Historians of JNU and AMU emphasise the role of Gandhi-Nehru-Jinnah dismissing every other aspect

The Statesman Be Better Informed Special Article
Marx and Clio~II Pakistani Textbooks Now A Source Of Indian History Dipak Basu

It is scarcely known in India that Karl Marx and Swami Vivekananda had similar views on the historical cycle of the world. According to Marx, world history has four cycles starting with primitive communism of tribal societies, followed by feudalism, capitalism and ultimately socialism. This is eventually followed by advanced communism. These cycles occur on account of the contradictions or dialectics in the existing system. Marx wrote:

“Changes occur in society because of contradictions in prevailing ideology, in its social, economic and political order. These contradictions arise from hostilities between the social classes” (A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy).

Similarly, Swami Vivekananda divided world history into four cycles, starting with the Age of the Priests, the Age of the Warriors, the Age of the Merchants (contemporay history) and finally the Age of the Worker. With every cycle, society attains a higher level of development.

Contradictions

Explaining the contradiction in society, Vivekananda wrote:

“At a certain time every society attains its manhood, when a strong conflict ensues between the ruling power and the common people” (Collected Works, vol iv, page 399).

In the new Age of the Workers,

“just distribution of material values will be achieved, equality of the rights of all members of society to ownership of property established and caste differences obliterated” (Collected Works, vol vi, page 343).

Sri Aurobindo had expressed similar views on history. The views of the Marxist historians in the former Soviet Union ought to be seriously considered if only to grasp the Marxian view of India. Their perception is exactly the opposite of the Anglo-American view. “The cosmic hymn of the Rigveda is, in our view, fundamentally a realistic work with strong elements of spontaneous materialism and dialectics. The Vedic literature has a great significance for the study of the forms of social life in ancient India” (Vladimir Brodov, Indian Philosophy in Modern Times; Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1984).

While examining the Muslim period the historians of AMU, JNU and Delhi University have followed the Pakistani version of Indian history, which is very different from the Soviet version. Jamia Millia’s Mushirul Hasan writes in India Partitioned (Oxford University Press, 1985) that Muslims came to the Malabar coast peacefully. However, in Notes on Indian History, Marx wrote: “Mussulman Conquest of India: First Arab entry into India AD 664 (year 44 of the Hegira): Arabs reached Kabul; in the same year Muhallab, an Arab general, raided India, advanced as far as Multan.”

Referring to Aurangzeb, Soviet historians wrote: “This cold calculating politician was a fanatical Moslem and his victory over Dara Shukho signified the advent of a policy, which stripped Hindus of their rights. Between 1665 and 1669, he gave orders for Hindu temples to be destroyed and for mosques to be erected from their debris. Hindus were not allowed to wear any marks of honour, to ride elephants etc. The heaviest burden of all was the poll-tax on non-Moslems, or jizya, introduced in 1679...” (The History of India by K Antonova, G Bongard-Levin, G Kotovsky, Progress Publisher, Moscow 1979, page 255).

The historians of JNU and AMU will certainly dispute such views about Aurangzeb and other Muslim emperors of India, who are considered by them and their fellow Pakistani historians as progressive reformers. The Soviet historians summarized modern India thus: “Progressive thought in India in the latter half of the 19th and early 20th century is characterised by the following features ~ direct links with the historical destiny of the country, with the search for the solution of political and economic problems and for the ways of the country’s democratic transformation (Dayananda Saraswati, Swami Vivekananda, Bal Gangadhar Tilak, Sri Aurobindo and others)”.

Russian historians have emphasized various popular uprisings against British rule in the 18th and 19th centuries, including the revolt of the Sanyasis mentioned in Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay’s Ananda Math, the revolutionary movements in the 20th century, the role of Tilak, Vivekananda and Tagore, the revolt of the Indian Navy in 1946. In comparison, they have ignored the Gandhi-Nehru factor and the prolonged negotiations between the British and Gandhi. On the contrary, the Western historians put extreme emphasis on the process of transfer of power from the British to the pro-British Indian and Pakistani politicians like Gandhi-Nehru-Jinnah. The historians of JNU and AMU also emphasise the role of Gandhi-Nehru-Jinnah, dismissing every other aspect of the political and historical developments of India.

Romila Thaper in her book, History of India, has dismissed the Indian revolutionaries as “bomb throwing terrorists’ in one sentence. She has devoted only two sentences on Subhas Bose and the Azad Hind Fauz. Bipan Chandra dismissed Subhas Bose as an “associate of the Fascists”. It is worthwhile to remember that the former Soviet Union had recognised the Azad Hind government and allowed Subhas Bose to open a consulate in the Soviet Union while the British had branded him as a war criminal. British historians (the best example is The History of the Second World War written by Winston Churchill) do not even mention Indian revolutionaries or Subhas Bose. Thus, India’s so-called Marxist historians of JNU and AMU have followed the British historical tradition, not the Marxist one.

Pro-Indian

Karl Marx was one of the greatest philosophers of the world, and he was highly sympathetic to India. Both Marx and Lenin wrote substantially on India. This has inspired a number of anti-British writers and politicians of India during the days of the freedom struggle. The writings of Karl Marx and the Soviet historians are very pro-Indian, unlike those of the Anglo-American writers. However, the historians of JNU and AMU, ideological gurus of the leaders of the CPI-M are the followers of the Anglo-American Indologists and Pakistani historians, who are by nature anti-Marx, anti-Soviet, and anti-Indian.

Yvette Rosser in her PhD thesis, “Curricula as Destiny: Forging National Identities in India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh” in the University of Texas in Austin, has proved that the source of the recent writings of the JNU-AMU-Delhi historians are the Pakistani textbooks. The ideas, dressed up as the new history of India by some American historians are not only biased but also full of ignorance, falsehood, and misinterpretations of facts. It is unfortunate that the historians of JNU-AMU-Delhi university are pursuing a policy to reflect and amplify the Anglo-American and Pakistani opinion, which are hostile towards India and particularly towards the Hindu religion and the Marxist leaders of India, former students of JNU, are their very faithful admirers. (Concluded)

Respecting the elephant from Marginal Revolution by Tyler Cowen

I would not go so far as some who would insist that a Hindu is not the person to ask about Hinduism, as Harvard professor Roman Jakobson notoriously objected to Nabokov's bid for chairmanship of the Russian literature department: "I do respect very much the elephant, but would you give him the chair of zoology?"

That is from Wendy Doniger's new and noteworthy The Hindus: An Alternative History. Here is a favorable Michael Dirda review of the book. Read the Wikipedia section on "Criticism" of Wendy Doniger, some of it from fundamentalist Hindus. Here is a defense of Doniger.

