Why Modi needs to be Modi’fied

OUTCOME: STATE PATRONAGE

Though crony capitalism is not the want, perhaps a modified model...

Nothing is right unless it gives results and nothing is wrong unless it fails to produce any results. There has been considerable criticism for state patronage in private business. It all started with the setting up Ratan Tata’s ‘prestigious’ Nano project in West Bengal. To encourage Ratan Tata, the West Bengal government agreed to provide a loan of Rs. 200 crore at a shockingly low interest rate of 1%. Tata (perhaps correctly) left West Bengal despite his “gun to the temple” theory; and entered straight into the alms of Gujarat. If the Left can do it right, the Right wants to do a Left it seems. This time, the Modi government has assured more gifts for Ratan Tata with a promise to provide a loan of Rs.9,570 crore (five times of what West Bengal promised) with an interest rate of 0.1% (whoa!!!) that is payable after 20 years. One wonders whether the Nano will also be made available on such lucrative rates to its customers. But wait, there’s more! Modi has also provided land worth another Rs.1,000 crore. Similar cases are strewn across (refer B&E’s Crony Capitalism issue, Feb 5, 2009). Eg, the Maharashtra government recently announced free land for all industrialists who agreed to invest in backward regions and hold 80% of the job for local people. These incidences have drawn national attention and brought severe criticism for the government’s irresponsibility and lack of accountability. It is true that the government has spawned generations after generations of crony capitalists. But rather than blindly criticise the government and hack off the State’s connect with the private sector, this is a good time to ruminate and work out a better model of an efficient public-private partnership. Given the fact that leaving projects with government departments more or less achieves nothing, private companies should be provided support albeit on a commercial basis (rather than on the back of questionable subsidies).

A beggar means an Arab?!?!

RACIST: ENGLISH DICTIONARIES

And the US ex-Veep was a Dick! Online dictionaries shock in racism

Why this hasn’t created a global controversy is a wonder to us! Over time, the world has seen the emergence of different kinds of racists; English dictionaries now join the inglorious club. To start off with, the San Francisco based online dictionary, www.freethesaurus.net, provides the synonyms of various English words. Imagine our surprise when we noticed that the synonym for the word ‘beggar’ is given as ‘Arab’. That for the word ‘terrorist’ are ‘Castroist, Communist, Leninist, Maoist and Marxist’. A ‘loafer’ is again our lucky ‘Arab’; an ‘atheist’ is a ‘blasphemer’, and so on so forth! If freethesaurus.net was too free for our digestion, Webster’s dictionary churns it further, hilariously defining ‘fundamentalism’ as a movement in American Protestanism that arose in the 20th century. The Oxford dictionary rocks the cradle by defining ‘fundamentalism’ as “strict maintenance of ancient or fundamental doctrines of any religion, especially Islam.” There, we get it now; how English tutored kids understand Islam.Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn was embroiled in a censorship controversy recently. The repeated use of the word ‘Negro’ in the classic saw virulent objections from African-American community. While the teaching community tried to justify Twain’s work on its literary value, the naysayers said that by that logic, even Hitler’s concepts would qualify as quite ‘literary’ in comparison. Well, while we personally stick to the literary stand, we also know there are some things you can change and some you cannot. Online dictionaries surely are the biggest hypocrites here that can be changed and should be regulated on their usage at the soonest. But yes, there are some synonyms that can never be changed. Richard Cheney is the former US Vice President. You got it, ‘Dick’ is what he’ll be called years hence too...

Can Obama ‘barrack’ racism?

RACISM: THE US
Believe it or not, the world will witness the resurgence of a new era of racism than the end of it...


