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There is an interesting article on Reuters about how the vast Indian film industry, or ‘Bollywood’ as it is widely known, is reflecting something of an improvement in relations between India and its neighbour, Pakistan. The article says that Pakistanis, once badly portrayed in Indian films, now get a more rounded image.
It is always unwise to make big conclusions about a few examples of popular culture, but bear in mind that in nations like India, the movie industry has enormous influence, particularly over the young. And if millions of young Indian people increasingly come to look at their Pakistani peers as regular, ordinary folk, then something very positive is happening in one of the fastest-growing movie and entertainment businesses in the world. It is all the more heartening given that only a few years ago the airwaves were thick with fears about a major military clash between India and Pakistan over the disputed territory of Kashmir.
Globalisation in action, perhaps?
Recently the IEA sent me a flier about this book in praise of globalisation, and I went round there and bought a copy from them (at an enticingly reduced price – thank you Adam). That second link is to an IEA review of the book. So far I have only read the Introduction, so I cannot offer you a review of my own, but already I am impressed.
I found especially interesting what the book’s author Martin Wolf had to say about the World Bank, and about its boss at the time that he worked for it, Robert McNamara.
For some reason I have never really paid proper attention to the World Bank. I knew that I was vaguely against it. I suspected it of doing too many of the things that the globalisers who are the target of Wolf’s book still complain about it not doing. But I had never really got to grips with the story. So this bit of Wolf’s Introduction really struck home to me:
By the late 1970s, I had concluded that, for all the good intentions and abilities of its staff, the Bank was a fatally flawed institution. The most important source of its failures was its commitment to lending, almost regardless of what was happening in the country it was lending to. This was an inevitable flaw since the institution could hardly admit that what it could offer – money – would often make little difference. But this flaw was magnified by the personality of Robert McNamara, former US Defence Secretary, who was a dominating president from 1967 to 1981. McNamara was a man of ferocious will, personal commitment to alleviating poverty and frighteningly little common sense. By instinct, he was a planner and quantifier. Supported by his chief economic adviser, the late Hollis Chenery, he put into effect a Stalinist vision of development: faster growth would follow a rise in investment and an increase in availability of foreign exchange; both would require additional resources from outside; and much of these needed resources would come from the Bank. Under his management, the Bank and Bank lending grew enormously. But every division also found itself under great pressure to lend money, virtually regardless of the quality of the projects on offer or of the development programmes of the countries. This undermined the professional integrity of the staff and encouraged borrowers to pile up debt, no matter what the likely returns. This could not last – and did not do so…
Wolf’s next paragraph starts predictably:
By that time I had had enough…
But then Wolf goes into a bit of detail, on the subject of India. → Continue reading: Martin Wolf on the World Bank
One of the better ways to learn about policy trends, in any policy area, in any country, is to read something by someone who disapproves.
This article, about what its author thinks is wrong with all the various directions which Indian education is heading in, reads to me like a catalogue of all that is right about it.
Two trends in particular struck me as especially encouraging. First this:
A self reliant India needs very different intellectual support from the kind of intellectual labour envisaged by a government that in its enthusiasm for selling out to multinationals could only dream of bringing some outsourced functions of these multinationals into our country. …
“Self reliant” reads to me like “futureless backwater”. So, what I take this to mean is that Indian education is now turning out people who are very employable indeed, and on the world market where the real money is to be made and where so much of India’s economic future will be created.
And second, there is this:
A self reliant and democratic India also needs its citizens prepared for the globalised world not as cogs in the wheel, fulfilling some technical function, but as thinking beings able to defend and safeguard democracy. …
… which the guy put in italics of his own, meaning that this was his biggest point. “Preparing for the globalised world not as cogs in the wheel” sounds to me like preparing them against the globalised world. So what this all says like to me is: “The education system isn’t turning out enough political mischief-makers.”
There is also much complaint in this article about “para-education”, which sounds to me like free enterprise education, rather than the state-provided shambles which most Indians were stuck with until recently.
