Death of Elites - Ironies

In the final count, politics, every single day, is killing, impoverishing, starving, denigrating, millions of Indians all across the country. If the backdrop were not so heartbreaking, the spectacle of the nation’s elite — the keepers of most of our wealth and privilege — frothing on television screens and screaming through mobile phones would be amusing. They have been outraged because the enduring tragedy of India has suddenly arrived in their marbled precincts. The Taj, the Oberoi. We dine here. We sleep here. Is nothing sacrosanct in this country any more?

 

What the Indian elite is discovering today on the debris of fancy eateries is an acidic truth large numbers of ordinary Indians are forced to swallow every day. Children who die of malnutrition, farmers who commit suicide, dalits who are raped and massacred, tribals who are turfed out of centuryold habitats, peasants whose lands are taken over for car factories, minorities who are bludgeoned into paranoia — these, and many others, know that something is grossly wrong. The system does not work, the system is cruel, the system is unjust, the system exists to only serve those who run it. Crucially, what we, the elite, need to understand is that most of us are complicit in the system. In fact, chances are the more we have — of privilege and money — the more invested we are in the shoring up of an unfair state.

 

IT IS time each one of us understood that at the heart of every society is its politics. If the politics is third-rate, the condition of the society will be no better. For too many decades now, the elite of India has washed its hands off the country’s politics. Entire generations have grown up viewing it as a distasteful activity. In an astonishing perversion, the finest imaginative act of the last thousand years on the subcontinent, the creation and flowering of the idea of modern India through mass politics, has for the last 40 years been rendered infra dig, déclassé, uncool. Let us blame our parents, and let our children blame us, for not bequeathing onwards the sheer beauty of a collective vision, collective will, and collective action. In a word, politics: which, at its best, created the wonder of a liberal and democratic idea, and at its worst threatens to tear it down.

 

We stand faulted then in two ways. For turning our back on the collective endeavour; and for our passive embrace of the status quo. This is in equal parts due to selfish instinct and to shallow thinking. Since shining India is basically only about us getting an even greater share of the pie, we have been happy to buy its half-truths, and look away from the rest of the sordid story. Like all elites, historically, that have presided over the decline of their societies, we focus too much of our energy on acquiring and consuming, and too little on thinking and decoding. Egged on by a helium media, we exhaust ourselves through paroxysms over vacant celebrities and trivia, quite happy not to see what might cause us discomfort.

 

For years, it has been evident that we are a society being systematically hollowed out by inequality, corruption, bigotry and lack of justice. The planks of public discourse have increasingly been divisive, widening the faultlines of caste, language, religion, class, community and region. As the elite of the most complex society in the world, we have failed to see that we are ratcheted into an intricate framework, full of causal links, where one wrong word begets another, one horrific event leads to another. Where one man’s misery will eventually trigger another’s.

 

Let’s track one causal chain.

The Congress creates Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale to neutralise the Akalis; Bhindranwale creates terrorism; Indira Gandhi moves against terrorism; terrorism assassinates Indira Gandhi; blameless Sikhs are slaughtered in Delhi; in the course of a decade, numberless innocents, militants, and securitymen die. Let’s track another.

The BJP takes out an inflammatory rath yatra; inflamed kar sewaks pull down the Babri Masjid; riots ensue; vengeful Muslims trigger Mumbai blasts; 10 years later a bogey of kar sewaks is burnt in Gujarat; in the next week 2,000 Muslims are slaughtered; six years later retaliatory violence continues.

Let’s track one more.

In the early 1940s, in the midst of the freedom movement, patrician Muslims demand a separate homeland; Mahatma Gandhi opposes it; the British support it; Partition ensues; a million people are slaughtered; four wars follow; two countries drain each other through rhetoric and poison; nuclear arsenals are built; hotels in India and Pakistan are attacked.

 

IN EACH of these rough causal chains, there is one thing in common. Their origin in the decisions of the elite. Interlaced with numberless lines of potential divisiveness, the India framework is highly delicate and complicated. It is critical for the elite to understand the framework, and its role in it. The elite has its hands on the levers of capital, influence and privilege. It can fix the framework. It has much to give, and it must give generously. The mass, with nothing in its hands, nothing to give, can out of frustration and anger, only pull it all down. And when the volcano blows, rich and poor burn alike.

 

And so what should we be doing? Well, screaming at politicians is certainly not political engagement. And airy socialites demanding the carpet-bombing of Pakistan and the boycott of taxes are plain absurd, just another neon sign advertising shallow thought. It’s the kind of dumb public theatre the media ought to deftly side-step rather than showcase. The world is already over-shrill with animus: we need to tone it down, not add to it. Pakistan is itself badly damaged by the flawed politics at its heart. It needs help, not bombing. Just remember, when hardboiled bureaucrats clench their teeth, little children die.

