The State of the Nation Summary This lecture considers an idea of India that is different from the conventional

wisdom that most Indians are fed by the establishment. At a time when India is being lionized as one of the BRIC locomotives of the world economy, we considers how the lack of a clearly articulated civilizational ethic has damaged India and caused many of its citizens to lead unnecessarily stunted lives. Can a strategic intent based on Indias past may enable the nation to thrive in the future? First, we shall look at the current state of affairs in India from a few angles: why India continues to harbor the largest cohort of impoverished and undernourished in the world; how the endemic scams imply a certain sense of urgency on the part of the ruling classes to rape and pillage as much as possible; and how social mores have undergone a tragic change in the recent past. Next, we shall attempt to do a root-cause analysis of why this nation, from time immemorial one of the greatest civilizations that the world has ever seen, has deteriorated so badly. Based on this analysis, we shall explore briefly what each of us collectively and individually can do to ameliorate the situation. What tragedy teaches us: Japans reaction to the earthquake and tsunami Even though I wish to speak about India, let me begin this lecture by speaking about Japan. As we all know, there was an incredible catastrophe in Japan with a 9.0 magnitude earthquake and giant tsunami that hit on March 11 th, causing enormous damage and loss of life. Nevertheless, the Japanese people, in the face of perhaps the single greatest disaster that has ever befallen a nation, have shown their mettle: they stood by each other, and helped their compatriots as much as possible. There have been no riots or violence or looting of shops, as, alas, we saw in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans. There have been no instances of breast-beating and emotional appeals on television, as we saw during the Kandahar hijacking. There were, on the contrary, examples of ordinary people acting for the common good helping those who were homeless or stranded, ensuring that no one hoarded more food or water or fuel than they needed, and so on. Foreigners stranded in Japan were extremely impressed by how well the society functioned, how politely the officials responded. I have been to Japan many a time, and I have developed a great respect for their civilizational ethos. The thing that strikes me most about the Japanese is their sense of honor. They are an honorable people: and their word is their contract. Their stoicism and valor in times of need makes me believe that the nation shall rise once again from the ashes: just as they did after utter devastation post Hiroshima/Nagasaki.

And the Japanese have been incredibly disciplined. Given the Japanese emphasis on the good of the community, and on each person knowing their roles and responsibilities, the reaction of the public at large was precisely as they had been drilled. There was no running around in a panic unlike what happened in Mumbai on 11/26 during the Pakistani gunmens siege with nobody in charge, and senior security officers not following the standard operating procedure. The Japanese knew what to do, and they did it. The spirit of India? Whenever India has a disaster and we have plenty of them nobody knows what to do, and unfortunately everyone simply tries to look out for their own interests, and the government and authorities do not have contingency plans. Furthermore, nobody plans ahead, even when the consequences of not doing so are as plain as day: a tragic example is the recent stampede in Sabarimala: experts have been cautioning for at least a decade that the facilities are inadequate, and suggesting that alternative plans be made for crowd control. But nobody cares, in particular the government does not care. Among the many acts of heroism and selfless service in Japan one stood out. One of the worst-hit spots is the Fukushima nuclear complex, with at least one reactor in grave danger of melting down. In the face of a nuclear meltdown, and in that case certain death due to radiation or fire, 50 plant operators and engineers volunteered to stay on and attempt to repair the broken cooling system. These Fukushima Fifty, as they are called, show the highest level of courage and honor. And it is not just fifty people, it is a rotating staff of fifty individuals on duty at any one time. Several have been diagnosed with radiation-related illnesses, but they carry on. That level of civic responsibility and indeed self-sacrifice is called yamataodamashi or the spirit of Japan that was displayed by these brave 50 startled me, because I would be hard put to imagine such a thing in India today. But it was not always so: there are tremendous tales of courage, but nobody knows about them. For instance, there was the Last Stand of C Company, 13 th Kumaon Regiment, at Rezang-La, Ladakh, during the India-China war in 1962. Under Major Shaitan Singh (Param Vir Chakra, posthumous) they fought practically to the last man and the last bullet to ensure that the Chinese would not take Leh. Then there was the recent anniversary of the martyrdom of Bhagat Singh, Sukhdev and Rajguru. They were hanged by the British exactly 80 years ago, on March 23, 1931, for the crime of daring to oppose the colonial yoke. Even though our textbooks do not provide a full picture of the valiant and desperate struggle for independence, from the Rani of Jhansi to Kalapani to the Komagata Maru 1 to the
1

The Komagata Maru was a Japanese ship commissioned by Indian immigrants, mainly Sikh, to travel to Canada in 1914, which they were entitled to emigrate to as British subjects. However, in a clear instance of racism, they were prevented from disembarking at Canadian

Gadhar Party2, we can still marvel that there were men and women who disregarded their own self-interest to advance a sacred cause: freedom. I am reminded of Shakespeare in Julius Ceasar: Cowards die many times before their deaths The valiant never taste of death but once. But today, that sort of valor sounds positively quaint. If you open up any Indian newspaper, all you read about are scams of varying kinds wherein the powers-thatbe spirit away enormous amounts. That is, if you ever hear about it for the pliant and colluding media takes pains to ensure that most malfeasance is never reported, but is swept under the carpet. The scale of the loot is absolutely staggering. A financial watchdog named Global Financial Integrity3 estimates that $462 billion has been spirited out of India till 2008, and they note the theft had accelerated in recent times. That amount of money is roughly half of Indias GDP, which is about a $1,000 billion. Indeed, some have taken to reporting the latest scams the 2G Spectrum, the Antrix-Devas Spectrum, etc. in percentage of GDP, as that makes the most sense. In fact, one may make a case that the spirit of India is in endemic corruption. Moral and material corruption is ubiquitous. For instance, the very people who trot out Gandhis ideas once a year on the day of his death would not recognize those same ideas if they were presented to them on a platter. Khadi-wearing has now become a watchword not for sacrifice and humility, but venality. The media also makes a big after every terrorist attack, about the spirit of Mumbai or the spirit of xyz-city. This is not very meaningful instead of a positive can-do spirit, the fact that people go back to business as usual the day after the carnage simply means they are resigned and fatalistic they expect nothing from the government: they know that the government is not going to protect them, and therefore it is the silence of the powerless, not the calm self-confidence of the empowered, as in Japan.

