Passionate About India

A couple of interesting reasons prompted me to write this editorial on the Special Economic Zones (SEZ) Act 2005. Firstly, the amount of attention it has received, and secondly, the entire logic with which the Ministry of Commerce and Industry is driving the Indian SEZ bandwagon. Though it took the ministry decades to realise the potential of SEZs, the concept finally got kicked off in the year 2005. The bill was passed by both houses in 2005, which eventually was called the SEZ Act. Once passed, the Indian policy makers have decided of approve, hold your breath (!), a staggering 237 SEZs for the country! The logic for such staggering madness: to create an enabling environment for investments and counter China in its own turf, as it is universally believed that those are the Chinese SEZs that are critical reasons for China’s phenomenal economic success and are also instrumental in attracting voluminous FDI to China. But the reality is, the experiment that started in 1979 with four SEZs...

After Saddam Hussein was hanged to death in a barbaric manner, preceded by a mockery of a trial remote controlled by Uncle Sam, arguably the biggest and most brutal bully in the history of the world, news channels like CNN showed sanitised footage of the former Iraqi dictator meeting his maker. If you believed the footage shown by global giants like CNN and Fox News, the hanging, in itself a deeply offensive and repulsive act, was done in as ‘dignified’ a manner as possible. Till a few years back, people like you and me had no choice but to rely on media outlets controlled by the neo-Imperial powers of the West to get information about events across the world. Remember the first Gulf War of 1990-91, when merciless pounding of Iraq by American bombs was shown on CNN almost like a Star Wars kind of movie or a fantasy? Fortunately for the world, media behemoths like CNN, Fox News and even BBC, who behave more like propaganda instruments of the West, can no longer hoodwink people of the wo...

That’s Bush’s way of celebrating the New Year. He thought his obvious personal vendetta was the gift that the world was waiting for in this New Year. And as has happened often with many ill-educated fools like him in the past, Bush too gave it to the world with a shameless pretence of righteousness, thinking what he personally thought to be right was indeed what was right and worthy of celebration. In previous such hangings, I remember how the pernicious Pakistani dictator Zia-ul-Haq had taken personal revenge in a similar way and blatantly used his country’s judicial machinery to get Zulfi qar Ali Bhutto hanged. But then, that was imaginable – Bhutto, after all, was a key political opponent he wanted to get rid of. Plus, Zia was manipulating his own country’s judicial system for the same. But what has happened with Saddam is unimaginable! It’s the first time perhaps that a country has interfered directly in another nation’s political process, arrested a leader it wanted to get rid of ...