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Saturday 28 July 2018

Support Pakistan’s people, not the military (Sunday Guardian)

By M D NALAPAT

Voices are calling for India to join China and the United States in the legitimisation of the endemic usurpation of civilian authority by the Pakistan army.


The reflections of A.S. Dulat on what “could have been” in India-Pakistan relations reveal a faith in the “untapped” goodwill of the Pakistan military that is shared by several officials and scholars in the Lutyens Zone. He once claimed that the 2001 Agra summit between A.B. Vajpayee and Pervez Musharraf would have been a success but for L.K. Advani. This assertion is as far from the truth. In a very readable book (Devil’s Advocate) that has more than a few revelatory paragraphs, television personality Karan Thapar detailed how L.K. Advani (while Deputy Prime Minister and Home Minister of India) and then Pakistan High Commissioner to India, A.J. Qazi met in secret on numerous occasions in a remarkably convivial manner in order to “improve India-Pakistan relations”, with the Deputy PM clearly searching for a “give and take” process he could help implement. Naturally, in a pattern set since 1947, India would do the giving and Pakistan the taking. Even in 2000, the Pakistan High Commissioner met Advani at his Pandara Park residence, late at night for over 90 minutes, with Karan Thapar acting as the taxi driver waiting patiently by the gate (for Qazi to return from his meeting with the “Iron Man” of the NDA). Advani showed his willingness in public towards dealing with Musharraf-ruled Pakistan the very day after the Pakistan army organised an attack on the Parliament of India on 13 December 2001. Advani went up to Qazi in the grounds of the Imperial Hotel (where a banquet that both were attending was being held). At the banquet, the High Commissioner of Pakistan and the Deputy Prime Minister of India held hands and gazed into each other’s faces with evident affection, as related by Thapar. To believe that an individual with such a publicly demonstrated commitment towards making peace with Musharraf’s Pakistan would “sabotage” the Agra summit is to indulge in a misreading of the truth. For the then Home Minister would never have opposed a Musharraf-Vajpayee summit, given his interaction with Qazi. Agra legitimised a military dictatorship set up through a coup, and marked the beginning of the rehabilitation of the “Kargil Jihad Commando” within the international community. Advani respects Vajpayee to the degree that he (though the obvious successor) led the clamour for Prime Minister Vajpayee to not follow through on the then PM’s 2003 offer to resign. By then, Vajpayee was in extremely poor health, and had Advani taken his place, the next year it would have been the BJP and not the Congress Party that got a higher number of seats in the Lok Sabha.
The chance to become Prime Minister usually comes only once in a lifetime, and while Vajpayee, Manmohan Singh and Narendra Modi seized theirs in 1996, 2004 and 2014 respectively, Advani let go his best chance to become PM in 2003. The easiest opportunity for Rahul Gandhi to have become PM was in 2012, by which time Manmohan Singh had lost practically all the good name he had earned during his 2004-2009 stint in the job and it made political sense for the Congress Party to replace him. Rahul Gandhi was electorally more viable than the other two names doing the rounds at that time, that of Palaniappan Chidambaram (a byword in North Block for his mastery over the intricacies of the handling of moneys flowing through banks and stock exchanges) and Pranab Mukherjee, the Finance Minister who imposed a 97% income tax rate and subsequently opposed the introduction of colour television when Indira Gandhi got re-elected in 1980. In a country hungry for change, had Rahul taken charge by 2012, and put in place a new and efficient Council of Ministers, the Congress Party may have reached three figures in the Lok Sabha in 2014, while the BJP may not, as a consequence, have secured a majority on its own. These days, although every day some Congress functionary or the other talks of Rahul Gandhi as the “next PM”, the reality is that for the coming Lok Sabha polls at least, votes for his party would actually get boosted were Rahul to declare that he was not in the 2019 race for the job now held by the former Chief Minister of Gujarat. And any regional leader who publicly backs the Congress president for the PM’s post in the coming polls will lose votes for his or her party to the advantage of the BJP, which has been on overdrive to make the coming contest a choice between Rahul Gandhi and Narendra Modi for the Prime Ministership. This is the reason why the followers of Mayawati and Mamata Banerjee are projecting them as potential PMs, aware that such a perception would energise their voting base.
Those far away from the portals of power in Modi’s India are confused at what exactly is the Pakistan policy of the present government. Certainly there is more than a whiff of the Vajpayee era within the post-2014 government. Several of those who in 2001 were active in pushing for the unwise decision to hold the 2001 Agra summit are in high positions in the Modi sarkar. Voices within it are calling for the Government of India to join China and the United States in the legitimisation of the endemic usurpation of civilian authority by the Pakistan army. It would be a mistake were there to be negotiations between South Block and GHQ Rawalpindi precisely when the people of Pakistan are themselves shedding their fear of the army and its instruments of coercion and are protesting the subversion of the electoral system yet again by the men in khaki, this time to secure a sponsored success for Imran Khan, a “mukhota” of GHQ for two decades. Instead, the Modi government should stand by the people of Pakistan and those few political parties which have mustered the courage to take on the tyranny of the military. Giving the generals legitimacy through negotiations with them on the lines of the Musharraf-Vajpayee Agra summit would mean that India has joined the US and China in choosing a jihadi and rapacious military over the interests of the people in Pakistan, a country that can survive only should the army be made to relinquish control over the civilian apparatus of governance.

ISI intensifies campaign to sabotage Assam NRC (Sunday Guardian)

By M D NALAPAT

ISI is activating its India-specific modules to create mayhem once the National Register of Citizens is made public.


Now that the Pakistan military has succeeded in ensuring that a candidate of its choice has been selected as the next Prime Minister of Pakistan, the ISI is gearing up to intensify the ongoing global campaign against efforts by the Sarbananda Sonowal government in Guwahati to identify the millions of illegal migrants in Assam. The identification will be done through the preparation of the National Register of Citizens (NRC), which will eliminate those illegally present within the state. Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee of Bengal has adopted the opposite strategy, that of apparently welcoming such migrants into her state on the ground of human rights, including Rohingyas, thereby becoming a heroine to the many agencies funnelling illegal migrants into India on a daily basis. Assam CM Sonowal’s efforts to weed out illegal migrants from genuine citizens are not based on religion, but on origin. However, Assam’s NRC is being characterised in a focused way as being directed solely against a particular community. Several NGOs in India—some of whom are acting from genuinely altruistic, if misguided, motives—have been petitioning the United Nations, the United States, the European Union and other consequential entities to stop work on the NRC, arguing that it is intended to “send Muslims to prison camps for life” and to create conditions for “mass murder, genocide, mass rape” and other human rights violations. The objective is to ensure that every individual now present in Assam be declared a bona fide citizen of India and be given voting and other rights on an immediate basis. A collateral effect of the campaign has been to impact the global image of the world’s most populous democracy.
Meanwhile, around 6 million more individuals in Bangladesh and Myanmar have been identified by the ISI as being “suitable for early entry to India” in view of their dedication to Wahhabism. Among these, the Pakistan army expects to recruit large numbers of extremists in order to intensify their covert campaign to ensure through riots, chaos and terrorism that India does not ever take off into a high growth trajectory, but follows Pakistan in becoming a divided society. Once the clamour in the US erupted last month over the separation by the Donald Trump administration of children from their parents, several of the groups promoting automatic citizenship to illegal migrants into India have been alleging that “children are being forcibly separated from their parents by (Indian) authorities”, and even that “they are being sold as juvenile sex slaves”. The absence of any evidence that such fake atrocities are taking place has not dimmed the decibel level of the “Instant Citizenship” campaign.
There has been a visible concentration of effort by the present UN Human Rights Commissioner on issues concerning a single community, with relative silence on the situation of minorities in Pakistan, with forced conversions of the few remaining Hindus and Christians, or the brutal treatment being given by Wahhabi fanatics in Bangladesh to hapless Hindus in much the same way as took place during 1989-91 in Kashmir. A special effort has been launched by ISI proxies since 2015 to ensure that as many media outlets as possible carry false reports on India, while ignoring the situation in Pakistan and Bangladesh. However, there are also several campaigners who are working entirely independent of the ISI, but are active for reasons of personal conviction. A noted crusader for the right of migrants to settle in India, Harsh Mander, has several times warned international agencies and tribunals that “detention centres are being prepared for lakhs of innocent people” because of religious reasons. He recently resigned as Special Monitor from the National Human Rights Commission (NHRC) because the agency refused to act on the basis of unsubstantiated information and wild allegations against authorities in India, but instead demanded proof of the many charges made by Mander. Others are asking why Harsh Mander has been silent not only on the situation in India’s neighbourhood, but in Europe, where the Roma as well as Muslim refugees are suffering discrimination on a scale unprecedented since the 1939-45 war across the world and its aftermath. Mander’s silence on Europe is disturbing those who wish to see the same standards applied across the board, rather than selectively. It is claimed by those familiar with his activities that former bureaucrat Harsh Mander “has an obsession with the Narendra Modi government and wants to discredit it globally”, although there is no evidence to back the oft-repeated claim that he is serving as a catspaw for the Congress party in its campaign against the Modi government. This effort acquired a new edge after Rahul Gandhi took over as Congress president.
A particular focus of the ISI is to try and send in hundreds of thousands of more Rohingyas into India via Assam and Bengal. In the latter state they get a much warmer welcome, thanks to the policy adopted by the Bengal government of welcoming rather than discouraging migrants from Myanmar and Bangladesh. Several of the representations and news reports being sent to global agencies (including by the ISI-funded campaign to ensure immediate citizenship to all illegal immigrants) give particular attention to the Rohingyas, whom they wish to see resettled in India on a mass scale. False reports with morphed images have been circulated by ISI fronts purporting to show rapes and massacres of members of the minority community in Assam since Sonowal took over as the Chief Minister, the intention being to portray Assam as a “cauldron of hate”. The Delhi Press Club was the venue for a report by the Students Islamic Organisation of India made public on 23 June 2018. This alleged that “over three million will face deletion from the National Register of Citizens” purely on grounds of faith. Among those who have jumped on the Instant Citizenship bandwagon is S.R. Darapuri (former IGP, Uttar Pradesh), who released alarming figures about the situation in Assam on 13 July 2018. It must be added that several of those active in the Instant Citizenship campaign are unaware of the ISI’s involvement in parallel movements working with the same objective as themselves. Both Mander and Darapuri are sincere citizens who have somewhere along the line begun to believe that their government is unreliable and even dangerous. Darapuri in particular has a record of working in defence of the rights of the underprivileged even while he was in service, and before he became a leading supporter of the “Instant Citizenship” campaign, effectively on behalf of illegal migrants.
Meanwhile, the ISI is activating its growing number of India-specific modules to create violence and mayhem not only in Assam, but in nearby states once the NRC gets completed and made public. The intention is to inflame the situation on communal grounds so as to create mindsets calling for a fresh partition of what is left of India after the partition of 1947. This is despite the fact that almost as many Bangladeshi Hindus as Muslims will be left out of the NRC in Assam because their entry was illegal. Fake news is being deliberately manufactured to generate fears and tensions such that they may explode into violence, as a consequence of which it is expected that Government of India will instruct the Assam government to scrap the NRC, and regularise the flood of illegal immigrants the way more than 13 million have already found refuge, many in Bengal but in other states as well. The ISI operation to sabotage the NRC is hitting high gear, and Chief Minister Sarbananda Sonowal will, as a consequence, find it increasingly difficult to implement the pledge of his party to ensure that the NRC gets completed soon so that genuine citizens get separated from illegal settlers of whatever faith through proper identity papers.

