He Says Come Over And Bring A Bag

He says come over and bring a bag. What, we have to move bodies? No he’s found a sideboard full of bottles of Chivas Regal. Whose? You know, the house he’s looking after, next to the park. Friend’s gone abroad. Rich fellow. His friend’s stash. He’s stealing the booze? Well, he’s called us and a few others. Wants us to take some away. We should go. And yes, there’s some kind of event in the park as well, a wedding or a musical performance or something. There’ll be a lot of people there. I think we ought to take a bottle or two from our side and offer it about. Its good to steal his friend’s booze but it looks better if we share some of ours. And so we went. We saw the sideboard open. No booze lying about. Maybe we were late. It didn’t seem right to ask. We walked into the park. Sure enough. Lots of people. I took out a bottle to share with folks on our table. Then the chap comes to ask us back to the house. We go but all the booze is gone. There’s nothing to put in the bag. Others at the park must have got wind of it. I went to the toilet. The sink was broken. Drunks. Went back to our table in the park. Our bottle was gone. This was not turning out right. Time to leave. Back to the car hoping I’d find it there. Good I didn’t bring the wife in the middle of all this greed. Got in and set off. Feeling stupid about it all. Couldn’t lay my hands on a single drink while the whole place was drunk. Never pursue this pie in the sky stuff again. A bottle down in the bargain. Chivas indeed. Not a fan.

 

November 28^th, 2021

Gautam Mukherjee

 

 Declining Fertility Will Be A Great Boon In The Long Run

 Being the most populous of countries is an economic no-no. The good news on population control has arrived at last, close to our 75^th year of Independence. The latest National Family Health Survey(NFHS), the 5^th in series, released by the Ministry of Health on 24^th November 2021, indicates Indians have stabilised their numbers on average, at just about replacement rate.

There is, in addition, a sharp bias in some states and UTs towards declining population. Overall, and in all regions, female births have increased holistically.

2.1 children per child bearing woman is globally considered to be the ‘no growth’ statistic. India overall now has 2.0. Some states have rates as low as 1.6.  The highest has a rate of 3, with several states returning a range between 2 and 3.

Fortunately for India, 65% of the population are younger than 35 and 50% are younger than 25 at present. This will change as the population ages rapidly post 2035. Then the edge to our often discussed ‘demographic dividend’  will reduce, but as the world changes rapidly through technological innovation, this will not matter.

We need to absorb that this is the era of mechanisation growing as fast as supercomputing. The earlier models based loosely on the Industrial Revolution of the 19^th century onwards are out of date. Today we are in the age of factories and trains that run themselves, with very small human staff requirements. Competitiveness and efficiency dictate this. This is the age of robotics, artificial intelligence, preventive medicines, cloning, surrogacy, gene splicing, drones, digital commerce, software-based controls. In short, the dominance of high technology and not population in everything. The labour-intensive models are going obsolete in most areas of endeavour.

In India, we already have a problem with rampant unemployment and under employment. And to an extent, jobless growth. Skilling and reskilling to take on new roles constantly will be imperative for both the young and not so young. 

This does not mean that present momentum from more fecund states with high growth rates of between 2 to 3 per child-bearing woman, won’t stop us overtaking China as the most populous country by 2031, a decade later than earlier expected.

It is further estimated we will reach figures of 1.50 billion by 2036, and 1.7 to 1.8 billion by 2050. The decline, per current projections can come only after that. However, the survey shows a holistic decline in the birth rate in all cases from the earlier survey of 2011. We need to accelerate this.

Part of this present reduction in population trends can be attributed to a 67% contraceptive usage, again sharply up from earlier figures of 54% in 2011. Greater health awareness in women, spacing of children, better nutrition,  medical care,  connectivity, aspiration towards education and upward mobility for progeny, have also changed things greatly.

Too many mouths to feed may not be India’s threat going forward. We have surplus production of foodgrains today. Storage, inventory management, distribution, will have to be improved. Currently, there is much waste, further vitiated by mandatory MSPs in many instances resulting in inappropriate water intensive crops being grown in unnecessary abundance, such as paddy and sugarcane. MSPs distort market economics, but few involved care about this.

India is a net exporter of foodgrain, but the quality is not very good. Water, including irrigated water, ground water, rainwater is under immense pressure. Ditto electricity, often unpaid for by farmers. This is not going to get better with more people around with urban and manufacturing hubs also demanding more and more.

India is now a leading producer of milk, cereal, pulses, vegetables, fruit, cotton, sugarcane, fish, poultry and livestock in the world. But there are  too many underemployed farmers. Land holdings are tiny. The recent NFHS survey 2021 expects 60% of the population to stay rural in 2036 even after the broadly declining trend in population. This is not a happy 21^st century statistic.

