On Politics.

When I say "politics", I mean it in the broadest and loftiest possible sense of the word, not the petty machinations of lying knaves which is what it has come to mean to most people in India. A prosaic working definition could be "The process by which groups make decisions.". I will start by defining what I consider to be the "National Interest" and by 'national' I do not mean 'Indian' but more generally, the interest of whatever interconnected and interdependent human society we happen to be considering. I will outline a goal of sorts - what I think we ought to try and achieve - and then I will give my thoughts about how/why it might or might not be attained and then Ill conclude with a few remarks about India.

The Magic Carpet.

The aim should be a society which carries every member on a 'magic carpet' and does not allow any of its members to fall below a certain standard of living. This magic carpet is something that the society as a whole provides to every one of its members - each of whome contributes to its upkeep. The following ought to be guaranteed -
1> Security. Everyone should be free to conduct their lives without fear of death or material disruption. This includes protection from severe weather etc. The basic resources necessary to exist.
2> Food. Everyone should have ample access to varied and wholesome food.
3> Healthcare. Everyone should have access to medical facilities.
4> Education. Everyone should have the chance to attend university level education.
5> Opportunity and Freedom.
6> Leisure. Yes, leisure. Each and every person in society should have the time, the resources, and the security needed to indulge in leisure activities, because it is from these that human happiness most often flows. Everyone should have time in which they are free to do whatever they like, it is such activity that most often leads to the breakthroughs that take our civilization forward.

Is it Possible ?

From a purely engineering point of view, the answer would be a definite Yes. The resources and the technology needed to bring this about exist. I might even go so far as to say, it has been technically possible for a long time now. The real problem is an economic one - How to allocate resources and lay down norms to create and sustain this sort of system. An ideal society has many other characteristics of course, like sustainability, but we will not go into those at the moment.

The State.

The state is the agent through which a society carries out its collective responsibilities (such as security, health, education, law and order etc) and regulates itself. For example, if a society collectively decides that "stealing is bad, and those who steal must be put in prison", then it is the responsibility of the state to conceive and enforce this law. This is of course, in theory. In reality, the state - whatever its origins, history or ideology - consists of a ruling elite which looks after its own interests rather than those of the society it rules. Laws in this situation, are a tool to manipulate and regulate society in order to enable the ruling elite to pursue their aims. All too often, their interests are divergent from the interests of the society, and this is illustrated by human history which is filled with rich aristocrats ruling for millennia over impoverished and helpless populations.

Again and again, civilizations and societies have come to grief because the short term interests of the elite did not coincide with the long term interests of the people. Again and again, the existence of an unchallenged ruling elite has inevitably led to suffering, poverty and eventually, to collapse. This is precisely the issue that Democracy attempts to address. By making the ruling class dependent on the people to continue in power, it forces the elite to factor into its calculations the interests of the masses. If the elite wants to continue to rule, they must be seen to be looking after the interests of the majority of the population. A fairly good solution one might say, though of course, whether the elite is taking care of the long term interests of the society or not is entirely a dependent on how demanding and perceptive the masses are. Which also seems fair, they get what they deserve. There are many other institutions that a democracy needs in order to function, but those will be considered to be implicit when we use the word 'democracy'.

The subversion of Democracy

As one can see, for a democracy to function - i.e. for the ruling elite to feel the imperative need to look after the interests of the masses - there needs to be choice. There needs to be an option that the people can vote for, an alternate set of people who promise and can deliver what the current ruling elite have failed to do. And if such an alternative does not exist, then a democracy (a good one) provides people with every reason to jump into the fray and provide the alternative themselves. This is crucial - for a democracy to be properly functional, common people should be able to contest elections and provide the alternative to the ruling elite that has not delivered. It is here that most large democracies - and especially India - fail.

