yasirkarim

Is India A Failed State

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Without adding more, here is an article worth reading. This is one of the few articles that I have read presents a more clearer picture of India than the garbage we read praising Hindustan.

Sadly, some of the content in this article can be attributed to Pakistan also. Comments?????

Is India a failed State?
Cover Story
On almost all parameters, developmental and otherwise, and for all its modernisation pretensions, India falls into that shameful category, along with Somalia, Afghanistan, Iraq, and Pakistan-the faltering State

Mohan Guruswamy Delhi

The term "failed state" entered our lexicon, initially, in the context of Somalia, Afghanistan, and now, increasingly, for Iraq. State authority and power are often confused as being the same. Authority derives from constitutional legitimacy and respect for the institutions such as the judiciary, Parliament, permanent bureaucracy, and the press, whereas power is really the power to coerce and enforce the will of the State. Authority is abstract while power is physical.

This is not to say that in a failed state the power to coerce or enforce does not exist. In Somalia, there are more guns in the hands of the various warring clans than a legitimately constituted state would have ever required. Ditto for Afghanistan. Ditto for Iraq. In these countries, the symbols of statehood are much in evidence. There is a currency and people trade with each other. Goods are imported and exported. Services like electricity, water, and transport are still available. Schools and courts function. There is even foreign representation. Somalia, Afghanistan, and Iraq have embassies in New Delhi.

Yet, we call them failed States because the people who call the shots, or more often fire the shots, are without any constitutional, legal, moral, divine, or civilisational authority. They are in a state in which societies existed before the advent of the modern state. That they are nationalities or even States is not in doubt, but the point is that they have failed to be states where constitutional authority reigns and power does not grow from the barrel of a gun.

In mediaeval times, the State mainly existed to enrich the king and the durbar, and increase their power and area of domination. Not so the modern State, implicit in which is that the State is tasked with not only providing order, but also improving living standards and transform society. Thus, while the ability to provide order is important, to judge whether a state has failed or only partially passed, one has to judge it by the other broad parameters. India is certainly not in the Somalia league. It is not even in the Pakistan league, where the internal situation is so appalling that many western observers have taken to calling it a failed State.

Yet our own performance is not something we can be proud of. Jammu and Kashmir, Bihar, Jharkhand, Chhattisgarh, Nagaland, Manipur, Assam, and significant parts of Uttar Pradesh and Andhra Pradesh are anarchic. Even in the states where we consider there is some order, what is the record of the police? Recorded crime in Delhi was up by 55 per cent last year. In Mumbai and Delhi, the police have had to resort to extralegal methods, euphemistically called "encounters", to curb criminals. The press and society, generally, laud this, not realising that such activities have a tendency to go out of hand and start devouring the innocent. Instead of exposing the essential criminality of a Rajbir Singh of the Delhi Police or Daya Naik in Mumbai, the media entertains us with stories of their unidirectional close encounters. We never hear of a policeman getting even a scratch in these encounters.

Only about a third of major crimes like murder and dacoity are solved, and less than 10 per cent end with convictions. On a more mundane level, not many people stop at red lights anymore. At the half-year point, nearly 800 persons have perished in Delhi from automobile-related accidents. It has been a steep descent from Sardar Patel I to Sardar Patel II, and then some more now.

The institutions from which our State should derive authority are in a poor way. The quality of justice, particularly in our lower courts, is suspect. Cases are routinely rigged. There is the case of Sanjay Dutt, a man caught with two AK-47 assault rifles, and he is set to be excused because his late father wanted it. More importantly, Shiv Sena boss Bal Thackeray wanted it. In Kashmir or Manipur, just the possession of such lethal weapons will invite an "encounter". Not just this, Sanjay Dutt gets to have dinner with former prime minister Atal Behari Vajpayee in New York.

The "party with a difference" had as a Member of Parliament (MP) a person who has been "acquitted" of the (unsolvable) murder of the husband of the woman he now openly lives with. Another Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) MP has been known to be an associate of the Dawood Ibrahim gang that set off the Mumbai bomb blasts.
One cannot turn to the courts for justice, although there is a growing tendency to do so. Several million cases clog the higher courts, which has had a devastating impact on orderly civil and commercial transactions. Delays in justice routinely lead to broken contracts and agreements. Even the State has joined in exploiting this. Witness the manner in which government departments and companies routinely hang on to properties where the leases have long expired. In fact, it is so accepted a practice that not to do it is to invite suspicion. We have created a system which encourages distrust. It is small wonder, then, that after politics, law is the most lucrative profession.