Statelessness is no longer eschewed as a source of weakness but embraced as an asset

Hoover Institution - Policy Review - The Power of Statelessness FEATURES: The Power of Statelessness
By Jakub Grygiel
The withering appeal of governing

Whither the state?
The appeal of statelessness will, I believe, continue to increase. It is a long-term trend that cannot be easily reversed or arrested. Hence, states should be prepared for continued and ever more numerous challenges coming from stateless actors. The question, then, is how to respond to these threats. Several suggestions have been put forth in recent years. For instance, many of these groups rely on extensive and complicated networks of financial sources, often based in the criminal world.31 By curbing groups’ ability to finance their activities, states can weaken them. Another strategy is to contain, as much as is feasible, the spread of technologies that empower stateless groups. A clear example of this is the Proliferation Security Initiative, in which almost 80 states participate in activities to limit the spread of weapons of mass destruction.32 Moreover, because stateless actors often function within their target states, a durable strategy to defeat them is for nations to contain, disrupt, and dissuade the members and leaders of these groups — a strategy of “countersubversion.”33

I think it is also worth considering a more defensive strategy, one that may be pursued as a policy by states but may arise, too, as a natural response to protracted attacks by these networked, decentralized, and stateless groups. Broadly, it would result in the decentralization of the state. Centralization of a country’s efforts and resources made sense when the enemy was another country. Now, however, nations face enemies that do not have to mass their resources and forces to have an impact; the new enemies are dispersed and unpredictable. An effective response to such a threat does not require a continued centralization of organization and massing of resources and forces. In fact, such centralization may weaken the state, because it gives the enemy an easier target, without giving the state a comparable advantage. Moreover, centralization means uniformity of methods and procedures, whereas the enemy will seek diverse venues for its attacks and adopt multiple tactics. The enemy will be unpredictable because each stateless group will pursue different methods and procedures, and it is impossible to establish procedures to deal with every potential attack. A centralized response to the stateless threat is, therefore, likely to be ineffective.
Decentralization is a form of defense because it can help to contain the damage inflicted by an attack. For instance, a segmented infrastructure is more likely to survive an attack than one that is dependent on the effective functioning of several central stations. The electrical grid, for example, is heavily reliant on a few nodes that would most likely be overwhelmed by a surge of electricity caused by the destruction of a line. The most effective, if extreme, solution to such a threat is to develop off-the-grid capabilities for cities (or, alternatively, to build regional grids) and even on a smaller level such as for neighborhoods and possibly individual houses. Then, in order to shut down the supply of electricity to a region or city, an attack would have to be directed against individual generators or the local grids.34 While certainly not impossible, such an attack would require a level of coordination and effort not readily available to stateless groups. By analogy, a state whose main functions, from political decision-making to the management of social and economic activities, are decentralized and spread out may be more capable of withstanding dispersed, small attacks. To put it starkly, a state without a capital is more resilient than one with all of its functions concentrated in one place.
Furthermore, cities are extremely vulnerable to disruptions in large measure because of their reliance on transportation infrastructures that supply them with energy and food.35 It is instructive to look at what happens in French or Italian cities when trucking unions go on strike or disgruntled farmers block highways: Those nations’ governments are often forced to submit to the strikers’ demands. The large number of urban areas makes it impossible to devise effective defensive measures for them. And there are simply too many potential targets within them that demand attention, and their identification, however difficult, is not a guarantee that an appropriate defense can be established. For instance, in 2006, the Department of Homeland Security made public that its list of potential domestic targets of terrorist groups increased from 160 in 2003 to 28,000 in 2004 and to 77,069 in 2006.36

Given that it is impossible to protect such a number of widely different targets, a state may have to abandon some of its key characteristics in order to defend itself from stateless actors. A diffuse threat requires a diffuse security system. Massed defensive forces are useless if they are not where the attack may occur. Hence, states may need to devolve their security frameworks by giving regions and cities greater authority and capabilities to prevent and, if necessary, respond to terrorist attacks. The establishment of counterterrorism centers in New York City and Los Angeles, which have their own intelligence and analytical units and rapid response forces, is a good start.37 A parallel can be made with counterinsurgency tactics. An army that wants to fight against an insurgency effectively needs to devolve its decisions to the lowest level possible (e.g., platoon-level or even squad-level).38 As armies have learned how to fight small wars at the level of platoons, characterized by small clashes and constant patrols, so states may have to learn to decentralize their control over security.
Such devolution of power is not unprecedented in history. The rise of a very complex, decentralized political system in the Middle Ages was in part the result of continued attacks by tribal forces from the fourth century on. The inability of the central government, in this case the Roman Empire, to protect either the frontier or central regions from these attacks, forced local populations to rely on the military power of local leaders.39 As political scientist John Herz put it in 1957, “Throughout history, that unit which affords protection and security to human beings has tended to become the basic political unit; people, in the long run, will recognize that authority, any authority, which possesses the power of protection.”40

The devolution of state power is not without risks. The weakening of the state’s monopoly of violence may lead to the “Somalization” of the country in question: Local authorities rely on private actors to provide the needed protection and security, who then assert their own authority, becoming warlords of a sort. It is much easier to establish local security providers, such as militias or private armies, than to control them, or, if the situation changes, to demilitarize them. Furthermore, threats from stateless actors are arising at the same time as states maintain the ability to inflict enormous damage on each other and new powers are acquiring nuclear capabilities. Militias may be better suited to protect from, and respond to, small, local attacks, but they are less effective in deterring and defeating an industrial power, especially if the potential conflict will be for control of the sea (as in the case of a U.S.-China rivalry in the Pacific Ocean).
The question therefore is one of balance: How much will states have to decentralize in order to withstand potential disruptive attacks from stateless actors, while at the same time maintaining a level of centralization and power necessary to deter and, if necessary, defeat peer competitors? To put it differently, will the state’s perfect defensive measures against stateless actors — pervasive devolution of power, development of small and localized security providers — result in considerable weakening of that state relative to its neighbors? I do not offer an answer to this very important question. But the problem of nonstate actors will not go away. The trends underlying their resurgence are strong and outside of the control of a single nation or even a community of concerned nations. And given the inherent difficulties of implementing both offensive and defensive strategies to cope with these actors, we ought to be prepared for a prolonged period of constant conflict which may lead, as suggested here, to a change in the very nature of the state as we know it.
Jakub Grygiel is the George H. W. Bush Associate Professor of International Relations at the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies of The Johns Hopkins University. His latest book is Great Powers and Geopolitical Change (Johns Hopkins, 2006). The author acknowledges the support of the Earhart Foundation, which funded part of the research for this article.

The world is waking up to the Master’s vision

A voyage to the destiny of man Hindu - ‎Mar 28, 2009‎ HISTORY
A voyage to the destiny of man
MANOJ DAS
This year marks the centenary of Sri Aurobindo’s escape from the British and arrival at Pondicherry to fulfil his life’s mission. The centenary celebrations begin on April 4.
Photo: The Hindu Photo Library Master’s vision: Sri Aurobindo.

