Vandana Shiva writes in The Deccan Chronicle on 4 January 2012

In November 2011, when the UPA government announced in Parliament that it had cleared the entry of big retail chains like Wal-Mart and Tesco into India through 51 per cent FDI in multi-brand retail, it justified the decision saying that FDI in retail will boost food security and benefit farmers’ livelihoods. But the assurance that FDI in retail would ease inflation did not resolve the political crisis the government was facing; it deepened it. Parliament was stalled for several days of the Winter Session after which the government was forced to withdraw its decision.

The story of FDI in retail goes back to 2005 when Prime Minister Manmohan Singh signed an agriculture agreement with the US, along with the nuclear agreement. On the board of the US-India Knowledge Initiative in Agriculture, as it is called, sit Monsanto (the world’s leading producer of GM seed), ConAgra (among the world’s big agribusiness along with Cargill) and Wal-Mart (the world’s biggest retail giant).

Protests had prevented Wal-Mart’s entry into retail, but in 2007 it did get a backdoor entry through a joint-venture with Bharti (their stores go by the names of Easyday and Best Price Modern Wholesale). No backend infrastructure has been built so far, one of the other claims of the government about why we need retail giants.

The way the UPA government tried to ram through the decision on FDI in retail — without consulting the Opposition parties, or even its allies — was clearly undemocratic. But the decision itself is also flawed. It illustrates a disconnect between an ideology based on market fundamentalism which is the leaning of the present government, and the Indian reality of small farms and small retail. There is also a disconnect between that ideology with its codeword of “reform”, and the crisis that market fundamentalism is facing, worldwide as well as in India. If anything needs reform, it is the failed paradigm of corporate globalisation.

Firstly, price rise is driven by commodification of food and speculation on food commodities. Industralisation and globalisation of food and agriculture has transformed food from a source of life into a commodity, and as a commodity, food is divorced from its sources — the seeds, the soil, the farmer — and from its end use as nourishment for our bodies. Industrialisation of agriculture and commodification of food is justified on grounds of producing more food and reducing hunger. However, industrial agriculture wastes and destroys resources — the soil, the water, the biodiversity — which produce food. The book, American Wasteland, by Jonathan Bloom, reveals that the US wastes 50 per cent of the £591 billion of food it grows a year.

Industrialisation of food also degrades and denutrifies food. We, therefore, have a dual malnutrition crisis — the crisis faced by one billion people who do not get access to food, and another two billion who have access to industrial food but not to healthy food and suffer from food-related diseases such as obesity, diabetes and hypertension.

Industrialisation, thus, creates hunger. And by increasing the costs of production, it creates a negative economy, locking farmers and food producers into debt. In the Third World, debt translates into hunger.

Hunger is also created by the commodification of food. The industrial model of food production is producing commodities, not food. More commodities do not mean less hunger, but more. And when food becomes a commodity it becomes an object of speculation for profits, robbing the poor of their entitlements. As a commodity it does not matter what food is used for. Food can be transformed into feed for animals in factory farms, or into fuel to run cars. Seventy per cent of the food grain in the US is used to feed animals, 30 per cent to feed cars. The proposed increase through FDI will take this to 40 per cent, creating a conflict between feed and fuel, and pitting both against food. This diversion of food to feed and fuel competes with the food needs of the poor. It creates food scarcity and contributes to the rise in food prices.

When food is treated as a commodity, it does not matter how it is produced — whether GM seeds were used or not, whether it is produced chemically or organically. But how food is produced does determine what happens to our soil, biodiversity and water; it also determines whether farmers live or die. And how food is produced determines whether what we eat nourishes our bodies or contributes to disease and ill health.

When food is a commodity, it becomes the object of speculation. Putting food on the global casino takes food away from people’s kitchens and plates. Secondly, the entry of big corporations into the food chain polarises prices, decreasing the share of the farmer and increasing the retail costs. This polarisation of prices is structural; corporations make their profits through vertical integration and controlling the entire food chain. They buy cheap from farmers and sell at high cost when they have a monopoly. The control of big retail over the food system has brought down the farmers’ share to as little as two per cent.

Before liberalisation, the difference between wholesale prices and retail prices was a mere six per cent. After the removal of Quantitative Restrictions, which opened up India to dumping of subsidised products, wholesale prices started to go down while retail prices continued to climb. The entry of retail giants will further push wholesale prices down, without taming the price rise. It is not the number of middlemen that matters but the size of a middleman. A giant retailer is a giant middleman. It might be a single player, but it harvests super profits at the cost of society. That is how the Walton family, which owns Wal-Mart owns $100 billion of personal wealth, which is equivalent to the wealth of the bottom 30 per cent of the US society. You do not accumulate that kind of money by paying farmers higher prices and bringing consumers cheaper products. Wal-Mart and Tesco are not friends of farmers as is being projected by the government and corporate spokesmen.