So, then: India doing really well. This has been one of the decade’s great Global Stories. Long may the story continue.
Paul Staines has some views on the interesting changes going on in India.
My initial disappointment (and surprise) that the world’s largest democracy had rejected the right wing BJP-led coalition for the Congress party, the former home of Gandhian-Nehruvian socialism, has turned to near joy with the news that Sonia Gandhi has stood down in favour of Manmohan Singh, a man described by the Grauniad as “the poster boy of India’s reforms, the architect of policies that turned India from a socialist behemoth into a regional economic power.”
Manmohan Singh as Prime Minister means India will have an avowed admirer of Margaret Thatcher in charge. In 1991, with India facing financial crisis, he convinced Rajiv Gandhi to implement liberal reforms in one month. He has described the changes he made:
We got government off the backs of the people of India, particularly off the backs of India’s entrepreneurs. We introduced more competition, both internal competition and external competition. We simplified and rationalized the tax system. We made risk-taking much more attractive… [and] much more profitable. So we tried to create an environment conducive to the growth of business. We removed a large number of controls and regulations, which in the past had stifled the spirit of innovation, the spirit of entrepreneurship, and restricted the scope for competition, both internal competition and external competition. As a result, in the ’90s, productivity growth in the Indian industry has been much faster than ever before.
He is pro-globalization and a critic of US and EU agricultural subsidies:
Globalization creates opportunities. As I said, freer trade, if it is genuinely free, and India’s labor-intensive products can find markets abroad that will help to get new jobs in our country. That will help to relieve poverty.
I am sure he faces many challenges, the Congress party is allied with communists, but international investors and Indian entrepreneurs are sure to welcome a man once voted “Finance Minister of the Year” by European bond investors. Indeed his first mission has been to re-assure that he would implement a “responsible macro-economic policy… We’ll bring in policies that will not hamper India’s progress – policies that are pro-growth.”
Paul Staines
Free market people should not be depressed by the result of the Indian general election. The BJP government borrowed money hand over fist (India has a large government deficit) and spent the money on government road building projects and other such.
Of course the new Congress Party government (plus its socialist allies) is not going to be any better – but that is democracy.
If anyone knows of any government (democratic or undemocratic) that is cutting government spending I would be pleased to hear of it.
India has closed the deal for the purchase of the ‘Admiral Gorschkov’, a Cold War era Russian aircraft carrier. It is expected this ship will come into service with the Indian Navy around 2008, just in time for the retirement of the INS Viraat, their current aircraft carrier.
It is quite interesting that there is a continuing armaments relationship between the Russians and India, despite the seismic geopolitical changes of the last decade. An untutored alien landing for the first time on Earth would make no sense of it. The roles of the US and the USSR in that region should be reversed, Russia should be partnered with the alternating military dictatorship and semi-democratic kleptocracies of Pakistan and the US with India, the oldest liberal democratic state in Asia.
Relations between nations have layers within layers and oft-times deep and conflicting historical roots, I am aware of some of the public history of the region, but cannot help wondering if there is a bit more to it, an unspoken geopolitical undertext.
India has centuries of liberal European traditions behind it. It is also not likely to change very much even under severe pressure. Generations would come and go before the paperwork for change was properly submitted, checked, authorized and filed. In a Cold War world the risk of India actually going Red was rather slim and thus of less worry than perennially unstable Pakistan.
Pakistan borders China and is within spitting distance of Russia across a ultra thin panhandle of Afghanistan. The region is wild and uncontrolled and right in the hotspot is the contested Kashmir Province. Given the location and the consistant interest in access to the oil and southern oceans shown from Tsarist through Soviet days, Northern Pakistan was absolutely ripe for fun and games with the KGB. It seems obvious checkmating this move was of far more Realpolitik value than telling the Indians how much we admired their history.
With the end of the Evil Empire, much of Geopolitics changed, but the full extent of the re-alignment of interests in this part of the world did not really click into place until September 11th, 2001. Islamic fundamentalists were already a clear and present danger to the Russians. Nutcases don’t even have to board an airliner to get to Moscow. They can drive there. After 9/11 they were also top priority to the US.
