Rahul must help pass GST (Sunday Guardian)

ROOTS OF POWER MADHAV NALAPAT www.sunday-guardian.com/profile/madhav-nalapat M.D Nalapat is the Editorial Director of The Sunday Guardian.

While he has since 1995 been less than effusive about Congress president Sonia Gandhi, this columnist has refused to include Rahul Gandhi and Priyanka Vadra in such acerbity. It would be unfair to pass a verdict on Rahul and Priyanka until they each have had the opportunity to prove themselves. While there has been much negative comment about Rahul Gandhi's role in the misfortunes of the Congress, the reality is that till very recently, this was marginal. Control was firmly in the hands of his mother and her confidants. However, now that the baton appears to have been passed on from mother to son, there is no doubting the fact that Rahul and his hyper-aggressive stance on the BJP has revived the confidence in itself of the Congress, helped of course by the BJP's less than perfect performance in the economic field. Jobs are still scarce and confidence low, despite windfalls such as a crash in global commodity prices and increasing tensions between the Atlantic allies and Japan on one side and China on the other, thereby opening the door for more "Make in India" investments, of course once a suitable policy and performance matrix gets implemented.

As for Priyanka, whether in the 2017 UP polls or later in 2019, she has charisma enough to move the voter, quite apart from her outgoing nature and its invigorating effect on the party cadre. Overall, the fact that after years of corruption charges thrown in their direction by key BJP leaders, the fact that in its 15th month the Modi government has not even filed an FIR against either the Congress' ruling family or its key retainers, has given ammunition for the claim that such accusations were a canard, or else would not the BJP government have acted against them during the past year? Such inaction on the part of the BJP government against the top guns in the UPA (in contrast to recent moves by the investigative agencies against smaller fry, coincidentally those involved in feuds against regional BJP leaders) has given an opening for Rahul to launch an assault against the BJP that has given his party a punch way above its puny weight in the Lok Sabha. A much bigger BJP seems often on the defensive and losing public esteem, despite being led by the still-formidable Narendra Damodardas Modi. However, such aggression needs to cease at the waterline of vital national interests, including terrorism, external threats and the economic policies essential to finally ensuring that India reach the 15% annual growth trajectory the country needs to abolish extreme poverty within a generation. In the roster of such measures, none is more important than the Goods and Services Tax (GST) Constitution Amendment Bill awaiting passage by two-third of Parliament and two-third of the state Assemblies. It must be said that the parliamentary management of the post-2014 government is thus far even worse than the low standards set by its predecessor. Both the GST as well as the Land Bill ought to have been passed at least two sessions ago, had an effective strategy been worked out by BJP parliamentary managers. During the previous session, the Congress had asked for the GST Bill to get referred to a Standing Committee, which has come up with a change that could easily have been effected without resorting to such a time-consuming procedure. It further promised that the GST Bill — which, incidentally, was a Congress-backed measure despite the legislation having been introduced in 2000 by Atal Behari Vajpayee — would get passed with Congress support during the current (monsoon) session of Parliament, an assurance that the national interest mandates be kept. As Rahul Gandhi would know, India after 68 years of freedom still has less of a unified market than the multi-country European Union, with our states each erecting barriers to inter-state commerce, thereby reducing overall growth by an estimated 2% each year. Getting the GST passed (of course with the Congress-suggested amendment) during this session of Parliament is crucial to ensuring that it comes into force during the next financial year. This is because it will take about six months from passage in both Houses of Parliament for the state Assemblies to enact supporting legislation. After that, for the measure to get fully operational would require a transition period of about 90 days. Should the GST Bill get delayed till the winter session, it will not be possible to get ratification by the states done as well as ensure the operational transition to the new system before 1 April 2016. This would mean that the measure would get delayed a year, during which five states go to the polls that may throw up governments that reject the present painfully-arrived at Centre-State consensus on the Bill. 2017 would be still more problematic, as the UP Assembly polls would take place that year together with the elections in Punjab. It is therefore essential that the GST Bill get passed during the next nine days (or if needed, more) that the current session of Parliament has. Rahul Gandhi need not worry that the GST-resulting uptick in the economy will boost the fortunes of the BJP sufficiently to gift Prime Minister Modi a second term in 2019. The BJP has already lost the chance for that by its inability to get the Bill passed thus far. For even after it does become law, it will take around three years for the impact of GST to get felt in the economy sufficiently to affect poll prospects. As in the case of the Vajpayee government, whose measures gave a growth cushion to the incoming UPA so as to camouflage for a while the damage that Manmohan Singh wreaked on the economy subsequently, passage of the GST would not help Modi before the 2019 Lok Sabha polls, but it would over the next several years significantly buoy up the Congress-supported coalition that Rahul's strategists are aiming at to replace the BJP in the next general elections. In the UK, during 1939, Conservative MP Leopold Amery exhorted the Labour Party's Arthur Greenwood to "Speak for England", rather than just for his party during the House of Commons debate on the war with Germany. Hopefully, Rahul Gandhi will in the coming weeks "speak for India" and thereby ensure the passage this Parliament session itself of a measure that can unify India as effectively as pilgrimage sites and the English language presently do http://www.sunday-guardian.com/analysis/rahul-must-help-pass-gst

