Scary GDP numbers are a golden chance to reform

The numbers are in and they are pretty scary. Q1 GDP growth is down to just 5%.

I want to make some nuanced arguments in this post, so let me clarify first where I stand. I have a healthy disrespect for economists and so let me just put this on record: here is a graphic that I stole from a tweet by Rahul Raj and decided to edit with red markings to show my point.

Last year, this quarter showed 8% growth which was very high. This year, the same quarter has shown just 5%, which is really low. Let me say this very clearly: you will see fantastic growth in this quarter next year.

This is simply base effect, which you can see amply in the graphic. A high base in Q1 of FY2018-19 led to a low number in Q1 of FY 2019-20. A low base this year will lead to a high headline number in Q1 of FY20-21.

But base effect works both ways : high base effect and low base effect. The only difference is that people tend to forget high base effect and only remember low base effect.

See what they did in 2018.  Do you think Congress is attributing this year’s low number to high base effect? Of course not.

So am I playing down the problems in the economy? Of course not. Rather, I would be pleased to see them played up (unless you go into fiction territory with the biscuit stories).

Because what I believe is that the GDP scare is extremely useful to push through reforms that are sorely needed.

See, left wing economics is a bit like not studying and hoping that the exam date will never come. It feels good for a while. But the exam always arrives. And shortly before that, there’s panic. And that’s when things finally get done.

Last week, I heard out the entire Press Conference by Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman. Much more than her specific policy announcements, what made me happy was that it was a full hour of this government talking only about how to help out business. This might be the first time that we have seen Modi sarkar talking only about business…business and business.

Because business is the only thing that creates wealth.

This was a huge departure from the welfare focus of the first Modi government.

There are many on the right who are furious with Modi sarkar 1.0 because of its focus on welfare rather than business. These people forget that Modi sarkar ran the most pro-business state government in Gujarat.

So what changed when Modi moved to Delhi? Consider the environment in 2014-15. It may be difficult now to remember the time when the ecosystem was absolutely on top. Do you remember the time the govt tried to pass the Land Acquisition Bill? The narrative was set: Modi on the side of big business and not poor farmers. A total PR disaster for the government.

Do you know what would have happened if Modi had gone “pro business” in his first term? He would have faded away into the sunset by now. PVNR lost. Atal ji lost. Right now, Rahul Gandhi would have been Prime Minister. *Shudder*

Who were the big winners in India’s electoral system? Jawaharlal Nehru, who never did a single thing that was pro-market. Indira Gandhi, who nationalized the banks. Jyoti Basu who didn’t do a thing for Bengal in his 30 year rule. And Manmohan Singh, who rode on the anti-business pitch of Congress in 2004.

Who were the big losers? PVNR and Atal Behari Vajpayee. And yes, Chandrababu Naidu as well. He might be one of the worst politicians in India right now, but you have to remember he created a national business hub in Hyderabad. Soon to be a global business hub. He paid for that “crime” with 10 years out of power.

When Modi came to Delhi, his first priority would have been to put Congress firmly in the rear view mirror. He was on the hunt for the elusive second term. Nobody had ever succeeded (until 2019) in keeping Congress out of power for 10 years. Going up against the accumulated power of 60 years of entrenched socialist narrative was not an option. It was like choosing sure defeat.

Now is the moment. The elusive second term has been achieved. The Congress is gone too far out of the equation. It may never revive as a party.

This is the opportunity. And right now people are terrified at the falling GDP numbers. It’s like the student who finally realizes that the exam is tomorrow.

Suddenly, we have a new consensus in the country. The economic right wing wants far reaching reforms to unleash the animal spirits of the economy.

The economic left does not really like reforms. But they are full of hatred towards Modi. And so they have jumped on these numbers to make Modi look bad. The other day I think I saw Ravish Kumar interviewing a Marxist professor about how Modi sarkar is being anti-business. LOL! People who believe business is evil by definition are now bashing Modi for not doing enough to help business.

This is great. I couldn’t be happier. We have finally achieved a consensus that business is good. The motivations of individuals don’t matter. Right now everyone is boxed into the pro-business club.

Most of all Modi himself, who *knows* his image is suffering badly due to problems in the economy. The government knows that if these problems last, nothing can save them in the next general election, which is a full five years away. Now they have the time, energy and political safety to put India on the path of genuine right wing economics. For once we are all on the same page. Panic works.

 

Media story about Tolstoy’s War and Peace was a big, fat lie

This cartoon has been around on the internet for several years now.

It is not often that a telling cartoon like this might be said to have come literally true. Except that’s what the Indian media just did. An exercise that has nothing to do with Tolstoy, but would have made Orwell’s most disturbing visions come true.

Yes, I did see the “War and Peace” story yesterday. It would have been impossible not to see it. It was all over the papers, all over the internet, plastered on the Facebook walls and Twitter feeds of liberal friends. Before twenty four hours had passed, second order headlines appeared as reactions to this story : opinion pieces, smug self loving rants from liberals and even some foolish self loathing rants from the right.

I kept quiet. Because I suspected there had to be a second story somewhere. I have so little trust in mainstream media and so much contempt for liberals that I would always wait before taking their outrage at face value.

And not surprisingly, it turned out that the garbage fire had started over a big, fat lie.

The claim? That Vernon Gonsalves, one of the accused in the Koregaon-Bhima incident, had been asked by the judge to explain why he had in his possession a copy of Tolstoy’s War and Peace. Perhaps it suggested an anti-national mentality?

This was of course catnip for our liberals, who have read so few books that they always need to show off how many books they have read. Liberal news portals and liberal newspapers fell over each other to show off that they have heard about Tolstoy’s classic. And their friends in BBC ate it up with a spoon.