 

Most of the shouting of the last few days is little more than personal catharsis through public venting. The fact is the politician has been doing what we have been doing, and as an über Indian he has been doing it much better. Watching out for himself, cornering maximum resource, and turning away from the challenge of the greater good.

 

The first thing we need to do is to square up to the truth. Acknow ledge the fact that we have made a fair shambles of the project of nation-building. Fifty million Indians doing well does not for a great India make, given that 500 million are grovelling to survive. Sixty years after independence, it can safely be said that India’s political leadership — and the nation’s elite — have badly let down the country’s dispossessed and wretched. If you care to look, India today is heartbreak hotel, where infants die like flies, and equal opportunity is a cruel mirage.

 

Let’s be clear we are not in a crisis because the Taj hotel was gutted. We are in a crisis because six years after 2,000 Muslims were slaughtered in Gujarat there is still no sign of justice. This is the second thing the elite need to understand — after the obscenity of gross inequality. The plinth of every society — since the beginning of Man — has been set on the notion of justice. You cannot light candles for just those of your class and creed. You have to strike a blow for every wronged citizen.

 

And let no one tell us we need more laws. We need men to implement those that we have. Today all our institutions and processes are failing us. We have compromised each of them on their values, their robustness, their vision and their sense of fairplay. Now, at every crucial juncture we depend on random acts of individual excellence and courage to save the day. Great systems, triumphant societies, are veined with ladders of inspiration. Electrified by those above them, men strive to do their very best. Look around. How many constables, head constables, sub-inspectors would risk their lives for the dishonest, weak men they serve, who in turn serve even more compromised masters?

 

India’s crying need is not economic tinkering or social engineering. It is a political overhaul, a political cleansing. As it once did to create a free nation, India’s elite should start getting its hands dirty so they can get a clean country.

America's Wars of Self-Destruction

Chris Hedges spent nearly two decades as a foreign correspondent in Central America, the Middle East, Africa and the Balkans. His column appears Mondays on Truthdig.

By Chris Hedges

War is a poison. It is a poison that nations and groups must at times ingest to ensure their survival. But, like any poison, it can kill you just as surely as the disease it is meant to eradicate. The poison of war courses unchecked through the body politic of the United States. We believe that because we have the capacity to wage war we have the right to wage war. We embrace the dangerous self-delusion that we are on a providential mission to save the rest of the world from itself, to implant our virtues—which we see as superior to all other virtues—on others, and that we have a right to do this by force. This belief has corrupted Republicans and Democrats alike. And if Barack Obama drinks, as it appears he will, the dark elixir of war and imperial power offered to him by the national security state, he will accelerate the downward spiral of the American empire.

Obama and those around him embrace the folly of the "war on terror." They may want to shift the emphasis of this war to Afghanistan rather than Iraq, but this is a difference in strategy, not policy. By clinging to Iraq and expanding the war in Afghanistan, the poison will continue in deadly doses. These wars of occupation are doomed to failure. We cannot afford them. The rash of home foreclosures, the mounting job losses, the collapse of banks and the financial services industry, the poverty that is ripping apart the working class, our crumbling infrastructure and the killing of hapless Afghans in wedding parties and Iraqis by our iron fragmentation bombs are neatly interwoven. These events form a perfect circle. The costly forms of death we dispense on one side of the globe are hollowing us out from the inside at home. 

The "war on terror" is an absurd war against a tactic. It posits the idea of perpetual, or what is now called "generational," war.  It has no discernable end.  There is no way to define victory. It is, in metaphysical terms, a war against evil, and evil, as any good seminarian can tell you, will always be with us. The most destructive evils, however, are not those that are externalized. The most destructive are those that are internal. These hidden evils, often defined as virtues, are unleashed by our hubris, self-delusion and ignorance. Evil masquerading as good is evil in its deadliest form. 

The decline of American empire began long before the current economic meltdown or the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. It began before the first Gulf War or Ronald Reagan. It began when we shifted, in the words of the historian Charles Maier, from an "empire of production" to an "empire of consumption." By the end of the Vietnam War, when the costs of the war ate away at Lyndon Johnson's Great Society and domestic oil production began its steady, inexorable decline, we saw our country transformed from one that primarily produced to one that primarily consumed. We started borrowing to maintain a lifestyle we could no longer afford. We began to use force, especially in the Middle East, to feed our insatiable demand for cheap oil. The years after World War II, when the United States accounted for one-third of world exports and half of the world's manufacturing, gave way to huge trade imbalances, outsourced jobs, rusting hulks of abandoned factories, stagnant wages and personal and public debts that most of us cannot repay. 