ports. When the vessel arrived back in Calcutta, the British authorities treated those on board as dangerous seditionists. At least 20 of them were shot and killed, and the others were imprisoned.
2

The Gadhar (Freedom) Party was formed in San Francisco in 1913, to agitate for freedom for India. A number of its members, for instance University of California, Berkeley, student Kartar Singh Sarabha and University of Washington student Vishnu Ganesh Pingle, were betrayed, caught and hanged by the British in the Lahore Conspiracy Case in 1915. Sarabha was only 19, and Pingle, 27.
3

India Lost $462 Billion To Illicit Financial Flows From 1948-2008, by Samuel Rubenfield, Wall Street Journal, Nov 17, 2010

Why are wealthy Japanese so willing to self-sacrifice, as compared to poor Indians? Perhaps the question should be about the middle-classes in both nations, because the poor in India are truly impoverished and hopeless you would hardly expect them to have ascended Maslovs hierarchy 4 to get to self-actualization, since they are still worrying about the basic issues of food and shelter. But then the observed fact is that the poor in India are generous: observe how after any accident or catastrophe, those on the ground are full of praise for how much the local people do for them. So it is the middle class that has been addled in India, becoming cynical, uncaring, too willing to dismiss anything other the untrammeled pursuit of self-interest as naivete. Of course, the middle class in India, as elsewhere, have a disproportionate impact, because they tend to occupy the positions of power and influence in the executive, the judiciary, the legislature, and the media. I believe this pervasive cynicism among the Indian middle class is the result of their internalizing an idea of India that is so grossly at variance with the facts that it is for all practical purposes a hoax; but a hoax that is so widely believed and propagated as an article of faith that it has become a dogma that none may question. In fact, I believe this cynicism arises from a manufactured consent 5, to use a phrase popularized by the leftist intellectual Noam Chomsky, who used it to denote the stranglehold that the military-industrial complex has on US policy and US public perspectives. The idea is simple: keep the people ignorant and in the dark, so that they can be manipulated easily to suit the interests of the ruling class. It usually involves some sort of an opiate of the masses which renders the masses mindless. This mechanism is clearly in wide use in the US. The average citizen is rendered relatively ignorant of the world at large because their education system and the media conspire to make them so. This is important because it enables the elites the top 5% that constitute the ruling classes there to make rapid decisions, secure that they can easily persuade public opinion. One example of this was when the Americans decided to attack Iraq: overnight, they persuaded their public that Saddam Hussein (who had been a friend for years, especially during the Iran-Iraq war) was suddenly the most wicked person ever. This sort of mass delusion, courtesy of an educational system intended to produce coolies, and a corrupt media that is hand-in-glove wit certain politicians, is rampant
4

Abraham Maslovs 1943 A Theory of Human Motivation posits that there is a hierarchy of needs: physiological, safety needs, love and belonging, esteem, and self-actualization.
5

Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media, Pantheon Books, 1988, by Edward S Herman and Noam Chomsky. It posits that media are business subject to the profit motive, and are particularly vulnerable to government sticks (such as withholding licenses or advertisements) and carrots (such as honors and allocation of prime properties to journalists, as has been seen widely in India)

in India as well. For instance, the content of the entire education system in India quickly destroys any creativity in a student; furthermore it fills their heads with arrant nonsense about history , soft power and geopolitics, and convinces most Indians that they can are not capable of competing on even terms with people of other nations. The opiate that keeps Americans sated has generally been television; in the case of India it is cricket: which, for all practical purposes, has become the national religion. The obsession with cricket has become a major problem in many ways, and is an example of a syndrome of importing inappropriate and damaging ideas, which then strangle native concepts. In India, the media has become essentially the handmaiden certain political vested interests. So much so that we really have a media-politician-bureaucrat-industrialist nexus in place: more widespread and with more of its fingers in every pie than the military-industrial complex has ever dreamt of in the US. Hunger in India: colonialism by other means But what might motivate the elites to keep the masses in this state of intellectual slavery or quasi-colonization? First, I was once startled to hear a first-hand account by someone I trust about a conversation they had with a senior Communist leader in Kerala about prohibition, some decades ago. At the time, there was a movement for prohibition, considering that many men were wasting their earnings on drink, and anyway, it was considered a social evil. The Communists were resisting the imposition of prohibition. When this person asked the leader why they opposed prohibition, the answer was: If there is no prohibition, there will be no poverty. If there is no poverty, who will need us?. That was an absolutely candid, if cynical statement by the politician. This is precisely what has led to the perpetuation of poverty in India: it is job security for the politician. And it is not fair to just tar the Communists with that brush. Most political parties in India are left-leaning, and in particular the Congress has a raft of high-sounding schemes, all of which are supposed to emancipate the down-trodden in society, of which India has a lot. India is home to the majority of the desperately poor in the world, whereas other nations have managed to lift their underclasses out of penury and into the middle classes. Notably, China: whatever their crimes, it appears that the Communists there have reduced poverty quite substantially. A particularly illuminating comparison is with South Korea. In the 1950s, the two countries had roughly the same GDP per capita. And experts comparing the two expected India to do much better than South Korea which had been ravaged by two wars: World War II and the Korean War. Whereas India, large, not having faced the devastation of war the skirmishes with Pakistan did not affect Indias industrial

heartland looked much more likely to succeed. But what has happened in reality? South Koreans now have a per capita GDP that is twenty times greater6 than Indias! Therefore, several hundred million people, who could have been rescued from poverty, continue to remain in dire poverty. There is a famous statistic that 78% of working Indians live on less than Rs. 20 a day 7; while the percentage has been disputed another committee put it at a much lower 25.7% of the population there is no question that large numbers of people are subsisting on practically nothing. At the lower end of the scale, that would still be 300 million people the largest collection of the poor in the world. Alarmingly, things are not getting any better for them. Study after study reveals damning numbers about nutrition and food security 8. And surely that is the most obvious thing about a population under stress that they are not eating enough, simply because they cannot afford to. The UNICEF says 9 that 46 per cent of all children in India below the age of three are too small for their age; 47 per cent are malnourished, and 16 per cent are wasted, ie they have little hope of a normal life. Malnutrition is more common in India than in sub-Saharan Africa. One in three malnourished children in the world lives in India. A recent Harvard University study 10 concluded that Growth in Indias economy since the early 90s has not ended under-nutrition among children in that country The Wall Street Journal11 referred to the Global Hunger Index, which shows that India is one of the nations most critically affected. It is in the same category of alarming, along with Haiti, Bangladesh, Sudan, Cambodia and Nepal. Even North Korea is better off! The only nation in a worse category is the Democratic Republic
6