Like the dispossessed Nehruvian liberals, the British too have self esteem issues, you see. Look closely at the image of this bookshelf. You will see multiple copies of War and Peace, with covers of different sizes and colors. Now, who would keep multiple copies of the same book to fill up the space on their bookshelf? Somebody with a lot of social anxiety about their lack of erudition, that’s who.

What’s the truth?

That’s it. The book the judge was asking about was another book with “War and Peace” in it’s title.

But now that the fake news is all over the internet, it will always survive no matter what. You can already predict that it will be referenced in the New York Times at some point.

Think about every link in this fake news distribution chain. The one who first crafted the lie. The media liberals who eagerly fanned the story. The smug liberals who believed it.

All of them were driven by the express aim of trying to make the Koregaon-Bhima incident accused look like activist angels facing the wrath of the Indian state.

This is the crowd that will cry over a lame statue of Lenin somewhere in Tripura but till date has not shed one tear for the 500,000 Hindus who were driven out of Kashmir.

And for whose sake? A man like Vernon Gonsalves. Every news outlet insists on referring to him as an “activist.” Who is he?

Arrested for Naxal connections in 2007. Actually convicted under the Arms Act in 2013. Served out a full jail sentence.

Yeah, he was a convicted criminal. His crimes, his conviction, his sentencing and his jail term are all in the public domain. The activities of this “activist” are as much available in the public domain as that of Masood Azhar. I suppose it sucks for the mainstream media that Masood Azhar is too well known. I bet they are itching to refer to him as an “activist” as well.

If they are ready to whitewash the life story of a convicted man with a long criminal record, if they are ready to crop out the words of a judge to create public sympathy for a man like Vernon Gonsalves, what won’t they do? They won’t stop at anything. Neither they nor their rich liberal contacts in the West.

This leaves us with no option but to see liberal media as outright anti-India propaganda. It is a propaganda war against us. And the other side is operating on the basis of the maxim that “Everything is fair in love and war.” Their love of the anti-national agenda and their war against Indians, specifically Hindus.

Why is UPSC producing people like Shah Faesal and Kannan Gopinathan?

This is Kannan Gopinathan, the ex-IAS officer who quit his job recently to express his anger over what happened in Kashmir. Since then, he has had at least two appearances on The Wire and at least one on NDTV that I have seen. I think he made a second appearance with Ravish Kumar.

In one of these appearances, he said, stunningly, that the Chinese government is allowing freedom of speech in HongKong but not India! Seriously? He has been on like ten different Indian channels criticizing the Govt of India and he still thinks there’s no free speech? Let’s see him go to Beijing and criticize Xi Jinping.

This is how they keep their agenda flag flying high. Remarks like those of Arund**ti Roy saying Pakistan has never used its military against its own people (forgetting what the Pakistan Army did in Bangladesh, in Balochistan, etc) don’t come out of nowhere. They are not incidental. They are not lying, I believe they don’t even care about the truth as long as they are making India look bad.

As we would say in Hindi, life set hai bas for Kannan Gopinathan. I guess he is already on the shortlist for the Ramon Magsasay award at some point.

And then there is of course Shah Faesal, the other ex-IAS officer who has been in the news.

How sinister is this guy? Said he was on his way to Harvard to complete his Masters degree, but he had no student visa. Just a tourist visa. You have to wonder what he might have done if they had let him leave the country. We don’t know for sure, but probably some kind of spectacle in front of some international body.

The real question is : why is UPSC producing people like Shah Faesal or Kannan Gopinathan? At the very outset, I must admit that this sample of two people is laughably unscientific. Okay, let us make the sample bigger then by adding in Arvind Kejriwal 🙂

He may be a pathetic clown like figure today, but he did try. And while AAP still mattered, it was one of the most poisonous forces ever created in Indian politics.

While this is still (highly) anecdotal and we have no hard data about how our bureaucrats think, I believe there might be some structural problems here.

Let me insert another anecdote here. A few months ago, a young niece of mine who wanted to study to be a lawyer, joined up for a coaching institute to help her clear the CLAT (Common Law Admission Test). I was shocked to hear that the institute had asked her to read The Telegraph regularly to help her chances! I don’t think we can blame the private coaching institute. They know what kind of “information” is needed to answer the questions on the competitive exam.

This is a structural ecosystem problem. Questions in a wide variety of subjects like political science, current affairs, etc can be tilted towards a certain worldview. The UPSC even has an interview, which makes the subjectivity component at least 10 times worse. An officer doesn’t even need to do this deliberately, the bias can easily be unconscious. It is not even humanly possible to be unbiased. So the Congress worldview will dominate simply due to the fact that they have been in power for 6 decades. And I am sure there are going to be bad people within the system who will try to structure the process to suit candidates of their left liberal worldview.

A Sangh Parivar education group recently pointed out that some 90% of UPSC qualifiers are from an English language background, which shows how absurdly unrepresentative the crop of IAS officers is. But the UPSC exam paper is provided in several languages, is it not? But the very fact that the paper is drafted in English and then translated puts non-English speaking candidates at a disadvantage. If this is possible, imagine how easily political bias can be sneaked into the system.

What is the solution to this? If you ask me, the ideal solution is quite drastic : simply get rid of the IAS.

In fact, I believe keeping the IAS was one of the worst decisions that independent India ever made. The Indian Civil Service was created by a colonial power with the express purpose of keeping people in check. In order to make sure that Indians don’t raise their heads too much.

While this may have worked splendidly for the Empire, it does not meet the needs nor the aspirations of a sovereign nation. To imagine that the same civil servants, with their same British protocols, will suddenly go from keeping people down to lifting them up, is ridiculous. Everyone in India knows that IAS officers are like “gods.” Which is a disaster.
An IAS officer does not create wealth. An IAS officer does not do anything innovative, nor come up with ideas to encourage innovation. An IAS officer merely enforces policy decisions from the top. But yeah, they do have the trappings of power : VIP cars, big mansions, many servants and many people begging them for favors.

