Chinese Views of India’s Rise

India in Transition
Dangerous Misperceptions: Chinese Views of India’s Rise
Minxin Pei 05/23/2011
The rapid economic ascendance of India as a global power is, without a doubt, a historic development that will reshape the balance of power in the world in the coming decades. Because of its democratic political system and private-sector entrepreneurial dynamism, India’s rise is warmly welcomed in the West. The West’s endorsement of India’s rise and its democratic development model is based on deeply rooted ideological affinity, mutual economic interests, and strategic considerations. India’s emergence as a great economic success story will provide an alternative, but powerful, model for the developing world, as well as a possible strategic counterweight to China.

However, India’s rise has met with far more ambivalent response inside China. At the mass level, ignorance, stereotyping, and latent hostility characterize the views of India held by a large segment of Chinese society. At the elite level, while interest in India is growing rapidly, the discourse on India is heavily polarized and politicized. As a result, the quality of analysis of India’s ongoing transformation is relatively low. Most worrisome, while elites affiliated with the government tend to discount India’s potential as a great power, they obsessively worry about India’s role as a strategic counterweight that could be used by the West in containing China. The combination of under-appreciation of India’s achievement and exaggeration of India’s role as a geopolitical rival could generate dangerous self-reinforcing dynamics that may make strategic competition between India and China more likely in the future.

Mass Ignorance and Prejudices
A quick survey of Chinese press coverage of India shows that it is limited both in quantity and quality. A search of stories on India on the Web site titled “The People’s Daily,” China’s most important official newspaper, shows that in the month of April 2011, there were only five short articles on India in the major publications linked to the site. April happened to be a month in which China hosted the third BRIC summit which Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh also attended. Chinese press interest in India ought to be higher, but it wasn’t.

Several reasons explain the ignorance and lack of interest in India among ordinary Chinese people. Aside from skimpy coverage in the press, the average Chinese citizen is fixated on the West as a model and, if he thinks about India at all, his image of India is not that of a dynamic, fast-growing country, but of an impoverished, chaotic, and backward society. Such ignorance and stereotyping are further reinforced by the lack of extensive social and cultural exchanges between the two societies. Only 356,000 Chinese visited India in 2008; about one million Chinese visited Malaysia in the same year. In 2010, roughly 380,000 Indians visited China; fewer than from those coming from Mongolia. Only one non-stop commercial airline service, provided by China Eastern, connects the two countries (between New Delhi and Shanghai). Significantly, there is no direct flight between Beijing and New Delhi.

Inevitably, such barriers to mutual exchange generate distorted perceptions of each other. According to a poll released in 2010 by Horizon Research, a respected Chinese private market research firm, the average Chinese citizen views India more negatively than how an average Indian views China. The respondents of the survey were asked to rate their “friendly feelings” toward twenty-five countries. While the level of “friendly feeling” reported by Indians toward China is “average,” Chinese respondents reported a much lower level of “friendly feelings” toward India. Only Japan registered a lower level of “friendly feeling.” Chinese respondents felt friendlier toward the U.S., South Korea, and Russia. The same poll showed that more Indians viewed China as a “partner” than as an “adversary,” but among Chinese respondents, India was seen as the number three threat, behind the U.S. and Japan. Thankfully, Chinese perception of India as a threat has been steadily declining in recent years. In 2006, the last year the question was asked, only 9 percent picked India as a threat.

Disconcertingly, the popular negative feeling toward India is matched by an under-appreciation of India’s economic importance. Of the four BRIC countries – Brazil, Russia, India, and China – the Chinese public viewed India as the “weakest” country. Only 1 percent saw India as the strongest BRIC today. In contrast, 70 percent of the Chinese respondents believed China to be the strongest today. As a consequence of such lack of appreciation of India’s rising influence, the average Chinese citizen surveyed did not see India as a major international actor. When asked which country will play a leading role in international affairs in the next five to ten years, 51 percent picked China and 36 percent gave the nod to the U.S.; only 0.2 percent chose India.

The radicalization of Pakistan’s military

This is a brutal article by Fareed Zakaria. His columns and views matter in USA. The write up also includes excerpts from a talk by the Pakistani Ambassador to USA to the National Defense University.
Must read.
Harbhajan Singh
Lt Gen

Fareed Zakaria
Opinion Writer The radicalization of Pakistan’s military
By Fareed Zakaria, Published: June 22, 2011
Whatever their strength, American troops will not determine success in Afghanistan. Nor will the newly formed Afghan National Army. As U.S. forces are gradually withdrawn over the next three years, it is Pakistan’s 600,000-strong army that will become the dominant military force in the region and will try to shape its future. But that military is undergoing a deep internal crisis of identity, its most serious since Pakistan’s founding in 1947. How it resolves this crisis will determine its future, the future of the Afghan war — and much else.