Over the last century or so, the Russians have ticked off a lot of people on their borders and they know it. They’ve done a far better job at this than the US… so it is somewhat in their interest for the US to take the brunt of whatever direct ire is caused by sorting out the problems. Otherwise they would have to deal with it, and given their level of success in Afghanistan and Chechnya, I would not have much hope for solutions from that direction.
From the Russian viewpoint, it is ideal if the US stabilizes Pakistan and acts as the lightning rod for fundamentalist ire; meanwhile they help arm India so that in the worst case, a fundamentalist takeover of Pakistan, India can keep Pakistan occupied and looking away from Russian territory.
The Russians see the regional problems up front and personal; they are damned pretty much whatever they do and aren’t very good at building stable liberal democracies. They haven’t even worked the bugs out of their own yet. The US is somewhat less at risk from the downsides of action in the region since it is far, far away and bordered by oceans and democracies. Not that such is a total protection. It just means the crazies have to expend more energy and more resources to carry out their attacks. To put it bluntly, the US stands to lose a smaller number of cities to the fundies than would Russia.
So there is method to this madness. You just have to sit a moment in everyone’s chair and ask ‘what’s in it for me?’
More than 10,000 people, falsely declared dead in northern India by greedy relatives and corrupt officials in order to steal their land, are trying desperately to prove that they are really alive.
Fifty of the ‘dead’ staged a protest last week by shaving their heads in front of the state assembly building in Lucknow, the capital of Uttar Pradesh state. Lal Bihari Mritak, secretary of a pressure group, the Association of the Dead said:
The state refuses to accept that they are alive. If it did, it would mean altering the district revenue records and restoring to them their properties, which is something that dishonest officials oppose.
Mata Prasad, a petitioner explains how court cases can get bogged down for years in the over-burdened and corrupt judiciary.
I haven’t had a hearing of my case simply because I can’t afford to pay a bribe. My documents disappeared from court overnight and I now have to start from the beginning.
Lal Bihari fought for eight years to be declared alive again, and a Bombay producer now plans to make a film about his struggle.
I finally won the battle and was brought back to life in the revenue records.
It seems that the Indian state has achieved nirvana all states aspire to – the ability to literally decide about the life and death of their citizens.
Thanks to Alex Knapp of Heretical Ideas for the link to this, which says that peace may have broken out between India and Pakistan. They aren’t yet talking to each other about it, but touch wood, for the time being, they’re doing it.
NEW DELHI (Reuters) – India said on Thursday it had begun pulling back its soldiers from the border with Pakistan and that the withdrawal would take about six weeks.
“The process has begun. This will take about one-and-a-half months. We are trying to do it faster,” Defense Minister George Fernandes told reporters after addressing a conference of coast guard commanders.
The withdrawal will end the longest and biggest peacetime deployment in India’s history. Pakistan has also announced it would withdraw its forces in response to the Indian decision.
The two countries massed nearly a million troops along their common border after a deadly raid on India’s parliament last December that New Delhi blamed on Pakistan-based militants fighting its rule in Muslim-majority Jammu and Kashmir.
I seem to recall not a disagreement exactly, more like a friendly exchange of his fears and of my hopes which both of us shared – “I hope I’m wrong”, “I hope I’m right”, that kind of stuff – between me and David Carr about India and Pakistan. The trouble with predicting peace and of then getting (a little slice of) it is that peace isn’t very newsworthy. War, on the other hand, gets absolutely everyone who ever told us so saying I told you so.
So anyway, I told you so.
Cue a nuclear attack by India. The Indians were withdrawing their forces because they didn’t want to bomb them. No, please, no.
