Human Rights and the Sri Lankan Pinochet

70 years ago, during the WWII, when Japan bombed Madras and Cyclone, the ethnic divide between the Tamils and Sinhalese was hardly pronounced. Both were victims of great power politics that was being played out in the region.

In the 1980s the hegemonic politics once again attacked the region. This time, instead of jointly facing the imperial wrath, the Tamils and Sinhalese were victimizing each other on behalf of a new empire in global politics.

The trans-Atlantic alliance opened the flood gates of money and arms for Sri Lankan Tamils and their terrorist organization LTTE to give the world the gift of suicide bombing and 20^th century’s first terrorist navy.

Like in so many third world civil-wars, America and the West played a dubious role in Sri Lanka too. They first ignited the war – let it simmer – granted a sudden victory to Sri Lanka after 26 years and finally vanquished the victors by making them slit each other’s throat.

In this entire game, America had all protagonists playing for them. Both General Fonseka, the Sri Lankan chief of army staff during the war and his boss secretary of defense Gotabhaya Rajapaksa, were US green card holder and US citizen respectively.

Fonseka was and continues to be a US green card holder and enjoys the status of a resident alien. His two daughters reside in US with movable and immovable assets. Being in the army, the general must have acquired the card surreptitiously. Forget being a card holder of a foreign country – or having a foreign spouse – most militaries even debar their serving men from officially interacting with foreigners without proper permission. Needless to say, the General agreed to compromise his office to swap for a green card with the CIA.

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http://orientalreview.org/2013/04/01/human-rights-and-the-sri-lankan-pinochet/

Gadar and the century of American wait to date India

Courtesy: www.indiapost.gov.in

PC Chidambaram, in his 2013 budget, has allocated a good sum of money to celebrate the centenary of the Gadar Movement. The proposed celebration plans include, upgrading the Gadar Memorial in San Francisco and honouring the ‘Gadari Babas’, the heroes of the movement. 

Gadar was the first American-German and Indian collaborative effort to overthrow the British rule in India. In 1912, the Hindustani Association of the Pacific Coast started publication of a weekly newspaper, titled Gadar. By 1913, Gadar was a political outfit with an aim to bring about an armed revolution in India. 

The Indian nationalist movement that began on the eve of World War I, ended with its culmination and the defeat of its German mentors. The Americans, who had willingly allowed the revolution to germinate on their soil, were the first to dig its grave at the end of war. 

The movement was almost killed in the court room at San Francisco with the murder of Ram Chandra and Ram Singh, the two activists being tried in the 1917 Hindu-German Conspiracy trial that lasted from 20 November 1917 to 24 April 1918. 

According to Young India of June 1918, “the trial costs the British government $2,500,000 and the American government $500,000. During the trial one Hindu became insane and two lost their lives by a tragic accident accidentally killed.” 

Thomas M Johnson gives a vivid description of the “tragic accident” leading to twin murders inside the courtroom - “Ram Chandra, the best known Hindu in America had given a testimony in the court that enraged some of his fellow conspirators. One of these, Ram Singh, now forced his way towards Ram Chandra, through the crowded courtroom. Suddenly, the brown man’s arm darted forward. There was a flash, a crash. Ram Chandra fell…Over him stood Ram Singh with a smoking pistol.”[1] But before Ram Singh could absorb his victory, he was instantly shot dead by another bullet by the US Marshal James B Holohan. 

It is difficult to say who was an Anglo-American agent, Ram Chandra or Ram Singh, but the fact is both were fooled. Apart from the direct killing of two Indians involved in the conspiracy, others were protected by the American administration. 

This was the time when ‘red scare’ was gripping the American imagination. Any whiff of Bolsheviks was enough to send the American elite into a tail spin. The question is why the Indian anarchists in Gadar party were, let off easy, with a minor punishment ranging from twenty-two months to sixty days? 

According to Karla K. Gower, who has studied in detail the “Framing of Indian Nationalists in Newspapers from 1915-1918” and the rather benign treatment meted out the Indians in the period says, “by presenting the Indian Nationalists as ineffective fools who were not to be morally condemned, the New York Times and the San Francisco Chronicle, with the assistance of the Indians themselves, helped to create an atmosphere of tolerance for the Indian Nationalists and their movement.” 

Preventing Indians from - falling prey to the ‘nativistic’ fervor - and protecting them from the British who had been constantly demanding their deportation - the Americans were able to retain their so-called neutrality, friendship with the British and also their intelligence sources that they had cultivated among the American Indian community. 

In the aftermath of the war, the Anglo-Saxons were quick to shift the blame on to the Germans and add another conspiracy to long list of German crimes designed to humiliate them. 

The Gadar’s aborted takeoff paved the way for Mahatma Gandhi’s brand of non-violent politics to enter the Indian shores. After this the American interests in Indian receded, mainly due to the British possessiveness and insecurities related to India. 

However, in the 1940s, with Japan making great strides in Asia, America wanted to monitor the Indian political situation more closely. The American intelligence Office of Strategic Services (OSS) under the stewardship of William J. Donovan was actively courting the Congress party leaders and giving them support for quit Indian initiative. 

On 10 and 11 March 1942, President Rooselvelt wrote to Churchill offering him various suggestions to break the deadlock with the Congress over the issue of Indian support to war. Churchill was adamant; he threatened to resign, if the American continued to persist on Indian independence. 

The threats made Roosevelt to backtrack. According to Richard J Aldrich, “The President was now fully aware of the dangerous consequences of overt American incursions into the politics of India. Thereafter Roosevelt increasingly focused his own anti-colonial aspirations on other Asian countries, such as Indochina.” 

Ever since, the beginning on 20th century the Americans had desired India. However, their friendship with the British prevented them from openly expressing their love. The British departure from India in 1947, was a great relief for the Americans, they could now openly flirt with India. 