According to World Bank figures for 2010, South Koreas per capita GDP is $20,165, which puts it at 33rd in the world. Indias is $1,176, which is 137th in the world out of 182 countries. For more details, see the Wikipedia entry at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(nominal)_per_capita
7

From the National Committee for Enterprises in Unorganized Sector report of May 16, 2006, as quoted in many places, including My data or yours by M K Venu, Indian Express, Sep 9, 2010
8

Food Security: India can do it, by Rajeev Srinivasan and P G Rajendran, Eternal India, Feb 2010, Vol 2, No. 5. http://www.indiafirstfoundation.org/publications/events/EternalIndia/Volumes/V_2_N-5.htm
9

http://www.unicef.org/india/children_2356.htm

10

Booming economy not helping our malnourished kids: Study, rediff.com, Mar 11, 2011 http://www.rediff.com/news/slide-show/slide-show-1-booming-economy-not-helping-ourmalnourished-kids-says-study/20110314.htm
11

India cant fumble its food right plan WSJ Asia, Mar 23, 2011

of Congo (extremely alarming). And China, the benchmark for India, is much better off at low level of hunger of 6.0 as compared to Indias shameful 24.1 (lower than only war-torn Congos 41.2, desperately poor Haitis 28.0, and Bangladeshs 24.2, and it looks like even war-ravaged Afghanistan and Iran are better off).

An even more damning statistic was published recently in the British medical journal Lancet and reprinted in the Economist. It talks about obesity12 around the

12

Global Obesity: An expanding world. How mens waistlines have grown since 1980, The Economist, Feb 7, 2011. By 2008 the rich world had itself expanded, bringing obesity to groups within countries that were previously considered poor, such as Brazil and South Africa. During that period, the prevalence rate of obesity among men doubled to nearly 10%. One country has stubbornly resisted this trend. For all its dynamism since India opened up its economy in 1990, its men have on average become even thinner.

world. Although it is a little hard to read, here is a screenshot:

What this chart says is truly astonishing: there are only three countries in the world (in blue) where people have grown thinner in the recent past (19802008): and these countries are Congo, Afghanistan, and India! This should make Indians, and the Indian government, hang its heads in shame: Congo and Afghanistan are ravaged countries where there are major wars or civil wars going on. (And Iraq, which also had a war, did better). That India is in the same category leads us to an inescapable conclusion: the Indian government is at war with its people. And what is the proposed solution? A laughable Right to Food bill, while agriculture has been ignored and downgraded for the past sixty years. In an astonishing irony, the state of the Indian masses, despite all the GDP growth, appears to be no better than what prevailed under the British, if you consider just the most basic of needs: caloric intake. While there are no major famines 13 unlike under the uncaring British imperialists, chronic undernourishment appears to be the lot of the aam admi, under the new overlords. This is what happened under the British: there were millions of people killed in major famines:
13

Late Victorian Holocausts: El Nino Famines and the Making of the Third World, by Mike Davis, Verso, London , 2000

Time 1876-79

Numbers of victims 10.3 million 8.2 million 6.1 million

Source of estimate Digby Maharatna Seavoy The Lancet Maharatna/Seavoy Cambridge

1896-1902

19.0 million 8.4 million 6.1 million

Total

12.2 to 29.3 million

Number of victims of colonial-era famines in the 19th century. Source: Late Victorian Holocausts Under the indigenous colonists, it is a slower death. Given the rapid rise in food prices over the last few years, hunger has grown exponentially. There are a billion hungry people in the world today, and a large percentage of them are Indians. The State has not been able to provide for this most basic of needs. It is therefore a colonial, grasping, entity squeezing the common man for its own benefit.

Number of hungry people worldwide. Source: The Economist, Nov 19, 2009 In an update to this graph, a recent issue of the The Economist14 says: The World Bank has said that surging food prices have pushed an extra 44 million people worldwide into extreme poverty, which can often be a precursor to malnutrition. The number of undernourished people could rise to more than 1 billion this year.
14

The world this week, Feb 10, 2011

Especially given roaring food inflation in India, it is likely that the number of hungry Indians has gone up proportionately more. The curse of the nation: the clever economists and thieving elites I once wrote15 -- although I might be more charitable now -- that the astonishing cavalierness of the State was the result of a folly by Jawaharlal Nehru and a coterie of hangers-on, who decided to pursue a statist model (based on the Soviet Unions model) of development. Unfortunately, the result was that the State got into doing all sorts of things it had no business being in: such as running airlines and hotels; but the State also did not the things that only it would do: such as building roads and ports, and insisting on universal basic education. Indias economists well-meaning though they might have been thought they were inventing a Third Way, neither capitalism nor communism, but something they imagined would be a clever mix of the two. Unfortunately what they did create was a chimera. Indias allegedly clever mixed economy does not have the positives or either system, but it has captured, in spades, the negatives of both systems. Thus, Indias mixed economy has not had the vigor and creative destruction 16 that characterize capitalism: in fact, it is deucedly hard for a firm to die, as they linger on as sick units far beyond a time when they should have been shot in the head. Nor does it have the iron discipline that a totalitarian Communist system (say China) has, which allows it to focus like a laser beam on particular objectives and to pursue them without deviation. In point of fact, what India has achieved is the creation of the worst of all possible worlds: gross inefficiency, the dead hand of bureaucracy, and in the midst of it, tremendous theft through corruption, and in particular, crony capitalism. You could not create a worse system even if the economists set out deliberately to create one. (Although a wise economist, Jagdish Bhagwati, once remarked that Indias curse had been its clever economists: presumably because they couldnt resist fixing what wasnt broken, or fix that which was actually broken.) It is true that there has been an opening in this sort of impenetrable iron curtain since the economic liberalization in 1991, when Prime Minister P V Narasimha Rao