A friend who lives in Haryana was recently relating a harrowing story of how he had to pay an inspector of police to get a case of theft registered. It is not surprising that common people without the wherewithal to get expensive and slow justice seek other avenues. In Mumbai, they go to godfathers like Arun Gawli Member of the Legislative Assembly; in western UP, they go to the caste panchayat; in Bihar, they go the caste mafia leader; and in Telangana and Bastar, they go to the Peoples War. The supreme irony is that more often the quality of justice delivered by the informal system is considered to be superior to that offered by the Constitutional legal system. Even policemen seem to prefer them.

Corruption is so well entrenched and accepted that one is not required to dwell upon it. The phrase "to enjoy power" has acquired an entirely different dimension. The critical thing is that no action of the State, however highly placed the decision-maker, escapes suspicion. Corruption, as Indira Gandhi once self-servingly pointed out, is a worldwide phenomenon. Compared to the scale on which the Suharto, Marcos, and Bhutto families prospered, the activities of the Narasimha Rao and Vajpayee families, real or adopted, were small change. They can even be condoned as inevitable and a small price to pay in a country where sycophancy and flexible notions of morality are inherent cultural traits.

But the record of the Indian State in improving the living standards of the majority of its people is abysmal. India languishes among the bottom five of the World Bank's annual Development Report. Almost 70 per cent of the Indian nation lives below a poverty line that would factor in balanced diet, shelter, access to education and healthcare, and basic civic amenities. Nearly 60 per cent of Indians are illiterate. Infant mortality is 137 per 1,000 births. On all infrastructure indices we are well below — forget China — even that failed State, Pakistan! The Central government earmarks less for health and education than the cumulative pay raise the bureaucracy got last year — Rs 9,000 crore.

The State spends much more on the bureaucracy — a whopping Rs 170,000 crore for all Central and state government employees each year. That is a good 10 per cent of the Gross Domestic Product and is growing. The service sector is doing so well because public administration is growing at 11 per cent each year. If we remove this growth from the annual growth of 5-6 per cent, about which all our sarkari and pink paper economists crow, you will get a real growth much closer to the Hindu growth rate of 3 per cent we used to deride.

The bureaucracy has a self-serving methodology to determine poverty — 2,200 and 2,400 calories, respectively, for urban and rural areas. Given the rise
in foodgrains production and the State's ability to make much smaller food subsidy investments, every successive regime is able to crow that poverty levels are coming down.

In Dr Manmohan Singh's last year as finance minister, the government reported that poverty was down to 19 per cent, and tried to make us believe that its industrial liberalisation policies were percolating down. An Oxfam report and studies by leading economists like Suresh Tendulkar revealed that due to inflation and contraction of the economy in the initial years of "liberalisation", simple economic logic says that poverty levels actually went up.

At that time, the BJP said that it would use more parameters to determine poverty. Such a step would have resulted in targeting poverty alleviation differently. Rather than focus on providing foodgrains, the State would also have to focus on education, health, water, work, transport, sewage, and so on. We would see more investments in the rural sector, where the war on poverty has ultimately to be waged. On the basis of this parameter, after 57 years as a modern state and with very clear non-realisation of the Founding Fathers' dreams of a modernised state, we are clearly a failed State.

The failures of the first 50 years set out the task for the BJP, India's first truly non-Congress government. When the BJP came to power, the Congress truly symbolised corruption, venality, and an uncaring leadership. But, instead of change, we got five more years of the same, the same monumental corruption, the same concentration of powers, the same uncaring attitudes to the real problems, the same kind of statism. Only, instead of a doting father, we now had a doting father-in-law. Liberalisation became Suhartoism instead of an all-encompassing reform process.

The two United Progressive Alliance budgets have made no significant alteration in the general direction of the previous decade. There is a decline of spending on critical sectors. The Central government spends less on agriculture and irrigation than on civil aviation. About 70 per cent of our people are dependent on agriculture, which accounts for 23 per cent of the Gross National Product, whereas there were only 12 million air-passengers last year.

