Shadow Warrior by Rajeev Srinivasan

This essay was published by the indianaffairs.com at https://theindianaffairs.com/en/hindus-the-diaspora-and-the-rishi-sunak-phenomenon/

Now that the euphoria over the ascent of Rishi Sunak to the position of Prime Minister of the United Kingdom has died down a little, it is worthwhile to consider the implications. On the one hand, there is understandable pride that someone in the diaspora has done well: I remember how delighted all of us were when V S Naipaul got his Nobel Prize in literature. 

On the other hand, what is the tangible value to India of Sunak’s rapid rise to the leadership of what is, let us be honest, a racist, white-supremacist, imperial nation that is staring at the edge of an economic precipice? I was personally relieved a month or so ago when Sunak lost the leadership race to Liz Truss, simply because the rot is so bad in Britain that not even superhuman efforts are going to save the country from ruin.

My argument was that Sunak had dodged a bullet: whoever ended up as PM would inherit such an impossible mess, such a tar baby, that they would forever be blamed for it, even if they were innocent bystanders. So why not let someone else, like Liz Truss, fall on the sword? 

If it were Sunak, not only would he be blamed individually, but also, in priority order a) Hindus, b) Indians, c) brown people, d) Stanford MBAs. It was best all around, I said at the time, to let some white woman be the fall guy, as it were. And we saw exactly what happened to her in 44 days: humiliated, disgraced, kicked out of office, her political career probably ruined forever. 

The sad thing is that nothing has changed now. After Brexit, the UK is merely a small “tribal”, “bad-toothed”, “flavour-starved” “sub-Scandinavian archipelago” as a hilarious critic on Twitter, @gathara, calls it. His/her “breaking news” about the West is a cheeky microscope turned back on the US, the UK etc by a Kenyan using the same demeaning language Western media uses for the rest of the world. 

Janan Ganesh, a columnist at the FT, had a good insight: Britain is laboring under the illusion that it is the US, which can wield its currency as a weapon; failing which, it has its military with which to quell challengers. Britain has none of the above. It has also been living beyond its means. Now it is forced to sell its family silver just to survive. As an example, there was a recent accusation that British Air Force pilots were sent to train Chinese pilots; which would likely mean American military secrets were dished out as they went ‘open-kimono’.

There is a fair chance that Sunak, too, will go down the same way Truss did, and indeed Boris Johnson did: resigning in disgrace. But in any case, everybody will find their expectations of him will be unfulfilled. Indians naively believe Sunak will be nice to India. On the contrary, his job is to look out for Britain's interests. And he has many constraints on him.

For example, Sunak has brought back Suella Braverman, who had been sacked as Home Minister. She  irritated Indians by being an arch-imperialist saying there were too many Indians overstaying their visas in the UK. Surely, he did to ensure domestic support and avoid schisms in his own party. And yes, Braverman is of Indian origin, too. 

Remember that Rishi Sunak is a Briton and not an Indian, even though he is a practicing and devout Hindu. His personal faith cannot get in the way of his doing his job as PM. In fact, he may even have to be particularly harsh on India to fend off allegations of dual loyalties. I remember Indian managers in Silicon Valley doing the same thing: they were especially hard on their Indian employees just to appear ‘neutral’: over-compensation. 

I am by no means saying that there’s nothing to celebrate in Sunak’s rise. I am also delighted when Indian-origin people do well in other countries, against the odds. Maybe it is an irrational bout of ethnic pride. And it is true that Indians, especially Hindus, are now becoming more visible in their countries of residence, through hard work and the efforts of ‘Tiger Mothers’. 

I was reminded of this the other day when searching through my usual podcasts: I came across two Indian-Americans, although based on their accents they are both immigrants. One is the Pulitzer-winning oncologist Siddhartha Mukherjee speaking of his new book The Song of the Cell; the other is Nick Santhanam, a Silicon Valley investor and former McKinsey consultant, talking about his new book The Titanium Economy. 

Then there’s the articulate Balaji Srinivasan, a visionary and crypto-evangelist who foresees the rise of distributed ‘network states’. And Saagar Enjeti, who runs an interesting podcast channel.

In a sense, Indians are following in the footsteps of Jews: they, too, leveraged their smarts, especially in medicine, finance and cinema, to rise to the top of the heap in the US. Indians are, interestingly, using medicine, finance and technology in their rise to wealth. Incidentally, the only other ethnic-minority PM ever in the UK was Benjamin Disraeli, a Jew. 

I used to think there would be a natural alliance between Jews and Hindus, especially as both have been under relentless attack by the same Abrahamic groups. India was the only country to never to oppress Jewish residents, too. But now I am not so sure. Maybe it’s because Jews are, after all, Abrahamics themselves. And maybe they find themselves in competition with Hindus.

I am reminded of various Jews who are not exactly pro Hindu: Wendy Doniger, Sheldon Pollock, Amy Wax (a law professor), Amy Kazmin (former FT bureau chief in India). Kazmin, whom I befriended on Twitter, once gave me the generic equivalent of “But my best friend is a Jew” when I complained about her unsympathetic stance towards Hindus: “But I check my articles with a Hindu Kayastha”. The irony was apparently lost on her. 

Similarly, Hindus are singularly unfortunate to not have allies, even though we are the last pagans standing. Some Buddhists are strongly anti-Hindu, as in the case of the Rev Zenji Nio, a Japanese. And we know about the Sikh diaspora and its Khalistan obsession. Yes, divide and rule has worked all too well. 

Be that as it may, personally, I am irrationally happy when fellow-paisanos do well. I celebrated when Sundar Pichai and Satya Nadella rose in tech; I was a big fan of the late C K Prahalad. But let us be very clear: while they will do what they can for the mother country, the diaspora are not Indians, and their success is not tied to India. To them, India is increasingly remote, a distant memory. Their reality is America, or wherever they have chosen to make their home. 

They have no skin in India’s game. India will rise mostly based on the efforts of those who live in the country. Rishi Sunak, ironically, has a stake in India because he’s married to Infosys Narayana Murthy’s daughter Akshata, and she owns about 1% of the company. Sunak is independently wealthy, though, having made his fortune on Wall Street and private equity. 

But that’s about it: we can all be proud of Rishi Sunak, whose Hindu values have enabled him to prosper in a hostile white world, and he is unapologetic about his religion. But his rise to the top of the Anglosphere is not particularly a win for India. India will have to rise based on its own efforts, not because of any favors from anybody. Permanent interests, not permanent friends.

1270 words, 6 Nov 2022

A version of this essay has been published by firstpost.com at https://www.firstpost.com/opinion/big-story-in-technology-is-generative-ai-and-it-is-like-riding-a-tiger-11916172.html

The past year has seen a number of newsworthy stories in science and technology, and several of them may turn out to be of great significance. For instance the protein-folding smarts of Deep Mind’s Alphafold and Meta’s ESMfold may be a game-changer in the creation of new molecules, specifically in drug discovery, although these drugs will take at least a decade to show up on pharmacy shelves.

Lawrence Livermore Labs (US Department of Energy) made an apparent breakthrough in nuclear fusion, although a commercial reactor is still years or decades away. The James Webb space telescope captured extraordinary views of the universe. 

Then there was the spectacle of the meltdown of cryptocurrencies (again) in the wake of the antics of Sam Bankman-Fried. And the ongoing saga of the “manufacturing consent” by Twitter and US government/Democratic party agents: potentially Watergate 2.0.

But quite possibly the most exciting event of all was the unveiling of the AI bots ChatGPT for text and DALL-E 2, Imagen and Midjourney for images, all generated with simple commands entered by a user. Stable Diffusion, Google and Meta also demonstrated text-to-video.

ChatGPT and DALL-E are two artificial intelligence (AI) tools that are making significant strides in bringing AI to the public. Both tools have the ability to generate text and images, respectively, in a way that is convincing to humans. This has the potential to revolutionize the way we create and consume content, as entire books, including illustrations, could potentially be written by these tools.

ChatGPT is a chatbot that uses the GPT-3 language model developed by OpenAI. It is capable of generating natural language responses to prompts, making it possible for users to have conversations with it as if it were a human. This technology has already been integrated into a number of popular messaging apps and virtual assistants, making it widely available to the public.

One potential use for ChatGPT is in the creation of written content. It could be used to generate entire books, including storylines, character development, and descriptions. ChatGPT could even be trained on a specific genre or style of writing, allowing it to create content that is tailored to a specific audience.

DALL-E is another AI tool developed by OpenAI that is capable of generating images based on a given text prompt. It works by using a neural network to understand the meaning of the text and then generating an image that represents that meaning. The results produced by DALL-E can be quite convincing, with many of the images it creates being indistinguishable from those created by humans.

Like ChatGPT, DALL-E has the potential to revolutionize the way we create and consume content. It could be used to generate illustrations for books, magazines, and other printed materials, reducing the need for human artists. It could also be used to generate images for social media and other online platforms, providing a quick and easy way to create visually appealing content.

Overall, ChatGPT and DALL-E are bringing AI to the public in a way that is both accessible and useful. These tools have the potential to change the way we create and consume content, and may eventually result in entire books, including illustrations, being written convincingly by AI. While there are certainly ethical and societal implications to consider with the advancement of these technologies, they have the potential to greatly enhance and improve our daily lives.

In the spirit of full disclosure, permit me to point out that the preceding six paragraphs were written by ChatGPT on a simple prompt: “write an essay about how chatgpt and dall-e are bringing artificial intelligence to the public, and may result in entire books, including illustrations, being written convincingly by these tools.” 

