Will Manmohan fall in March? (PO)

M D Nalapat

The Ides of March proved fatal to Gaius Julius Ceasar more than two thousand years ago, when he was felled by a large group of conspirators in the Theatre of Pompey in Rome. Several of those that stabbed him were his closest friends, people who may have been expected to defend rather than to murder him. These days, within Delhi and Mumbai, a similar group of conspirators has been active over the past eleven months, seeking to take away not his life but his job from Prime Minister Manmohan Singh. And as in the case of Ceasar, many of those scripting his downfall are from his own party, and claim to be his ardent backers, often going before television cameras to “damn him with faint praise”.

Deja vu! A quarter-century ago, many of the same group that are nowadays active against Manmohan Singh were expending considerable effort on unseating his mentor, then Prime Minister P V Narasimha Rao. The Congress Party’s second non-Nehru Prime Minister (after the short-lived 1964-66 tenure of Lal Bahadur Shastri had incurred the anger of loyalists of the family that owned the party, by his refusal to step down after two years in office and hand over charge to a faithful retainer, Kunwar (Prince) Arjun Singh, who had been Chief Minister of Madhya Pradesh when the Bhopal disaster took place, and who made arrangements for the safe escape of Union Carbide chief Warren Anderson from Bhopal. Despite the fact that it was on his watch that the world’s biggest industrial disaster took place, his 100% loyalty to the Nehru family ensured that Arjun Singh was given his fill of important jobs, ranging from chief ministership to Union Cabinet status and also Governor of important states.

How Sri Lanka slipped into China's orbit (gatewayhouse.in)

BY M.D. Nalapat

That old habits die hard is clear from the way in which the functionaries of the European Union seek to influence the developing economies on the best way to manage their nations. And woe betide those leaders from the former colonies who explain that their knowledge of local conditions may be a tad better than the EU officials jetting in from Paris, London, Berlin and other exquisite capitals to advise the locals. If Chechnya or Kashmir did not follow the Kosovo and East Timorese path of breaking away from their parent countries, then it was the good luck of Russia and India, both countries with leaders receptive to advice from afar. Indeed, India has the distinction of asking the British Viceroy to tarry a while longer in 1947 after its independence and partition of Pakistan, so terrified were the new rulers of the country to exercise their responsibilities sans the guidance of the colonial hand.

If India has had about a century and a half of unbridled European colonisation, Sri Lanka has had nearly five centuries. Small wonder that its leadership, of whichever political hue, obeyed the dictums of even junior officials from Europe and the US.

That ended when Mahinda Rajapaksa was elected President of Sri Lanka in 2005. Within a year, he had shed the cocoon of subservience that had been the characteristic of his predecessors, going so far as to challenge even India, the country that " Sri Lankans love to hate, and hate to love"

Rajapaksa's most egregious crime of lese majeste has been his refusal to heed the many and ever-shriller EU, US and Indian demands for an immediate ceasefire in early 2009. Then, the Sri Lankan army was on the cusp of overrunning the last sliver of territory controlled by the LTTE, an organisation whose backers have significant influence not merely in Chennai, but even more so in Brussels.

Does “freedom” mean vote every 5 years? (PO)

M D Nalapat

Till two centuries ago, China comprised about 35% of the global economy while India accounted for around 26%. Only after the grip of European powers became strong in the 19th century that their economies contracted. The mentality of the European powers was that only they had the right to prosperity, while the rest of the world needed to be content as slaves. In India, Britain ensured the destruction of almost all of local industry, thereby seeking to create a market for its own manufactures. Certainly this brought some prosperity to the UK, but the wealth generated there would have been much more had India been allowed to continue to be a prosperous country. The markets for British produce would have been far larger. As for China, by squeezing revenue out of channels such as the opium trade, the European powers ensured the fall of the Imperial Dynasty and its replacement with a series of fractious and incompetent warlord regimes, a phase that ended only with the establishment of the Peoples Republic of China in 1949.

While China entered into its current period of economic growth through reform in the 1980s, till today India has continued with its colonial-era laws, that transfer obligations to the population and authority to the state Today, despite corrupt and incompetent governments at both the central and state levels, the Indian economy is growing at a speed of almost 10% annually, because of the savings of its people and their zeal for education and betterment. India is called a “free” country, while China is authoritarian, with no elections and single-party rule. However, here in Hong Kong, where your columnist has been since the beginning of the week, it would seem that people here have as much - if not more - freedom than people in Mumbai or Delhi, all of whom have to get permission from multiple authorities (usually in triplicate) before being allowed to do the simplest tasks.

