Indian Economy - News & Discussion 27 May 2012

[RoyG]

I wonder how much of this "foreign" money is our money.

[Bade]

Imo ak antony might make a better pm esp given the hyenas gnawing away at the borders

He may be ok considering the current PM, his ability to communicate freely in Hindi or English is again very limited. Right now the Congress does not seem to have a charismatic candidate for the PM's job. Rahul better limit himself to party activities like his mother. IMO, that role suits him better.

[Austin]

The only qualifying attribute of being a PM in Congress is complete faith and worship for SG and RG and listen to dictates of her office when ever they come from High Command.

Any one is good to be a PM if it is adhered to the above principle and the qualifying person is monitored for long time for his loyalty.

[Prem]

The only qualifying attribute of being a PM in Congress is complete faith and worship for SG and RG and listen to dictates of her office when ever they come from High Command.Any one is good to be a PM if it is adhered to the above principle and the qualifying person is monitored for long time for his loyalty.

http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/04/ ... TO20130428
Chidambaram's ( Him, Not India or sarkar)race to reform Indian economy runs into political hurdles

Reuters) - An Indian Parliament deadlocked yet again over corruption scandals threatens Finance Minister P. Chidambaram's ambitious reform agenda, dealing a harsh dose of political reality on the heels of his North American roadshow to sell the India story.Chidambaram promised investors during his roadshow in Boston, New York, Ottawa and Toronto to get the bills on insurance and land reform passed in the current session, hoping their passage will boost investment from eight-year low growth and help spark an economy growing at its slowest in a decade."If we can pass the land bill, if we can pass the insurance bill and if we can pass the Goods and Services Tax bill, that will be an accomplishment of this parliament," Chidambaram said last week, appealing for bipartisanship on economic issues.Chidambaram is increasingly spoken of as a future prime minister if the Congress party retains power, although he denies any such ambition.While the main opposition Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has agreed in principle on land reform, it has refused to back the insurance bill, and with national elections due by May 2014, it is not in a mood to compromise."Chidambaram is misleading. The government is in its last days of office. They cannot bring the economy back to health," BJP spokesman Prakash Javadekar told Reuters.New Delhi's poor record of delivering on promises, coupled with myriad regulatory hurdles - including high-profile tax battles with foreign companies such as Vodafone and Royal Dutch Shell - has driven investors away.Foreign direct investment into the country fell 38 percent in the 11 months through February. The Center for Monitoring Indian Economy, a think tank, reckons new capital investment announcements in the March quarter dropped 75 percent from the same period last year.Meanwhile, Indian companies are looking for greener pastures. A government body expects outbound corporate investment to rise about 45 percent in the fiscal year that started this month.

DON'T WRITE ME OFF
Chidambaram warns sceptics against underestimating his ability to deliver, pointing to his success in reining in a bloated fiscal deficit and carrying out fuel, retail and aviation industry reforms.No one had thought fractious coalition politics would let him drive through those reforms, but the benefits are already evident.Abu Dhabi-based Etihad Airways last week made a $379 million investment in India's Jet Airways, a deal that was made possible by the rule change and was helped along by the government. Swedish retail chain Hennes & Mauritz said it will spend about $130 million to open an initial 50 stores in India.The cabinet committee on investment, which Chidambaram had pushed to speed clearances for big infrastructure projects, has approved $27 billion worth since January.His success in controlling the fiscal deficit has also pulled the country back from the brink of a ratings downgrade.Luck also seems to be favouring Chidambaram, with India getting a boost from the correction in global oil and gold prices, easing its import bill and current account deficit.But with the election fast approaching, the din in parliament is getting shriller by the day, making it difficult to carry out meaningful legislative business. Even colleagues within Prime Minister Manmohan Singh's cabinet oppose some of the reforms Chidambaram wants to make.His plan to set up a coal regulator to decide the allocation of coal mines and pricing of the fuel has run into trouble as the coal ministry is not willing to cede its power.
Providing fuel supply linkages to utilities has become a victim of a feud between the coal and power ministries. Plans to free up prices of oil and gas drilled locally have been put on the back-burner following a disagreement among ministries.
Similar opposition from his cabinet colleagues forced the finance minister to boost public spending for welfare programmes in this year's budget and accept a watered-down version of a plan to fast-track major infrastructure projects.Chidambaram, who has also courted investors on visits to Asia and Europe, is planning to take his roadshows to Australia and Qatar next month.A failure to honour his commitments could not only dent hopes for India's economic revival ahead of next year's election, but could also take the shine off the Harvard-trained Chidambaram's reputation as an investor-friendly "doer"."The issue is that the roadshows have to be followed by actions," said Sandeep Aneja, managing director at Kaizen Private Equity. "Unless we show consistent reforms, we will not see significant investment coming in."

[abhishek_sharma]

8 Myths About India's Growth

[Gus]

He may be ok considering the current PM, his ability to communicate freely in Hindi or English is again very limited.

That is not a handicap...that is the BIGGEST QUALIFICATION to be a con PM.

[amit]

Discussing future PMs and their relative merits or in this case the race to the bottom, who has the least demerit is I guess serious OT for this thread.

However, in the context of future economic policy (which I suppose is not so much OT) I'd like to add that performance of any future PM, be that person be from the UPA/Congress or NDA/BJP will be dependant on coalition dynamics.

The fact remains that ever since Rajiv Gandhi won that two-thirds majority and squandered it, PMs in India have been hamstrung by dirty, short-term (with no strategic vision) coalition politics. It took the guile and craftsmanship of PVNR to weave a path through that to enact far reaching economic policy. The other instance in all these years was ABV who, through his towering presence (the merits or demerits of this aura is a discussion for some other thread) was able to push through reforms.

But even these two towering political figures were less than 100 per cent successful. After the big bang of 1992 meaningful reform stalled after three years under PVNR who had his mind on things like huge suitcases full of money etc. Under ABV also many meaningful reform measures didn't really add up to much - one example is Arun Shourie's disinvestment programme - a wonderful reform measure - which the BJP just didn't have the necessary political capital to take to its logical conclusion.

Under MMS for the past 10 years, frankly it's been a mixed bag. On hindsight, IMO, he spent too much political capital on the nuclear deal. Don't get me wrong, I think that's the most important thing that he will be remembered by IMO. After that it's just been downhill. And yes a lot of that blame can be put on the doorstep of the Gandhi parivar.

The next incumbent PM will face the same constraints that all these PMs have faced. I know there's a feeling that NaMo should be the next PM and on the basis of his track record and capabilities (I've had the fortune of dealing with him a few times and boy I'm impressed!) India needs him as the PM.

However, will he be able to work the same wonders in economic liberalisation that he has in Gujarat - where he commands a comfortable majority - in India at the head of a fragile coalition with pals like Mamata Didi sitting in the same room? Maybe and maybe not.

I just hope he can.

As Raja Ram ji used to say, this is just a ramble, so please don't sharpen your daggers and come hunting for me.

[gakakkad]

8 Myths About India's Growth

while there are several myths about indian economic growth ,the above article is clearly a hatchet job.

i ll try re write this article from a more neutral perspective.

[Austin]

India and Russia on the path to free trade zone

[kish]

10 countries with the largest labour force

India
The Indian labour force is the world’s second largest. The service sector in India makes up to more than 50 percent of the country’s GDP. Major industries include textiles, telecommunications, chemicals, pharmaceuticals, biotechnology, machinery and technology among other things.