The Financial Times said on November 28, 2011: “A consolidated retail sector would require consolidated agriculture to supply.” Consolidation means concentration, concentration means displacement of small farmers, destruction of small farmers means deepening both the food crisis and the agrarian crisis. Big retail means big agribusiness.

About 250,000 farmers have already committed suicide in India since 1997 because of increasing monopolies on seeds and chemicals, rising costs of inputs and deepening debt. Big retail will uproot small farmers, as it has done worldwide. India’s future cannot be “retail dictatorship” and “seed dictatorship”. It has to be “retail democracy” and “food democracy”, based on small retail and small farms.

Bharat  Karnad writes in The Deccan Chronicle on 18 August 2011

It is curious that India and the United States — the two most important democracies in the world today, have in Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and President Barack Obama, chief executives who, it turns out, share traits that the Washington Post columnist, E.J. Dionne, Jr., identified as Mr Obama’s hallmark, namely, being at once risk-averse and competitive. In the three weeks this writer recently spent in America, it was impossible to escape the incessant drumbeat in the media about the economy on the skids, raising of the national debt ceiling amidst rancorous partisanship, the loss of “Triple A” credit rating, and an ascendant China, fearing its huge investment in some 13 per cent of the US Treasury bonds issued being reduced to waste paper, furiously wagging a finger at Washington, demanding Americans live within their means. (In all this gloom, amusement was afforded visiting Indians and NRIs, at least, by the website of a major Indian newspaper heralding an Indian as having “downgraded the United States”!) Meanwhile, at the centre of the hubbub, Mr Obama stayed on the sidelines, mostly disengaged, even as Republican Party Right-wingers called him names. It felt like home. With scams and scandals of all kinds coming home to roost within the Congress Party portals, bad economic news dogging his every step, Dr Singh, other than sleep-talking through much the same Red Fort speech he has made the last seven years on Independence Day, has stayed mum, barricading himself in 7 Race Course Road, a mute spectator to things going horribly wrong for his government and for him personally. Except, unlike Mr Obama, the Indian Prime Minister is no mass leader nor a political visionary; even less is he an orator able to turn around a disbelieving public. His public speeches actually set many a teeth on edge. Dr Singh hopes to keep warbling the same old song without taking any of the follow-up actions he has been promising these many years to implement the second-generation economic reforms desperately needed to shift the economy to a higher plane. But transforming India into a powerful growth engine, at a minimum, requires overhauling archaic labour laws and instituting new land acquisition norms in order to give fillip to industry, and boosting the rural economy by freeing the agricultural sector from export and other restrictions, none of which is being done because of fear of the faux socialists — Messrs Mulayam Singh, Amar Singh, Lalu Prasad Yadav, and Company, and the unpredictable politics of Mayawati. It is another matter that these worthies have, so far, been held in check by the ruling party manipulating the CBI corruption cases against them. But general economic up-gearing and CBI threats nevertheless entail risks because, overdone, these measures may persuade these leaders to join with the BJP-led Opposition to bring down the Congress-led coalition government. And risk-taking of any kind, especially with so much at stake, goes against Dr Singh’s over-cautious nature and party chief Sonia Gandhi’s plans. After all he is a career bureaucrat hoisted, for reasons of zero-threat to the Nehru-Gandhi dynasty and his personal malleability, to the top post in government, an arrangement that permits Mrs Gandhi to keep her hand on the steering wheel, a control now reinforced by her chosen civil servant, Pulok Chatterji, replacing T.K.A Nair as principal secretary to the Prime Minister. The corporate bosses’ understanding of the turgid pace of economic reforms is limited by the automotive metaphor they have used. Y.C. Deveshwar of Indian Tobacco Company in the August 2 meeting with finance minister Pranab Mukherjee reportedly ventured that the problem lay with two drivers — one pressing the accelerator, the other the brake. It’s a view similar to the Infosys founder N.R. Narayana Murthy’s that the government’s “culture of taking slow decisions” is attributable to “two leaders in the set-up”. While such takes on reality seem reasonable at first glance, they are wrong in their essentials, in the main, because they assume that Dr Singh is driven by the desire for systemic change. The fact is he never had his foot on the accelerator, even as Mrs Gandhi never lifted hers from the brake pedal for fear that any forward movement would undermine the ruling party’s pseudo-Leftist moorings. Indira Gandhi’s Garibi Hatao-brand of crude populism masquerading as socialism is the true ideological lodestar of the Congress Party, not the quaint Fabian socialist tenets that animated Jawaharlal Nehru’s policies. Dr Singh, the ultimate apparatchik and beneficiary of the system, in the event, has a disincentive to burnish his reformist credentials, such as they are, if that involves crossing the party line. Mrs Gandhi, on her part, may understand little about socialism other than that it has kept her family in the clover for a very long time. But it is sufficient reason for her to stay with the socialist rhetoric, statist solutions, and a horrendous state apparatus, which together have turned corrupt practices and mis-governance into a thriving cottage industry. Where corruption is concerned, Dr Singh and Mr Obama are somewhat similarly placed. Personally clean, Mr Obama owes his meteoric rise from a grassroots organiser in Chicago to the corrupt Democratic Party political machine ruthlessly run, gangster style, first by mayor Richard J. Daley, who bequeathed the machine to his son, the even longer serving Richard Michael Daley, whose brother, William J. Daley, incidentally, is Mr Obama’s White House Chief of Staff. Dr Singh may not be corrupt himself, but that is small consolation considering he is presiding over a government that, going by the sheer extent, scale and magnitude of the loot indulged in by his party members and Cabinet colleagues, is patently the most corrupt in independent India’s history, and one that may be headed for a downfall. The muck has long ago stuck to the Prime Minister’s escutcheon. So, when he repeatedly declares that the corrupt will face punishment, who takes him seriously?