However, this open relationship could not last long. The Cold War imperatives forced the flirtations to go on under the cover of Non-Alignment, where the US even gave a tacit approval to the Indians to even sleep with the enemy (USSR). The Americans finally got their moment of peace with India after the demise of Soviet Union in 1991. 

By remembering San Francisco in his budget speech, one is not sure if PC Chidambram wants to honour the Indian Nationalist movement or he is paying off 100 years of American patience, persistence and plots (intelligence) to overtly date India. 

[1] Secrets of the Master Spies, Popular Mechanics Magazine , 1932

Pawns, Pygmies and the Pope in Fake Falkland War

Looking at the events that unfolded in 1982 – the phrase ‘fascist and fool’ is a more apt description of the Argentinean “strongmen and caudillos” – General Leopoldo Galtieri, and Admiral Jorge Anaya – than the two North American diplomats. The popular narrative that locates and limits the Falkland war in the internal political dynamics of Buenos Aries tells us that Admiral Anaya was the main architect of Argentina’s Falkland fiasco. The story goes that the Admiral had conceived Falkland operation as a young captain, after reading about the relatively easy and successful Goa operations that India had achieved against the Portuguese colonizers in 1960. Incidentally, Anaya’s prolong stint as naval attaché in London had failed to douse his desires to defeat the British colonialism. In fact, the Admiral’s confidence flowed from the fact that he had Lynx helicopters and Type 42 warships with the £ 45 million that the British Foreign Secretary David Owen had grated them in 1979.

If American diplomats were pygmies, the Argentinean military men were pawns in the whole game. Fooled by their spiritual and military mentors in Vatican and Washington respectively, the gullible duo plunged their nation into a senseless war in Las Malvinas that Galtieri named as Op Rosario – in honour of the Virgin of Rosario.Besides, the pygmies and pawns – the war-drama enacted some 8000 miles from London – had the powerful pair of Thatcher-Reagan as the chief protagonist and Pope John Paul II as the character actor.

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http://orientalreview.org/2013/02/15/pawns-pygmies-and-the-pope-in-fake-falkland-war/

INDIA-PAKISTAN - BACK TO SQUARE ONE

Courtesy: http://www.outlookindia.com/article.aspx?239249

As a child, my mother always told me “don’t ever come home crying, if somebody hits you, give him back in the same coin”. One is sure, the basic parental wisdom is always followed by the armies of India and Pakistan, sitting on powder keg on the border. They sort out their matters locally - if one crosses the line or transgresses the cease fire norms, the other pays him back with equal ferocity. One doesn't expect them to come crying and cribbing on television channels to report the atrocities committed against them. 

However, on 08 January 2013, when the bodies of two Indian soldiers were reported to be mutilated by their Pakistani counterparts in Mendhar Sector at the Line of Control (LoC) - some sections of the Indian electronic media began crying hoarse. The pitch of mourns was so high, one felt, it was not the cease fire but the Indian army that had been violated. Listening to the television debates, one was almost convinced that the Indian army was a meek spectator to the beheading of its soldiers. 

The big question is why did the matter that was supposed to remain within the precincts of LoC, walk into the Indian drawing rooms - inflaming passions and jingoism.[1] One is not sure about the Pakistani motives in beheading the Indian soldier and escalating the tensions on the borders and derailing Indo-Pak peace talks, but one is able to discern that in India some media houses and pressure groups have tried to earn political and ideological capital from the incident. 

Based on the mood in the television studios and screens, BJP, India’s leading opposition party, thought that the slaying of soldiers was the tipping point that could trigger the much awaited India’s ‘Tahrir Square’. Not to miss out on the opportunity to capitalize on the ensuing prospects of another urban protest - the leader of the Opposition in the Lok Sabha, Sushma Swaraj, declared, “if his ( the slain soldier Hemraj’s) head could not be brought back, we should get at least 10 heads from their side.”[2]

As things began to get out of control, the National Security Advisor, Shiv Shankar Menon, met the opposition leaders apprising them of the need to present a united front. The meeting resulted in charting a face-saving formula, where the opposition convinced the Prime Minster to alter his stance and announce, “Can't be business as usual with Pakistan”.[3]

In the initial days, the government had tried to cool temperatures. But as emotions began to flare up, united front became a necessity, especially, because conflicting signals were emerging from the ministry of external affairs and the armed forces quarters. While the armed forces were keen to reiterate its importance on matters pertaining to national security, the foreign minister was working to dissolve the issue through diplomatic means.[4]

Some hawks in the Indian security setup (or rather chess players), who tried to use the incident as a strategic tool[5] have actually ended up exposing the chinks in the Indian armour. The handling of the incident has exposed that Indian military is now an independent constituency on foreign policy matters - a development that will surely please the Americas working tirelessly on distancing the Indian military from the state. 

Inspired by the right-wing conservative media, a friend posted on the social networking sites “Where are social networking site shenanigans hiding now, why aren't they sitting at Jantar Mantar and lighting up candles, seeking justice for the armymen dying every day on the borders...” Such was the outpouring of emotions that one felt that the Indian army would be further enfeebled if the people did not come out on the streets to protest against the Pakistani atrocities. 

Many others, who have been vying for greater militarization of the Indian society and polity, used the occasion to reiterate their old lament and suggestion that the Indian government that was callous towards the plight of soldiers should learn from the US President who is always in the forefront, “whenever the armed forces suffer a serious setback.”[6]

The building up of hysteria also suited the right wing forces that promote patriarchy. These forces were shocked by the protests against the Delhi gang rape where young boys and girls challenged patriarchy that “allows men to be either rapists or protectors, or even both,”[7]

Furthermore, the young boys drifting towards the postmodern discourse that sees male masculinity in poor light too was unpalatable to those who constantly complain that India is a soft state and “India and Indians have had ambivalence about projecting strength. There is a tendency towards softness and sentimentality.”[8]

In the drama, enacted mainly on the television screens, “Journalism was the first casualty of war”. The truth was tossed around to flare up jingoism and the “falsehood of war” was used miserably to vitiate the atmosphere for political, ideological and commercial reasons.

