thecatapult.in

This blog had taken strong exception to the statement by General Deepak Kapoor when in an interview to Karan Thapar for CNN-IBN’s Devils Advocate he had said that

“The Chinese have a different perception of the Line Of Actual Control as do we – when they come up to their perception we call it an incursion, likewise they do.”

Now considering the very high status and respect that we in India accord the Armed Forces compared to the rest of the civilian establishment. this shocking statement went unchallenged because it was an Army General who said it. If the same statement had been made by a non-uniformed defence minister or even any bureaucrat one could imagine the furor it would have caused.

Now Karan Thapar the interviewer has broken his journalistic stance of neutrality and has gone over to bat for the General. In his column in Hindustan Times he reiterates that the General was only “setting the record straight” on the Chinese incursions into Indian territory by saying that it was only a matter of “differing perceptions” and that when the Chinese side patrol right upto their claim line we call it a incursion and when the Indian forces patrol right upto our claim line then the Chinese call it a incursion.

It is amazing that a seasoned interviewer like Karan Thapar gave a easy pass to the General on this during the interview. For one he must be well aware that even after more than two decades and 11 rounds of talks the Chinese side have yet to exchange maps clarifying their claim line in the Eastern and Western sectors of the Indo-Tibetan border. All that they have done till date is refute the McMahon Line which India along with formerly independent Tibet accepted as the International border nearly a century ago.

so in the absence of a claim line from the Chinese side how can there be a “differing perception” of where the border actually lies? And where is the flip side of Indian soldiers violating the Chinese claim line if they don’t know where the hell it is in the first place. The Chinese seem to have a habit of protesting everything and anything, including a visit by the PM to Arunachal Pradesh. Or is this General hinting that he is such a hero that he is ordering his men to quietly violate the McMahon line itself and claim more land north of it??!! unlikely he doesn’t seem to like that old Army ad have it in him to do that.

So it is a open and shut case of the General offering a placebo to the Indian public by saying all is well by clearly misrepresenting the truth. Surely if a “dhoti-khurtawallah” or a certain “ex-Army Major” whom Karan is presently miffed with had said such a thing in an interview with Karan would he have given them an easy pass too? perhaps not. But now he wants us to accept nonsense only because it comes from a serving officer. And wants us to disregard wiser counsel from Jaswant Singh atleast in this case because he is only a “dhoti-kurtawallah” now and was a mere Major in his earlier avatar? who is this little guy cum lowly “dhoti-kurtawallah” to chirp against an Army General? Is this the way a clear headed and civilised discussion on facts and figures relating to ground realities to be conducted?

Is this how Karan wants policy to be made? leave it to those who are supposed to know best? We all know how many avoidable disasters this country has faced by such personalised and adhoc policy making as opposed to institutionalised policy making keeping the nation’s interest as supreme. Nehru, himself in the very case with China is a good example. There is a long tail thereafter which reaches out to the likes of Krishna menon, K.M panickker, LB Shastri, IK Gujral, Vajpayee, Manmohan Singh and our current and former foreign secretaries.

Atleast in this case the Army General’s job is to command his Army and do as commanded by the duly elected government of the land even if he and his colleagues hold them in as much contempt as the rest of the Indian public does. His job is not to make policy but give clear, unambiguous and unbiased inputs to the policymakers to do their job and certainly not do a hatchet job for the current central government which appointed him by misleading the Indian public which pays its hard earned money in taxes to fund his military machine in the hope that they will defend the country’s frontiers come what may by saying that all is well on the Chinese front when it most certainly is not.

Update: The Complete transcript and Videos of the Army Chief’s interview .

The most useless ministry of the Indian government though it has some serious competition from others such as the I&B ministry rattles out against the so called “guests” for violating Indian law by protesting against what he laughably termed as a “friendly” country.Never mind the history of his ministry’s and his “friendly” country’s contribution in creating circumstances forcing them to live as “guests” in a foreign land.

