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

 

 

The Gunga Din Syndrome Is Gone At Last

Of all them blackfaced crew/The finest man I knew/Was our regimental bishti, Gunga Din – Rudyard Kipling

 

As Prime Minister Narendra Modi heads towards Washington and New York for the first time since 2019, the European end of NATO is examining its options. The sudden Anglo-Saxon unilateral military alliance between the US, Australia and the UK, has rattled the chains of not only France, but the EU as a whole.

France has lost a troubled if massive $ 90 billion contract for conventional submarines, without warning. It is nothing short of furious. President Joe Biden, whom nobody expected to be quite so decisive during his campaign, has followed through on President’s Trump’s complaints against the European NATO partners. They haven’t been ponying up their share of the costs, nor showing the strategic commitment that this post WWII military alliance demands.

France and Australia have been conflicted on the much delayed and cost escalated deal for some years, but the key change is that Australia has just gone nuclear with US help, nods towards non-proliferation notwithstanding.

China is worried, perhaps for the first time, with America moving into Australia with its nuclear weapons on land, sea and air more or less on an immediate basis. Nobody is waiting to actually build the nuclear attack submarines at Adelaide which will take a decade for the appearance of the first one. China has 50 conventional and 10 nuclear submarines. But these numbers are no longer daunting.

India is likely to gain economically from the shifting of a number of American manufacturing enterprises to India from China as this squaring off escalates. It will also be able to buy military technology and hardware it needs from the US as an important partner of the QUAD. It will gain from Japan and Australia as well on similar lines. AUKUS may prove to be a general benefit in the Indian Ocean and the Pacific to those in the QUAD. Others are welcome to be camp followers. There is the UK beyond the AUKUS deal, in Diego Garcia and with its aircraft carrier group in the Asia-Pacific. France in the Indian Ocean. Germany in the South China Sea. Littoral states such as Vietnam, Singapore. All of them are in a sense QUAD plus.

At the same time, India needs to ramp up its own economic and military strength by bilateral cooperation with multiple countries. After all, the old order is changing, and India is well placed comparatively, without any bones of contention with any of the players except China and Pakistan. Beyond the hectic bilateral meetings and those with American company heads, India would do well at the UN to stick to its tried and tested messages against international terrorism and broad-based cooperation on climate change. Bland is good to negotiate through these sensitive times.

The Modi government knows there is much to be gained in a multipolar universe. It offers sovereign autonomy and freedom of choice. However,if we are pressured to toe any American line in our region or country, pragmatism dictates we need to be well compensated for it both strategically and economically. But to say no may not be wise, with China watching for any rift. Australia and the UK have happily embraced their supporting roles in AUKUS. Like Australia, India needs a lot more military equipment than it can readily buy or manufacture in short order. Again, China is relentlessly building up strength on our borders all along the LaC and via Pakistan as well. Russia cannot really help in this, because as a smaller economy, it has its limitations and is dependent on China to an extent. If India as a member of the QUAD with imminent threats from China, is presented with American military teeth, provided India supplies the bases, it must not hesitate.

Looking at the past can be educational. Non-alignment was meant to be a post-colonial equidistancing from the then power blocks of the Capitalist West and Communist Soviet Russia. It degenerated swiftly into all the newly independent countries adopting both Socialism and the USSR as Godfather.

This arrangement apparently gave the have-not nations a voice in the UNGA and a certain dignity to poverty. It was axiomatic that the poor countries could not survive without the help of a big brother. The benefactor, in turn, subordinated these satellites in large ways and small, and expected their unflinching support in foreign policy, big buying decisions, and value systems.

For India, this hollow form of non-alignment lasted nearly fifty years. Nobody has quite removed the obsolete name-plate as yet. We talk of national interest and multipolarity these days.This is because we no longer accept aid and have grown into one of the top ten economies of the world.

But in the old days, due to our British colonial hangover and Nehru’s penchant for imported conceptions under the surface Gandhianism, we became part of the Commonwealth - a kind of non-military QUAD of its time. We continue with this example of subservient Gunga-Din diplomacy. Even as it too has declined along with the fortunes of the United Kingdom, little more than a US satellite itself.

Of course, Socialist India also needed British Aid and grants in the early years. The Commonwealth Games extant to this day, are fun, though they are really also reminders of the extent of the imperial British Empire at its zenith. 

During our active non-alignment years, made a nonsense of as we held hands with the likes of Marshal Tito of then Yugoslavia, Gamel Abdel Nasser of Egypt, and later, Cuban supremo Fidel Castro and Yasser Arafat of the Palestinian Authority.

We were laughed at for our posturing and hectoring at the UNGA by the prosperous and technologically superior West. But, that wasn’t the half of it. India had to endure many humiliations from both sides of the see-saw.

The USSR kept India on its leash with bribery, flattery, while  infiltrating Indian politics and policy-making using the KGB. They sold us second level armaments no longer used by the Soviet armed forces. They permitted us our rupee payments and barter as we persisted with 2% or less rates of GDP growth. Today, we still buy Russian armaments because 50% of our in situ equipment comes from there, but we get much better terms. Including JVs such as the one that has produced the universally respected Brahmos missile. A grown economy on its way to become the world’s third biggest, is putting the erstwhile bishti in the driver’s seat. 

