KHAOISTS: PLUNDERING INDIA'S FUTURE

An admission: this is a rather torpid post, the spiritlessness, the tiredness induced not by any physical ailment but by a sapping despondency and a sense of hopelessness about the speed at which India seems to be hurtling towards some sort of disaster, social upheaval, coup, even revolution, whose outcome one cannot even begin to visualise at this moment in time.

I have written many posts on the cancer of corruption that is eating into the vitals of this country. But to an outsider like me, as more and more layers of the rotten onion become visible, the bottom of the pit seems to get that much farther. What I had once thought was the Nadir, appears now to be just the shallow end of the stinking pool in which members of almost every single organ of the state - politicians, babus, judiciary, police - are splashing merrily along with that so-called watchdog, the media, that now appears to be in the vanguard of The Great Indian Robbery.

I simply do not have the heart, the enthusiasm, to pen another article with the passion and detail that I have earlier. Those who have the time and inclination may go through some of the older ones, links provided at the end of this post. But the matter is so grave that I cannot shut what I am seeing out of my mind altogether and remain no more than a passive, mute spectator and, thereby, a party to this plunder of India.

As we sit in the comforts of homes and theoretically debate, unaffected and from a safe distance, whether India faces a grave threat from Maoists whose writ already runs in varying degrees in 160 districts across eight states, we forget to notice that the real darkness, the real danger is right where each one of us is, in every corner of the country, and that most of us are actually responsible for it, one way or another. Just saying that lifts a burden off my soul and makes me feel good about myself. But, it does nothing to lessen the increasing and already unbearable load that we have placed on the soul of India.

We are the Khaoists, the incorrigibly corrupt, the shameless plunderers, the reckless looters who are hollowing this country from within. With gay abandon, as though it is our birthright. Many of us will, naturally, not admit publicly to being Khaoists, but as even a fool knows, only eunuchs and men of extraordinary virtue and character can stay away from the pleasures of a harem if they live there. Both are hard to spot these days. Many of the rest of us are India's shame. We are pushing India into an abyss at a furious pace because we are in a tearing hurry to catapult to riches with the nation's wealth, the money that should have fed, clothed, educated and empowered more than half of India's population that is still mired in the grime of inhuman poverty because of our unbridled, unprincipled ambition and greed that does not think before snatching a morsel from a hungry mouth, that conveniently shuts its eyes when it sees another doing so out of fear that it may spoil our party, disrupt our good life. Not one of us is blameless here.

I am feeling enervated. So I will leave you to go through some words of a few of those who live in and/or are fully cognizant of what goes on in the Khaoist's core. Make sense of what they are trying to say - and hide - and then decide for yourself whether there is hope yet, whether anyone can pull India out of this vortex at all before it is too late.

• Barkha Dutt. As a political journalist, I have to confess, that I am almost shock-proof when it comes to the entrenched corruption of many of our netas and the deals they strike to keep the wheels churning.
• Rajdeep Sardesai. We live in the age of institutionalised corruption. From politicians to judges, from senior bureaucrats to policemen, from corporate tycoons to petty officials, everyone it seems has a price... ‘paid news’ is not an overnight phenomenon that began with election ‘packages’... A political candidate who pays for favourable media coverage is not guaranteed victory, a corporate house through a ‘private treaty’ is almost guaranteed lasting immunity against journalistic ‘objectivity’...has led to a near-total breakdown of rules and standards.
• Tavleen Singh. At some point around the end of the eighties...everyone seemed to suddenly want to be in politics...the lure was filthy lucre. Indian politics had become the quickest way to make a fast buck...jewels from Cartier and Bvlgari, watches from Piaget and Patek Phillipe and handbags and shoes that cost more than an MP earns in a year.. grand mansions and hugely expensive vehicles... some travel only in private aircraft. The real money disappears into various corporate efforts that on the surface can look very legitimate. In almost every political household these days, there is at least one ‘corporate prodigy’... who thrives in the cloistered boundaries of crony capitalism...The sums we are talking of are so huge that they are beyond calculation.
• Shekhar Gupta. Like conquerors of the past, India’s politicians love to rule, and plunder cities... In older times, cities attracted conquering hordes who wanted to sack them for their riches. Now, in democracies, the political class knows that while their votes lie in the countryside, the real money sits in the cities and their real estate...If the new Andhra can get over the loss of Hyderabad, use what it gets in compensation and its own enterprise to build a new capital city...its politicians will figure soon enough that the money-making opportunity a new city offers is much greater than an old metro nearing saturation, howsoever energetic.
• Sagarika Ghose. (on Twitter) sad truth is media is too tied to advertising. That's why when it cos to corporates our lips are mostly sealed. not a good business model. profession has become terribly degraded. am very disillusioned! i joined in early 90s when press still meaningful.
  