This week’s news that a Pakistani brigadier general has been arrested for his ties to a radical Islamist group, Hizb ut-Tahrir, is only the latest in series of events that have rocked that nation. In the past year, two senior Pakistani officials have been gunned down, one by his own security guard. Last month, well-armed militants attacked a key naval base in Karachi, an operation that required inside assistance. Also last month, a brave Pakistani journalist, Syed Saleem Shahzad, who detailed the growing extremist presence within the Pakistani military, was tortured and killed, almost certainly by Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence directorate (which denied the allegation). And then there is the case of Osama bin Laden, who was for years comfortably ensconced in an army town.

Pakistan’s military has traditionally been seen as a secular and disciplined organization. But the evidence is now overwhelming that it has been infiltrated at all levels by violent Islamists, including Taliban and al-Qaeda sympathizers.

There is also strong evidence of a basic shift in the attitude of the Pakistani military. Last month, Pakistan’s ambassador to the United States, Husain Haqqani, was invited to speak at the country’s National Defense University. Addressing a large gathering of officers, Haqqani asked the audience, “What is the principal national security threat to Pakistan?” He offered three categories: “from within [Pakistan],” “India,” and, “the United States.” A plurality voted for the third option.

The vote is consistent with a WikiLeaks document, a 2008 cable from Anne Patterson, the U.S. ambassador to Pakistan, expressing shock at the rising levels of anti-Americanism in the next generation of leaders of Pakistan’s military elite. Last November, Dawn, a Pakistani newspaper, described a military briefing in which a senior military officer explained to a handful of top columnists that the Pakistani military viewed the United States as a hostile force trying to perpetuate a state of “controlled chaos” in Pakistan and determined to “denuclearize” the regime.

Islamist ideology is replacing strategy. For 60 years, Pakistan’s military has focused obsessively on its rivalry with India. Large elements within that military appear to be switching obsessions, and the United States is replacing India as the organizing principle around which Pakistan’s military understands its national security interests. If this happens, not only is the Afghan war lost but Pakistan itself is also lost. (It does not have that far to fall; it made its annual appearance this year on Foreign Policy magazine’s “Failed States” list, coming in 12th, above Yemen.)

Ambassador Haqqani explained to his audience, “If [the threat] really comes from the United States then we’ve already lost, ladies and gentlemen, because you can’t beat the United States in a military confrontation . . . [L]et us be honest, we do not have the means to take on the one military power in the world that spends more on defense technology than the next 20 nations in the world. So that is where I think we sometimes end up having what I call an ‘emotional discussion.’ ” Haqqani was gently pointing out the incoherence of these attitudes, but they persist.

It’s more than emotional. It is an indication that radical Islamist ideas — with America as the great Satan — are now reflexive for many in Pakistan’s military.

After the bin Laden raid, Pakistan’s military dispatched Prime Minister Yousaf Raza Gillani to Beijing to try to cozy up to the Chinese. “We have asked our Chinese brothers to please build a naval base at Gwadar,” said Chaudhary Ahmed Mukhtar, Pakistan’s defense minister, and Gillani returned claiming triumphantly that he had secured the deal. The Chinese, however, were too savvy to play this anti-American game and humiliated the Pakistanis by publicly contradicting the story.

Pakistan is drifting into a strategic black hole. Does the country really think its best path forward is as an adversary of the United States, currying favor with militants and becoming a vassal of China? Are its role models North Korea and Burma? Or does it want to crush the jihadist movements that are destroying the country, join the global economy, reform its society and become a real democracy? These are the questions Pakistan has to ask itself. The United States, for its part, having disbursed $20 billion in aid to Pakistan in the past decade — most of it to the military — needs to ask some questions of its own.
comments@fareedzakaria.com
Fareed Zakaria Opinion Writer The radicalization of Pakistan’s military