We had to turn to America for food grains and milk in the early decades, donated under their PL-480 programme. This went on till the 1960s and even later till the Green and White Revolutions despite distribution bottlenecks and primitive storage conditions that persist to this day.

But our mateyness with the newly liberated Socialist or Communist countries, our dislike of imperialism, plus that unworkable non-alignment, clearly harmed us. We refused to accept Nepal and Balochistan into our fold. We didn’t take the proffered UNSC seat from President John F Kennedy, or his offer to turn India a nuclear weapons power before China.

Instead, we gave away both opportunities to China. China went nuclear in 1964 itself.  A couple of years before that, Mao’s China came at us in NEFA, took over the Karakoram Pass, large tracts of Akshai Chin, and all of Tibet. We ended up providing refugee status to the Dalai Lama and lakhs of his followers as a gesture.

Early independent India had no idea of realpolitik. Ironically, we forgot all about non-alignment when Nehru begged America in panic to attack China for us. Kennedy didn’t, but forced China to give back seized Indian territory to an extent.

The Soviets didn’t come into all this, but years later rival block pressures, with China added to the mix, persist. Russia, the successor, was forced by America to deny us its cyrogenic technology for rockets. Israel’s dealings with China sometimes get in the way of its posture towards India.

Going with the power blocks however used to hurt much more when India was poor. Pakistan was the out-and-out US ally, and India was hyphenated with it, till the disparity between our economies became too large to ignore. By then the Soviet Union was gone but Russia, with a much smaller economy, is not free of pressures.

Pakistan wasn’t so essential, once the US managed to oust the Soviets from Afghanistan. Now Afghanistan too is gone from the US equation.

In the heyday of non-alignment, India needed development money, soft, long-term loans, aid, grants. And this came via institutions controlled by the West- the World Bank, the IMF, the ADB. The Soviets couldn’t help in this regard, being hard up behind their ‘Iron Curtain’ themselves.

Coming back to the Prime Minister’s US visit, it is reassuring that India will be seen as a power on its own. Buying armaments from Russia continuing, no longer defines us. We buy significant value from the US, France and Israel as well. India has begun exporting its military equipment starting with excellent bullet proof vests and coast guard boats and frigates for the navy. Missiles might be next. Gunga Din can rest from his labours at last.

(1,532 words)

For: Sirfnews

September 22^nd, 2021

Gautam Mukherjee

 

A Richer India Will Be A Safer India

Money, money money/Always sunny/ In the rich man’s world- ABBA

The aspirational aspects unleashed by the Modi government from the start, need  large funding. More so, because the approach is holistic and spread over all sectors. All being awakened to their potential, perhaps for the first time.  We have stopped calling ourselves poor, as if to excuse all shortcomings. There is massive welfarism still, but it has been shorn of corruption and has developed a reformist sheen. However, ‘povertarianism’ as a pornographic Marxist glory is gone.

Today there is every attempt to try and balance the books. Revenue generation is important. That is why the NHAI, furiously building expensive and world class highways,targets income from tolls to rise from Rs. 40,000 crores to 1.5 million crores a year.

What we must aim at though, is surplus revenue in all our productive endeavours, that can be directed in any direction necessary.

And the best money, as ‘borrow and spend’ disasters from across the world remind us, is earned money. So far, seven years in, the GDP is far less than in the Vajpayee years. But public spending on modernisation, infrastructure, welfare, the military machine, the railways, ports, airports, education, health, culture, has blossomed. These things, essentially investments, have a way of paying handsomely in the medium term.

There is a steady increase in Foreign Direct Investment (FDI). But we need the Chinese rate of growth of the three decades from 1980. Fuelled, not so much by exports as theirs was, but pumped up domestic demand.  Exports today are hampered by low growth in the buyer countries and pressure on margins.

Still, lateral shifts of manufacturing are promising. The opportunity from global disenchantment with China can do much for us if we work with a will.

A sharpening bipolarity between America and China is now an established reality. As they duke it out, the challenger China, has subverted or ignored most existing institutional mechanisms, the UN, G7, G20, many other fora, various protocols and agreements, international law.

China, particularly with regard to the East and South China Sea, various territorial and boundary disputes in its vicinity, says I don’t accept international laws and positions. It seeks, further to dominate the world with forward military bases and a growing blue water navy supported by its other military arms. Till recently, it was proud of its ‘wolf warrior’ diplomacy to counter all objections though this is somewhat muted post-covid.

America under Biden has been surprisingly decisive too. It has already removed missiles from Saudi Arabia, pulled out of Afghanistan, and turned Australia into its forward base in the Pacific looking squarely at China.

India’s own gradual ascendancy into a leading economy has sharpened rivalries. There are serious military threats from China and Pakistan and fomented internal security concerns. These are making fresh demands on its purse that cannot wait.

The march to a $5 trillion economy has become urgent. This, not only to lift most Indians towards first world levels of prosperity and well-being, but to keep the country safe.

Post Covid, or the most of it, as we approach the end of 2021, the Modi government seems determined to aim for double-digit growth in 2022. 

