#What would India be without those two.. Prime Ministers who made economic reforms..

[leadertelugunews]

ఆర్థిక సంస్కరణలతో దేశానికి ఖ్యాతి గడించిన మహోన్నతుడు.. ఇవాళ మాజీ ప్రధాని మన్మోహన్ సింగ్ జన్మదినం

ఆర్థిక సంస్కరణలతో దేశానికి ఖ్యాతి గడించిన మహోన్నతుడు.. ఇవాళ మాజీ ప్రధాని మన్మోహన్ సింగ్ జన్మదినం

భారతదేశానికి 13వ, 14వ ప్రధానమంత్రిగా పని చేసిన డాక్టర్ మన్మోహన్ సింగ్. భారతీయ ఆర్థికవేత్త, విద్యావేత్త, రాజకీయవేత్త, రాజ్యసభ సభ్యులుగా ఆయన ఎక్కువకాలం కొనసాగారు. ప్రధాని పదవిలో ఉన్న మూడవ ప్రధానిగా 2వేల 639 రోజులపాటు ఆయన చరిత్రలోకి నిలిచారు. భారత జాతీయ కాంగ్రెస్ సభ్యుడైన మన్మోహన్ సింగ్ దేశానికి 17వ ప్రధాన మంత్రిగా 2004 మే 22 లో బాధ్యతలు స్వీకరించారు. అనేక అర్హతలు గల ఆయన 1991లో ఆర్థిక శాఖా మంత్రిగా…

[samuelcarveraccidentman]

IT HAS FOR so long been a country of such unmet potential that the scale of Pakistan’s dereliction towards its people is easily forgotten. Yet on every measure of progress, Pakistanis fare atrociously. More than 20m children are deprived of school. Less than 30% of women are employed. Exports have grown at a fifth of the rate in Bangladesh and India over the past 20 years. And now the ambitions of the new government under Imran Khan, who at least acknowledges his country’s problems (see Briefing), are thwarted by a balance-of-payments crisis. If Mr Khan gets an IMF bail-out, it will be Pakistan’s 22nd. The persistence of poverty and maladministration, and the instability they foster, is a disaster for the world’s sixth-most-populous country. Thanks to its nuclear weapons and plentiful religious zealots, it poses a danger for the world, too.

Many, including Mr Khan, blame venal politicians for Pakistan’s problems. Others argue that Pakistan sits in a uniquely hostile part of the world, between war-torn Afghanistan and implacable India. Both these woes are used to justify the power of the armed forces. Yet the army’s pre-eminence is precisely what lies at the heart of Pakistan’s troubles. The army lords it over civilian politicians. Last year it helped cast out the previous prime minister, Nawaz Sharif, and engineer Mr Khan’s rise (as it once did Mr Sharif’s).



Since the founding of Pakistan in 1947, the army has not just defended state ideology but defined it, in two destructive ways. The country exists to safeguard Islam, not a tolerant, prosperous citizenry. And the army, believing the country to be surrounded by enemies, promotes a doctrine of persecution and paranoia.

The effects are dire. Religiosity has bred an extremism that at times has looked like tearing Pakistan apart. The state backed those who took up arms in the name of Islam. Although they initially waged war on Pakistan’s perceived enemies, before long they began to wreak havoc at home. Some 60,000 Pakistanis have died at the hands of militants, most of whom come under the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP). The army at last moved against them following an appalling school massacre in 2014. Yet even today it shelters violent groups it finds useful. Some leaders of the Afghan Taliban reside in Quetta. The presumed instigator of a series of attacks in Mumbai in 2008, which killed 174, remains a free man.

Melding religion and state has other costs, including the harsh suppression of local identities—hence long-running insurgencies in Baloch and Pushtun areas. Religious minorities, such as the Ahmadis, are cruelly persecuted. As for the paranoia, the army is no more the state’s glorious guardian than India is the implacable foe. Of the four wars between the two countries, all of which Pakistan lost, India launched only one, in 1971—to put an end to the genocide Pakistan was unleashing in what became Bangladesh. Even if politicking before a coming general election obscures it, development interests India more than picking fights.

The paranoid doctrine helps the armed forces commandeer resources. More money goes to them than on development. Worse, it has bred a habit of geopolitical blackmail: help us financially or we might add to your perils in a very dangerous part of the world. This is at the root of Pakistan’s addiction to aid, despite its prickly nationalism. The latest iteration of this is China’s $60bn investment in roads, railways, power plants and ports, known as the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC). The fantasy that, without other transformations, prosperity can be brought in from outside is underscored by CPEC’s transport links. Without an opening to India, they will never fulfil their potential. But the army blocks any rapprochement.

Mr Khan’s government can do much to improve things. It should increase its tax take by clamping down on evasion, give independence to the monetary authority and unify the official and black-market exchange rates. Above all, it should seek to boost competitiveness and integrate Pakistan’s economy with the world’s. All that can raise growth.

Yet the challenge is so much greater. By mid-century, Pakistan’s population will have increased by half. Only sizzling rates of economic growth can guarantee Pakistanis a decent life, and that demands profound change in how the economy works, people are taught and welfare is conceived. Failing so many, in contrast, really will be felt beyond the country’s borders.

Transformation depends on Pakistan doing away with the state’s twin props of religion and paranoia—and with them the army’s power. Mr Khan is not obviously the catalyst for radical change. But he must recognise the problem. He has made a start by standing up to demagogues baying for the death of Asia Bibi, a Christian labourer falsely accused of blasphemy.

However, wholesale reform is beyond the reach of any one individual, including the prime minister. Many politicians, businesspeople, intellectuals, journalists and even whisky-swilling generals would far rather a more secular Pakistan. They should speak out. Yes, for some there are risks, not least to their lives or liberty. But for most—especially if they act together—the elites have nothing to lose but their hypocrisy

[racingtoaredlight]

Opening Bell: April 19, 2019

Yesterday, in the culmination of a process that began two years ago, the Justice Department released a redacted version of the 448 page report that was authored by Special Counsel Robert Mueller III and included all of the findings of his expansive investigation. The report, which was redacted to remove any mention of evidence that is connected to any of the 20 or so investigations currently still underway into either President Donald Trump, his campaign, his inaugural committee, the Trump Organization, among others. The redactions themselves are telling, they are a standing indictment of the nature of Trump’s various conflicts with his role as the nation’s chief executive. It also points to the fact that Trump, though he promised to fully divest himself of all of his business ventures before assuming office, it continues to appear that he has failed to do so, and apparently without consequence. In terms of the Mueller report, the primary takeaways are that, while Mueller’s investigators did not feel as though they could make a case for collusion or conspiracy, but the report explicitly stated that the president was not exonerated by the report; a talking point which will be a Rorschach test of the rest of the report in that people will want to see what they want in the report. For those wanting to read, an annotated version of the report, it is available here. 