Total labour force: 498,400,000

[vina]

For all the "Gold Nuts","Austrians" and their mirror images, the JNU/ISI/DSE ding dongs, and their fixations and pig headedness in the face of facts and experiences.. The NeshRants and of course Prabhat Patnaik, Jayathi Ghosh and CP Chandrashekar kind of nut cases and their doppelgangers.

Check this out.. Krugtron the Invincible

For the "Inflation Armageddon Coming" goldnutters, check out this story Krugman or Paulson, Who you gonna bet on ?, circa 2010 to, Paulson's Costy Bet on US rebound Unravels (and oh, Paulson lost his shirt again in the Gold Crash recently.. food for thought you nutters. . so who you gonna bet on a, a patsy or a winner? The Delhi & Calcutta clique (JNU/ISI/DSE ding dongs) of nutcases or a winning model post 91?) .

Dilli/Kolkata ding dongs would do fiscal discipline be scared, borrow and spend like there is no tomorrow ( repeal the fiscal responsibility act nutters like the CPI-M (Karat and Yechury) and their JNU acoloytes, Jayati Ghosh and CP Chandrashekar) and drown us in inflation (like what happened when Pranabda -- another joker whose very presence in the Finance Minister is like a Shani Dasa / Saade Sathi for the economy , did just what those guys did and cooked up some numbers and let the fiscal deficit balloon), while the Gold Nutters and Austrian nutters would never do counter cyclical expansionist policies and repeat the follies of the great depression again and again and consign vast swathes of civilization to doom.

[member_20317]

^^^

We used to read such stuff during the certification exams. Never could understand how that would help me or my country make money. There was a C/D grade Hollywood movie that had a superior, cross at his subordinate, scolding him if the dip shit understood 'what buying low and sell high' meant. That question lead me to some real good education.

Just leave gold, its not like people drop everything to invest only in gold. panduranghari ji is an exception but then he could have been in exceptional circumstances. One swallow does not a summer make. Speaking over a period of time, the Gold Trade Deficit as percentage of GDP would be something like 1.5-2% of GDP. So no big harm considering Gold loans have been growing too in a very healthy manner and the internationl gold prices have risen at a healty 16% CAGR for last 12 years. You want it to slow down, well great. The Gobermint of India has heeded to your call. So peace only. And don't worry Indians will loosen their golden purses, for business purposes. Just give them a good deal.


On a separate note, you seem to use words like deficit etc., with some confidence. That accounting is also beyond me even though I do believe in that part of national income accounting. If you are ever in a good mood, do drop us some crumbs. If Suraj and you could collaborate on it, this thread could see some party time.

[RamaY]

Myth: Gold loses value
Fact: There is no consumable in the world, including children parents and BRF membership, that doesn't lose value over time.

Myth: Gold is not an asset
Fact: Gold is an asset that comes after Farm land (lively hood for people same as an SMB), House. It is definitely a better asset than derivative driven pension schemes, financial assets and even long-term bank deposits. It is less invasive than a credit card in some aspects. When you lose a credit card size of gold (Say 20-30gms) you just lose the money. If you lose a credit card there is a chance for you to lose everything in your bank and also your identity.

Myth: Gold is not a safe asset
Fact: There is no "safe" asset in life. Every asset has the potential to make profit or loss. Yes, one can live in the house even if it loses its value, but one cannot live in 6 houses.

Myth: Gold Jewelry is not for fun
Fact: Gold Jewelry is like expensive toy, albeit mostly for women (exceptions are there like the guy who made gold shirt and so on). Whoever says Jewelry is not good they are male chauvinists and oppress women by taking away their most loving possession.

Myth: Gold can be taken away or made illegal by Govt.
Fact: Yes they can, but it is a early (or late) sign of govt bankruptcy. In the same way Govts can take your bank balances (Cyprus) and your lands (ask those farmers whose lands were taken away for SEZs and others)

Myth: Gold imports doesn't create economic value or employment
Fact: There are at least one gold smith per village. That means nearly at least 1million goldsmiths are employed in this sector. In addition to that in 2011 India exported $14B worth of Gold Jewelry (just gold jewelry and not all types of jewelry) in 2011. To achieve this it should have employed at least 14x25000 = 350,000 permanent employees. All this employment without losing the value of gold, value addition from jewelry making (15% that people claim to lose when they buy jewelry).

Myth: Indian Oil imports create economic activity but not Gold imports.
Fact: India's Oil imports grew ~10% a year where as the economy grew only ~5% between 2005 and 2009. That means nearly half of Oil imports produced no economic value at all. On the other hand India's Gold imports do not lose value (not more than 5-10% depreciation consumers see - most of this gold is recovered by gold smiths in the form of gold waste/powder).

Then why people question India's gold consumption? Due to the religious bigotry of secularists. There is no other reason.

[RoyG]

For all the "Gold Nuts","Austrians" and their mirror images, the JNU/ISI/DSE ding dongs, and their fixations and pig headedness in the face of facts and experiences.. The NeshRants and of course Prabhat Patnaik, Jayathi Ghosh and CP Chandrashekar kind of nut cases and their doppelgangers.

Check this out.. Krugtron the Invincible

For the "Inflation Armageddon Coming" goldnutters, check out this story Krugman or Paulson, Who you gonna bet on ?, circa 2010 to, Paulson's Costy Bet on US rebound Unravels (and oh, Paulson lost his shirt again in the Gold Crash recently.. food for thought you nutters. . so who you gonna bet on a, a patsy or a winner? The Delhi & Calcutta clique (JNU/ISI/DSE ding dongs) of nutcases or a winning model post 91?) .

Dilli/Kolkata ding dongs would do fiscal discipline be scared, borrow and spend like there is no tomorrow ( repeal the fiscal responsibility act nutters like the CPI-M (Karat and Yechury) and their JNU acoloytes, Jayati Ghosh and CP Chandrashekar) and drown us in inflation (like what happened when Pranabda -- another joker whose very presence in the Finance Minister is like a Shani Dasa / Saade Sathi for the economy , did just what those guys did and cooked up some numbers and let the fiscal deficit balloon), while the Gold Nutters and Austrian nutters would never do counter cyclical expansionist policies and repeat the follies of the great depression again and again and consign vast swathes of civilization to doom.

Or we could follow this nutter

[Theo_Fidel]

Vina,

That is an excellent post. The only thing that matters is the effect of policy on reality.

All these assorted ideologues and rhetorical point scorers have no interest in the welfare of their fellow human beings or even bothering to learn something new. It amazes me that in the past 8 years not one lesson has been learnt by these folks and the same blaah blaah is trotted out as some pretend insight. Like Voltron, reality will cleave them in two....

[abhishek_sharma]

Paul Krugman's notes on trade policy

there is one file on India too.

[Arjun]

For all the "Gold Nuts","Austrians" and their mirror images, the JNU/ISI/DSE ding dongs, and their fixations and pig headedness in the face of facts and experiences.. The NeshRants and of course Prabhat Patnaik, Jayathi Ghosh and CP Chandrashekar kind of nut cases and their doppelgangers.

Let me ask you Vina - do you really think the socialist policies put in place by the Dynasty are because of Prabhat Patnaik, Jayati Ghosh and CP; or is it the other way around and Prabhat, Jayati and CP merely provide hired 'intellectual' backup to the Dynasty's well-documented ideological leanings ??

While I don't have a problem per se with your denunciation of leftist policies, your posts have always had a highly 'Rip Van Winkish' feel to them. The communist problem is such a nineties-issue. Its hardly relevant now - if you are truly against leftists the battle of the current decade is against the Dynasty.

You actually seem to think that the tail wags the dog - and that these JNU ding-dongs are the ones that are responsible for the Dynasty's retardedness ? Is that what you truly think and why ??