The US works its productive mechanised farms, albeit subsidised, with just 4% just of its population of around 334 million stabilised for decades now.

The population growth in India however has been stabilised at last without having to resort to draconian measures like China’s One Child Policy. But it needs a declining trend across the board of the minimum obtained so far, which is just 1.6.  

India’s population has more than trebled to 1.39 billion in the 75 years since Independence. This is already 17.7% of the world population. This percentage will grow unless our own slowdown in population is accelerated. 

The dream of a decent standard of living as obtained in the developed countries can only come with a sharp rise in per capita income. Life expectancy has soared. The death rate has declined. Millions have been lifted above the poverty line. All this is good.

Despite stellar GDP expectations of 9% year-on-year, the highest in the world for a major economy, making one child per second is a huge problem.

At present India has the 5th largest economy, at about $ 3 trillion, but even when it gets to 3rd, after the US and China, expected by 2030, there will be a strong divide between haves and have-nots. There will be more billionaires, millionaires, upper and middle class, but also more paupers. As things stand, unless the next survey shows a much rosier picture, a net reduction in population will occur only in the last decades of the 21^st century.

For countries in Europe with small 20^th century populations in the first place, and zero population growth for decades since, wolves of the forest have reclaimed deserted villages. Immigration from poor, often war-torn countries such as Syria are the norm. But this causes societal rifts, religious tension and culture shocks.

But this is certainly not going to be India’s problem.  But as population keeps growing, so will conflict between followers of different religions,  cultural practice and linguistic diversity. People will live cheek by jowl as the fastest population growth will be in urban India. Life will become far more competitive with resources always outstripping demand. So let us hope the good news on declining population is a case of well begun is half done.

 

(1,021 words)

November 26^th, 2021

For: Firstpost

Gautam Mukherjee

 

 

 

Cryptocurrency: Its Time Has Come

Cryptocurrency is the Guy Fawkes to sovereign legal tender. This 21^st century avatar is the disruptive spawn of the digital age, now using stage three of  internet efficiency and proliferation, dubbed Web3. It offers a global currency that goes by thousands of names. But none of them have underlying assets like national currencies. Neither is their value guaranteed. Its reckoning comes from an investment frenzy of speculation and the times it lands from cyberspace to transact with conventional currency.

This virtual Guy Fawkes used the pseudonym Satoshi Nakamoto for its alleged inventor. It does not want to blow up the King and the House of Lords. It simply wants to operate as it is, anonymously, without regulation, across the digital universe. A self-driving train without a central bank at its apex.

Ten odd years since Bitcoin, the best known of the cryptocurrencies started in 2009, Indians own 60% of the world’s cryptocurrencies via 15 million people, trading, investing, or creating blocks for the chain in a process named mining.

Large cryptocurrency exchanges such as WazirX, CoinDCX, Giottus, Zebpay and Bitbns here are partnered by Punjab National Bank, IDFC First Bank, Federal Bank, Deutsche Bank, Bank of India, Bank of Maharashtra, Indian Bank. This lot clocked trading volumes of $ 977.68 million on the spot market on the 24^th of November 2021.The biggest banks such as SBI, HDFC and ICICI  Bank have stayed away so far.

Foreign firms such as Tiger Global, Sequioa Capital, b Capital, Andreessen Horowitz, Paradigm, Ribbit Capital, pumped in $ 500 million  into India’s cryptocurrency and blockchain technology in 2021. This has taken the Indian valuation to $ 1.9 billion, up from $ 500 million six months ago.

It is not all speculation. Tata Steel has executed a Standard Chartered Bank/Contour blockchain-enabled, paperless export order, to a metals major in Bangladesh. This follows on from an HSBC platform enabled trade finance transaction with a UAE based company in April 2021. These fraud-proof, confidential, and safe blockchain transactions, could be completed in hours instead of days, bypassing a heap of paperwork. Blockchain technology offers a collective of users that perform their own gatekeeping and custodial functions.

But all is not well in paradise. Valuations of the some 6,000 odd cryptocurrencies in operation are volatile, and do not operate with safety nets of any kind. The big ones are Bitcoin, Ethereum, Tether, Solana, Cardano, Polkadot, Avalanche. A New York based website CoinDesk provides news on cryptocurrencies. Bitcoin valuation at its highest ever was $69,000 earlier this November. It was at $55, 460.96 on 24^th November 2021.

 There is an effort to market cryptocurrencies as a get-rich-quick scheme for gullible investors. This could come back to bite the government in the absence of regulation.

However, news of coming Indian government legislation in the winter session of parliament also panicked  up to a 20% decline in value.A similar knee-jerk reaction followed on from remarks made by the RBI governor in April 2021.