It’s a little embarrassing to admit that the text is as good as anything I, or any human essayist, could have written. By utilizing the collective ‘wisdom of crowds’ on the Internet, and using neural nets to decode the structure of English composition, the bot emits plausible content, and can even hold quite believable conversations with you.

And anyone can sign up at chat.openai.com. It’s free at the moment, but OpenAI, a non-profit entity, may well start to monetize it, considering the huge cost of running the server farms that host the AI, which is based on GPT-3, a natural language interface that draws on 175 billion parameters in a neural network. 

When GPT-3 was first announced in 2021, I did a podcast titled AI and the coming language wars. I was concerned about various things, including gaslighting, and those concerns have not gone away by any means. 

OpenAI’s for-profit venture that manages ChatGPT was seed-funded with a billion-dollar investment by Microsoft. Similarly, Google has its own gigantic neural network, although that is not available to outsiders. Interestingly, ChatGPT may begin to compete with Google search as the default model for the search user experience.

Similarly, the art produced by AI bots is evocative and beautiful (the images here are included by kind permission of TheEmissary; some of these images appear in the beautiful Hindu Planner 2023 by ArthamShop).

However, there are several issues. One is that, at least for the moment, ChatGPT is not much more than an amusing toy, though it will improve. Old-timers will remember Eliza, a 1960’s LISP-based system from MIT’s AI Lab, that could carry on what seemed like a somewhat-stilted session on a psychiatrist’s couch. 

Eliza was good enough to appear almost-human, and by sort of rephrasing a user’s words and regurgitating them back as questions, it seemed to possess a certain soothing intelligence. That was far from the case, of course. It had no semantic understanding.

To some extent, GPT-3 (which stands for Generative Pretrained Transformer, version 3) is only a sophisticated version of Eliza, because it too has no contextual understanding of what’s going on: it makes educated guesses based on statistical patterns in its text dataset gathered from many sources. 

The diabolical thing about GPT-3 (and this will be even more so with GPT-4 that is due to debut in 2023 and is rumored to be able to handle multiple languages) is that it appears sentient, but it is not. It also has no qualms about giving you false information: for instance it ‘believed’ rumors, and gave ‘references’, about Noam Chomsky’s death. 

I asked it whether it believed rumors about Chomsky, and it gave this anodyne response: It is not possible for chatGPT to believe or not believe anything as it is a machine learning model and does not have personal beliefs or emotions. ChatGPT is programmed to generate responses based on the prompts it receives, and it does not have the capability to believe or not believe anything. Oh goody.

On the other hand, the quality of its literary output is a little lacking, although I got it to emit haiku, limericks and sonnets. My benchmark for mechanical intelligence is Stanislaw Lem’s brilliant robot poet in the story “The First Sally (A) or Trurl’s Electronic Bard” (sorry, Marvin the paranoid android from “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy”: you are too depressing!).

Lem’s robot is given this command: compose a poem- a poem about a haircut! But lofty, tragic, timeless, full of love, treachery, retribution, quiet heroism in the face of certain doom! Six lines, cleverly rhymed, and every word beginning with the letter S!

And it produces the sublime:

Seduced, shaggy Samson snored,

She scissored short. Sorely shorn,

Soon shackled slave, Samson sighed,

Silently scheming

Sightlessly seeking

Some savage, spectacular suicide.

Given the same command, this is all ChatGPT could manage:

She sat in the chair, so sad and so forlorn

Her hair was a mess, a tangled and knotted thorn

The stylist approached, with scissors in hand

Ready to cut, to style, to make her stand.

But as the snips began, a sense of dread

Overcame her heart, her mind filled with dread

For with each lock that fell, a piece of her soul

Felt as though it left, leaving her feeling alone

Yet in the end, as the stylist stepped back

She saw her reflection, and her heart began to lack

For her hair was sleek, her eyes shone bright

And she knew, in that moment, everything would be alright.

No, not in the same class at all. ChatGPT, better luck next time! Of course, if asked to regenerate, ChatGPT will produce a slightly different opus, but I doubt if it will land on the poetic metaphor of Samson, whose strength lay in his hair, which the temptress Delilah, with malice aforethought, removed.  

But then, Stainslaw Lem was a genius of science fiction (you must see Andrei Tarkovsky’s stunning adaptation of his Solaris, with its sentient planet), and so the comparison is a little unfair. And his translator was outstanding: I have never forgotten that phrase “savage, spectacular suicide”, which of course we have seen many times in the recent past. 

Apart from the banality, there are serious legal issues as well. For one thing, since it has no common sense, an AI will absorb all the worst prejudices of the Internet, including racism, sexism, bias and religious bigotry. Some time ago, Microsoft hastily deactivated its AI bot after it started spewing hate speech. So who’s to control AI’s output?

How about surreptitious surveillance? One of the problems with big data per se is that governments and BigTech can snoop on you, and arrive at the moral equivalent of “pre-crime” as in the film “Minority Report”. In effect, that is what China’s “social rank” algorithms have done. AI’s broad sweep makes this ever more powerful. If you do things that governments don’t like, you could become a non-person.

There will have to be a whole slew of regulations to protect the public interest. Fake news, fake images, and especially fake videos (“deepfakes”) can have huge propaganda impact and could incite people to violence. 

How these affect elections is already a good question: Cambridge Analytica allegedly worked with Facebook to nudge people into voting for the Congress in India. We have also seen how the Hunter Biden laptop story and the Russian interference story have been used to manipulate US elections.

There is a current New Scientist story about how deep fake videos about Ukraine’s Zelensky are in circulation. There will be more. One way to identify them would be to force watermarks on them via every application that can create them; but of course the dark web will have applications outside the purview of regulators.

I have concerns about the concentration of AI research in two countries, the US and China. Where does this leave India? In particular, I worry about Indian data: the draft law that was circulated seems to imply that India will permit Indian data to be held abroad in “friendly” countries. That is just plain wrong. 

The concerns expressed by Rajiv Malhotra in Artificial Intelligence and the Future of Power do need to be addressed if India is not to be left out in the cold.

There is also the question of language. It is becoming increasingly clear that English is not optimal for Indians as the medium of instruction and communication, partly because it brings substantial cultural baggage, and partly because it imposes an unnecessary epistemic burden on students. 

I can see two diametrically opposite scenarios for the language issue. On the one hand, the dominance of English may well increase as a lot of AI that Indians are exposed to will be from US Big Tech (there is a barrier with Chinese technology).

On the other hand, sophisticated natural language systems such as GPT-3 and -4 could be used to perform real-time translation of both text and speech to Indian languages. If, that is, there are sufficiently large text troves in these languages; and that is a big ‘if’. 

On a related topic, AI is already helping decipher ancient cuneiform text: can it do the same for the Indus-Sarasvati Valley inscriptions? That would be a tremendous boost for Indian civilization. 

Philosophically speaking, there is also a debate about whether AIs can become truly sentient: the question of consciousness. Subhash Kak has written that it is unlikely that AIs will ever become conscious. I am not so sure any more, but if they do, it would in fact be a catastrophe for humanity, as we would become superfluous. 

As has been said famously, all new technology and innovation can be used either for good or for evil. Besides, we often have no idea as to the directions in which truly disruptive innovation can take us. We are on the threshold of such a revolution today with advanced AI. One can only hope, and pray, that the outcome is benign. 

2100 words, Dec 28, 2022

This essay was published by firstpost.com at https://stg.firstpost.com/opinion-news-expert-views-news-analysis-firstpost-viewpoint/shadow-warrior-the-us-midterm-elections-and-implications-especially-for-india-11146761.html

This is being written on the eve of the US midterm elections, and so far as can be gathered from voluminous punditry, it appears the Democrats are going to take a direct hit. Normally the ruling party loses seats in the midterms, but this time the loss could actually turn into a rout, especially because of inflation and high interest rates.

If the opinion polls are correct, and there is no hanky-panky at the voting-booth, chances are that the Republicans will gain control over one or both of the upper and the lower house: the Senate and the House of Representatives. This means that Joe Biden will be a lame duck, and his far-left, ‘woke’ agenda will be stymied by continuous obstruction by the Republicans.

US election issues

Democrats are on the defensive on many issues that are top of mind for the US voter: 

* Inflation and the economy

* Abortion and women’s rights

* Immigration and border control

* Climate change

* Law and order

* The war in Ukraine

* The Trump factor and the 2020 election

Undoubtedly there are other, local issues that concern voters, but on the national level this is what they will bring to the voting booth on November 8th. In general, there is a backlash to the extreme-left politics espoused by the ‘progressives’ who appear to have hijacked the Democratic Party.

Inflation is hurting people directly (at about 8%, a 40-year high, and very visible in the price of staples like food and petrol). Naturally, those in charge in times of trouble take the blame, whether it is deserved or not. As the Fed tightens, there will be job losses; there already are, in Big Tech, eg Twitter and Meta, including for other reasons. Small businesses are hurting, too. 

The abortion issue looked like a major galvanizing force a few weeks ago when the US Supreme Court overturned the legendary Roe v. Wade decision, but it has faded in importance except for the activist leftist faction within the Democratic party (the so-called ‘progressives’).

Relatively uncontrolled immigration through the porous southern border is an emotive issue in border states such as Texas. 

With riots in several cities, ‘defund the police’, and general mayhem such as repeated school shootings, rampant gun violence, breakdowns in law and order may be an emotive issue. 

Climate change is less of a concern than it had been earlier, because it is increasingly clear that there will be pain to the general public in making a move to renewable energy. 