The bill is now due. America's most dangerous enemies are not Islamic radicals, but those who promote the perverted ideology of national security that, as Andrew Bacevich writes, is "our surrogate religion." If we continue to believe that we can expand our wars and go deeper into debt to maintain an unsustainable level of consumption, we will dynamite the foundations of our society.

"The Big Lies are not the pledge of tax cuts, universal health care, family values restored, or a world rendered peaceful through forceful demonstrations of American leadership," Bacevich writes in "The Limits of Power." "The Big Lies are the truths that remain unspoken: that freedom has an underside; that nations, like households, must ultimately live within their means; that history's purpose, the subject of so many confident pronouncements, remains inscrutable. Above all, there is this: Power is finite.  Politicians pass over matters such as these in silence. As a consequence, the absence of self-awareness that forms such an enduring element of the American character persists."

Those clustered around Barack Obama, from Madeline Albright to Hillary Clinton to Dennis Ross to Colin Powell, have no interest in dismantling the structure of the imperial presidency or the vast national security state. They will keep these institutions intact and seek to increase their power. We have a childish belief that Obama will magically save us from economic free fall, restore our profligate levels of consumption and resurrect our imperial power. This naïve belief is part of our disconnection with reality. The problems we face are structural. The old America is not coming back.

The corporate forces that control the state will never permit real reform. This is the Faustian bargain made between these corporate forces and the Republican and Democratic parties. We will never, under the current system, achieve energy independence. Energy independence would devastate the profits of the oil and gas industry. It would wipe out tens of billions of dollars in weapons contracts, spoil the financial health of a host of private contractors from Halliburton to Blackwater and render obsolete the existence of U.S. Central Command. 

There are groups and people who seek to do us harm. The attacks of 9-11 will not be the last acts of terrorism on American soil. But the only way to defeat terrorism is to isolate terrorists within their own societies, to mount cultural and propaganda wars, to discredit their ideas, to seek concurrence even with those defined as our enemies. Force, while a part of this battle, is rarely necessary. The 2001 attacks that roused our fury and unleashed the "war on terror" also unleashed a worldwide revulsion against al-Qaida and Islamic terrorism, including throughout the Muslim world, where I was working as a reporter at the time. If we had had the courage to be vulnerable, to build on this empathy rather than drop explosive ordinance all over the Middle East, we would be far safer and more secure today. If we had reached out for allies and partners instead of arrogantly assuming that American military power would restore our sense of invulnerability and mitigate our collective humiliation, we would have done much to defeat al-Qaida. But we did not. We demanded that all kneel before us. And in our ruthless and indiscriminate use of violence and illegal wars of occupation, we resurrected the very forces that we could, under astute leadership, have marginalized. We forgot that fighting terrorism is a war of shadows, an intelligence war, not a conventional war. We forgot that, as strong as we may be militarily, no nation, including us, can survive isolated and alone. 

The American empire, along with our wanton self-indulgence and gluttonous consumption, has come to an end. We are undergoing a period of profound economic, political and military decline. We can continue to dance to the tunes of self-delusion, circling the fire as we chant ridiculous mantras about our greatness, virtue and power, or we can face the painful reality that has engulfed us. We cannot reverse this decline. It will happen no matter what we do. But we can, if we break free from our self-delusion, dismantle our crumbling empire and the national security state with a minimum of damage to ourselves and others. If we refuse to accept our limitations, if do not face the changes forced upon us by a bankrupt elite that has grossly mismanaged our economy, our military and our government, we will barrel forward toward internal and external collapse. Our self-delusion constitutes our greatest danger. We will either confront reality or plunge headlong into the minefields that lie before us.

War on Iraq: an Account of what really lead to it

Throughout the 1980s, Washington supported Saddam's war on Iran. Not only was he our vehicle for revenge against the ayatollahs who had deposed the shah, stormed our embassy, humiliated American hostages, and expelled our oil companies, but also he sat on the world's second-largest oil reserves. The Economic Hit Man's (EHMs) went to work on him. We gave him billions of dollars. Bechtel built him chemical plants that we knew would produce sarin and mustard gas for killing Iranians, Kurds, and Shi'a rebels. We provided him with fighter jets, tanks, and missiles and trained his military to operate them. We pressured the Saudis and Kuwaitis to lend him $50 billion. 

Watching events unfold in Iraq, I often thought back to the words of that Iranian engineer, back when the Shah ruled Iran, who escorted me and the other two MAIN employees from Kerman to Bandar-e Abbas. "Iranians are not Arabs, we're Persians, Arians," he had said. "The Arabs threaten us. We're with you guys 100 percent." Suddenly after Iranian revolution, the tables had turned. The Iranians had become the bad guys and an Arab named Saddam was our ally. 

