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 Obduracy is obsolete and restrictive.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

 

Undead Imperialism Can’t Digest India’s Digital Success

The Economist, a British weekly magazine, now depends on its American subscribers, having switched from backing the extinguished British Empire, to American supremacy.

It has a combined print and digital subscription globally shy of 2 million. It also claims to reach 35 million via its social media platforms.

While giving itself an unproven seventeen-fold reach, it had no difficulty in scoffing at the scale and reach of India’s digital revolution. It once praised Aadhar but that must have been a slip. Because it regularly slams the Modi administration under the present Editor’s watch, citing the original sin of the 2002 Gujarat Riots. This apparently gave it the temerity to exhort Indians not to elect the Hindu nationalist BJP, or failing that, Modi as prime minister.

This from a magazine representing a people that had its war-time Prime Minister Churchill murder over 4 million Indians in the man-made Bengal Famine of 1946. A Raj administration that shot unarmed, men, women and children at Jallianwala Bagh with nary an apology. A nation that responded with ingratitude and silence about 2 million plus Indians that fought in the two world wars alongside the British.  

A constant criticism in repeated articles is about the Indian government’s alleged antipathy towards civil liberties and the 200 million strong Indian Muslim community. The Economist treats its story-telling as proof. It pretends it knows best.

The Indian digital revolution, though a work in progress, is an astounding success. But the Economist thinks it will leave out the poorest and create a great divide between the haves and have nots. That our digital reach has been facilitated not just by the crores counted by the biometrically authenticated Aadhar, but also widespread bank accounts for the erstwhile unbanked is ignored. Common usage of the internet for online shopping, tele-health consultations, digital payments, music, movie streaming, OTT likewise.

The Economist likes adopting a tone of omniscience. But this is being challenged by others on home turf and across the Atlantic who also lay claim to economic liberalism. But not a dodgy, U-turning version of it. The magazine employs exclusively White staffers, educated at Oxford or Cambridge. Unfortunately, despite its storied history supporting the British financial establishment, it increasingly offers slanted, hectoring, Oxford Union style leftist opinion. This, dished up as sharp analysis garnished with acute word play.

The Indian digital economy, at $ 200 million in 2017-18 is headed towards $ 1 trillion by 2025, with 900 million active internet users. In 2020, 25% of the adult female population owned a smartphone while 41% of adult men did. We know most teenagers, and not a few children do as well.

Rural broadband penetration stands at 29% while the national average is at 51% (687 million people), as on March 2020. But this is changing rapidly. Rural internet penetration is growing at a pace 3 times faster than  in urban India. Wireless telephony constitutes 98.3%. Teledensity in India already stands at 86.6%.

Covid has played its part to hasten matters. School closures forced teaching over WhatsApp, and many people purchased smart phones to access it. India has the largest number of students globally at some 315 million.

Digital illiteracy and unfamiliarity with digital platforms have driven many people to community services like cyber cafes in urban areas, and village choupals that own a TV, computer, smart phones, have connected broadband, electricity back-up. They also have skilled and knowledgeable operators. There are simple EMI schemes to enable poor people to purchase inexpensive smart phones, and Mobile Libraries to borrow them for online sessions. There are ‘Digital Didis’ to teach women how to use it and reduce gender-based hesitancies.

The Economist’s neo-colonial top-down assessment is not surprising however, given its allergy to the Modi government’s nationalistic assertions, and its successes. India overtook the British ($2.83 trillion) and French ($2.71 trillion) economies at $2.93 trillion in 2019 itself. This is not the India the Economist is used to preaching at, with its endemic corruption, low growth, dependencies, and chronic inefficiency.

This time, the Indian government has, unusually, written to the magazine, calling this latest outing ‘inaccurate and biased’. Perhaps it is a warning to the British establishment that the Economist represents.

The magazine does not byline its articles, hiding under a collective eiderdown. It espouses a lofty if obscure stance of ‘economic liberalism’ and ‘radical centrism’, which probably means hitch-a-ride on the latest vehicle of Western neo-imperialism in order to survive.  It is owned largely by the Agnelli family of Fiat fame (43.4%). Other owners are its staffers, Rothschild, Cadbury and Shroder Layton. Currently, it boasts of its first lady editor, Zanny Minton Beddoes, Oxford and Harvard educated, who joined the ‘newspaper’ in 1994, and became its Editor-in-Chief in 2015.

