,’ I said.

‘Oh, Hitler was no monster.’

‘What! The cause of World War II, the author of holocaust, not a monster?’

‘Don’t forget my client has known them all. Hitler was just a garden variety politician.’

‘Absurd! He was inhuman.’

‘Well, what was his big offence? He believed in racial and cultural superiority. And he thought superior races and cultures were entitled to invade other people’s countries, enslave them, and even exterminate them.’

‘I said he was a monster.’

‘But isn’t that exactly what other Europeans have been doing since Columbus? In the 80 years after the Spanish conquered Mexico and South America, the native population fell by 90 %. That was about 40 or 50 million people. Hitler was faster, but he wasn’t responsible for any more deaths than Spaniards were.’

‘Aw, come on Nick-’

‘The French conquered parts of Africa and South East Asia, not to mention Quebec. The English thought they deserved to rule what Kipling called ‘the lesser breeds,’ all over the world. The Belgians ran the Congo like a big concentration camp. The Dutch and the Portugese-’

‘Sure, the old colonial empires were bad, but they weren’t as bad as the Nazis.’

Nick Mephisto shrugged. ‘The Europeans believed that their supposed superiority justified slavery, massacres, deportations and suffocating of other people’s cultures. And Europe has flourished on that basis for centuries. In my client’s opinion, Hitler made just one mistake.’

‘Which was?’

‘He picked on Europeans.’

‘True enough, but-’

‘If he’s massacred native Indians, African blacks, or Asians, his neighbors wouldn’t have minded much. After all, they’d all done the same thing. But treating his fellow-Europeans that way was simply unforgivable.’

‘That’s enough! If Hitler had won, we’d have centuries of horror.’

‘Just as native Indians have had since 1492, and the Africans for almost as long. Oh, my Client gives full marks for effort, but he saves his real respect for the successful conquerers, the ones who commit genocide and become national heroes.’

‘So you are saying that we’re as bad as the Nazis?’

‘Tut-tut, we’re much more genteel. My Client does point out, though, that Canadian defence policy is based on inflicting nuclear genocide on any nation that threatens to keep us from shopping in the mall of our choice. And the vast majority of Canadians firmly support that policy, no matter how many peace marchers turn out in Vancouver every year.’

Something began to dawn on me. ‘Does this mean Hitler has a lot of company?’

The Devil’s advocate grinned. ‘Plenty, and more coming all the time. You wouldn’t believe the housing crisis created by dead racists. It’s absolute hell.’

Just for the record, Mr Kilian, it’s “native Americans”, not “native Indians.”

In an opinion piece in the Wall Street Journal of 10th June, Edward J. Markey asks rhetorically “Why Is Bush Helping Saudi Arabia Build Nukes?” He points out that if at all the Saudis need more energy — even after sitting atop the world’s largest oil reserves — then the US should be helping them out by selling them solar technology. Solar technology makes sense in a country three times the size of Texas, and where the desert sands see around 300 days of sunshine every year. He says, “For a country with so much oil, gas and solar potential, importing expensive and dangerous nuclear power makes no economic sense.”

Quite right. It makes no economic sense for the Saudis to import nuclear technology, a technology which Markey points out the Saudis are ill-prepared for. But it does make immense strategic sense for the Saudis to import nuclear technology. Markey points out that it is probably the first step for the Saudis to create Sunni nukes that will balance the potential Iranian Shia nukes.

I think that it makes immense sense for the US government to go around spreading weapons of mass destruction technology. Every country that has, or attempted to have, WMD ultimately has to thank the US for the capability. Why does the US do it? Because, first, the US makes money from selling the technology. The US is not the greatest arms exporter in the world for nothing. Selling weapons and weapons technology is its bread and butter. Second, it gives the US the opportunity to later go in and invade countries that it disagrees with under the pretext that WMD should be destroyed. Just one example out of many: the US gave WMD technology to Iraq and then invaded Iraq when it thought that the time was ripe. Another example (which Markey cites) is how the US transferred nuclear technology to Iran before the Shah was overthrown.

All indications are that one of these days the US will have to take action against Iran for their ambition to develop nukes. In the meanwhile, the US is putting the next country — Saudi Arabia — in the pipeline for the same old routine: sell them technology, and then go invade them and take over the oil fields under the pretext that they have WMD.

It’s quite impressive. I am not only impressed by the American strategy but also impressed by the foolishness of the countries that fall for it.

Related post: The care and feeding of the permanent arms industry–part 2.

I suppose the court would figure out if Mr Chee’s charge is true or not. If the charge is false, I would be much relieved because I would hate to find out that the man I have very high regard for — Mr Lee Kuan Yew — has feet of clay.

Why do I admire the man so much? Perhaps because of what he achieved. Here’s the NY Times:

“The final test is what Singapore was when I became prime minister in 1959 and what Singapore is now,” Mr. Lee said. “We had less than $100 million in the kitty.” Today, he said, “global financial services assess Singapore to have sovereign wealth funds of over $300 billion.”

Singapore is just a few million people. LKY worked the miracle of transforming a third world resource-poor mosquito-infested swamp into a wealthy first world nation state admired around the world for efficiency, lack of corruption, order and cleanliness. He didn’t make pretty speeches about scaling the commanding heights of the economy. He just did it and did it within a generation. Not just the phenomenal infrastructure of the tiny place, not just the rich stock of human capital, Singapore has also amassed $300 billion in reserves. Under LKY’s guidance, Singapore’s reserves have multiplied 3000 times. How great is that?

Lee says that Singapore has $300 billion in the kitty. Chee says that it does not make up for

the silencing of political opponents, the closing down of independent media “and all your shenanigans, including making sure that I’m not allowed to speak during an election rally.”

Speaking strictly for myself, I value political freedom and the freedom of expression. A civilized human existence requires freedom. But in what sense is there freedom if one is starving? Isn’t one willing to sell one’s soul for a piece of bread when starvation threatens one’s life? What would you give up in exchange for not seeing your child starve to death? I know that I would give up a lot of my highly prized freedom of political expression if in the process I could at least see my children not starve.

Mr Chee says that $300 billion in the bank (and of course all other goodies that Singapore enjoys) is too high a price to pay for the lack of political freedom and the muzzling of the press. Perhaps the restrictions on the press and on political opposition were wholly unnecessary and Singapore would have been what it is today even otherwise. Perhaps it was merely to satisfy LKY’s personal whims and fancies that political opposition was curbed and which actually did not serve any instrumental purpose. But I doubt it. When a country is poor, the squabbling for resources does push to the fore the most opportunistic criminals to enter the policymaking circles.

I know that no one reading this is actually starving. When one is sitting comfortably with a full tummy, it is easy to see how valuable it is to have the freedom to speak your mind. It is clearly better to have political freedom than not to have it, all else being equal. But how would one rank these two: one, a very full stomach but limited political freedom; two, a very empty stomach but unlimited political freedom.

At which point does the benefits of political freedom of the few outweigh the material concerns of 500 million others? How many million people is it ok to condemn to a pitiably poor life so as to guarantee that a few people have the right to make fiery political speeches?

And often times, the only political speeches made are ostensibly on behalf of the starving millions. If those starving millions did not exist, these politicians would have little to make speeches about. So it would seem that if by banning idiotic political speeches, one achieves a level of prosperity such that it makes political speeches about poverty completely irrelevant and inconsequential, it would be a good thing.

I think that there is a hierarchy of needs, as Maslow pointed out. Only after the lower level needs are met can one attempt to satisfy needs higher up. I will secure air before I start worrying about food and water. I will not worry about free speech if I am in imminent danger of keeling over from hunger. I would trade in a lot of pretty political speeches in exchange for a decent shot at living a comfortable life. If I were in the bottom 300 million in India, I would happily trade in my situationally useless right to political freedom in exchange for the life of an average Singaporean.

All the above with the usual disclaimer that your mileage may vary.

POSTSCRIPT:

Why do I stress so much on the starvation bit? Because I know how it feels to starve for 2 days. If it feels that awful to starve for just 2 days, I wonder how it must be to chronically starve — as do an estimated 200 million in India. I know that I could not handle it and I would make a deal with the devil himself to try to avoid it. That is what I fear: that millions of people at the edge of starvation are quite capable of making deals with the devil. Don’t believe me? Well, then, how do you think the communists get elected in India?

I sincerely doubt if Indians are capable of building LARGE world class institutions EFFICIENTLY, without external assistance.

While asking for help does not make anyone particularly proud, I don’t see any shame in approaching a university system consistently known for its high standards and asking for administrative, structural and vision related guidance. This is not a begging bowl scenario, in my opinion. Learning from the best and involving them formally and intimately is an excellent idea, and a respectable form of learning.

Self reliance

I am all in favor of learning from others. In fact, one can achieve very little if one steadfastly refuses to learn from others. (See related post “Ideas on the road to development“, where I discuss briefly the two gaps: the ideas gap and the objects gap. The ideas gap is more constraining and can be bridged by judiciously learning from others. Also see “On Gandhian self-sufficiency” where I argue that ” A goal that seeks self-sufficiency (at any level of analysis) is a prescription for poverty — not just of the body but also of the mind. We are deeply and inalienably connected with all others, however one defines the ‘other.’)

A sure-fire recipe for poverty is to insist on inventing everything before you use it. “Not invented here and therefore we will not use it” is the philosophical underpinnings of the disastrous “import substitution industrialization” (ISI) that Nehru thrust down India’s throat.

Now it is silly to expect Indians to build world class educational institutions by 6 PM next week Saturday if they are only allowed to do so. Today’s world class educational institutions were not built last week. It took them hundreds of years. Indians will not take that long because it has the benefit of the learnings of those institutions. But I am confident that India can have excellent institutions within our lifetimes, iff the government allows Indians the freedom to do so.

Learning by Doing

I am repeating myself but this point is worth repeating till there is no mistaking the essential lesson. There is such a thing as learning by doing. If you allow people freedom to do something, then over time you find some people who get pretty good at doing something. This is a natural process — as natural as natural selection. The marketplace is a strict but fair taskmaster and given sufficient time, it picks winners.

The problem with Indian education is that it is not free. It does not allow the natural selection to take place. The government either runs the institutions (Type 1) or permits some to run educational institutions by licensing them (Type 2). IITs are an example of the former. Those who get the permission to run educational institutions are generally those who have political power or can buy political power. They buy their permissions and run the Type 2 institutions.

IITs

Let’s stick with Type 1 for now. Aditya in his comment writes about his experience at an IIT and his assessment of the quality of teaching there which was good. (Note “was” as opposed to “is.”) But he points out that even the IITs are inflexible and don’t keep up with the times. He thinks it is the mindset which is rigid. I am not surprised. The IITs receive public funding and that is a good thing but only to a limited extent. The drawbacks of public funding are many but the most debilitating bit is that they are prone to political meddling. But aside from all that, IITs operate in a sellers’ market and therefore have very little incentive to actually perform.

Just to remind ourselves, IITs are not universities. They are technical teaching colleges. Their job is to teach some useful technical skill. How good are they at that? I am not sure whether they are any good or not. No one can dispute that some IIT graduates are extremely successful. It is, however, not clear how much value addition the IITs actually do. The top 1 percent of any population can be expected to be good. The IITs, because of their reputation and the fact that they operate in a supply-constrained environment, have the luxury of picking about one or two percent of the applicants. Take any highly motivated bunch of people, select the top few from them, make them compete for grades for a number of years, and it does not matter whether you are good at teaching or not — the resulting graduates are bound to be good.

What if there were hundreds of IITs? What if there were so many that the IITs had to compete amongst themselves to get the best students, instead of the students having to compete to get into a handful of IITs? What if the IIT tuition fees were priced at full cost instead of the heavy public subsidy? What if the intake of the IITs were the average student (instead of the cream of the high-school classes)? If with an average quality intake the IITs produced above average output, one can confidently assert that the IITs do indeed add value; otherwise one can reasonably suspect that the IITs are simply sorting mechanisms merely separating the good students from the not so good.

Other institutions

There are hundreds of type 1 (that is, government funded and controlled) institutions. Most are nothing to write home about with the possible exception of the IITs and IIMs. These successful type 1’s don’t face much competition because free entry is not allowed. Those that the government allows are what I have labeled type 2. Type 2’s don’t pose a threat to the premier type 1’s because the type 2’s are not really interested in performing. Once an institution has the permission from the government, it can get into the business of recovering the costs it had incurred in getting the permission. It can recover the costs because it is also operating in a sellers’ market. Desperate for any sort of degree, people scramble to get into one of these and parents often go into considerable debt to pay for the outrageous under-the-table bribes. Because these type 2 institutions never lack willing customers, they could not really care less about what they teach.

Shifting gears

Let me shift to a different sector to illustrate the major point that I wish to make in this post. Consider the automobile sector in the 1970s in India. There were two manufacturers only and free entry was not allowed. The two companies turned out shoddy cars that were of 1950s vintage. They had no incentive to improve the product because people would be willing to take anything they could get their hands on — and indeed waited for years to get their “allocation.” There was a thriving black market for cars as well. People were willing to pay a premium even for those shoddy cars just so that they won’t have to wait for years. The sector was controlled by the government and for the best of reasons: because manufacturing cars was too important an economic function to be left to free private enterprise that only government control could ensure a plentiful supply, assure quality, and prevent the public from being cheated by unscrupulous private companies.

Imagine that someone had claimed that India could not ever manufacture cars that could meet global standards back in the 1970s. Absolutely reasonable claim. It takes decades of manufacturing cars in a competitive market to learn how to make cars. By not allowing not allowing that learning to occur in the Indian manufacturing sector, the government guaranteed that Indians could not ever manufacture cars.

We all know the rest of the story in the automobile sector. It was liberalized and now Indians are manufacturing cars that can compete in the world markets. But note: India is not a Japan or a Germany in terms of the automobile sector. Indian manufacturers are learning. For now they are collaborating with foreign firms but soon enough they will be competing with the best. For a while now India has been a supplier of intermediate goods to the global automotive sector. (Note especially the phenomenal success story of Bharat Forge.)

Free markets

Analytically the free-market story is simple. Allow firms to enter the market. Let them compete. Firms learn by doing. Let the market pick the winners. The result: world class products. So also the socialist-economy story is analytically simple. Rigidly control who enters the market by predetermining the “winners.” Forbid competition and thus ensure that there is no learning by doing. The result: shoddy products.

The lesson is simple to learn provided one is willing to learn: competition that arises from allowing firms free entry into the market is good for everyone. Refusing to learn that lesson is too costly and India cannot afford not to learn that lesson.

Now back to education. Aditya writes:

I don’t believe Indian universities are far enough along that with the improved communication methods and additional money available that they could be transformed to a world class institution, completely indigenously.

Quite true. India cannot build world class institutions without learning from others. But even learning from others requires a certain degree of preparedness. India cannot build Stanford, Harvard, MIT and Berkeley overnight and cannot do so under the current system of absolute government control of the educational sector. What can it do? India can allow free entry into the education sector. Indian firms will figure out as best as they can what to do. Some will collaborate with foreign institutions perhaps or figure out some other strategy. In the end, the competition will ensure that those that have been most successful in learning succeed in the marketplace.

What will not work is for an “education minister” to go around with a begging bowl to foreign officials for aid in building world class universities while continuing to keep the same old rigid system of government control of the sector. Even in the unlikely event that some foreign government agrees to help, what can it actually do? What does help entail? Will the governments come and build the infrastructure, hire the faculty, set up the research labs, determine the curricula, admit students, teach the courses, conduct the research, administer the tests, and grant the degrees? The best they can do is to say, “We have good universities in our country. Do come by and see what they are doing. Do the same thing.” If Indian cannot learn by carefully observing what it is that makes those institutions tick, I don’t see how else India can emulate — and later surpass — their success.

Liberalization as a dirty word

Now to address the question that Pramode CE raised:

Atanu’s solution?

Liberalise. Liberalise. Liberalise.

That brings up my questions. One, isn’t the Indian education system already “liberalised”?

First, I have often (though not in the present instance) found that “liberalize” is thrown back at me in an accusatory tone, as if I was recommending something dishonorable and immoral. For the life of me I cannot understand what it is that people don’t like about freedom. Does it frighten them to think that they have freedom? Are they so insecure that they find comfort in restrictions on behavior? Have decades of living in a socialistic state where some official sanction is required for even the most trivial of enterprises warped their psyches to the extent that freedom is seen as threatening?

Which part of the cry, “Freedom, freedom, freedom!” don’t they understand? What makes them think that living under bondage and under the paternalistic dispensations of politicians and bureaucrats is preferable to living as free humans? That’s the question that I struggle with. I think that Indians have to introspect deeply and answer that question first before India can truly hope to achieve its potential.

Let me throw out a conjecture: Indians have lived so long in the socialist prison that they have forgotten the meaning of freedom. They falsely believe that they are already free. Are Indians the largest group to suffer a sort of collective Stockhold syndrome?

That could explain the frequently raised objection: “Isn’t the Indian educational sector already liberalized?”

In India today, you cannot run an educational system without government permission. That permission is not given freely but under certain conditions. One condition — not mentioned in the books of course — is a very fat bribe. The other conditions require that you have to be a “trust” or a charitable organization and whatever resources you put into it, you can never ever recover. Then the real shackles come out: everything that you do, you will do only as the government dictates. Whom you hire, how much you pay, whom you admit, what you teach, how long you teach — every trivial matter is dictated by the government. What is worse, the dictations of the government are usually harmful to the whole enterprise and process of teaching and learning.

If this system is called “liberalized,” I am sure that the word means something else to others than what I think it means.