---

[1] Shivam Vij, “In Multiples of Ten Ravanas”, Kafila, January 16, 2013, http://kafila.org/2013/01/16/in-multiples-of-ten-ravanas/

[2] Ravish Tiwari, As Sushma Swaraj calls for ‘10 heads’ from Pakistan, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh reaches out to BJP”, The Indian Express, 15 January 2013, http://www.indianexpress.com/news/as-sushma-swaraj-calls-for--10-heads--from-pakistan-prime-minister-manmohan-singh-reaches-out-to-bjp/1059464/

[3] “Can't be business as usual with Pak: Prime Minister”, NDTV, http://www.ndtv.com/video/player/news/can-t-be-business-as-usual-with-pak-prime-minister-to-ndtv/261949
[4] “Salman Khurshid downplays Army chief's stern message to Pak, says govt will handle the crisis”, http://in.news.yahoo.com/video/salman-khurshid-downplays-army-chiefs-124041479.html 
[5] Brahma Chellaney, “Is it time for India to inject greater realism into its Pakistan policy?” The Economic Times, 10 January, 2013, http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/politics-and-nation/is-it-time-for-india-to-inject-greater-realism-into-its-pakistan policy/articleshow/17960866.cms?intenttarget=no 
[6] B Raman, “Neglect of welfare and Honour of Ex-Servicemen” http://ramanstrategicanalysis.blogspot.in/2013/01/neglect-of-welfare-honour-of-ex.html 

[7] Inderpal Grewal, “Protests Against Rape in India: Can the Myth of Male Protection Be Shaken?” Huff Post , World, 9 January, 2013, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/inderpal-grewal/india-bus-rape_b_2368032.html
[8] Narayan Ramachandran, “Contours of India’s national security”, Pragati, December 14, 2012, http://pragati.nationalinterest.in/2012/12/contours-of-indias-national-security/

KEEP PENTAGON OUT OF INDIA’S MoD

Photo Courtesy: OutlookIndia.com 

‘Military diplomacy’ sounds like an oxymoron. Diplomacy is about culture and finesse –graduated gratification of desire- military is about roughing it out and instant success. However, the phrase ‘military diplomacy’ is as frequently used as ‘cultural diplomacy’. While the latter “conjures up images of ambassadorial dinner parties and the elite pastimes of the Fererro Rocher set,”[1] the former is more about gunboats. 

The two are often hyphenated because, diplomacy is as much about pressurization, as it is about persuasion. And more often than not, coercive military power either precedes or follows foreign policy. 

It is perhaps to avoid the use of an oxymoron that a high powered working group at the Institute for Defence Studies and Analyses (IDSA), New Delhi has titled their recent report as, “Deliberations on Military and Diplomacy.”[2] 

Besides catering to “restructuring the Ministry of Defence (MoD)... to ensure greater integration of the civilian bureaucracy with the Armed Forces Headquarters” - the IDSA document, is also guided by pragmatic imperatives to use ‘defence cooperation’ and Indian “military professionalism, including the high standards of its military training institutions and capacities in the field of international peacekeeping ...in furtherance of its foreign policy objectives.” 

The aim to integrate military into the national decision making process is laudable. However, what needs a more rigorous debate is the effort to conjoin the civil-military reform with foreign policy imperatives – re-orienting the Indian military from a force guarding the nation to a resource to be exploited to secure a place on the high table of “international security politics”. 

Simply put, the proposed reforms are less inclined towards self–correcting the existing anomaly in the national higher defence management and more to satiate the American demands to have well trained military manpower at its disposal in Asia.[3] 

The US financial resources and security ambitions are precariously perched on a fiscal cliff.[4] United States has enough fighter planes and satellites to soften any land on earth, what it does not have is the unlimited quantity of boots on ground to actually go and occupy the conquered land. As Robert Kaplan says in his latest book, “anyone who truly believes that geography has been pivotally downgraded is truly ignorant of military logistics - of the science of getting significant quantity of men and materiel from one continent to another.”[5] 

Since Washington does not have the money to ensure mobility of its troops across continents, it is urging New Delhi to contribute its soil and soldiers to sustain the falling empire. And many, with a fetish to see India as a vassal state with ‘great power’ tag have no hesitation to suggest using India’s ‘demographic dividend’ to please pentagon. 

The IDSA document uses terms like “benign security provider “and ‘defence cooperation’ to add academic flavour to the American demands. In sharp contrast, Lt Gen (Retd) Satish Nambiar, in his article placed as an annexure to main document, openly admits that time is ripe for India to follow Henry Kissinger’s prescription and “behave like the British Raj” and share America’s security burden in the Indian Ocean Region. In order, to support his case for making the Indian armed forces expeditionary, Nambiar, goes to the extent of citing historical examples from World War I and II, where millions of Indian men were used as cannon fodder to save and expand the British Empire. One hopes that the general is his eagerness to send Indian troops on “out of area missions” is not hinting at rechristening the Indian army as American–Indian Army. 

