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Wednesday 30 May 2018

Petrol, diesel prices fall after 16 straight surge days: Faux Pas or Cruel Joke? (NewsX)


Petrol and diesel prices are at an all time high. Prices have been steadily rising for the last 16 days pinching commuters all across the country. This is having a cascading effect as other commodity prices are rising too. What happened today though has come as the biggest shock to the Aam Aadmi. First they were silent, with no concrete solution and now the Government has played the cruelest joke on the common man. After a fortnight of struggle, the relief offered by the government is a mere 1 paisa. Yes thats right finally a price cut but just of 1 paisa. Whether this is a faux pas or not, is certainly not gone down well with the Aam Aadmi who want concrete action on this issue immediately.

Tuesday 29 May 2018

Robert Mueller's probe is damaging U.S. interests (UPI)

M D Nalapat 

Robert Mueller's investigation has systematically created a toxic atmosphere around and within the structures of governmental command and control in Washington that has clearly been affecting both the direction as well as the quality of policymaking within the administration. 

Months ago, special counsel Robert Mueller identified about a dozen Russian nationals and a few million dollars in cash as (effectively) being responsible for changing the electoral outcome of the 2016 U.S. presidential elections. Were this "finding" of such detective work to be taken seriously rather than regarded with laughter by anyone other than the Beltway denizens, it would telegraph to the world that U.S. elections are even more fragile than those held in Belize or Guatemala.
There exist countries that would be willing to spend $100 billion and counting to get their "puppet" ( Hillary Clinton's description of Donald Trump) elected to the most consequential office in the United States, and therefore of the world. If Mueller truly believes that a handful of foreign nationals having access to a measly amount of cash can even affect slightly -- much less change -- the election outcome of a contest held in the glare of international media and attention, he must regard his country as being a peanut republic, for even banana republics would need far more expenditure in cash and man hours to have their election outcomes seriously affected. Through a nonstop drumbeat of support for this and other like findings, the Beltway media and their acolytes in the rest of the United States have gone a considerable distance to making the United States of America (and not Trump, as they imagine) an object of global ridicule.
Within the inner circle of the 45th president of the United States are some individuals who have long been in awe of the Beltway, and it was presumably on their advice that several appointments have been made to the new administration of individuals who respond to Beltway cues with the certainty of Pavlov's dogs. Given the decades of experience of such people in how to operate within the D.C. swamp, it is small wonder that most of them have remained out of radar contact of the very few loyal individuals within the Trump administration. This has given them the time and space to continue a dribble of "leaks from administration sources," the cumulative object of which is to ensure that the elected first citizen gets regarded with scorn and contempt, not just within the United States but outside.
Anyone visiting consequential capitals such as Berlin, London and Beijing several times since the 2016 elections will find it easy to find out that several visiting individuals (who are part of the Washington policymaking matrix) have been retailing -- in private, naturally -- stories about their chief of state. Such tales are precisely that -- stories that ought to be regarded correctly as unbelievable, but which have instead gained substantial currency within policymaking circles in many capitals.
This is affecting their responses to even routine moves and requests of the new administration, often to the detriment of U.S. interests. Not that this is bothering the Beltway wrecking crew, whose concentration is on ensuring that the president either quit of be removed from office well before his term is over, a task that Mueller is clearly engaged in with the enthusiasm of the true believer in the dictum that the "Beltway knows best" in its desire to see the premature close of the Trump presidency.
Bill Clinton and his brilliant spouse were quick learners, and by the third year of the first term had become embedded in the Beltway, as an examination of the personnel changes made since then under the 42nd president would reveal. Jimmy Carter never sought to bridge the distance between him and the informal human collective that has dominated policymaking in the United States since the 1940s and paid with his job and his reputation, losing to Ronald Reagan after a single term in office.
Was it that hints were given from within the Beltway to those in power in Iran that it would be helpful if the U.S. Embassy hostages remained in custody during a hard-fought contest? Certainly the South Vietnamese (and possibly the other, through a European power) government got briefed not to give a diplomatic victory to President Lyndon Johnson, lest it would result in Hubert Humphrey prevailing over Richard Nixon. However, hubris after an impressive second-term victory made Nixon humiliate his (largely Beltway) staff, thereby motivating many to follow much the same "drip drip drip" tactics as are now being deployed against Trump.
As for Reagan, the D.C. policy establishment may have marked the sometime actor down as an easy chief executive to play, given his career previous to joining politics. However, the 40th president of the United States showed that he had a mind and will of his own and changed domestic and foreign policy on a scale attempted in the postwar past only by John F Kennedy. Both George W. Bush and Barack Obama stuffed their administrations with Beltway brainpower, thereby avoiding the systematic albeit silent campaign of ridicule and abuse faced by Carter and initially by Reagan (till John Hinckley made the U.S. president a hero by his vile act.)
Trump's problem is not that he is fake but that he is genuine. The man makes very little effort to disguise his views, even on social media, which is the modern equivalent of the street billboard. And that unlike the Clintons and others who very quickly decided to play along with the Beltway rather than incur its (in several ways concealed) ire, Trump has remained adamant on not filling up the patronage posts at his command with those who are (policy-wise, though not always geographically) in sync with the Beltway. Such lese-majesty has angered the Washington establishment, which since Nov. 8, 2016, has been seeking the ouster of Trump (and his attractive wife, Melania) from the White House.
Mueller, who has been perfectly chosen for his task, is the most deadly weapon in their arsenal. The Mueller investigation has systematically created a toxic atmosphere around and within the structures of governmental command and control in Washington that has clearly been affecting both the direction as well as the quality of policymaking within the administration, factors that then immediately get ascribed to Trump rather than to the campaign against him. A byproduct of the "Humiliate & Oust Trump" movement has been the president letting go of several of the policy positions that he took during the election, including on Russia, on China and in parts of the Middle East. If Trump and his team were less harried by the toxic fumes of controversy created precisely to paralyze his administration, he may have by now succeeded in getting both Moscow as well as New Delhi into the "U.S. ally" column, something that was last within the reach of Bill Clinton, but which opportunity was rejected with contempt by the Arkansas politician.
Where Trump is scoring is in those few initiatives where he has -- despite the efforts of Mueller and others intent on his removal -- moved away from Beltway preferences. Rather than cozy up to the Wahabbi establishment (which funds several individuals and institutions either part of or close to the Beltway crowd), Trump has been forthright in his condemnation of this extremist creed. But for Trump, Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman of Saudi Arabia may not have found the nerve and the opportunity to attempt the essential task of weaning his country away from the strands of a creed that has become intertwined with the roots of governance in Saudi Arabia since its inception. Given the importance of Jerusalem to the Jewish people, Trump was the first U.S. president to substitute action for words by moving his embassy to that ancient city.
However, he has succumbed to the doctrine that Shiite Islam is ab initio an enemy of U.S. interests, and instead of engaging with Iran, is reverting to the Bush-Cheney policy of making threats tailor made to send oil prices through the roof. Fortunately, in the case of North Korea, Trump stood his ground and will almost certainly be meeting supreme leader Kim Jong Un. The only two options before the United States are either total war against the DPRK or adopting a "Bright Sunshine" policy that would over time ensure that North Korean behavior and policies became an opportunity rather than a threat to the United States.
While getting Kim to give up his only defense against a decapitation strike may be a tough errand, the Trump-Kim meeting may at the least ensure a public freeze in the DPRK's nuclear and missile program, followed by engagement with the rest of the world that would hopefully change its chemistry. If the United States and communist Vietnam could become friends (as they undoubtedly are now), there is no reason why Washington and Pyongyang should not follow suit. Whether it be North Korea, Iran or Cuba, the best non-military instrument of change that the United States has is engagement with the U.S. economy and people.
Should the shadow of the Mueller decapitation sword get removed, hopefully Trump will be more himself and not get forced to accept Beltway solutions that are harmful to U.S. interests in a world very different from that of 1945.
Despite the moves designed to cripple his administration, Trump has moved into the Indo-Pacific groove from the Atlanticist furrow. Mueller and his obsession with somehow discovering a case for impeachment is harming U.S. interests in a manner few outside powers have succeeded in doing to the world's most powerful country. It is time to recognize the Mueller probe as what it is: a wrecking ball aimed at the future of the United States.