The Roundtable: The idea of India (NewsX)

Friday 27 July 2018

Oil prices too high for fundamentals (Pakistan Observer)

July 27, 2018

Geopolitical Notes From India

M D Nalapat

IF any single gesture was designed — inadvertently or not — to further raise international oil prices beyond the already high levels reached during the past year, it was President Donald J Trump’s tweet threatening Iran with consequences far deadlier than anything that nation has faced before. For a country that endured a murderous war launched by Saddam Hussein (with various forms of assistance from the US and the UK), this was a threat too far. Till now, the security establishment in Tehran may have simply made a few alterations here and there to the war plans already on file in the event of hostilities launched by the US and its allies. After the Trump “threat tweet”, it is certain that the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) in particular must be working round the clock on blueprints designed to inflict as high a cost as possible on the US and its regional allies (mainly Israel and Saudi Arabia), should military action follow the tweet. However, such a kinetic rise in the tensions between Washington and Tehran is unlikely.

Donald Trump is a businessman, not a politician, and therefore can be expected to understand the disastrous consequences to the global economy were there to be a substantial escalation of an already simmering low intensity conflict between Iran and Israel in both Syria as well as Lebanon. This columnist warned more than once in speeches and in writing that Syria under Bashar Assad was not Iraq under Saddam Hussein or even Libya under Kaddafy. That the majority of the population of Syria preferred the Assad’s to the alternative on offer, which was militants backed by Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Turkey, the US and much of the EU.

This backing of such fighters by NATO and its allies did not stop even after Christians, Druze and Alawites were killed off in a systematic fashion by these “freedom fighters”, nor when some of them began to trickle into Europe so as to form modules there that could get activated at a suitable opportunity, the way it actually happened with several. Barack Obama tried to slow down the flow of assistance to such fighters, and was ridiculed by those in the US who favoured the same strategy as Qatar, Saudi Arabia and Turkey were pushing for. The ceaseless effort by the Washington Beltway and its Atlanticist core to reduce Trump to irrelevance notwithstanding, the 45th US President has quietly begun a process of disengagement from Syria, lest his military find itself in that country in the same morass that faulty tactics and over-confidence caused in Iraq and Afghanistan. Donald Trump’s overall policy towards global heat islands has been a mixture of Trumpian pragmatism and Bush-style zealousness, the latter largely a consequence of the fact that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel often proffers counsel on ways to deal with the Middle East, advice that Trump very often takes. On Iran, the US President and the Prime Minister of Israel are on the same page, in the process wiping out the gains made by moderates during the second term of President Barack Obama and strengthening hardline factions in much the same manner as Iraqi Head of State Saddam Hussein’s thoughtless adventure into Iran in 1980 did. Should hostilities erupt between Iran and the US and its allies, there will almost certainly be a complete takeover of power by hardliners in Teheran, not good new for either the US or Israel. Unlike in the case of Iraq or even Libya, the people of Iran have a fierce determination to protect their land against a military attack, and all bets will be off as a result, with such disasters as the stoppage of the Strait of Hormuz being among them.

A factor which would send oil prices to levels higher than what George W Bush made them through the measures he and Vice-President Cheney took in the Middle East. Of course, the huge profits that such spikes in price made to the oil majors based in Houston must have been a source of some satisfaction to the Bush family, whose relationship with the sticky liquid goes back a long way, although it would be unfair that Bush and Cheney launched the war with Iraq to send oil prices skyrocketing. The fact is that in the case of both Iran as well as Kuwait, Saddam Hussein showed himself to have a pathological streak that made him a danger to the stability of the region. There was therefore a sound case for overthrowing him by military means, in view of the fact that his hold on power was too strong for any other method of regime change ( such as that adopted in the case of Ukraine or Egypt) to work. What was wrong was not the war but the clumsy, colonial manner in which the occupation of Iraq by the US and its EU partners was carried out. Had the US done what this columnist advised Andrew Marshall in early 2004 at the Pentagon (to thin out and thereafter to confine US troops to safeguarding the borders of Iraq), subsequent disasters could have been avoided.

It was to the credit of Marshall – easily among the greatest military minds since Clausewitz and Vo Nguyen Giap – that he listened very carefully to the arguments made, summarizing it as a call for the US military to leave Iraq altogether, although US tactics changed not a whit thereafter. Instead, a myth was created that the “Surge” in troops “stabilized” the situation. The Fake News spewed out by the self-proclaimed Truth Brigade in the US (and substantially within its EU allies) has weaved a narrative which places almost the entire blame for the wounds inflicted on Iraq Libya and Afghanistan by prolonged US-EU occupation on the local people and leadership, omitting any serious mention of the errors made by the occupying forces.

Should President Trump’s innate pragmatism ( it was not an accident that he remained a billionaire through much of his business career) prevail over the counsel of the triumvirate of Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Israel, the “threat tweet” is unlikely to be followed up by steps which would be sen to be provocative enough to warrant a kinetic response by the IRGC, a force that has done more than any other to destroy Daesh in the lairs that were constructed for it by copious amounts of cash, training and weapons given by individuals and entities that have wholly escaped punishment for such a crime. Oil prices should be around $ 45 a barrel at most, based on fundamentals. The rest has been made up of manufactured crises and manipulation of perceptions in a world where oil is rapidly becoming a surplus commodity.

