An India-Europe free trade agreement must benefit both (Sunday Guardian)

ROOTS OF POWER MADHAV NALAPAT www.sunday-guardian.com/profile/madhav-nalapat

Manmohan Singh omeone forgot to tell Manmohan Singh that the European Union is in crisis, with its banking system effectively bankrupt, and being prevented from visible collapse only by constantly feeding creditors the notion that the EU's financial worries are solvable when they are not. German banks in particular have been the victims of the country's propensity to believe that the EU offered a safety net sufficient to throw to the winds all canons of prudent lending. Their exposure to Greek and Italian debt, in particular, threatens the existence of many of them well before the next 18 months. In such a context, to spend precious rupees on an expensive junket to Berlin would be laughable, if it were not yet another indication of the fact that time appears to have stood still for the Prime Minister and his economic team, who persist in the belief that the US and the EU are the solution to India's lack of capital, when in fact the answers are these days to be found in West and East Asia. A visit to Kuwait or Tokyo would have been much more profitable for India than the current rush to Germany. Certainly Manmohan Singh has the right to be sentimental about a continent in which he has spent so many happy years as a student, but sentiment has seldom been a sufficient foundation for sound policy. Since his stint as Union Finance Minister during the Narasimha Rao period, Manmohan Singh has concentrated his considerable intellect on ways of making it easier for foreign businesses — predominantly those based in the member-states of NATO — to do business in India. Or, in other words, to compete with their Indian counterparts. The high bank interest rates favoured by his economic adviser, C. Rangarajan, who as RBI governor in 1994 slowed down a nascent economic boom by a similar policy has been combined with a slew of new regulations passed by the myriad arms of a government harking back to 1970s style control of private industry. Overall, the effect has been to drain Indian industry of much of its global competitiveness during the nine years that he has been in office, with obvious consequences for the balance of payments. Given the government's penchant for unilateral (and unreciprocated) trade concessions to the EU, it is no surprise that Indian industry is looking nervously at the Prime Minister's foray into a country that has made overpriced manufactures almost an art form. India being considerably poorer than Europe, it is only fair that the bulk of concessions ought to flow towards this country rather than away from it, as is so often the case. In particular, there needs to be tangible progress on efforts to ensure better access to Indian skill pools, IT and pharma into the European market, rather than simply industries such as textiles, which are rapidly giving way to more modern lines of manufacture. Thus far, the European side has remained committed to ensuring that its people pay extortionate prices for medicines, by blocking access to much cheaper substitutes from India. In the case of manpower flows, services and IT as well, the proffered concessions by EU negotiators have been derisory. In exchange, what they are asking for is the destruction of the automobile industry in India through a flood of imports from Europe, mainly Germany, as well as unrestricted access to other manufactures and services, all without any corresponding benefit to India. Certainly Manmohan Singh's gesture of gifting the EU more than $10 billion via (an EU-controlled) IMF indicates the PM's generosity towards that particular entity. However, he needs to be reminded that those who voted him to office are in India, not in the EU, and that it is their interests that he has sworn to protect. Should Manmohan Singh succeed in ensuring better access to Indian medicines — and the chances for this appear minuscle, given both the PM's propensities and the hold that Big Pharma has over EU policymaking — he can have the satisfaction of knowing that the biggest beneficiaries will be the Europeans themselves. At present, they are being forced to pay very high prices for drugs in a context where equally effective (and far cheaper) substitutes are available. Shamefully, the EU has not merely blocked the flow of drugs from India into its own territories, but has sought through vexatious litigation and police action to stop them from going to countries in Africa, where the price of medicine is often a matter of life or death. Hopefully, someone in the PM's large delegation will whisper a complaint about this to the Germans, who have been the most aggressive in creating a Fortress Europe that demands concessions from much poorer countries such as India than it is willing to concede in return. An India-EU Free Trade Agreement (FTA) ought to be signed only if it is truly beneficial to both sides and not the one-sided agreements that policymakers in India so often return with. Rather than going about the futile task of begging the EU for capital that it does not any more have, the Prime Minister needs to reverse course and defend Indian interests abroad rather than foreign interests in India.

http://www.sunday-guardian.com/analysis/an-india-europe-free-trade-agreement-must-benefit-both

NATO & Al Qaeda join hands in Syria (PO)