At worst, we have a crummy old ecosystem that trudges on with loyalty to old Nehruvianism.

At the best, we have produced a class of people drunk on power, who take one exam which demands zero creativity. And never forget about how many young people waste their energy trying to crack this exam and achieve the elevated status. If the minds of these young people were freed up to do productive things, we could have achieved so much more as a nation.

I do see some hope. The Modi government has opened up lateral entry into civil service positions. I believe these are fixed term appointments. It’s a small beginning. But you have to realize that for most hidebound bureaucrats, circumventing the holy UPSC exam is sacrilege. In the coming years, I hope to see this grow and grow until the IAS is effectively disbanded, rendered totally irrelevant.

Of course, you are going to have people who will say that such lateral entries will make civil service appointments seem political. Yeah and so what? The civil service was always political all these years. Because human beings are political. The only difference is that the politicization of the civil service was done by faceless elements embedded in an ecosystem under strict secrecy. In reality, we can only choose whether the civil service should be overtly political or covertly political. Which is better?

Biscuit based doomsday stories about the economy are total nonsense

This is not to say the Indian economy isn’t in a slowdown. But to think that people can no longer afford Rs 5 biscuit packets, that’s crazy.

A few days ago, a news story went viral, with claims that people no longer had even five rupees to spend and that Parle was about to cut 10,000 jobs.

As with any claim or report that can be used to bash Modi sarkar, the usual suspects went to town. The headline potential was immense. And with zero application of common sense, the usual suspects went to town. Take for instance expert Andy Mukherjee, with his tearful imagery of poor women desperately wishing to buy biscuits for their children, but presumably not having even Rs 5 to spend.

On a side note, one wonders why until now experts never realized the plight of 2-3 crore Indians who had been left without electricity despite 6 decades of Nehruvian governance. Nor had the realization that over half of Indian households were doing without toilets. In 60 years of Nehruvian rule, do you remember any expert talking about the poor woman who has to defecate in the open,  burn her eyes and lungs as she cooks over a wood fire and put her kids to sleep early because there is no electric light?

Back to the point, let us find out what’s happening to those Rs 5 biscuits.

According to the article :

“Biscuits costing more than Rs 100 per kilo, the premium version, account for twothirds of the market and grew 8%. The rest of the market — selling for less than Rs 100 per kilo — fell 9%. ”

But I heard people don’t have even five rupees. What if Indian consumers want something perhaps a little more than a humble packet of Parle G that hasn’t changed in 30 years?

A small point here. While the Rs 100 mark is psychological, the price of biscuits, like everything else keeps inching up all the time due to inflation. You may not have noticed this in the sticker price of biscuits you buy. Because of an understanding of consumer behavior, most brands keep reducing the amount in a packet little by little instead of raising prices. Next time look carefully at a packet of biscuits: you might be surprised to see that it contains strange looking amounts like 43g or even 37g; every gram matters. These probably started off as 50g packets.

Even more telling is this ET graphic comparing the YoY growth in various FMCG sectors.

So what am I supposed to conclude from this? Face care products are growing much faster, body care products and toothpaste is speeding up as well. But biscuits are growing slowly.

Hmmm… so it must be that rich and health conscious Indians are ditching biscuits. And as Tinder takes off, face care products are flying off the shelves. But wait, why are skin cleansing products slowing down? Who wants to go on a date with ugly skin? And if people are ditching biscuits, why are they eating so many chocolates? After effects of bad dates?

What you see here is the absurdity of using random data points to draw sweeping conclusions. Now think about the entire doomsday narrative created by liberals around a rather suspicious looking story about Rs 5 biscuits.

Okay, so what is the total figure? FMCG market growth fell to an estimated 10% in the current quarter compared to 16% in the same period a year ago. Did the market decline? No. There was a decline in how much the market was growing, from a scintillating 16% to 10%.

Now look at this graphic from Nielsen about FMCG growth over the years.

Just before the high of 16% in Q3 of 2018, we had three successive quarters of 10%, 12% and 11% growth. These were coming down from the big peak of 20% in Q2 of 2017. And now it’s fallen again to 10%. That’s pretty much the definition of a cyclical slowdown.

In fact, you can observe the same cyclical phenomena in the competition between “data” and “mahaul” that has been going on since May 26, 2014. Data goes down, mahaul goes up. Every liberal wanted to talk about the economy in the second half of 2017, just after GST. Then, the Indian economy staged a huge recovery in early 2018 and “mahaul experts” lost interest in economic issues. Their interest has suddenly recovered in recent months as the data cycle has gone downwards. A year from now, the mahaul experts will be nowhere to be found when you want to talk about the economy. Take it from me in writing. That’s why the smart ones invest in the intolerance narrative, which is the only safe investment, growing around “pichattees” percent year after year since 2014.

After Article 370, we need a surgical strike against leftist terrorism

Which is the most popular ministry in Modi sarkar right now? Without any doubt, it is the Home Ministry.  The Hindu right expects a lot from Amit Shah. After all, we have been waiting quite literally for decades. This from yesterday.

I have been saying for the longest time that the leftist terror threat all across India is much bigger than any kind of external threat. Our security forces have suffered multiple attacks on the scale of Pulwama or Uri. And yet, for some inexplicable reason, these attacks over decades have failed to create a sense of urgency among the general population.

Does anyone remember Dantewada in 2010? That’s where 76 CRPF men lost their lives.

At that very moment, India should have gone for an all out war against left wing terror. But now is as good a time as any other.

Let me put it to you like this. If you heard tomorrow that Pakistan had crossed the international border and occupied say the city of Jaisalmer in Rajasthan, what would you do? Would you not call for immediate war to liberate the people of Jaisalmer? In 1999, when it was found that Pakistani infiltrators had entered Kargil, we did not wait. We went to war immediately.