Obama’s win in the US Presidential election and his swearing in as the first African-American President was predicted to be a case study on the beginning of a new era But perhaps history doesn’t want it to happen that way. And thus even before the euphoria over his historic swearing in has settled down, the dark side of the American racism has started raising its dirty head. And for some it was not absolutely unexpected either. And the more unfortunate thing is that even Obama’s charisma and his incredible campaign for nearly one and a half years could not bridge much of the deep divide that run deep between the Whites and the Blacks of the US.President elect Barack Obama himself was skeptical about it. His confession at a civil rights group’s convention stating – ‘our work is not over, mere electing me President doesn’t mean our work is over, we got more work to do’ to the NAACP bears testimony to it. In fact, the ugly aspect of racism was blatantly evident in the presidential election result itself. The voting pattern between two presidential candidates- John McCain and Barack Obama was biased and discriminatory. A closer scrutiny at the voting pattern reveals that McCain won greater support in white dominated counties of states like Arkansas, Oklahoma, Tennessee and Northern Texas. For example, about 80% of the voters in Arkansas are Whites and 70% of them unanimously voted for McCain. The same was witnessed in case of Obama who equally gained greater support from Blacks and minority groups. Research reveals that 67% of Latinos and 62% of Asian voters voted in favour of Obama. It wasn’t a surprise that 88-95% of Black voters who comprise 13% of total the US population unhesitatingly supported him. Well, even the most die hard optimist who would love to find a silver lining in it would accept rather grudgingly that if this does not exemplify racism then nothing else perhaps does. However, moving further, what was a little more horrifying than this was the fissures among the Democrat leaders. Reports state that when Obama was to take oath, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid was busy convincing Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich and other Democract leaders to replace Obama’s vacancy at the Senate by any of the two White women (Veteran Affairs Chief Tammy Duckworth or Illinois Attorney General Lisa Madigan) and rejecting the three potential Black candidates namely Jesse Jackson, Jr. Danny Davis and Emil Jones.

Yet the fissures run deeper than what is visible to naked eyes. Bruno Serato, the Presidential-themed restaurant owner in the Anaheim, White House, e-mailed his announcement to some of his several high profile customers that he has dedicated a special room to Obama as has been the customary in the presidential theme (in the past he dedicated similar rooms for Nixon, Reagon, Carter, Kennedy, Washington and Jefferson). But then this time, he literally got the shock of his life with strange and revulsive responses from some of his regular customers. Some of the replies indicated utter disregard for Obama. Later when Serato revealed some of the angry responses to the press, one read as follows , ‘I am not an Obama supporter, I could never be and as much as having an African-American in the White House could be a good thing, having one with Marxist ideals is certainly not a good thing! I will not be patronising your restaurant, much less the Obama Room.’ The next one goes as ‘Do not insult us with a Barack Obama room. … You have no idea whether he is a great leader or a hopeless socialist. You may regret your hasty judgement of what he will do to this country. May you remain Orange County’s hidden treasure with the emphasis on Hidden.’ The one as ‘you must be kidding? He didn’t do anything yet other than weaken our internal security. May be you could house all the Gitmo internees there instead.’ Moreover, tensions between the national and state security forces are not at all healthy for the US or its president. No one can kill an American President without involvement of someone from its own intelligence forces (read: Vantage Point). Obama’s failure to replace FBI director Robert S. Mueller reveals Obama’s hard struggle against racism. Muller was appointed FBI director in 2001 by former President, George W. Bush and was obvious to be replaced by someone nominated by the next President. When Obama pronounced his time tested aide Sandy Berger as the next FBI director, Muller didn’t agree to resign and made it clear that he intends to complete his first ten years term which will be over by 2011.
In another case, though Obama succeeded to replace the CIA’s director by the former Chief of Staff, Leon Panetta, he had to face huge criticism from press, polity and public. Adding salt to the woes, the relation between the President and New York Police Department (NYPD) is exemplified by the recent cartoon controversy in New York Post. In it, two NYPD policemen were shown shooting a chimpanzee with a caption that read, ‘they’ll have to find someone else to write the next stimulus bill.’This agitated Black civil rights activists. These issues raised questions over the extent of control Obama has on the intelligence and security establishments of US. One has to remember that US is nothing much without its key intelligence agencies and the world’s most sophisticated armed forces. Amidst all these, the arrest of two Tennessee guys- Daniel Cowart and Paul Schlesselmen who were planning to kill 102 African-American children and then assassinate Obama vindicates the resurgence of white racists and reminds the assassination of another American President John F. Kennedy. It’s better to hope less than to expect that Obama can completely end racism. He can at best abolish it from English language. If he does, it would just be the word and not its essence that would be wiped from earth and especially from the US. Poor Obama.

Alright, Hallelujah! What next?