In Pakistan, denial is easier than heartbreak

Christian Science Monitor
In Pakistan, denial is easier than heartbreak Reuters
By Nzaar Ihsan Nzaar Ihsan – Tue Jun 21, 11:11 am ET
Doha, Qatar – Ever since Osama bin Laden’s assassination, the western media have been wondering why Pakistanis refuse to accept the truth and instead believe in wild conspiracy theories. As one particularly scathing article in a Canadian paper puts it, “This is the salve that now comforts millions of Pakistanis at a time of fundamental crisis. They choose the magical world of conspiracy.”
As an expatriate Pakistani, I’ve also been asked by confused Britons, Arabs, and Indians: “Why don’t you guys admit that things are out of control? Why is everything that goes wrong in Pakistan always a CIA conspiracy?”
Let me explain. In the 1980s, every 5-year-old in Pakistan wanted to become a commando or a pilot. Nobody wanted to become an accountant or an architect or a civil engineer. Ever wonder why? It’s because the army was awesome.
Pakistan's national heroes.
One of my earliest memories was waking up early in the morning each Sept. 6 to watch the Defense Day Parade on TV. It was amazing. There were planes, commandos, and missiles: everything that makes up the fantasy toy world of a young boy.
As we watched the tanks roll by, my mom told me that Sept. 6 is celebrated to commemorate the valiant defense of the country against an Indian attack in 1965. The Pakistan studies book in school later taught me that India attacked Lahore in the dead of the night, without any provocation or formal declaration of war – a “cowardly attack.” We won the war and caused major losses to the Indian military machine. Maj. Shaheed Aziz Bhatti was my hero.
The next chapter talked about 1971. We learned that India created a terrorist group called the “Mukti Bahini,” which terrorized the population in Bangladesh. While a massive conspiracy engineered by the Indians misled the East Pakistan population and eventually led to partition, our army still won the war and the Indian army was left licking its wounds. Shaheed Rashid Minhas was the hero this time.
School books told us that India never accepted the creation of Pakistan and that its army would invade Pakistan the first chance it got; we would then be forced to lead terrible lives, just like Muslims in India lived a life of servitude and backwardness.
A career in the army was a dream. Regardless of economic background, if a young man made it into the Pakistan Army as an officer, it was guaranteed that he would have a nice house, a decent car, and access to the prestigious Services Club. His children would study in good schools and he would be eligible for discounts on everything from groceries to airline tickets.
Never again would the police harass him, and petty burglars would think twice before trying to break into his house in the military cantonment. He would get to play golf and polo. When he retired, he would end up with a couple of plots of land in prime neighborhoods, allowing him to grow old in peace.
The army was everything good and reliable. Over the years, we observed that everything that was good, pure, and reliable in the country was associated with the army. The state infrastructure was corrupt, inefficient, and lazy, while the army was honest, disciplined, and efficient.
Policemen in the street were overweight, unshaven, and unkempt – they traveled in banged up pickups. Soldiers, on the other hand, were lean, well groomed, and smartly dressed. They drove around in Land Cruisers and big shiny army trucks. Army officers wore Ray Bans. Girls dreamed of getting married to dashing young lieutenants.
The army was awesome. The army was also obviously successful in the pursuit of Pakistan's strategic interests. In addition to the fending off the Indians, the army had now also saved us from the wrath of the Soviet juggernaut. The creation of the Taliban and a pro-Pakistan government in Afghanistan was a success in our effort to achieve "strategic depth".
We had a highly skilled, extremely powerful, and deadly efficient military. We were a nuclear-armed nation that basked in the glory of our military strength – we were the world’s most powerful defenders of Islam. Allahu Akbar.
With new information, disillusionment :
Then the 21st century happened and things started going wrong. Information that was locked up in books that nobody read, was suddenly available on TV and in people’s email boxes. Internet articles told us that Pakistan started the 1965 war on Aug. 5 by sending soldiers into Kashmir (and that the Sept. 6 attack from India was a retaliation). Wikipedia showed us a news item from the Los Angeles Times that referred to our beloved Gen. Tikka Khan (the martial law administrator for East Pakistan) as “The Butcher of Bengal.” Googling “Operation Searchlight” gave gory details of the mass atrocities committed by the Pakistan Army in Bangladesh during 1971, including mass murder and rape.
The previously classified Hamoodur Rahman Commission Report, a post-fact investigation by a Pakistani judicial commission on the causes of the 1971 disaster, was leaked on the Internet for all to read.
Its findings accused the Pakistan Army of arson and excessive use of force. It also recommended courts-martial for much of the top brass for criminal neglect of duty, premature surrender, corruption, incompetence and for being power hungry. We learned that no action was ever taken on the recommendations of the report. President Pervez Musharraf was blamed in 2001 for hastily jumping into bed with the US after 9/11. Books were written on the multi-billion dollar businesses owned by the Army. Bomb blasts started happening. Was the Army still awesome?
Answers to tough questions? Denial :
Fast forward to 2011. The “war on terror” has killed 35,000 Pakistanis. Taliban have shown they can take over small towns. Terrorists have shown they can take over the Army general headquarters and one of Pakistan’s largest naval installations. Mr. bin Laden has been found and killed by a covert US raid, which the Pakistani air force couldn’t detect. Bin Laden’s long-time residency in Abbottabad raises serious questions about Pakistan’s intelligence agency.
The air force has admitted that the airbase in Balochistan is not actually under their control, as it was constructed by the United Arab Emirates. Meanwhile, Wikileaks has proven that our top general secretly asked for drone strikes and lied in public.
Suddenly, 187 million people are forced to come to terms with the possibility that their armed forces might not be as awesome as they thought.
Pakistanis are now asking difficult questions: Is the Army incapable? Is it corrupt? Has it really been the savior of the country for the past 65 years? And the most dangerous question of all: Are sections of the Army supporting the terrorists? In a world where the Army is the only thing in Pakistan that is reliable and true, this is a fundamental shock to the nation’s value system.
Denial is a natural reaction when everything that you believed in is suddenly taken away from you. That’s why I agree with most Pakistanis that it’s all a conspiracy. It’s a plan by the CIA to malign our armed forces and take over our nuclear assets. Maybe it’s an effort by India’s intelligence agency to hurt our defense capabilities. In fact, it’s probably an evil scheme by the Israeli Mossad to destroy the world’s most powerful Muslim army. The Army isn't corrupt. The Army is still awesome.