The Ukraine war, although it has some bipartisan support, is dragging on, and is correctly seen as a factor in increasing oil and gas prices, as well as food prices. 

Former President Trump is still a factor in the Republican party, and quite a few members of that party are convinced that the 2020 elections were flawed at best, and stolen at worst. 

Finally, one of the imponderables is the ‘swing vote’: groups that may be persuaded based on specific issues. 

Swing voters

It appears that there are only two genuinely committed votebanks: one is the mostly white, young-ish, college-educated ‘liberal’ Democratic cohort, that comprise the ‘progressives’ of both the East Coast and California. The other is the rural, again mostly white, older, non-college-graduate ‘conservative’ cohort, which has been dependably Republican for long.

Black voters have been Democrat-leaning for years, and that will continue to be the case. Other groups, for example Latinos (Spanish speakers, or their descendants, often immigrants from Mexico, Central America, Cuba and so on), may well change their allegiance. Latinos were dedicated Democratic voters, but they have shown signs of defecting in droves because of the overly-socialist noises coming from the Democrats. Latinos who escaped from leftist ‘paradises’ like Cuba and Venezuela have no illusions about the pleasures of socialism and communism.

Similarly, Indian-Americans in America have been dependably Democratic-leaning. That party was seen as immigrant-friendly, minority-friendly, etc. but as Indians (as well as other Asian-Americans) see the appalling deterioration in their cities, they are beginning to sour on extreme-left Democrats. For instance, Asian-Americans spearheaded the recall of school board members and a district attorney in San Francisco. 

Unfortunately, those Indian-American legislators (you know who they are) who are most woke and most anti-India are unlikely to be dislodged as their constituencies are leftist strongholds.

Put all these factors together, and unless there is widespread voting fraud (the US equivalent of booth-capturing), it is hard to see how the Democrats are going to avoid a disaster. A lame-duck President Biden has consequences for the rest of the world, too.

Global implications from a lame-duck US Presidency

What are the implications? On the one hand, a number of the problems facing the world at the moment can plausibly be traced back to the US, and to be fair, they were not all created by the Biden Administration. But Biden has certainly exacerbated things, leading to global pain.

The four big problems are: 1. The coronavirus, 2. Inflation, 3. The Ukraine war, 4. Dependence on China. 

It seems increasingly likely, despite strenuous objections and attention-diverting tactics by the US medical establishment led by Anthony Fauci, that the Covid pandemic is the result of a lab-leak from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, where experiments in ‘gain-of-function’ were being carried on, with American funding channeled through Peter Daszack’s Ecohealth.

Impact: Ideally, in a lame-duck Biden regime, the US comes clean on the whole virus conspiracy.

The massive money-printing exercise and largesse (a few thousand dollars to every US taxpayer as stimulus payments) have led to too many dollars chasing too few goods, the textbook definition of inflation. This structural problem was exacerbated by supply-chain disruptions (read imports from China) due to the coronavirus and the Ukraine war. 

Impact: Instead of throwing good money after bad, as in the ill-considered and Orwellian Inflation Reduction Act, a chastened Biden regime might pursue more sensible fiscal policy.

Speaking of the Ukraine war, neutral observers are hard pressed to see how it has helped anybody, other than the pals of the Deep State, for whom increased military spending means a windfall. Atlanticist Democrats with Eastern European ancestry have dragged the US into some obscure blood feud of theirs with the Russians. Starved of Russian energy supplies, Western Europe is likely to suffer a cold winter and find that its industry is severely damaged. 

Impact: With the prospect of a loss in the midterms, WaPo reports that the hitherto pugnacious Biden crowd is telling Zelensky to seek a negotiated end to this pointless war. That is a relief.

Through a series of poor strategic decisions, the US has made itself almost fatally dependent on China as a supplier. While it is not impossible, a decoupling of supply chains (the China + 1 strategy) is difficult. Apple is the latest company warning that its production in China is taking a hit partly because of Foxconn’s well-publicized troubles with pandemic lockdowns. 

Impact: This is the one Biden policy that makes sense: isolate China and deny it technology. Biden has been China-friendly but the U-turn will get bipartisan support. 

There are some other secondary implications: for instance, the Republicans may probe the Hunter Biden laptop and its damning contents. This could potentially lead to a Biden impeachment, which would then make Kamala Harris the US President. That would be an outcome with many implications, especially for comedians and talk show hosts. 

The impact on India

India is low on Joe Biden’s priority list: he hasn’t even bothered to confirm his ambassador to India, although that may be a blessing in disguise. Eric Garcetti, the designate, is a Los Angeles party hack who is being kicked upstairs after a disastrous showing in his home town as mayor. 

In the 21st century, under Democratic Presidents Clinton, Obama and Biden, it has been clear that America is not exactly India’s friend. That was perhaps fortunate, given Henry Kissinger’s dictum: “It may be dangerous to be America’s enemy, but to be America’s friend is fatal”. 

Biden’s most prominent action regarding India was the futile effort to bully India into joining the US-NATO camp regarding Ukraine. His officials have taken ‘revenge’ in a number of petty ways, including the denial of visa appointments (when last checked, the waiting time for a visitor visa in Delhi was 880 days. Contrast this with just 2 days in Beijing).

Then there was the announcement of $450 million worth of enhancements to their F-16 fleet to Pakistan, followed by the release of that country from the FATF gray list, as well as the approval of a billion-dollar IMF bailout package. 

A less woke, lame-duck US Administration may well be in India’s interest. The more worried the US gets about China, the more value they see in the Quad, as the Trump Administration did. In that sense, continuing frictions between the US and China would be useful to India, as indeed also a full-fledged Thucydides Trap of all-but-war between them.

Similarly, a less cocksure US Administration may want to bring the Ukraine war to an end with a face-saving exit for all concerned. Nuclear brinkmanship is not good for business in general, and if pushed, the Russians may in fact use tactical weapons, or worse. Nuclear war always seems like a bad idea, including with China over the latter’s likely invasion of Taiwan. We don’t know the unintended consequences.

On the other hand, any commercial pressure that the US puts on China is good as far as India is concerned. Presumably the chip wars, wherein the US is apparently intent on putting the brakes on Chinese development and manufacture of leading-edge semiconductors, will continue or gain momentum. That is in the US interest, and incidentally in India’s as well, as India tries to attract more investment into its own chip industry.

On average, a lame-duck Biden Presidency is a reasonably good outcome for India. If 2024 brings back a Republican Presidency (not necessarily Donald Trump) that too may be a good thing. The decline of the woke ‘progressives’ is good; however the hostility of the Deep State and the Military-Industrial Complex is not going to diminish until and unless India becomes a major economic and military power; which of course will happen by 2047. 

1720 words, Nov 7, 2022

This essay was published by firstpost.com.

The Hero’s Journey is a common metaphor used by storytellers from the Ramayana to the Iliad, and in innumerable modern works. You have the hero rising, then facing odds that are so overwhelming that he is on the verge of failure, but he often wins in the end, and is transformed or redeemed in the process. And indeed, for each of us, our own lives are heroes’ journeys, as the mythologist Joseph Campbell elucidated in a series of excellent documentaries.

Both the recent films Kantara and Rocketry: The Nambi Effect, in my opinion, fall into this broad categorization; but what’s notable and different is that they are about very Hindu heroes, quite a departure from the standard Indian film (especially of the Urduwood variety) where overt Hindus are usually depicted with contempt or disgust. 

The two films are very different from each other, of course, but it is telling that they both resonate with audiences, in a visible departure from the conventional wisdom that holds that neither a Hindu nor a nationalist should be depicted with sympathy, and especially not a Hindu nationalist. 

There is another Hindu meme: the local and the national are not meaningfully distinct, just as the Atman and Brahman are not. Kantara, set in the Tulu-land of Dakshina Kannada district, Karnataka, is instantly understandable to Hindus anywhere; and Rocketry, the story of a patriot of Tamil origin living Thiruvananthapuram, who is attacked and to whom tejovadham is done by mysterious, malign forces, is understandable to any Hindu, we whose face hostility in India and elsewhere.

When I saw Kantara, I was surprised by how normal the story was to me: of course, obviously, there are spirits, or demi-gods/daivas all around. This is something that I grew up with. I remember as a small boy being taken by my grandfather to the bharani festival of the village Devi temple in central Travancore: there were wondrous, magical things there then. 

Much later, I watched theyyams in Malabar, which is adjacent to Tulunadu, and the wonderful costumes are almost identical to those in the Bhoota kola depicted in the film; some of most impressive were thee-pothi (the fire-goddess) and the gulikan (the fierce deity identical to guliga in the film), especially as they performed at dusk. 

The belief in possession by spirits, as in the hypnotic sarpam-thullals (serpent-dances) of Travancore or of velichapads (oracles) in many parts of Kerala, holds no surprises for me. It is easy for a practicing Hindu to believe in them. It is not hard to imagine benign (and malign) spirits all around, for example as in O V Vijayan’s story The Little Ones, luminous ancestral spirits that help in times of trouble. 

I had a personal experience of the Divine, on my first trip to Sabarimala when I was a teenager. It was an incredible religious experience: for a moment, a glimpse of something extraordinary, a powerful vision of the Infinity of Grace. My friend, a doctor, tells me of medical miracles that can only be attributed to the power of prayer and Divine Grace.

In Kantara, the protagonist Siva consistently and carefully avoids the bhoota kola, as he was traumatized by the unexplained disappearance of his father, the oracular dancer of the village. He tries to lead the life of a carefree youth, drinking, hunting wild boar and getting into fights; but the panjurli daiva calls to him in his dreams. Spoiler alert: his hero’s journey culminates in a spectacular finale.