On April 7, 1910, Ramsay MacDonald (a future Premier) asked the Secretary of State for India in the House of Commons “whether he can confirm or otherwise the report in this morning’s Times that a warrant has been issued against Mr. Aurobindo Ghose for an article which appeared in the Karmayogin, and whether, if the report be accurate, a copy of the paper can be placed in the Library for the information of the Members.” He was told that the Government was awaiting a report. Voices from Britain
An exasperated MacDonald repeated the question for the third time on April 27 and when the Government was still unable to produce the magazine, flashed a copy of it himself and read the article paragraph by paragraph, challenging whoever could to point out where hid any sedition. The only voice that tried to embarrass MacDonald wondered if the original article was not in Bengali! Replied MacDonald, “The article is in most excellent English and Mr. Aurobindo Ghose could no more write in Bengali than I could.
Keir Hardie, the founder of the Labour Party and the first Socialist Member, quoted from the judgment of the famous Alipore Conspiracy pronouncing that no article or speech by Ghose (later Sri Aurobindo) incited violence.

“Here we have a movement which admittedly is animated by a high patriotic and moral ideal — a movement which claims the attention of the young enthusiasts of India to prevent them from being led into those devious courses into which some of them, unfortunately, have lately been tempted and the Government, seeing the growth of this movement, apparently wish to stifle it, or, by threatening the prosecution of Mr. Aurobindo Ghose, hint to others that every attempt to organise that force will be encountered with all the rigours of the law.”

This was the first major debate in the British Parliament on any Indian personality. By then no stone had been left unturned by Minto, the Governor-General, to try to trap and deport Sri Aurobindo, disregarding repeated advice to the contrary by Morley, the Secretary of State.
But Sri Aurobindo had disappeared just before the police knocked on his door, inspiring fantastic rumours obliging Sister Nivedita, who edited the Karmayogin after him, to announce that if he had gone over to Tibet to consult “Kuthmi or any other great Rishi, the fact is unknown to his other Koshas!”
Wrote The Englishman, “There is a rumour abroad that Mr. Ghose has made for Europe and probably by this time is in Geneva, the Mecca of the extremists.”
But by then Sri Aurobindo was ensconced in Pondicherry, after receiving a sudden providential command, Adesh, to the effect. Already a legend, he had no dearth of admirers in South.
A young follower, Moni, had arrived three days earlier and met Mandayam Srinivasachariar, the harassed editor of India, who had taken abode at Pondicherry. Arrangements were made for Sri Aurobindo to be put up in the vacant upper floor of a distinguished citizen Calve Shankar Chettiar’s house. Incognito
The hosts planned a grand reception, but Moni dissuaded them, for Sri Aurobindo was coming incognito. It was a quiet afternoon when he, accompanied by a follower, Bejoy, disembarked from S.S. Dupleix.

It did not take long for the British intelligence to know about his whereabouts. Efforts were made to kidnap him and failing, to persuade the French authorities to expel him. At last he was offered a comfortable bungalow in the Himalayas for his meditations. Sri Aurobindo informed all concerned through a letter to The Hindu on November 7, 1910, “I am and will remain in Pondicherry.”
Sri Aurobindo lived in solitude, a faithful few attending upon him, though he changed over to rented houses. However, some were irresistibly drawn towards him and among them were the writer Va Ra, Subramania Siva, V.V.S. Aiyer and the poet Subramania Bharati.
Then came pressure from leaders like Lala Lajpat Rai and C.R. Das insisting that he preside over the National Congress.
But he was firm in his conviction that no great change over humanity could come unless it is elevated to a new height of consciousness.
While engrossed in Yoga for enabling the descent of the power that would pave the way for such a transformation, he laid down in terms intellectual the raison d’etre of a new phase of evolution, in his works like The Life Divine and The Synthesis of Yoga..
The world is waking up to the Master’s vision. As an eminent philosopher of our time, Ken Wilber says,

“Sri Aurobindo’s message is far ahead of its time…The world remains divided into two highly contentious camps: those who believe in the ancient wisdom traditions and those who believe in the modern scientific view of evolution. Both of these views are terribly partial…But as Sri Aurobindo saw, probably more clearly than anybody before or since — the scientific account of evolution…cannot even begin to explain the extraordinary series of transformations that brought forth life from matter and mind from life and that is destined to bring forth Higher Mind, Overmind and Supermind.”

Sri Aurobindo’s destination, Pondicherry, also became his voyage to the destiny of mankind, a destiny about which, to quote from his epic Savitri:

A few shall know what none yet understands,/God shall grow up while the wise men talk and sleep,/For man shall not know the hour till its coming/And belief shall be not till the work is done.

Between 1906 and 1910, Sri Aurobindo was demanding outright independence from the British

Books \ Opinion Illustration by Sorit Magazine Apr 13, 2009 OPINION
A Fatherhood More Equal?
In exalting Gandhi, we've elbowed Sri Aurobindo into the shadows
Francois Gautier on Sri Aurobindo

In this time of elections, the Congress has again claimed ownership to the Father of the Nation. But is the Mahatma, whose tremendous personality cannot be denied, indeed the architect of Indian independence, as most history books, Indian and western, are claiming?

The Lives of Sri Aurobindo (Columbia University Press, May 2008), a recently released biography by the American Peter Heehs, sheds new light on Sri Aurobindo's role as a leader of the Congress. Not many people know that originally, the Congress was created in December 1885 by an Englishman, A.O. Hume, with the avowed aim to "allow all those who work for the national (read British) good to meet each other personally".

Yet, between 1906 and 1910, Sri Aurobindo was not only demanding outright independence from the British, but he also re-enacted Krishna's message in the Bhagavad Gita by allowing his brother Barin to manufacture bombs in his own house and secretly endorsing early assassinations of select Englishmen. Compare this to the Mahatma, who only asked for independence in 1940—and that because he was against cooperating with the British in their war efforts against the Nazis.

Heehs writes: "Sri Aurobindo never ceased to believe that Indians had the right to use violence to topple a government maintained by violence." This enormously important aspect of Sri Aurobindo's life, of protecting dharma, of standing for what is good and true and noble, by force if necessary, is today ignored and not applied to the enemies of modern India. Many of today's disciples of Sri Aurobindo and his companion, the Mother, would rather sweep this aspect of his life under the carpet. Thus, someone has slapped a court case against Heehs in Orissa, thereby stopping the book from being published in India.

Heehs also dwells on the famous Uttarpara speech, in which Sri Aurobindo, after one year in Alipore jail, clearly defines what he calls the Sanatana dharma: "Something has been shown to you in this year of seclusion, something about which you had your doubts and it is the truth of the Hindu religion. It is this religion that I am raising up before the world, it is this that I have perfected and developed through the rishis, saints and avatars, and now it is going forth to do my work among the nations. When, therefore, it is said that India shall rise, it is the Sanatana dharma that shall rise."

If we, in France, had a great man such as Sri Aurobindo, who comes out in the Heehs biography not only as a revolutionary and a yogi, but also a tremendous philosopher and peerless poet, we would cherish him endlessly. His poetry would be taught to children, his philosophical works would be part of the university curriculums, books would be written about him, museums would be built.... In fact, France's outspoken ambassador in India, Jerome Bonnafont, is an ardent admirer of Sri Aurobindo's political works.

But today, amongst Indian politicians (apart from Dr Karan Singh, a scholar on Sri Aurobindo), everybody quotes conveniently from Gandhi, although nobody applies his ideals of charkha, non-violence, khadi and birth control by sexual abstinence. No journalist ever mentions this extraordinary yogi, whose sayings of one hundred years ago are still one hundred per cent relevant today. Not only is he absent from schools and universities, in some manuals written by the Congress, he is branded a 'terrorist'. Shame on India!