In preparation, a series of economic reforms have been unfolding. The bold step of the three new farm laws have started yielding good results.

The long-awaited repeal of the retrospective taxation that hit oil player Cairn and telecom’s Vodafone has taken place. In the aftermath, reforms to financially unburden the telecom sector have been so practical and dramatic that a near collapse has turned into green shoot optimism.

The much postponed bad banks have come, even as the non-performing assets ballooned to Rupees ten lakh crores. Some three to four lakh crores of it, mainly due to badly structured infrastructure loans, have happily been recovered by the lender banks themselves. The rest may involve partial recovery from asset-light borrowers. But all of it leaves the books of the high street private and PSU banks, some of which have changed ownership or been merged. This sets up a new lending cycle towards better results in the near future.

Exports, supported by government incentives and facilitation, have shown a great upswing of late -rice, mobile phones, vehicles, bullet-proof vests, software, data storage, components, engines, textiles, other raw materials and finished goods. We are emerging as the pharmacy to the world as the multiplicity of India made vaccines for Covid-19 have demonstrated. There is a lot of money in this area too.

Breaking through the tentacles of a powerful import lobby in military procurement, a host of joint ventures in the armaments space are gaining momentum. There are others, involving making parts of civil and military aircraft for US and European majors. 

The replacement for the superannuated Avros, with Airbus transports, will, for the most part be made by the Tata Group in JV here. Air India too is about to be privatised at long last and returned to the Tata Group.

The second generation Mk2 Tejas programme for single engine fighter jets, has been boosted with orders for 83 from the Air Force and the acquisition of 100 GE Aviation engines.

DRDO too has gone in for a JV with Rolls Royce in addition for the manufacture of a wide range of aircraft engines. India has also developed 1500 Hp and 750 Hp turbo-charged engines for its Main Battle Tank and Armoured Carriers. Ammunition manufacture has been reorganised in order to get out of the clutches of Communist trade unions that have engineered go-slows and man-made blockages for long.

A lot of the military manufacturing initiatives are achieving the dual objectives of becoming cost efficiently atmanirbhar while bypassing the rigmarole of technology go-slows and embargoes from the military export majors. This is very important in an every-country-for-itself atmosphere prevailing.

The armed forces are being structurally reorganised to form more integrated fighting groups involving all three services. A new Rocket management corps is on the anvil. Space warring capabilities are being developed. High altitude warfare battalions have been raised. There is increased recognition of the changing face of modern warfare.

This involves digital process, drones, armed drones, robotics, missile deployment, stealth technology, electronic and satellite surveillance,  space wars, missile shields, cyber warfare.

On ‘Civvy Street’ LIC is going in for a mammoth IPO, even as the Indian stock market is booming as a show of confidence in the future. A plethora of start-ups are not only accessing mega funds on the stock market but have put India in the top echelons of the global start up ecosphere.

The Chinese debt crisis is now spilling out into the open with the Evergrande real estate group with over $300 billion owed is trying to barter its way out on the point of default. Analysts have long predicted that the mountain of debt that fuelled Chinese growth, as indeed it did the American boom years, is not sustainable. The difference is that the US has the confidence of the world behind it but China does not.

Though China will do everything possible to control the financial and social fallout, it will still be highly preoccupied with containing the damage. Abroad, the Chinese getting paid in seized assets in sub-prime countries is also far from good enough.

India has a good chance to catch up. This will be assisted by the constitution of the QUAD and other outside followers of the same script such as France, Britain, Singapore, Vietnam, and probably, even Russia.

With a 67% approval rating in a recent CNX survey, the present Modi government is still overwhelmingly popular. It should therefore not only win most of the assembly elections including UP in 2022, but also the general election in 2024. Assuming the NDA gain another majority, they can implement their nationalist economic agenda till 2029 at least. And a fifteen-year run tends to ensure a further continuance as the opposition dies of political starvation.

Side by side we must continue making large gains in diplomacy, foreign affairs, manufacturing, robotics, cyber software, start-ups, modern high-yield agriculture, preventive medicine, cutting edge technology. High year on year growth will end our days of playing Gunga-Din, the water bearer – meeting the thirst of the developed world. A prosperous, modern, responsible, civilisationally-gifted India is to be our identity in the future. It is our duty to realise this and work towards it.

(1,395 words)

For: The Sunday Guardian

September 20^th, 2021

Gautam Mukherjee

 

 

What Makes For Conservatism?

What makes for conservatism? Is it a stiffening of attitude against chaos? Is conservatism a vote for order? Is order a fascist desire? Is chaos democracy? Ending short sentences with a question mark can be irritating. It is provocative. Like an attack dog on a leash, but an attack dog nonetheless.  

A push back against those that would disrupt and overthrow cannot be morally wrong. It is the bane of power to have to confront the rabble. Even the powerless masquerading as ignorant rabble. The rabble expects it. Not being put down spoils its aim. It needs the baton blow raining down on its back for its legitimacy. What does a provocateur do if it is ignored, or worse, treated kindly. It starts to be emasculated. It is stripped of power and salience.  This, shudder, shudder, is Gandhianism. Along with it comes the trappings- fasts, protests, blockades.