M D Nalapat

Friday, April 12, 2013 - When President Bashar Assad warned that developments in Syria had the potential to destablize the entire region, he was being serious. The fall of two anti-monarchist Heads of State, Saddam Hussein in Baghdad and Muammar Kaddafy in Tripoli combined with the downfall of a republican, Hosni Mubarak, to make the ruling group in Qatar believe that now was the chance to go even further. Doha,in partnership with Riyadh and Ankara, are determined to ensure that the Sunni majority assume full power in Syria, the way the Shia majority has become the dominant player within Iraq. Apart from the fact that he too subscribes to the anti-monarchist ideology of the Baath movement, Bashar Assad is Shia, coming from the Alwaite branch of that great variant of the noble faith of Islam. At its base,the opposition of the anti-Syria regional troika (Turkey, Qatar and Saudi Arabia) to the Assad-led government in Damascus is because of his faith. What the three forget is that success in Syria - in terms of the fall of the Assads - would prove to be a Pyrrhic victory, bringing immense damage in its wake.

By their action in giving money and weapons to any individual willing to militarily challenge the Assad regime, the anti-Syria troika are creating the grounds for Shia-Sunni tensions within the entire region that could last for generations. It would be Lebanon all over again, only deeper and broader in scope and virulence, and would tear apart society in a way that would destabilize the entire region, most especially the GCC, which has allowed itself to become the spearhead of the anti-Shia crusade despite protests from Iraq and Lebanon.

Also, those active in Syria would seek out new theatres once the conflict there ends in a victory for the anti-Assad forces in the manner in which the anti-Kaddafy forced ( with crucial help from NATO) prevailed in Libya. Even in the case of Syria, the French secret service in particular is known to be deeply embedded with the fanatic fighters in Syria, guiding them in their numerous actionsagainst the regime, despite the huge increase in civilian casualties which this entails. France is a country that thrives on denial. Because of the indulgence of Winston Churchill, a close friend of Coco Chanel, Paris was gifted a permanent seat in the UN Security Council despite the fact that it surrendered to Germany in 1940s and thereafter tool almost zero part in the war, barring bombastic broadcasts from London by Charles De Gaulle.

In the 21st century, France has been reduced to the status of a minor player, lagging behind Germany in hard power and behind the UK in soft power. However, successive regimes in Parishave sought to cover up this insignificance by embarking on adventures in which it relies on its stronger partners - especially the US – to achieve success It was Nicholas Sarkozy who led NATO’s charge against Libya, and the reason for that has now become clear. The considerable assets of the Libyan government have disappeared. Few are asking where the $160 billion in Libyan financial assets have gone to. The new so-called government in Tripoli, which controls nothing, will never ask NATO to give back the money that the alliance has confiscated, being as it is a dependency of Brussels.

Even the UK, a country that ought to have had better standards in such matters than the French, has entered the game of loot. For example, the immense properties of Colonel Kaddafy and his children have been taken away without any compunction, and handed over to new owners. This is whoesale confiscation. First, NATO declares a set of individuals as “human rights violaters”, and subsequently takes away their property.

This must be a source of concern, for example to corrupt officials in China, most of whom have placed millions of dollars (in some cases, billions) in NATO-bloc banks and other financial institutions. Should they ever fall from grace, the chsnces are high that NATO will declare them as “war criminals” and “human rights violaters” and take away their billions of dollars and euros,the way they have Iraqi wealth after 2003 and Libyan money after 2011

Just as in the 1990s,when Bill Clinton ensured the success of the Taliban while claiming that it was Islamabad that was the lead player, in Syria Brussels has joined hands with extremists in order to assist the regional troika to depose Assad. It does not seem to bother the alliance that Ayman Al Zawahiri and they are on the same side, or that almost all the actual fighting in Syria against the regime is being conducted by Al Qaeda.

However, just as 9/11 was a wake-up call (that seems to have been forgotten, given the way Secretary of State Kerry is backing the Clinton line of obedience to the wishes of the

Ankara-Riyadh-Doha troika), NATO will understand its folly once the Al Qaeda elements energized by them turn their attention to the very countries now nourishing them, Saudi Arabia, Qatar andTurkey. Those who forget history, as they say, are condemned to repeat it. The first time (9/11) was a disaster. The second time around will be a catastrophe.

http://pakobserver.net/detailnews.asp?id=203451

Time for our spooks to grow up and smell the Chinese coffee (Sunday Guardian)