Conclusion

We have a long way to go. The path to development is not easy even with eyes wide open. With eyes firmly shut, it is well nigh impossible to make any progress. India is poor today because Indians lack freedom.

Let’s remember that India was a British colony and therefore Indians did not have freedom, and were dictated to by their colonial masters. The result of that lack of freedom was a steady decline of the economy. By the time the British departed, India was impoverished. In fact, having extracted whatever they could, the British left because the well was sucked dry and little of economic value remained. The institutions that the British had built in India were for the extraction of wealth from India. Controlling every aspect of the economy was the means that the British employed for enriching Britain at India’s expense.

The British have been gone from India for over 60 years. In their place, Indians inherited the system of extraction and exploitation. The Indian government continues in the grand old tradition of the British: control, permit, license, quota. And the effect is the same: impoverishment of the economy and continued misery of the people. Yes, the gora sahibs left but in their place the indigenous brown sahibs are doing quite well.

I am quite sure that corporations are not benevolent higher beings whose only motive is universal peace and prosperity. I am sure that firms supply to my needs out of their self-interest. But in a free market, the firms have to compete for my patronage because otherwise I will go to their competitors. That is what essentially distinguishes private firms from governments: firms have to please me but the government knows that I am a captive and I am powerless against its whims and fancies. That is what frightens me about government control of education: it prevents me from choosing, it denies me freedom.

The denial of freedom is a common enough occurrence in the world for us to be sure of one thing: someone gains and that gain is at someone else’s expense. People wouldn’t be in the denying of freedom business unless it made sense to do so. This is so trivially true that I feel stupid even mentioning this. But then, how frequently do we ask who exactly is gaining by the denial of freedom in Indian education? Someone has to be gaining and we must have a national debate to expose them because the nation is losing any hope of a decent future as a result of their greed. These people should be identified and charged as traitors.

Yes sir or madam, that is what Amravati chiefly needs–an international airport. That is if by “chiefly needs” one means something like “a fish chiefly needs a bicycle.” From the almost infinite list of things that Amravati lacks, Patil’s fatwa, or patwa, was that it needs an international airport. Why international, you ask? That’s because of the new patwa.

The new patwa is that Amravati needs an IIT. Yup, an Indian Institute of Technology. But wait there’s more. The IIT is “Indira Institute of Technology.” Why, you ask, does “India” get transformed into “Indira.” Well, as they say in Hindi, Patil has done a lot of roti baylna for the family Family and she got to be El Presidente and now more rotis are being baylow-ed. Besides, she recalls that “indira is india” and “india is indira.” So, IIT stands both for Indira as well as Indian institutes of technology. Or is it now “Institute of Indira Technology”?

Anyway, the new IIT is going to be only for women. Only women, you ask? What is with this gender discrimination? Is she the president of Saooodi Arabia, as The Acorn suspects? Will she require that women go about clad in black tents while studying at IIT in Amravati? And what about the international airport? Will the flights be between Saoodi Arabia and Amravati?

Don’t know. Let’s just hope that the Family sticks to pizza delivered from Italy so that they can dispense with the roti baylna of Patil and we are all spared the patwas.

[Background information: Pratibha Patil wants an IIT in her constituency.]

If I were an illiterate person, I would be convinced that Gandhi is goodness personified. After all, doesn’t Indian money carry his image? Isn’t he the father of the nation? And should I not vote for Gandhi’s children — Rajiv, Sonia, Rahul, whoever? And should I not vote for the party that Gandhi founded? And should I not believe everything from a person who says he is a Gandhian?

Anyway, I must admit that the Congress party of India has a winning formula and they know it. Gandhi is the biggest brand name in the world — forget Coca Cola and McDonalds. Mera Bharat Mahan!

From my own perspective as a secular humanist, I believe that any whitewashing of historical record is counterproductive. No matter how lofty the ideals of a current cause, any whitewash of history tempts the fates. To forget history will always be fateful; to forgive its horrendous facts can be redemptive. Forgive — but never forget — history.

I, like the millions of others of my generation, grew up basically ignorant of Indian history as I had only been taught the Nehruvian pseudo-secular socialist government-sanctioned propaganda “history.” Now it is time that we free ourselves from the government brainwashing by reading alternative viewpoints critically. I bow deep in gratitude to the internet gods for allowing some light to shine through the darkness that Nehru imposed.

The review is continued below the fold.

[The following text is by C J S Wallia.]

Rewriting Indian History is a provocative new book by the French writer Francois Gautier, who currently serves as the political correspondent in India for France’s top newspaper, Le Figaro, and for Switzerland’s leading daily, Le Nouveau Quotidien. Having lived in India for 25 years has helped him “to see through the usual cliches and prejudices in India to which I subscribed for a long time, as most foreign (and sometimes, unfortunately, Indian) journalists, writers, and historians do.”

Rewriting Indian History,the author prefaces, “might well be called an antithesis” for it questions many of the assumptions in the “standard” treatises by Euro-centered colonialist historians and their imitations by Indian Marxist writers.

Gautier focuses mainly on the Muslim period of India’s history. “Let it be said right away: the massacres perpetrated by Muslims in India are unparalleled in history, bigger than the holocaust of the Jews by the Nazis; or the massacre of the Armenians by the Turks; more extensive even than the slaughter of the South American native populations by the invading Spanish and Portuguese.”

However, the British, in pursuing their policy of divide-and-rule, colluded “to whitewash” the atrocious record of the Muslims so that they could set up the Muslims as a strategic counterbalance to the Hindus. During the freedom struggle, Gandhi and Nehru went around encrusting even thicker coats of whitewash so that they could pretend a facade of Hindu-Muslim unity against British colonial rule. After independence, Marxist Indian writers, blinkered by their distorting ideology, repeated the big lie about the Muslim record.

Gautier cites two eminent historians who wrote free of any colonialist or ideological agendas, basing their accounts on documents by contemporary Muslim chroniclers themselves: Alain Danielou in Histoire de la Inde: “From the time Muslims started arriving, around 632 AD, the history of India becomes a long, monotonous series of murders, massacres, spoilations, destructions. It is, as usual, in the name of ‘a holy war’ of their faith, of their sole God, that the barbarians have destroyed civilisations, wiped out entire races.” And the well-known American historian Will Durant in The Story of Civilization: “…the Islamic conquest of India is probably the bloodiest story in history. It is a discouraging tale, for its evident moral is that civilization is a precious good, whose delicate complex order and freedom can at any moment be overthrown by barbarians invading from without and multiplying from within.” (From my perspecive as a secular humanist, and my own experience, I regard a typical liberal Indian Muslim to be as good a human being as any other Indian.)

Gautier should have continued with the Will Durant quote: “The Hindus had allowed their strength to be wasted in internal division and war; they had adopted religions like Buddhism and Jainism, which unnerved them for the tasks of life; they had failed to organize their forces for the protection of their frontiers and their capitals, their wealth and their freedom, from the hordes of Scythians, Huns, Afghans and Turks hovering about India’s boundaries and waiting for national weakness to let them in. For four hundred years (600-1000 A.D.) India invited conquest; and at last it came. This is the secret of the political history of modern India. Weakened by division, it succumbed to invaders; impoverished by invaders, it lost all power of resistance, and took refuge in supernatural consolations; it argued that both mastery and slavery were superficial delusions, and concluded that freedom of the body or the nation was hardly worth defending in so brief a life. The bitter lesson that may be drawn from this tragedy is that eternal vigilance is the price of civilization. A nation must love peace, but keep its powder dry.”

About Gandhi’s whitewash of Muslims, Gautier observes:

“Ultimately, it must be said that whatever his saintliness, his extreme and somehow rigid asceticism, Gandhi did enormous harm to India… The British must have rubbed their hands in glee: here was a man who was perfecting their policy of divide-and-rule, for ultimately no one contributed more to the partition of India, by his obsession to always give in to the Muslims; by his indulgence of Jinnah, going as far as proposing to make him the prime minister of India.”

Worse yet, Gandhi’s anointed disciple, Nehru, propagated false readings of Indian history in his books and speeches. Gautier quotes Nehru’s “amazing eulogy” of the tyrant Mahmud Ghazni, the destroyer of Mathura’s great Hindu temples, Gujarat’s Somnath, and numerous other Hindu and Buddhist temples. When Nehru, the arrant appeaser of Muslims, became India’s first prime minister, he appointed a fundamentalist Muslim, Maulana Abul Kalam Azad, as the first education minister. Under Nehru’s pseudo-secular rule, “Hindu-bashing became a popular pastime.” Moreover, Nehru “had a great sympathy for communism…. He encouraged Marxist think-tanks such as the Jawaharlal Nehru University [JNU] in New Delhi, which has bred a lot of ‘Hindu-hating scholars’ who are adept at negating Muslim atrocities and running to the ground the greatness of Hinduism and its institutions.” These Marxist “historians,” well-ensconced at JNU, have long been masterminding the politically correct textbooks of India’s history used in Indian schools. No wonder, JNU is also known as “the Kremlin by the Jumna.” For a long time, the Indian Marxists had been so brainwashed that whenever it rained in Moscow — the capital of their “only true fatherland”– they opened their umbrellas in Delhi.

To be sure, dissenting voices were raised against Gandhi’s whitewash of Muslims. Before the partition of India, Aurobindo Ghosh, the great Hindu poet-philosopher, posed the question about Islam:

“You can live with a religion whose principle is toleration. But how is it possible to live with a religion whose principle is ‘I will not tolerate you’? How are you going to have unity with these people?… I am sorry they [Gandhi and Nehru] are making a fetish of Hindu-Muslim unity. It is no use ignoring facts; some day the Hindus will have to fight Muslims and they must prepare for it. Hindu-Muslim unity should not mean the subjection of Hindus. Each time the mildness of the Hindus has given way. The best solution would be to allow the Hindus to organise themselves and Hindu-Muslim unity will take care of itself, it will automatically solve the problem. …I see no reason why the greatness of India’s past or its spirituality should be thrown into the waste basket, in order to conciliate the Muslims who would not be conciliated by such policy.”

Another strong dissenter was Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel. Seeing through Nehru’s pseudo-secularism, Patel commented, “There’s only one nationalist Muslim in India: Jawarharlal Nehru.”

Gautier warns:

“Even today, there is no doubt that Islam has never been fully able to give up its inner conviction that its own religion is the only true creed and that all others are kafirs, infidels. In India it was true 300 years ago, and it is still true today. Remember the cry of the militants in Kashmir to the Pandits: ‘convert to Islam or die!’ … The Hindu-Muslim question is just plainly a Muslim obsession, their hatred of the Hindu pagans, their contempt for this polytheist religion. This obsession, this hate, is as old as the first invasion of India by the original Arabs in 650 AD. After independence, nothing has changed: the sword of Allah is still as much ready to strike the kafirs, the idolaters of many gods.”

The source of Muslim’s fanatical aggression, Gautier points out, is the Koran itself, from which he quotes: “Slay the infidels, wherever ye find them and prepare them for all kind of ambush”; and “Choose not thy friends among the infidels till they forsake their homes and the way of idolatory. If they return to paganism then take them whenever you find them and kill them.”

In the section on Ayodhya, Gautier says that demolishing the Babri Masjid has proved that Hindus too can fight. He criticizes Nehruvian “secularism” as interpreted by the Congress party to mean “giving in to the Muslims’ demands, because its leaders never could really make out if the allegiance of Indian Muslims is first to India and then to Islam or vice-versa.” For many of India’s Hindu journalists, this pseudo-secularism has meant “spitting on their own religion and brothers.” Curiously, Gautier does not mention Arun Shourie’s well-researched, lucidly articulated columns, which, in recent years, have laid bare the pretentions of Nehruvian pseudo-secularism.

From my own perspective as a secular humanist, I believe that any whitewashing of historical record is counterproductive. No matter how lofty the ideals of a current cause, any whitewash of history tempts the fates. To forget history will always be fateful; to forgive its horrendous facts can be redemptive. Forgive — but never forget — history. A salient example of making sure that the horrors of history are not forgotten is the contemporary German state’s law prohibiting any World War II history that whitewashes the holocaust perpetrated by the Nazis on the Jews, Gypsies, and Poles. The Jews rightly insist that the world must never forget what happened to them. Where is the Hindu Holocaust Museum?

The historical record of the Muslim rule in India is soaked in blood — just take a look at the documents left by contemporary Muslim chroniclers. Yet, as a secular humanist, I would like to make a distinction between an ideology and its adherents, especially those born into it. From my own experience, I regard a typical liberal Indian Muslim to be as good a human being as any other Indian.

In the opening chapter, Gautier briefly examines the “tainted glasses” which made Euro-centered historians expound gross “disinformations” about ancient India: the discredited Aryan invasion theory; the deliberate mistranslations of the Vedas; and the erroneous theory of the origin of the caste system.

Throughout the book, Gautier quotes Sri Aurobindo, and in the concluding chapter, “The Final Dream,” pays an inspired homage to the great visionary’s writings.

Like Konraad Elst’s Negationism in India: Concealing the Record of Islam, Francois Gautier’s Rewriting Indian History contributes to the growing literature of dissent against the “standard” textbooks of India’s history.

[Please note: The above text is not written by me. I did not put it within blockquotes for formatting reasons. The source of the review is here.]

Full marks for perseverance, though. “When Mahmud of Ghazni conquered Afghanistan and part of west India in the 12th century, the Buddhas and frescoes were spared from destruction though Buddhist monasteries and other artifacts were looted or destroyed. Aurangzeb, the last Mughal emperor distinguished for his religious zeal, employed heavy artillery in an attempt to destroy the statues. Nadir Shah, too, had cannon fire directed at the statues. But over the centuries the statues had largely been left untouched.”

I marvel not just at the destruction that Aurangzeb unleashed but also at the ultimate expression of dhimmitude — naming a major street “Aurangzeb Marg” in the capital of India, New Delhi. I doubt that Jews would be naming a major thoroughfare after Hitler anytime soon. I recommend that some street in Delhi be now named “Taliban Marg.”

What brought all this to mind is the recent destruction of a Buddha statue in Swat in Pakistan. So what else is new? Islam mandated destruction of cultural and religious artifacts is really old hat. Just keep moving, folks. There’s nothing new to see here.

Here’s a piece I had written back then in 2001. This one is a re-run, just like the destruction of Buddha statues.

Do the Taliban have Buddha Nature?

I bumped into my old friend CJ at Cody’s bookstore at the corner of Haste and Telegraph in Berkeley yesterday. I was browsing through the pile of discount books when I saw him similarly engaged. I was thrilled to see him.

“Hey, CJ, what’s up?” I said. “Fancy meeting you here.”

“Want to grab a coffee? I am about done here,” he said. We walked to the donut shop next door and sat down with our coffee.

“I suppose you must have heard about the destruction of the Bamiyan Buddhas by the Taliban in Afghanistan. That really sucks,” I said.

“Naah. In fact it is great news. Excellent bit of good luck. Couldn’t be better,” he replied. The pressures of his thesis must have finally gotten to him, I thought. I reached across and touched his forehead.

“Why are you doing that?” he asked.

“I was just checking to see if you were running a high fever. You are incoherent,” I explained.

“Don’t you see that the Taliban are heaven sent for mankind?”

“Are you on drugs or is it that you have stopped taking the drugs that you should be on? I really worry for you,” I said.

“Let me explain,” he said. “The Taliban are the poster boys for Islam. They are keeping to the letter as well as the spirit of Islam.”

“Letter of Islam? Haven’t you heard what Prime Minister Vajpayee said? He said that what the Taliban were doing was un-Islamic,” I protested.

He smiled. “Ah, good old Mullah Hajpayee, bless his soul. I would not be surprised if they revoke his mullah status and put a fatwa on his head for misrepresenting Islam. He ought to read the Koran,” he said.

“Very funny, CJ. But this is no laughing matter, you idiot,” I said.

“I am serious. See, very few people know history. And even if they know it, they prefer to ignore the lessons if they are inconvenient. The Taliban are the heirs of a long line of temple-breakers. It was from Afghanistan that Mahmud of Ghazni arrived and destroyed the Somnath Temple. Today it is an unremarkable event because over the centuries too many thousands of temples have been razed to the ground by Islamic invaders. The Taliban are succeeding in doing what the historians have failed to do. They are forcing the world to pay attention and are succeeding in what the scholars and historians have failed. They are giving us a living lesson in history. If this doesn’t wake up the pseudo-seculars in India, they are totally brain-dead.”

I sat sipping my coffee. “Still it is a tragedy,” I said. “Instead of feeding their starving children, these heroes are inviting international condemnation. Why don’t they just let the statues be? The statues are not the cause of their misery.”

CJ replied. “Actually, the Taliban are following their tradition once again. Mahmud of Ghazni had the choice of sparing the Shivling at the Somnath temple in exchange for immense wealth. He chose to forego that just so that he could destroy the idols as his holy book commanded. After all, the rewards in heaven for slaying idolators far exceed the rewards that you can get on earth. No, the Taliban know which side of the bread is buttered, so to speak. Between feeding their children and breaking idols, there is no contest in their minds.”

“But CJ, what about those priceless treasures that will be lost to humanity forever?”

“That’s the other wonderful thing about these Taliban fellows. They are teaching the world the truth about what the Buddha said many centuries ago. The Buddha had said that the cause of suffering is the attachment to things that are impermanent. Stone buddhas are also impermanent. So you should be examining your attachment to them to seek the cause of your sorrow,” he said.