15

The Nehruvian Penalty: Fifty wasted years, by Rajeev Srinivasan, rediff.com, Jan 14, 2004 http://www.rediff.com/news/2004/jan/14rajeev.htm
16

As popularized by the Austrian-American economist Schumpeter: the idea that companies and economies evolve, and there is a constant churn on creation of new models and new firms, with older ones that have reached the end of their useful life being destroyed. This idea has been used to explain, for instance, the vigor of Californias Silicon Valley, where there is constant innovation, and new ideas rapidly replace old ones

decided that liberalization was inevitable, and indeed that there was no choice, in the wake of the infamous balance of payments crisis. Several companies have done well, but there is also a general cause-and-effect relationship: the successes have come in areas where the State exited. In sector after sector, where the State either had no presence (as in IT, where the bureaucrats could not quite figure out how to implement quotas on something as intangible as software, and so left it alone) or where the State exited or reduced its monopoly (as in telecom, retail banking, airlines or hotels), Indian firms have done very well, some of them becoming world-class players. One can conclude that it was the stultifying dead hand of the dirigiste State that had held them down. Among these Indian champions, there is no company that has been more respected than the Tata Group, which has become a flag-carrier 17 for the country, especially with its purchase of Jaguar Land Rover, Tetley Tea and the steelmaker Corus, but even more so with its iconic Tata Nano, which showed a remarkable level of innovation and forward thinking. Therefore it is ever more distressing that the reputation of the Tata Group has also been besmirched in the recent Radiagate scandals. This is on top of the scandal involving Satyam Computer. Thus even some of the hallowed and well-respected names in industry have been enmeshed in shady activities: this is a measure of how entrenched and endemic moral and material corruption have become in India. It is the norm, not the exception. There have been concerns that large amounts of money due to this sort of wholesale corruption have been squirreled away in secret Swiss and other European bank accounts. Estimates are that this could be as much as a trillion dollars, which would be almost $1000 for every man, woman and child in India. And what does this mean, in real terms? This is why, 64 years after formal independence, India continues to harbor the largest number of under-nourished people in the world, and 5,000 children die in India18 every day. They have been robbed of their futures and of their right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. The State has been complicit in this crime against humanity. In a hurry? Why are elites making a run on the bank?

17

Interestingly enough, the Tatas had literally been a flag-carrier for India by creating the countrys first airline, which was the precursor of the State-controlled Air India
18

15000 children die in India in 3 days, rediff.com, Sept 22, 2010, http://news.rediff.com/slide-show/2010/sep/22/slide-show-1-in-3-days-15000-kids-will-die-inindia.htm

Why has the level of corruption grown so dramatically in the recent past? The best explanations I could find comes from a Chinese-American intellectual writing about China. It is referred to in a piece in the WSJ by Bret Stephens 19; here is the relevant portion, quoted verbatim: "Most ruling elites are aware that economic development will result in the emergence of powerful challengers to power and probably the loss of the political monopoly," writes Chinese American scholar Minxin Pei in his book "China's Trapped Transition." What follows is a bit dense, but worth reading carefully: "Such a realization would prompt the agents of the regime to increase their discount rate for future income from the monopoly and, consequently, intensify their efforts to maximize current income while maintaining a high level of repression to deter challengers. In addition, the collapse of a foreign regime with similar characteristics may make fears of losing one's own power even more acute and real. The net effects of the combination of a growing sense of longterm insecurity and the demonstration effects of a fallen fellow autocracy may be those akin to a run on the bank, with agents rushing to cash in their political investments in the regime, quickening the collapse of the regime's authority." This quote provided one with an epiphany: even though the article is talking about the fact that Chinas totalitarians were a little unhappy about the events in Egypt perhaps seeing in them a harbinger of what might be in their future it is still highly applicable to India. The ruling elites in India are entirely convinced that powerful challengers will emerge, removing them from what they consider their obvious birthright, the right to rule India. Therefore, taking Minxin Peis argument to the next logical step, Indias ruling elites steal as much as they can. What if there is no tomorrow? Therefore, let us loot, rape and pillage the economy as much as possible. The rent-seeking agents of power are doing precisely that. In other words, let us spirit as much money out of India and into safe havens in, say, Switzerland, before, heaven forbid, we lose our cushy sinecures in an election. We are definitely seeing a run on the bank: consider the unseemly haste with which the ruling elites have been siphoning off money. The scams are getting bigger, bolder, and more urgent: the report from Financial Integrity suggests that the scale of loot has accelerated in the recent past. As Indias GDP has started to grow at the rate of almost 9% a year, inflation has boomed at 20% a year, and the scams have boomed at 500% a year. Why? Have the elites people given up hope? Recently there was the curious spectacle of the embattled Prime Minister Manmohan Singh explaining away the cash-for-votes scam that allegedly led to his government staying on in power. He claimed that the fact that his UPA had won an election in 2009 even after this scam was broadcast proved that the public has in effect factored that into their
19