The bane of Indian Democracy is the rise of a political class with very high barriers of entry implemented through a multi-layered system. Basic neccessities of Indian politics such as vast quantities of (black) money, availability of street muscle and so on, ensure that the vast majority of Indians cannot venture into politics. Thus, the Indian political elite remains - to a large extent - unchallenged. They swap power among themselves, and the elections are bitterly contested, but they all belong to a class who have broadly common interests. None of them want an enlightened, educated and empowered population. None of them want fair and effective law enforcement agencies or an efficient judiciary. None of them are interested in cracking down on organized crime, enforcing financial laws or cleaning up hooligans from the street. All for the simple reason that even though these things are obviously desirable for society at large, they are not in the interest of the Indian ruling elite and it is these interests which the Indian state - as of now - most closely defends and promotes.

Fundamentally, the Indian political class is not interested in removing the socio-economic conditions that ail our people and cripple our country. And they can get away with it because they have ensured - as a collective - that Indian Democracy cannot throw up a credible alternative that better looks after the interests of its people. Thus, it is the high barriers for entry into politics that most subvert our democracy. They maintain their power in the crudest possible manner, by beating up the new comer who dares to stand for election, by threatening his family, by buying him out. And anyone who 'makes it' in indian politics, is forced by the political class to become one of them - he needs the hooligans, he needs the money, and thus, he needs the political class and cannot rebel.

To sum it up -

Low barrier for entry into politics => Choice => state protecting interests of the people and a mature evolving functional democracy => evolution towards a better society with less suffering and more enlightenment and peace, thus freeing up more resources for endeavors of vision and courage such as the exploration of space, the quest for longevity and the search for truth and meaning.

To hell with News !

Because this is the sort of news that is dished out even by the BBC - the best of a sickeningly bad lot. What have we come to ? is this really the sort of thing that the public care about or want to read ? Why does making money have to mean that only the most stupid crass, gross and sickening things get printed ? Im through with this. Im done with mass media and conventional ideas of culture and entertainment. It makes me angry and sad. how did things come to this ? bombs, death, fun, murder, sex, lust, consumption consumption and god. I hate the whole lot.

The Opportunity for a New Rennaissance

Image Source BBC

A Soyuz rocket leaves the Bainkour Cosmodrome to take a new crew to the ISS, representing the greatest achievement of our species and all that is good in it. It is symptomatic of a remnant of the pioneering spirit that has led us to the domination of our biosphere and made us the most successful species (in terms of complexity and versatility) that our planet has ever seen. It is no mean achievement, and many times in our past we might have become extinct had it not been for some fortuitous circumstances coupled with our own ingenuity. What has distinguished us from all other species goes beyond what we label "intelligence". It is not merely the capacity to process information and manipulate the environment with our opposable-thumb-equipped appendages, but the desire and the drive to learn and explore and stick our neck out, that has set us apart.

In the past the great expansions of our species and the great migrations (including recent ones like the American conquest of the wild west and the Russian conquest of Siberia and the far east) have been driven by economic factors - a thirst for resources and food, driven by the people at the bottom of the pyramid, who had the least to lose and most to gain from taking risk and braving the dangers of the unknown. The rich might finance the discoveries and administer the empires, but it is always the poor who actually make the land their own and make it productive, and provide the expendable numbers who die and reproduce to push ever further the boundaries of the domain of mankind.

We already dominate the land masses of our planet, and we are fast stripping them bare and the unsustainable nature of our civilization is making itself obvious to even the most obtuse among us. Millions of our fellow men go hungry because we just cant be bothered about feeding them, our civilization has insulated most of us from human suffering and has insidiously sucked us into a vortex of shallow entertainment to the point where we are perpetually bored. This is a result of the complete lack of opportunity for worthy exploration and meaningful risk in our societies today. The only risks we take - in mountains and rivers and jungles - are for our entertainment and pleasure. Perhaps today, even when so many of us have so much leisure and vast resources and knowledge bases at our command, the number of explorers and pioneers as a percentage of the population is at an all time low. And so our kids do drugs and play video games and preach jihad when they should be picking up the skills that will stand by them on some worthy task.

