Preet Bharara sours India-US ties (Pakistan Observer)

MD Nalapat. Friday, December 20, 2013 - Prime Minister Manmohan Singh makes no secret of the fact that he works under the guidance of Congress President Sonia Gandhi, who despite her primary school education has managed to establish absolute control over the party and the government. Her foreign policy has been completely different from that of mother-in-law Indira Gandhi, who sought to retain independence in action for her country. Prime Minister Singh himself has what in India is called a World Bank (and since Kofi Annan era, the UN) mindset, which looks with exaggerated awe towards Washington, and bends over backwards, forwards and sideways in order to avoid offending what is both world’s biggest economy as well as the country holding the most people in prison, even more than China, a country with four times the US population.

The Prime Minister shares with Sonia Gandhi an eagerness to visit the US and its NATO allies at every opportunity, despite the fact that such trips have not resulted in any concessions to India from any of these countries. On the contrary, there have been numerous concessions made by India to the NATO bloc economies, especially since 2004,the year when the Sonia-Manmohan took charge Those who behave in a servile fashion are treated as servants, and it therefore ought to have occasioned no surprise that Washington humiliated Delhi a few days ago by sanctioning the arrest by a New York prosecutor, Preet Bharara, of Deputy Consul-General Devyani Khobragade, a brilliant young lady officer with an impeccable record of service to the country.

There have been reports, all unconfirmed, that Bharara’s relatives include several who - allegedly - backed the 1980s and 1990s movement for an independent Khalistan out of parts of the Punjab State. Several US,UK and Canadian citizens made huge donations to “Khalistan Liberation Movement”, which entered upon more than a decade of insurgency in India,in which several hundred people lost their lives.

However, those close to Bharara say that the charge that he has a Khalistan connection is false, and that he is “100% American”, with no interest in politics except within the US. It is a fact that the youthful attorney has made a name for himself by going after powerful names in the finance industry, sending them to jail on the basis of painstaking investigation of wrongdoing. To allege a Khalistan angle to his arrest of the Indian diplomat may therefore do an injustice to a zealous crime fighter, unless clear evidence is brought of a Khalistan link. However,there is no doubt that neither Bharara nor those in the State Department who gave permission for the arrest of the Deputy Consul-General of India in New York had any qualms in humiliating not only the diplomat but her country.

That they felt emboldened to do so reflects the fact that since 1998,the year when Atal Behari Vajpayee took over as Prime Minister of the National Democratic Alliance government, the Government of India, whether led by the BJP or by the Congress Party, has sought to forge an implicit alliance with Washington the way Delhi had with Moscow for decades, until the USSR itself collapsed in 1992. Indeed, the first serious effort at a US-India alliance was during the aftermath of the 1962 war with China, when a chastened Jawaharlal Nehru sent several supplicatory messages to President John F Kennedy. Had the latter not died in 1963, such a partnership may indeed have taken place, with Kennedy going beyond the State Department line that India must first “settle” Kashmir with Pakistan before close cooperation took place.

However, his successor Lyndon Johnson had very little regard for India, and the opportunity was missed, just as it was in 1992-96,when President Bill Clinton once again insisted on the “solving of the Kashmir issue” before accepting Prime Minister PV Narasimha Rao’s outstretched hand of friendship. The third chance came and went in 2001,after President Bush and Vice-President Cheney heeded the advice of the Saudis and the CIA and chose Pakistan over India as the ally of choice for the war against the Taliban, after India had indicated its readiness to join the battle. By far the best chance came in 2004,when Manmohan Singh took over as the Prime Minister, determined to craft a new partnership between India and the NATO bloc.

While George W Bush and Condoleezza Rice were broadly sympathetic to the concept of an India-US alliance, they could not persuade sceptics such as the State and Commerce Department to go along. The result was that all the deals on offer were 95:5,with the US side asking for 95% and leaving the Indian side with just 5% of the total concessions made. The mistake made both by the Bush White House as well as by President Obama was to ignore the role of public opinion in a democracy. They saw that Manmohan Singh and Sonia Gandhi were eager for any deal, even a 95:5 split, and could not understand why the two who jointly ran the Government of India could not deliver their country to Washington. Public opinion in India, although filled with invective about Yankee perfidy, is in reality very pro-American, and even an 80:20 deal may have passed the public opinion test, but the most Obama has been prepared to go has been 90:10. Hence, once again, a US administration has squandered an opportunity to convert India into as reliable an ally of the US as it has been in the past for Moscow. The Khobragade episode has shown the Obama administration the limits of Sonia Gandhi and Manmohan Singh in seeking to accomodate the US.