It is a computer-generated phenomenon, using a  book-building process it calls ‘mining’. It is a peer-to-peer payment system and operates internationally with no exchange rate arbitrage. Bitcoin is used to buy goods and services at networked online stores, turns into cash at designated Bitcoin ATMs, and can even transact at some brick-and-mortar establishments. Many people use it as an investment to speculate on its ups and downs. Bitcoin balances are kept in encrypted online ledgers. It descends from cyberspace to cash in its chips for hard currency, or in exchange for goods and services.

Truth be told, no government can actually stop it, given that they are all becoming more and more dependent on the digital universe. It has created its own crypto platform on a raft of computers. Like an amoeba, it can break away, multiply and reform in fresh clusters, if threatened. Countries worry about its run-away potential to be used for ‘illegal transactions’, even as they grapple with ways to put a saddle and bridle on it.  But a hamfisted approach could drive it out of reach into the encrypted Dark Web.

If you can’t beat it, you may have to join it. This seems to be what India proposes to do, with the issue of its own RBI issued cryptocurrency. Some are already naming it Bharatcoin. It will probably muck in on the ‘private sector’ Bitcoin and friends user platforms. This will give it a large slice of the cryptocurrency pie, infiltrate this anonymous universe to better understand how it works, and gain the opportunity to make further advances.

Attempting to invent its own international delivery system will kill it dead in the water, especially if other governments decide to also launch. Besides Niti Aayog is already proposing ‘full-stack digital banks’ to end physical branches run entirely on the Web3 internet. It cites the success of UPI with over Rs. 4 lakh crores in value of transactions, while Aadhar based authentications have reached 55 crores.

Prescient El Salvador, the first country to do so, has accepted Bitcoin, the first and most famous of the cryptocurrencies, as legal tender from June 2021. It works alongside normal money for purchases and payments. Cuba and Ukraine are also in the process.

The US, mainly with a view to harness it for taxation has classified it, not as currency but a ‘Money Services Business’ (MSB). It already operates legitimately in the US ‘Derivatives’ market. The American Internal Revenue Service (IRS) or taxation arm, classifies Bitcoin as ‘property’. And where the US goes, most of the free world must follow.

Canada calls Bitcoin a ‘Commodity’. Australia classifies it as an ‘Asset’. The EU also allow its use, and has exempted it from Value Added Tax (VAT).  Britain has put Bitcoin under some tax regulations. Germany is regarded as the Crypto capital of Europe. Many of its stores  have been accepting Bitcoin for several years now. Recently, Germany has passed a law to allow special funds to allocate 20% of their capital in crypto assets. India is about to try regulating them, with a view to taxing them as assets, put in protective provisions to safeguard the unwary, and perhaps try to popularise the sarkari offering by banning private cryptocurrencies.

Interestingly, both China and Russia, large totalitarian systems, have banned cryptocurrencies. How they will enforce such a ban offshore remains to be seen. Minnows such as Vietnam, Bolivia, Columbia and Ecuador have also turned their backs on Bitcoin. 

Bitcoin is the potential darling of black money, a digital hawala on the brink of legitimacy worldwide. It can be used anonymously by intelligence services, evangelists, angel investors, international NGOs, tax-dodgers, criminals, drug cartels, terrorists, and anybody willing to take some risk for possible profit. Like the internet, it is a freeing agent. There is no guarantee than Indians will use ‘Bharatcoin’ when they want to do something naughty or illegal. The only way to regulate it is by following suspicious digital trails and nab the money when it lands in the conventional monetary universe.

 It seems like many moons ago when Shri Ajit Panja, then Minister of Information and Broadcasting (I&B), responded to an ignorant clamour in parliament that wanted Satellite TV banned. Pernicious content, said the naysayers. It will spoil the morals of our children and youth. And this when there was just Star TV available in addition to DD. There was no internet beyond slow ‘dial-up’ in rare clusters.

Panja, in turn, said it couldn’t be done. This country was served by a satellite in space that had a giant  ‘footprint’ ranging from Singapore to the Arabian Gulf, with India in-between. It was a far cry from the technology used by terrestrial TV. Anyone could make a dish antenna in a roadside workshop in the event the government was tempted to ban their manufacture. Now, in the age of OTT and streaming, and yes, Web3, this Panja story seems unreal.

In Afghanistan, then also under Mullah Omar’s Taliban, people made dish antennas to access banned pornography. You were hung if you were caught there, but this did not deter people.

Cryptocurrency is here to stay. It has already knocked a few spots off the concept of sovereignty, and will only advance its game in future. Blockchain works. So does Mining. We may be headed towards a World Currency. All one can do is join the fray and try to duke it out in the free market in the interim.

(1,399 words)

November 25^th, 2021

For: The Sunday Guardian

Gautam Mukherjee

 

Reform In A Post-Modernist World

Reform is a can of worms. It was tough for Margaret Thatcher, but she stuck to her guns.

