shiv wrote:
What bothers me is what might be a huge hole in everyone's analysis as we jump up to blame internal political idiocy, Muslim appeasement, fake accusations of "Hindu terror" as the real reasons why India is going soft on terrorism and on Pakistan. In reality all these "BRF explanations" about why terror continues may be missing the point that India is actually a weak nation.
Many people might be deluding themselves about India's strengths and growth etc. In reality our diplomatic and military position vis a vis an aggressive, dysfunctional Pakistan, a supportive and powerful China and a manipulative USA may be very weak. It may be that india is basically being forced into a corner where we take hits from Pakistan as the least hurtful of many bad choices - with promises from the US and China that they will do everything they can to support Pakistan if India were to take military action. Oh yes one could argue that this cannot be so, but the argument that India has basically been forced into a corner and told to shut up and put up is no worse than the argument that Pakistan would be toast in the absence of people like MMS or Diggy. These latter "excuses" could merely be a way of comforting ourselves by saying "Oh we are strong, but we have internal traitors" The real story could be that not only do we have internal traitors, but we are weak also. Karnad openly says we are weak in relation to China. Everyone knows that and you have heard on this forum how Clinton may have come down on the "strong" BJP in 1998.
If you believe that Clinton basically made Vajpayee and Jaswant back down on further testing it shows India in a very weak light. India's behavior certainly is not one of a strong nation. India behaves weak. We may be deluding ourselves that we are not actually weak, we are very strong but have weak leaders. This may be nonsense.
If India is weak, the WKK and absorbing continuous terrorism is the action you would expect from such a weak nation. And WSIWYG - what you see is exactly that.
Shiv Sab,
You have articulated what has been in my heart, word for word. I had arrived at this conclusion years ago and things have only gone downhill since. Once you accept the proposition that India is weak, then you have to analyze the reasons why it is weak. I dont buy a lot of the "historical baggage inheritance that makes us weak" theory. China, South Korea, Japan and many other countries are prime examples of how they overcame even worst "historical cards" and came out strong. No. It is how we Indians as a people have conducted ourselves in the recent past and continue to conduct ourselves in the present and will conduct ourselves in the future, unless we drastically change things, that explains our weakness. I will cross post my analysis of why India is weak from some of my other posts from another thread in the next couple of paragraphs. But before I do that, I also want to agree with you on another point you made. That it is not that our leadership such as Diggi and MMS make us weak. They do, but only marginally. No one leader, or two leaders or even an entire political class of several hundred thousands have in themselves the power to make a country like India, weak. They are simply not that powerful. No, it is only hundreds of millions of ordinary Indians, who through their conduct and behaviour can make a nation like India weak or strong. Only those kinds of numbers have that power. And I assert that it is the conduct of the hundreds of millions of us ordinary Indians in the recent past and the present that has weakened us. How ? Read on.
In one of my previous discussions with B'pati Sab, he and I were discussing what the objectives of a nation like India or any nation should be. We more or less agreed on the following common sense objectives that India should have (very basic, no rocket science here). Most healthy nations in this world and even the unhealthy ones by and large follow these objectives and that is the reason they survive as a nation.
1. National Defense to protect Indian territorial integrity and vital interests, consistent with our current threat scenario and perception and also future threat scenarios. This would include weapon systems, strategic systems, armed forces, intelligence agencies and other institutions and functions required to provide this function, optimally.
2. Raise revenues for any and all governance, a revenue generation regime which is fair and least burdensome
3. Effective and Efficient Law and Order regime, which includes police and the judiciary and a seperate and decentralized anti-corruption cell. The system should be such that criminal cases with all its appeals have to be mandatorily adjudicated within one year and civil cases with all its appeals to be mandatorily adjudicated within two years. Criminal cases will have a maximum of three appeals and civil cases will have a maximum of two appeals. A mix of Western and native Indian system of judiciary and trial will be followed, which will do away with the causes of delays within the justice system.
4. Regulation of Currency
5. Foreign Policy
6. Protection of the rights of adherents of native religions such as Hinduism, Jainism, Buddhism, Sikhism and other native aboriginie and animist religions without infringing on the rights of adherents of other religions such as Islam and Christianity. In those instances where there is a doctrinal difference between native religions and "externally originated" religions, native religious doctrine will prevail, in the social arena, law and order arena and law of the land arena. Conversion out of any native religion to any "external religion" will be highly regulated and will only be permitted if the religious leaders of the native religion which a person is leaving issue a certificate that this person is leaving out of his own free will without coersion or being bribed.
7. Vital infra-structure projects, which absolutely cannot be performed by the private sector. These have to be rare and should generally be avoided to be taken up by the government, even if the private sector passes on the full, true cost of the infra-structure to its users. But there has to be provision for some, just in case.
8. Excellent primary education till grade 6, via vouchers of equal value provided by the government to all children (regardless of any financial, social or any other status of the parents), to be used in a private school of choice of the parents (India in 2011 can afford this, if corruption doesnt come into play and a voucher system will just about remove corruption from education and transfer the reponsibility of using the vouchers wisely with parents).
9. Citizens will be free to undertake any other public project that they choose through organizing grass roots bodies at the village, city and state levels. These grass roots bodies will be free to raise their own revenues through local taxation, either on a project by project basis or on an ongoing basis for long term maintenanace.
10. Protection of vital national resources including the environment, regulation of public airwaves for broadcasting, water(lakes rivers and oceans), forests, vital minerals and metals only and wildlife
I also argue in one of my other posts, which I dont know if B'pati Sab agrees or not that a large majority of Indians do not have the above as their objectives for India. Hundreds of millions of us Indians only pay lip service to the objectives stated above. The actual and real Indian list of objectives is entirely different from above and is as follows:
1. To live out our lives within the narrow sphere of our castes, regions, sectarian groups, religions and to define even more sharply our differences based on these factors as opposed to coming together to form a larger community, which is called a nation
2. To live in an endless struggle with each other for economic resources and political power, based again on castes, regions, religions and sectarianism. In other words be in a continuous state of caste and sectarian civil war, albeit, a cold civil war, which sometimes turns into a hot civil war.
3. For groups within India that have larger numbers to constantly seek to exact revenge against other smaller groups, using past grievences as a justification, using tools for this retribution, such as job reservations, education reservations and causing consciously as a strategy to totally collapsing law and order (both police and judiciary)
4. To pursue massive transfer payments from one narrow group to another, in the forms of massive subsidies, again using past grievences as justification
5. To deliberately keep the center weak and all its institutions such as the governments and other community institutions toothless to pursue goals such as law and order and national defense, so that caste and sectarian groups can continue their internecine warfare without any check
6. To deliberately weaken the native religions so that even religious authority cannot fill the vaccum to check this internecine struggle, again using the argument that these religions did nothing to prevent past exploitation of large groups of people by the elite of the past
7. To deliberately weaken the traditional culture, so that no order is imposed on the society even by healthy cultural traditions, again so that groups can continue their civil wars with impunity
All our ills, such as lack of national will to pursue robust national defence and foreign policy, enforce fair and stringent law and order, corruption, and all other ills that plague us, and most of all, our "weakness" that you talk about, are a result of these "actual" objectives of the majority of our population.
The prescription of how not to be weak going forward, is also inherent in this post.
IF this post is deemed not very relevent to this thread, moderators, please remove it or suggest another thread where it can be placed.
