NDTV
16 May 2014

The promise, and peril, of Modi’s mandate

Siddharth Varadarajan

If the struggle of Narendra Modi for power is the struggle of forgetting over memory, his victory represents a collective leap towards an uncertain future.

Mr Modi’s remarkable election campaign may have been fuelled by unprecedented sums of money and magnified by the logic of the first-past-the-post system — which converted a 12 percentage point difference in vote share with the Congress into a 600 per cent difference in seats – but it has helped him banish, for all intents and purposes, the lingering shadows of a darker past.

Troubling questions about his record that were met earlier with menacing silence or anger, but never answers, can no longer be asked. With the absolute majority Mr Modi has now delivered for the BJP, a new ledger of accounts has been opened. Any audit of his record will henceforth be on his own terms.

Narendra Damodar Modi asked the electorate for 272+ seats and they have given it to him. He asked voters for a ‘Congress-mukt Bharat’ – an India free of the Congress – and they have handed it to him. So reviled was the Congress-led United Progressive Alliance government and so terrible its record of governance that the party has justifiably suffered the worst defeat in its 129-year history.

The ‘Modi Wave’ left nearly 60 per cent of the electorate cold and failed to make a major dent in those states where regional parties still enjoy a high degree of credibility with voters like Tamil Nadu, Odisha and West Bengal but it has wrecked the Congress everywhere. The wave swept through Uttar Pradesh, where it also managed to draw away voters from the Bahujan Samaj Party if not from the Samajwadi Party, and of course Bihar too.

With the Congress winning less than 55 seats, the 16th Lok Sabha will not have an Official Opposition or a formal Leader of the Opposition. Ever reluctant to shoulder responsibilities in a competitive environment, Rahul Gandhi is once again off the hook. But the question of an effective opposition so essential for democracy is not merely a formal one.

Taken together, MPs from national parties like Congress, the Left and the Aam Aadmi Party will barely add up to 60.

Regional parties like the AIADMK, the TRS and the Biju Janata Dal, which are non-ideological, or the Trinamool Congress, which veers towards populism but is essentially Bengal-centric, are unlikely to show much interest in, let alone challenge, the Modi government on a large number of crucial areas of policymaking.

http://svaradarajan.com/2014/05/16/the-promise-and-peril-of-modis-mandate/

Posted By F. Sheikh

The nations of the world, claimed Lord Salisbury in a speech to the Primrose League at the Albert Hall in 1898, were divided into the ‘living’ and the ‘dying’. The ‘living’ were the ‘white’ nations – the European powers, America, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. The ‘dying’ comprised the rest of the world. ‘The living nations’, Salisbury claimed, ‘will gradually encroach on the territory of the dying’ and from this ‘the seeds and causes of conflict among civilized nations will speedily appear’. The partition of the globe ‘may introduce causes of fatal difference between the great nations whose mighty armies stand opposed threatening each other’.

Less than twenty years after Salisbury gave his speech, the mighty armies of the great nations did indeed stand opposed threatening each other, and bringing calamity upon a generation. Virtually from the moment that the ‘lamps went out all over Europe’, in Sir Edward Grey’s evocative phrase, there has been much debate – too much debate – about why they did so and who snuffed them out, not least in this, the centenary year of the First World War.

At the heart of the global imperialist network stood not Germany but Britain. By the middle of the nineteenth century, Britain had become the dominant world power, already with an unmatched empire, a powerhouse of an economy, unparalleled naval power and unsurpassed political influence. Britain’s pre-eminence in all these areas was, however, also being challenged in an unprecedented fashion, by the old powers, such as France, Belgium and Russia, by the new power of the USA, and, most ominously, by the newest power of all in Germany.

The rivalries first manifested themselves outside Europe, as the newer powers tried to create their own empires and Britain sought to maintain its supremacy. There was, in the second half of the nineteenth century, from Africa to the Pacific, a frenzy of land-grabbing. ‘Towards the end of the nineteenth century’, the historian Ronald Hyam observes in his book Britain’s Imperial Century 1815-1914, ‘European politicians felt themselves living in an era of world delimitation, “a partition of the world” as Rosebery called it, from which, as Elgin (when viceroy of India) agreed, Britain could not stand aside because of her “mission as pioneers of civilization”’.

Between 1874 and 1902, Britain alone added 4,750,000 square miles and 90 million people to her Empire, ranging from numerous little Pacific Islands to Baluchistan, from Upper Burma to vast swathes of Africa. Britain, the Times declared, must continue expanding her empire because she could not afford ‘to allow any section even of the Dark Continent to believe that our imperial prestige is on the wane’.