Saturday 26 May 2018

Opposition seeks to catch up with BJP (Sunday Guardian)

M D Nalapat 

Modi has seven months to revive confidence in his leadership for his party to win.


Chief Minister H.D. Kumaraswamy will need to make difficult concessions to the Congress Party to revive the chances for H.D. Deve Gowda to once again emerge as a viable (with Congress, Left and some regional support) PM  candidate. However, that would be a better course to follow than to test his luck (and the patience of the supporting party) by acting the way the Congress itself did during UPA-II or the BJP is doing now, which is act as though only a single party’s voice counts within the portals of government. Should the JDS-Congress coalition continue smoothly up to the 2019 polls, it would be a powerful argument in favour of the proposition that “khichdi” can be as tasty as the monochrome dish on offer by Prime Minister Narendra Modi and BJP president Amit Shah. Contrarily, should the coalition collapse before the Lok Sabha polls, either owing to defections or because of irredeemable tensions between the two parties forming it, the BJP will gain substantial oxygen in its warnings to voters that the opposition coalition will be too fragile to give effective governance. Karnataka is an ongoing test that the BJP has not yet lost and the opposition is yet to win, from the perspective of the Lok Sabha polls.
Given the implicit premise that a “stable” government will be better enabled to generate administrative results than a fractious coalition, the very quality of power projection that the opposition most dislikes in Prime Minister Modi may be an important factor pulling in votes into the BJP column. Contrarily, the Congress would find itself better placed were Rahul Gandhi to make it clearer than he did during the Karnataka campaign that his focus is not on replacing Modi in 2019, but simply on removing him through holding the BJP to a seat tally such that it would be difficult for the Prime Minister to persuade enough parties to back his party’s bid for a second term. If the BJP Lok Sabha tally falls below 240, even should Modi manage to secure a majority through the persuasive powers of Amit Shah, that would be as fragile as almost all other coalition governments in the past were. Interestingly, the BJP’s 2014 majority meant that Modi could have formed a Council of Ministers entirely different from the 1998-2004 crew under A.B. Vajpayee. However, once Prime Minister, he fashioned a team that could well have been chosen by Vajpayee himself.
Despite occasional bouts of verbal pyrotechnics, the Vajpayee government was indulgent towards UPA chairperson Sonia Gandhi, as indeed was she towards him. Results on the ground show that this tradition of fellowship has in effect been continued by the new administration, which appears to have spared the entire top tier of the UPA from any sort of legal accountability for numerous actions claimed to be scandalous by the BJP during 2011-2014. Congress president Rahul Gandhi can claim that this absence of prosecutions indicates that the anti-corruption plank of the BJP during the 2014 LS campaign was akin to the “dodgy dossier” compiled by Bush and Blair to justify their invasion of Iraq in 2003. Rahul himself has lately been following the UPA-era Modi playbook in launching one aggressive sally after the other on the Prime Minister and his team, although as yet he has not managed to build a convincing enough public case of NDA corruption. In the 2019 election campaign, corruption will re-surface as a core issue of concern, and it will be Rahul Gandhi’s task to demonstrate that UPA-era corruption was far less than NDA-era corruption, a task yet to get fulfilled. Even should Rahul act pragmatically and remove himself (at least till the election results get counted) from the Prime Ministerial sweepstakes, by now the Congress president has established himself in the mind of most voters as the new “Anti-Modi”, easily outpacing others such as the now much subdued Arvind Kejriwal. However, the incubus of the Sonia past still clings to him, including his apparent re-affirmation of “secularism” as practised by Manmohan Singh, which essentially discriminated against the Hindu community. Rahul Gandhi seems to be hesitant in taking a leap into the realm of treating Hindus as what they are, the majority community. Such a change would be through backing projects dear to their psyche, such as the Ram Mandir. His not doing so means that Prime Minister Modi and BJP president Amit Shah retain their strongest card, which is that the era of discrimination against Hindus could well return were the Congress and its allies to take control of the Central government. Given the lack of prosecutorial action against UPA grandees during the past four years, Modi’s anti-corruption plank of 2014 seems less than effective at present, despite hyper high-stakes gambles such as DeMo. Administrative bungling on matters such as GST and demonetisation have taken much of the gloss off the perception that Modi is a Deng Xiaoping, a “Wirtshaftwunderkind” (economic maestro) who can power the economy to a double digit growth stage.
Seven months is a long time in politics, and this is about what Modi has to revive enough confidence in his leadership for his party to return with a tally past 272 seats. Should he be seen to be taking vigorous action against high-level administrative graft, such as by dismissing a substantial number of officials, putting petrol and diesel under the ambit of GST, abolishing tolls across highways in India, and presenting a February 2019 vote on account that would incorporate cuts in tax rates (including indirect levies) to levels that power growth rather than slow the economy down as at present, the coming election may yet see a return of the BJP under Modi. However, his 2014 decision to entrust the running of his administration to much the same bureaucratic team as held high responsibilities under Manmohan Singh makes such dynamic moves unlikely. Instead, there is likely to be more of the incrementalism and caution in economic and financial policy that has characterised this government. It may be that a silent administrative revolution is taking place, the way those working with the Prime Minister claim. However, such a transformation is clearly too silent to be heard by many voters, given the relative lack of meaningful access that the media in general have to the workings of the inner recesses of the government. Unless the Modi of 2013 displaces the Modi of May 2014 onwards in both perception and performance, Rahul Gandhi and his allies will be within striking distance of ensuring in 2019 that the Government of India be made “BJP-mukt” for the term of the next government.

The reason for the rise in price of Petrol and why - A conversation with Prof M D Nalapat (PGurus)

The Roundtable: Has PM Modi lived up to the expectations? (NewsX)

Friday 25 May 2018

Missed opportunities by US bedevil Trump (Pakistan Observer)

