ISI is far from RAW (PO)

M D Nalapat
Although Pakistan and India were once a common people, the difference in trajectory of the two states since 1947 has resulted in the creation of two very different societies across both sides of the border. For example, even though they speak the same language, the Punjabis of Pakistan are very different from Punjabis in India. Across the world, there is a wide and growing difference between the Indian and the Pakistani Diaspora, and this is not caused only by differences in perception about Kashmir. Of course, there exist wide variations within both countries, in view of the size of both and the ethnic diversity found within national borders. However, the chemistry of 21st century society in India is very different from that of Pakistan’s. A primary driver of this has been the vast difference in the role of the military.

An example of the difference in trajectories can be provided by an examination of the ISI as compared to an organisation that many regard as the equivalent of that powerful force, the Research & Analysis Wing of the Cabinet Secretariat, otherwise known as RAW. But what is the factual position? The ISI nests within the bosom of the Pakistan army, the most powerful of the wings of the state, far stronger than the executive, judiciary or the legislature. It is homogenous in composition, being sourced from within the armed forces, with almost no civilian content. Aware that there exists no substantive difference between “internal” and “external” security, the ISI inserts itself into domestic issues whenever it sees a link between them and national security. There is little doubt that Pakistan is under siege, although the perception that this is entirely because of India is not accurate. There are other large countries in the vicinity that may have an interest in a weakened Pakistan. Because Islamabad is a military ally of the US and is close to Saudi Arabia, certain nearby capitals will regard it with less than complete trust, no matter how many soothing words get expressed in public. Finding out exactly which country is creating a particular problem inside another is usually as difficult as finding out who the father of the unborn baby is in the case of a woman who has been repeatedly subjected to sexual assault by a multitude of men.

RAW was the creation of Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, who saw for herself the failure of the Intelligence Bureau in predicting the 1950 takeover of Tibet by the PLA, the 1959 arrival of the Dalai Lama in India, the 1962 and 1965 wars with China and Pakistan, and the surprise decision of the Mizo National Front to declare independence in 1966.

Retro RBI is not only living abroad, but in 70s (Sunday Guardian)

Activists of Janata Party burn an effigy of Prime Minister Manmohan Singh during a protest against the hike in the prices of petroleum products, in Kolkata on Tuesday. urjit Bhalla is that rare economist who does not forget that he is in India while giving prescriptions, as witnessed in his op-ed in The Indian Express of 23 June, where he shows up the hypocrisy in the RBI assumption that high interest rates are needed to fight inflation. The Central bank seems to believe that they are in the UK or in the US, while working out their nostrums. Even worse, not in today's UK or US, but that of the 1970s, the period relevant to the textbooks that they by-hearted. Mathematical scribbles complete the illusion of infallibility, especially in Manmohan Singh's India, where textbook economists are revered. These worthies, many of whom adorn the upper reaches of the Ministry of Finance and the Reserve Bank of India, would like the rest of the country to believe that the 8% growth rate of the economy is because of their wisdom, when in fact India ought to have been growing at 15%, the rate achieved by China during an equivalent period in the reform process. Across the board, there are hurdles to efficient functioning and to expansion absent even in the highly-regulated EU. Crossing each requires cash, lots of it and little in rupees. These days, the babus and politicos sniff at anything other than euros or dollars, although a few are these days willing to accept the Chinese RMB. At least in Mumbai and Delhi, most of the "speed money" invested in getting the correct decision is paid in offshore accounts, far away from the risk of detection by the media or the public. Of course, travel patterns of family and (often very charming) "friends" of our policymakers would reveal their good taste. These days, most of the higher echelons of India's Beltway refuse to settle for anything less than the best of Europe or (for those with slightly less refined sensibilities), North America. Sons, daughters, in-laws and others settle down in foreign climes for "study" or "work". Any relative or dependent of a senior policymaker (joint secretary and above, including ministers) who travels or lives in a high-cost location ought to make the details public, so that Arvind Kejriwal may begin the process of finding out exactly how Junior is able to pay his fees and meet his other expenses in the UK or the US on Papa's derisory (in hard currency terms) salary. Both Sonia Gandhi and Manmohan Singh have frequently spoken about corruption. Now is the chance for them to do something about it, rather than simply wail into the wind. Returning to the RBI, that instrument of torture — which takes its cues from The Economist, a magazine that enjoins upon India to do exactly the opposite of its panacea for Europe. The magazine backs low interest rates in the US and in Europe, while calling for repeated rate hikes in India. Given the adoring glances that RBI governor D. Subbarao throws at western bankers, this brutal advice is being followed to a degree that has choked investment (and consequently job creation) in Indian corporates. Even Subbarao knows that high interest rates make no dent on an inflation caused by supply bottlenecks, but in his zeal to become the toast of London and New York, commonsense gets ignored. However, say this for him, he has not made the extravagant claims of his predecessor Yaga Reddy, who — with characteristic modesty — claimed to have "saved Indian banks from the subprime mortgage crisis". Yaga Garu seems unaware that 40% and sometimes more of the value of property in India gets paid in black, because of onerous taxes and duties in transfer of assets. This gives a huge cushion to the banks in cases where property values come down, in a way that was not available to them in the US or in Europe. To claim credit for a healthy situation created not by RBI policy but by rampant undervaluation of property is to be dishonest, but as long as The Economist cheers, who cares? Let the financial companies who brought the world economy to the edge of collapse with their greed in 2008 operate freely in India and repatriate huge profits back to their home countries, with the blessing of the RBI and all policymakers whose offspring are given high-paying jobs in such entities. Bhalla has shown up the mendacity of the RBI by, for example, pointing out that regulation of savings rates only helps to keep them low, rather than prevent them from falling, as the RBI claims will happen. Will things change and interest rates for loans and regulations preventing output increases come down? Sadly, Manmohan Singh seems to have moved into a new avatar, that of the Counter-Reformer, ever since he took over the job of his old boss, P.V. Narasimha Rao, in 2004. http://www.sunday-guardian.com/analysis/retro-rbi-is-not-only-living-abroad-but-in-70s