Today, Delhi has the highest level of air pollution in the world. The Ganga is so polluted that health experts say that exposure of even a small wound to it will lead to infection. All urban, human, and industrial wastes flow into waterbodies, and thence into the groundwater or rivers. All over the country, groundwater tables are falling alarmingly as the State has abandoned its responsibilities to provide for water harvesting and irrigation.

http://www.hardnewsmedia.com/portal/2005/08/54

Ray

Absolutely.

It is a failed state if the Communist Mohan Guruswamy says so.

Failed because it has not become a prey to Communism.

More so because India still has not conquered the USA and is but contented to be the capitalist running dog!

The victory of the toiling masses is still so far away!

So sad. So evil!

Down with India! Down with America! We will not tolerate this Dollar Imperialism! And down with Mars too!

dalem

From what little I understand about India, it seems like a pretty kickass place - boistrous, industrious, and bawdy. In 20 years they will run the Eastern Hemisphere and we will run the Western Hemisphere.

I'd better learn Hindi, eh? Is it Hindi? A friend of mine studied Hindi back in college.

-dale

indianguy4u

English would would be good enuff my friend!

__________________
Hala Madrid!!

Ray

Dalem,

It would be better that you learn Arabic.

They have crushed one superpower and they are taking on the second and the only superpower today.

No one has a chance!

All I know is Al bin tun, which one of my friend tells me means Pretty girl!

Asim Aquil

Its not so bad.

bull

this article was already posted here in WAB right???

__________________
What's the difference between people who pray in church and those who pray in casinos?
The ones in the casinos are serious.

Leader

I seem to recall seeing it before

__________________

lemontree

Mohan Guruswamy - he is disappointed that USSR does not exist and we are not following the communist model of socialism.

__________________

Cheers!...on the rocks!!

Jay

Yes, come invade it

__________________
A grain of wheat eclipsed the sun of Adam !!

Ray

Actually nothing wrong of YasirKarim in posting an old thread in the History subforum.

He is madrassa trained. All he knows well is the Quaran.

Therefore, since the same thread was posted a few weeks ago and has died its natural death, he must have thought it has become history.

His simple mind, honed at the madrassa to think he is a Tiger on the prowl, suggested to him that it being history, it requires to be registered in the history subforum.

Attaboy Yasirkarim, you are doing excellently for a madrassa boy.

Now just pick up your AK 47 and its magazines and the IED and head the Iraq or Afghanistan way and become history yourself at the hands of the US forces!

Good luck and Allah Bless.

Jainderpal

India is the biggest success story that the educted elite of the Pakistani mulim madrassa hate and detest. The 20,000 sikhs in Pakistan are the most anti-Pakistan people in that land becuse of the inflicted torture they have faced from state sponsored muslim fundmentalists. Most commies are angry with India's success. India represents the best of Buddhism, Christianity, Hinduism, Islam, Judaism, Zoroastroism et al. This really makes all the fundamentalists angry. It takes their power away. I wish the average person from all over wakes up and realizes he/she will not be used as a pawn anymore. That will be the end of religious fundamentalism. End of the Mullahs and end of Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Without adding more, here is an article worth reading. This is one of the few articles that I have read presents a more clearer picture of India than the garbage we read praising Hindustan.

Sadly, some of the content in this article can be attributed to Pakistan also. Comments?????

Is India a failed State?
Cover Story
On almost all parameters, developmental and otherwise, and for all its modernisation pretensions, India falls into that shameful category, along with Somalia, Afghanistan, Iraq, and Pakistan-the faltering State

Mohan Guruswamy Delhi

The term "failed state" entered our lexicon, initially, in the context of Somalia, Afghanistan, and now, increasingly, for Iraq. State authority and power are often confused as being the same. Authority derives from constitutional legitimacy and respect for the institutions such as the judiciary, Parliament, permanent bureaucracy, and the press, whereas power is really the power to coerce and enforce the will of the State. Authority is abstract while power is physical.

This is not to say that in a failed state the power to coerce or enforce does not exist. In Somalia, there are more guns in the hands of the various warring clans than a legitimately constituted state would have ever required. Ditto for Afghanistan. Ditto for Iraq. In these countries, the symbols of statehood are much in evidence. There is a currency and people trade with each other. Goods are imported and exported. Services like electricity, water, and transport are still available. Schools and courts function. There is even foreign representation. Somalia, Afghanistan, and Iraq have embassies in New Delhi.