Well Mr MEA spokesman, if the Tibetans who have contributed to their adopted land as much as possible by working hard for a living and serving in its security forces with distinction are to be insulted with the moniker of “guest” who should shut up at your ministry’s convenience. What should your useless ministry which merely occupies some precious real estate in the capital and in other parts of the world doing nothing other than living off the hard earned money of the Indian tax payer be called?

The cognitive dissonance and China love of this ministry is sickening. How can it possibly classify China as a “friendly” country when it is illegally occupying thousands of square kms of Indian territory and lusting for even more? And how does it consider it a “friendly” country when it is supplying nuclear weapons and missiles to an enemy country which is crystal clear about its intentions of using it against India rather than mere self-defence? And the less said about its support for the militants of the north-east and the Naxals in India and Nepal the better.

One wonders whether there is a crucial sub-text when he calls China a “friendly” country, does he mean that it is “friendly” country among those who sympathise with its ideology? which in this country includes a foreign secretary who is a famous apologist for the Chinese junta.

And why is the MEA interfering in the affairs of the Home ministry? isn’t it that ministry’s job to speak about whatever happens within the country including domestic law and order issues if any?

The MEA would do better to respect the sentiments of the Indian taxpayer who pay for their luxuries with their hard earned money and realise that the Indian public may or may not sympathise with the plight of the Tibetans but they certainly do not like a ministry of the Indian government holding a brief for an untrustworthy and unfriendly country like China no matter even if those in that ministry feel a certain ideological affinity and emotional attachment with the ruling junta there.

And to answer the spokesman and his pontifications on the law of the land, The Tibetan community have as per the law of this land every right to hold peaceful demonstrations and his ministry or any other has no right whatsoever to seek to curtail it.

The Army Chief Gen Deepak Kapoor in an exclusive interview to CNN-IBN to be telecast at 8:30pm IST(GMT + 5.5) tonight has gone on record saying that India can be held equally to blame of intruding into Chinese territory!

“The Chinese have a different perception of the Line Of Actual Control as do we – when they come up to their perception we call it an incursion, likewise they do.”

His shocking statement that India can be equally blamed for intruding into Chinese territory is based on a presumed logic that since the two sides have not agreed on a mutual Line of Actual Control both sides can accuse each other of intruding into their territories.

Infact the Army chief by making such a statement has exposed his ignorance of the history of the India-China border issue and also gives the impression that he is completely ignorant of the proceedings of the nearly 11 rounds of border talks that have been taking place since the last two and a half decades which coincided with much of his Army career.

He doesn’t seem to realise that technically India and China do not share a border. The entire length of the India-China border as it is today is actually the borders of occupied Tibet and Chinese Turkestan both forcibly incorporated into Chinese territory in the years immediately after the Maoists seized power from the nationalists in China in 1949. And the entire historical Chinese claim to these two territories is based on the premise that they were both part of Chinese territory during the Yuan dynasty of Kublai Khan.The so called “Middle Kingdom” hypothesis. The only fly in the ointment is that Kublai Khan was a Mongol vassal for much of his rule and thus it is more correct to say that Mongolia has more historical claim to China, Tibet and Chinese Turkestan rather than China has a claim on Inner Mongolia, Chinese Turkestan and Tibet.

The wily Chinese get around this by peddling the fiction that Kublai Khan became a “Chinese emperor” after the death of Mongke Khan and his subsequent defeating of his younger brother Arik Boke who had succeeded Mongke as Khan of the Mongol empire. That is absolute nonsense because after defeating Arik Boke, Kublai Khan had declared himself as the Khan of the Mongol empire the only problem was that the rest of the Golden family refused to recognise him as such. On the other hand Kublai Khan like a lot of other pragmatic conquerors in history also adopted some local Chinese titles and symbols to make himself more acceptable to the Chinese masses and cement his rule over the part of the empire directly under him [1] and by the time the Yuan dynasty was overthrown a century later by the indigenous Ming dynasty Tibet and Chinese turkestan did not form a part of their realm.