Are Barkha Dutt and others really "shock-proof" to corruption? Their silence and thereby complicity applies only to corruption at the highest levels where the sums involved "are beyond calculation." Where petty officials and petty amounts are involved, where a cop taking a Rs 100 bribe is concerned, these guys aggressively carry out sting operations and confidently con the nation into believing that they are sparing no efforts to expose corruption and clean up the rot. Why this Janus-faced approach? Can they even begin to claim that they have remained "temptation-proof", not just for big bucks but entry into the inner circle of India's most powerful - and corrupt - politicians, whose reflected power enables them to almost 'terrorise' those on the lower rungs of political ladder with an arrogance that you will not see anywhere else in the civilised world?

Is it surprising that Shashi Tharoor can stand in the Lok Sabha and say with a straight face that it is ideals that brought him back to India after over three decades abroad and a failed attempt to become UN Secretary General, and despite the stench of corruption and nepotism emanating from him in the IPL scandal? Is it surprising that politicians are saying that the media, babus and judges rank much higher than them when it comes to graft? As the hastily buried and till now not denied allegation about the manner in which Barkha Dutt and Vir Sanghvi negotiated to get the current Raja of corruption the telecom portfolio indicates, and as is also evident from what you have read above, at the very top, corrupt politicians and journalists are like Siamese twins. Had it been otherwise, corruption would not have become the uncontrollable bush fire that it has.

I can say no more. I know this is a poor, illogical, abrupt way to end an article. Perhaps I should take a break and come back to finish it with a flourish. But why? Why should I pretend to be "shock-proof" to this pervasive rot and close this piece too with detached objectivity, when my mind is filled with a numbing mixture of revulsion, anger and helplessness at what Khaoists have done and are doing to my country, the way they are plundering its future to make their own? I think it will be best if your comments complete this unfinished story, if possible with hope.
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Previous related posts:
1. Shashi Tharoor: making a 'difference'
2. Politics and media: a new nadir
3. ND Tiwari: much more than a sex scandal
4. Covering up the mother of all corruption scandals
5. Conspicuous consumption and conspicuous poverty
6. Sink sting operations that stink
7. Capital punishment, not gain, for the corrupt
8. Corrupt, colonial India faces volcano
9. As long as there is aloo corrupt will be Laloo
10. Modi and Reddy: the choice is clear
11. Maytas: truth inverted, greed is king
12. 1000 times President's salary for India's babus
13. Tarun Tejpal: extra God and the Devil
14. Wake up (poem)
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NO PRICE IS TOO HIGH, JUST 'LOVE PAKISTAN'

Should anyone be surprised that after sweet-talking gullible Indian intellectuals and media stars into believing that he genuinely wanted friendship with India, Pakistan President Asif Ali Zardari has bared his real Pakistani fangs? Reiterating his father-in-law's famous words that Pakistan would wage "a thousand-year war" over Kashmir which is "Pakistan's jugular vein", Zardari has warned India that this was a war of ideologies that would last for generations.

Is this mere rhetoric? Is Zardari making a noise just to please a constituency? Or is it, as by now should have been clear to even the most dumb-headed, a plain reiteration of a core reality that India has refused to recognise and deal with conclusively?

Zardari's statement comes a few days after the Prime Minister's Working Group on Kashmir - it hadn't met for over two years - submitted a report recommending greater autonomy for the state, and amidst reports that the government was talking quietly to separatist Kashmiri leaders to come up with some half-baked, surrender-based solution to bring peace back to the Valley.