Beijing and the Arab Revolt, by Bret Stephens, Wall Street Journal Asia, Feb 23 rd, 2011

calculations: in other words, he suggests that the public accepts corruption as a matter of course, and still wishes to have the UPA rule, presumably for other reasons, for instance that the Congress is the natural party of governance. If that is so, why is there such haste? It is not the case, of course, that there has been no corruption in the Indian State in earlier days. The License Raj that stultifying regime that enabled the wise men and women of the Planning Commission to specify in excruciating detail who might produce what, when, and in what quantities was tailor-made for bureaucratic pilferage. Thus the opportunity for endemic corruption, as rent-seeking politicians and bureaucrats ensured that they got their pound of flesh for the favor of allowing someone to set up an industry. There were also famous scams like Bofors. Why then the desperate hurry? There are two possibilities: one positive, and the other negative. Let us take the positive one first. It may well be that the Congress which is the ruling elite in the context of Minxin Peis analysis believes that the writing is on the wall for its eclipse. Despite the near-total support of the media, there are rumblings that suggest that the voter, hurt by rampaging inflation and impaired governance, may well vote the Congress out of power. In fact, there are persistent allegations 20 that even the 2009 elections were not won and fair and square, because there is good reason to believe that the Electronic Voting Machines could be, and possibly were, manipulated to get any election result desired. Perhaps as a result of this, there is a certain urgency on the part of the Congress to, as it were, make hay while the sun shines. Thus they may want to accelerate their revenue-generating activities, especially when they may involve the one-time sale of public goods such as telecommunication spectrum or exploration rights for oil. That would support Peis contention about agents rushing to cash in. They expect their run to end, and therefore the unseemly haste. The darker interpretation is much more serious: the elites are like rats deserting a sinking ship, because they expect that not only will their run end, but it will be end of India as we know it, too. There are many centrifugal forces in India, and supporters of these abroad (the barbarians within and without) that are looking to break India up. Indias hold over many parts of its territory is tenuous. For instance, the State prevented opposition party members from hoisting the Indian national flag in a

20

www.indiavem.com has a large number of stories about the possibility that Indian electronic voting machines can be easily tampered with.

square in Srinagar, Jammu and Kashmir, on Republic Day 2011. In some 180 districts of the country, there are separatist and in fact anarchist Communists active, and some of them are no-go areas for State security personnel. Chief among the instigators of the break-India effort is, of course, Pakistan. They have never forgotten that they lost their colony, the erstwhile East Pakistan, because of Indian interference, as they call it. Then there is China. A recent, detailed report from the South Asia Analysis Group 21 talks of a Chinese suggestion that a clinical thrust through Siliguri will detach the entire Northeast including Arunachal (Southern Tibet [sic]) from India, thus removing India from the regional equation with Myanmar and even Bangladesh. There is also good reason to wonder if there is an American plan under pressure from their Christian fundamentalists to do an East Timor to India. In that case, the predominantly Christian East Timor seceded from Indonesia in a clearly religiously-motivated civil war. The chances of something similar happening in Indias Northeast are high: where Baptists and other missionaries, American, Australian and New Zealander, have created massive Christian majorities through conversion and intimidation. Just as the coalition forces have suddenly appeared in Libya, alleging human rights violations, it is quite possible to imagine a motivated Security Council resolution. Let us remember that, contrary to the tender sentiments being expressed by those supporting the intervention in Libya, portraying it as humanitarian, when Pakistanis were murdering22 some 5 million people (mostly Hindus) in the erstwhile East Pakistan exactly forty years ago, starting on Mar 25th, 1971, the US did not oppose the thuggish Pakistani forces, who, among other things, tried to improve the inferior Bengali stock through an organized campaign of mass rape and impregnation of Bengali women. In fact, the US that is, eminence grise Henry Kissinger and his boss Richard Nixon actually sent their Seventh Fleet steaming into the Bay of Bengal to intimidate India. Put East Timor, Libya, Tibet and
21

China Southern Tibet (Arunachal) invaded by India; Separating Northeast from India can be a response from Beijing suggests a Chinese blogger, Paper No. 4390, by D S Rajan, South Asia Analysis Group, Mar 21, 2011
22

Thirty Years of Twilight, by K V Bapa Rao, Outlook, Mar 26, 2001. http://www.outlookindia.com/article.aspx?211145

Bangladesh together, and a picture emerges where Indias interests, or those of Hindus, are not uppermost in the minds of those who showed so much compassion, say, for Kosovars et al in the former Yugoslavia. In other words, we can expect no help from even the US other than lip service. That is as far as the Northeast is concerned. There are other fissiparous tendencies. Islamic fundamentalists, active in Kerala, have already called for a Muslim-majority state in Malabar, and that is not a whim: they are serious. Increasing ISI infiltration and the call by Pakistanis for creating a Mughalistan and a Moplahstan and a Nizamistan are not to be taken lightly. Let us remember that the call by the LTTE for Greater Eelam included Tamil Nadu and Kerala as well. These separatists are serious. There are a number of groups that have been infiltrated by malign external forces. A recent book by Rajiv Malhotra 23 considers some of them: in particular the Dravidian and the Dalit movements, both of which he thinks are being encouraged by Western churches, academics and governments to actively reject their connections with a pan-Indian identity, as a possible prelude to secession. Then there is the Red Corridor (as they say, Pashupati to Tirupati) wherein the government effectively has ceded control to Communist terrorists who straddle the Indo-Nepali border. Despite all their disclaimers, it is highly likely that these people are aided and abetted by China so there are those who are in effect Chinas agents in India (in addition to a large number of self-proclaimed intellectuals and media who regurgitate the Chinese line, including propaganda verbatim from Xinhua.) If China were to invade India (or for that matter, Pakistan were to drop a nuclear bomb on India let us note that Pakistan has more bombs than India, and is accumulating them at a faster rate thanks to Chinese supply of designs and material) let us not delude ourselves that anybody will come to our aid. After all, when Japan, which is one of the largest aid donors in the world, suffered its catastrophic quake, there was very little coming in from the outside world other than platitudes. Also, let us remember that in 1971, when the UN General Assembly censured India for invading East Pakistan (which it did only after millions of refugees had crossed over, and the scale of the slaughter had become clear), the vote was something like 115 to 6 against India. So much for Indias friends in the Non-Aligned Movement! It is rather evident that India, like Abhimanyu inside the chakravyuha, is entirely alone. And the chances for Indias breakup are rather good. After all, half the