Geopolitical Notes From India
M D Nalapat

SAY this for the United States, the country has both those who hero-worship and those who work tirelessly at showing why the heroes of the country ought to be relegated to the wastebasket of history. Henry Kissinger followed the example of Winston Churchill and wrote by himself what has since been regarded as the definitive account of Henry A Kissinger, former Secretary of State. Overall, his books ( including “Diplomacy”) are of little value to practitioners of foreign policy, although they obey Richard Gere’s dictum in the musical “Chicago”. Which is to “give them the old razzle dazzle”. Mixing irrelevant examples of European diplomacy with anecdotes about he charmed world leaders, Kissinger has almost surpassed Churchill in literary self-glorification.
Reading his books on the history of the period when he dominated US foreign policy, it would be impossible to know that Kissinger was instrumental in giving false hope to President Nixon that he would be able to rescue South Vietnam from annexation by Ho Chi Minh, provided yet more hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese,Laotians and Cambodians got killed by the bombing and intervention caused by US involvement on the French colonial side in the Vietnam war. For his success in helping to control the population of the planet, Kissinger was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. The Nobel Committee clearly was ignorant of the fact that the war was ended by Kissinger through his North Vietnamese interlocuters only after even the Secretary of State realized that mass killing would not work against Ho Chi Minh, unless almost the entire population of the country got killed, something even Nixon and Kissinger shrank from. An individual less narcissistic but as brilliant as him, Seymour Hersh, has written in convincing detail about the facts behind the “fake news” narrative spun by Kissinger, only to be ignored as just another scribe on a rant against the powerful.
Kissinger missed an opportunity for peace (and to save more than two million lives) by not agreeing to work out the same peace agreement he finally worked out with the North Vietnamese, an agreement that had been placed on the table by Hanoi from the initial days of the Nixon presidency. Bill Clinton missed two mega geopolitical opportunities, the first to enlist Russia as a staunch US ally and to do the same with India. The problem faced by US Presidents and many of their appointees is that there is a lag – sometimes of several decades – between the reality of the present and the glories of the past. Looking at the way in which he is walking along a path that could lead to war with Iran and North Korea, it would appear that Donald J Trump is still of the view that US influence is where it was in the 1960s, before the Vietnam war and emphatically before the Taliban in Afghanistan has managed to prevail over the US and its allies since 2001, even though they are at the crossbow stage of weapons development when compared to the NATO forces battling them with all the finesse of a Keystone Cops brigade.
Say this for the 45th President of the US, he loves his admittedly remarkable country to distraction, thereby endowing it – and himself as its Commander-in-Chief – with perfection. No other explanation is possible for such policy initiatives as asking Supreme Leader Kim Jong Un to surrender his nuclear and missile stockpile just for the privilege of being in the same room as Trump. Because of the opportunity missed by two-term Presidents Clinton, Bush and Obama, by now North Korea has a stockpile of nuclear weaponry that can kill around six million people overall in South Korea, Guam and Japan before the country itself gets eliminated by a US nuclear attack that through the effects of fallout and blast will kill almost as many South Koreans, Chinese, Russians and Japanese as it will North Koreans. Already Pyongyang has the missiles needed to reach South Korea, Guam, the Philippines and Japan. Well within a year, it will be able to send missiles that would hit the Pacific coast of the US, and in a few months more, the East coast.
This is the country that Vice-President Pence (who seems not to have been briefed about the difference between nuclear and conventional weapons) is threatening to “do a Libya on”. Given such charming perspectives, beyond detonating a few test sites that have outlived their use, including by becoming vulnerable to external attack, the chances are close to zero that the DPRK’s Supreme Leader will surrender the only capability of his that matters to the big powers. As time passes with US officials blowing hard but doing little, soon the only question will be whether Secretary of State Pompeo will accept the inevitable and work out a peace deal with North Korea sweet enough to make Pyongyang as much a buddy of the US as Vietnam now is. The alternative would be to follow the Kissinger playbook and cost 2 million lives. Over to Mike Pompeo.
As for Iran, Prime Minister Netanyahu seems to have calculated that Israel will remain unaffected by the meltdown (within an already existing meltdown) in the Middle East that the Netanyahu-Trump diplomacy towards Teheran is heading towards. This seems to be the case at first glance, but the law of unintended consequences suggests that those in power in Israel should not expose their people to a future risk from unforeseen effects of the cauldron that the region will become once the US and its allies actually land up in a conflict with Iran. This columnist warned his friends in the US and Israel several times that Bashar Assad was no Muammar Kaddafy but much more resilient, and that he was preferable to the available options (such as Al Nusra). Now that President Rouhani has been politically emasculated by the US walkout from the nuclear deal, the hardliners are in full command, with the advantage that the average Iranian has swung to their side after the US withdrawal. The chance for John Bolton to “take out” the Iranian regime was when he was with George W Bush, who lacked the grit to finish that job. To attempt a similar move now would be collective suicide.
 

Missed opportunities by US bedevil Trump (Pakistan Observer)

Geopolitical Notes From India
M D Nalapat

SAY this for the United States, the country has both those who hero-worship and those who work tirelessly at showing why the heroes of the country ought to be relegated to the wastebasket of history. Henry Kissinger followed the example of Winston Churchill and wrote by himself what has since been regarded as the definitive account of Henry A Kissinger, former Secretary of State. Overall, his books ( including “Diplomacy”) are of little value to practitioners of foreign policy, although they obey Richard Gere’s dictum in the musical “Chicago”. Which is to “give them the old razzle dazzle”. Mixing irrelevant examples of European diplomacy with anecdotes about he charmed world leaders, Kissinger has almost surpassed Churchill in literary self-glorification.
Reading his books on the history of the period when he dominated US foreign policy, it would be impossible to know that Kissinger was instrumental in giving false hope to President Nixon that he would be able to rescue South Vietnam from annexation by Ho Chi Minh, provided yet more hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese,Laotians and Cambodians got killed by the bombing and intervention caused by US involvement on the French colonial side in the Vietnam war. For his success in helping to control the population of the planet, Kissinger was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. The Nobel Committee clearly was ignorant of the fact that the war was ended by Kissinger through his North Vietnamese interlocuters only after even the Secretary of State realized that mass killing would not work against Ho Chi Minh, unless almost the entire population of the country got killed, something even Nixon and Kissinger shrank from. An individual less narcissistic but as brilliant as him, Seymour Hersh, has written in convincing detail about the facts behind the “fake news” narrative spun by Kissinger, only to be ignored as just another scribe on a rant against the powerful.
Kissinger missed an opportunity for peace (and to save more than two million lives) by not agreeing to work out the same peace agreement he finally worked out with the North Vietnamese, an agreement that had been placed on the table by Hanoi from the initial days of the Nixon presidency. Bill Clinton missed two mega geopolitical opportunities, the first to enlist Russia as a staunch US ally and to do the same with India. The problem faced by US Presidents and many of their appointees is that there is a lag – sometimes of several decades – between the reality of the present and the glories of the past. Looking at the way in which he is walking along a path that could lead to war with Iran and North Korea, it would appear that Donald J Trump is still of the view that US influence is where it was in the 1960s, before the Vietnam war and emphatically before the Taliban in Afghanistan has managed to prevail over the US and its allies since 2001, even though they are at the crossbow stage of weapons development when compared to the NATO forces battling them with all the finesse of a Keystone Cops brigade.
Say this for the 45th President of the US, he loves his admittedly remarkable country to distraction, thereby endowing it – and himself as its Commander-in-Chief – with perfection. No other explanation is possible for such policy initiatives as asking Supreme Leader Kim Jong Un to surrender his nuclear and missile stockpile just for the privilege of being in the same room as Trump. Because of the opportunity missed by two-term Presidents Clinton, Bush and Obama, by now North Korea has a stockpile of nuclear weaponry that can kill around six million people overall in South Korea, Guam and Japan before the country itself gets eliminated by a US nuclear attack that through the effects of fallout and blast will kill almost as many South Koreans, Chinese, Russians and Japanese as it will North Koreans. Already Pyongyang has the missiles needed to reach South Korea, Guam, the Philippines and Japan. Well within a year, it will be able to send missiles that would hit the Pacific coast of the US, and in a few months more, the East coast.
This is the country that Vice-President Pence (who seems not to have been briefed about the difference between nuclear and conventional weapons) is threatening to “do a Libya on”. Given such charming perspectives, beyond detonating a few test sites that have outlived their use, including by becoming vulnerable to external attack, the chances are close to zero that the DPRK’s Supreme Leader will surrender the only capability of his that matters to the big powers. As time passes with US officials blowing hard but doing little, soon the only question will be whether Secretary of State Pompeo will accept the inevitable and work out a peace deal with North Korea sweet enough to make Pyongyang as much a buddy of the US as Vietnam now is. The alternative would be to follow the Kissinger playbook and cost 2 million lives. Over to Mike Pompeo.
As for Iran, Prime Minister Netanyahu seems to have calculated that Israel will remain unaffected by the meltdown (within an already existing meltdown) in the Middle East that the Netanyahu-Trump diplomacy towards Teheran is heading towards. This seems to be the case at first glance, but the law of unintended consequences suggests that those in power in Israel should not expose their people to a future risk from unforeseen effects of the cauldron that the region will become once the US and its allies actually land up in a conflict with Iran. This columnist warned his friends in the US and Israel several times that Bashar Assad was no Muammar Kaddafy but much more resilient, and that he was preferable to the available options (such as Al Nusra). Now that President Rouhani has been politically emasculated by the US walkout from the nuclear deal, the hardliners are in full command, with the advantage that the average Iranian has swung to their side after the US withdrawal. The chance for John Bolton to “take out” the Iranian regime was when he was with George W Bush, who lacked the grit to finish that job. To attempt a similar move now would be collective suicide.