Indranil Banerjie writes in The Deccan Chronicle on 8 August 2011

West Bengal chief minister Mamata Banerjee might well be the political paradigm of our times. Last week, she stood by the River Hooghly and announced amidst much fanfare and media attention a multi-crore rupee riverside beautification programme, in accordance with her pre-poll promise to make Kolkata another London. Like a modern-day Victoria, Ms Banerjee promised to reward the city mayor if he could complete the project in four instead of the projected six months. She either omitted to mention or did not know that the municipality was facing an acute cash crunch and had been instructed to slash development expenditure on sewage works, roads, health schemes, slum development and water supply. The reality is that Kolkata’s finances are in dire straits and although the honourable chief minister has decreed that Kolkata will be another London she really has no means to effect that transformation.

Ms Banerjee’s method of producing a public good through the waving of a make-believe magic wand is not her invention. Successive railway ministers, herself included, have shown the way by announcing new trains to woo politically important constituencies without bothering to first increase capacities in the railways. But that is not the concern of the modern-day Indian politician, who believes that public goods, public capacities and public revenues are nothing but means to further political aims.

The workings of the decree and be damned attitude are evident in two crucial pieces of legislation that are in the works. The first is the Land Acquisition Bill, vital for both development and social justice, and greatly overdue. The problem is not so much the provisions of the bill but the attempt to make it effective in retrospect. This means all the land acquired in the past decades to build townships all over the country would be affected. This would plunge the country into a frenzy of litigation and social turmoil.

This would not merely affect the middle classes who have bought houses in towns such as Noida and Gurgaon but would also bring down the fortunes of states like Uttar Pradesh and Haryana which depend on new urban clusters for economic development. Any sensible government would not have considered passing such a sensitive piece of legislation with retrospective effect; unfortunately, the bigger concern here appears to be the need for a regime change in a state ruled by a political rival.

The Food Security Act is another conjuror’s trick. Unexceptionable in intent, the legislation is completely unaffordable and impossible to implement fairly. As it is, the government is having a hard time paying subsidy on the existing Public Distribution System (PDS), the bill for which is climbing exponentially; it jumped 65 per cent in 2010-11 to over Rs 74,000 crore from Rs 58,228 crore in the previous year.

While the food subsidy bill is skyrocketing, much of the food meant for the poor continues to be stolen. The World Bank has warned that 60 per cent of food subsidies do not reach the poor and that it would be folly to push more money into a putrefying system without first fixing it.

The Right to Education (RTE) Act passed in 2009 is another example of how little can be achieved by mere legislation and budgetary allocations. A New Delhi-based NGO, Accountability Initiative, has pointed out that currently only an estimated 11 per cent of government schools have the necessary infrastructure as per the act and several thousand crores would have to be pumped in to bring them to minimum standards.

It is not as if the government is being miserly; it has in fact upped expenditure on the Sarva Shiksha Abhiyaan from Rs 15,000 crore in 2010-11 to Rs 21,000 crore for this fiscal year. This money is to be transferred to state governments for implementing the scheme. Problem is there are no mechanisms to enforce basic performance parameters in government schools; absent teachers, broken-down school buildings and abysmal academic standards have become the norm. Even in rural India more and more parents are sending their children to private school if they can afford it. India still has the largest number of illiterates in the world.