“Spare me the philosophizing, CJ. I feel sick just thinking about the dynamiting of these magnificent towering Buddhas at Bamiyan.”

CJ continued. “But there is a practical aspect to the whole thing too. The Buddha statues are huge. It would take a whole lot of ammo to destroy them. Therefore, the more ammunition they throw at stones, the less they will have to throw at sentient beings. Less suffering all around. Karma, neh?”

I saw that he had a point. I had run out of arguments. But he evidently had not finished. Then he added something that I thought was very insightful.

“You know about the bodhisattva ideal: the vow to relieve the suffering of all sentient beings. Those stone buddhas are fulfilling those vows by drawing fire away from other sentient beings. Ironically, the Taliban’s promoting those very ideals that are symbolized in the Buddhas that they are hell bent on destroying.”

“Do the Taliban then have Buddha-nature?” I couldn’t help asking.

“Mu,” he said with a serene smile on his stupid face.

Notes::

1. The story goes that a monk was trying to understand the Zen idea that “all things have buddha-nature.” He asked Joshu, a Japanese Zen master, “Does a dog have Buddha-nature?” Joshu replied, “Mu.” That response is generally understood to mean “yes and no” — a paradoxical state of affairs that is beyond yes and no, something like an indeterminate state. I am reminded of Schrodinger’s cat’s state of being, beyond dead and alive.

2. Long time readers of this blog have met CJ before. Here are some other posts featuring CJ:

a. The Ownership Society.

b. The Future of Energy.

c. How to Study Economics.

d. Choosing between WCs and PCs.

Not to put too fine a point on it, but the law of supply and demand is a bitch. Stripped of all details it basically states that the price of something is determined by the interaction of the quantities supplied and demanded. Therefore (1) an increase of the quantity demanded, holding the supply constant, will increase the price; (2) an increase in the quantity supplied, holding the demand constant, will decrease the price; (3) a decrease in the quantity demanded, holding the supply constant, will decrease the price; and (4) a decrease in the quantity supplied, holding the demand constant, will increase the price.

Sing pretty songs, if you please, or dance nimbly invoking the gods, or pass sincere legislation to suspend the effects of that law. You would have as much success doing that as you would have in suspending the law of gravity and legislate against it effects. The law of supply and demand is not quantum mechanics and can be taught to the average 6 year-old with ease. Ignorance of the law should be a matter of shame, and willful disregard of the law by policymakers should be punished through public floggings.

Public Floggings

So why, you may ask, don’t we regularly enjoy the spectacle of public floggings of policymakers given that they frequently willfully disregard the law of supply and demand and legislate prices? Two reasons. First, the general public is shamefully ignorant of that law. They don’t know that the law is inviolable as it is not a man-made law. Second, the idea of public flogging makes them queasy. I am very much in favor of public flogging as punishment because it is equitable and wealth invariant.

Suppose you impose a monetary fine which is the same for everyone irrespective of the wealth of those being punished. The rich will be much less affected than the poor. But if you flog publicly, the rich and therefore the more powerful (and thus those who should be expected to be more responsible) would pay more in terms of loss of dignity and greater shame for their crimes, and it would have a greater deterrent effect. Imprisonment for most non-violent crimes is not a good idea because it is costly for society to maintain prisons and besides it robs society of any productive services that the criminal could otherwise provide.

I am rambling. But of course I am rambling. It’s my blog and if I want to build a solid foundation upon which to rest my argument, I have that privilege.

Poverty

I have arrived at the conclusion that poverty is a fact of life and will remain so for a while because the poor will be around for a bit longer. I should explicitly define what I mean by “poverty” and “the poor.” Poverty is a relative term and its definition varies across time and space. By US standards, most of the world is poor. Also by today’s US standards, most of the US of a hundred years ago was poor. Conversely, by the US standards of 1900, most of today’s India’s population is not poor.

That said, one could define something called absolute poverty. I would define it to be a degree of material deprivation which does not allow a person to obtain the most basic of food, shelter and clothing. From what I have seen first hand and know second hand from various published sources, by my standards (therefore naturally not objective), about 40 percent of India’s population – about 400 million — is poor.

LOSADS! Supply

Now let’s ask a very stupid question: Why does India have so many poor people? It’s the law of supply and demand, stupid! LOSADS.

So here’s what we will do now. We will let the simple model of supply and demand inform our investigation in the questions of why there are so many poor, how long will poverty (absolute or relative) persist in our world, what are the factors which tend to increase or decrease the number of the poor, and many other such matters. The subject, in this application of supply and demand, is people.

Wages correspond to “the price” which is jointly determined by the supply of and the demand for people. Let’s focus for now on low-skilled manual labor. Their wage is low in India because the supply is high and the demand is relatively low. So their price, or wages, though low is positive. That low positive price is sufficient for the continued supply of low-skilled people. In certain states of India and within a certain socioeconomic class, families produce half a dozen children or more. Without going into the details of the factors that lead to this fecundity, let’s just note that the supply is plentiful. Now let’s see the demand side.

LOSADS! Demand

On the demand side, there is sufficient demand for low-skilled manual labor to maintain a positive price which happens to be close to subsistence level. But the demand is not so little so as to drive the price to zero and therefore the wages below the subsistence level. In that case, the supply would contract. Also, the demand is not sufficiently high that it would raise the price such that the wages climb way above the subsistence level. Indeed, if the wages go too much above the subsistence level, the supply is sufficiently wage elastic that the higher wages would induce an increase in the supply so that the price is once again driven down to the subsistence level.

Derived Demand – Manufacturing

Demand for low-skilled manual labor derives from the usual domestic sources. For example, there is a great deal of construction going on around India. Labor and capital are to some degree substitutes in construction. You can use huge earthmovers (capital) or you can use an army of laborers armed with shovels. Firms will figure out their profit maximizing mix of capital and labor. As the supply of manual labor is plentiful, firms in India use labor preferentially over capital where it is feasible, such as in road-building or digging canals. But in high-tech manufacturing such as in semiconductor chip fabrication, substitution of labor for capital is not possible. Note that the amount of high-tech manufacturing going on in India is not very large. So relative to the supply to high-skilled labor, the demand is low and therefore the wages for high-skilled labor is low relative to, say, in Taiwan where the demand is high and the wages are high.

Derived Demand – Services

Another source of domestic demand for low-skilled labor is the services sector. Household servants in the cities and towns, for example. There is an apparently unending supply from the rural areas. The wages are really low but still they come to cities like Mumbai. Of course, they somehow have to subsist and therefore you have those mega slums. If demand for low-skilled manual labor were to magically disappear tomorrow, the slums will disappear just as magically without the need for bulldozing them.

Derived Demand – Foreign

In the world of the past, domestic supply and demand were all that mattered. Today’s more integrated global economy allows foreign demand to play in the domestic market. Once again, where possible, the profit maximizing decisions of transnational corporations take into account the substitution of domestic production with off-shore production, and also substitution of capital with low-skilled labor.

Thus Gap, the giant clothing manufacturer and retailer, could produce stuff in the US but the supply of low-skilled labor there is sufficiently low that the wages would be high, and since the job cannot be sufficiently automated, the possibility of substituting capital for labor is limited. Therefore they send the work off-shore and locate their sweatshops in poor countries where the supply of low-skilled labor is so abundant that the price (wage) is really low.

As long as there are things that people in the advanced industrialized countries need which cannot be made using only capital and high-skilled labor, there will be a derived demand for low-skilled labor in the world. And that demand for low-skilled labor together will continue to perpetuate the supply but at a subsistence wage level.

If the demand for low-skilled labor derived from foreign sources (such as Gap and Nike) were to magically disappear overnight, the immediate effect will be a drop in the price of labor. That will contract the supply till the wages once again hover around the subsistence level. At the new equilibrium price, the supply will contract appropriately.

LOSADS! Conclusions

Hence I reach the following conclusions. First, as long as the demand for low-skilled workers continues in this globalized economy, the supply of low-skilled workers in the third world will persist. In other words, the poor will continue to go forth and multiply. Poverty will be a fact of life and cannot be wished away. Children of the poor will be exploited in sweatshops and the monkeys will continue to wring their hands in feigned anguish while simultaneously saving fish from drowning (quite a feat, you must admit.)

It is easy to do the arithmetic to figure out that if the will existed, the poor and the attendant poverty could be a thing of the past. The world produces enough wealth, and the production of wealth continues to grow, that if only a relatively small percentage of it were distributed to the poor, it would be sufficient to eradicate extreme and absolute poverty. The reason it is not done is because with the eradication of poverty, the elastic supply of low-skilled labor would disappear. Why? Because only those who hover around the subsistence wage level display a degree of fecundity that is unmatched by those who are comfortably off. By eliminating poverty, those who are currently comfortably off would be worse off. Shoes currently produced in third world sweatshops would cost a lot more and so will all sorts of low-skilled labor intensive goods.

Second, the supply of low-skilled workers in the advanced industrialized economies will shrink further. I refer you to the “factor price equalization” theorem. Low-skilled labor wages would equalize around the world due to globalization. This low price (another word for wages in our context) would be sufficient to induce continued supply in the poor economies but be insufficient to induce supply in the advanced industrialized economies.

Third, it is rational for the rich to ignore the problem of overpopulation. Overpopulation is a good thing for them because it lowers the cost of low-skilled labor. As long as they need low-skilled labor, and the poor obligingly supply the fruit of their loins to be exploited in sweatshops, everything is hunky-dory. Of course, it makes good copy and sells newspapers whenever someone discovers that children from Bihar and Bengal as young as 9 years old have been sold into bondage and slavery to sweatshops in Delhi.

It gives everyone a great opportunity to feel morally superior and express their shocked outrage and righteous indignation. Celebrated journalists on the left write movingly about the horrible capitalist system; other celebrated journalists on the right write movingly about how overpopulation is just a figment of the fevered imagination of neo-Malthusian morons. The bullshit factories go into overdrive and the world sinks a little deeper into the ocean of stupidity that we have floundered into by not understanding the simple demand supply model.

It is all karma, neh?

Notes:

1. An excellent brief introduction to supply and demand is at ThinkEconomics. Do click the “Next” button on the interactive graph. You will find a little more detail here but you can skip it for now.

2. If you are easily disturbed by reports of very small children suffering inhuman treatment, I recommend that you don’t click on these links. But if you care to know how terrible the situation is, check out these: “Children Tricked into Industrial Slavery”, “Child Sweatshop Threatens Gap’s Ethical Image”, and “Indian Slave Children”.

My (almost) dispassionate analysis above is an attempt by me to maintain my sanity in face of the horrors that I can well imagine when I read those reports. Humanity has little claim to being human as long as injustice, poverty, and needless suffering is tolerated by us all.

Hitchens also took on Mother Teresa, another Peace Prize winner, who did considerable harm to humanity. Actually, looking at the list of winners, one sees a lot of seedy characters who ought to be prosecuted rather than felicitated. The latest award is also rather dubious. Mind you, I would rather have Gore run in the US presidential elections than Hillary Clinton. With all his faults, he is a much better candidate than the bunch of jokers currently in the race. Still, one wishes that the prize was less of a joke.

My first axiom derives from the Golden Rule. Do unto others what you would have others do unto you. Treat others as you would like others to treat you. The negative formulation of the same rule goes “Do not treat others the way you would not like to be treated yourself.” Abraham Lincoln used that rule to conclude “that as I would not be a slave, so I would not be a master” and opposed slavery. I do not want to be coerced into an involuntary trade, and therefore I refuse be the coercive party in any involuntary trade. If the taxi driver does not wish to ferry me for whatever reasons, regardless of what the law permits me to do, I will not force him against his will.

My second axiom is that adversarial laws are harmful and decrease social welfare. When a law pits one individual (or group) against another, it blocks many voluntary trades. All agents in society have interests that are congruent in some respects of other agents and divergent in others. If one’s interests were fully and comprehensively divergent from that of another, then any interaction between the two would be a zero-sum game: one can gain only at the expense of the other. But in reality, most people in society have some overlapping interests and any voluntary trade in those areas yields gains to both parties and thus is a positive-sum game.

My third axiom is that one has to be careful in evaluating the benefits of an action. One should not only look at action A’s benefits. Action A’s benefits have to be weighed against the “opportunity cost” of A: the benefits of action B which are foregone because A precludes taking action B. A corollary to this axiom is: be careful in noting both the long term and short term costs and benefits.

My fourth axiom is that one should arrange society on a minimal set of rules that are consistent and comprehensive. That a small set of simple rules can give rise to systems that are complex, sustainable, elegant, and beautiful is well known empirically and I believe that social systems which are free from very large and complex rule sets are more efficient and effective. Specifically in terms of the economy, a society that does not needlessly restrict free trade is one that prospers. Economic freedom leads to social good and effects a productive, efficient and sustainable society.

Starting with the last – as this blog is ostensibly about India’s economic growth and development – I believe that the lack of economic freedom is one of the major causes of India’s poor economy. Like in all things that matter, India’s lack of economic freedom traces its roots to its history of foreign rule. Colonialism is grounded on denying economic freedom to the colonized society so as to more efficiently exploit and extract resources from it. Economic growth and development are not the colonialists’ ultimate goal but enters into the calculus only to the extent that they promote the ultimate aim of maximizing the extraction of wealth.

Political freedom does not automatically translate into economic freedom. Indeed, political freedom and economic freedom are essentially distinct beasts and you can have one without the other. India has been politically free externally but it is economically in shackles and is kept so by its new political masters. Of course political freedom is a good in its own right, just as economic freedom is. How much people value political freedom over economic freedom is an empirical question. I believe that most people value economic freedom more than political freedom. The evidence? Check how many people migrate from nations where they have political freedom but lack economic freedom, to nations which are economically free (and therefore economically prosperous) but where they don’t have political freedom. Case in point: Indians that are capable do migrate to the US at the drop of a hat. Furthermore, the reverse migration of Indians from the US is powered by a corresponding rise of economic opportunities in India (thanks to a limited degree of economic liberalization) – often times those returning lack political freedom (such as their inability to vote in India, having relinquished their Indian citizenship during their sojourn abroad.)

Economic freedom is determined by the set of laws that constrain economic behavior. It is the entire set, not just any particular law. If the set contains a large number of what I call ‘adversarial laws,’ then inevitably they collectively introduce friction into the economic machinery and it grinds very slowly and inefficiently. The society produces little and the end result is poverty.

Adversarial laws pit one set of people against another. The one forcing tax-drivers to take any and all passengers is one such. Each such law introduces only a small inefficiency but a truckload of similar laws introduce inefficiencies which aggregated over time and space add up and create havoc. The reason that these adversarial laws are made is due to myopia and ignorance. Myopic because they trade small short-term gains for long-term costs; ignorant because finally they end up hurting those who are the supposed beneficiaries.

Examples of adversarial laws abound. Rent control, for instance. It is supposed to penalize the landlord and to favor the tenant. Perhaps good in intent but results in lack of affordable housing. Another example: labor laws that favor the employee in that the employer has to expend enormous effort to fire an employee. The result is that employers are reluctant to hire and the substitution of capital for labor leading to higher unemployment. Yet another example: disallowing large firms from producing certain goods and only permitting small producers. Result: costlier products that hurt the consumers.

I find it fascinating that there are phenomena in the world that are defy naïve intuition. For instance, how can the general welfare be advanced through the uncoordinated self-interested actions of a large number of people? Yet that is what happens, as suspected by Adam Smith in the 18th century. Economists have figured out why and how, and have enshrined the phenomenon in what is called the Fundamental Laws of Welfare Economics.

Naïve intuition says that limiting one’s own freedom voluntarily is a silly idea. But in reality it is often a strategically good idea. It allows a party to make commitments that are credible to the other party and hence allows trades that would have not occurred in the absence of that commitment.

The operative word is trade. Humans are distinguished from all other forms of life on earth by their capacity to trade. In general, we produce some stuff and consume some stuff, and exchange some of what we have with others in a place (sometimes a virtual place) we call a market. Sometimes what we exchange is our own labor, sometimes stuff that we have produced. The centrality of exchange in human affairs leads to the centrality of the market. That we produce stuff which is in excess of our own consumption needs is due to the remarkable but commonplace fact that we all differ in our preferences and our abilities. If we all had the exact same preferences and the exact same abilities, we would have no need to exchange. It is our human diversity that allows us to exchange stuff and thus have more stuff than what we would have had otherwise. It is that wonderful invention called the market that makes this exchange possible.

For the market to work as advertised (maximize social welfare) there is one very important caveat: that all trades must be voluntary.

So what about that taxi law? I think it is not a good idea. Sure it privileges me occasionally and I get a small gain but in the long run, it hurts me directly and indirectly. The damage that it mostly does is that it supports and reinforces the notion that it is alright to coerce people to do things that they perceive to be against their self-interest and that it is ok to force people to do things against their self-interest as long as it is for the “greater good.” I am vehemently against any coercion against my own self for the “greater good” and I have not yet met anyone who will acquiesce to being forced to do something for the “greater good.” Laws that are not consistent with economic freedom are bad laws and I am not willing to abide by them.

Why, I ask myself, do people agree to laws that are clearly bad for them? Perhaps because they mistakenly believe that the law does not apply to them. Take, for instance, the principle of free expression. It leads to social welfare gains in the long run but it could have the occasional short-term cost of nasty and hateful speech. I want the freedom to speak freely and therefore will accord the same right to everyone else, even those who I disagree with. I would like to live free of coercion and therefore will not coerce anyone else.

Responses to comments from the previous post.

Amit asks how should one deal with case of Muslim cab drivers who refuse to take passengers carrying alcohol.

