There are two sources of political power. The more obvious is that of patronage. When you hold office, you hold the purse strings,can make appointments, pass bills and set policy.
The less obvious is the power of insurgency. When you are out of power, you get to sit back and criticize, watch for abuses of power, put your opponent on the defensive by exposing corruption. To do this effectively you must be aggressive and passionate. You need to have a cause that will unite your base, which might whither away without patronage.
The best situation of all is to be able to do both. As you are reforming the Government in your own vision, the past abuses of the previous Government come out. The more embarrassing the revelations, the more dispirited the opposition’s base will be. They will be too busy defending the indefensible to launch any offensive against you. And you can use that breathing room to further your own agenda. (more…)
The Railway was a failure when it was a monopoly. Now it has competition from trucks plying the recently built highways. So they had to shape up to survive. The Government owned airlines are struggling due to competition from the newly licensed private carriers. The Indian Airlines (the domestic airline) has already been folded into Air India. So why did the Railway thrive under competition and not IA? (more…)
The Indian Railway is the world’s largest employer. The main lines were built in British times. Mostly to move the army around to quell rebellions in different parts. The Madras regiment in Punjab, the Punjab Regiment in Assam and so on. But later, it also became the common man’s mode of travel in India. For a few dollars you can go from Chennai to Delhi or from Mumbai to Kolkatta. The trains are slow and the bathrooms are–ahem–aromatic. The food is of questionable hygiene. But you will see the countryside, and most likely make some friends. In the long distance trains, if you have a sleeper berth, the journey is comfortable but not luxurious. I am not talking about the palaces on wheels meant for foreign tourists. (more…)
I mentioned to a colleague that Varadhan, a mathematician of Indian origin at NYU, won the Abel Prize. One of the top honors in the field. My colleague turned to the person sitting next to him, a visiting academic, and said:
In the middle of all that corruption, they are good in statistics. It must be because the British were good at it.
He was expressing a common view of India as a corrupt place where nothing works, perhaps with an occasional genius. Even Americans whose knowledge of India does not extend beyond watching “Slumdog Millionaire” feel free to pass such judgment. (more…)
What I am opposed to is a dumb war. What I am opposed to is a rash war…A war based not on reason but on passion, not on principle but on politics…
As Sen. Clinton pointed out back then, this speech is the only thing Obama brought to the Primary campaign. It was enough. In that speech, of which only a few seconds of video remain, Obama laid out a vision for how to use (and not use) military force in the complicated world we live in.
Today is Easter Sunday. The day that Jesus is said to have resurrected himself after being executed by a State that found him guilty after a trial. This could explain why the modern Catholic Church is against capital punishment. A cross is the best reminder that a Government’s system of justice can go horribly wrong.
The Popes of recent years have opposed executing even hardened criminals. Pope John Paul II during a visit to the US in April of 1999:
I renew the appeal I made most recently at Christmas for a consensus to end the death penalty, which is both cruel and unnecessary. Modern society has the means of protecting itself, without definitively denying criminals the chance to reform.
So why was there no protest when George W. Bush was given an honorary degree by Notre Dame in 2001? During his six years as Governor, Bush presided over 152 executions in Texas: any of which he could have prevented by an executive order. In the case of Karla Faye Tucker, he ignored a personal appeal by the Pope himself. And yet when Obama is invited to address the graduating class and receive a degree there is a firestorm of protest. (more…)
There is an apocryphal story about Gandhi, said to have taken place when he was working as a lawyer in London. It was unusual for an Indian to have an Englishman working under him, but Gandhi had an English assistant. One day Gandhi asked him to do something and the Asssistant asked,
As if to confirm that much of our so-called legitimate financial world has been six degrees of separation from Bernie Madoff, GMAC’s chairman was none other than J. Ezra Merkin. In addition to presiding over losses of nearly $8 billion at GMAC, Merkin had a separate investment management business that threw away another $2 billion by feeding other people’s money (including the endowments at N.Y.U. and Yeshiva University) into Madoff’s Ponzi scheme.
It is a small world at the top of the pyramid schemes of the Bush years. The impending bankruptcy of GM, with the hundreds of thousands of jobs at stake, is directly connected to its financial shenanigans. The “Real World” of blue collar jobs cannot escape the contagion of greed that brought down Wall St.
