Elections. It's effect on Eco Development. Electoral Reform

Post by **jayakris** » Thu May 20, 2004 5:38 am

PKB -- your path has crossed so many interesting characters, you should write a book on that (similar to my favorite book, India Unbound by Gurcharan Das - again, filled with all the people who crossed his path) ...

Jay

PKBasu · Post by **PKBasu** » Thu May 20, 2004 6:08 am

I am working on a book...but it's not the anecdote-filled one (which can only work if the first one flies

). This one is about Asia in the twentieth century -- politics and economics. I'm an amateur historian with a point of view...but am finding it difficult to devote enough time to the book!

trinanjans · Post by **trinanjans** » Thu May 20, 2004 11:11 am

well - at least now we have the most educated president & prime mininster in the whole world !!!! atleast all others donot have such high qualis or credentials

PKBasu · Post by **PKBasu** » Thu May 20, 2004 11:14 am

Indeed, I think it is difficult to beat

Manmohan Singh, MA (Cantab, Adam Smith Prize), Ph.D. (Oxon)

No world leader comes close to that "degree" of erudition.

trinanjans · Post by **trinanjans** » Thu May 20, 2004 11:26 am

dont forget our president too !!!!!

PKBasu · Post by **PKBasu** » Thu May 20, 2004 11:57 am

Yes, of course, our president is a man of great learning -- but of even greater practical achievement, as the designer of our missile program and the brains behind Pokhran-II.
They also share a mildly dishevelled look that is typical of academics in India -- although neither has been an academic for most of his life. Both moved early from academia to practical work more than three decades ago, but neither of them completely abandoned the academic mien. That is probably a big part of their charm. I expect them to get along well. I hope Sonia Gandhi isn't planning to keep accompanying the Prime Minister on trips to Rashtrapati Bhavan and elsewhere. Manmohan must become his own man, and stamp his authority on the government. There is no scope for ambiguity about who is Prime Minister.

PKBasu · Post by **PKBasu** » Thu May 20, 2004 12:39 pm

Actually, Mexican presidents are often just as learned. Carlos Salinas de Gortari had graduate and post-graduate degrees from Harvard, but he ran his country's economy into the ground. His successor, Ernesto Zedillo, was even better-educated: he had a Ph.D. in economics (albeit from Yale, the same University that Bill Clinton, GW Bush and John Kerry went to; but not quite Harvard!). The "Tequila crisis" (involving a massive devaluation of the peso) hit three weeks after Zedillo took office. He steered the country past this reasonably well, negotiated and signed NAFTA (near-term positive for Mexico; medium-term question-mark) and managed to ensure that there was no economic crisis at the end of his term -- as there had been every 6 years in Mexico, at the end of each president's term (or soon after) in the previous 3 decades.
But while he had been an economic success, Zedillo's party (PRI) lost the next presidential election, the first time it had lost power in 80 years.

BSharma · Post by **BSharma** » Thu May 20, 2004 8:05 pm

Who will be India's next Finance Minister?

Who will be the next FM? discusses some potential candidates.

1. Former RBI Governor Chakravarthi Rangarajan
2. Montek Singh Ahluwalia
3. former RBI governor Bimal Jalan
4. Harvard University educated P. Chidambaram

All four seem excellent candidates for the job. Will it be Montek Singh Ahluwalia to continue the Singh Pariwar that the new PM had when he was the Finance Minister in 1991?

Post by **Dhruv** » Thu May 20, 2004 9:06 pm

Here is an interesting article on Rediff by a French author of all things. Not all true but makes for an interesting point of view.

The white woman and India

BSharma · Post by **BSharma** » Thu May 20, 2004 9:42 pm

Dhruv,
Thanks for sharing the interesting article by Francois Gautier. If you get past the history lessons about the Dravidians and Aryans, the author does make some sense. The white man left India in 1947 but the brown man still looks up to the white man in awe and as his superior. Beyond the color issue, many Indians still feel that only the Nehru family can run the country. India would have been better off if the country did not have the failed policies of Pt. Jawahar Lal Nehru, Smt. Indira Gandhi, and Rajeev Gandhi. I could see that the country had given a mandate to Sonia if Congress had won over 350 seats but all this talk by the sorry politicians of how they will become orphans without Sonia at the helm makes me puke. Wake up Indians and develop a spine. Look into the mirror and repeat, "Indians have the brains and talent to be the best in the world and nothing can stop them from achieving it if they work hard and cooperate with each other."