Somnath Chatterjee, who has been made an icon by the Indian media in spite of his sitting on the cash-for-votes scam, has built an Indian history museum at the Parliament annexe. In this museum, the history of India more or less starts with Ashoka (because he was supposedly Buddhist), jumps to Akbar (who is glorified beyond measure) and finishes with Subhash Chandra Bose, Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru.Not one mention of Sri Aurobindo or even Bal Gangadhar Tilak. Isn't it time Indian history is rewritten?

Heehs's book can be used to rectify some of the major injustice done to Sri Aurobindo, the true father of Indian independence, who prophetically said about Pakistan in 1947: "India is free, but she has not achieved unity, only a fissured and broken freedom. The whole communal division into Hindu and Muslim seems to have hardened into the figure of a permanent political division of the country. It is to be hoped that the Congress and the nation will not accept the settled fact as for ever settled.... For if it lasts, India may be seriously weakened, even crippled; civil strife may remain always possible, possibly even a new invasion and foreign conquest." How prophetic!

(The writer is editor-in-chief of La Revue de l'Inde and has been living in India for over 30 years.) More Stories: Francois Gautier Sri AurobindoMore in Opinion

It is a myth that gold is a “safe” investment or that it delivers steady returns

Business Line Gold, only to diversify
K. Ananthapadmanabhan Sunday, 22 March , 2009, 10:09

Bangalore: Unlike stocks, where it is possible to arrive at a price target based on a company’s earnings potential, there is no scientific method to arrive at a “fair price” for a commodity. Commodity prices are purely a function of demand and supply factors, with the speculative element usually adding to the momentum on either side.

The prediction that gold will head to $2000 an ounce is thus based either on the study of charts (technicals) or on the fact that gold prices last peaked at $873 an ounce during the oil crisis of 1980. Adjusted for inflation, the 1980 peak equates to $2,500 at today’s prices. As is the case with all predictions, this one too is not foolproof.

Not so safe
Though gold has emerged as full-fledged asset class in recent years, it is a myth that gold is a “safe” investment or that it delivers steady returns. With gold prices remaining extremely volatile, investing in gold today for quick gains, requires as much of timing as do stocks. Gold, only to diversify Sify

They want to use religious sentiment as political fuel to reach power house

INDIA 210309 TODAY from bijan ghosh <adv.bijan.ghosh@gmail.com> date 21 March 2009 21:34 subject india today. New Lawyers Chambers Supreme Court Buildings, New Delhi

Three weeks back, I reminded my people to evaluate once that what we got out of demolition of Babri Structure – effect not only in India, but in these sub-continent – apart from gift of growing terrorism.

Today’s news says – RSS Sudarshan said that Babri was demolished by external powers with the help of dynamite , while BJP top Mustak Ahmed said , BJP is not a construction company that it would build temple, mosque, churches… while BHP has been saying of late that demolition was not in the agenda… public-spark of the moment

They are now trying to give a cover of their acts and deeds – but they can not say sorry openly, since they would loss hindu votes. It is electoral politics not religion. They want to use religious sentiment as political fuel to reach power house - ram-nam just being a vehicle.

We must keep ourselves reminded always that vested interested communities internationally would keep on striving to torn India from within, so that India can not achieve superiority in terms of economics, man-power energy sources being the very foundation of it.

Two years back Ayodhya temple received attack, it is not any Islamic out fit or known terrorist camp who is responsible for it, it is totally a new launch premised on economy based war head but in a different colour. All such different attacks will come on India and Pakistan so that each may be provoked to blame the other to instigate religious sentiment – that being the most vernable premises in this sub-continent, which caused partition and the monumental human calamity that has no parallel in history. It is a shame; we adorn Lord Amarnath and indulge equally in communal hatred. What is the use of re-constructing Ram Temple if one has to offer Puja there in police protection!

All that is needed, all political leaders should not translate such accidents for their respective political dividends, restrain themselves in terms of real cause and teach people to maintain communal harmony by all means and at any cost.

The emerging need of the hour is: a strong leadership, an Indian leadership.

The days of individual leadership have gone, it is the day of collective leadership, and collective leadership can be evolved only when one can travel across the political fencing, ideological boundaries and religious limitations – while country being the only biding interest. This is an unusual situation and only an unusual step can help to bail out this situation. Not only pigmies of politics, man of eminence of different fields are also required to be joined hands together in this collective leadership.

Now not the Third Front – but Forth Front has also formed, i.e., unknown-unidentified faces from all the three fronts – see the situation which could be compared with jugglery only – a juggler is playing with four balls – three is always in air …. And everybody is desirous to be the PM, be that Lalu, Paswan, Pawer, Mulayam, Kalyan, Maya, Jayalalitha, Naidu, Gowda – while none of them have the quality to lead the country – specially in the crisis hour of global economy.

The real crisis of India is the crisis of Leadership. Nature will collaborate, immensely, to reinforce INDIA IS GREAT, if we can assure her right and proper utilisation of man-power harmony, integrated “We, the People” - while in absence of true leadership such assurance is a practical absurdity. 1:20 PM

We must follow the path of Sri Aurobindo

Organiser - Content
India has to give a unifying principle—Mohan Bhagwat ... He was addressing a gathering of eminent people at Sri Aurobindo Ashram in Shillong, ...

Tri-State Hindus come together for Hindu Sangam in New Jersey ...
16 Sep 2006 ... Mohan Bhagwat Ji addressing the public at Hindu Sangam ... Mohanji recalled Sri Aurobindo’s quote that “Sanatan Dharma will rise” and urged ...

Inspirational Speech by Sri Aurobindo: 15th Aug 1947 Sangh Parivar
we must follow the path of Sri aurobindo and do wht ever is best to full fill ... to give a unifying principle—Mohan Bhagwat · SANGH : UNIQUE AND EVERGREEN ...

Tarun Vijay: Denying Hindus space
He was an ardent devotee of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother had great hopes from him .... Mohan Bhagwat ji releasing the book Saffron Surge by Tarun Vijay at ...

Tarun Vijay: Stronger at Sixty
August 15 also happens to be Sri Aurobindo's birthday, .... Mohan Bhagwat ji releasing the book Saffron Surge by Tarun Vijay at India International Centre, ...

Samvad: Bhadrapad 31, 2065 Vik Samvat. Yugabda 5110 September 16, 2008
Pravas: Sh. Mohan Bhagwat, Sarakaryavaha RSS is on his last leg of the tour with book release functions on ... Sri Aurobindo, India's Rebirth.