The Indian military leadership has always been a step ahead of the bureaucracy in courting Pentagon. This fact came up when Wikileak exposed a 2009 US Embassy cable addressed to Hillary Clinton that blamed India's civilian leadership and bureaucracy for adding road blocks to the fruition of Indo-US strategic partnership – “slowing down a relationship that the military brass was keen to accelerate.” [6] A point reiterated in the latest report by S. Amer Latif, of Centre for Strategic and International Studies, report on Indo-US relations, where he elucidates, 

“Although the Indian military is keen for a much closer relationship with its U.S. counterparts, the MOD bureaucracy is consistently in the background, keeping the services on a tight leash. The reluctance for closer ties has stymied deeper strategic discussions between the U.S. and Indian. armed forces, and has also caused frustrations on the U.S. side about last-minute cancellations of exercises, courses, or visits. The MOD’s reluctance has also led to strict prohibitions on social contact between active-duty U.S. and Indian officers outside official business. Such restrictions stymie the development of personal relationships, which could be helpful in times of crisis.” [7] 

More interesting is Latif’s highlight on Indian military’s recommendation to boost up the Indo-US ties, which sadly rely on seeking foreign appointments for Indian military leaders in PACOM and Central Command and also executive level courses at the Asia-Pacific Center for Strategic Studies or the Near East South Asia Center for Strategic Studies.[8] 

The Indian military has little experience of swimming in the international political pool. Therefore, their concerns largely revolve around protecting their corporate interests, based on seeking foreign tenures and well advertised American military equipment. International politics is a dirty game. Recent revelations, on Falkland War have thrown adequate light on how the CIA, instigated the, Junta in Argentina to invade Falkland Island, and simultaneously, provided tacit support to Britain to win the war. 

The well-designed war elevated Margret Thatcher to the status of ‘iron lady’ giving her the required energy to push forward Regan’s privatization agenda in UK. On the other hand, poor General Galtieri, after losing the war was pushed into a corner in Buenos Aries. According to former CIA boss, William Casey, Argentinian General had “wrongly believed its (his) support for US covert operations in Central America would mean Washington's 'acquiescence' for the 1982 invasion.”[9]

Why look as far as Argentina - Pakistan military’s more than six decade old relationship with Pentagon offers a good example of how the armed forces that are mortgaged to the empire can wreck havoc for their own nation. The idea of strategic tie-up with US is fraught with great dangers of making our military an entity that can become bigger than the state. We need to reform our civil-military conundrum, but that cannot happen in the backdrop of US imperial demands. India is not so bankrupt that it needs to put the lives of its young men on the negotiating table to sustain their relevance in the US scheme of things. India cannot be Pentagon’s Back Office to make itself a great power. [10] 

[1]The Art of diplomacy, BBC News, 28 February, 2007

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/magazine/6403643.stm

Also see, Mark Lamster, “The Art of Diplomacy”, The Wall Street Journal, , 10 October 2009.http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703298004574459753201012282.html


[2] “Deliberations of a Working Group on Military and Diplomacy”, Institute for Defence Studies and Analyses(IDSA), New Delhi, January 2013, http://www.idsa.in/system/files/book_MilitaryDiplomacy.pdf

[3]Net Security Provider: India’s Out-of-Area Contingency Operations, IDSA Task Force Report, Magnum Publishers, 2012.


[4]“Sustaining U.S. Global Leadership: Priorities for 21st Century Defense”, Department of Defence, USA, January 2012, http://www.defense.gov/news/defense_strategic_guidance.pdf


[5] Robert D. Kaplan, The Revenge of Geography , eBook, location 697, 2013

[6] Siddharth Varadarajan, “U.S. cables show grand calculations underlying 2005 defence framework”, The Hindu, March 28, 2011


[7] S. Amer Latif, U.S.-India Military Engagement - steady as they go, A report of the Center for Strategic & International Studies, US, December 2012, http://csis.org/publication/us-india-military-engagement


[8] Ibid.


[9] Brendan Carlin, “US may have accidentally helped to start Falklands war by encouraging Argentinians to invade islands, admits ex-CIA chief”, Mail Online, 30 December 2012, http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2254755/US-accidentally-helped-start-Falklands-war-encouraging-Argentinians-invade-island-admits-ex-CIA-chief.html#ixzz2HTj1ffNA

[10] Atul Bharadwaj, India as Pentagon’s back office?, The Indian Express, 25 June 2003, http://teleradproviders.com/nbn/editorialstory.php?id=MTAwOQ%3D%3D

LOOKING AT KAUTILYA BEYOND THE REALM OF REALISM

The blurring of lines between the nationalist and Comprador Bourgeois 

Money is more powerful than the military. It is perhaps for this reason that Kautilya, one of India’s foremost philosophers on statecraft had said, “From the strength of the treasury the army is born.” Many scholars belonging to the ‘liberal realist’ school casually equate the strength of Kautilya’s treasury (as it existed in the 4th century BC) with the “comprehensive national power” of the 21st century Chinese state.[1] 

The assumption that the key to the treasury is always in the king’s (the one who exercises the monopoly over violence) pocket, leads one to see the state as an omnipotent power that acts in the geo-economic sphere, independent of the non-state actors or the class that controls the purse strings. In fact, what appear to be assumptions are, in “Gramscian terms, the ideological apparatuses”[2]  that are invoked by the ruling elite to hide the power that global finance capital exercises over domestic rule. 

The powerful thought leaders of the bourgeois brigade use various techniques to control dominant discourse and limit their analysis by merely quoting Kautilya’s “strength of treasury” logic, without actually going into the detail as to who controls the capital and therefore, war. For example, realist foreign policy often omits the impact of HNWIs who own assets equivalent to one-fourth of the Indian GDP and deliberately camouflage the parochial class concerns of the big bourgeois as national interests. This is done to obviate any probe into the comprador character of the national bourgeois. As Karl Marx says in The German Ideology (1845), “The ideas of the ruling class are, in every age, the ruling ideas: i.e. the class which is the dominant material force in society is at the same time the dominant intellectual force." 