The reasons for this web of interrelated problems lie in the fact that our species is at a crucial point in its history, we are at the base of a great leap, one that we cannot break up into manageable hops and cannot hope to take in the natural course of events - because, the next phase in the expansion of our species must play out in the vastness of space and the depths of the ocean. It is not possible for individuals or small groups to participate in this,without heavy investment from the defining institutions - nation states - of our era. The very nature of the challenges we face is such that they require us to act together as a species rather than as a collection of random individuals, and so far, we have shown ourselves to be quite incapable of doing anything of the sort. We have been vacillating for decades if not centuries, bickering and butchering, we have become soft and feeble minded. The lives of men - and any meaning that might be found in them - are determined by the quality of the ideals and utopias they choose to pursue, and we have spent too much of recent history in the bloody and perfidious pursuit of narrow, contradictory and stunted ideas. Men need worthy challenges and dangers to bring out what is best in them, men need impossible odds and mighty causes to bind them together and it is up to our leaders, who are in the privileged position of being able to allocate the truly vast resources brought together by our civilization to give mankind the chance to galvanize itself, to sally forth into the unknown and conquer and toil and set up new worlds.

The conquest of the oceans and of the solar system will provide inspiration to a disillusioned race, it will revitalize the population, it will provide chances for the risk takers to seek fortune and the the frustrated to redeem themselves, it will be the most splendid stage men will have ever had to cover themselves with glory. It will distract the devout among us from the rantings of priests and save the skeptical from the blatherings of politicians, it will force the greedy to be brave and the offer the bored a chance to be audacious, Men will see vistas and wonders hitherto unimaginable, and that is why we live is it not - to go further, venture deeper, learn more than ever before ! What can be more pointless than stagnation and the pursuit of money and riches without tying it into exploration and knowledge ? what can be more boring than living exactly like our forefathers, seeing only what they have seen (now polluted, and on a computer screen), what can be more sad than young men looking for adventure in computer generated illusions !

It is time mankind dared to live and dream again. It is time we realized, as our faraway ancestors did, that our species and the pursuit of knowledge and the exploration of the unknown are things glorious and magnificent enough to die for. The physical and psychological challenges of space and the deep ocean await us, we must accept them, we must live again !

At least Google has them figured out.

Kashmir and beyond : Further Thoughts

In my last post (Kashmir : Give them Azadi) the implicit assumption I had made was that the entire Jammy division was predominantly Hindu and would thus stay with India. As the map above indicates (if it is accurate), this is not the case. This changes several things since this means that the section of Jammu that is likely to stay with India unequivocally is not contiguous to Ladakh (in which sector India will not have any problems winning any plebiscite) making the strategic cost of giving all the Muslim parts of Kashmir azadi a lot higher, and making it very very difficult to contain anti-India activities (should there be any, and as I have indicated previously, we must expect the worst) in Himachal, Jammu and Ladakh. Also, this leaves Ladakh very exposed indeed, since it will then be precariously placed between 2 hostile powers, with only one road connecting it to India (the Manali-Leh highway) which is open only 2 months or so in a year. In the case of large scale aggression, the defence of Ladakh will be untenable.

Of course, it is possible that the Muslims of the Jammu division will not want to be part of a new state dominated by the Kashmiri's of the Valley (and such a split was indeed indicated in the participation of Muslims in the recent protests in Jammu). If this is indeed the case, then my analysis of the previous post holds. There is of course a third possibility - we hold on to the whole of Jammu division regardless of how it votes, but that rather defeats the purpose of the whole exercise I think. However, as the map below indicates (IF it is correct), the Muslim parts of Jammu division share a common language and culture with the Valley, so the reports of Muslim participation in the protests in Jammu likely referred to the Indian Muslims living in Jammu the city and surrounding areas.


This does severely restrict the possibilities that India has in terms of granting Independence. I am inclined to view these maps with scepticism however, since they originate from a site that seems Pakistani, and both the maps just might have a certain amount of disinformation built in. (It is however, a fascinating site with lots of geographical information about Kashmir and the surrounding region and detailed survey maps)

The more I read about the tensions and conflicts in our neighborhood and beyond, the more convinced I am that India needs to scale up its military in a significant way, the debilitating shortage of officers in the Army and pilots in the Air Force is shameful, and the Govt. of India must take urgent steps to rectify these circumstances. Also, a blue water navy, AWACS and in Flight Refueling systems to increase the range of our aircraft are necessary if we are to harbor hopes of power projection into the heart of the Eurasian landmass. Kashmir is the closest modern India has ever been to this region, and Indira Col above the Siachen glacier is the magnificent watershed between the Indian Subcontinent and Central Asia. We have spent a lot of blood and money on being there, and handing it to anyone on a platter is hardly an option.