Thursday 26 July 2018

BRICS Look to Cooperation Amid Trade Wars (CGTN)



The leaders of BRICS nations are gathering in Johannesburg, South Africa for this year's annual summit. The theme is "collaboration for inclusive growth and shared prosperity in the fourth industrial revolution". They're looking for solutions while the world grapples with trade wars.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QP4oA0bi3Qw 

Monday 23 July 2018

Trump, the Washington Beltway and 'China's century' (UPI)

By M D Nalapat

It ought to have been a "no-brainer" that dialogue was essential between the United States and by far the largest geographical entity on earth, the Russian Federation, more so as the interests of both countries could through agreement intersect rather than collide.
The hysteria that surrounds any U.S. President Donald Trump outreach to Moscow became several decibels higher after the Trump-Vladimir Putin Helsinki summit. The charge first made by Hillary Clinton during the 2016 presidential campaign of Trump being a "Russian puppet" was repeated even by some members of the Republican Party, who were caught within the vortex of the Washington Beltway's campaign to either unseat or paralyze Trump.
Unsurprisingly, European powers such as Germany and France were the silent cheerleaders of an assault on the 45th U.S. president from within his own party, given that bad relations between Moscow and Washington are a precondition for the primacy of Europe over Asia in U.S. foreign policy, as has been the case since the present strategic construct followed across both sides of the Atlantic were fashioned in 1945.
Since then, while much may have changed across the globe, the mindset of the Atlanticist establishment has remained static. The overwhelming majority of those who depend for their "bread,butter and jam" on jobs within the administration or the think tanks and university departments surrounding U.S. policymakers face an existential threat, were a U.S. president to move away from an Atlanticist to an Indo-Pacific world, the way Trump has indicated will take place.

Trade war with China
He has followed up such an intention by launching a trade war on China, a country vital to personal and corporate bottom lines across commercial and political hubs in the United States. Small wonder that Helsinki has been used by them to create an atmosphere so toxic for Trump that he will henceforward concentrate only on golf and leave policy to what gets termed the "adults in the room," i.e., those anchored to Atlanticist policies that are by now not merely anachronistic but in many respects actually hostile to the interests of the United States.
Of course, this is on the assumption that it makes no sense for the United States to bear much of the cost of the artificial (since 1987, by which time Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev had reduced the glaciers of the Cold War to the size of a few ice cubes) presentation of Moscow as the enemy No. 1 of the United States when the only "threat" represented by that capital was to the primacy within Europe of the Franco-German alliance.

Since then, China has become a formidable competitor to U.S. influence even while contributing to U.S. affluence. Except to those clinging to the tattered logic in refusing to acknowledge that the world has changed since 1945, it is Beijing and not Moscow that represents the most potent threat to U.S. primacy. Trump's "crime" is that he has acted on this in a manner far more vigorous than any of his predecessors did. Bill Clinton and George W. Bush failed to match even 15 percent of their tough talk on China with substantive action, while Barack Obama, the Hamlet of the presidency, hovered on the brink of change without actually dipping into the water. Both on Russia (to appease the Atlanticist lobby in his pwn party) and on China, Trump has been far tougher than any of his predecessors of the 21st century.
However, this has not blocked the Beltway from seeking to put him down.
Trump's trade war on China was clearly the geopolitical trigger for the current paroxysms of outrage against the U.S. president. This is hurting wallets and bank accounts, or could do so, should Peter Navarro and John Bolton continue to have the ear of the president, more than committed Atlanticists such as James Mattis or Dan Coats. The summit with Putin has presented an opportunity for the Washington Beltway to try once again to either get Trump removed through the obliging Robert Mueller or ensure his participation in policy gets reduced to insignificance for the remainder of what they hope will be a single term in office.

Unlike Russia, which has almost no influence in Washington, China is a PR superpower in the United States. This continues a tradition going back more than a century. During the early part of the 20th century, newly republican China was an obsession with several in the United States, especially to missionaries who sought to "harvest souls" in that vast country. The takeover of power by Mao Zedong in 1949 temporarily set back relations between Washington and Beijing. So much so that Secretary of State John Foster Dulles suggested to Jawaharlal Nehru's sister Vijaylakshmi Pandit that India take the place of China as a permanent member of the U.N. Security Council, an offer Nehru spurned.
Even after the 1962 border conflict, India continued to back Communist China's claim to the U.N. Security Council and indeed to the United Nations itself, a desire that finally came through after the U.S.-China rapprochement scripted by Zhou Enlai and Richard Nixon. Since that time in the 1970s, China has evolved as a major presence in Washington and today enjoys enormous influence -- mostly through the corporate sector -- within the Beltway, the traditional repository of power within the U.S. governance system, now facing a challenge from Trump.
The U.S. president has for the first time since the 1970s made China a focus of hostile action, both on the military as well as the business front. Naval patrols have multiplied in the South China Sea, while defense relationships with India and Vietnam have been established. Most worrisome for Beijing, there is a growing confluence of military to military between the United States and the Republic of China, otherwise known as Taiwan. It is not accidental that the new U.S. mission in Taipei is much bigger than several of the embassies maintained across the globe by the State Department. In the field of business, for the first time since relations between China and the United States were re-established in force 43 years ago, a Trade War has been launched by Trump against Chinese manufacturers.
This step is proving to be immensely unpopular within business groups in the United States, several of whom look to China for markets and profit, the latter mainly through import of Chinese wares that are much cheaper than those of the nearest competitor. The fear is that Beijing will turn to Europe and to other parts of Asia for the purchase of items that until Trump's trade war were mostly sourced from the United States -- items ranging from soybeans to aircraft.
China's strategy
President Xi Jinping has put in place a finely calibrated strategy to persuade the Trump administration to call off economic hostilities against Chinese businesses. Imports of items produced in farm locations crucial to Republican Party control of the U.S. House of Representatives and Senate have been stopped. As a consequence, prices have dropped and farmers (most of who vote Republican) are angry just months before midterm elections to the U.S. Congress.
At the same time, the thousands of influential individuals who are in favor of good relations with Beijing have been exerting themselves lobbying against the president and his key advisers, many of whom believe that Washington can win a trade war with China if it holds its nerve for long enough. Peter Navarro and John Bolton in particular are of the view that Trump can replicate in the case of the Chinese Communist Party what Ronald Reagan did in the case of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, which was to force that organization to respond to U.S. moves in a way that accelerated an implosion in the Soviet economy.
However, the Washington Beltway is opposed to such moves, as it believes that the CCP is far more cohesive than the CPSU ever was, both ideologically and organizationally. Also that Xi is a much more formidable rival than the post-Stalin leaders of the Soviet Union ever were, especially during the years of Leonid Brezhnev, a mediocrity who ensured only others like him reached the top in the CPSU and hence the Soviet government.
The Beltway has doubled down in its efforts at weakening Trump into irrelevance if it cannot get him thrown out of office altogether, and the opportunity presented itself as a consequence of the meeting in Helsinki between Trump and Putin. In fact, whether it be on oil prices (which would moderate rather than boil) or on the security of Israel or stability in the Middle East, the Trump-Putin meeting and evident chemistry can only be helpful. However, the Beltway has spun the meeting as a "treasonous giveaway" to Moscow, without specifying what exactly was "given away." Panicked Republicans joined the Democrats in bad-mouthing Trump, weakening his ability to force the pace of change in Washington. The trade war with China was a bridge too far for Trump to cross, and the Beltway was waiting for an excuse to fire back at the president, a chance that presented itself because of the Helsinki summit as seen through the eyes of the Atlanticist lobby (for whom it is Moscow and not Beijing that poses the greatest threat to U.S. primacy).
The charge that Trump is a dupe of Putin is ridiculous. Were he so, rather than be overtly friendly to the Russian spymaster turned world leader, the U.S. president would have put on an act, so as to give the impression of hostility to both Putin, as well as to Russia. This would have been done to camouflage any links with a country that France, the U.K. and Germany desperately wish to see continued as the "no. 1 threat" to the United States, even at a time when the Russian economy has shrunk to the level of a Chinese province. The supremacy of Atlanticist (rather than Indo-Pacific) policies in Washington cannot continue unless Moscow is the primary foe.
The focus of the Trump administration on seeking to win over allies of Beijing, such as Moscow and Pyongyang, were distasteful to the Europe-centered political and media establishment in the United States, who have jointly made little secret of their desire to force the resignation or removal of Trump from the exalted office he was elected to. The skillfully created hubbub around the meeting with Putin is designed to so weaken Trump that he will be president in name only for the remainder of his term, given that even Mueller seems to be finding it difficult to concoct a case that Trump and Putin worked in tandem to rig the 2016 presidential contest. The expectation is that Trump will no longer have the horsepower to continue such "disruptive" actions as a trade war with China and will pull back from such a course, returning the U.S. establishment to a policy course first set in the stone of governance during 1945-47 but which has ceased to be relevant since the close of the 1990s.
The attack on Trump that is being witnessed over the Helsinki meeting is fueled by an urgency to ensure a rollback of the trade war with China, a commercial contest which could impact the balance sheets of several companies in the United States and cost Republicans the U.S. House and Senate as a consequence of the skillful retaliatory moves made by the Chinese side. Should the Washington Beltway succeed in closing the gate to reconciliation with Moscow, that capital will have no other option but to get ever closer to Beijing. A Chinese Century may yet come, not as a consequence of Trump, but despite him.