In a remarkable examination of what can happen to a president once he leaves office and is accused of malfeasance, former President of Peru Alan Garcia was accused of bribery and corruption. As police officers closed in and entered Garcia’s home, he excused himself into his bedroom, saying that he was going to call his lawyer. Instead, Garcia produced a handgun and shot himself in the head, and was declared dead shortly thereafter. Garcia was elected in 2006 as a response to the corruption of previous administrations, especially Albert Fujimori, but was himself unable to avoid the financial entanglements that have corrupted other South American leaders such as former Brazilian president Michele Temer and both of his immediate predecessors. This would be like if in this country we found out that Jimmy Carter had been involved in graft and rather than surrender to authorities well….he killed himself. So yeah, there is no comparison to the United States.

Almost two years after it suffered a catastrophic collision, and nearly a year after it entered dry dock, the USS Fitzgerald refloated for the first time this week at the Huntington Ingalls Shipyard—which it was originally build—in Pascagoula, Mississippi. While this is a major milestone in the Fitzgerald’s return to service, much repair work remains to take place; the Navy allocated $533 million in repair costs for the guided missile destroyer, and while this may seem like an absurd amount, it is less than half the cost of a new Arleigh Burke class destroyer. A few weeks ago I linked an interactive ProPublica story which recounted the saga of the Fitzgerald on a minute-by-minute basis, which clearly showed the warship was, on multiple occasions, close to sinking but for the actions of its crew. Unfortunately, the actions, or lack thereof, of some of the Fitzgerald’s officers led to the collision, or so the Navy alleged in formal allegations against the ship’s Commanding Officer and the officer in charge at the time of the collision, among others. This week, however, the Navy was forced to drop all charges against Commander Bryce Benson, the ship’s CO, and Lt. Natalie Combs, the officer on the bridge at the time of the collision. While both will escape criminal charges in a court martial for their actions—or, more correctly, their alleged negligence—they each received letters of reprimand from the Secretary of the Navy, which will effectively end both of their careers. The prosecutions of Benson and Combs, however, was tainted from the beginning by senior Navy commanders violating a bedrock principle of military criminal justice: senior officers do not comment on cases under adjudication. The two senior officers accused of commenting on the case? Chief of Naval Operations Admiral John Richardson and Vice Chief of Naval Operations Admiral Bill Moran. In tangentially related news, the Trump administration announced this week that Admiral Bill Moran would replace Admiral John Richardson as Chief of Naval Operations after Richardson’s retirement later this year.

Healthcare has, of political and economic necessity, become a major talking point over the last three decades. Shortly after his inauguration in 1993, then President Bill Clinton appointed his wife, First Lady Hillary Clinton, to head a committee which author a proposal for Universal Healthcare in order to arrest skyrocketing healthcare costs in the United States. For a variety of reasons, congressional Republicans opposed the proposal and it never made its way out of a Democratically-controlled Congress. Subsequent scandals affected the Clinton administration and no further attempt at major healthcare legislation was attempted. In 2009, Barack Obama was elected, in part, on a promise to take up the challenge of healthcare reform and after a year of political wrangling, and bitter partisanship, a Democratically-controlled Congress passed the Affordable Care Act or ACA. In India, healthcare has, proportional to the national median income, also become a major socio-political issue. In the 1990s, an Indian practitioner, Dr. Devi Shetty, a surgical cardiologist by training, opened a series of hospitals around India that provided full-range care at costs that were dramatically lower than other private hospitals, to say nothing of American hospitals and their highly itemized billing system. Shetty’s hospitals offered flat rates for open-heart surgery, lung transplants, bypass surgery, and other procedures which would cost thousands of dollars in India and hundreds of thousands in American hospitals. Shetty, however, found ways to economize within acceptable medical standards, and his hospital system has turned a profit every year since its founding, and without charging burdensome prices to its patients. However, 500 million of India’s population still cannot afford insurance and so Prime Minister Narendra Modi has pushed through parliament a major campaign promise: healthcare for India’s uninsured, or Modicare as it has been termed. Unlike Obamacare, which launched almost a decade ago, Modicare is less than a year old. While its goal is laudatory, its funding is insufficient—Modi’s government allocated only $900 million in the plan’s first fiscal year—and the rates it demand participating hospitals charge, are even lower than the bargain rates that Dr. Shetty’s hospital systems can offer. Rather than view this as a market interference, however, Dr. Shetty has instead taken this as a challenge: he is determined to eliminate inefficiencies without sacrificing patient care in order to meet the Modi government’s cost targets for procedures, while still enabling his company to turn a profit. If he can succeed, Shetty may discover a model for affordable, and yet business friendly healthcare for the world to copy.

Sticking with medicine, sort of, The Atlantic has an interesting dive into something that few of us ordinarily do not think of, outside of two unpleasant events per year: a trip to the dentist. There is a joke in Seinfeld, among many other places, about dentists being persecuted because they are not on the same level as MDs. And while this is a shorthand and lazy, reductionist malign attack on an otherwise honorable profession, there are notable distinctions between how medical and dentistry practices are vetted by scientific, evidence-based studies. And many dentists used this in order to recommend invasive treatments that cost clients thousands. To be clear, there is no negligence here, rather there are a large number of dentists who knowingly prescribe invasive, surgical procedures without regard to their actual value to the patient, and then charge that patient thousands of dollars that that patient would not otherwise haves spent; so this is closer to fraud than negligence or malpractice. What I like about this article is that it examines, albeit too briefly in my opinion, the difference in experience between visiting a doctor and visiting a dentist. I also appreciate the review of the apparently scant number of dentistry articles which approach issues from an evidence based perspective, something which medical journals have done now for generations. Few of us like going to the dentist, but this article may give you pause when your dentist recommends a procedure at your next appointment.

Many of us have seen the movie The Thomas Crown Affair. In it, Pierce Brosnan plays an otherwise wealthy Manhattan playboy who steals priceless works of art purely for the joy of doing so. While there have been many notable art heists over the years, the majority of the assailants are caught when they try to fence the art they have stolen. But, in The Thomas Crown Affair, the protagonist does not wish, and indeed has no need, to sell the artworks he steals. This is actually a major, if brief, turn in the movie’s plot, which helps the protagonist’s start to build a profile of Crown. There is, it may surprise you, a real life equivalent of Thomas Crown, but he is not a dashing Manhattan British ex-pat who has a day job as an investment banker. Instead it is Stéphane Breitwieser who stole over 200 pieces of art from museums around Western Europe, often in broad daylight and always without any gun or other firearm. Breitwieser was no monied playboy though. Instead he and his long-time girlfriend worked together to steal artwork in plain sight in the middle of the day and then curated it in his own home; the bedroom of his mother’s home in northeastern France. Eventually Breitweiser possessed stolen art that had a vale of over $1 billion, though he never attempted to sell any of it, and in fact Breitweiser was often broke, relying upon his mother’s pension and his girlfriend’s salary as a hospital orderly. This is absolutely worth reading from beginning to end, including the epilogue.

