Episodes
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First, in 2003, exhorting India to be a hard state. i wrote this 20 years ago about why India needs to be #hardstate. coercion, carrots, covert action and containment: the principles remain relevant even though the dramatis personae are different. https://www.rediff.com/news/2003/feb/21rajeev.htm
Second, in 2008, the fear that India would be a failed state. I wrote this just after the invasion of Mumbai on 26/11/2008. https://rediff.com/news/2008/dec/08mumterror-are-we-heading-to-being-a-failed-state.htm…
2008 was antonia maino rule. no wonder India looked like a failing state then.
in 2022, I wrote of India, a serf state, as per the neo-feudal #deepstate:
https://www.firstpost.com/opinion/nupur-sharma-neo-feudalism-and-the-geopolitical-squeeze-on-india-10808101.html
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Dr Puri is a Telegram enthusiast (and a tech maven in general, despite his day job as a radiation oncologist), so he is particularly concerned about the full-court press against the app recently: its founder was arrested in France, its antecedents were questioned, its business model (which includes its own cryptocurrency, and also a million paying subscribers) was mocked, and there was a suggestion that it was nurturing crooks, criminals, child pornographers, human traffickers, etc.
There are some fundamental questions about Freedom of Speech, as well as about the US First Amendment as well as their Section 230 of the Communications Code that provides immunity to common carriers. In the context of problems faced by X in Brazil and Mark Zuckerberg confessing that he had been forced to censor things during Covid, the issue of the control over social media does come to the fore. What is “all the news fit to print”? Who determines that?
This may also be very different from laws in other nations: India’s First Amendment actually imposes restrictions on free speech, for instance.
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PS. The video is a little small, I think there was some conflict between Abhishek’s phone and my PC. The audio content should be fine.
PPS. As per Hari Mahadevan’s request, here are the slides that Abhishek put together that may not be so visible in the video.
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The Dr B S Harishankar Memorial Lecture, Bharatiya Vichara Kendram, Trivandrum, 27th August 2024.
A Malayalam version of this has been published by Janmabhumi newspaper at https://janmabhumi.in/2024/09/01/3258051/varadyam/geo-political-implications-for-bangladesh/
A brand-new genAI-generated podcast with two different anchors (it’s really quite good, give it a listen!) courtesy Google NotebookLM added. Let me tell you, I liked it. Your comments on this, below?
It was startling to hear from retired Ambassador G Sankar Iyer on Asianet’s program with Ambassador TP Sreenivasan that the celebrated Malayalam author Vaikom Mohammed Basheer (once nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature) said in 1973: “In Bangladesh, we have created yet another enemy.” With his novelist’s insight, Basheer understood that the Two-Nation Theory held sway among certain sections of Bengalis.
In the current crisis situation in 2024, the ongoing pogrom against Hindus (amounting to a virtual genocide) and the forced resignation of teachers, police officers and other officials based only on the fact that they are Hindus (there are videos that show them being beaten and humiliated even after resigning) suggests that anti-Hindu feeling is running rampant in Bangladesh. It is another kristallnacht.
This is coupled with anti-India feeling. For instance, the current floods in Bangladesh are being blamed on India opening a dam in Tripura after torrential rains, although the Indian government has said that it provided all the hydrological data that it always has.
The fact of the matter is that the departure of Sheikh Hasina is a blow to India’s geo-political ambitions. It now appears as though India erred in “putting all its eggs into one basket” by cultivating only her Awami League, and not the Bangladesh National Party of her arch-rival Khaleda Zia.
The indubitable fact that Indian influence in Bangladesh has now been supplanted by forces inimical to India raises the question of who might be behind the regime change operation. Beyond that, there is the question of whether it was indeed a popular uprising based on the suppressed ambitions of the people that led to the ouster of Sheikh Hasina.
The third question is what this means for Bangladesh, India and the region going forward, especially as climate change may alter the very geography of the area. It is predicted that as much as 11% of the land area of Bangladesh could be underwater by 2050. This could displace 18 million people, which would lead to unprecedented migration of their population into India.
Regime Change operation: Who benefits from it?
Cui bono? Who benefits? That Latin phrase is used to consider who might be motivated to commit a crime (the other part is who has the means to commit it). In this case of regime change in Bangladesh, there are several entities who might benefit.
Obviously Pakistan. That country has never lived down its balkanization in 1971, and it had a number of its sympathizers already in place at that time. There were many who collaborated with the Pakistani Army in identifying Hindus and facilitating their killing or rape or ethnic cleansing, and also Muslims who were their political opponents. These are the people Sheikh Hasina referred to as “razakars”, and they are essentially in control now.
China is a clear winner whenever something happens that hurts India’s interests. There is the perennial issue of the Chicken’s Neck, that narrow strip of land that connects the Seven Sister states of India’s Northeast to the Gangetic Plain. It is a permanent threat to India that somebody (most probably China) will cut this off and truncate India, with the Northeast then becoming part of a Greater Bangladesh, with associated genocide of Hindus and Buddhists.
Former Ambassador Veena Sikri spoke to Ambassador TP Sreenivasan about something very odd indeed: Sheikh Hasina made a state visit to China in mid July, and she was thoroughly humiliated there. Xi Jingping refused to meet her; and she cut her visit short by one day and returned to Dhaka. This is an unheard-of protocol violation for a State Visit; what it suggests is that China had decided that Sheikh Hasina was on the way out. This is in sharp contrast to a Xi visit in 2016 when he made grand promises about Belt and Road Initiative investments.
The United States also has interests. Sheikh Hasina had alleged two things:
* An unnamed Western power wants St Martin’s Island (aka Coconut Island) off Cox’s Bazaar as a military base to keep an eye on both China and India,
* An unnamed Western power intends to form a new Christian Zo nation (for Mizo, Kuki, Chin) just like Christian homelands were carved out in East Timor and South Sudan.
The implication was that the unspecified Western power was the US.
It is not entirely clear that the US benefits greatly from a military base in the Bay of Bengal but there has been a long-running Great Game initiated by the British to keep India down as a supplier of raw materials and a market for their products. The US may have inherited this mantle.
Intriguingly, the US Deep State and its proxies in the Western media had built a narrative around Sheikh Hasina as a model leader for developing Asia, a woman who also succeeded in improving the economic status of her country. That Bangladesh’s per capita GDP had overtaken India’s, and that its garment industry was doing well were used to mock India’s own economic achievements. The switch to Hasina being a ‘dictator’ was a sudden change in narrative.
There is, therefore, enough circumstantial evidence to suggest that there was a foreign hand in the happenings in Bangladesh, although we will have to wait for conclusive evidence.
Was this indeed a regime-change coup or a true popular uprising?
It is true that Bangladesh under Sheikh Hasina’s fifteen-year rule was not a perfect democracy. But there are mitigating factors, including a violent streak that led to the assassination of her father and independence hero Sheikh Mujibur Rahman just four years after the bloody birth of the new State after the Pakistan Army’s assault on its Bengali citizens. The toppling and desecration of his statue shows that his national hero status may not be accepted by the entire population: in fact it looks like friends of Pakistan wish to erase his entire legacy.
The history of democracy in independent Bangladesh is checkered and marred by violence. Before he was deposed and killed in 1975, Mujibur Rehman himself had banned all opposition parties. After Mujib, there was outright military rule till 1986, when the erstwhile Chief Martial Law Administrator Hussain Mohammed Ershad became the elected President.
When Ershad was deposed after (student-led) agitations in 1991, Khaleda Zia (BNP or Bangladesh National Party) became the PM and after that she and her arch-rival Sheikh Hasina (Awami League) alternated in power. The BNP boycotted the 2018 elections partly because Khaleda Zia was jailed on allegations of corruption.
In all of these twists and turns, ‘students’ were involved. In 1971, when Yahya Khan launched Operation Searchlight, the Pakistani army went straight for students and professors in Dhaka University, especially if they were Hindus. Later too, ‘student’ protests were instrumental in the overthrow of Ershad.
The proximate cause of the troubles in 2024 was also a ‘student’ uprising. There had been a 30% quota in government jobs for the children of freedom fighters; along with other such set-asides e.g. for minorities and women, a total of 56% of government jobs were ‘reserved’ by 2018. This reservation system was largely abolished by Sheikh Hasina’s government in 2018 after yet another student agitation.
In June 2024, a High Court in Bangladesh overturned the 2018 judgment as unconstitutional. Even though the Supreme Court reversed it, and restored the status quo ante (of drastically reduced reservations to 7% in total), the peaceful ‘student’ agitation suddenly morphed into a violent confrontation led by members of the Jamaat e Islami (an Islamist party) and the BNP. There was police firing. The Daily Star, a respected daily, found out that 204 people were killed in the first few days, out of which only 53 were students.
It appears the supposed ‘student revolution’ was taken over by professional agitators and agents provocateurs, and it rapidly led to the overthrow of Sheikh Hasina, with escalating violence, especially against Hindus, and the Army getting involved. Even though the Army is in charge now, there is a smokescreen of an ‘interim government’ that allows entities like the UN an excuse to not impose sanctions on Bangladesh.
It is hard to take it on face value that this was a popular uprising; circumstantial evidence suggests that there was a clear agenda for regime change, and since it suits both China and the US to keep India constrained, either of them could have been behind it. The diplomatic snub to Hasina in July suggests the Chinese were well aware of the coming coup.
On the other hand, the sudden U-turn in the narrative about Hasina in the Western media suggests that the US might have decided to dump her. The process by which the regime change happened is also similar to what happened in other countries that experienced ‘color revolutions’. The actions of the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), and of some diplomats in supporting the BNP, have been offered as possible evidence of US bad faith.
What is obvious is the role of the fundamentalist group, the Jamaat e Islami, which has strong connections with Pakistan. It seems likely that they were the enforcers, and had invested assets within the armed forces. They have called for the secular Bangladesh constitution to be replaced by Islamic Sharia law, and for non-Muslims to be treated as second-class citizens. The Yunus government has just unbanned the Jamaat e Islami.
The attacks on Hindus, including large numbers of lynchings, rapes, and abductions of women, suggests that there is a religious angle and the Jamaat e Islami’s prejudices are coming to the fore. Notably, the entire Western media, Amnesty International, the United Nations, and the USCIRF, human rights specialists all, had nothing at all to say about the horrific oppression of Hindus.
The New York Times even had a headline about “revenge killings” of Hindus, as though somehow the 8% minority Hindus had been responsible for whatever Sheikh Hasina was accused of. Upon being called out, the NYT changed the headline to just “killings” of Hindus with no explanation or apology.
The role of Professor Mohammed Yunus is also intriguing: he had been invited to head an interim government in 2007 but abandoned the attempt and in fact left politics. He had been close to Sheikh Hasina at one point, for instance he got the licenses for his Grameen Phone during her rule, but they later fell out. Yunus’ Nobel Peace Prize and his earlier stint in the US have raised questions about whether he is in fact managed by US interests.
Given all this, it is much more likely that it was a coup than a popular agitation. It remains to be seen who was behind the coup.
What next for India and the region?
There are several long-term challenges for India. None of this is positive for India, which is already facing problems on its periphery (eg. Maldives and Nepal). The coup in Bangladesh also makes the BIMSTEC alliance as unviable as SAARC.
1. Deteriorating India-Bangladesh Relations
The overthrow of Sheikh Hasina, seen as a close ally of India, has led to a rise in anti-Indian sentiment in Bangladesh. The new government may not be as friendly towards India, especially on sensitive issues like trade and security. This could jeopardize the gains in bilateral ties over the past decade. The presence of hardliners among the ‘advisers’ to the interim government suggests that India will have little leverage going forward.
2. Increased Border Security Risks
India shares a long, porous border with Bangladesh. The political instability and potential increase in extremist groups could lead to more infiltration, smuggling, and illegal migration into India's northeastern states, posing internal security risks. Monitoring the border region will be critical. As it is, there are millions of illegal Bangladeshis and Rohingya residing in India, which actually poses a threat to internal Indian security.
3. Economic Fallout
Bangladesh is India's largest trading partner in the region, with $13 billion in commerce under the Hasina government. A deterioration in relations could hurt Indian exports and investments. The economic interdependence means India also has a stake in Bangladesh's stability and prosperity. Brahma Chellaney pointed out that Bangladesh is in dire straits, and has requested $3 billion from the IMF, $1.5 billion from the World Bank, and $1 billion each from the Asian Development Bank and the Japan International Cooperation Agency to tide over problems.
4. Climate Change Challenges
Both countries are vulnerable to the effects of climate change, including rising sea levels, floods, droughts and extreme weather events. Bangladesh is especially at risk due to its low-lying geography. Millions of climate refugees could seek shelter in India, straining resources and social cohesion.
5. Geopolitical Implications
The regime change has opened up space for China to expand its influence in Bangladesh. India will need to balance its ties with the new government while countering Chinese inroads in the region. The U.S. is also closely watching developments in Bangladesh. Instability in the region plays into the hands of Pakistan, whose medium-term ambition would be to detach India’s Northeast as revenge for the creation of Bangladesh and for increasing normalization in J&K.
6. Quota Implications
Indians, especially those agitating for ‘proportional representation’ should note that the Bangladesh quota system was abolished in its entirety by Sheikh Hasina’s administration in 2018 in response to student demands. India has a constitutional limit of 50% for reservations, but some are agitating for even more, which is a sure recipe for resentment and possibly violence. It is not inconceivable that it could be the spur for regime change in India as well.
7. Human rights for Hindus and Buddhists; Citizenship Amendment Act and the Right to Return
The Hindu population in Bangladesh has fallen dramatically from about 28% in 1971 to about 8% now, and there is every indication that this is a demographic under extreme duress. Buddhist Chakmas in the Chittagong Hill Tracts are also under stress. India should enhance the CAA or create a formal Right to Return for Hindu and Buddhist Bangladeshis. Writing in Open magazine, Rahul Shivshankar pointed out that Hindus had faced attacks and threats in 278 locations across 48 districts.
In summary, the fall of the Hasina government and the long-term threat of climate change compel India to rethink its Bangladesh policy. Fostering stable, democratic and economically prosperous neighbors is in India's own interest. Rebuilding trust and deepening cooperation on shared challenges will be key to navigating the new realities in the region.
2350 words, Aug 26, 2024
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A version of this essay has been published by firstpost.com at https://www.firstpost.com/opinion/climate-tragedy-of-wayanad-and-the-vulnerability-of-western-ghats-13808331.html
Here’s a new AI-generated podcast courtesy of Google NotebookLM that summarizes this essay.
After days of intense coverage of the landslides in Wayanad, the news cycle has moved on to other calamities. But the problems remain, and things cannot be left to benign neglect as is usually the case. For example there was a strange thundering noise from deep underground that alarmed people in the area. This is ominous, as it may presage a tectonic movement, although there have been no big quakes here for centuries.
A dramatic before-and-after report from Reuters, using satellite images from Planet Labs, Google, Maxar Technologies and Airbus, shows how the landslide left a giant scar on the surface of the earth, washing away hundreds of houses, leading to widespread fatalities and destruction.