Truth is not ‘propaganda’, PM Singh (PO)

M D Nalapat

Over the past year, more and more observers have accepted what has been obvious to this columnist for decades: that the government in India is the major roadblock to economic progress. This is in contrast to China, where the unelected Communist Party knows that only strong growth can ensure the stability of its rule. If a visitor were to spend a week in India followed by one in China, the contrast would be obvious. In India, there are frequent power cuts, roads resemble moon craters, and the facilities available to the “Aam Aadmi” (common person) are shoddy and inadequate. In the seventh decade of freedom, there are no excuses left. However, any characterisation of the situation is brushed aside as “Opposition propaganda”, the words used by Prime Minister Manmohan Singh on Wednesday to a carefully-chosen group of newspaper editors. It is no secret in the National Capital Region that the Prime Minister has been constrained from enforcing accountability on colleagues, officials and others by the fact that most of the depredators have strong political connections. The Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI), whose chief was appointed after a friendly nod from Political Secretary to the Congress President Sonia Gandhi, is twisting between two extremes. The “political” who seek to ensure that the organisation continue to protect their interests, and the Supreme Court, which has publicly expressed its testiness at the inadequate pace of investigations into scams that have collectively cost the country nearly $50 billion in lost revenue. 

The Prime Minister is in the same uncomfortable position as the CBI Director. He is aware that the credibility of his government is so low that even his own party workers openly bad-mouth it on street corners. He knows that only by sending the remaining twenty-nine of the “Forty Thieves” to long periods in jail can change the perception that the Prime Minister is a good man paralysed by those more powerful in his party who seek to perpetuate corruption. In the meantime, those who have gained billions from the rotten and opaque system that has been created in India since the 1960s are fighting back, and hard. A top businessperson has since February been making the rounds of his friends in Delhi and Mumbai, to ensure that Prime Minister Singh gets replaced “and fast”. Not accidentally, there is a steady drumbeat of criticism against the PM, including from an Opposition which is led mostly by those who have made billions out of politics. However, should the next CBI charge sheet go after the top echelons of the wrongdoers, rather than remain confined to the middle ranks, it will become difficult to sustain the charge that the PM is conniving at protecting the guilty. Ironically for Manmohan Singh, the more he challenges the “political” by going after their illegal empires, the more stable will he be in office.