Montesquieu observed that “Peace is the natural effect of trade"

Home / Announcements / Free Trade Petition
March 20, 2009 by David Archer Filed under Announcements
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Join the Petition for Free Trade
Dear Friends,
In cooperation with the International Policy Network and a worldwide group of think tanks, we are circulating this petition to combat recent moves toward harmful economic nationalism. I urge you to sign it. It is not yet a public effort, but please do share it with your colleagues, friends, and professional contacts. The first unveiling of this petition will be April 1st before the G20 meetings in London. It is a part of a much broader campaign that will be mobilized around the world to alert the public to the dangers of attempts to block trade and to revive positive efforts toward increasing freedom of trade. We will have a series of videos on the benefits of trade, booklets, public events, and much more, available in a multitude of languages.
Besides English, this petition will soon be available in over 20 languages. (Please see below). We are working toward an authentically worldwide effort on behalf of freedom of trade. Your help toward that end will be greatly appreciated.
If you would like more information, please contact my colleague David Archer.
Cordially, Dr. Tom G. Palmer Vice President for International ProgramsGeneral Director, Atlas Global Initiative for Free Trade, Peace, and Prosperity

Free Trade Is the Best Policy
The specter of protectionism is rising. It is always a dangerous and foolish policy, but it is especially dangerous at a time of economic crisis, when it threatens to damage the world economy. Protectionism’s peculiar premise is that national prosperity is increased when government grants monopoly power to domestic producers. As centuries of economic reasoning, historical experience, and empirical studies have repeatedly shown, that premise is dead wrong. Protectionism creates poverty, not prosperity. Protectionism doesn’t even “protect” domestic jobs or industries; it destroys them, by harming export industries and industries that rely on imports to make their goods. Raising the local prices of steel by “protecting” local steel companies just raises the cost of producing cars and the many other goods made with steel. Protectionism is a fool’s game.
But the fact that protectionism destroys wealth is not its worst consequence. Protectionism destroys peace. That is justification enough for all people of good will, all friends of civilization, to speak out loudly and forcefully against economic nationalism, an ideology of conflict, based on ignorance and carried into practice by protectionism.
Two hundred and fifty years ago, Montesquieu observed that “Peace is the natural effect of trade. Two nations who differ with each other become reciprocally dependent; for if one has an interest in buying, the other has an interest in selling; and thus their union is founded on their mutual necessities.”
Trade’s most valuable product is peace. Trade promotes peace, in part, by uniting different peoples in a common culture of commerce – a daily process of learning others’ languages, social norms, laws, expectations, wants, and talents.
Trade promotes peace by encouraging people to build bonds of mutually beneficial cooperation. Just as trade unites the economic interests of Paris and Lyon, of Boston and Seattle, of Calcutta and Mumbai, trade also unites the economic interests of Paris and Portland, of Boston and Berlin, of Calcutta and Copenhagen – of the peoples of all nations who trade with other.
A great deal of rigorous empirical research supports the proposition that trade promotes peace.
Perhaps the most tragic example of what happens when that insight is ignored is World War II.
International trade collapsed by 70 percent between 1929 and 1932, in no small part because of America’s 1930 Smoot-Hawley tariff and the retaliatory tariffs of other nations. Economist Martin Wolf notes that “this collapse in trade was a huge spur to the search for autarky and Lebensraum, most of all for Germany and Japan.”
The most ghastly and deadly wars in human history soon followed.
By reducing war, trade saves lives.
Trade saves lives also by increasing prosperity and extending it to more and more people. The evidence that freer trade promotes prosperity is simply overwhelming. Prosperity enables ordinary men and women to lead longer and healthier lives.
And with longer, healthier lives lived more peacefully, people integrated into the global economy have more time to enjoy the vast array of cultural experiences brought to them by free trade. Culture is enriched by contributions from around the world, made possible by free trade in goods and in ideas.
Without a doubt, free trade increases material prosperity. But its greatest gift is not easily measured with money. That greatest gift is lives that are freer, fuller, and far less likely to be scalded or destroyed by the atrocities of war.
Accordingly, we the undersigned join together in a plea to the governments of all nations to resist the calls of the short-sighted and the greedy to raise higher the barriers to trade. In addition, we call on them to tear down current protectionist barriers to free trade. To each government, we say: let your citizens enjoy not only the fruits of your own fields, factories, and genius, but also those of the entire globe. The rewards will be greater prosperity, richer lives, and enjoyment of the blessings of peace.

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Roubini decided to discard the assumption of market rationality

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washingtonpost.com > Columns > The Death of 'Rational Man'
By David Ignatius Sunday, February 8, 2009; Page B07

What allowed some people to see the financial crash coming while so many others missed its gathering force? I put that question recently to Nouriel Roubini, who has come to be known as "Dr. Doom" because of his insistent warnings starting in 2006 that we were heading into a global firestorm.
Roubini gave two kinds of answers. The first involves standard number-crunching of the sort that economists routinely do -- and that Roubini just did better and sooner. It's his second answer that's more interesting, because it goes to the heart of what we should take away from this crisis: Roubini decided to discard the assumption of market rationality that underlies most economics and to embrace the psychological insights of what's known as "behavioral economics."
First, the standard analytical explanation: Roubini said that he studied a chart in economist Robert J. Shiller's book "Irrational Exuberance." It showed that U.S. housing prices, adjusted for inflation, had remained essentially flat for a century, until the mid-1990s, when they began to shoot up. What's more, Roubini saw that the most recent housing correction in the late 1980s had a severe effect on the financial system -- leading ultimately to the collapse of the savings and loan industry.

So Roubini knew two things: Housing prices wouldn't keep going up forever, and when they went down, they would take a big piece of the financial system with them. From then on, it was a matter of watching the data.
But everyone else had those same numbers. Why did Roubini act? The answer is that he decided to trust his gut, which told him there was trouble ahead, rather than Wall Street's "wisdom of the crowd," which -- as reflected in stock prices -- said everything was rosy. He concluded that the markets were not pricing in the degree of risk that was actually present in housing.
"The rational man theory of economics has not worked," Roubini said last month at a session of the World Economic Forum at Davos. That's why he and other prominent economists are paying more attention to behavioral economics, which starts from the premise that economic decisions, like other aspects of human behavior, are influenced by irrational psychological factors.
The most compelling rebuttal of the rational model, paradoxically, was delivered by the ultimate rationalist, Alan Greenspan. "I made a mistake in presuming that the self-interests of organizations, specifically banks and others, were such that they were best capable of protecting their own shareholders," the former Fed chairman told Congress last October.

That's why Greenspan didn't see it coming, argues Daniel Kahneman, a Princeton professor who is often described as the father of behavioral economics. His rational-actor model wouldn't let him.
Let me put in a plug here for the godfather of behavioral economics, John Maynard Keynes. His 1936 "General Theory" is often interpreted simplistically as a call for fixing recessions by boosting demand with government spending. But at a deeper level, Keynes was analyzing the role of psychological factors, such as greed and fear, in economic decisions. He understood that markets freeze when people panic and start hoarding cash. ("Extreme liquidity preference," he called it.) Conversely, economies start to roar when investors feel a surge of what Keynes called "animal spirits."