Finally, in the least unlikely news of the week, President Donald Trump gained a Republican challenger for the 2020 nomination. This challenge comes from former Massachusetts Governor Bill Weld. To call this challenge quixotic is an insult to the Gentleman from La Mancha and to windmills. However, Weld being the sole challenger to Donald Trump is newsworthy, and it is worth looking at the analysis by the Center for Politics on the potential bottleneck for Trump in the New Hampshire Primary.

  Welcome to the weekend.

[itsfinancethings]

With fears of the coronavirus and restrictions on crowds still in effect, there were no defiant protests when journalist Maria Ressa emerged from a Philippine courtroom on June 15, convicted on a dubious charge of “cyber libel.”

Neither were there massive demonstrations in early May, when the country’s largest broadcaster, ABS-CBN, was forced off the air just as independent reporting and accountability over the COVID-19 response were arguably most needed.

“It was timed for the pandemic,” says Ressa, who was one of the press freedom “Guardians” featured as TIME’s 2018 Person of the Year. “Because at any other time there would have been people out on the streets.”

An outspoken critic of President Rodrigo Duterte’s deadly war on drugs, Ressa has long been in legal crosshairs, facing 11 court cases in 2018, and eight warrants for her arrest in 2019. But she says the pandemic has “exacerbated” suppression of the media.

Rights groups agree. They say crackdowns on the press are unfolding across the world — and escaping public backlash — as governments use the health crisis as a pretext to hound critics and tighten control.

Globally, the number of regimes hostile toward journalists was already on the rise. According to the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ), 2019 marked the fourth straight year that at least 250 journalists were incarcerated for their work.

Many of those were in Asia. The world’s most populous continent holds the dubious distinction of being home to both the most prolific jailer of journalists (China) and the deadliest places for them to work (Afghanistan, Pakistan, Philippines and Bangladesh). The region’s journalists have long been targeted by trumped up tax investigations, license cancellations, and threatened or actual arrest, alongside other forms of harassment. Now they face a tightening net.

“The public health crisis provides authoritarian governments with an opportunity to implement the notorious ‘shock doctrine’ — to take advantage of the fact that politics are on hold, the public is stunned and protests are out of the question,” says Christophe Deloire, secretary-general of watchdog Reporters Without Borders (RSF.

‘A dreamlike situation for any authoritarian government’

Under the guise of safeguarding public health, governments are introducing sweeping new powers. In Southeast Asia, many of these regulations are being wielded for political ends, such as interrogating, arresting and detaining critics who question a government’s handling of the crisis.

“Efforts to control the virus are giving authoritarian rulers the perfect cover to adopt draconian levers to rein in their opponents and critics,” says Murray Hiebert, a Southeast Asia expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington.

Read more: These Are the 10 ‘Most Urgent’ Threats to Press Freedom Amid the Coronavirus Pandemic

In Thailand, Prime Minister Prayut Chan-o-Cha has threatened to suspend or edit news that he deems “untrue.” The state of emergency imposed in March and extended in May, hands the government such power, as well as the right to order media organizations to “correct” any information deemed problematic.

In Myanmar, the health ministry cited virus misinformation when it ordered the country’s four telecoms operators to block access to 221 websites accused of carrying “fake news.” Although the exact list of sites has not been made public, several news outlets suddenly found they were inaccessible.

“This period is a dreamlike situation for any authoritarian government,” says Daniel Bastard, RSF’s Asia-Pacific director. “They can pretend to protect their citizens from ‘fake news’ while being the only authority that can precisely decide what is true or what is false. In this regard, the coronavirus crisis is a formidable pretext to impose censorship.”

Undoubtedly, the pandemic has fueled a deluge of disinformation. Social media platforms are abuzz with conspiracy theories about the origins of the disease, bogus miracle cures, scam at-home tests and hysterically inflated death counts. The viral spread of these hoaxes has spurred an “infodemic” that can crowd out accurate information and make it even more challenging to fight the disease.

Even Silicon Valley’s normally regulation-adverse tech companies have taken notice: Facebook said nearly 50 million pieces of content related to COVID-19 had to be flagged in April with a warning label for disinformation, while Twitter challenged more than 1.5 million users for spreading false information and displaying “manipulative behaviors” during the same month.

This avalanche is giving governments all the justification they need for exercising existing censorship laws or enacting new ones.

Singapore’s Protection from Online Falsehoods and Manipulation Act, introduced last year, empowers officials to determine what constitutes a falsehood, and to order corrections to or the removal of offending posts. The city-state’s minister of communications said the explosion of pandemic misinformation has retroactively justified the law, which was invoked in April against the online news commentary site States Times Review after it accused the government of concealing the true toll of the virus.

That same month, Vietnam introduced fines of 10-20 million dong ($426-$853) — equivalent to many months’ of minimum wage salary — for disseminating “fake news” on social media. Police had already used pre-existing regulations to summon more than 650 people over coronavirus-related posts by mid-March, according to Amnesty International. Of those, 146 were fined and the rest forced to delete their statements. Others, like 28-year-old Facebook user Ma Phung Ngoc Phu were less lucky, receiving jail sentences of up to nine months.

“Authorities have tended to cloak their crackdowns in notions of combating ‘fake news’ and the need to suppress misinformation that could cause a public panic,” according to Shawn Crispin, CPJ’s Southeast Asia representative. The reality, he says, “is that authorities are using vague and broad emergency powers to suppress criticism of the government’s virus response.”

In Cambodia, where Prime Minister Hun Sen was initially skeptical about the threat posed by the coronavirus, the government has given itself unprecedented emergency powers that include the right to ban “any information that could cause unrest, fear or disorder.”

While the new law has not been invoked, the government has faced criticism for accelerating its sustained crackdown on the political opposition, civil society and the media. According to a count by Human Rights Watch, as of the end of April Cambodian officials had arrested at least 30 people on such charges as spreading “fake news” about the virus and “stirring chaos.” Among them was a journalist who was imprisoned and had his online broadcasting license revoked. His offense? Quoting a speech by Hun Sen.

“Of course press freedom has been threaten[ed] because of the virus,” says Nop Vy, founder of the Cambodian Journalists Alliance. With the emergency powers, he adds, the government can “totally put press freedom and freedom of expression under control.”

Several journalists around the region declined to comment for this story, even anonymously, citing anxiety over possible arrest just for describing the situation. One reporter, who declined to use a name or country, expressed “concern” about continuing to work in the current environment.

Even in democracies where press freedom is thought to be more firmly entrenched, journalists are finding themselves under attack.