Reform in the national interest, something Modi has chosen as his mission too, is always difficult. It displaces the hold of various vested interests and elites. But great leaders historically have tended to cast themselves in a heroic mould. They made a virtue out of not yielding or retreating. 

However, in a post-modernist world, all bets are off. U turns and changing goal posts are no longer ignominious. New management gurus tell us, the flexibility allows the leader to come at the problem from another side. Obduracy is obsolete and restrictive. Modi, the reformer seems to buy this, perhaps with a view to cause confusion and disarray.

But there appear to be some psychological issues too. This tendency to be tough on external security matters and soft on governance has roots somewhere. Is it an innate Gandhianism?

Or is it the trauma of being labelled a mass murderer by the Opposition? This, after the communal riots that followed the horrible burning alive of 69 Hindu pilgrims in a train compartment at Godhra in 2002.

 Then Chief Minister Modi and Home Minister Shah were legally cleared of all wrong-doing. But unlike the Gandhis, that brazen out any and all references to 15,000 Sikhs murdered after the assassination of Indira Gandhi, Modi still seems diffident. 

In addition, there is the basic neediness. Ever since Modi stormed the citadels of power in May 2014, he has chosen to be extremely gentle with the Opposition.

The truncated and demolished Congress could not believe their luck. Likewise, the TMC in their West Bengal bastion. They, and a few others, quickly seized the initiative to create chaos in parliament. Getting away with this, they took to the streets.

Modi did not act energetically to punish arson, violence, rioting, lynching, illegal road blocking. This softly-softly stance has become something of a leitmotif of his administration.

The NDA pushed through legislation in parliament, including garnering support from other parties in the Rajya Sabha. This is commendable because it still does not have a majority in the upper house.

But implementation has always been difficult. It is this pattern that has stopped land acquisition, the CAA, the NRC, and now the Farmer Acts.

Is the Modi government intimidated by opposition propaganda, supported by leftist media both in India and abroad? It calls him arrogant and dictatorial personally. It says the BJP and the RSS are blatantly divisive and communal.

That this is a mirror image of the main opposition is the irony. Pseudo-secularism apart, it has no difficulty in acting against dissidents. Prime Minister Narendra Modi, on the other hand, is out on a quest to be loved rather than feared. 

Currently, there is much analysis on whether the Farm Laws were withdrawn because the alienation of the Sikhs is at stake. There is also talk of a sinister multidimensional plot aided by Pakistan’s ISI, other Islamic terrorists, Christian support groups, Khalistanis and China, to foment riots in multiple states. China has apparently stepped up its support to the Maoists in central India and the insurgents in Manipur. NSA Ajit Doval recently hinted at the existence of such internal fronts. The objective is to overthrow this government in 2024.

There is a very real threat along the LaC. Pakistan is working on its side of the LoC and along the international border as well.  Still,  economic reform paralysis  if achieved is a victory for India’s enemies.

Britain is still welfarist and liberal under Boris Johnson, as is Modi’s India. But Thatcher thought the almost dictatorial post WWII trade unions needed to be tamed. Loss-making public enterprises needed to be privatised. Coal mining needed to be shut down. Unaffordable subsidies had to be withdrawn. It was a question of economic survival.

However, working class people did not like their cheese moved. This even in a small island country with just one dominant religion and ethnicity. And a population many times smaller than India’s today.

Thatcher also had a long festering terrorist insurgency emanating from Ireland. The Irish Republican Army (IRA) nearly succeeded in killing her. It blew up her bedroom but she was in the adjoining bathroom at the time. The bombing was at the Grand Hotel in Brighton. Thatcher was attending a Conservative Party conference there.  This was some time before Indira Gandhi was assassinated. Margaret Thatcher came to the funeral in solidarity.

Indira Gandhi was not an economic reformer in the Modi mould. She nationalised the banks and abolished the privy purses, strengthening India’s socialism.  She also liberated Bangladesh and confronted the Khalistanis. It was the last that resulted in her assassination. 

 Thatcher was able to retire with her stature intact.  But her tough  conservative policies, her confrontations with the EU, eventually resulted in her own party tilting her out of the prime ministership. Thatcher was Britain’s longest standing prime minister nevertheless.

In international affairs, along with Ronald Reagan, she was instrumental in persuading Mikhail Gorbachev to dissolve the Soviet Union.

Reform, as in turning Turkey, the former keeper of Mecca, into a secular country was not easy. But a militarist Kemal Ataturk shoved it through. Emerging from the ruins of the Ottoman Empire, he saw the future of Turkey as a part of Europe. This dream was only partially realised, with romantic connections like the Orient Express. But even a secular Turkey was never admitted into the EU.