In TV studio discussions following the submission of the report, mainstream Kashmiri politicians made it very clear, for the millionth time, that no real solution is possible unless Pakistan is made party to it. While some of them were airing the 'ideological', read communal, line that defines Pakistan's claim on Kashmir, others clearly had the reality of the situation on ground in mind, a reality that has taken deep roots, thanks to a confused and paralysed Indian leadership that reacts mechanically after every terror attack but has never given serious thought to putting Pakistan out of business in Kashmir.

A couple of days back, terrorists struck in the heart of Srinagar and engaged the security forces in a 20-hour gun battle. These two gunmen, like those of Mumbai 26/11, were in contact with their handlers in Pakistan. As per reports, this was not an isolated fidayeen attack. It was a part of a larger plan supported by the military to step up terror attacks in Kashmir. As many as 700 trained terrorists are waiting to stage more such and worse attacks. This may be to pressurise the US to pressurise India into giving fatal concessions on Kashmir. But, more fundamentally and enduringly, it is to warn India and Kashmiris that Pakistan will not let Kashmir slip away from its fingers, no matter what. Zardari was not shooting his mouth off.

Unfortunately, India's intellectuals and media lights have been hell-bent on leading India and Indians up just the path that Pakistan would want them to take. And it seems that they are not likely to give up their efforts anytime soon, no matter what Pakistan does or says to provoke India.

The latest in this manifestly carefully coordinated and well orchestrated strategy is what The Times of India unleashed on its unsuspecting readers on the first day of the new decade. On January 01, 2010, I was jolted when I looked at the Times of India. "Love Pakistan" were the two bold words in black that the management of the newspaper forced lakhs of Indians to stare at on its front page. A few pigeons flying above the explanatory print made the picture almost morbid.

Ostensibly, this was to tell India that the TOI and Pakistan's Jang Group were re-launching that completely worn-out 'people-to-people' -which people? - contact program in the form of "cross-border cultural interactions, business seminars, music and literary festivals and citizens meets" that would once again do little more than fill newspaper columns and entertain the well-heeled and well-protected in both countries. But TOI wanted all Indians to "Love Pakistan" already, barely a little more than a year after 26/11 and with no evidence whatsoever to show that the state of Pakistan had shed even a trace of its congenital hatred for India. Even then, well before Zardari's reality-check, to me those pigeons looked like innocent Indians being brought down by terrorists indoctrinated and trained by Pakistan, shouting 'Love Pakistan'.

This enervating disease of pretending that the DNA of the state of Pakistan will change if a few Indians and Pakistanis hug each other and enjoy a musical evening together, and that there is little more that India needs to do to protect itself and its citizens, had already cost India dear. This reality-defying belief is not limited to the TOI alone. It is endemic to the media that has got obsessed with creating emotional images padded with words that should find place in only mediocre works of fiction.

Karan Thapar, the otherwise terrorising interviewer, loses his fangs and even elementary commonsense when it comes to Pakistan. Last year, when he interviewed Pervez Musharraf, so fascinated was he by the latter's sartorial elegance that he completely failed to read the very dangerous statements that he made about more Kargils, Indian Muslims and the continuing role of the LeT, not just in Kashmir but in the rest of India. The same thing happened at the HT summit when he literally hand-held Zardari to make dove-like statements, and then asked India, in gushing-schoolboy fashion, to trust him.

Shekhar Gupta wants Indians to believe that helping Pakistan win its internal war on terror is in "India's supreme national interest". He also wants India to buy the preposterous argument that a strong Pakistan, the state that is waging an ideological war against that with the sole aim of winning it even of it takes generations, is in India's interest and that India must make whatever concessions are needed to strengthen the democratic government in that country.

It is beyond belief that India's so-called intellectuals keep finding absolutely non-existent grounds for beating Pakistan's drum and preventing India from doing anything that can put a decisive end to this existential threat that it has been confronting for decades now. Despite the fact that Pakistan has joined all the dots and left not no space for doubt about its intentions by its numerous acts, some of us want to keep pretending that Pakistan is the poor victim of terror and that once India gives in to its demands on Kashmir in a manner that is visible to ordinary Pakistanis, all will be well and TOI's campaign will then define the relationship between the two nations.

I may be wrong, but the more I see the manner in which India is refusing to take any logical steps to protect itself as it should and terminate this religious war-of-generations in this generation itself, the more I am convinced that this has less to do with Pakistan and more to do with harmful-to-India and potentially inflammatory manipulation of the dynamics of India's democracy, and the unbridled lust of its politicians to get to power in Delhi, no matter what the cost and damage to the nation.