Well, much of Indian territory has been facing exactly that for several decades now. Parts of Jharkhand, Chhattisgarh, Odisha and bits of other states including Bihar, Bengal, Maharashtra and Telangana. They have occupied territory and set up their military bases. And just like Pakistan refers to certain parts of PoK as “Azad Kashmir,” the leftists refer to their occupied territories as “liberated zones.” And it is from these bases that they carry out guerilla attacks on our people and our forces, exactly what Pakistan does with PoK.

It never ceases to amaze me how the scourge of left wing terrorism somehow still manages to fly slightly under the radar of our national consciousness.

Once upon a time, Dr. Singh referred to leftist terror as India’s gravest security threat. One of the few times when he was 100% right. And true to his nature, he did very little about it. If my memory serves me correctly, Chidambaram was Home Minister when the government decided to make an end to the leftist terror threat once and for all with 30,000 troops. It was supposedly called Operation Green Hunt.

But Operation Green Hunt never actually materialized. Everyone paid the price. Common people for sure. The jawans of CRPF and BSF and their families. Even prominent politicians of both Congress and BJP paid with their lives. If there is something that should unite all Indians, it is opposition to leftist terror.

The time is ripe for Amit Shah to do a ‘surgical strike’ on leftist terror. Hot pursuit. To wipe out left wing terror.

What can the other side do? The worst they can do is unleash their ragged army of talking heads with all sorts of absurd claims. You know all the usual suspects. Surely, we can’t care about them. And dare I say, many of them have actual links with actual left wing terrorists. Check a few NGO money trails and some testimonies from surrendered terrorists. Some big names will spill out into the open.

The other thing we can do is absolutely banish the thought that leftist terror has any kind of moral underpinning. The myth of the “misguided youth.” First of all, we have had enough experience with terrorism in India and around the world to know that you can’t make any excuses for terrorism.

Part of this is to banish the myth that local people in leftist terror affected areas have any kind of sympathy for Naxalism. Frankly, that myth is quite insulting on many levels to the local people there, mostly Adivasis. Do you seriously think those people want to live under a violent occupying force, with no democracy and with kangaroo courts? Do you seriously think those people don’t want schools, hospitals, roads and jobs? Every time there is an election, local people in those areas flock to voting booths at the peril of their lives to make their voice heard. The turnout in many leftist terror affected booths would beat out the voter turnout in many affluent areas of big cities like Bengaluru or Mumbai. Just think about that.

Would you risk your life to go out and vote? Now think about lakhs of people who are doing just that. You can’t possibly let an “intellectual” convince you that these most committed of voters reject the Indian state.

One final point – let’s stop using the expression “Left Wing Extremism.” The term suggests that Naxals are, well, extremists. Outside the mainstream of the left. Okay, so who are the “mainstream” of the left wing? Perhaps the CPM with its 2-3 MPs? That’s all? Well, if there are so few Communists contesting elections and so many Communists fighting with guns, who is the extremist and who is mainstream? It looks to me that the Naxals are not the extreme of the left wing, they are the mainstream of the left wing. Let us call them what they are.

The time is now. The scourge of left wing terror has gone on far too long. It’s time for Amit Shah to finish off this problem. As we say in Hindi, “aar paar ki ladai.”

 

 

Why Hindu RW should never be embarrassed to play blame games with liberals

Take a look at this screenshot.

It contains a picture of a recent caste based indignity in Vellore in Tamil Nadu, where the body of a Dalit man had to be lowered from a bridge because the mourners were refused passage to the cremation ground. This shameful incident went viral and people were understandably outraged.

Now take a look at the accompanying text in this screenshot. Do you see what Scroll has managed to do here? They have managed to drag in RSS while discussing this incident. Remember that this happened in Tamil Nadu, a state where the BJP does not have a single MLA. Possibly never did.

Now you get the true picture of the brazenness of Indian liberals. How could any reasonable person possibly think of RSS while discussing social evils in Tamil Nadu?

How absurd. How infuriating. Yet not surprising.  Indian liberals have held power almost continuously for six decades. And yet, Indian liberals manage to look everyone in the eye and act as if the long term opposition BJP is responsible for every problem in India. Without a trace of embarrassment or shame or irony. Even in states where BJP did not even get to sit in opposition benches, like Tamil Nadu. Somehow, it is all the fault of RSS and BJP, who had no resources, no power and no traction in the state ever.

This strategy is so unbelievably brazen that it sort of works.

The reason I am giving this example is so that the Hindu right does not get bullied by hypocritical liberals who demand that BJP/Modi can no longer blame older regimes for structural problems with India.

The BJP has merely entered its second continuous term in office. And there is absolutely nothing wrong with blaming Nehru loudly and clearly for the problems in Kashmir.  If liberals are going to suggest that RSS is to blame for caste injustices in Tamil Nadu, it is absolutely fitting and absolutely relevant that the Hindu right lay the blame for Kashmir issues at the door of Nehru where it belongs.

Don’t even try the defense that Nehru has been dead for 50 years. BJP didn’t rule Tamil Nadu ever. BJP wasn’t even the opposition party in Tamil Nadu ever. Still liberals are blaming them. Why can’t Nehru and Congress who ruled India for 60 years take responsibility and blame?

Let’s be clear : all the social problems with India, from gender issues to caste issues, every single thing is the fault of the Congress, the Nehru-Gandhi dynasty and its political fellow travelers.

Hey liberals, did you know about this?

The caste related aspects of manual scavenging is known to all. Who should I blame for this situation in Tamil Nadu? RSS?

Or did you know about this?

How many MLAs does BJP have in West Bengal? Maybe 3-4 out of 292, until recently. Who is to blame for this situation in West Bengal? RSS?

Haryana has the worst gender ratio among all Indian states. Who is responsible? Haryana got its first BJP CM only in 2014. And since then, the gender ratio has steadily gone upwards.

And yet you will see Indian liberals who never fail to act as if problems of caste discrimination and patriarchal mindset somehow have something to do with RSS.

