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.

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.

Religious Supremacists (UPI)

M.D. Nalapat

MANIPAL, India, Nov. 25 (UPI) -- Thanks to the extraordinary burst of innovation and enterprise created in the countries of Western Europe during the previous five centuries, the world came under their tutelage. However, those from the region who lacked the characteristics of rationality, resourcefulness and drive that resulted in the west leading the world fell back on the absence of skin pigment to distinguish themselves as superior from the rest of humanity. In this, they were merely following an ancient precedent. For example, the very Sanskrit word for India's 4,000-year old tradition of caste is "varna," meaning: color. Indeed, the Slavic peoples used this characteristic to name the lands in which they resided. Thus, "Russia" means "Land of the Blonde" while "Belarus" goes even further, signifying the "Land of the White Blonds." Small wonder that notions of racial supremacy grew in Western Europe, sometimes even crossing the bounds of color, as for example in much of the European continent during the period when those belonging to the Jewish faith were discriminated against and finally, sought to be eliminated altogether. The Holocaust has been the vilest depth in human history of a deformed social consciousness that survived in the modern era in locations such as the segregated south of the U.S., and countries such as South Africa, where "racial supremacy" was the norm.

Today, neither does segregation exist in the U.S. nor apartheid in South Africa. The notion of racial supremacy has become an international outcast, even though sporadic manifestations of old attitudes linger, as for example in the recent German political formulation, "Kinder statt Inder," which implied that people coming from India were less than human. However, in practically all of western societies, discrimination based on color has practically disappeared, even though there are occasional "glass ceilings" that limit the upward mobility of those with a higher level of cutaneous pigment. Once identified, these are pulled down. The result has been that in advanced western societies such as the U.S. and Israel, those whose ethnicity comes from India have frequently bested others from locations in Europe.While "Race Supremacists" have been under attack from the civilized world, and are either extinct or on the defensive, another brand of hate crime flourishes undisturbed, even in countries that are the allies of the West. This is "Religious Supremacy," the belief that those practicing a particular faith have the same "right" to discriminate against others that "White Supremacists" in the past saw as their God-given privilege to consign the rest to a permanently inferior status. In states governed by religious supremacists, those belonging to other faiths lack the freedoms enjoyed by the privileged. In Saudi Arabia, for instance, those who do not belong to the Wahabbi creed lack the elemental right to build their own houses of worship and to openly pray in them. There are mosques in Israel and the U.S. that have Wahabbist elements in them, but no trace of a synagogue or even a church in Saudi Arabia. In another such country, Pakistan, the legal and electoral system itself discriminates against minorities. While in the past color was the engine of injustice, these days it is creed. What is taking place in countries that discriminate against minorities is as vile as what was seen - and demolished - in the segregated U.S. south or in apartheid-era South Africa.

Indeed, while the United Nations General Assembly has several times discussed apartheid and racism in general, it has thus far been as silent as western and other chancelleries in identifying the discrimination and segregation that takes place in "religious supremacist" countries. In Saudi Arabia, for instance, those who are Shiite, non-Wahabbi Sunni, non-Muslim or women suffer severe discrimination, and are denied the rights that are given to adherents of the Wahabbi creed, who alone are permitted to set up houses of worship and who are given preferential treatment in several ways. This is a "hate crime" as noxious in its logic and effects as racial segregation. Indeed, in that particular country, even Wahabbis do not yet have the right to vote. The entire authority within the state adheres -- naturally -- to close relatives of the founder of the Saudi faith, Abdul Ibn Wahhab. While Khomeinism in Iran is a close cousin of Wahabbism in its world-view, there are Sunni houses of worship in Iran, and even a few synagogues, although in other respects the two countries are alike. In both, an unelected group controls the government, and bases this usurpation of power from the hands of the people on religious grounds. Indeed, Khomeinism is as much a perversion of Shiite Islam as Wahabbism is of Sunni Islam.