I absolutely support the freedom of the Muslim drivers to refuse passengers without having to justify their action. Reciprocally, the passengers are also free to not ride in cabs driven by Muslim drivers. The market will decide if there is much need for Muslim cab drivers. If passengers refuse to hire Muslim cab drivers regardless of whether they have alcohol on them or not, the number of cabs driven by Muslims will be optimally determined. If there are too few non-Muslim cabbies at that airport, over a very short period that imbalance will be rectified by the greater demand for them.

Bongopondit comments that there is a shortage of cabs and hence the cabbies can dictate terms. Which brings me to an important general principle: that one should address the root cause of a problem rather than the symptom. It is pointless to force cabbies to take on fares when the real problem is that there is a shortage of cabs. Why are there too few cabs? Is it because of not sufficient people wishing to be cabbies because of too little profit in the business, or is it because government regulation limits the number? Needs investigation.

Sreddy comments that it is a union problem. Same as above: figure out the root of the problem instead of using a band-aid solution that masks the symptom.

I acknowledge Rishi’s comment and note that the matter of fixing fares deserves an entire post which I will go into later.

Tejas’ comment about discrimination likewise deserves a separate post. I am absolutely in favor of the freedom to discriminate by anybody towards anybody. I will write in praise of discrimination later.

Thanks to all who have bothered to comment and advance the discussion. I am grateful to those who disagreed with me for they afford me a chance to explore the topic.

Thank you, good night, and may your god go with you.

Do you know, Rickshaw & Taxi Drivers do not have a right to say NO. So remember that each time the rickshaw/taxi driver tells you a NO, take down his vehicle registration number, note the time date and place, please click on the following link and register your complaint.

We have had enough of these guys bullying us around, and refusing to ply specially when its urgent. They have been told that they cannot say a NO to any customer when their meter is FOR HIRE! not even for short or long distances. I’d suggest you stop asking them whether they will take you wherever you wish to go and rather tell them where you want to go. And if they refuse. REGISTER a COMPLAINT. Let’s teach these guys who’s the customer , and who’s the boss!

I did not care much for the tone of the email. It was needlessly adversarial. The ending suggests an unhealthy attitude of putting someone who is most likely struggling close to the bottom of the economic ladder firmly in his place. If one has any doubts about whether one has the upper hand in the taxi-driver/rider relationship, there is little room for debate. This rule needlessly imposes additional burden on the party that is already socially disadvantaged. Even more importantly, it makes no economic sense, as I argue below.

Imagine that you wish to travel south and the taxi driver you encounter wishes to go north for some reason (such as his home being in that direction or that he had previously arranged to pick up fare somewhere north.) Forcing that driver to take you south is wasteful because there may be other taxis which would be happy to travel south. The economic waste arises from the mismatch between the preferences of the parties involved.

Which brings us to the most important principle ever discovered by humans about economics: trade is welfare improving provided it is voluntary. Conversely, coercion in trade leads to avoidable losses. If any party is forced to participate in a transaction, the full gains from trade are unrealized. People should not be forced to sell their labor or their goods. This principle is not only good economics but it lies at the foundation of a free society. Involuntary servitude is characteristic of regressive regimes and socialistic societies.

My objection to the Mumbai taxi law (and I am assuming that it indeed is the law) arises from a matter of principle. A society which does not value individual freedom is doomed to poverty. Every one of us has to have the right to refuse to provide service to anyone without having to justify it. Yes, it would be inconvenient for me personally if the only taxi driver available is unwilling to be hired by me. But the possibility of occasional personal inconvenience has to be balanced by the greater threat that I face when society enlists me for involuntary servitude. It is a slippery slope and it is easy to slide from forcing taxi drivers to obey orders to people being forced to bake bread when they are more inclined to build furniture.

I recall a story which I had read many years ago in high school. I think it was by “Saki” and the title was (if memory serves) “All About a Dog.” It was a dark and stormy night and the driver of a bus notices that the lady who boarded the bus was carrying a small lap dog. He stopped the bus and asked the lady to get off the bus as the law was that no dogs were allowed on board. It was late at night and she would have had serious difficulty finding alternative transportation. The other passengers had no objections to the lady with the small dog and pleaded with the driver to please allow the passenger to continue. The driver refused to drive any further. I don’t recall how the story ended but the writer made the point that while the driver stuck to the letter of the law, he clearly violated the spirit of the law.

I am not sure how bad laws get enacted and how one can go about removing them from the books. I think that the taxi law should be removed. Personally, I always move on to the next taxi if one is reluctant to take me as a fare. In a small way, I feel a sense of satisfaction that I have not reduced social welfare and caused economic inefficiency by insisting that service be involuntarily provided even though that may be the law.

So what would I do if I really needed to go somewhere and the only taxi available refused? Actually, there is always a price — a ‘reservation’ price — above which the driver would be willing to drive me. If my need to get the service is sufficiently strong, I should be able to meet that price. Yes, I am a market economist and I will only enter into a transaction where both parties are willing and able. Otherwise we would be on the road to serfdom.

India is a large country and Indians are definitely not slackers when it comes to ingenuity, hard work, and drive. The resources required for creating a large supply of quality educational institutions are well within the reach of the Indian population. There is ample evidence to suggest that whenever some sector of the Indian economy has been unshackled, the people and corporations in India have produced results. So how does one explain the state of affairs in the Indian educational system? Why does the government continue to maintain a stranglehold on the system even though it leads to such obvious failings? More importantly, why do the Indian leaders go around begging foreign nations for assistance with improving the education system when Indians themselves are fully capable of helping themselves with creating great educational institutions?

Consider this report in the Indian express of 21st August: “Help us build eight new IITs, with money and faculty, India tells Japan” (Hat tip: Ashish Asgekar.)

Within a week of the Prime Minister’s Independence Day announcement of eight new IITs, India today asked Japan for helping in building these institutions, sources told The Indian Express.

The government’s request comes in the wake of a massive infrastructure upgradation exercise in the higher-education sector being planned by the government, which includes seven new IIMs and 30 new Central universities.

India is not just looking for “financial assistance” but also “technical expertise” in building state-of-the-art infrastructure for these new institutions.

(See also a related report in the Times of India of 9th August: “Japan to help in setting up IIT”.)

So here’s the puzzle. The physical and human resources exist domestically to solve India’s educational problems; yet the Indian leaders go around begging other governments to help improve the system. Wouldn’t it be far more rational and exceedingly dignified to just unshackle the educational system from the clutches of the government and let the people of India work out their own educational system? So what gives? Why don’t they do that?

To address not just this question but a whole family of related questions, I propose a general theory of “Power, Scarcity, and Corruption.” Basically, the three form a nexus, with mutually reinforcing influences. Scarcity in general is not a chronic condition in any functioning economy; it has to be engineered. Given economic freedom, people work their way out of any transient scarcity. For persistent scarcity to exist, it has to be carefully nurtured. The motivation for engineering scarcity is that it allows the consolidation of power. This is Econ101 and even a superficial reading of the chapter on monopolies is sufficient to persuade one that monopolies do restrict quantities to maximize “profits.”

The relationship between power and scarcity is bi-directional. You have to have power to engineer scarcity, and through that engineered scarcity you gain power. Political power allows you to dictate policies that give you monopoly control and then you use that for gaining even more political power. Then of course, where there is scarcity, corruption cannot be far behind. Corruption is therefore a mechanism which allows the collection of rents that arise from the scarcity.

If scarcity were to vanish for some reason, both the corruption and the power to extract rents would disappear. For those in power, therefore, the primary objective is to somehow maintain an artificial scarcity both for maintaining power and for gaining from the corruption.

Now back to our educational system. The government has a monopoly control of the sector through many institutions such as the Ministry of Human Resources and Development, the University Grants Commission, etc. Licenses and other requirements force the private sector from fully and freely participating in providing education. The resulting scarcity gives the government a handy lever for manipulating voting blocks. Quotas and reservations are handed out to favored groups. And more directly, the bureaucrats and politicians extract rents from handing out the licenses and permits to those who have the deepest pockets.

So now it becomes clear why the government would not liberalize the educational sector and instead shamelessly go with a begging bowl to foreign government. The begging bowl into which the foreign government throws its money is in the hands of the government. This gives the bureaucrats and politicians even more power. If instead the government were to relinquish its monopoly control of the educational system, they would lose power as the private sector steps in and removes all scarcity. And with no scarcity, corruption also disappears. This, of all things, cannot be allowed to happen.

It is India’s misfortune that it is governed by a rapacious, stupid, narrow-minded, immoral, shameless bunch of politicians and bureaucrats. But then, it is hard to see how it could be otherwise given that we have a “democratic” system and the basic characteristic of a democratic system is that it reflects the wishes of the people. Democracy is a cruel joke when instituted among a population that is not informed.

It’s all karma, neh?

Then from the Department of “Do as I say, Not as I do” the copyright notice warns, “No part of this motion picture may be copied or broadcast unless authorized. Copying is illegal and subject to prosecution.” Now what was that bit about not differentiating ourselves from others?

“The Danish Embassy in India is located on Aurangzeb Road in New Delhi. So there is still a road in India that is named after the most ruthless and cruel of the many ruthless and cruel Muslim rulers, oppressor and mass-murderer of Hindus. Why is there a road by that name? Change it, for god’s sake.”

Nope. We can’t do that. Bangalore can be changed to Bengaluru for reasons not very clear. Airlines can be renamed from “Indian Airlines” to “Indian”. But mass murderers have cities and major streets named after them. Dhimmis tend to do that. Personality cult disorder, as I wrote a few years ago.

Air travel: Horrified at the Air India trip from Hong Kong to New Delhi (“Do they really have to spend several minutes, first up, showing what not to push bottles down the toilet? Have they not heard of the power of negative suggestions? Possibly my worst flight since the Soviet Aeroflot slog from Moscow to Tokyo in 1970.”) But thrilled at the Jet Airways flight from Delhi to Pune (“Great airline; beaut service.”)

Roads: “What roads? Enough said.”

Airports: “Take a trip to Singapore, guys. And the prices for a drink inside Mumbai International Airport? Wow! In New Zealand I can buy a full bottle of Italian Pinot Gris wine for well under half the price of half a glass there. Took time out to fill in the questionnaire asking customers to specific anyone in the bar needing strong praise. Nominated the company accountant for “the Nobel Prize for profiteering”.

Hotels: The Intercontinental and The ITT Sheraton Towers in Mumbai. Sheraton great in almost every way. Intercontinental: “Hey, if you’re going to charge at the very top end of international prices, how about some international service? Half an hour to get a coffee in the lounge and twenty minutes for a beer in the housebar – when no other customers around? Not for my money.”

Surprises? “The incredible sophistication, efficiency and all-round competency of your big pharmaceutical companies: Cipla and Emcure. Outstanding plants by any world standard. And the very best of your herbal nutraceutical operatons: Nisarga Biotech in Satara . . . doing some very surprising things in distilling extracts from Ayurvedic herbs.” (Gordon’s writing a new book called The Health Revolution – hence the interest.)

Double surprises: “Some of the information in Niranjan Rajadhyaksha’s new book, ‘The Rise of India’, which I bought at the Hong Kong airport. Good background. Amazed that 70% of the Indian economy is ‘informal’. After driving around Mumbai, Satara and Pune, no longer surprised.”

Most amazing statistic: “That Singapore’s Changi airport handles more passengers and air cargo every day than all the airports in India.”

Sport? “Or is it religion? Every the cricket-mad Australians don’t devote as much press space to this game as do the Indian newspapers. Amazed at how many executives, on learning my nationality, commented on the sportsmanship of the New Zealand cricket team and captain Stephen Fleming – and New Zealand not supporting George W (for woeful?) Bush in his idiotic invasion of Iraq.”

The IT industry: “Not really surprised at this. Most western business papers are full of it. But still impressed to catch up again, in his own head office, with Rajesh Jain, founder of Novatium.”

Hopes: “1: as a television producer, hope to persuade someone to sponsor an international TV program or series on how India’s world-class, low-cost pharmaceutical industry might just help the world to slash HIV-AIDS and some other diseases. 2: How about throwing imports open to second-hand Japanese taxis?”

Also see related post on Banning Child Labor on this blog.

Your thoughts?

Wow. How absolutely majestically profound-sounding. Of course, I paused the video to ponder it for a bit and gave up after the screen saver kicked in after the usual 10 minutes of inactivity. Time to move on.

The sound track were the usual shlokas from the Bhagavat Gita set to a fast paced fusion type music. Mr A R Rahman, is that you?

The creator of that video, Bharatbala Production, have “unconsciously internalized” the movie Koyaanisqatsi, no doubt. Kaavya Vishwanathan, you are not alone. Check out the time-lapse photography, the images of crowds flowing like water, the random shots of people busy in high tech activities, the heavy crucible of molten steel, the hot-rolling sheets of steel, the welding robots busy at a car assembly line, . . . OK, I will not spoil it for you. But here is the blurb:

“This film is a journey through emerging India,”the fastest growing free market democracy in the world”. It celebrates the relentless spirit of the people of India, who through their karma give it a place amongst the leading economic nations of the world. Conceived and produced by Bharatbala Productions (BBP) for India Band Equity Foundation (IBEF).”

Wow again. I am impressed.

Fastest growing does not mean particularly much at all. Growth is neither necessary nor sufficient for any meaningful assessment of a system. But even then, fastest growing economy has to be qualified with “democracy,” of course. With sufficient qualifiers one can pretty much make anything shine.

I am still trying to figure out what “the relentless spirit” and “their karma” has to do with it all. But let that be for now. My meta-puzzlement is this: who are the idiots behind this sort of stupidity? Where did the money come from (even though it could have been put together by a few college kids with a decent video camera and some editing software)?

I have a thumb rule which goes: if you really have it, you don’t have to shout about it. The really academically qualified person does not have to put “B.S, M.Tech, M. Phil, PhD” after his name, nor a “Dr” before his name. The really wealthy person does not have to advertise that he is rich. A truly vibrant economy does not have to produce promotional videos.

The day that these idiots stop producing these silly “India Shining” videos, we will know that India is no longer at the bottom of the heap. Until then, enjoy the videos.

The reason for this is the basic fact that all global systems are interconnected in the present age. The economic system is part of the socio-political system which is tied to the population which exists in the ecological system and so on. No man, nation, system, organization or institution, is an island. The consequences of this fact are sobering. Firstly, it is futile to attempt to try to solve just one of them while disregarding the others — there is considerable evidence to attest to that. Secondly, any solution advanced has to meet the requirement that it must not leave any losers in the deal; the solution has to create a win-win situation. To borrow from a biology lesson, every evolutionary stable strategy is win-win: the win-lose strategy is not sustainable – both predator and prey disappear for good.

To go back to the computational analogy for a bit. To solve computational problems for any real-world situation where the size of the input would rule out computing exact solutions due to the fact that such a solution would require more time than the age of the universe, heuristics are used which provide approximate solutions which can be arrived at in a reasonable time. In a similar sense, to address the seemingly intractable global problems, we need to apply heuristic methods which limit the search for a solution.

A BASIC SET OF AXIOMS

Consequently, there must be a set of axioms that can be used as boundaries to limit the search for sustainable solutions to the global problems. In my opinion, as a first cut, I present the following:

0. It is all interconnected.
1. Nothing inequitable is sustainable.
2. The solution must be win-win for all concerned parties.
3. The solution cannot incorporate a growth in the physical throughput of the system.
4. Competition for scarce resources must be replaced by cooperative use of the resources.
5. There are real limits to basic resources – land, energy and water – currently available to humanity.
6. Growth centered development is inherently unsustainable.
7. The attempted solution must be appropriate to the nature of the problem.

The 6th axiom is to make explicit that there is a distinction between growth and development. Growth is natural and healthy at specific stages of a system and has to stop when the system reaches an optimal size. Development of a system, however, need not stop if it is defined as the expansion of the potential of the system and does not necessarily imply growth.

The last heuristic is meant to guard against the common folly implicit in the dictum that to a man with a hammer, everything appears to be a nail. No point in trying to attempt an administrative fix to a sociological problem. Or a technological fix to a ethical problem. Or a political fix to a technical problem.

The global interacting system can be understood broadly as the environment, the economy, and the population. Every global problem has a component which affects and is in turn affected by each of these three subsystems. Take, for example, the fact that economic factors have shaped environmental trends and in turn affected populations. Demand for resources has escalated pushed by the engine of population growth and led to the unsustainable exploitation of resources. Deforestation is a direct consequence of population pressures which is partly responsible for the 24 billion tons of topsoil lost every year. The earth’s carrying capacity has been sorely tested and it is evident that the ecological space that humanity has in a sustainable ecosystem is nearly, if not already, full.

However, there are economists like Julian Simon who would argue that global resource scarcity is not a serious problem on the grounds that prices of resources relative to wages would tend to decline over time. This view cannot be maintained if one posits the finiteness of resources available at any given time. It becomes even more untenable if one were to consider the loss of resources which are non -substitutable like biological diversity. No amount of money can replace the value lost in the extinction of species.

Perhaps, one conjectures, that the per capita availability of resources has something to do with the killing sprees that last decades in Burundi, with the Tutsi and Hutus slaughtering each other. It could be nature’s way of redressing the imbalance between people and resources. But I digress.

Canada’s GDP is around US$ 1 trillion and Burundi’s around US$ 0.74 billion. Per capita, Canadians earn about 300 times as much as Burundians. I don’t have an estimate of wealth differentials, but I would guess that Canadians are about 10,000 times wealthier than Burundians. I base this conjecture on the fact that if your income is consistently high over a long period, you end up with lots of accumulated wealth.