[Singha]

^ good point. academia and economic planning bodies have been selectively filled with people who can support the dynasty's political and economic philosophy. if you ask series IAS aspirants they know very well how to answer interview questions on economics because they know the kind of people who sit on the panel....its not a joke, they are making a life changing interview, so they carefully prepare with the right 'social justice' and 'redistributive' type answers to potential questions, no matter what their personal belief.

I know of a guy who failed to clear the interview twice, each time being beaten up in the interview for giving 'capitalist' answers to the usual questions.

[abhischekcc]

I wonder how much of this "foreign" money is our money.

Yeah. These lalajis must have got spooked with the way Euros went after private accounts in Cyprus (not to mention Lichtenstein, Switzerland! , and other money laundering pits). They are probably thinking that at least they can 'manage' the political system in India.

[member_20317]

^ good point. academia and economic planning bodies have been selectively filled with people who can support the dynasty's political and economic philosophy. if you ask series IAS aspirants they know very well how to answer interview questions on economics because they know the kind of people who sit on the panel....its not a joke, they are making a life changing interview, so they carefully prepare with the right 'social justice' and 'redistributive' type answers to potential questions, no matter what their personal belief.

I know of a guy who failed to clear the interview twice, each time being beaten up in the interview for giving 'capitalist' answers to the usual questions.

It is the same in every single govt dept./effort. A set of pliable amoebic guys get hired to say, sign and stamp whatever the Neta ji decides. Form here on essentially three different kinds of responses come up to the observed phenomena:

1) AK kind of people come up and claim that if we solve corruption and doodh ki nadiyan will start flowing,

2) Some academic sort of people come up with some obscure intellectual who will argue either this way or that way,

3) Some street smart business promoters at levels varying from panwadi to mega billionairs come up and screw the system royally with complete disregard for the above two categories.

[Muppalla]

Oye MMS fans on the forum, here are the jilebis. There is a lot of economic policy content and hence cross posting from 2G thread.

Something is being cooked and hence this obit style article . This article as it comes from Tehelka does its usual intellectual dishonesty and is shielding the dynasty. MMS is finally being made the scapegoat. I think it may be difficult to replace MMS as he did per orders from political masters and he has evidence in his sleeves. If he goes the ship goes down.

No, Prime Minister

A scam-ridden decade in office has tarred the clean image of Manmohan Singh. But is the PM a victim of circumstance or has he mastered the art of staying in power without accountability? Shoma Chaudhury tracks his legacy

History will judge him harshly for betraying faith; for failing the chance it gave him. It is not everybody who gets two shots at being the prime minister of the most populous democracy in the world. To get to be so as its unelected head is even rarer. Unfortunately for Dr Manmohan Singh, so stark and unexpected have the betrayals been, history has begun to train its lens on him even before his term is done.

For most of the nine years so far in his miracle position, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has been uniquely protected by an adjectival fortress. Even as his government has steadily imploded into darker and darker scams, even as the economy has slid into seemingly terminal decline, even as, shamefully, the 15th Lok Sabha has clocked the least number of hours in its history, even as the country feels completely adrift and leaderless, Singh personally has remained curiously firewalled behind the idea of him being a decent, upright and erudite man.

That fortress of goodwill has been fraying for a while. Events this week prove, finally, it is just not tenable any longer. It is time, in fact, for a complete reassessment of who Singh is and what his tenure as PM has meant for India.

Over the past nine years, Singh has often cited “coalition pressures” for stands not taken, decisions not made, scams not averted. This time, he has no such alibi. The CBI’s investigation into the coal scam was being monitored by the Supreme Court. Both as PM — which makes him the head of the council of ministers and responsible for all his colleagues’ actions — and as coal minister for three of the five years under scrutiny, Singh is himself a subject of the inquiry. The Supreme Court had explicitly asked the investigating agency not to share its report with the political executive. But not only did the law minister and officials from the coal ministry and his own office vet the report, they were complicit with three of the highest officers of the land — the Attorney General, Additional Solicitor General and CBI director — committing perjury in the Supreme Court. This is a scandal of unprecedented proportion. The court has made scathing statements about “erosion of trust” and how the entire “process of investigation has been shaken”. But how does the PM react? He asserts there is no reason for the law minister to resign and defers taking any decisions till the Court should force his hand.

This absence of propriety — this chronic timidity in taking a stand — has been a key signature of Singh’s tenure as PM. Leader of Opposition, Arun Jaitley, who has long been a strident critic of Singh, has often exhorted him both within and outside Parliament to behave like the head of the country and not merely a civil servant or party marionette. “The trouble with the prime minister,” he says, “is that he is completely ideology-less. He does not act like a leader; he does what a cabinet secretary should do.”

There was a time when only critics held this dim view of the PM. Increasingly now, even his well-wishers are voicing similar misgivings. Sanjaya Baru, who was Singh’s media adviser, says, “For the first five years of his tenure, he was seen as a puppet PM, a nominee of the Congress President Sonia Gandhi. In 2009, had he stood for Lok Sabha elections, it would have been his mandate. Those 60 extra seats they got were earned on his goodwill and performance. But he could not bring himself to claim that mandate.”

The second thing Baru faults him for is to not have had the spine to assert himself when corruption charges began to emerge in UPA 2. “He should have gone to the party and said, I refuse to carry the can, but he did not do that. Being the prime minister is no ordinary position. You are the symbol of the entire country. There is no position more powerful than that. Even the president cannot make a speech in Parliament unless it is cleared by the prime minister, but he never assumed that authority.”

There is a sort of reductive irony about a good man in a big chair who insists on behaving small. Baru encapsulates that with a joke doing the rounds in Delhi’s power circles. When Atal Bihari Vajpayee was the PM, people used to say the real prime minister was his national security adviser and principal secretary Brajesh Mishra. Now that Manmohan Singh is the PM, they joke that he is the principal secretary. Baru says he shared this crack with the PM; Singh had the magnanimity to laugh. But clearly, he did not draw on its lessons.

This talk of Singh’s proclivity to behave like a bureaucrat — an employee dependent on some higher political authority — rather than as the country’s foremost leader is no ordinary criticism. In fact, its damaging impacts cannot be emphasised enough. It has resulted in an unparalleled power vacuum; a loss of morale; stagnant decision-making; a log-jammed Parliament; zero public messaging; a crippling absence of vision. And a country lurching from crisis to crisis.

In fact, the dismaying truth about Prime Minister Singh is that his positive attributes may only be a shallow cover for darker ones: cowardice, complicity, an inordinate attachment to power and a constant abdication of responsibility. In effect, this has hollowed out the very institution of the prime minister’s office, leaching it of authority, making it the butt of jokes. Ironically, in the process, Singh has even made the idea of decency, erudition and honesty — genuine calling cards he had to begin with — seem effete and irrelevant to public life.

So far, Singh has evaded scrutiny despite an epic season of scams. But how much longer can he? The blueprint of this scandal stretches disturbingly, much further back into his tenure. The patterns make for dismal reading.

Singh’s most severe critics — Supreme Court lawyer and Aam Admi Party leader Prashant Bhushan, for instance — would concede one thing about him: he is not in the clumsy business of greed and kickbacks. His failing is subtler but, in the long run, far more corrosive. His failure is that he has allowed chaos and corruption to balloon around him. The charitable view on this would be that he has been helpless, or “out of depth” as one sympathetic officer in government put it. (The riposte to this would be that such naivete then has no business being in such a complex chair.) More clear-eyed analysis would say when push came to shove, he’s always deliberately looked the other way — or knowingly allowed things to happen — so he could stay in his seat and his government could run. A couple of such incidents could pass as oversight. When it becomes a habitual way of being, it can only count as corruption.