In short while the Chinese refuse to recognise the McMohan line terming it as a product of British imperialism their entire claim on Chinese Turkestan and Tibet which brings them to that Border line in the first place is itself a product of their past allegiance to Mongol imperialism which they cleverly disguise as the “Middle Kingdom” for consumption by gullibles!

Gen Kapoor has also conveniently sidestepped the fact that the Line of Actual Control remains undefined because the Chinese side inspite of nearly two decades of border talks have refused to exchange maps of the Western and eastern sectors with India while India’s own claim line is crystal clear for all including the Chinese side to see. It is therefore the responsibility of the Chinese side as a claimant to submit maps clarifying their own stand on where they think the Border in their opinion must run. India as a status quo power which has since the last 100 years adhered to the McMohan line cannot be held “equally responsible” in anyway for incidents on the border.

Gen Kapoor has clearly overstepped his brief in this case and this is not the first time, recently he held forth on the sixth pay commission on foreign soil disregarding all established norms that domestic politics stops at the water’s edge.The Government should either rein him in or relieve him of his responsibilities immediately if he continues to undermine the Indian position with his hollow moral grandstanding and continuous whining.That seems to be a long shot considering that the rest of the current government is no better in this regard.

It is also sad that Karan Thapar who has a reputation of being a “tough” interviewer who wouldn’t let even a bat escape on a dark moonless night gave a free pass to Gen Kapoor and did not challenge him with the fact that it was China which was being the obstacle in clearly demarcating the Line of Actual Control and India’s position in that regard is clear that it adheres to the McMohan line. Thapar would surely have pounced on any bureaucrat or politician if he had said such a thing. That he didn’t in the case of Gen Kapoor proves Pragmatic’s position that the Indian media and the public are in awe of the institution of the Armed forces and do not want to question them too closely for fear of offending them. This has to change. The Armed Forces like the rest of the state establishment should be held as much accountable to the Nation’s interest like anyone else.

Source: 1. Genghis Khan and the making of the Modern World by Jack Weatherford.

After hemming and hawing and trying to wriggle out of a very difficult situation the BCCI finally found succour in the same time tested tactic that the Congress has used for several decades ever since the time of the senior Gandhi and has since been adopted as standard procedure in the country. Ride out the public opinion storm somehow and then once the hullabaloo dies down, make a silent and incremental U-turn to get back to the point where they started.

The BCCI which had earlier threatened to pull out of the tour at any stage if the baseless charges against Harbhajan Singh were not withdrawn now sensing that the public busy celebrating harvest festivals across the country is no longer paying as much attention to this controversy as a week ago has quietly changed its stance saying that the tour will go on even if the baseless charges against Harbhajan wasn’t dropped! virtually sealing this talented cricketer’s fate to a 3 match ban and the tag of a “racist” which will soon be on record against him and the Indian cricket team forever.

Read the rest…

The MEA that “great” institution whom the god-like(for shashi tharoor and Veer Sanghvi) Neru created to take upon its own frail shoulders the overwhelming burden of bringing about world peace and harmony is at it again.

Following in that hallowed tradition of that first Indian Ambassador in Beijing K.M. Panicker who became more of a China pointman for India than the other way round, another former ambassador to the world’s largest police state and now foreign secretary is doing everything to whitewash China’s bellicosity and pretend that everything is hunky-dory with the relations with China when it is clearly NOT. 

• India is “comfortable” with its China relationship, Foreign Secretary Shivshankar Menon said on Friday when asked if New Delhi was worried that Beijing could now speedily move troops into Tibet.
• In reply to another question about Chinese “incursions” into Indian territory the foreign secretary stated that the two countries had “worked together” to maintain peace and stability in the border areas. “We don’t see a change in that,” Menon told presspersons.
• “I don’t have that sense,” Menon shot back when asked at the press conference whether China was moving away from an April 2005 agreement on guiding principles and parameters to resolve the border dispute. 

And his political boss of the moment does not seem to be any better.

 ”Sometimes the incursions take place. Every incursion is taken care of. It’s being addressed through the established mechanism,” External Affairs Minister Pranab Mukherjee told a private news channel.