Being left out most often in the stupendous gains India has made since 2014 is one of the reasons for the Economist’s pique. India does not need foreign help with its digital revolution. India’s software exports at $133.7 billion in 2020-2021, were up 4%.

On 21^st October 2021, India completed the free vaccination of a billion adults against Covid. The Economist can be sure many of these people were amongst the poorest, lodged in remote areas, and included a large number of Muslims. It is now going ahead with inoculating the rest of the adults, some 20 million strong, and then onwards towards children and teenagers between the ages of 2 and 18. All this with the very effective India-made vaccine Covaxin, alongside the Oxford Astra Zeneca franchised Covishield. It is also exporting vaccines and making other types under licence such as Russia’s Sputnik. Yet more are in the works.

Democracies, with growing woke sensibilities, are increasingly difficult to manage. But India, with a population of 1.4 billion and multiple religions, languages, customs, topography, does a consistently good job.

This, for whether it is turning the entire nation largely digital, running the world’s largest election machine, or lately, hitting back at Western misinformation motivated by envy, lazy journalism, and sheer disbelief.

(995 words)

October 22^nd, 2021

For: Firstpost

Gautam Mukherjee

 

India Has A Century Worth Of Coal If We Need It

Do we have a coal shortage? In absolute terms-no. But did a lot of the thermal plants around the country let their coal stocks go below even 5 days stocks-yes.

They did so, basing their demand projections on near flat Covid induced demand last year. Maybe they were expecting a third wave as bad as the second. Instead, the intense round of vaccinations, nearly 100 crore people worth, has greatly assuaged the situation.

There is a reason for the hesitation. Electricity, once produced, is a perishable commodity without expensive and high technology methods of storage. The US has created over 25 gigawatts of strategic electrical energy storage. But India has next to none, unless you count a few batteries. But we do have a National Grid and Exchange. The trouble is, it buys at market rates and sells its electricity to the highest bidder. This can upset contractual rates and force electricity selling prices upwards.

Besides, the thermal generation units let this squeeze happen every year post Monsoon. There is a dip in the mining of coal after the rains till all the water can be drained. Still, dry coal stocks at the mines are maintained at about 22 days demand. Coal India meets 80%, though many thermal units have been importing a lot in past years.

Caught out by their own calculations, particularly in Punjab, Rajasthan, Jharkhand, thermal power plants are scrambling to raise stocks to 15 days need now to meet a sharp uptick in demand of more than 20% .

The manufacturing economy has woken up to the emphasis on atmanirbhar, and opportunities based on at least partial relocations from China. Other sectors of the economy too have perked up enough to produce the highest growth forecasts in the world for this fiscal. Rural electrification has increased consumption. GDP is headed to clock 9.5% growth this year followed by another 8.5% growth on top of that next year as well. The IMF and World Bank are saying so, and not our government statisticians.

Economics being a demand/supply game there are a few associated problems on the coal imbroglio that cannot be glossed over. The thermal plants owe the coal suppliers Rs. 20,000 crores in unpaid bills. Nevertheless, enhanced coal supplies are already at 1.62 million tonnes a day heading up towards 2 million tonnes a day post Dussehra, according to the coal minister Pralhad Joshi.                                                                                                                                                                          The PMO has taken a quick supervisory interest, as it doesn’t want anything like this to damage the return to robust growth. The partially revamped and far more dynamic railways  are moving vast tonnages around the country on an emergency basis.

The electricity distributing companies (discoms) also owe the generating companies Rs. 1,60,000 crores in unpaid bills. Presumably, this is because the governments of the States and at the Centre have not paid. Private consumers have to pay if they don’t want to be cut off. Present firefighting apart, the situation seems pretty precarious.

The political buck passing that is usual in such situations has been countered rather well by the Centre in this instance with ready facts and figures. The comparisons in the international media with China are misplaced, because China is highly dependent on imports to make up the deficit in demand. That it is in a financial bind right now is another matter.

In the broader context, India has the 5^th largest proven coal deposits in the world after the US, Russia, Australia and China in descending order. Some accounts put India at No.4.These can last us for 111 years at present offtakes, but even accounting for increased requirements, it’s enough for at least a century going forward. And that’s assuming no further discoveries of large deposits.