ROOTS OF POWER MADHAV NALAPAT www.sunday-guardian.com/profile/madhav-nalapat

Airplanes displayed at the museum in Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics in Nanjing. he weather in Nanjing, once the capital of the KMT government in China and since 1949 a provincial city in the People's Republic, is depressing. The skies are grey and a chill wind from the oceans has brought the temperature down to 12ºC, or half what it ought to have been when this columnist ventured forth to the Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics (NUAA), the academic hub of hi-tech research in aerospace in China. The half-sleeved woollen jacket from New Delhi's Khan Market offers scant protection from the weather, so it is with relief that one enters the university buildings to sign an MoU between NUAA and Manipal University (MU). A day previously, a similar MoU had been signed with an affiliated institution, the Beijing Institute of Technology (BIT). Together, the two account for a substantial portion of China's advanced R&D in civil and military applications, the reason why MU sees them as ideal partners to ramp up its own research from UGC levels to global standards. Although initially both the Chinese as well as the Indian media were equal in the manner in which they bash each other's country, these days it is television channels and print outlets in India that warn of a "repeat of 1962" and of hordes of Chinese stealing industrial and other secrets from gullible Indians. Indeed, the day after the MU-BIT MoU was signed, one of India's premier commentators on security matters, the venerated Bahukutumbi Raman, sounded an alarm, warning that all that the Chinese wanted was a base within India to conduct espionage. Raman's former agency, RAW, has several times been infiltrated by the CIA and indeed has had more than a few cases of officers being seduced by the United States into serving as double agents. Fortunately for Manipal, which has partnerships with numerous US universities, Raman does not believe that the Americans would ever think of using its campuses as a base for espionage. Nor, clearly, would the British or the French, each of whom has multiple educational partnerships in India, but have yet to be warned about in the way that the two Chinese universities mentioned above have. Security agencies in India have worked like beavers to ensure that Chinese companies are denied the chance to compete with US and European firms in India, even in sectors where they are highly competitive, such as in telecom, infrastructure, finance and energy. The French, US and Pakistani secret services would be delighted to see that the two biggest countries in Asia remain intensely wary of each other. Whether it be in allowing companies to operate or citizens to be given a visa to the other country, India and China have placed multiple roadblocks in each other's way, to the benefit of third countries. This situation needs to change, for the strengths and skills of both are complementary. Only international weapons manufacturers gain from the perception of another imminent Sino-Indian war in a context where not a single bullet has been fired across either side of the India-China border since 1962. And as for Manipal, despite disapproving frowns from those who believe that India and China should continue to remain apart, the university is happy to join Columbia, California, Toronto, Leeds, Oxford, Purdue, Lyons, Carnegie-Mellon, Yale and Moscow universities in joining hands with BIT and NUAA to ensure more opportunities for its students. If our spooks are correct, the US, the UK and other countries that have established partner relationships with the top Chinese universities are careless about security. As are, perhaps, Boeing, Motorola and Airbus, each of whom has set up research centres within NUAA in Nanjing. Time to grow up and smell the coffee, boys! However, Raman's implied point is correct, which is that Delhi has a long record of making concessions to Beijing without getting anything in return. In the 1950s, Jawaharlal Nehru walked away from the numerous treaty rights that India had in Tibet without even getting the Chinese side to formally recognise the Sino-Indian boundary in return. In more recent times, India has wholeheartedly backed China in WTO talks without first making sure that the barriers to entry of Indian IT and pharma in that huge market get lifted. And there is no doubt that it is Beijing that has converted Pakistan into a nuclear threat, not only to India but ultimately to itself as well. However, none of this detracts from the fact that in 2013, China is way ahead in technology when compared to India, and that if anybody is to be worried about leakage of technical secrets, it ought to be the Chinese. Our spooks still follow the strategy of blocking any development that excites their suspicion. They need to understand that economic logic cannot get subverted in the name of security, and that — like China or the US — they need to improve their functioning so that they can monitor even in a dynamic environment. http://www.sunday-guardian.com/analysis/time-for-our-spooks-to-grow-up-and-smell-the-chinese-coffee

China decision on dams may hurt ties with India (Sunday Guardian)