Millions of Turks work in Germany, for example, but as guest workers who need visas. Ataturk’s secular Turkey has now turned sharply towards Wahhabi Islam. But he is still seen, even under Erdogan, who wants to be the new Caliph for Sunni Islam, as the founder of modern Turkey.

None of the other leaders cited here backed down from their agendas. Can Prime Minister Narendra Modi win using a different methodology? Also because this latest capitulation is seen, given the timing, as an electoral ploy. It has already triggered calls to roll back CAA, revoke Article 370, make a law to solidify MSP.

What next for the season of U turns? Modi is not the only one.  Arvind Kejriwal does it. Mamata Banerjee does it. Rahul Gandhi does it. So does almost any politician put on the spot. Post-modernism calls for ‘fluid discourses’. Welcome to the third decade of the 21^st century.

 

(1,061 words)

November 21^st, 2021

For: Firstpost

Gautam Mukherjee

 

 

 The Dragon Breathes Fire But China Is Not Going To Dominate The World

The virtual summit between Biden and Xi Jinping, recently concluded suggests a Mexican standoff. But, this is deceptive. In effect, China has been warned off- this far but no further. Will there be war, even a limited one? China needs to ask itself what consequences it is willing to suffer if it provokes one. Not the least of which will be a precipitous blow to Xi Jinping’s hold on the CCP.

America has not backed down, and seems willing to take its chances in a confrontation should it come. And neither have its South Asian and Asia-Pacific allies right in Beijing’s theatre of operation, if not influence. China has given them every reason to stand fast.

China must be feeling hemmed in.  The bluff has been called on its much publicised military machine, standing armed forces, economic prowess. None of this has the US quaking in its boots. It is not impressed. The US president reads his intelligence briefs daily, first thing in the morning, before discussions with his Defence Secretary and National Security Adviser, whenever necessary. He knows the inside story.

In fact, China’s military posturing has not even panicked Taiwan into counter measures for all the scores of mainland intrusions into its airspace. The antiquated rantings of the Global Times suggests China does not live in the real world.

Taiwan has called for US and Japanese help, certainly, and both have responded positively. American troops are stationed in Taiwan and are ostensibly training the Taiwan military. There is also a sizeable American military presence in Japan and Guam. The QUAD and QUAD Plus regularly patrols the South China Sea and the Taiwan Straits and China finds itself unable to do anything about it.

Mainland China’s stance of continuing to insist that Taiwan is part of it, after a status quo that has been in place for over seventy years, is not working on the ground. Its One China Policy is regularly mocked. Taiwan is quietly being let into more and more international fora, sometimes as a full member, other times as an observer.  High-powered American delegations have been visiting Taiwan with greater frequency despite Chinese protests.  

China’s One China Policy is under threat not just in Taiwan, but simmering on the back burner in Tibet, Xinkiang and Inner Mongolia. All these occupied provinces are restive and not happy at being forcibly occupied by Mao Zedong. Since then, China has not managed to seize any more territory, but Xi Jinping lusts to take over where Mao left off.

Perhaps he does not realise that the world is a very different place in 2021. It is not wearied and broken by two world wars as it was in 1949 when Mao seized the mainland. Nor is it menaced by an Iron Curtain.

China today should remember its own role in bringing down the Soviet bloc in collusion with the US. Alliances can put a kind of pressure that makes it difficult to determine whom to fight.

But today, even tiny Hong Kong has only been suppressed into uneasy compliance, while there is an exodus of its more capable and wealthy residents to Britain and other places, away from Beijing’s direct influence. If the time comes when China begins to break up, as before in its colonial past, Hong Kong, even tiny Macao, are sure to pull away.

Biden spoke of China leaving self-governing Taiwan alone at the virtual summit, and Xi issued one of his trade mark threats about playing with fire.

 Xi also tried to benefit from a dubious report issued by McKinsey &Co.  claiming China had overtaken the US economically. Its release was timed for just before the summit. Forget supremacy, even equality is elusive for Xi Jinping’s China.

Where does the US-China relationship go from here? Biden will keep the economic pressure on. More and more Chinese supply lines are, and will be relocated elsewhere. He will continue the policy of frequently referring to China’s human rights abuses in Xinkiang, Tibet, Inner Mongolia, Hong Kong, and against the Chinese people themselves. Dissidents and critics regularly disappear. Chinese companies in the US will  continue to be sanctioned. Tenders that involve national security will exclude the Chinese.

Biden says he can cooperate with China on Climate change- another way of pushing China to do the bidding of the West.

 President Biden will continue to demand that China does not interfere with international sea lanes, particularly in the South and East China Sea. That it winds down its aggressive rhetoric against Australia, the menacing of Japan in the East China Sea, sometimes via North Korea.