The current crisis with the country’s law officers is extremely telling. As Supreme Court lawyer Kamini Jaiswal says, “This government has ravaged every institution in the country. The scandal of GE Vahanvati and Harin Raval lying in court is the saddest day for India. Vahanvati’s convenient opinions have lowered the office of the Attorney General. These officers are meant to have the same moral stature as the judges of Supreme Court; they are meant to give sound legal advice to the government, they are meant to uphold the law, not become errand boys.”

What makes this doubly dark is that the perjury is not an isolated incident. As Gopal Subramaniam, former Solicitor General who resigned over a moral disagreement with the government over a representation in the 2G case, says, “The UPA government led by PM Manmohan Singh has shown very little regard for constitutional values and the rule of law. They have no legal ideology. This is the deepest faultline of this government.”

The gravity of this charge tops the Richter. It suggests that the UPA has been willing to subvert due process whenever convenient, even though, as Subramaniam puts it, “due process of law” is the very heart of fundamental rights and parliamentary democracy.

Another lawyer who declined to go on record said, “There’s no point blaming Vahanvati. If the PM or his law minister had wanted higher standards from him, he was perfectly capable of delivering on them. But they only wanted the shortcuts and the getaway strategies.”

As political nominees, the quality of its law officers is indeed directly reflective of the government. In that light, Vahanvati’s track record is not a flattering one. On 27 February this year, in an infamous first for an Attorney General, Vahanvati deposed as a witness in Judge OP Saini’s court examining the 2G scam. Former telecom minister A Raja has vociferously maintained that both the prime minister and Vahanvati (who was the Solicitor General at the time of the scam) were completely aware of all the decisions for which he was jailed. In an outburst in court one day he shouted pointing at Vahanvati, “He gets promoted from SG to AG and I am jailed. Is this justice?”

Raja stands on some valid ground. In a cover story last year, former TEHELKA Investigations Editor Ashish Khetan had detailed why jailing Raja and exonerating Vahanvati was legally untenable. In a nutshell, the argument goes like this: The brunt of the accusation against Raja in the 2G scam is 1) that pricing for the spectrum had not been raised to accommodate new market conditions; 2) that he arbitrarily advanced the cut-off date for applications, thereby disqualifying almost 60 percent of the applicants and favouring a few; and 3) that he subverted the terms of the first-come-first-served policy.

On 10 January 2008, Raja issued a press release that outlined the contours of all these decisions. This is deemed to be the heart of the scam: D-Day. The then law minister HR Bhardwaj had wanted this referred to an empowered group of ministers for further deliberations, but Raja by-passed him and sent a draft of the press release to Vahanvati for legal clearance, along with a comprehensive file. Vahanvati, who had been appearing for the government in several telecom-dispute related cases and was presumably very familiar with the policy issues involved, wrote in the file, “I have seen the notes” and declared it “fair and reasonable” and “transparent”.


When the scandal broke in 2011, both Prashant Bhushan and BJP leader Murli Manohar Joshi, who was heading the Public Accounts Committee, raised questions about Vahanvati’s role in the 2G scam, but the CBI submitted a detailed affidavit defending him on flimsy grounds. They argued that Vahanvati was not culpable because Raja had changed the press release after the AG’s clearance. In truth, Raja had merely dropped a paragraph that had absolutely no bearing on the case.

But till date, Vahanvati has escaped all culpability for this. In the witness box this February, he argued rather incredulously that he had not seen the rest of the file, did not know about the advancement of date or that the policy had been subverted.

Most of Raja’s exertions in the 2G case seem to have been to favour the Anil Ambani group and Unitech. What makes this saga even darker is that Vahanvati himself is seen as being close to Anil Ambani.

{This is clearly like the saga of Mohan Khatre the infamous CBI director who plotted to kill Nusli Wadia along with Ambani in the 1980s}

In two other instances related to Ambani, he gave extremely dubious advice. In January 2009, the Department of Telecom had wanted the Ministry of Corporate Affairs to look into Swan Telecom’s ownership pattern, which was deemed to be a front company for Ambani and seemed to violate some eligibility clauses for spectrum. In March 2009, however, Vahanvati ruled out any need to investigate this further. Later, of course, Swan was one of the companies that lay in the eye of the 2G storm.

In 2011 again, the CAG report on coal flagged that Anil Ambani had been given three cheap captive coal blocks to service his ultra mega power project in Sasan in Madhya Pradesh. However, soon after, on Madhya Pradesh CM Shivraj Singh Chauhan’s request to the PM, he had been allowed to divert excess coal from these blocks to service another plant in Chitrangi. CAG calculated that this concession would earn Ambani Rs 29,000 crore over 20 years. The Tatas, who had also been in the fray for the Sasan plant, complained about this unfair concession. Both coal and power ministry officials wanted the decision cancelled, but Vahanvati and Pranab Mukherjee, then finance minister, overruled them.

The point in detailing these disparate cases is that even if one supposes the PM was not directly issuing instructions to Vahanvati to take a certain line, surely he could not have been unaware of the AG’s nepotistic interest in the Anil Ambani group or his dubious positions on the 2G policy? Why did he not flag any discomfort with the situation? Instead, the government’s relationship with Vahanvati has only continued to deepen while other law officers like Gopal Subramaniam and Rohinton Nariman, who held their ground at different junctures, were made to leave precipitously.

The PM’s own tacit complicity in the 2G scam is itself hard to deny. On 26 December 2007, Raja had sent a letter to the PM with a memo, explaining the process of spectrum allocation as he envisioned it. On 29 December, Singh had asked for this to be “urgently examined”. His officers in the PMO — Pulok Chatterjee and his then principal secretary TKA Nair — did a detailed analysis through a “comparative chart” on 6 January 2008.

About a week later, Pulok wanted to share the PMO’s broad agreement on the policy with the telecom secretary, but the PM’s Personal Secretary BVR Subrahmanyam sent the now famous note that said, “The PM wants this informally shared, does not want any formal communication and wants the PMO to remain at arm’s length please”.

The PMO has subsequently clarified that the PM’s desire to “remain at arm’s length” was to enable the telecom ministry to apply its mind on the merits of the issue and not feel bound by a directive from the PM. However, the whole sequence shows the PM in very painful light.

When he was finally cornered into making a statement in Parliament, contrary to the paper trails detailed above, Singh categorically washed his hands of the issue saying the Cabinet decision of 2003 had specifically left the issue to be determined by the Ministries of Finance and Telecom.

But that is not where it ends. As an aide who once worked closely with the PM says, “It’s never the scam per se that is the problem; the real problem begins with the cover-ups.”

Even after the scam was exposed, Singh refused to claim the high ground by initiating any clean-up himself. He has of course consistently refused to appear both before the JPC and the PAC, rendering both mechanisms toothless. In a clear violation of just and fair process, Raja too has not been allowed to testify before the JPC. An official with the CBI says on condition of anonymity that the investigation into the 2G scam has itself been a scandal, with its illogical and selective arrests: some corporate chieftains, but not others; some ministers, not others; some bureaucrats not others.

Three circumstances have defined Singh’s tenure as a prime minister. First, as an unelected prime minister he has been perceived to be a nominee of Congress Party President Sonia Gandhi rather than a natural leader. Two, he has had to balance the unruly demands of coalition partners, often in contradiction to his own temperament. And three, he’s been part of what veteran columnist and journalist Prem Shankar Jha calls a “very complex diarchy”: an asymmetrical division of power between Sonia and Rahul Gandhi and himself.