In 1971, Indira Gandhi dismembered Pakistan. That should have, and to an extent did, put an end to this war that virtually defines Pakistan. But she lost in Shimla on trust what India's sons had won on the battlefield with blood. And now, nearly three decades later, a heavy price is still being paid for that lapse.

Surely, no one can disagree that such an ideological war can only be won by defeating the very ideology that is sustaining it. The Americans may not be going about the task in the best manner but they have understood that elementary truth. In India, on the other hand, what we are seeing is exactly the opposite; we are being told that this war can actually be won by trusting and strengthening the one who is fighting it against us.

Manifestly, there are powerful elements in India's political landscape who do not want Pakistan and, thereby, the idea behind it, to be defeated. These can only be those elements whose own strength and bargaining power is derived from the strength of Pakistan, not India. If there is no Pakistan, those who created it out of thin air will begin to look like small, obdurate men who were unable to stop living in the past, in another century and world. Even worse, those who are now trying to sustain it with the garb of jihad will show up for what they really are: uncivilised men fit to rule in an ignorant 15th century, not in an aware 21st. That will be a body blow from which recovery will be almost impossible and further decline precipitous.

It is evidently this group that has the ears of the present leadership of the Congress that has virtually no connect with India. It seems to have successfully managed to sell to it the story that if it does anything to weaken Pakistan, it will lose the votes of Indian Muslims. Conversely, Muslim votes - and electoral victory - can be its for the asking only if it props and helps hold together a Pakistan on the brink of collapse, no matter that it will mean shedding even more Indian blood to the ideology that is programmed to keep drawing it till its last breath. This group has also apparently convinced the leadership that Hindu votes and sentiments are irrelevant if they can be kept divided, that Hindu right is poisonous and that the only antidote to it is Muslim votes that can be delivered to it en bloc. For a 'small' price, of course.

That famous "maut ke saudagar" remark of Sonia Gandhi during the Gujarat elections of 2007, the Sachar and Ranganath Commissions, and the systematic media campaign that is attempting to psyche Indians into believing that no price is too high for gaining Pakistan's 'friendship', all appear to be a part of well-thought out election strategy prepared by the Congress think tank to ensure that it is well poised, with the help of Muslim votes, to thwart any challenge to it in the elections that are due to be held in 2014.

Had Indira Gandhi been alive today, would the TOI have dared to brazenly ask India to "Love Pakistan"? Would she have allowed Pakistan to regain its strength and will to mount and sustain the most serious and as yet unanswered challenge to India after Partition? Would she have let things come to this sorry pass where some individuals could gather the courage to even suggest that votes of some Indians could be ensured only if they were routed via Pakistan?

Something has gone seriously wrong somewhere. India's leaders after Indira have paid scant attention to an increasingly dangerous Pakistan and harmless-looking insects who are actually termites furiously at work below the surface. India has paid and is paying the price for this failure. And, as things stand now, it looks as if the scenario will get far worse before it begins to get any better. Be prepared for much bigger shocks in the build-up to elections 2014. A wave has to be generated. No matter what it takes.

Picture source: The Times of India
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Related reading:
1. A year after 26/11, calls for a strong Pakistan
2. Don't " beggar-my-buggering-neighbour"; strengthen him
3. Akbar turns Jinnah, asks for a Muslim state
4. Musharraf's shockers on terror, Kashmir and Indian Muslims

AFTER THE NADIR, A RAY OF LIGHT

How many of us have noticed the stark difference in the reaction of the media and intelligentsia to two recent developments of great import, one of which we should be proud and the other that should shame us? It will not a surprise if the answer to this question is another question: which ones? Even after the answer is known don't be surprised if many believe that the good development is actually bad and the really bad one, good.

What has happened in Andhra Pradesh is something that should shame us all, no? The sordid drama that turned one people into foes overnight because of the manner in which the separation of Telangana was announced at midnight, should have had the media out screaming. Who does not know that the whole charade was the direct result of the manner in which YSR Reddy, according to reports, enriched himself and his family beyond all proportions in just five years, turned much of the rest of the political class into plunderers and royally ignored Telangana leader and ally CS Rao?