In Rocketry, the fictionalized story of the real-life Nambi Narayanan, the hero’s journey is even more evident. After early and brilliant success as a rocket engineer, his life and career were ruined in what was apparently a sordid combination of commercial sabotage by a three-letter acronym spy agency, and a power struggle among Congress politicians in Kerala, with some corrupt policemen in the mix.

Even if it is a little exaggerated for rhetorical purposes, Nambi Narayanan’s efforts to convince Rolls-Royce’s head (a Scot), the French Ariane rocket program, and the Soviet cryogenic labs to transfer technology and know-how to ISRO are amazing stories that I too had not heard, even though I live in Thiruvananthapuram, where Narayanan and Abdul Kalam did their work on solid and liquid-propelled rockets. 

Despite Narayanan’s value to the Indian space program, and the evident holes in the 1994 Maldivian spy story (see my Rediff column Who killed India’s cryogenic engine?) it took a court saga of 24 years to clear his name, and to get the redemption he deserved (a Padma Bhushan in 2019). In the meantime, India’s cryogenic engine was delayed by 19 years. 

What is remarkable in the film -- and it is disturbing that this should even have to be highlighted -- is that Narayanan is shown as an unapologetic Hindu. There is nothing whatsoever that prevents an observant and pious Hindu from also being an engineer and scientist: no dogma. But the prevailing filmi wisdom, which has become “truth by repeated assertion” is that Hindu rituals are superstition, but Abrahamic superstition is somehow ‘scientific’. 

The very fact that such films are being made, and are becoming blockbusters, shows that the narrative is shifting (the so-called Overton window). There is pushback, though: a little-known band in Kerala is suing Kantara over the song ‘Varaha-roopam’, which has Sanskrit lyrics and traditional tribal music. Because traditional knowledge cannot be copyrighted, it is likely that their intellectual property claim is not sustainable.

There were also people grumbling that Narayanan was lionized and that he wasn’t as key to ISRO’s success as the film makes him out to be. Maybe, but even if it was 50% exaggerated, he is still an amazing engineer and manager, and in any case it was unconscionable by any measure to torture him for 50 days, defame him, and destroy his career. Those who ordered the hit have never been named. 

My heroes have long been those among us who fight for Dharma and righteousness: Professor Eachara Warrier, Major Shaitan Singh. I am happy to now add Dr Nambi Narayanan to that list, and perhaps Siva, who brings to life the forest deities.

1020 words, 3 Nov 2022

A version of this essay was published by firstpost at https://www.firstpost.com/india/75-years-have-midnights-children-come-of-age-11093221.html

It is a bit of a coincidence that, just around the 75th anniversary of India gaining political independence from the British, Salman Rushdie should be in the news again, because he was stabbed in Chautauqua, a literary watering-hole in upstate New York. His book Midnight’s Children was, as is well known, a sensation when it first came out some forty years ago, in 1981.

The central conceit in the book is that 100,000 children born all over India on or around midnight on August 15th, 1947, are endowed with magical powers. Their lives are an allegory for India’s progress. It is a picaresque romp centered around the protagonist, Saleem Sinai, who can telepathically connect with and organize them. 

When I first read the book, I was impressed by the verbal pyrotechnics, and more so the clever interweaving of contemporary events into the magical realism of the ‘children’s’ lives. The great human tragedies and triumphs of Bharat, that is India, are a rich mother-lode to mine for fiction, and another example is the re-telling of the Mahabharata by Shashi Tharoor in The Great Indian Novel. 

But over time, the book’s impact faded for me. Even though I didn’t pay attention to it on first reading it, now I see it as significant that Saleem Sinai’s principal rivals among the children are ‘Shiva’ and ‘Parvati-the-witch’. Interesting choice of names, wouldn’t you say? A bit like Deepa Mehta’s choice of Radha and Sita for Fire, which I criticized as dog-whistle Hindu-hatred at the time in The problem with Fire.

Thank you for reading Shadow Warrior. This post is public so feel free to share it.

Nevertheless, Rushdie’s and the book’s charm obviously did not fade for the Anglosphere, because it fit into their world-view of India, as an exotic, barbaric country where bizarre things happen. They awarded it a Booker Prize, and later a Booker of Bookers, basically dubbing it the best book to have been written in English in decades. 

Rushdie rode his new-found stardom to riches and influence, and became a sort of seer on all things related not only to India, but also literature in general. And he physically moved to the Anglosphere, all the better to suit his new status as an oracle. In this he trod a well-trodden path which, for example, Amartya Sen and V S Naipaul also followed. More on that by and by.

If I am not mistaken, Rushdie’s output after Midnight’s Children is hit-and-miss. His only other work that gained fame (notoriety?) was The Satanic Verses, but that was for other reasons, not literary merit. Since I haven’t read that book, I have no particular opinion on it, and the politics is anyway complicated because of Shia-Sunni issues and internal Muslim issues of blasphemy. 

But I am now beginning to wonder if Rushdie is also a one-horse wonder, like Arundhati Roy. I have not read her The God of Small Things, but her trajectory has been similar to Rushdie’s: one hit, instant elevation to global stardom and a bully pulpit from which to spout all sorts of radical ideas. A pliant Anglo media piled on and lionized both, regardless of actual merit. 

Furthermore, I am struck by the parallels with Amartya Sen, who also parlayed fame from early works into global demi-god status, marriage into the Rothschild empire, and a Nobel Prize (although technically it is only the Swedish bank’s prize for economics). His theories about the ‘Kerala model’ of development turn out to be pure bunkum, but then who’s counting? 

Which reminds me, I suspect the always au courant Scandinavians will now award the Nobel Prize in Literature to Rushdie as a knee-jerk reaction to the stabbing, as they awarded the Peace Prize to Barack Obama basically because, he was, well…. black. Well, bully for Rushdie!

That, of course, is pure speculation. But the comparison with Naipaul is interesting. Both made Britain their home, and both commented on India in less-than-flattering terms. Naipaul’s An Area of Darkness was fierce, disappointed, and condemnatory. But the difference is that Naipaul, over time, became convinced that India was on the rise. Rushdie, so far as I can tell, does not see any future for India, nor anything worth celebrating.

Maybe that’s why I like Naipaul, because he agrees with my prejudices; but objectively speaking his writing has greater insight. Here’s an excerpt from Naipaul’s India Today article on the occasion of the 50th Independence Day. 

I think that within every kind of disorder now in India there is a larger positive movement. But the future will be fairly chaotic. Politics will have to be at the level of the people now. People like Nehru were colonial-style politicians. They were to a large extent created and protected by the colonial order. They did not begin with the people. Politicians now have to begin with the people. They cannot be too far above the level of the people. They are very much part of the people. The Nehrus of the world have to give way now to the men of the people...

It is important, in this apparent mess, for two things not to be interfered with. One is economic growth. I would like to see that encouraged in every way. It is the most important news coming out of India, more important than the politics. I would like to see education extended and extended. If this were to happen, and I feel it might, gradually, the actual level of politics will reflect both the economic life and higher level of education.

Rushdie doesn’t have that sympathy, nor the realization that there is something behind the chaos. Fair enough, he is entitled to his opinion. But the point at which I personally became annoyed with Rushdie was when he proclaimed (like Macaulay before him) that there is nothing worthwhile in modern Indian-language literature. 

I knew this to be false because there is proof of existence: I had read O V Vijayan, Thakazhi, S K Pottekkat, Basheer, Anand, and M Mukundan in Malayalam; Ashapurna Devi and Tarasankar Banerjee in translation from Bengali; S L Bhyrappa in Kannada and a host of other world-class writers. For Rushdie to blithely denigrate them all showed both arrogance and ignorance, typical of India’s ‘liberals’. 

In fact, it is India’s English-language output that is inferior and derivative. With the exception of a few tour-de-force works such as Vikram Seth’s Golden Gate and Amitav Ghosh’s The Shadow Lines, there’s nothing unique or noteworthy that will stand the test of time. Even Rushdie’s magical realism, I found out, pales before Vijayan’s 1960’s The Legends of Khasak with its shape-shifting odiyans and the disembodied flying oracular head of the ancient magician Kandath Nair; not to mention Gabriel Garcia Marquez’ 1970s English publication of One Hundred Years of Solitude.

Thanks for reading Shadow Warrior! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

It also turns out that Naipaul was right: 25 years later India is finally on an upward trajectory (that graphic from the FT is interesting, although it misrepresents India’s external boundaries). The colonialists are dead and buried, and ordinary men are now taking India forward. With economic growth, everything comes your way; and yes, the education system still sucks, as it’s infested with English and anti-national woke leftism (alas, also derivative and unoriginal). 

A Rushdie, steeped in the groupthink of Lutyens and Khan Market, has simply failed to see this, which  may mean he lacks the empathy, understanding, and feelings the greatest writers possess. 

The children and grandchildren of ‘midnight’s children’, however, see this.And what of the real midnight’s children? Hat tip to @NAN_DINI:  they are honoring the flag. They believe. 

Now personally, I am a little ambivalent about the ‘fly the flag in every house’ request by Prime Minister Modi. Of course, in my neighborhood in leftist paradise Thiruvananthapuram, hardly anybody took up his clarion call. Besides, I feel a little queasy about the American kitsch of flag-waving jingoism. In addition, flying the national flag from temples bothers me. I believe in the separation of ‘church’ and state; and I honestly think the interference of politicians in temples is an abomination. 