Post Cold War, the elite consciousness has been shaped by a sense of triumphalism that has emboldened them to institutionalize the bourgeois relations to obliterate all possibilities of a revolution that may result from growing income gaps. We are currently living in a geo-economic environment, where, as Stephen Gill says, “the identification of a nation-state with the material interests of its own 'national capital' is more problematic. In economic terms, this system is increasingly instituted by a deepening interpenetration of capital, both functionally and geographically. At the political level, there is policy interdependence which is the counterpart to the economic internationalization processes, as well as more integral, and more organic alliance structures binding the major capitalist nations together under American leadership”[3]

Using Lenin’s phrase, the “treachery of (bourgeois intellectual) leadership” lies in manipulating discussion and halting analysis at a point beyond which the sources of their power would lie exposed. It is for this reason that the geo-economic narrative refuses “to look more closely at the global capitalist system and the transnational capitalist class, both locally and globally.”[4]

To understand the “treachery” of the comprador class, let us see what happened in 1757, at the Battle of Plassey, where Siraj-ud-Daulah, the independent governor of Bengal, Bihar and Orissa was defeated by the East India Company army, thus paving the way for colonization of the Indian sub continent. The popular primary reason for defeat was the betrayal by Siraj’s trusted force commanders, Mir Jaffar, Rai Durlabh and Yar Lutuf Khan, who were bought over by the British. 

Popular history ends with Mir Jaffar attaining the status of an iconic conspirator, thus diverting attention from the role of Siraj-ud-Daulah’s bankers, the chief conspirators, who invited the East India Company to establish their roots in East India. The conspiracy hatched by the money-lenders has largely remained hidden because the class to which they belonged controlled the “material force in society” that had the capacity to monopolize intellectual discourse. 

Aakar Patel writes a fairly detailed account of the role that Jain and Hindu baniyas played along with the British to cause a regime change in east and west India. Patel highlights Jagat Seth’s (Siraj-ud-Daulah’s banker) involvement in the Battle of Plassey. Seth lent money to the Nawab, who in turn provided security for business and also collected tax. Out of every four rupees of tax collected by Siraj-ud-Daulah, three rupees went as loan repayment to Jagat Seth. As usual, Siraj-ud-Daulah was facing a cash crunch and Jagat Seth the banker thought it was time for a regime change. History records that Seth paid Robert Clive to defeat Siraj-ud-Daulah and install Mir Jaffar. This marked the first coming together of the Indian capitalist class with transnational capital.

The class to which the likes of Jagat Seth belong continues to be as powerful as it was in the 18th century. Even in the 21st century, their descendants continue to guide the economic and strategic destinies of India. Of the top 60 Indian dollar billionaires, roughly half belong to the Jain and Hindu baniya community, which constitutes just about 1% of the Indian population.[5] Recently Forbes magazine carried a pictorial story on how Indian business elite are interconnected through marriages and business deals.[6]

A more extensive and similar case study is done by Zeitlin and Ratcliff on the dominant class of landlord capitalists in Chile that not only controls politics but also represents foreign capital and this class “has not been a threat to imperialism, but its bulwark”. The study brought out that “within a ‘central core’ of just 137 individuals linked by kinship and intermarriage were found 51 percent of corporate executives belonging to major capitalist families while 82 percent of executives with no capital in their families were outside of this central core.”[7]

This central core in the developing and the under developed world is linked and protected by the chief guardians of capital who occupy the center of gravity in the developed capitalist world. The core of the capitalist world that is as old as capitalism wonderfully combines the power of money and the military. Towards the fag end of the 19th century, the invention of the Maxim machine gun changed the course of African history and British imperial fortunes. Rothschild, the banker, was intelligent enough to understand the power of ‘Maxim’ and the need to monopolize its production capacities. In 1888, Lord Rothschild, the board member of Maximum Gun Company, funded €1.9 million for the merger of the Maxim with Nordenfelt Guns and Ammunition Company. The merger agreement precluded Nordenfelt from producing guns for next 25 years. The result was that in WWI, barring the US, all militaries fought each other with Maxim guns. [8]

Incidentally, when India was reeling under a backbreaking foreign exchange crisis, the Indian government approved the acquisition of one light aircraft carrier in 1955. The first carrier Hercules built by Vickers Armstrong, a Rothschild company for the Royal Navy during the Second World War was dumped on India by the comprador as well as national bourgeois elements both within and outside the government. And the same class sold to gullible Indians the idea of being a great Asian power; the desire to become a great power riding piggy back on American shoulders continues to resonate loud in Indian strategic circles.

Nehru was one of the advocates of India becoming the leader of the under developed world. He probably thought that the communist victory in China had opened the floodgates for India to play the leadership role in Asia that American had envisaged for Chiang-kai-shiek. Nehru was also aware that closeness to Soviet Union could also be used to further his appeal among the anti-colonial movements. Nehru believed that by adopting a non-aligned policy he could possibly be the “proverbial clever calf that could indulge in simultaneous suckling of two udders”[9] as popularized by Polish economist Kalecki. 

Nehru’s confidence flowed from the strength of his treasury, which at the time of independence was as strong as £1,134 million (Rs 1,512 crores). Even after payments to British and Pakistan, by 1949, India had £621 million (Rs 828 crores).[10] The nationalist bourgeois that was as aware of the brimming coffers as Nehru was, proposed through the ‘Bombay Plan’ that India rely on extensive imports for rapid industrialization.[11]

The Bombay Plan was compiled by the key members of the Indian industry (JRD Tata, GD Birla, Kasturbhai Lalbhai, Purshottamdas Thakurdas and Shri Ram) and their key directors like John Matthai, Ardeshir Dalal and AD Shroff. The plan inspired India’s first Industrial Policy Resolution of 1948 and subsequently continued to influence India’s five year economic plans till early 1960s. 

