India’s pro-Obama government may be on its last legs
by Ramtanu Maitra on 01 Mar 2013
http://www.vijayvaani.com/ArticleDisplay.aspx?aid=2702
A series of money scams, high inflation, a significant slowdown of
India’s much-touted economic growth, and currying favor with the
globalization crowd at the expense of India’s vast majority of poor,
have brought the Manmohan Singh-led United Progressive Alliance (UPA) to its knees.
With a year to go before the next general elections, the
government has very few straws to grasp at right now. The Alliance, if
it can hold itself together until the death knell tolls, has really no
possibility of getting back into power.
It should be noted that during the last general election in 2009, people
did not give a mandate to any party, but the Alliance somehow managed to survive because the opposition to it was unimaginative and equally
incompetent, if not reeking with corruption.
An Alternative?
This time around, some people in India have begun to assert that indeed an
alternative does exist, in the person of a state leader, Narendra Modi,
who is also a leader of the only other national party of note in India,
the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). Modi, who was elected for the third
time in the state of Gujarat, is not a household name across the
country, although many have heard of his successes as chief minister in
Gujarat. Modi’s efforts for development and his ability to keep his
stable clean have drawn attention and pose a challenge to the inept and
increasingly dysfunctional UPA.
Gujarat today is considered a good example of what can be achieved under solid
leadership that is not in power simply to facilitate favors to one
coterie or another. Gujarat is surely the most desired target in India
for investors - manufacturers in particular.
A senior Indian commentator in a recent website posting pointed out that
Modi has strong support from the young. “He is not a complainer. He does things exactly as the young do. Modi is like an entrepreneur who knows
how to squeeze the best out of the system.
Modi is a wealth-creator,
precisely what the young seek, and the Gujarat chief minister, unlike
Manmohan Singh and other World Bank/IMF economists” who are in power in
Delhi “is at home with the Indian model.” He comes across as an outsider to New Delhi politics and India is tired of insiders who have come to
be represented by the Nehru-Gandhi dynasty in the main, the commentator
added.
If Modi is indeed as good as some say, it is important that he emerge as
the prime minister-in- waiting. Apart from the fact that it is not
evident how many Indians have a clear image of who he is or what he
could deliver, his biggest obstacle could be his own party leaders who
have enmeshed themselves with the corruption that has become the
hallmark of the Manmohan Singh-led government.
A quartet consisting of
LK Advani, Sushma Swaraj, Arun Jaitley, and Nitin Gadkari of the RSS has not only played along with the corrupt UPA administration, but is
believed by some to have enriched themselves financially from the scams
perpetrated by those whom they purport to oppose. The quartet, unwilling to address India’s real problems, has never shaped a political agenda
that would address reality and build popular support. {D4:mrgreen: }
That reality is that 400-500 million people live without electricity and
many more millions lack safe drinking water; that millions of children
do not have any opportunity for a fair lot in life; that millions of
poor who live from hand to mouth cannot survive with year after year of
10% or higher inflation; that this nation of 1.2 billion people will not be able to assume its rightful place in the world unless these 400-500
million are provided with education, skill, and a life that offers them
hope.
In all likelihood, this quartet will do its very best to quietly soil
Modi’s positive image and in the process help the failed UPA to secure
yet another term of five years in office.
Obama’s Guru: Manmohan Singh
President Obama calls Prime Minister Manmohan Singh his economic “guru.” The “success” of Singh’s chela (disciple) in pushing the United States to a path of unmitigated
disaster on every front should not come as a surprise. While Obama is a
handmaiden of the Wall Street-City of London financial mafia, Singh
comes virtually from the same stable. His education at Oxford and his
years with the World Bank imbued him with the absurd notion that money
is the economy, and his ten-year tenure as Prime Minister in India shows that he never grasped, nor even tried to grasp, what a national economy is, or what creates national wealth.
Neither Singh’s Congress Party, the single largest party in the 2009 general
elections, nor Manmohan Singh himself, were the people’s choice.
The
Congress Party bagged less than 25% of the parliamentary seats. The UPA
cobbled together state parties lured by Cabinet positions (if not by
money outright), to gain a majority. Singh never even ran in the
election.
Manmohan Singh is a packaged product delivered from outside by the international financial and corporate power-brokers who saw him as the pawn that he
is. He was foisted upon the Indian people by Congress Party president
Sonia Gandhi, the Italian-born widow of Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi (d.
1989). Singh was sold to the electorate as an economist, an honest and
apolitical technocrat. All those qualities have now pretty much
vanished.
Bowing to the Financial Mafia
This is why - Singh is considered by many in India as the most pro-US Indian politician ever to sit in the prime minister’s chair.