Prime Minister Modi visited the afflicted area. Better governance, both by Center and State, is sorely needed to tackle the problem, because it is not simple: there are proximate, preponderant and root causes. A lot of it is anthropogenic based on local factors, but climate change is also a major factor, as the local climate and rainfall patterns have shifted dramatically in the recent past. There was a drought in 2015, followed by the Ockhi cyclone in 2017, and then landslides and floods in 2018 and 2019.
As a resident of Kerala, who has visited Wayanad only twice (once in 2018 and the second time in April this year), both the problems and the possible solutions are of immediate importance to me, because the very same issues are likely to crop up all over the State, and unless remedial measures are taken now, we can expect further tragedies and endless suffering.
Proximate Cause: Excess Rain
The proximate cause is La Nina-enhanced rainfall, which has been higher this year along the west coast. In Wayanad itself, it rained 572mm in 48 hours before the landslide: about 1.8 feet, an enormous amount.
Before the Wayanad landslide, there had been another in Shirur on the Karnataka coast near Ankola, where a number of people were swept away. The story of Arjun, a Kerala trucker whose truck full of lumber disappeared, was all over the news, and after a weeks-long search, there was no sign of him or the truck.
The total rainfall since June 1 was of the order of 3000mm in Wayanad, which is unusually high, creating vulnerability to landslides. In a recent interview, environmental expert Madhav Gadgil mentioned that quarrying may have added to the intensity of the rainfall, because the fine dust from the mining and explosions forms aerosols, on which water molecules condense, leading to excessive precipitation.
The intense rainfall saturated the soil, and in the absence of sufficient old-growth vegetation that might have held it together, the hillside simply collapsed.
Preponderant Cause: Population Pressure, Over-Tourism, Ecocide
The preponderant causes of the problems in Wayanad are obvious: population pressure, over-tourism and environmental destruction. The forest has basically ceased to exist due to human exploitation. According to India Today, 62% of the green cover in the district disappeared between 1950 and 2018 while plantation cover rose by around 1,800%. Fully 85% of the total area of Wayanad was under forest cover until the 1950s.
Overpopulation, settlement and habitat loss
My first visit to Wayanad was in 2018, when we drove to Kerala from Karnataka: from the Nagarhole/Bandipur Wildlife Sanctuaries to the contiguous Wayanad Wildlife Sanctuary, all forming a Project Tiger ecosphere along with neighboring Mudumalai Wildlife Sanctuary in Tamil Nadu. Together they form the Nilgiri Biosphere Reserve.
Bandipur/Nagarhole actually looks like a forest. But I was astonished when we drove into Wayanad, because it does not look like a forest any more: it is full of human habitation. It looks like any of the other districts in Kerala: thickly populated, with settlements all over the place. It appeared to be only notionally a wildlife sanctuary.
Habitat loss, especially that of forest cover, is true of all of Kerala, as highlighted in a study by IISc scientists. It is startling to see how much of this has happened in just a few decades. But it is the culmination of a process that started at least a century ago.
Wayanad, according to myth and legend, was once a lovely, lush forest inhabited by a small number of tribals. There were fierce Kurichya archers (it is possible they were warriors banished to the forest after losing a war) who, with Pazhassi Raja, carried on a guerilla war against the British colonials in the 19th century until the Raja was captured and executed. I visited the Pazhassi Museum in Mananthavady this May, on my second visit to Wayanad. There were artifacts there from the tribal settlements.
Then, in the 20th century, there was a large migration of lowland people, mostly Christians from Central Travancore, to the Wayanad highlands (and the Western Ghats uplands in general). They encroached on public/forest lands, cleared the forests, and created plantations and agricultural settlements. Their struggles against malaria, wild animals and the land itself was the subject of Jnanpith winner S K Pottekkat’s renowned novel Vishakanyaka (Poison Maiden).
The public land thus captured eventually made some people rich, but the whole process also in effect enslaved the tribals, who became an exploited underclass: the very same story as of Native Americans, who are still struggling for social justice after centuries of being untermenschen.
Since most of the settlers were Christians, the Church became a powerful spokesman for them. Successive governments gave a lot of the settlers title to the land they had illegally captured. So there is a class of rich planters, and on the other hand, miserable plantation workers, often migrants especially from Tamil Nadu.
The green deserts need to be turned back into forests
Kerala’s highlands, over time, became ‘green deserts’, rather than ‘tropical rainforests’. The monoculture of tea, rubber, coffee, and especially invasive species such as acacia and eucalyptus is destructive. They crowd out native species, ravage the water table, do not put down deep roots, and offer almost no sustenance to wild animals. It may look deceptively green, but it is no forest.
An expert committee, the Madhav Gadgil Commission, recommended in 2011 that the entire Western Ghats was ecologically sensitive (ESA or Ecologically Sensitive Area) and 75% of it must be preserved intact with minimal human presence. The report was scathing about quarrying, including blasting with dynamite, which upset the already fragile ecosystem, ravaged as it was by the removal of old growth forest and the root system that held the soil together.
At the time, Gadgil did say that the calamity would not take a 100 years, but it would happen in ten to twenty years. He was right, but he was ignored as though he were Cassandra.
The Church opposed the Gadgil report tooth and nail, and the Government of Kerala pushed back on it. So the Central government created the Kasturirangan Commission (2013), which reduced the proposed ESA to 37%. It classified 60% of the Western Ghats as a ‘cultural landscape’ with human settlements, plantations and agriculture.
But that too was not acceptable. In fact, Jayanthi Natarajan claimed that she was forced to resign as Environment Minister because she actually notified the order on protection of the Western Ghats the day before she was removed. Her successor duly put the order on hold.
Sitting Congress MP in nearby Idukki, P T Thomas, says he was dropped in the 2014 elections because he supported the Gadgil report against “encroachments… illegal constructions, quarrying, timber smuggling, sand mining from the rivers and ganja cultivation…My stand upset the Idukki dioceses of the Syro Malabar Catholic Church. The Idukki Bishop had openly opposed my candidature.”
The GoK convened a third committee, the Oommen Commission (2014), which was specific to Kerala, and it recommended keeping all inhabited areas and plantations out of the ESA altogether. Mission accomplished. No more restrictions on land use.
Over-tourism and carrying capacity of the land
This is one reason for the proliferation of resorts and homestays in Wayanad. Every second house caters to tourists, as can be seen from a Google Map (of the area around Kalpetta). The environmental pressure from this (what about solid waste disposal? Do they dump liquid wastes into rivers?) is horrific and increasing. Trash lines the area near the Thamarassery Pass.
As a tourist myself, I did not choose a plantation resort, but instead a homestay which has a working farm. Perhaps I made a wrong choice, because a plantation has a lot of space to absorb the tourist impact. The homestay had many youngsters from Bangalore over the weekend, and it was perfectly nice, but I wonder how much I contributed to the human toll on the environment.
I had gone to Wayanad to visit the Thirunelli temple and the Edakkal caves, which have petroglyphs and drawings reliably dated back to 8000 Before the Present, making them second only to the Bhimbetka caves in Madhya Pradesh, whose rock art dates back to 10,000 BP and earlier. So this area, despite the geological fault lines, has indeed been inhabited for a very long time. The carrying capacity of the land was sufficient in those prehistoric times and even up until recently; now the land can no longer sustain the population.
It is also host to another recent influx. Muslims from nearby lowland Kozhikode and Malappuram districts have come up the Thamarassery Pass and settled in Wayanad in numbers. They have added to the population pressure in Wayanad. Incidentally this is one reason Wayanad Lok Sabha constituency (which includes areas from nearby Kozhikode and Malappuram districts that are heavily Muslim) is so dependably a Congress citadel.
When I made my trip in April, just before elections, I asked several people who would win there: the candidates were Rahul Gandhi (Congress), Annie Raja (CPI), K Surendran (BJP). All of them said “Rahul Gandhi”. One man told me “Rahul Gandhi is going to become the PM”. Another laughed and said, “Are you joking? We all know the answer”. It was, pun intended, a landslide win for the Congress candidate.
Root Cause: Geology and Errant Rainfall
The root cause of the problems in Kerala is the increasingly unstable landscape. It is remarkable that Kerala has such a high number of landslides and vulnerable spots. India Today reports that Kerala has recorded the largest number of landslides in the country, 2,239 out of 3,782 that occurred between 2015 and 2022. The “Landslide Atlas of India 2023” from ISRO lists 13 out of 14 Kerala districts among the top 50 landslide-prone areas of the country.
This is surprising, because the more obvious fault lines must be in the North, where the Indian Plate continues to grind up against the Eurasian Plate, and the Himalayas and the Tibetan Plateau continue to gain a few centimeters in elevation every year. Indeed Arunachal, Himachal, J&K and Uttarakhand are landslide-prone. But why Kerala, at the other end of the land-mass?
It must be the case that there have been severe tectonic movements in Kerala in the past: the Parasurama legend of the land coming up from the sea is based on a real event, presumably caused by an earthquake in a prehistoric time frame. More recently, the thriving Kerala port of Kodungalloor (aka Muziris), the principal West Coast port in historical times along with Bharuccha in Gujarat, was suddenly rendered bereft in 1341 CE after a severe flood in the River Periyar, and port activities shifted to nearby Kochi.
More recently, old-timers talk about the Great Flood of ‘99, i.e. 1099 Malabar Era, or 1924 CE. Exactly 100 years ago there were torrential rains in July, and records suggest it was 3368mm or 1326 inches over three weeks, that is 11 feet of rain. Floodwaters rose up to 6 feet, rivers changed course, and at least 1,000 people died along with large numbers of livestock, and there was massive destruction of agricultural land and foodgrains. The Flood of ‘99 became etched in the collective memory of the area, but it mostly affected the lowland areas of Travancore and Cochin, leaving the highlands largely untouched.
That has changed with deforestation, quarrying, construction, and denudation of hillsides.
There were the floods of 2018, which affected the hills, especially in Munnar. A full mountainside fell 300 meters into a river there. Entire settlements were washed away. A total of 2,346mm of rain or 923 inches was recorded in July and August, almost 50% higher than the norm. 483 people were killed, with many more missing and unaccounted for. Infrastructure was wiped out, including roads and clean water supply. Dams had to be opened, wreaking havoc on those downstream.
There is also the perennial threat of Mullaperiyar Dam overflowing or being breached, which is, among other things, a source of friction between Kerala and Tamil Nadu.
Other root causes include the following:
* Climate Change: A study by the World Weather Attribution group indicated that climate change has intensified rainfall in the region by about 10%, contributing significantly to the severity of the disaster. The ongoing increase in global temperatures has led to more extreme weather patterns, including heavier monsoon rains.
* Soil Characteristics: Wayanad's soils are loose and erodible, particularly in areas with steep gradients exceeding 20 degrees. When saturated, these soils lose their structural integrity, making them susceptible to landslides. The presence of large boulders and mud further complicates the stability of the slopes during heavy rains.
* Soil piping: Previous landslides in the region, such as the 2019 Puthumala event, created conditions for soil piping, where voids form in the subsurface soil, increasing the risk of subsequent landslides during heavy rainfall.
* Lack of Effective Land Management Policies: There is a notable absence of comprehensive land use and disaster management policies in Kerala, particularly in ecologically fragile areas. Despite previous disasters, there has been insufficient progress in implementing hazard mapping and community awareness programs to mitigate risks associated with landslides.
Thus Kerala is vulnerable to a host of issues, especially climate change (which is also eating away at the coastline). Behind the tropical paradise facade of “God’s Own Country”, there lie tremendous dangers related to excessive human exploitation, amounting to ecocide. What is the solution?
Maybe Madhav Gadgil was right, after all, and strict controls should be imposed on human activity, especially denudation of forest, and quarrying. His report had included Vythiri, Mananthavady and Sulthanbathery taluks in Wayanad as Ecologically Sensitive Zone ESZ-1, which means no change whatsoever in land use is permissible there. Chooralmala, Mundakkai, and Meppadi, where the worst of the disasters happened, are all in Vythiri taluk.
No effective disaster prevention or mitigation efforts have been put in place. The only solution is reforesting and restoring green cover, and stopping construction, quarrying, and tourism and the most contentious issue, relocating people away from the ESZ. Unfortunately the tropical rainforest may not restore itself if simply left alone (as temperate-zone forests do), and perhaps efforts such as Miyawaki foresting with native species may need to be pursued.
It is to be hoped that we have not passed the point of no return. Kerala’s population is shrinking (Total Fertility Rate is 1.80, well below the replacement rate of 2.1 children per woman), but there is no limit to human greed.
What needs to be done
There are no magic solutions, but comprehensive climate action and improved disaster management strategies can mitigate things to an extent. Experts emphasize the importance of:
* Enhanced Communication and Coordination: There is a critical need for better intergovernmental communication regarding disaster preparedness. This includes timely warnings and efficient evacuation plans to mitigate the impact of natural disasters.
* Land Use Policies: Implementing stringent land use regulations is essential to prevent construction in ecologically sensitive areas. The degradation of green cover due to unregulated development has significantly increased the risk of landslides.
* Early Warning Systems: Developing robust early warning systems for landslides and floods can provide crucial alerts to communities at risk. These systems should be supported by regular community education and drills to ensure residents are prepared for emergencies.
* Afforestation and Environmental Conservation: Massive afforestation and reforestation drives (especially with native species) are necessary to stabilize hillsides and reduce landslide risks. Protecting and restoring natural habitats can help mitigate the effects of climate change and enhance biodiversity. Collaborating with local communities for reforestation projects can also provide economic incentives and foster a sense of stewardship.
* Community Engagement: Empowering local communities to participate in disaster preparedness and environmental conservation efforts is vital. Education on risks and proactive measures can significantly reduce the impact of disasters.
* Tourism Management: Over-tourism can exacerbate environmental degradation. Developing a sustainable tourism strategy that limits visitor numbers, promotes eco-friendly practices, and educates tourists about environmental conservation is essential. Establishing eco-tourism zones and supporting community-based tourism initiatives can provide economic benefits while preserving the natural environment.
* Regulation of Quarrying and Construction: Strict regulation and monitoring of quarrying and construction activities are necessary to prevent ecological damage. Implementing sustainable practices in these industries, such as controlled quarrying methods and responsible waste management, can mitigate their impact on the environment. Regular audits and penalties for non-compliance can enforce these regulations.
* Surveillance and meteorological data collection: With modern technology like drones, continuous monitoring of the landscape is possible at a relatively low cost; and this can also be used for collecting large amounts of meteorological data to support early-warning systems. Satellite images from India’s own as well as foreign sources can be used to warn of dangerous construction, quarrying, and loss of forest cover.
Some of these are purely technical solutions, offering computerized forecasts and disaster warnings. The social and governance aspects are even more important: discipline, co-operation and awareness on the part of the residents, and the strict enforcement of land use rules and regulations.
Dealing with powerful settlers, encroachers, and vested interests requires a delicate balance of enforcement and negotiation, carrot and stick. Government agencies, non-governmental organizations (NGOs), and local communities must collaborate to develop and implement policies that address these challenges. Advocacy for stronger environmental laws and community involvement in decision-making processes can help align interests and foster co-operation.
With all these in place, it may be possible to repair the damaged hills of the Western Ghats, one of the global hotspots of biodiversity.