Not only were most media mega stars were afraid to even whisper this bitter and damning truth, the usual suspects also overnight started selling to India the idea that there is great merit is having smaller states on all kinds of specious and often blatantly dishonest grounds. All that just to make the unprecedented plunder of Andhra look good and keep the Congress High Command unsullied. No conscience, no honesty, no nation.

Had it not been for the unbelievably foolish Shekhar Gupta, the real ugly underbelly of India's rulers, plunderers as he proudly called them only to make the division of Andhra lucrative for those who will suffer huge financial losses, would not have been so starkly revealed. In the process, he also unwittingly destroyed the credibility of sections of the media and exposed its complicity in keeping a lid on something that should have rudely woken Indians up and made them realise that their nation was in very wrong hands indeed. Remember how Bangaru Laxman was hounded by Tehelka and the rest of the media for taking Rs 1 lakh? YSR Reddy reportedly plundered close to a mind-boggling Rs 1 lakh crore, but there is praise for his dynamism! Do you think that would have happened had YSR not been protected, promoted and 'blessed'?

Coming to the second development; what do you think would have been the response if it had been thought up by someone but announced in the name of Rahul Gandhi? Tearing headlines, fawning TV studio discussions and relentless, saturated coverage to project how this original thinking signified the real change of guard, the arrival of the youth and the new direction that India's stagnating and failing democracy sorely needed.

Unfortunately for those who breathe not for India but their own little nests and empires, the man who has thought of one step that has the potential to set right some unacceptably enervating ills of India's democracy, is someone who is hated to death by them. Why is he so utterly unacceptable? Gujarat 2002, they will say in chorus, forgetting conveniently what one foolish decision, with no deaths involved, has done to one people with no history of animosity, much less sub-terranean tensions born out of many past riots and killings. That is only a - and the only - convenient chink through which they want to make a fatal penetration and fell him. Why? He poses the gravest threat to the comfort of status quo and the rot of corruption and nepotism that has enabled them to amass riches, power and titles and rise to levels that Laurence Peter never could have imagined people like them would when he propounded his famous principle.

Narendra Modi has stunned everyone by making voting compulsory in municipal corporations, municipalities and panchayats in Gujarat. Along with it, he has also given the voter the much-needed power to cast a negative vote and reject all candidates. This move, believes Modi, with great justification, will bring "the voter rather than the political party centrestage"

One more crime has been committed by Modi. In India, no one else other than the 'Congress', it seems, has the right or ability to do something good for the people. Other politicians and parties, if they are opposed to the Congress that is, can do only evil either because they are communal or because they are with those who are communal. The media and the accompanying paraphernalia have a clear cut role: create a non-existent genius in Rahul Gandhi and a villain in anyone who can rock his boat.

After the elections in Maharashtra, all these guys were lamenting the apathy shown by voters, particularly of Mumbai, and bemoaning the fact that some of those who shout the loudest in TV studios had mentally seceded from India. In hindsight, does it not appear absolutely elementary that someone should have thought of doing something about increasing voter participation, to get people fully involved in the electoral process? Should not people have been worried about this failed model of democracy, even when the PM himself had sounded the warning bell?

But, no one had the time, much less the inclination. They were, as always, having a good time and doing little more than waiting for their solitary fountain of wisdom to say or do something that they could applaud, add to most imaginatively and propagate in terrific prose. Keeping Indians believing in tomorrow even as institution after institution crumbles around them is no easy task!

Now that Modi has stunned them, once again, the reactions are predictable: Modi wants to exploit the superior organisational structure of the BJP to mobilise more voters; voting is a right not a duty; voting by dictat is dangerous; it is impractical to implement it across the country that has over 800 million voters; it takes away a fundamental right; it is an infringement of individual rights etc. No one, repeat no one, can honestly fault it as a partisan move that will benefit the BJP, or any other political party, at the expense of another. No one wants to mention the fact that 32 countries, including Italy, have already made voting compulsory. No one can question the intrinsic merit of the proposal but hardly any one with a reach is willing to risk his/her future and applaud it.