Yet, we call them failed States because the people who call the shots, or more often fire the shots, are without any constitutional, legal, moral, divine, or civilisational authority. They are in a state in which societies existed before the advent of the modern state. That they are nationalities or even States is not in doubt, but the point is that they have failed to be states where constitutional authority reigns and power does not grow from the barrel of a gun.

In mediaeval times, the State mainly existed to enrich the king and the durbar, and increase their power and area of domination. Not so the modern State, implicit in which is that the State is tasked with not only providing order, but also improving living standards and transform society. Thus, while the ability to provide order is important, to judge whether a state has failed or only partially passed, one has to judge it by the other broad parameters. India is certainly not in the Somalia league. It is not even in the Pakistan league, where the internal situation is so appalling that many western observers have taken to calling it a failed State.

Yet our own performance is not something we can be proud of. Jammu and Kashmir, Bihar, Jharkhand, Chhattisgarh, Nagaland, Manipur, Assam, and significant parts of Uttar Pradesh and Andhra Pradesh are anarchic. Even in the states where we consider there is some order, what is the record of the police? Recorded crime in Delhi was up by 55 per cent last year. In Mumbai and Delhi, the police have had to resort to extralegal methods, euphemistically called "encounters", to curb criminals. The press and society, generally, laud this, not realising that such activities have a tendency to go out of hand and start devouring the innocent. Instead of exposing the essential criminality of a Rajbir Singh of the Delhi Police or Daya Naik in Mumbai, the media entertains us with stories of their unidirectional close encounters. We never hear of a policeman getting even a scratch in these encounters.

Only about a third of major crimes like murder and dacoity are solved, and less than 10 per cent end with convictions. On a more mundane level, not many people stop at red lights anymore. At the half-year point, nearly 800 persons have perished in Delhi from automobile-related accidents. It has been a steep descent from Sardar Patel I to Sardar Patel II, and then some more now.

The institutions from which our State should derive authority are in a poor way. The quality of justice, particularly in our lower courts, is suspect. Cases are routinely rigged. There is the case of Sanjay Dutt, a man caught with two AK-47 assault rifles, and he is set to be excused because his late father wanted it. More importantly, Shiv Sena boss Bal Thackeray wanted it. In Kashmir or Manipur, just the possession of such lethal weapons will invite an "encounter". Not just this, Sanjay Dutt gets to have dinner with former prime minister Atal Behari Vajpayee in New York.

The "party with a difference" had as a Member of Parliament (MP) a person who has been "acquitted" of the (unsolvable) murder of the husband of the woman he now openly lives with. Another Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) MP has been known to be an associate of the Dawood Ibrahim gang that set off the Mumbai bomb blasts.
One cannot turn to the courts for justice, although there is a growing tendency to do so. Several million cases clog the higher courts, which has had a devastating impact on orderly civil and commercial transactions. Delays in justice routinely lead to broken contracts and agreements. Even the State has joined in exploiting this. Witness the manner in which government departments and companies routinely hang on to properties where the leases have long expired. In fact, it is so accepted a practice that not to do it is to invite suspicion. We have created a system which encourages distrust. It is small wonder, then, that after politics, law is the most lucrative profession.

A friend who lives in Haryana was recently relating a harrowing story of how he had to pay an inspector of police to get a case of theft registered. It is not surprising that common people without the wherewithal to get expensive and slow justice seek other avenues. In Mumbai, they go to godfathers like Arun Gawli Member of the Legislative Assembly; in western UP, they go to the caste panchayat; in Bihar, they go the caste mafia leader; and in Telangana and Bastar, they go to the Peoples War. The supreme irony is that more often the quality of justice delivered by the informal system is considered to be superior to that offered by the Constitutional legal system. Even policemen seem to prefer them.

Corruption is so well entrenched and accepted that one is not required to dwell upon it. The phrase "to enjoy power" has acquired an entirely different dimension. The critical thing is that no action of the State, however highly placed the decision-maker, escapes suspicion. Corruption, as Indira Gandhi once self-servingly pointed out, is a worldwide phenomenon. Compared to the scale on which the Suharto, Marcos, and Bhutto families prospered, the activities of the Narasimha Rao and Vajpayee families, real or adopted, were small change. They can even be condoned as inevitable and a small price to pay in a country where sycophancy and flexible notions of morality are inherent cultural traits.