Question: if someone wanted to swathe you in cloth dipped in turmeric water and then bury you alive in a pit, what would you say? Awww, c’mon, it’s only for a minute or so, and in the 400 years of this tradition, no one has died yet (they say). Actually, the participants on the sharp end (or is it in the deep end?) are typically young children, it being far too terrifying a procedure to subject adults to. They say it’s completely consensual, and after all, if the gods are not appeased, who knows what might happen! Naturally, the police don’t want to intervene, because no one is calling them to do so. Hang on a minute, one of those little children is bound to place a call to her local police station or submit a complaint in writing if there is any problem, isn’t she? The fact that her parents are making her submit to being buried alive by putting the fear of the gods into her is neither here nor there, is it?
India and Pakistan. Will they? Won’t they? Will there be mushroom clouds over Peshawar or will it all amount to nothing more than sporadic mortar fire, vigourous fist-shaking and some spectacular face-pulling before all parties come grudgingly to the table to thresh out their differences? I couldn’t tell you because I just don’t know.
The preponderance of opinion, though, seems to be that it won’t go all the way. That both parties have far too much to lose from all-out, balls-out war and, consequently, the instinct of self-preservation, if not common humanity, will win the day. I don’t regard this as a misapprehension. After all, both India and Pakistan do have a lot to lose from all-out war, particularly if it escalates to the point where plutonium bhajias are being lobbed over the Line of Control, and I am sure that this is not lost on the polity of either protagonist. But just because war would be a disaster, that doesn’t mean it won’t happen anyway.
We in the West find it very difficult to contemplate true catastrophe so we tend to assume rather too glibly that such catastrophe is not possible because catastrophe leaves a vasy body-count in its wake, not to mention the damage it causes to many investment portfolios. But have we not been lulled into a false sense of guarded optimism by the 20th Century? The Century that saw the Nazis buried by the Allies in Word War II, the Soviet Union laid low by capitalism and France beaten by Senegal in the World Cup (Alright the last one happened in the 21st Century but I am just too pleased not to mention it).
In other words, our generation has become well used to seeing the world in terms of the rise of badness and madness being overwhelmed by the onward march of goodness and reason. Those of us born post-WWII have been particularly fortunate to have lived through an era of relative peace where ‘war’ is played out on TV and mostly consists of a bit of a fracas followed by a peace process. So many times have we seen these melodramas played out that they have become the topography of conflict. We assume that the men in uniforms will be free to do their thing for a short period before everyone calms down and the men in suits step in to press flesh and hammer out some sort of deal. But we may forget that this is a manifestation of our era and not an eternal truth and all eras have to come to an end sooner or later.
‘Jaw-jaw is better than war-war’ has been the axiom of our age. ‘There is no substitute for victory’ may be the axiom that replaces it.
With all attention focussed on the Middle East, it might be easy to forget the India .v. Pakistan conflict which, according to this report has moved another half-notch up the ratchet.
Of course, it may be nothing more than a brief intensification of the sporadic skirmishes that have been bubbling under for the last few months but, coming on the back of the news that Delhi has expelled the Pakistani Ambassador, a lot of the ingredients of all-out, balls-out war look like they’re falling into place.
Suman Palit over on The Kolkata Libertarian has been prognosticating with considerable plausibility on various nightmare scenarios for the Indian sub-continent. His view on where some of those scenarios could lead are:
In 2050 A.D., Sudan and Botswana surpass the Indian GDP, organize pop-rock concert to deliver food aid to Calcutta.
Not vastly optimistic then, Suman?
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Who Are We? The Samizdata people are a bunch of sinister and heavily armed globalist illuminati who seek to infect the entire world with the values of personal liberty and several property. Amongst our many crimes is a sense of humour and the intermittent use of British spelling.
We are also a varied group made up of social individualists, classical liberals, whigs, libertarians, extropians, futurists, ‘Porcupines’, Karl Popper fetishists, recovering neo-conservatives, crazed Ayn Rand worshipers, over-caffeinated Virginia Postrel devotees, witty Frédéric Bastiat wannabes, cypherpunks, minarchists, kritarchists and wild-eyed anarcho-capitalists from Britain, North America, Australia and Europe.
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