In Indonesia, where a democratic transition followed the end of dictatorship in 1998, journalists who criticize the president can now be imprisoned for 18 months under a new directive that targets both coronavirus-related hoaxes and information perceived to be hostile to the leadership.

Neighboring Malaysia, where a new administration scrapped the reform agenda of its predecessor, is investigating a correspondent for the Hong Kong-based South China Morning Post. She faces a possible two-year prison sentence on charges of breaching the peace after she reported last month on roundups of refugees and undocumented migrants in coronavirus “red zones.”

And in the world’s largest democracy, India, a flurry of arrests and legal cases has dogged journalists covering the negative impact of the pandemic. Prior to imposing a sudden lockdown on 1.3 billion people in March, Prime Minister Narendra instructed news executives to publish “inspiring and positive stories” about the government’s efforts. Not long afterward, the Supreme Court ordered all media to carry “the official version” of the country’s battle with the disease.

‘We’ll never go back to normal’

The international response to these attacks on press freedom has been muted at best. The U.S. State Department released a single sentence expressing “concern” over Maria Ressa’s conviction 48 hours after it was announced. Earlier this month, U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights, Michelle Bachelet, expressed alarm at how governments in the Asia-Pacific region were exploiting the pandemic to clamp down on free expression. But the sentiment had little impact. In a joint statement, eight of the countries singled out for censure replied that extraordinary times require “extraordinary and unprecedented measures.”

Yet once this unprecedented period subsides, it’s unclear whether they will be inclined to relinquish the arsenal of decrees, regulations and new powers rolled out for the health crisis. Few came with sunset clauses ensuring they would not outlast the emergency, and governments may get comfortable with their information monopoly. Emergency restrictions on civic life, politics and economics are already being rebranded as the “new normal,” threatening to become entrenched in the post-crisis reality.

Read more: We Can’t Let the Virus Infect Democracy

Even where emergency powers did include clearly defined time limits, extension efforts are underway. In the Philippines, the “special temporary power” granted by Congress was set to expire on June 24. But President Duterte, who once compared the country’s constitution to a “scrap of toilet paper,” has requested another 90 days. And it could continue much longer. According to his spokesperson “we’ll never go back to normal” without a COVID-19 vaccine, a development that, at its earliest, is not expected until sometime next year.

Amid such public health and political crises, many journalists who threaten official narratives by pushing for accountability and transparency face escalating risks that could soon make it impossible to operate freely.

“It’s so dangerous to be a journalist right now,” says Ressa. “But the mission is more important than ever. We have to stand up for it or we will lose so much.”

[newstfionline]

Headlines

Historical figures reassessed around globe after Floyd death (AP) The rapidly unfolding movement to pull down Confederate monuments around the U.S. in the wake of George Floyd’s death at the hands of police has extended to statues of slave traders, imperialists, conquerors and explorers around the world, including Christopher Columbus, Cecil Rhodes and Belgium’s King Leopold II. Protests and, in some cases, acts of vandalism have taken place in such cities as Boston; New York; Paris; Brussels; and Oxford, England, in an intense re-examination of racial injustices over the centuries. Scholars are divided over whether the campaign amounts to erasing history or updating it.

Masks required and fewer parties (allegedly): What college will look like this fall (Washington Post) Students who move into Virginia Tech’s residence halls for the fall term are on notice: They must wear face masks indoors except in their own bedrooms or bathrooms or when eating a meal. They also must follow a regimen of “physical distancing” from people and other measures to prevent the spread of the novel coronavirus. “We know there are new expectations to follow now, but to be together we need to work together for the safety of all in our campus community,” the public university states in a housing contract rewritten to meet the pandemic moment. Those who don’t sign it won’t get a bed on campus. Those who flout the rules face possible eviction. Welcome to the weird new reality of campus life under a public health crackdown. Many universities are warning students to expect a new normal. Parties will be minimal or nonexistent, if schools have their way. Seating at sports events will be limited, if spectators are allowed at all. Many lectures will be online. Food service will be grab-and-go. Foot traffic will be routed one way through specific exits and entrances. Coronavirus testing will be widespread, with quarantines expected for those who test positive. In many places, face-to-face instruction will end by Thanksgiving.

Trump authorizes sanctions targeting International Criminal Court (Washington Post) President Trump has signed an executive order authorizing new sanctions against prosecutors and officials of the International Criminal Court after the body approved investigations of alleged war crimes by U.S. service members and intelligence officers in Afghanistan. In an unprecedented display of administration firepower, the secretaries of state and defense, along with the attorney general and the national security adviser, jointly announced sanctions against officials of what they called a “corrupt” and “politically motivated” court manipulated by Russia and other U.S. adversaries. The announcement escalates a long-standing dispute with the Netherlands-based court, established 18 years ago under the Treaty of Rome. The United States has never ratified the treaty or recognized the court’s jurisdiction. The measures announced Thursday include economic sanctions against any ICC officials involved in efforts to investigate “allied personnel without that ally’s consent” and an extension to family members of visa restrictions already in effect against those officials.

New forecasts show potential for widespread, long-lasting heat for Lower 48 by late June (Washington Post) A period of punishing heat may envelop much of the Lower 48 and potentially extend to parts of Canada and Alaska. Soaring temperatures could swallow much of the contiguous United States toward the end of June, arriving just in time for calendar-year summer and potentially lingering for weeks. The above-average temperatures are part of a major pattern change that would bring anomalous warmth to some parts of the nation that have seen a cooler than average spring. Summer 2020 may go down in the books as much warmer than average for the United States or portions of the country—unsurprising considering the past five summers have been the top five hottest on record for the globe.

Experts: Police ‘woefully undertrained’ in use of force (AP) Seattle officers hold down a protester, and one repeatedly punches him in the face. In another run-in, officers handcuff a looting suspect on the ground, one pressing a knee into his neck—the same tactic used on George Floyd. The officers were captured on videos appearing to violate policies on how to use force just days after Floyd died at the hands of Minneapolis police, setting off nationwide protests. With calls for police reforms across the U.S., instructors and researchers say officers lack sufficient training on how and when to use force, leaving them unprepared to handle tense situations. Better training can’t fix all the issues facing the nation’s police departments, but experts believe it would have a big impact. “The skills are not taught well enough to be retained and now the officer is scrambling to find something that works,” said William Lewinski, executive director at Minnesota-based Force Science Institute, which provides research, training and consulting to law enforcement agencies.

Venezuelan migrants make long trek back home (AP) A couple pushing their 6-month-old twins in a stroller. A family with their life’s belongings stuffed into one large cloth sack. Young boys and girls sleeping beneath makeshift tents, their mouths covered with face masks. These are some of the thousands of Venezuelans who fled their homeland hoping for a brighter future abroad and are now trying to get back home. A severe economic downturn caused by the coronavirus pandemic has dashed the dreams of countless Venezuelans who fled their crisis-torn country in what had been one of the largest mass migrations anywhere in recent years. Colombia migration authorities estimate nearly 75,000 have made the journey back, traveling tiring miles by foot and bus. Many are arriving at the border crossing in the city of Cucuta only to find they will have to wait longer: Authorities in Venezuela allow only a few hundred to enter and just on three days a week.