‘Sonia didn’t want to divide the country, she thought there will be violence and agitations'

The inner voice of people says you should become the prime minister. Please don't leave us’ Congress MP Mani Shankar Aiyar

Post by **Dhruv** » Thu May 20, 2004 11:14 pm

Congress Party: Seats won over the the last few elections

Code: Select all

                      1989      1991      1996             1998        1999    2004
Seats Won              197       227       140              141         114     145
Percentage of Votes   39.5%     36.4%     29.7%            25.82%     28.30%  26.69%
Leader of party      Rajiv   Sympathy  PV Narasimha Rao  Kesri/Sonia  Sonia    Sonia

This little compilation clearly shows how much better the Congress has fared with Sonia in charge over the years. I must give her full credit for sweeping back to power. The Congress vote and number of seats has increased manifold in the everpresent glow of her greatness. It is a tribute to her nobility that she has sacrificed so much for an adopted nation in which some people are so ungrateful as to besmirsch her almost holy name.

I'm sorry even though I am trying I can't quite get the same effect as as a Jairam Ramesh or a Mani Shankar Aiyar. I guess you need a lot of practice or be really really blind to appear to be as blinker visioned as those two. I had realy expected better from Jairam. Don't go overboard guys. pfff

Post by **jayakris** » Fri May 21, 2004 1:36 am

"Singh Pariwar"

-- love that term, Bhushan..

As for Gautier, he has written a lot of similar articles over time, that the "secularists" basically consider him a Sangh Pariwar guy.

The history lesson was somewhat needed though. It is funny that there is a good number of Indians (Hindus) who actually would rather buy the cooked up white-man history about the Aryan invasion in 1500 BC, etc .. Well, otherwise they will have to actually agree that some of these things in Ramyana and Mahbharata did happen in India sometime in some form and that all our so called Hindu books may not be all "mythology" as we were all taught in school ... It is more important for them to forget all of that and talk about secularism. What we have is really a system of scientific thinking (of a completely different nature than modern science, that it keeps getting called religion) and there is a need to state it with the proper historical backing. This is the part of the original BJP agenda that I agreed most with, though the Indian press and the pseudo-secularists kept painting it as some sort of attempt to show the superiority of Hinduism and constantly harped on the ridiculous idea of "saffronization" when ever somebody said we should look at our history books a bit more closely. (Alas, the BJP did not make as much headway in this area like I hoped) ..

The reason why Gautier mentioned the history lesson is that, THIS is the crux of the matter in India - to convey to all Indians that they should not be looking at everything that sounds like Hinduism as religion, but rather as the scientific/cultural sophistication India has - even if they reject some of that science in favor of another religions' tenets if it is counter to what their religion says. That message never got delivered properly to the pseudo-secularists, thanks to the shrill voice that BJP/RSS/Sena uses (and sometimes also because of their own misunderstandings on what Hinduism is -- see the unecessary attempt to push a beef ban on everybody). The secularists ask the question "why is Ayodhya so important?" - it is, because, showing that it IS where Rama was born is a validation of the books we have, which are now being called "mythology". The Sangh Pariwar never made the case properly on this. But I digress.

The one mistake that Gautier makes is to think that Indians who say all these great things about Sonia really mean it. That is not really correct. Indian politicians figured out long back that sycophansy never hurts in Indian politics. We have never heard of a politician losing an election because of that, have we? ... The reason is that a large majority of Indians anyway look at certain others as their masters, from the zamindars to the bosses at the work place. There isn't much of a culture of relative equality based on and self-respect among people. So they find nothing wrong in sycophansy - most of them also indulging in a bit of it in their day-to-day lives as well. When there is no price to pay for being a sycophant, why not be one if some reward *might* come out of it? - that is how the polticians think. And so we have a political party that has sycophancy as the only real permanent ideology.