Burundi is tiny compared to Canada in terms of wealth and income. The only reason I started comparing them because in the CIA fact book tables, they appear close to each other. India, on the other hand, is not tiny. With nearly 200 times the population of Burundi, India’s GDP is US$ 735 billion. Still India’s GDP is lower than Canada’s even though India’s population is about 30 times Canada’s. Considering that India is about a third of the size of Canada, India’s population density is about 100 times that of Canada. However, around 55 percent of India’s land is arable (compared to only 5 percent for Canada); so per capita arable land in Canada is only 10 times that of India.

India has population/resource imbalance problems, of course, but not as acute as that of Burundi. This could explain at least in part why India is conflict free relative to Burundi. Of course, one cannot discount the pacific nature of the dominant ethic in keeping conflict at bay in India.

If you think about it, of the three countries, Canada is the “cheapest” and Burundi the “costliest” country, with India in the middle. Having lived in California (pretty place but not as cold as Canada) for many years, I often find myself recoiling with sticker shock in India. I find Indian prices totally unbelievable.

But naiveté induced shock is soon reconciled with reason, and it goes thus: of course, India is expensive. That is just another way of stating that people in India are poor. You are poor if you cannot afford stuff. Which means that the prices you face are too high for you to buy stuff. Therefore you are poor. Simple enough but misunderstood by many reasonably bright people.

I keep hearing “India is cheap” from people who are going around comparing some Indian prices while carrying US dollars in their pockets. But Indians don’t carry around dollars. They carry Indian rupees when they go to the market. To an American some stuff (and only some stuff) may be cheap in India. But then if the American is Bill Gates, everything is cheap. It is not the subjective experience of a person that I am concerned with here. I am concerned with whether the prices that a person faces in India is objectively higher than the prices a person faces in, say, Canada. Since prices one pays translate to costs one bears, it is important to measure costs to understand what it means that India is more costly than Canada.

I think I have figured out an objective measure of the cost of living. I will present that the next time.

[Continued in Part 2.]

Pain matters. If due to some neurological injury, you were to stop feeling pain, you could be in dire danger. Pain signals that the body is injured and that steps need to be taken to mitigate the threat and to take appropriate action to heal the already damaged part.

Terrorism threatens the body of the society and damages it. It is when the pain of the terrorism inflicted wound does not reach what constitutes the “brain” of the society – the policy makers who control the mechanisms that can prevent terrorist acts and can respond appropriately when they do happen – that society is in danger. The solution is therefore simple: the brain has to know that it will feel the pain if and when injury occurs to the body. Only then will the brain be motivated to seek appropriate mechanisms for stopping terrorists, and be prepared to deal forcefully with terrorists if it does occur.

Dr Manmohan Singh and the leader of the Government of India, Ms Sonia Gandhi, would never feel the pain of terrorism. A thousand – or even a million – Indians could perish at the hands of terrorists without having the least effect on those leaders. At most their security will be strengthened a bit more, more public funds will be spent on getting them more black commandoes as bodyguards, more road and air traffic disrupted when they travel, more citizens will be inconvenienced to protect the leaders from terrorists. The leaders will never be inconvenienced to protect the people, however.

Is there a way out? An economist would respond, “Yes, get the incentives right.” My proposal is to create the mechanism which would transmit the pain of terrorism to the leaders. In a sense, I advance the creation of a nervous system that carries the pain signals to the brain. The incentive mechanism I propose involves public flogging but is not limited to that.

After every terrorist attack, the Prime Minister, the head of the government (if not the same as the PM), the Home Minister (who is in charge of security), the police chief in whose jurisdiction the incident occurs, and the Defense Minister should be publicly flogged, with the number of lashes equal to the number of deaths, within two weeks of the incident. So for the Varanasi terrorist attack, Dr Singh, Ms Sonia Gandhi and the others listed above (I don’t know their identities) should be flogged by 21st of March in the courtyard of the Rastrapati Bhavan.

Aside from the public flogging, the other measure would be to fine them 1 percent of their wealth for every 100 deaths. This means, after 10,000 deaths under their watch, they will have all their wealth confiscated.

What would this accomplish? Firstly, it would put the fear of the lash into them. They would have the incentive to actually reduce the chances of terrorists succeeding. For instance, right now they would for political reasons molly-coddle Islamic preachers sermonizing the slaughter of infidels. Or they may be considering increasing the number of buses and trains between India and Pakistan. Or they may be advocating more porous borders with Pakistan and Bangladesh. When they know that these measures will increase the incidence of fatal terrorists attacks, they will not be so careless with the lives the citizens.

Second, the fines will help with the compensation to the families of the victims of terror attacks. Indian leaders have enormous wealth – from foreign gun deals, from cattle feed, from handing out licenses and permits, and from dipping extremely sticky fingers into the public till. Some of that wealth could be given back to the people.

Insult to their dignity and their behinds combined with injury to their pockets will work wonders.

Now the question would naturally be: would the leaders who make the laws agree to such a deal? The answer: don’t be ridiculous. They would welcome it as much as they would welcome a terrorist bullet in their behinds. No, this is just a pipe dream. Only the citizens – the targets of the terrorists – would support such a proposition. But their opinion does not matter in any case. India is not a cargo-cult democracy without reason.

The inept, uncaring government of Ms Sonia Gandhi has been chosen by the people. The people of India have elected her to run the country. That they should suffer as a consequence of the ineptitude of those whom they elected has a certain poetic justice to it. Yet while this rationalization satisfied the head, it outrages the heart.

Well, until the next terrorist slaughter in the near future, I can only say, “It is all karma, neh?”

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Keith

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Keith:

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Hi Atanu,

Best wishes,
Keith

Atanu: You are a Phd in economics, I am sure you know enough how the world works. There isnt always a meaningful reasoning to everything more so in the world of politics. BY your logic since India itself spends so much on nuclear weapons it has no right to recieve any kind of aid. And since the US spends more on military than the rest of the world put together it has no right to talk of peace. Yet it also funds the UN and then bypasses it when it suits her. No country that spends on military should have recieved any aid during the devestating tsunami. But thats not the way the world works. As for your comments on muslim invaders you should remember “An eye for an eye leaves the whole world blind” Also, if we are so concerned about our past we should shut down the british high commission . At least till the british arrived india was still the richest country. Just by changing the name of the missile doesnt change its character. Be it Prithvi or ghauri they’ll still kill an equal number of people.

One really does not have to have a PhD in economics to know how the world works. Anyone past puberty and of average intelligence is equipped to figure out how the world works given a bit of pondering. The basic principle upon which the whole argument hinges I stated in the first line of the post: Money is fungible.

There are limited resources available to any entity, be they an individual or a nation state. It is a matter of choice which uses these resources are employed in. If the entity chooses to waste resources into destructive activities, there is no moral ground for anyone to promote those by providing additional resources to the chooser. It is a shortsighted ethically unsupportable act. As long as a country is wasting resources arming itself to wreak havoc on another country, that country does not deserve any sympathy or material help, irrespective of the circumstances. I would apply this principle to all states, but I would be especially vehement in my objection when it comes to terrorist states.

By this standard, I would argue that India should not be offered, nor should it accept, any material help from any other state, as long as India is spending any resources stockpiling weapons of mass destruction. I am quite aware of the fact that India lives in a dangerous neighborhood and needs nuclear weapons to deter its nuclear-armed neighbors who seeks its destruction. India has to do what it has to do–stockpile nuclear bombs and missiles to deliver them as a deterrence. But as a matter of principle, India should not accept any charity from any other nation.

More importantly, India should not offer charity to nations that use their limited resources to arm themselves with weapons for India’s destruction. There are two reasons for this, the first of which is that money is fungible: what India gives to Pakistan–even if ear-marked for feeding the poor–is indistinguishable from a gift for Pakistan to employ and equip a huge army of jehadis to kill innocent average Indians. This is unconscionable and irresponsible. The reason this sort of insanity happens is simple. Those who are incharge of this insane magnanimity are shielded from the effects of their folly. The politicians are not the ones who will have to pay with blood, sweat and tears when the next jehadi terrorists–funded by the Indian politicians–strike and kill by the scores in India. It is a sad and lamentable fact that the politicians have security (unlike the average guy on the street) and are immune to the consequences of their actions.

The other reason for my opposition to state-directed charity is based on the recognition that charity should be voluntary. If I pick your pocket and then even if I give the proceeds to charity, there is no virtue in it, is there? It gets worse if I take your money under the threat of violence and then give the money to someone you may not wholly approve of. That is in effect what the government of India is doing when it takes tax payer’s money and gifts a part of it to Pakistan. I think that the people of India should have the freedom to decide which charity they wish to support. Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, as a citizen of India, is entirely free as much as the next guy to take his money and gift it to Pakistan. But it is absolutely immoral and unprincipled of him to take my money and give it to Pakistan. He did not ask my permission and even without asking it is easy to figure out that I would not approve of his taking my money to fund Pakistani jehadis. I am sure that the Prime Minister is capable of this simple thought experiment: if he were to ask the 400 million Indians who live on less than $1 a day if it is alright with them if $25,000,000 were given to fund terrorism, what does he imagine their response would be?

With all due respect to the Prime Minister of India, I think it is totally stupid and asinine and I hold him responsible for such blatant idiocy. You can quote me on this one.

I should hasten to add that this is nothing new. Indian prime ministers have had a particular penchant for their asinine policies with regard to Pakistan. It starts off with Nehru (ack-poo!) and his refering the Pakistani invasion of Kashmir to the UN. It continues with his daughter Indira not negotiating the mess that he father created when she held all the chips following the humiliating defeat of the Pakistani army in Dhaka and the taking of over 90,000 Pakistani prisoners of war. Then Vajpayee continues that tradition so well-associated with Prithviraj Chauhan. He goes on a “bus yatra” and is amply rewarded with a knife in his back planted by General Musharraf. No, I take that back. He is not the one who got a knife stuck on his back–it was a thousand poor soldiers who died in the icy wastes of Kargil who paid the price. Vajpayee was safe and comfortable at home, just as all his predecessors were. Neither Nehru (ack-poo!) nor his kin paid for his Himalayan Blunder. It was the poor sods who enlist in the Indian army that pay with their lives. In the meanwhile, Nehru (ack-poo!) sheds crocodile tears while listening to Lata Mangeshkar sing “Aye Mere Vatan Kay Logo“.

Economists always stress that as long as we get the incentives right, the world will work out the right solution to any given problem. I sincerely and totally believe in that. The problem of modern state warfare is a problem of incentives. How eager would Bush the Idiot have been to attack Iraq if his children were among the first to be sent to Iraq? How eager would the US Senate be to authorize invasion and wars around the world if the necessary requirement for being a senator was that you have to have your children in the military? How eager would any government be to wage war if the requirement was that to be in government, you have to have all your children in the military serving at the front? It is only because the politicians and often the generals don’t have anything to lose that they wage wars.

Coming back to Tanveer’s comment: yes, no nation that is engaged in arming itself against any threat is incapable of helping its own citizens when faced with a tsunami or an earthquake. If Pakistan wishes to spend five billion dollars ($5,000,000,000) buying F16s from the US and then go about with a begging bowl for a hundred million dollars to provide relief to its citizens, it is a pathetic hypocrite and scorn should be heaped upon it rather than pity and money.

I have always been amazed at the well-meaning stupidity that most NGOs display when they beg around the world for a bit of money to help the needy and do nothing about the insane waste of resources by militaries around the world. I have volunteered for some of these–and yes, it was stupid of me. In one organization, hundreds or even thousands of volunteers in the US would spend enormous amounts of time raising money. Their take? About a few hundred thousand dollars. And they would congratulate themselves for it. That same time could have been spent in lobbying the powers that be to reduce military expenditure, to think beyond war, and that would have resulted hundreds of millions of dollars–not a hundred thousand–being available for education or whatever. But no. Stupidity is the defining characteristic of the charities that work to raise a few dollars while not working to change the dysfunctional system.

>>>>>>>

I took a break from blogging. The primary reason is that I am totally disheartened. Of late I have been thinking that the system is so badly flawed that there is no way that any good will come out any attempt to change it. It is a vicious circle: the government is bad because the people from which the government is drawn are ignorant and stupid. And given a bad government, there is no way that the people will find a way out of their ignorance and stupidity. I am sure that some readers with over-active PC sensibilities will be offended by my characterization of the majority as ignorant and stupid. But where is the argument that will persuade me that the majority are not stupid and ignorant. What accounts for the sorry scheme of things? Surely there has to be some reason. India has 250 million who are below a poverty line which is so low that all it requires is that you can purchase 2000 calories a day. Imagine: if all you have was about seven rupees a day to buy just 2000 calories, you are above that poverty line. You are, by that definition, not poverty stricken. And yet there are a quarter billion people, the size of Western Europe, who have less than that in India. How did we get here? When India gained independence, there were only 350 million people, half of which were poverty stricken. So after all these years of advancement, growth, progress, poverty alleviation schemes, amazing Nehruvian (ack-poo!) socialistic schemes, we have increased the number of the abjectly poor by about 75,000,000. What was the reason if not the collective inadequacy of the nation? Were the leaders stupid? Or was it the people who consistently vote these thugs into power?

The same policies that have brought us to this unimaginably pathetic pass, there is more of it coming down the pike. And why not? The incentive structure has not changed. The politicians and bureaucrats have the same incentives to continue implementing the same failed policies. The economy loses but they don’t. Until that incentive structure is changed, there is no hope for India.

I am sorry that I am unable to sign a happy song and talk glowingly of the amazing Indian consumer and how that growth is going to transform India. Those who join that chorus are generally anaesthesized. Perhaps I should also swallow a happy pill. But until then, I will write a bit more about how to bring the incentives of the policy makers in line.

Couldn’t you make the argument Indian charity and compassion during Pakistan’s time of need might make a positive impression on at least a few Pakistanis. Maybe the aid provided will change a couple of hearts and minds and they will be less likely to “throw a bomb over your fence.

Dan, unless you are kidding, your naivety is touching. If $25,000,000 were to change a couple of hearts, then to change the few hundred million hearts that need changing would require a brazillion** dollars (which is more money than the entire debt–foreign and domestic–of the United States which is merely in the order of thousands of billions of dollars.)

Dan, Pakistan military policy is dictated by the Pakistani military. Heck, everything there is dictated by the military. With the exception of a few years, Pakistan has existed as a military dictatorship its entire existence. So what the average person feels does not amount to a hill of beans. But even if it were otherwise and the average person were given a choice, I am not sure if that average person would not choose to eat grass if that meant “the infidel nation of evil devil-worshipping” Hindus could be wiped off the face of the earth. Pakistani leadership have gone on record and promised 1000-year jihads against India on several occasions. Assuming that these 1000-year jihads run concurrently, I would say that they have about 950 years of jihad left against infidel India; if the promised 1000-year jihads don’t run concurrently, then kuffar India has about 3000 years of war coming to it.

You may say that as an infidel idol-worshipping Hindu, I am being overly paranoid. Perhaps I am. But even as we debate my paranoia, Pakistan is acquiring $5,000,000,000 (that is five billion dollars) worth of F16s from the US. And all sorts of other military hardware which you can bet it is not going to use against Afghanistan, or China, or Saudi Arabia, or Iran, or the republics of the former Soviet Union. The target, dear Dan, is India.

My ancestors, being polytheists, were the target of dreaded Islamic invasions led by people bearing names such as Babar, Mohammad of Ghaur (Ghor), Mahmud of Ghazni, Ahmed Shah Abdali. These worthies have gone but their legacy lives on. Pakistan has named its ballistic missiles capable of carrying nuclear warheads after these invaders who came to destroy India. These are not targeted at Saudi Arabia or China or Afghanistan. These missiles are aimed at Mumbai and New Delhi and Bangalor and Nagpur (my home town) to finish off what their namesakes left unfinished centuries ago.

Coming back to the point about India funding Pakistani jihadis, let me repeat the main point which I put at the top of my last post: MONEY IS FUNGIBLE.

It does not matter what you send the money to Pakistan for. As long as Pakistan is funding terrorism worth more than $25 million, then the entire amount that India gives as charity can be considered to go into funding terrorism. Here is the arithmetic. If Pakistan were only spending $10 million on arming terrorists and itself to destroy India, then sending $25 million to them would mean that India was funding the destruction of India to the tune of $10 million and the remaining $15 million is for, say, feeding the hungry. But if Pakistan is spending $5 thousand million on buying weapons to destroy India, then India sending $25 million to Pakistan can be seen as contributing half of one percent of the cost of destroying India, and none of it goes into feeding the hungry. In other words, it is a stupefying act of astounding idiocy.

Just in case my argument is not entirely clear about the fungibility of money, let me put it this way. If Pakistan were to just buy one F16 less from the US, it would have an additional 100 million dollars to pay for the rehabilitation of those affected by the earthquake. As long as they have money to buy weapons, they really don’t need charity from the country that they have sworn to destroy.

Here is a clue to the Indian government which I offer gratis: Charity begins at home. If you care to look into the slums of New Delhi, and in the rest of India, you will find hundreds of thousands of Kashmiris who have been ethnically cleansed from the state of their ancestors. Try giving them $25 million first, you clueless retards.

** [Brazillion is a very very humongously large number. The genesis of the word goes thusly. President George W Bush was told that in a military encounter three Brazilian soldiers were killed. He bowed his head in stunned silence. His aides were rather puzzled to see the show of emotion. Then he raised his head and asked, "How many exactly is a brazillion?"]