23

Breaking India: Western Interventions in Dravidian and Dalit faultlines, Rajiv Malhotra and Aravindan Neelakantan, Amaryllis, 2011. http://www.breakingindia.com/

intellectuals in India do not believe that India or the idea of India existed before the British arrived with their guns, germs and steel. Although it has there has been an idea of India for millennia, a concrete and well-established national identity. Is India the new Russia? There is one more distressing trend that I have noted lately: a series of comparisons of India with Russia. This is not at all flattering to India. In the post-Cold War scenario, Russia basically imploded, its GDP shrank, and it became a bastion for buccaneer capitalism, with well-connected individuals in the bureaucracy and the ruling elites making billions, while the life of the general public deteriorated. Writing in the Financial Times, a commentator24 suggested that the Russian model where a handful of people became very wealthy, conditions for most worsened as national income declined. In another article 25, there was the statistic that Indias oligopolists have become as wealthy as Russias: the total wealth of Indian billionaires is more than a fifth of the nations GDP, equaled only by Russia. Of course, there are several points of difference: Russias population itself is shrinking (it has fewer people now than Pakistan, which is about 1/15 th its size), as there is an epidemic of alcoholism, crime and general social deterioration. Indias GDP and population are both increasing, and there is youth bulge that will, one hopes, lead to a demographic dividend while Russia is facing a demographic meltdown soon there will not be enough Russian soldiers to defend their long border with China, for example. Unfortunately, there is a part of India where the sort of decline that Russia is subject to seems to be catching on: and that is Kerala. Long famed for its quality of life, Kerala is now getting to be full of alcoholics (the per capita consumption there is the highest in the country); the list of crimes is growing (for instance contract killings, murders for money, robbery). And the situation for women is deteriorating in a state that had previously with its proud matrilineal heritage been a bellwether. Violent crimes against women are routine in Kerala. Just within the last two months, a young woman was pushed out of the ladies compartment of a moving train, raped on the tracks, and she was murdered there, her head bashed in with a cement block. An 11-year old girl was found with broken arms and marks of severe torture including cigarette burns it is believed she was purchased for Rs. 15,000 in Tamil Nadu and was being inducted into prostitution. She died of her injuries An engineering student was lured to a remote place by her boyfriend, where he and three friends disrobed and raped her, and posted the video on the internet. She
24

Indias heirs of corruption, by James Lamont, Financial Times, Mar 26, 2011

25

It is time for India to rein in its robber barons, by Jayant Sinha and Ashutosh Varshney, Financial Times, Jan 6, 2011

committed suicide. A young MBA student who rejected the advances of a boy was stabbed by him along with her father. Her father died, she is in critical condition. If Kerala, long one of the most progressive parts of India, one of the wealthiest too, thanks to its expatriates payments, and one of the healthiest and best educated, is on this steep societal decline, then it appears there is a real problem: we are at the edge of a precipice. A failing State? While I do not wish to be an alarmist, the above litany of woes suggests that India is on the verge of being a failed State. Consider the following table of failed states 26 from The Economist magazine: Country (population in millions) Somalia 9.4 Chad 11.5 Sudan 43.2 Zimbabwe 12.6 Congo 67.8 Afghanistan 29.1 Iraq 31.5 Central African Republic 4.5 Guinea 10.3 Pakistan 184.8 Haiti 10.2 Cote divoire 21.6
26

Failed state index, score 114.3 113.3 111.8 110.2 109.9 109.3 107.3 106.4 105.0 102.5 101.6 101.2

Life expecta ncy, years 51.5 50.0 59.8 50.4 48.8 45.5 70.2 48.6 60.1 68.0 62.1 59.6

Symptoms

Anarchy, civil war, piracy Desertification, destitution, meddling neighbors Ethnic, religious strife, illiteracy, tyranny Economic collapse, kleptocracy, oppression Civil war, massacres, mass rape, looting Civil war, drugs, no infrastructure, terrorism Ruined infrastructure, sectarian strife, terrorism Desertification, destitution, disease, terrorism Destitution, drugs, kleptocracy Coups, drugs, illiteracy, terrorism Deforestation, destitution, crime Incipient civil war, post-election

Failed states: Where life is cheap and talk is loose, The Economist, Mar 19, 2011

deadlock

Is this the company that India is about to join? A giant with 1200 million in population, and a life expectancy of around 65 years, but beset with illiteracy, terrorism, deforestation, destitution, secession, kleptocracy, terrorism, interference from neighboring states? The real idea of India There is no reason for India, an old and proud civilization, to have come to this pass, where it cannot feed its citizens, nor ensure its territorial integrity. Why has this happened? Is there no hope? Can things improve? The core reason for why things have deteriorated to this extent is one word: deracination. And yes, there is hope; things can improve: again it can be captured in one phrase: strategic intent. The real problem is that we have forgotten what made this nation great. It is all the virtues we associate with a great civilization: respect for knowledge, openness to ideas, a land well-endowed with resources, and a populace that had a certain civilizational ethos. And it was indeed a great nation: it was the richest country in the world from time immemorial27 to the 15th century; it had the oldest and greatest universities; was known for its innovations such as yoga and ayurveda, and for its products, such as gems, spices and high-quality steel. It was the richest economy in the world, accounting for a major portion of the worlds GDP:

27

The World Economy: A Millennial Perspective, by Angus Maddison, OECD, 2001.

The problem is that there has been a deliberate erasure of this history from our minds. Indians have been so uprooted that they no longer recognize the idea of India that existed for thousands of years the nation that astonished the first Europeans to arrive at the opulent royal courts of the Mughals and of Vijayanagar. That idea of India was that this was the greatest, richest, most benevolent nation in the world, one that was the country everybody wanted to see before they died. Instead, the idea of India that most of us have been taught, and that we have internalized, is a colonial construct: the imperialists wanted to justify why they had raped and pillaged an entire civilization, so they constructed a mythology, that their mission was one of benevolence. They also claimed that they had chanced upon a continent that was just a bunch of warring tribes, and they had caused the creation of a unitary State. Arch-imperialist Winston Churchill articulated this memorably by stating that India is a geographical term. It is no more a united nation than the equator. The colonialists claimed that they had united India, whereas the reality was that there was an age-old concept of India as a culture and a civilization that goes way back to

