Suman Palit

More on the new axis of evil within the EUuuu.. This is an axis of evil the same way the US is a murdering, power-grabbing, post-modern neo-colonial imperialistic silicon machine, whose souless Zionist puppet masters eat little babies for breakfast and spit their forlorn little carcasses in pits of brimstone and fire, while offering their flesh to wanton graven images of Barbara Streisand.


In case you haven't guessed already, I'm angling for a cushy editorial job on Al-Jazeera Online... !

Osama Bin Laden may be in Kashmir... so strong is the possibility that SAS and Delta force commandos are supposedly in J&K (persumably the Indian side) looking for him. The report also asserts that "..The whole area is ultra-sensitive.."



I think the Indian government is walking on some imaginary egg-shells here. The presence of SAS and Delta Force in India needs more publicity, not less. Part of the problem with public support in India for the war on terror has been the lack of adequate publicity around this continually close cooperation. The average Indian gains a large measure of confidence from knowing that his country is not alone in this war. Having well-trained foreign Special Forces troops working alongside Indian commandos is also a matter of pride, not something to fear. Most Indians understand this quite well and I suspect many Indian military officers and elite forces troops are champing at the bit for the chance to engage in combat alongside their US and UK counterparts.



A few on both the left and the right in India find it politically convenient to attack these alliances using largely irrelevant post-colonial and Cold War rhetoric. As the average "Apu" on the street begins to see the unique non-zero-sum benefits resulting from India edging closer to the Anglosphere, these attacks will lose what little coherence they have left.

David Warren makes a plea for the status quo in Kashmir with some well-nuanced points:




The only way forward is to recognize that arbitrary ceasefire line as the border between Pakistan and India "in perpetuity". (A legal concept, not an historical one.)



This would not be a confirmation of the status quo. It would be the only way out of a status quo, in which both sides are perpetually at war.




The crux of his argument is that picking an arbitrary point in the history of Kashmir and hitting the rewind button is not only impractical, but beyond the purview and capacity of conventional diplomacy. He proposes shifting the current status quo from an unresolved dispute with military and economic consequences to a new status quo that accepts, in a Zen-like fashion, the political reality on the ground.



I agree with much of his argument. If implementable, this solution would open up much needed breathing room in South Asia. This would allow India to get on with more important issues, like economic growth, and force Pakistan to deal with the debate on the identity of their nation-state without the distraction of Kashmir. No one, least of all myself, expects the situation to become any less chaotic as a result. It would simply allow both countries to experiment with national policies that do not possess, at their core, an obsession with Kashmir. Like peeling layers off an onion, this solution has a certain subtle and simple logic. The "status quo" in Kashmir has always had two basic layers of conflict. Both are currently zero-sum games, but one has the potential to unleash non zero-sum alliances which may lead to greater stability in South Asia. Lets look at both of them in turn.



The Indo-Pak nation-state conflict:

This is the zero-sum game that cannot be won in the foreseeable future by either side. Part of the reason is that regional players who are allied on one side or the other have just enough relative power to project in South Asia to counter each other. Not enough, it would appear, for one side or the other to pursue the zero-sum conflict to it's otherwise logically bitter end. For example, the US makes up for geographic distance with the ability to project naval and air power. On their end, the Chinese use the bait of ballistic missile technology to keep Pakistan in the game. Russians counter with giving India a perceived edge in conventional weapons and air power. The other big reason is that there is no war-game scenario that does not result in large-scale t.e.o.t.w.a.w.k.i. The military gulf between India and Pakistan is less than the Indians would like to believe, and more than the Pakistanis love to brag about. If this conflict cannot be won, then it makes sense for both to find a way to declare this game ended and walk away with heads still held high.



The conflict over the "Kashmiri" identity:

This started out as a zero-sum game amongst Kashmiris, with the Sunni majority on one side, and a rag-tag of Shias, Hindus, Buddhists on the other. A half-century of conflict; two generations lost in bitter conflict; their history is now forever stained with fraternal blood. The story of this zero-sum game has often been lost in the clamor of the first. But remove the nation-state conflict from the picture, and the two sides have to confront decades of modern-day mistrust and contrast it with the previous centuries of historic amity. They have to ask themselves what they have to gain by continuing to stare at each other across political borders that now have little meaning in their own lives. The only way to perpetuate a "Kashmiri" identity will be for the two sides to re-enage each other in new economic and cultural alliances. Why is this scenario so likely? The zero-sum game has now been altered. The old zero-sum game was propped up by a parallel zero-sum game waged by the two nation-states of India and Pakistan. The new zero-sum game is the loss of the "Kashmiri" identity in an "Indian" identity and a "Pakistani" identity. Facing this new zero-sum game on both sides of their valley home, I believe Kashmiris will toss out old rivalries and theological boundaries in the pursuit of their unique place in history.