What the Hindu right needs to learn here is not to get so easily bullied. Remember that Nehru created the catastrophe in Kashmir. Never be embarrassed to point out that the current problems in the economy have to do with the bad loans given by UPA under Manmohan Singh.

Do not give in easily to liberals who act as if they have a saintly counter-argument : Stop blaming what happened in the past because it’s over. Except the liberal side is happily blaming the Hindu right for all problems all across India, even if those places don’t have a single BJP MLA.

Now it’s all very well to say that ‘blame games’ don’t help anyone. And they don’t. Isn’t it better to focus all the energy on doing things right rather than blaming those who did wrong? But such a blame game is a necessary evil in a democracy, where there is always a political game to be won. If you lose the political argument, then you lose all power to effect any positive change whatsoever. That’s worse, isn’t it?

So let’s get this clear. His Majesty Jawaharlal Nehru and all his heirs and successors are 100% responsible for India’s problems in Kashmir. Every bit of expense, every bit of suffering that India has gone through in Kashmir is due to their strategic blunders.

Every time they point one finger at RSS for things the RSS has literally nothing to do with, the Hindu right should point four fingers back at Nehru. Until they stop telling lies about the Hindu right, keep telling the truth about them.

 

[Guest post] Forgotten story of killings of RSS officials in Tripura – by Gujaratriots.com

Mitron,

Today’s guest post is by a very special person, who prefers to keep his identity hidden. He is one of the people behind the website gujaratriots.com. You may remember how this website was at the forefront of debunking vicious liberal lies about the Gujarat riots.

But this post is not about Gujarat riots, it is about an incident that happened some years before that. In 1999. It is a forgotten incident. Possibly one of many cases of RSS workers who suffered the worst kinds of persecution, but whose stories were conveniently forgotten by mainstream media.

Remember how the whole liberal ecosystem cried when some lame statue of Lenin was toppled in Tripura after the BJP’s famous victory last year? How democracy fell into danger?

Those people will never tell you stories of the kind you are about to read below.

You know this is why I laugh at the whole intolerance debate. Because liberals have never considered any non-liberal even as a human being. I always like to ask : can you name a single person who perished in the fire at Godhra?

And today liberals want us to take seriously their sob stories of getting trolled on Twitter by angry Hindu right wingers? Ha!

As usual, standard guest blog disclaimers apply. All the words below are those of the guest blogger and have not been edited by me in any way. The words, the claims and the references have not been independently verified by me. Please read along…

—- Guest Post begins —

 6 August 2019 was the 20th anniversary of a major event, which was almost totally ignored by the mainstream media when it happened 20 years ago in 1999. Since it was mostly ignored 20 years ago, it was very unlikely that it would be remembered now. 

  The event is, the kidnapping (and later killings after torture for over 1 year) of 4 senior high-level RSS office-bearers in Tripura by terrorists of the NLFT (National Liberation Front of Tripura). Let us see this episode in detail now.

  

   Four RSS officials, not ordinary workers, but high level officials (and full time workers, as they call them, pracharaks) were kidnapped on 6 August 1999 in Tripura, held captive for over a year and brutally tortured and killed.

https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/india/Abducted-RSS-men-killed-in-Tripura/articleshow/472452524.cms?referral=PM

   Those abducted and later declared killed were: kshetra karyavah (Zonal General Secretary) of West Bengal, Assam and the North-East Shyamal Kanti Sengupta, pracharak working in southern Assam Dinendranath Dey, Agartala vibhag pracharak (area-in-charge) Sudhamay Dutta, and district pracharak Subhankar Chakravarty. No less a man than the in-charge of entire West Bengal and North-East was killed. They were all abducted from a Vanvasi Kalyan Ashram-run students’ hostel in Tripura’s Kanchanchhada area. The NLFT i.e. National Liberation Front of Tripura confessed its crime.

https://web.archive.org/web/20130726204253/http://www.rediff.in:80/news/2001/feb/19assam.htm

   With the victory of BJP in the Assembly elections in Tripura in March 2018 and rout of the CPM, a message was being circulated on the social media that this is homage to 4 RSS officials who were kidnapped on 6 August 1999, brutally tortured for over a year, and killed. The national media almost let this case go unnoticed in 1999 as well as 2001, when the deaths were confirmed. 

   In April 2000, they were alive and communicated that they were being tortured. On 3 April 2000, there was a report on Rediff.com titled : “Kidnapped RSS pracharaks plead for help“:

“The four Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh pracharaks abducted by an insurgent group in the northeastern state of Tripura have written to their colleagues stating that they are alive, but under great physical and mental stress. The NLFT, one of the two major insurgent groups in the state, has several camps in the Chittagong hills, just across Tripura’s porous international border with Bangladesh.    The four pracharaks, all from West Bengal, were abducted by NLFT extremists on August 6, 1999, from a remote hamlet in the state’s Dhalai district. All four- Shyamal Sengupta, Dinen De, Sudhamay Dutta and Subhankar Datta- were on a visit to a school run by the RSS-affiliated Vanvasi Kalyan Ashram (Tribal Welfare Organisation).    According to RSS officials in Guwahati, the letter, which bears the signatures of all four pracharaks, speaks about their “great mental agony and tension”. “We are still alive, but physically and mentally unwell. Please take up the matter with the authorities to ensure our release at the earliest,” the letter said.    The NLFT had initially demanded Rs 10 million as ransom, but later scaled it down to Rs 5 million. The RSS leadership is, however, against paying any ransom. “We have already conveyed our stand to the NLFT,” a top RSS leader in the Northeast told rediff.com    Indeed, even K S Sudarshan, the new RSS chief, on a recent visit to Tripura ruled out paying any ransom to the militants. “If we pay money for their release, the RSS will be unable to work here,” he told a gathering of RSS workers in December 1999.    The family members of the four pracharaks collected Rs 1 million and handed it over to the NLFT about a month ago, but the insurgents refused to accept the sum and stuck to their demand for Rs 5 million. The impasse between the RSS and the insurgent outfit is thus likely to continue since both sides have refused to budge from their respective positions.    In fact, the RSS has launched an agitation against the NLFT and started highlighting the contribution of the four pracharaks to the development of the tribals in remote areas in Tripura. All four RSS activists were frequent visitors to the state over the last two decades and are well known and respected in the area, RSS officials say.    The Sangh had, in fact, accused Christian missionaries operating in Tripura of having instigated the kidnapping by the NLFT, which has a large number of Christians among its cadres. The Church has, however, denied this allegation.” rediff.com: Kidnapped RSS rediff.com: Kidnapped RSS ‘We are still alive, but physically and mentally unwell. Please take up the matter with the authorities to ensur…