Hidden hand poisoning ties between India and the West? (UPI Asia)

M.D. Nalapat 

Manipal, India — Quiet surveys conducted through multiple sources indicate that the root of the spasms of "curry bashing" – violent attacks on Indian students – seen in Australia over the past year is the belief of migrants from some European states that only whites ought to be allowed to emigrate to Australia.Since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1992, Germany ensured that a huge chunk of Western Europe's resources would go into subsidies for the eastern part of the continent, believing that ethnicity would trump economics.

Had Western Europe adopted a strategy of relying on global skills for its expansion, rather than relying on a single source, Eastern Europe, with a half-century history of dysfunctional educational and occupational networks, that most productive part of the world would have witnessed rates of growth closer to those of India and China than to Japan’s.

As matters stand, the hugely expensive Western gamble on Eastern Europe is likely to see the eclipse of Western European companies within the next 15 years, faced as they will be by competition from China, India and Brazil. Had even one-third of the investment that flowed into Eastern Europe gone to India, for example, the returns from that would have been enough to wipe out the losses now being made in Eastern Europe.
Eastern Europe surely includes many highly artistic, liberal and talented individuals. Yet it also includes those whose notions of ethnic privilege belong to a bygone era, but have now been made the foundation for EU immigration policies.

Such individuals would like to see the United States, Canada and Australia copy the European Union in shutting the door to those of non-European ethnicity. They have linked up with anti-nonwhite immigrant lobbies in all these countries to seek to enforce an effective ban on even highly skilled migrants from nonwhite countries.

Video: Prof. Nalapat on Insurgency (Part 1)

Punjabi Power and Zardari (UPI)

M.D. Nalapat


MANIPAL, India, March 18 (UPI) -- Regular readers of this column will not have been surprised at recent developments in Pakistan, in which army chief Ashfaq Kayani enforced the surrender of the Pakistan Peoples Party-led government to the demands of the Pakistan Muslim League-N chief, Nawaz Sharif.

The core purpose of Kayani's institution is to ensure the continued supremacy of Wahhabi Punjabis over all other groups in Pakistan, a mission that it has fulfilled thus far.

Uppity non-Punjabis, such as assassinated former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto, were shown their place for daring to talk of a genuinely federal structure for the country. Now it is the turn of her husband, President Asif Ali Zardari, to be at the business end of Kayani's swagger stick.

The "honest" former -- and soon to be reinstated -- chief justice of Pakistan, Iftikhar Chaudhry, has been a member in good standing of the Punjabi supremacist brigade since his years as a lawyer. He detests Zardari and has only kind words about his champion and fellow Punjabi, Nawaz Sharif. This despite the fact that the Sharif family has acquired an asset base of close to $2 billion, entirely because of its proximity to the military and other levers of patronage in Pakistan.

Kayani: Arsonist Disguised as Firefighter (UPIASIA)

M.D. Nalapat 

Manipal, India — Pakistan's chief of army staff, General Parvez Ashfaq Kayani, is a master at the strategy of starting a fire and then volunteering to put it out in exchange for concessions. Yet he was taken aback when President Asif Ali Zardari declined to enter the noose of imprisonment being prepared for him by the expected return to office of dismissed Chief Justice Iftikhar Chaudhry.

Zardari has refused to reinstate Chaudhry, ousted by his predecessor Gen. Pervez Musharraf, despite urgings from Prime Minister Yousuf Gilani – who was functioning in tandem with Kayani in wanting a more pliant head of state than Zardari.

Since then, Kayani has been working at undermining his nominal superior, ensuring a steady diet of negative media reports about Zardari, and ensuring backroom backing for those champions of Punjabi supremacy in Pakistan, the Sharif brothers. The conspirators meet outside Pakistan, usually in locations in the Middle East, to fine-tune their plans to ensure the removal of Zardari and the return to center stage of Kayani ally Nawaz Sharif.

Of concern to democracies about this Pakistani soap opera is the backing that Kayani has given to the Taliban and its parasite, al-Qaida. It is no accident that NATO has failed to prevent this group of louts from retaking one-third of Afghanistan and moving into the rest.

U.S. backing for Kayani has ensured that the Pakistan military's double-faced policy of secretly helping the Taliban while publicly backing NATO continues. Now that the Clinton team is back in office, courtesy of President Barack Obama, the United States is returning to the 1994-96 policy of backing the Taliban.