However, with concerns over pollution, scrubbing expenses, environmental concerns, the Paris Accords, coal is regarded worldwide as a bad old Victorian Industrial Revolution leftover.  However, it would be a mistake for India to not leverage a strength just to please the climate lobbies. Concern over global warming may be real, but immediate fuel shortages and spikes in pricing are more compelling.

This year coal prices have risen from $60 a tonne to $160 internationally. India has been the second largest importer of coal after China, at about $16 billion to their $16.7 billion per annum, running neck to neck with Japan in this. But not this year.

After this page break caused by rapacious international coal prices, freight hikes and shipping congestion, India should be headed towards export of coal. This, after meeting all its needs.

A revived Coal India is now producing 600 million tonnes per annum but slated to produce a billion tonnes by 2023-24. Other coal blocks have been auctioned. Commercial production of coal as opposed to the UPA era ‘captive’ mining handed out to industrial groups has been introduced.

Are there any real alternatives to coal?  Alternate energy sources including hydroelectric, solar, biomass, nuclear-both Uranium based with its erratic supply, and the as yet non-player Thorium, have not done very much.  Then there are wind, wave, gas, petroleum, and who knows, hydrogen in the future.

For now, plentiful coal might be the main player for years yet.  At present it provides 70% of the thermal based electricity, with all the other contenders put together accounting for no more than 30%.

India has the largest reserves of Thorium in the world, but has not been able to develop a workable Thorium based reactor to produce electricity.

It may be political to create a fuss over perceived  coal shortages just as there was a real one for oxygen during the second wave last year. There may be some blackouts, and load-shedding power cuts have already begun in some states. But it is a crisis of our own making at best, and headed swiftly towards a solution. But having said that, it is another misinformation gambit aimed at a 2022 election scenario that is not going to fly.

  (990 words)

October 14^th, 2021

For: Firstpost

Gautam Mukherjee

 

China’s Titanic Moment Approaches

Cameron’s 1997 blockbuster remake of Titanic showed that it lacked an adequate supply of binoculars, let alone lifeboats. Not only was it going at full speed in Arctic waters when disaster struck, but the Crow’s Nest was relying on naked eyesight in the dark. Icebergs are white. Otherwise, the Titanic may not have even got the couple of hours evacuation time it did.

First Class was sumptuous on its maiden voyage. It had a number of ‘name’ American millionaires and heirs to substantial fortunes making the Atlantic crossing back to New York. In 1912, people did not speak of billions and trillions in Washington and Beijing alike.

 It also had the film’s heroine Rose and her mother on the secret brink of poverty. Rose had to make up to her rich and arrogant beau, also on board, because her mother reminded her, it was their last hope to stay amongst the privileged.

Of course, Rose fell in love, despite her parlous circumstances, with a heroic and talented painter from Steerage Class. But that, for today, is another story.

President Xi Jinping and the CCP are approaching their Titanic moment. Overconfidence in Communist social engineering is provoking a course correction that is as doomed as not doing anything. Xi says he is fed up of debt-fuelled capitalist style prosperity. It has created vast inequalities and deviated from the path of the founding father of Red China, the always serviceable Chairman Mao.

 That he has come to this personal eureka moment coincidentally when the dragon’s ecosystem is sputtering into stoppage and decline is perhaps not good news. His room to manoeuvre is severely limited. Thinking of Moral Hazard and catching hold of scapegoats after the excesses (and received benefits) of rapid GDP growth, is fraught with danger. When America let 1,000 banks fail in 1929, it led to a decade- long Great Depression. Barack Obama paid his way out of a similar crisis in 2008.

The Chinese may not have had political freedom from the establishment of Mao, and the expulsion of Chiang Kai Shek, but they have grown very prosperous, albeit in certain pockets, over the years since 1980. Can Xi Jinping snatch this away without grave political consequences? Is he, on the other hand, just trying to make a virtue of necessity like Rose’s mother?

President-for-life Xi is trying to deflect the blame away from himself and the CCP towards the actual hands-on engine drivers. The Engine Drivers - Evergrande’s owners, who owe $300 billion they can’t pay, Jack Ma of the ANT Group who has been forced to lose $100 billion, Local Government Mayors who have accumulated over $ 8 trillion in debt, other tech biggies, manufacturers, exporters, conspicuous consumers, and their Rolls Royces. These ‘deviants’ from Mao’s path - and not the Railways themselves. These people, and not Xi and the CCP, must be held responsible for derailments, goes the logic. The owners of the Titanic who were not on board, in order to go down with it, advanced a similar argument in the subsequent enquiries.