But I guess this Magnificent Generation that suffered through fifty years of kakistocratic dynasty mis-governance (see my earlier piece The Nehruvian Penalty: 50 wasted years) deserves to be applauded because they still believe. I do, too, but maybe I am an old cynic. 

I am not as old as them, but I remember suffering through those awful years of PL-480 and war and shortages of everything. I left, but then I returned because I, too, do believe. 

Giving credit where it’s due, I applaud Rushdie for coming up with the vanity of ‘midnight’s children’ and giving it a lot of airplay. But I’m afraid they, and their children and grand-children, have left Rushdie behind. They have moved on. He hasn’t, like the rest of the Anglo-Mughlai elite. Rushdie, midnight’s child himself, stayed stuck in the past while the others moved ahead. And that can become an avalanche, an irresistible force, if all goes well.

1470 words, 18 Aug 2022

A version of this essay has been published by swarajyamag.com at https://swarajyamag.com/culture/cinema-as-metaphor-enough-with-trashing-hindu-sentiment-especially-as-streaming-largesse-fades

The ongoing debate about three Hindi/Urdu films: Lal Singh Chaddha, Shamshera and RakshaBandhan is interesting. Social media is trending calls to boycott all three because they show Hindus and Hinduism in a bad light. They are not all released yet, so in some cases it is the antecedents of the principals, and their prior bad behavior, that is triggering boycott calls.

This is intriguing for several reasons: one is that usually passive Hindus are standing up for their faith in peaceful dissent; two is that cinema has such deep visceral impact that they can manufacture the truth; three is that the financials don’t add up; four is that we may have passed peak Hindi/Urduwood; and five is the persistent hypocrisy of the ‘liberal’ crowd screaming about freedom of expression within weeks after they urged a boycott of The Kashmir Files and grumbled about devout Hindu Nambi Narayanan in Rocketry: The Nambi Effect. 

I confess I am not a regular film-goer, especially not someone who habitually watches Hindi/Urdu films, although at one time I was a fan of the New Wave of independent/realist films in Hindi, such as Bhuvan Shome, Albert Pinto, Aakrosh, Garam Hawa, Uski Roti. The last two films I saw in theaters were Tanhaji and The Kashmir Files. This is partly because I find the increasingly Urduized lingo in mainstream films simply incomprehensible. Streaming video’s subtitles do help.

I used to see a lot of Malayalam films. Often New Wave, low-budget, realist (and outstanding) films, such as Piravi, Uttarayanam, Kanchana Sita, Vaastuhara, Elippathayam, Swayamvaram (but now I watch mostly mainstream films streamed on OTT). Malayalam mainstream film is where I first encountered what has now become endemic enough to outrage a lot of viewers: the casual or deliberate attack on Hindus and Hinduism. 

The specific film that first sensitized me was 1973’s Nirmalyam, which won national awards. The climactic scene has a velichapad, or temple oracle, spitting on the deity at the small, poor Hindu temple that he had served all his life, in despair that his life was ruined, and he falls down dead. Notably, the very fine actor was a Christian named P J Antony. (You might remember another Christian years later in Kerala who was accused of blasphemy and had his hand cut off.) 

What staggered me was that you would never see such a scene about any other religion in even the most ‘progressive’ Malayalam films, as it would be blasphemous, and there would be umm… consequences. But in the lexicon of leftist ‘intellectuals’, such a narrative demeaning Hindus is acceptable, and the director/writer went on to win the Jnanpith for his body of work about decadent Nair families: after all, the Akademi was dominated by people with similar views.

I began to notice that Hindu swamis are inevitably portrayed as crooks, rogues or cheats in Malayalam films, whereas Christian padres are uniformly holy and kind, and Muslim mullahs always stern but with a heart of gold. That is a standard leftist narrative. Over time, the narrative has become rigid, and even in fictional retellings of real incidents where an Abrahamic hurt a Hindu, the roles are reversed, so that the villain is always a Hindu. 

Over time, as wealthy Christians began to fund the films, their stories began to take center stage, but the motif of Hindu-hatred continued. Now the majority of films are funded by wealthy Muslims, but the Hindu-hatred is unabated. I think this is pretty much the case in Hindi/Urdu films too now, where it is par for the course to mock Hindus, Hindu religious rituals and deities. 

The demonization in Malayalam is so extreme that a recent film, Meppadiyan, was attacked simply because it had a staunch and religious Hindu protagonist, and featured a Sewa Bharati-funded ambulance! This is reaching absurd levels of ‘cancel culture’, in effect denying Hindus the very right to exist. It is normalizing the idea of ethnic cleansing and genocide. 

The twitter handle @GemsofBollywood has documented widespread Hindu-hatred in Hindi/Urdu films, including surprising ones going way back into the 1970s. Certain script-writers specialize in mocking Hinduism; well-known actors too, including those with known sympathies to Pakistan, Turkey, Qatar etc. The evidence is overwhelming, and social media is making ordinary Hindus aware of it, whereas the mainstream media buried it. 

That is point number 1: Hindus, fed up with this attack, are reacting in peaceful, legal, Gandhian ways, boycotting them. It is both tactical (“I’ll put my money where my mouth is”) and strategic, because films with their visceral impact have an outsize chance of becoming ‘The Truth’. They mold and cement lasting public perceptions, which is point number 2, as with Hollywood’s creation of massive US soft power. 

For instance, there were several films in the works for the 2021 centenary of the Moplah riots and massacres, rapes, and forced conversion of Hindus in Malabar. Most of them planned to show the rioters as heroic figures; but a public outcry forced them to go slow. The only one that seems to be finished is sympathetic to the Hindu victims: it is From River to River (Puzha muthal puzha varey), and it is apparently planned for release. 

Obviously, boycotts will hurt films’ revenues, which brings up point number 3: it is not clear that things are on the level. There are hundreds of films being produced in Malayalam, Tamil, Telugu, Hindu and Urdu, and the vast majority of them will fail at the box office. So why are they being produced in the first place, if they incur losses? The obvious answer is that they are a front for financial hanky-panky, most likely money laundering.

No, the financials simply don’t add up: something is fishy. Some films report massive collections in China. Which could mean Chinese money (or money from third countries) is being laundered for other, sinister, purposes. Similarly, some ‘house-full’ shows run to near-empty theaters, but they show pucca accounts to the tax authorities: lo, money has turned ‘white’. 

Thus point 4: that we may have reached ‘peak Hindi/Urduwood’. There are two good reasons to believe this. One is the success of films from outside that camp, eg. Bahubali, RRR, Pushpa, KGF, indicating that the film-going public is fed up with Hindi/Urduwood. I am personally not a fan of the excesses of RRR, preferring realism in historical times, but I understand its value as pure entertainment (and I loved the fantasy of Bahubali, a modern masterpiece set in the mythical past). 

Unlike RRR (which gained critical and apparent market success in the West), the Mumbai industry has not produced a single global hit… ever. That’s partly because of its dubious ideology, and partly because of lack of originality – almost everything is a second-rate parody of some Western film, as I expect Lal Singh is, although in its defense, at least it isn’t stealing intellectual property, being an authorized remake. 

Another reason is that, in addition to illegal hawala transactions, in recent times Hindi/Urduwood has depended on selling its output to the likes of Netflix, Amazon and Disney. They have managed to convince OTT channels that their product sells well in India, thus in effect gaming the OTT guys into paying good money for not only anti-Hindu but also anti-India trash. 

That gravy train is now grinding to a halt. Slowing subscriber uptake and plunging valuations have forced Netflix et al to take a hard look at what actually sells: the carte blanche to local partners will end. The Financial Times had a detailed article on this titled The Great Netflix Correction: loss of subscribers throws streaming business model into question.

The growing and visible ruckus about Shamshera etc, and several recent films that bombed badly, means that Hindi/Urduwood will have a hard time monetizing deadbeat scripts that piss off the public, as the OTT folks will ask more penetrating questions about viability and return on investment. There will be more demand for the likes of the patriotic Family Man on Amazon Prime. Amazon with its billions is less troubled than Netflix and Disney, but it will surely also ask hard questions.

Finally, point number 5: the hypocrisy of the ‘intellectual’ ‘liberal’ class of India. They are quick to shout down and ‘cancel’ anything that they do not like (remember the ‘ghar wapsi’ dramas?), but when the same happens in reverse, they play the victim card. Not any more, folks. The NYT and WaPo may buy your crocodile tears, but the average film-goer is on to you. You have to make money the old-fashioned way, by earning it, not by arranging a suspension of disbelief.

1450 words, 6 Aug 2022 updated 11 Aug 2022.

Errata: Corrected the name of the Nirmalayam actor to P J Antony. Earlier, I had mentioned it incorrectly as ‘Joseph’.

See also:

* https://esamskriti.com/e/National-Affairs/For-The-Followers-Of-Dharma/Bollywood-colon-s-passive~aggressive-attitude-towards-Hinduism-1.aspx hat tip @KartikV

* https://www.indiafacts.org.in/culture-wars-hindus/

A version of this essay has been published by firstpost.com at https://www.firstpost.com/opinion/from-caatsa-waiver-for-india-to-chastened-visit-to-saudi-arabia-why-biden-is-making-conciliatory-noises-10961801.html

Samuel Johnson once said: “When a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully”. Going by POTUS Biden’s recent hyperactivity, it seems that the prospect of imminent electoral catastrophe has the same effect. For, the hitherto imperious Democrats have been backpedaling so furiously that it is a wonder to watch.

