Goodinsight in current state of Indian Economy and politics. It may be one sided butnevertheless offers good perspective Hindustan Times hasdeleted the below article from their websitehttp://www.hindustantimes.com/…/story-RtXSligZ4FHH9sAJO7tq9…Here is the articleitself written by Sushil Aaron:The India-China militarystandoff near Sikkim continues. The rhetoric from both sides is very revealingof their states of mind. India is adopting a conciliatory tone but China isuncompromising. India will be “patient and peaceful” in dealing with itsneighbours, says the Narendra Modi government; commentators emphasise Delhi’smoderation and maturity. China insists that withdrawal of Indian troops fromthe disputed Doklam area is a precondition for dialogue. Chinese experts arenot mincing words. Victor Gao, a former diplomat and once an interpreter forDeng Xiaoping, has said any other country in China’s situation of seeingforeign (Indian) soldiers on its territory would send troops to drive them out.He says the longer India keeps troops in Doklam the more likely a militaryconfrontation is.The reaction in Indianmedia to the standoff with China is markedly different from what tensions withPakistan usually provoke. Television channels are not dishing out angryhashtags about Beijing as they usually do about Islamabad’s misdemeanours. TheIndian establishment clearly wants to avoid a confrontation. In Delhi’s mutedreaction and Beijing’s belligerence there is perhaps a tacit acknowledgment inboth capitals that the reason China is being aggressive is because India now isthe weakest it has been for years.China wants tosymbolically establish dominance in Asia and it has chosen a moment when thecontours of India’s path to decline are fairly well-established, three yearsinto Modi’s rule. This is the lesson that Delhi should take away from thisstandoff, that not only is India militarily not in a position to challengeChina now (short of a nuclear exchange), the direction that the BJP is takingthe country undermines India’s capabilities as a power and leaves it in noposition to deter China’s aggression for years to come. This is the time tostarkly assess India’s situation, let go of the positive spin the BJP governmentputs out, and view India as how its adversaries would. This may be acounter-intuitive argument to make because India certainly has some impressiveattributes: a large youthful population, a formidable military machine withnuclear weapons, a sizeable middle class and elite to keep foreign companiesinterested for years and, like any happening power, it convenes severalhigh-profile business and think-tank conferences. China is evidently notdaunted by these because some indicators of India’s power make for grimreading. India’s vulnerabilitiesare manifest in four areas. The first is in the economy, where India hasrecently endured a series of self-inflicted wounds. India has had a weakinvestment climate for years owing to regulatory bottlenecks and because banksare saddled with bad loans. Demonetisation was needlessly introduced in analready difficult situation and it brought cities to a standstill for weeks andcompounded an agrarian distress by short-circuiting billions of transactions inrural India and disrupting supply chains. Growth slowed to 6.1% in the lastquarter; one economist believes it may have permanently damaged the country’sinformal sector. After demonetisation came changed rules for cattle slaughterwhich essentially constitute a form of trade war against Muslims, Dalits andthe meat export industry at large. The subsequent introduction of GST has bredwidespread confusion; one businessman simply warns that “small traders willdie”. Alongside the effects ofrecent decision-making, India has a jobs crisis, an education crisis and askills crisis. PM Modi claimed his leadership would yield 100 millionmanufacturing jobs by 2022; around 135,000 materialised in eight sectors in2015 – far shorter than the 12 million that reportedly enter the workforce eachyear. The government has simply abandoned the goal of training 500 millionIndians as part of its Skill India plans. The education sectorlooks almost irredeemable. A committee appointed by the ministry of humanresource development has conceded that “large segments of the educationsector…face a serious crisis of credibility in terms of the quality ofeducation which they provide, as well as the worth of the degrees which theyconfer on students.” There are simply too many bad teachers in governmentschools, many of whom get their jobs through patronage or corruption. Studentsare not failed in schools and colleges for political reasons – since parentswould be angry if governments provided their children bad education to beginwith and then failed them. India thus has millions of youth with collegedegrees often lacking foundational skills let alone employable ones. That’s thereason why, as Rajesh Mahapatra writes, “no one any longer speaks of India’syouth bulge as a demographic dividend. It is, as we speak, fast turning out tobe a liability of monstrous consequences in the time to come.”If challenges in theeconomy, education