Although sending key officials and corporate heads to jail may create temporary instability, yet over time such an unprecedented move would bring closer the day when India will have a transparent and efficient administrative system.

Double double-cross on nuclear deal (Sunday Guardian)

US President George W. Bush raises his glass for a toast with Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh at the White House in 2005 hen George W. Bush and Manmohan Singh announced that they would jointly work to ensure that India get freed of the innumerable restraints that were placed after the 1974 Pokhran mini-explosion, the spin from South Block and Shastri Bhavan was that the country would finally get freed of the fetters first imposed by Jimmy Carter nearly four decades back. That India would be treated as a "de facto" nuclear weapons state and that the country would be given a clean waiver from the restrictions imposed by the Nuclear Suppliers Group. In 2008, the NSG did approve a waiver that, at face value, amounted to exempting India from the non-proliferation treaty. The champagne corks were pulled out and the establishment celebrated. The question is: did they celebrate a clean waiver, or simply that they had succeeded in hoodwinking the public — including, it must be admitted, this columnist — into believing that India had escaped much of the NPT's restraints and could now go about developing both its indigenous as well as its imported program? Friends within the atomic energy and nuclear weapons fraternity warned then that the benefits were created by smoke and mirrors, and that in effect, the Singh-Bush deal would gradually but inevitably de-nuclearise India and so degrade the nuclear deterrent that it would be valueless even against North Korea, much less a Pakistan armed by China. After Barack Obama became President of the United States nearly three years ago, the future ought to have been obvious. Senator Obama was among the few lawmakers in that chamber implacably opposed to the nuclear deal. Believing as he did that only the West had the divine right to possess advanced nuclear technology. China was the exception, there in this privileged club by sufferance, because the country could not be rolled back the way puny India could be. The French — that fortunate country so much beloved of our defence procurers — were the first to indicate that all was not well. They stonewalled informal soundings about reprocessing technology, hinting that such "advanced technology" was not permissible for India. This despite the fact that Homi Jehangir Bhabha had ensured more than four decades back that India could undertake such a task. The Russians showed the other boot, giving the country processed uranium pellets as feedstock (as the Chinese earlier had) rather than unprocessed uranium that could (with ease) get processed in India. Incidentally, although there is no legal obligation on India to be so forbearing, the country's political establishment — whether Congress blue or BJP saffron or Third Front polka-dotted — has refused since the 1970s for the country's scientists to reprocess the pools of spent uranium, especially at the Tarapur plant. Such a feedstock could have done away with the shortage of uranium that has plagued the Indian program, but the order to do so was never given. Interestingly, whenever efforts were made to recover some of this country's 60,000 tons of natural uranium, miscellaneous NGOs would spring up and block the same, using the country's judicial system as well as political parties and the media. In states such as Meghalaya, the Manmohan Singh government has practically given up trying to extract sufficient uranium. Of course, "shortage of uranium" has been put forward as the main justification for the Singh-Bush deal. Now that the NSG had given a "clean waiver", this shortage ought to have disappeared through imports. It has, but on the same conditions as apply to non-nuclear weapons signatories of the NPT. In other words, India gets placed — in practice — in the same queue as Lesotho or Guatemala when it comes to the import of nuclear technology or materiel. Hardly what was promised to the country when the nuclear deal was rushed through the political system. Worse, the CIRUS reactor has been mothballed, thus severely affecting feedstock for the small supply of nuclear weapons available to India against potential and present threats. Since 2008, a series of incremental but consequential changes in the design and operation of reactors in India will mean the shrinking to near-zero of the country's stock of plutonium, thereby ending the nuclear weapons program. This at a time when Pakistan, North Korea and in the future Iran will become more and more nuclear-capable, unconcerned as they are with pleasing the many friends of Montek Singh Ahluwalia. Within a few years, the indigenous three-stage program will wither away to insignificance, and the country will become totally dependent on imported feedstock and technology. The French, the Russians and the Americans will be laughing all the way to the bank, while the Chinese will be smirking at the de-fanging of a country that once saw itself as a serious competitor to the PRC. There has been a double double-cross on the nuclear deal. The first was when the US under Barack Obama and his Euro-centric team began pushing India into the non-nuclear weapons pen through changes in regulations following the nuke deal. These alterations mean that the benefits from the deal have disappeared but the costs continue and multiply. Worst of all, the dream of self-sufficiency through the use of thorium via fast-breeder reactors will vanish. What Indira Gandhi and Rajiv Gandhi preserved, Sonia Gandhi is throwing away. http://www.sunday-guardian.com/analysis/double-double-cross-on-nuclear-deal

