Have To Live With It: But Here's The Silver Lining

Have To Live With It: But Here’s The Silver Lining

Normality can be very sweet, especially when smatterings of it returns after more than sixty days. No, The Wuhan Virus is not going away. It will infect and kill people for at least a year or two going forward.

Lockdowns and quarantines will continue, but in stubborn retreat, issuing dire threats, as it is pushed back to ever narrower domains. The method, like the affixing of medieval leeches, is much less effective than the proverbial silver bullet. It slows the spread, yes. But the cost-benefit is haywire, and so, the world has resolved to live with the virus.

Will it postpone the US presidential elections, just as it did the Tokyo Olympics? By months, a whole year? Probably.

This is President Donald Trump’s opportunity to not only turn the tables on China, but decisively win another term in office. Will it be a full four year term, or will he have to minus the months of postponement? Could the Democrats, if they win, take a softer line with China?This is a most unusual year. We will just have to wait and see.  

Various medicines existing and repurposed, have been pressed into service. They try but do not cover the spectrum of the disease. Many infected have co-morbidities, complicated by management protocols of their own.

Immunity building is probably the best defence.  And being young,  or at least reasonably fit.   The protocols: hand washing, sanitiser usage, masks, social distancing, avoiding crowds. These are sometimes difficult to implement amongst rebellious populations. Highly populated regions like ours are doubly challenged. We are also served by inadequate facilities- transport, hospital beds, border crossings, liquor, no money.

Vaccines are still under development or in human trials, with little chance of any hitting the market much before the last quarter of the year.

The virus does kill exposed people of all ages and not just the elderly or the already sick. But not very many. The death rate has stayed between 3-5% globally. Even numbers in need of critical care have not exceeded 5% .

These are infinitely better statistics than past pandemics like cholera and the plague. Or even the Spanish Flu of a 100 years ago. And the recovery rates are improving steadily. Unfortunately, recovery rates are not man bites dog  news. In India it has inched up to 41% and rising.

But the Wuhan Virus has been the banana peel of stepped on banana peels for its originator. From an ascendancy that seemed unstoppable, even inevitable. Particularly, given the extraordinary manufacturing and infrastructure building successes of the Red Chinese. To a downfall, that is like being thrown off from the highest point of the Three Gorges Dam.

China is definitely on the back foot, wolf warring notwithstanding. This has been so sudden and dramatic that it is hard for the Communist Party and its President Xi Jinping to swallow.

It has made it not only belligerent, but also a little irrational. China is now claiming entire countries in addition to mere portions of other sovereign nations including India. This, in addition to its relatively long standing programme to gird the world with its roads and train lines, dominate every ocean with its blue water navy. It has built artificial islands to extract tolls of passage on international sea lanes. It flies aircraft over the South China Sea and uses navy ships and armed fishing boats to patrol it.

It is presently bullying Australia, Leaning on Nepal, pressuring Bangladesh, making Sri Lanka sit on the fence, insulting Africans, Arabs, South East Asians and Europeans who don’t toe its line of innocence on the virus.

And most absurdly, it frequently threatens the United States with war, monetary withdrawal, and trade sanctions.

It is launched on a disastrous course to steam-roller all democracy and dissent in Hong Kong. It is sailing aircraft carriers in the narrow sea lanes near Taiwan to make its intent clear.

But two things have changed overnight for Xi Jinping’s Red China. One: people who have shied away from potential conflict in the past are no longer backing down. Two: everyone has stopped indulging China despite its money, muscle and importance in the global supply chain.

China is rapidly, like a house on fire, losing business, manufacturing contracts,  commercial and diplomatic influence.

Red China was sworn to uphold the autonomy of Hong Kong for 50 years from just before the millennium. But it does not care for solemn treaties with Britain. Tibet, which it overran under Mao, while the international community looked away, has surfaced again in the news. America now wants to see it independent.

And Taiwan, the Republic of China, is in contention once again to be regarded as the true owner of a unified democratic China. Will the Communist Party of Red China be  ousted in its turn?

Certainly, the newly elected second term government in Taipei is not interested in any form of rapprochement. It wants no part of Beijing’s one country two systems offer. It is on the side of an autonomous Hong Kong. Britain too has opened a path to citizenship for 300,000 of its people.

All this has happened in six months.  These changes have come at the cost of thousands of lives sickened or lost.  The global economy is in tatters.

The silver lining is in the new world order that is emerging. China is no longer a contender to take over the world. It will suffer horrendous economic degradation and internal insurrection. If it decides to use its military, the process will, if anything be accelerated.  

So, true to this new template, China will probably back off from its aggressive intrusion at several points into Indian Ladakh. It is stymied by a corresponding Indian build up and its strategic advantages. Quite apart from infantry, artillery and armoured divisions, Indian fighter planes are close by and can deploy with ordnance from multiple airfields. Chinese airports in Tibet are far apart, vulnerable, their fighters visible to our satellites, out in the open.  Most of the Chinese planes anyway are on the other side of the country, thousands of kilometres away, protecting Beijing.