It is the reason that a so-called pluralistic democracy refuses to let go of the old man’s methods. Rapists, let alone so-called democrats, are deprived of their sense of dominance without the outrage their actions provoke. Murderers are stripped of meaning and mindfulness. Perverts are forgiven. Unfairness is condoned. It is the ultimate subversion.

When Christ practiced it, dying on the cross to underline his intent, he established a religion that thrived on persecution, and wilted without its sense of guilt and sin. In the hands of unbelievers or the lapsed it was nothing but empty cathedrals. Good for AA meetings, and classical music concerts for its acoustics. Pacifism in the face of aggression is revolutionary. Yes, but it is also a thwarting of karma that cannot go unpunished. And that is why, enigmatically, no good deed ever does go unpunished. The implication being that the ethical or good is just as premeditated as deliberate evil doing. Nothing is accidental or spontaneous. Doing good is a desire to overcome. It wants to win the battle, just as much as its opposite.

The Communists call this ebb and flow, this rubbing up of opposed viewpoints, the dialectic. It is grist to the mill of progress. Of course,  it is seen, Communist progress towards the goal of universal equality has many holes in it. Still, in less than a century, it has narrowed the gap between great disparities.

A pricking of conscience can only happen to humans because it is apparently the only species that has a conscience. But wouldn’t it be a travesty of justice if it is found out that that other creatures, animals, plants, birds, fishes, also have finer sensibilities? What if they have feelings that approximate, and are tantamount, expressed in nature in all its nobility, starkness and subtlety. Humanity can stop putting on airs.

But what can move forward the march of civilisation? Is it a questioning and challenging of the vested interests? Is it the unfolding of an ideology that brooks no opposition? Are great ideas the vehicles of ultimate destiny? Or is destiny made up of the stabs of predatory dominance? What ultimately prevails? Or is it a combination, of the old imperial bell, book and candle?

Are burning of libraries and destruction of civilisational evidence a boorish crime, or the tools for a great cleansing? How can one order supplant another otherwise?

What is moral in conservatism that wishes to establish its version of order by vanquishing the chaos engendered by its challengers? How is a bloodthirsty Maoist less deserving of his brand of coercion? Is the innate aggression and need to convert of Abrahamic religions moral? How can it be though, when it negates free will to the maximum extent possible, out of a dogmatic view of its own superiority.

Are we condemned to live in our chosen silos of belief in an eternal battle of civilisations? Might as right. It has been seen to be the solution throughout history, however nasty it may sound. We are wasting energy by seeking justifications when overwhelming the opposition is the only task. It is the great persuader on the path to victory. Everyone cannot win at the same time. The losers must accept their fate. And the winners must rejoice, even as they shrug off the labels fashioned by the vanquished.

But are we in an age when total victory is no longer possible? Too many forces cross each other out, balance powers and possibilities. It is a relative advantage that we must leverage. The implication is flux, of course. But then, how permanent were previous victories over the centuries for that matter? The seeds of a challenge are sown at the moment of triumph. After that, it is a season.

What then is the efficacy of conservatism. Through the ages, it has been seen to be a bulwark against barbarians at the gate. It uses traditions, rituals of permanence, as reassurance for itself. It upholds and seeks continuity. It resists overthrow even as new orders that supplant it play out their version of the same aspirations. It is perhaps an instinct of survival. To endure, as little changed by force as possible.

In India today we are experiencing a shifting of the tectonic plates. The basis that has served us for over seven decades is found to be a spurious importation in the main. Without the officers that tended those hedges, the garden has been lost to the wilderness. There is a deeper and earlier identity that is more attuned to the demands of the 21^st century, paradoxical as it may sound. The older culture is less restrictive, broader in scope, more inclusive of our millions of people. It is perhaps for this very openness that it was overthrown by a series of pointed conquests. But, happily it never died.

Today, when its votaries are back on top, it has found a new relevance. This is the essence of conservatism. That which endures and can keep up with the changing times.

(984 words)

For: Sirfnews

August 12^th, 2021

Gautam Mukherjee

 

The Watershed Years

Modi 2.0 at the two-year mark, on top of the 5 from Modi 1.0, exhibits both dynamism and moderation. It is difficult for its critics to get a proper grip. They have been trying for all of the seven years with meagre electoral and political results. And here comes another independence day celebration in a nation waking up to its confidence.

Maharashtra, the biggest Opposition prize, has been mired in corruption and controversy ever since the troika that currently runs it took over. Jharkhand, Rajasthan, Punjab, West Bengal, Kerala and possibly Tamil Nadu are strongly opposed to the BJP. However, they have achieved little change out of it.

Modi continues onwards, with his special blend of welfarism for the poorest, economic reform for the rich, diplomacy and infrastructure development for the nation. He is boosting military capability, equipment and morale to the frustration of China. Then there is the undercutting and reorganising of a recalcitrant bureaucracy. The nudging out of smug, underperforming politicos from the council of ministers. The nabbing of the corrupt from years before, and the curious extending of a more or less sincere olive branch to the suspicious minorities.