MADHAV NALAPAT  Beijing | 6th Apr 2013

The Brahmaputra in Assam: ‘The sanctioning of three new dams on the Brahmaputra river in Tibet just four months after Xi Jinping (below) took over as General Secretary of the Chinese Communist Party threatens to derail the reset of ties with India.’ | Reu fter a gap of two years following the uproar among ecologists and disquiet in Delhi about China's beginning construction of the Zangmu gravity dam on the Brahmaputra river in Tibet (or Yarlung Tsangpo, as it is locally known), the sanctioning of three new dams (Jiache, Degu and Jiexu) on the same river just four months after Xi Jinping took over as General Secretary of the Chinese Communist Party in September 2013 threatens to derail the reset of ties with India which the new Chinese Head of State is planning to carry out. Together with German Chancellor Angela Merkel, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh of India was the only other Head of Government who was called personally by incoming Chinese PM Li Keqiang on his first day in office. And although both President Asif Zardari of Pakistan and President Rajapaksa of Sri Lanka were called by President Xi Jinping soon after taking charge, this was explained by a senior official in Beijing as being "because both are executive Presidents", unlike India's Pranab Mukherjee, whose role is titular. Chinese officials also point to the early meeting of Xi with Manmohan Singh in Durban and the cordial talks they held there as evidence that the new Chinese Head of State seeks a "reset of ties with India". As in the case of his predecessor Hu Jintao, who distinguished himself from the West-focused Jiang Zemin, the first country Xi visited after his swearing in was Russia, followed by the BRICS summit in Durban. Interestingly, the policy document released after the September 2012 Party Congress mentions no country by name, except for the BRICS bloc, thereby indicating that Xi wishes to continue the global focus of Hu rather than the West-focused policies of Jiang Zemin, the President under whom a few in China amassed billions while state-provided benefits to the rest of the population got drastically pruned. A scholar in Beijing claimed that during the 1990s, Jiang "converted the Chinese Communist Party into the Chinese Capitalist Party", and that he and his faction "blocked efforts during 2002-2012 by Hu Jintao and Wen Jiabao to make the system less unfair to those without influence", especially the benefit of ancestry. The scholar was hopeful that "Xi Jinping would succeed where Hu failed, and bring back Deng Xiaoping Thought into the policy matrix". Although Deng concentrated on economic development, he was careful throughout the 1980s not to dilute the "Iron Rice Bowl" of social security benefits to the common man, whereas Jiang did away with this safety net. Officials in Beijing are clearly in a mood to assert their own position in international councils, even where these collide with the course favoured by NATO, Syria being an example. Beijing has joined with Moscow to block NATO, Qatar and Turkey from doing a Gaddafi on the country's Shia President, Bashar Assad. "We would like India to remain loyal to non-alignment", said a senior official. The possibility of Delhi joining hands with Tokyo as a military alliance partner of Washington is giving nightmares to policymakers in Beijing, who see the need for "practical steps to show India that China can be an all-weather friend", the same formulation used in the case of relations with Pakistan. However, close ties with Islamabad are an important reason why diplomats in Delhi are sceptical of hints from Beijing of a reset in ties. A senior MEA official pointed out that (apart from the announcement that three more dams would be built on the Brahmaputra) "soon after Xi took office, it was announced that China was replacing Singapore in the managing of Gwadar port". The Indian side has yet to see any positive momentum in either the boundary talks (where the Jiang position, which is much more rigid than that of Zhou Enlai and Deng Xiaoping, continues to this day) or in giving better access to Indian pharma and IT companies. Chinese officials say that they are looking at ways of evening the balance of financial flows between India and China "by getting more involved in financing Indian industry and infrastructure" and also in "sending 300, 000 tourists each year to India to visit Buddhist sites". They are also uneasy at the nature of a Taliban and are therefore hesitant in following the US lead in accepting the Pakistan army's plea that the extremist group ought to be given a privileged place in any new Afghan dispensation. Some officials speak of joining hands with India "to keep extremists from power and to stabilise Afghanistan", although as yet Delhi does not seem to have received any formal overture in this regard. Beijing under Xi is also likely to drop its earlier opposition to India's fuller participation in fora such as the SCO and APEC. However, the matter of the four dams across the Brahmaputra remains. "Unless Beijing agrees to share information with India on this dam project and ensure that the interests of the lower riparian states (India and Bangladesh) are safeguarded, a reset cannot take place", a senior official in Delhi warned. Officials in Beijing were unwilling to comment on whether President Xi was ready to agree to meaningful talks with Delhi on the Brahmaputra dams. "Should that happen, the sky is the limit for India-China relations," a senior Indian official claimed. http://www.sunday-guardian.com/investigation/china-decision-on-dams-may-hurt-ties-with-india

When businesses become WMD (PO)

M D Nalapat

Friday, April 05, 2013 - Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD) are feared for the immense loss of life that they can cause, once unleashed. Thus far, the term has referred to chemical, biological and nuclear weapons used in situations of conflict. However, the reality is that several hundreds of thousands of deaths of innocents get caused by agencies that are pampered and protected by the very governments that constantly talk of (someone else’s) WMD. These are businesses dealing in commodities important to life, such as pharmaceuticals. Huge pharma companies based in the US and Europe have for the past two decades sought to prevent competitors in poorer countries from developing and marketing medicines as efficaceous as the ones the pharma giants peddle, but which often cost less than 10% of the prices charged by NATO Bloc-based entities and their allied states.