Sunday 22 July 2018

Saturday 21 July 2018

Two people arrested in the horrific incident of mob lynching in Alwar, Rajasthan (NewsX)



2 people have been arrested in the horrific incident of mob lynching in Alwar, Rajasthan. A man was beaten to death on the suspicion of cow smuggling by a group of villagers. Victim Akbar was a resident of Kolgaon in Haryana. A bizarre statement has come from union minister Arjun Ram Meghwal who has given the lynching a political twist. The minister said that the lynching are common in election season and are linked to the prime minister's popularity. The statement from the minister came a day after both prime minister and home minister condemned the incidents of lynching.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zsZHw7XlXcY 

First amend, then pass all Women’s Bills (Sunday Guardian)

By M D NALAPAT

Nehru’s diktat still holds sway that changes in Hindu personal laws are kosher, but changes in Muslim laws should be avoided in the name of ‘secularism’.


Modern competitive communalism did not begin in 1992 or 2014, but after the 1919 support of the Congress Party to the Ali brothers and their fanatic devotion to a dead cause, that of reviving the Turkish caliphate. Confining support to the radical fringe within the Muslim community is an error that is being repeated over and over in India, even to the present. Triple talaq, nikah halala and polygamy are clearly discriminatory to women, given that it would be close to impossible to find a human being on the planet who would have the capacity to treat entirely equally more than a single wife. It has become fashionable for some to label India “fascist” because its ruling party calls for a uniform civil code. However, they refuse to affix that label to the United States or the European Union, where laws do not permit more than a single spouse (in some countries, of whatever gender). Several parties object to the passage of legislation banning triple talaq, nikah halala and polygamy, as being “opposed to Muslim personal law”, while simultaneously asking for women of childbearing age to be permitted into the Sabarimala temple, overturning aspects of longstanding Hindu personal law. Nor do the “secularists” back the return of temples to civil society (as is the case with all other faiths) rather than remain with the state, or equalise across all communities participation in the education of the underprivileged through the Right to Education laws. Clearly, Jawaharlal Nehru’s diktat still holds sway, that changes in Hindu personal laws are kosher, but that changes in corresponding Muslim laws should be avoided in the name of “secularism”. Television talk-time and printers’ ink have been expended on perceived deviations from “secularism” in Gujarat since Narendra Modi became the Chief Minister of that state in 2001, but little about Jammu & Kashmir, a state where there is palpable discrimination against the state’s minorities (as also against moderate elements within the majority population of that border state). Far from erasing the toxic mindset that enabled Jinnah and Churchill to partition India on the insane ground that Hindus and Muslims formed “two nations”, the form of “secularism” followed since the Union Jack was banished across the subcontinent has kept the mischief of communal politics alive.
The words “Hindu” and “Muslim” have recently been reverberating across media outlets and in public discourse in our country with much greater frequency and vehemence than the appellation: Indian. For three years, the BJP blocked passage of the GST Bill while the UPA was in office, with the Congress repaying the gesture for the same period after the last Lok Sabha polls. Given that it will take 3-4 years for the wrinkles in such a major reform to get ironed out, it would have made sense for the BJP to have accepted the Congress Party’s 2014 suggestion that a flat 12% GST rate get fixed rather than the multiple rates that were finally decided upon, so that the measure got passed before the close of 2015. The 2019 elections would have taken place after (and not as now, before) the GST system began to work with the features and efficiency only trial and error can ensure. As for the Triple Talaq Bill, jailing a delinquent husband mandatorily makes much less sense than (a) leaving such a decision to the wife who has been the victim of the practice, and (b) that only if the husband did not make sufficient financial restitution for the spouse and her children for life. Should he resile from the obligations of (b) at any stage, only at that point should a prison term get enforced. This too only when the initiation of prosecution fails to make the husband (or ex-husband) resume fulfilment of his financial obligations to the complainant and her children. Prime Minister Modi needs to avoid the Sibal-Chidambaram path of regarding harsher and harsher penal provisions as a quick fix “solution” to problems, the way his Law Ministry is presently recommending with reference to the current law against molestation of children. The Sibal-Chidambaram tightening of rape law (and the introduction of laws against molestation of females that are easily susceptible to misuse by either former romantic or spousal partners or by policemen looking for bribes) has done little to reduce the incidence of rape and harassment of women in India. In this context, it is logically a stretch to entertain the claim that members of a faith nearing the 200 million mark within the country are in “imminent danger”, when even the tiny Parsi community in India feels no sense of threat. Skilfully created perceptions of threat and separateness are what facilitated an event that has most harmed the Muslim community in the subcontinent, the 1947 partition. The tiny proportion of Muslims who are Wahhabi seek to enforce their practices and mindsets across what is still a vibrant and moderate community, and seek to label as threats to all Muslims any fight-back against Wahhabi practices.
As for the Women’s Reservation Bill, this needs to get redrafted so as to expand the number of MPs by making a third of constituencies double-member. In such seats, the female candidate (or candidates, if both the first and second positions are held by women) getting the most number of votes should also get into Parliament, even if this number be much below that secured by the male candidate getting the highest number of votes in the contest. Seating in the Lok Sabha and the Rajya Sabha should follow the “seamless seat” system prevalent in the UK, besides doing away with half the exit corridors. Such alterations would permit the additional MPs to find seating within the RS and LS chambers. The Triple Talaq, Nikah Halala and Polygamy Abolition Bills should get passed after suitable amendments have been made, as should a suitably reworked Women’s Reservation Bill. Hopefully, a time will come when civil society has at least as big a role in the drafting of legislation as those who rule over them through the same laws and administrative practices brought into India during Queen Victoria’s time.

Friday 20 July 2018

Beltway punishes Trump for China with Russia (Pakistan Observer)

July 20, 2018

Geopolitical Notes From India

M D Nalapat

DURING the early part of the 20th century, newly republican China was an obsession with several in the US, especially to missionaries who sought to “harvest souls” in that vast country. The takeover of power by Mao Zedong in 1949 temporarily set relations between Washington and Beijing back. So much so that Secretary of State John Foster Dulles suggested to Jawaharlal Nehru’s sister Vijaylakshmi Pandit that India take the place of China as a Permanent Member of the UN Security Council, an offer Nehru spurned. Even after the 1962 border conflict, India continued to back Communist China’s claim to the UN Security Council and indeed to the UN itself, a desire which finally came through after the US-China rapprochement scripted by Zhou Enlai and Richard Nixon.Since that time in the 1970s, China has evolved as a major presence in Washington, and today enjoys enormous influence – mostly through the corporate sector – within the Beltway, the traditional repository of power within the US governance system, now facing a challenge from Donald Trump.

The US President has for the first time since the 1970s made China a focus of hostile action both on the military as well as the business front. Naval patrols have multiplied in the South China Sea, while defense relationships with India and Vietnam have been established. Most worrisome for Beijing, there is a growing confluence of military to military between the US and the Republic of China (RoC), otherwise known as Taiwan. It is not accidental that the new US mission in Taipei is much bigger than several of the embassies maintained across the globe by the State Department. In the field of business, for the first time since relations between China and the US were re-established in force forty three years ago, a Trade War has been launched by President Trump against Chinese manufacturers. This step is proving to be immensely unpopular within business groups in the US, several of whom look to China for markets and profit, the latter mainly through import of Chinese wares that are much cheaper than those of the nearest competitor. The fear is that Beijing will turn to Europe and to other parts of Asia for the purchase of items that till Trump’s trade war were mostly sourced from the US, items ranging from soybeans to aircraft.

President Xi Jinping has put in place a finely calibrated strategy to persuade the Trump administration to call of economic hostilities against Chinese businesses. Imports of items produced in farm locations crucial to Republican Party control of the US House of Representatives and Senate have been stopped. As a consequence, prices have dropped and farmers (most of who vote Republican) are angry just months before mid-term elections to the US Congress. At the same time, the thousands of influential individuals who are in favour of good relations with Beijing have been exerting themselves lobbying against the President and his key advisors, many of whom believe that Washington can win a trade war with China if it holds its nerve for long enough. Peter Navarro and John Bolton in particular are of the view that Trump can replicate in the case of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) what Ronald Reagan did in the case of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU), which was to force that organisation to respond to US moves in a way that accelerated an implosion in the Soviet economy.