[Final Part of this series: Part 3 of India Funding Pakistani Jehadis.]

If I give money to my neighbor to help out with his grocery purchases, I may be acting out of good neighborly feelings. But what if he is an alcoholic? By giving him money, I could as well be funding his alcohol purchase. Even if I were to buy groceries and have them delivered to his home, I am again freeing up his own money for booze. Worse yet, what if my neighbor actually builds bombs in his basement which he frequently lobs over the fence and destroys parts of my house? Surely, giving him grocery money out of misplaced pity is the same as my paying him for his bombs which he uses against me.

Easy enough to understand, isn’t it? But which part of this simple argument do the sainted leaders of India don’t understand? Giving Pakistan US$25,000,000 is the same as partly funding jihadis that terrorise India. Let’s be clear about this. India is a generous country. It sent US$5 million to help the US with the recovery post Katrina. Now it is giving $25 million to a country which is buying 80 F16s from the US. The cost of these F16s would feed, clothe, educate, and entertain hundreds of thousands of impoverished Pakistanis. Instead, Pakistan is spending scarce resources and starving its own people just so that India can be bombed if the need arose in the near future. And just to help the Pakistanis out with their avowed goal of destroying India, India is sending them a $25 million check!

Centuries of being a dhimmi does that to one. Dhimmitude is hard-coded in the Indian psyche. There is no compulsion right now to pay the jaziya (the tax that non-Muslims pay to Muslim rulers) Indians used to pay. But old habits die hard and I am sure that however disguised, the $25 million is a simple jaziya that dhimmis must pay.

There are millions of children running naked and hungry around in India. Twenty-five million dollars would have helped them live a somewhat human existence. But now we are funding Pakistani jihadis who will bomb a few more cities. Seriously, we deserve what we get because we are really abyssmally and eternally stupid.

Update Nov 3rd: See the followup here in response to the comments.

Allow me to highlight some of his responses. He states:

The first and foremost priority is to finish the unfinished task which the founding fathers of our republic set out for us at the time of our independence: to get rid of chronic poverty, ignorance, and disease, which have afflicted millions and millions of our people.

Recognition of the true state of affairs is a good beginning. I would only wish to stress that persistent chronic poverty, ignorance, and disease are consequences of flawed strategies that the founding fathers in their great wisdom imposed on the nation. The ills that India suffers is an enduring legacy of the policies that they espoused.

I point this out not out of meanness of spirit but out of a pragmatic concern that unless we recognize that, we may continue to embrace those policies out of ignorance and reverence for the founding fathers. For instance, the socialist labor policies. When asked about it, Dr Singh said:

First of all, we must make a distinction. When we talk about labor reforms, we are essentially talking about 10 percent of our labor force, which is accounted for in the so-called organized sector.7 Outside this 10 percent, for the 90 percent we are a completely flexible labor market. The normal laws of the market take precedence. Even within this organized sector, the problem is most acute in the public sector. In the private sector, most people tell me that they can find ways and means of working out voluntary agreements with the trade unions, whereby necessary labor flexibility can be introduced. In the public sector, we have rigid laws, and therefore there is this problem.

I find it curious that Dr Singh downplays the problem of flawed labor policies on the grounds that only 10 percent of Indian labor is in the organized sector. He further narrows down the deleterious effect to apply to only the dysfunctional public sector firms. No, it is not curious, it is downright astounding that one can even excuse the labor policies on the fact that the organized sector employs only a very small percentage of the total labor force.

Having most of the labor force in the organized sector is a requirement for a healthy economy. The imposition of mindless labor laws leads to a small organized sector and this hampers economic growth. Then dismissing the damage caused by those labor laws on the grounds that the organized sector is small is beyond comprehension. (See Kaushik Basu on Why India Needs Labor Law Reform.)

Moving on, here is Dr Singh’s take on job creation.

Jobs have to be created in all sectors of our economy. Agriculture still accounts for 60 percent of our labor force, and I believe that we will need a second green revolution to increase production and productivity, and in the process, I hope, we will create more jobs. But essentially over a period of time, our salvation lies in getting people to move out of agriculture. Services today account for 50 percent of our GDP. There are lots of people who tell me that services cannot move far ahead of what’s happening in manufacturing, and that worries me—this imbalance. I feel we have to do a lot more on manufacturing because, ultimately, services respond to what’s happening in the production sector.

Maybe he was just speaking loosely. But I get a very uneasy feeling when the PM speaks loosely on matters that have grave consequences.

We have 60 percent of our labor force in agriculture and that is a terrible thing. Roughly speaking, six Indians labor to produce food for 10 Indians. That leaves only four Indians free from producing food to do other things, from programming computers to manufacturing stuff to shop keeping. The last thing you want to do is to create more jobs in the agricultural sector. Indeed, the goal should be to reduce jobs in the agricultural sector by increasing productivity (even as production increases.)

It is trite but true that fundamentally it is all about production of stuff when it comes to economic well-being. And manufacturing is the best known method for producing stuff. If India has to move beyond being a subsistence economy, it has to manufacture stuff. Dr. Singh got the last part right — services are secondary.

To manufacture stuff, you need human capital, not just machines and land. For that, a broad based education is the primary necessity. While a handful of IITs and IIMs are well and good for the elite that go there, it does precious little for the 99.99 percent of the people.

Dr. Singh notes:

The IIMs and IITs, the regional engineering colleges, they have served us well. But ultimately, if the educational pyramid is not right there are limits to getting dividends. Therefore we are making, for the first time, the most determined effort to ensure that all our children—particularly children coming from disadvantaged families, particularly the girl child—in the next four or five years have the benefit of minimum primary schooling. But that will generate demand for upgrading the quality of our secondary schools. We have not given that much attention toward upgrading our secondary-school system, and that is our next step. After what we have done in the last one year, primary education is well looked after. What we have now in place is a system which will ensure that all our children who are of school-going age are in primary school. But the secondary-school system will require a major effort, and it worries me.

My question is: what took the government so long to realize the importance of primary schooling? And if this recognition is not new, then why have they failed for half a century in that most basic of tasks? It is not as if the task is impossible. The country can be made 100 percent primary school literate in 5 years. So by 1955 we could have had a fully literate society. Yet, half a century past that date, we are no where near 100 percent literacy.

Moving on, Dr Singh identifies “big thrust” areas. Central planning horrors loom.

I am thinking of identifying areas where we need big thrusts forward. For example, steel is one sector where we are thinking about investing large amounts of money. Our own domestic steelmakers are very bullish in investment in this area. We’ve got the [South] Koreans involved in building a steel plant of 12 million tons’ capacity.

Old habits die hard. Nehruvian socialistic planning is hard to give up. It is not steel that the government should be focusing on. The private sector is quite capable of producing steel in all the required quantities. The demand for steel is a derived demand. People don’t want steel. People want stuff that may involve steel in the making. So you don’t start off by saying that our target is to increase steel production. That is putting the cart before the horse. You start by saying, for example, that we will build a modern efficient rail transportation system. The steel needed will magically emerge. Surely an Oxford trained economist would get that.

Dr Singh:

If I have any message, it is that it is our ambition to integrate our country into the evolving global economy. We accept the logic of globalization. We recognize that globalization offers us enormous opportunities in the race to leapfrog in development processes.

I don’t know what “accepting the logic of globalization” means. Perhaps it is a good line to throw out. But I have serious reservations about his idea of leapfrogging development processes. Development cannot be leapfrogged any more than you can go from being seven years old to being an adult, whether you accept the logic of globalization or not.

Development requires a bunch of things, none of which are optional. For instance, we have to have a stuff. Can’t leapfrog that. We need to have institutions such as a functional legal system. (More about this in the next column.) Can’t leapfrog that. You get the point. If there is a short-cut to development, I would be most interested in learning about it. Perhaps I will write to Dr. Singh to explain.

The entire interview is fairly predictable and standard issue. No great insights or shocks. The most memorable line for me is the following:

I have full confidence in the patriotism of our Left colleagues to believe that in the final analysis of what is good for India, they will also be on board.

I too am confident of the patriotism of “our Left colleagues”. And that’s precisely what gives me the heebie-jeebies and scares the bajeesus out of me. The Left colleagues are patriotic to the core and owe their undying allegiance to China and USSR (non-existent though it is.)

Dr Singh ends on a positive note and so shall I:

I think, overall, India is today on the move. The economic reforms that our salvation lies in—operating an open society, political system, an open economy, economic system—this has widespread support. Fifteen years ago, a Congress government launched this economic-liberalization program, integrating India into the world economy. Since then, three governments have come and gone, but the direction of economic policy has been, year after year, toward more liberalization. The pace may be slow, may not be as quick as some people would want, but the direction is unmistakable. India’s future lies in being an open society, an open polity, a functioning democracy respecting all fundamental human freedoms, accepting the rule of law and, at the same time, to emerge as a successful, internationally competitive market economy.

I am glad that it was the Congress government that launched the economic liberalization program. We just need to remember that present liberalization implies a past illiberal state which was the sole handiwork of the same Congress government. Taking the credit for liberalization and congratulating oneself is akin to boasting that one is a great proponent of women’s emancipation because one has recently slowed down–but not entirely stopped–the daily beating of one’s wife.

Well, I guess I can never take credit for stopping beating my wife; I never started. And that is the good news.

Here is an extended quote from the analysis by Friedman. [The emphasis in bold is mine.]

Marginalization is the key concept for understanding India’s position in the world prior to 2001. Geography prevented it from having substantial interaction with the great powers. Its point of contact, Pakistan, was of some importance, but not decisive importance. Prior to becoming a nuclear power, India had only one recourse: naval power. But its economy would not support a full-blooded fleet-building program. Its strength was in its army, but that army could not be projected anywhere.

Its economy was also marginalized. Built on a socialist model that took the worst from Soviet planning and Western markets, the Indian economy isolated itself by laws that severely limited outside investment. Its infrastructure did not develop and, while several key industries — pharmaceuticals and electronics — emerged, this never created the fabric of what might be called a national economy. India was a huge, fragmented country, on the margins of the international system. Its friendship with the Soviets and its enmity with the United States were tepid on all sides.

Then came the 9/11 strikes, and the American relationship with the Islamic world was transformed almost overnight. Suddenly, Pakistan became a critical piece of the United States’ long-term war plan, and therefore India became an extremely valuable asset. The Indians understood two things. First, that as marginalized as they had been in the Cold War, they had become irrelevant to the international system in the post-Cold War period prior to 9/11. Second, they understood that the U.S.-jihadist war could become India’s entry into the broader international system.

U.S.-Indian collaboration began intensely shortly after 9/11. Part of it consisted of a mutual interest in manipulating Pakistan; part of it had broader implications. As the United States began to view the Muslim world as an unreliable and threatening entity, it started to see India in the same light as Israel. It was a potentially powerful ally that, in spite of its hostility to the Islamic world, or perhaps because of it, could be extremely useful. Long, complex negotiations ensued, leading up the present summit. The terms of endearment, so to speak, were defined. A range of issues on which the two sides could collaborate emerged.

A not-so-hidden issue at the summit in Washington was China. Sino-U.S. relations are deteriorating fairly rapidly. There was much speculation about India being an Asian counterweight to China. We have no idea what this means, since geographically China and India occupy two very different Asias. The United States doesn’t need a nuclear counterweight to China, and China is very far from becoming a major naval power capable of projecting force outside of its regional waters. By that, we do not mean sailing into these waters, but fighting, winning battles and sailing home. The nuclear technology agreement that Singh obtained in Washington increases the likelihood that China is not going to project force west of Singapore. On the other hand, it was never likely to do so.

There is, however, another dimension to this. For a generation, China has been the place where hot money in search of high returns was destined. It was where the action was. It is no longer that place, except in the minds of the nostalgic and delusional. But India could well be. If one thinks of China in 1980, the notion that its bureaucracy, lack of infrastructure and a culture antithetical to rapid development would yield the economic powerhouse of 2000 would have been unthinkable. It was unthinkable.

India is in China’s position of 1980. It has a mind-boggling bureaucracy, poor infrastructure and a culture antithetical to rapid development. At the same time, it has the basic materials that China built on. As the Sino-U.S. relationship deteriorates, India can be a counterweight to China — not in a military sense, but in an economic sense. If the United States has an economic alternative to China for investment, Washington develops leverage in its talks with Beijing on a host of issues. China, after all, still courts investment — even as the Chinese buy anything that isn’t Chinese.

Another factor underscoring the significance of the shift in Indo-U.S. relations is New Delhi’s relationship with Tehran. India’s relations with Iran have always been a serious point of contention and concern for the United States. However, due to the situation in Iraq, tensions with New Delhi over this issue are on the decline. The United States and Iran at the moment are developing parallel interests, each with their own reasons to work together to ensure the success of the fledgling Shia-dominated government in Baghdad.

The Indo-American relationship did not develop out of the subjective good will of the leaders. The Sept. 11 attacks created a dynamic that couldn’t be resisted, and that created a reality that the Bush-Singh summit confirmed. It doesn’t transform the world, but it changes it fundamentally. India will come out of this a very different country, and the United States will look at the Indian Ocean Basin in a very different way.

The entire piece is worth reading.

[Thanks to Myke for the link to Frontline Thoughts.]

I make this observation not from a moralistic standpoint but only as an interested observer. In their place, I would probably have reacted exactly the same way as they do. Caring more for one’s self is neither a crime nor immoral, in my estimation. What is unacceptable is the hypocrisy that consists in declaring that one is against terrorism anywhere in the world, while in practise only caring about one’s own skin and not giving a damn about how one’s actions actually increase the incidence of Islamic terrorism elsewhere.

The rich are definitely different. Their demons are the most important demons that plague humanity. For example, ask anyone — even those who have little to do with the rich — who was the worst mass murderer in history, and the most likely answer will be “Hitler.” Was he really? Here is a different perspective on Hitler. No, it does not claim that he was not a bad guy, but rather that he was not all that remarkable.

I view the Islamic terrorist bombings of London with the same abhorrence and disgust as I do the peddling of weapons of mass destruction by the advanced industrialized countries. (See also the followup article.) Islamic terrorism has to be eradicated of course. But to really make the world safe, we must also eradicate the military industrial complex of the advanced industrialized countries.

{Related post: What the World Owes the US. Here are the true weapons of mass destruction which could not be found in Iraq.}

What do we want in India? If foreigners want these things, we want them twenty times more. Because…in spite of our boasted ancestry of sages, compared to many other races, I must tell you that we are weak, very weak. First of all is our physical weakness. That physical weakness is the cause of at least one-third of our miseries. We are lazy, we cannot work; we cannot combine, we do not love each other; we are intensely selfish, not three of us can come together without hating each other, without being jealous of each other. That is the state in which we are — hopelessly disorganized mobs, immensely selfish, fighting each other for centuries as to whether a certain mark is to be put on our forehead this way or that way, writing volumes and volumes upon such momentous questions as to whether the look of a man spoils my food or not! This we have been doing for the past few centuries. We cannot expect anything high from a race whose whole brain energy has been occupied in such wonderfully beautiful problems and researches!

First of all, our young men must be strong… You will understand the Gita better with your biceps, your muscles, a little stronger. You will understand the mighty genius and the mighty strength of Krishna better with a little strong blood in you. You will understand the Upanishads better and the glory of the Atman when your body stands firm upon your feet, and you feel yourselves as men.

I am deliberately leaving the quote above anonymous. Who is this guy who speaks of Indians being weaklings, physically and mentally? This passage was pointed out to me by a visiting friend. (The book is in my library and like scores of others sitting there, I have all sorts of good intentions about reading them but never seem to find the time.)

Gratuitous fault-finding is silly. Looking unflinchingly at reality, on the other hand, is absolutely required if you want to have any hope of solving the problem. This I believe is the first mistake that we make in India. The Mera Bharat Mahan attitude will ensure continued poverty and irrelevancy.

We are an underdeveloped poverty-ridden over-populated nation of over a billion people. Does anyone ever ask the question: Why is India the way it is? No. If we cannot ask this question because the answers may be unpleasant, I don’t see much hope for India. If we do not ask this question and answer it honestly, we may continue to blunder as we have done at least since independence 57 years ago under the flawed policies of the Nehruvian socialism and cargo-cult democracy.

When was the last time you ever heard of a conference where serious people with lots of knowledge and understanding got together to examine that question? Here is a suggestion for the movers and shakers of the great nation of India: commission a series of lectures by accomplished sociologists, economists, historians, philosophers, etc, which will examine the causes of India’s failures and what can be done to fix them. That lecture series can form a good counterpoint to the over-optimistic, rose-colored glasses-wearing, rocket-weilding India-superpower shouting, pyramid-power cult-worshipping, internet-surfing digital village hyping craziness so much in vogue.

PS: So who do you think is the author of the opening extended quote? Fabulous prizes for the correct answer. Please don’t cheat by using google.

Someone promptly responded with effusive piety:

“Enemy”, in this context, doesn’t refer to those whom one has hurt; it refers to those who would hurt one. You have no enemy only if there is no one who would hurt you. Having defined what enemies are, Jesus’ admonition was to love enemies rather than, say, cultivate a desire to break their legs.

My follow-up to that was that if enemy is defined as above, and the injunction to ‘love’ them holds for them, then we have a bit of a problem. That strategy is not evolutionarily stable. In fact, I would go so far as to say that it is immoral. Here is why.