Each year, millions die of diseases that could have been cured, but only if the treatment were affordable. The pharma giants who are based in countries which daily lecture the world about “human rights” and “civilisational values” gouge the sick by making available their products only at very high prices. Take the Swiss-based Novartis as an example. Presumably, the principal shareholders of the company belong to the Christian faith. It is likely that they would be regular churchgoers and that they would be making small (in relation to their total wealth) donations to charity in order to make themselves believe that they are moral human beings.

However, by placing individual profit above social needs, they are betraying the example of Jesus Christ, the scourge of the money changers in the temple, who insisted that he and his followers should voluntarily live a life of poverty. For the past seven years, Novartis has engaged the highest-priced lawyers in India to prevent domestic companies from producing medicines for cancer which it claims infringe upon its patent for a drug,Glivec.

In common with other pharna giants based in the NATO bloc and that alliance’s ancillary partners,once the patent on Glivec expired,Novartis made a few small changes in its composition and passed off the resulting variant as a new drug, thereby meriting a fresh patent. Shamefully, several authorities and even courts in selected countries accepted this transparent effort at squeezing the last banknote of profit from the deaths of thousands condemned because they cannot afford the extortionate price of Glivec, which is reported to cost nearly US$ 60,000 for a year’s treatment, or a hundred times more than the India-produced substitutes that Novartis was seeking to drive out of the market Hundreds of thousands of victims of AIDS are alive today because Chairman Hameed of CIPLA,an Indian pharna company with conscience and not greed at its core,is producing anti-AIDS drugs at a small fraction of the prices charged by US and European companies. Hameed is saving lives that less scrupulous companies do not care about,because they have no money, the only attribute which the owners of such WMD in corporate form care about. This has made CIPLA a target of several vicious legal and media attacks designed to drive the company out of business. Shamefully,the European Union is seeking to blocktranshipment through its territory of low-cost medicines bound for Africa,by the use of legal and administrative measures which are openly protectionist.

Of course, no human rights” campaigner in Europe or the US cares to hold the bureaucrats of Brussels to account for seeking - albeit indirectly-the deaths of thousands in Africa by denying them access at an affordable price to life-saving drugs produced in India Former President of the US B Ill Clinton, who during the 1990s ensured the freedom from regulation of US financial giants that led directly to the 2008 meltdown, controls foundations with a corpus reported to be in excess of US$ 16 billion. Because Clinton has not yet made public the sources of funds for his enterprises, there is no public record of how much pharna giants engaged in keeping the prices of formulations beyond the reach of the common man have contributed to his kitty. Certainly while in office Clinton ensured that cheaper substitutes for extortionately priced drugs were denied access to US markets in the same way as they were banned in the EU. The principal reason why the healthcare system in the US is helping to bankrupt the country is because of the control that huge drug companies have over policymakers across both sides of the Atlantic. The only way that healthcare in both the US as well as the EU can be made affordable is to source medicines and other services from the many low cost but high quality providers that have sprung up in countries such as India. However, instead of following such a citizen-friendly policy, governments in countries which constantly sermonize to the rest of the world partner with the few against the many, securing profit to a handful in exchange for misery to millions.

Those pharma companies which place greed above morality claim that the high prices are needed to ensure research costs get covered. This argument is false. Much of the research takes place in government-funded labs rather than in those of the drug giants.Also,much of the research done by the latter get carried out in Third World locations where staff are paid a pittance compared to what their counterparts earn at home. Were the UN - especially its human rights wing - less deferential to NATO and its allies,an investigation would get launched into the way in which Corporate WMD has killed innocent lives by ensuring that prices of essentials such as food and medication soar beyond the reach of the overwhelming mass of humanity. However, such a day seems distant, at best. 

http://pakobserver.net/detailnews.asp?id=202710