A Battle of Extremes in the US? (Pakistan Observer)

M D Nalapat

Friday, July 31, 2015 - The past two weeks have been spent in what is still the world’s most consequential country, the US, in Washington and New York, with a couple of days in between in Miami, the home of Republican Party Presidential hopefuls, Jeb Bush and Marco Rubio. They are looking to contest an extrordinary election, for the US has changed significantly since Ronald Reagan swept aside Democratic Party opposition in the 1980s. The reason for this is the weakening of the middle class in the US, just as what took place in South America in the 1970s.

This trend is worrisome, for the middle class provides an anchor of stability in a democracy. This is so for two reasons, the first being the perception of opportunity for advancement within the lower economic brackets seen in a growing middle class. Such an expectation lowers societal tensions and generates the ambition needed for success, as well as a sense of pride that enables a citizen to adopt socially helpful work and lifestyle ethics. The second reason is the market a strong middle class provides, thereby ensuring the health of manufacturing and services in the economy.

The continuance of high tax rates (relative to the quality of government services delivered, which in India is among the worst in Asia) has angered the middle class, which were strong backers of Modi in 2014. This disquiet has been fuelled by the inexplicable refusal of the BJP leadership to take action against senior BJP leaders exposed in the media as corrupt, apart from avoiding any action against top central leaders of the Manmohan Singh government who are known to have become super rich during their decade in office. Only some state-level BJP leaders have been proceeded against, that to, usually those who levied corruption charges against BJP leaders, against whom of course zero action has been taken despite evidence of massive enrichment while they were in power in certain states.

The middle class is getting squeezed in India, but as yet less so than is taking place in the US and in much of Europe. Within the NATO alliance, the decade just past has been disastrous for the middle classes, which in countries such as Greece, Spain and Italy are getting reduced by the week. In the US, President Obama went by the advice given by Larry Summers, who was responsible during the Clinton years of the 1990s of freeing banks and financial institutions in the US from the prudential norms that had been in place since 1936. What followed was an orgy of greed, which ended in a collapse that led to Obama following his predecessor George W Bush’s prescription of bailing out the very bankers who were responsible for the 2008 economic collapse. Of course, when it came to the millions of US citizens who were in danger of losing their homes because of mistakes made by financial entities, President Obama had no money to help them keep their homes.

The dispossession of millions of US citizens of their homes during 2008-11 has led to homeless individuals sleeping on the pavements of big cities a sight usually associated with Bombay and Calcutta rather than New York or Washington, now both cities where the streets are filled with the helpless, the hopeless and the homeless. Had Barack Obama not abandoned his own conscience by following jn the footsteps of the Clintons in the matter of economic policy, he would have ensured that US citizens kept their homes rather than have them foreclosed by banks and sold at distress prices. This act of inhumanity towards the economically damaged has led to a revival of the “socialist” stream within the US, an ideology that had almost vanished for the past four decades.

This rise in discontent has led to Bernie Sanders, the only socialist in the US Senate, becoming a powerful force in the coming Presidential polls. Of course, an even more formidable candidate would have been Elizabeth Warren, the Democratic Senator from Massachusetts, who (like Sanders) is an idealist who has not followed the example of other US Senators and become millionaires. However, for reasons which are not clear, Senator Warren has refused to run for the Democratic nomination for the Presidency, thereby giving respite to the candidate of Big Business in that party, Hillary Rodham Clinton. Both the Clintons are millionaires many times over and make no secret of their ties to Wall Street. However, the mood within the Democratic Party reflects that within the country, which is why there is a rising probability that Bernie Sanders may become more favored to run for office than Hillary.