I am thinking in terms of "empire" of course (Arundhati Roy would be very angry indeed), and in many ways that is not helpful, but one has to appreciate the fact that there are places which from time immemorial have been points where races, cultures and peoples (which organize themselves into Empires ) have crashed into each other. Never in history has the Himalaya been straddled by a kingdom, never has the Gangetic plain and Tibetan plateau been part of the same nation. Never has India broken through the Northern wall that isolates us, this is the nearest we have ever come - at Indira Col. Will an Indian force ever control lands on either side of that dramatic, beautiful and immensely powerful geographic laxman rekha ? Not in the forseeable future. But we are making progress - there will soon be a fully functional IAF base in Tajikistan at Ayni,/Farkhor which is 2 km from the Afghan border, not very far from the Wakhan corridor and Pakistan, and if we can maintian good relations with Russia (which is not a given any more, after the fracas about the Admiral Gorshkov and our current affair with America) more can follow.

How many ironies History throws up ! Once upon a time the Wakhan corridor was given to Afghanistan by the British to create a buffer between the ever expanding Russian Empire and Britains Indian possessions. The British fears of a Russian invasion of Afghanistan (which prompted the Brits to fight 2 disastrous wars in Afghanistan themselves) in order to threaten the greatest colonial prize of them all - India - never materialized as long the British were here. When the Soviets (Russians by any other name..) did invade, it was the Americans who were most worried, because they had interests in Iranian oil, so they financed and helped (through Saudi intermediaries - Osama) a Tajik warlord - Ahemed Shah Massoud to make the war too expensive for the Soviets who ultimately withdrew after suffering heavy losses. In this process they used Pakistan (formerly a part of British India) to create and train the Islamic army of brainwashed irregulars, who later went out of control and overran Afghanistan. When America wanted to go after these guys because they were hiding Osama (who after 9/11 was Public enemy No. 1), the Americans turned to - guess who - Ahemed Shah Massoud, relying heavily on Russian(!) and Indian support to equip and train the Northern Alliance of warlords which eventually overthrew the Taliban. Through this, India finally got a foothold in Afghanistan, and opened a military hospital in Farkhor on the Tajik-Afghan border (with blessings from Russia of course). When Al Queida (formed by Massoud's former comrades in arms) managed to attack the Lion of Panjshir, the hero of the war against the Soviets, using a bomb concealed in a camera taken by 2 chaps posing as western journalists, he was rushed to the foreign medical hospital in a former Soviet country and breathed his last tended by Indian doctors.

Central Asia is extremely energy rich (alone reason enough to go there), provides access to immense resources and trade routes, is a reasonable sized market, has vast spaces for Indians to settle on, and is important for our security - if we are in a position strong enough to open a Western front on Pakistan, they will never attack us. However, if India is to have a realistic chance of breaking out of the subcontinent in terms of influence and economic reach we must find a way to stabilize Kashmir and consolidate our military presence there in terms of large, long range, sophisticated airbases and eventually, we must open the ancient trade routes to central Asia, and we can only do this if we are in a position of overwhelming strength which we will never be unless there is Peace in Kashmir. Apart from Kashmir, India needs to settle the fires that rage through it before thinking of exerting its influence overseas. Naxalism and the closely related phenomenon of alienation of poor rural and tribal communities, infrastructure development and a subtle but implacable nationalism achieved through a vigorous and positive campaign to engage and integrate the minorities into the mainstream. Carefuly chosen infrastructure projects and wise investments in heavy industry and careful nurturing of the agricultural sector to preserve social cohesion in rural India are all vital to ensure that India grows out of the "sub" and takes its rightful place on its continent and the world.