Nzaar Ihsan is a Pakistani expatriate currently living in Qatar, where he works in the banking sector.
In Pakistan, denial is easier than heartbreak

India has outsourced its Foreign Policy

Has India outsourced its foreign policy to US?Shobhan Saxena
29 June 2011, 06:38 PM IST
We are so proud of the techies in our little Silicon Valleys (Bangalore, Hyderabad) that we mistakenly believe that the nerve-centre of US economy is now in India and the Americans can’t do anything until a guy sitting somewhere in India presses a button.
No doubt, thousands of young Indians (with fake names and fake accents) every day tell hundreds of thousands of Americans how to make their credit card payments or how to use a toilet cleaner, but to assume that we run America is preposterous. The fact is that our economy is dependent on American companies which outsource their work to us (at the cost of poor Americans). If the Americans stop hiring our cheap labour, it’s India that will get hit, not the Americans. Every time an American leader talks against outsourcing, India’s BPO bosses begin to shiver with fear... Read more click here
Comment: Indian Foreign Policy is rudderless manned by a crew (bunch) of incompetent IFS bureaucrats who only see their Bank Balance swell in Foreign Lands! How rudderless? click here (Paid my own bill for overstay to watch Wimbledon)

Dragon Fire- China accelerates defence spending:

By LESLIE P. NORTON | MORE ARTICLES BY AUTHOR
The U.S. military is getting ready to leave Iraq and Afghanistan. The next threat is much bigger.
Even the most casual observer seems to know that China's economy has been growing at a roughly 10% annual rate for much of the past decade. Less recognized and arguably more important to the state of the world is the fact that China's defense spending rose even faster than that -- 12% or more a year between 2000 and 2009.
"The accelerating pace of China's defense budget increases is driving countries in the region, as well as the U.S., to react to preserve a balance of power and stability," says Jacqueline Newmyer, head of Long-Term Strategy Group, a Cambridge, Mass.-based defense consultant. "There is a real potential for arms races to emerge," she adds. "While once we assumed we'd have access to areas to conduct anti-terrorism or anti-insurgency operations, now we're compelled to think about preserving our ability to gain access to East Asia."
Stephen Rosen, Harvard's Beton Michael Kaneb professor of national security and military affairs, agrees. "All of us are clearly moving in that direction: We, the Japanese, the Indians. The only thing stalling it now are fiscal problems in Japan and the United States," says the former advisor to one-time presidential hopeful Rudy Giuliani.
Highlighting one of the fastest military buildups in history was China's debut of its stealth jet just hours before the January visit to Beijing by outgoing U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates. The fighter will rival the U.S.'s F-22 Raptor, the world's only operational stealth fighter. Larger than the F-22, with bigger fuel tanks, it will fly higher, faster and with less chance of detection. It's one of many Chinese weapons that will impede the U.S. military's ability to roam freely in the region.
Nelson Ching/Bloomberg News
An Asian arms race is getting under way, driven by China.
The investment implications for China's military modernization are only starting to take shape. But some U.S. companies like Lockheed Martin (ticker: LMT) and United Technologies (UTX), facing big budget cuts as President Obama withdraws the U.S. from wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, should get some offset from a new spending cycle worldwide. Like it or not, U.S. investors also are likely to hear more about Chinese companies such as Xi'an Aero-Engine (600893.China) and China Shipbuilding Industrial that are helping arm the country.
There's likely to be a steady stream of new IPOs for Chinese defense companies that some Western investors may choose to avoid. The effects go beyond equities. The sounds of new sabers rattling will stir both the bond and currency markets.
Dragon Fire