Breaking News: Singapore summit with Kim Jong-un can still continue, says Donald Trump (WION)


US President Donald Trump said that the Singapore summit with Kim Jong-un can still continue. Watch the video to know more.

Saturday 19 May 2018

Opposition unity boosted by Karnataka events (Sunday Guardian)

M D Nalapat 

The BJP appears to believe that the path to victory in 2019 flows through securing control of as many state governments as possible. Hence the fiasco in Karnataka.

 That a clear winner of the Assembly polls in Karnataka (i.e. a party securing a majority on its own) would have secured pole position in the 2019 Lok Sabha polls is obvious. Had the Congress Party secured a majority, it would have proved its ability to successfully challenge the BJP in future contests. However, the Congress fared poorly in seats when compared to its tally in 2013, while even the seat score of the Janata Dal (Secular) fell. In contrast, the BJP secured more than double the seats it had won the last time around, which made it the only party of the trio with the right to claim a “moral” victory in the polls. This would have been possible were the party to have decided at the start to allow the JD(S) and the Congress Party to form the government in the state, given that their poll losses made both “losers” rather than “winners”. Only by acting as a strong opposition can the BJP put on the defensive the incoming Congress-JD(S) government in Karnataka, but this will not be easy under the leadership of B.S. Yeddyurappa. For Kumaraswamy is a wily politician with the same level of skills as his father H.D. Deve Gowda.
Not forming the government will crimp the financial health of the BJP in Karnataka. The financial fortunes of the JD(S) will rise substantially, while the Congress retains most of the liquidity the party enjoyed during five years of incumbency, were the Congress-JD(S) to assume power. However, while financial resources are important in an election, this is not enough. High spending power can succeed only as an add-on to the good performance of the party in power or as a boost to the seat trajectory of the opposition, but only in a state where the ruling party is encountering substantial headwinds as a consequence of bad performance. The Uttar Pradesh Assembly result had little to do with demonetisation and much to do with the way in which the BSP sought to wean away Muslim voters from the SP, in the process alienating other possible pools of support, while ultimately showing itself unable to persuade significant numbers of Muslim voters to cast their ballots for Mayawati, rather than for the Akhilesh-Rahul combo. Pandering to the minority fringe carries electoral risks. From the 1990s, a reaction has gathered traction within the Hindu community against the implicit premise in “secularism” as practised in India, which is that the majority community should be treated the way minorities are in several countries (i.e. be discriminated against by government). Such a mood is still the BJP’s best bet in 2019.
This is so despite Prime Minister Narendra Modi apparently deciding that it will only be in a second term that he removes discriminatory edicts and regulations that handicap the majority community, including those dating back to the British period. This has disappointed some of his 2014 voters, but most believe that while there is a reasonable chance of such dreams such as a Ram Mandir coming up during Modi’s tenure, it is unlikely that the leaders of the major opposition parties would take the risk of annoying the 2% of the Muslim community who are Wahhabi by going ahead with the construction of the temple. The fact is that 98% of Muslims would have no problem with a Ram Temple coming up in Ayodhya. Sadly, the modern, moderate Muslim has—especially after 1947—been ignored by both the media as well as the governance mechanism within our country. While even a leader with the mass appeal of Jawaharlal Nehru did not risk introducing reforms in the Muslim community in the 1950s the way he went ahead with the Hindus, Prime Minister Modi has gone ahead with reformist measures braving Wahhabi ire, such as the ordinance banning the practice of Triple Talaq. While this legislation suffers from infirmities, as for example making arrest and incarceration in such cases mandatory, rather than leaving these to the discretion of the aggrieved spouse, overall it represents a move away from the longstanding governmental practice of conflating the prejudices of the Wahhabis within the Muslims as representing that of the entire community. Out of fear of “Muslim” (i.e. Wahhabi) blowback, successive Prime Ministers have ignored the need to equalise laws and practices across all faiths. Instead, they indulged the Wahhabi fringe through policies crafted to appeal to this segment. That the BJP under Modi seems the only national party to sense and respond to the awakening of Hindu majority consciousness across the country has been a primary factor behind its poll victories. Interestingly, the unwillingness of the Vajpayee government to move beyond past practices where communal dynamics were concerned led to enough supporters staying away from voting during the 2004 polls to ensure a UPA victory. However, the majority-bashing policies of Manmohan Singh led to Modi securing a majority in the 2014 Lok Sabha polls.
Judging by its post-2014 electoral strategy, the BJP appears to believe that the path to victory in 2019 flows through securing control of as many state governments as possible. Hence the fiasco in Karnataka. The fact is that few state governments would be able to satisfy the expectations of voters, with the result that an anti-incumbency mood may grow that would affect the Lok Sabha polls. Such a factor may make many of the states under the BJP an electoral liability, which is clearly the case in some states. In India, the only victory that counts is that won for control of the Lok Sabha. Even if a party or combination controls very few states but secures a majority in the Lok Sabha, such a party would be much better positioned nationally than a party which controls several states, but has lost the Lok Sabha to its rival. The BJP’s tactics since the results of the 2018 Assembly polls in Karnataka got declared have made opposition unity a certainty in several states (including Karnataka), a factor which could cause the BJP major headaches in the coming parliamentary polls.

Friday 18 May 2018

Anwar should give Mahathir 3-5 years (Pakistan Observer)