On the Republican Party side,the most popular candidate is Donald Trump, a high-living, free-spending billionaire who is associated more in the public mins with pretty women than with matters of state policy. Trump talks in public what many leaders of his party say only in private. He hatred immigrants from poorer countries and has even called Mexicans “rapists and murderers”, a slur on a hard-working people. His honesty in revealing his views has made him the front-runner within a party thrown into panic at his success. Although the establishment in both parties despise the socialist Sanders and the plutocrat Trump, yet it is conceivable that they may emerge as the top two candidates, thereby ensuring that one of therm will get elected as President of the United States.

Both Jeb Bush as well as Hillary Clinton are too closely associated with the failed security and economic policy of the immediate past, and discontent at the injustice done to both the middle as well as the working classes by administrations that work only for the benefit of billionaires may ensure that the Democratic Party nominee may be the socialist Bernie Sanders who is independent of the Big Money lobbies backing Clinton ,while Donald Trump may get the Republican Party nomination for his candour in speaking in public what the other party leaders only whisper in private.

http://pakobserver.net/detailnews.asp?id=269439

Lead India towards genuine independence (Sunday Guardian)

MADHAV NALAPAT  New Delhi | 25th Jul 2015

College students dressed in the colours of the national flag rehearse for the Republic Day parade in Ahmedabad. REUTERS | amit dave t was not a casual afterthought which made the founders of The Sunday Guardian choose the name of this newspaper. Although it reaches the reader every Sunday, its contents are valid for an entire week, suitable for dipping into during even the midweek, in case there was not enough time during the close of the week to peruse all its pages. And why "Guardian"? Because that is what it is, seeking to — in its own manner — protect and expand the rights of the citizen in the face of the onslaught of British colonial law on the prerogatives of the individual. The Sunday Guardian will not prescribe a dress or diet code, nor will it accept the views of those favouring a continuation of colonial law, that the citizen does not have the right to offend, only to pander and to flatter. This newspaper has spoken out against not merely Section 66A of the Information Technology Act, but has pointed out that it was after passage of this legislation 15 years ago that India's Information Technology industry (till then a world leader) began to falter in the face of competition, especially after an even more regressive version of the Act was passed nine years ago by the Chidambaram-Sibal duo. This publication seeks the decriminalisation of comment, because of the stifling effect the very threat of enmeshing the critic in a criminal case can do to the freedom of speech necessary in order for India to emerge as a knowledge superpower. It is small comfort to know that after a decade and more, usually much more, of court appearances and the constant threat of incarceration, a commentator can finally emerge from the shadows, most likely too intimidated to again participate in what ought to be a rumbustious celebration of free speech in a country which advertises itself as "the world's largest democracy", despite the colonial constructs its Founding Fathers clung on to after freedom, not excluding the country's first Governor-General, Lord Louis Mountbatten, who stayed on long enough to ensure that a third of the princely state of Kashmir remained in Pakistan's hands, despite the fact that this could have been liberated by the Indian Army if given two months more prior to the ceasefire agreed upon in an unfinished war. That decision, as also other decisions involving Gwadar port (which was initially offered to India by the Sultan of Oman but declined by Nehru), the UN Security Council permanent membership (again on offer but turned down), the Indus Waters Treaty, which gave an unprecedented 80% share to Pakistan, or more than the total share given to lower riparian states by all other international river water treaties combined. The Sunday Guardian does not believe in the "protected species" concept, whereby certain individuals are immune from critical comment. Such a ban violates the independence of thought that is central to an effectively-functioning democracy. India is evolving towards genuine democracy, but not because of the outsize bureaucracy that has been spawned over successive generations. Progress is being made because the people of this country are no longer willing to accept the status of helots that colonial law and practice relegate them to. They showed this feisty impulse towards genuine freedom when they opposed the move to dilute