Consider just a few events: the importunate, chastened visit to Saudi Arabia (after having trashed it for the Jamal Khashoggi murder); the CAATSA waiver for India (after blood-curdling threats by the sorely missed Daleep Singh et al regarding Ukraine); and the noises being made by several parties about bringing hostilities to an end in Ukraine. 

Behind all these is the realization that pandemic management has been royally screwed up (the much-vaccinated and Pfizer-oral-vaccine-medicated Biden himself caught the Wuhan virus), and that Anthony Fauci, Peter Daszak et al surreptitiously funding gain-of-function research in Wuhan was a major mistake. To be fair, even formerly lionized New Zealand now has significant numbers of covid deaths, but that is hardly comforting to Americans. 

Printing trillions of dollars as the panacea for covid was an even greater mistake, because the blowback has been raging inflation at 9.1%, hitting the average voter in the pocketbook. I personally endured the previous bout of high US inflation in the late 70s, but as a poor student it didn’t affect me much; as a family man I am sure I would have been pinched badly if I were a US resident and voter now. I remember petrol at $1-2, not $5 as it is now. 

This does not bode well for the Biden Democrats in the November midterm elections.

Inflation is not fun, as the Turkish voter is also finding out. Someone will take the blame.

I don’t think blaming Vladimir Putin for inflation is quite working; nor is blaming Donald Trump, who, after all, was the only recent POTUS who didn’t go to war. Biden’s ratings may continue on a downward trajectory. The abortion rights issue roused some of the faithful, but I don’t think this has staying power till November. 

Thus the U-turns, amusing to the impartial observer. 

The energy squeeze (and related inflation) explains the Saudi visit. The European Union, in particular Germany, is in bad shape, as is evident from the Euro dropping to a historical low of parity to the dollar. Germany’s GDP shrank for the first time in, well… a long time. If there is no renewed supply of Russian gas, Europe is going to freeze this winter. So it is imperative for NATO to beg or cajole or threaten OPEC, especially the Saudis, into increasing production.

There had earlier been the unedifying spectacle of Biden seeking help from Saudi Arabia, Venezuela and even Iran, all of whom his staff had demonized earlier. If I am not mistaken, the Saudis and the Venezuelans literally refused to take his phone call, which is humiliating. 

There is a more subtle reason the Saudis are important to Biden: petrodollars. Who outside the US is going to want all those trillions printed by the US Fed other than to buy petroleum products? The fact is that, having been lured by the siren-song of the Chinese, the US has de-industrialized to such an extent that there's not much global demand for dollars to buy American goods, except for armaments and high technology. 

If petroleum were to be traded in any other currency than the US dollar, it would depreciate, maybe even collapse. That is a scary prospect, which could trigger a serious global recession. Saudis have to be mollified and/or terrified so they don't even think of accepting other currencies in payment. Both Gaddafi and Saddam Hussein talked about accepting payment in Euros etc, and we all know what happened to them. 

Besides, there is an interesting little trick: the ‘Tipu Technique’. I believe the British tacitly encouraged Tipu to invade and loot the temples of Kerala, which had grown rich through centuries of lucrative spice trading. The British saw this opportunity, and allowed Tipu to haul the loot to Srirangapatnam. Then they killed him, and took all the riches in one fell swoop instead of piecemeal. And the clever British came out smelling of roses, as the good guys.

They also charged the entire cost of their war with Tipu to Travancore, paupering the latter, while maintaining the fiction that they were ‘protecting’ Kerala. Absolutely brilliant tactics. Nice transfer of wealth from India to Britain. 

This is similar to the American playbook in 1973, when OPEC suddenly tripled oil prices. The US didn’t invade, which is a surprise. Why? The reason is that though the US also had to pay higher prices (consumers and industry felt the pain), the Deep State (and the US economy) made most of it back by selling weapons aplenty to OPEC. It was, and is, a zero-sum dollar-recycling game for them. 

But it was, and is, also a massive transfer of wealth to OPEC from developing countries who could least afford it. The Third World took it on the chin. Once again, brilliantly done. 

Thus it is imperative for the US to maintain good relations with Saudi Arabia. Moral grandstanding by the Democrats has reached a point of seriously diminishing returns. 

Onwards to the CAATSA (Countering American Adversaries Through Sanctions Act). It is intended to deter other countries from doing things the US administration of the day doesn’t like, as in the fashionable ‘social-justice warrior’ tropes of the day, although sanctions are clearly a blunt instrument. India was threatened with these because it is buying Russian SA-400 anti-missile defense systems, instead of US analogs like THAAD and Patriot.

As Gautam Sen of the London School of Economics said in a penetrating commentary on Why the West is so uncomfortable with a rising India and happy to sponsor its enemies, India is important to American plans for continued world dominance, unfortunately in a negative way as a permanent vassal, a low-caste neo-feudal flunky that exports raw materials and labor and imports manufactured goods. 

And weapons, especially weapons. There has been a full-court press on India to buy increasing amounts of US armaments, and the Ukraine war provided a good excuse to bully India (which is easily shamed by the West chiding it) into dumping perfectly good Russian weapons like the SA-400 (and presumably the Indo-Russian joint venture, BrahMos). 

India becoming a minor exporter of weapons (not just a big consumer) is not part of the plan. India has been the third-biggest weapons buyer in the world, accounting for 11% of global purchases in the recent past. Reversing itself on bullying India to buy nothing but American weapons is another tactical U-turn by the US.

Evidently Atlanticist-minded Biden is not serious about the Indo-Pacific, as seen in his evisceration of the Quad. But it must have dawned on his foreign policy types that India and Japan are the cornerstones of any possible response to China’s rampant imperialism in the region. Besides, India has endured American sanctions and technology denials before (supercomputers, cryogenic engines) without collapsing; and probably will do so again. 

On balance, better not to piss India off totally. But Biden has no love lost for India: it was his Biden Amendment that messed up India’s cryogenic engine deal with Russia, which is the central theme of the movie Rocketry: The Nambi Effect. I wrote long ago about this in Who killed the ISRO’s cryogenic engine?, as it happened in my hometown. It ruined eminent aerospace engineer Nambi Narayanan’s career and delayed India’s heavy rocket GSLV by 19 years. 

As far as the Ukraine war is concerned, even the war-mongering Deep State mouthpiece The Economist, which was gung-ho in the beginning, is now making conciliatory noises. Foreign Affairs, a notably optimistic outlet, had a story titled Ukraine’s Implausible Theories of Victory: The Fantasy of Russian Defeat and the Case for Diplomacy.

The fact is that Russia has (certainly in the short run) weathered the vaunted sanctions rather well, and the rouble is the best-performing currency against the dollar. The unintended consequence of the war has been widespread pain, especially in the ‘First World’, that is, Western Europe and North America. It would be better, as India has been saying all along, for there to be a negotiated settlement. 

A stalemate is still a win for Russia, as it has captured the disputed Russian-speaking parts of eastern Ukraine, created a land bridge to Crimea, and now controls the ports on the Sea of Azov. That is the most likely outcome, as Europeans tire of the war, and Biden’s plans to fight Russia to the last Ukrainian seem to have unraveled. 

It is time for the Great Reset. And that may not help the wokes; they are being consigned to the trash-heap of history at a record pace. It is the end of the Woke Century, after just a year and a half. And deservedly so. 

1500 words, 25 July 2022

A version of this essay was published by Swarajya magazine at https://swarajyamag.com/world/does-roe-v-wade-foreshadow-the-end-of-the-american-dream

There are only two US Supreme Court judgments deemed epoch-making enough to be called ‘landmark’ every time they are mentioned. One is Roe v Wade, and the other is Brown v Board of Education. Both favorite liberal causes, one about abortion and therefore about womens’ rights; the second about ending systemic black segregation in education, which had a signal impact on the rest of their Civil Rights movement. 

On the face of it, both were unexceptionably positive. Roe surely reduced the number of young women bleeding to death when some backstreet quack terminated their pregnancies with a coat-hanger. Brown made it possible to end the ‘separate-but-equal’ idea of racial segregation. 

When the SCOTUS overturned Roe v Wade recently, that was another landmark. There are legitimate questions as to whether things have regressed badly in the US: the worry is that whatever women have managed to achieve over a century, in what is frankly a conservative Abrahamic patriarchy, is suddenly in jeopardy. Is the US going back to Stepford Wives and suffragettes struggling for the vote?

It is also true that despite decades of protests and hard work, and Betty Friedan and Gloria Steinem, the American woman still has miles to go. Despite the Pill and the sexual revolution and equal rights, I believe the average woman gets paid only about 70-80% of what an average man gets paid for the same job: not very different from the Biblical worth of 30 shekels to a man’s 50. Vast numbers of women struggle in single-parent households. 

Curiously, American women, despite failure. bravely export their feminism. This is a sort of recursive feudalism, where white men and white countries treat white women and non-white (‘Third World’) countries as lower castes they are entitled to dominate. And the white women market their nostrums to Third World women as the ‘White Woman’s Burden’. An entire cottage industry of grifters and true believers is now offering these panaceas to India.. 

What is bizarre is that Professor S N Balagangadhara in “What Does It Mean to be an Indian?” pointed out that this is all old hat for Indians. India has been suffering from a surfeit of identity politics for half a century and the results are not pretty.

This stuff is not going to end well for the US. But it’s also true that their framing of issues elsewhere is laughable: and here’s a sarcastic take on the kind of breathless negativity the US media applies to other countries. 

The US Supreme Court is providing a backlash to an excessive move to the Left by the entire political class. That is a benign interpretation. There is a more malign interpretation of a wholesale retrogression by the Court (and some politicians) that will take the US back to some benighted era of racism, bigotry and unabashed patriarchy. 