He said there was nothing to worry about the incursions as the mechanisms established by India and China to deal with such issues “are doing well”[link].

They may delude themselves by sticking their head in the sand as much they want. But the reality is China doesn’t care a fig leaf for their precious Border talks which it has stretched for the last 25 years without agreeing to agree on anything. China’s ambassador on the eve of Hu Jintao’s visit back in Nov 2006 had reasserted illogical Chinese claims on an entire Indian state which is  based on nothing but tentative eccelestial links to occupied Tibet. A very strange thing to do for an officially atheist regime. But anything to get their way will do. And now with the Qinghai-Tibet rail link being extended to India’s vulnerable chicken neck area near the Sikkim-Bhutan-Nepal junction and incessant reports of intrusions into Bhutan and elsewhere along the LAC. This is not a time to mouth platitudes in the face of clearly determined foe and hope the problem will go away. It didn’t work for god-like Neru in 1962 and it won’t work now.

I had reservations about this deal from the beginning and had expressed it often on this blog and other fora. I favoured that this deal be kept on hold till some kinks in it were ironed out and that we don’t rush into it without properly thinking it through. But that is a tall order to ask in India especially with the current ruling clique. And it is political expediency of the worst kind rather than concerns regarding national interest which has led to the stalling of this treaty.

Can’t go through with the deal right now: Manmohan Singh to Bush

The prime minister explained to Bush that certain difficulties have arisen with respect to the operationalisation of the agreement.

This statement by the prime minister almost officially puts the deal on the backburner, which has become a bitter bone of contention between India ’s United Progressive Alliance government and its ally, the Left. Just before setting off for a state-visit to Nigeria and South Africa, the prime minister had hinted at such a development by mentioning at a summit, “If the nuclear deal does not come through, it won’t be the end of the life.”

Pakistan as India’s “Buffer” state is the incredible theory dreamed up by yet another member of the current Indian “intellectual” elite. it seems to be the norm among them to make up their mind first on any given topic and then cherry pick only those facts that fit their theory. This op-ed titled “Let’s wish them well” by Jaithirth Rao over the weekend continues in that hallowed tradition.

He writes

“My support for partition and for the continuance of a strong Pakistan stems from what I would call a practical sense of realpolitik. Pakistan is the buffer state that India needs to protect us from the hot-spots of Afghanistan and Persia (aka Iran). Less than three hundred years ago, we were invaded by Persians (led by Nadir Shah) and Afghans (led by Ahmed Shah Abdali). Both of these were in the nature of predatory raids. They did not result in conquests. But they did succeed in finishing off the glorious Moghul Empire and in causing considerable human and economic damage. It has been noted that a substantial portion of Afghan GDP derived from raids on India! Now as then, raids, unrest and related tensions are real dangers to us.

But let us breathe a sigh of relief. If today a Nadir Shah or an Abdali were to try to invade us, he would have to first defeat the legions of General Musharraf. In effect, the Pakistani army will protect us from the assembled forces beyond the Khyber. This is the kind of “outsourcing of our defence” that should really warm our hearts. Herein lies the overriding need for us to support the continuance of a strong Pakistani state and an effective Pakistani army.”

Sounds incredible and to be fair he actually seems to believe it himself for some reason. Read the rest…

In the guise of “Public opinion”. Buy it here

The UPA Govt is considering imposing an UK style Annual TV tax of Rs 500 for a colour TV and Rs 200 for a B&W TV to bail out its sick state owned entities such as Doordarshan and AIR collectively called the Prasar Bharati.

The point to remember here is that we the Aam Janta(in whose name the socialists in India and all over the world pretend to fight for while lining their own pockets and their families nest eggs) are being asked to pay not for some high quality programming which is becoming more and more expensive to produce over the years as in the case of the UK TV tax, but for the Prasar Bharati’s collective incompetence and inability to provide some good programming and compete for some respectable marketshare in the open market where the private players over the years have virtually captured the entire market in the past 15 years and pay its own way.