No one can dispute that the country needs more prosperity but little can be achieved by pompous promulgations and financial allocations read out in Parliament. In the past, politicians relied on strategising, long-term planning, gradual accretion of assets and building capacities to implement public development initiatives. They scoured the world for appropriate technology, expertise and finances; managers and workers were trained for the new enterprises; and it was through this process that the country was built up.

It would be a wonderful world if poverty, hunger and ignorance could be removed by decree; but this has not happened anywhere in the world, not in the erstwhile Soviet Union or China, and will not happen in India either. What will happen instead is that the government would fast become insolvent, paying out the bulk of its earnings on subsidies and interest payments, borrowing funds it cannot afford, slashing expenditure on new investments and infrastructure, and gradually but surely running the country into the ground. Already, in fiscal 2010-11, interest payments and subsidies accounted for 49 per cent of the Central government’s non-plan expenditure.

Given the country’s severely eroded mechanisms for implementing development projects, enforcing laws, adjudicating disputes coupled with the enormous corruption machinery that drains the financial allocation system, the politics of decrees translates to very little on the ground. Yet politicians continue to wave their mythical wands and hope the electorate will remain enthralled.

Despite having a renowned economist as the Prime Minister and several stalwarts like Pranab Mukherjhee, P.Chidambaram, etal the Union Government is sinking ship every moment.  The common perception is that the government works for the rich and ignores the poor. Some one aptly captured UPA as the reverse Robinhood – robbing the poor and paying the rich. 

Bharat Karnad writes in The Deccan Chronicle on 20 July 2011

On June 29, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh met with the editors of a few newspapers.

When asked about whether he had been putting pressure on the environment ministry (then headed by Jairam Ramesh) to overlook environmental violations of several projects, Dr Singh said yes, and justified his action thus: “As Gandhiji said, ‘Poverty is the biggest polluter’.

We need to have a balance.” The Prime Minister was probably referring to what Indira Gandhi had said at the first UN Environment Conference in Stockholm in 1972: “Are not poverty and need the greatest polluters?” In that same speech, she had also quoted from the Atharva Veda:

“What of thee I dig out, let that quickly grow over,
Let me not hit thy vitals, or thy heart.”

Dr Singh conveniently ignored the more significant quote. The Prime Minister’s duty is to uphold the Constitution and nation’s laws, including environmental laws, not subvert them. By admitting that he has been putting pressure on the environment ministry, Dr Singh admitted that he was, indeed, subverting the law. Most commentators view the removal of Mr Ramesh from the environment ministry during the July 12 Cabinet reshuffle as a further step in environmental deregulation.

While quoting Indira Gandhi to justify his subversion of environmental law, the Prime Minister forgot that it was Indira Gandhi who created the country’s environmental governance structure; he forgot that it was Indira Gandhi’s intervention that strengthened the call of movements and scientists not to build a hydro-electric project in Silent Valley in Kerala, thereby saving a biodiversity rich ecosystem. And it was Indira Gandhi’s concern that Mussorie, the Queen of Hills, was being stripped naked by limestone mining that led to the Supreme Court order that shut down the mines in 1983.

In pre-liberalisation days, it was accepted that if commerce undermines ecosystems which support life, then commercial activity must stop, because life must carry on. Article 21 of the Constitution makes it the duty of the state to protect life. Since ecological processes support life, the state has a duty to protect ecology. Under Dr Singh’s leadership since the 1990s, based as it is on “growth fetishism”, all ecological devastation has been justified in the name of growth. But who is driving this ecological devastation and pollution? The rich and powerful corporations or the poor and powerless farmers, tribals and displaced rural communities who become urban slum dwellers?

The poor do not cause the pollution, but live in polluted places because they are displaced from their homes in rural areas where they lived sustainably for millennia. This is environmental injustice and it is an inevitable consequence of outsourcing of pollution from rich countries in the garb of FDI.

Coastal Orissa is a case in point. In the Jagatsingpur district, where Posco’s giant steel plant is planned with a massive FDI ($12 billion), farmers grow betel and paddy, coconut and cashew, fruits and fish. There is no pollution and no waste. There is a prosperity that the GDP does not count. This economy of sustenance is being uprooted violently to enable Posco to export our iron-ore and steel. Every law of the land, including the Forest Rights Act and the Coastal Zone Regulation Act, is being violated. But when the committees of the ministry of environment confirm the violations, the Prime Minister puts pressure on the environment minister to give approval to Posco. The women and children of Govindpur, Dhinkia and Nuagaon lay down under a scorching sun to stop the land grab in June. They know what the Posco project will bring: ecological destruction, pollution, displaced people and the destruction of our democracy.

