India must create her own Silk Routes

A very large class of authors of all hues have hinted in their work that India is intellectually richer than China. And vast bodies of works which have examined the past for their historical  and allegorical importance have indicated the same. While on such issues, hard empirical data may never be available, the purpose of this blog piece of mine is not really that. While the edge India may have in that arena not-withstanding, there is clearly another where China eminently excels India today, as much it did in the past and that is Geo-Politics.

While in the blog that I penned just a few days ago, I did say, just like the Soviets, the Indian army must modernize and sweat while in peace, so that it can be galvanised into action when needed in no time, just like Russia did, to dash the American dream of hegemonising Syria. 

Having said that, I believe, more than a well oiled, fleet footed and modern fighting machine, what India needs is a make over of its egregiously week willed geopolitical strategy. In fact it needs a complete re-think and make over, something that took off well with Modi’s ascendancy, but lost steam and direction somewhere down the road.

Post the cartographic mis-adventure that the British did with India, just before they decided to leave India to her destiny, carving out an amorphous Pakistan and Bangladesh from within her, one of the most brazen exercises of creation of nation states based not on ethnicity (which is usually the case) but based on religion, a robust geo-political strategy has become an imperative for the following reasons :

1.Creating a sphere of influence so that wars don’t take place, there is peace and prosperity

2.Ensuring that the 1.25 bn and growing Indians have more land and resources tied to land to live on than to constantly jostle with each other for the same piece 

Geopolitics today is a very subtle art of diplomacy and can help create a virtual sphere of influence and an ecosystem that attenuates the pressure on finite indigenous resources.

Vietnam, Lagos and Cambodia were under the Chinese sphere of influence once upon a time. Nepal and Tibet were under the Indian sphere of influence. While India has lost both, China has gained not only them, but Taiwan, Hong Kong, Singapore, Mongolia, parts of south eastern Russia, Pakistan, PoK, several African countries and much more.

While the American sphere of influence once upon a time followed its US Dollar denominated aid, direct or indirect military intervention, the Chinese model is far more sustainable as it rode on foreign investments, trade and the Chinese diaspora, which is what I call the modern silk routes.

Despite India being the spiritual beacon for centuries to several countries of SE Asia including Japan and China, she could never create her own silk routes, and consequently failed to perpetuate her sphere of influence. Despite her people being personally more productive and innovative, the state failed them, right from the time of Nehru, when a protracted political mis-judgement inflicted a humiliating defeat on India in the 1962 Indo-China war. 

If we want to alleviate poverty and suffering from the country and if we seek to provide a basic standard of living to the poor, whose number is increasing every year, the modern silk routes that we create which help us exploit resources overseas and would be as important a factor as growing the domestic economy.

Russia fights for Hegemony

Russia under Putin is a country under a virulent warrior. While this is known that he drives her like his personal fiefdom, he also tries to lord over her neighbours, like even the mighty Czars would not have. 

The Syrian war theatre and the IS unified command, both have fuelled Russia’s immense need to one, make the brute military power that she was always known for felt again and two, even revive the hegemony that she had long lost in international matters. And this under the leadership of a man who seems to have reclaimed her for himself, as though she was always his a ominous development. 

While Putin is known to flaunt his rippling though ageing biceps, that he would do the same for his country was something that I had not imagined. Will this herald the revival of the cold war era is something that we have to wait and watch. I am certain, had it been Bush at the helm of American decision making, the Cold war would have by now been escalated to a Hot war, with the American forces standing face to face with Russians in Syria. 

What both countries - Russia and USA - have very intelligently managed is, their fight for hegemony has always been offshore - Vietnam first, then Afghanistan and now Syria. They have diligently managed to keep the war off their own grounds. Putin may well have been itching for an opportunity of this sort. He had strolled into Crimea and Ukraine and stays on unchallenged. But both these shameless incursions were localised affairs. Now he is taking USA head on under the ruse of helping the Bashar regime on invitation. 

With the annexation of Crimea, Putin added more than 2 mn Russians in one stroke to a country, demographically de-growing and reeling under a death rate of 14.7 double that of the United States. 

But there is a lesson to learn from this. When in peace, his army was sweating. And that is why he took just hours to mobilize jets into the Syrian sky, and Navy into the Caspian sea. India should also use her time of peace to rally its strength and conserve it to use later as a deterrent for border ingressions and skirmishes. I would not recommend Indian army marching into Tibet or annexing Pakistan, even though I personally believe them to be natural corollaries of acquired power, and the only way to ensure lasting peace. But the bloodshed and loss of lives that will bring this about is something that I will never be willing to swallow.

Negativity gets Front Page Prominence in Newspapers

https://drive.google.com/file/d/0BzdnGoNv7vAiTmM4VDJQNG5ycms/view?usp=sharing

My Interview with Thomson Reuters

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OUdQebcAaMU

RELIGIOUS TOLERANCE

RELIGIOUS INTOLERANCE

Trusting the law and respecting the process of Law, is a very simple way of channelising your anger and curbing intolerance. 

While there is once again a raging debate on the “Agnes of God” in quick sequel of the beef eating controversy, my view in such issues is simple. If a community at large finds some content or conduct offensive, then it should not be done or displayed.  After all, that is what democracy is all about. But it is important to, with certainty ascertain, that the community is actually offended, and it is not some vociferous fringe elements, trying to catapult themselves to a position of leadership  for personal gains or seek political mileage by bandying the band wagon of intolerance to some form of expression.

It is also queer, questioning the existence of God per se is not blasphemous. Even if it is in some cultures, at least the believers, but for the fanatic muslims or Islamites, have learnt to live with that scepticism. What intrigues me most is, if people can live with scepticism on the very idea of God, why does an allegedly aberrant depiction pique communal sensitivities

  

Jurisprudence : Besides, both groups, those who question, in toto, or in the name of art, and those who want to decisively quell that questioning, don't have faith in the law, and the law does not act sou moto, but keeps waiting for the situation to get ugly, before it gets galvanised into action.

If only would people trust the system and have faith in the law taking its course to punish the people who flout it, such incidents of mob fury and justice will get automatically weeded out. The fact of the matter is, mob fury, or community justice is meted out only when the perception of systemic dys-functionality has become deeply set in the minds of the people.

Those you suspected that beef was stored and consumed in a families house, could have lodged an FIR with the concerned police station. And the police should have taken action as per law. But they did not. Because, to gain cheap popularity, the chief patron of the state, the father of the CM of the state would invariably have instructed the police to not entertain such complaints against the muslims, whose messiah he wants to portray himself as. And similarly, the champions of the sentiments of the majority faith, who have always questioned the politics of appeasement, also went overboard taking the law in their hands, once again as they suspected that law will not act.

When I was a class 12 student, a friend of my father in the police services told him that Mulayam Singh had clearly instructed them to not file any FIR against any Kanpur Muslim family for theft of electricity. Similar special status was conferred on the Yadavs also, the community that Mulayam himself hails from. And favouritism is not shrouded. It happens openly, for if it is shrouded, then the electoral benefit that can be reaped from such political brazenness will be far less.