2200 words, Aug 17, 2024 updated 3000 words, Aug 19
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A version of this essay was published by news18.com at https://www.news18.com/opinion/shadow-warrior-beyond-lenient-laws-what-will-it-take-to-protect-indias-women-9023844.html
After this fortnight, it is not hard to see why some are demanding speedy punishment, including automatic death sentences for severe crimes against women. To put it bluntly, the Indian State is letting rapists and murderers get away with their crimes against both grown women, and especially tragically, against little girls. This is a blot on humanity. There needs to be recourse. There has to be a severe deterrent, and men should quake in fear at the prospect of instant, fearsome retribution.
The cry of anguish began with the extraordinarily brutal rape (suspected gang-rape) and murder of a 31-year-old doctor (revealed by her mother as Moumita Debnath) in the R G Kar Medical College Hospital in Kolkata on August 9th. As information trickled out, it became clear that she had also been severely tortured before being smothered to death. It is rumored that she had stood up to some important people and this may have been “punishment”.
The immediate parallel was with the gruesome rape-murder of Girja Tikkoo in 1990 in Jammu and Kashmir, where she was gang-raped and then sliced alive in two, screaming in mortal pain, on a mechanical saw.
There was also, in a hospital setting, the extraordinary case of Aruna Shanbaug, a 25-year-old nurse who was choked with a dog chain and raped by a janitor in a Mumbai hospital in 1973. She was brain-damaged and in a coma for 42 years, cared for by the nurses in the hospital until she died in 2015. Assaults on women staff in hospitals is especially ironic considering a recent finding that patients treated by female doctors have better outcomes possibly because of empathy.
Then there was the 2011 case of Sowmya, a 23-year-old shop assistant traveling in an empty women-only coach in a train in Kerala. She was chased around the coach by a one-armed vagrant named Charlie Thomas alias Govindachami, who repeatedly bashed her head against the walls. He then pushed her off the train, raped her and beat her head in with a stone. The lower courts sentenced Charlie to death, but the Supreme Court commuted it to life imprisonment.
Not about sexual crime, but about power over women
This is not about a sexual crime, it is about something more vile and reptilian. It is about sadistically inflicting pain and humiliation, dominating women, exerting power over them. It is extreme misogyny, and is motivated by pure hatred, possibly intent on sending a message. It is also about “putting women in their place”, so that uppity females are “taught a lesson”.
The rape-murder of “Nirbhaya”, later revealed by her mother as 22-year old paramedical student Jyoti Singh, in 2012 in Delhi, was similarly traumatic. Four of her assailants were executed after seven years, and one killed himself in jail, but the worst offender, who instigated the ramming of an iron rod into her genitals, was let go in 2015 on the flimsy reason that he was allegedly a juvenile. Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal presented a sewing machine to the offender upon his release.
There was also the 2016 case of Jisha, a 30-year-old law student in Kerala who was subjected to extreme violence, including disembowelment in her rape-murder. A migrant laborer was charged with the crime, and sentenced to death, which was upheld in May 2024 by the Kerala High Court. However, it is rumored that Jisha was the illegitimate daughter of a local bigwig, and that she was “punished” for demanding a share in his property.
In Kerala again, there were the Walayar sisters, a 13 year old and a 9 year old, who were found hanging, two months apart, in 2017. The initial conclusion was ‘suicide’, but after an uproar when postmortems confirmed sexual assault, the case was reopened. Several politically connected people were involved, whom the POCSO court acquitted. But the Kerala High Court ordered a retrial of the five accused, including a juvenile, and the case is with the CBI as of now.
Every sinner has a future, maybe, but he denied his dead victim her future
There was the startling “every sinner has a future” Supreme Court verdict of 2022 that commuted the death sentence of a rapist-murderer of a four-year-old child into imprisonment for 20 years. The court also held that this was not a “rarest of the rare” case.
Using this “every sinner has a future” precedent, the Orissa High Court in May 2024 also commuted the sentence of a rapist-murderer of a six-year-old child. He had been on death row, but they commuted it to “life imprisonment”. In India, “life imprisonment” usually means the convict will walk after 14 years, so that is the total sentence the murderer will serve in practice.
On August 20th came another shocker. After 32 years, a POCSO court has convicted six men in Ajmer of raping/molesting, photographing and blackmailing over a hundred minor girls. It took 32 years for what should have been an open-and-shut case. The assailants are said to have political connections with a particular party.
Also on August 20th, the Justice Hema Commission published its report on the plight of women in the Malayalam film industry. It alleges that sexual exploitation including the ‘casting couch’ is rife, discrimination such as the lack of even basic amenities like toilets on sets is common, and that a ‘criminal gang’ of senior actors, producers, and directors perpetuates a cycle of abuse.
Soft on crimes against women and girls
All this signals that the Indian State, especially the Judiciary, is soft on horrific crimes against women and girls. This cannot continue in a civilized nation. One possible outcome is that the Executive and the Judiciary will take cognizance of these lapses, and provide severe deterrence, which can only come with fast-tracking of these cases, and enforcing capital punishment, instead of vague homilies quoting Oscar Wilde.
Another possibility is vigilante justice. There was the 1974 film Death Wish about an unassuming architect in New York who takes the law into his own hands after his wife is murdered and his daughter raped by violent criminals. He stalks muggers and criminals. Ordinary citizens may be tempted to do the same in India.
The third thing is to drum it into males from a young age, especially in school, that they have to respect women as human beings, not see them as sexual prey. Repeated insistence on that message will get through to them.
Furthermore, there is every reason to try juveniles committing heinous crimes (such as rape and murder) as adults. The existing Juvenile Justice Act is sufficient for this; it may well be that prosecutors are not using the law to its full extent. Prosecutorial incompetence was alleged in the Sowmya case as well, along with the involvement of shadowy benefactors for the murderer.
Copycat crimes, in particular against babies and toddlers, are becoming more frequent. In November 2023, a two-and-a-half-year-old girl was raped by a 17-year-old boy in Buldhana, Maharashtra. In August 2024, a Class 9 student was detained for allegedly raping a three-year-old girl in Mumbai.
This sort of thing simply cannot continue. It is not the case that India is particularly prone to sexual crimes against women: the number of reported rapes is not high compared to other countries, but for a nation that calls itself the Motherland and worships many female deities, the cavalier treatment of crimes against women is a disgrace, and must be stopped.
1100 words, 20th August 2024, updated 21st August
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A version of this essay was published by firstpost.com on April 8th at https://www.firstpost.com/opinion/shadow-warrior-generative-ai-creates-challenges-in-intellectual-property-and-epistemology-13757273.html
It is fairly obvious that the dominant, i.e. Western mechanism for generating new knowledge is rather different from the traditional Indian mechanism, and this shows up in all sorts of ways. One is that Indian epistemology seems to be empirical and practical, based on observation; whereas the Western tradition seems to prefer grand theories that must then be proved by observation.
Another difference is the Western idea that Intellectual Property is a private right that the State confers on an inventor or a creator. The Western gaze is fixed on the potential monetary gains from a monopoly over the use of the IP Right (for a fixed period of time, after which it is in the public domain): the argument is that it eventually helps everybody, while incentivizing the clever.
The Indian concept is vastly different. It was assumed that a creator created, or an inventor invented, as a result of their innate nature, their god-given gifts. In a way they could not avoid being creative or inventive, which would be a negation of the blessing they had received from the Supreme Brahman. Therefore no further incentive was needed: benevolent patrons like kings or temples would take care of their basic needs, allowing them to give free rein to creativity and innovation.
This seems to us today to be a radical idea, because we have been conditioned by the contemporary epistemological idea that incentives are a necessary condition for knowledge creation. Although this seems common-sensical, there is no real evidence that this is true. Petra Moser, then at MIT, discovered via comparing 19th century European countries that the presence of an IPR culture with incentives made little difference in the quantum of innovation, although it seemed to change the domains that were the most innovative..
In fact, there is at least one counter-example: that of Open Source in computing. It boggles the imagination that veritable armies of software developers would work for free, nights and weekends, in addition to their full-time jobs, and develop computing systems like Linux that are better than the corporate versions out there: the whole “Cathedral and Bazaar” story as articulated by Eric Raymond. Briefly, he argues that the chaotic ‘bazaar’ of open source is inherently superior to the regimented but soul-less ‘cathedral’ of the big tech firms.
It is entirely possible that the old Indian epistemological model is efficient, but the prevailing model of WIPO, national Patent Offices, and all that paraphernalia massively benefits the Western model. As an example, the open-source model was predicted to make a big difference in biology, but that effort seems to have petered out after a promising start. Therefore we are stuck for the foreseeable future with the IP model, which means Indians need to excel at it.
In passing, let us note that the brilliant Jagdish Chandra Bose was a pioneer in the wireless transmission of information, including the fundamental inventions that make cellular telephony possible. However, as a matter of principle, he refused to patent his inventions; Guglielmo Marconi did, and became rich and famous.
India has traditionally been quite poor in the number of patents, trademarks, copyrights, geographical indications, semiconductor design layouts etc. that it produces annually. Meanwhile the number of Chinese patents has skyrocketed. Over the last few years, the number of Indian patents has grown as the result of focused efforts by the authorities, as well as the realization by inventors that IP rights can help startup firms dominate niche markets.
India also produces a lot of creative works, including books, films, music and so on. The enforcement of copyright laws has been relatively poor, and writers and artistes often do not get fair compensation for their work. This is deplorable.
Unfortunately, things will get a lot worse with generative AI. Most of us have heard of, and probably also tried out, the chatbots that have been the object of much attention and hype in the past year, such as chatGPT from OpenAI/Microsoft and Bard from Google. Whether these are truly useful is a good question, because they seduce us into thinking they are conscious, despite the fact that they are merely ‘stochastic parrots’. But I digress.
The point is that the digital revolution has thrown the edifice of copyright law into disarray. At the forefront of this upheaval stands generative AI, a technology with the uncanny ability to mimic and extend human creative output. Consider two stark examples: the contentious case of J.K. Rowling and her copyright battle with a Harry Potter-inspired fanfic, and the recent Japanese law that grants broad exemptions for training large language models (LLMs).
J.K. Rowling's spat with Anna M. Bricken, the author of a Harry Potter fanfic titled "Harry Potter and the Goblet of Wine," ignited a global debate about fair use and transformative creativity. Bricken's work reimagined the Potterverse with an adult lens, but Rowling, citing trademark infringement, sought to have it taken down.
While the case eventually settled, it exposed a fundamental dilemma: can AI-generated works, even if derivative, be considered distinct enough from their source material to warrant copyright protection? The answer, shrouded in legal ambiguity, leaves creators navigating a tightrope walk between inspiration and infringement.
On the other side of the globe, Japan enacted a law in 2022 that further muddies the waters. This controversial regulation grants LLMs and other AI systems an almost carte blanche to ingest and remix copyrighted material for training purposes without seeking permission or paying royalties. While proponents laud it as a catalyst for AI innovation, critics warn of widespread copyright infringement and a potential future where authorship becomes a nebulous concept. The Japanese law, echoing anxieties around J.K. Rowling's case, raises unsettling questions: who owns the creative spark when AI fuels the fire?
For India, a nation at the precipice of the AI revolution, these developments raise crucial questions. With a burgeoning AI industry and a large creative sector, India must tread carefully. Adapting existing copyright laws to encompass the nuances of AI-generated works is paramount. Robust fair use guidelines that incentivize transformative creativity while safeguarding original authorship are urgently needed. Furthermore, fostering ethical AI development practices that respect intellectual property rights is crucial.
The debate surrounding AI and copyright is not merely a legal tussle; it's a battle for the very definition of creativity. In this fight, India has the opportunity to carve a path that balances innovation with artistic integrity. By acknowledging the complexities of AI while upholding the cornerstone principles of copyright, India can become a global leader in navigating the uncharted territory of digital authorship. The future of creativity, fueled by both human imagination and AI's boundless potential, hangs in the balance, and India has the chance to shape its trajectory.
Disclaimer: The last few paragraphs above were written by Google Bard, and lightly edited. A chatbot can produce coherent text, but it may be, and often is, completely wrong (‘hallucinations’). Now who owns the copyright to this text? Traditionally, it would be owned by me and Firstpost, but what is the right answer now? Would we be responsible for any errors introduced by the AI?
On the other hand, the ‘mining’ of text, audio/video and images to train generative AI is an increasingly contentious issue. As an example, the New York Times sued OpenAI and Microsoft, arguing that they weren’t being paid anywhere near the fair market value of their text that the tech companies mined.
This sounds familiar to Indians, because Westerners have been ‘digesting’ Indian ideas for a long time. Some of the most egregious examples were patents on basmati, turmeric and neem, which are absurd considering that these have been in use in India for millennia. The fact that these were documented in texts (‘prior art’) enabled successful challenges against them.
An even more alarming fact is the capture and ‘digestion’ (a highly evocative term from Rajiv Malhotra, who has warned of the dangers of AI for years) of Indian personal and medical data. Unlike China, which carefully firewalls away its data from Western Big Tech, and indeed, does not even allow them to function in their country, Indian personal data is being freely mined by US Big Tech. India’s Data Privacy laws, being debated now, need to be considered defensive weapons.
Paradoxically, there is also the concern that Indic knowledge will, for all intents and purposes, disappear from the domain of discourse. Since the chatbots are trained on the uncurated Internet, they are infected by the Anglosphere prejudices and bigotry therein, not to mention deliberate misinformation and ‘toolkits’ that are propagated.
Since most Indic concepts are either not very visible, or denigrated, on the Internet (eg Wikipedia), chatbots are not even aware of them. For instance, a doctor friend and I published an essay in Open magazine comparing allopathy to generative AI, because both are stochastic (ie. based on statistics). We mentioned Ayurveda positively several times, because it has a theory of disease that makes it more likely to work with causation rather than correlation.
However, when the article summarized by chatGPT, there was no mention whatsoever of the word ‘Ayurveda’. It is as though such a concept does not exist, which may in fact be true in the sense that it is deprecated in the training data that the chatbot was trained on.
One solution is to create Indian foundational models that can then become competent in specific domains of interest: for example an Arthashastra chatbot. These can also be trained, if sufficient data sets are created, on Indian languages as well, which could incidentally support real-time machine translation as well. Thus there can be an offensive as well as a defensive strategy to enable Indic knowledge systems to thrive.
India is at a point of crisis, but also of opportunity. If India were to harness some of the leading-edge technologies of today, it might once again become a global leader in knowledge generation, as it was a millennium ago with its great universities.
1680 words, Jan 10, 2024 updated Apr 7, 2024
This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit rajeevsrinivasan.substack.com/subscribe -
A version of this essay was published by rediff.com at https://www.rediff.com/news/column/rajeev-srinivasan-hamas-war-is-an-immediate-setback-to-india/20231017.htm
It can be argued on several grounds that the 2023 Israel-Hamas war is a point of inflection indicating the general eclipse of the West, and in fact I have done so in an essay. What is unclear is how the end of this era will play out in the medium term and the long term.
The best analogy I can think of is the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand of Austria by a Serbian nationalist in 1914 or so, and how that set in motion a chain of events that, among other things, ended the European and Ottoman empires over the next forty or fifty years, and more immediately caused the so-called Great War, now re-framed as World War I.