And the government is not even pretending that the money going to be collected in this manner is going to be utilised to set the house right and hereafter compete effectively with the private TV and FM channels. No, they are collecting this money to pay the babus in DD and AIR according to government pay scales, retirement and pension benefits, facilities like government accommodation and health benefits. And all this for not doing their job!

The Question is why should we the people pay even if it is to finance some “high quality programming”(UK, i’am looking at you) let alone to finance the nest eggs of some non-working babus? And why is the government in the broadcasting business in the first place?

Swaminathan S Anklesaria Aiyar’s columns was one of the few things on ToI that i used to think was worth reading. But nowadays even he seems to have struck the rock bottom of mediocrity and digging furiously.

What should one say after reading this hair brained Column of his where he talks about the “Hidden Social cost” of vehicles?!

One of his gems

Vehicular pollution causes smog that makes it impossible for planes to land in Delhi in winter, forcing them to travel to distant airports to dump their disgruntled passengers. This imposes high costs on the passengers, the airlines, and on tourism. India has barely scratched the surface of world tourism: it gets four million tourists per year, against China’s 124 million. Yet, vehicular pollution strikes right at the peak of the tourist season. The cost to tourism must be huge.

And afterall this

I am not among those who want cars to be abolished and replaced entirely by buses and trams.

I believe in the freedom of people to travel where and when they want.

But this freedom imposes a wide array of hidden costs on a city economy, and car-owners should pay these costs in full. Otherwise we will be subsidising pollution, fuel adulteration, congestion, respiratory disease, and the disappearance of green spaces.

In other words tax the cars out of the roads than an outright ban, that will look so much like a seedy latin americanish banana republic.

One would like to ask him whether they teach Logic in “intellectual” schools? Or is he having a nostalgia attack for the good old socialist days?

His is a sure fire recipe to kill off middle class car ownership and make it the exclusive privilege of the Rich and the Political/Bureaucratic class just like the old days of the socialist raj.

Instead for a change why not prepare some points on the positives of car ownership? How about increased Safety for families who are inside cars rather than dangling in precarious angles along with their monthly rations on a Bajaj scooter? and what does he have to say about many people opting for cars running on LPG, directly cutting both pollution and fuel costs and has he heard about the increasing number of multi-level car parks springing up in cities across India to cater to the market demand for more parking space?

What about the thousands of people from poor families who are getting jobs in auxillary industries like Service stations, car washes, as Mechanics, security guards etc… Why not count that as “hidden benefits” of car ownership? And why does he not ask his favourite government to replace their own outdated smoke spewing vehicle fleets with more fuel efficient Euro-3 compliant vehicles? that will certainly help with the smog that he is so much worried about. And who does most of the fuel adulteration? the Auto and taxi drivers or the “evil”, “bourgoise” Middle class car owners who keep their car engines tuned to wring out every extra mile out of every last drop of petrol?

The real intention of his column seems to be nothing but a trial ballon to propose imposing some new taxes on vehicle owners. Mr Aiyar gives the game away here.

There is little appreciation among politicians or the middle class of the huge social cost of cars. They cannot see that huge subsidies, mostly hidden, are being ladled out to car-owners. These need to be abolished and replaced with user charges or taxes that reflect the full social cost of cars. The Left front, which once supported high taxes on petrol, now acts as though petrol is a Fundamental Right. So does Sonia Gandhi. And so the government hands out Rs 25,000 crore to oil companies to keep the price of cooking and transport fuels low.

Sounds familiar? This Social justice drama of the “intellectuals” is getting more and more ridiculous by the day.

On a related note. One of the Global warming sceptics in the CH4 documentary ‘The Great Global Warming Swindle’ noted that “If you want a grant to study Squirrels, there is no money around. But if you prepare a project proposal saying that you want to study the effect of Global warming on Squirrels then money materialises instantly”

Similarly today in India, If you can present any of your pet proposals with a “social justice” angle attached to it then there is a big chance of it getting wide currency and even adopted. Just try reading Mr Aiyar’s proposal minus his “social justice” angle and one gets the picture.

This is called ‘The Great Indian Social Justice Swindle’.