But the record of the Indian State in improving the living standards of the majority of its people is abysmal. India languishes among the bottom five of the World Bank's annual Development Report. Almost 70 per cent of the Indian nation lives below a poverty line that would factor in balanced diet, shelter, access to education and healthcare, and basic civic amenities. Nearly 60 per cent of Indians are illiterate. Infant mortality is 137 per 1,000 births. On all infrastructure indices we are well below — forget China — even that failed State, Pakistan! The Central government earmarks less for health and education than the cumulative pay raise the bureaucracy got last year — Rs 9,000 crore.

The State spends much more on the bureaucracy — a whopping Rs 170,000 crore for all Central and state government employees each year. That is a good 10 per cent of the Gross Domestic Product and is growing. The service sector is doing so well because public administration is growing at 11 per cent each year. If we remove this growth from the annual growth of 5-6 per cent, about which all our sarkari and pink paper economists crow, you will get a real growth much closer to the Hindu growth rate of 3 per cent we used to deride.

The bureaucracy has a self-serving methodology to determine poverty — 2,200 and 2,400 calories, respectively, for urban and rural areas. Given the rise
in foodgrains production and the State's ability to make much smaller food subsidy investments, every successive regime is able to crow that poverty levels are coming down.

In Dr Manmohan Singh's last year as finance minister, the government reported that poverty was down to 19 per cent, and tried to make us believe that its industrial liberalisation policies were percolating down. An Oxfam report and studies by leading economists like Suresh Tendulkar revealed that due to inflation and contraction of the economy in the initial years of "liberalisation", simple economic logic says that poverty levels actually went up.

At that time, the BJP said that it would use more parameters to determine poverty. Such a step would have resulted in targeting poverty alleviation differently. Rather than focus on providing foodgrains, the State would also have to focus on education, health, water, work, transport, sewage, and so on. We would see more investments in the rural sector, where the war on poverty has ultimately to be waged. On the basis of this parameter, after 57 years as a modern state and with very clear non-realisation of the Founding Fathers' dreams of a modernised state, we are clearly a failed State.

The failures of the first 50 years set out the task for the BJP, India's first truly non-Congress government. When the BJP came to power, the Congress truly symbolised corruption, venality, and an uncaring leadership. But, instead of change, we got five more years of the same, the same monumental corruption, the same concentration of powers, the same uncaring attitudes to the real problems, the same kind of statism. Only, instead of a doting father, we now had a doting father-in-law. Liberalisation became Suhartoism instead of an all-encompassing reform process.

The two United Progressive Alliance budgets have made no significant alteration in the general direction of the previous decade. There is a decline of spending on critical sectors. The Central government spends less on agriculture and irrigation than on civil aviation. About 70 per cent of our people are dependent on agriculture, which accounts for 23 per cent of the Gross National Product, whereas there were only 12 million air-passengers last year.

Today, Delhi has the highest level of air pollution in the world. The Ganga is so polluted that health experts say that exposure of even a small wound to it will lead to infection. All urban, human, and industrial wastes flow into waterbodies, and thence into the groundwater or rivers. All over the country, groundwater tables are falling alarmingly as the State has abandoned its responsibilities to provide for water harvesting and irrigation.

http://www.hardnewsmedia.com/portal/2005/08/54[/quote]10

yasirkarim

India: A Failed State
by Ravi Shanker Kapoor
10 June 2005

Political commentators in India are fond of calling Pakistan a “failed state,” but few Indians are willing to admit that their own country is hurtling towards anarchy.



Political commentators in India are fond of calling Pakistan a “failed state,” given the havoc wrought by uncontrollable jihadis in our neighboring country. Few Indians, however, are willing to admit that their own country is hurtling towards anarchy. While Leftwing extremist violence and Islamic terror are rising at an alarming pace, the Indian state and the intellectual class refuse to even recognize the existence of any serious threat.