   RSS General Secretary (No. 2) and then Joint General Secretary H V Seshadri (he occupied both these positions, he was General Secretary from 1994-2000 and then Joint General Secretary from 2000-2003) had sat on a dharna before Tripura House in Chanakyapuri, New Delhi, with thousands of swayamsewaks demanding the early release of these pracharaks in Tripura. The pracharaks were later killed under the nose of the CPM government of Tripura. The CPM government did nothing to save them.

   Even the then BJP-led NDA Government did not do enough to save these 4 pracharaks. In fact, even the then Sarkaryawah (General Secretary) Mohan Bhagwat, who was a man who totally avoided public exposure and political comments until he became Sarsanghachalak in 2009 publicly blamed the BJP-led NDA Government too along with the Tripura Government of the Left. A Times of India report after the deaths were confirmed said on 29 July 2001:

 “New Delhi: The RSS has squarely blamed the Baptist Church and the National Liberation Front of Tripura (NLFT) for the murder of its four senior functionaries in the state. These four pracharaks (whole-timers) who have been missing since August 6, 1999, included a 70-year-old national level leader. RSS Sarkaryawah (General Secretary) Mohan Bhagwat in a statement said the Tripura and Union governments on Saturday [28 July 2001] confirmed the RSS functionaries’ death…”The conspiracy of the Christian missionaries behind the anti-national activities of this (NLFT) organisation is no longer a secret,” wrote Bhagwat. The General Secretary has called on volunteers all over the country to pay homage to the deceased functionaries in their respective shakhas on August 6 [2001]… At the height of terrorism in Punjab, a large number of RSS volunteers where killed during a morning shakha. While announcing the pracharaks’ death, Bhagwat has made a scathing attack on the Union and the State governments. “From the day of their abduction, the RSS has been trying hard to get them released. But its desperation was reciprocated by the Union and State governments’ insensitivity.” …Till November 2000, the RSS had been in touch with the kidnapped functionaries through middlemen, but their contacts broke off soon after and hence it was believed since that these four had been murdered. In fact, last August [2000] the RSS had demonstrated against the Union Home Ministry and staged a protest march at the Tripura House in Delhi, seeking the government’s intervention to get the abducted functionaries released.”

https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/india/Abducted-RSS-men-killed-in-Tripura/articleshow/472452524.cms?referral=PM

   It was good that after the win of the BJP in Tripura, the sacrifice of those 4 officials was being remembered in March 2018. In April 2018, almost 19 years after the incident, the BJP Government of Tripura constituted a Special Investigation Team (SIT) to reopen the case. https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/agartala/20-years-after-murder-of-4-rss-workers-tripura-government-to-reopen-case/articleshow/63879870.cms 

   In case of this horrific event of the pracharaks who were high-level adhikaris’ deaths, the RSS had raised the demand for an independent inquiry several times but the CPM-led Left Front Government of Tripura had never accepted it. The BJP certainly appeared to act differently from the CPM Government in Tripura, and certainly differently from the way the Union Home Ministry acted in this case in 1999-2001.

   The people who are today crying coarse over ‘intolerance’ and ‘suppression of democracy’ were stunningly silent. The reason for their silence, of course, was that they were GLAD that this happened. When 59 innocent people including 25 women and 15 CHILDREN including BABIES were burnt to coal in Godhra on 27 February 2002 by a mob of 2000 fanatic Muslims, these people defended the heinous killers and slandered the dead, falsely accusing them of trying to ‘kidnap a Muslim girl’, which was after a fake and malicious email circulated in the name of PTI reporter Anil Soni, who had made no such report. Naturally, when such heartless people rejoiced over the deaths of people like Atal Bihari Vajpayee, Sushma Swaraj and Arun Jaitley, slandered the dead CHILDREN including BABIES and toddlers [their hearts couldn’t melt when babies and toddlers were burnt] and defended their killers, how on earth could they consider grown-up men who were high-level officers of RSS as humans? They would obviously cover-up this heinous crime completely, and in their hearts be glad that the RSS officers died.

Politicians teach us about living a life less ordinary

This was his tweet just a few weeks ago.

And now he’s gone. Into the same void. Isn’t it terrifying how uncertain life is?

A reminder of how fragile our lives really are. How temporary.

Maybe I’m getting old. But this leaves me kind of shaken. Sheila Dikshit. Then Sushma Swaraj. Now Arun Jaitley.

We know the game of politics is about things much bigger than ourselves or any individuals. But some of it also feels like a game. These are the players that I grew up with. And now, one by one, they are all going away. Fading away into the inevitability of time.

It is amazing how deeply we are impacted by the life we lead between 12 and 20 years of age. Before that I guess we are too young to really understand anything. I was twenty a long time ago, but it seems like life is an unfolding of the plot whose terms were set in those years. My heroes when it came to politics, to the movies and to cricket remain largely the same.