However, the Washington Beltway is opposed to such moves, as it believes that the CCP is far more cohesive than the CPSU ever was, both ideologically and organisationally. Also that Xi Jinping is a much more formidable rival than the post-Stalin leaders of the Soviet Union ever were, especially during the years of Leonid Brezhnev, a mediocrity who ensured only others like him reached the top in the CPSU and hence the Soviet government. The Beltway has doubled down in its efforts at weakening Trump into irrelevance if it cannot get him thrown out of office altogether, and the opportunity presented itself as a consequence of the meeting in Helsinki between Trump and Vladimir Putin. In fact, whether it be on oil prices (which would moderate rather than boil) or on the security of Israel or stability in the Middle East, the Trump-Putin meeting and evident chemistry can only be helpful. However, the Beltway has spun the meeting as a “treasonous giveaway” to Moscow, without specifying what exactly was “given away”. Panicked Republicans joined the Democrats in bad-mouthing Trump, weakening his ability to force the pace of change in Washington. The trade war with China was a bridge too far for Trump to cross, and the Beltway was waiting for an excuse to fire back at the 45th President of the US, a chance that presented itself because of the Helsinki summit. The charge that Trump is a dupe of Putin is ridiculous.Were he so, rather than be overtly friendly to the Russian spymaster turned world leader, the US President would have put on an act, seeming to be hostile to both Putin as well as to Russia. This would have been done to camouflage his actual links with a country that France,the UK and Germany desperately wish to see continued as the “Number One Threat” to the US, even at a time when the Russian economy has shrunk to the level of a Chinese province. The supremacy of Atlanticist (rather than Indo-Pacific) policies in Washington cannot continue unless Moscow is the primary foe. The focus of the Trump administration on seeking to win over allies of Beijing such as Moscow and Pyongyang were distasteful to the Europe-centred political and media establishment in the US, who have jointly made little secret of their desire to force the resignation or removal of President Trump from the exalted office he was elected to.

The skilfully created hubbub around the meeting with Putin is designed to so weaken Trump that he will be President in name only for the remainder of his term, given that even Robert Mueller seems to be finding it difficult to concoct a case that Trump and Putin worked in tandem to rig the 2016 Presidential contest. The expectation is that Trump will no longer have the horsepower to continue such “disruptive” actions as a trade war with China, and will pull back from such a course, returning the US establishment to a policy course first set in the stone of governance during 1945-47 but which has ceased to be relevant since the close of the 1990s. The attack on Trump that is being witnessed over the Helsinki meeting is fuelled by an urgency to ensure a rollback of the trade war with China, a commercial contest which could impact the balance sheets of several companies in US and cost Republicans US House and Senate as a consequence of skilful retaliatory moves made by Chinese side. Should Beltway succeed in closing gate to reconciliation with Moscow, that capital will have no other option but to get ever closer to Beijing. A Chinese Century may yet come, not as a consequence of Trump but despite him.

https://pakobserver.net/beltway-punishes-trump-for-china-with-russia/

Thursday 19 July 2018

Rahul Gandhi VS PM Modi Parliament Speech War On Friday Over No-Trust (NewsX)



Come tomorrow all eyes will be on the no confidence motion that will be taken up against the Modi Government-the first in 15 years. Since the numbers are firmly stacked in favour of the Bjp, its almost a given that the motion will be defeated. On the eve of the no confidence vote, we discuss why is it so crucial for both sides. While the bjp is using the opportunity to reach out to all its disgruntled allies and the pm will fully utilise the chance of launching into poll pitch from Lok Sabha. For the opposition it’s a unique chance to show a united face, to put the government on the mat on contentious issues like lynching, atrocities on Dalits and rise in money of Indians parked in Swiss banks and above all it will give congress president Rahul Gandhi a chance to display his oratory skills and match up to PM Modi. That’s our big debate on nation @9, will battle lines for 2019 be clearly drawn tomorrow and the stance of regional parties would be the big takeaway of the no confidence vote? Will this allow the NDA to drive home the point that despite the numbers it was the opposition that didn’t allow it to get down the legislative business and above all could it also show that BJP has some cracks within.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sr6vPRFuBxo&feature=youtu.be 

Dr. Swamy, Prof. M D Nalapat and Sree Iyer in NewsX on the Chidambaram Aircel-Maxis scam (PGurus/NewsX)



1. Sree Iyer, would like to know whether the Finance Ministry accepted the offer of the US Government in getting software tools to track money going in and out of tax havens. The offer was made in 2014 to both the UPA and NDA governments.

2. Dr. Swamy wanted to know when the government would act against Chidambaram for having "Top Secret Papers" for the Supreme Court prepared by the CBI

3. Prof. Nalapat alleged that Mr. Chidambaram could be scheming with some corrupt brokers to crash the Stock Markets of India and cautioned that everyone should be careful on where they are investing.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Su5mucgF-qE 

Saturday 14 July 2018

Officials look to PM Modi to rescue economy from toxic cabal (Sunday Guardian)

By M D Nalapat 

‘Banks and exchanges being hollowed out by mega scamsters.’


