What Role for Indian Think Tanks? - By Bhaskar Menon - http://undiplomatictimes.blogspot.in/

Bhaskar Menon has written a very thought-provoking and historical article that is a grave warning and a call for review of all that is going on in India in the name of progress, development, modernity and security. Foreign funds are not only flooding the corporate world, but are taking on our entire thinking faculties as a proud, independent and old civilisation that was toast of the world. The sectors that were starved of funding during the earlier Congress clamping down of India, have suddenly rushed to devour whatever crumbs are thrown at them, without even a shade of reflection as to where are we heading. Bhaskar Menon deserves great honour for having the courage and insight to bring out the calamitous slide of the nation into a quagmire that will not give us any chance for a free existence for another millennium. Saner elements should band together and expose all those carpetbaggers, opportunists and self-seekers who are willing to sell the nation, for a few pieces of silver.

Ghulam Muhammed, Mumbai

<ghulammuhammed3@gmail.com>

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undiplomatic times

An Indian view of the world

What Role for Indian Think Tanks?

By Bhaskar Menon

Wednesday, February 8, 2012

According to an Edit Page article in The New Indian Express on 6 February, a global ranking of Think Tanks has found not one of India's 292 institutions good enough to be in the global top 30. In terms of number of TTs we rank third, behind the US with 1815 and China with 425,

The writer, Amitabh Mattoo, billed as a JNU professor and Director of the Australia India Institute at the University of Melbourne, admitted that the criteria used in the ranking had been widely criticized, but nevertheless, urged remedial action by the government to avoid a “mushrooming” of American and European franchises with Indians as “junior partners.” His “guesstimate” was that some 50 percent of projects run by Indian Think Tanks were already funded from abroad.

Mattoo saw three factors as most responsible for the weakness of Indian Think Tanks: lack of adequate and steady funding, government suspicion of “truly independent” organizations, and the tendency of “idealistic founders” to become “feudal patrons.”

To deal with the situation, he urged the government to create four new TTs, each with an endowment of Rs. 1000 crore, dealing with Economics; Security; Politics/Governance; and Social Change. He recommended that they be given unconstrained “freedom to hire the best global talent to work on critical areas of policy” and work without “interference.”

Strangely for a piece titled Unthinking Think Tanks,” Mattoo said not a word about the quality of thought that has emerged from Indian Think Tanks.

If he had looked at that issue, it might have become quickly apparent that pots of money will not help, and that the “best global talent” might make things worse. For the basic problem with Indian TTs is not lack of money or access to foreign talent; it is the hangdog "Bollywood" state of mind, reflecting the belief that our reality is second-class, that it gains meaning only from association with that of the West.

Remember NDTV's maddening crawler "India's 9/11" that disfigured its coverage of the 2009 attack on Mumbai? It was as if Indian loss of life and blood lacked authenticity without a Western reference.

That syndrome is widely evident in India, including in areas of marked success.

"Bollywood" has been followed by the equally silly (and confusing) Tollywood, Kollywood and Mollywood.
 "Silk" is "India's Marilyn Monroe."

The Jaipur Literary Festival is "India's Cannes."

Jug Suraiya is "India's Art Buchwald."

Indian cuisine, traditional fabrics and costumes are referred to as "ethnic." (This might be mere ignorance: the usage originated in the United States, where the non-ethnic default was WASP: White, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant.)

If we look at more considered manifestations of thought, for instance, at the books that have come from our post-1947 political and corporate leaders, there is the same unquestioned kowtowing to the dominance of the West. Paranoia about American intentions in India does not qualify as evidence to the contrary; it is an attitude fostered by a political "Left" slavishly imitative of the British model.

The slavishness can be traced back to Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru's hugely influential attitudes to the West (and his fundamental differences with Mahatma Gandhi on that count). Perhaps the crux of his attitude was captured in his declaration to Gandhi during their 1928 exchange of letters: "You misjudge greatly, I think, the civilization of the West and attach too great importance to its many failings. ... I think that Western, or rather industrial civilization, is bound to conquer India."

Nehru's staggering presumption has become general today. The fact that industrial civilization has proved to be unsustainable and is in a state of terminal crisis has made hardly a dent on the views of Indian acolytes. For instance, former President Abdul Kalam's several books and numerous speeches present a vision of a "developed India" entirely in technological terms. He hardly ever mentions Gandhi's vision of how India could progress, and ignores the great problems that beset industrial development.