China is rightly concerned that India may, in future cut off its access to Tibet. India is resolutely building substantial border infrastructure, roads, all weather tunnels, railways, to mirror Chinese activity over years of building such facilities in Tibet. And it has flatly refused to stop doing so. India is also building roads, airstrips, bridges, other infrastructure all along the long LaC with China.

There is a profound shift in India’s military perceptions and foreign policy vis a vis China, provoked by decades of bullying and use of Pakistan as proxy. Many treaties and written understandings on the status of the LaC have been flouted.  The McMahon Line is not accepted.  Older British treaties are not honoured either.

But now, as Sikkim, Doklam and now Ladakh demonstrate, India will not be pushed. It has closed the military gap  disparity with hardware, software, infrastructure and the creation of regiments trained and equipped to operate at high altitudes.

The current Chinese apprehension over Ladakh, recently converted into a Union Territory by India, is not unfounded. It is India’s stated objective in parliament to reclaim the parts of Akshai Chin that belong to it.

China’s vassal states, North Korea and most notably the bankrupt state of Pakistan cannot survive without Chinese patronage. Pakistan doubly so, because of  American reluctance to fund it. The much impoverished finances of its erstwhile supporters from West Asia are another problem.

A resolution against China’s crack down in Hong Kong has already been initiated by the United States in the UNSC. This will result in crippling economic sanctions. Hong Kong will not remain a global financial capital under Red Chinese domination.

These changes are all to the advantage of India. It will suffer much less from terrorism starved of funding. It will soon be in a position to reclaim PoK and Gilgit Baltistan, most likely via another UNSC resolution.  

Armed with the Security Council’s reiteration of India’s legitimate claim over PoK and Gilgit-Baltistan, India will move to take possession. This will entail a minimum of bloodshed and military conflict, as a consequence. The Shia people of the region, long suppressed by Sunni Pakistanis, will welcome the development. It will give a fillip to independence movements in Balochistan, Pakhtoonistan and Sindh.

The reclaiming of PoK and Gilgit Baltistan will dramatically change the calculations of both China and Pakistan with regard to the $60 billion CPEC. And China’s access to Gwadar Port via Pakistan and Balochistan.

The CPEC can only survive with the cooperation of both India and Balochistan in future. When China falls, Pakistan, as we know it today, must also fall. It will make for a more peaceful South Asia.

(1,449 words)

For: Sirfnews

May 29^th, 2020

Gautam Mukherjee

  

Dr. Sun Yat Sen Will Ride Again

Dr. Sun Yat Sen Will Ride Again

Dr. Sun Yat Sen, physician, philosopher, and the first president of the new Nationalist Republic of China, died, of natural causes, in 1925, at a relatively young 53 years of age. But, this was not before mentoring and driving a revolution that gave birth to a modern independent China.

Starting in 1911, Sun Yat Sen succeeded in melding the warlords that then roamed across China, into a republic. At the time, the country was nominally under a non-functioning Qing Dynasty.

Political power was devolved into the hands of a main political party, broadly socialist in outlook, the Kuomintang (KMT). Sun Yat Sen became its first president.  

But soon enough, the anti-monarchical Sun Yat Sen gave up his position of administrative power, to preside over the political party apparatus instead.

The KMT, established on the mainland in 1911, also ruled unbroken in Taiwan till 2000. Taiwan now has the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) at the helm. The country was under martial law for a long time, from 1948 to 1987. 

Today  Taiwan is in a process of democratic political reform to become more responsive to the wishes of its people, even as some elements do favour a reunification with Communist China. But the bulk of the people regard   them as infiltrators from the mainland, not to be trusted.

Sun Yat Sen himself, as a world figure, is today relegated to the shadows of history. He was, in the end, the founder-mentor of the losing side in a momentous civil war. His successor General Chiang Kai Shek, who died only in 1975, was driven out of the mainland along with the Nationalists, by Mao Ze Dong and his Communists, in1949.

The Mao era saw many excesses and miscalculations that resulted in the death of more than 30 million Chinese, but the Chairman held on doggedly to power till his death. After him, the Deng Xiaoping era was hugely successful economically for China till he, in turn retired in 1992. And then came the turn of new strong men who pushed ahead with the economic miracle but with increasingly jingoistic and militarist overtones. It is this groundswell that raised Xi Jinping via the People’s  Liberation Army (PLA).

But now, the time may be coming when Sun Yat Sen and Chiang Kai Shek’s nationalist successors can return the favour to mainland China.  It is  already challenged internally in some of its provinces. Hong Kong and Tibet are not happy at all. Neither is Xinkiang. All this despite use of an iron fist to curb dissent. Can China become a democracy once again nudged in that direction by America and others?  We will only know once all the chips have fallen in the ongoing drama.