Why did only Modi think of it and give it shape too in such a short time? How did he, a Hindi/Gujarati-speaking guy from a humble background, once again manage to keep many feet ahead of the many Ivy League stars who adorn the Congress, and make them look like less than ordinary mortals, even midgets? As I have already written earlier, it is primarily because he is has no family to promote and is selflessly committed to Gujarat and India. He has a clear vision and is possessed by the belief that India can do much, much better than its leaders have allowed it to till now. And he has already demonstrated that it can be done even within the existing system that others have only exploited and then conveniently blamed, by tuning it to deliver. He is also scrupulously honest and leads a spartan life. But as Chief Minister, he is working with single-minded devotion to ensure that Gujaratis become rich and Gujarat becomes better than the best in the world.

Such men can do what has so far remained undo-able. Such men can awaken opiated masses who have not been allowed to shed their raja-praja mindsets that makes them accept plundering by 'royals' as their divine right and their own miserable fate as divine retribution. Such men are poison for those who have become plunderers, big and small, of their own land.

That is why, no matter how much India may need such men, the feudalistic elite who have taken over this country and the dynasties who have grotesquely twisted democracy to further their family businesses, will gang up against them to protect and further their own interests. That is why what should have shamed India is being covered up, justified and even obliquely praised. That is why what should have been welcomed as a positive, even if small, step to rid India's democracy and politics of the filth that has come to dominate it, is either being ignored or criticised.

But, there is hope yet. If Shekhar Gupta created a new Nadir by celebrating the plunder of India by its Indian rulers, Narendra Modi has re-kindled hope, fearless of the treacherous minefield in which he has been put. He has shown that there still are Indians out there whose hearts genuinely beat for the ordinary Indian waiting still for freedom to reach his doorstep; there still are Indians who have the strength, fire and moral courage to stand apart and away from those who have lost sight of their sacred duty to the suffering millions who have given them power with trust and hope. The spirit with which our forefathers fought to free us of yoke has not been snuffed out completely.

A ray of light is visible in the dark cave.
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Related reading:
1. Will Modi accomplish his 'Mission Impossible'?
2. Politics and media: a new Nadir
3. The Telangana domino: time to transcend parties, talk India
4. Covering up the mother of all corruption scandals
5. Wake Up...
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POLITICS AND MEDIA: A NEW NADIR

Like conquerors of the past, India’s politicians love to rule, and plunder cities... In older times, cities attracted conquering hordes who wanted to sack them for their riches. Now, in democracies, the political class knows that while their votes lie in the countryside, the real money sits in the cities and their real estate.

If the new Andhra can get over the loss of Hyderabad, use what it gets in compensation and its own enterprise to build a new capital city...its politicians will figure soon enough that the money-making opportunity a new city offers is much greater than an old metro nearing saturation, howsoever energetic.

Can you think of a more shocking, immoral and sickening call to make the 'people' of emaciated Andhra Pradesh accept a decision that will have disastrous long-term consequences for India? Can you swallow the casual manner in which this gentleman has, with pride almost, spoken about the nadir that democracy has touched in this country?

How will you react when you get to know that this call, this 'indecent proposal', has been made not by an anonymous analyst or a lowly reporter paid to write these words, but by someone who is at the very top of the media pyramid and has deep tentacles inside the top leadership of the Congress and other political parties? Will you ever believe again that the media is our watchdog and not the pet dog of the plunderers?

A state that consists of people of "the same caste mix, same ethnicity, culture and so on", and language, is being split primarily due to fatal mistakes made by 10 Janpath that have made people of as homogeneous a mix as one can get in a state, enemies overnight. But that does not agitate this media luminary at all. He manifestly has a brief which he will not exceed, no matter what. That is why the people of Andhra do not figure anywhere in this argument. His sole job is to convince plunderers to part with the jewel that they have pocketed in the last five years. The promise is that they will not only be given more than ample "compensation" by bigger plunderers sitting in Delhi, but will also be able to plunder much more than they have been able to in Hyderabad. Don't be surprised if this carrot results in a demand for not one but two new states; two new cities to plunder.

Let us wake up and understand at least now that the call and the capitulation for a separate Telangana have nothing to do with the people who are celebrating there and those who are protesting in Coastal Andhra and Rayalseema. Had it been so, this gentleman would not have been, without any shame, publicly celebrating the plunder of India, not by alien conquerors who have long gone, but by leaders chosen by the people through the much celebrated process of "free and fair" elections.