There are two schools of thought on this. One school, represented by people like Sanjaya Baru, believes there is tremendous interference from the Gandhis in the choices Singh is allowed to make. He is neither allowed to choose his ministers nor his key officers; often the grey area compulsions that dictate his actions are communicated to him through informal channels. He is merely the titular face of decisions that are taken elsewhere.

“He should never have agreed to these terms of employment,” says Baru. “He could have become a very tall leader in his own right, especially after 2009. But he is driven by a sense of loyalty. He believes he owes his job only to the Gandhis.”

There is another school of thought, however, which asserts that the Gandhis almost never interfere with the actual workings of the government and are very mindful of the PM’s dignity. If Sonia claimed any space at all on the policies of the government, it was through the mechanism of the National Advisory Council in UPA-I. Other than that, they believe, she leaves Singh to take his own decisions.

One officer from the foreign services, now retired, hazards a third framework. “The truth is Sonia rarely intervenes, but because he’s always looking over his shoulder and there are indeed two clear centres of power, it leaves a lot of space for people in the middle to whisper innuendoes and orders in her name. There’s no way of crosschecking whether they are speaking on authority or not. This creates a lot of confusion and second-guessing.”

All three scenarios are in the realm of conjecture. But they have one common riposte: no matter what the circumstance, he is the man who has had the chair. What has he made of it? If indeed he’s been cornered into too many positions not of his liking, why has he not protested and risked his job to get the right thing done? On what does his reputation for integrity and decency lie? What is his legacy going to be?

In February 2012, while cancelling 122 2G licences, in a scathing indictment, the Supreme Court criticised the “arbitrary and capricious” way in which a precious natural resource like spectrum had been given out — “contrary to public interest and violative of the doctrine of equality”.

Before economist Raghuram Rajan joined the government as economic adviser to the PM, he spoke of how crony capitalism was destroying democracy; of how 80 percent of India’s new billionaires had made their “wealth through stealth”; through proximity to government rather than through innovation and genuine entrepreneurship.

For the man billed as India’s most revered “reform architect”, nothing could be a worse report card. Be it spectrum or coal then, quite apart from the specific instances of corruption, even at a policy level, Singh has been unable to acquit himself in his area of core competence: economy and governance. He has proved unable — or disinclined — to leave a robust legacy and regulatory framework on how natural resources should be transparently and judiciously used. In January 2011, aware of the growing crisis around him, Singh even set up a highpowered committee under former finance secretary Ashok Chawla to create this framework. But inexplicably, two years later, he has not even begun to act on the recommendations.

The same apathy and weakness marked his run-up to the coal scam. With coal secretary PC Parakh constantly raising flags by his side, Singh announced in 2004 that auction was the most transparent and preferred option for allocating coal blocks, but he did not operationalise this till 2010. The intervening six years saw a mad, cross-party scramble for coal blocks handed out to favourites and pressure groups. Both as coal minister for three years and, of course, as PM, Singh presided unblinkingly over that unseemly chaos without doing a thing to either streamline the ad hoc largesse of the screening committee or order and audit of the functioning of the blocks that had been given.

In a bitter irony for Singh, therefore, there is now a new reading of him doing the rounds. As Rajya Sabha MP Rajeev Chandrasekhar says, “People now say maybe he’s an overrated economist but an underrated politician. The presence of the PMO,” he continues, “in many visible instances of corruption — be it CWG, Coalgate, 2G, or CBI investigations — is very disconcerting. The PM and his team are supposed to reflect the moral attributes we expect of our leaders and not become the emblematic symbol of what’s wrong with governance.”

A Congress member of the Union Council of Ministers puts it more bluntly, “Don’t underestimate the PM. The Congress president may have made him the PM, but he has started enjoying power. He will not fade into oblivion quietly.”
{100% right on dot}

Over the past few years, the media has indeed been rife with speculation about the internecine power struggle between Singh, P Chidambaram and Pranab Mukherjee.

Jaitley has a similar prognosis. “Singh,” he says, “has learnt the art of staying in power without doing anything.” Even coming from a political adversary, it seems a fair assessment. Singh’s instinct has been to isolate himself from the underbelly of politics. Yet he is quite comfortable to let others do his dirty work for him. In some sense, in his desire to maintain his own clean image while enjoying the fruits of power, he seems to have outsourced the very process of decision-making. While Pranab Mukherjee was in the Cabinet, there were 27 Groups of Ministers — popularly called GOMs — meant to review thorny issues and decisions. Mukherjee headed 12. Above this, there were 12 EGOMs (empowered group of ministers) with even more powers. Mukherjee headed them all.

Currently, there are six EGOMs, four headed by AK Antony; one each by Sharad Pawar and Chidambaram. Of the GOMs, 10 are headed by Chidambaram, five by Antony and six by Sharad Pawar. Under the circumstance, if any area of decision- making gets sticky, the “arm’s length” distance can be invoked in an instant.

Singh, however, is clearly not above getting his way. Party insiders remember the 15th Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) Summit in Sharm el-Sheikh in Egypt in 2009. India and Pakistan had met on the sidelines of the summit and issued a joint statement in which Balochistan was officially mentioned for the first time as an area of concern in bilateral relations. This created a furore back in India. The Opposition, media, policy wonks and some within the Congress party itself were very perturbed by what they felt was a foreign policy gaffe. Sources say Singh’s own national security adviser MK Narayanan had a difference of opinion with him on this. This did not please Singh. To Narayanan’s utter surprise, Singh took him out of his powerful post and booted him up as Governor of Bengal soon after.

The only time Singh has played the self-assertion really high, however, is over the Indo-US nuclear deal in July 2008. Despite deep opposition from Sonia Gandhi and sections of the Congress, despite the risk of losing Left support and, in turn, the government itself, he stood firm. It was either the deal or him, he told Sonia.

The subsequent events are too well known to merit a revisit. Those who were close to the PM at the time say Singh had been told by John Kerry, now US Secretary of State, that if the deal was not done before George W Bush’s tenure ended, India would not get another shot at it. Singh was convinced India needed this deal. He went for broke.

But what makes Singh’s gauntlet then so interesting is a corollary question: why has he never felt so strongly about anything before or since? Certainly, no crucial governance or constitutional issues seem to have ever caught his passionate attention. The current CBI flashpoint is a good test case.

If Singh had wholly deserved his reputation for being a man of great integrity and probity, the intensely compromised state of the CBI should have been at least one equivalent concern. The misuse of the CBI is not a new phenomenon. When CBI chief Ranjit Sinha says now that the agency is not an autonomous body, he is articulating a truism many exasperated CBI bosses have echoed before him.

In another TEHELKA cover story last year (Leave the Sleuths Alone; by Ashish Khetan, 14 January 2012), several CBI chiefs have spelled out how successive governments have interfered in the investigation of the Taj Corridor Case involving Mayawati; the fodder scam involving Laloo Yadav; the Jain hawala case and many more. Each of them has outlined the myriad ways in which government control has crippled and compromised them. Some solutions already exist in the Supreme Court’s Vineet Narain judgement of 1997.

If Singh had been serious about leaving a luminous legacy history would remember, he would have deemed this a “wakeup call”. This is one vexed question he could have tried to answer: how do you make the CBI truly independent?

But in a typical pattern of abdication, Singh has done absolutely nothing since the scandal broke. Not expressed a word of dismay; not promised an iota of action. Instead he’s been quite happy to let the courts dictate how the agency can be resurrected. The talk, in fact, is that Singh has decided to hold on to law minister Ashwani Kumar — seen to be close to him — despite the embarrassment, so some assurance could be brokered that if Kumar was sacrificed, Singh would not be next.