There is, first going to be a strenuous competition for world domination. But this struggle is sure to be lost by a Communist China that had hoped to win by incremental steps, without having to fight economically or militarily. But this over clever thinking of President Xi Jinping is now being openly challenged by many countries led by America.

Red China is globally out of favour after the havoc wreaked by the bio-warfare unleashed using  the Wuhan Virus and its ham-fisted attempts at cover-up, threats, and inducements.

The one man virtual dictatorship of President Xi Jinping, combined with his bizarre, anachronistic and imperial megalomania, has put a question mark over the survival of Red Chinese Communism itself. The world is coalescing to curb its excesses, and a brutal, multi-nation economic blockade of China is on the cards.

Chiang Kai Shek and his Nationalists were driven out of mainland China to the nearby island of Formosa, so named by the Portuguese. It is now known by its older Chinese name of Taiwan.  The Nationalists, impressively enough, have never given up the dream of reclaiming the mainland one day.

The Nationalists, who style themselves The Republic of China (ROC), did, in the beginning, run the whole of China for 38 years.  They were driven out to the nearby large island, just 100 miles off the mainland.  Taiwan is 240 miles long and 60 to 90 miles wide. But this 13, 976 sq. miles has proved enough to become a prosperous country with $1.3 trillion GDP, and a per capita income of over $55,000.

This despite being converted, 1971 onwards, into a de jure state of 23.7 million people. Still, most countries maintain representative offices at Taipei, its capital, which act as de jure embassies. Taiwan never stopped being recognised officially by a handful of countries. It interacts with most leading world bodies but under a pseudonym. Or as a guest/observer. Or in some other unofficial capacity.

But despite the best efforts of Red China to either subsume or destroy it, Taiwan has secured its independent place in the world.

The People’s Republic Of China (PRC) or Red China lays claim to it under its “One China” credo. America aided and abetted this assertion. First, the ROC lost its UN seat to the PRC in 1971. That was when Red China and America entered into an entente cordiale during the Nixon administration. This not only raised Red China gradually to become the manufacturer to the world, but also the No.2 economic power after America itself.

China now plans to topple America from its pinnacle. This quest was going well according to some analysts. But only till its infliction of the Wuhan Virus on the world changed everything.

Meanwhile, Taiwan, after losing its UN seat to Red China saw the US sever diplomatic relations too in 1978. Then the US let its defence treaty to protect the ROC lapse in 1980 as well.

But, all this is about to change in 2020. The US has announced it will reassess the status of not just Taiwan but a restive Hong Kong as well. This could well be followed by Tibet where the US has already questioned China’s handling of the Panchen Lama. Then will come the  artificial islands and military bases on the South China Sea. The claims of territory in Bhutan, the various territorial claims and line of actual control (LAC) disputes with India.

All this, in the context of   acute sanctions placed on trade with China, capital flight, seizure of Chinese assets abroad, revocation of one sided treaties and diplomatic loss of face everywhere.

Meanwhile, the ROC keeps itself in a state of Israel-like military readiness for the ever present existentialist threat. The size of its lean military tops half a million soldiers. It keeps most of its military machine underground, in reinforced facilities. Importantly, it is also a covert nuclear power, a status wheedled out of the US, a parting gift, to maintain the balance.

Today, as the sun on the ROC’s flag is shining bright once again, that balance will help Taiwan eventually resurrect mainland China from the tyranny of a Communist dictatorship. China helped America destroy the USSR via the Nixon-Kissinger- Mao alliance. Today, as the last bastion of totalitarian Communism, China too will be destroyed by America.

Dr. Sun-Yat-Sen is secretly regarded by many Chinese as the true father of modern China. He was certainly an astute thinker. He famously let it be known that only 5% of the people are capable of “Pre-seeing”, or visionary thinking. Another 10% could promptly understand once they were told, the “Post-seeing”. But the bulk of people, 85% of any populace, is “Unseeing”. They are incapable of understanding theoretical postulates. They must be instructed.

Today, the world is ready to instruct and command a regime change in China. The wheels may grind slowly but they are sure to grind fine. The direction is set. It is now only a matter of time.

For: WIONNEWS

 (1,279 words)

May 18^th, 2020

Gautam Mukherjee

Pamphlet For A Geo-Political Make-Over

Pamphlet For A Geo-Political Make-Over

Pamphlets were made famous by Giuseppe Garibaldi (of the 19^th century Risorgimento), the mastermind that unified Italy into a republic. This pamphlet however outlines the coming decline and fall of the might-have-been Chinese domination as the world’s No.1 power.

The plan, authored by President-for-life Xi Jinping was to get this done by the third decade of the 21^st Century. Effectively, he meant to depose America as the leading power on the globe, and take over all the spoils of pre-eminence that go with it. But what looked like legitimate competition, albeit with sharp corners, has tipped over into bio-warfare. And this will not be tolerated.