Economic Advisor to the Ministry of Finance, Arvind Subramanian, who gained fame in the United States by calling for harsh sanctions against India over pharma policy just before he landed as a high powered resident in the Lutyens Zone, seems to be auditioning for an enhanced role in what he clearly expects will be a new government by end-May 2019. He is suddenly waxing eloquent on the pitfalls of both GST as well as DeMo. Several others in the bureaucracy are also getting back in touch, albeit more silently, with their old masters, ready to serve the nation post poll.(1) Economic growth (2) cleanup of corruption and (3) protecting national security; these are the three reasons why the Narendra Modi-led BJP secured a majority in the Lok Sabha in 2014. Since then, growth has been good, but below Modi-fied expectations, while not a single UPA-era VVIP has been prosecuted for graft or other forms of misfeasance, even while the situation in Kashmir and on the western border remains unsettled. Prime Minister Narendra Modi effectively has less than five months to reverse a mood of spreading disenchantment with his government, so as to prevent Arvind Subramanian’s gamble on the Opposition winning the 2019 LS polls from becoming a reality. The expectation is that the Economic Advisor’s planned “tell-all” book on the Modi government will reach bookstores well before polling for the Lok Sabha. As for the existing government, growth rates in the short run are difficult to change, but on the anti-corruption front, there is talk among a few officials that a PM-led major drive against “mega corruption” may get launched shortly. However, success in this may be affected by the sabotage tactics of the many officials who have been associated with past misdeeds but who still retain influential positions within the post-2014 government. This persistence of high-level corrupt officials is resulting in the creation of a growing threat to the stability of India. The present situation is not optimal for the economy, as two engines of growth, the banking system as well as stock exchanges, are experiencing problems related to their misuse by crony capitalists and their political and official patrons, especially after the 2009 Lok Sabha polls. Unmolested by the CBI, ED or DRI, several politicians and former officials from India repeatedly visit the Swiss financial hub of Zurich, a recent example being that of a former Union Minister of Finance, who wore a pair of trousers rather than his traditional southern attire. Dubai and Singapore are the other locations to where frequent visits by top Indian politicians and former Indian officials (as well as family members of serving officials) get made. These three cities (together with London, Mumbai and Delhi) form the operational headquarters of a cabal of financial carpetbaggers that has been operating in India since 2003, whose purpose is to cull out tens of billions of unaccounted dollars through systematic gaming of both banks as well as stock exchanges in India, the two pools of capital that entrepreneurs need to go to for their production needs.
THE ‘HIDDEN’ HAND
By 2005, the Carpetbagger Cabal had refined its tactics and begun functioning in a 24/7 mode, although the deleterious effects of their termite-like activities began showing in the economy only around 2009, the year when the UPA won a fresh term in office on the back of a stellar economic performance during the previous five years that was the result of decisions going back to 1992, but which began to be systematically reversed from 2007 onwards without much blowback from the “pink” press. During 2004-2006, the proportion of influence of Sonia Gandhi and Manmohan Singh on economic policy was about 30:70 in the Prime Minister’s favour. The Congress president deferred during that period to the individual she had chosen to head the government, at least so far as the economy was concerned. By 2007, however, the cry from Congress party treasurer, Motilal Vora, for large supplies of oxygen to fuel the 2009 Parliamentary election campaign witnessed a steady lowering of the share of Manmohan Singh in economic decisions, including those relating to allocation of resources such as coal and spectrum. Increasingly, key officers in the Prime Minister’s Office (augmented by 10 Janpath loyalists) were informally told to “do what was needed” to generate oxygen for the polls. These commands, couched in the language of requests, were in the form of both telephone calls as well as unsigned chits from the handful of individuals known within South and North Blocks to enjoy the complete trust of 10 Janpath. The economist turned Prime Minister, aware that seeking to get back his former influence would be a lost cause, concentrated his attentions on the 2005 nuclear agreement he had worked out with US President George W. Bush, finally witnessing its triumph in 2008. By the time he took office once again in 2009, the share of Prime Minister Manmohan Singh in economic decision-making was negligible, and it showed in the type and quality of decisions taken during UPA II.
CARPETBAGGERS
The modus operandi of the cabal (which was led by a senior politician) was simple, and involved (a) the looting of commercial banks by forcing them to give loans to individuals who had zero intention of repaying such advances, and (b) manipulating selected stock prices through deployment of Participatory Notes (PNs), selling out just before their own artificially created stock bubbles burst. The holders of the soon to depreciate stock would either be government financial entities or small investors, including those who had placed their trust in mutual funds remote controlled by the cabal. Such ostensibly “independent” funds would join the public financial institutions’ and small investors’ queue in buying up stock offerings while they were at their cabal-created price peaks. The stock exchange scams of the A.B. Vajpayee government helped send off the BJP to the Opposition benches in 2004 and assisted the BJP’s return to office in 2014. It cannot be forgotten that PNs were first launched by the Vajpayee government and later made totally anonymous by P. Chidambaram. Unwisely and perhaps intentionally, the holders of PNs were given exemption from capital gains tax if routed through Mauritius. Worse, they were allowed to take the capital invested (as well as profits made) back entirely in US dollars, rather than in rupees, as ought to have been the case. Given that the cabal is still operating in 2018 with much of its potency intact, it would be a simple task for them to create stock market gyrations of such velocity close to the 2019 polls that the BJP’s prospects would once again get severely impacted as in 2004. This would come on top of the dent already created in the rural vote by the manner in which the currency reforms announced on 8 November 2016 were implemented, and which dampening effect the higher MSP prices announced by the Central government are unlikely to change. Although several warnings have been sounded in the past about the financial carpetbagger cabal, thus far regulatory and investigative agencies have looked the other way, or made only token gestures that have had near zero effect on the cabal’s operations. During the UPA-era tenure of M. Damodaran as SEBI Chairman, officials say that he drew the attention of the Prime Minister’s Office to the manner in which a small group of hyper-greedy individuals led by a senior Union Cabinet minister was “talking markets up or down” and indulging in other insider manipulation to enable a designated group of investors and brokers to make windfall profits at the expense of other investors and public institutions. Rather than take this warning seriously, the PMO allowed the Union Ministry of Finance to persuade it to drop Damodaran as SEBI chief in 2008. Prime Minister Manmohan Singh had to give way to Finance Minister P. Chidambaram, who was adamant that Damodaran be shown the door. The no-nonsense official was replaced with Chandu Bhave, who at the time of his appointment as head of SEBI had an enquiry pending against him by the same agency. Later, a whistle-blower brought out into the public domain some aspects of the operations of the cabal, this when U.K. Sinha was heading SEBI. Interestingly, while a SEBI member attempted to make a serious enquiry into the allegations (which had been largely confirmed by an examination of the data by IIT), he was not re-appointed to his post, despite being in the middle of his enquiry into insider manipulation of stock prices, as well as being eligible for such an extension of service.
It needs to be reiterated that the investigative agencies have thus far not come up with any names of the carpetbaggers’ cabal. Hence, linking the cabal with any individual or group of individuals would be premature.
COMPLETE LACK OF ACTION
Financial experts point out that a group of unscrupulous carpetbaggers (they cannot be called “investors” as there is almost zero risk of their not making illicit gains from their manipulative insider information tactics) made billions of US dollars of profit at the expense of public financial institutions and retail investors. Part of this would return to India in the form of Participatory Notes (PNs), while the rest would be deployed in buying assets abroad. Interestingly, US Treasury Secretary Jack Lew, in 2014, offered the Government of India full details of financial transactions made by citizens of India through the global banking network. Taking advantage of this offer would have led to the discovery of numerous transactions that would have escaped tax in India. According to individuals in positions of authority in Washington, the Government of India is yet to respond to this offer. The Cayman Islands, Mauritius, Singapore, Dubai and other “safe havens” are almost wholly transparent to the Treasury Department of the United States. An exception is territory controlled by the People’s Republic of China, such as Macau or Hong Kong, as the PRC is—along with Russia—big enough to ignore when desired any requests for information made by the US. However, the warming relations between Prime Minister Modi and President Xi Jinping will make it easy for North Block to gain access to those individuals from India who have funnelled cash to locations controlled directly or otherwise by Beijing. Similarly, the Prime Minister may be expected to get a high degree of cooperation from London so far as an examination of offshore accounts controlled from that city is concerned. As yet, however, investigative agencies are going about the enquiry in what can only be described as a wholly unsatisfactory way. For example, although former Finance Minister P. Chidambaram was twice questioned by the ED, thus far there has not even been an attempt by the agency to check out in foreign locations such as London reports of property there. Essentially, the same financial data are with the ED that got discovered two years ago, despite occasional publicity about the matter through leaks by officials within the ED connected with the “investigation”. Coming to co-location, the scam affecting the National Stock Exchange (NSE), permission was granted in 2010 for such a close and unprecedented juxtaposition of brokerage servers next to those of the exchange. SEBI gave permission in the record time of a month for reasons yet to be ascertained. Immediately, several “carpetbagger funds” (i.e. those that sought to gouge out profit from the market using whatever methods they fancied (and which were illegal in the US) at the expense of small investors and public financial institutions. Several brokerage firms set up servers next to those of the NSE, but some got data faster than others. Such a difference in speed was probably illegal, as was possibly the 2012 decision of the exchange to allow brokerage firms to locate servers close to the backup servers of the NSE. Forget about serious investigation of any of such actions, even the relevant logs of the NSE have yet to be seized by the CBI, thereby giving those elements in the exchange who may have been involved in wrongdoing enough opportunity to alter records and delete logs. Such a lack of action is unprecedented in the financial world of London or New York, but seems commonplace in India. Given such lethargy, it will be a herculean task for the Modi government to build a sufficient case on a matter that has raised eyebrows across the world’s financial markets and given a handle to those who cast doubt on the integrity of exchanges in India.