An ancillary to the worship of technology seems to be ignorance of Indian realities. Nandan Nilekani's " Imagining India" is a good example of that phenomenon. Consider his explanation of why newly independent India was mistrustful of free-market economics: "Nehru saw Britain as a hard, repressive State, and the market-friendly systems it had established got tarred with the same brush." (Colonial rule, established and maintained with violence, grossly discriminatory towards Indian business, was "market-friendly"!!!) Other examples of ignorance are rife. At one point he refers to Sita's "Kush" as "the son of Vishnu."

I could give numerous other examples from a wide range of writers, but will desist for fear of boring the reader. The evidence is overwhelming that the Maya of the West has come to suffuse the disordered view of our thought leaders. We have not had since Gandhi a leader who comprehended clearly the challenges facing India.

To understand how Mattoo's hankering after the "best global talent" is rooted in post-colonial confusion, consider how ridiculous it is to have a global ranking of Think Tanks.

In the United States, Think Tanks are instruments of a variety of interest groups, making the arguments to be taken on board by legislative processes minutely overseen by political lobbyists. Chinese TTs are meant to facilitate, strengthen and on occasion hide the Communist Party’s brutal grip on power. In India, as Mattoo notes, TTs are founded by idealists who then become invested in keeping control of their creations and turn into “medieval patrons.”

Given those differences, what is the basis for comparison?

This is not to deny Mattoo's point that we stand in danger of a foreign takeover of our policy space.
But money and foreign talent are not an appropriate response to that danger.

Indian reality, more than that of any other nation, is sui generis. We Indians are its best judges.

Perhaps the way forward would be to reorient our Think Tanks so as to generate on every major policy issue, a national discourse rooted in an understanding of our post-colonial situation. The overall aim must be to understand contemporary global realities within the frame of India’s historical experience.

The difficulty in undertaking such an effort will lie in surmounting the enormous distortions that colonial rule introduced in our understanding of Indian history. Perhaps a National Truth Commission about the colonial period, examining what the British did to India would be a good way to begin. Once the past is clear our policy options will clarify themselves.

Posted by Bhaskar Menon at 2:51 PM 0 comments Links to this post

 
Labels: Bollywood, china, india, Jawaharlal Nehru, Mattoo, Nandan Nilekani, Think Tanks, United States

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704323204576085013620618774.html?mod=googlenews_wsj

Opinion Journal

• OPINION ASIA
• JANUARY 17, 2011

The Coming Clash With China

Hu Jintao's visit to Washington may be intended to patch up relations, but it is more likely to prove a turning point as tensions rise.

By AARON FRIEDBERG

When he meets with U.S. President Barack Obama this week, China's paramount leader Hu Jintao will not be carrying a symbolic "reset button" of the sort that Secretary of State Clinton presented to her Russian counterpart back in 2009. But he will probably be looking for ways to soothe concerns over his country's recent behavior and its possible implications for the future course of U.S.-China relations.

The last two years have seen a marked upturn in tensions between the two Pacific powers, as well as between China and many of its Asian neighbors. As viewed from Washington, but also from Seoul, Tokyo, Hanoi, Canberra, and New Delhi, this trend is a direct result of increasingly assertive Chinese words and deeds across a wide range of fronts. In the past 12 months alone Beijing has:

•Shielded North Korea from tough international sanctions, despite Pyongyang's unprovoked sinking of a South Korean naval vessel and subsequent deadly shelling of a small island;

•Escalated what might otherwise have been a minor incident at sea into a major confrontation with Japan.

•Used its near monopoly in the production of certain rare earth minerals critical to high-tech manufacturing as an instrument to exert diplomatic leverage.

•Intensified its long-standing claim to virtually all of the resource-rich South China Sea by suggesting that the region was a "core national interest," a term previously used to refer only to areas (like Tibet and Taiwan) over which China is willing to go to war.

•Declared publicly that, when it comes to resolving competing claims over this region "China is a big country and other countries are small countries, and that's just a fact."

•Threatened for the first time to impose sanctions on U.S. companies that participate in arms sales to Taiwan.

•Conducted unprecedentedly large and complex naval exercises in the waters of the Western Pacific outside the so-called "First Island Chain."

•Revealed the existence of a new stealth fighter aircraft.