The eight-year Iraq-Iran war was one of the longest, costliest, and bloodiest in modern history. By the time it ended in 1988, more than a million people were dead. Villages, farms, and the economies of both countries were devastated. But the corporatocracy had enjoyed another victory. Military suppliers and contractors profited handsomely. Oil prices were up. Throughout, the EHMs tried to convince Saddam to accept a deal similar to SAMA, the one I had helped forge with the House of Saud. They wanted him to join the empire. 

But Saddam kept refusing. If he had complied, like the Saudis, he would have received our guarantees of protection as well as more U.S.-supplied chemical plants and weapons. When it became obvious that he was entrenched in his independent ways, Washington sent in the jackals. Assassinations of men like Saddam, usually have to involve collusion by bodyguards. In the cases I knew personally - Ecuador's Roldós and Panama's Torrijos - I was certain that bodyguards trained at the United States' School of the Americas were bribed to sabotage the airplanes. Saddam understood jackals and their techniques. He had been hired by the CIA in the sixties to assassinate Qasim and had learned from us, his ally, during the eighties. He screened his men rigorously. He also hired look-alike doubles. His bodyguards were never sure if they were protecting him or an actor. 

The jackals failed. So in 1991, Washington chose the option of last resort. We used the Kuwaiti's as a bait to provoke him. Saddam fell in trap and made the mistake of attacking Kuwait. The first President Bush sent in the U. S. military. At this point the White House did not want to take Saddam out. He was their type of leader: a strongman who could control his people and act as a deterrent against Iran. The Pentagon assumed that by destroying his army, they had chastised him; now he would come around. Down the line it was believed sanctions might break his backbone and hence he would fall in line. EHMs went back to work on him during the nineties. He did not buy their package. Once again the jackals failed. A second President Bush deployed the military. Saddam was deposed and executed. It has been a warning to other states who do not cooperate.

Making of the Kings: Sauds and Dollar Supremacy

Washington's first ally in the struggle to defend the sovereignty of the dollar was Israel. Most people, including the majority of Israelis, believed that Tel Aviv's decision to launch attacks against Egyptian, Syrian, and Jordanian troops along its borders in what came to be known as the Six-Day War of 1967 was driven by Israel's determination to protect its borders. Territorial expansion was the most obvious reason; by the end of that bloody week, Israel had quadrupled its land holdings, at the expense of people living in East Jerusalem, parts of the West Bank, Egypt's Sinai, and Syria's Golan Heights. However, the Six-Day War served another purpose, it lead to the supremacy of dollar as the standard of trade. 

Arabs were humiliated and infuriated by the loss of their territories. Much of their anger was aimed at the United States; they knew that Israel could never have succeeded without American financial and political support, as well as the not-so-veiled threat that our troops were standing by in the unlikely event that Israel needed them. Few Arabs understood that Washington had motives that were far more selfish than defending the Jewish homeland, or that the White House would turn Arab anger to its advantage. We had pulled out of the Gold Exchange on August 15, 1971. Gold was no longer our standard against which currency would be printed. 

Nixon's second, and wholly unsuspecting; ally was the entire Islamic Middle East. In response to the Six-Day War of 1967, Egypt and Syria simultaneously attacked Israel on October 6, 1973 (Yom Kippur, the holiest of Jewish holidays). Knowing that strategically he was on shaky ground, Egypt's President Anwar Sadat pressured Saudi Arabia's King Faisal to strike against the United States and therefore Israel in a -different way-by employing what Sadat referred to as "the oil weapon." On October 16, Saudi Arabia and four other Arab states in the Persian Gulf announced a 70 percent increase in the posted price of oil; Iran (which is Muslim but not Arab) in an act of Islamic solidarity joined them. During the ensuing days, Arab oil ministers, agreeing that the United States should be punished for its pro-Israel stance, unanimously backed the idea of an oil embargo. 

It was a classic game of international chess. President Nixon asked Congress for $2.2 billion in aid to Israel on October 19. The next day, led by Saudi Arabia, Arab oil producers imposed a total embargo on oil shipments to the United States. At the time, few people perceived the cunning behind Washington's move, or the fact that it was driven by a determination to shore up a weakened dollar. The impact was immense. The selling price of Saudi oil leaped to new records; by January 1, 1974, it had soared to nearly seven times its price four years earlier. The media warned that the U.S. economy was on the verge of collapse. Long lines of cars formed at gas stations across the nation, while economists expressed fears of the possibility of another 1929-style depression. Protecting our oil supplies had been a priority; suddenly, it became an obsession. 

We know now that the corporatocracy played an active role in driving oil prices to these record highs. We had created and used the Middle East Crisis to strengthen our dollar.  Although business and political leaders, including oil executives, feigned outrage, they were the puppet masters pulling the strings. Nixon and his advisors realized that the $2.2 billion aid package to Israel would force the Arabs into taking drastic actions. By supporting Israel, the administration engineered a situation that generated what was the craftiest and most significant Economic Hit Man (EHMs) deal of the twentieth century. 