The manner of her arrest has touched once again what may be described as “colonial nerve” in India, bringing out a bubbling lava of discontent at shabby treatment given to the lady diplomat. Preet Bharara may not have ever been a supporter of the Khalistan movement, but by his action in indicting Devyani Khobragade, he has helped one of the core objectives of that movement, which was to keep India and the US far apart. Thanks to Bharara and the State Department officials who backed him, 80:20 will no longer work. It will have to be at least 60:40 if the US is to make India an ally, the way it did China (with a 40:60 deal in China’s favour) in the 1970s.
http://pakobserver.net/detailnews.asp?id=227421

Mr Chidambaram, it’s time to walk the talk (Sunday Guardian)

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

LGBT people during a protest against Supreme Court’s verdict on Section 377 of IPC, in Bhubaneswar on Friday. PTI he best news of the month is that Palaniappan Chidambaram has finally woken up to the need to do away with the "medieval and colonial" laws that so infest the system of justice in this country. These comments were made after Sonia Gandhi and Rahul Gandhi expressed dismay at Justices Singhvi and Mukhopadhyaya's touching loyalty to Victorian values. For Chidambaram has, along with Kapil Sibal, been responsible for criminalising vast swathes of human behaviour since 2004. The Chidambaram-Sibal duo has ensured that a slew of fresh legislation and regulations have come into force, that are so diffuse in their meaning that almost any action can be deemed sufficiently criminal to send an individual to prison. Chidambaram in particular has ensured that prison gets made the default option for a slew of tax-related actions on the part of the private citizen. Discretion given to the official has increased in proportion to the increase in punishments prescribed. Small wonder that the quantum of bribes has gone up significantly during the past nine years. Of course, the domestic economy gets very little benefit from such unrecorded income, as since 1998, much of the black money collected as bribes — even within India — gets sent abroad, to Dubai, London and Singapore, amongst other destinations. It has taken a long time for Chidambaram to realise the harm he has done to the future of India by seeking to perpetuate and deepen a medieval code of "justice", intended by its British framers to be a way of ensuring that the people of India remain in chains, unable — by the force of law — to develop their skills and improve their lives, save by the express consent of one government agency or the other. India is unique in having a modern Constitution that co-exists without challenge alongside an archaic set of laws, including the criminal and police codes. These belong to the 19th century and are clearly intended to hold down rather than liberate the citizen. It is a mystery as to how the IPC, the CrPC as well as the overwhelming bulk of existing laws and regulations in the country can get reconciled with Articles 14, 15 and 21 of the Constitution of India, which together guarantee equality before the law, prohibits discrimination on grounds of race, sex, caste, location or faith, and the protection of life and liberty. If a Hindu sets up a school, that becomes subject to the Right to Education Act, which seeks to make up for the wilful failure of the state to ensure a proper school education for the poor by leeching onto the private sector. However, a school set up by a member of the minority community gets exempted from the RTE's far-reaching provisions. A temple can be taken over by the government at a whim, and often are, although a church or a mosque is exempt from such control. In Kerala, the Guruvayur temple near Thrissur gets far more visits by devotees (and far more gifts of gold and cash) than the Sri Padmanabhaswamy temple in Trivandrum, yet the treasure of the latter is several hundred times greater than that of Guruvayur, or indeed, tens of times greater than that of Tirupati, which witnesses a flood of gifts from devotees each hour. Unsurprisingly, there is a clamour for state takeover of the Sri Padmanabhaswamy temple, so that over time, it too can become as bereft of its treasures as those temples under state control have become. The fact that the colonial-era discrimination against temples was not overturned during the six years that the NDA ruled is partly why the Vajpayee period is seen by many as a Congress Lite regime, rather than a genuine alternative to Nehruvian policies. By its verdict on the gay rights issue, the Supreme Court has once again illustrated the unnatural adherence of post-Independence India to Victorian codes that have seemingly been set in stone for an eternity. Already an object of pity on the world stage, the SC judgement re-criminalising a huge swathe of human sexual behaviour has made this country a laughing stock. Now once again, the police and self-appointed moral policemen will get licence to peek into bedrooms and swagger into parks, to "enforce the law". The visit of King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia to India in 2005 gave a fillip to ties between two countries that have not always been the best of allies. However, in an effort to make up for lost time, it would appear that institutions in India are on course to ensure that the legal system in India remains chained to what the country's former British masters wanted it to be, which is a system very like what is in vogue to this day in Saudi Arabia. That is, unless Chidambaram acts on his "Born Again" commitment to human dignity and the freedoms given by the Constitution, and seeks to do away with the archaic and oppressive laws that he and his partner Sibal have introduced in the era of the so-called "reformer", Prime Minister Manmohan Singh. The Constitution of India needs — at long last — to prevail over laws that belong to the dustbin of history. http://www.sunday-guardian.com/analysis/mr-chidambaram-its-time-to-walk-the-talk