British economy battered (Reuters) The UK economy shrank by a quarter in the March-April period as entire sectors were shuttered by the coronavirus lockdown. “This is catastrophic, literally on a scale never seen before in history,” Paul Johnson, director of the Institute for Fiscal Studies think tank, said. “The real issue is what happens next.”

Nepal’s map irks India (Foreign Policy) Nepal’s parliament is due to vote over the weekend on a new map of its border with India. The new map would extend Nepal’s territory into India, a move New Delhi rejects as a “unilateral act.” Nepal’s Prime Minister K.P. Sharma Oli said he has tried to broker talks with India over the land dispute. “We have told [India] that we want to resolve this through diplomatic talks … And the solution is that our land should be returned to us,” Oli said.

North Korea says “never again” to Trump-Kim meetings (Foreign Policy) On the two-year anniversary of the first meeting between President Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, Pyongyang seems in no mood to pursue closer ties, according to a statement by Foreign Minister Ri Son Gwon. “Never again will we provide the U.S. chief executive with another package to be used for achievements without receiving any returns,” Ri said. The statement called for a change of direction in U.S. policy and pointed out what North Korea believes is U.S. hypocrisy. “The U.S. professes to be an advocate for improved relations with the DPRK, but in fact, it is hell-bent on only exacerbating the situation,” Ri added.

Hong Kong’s increasing divide portends a tumultuous future (AP) Protesters in Hong Kong got its government to withdraw extradition legislation last year, but now they’re getting a more dreaded national security law. And the message from Beijing is: Protest is futile. One year ago Friday, protesters took over streets and blocked the legislature, preventing lawmakers from starting debate on the extradition bill. Thousand of rounds of tear gas later, the movement has been quieted—in part by the coronavirus—but the anger has only grown. In its wake, the polarization has deepened between the city’s disenchanted youth and its government. And the resolve of the central government in Beijing to crack down on dissent, as evidenced by the coming national security law for the territory, has hardened. “Emotions are running high because these young protesters see no future,” said Willy Lam, a commentator and adjunct professor at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. “They know they can’t change the mind of (Chinese President) Xi Jinping.” The divide signals an uneasy and possibly tumultuous future for the semi-autonomous territory, which is part of China yet has its own laws and greater freedoms than the mainland under a “one-country, two systems” framework that is supposed to guarantee it a high level of autonomy until 2047.

Lebanese central bank to inject dollars as currency tumbles (AP) Lebanon’s money changers said the country’s central bank agreed Friday to inject fresh dollars into the market to prop up the national currency following a night of protests spurred by the dramatic plunging of the Lebanese pound. The protests, which degenerated into attacks on several bank branches, and the tumbling of the currency prompted an emergency Cabinet meeting Friday. Despite previous efforts to control the currency depreciation, the Lebanese pound sold for more than 6,000 to the dollar Thursday on the black market, down from 4,000 in recent days. The pound had maintained a fixed rate of 1,500 to the dollar for nearly 30 years.

Saudis consider cancelling the hajj pilgrimage (Financial Times) Saudi Arabia is considering cancelling the hajj pilgrimage season for the first time since the kingdom was founded in 1932, after cases of coronavirus in the country topped 100,000. “The issue has been carefully studied and different scenarios are being considered. An official decision will be made within one week,” a senior official from Saudi Arabia’s hajj and umrah ministry told the Financial Times. The annual ritual held in late July is one of the largest religious gatherings in the world, attracting about 2​ million​ people to the kingdom every year.​

[theconservativebrief]

Two prime ministers are claiming power in Sri Lanka in a bizarre political struggle that has thrown the country’s democracy into doubt.

In the latest twist, Sri Lanka’s Supreme Court on Tuesday temporarily blocked a move by Sri Lankan President Maithripala Sirisena to dissolve Parliament altogether and call snap elections in January.

The saga began abruptly on October 26 when President Sirisena ousted Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe and installed a replacement. His replacement, Mahinda Rajapaksa, is a former president who presided over the end of Sri Lanka’s bloody 25-year civil war and is accused of serious human rights abuses during his strongman-style rule from 2005 to 2015.

Sirisena says that he pulled off this dramatic prime minister switch because his life depended on it — literally. In a speech in October, days after his political maneuver, Sirisena said that one of Wickremesinghe’s cabinet ministers had been plotting to assassinate him. So Sirisena argued he had no choice but to kick Wickremesinghe out and put someone else in his place.

What makes this situation even stranger is the on-again, off-again alliance between Sirisena and Rajapaksa, the replacement prime minister. Sirisena had been a member of Rajapaksa’s cabinet back when he was president, but broke with him ahead of the 2015 elections. Now Sirisena has forged a political partnership with Rajapaksa once again.

There’s a big problem here, though: Wickremesinghe continues to claim that he is the rightful prime minister and that Sirisena’s move was unconstitutional. Wickremesinghe’s supporters and members of his United National Party (UNP) have gone so far as to call it an “undemocratic coup.”

Rajapaksa — who was sworn-in during a hasty ceremony on October 26 — claims he has popular support, including a majority in Parliament, which justifies his takeover.

But that doesn’t exactly seem to be the case. Sirisena suspended Parliament, and critics of Sirisena’s maneuvering said he delayed the reconvening of the lawmaking body in an attempt to rally and strong-arm votes for Rajapaksa.

Sirisena, under intense pressure, finally said he would reassemble Parliament on November 14, allowing it to vote on its rightful prime minister. Then he reneged on the promise and did a complete about-face: dissolving the body and calling for snap elections in January.

Now, Sri Lanka’s highest court has stepped in, halting Sirisena’s order and putting a stop to the snap elections. But the order was temporary, so Sri Lanka remains on the precipice of a full-blown political catastrophe, with fears of violence returning in a country that’s still healing from a decades-long civil war.

Former Sri Lankan president Mahinda Rajapaksa. Buddhika Weerasinghe/Getty Images

Rajapaksa served as a popular Sri Lankan president from 2005 to 2015. He is credited with finally resolving the country’s more than 25-year civil war with a separatist group known as the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, or the “Tamil Tigers” for short. The bloody ethnic conflict had been waging since the 1980s, with the largely Hindu minority Tamils seeking independence from the Buddhist Sinhalese majority.

But the tenuous peace Rajapaksa helped secure in 2009 came at a heavy cost. Rajapaksa has been accused of allowing war crimes and other human rights abuses under his watch, particularly during the final, brutal push to end the insurgency — including attacks on civilians and denial of humanitarian aid. Once Rajapaksa secured victory, he resisted international efforts, including by the United Nations, to investigate atrocities.