Chaos theory at work: as the saying goes, the flapping of a butterfly’s wings in Brazil setting off a tornado in Texas.
There is the obvious concern that the Israel-Hamas war could set off World War III, especially given that there are many nuclear weapons in the possession of the belligerents and their friends. Iran has recovered from the debacle of the Stuxnet computer worm that caused their Uranium-enrichment centrifuges to blow up (in what was then lauded as an unacknowledged triumph of American and Israeli cloak-and-dagger and technical know-how).
Then there is Pakistan and its rapidly growing arsenal, no doubt helped along by screwdriver assembly of Chinese components, and perhaps knocked-down kits. Pakistan is one of the most vocal supporters of Palestine as an Ummah cause, which is ironic considering that Pakistani soldiers (and maybe irregulars) seconded to Jordan in 1970 during the Black September uprising may have been responsible for the deaths of thousands of Palestinians.
The specter of an encompassing World War III is sobering, and just as the crumbling League of Nations was unable to fend off earlier editions of world wars, the toothless United Nations is now unlikely to be able to prevent a new one. It hasn't been able to prevent all the smaller conflicts, such as the Ukraine war, and it is obvious that major powers simply don't care about the UN's exertions and bloviations. Therefore, one of the biggest fears is that the Hamas attack might seed a larger conflagration.
Of immediate concern, though, is that a nascent process of normalization in West Asia may now grind to a halt. This can have global consequences. It is likely that the earlier edition of the Arab-Israeli conflict, the Yom Kippur War of 1973, led directly to the Arab oil embargo followed by the shock of their quadruplication of oil prices. This caused inflation in the US, but more seriously, it precipitated a massive transfer of wealth from developing countries, which set them back by decades, compounding human misery.
There are thus unforeseen consequences to what happens in West Asia, which, barring some miracle, will continue to dominate energy supplies for the next couple of decades, even if the most optimistic Green initiatives come to fruition. Things are obviously different from 1973, with West Asians (especially Saudi Arabia) much more self-confident, immensely richer, and also cognizant of the fact that their oil/gas bonanzas will run out sooner or later. They need to diversify their economies, and possibly make some new friends, other than those who are dazzled by their petro-dollars.
It is this realization that led to the landmark Abraham Accords, whereby several Arab nations normalized their relations with Israel. The general expectation has been that Saudi Arabia would follow suit, and Mohammed bin Salman has been signaling that he is willing to do this (but also, in his own national interest, willing to embrace China and the proposed BRICS+ currency, both of which would be setbacks for the US and the collective West). The biggest geopolitical casualty of the Hamas war is that this normalization will be put on hold.
Saudi Arabia simply cannot appear to be mindless of the plight of the largely Muslim Palestinians, even if they are nervous about the decidedly fundamentalist Hamas, who, in an interesting twist, may well be aligning themselves with Shia Iran, the principal regional foe of the Sunni Saudis. However, what is also worth noting is that the Saudis, as well as Egyptians and other Arabs, are all reluctant to resettle Palestinians in their largely empty, and rich, countries.
There might be two reasons for this: one, perhaps it is still the ambition of the Arab States to eliminate Israel and wipe it off the map altogether (which is what they, and Iran, proclaimed loudly in the past, although it is not clear this is actually feasible any more). If so, maintaining Palestinians as an aggrieved quasi-nation, which would supply an endless stream of militants to the Hamases and Hezbollahs of the region, is a viable, if brutal, strategy.
Two, Arab States may not actually want Palestinians as refugees because they might cause all sorts of domestic problems. This always puzzled me, because on average the Palestinians of 1948 were much better educated than most other Arabs, and could have contributed to other Arab nations. My conjecture is that, given the examples of Pakistani migrants in Britain, the Black September Palestinians in Jordan, and more recent Syrian etc refugees in Europe – easily radicalized and prone to blood-curdling rhetoric and possibly action against their host nations – Arab States want to keep them out.
This could be the real reason Egypt refuses to open the border for the fleeing residents of Gaza..
It is a bit like the Rohingya of Myanmar. They have a reputation for being troublesome radical Islamists, and so nobody wants to take them in: not Bangladesh where they originally hail from, not any Arab States, not Pakistan (although some Westerners suggested that India and China should take them. China laughed in their faces, but India dutifully did so).
Given all this, and the growing clout of Israel under the American security umbrella, chances are that the Palestinian cause would have become increasingly less relevant to Saudis and other Arabs. And that is precisely what might have motivated Hamas and friends: with the emergent normalization of ties with Israel in the region, and initiatives like i2u2 (Israel, India, US, UAE) and IMEC (India Middle East Europe Corridor), there would be commercial and trade ties that would bind.
After all, a major part of these trade corridors would be the infrastructure links (railway lines through Saudi Arabia, the Israeli port of Haifa) that would offer alternative trade routes to Europe from India and Southeast Asia. This would offend China too, because its grand Belt and Road Initiative and trans-European railway links would see less business. Thus, in passing, China also is a winner in this Great Game as West Asia goes on the boil, along with usual suspects Iran, Qatar and Turkey.
Thus, from several points of view, this Hamas war is an immediate setback to India: it is one of the few countries in the region that enjoys good relations with both Israel and Saudi Arabia, and IMEC would allow it to recreate the old Spice Route to Europe, which was highly lucrative over millennia. All this is in jeopardy now. The strategic and under-construction Vizhinjam container transhipment port in Thiruvananthapuram is a key part of this ambitious trade route.
India also has interests in Iran: the Chabahar port could enable India to create an alternative route to Central Asia and Russia called the INSTC (International North South Transport Corridor) bypassing trouble-prone Pakistan and Afghanistan (although that long-pending logistics link is years behind schedule). India cannot allow its relations with Iran to be affected by the war in Gaza.
More broadly, if world trade collapses and/or a war begins now it would be unfortunate timing for India. This is the very moment India is ready to finally leave behind the bitter legacy of colonialism, which looted enormous wealth from India (I have argued it was $10 trillion, but economist Utsa Patnaik puts the figure at $45 trillion). A collapse in the procedures of the ‘liberal, rules-based international order’, however biased it is in favor of the West, is unfortunate for India in the medium term, although it would probably be fine in the longer term.
There are two other aspects of the response to Gaza that are notable. The first is the rise of ugly anti-Jewish sentiments in many parts of the West. This is of concern to Indians, specifically Hindus, because Hindu-hatred is anti-semitism 2.0 and Hindus cannot wish it away.
On the other hand, the Left was startled by the dramatic reaction from American Jews to standard Left positioning of moral equivalence between Hamas and the Israeli Defense Forces. For instance, several Harvard student groups released statements about their support for Palestine and/or Hamas, which probably was seeded by Pakistani and, alas, woke Indian-origin students in their ranks.
Retribution was swift: Bill Ackman, a billionaire hedge-fund manager, in effect asked fellow CEOs to blacklist these students. There was furious backpedaling as many students, worried about their job prospects, protested that the statements were made without consulting them.
This is positive. The Woke Left in the US is splintering. That may mean the Democratic Party tactic of uber-wokeism may now backfire on them, especially notable as elections are looming in the US. The less the wokeism around, the better for India (see Justin Trudeau’s Khalistan antics).
The weakening of Western power and resolve vis a vis China is another problem for India. The West simply cannot supply munitions for multiple wars (Ukraine, Gaza, and possibly Taiwan), partly because the US has been deindustrialized. What we might see in the medium term is the deprecation of US power in the Indo-Pacific, and indeed a fallback to isolationism and Fortress America. This would encourage a China that is just waiting to rampage.
The current Israel-Hamas war is a net negative for India; the issue of Western Hindu-hatred is a topic for another day.
1650 words, 16 October 2023
This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit rajeevsrinivasan.substack.com/subscribe -
A version of this essay was published by firstpost.com at https://www.firstpost.com/opinion/shadow-warrior-does-the-war-in-israel-mark-the-end-of-pax-occidentalis-13235762.html
The attack by Hamas on Israel may well be remembered in future as marking the very moment the decline of the West became an indubitable fact. Thus October 7th, 2023 may be a point of inflection in geo-politics and geo-economics, although it is true that the economic center of gravity of the world has been moving eastwards (and southwards in future) for some time.
The question really goes to the heart of the so-called ‘liberal rules-based international order’, which is a nice euphemism for ‘America and friends lay out the rules’. To give credit where it is due, this was a pretty good paradigm for the post-World-War-II period, and it helped much of Europe and East Asia advance economically, although it didn’t help India, Africa or Latin America much (and that was partly due to poorly thought-out self-imposed policies as well).
But like all empires and quasi-empires, this one has also deteriorated over time, partly as it was based on the presupposition of overwhelming American dominance. The US was supposed to be the global policeman who could arbitrate if necessary, and offer a bracing dose of punishment if someone erred. But that is no longer the case, as the US is bogged down in arguably futile wars.
The rot goes much deeper, and affects every institution that has been built up by the ‘liberal, rules-based international order’. All of us thought the UN and in particular the Security Council would be champions at preserving world order, unlike the hapless League of Nations. But it has proven singularly ineffective, and the media didn’t even quote the Secretary General or the Security Council making a pro forma plea for peace in Israel on October 7th.
The World Health Organization was another entity that lost much of its credibility in the wake of its hapless performance during the coronavirus pandemic. UNESCO has long since become a woke fortress, shorn of its earlier importance. The World Bank and IMF are so often handmaidens of Western agendas and dogmas (see “Confessions of an Economic Hit Man”) that nobody mourns their eclipse as new lending institutions arise.
The Nobel Prizes, we were brought up to believe, were the ultimate in impartial recognition of excellence. Perhaps in the sciences they still have some value, but the moment the Peace Prize was given to Henry Kissinger (and Le Duc Tho who had the grace to reject it), it became evident that it was political. Of course, never giving the Literature Prize to Leo Tolstoy had damaged it way back (Sully Prudhomme got it instead. Sully, a household name!).
The less said about the Economics Prize the better. Just look at the Indian-origin winners or the New York Times columnist. I think I can rest my case.
In passing, there is this reputation that the Scandinavians have for fair play, partly because of the Nobels, and partly, I imagine, because they are blond, blue-eyed Vikings. But increasingly I have noticed that their antics on the environment (“How dare you!”), on politics (“we can judge the quality of your democracy via V-dem index”), on psychology (“happiness index”) and various others things suggest that some gaslighting is going on. But that’s just by the way.
The other institutions that we have always depended on are the media. It was practically a given for most of us that the BBC was objective and trustworthy, the VoA a little less so, and Pravda was full of propaganda. The NYT was the gold standard, the Economist and the FT were, if not paragons, worthy of respectful attention, despite charges of ‘manufacturing consent’.
And the Lancet was impeccable, the very fountainhead of medical wisdom. During covid, it was stunning to find them endorsing research by an entity called Surgisphere, which, I wrote at the time in “Pious Frauds” (Open Magazine, June 2020), was a naked scam with the intention of deprecating a cheap off-patent medicine called hydroxychloroquine or HCQ. Let us compare prices: Rs. 6.25 for HCQ, Rs. 30,000 for Remdesivir. That must mean something.
Over the last year or so, revelation after revelation has exposed the ‘Censorship-Industrial Complex’ as a handmaiden of governments; particularly shocking has been the suggestion that the Biden administration has been hand-in-hand with Big Tech in defenestrating anybody whom the Thought Police did not like, eg those who opposed vaccine mandates.
To be blunt, you cannot take Facebook/Meta, Google, YouTube, Apple, Amazon, Wikipedia, or any other Big Tech outlet at face value; parenthetically, and for different reasons, you cannot take anything spewed by chatbots like chatGPT or Google Bard seriously either. Twitter/X, after Elon Musk’s takeover, seems to be the least compromised news outlet available.
But the real kicker comes with Mossad and Five Eyes, and Israel’s total unpreparedness for the Hamas offensive. Mossad is legendary for its almost superhuman acts to protect Israeli lives and property, and is the world’s most admired intelligence agency. On top of this, there is the Five Eyes intelligence-sharing mechanism among the Anglosphere. In the recent past, we have heard a lot about this in the context of Justin Trudeau and Khalistanis.
The impression that I, for one, had was that these people were masters at intelligence gathering, with sophisticated technical means including satellite reconnaissance that could spot any substantial logistics on the ground. It would have taken a lot of organization to gather 5,000 rockets and dozens of pickup trucks and hundreds of fighters, but none of this registered on their signals intelligence or human intelligence?
That is hard to believe. Except for the likelihood that Mossad and the Israeli armed forces have been distracted by the internal squabbles between Prime Minister Netanyahu and the Israeli Supreme Court. The usually apolitical security services took sides in what is partly a divide between white Ashkenazi and brown/black Mizrahi, with religious orthodoxy thrown in. (It is a stark reminder to Indians, especially the INDI alliance, that a house divided will fall.)
Yes, it is hard to believe the combined might of the Anglosphere did not anticipate the Hamas invasion catastrophe. Maybe they did not want to prevent it? That would be criminal, considering the sufferings of Israeli civilians, as well as what’s to come for Palestinian civilians when Israel, as it always does, hits back hard in Gaza.
A Jewish writer in Tablet Magazine, Liel Leibowitz, accused the Israeli ruling class of “cosplaying some game of Demokratia, complete with donning handmaid outfits and ululating about fascism”, and of entertaining “the fantasy that the United States was and always would be their protector—when in fact the ruling party in America has decided that Israel is a liability”. The same magazine, in March, accused the US Deep State of instigating Israel’s internal squabbles.
That is harsh, but in a nutshell it suggests that America in particular, and the West in general, is no longer able to, or willing to, run the ‘rules-based liberal international order’. Thus, the end of Pax Americana or Pax Occidentalis may be here. This does not make the world a nicer or easier place: Pax Sinica, for instance, could be brutal (ask the Tibetans). But it suggests that a Pax Indica in the Indian Ocean Rim is a worthwhile goal for India.
1200 words, 10 Oct 2023
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A version of this essay was published by firstpost.com at https://www.firstpost.com/opinion/shadow-warrior-g20-and-its-fallout-india-the-swing-state-imec-and-trudeaus-tantrums-13162212.html?utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=social
A fortnight after the end of the G20 Summit in New Delhi, it’s worth revisiting what really materialized, and what India can expect out of all the hard work that went into it.
First, the positives. The flawless execution of the Summit is something the Indian leadership and officials deserve to be congratulated on. There were all sorts of things that could have gone wrong – including security worries – but the whole thing was done with clockwork precision. In a way, this is unsurprising: Indians revel in complexity, and surely running this event, despite the VVIP foreigners, was easier than pulling off the Kumbha Mela.
Many pundits had written off the Summit, citing the absence of Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin, and predicting that it would be next to impossible for there to be a consensus based on which a common declaration could be accepted by all. In the event, the 83-paragraph Leaders’ Declaration, wide-ranging and comprehensive, was seen as a diplomatic triumph, with everybody giving in a little on their positions in the interest of the G20 community.
The fact that NATO members had to swallow a watered-down condemnation of the Ukraine war, without actually naming Russia, has been framed as a ‘climbdown by the West for the sake of G20 unity’ by the Financial Times. That’s pretty good spin, but it was remarkable that they didn’t seem to be bothered by such ‘G20 unity’ at the Bali Summit, 2022.