The forbearance that the current government has shown in the face of vicious and sometimes bloody provocation underlines its political savvy. But it dismantles the old order with the Pakistani style and substance of a thousand cuts- a dropped programme here, a name change there. It is good to learn from one’s environment, and Modi is no slouch at it.

Modi 2.0 occasionally floors critics and tormentors only when they think they have it on the run. When they least expect it. When they are caught flat-footed and unawares. There is no pogroming. On the contrary, there is a carefully cultivated meekness of demeanour. The NDA takes advantage of obstruction and chaos in parliament to zip past bill after bill into law. If the Opposition won’t allow discussion, then so be it.

Still, Twitter has indeed suspended Rahul Gandhi’s account, albeit temporarily. Congress has risen to the bait. Instead of trolling every move of Modi using other platforms without interruption, it is now diverted to doing battle with Twitter instead. Timing. Modi is good at it. Even his closest compatriots don’t know what he is hugging to his chest. And what is coming next.

And now, with the worst of Covid behind us, the economy is growing again. Starting on a low base line means the slow downs that plagued it pre Covid are now history. Big numbers will enthuse the future. New, particularly digital initiatives, combined with a crowd of start-ups, many promising, seeking and jostling to line up IPOs, will catapult India into the modern way of doing business.

The old behemoths, not to be left behind, are now providing the 5G networks and getting into silicon-chip making and lithium-ion batteries.  

The traditional physical trading in goods, extant from time immemorial, is becoming redundant to an extent, and expensive. First, money didn’t have to physically move, from some decades ago. Now, arbitrage is rendered transparent. Where is the mileage in buying cheap from secret locations in order to sell dear in the demand areas? The web is a vast marketplace. Paying for arbitrage is not as necessary. The middle man has to update his game. And the great thing is, he has, with technology as his most reliable partner. It’s change or perish.

China is already out-of-date with its development, debt-trap imperialism. The East India Company is lousy inspiration for Xi. Mao is no better. 2021 cannot be retro-fitted into the Mao mould of bloodthirsty poetry. Mao, Stalin, The East India Company, can only supply the demand for sadistic fantasies or nostalgic motifs now. The robber barons of today are all software jockeys. Not hackers Xi, but genius strength software developers. Chinese aeroplane fighters, copies, are beaten in every war game by almost any make of war plane. The physical conscripted Chinese soldier is a no experience wimp.

5G will vastly speed things up for now. And in time, not much time, it will seem slow, clumsy, and be supplanted. Three months is a decade in IT.

The Internet, long in the making and growing, reigns in everything from design, despatch, merchandising, farming, medicine, defence manufacturing. Nobody does anything from scratch anymore.  Very little is successfully misrepresented or hidden.

Buying a jet engine from the experts is better than developing it oneself. Because the tweaking and stepping up from the best available, is the fast forward future of manufacturing.

Ideas proliferate digitally, and work is done from home and remote locations as much as from an office. Data processing and storage is another huge new frontier. Even Bond-style real-life and movie villains now seek to destroy by introducing software viruses into data storage. We will need data commandos to deal with them and not just steady and freezing air conditioning.

India has intelligent and highly educated software engineers that speak good English, the lingua franca of global commerce. The Chinese are no match in a pitched meritocracy. Indians may not steal or copy as only the dragon can, but it is spread all over the world’s cutting-edge technology development centres. At home is anywhere these days. There is no deficit of geography to speak of.

Utilities yes, are very, very, important. Must be plentiful, affordable, reliable. India has a good deal of catching up to do. But, conceptually, it can be taken as read.

Raw materials cannot be usurped and purloined like centuries past. The robbed become instantly aware. So do the fences and customers. Piratic leverage has to outdo swifter piratic leverage.

The Internet always wanted to usher in a free and level playing field. Now the server masters and the network backboners too are on the mat. The markets, from raw material to end consumption, know their worth. They have the true leverage.

Perhaps national sovereignty will maintain its edge for a few centuries yet. Not so much because of necessity. But primeval fears and mutual suspicion of being murdered by marauders. But, just as castles and moats, kings, lords, ladies, blood aristocracies have mostly gone, so too will sovereignty be divested of a lot of its trappings. The free access commerce that cannot be legislatively or militarily stopped will see to it. It’s a satellite world. Space is on its way to being colonised.

The only losers will be those who rely on the old methods. India in its Vedantic wisdom is definitely the wisest nation on earth. As long as the BJP redefines what modernity means, we will be alright. Modernity is not in the denial of history and overlaying it with a procession of Central Asian Moghuls that found their glory days here. It is wrapped up in its  Vedantic embrace. We are on our way to rediscovering our true selves, and no penny-ante Communist doctrine developed in a vacuum can stop us.  Nor can an exhausted Abrahamic ethos, born in the medieval desert, unreformed, bedevilled by mirages, do India more than the slightest damage.

(1,174 words)

For: Sirfnews

August 10^th, 2021

Gautam Mukherjee

 

 

Of Wogs, Gollywogs And Bhakts

The term Wog- an acronym for Westernised Oriental Gentleman, was popular in the last stages of the Imperial Age, aka the first part of the 20^th century. By which time in the continuum, numbers of Wogs had access, not only to Western ideas, but to the West itself. This covered all the Brown and slant-eyed races – regarded as orientals and exotics one and all. India had its caste system, its untouchables, its notions of pollution and purity, its ancient tyrannies. China tied up and crippled the feet of its women.