Rajapaksa has also been tied to the abduction and death of journalists during his tenure. Sirisena, a former minister in Rajapaksa’s cabinet, capitalized on this ahead of presidential elections in 2015, breaking with his former ally and joining the opposition against him.

Sirisena won in 2015, and his upset victory was seen as a promising sign for Sri Lankan democracy. Sirisena promised to crack down on corruption and implement government reforms. He also took a less hostile approach to the United Nations and accepted a resolution to investigate war crimes, part of a broader push for reconciliation in the post-civil war era.

Geopolitics also factored into their political rivalry. Rajapaksa sought closer economic and political relations with China, and when he was president he took loans from the Chinese for pet projects a maritime port and airport in the remote Hambantota area; the airport was dubbed “the world’s emptiest.” Sri Lanka now has serious debts to the Chinese.

The opposition, including Wickremesinghe, criticized these deals at the time, and sought to move closer to India.

Sirisena’s government, with Wickremesinghe as prime minister, hasn’t fulfilled its agenda since it took power in 2015, and the two politicians have repeatedly clashed. Sirisena has been criticized for slow-moving economic and government reforms and stalling on promises of reconciliation. Sirisena’s deteriorating partnership with Wickremesinghe exacerbated this sense of political impasse.

So Sirisena had a strong motive to replace Wickremesinghe, despite the truly astonishing political risks. But he seems destined to be the loser, no matter the outcome: either his gambit will fail, or, if Rajapaksa does manage to take control of the prime ministership, Sirisena will have empowered a former rival, who is more broadly popular and likely won’t defer to the president.

“[Sirisena’s] popularity does not come anywhere close to Rajapaksa’s,” said Jeffrey Feltman, a foreign policy fellow at the Brookings Institute and former UN official. “He doesn’t have the charisma, he doesn’t have the anti-terrorism credentials that create this Trump-like following that Rajapaksa has.”

Sirisena, Feltman added, “is somehow blinded to the realities into which he’s thrust himself.”

The rumblings that prompted Wickremesinghe’s ouster actually started earlier in October, when a report in the Indian newspaper the Hindu said that Sirisena had been accusing Indian intelligence of trying to murder him.

The Indian government denied the report, and assured Sirisena that it did not want to kill him. But apparently Sirisena did not let this idea go, and now he says one of Wickremesinghe’s cabinet ministers plotted to kill him, and has claimed Wickremesinghe failed to properly investigate.

“This information (received by investigators) contains a number of details hitherto hidden [from] the people,” Sirisena said on Sunday, two days after he decided to replace Wickremesinghe with Rajapaksa. “The informant has made a statement regarding a Cabinet minister involved in the conspiracy to assassinate me.”

The details of this alleged plot are still murky, as is Sirisena’s decision to kick out Wickremesinghe along with the prime minister’s cabinet officials over it. As Akhilesh Pillalamarri wrote in the Diplomat, Sri Lanka’s constitution “prevents the president from removing a prime minister unless they resigned or lost the confidence of parliament, neither of which has yet happened, according to Wickremesinghe.”

So Wickremesinghe says he’s still the prime minister. And his party is backing him — strongly, it turns out:

Rajapaksa was sworn in as prime minister on October 26, though, and he claimed he had the support in Parliament to back him up if it were put to a vote. Sirisena originally said he would not reconvene Parliament until November, which many saw as an attempt to wrest the votes for Rajapaksa.

Sirisena had finally agreed to reconvene the Parliament on November 14 — this Wednesday. But over the weekend, the president reversed course entirely and dissolved the entire Parliament and called for a snap general election next year, on January 5, with the body to reassemble on January 17.

Sirisena justified his decision as an attempt to avoid political violence, though he’s the one that instigated the turmoil.

“It appeared to me that, if I allowed the Parliament to be convened on the 14th, without dissolving it, it could have brought about commotion and fights in every city and every village would lead to very unpleasant and difficult situation for the average citizens of my beloved country,” Sirisena said about his decision.

“As such, the best solution was not to allow those 225 members in the Parliament to fight each other and allow that to develop into a street fights in every part of the country,” he continued, saying it was “his duty and responsibility” to let voters decide the Parliament through a free and fair election.

Wickremesinghe’s supporters challenged Sirisena’s decision, framing it as a ploy to avoid a decision in Parliament, where Rajapaksa wouldn’t have the votes. But Wickremesinghe’s party also took it a step farther: to the courts.

On Tuesday, Sri Lanka’s Supreme Court agreed, ordering a pause to Sirisena’s snap elections. But the order was temporary, and the Court will hear more arguments next month, leaving open the possibility that the Court could reverse its decision and keeping Sri Lanka’s political future in doubt.

Wickremesinghe has hailed the Court’s decision, calling it a “resounding victory for the people’s franchise.”

“The powers of the president are limited and he must act according to the law,” Wickremesinghe said. “He is not above the law.”

Wickremesinghe and Parliament’s speaker (who’s a member of the same UNP party) have said that members of Parliament will now get a chance to vote this week on the rightful prime minister — Wickremesinghe or Rajapaksa — on November 14.

The Court’s decision, which aligned with the current Parliament, represented a “significant institutional setback” for Sirisena, Feltman said. But it’s still unclear if Sirisena will try some last-minute maneuvering to stop Parliament from meeting to take the crucial vote.

Right now, Sri Lankan politics are basically in a holding pattern until Parliament gets a chance to vote on its prime minister.

But tensions have ratcheted up in the country since Sirisena swapped prime ministers on October 26. The week after his move, thousands of protesters flocked to Sri Lanka’s capital, Colombo to demand that Sirisena call Parliament back into session and end this self-inflicted constitutional crisis.

The rallies have largely been peaceful, but violent clashes have broken out — most notably on October 28, when one of the deposed ministers tried to reenter a government building and encountered supporters rallying for Rajapaksa. The pro-Rajapaksa crowd tried to block the minister from entering the building, and a bodyguard fired into the crowd, killing one person.

But the continued risk for violence is particularly acute in Sri Lanka, whose history is punctuated with ethnic conflict. Rajapaksa was president during the end of the country’s civil war, and experts worry that if Rajapaksa prevails in the power struggle, it could heighten ethnic tensions against Tamils and other minorities, as he’s been known to stoke Buddhist nationalism.

Protests will likely continue. Both Wickremesinghe and Rajapaksa have called on their supporters to rally on their behalf, according to the Guardian.

Western governments, including the United States, have largely condemned Sirisena’s bizarre power swap.

The US Embassy in Colombo denounced Sirisena’s decision to dissolve Parliament over the weekend. “There is much at stake and such actions jeopardize Sri Lanka’s economic progress and international reputation,” the embassy said in a statement. “We call on the President to respect his country’s democratic tradition and the rule of law.”