Behind imperialist expansion lay venomous racism. ‘What signify these dark races to us?’, asked Robert Knox, Britain’s leading racial scientist, in his 1850 book The Races of Men. ‘Destined by the nature of their race to run, like all other animals, a certain limited course of existence, it matters little how their extinction is brought about.’ Half a century later, the future American president Theodore Roosevelt wrote in his four-volume tome The Winning of the West that all must appreciate the ‘race importance’ of the struggle between whites and the ‘scattered savage tribes, whose life was but a degrees less meaningless, squalid and ferocious than that of wild beasts’. The elimination of the inferior races would, he insisted, be ‘for the benefit of civilization and in the interests of mankind’, adding that it was ‘idle to apply to savages the rules of international morality that apply between stable and cultured communities’. Here was the grim, genocidal reality of Salisbury’s distinction between ‘living’ and ‘dead’ nations and the true meaning of the ‘encroachment’ of the one upon the other.

If racial ideology justified imperialist expansion and, indeed, genocide, the very fact of empire seemed to confirm the reality of race. ‘What is Empire but the preponderance of race’, as the Liberal imperialist and Prime Minister Lord Roseberry asked. Even the anti-imperialist Gilbert Murray accepted that ‘There is in this world a hierarchy of races’, those that will ‘direct and rule the world’ and the ‘lower breeds of men’ who will have to perform ‘the lower work of the world’. ‘The brown, black and yellow races of the world’, the Times insisted in 1910, ‘had to accept that ‘inequality is inevitable’ because of ‘the facts of race’.

http://kenanmalik.wordpress.com/2014/05/15/the-forgotten-roots-of-the-first-world-war/

 Posted By F. Sheikh

Few days ago China placed its oil rigs about 200 miles off the coast of Vietnam in South China Sea and fired water cannons at Vietnam’s vessels which were trying to block it. China has territorial and maritime disputes with many of its neighbors some of which include Japan, Vietnam, Malaysia, Philippines, and Indonesia. Just a few years ago, China was enjoying cozy relations with most of its neighbors with advancing economic ties but it changed ever since its dispute with Japan flared up over Senkaku/Diaou islands, and USA started to move aggressively in the South pacific region to build new military alliances with countries surrounding China. Recently USA conducted naval exercises with Vietnam.

Our strategy of encircling China with military alliances is similar to expansion of NATO  around Russia. Will these military alliances act as a deterrent or create a paranoia that will lead to a unnecessary military conflict? The Ukraine conflict is a prelude to what is in the store for future, and if not handled properly it can lead to a bigger more disastrous war. Our Naval exercises with Vietnam did not prevent China from moving ahead to place oil rigs in South China Sea and expansion of NATO did not prevent Mr. Putin to annex Crimea.

Our weak military alliances around China and Russia may give false sense of security to these countries and which may expect more from us than we can deliver. It may induce them to act irresponsibly, take hard stand to resolve the differences peacefully and even escalate an incidence. Indirectly we may be pushing China and Russia to become allies against encirclement of their borders and push back militarily against their neighbors leading to military conflicts.    

What is the alternative?

Few year back, over Siachin and Kargil conflict, Pakistan and India were on the brink of war, but it was averted by pressure from Business leaders in India who warned about disastrous economic consequences. Economic ties and Economic independence, which was absent during Cold War, is the best deterrence to conflicts and potent incentive to resolve them peacefully. If we are concerned and want to help the countries surrounding China and Russia, we should encourage and help them to build democratic institutions as well as economic ties with China, Russia and the West.  For these countries economic alliances are much more beneficial and deterrent to armed conflict than military alliances. Unfortunately they may still be exploited by their powerful neighbor, but they will be much better off with economic ties, which will bring them prosperity, as compared to military alliances which will inevitably bring armed conflict causing loss of innocent lives, misery and economic disaster as is happening in Ukraine. Unfortunately with military conflict, these countries may become battleground for proxy war between major powers and ruining the whole country with many innocent lives lost.

For the West, expanding military alliances does not make much sense either, because it brings un-necessary responsibility and may entangle us in an armed conflict we either do not want to get involve or cannot afford to get involved. No country in the West, especially USA, is ready to send their daughters and sons to defend faraway lands. These military alliances may generate the very armed conflicts we trying to avoid.