‘NIRAV MODI, A LAUNDERER’
Global financial entities had raised eyebrows when India (during the UPA period) worked out an agreement with the Swiss authorities to reveal details of accounts parked in that country that was only prospective rather than retrospective. This allowed countless depredators to escape detection. Financial circles in Zurich say that a substantial proportion of the moneys parked by Indian citizens and their nominees (usually close relatives who have in a systematic way acquired citizenship in foreign countries solely for the purpose of being receptacles of illicit wealth generated in India) subsequently were withdrawn and expended on properties and other assets across the globe, including in India through PNs. Interestingly, individuals in London and New York familiar with the trade say that Nirav Modi was a “money launderer for the rich and powerful par excellence”. They claim that he would sell fake gems to individuals at inflated prices and then repay them through making deposits in offshore entities. Some years ago, he and his associates had their eye on temple gems. It must be added that the valuables in several state-run temples in India are negligible in amount, despite centuries of donations by believers. This is because of organised loot of such temples over decades by gangs having high-level patronage and which are still active. It is expected that the Narendra Modi government will institute an enquiry into the theft of temple jewels and idols across India and their sale in the relevant markets across the globe. This should also include a fullscope examination of the contacts and activities of Nirav Modi and Mehul Choksi since 2007, together with others who have played footsie with the wealth of the country, including in its temples.
CHIDAMBARAM’S CIRCLE
The public will have to await the findings of the numerous agencies which are looking into the activities of the secretive cabal. Although several officials claim that former Finance Minister P. Chidambaram was at the centre of “several activities involving both banks as well as stock exchanges” during his tenure in office, as yet the agencies whose job it is to monitor such activities have not come up with conclusive findings. Hence, it would be improper to place the finger of suspicion on the former minister or his friends and associates. What is, however, clear is that Chidambaram had enormous clout within the UPA (even prevailing over the Prime Minister himself in the matter of the refusal to extend the tenure of M. Damodaran as SEBI Chairman, besides numerous other similar victories of placement of favourites in key slots). He drew around himself a circle of officials who were in touch with him as well as with each other. These included Arvind Mayaram, K.P. Krishnan, Raghuram Rajan, S.K. Das, C.B. Bhave, Ramesh Abhishek, Ashok Chawla, D.K. Mittal, Arbind Modi, U.K. Sinha, Sindhushree Khullar, Amitabh Verma, T.S. Vijayan, Vinod Rai (who remained close to Chidambaram despite sending damning reports on the UPA regime as CAG) and K.V. Chaudhary. Outside the government, the suave Union Minister for Finance had confidants of the eminence of Deepak Parekh, Ravi Narayan, Chitra Ramakrishna, Uday Kotak, Ajay Shah, Vijay Kelkar, Susan Thomas, Sunita Thomas, Suprabhat Lala and Amitabh Jhunjhunwala, together with others close to the group around the former Finance Minister. The heads of key global and domestic financial institutions were also part of his orbit. Chidambaram moved between the official and non-official world with ease, even as they moved together with each other. NIPFP’s Ajay Shah, for example, was regarded by senior North Block officials as being the de facto Economic Advisor to the Finance Minister from September 2013 (the time when Raghuram Rajan was made RBI Governor) till the time that Narendra Modi was sworn in as Prime Minister on 26 May 2014. Even earlier, Shah was a regular visitor to the office of Ila Patnaik, who for a time was Principal Economic Advisor in the Finance Ministry. Thus far, the agencies seem to have decided not to intensively question him, much less book him for several charges that have been laid at his door, but which are all emphatically denied not only by Ajay Shah but by his supportive (and powerful) boss, NIPFP chief Vijay Kelkar. Even after Union Cabinet notes (some relating to budget proposals) were mentioned by officials as having been found on his personal computer, Shah remains free to travel across the globe. It may be added that several individuals under investigation have been given permission to go abroad, from where they have created multiple alternative entities to hold legal ownership of the assets they have accumulated abroad. Small wonder that the SIT has come up with so little after so long.
SET UP MORE SITS
Should North Block be ordered by the PMO to take advantage of the offer made in 2014 itself and request the US Treasury Department to assist in locating the sources of such asset purchases, several individuals may find themselves in trouble with the law. Although exposing such mega financial crimes would be of immense help to the BJP in the 2019 Lok Sabha campaign, officers close to those guilty of wrongdoing appear to be going ultra slow on their enquiries, or diverting the investigation into irrelevant or insignificant channels, expecting that such “good work” (by not working) will stand them in good stead should the BJP tally crash in the coming polls as a consequence of economic woes. A method of collecting cash safely and quickly is to sell equity at lower than possible prices to brokers through PNs, who will give back the balance in cash in India. This route is favoured by politicians during elections, and each knows trusted brokers who can be expected to make deliveries of cash despite the eagle eye of the Revenue authorities. Thus far, none of these brokers have faced any other than token investigations into their operations. Their being linked to offshore funds ensures ease of money laundering, a factor that hopefully will come to the attention of the SIT during one of its sittings. The SIT represents the crown jewel of the Modi government’s battle against corruption and the holding of black money, but there are suggestions that more SITs need to be set up, this time including outside experts of known integrity.
THE FIXER AND FRIENDS
Thus far, serving officials whose identities have yet to be revealed have ensured that the enquiry into the alleged co-location shenanigans in the National Stock Exchange (NSE) has gone nowhere. A top UPA-era politician (whose name is not being mentioned as the agencies seem to be hesitant to move against him) is calculated by bureaucrats, who had worked with him, as having made Rs 35,000 crore in illicit stock market trading profits through this method alone. This long-serving politician (who had on several occasions held Cabinet-level posts) ensured for reasons of protection and future immunity that other VVIPs from multiple parties (both ruling and opposition) share in the booty generated by cheating small investors (and small depositors in public financial institutions), some of them earning several thousand crore rupees each through insider rigging. Those who took advantage of the co-location scam to make windfall profits (which officials attached to the UPA-era politician helped shepherd through the international banking system) and who are now in high office have an interest in ensuring that the co-location and associated stock fixing cases go nowhere, as they (and the concerned officials, many of whom are still in high positions) would get exposed were the facts to ever come to light. However, a few admirers of Narendra Modi say that it is “only a matter of time before the Prime Minister pays attention to the NSE co-location scam” and ensures through the PMO that the “facts tumble out, no matter who gets affected”, whether the wrongdoers be friend or foe. As the Lok Sabha election nears, unless much more success has been registered in the campaign against corruption than the scanty results achieved by the several sittings of the “Anti-Black Money” SIT, the BJP will be on the back foot when the party seeks to remind voters of UPA-era corruption. The question from voters in case no major activity on the VVIP corruption front takes place in the next few months will be: if the UPA leadership was so corrupt, how come none of them are in jail or have even been the subject of an FIR by the post-2014 government?
CO-LOCATION CABAL
Thus far the investigative agencies have yet to seriously look into the charges against financial mastermind Ajay Shah, his wife and his in-laws. Allegations are multiplying that Shah was the mastermind of the co-location imbroglio, and (in the words of a senior Finance Ministry official) “misused data he had obtained from NSE (owing to his closeness to Kelkar, who was then its head) to assist firms controlled by close relatives to create algorithms and other software that would be given for use to select brokers. The internet servers of these brokers would be placed cheek by jowl with NSE’s own servers, thereby enabling chosen brokers to “get a time advantage through HFT and dark fibre” while striking deals. Data was secretly exchanged regularly between Mumbai and Singapore in a manner that enabled huge profits to be made out of funds that flowed in from offshore havens (mostly through the Mauritius route), and which gave a significant advantage to those brokers who were participants in the scam. Although names of such brokers have yet to be officially confirmed by the agencies, that somehow have yet not recognised the magnitude of the fraud, brokers who were a part of the Co-location Cabal are well-known within the profession. Major competitors were killed off by use of the discretionary power available to officials in India’s Victorian-era governance system. However, such misuse of the public trust has not prevented these officials from getting promotion upon promotion, including in the present dispensation, some of whose senior officials seem to be covering up for their brother (and sister) officers by not bringing to the PMO’s attention the manner in which stock markets and exchanges have been getting converted into insider trading and money laundering havens at the cost of the investing public
STRICT ACTION NEEDED
In August 2013, a senior official met The Sunday Guardian in the pre-dawn hours near an airport and gave details of how a senior minister was “talking the currency up or down, depending on what was needed for his speculative positions”. This was done in tandem with a “very senior person” in the RBI. The rupee had indeed been gyrating unusually during that period, mostly in a downward direction as the cabal were “shorting” the rupee. While “more than US $2 billion was made by those behind the induced currency volatility”, the losers were exporters, importers and the economy in general. Once The Sunday Guardian wrote about this, the volatility ceased from the next trading onwards, and the value of the rupee stabilised. However, officials warn that “the same set of currency manipulators are at work again” shorting the rupee yet again for illicit gain and causing it to lose value to a level not warranted by the fundamentals, but which is “perfect for huge profits by the corrupt cabal and their international money managers”. Not to mention those who hold large amounts of hard currency in offshore havens, and transfer parts of that stock to India via Participatory Notes invested in stock markets and in other assets. Neither the banking NPA meltdown nor the insider stock trading issues have been seriously examined by agencies whose remit is to protect the country from external and domestic depredators. Honest and patriotic officials (and they form the large majority even at senior levels of the bureaucracy) are hopeful that Prime Minister Modi will “go beyond the briefs placed before him by officials” (many of whom are friends of those involved in the scams mentioned, and therefore may be pre-disposed to regard the entire basket of wrongdoing as a “conspiracy theory”) and initiate “strict action”, including against not just VIPs but VVIPs, some of whom may belong to his own or allied parties. Unless this be done, the warning is that neither the banking system nor the stock exchanges can get cleansed of the rot that has infected them since the 1990s, thereby slowing growth to a level even below present rates, which are themselves below the rates achieved under UPA I.