There are more plausible reasons for this ‘climbdown’. One is that the Ukraine war is not going according to plan, which anticipated Russia being beaten by now, both militarily and financially. On the contrary, the EU continues to be Russia’s biggest customer, by far. So the sanctions have failed, and the EU is probably fed up with energy shortages. Plus, the Ukrainians don’t seem to be making much progress with the much-hyped ‘counteroffensive’. NATO could well be on the point of throwing Zelenskyy under the bus any day now.
The West appears to be backpedaling furiously, and they have made such miscalculations before: 1971, Bangladesh; 1975, Vietnam, and so on. Ironically, POTUS Biden went to Vietnam after the G20 Summit, and announced billions of dollars worth of deals in semiconductors and AI, among other things. What a U-turn from the 1970s! Kissinger would be turning over in his grave, except he’s still alive.
A more optimistic reading of the G20 outcome could well be that India has finally become a swing state. While it is precarious being a swing state, it also has benefits: you get courted by both sides, and you can play them off against each other. India’s persistent and aggressive fence-sitting, combined with its robust economic performance, is now making others pay a little more attention to India’s needs. But it also invites hostility.
There was evidence of this new reality, in a back-handed sort of way, in Canadian PM Justin Trudeau’s hissy-fit against India accusing it of a hit-job on a Khalistani terrorist. Trudeau has his own reasons (hurt amour-propre, perhaps), but the Washington Post reported that nobody else in the Anglosphere agreed to support him, with Biden going to great lengths “to avoid antagonizing India and court the Asian power as a strategic counterweight to China”. Even the usually hostile BBC said, “On the grand geopolitical chess board, India is now a key player”. Deep State is not amused. Nor are the rest of the Five Eyes.
India’s transition from ‘non-aligned’ to ‘multi-aligned’ has come at the right time. I do hope India does not get swayed by its own rhetoric of being the ‘champion of the Global South’ and go back to the Nehru-era ‘king of the banana republics’ self-image. Pretending to be the leader of the Third World, and all the NAM exertions got India nothing at all. In 1961, the entire Third World voted 90-1 against India’s decolonization of Goa, which was startling.
However, things are a little different now that India is looking out for its own interests first and foremost. In that context, the formal induction of the African Union into the G20 is a win for India, especially in light of the stacking of BRICS+ with friends of China.
Looking at it from India’s point of view, the African Union means especially East Africa, which is part of the Indian Ocean Rim, India’s backyard. Africa will be the fastest-growing area, in population and GDP, over the next few decades, and the giant continent’s people face problems quite similar to those Indians face. East Africa has millennia-old trade links with India. For instance, a 1500 year old Malabar-built uru, a wooden ship made of teak, was found buried, well preserved in the sands near Alexandria, Egypt, indicating ancient commerce.
It is in the context that the new Spice Route, or the India-Middle East-Europe Economic Corridor (IMEC), is also a good initiative. For one, it is fairly direct competition to China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), which has been dogged by accusations that it is ‘debt-trap diplomacy’ that ends up with valuable assets extorted from others, as in Hambantota port in Sri Lanka, now forced into a 99-year lease agreement as the debt payments became onerous.
Having said that, and despite the fact that a growing India will have more trade with Europe as in the millennia past, it is not entirely clear that the IMEC will take off. On the one hand, there is the history of prized Indian goods like spices, gold, gems, etc. The Roman Pliny the Younger complained that their treasury was being emptied because of the demand for spices and in satisfying “the vanity of [our] women” with cosmetics etc. from India.
India of the future may not become, or may not be allowed to become, a workshop of the world at the scale of China. After all, China will not go off into that good night without raging, raging. An article by Martin Wolf in the Financial Times pointed out that ‘peak China’ may be some time off. I usually disagree with the man, but here I agree: China’s obituaries are a bit premature. It will also double down on a new and improved BRI.
Going back to IMEC, there are also practical difficulties even if the political will and funding can be arranged: the port of Haifa, Israel, which would be a logical choice for it, has a major terminal where China is the concessionaire, and so does the Greek Port of Piraeus. Interestingly enough, Adani Ports has control over the older terminal at Haifa, and is reported to be seeking a terminal at Piraeus as well. How curious that Soros keeps attacking Adani again and again: perhaps he is acting on China’s behalf as well?
Chances are that IMEC will remain a pipe-dream, but there is more of a chance that the Digital Public Infrastructure (DPI) that India has excelled in may be appealing to many other nations. According to the World Bank, India only took 6 years to achieve development that would normally take 47 years, because of the efficiency improvements due to digitization. This is something the Global South can use.
There is also a negative from the G20. The upsurge in infiltration and the huge standoff against terrorists in Anantnag, Jammu and Kashmir, may well be a Chinese signal that they can ratchet up mischief any time, and that the G20 success should not go to India’s head. Given that there is a lot of alleged infiltration into and coziness by the Chinese into the Canadian establishment, Trudeau’s tantrums may also be inspired by China: the other shoe dropping.
All in all, India gets a solid A- for its G20 efforts; the outcomes, alas, may only be a B-.
1300 words, 20 Sept 2023
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On the one hand, there is massive propaganda from the west, ably supported by native sepoys, that India is on the verge of some genocide of Muslims.
On the other hand, last month, the Speaker of the Kerala Assembly, a Muslim, said that Lord Ganesh was “a myth”. Instead of censuring him for hurting the sentiments of Hindus, the ruling communists of Kerala supported him.
This month, Udayanidhi Stalin, a minister, who is also the son of the DMK Chief Minister of Tamil Nadu M K Stalin, said Sanatana Dharma is like dengue, and needs to be eradicated. A former Union Minister, A Raja, compared Hinduism to HIV.
Thus there is de facto discrimination and hate speech against Hindus, and Stalin Jr’s call, for all practical purposes, is an invitation to genocide of Hindus.
Several bigwigs in politics, including the DMK’s allies such as the Congress, instead of censuring Stalin Jr for calling for crimes against humanity, have instead supported him.
Then there is de jure discrimination against Hindus as well. The Constitution through Articles 25-30 appears to give protection to non-Hindus (based on some strange idea that Hindus would oppress them), which has been interpreted by the courts as giving extraordinary privileges to non-Hindus in all sorts of ways. The same is true of governments as well: in fact there are Kerala government job postings reserved exclusively for converts to Christianity, not to mention the pilgrimage concessions given to Muslims and Christians, but not to Hindus.
The Supreme Court, on its own accord, forcefully chided Nupur Sharma merely for quoting correctly a verse from an Islamic source, and claimed she was causing fissures in society. But the Supreme Court has not bothered with any suo moto comments on Stalin Jr or A Raja.
This is apartheid, a classic oppression of majority populations to benefit minorities.
Anand Ranganathan’s recent book goes into detail in this, and I am sure it is worth a read. An apartheid state is unsustainable and needs to be reformed.
The fact of the matter is that there are several religions intent on world conquest, Christianity, Islam and their modern-day variants Communism and Wokeism. All of them view Hindus as targets and as sacrificial lambs for their glory.
Unfortunately, this is not even new. Here’s a letter to the editor published in the Hindu newspaper, apparently in the 1940s.
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* It’s illegal. There is a constitutional right to worship. Even more so there is a right to equality to all citizens.
* It’s immoral and criminal. To call for genocide. This is not free speech. This is hate speech
* This is pure propaganda
* Demonizing the enemy has a long history
* Spaniards called aztecs cannibals and vice versa, but white people got to write the history books
* Yellow peril
* Nazis called jews vermin
* Hutus in rwanda called tutsis cockroaches, and then genocide them
* N s rajarams’s comment on how caldwell, naicker etc were attempting the same in tamil nadu
* History of the justice party, dmk etc is shameful: basically arms of conversion, not anti-religion, only anti-hindu
* Anti-hindu memes in the west: california bill, equality labs, audrey truschke, against vivek ramaswamy
* Progressively from hindutva to hinduism to sanatana dharma. escalation
* INDIAlliance has shown itself to be purely anti-hindu
* But questions for BJP too: why are hindu temples still managed by the state? Anand ranganathan maintains that hindus are not even second-class, they are eighth class, with far fewer rights than others.
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A version of this essay was published by news18.com at https://www.news18.com/opinion/opinion-what-a-difference-ten-years-make-india-since-2014-8559632.html
I wrote ten years ago on Rediff.com (‘The great Indian rope trick and other illusions of progress’ https://www.rediff.com/news/column/the-great-indian-rope-trick-and-other-illusions-of-progress/20130716.htm) about how the average Indian is satisfied with illusion, never mind real progress. That made India a Potemkin State, where form is everything and substance is immaterial.
It turns out that I was wrong: Indians do want actual progress. I might be pardoned for saying what I said then because the country was at the fag-end of the Lost Decade, 2004 to 2013, wherein things deteriorated steadily. Decline had been par for the course throughout the Nehruvian-Stalinist decades of dirigisme. Conversely, there has been noticeable change in 2014-2023.
Apart from mis-steps in economic management, the political environment was also dicey. There was the appalling spectacle of a constitutional coup, as I noted at the time (‘Four ways the Congress won power by Constitutional coups’ https://www.rediff.com/news/column/column-rajeev-srinivasan-4-ways-the-congress-won-power-through-constitutional-coups/20140107.htm): by colluding with the Communist Speaker in the cash-for-votes scam, the Congress clung on to power violating democratic norms.
We see the same recklessness today in the US (“Let’s jail the leading opposition candidate”) and in Germany (“One party is getting too popular, let’s ban it”). It does not bode well. The New York Times, on August 21, 2023 ran the striking headline, “Elections Are Bad for Democracy” before changing it to “The Worst People Run for Office. It’s Time for a Better Way”. Yes, democracy is too important to leave to the people. Let us elites tell them what to think.
The most striking example of this uncaring State, the very nadir of its contempt for the man in the street, was the length of the chain anchoring the mug in the loo in railway compartments: just three inches too short, thus shattering the illusion that you could actually clean your bottom. A daunting prospect for any traveler, especially because of the overwhelming stink, and a world of difference from Japan’s shinkansen and their amazing high-tech loos.
Recently I traveled in several train compartments, including ancient Jan Shatabdi chair cars and newish Hamsafar sleeper coaches, although, alas, not in Vande Bharat coaches yet; but I was surprised at how much better the toilets were. The ‘bio toilet’ means human feces are not dumped on the tracks; they do not smell terrible, and, wonder of wonders, there is a hygiene hose/bidet that is actually long enough to do the deed.
And, perhaps redundantly, the chain for the mug has been lengthened. And there is water!
It is hard to explain to a non-Indian what a difference all this makes. I had a cousin who denied herself food and drink while traveling by train just so she could avoid the toilet. It is a sea-change when you are granted a little self-respect. I am reminded of the placard held by a man at a Martin Luther King rally: “I am a man”. Yes, the proverbial average Indian aam admi is a human who deserves consideration: not only Lutyens and Khan Market types.
I am sorry to talk about a cringe-making topic like toilets, but this is something earthy and immediately understandable; it makes the point that India is, 76 years after the imperialists left and brown sahebs took over, finally on the march. Indians are beginning to see that they can demand respect from their rulers, and get it. Dignity, that watchword of the butler Stevens in Kazuo Ishiguro’s brilliant The Remains of the Day.
In a penetrating 1997 essay, “India shouldn’t have fantasies about the past, but face it” (https://www.indiatoday.in/india-today-insight/story/from-the-archives-1997-v-s-naipaul-india-shouldn-t-have-fantasies-about-the-past-but-face-it-1988599-2022-08-16) Sir V S Naipaul mentioned that those who have been oppressed and denigrated for centuries are now rising, and this rise will be messy. He was talking about those outside the charmed circle that ruled the country for long. It is also broader: the rise of the Other Backward Communities, that uncharming name for the majority of Indians, the bahujan.
Naipaul also said that the rulers will now of necessity be of the people, not overlords. It can be argued that for over a thousand years, Indians have been effectively ruled by a comprador ‘elite’, middlemen who did the dirty work on behalf of invaders or distant rulers. It is my suspicion that the zamindars and other local strongmen were largely from the upper or middle jatis, and it is only now that those from the bottom of the pyramid are finally getting a say in things.
No, this is not a jati-bashing exercise, and I may be extrapolating from my observations in Kerala, where a middle jati, Nairs, were the kulaks who lorded it over those below them in the hierarchy, such as OBC Ezhavas, SC Pulayas, and ST Mala-arayans. The latter are now rising, though not in full measure, yet. I think it’s similar in Tamil Nadu, too.
In the Soviet Union, Stalin liquidated the kulaks. In India, their eclipse has come about too late, though without violence. The usual woke Lutyens/Khan Market suspects were disappointed they couldn’t chortle about Chandrayaan-3 being yet another expensive failure a poor country could ill afford, echoing Brits upset that their alleged ‘aid’ was going to India (in reality, as per the UK Foreign Office, India politely declined any charity from them starting 2015; any money coming to India from the UK is foreign direct investment (FDI), or strictly in support of their geopolitical objectives, channeled via dubious NGOs or missionaries).
The ‘wokes’ also grumbled about ISRO engineers going to Tirupati and invoking the blessings of the Divine for their project. I am glad they got a munh thod jawab. There really is no dichotomy in Hindu thought between science and faith: science too requires faith and belief.
The ‘wokes’ have reason to be worried, not only by the picture-perfect moon landing, but also by Praggnaanandhaa, who almost unseated the reigning World Champion in chess; Neeraj Chopra, who won the World Athletic Championship in javelin to go with his Olympic gold; the 4x400 relay quartet with their heroics of almost defeating the Americans in the heats while setting an Asian record; and Vivek Ramaswamy, who is unabashedly Hindu and at the same time a patriotic American and a force to contend with in the Republican party in the US.
Even though they haven’t been defenestrated, except perhaps some unfortunate folks at Ashoka University, India’s Left are less and less relevant: relics of a failed ideology. They should count their lucky stars: in Singapore, Lee Kwan Yew liquidated them. And indeed, even in the US, the ‘woke’ capital of the world, their star is setting.
There is another reason I brought up toilets: the unseemly obsession that westerners have with them. I was delighted to see this cartoon on Twitter, and it is obviously a parody of the earlier one in the sadly overrated New York Times, below.
While the racist derision of the original cartoon, and the celebration of the be-jasmined and be-bindi’d women in Indian engineering are the obvious takeaways, I was intrigued by a detail: the white guy in the cartoon is dragging a shopping-cart full of toilet paper behind him! I am not sure why toilet paper is some kind of atavistic guilty pleasure for westerners.
Despite being purely climate-related (they could not afford to melt ice and snow just to wash their bottoms, or for that matter their hands, thus cutlery), toilet paper has become a cultural staple for them. You might remember the hoarding of toilet paper in the early days of covid! It’s time westerners abandoned killing trees, and went for the more healthy bidet-like health faucet. For that matter, the squat in Indian closets is apparently better than the sitting posture on a western ‘thunder-box’. Recently while traveling in the Czech Republic, I stayed in a (fancy) hotel that had a bidet: such a relief! May their tribe increase!