A common man’s party (Pakistan Observer)

MD Nalapat
Friday, December 13, 2013 - India has the largest Middle Class in the world,which at 340 million is comparable to the population of the United States. However, since the Dawn of independence from the UK in 1947, this class has been less active politically than those higher and lower than them in economic status.The rich ensure that policies favourable to their immediate interests remain untouched,by giving vast amounts of money to politicians as well as to officials.The poor come out to vote in large numbers,although thus far,their primary achievement seems to have been to make many politicians who came from poor families super rich.

Whether it be Sonia Gandhi or Mulayam Singh Yadav - or,indeed,the entire political class barring the Left parties and outliers such as Defense Minister A K Antony or Gujarat Chief Minister Narendra Modi - all have ensured that they and their friends and relatives climb from poverty to plenty within a generation.Where once the bicycle was the only available means of transport,these days the preferred mode is by BMWs and Audis. Where once even a train ticket was too expensive unless in the lowest class,these days the use of chartered aircraft is ubiquitousare. Of course,during the election season,the expensive clothes (although not shoes or watches) are packed away,and an effort is made to seem ordinary. Those bi-monthly shopping visits to London get postponed till after the votes get polled. Estate agents in London say that during past year,there has been a substantial increase in the number of Indians purchasing flats and houses in that metropolis and its environs,perhaps as a place of refuge should political rivals come to power

The growth of the Middle Class became pronounced during the period after 1992,the year when a nondescript and hugely underrrated Prime Minister, Pamulaparthy Vekkata Narasimha Rao,took over as an accidental PM and began a process of economic liberalisation which ought to have been started in 1980,the year when Indira Gandhi was re-elected to power. Had her younger son Sanjay survived rather than perish in an air crash less than six months after the 1980 Congress victory in the Lok Sabha polls,India may have been a much more advanced economy than it is now. Sanjay Gandhi detested the socialism favoured by his grandfather and mother,and himself set up a private company to manufacture automobiles. In foreign policy,he was a critic of the Soviet Union,and ideologically much closer to Washington. It was fortunate for Moscow that Sanjay Gandhi was killed,as otherwise,relations with India may have ceased to be as close as they were since the 1960s,a situation which continued until the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1992.

A year earlier,India was the only country in the world to officially welcome the short-lived coup against Mikhail Gorbachev,something that soured relations between Delhi and Moscow not only when Gorbachev briefly returned to power but afterwards,when Boris Yeltsin took charge of the Russian Federation. Indeed,in 1980,there were reports that a mysterious hand had filed away the control wires of the small aircraft that Sanjay had been piloting the morning of his crash,so that after a few tugs on the control stick,the wires connecting that with the ailerons gave way and the aircraft came hurtling down. Details of the condition of the wires leading up to the control rod (or joystick) of the aircraft were never released.Sanjay Gandhi had many enemies in India ad outside,so it is difficult to identify those responsible for filing the control wires to a thread,if indeed that was the cause of death rather than an excess of exuberance in piloting the high-performance aerobatic aircraft

It may be mentioned that Sanjay Gandhi’s was not the only death of a senior Congress leader which took place in suspicious circumstances. Years later,a dynamic Congress leader,Madhavrao Scindia,met his end when his aircraft crashed some distance from its destination. For a brief while,there were reports about a faulty fuel gauge,that showed the fuel tanks to the full when in fact they were half empty. Some muttered that it was this alleged fuel gauge that was the cause of the crash,because the pilot was under the impression that he had plenty of fuel in the tanks,when in fact they had become empty just before he crashed. As details of this have not been made public,and it is anyway unlikely that the truth will ever emerge from the fog of official mishandling of evidence,we will never know the exact circumstances behind the death by an air crash of one of the most charismatic and competent of politicians in India, Madhavrao Scindia.