INFLUENCE: RELIGIOUS LEADERS
How religious leaders can help the world for its betterment

A close scrutiny exemplifies the fact that be it the Pope in Christianity or Dalai Lama in Buddhism, Rabbis in Judaism or Imams in Islam, religious leaders do all have implicit and explicit influences in the lives of even non-devotees.To start off with, Pope Benedict XVI. Given the current global scenario, each of the Pope’s visits, addresses to the common people, official statements marks history. For instance, his mind-boggling address to the youths of Germany, inter-faith talks with Jews and Muslims and many other similar visits to Brazil, Austria, Poland, Spain, Turkey and the US have been overwhelmingly successful in garnering more international attention than his religious designation should warrant. His recent visit to Africa might have drawn some controversies due to his remarks on condoms as ‘not [being] the solution to end HIV/AIDS’, but what one misses is that his visit in itself helped Africa get enough attention from world authorities. Even Angolan President Eduardo dos Santos, despite the Pope’s ‘condom-controversy’, had to accept, “We are very grateful for all the advice that you have given to our people.” Similarly, the Israeli chief Rabbi, Shlomo Amar, has contributed considerably by reaccepting the Falash Mura community – a group of Ethiopian Jews who converted to Christianity – and also fighting for the rights of non-Israeli immigrant Jews. Similarly, calls or addresses by Muslim leaders like the 49th Imam, Prince Karim Al Husseini or Imam of Jama Masjid remain very prominent. And the Dalai Lama’s politico-religious influence is in another seventh sphere already. Quite clearly, if with great power comes great responsibility, then would it be too churlish for us to comment that with great responsibility comes great duty? Towards global peace?

Election elects the unelected!?!

MANDATES: PARADOX
Major countries in the world hold elections but and most of them end up electing the unelected


Imagine the course of the history if Al Gore were to be President of the US instead of George W. Bush and Zharmakhan Tuyaqbay the opposition leader of Kazakhstan instead of Nursultan Nazarbayev. This might seem like a fairytale but would not have been impossible had the world had ‘free and fair’ elections. Thus, here we attempt to analyze how fraud and gun power in elections have changed the world’s history which otherwise would have been quite different .Often countries across the world hold elections which end up electing the ‘unelected’. A bigger irony is that even dictators hold elections to vindicate the fact to the world that how democratic they are. Yet no prizes for guessing how fair those elections eventually turn out to be. Consider this: Enver Hoxha, former communist leader of a South European country, Albania garnered 99.90% of the vote (upset because his expectation was 99.99%) which not only surprised and outraged the Albanians but the world at large. Perhaps the most notorious of all elections was witnessed in Iraq during the regime of Saddam Hussein. His rule in Iraq since 1979 notwithstanding, the first presidential election took place in Iraq in 1995 - framing a referendum where no one from the opposition parties was allowed to contest. Iraqis were given a paper ballot asking “Do you agree that Saddam Hussein should be the President of the Republic of Iraq for another seven years?” And all the option they were given was just to tick ‘yes’ or ‘no’. The next day, Izzat Ibrahim, Hussein’s deputy declared Saddam Hussein as the winner with 99.96% of the 8.4 million votes. This trend is bluntly pervasive in many of the African and Central Asian countries too. Most recently, Nursultan Nazarbayev and his political party, the Fatherland won 91.15% votes in Kazakhstan in the 2005 Presidential election and left no seat for the oppositions in the Mazhilis, the lower house of Kazakh parliament. The opposition leaders criticised this severely and then rejected the result stating it as the most fraudulent election that has ever taken place there and warned people of the shape of things to come if Nazarbayev is allowed to hold on to power. International observers like The International Election Observation Mission too agreed that the election failed to meet many international standards.