Perry de Havilland from Libertarian Samizdata pointed out a recent article on stratfor.com analyzing the rather weak Indian naval and nuclear strategy - particularly in response to this new post Cold War era. In particular, Stratfor notes:



...The Dhanush is an ill-conceived weapons system that offers only a marginal contribution at best to India's tactical and strategic effectiveness. The navy continues to pour scarce resources into the Dhanush in hopes that, by becoming a leg of India's strategic nuclear triad, it can increase its currently meager share of the defense budget. Continued inter-service squabbling over the nuclear arsenal is short-changing India's real strategic asset -- the navy -- and is distracting New Delhi from a prime opportunity to secure its influence in the Indian Ocean basin and beyond...



...The Dhanush is being pitched as an anti-ship missile, but it is ill-suited for the role. Its large size limits the number of missiles that can be deployed. The pitch and roll of ships complicates the stabilization and targeting process, and the missile must be modified to cope with salt air corrosion. The ballistic Dhanush would be ineffective against a warship equipped with an Aegis air defense system -- and unless India has made advances in terminal guidance systems or is committed to large blast radius nuclear warheads, its poor accuracy would render the missile useless against anything smaller than a Nimitz class aircraft carrier....




I have commented unfavorably in the past on the inefficiencies of the Indian military machine here, here, here, as well as on the continued insistence by the Indian military and political circles on the virtues of self-reliance. When it comes to major weapons platforms, very few countries besides the US and some EU nations have the technological breadth and depth to build effective, competitive systems. The Indian defense infrastructure suffers from all the flaws of its other public sector enterprises without even the modicum of transperancy and accountability that those enterprises possess. Some branches of the Indian military are definitely locked in a Cold War "non-aligned-self-reliant" policy loop.



Other commentators have been equally critical of the public sector defense undertakings.



...despite its ambition, India's efforts to develop an indigenous defence production capability have failed to live up to initial expectations. Therefore India is likely to remain heavily dependent on foreign arms exporters for the supply of key capabilities for the foreseeable future. In response, some officials and businessmen are now calling for the participation of private sector and foreign companies in India's defence industrial base...




A forward-leaning defense establishment, with a high degree of private enterprise participation, is quite possibly the only way any indigenous defense industry will survive. On this note, there have been some good decisions made by the current batch of the body politic. Moving beyond Russia as the primary supplier of weapons platforms and a potential research partner is another really good idea one, even if the bulk of Indian ground forces continue to buy from Russia (like these 8000 laser-guided shells..!). For India watchers, this means looking keenly
at Israel, whose specialty weapons platforms could very well give India the tactical and even strategic edge in South Asia for the next several decades. Israel is without a doubt, the finest source for information-technology battlefield weapons like UAVs, missile drones, and even aircraft navigation systems.



For game-theory hobbyists like myself, defense procurement is a fascinating indicator of the evolution of zero-sum and non-zero-sum games in play across South Asia and the spillover on to nearby regions like the Middle East and East Asia. Zero-sum dimensions like the Indo-Pak wars have historically lead to increased non-zero-sum alliances between the two South Asian nations and players like Russia (ex Soviet Union), the US, the Chinese, and yes, even the French, who play this game surprisingly well. The latest iteration of this evolution is the rapid strengthening of the Indo-Israeli and the Indo-Russian alliance, both driven by fears of out-of-control zero-sum games in their own backyards. Every alliance has a counterweight and the strengthening Sino-Pak alliance is the obvious opposing force. In all human conflict, the strongest alliance always wins. May the force be with all of us!

New images on the header courtesy of my better half, it's her job to clean up after me, as always ...

This is a text-book case of how people can be forced into extra-legal methods when attempting to build homes and small businesses when the formal legal system fails them. The Delhi Supreme Court declares the building industry to be the most lawless in the world. Before we take the comments of such an august body at it's face value it is worth examining the asinine bureaucracy that people have to wade through in order to conform to the law, and how much work is involved in staying legal after the fact..



the Government wanted to permit the height of the residential buildings to go up to a height of 12.5 metres from the existing limit of 11.5 metres.



Exasperated by the mushrooming illegal constructions and large scale violations of building bye-laws despite repeated court orders to the authorities to set things right, the Supreme Court on Wednesday said Delhi was the worst example of lawlessness in the world.




This kind of thinking pervades much of Indian politics and law.. where the enforcement of Western-style legal principles is seen as the entirely benign attempt by the sophisticated and affluent elite classes to impose rules of conduct on an illiterate and therefore untrustworthy populace. This is indeed a wake up call for the government, but not for the superficial law-and-order problem created by law-breaking on a mass scale. It is an indication that the current formal legal system is wholly inadequate, difficult to traverse, rife with corruption, thereby forcing otherwise law-abiding citizens into extra-legal arrangements.
The law does not exist to force people into unnatural patterns of behavior they are not accustomed to. The law exists to formalize accepted social, economic and individual behavior and to provide the kind of consistency needed to allow a stable, free-thinking society to create itself.

Military jets take to the skies while the plague tiptoes back into India's heartland..