One of the most powerful ideas I heard at Davos was the idea of "pre-mortem" analysis, which was first proposed by psychologist Gary Klein and has been taken up by Kahneman.
A pre-mortem analysis can provide a real "stress test" to conventional thinking. Let's say that a company or government agency has decided on a plan of action. But before implementing it, the boss asks people to assume that five years from now, the plan has failed -- and then to write a brief explanation of why it didn't work. This approach stands a chance of bringing to the surface problems that the decision makers had overlooked -- the "black swans," to use former trader Nassim Nicholas Taleb's phrase, that people assumed wouldn't happen in the near future because they hadn't occurred in the recent past.

One more take-away from this year's Davos forum was a Japanese proverb cited by one speaker: "An inch ahead is darkness." Recognizing the inherent unpredictability of economic life -- the darkness that's just ahead -- should make us wary. But it can also make us smart.
The writer is co-host of PostGlobal, an online discussion of international issues. His e-mail address is davidignatius@washpost.com

Doraiswami Iyer was a friend and ardent follower of Sri Aurobindo

Extremism to asceticism S. MUTHIAH The Hindu Metro Plus Chennai Monday, Mar 16, 2009

A few weeks ago, I heard for the first time the name S. Doraiswami Iyer. Since then, the more I’ve heard of him the more he’s sounded a fascinating personality. His journey from extremism to asceticism would certainly warrant a book.
He was a promising young lawyer when he got involved in the freedom movement. When the Congress found itself threatened by division between the Moderates and Extremists, Doraiswami chose the latter, drawn to the message of Tilak, Bipin Chandra Pal and Lala Lajpat Rai. The differences climaxed in violence — and a rain of slippers — at the 1907 Surat sessions of the Congress.

One Extremist, who lifted a chair to bring it down on the head of a Moderate, suddenly stopped in mid-action when he recognised who his target was; the old student of Triplicane Hindu High School, Doraiswami Iyer, had in the nick of time recognised his former Headmaster, V.S. Srinivasa Sastri.
When the warring factions of the Congress made their peace a few years later, ‘Surat’ Doraiswami Iyer, disillusioned with the way the freedom struggle was headed, returned to law and became one of the most successful lawyers of his time. He was at the peak of success when he gave it all up, the deaths of his two sons shattering him; one was killed in the early years of World War II while serving with the Royal Air Force and the other died while with the Indian Army. He then turned to spiritualism. He passed away while at the Ashram in Pondicherry.

Two stories about him connected with Pondicherry were recently related to me. I relate them here as told to me. The first is of how Doraiswami Iyer helped a close friend of his, Subramania Bharati. When the outspoken poet had to flee to Pondicherry to escape arrest by the British, news about the happenings in British India was sent weekly to him by Doraiswami Iyer. It was during Doraiswami Iyer’s Friday visits to the Tiruvottriyur temple that he would drop paper slips into the bowls of a couple of beggars. These ‘alms’ found their way to Bharati and his journal India benefitted considerably.
The other story reflects the mellowing of two extremists. Doraiswami Iyer was a friend and ardent follower of Sri Aurobindo. It is said that Sri Aurobindo requested Doraiswami to meet Mahatma Gandhi and convince him to accept the Sir Stafford Cripps proposals to ensure a united India. Gandhiji, of course, thought the proposals “a post-dated cheque.”
S. MUTHIAH

Digital technologies bring with them new forms of control & micromanagement

Communism conference — Michael Hardt
from The Pinocchio Theory by Steven Shaviro: Now, I am largely in agreement with Hardt (and Negri, and some of the economists associated with their position, like Marazzi and even to some extent Moulier Boutang) about the transformations in capitalism over the last fifty years, and especially since the 1970s.

But I am not sure I entirely accept the framework through which Hardt interprets these developments. In particular, I do not think that immaterial production involves a more “direct” expropriation of the common than was the case when industrial capitalism extracted value. It is true, as I have already said, that a lot of this new source of capital appropriation comes from a kind of “primitive accumulation” — corporations are now appropriating the commons in the form of things like genomes and songs and procedures of working, in the same way that landlords appropriated the commons of land at the time of the enclosures. But I don’t think that this is either a novelty or a reversion. It is rather the case that “primitive accumulation” never went away; it is a continual structural feature of capitalism, and was at work in the industrial age as much as it was in the agricultural stage, and as much as it is still today. Capitalism always both appropriates to itself things that it didn’t produce — and this precisely by “privatizing” them — and extracts a surplus from the processes of production that it directly initiates and supervises.

That is to say, there isn’t that great a difference between, on the one hand, how industrial capitalism imposes “cooperation” on large numbers of workers simultaneously, and draws profit from the economies of scale due to this cooperation (which is a form of relative surplus value) as much as it does from the initial inequalities built into the process of buying and selling “labor power” as a commodity (which is what Marx calls absolute surplus value); and, on the other hand, the way that immaterial capitalism today draws its profits from turning employees’ collaborative projects, and the cultural knowledge of indigenous peoples, into “intellectual property” locked under copyright and patent. In both cases, there is a double movement: on the one hand, the appropriation of what would otherwise be (or what previously was) common, and on the other hand, the transformation of that “common” precisely into a commodified form that stores or embodies congealed “labor” and that allows for the “marketization” of the product. The transformation of home knitting into manufactured clothing is not that different from the transformation of a plant with medicinal properties into a patented drug, or into a genetic sequence that can be used for controlled production of the medicine.

So, the point is that primitive accumulation and surplus-value extraction go together, both in 19th-century industrial production and in today’s immaterial production. This is why I don’t accept Hardt’s claim that production today somehow involves a less mediated and more direct appropriation of the common than was the case in the large factories of the 19th century and the first half of the 20th. Primitive accumulation or appropriation doesn’t occur apart from those other techniques of the extraction of surplus value — and this is just as much true for immaterial production today as it is, and was, for industrial production.

If we are to see a difference in the capitalism of the contemporary era, this has to to with the fact that, today, capital has become even more mobile and abstract than it was in the age of heavy industry. The movement from industrial to immaterial production is an intensification of the movement from agricultural to industrial, an even further internalization of capitalist social relations, an increase in the “mobility” or “flow” of capital. Today we are coming closer than ever to the limit-condition of the real subsumption, instead of the merely formal subsumption of all of society under capital. There is less and less of an “outside” that capitalism can “primitively” accumulate, and more and more is included in the mass of what is directly managed by capital’s disciplinary and modulatory procedures. (But there is only an asymptotic approach to the absolute of “real” subsumption; such a totality is never fully achieved. There always has to be some outside that capital has not appropriated yet, and without such an outside capitalism would entirely stagnate — a point made as much by Schumpeter as by Marx).

To say that we are moving ever closer to real subsumption is equivalent to saying that now — under what Jonathan Beller calls “the cinematic mode of production” (although I think it is rather post-cinematic — which is a point I am still working on), or what Jodi Dean calls “communicative capitalism” — surplus value is extracted in the processes of distribution and consumption as well as in the process of primary production.

For Marx, circulation involved the faux frais of the capitalist mode of production, and had to be subtracted from profit. But today, in an “information economy” or ‘attention economy,” circulation is itself a direct source of further profit. Hardt and Negri are correct to associate this situation with real subsumption displacing merely formal subsumption. But they seem to me to be overly opimistic when they suggest that this means that we are finally reaching the point where the “objective conditions” for communism finally exist, or that the property form has become a “fetter” on the technological means of production, a fetter that is ready to be burst asunder. It just ain’t so. Digital technologies bring with them new forms of potential liberation, certainly; but they also bring new forms of control, new potentials for micromanagement and control via continual modulation (as Deleuze says in his great article on the society of control).