The apprehension is real. In the past, when the need has arisen, Singh has stooped to conquer. For instance, the CBI investigation into Mulayam Singh’s disproportionate assets is a red button the government clearly switches on and off at will. Even a cursory look at it makes for a dizzying story.{Mulayam is created as Mir Jaffer}

This was particularly evident after the trust vote over the nuclear deal. Interestingly, Vahanvati, once again, had a major role. The sequence of events is pretty damning. Responding to a PIL in March 2007, the Supreme Court had directed the CBI to start a Preliminary Enquiry on Mulayam and his family’s assets. The CBI filed its report and requested the court to order the case to be registered. Inexplicably, the court failed to do so. In July 2008, the SP supported the UPA on the trust vote. A few months later, in November 2008, Vahanvati appeared for the CBI and said the application to proceed with the investigation was being withdrawn because it was improper of the CBI to include the assets of the kids unless it could be proved they were being held for Mulayam to avoid detection. Without allowing an investigation, it was impossible to prove this.

In January 2009, in a bizarre twist, Vahanvati again appeared before the Supreme Court and trashed his own opinion in the case as ‘no longer relevant’ and requested that investigations be opened. In March 2009, as a pre-poll alliance with the SP went cold, the CBI further stepped up its investigations. In February 2011, Vahanvati appeared yet again and argued that the case should be withdrawn because no “fundamental right had been violated”. An exasperated court told Mulayam’s lawyers, “He is supporting you. He has argued for you.”

In November 2012, Vishwanath Chaturvedi, the original litigant, wanted to have Vahanvati charged for “criminal conspiracy”. It is impossible to imagine that PM Manmohan Singh has been oblivious to all of this: the backroom machinery that has kept his government in place — almost to a full term now — despite scams and alienated coalition partners.

The only other times Prime Minister Singh has even come close to something akin to public noise has been over the POSCO, Niyamgiri and Lavasa projects and his spat with Jairam Ramesh over the “go-and no-go areas” in allocation of coal mines. His other strident position has been on the tribal unrest and Maoist insurgency in central India. Singh famously called it the “biggest internal security threat in the country”, not out of a moment of conscience, not because the most dispossessed of India’s citizens had reached a point of desperation, but because the conflict was holding up mining leases and spoiling the “investment climate” in India.

Prashant Bhushan offers two clues into understanding Singh’s mindset. Singh’s PhD thesis in Oxford University, says Bhushan, was titled “India’s Export Performance, 1952-62”. In this Singh argued that India’s export had not grown sufficiently because it had failed to export its minerals. “He does not grasp the idea of a ‘resource curse’,” says Bhushan. “He does not understand that even domestic consumption is a curse, but to export a country’s mineral resources is completely a colonial mentality. His thinking is completely captured by foreign investments and GDP growth.” Joblessness, human development index, nutrition, education — these, says Bhushan, seem to hover very far on Singh’s peripheral vision.

The other clue to Singh’s mental landscape, feels Bhushan, is a detail in Apila-Chapila, Ashok Mitra’s autobiography. Mitra writes in his book that when Narasimha Rao took over as PM in 1991, India had only two weeks of foreign reserves left. The country was desperate for a loan from the IMF. The terms of the loan were one, that India would make the necessary structural adjustments to its policies, and two, that the finance minister would be chosen in consultation with the IMF and US government. It is in these circumstances that Manmohan Singh was made finance minister in 1991.
{This is I told you so moment. There were times when BRF warned/banned for calling Traitor. Someone wrote this in a book}


“He has been faithfully implementing their policies ever since,” says Bhushan.

Baru, though, scorns such easy binaries. “He’s the last guy you can accuse of being a neo-liberal,” he says.

Either way, on the economic front — be it on high GDP growth or the human development index — as the last year of his term creeps up on him, Singh has some hard problem solving to do. One only has to recall the euphoric “Singh is King!” jingles with which the media welcomed him back for his second term in 2009, to get a full sense of the travesty now.

India is seeing its worst GDP figures, inflation is high, joblessness is rampant, growth has outstripped infrastructure, the trade deficit is huge, the rupee has crashed, investments are fleeing and 10 million youngsters are joining the work force each year with nowhere to go. Economists complain that interest rates are too high. Food is rotting in granaries. There is little transparency, speed, cohesion or stability in decision-making. Infrastructure projects are stalled. India’s policies on forest, land usage and mining remain unclear and full of loopholes for industry to exploit. Consumer spending is down. Education, health indices, skill development and water management is in a mess.

The cacophanic list of woes goes on. But, chillingly, all it is met with is silence. That is the one thing India can no longer afford now.

Manmohan Singh lost his mother at childbirth in Gah, a little village in Rawalpindi. His father was never home. Singh was brought up by his grandmother. He walked to an adjacent village to go to school. His home had no access to electricity or drinking water. His aunt fed him selectively, he was bone thin. From there, Singh came to Amritsar and further to Cambridge and Oxford. He’s been RBI governor, Planning Commission head, chief economic adviser, finance secretary, leader of Opposition and now PM for 10 years. He’s lived every part of the Indian narrative: he could embody its best dream.

Unfortunately though, right now, he feels only like a slow fall nightmare.

— With inputs from Shaili Chopra, Brijesh Pandey, Ashhar Khan and G Vishnu

[Supratik]

The welfare splurge was "NAC run by SG" idea which tanked the economy. Tehelka is doing its job of protecting the dynasty. MMS may be lambasted for not standing upto the demarches from high command. However, the idea seems to be to shield the Gandhis.

[Theo_Fidel]

The thought always has been that the NREGA type stuff came straight from the soniaG kitchen cabinet.
That said I don’t believe that that by itself was sufficient to knock down the economy.
There has not been a year when more that $10 Billion was spent on it and this is a fairly small amount for the economy.

The slow down is due to all the factors that have always plagued India down the years.
Land acquisition problems, labor disputes, lack of FDI and inability to divert resources at low cost to industry.

I mean take a look at the POSCO drama. At Rs 40,000 crore that single investment was larger than all the money being spend on NREGA annually.
All by itself it would have provided a cumulative boost of 2%-3% to the economy including all the ancillary production.
Take a look at our inability to mine and produce coal. Right now the economy could easily do with another 200 million tons of coal annually, some of which is being imported.
At current market prices that would have meant a recurring boost of $10 Billion annually to the economy, $20 Billion at international prices, much more if all the ancillary demands from that were satisfied in state.

Just those two items are probably 1%-2% off our economic growth rate.

I could mention dozens more. The slow progress of the DFC construction/expansion is particular pet peeve of mine. Probably another 1% off gdp growth.

There is nothing wrong with the economy that a sustained bout of hard work and 16 hour days could not fix.
If I would accuse this government of anything it would be laziness.

[Suraj]

I have to agree with Theo_Fidel on the NREGA. Yes, it's a waste, but it's not a substantial contributor to growth or the lack of it, beyond perpetuating the vicious cycle of poverty in rural areas, and worsening localized inflation. In purely monetary terms, it amounts to a lost opportunity cost more than a sustantial economic drag - it's about 5% of central revenues and even less of expenditures, due to the subtantial revenue deficit funded by borrowings. It's about 0.5% of GDP. The complete paralysis and lack of priority towards clearing fixed asset investment that amounts to much more than the NREGA outlay is a far greater problem - it eats away at the investment/GDP figure and worsens inflation by constraining core sector output, whose effect multiplies across the economy in the form of costlier energy, inefficient transport, and more.