The other currency-Gollywog, popularised by Enid Blyton is being challenged lately by the Black Lives Matter Movement. It’s been a long road. There was the highly musical and entertaining Black & White Minstrels Show, now expunged, from every browser, even on the Dark Web. There was the common or garden Hollywood of the 1940’s with the maid, butler, driver, pool-cleaner parts reserved for coloreds, the blacker the better. There was apartheid.

All such racial slotting, its horrible history, and its implied slurs are mostly gone from plain sight now. There is racism and ethnic hatred, obdurate as ever, but under the surface. The once oppressed have also taken to hitting back. But there are also laws against it in most of the West. It recently sent a policeman who killed a young and innocent Black, George Floyd, to jail for 22 years in America.

Today you have Hollywood films in which Blacks and Whites routinely make love, even marry, and procreate. There is talk of a black James Bond. A black Anne Boleyn has already essayed the role. The Klu Klux Clan and organisations of White Supremacists merely exist alongside.  

But who were the Gollywogs of Enid Blyton fame? They were Blacks, who did not look like Masai Tribesmen, or Hottentots for that matter. These  dressed up in Western clothes- Top Hats, Spats, watches on chains, extravagant cravats. But they were always painted in as rogues.

Enid Blyton’s Gollywogs were thieves, fences for stolen goods, confidence tricksters, black marketeers. In her books they weren’t pimps inclined to violence, but that is probably only because she wrote for children.  Gollywog Town, a separate district in Toy Town, partied all night, bottles held aloft in white gloved hands. It might have been all too much for Noddy and Big Ears, but sounded sublime to the young reader.

The spread of  Asian & Oriental Woggery, and the snickers it elicited, was mostly thanks to the advent of commercial passenger steamship cum cruise vessels. These were put on the sea by the likes of Cunard and the P&O -The Peninsular And Oriental Steam Navigation Company.  Early cruises went from an English port to the Iberian Peninsula. Soon they were sailing to Bombay, Singapore,Shanghai, Sydney, New York.

The Oriental Wogs, which included the mixed races, quite often knew how to dance to In The Mood. That WWII rage by Glen Miller and his Band did not call for the formal training of ballroom dancing. Though there was that too, at the weekend dance halls where men met women. Our Wogs were desperate to be accepted, at least to a workable degree. They were willing to be more White than White. In the way, of course, was the tar-brush, the distressing reversion to sing-song in speech, fleshier faces, fuller lips, a certain shortness at the shoulder.

But then, the Wogs, came to encompass travelling Arabs, Turks, Armenians, Jews, Malays, Chinese. It was one thing for Roman Catholics to convert a swarthy, curly-haired, black-eyed Yesu into the blond blue-eyed saviour on the cross. But altogether another to make sense of hordes, smelling of strange foods, and speaking in tongues.  

MK Gandhi tried his hand at being a Wog while studying to be a lawyer in London. He dressed the part and took dancing lessons. But he changed course after being heaved off a South African first-class train compartment. His days as a Wog started to transform into that of a political activist. The sartorial effect was completed in India, some years on, with a loincloth and a chaddar. It was the dress of a a poor Indian peasant in the hotter parts of the subcontinent And it was handspun Khadi, made on his 0wn wobbly charkha. All of it was a big hit. It made a potent economic and political p0int. There were bonfires of mill-made Manchester cotton.  And MKG turned into a Mahatma, a Christ-like general striking Apostle of Peace.

His disciple, Jawaharlal Nehru, also changed out of his Harrow and Lincoln’s Inn suits. And later, the tropical gabardine too. Now it was  white cloth astrakans, churidars, sherwanis and a rose-bud. The look of a future secular prime minister, one part Moghul, one past homespun. Less emphasis on the Kashmiri Hindu Brahmin except for the title of Pandit.

But, Nehru’s was a woggery of the mind that even MK Gandhi could not erase. He kept his Englishman trapped in an Indian body airs and graces intact till his dying day. Overlaid, of course, with fashionable Socialism and a post-colonial but very impractical internationalism. After all, the gifted amateur was revered above the mundane professional in English sporting circles.  

And the entire ICS and IAS/IFS permanent bureaucracy followed suit, with its brown sahib ways, the citizen be damned. This, for the seven decades since 1947. It wore a little thinner with time, and more so after liberalisation in 1991. Suddenly, India stopped being basket-case poor and squalid and began to grow its economy  at more than 6% per annum.

Today’s IAS/IFS aspirants have a changed profile. They are less privileged people, often from the provinces rather than the metro cities, content with government salaries, perquisites and power. This even as the sons and daughters of the brown sahib bureaucrats mostly emigrated abroad or went into business or the multinational private sector.