•Begun initial deployments of a new anti-ship ballistic missile targeted on U.S. aircraft carriers operating in the Western Pacific.

Not surprisingly, all of this activity has stirred anxiety across Asia. It has begun to Not surprisingly, all of this activity has stirred anxiety across Asia. It has begun to
Not surprisingly, all of this activity has stirred anxiety across Asia. It has begun to provoke responses from the United States as well as other countries in the region. President Obama's recent swing through Asia included stops in the capitals of India, Indonesia, South Korea and Japan, but it pointedly excluded Beijing. American and Japanese defense officials have since announced their intention to devote more resources to counter China's rising power, the United States and South Korea have enhanced their military cooperation, and, despite a history of animosity, Seoul and Tokyo have taken steps in the same direction.

Beijing's behavior has thus triggered reactions that, if allowed to run their course, will make it harder to achieve its likely long-term goal of re-establishing China as the dominant power in East Asia. A well-timed campaign of "smile diplomacy" could help to slow down this balancing process, even if it cannot derail it altogether. That is likely what Mr. Hu and his handlers have in mind for their meetings in Washington this week.


But how meaningful and lasting will any of this be? The answer depends in large part on what lies behind China's recent assertiveness. Some Western analysts have sought to explain it away as an incidental by-product of political infighting in the run-up to the planned 2012 leadership succession or a passing outburst of belligerence by some elements of the People's Liberation Army. Cooler heads have now prevailed and are trying to put the country back on the smoother, less confrontational path it has followed for the past several decades.

Unfortunately, the problem is more deeply rooted than these reassuring assertions would seem to suggest. While they may disagree on questions of tactics and timing, there is no reason to believe that China's leaders differ over fundamental questions of strategy. Beijing may be willing to dial back its rhetoric but it is not going to abandon its goal of regional preponderance. That fact will lead inevitably to growing tensions with its neighbors, and with the United States.

Since the start of the 2008-09 financial crisis many Chinese strategists have reached the conclusion that the United States is declining, and their own country is rising much faster than had previously been expected. Belief that this is the case has fed an already powerful strain of forceful, sometimes belligerent nationalism that appears to be increasingly widespread, especially among the young.
In this view it is time for China to "stand up," to right some of the wrongs suffered when the country was relatively weak, and to reclaim its rightful role in Asia and the world. Such sentiments are not the exclusive preserve of the military, although it may seek to tap them, and at times to stir them, for its own ends. The rising generation of Chinese leaders cannot afford to ignore these views; indeed, to a considerable degree, it probably shares them.

If this assessment is correct, then the last two years are not a temporary deviation but a portent of things to come. Rather than signaling the start of a new interval of cooperation and stability, Hu Jintao's visit may actually mark the end of an era of relatively smooth relations between the United States and China.

Mr. Friedberg is a professor at Princeton University. His new book, "A Contest for Supremacy: China, America and the Struggle for Mastery in Asia" is forthcoming from W.W. Norton.

Letter to the Editor : US should have learned the lesson from Great Britain, the world’s most successful colonialist By Ghulam Muhammed

Saturday, January 16, 2010

Letter to the Editor

US should have learned the lesson fromGreat Britain, the world’s most successful colonialist

There cannot be any doubt or debate that 18^th/19^th century Great Britain was the most successful colonial power that the world history has so far witnessed. The more relevant lesson to be learned from history at the moment is; as to how a prolonged war with Axis forces knocked off its economic power base and it had to call on the US to fill in the vacuum caused by its compulsion to pull out of its colonies.

US itself was at one time a British colony and had to fight a protracted war to get its freedom from the British Crown. Still Britain was able to drag the US to leave is shores and venture forth in the name of saving humanity. Some would swear it was all British Jewry’s successful effort that finally sealed America’s fate.

Doubts can be raised if 9/11 should be the designated the landmark event to inaugurate the American Jewish Neo-con’s most potent blueprint for American policy makers to venture forth in the world, while its armed forces were now free from any threat from its post-World War rival, the Soviet Union. But the way America’s foreign forays with state of art armories pounding and devastating country after country, portents are emerging that as America is overreaching its capacity to colonize and hold the colonies, it may face the same fate that befell the British colonialist. There is further corollary that while British called on the US to take over, the most eligible contender to fall to that bait, this time around will be China.

Though people dread a confrontation between US and China, there is a possibility thatChina, instead of challenging the US in any conflagration, will rather use its leverages with the US very judiciously, and take over America’s various international institutional prerogatives as the biggest creditor nation.