Of course, some things never change. This was demonstrated in two ways: the thinly-veiled envy from the British that manifested itself in their assertion that an India full of open defecation shouldn’t be spending on space research, and The Economist magazine in their recent obituary of Bindeswar Pathak repeatedly emphasizing caste discrimination and manual scavenging. These are vestiges of the past, and mostly due to the $10 trillion (or $45 trillion depending on whom you ask) that the Brits looted, impoverishing India. But then, who’s counting?
Oh, you want to talk about open defecation? Once-beautiful San Francisco is now the champion, while India has built large numbers of indoor toilets all over the country. See the ‘poop map’ of San Francisco here (https://mochimachine.org/wasteland/# ).
One thing that has definitely changed in the last ten years is the amount of Hindu-hatred expressed in the West, particularly America. The California caste Bill, Equality Labs, Audrey Truschke, and the latest, tech journo Kara Swisher’s racist attack on Vivek Ramaswamy, are all related to the fact that Hindus have quietly become one of the most economically successful (but politically powerless) groups in the US. It is really a back-handed compliment, happily cheered on by rogues from the “Chindu” stable or similar. Caste is the weapon.
Hindus tend to be defensive about caste. We shouldn’t be. Caste is really a white invention, from the Portuguese casta, intended to segregate mixed-race people based on how white they are, half, quarter, one-eighth, etc: thus mulatto, quadroon, octroon, etc. It is their cross to bear. There is an ocean of difference between this caste business and jatis, but I digress..
Besides, there are de facto castes in the US: the investment banker caste, the doctor caste, the lawyer caste, the management consultant caste, etc. They all go to the same tony prep schools, the same Ivy League colleges (legacy admissions mean you easily get into Harvard, if your parent(s) went to Harvard, regardless of your grades. Raj Chetty has published reams of data about this); they are endogamous; and they all miraculously end up at Goldman Sachs or McKinsey. An outsider can’t break in. These castes are also Lindy (ask Nassim Taleb).
Perhaps, taking a cue from other groups that have prospered, Hindus (and Indian Americans in general) are becoming ‘white’, like others have before them. Irish, Italians, Jews, Japanese, Koreans, Chinese: there is a long list. ‘Whiteness’ is a construct. I was flabbergasted decades ago when a well-meaning white guy said, “You guys are almost white”. I stuttered: “But, but… we are brown!”.
If you have money, you pretty much become white. I give it another ten years. With India’s GDP at $10 trillion, and more Hindu-Americans creating unicorns, I bet by 2034 Hindus will be ‘white’. Maybe Vivek is the first white Hindu. I am not making a value judgment, merely making a prediction. You heard it here first.
1800 words, Aug 29, 2023, updated Sep 10, 2023
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A version of this essay was published by firstpost.com at https://www.firstpost.com/opinion/shadow-warrior-paris-is-burning-why-12837712.html
I had the disconcerting experience of being on the ground in Paris while the current riots raged. Oddly enough, on my previous visit, in April 2019, I arrived the night the Notre Dame cathedral caught fire, and then was in town during the Yellow Vest riots against fuel taxes. In both cases, my plans were affected: in the current case I stirred out of my hotel room near the Arc de Triomphe with trepidation, worried as I was by TV images of random violence and especially arson.
I had been to Paris for several years in a row (until covid) for an annual conference on innovation, so I have a slight familiarity with the city, and it remains one of the most charming cities in the world. Architecturally appealing, with world-class museums (I did my usual homage to the Louvre, the impressionist Musee d’Orsay and the Musee Guimet of Asian art), lovely boulevards, the peerless Eiffel Tower, the unhurried meals in sidewalk cafes: the very picture of the good life.
Then there is the dark side of things.
The proximate cause of the troubles was the shooting death of a 17 year old youth of Algerian heritage, possibly the result of excessive force by the police. But this is just the spark. As in other countries with restless minority populations (e.g. the US with periodic riots after police shoot yet another black man, as in Los Angeles burning after the death of Rodney King), there are many other resentments that fan the fire. It would be easy to surmise that racism and the reaction thereto are the main factors in action.
But I think there is another, possibly preponderant cause: demographic shift. France is getting less white, more black and Arab, and more Muslim. Coupled with an ever-restive leftist streak that has been evident for long (remember the student riots in May 1968 and the always volatile Left Bank?), today we have a left-migrant nexus of sorts that magnifies any issue and takes to the streets.
There are large numbers of migrants, including those who came from the colonies and more recently refugees fleeing terror and chaos in Syria, Afghanistan etc. One would think that they would generally be grateful to Europe for taking them in, but radicalization is literally visible on the streets: the older generation is more secular, but their sons and especially their daughters-in-law are more observant, with beards, hijabs and other signs of religiosity. They are influenced by fiery preachers who call for jihad.
It is now much easier to marshal ‘flashmobs’ via social media. In fact, France has just had to turn off the Internet to prevent further provocation and nastiness. Let us note that this was not trumpeted by Deep State journalists as a sign of autocracy, although that is exactly what they say when India has to turn off the Internet in Kashmir.
There were statements made by some of the rioters (I’m not sure if it is just bravado or whether they seriously mean it) that they intend to take over Europe through the power of their numbers, as they are noticeably more fertile than native whites. Eurabia is an inevitable reality, they believe. This, naturally, does not sit well with the locals. They will probably begin to curtail migration, as some Scandinavian countries have begun to do.
Perhaps there is also a crisis in governance, which was the opinion of an old friend, whom I met for drinks at the landmark Publicis Drugstore on the Champs Elysees. She was unhappy about the mayor and other politicians whom she blamed for the poor state of general administration. (I just read that a suburban mayor’s home was attacked, and his wife injured). Although my friend didn’t talk about him, Emmanuel Macron is not universally popular either; even senior citizens appear to be upset with him.
She also mentioned that the covid lockdowns had had a hugely disruptive, and lingering, effect, as many people lost their jobs, many moved out of Paris, and have had their prospects diminished. France’s place in the world is also diminishing: it is now mostly a purveyor of luxury goods (fittingly, the head of LVMH is now the richest person in the world), and it was roundly humiliated by the US in the AUKUS affair, even though it is still a major arms supplier.
Maybe there is a certain angst in the air. Maybe that is the root cause, or at least a root cause.
I met a Pondicherry-origin man working in the transit hotel near the airport where I spent my last night in Paris, not wanting to risk riots, arson and barricades on the way from the city to Charles de Gaulle. He was generally negative, warning me about crime ranging from pickpocketing to muggings and especially the riots. He felt that his life as an immigrant (he has been there for many years) has become worse, and he felt he could be targeted by both Arabs and whites based on his Indian looks and the certainty that he was harmless and would not retaliate.
I only personally witnessed a boisterous crowd shouting slogans that I couldn’t understand, and no violence or arson (thankfully), but there was the constant wail of police sirens in the background, and what sounded like shots in the middle distance. Sadly, the largest library in France was set on fire. Thousands of vehicles were destroyed, and hundreds of houses looted and burned. In the end, I am told residents responded with vigilante squads fending off the unruly mobs.
I also spoke to the proverbial taxi driver (a Moroccan-Frenchman), following in the footsteps of famous economists and journalists. He tried to be circumspect, and he didn’t seem to be a religious person (there were no accoutrements in his car), but he told me about hard times. He was running an illegal taxi service, and he overcharged me 10 Euros since (he claimed) he didn’t have enough change.
He spoke about unemployment and discrimination, and how inflation was hurting his living standards. I have in the past found French Arabs not very hostile to Indians (as we don’t threaten their livelihoods), and this man wasn’t either.
The same issue of economic problems was echoed by a Malayali manning a souvenir shop. He had arrived as a student, stayed on for a few years, and now was facing problems in bringing his family over from India. Incidentally, a lot of the souvenir stalls near Sacre Coeur, the Louvre and elsewhere are staffed or owned by Indian-origin people: I met one from Gujarat, another from Mauritius.
The number of Indians I saw around Paris has gone up from prior visits: both tourists and residents. There still are far more East Asians (in my hotel there were Koreans and Singaporeans) around. I met a young woman from Kanyakumari who was leading a tour group on the Eiffel Tower. She was optimistic: she was doing her MBA, working part-time, and she has an import-export startup in India that she will be returning to.
My chance encounters with these people illustrate the point about European decline. France has a nice little niche in luxury goods, but I suspect their buyers are increasingly from newly-affluent Asia. The departure area at CDG airport Terminal 1 is a veritable secular cathedral, with chandeliers and luxurious seats, surrounded by glitzy and expensive Dior, Chanel, Louis Vuitton, Hermes, Cartier, etc. shops tempting the departing traveler.
But decline in the former colonial powers (most evident in Britain, which also shot itself in the foot with Brexit) is a fact. In a way it is poetic justice: Paris is full of evident loot from elsewhere (the Egyptian obelisk from Luxor, the Cambodian sculptures from the Bayon and Angkor Wat) and France clearly was enriched by exploitation of the colonies.
But their core industrial strength has vanished (China continues to rape and pillage their IPR), along with their position in the global GDP standings. India has overtaken France and Britain, and will soon overtake Germany. Europe is now less of a factor in the world than it has been since the Middle Ages. Asia is rising again.
It’s a powerful cocktail: inevitable cyclical decline, memories of imperial grandeur, the determined Islamist assault, and general anti-government feelings going way back to the French Revolution. Surely, the crackdown by some 50,000 police and if necessary, the army, will control the riots, but one day the rioters may win. Predictably, all of Europe is now shifting right-wards: Italy, Finland, Greece, possibly Spain. Hard times beget hard men.
1450 words, Jul 3, 2023
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A version of this essay was published by firstpost.com at https://www.firstpost.com/opinion/shadow-warrior-permanent-interests-not-permanent-friends-drive-foreign-policy-12814872.html
The optics for PM Narendra Modi’s visit to the US were good. There was a surprisingly positive reception to his speech to the joint houses of the US Parliament (known as the US Congress, not to be confused with the Indian political party with its congenital allergy to Modi). I read that the PM gave a bravura performance, and that he was interrupted by several standing ovations.
The rest of the trip also got generally good reviews. It would be wonderful if my two favorite nations were to become good friends. I lived most of my youth in the US, and I love the country. By ancestry and culture, of course my roots are Indian.
But any such rapport will not come about if the usual suspects can help it. I was not really surprised by the news that former President Barak Obama was scathing about India and Modi. I have not been a fan of Obama’s from day one: something about him made my antennae go up. And then I heard that he had gone to Pakistan in his youth, at a stage in life when most young Americans go to India to find themselves. I guess Obama had already found himself.
Then there was Fareed Zakaria who echoed the libel that India was massacring Muslims. He knows well enough that this is not true. If anything, Indian Muslims are more privileged than others. And Zakaria and his father are among the most privileged, a super-elite caste of “Anglo-Mughalais” (my friend Bapa Rao’s evocative term) who take advantage of everything India has to offer, in the name of the poorer castes of Muslims whom they find it convenient to keep poor and angry.
And then there was Sabrina Siddiqui, a Pakistani-American journalist who is part of the Biden administration, whose provocative question to the PM raised hackles.
The meme that is quietly being propagated by all of them is that India is on the verge of genocide of its Muslim residents. This is simply not true: just as they are currently doing in France, Muslims riot at the drop of a hat in India. This is hardly a dara hua population. Obama’s direct hint about a Partition 2.0 is a good summary of the standard Deep State perspective on India: keep it down, poor, and preferably broken: Hindus are not allowed to rise.
Less sinister was some guy in Foreign Affairs opining that the US and India do not share ‘values’ but only ‘interests’. Maybe, but that should not stop them from becoming friends. That is realpolitik: the enlightened pursuit of self-interest. Nations, in a Chanakyan way, can and should pursue their own long-term and short-term interests. I once invoked Chanakya’s ‘Far Emperor’: you cultivate the distant emperor to wage war against the neighbor, who, sadly, will sooner or later become your foe. That’s a good model for India. A benign US can be the Far Emperor when the nearby power threatens.
As for the US, with a rampaging China threatening to overturn the entire US-dominated international order, it is good to have friends who can keep China occupied in its neighborhood: to put it crudely, India is the only country to have recently killed Chinese troops, and stared them down in a tense stand-off.
And values. I have to believe that the guiding values of the US are “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness”. So far as I can tell, this is exactly what India is attempting to do for its citizens and this is precisely what the much-maligned (by the US Deep State) Modi is trying to do. How much more congruent can your values get?
But I must acknowledge that there is a definite gulf between Abrahamic values and Dharmic values.
The ‘religions of the desert’, that is, Abrahamisms including the Christian, Islamic and Communist faiths, have as a central tenet world conquest. I classify Abrahamisms as follows:
* Paleo-semitic: Zoroastrianism, Judaism
* Meso-semitic: Christianity, Islam
* Neo-semitic: Communism, Fascism, Nehruism, Ambedkarism, Dravidianism, and so on
The common thread is that these are prone to promote competition and zero-sum games. This is a consequence of the fact that the Middle East, where these ideologies germinated (though they have obviously managed to capture much territory elsewhere) is mostly a fearsome desert. If you do not follow a few simple rules (‘Commandments’) you will perish: for instance, “carry water”, “cover yourself up against the sun and sand”, “kill or be killed”, “your life here and now may suck, but there’s a heaven after you die and if you want to get there, do the following”.
The Dharmic worldview, being that of the ‘religions of the forest’, is fundamentally different. This is because the Asian forest, while it can be dangerous, is benign. There are fruits to forage for, and water to drink. Your basic survival is not in such jeopardy, and so you can afford to be a little flexible. Of course there are rules like “look out for snakes”, and “climb a tree to escape predators”, but basically life is easier, and so you develop an attitude of “live and let live”.
I have recently been traveling in Europe, and spent some time in the Louvre Museum. The items on display there are a graphic reminder of these differences: the galleries showing Greek, Roman, Persian and Mediterranean art (pre-Abrahamic) are radically different from medieval (Abrahamic) art from later times. Yes, there is a difference ever since meso-Semitism became the European standard.
The biologist Richard Dawkins is a good example of the fact that Abrahamic values are the norm for anyone in the West, even if they reject Abrahamic religions, and claim to be atheists, although one could easily argue that atheism is yet another Abrahamism. He has admitted to being culturally Abrahamic, and he is both ignorant and arrogant regarding Dharmic systems: he doesn’t understand them, and fits them into a Procrustean Abrahamic mold. The same is true of Noam Chomsky.
I do believe that the US and India do not and couldn’t possibly share all their values: so that is a futile argument at best. Yet they can and do share interests, mostly the containment of China. Values at a grassroots level are not all that different in practice. Individual Americans are among the nicest, friendliest, most gregarious and decent people anywhere. And so are Indians.
It is possible to write reams about Chinese strategic brilliance and Sun Tzu and all that, but the fact remains that while it has thrived under centralized imperial rule, it has also regularly faced catastrophic collapse and periods of chaos. But there is no gainsaying the fact that for the last thirty years or so, China has outplayed the US, to the extent that the CEO of a big defense company (Raytheon if I remember right) says it is impossible to decouple from thousands of Chinese suppliers.