Meanwhile, China seems just fine with finding an old ally suddenly back in power, and Beijing was quick to congratulate Rajapaksa. It’s a sign the region’s rivals, India and China, are closely watching the developments in Sri Lanka for their own geopolitical gain.

Original Source -> Here’s what you need to know about Sri Lanka’s escalating political crisis

via The Conservative Brief

[sporadicwinnersong]

India’s prime minister is not as much of a reformer as he seems#MohnishAhluwaliaNotes

But he is more of a nationalist firebrand WHEN Narendra Modi became prime minister of India in 2014, opinion was divided as to whether he was a Hindu zealot disguised as an economic reformer, or the other way round. The past  four years appear to have settled the matter. Yes, Mr Modi has pandered to religious sentiment at times, most notably by appointing a rabble-rousing Hindu prelate as chief minister of India’s most-populous state, Uttar Pradesh. But he has also presided over an acceleration in economic growth, from 6.4% in 2013 to a high of 7.9% in 2015—which made India the fastest-growing big economy in the world. He has pushed through reforms that had stalled for years, including an overhaul of bankruptcy law and the adoption of a nationwide sales tax (GST) to replace a confusing array of local and national levies. Foreign investment has soared, albeit from a low base. India, cabinet ministers insist, is at last becoming the tiger Mr Modi promised. Alas, these appearances are deceiving.he GST, although welcome, is unnecessarily complicated and bureaucratic, greatly reducing its efficiency. The new bankruptcy law is a step in the right direction, but it will take much more to revive the financial system, which is dominated by state-owned banks weighed down by dud loans. The central government’s response to a host of pressing economic problems, from the difficulty of buying land to the reform of rigid labour laws, has been to pass them to the states. And at least one of the big reforms it has undertaken—the overnight cancellation of most of India’s banknotes in an effort to curb the black economy—was counterproductive, hamstringing legitimate businesses without doing much harm to illicit ones. No wonder the economy is starting to drag. In the last  three months of year 2017  it grew at an annualised rate of 6.1%, more slowly than when Mr Modi came to power. More an administrator than a reformer India’s prime minister, in short, is not the radical reformer he is cracked up to be. He is more energetic than his predecessor, the stately Manmohan Singh, launching glitzy initiatives on everything from manufacturing to toilet-construction. But he has not come up with many big new ideas of his own (the GST and the bankruptcy reforms date back long before his time). His reputation as a friend to business rests on his vigorous efforts to help firms out of fixes—finding land for a particular factory, say, or expediting the construction of a power station. But he is not so good at working systematically to sort out the underlying problems holding the economy back. India does not just need power stations and parcels of land for development. It needs functioning markets for electricity and land—and capital and labour, for that matter. Lending to industry is contracting, for the first time in 20 years; Mr Modi should recapitalise state-owned banks and sell them off, to get loans flowing again. He should be working to simplify the over-exacting labour law, which perversely harms workers by deterring companies from hiring them formally. Property purchases are a forbidding quagmire; the government, at a minimum, should try to improve the quality of registers to reduce the scope for disputes. Political conditions are about as propitious for reform as they are ever likely to be. Mr Modi’s government is the strongest in decades. It has a big majority in the lower house of parliament and is edging closer to control of the upper house, as well. It runs most big states. The opposition is hopeless. There are economic tailwinds, too. India is a big importer of oil; the low price of late has been boosting growth by perhaps two percentage points a year. Ageing has long weighed on Western economies and is starting to sap China’s. India, by contrast, is still young. Over a quarter of the people joining the world’s workforce between now and 2025 will be Indian. And there is enormous scope for catch-up growth: India is the poorest of the world’s 20 biggest economies. By rights, it should be surpassing others’ growth rates for years. Mr Modi, in short, is squandering a golden opportunity. Some apologists claim that he is waiting until he wins a majority in the upper house before taking on bigger reforms. If so, he has given no inkling of what he is planning. In fact, he has not even made clear that economic reform is his priority. More a chauvinist than an economist As prime minister, Mr Modi has been just as careful to court militant Hindus as jet-setting businessmen. His government recently created havoc in the booming beef-export business with onerous new rules on purchases of cattle, in deference to Hindus’ reverence for cows (see article). Yogi Adityanath, the man he selected to run Uttar Pradesh, is under investigation for inciting religious hatred and rioting, among other offences. The fear is that, if the economy falters, Mr Modi will try to maintain his popularity by stirring up communal tensions. That, after all, is how his Bharatiya Janata Party first propelled itself to government in the 1990s. Mr Modi himself was chief minister of Gujarat in 2002 when rioting there killed at least 1,000 people, most of them Muslims. To this day, he has never categorically condemned the massacre or apologised for failing to prevent it. Under Mr Modi, debate about public policy, and especially about communal relations, has atrophied. Hindu nationalist thugs intimidate those who chide the government for straying from India’s secular tradition, or who advocate a less repressive approach to protests in Kashmir, India’s only state with a Muslim majority. One of the few media companies that dares to criticise the government has been raided by police on grounds that would not normally attract such heavy-handedness. Mr Modi himself has become the object of a sycophantic personality cult. The prime minister may intend all this as a way to keep winning elections. But it is not hard to imagine it going disastrously wrong. Mr Modi’s admirers paint him as the man who at last unleashed India’s potential. In fact, he may go down in history for fluffing India’s best shot at rapid, sustained development. And the worries about a still darker outcome are growing.

via Blogger http://ift.tt/2BLJiv3

[akividu]

India at 70, and the Passing of Another Illusion

The Opinion Pages | Op-Ed Contributor

By PANKAJ MISHRAAUG. 11, 2017

Credit Daniel Zender

August 15, 1947, deserved to be remembered, the African-American writer W.E.B. Du Bois argued, “as the greatest historical date” of modern history. It was the day India became independent from British rule, and Du Bois believed the event was of “greater significance” than even the establishment of democracy in Britain, the emancipation of slaves in the United States or the Russian Revolution. The time “when the white man, by reason of the color of his skin, can lord it over colored people” was finally drawing to a close.

It is barely remembered today that India’s freedom heralded the liberation, from Tuskegee to Jakarta, of a majority of the world’s population from the degradations of racist imperialism. India’s first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, claimed that there had been nothing “more horrible” in human history than the days when millions of Africans “were carried away in galleys as slaves to America and elsewhere.” As he said in a resonant speech on Aug. 15, 1947, long ago India had made a “tryst with destiny,” and now, by opening up a broad horizon of human emancipation, “we shall redeem our pledge.”

But India, which turns 70 next week, seems to have missed its appointment with history. A country inaugurated by secular freedom fighters is presently ruled by religious-racial supremacists. More disturbing still than this mutation are the continuities between those early embodiments of postcolonial virtue and their apparent betrayers today.