And to climb down from the actual military build-up along the borders with India. That the border build-ups have been ineffective since 2020, are being watched closely by other smaller countries like Vietnam, Indonesia, Thailand, Malaysia, Myanmar, Bangladesh, Nepal, Sri Lanka and the Philippines. Most African countries have already asked China to leave. South America too does not seem to be interested after the Venezuela mess.

Xi Jinping is smarting from all these silken, diplomatically couched strictures from erstwhile mentor and ally America. Biden himself was a good old boy who got along as a ‘friend’ with Xi when both were VPs. But now, Xi wants to be Mao, to change the equation with the US, with China as the dominant power, But Joe Biden is now president and cannot allow that. The story has turned clearly adversarial, like Henry II and Thomas Becket, the Archbishop of Canterbury.

India, meanwhile is moving onto the great power stage. The world acknowledges it will become the 3^rd biggest economy after the US and China by 2030, up from its present fifth place. It is stronger in alliance with the US than ever before via the QUAD. It has formed another QUAD with Israel, UAE and Bahrain. It is an unprecedented Jewish, Hindu, ‘Good Muslim’ QUAD. UAE wants to invest in Kashmir. The new GoAir direct flight from Srinagar to Sharjah is a big hit despite having to fly longer for being denied overflight rights by Pakistan.

This alliance with the Good Muslims is drawing in Saudi Arabia and Oman on the sidelines. Pakistan meanwhile is having difficulty getting anyone at all to recognise the Taliban ‘government’ in Afghanistan- not even Qatar and China!

The earlier QUAD with the US, Australia, India and Japan is attracting plus interest from Britain, already a member of AUKUS along with the US and Australia, and to a certain extent, France.  Both Britain and France want to share more military technology with, and sell equipment to, India. Germany too is not going to be as cosy with China after the departure of Angela Merkel. But just how much frost enters that relationship is not as yet clear. A multipolar opposition to Chinese ambition is forming rapidly with the US as nucleus.  

From being a most favoured trading partner of the US and Europe, China, post Covid is seen as the predatory villain by most countries around the world. Its one-sided and debt-trapping overseas investments are unravelling, as the debtor countries are changing out. Grabbing the United Nations is not providing much succour to China either. Certainly, the global lending agencies, controlled mainly by the US, are not happy with the Chinese books.

Even the CPEC with Pakistan is stalled with fund shortages and mutual acrimony. China is no longer perceived to be the country that will inevitably, take the pole position globally. Instead, riven with gargantuan debt, a slow economy, complicated future prospects, it has been forced towards internal consolidation and marked repression.

The Middle Kingdom was once a very insular place that regarded all others as barbarians. Today, Han China is under threat, as its projects fail and in the name of better wealth distribution, a back to Communist basics movement, the CCP chokes its own engines of growth. There is significant unemployment, scarcities, stoppages and internal grumblings that threaten to blow up.

China’s fairly recent alliance with Russia too is coming apart. Even as India is likely to reiterate its military cooperation with Russia during the Putin visit next month, America is beginning to realise pushing Russia into Chinese arms is not good strategy. India can and will be a wonderful go-between.

Without an economically vulnerable Russia that is realising China now has little to offer, and a resurgent India eager to strengthen traditional ties, the answer is evident. India has bought five suites of the state-of-the-art S-400 from Russia. It is working on further advances on the Brahmos missiles jointly. The new versions of the Kalashnikov are under aatmanirbhar production. There are many other collaborations with Russia for all three services, given that even in 2021, 50% of our armaments are still Russian and Soviet in origin.  The Indian armed forces are comfortable with this.  

On the other side, our purchases and collaborations with both Israel and the US have also grown exponentially, helicopters, howitzers, drones,  missiles -the armed Predator drones being the latest to be put on order. India is also buying and collaborating on military equipment with another US ally, South Korea.

 China is on its own. America is not. India is surrounded with allies. This Game of Thrones will not go the Xi Jinping way.

(1,539 words)

November 17^th, 2021

For: Sirfnews

Gautam Mukherjee

 

The Feel Of Modern India Coming Into Its Own

Cut to the independent republic of India circa 1947, and we can see Socialism, Soviet style Five Year Plans, the Licence-Permit Raj, The Mixed Economy, Non-Alignment. All this produced no more than 2% growth on a miniscule base of around $250 million. This stunted India’s stature. 

Apologists say it laid the foundations of the fledgling republic, with its heavy industry and institutions of higher learning. But capitalism, as in Singapore, that joined the party only in 1962, would have no doubt done better, and faster. President Lee Quan Yew often shook his head at the waste and folly he saw in a country with the potential of India.

Capitalism was anathema to our early leaders. It was tainted with memories of the laissez-faire East India Company, and later the British Raj with its pillage, loot, monopolies, destruction of local craft, industry and enterprise. 