Hardt said at several points that the restrictions of copyright, patent, etc., because they are privatizing the common, are thereby making immaterial or affective labor less “productive” than it could be — which isn’t altogether wrong, but also isn’t the right point to be making — since “productivity” (like “efficiency”) is a category of the private enterprise system and wouldn’t have the same meaning (certainly wouldn’t be measured in anything like the same way) in a world of communism, or of the unrestricted common. Part of the point is precisely that (as Hardt, together with Negri, says — and as Virno says as well) even the most individualized and particular acts of human invention rely so extensively on the whole past accumulation of human invention, that private property rights become absurd. I maintain my signature on this blog, for instance, but it would be utterly ludicrous for me to maintain that my ideas and words come from nowhere — in fact, they come from what I have heard and read and otherwise encountered in the society that I live in. My own personal spin on things is still a spin on what arises and exists elsewhere, or in many elsewheres. And people can make what they want of my words, including things that I absolutely detest, which disabuses me of the notion that these words are “mine” in any metaphysical, propertarian sense.

At best, my words here will become part of what Hardt beautifully called — quoting from Marx’s 1844 Manuscripts — “the production of man [sic] by man” — this by way of making the point that those early manuscripts are anything from essentialist, since they see “human nature” not as something that exists once and for all as our basis, but rather as something that human beings themselves continually remake. Our very remaking of ourselves is at stake, and this is one further reason why the relentless privatization of the common is so obscene. But I am made uneasy when Hardt also calls this remaking a process of “biopolitical production” — because, once again, I think that this characterization is only valid under the conditions of capitalist appropriation, and that it would have to be characterized differently if it were truly to be, and to remain, common. I think that more than vocabulary is at stake here; Hardt and Negri’s terminology reflects what I see as their excessive optimism about how conditions for the common have (supposedly) already been achieved in the heart of capitalism itself. [Libertarians and Marxists agree on fictive finance at 12:41 PM]

Humans feel better working to help each other rather than to do each other down

Now is the time for a less selfish capitalism
By Richard Layard FT Home > Comment > Opinion: March 11 2009

Increasingly, we treat private interest as the only motivation on which we can rely and competition between individuals as the way to get the most out of them. This is often counterproductive and does not generally produce a happy workplace since competition for status is a zero-sum game. Instead, we need a society based on positive-sum activities. Humans are a mix of selfishness and altruism but generally feel better working to help each other rather than to do each other down.

Our society has become too individualistic, with too much rivalry and not enough common purpose. We idolise success and status and thus undermine our mutual respect. But countries vary in this regard, and the Scandinavians have managed to combine effective economies with much greater equality and mutual respect. They have the greatest levels of trust (and happiness) of any countries in the world.

To build a society based on trust we have to start in school, if not earlier. Children should learn that the noblest life is the one that produces the least misery and the most happiness in the world. This rule should apply also in business and professional life. People should do work that is useful to society and does not just make paper profits. And all professions – including journalism, advertising and business – should have a clear, professional, ethical code that its members are required to observe. It is not for nothing that doctors form the group most respected in our society – they have a code that is enforced and everyone knows it. So we need a trend away from excessive individualism and towards greater social responsibility.

Is it possible to reverse a cultural trend in this way? It has happened before, in the early 19th century. For the next 150 years there was a growth of social responsibility, followed by a decline in the next 50. So a trend can change and it is often in bad times (such as the 1930s in Scandinavia) that people decide to seek a more co-operative lifestyle. Lord Layard is at the London School of Economics Centre for Economic Performance. He has written ‘Happiness’ (2005) and co-authored ‘A Good Childhood’ (2009)
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2009 4:42 PM 11:32 AM

The decisive battle of the Portuguese at Calicut, off Diu in 1509

Mar 12, 2009 On Babur... And The Weather... And Exodus from ANTIDOTE by Sauvik

I have just read Amitav Ghosh’s review of the Baburnama, an essay included in a collection titled The Imam and The Indian. It is a brilliant review of this classic work, the diary of the Emperor Babur, founder of Mughal rule in India. I found Amitav Ghosh’s conclusion, in particular, hugely enlightening: the fact that these were “men of the steppes” who had never seen The Sea.

Ghosh finds it “baffling” how, down to Aurangzeb, who exhausted himself and his treasury trying to conquer a plateau, none of the Mughals looked at the sea as a source of wealth and power. “Their emissaries to Persia generally took the difficult and dangerous overland route rather than the much easier seagoing one,” Ghosh writes.

Ghosh concludes that the decisive battle of those years was not Babur’s with Ibrahim Lodi at Panipat in 1526, but that between the Portuguese and the combined navies of the Sultans of Gujarat and Egypt, and that of the Hindu king of Calicut, off Diu in 1509. After that, all the real “action” was seen on the coasts, with the French, the English, the Dutch and even the Danes – following the Portuguese – setting up “factories.” All this while the Mughals, “men of the steppes,” looked for more “acres and revenues” – for more and more Land: indeed, the massive Deccan Plateau.

Says something about our rulers today sitting in New Delhi, like Chacha Manmohan S Gandhi, a sardar from west Punjab, and his anti-commerce minister, The Great Kamal Nutt, whose constituency lies in land-locked, poverty-stricken Madhya Pradesh. Like the Mughals, the rulers of India today are all “landlubbers” who have never “seen” the sea, never thought that there was much more to rule than the Land. That the earth is 70 percent Ocean; that the source of wealth and power is The Sea.

Smith wanted institutional diversity and motivational variety, not monolithic markets and singular dominance of the profit motive

Amarya Sen's Two Brilliant Essays on the Relevance of Adam Smith Today
from Adam Smith's Lost Legacy by Gavin Kennedy
Amartya Sen writes two great articles of current relevance on Adam Smith. The shorter one is in the Financial Times HERE and the longer one is in the New York Review of Books HERE.I recommend them both to you (following correspondents asking if I had read them, and, presumably, looking for my comments on Lost Legacy). As I have been busy completing my paper on ‘Adam Smith’s Alleged Religiosity’, I chose not to post a comment last week, but to generate more publicity for an approach with which I agree and I am pleased now to recommend them and I provide links to the two articles and a very short extract: ‘Adam Smith’s market never stood alone’

“For example, the pioneering works of Adam Smith in the eighteenth century showed the usefulness and dynamism of the market economy, and why—and particularly how—that dynamism worked. Smith's investigation provided an illuminating diagnosis of the workings of the market just when that dynamism was powerfully emerging. The contribution that The Wealth of Nations, published in 1776, made to the understanding of what came to be called capitalism was monumental. Smith showed how the freeing of trade can very often be extremely helpful in generating economic prosperity through specialization in production and division of labor and in making good use of economies of large scale.