The fact is that the SCOTUS has in quick succession issued several significant rulings: Roe, then it refused to curtail gun rights, and most recently, it ruled that the Environmental Protection Agency cannot regulate greenhouse-gas emissions that cause climate change. In a single week, it has hit three of the Left’s hot buttons: abortion, guns, and climate change.

This may suggest a sharp ideological shift engendered by ex-POTUS Trump “packing the court”. In that case, given SCOTUS judges don’t retire until they die or quit, the Left is in for a long dry spell. Which is a good thing. They have driven the average US voter to distraction with their gender antics, climate fanaticism, law and order craziness, victimhood narratives, fiscal imprudence, and tendency to go to war on what appears to be a whim.

Therefore, if it is a useful corrective to deranged Left certainties, it should be welcomed. 

On the other hand, some observers, including Indians living in the US, have painted a darker picture of regression to some mythical golden past, which would have been golden mostly for white males. I defer to Indian-Americans on this as they live it, and two of them I follow had warnings for all of us. 

The first, a finance man, wondered if the US will revert to a point where immigrants, especially non-whites, would not be welcome. It reminded me of the 1900-era decisions that a) offered citizenship only to ‘Caucasians’ to exclude Chinese, and b) when some Indians got naturalized on the basis of being ‘Caucasians’, they amended the rule to restrict it to ‘white Caucasians’, thereafter revoking their citizenship.

The second, a journalist, painted a picture where the coastal ‘liberals’ were being overwhelmed by rural, white, working-class voters (he didn’t call them that, but he did mean ‘rednecks’). 

Both are voicing a concern that cannot be ignored. There were, for example, the shooting deaths of two Indian-Americans in their new SUVs just this week: 25 year old Nakka Sai Charan on a freeway in Baltimore on June 22nd, and 31 year old Satnam Singh, in Queens, New York on June 28th. I also remember a spate of shootings of Telugu-speakers in the US a few years ago.

An America that reverts to its undeniably brutal and racist past would be extremely unfortunate. Its soft power will diminish, and its standing in the world will diminish as a result. Its institutions, including the SCOTUS, have been held up as role-models all over the world. They all seem to be under attack: e.g., the SCOTUS, once held in breathless reverence, is now being berated by many Americans on the Left.

The Federal Reserve is another. I remember times when its chairmen like Paul Volcker and Alan Greenspan were spoken of in hushed tones, and their every utterance was pored over as though they were magic incantations that had the power to move markets. Many observers treated them as though they were as inscrutable as the Kremlin or the Forbidden City in Beijing.

Greenspan’s reputation was ruined after the 2008 crash; and now, along with POTUS Biden, the hapless Jerome Powell, and his immediate predecessors are all being criticized for having failed to anticipate or prevent roaring inflation, and it is feared, an imminent Recession. 

The NIH, FDA and other medical bureaucracies also suffered loss of face as the result of the Wuhan virus. Francis Collins and especially Anthony Fauci were accused of gross irregularities including being on the payroll of Big Pharma, and of secretly funding biowarfare research (‘gain of function’) in Wuhan. Like The Lancet and the NEJM, they too suffered loss of credibility.

If one were to extrapolate from all this, it seems like a fin-de-siecle malaise is afflicting all of America. Is it really the end of the American Century, despite its extraordinary endowment, with all the resources of a vast continent, and its human resources constantly renewed by the best and brightest from around the world? As someone who loves the US, I hope this isn’t so. I hope this is a passing phase brought on by bad politics and the military-industrial complex. I really hope this is not the end of the American Dream. 

1173 words, 30 June 2022

A version of this essay was published by firstpost.com at https://www.firstpost.com/opinion/requiem-for-a-japanese-statesman-who-loved-india-abe-shinzo-10896211.html

Abe Shinzo will be remembered as Asia’s greatest 21st century statesman. He recognized early that the Indo-Pacific will (re)occupy center stage as it did throughout most of history, barring a brief Atlanticist interregnum. And then he did something about it, by proposing the Quad and the “free and open Indo-Pacific”. He realized that China would revert to imperialism, and would have to be contained.

Abe-san understood that America would withdraw into its comfort zone (“Fortress America”) as its economic and military dominance diminished. It was up to Asians to defend themselves, and not depend on cross-Pacific partnerships. This may have driven his nationalist sentiments. Japan, with its proud history, could not forever be anybody’s junior partner. It would have to assert itself, and it could no longer be hobbled by the pacifist Article 9 imposed by the US, that prevented it from arming itself. 

All of this has come to pass, more or less. After Obama’s content-free “pivot to Asia”, Biden’s obsessions with Russia, Ukraine and AUKUS, and China’s consistent saber-rattling along its entire periphery, it is evident that the old “liberal, rules-based international order” with its Euro-American bias can no longer protect Asia’s democracies. A muscular Quad, or even an ‘Asian NATO’ is necessary.

This is critical for India’s very survival, and Abe helped turn around Japan’s official attitude towards India. Even his grandfather, former Prime Minister Kishi Nobusuke, had been positive towards India, but Abe-san turned out to be a true friend. Under him, relations bloomed; and from a stance of anger at India’s Pokhran blasts, Japan has now become India’s most, and in fact only, trusted partner. 

This endeared Japan’s longest-serving PM, Abe-san, to many Indians. He believed in India, and it showed. So much so that some of us are in personal mourning. India has lost its best friend, and in a world where it has no friends, that is a tremendous loss: even after he resigned the PM position on health grounds, Abe-san continued to generate goodwill for Indo-Japanese partnerships. The last time the death of a foreign leader affected Indians so much was when John F Kennedy was assassinated in 1963.

Prime Minister Modi put it well in a personal note, “My friend, Abe-san” https://www.narendramodi.in/my-friend-abe-san-563044. He also declared a day of national mourning. 

Among his greatest gifts to us and his most enduring legacy, and one for which the world will always be indebted, is his foresight in recognizing the changing tides and gathering storm of our time and his leadership in responding to it. Long before others, he, in his seminal speech to the Indian Parliament in 2007, laid the ground for the emergence of the Indo-Pacific region as a contemporary political, strategic and economic reality - a region that will also shape the world in this century.

There is a starkly different, and possibly grossly unfair, characterization of Abe-san in the US media, as some kind of ultra-nationalist. The left-leaning NPR was positively churlish. But then this goes back to the Manichean/Abrahamic “with us or against us” dualism put about by US sources. They portray Japan as being particularly wicked, with Pearl Harbor as Original Sin, and the “Yellow Peril” as being particularly dangerous, deserving of the ultimate horror of the atomic bombs in Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Remarkably enough, this was along the same lines as the vitriol from China.

I can understand China being extraordinarily mean. That’s just par for the course. But an American outlet saying this is a little surprising, that too a public-sector, publicly-funded, non-commercial entity. Are there wheels within wheels?

But wait, here’s more:

Growing up in India, I too was subject to this negative barrage, but I had the advantage of reading Malayalam translations of Tanizaki, Kawabata and Lady Murasaki in my teenage days. I understood Japan as a unique but Dharmic civilization with integrity and codes of honor. Later, I read about Subhas Bose’s perspective on imperial Japan, and its support for the Indian National Army. Many years later, I went to Nair-san’s Indian restaurant on the Ginza in Tokyo: he had been Rash Behari Bose’s interpreter. 

The dichotomy of reactions persists. The Western-Chinese narrative against Japan was one of convenience; on the one hand, the Chinese realized that they just needed to shout “Rape of Nanjing”, and the Japanese would give them money to shut them up. On the other hand, the famous “liberal rules-based international order” (see my deconstruction thereof at

) consistently tried to keep Japan down as a low-caste vassal even when it was the world’s second largest economy.

There was an enormous fuss about the fact that Abe-san visited the Yasukuni Shrine, the memorial to Japan’s war dead. I could never quite understand this. Every country is entitled to remember its warriors, and most do, with gratitude. Why is it that Japan, alone, was prohibited from doing so? In 2019, I visited the shrine myself. It is a stately, mournful, quiet place of introspection. It has a magnificent torii, a museum, and a shrine. It is pure gaslighting to claim this place is somehow loathsome.

And it has a memorial to Justice Radhabinod Pal, the Indian jurist who was part of the War Crimes Tribunal post World War II. He was the only dissenting voice in what he more or less said was a kangaroo court. Its intention, from the victors’ point of view, was to extract revenge rather than to arrive at the truth about the war. If some Japanese military men were deemed war criminals, were William Calley of My Lai and Henry Kissinger who ordered the carpet-bombing of neutral Cambodia any less?

It was an honor for me to stand before Justice Pal’s memorial. 

Many older Japanese are grateful to Justice Pal for what he did then; Abe-san, though he was born a few years after the trials, may have heard from his grandfather Kishi-san about it. 

There are several other connections to India. I used to visit Japan frequently on business in the 1990s, and I found a number of links old and new. Kabuki, for example, is rather similar to Kathakali in concept. Sanskrit is still chanted in Japan’s Buddhist temples, and they write it in the Siddham script that is extinct in India, but seen in temples in Japan.

I found actual Devanagari written on the Peace Bell in Hiroshima: it is one of the sutras that constitute prayers for the dead. 

In Nara, where Abe-san was assassinated, there is the famous great bronze Buddha in the Todaiji temple. In the adjacent park, where a lot of tame deer roam, there is also a reproduction of the Ashoka Stambha, the Lion Capital of Sarnath, the emblem of the sovereign republic of Bharat/India.

