Let us pay attention to the Maoist movement

Could China be encouraging the Maoist Movement in India? This possibility should not be ruled out. Every insurgency requires significant financial support besides a regular supply of arms and ammunition. Poor tribals and destitute farmers can not afford such sustained effort over decades. Who else but China benefits from such bleeding of India? The recent incursions by China along the Indian border are further evidence of China’s obsession with a rising India. No other country fears the rise of India than the ‘Communist China’. India defies the logic of Chinese ideology! They know in their hearts that Chinese nationalism is not enough to emerge as a great power and the Indian liberalism keeps reminding them of this contradiction. I am a firm believer of the limitations of an authoritarian regime. History is replete with such rise and fall of great powers like Japan, Germany and the erstwhile Soviet Union.

Coming back to the Maoist movement or ‘Naxalite Movement’ in India is a great opportunity for the ‘Indian Union’. It is an opportunity because otherwise nobody would have paid any attention to this vast population of India spread over five states – West Bengal, Bihar, Orissa, Jharkhand and Chhattisgarh – anytime soon. This is the result of a gross neglect of Eastern India by the central government and the respective state governments for past 6 decades. Ever since India’s independence in 1947, the Nehru-Gandhi cabal has shunned the ‘Eastern States of India’ like a plague. We are lucky that the entire region is still part of the ‘Union of India’. The Communist Parties of India have exploited the situation to their political advantage. Now the mainline communist leaders have no control over the Maoists guerrillas. The ‘Left Front’ has ruled over the state of West Bengal for more than 30 years and the Naxalite insurgency has only grown in that state. It is a joint failure of all political parties in India. Now is the time for the government to put the money where their mouth is!

Kapil Sibal could harvest the demographic dividend

Twenty years back when we left India, Indira Gandhi and her son Rajiv Gandhi used to consider India’s exploding population as a major national liability. Their successors, P V Narasimha Rao, Atal Bihari Vajpayee and Dr Manmohan Singh converted this liability into a global human capital. How could this happen and that too virtually overnight? The reason was simple, the Gandhi’s were modestly educated, unlike the three scholars who followed them as Prime Ministers of India. Gandhi’s of India, excluding Mahatma Gandhi, were political animals with a short-sighted vision of India. It was Prime Minister P V Narasimha Rao who completely changed the destiny of India. Even today the sycophants of Nehru-Gandhi cabal would hate to admit the fact, but then who cares? The fact of the matter is that Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi got a unique mandate in 1985 but squandered it on petty politics. India is lucky to have a window of relief from this political dynasty and grow to its full God given potential.

Kapil Sibal, a Master’s of Law from Harvard Law School, has been appointed the Minister for Human Resource Development by Prime Minister Dr Manmohan Singh, replacing a dogmatic and infirmed, Arjun Singh. Sibal has already indicated his willingness to open India’s educational sector to foreign universities and thereby provide vastly expanded higher-education opportunities to millions of Indians. This has the potential to further enhance India’s growing human capital. India is on its way to become the world’s largest English-speaking liberal democracy. Currently, 30 million Indians are fluent in English language and 60 million more are somewhat functional in an English speaking environment. There seems to be a unanimous opinion around the world that India would have 300 million English-proficient workers by 2020. Besides being fluent in English, these Indian workers are likely to be better educated and trained compared to their Western counterparts and would cost only half to one third of their competition. Just THINK about its global impact!

The best part of India’s story is its demographics. India has the youngest population in the world, unlike China or the ‘Western World’. According to Vijay Srinivasan, “Nearly 31% of the Indian population is less than 14 years old, and approximately 58% of the population is less than 25 year old, which translates to over 600 Million young people. As the Western nations age and even China ageing fast due to its “one-child policy”, the future workers of the world would be coming from India, it seems. The GDP growth of India itself would absorb most of these young workers, if only India manages between 8 and 10% growth annually for the next 25 years. This is entirely possible, and India could well become the only country in the next few years to reach a double-digit economic growth rate. China would experience an inevitable slow down, possibly dropping down to no more than 5 to 6% growth rate.” India is likely to provide low-cost legal and health-care services to the world for decades to come. Indian design and culture has the depth and breadth to fire the imagination of the world. Young people around the world are likely to follow India in this century!

The evolution of India’s foreign policy – Part VII

The assassination of Rajiv Gandhi in the evening of the first day of balloting on May21, 1991, stunned the nation and the world. We were in Syracuse, New York at that time, everyone looked shocked and apprehensive. I was not all that shocked because Indira Gandhi and her son Rajiv Gandhi were busy playing with fire since 1979 when they brought down successive governments just to return back to power. Both were playing dangerous games with Punjab, Kashmir and Sri Lanka. My reaction to the gruesome murder was that anyone of the above groups could have done that. But that was not my main concern, I prayed for my country and its stability. The voters of India moved towards Congress Party in sympathy and gave them 215 seats to form a coalition government at the center. Mercifully, better sense prevailed in Congress Party and a soft spoken, mild and seventy year old P V Narasimha Rao, a former foreign minister, was sworn in as the new Prime Minister of India on June 21, 1991.

Prime Minister Narasimha Rao was considered a push-over and a weak leader. He faced enormous problems internally as well as internationally. India faced serious challenges from the self-proclaimed Khalistanis of Punjab, the secessionists from Kashmir and the insurgents in Assam. Rao had to face a humiliating balance of payments situation overseas and a bankrupt country, thanks to a personal feud between V P Singh and Rajiv Gandhi. Neither cared about their country enough to put its priorities first! Narasimha Rao brought Dr Manmohan Singh, an economist and a former governor of the Reserve Bank of India as the new Finance Minister of India. Together these two matured and patriotic Indians gave birth to a new country. Rao was called the “Chanakya” of the new India and Manmohan Singh the savior. Neither could have done without the other. This was the new dawn for a modern India!

India was free again, free of Nehrus, free of Gandhis, free of ideologies and free of stupid socialism. I said “Let freedom ring!” no more license-permit raj, no more babus, no more bribes, only the communists remained as traitors. Dr Manmohan Singh with the political support of cunning Narasimha Rao began the process of dismantling the command and control economy of India. While Indians took a sigh of relief, the world watched an emerging India. The duo (Rao & Singh) transformed a shackled country into an economic dynamo. How many Indians realize the curse of Nehru-Gandhi cabal? Hundreds of millions in India waited for decades for this dynasty to move over and let them also breath for a change. This family beggared 99 crore Indians for 1 crore chamchas. This family destroyed our relations with America and the west because of their Fabian ideologies. India, fundamentally a capitalist society, suffered pseudo socialism for 45 years. Who actually gained anything? The ‘Left Front’ will keep reminding us about the horrors of Nehru-Gandhi era!

The United States of America called on countries like India to open their economies for 50 years after the Second World War. Now that the whole world has heard their call, America is getting ready to shut its doors on trade and commerce. Indo-US relations should have taken off after 1991 but remain mired in American love-affair with Pakistan. George Bush senior and his secretary of state James Baker were keen to improve the relationship with India but the Pakistan lobby in the ‘State’ and ‘Defense’ departments fought hard and maintained the status quo. In any case the Bush administration was on its way out when real reforms hit India. Bill Clinton was coming in with all the baggage from Harry Truman to Jimmy Carter. Exciting things were happening in India and elsewhere but the “bubba” was more interested in other things! Clinton wasted more than 5 years before India blasted its way to the international stage. Prime Minister Narasimha Rao danced in front of President Clinton but the man from Hope, Arkansas was busy being a white man and his transatlantic relationships. He ignored Asia and India till May 1998 explosions!