Geopolitical Notes From India
M D Nalapat
MAHATHIR Mohammad is among the greats of the post-colonial period in Asia. In the case of India and Pakistan, where the leaders who took over from the British failed to ensure a high growth rate and acceptable social indices. Mahathir ensured that Malaysia became a moderately prosperous country, which today has a much higher per capita income than the South Asian countries. Although he was often critical of the manner in which colonial states exploited the territories they controlled, this did not prevent him from associating Malaysia closely with Europe and the US, to the economic advantage of both. Unlike in so many other newly liberated countries, where corruption remained endemic, only difference being the skin colour of those who were doing the looting, Malaysia had a relatively clean govt so long as Mahathir was in charge.
This changed after Najib Razak took over, for the new Prime Minister believed that the Malay majority in Malaysia would always support the UMNO rather than opt for parties that depended on the votes of the Indian and Chinese communities. In Mahathir Mohammad, he met his match, for the brilliant and tenacious doctor of medicine was the originator of the “Bumiputra” laws and practices that from the inception of the country have ensured primacy of opportunity to the Muslim Malays over Hindu Indians and Buddhist Chinese, even though the Chinese have emerged as the most important component of business in Malaysia, the way they have in Indonesia, the Philippines and Thailand as well. At the same time, Mahathir sought to integrate his neighbours through ASEAN, a group that India unwisely opted to stay out of when it was formed, among the numerous geopolitical errors committed by those who led India in the decades after August 15,1947.
When it became a choice between Mahathir and Razak, voters of Malay descent were confident that the former would protect their interests, and voted for him in sufficient numbers to topple UMNO from power, to the shock of Najib Razak. Unlike Narendra Modi, who till now has adopted a largely absent accountability policy towards those who led the 2004-2014 United Progressive Alliance (UPA), Mahathir immediately blocked Razak from travelling abroad, perhaps never to return, given the wealth that the former Prime Minister and his friends have amassed. Although Modi has given several verbal darts against the UPA leadership, in practice not even a First Information Report has been filed by the police against any top UPA leader. Only the son of former Finance Minister Chidambaram was briefly arrested, that too over a petty case involving a sum below a million dollars, small change for South Asian leaders, who deal in the billions of dollars.
Unlike Modi, Mahathir has moved against the UMNO leadership from the start, beginning with Razak, aware that he has to demonstrate to the Malaysian voters both that the former ruling party was corrupt and that he as the new Head of Government has the will and the ability to punish them for such a betrayal of the public trust. At 92,Mahathir is still fully alert in both mind and body, and is clearly the architect of the victory his alliance has just scored. However, those in Anwar Ibrahim’s party would like the public to believe that it was the former Deputy Prime Minister who was responsible for the defeat of Najib Razak. While Mahathir has released Anwar from prison (to which he was sent earlier by Mahathir himself), there will certainly develop tensions and fault lines between the two individuals. Anwar will not be able to forget that it was Mahathir who was responsible for his downfall, while the new Prime Minister of Malaysia understands that he needs at least three years ( if not five) to ensure that his leadership style and intellectual prowess ensures change on the scale sought by the Malaysian voter. Mahathir brought Malaysia into the 20th century and he needs time to bring his country firmly into the 21st century at a time when Najib Razak was trying to make Malaysia go the South Asia way of corruption and economic mismanagement accompanied by bravado and bombast.
Nelson Mandela was a much admired figure for his absence of anger consequential to the decades he spent in prison just for wanting his people to be freed from racial tyranny. However, during his five years as President, the pace of genuine change in South Africa was slow. In the same way, Jawaharlal Nehru may have spent years in prison thanks to the British, but he presided over an economy that limped rather than ran. The private sector in India shrivelled into a midget compared to global giants, while in both Japan and South Korea (where private enterprise from 1945 till the 1950s was much below the levels of their counterparts in India) governments ensured that Japanese and later South Korean companies became world beaters, exactly the way the Chinese Communist Party is ensuring that Chinese companies are beginning to dominate the global space in several fields.
Already it is more Anwar Ibrahim than Mahathir Mohammad who is being interviewed by media from the US and the EU, the latter being aware of the strong feelings that Mahathir has against the way in which a proud continent was reduced to penury by European domination. Already Anwar’s followers are seeking the early retirement of Mahathir and his replacement by their hero, who has just been freed from prison thanks to the very individual who first put him there. The fact is that Malaysia elected Mahathir Mogammad and not Anwar Ibrahim to power. And that Prime Minister Mahathir needs time to clear away the rot that has crept into the state maschinery because of UMNO corruption under Razak and his intimates. What Anwar Ibrahim needs is to put his ambition in check and give Mahathir three or even five years before stepping forward as his successor. His previous downfall was because he was over eager to take over from Mahathir. Anwar should not repeat this mistake by constantly pressurizing Mahathir to step down well before his 5-year term ends.
 

Saturday 12 May 2018

Terrorists will gain through a Kashmir ceasefire (Sunday Guardian)

M D Nalapat

Terror groups would get time to replenish stocks of personnel, weaponry and cash, all of which would be running low after setbacks against security forces.

Whenever terror organisations go on the defensive as a consequence of effective action against them by the uniformed forces, those sympathetic to their cause call for an immediate ceasefire by the security forces. This would give the terror groups time to replenish stocks of personnel, weaponry and cash, all three of which would be running low after sustained setbacks against security forces. The LTTE in Sri Lanka was expert in such tactics. Each time the Tamil Tigers were on a losing trajectory against the Sri Lankan military, their international supporters would lobby Colombo to declare a cessation of hostilities, always succeeding in such a quest until Mahinda Rajapaksa took over as President of Sri Lanka and defeated and destroyed the LTTE, defying global calls to give the organisation an extra life through a ceasefire. Rajapaksa was different from other South Asians, who having emerged from three centuries of European domination, took advice coming from that corner as gospel, even when it was damaging. This South Asian propensity to swallow without restraint suggestions from the continent which colonised them applies also to guidance given by those in North America. Talk within the Lutyens Zone is that it was hyper-billionaire Bill Gates who took upon himself the cause of persuading the Narendra Modi government to make 1.26 billion Indians go cashless through a shock demonetisation. If it was Gates who first sounded the DeMo bugle, the refrain was soon picked up by some in the most consequential posts within the Modi government, all of whom championed the measure to the Prime Minister. The consequence was the 8 November 2016 demonetisation that set back growth in India through its aftershocks. Bill Gates is not reported as having weighed in on the issue of a Ramzan ceasefire, so hopefully there will not be a rush within the Lutyens Zone to urge the Prime Minister that such a measure be implemented, as indeed it was during the period when A.B. Vajpayee was Prime Minister. Vajpayee’s ceasefire in Kashmir gave terrorist groups there a welcome pause in actions against them by the military. This was used to recoup their strength. Despite or because of such a show of governmental restraint, the Pahalgam and other massacres took place during Vajpayee’s tenure.
Later, PM Vajpayee created a perception within the pro-Pakistan lobby of being ready to move beyond the Constitution of India. He promised to settle the Kashmir problem not wholly through law but via the diffuse concepts of “jamhooriyat” and “insaniyat”. These terms were interpreted by Pakistan-controlled elements as code indicating that Vajpayee would accept a change in the status quo that would get created through an intensification of the “Azaadi from India” movement. What the then Prime Minister ought to have done was to make it clear to each and every individual in Kashmir that its accession to India was final and irreversible, and that the Constitution of India was the inescapable basis of any negotiation, rather than poetic phrases such as those used by Vajpayee. Not surprisingly, the first BJP Prime Minister of India failed to overcome the problem of insurgency, which remained severe throughout his six years in office. As for Vajpayee’s Lahore journey of 1999, this show of one-sided goodwill was met with the perfidy of Kargil, besides countless other thrusts by the ISI and its proxies in India. Given that the central mission of the Pakistan army is the attempted disintegration of the Union of India, efforts to cast the potential for India-Pakistan relations in dreamy poetry rather than harsh prose is an errand doomed to failure from the start. In such a context, Chief Minister Mehbooba Mufti’s constant efforts to show generosity and forgiveness to Pakistan-directed groups have predictably made them even more intransigent and determined to delink Kashmir from the rest of the country. Given the failure of Vajpayee’s numerous peace initiatives, it is a mystery as to why the lady believes that similar gestures on PM Modi’s part will create outcomes different from those that faced Vajpayee. The Kashmir CM appears to be fixated on a policy of appeasement of anti-India groups, a line of action that has been directly responsible for the substantial deterioration in the internal situation in Jammu & Kashmir since the BJP installed her as the Chief Minister of the state through its incomprehensible alliance with the PDP.
Responsibility for the murder of a tourist from Tamil Nadu in Kashmir by stone pelters can be directly ascribed to the policy of amnesty for such elements that was—surprisingly for a party claiming to take a tough line on national security—meekly acquiesced in by the BJP. If the Union Home Ministry is in any way concerned by the tango being danced by the PDP in association with pro-Pakistan elements, that venerable if hardly venerated institution has kept such feelings to itself, barring a few ineffective disapproving clucks from Home Minister Rajnath Singh. Those who voted for Narendra Modi in 2014 did not expect just words from his government, but action. However, in Kashmir, the BJP seems to be a passive spectator to the systematic way in which the PDP is giving oxygen to pro-Pakistan elements by its permissive policies towards those seeking to once again drag the state into the same cauldron of hate and violence into which it was thrown during the period when Mufti Mohammad Sayeed was Home Minister of India. Let it be admitted that on Kashmir, Manmohan Singh’s record was stellar when compared with the follies of the present government in handling the state. It is time for those in thrall to the Vajpayee years to remember that voters threw out his government in 2004, and that the BJP won in 1999 only because the country had just recently been at war. A war that was caused by the neglect of the Vajpayee government in protecting the country’s borders from nibbling by the Pakistan army, but which its superior PR skills passed off as a great victory. India needs real victories, not make-believe ones. And these can come only when realism replaces romanticism in policy.