Image sources : Blank on the map, Maplandia

Kashmir : Give them Azadi

Thats not as radical as it sounds. You see, "Kashmir" is only a very small part of the Indian state of Jammu and Kashmir. For the uninitiated, J&K consists of 3 major regions - Jammu, the Vale of Kashmir and Ladakh. Ladakh is culturally close to Tibet and is largely Buddhist, while Jammu is very like Punjab. In any plebiscite, these 2 regions will certainly vote overwhelmingly to stay with India. The Valley of Kashmir which is quite small in area but has a large population which is now overwhelmingly muslim (after the Kashmiri Pundits (400,000 of them) were systematically massacred and forced out in the early 1990s) will almost certainly vote for Azadi or union with Pakistan.

Let them go.

The major objections to such a move are strategic and not ideological or value based. One of the 2 highways that goes to Ladakh passes through Srinagar (the other being the Manali-Leh route) and is as such a vital road to keep Leh and the Siachen Glacier supplied. Ladakh is contiguous with the Aksai Chin region occupied by China and is a theatre where the Chinese have been making repeated incursions and provocative moves in the recent past. This means that keeping Ladakh well armed and supplied is vital.

Secondly, once the Valley of Kashmir is free (and if they remain free, I respect them and wish them well) or a part of Pakistan (in which case they will have made a mistake, and it'll serve them right !) one must expect that it will become a hotbed of terrorism and anti-India activity. Therefore, we must ensure that all around the Valley of Kashmir we control the passes and the heights. Our armed forces must be in complete control of the borders before any independence is given, and must oversee the opening of the borders with Pakistan (if that is to happen) in an orderly fashion. Most important of all, we must spend years (maybe a decade or more) developing an alternate route to Ladakh through the harsh terrain of the trans Himalayan ranges that avoids the Kashmir Valley altogether. We could also take this opportunity to strenghten the road and military infrastructure along the border with China in that region.


India can only gain from this arrangement. The land area we are giving up is small (though beautiful, fertile and heavily populated), and through careful preparation it might be possible to keep the strategic disadvantage to a minimum. Kashmir is a huge drain on our resources, financial and military. India spends 10 times more per capita on Kashmir than on any other state (excluding military budgets, this is simply aid from the Union budgets) and the social indicators in Kashmir are among the best in the country. For years, India has sunk billions and billions of dollars into the beautiful black hole that is the Vale of Kashmir and it will remove a huge burden on the exchequer once it is off our hands. Not to mention the fact that something like 200,000 troops will be free to go home, rest and redeploy in more useful places like the Bangladesh and China borders, our capacity to face bullying from China will increase manyfold.

Besides, what more can we do ? I think I am right in saying that Indians do not see themselves as imperial occupiers, we do not want to be imperial occupiers. India wanted Kashmir to be a happy prosperous and peaceful part of the Union. India was willing to give special privileges (as we have, in many cases being unjust to Ladakh and Jammu, and that anger is now boiling over) and infinite amounts of money. The classic case of the beggar giving away his bread to win hearts and minds. And yet, and yet it remains a dangerous place for our soldiers and policemen, it remains a place where security forces regularly have to fire on protesters, where Hindu and Sikh communities in remote mountain villages where they have lived for centuries are massacred, where the population justifiably feels repressed and humiliated by a huge military presence that dominates their daily lives. We can do no more, its time to accept defeat, strengthen our hand strategically for the post Kashmiri independence situation, and get rid of the issue.


Maybe things will work out, maybe they will manage themselves well and Indian tourists will flock to Paradise on earth, but we must prepare for the worst and expect that they will find more reasons to attack our country and murder our citizens. We must give them freedom, and we must ensure that they cannot harm us once they are free. Kashmir is a disgrace to India, we are an occupying force, our soldiers kill and die there every day, they hate us, they celebrate 15 August as a black day, they wish us death and sing odes to Pakistan (of all the messed up places !) - why should we spend our money (and we are a desperately poor country) and the lives of our soldiers on them ? What do we gain ? Hate and international embarrassment and frustration. Its just not worth it.

Let the Valley of Kashmir go its own way. India has more pressing matters to attend to.

Image sources : Wikipedia, BBCnews