In the present, Italy is called China’s uncomplaining Trojan Horse into the EU. But today the 28 member EU is a shaky economic entity, devolving on just France and Germany as the biggest economies within it, to keep going.

This has been putting cracks into China’s plans to attack the EU economy as  a  whole, from the inside, for a creeping takeover. It has chipped away at parts of it, even succeeded to a degree, but now that a halt has been called, it finds itself a long way yet, from home.  And the latest moves to buy beaten down stocks and assets during the pandemic have revealed its predatory hand and shown it up in a bad light. Italy and Spain in southern Europe with considerable trade relations with China have been key victims of the peculiar Aids –like pneumonia inducing Covid-19 virus. Complicit as these two countries are, they refuse to point the finger at China still.

But it is a virus that may have come to stay, with no known cure, just like Aids, that the lab-grown Covid-19 is based on.

Covid-19, an invisible contagion from a man-made virus, originated and spread from a single nation to start with. And it was accompanied by a totalitarian state led cover-up, in tandem with the world’s foremost health body. A part of the largely broken United Nations.  One headed currently by a non-medical doctor. A WHO director general, hopelessly beholden to China for his appointment and continuance.

An organisation cut off from the funding of its biggest erstwhile donor, the United States. One that President Trump calls a PR agency for China. An organisation, peopled by quite a few medical doctors. But reduced, by the fraudulent lead of its director general, to selling misinformation. 

Snake Oil, good for every ailment, never seems to lose its hold on the imagination. Ask China’s well appointed PR machine, which is faltering nevertheless under the burden of truth.

The offending totalitarian state has mounted a multi-million dollar PR campaign to suggest Covid-19 originated in Maryland in the US, and not China. It has chosen to stoutly play victim. Dark Ops. it suggests, are the native province of the United States. China cannot be made its scapegoat it says.  China is being maligned. This is racism. China is a responsible global citizen. China will not sit on its hands while it is being vilified unfairly. It will retaliate. It will ban imports from offending countries.  It will impose sanctions and   tariffs of its own.It might use force.

The narrative is relentless. It continues with a good-cop-bad-cop routine. China has resolutely improved quality and moved up the value chain. It is reliable and trustworthy. It is a major global investor and force for stability. It has lent the United States trillions and accounts for over 5 million jobs in the country. It has many friends, academics, lobbyists and think-tank mavens rooting for it.  President Trump is misguided and must be stopped.

China’s diplomats are also using a muscular language. The strategy is to be aggressive and unapologetic. It has moved rapidly towards a new normal with masks and social distancing and limited crowds in China, even opening Disney World at Shanghai, as a second wave of infections has hit it. Of course, there is no virus spread to Shanghai and Beijing, even as it travelled 15,000 miles to America.

The PR firms working for China, incidentally, are American joint ventures with the dragon.

China now attempts to hide in the crowd of fellow victims around the globe. It points out tens of thousands of Red Chinese, killed in droves, though they were sacrificial lambs of the regime in power.

China is now, six months plus into the pandemic, proactive in reporting fresh outbreaks realising it had made a big mistake by hiding facts the first time around. It has declared news of Shulin, near the Russian border as a new hotspot. It has messaged it will test all 18 million Chinese in Wuhan to protect the entire city population against a new wave. This is its transparency strategy now.

WHO too, in tandem,  in trying to regain some vestige of credibility afresh, has warned of second and more waves of contagion and the  possibility of a cure never being found. Is this considered information or an over correction of its earlier messaging? Meanwhile, there are hectic efforts on around the globe to repurpose existing drugs and  develop a preventive vaccine.

This depiction of innocent Red Chinese sickened and dying of Covid-19 is probably true. They are cannon fodder, after all, small potatoes in an overall population of 1.4 billion.

But, it is patently false that the diabolical Chinese State led by President Xi Jinping has not deliberately unleashed the first global bio-warfare pandemic.

It may not have leaked the virus deliberately, at least the world does not know that for sure, but it definitely decided to take advantage of the opportunity it provided as its subsequent actions make clear. Crisis in Chinese is written as one part danger and one part opportunity.

The intelligence authorities in America, Germany, France, have come to this conclusion from their independent investigations, and have said so. One or two legal suits asking for trillions in reparation have already been instituted. Leading governments of Western Europe, Australia, Japan, and America have made it clear they will fix accountability for this pandemic.There will be, they promise, punishment for this. Meanwhile, China has stopped importing Australian beef in retaliation for calls for an international investigation at Wuhan.

It is true we live in a time when Islamic and other terrorists regularly kill innocents. But to use germ warfare or a virus in state policy is a new level of monstrosity.