and skills weren’t enough there is now an active attack onIndia’s social cohesion, the one thing that held the country together despiteall its problems. The BJP’s rule has seen a spike in hate speech directed atMuslims, leading to their targeting and lynching. The Indian Muslim is beingconstantly represented as a hate figure, with a view to snap the associationallife between Hindus and Muslims. All this corrodes social life and undermineseconomic productivity -- a divided and fear-ridden country is hardly in aposition to pool its energies and talents to tackle present and futurechallenges. Several other fissureshave come to the surface since 2014. In addition to intensifying Hindu-Muslimstrife, there is the North-South divide which we are increasingly seeingbecause of the NDA’s attempts to impose the Hindi language. There is continuingconflict in Kashmir and great restiveness among different social groupselsewhere: Patels and Dalits in Gujarat, Rajputs in Rajasthan, and farmers invarious states, including Maharashtra, Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan, Gujarat andTamil Nadu.Not only is societypolarised by identity politics, the Modi government is also instinctivelyanti-intellectual and waging a war against knowledge, particularly targetingthe liberal arts and social sciences. There is not a single form of independentintellectual endeavour that is potentially not under threat in India now,either by regulation, censorship or physical intimidation – be it a play, film,comedy sketches, documentaries, political discussions in universities oracademic publications.This is a disturbingtrend with real implications because the Modi government is letting itsantipathy toward liberal intellectuals undermine the transmission of socialscience knowledge in India – which is indispensable for a society to understanditself and the world. The problem here is two-fold. Progressive intellectualsdominate the social science scene in India, perhaps not in number but in thestanding they have in their disciplines. On the contrary, there is no credibleright-wing intellectual ecosystem in India – in that one can scarcely find historiansor sociologists sympathetic to the BJP who are capable of being published byuniversity presses, the gold standard of academic publishing. Rather than treatprogressive intellectuals as a national resource, the BJP government is hellbent on marginalising them, thereby threatening to snuff out forms of knowledgethat have developed with some difficulty over the decades. If India isstruggling with its quality of education to begin with, it makes little senseto undercut whatever little intellectual capital it has. The Modi governmentmay well note that in the US, a few years ago, around 58-66 percent of socialscience professors identified themselves as liberals, only 5-8 percent asconservative. Liberal intellectuals are often critical of America and yet itsgovernments do not interfere in academic life as universities advance knowledgeand ultimately America’s cultural power.The real source of India’sweakness at the moment is that the Modi government is concentrating itsenergies on achieving political and ideological dominance, rather thanaddressing the country’s glaring deficits. Politics of polarisation has takenprecedence over governmental efforts to facilitate cooperation among citizensthat can yield productive outcomes. All regimes in big countries aim toconsolidate their own power, but they strive for excellence as well (in thehope of compensating for weaknesses). In India we are seeing the former withoutmuch evidence of support for the latter. The Chinese Communist Party is unflinchingabout exercising political control but it is also pushing the country towardsnew frontiers. It wants to introduce 100,000 industrial robots .every year and plans on having 150 robots in operation for every 10,000 employees by 2020. It is making major investments in artificial intelligence; this year an international conference of AI researchers in the US had to be rescheduled because Chinese delegates could not attend as it clashed with the Chinese New Year. China takes social science seriously too and is making strenuous efforts to get Western academics to teach and undertake research projects in China, through initiatives such as the Thousand Talent and Thousand Foreign Experts programmes.India, by contrast, is grappling with basic issues of social order, the rule of law and constrictions on the life of the mind. The military standoff with China is an important opportunity to take a hard look at its own realities and see how they stack up against the priorities of other countries. If the Modi government does not change course now, the gap between India and China will increase in the future and give Beijing more reason to continue bullying India. The Hollow power: India is on a path to decline and that is why China ischallenging itNot only is India militarily not in a position tochallenge China now, the direction the BJP is taking the country underminesIndia’s capabilities as a power and leaves it…hindustantimes.comby Sushil Aaron
