Jolt for BJP, spur for Congress
India’s pollsters came of age with their predictions that the ruling BJP government at the Centre was in for an unpleasant surprise in the State Assembly elections in the Hindi-speaking heartland of Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh. Congress were comfortable winners in the first two States, winning in a canter in Chhattisgarh. There were omens aplenty for the BJP and Prime Minister Narendra Modi, with a general election looming in June 2019, barely six months away, However, as Harold Wilson, Britain’s Labour prime minister of the 1960s said ‘a week is a long time in politics.’
So nothing is done and dusted. The electorate in India has been known to vote for one side in State elections and vote in contrary fashion in national elections. The caveat is that while this may broadly be the case – the distress of farmers was self evident - an election as critical as the one witnessed is also likely to carry a message that is national in content.
Witness, thus, the blistering attack on the BJP by the Shiv Sena, its coalition partner in Maharashtra, whose strength lies in Mumbai, the State capital and also India’s financial capital. The Shiv Sena excoriated the BJP’s relentless broadsides at India’s first, and in the view of the broad mass of Indians, its greatest prime minister; the Shiv Sena blasted the tasteless campaigns denigrating Nehru and his daughter Indira Gandhi by Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his close associates and the BJP twitterati. The Shiv Sena slammed the Prime Minister and his party for their gross attempt to mutilate India’s post Independence history with the preposterous insinuation that India became a serious country domestically and globally only with the advent of the present BJP dispensation in Delhi.
Congress was reviled, yet it was the party, born in Bombay in December 1885, that carried to India independence in August 1947. Its leaders during this were outstanding by any standard, past or present.
India’s recovery from the trauma of Partition, the integration of the Princely States into the Indian Union, the Indian Constitution, India’s democratic institutions, the beginnings of the science and technological routes to national empowerment were Congress achievements.
The rising decibels of xenophobia, lynching, calls for censorship of films and books – thankfully ruled out by the Supreme Court – have damaged civil society. It is now time for sanity and reflection. The Congress Party must play its part in the healing of discords. In the economic sphere the BJP legacy that has many positive aspects, notably in ease of doing business in the country. Populist shibboleths must be jettisoned for serious economic thought and application. There is still the burden of poverty, inequality, unemployment and much else that have to be surmounted if India is to become a properly functioning developed entity. The space age, computer raj, nuclear power cannot coexist happily without affordable healthcare, education, unemployment, sufficient job creation and much else that is work in progress, but not always at the desired speed. A responsible opposition Is what India most needs and seldom gets. For instance, what inspired the BJP to align with the Communist party in opposing the seminal Indo-US nuclear power deal in 2007? Only the disgraceful cynical ploy of voting the Congress government of Dr Manmohan Singh out of office must surely be the answer. Aborting the treaty was in China’s national interest, and not in India’s. Patriotism is frequently the last refuge of a scoundrel, pronounced Dr Samuel Johnson, the great English man of letters in the Eighteenth century. A final thought: the Indian elections are likely to resonate in India’s neighbourhood and possibly beyond.
No lessons in tolerance, please
A bipartisan hearing in Washington on religious tolerance in India, due to be held a fortnight ago has been postponed to May 2019, around the time of the country’s general election. Cynics might be forgiven for suspecting that the goal of this exercise could be regime change, for long one of the hallowed practices of American statecraft. Assassinations, fake news, subversion, you name it, are all strings to the bow of Uncle Sam’s foreign policy from the early years of the Republic to the present day. Its westward expansion to the shores of the Pacific Ocean involved forcible territorial acquisition through conquest, subterfuge and voluntary choice. There were great achievements on the way: tilling the land, setting up vast industries through remarkable entrepreneurial innovation, these followed later by a galaxy of Nobel laureates across disciplines, great cinema, great jazz, and ,through the entire period, American welcome to millions of Europe’s poor and persecuted. However, there was a dark side too: the genocide of the native Indian populations of the North American plain and the commerce in African slaves shipped across the ocean to serve their white masters on their plantations, including those of the founding fathers of the United States of America.. Cast outside the pale, the ‘pursuit of happiness,’ enshrined in the nation’s sacristan Constitution remained a distant dream for the black population.
Senator Albert J. Beveridge addressing his peers in the Senate in January 1900, expounded his vision of America’s Manifest Destiny in this rhapsodic passage: ‘The Philippines are ours forever…And just beyond the Philippines are China’s illimitable markets. We will not retreat from either. We will not repudiate our duty in the archipelago. We will not abandon our opportunity in the Orient. We will not renounce our part in the mission of our race, trustee under God of the civilization of the world…with a task worthy of our strength, and thanksgiving to Almighty God that He has marked us as His chosen people , henceforth to lead in the regeneration of the world. ’
Clinging to these sentiments, if not its words, but in deeds, the United States is entrapped in hallucinatory follies, from the atom bombing of the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the carpet bombing and chemical defoliation of Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia, and the disastrous military interventions in the Greater Middle East, resulting in a flood-tide of dispossessed humanity seeking salvation in Europe.
The manic search for an elusive security to which the American political class is addicted has led to insane, spiralling defence expenditures that transcend logic and common sense. A visibly broken society that needs urgent mending is wracked by perpetual violence. Franklin Delano Roosevelt - among America’s few truly great presidents – had warned presciently that the most telling obstacle to the freedom from fear was fear itself.
US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, in a gaseous declaration of intent envisaged a US-led handpicked world order, surely a Kafkaesque mirage. Further to this, the US challenge to the Russian and Chinese presence in Africa on moral grounds is blatant hypocrisy, when the continent is aleady an American military encampment. The lands that once sourced America’s slaves, need most of all peace and development.
American hysteria over Russia bears some likeness to that of Nazi Germany. The English historian Hugh Trevor-Roper in his masterly study, ‘The Last Days of Hitler,’ says the Fuehrer was prepared to tolerate a France reduced to second-rate status, would ‘guarantee the British Empire’ in exchange Britain ceasing to interfere in Continental politics. ‘But the offence of Russia,’ he continued, ‘is the existence of Russia.’ with whom no compromise was possible, and hence it had to be destroyed root and branch. Where Napoleon and Hitler failed disastrously, the Trump administration is unlikely to succeed. Good sense should prevail in the larger interest of life on earth.
Surge in UK investments in India
Britain is India’s largest European investor, ahead of France and Germany, thanks largely to the economic reforms initiated by the Modi government. Ease of doing business in India has made considerable progress. According to the World Bank, from the once 130th position in the league of 192 sovereign nations, India has climbed to 77, up 53 places under the Modi dispensation since assuming office in June 2014.
The ‘Sterling Assets: Britain Meets India’ report by the Confederation of Indian Industry and Grant Thornton India reveals that Britain strengthened its investments in India. Around 38 per cent British companies have made new investments in India, their fourth-largest overall in the country, whose expanding middle class and abundance of local talent plus the General Services Tax have made it an attractive destination for investors, warts and all, more so as India is already the world’s sixth-largest economy – and growing.
