Why NaMo is top-of-the-pops.

Our Founding Fathers made two monumental mistakes when power was transferred from the British Emperor to the Indian Government of India in August 1947.

Monumental mistake #1: They opted for universal franchise without universal literacy.

Monumental mistake #2: they did not dismantle the then prevailing framework and mindset of Feudalism before ushering in Democracy. Equally important, they did not bother to upgrade the bureaucracy set up by the British to serve the aims of the Imperialistic reign of subjugating and controlling the citizenry, of “keeping them in their proper place” at any cost as well as of extracting an annual tribute (“drain”) of £30 million (roughly Rs.450 million in contemporary exchange terms) in the reckoning of Dadabhai Naoroji (1825 -1917). http://bit.ly/1jgDmya (By the by, in Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith dubbed the British Rulers “plunderers of India”. http://bit.ly/1jCDpns)

In 1952, around 85% of the eligible voters in India’s first General Election – most  of whom still lived in abysmal poverty in the countryside − were angutha chchaap: they could neither read nor write. Ma-baap Sarkar, a legacy from the British Rulers, was the only political metaphor they understood and could relate to. The Indian National Congress won hands down. The 15% literate middle class had almost no say in the matter.

How different is the scenario at the time of the 2014 General Elections to constitute the 16^th Lok Sabha?

Increasing urbanization particularly after globalization has swelled the ranks of the urban middle class. They want better living conditions, more jobs, better governance, less − if not zilch − corruption, decisive leadership, less inequality. The omnipresence of television, the Internet http://bit.ly/1ssnDhP and mobile phones has further fuelled these burgeoning aspirations. The BJP seems to be the party of choice of Middle India.

Like it or not, admit it or not, NaMo = BJP as of this moment. The personality cult for which it is fashionable to criticize the Congress is very much alive and kicking away merrily in the BJP. NaMo demolished every likely rival within the Party using tactics almost identical to the Indira Gandhi gambit against The Syndicate in the winter of 1969.  http://bit.ly/Rmeydm Employing IT imaginatively and extensively, he has been successful in reaching to, and enrolling for his cause, the urban (mostly middle class) youth.

The World Bank defines poverty as survival on less than $1.25 per day (2005 purchasing power parity) and says that, between 1981 and 2005, poverty in India dipped from 60% of the population to 42%. The number in 2010 was 33% (about 400 million people). http://bit.ly/1s2synE There is much dispute about the veracity of the Government of India and World Bank statistics. After making allowance for population growth in the interim, there appears to have been very little progress on the poverty alleviation front since 1947 – certainly nothing to boast about with claims like “India Shining”. The UPA-II efforts to alleviate poverty (Public Distribution System, Integrated Rural Development Program, Jawahar Rozgar Yojana and Training Rural Youth for Self Employment) have met with very limited success.

As for literacy, UNICEF tells us that between 2008 and 2012, 62.8% of Indians aged 15 years and over were able to read and write. The literacy rates in the age group 15 – 24 years for the same time span were 88.4% (male) and 74.4% (female).  The net primary school enrolment rate for 2008 – 2011 was 98.6%. It looks like the 2014 General Elections have a literate electorate. Does it mean that it will be a conscientious electorate?

Ironically though, if Middle India’s aspirations are contemporary, many from their ranks still respond to Feudalistic overtures: religion, caste, social status, respect for authority and the pecking order among others. NaMo seems to have understood this characteristic of the electorate well. To assure them that he means business, he talks down to them like a decisive leader. Every election speech is a diatribe, a raging tirade. 

He blunders on declaring that the elections are for  the 14^th Lok Sabha in a rally in Gumla (Jharkhand); linking Chandragupta Maurya with the Gupta dynasty, giving Biharis credit for halting the victorious onslaught of Alexander and relocating Taxila in Bihar – all these in a Patna rally; bumping off Shyama Prasad Mookherji, Jan Sangh’s founder, in 1930 in London in a Kheda (Gujarat) meeting (in fact, he died in a Jammu & Kashmir prison in 1953); and changing Gandhi’s first name to “Mohanlal” in a Punjab rally.