net neutrality or when 66A was opposed, including in court by a courageous young citizen . Choice is central to democracy, whether these be in lifestyles or in dress or diet. There are countries which impose often severe restrictions on dress, lifestyle and diet. India should not be in such a list, no matter what the cacophony of those who seek to continue the colonial practice of using the bludgeon of law to enforce obedience to their own narrow and deformed view of life. Laws should promote freedom rather than restrict it, and the converse should be the exception rather than the norm, as is the case today in India, which is the easiest democracy to get an individual thrown into prison. The Official Secrets Act has become a facilitator for corruption, as also the limitations of the Right to Information Act, which was in effect whittled down while Manmohan Singh was Prime Minister, and whose full development has yet to take place. Narendra Damodardas Modi was elected on the promise not of continuity but change. He was given votes in the tens of millions not to tweak the existing colonial system of governance but to replace it with a 21st century construct that promotes rather than hinders individual expression and enterprise. The Sunday Guardian expects that now that his year of On The Job training (for developing an all-India operating system in place of the state-specific operating system Modi evolved in Gujarat) is over, it is expected that the vow of ensuring Minimum Government and Maximum Governance will be fulfilled, and that to, "wholly and in full measure" rather than merely "substantially". Our cousins do so much better in locations such as the US, the UK or Hong Kong because the systems there have long discarded the colonial model, sometimes (as in the case of the UK) by half a millennium and in the case of the US, by two centuries. India needs to follow a path that will give its people the same ecosystem for excellence as they get elsewhere, and Swachh Bharat is a start, but only a start. Lower taxes lead to higher collections, yet North Block clings to its impulse of taking away as high a proportion of the honest taxpayer's income as it can get away with. Hopefully, the country will be third time lucky, and the next budget will lower taxes and thereby incentivise a much higher proportion of individuals to get within the tax net than is the case at present. In 1992, within a hundred days of coming to office without even a majority in the Lok Sabha, P.V. Narasimha Rao did away with much of the Licence Raj, but this at first crept and subsequently galloped back during the decade when Manmohan Singh was the Prime Minister. He showed why reform in India is easy, for in this country, beneficial change does not require the substitution of existing constructs with replacements so much as it calls for the scaling down and a dilution in the invasive nature of existing constructs. The superstructure of regulations favour the crony capitalists, while a chopping away of such toxic measures would empower those with zero political connections to effectively compete with those who spend vast sums of cash in ensuring political patronage, often to the detriment of the overall public interest. Rather than inflict whiplash upon whiplash upon the honest taxpayer through impost upon impost, other means need to be found to finance the machinery of government. An example would be the recapitalisation of public sector banks, which should come about not by throwing taxpayer rupees at them, but through diluting the stake of government in them. Spectrum and airspace need to be taken away from its current state users and transferred to public use. The justification for the defence forces hoarding both assets is their need in times of war. Should such a situation occur, they could easily get commandeered, rather than deny the economy the benefit of such resources for an indefinite length of time. A double digit growth rate provides the best security for the people of India, and such is the stated goal of Team Modi. Hopefully, before a year is past, such expansion in national income will go from a promise to a reality. Whether it be the taking of decisions by various agencies of government or the resolution of cases in the court system, procedures need to be evolved, which would ensure swifter decisions in both the administrative as well as the judicial spheres. Overall, an atmosphere of empowerment of civil society should replace the present monopoly of powers in the hands of the civil service. The people of India expect no less and deserve no less. It is up to Prime Minister Modi to fulfil these expectations so that his term of office as Prime Minister would be as long as his Chief Ministership has been. Lead the people of India towards genuine independence, Mr Prime Minister. http://www.sunday-guardian.com/extra/lead-india-towards-genuine-independence