The U.S. Treasury Department contacted MAIN and other firms with proven records as corporatocracy henchmen. Our assignment was twofold: to formulate a strategy to ensure that OPEC would funnel the billions of dollars we spent on oil back to U.S. companies and to establish a new "oil standard" that would replace the former "gold standard." We EHMs knew that the key to any such plan was Saudi Arabia; because it possessed more oil than any other country, it controlled OPEC; the Saudi "royal" family was corrupt and highly vulnerable. Like other "kings" in the Middle East, the Sauds understood the politics of colonialism. Royalty had been bestowed on the House of Saud by the British. 

Details behind the strategy I helped engineer-the Saudi Arabian Money-laundering Affair (SAMA) are provided in by book "Confessions of an Economic Hit Man". In summary, as far as the media was concerned, the House of Saud agreed to three important conditions; it would: 

1) invest a large portion of its petrodollars in U.S. government securities; 

2) allow the U.S. Treasury Department to use the trillions of dollars in interest from these securities to hire U.S. corporations to westernize Saudi Arabia; and 

3) maintain the price of oil within limits acceptable to the corporatocracy. 

For its part, the U.S. government promised to keep the Saud family in power. They had no choice for they knew about our history in taking out the authorities that did not support our interest. (Recent examples of 50's and 60's, in the Middle East had been overthrow of Mossadegh in Iran, Hassimites dynasty in Iraq and later Prime Minister Qasim of Iraq) 

There was an additional agreement, one that made few headlines but was crucial to the corporatocracy's need to maintain the dollar as the standard global currency. Saudi Arabia committed to trading oil exclusively in U.S. dollars. With the scratch of a pen, the dollar's sovereignty was re-established. Oil replaced gold as the measure of a currency's value. 

……. A side benefit-one appreciated only by the most savvy economists-also allowed Washington to continue imposing a hidden tax on every foreign creditor. Because the dollar reigned supreme, we bought their goods and services on credit. By the time they used that credit to purchase oil (or something else) from our companies, the value of their funds had diminished, due to inflation; the difference between these amounts was cash-in-the-pocket for the corporatocracy - a tax without the need for tax collectors. 

……. When Tel Aviv and Washington drove the Arab world into a corner, Arabs had little choice but to strike back, in the Yom Kippur War and through the OPEC embargo. This propelled the U.S. Treasury Department into action. EHMs were enlisted to forge a deal with Saudi Arabia that wed the dollar to oil. The dollar was crowned king, and has reigned supreme ever since. 

SAMA changed geopolitics. It helped bring down the U.S.S.R., established the United States as an unchallenged superpower, and angered Osama bin Laden, the Saudi millionaire who would mastermind 9/Il. 

A List Of Grievances : Effect of Corporatocracy

Because of corporatocracy policies and actions...

 §         More than half the world's population survives on less than $2 a day-about the same real income as they had thirty years ago. 

§         More than two billion people lack access to basic amenities, including electricity, clean water, sanitation, land titles, phones, police, and fire protection. 

§         There is a 55-60 percent failure rate for all World Bank-sponsored projects (according to a study by the joint Economic Committee of U.S. Congress). 

§         The cost of servicing Third World debt is greater than all Third World spending on health or education and nearly two times the amount those countries receive each year in foreign aid. Despite current lip service to forgiving it, Third World debt grows every year, currently approaching $3 trillion. The record is not encouraging. During the 1996 round of "debt forgiveness," the G7 countries, IMF, and World Bank announced a cancellation of up to 8o percent in HIPC (Heavily Indebted Poor Countries) debt, but between 1996 and 1999 the overall amount of debt-servicing payments from HIPC actually increased by 25 percent, from $88.6 billion to $114.4 billion. 

§         A trade surplus of $1 billion for developing countries in the 1970s turned into a $4 billion deficit at the beginning of the new millennium and continues to grow. 

§         Ownership of Third World wealth is more concentrated than it was before the 1970s era of massive infrastructure development and the 1990S privatization wave. In many countries, the top r percent of households now accounts for more than 90 percent of all private wealth. 

§         Transnational corporations have taken control over much of the production and commerce in developing countries. For example, just four companies trade 40 percent of the world’s coffee while thirty-supermarket chains account for almost one-third of worldwide grocery sales. A handful of oil and other resource-extractive companies control not only the markets but also the governments of countries that possess the resources. 

§         Corporate greed was highlighted when Exxon Mobil announced another record-breaking profit, $10.4 billion, in the second quarter of 2006-the second biggest profit ever reported by a U.S. company, surpassed only by Exxon's $10.7 billion in the fourth quarter of 2005; both were years when rising oil prices caused intense suffering among the world's poor. Oil companies are highly subsidized through tax breaks, trade agreements, and international environmental and labor laws that favor them. 

