Passionate About India

The war on terror was never on terror. With every passing day come more revelations, humiliating and embarrassing, on how the entire concept of weapons of mass destruction was manufactured to suit US President George W. Bush’s plans to capture the Iraqi oil fields . . . and now as the US-dictated dummy government runs Iraq, and almost all oil and infrastructure building contracts are pocketed by American companies (Bush and Dick Cheney it seems had started deciding on the companies like Bechtel, Flour Daniel etc. for awarding of the contracts even before they started the war on Iraq) . . . the result is quiet evident . . . oil prices at one time all set to touch the $100 per barrel mark are now hovering around the half way mark. And Americans are happily guzzling oil in their heavy duty SUV’s . . . after the destruction of the twin towers instead of finding out the al-Qaeda terrorists, Bush started focussing on all those who, according to him, were evil including the Saddam Hussein-led...

I knew there must be more to it than meets the eye when I read media reports about the latest move by the Prime Minister to send Indian bureaucrats to American universities to improve their ‘governance skills’. Since he took office in May 2004, the honourable Prime Minister has time and again emphasised the crying and urgent need for reforms in the Indian bureaucracy. Many a time, he has used public platforms to assert that India cannot shine for its deprived and disposed citizens unless Indian bureaucrats become more transparent, efficient and accountable. He has even chanted the ‘corporate’ mantra of promoting bureaucrats solely on the basis of merit and performance. Could hapless Indians, who are forever at the mercy of the whims and fancies of Indian bureaucrats, even dream of such a thing happening in the country? I think their dreams will be dashed. The Prime Minister may be an honourable man; but the ‘system’ in India is ensuring that his noble intentions will never be translate...

What do you do when you don’t have solutions to the most pertinent problems devastating the world? Well, you just form a forum of like minded, power hungry and ayesayers, find an exotic resort in Europe and discuss the problems for a few days in the most obscenely luxurious environs and pledge to meet next year again with some new issues to discuss, albeit without any substantial solutions. This is the best way to define a forum most ceremoniously called the ‘World Economic Forum’. From which viewpoint it is a ‘world’ forum, is hard to comprehend. It can be termed a world forum if and only if the world is just about the US and Europe. And since it is not, the World Economic Forum (WEF) is in no way a global forum. So what is it? Well, to begin with, the World Economic Forum is a private entity and not essentially one, which is necessarily represented by all the nation states. Initiated by Professor Klaus M. Schwab (who has been famous for equating the anti globalisation protesters with...

I still remember reading somewhere that a few years ago, when a contingent of police in an Indian metropolis had gone to confiscate some contraband computers and CDs, all that they did was to seize the monitors (assuming them to be the computers, while they left the CPUs behind) and contracted labourers to staple all the seized CDs (as they felt that they might get infected by some ‘dreaded’ computer virus). This might sound hilarious to many, but this incidence reveals more than a crude joke. Whenever you think of an Indian policeman, the picture that evolves is: semi-literate men (as there are hardly any women), armed with antiquated weapons (the worst of them date back to the era of World War I and the best to four decades back), a pittance of a salary (breeding unabashed corruption), stained and un-ironed uniforms (showcasing the attitude), rusty vehicles, overstretched working hours (as there is one policeman for almost 700 citizens), and with a constant fear of persecution from t...

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 ...