In India, the major polluters are the giant coal-based power plants and industries, like the automobile. Emissions from the use of fossil fuel are driven by the economically powerful, not the poor. But it is the poor who are most vulnerable to the floods, droughts and cyclones that climate change intensifies.

The same applies to toxic pollution. A case in point is the pesticide, Endosulfan. The UN has banned it. Most countries in the world have banned it. The Supreme Court has ordered an interim ban after it was reported that over a thousand people have died and more than 9,000 crippled in Kasargod where Endosulfan was sprayed on cashew plantations for 20 years. The innocent victims did not cause the toxic pollution. It was caused by powerful corporations who influence decisions, who have blocked a ban on Endosulfan even as people die and children are born disabled.

Toxic agrichemicals harm all life. Synthetic fertilisers run into rivers and oceans, creating “dead zones”. Nitrogen oxide released from nitrogen fertilisers accumulates in the atmosphere as a green house gas that is 300 times more damaging than carbon dioxide. These synthetic fertilisers also make bombs, as the recent terrorist attacks in Mumbai and the Oklahoma bombings have shown.

We now have a new form of pollution in agriculture — genetic pollution from genetically engineered crops. Genetic pollution is destroying biodiversity and devastating farmers’ livelihoods. The chemical corporations are the gene giants who now control seed. Here too, instead of being the voice of poor and vulnerable farmers, the Prime Minister is the voice of powerful global corporations through his repeated reference to genetic engineering as the second Green Revolution.

Whether it is atmospheric pollution, toxic pollution, genetic pollution or urban waste pollution, all environmental pollution is an externality of a greed-based economy which privatises natural resources and socialises pollution. The rich accumulate the land, the biodiversity, the water, the air and the profits; the poor bear the burden of dispossession and accumulated pollution. We expect the Prime Minister to uphold the Constitution and environmental laws. We do not expect him to support and promote the polluters. We expect the Prime Minister to remember that he holds our precious natural heritage and natural capital in trust for future generations, not to be given away to greedy corporations and destroyed for short-term profits.

Robert Cohen writes in The Deccan Chronicle on 20 July 2011

Peter Oborne, writing in the conservative Daily Telegraph, recently suggested that the Conservative British Prime Minister, David Cameron, was not merely in a mess, he “is in a sewer”. That seems about right. Cameron lost it over Rupert Murdoch. He showed staggering lack of judgement in hiring Andy Coulson, the former News of the World editor, as his first director of communications at Downing Street, a hubristic decision made against the best advice and apparently with a dual aim: to show he was not an old Etonian “toff” and to get favourable treatment from the 37 per cent of the British print media owned by Murdoch.

He then spent a fair chunk of time during his first year in office in 26 meetings with various News Corp honchos, including Rebekah Brooks, who was arrested by the British police on July 17. Brooks happened to be part of the Chipping Norton set, well described by Oborne as “an incestuous collection of louche, affluent, power-hungry and amoral Londoners, located in and around the Prime Minister’s Oxfordshire constituency”.

When I was at Oxford University many decades ago, the surrounding countryside was still just that — countryside and a delight. That was before the masters of the universe starting acquiring their Cotswold gems as weekend homes and gentrification went into overdrive, complete with helipads, of course. Brooks and her husband live a few miles from Cameron’s constituency home. Matthew Freud, the public relations guru married to Elisabeth Murdoch, also has a weekend home in the area. Chipping Norton was the limestone British Camelot. Who would have dreamt it?

Cameron’s judgment is in serious question. His coalition’s earlier green light for News Corp.’s acquisition of the 61 per cent of British Sky Broadcasting that it does not own — a deal now aborted — demands further scrutiny. It is hard to resist the impression that Cameron was completely in the thrall of Brooks, Murdoch and his son James Murdoch. I had thought there was more to the Prime Minister than slickness.

But it is not only Cameron who is in the sewer. The culture of the United Kingdom as a whole has been reeking pungently of late — its venal, voyeuristic, reality-show-obsessed, me-me-me nature thrust under the magnifying glass by revelations about what the tabloid press would do to satisfy the prurience of its readers, hacking into phones at any price, even the phone of a 13-year-old murdered girl. It may be debated to what degree Murdoch created this culture, or reinforced it, through his ruthless, no-holds-barred approach to journalism — and its ultimate deviation into criminal activity.

Certainly he had a significant role. The police and members of Parliament were compromised. But would Western societies, including the United States, be betraying these same characteristics — obsession with celebrities (and especially their sex lives); blurring of the lines between news and entertainment; extreme self-indulgence (I am my Facebook Wall); a dearth of political principle and a surfeit of political attraction to money — without Murdoch?