§         The overall share of federal taxes paid by U.S. corporations is now less than 10 percent, down from 21 percent in 2001, and more than o percent during World War II. One-third of America's largest and most profitable corporations paid zero taxes in at least one of the first three years in the new millennium. In 2002 U.s. corporations booked $149 billion in tax-haven countries such as Ireland, Bermuda, Luxembourg, and Singapore. 

§         Of the one hundred largest economies in the world, fifty-one are corporations. Of these, forty-seven are U.S.-based. 

§         At least thirty-four thousand children under five years old die every day from hunger or preventable diseases. 

§         The United States and many of the countries Washington touts as democracies exhibit the following undemocratic characteristics: the media is manipulated by huge corporations and the government; politicians are beholden to wealthy campaign contributors; and policies made "behind closed doors" ensure that voters are not informed about key issues. 

§         When the international treaty to ban land mines was passed by the U.N. in 1997' by a vote of 142-0, the United States abstained; the United States refused to ratify the 1989 Convention on the Rights of the Child, the International Biological Weapons Convention, the Kyoto Protocol, and an International Criminal Court. 

§         Global military spending reached a new record high of $1.1 trillion in 2006, with the United States accounting for nearly half of that (averaging $1,600 for every U.S. man, woman, and child). 

§         The United States was ranked #53 in the World Press Freedom list in 2006 (compared to #17 in 2002) and has been severely criticized by Reporters Without Borders and other NGOs for jailing and intimidating journalists. 

§         The U.S. national debt (amount of money owed by the U.S. federal government to creditors who hold U.S. debt instruments), the largest in the world, reached $8.5 trillion in August 2006 or $28,500 for every U.S. citizen; it was increasing by $1.7 billion a day. A large percentage of this debt is held by the central banks of Japan and China and by members of the EU, rendering us extremely vulnerable to them. 

§         U.S. external debt (total public and private debt owed to non-residents repayable in foreign currency, goods, or services) is also the largest in the world, estimated at $9 trillion in 2005. (It is noteworthy that Washington uses the National and External Debts of other countries as weapons, forcing their governments to comply with corporatocracy demands or face bankruptcy, economic sanctions, and severe IMF-imposed "conditionalities"; yet the United States is the largest debtor nation in the world.

In Truth, Dark Times

TARUN J TEJPAL 
Editor-in-Chief Tehelka

DICTATORSHIP WALKS in through the front door, often without a preamble, one sunlit morning. Fascism almost never rings the bell. It slips in through the backdoor, climbs in over window-sills, pads up the basement, locates a rotten rafter to make its covert entry. Dictatorship is showy. It lodges itself in the living room, confident it commands the house. Fascism is sneaky. It quietly settles into every room, knowing it runs the house. Dictatorships can be overthrown by the people. Fascism is the people.

Of course we must not be alarmist. We are a great democracy. Look at our Constitution. Look at our Parliament. Look at our free and fair elections — well, okay, prolific elections. Look at our free and fair media — well, okay, prolific media. Look at our free and fair judiciary — well, okay, our judiciary. Let us not try and list the police and the bureaucracy: we have a consensus of unhappiness about them. In a great democracy — well, okay, a great democracy in the making — these are minor flaws. No doubt, evolution will make us perfect.

This catalogue of virtues is only enumerated by those of us who live inside India’s charmed circle. To whose privileged lives the soaring idea of democracy can provide a glittering embroidery. It’s the banquet hall view of the state — cosy with good food and fine conversation. And it is articulated only by those of us who have somehow managed to grab a seat at the table, even if it is a low one. It’s useful to remember, every ruling class from Caesar to Stalin has believed it was doing right by its people.

Today to read the Indian state through the banquet hall is to read a crocodile through a handbag. Only those who confront the beast know its true nature. A thousand handbags cannot tell you how mercilessly the jaws of a crocodile clamp. But all around the country there are numberless Christians, Muslims, displaced tribals, turfed-out farmers, brutalized dalits, disputing citizens, who can give you a clear idea of its brutal force. Each of their accounts tears the heart out of the idea of India.