One of the key members of the Bombay Plan drafting committee was John Matthai, he went on to become India’s first railways minster (incidentally, World Bank’s first loan of $34 million was meant for Indian railways) - and the second finance minister of independent India. Such was the influence of big bourgeois on India’s political economy that Mathai was chosen to head India’s first State Bank of India when it came up in 1955. When Nehru chose his first finance minister, it certainly was not from the socialist ranks, instead he chose, Shanmukham Chetty, an economist who had been awarded the Knight Commander of the Order of the Indian Empire in 1933 and who had served as the Diwan of Cochin Kingdom till about 1941. 

Incidentally, in 1944, the Indian delegation that participated in the formation of the World Bank consisted of luminaries who were to play a crucial role in independent India’s economic and trade policy - Sir Jeremy Raisman, Finance Member of the Government of India led the team that had - “Sir C. D. Deshmukh (Governor of the Reserve Bank of India, later to become India's Finance Minister), Sir Theodore Gregory (the first Economic Advisor to the Government of India), Sir R.K. Shanmukhan Chetty (later independent India's first Finance Minister), Mr. A.D. Shroff (one of the architects of the Bombay Plan) and Mr B.K. Madan (later India's Executive Director in IMF).”[12]

These cross connections led EMS Namboodiripad to conclude that Kalecki’s categorization of intermediate regimes did not apply to India because here the classes were aligned differently at the time of dismantling of British empire - “the big business (was not) predominantly foreign controlled (and had) a rather small participation of native capitalists". EMS further goes on to say that power never passed on from the British into the hands of progressive forces. Instead, 

“It was the bourgeoisie, headed by big business and in alliance with the feudals, that got into the seats of power…The evolution of the economic and political thought of Indian nationalism from the early pioneers (Ranade, Naoro-ji, Dutt and so on), through the 'moderates' and 'extremists' to Gandhi and Nehru shows that a national (as opposed to comprador) bourgeoisie was emerging and rapidly growing. This bourgeoisie class was systematically forging a two-sided relation - there were conflicts and contradictions, but within the broad framework of friendship and co-operation - with imperialism and foreign capital externally, and princely rulers and feudal landlords internally.” [13]

If the dismantling of the British Empire had opened up opportunities for the big bourgeois in India, it had also exposed them to challenges. Having lived under imperial patronage for over a century, the Indian capitalists were apprehensive of the Congress Party’s ability to keep communism away from Indian shores. During the making of the Bombay Plan, Lala Shri Ram wrote to P. Thakurdas: 

“I am afraid that this sabotage may any day start of private property also. Once the Goondas know this trick, any Government … will find it difficult to control it. Today Mahatma Gandhi may be able to stop it, but later on it may go out of their hands too.” [14]

In the early years of independence, Indian business had skillfully cloaked its capitalist concerns and alignments with foreign capital by accepting the state to be in the driver’s seat of the economy. This was done to placate and prevent the looming specter of communism from descending on the subcontinent. Taking lessons from the bourgeois approach to tackling communism, Nehru, too befriended Soviet Union. This unnerved the Indian communists who abandoned B T Randive’s revolutionary approach and adopted a more accommodating tone towards Nehru. This was Nehru’s finest political stroke - he kept the US state secretary Dulles happy by causing confusion within the communist ranks - and also Khrushchev smiling by talking socialism and anti-imperialism. 

Contrary to the popular belief, immediately after independence, India followed a free market economy - import licenses were distributed freely- that led to foreign exchange crisis in 1957 - and then we liberalized more because we were forced to seek IMF and US Aid.[15] Since there are no free lunches, India had to pay a price – and the price probably was a war with China. In a December 7,1956 telegram from the US embassy in India to the State department, JS Cooper the then US ambassador to India explicitly stated, “Externally, India almost certainly faces readjustments of policies in which factors within its economy are compelling influences…Nehru, therefore, comes to Washington in a sensitive position of weakness. He and his advisers know that they have fumbled internationally, that UK no longer represents acceptable alternative leadership to US, and that they are in grave economic difficulties. (Latter point driven home during Nehru’s holding finance portfolio this year plus recent indoctrination by planning commission.)” To complete the co-relation between money and geo-strategy, Cooper concluded in his telegrams, “We feel strongly that “moment of history” has arrived which if seized and exploited, can give US much firmer anti-Communist and anti-Red China counterpoise in India.” That moment did arrive for the US when Nehru changed his stance on China and allowed Dalai Lama to reside in India – opening up the avenues of direct confrontation with China. 

In just a decade after independence, India had been reduced to a financial state where it was standing with a begging bowl in front of foreign capital. In the first decade after independence India had only got a total amount of $611 loan from World Bank. However from 1960-69, overall the Bank lent India $1.8 billion.[16] It may not be coincidental that India fought three wars with its neighbours during the decade of 1962-1972. 

That India followed a socialist track after independence is a myth that has been propagated by the media and intelligentsia. It was only for a brief period in the 1970s that Indira Gandhi tried to rein in capitalist tendencies, else India had always welcomed foreign capital since 1950s in accordance with World Bank’ President Eugene Black’s prescription: “India’s interests lies in giving private enterprise, both Indian and foreign, every encouragement to make maximum contribution to the development of the economy particularly in industrial field.” 

Such has been the impact of the myth that even the mainstream communist parties of India have refrained from identifying the comprador tendencies of the Indian national bourgeois and at best called them "dependent" or "collaborationist”. However, the ongoing transatlantic economic meltdown and its impact on the world have exposed the inherent frailties and contradictions of the capitalist world order - bringing to fore the relationships between the global capitalist class. 