It was only after India went bankrupt in all except name, that a drastic change was made. India dumped a lot of the old economic order in 1991. This was under dictation of the international lending agencies which handed in a non-negotiable to-do list to the Government of India. However, then Prime Minister PV Narasimha Rao was not unhappy. A veteran Congress politician, learned, erudite, he had been looking for a politically acceptable way to break out of the ideological shackles.

After the changes made, the day-to-day situation in India, previously riddled with Soviet style shortages and shoddy goods on a take- it-or-leave-it basis, change beyond recognition. For the first time India began to see 9% growth rates.

India may not wear socialism on its sleeve anymore, nor lecture the rest of the world on its virtues, but it is highly committed to welfarism.  This has gone beyond the slogans of the early decades into solid gains towards the elimination of hunger, disease, illiteracy. It has delivered connectivity, basic utilities, housing and sharply reduced numbers below the poverty line.

Meanwhile, China had already been producing double-digit growth from the 1980s. This, after radically altering its attitude to capitalistic methodology. That it is once again going down-hill, is a consequence, in part, of its revival of hard-line Communism and chronic indebtedness.

Cut again to 2021 India, thirty years on when India has a $3 trillion economy. Observers in the developed world see India’s new dynamism and liken it to Europe during the Industrial Revolution, or America in its pioneering frontier days. There is a new tonality and aspiration that is very refreshing. In addition, India is an acknowledged thought-leader and agent for global peace, plenty, and responsibility. It agrees to help retard climate change.  It wants an end to terrorism and expansionism.

Mark Mobius, a legendary billionaire global investor, says India has entered a 50-year bull market, and can expect 9% growth year-on-year for the half century. This, even as China is in decline. He has put most of his emerging market investment into Indian stocks. Mobius is not the only one, though his bold prescience is notable.

There are now many clean breaks with the past. Our infrastructure on land, sea and air is looking at providing for the next three decades. Modernisation and digitisation is being pushed hard. What was never done before is being attempted in multiple fields. India has stopped looking on itself as a poor country of low per capita income and teeming millions.

Instead, it is relentlessly getting on with the job of emerging as the third largest economy in the world. Of course, having 1.4 billion people is both a blessing and a curse. However, no economy can thrive on the backs of only well-to-do people. Europe and America have long realised this. Immigrants, eager to do the lowly paid jobs, have been vital.

India, thanks to its fecundity, does not have to look at this in policy terms for at least thirty years. However, the presence of over 2 crore illegal Bangladeshi immigrants tells the essential economic story. They not only meet their own need for livelihood, but to a certain extent, rising material costs apart, do their part in holding the line on inflation.

India is also erasing the poverty-stricken continuity with its colonial past. Physical structures such as North and South Blocks and the round present-day parliament building will soon become museums. The new, expanded Indian Railway networks are supplanting the superannuated British outlay. The Victorian era railway stations are fast disappearing and giving way to modern structures on par with the best in the West. The inter-city and inter state highway systems are removing transportation bottlenecks.  The airports and airline scenario is replete with choice and more than a little competition. Old PSU behemoths are being closed down, merged, or privatised. Even profitable ones such as the monopolistic LIC and ONGC are being partially sold off. Air India was the first large unloading of a storied airline piling up heavy losses. But clearly it will not be the last.

Bureaucrats, for long years beyond accountability, have been instructed that they cannot move files beyond four levels and that too transparently and digitally. Acres of redundant government files and other obsolete junk have been sold to raddiwalas.

Once the ‘Fabled East’ meant Bharatvarsha, richest in the world, bulging with gold and jewels. ‘The Middle Kingdom’ was no match. India also had its palaces, temple architecture, universities, city planning, drainage and wisdom that stupefied early visitors from the West, the East and Arabia alike. But nobody calculated GDP then. Besides, Bharatvarsha was a region, much bigger than it is today, populated by many independent kingdoms.

The present renaissance however, promises to leave fabled India behind. It will see India to a $ 10 trillion economy and more with a combination of domestic demand, aatmanirbhar manufacturing and services, and exports.

China, long plaguing India via proxies and menaces, could break into an open attack. The question is, can it win? Despite this existential risk, this is definitely a good time to be an Indian.

(993 words)

13.11.2021

For: Firstpost

Gautam Mukherjee

 

 

For Atmanirbhar New India: Reboot History & Popular Culture

 

A New India needs a revision of its history. Similarly, it needs to examine the tropes in popular entertainment and culture that seek to promote a hatred of Hinduism and its alleged caste divisions.

For the early decades since independence, a pandering to the minority vote banks by the Congress Party, was squarely responsible for this. Later it became something of a template as regional parties poached the Congress support.