Why India is escaping more terror strikes (PO)

M D Nalapat

Those who planned the 26/11 terror attack in Mumbai in 2008 were aware that the Mumbai police is widely regarded as being among the most corrupt in the world. Although all levels of the force are routinely said to accept money in exchange for official favours,a distinction has to be made between juniors and seniors. Harm gets done to the national interest only when the higher rungs of the police become corrupt, which is the case in Mumbai. Like their counterparts in Colombia or Mexico, many of whom are on the payroll of the narco mafia, too many top policemen in Mumbai are reported to think nothing of accepting money and other gifts from the underworld, including that section which funds and facilitates terror attacks. Just as corruption in the force has helped narco traffickers to use Colombia and Mexico as safe havens for their operations, terror networks in India use their corrupt contacts in the Mumbai police to facilitate their

There is a difference between corruption that causes harm to national security and other types of graft. In an economy and a society at the stage that India is in, it is utopian to visualize a situation when corruption will disappear the way that it has in Finland, Sweden or Norway ( but certainly not in Spain, Italy or France, in each of which large pools of corrupt officials thrive, including at the highest levels). Hence, the war on corruption must principally target (1) the higher levels of the administrative structure and (2) those forms of graft that immediately impact national security. In the case of Mumbai,this is represented by the senior officers of the police force who accept cash from narco traffickers, even though they are aware that many of them are also associated with terrorist networks operating in India and overseas. Indeed, narcotics and terror go hand-in-hand in South Asia, as the results of the poppy trade in Afghanistan have made clear.

In the case of 26/11, key sources within the security establishment say that at least two senior police officers of Maharashtra state ( of which Mumbai is the capital) have been in the pay of a Dubai-based operator since the middle of the 1990s. They say that this is the reason why the Mumbai accomplices of the 26/11 plotters have escaped detection. Instructions were given “from the top to ignore any possible local leads to the conspiracy”. Even in the identification of the external players, almost all the detective work was done by the FBI, with the Indian authorities playing second fiddle. In particular,the grave security lapses by the Mumbai police that allowed the 26/11 terrorists to continue on their destructive path for three days has yet to be addressed. Not a single top official – including those guilty of clear dereliction of duty and worse - has been cashiered. Instead, a few have been promoted and all shielded. The reason behind this is the influence that a certain businessman based in Karachi has over key politicians in the central and state level.

UPA sabotages India’s thorium energy quest (Org.)

M D Nalapat

Over the past decades, despite severe international sanctions led by the US and China, Indian nuclear scientists such as Dr P K Iyengar and Dr Anil Kakodkar have ensured that this country secures the capability of becoming a major player in the energy market, provided that the Three Stage Programme devised by Homi Jehangir Bhabha in the 1960s gets implemented. However, over the past four years, the UPA has quietly sought to abandon the Three Stage Programme in favour of a massive programme of purchasing foreign reactors that give zero benefit to local technology and very little to local industry.

Interestingly, each time an effort is made to recover sufficient uranium for the nuclear industry, a slew of NGOs emerge that block mining. Although the Manmohan Singh government has evidence that many of these are funded by interests hostile to the indigenous nuclear industry, yet—clearly under pressure from 10 Janpath—it has succumbed to blackmail and refused to mine uranium, especially in Meghalaya. As a result, the PHWR reactors of the Department of Atomic Energy have for long been forced to operate at below 70 per cent of capacity, thereby depriving the country of energy.