I suspect they would.
The Murdoch story is a cautionary tale for our times that goes well beyond the now-compromised fortunes of News Corp.
The United States, after all, has been doing its own good impression of life in the political sewers recently. Republican ideologues with no notion of the national interest do their brinkmanship number as the country hovers near an unthinkable default. The only thought in their heads seems to be: How will all this play next year in the election and how can we hurt US President Barack Obama without being blamed for it?

Is the calculation of these Republicans that different from Cameron’s? It’s all about the next news cycle, and spin, and ego, and where the money for political campaigns is, and a total absence of judgment. What it’s not about is responsibility and the commonweal.

Murdoch is a flawed genius whose very ruthlessness has now led him to his comeuppance. He knew, more viscerally than anyone, what postmodern societies wanted to satisfy their twisted appetites and he provided that material in all its gaudiness. I don’t think he created those appetites. But he sure fed them.

Something deeply insidious and corrupt is at work that has been on view in both Britain and the United States. It involves the takeover of politics by money and spin and massaged images and privileged coteries. It is the death of statesmanship.

Murdoch’s Fox News has played a big role. But all the major technological and other forces in Western societies are pushing towards polarisation. Google is profiling you through your searches and directs you to the material most likely to reinforce your world view and ideology. Increasingly, we live in our political comfort zone. Debate and dialogue die. The sordid dance of Cameron and Murdoch has ended up revealing deep flaws in the British society that are also deep problems in Western societies as a whole. Will the two men recover? Cameron is much younger and so in theory he should be able to claw his way out of the sewer. But I’m not sure he will get over this. Murdoch has more backbone and so a better chance, even at this late stage.

Ashok Malik writes in The Deccan Chronicle on 21 June 2011

Six months have passed since 2011 began and increasingly this is being written off as India’s wasted year. Caught — some would say enthralled — by domestic political theatre, it has been easy for India to ignore the wider implications of the series of corruption scandals, a paralysed government and policy and public initiatives being hijacked by amateurs belonging to one or the other civil society platform.

India will survive 2011, survive the United Progressive Alliance government and survive this storm. Yet the India story has been substantially damaged. From falling foreign investment figures to rising home-grown pessimism, the signs are telling. It is for us to read them.

There is a substantial change from even eight months ago, when US President Barack Obama addressed Parliament and called India a power that had emerged and deserved permanent Security Council membership. This summer a vacancy arose at Roosevelt House, home of the American ambassador in New Delhi. If India were still the India of Mr Obama’s praise, there would have been a clamour in Washington, D.C., for the India job. Political high-fliers would have lobbied for themselves.

Instead, a veteran diplomat — an old India hand admittedly — has been appointed. He is a trusted professional but not the sort of “A list” insider the United States President would have sent to India if it were really top of his mind. The Americans are not alone. One by one many ancient demons are coming back to haunt perceptions of India. Egregious corruption, ineffectual governance, inability to promptly honour contracts, failure to appear consistent in economic or strategic policy and goal-making: the doubts are surfacing again.

From Australia to the Netherlands, a clutch of foreign missions is constantly urging the ministry of external affairs to help clear payments to Australian or Dutch (or other) companies for services rendered during the Commonwealth Games. There have been no definite answers offered. The government is too scared to approve any payments till investigations into Games-related embezzlement are over. This could take years. In at least one case, an Australian company of long standing has gone bankrupt.

These may seem minor incidents but they are adding up. Exasperation with India, disgust with its venal and unreformed political system and concern it is slipping back to its mid-1990s (or even pre-1990s) ostrich-headed world view is growing. It would be futile to run away from that reality. In the past year India has not just stayed where it is; it has actually lost ground.

It is facile to pretend India is paying the price for democracy. Everything from coalition governments — and the failure of the Prime Minister to rein in wild political partners who may have won elections in a specific state — to Baba Ramdev submitting a list of outlandish demands, to lack of urgency on infrastructure reforms till a mythical “unanimity” is achieved can be blamed, rationalised and explained in the name of democracy.

Unfortunately, this so-called “democracy tax” is an excuse for a line of least resistance. That apart, while India’s commitment to universal franchise and free speech are applauded worldwide, the rest of the planet is driven by both political processes and economic outcomes. For India’s external stakeholders, it is not an “either/or” situation.

Global powers began to take India seriously in about 2002-2003 due to a happy confluence of phenomena. India’s economy shifted gears and GDP growth rates zoomed. The outsourcing boom matured. Key sectors — pharmaceuticals, automobiles — started to offer early evidence of India’s manufacturing prowess.