Du Bois would have been heartbroken to read the joint statement that more than 40 African governments released in April, denouncing “xenophobic and racial” attacks on Africans in India and asking the United Nations Human Rights Council to investigate. The rise in hate crimes against Africans is part of a sinister trend that has accelerated since the Hindu nationalist Narendra Modi came to power in 2014.

Another of its bloodcurdling manifestations is the lynching of Muslims suspected of eating or storing beef. Others include assaults on couples who publicly display affection and threats of rape against women on social media by the Hindu supremacists’ troll army. Mob frenzy in India today is drummed up by jingoistic television anchors and vindicated, often on Twitter, by senior politicians, businessmen, army generals and Bollywood stars.

Hindu nationalists have also come together to justify India’s intensified military occupation of Muslim-majority Kashmir, as well as a nationwide hunt for enemies: an ever-shifting and growing category that includes writers, liberal intellectuals, filmmakers who work with Pakistani actors and ordinary citizens who don’t stand up when the national anthem is played in cinemas. The new world order — just, peaceful, equal — that India’s leaders promised at independence as they denounced their former Western masters’ violence, greed and hypocrisy is nowhere in sight.

Back in 1947, Du Bois had good reason to hope that India would offer a superior alternative to the West’s destructive modernity. His hero, Mohandas K. Gandhi, had lived on three continents by the time the first phase of globalization violently ended with World War I. Gandhi had intimately experienced how Western imperialists and capitalists blended economic inequalities with racial hierarchies, entrenching, as Du Bois wrote, “a new industrial slavery of black and brown and yellow workers in Africa and Asia.” Gandhi was determined not to let postcolonial India replicate the injustices built into modern civilization or, as he put it, “English rule without the Englishman.”

From that perspective, Gandhi may seem to have chosen his protégé unwisely: Nehru was the scion of a family of rich Brahmin Anglophiles. But Nehru received his own education in global inequities through people he met in international left-wing networks. On a wide range of international issues, the two men shared a rhetoric that expressed a preference for solidarity, compassion and dialogue over violence.

Gandhi claimed to “understand the longing of a Jew to return to Palestine,” but warned Zionists against doing so “under the shadow of the British gun.” As early as 1946, Nehru, then prime-minister-in-waiting, sacrificed India’s lucrative trade links with South Africa in protest against apartheid. In 1947, India voted at the United Nations against the partition of Palestine because, Nehru explained to Albert Einstein, the Zionists had “failed to win the good will of the Arabs.” Distrustful of American motives, Nehru spurned a potentially rewarding partnership with the United States during the Cold War.

But Indian leaders very seldom practiced domestically what they preached internationally. Though committed to parliamentary procedures, Nehru never let go of the British-created colonial state and its well-oiled machinery of repression. The brute power of the Indian police and army was used in 1948 to corral the princely state of Hyderabad into the Indian Union. Up to 40,000 Muslims were killed, and the episode remains the single-largest massacre in the history of independent India.

Nehru shared with Hindu nationalists a mystical faith in the essential continuity of India from ancient civilization to modern nation. Determined to hold on to Kashmir, for example, he abandoned his promise of organizing a referendum to decide the contested region’s political status. In 1953, he deposed a popular Kashmiri politician (and friend) and had him sent to prison, inaugurating a long reign of puppet leaders who continue to enrich themselves under the long shadow of the Indian gun.

As early as 1958, Nehru’s regime introduced the Armed Forces Special Powers Act, the forerunner of repressive legislation that today sanctions murder, torture and rape by Indian soldiers in central India and border provinces. It was under Nehru that Indian troops and paramilitaries were unleashed on indigenous peoples in India’s northeastern states in the 1950s and ’60s. It was Nehru who in 1961 made it a crime to question the territorial integrity of India, punishable with imprisonment.

Yet in the eyes of the world, India maintained its exceptional status for decades, as many promising postcolonial experiments with democracy degenerated into authoritarianism, if not military rule. The country’s democratic politics appeared stable. But they did so only because they were reduced to the rule of a single party, the Congress, which was itself dominated by a single family — Nehru’s. And far from being socialist or redistributionist, Nehru’s economic policies boosted India’s monopoly capitalists. His priorities were heavy industries and elite polytechnics, which precluded major investments in primary education, health and land reform.

The Congress’s reliance on reactionary upper-caste Hindus also prevented the very possibility of emancipatory politics for dalits until the early 1990s. (It was those upper-caste Hindus, incidentally, who were the first in the republic’s history to ban cow slaughter, in several states in the 1950s.) By the 1980s — after Nehru had been replaced by his daughter, Indira Gandhi, at the helm of both the Congress and the country — the party had chosen Hindu majoritarianism, and hostility to Muslims and Sikhs, as the low road to electoral success. It was a nasty and dangerous strategy, which emboldened extremists on all sides. Many more people died in the Congress-led anti-Sikh pogrom of 1984 than in the 2002 massacre of Muslims in Gujarat that Modi is accused of supervising while he was the state’s chief minister.

India’s lynch mobs today represent the latest and most grisly expression of such cynical political ideologies. As the sheer brutishness of Mr. Modi’s populism becomes clear, the memory of the aristocratic Nehru becomes more sacred, especially among politicians and commentators from India’s English-speaking upper castes. But Mr. Modi has also turned that legacy of high-flown promises to his political advantage.

Nehru and his followers had articulated an influential ideology of Indian exceptionalism, claiming moral prestige and geopolitical significance for India’s uniquely massive and diverse democracy. Only many of those righteous notions also reeked of upper-caste sanctimony and class privilege. Mr. Modi has effectively mobilized those Indians who have long felt marginalized and humiliated by India’s self-serving Nehruvian elite into a large vote bank of ressentiment.

Virtuous talk of unity in diversity and secularism has been replaced by a barefaced Hindu nationalism: The tattered old masks, and the gloves, have come off. The state, colonized by an ideological movement, is emerging triumphant over society. With the media’s help, it is assuming extraordinary powers of control — telling people what they should eat at home and how they should behave in public, and whom to lynch.

Mr. Modi’s rule represents the most devastating, and perhaps final, defeat of India’s noble postcolonial ambition to create a moral world order. It turns out that the racist imperialism Du Bois despised can resurrect itself even among its former victims: There can be English rule without the Englishman. India’s claims to exceptionalism appear to have been as unfounded as America’s own.

And so one can, of course, mourn this Aug. 15 as marking the end of India’s tryst with destiny or, more accurately, the collapse of our exalted ideas about ourselves. But a sober reckoning with the deep malaise in India can be bracing, too. For it confirms that the world as we have known it, molded by the beneficiaries of both Western imperialism and anti-imperialist nationalism, is crumbling, and that in the East as well as the West, all of us are now called to fresh struggles for freedom, equality and dignity.

Pankaj Mishra’s most recent book is “Age of Anger: A History of the Present.”

Source: nytimes