Meanwhile, the ravages of the virus defy solution. There are no specific drugs for its treatment. Medicines previously applied to alleviate symptoms of the Aids Virus have  been pressed into service. Others used for Malaria, Leprosy are being used too. Anti-virals, one in particular, are being tried. Plasma treatments, using material from recovered Covid-19 patients, thought to be rich in anti-bodies, have been used with inconclusive results.

Milder symptoms are being treated with Paracetamol. Critically ill patients, mercifully a small number of the total, and often with existing co-morbidities, with Respirators, Ventilators, and Oxygen in a last ditch attempt to save their lives. But Covid Warriors  such as policemen, medical staff and journalists have sickened, and some have died, because of prolonged exposure  to the virus too.

Lock-downs, employed with different levels of stringency all over the world have failed to end the sickness. They have even failed to control its growth. Testing, quarantining, early hospitalisation – none of it has proved completely effective.

There is some doubt now on whether Covid-19, being a lab-grown deadly virus and not a hop, skip, and jump from a Bat, can be prevented at all by using any single vaccine.

Covid-19 is seen to mutate regularly in different geographies. Expert thinking around the world is now saying it may be necessary to live alongside the virus, which may perhaps weaken and dissipate on its own like other corona viruses before it.

People will have to take their own precautions with medicines and tonics that strengthen immunity as moth-balled economies stir back into life. They will have to avoid crowds of strangers as much as is practicable. Going out will mean sunglasses, gloves, masks and the new norms of social distancing, sanitising and hand washing. Hot weather may help. Public transport, trains, planes, metros, buses, will allow fewer people on board.

Covid-19 crossed over the walls of the Wuhan Virology Research Centre, intriguingly part financed by the US, and proceeded to creep along the streets of Wuhan City on silent slippered feet.

It infected people it met at random. Were there also infected laboratory technicians who unknowingly spread the virus during its fortnight of gestation? Like Aids too, some people are carriers, but show no symptoms themselves. When did this begin? Was it in November 2019?

Covid-19 racked up early Chinese victims in Wuhan in their thousands even before  the virus had been given a name. Nobody from the outside world knew about it for months. Early whistleblowers from Wuhan including treating doctors were quickly silenced. Others disappeared or died.

The Chinese leadership knew, and used WHO to misguide the world. Director General Tedros said it was not contagious to humans at first, and issued no travel advisories against it. There was no intruder alert. No alarms were allowed to go off.

By the time it did, after a trade treaty with the US was signed towards the end of January 2020, the virus had already spread far and wide.

The virus, in its virulence and mutations, went on to become a global pandemic in weeks. It bears some comparison with WWI when Mustard Gas was used by the Germans during the interminable trench warfare.

But then use of Mustard Gas was Chemical Warfare – a very different thing.  One well known to genocide. Communities that were sought to be eliminated. Jews in the Holocaust. Kurds in their as yet unrealised struggle for an independent Kurdistan, carved out of Iraq. Armenians, who now buy Indian radar, when largely Christian Armenia was part of Muslim Turkey.

World Wars change the prevailing order. WWI killed off the land owning aristocracy on both sides because they liked to lead from the front.  In its wake that Great War enabled the entry of women into the workforce and later, with Communist and Socialist overtones, the rise of the other classes, colours, merchants, tradesmen, the less educated and connected.

WWII, in turn, broke the back of European colonialism.  It established America as the dominant world power in the West. It was rivalled by the USSR and its Iron Curtain satellites.  This stand-off and the subsequent Cold War took the sheen off the Communist regimes. China and the USSR, their proxies and satellites around the world were regarded as the other by Western eyes.

Many of the newly liberated colonies however were unabashedly Socialist, and leaned towards Moscow.

Covid-19 was quickly named so by the WHO, instead of the Chinese Virus or the Wuhan Virus,  as the Spanish Flu of 1918 was.

The ravages of Covid-19 have quickly driven the world into recession, shrinkage, and mass unemployment, inflation.  It will not be possible to bounce back quickly. The scourge has crashed stock markets, bankrupted companies, engineered loan defaults, destroyed airlines, emptied beaches, bars, hotels, cinemas, concerts, cruise ships, malls.

In the US, the great wound of 9/11 and its over 3,000 dead, has receded in the rear view mirror. This even as, once again, crowded rebellious, leftist, New York became the chosen epicentre of Covid 19.

Across the Atlantic, death defying Italy and Spain, and a bumbling, initially gung-ho Britain were hit hard too.

Does this pandemic qualify as a different kind of  WWIII? Or will there have to be a shooting war to follow as China is brought to book?

Over 180 countries are cowering under its sway. Covid-19 has disturbing long term effects for survivors as well. Nevertheless, have leaders and governments jumped on this pandemic bandwagon as a means to dwarf other inconvenient shortcoming in performance and governance?

What of the culprit that set the whole wagon train in motion? What should the world do with Red China, the manufacturer to the world set up by Richard Nixon’s America?