Military help was sought on May 18 against Naxals, the Leftwing extremists, to rescue senior police officials in the central Indian state of Chhatisgarh. Quoting Union Home Ministry officials, The Indian Express (May 20, 2005) reported that “Naxals carried out a series of coordinated attacks on two police outposts adjoining the Abujmarh Hills...They had also laid land mines along the exit and entry points,” trapping the senior officials who had rushed to the spot. “Ministry officials said that the Naxals wanted to loot arms and ammunition from the police. Ten policemen were injured in the attack.” That Leftwing extremism has assumed alarming proportions becomes evident from the fact that it was the first time that a military helicopter was used in anti-Naxal operations.



Hardly a day passes when the media does not inform us about killings by the various Naxalite groups. According to expert estimates, Naxal influence has spread from 55 districts in nine states in October 2003 to more than 150 in 13 states (in India, there are 602 districts).


Peace talks with the Naxalites in Andhra Pradesh -- the southern coastal state where Leftwing extremism is six decades old and is very strong -- ended unsuccessfully on April 4. Right from the beginning -- that is, October 2004, when the talks began -- there were doubts about any meaningful outcome.

State police chiefs met on November 4 last year. A news report in The Indian Express quoted the police chief of Chattisgarh, a state in central India, OP Rathore as saying, “Actually, there is nothing to talk. These people are ruthless. They are killing poor and innocent people and indulging in extortion.”


According to Rathore, “The country has never witnessed internal insurgency of this extent, spread over such a large geographical area. And what we see is only the tip of the iceberg. Tough measures are required to tackle it.” Another senior police official was quoted: “It is alarming the way Naxalites are spreading their activities, right from the Nepal border down to parts of Kerala now. New mergers are happening… Foreign elements are supporting them.” The police chief of Uttaranchal, a northern state, Kanchan Chaudhary, wanted her state to be included in the list of Naxal-infested states.

Naxal violence is not the only threat India faces; there is also demographic invasion from Bangladesh, which is linked with Islamic terror.

On April 16, 2005, an assistant commandant of India’s Border Security Force (BSF), Jeevan Kumar, along with a BSF soldier, went to the Akhaura Border checkpost in the Indian State of Tripura to seek a meeting with Bangladesh Rifles (BDR) officials, following a report that an Indian national had been abducted by Bangladeshi miscreants. But it was a trap to ensnare Kumar, who had proved effective in checking smuggling and illegal immigration of Bangladesh nationals. He was tortured and murdered in cold blood. His subordinate was also tortured and left for dead, but he survived to tell the tale.

Exactly four years earlier, on April 16, 2001, as many as 16 BSF personnel were similarly murdered in the Boroibari area of the Mankachar sector bordering the Indian state of Meghalaya. The bodies of some BSF men were tied onto bamboo poles, in the fashion that killed beasts of prey are tied, and paraded through the villages. Photographs of slain soldiers appeared prominently in all newspapers.

The two instances are part of a pattern: Bangladesh’s espousal of lebensraum policy to push its nationals to India and its promotion of the Islamist cause. In an interview with rediff.com, Lt Gen SK Sinha (Retd), former governor of the Indian state of Assam bordering Bangladesh, said in July 2000, “Even a friend of India like Sheikh Mujibur Rehman [father of Bangladesh, erstwhile known as East Pakistan] wrote in his book that East Pakistan should be given more space and the mineral wealth of Assam for his people to improve their lot. And in the 1990s, intellectuals in Dhaka began talking about lebensraum, which in German means living space, and they have been targeting Assam and the northeast. They have even been saying that with globalization, you have free movement of goods across international boundaries. There should also be free movement of labor, which means movement of population.”

Dhaka also believes in another kind of globalization: spreading Islamic terror in the entire region. In an article in South Asia Intelligence Review, Ajai Sahni and Bibhu Prasad Routray wrote, “Bangladesh has long supported terrorist organizations operating in India’s Northeast; Dhaka has been complicit in the massive demographic invasion and destabilization of India’s East and Northeast; BDR personnel have disrupted every Indian effort to construct a fence along the border by firing on the workers and BSF personnel engaged in this task; Bangladesh has emerged as the primary source of illegal arms and explosives for virtually every insurgent and criminal operation all along India’s East and Northeast; and the BDR supports a wide range of smuggling and criminal operations along the border.”