Take the example of Greece, where the common person is being told to tighten his belt for the country and on the other had you have 2000 odd tax evaders who have been abandoning their sinking nation with impunity-stashing away their wealth in Swiss banks. As Kostas Vaxevanis says, “The crisis in Greece wasn't caused by everyone. And not everyone is paying for the crisis. The exclusive, corrupt club of power tries to save itself by pretending to make efforts to save Greece. In reality, it is exacerbating Greece's contradictions, while Greece is teetering on the edge of a cliff.”[17] According to New York Times, “about 120 billion euros in Greek assets lie outside the country, representing an extraordinary 65 percent of the country’s overall economic output.”[18]

The so-called nationalist bourgeois turning comprador is not limited to Greece alone. This chameleon like behavior of the propertied classes is a worldwide phenomenon; even the Indian elite who top the global “tax dodgers’ corps” and have hidden their money in tax havens like Mauritius, Lichtenstein, Switzerland and British Virgin island could go to any extent, even plunging their nation into war to save their money. Paradoxically, the conservative analysts who denounce the Marxist term comprador bourgeois in relation to American imperialism, use it freely against growing Chinese capitalism; which has yet to turn imperialist by adding a military element to make its money trample over nations across the globe. 

Highlighting the new comprador class in Australia, Ashok Malik a, right wing analysts gives the example of Clive Palmers, an Australian businessman who got a $6-billion loan from a Chinese bank and then signed a US$ 60 billion, 20-year coal deal with China. In return Clive gave the Chinese, “US$8 billion EMC (engineering management and construction) contract for the project” and openly blamed the CIA for putting spokes in the contract with the Chinese.[19] The same people who see business transactions with China to be anti-national, justify the increased US military presence in Darwin, Northern Australia as a normal realist option against the Chinese threat. 

Economics and politics are about human welfare. “Just as war is too important an activity to be left to generals, the material welfare of peoples is also too important to be left to economists alone.[20] Military’s nexus with mercantilism and markets must be broken. The strategic analyses must not allow the “comprador-cum-financial oligarchy” concerns to be conflated with collective national concerns. It should become unnatural and inconsistent for every government to “allude to the importance of protecting commerce of the country, by means of a powerful navy.”[21] For wars to stop being a continuation of political economy by other means, the multitude would have to stop giving up their lives to establish trading monopolies and financial oligarchies. 

[1] Sanjay Baru, “India and the World: A Geo-economics Perspective”, National Maritime Foundation Lecture, India Habitat Centre, New Delhi, October 26, 2012, http://maritimeindia.org/sites/all/files/pdf/NMF%20Lecture%20-%20Baru.pdf 

[2] Stephen Gill, “Intellectuals and Transnational Capital”, The Socialist Register, 1990, pp 290-310

[3] Stephen Gill, p.295

[4] Leslie Sklair & Peter T Robbins, Global capitalism and major corporations from the Third World, Third World Quarterly, Vol 23, No 1, 2002, p 83

[5] Aakar Patel, “The peculiar pedigree of the business class: The peculiar pedigree of the business class”, Mint, 14 April, 2011, http://www.livemint.com/Opinion/tDRJXCAEsoYMxdtSnZDoGJ/The-peculiar-pedigree-of-the-business-class.html

[6] Prince Mathews Thomas, How India's wealthiest are connected socially, Forbes India, 6 Nov, 2012, http://forbesindia.com//article/richest-indians-in-2012/how-indias-wealthiest-are-connected-socially/34077/1
[7] Jeffery M. Paige, “Coffee, Copper, and Class Conflict in Central America and Chile: A Critique of Zeitlin's Civil Wars in Chile and Zeitlin and Ratcliff’ s Landlords and Capitalists, The University of Michigan paper, presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Sociological Association, Chicago, Illinois, August 20, 1987, http://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/51115/1/347.pdf 
[8] Niall Ferguson, Empire: How Britain Made the Modern World 
[9] Sanjay Baru, “India and the World: A Geo-economics Perspective”, National Maritime Foundation Lecture, India Habitat Centre, New Delhi, October 26, 2012, http://maritimeindia.org/sites/all/files/pdf/NMF%20Lecture%20-%20Baru.pdf 
[10] The Problems of Plenty, 1947-56,RBI History, Vol II, p.593, http://rbidocs.rbi.org.in/rdocs/content/PDFs/90037.pdf 

[11] Amal Sanyal, “The Bombay Plan: A Forgotten Document”, Contemporary Issues and ideas in Social Sciences, Vol 6, No 1, June 2010, pp1-31
[12] The World Bank In India, published by PRIG, (Public Interest Group) Delhi, http://www.ieo.org/world-c2-p1.html 
[13] E. M. S. Namboodiripad, On "Intermediate Regimes" Economic and Political Weekly, Vol. 8, No. 48 (Dec. 1, 1973), p. 2134 

[14] As quoted by Amal Sanyal, from Shri Ram to Thakurdas, P. T. Papers,
[15] Dealing with Scarcity, 1957-63,RBI History, Vol II, pp.625-656 http://rbidocs.rbi.org.in/rdocs/content/PDFs/ 
[16] The World Bank In India, published by PRIG, (Public Interest Group) Delhi, http://www.ieo.org/world-c2-p1.html 

[17] Kostas Vaxevanis, “Greece gave birth to democracy. Now it has been cast out by a powerful elite”, The Guardian, 30, October 2012 http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/oct/30/greece-democracy-hot-doc-lagarde-list

[18] Landon Thomas Jr., “In Greece, Taking aim at wealthy tax dodgers”, The New York Times, 11 November 2012.