The links between India and Japan go back a long way, at least to Daruma, or Bodhi Dharma, the preceptor of the Zen school of Buddhism, who took kalari payat and Buddhist philosophy to the Shaolin monastery in China, around 500 CE. He was reputedly a Pallava prince, who embarked from Muziris or Kodungallur in Kerala. There is the famous Zen koan, “Why did Bodhi Dharma go east?”.

Is that why Abe-san came west to India? To repay an ancient debt? 

Moksham praptirastu, Abe-san. You were a good man. We miss you. 

1150 words, Jul 9, 2022

A version of this essay was published by firstpost.com at https://www.firstpost.com/india/a-tale-of-two-supreme-courts-best-practices-from-the-us-and-india-need-to-be-adopted-10875201.html

I must confess a little shamefacedly that I watched the godawful fuss in the US following the SCOTUS’ overturning of Roe v Wade with some smugness. That was because, at long last, the Supreme Court of India finally threw the book at Teesta Setalvad, R B Shreekumar, Sanjiv Bhatt et al, in what had long been a travesty of justice. I began to think that maybe the Indian system, although glacially slow, has a thing or two to teach the much-ballyhooed Americans.

Sadly, my joy was short-lived. Within a week, there was the spectacle of a two SC judge-bench in India harshly criticizing Nupur Sharma. They denied her plea to bundle various FIRs filed in far-off places like Calcutta, expressed personal opinions not germane to the plea, and lectured her on how a blasphemy allegation against her was her fault. They had apparently made up their minds without considering any evidence.

I am properly chastened, and I am eating crow. Hubris before nemesis. I should have known. India’s institutions are severely compromised. Even the CJI implied in a speech in the US that India’s institutions are less developed because India is not a “mature democracy”.

Thanks for reading Shadow Warrior! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

Earlier, I used to stand in awe of the Indian judiciary. My great-uncle was a Chief Justice, and a family friend was on the Supreme Court. Two friends are or were High Court justices. I have always had a good impression of them. But over time, I began to see problems in the Indian system, and I wrote in 2018 about urgently needed judicial reform in Can We Fix the Deeply Troubled Judiciary?. The PIL (Public Interest Litigation) system has been weaponized, for one thing. The backlog of cases is daunting, for another. 

Several years later, the same problems have gotten worse, including structural issues about the Supreme Court straying far beyond its remit of interpreting the Constitution. But in India, a judge recently condemned ‘social media’ for alleging that he had violated both decorum and propriety in what an impartial observer might consider extraneous comments.

In the US, those who were upset with the SCOTUS’ action roundly abused it; for instance an Indian-origin politician named Congresswoman Pramila Jayapal. I don’t know about the merit of her argument (and based on her ultra-woke-ness, it may have none), but it is very interesting that she could say rude things like this about the court and judges. In India, draconian ‘contempt of court’ provisions would be applied, and the critic jailed, for even mild criticism..

That is one of the differences between the US judiciary and the Indian. There are several others. To begin with they are a) selection, b) tenure, c) ambit/remit and jurisdiction, d) appraisal and termination.

Thank you for reading Shadow Warrior. This post is public so feel free to share it.

Selection and Accountability

In the US, quite a few judges are elected: I have seen their names on election billboards, and so far as I can tell this is for state judge positions. That sounds odd to Indians partly because the US is a federation of states, whereas India is a union, and that makes a difference. Anyway, I am under the impression that most judges in say, the California state judiciary, are directly elected by the public. 

On the other hand, federal judges are appointed by the government, but they also have to go through a confirmation process wherein they are basically grilled by the Senate, i.e. the equivalent of the Rajya Sabha. Thus, elected officials representing individual voters do ‘elect’ the judges. This brings in a level of accountability.

There is the obvious flaw that a determined government can “pack” the courts with people they like, especially if they have an ideological ax to grind. This only works, of course, if the Executive Branch can convince a majority in the Senate, i.e. the Legislative Branch. In fact, it is alleged, and it is likely, that ex-POTUS Trump packed the courts with people he liked. 

Even then, it is hard to make the case that the US Supreme Court is representative of public opinion. Look at how the old school tie works, and how a discreet endorsement here and there might have worked.

In India, it is much worse. Judges themselves select new judges, and will not tolerate the Executive branch or Legislative branch getting involved in this. So far as I know, this is unique in the whole world. When the Indian Government suggested a National Judicial Appointments Committee (NJAC) that would have input from the other branches, the judicial branch shot it down claiming it was unconstitutional. 

I wonder if a National Judicial Service is a good idea, because the obvious rot in the Indian administrative services gives one pause. 

Common sense suggests a selection mechanism where there is a level of outside input. Without that, there is every incentive to promote friends and relatives of current judges. In fact, it turns out that many current Supreme Court judges are indeed related to former judges or politicians. It would be better to adopt the US system of confirmations by the legislature following a nomination by the government, of course with advice from the judiciary. 

Tenure

Once selected, a US Supreme Court judge is in place for life, until he/she retires voluntarily, or dies, or is impeached. This means judicial appointments can have a very long impact, because a judge may be on the SCOTUS for fifty years. But judges have also been known to change in office, for instance moderating extreme views they might have entered with.

In India, Supreme Court judges retire at 65, state High Court judges retire at 62.  

On the face of it, this seems like a more sensible system, because the judges are still relatively young and vigorous while on the court. However, there is a pernicious loophole: retiring judges are then absorbed into other positions, which means there is an incentive for them to write judgments that make them attractive to possible future employers. 

Judges get such substantial pensions and other privileges that it would not be a hardship to place a moratorium on them accepting post-retirement employment. In the US case, it is unlikely that a SCOTUS judge would take up post-retirement employment, even though I wonder if they are explicitly forbidden from doing so. (Even post-retirement POTUSes don’t take up new jobs. They just sort of fade away).

A via media on tenure may be a better idea: raise Indian judges’ retirement age to, say 70, considering that people are healthier and live longer these days, and that they have valuable expertise, but strictly forbid any post-retirement employment of any kind, including commissions, arbitration, etc. 

Ambit/remit and jurisdiction

In my earlier essay, I pointed out the need to bifurcate the top court and to clearly specify its scope. Here the US structure is clearly superior, and could be adopted more or less in toto.

For, in the US, the Supreme Court hears Constitutional cases, and only Constitutional cases. All other cases go elsewhere: Federal Circuit Courts that are courts of appeal, and Federal District Courts that are trial courts. 

I think this fine distinction can be ignored, and India should institute four regional Courts of Appeal that will hear cases that exceed the state High Courts’ jurisdiction, for instance inter-state disputes. 

One of the issues today is that the SC seems whimsical in what cases it decides to hear, and what it drops. For instance, it declined to hear a case brought by Kashmiri Hindus about their genocide saying the matter was too old, but paradoxically it agreed to hear a case about the Mahatma Gandhi assassination, even though that was much older. And it likes to take up cases on cricket! 

Besides, certain influential lawyers (and certain NGOs) can get the SC to hear their clients at midnight, while others languish for decades. 

There must be clear guidelines provided by Parliament perhaps through a Constitutional Amendment. This should also put paid to such quaint notions as “constitutional morality” (Constitutions are not moral documents) or “original intent”, the US version of “basic structure” (who knows what was going on in the minds of the Constituent Assembly; only what they wrote down can be discussed).

In addition, the PIL mechanism should be dropped, and all cases required to be filed at the District or Magistrate court, and they should bubble up through the system in case they have merit. It is deeply offensive to watch those with deep pockets, especially malign foreign-funded NGOs, getting their way with little effort by just waltzing directly into the SC.

Appraisal and termination

Judges are extremely important members of society, and the Supreme Court in particular is the last refuge for a common man. There should be mechanisms to ensure that the judiciary does not go off on tangents, but that they are working towards the common good of the nation. 

An ancient judge was executed and flayed alive. His skin was used to upholster a judge’s chair. What is more, his successor, his son, was forced to sit in that chair, on his dead father’s skin, to deliver his judgments. That is barbaric, but it does make a point. Judges must be immaculately neutral and scrupulous.

So what is the metric for appraisal? In India, one should be the quick disposal of cases. Pendency is a huge problem, and a good bit of it is because of too few working days: too many holidays, and a two-month vacation in summer and a two week vacation in winter. These days there is no reason not to run the courts in multiple shifts, including a night shift. And most work should be done online, so that litigants needn’t waste time waiting around courthouses all day.

There should be clear Key Result Areas, and judges need to be measured on meeting them. These metrics can be determined by Parliament through a Constitutional Amendment. Justice delayed is justice denied, after all.

What if a judge fails in these metrics, or in other ways? There was a High Court judge, with the memorable name of Karnan, who was sent to six months’ imprisonment for contempt of Supreme Court. The rules for impeachment should be made more transparent. At the moment, it looks like judges can close ranks and prevent impeachment, or at least make it very difficult in India, and possibly even in the US. 

There has been only one successful impeachment of a SCOTUS judge so far as I can tell: one Justice Samuel Chase in 1805. But the US senate acquitted him, so he returned to service. I am not aware of a single Indian judge who has been impeached, but surely some deserve to be. 

While India’s democracy “matures”, there is nothing wrong in taking some lessons from the US about what works. There is no need to import everything wholesale, but pick and choose judiciously. 

As has been discussed by many, it would be a good idea to also emulate the structure of the US Constitution, a brief document of 10 or so pages. A new Constitution is needed in India, as the prolix version we have now is failing to stand the test of time, as the many Amendments indicate. All the more reason why we need a better-designed Supreme Court to interpret it, and it alone. 

1900 words, 5 Jul 2022