Sadly, since 2001, the establishment in India has slowed down the Indian reprocessing programme, the result being that vast pools of irradiated natural uranium have built up,that are a safety hazard and which—once processed—can serve as feedstock for a nuclear energy programme. Because of a tendency of successive governments to succumb to US-China pressure, the Fast Breeder reactor has not yet been fully operationalised, mainly because of lack of fuel. Incidentally, the US, China and the EU are using every means of pressure at their disposal to prevent India from mastering the Fast Breeder Reactor technology, because they know that once such a Rubicon gets passed, India would become one of the key countries in international nuclear commerce. What is a mystery is why governmernts in India have agreed to such anti-Indian diktats for so long, and now appear poised to even scrap the Three Stage Programme altogether.

For the past fifteen years, the Department of Atomic Energy has been working on Advanced Heavy Water Reactors(AHWR) and Compact High Temperature Reactor (CHTR), both being thorium-based. Once these get operationalised, the country would be able to do without costly imports of nuclear plants as well as petro-product feedstock. Of course, this would cut into several Swiss bank accounts held by VVIPs in India, which is why the indigenous AWHR and CHTR programmes are being sabotaged by the Sonia-led UPA.

Will Sonia trump Saint Antony? (Sunday Guardian)

M D Nalapat

t was Pramod Mahajan who came up with the concept of "India Shining". And in his case, such a claim was certainly true. From a lower-middle class background, the BJP's Mr Fix-it entered the higher rungs of the economic elite. Of course, because of the need to pretend that he was still penurious by the standards of his business friends, a lot of such wealth would have been distributed amongst various names. Some claim that the marital adventures of his only son was motivated more by a desire to husband the wealth left behind by Mahajan than by romance, although this is something that is difficult to prove, and may indeed be wrong. The lady in question was admittedly a charmer, as the Mahajan family well knew. Decades ago, during 1977-78, when Indira Gandhi was out of office and needing vast amounts of money for her political comeback, the oxygen for her return was provided by D. Devaraj Urs, the urbane Chief Minister of Karnataka. Urs took care of her needs almost as comprehensively as another Karnataka CM, Ramakrishna Hegde, ministered to V.P. Singh. After all, it needs to be remembered that just as it took a lot of money to keep M.K. Gandhi in poverty, it takes a lot of cash to run a noticeable anti-corruption campaign.

Supreme power with zero responsibility (PO)

M D Nalapat


In times past, a section of society was treated as “untouchable” by the rest. They were not allowed to approach the others, and if by mistake one of them made physical contact with the “touchable” part of society, the unfortunate individual was put to death. In the south, a section of society was not merely “untouchable” but “unseeable”. This lowest of the low was forced to ring bells or shout out their location, so that others may be warned to keep away. They were not allowed to use the same paths as others did, having to content themselves with moving around inside fields and jungles, out of sight of others. The rigid stratification of society - which after a while became based on birth - helped weaken the different kingdoms within the country such that they became easy prey for invaders from Afghanistan, Arabia, Central Asia and the territory that is modern-day Iran

One of the few benefits of British rule was the springing up of reform movements within the Hindu religion, many led by thinkers from Bengal. Raja Rammohun Roy and others like him understood that there was no way India could expel the British, unless society itself became more just. For millenia, learning had been confined to a small proportion of the total population. The rest were given no opportunity to study. This state of affairs continued till the Mughal era, when several from the lower orders of society discovered that they could vastly improve their status by adopting the faith of their conquerors. Of course, such individuals could not dream of equality with the Mughal princes and their retinue,just as later on Christian converts in India were still treated as inferior to the British,despite both having the same faith. However, the treatment given to them was far better than the discrimination they had endured when they were in their previous faith, a factor that encouraged a steady flow of converts for several centuries

Ever since the 1857 uprising, the British in India were reluctant to force social change,or to impose their systems and standards on those who did not want them. Hence the country had to wait till independence in 1947 for laws to get passed that criminalized discrimination on the basis of caste.

Life After Bin Laden (The Diplomat)

By M. D. Nalapat

The Diplomat speaks with Indian Decade contributor and UNESCO Peace Chair Madhav Nalapat about the implications of Osama bin Laden's death and the future of islamic extremism.