Dawood hiding in plain sight with new identity: US experts (Sunday Guardian)

MADHAV NALAPAT  New York | 25th Jul 2015

Experts in counter-terrorism activities say that there is "credible information that India's most wanted person", Dawood Ibrahim Kaskar, aka Sheikh Dawood Hassan, who, ironically, was the son of a Mumbai police constable of known integrity, "was in March 2003 given a new identity and accompanying papers by the ISI, in order to reduce the chances of detection and to facilitate his travel to multiple locations across the globe, including South Africa, Malaysia, Thailand, Hong Kong, Portugal and Dubai". They say that this identity change was carried out once it was confirmed that the United States (responding to repeated requests by the A.B. Vajpayee government at the level of Home Minister L.K. Advani and National Security Advisor Brajesh Mishra) would declare Dawood a Specially Designated International Terrorist. This was done in October 2003, or six months after Dawood's identity makeover. According to these sources, "such a step had no effect on Dawood's international operations, both business and terror-related", in view of the fact that he was thereby enabled to travel safely to multiple locations through use of the documents prepared for him by the ISI. They claim that Dawood was made aware in advance — presumably by the Pakistan authorities — that he would be labelled an international terrorist by the US. Responding to this, towards the close of 2002 itself, the canny fugitive had transferred properties which were in his name to nominees and benamis, so that nothing of any value was seized anywhere in the world, including in India, where he has substantial assets, especially in Mumbai and Hyderabad. Terrorism, hawala and narcotics go hand in hand in Dawood's business empire, which at its peak had an estimated annual turnover of $4 billion in value before beginning a decline around 2007, because of increased US tracking of his assets and the financial networks operating on his behalf in Hong Kong and Singapore. The heightened interest was because of the expansion of operations of the LeT to Europe. "During 2006-2011, (Dawood) sold much of his international businesses and relocated some assets to India and most to Pakistan", these US-based sources claimed, adding that there was little effective countering of Dawood's operations in India during the period in office of both Prime Ministers Vajpayee and Manmohan Singh. But they added that "the heat has increased after (Prime Minister) Modi took over in 2014". During Narendra Modi's visit to the US in September 2014, National Security Advisor (NSA) Ajit Doval stayed an extra two days in Washington "mainly to work out ways of capturing or otherwise incapacitating Dawood". They add that Doval told his US interlocutors that he had been on the fugitive's trail for two decades, and that he wanted to ensure success in the hunt during his tenure in office as the NSA. However, the problem facing the sleuths in India is that the mastermind of the 1993 Mumbai bomb blasts has been travelling under a new legal identity since 2003, and has adopted a very low profile, shunning the high-profile events he was earlier seen in, "although he retains his contacts with Bollywood and is working to ensure through his contacts that favourites of his be given meaty roles". They say that sports and movies are his favourite hobbies, as well as being money-spinners, mainly through match-fixing in the case of the first and influence over distribution networks in the subcontinent in the case of the second. These sources claim that "the 26/11 attack could not have succeeded the way it did but for longstanding contacts within the Mumbai police and state political network of Dawood and his close associates". They claim that "high-level politicians, afraid of being implicated through Dawood ensured that the domestic angle was never seriously probed by the police following the blasts", with the bulk of attention being focused on captured operative Ajmal Kasab and his contacts in Pakistan. "It was as though the investigators were told not to believe that there was a network in India, which provided information to ISI proxies about the interior layout and work schedules of the Taj Mahal and Oberoi Trident hotels." These sources claim that "at least two employees of Taj and another of Trident" gave details about the hotel to planners in Pakistan. But none of the three "were questioned by the police and in fact remained in service after the blasts". However, on the Indian side, police authorities in Mumbai claim that no employee of either hotel was involved in the planning for the 26/11 attack, nor was there any input from domestic networks. "It helped such a surmise of domestic non-involvement that handlers in Pakistan cut off all communications with their collaborators in India 16 days before the attack", these experts claimed. Although there have been reports of Dawood hiding in PoK or in a remote location close to the Afghan border, US sources say that like Osama bin Laden before his assassination, Dawood is "hiding in plain sight" and in comfort, shuttling between homes in Peshawar, Hyderabad (Sindh) and Lahore and that he is in regular touch with family members in both Pakistan as well as India, sometimes directly but usually through trusted associates who travel freely in both countries and who are not known to law enforcement to have any connection with Dawood himself. However, the don is "still very much in charge of the operations of the companies he owns", as well as his traditional business of extracting money from businesspersons in India, besides dealings in real estate, mainly in Maharashtra, his home state "where he knows several officials and politicians, even meeting in the past with them in locations where his actual identity is safe from detection". The sources claim that "a director-general of police and five inspectors-general of police and DIGs have worked for Dawood in the past". However, they add that since the new government took office in 2014, conditions have become more difficult. A claim made by these sources is that Dawood in 2006 travelled on an international flight from the UAE to South Africa and "the seat next to him was occupied by a senior politician who knew whom he was talking to throughout the journey". They claim that "up to 2008 (when the Mumbai attacks took place), at least two senior NDA leaders and four top UPA personalities were in direct and indirect contact" with the reclusive Enemy Number One of India, but that "after 26/11, all but one of the six stopped further contact". However, even this remaining holdout among the VVIP Six "stopped contact with Dawood in 2011". The counter-terrorism experts say that Dawood's family is "almost totally unaware of the new identity of their internationally known relative as given in the travel documents", supplied to Dawood 12 years ago, and that these papers are used "only while travelling internationally and domestically and in financial transactions", so that the names and aliases of Dawood do not come up on any record, including those of banks and airlines. They add that since 2011, the don has ceased communicating directly through telephone, and is using close aides to relay his messages. Since 2012, he has even restricted his travel, confining himself to locations within Pakistan. The New York sources give high marks to National Security Advisor Ajit Doval for his persistence in trying to bring Dawood back to India, but say that in view of the change in the records establishing his identity, such a task would be difficult without the cooperation of Pakistan, something unlikely to be forthcoming. http://www.sunday-guardian.com/news/dawood-hiding-in-plain-sight-with-new-identity-us-experts

All faiths should avoid Wahhabi intolerance (Sunday Guardian)

ROOTS OF POWER MADHAV NALAPAT www.sunday-guardian.com/profile/madhav-nalapat M.D Nalapat is the Editorial Director of The Sunday Guardian.