Mumbai 11/27: the Pakistan Army's Alibi (UPIASIA)

M.D. Nalapat

Manipal, India — Since the terror attacks on Mumbai five days ago, key Western intelligence agencies have been shown documented proof that the operation was carried out by squads trained by regular elements of the Pakistan army.

While the field training took place at a farm run by Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence, near Muzaffarabad in Pakistan-controlled Kashmir, fluency in the handling of ordnance was taught at another ISI safe house on the outskirts of Karachi.

Pakistan has done little to create deniability about these connections or earlier links discovered by U.S. intelligence agencies between the ISI and the July 7 bombing of the Indian Embassy in Kabul.

The Pakistan army has made little secret of the fact that the top priority of its intelligence operations is to reverse India’s path toward social stability and economic growth. Still, why were so many tell-tale clues left behind in these attacks that enraged the Indian public and made the world aware that India is the softest terrorist target among the major democracies?

Analysts piecing together the documentation are divided over whether army chief Ashfaq Kiyani was himself in the loop on the Mumbai attacks. It is certain that at least two corps commanders were, however, both of whom provided materiel and arranged training for the 70-odd terrorists tasked with the Mumbai operations.

Their hope was that India would respond to the attacks the way it did to a failed bid to kill members of Parliament in 2001 – by mobilizing troops on the Pakistan border and creating an expectation that a full-scale, conventional India-Pakistan war was imminent. At that time Prime Minister A.B. Vajpayee's unwise decision to "bluff" the Pakistanis into cooperating with India by the threat of war boomeranged on New Delhi. Foreign missions evacuated their nationals in a panic and business confidence plunged.

Pakistan's Mumbai Alibi (UPI)

M.D. Nalapat 

MANIPAL, India, Dec. 1 (UPI) -- Since the terror attacks on Mumbai five days ago, Indian security sources have promoted evidence that the attackers were trained by elements of the Pakistani military.

While the field training took place at a camp run by Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence agency near Muzaffarabad in Pakistan-controlled Kashmir, fluency in the handling of ordnance was taught at another ISI safe house on the outskirts of Karachi.

Pakistan has done little to create deniability about these connections or earlier links discovered by U.S. intelligence agencies between the ISI and the July 7 bombing of the Indian Embassy in Kabul, Afghanistan.

Many analysts see the top priority of Pakistani intelligence as reversing India's path toward social stability and economic growth. Still, why were so many telltale clues left behind in these attacks that enraged the Indian public and made the world aware that India is among the softest terrorist targets of the major democracies?

The hope of those who planned last week's attack was that India would respond to the attacks the way it did to the attack on its Parliament in 2001 -- by mobilizing troops on the Pakistan border and creating an expectation that a full-scale, conventional India-Pakistan war was imminent. At that time Prime Minister A.B. Vajpayee's unwise decision to "bluff" the Pakistanis into cooperating with India by the threat of war boomeranged on New Delhi. Foreign missions evacuated their nationals in a panic and business confidence plunged.

Musharraf Calls the Bluff (UPI)

M.D. Nalapat

MANIPAL, India, Oct. 27 (UPI) -- While most U.S. secretaries of state -- save perhaps Dean Rusk -- have gobbled up credit for outcomes that they had little to do with, few have been as brazen as Colin Powell.

Two years ago, Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf was surprised when the leader of the main Islamist alliance -- Maulana Fazlur Rahman -- visited India and issued a series of highly conciliatory statements. As Pakistan's president had been telling the United States he was "forced" into taking a hawkish line on India precisely by the likes of Rahman, this was an embarrassment.

The reality is that India is no longer the enemy of choice for the people of Pakistan. That distinction has now gone to the United States.

Realists, and this even includes members of the U.S. Democratic foreign policy establishment such as Strobe Talbott, who have long sought to divest India of its defensive capability against another nuclear power in Asia, understand the only feasible solution for Kashmir is the acceptance of the status quo. India keeps what it has while Pakistan and China (which was gifted a slice of the territory three decades ago) do likewise.

Simultaneously, New Delhi would ensure a degree of autonomy for the state that would help cut popular support off from jihadis attempting to convert Kashmir into a second Afghanistan.

Bill Clinton understood this at the end of his term in office yet, under Colin Powell (who appears to have an affinity for generals active in politics), the pendulum of U.S. policy has once again swung toward a quixotic effort to prize at least the Valley of Kashmir loose from India.

This, Pakistan's lobbyist in Washington Christina Rocca has been told, is the "minimum" that the Pakistan army will accept. It is also far more than what any administration in New Delhi can deliver.