Suppose you define the social good to be that the total amount of misery is minimized. Assume that society has two classes of people: “leg-breakers” (LB) and “enemy-lovers” (EL). A person can choose to be either a LB or an EL based on their preferences and the prevailing conditions. The probability of an EL getting his leg broken is proportional to the fraction of population who are LB. If there are no LBs in society, EL don’t have an incentive to change their class and it is an equilibrium.

However, if the LB fraction is non-zero, then because only ELs get their legs broken, and because being a LB does not expose you to any risk of broken legs (because ELs don’t go around breaking legs but love those who break legs), there is an incentive for the more sensitive ELs to switch to becoming LB. This switch raises the fraction of LBs in society and therefore the remaining ELs are at a greater risk of broken legs. This causes even more ELs to switch.

As you can imagine, all this raises the total misery in society till you reach the other equilibrium where the entire society comprises of LBs. Of course, if LBs don’t break the legs of their own kind, this equilibrium point puts an upper bound on the total misery of society. The situation becomes much worse if LBs finally turn on their own kind once the number of ELs have been driven to zero.

The above model suggests that the strategy of not imposing a cost of breaking legs on LBs actually encourages the growth of LBs in that society [1]. You end up with a socially undesirable number of LBs.

The ethical position, it seems to me, is that socially harmful behaviour must be discouraged. Leg-breaking imposes what is called a negative externality, namely pain. To properly internalize this externality, you have to credibly commit to break the legs of anyone who breaks another person’s legs [2]. Assuming that a LB is a rational being, he would find the benefit of breaking legs (joy of seeing another suffer, for example) not worth the cost of breaking legs (pain of having their own legs broken.) So it would deter that behaviour and therefore reduce the aggregate amount of leg-breaking going on in society. It would lead to a more civilized society.

The above analysis could explain the saying that in the conflict between the Greeks and the Barbarians, the Barbarians win. This situation could arise only if the Greeks are more ‘civilized’ and employ the love-thy-enemy (or some similarly brain-dead) strategy while the Barbarians are not bound by any such rules. A real instance of the ‘Greeks versus the Barbarians’ model is what happened to India over the millenia. The invading hordes repeatedly brutalized the peaceful people of India [3].

Finally, the model also explains why an intolerant and cruel religion would spread in a population. If the population initially followed a peaceful and tolerant religion, the invading religion would have an advantage and the final equilibrium would be that the entire population would switch to the invading religion. A natural experiment which is finally coming to its inevitable conclusion is what you see in Pakistan and Bangladesh. The non-Muslim population is being absorbed by the Muslim population, as the LB-EL model would predict.

NOTES:

1. A related bit of folk wisdom is contained in the statement that shielding a fool from the effects of his folly has the ultimate result of filling the world up with fools.
2. The old eye-for-an-eye thing of the Bible. Gandhi noted that that strategy would make the whole world blind. My analysis suggests that it would have the opposite effect. If you can guarantee that anyone who pokes anyone elses eyes will have both his eyes poked out, everyone would think a million times before they give in to the temptation of poking anyone’s eyes out. In a Gandhian world, people who enjoy poking people’s eyes would have a terrific old time and a good number of people will have to go through life blind or at least semi-blind. In the non-Gandhian world, no rational person will find it beneficial to poke anyone’s eyes out.
3. Not just peaceful, but evidently unspeakably stupid as well. One fellow called Prithviraj Chauhan defeated the same barbarian 16 times in battle and let the barbarian go. The 17th time the barbarian defeated Chauhan and promptly beheaded the silly bastard.

Oh, alright. I was getting tired of posting only development related stuff. So I thought that I would intersperse stuff that I write with stuff that I like written by others. Here is a perspective piece written by a Canadian and published by a Canadian newspaper. (I hope that I am not stepping on too many copyright toes.)

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Source: ‘The Province’ (Tuesday, May 1, 1990)

ADOLF HITLER IN GOOD COMPANY

by Crawford Kilian

My Lawyer friend Nick Mephisto took me out for a celebration lunch yesterday, which worried me. He is a Devil’s advocate, the infernal version of a Queen’s Counsel. What he likes to celebrate usually appalls any normal person.

‘It’s the 45th anniversary of Adolf Hitler’s death,’ Nick explained. ‘My client has been hosting him-and roasting him-since April 30, 1945.’

‘I suppose your Client is very proud to have such a monster,’ I said.

‘Oh, Hitler was no monster.’

‘What! The cause of World War II, the author of holocaust, not a monster?’

‘Don’t forget my client has known them all. Hitler was just a garden variety politician.’

‘Absurd! He was inhuman.’

‘Well, what was his big offence? He believed in racial and cultural superiority. And he thought superior races and cultures were entitled to invade other people’s countries, enslave them, and even exterminate them.’

‘I said he was a monster.’

‘But isn’t that exactly what other Europeans have been doing since Columbus? In the 80 years after the Spanish conquered Mexico and South America, the native population fell by 90%. That was about 40 or 50 million people. Hitler was faster, but he wasn’t responsible for any more deaths than Spaniards were.’

‘Aw, come on Nick-’

‘The French conquered parts of Africa and South East Asia, not to mention Quebec. The English thought they deserved to rule what Kipling called ‘the lesser breeds,’ all over the world. The Belgians ran the Congo like a big concentration camp. The Dutch and the Portugese-’

‘Sure, the old colonial empires were bad, but they weren’t as bad as the Nazis.’

Nick Mephisto shrugged. ‘The Europeans believed that their supposed superiority justified slavery, massacres, deportations and suffocating of other people’s cultures. And Europe has flourished on that basis for centuries. In my client’s opinion, Hitler made just one mistake.’

‘Which was?’

‘He picked on Europeans.’

‘True enough, but-’

‘If he’s massacred native Indians, African blacks, or Asians, his neighbors wouldn’t have minded much. After all, they’d all done the same thing. But treating his fellow-Europeans that way was simply unforgivable.’

‘That’s enough! If Hitler had won, we’d have centuries of horror.’

‘Just as native Indians have had since 1492, and the Africans for almost as long. Oh, my Client gives full marks for effort, but he saves his real respect for the successful conquerors, the ones who commit genocide and become national heroes.’

‘So you are saying that we’re as bad as the Nazis?’

‘Tut-tut, we’re much more genteel. My Client does point out, though, that Canadian defence policy is based on inflicting nuclear genocide on any nation that threatens to keep us from shopping in the mall of our choice. And the vast majority of Canadians frimly support that policy, no matter how many peace marchers turn out in Vancouver every year.’

Something began to dawn on me. ‘Does this mean Hitler has a lot of company?’

The Devil’s advocate grinned. ‘Plenty, and more coming all the time. You wouldn’t believe the housing crisis created by dead racists. It’s absolute hell.’

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Update (Jan 25th, 2006): See this article by George Monbiot “How Britain Denies its Holocausts“

IndLinux.org has launched a Hindi Interface for GNOME, the GUI for the GNU/Linux operating system. We request users to download the software from www.indlinux.org and give us their comments and feedback. Those interested in volunteering are requested to go through the web site–we need volunteers with technical skills as well as volunteers with skills in translating from English to Hindi, Gujarati, Telugu, Kannada and other languages.

I responded saying that it was a commendable effort. I had a look at the screen shots. I suppose that it is a work in progress and therefore the screen shots show a hybrid of Roman and Devnagri fonts.

Also, upon reading the press release I thought that the operating system was being localized by changing the language from English to Hindi. Upon viewing the screen shots, I realised that I was mistaken. It appeared to me that Devanagari is being used for transliteration of English words (mainly technical words) and held together in a sentence with Hindi syntax and structure. For instance, one information pop-up says:

“is folder ki sabhi executable files script menu mein dikhai degi. menu say koi file chunnay pur vuh chalnay lageygi…”

It feels as if our dear departed Rajiv Gandhi is speaking directly to us

“is country ki development kay liye, humay bahut effort laganey ki necessity hai”.

Hey, that’s a thought. Since Indians love to name every bloody thing after their idiotic leaders (Rajiv Gandhi this, and Indira Gandhi that, and Jawaharlal Nehru the other), perhaps this IndLinux should be named “RajivLinux.” And if and when a Hindi language OS (as opposed to a Devnagri font OS) comes about, it should be called “DesiLinux” or some such thing.

Seriously though, it is a great beginning and I hope this effort is successful in lowering some of the many barriers to entry to the world of IT for some Indian non-English speakers.

To which Rishab responded with

perhaps you would like to suggest a “truly hindi” alternative to this sentence? i don’t know if there is an extensive usable vocabulary among hindi-speaking computer users that has hindi alternatives for most technical words. after all, there’s no point inventing words of the kanth-langot variety.

I am neither a linguist nor do I play one on the usenet/internet/web. So I cannot suggest a ‘truly Hindi’ alternative to English technical words. But that does not mean that no one has the expertise to do so. Indian languages — Hindi included — have rich vocabularies and I am sure a rich mine of roots from which one can derive all the specific words that one needs to describe concepts that are new. What we have to do is to intelligently use the roots to create appropriate equivalents now.

It is important that we don’t repeat the idiocy of kanth-langotisms. That is a braindead attempt at translation of specific words into descriptive phrases. Such as translating the word steam-engine into the Hindi equivalent of the phrase humongous iron machine that runs on iron roads while puffing clouds of vapor and making loud clanking noise as it pulls wagons behind it.

There are alternatives to wholesale importing of English words on the one hand, and the silly unimaginative direct translations of descriptions into hindi on the other. For instance table tennis in Hindi should not be table kay upar, batti kay neechey, lay thaka thak, dey thaka thak. It could be a word that is constructed from some Sanskrit root (probably) or could be an entirely new word that enriches the language and is invented out of the blue but has some resemblance to the existing set of words in the language. Import the concept but localize it to fit into the existing scene, so to say.

Hebrew is an entirely reconstructed language and it not only serves the Israelis well, it creates a sense of belonging and ownership among them.

The time is now when we can have a discussion about what to do regarding this issue. The vast majority of Indians have little or no access to computers. We don’t have the burden of a legacy of the sort that is represented in the qwerty keyboard. We can, after due deliberation, decide to go one way or the other. It will be too late to change once about 100 million users with Hindi as their mother tongue come on board.

I cannot agree more with Mahesh when he wrote in the ensuing discussion that:

“I think there is a need to comment, to praise and condemn, to discuss and decide, to change opinions if we can. That’s why we’re here. Because we have this medium. And regardless of whether we can actually change things or not, we HAVE to try.”

The question of whether we can burden people with new words or not is not really relevant. If the made up Hindi word for ‘file’ is ‘limi’, then to a person who is learning the concept of a file, it does not matter whether the concept is called file or limi. It is too late to change the qwerty keyboard now. But it is not too late in the life cycle of the Hindi or other Indian language OS to discuss what should be done regarding technical words.

To which Venky wrote back to say

The challenge for us with localization is–How far do we go with keeping the language pure? If we take this to the extreme, we should call the computer “sanghanak” but even Hindi speaking people would wonder what a “sanghanak” is. At the same time, the example that Atanu pulled out from one of the Indlinux Hindi dialog box veers to the other extreme!

Always willing to help, I dug up an old piece that I had first seen in 1997 on the usenet. So here it is — for the record.

Windows Commands in Hindi version shoonya bindu shoonya ek (0.01).

Phile = File
Kholo = Open
Bandh Karo = Close
Naya = New
Khatara = Old
Bachao = Save
Aise Bachao = Save as
Paise Bachao = Save money
Bhaago = Run
Chaapo = Print
Dekh Ke Chaapo = Print Preview
Paise Deke Chokri Dekho = Pay Per View
Phirsay = Edit
Kaapi = Copy
Kaato = Cut
Kato = Stupid Houseguest
Chipkao = Paste
Payshul Chipkao = Paste Special
Goli Maaro = Delete
Nazaara = View
Bakwaas Nazaara = View From My Apartment
Hatyaar = Tools
Hatyaar Khamba = Toolbar
Uh Buh Kuh Duh Thik Thak = Spell Check
Isko Kya Kehte Hain = Thesaurus
Khuli Chaadar = Spreadsheet
Iska Bhi Naam Nahin Aaata = Database
Futaas Ki Goli Kha = Exit

{Reposted from April 2003}

It is more than a bit unfortunate that we have a tendency to immediately label any criticism of any person as a sign of disrespect. Any person whose image cannot withstand the harsh glare of honest criticism says something about the fragility of that image. The image takes on a aura of such holiness and awe that any hint of possible flaws is taken as sacrilegious. Taken to an extreme, this sort of idol-worshipping ends up with the worshippers lynching anyone daring to profane the sacred image.

For the record, I do believe that Gandhi was a giant of a man. But for all his greatness, he was still cut from the same cloth as you and I. The same human frailties, the same hopes and ambitions and fears. The difference between a Gandhi and one of us is one of size, not of substance. If we keep that in mind — not just about Gandhi but everyone — I do believe that we would have a useful working hypothesis. Those great big people are magnified images of ourselves. And that which magnifies the virtues, magnifies the flaws as well. An old Chinese saying says that the bigger the front-side, the larger the back-side.

I heard that Chinese saying on the radio (I think it was Fresh Air with Terry Gross.) The program was about the late Joseph Campbell. Campbell was a great big man whose work on the power of myths is legendary. I have enormous respect for the man. So I was fairly shocked to learn on that radio discussion that he was an anti-semite. The mind reeled. How could that be! A man with so much obvious humanity stooping so low? Then one of the discussants mentioned that Chinese saying and I had a sort of epiphany.

The epiphany was of the type that accompanies growing up, of maturing. I realized that all my heroes have pretty large backsides, just as much as they have front-sides. The two men I admired the most, the Buddha and Einstein, too had large backsides. That realization deepened my understanding of who they were and why I respect them. Knowing that they too have their faults did not imply that I stopped considering them worthy of respect, but only that they were more like me than I would have suspected. That is what happens, I suspect, in the case of parents and children. As children we grow up adulating our parents. At some point in our lives, we do realize that they too have their faults. Rarely do children end up losing their love and respect for the parents.

All I am trying to do here is to explain that my criticism of Gandhi does not imply that I don’t consider him worthy of respect. I do not consider anyone above criticism and that goes with a greater force for someone placed on so high a pedestal as he. Idol-worshipping, it would appear, is not limited to the religious sphere in India; it creeps into the political sphere as well. That is not to say that all other peoples are not guilty of idol-worshipping as well. Only that in India it has been taken to stratospheric levels. Mention the name “Gandhi” and people are willing to believe and do anything. A recent display of that sort of insanity was when a bunch threatened to commit suicide unless a certain Gandhi became the prime minister of India.

Here is what my position is with regards to Gandhi and Nehru. Gandhi is widely acknowledged to be the Father of the nation. OK, I am willing to grant that. Then I look around and see the nation and find it less than desirable. Therefore, I conclude that there must have been something the matter with the father if the child (the nation) is so pathetic. I am merely taking the argument to its logical conclusion. Gandhi was great; he was the father of the nation; the nation is pathetic; ergo, the father was not perfect. Now some would argue that Gandhi was great and he is the father of the nation, but it is not his fault that the nation is pathetic. My objection to that would be that you cannot have it both ways: if he was the father, then both the praise and the blame for his progeny rest at his feet. You cannot simultaneously claim that he was the father and yet assign no responsibility for the way things turned out. It is logically consistent to say that he was a great man but the nation did not follow what he preached. In that case, he was not the father of the nation.

The same goes with Nehru. It is silly to praise Nehru for all sorts of supposedly good stuff he is responsible for and to adorn each and every public institution with his or his progeny’s name and turn a blind eye to the disasters that he and his progeny have inflicted on an adoring nation. I find it bitterly ironic that educational institutions carry Indira Gandhi’s name when she was strictly opposed to education for the masses. Every time I come across the name of the Indira Gandhi National Open University, I can only marvel at the blinkered pig-ignorance that motivates the naming of educational institutions after her. I don’t think that there will ever be an institute called the “Adolf Hitler Institute for Jewish Advancement”.

My basic concern is to figure out what is the reason for what India is today. How did it get here? Is there something wrong with our national character? Is it that external forces have ruined us? Where did we go wrong? Were our policies good and if so, what explains the state of India today? If our policies were bad, who was responsible? What can we do so as to correct our mistakes? What were the mistakes and why were they made?

One cannot hope to answer those questions if there are some people and some policies that are not to be questioned. I think that unless we can critically look at the past, we may end up repeating the mistakes that were made. I suspect that most of us are fairly well off and we don’t really believe that India is badly off at all. So we are comfortably numb to the real state of affairs, because acknowledging otherwise would be to burden oneself with the unpleasant task of doing something about it. We pretend that there are no hard problems and therefore no real hard work needs to be done. And if someone turns up with bad news, we heap abuse on the messenger and when he goes away, we will continue to live happily ever after.

This messenger is here to stay for a bit longer.

Occupying moral high ground is well and good if that is one’s objective. But one could be very dead at the end of the day — on high ground but still dead.

Those tools elevate the user in the user’s estimation at least. But the sad fact of this world is that it does not work in those cases where you most desperately want it to work. One needs an effective tool against mass murderers more urgently than against robbers. The former could not care less whether you have an elevated opinion of your own moral standing. Hitler, for instance, would have slaughtered without compunction those who responded to his aggression with non-violence; it would have eased the realization of his megalomanical dreams of world domination.

I must hasten to add that satyagraha and non-violence is a “first-best” tool. And that is precisely the trouble, ironically. First-best tools work in “first-best” worlds. A bit of reflection will convince most people that the world we live in is a “second-best” world.