 In recent speeches, Xi Jinping said he wants to steer the ship of state towards more equitable waters where disparities between rich and poor are lessened. He wants to go back to Chinese Communist first principles. However, is the iceberg too close to dodge? And are those yet more and more, ice mountains, behind and beside that first one?

It’s not the fudged statistics in the recent World Bank Report on China to show its economic prowess. Not the insatiable cement consumption figures that fuelled the construction boom. In 2004, at a seminar in swish Hong Kong, the Chinese economics professors who spoke said the Chinese banking system was ‘unreal’. Nobody would be able to find it on Judgement Day. That was 17 years ago. Judgement Day, aka the iceberg, still hasn’t loomed into sight less than a mile away, but it could be hidden in yonder mist.

The story is coming apart at the seams now. It’s not only the unused infrastructure at home and abroad. In places like Hanbantota, Sri Lanka, or Venezuela, far away. Neither can pay the bill, to paraphrase am old Cole Porter song that might have been played in  the nightclubs of sophisticated colonial Shanghai. And seizing sub prime property in Pakistan and around the belt and road/ new silk route globe will not pay the bill in a hurry either.

Nevertheless there is a headlong rush, a full speed ahead in the night at work. A French think-tank, its Military School Strategic Research Institute, alludes to Nicolo Machiavelli’s The Prince in its characterisation. It says China once preferred to be loved rather than feared, but this has changed. Now it wishes to coerce.

It has invested billions in international media to finesse its image. It tries to influence foreign elections Moscow style. It liberally uses embargoes, sanctions, tariffs, and controls access to its markets, in an effort to bring other nations to heel commercially.

This report does not refer to the years of espionage responsible for some of China’s biggest technological advances. It has been a master of copyright infringements, theft, retrofitting, rather than greenfield R&D most successful in the West and the US in particular. That is why its equipment often does not work, and nobody, not in dire straits, wants to buy Chinese fighter jets.

Nor does it refer to the massive Chinese government subsidies used to grab export market share in the early days. Later, China did make money, and its costs rose and rose. This proved a boon for Vietnam and Bangladesh if not for slow, ponderous India.

When the borrow and spend Western bubble burst in 2008, the beginning of China’s export decline was scripted. There was no market like in the old days.

The Chinese economic myth-making was becoming visible.  The woods of apartments in ghost cities in the Chinese hinterland just to boost the GDP. More dams built and being built than a school of beavers could justify. Highways to nowhere.

The myth-making was also an international propaganda machine that captured the UN. UNESCO, WHO, The Human Rights Commission, the UNSC. The lack of progress on the WHO investigation on the origin of the Wuhan Virus is a sell-out to Xi Jinping. The ineffective vaccine Sinevac. The casualty figures suppressed in Wuhan had the crematoriums working 24x7 for more than six months. Was it a man-made virus? Was it deliberately spread by the Chinese, killing nearly 7 million people worldwide so far?

Europe, certainly EU leader Germany, and also France, are beholden to Chinese commerce. So is America. Only Australia has had the courage to break free despite massive economic losses. India has reacted too, in its quiet muted fashion. Chinese 5G is out. Many other opportunities have also been denied.

Its hard to determine Chinese statistics from the outside. Is the currency  overvalued given its massive external and internal debt?  The Local Government domestic debt being half (52%) of its current GDP at $ 8.2 trillion is an informed estimate from Goldman Sachs and the Rhodium Group. China itself does not release Local Government debt figures.

For as long as possible, Xi Jinping and the CCP will keep the veil  drawn over its financial affairs. The electricity is failing. Factories cannot function. Orders are unfulfilled. Scams are being unearthed. The ports are in chaos. Homes are in the dark. Unemployment is getting out of hand. Shortages are mushrooming. The public is risking protests.  The military does not want to fight. Friends of China are leaving the table. Outside adverse comment is growing exponentially. The iceberg will not be denied.

(1,272 words)

For; Sirfnews

September 30^th, 2021

Gautam Mukherjee