On the other hand, it is an open question, if international Zionists have been nourishing any hidden agenda to once again ride the waves and jump on the Chinese bandwagon. Given their specialization in promoting warfare, they would rather promote an armed conflict between US and China. There has never been a devastating war of the scale of the two World Wars on proper Asian soil. Zionist warmongers have their role cut out. It is perpetual war for perpetual peace for the Zionists. Once the world is at peace, Zionists hold, it will come after them, to take revenge for their acts of real or imagined acts of commission or omission.

If America could learn the lessons from the plight of the British colonial power, it should desist from further depleting of its resource reserves and choose a more cooperative life, to offer the world a new alternative of peace with prosperity. Besides, did not British pull out its colonies in such a smooth transition, that none of its own citizens were confronted with wholesale annihilation? Obama should take up that option for the continued prosperity of the US, without its own people coming under physical threats.

It is also time for the Indian policymakers to properly evaluate their moves in walking into the Zionist parlor, with their eyes shut.

Ghulam Muhammed, Mumbai

ghulammuhammed3@gmail.com

www.GhulamMuhammed.Blogspot.com

Why UNSC members US and UK are worried about Iran while Russia and China are not? - By Ghulam Muhammed

Tuesday, October 13, 2009

Why UNSC members US and UK are worried about Iran while Russia and Chinaare not?

The simple answer is Israel’s grip on both US and UK.

Both these UN member countries, US and UK, are populated by powerful Israel lobbies that do not leave any stone unturned in trying to impose their undemocratic fascist agenda on the rest of the world. Note how both these countries allowing dual US/Israeli and UK/Israeli citizenship to make the most of a small minority of Jews to cover as much geographical and political area as they covet, beside their supposed homeland, Israel.

Their clout in Russia and China is not much to say; though Russia, the Zionists are treated more or less as pariah out to bring one more revolution in that country, to subvert it for their own world dominance strategies.

Whatever the world is being engaged to scatter its attention span over varying scenarios in world events, the overriding agenda of the Neo-con is to subdue the Muslim World.

The opening shot was fired by the British Jewish scholar, Bernard Lewis, who coined the phrase – Clash of the civilizations – conceptualizing how the next stage of the Jewish dogma of ‘perpetual war for perpetual peace, will unfold.

The next big event was the formation of the Neo-con group that prepared a self-serving thesis – The Project for America’s New Century. (This was whetted by Israeli leaders before being presented to Clinton and others.) The Jewish cabal chose social subjects like democracy, human rights, liberalism, to camouflage their ambitions to entangle the US and use its military prowess to advance their own hegemonical strategies. The small Jewish minority knows how to leverage its intellectual expertise to rule over the world of majorities.

The Kristol cabal surrounded an intellectually dumb US President with inputs to unleash wars on Muslim world and drain US financial resources in a way to enrich their own kind to the detriment of the US tax-payers who are burdened with trillions in debt. In fact, they are possibly convinced that world debt will never be called. And thus they are defrauding the whole world. The credit explosion in exploiting America’s sub-prime mortgage paper trade is just part of the same financial exploitation of the world of finance that is in their grips.

Both Russia and China are at the moment out of their multilayered traps to subvert them into following their lead that is presented to the world as demand of the US and UK. In fact, it is common knowledge that behind the relentless pursuit of the agenda to destabilize string of Muslim countries from Iraq, to Iran, Afghanistan and Pakistan, are the Jewish conspirators from Israel and victimized nations of US and UK.

Both Russia and China have extensive economic interest in Iran and they only pay lip service to the supposed international concerns over non-proliferation. While the US and Europe is in the grip of Jewish warmongering strategies, the East as represented by Russia, China, India and the rest, are merrily enjoying their economic boom. The more they see US and UK busy in their self-destruction through Jewish warmongering, they more respite they get to develop their own economies.

India’s foreign policy planners should remain alert to the choices available to them, whether to get sucked in by the Western conspiracies or better build up their own independent trip devices to warn them, when they are sliding into the Western dug up quagmire. China’s independent route to economic development should not be overlooked, especially as a model to remain engaged with the West, only to the extant not being overwhelmed by them.

Ghulam Muhammed, Mumbai

ghulammuhammed3@gmail.com

www.GhulamMuhammed.Blogspot.com