Although Wahhabism claims to be the "purest" form of Islam, in reality it has little in common with a faith which has mercy, compassion and beneficence at its core, qualities repeated over and over in the Quran, so that each believer will understand and absorb the attributes that are likely to lead him to a pleasant afterlife. Wahhabism is based on religious supremacy, a philosophy which posits a particular set of beliefs as being superior to all others. The corollary is that those professing a different set of beliefs are considered inferior, "Untermensch", the term used to describe the so-called "non-Aryans" in Hitlerite Germany. Dialogue, much less debate, is discouraged except on its terms, which is that there ought to be zero questioning of the postulates of Wahhabism by the other. Unfortunately for the Muslim community, because of the tens of billions of dollars spent on its propagation by HNIs in the GCC countries, many regard Wahhabism as identical to Islam, when in fact the two differ substantially. Because India is a multi-religious society, where, unlike Pakistan, the number of individuals belonging to so-called "minority" faiths has grown over the years and now has reached close to 200 million, it was expected that Wahhabism would be in retreat in this country, giving way to the more moderate schools of thought enunciated in prominent seminaries in the country. Rather than this happening, it is the Wahhabi impulse that seems to have seeped into other faiths, thereby making a growing section of practitioners almost as immoderate and intolerant of differences as the Wahhabis are. The United States of America is among the countries where Christians are in an overwhelming majority, with the three major ethnic groups — Caucasians, Latinos and African-Americans — all professing different schools of the faith based on the life and teachings of Jesus of Nazareth. A few days ago, this columnist sat through a Broadway show, The Book of Mormon, in the Eugene O'Neill theatre, a still impressive structure that has aged gracefully rather than in bits and pieces of falling plaster. The play itself was a spoof on the Book of Mormon, which is regarded by the Mormon community as having been handed down to human beings from a divine source. The actors played out a parody of Mormon missionaries, and included in the repertoire an actor whose role was that of Christ himself, sometimes using language that would be considered about as far from saintly as Pluto is from Earth. Had such a performance taken place anywhere in India, protests by the community would have resulted in the performance being shut down and the actors arrested for "inciting communal tensions". So brittle is the protection given to speech in India that to cross a red line is a simple matter of having some individual register a case against anyone who utters something deemed to be offensive to him or her. In New York, however, there was no dismay but laughter at the sallies directed against the actors acting the part of Mormon missionaries. There was no rush to file FIRs, no cries that the US is an "anti-Christian" state for permitting such a parody of one of the subsidiary faiths of the Christian religion to be played before full houses in the theatre. Instead of Christianity, were it another religion that was being lampooned, it is very likely that a campaign would have been launched by practitioners of that faith to either sanitise the show through censorship or to ban it altogether. Those who died at the Paris offices of Charlie Hebdo became the victims of those for whom freedom of expression means the "freedom" to follow or to praise what the fanatics wish to propagate. The Christian-majority countries have long been sanctuaries for those of other faiths, with even Wahhabism getting a friendly reception in most of them, although these days, the spread of ultra-Wahhabi groups such as ISIS is visibly diminishing that welcome, especially after the flood of reports showing the discrimination faced by Christians in countries within West Asia and North Africa. Those who are confident of their worth will not get hysterical about even a slur, for the reason that such lack of respect by the uninformed does not in the slightest take away the worth of a faith. Hopefully a time will come when Muslims or Hindus laugh at certain depictions of their faiths rather than seek to shut down such shows, the way it has been attempted — often with success — in the case of film after film, book after book. Watching the Mormons in the audience laugh at the irreverent manner in which their core teachings had been lampooned by the actors in The Book of Mormon, a question surged up. When would it be before every community in India showed tolerance to those depicting the faith of their birth in a less than awestruck way? When would they stop going to courts to get arrest warrants issued, and stop importuning television anchors to join with them in spewing venom against those who refuse to abide by the views and attitudes of the apex leadership of a particular faith? Development is not merely a matter of steel and glass, but retaining the qualities of tolerance and compassion when confronted with those whose views are distasteful to others. If India is to become a knowledge superpower, ensuring freedom of speech would be a good way to start. http://www.sunday-guardian.com/analysis/all-faiths-should-avoid-wahhabi-intolerance