Second best worlds are not perfect and indeed have multiple distortions. Employing tools that are meant for first best worlds could lead one to make a situation worse. And that is what most well-meaning but misguided moral busybodies end up doing — making a bad situation worse. Their enthusiasm to do good often outstrips their ability to comprehend the nature of the world. “Let me save you from drowning,” said the monkey to the fish, as he put the fish up on a tree.

Mere good intentions are not sufficient; often they pave the road to hell. In my considered opinion, it was Gandhi’s good intentions that have paved the way India’s descent into hell. My contention is that the ‘Gandhian Revolution’ is what has condemned hundreds of millions (if not more than a billion) people to lead inhuman lives.

By ‘Gandhian revolution’ I mean the notion of ‘Gandhian self-sufficiency’ and Gandhian economics. And here in a nutshell is the problem: in a world that is mutually interdependent, it is insanity to insist upon self-sufficiency at any level — whether it is the level of the nation, the city, the village, the family, or the individual. Mutual dependencies exist at all levels down to the gut level where we depend on bacteria for our lives.

A goal that seeks self-sufficiency (at any level of analysis) is a prescription for poverty — not just of the body but also of the mind. We are deeply and inalienably connected with all others, however one defines the ‘other.’

My criticism of Gandhi is that he did not comprehend the interconnectedness of the world we live in. But that is not surprising considering that he was perhaps one of the world’s greatest egotists. His ego was sufficiently large that he sometimes eschewed the use of reasoned argument for persuading others and instead blackmailed others into complying with his demands by threatening to starve himself to death. The public, like doting parents scared stiff that the child may indeed hold his breath till he turns blue, gave in to blackmail repeatedly. But that is par for the course for the unreasoning masses of India — they go for this kind of pathetic uncritical hero-worship. However noble the cause, blackmail is blackmail. And the larger the canvas upon which the ransom note is written, the more egregious the crime committed.

I claim that he was the greatest egotist around because to him, only his wishes counted. Sure, it was all dressed up in saintly rhetoric but in the end it was what he wanted that mattered. He wanted to be celibate; so the heck with Kasturba. He could make do with little if needed; therefore every Indian must make do with little. His needs could be satisfied with simple handmade goods, so every person must also aim for that. The spinning wheel and self-sufficient village economy and small scale enterprises were prescribed. He failed to see that in a world which is second-best, he was using a prescription that suited him best. Being an egotist, he could not comprehend that others’ preferences may be different.

Being an egotist is not against any laws, however. At worst, in the case of the average human, it is a handicap not much worse than extreme body odor. But it does have the unfortunate consequence of the person feeling a sense of being above others, not really connected to others. In the case of a ‘mahatma’, that sense of self-reliance translates into xenophobic isolation for the entire nation.

That is the Gandhian revolution that I am against.

The Gandhian revolution has been an unmitigated disaster. It ranks up there with communism as ideologies that have wreaked havoc on human societies. The Chinese suffered under communism and only in the past few years have they started up the road to development once they realized their mistake.

India has to look very critically at the burden we bear of the legacy of Gandhi. We must choose to free ourselves from a blind uncritical acceptance of a defunct ideology. Until we do that, I am afraid that we are condemning large masses of humans to needless misery.

Communism fails because it is a first-best recommendation (behave like saints) in a second-best world (where people are selfish and there is not enough to go around.) Similarly for the Gandhian revolution; it would have ushered in a heaven on earth had the nation been a collection of selfless ascetics. Instead Indians are average humans and therefore the same prescription has given the majority of us a living hell.

“It must remain to the wise to undo the damage that is done by the merely good.”

Folk wisdom captures a lot of evolutionarily stable strategies, I believe. Take, for instance, the

Golden Rule: Do unto others what you would have them do unto you.

A variant of the above is the

Silver Rule: Don’t do unto others what you don’t want done to you.

And finally, the

Bronze Rule: Tit for tat – repay kindness with kindness, unkindness with justice.

Confucius, the ancient Chinese sage, was smart enough to see that repaying unkindness with kindness is patently silly. When told that unkindness should be repaid with kindness, he asked, “What would you repay kindness with?”

For a more detailed analysis of what Confucius means and what the implications of repaying nastiness with kindness are, see my article on why loving thy enemies is a flawed strategy.

I had found it on the usenet some years ago. Unfortunately, now I cannot trace exactly when it was that Nani delivered this address to the Australian College of Defence and Strategic Studies. Most likely it from around 1999. I include it here, for the record.

The newsletter from US-India Political Action Committee (USINPAC) contained this:

We need support and financial contribution from at least 50,000 Indian Americans by March 2004 to persuade the US government to support India in its fight against HIV/AIDS. The US government has already funded 14 nations in curbing the HIV/AIDS menace. With your support, India can become the 15th country to receive the much-needed US funds for fighting the epidemic.

Begging bowl all shiny and ready, I suppose. What the heck is wrong with these people? Do they have no shame? Begging for their living? Because I don’t doubt that they fly first class from one end of the country to the other shiny begging bowl in hand.

It is said that there are beggar lords in Mumbai. They send out children to beg on the streets and the beggar lords take the collections at the end of the day. They make a fine living.

So I guess that those who are parading the horrendous HIV/AIDS numbers around looking for a handout are similarly benefiting from the charity they expect to get.

India is a large country. India, if Indians have any shame, should and must do what is required for fighting its own battles. Whether it is fighting AIDS or Pakistan, it should not expect — indeed, refuse to take — any help from the US. Asking for aid from the US is the most ignominious idiotic move made by any organization.

I am truly ashamed that Indian public policy has failed to address public health issues. But I am horrified that USINPAC is begging for money on India’s behalf.

I don’t even believe that this feel-good-India-shining thing is new at all. I remember way back in early 1990s having a conversation with a friend who had recently returned to the US from a holiday in India. How goes it back home in India, I asked. He was ecstatic. He said that things could not be better. Everyone he knew had a TV and VCR. India was prosperous beyond imagining, he added. Everyone had a car and washing machines and telephones.

Everyone he knew was doing fabulously and therefore India was shining so hard that he had to wear dark glasses — and that was in the early 1990s.

I suspect that India has always been shining. If you missed the ad campaigns in the past, it was because the advertising companies weren’t shining then. Now that a few hundred crores have been pushed their way, the advertising industry is effulgent and we see shining ads in glossy magazines.

India has always been shining for some elite group or the other. If you neglect the hopeless 970,000,000 and just concentrate on the 30 to 40 million who have it all — from PCs to cars to foreign vacations — India is shining like a crazy diamond.

The boat, however, is leaking in a big way. Even as the dancers prepare to tango and the deck hands are busy rearranging the deck chairs, the water is pouring in ever faster. BPO and call centers notwithstanding, when you see 120,000 people show up to apply for 40 job openings, you know that sooner rather than later, it is going to sink. When you hear that 40% of India’s children under the age of 5 are malnourished, you know that the future is bleak. When you know that the vast majority of Indians don’t have high school diplomas, you also know that in the coming age of a global knowledge economy, Indians will not be able to compete against literate nations.

So one may ask, what is wrong in believing that India is shining even if it is not shining for a majority of Indians. I think it is this: That we may believe that all is hunky-dory and neglect addressing the hard issues which would spell doom for the country.

Irrational exuberance is the term some used when the Nasdaq and the DJIA were soaring and the internet bubble was growing ever bigger. Animal spirits was what Keynes conjectured was behind the boom-bust cycles that economies suffer from. Irrational exuberance and animal spirits are great in context — such as at a birthday party where the spirits are flowing freely and everyone at the party is having a great time. But in the larger everyday world of trying to make a living, irrational exuberance is plain simple asking for a disaster to happen.

Whom that the gods wish to destroy, they first make mad. It is collective madness to believe that India is shining.

The apparent contradiction between the policies for used cars and used computers can be explained by understanding the political economy of the segments of the population which would benefit from the two different policies. Cars — used or new — are primarily demanded by the upper middle class, the same segment which can afford new computers. Used computers imported duty-free would allow the lower middle class access to IT solutions. This is not seen as a priority since the policy makers don’t fall in this category. This policy is short-sighted at best, but a more sinister reading of the policy would imply that the movers and shakers of India gain from the permanent underclass they help perpetuate. The long term growth prospects of India is being severely undermined by the sheer ignorance and intransigence of the politicians, bureaucrats, and big business interests.

Enlightened self-interest of those who direct the ship of state should persuade them that not empowering the lower classes of society is tantamount to keeping India a third-world country of little significance, notwithstanding all the hype that surrounds the BPO and ITES gains. These gains look impressive in absolute terms but translate into nearly negligible figures per capita.

Let’s keep one more distinction in mind. Cars are almost pure consumption goods for the rich. Very low cost computers, on the other hand, are goods that facilitate not just production by the masses, but also their education. Properly used, computers have the potential to create a more productive population. And finally, it is increased productivity which leads a way out of poverty. Our task is to somehow convince those who make policy that we need to worry about production and productivity a lot more, and to go easy on congratulating ourselves for becoming the world’s back-office chaprasis.

Congressman Crowley said, “…With over 300 million citizens considered middle class and with a burgeoning economy and geo-political role, strengthening US-India relations is more important now than ever for trade and security. I commend the Confederation of Indian Industries for putting together this exceptional program to give the delegation a well rounded overview of the political, economic and cultural vitality of India.”

Congressman Crowley’s delegation includes Congressman Steve Israel (NY), Congresswoman Carolyn McCarthy (NY), Congresswoman Denise Majette (GA), Congressman Jim Marshall (GA), Congresswoman Barbara Lee (CA), Congressman Anthony Weiner (NY), and Congresswoman Linda Sanchez (CA). Congressman Gregory Meeks (NY) will join the delegation in Mumbai. Except for Congressman Crowley, no other member of the delegation has previously visited India.

None except Crowley has ever been to India?

The last thing one should do to people who are favorably inclined towards India (from news reports and such like) is to bring them to India. The disillusionment cannot be but a total reversal of opinion.

If all I knew about India was from hyped-up news reports that claim that India is an IT superpower, from pictures of the Taj Mahal, pictures of regal Royal Bengal tigers, pictures of pretty village women dressed in colorful ghagras carrying shiny pots on their heads, and other such advertizing copy, it would be a total shock for me to arrive at any of the international airports and find that it is so dilapidated that it beggars imagination, and from then on, it would be a downhill run when I see the unimaginable crowds and abject poverty amidst the filthy rich of any city of India.

I think the best thing for friends of India is to stay as far away from India as possible and to use their time reading the articles by President Kalam and other visionaries. I recommend they put off their visits till — shall we say — 2020.

The article by Kelkar and Shah essentially tells us that the Indian economy is not doing badly and that we would not be remiss if we indulge in a little bit of self-congratulatory back-slapping. They indicate with pride the progress we have made. For instance:

In a recent month, we added two million mobile phones, an event that made the global telecom industry sit up. Prices have crashed. In a truly ironic reversal of roles, land lines are now a luxury, mobile phones are cheap and ubiquitous.

The turnaround time at our ports has come down by half. And we are finally getting the first high-quality highways in our history. We used to build 11 km of highway per year; we are now on the verge of building 11 km of highway per day.

Services exports: Ten years ago, we started exporting software. This sounded like an elitist thing, where a handful of top universities would produce computer engineers for the software export industry. That industry was enormously broadened owing to an explosion in private and public production of IT skills.

But then IT exports have metamorphosed into the much wider field of services exports, where all kinds of services (and not just software) are being exported. Its components include call centres, financial back offices, database creation.

A whole range of labour-intensive activities can now be traded on international markets, thanks to improvements in telecom. India is the country best equipped to harness this.

All very fine and good and it gives a body a very warm and fuzzy feeling. Until one stops to ask a different question. Nobody seems very eager to even ask that question. It is an important question that if not answered, can have some serious consequences.

Kelkar and Ajay write

FOR many decades, we in India watched with envy while countries of east Asia embraced globalisation, cut customs duties and obtained export-led growth by harnessing the dramatic rise in world trade in goods in the 1970s and 1980s.

The question we need to ask is this: Why did the policy makers and leaders of this blessed nation strap itself into a suffocating straitjacket and stifled the economy so as to condemn hundreds of millions to a degrading inhuman existence below an abyssmal poverty line and reduce the nation into a basket case?

“Well, we are great. We need to congratulate ourselves for the wonder that we are.”

“What wonder is that?”

“We are doing really well. Our children have stopped crying all day long. Now they only cry a few hours a day.”

“Did they really cry all day long?”

“Yes, they wailed all day long. We used to look with envy at our neighbors’ children because they did not cry at all. But our children used to cry a lot. So now that they cry less, we are catching up with our neighbors and we are starting to feel good.”

“That’s really good. But what was it that made them cry? Why did they cry?”

“Well, we used to beat them mercilessly all day long. Now that we don’t beat them continually, they cry less. And that is why I think we are great. Our children have stopped crying all day long and we are really making progress.”

“I see. You must have noticed that your neighbors did not beat their kids and that the kids did not cry?”

“Yes, we knew that. But we have made progress. You have to admit that we are the best because our children have stopped wailing all day long. We are great.”

“Wait a minute. You used to beat them all day long. And now you only beat them occassionally. So you are congratulating yourself for stopping doing something that you should not have been doing in the first place. Are you a brainless cretin or are you just a sadomasocistic idiot?”

Whenever we hear the word ‘liberalization‘, we need to ask what was the reason for chaining the economy in the first place. What was it that caused the economy be be bound and gagged and strangled and choked and stifled? Unless we understand that cause, we will not completely be able to deal with the effects.

Like the cretin in the above dialog, the government has stopped continually beating up on the economy but has not yet stopped entirely. It still does it. You may say, it is better than before. Sure it is, but why not stop entirely? Here is a joke that illustrates my argument.

A motorist does what we call a “California Stop”, that is, he comes to a stop sign and slowly rolls through without actually coming to a stop. A cop catches the guy and is about to write a ticket when the guy explains that he should be let go because even though he did not stop, he did slow down and isn’t slowing down just as good as stopping? At that the cop (and this is just a joke) starts rapidly slapping the motorist. The motorist shouts in alarm, “Stop, stop!” The cop asks, “Do you want me to stop or should I just slow down?”

The good news is that we don’t have to be particularly smart or heroic to improve our economy; we just have to stop doing the stupid things we have been doing, and do so immediately. The telecommunications sector provides an illustrative case in point.

The telecommunications sector was declared off-limits to the private sector and kept as a public sector monopoly. The laws governing phones was framed in 1885 — that’s not a typo, it really is nearly 120 years ago. The objective of the government then was to deny the citizens access to a tool that would empower them. It was meant to be the sole preserve of the government (British) so that they could administer the country. When the British left, the objective of controlling the population did not change. Hence we had until very recently a pathetic telephone system. The waiting time for receiving a telephone line even in cities was of the order of 10 years, leave alone telephones in rural India.

So while our chests may swell up with pride that we are adding a million cellular phones each month, the question is what took us so long and what was the reason for the colossal idiocy of not allowing the telecommunications sector freedom. Why, indeed, even now is the sector not being allowed to reach its potential? Why are the private providers being forced to squeeze money out of their customers to feed the government machinery?

Reform is great. But the need to reform implies that something was rotten in the first place. What need to inquire into the cause of that rot and having figured it out, we need to remove that cause from its very roots. If we don’t do that, we will continue to be also-rans in a race that is so fast and furious that like Alice, we have to keep running as fast as we can just to be at the same place.

Misapprehension #78: There is a digital divide and it is the cause of retarded development. Hence, if we bridge the digital divide, development will occur.

The reference is to the fact that broadly speaking, the rich have computers and cell phones and the poor do not. No argument there: the rich have not just that, but they have cars, and airconditioners, and washing machines, and toilets, and medicines, and excess food. So what is so astonishing about them having more digital gizmos? And why is that digital divide more important than the other scores of divides such as the air-conditioner divide or the toilet divide or the food divide?

Fact #84: ICT is neither necessary nor sufficient for development.

The rich countries developed long before the fathers of digital revolutions were born. There are many reasons why developed nations developed and when and how they developed; and none of those reasons have anything remotely to do with the digital domain.

Misconception #12: ICT is the cause of development.

The confusion between causes and effects is rampant. Part of the time it is a simple confusion between correlation and causation, such as when two things frequently occur jointly, the tendency is to believe that one is the cause of the other. But even when there is a causal link between two features, one cannot randomly assign one as the cause and the other to the effect. Confusing the cause for the effect is a distressingly common occurrence.

Why the confusion? Number of reasons, really. First, plain old fashioned inability to think through the issue.

Second, laziness. Even if one is capable of thinking, it is harder to think things through rather than to jump to a convenient conclusion.

Third, even if one is not inclined to be lazy, there is the hurry to get on the bandwagon lest one gets left out on the sidewalk. So what, one may ask, is going on in the bandwagon rolling through town with the cry ICT for Development, All Aboard! Where do did they start off from and where are they headed to?

The ICT for development bandwagon starts off in Cart-Horse-ville. There people put the cart before the horse. They notice that developed (rich) countries use a lot of ICT. Ergo, they reason, ICT causes wealth. It is no use telling them that it is because that they are rich that they can afford all the digital gizmos and not the other way around. It is no use telling them that in developed countries with high wages (and labor shortages), labor saving capital-intensive goods will be cheap relative to labor and hence they would use ICT more intensively.

Analogically, one can present the case this way: in developed countries, lots of people have cars, while in poor countries very few people have cars. So they reason that cars make people rich. Ergo, they conclude, that for poor people to become rich, all they need is cars.

The horse of the cart-horse confusion is dead and there is no point in flogging it any further. So I will close this one here.