The problem is
that the United States that Manmohan Singh kowtows to so slavishly is
currently led by a financial-corporate mafia whose principal objective
is to use the military to indiscriminately kill people anywhere in the
world and to create toxic financial instruments to suck out the real
wealth of other nations. They have their collaborators within India’s
corporations, many of which have become global. This mafia “likes”
Manmohan Singh because he believes in “reform” - by which he and they
mean unshackling the Indian economy from its legacy of state-controlled
“bondage,” and paving the way for the global corporations to grab up
large chunks of India’s economy.
Last November, millions in India took to the streets to vent their anger
over a move which could see international bulk retailers like Tesco,
Carrefour, and Wal-Mart, entering the $500 billion Indian consumer
retail market. Last week, millions participated in a general strike
protesting two recent decisions of the UPA government: preparing the
ground for Tesco, Wal-Mart, et al to enter India’s retail sector, and
allowing corporations to open up private banks. Earlier, protesting
against Singh’s Foreign Direct Investment (FDI - some in India call it
the “Foreign Destruction of India”) reform policy, which helped foreign
companies like Wal-Mart to enter the lucrative Indian retail market, a
key ally, Trinamool Congress, the ruling party in the state of West
Bengal, left the UPA, making it a minority alliance in the Indian
Parliament.
Why Singh and his two major props, the finance minister and the deputy
chairman of the Planning Commission, took such extreme risks to satisfy
Wal-Mart while facing such strong public opposition and political danger is not hard to explain. Wal-Mart prepared its entry into India in 2010
with a $100 million investment into a consultancy that had no employees, no profits, and a scant $14,000 in revenue. The company, called Cedar
Support Services, is now the focus of an investigation by India’s
financial crimes watchdog, to find out whether the company broke the FDI rules by putting money into a retailer before the government had thrown open the sector to other global players.
The pressure on Singh to push the FDI reform bill surely came from
higher-ups who are not Indian, but global. The US wish list vis-à-vis
India - from nuclear commerce to Wal-Mart’s entry into the Indian market - as former Indian Ambassador M.K. Bhadrakumar pointed out in an
article, is lying on Obama’s desk. Obama would have known that changes
were likely in the stewardship of India’s finance ministry. The Western
media had been criticizing then-Finance Minister Pranab Mukherjee as the main hurdle in the way of “reform”; he was shoved out in July 2012 and
made the President of India - a position of great honor, but almost zero political power.
The Obama Administration has acknowledged Singh’s delivery to the financial mafia of at least one item from the White House’s wish list. On Feb.
12, US Undersecretary of the Treasury for International Affairs Lael
Brainard told reporters ahead of the G-20 Meeting of Finance Ministers
and Central Bank Governors in Moscow: “I have been very favorably
impressed by some of the recent reform efforts undertaken by the Indian
government. We have seen some important reform commitments subsequent to that, which I think bode well. Of course he is going to continue to
want to improve its investment in areas such as infrastructure and in
financial markets to enable more vibrant investment response. We support those efforts, and we’re going to continue to engage India through our
bilateral dialogue and also in the G-20.”
In addition to this endorsement of Singh’s penchant for “reform,” last
December, Goldman Sachs issued a statement expressing its continuing
faith in Manmohan Singh, while asking for yet another pound of flesh.
“India in many ways remains the most complex of the four [BRIC nations,
Brazil, Russia, India, China], with its demographics giving it the best
potential GDP growth rate, but its inability to introduce effective
policy change is a persistent source of disappointment,” said Goldman
Sachs Asset Management Chairman Jim O’Neill.
“This being said, there are lots of policy changes being discussed and the
Indian stock market seems to be quite excited about something. We think
2013 Indian GDP will probably exceed expectations, as there are indeed
signs that policymakers might also positively surprise,” O’Neill added.
He did not put any figures to his estimates.
The Headley Fiasco
Besides the UPA’s slavish approach, led by Obama’s guru, there is yet another
giveaway that Manmohan Singh turns almost into an invertebrate when it
comes to standing up to irrational and dangerous diktats of the Obama
Administration. For instance, consider the case of David Headley, a
terrorist.
The Mumbai attack in November 2008 is considered by Indians as similar to
the US 9/11 in all its dimensions. There was never a question that the
people in India wanted to punish all those who were involved in
committing that crime. David Headley, an American, who was an FBI
agent-cum Lashkar-e-Taiba terrorist-cum drug runner, made public under a plea bargain that he was in Mumbai doing reconnaissance work for the
attackers. Headley was tried in the US courts and given a 35-year
sentence. Why did the Singh government authorize the United States to
enter into a plea bargain with a terrorist wanted in India? Or, why did
the prime minister not stand up against it?
Headley was deeply implicated in a massive terrorist operation within India.
Prior to his sentencing, the Singh government declared that India wanted him to receive the death penalty. However, the Obama Administration’s
Attorney General Eric Holder announced that the United States would not
extradite him to India unless he was to violate the terms of his plea
bargain. As one senior Indian commentator pointed out, this was an
“unreachable lollipop for Manmohan Singh and his pro-American cabinet.”
The author is South Asian Analyst at Executive Intelligence Review