The response of the political class to growing Naxalite violence and Islamic terror has been, to put it mildly, pusillanimous. After observing the ritual of lodging a “strong protest” with Dhaka over the killing of Kumar, India’s national security adviser MK Narayanan directed the BSF to “exercise restraint.” Similarly, the federal government, which depends on the crucial support of the Left Front from outside, continues to oscillate between tough talk and reconciliatory posturing in its response to the Naxalites.


However, it is not only the incumbent United Progressive Alliance government that has behaved in an abject manner in its dealing with the threats to the nation. Even the earlier regime of the National Democratic Alliance (1998-2004), which was accused of being jingoistic and anti-Muslim, ended up appeasing Bangladesh by refusing to bring the culprits to justice. The real factor behind the NDA’s, and now the UPA’s, capitulation was the fear of losing Muslim votes. Besides, there was the fear of getting targeted as anti-Muslim by the intellectual class. Not surprisingly, in the words of Sahni and Routray, “the then Union Home Secretary [during the NDA regime] went so far as to inform the media that it was ‘a unilateral action by the BDR troops and Government of Bangladesh was not aware of it.’ The fact that Dhaka chose to take no action against the guilty -- and that it has till now taken no such action -- has not deterred the pronouncements of Delhi’s political and bureaucratic illusionists.”

The illusionists are not confined to the political and bureaucratic circles; the intellectual class is not far behind. Some of the issues which engage our experts, scholars, and media brahmins are: when would India become a developed country, how to build an Indian century, when would we achieve the superpower status. When Prime Minister Singh was chosen to speak for Asia at the recently concluded Bandung conference of Asian and African countries, intellectuals started celebrating. The choice of Singh to speak for Asia was called “yet more evidence of India’s rising eminence on the global stage” by The Times Of India. The rest of the media was no less ecstatic.

This is not to suggest that there are no grounds for optimism. India registered 6.9 percent growth in 2004-05; this fiscal year, the GDP growth is projected to be in the region of 7.5 percent. Industry grew by 8 percent in the last fiscal year, and the high growth rate is expected to continue in 2005-06. Similarly, many other indicators -- exports, foreign exchange reserves, etc. -- are also encouraging. A major concern, however, is spiraling government expenditure; this is mainly a legacy of socialism, which molded economic policy till 1991. On the face of it, the economy appears to be sufficiently resilient; but such resilience is because of private enterprise and robust values of Indian society; as the Indian state retreated from the economic arena after the economic reforms of 1991, the creative forces of Indian society filled in the gaps, giving rise to a veritable feel-good factor in the economy.


But politics is different from economy: if the state does not deliver in the economic arena, it can just withdraw; but it cannot give up its primary duties of maintaining law and order and protecting the nation. The Indian state has failed not in just its peripheral functions -- like running government-owned businesses -- but also in its primary duties.

But the political and intellectual illusionists refuse to see such failures of the Indian state; instead they keep pontificating about the need to make India a permanent member of the UN Security Council, given its “rising eminence on the global stage.” It is another matter that the aspiring superpower meekly watches the slaughter of its soldiers.

Ravi Shanker Kapoor is the editor of www.indiaright.org, India's first conservative website. Before that he spend more than ten years with The Financial Express. His most recent book is Failing the Promise: Irrelevance of the Vajpayee Government (2003).

Ray

India heading to anarchy?

Good one.

You guys sure know how to joke. Maybe you are following your 'honourable' and "venerable" President.

Remember that assinine "joke" he played on Pakistan while in the US? The "joke" that Pakistani women rush around deperately to get raped so that they get a visa and become millionaires!

In short, that Pakistani women are basically of the Heera Mandi (the world famous redlight area of Lahore (appropriate name of the town, I presume) mould. Would anyone with self respect accept that? I don't. And then he lies only to be made a laughing stock and a pathetic figure wherein the audio tapes are put on the net including this forum! In fact, Pakistan is moving towards insanity if one goes by the way the President indicated in the USA. He is losing his balance and since he is a dictator, Pakistan has to follow suit unfortunately. And imagine he calls prostitution (women running mad to get raped!) as the "Pakistani environment"! Heavens, even a sworn enemy of Pakistan can never hold a candle to this slur by the very own President of Pakistan himeself. And he claims he is the persona of Pakistan! Christ!

I know it is your desire that India collapses, but then sad that it is not happening. Very sad..........for you, that it.

Leader

"India heading to anarchy?"

America's right behind you. Don't worry.