When I first went to the US, in the late 1970s, things generally looked good there, even though there was a period of high inflation. The Cold War came to an end soon thereafter (The Soviets were outmaneuvered) and Francis Fukuyama’s The End of History seemed possible: Western (that is, a special form of Abrahamic) values had won. Period.
Hubris is usually followed by Nemesis. The needs of the war industry took center stage, and money that could and should have been spent on the welfare of Americans was lavished on strange ‘projects’ everywhere, such as Iraq, and much later, Afghanistan. The latter was justifiable based on 9/11, but the way it was conducted and (in particular) terminated was atrocious. And now, Ukraine.
Meanwhile, China has deeply infiltrated the US through its agents; its unwitting fifth columnists now include Wall Street bankers and captains of industry. Then there are these suspicious little joint ventures, for instance, it now looks increasingly possible that the Covid virus was dreamt up by some billionaires, and executed as a biowarfare project by senior US government officials. It just got a little out of hand. 10-20 million dead, mostly in mRNA-vaccinated rich countries. Oops.
So there are many players in the US (and I am not going to get into the godawful wokeness issue or the dubious and dangerous anti-democratic games going on) who are interested in, or paid to, create a narrative that puts India down and keeps it down. This includes the Indian-origin activists and journalists who are astroturfed with ISI money and Chinese money, and when they attack Modi, it is perfectly clear that the target is really India and Hindus.
Given the power of these lobbies, the US will get close to India if and only if it has no other choice. Someone writing in the WSJ asked if the US needs India. My belief is that there is mutual benefit. India is no longer the country that some Americans remember: waiting for PL-480 grain to avoid mass starvation. Economics matters, and matters greatly. As and when India becomes a major consumer of all sorts of goods and services for its domestic market, the US will benefit.
Is India there yet? No. Can it get there? Yes, if all goes well. But things can easily go south. There are dangerous elements in India with their rent-a-riot crowds and their ‘500 rupees and biriyani for your vote’. The painful and hard-won infrastructure improvement and quality of life improvement can disappear virtually overnight.
India’s interests include American help in continuing to grow, and this may be in the form of funding and R&D, although quite frankly this could just as well come from Japan. It includes a modus vivendi with China, which is the original intent of the Quad as visualized by that visionary statesman Abe Shinzo: an armed truce, as it were. Red lines. Guardrails. And it wants the ‘rules-based, liberal, international order’ to be amended to include 1.4 billion Indians.
None of this sounds unreasonable. The question is, how much of this coincides with America’s interests. Values are nice, and yes, it would be good if they coincide. But if not, common interests are perfectly good bases for co-existence.
1200 words, 23 June 2023, 1700 words updated 1 July 1, 2023
This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit rajeevsrinivasan.substack.com/subscribe -
A version of this essay has been published by firstpost.com at https://www.firstpost.com/opinion/shadow-warrior-mr-modi-goes-to-washington-deja-vu-all-over-again-12750892.html
Considering that India and the US are my two favorite countries, it is odd that I get nervous whenever there is a summit between the two. I am reminded inevitably of the Frank Capra film “Mr Smith goes to Washington” (1939), where James Stewart plays Mr Smith, a naive idealist, who goes to the corrupt company town Washington DC and is bullied and humiliated. In the end (this being fiction) Mr Smith wins a famous victory for democracy and the power of the people.
In real life, things are different. Mr Modi is not naive, and he is a pragmatist (though there is a wee bit of an idealist in him), and he is quite aware of the Deep State and its regime-change agendas (e.g. they just did one in Brazil, defenestrating Bolsonaro, although it didn’t quite work with Hungary’s Orban). Besides, I am sure that the PM remembers the same Democrats giving him the dubious distinction of being the only person ever denied a visa on the grounds of “severe violation of religious freedom”, purportedly for the Gujarat riots in 2002. Yes, along the same lines as the absurd USCIRF.
When Democrats are in power, things simply don’t seem to go well for Indo-US relations. There are many reasons: one is that Democrats on average seem to prefer autocrats and uniformed caudillos because hey, they get things done; another is that many are Atlanticists, and quite a few are of Eastern European origin (eg Brzezinski, Albright, Nuland, Blinken) with scant regard for Indo-Pacific issues; a third is that they tend to be woke (trans-gender bathrooms, yeah!).
The Clinton Administration and especially the Obama Administration were unpleasant to India, in keeping with the above tendencies Democrats exhibit. Manmohan Singh was, with much hoopla, given the “first state dinner” by Obama, which so far as I can tell meant nothing whatsoever. It was an empty gesture.
In fact, I have been underwhelmed by various US shows of bonhomie. I panned the Obama state visit in 2010. To be honest, I have not been an admirer of Obama from day one, and the current Biden Administration seems to be, for all practical purposes, Obama 3.0: same ruinous economic and foreign policies, mostly the same tired faces, the same wokeness.
Even though I am Republican-leaning, I was not all that impressed by Narendra Modi’s interaction with Trump in 2017 either. Certainly, Trump was a lot better than the Democrats, but then I expected Trump to look out, correctly, for US interests, rather than do anything for India, even though Republicans understand the China threat better.
Earlier, I thought the entire full-court-press and hard-sell on the 2008 ‘nuclear deal’ simply indicated that it was a good deal for the US, and not so good for India. In the event, India’s nuclear power production capacity did not go up dramatically, India became a much bigger buyer of US military hardware, and there were surely (non-public) limitations placed on India’s nuclear weapons programs.
I guess I suffer from the soft bigotry of low expectations. I think this is a selling job on the part of the Americans, and that ill-prepared Indians will be taken in by flattery. Therefore I continue to be skeptical about the real value of the current tour by Modi to meet Biden, and have a ‘state dinner’ with him. In fact, I do hope Modi will take his own chef with him. Let’s be careful remembering (God forbid) what happened to Lal Bahadur Shastri.
I get particularly suspicious when The Economist magazine, which is the voice of the Deep State, starts waxing eloquent about something. Apart from the fact that they are generally wrong about all their geopolitical forecasts, being unvarnished imperialists, I am reminded of Kissinger’s dictum: “It is dangerous to be America’s enemy, but fatal to be America’s friend”.
I tried to get Microsoft Bing and DALL-E to get me an AI-generated image of the great mans’ quote, but I was warned sternly that such a query was “against content rules” (whatever they are) and that I would be kicked off the platform! So I am satisfying myself with this Economist cover story, which apparently is a parody of some Netflix show.
Prospects are actually worse for Indo-American rapport today than they have been for years, although it should be the opposite, given rampaging China. The principal reason is Democrat antipathy: for instance Biden’s staff explicitly hurt India in the past with the so-called Biden Amendment that set India’s space program back by 19 years by pressing the Russians to cancel the transfer of cryogenic engines, as seen in the brilliant “Rocketry: the Nambi Effect”.
On top of this, the US has hurt itself in the last few years through disastrous policies, allowing others to gain power in relative terms. So when Modi goes to Washington, it would be appropriate to revisit the old story about the emperor, the vassal king and his court bard, who wrote a new poem extolling the emperor as “the full moon”, and the king as “the new moon”.
Upon being berated by the king for diminishing him, the bard explained: “The full moon is waning, and the new moon is waxing.” This mollified the king, presumably saving the bard from having his head separated from his body.
India is on a trajectory to achieve economic (and military) power, but then it may or may not be in the US’s interests to accommodate India. The on-again, off-again US approach to the Quad (eg the AUKUS diversion) signals that the US is not serious about India’s concerns regarding China’s hegemonic ambitions. Not only US politicians, but the steady stream of Wall Street and business honchos making a beeline for China suggests that even for the money folks, despite calls for ‘de-coupling’ or ‘de-risking’, China is very much a factor in their future plans.
The US has made several strategic, even existential, blunders in the recent past, and again I think the Democrats are mostly to blame:
* The US actively collaborated in the rise of China by allowing it to be a principal manufacturing partner. People such as Henry Kissinger and several POTUSes wittingly or unwittingly helped in a process where China effectively de-industrialized the US. As the realist foreign policy analyst John Mearsheimer suggests, this may be the worst example ever of a major power paving the way for its own eclipse.
* The unnecessary Ukraine war, with the singular goal of humiliating and possibly balkanizing Russia, has already had disastrous consequences for Western Europe. Russia is a demographically declining power, and it will eventually fade away on its own; wasting enormous amounts of money and effort on ‘punishing’ it is a folly, as was the peremptory, headlong abandonment of Afghanistan to the Taliban. By pushing Russia into China’s dhritharashtra embrace, the Ukraine war is counterproductive strategically.
* The emerging facts about the Covid pandemic suggest that Anthony Fauci and others were working with the Wuhan Institute of Virology on ‘gain-of-function’, in direct contravention of US law. In addition, the poorly handled fiscal and monetary policies in relation to the pandemic have imposed pain, including high inflation, on the US.
* The awful culture wars and the focus on gender issues, diversity, equity, climate change and other divisive issues have been tearing the US apart since Obama’s time. Objectively speaking, some of these are manufactured issues. In addition, there is clear deterioration in the system, where now we have the unedifying spectacle of an ex-President indicted on mishandling classified documents, and the sitting President is accused of the same, as well as of relatives doing influence peddling.
None of this is a good look. The US is in trouble. Which it pains me to say, because I think the ideals of the ‘City on a hill’ that animate the spirit of the US Constitution still resonate after all these years. It is hard to think that the US is being overtaken by an authoritarian China.
Anyway, I think the general idea from the Biden Administration’s point of view is to get India into its orbit as a vassal, just like most of Western Europe, Japan, Australia, etc. The nastiness at the time India stoutly refused to toe the US/NATO line on Ukraine is a signal about this. People like the Portuguese Bruno Macaes and Duleep Singh, the architect of the Russia sanctions, chided India severely; the official US stance was that India somehow betrayed their trust. They couldn’t accept that India has no dog in this very European/Western fight.
I suspect a big part of the backroom negotiations on the PM’s trip will be to get India to toe the line on Ukraine. There will be various sticks and carrots dangled, such as technology transfers (which is actually an oxymoron, as nobody in their right mind transfers technology; the only way it happens is if you steal it, like China does). Then there is the GE fighter aircraft engine under discussion, and vague talk about quantum computing and other exotic stuff.
There will be more efforts to wean India away from Russian arms imports, and to sell lots of US hardware. There are expensive drones being discussed. An expert told me that if these are Reaper-class Sea Guardians, they may be a good buy, as they can be paired with the submarine hunter-killer surveillance craft, the P8i Poseidon, to help patrol the Indian Ocean.
All in all, the prospects for a mutually beneficial outcome seem bleak. Let us just hope that the Indians don’t come back with a whole lot of lemons, having been bamboozled. Again.
1473 words, June 15th 2023, updated June 17th
This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit rajeevsrinivasan.substack.com/subscribe -
A version of this essay has been published by Open Magazine at https://openthemagazine.com/essays/the-new-knowledge-war/
Generative AI, as exemplified by chatGPT from Microsoft/OpenAI and Bard from Google, is probably the hottest new technology of 2023. Its ability has mesmerised consumers to provide answers to all sorts of questions, as well as to create readable text or poetry and images with universal appeal.
These generative AI products purport to model the human brain (‘neural networks') and are ‘trained’ on large amounts of text and images from the Internet. Large Language Models or ‘LLMs’ are the technical term for the tools underlying generative AI. They use probabilistic statistical models to predict words in a sequence or generate images based on user input. For most practical purposes, this works fine. However, in an earlier column in Open Magazine, “Artificial Intelligence is like Allopathy”, we pointed out that in both cases, statistical correlation is being treated by users as though it were causation. In other words, just because two things happened together, you can’t assume one caused the other. This flaw can lead to completely wrong or misleading results in some cases: the so-called ‘AI hallucination’.
To test our hypothesis, we asked chatGPT to summarise that column. It substantially covered most points, but surprisingly, though, it completely ignored the term ‘Ayurveda', although we had used it several times in the text to highlight ‘theory of disease’. This is thought-provoking, because it implies that in the vast corpus of data that chatGPT trained on, there is nothing about Ayurveda.
The erasure of Indic knowledge
Epistemology is the study of knowledge itself: how we acquire it, and the relationship between knowledge and truth. There is a persistent concern that Indic knowledge systems are severely under-represented or mis-represented in epistemology in the Anglosphere. Indian intellectual property is ‘digested’, to use Rajiv Malhotra’s evocative term.
For that matter, India does not receive credit for innovations such as Indian numerals (misnamed Arabic numerals), vaccination (attributed to the British, though there is evidence of prior knowledge among Bengali vaidyas), or the infinite series for mathematical functions such as pi or sine (ascribed to Europeans, though Madhava of Sangamagrama discovered them centuries earlier).
The West (notably, the US) casually captures and repackages it even today. Meditation is rebranded as ‘mindfulness’, and the Huberman Lab at Stanford calls Pranayama ‘cyclic sighing’. A few years ago, the attempts of the US to patent basmati rice and turmeric were foiled by the provision of ‘prior art’, such as the Hortus Malabaricus, written in 1676 about the medicinal plants of the Western Ghats.
Judging by current trends, Wikipedia, and presumably Google, LinkedIn, and other text repositories, are not only bereft of Indian knowledge, but also full of anti-Indian and specifically anti-Hindu disinformation. Any generative AI relying on this ‘poisoned’ 'knowledge base' will, predictably, produce grossly inaccurate output.
This has potentially severe consequences: considering that Sanskrit, Hindi, Tamil, Bengali (and non-Latin scripts) etc. are underrepresented on the Internet, generative AI models will not learn or generate text from these languages. For all intents and purposes, Indic knowledge will disappear from the discourse. These issues will exacerbate the bias against non-English speakers, who will not think about their identity or culture, reducing diversity and killing innovation.
More general problems with epistemology: bias, data poisoning and AI hallucinations
Generative AI models are trained on massive datasets of text and code. This means they are susceptible to inherent biases. A case in point: if a dataset is biased against non-white females, then the generative AI model will be more likely to generate text that is also biased against non-white women. Additionally, malicious actors can poison generative AI models by injecting false or misleading data into the training dataset.
For example, a coordinated effort to introduce anti-India biases into Wikipedia articles (in fact this is the case today) will produce output that is notably biased. An example of this is a query about Indian democracy to Google Bard: it produced a result that suggested this is a Potemkin construct (i.e., one that is merely a facade); Hindu nationalism and tight control of the media “which has become increasingly partisan and subservient to the government” were highlighted as concerns. This is straight from ‘toolkits', which have poisoned the dataset and are helped, in part, by US hegemonic economic dominance.
More subtly, generative AI models are biased towards Western norms and values (or have a US-centric point of view). For example, the Body Mass Index (BMI), a measure of body fat, has been used in Western countries to determine obesity, but is a poor measure for the Indian population, as we tend to have a higher percentage of body fat than our Western counterparts.
An illustration of AI hallucination came to the fore from an India Today story entitled "Lawyer faces problems after using ChatGPT for research. AI tool comes up with fake cases that never existed." It reported how a lawyer who used ChatGPT-generated precedents had his case dismissed because the court found the references were fabricated by AI. Similar risks in the medical field for patient treatment will be exacerbated if algorithms are trained on non-curated datasets.