The NaMo juggernaut thunders on regardless. His fans don’t seem to care about his historical inaccuracies. They have been brought up listening to lies and false promises mouthed by politicians. They want to believe in someone. That someone happens to be NaMo. His Gujarat governance record is not bad. His role in the 2002 riots seems to have been forgiven. His style of dealing with problems seems decisive. The saviour has been found at last. NaMo is the one.

All hail NaMo. Bow to NaMo. Kowtow to NaMo. There is no alternative left. 

377.

Homophobic, I'm certainly not. I have nothing against homosexuals. In fact, I feel more of them among us would put a natural brake on the brainless, breathless breeding that's putting a lot of strain on Mother Earth's bounty. The HIV epidemic to which, from all available evidence, they seem to have made no mean a contribution too is known to slow down popularion growth in the sub-Sahara region of Africa. http://tinyurl.com/6f4kpg. Not only should the gays be allowed to crawl out of their closets, but they should also be allowed to live like the so-called normal folks: marry, raise families and all the rest. I'm all for Ellen DeGeneres, 50, tying the knot with her 35-year -old Australian steady. http://tinyurl.com/5vomt7. But I'm more than a bit cheesed off by glorified darzis and their fawning Queen Bee and assorted celebrity clients flaunting it like the eighth wonder on Page Three. http://tinyurl.com/6nlslj (please search for the 18 August 2008 issue after the page loads, then click on the title of the article ). Suddenly, these half firangis who spend the better half of their lives flying to London for shopping, if nothing else, have stumbled upon the imperious imperialistic injustice of Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code imposed on us by the bloody Brits. Dr Anbumani Ramdoss who used to be a figure of ridicule till the other day http://tinyurl.com/6pffpw & http://tinyurl.com/5guqx9 is now their bosom buddy, nay a virtual soul mate. Bah! The hypocrisy of it all disgusts me.

To be or not to be.

That’s the question the Indian State should be pondering deeply right now. To be or not to be a client-state of the United States of America, to be precise. Thank the Comrades for bringing it to our notice. At the latest count http://faculty.washington.edu/majeski/decline-pap-5.pdf, i.e. as of February 2005, the self-appointed Leader of the Free World had 81 client-states (43 per cent of the countries in the world). This list is based on the US State Department information on Treaties in Force and Fiscal Year 2006 Budget Justification. Around 1945, Great Britain, France and Russia had about 50, 30 and 20 colonies/client-states respectively. The vacuum created by the decay of European Imperialism was filled by the US propensity to acquire and maintain client-states for strategic reasons of its own including its self-determined roles as the Leader of the Free World and the Global Peacekeeper. It is in this community of 81 would-be peers that India is likely to lose face were it to try to renegotiate the 123 Nuclear Treaty. That’s a fate worse than Death, I guess, if one were to judge from the headlines in the Indian Press. When India chose to remain “non-aligned” and Pakistan enrolled as a US client-state after partition, we know what happened. As is well-known, the relationship between the “central star” (the US) and its satellites (say, Pakistan) is identical to the mother country (Great Britain) and her colonies (say, British India) under Imperialism. The leader of the pack offers the satellites goodies (Green Revolution in Pakistan in the fifties, two decades before India got hers) in return of flooding her markets cheap made-in-the-US goods. This involved large-scale mechanization and capitalization of the agricultural sector and the generation of a huge market for the based-in-the-US agribusiness (seeds, fertilizers, pesticides). Our brush with WTO has already taught us what to expect in the future. Even then, I wonder why the US wants to add to its liability by getting hold of one more client-state. All the biggies among US businesses have already made it to the Indian shores. Having got into the habit of acquiring more and more clients, maybe it just cannot deny itself the pleasure of getting one more. I’m being facetious, of course. The US white culture is a culmination of its history of stealing land from the Native Americans, slave trading, dehumanization, exploitation and Imperialism, as even a casual observer of history can vouch. In view of this backdrop, Imperialism may now almost have become life blood for the Leader of the Free World. And, the supreme imperative to be the ultimate arbiter of Truth, Justice and the American Way to the rest of us lesser mortals, most likely.