the earliest days of recorded history. The earliest settlements in the subcontinent can be traced back to about 7000 BCE (Mehrgarh at the foot of the Bolan pass) and then there was the superb urban civilization of the Indus-Sarasvati valley a few millennia later, followed by the desiccation of the Sarasvati and the movement eastward. Never has there been any question in the minds of Indians themselves in historical times about the uniqueness of Jambudvipa and its exceptionalism. The geographic boundaries of the civilization were reflected, for instance, in the ashrams set up by Sri Sankara in the four corners of the Indian subcontinent. Within this region, the civilization grew and prospered and flowered. Despite all the mischief that has been rammed down our throats regarding the Aryan Invasion hoax and unfortunately this has become more or less the official dogma in the country regarding history, thanks to Communist historians at the JNU who found it convenient to regurgitate the colonialist myth it is clear to most Indians that there is a civilizational unity and continuity, which has a wholly indigenous base, although it has quite generously accepted a lot of ideas from outside. The biggest problem with this Aryan Invasion hoax and other related constructs is that it has given many Indians an inferiority complex. Somehow there is the feeling that Indians cannot measure up to those of other countries, specifically whites (and increasingly Chinese). In point of fact, it was manifestly true in the first fifty or so years after independence: India was a definite also-ran in the world, and its image was that of a basket case, impoverished and condemned to be always full of potential that it could never realize. India had nothing to be proud of: it was never at the top of the league in anything whatsoever. In particular India has been, barring a few exceptions like R Krishnan and Prakash Padukone, virtually absent in all major sports. This also contrived to give Indians a sense of inferiority: it didnt look like we could ever be contenders. This is why the success of the Indian IT industry has been such a boost to the Indian ego. Suddenly, Indians were beginning to be recognized as among the worlds leaders in one of the hottest fields, high technology. In fact, the very image of the Indian has changed: whereas just thirty years ago every Indian in the West was seen as someone lucky to escape from the grinding poverty of India, now the default assumption is that every Indian is a software engineer. Or a smart, mathematically-minded person. Of course, this sea-change has been helped by the very real growth in Indias GDP since 1991, and especially by the Goldman Sachs coinage of BRIC which has helped elevate India from the muck of the banana republics of the Non-Aligned Movement. In a way, Chinas rapid rise has also helped Indias image, because if former basket-case China can do so well so quickly, why not India as well?

It is now widely accepted that India will be one of the top economies on the planet in years to come. Of course predictions about that always come with a little small print: this will happen if India fixes its educational system or its infrastructure; if it is able to deal with the centrifugal forces in the country; if it is able to ensure that its demographic dividend doesnt deteriorate into a demographic albatross, and so on and so forth. But this has still not translated into a clearly articulated goal for Indians to aspire to. The late management guru C K Prahalad 28 came up with a wonderful concept: strategic intent along with a companion concept: core competence. Towards a strategic intent for India: what is its core competence? A strategic intent is a simple, clearly articulated objective that can excite and motivate people. It is a worthwhile, challenging (stretch) goal that does not change easily over time, and one that is based not only on what the current situation but also on the potential for the future. It requires reciprocal loyalty between the rulers and ruled, where they are clear they are working together for a common goal. India has failed to articulate a strategic intent. This leaves everybody confused about between a strategic goal and a tactical goal, and this is one of the reasons why Indian diplomats seem to generally come off worse in their negotiations with others: for instance, at the climate summit in Copenhagen, and especially in every deal with the Pakistanis. The Pakistanis actually have a clear strategic intent that they have articulated strongly and forcefully: they want to dismember India and establish a Mughal sort of kingdom, an emirate ranging from Afghanistan to Burma, with Islamabad as the imperial capital. That is clear, specific, a stretch goal, and is based on their belief that Muslims, while not a majority of the population in the subcontinent, will eventually become one through their high birth rates, and if needed, a judicious ethnic cleansing here and there. Whether or not you agree with this, it is clearly a strategic intent, and the Pakistani army and the ISI are hard at work night and day to make this intent a reality. On the other hand, Indians have no strategic intent to fend this off, therefore India makes these mealy-mouthed statements and kind of hopes for the best, as seen most recently in the acclaimed visit of the Pakistani PM to India to watch a cricket match. While Indians seem to hope that this shows good faith on their part, the Pakistanis view this (and they are right) as an admission of weakness by India. Generally, major powers on the world stage have unequivocal strategic intents. The US, for instance, intends to dominate. Its intent was articulated in a wonderfully pithy statement attributed to George Kennan, a US State Department person. He is
28

Strategic Intent by C K Prahalad and Gary Hamel, Harvard Business Review, 1989

supposed to have said: The US has 8% of the worlds population, but it enjoys 50% of its resources. Our foreign policy is intended to keep it that way. While the actual quote may be apocryphal, the US certainly acts as though this were the guiding light behind its policies: to gain control over the resources of the world. This is why, for instance, it gets very sentimental about the human rights of people in oil-rich Libya, while being not bothered at all about the human rights of people in oil-less Tibet. China also has a well-articulated strategic intent. It has a history of believing itself to be the center of the world, the Middle Kingdom, the natural imperial center, with vassal states all around the Asia-Pacific kowtowing to the Chinese emperor and offering them tribute. This is its vision for the future as well: it wants to be Number One, no ifs, thens and buts, in everything economic, military and cultural strength. And they move towards this goal relentlessly. Compared to them, India is a naive lamb being led to slaughter. India has never even suggested that it could be among the top economic powers in the world: it is thanks mostly to the Goldman Sachs BRIC papers that the very idea which would have been considered blasphemous by many Indians has gained currency. The fact that Indians have no overarching goal along the same lines as the Americans and the Chinese have is demonstrated by a simple instance: the Indian attitude to the Olympics. Every other country sends its athletes to win. Indians are the only people who mouth the pious and utterly meaningless platitude: It is important not only to win, but to participate. And most Indians actually believe this twaddle. Indians need to think clearheadedly about a plausible but difficult goal. They should not be blinded by the situation today, but should aim for the stretch goal, and figure out what they need to do to get there. An excellent example is the Tata Nano car. It was a stretch goal which even seemed like an impossible goal to come up with a Rs. 1 lakh car. But Tata persevered, and people figured out how to get there in very creative ways. The Nano stunned skeptics who truly believed its price point could not be reached. Another example is Aravind Eye Clinic in Madurai. The founder of the facility, the legendary Dr. V, had an audacious goal: he wanted to eliminate avoidable blindness among Indians, who constitute the largest cohort of the blind in the world. He did not tell people how to do it, but he felt that if he could provide world-class eye surgery at 1/10 the cost, that would be a way of getting there. It turns out that through a remarkable set of innovations, Aravind has reached that cost goal (indeed, in rough terms, it costs Aravind $12 to do a cataract surgery, whereas the same operation would cost an American hospital $1500, and we ignore purchasing power multipliers and so on), but it is able to provide 70% free surgeries