The arrangement worked well for decades and helped to  breach the Iron Curtain and finally destroy the USSR as well.

By outsourcing all routine manufacturing at relatively low cost to China, America lost out on its own skills to manufacture almost everything except high technology items such as aeroplanes and armaments. And China became the second richest country in the world.

The friction between the two powers has been simmering for the decades after the Deng Xiaoping era ended in 1992.

The new Chinese leadership became arrogant as America found it increasingly difficult to fund its role of globocop all by itself. Even its NATO allies took financial advantage of it.

But under President Trump, the policy of ‘America First” has been at its sharpest. The US  bluntly declared its unwillingness to put up with a trade balance tilted so sharply in China’s favour, while chiding its European allies to the same end as well. Trump threatened China at bilateral summits, and then imposed tariffs. China retaliated, but not with much confidence in its ability to see it through. It needed its US trade more than America needed Chinese goods. Yet, it was a cat and mouse game that China hoped to win. A key desire on its part was to get rid of an obdurate Trump as US president at the end of his first term.

That time has nearly come, with the elections due in November 2020, even if it postponed a few months under the circumstances. But it appears China decided to jump the gun. By using the Covid-19  virus  it may have lost control of the narrative.. What will actually happen remains to be seen, because Trump has a relatively weak opponent in Joe Biden at the head of the Democratic Party.

Meanwhile, Trump has already taken the battle into the Chinese lines, blaming it squarely for suppressing information on the Covid-19 outbreak in Wuhan. He is determined to seek both justice and reparations. Other European allies are beginning to line up behind him.

So, culpability and consequences may become the biggest question of all going forward.

Who could have imagined that the next great war would be fought using a laboratory made Aids Virus, laced with a natural Bat Virus plus a lab altered kink to help it infect humans?  

This virus is a deadly and subtle thing. If it doesn’t kill you in the first flush, it kills you slowly. Your immune system and vital organs are ravaged in the primary survival, even if you’re cured. It can and does recur with once infected and cured people testing positive again. Those who wobble away, have 10 years cut off their life span. Because of this knock to human vitality, the US Armed Forces have decided to not recruit anybody who has had Covid-19.

The astrologers say the stars were no different during the world wars and the Spanish Flu pandemic of a hundred years ago. The economists and strategists say, in that case, it is clear, when this is over, a new world order is sure to follow.

Nobel laureate ( 2008), French virologist Luc Montaigner, who isolated the Aids Virus in 1983, says Covid-19 used it as a base, and it is definitely laboratory grown. It has had elements of the bat Corona virus added to it with a modification to enable it to infect humans. There are in fact over 600 bats kept in the Wuhan laboratory for research.

The situation has been aggravated by the fact that China has sold millions of dollars worth of test-kits that don’t work, substandard masks, respirators, ventilators and protective body suits.

India now has developed its own PPE suits, N95 masks, respirators and ventilators. Its working on its vaccine independently in several teams, and has manufactured 40 million doses of the Oxford developed vaccine, in anticipation that the human trials going on there will prove successful soon. India could, of course, start another controlled test group here.

The death count in India is relatively lower and the various drugs it is using to treat the infected are also in great demand around the world. Many Indians are apparently immune to the ravages of the virus even when they test positive, and others develop mild symptoms that do not need hospitalisation.

There is much scepticism about China’s claims that it has already developed a viable vaccine. Other countries are working on their own vaccines. But can there be one vaccine broad spectrum enough to tackle all strains of the virus?

Beijing has started border skirmishes with India at Sikkim and Ladakh as a prelude to India chairing the board of directors at WHO from next month. It refuses to let in any inspectors into Wuhan .It has issued angry denials and counter narratives to what it calls 24 preposterous allegations from Western governments.  It used thirty pages and 11,000 words to say it.

Thousands of Chinese from Wuhan flew in scores of planes all over the world during, before and after the Chinese New Year 2020.  Meanwhile the pandemic was in full swing in Wuhan. Accounts eventually emerged that the crematoria in Wuhan were operated night and day like the ovens of the holocaust. And that there were tens of thousands of urns sent in for the ashes.

The story of President-for-life of Red China, Xi Jinping’s over-reach started some time ago. The Belt and Road and Silk Route ambitions are a case in point. He has already accomplished much but it is likely to come to nought. Xi Jinping has neutralised all critics in the Chinese Communist Party’s top body and the People’s Liberation Army (PLA). He has bought land for agriculture, and mines that yielded rare earths in Africa. He has cornered the market for many of these minerals including the Lithium that goes into all the Lead-ion batteries. He has captured much of the world’s oil and gas via long term contracts. He has built, modernised or expanded ports at Hambantota in Sri Lanka, Gwadar in Balochistan, Piraeus in Greece, Male in the Maldives and elsewhere. He has lent vast sums of money to the United States and held the line on a very askew trade imbalance in China’’s favour. He had outsmarted several American presidents in series without conceding anything.