Experience is a gift for anyone. Especially for journalists. Seven years ago some of us at TEHELKA were accorded a special opportunity by the Indian state. For blowing a sharp whistle we were dragged into the entrails of the beast. How fearsome its innards were — with not a hint of the beauty of the handbag! Among the many intimate journeys we were taken on was a special starring role in a commission of inquiry. This is a special trick of the beast — an invite to a lengthy palaver at the end of which, when no one is looking, the guest is eaten. For 19 months we participated, along with more than 15 lawyers including some of India’s finest, in a burlesque of lies and immorality against us. It was a rare education. We were forever cured of the banquet hall view of the state

IN GUJARAT last week, a commission of inquiry has just eaten up its guests. Justice Nanavati, mandated to inquire into the Godhra tragedy and its violent aftermath, has delivered an astonishing verdict. Flying in the face of all evidence, he has perilously declared that the bogey burning was the result of a local Muslim conspiracy. At the best of times such a conclusion would have called for caution. To do so in a time of ratcheting communal tensions, with all the facts suggesting otherwise, is nothing short of disastrous.

The truth of Godhra is awful, but it’s not a conspiracy. All the evidence indicates that neither the state nor the local Muslims played any premeditated role in the horrific assault on the train. Once the dastardly event was over, a sinister attempt began to give it a political colour. In the pages that follow, a six-month-long TEHELKA investigation reveals how the establishment and the police broke every rule in the book to manufacture a conspiracy theory. Nanavati was meant to snooker the state’s unlawful conduct. Instead he has endorsed it!

The chances are he will get away with it. As it is universally, India’s secure classes have a charitable view of the system they run. Breathless with carving out the pie, they have little time for distant niceties. In a country of a billion people, a few hundred Muslims mouldering in jail can arouse only so much concern. Citizens move on slogans not on details. Politicians and policemen bank on that.Terrorism is a headline; individual innocence is a nuance. And anyway all those Muslim names sound the same after a while. As do the tribal. And the dalit.

Fascism keeps padding in into our rooms on animal feet. We know the answers. Enforce the law. Ensure justice. Follow the Constitution. The beast knows them too. Only too well. It knows these are the very leash by which it should be bound. But the stake anchoring the leash — public will: as represented by media, intelligentsia, civil society — has come loose. It has badly splintered, lost its sense of anchorage, and it believes the beast will maraud elsewhere and never round on it. The fables of the world are full of such foolishness.

Once, a few good men had a good idea. The idea of India. It resulted in the most magical political experiment of the 20th century. It allowed a complex, ancient, trampled civilisation an enviable entry into modernity. The experiment is still on. In truth, there are dark days — increasingly too many — when it seems to be sliding towards failure. In their roster of virtues, the original visionaries had a gift that made their grand experiments possible. Like the finest literary writers they had the gift of empathy. The ability to intimately imagine the life of another. It took them to a place beyond caste, community, and religion. It made the idea of India possible. It is a gift we need to rediscover again, at every level. To imagine once again the life of one man, one woman. One people.

From Tehelka Magazine, Vol 5, Issue 40, Dated Oct 11, 2008

AN OPEN LETTER TO THE PRIME MINISTER OF INDIA

Tuesday 16 Sep 2008

Dear Dr. Manmohan Singh,

The blasts in Delhi (September 12, 2008) are another in the series of tragic blasts in which scores of people have been killed. We strongly condemn the blasts and demand a proper, unbiased investigation into the same. We demand that the guilty be punished. At the same time it seems that our investigating agencies are ignoring some thing very crucial in the matters of investigating the acts of terror. 

The acts of terror have been occurring and Home Ministry is watching helplessly. While the current investigation is totally focused around SIMI, many an alleged culprits have been put behind the bars, despite which now some unknown entity Indian Mujahideen seems to have been projected as being responsible for the current ones. At the same time another stark truth is being deliberately sidelined and undermined. And that relates to the blasts done by Bajrang Dal and Hindu Jagran Samiti. We fail to understand as to why the investigation authorities are turning a blind eye to some of the well established facts. 

1. In a serious case of blasts in Nanded in April 2006 two Bajarang Dal workers died when making bombs. Similar incidents of bomb blasts were witnessed in many places around that time, Parabhani, Jalna and Aurangabad in Maharashtra . Most of these were in front of the mosques. The Nanded investigation 'leads' were not followed. On the contrary the investigation in that direction was not pursued at all. The attitude of police in this investigation has been totally lax. Social activists made the complaint about this to Human Rights commission. The commission summoned the Superintendent of police, Nanded, in its hearing held on 17th June. The SP failed to turn up for hearing! There seems to be a deliberate cover up of this important finding of Maharashtra Anti terrorist Squad. ATS did investigate the links of the dead with Bajrang Dal, an RSS affiliate. At the same time the injured were visited in the hospital by the top brass of local BJP and associates. Local BJP MP told the police not to harass those related to the culprits in the wake of the Bajrang Dal involvement in the bomb making. In Nanded, ATS also found fake moustache and pajama kurta, the idea being that the culprits will dress like a Muslim while doing these black deeds.