In parallel, India adopted a sober, pragmatic and modern foreign policy. It went out of its way to allay apprehensions that it was an unpredictable international actor that harboured adventurist tendencies. Finally, the US presence in Afghanistan and pressure on the Taliban and its backers in Pakistan took care of some of India’s near-term security apprehensions.

Other than 9/11 and the US intervention in Kabul, none of those events happened without effort on India’s part. Each was a hard won victory. Today, all three props of that edifice are vulnerable. The economy is shaky. A combination of high interest rates and a downbeat mood is keeping consumers from buying and manufacturers from increasing capacities (and so creating jobs).

In economic and foreign policy alike, the government has not fulfilled the potential India had demonstrated. Infrastructure, retail, land acquisition, an agricultural technology revolution, a genuine manufacturing thrust: India has been regurgitating the same promises and citing the problems for a half decade now. Where is the movement?

As for foreign policy, a country that was rewarded with an exceptional nuclear deal three years ago — the rules of global nuclear commerce rewritten only to accommodate India — has reverted to trademark diffidence. It barely counts even in Afghanistan, where the Americans are pushing for talks with the Taliban if only to give Mr Obama space and make symbolic “the tide is turning” gestures for his planned 2012 re-election. In short, India’s decade of good fortune is over.

Of course what this also means is that the supposed India-China rivalry has, in the medium term at least, devolved into a no-contest. India has chosen the worst moment to resort to navel gazing, give its economy sleeping pills and doggedly aim for strategic self-goals. In the past few months, China’s stock has actually risen. Its consumers are beginning to buy more, not enough for the West to be satisfied but more than the Chinese were willing to concede when the financial crisis broke in 2008.

The importance of China to the global economy is difficult for Indians to appreciate. In Canberra, the Prime Minister refuses to meet the Dalai Lama lest China — the largest buyer of Australian commodities — is offended. In something as obscure as the wine trade, expectation of demand from Chinese wine drinkers and collectors is pushing up 2011 prices to levels where these are 20 per cent above an anyway overheated 2010 market. In Asia, middle classes from Indonesia to the Philippines are increasingly looking to a life under the Chinese umbrella.

None of these groups and individuals has an option; and the India of 2011 is not even a ghost of an option.

The Deccan Chronicle writes on 6th June 2011

After both sides struck an initial stance of reasonableness, the government reckoned that yoga guru Ramdev was probably disinclined to end his protest campaign at Delhi’s Ramlila Grounds, although he had agreed to do so in a letter submitted the previous day to the government ministers negotiating with him.

Sensing that the Ramdev movement had, in effect, been organised by the RSS, and then finding arch communal troublemaker Sadhvi Rithambara, known for spewing venom against the minorities, was sharing the Ramlila Ground stage with the yoga teacher, it was expected that concern and alarm would follow in official circles, not to say among a broad swathe of public opinion.

The eviction of the saffron-wrapped yoga teacher and his followers by the Delhi police from the Ramlila Grounds past midnight on Saturday thus occasions little surprise. It transpires that Baba Ramdev had sought official permission to hold a “yoga camp” there but instead he nourished a political jamboree seeking to instigate people against the government. This was unfortunate.

Baba Ramdev had told followers that 90 per cent of his demands had already been met. Some of the issues raised by the yoga guru are indeed reasonable. The corruption question finds an echo among all sections of citizens.

It is beyond considerations of party politics and ideology. The Centre, for instance, can without delay clear legislation — one of Ramdev’s key demands — intended to provide relief to ordinary people against petty harassment and bribe-extraction at service delivery points, for instance when picking up a ration card, a driving licence, a water connection or a death certificate.

When governments don’t take care of such basic needs of citizens, they lay themselves open to the charge of imperviousness, and typically fire middle and lower middle class angst, which generally drives protests in urban India.

Worse, in such situations, an absence of governmental initiative makes possible large-scale mobilisation of disgruntled elements — as we saw in the case of Ramdev and Anna Hazare. Such collectives can be exploited to irresponsible ends by demagogues of any hue — from Naxalites on the far left to the communal far right.

Popular concern and frustration with the official machinery has been exacerbated by instances of corruption in high places that have come to light in the last eight or nine months, detracting from the government’s moral authority. Even so, it would be foolish and dangerous if society permitted half-baked ideas of demagogues to take hold, and permit such elements an opportunity to overrun the system.

It cannot be overemphasised that, in particular, the issue of repatriation of black money in foreign tax havens is complex and not amenable to overnight solutions as it presupposes negotiations with foreign governments. The idea of declaring all Indian black money overseas a national asset is even more complicated.