I stopped watching cricket after Sachin Tendulkar retired. As difficult as it may be to believe, coming from a Ranchi boy who incidentally studied in the same school and grew up in the same colony as Mahendra Singh Dhoni, I never really warmed up to him. Because Sachin was around during my most impressionable years. Not Dhoni. With the exception of Virat Kohli, I cannot recognize the face of a single player in the current team. Would you believe that?

For my generation, Atalji was the Kapil Dev like figure. We understood his greatness, but we always knew his innings was drawing to a close.  The ones like Pramod Mahajan, like Sushma Swaraj, Manohar Parrikar and Arun Jaitley seemed to be the stars of the future. Each one of them is gone today.

In 2002, of course, there was the rise of Narendra Modi. As the UPA era washed over the country, his star grew brighter and brighter until it occupied the whole sky.

Will there be more heroes for me? I don’t know.

I think I can understand the appeal of dynasty politics at least a bit now. You get to see shades of the past in new faces and pretend as if the past is still here. I can now understand my 85 year old uncle who cannot imagine supporting anyone other than Indira Gandhi’s grandson. I get it.

Without doubt, I am being weak minded here. It is not parties which matter, it is not individuals that matter, it is only the nation that matters. And the dream of a superpower Bharat. To describe all of this like a game of cricket, to talk of ideology as a matter of attachment to certain individuals you see on screen is rather foolish.

You will notice that I have been rambling on about myself, rather than speaking of the departed. When something really touches us, it makes us open up about ourselves.  See, how does it matter what I say here about Arun Jaitley? He led a famous life and a highly successful one. Every single detail about his life is carved into public memory. Do I really need to remind anyone?

But there is one thing I will say here, about the special bond between Modi and Arun Jaitley. The toughest election that Modi ever faced in his life was Gujarat 2002. That was when the “whole world” was against him … literally. Most world powers. The powerful opposition within India. Almost every member of the intellectual ecosystem. And much of his own party.

The man who stood with Narendra Modi at that time was Arun Jaitley. From candidate selection to dropping sitting MLAs, the man who worked behind the scenes in that campaign was Arun Jaitley. Imagine how different our world would have been if Modi had lost that election in 2002.

Few remember the next thing that Arun Jaitley worked on after his Gujarat assignment. That was the famous triumph of BJP over Digvijay Singh in Madhya Pradesh. A mammoth 173 seats out of 230, which led to a 15 year BJP regime in the state. Behind Uma Bharti’s scintillating 2003 campaign was the brain of Arun Jaitley.

The third famous assignment? Karnataka. The man who worked with B S Yediyurappa to form the first BJP government in the South.

Be it Gujarat, Karnataka or Madhya Pradesh, Arun Jaitley was the iron man who stood with BJP’s most famous triumphs. And then he served Narendra Modi at the Center as his most powerful minister.

Set partisan politics aside for a second and just think about life. All life comes to an end. There’s always a zero balance at the end of it. All that matters is the transactions in the book of life. It is here that politicians excel. Most of them started at a very young age, following nothing but a dream. And from that age till their last breath, they lead a life story that is compelling and fascinating to talk about. A life full of successes, failures and even ironies. How many of us can say that?

Narendra Modi will be 69 next month. By that age, pretty much everyone else has retired from active working life.  But Modi is soldiering on, with ever bigger hopes and dreams. Many politicians across parties are his age or much older than him. Every one of them leads a full and active life.

There is a lot to learn from this. Politicians teach us to lead a life less ordinary. How many of us can do that?

Modi sarkar needs to spend its political capital on tough reforms for the economy

This is definitely the right question to ask. Everything else belongs in the past for now.

So what exactly did this govt do wrong wrt Economy? Genuine question. (Not looking for what they did not do or should have done) . TIA.

— दिव्या (@divya_16_) August 23, 2019

I cannot possibly give the answers, except some guesswork. For the second time this week, I want to ask you folks this question.  I want to hear what you have to say.

Let me at least say what I feel. I know Nirmala Sitharaman isn’t popular among RW, especially not right now. And she should be blamed for the collapse of market sentiments.

But I still feel she has come in too recently to be directly blamed. Many of the worst economic indicators are from June, which is before she even presented her first budget, which was on July 5.

I have spoken at length before about the bad loan crisis left behind by UPA, so I will not focus very much on that in this post.

If you ask me, the story goes something like this. The Indian economy had been built on foundations of sand. First of all, the economy was vastly informal. Okay, that is to be expected for a poor country trying to transition into prosperity. And efforts to formalize the economy proved too much too soon.

Honestly, I like big ideas and big moves. Long time readers of this blog will remember that I said I stopped using cash for almost 8 years while I was living in the US. Not even one dollar nor one cent. I am totally moved by the appeal of a 100% digital, 100% cashless economy. But there is a vast informal economy that will not agree with me.

The second problem was humongous amounts of corruption and black money. For example, demonetization all but destroyed the real estate market. How would that be possible? Any house or any office anywhere is priced in several lakhs, often crores. How can sucking out the cash possibly affect this?

But sadly, there were people who actually were buying real estate in cash. We all know that. It was dirty money. Black money parked in real estate often as benami property. And when the cash was sucked out and there was a crackdown against benami properties, there was tremendous wealth destruction in the real estate sector.

The problem is that reality exists in shades of grey. When a heroin addict arrives for rehab, quitting the habit outright is kind of impossible. There’s always going to be a delicate moral question here : should you allow smaller and smaller doses to wean the addict away from the drug? Or do you say NO more drugs at any cost?

It’s not just real estate. We all know that the informal sector used to have near zero compliance in matters of taxation. This was endemic. Whether right or wrong, taxes were never part of their business model. And when everything changed suddenly, many of their business models collapsed. This hit to the informal sector gradually made its way “upwards,” hitting the big companies in the formal sector.

Now this “criticism” is not intended as a backhanded compliment to the government. Like youngsters everywhere interviewing for their first job who say their biggest “weakness” is that they sometimes work too hard 🙂 The government cannot afford to think like a raw college senior.