The phenomenon today, of a ‘committed bureaucracy’, demanded first by Indira Gandhi put paid to the original intent of integrity and service. It came to be composed of left-leaning people willing to do the bidding of their political masters. These, as a crawling sub-species of the body politic, not averse to aiding and abetting all forms of corruption. But fortunately, these people too are retiring, as they are in the judiciary and academia. Thus, making space at last for the phenomenon of the Bhakt.

The Bhakt is a committed nationalist but eschews corruption. Ditto his political masters. So the time for both has come.Since 2014, a very different dispensation came to power at the Centre and in a number of the States. These new people speak better in Hindi and other regional languages, notably Gujarati, and wear saffron and red Raj Tilaks. They don’t generally come from the big cities. They speak in Ramayan and Mahabharata inspired allegories. They tend towards vegetarianism and don't drink alcohol, but are quick to step away from annoying any in the fold who differ.

 To the earlier order, this is the invasion of the hordes from the hinterland. The ingress of unsophisticated Bharat into the corridors of power and legislation. Overwhelmingly Hindu in composition, they are harbingers of a Hindu Rashtra to come.

A clash of civilisations has ensued almost immediately, as the minorities cannot be convinced that such a government will also look after their interests. That the legislatures apart, the judiciary, academia, the bureaucracy, the police, perhaps even the armed forces are being saffronised means a very different future awaits India. It is likely to be prosperous, nationalist, somewhat militarist, confident of its place in the world, and uncaring of illegitimate or motivated criticism.

As yet, the Bhakt is still emergent. It is depicted in caricature by the established mainstream media and parts of Bollywood. The voter could always be ignored once elections were over, but this time  it has thrown up its own into parliament and the state assemblies. To fight the Bhakt is clearly a losing battle. A losing battle as long as the voters stay loyal to the saffron surge.

This alone will see to it, even in a slow and chaotic democratic process, that the old certainties are discarded. Indeed some of it as accomplished is evident in the six years. More will change, just as securely as the end of Article 370 and 35A in J&K. Even its most ardent votaries do not seriously expect its return.

One day soon, just as the Wog and Gollywog have been discarded, the false secularism and inadequate, unproductive socialism will also be relegated to the past. India belongs to the Bhakt now. It is no use calling this a communal phenomenon, or the action of narrow-minded revanchist chaddiwalas fond of cows, bovine urine and faeces.

There will be many changes made, despite the desperate howling of those who no longer matter, to make this abundantly clear. Symbols are revered because they translate into expressions of reality. They create new narratives, new assumptions, aspirations, facts. A new history is uncovered, with links and pride in a hallowed past.

Ridicule won’t stop Ayurveda, Yoga, a Uniform Civil Code, Population Control, a military industry, the identifying of real citizens from illegals, an economic prosperity never envisaged or seen before. Ancient Indian wisdom from the Vedas will guide this country in place of Marxist importations and distortions of history, and be admired afresh by the world. Right now, the Bhakt phenomenon is still a work in progress. If 2024 and 2029 belong to it after the national delimitation exercise, it will mean the change that has come cannot be reversed.

(1,588 words)

June 26^th, 2021

For: Sirfnews

Gautam Mukherjee

 

Red China’s Pandemic Crime Will Wreck Xi’s Ambitions 

The noose is finally tightening. China has presented a golden opportunity to the US. For long years the US has appeased Red China despite its sharp trade practices, its espionage, the one-sided trade deficits, its diplomatic belligerence, its military sabre-rattling. All this because of its reliance on a profitable supply chain. It was a win-win situation for which some irritants were best ignored. But now, the world has lost 3.5 million dead to Covid of which the US accounts for over 591,265.

The world’s first global Bio-warfare indemnities and reparations are about to fall due. But only sovereign executive action by the US can make them stick. Even US based law suits are unlikely to yield enforceable results.

China, said Biden recently, is fixing to ‘eat our lunch’. The President, with decades of experience in government, knows a calibrated confrontation with China cannot be avoided, or put off any longer.

The decision to fix responsibility for Covid was taken soon after a two-hour conversation between Biden and Jinping, with the latter conceding nothing except a willingness to cooperate on climate change.  And like the ‘thug’ Biden called Xi informally, Jinping warned of a ‘disaster for both’ if penalised for Covid.

China may well be running scared under the bluster. It is already reeling under massive internal and external debt, large scale unemployment, food shortages, simmering domestic discontent. Its GDP and exports are sharply down.

Former President Trump imposed tariffs and a trade war but the indemnities were waiting till the pandemic could be managed. Germany wanted to impose $160 billion for itself, but Trump was thinking in trillions.

China is also hard-pressed to continue financing its external infrastructure projects. However, with massive censorship, repression, propaganda and ‘wolf warrior’ diplomacy, China strives to presents a business-as-usual façade. Course correcting a little lately, Xi has asked his diplomats to become ‘lovable’ and reach out to international media. 

Biden has tasked the US ‘intelligence agencies’ including the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). This is in supercession of all the doctorly opinionating so far, and is a clearcut geopolitical move. 

In the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) centenary year, the foregone conclusions in the intelligence report will be submitted, unless Biden wants to absolve the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV), of all blame. This, in less than 90 days from now.

Assuming the report says Covid-19 is a Chinese-made virus developed at the WIV that deliberately combined bat viruses with the as yet incurable AIDS virus so that it could transmit to humans, what is to be done?