Indeed,there was another - and equally dynamic - Congress politician, Rajesh Pilot, who too met his end “accidentally”, this time in a road accident.While Scindia perished on 1 October 2001,Rajesh Pilot died a year earlier,on 11 June 2000,in a road accident with several unexplained factors,including why he was rushing back to Delhi (on whose summons?) and what happened to the driver of the bus that seemed almost to follow him around on the road until it crashed into his vehicle. Another unnatural death was that of Jitendra Prasada,a brilliant tactician from Uttar Pradesh,who died around the same time as Scindia,in 2001,apparently of a brain haemmorage. However,there was speculation as to why he was shifted from one hospital to another on that final night on 16 January,while there were reports that an early blood test had shown traces of botulin,which were absent in a second blood test at a different hospital,which gave him a thorough stomach wash even though it was supposed to be a brain haemmorage rather than food poisoning.

The passing away of Sanjay Gandhi changed the course of the Congress Party,delaying economic liberalisation for twelve more years,while the unnatural deaths of Pilot,Scindia and Prasada took away three stalwarts from the Congress Party,making it a much tamer and paler version of what it might have been had these three remained at the higher levels of the party

Under Manmohan Singh,who has proved a disaster in politics as much as in economic policy,the Middle Class has become alienated from the Congress Party. In Delhi, they have substantially gravitated towards the Aam Aadmi Party led by Arvind Kejriwal, an honest former bureaucrat. The shock success of the AAP in the just-concluded assembly elections in Delhi have shown the middle class that they can make a difference,if only they come out and vote. This is likely to ensure that the Middle Class finally come out to vote in large numbers,thereby ensuring victory for whatever party or leader they see as best for the nation.The awakening of the Middle Class will be the big story of the 2014 elections in India,and for this,Arvind Kejriwal and the Aam Aadmi Party deserve a lot of the credit.

http://pakobserver.net/detailnews.asp?id=226697

The 21st century is India’s era of sexual Inquisition (Sunday Guardian)

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

P. Chidambaram and Kapil Sibal have got a chance to nudge the Indian Penal Code even further into medievalism. n 1 December, at 11 minutes past 11 p.m., 22-year-old Rahul Tilak's life changed. He was taken into custody off Gulistan Hotel at Grant Road, Mumbai, and is still in jail. Arraigned under Section 509 of the (19th century but still extant) Indian Penal Code, the youthful office worker is likely to spend the next couple of years in prison, from whence he will hopefully emerge a reformed man. His crime? That he, according to a young lady passing by about 20 feet from him, "blew a flying kiss" in her general direction. Whether it was actually a flying kiss or Tilak trying to brush away a fly that had settled on his upper lip is irrelevant. Since the legal duo of P. Chidambaram and Kapil Sibal got their joint chance to nudge the IPC even further into medievalism than it has been for a century and a quarter, the definition of what constitutes a jailable offence has been made so vague and broad in scope that any individual can be sent for a spell in prison on the most subjective of reasons, such as interpreting a gesture to be that of a most indefensible of deeds, blowing a flying kiss at a lady from 20 feet away. Steeped as he is in Sibal-Chidambaram logic, it took but an instant before a police constable in Grant Road (which, it may be mentioned, gets somewhat lively in the evenings) hauled the young man off to prison. One of Manmohan Singh's "reforms" has been to make prison the default option for a variety of transgressions that in a democracy would either be ignored or be punished by just a warning or a fine. This columnist comes from a matriarchal family and is proud of the fact that he bears his mother's surname rather than his father's. Women are far and away the better sex, and only those societies which acknowledge this truth achieve their full potential in creativity and progress. It is only the healing presence of the fair sex that makes life tolerable in a country with a Kafkaesque system of law and administration. However, thanks to the post-2004 introduction of laws that are diffuse and therefore impossible to escape from, subjective accusation has trumped any need for substantive proof before penal action gets initiated. It may soon become necessary to introduce in India the same segregation of the sexes at the workplace and in educational and outside locations as was prevalent in Mullah Omar's Afghanistan, and which is largely the rule in that citadel of modernity, Saudi Arabia. While in Mumbai, this columnist looks forward to his daily walk along the Marine Drive. Let it be admitted that the collateral advantage of the sight of many charming members of the opposite sex having the same idea (of taking a walk) has been as big a bonus as gazing at the seas washing in waves across the shoreline. However, these days, one needs to focus less on calories than on weaving right, left and in a circle while walking, so as to avoid the merest chance that there may be accidental physical contact with a lady who may subsequently feel motivated to summon the nearest policeman to report a case of "rape" . Of course, this as per the Sibal-Chidambaram definition, of a man being guilty by declamation, and to blazes with the (lack of) evidence. As Rahul Tilak found out exactly a week ago. A woman has the right to her own body, and those who take liberties with it without willing (i.e. non-coerced) consent deserve severe punishment. In the Damini case, the so-called juvenile deserves the same punishment as the other perpetrators of the heinous crime they jointly committed. A technicality which ought not to allow this predator to get released back into society, once again to place young women in danger. However, to embrace medieval codes of morality by sending to prison a man on the (unsupported by other witnesses) word of a woman in the absence of any verifiable evidence, and before an impartial examination takes place of the incident, is to make nonsense of the concept of innocence until proven guilty. The same day as Tilak lost his liberty, a postman dismissed for the alleged theft of a Rs 57 money order won exoneration from a court, a mere three decades after loss of livelihood and liberty. Will those who filed false charges against the man ever get prosecuted? Never, just as those policemen who destroyed India's cryogenic engine program by arresting key scientists on false charges still walk free and get promoted. The 21st century was thought to be the era of the sexual revolution, the freeing of women from patriarchy. Instead, it is becoming the age of the sexual inquisition, the swelling virulence of which is making contact between the sexes a danger to individual liberty. http://www.sunday-guardian.com/analysis/the-21st-century-is-indias-era-of-sexual-inquisition