[19] Ashok Malik, “The New Compradors” The Hindustan Times, 03 September, 2012
[20] Mahmood Mamdani, “State, Private Sector And Market Failures”, Pambazuka News, 29 July, 2012, http://www.countercurrents.org/mamdani290712.htm
[21] Edward P. Stringham, Commerce, Markets, and Peace: Richard Cobden’s Enduring Lessons, The Independent Review, Volume IX, Number 1, Summer 2004, pp. 105-116 

The political revival of India

Arvind Kejriwal is attacking the center of gravity of the ruling elite. He is shaking up the system from the state of dormancy that it has been subjected to for the past two decades. He is making politics reassert itself. By taking on Robert Vadra and DLF, both Kejriwal and Prashant Bhushan have shown that the root cause of corruption in India is nothing but the politician-corporate nexus that regularly indulges in dubious land and money transactions. 

While Kejriwal is raising the levels of political consciousness in the country, the Congress and other political parties are dipping into a state of cognitive freeze. The economist Prime Minster is clueless about what is happening - for him governance begins and ends with “Reforms”. For the political class born and brought in Davos environs, politics is a pejorative that stands for populism. With the sudden arrival of Arvind Kejriwal on the political landscape, the so-called politicians are palpably flummoxed, clinging to the pillars of parliament as the deluge of people’s wrath begins to pick up momentum. 

The World Bank and other global financial institutions have designed Mammohan differently; therefore, he may be pardoned for being ignorant of the value inherent in political capital. But how does one absolve seasoned politicians for turning a blind eye to the continuous devaluation political capital since the 1990s?

While Manmohan believes that Indian growth can be tackled by rekindling the “animal spirit”, Arvind strongly feels that Indian political animal needs to shun its indifference to change history of poverty in India. The economic man has usurped the political space for too long and rendered the value of political capital to almost zilch. Arvind is only exposing the paucity of political capital in parliamentarian’s coffers and how this bankruptcy is making our democracy look pale. 

Sadly, many politicians are blissfully unaware of the fact that by making the global finance capital sit on the driver’s seat (hobnobbing with corporate leaders), they have distanced themselves from the people, thereby gnawing at their own roots. 

Almost the entire Indian political class including the media and many sections of the intelligentsia had come to believe that politics had died with the demise of Soviet Union. They diligently imbibed the lessons imparted to them by ‘Washington consensus’ and joined the herd and loudly communicated to their political constituency that markets would create global individuals whose innovative faculties and self-interests will thrive in the atmosphere of competition. Long queues for state subsidized rations, a relic of bygone socialism would be replaced by "queues for Mcdonald’s and Coke." 

The politicians thought that elections could be won by weaving dreams based on market solutions – chaperoning people into a global market - where trade flows unhindered and solutions to all human problems can be bought and sold - where slums will automatically get replaced by technology hubs. The inefficient and corrupt governments will bow before the diktats of the markets or else face ouster. 

Friedman confidently stated in his book, The Lexus and the Olive Tree Understanding Globalization (2000), “It is increasingly difficult these days to find any real difference between the ruling and the opposition parties in these countries that have put on the golden straightjacket. Once your country puts it on, its political choices get reduced to Pepsi or Coke”. Such trivialization of politics and its reduction to acts of buffoonery was supported by the same political class that is now oversensitive about its depiction in cartoons and books. Arvind Kejriwal is making us understand the role of opposition in a democracy. 

Markets consider organized political animal inimical to profit making. Markets and business continuity is best served by atomized individuals/consumer, who according to noted author Samir Amin, “are urged to ‘believe in the market’ which alone reveals (encapsulates) the ‘true values of hamburgers and the automobiles.” Such individuals seek salvation in malls and markets and are politically lethargic, incapable of raising the banner of protests. 

This breed is commonly referred to as middle class. A class that till very recently had been living a dream of making it to the top through liberalization. Liberalization did help this class to climb a few steps up the ladder. But on reaching a certain level, the aspiring class discovered that they had hardly ‘arrived’ - their Maruti car and 2BHK flat was just not enough to buy them the dignity in the society. One reason for this sense of betrayal resulted from the fact the so-called middle class still had to beg before the government officials to get even their small work done. The upper classes on the other hand and India's 69 dollar billionaires graduated from Maruti to Mercedes in the same time-frame and continued to garner major share of the fruit of neo-liberal economic policies. 

Political lethargy and political laterality (when it becomes difficult to distinguish between the political left and right) are the by-products of consumerist culture that has promoted desires over needs. The continuous bombardment of images democratizes the aspirations among the people, but TV has no magic wand to bring purchasing power parity among the vast sections of the society. Therefore, those who do not possess the capacity to buy and are too simple to steal and kill, resort to making illegal money by using their office. Officials who deal with the big business have ample opportunity to make money through a couple of corrupt deals. The lower level government servants try to fleece the common man almost on a regular basis. 

Since, the government is always under the media scanner the general perception is that almost all government servants are thieves. And the common man is the most corrupt element in the entire graft chain. However, nobody is ready to look at the process that makes a government servant corrupt. Look at it from a pure economic perspective and not any moralistic angle. A middle class government servant whose salary is inadequate to buy his children a good public school education, mobile phones and LCD TV is expected to clear the files that fetch billions to the business houses. All the moral pressures are exerted on the government servant to be honest, while nobody talks about the limits on the profits that a businessman can earn. 

In an environment where individual profits making taking precedence over collective good, the government servant considers it his right to demand money. Therefore, before blaming the government servants for being the biggest link in the national graft chain, it is imperative that we talk about the culture of greed and individualism. 

After disengaging from Anna Hazare, both Arvind Kejriwal and Prashant Bhushan have introduced greater clarity in their approach to fighting corruption. They are no longer blaming the small and medium government servants for all the ills plaguing the nation. By adopting a top down approach and hitting directly at the corporate-politics nexus, Kejriwal and party are enunciating their political line that speaks the language of the people. He is talking class war minus the Marxist maxims. 

All that Arvind is telling us that the role of politics extends beyond the realm of politicking. Politics is not about conniving, contriving and conspiring, it has role to guide the destinies of human civilization by making sure that religion and economics are kept within limits.