Those lessons remain deeply relevant even today (it is interesting that the impressive and highly sophisticated analytical work on international trade for which Paul Krugman received the latest Nobel award in economics was closely linked to Smith's far-reaching insights of more than 230 years ago). The economic analyses that followed those early expositions of markets and the use of capital in the eighteenth century have succeeded in solidly establishing the market system in the corpus of mainstream economics.

But Smith's defense of private trade only took the form of disputing the belief that stopping trade in food would reduce the burden of hunger. That does not deny in any way the need for state action to supplement the operations of the market by creating jobs and incomes (e.g., through work programs). If unemployment were to increase sharply thanks to bad economic circumstances or bad public policy, the market would not, on its own, recreate the incomes of those who have lost their jobs. The new unemployed, Smith wrote, "would either starve, or be driven to seek a subsistence either by begging, or by the perpetration perhaps of the greatest enormities," and "want, famine, and mortality would immediately prevail...."

Smith rejects interventions that exclude the market — but not interventions that include the market while aiming to do those important things that the market may leave undone.

Despite all Smith did to explain and defend the constructive role of the market, he was deeply concerned about the incidence of poverty, illiteracy and relative deprivation that might remain despite a well-functioning market economy. He wanted institutional diversity and motivational variety, not monolithic markets and singular dominance of the profit motive. Smith was not only a defender of the role of the state in doing things that the market might fail to do, such as universal education and poverty relief (he also wanted greater freedom for the state-supported indigent than the Poor Laws of his day provided); he argued, in general, for institutional choices to fit the problems that arise rather than anchoring institutions to some fixed formula, such as leaving things to the market.”

Amartya Sen received the 1998 Nobel Prize in economics; he teaches economics and philosophy at Harvard University and he has written an introduction for the anniversary edition of ‘The Theory of Moral Sentiments’ (Penguin Books, 2009) in which he discusses the contemporary relevance of Smith’s ideas.

Finest writings of Sri Aurobindo (1872–1950) — the nationalist, visionary, poet-philosopher

Sri Aurobindo: A Contemporary Reader
Edited by Sachidananda Mohanty
List Price: $115.00 Add to Cart ISBN: 978-0-415-46093-4 Binding: Hardback
Published by: Routledge India Publication Date: 28/03/2008 Pages: 180 Description
Contents Bio About the Book

This book compiles some of the finest writings of Sri Aurobindo (1872–1950) — the nationalist, visionary, poet-philosopher. It reflects the range, depth and outreach of the moral, intellectual and spiritual vision of this versatile and multifaceted genius. It aims at providing, at one place, access to the key concepts, tenets, and the spirit of the extraordinary range of texts authored by him.

Although concretely grounded in contemporary times — with its location in a specific socio-cultural matrix — this work projects a body of writings that is certain to have lasting value. In particular, the compilation brings forth Sri Aurobindo’s social vision and his role as a cultural critic: his views on ethnicity, his exposition of the key role language plays in the formation of communitarian identities, his crucial understanding of self-determination which has incidentally become an important aspect of human rights discourse today.

Situating the writings in a specific intellectual, spiritual and historical context, this collection will enable readers to appreciate the overall vision of Sri Aurobindo, in what can be conceived as a caravan of history of ideas in terms of a common heritage of humankind, and recent developments in theory and disciplinary practice, especially those pertaining to consciousness and future studies.

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How caste-based social diversity gets translated into politics

Rise of the Plebeians? from Sri Aurobindo: A Contemporary Reader
Rise of the Plebeians?
The Changing Face of the Indian Legislative Assemblies
Edited by Christophe Jaffrelot, Sanjay Kumar

For decades, India has been a conservative democracy governed by the upper caste notables coming from the urban bourgeoisie, the landowning aristocracy and the intelligentsia. The democratisation of the ‘world’s largest democracy’ started with the rise of peasants’ parties and the politicisation of the lower castes who voted their own representatives to power as soon as they emancipated themselves from the elite’s domination. In Indian state politics, caste plays a major role and this book successfully studies how this caste-based social diversity gets translated into politics.

This is the first comprehensive study of the sociological profile of Indian political personnel at the state level. It examines the individual trajectory of 16 states, from the 1950s to 2000s, according to one dominant parameter—the evolution of the caste background of their elected representatives known as Members of the Legislative Assembly, or MLAs. The study also takes into account other variables like occupation, gender, age and education. ISBN: 9780415460927 Published March 09 2009 by Routledge India.

The City in American Political Development from Sri Aurobindo: A Contemporary Reader
The City in American Political Development
Edited by Richardson Dilworth

There are nearly 20,000 general-purpose municipal governments—cities—in the United States, employing more people than the federal government. About twenty of those cities received charters of incorporation well before ratification of the U.S. Constitution, and several others were established urban centers more than a century before the American Revolution. Yet despite their estimable size and prevalence in the United States, city government and politics has been a woefully neglected topic within the recent study of American political development.

The volume brings together some of the best of both the most established and the newest urban scholars in political science, sociology, and history, each of whom makes a new argument for rethinking the relationship between cities and the larger project of state-building. Each chapter shows explicitly how the American city demonstrates durable shifts in governing authority throughout the nation’s history. By filling an important gap in scholarship the book will thus become an indispensable part of the American political development canon, a crucial component of graduate and undergraduate courses in APD, urban politics, urban sociology, and urban history, and a key guide for future scholarship. ISBN: 9780415990998 Published March 02 2009 by Routledge.

Thanks for the tip on the book India After Gandhi by Guha. (I am not sure which comment train that was under) Although a bit pedantic in places its a pretty accessible detailed history of modern India that I enjoyed. It also clarified for me the unbalanced judicial systems regards the different communal/personal laws of different communities... another book on modern India I just read is called In spite of the Gods Its a fairly neo-liberalist narrative, that champions urban growth and globalization, but all in all not a bad read and interesting in that the book begins in Auroville. Re: India After Gandhi (thanks Rakesh) Tony Clifton Tue 10 Mar 2009 02:06 PM PDT

The State runs monopolies and cartels

North Korea Is Just Like Us from ANTIDOTE by Sauvik

Thus, the news that a Competition Commission of India (CCI) has been constituted should be greeted with howls of derision. The body is supposed to act against cartels and its approval will be required for all acquisitions and mergers. In reality, all that is required for free competition is open entry into all markets.

In India, most markets are closed. Civil aviation is a case in point: the sector was wide open and there was full-blown competition until the government killed it by raising taxes on aviation fuel to sky-high levels, thereby forcing most low-cost airlines into mergers. If competition barely exists today, it is the civil aviation ministry that is to blame.

Further, it is our The State that runs monopolies and cartels – as in steel, as in roads, in electricity, in water – and even in booze shops in Delhi, where the competition commission is headquartered.

The conclusion: Our The State is nothing but a bundle of lies and deceit. It is run by a political cartel, one which includes the top bureaucracy. They call it “democracy” but it is much like East German and North Korean democracy, very far removed from the basic democratic ideal – that power must be diffused, not centralized. Overseeing this democracy is a politicized Election Commission, comprising politicized bureaucrats. Ditto with the new Competition Commission. Pretty ugly, huh?