He has something more to say to entice them to accept the division of Andhra: the second largest hydrocarbon discovery in the world after Mexico, which YSR Reddy used to fuel economic growth in the coastal regions and not in the drier and poorer area of Telangana. As per him, there are "nearly $35 billion worth of under-construction irrigation projects, new ports and power plants" there while Telangana has nothing more than Hyderabad. Drool plunderers of New Andhra, you have an El Dorado waiting to be looted; dump the bare bone.

Are we getting an idea about why CS Rao really went on a hunger strike to call for separating Telangana from Andhra? If reports are correct, the greatest plunderer in the history of Andhra Pradesh, YSR Reddy, made billions in real estate in and around Hyderabad almost all alone after the 2004 elections. He could not have done it in the manner that he did had 10 Janpath not plucked CS Rao from Andhra and got him to Delhi. And YSR, like all plunderers - I am borrowing the word - of the past, only looted from Telangana. All big ticket investments, totalling nearly $ 35 billion, were made in his part of the state. Why did nobody ask that if KG basin gas can power Anil Ambani's power plant in faraway Delhi, what was YSR's difficulty in locating major gas-based projects in neglected Telangana?

Now that YSR is dead, CS Rao has forced 10 Janpath to let him claim his share of the plunder. The people of Telangana, who have wrongly discovered the messiah in him, have compelled Sonia Gandhi to, finally, look at her neglected step-child - "I am like her son" - and open the gate of fortress Hyderabad for him. YSR's 'benami' troops who had virtually taken over the city's real estate, are running for cover; their game is up, the losses huge. That is why they don't want the state to split; that is why our man is telling them that they should not worry; they will be covered for immediate losses and will also be able to plunder much more over a period of time.

India's people had lost respect for politicians long back. Over the years, they had resigned to the fact that, sterling exceptions apart, politicians were corrupt. Despite mounting evidence to the contrary, they still had some faith left in India's free media. Shekhar Gupta, editor-in-chief of one of India's leading national newspapers, Indian Express, and anchor and co-host/panelist in a number of programs on a leading TV news channel, NDTV, has, in one stroke, destroyed all illusions of separation between the two and killed hope.

Nadir Shah came from afar and became immortal for the new low he created. He did know not then that in the 21st century, Independent India would produce a new breed of home-grown plunderers who would unashamedly loot their own people. Not once, not twice, but non-stop. Even worse, they would also employ conscienceless drum-beaters who would not only celebrate this rape but encourage it.

Politics and media have surely touched a new low. What should we call this new Nadir?
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Related reading:
1. Telangana domino: time to transcend parties, talk India
2. Covering up the mother of all corruption scandals
3. Don't 'beggar-my-buggering-neighbour'; strengthen him

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DON'T 'BEGGAR-MY-BUGGERING-NEIGHBOUR', MAKE HIM BIGGER

Recently, when visuals of a few people celebrating someone's election victory in Rohtak were shown on NDTV, Shekhar Gupta remarked that they, his Haryanvi brothers, were celebrating "just because someone had won!"

That typical remark solved one mystery for me. I used to wonder how a man of Shekhar Gupta's immense experience and reach could write something as ridiculous as he sometimes does. Now I know. This man from Haryana also sometimes says things "just because someone has said so!"

A few months back, he attempted to 'educate' professionals who are in the know of the state of India's military strength and preparedness. He informed them that India was a nuclear power with the fourth largest standing army in the world, and that a resurgent India was now militarily in a terrific position to take on the Chinese. Had he backed his fanciful conclusions, designed to dishonestly lull the nation into complacency, with hard data, one would have believed that he, a journalist, had at least some rudimentary knowledge and understanding of the subject. But, not surprisingly at all, all he spoke about were some old stories, Lata's song, a movie about the 1962 debacle and the skirmishes between India and China in 1967! On the basis of that utter nonsense, he concluded - as he might have been asked to by ossified and ignorant minds in the government and the bureaucracy - that all was well on the Chinese front, and asked those in the military to stop being 'defeatist', stop fighting the 1962 war, stop panic-mongering and "stand down" .