Friday 11 May 2018

Trump active in ‘Contra-Trump’ mode (Pakistan Observer)

Geopolitical Notes From India
M D Nalapat

JUDGING by present indications, it would appear that President Donald J Trump has been placed on the defensive by serial cooked-up allegations of collusion with Vladimir Putin. The Washington Beltway is a forest of lobbies, each inhabited by lobbyists energetically working for whatever vested interest is willing to pay for their services. Those around Trump are not followers of Mahatma Gandhi, whose possessions consisted of a few dozen loincloths, three pairs of spectacles and some books. They relish the good life, which is presumably why they signed on to the tension-filled atmosphere inside Trump Towers in New York. Not just those around Trump but associates of Hillary Clinton as well operated with an implied “For Sale” sign affixed to their offices, but Robert Mueller seems in no mood to investigate any individual other than those close to the President.
If we were to believe the many US media outlets working on overdrive to get Trump impeached, the most important issue facing the US is the $ 500,000 payment made to legal counsel Michael Cohen by a company reported as having links to a US-sanctioned Russian billionaire. Given the tensions between the Atlantic Alliance and Russia, oligarchs from the latter are an endangered species, unless they create a firewall between their activities in Russia and the operations they conduct within the NATO bloc. Several have become hidden “agents of influence” of western intelligence agencies, giving information and conducting operations involving Russia on behalf of their hidden controllers. The recent poisoning through a nerve agent of a former Russian spy and his daughter was most likely carried out not by the Russian state but by a Russian oligarch eager to ingratiate himself with those seeking to portray Putin in a dark light.
The incident gave an excuse to the Theresa May government in London to expel several Russian diplomats, exactly as the gas attacks in Syria (which were immediately ascribed to the UN-recognized Syrian regime) opened the door to a rain of US,French and British missiles on Bashar Assad’s facilities. A lethal shower of projectiles that is expected to have the effect of persuading the GCC to spend yet more billions of dollars on armaments from France,the UK and the US that will get used only against tribespersons in Yemen and such other unfortunates, barring weapons that will go to those in the field active against groups and militias.
As a candidate for the office he now holds (and hopefully will for years to come), Donald J Trump adopted a sensible policy of seeking to keep the US out of regional conflicts and faultlines in the Middle East. However, the battering he is getting from the Washington Beltway is forcing the 45th US President into embracing several of the policies that he condemned on the 2016 campaign trail, including inserting the US more deeply and in a partisan way in the Iran-Saudi conflict that is reaching the danger point which threatens global security and financial stability. Iran and Saudi Arabia are at the centre of that battle, and the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia has opened a two-front war.
It is beyond the capacity of the Saudi establishment to prevail in both, and the needs of the 21st century mandate that Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman focus on the battle within Saudi Arabia against internal extremism rather than disperse the resources of his country in going to war in Yemen and in other locations. The only player in the cauldron of regional politics is Binyamin Netanyahu, who is clearly seeking to act as a catalyst to ensure a meltdown in the Middle East that would leave Israel as the only stable power in the region. And this in an era where increased production of shale oil by North America can take up any slack caused by disruptions in oil supplies by Iran, Saudi Arabia or other regional oil producing countries. Just as conclusions were aired about culpability almost as soon as information was released about the “chemical weapons attacks” in Syria, the Netanyahu government has claimed that the Quds Force in Iran was behind an ineffectual aiming of missiles from inside Syria on Israeli positions on the Golan Heights.
These could as well have been fired by anti-Assad fighters clustered near the Golan so as to generate a military response against Damascus, which is precisely what Israel has done. Wars are seldom created deliberately, unless those such as the 2003 attack on Iraq by Bush and Blair are taken into consideration. The reflexive pinning of blame on Teheran and Damascus by Washington and Jerusalem on any apparently hostile military activity from within Syria assumes that Bashar Assad is in control of the country the way he was before a well-resourced campaign to unseat him began in 2011. Such jumping to conclusions may lead to a situation in which a major conflict becomes inevitable. In such a contest, the casualties on the Syrian and Iranian side will be several times more than the harm suffered by their foes, but such punishment will unleash furies across the region that will take decades to play out, and which in the meantime could wreck the stability of several states. Netanyahu is taking a gamble that he can insulate his country from such a catastrophe, and in the short term he is probably right, although over time the impact of widespread turmoil will impact Israel as well, thereby creating more pain to a people that have undergone unimaginable miseries throughout much of their history.
The way in which the Washington Beltway is forcing President Trump into adopting Trump Contra policies through ceaseless efforts at driving him prematurely from office is generating the possibility of a Middle Eastern war in a situation where the Korean peninsula stands at high risk of a conflict, despite the anodyne headlines coming out of Washington, Seoul and Pyongyang. Countries such as China, Japan and India need to build pipelines that could bring oil from Russia to their refineries, as well as diversify sources, including tapping shale oil. The probability is high that the Middle East is tilting towards a debilitating meltdown engineered by those responsible for the spreading of extremist in ME, hence the need to lock in alternative sources of oil.
 

Tuesday 8 May 2018

M D Nalapat on GSTN, Karnataka and Price of Crude and who is driving it up (PGurus)



PGurus with M D Nalapat on GSTN, Karnataka and Price of Crude and who is driving it up. A higher crude could hurt India's growth.

Monday 7 May 2018

Trump faces a daunting decision on Korea (Sunday Guardian)

M D Nalapat 

The greater Kim Jong Un’s success in ‘peace diplomacy’, the more difficult he calculates it will be for Donald Trump to push the red button that denotes a full-scale war of elimination of North Korea’s offensive capabilities.