Pearl Harbor- Japan made 3 big mistakes!

Always look for the Silver Lining
Tour boats ferry people out to the USS Arizona Memorial in Hawaii every thirty minutes. We just missed a ferry and had to wait thirty minutes. I went into a small gift shop to kill time. In the gift shop, I purchased a small book entitled, "Reflections on Pearl Harbor " by Admiral Chester Nimitz. Sunday, December 7th, 1941 - Admiral Chester Nimitz was attending a concert in Washington D.C. He was paged and told there was a phone call for him. When he answered the phone, it was President Franklin Delano Roosevelt on the phone. He told Admiral Nimitz that he (Nimitz) would now be the Commander of the Pacific Fleet.
Admiral Nimitz flew to Hawaii to assume command of the Pacific Fleet. He landed at Pearl Harbor on Christmas Eve, 1941. There was such a spirit of despair, dejection and defeat--you would have thought the Japanese had already won the war. On Christmas Day, 1941, Adm. Nimitz was given a boat tour of the destruction wrought on Pearl Harbor by the Japanese. Big sunken battleships and navy vessels cluttered the waters every where you looked. As the tour boat returned to dock, the young helmsman of the boat asked, "Well Admiral, what do you think after seeing all this destruction?"
Admiral Nimitz's reply shocked everyone within the sound of his voice. Admiral Nimitz said, "The Japanese made three of the biggest mistakes an attack force could ever make or God was taking care of America. Which do you think it was?"
Shocked and surprised, the young helmsman asked, "What do mean by saying the Japanese made the three biggest mistakes an attack force ever made?" Nimitz explained.
Mistake number one: the Japanese attacked on Sunday morning. Nine out of every ten crewmen of those ships were ashore on leave. If those same ships had been lured to sea and been sunk--we would have lost 38,000 men instead of 3,800.
Mistake number two: when the Japanese saw all those battleships lined in a row, they got so carried away sinking those battleships, they never once bombed our dry docks opposite those ships. If they had destroyed our dry docks, we would have had to tow everyone of those ships to America to be repaired. As it is now, the ships are in shallow water and can be raised. One tug can pull them over to the dry docks, and we can have them repaired and at sea by the time we could have towed them to America . And I already have crews ashore anxious to man those ships.
Mistake number three: every drop of fuel in the Pacific theater of war is in top of the ground storage tanks five miles away over that hill. One attack plane could have strafed those tanks and destroyed our fuel supply. That's why I say the Japanese made three of the biggest mistakes an attack force could make or God was taking care of America.
Pearl Harbor- Japan made 3 big mistakes!- click here to read more...