Manifestly, as far as Shekhar Gupta and his educators are concerned, the Indian Army is telling lies when it says that it is so badly under equipped that it cannot fight and win a war; the Air Force is exaggerating when it informs the nation that it is no match for China, and that the balance of air power is worse than it was in 1962; the Navy is misleading the nation when it bemoans the fact that the Chinese have gone far, far ahead, and that we have neither the capability nor the intention to match them force for force; international experts are being being needlessly alarmist when they say that Pakistan has more nuclear weapons than India - and better delivery systems, I may add.

Last month, Gupta went many mindless steps further. He actually said that Pakistan winning its war on terror is in India's "supreme national interest!" If that was not bad enough, he went on to say that India must make "moves, offers, anything that will enhance the power and credibility" of Pakistan's government.

In his latest article in the India Express of December 05, 2009, he has gone even further to say that every dollar spent by the US in strengthening Pakistan's democratic elite "is a million invested in our future." To make this and other illogical deductions designed to ensure that India does nothing at all to strengthen itself, he has seized upon the broad statement of intent of Obama to begin withdrawal of troops from Afghanistan 18 months from now, and quoted Jay Leno! to make the US President and the military look like bums who should be taking lessons in strategy from the deaf, dumb and blind men who rule India.

Gupta talks of India's "foreign-strategic policy" doctrine objective of establishing "India's pre-eminence in its immediate neighborhood." Needless to add that in that map put up by bureaucrats in the MEA and MOD, China does not figure at all in India's immediate neighbourhood, despite a 4,000 km long disputed border. As far as they are concerned, it does not exist. But what about Pakistan, the object of obsession of their petrified minds? How do they, through Gupta, suggest that India should build the strength to "restore" that never achieved, even attempted, pre-eminence after the Americans leave? You got it: strengthen not India but Pakistan!

Gupta is happy to let India remain militarily so weak that it never develops "the traction" to do what it should have done long back in its supreme national interest. As per him, India should forget about the history of the last six decades and pretend that Pakistan's military, its ISI and the LeT either do not exist or will be magically turned into angels by a feudal Pakistani "democratic" elite that, thanks to India's support, will miraculously become powerful enough to dump jihadi terrorism, tear up school text books that preach nothing but hatred for India and re-discover in India the brother that it had violently dumped on the basis of a politico-religious ideology that has only become more extreme and violent in the last 63 years. All that India will have to do is give fatal concessions on Kashmir since it runs in the blood of Pakistanis and no Pakistani leader can survive without it. Simple! Remember Shimla 1972?

In the fifties, Nehru thought that India's foreign-strategic policy objectives (if there were any, that is) would be best served by strengthening not India but the socialist regime in China. We all know how enormously China benefitted from that panchsheel disaster. One would have expected that China would have taught India's political leaders and its babus, the ones who have colluded to keep India weak and the military out of the loop, the hard lesson that national interest can only be secured by strengthening yourself and not you potential adversary, much less an adversary who has your jugular in his cross hairs.

Tragically, that has not happened. Then the magic word of the weak was socialism; now it is democracy. Then there was no one educated or informed enough in the media to expose the harm that was being done to India by that flawed argument based on criminal ignorance and arrogance. Now, there is a powerful, but pliant section of the media that is more than willing to spread that same dangerous argument because it is told to.

Says Gupta, "Beggar-my-neighbour may be a tempting thought each time a big terror attack takes place. But big, serious nations do not run a foreign policy for cheap thrills." So next time Pakistan does another "bugger-my-neighbour" act in the form of a 26/11 or a Parliament or something even more disastrous, India must meekly and quickly run to its democratic leaders and make offers so that Pakistan's democracy is strengthened; that is the shield that will best protect India. Any response that will deter Pakistan for doing what it has been for decades - democracy or military rule - will amount to "cheap thrills."

The US must listen to this, China must listen to this, the whole world must listen to this. And laugh. India must cry.

A nation that does not learn, a nation that accepts leaders, policy makers and opinion makers who do not learn, must expect to face increasingly debilitating consequences. For this continuing criminal dereliction of national interest, India will have to keep paying a heavy price. In blood. Again and again. Till it learns...
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Related Reading:
1. A year after 26/11, calls for a strong Pakistan
2. Obama and India: no room for apprehension now
3. Musharraf's shockers on terror, Kashmir and Indian Muslims