China will have to pay for accidentally or deliberately leaking the virus. And then spreading it via at least 400,00o infected or carrier Chinese travelling from Wuhan, not to Beijing or Yunnan, but to the US, Europe, and other parts of the world, for over 90 days. Three months of spreading the virus before China announced the existence of Covid-19.

First, there will be formal indictments. Then, massive demands by way of fines and reparations. Avoiding the International Court of Justice that China does not recognise, and which has no power to enforce its decisions, is desirable. Ditto the UN where China has compromised many of its agencies, including the WHO. And where it possesses a veto in the UNSC. 

If China refuses to pay, as is expected, the economic sanctions, confiscations and bans will have to begin. Both Chinese exports and imports will have to bear the brunt. Chinese services and infrastructure companies will probably also be banned.

The American actions taken will provide a template for countries the world over. The effort will be to severely punish China economically. Sovereign or diplomatic immunity will not be infringed upon to avoid retaliation.

Visas to Chinese nationals may be denied. Chinese organisations, often used for spying, may be expelled. Ditto, Chinese students and academics. Chinese assets and investments in the US can be seized as compensation. Share values in all Chinese companies listed on US bourses can be captured.

India’s imports from China were at under $67 billion before most, plus services and companies were banned after Chinese aggression in Eastern Ladakh.  That too was trying to take advantage of the Indian preoccupation with the pandemic.

The US imported almost $500 billion worth from China in 2020. Many countries, on their own initiative, including India and Canada, have banned Chinese 5G firms like Huawei, fearing espionage.

There will need to be a series of economic actions and sanctions to compensate for the trillions of dollars in US damages. America could redirect all imports from China to other countries. It supplies the US with electrical machinery, other machinery, furniture, bedding, toys, sports equipment, plastics, food and snack items. Services from China are worth $ 20 billion.

In retaliation China will probably ban $125 billion worth of US imports. Compared to the damage done to America, this loss would be miniscule. Besides, this pandemic as bio-warfare was planned by the Chinese military two years ago. This is documented.

While up-to-date figures are still being compiled, the US economy contracted 3.5% in 2020, something not seen since 1946. The US budget deficit at nearly $3.5 trillion was at 16% of GDP. To bounce back, huge stimulus packages are being processed as part of an unprecedented $ 6 trillion annual budget by the Biden administration. 

America has suffered over $ 12 trillion in losses during 2020, plus equivalent indirect losses. That is almost two years US gross domestic product (GDP). Half way through 2021, a third wave or more only has the massive and costly vaccination drive to stave it off.

The US unemployment rate in May 2020 was at 14.7% up from just 3.5% before the pandemic. This has not been seen since the Great Depression.

Many countries, led by the US example, will not buy Chinese despite temporarily increased costs. This will create new trade linkages outside Chinese influence. This will be awkward at first, because China has long been a supplier of raw materials, manufacturing parts and finished goods. It will also be monitored and prevented from channelling its goods via proxies.

China has penetrated the sovereignty of many of its debtor nations like a latter day East India Company ruthlessly seizing territory. It has inadvertently shown the way on how to deal with it. Seizing Chinese assets seems eminently fair.

All this, while checking and curbing China’s military and diplomatic attempts to wiggle out of the situation, and its pursuit of world domination.

In the end, it must be remembered that a prosperous Red China was created by the Nixon-Mao entente in the Seventies. But China only began its double-digit growth under the leadership of Deng Xiaoping in the 1980s. 3o years later, China was a US fuelled powerhouse and 2^nd biggest economy in the world. But this prosperity turned its head and changed its attitude. 

The CCP, its militant generals and supreme leader now think it is time to topple the US. However, the unseemly haste of this pandemic, engineered to bring the world to its economic knees, may be China’s Pearl Harbour moment.

To check any military adventurism, coalitions of battle-hardened military checks by multiple countries will indeed be active in the Indian Ocean and the Indo-Pacific. There will be an unprecedented policing of all the possible flash points in the land and seas of the region, and heightened alerts elsewhere. China’s belt and road, silk route, and string of pearls initiatives will be constrained using diplomatic pressure on its junior partners. Those who supply China with raw materials, petroleum and even access, will be asked to stop if necessary. The Straits of Malacca, a main conduit for Chinese supplies to its Pacific ports will be watched and monitored. Along with Hambantota, Gwadar, Chabahar, Djibouti, and elsewhere where China has bases or access.

China could, in turn, menace non-nuclear states in the Pacific/South/ East China Sea region such as Vietnam, Japan, Australia, New Zealand, the Philippines, Taiwan. It could also move against India knowing that nuclear weapons cannot be used. 

However, once China undertakes any overt military action, it will allow others to retaliate, and possibly expose it’s lack of battle experience.

There has been a grave miscalculation on Xi Jinping’s part. It is the failure of megalomaniacs throughout history who underestimate their adversaries. This hubris will, instead destroy the hold of Xi Jinping and the CCP over the hopefully titled Middle Kingdom.

(1,397 words)

June 3rd, 2021

For: The Sunday Guardian

Gautam Mukherjee