Government running out of steam- Unmask the purdah and face the Nation

The Statesman, 01 July 2011, Kuldip Nayar. A government which seems to have run out of steam cannot prove its dynamism with the Prime Minister briefing some editors. He should come out of purdah more often and face the nation
Governments run out of steam after traversing some distance. It happens all over the world because the enthusiasm with which they start peters out, the promises which they make become remote and the schemes which they take up lack push. This is the most charitable explanation for the Manmohan Singh government’s non-performance. It has no sense of direction. How can it direct the nation? This comes out clearly as the government is midway to its five-year tenure.
Yet, it does not realise how strong is the groundswell of public opinion against it. The agitation spearheaded by Mr Anna Hazare gave evidence of that. People came out in the open in his support throughout the country. The government assessed the mood at that time correctly and sat with the representatives of civil society to draft the Lokpal Bill. The issue is corruption and the government has to attend to it.
By reshuffling the Cabinet, people’s anger is not going to go away unless they see some concrete steps to eliminate corruption. The battered government has to come up with an answer to explain why the system does not function. The government’s ham-handedness can be judged by the way even the finance minister’s office in the secure North Block was broken in to bug it and chewing gum was left behind to mock at the security apparatus.
By changing portfolios, the Prime Minister would not necessarily improve the efficiency of government departments or quicken the pace of decisions. And what do you do about integrity? Practically all ministers of Dr Prime Minister Manmohan Singh are mixed up with one magnet in the corporate sector or the other. Ineptness has, in fact, become the hallmark of this government.
Even if one were to leave out corruption, which has spread its tentacles the maximum since Independence, one would find numerous examples of the administration overrun by sloth. Maybe, there is a purpose behind it, probably to cover up the fallout of an unholy alliance between ministers and bureaucrats. The government seems to live under the illusion that the subsidies and pro-poor yojanas (plans) keep the aam aadmi happy. Half of the allocation does not reach him and what does tends to make most among them indolent and hopelessly dependent. Punjab and Haryana are two examples where the agriculture labourer prefers to draw a dole than work.
What depresses me is the Prime Minister’s belief that nothing is wrong with the government and that its image has been damaged by the media and the judiciary ~ in that order. He should realise that if that has happened it is a consequence, not the cause. The cause is the series of scams which would have remained unexposed if journalists had not brought them to the fore and judges had not pulled up the administration. Dr Singh goes by what the bureaucrats tell him or his senior ministers suggest. They are cut off from the public and do not know about its thinks. Having been a bureaucrat all his life, Dr Singh should have known how to make the administration function quickly and be responsive.
My feeling is that time is running out. The Prime Minister does not realise that he has no leeway and must act now if he does not want the situation to go out of hand. He should compare his last tenure with the current one. His earlier stint suggested that he had thought over the steps he had taken. Despite the pressure of coalition partners, he had his way. True, he performance didn’t exactly meet expectations, but the Prime Minister did not seem as out of depth as he seems today.
In his current tenure, he does not seem to get anything right. Understandably, he feels uncertain because he has to manage some 24 parties and does not have the chunk of 60-odd members from the Left to depend on (they themselves have been reduced to 16). But coalition dharma does not mean that he should be passive about the corruption that his allies are indulging in. The correspondence between him and former telecommunication minister Mr A Raja shows that he had known about what the DMK members in the Union Cabinet were up to but still he chose not do anything about it. Dr Singh should have at least warned DMK chief Mr K Karunanidhi instead of placating him. True, Congress president Mrs Sonia Gandhi dictates the terms and she was not willing to disturb the applecart at the beginning of the second term.
The issue of price rise is a serious one. There must be something wrong something to make inflation climb up with impunity. By saying that inflation is “causing worry,” the government does not mollify the angry nation. I get the impression that the rulers have no idea of coping with ever-increasing prices. “We have no magic wand,” is the stock reply when pressed to explain why prices are inordinately high. Why did the government let the situation reach such a pass in the first instance? No economist is required to tell the government that it is a question of demand and supply. What is required is productivity. Probably, it has referred the matter to the Planning Commission which will tell us in good time what steps to take. By that time inflation would have risen still further.
Has the government ever tried to cut its expenditure? I do not hear the word austerity in official circles any longer. Almost 75 per cent of petrol and diesel available in this country is utilised by vehicles of government and the public sector undertakings at the Centre and in the states. Why doesn’t the government reduce the cavalcade of cars and security personnel accompanying a minister or a VIP? I thought BJP leader Mr LK Advani would have been sensitive enough to voluntarily cut the number of cars and security men when he travels at least within New Delhi, a protected area. In fact, all Opposition leaders in the country should unilaterally surrender the vehicles that follow them around save the one which carries the security personnel. This may be one way to shame the government.
The Prime Minister and the Congress president are now engaged in an exercise to refurbish the image of the government. They should recall how Jawaharlal Nehru and Lal Bahadur Shastri stressed on curtailing government expenditure. Shastri even gave a call for “miss a meal” since food was in short supply. That leadership spirit is lacking.
Concrete steps are required to convince people that the government is serious about eliminating corruption as well as avoiding wasteful expenditure. A government which seems to have run out of steam cannot prove its dynamism with the Prime Minister briefing some editors. He should come out of purdah more often and face the nation.
The writer is a veteran journalist and commentator
Out of steam- Between the Lines ~ Kuldip Nayar