‘Misuse of surveillance pervasive in India’ (Sunday Guardian)

MADHAV NALAPAT  New Delhi | 7th Dec 2013

Illustration by Sandeep Adhwaryu ither directly or through unofficial proxies, there is widespread officially-inspired surveillance for personal and political reasons in India, say officials dealing with such matters. Reacting to news reports about the placing of a lady architect under 24/7 surveillance, a senior official claimed that such snooping "was the rule rather than the exception" across the states and at the central level. He pointed out that "as yet, there are no accepted codes of conduct binding intelligence agencies and their police auxiliaries in the collection of information" on human targets. According to him, "the prohibition of misuse in laws such as the Telegraph Act is followed only in the breach". A junior officer pointed out that "technology has made such legislation obsolete, in an age where a mobile phone can record both images as well as sound". A senior official claimed that "agencies achieve deniability by requisitioning the services of private detective agencies, who are usually paid through unaccounted funds". He warned that "cash for such purposes is easily available, either from available funds or by leaning on a businessman to produce the cash". Fulfilling such requests for data collection from government officials "gives a private agency immunity, which it then uses to conduct similar snooping, this time on behalf of private clients". According to a junior colleague, "telephone surveillance of certain opposition leaders, which got exposed some months ago, was carried out by individuals who regularly conduct such activities on the verbal request of police and intelligence agencies". He pointed out that "should the private individuals (charged with the surveillance of opposition politicians) reveal the close connection between them and officials, it may prove embarrassing." The War on Terror declared twelve years ago by President George W. Bush "has become the perfect cover for a range of snooping activities, much of which has nothing to do with terrorism", a senior official claimed, adding that "in India, much of the requests for surveillance have a political or personal motive", and are either "designed to find out incriminating evidence against a target individual or to find out whether that individual has damaging information against a VIP politician or high official. "There is almost no application of mind before such requests get sanctioned, even in cases where proper procedures are followed", a senior official pointed out, saying that "This can be seen from the fact that permission is given immediately after a request for surveillance has been made". Such sanctions are justified "on the vaguest grounds, detailing anonymous complaints or unverified information" used as grounds for sanction. A colleague added that "an interesting point is that while there is a list of target individuals, there is also a much smaller list, of persons who it is informally forbidden to track". These are usually close personal friends of VVIPs, who therefore get enabled to carry out whatever activities they are engaged in beyond the radar of the official agencies presumed to be tracking such activities A senior official said that "unless it be enforced that only orders in writing will be followed, such misuse of official machinery as well as auxiliaries for personal and political purposes will go on". A junior officer said that "there ought to be public hearings on the use of intelligence agencies in situations where terrorism and subversion is ruled out". The US is known to collect business-related data through its lock on email servers, which may then get used to give an unfair competitive advantage to US and allied companies against their competitors in South America and Asia. Both officials said that should there be a discussion in Parliament on the Gujarat Snoopgate, "it ought to be extended to the entire question of misuse of police and intelligence agencies across the country for personal and political (rather than national) purposes." http://www.sunday-guardian.com/investigation/misuse-of-surveillance-pervasive-in-india