Donald J. Trump is accurate when he blames his predecessors for causing the dilemma that the 45th President of the United States finds himself in on the nuclear capabilities of the DPRK (North Korea). President Bill Clinton had the best chance of settling the issue in a manner satisfactory to US interests, but waffled and shifted goalposts frequently, thereby confusing Pyongyang. Since the USSR had collapsed, the Clinton administration was taken in by NGOs claiming to have the means to generate mass agitations against the Kim family, claims that proved to be a hoax. The consequence of the belief within the Clinton White House that they could topple the Kim family on the cheap, led to a reneging of secret commitments made to the DPRK, a factor which led to the acceleration of a nuclear program that till then had been given only secondary importance when compared to the build-up of conventional forces. The Clinton era was riddled with lost opportunities, including the possibility of an alliance with India during the period (1992-96) when P.V. Narasimha Rao was Prime Minister. The Clinton White House let go of this chance by demanding that Delhi make impossible concessions to Pakistan on Kashmir and at the same time dismantle its entire atomic research program. Secret exchanges between the United States and Indian sides during that time show how the Clinton administration defined “dual use” nuclear technology in such a broad way that the entire program begun by Homi Bhabha in the 1950s would have had to be sent to the junkyard. In the case of North Korea, Kim Jong Il was willing to scale back the program to “Iran nuclear deal” levels and even below such a threshold, and sent several feelers to the US side for high-level talks on this, all of which were insultingly ignored by the Clinton White House, that saw the DPRK as being vulnerable to internal subversion. His successor did little better. Puffed up by initial successes in Iraq, President George W. Bush (2001-2009) zeroed in on a “maximum concessions from North Korea, zero from the US” negotiating stance that was not backed up with any serious intention of militarily confronting the DPRK. This lack of aggressive resolve barring tough talk became known to the Chinese and thereafter reached the North Koreans, who thereafter ignored as bluff any verbal threats coming their way from the Bush White House.
The only way Bush could have secured his stated objectives regarding de-nuclearisation of the DPRK sans substantive concessions to Pyongyang, would have been through the launch of a pre-emptive military strike, but the Afghanistan-Iraq quagmire took that option off the table in the minds of those dealing with the subject during the George W. Bush period. A role was also played by the Bush family’s desire not to offend Pyongyang’s prime (indeed, only) patron, Beijing, which then and now remains opposed to any use of the military option by the US and its allies. The initial years of the Barack Obama administration (2009-2017) provided the last chance for resolving the North Korean nuclear issue in a manner that would meet US interests without entailing substantial casualties in the RoK (South Korea) and Japan, including of US forces stationed in both countries. However, the Obama administration neither offered concessions on the scale needed to tempt the Kim regime into scaling back its nuclear program, nor gave any credible indication that it had the stomach to launch a war against North Korea. In 2011, Hillary Clinton joined hands with David Cameron and Nicolas Sarkozy to finish off Muammar Gaddafi and his regime, thereby convincing incoming Supreme Leader of the DPRK Kim Jong Un that giving in to US demands would only delay his end and not eliminate that possibility as was being promised by US and UN diplomats. From that time onwards, the nuclear and missile program took top priority within the Kim regime, and as a consequence of secretive assistance by a clutch of scientists from countries that regard their homelands as having been short-changed by the US, by now the DPRK has built up sufficient offensive capability to cause mass casualties running into the tens of thousands in South Korea, Japan and Guam. Within a couple of years at most, the North Korean regime will have the capability to drop a viable nuclear device on New York or Washington, but eliminating that capability would almost certainly entail mass casualties on a scale not seen since the Vietnam War ended. The only scenario that could avoid much of such a blowback would be a joint US-China strike on North Korea, with the US destroying the offensive conventional capability of the DPRK in the south of the country (especially along the DMZ), while China would move in and seize control of the nuclear facilities clustered near its border with North Korea. The US would eliminate almost all the DPRK’s conventional (and part of its WMD) capabilities without sending troops across the 38th parallel, in deference to the sensibilities of Beijing, which could then justify its takeover of nuclear assets in the northern part of the DPRK as being needed to “protect” the communist regime in power in Pyongyang. A new administration would thereafter be set up in the DPRK that would be without participation by the Kim family, who could be provided shelter in China and Russia, two countries they still maintain frequent contact with.
However, it is unlikely that the negotiating skills of the Trump administration are versatile enough to enlist the Chinese into a joint move against North Korean nukes and missile systems. That would leave the option of either accepting Pyongyang as a nuclear weapons power or launching a killer strike against its capabilities that would be certain to entail mass casualties outside the boundaries of the DPRK, and which would be resented if not resisted by China, now that in Xi Jinping the country has a leader in the mould of Mao Zedong for the first time since the founder of the People’s Republic of China passed away in 1976. DPRK Supreme Leader Kim Jong Un has skilfully used his considerable diplomatic skills to convince the international community that he has a safe pair of hands so far as the nuclear button is concerned. He has a partner in the effort to avoid another Korean war in President Moon Jae-In of South Korea, who believes in the option of integrating the DPRK into a regional economic and security network. Treating it as an outlaw, the way successive US administrations (and some in South Korea) have done, has forced Pyongyang to use unorthodox methods to secure its needs. Sanctions on the DPRK have neither reversed its nuclear and missile program nor made the Kim regime compliant with other international norms. President Moon understands that only a “Bright Sunshine” policy towards the North can peacefully ensure that Pyongyang cease to be a global troublemaker, but instead be a good neighbour, including to its hitherto implacable foe, Japan. If not such a course, the only other method is war, with its attendant loss of life in several countries.
President Trump has acted with a boldness that was beyond the capabilities of Bill Clinton, who passed on a genuine chance to make peace with a de-nuclearising North Korea and that too in Pyongyang. However, Kim Jong Un is unlikely to believe Trump’s assurances given the previous record of the US just within the 21st century. He will refuse to begin rolling back his WMD capability, unless the US pulls out of the entire region militarily, an impossibility both politically as well as strategically for Washington. In the meanwhile, the Supreme Leader is seeking through a charm offensive to convince the world (especially domestic opinion in the US and Europe) that he is a statesperson who favours peace over war, conciliation over conflict. The greater his success in such “peace diplomacy”, the more difficult he calculates it will be for President Trump to push the red button that denotes a full-scale war of elimination of offensive capabilities of North Korea. For Kim Jong Un, there is no choice. He has to retain his WMD capability to avoid going the Gaddafi way. For President Trump, it is a choice between a costly (in lives and treasure) war or accepting the DPRK as a nuclear power capable of inflicting unbearable harm on the US. Kim may of course offer some face-saving gestures that the Christiane Amanpours could showcase as a US success. This would be while holding on to their core WMD capabilities.
President Moon meanwhile will be seeking to integrate North Korea into a relationship with the South that would reduce the prospect of future conflicts to very low levels. There are several diplomatic and policy projectiles in the air around the Korean peninsula, but by far the most difficult decision will need to be taken by President Trump well within his present term in office. This is whether Trump “declares victory” and accepts the reality of the DPRK as a significant nuclear power or takes the decision to enter on a war with consequences that by now have grown immense but incalculable.

NewsX Kannada conclave 2018: The good aspects being sidelined, says Congress (NewsX)



It's time for the big Karnataka conclave. Its 5 days to go for the Karnataka poll battle and NewsX is conducting the mega NewsX Kannada conclave 2018. India's biggest faces are joining us today.

Sunday 6 May 2018

Rahul must escape the toxic 2% legacy (Sunday Guardian)

M D Nalapat 

98% of Muslims have the same societal impulses as the rest of the population.