[RamaY]

I disagree.

The NREGA funds are coming from tax revenues. Given our Tax revenue being 10% of GDP, the $10B NREGA funds are coming from ~$100B of GDP.

I do not know the ratio between investment:GDP. Assuming a 33% of GDP investment is resulting in a 8% growth then NREGA becomes even costlier.

Comparing this useless program to any other policy/investment decision is nothing but a cleaver ploy to put some lipstick on a pig.

[Suraj]

GDP is $2000 billion, so tax revenues are $200 billion @ 10% tax/GDP (it's higher than 10% right now - closer to 12 or 13% the last I checked). $10 billion on NREGA is 5% of that, as I mentioned earlier. As a fraction of expenditures, it's less than 5% because expenditures exceed revenue.

The point isn't to say NREGA 'is ok' - I'd like to see the program ended and replaced with rural infrastructure and social services spending. But the absolute numbers are what they are.

[member_20317]

^^ Theo ji

You had a problem with 1-2% of the economic activity getting locked up in gold. A substance:
1) which is liquid;
2) carries value across civilizations over long-long times and vast spaces unlike other liquid assets which remain hostage to the political authority
3) ends up giving 16% for 12 years in a row
4) just after it has saved every single person who ever invested in gold from the clutches of inflation


But you have no problem with 1-2% of economic activity being 'used' for digging a ditch then filling it up in civil works that uses 60% labour and 40% material cost.

Request some education to understand this.

[Supratik]

we have to also consider spending fueling inflation. but i agree with suraj and theo that it is plain bad governance in general.

[Supratik]

another pain coming up. it seems NAC has got its way with land acquisition bill. it is going to drive up cost tremendously for industry. while i am in favor of transparent r&r, 80% consent and 4X market value seems to high. the ****** harsh mander was unhappy on tv that the govt. did not agree to something like full consent and 8X market value. i think the BJP is also not protesting in order not to appear anti-farmer.

[RamaY]

another pain coming up. it seems NAC has got its way with land acquisition bill. it is going to drive up cost tremendously for industry. while i am in favor of transparent r&r, 80% consent and 4X market value seems to high. the ****** harsh mander was unhappy on tv that the govt. did not agree to something like full consent and 8X market value. i think the BJP is also not protesting in order not to appear anti-farmer.

I think is a bad bill for different reasons.

Instead I would have loved to see SEZ as a land-bank which is leased to industries for 99 years for an inflation adjusted monthly payment plus fixed jumbo payments every 10 years. The underlying land can be sold/bought by individuals at market prices as needed. In addition to that these farming families should get assured reservation (up to 100%) in qualified jobs in the SEZ. If the SEZ lives more than 99 years, then it can continue the lease for 99 more years. For any reason if 100% of land is not in industrial use then the SEZ committee (proportional votes for land owners, bankers, industrialists etc.,) can decide if they want to release some of the land back to farmers or reflect that difference in jumbo payments.

At current market prices I would put these amounts as Rs 4,000 monthly payment (with 5% annual increase) and Rs 1,00,000 jumbo payment every 10 years starting from Day 0. This works out to be ~Rs45L/Acre. If the company and farmer want they can have this as one payment.

The rationale is that irrespective of the price one pays for the farm land, the family will lose the asset forever. If the farmer leases his land he will definitely get Rs 20-30K (Depending on the crop/land etc) per year while the land price keeps going up.

[Theo_Fidel]

If I read the land bill correctly the 4x valuation is for forcible, no recourse acquisition.
The land developer always has the option to buy for less using bargaining and patience.

Maybe some legalistic types can comment.

Chanakya, if you see this…..

[Virupaksha]

If I read the land bill correctly the 4x valuation is for forcible, no recourse acquisition.
The land developer always has the option to buy for less using bargaining and patience.

Maybe some legalistic types can comment.

Chanakya, if you see this…..

theo,

why will any person go for recourse or whatever when he knows that if he holds up he will get 4x more?

[vina]

Let me ask you Vina - do you really think the socialist policies put in place by the Dynasty are because of Prabhat Patnaik, Jayati Ghosh and CP; or is it the other way around and Prabhat, Jayati and CP merely provide hired 'intellectual' backup to the Dynasty's well-documented ideological leanings ??

The "socialist" rubbish was pure opportunism and can be traced to Indira Gandhi's lurch to the left to win power in the Congress and check mate the internal opposition. As part of that , she made a bargain with the devil and allowed the CPI ding dongs to get into positions of influence in academia and arts and social sciences .

The toxic after effects of that lurch to the left was a disastrous economic performance in the 70s , right until 1984, with a small boom and then a bust. Now the hard reality of life forced a retreat from the extreme left in economics, but the pernicious influence of the ding dongers and their influence peddling and networks is extant and wide ranging. They are lying low, but not destroyed beyond repair , like the commies are in Russia or compromised beyond recognition like the Chinese commies.

While I don't have a problem per se with your denunciation of leftist policies, your posts have always had a highly 'Rip Van Winkish' feel to them. The communist problem is such a nineties-issue. Its hardly relevant now - if you are truly against leftists the battle of the current decade is against the Dynasty.

Karat & Co and the nuisance for UPA I is very recent. Mamata Di walking out of UPA is also another case. The entire politics of Bengal is beyond repair in the short term. The intellectual prop/pillar for that kind of politics has not been discredited fundamentally , especially the economic part of it , and it still seems to have some appeal. The "intellectuals" touting such rubbish (CPC, Jayati and Prabhat) etc are not laughed out of lectures for being the intellectual charlatans and the knaves and spin doctors who created an economic disaster and inflicted misery for 40 years on the Indian masses , but get air time in serious publications.

It is important to call those charlatans to account for their (mis) deeds and the damage they have wrought in terms of lost/missing prosperity. If that intellectual thought is fundamentally discredited in the eyes of the larger population, no politico (dynasty or commie) will have any use for them and that will die a natural death. Think of it, the political discourse in India is still a throw back to the 60s and 70s and the left agit-prop nonsense.. Think Mulayam and why he has to name his party "Samajwadi" or why a leftist alternative to the Congress was considered "desirable" (The Janata Party), while a right of center one (the BJP), gets the ding dongs frothing in the mouth. Commiedom is dead in vast swathes of India (Western and south, excluding Kerala), but still retains infuence in the east and in some spin doctoring academia and mass media.

You actually seem to think that the tail wags the dog - and that these JNU ding-dongs are the ones that are responsible for the Dynasty's retardedness ? Is that what you truly think and why ??

I explained why the leftist intellectual scalawags and their edifice should be called to account for their intellectual charlatanism and record of inflicting misery on India. The Congress was an umbrella party, still is and had all the folks who went and formed Swatantra , and it still has a lot of folks within who are driven by common sense and less of the frothing in the mouth ideological rubbish (like Mani Shankar Aiyar). The idea is whose side do you want the balance to tip. The leftist loonies get their anchor and heft from the so called "intellectual" affirmation of "correctness" by the academic ideologues. Discredit that and the left flounders and the balance comes back to Congress.

The recent troubles in the Congress was precisely due to the rise of the loony left (NAC and those nutters) and Pranab Mukherjee (the old style command and control , walking disaster) and the leftist constraints of the CPI-M and Mamata. Why even something like a voucher /direct tranfer runs into ideological opposition from those nuts. There is way lot of reform /cleaning the Augean stables that need to be done, which were never done for many reasons (by both Narasimha Rao and Vajpayee). To do that, you need to sweep the left out.