While these technologies promise access to communication, language itself becomes a barrier. For instance, due to the dominant prevalence of English literature, a multilingual model might link the word dove with peace, but the Basque word for dove (‘uso’) is used as a slur. Many researchers have encountered the limitations of these LLMs, for other languages like Spanish or Japanese. ChatGPT struggles to mix languages fluently in the same utterance, such as English and Tamil, despite claims of 'superhuman' performance.
The death of Intellectual Property Rights
Intellectual property rights are a common concern. Already, generative AIs can produce exact copies (tone and tenor) of creative works by certain authors (for example, J K Rowling's Harry Potter series). This is also true of works of art. Two things are happening in the background: any copyright inherent in these works has been lost, and creators will cease to create original works for lack of incentives (at least according to current intellectual property theory).
A recent Japanese decision to ignore copyrights in datasets used for AI training (from the blog technomancers.ai, “Japan Goes All In: Copyright Doesn't Apply to AI Training”) is surprisingly bold for that nation, which moves cautiously by consensus. The new Japanese law allows AI to use any data “regardless of whether it is for non-profit or commercial purposes, whether it is an act other than reproduction, or whether it is content obtained from illegal sites or otherwise.” Other governments will probably follow suit. This is a land-grab or a gold rush: India cannot afford to sit on the sidelines.
India has dithered on a strict Data Protection Bill, which would mandate Indian data to be held locally; indirectly, it would stem the cavalier capture and use of Indian copyright. The Implications are chilling; in the absence of economic incentives, nobody will bother to create new works of fiction, poetry, non-fiction, music, film, or art. New fiction and art produced by generative AI will be Big Brother-like. All that we would be left with as a civilisation will be increasingly perfect copies of extant works: Perfect but soulless. The end of creativity may mean the end of human civilisation.
With AIs doing ‘creation’, will people even bother? Maybe individual acts of creation, but then they still need the distribution channels so that they reach the public. In the past in India, kings or temples supported creative geniuses while they laboured over their manuscripts, and perhaps this will be the solution: State sponsorship for creators.
Indian Large Language Models: too few yet, while others are moving ahead
Diverse datasets will reduce bias and ensure equitable Indic representation to address the concerns about generative AI. Another way is to use more rigorous training methods to reduce the risk of data poisoning and AI hallucinations.
Progressive policy formulations, without hampering technological developments, are needed for safe and responsible use to govern the use of LLM's across disciplines, while addressing issues of copyright infringement and epistemological biases. Of course, there is the question of creating ‘guardrails': some experts call for a moratorium, or strict controls, on the growth of generative AI systems.
We must be alive to its geopolitical connotations, as well. The Chinese approach to comprehensive data-collection is what cardiologists refer to as a ‘coronary steal phenomenon’: one segment of an already well-perfused heart ‘steals’ from another segment to its detriment. The Chinese, for lack of better word, plunder (and leech) data while actively denying market access to foreign companies.
Google attempted to stay on in China with Project Dragonfly, while Amazon, Meta, Twitter were forced to exit the market. Meanwhile, ByteDance, owner of TikTok, is trying to obscure its CCP ties by moving to a 'neutral jurisdiction' in Singapore, while siphoning off huge amounts of user data from Europe and the US (and wherever else it operates) for behavioural targeting and capturing personal level data, including from children and young adults. The societal implications of the mental health 'epidemic' (depression, low self-esteem, and suicide) remain profound and seem like a reversal of the Opium Wars the West had unleashed on China.
India can avoid Chinese exclusivism by keeping open access to data flows while insisting on data localisation. The Chinese have upped the ante. Reuters reported that “Chinese organisations have launched 79 AI large language models since 2020”, citing a report from their Ministry of Science and Technology. Many universities, especially in Southeast Asia, are creating new data sets to address the spoken dialects.
West Asia, possibly realizing the limitations of “peak-oil”, have thrown their hat in the ring. The United Arab Emirates (UAE) claims to have created the world’s “first capable, commercially viable open-source general-purpose LLM, which beats all Big Tech LLMs”. According to the UAE's Technology Innovation Institute, the Falcon 40B is not only royalty free, but also outperforms “Meta's LLaMA and Stability AI's StableLM”.
This suggests that different countries recognise the importance of investing resources to create software platforms and ecosystems for technological dominance. This is a matter of national security and industrial policy.
“We have no moat” changes everything: welcome to tiny LLMs
Chiranjivi from IIT Bombay, IndiaBERT from IIT Delhi and Tarang from IIT Madras are a few LLMs from India. India needs to get its act together to bring out many more LLMs: these can focus on, and be trained on, specialised datasets representing specific domains, for instance, that can avoid data poisoning. The Ministries concerned should provide support, guidance, and funding.
The obstacle has been the immense hardware and training requirements: GPT-3, the earlier generation LLM, required 16,384 Nvidia chips at a cost of over $100 million. Furthermore, it took almost a year to train the model with 500 billion words, at a cost of hundreds of millions of dollars. There was a natural assumption: the larger the data set, the better the result with ‘emergent’ intelligence. This sheer scale of investments was considered beyond Indian purview.
A remarkable breakthrough was revealed in a leaked internal Google memo, timed with Bard's release, titled "We have no moat, and neither does OpenAI," a veritable bombshell. It spoke about Meta’s open sourcing its algorithmic platform, LLaMA, and implications for generative AI research. Although there is no expert consensus, the evidence suggests smaller datasets can produce results almost as good as the large datasets.
This caused a flutter among the cognoscenti. Despite Meta releasing its crown jewels for a wider audience (developers), there was an uptick in its stock value, despite failures in its multiple pivots beyond social media.
To understand this better, Geoffrey Hinton, the ‘godfather’ of deep learning, explains in detail: All large language model (LLM) copies can learn separately, but share their knowledge instantly. That’s how chatbots know more than an average person. The performance trajectory of different LLM’s has skyrocketed; for example, consider this:
Using LLaMa as a base, researchers were able to quickly (in weeks) and cheaply (a few $100) produce Alpaca and Vicuna that, despite having fewer parameters, compete well with Google’s and openAI's models. The graph shows that the answers from their chatbots are comparable in quality (per GPT-4). A fine-tuning technique called LoRA (Low Rank Adoption) is the secret behind this advance.
This abruptly levels the playing field. Open-source models can be quickly scaled and run on even laptops and phones! Hardware is no longer a constraint. Let a thousand Indian LLMs bloom!
The way forward
Given the astonishing amounts being invested by venture capitalists and governments in generative AI, there will be an explosion in startup activity. There are already a few in India, such as Gan, Kroopai, Peppertype.ai, Rephrase.ai, TrueFoundry, and Cube. Still, TechCrunch quoted Sanford Bernstein analysts who painted a gloomy picture: “While there are over 1500 AI-based startups in India with over $4 billion of funding, India is still losing the AI innovation battle”.
Without exaggeration, it can be argued that this is an existential threat for India, and needs to be addressed on a war-footing. The AIforBharat initiative at IIT Madras is a start, but much more is needed. A sharply focused set of policies and regulations needs to be implemented by the government immediately that will both prevent the plunder of our intellectual property and data, and also encourage the creation of large numbers of models that make good use of Indian ingenuity and Indic knowledge.
2245 words, 4 June 2023
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A version of this essay was published by firstpost.com at https://www.firstpost.com/opinion/shadow-warrior-no-the-finance-mandarins-dont-always-screw-up-they-only-do-it-in-petty-ways-12678122.html
The Twitterverse and the media in general have been brutal on India’s babu-log for several recent missteps. These, many fear, revive the ghosts of the late lamented License Raj: for instance the imposition of 20% Tax Collected at Source for overseas credit card transactions, the poorly-managed withdrawal of 2000-rupee notes, or the angel tax on domestic investments in startups (but not on investments from 21 specified countries).
But let’s be honest and give them credit where it’s due: they shepherded India through the pandemic leaving the economy in pretty decent shape compared to the rest of the world. Even more importantly, the general handling of the economy has gone so well (of course thanks also to other tailwinds like the infrastructure push and the manufacturing thrust) that there is a genuine feeling among both locals and foreigners that India’s time in the sun is finally here.
This is no mean achievement, especially given the withering information warfare waged by the Deepstate. India’s GDP grew in FY 2022-23 at 7.2%, pretty much the highest rate for any large economy, exceeding estimates even by the RBI. An optimistic report from Morgan Stanley, "How India Has Transformed in Less than a Decade" cites several reasons for such optimism: government reforms, demography, technology, strong economic fundamentals.
“India is broken”, it ain’t. And let’s not go with services alone, Raghuram Rajan!
And then the babus go and screw up on these relatively minor things, making everybody look bad!
This is like I have always said, Indians thrive on complexity. We can do the Kumbh Mela in fine style (kudos to the much-maligned babus), but we can’t queue up for an elevator to save our lives. Or desist from driving like maniacs, honking like mad and darting all over the place. Too simple, I guess.
There are also habitual naysayers (some surely beholden to the Nehruvian Stalinist ecosystem or on the Deepstate/Soros payroll) who simply cannot believe that things are finally beginning to look up in and for India. There are those who are perennially on pet hobby-horses (one who gets all his wisdom from taxi-drivers, and another who thinks low-quality service jobs that add no lasting value are manna from heaven). Others are periodically astroturfed like mushrooms after rains, to mix American and Malayalam metaphors recklessly.
What they fail to see (intentionally) is that the glass is half-full. Yes, there are major problems: India’s education system is going from bad to worse; corruption is still a menace; the public sector continues to be an albatross around India’s neck; the endless election cycle means that it is hard to think long-term (both for babus and for politicians); populist giveaways and special interest lobbies bankrupt the exchequer; the judicial system is in bad shape; and so on.
On the other hand, there is proof of progress. Undeniable proof. Once the dirigiste state was partly dismantled under duress by Narasimha Rao, things improved notably, as the animal spirits of Indian entrepreneurs and traders apparently had a field day. Under Narendra Modi India’s steady recent growth has been in nice contrast with tepid growth elsewhere.
But the more intriguing tale is about poverty reduction on the one hand, and of the provision of services on the other. If the UN is to be believed, India has lifted 415 million people from poverty in 15 years. Furthermore, various infrastructure projects providing electricity, drinking water, roads and railways to even remote parts of the hinterland are quite likely increasing the quality of life as well as the per capita income.
The other big deals, of course, are Demonetization and GST. Despite massive negative propaganda, I think the impartial observer today would be hard pressed to see these as net negatives. The giant strides made towards digitization, just by themselves, would justify the relatively minor inconvenience people went through at the time.
UPI has made inroads into the remotest interior villages (Ecowrap from the SBI says that 60% of transactions by volume and value are now coming from rural and semi-urban areas). The same report says the value of UPI payments has gone up from Rs. 6947 crore in FY17 to Rs. 139,00,000 crore in FY23, a huge growth of 2004x. The use of the smartphone as a Point of Sale system has been a nice adaptation of technology, supported by Jio and inexpensive data.
There is a video clip of P. Chidambaram, the former Finance Minister of India, mocking digital transactions. In the video, Chidambaram is speaking at an event and he says, "How can you expect a poor lady in a village to use digital transactions when there is no electricity and no POS devices?"
Pretty bad look from the supercilious Chidambaram. It is the same attitude displayed by nay-sayers from Lutyens and Khan Market: they do not believe the average Indian can or will progress. Only the mai-baap sarkar of the Nehru Dynasty can save them, they claim. On the contrary, the Nehruvian Penalty has kept 500 million Indians poor, as I wrote on Rediff.com in 2004. The reality is that under the Nehruvian Stalinists, India kept falling behind the rest of the world. After 1991, India is slowly and painfully clawing its way back up the ranks of global wealth.
The GST, despite many flaws, has also been a success in creating a single national marketplace, and in reducing logistics bottlenecks (remember those mile-long queues of trucks idling at state boundary checkpoints, and surely the enormous amounts changing hands?). As India ramps up manufacturing, the improvement in transportation efficiency will pay for itself.
None of this happened just like that, it was willed into existence, says TheEmissary in a positive post https://theemissary.co/modinomics-why-india-is-rising/ and this is true, somebody imagined it, and somebody else, yes, the very same babus, put things into motion.
Compared to all these pluses, surely the mandarins are entitled to screw up a little bit now and then. But the point is the mindset behind the TCS, and the poor communication strategy behind the Rs 2000 note withdrawal.
At a time when India is attempting to offer the rupee as a global currency, and trying to make India a more attractive investment location, the TCS (Tax Collected at Source) surely feels like a retrograde step dating back to the days of worrying about foreign exchange reserves (unnecessarily, as India’s current kitty is around $572 billion, which is close to an all-time high).
The signal it sends out is that officious babus will make life difficult for average users in the pursuit of either minor increases in tax collections or an illusory improvement in forex reserves.
Far more useful would be a deep analysis of what is causing the trade deficit with China to balloon (it is now bigger than India’s entire defense budget), which sectors or products will have the greatest bang for the buck (eg. pharma APKs), and solid Production Linked Incentives to increase Indian production of the same.
The withdrawal of the Rs. 2000 notes is probably a good idea, because by now the criminal ecosystem has figured out how to counterfeit them efficiently. As in years past, the ‘second-best’ notes are likely being produced in Pakistan and shipped through the Middle East to India. So there’s nothing wrong in removing them from circulation.
Two caveats, though. It would have been a lot better to withdraw them before the BJP’s debacle in Karnataka. It’s sort of locking the barn door after the horse has bolted. As in years past, the vast bulk of corruption money intended for elections is quite likely stored in these larger notes, and removing them from circulation is a good idea. Well, fine, this will have an impact on the 2024 elections, I imagine.
The second is the total cockup in the communication of the withdrawal. The first announcement said the notes could be deposited before a certain date, but that they would continue to be legal tender (which seems counter-intuitive). If you deposited more than Rs. 20,000 a day, though, the idea seemed to be that you would have to show some id, PAN/Aadhar. That would help identify anybody who had been hoarding large quantities of cash (usually for dubious purposes).
But then the second announcement, from SBI, said that there would be no need for any paperwork. Meanwhile people were using 2000-rupee notes to buy luxury items, especially gold.
So exactly what is going on? What is the point in this not-demonetization? Did the babus get cold feet and do U-turns?
The angel tax on startups is itself a dubious idea, especially when India is attempting to increase the viability of its homegrown early-stage companies. The regulatory atmosphere and the relative paucity of local venture funding is anyway encouraging startups to register themselves abroad, say in Singapore or Dubai or Silicon Valley. By adding a tax you’re making Indian startups less appealing to investors.
Furthermore, by picking and choosing investment from certain countries to be exempt from the tax seems either capricious or over-reach/meddling. It simply isn’t true that these Anglo and Nordic countries are all pure as the driven snow, as we have seen on numerous occasions.
The bottom line, though, is that despite periodic missteps, India’s finance folks and the central bank have done a stellar job, and it shows: India’s banks are currently among the most profitable in the world, with no worrying bank failures (unlike, say, in the US and Europe); interest rates and inflation are modest (again, unlike the US and EU). So two cheers for the babus!
1538 words, May 27, 2023, updated 1626 words, June 1, 2023
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