Across the world, a perception is being spread that Muslims are different, “they are not like the rest of us”. Several of those holding on to such a view are themselves friends of members of a community that has crossed a billion in number globally. Such friends would prove that 98% of Muslims (as indeed, 98% of Hindus) have the same societal impulses as the rest of the population. India’s Muslims want adequate standards in shelter, food, health and employment. While in states such as Kerala, Muslim women are being educated to a level not seen in many other states in India, these days—across the country—girls from the diverse strands of the Muslim community are demanding the right to get educated to the same level as their brothers. The backwardness of a territory is in inverse proportion to the empowerment of women, and this reality can be witnessed all over India, especially in places where women (no matter the faith they profess) are regarded as “children of a lesser god”. It is no accident that the quality of life in low-income Kerala stands comparison to countries in Europe with far higher per capita incomes, for women in that state are moving close to equality with men in access to employment and education. Returning to the issue of why Muslims are being singled out as exclusivist, the explanation may vest in the fact that society (even including the Muslims themselves), in effect, acts as though the 2% of the community that are exclusivist and medieval are genuinely representative of the wider population. Whether it be in the fashioning of policy or in allocating talktime in television studios, those belonging to the 2% fringe get a hugely disproportionate share of the access and attention given to members of the community.
Rajiv Gandhi was a modern individual, as much at ease in London or New York as in Mumbai or Bangalore. However, in 1986 he brushed aside Arif Mohammad Khan in favour of those who sought to perpetually keep women in check through repressive laws and practices. Ironically, the then Prime Minister himself revealed to this columnist the names of the Muslims known to him who were adamant that the Supreme Court’s verdict in defence of the rights of Muslim women should be overturned. They included more than a few who were as cosmopolitan as Rajiv was, but who so misread their own community that they portrayed to the then PM the 2% fringe as being representative of the entire community. The Muslim Women’s Bill was the turning point in the political career of an individual who had till then the potential to transform the country into a 21st century phenomenon. Of course, Rajiv Gandhi was not the first leader of the Congress Party to mistake the Muslim fringe as the mainstream. During 1919-1922, Mahatma Gandhi embraced the Ali brothers and their revivalist cause of bringing back the Turkish caliphate, a decision by the Mahatma that vastly increased the power of the fringe within the Muslim community. Partly because of attitudes from outside the community, Muslims have overwhelmingly remained silent in the face of the takeover of leadership by the fringe. There were practically no protests when Shah Bano and other women similarly placed got deprived of their rights by a new law passed explicitly to nullify the apex court verdict in Shah Bano’s favour, while a series of staged protests took place when the Supreme Court verdict was announced. Empowering the 98% of Muslims who are modern and moderate to take on the 2%, just as has taken place in the case of other communities, was dealt an early blow after India became free, when Jawaharlal Nehru avoided legislation to ensure reforms in some longstanding practices of Muslims in India, while going ahead from 1951 onwards with the Hindu Code Bills. This was again a case of a liberal acting in accordance with the myth that in the case of Muslims, the small minority that are medieval represent the overwhelming majority of those born into the faith. Had Nehru gone ahead with ensuring needed changes to such Muslim practices as multiple marriages or triple talaq, the social chemistry of India would have been altered in a beneficial way. Instead, there have been serial genuflections by policymakers in India to the Muslim fringe. Not surprisingly, such solicitude has energised the Hindu fringe, so much so that these days, many policymakers are confusing the fringe’s exclusivist and medievalist views on matters such as diet or lifestyle to represent the mind of Hindus as a whole. A competition in appeasement of the fringe of both faiths is taking place among political parties in India, that cannot end well for the country if continued.
This columnist comes from a family which had to flee from their homes to save themselves from Tipu Sultan, so he may be pardoned for not sharing the enthusiasm of Congress president Rahul Gandhi for the former ruler of Mysore. That Rahul talks of Tipu as “secular” is indicative of the misreading of the term that has so skewed policy in India, and which the new Congress president needs to walk away from. He needs to move away from the toxic legacy of appeasement of the minority fringe, a line of action that was carried to such levels by the Manmohan Singh government that it proved disastrous for the Congress Party. While Rahul has been visiting temple after temple, such sojourns will carry more conviction if he also supports the building of a Lord Ram Complex at Ayodhya. Such a complex, especially if complemented by the restoration of the ancient Kashi Viswanath temple in Varanasi and the creation of a Krishna Janambhoomi Complex at Mathura, would ensure that the Hindu fringe would find itself unable to mislead others in the community into regarding Muslims as the hostile “Other”. Kapil Sibal has created a perception that the Congress is against a Lord Ram Complex at Ayodhya. Unless Rahul Gandhi ignores the veto of a scant 2% of the Muslim community about a historic compromise between the two communities that would pave the way for a grand gesture of reconciliation between Hindus and Muslims at Ayodhya, Mathura and Varanasi, his party will continue to undershoot its potential as a national party. In any democracy, 98% is way bigger than 2%, and both the Congress Party as well as the BJP need to understand such simple mathematics rather than continue to indulge their respective fringes in a manner that is demonstratively harmful to the future of India.

Friday 4 May 2018

Pompeo follows Cheney in boosting oil prices (Pakistan Observer)

Geopolitical Notes From India
M D Nalapat

MIKE Pompeo, the personal pick of President Donald J Trump to be the US Secretary of State, is proving to be as effective as Vice-President Dick Cheney was in the George W Bush era in boosting oil prices. The global oil demand is still in slow motion as compared to past periods, while “green” technologies for generating power (wind and sun) are steadily becoming competitive with fossil fuels. Simultaneously, shale oil output in North America is rising at speed. Despite all this, economic fundamentals have taken a back seat to geopolitical perceptions in the determination of oil prices, which have reached $ 80 a barrel after a long time when half that would have been the price but for the “booster dose” of geopolitical tension created by Pompeo and his global partners in the effort to create a perception of impending war in the Middle East. $ 80 per barrel is exactly the rate Saudi Arabia needs to balance its budget, and comfortably more than what is needed by Kuwait and other major oil producers.
Of course, such a rise in oil prices will benefit Russia, Iran and Venezuela as well, but sanctions and technology denial led by Washington will continue to reduce their production of the liquid which fuels their economies. Even over a 5-year period, the $ 80 a barrel price will accelerate the ongoing switch to “green” technologies, but that is a long time in the world view of a Cheney or a Pompeo, who are more attuned to a 6-month horizon while deciding policy. While Barack Obama was cautious, sometimes to a fault, Donald Trump is much more secure in his assessment of himself and consequently does not walk away from taking risks that another US President would never have taken. Among the most consequential is the baiting of Iran, which has found that the returns on the nuclear deal between itself and other powers have been derisory, and may become even more so, should President Trump abrogate the Iran deal on May 11, as both he as well as Secretary of State Pompeo give indications of doing. Such a move would terminally weaken the influence over policy of President Hassan Rouhani and other moderates who seek to integrate Tehran into a global order that is still largely led by the US.
Over the past sixteen months, it is clear that Trump is a shrewd bargainer who knows when to retreat and when to advance, so far as his objectives are concerned. The US President is clear-eyed about China being the primary – indeed, the only – competitor to Washington in the global primacy sweepstakes, and has gone much further in nudging that country towards opening its markets to the US than his previous three predecessors combined. At the same time, he has backed away from threatened action whenever it became clear that President Xi Jinping was reaching a red line and would retaliate in force were Trump to go further than he already had. Such a move would impact a major reason for Trump’s 2016 victory over Hillary Clinton, which is that tens of millions of voters saw him as better able to raise economic performance than his Democratic Party competitor. Whether it be Xi Jinping, Narendra Modi or Trump, all three need to show their people that they will be able to assure growth adequate to raise living standards. A full-blown trade war with China would send the US economy to the ICU, and being joined by China and several other countries there would be scant compensation. So while threats of a trade war may be uttered, these are unlikely to be acted upon by Washington.
In much the same way, although Trump will join with Israel’s Netanyahu and Saudi Arabia’s Al-Jubeir in heaping calumny on Tehran, the US President will be wary of actually beginning a conflict with a country that has over the past decade built up significant capability (albeit recessed) to subvert governance structures throughout the Middle East. Should Saudi Arabia actually succeed in goading its US ally into a major military confrontation with Iran, their response would not only be in the conventional battlefield, but in the Shia-populated pockets of the country. Similar eruptions would take place in Bahrain as well, which is why no other Arab capital barring Riyadh is behaving in a diplomatically aggressive manner towards Tehran.
Both Kuwait and the UAE, for example, are plainly restless at the way in which the joint rhetoric of Pompeo, Al-Jubeir and Netanyahu are shaping up in front of television cameras. They are aware that the most emphatic foe of Iran of the trio, Netanyahu, is playing to a beat different from the largely make-believe warlike sounds made by Pompeo and Al-Jubeir. The Prime Minister of Israel would like to see chaos throughout the Middle East, confident as he is in the ability of his administration to wall off Israel from such turmoil. War between the US and its allies with Iran would create a meltdown throughout the region, except in Israel. Oil prices would climb back to three figures, and the world economy would get into the same danger zone as it entered in 2008 owing to the greed of moneymen within the NATO bloc.
Dick Cheney ensured that the George W Bush administration fashioned policies that oversaw a steep rise in oil prices, to beyond $ 140 a barrel at one stage, before prices fell after it became clear that the incessant talk of war by the Bush administration on Iran was bluff. In 2018, even without a war, tensions created by the tearing up of the Iran nuclear deal by US (a step which would make the deal with the other signatories sharply diminished in value to Tehran) would have effect of pushing up oil prices. This would be bad news for the world economy, and therefore for US and Europe as well. It would affect China, Japan and India particularly hard. But oil-producing states (except those under US-EU sanctions) would enjoy a few years of plenty, and it is clear that Secretary of State Pompeo is aiming for that by his admittedly deft moves on Iran, Venezuela and Russia.