 Xi Jinping has built railways and roads in a dozen countries. He has, written unequal treaties with everyone involving the handover of key assets on long lease to China in the event they could not service their commercial loans from Chinese Banks.

Was Red China therefore preordained to this misstep sooner or later? That it has come will mean its downfall.

To want to deliberately ruin the economies of the world using a highly contagious virus, and then go in and mop up assets at rock bottom prices is rapacious.

But how did President Xi Jinping think he could get away with it?  Did he think he could divide and rule the world? Instead  he has made China a pariah in the international community. It may experience an increasingly stringent economic  boycott that will bring it to its knees.

This cannot happen overnight, because China is literally the manufacturing hub of the world, particularly America. The calculation has been that no American president will dare to economically sanction China at this point in time, or even seek reparations. This is because it is so dependent on China’s elaborate manufacturing infrastructure. And more so when its own economy is in recession. There is a  30% unemployment rate, and worldwide economic chaos.  This would get even worse if China is shunned. 

America’s  European allies are also weakened to the point of crisis. Everywhere there is concern and anxiety for both physical and economic survival.

However, other tyrants before Xi Jinping have thought his opponents would not have the spine to resist. But they did. Underneath all the present tribulations, there is a sure feeling that the world will revive. And a desire to punish the perpetrator of so much misery and mayhem.

In fact, most countries have begun to open up their lockdowns while bracing for a spike in infections or even a second wave to the pandemic. Several experts have said  outbreaks of the virus may keep cropping up from time to time.

But for China, this is the point of no return. It has gone too far. It is in for a long season of being blackballed and resisted.  As a first step its assets abroad will be seized as reparations.  There will be a mass exodus and relocation of companies using China as a manufacturing base. This in turn will vastly aggravate China’s economic woes as Chinese exports reduce as new sources are developed. There will be a closure of its construction and infrastructure building activities abroad using Chinese bank financing. Dams and river-blocking that affect flows to other countries will have to stop. Territorial concessions, including some involving  Pakistan’s   occupation of PoK and Gilgit-Baltistan, would have to be made. In multiple disputed areas.

 If this is resisted by China, it may discover the limits of its conventional military prowess, because no nation, not even its rogue satellites, can hope to survive a nuclear escalation.

As consequences grind on, and they will, the Chinese Politburo will replace Xi Jinping at the helm. It will have to overthrow him in a Stalinist style sweep of the president and his coterie to succeed but there will be little option.

But even after this, there will be further consequences. If a more get-along as opposed to predatory leader is installed in Xi Jinping’s place, there will still be a huge bill to pay.

Much of what will come will sound very much like a post world war treaty of surrender.

 It will mean a change of China’s aggressive trade tactics. An expanded UNSC will have to be agreed to, with India, Germany , Japan and Brazil added as permanent members and with majority veto powers. This has been a long standing wish of some of the five country UNSC, formed after WWII.

The world’s monetary system established at Bretton-Woods that more or less made the US dollar the currency of international trade may allow for some digital currency additions. But China will not be allowed to weaponise the Yuan as it apparently wants to, in order to undermine the basket of convertible currencies from the West including the US dollar.

No more will China alone, or along with Russia, much weakened after the fall in oil prices, be able to block the UNSC initiatives. China will not be able to block a new UNSC resolution indicting it for  this bio-warfare.

China will have to relinquish claims to Taiwan, and let it be recognised everywhere as an independent country with full rights to be admitted into the powerful fora of the international community.

China will have to provide substantial autonomy to Hong Kong in perpetuity, or even concede its independence outright. It will formally have to renounce all Chinese claims to the South China Sea along with all attempts at bullying those nations in its littoral.

China will have to restore the autonomy of Tibet at a minimum but more likely its independence.

Chinese joint ventures abroad as well as its balance of trade will stand abrogated and much changed.

China will have to do these things and yet face further balkanisation. This, not so much because of direct foreign diplomatic or military action, but because of massive popular unrest in many of its provinces. This, brought on by economic hardship and a political system that denies the population a political voice.

Other things are more nebulous. China will have to undertake to not spy, subvert, hack into the secrets of other nations or face further economic consequences. China will be warned off menacing its neighbours or attempting to dominate the Indian Ocean. China will have to desist from threatening any country that does not do its bidding.

China’s influence in the world will drastically reduce.

For: Sirfnews

(3,998 words)

May 14^th, 2020

Gautam Mukherjee

Abolish Capital Gains Tax On Residential Real Estate

Abolish Capital Gains Tax On Residential Real Estate

A recent report states that residential real estate prices have dropped 2%-9% across India because of the prolonged lockdown.

Other articles from journalists who cover the space have speculated about an expected 20%-30% drop in residential real estate prices. All as a consequence of the economy in crisis.