In conversation with an Economist Prof. Nalapat - Can a Stock Market Crash be engineered? (PGurus)



Can a Stock Market Crash be engineered? It is a real possibility as many high net worth individuals have stashed their ill-gotten wealth via Participatory Notes into India's Stock markets and select scrips and can engineer a crash at will. What is the investor to do? Especially if he/ she has SIP

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z_kG3GTitow 

Friday 13 July 2018

Republican fringe may cost Trump 2020 election (Pakistan Observer)

July 13, 2018

Geopolitical Notes From India
M D Nalapat
MONTHS before US Senator Bernie Sanders was through rigging to lose the contest for the Democratic Party Presidential nomination by Hillary Clinton and her Wall Street and Beltway backers, this columnist forecast that Donald Trump would lose to Bernie Sanders but prevail against Clinton. This the New York construction magnate did on November 8, 2916, the same day Prime Minister Narendra Modi made the most electorally consequential decision of his term, the replacement of Rs 1000 notes with newly designed Rs 2000 notes, part from changes in the shape and colour of Rs 500 notes. Unfortunately for India’s PM, officials chosen to man the Reserve Bank of India and the Union Ministry of Finance failed to implement the changeover efficiently.

As a consequence, the economy was badly affected through a collapse of liquidity for more than a year, while the impact of the “DeMo” measure on corruption was negligible. Senior officials claim that there is a reason why the RBI has yet to reveal the value of demonetised currency notes exchanged for new notes in banks. This is that the value of notes submitted to the banking system was more ( the figure mentioned by them seems incredible, so huge is the sum) than the value of legal notes in circulation. In other words, holders of fake notes enjoyed a bonanza after November 8,2016 by exchanging dud cash for real. Hopefully the RBI will prove this wrong by releasing the actual figures of old currency notes deposited in the banking system post demonetisations In much the same way as Modi is paying for the missteps of some in his team, many of those chosen by President Trump have been making errors in approach and policy to social issues. Such errors are cumulatively smoothening the way towards the victory in the 2020 Presidential elections of a Democratic Party candidate in sync with the policies favoured by the idealistic and incorruptible Senator Bernie Sanders. Trump’s opponent may get elected as the 46th President of the United States because of the regressive social policies favoured by the Republican Party, which has travelled a long way from the idealism of Abraham Lincoln. The Democratic Party candidate may even be Sanders himself, who retains enormous goodwill among voters despite his acting as an election agent for Hillary Clinton in the final weeks of the 2016 campaign despite the way in which he was cheated of the nomination by Clinton. New York, the state to which Trump belongs, is a liberal enclave, and yet Team Trump is on social issues (including education) probably the most reactionary of any US administration since that formed during Ronald Reagan’s first term.

The Republican Party has made the essentially liberal Trump take stands that resonate solely to a dwindling minority of conservative euro-ethnic voters. An example of such toxic policies is the morally reprehensible if legally tenable (forcible and often permanent) separation of thousands of non-euro parents from their children at US border posts. Had Trump listened to Melania and Ivanka rather than to Mitch McConnell in the matter of separating families. Or had he taken his predecessor’s advice and retained Obamacare after making a few changes and renaming it as Trumpcare, both he as well as the Republican Party would have gained. However, the latter is in danger of being made a serial loser because of the extreme elements within it that are seeking to impose a “Hard White, Hard Right” social agenda on a country that is increasingly becoming more tolerant and liberal. This is despite decades of bad policy crafted by the Wall Street-Beltway partnership on the lives of those US citizens who are not millionaires.

Trump is opposing the Republican conservatives in some fields, such as in his trade war with China, but are backing them in in social policy to his own detriment Experts on the subject claim that Judge Brett Kavanaugh, President Trump’s choice to replace Justice Anthony Kennedy, has a mindset certain to overturn Rose v Wade, the Supreme Court judgment which legalised abortion across the US. Kavanaugh has never hidden his Republican affiliations, nor his conservative social views. His champions say that Kavanaugh is among those who were sympathetic to the ironically-named “Right to Life” Irish authorities who denied Savita Halappanavar her request to terminate the pregnancy that subsequently killed her. However, justices of the US Supreme Court have often surprised their backers by adopting stances different from what they back, and it may be that this lifelong Republican jurist may understand the societal uproar – indeed civil war – that would be caused by the Supreme Court overturning Roe v Wade, and desist from backing such a move should he take office as an Associate Justice of the US Supreme Court.

However, the apprehension that the judge may provide a majority to existing anti-abortion justices on the court make it certain that there will be a contentious confirmation hearing in the US Senate Whether Judge Kavanaugh gets confirmed or not, there may be several defections from his camp to the newly liberalising Democratic Party from within the majority of Euro-ethnic women who voted against Hillary Clinton for Donald Trump. After all, Bernie Sanders is certainly against the Wall Street-Beltway crowd and they against him. Keeping happy the minority “hard right hard white” voters may result in millions of votes moving away from Trump and his party. Both Trump and Modi have in their social policies concentrated on their hardcore base, without considering the fact that such votes would anyway go to them, but that by succumbing to the wishes of their respective fringes so completely in social policy, they are losing the “moderate middle” whose votes are crucial to victory in elections scheduled to take place in both of the world’s biggest democracies in a few months time.

https://pakobserver.net/republican-fringe-may-cost-trump-2020-election/ 

Thursday 12 July 2018

Prof. Nalapat on Pak Elections - Sharif the Punjabi will fight Imran a Pak Army proxy (PGurus)



For perhaps the first time, the Punjab political family is going up against the Punjabi-dominated army. Will this be beginning of the collapse of Pakistan? A must watch!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=59s_AIiRAIQ&app=desktop 

Saturday 7 July 2018

Minimum Government is decades overdue (Sunday Guardian)

M D Nalapat

‘Hanging’ the gun used in a murder is about as logical a punishment as it is to try and choke off the few freedoms available to social media platforms in India.

Lynchings have been taking place in India for centuries, the difference being that these days, they are almost certain to get captured on the cameras installed on cellphones. Child lifting is an execrable offence, and used to happen frequently in several cities across India, notably Mumbai during the 1960s, when small children living in mainly makeshift accommodation used to disappear, only to emerge later in distant locations with some of their limbs sawed off, or their eyes gouged out, or their tongues chopped in half. Some had had substances smeared across their bodies which caused eruptions that were horrible to behold, all the better to make people throw coins at such unfortunate importuners so as to make them go away. These days, there are so many other ways of making money that such deformed child beggars appear to have almost disappeared, despite the fact that practically none of those responsible for the systematic mutilation of children so as to set them loose to beg were caught by the police. “Hafta” (or bribes given to the police) being commonplace even during those times, this was no surprise. In these “modern” times, a considerable proportion of child lifting is related either to ransom or to sex trafficking in the very young. Given the uncertainties and delays in the justice system in India, it is not a surprise that some citizens administer on the spot punishment (often capital) to those they suspect of this crime. News reports about child lifters and lynchings appear to have led to some perverted minds posting photographs, locations and other descriptions on social media of individuals they seek to destroy, whether this be because of jealousy, or greed for the property that would be left behind by those lynched on the basis of false reports about them. Expectedly, a call has risen to “lynch” (through suppression or at the least severely controlling) social media platforms.
This columnist is no addict of social media, and does not even know the passwords of accounts that are operated by a few dedicated well-wishers, mainly to disseminate his work. It is as yet more proof of the innovation-smothering nature of the governance system that unlike in China, there is no WeChat, Baidu, Weibo, nor even a Jack Ma in India. There are, of course, some internet companies that do data crunching work for foreign customers, a few of which have parlayed their reputations into ensuring for themselves land and other benefits from the state at very low prices. But there is no domestic counterpart to Facebook, Yahoo! or Google or Microsoft, and the fact that there are brilliant NRIs at the helm of some of these global giants is scant compensation for India’s failure to emulate China in creating its own web titans. Digital India is at present largely a digital colony of the US and a few Chinese companies. However, seeking to suppress them is not the answer, but ensuring an ecosystem where domestic companies can grow to giant size. What would make the difference is when Prime Minister Narendra Modi acts on his promise of “Minimum Government”, by which he presumably means minimal state interference with the lives and occupations of the 1.3 billion citizens of this country. To act against the operation of internet platforms that are used by hundreds of millions each day would be akin to declaring as criminal implements such as a knife or a stick, on the grounds that these are usually the weapons used by those who motivate putative lynchers against their victims. India’s underpaid, overworked police force seems unable to identify and apprehend the few who deliberately spread toxic “child lifter” messages about other citizens on the web, while our justice system continues to remain slow in coming to a final verdict about any crime. Prime Minister Narendra Modi sought to eliminate “unnecessary” laws, but left this task to the bureaucracy (which, in its continuing 1870s avatar, seeks to retain all edicts that add to their power and discretion over the citizen). Small wonder that most of the laws that have been discarded are those that are unenforceable because they have lost their relevance decades ago owing to the changes in circumstances that time inevitably brings. Such pruning of dead law is different from cutting away at the many colonial-style laws designed to keep civil society under the heel of the civil service. India is more “corrupt” than Norway because 90% of what is legal in that Scandinavian paradise is illegal in an India still under the jackboot of the 1862 Police Act.
“Hanging” the gun used in a murder is about as logical a punishment as it is to try and choke off the few freedoms available to social media platforms in India despite Pramod Mahajan’s efforts at state control of the internet medium and industry through an Information Technology (IT) law. The legislation he got passed, and which was made still more regressive by the UPA (and left undisturbed by the present government) caused the end of the phase of hypersonic expansion that the IT industry had witnessed since 1989, the year when Silicon Valley discovered Bangalore. It was Jawarharlal Nehru, celebrated as a democrat par excellence, who oversaw changes in the Constitution of India that have been used since then to punish free expression. It is from this 1950s legislative root and its offshoots that a climate of intolerance to dissent has grown in India side by side with rituals such as the screening of the National Anthem in cinema halls even during peacetime. It is from the longstanding absence of an accommodative attitude towards the “other” (including, during the UPA days, those who opposed appeasement of Wahhabism; and these days, citizens who have a taste for bovine meat) that intolerant strains of public conduct have multiplied. The mass lynching of a human being is an act of terror, and should be treated in law and by the police as being the equivalent of ISIS recruits cutting the throats of their captives. It is not the medium nor even the message that is responsible for the eruptions of barbarity that we see captured on cellphones in India, but a mindset nourished on the restrictions, regression and restraints that have continued with state patronage to remain commonplace in India even after the colonial era. The time to fulfil the promise of “Minimum Government” is long, long overdue.