[Supratik]

70% consent is working fine in Mumbai redevelopment projects as is 2X + market value for land for NHAI. Instead of making land acquisition more difficult they could have been more innovative e.g. life long return or return of 5% developed land, etc.

[Arjun]

Your response seems extraordinarily naive to me, Vina.

You agree that India has been continually screwed in the period under Dynasty rule, all the way since the 70s to today – except for the brief period under PVNR and ABV when reforms were initiated that corrected India’s suicidal course. You agree that the leftist scumbags responsible for this should be called to account for their ‘charlatanism’ and record of inflicting misery on India.

And yet – the charlatans who you hold responsible for this state of affairs are not those directly overseeing the executive arm of the government, ie the Dynasty NOR its army of retarded supporters - but some Communist-supporting JNU academics who you seem convinced have a Sauron-like grip over an INC government in its formulation of policies !?

I find this view quite incredible...I am listing the problems I have with this argument and would appreciate if you could address each one of these in your response:

1) Despite your knowledge that all socialist initiatives that have sunk India over the past decade have been initiated directly by the Sonia Gandhi-led NAC , you prefer to take the view that none of this reflects Sonia’s own ideological leanings and as a fairly typical Dynasty apologist – you are content to attribute her failings to the coalition / NAC / Bengali academics / Pranab and various other excuses....What is the basis for your thinking that Sonia’s own instinct is not leftist ?? Have you even listened to the Princeling’s speech at FICCI – what understanding of his ideological leanings do you infer from that speech and his other statements made on multiple occasions?

2) Your argument at its core, is based on the premise that the government derives legitimacy for its program from the “intellectual” output of some academics. You therefore seek to discredit these academics which you think will lead to dissuading the government from such policies. This is a false reading – the government derives legitimacy from the voters mandate. The Congress has been characterised (by its supporters like yourself) as a party without any serious ideological moorings except populism and opportunism – and therefore focused on the voters mandate. Well, the issue there is that populism invariably leads to leftist policies since the economic pyramid is bottom-heavy and the redistributive core of leftist thought would always appeal to the bottom layers. Irrespective of all your “intellectual” demolition of JNU academics on this forum – IF the Congress wins again in 2014, that WILL be taken as an affirmation by voters for the Dynasty’s socialist idiocy, which would NOT be rolled back. If you are serious about holding leftist charlatans accountable – the only way to do that is to ensure that all leftist elements – including the Communists and the INC, lose at the hustings next year.

3) Practically anybody who is a serious supporter of right-wing economic thinking in India understands that the one person with political credibility to change the country’s thinking and direction rightwards is Modi...which is why we have seen a renaissance in economic right-wing intellectual output over the last couple of years on various internet platforms (Firstpost, Centerright.in etc). Right-wing (using this term purely in the economic sense in this post) intellectuals, by and large, back Modi and correctly identify the Dynasty as the core that needs to be defeated in order to destroy leftist thinking. As someone who pretends to make a big deal of anti-leftist thought – you on the other hand, solidly back the Dynasty and have been active in running down Modi. This is quite strange..., and raises questions as to who the true ‘charlatans’ are that need to be held accountable for the mess that is today's India.

[svinayak]

That is known as personality based worshipping. Even being anti nation they will worship a cult or a family.
There is a cognitive dissonance in looking at the whole.

[Prem]

Wanted: Angel Investors...In The U.K., India, France And Canada
http://www.forbes.com/sites/groupthink/ ... nd-canada/

In Q1 2013, several new markets broke the list of top ten countries with startups seeking angel funding. The United Kingdom, representing 2.3% of total funding applications worldwide, is up 171% from Q1 2012, and India, with almost 3% of total funding applications, is up 56% over Q1 2012. Traditional powerhouses Canada and France continued to jockey for most activity. France took the lead in Q1 with almost 5% of all funding applications, while Canada, at 4.5%, showed a slight decline from Q1 2012.Internet web services sector continued to grow for five straight quarters, representing 18.5% of total startups seeking funding in Q1. Media/entertainment and software startups also saw strong growth, achieving 6% and 5% of total funding applicants, respectively, while clean tech (4%) and consumer product services (7%) held steady. Healthcare and medical device startups seeking angel funding also showed a slight uptick to 4% and 3.5%, respectively./b]
The startup’s company stage remained relatively consistent with strong growth year over year for startups in the idea and development stage. While the number of idea stage (8%) and development stage (82%) companies demonstrated a strong year over year increase, startups in the revenue stage (9%) were down several points from Q1 2012. However, the number of startups seeking angel funding at the revenue stage has been on a steady increase since a significant drop in Q2 2012, indicating a gradual resurgence of companies with traction among the funding applicant pool.

[svinayak]

http://www.frontline.in/cover-story/the ... 666181.ece

[vina]

And yet – the charlatans who you hold responsible for this state of affairs are not those directly overseeing the executive arm of the government, ie the Dynasty NOR its army of retarded supporters - but some Communist-supporting JNU academics who you seem convinced have a Sauron-like grip over an INC government in its formulation of policies !?

It is like this. Think of the Congress as the Labour Party of India, it historically got its world view from that. Question is do you want he frothing in the mouth de red, controlled by union fruitcakes like the 70s or the reformed new labour under B Liar oops Blair.

Shaping the intellectual discourse and discrediting the fruitcake fringe that gained control is important, as is pushing those fruits to the fringe.

1) Despite your knowledge that all socialist initiatives that have sunk India over the past decade have been initiated directly by the Sonia Gandhi-led NAC , you prefer to take the view that none of this reflects Sonia’s own ideological leanings and as a fairly typical Dynasty apologist – you are content to attribute her failings to the coalition / NAC / Bengali academics / Pranab and various other excuses....What is the basis for your thinking that Sonia’s own instinct is not leftist ?? Have you even listened to the Princeling’s speech at FICCI – what understanding of his ideological leanings do you infer from that speech and his other statements made on multiple occasions?

Oh, you are confusing the means for the ends. This NAC and speech etc is just he means and not the end, which is the coronation of Yuvraj. The end is non negotiable for he Kangress, the means can Ben anything. Right now , what seems to sell for them is that remnant of socialist talk ( nutcase positions largely dispensed with. Turn the intellectual climate aruond and make that he dominant discourse and the talk will be different. For eg, I got he flyer from the Cong candidate for the KTK elections. No socialism , no this and that, largely promise of stable and corruption free govt.

3) Practically anybody who is a serious supporter of right-wing economic thinking in India understands that the one person with political credibility to change the country’s thinking and direction rightwards is Modi...which is why we have seen a renaissance in economic right-wing intellectual output over the last couple of years on various internet platforms (Firstpost, Centerright.in etc). Right-wing (using this term purely in the economic sense in this post) intellectuals, by and large, back Modi and correctly identify the Dynasty as the core that needs to be defeated in order to destroy leftist thinking. As someone who pretends to make a big deal of anti-leftist thought – you on the other hand, solidly back the Dynasty and have been active in running down Modi. This is quite strange..., and raises questions as to who the true ‘charlatans’ are that need to be held accountable for the mess that is today's India.

The old saying by was it Churchill? If you are 18 and NOT a socialist you have no heart. If you are 40 and STILL a socialist you have no brains.

While I am no longer a socialist of the old, problem with Modi is that there is no heart.there is lot more to running a country than just efficiency, economically or otherwise. Not that it is not important. It is and vitally so. But then, what about inclusion? Where is the heart?

[RamaY]

^ why do you think NM doesn't have any heart?

1. Please check how he is empowering women (you can see my post in Indian interests)
2. How he is more inclusive than Gandhi (you read Modinama at Manushi website)