However, inelastic urban and metro land prices and inflation alone would dictate against this. It is an oft ignored fact that real estate prices, all categories, at a minimum, tend to keep up with the most of inflation. A person is assured, even in a bad market in India, that his flat or house will appreciate 10% per annum pro rata over a period of ten years. How many can say that any more about highly volatile Indian equity in a ruined economy?   

This low pricing now for residential real estate is on top of price stagnation over the last few years due to apparently massive over-supply and the absence of speculators and investors.

Though it is remarked quite often that demonetisation and the advent of GST contributed quite a bit to the decline of enthusiasm for residential real estate. Nevertheless, Builders are said to have an estimated Rs. 3.7 trillion in unsold inventory, according to international real estate brokerage JLL.

The end-users too are either waiting for further drops in pricing from a beleaguered real estate industry, or a better atmosphere of economic certainty and the prospect of sustained job security and cash flows. This, of course, might be a year or two in the coming. Most companies, both in the organised and unorganised sector, will need this sort of time to recover to full strength.

While real estate is composed of residential dwellings, commercial office and retail space, hospitality in terms of hotels and resorts, and land; it is the residential segment that is stagnating the most.

With recent government initiatives such as REIT, a government stimulus of Rs. 25,000 crores for stalled residential projects, the ingress of private equity and venture funds from abroad investing, money has flowed in, but mostly into commercial and retail development.

Land is increasingly being organised on the basis of a collaboration between developers and land owners, given its very high cost. This works well for the economics of ventures that would otherwise flounder on this very first requirement.

Together, and not counting the government’s hyper infrastructure building and modernisation drive, this real estate sector has   projected some very encouraging numbers running into hundreds of billions of dollars in every reported instance.

For example, the real estate sector, housing, hospitality, offices including SEZs,retail, has the potential to reach a market size of US$1 trillion by 2030. This is up from a modest US $120 billion in 2017. It potentially can contribute, though statistics can be misleading in a deeply depressed economy, 13% to 17% of the economy.

The real estate sector can quickly ramp up, once again, and contribute the second largest number of jobs to the economy too.

When these are spread out around the country, not just in the six metro cities, but another 24 smaller ones, and some 200 sizeable towns, it makes for something of a panacea, particularly for the artisanal class and unskilled labour. Not to mention the professional classes and the large number of industries that supply to construction.

That farming absorbs the largest number of people in rural India is not surprising, given the mostly manual, over-manned rural landscape. But does it really pay? If it did, you wouldn’t have lakhs of migrant labourers. A large number of these migrant labourers work in real estate and in those companies that supply goods and services to real estate.

Given the very difficult current situation, the ruling NDA needs urgent remedy, shorn of some of its more squeamish feelings about the cash economy. It should think only of such measures that will yield quick results in the first instance. One of them is certainly to revive demand in the residential real estate sector.

A first task should be to absorb the unsold houses, and free the capital stuck. It belongs to hapless would be home owners who have paid instalments, the over-extended Builders, NBFCs, investors and Banks that have lent them the money.

For primary buyers, the stamp duty should be capped at a uniform 2% of the circle rate countrywide, making it easier and cheaper to take over and register properties. None of this should be much of a revenue loss for the government that has quietly added both GST and VAT to the purchase price in any case.

This has inflated purchase cost by 10% to 20% for the buyer, without recourse, and after he has booked the flat when these taxes were not applicable. His calculations on both price and delivery have gone badly awry. This has resulted in extended rent payments in many cases, and housing loan EMIs against a flat that should have been delivered in three years, but is stuck sometimes for 7 to 10 years instead.

An abolition of Capital Gains Tax altogether on residential real estate transactions for a period of ten years will galvanise the secondary market in residential houses. This will likely wipe out the unsold inventory, with investors and speculators flocking to the business opportunity. And it is these investors and speculators that can buy and sell large numbers of flats for the arbitrage, even in the near absence of end-users reluctant to make expensive commitments at this time. It is this speculation, philosophically repugnant as it may be to the current government, that has been the life blood of the real estate industry throughout the comparatively buoyant UPA years.  

People in general should be encouraged to purchase houses for  their own use of course. But having said that, there should be no  tax consequence as to number of flats purchased and sold as stock-in-trade apart from the normal corporate or individual direct taxes applicable. There is nothing wrong in the citizen regarding real estate as a solid business opportunity even if it does not want to live in the house or flat it is buying.

Residential and Office rentals as a category of income should also be rendered tax free for a period of ten years. This will encourage the animal spirits that have been dampened to the point of extinction at present.

The time has come to look upon the real estate sector, along with infrastructure, as an economic catalyst, massive job creator, growth multiplier. It can be a saviour in tough times.

For: SIRFNEWS

(1,087 words)

May 8^th, 2020

Gautam Mukherjee