And then there was the commitment to socialism, though it proved disastrous for economic growth. Nevertheless, academia was put to work to cast Indian history and economics in a Marxist mould.

For cinema and the digital streaming space to project the current government and its policies as communal is undemocratic. A Hindu nationalist government that has been voted in with large majorities is not ergo determined to subvert the constitution. It may well change certain clauses, as prime minister Indira Gandhi did. This is how a great anomaly, the special status of Jammu & Kashmir, originally introduced without debate as a temporary measure, was set right. A living constitution needs amendment from time to time. The trouble is, what is good for the goose, is not readily granted to the gander.

So what does an atmanirbhar New India need from the historical narrative and from popular culture? First and foremost there is a need to evolve and accept a home grown and grass-roots Indianness.

Marxism is not an Indian concept. Neither is a fraudulent form of secularism. Ditto aping British practice, whether in parliament or in the judiciary.

The other is to reach back. Beyond the advent of the British and the Islamic rulers, to find our historical identity amongst the many great Hindu dynasties and Seers. To glory in our ancient cultural, scientific and spiritual excellence. To drop the Macaulayism that has enslaved our minds.

A new found interest both amongst Indians and foreigners in Hindu Studies, Diwali, Yoga, the great epics of the Ramayana, the Mahabharata, the Upanishads, Puranas, indeed Sanatan Dharma, is now apparent. Many are starting to realise the living management lessons that can be derived from the Bhagwad Gita.

India is now a reformist powerhouse for others to emulate. It is becoming a substantial defence and armaments manufacturer. The stupendous response with vaccines and vaccination has been noted by the whole world. Its increasing export footprint is taking on from a relocation of supply chains from China. India’s diplomacy is resulting in dramatic new alignments. It has the greatest growth statistics in the world post Covid. The start ups and unicorns populating the stock market are a case in point. There is nothing derivative in it. This is home grown dynamism.

Contrast this situation at the end of 2021 with how it all began. The need to revise the independence narrative too. When Jawaharlal Nehru wrote his Discovery of India, he was lodged in a comfortable palace turned jail as a Class One political prisoner.

His British jailers called him Sir, he could take his constitutional chukkers around the property, receive vetted visitors, and was served his meals.  He saw himself as the first prime minister of independent India in waiting.

This no doubt infuriated Mohammad Ali Jinnah, a fellow Lincoln’s Inn lawyer and loyal Congressman at the time. But then, Jinnah did not have the backing of Nehru’s fellow prisoner Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, as often hailed as a Mahatma, as Nehru was called a Pandit by the press of the day.

Nehru had a room with a window, curtains , a bed, not a pallet. There was a sofa and a side table. It was not a cell with bars, he wasn’t locked in, though there were sentries. There were no leg irons and solitary confinement. Nehru was never sent to the Cellular Jail in the Andamans that Veer Savarkar had to endure.

In the writing of his vision statement, Nehru, who saw himself partly as an Englishman in Khadi, wasn’t just imitating Winston Churchill, but outlining his Fabian Socialist cum Unity in Diversity paean to pluralism.

India had about half of its landmass under the princely states then, and the rest had many geographical, linguistic, religious and cultural variations. It seemed vital to Nehru, in the context of his times, that India could not have any divisive ideas of its own. He was lucky indeed to have Sardar Patel by his side. That this lofty vision was first cut asunder by Partition caused by his lust for power, and then steadily subverted by himself as prime minister is the story of his The Idea Of India.

Pandering to the minorities at the expense of the majority is the original sin of independent India, or is it the low growth of Fabian Socialism?

Nehru’s Congress Party successors consolidated this distorted ideology, holding the voter in contempt, till, at last, there were upheavals. The first of them came in the seventies with Jayaprakash Narayan, the Lohiaites and the unstable opposition coalitions that followed. Then came partial rejection at the end of the nineties with the advent of prime minister Vajpayee. Last came the resounding rout in 2014.

Churchill began his multi-volume History of the English Speaking Peoples in 1937, ensconced in his ancestral Blenheim Palace.

Churchill’s leadership during WWII  was deservedly lionised. And in this time, as prime minister, he saved Britain from Nazi occupation, principally by begging for and securing American support.

 Churchill’s imperialist views made no sense once America became global number one. It forced the dismantling of the British Empire, starting more or less with India, Britain’s Jewel in the Crown.

That Nehru and Gandhi, political moderates, were allegedly in a cosy relationship with the British does not surprise anyone today.  That they did not really secure the independence of India in 1947 is a moot point. They played their part certainly, as did Subhas Bose. But it was probably American dictation that did the trick. A war torn and bankrupt Britain was in no position to resist.

 

(996 words)

For: Firstpost

November 11^th, 2021

Gautam Mukherjee