to the rural poor, with the 30% paying customers being enough for the operation to break even. They havent yet reached the strategic intent of eliminating unnecessary blindness, but they are well on their way to making that possible. And that, in fact, is part of Indias core competence: ingenuity, innovation, intellectual property generation, whatever you want to call it. In the current socialist scenario, this ingenuity or jugaad has mostly gone into clever schemes to beat the malign system, or to dodge taxes, or to make money by getting the right licenses. But in a more congenial time and place, Indians native intelligence has made them the worlds best idea generators. It is not for nothing that a large number of Silicon Valley startups are founded by or managed by Indian immigrants. Under the dead hand of socialism and crony capitalism, Indian ingenuity has been stunted, but in the hothouse environment of Silicon Valley, it has thrived. As the Indian State retreats one hopes from more sectors of the economy, for instance education, it is quite likely that clever Indian ideas will once again come to the forefront. India was one of the leading sources of innovation in the world throughout history, and China was another. The difference seems to be that India concentrated on abstract thought, while China focused on the concrete. Thus India invented Paninis grammar, infinite series for trigonometric functions, and yoga and ayurveda. China invented paper, printing, the compass and gunpowder. In a world that is moving towards more conceptual ideas, Indias facility with abstraction may well be a big advantage. In fact Indias core competence lies in two areas: intellectual property generation and agriculture, both of which have been ignored by the State in its mad rush for industrialization a la 1950s-era Soviet practice. A core competence is something that allows for the creation of a series of offerings that may be of value in the marketplace. The understanding and enhancement of core competence is a major weapon used by companies to improve their market position. Likewise, if India sets is focus on IPR and agriculture, it will do wonders for itself. On the contrary, education has been ruined in India, and so has agriculture. If the nation had focused on farming, it may well have avoided the dubious distinction of finding its people growing ever more thin and its food inflation shooting through the roof, as much as 25% annual for some key food items. As for education, the virtual extinction of Sanskrit education in India is a massive tragedy because there are literally millions of palm-leaf manuscripts that are falling apart, which may contain enormously useful materials. It is important for India to establish a strategic intent that it will be Number One in the world in its core competence: education/intellectual property generation and agriculture, and to invest heavily in both. If it does this, it may well find that it

becomes Number One in other areas, such as economic power and military power as well. Just one word: governance The really tragic thing is that in India all the ingredients for success are present, except for one crucial thing: leadership. If there is good leadership and good, enlightened governance, India could be once again reach its place at the top of the heap: not one of the top 10, but Number One. The contrast can be seen in the governance of enlightened monarchs in India as compared with British rule. When the Late Victorian Holocausts were caused by El Nino climate changes that led to drought, the British were completely unprepared: so in their reign, there were some 31 major famines in 200 years; however in the previous 2000 years, there had been only 17 famines! Why? Governance. El Nino effects happen regularly, once every 15 or so years, and this leads to drought in India. But the native monarchs had governance structures in place to provide cash payments to drought victims; they stored grain in anticipation and avoided famine. This the British did not do. The same applies to leadership and governance today as well. If there is leadership that is not worrying about how much it can skim off from the public purse, then it can something for the public. How can we ensure there is good governance? Let us utilize the weapons in our hands: the courts, the Right to Information Act, peaceful demonstrations. Most of us tend to not want to rock the boat. We do not sue. The legal system is a powerful weapon if it can be wielded properly. If you see injustice being done, file suit. Be prepared to suffer through the delays in the system, and the occasional crooked judge and lawyers, but the current Supreme Court, for instance, is an activist court, and it may well listen with sympathy to ordinary citizens. The Right to information Act is another useful weapon. When something looks fishy, ask for information. The secret of a successful authoritarian State is the wall of opaqueness it builds around itself. If it is possible to breach this, all of a sudden it becomes easier to ensure accountability and responsibility by both bureaucrats and politicians. So much so that, alas, whisteblowers using RTI are now in some danger of being bumped off by thugs. And finally, there is the option of peaceful demonstrations. Whether you are part of an NGO or some other group, the Indian State is obliged to pay attention if a fairly large number of citizens express their unhappiness through a polite and peaceful and that is key demonstration. As much as the public is annoyed by pointless political demonstrations and the use of hired men to enforce bandhs and hartals, it is important to note that satyagrahas and other action do have an impact.

But most of all, what individuals need to do is to organize. I am not necessarily recommending any political or other organization, but if you look around, you will surely find a few that are doing charity work or heritage preservation work or environmental work. There is surely no dearth of NGOs in this country, although you have to be choosy and exercise due diligence: quite a few of them are fronts for dubious purposes, and are fifth columnists for foreign interests. But there is certainly strength in numbers, and you can accomplish a whole lot more with numbers than on your own. Conclusion In this lecture, we have looked at the state of the Indian nation today, with particular emphasis on the food situation, the rationale behind the widespread scams, and the deterioration of society. In a root-cause analysis, we have seen how a number of Indias problems may be attributed to an idea of India that is a manufactured construct intended to deracinate Indians. The solution may be the creation of a well-thought-out strategic intent that will enhance the nations core competency, and impel citizens to use their creativity in solving difficult problems. This can lead to improved governance and leadership. And each of us has the responsibility of actively participating in the efforts to bring accountability and responsibility to the actions of our rulers.