Other international monitors like the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe and the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe expressed their agony for the limited ‘possibility of a meaningful competition’ due to rigorous harassments and intimidations of opposition candidates by the ruling party. In another case, a tiny African country, Equatorial Guinea has for long been striving for ‘free and fair’ elections in order to achieve a transparent democracy. Yet its efforts have been in vain. President Mbasogo won the presidential election for the third time in 2002 with an incredible 99.5% of vote share. This, however was not because of his popularity but because of official threats, irregularities and frauds which forced many opposition leaders to back out from contesting. Those who had planned to vote against him were threatened with dire consequences. The list of such fraudulent elections is rather long even in the 21st century.The sad part of this saga is that it would be unfair to blame only the dictators of impoverished countries of the third world for allowing such dictators to continue with such malpractices. Such irregularities are also witnessed in countries which otherwise take pride in having advanced democracies. What can be a better example than George Bush’s victories in presidential election? Perhaps no other election was so openly fraudulent as that of George Bush’s in the year 2000 which not only got censured globally but also created resentment and dissatisfaction among democracy advocates.. It was the first US election which showed that Al Gore failed to win in spite of gaining more popular votes than Bush. The result was actually in favour of Gore and Florida was the key state in deciding the winner, but then the world was shocked when Bush was declared the victor! However, his win was not possible without the alleged irregularities in Florida. “Butterfly ballot” in the Palm Beach county was designed strangely to confuse the voters. As a result, their votes had gone for a third party candidate which would have gone for Gore. Duval county had also wasted over 27,000 votes because of the bewildering design of ballot papers.
More strangely, around 50,000 voters were declared felons during the election, of which half were African-Americans and thus were not allowed to vote. Majority of them were not actually felons and were eligible to vote. A survey by John McLaughlin & Associates estimated the number of voters who also did not vote due to inappropriate closing time of the polling booths was as high as 15,000. Moreover, several incidents of cancellation of votes due to voting machine failures, security issues, road blockages etc also hampered voting and greatly favoured Bush. The US is also an example of an advanced democracy which had an unelected president to run their democratic country. Rudolph Ford Jr. suddenly became the Vice President for the first time under the terms of 25th Amendment two months after Spiro Agnew was forced to resign after a tax evasion charge. Incidentally Rudolph Ford Jr became the 38th president after Richard Nixon resigned as a result of Watergate scandal as recently as 1974.All the big talks of elections being the backbone and the very fundamental of democracies notwithstanding, malpractices are increasingly becoming the fifth pillar of democracy. At this rate, democracy would increasingly lose its very right to criticise countries like China who refuse to repose faith in democracy. Yet at least China is honest with what it does and unlike the US does not take the excuse of creating a free world to invade Iraq for oil.

Saviour of the world

The nation building missions of the US & UN aren’t fake always


There might be ample reasons to blame the US for its imperialistic policies and United Nations for being weak and non transparent but if scrutinised, there are innumerable reasons for praising them too. The US and UN are often blamed for being too interventionist but the truth that should not be ignored is that their interventions somehow and somewhere have worked in favour of building nations, to a greater extent! It is said that peace and prosperity can’t be gifted - they can only be earned. But, for all those countries who failed to claim the same, the world hould not forget how hard the US and UN have strived to help them in fetching the same. However, the US and UN are distinct in their approaches when it comes to their nation building
operations. For instance, the US invades a country while the UN never does it. US operations are very expensive compare to operations run by UN. UN spends $4 billion every year currently in its 17 nation building operations worldwide which is equal to one month’s spending of the US in Iraq. But howsoever different approaches they adopt, they have had significant contributions. The US endeavour in stabilising and democratising Germany and Japan during the Cold War era is outstandingly praiseworthy. History testifies how hard US fought to save Germany from anarchy. Japan was another challenge which made US realise that defeating emperors was easier than rebuilding and reconstructing a nation. It later formed two global bodies – Far Eastern Commission and Allied Council for Japan to engage elite countries for development of Japan and make sure that all of the surrender terms made in the Potsdam Agreement were fulfilled. The rest is history of how Japan emerged as a democratic, peaceful and a prosperous
nation. However, of all the US led operations during the post Cold-War era, Bosnia and Kosovo have been successful while Somalia and Haiti proved to be less fruitful. According to the Brookings Institution, America's sending of troops to a new country once in a decade notwithstanding, since Clinton’s regime it went up to once in every alternative year. UN had only 14 peacekeeping operations in the last four decades during Cold War but that had increased to 40 in the decade after the Cold War. Though its performance in Congo, Mozambique, Namibia, Cambodia, Eastern Slavonia, El Salvador, Sierra Leone and East Timor isn't satisfactory but considering all the parameters from bringing peace to democratisation and ending wars, they
weren’t complete failures either. There is now peace in most of these countries except Congo. Moreover, six out of above stated eight countries are democratic nations today. The struggle in Afghanistan and Iraq might not yield expected results yet. And both the US and UN are already being criticised for the same. Yet the situations weren’t very different when they fought in
Japan, Kosovo or Cambodia. People criticised the US severely then but they praise the US today for what it has done for them. When Iraq or Afghanistan will emerge democratic and peaceful in a decade or two's time, same people who criticise today will praise them tomorrow. That's perhaps the predicament of being leaders or change agents! Damn if they do, damn if they
don't, criticism would remain.