What should really have happened is that two things should have gone hand in hand : Increased pressure for compliance should have come with lowering the regulation burden.

What that means is that you draw a line in the sand and say you can no longer do business without paying taxes. You stick steadfastly to that moral and legal position. But you also hold out a hand saying the government will make that compliance as painless as possible. Cut the taxes. Make it really easy to file taxes.

That did not happen. And worse, taxes have crept up. Old taxes that had been long forgotten have been dredged up. I am referring of course to LTCG. And now there are all sorts of new taxes on Foreign Portfolio Investors and the super rich and what not.

So what should be done here and now?

The lowest hanging fruit in any economy is sentiment. This can be revived almost overnight by cutting the new taxes introduced on July 5. The LTCG could be done away with. We’ve already seen reports that something like 80% + of stocks gave negative returns since Jan 31, 2018 and so there’s no question of LTCG anyway. So these things won’t even cost any money and you get a revival of sentiment for free.

The second thing to do is keep cutting interest rates. The RBI has been doing this sharply in the last one year. The last concern right now is inflation. Prices have never been so stable in India as in the last five years. But we need more cuts and sharper cuts. Instead of a sharp cut spread over several months, why not go in for the same amount of cut in one big swoop? You can get a surge of investment that way.

Honestly, I don’t know about a stimulus. Such a thing goes against my core right wing beliefs. About getting the government out of business. But hey … in India we don’t just have big government, we are immersed in big government from head to toe. So what’s another splash of big government? We should remember here though the extremely unpleasant experience from 2010-11. The stimulus announced in 2009 sent everything sharply upwards for exactly one year. For one year, India actually delivered double digit GDP growth. Then, the collapse began.

Who wants to jump off that stimulus cliff again? That’s why I welcome these comments from Chief Economic Adviser K Subramanian.

We have to hold off on the stimulus. It’s just too risky.

Instead, cutting some of the GST rates may help. Even if there is a stimulus package, let it be sector specific. The auto industry is in grave crisis, better to give them something.

One great thing right now is that Modi’s popularity is sky high. I will say he has gained even since May 23. If there was an election right now, the BJP could have got 350 seats. The NDA would probably cross 400.

But that’s about 80 seats more than we need to have a BJP government. So that’s accumulated political capital that the government is sitting on and can afford to spend.

On what could it spend this political capital? Why not revive the long suspended dream of the Land Acquisition Bill? It was the first big economic measure announced by Modi sarkar. He had to roll it back due to extreme pressure.

But this is 2019, not 2015. The ecosystem has lost much of its bite and most of its resources. Modi sarkar can now afford to spend its political capital on the Land Acquisition Bill. And many other labor law reforms. These tough reforms will improve short term sentiment, show real intent and yield long term gains.

Basically, what I am proposing is the political equivalent of a stimulus package. Instead of spending money, you spend the accumulated political capital from Article 370 abrogation, from Triple Talaq Bill, from arresting the corrupt captains of UPA.

And when this political capital is spent, there are a hundred ways of earning it all back again. The Ram Mandir verdict is coming. There’s the Indus Water Treaty that we can cancel. You could bring a nationwide anti-conversion bill. Sooner or later you will succeed in bringing back the fugitive businessmen who plundered India and ran away. We have five full years.

For now, it’s time to go for tough reforms. What do you all think? I can’t wait to hear.

Head caretaker of UPA castle is arrested and the common Indian is smiling

Do you recognize this guy?

Of course you do. That’s R K Laxman’s common Indian. He has very little to his name. He carries with him a small bundle with few material things. The real weight on his shoulders is the disappointment of 70 years of independence.

R K Laxman’s common Indian was never angry, never impatient. He had an expression that was made up of equal parts of amusement and curiosity. Mostly resigned to the fact that some people in India are unshakeable, like the sky.

Last night we saw some other expressions on different faces.

When I saw that face, my first thought was : if R K Laxman was around today to make a cartoon out of this picture, what would he draw? He would doubtless insert his common man somewhere. And what expression would he draw on his face?

When you grow up in India, you know you cannot ask certain questions about certain people. These are questions that we dare not verbalize even today. You’ve read the newspapers. You know all the keywords. But will you dare ask the questions to big people? Not me. I am a common man. I know better.

What I can do however is smile. At how the high and mighty have fallen. We all know what’s eventually going to happen. The high and mighty will resume their high and mighty lives and you and I will keep living our common lives. But in the meanwhile, we can break character for a few moments and smile.

You know they are saying P Chidambaram wanted a clean lockup without rats.

Are you smiling yet?

Be it for ever so little as just one night, we the common Indians slept better than Chidambaram did. How does that feel?

That’s P Chidambaram we are talking about. The head caretaker of the UPA castle.

Now the ecosystem is very good at protecting their own. But rarely do you see all members of the Dynasty personally batting for someone in public. Generally they seem to consider such things as beneath their royal dignity. But it’s different this time.

Between multiple tweets about the supposed achievements of Rajiv Gandhi, look what Rahulji managed to squeeze in.

Because this is no ordinary stool pigeon we are talking about here. This is the head caretaker of the UPA castle. If he goes, who could be next?

Dare I say … ?

The sense of disorientation that shook Lutyens yesterday was something to see.

Enjoy the Whataboutism. By the way, how long before some renowned “divider” in media tries to size up yesterday’s arrest in terms of caste or regional faultlines? Let’s see who does it first.

And this is Nistula Hebbar, political editor of The Hindu, apparently losing control over language.

As I said, enjoy the disorientation.

But who knows, maybe Nistula does have a point? Perhaps R K Laxman’s common Indian was meant to be a troll after all. Long before that word was coined and the internet came to be.

One thing I can tell you for sure is that the common man today is smiling. Morning walkers embracing, strangers hugging each other. Hope it lasts.