The part on which I take issue with Gautier is that I do not believe that everybody who was willing to accept Sonia necessarily felt good about it. Most were not feeling any great love for her color or anything either. Perhaps some also felt that she may be at least half-way decent compared to a lot of politicians in India (any one of us would agree that we would rather have her as PM than say a Laloo). Some, like me, were quite secure about the greatness of the country and did not think one Sonia could make much of a dent on it - certainly not much more than her mother-in-law and husbands grandpa. So I wouldn't feel the kind of anger that say Uma Bharti was feeling (which was genuine by the way, despite the press trying to pooh-pooh it as just politicial theater). Gautier is doing a bit too much of stereotyping and taking a bit of a simplistic view of the Indians.

Jay

BSharma · Post by **BSharma** » Fri May 21, 2004 2:48 am

trinanjans:

well - at least now we have the most educated president & prime mininster in the whole world !!!! atleast all others donot have such high qualis or credentials.

Rediff article about the qualifications of our Prime Ministers (starting from Pt. Nehru).

Education and performance as a PM are, however, not related but it makes for interesting reading.

PKBasu · Post by **PKBasu** » Fri May 21, 2004 11:50 am

Francois Gautier, incidentally, spent a lot of his formative years in Pondicherry, at the Sri Aurobindo Ashram.
Aurobindo Ghosh was one of the most interesting thinkers of the twentieth century -- albeit one whose thought is known to only a select few in India and around the world. (The father of an American friend of mine -- a senior journalist at the Asian WSJ -- teaches the philosophy of Sri Aurobindo and the Dalai Lama at a small college in California, for instance).
I knew the rudiments of Sri Aurobindo's life: first class in the Classics Tripos at Cambridge -- easily the toughest degree course there, in Latin and Greek, in which getting a first class is extremely rare -- then resignation from the ICS and a period of work with the Maharaja of Baroda, during which he began to learn Indian languages properly, particularly Sanskrit and Bengali; by 1906 he was an ardent nationalist, strongly imbued with a deep understanding of the universality of the Sanatana Dharma and the astonishing inner strength of Indian civilisation; he expressed his aversion to British colonisation by joining the violent struggle against their rule, and was twice sentenced to death -- but was mysteriously able to convince the judge to overturn the judgement in each case.
By 1910, however, another conviction appeared imminent (his brother was executed) and Sri Aurobindo took refuge in the French enclave of Pondicherry, where he spent the rest of his life -- engaged in spiritual pursuits, and the creation of a microcosm of an ideal society imbued with the best of Indian civilisation and thinking.
I have just begun to explore Sri Aurobindo's writing, which is fascinating, unique and very erudite (he was an absolute master of the English language) -- but he acknowledges Swami Vivekananda and Sri Ramakrishna as his yogic teachers. He was asked to come back and lead the Congress in 1919, but turned it down as he felt it didn't need him and was in any case taking the right direction.

An interesting book that debunks the Aryan invasion theory quite effectively is "In Search of the Cradle of Civilisation". Although some of us are becoming convinced of this, the Macaulay-derived consensus is very well-entrenched and will not be easily broken.

Post by **jayakris** » Fri May 21, 2004 1:16 pm

Some details emerging, about the Common Minimum Program.

http://www.rediff.com/money/2004/may/21job.htm

"Royalty for life" for those who are ousted from infrastruture project -- I like that one. More of an issue in projects like Narmada valley is making sure that the displaced even know about what they are entitled to, though...

Two percent cess for job loss insurance, seems interesting.

Another article in rediff says, "The CMP, which will provide a roadmap for the economic policies to the new coalition government, may also propose to tone down some of the tough labour reforms like the 'hire and fire' system as contemplated by the previous National Democratic Alliance government" ..

I hope that does not become the thrust of the labor "reforms", and this is more of lip service - the action being mostly from the insurance scheme (which I suppose is expected to reduce the pain of "hire and fire"?)

Jay