After the police action at Ramlila Grounds, it is a pity that a national party like the BJP lost perspective and begun comparing it with the Emergency. It would be useful to remember that if it were indeed the Emergency once again, the party would not be free to belt out anti-government messages from the podium of its national executive in Lucknow.

Maureen Dowd writes in The Deccan Chronicle on 20 May 2011

Oh, she wanted it.
She wanted it bad.

That’s what every hard-working, God-fearing, young widow who breaks her back doing menial labour at a Times Square hotel to support her teenage daughter, justify her immigration status and take advantage of the opportunities in America wants — a crazed, rutting, wrinkly old satyr charging naked out of a bathroom, lunging at her and dragging her around the room, caveman-style.

Dominique Strauss-Kahn’s reputation as a thrice-married French seducer loses something in the translation.

According to the claims of the 32-year-old West African maid, what took place in the $3,000-a-day Sofitel suite had nothing to do with seduction. If the allegation is true, Strauss-Kahn’s behaviour, boorish and primitive, is rape.

Was the chief of the International Monetary Fund telling other countries to tighten their belts while he was dropping his trousers? Lawyers for the 62-year-old Frenchman, who had been a leading Socialist prospect to run against Nicolas Sarkozy next year, seem ready to rebut any DNA evidence by arguing that sex with the maid who came in to clean his room was consensual.

Will they argue that she wilted with desire once she realised Strauss-Kahn had been at Davos?
Jeffrey Shapiro, the maid’s lawyer, angrily rebutted that there was “nothing, nothing” consensual about the droit du monsieur. (It was not a “come in and see my monetary fund” kind of thing.)

“She is a simple housekeeper who was going into a room to clean a room”, Shapiro told the New York Times. He called the devout Muslim woman from the Bronx “a very proper, dignified young woman” and said “she did not even know who this guy was” until she saw the news accounts.

Strauss-Kahn’s French defenders are throwing around nutty conspiracy theories, sounding like the Pakistanis about Osama. Some have suggested that he was the victim of a honey-pot arranged by the Sarkozy forces.

Bernard-Henri Lévy, a friend of the accused, says he is outraged at the portrayal of Strauss-Kahn as an “insatiable and malevolent beast”. He wrote on the Daily Beast: “It would be nice to know — and without delay — how a chambermaid could have walked in alone, contrary to the habitual practice of most of New York’s grand hotels of sending a ‘cleaning brigade’ of two people, into the room of one of the most closely watched figures on the planet”.

At least he didn’t mention Dreyfus. For years, I’ve stayed at the Sofitel and other hotels in New York City, and I’ve never seen a “brigade”, simply single maids coming in to clean.

In Washington, they have now nicknamed the street that separates the IMF and the World Bank, where Paul Wolfowitz lost his job over financial hanky-panky with his girlfriend, the Boulevard of Bad Behaviour.

These are the two institutions that are globally renowned for lecturing the rest of the world on discipline and freedom, when it’s the West that’s guilty of recklessness and improvident behaviour. First in finance, then in sex.

People who can’t keep their flies zipped lecturing other people.

While the French excoriated the American system of justice — discouraging pictures of Strauss-Kahn handcuffed, which are illegal in France — Americans could pride themselves on the sound of the “bum-bum” “Law & Order: SVU” gong sounding, the noise that heralds that justice will be done without regard to wealth, class or privilege.

It’s an inspiring story about America, where even a maid can have dignity and be listened to when she accuses one of the most powerful men in the world of being a predator. (A charge that has been made against him before, with a similar pattern of brutal behaviour.)

The young woman escaped horrors in her native Guinea, a patriarchal society where rape is widespread and used as a device of war, a place where she would have been kicked to the curb if she tried to take on a powerful man. When she faced the horror here, she had a recourse.

Another famous European with a disturbing pattern of sexual aggression got in trouble over the help this week: The ex-governor of California, who got elected after his wife, Maria Shriver, defended him so eloquently against groping charges.

Arnold Schwarzenegger was also guilty of the raw assertion of male power. More than mere infidelity, The Sperminator was caught on lying and piggishness, having a son with a staffer around the same time Maria had their youngest son, who is now 13. He kept the staffer on the payroll and even may have brought the son Maria didn’t know about into the house. No wonder Maria fled to a Beverly Hills hotel.

We’re always fascinated with the contradiction that cosmopolitan, high-powered, multilingual people can behave in such primitive ways. But civilisation and morality have nothing to do with sophistication and social status.

The lesson of these two fallen grandees, as Bill Maher told Chris Matthews, is: “If you’re going to go after the household help, get a ‘Yes’, first”.