Bo Xilai takes revenge on Xi Jinping’s China (Sunday Guardian)

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

Bo Xilai (L); Xi Jinping odern China is the creation of Deng Xiaoping, who correctly identified the main enemies of the Chinese people as disease, ignorance and poverty rather than the "imperialists" and the "hegemonists" so often declaimed against by Mao Zedong. The last war fought by China was in Vietnam in 1979, three years before Deng was able to consolidate his control over the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). Since then, there has been no theatre in which the PLA has played an offensive role. This is in contrast to NATO, which seems to be looking for locations where it can unleash firepower, naturally on those too weak to offer much resistance. During the period when Deng was in direct charge, the PLA received much less attention and financial support relative to other institutions than it had during the Mao years, when it was coddled as the main guarantor of the Chairman's power, especially during the tumultuous 1960s, the decade of the Cultural Revolution as well as of the Sino-Indian border conflict. Once Jiang Zemin took charge in the 1990s from Deng, and after the latter's passing in 1997, huge boosts were given to the PLA's capabilities. However, except for a bit of sabre rattling across the Taiwan Straits, which ironically helped the anti-China DPP presidential candidate Chen Shui-bian to defeat his pro-China KMT rival, there was hardly any instance where force or even the threat of force was used. The concept of the "peaceful rise" of China that had been popularised by Deng held, as it did during much of the time of Jiang's successor, Hu Jintao. Matters began to change around 2010, and this may be traced to the rise of Bo Xilai, the charismatic scion of one of the CCP's most prominent political families. Bo sought to return to the era of Mao Zedong, and this he did by basing his appeal on raw xenophobia. Anti-Japanese sentiment was whipped up, while those who called for China to copy the NATO strategy of the use of force to defend its interests were encouraged. The higher, lower and middle ranks of the PLA became entranced by Rambo Bo, seeing in him a leader who would free the military from the invisible fetters mandated by the "Peaceful Rise" strategy. Aware that Bo's purpose was to upset the line of succession and thereby to replace Xi Jinping or Li Keqiang (at that time, it was not clear who would emerge as Top Gun), party elders began to tack to the Maoist wind, ramping up their references to the military. This change became most obvious when Beijing suddenly raised the stakes in the South China Seas. Its rate of growth would have inevitably given Beijing dominance in the South China Seas over others within about 15 years, and without any threat of force. However, to compete against Bo, even Hu Jintao (whose greatest success was to use the "Peace Card" in order to win over hearts and minds in Taiwan) was forced into accepting the PLA's desired tactic of following the NATO example of giving primacy to the use of military force in the settling of disputes. Because of this policy, China has lost almost all the goodwill that it had acquired in South-East Asia since the 1980s, thereby giving the advantage to the US and Japan, now seen as the only protectors against the PLA. Over the year that he has been in office, Hu Jintao's successor Xi Jinping has taken a tough line against official corruption, jailing several top officials, including such key figures as the Mayor of Nanjing. Many of those within the higher echelons of the CCP who have become dollar millionaires and billionaires belong to the Jiang Zemin faction. This faction prevented Hu from implementing his favoured policies to the extent that he wanted, and Xi seems determined that he will not be similarly hobbled. The anti-corruption drive has, therefore, had the effect of weakening the Jiang faction to a level where it is no longer a hindrance to policy. However, the Catch 22 in such a process of consolidation of power has been the need for Xi to tack to the military, lest that institution veer to the side of Jiang the way some of its key commanders became admirers of Bo Xilai. Such deference to those in uniform has led to policy errors such as an Air Defence Zone over the China Seas, that has the potential to cause war between China on one side and the US and Japan on the other. Such a conflict would, within a decade, bring China's economy back to where it was under Mao Zedong. Although he is now in prison, his dreams of supreme power shattered, Bo Xilai must be chuckling at the mess that he has got his rivals within the CCP into. Should China abandon the strategy of peaceful rise, its own rise is likely to stall.

http://www.sunday-guardian.com/analysis/bo-xilai-takes-revenge-on-xi-jinpings-china