You've written before about alleged links between Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence and terrorists, specifically in relation to the Mumbai attacks in 2008. Do you expect the attention focused on Pakistan's intelligence services following the killing of Osama bin Laden to bring sufficient pressure for change?

Days after the Mumbai attack, sources tracking events in Pakistan told me that the ISI was behind the carnage, and that the Pakistan military had assisted in the training and logistics of the attack. Because of this information, I was the first to write authoritatively on the ISI's involvement, which was denied by the United States for more than a year after the terrorist outrage happened.

Successive US administrations have, for the previous 60 years, believed that they can use Pakistan for their own purposes. Military assistance given since the 1950s to ‘fight communism’ was used solely against India, with Pakistan joining hands with China since 1963 -- nine years before President Richard Nixon established a strategic partnership with Beijing. Even the CIA can’t believe that the Pakistan establishment was unaware of A.Q. Khan's activities, yet it acts otherwise, exactly as it has over the bin Laden execution.

Yes, the Pakistani military can be forced to support rather than sabotage US interests. However, this will come about only when carrots get replaced by sticks, and when officers known to be assisting groups such as Lashkar-e-Taiba get sanctioned by the United States the way the Iranian Revolutionary Guard has been, and prosecuted in the International Court the way the Serbians have been.

Thus far, there’s no sign of this happening. Indeed, the United States is rapidly losing the very ability to alter the behaviour of the Pakistan military. For the past decade, I’ve pointed to the growing influence of China within the Pakistan military. By around 2005, I’d say, Beijing had overtaken the US in overall influence, and is now far ahead. The Pakistan military is becoming like the Burmese military, a tributary of the People’s Liberation Army. Hence, to expect change post-bin Laden is to live on illusions.

Do Pakistan’s protestations that they didn't know bin Laden was there have any credibility?

Still slaves, even after ‘Independence’ (Sunday Guardian)

By M. D. Nalapat

	Police officers beat a man during a protest in Ratnagiri, Maharashtra on 19 April: ‘If the notables close to Dus Number visit a police chowki in rural India or a government office in the exurbs as ordinary citizens, they will soon come to understand the martya Sen, Sunil Khilnani and the other notables close to Dus Number may not notice this, but India is hardly a democracy for the 99%-plus of the population sans access to money and its Siamese twin, power. Although the Congress party claimed to be opposed to the British Raj, they have retained each and every one of the accoutrements of the colonial authority, including the laws and the administrative structure. Not coincidentally, such an institutional framework sucks away rights and authority from citizens and places them in the hands of the — admittedly elected — political executive. Hopefully, some day Sen and Khilnani will wander away from the air-conditioned environs of British-built Delhi and visit a police chowki in rural India or a government office in the exurbs, not as favourites of Dus Number, but as ordinary citizens. If they escape arrest or worse, they will soon come to understand the reality of democracy, Nehru-style. During the Raj, any Indian needed the permission of the white masters to undertake most activities. Any that was seen as detrimental to the interests of the few hundred thousand British in India and their fellows at home was banned. Has anything changed since then? Circa 2011, the permission of one agency of the government or the other is mandatory for any activity, including those regarded as routine in genuine democracies. The home ministry and the HRD ministry, in particular, have worked in tandem to snuff out independence and initiative in thinking in our institutions of learning. If Jairam Ramesh is correct that the IITs and the IIMs are not of the standard that he is used to in his peregrinations abroad, the reason lies in his own government which has tasked a 76-year-old (Professor Yash Pal) to come up with a roadmap for a 21st century education system. Hopefully, the good professor will suggest policies that are internationally in sync with the values and needs of the 1960s, rather than the 1930s. Several hundred thousand officials in India have — individually — the power to take away liberty and assets of a citizen. Many of them exercise such discretion in a manner that is designed to quicken the flow of funds to unnamed accounts in tax havens. It is characteristic of Dus Number that it got set up a committee to examine how black money could be eliminated, that was staffed entirely by exactly the same team that has presided over the biggest accumulation of black money in the nation's history. Naturally, these worthies would like even more extreme punishments to those they finger as wrongdoers (for a consideration of course, or the lack of it). They know that each turn of the thumbnail screw will increase the bribes that need to be paid to them and to their political seniors to escape torture. A Baba Ramdev and an Anna Hazare, with their prattle about death sentences, suit their purposes perfectly. We have a Reserve Bank of India that cannot get beyond undergraduate textbooks in economics, and which ignores the fact that the single biggest cause of inflation in India is corruption; a defect that no increase in interest rates will touch. The RBI has allowed the same US and European financial entities responsible for cheating investors of more than $4 trillion to set up shop in India and fleece unwary investors. Today, India has become as much a haven for commodity speculators as is the US and the UK, including in foodgrains. Instead of seeking to bring such elements to book as international criminals, Dus Number gives them access to the Prime Minister and the Finance Minister.
	ust as the authoritarianism of the 1970s led to the 1977 reaction against Indira Gandhi, the reversal of the — far too slow and incomplete — liberalisation of 1992-2004 by the UPA has created a public backlash against the state and its instruments. The people of India are even more circumscribed by the state as they were pre-1947. The ersatz democracy created by politicians unwilling to shed colonial-era powers needs to get replaced by a structure of administrative governance that returns to the people the rights they would enjoy in a democracy. There is a contradiction between the Constitution of India and the colonial-era criminal and civil procedure code and between the rights given to the people under the Constitution and the British-era administrative structure of Nehruvian India. That the people of the country are finally realising that they are still slaves is the only harbinger of hope. http://www.sunday-guardian.com/analysis/still-slaves-even-after-independence