The Kolkata Libertarian is moving to a new URL, taking advantage of server-side ASP, XML, etc.. All old archives and permalinks within other posts will still work, but from now on the new URL is http://www.palit.com/tkl.asp. I'll keep the old http://www.palit.com/blogger.html link around for a while, and it should redirect to this site, so hopefully this change will be transparent to everyone.



UPDATE: The comments don't work yet, need to fix some permissions on the server.. then it'll all be gold..

UPDATE: Comments work now.. joy!

// posted by Suman @ Tuesday, February 19, 2002   

After hitting a deer on a highway, a couple of PETAphiles did what every red-blooded activist does.. find someone else to shoulder the blame and then sue them. In a motion to sue the New Jersey Wildlife Agency, they claim that:




...PETA, Mr. Shannon, and Mr. Kelly believe that this collision, which occurred near the start of New Jersey's hunting season, was caused by the states Department of Environmental Protection Fish and Wildlife Division and the Fish and Game Council as a result of their deer management program, which includes, in certain circumstances, an affirmative effort to increase deer populations...




PETA and their ilk would like to see the deer population in North America down to a big fat zero, if it means they can ban all hunting after that. The inconsistency of this position must rank at an all time high. Deer populations are exploding because hunters are finding it increasingly difficult to hunt near urban or suburban lands, largely due to ARA media campaigns. In addition, deer are now remarkably adapted to living near human habitat. New forest growth in the US has been on the upswing since the 1970s, which has lead to an explosion of native wildlife as they move to occupy these new ecological niches. Hunters are largely responsible for funding these efforts, and organizing grass-roots efforts to actually help state wildlife agencies achieve these goals. I suspect this is what angers your average animal-rights beatnik no end..



Perhaps we should all live in fenced off concrete jungles surrounded by animal-proof domes, eat cabbage and yeast from hydroponics tanks and vent our flatulence into deep space. Heaven forbid that we should ever collide with the rest of Nature, or engage in any form of responsible consumption of natural resources..!

India coming under some pointed and well-placed criticism from many observers on the growing reactionary Hindu movement with a tendency to "saffronize" Indian culture.



I tend to believe that Hindu hardliners in India have **completely** missed the boat with their wretched attempts to crack down on people celebrating Valentine's day. Personally, I don't like Valentine's day.. I would rather replace it with something more fun, like "World Drinking Day".



Such prudishness was not always inherent in Indian culture. Anthropologists theorize that the erosion of the expressiveness of free-love, public displays and celebration of sensuality and the uncomplicated enjoyment of simple pleasures may have began in the middle ages. Buffeted by repeated waves of Muslim conquests, the natural reaction of a slowly conquered people is to adopt the ways of their conquerors. However, as it happens often enough, the pendulum always swings both ways, and the average Indian is now re-discovering that heritage wrapped in a new context.



There is one lesson of Indian history that is of vital importance today. India flourished when her citizens were given the chance to interact, exchange thoughts and ideas, experiment with other cultures and then paint them with local color. India's decline began when she turned her back on this discourse with the world, believing that the lands outside her borders were rife with untouchables and of little value.



Whether Valentine's day is a vulgarism or not is inconsequential.. what is important is that Indians need the unfettered opportunity to either embrace or reject cultural icons from the rest of the world.To the boorish Shiv Sena who plan to continue to oppose such "foreign" holidays, I would therefore say:".. don't tread on me.."

Pan-Islamists are not the only ones with delusions of grandeur, and plans for historical revisionism.. my sister points out the author of this pseudo-historical article which makes some fantastic and lurid claims. Claims that are completely unencumbered and unhampered by the lack of such wee details as empirical evidence, corroboration by other historical works, etc.. It's a fun read, if you aren't allergic to idiots substituting fiction for history. It is unfortunate that nonsense like this sometimes passes for historical research, because otherwise this site does indeed have some well-written articles on Hinduism and deserves credit for that.




It might come as a stunning revelation to many that the word ‘ALLAH’ itself is Sanskrit



Unfortunately these chapters of world history have been almost obliterated from public memory. They need to be carefully deciphered and rewritten. When these chapters are rewritten they might change the entire concept and orientation of ancient history.



In view of the overwhelming evidence led above, historians, scholars, students of history and lay men alike should take note that they had better revise their text books of ancient world history. The existence of Hindu customs, shrines, Sanskrit names of whole regions, countries and towns and the Vikramaditya inscriptions reproduced at the beginning are a thumping proof that Indian Kshatriyas once ruled over the vast region from Bali to Baltic and Korea to Kaaba in Mecca, Arabia at the very least.




Yes, I am thumping with laughter as well, as I proceed to redraw the map of the United States as it was when ancient astronauts and their Hindu warriors and clans of monkey gods and dinosaurs ruled over a vast and forgotten North American Vedic empire...

William Saletan takes on the Intelligent Design movement, and rips them to shreds, while at the same time, cracking the sarcasm whip at the educational establishment for failing to use the proper arguments against this new pesudo-science. Ouch!




Meanwhile, all over the United States, the Feds take over airport security, and the plans of budding terrorists get ripped into little tiny shreds...