2. A bomb blast took place at the RSS office at Tenkasi, in the Tirunelveli District of Tamil Nadu on January 24. After a thorough investigation, the Tamilnadu Police had arrested 7 persons belonging to Sangh Parivar outfits. They had confessed that they indulged in this terror act to instigate the local Hindu population against the Muslims. 

On further investigation, the Tamilnadu Police arrested Siva Alias Sivanandam, who is the General Secretary of Hindu Munnani at Kadayanallur, a neighbouring town of Tenkasi . Formed in 1980, Hindu Munnani is a frontal organisation of Sangh Parivar operating in Tamilnadu. 

Siva, who has earlier worked in quarries in the neighboring state of Kerala had supplied the ammonium nitrate and other raw materials for preparing the bombs. 

3. The bombs which exploded in Gadkari Rangayatan on 4th June 2008 injured seven people. Again Maharashtra Anti Terrorist Squad succeeded in nabbing the culprits. The culprits were part of Hindu Janjagaran Samiti (HJS), an outfit of Sanatana Ashram in Panvel. These culprits were also involved in other blasts, in Vashi, Panvel and Ratnagiri. We have not heard anything about the further tracing of this very important lead.

4. On 24th August, in Kanpur two Bajrang Dal workers died while making bombs. Rajiv alias Piyush Mishra and Bhupinder Singh were killed while making crude bombs on Sunday afternoon. 

On 25th August, Monday, police recovered some crude hand grenades, lead oxide, red lead, potassium nitrate, bomb pins, timers and batteries from the spot, inside a hostel in Kalyanpur area of Kanpur, about 80 km from Lucknow. No further investigation, why?

Every time there is a bomb blast immediately the agencies and the media declare that it is done by some Muslim organization without any proof. Hundreds of innocent young boys are picked up, what follows are illegal detentions, torture, arrests, harassment of families, forcing the families and victims to sign blank papers. For years these helpless victims are tortured in jails, denied legal aid, even lawyers who try and fight their cases are attacked openly in courts. Their images tarnished for life time. If they are lucky they get let off after years as neither the agencies or the police have any proof against them. The cacophony of stricter laws rises so that a police can extract a confession by third degree torture and present that as evidence.  Through this systematic vilification campaign the process of demonization of minorities continued unabated. 

If we look at the timing of the terror attacks it is very clear that one and only one political outfit is gaining from it and that is Sangh. With their eyes on the central government their agenda of polarizing the voter is going ahead successfully.

On the other hand there are constant attacks on minorities on one pretext or another. Orissa thousands of Christians have been attacked, rendered homeless, their homes ransacked and looted and burnt down, churches attacked and even orphanages are not left alone.

 
Karnataka a similar picture is emerging. We have personally briefed very senior people in the government and the Congress party about the Karnataka situation and that it might explode but nothing was done and we have seen what has happened yesterday. 

While we write to you now, the police are firing at Muslims in Yakutpura in Vadodara. Yesterday during the Ganpati procession a local dargah was broken down and shops of Muslims looted and ransacked. Already one boy has died and many are injured.

Last few days the only Muslim village Nandepeda in the Dangs, Gujarat has been attacked, ransacked. Villagers have been beaten up brutally including women and children. All men have fled to the jungles. The police not only took away all the goods but before going they poured kerosene into the eatable good so that they could not eat anything too. A proposed VHP rally today was stopped after spending 4 hours on the phone and pressuring various police departments.  

UPA had formed the National Integration Council under tremendous pressure. The first agenda papers which were prepared, if you remember, were highly communal and objectionable. A number of us had raised it during the meeting and the Home Minister had replied' treat them as scrap' in your presence. Probably the Home Minister realized that people like us were too uncomfortable to have in the NIC, who would raise these questions. The NIC was never convened again. It was supposed to meet every six months. 

 
The country unfortunately has been given on a platter to the Sangh and the government looks helplessly in providing security to ordinary citizens whether they are victims of terror attacks or victims of the constant attacks by the Sangh Parivar's various outfits. 

We hope you will intervene and question why are such clear cases of involvement of RSS affiliates in terror attacks being ignored. It seems the investigating authorities deliberately want to cover up the role of RSS affiliates in these acts of terror. Can the real truth behind the dastardly acts come out without properly investigating these incidents, where the culprits' involvement is very clear? We urge upon you to instruct the investigating authorities to pursue the investigation in an unbiased, honest and professional manner. The life of innocent citizens is at stake and such irresponsible cover will definitely prevent the real truth from coming out. For the sake of fairness, honesty and the values of our constitution, we need to pursue these cases in their logical direction. 

Can we look forward to you, Mr. Prime Minister to make your Government to rise above partisan attitude and unravel the truth behind the blasts which are rocking the country in a painful way?

Sincerely,
 
Shabnam Hashmi, Member, National Integration Council

Ram Puniyani, Social Activist, and writer