Corrupts made accountable (PO)

M. D. Nalapat

M A Jinnah, the founder of Pakistan, was a tactical genius who succeeded in dividing the Subcontinent in two. Unlike the Congress leadership, Jinnah understood that World War II would have so weakened the UK that freedom for India would be inevitable, even without the exhaustive - and exhausting - agitations launched by the Congress Party. After the fatal tactical error of withdrawing from government both nationally and regionally in 1939, the Congress Party began to rapidly lose the support that it had hitherto enjoyed within the British establishment. In contrast, the Muslim League under its leader M A Jinnah supported a British establishment that he knew was in a severely weakened state. Jinnah kept away from the freedom struggle because he saw that independence was a foregone conclusion. Instead, through gaining the goodwill of London, he ensured the backing – both open and quiet - of the British government in his single-minded pursuit of Pakistan.

Interestingly, as soon as the Union Jack was pulled down at midnight of August 15,1947, the new government of “free” India retained the entire framework of colonial rule. It retained the colonial administrative structure and the legal framework of the colonial past. Indeed, within five years of gaining control, Nehru began to introduce more and more restrictions on the non-governmental sector in India. Much of private industry - which had flourished during World war II as a result of military orders - was nationalised. Tax rates were brought up to absurd levels, reaching 97.75% by the 1970s. After three decades of Nehru family rule, almost any activity needed prior governmental permission. Finally, in 1977, in a reaction to such colonial-style control, the electorate reacted and threw out the Congress Party led by Indira Gandhi. Since then, no subsequent government dared to add on to the web of regulations and prohibitions, or to once again show the contempt for public opinion that was demonstrated by Indira Gandhi during 1975 and 1976, a time when several citizens (including this columnist) faced police incarceration. Of course, it was only in the 1990s that a few steps were taken to liberalise the economy, steps that were added on to till 2004, when the Congress Party once again came to power as the lead actor in a coalition.

From the final decades of the 18th century to almost the first half of the 20th century, a small number of British and other colonialists skimmed the cream from the Indian national product. Several stately homes in the UK were built out of the money gained from stints in India. Even jewels of historical value, such as a Koh-i-noor, were taken away and made the property of inhabitants of the conquering power. This loot by a relatively small and distinct segment of society finally roused tens of millions in the Subcontinent to protest, and to revolt. Even in the armed forces, anger grew at the double standards practiced on those not of the “Master Race”. The career prospects and salaries of those from the UK were way higher than that given to those unfortunate enough to have been born in India.

Since 1947,has there really been a change?