Illegal Immigration and the Commons

By Niranjan Ramakrishnan

The Eiffel Tower has been sold a couple of times. So too have Platform #1 of the Patna Railway Station, and the Taj Mahal. We are struck by the audacity of a seller parlaying a public landmark into a private transaction. We laugh at the suckers who were so gullible to buy them. As usual, we laugh loudest at those who resemble us most.

A couple of days ago, there appeared an article about the privatization of water in India. Privatization of the commons is always cause for alarm, because its social consequences are always disastrous. Some time ago, I wrote that the single major differentiator between the First and Third Worlds was the faith in the Commons. The First world had huge investments in the public sphere. No less a luminary than John Kenneth Galbraith, Kennedy's ambassador to Nehru, wrote in his memoirs how he would find himself chuckling at the Indian government's boasts of socialism, gently reminding them that there was much more social investment in America than they could ever imagine in India (I paraphrase).

What does this all mean in terms of consciousness? When I was growing up in India, a family celebrating a wedding would think nothing of erecting a wedding tent in the middle of a public street. Blocking a major road meant that you had real clout. A religious bhajan would be blared out on loudspeakers, with no concern for those in the neighborhood. Ditto for the muezzin calling the faithful to prayer. People would complain when it was someone else doing it, but they would do the same in their turn. Now things have changed, as people are more conscious of the boundary between private and public.

Put differently, first world thinking means we do not presume upon public resources for private ends. When we begin to misuse public resources, the inevitable result is (a) greater layers of bureaucracy and (b) the deterioration all such public resources and (c) increased social tension and strife. Even the person who perpetrates this, if he continues to live in the same society, will eventually feel the ill-effects of this process.

One enduring contribution of the Reagan era has been the legitimization of the grab of the commons for private profit. Twenty five years after it commenced, we are still in Reagan's thrall, so much so that this mindset is no longer even questioned, although some stirrings may have commenced -- the latest evidence being a complaint by Field and Stream magazine that Bush and Cheney are terrible stewards of the wild.

Societies break down in strange ways when the commons is used for personal profit, or even perverse private fulfilment. Graffiti is shocking when it first appears on the stop sign near your home. A week later it shocks a lot less. A month later you're practically used to it. Respect for the law, too, is part of the commons. It works because everyone does it. Weird as it might seem, the simple expedient of standing in line is by no means universal. It is a tribute to American society that people do so. That so many people drive, and have a fair understanding of traffic rules, is nothing short of an American social engineering miracle.

What about illegal immigration? When I read impassioned speeches and writings about the rights of illegal immigrants, I wish I could ask these opponents of punishment for illegal immigration a simple question -- would you allow any illegal immigrant to stay in your home and support them 100%? Remember, 100% -- which means you have to pay for private schooling for their children, their health care, etc. -- forever (You cannot, after all, seek to benefit from a breaking of the law). I doubt there would be many takers. And this, it seems to me, is the basic infirmity of their position. They want to be charitable, and claim to be settling ancient scores, but all on the back of the Commons.

Call their attention to this, and there are angry responses about how America had done this or that atrocity, or how immigrants have built this country. That last is particularly unctious. Let us suppose I helped build a public park. Let us even ignore the fact that I was paid for it (as did any immigrant). Does that mean that I can, without permission, usurp it to throw a party? As with the Taj Mahal or the Eiffel Tower, I cannot dispose of something I do not own outright. If there are others involved, they must sign on too. In the case of the commons, those involved are the American people, most immediately those living along the Mexican border. Who has obtained their assent to allow foreigners to arbitrary cross into their towns, because some wise folk in Wall Street or Washington have concluded that immigration is a 'net plus'? And when their governments fail to protect them despite repeated pleas, why should anyone be surprised at the rise of bodies like the Minutemen?

One does not have to lose sight of America's numerous acts of omission and commission in and outside the USA. But that is no excuse for anyone to defend sneaking around the law, soaking up public resources in a manner never intended. After all, even if the official figures of 12 million illegal immigrants (which should, realistically, be revised upwards, being official statistics -- that's third world thinking) are true, that is a 4% population of illegal immigrants, encroaching upon the commons. A large figure in any circumstances, in an era when investment in the Commons is considered akin to heresy, it is a straw more than capable of felling the camel.

Niranjan Ramakrishnan can be reached at njn_2003@yahoo.com. His blog is at http://njn-blogogram.blogspot.com/.

The Approaching Water Crisis

From Counterpunch (Apr 12, 2006)

Water as Commodity and Weapon

The Corporate Hijack of India's Water

By P. SAINATH

2001: The old man shuffled his feet, acutely embarrassed. No matter which part of India you're in, the first thing you do is offer your guests a glass of water. And this was one part of Nallamada in Andhra Pradesh blessed with that element. Things had changed, though. "Please don't drink it," he said, finally. "See how it is?" he asked, showing us a tumbler. Tiny blobs of thingummy floated atop a liquid more brown than transparent. But then he brightened up. "Will you have Coca-Cola instead? That, this village has." And so it did. As in the Aamir Khan ad. The smaller bottle for Rs. 5.

It's also there in countless other villages where a glass of clean water is now hard to find. And Coca Cola's impact on both drinking and irrigation water sparks revolts across the country. From Plachimada in Kerala to Kaladera in Rajasthan. From Gangaikondan in Tamil Nadu to Mehdiganj in Uttar Pradesh. From Thane in Maharashtra to Khammam in Andhra Pradesh.

2002: M.P. Veerendrakumar, chairman of the Mathrubhumi group of publications, is startled to discover that the Malapuzha river and dam in his native Kerala are "for lease or sale to private parties. "I did not know you could sell and buy dams and rivers." He learns this from a tender he sees in an American daily while on a trip overseas. "This had not appeared in any of our local newspapers."

It had already begun in Andhra Pradesh There, two years earlier, farmers chased away the World Bank's James Wolfensohn. He had come to unveil the confederation of "Water Users Associations" in the state. "Water Users." Oh, what a lovely word! It denotes that special group of folks who use water. The rest of us are non-users, a type of dryland bacteria.

But non-users, being a touchy, irritable lot, showed up in large numbers at the Koelsagar dam in Mahbubnagar. Pitched battles were fought and hundreds arrested. The government shifted the plaque of the dam to a safe haven miles away so the Bank Boss could cut his ribbon in peace.

2003: Private theme and water parks in and around Mumbai are found to be using 50 billion litres of water daily. This, while countless women in the slums and chawls of the city wait hours in queues for 20 litres. Meanwhile, anti-Coke battles are hotting up again. Kerala's pollution control board confirms the toxic nature of the sludge spewed out by Coke's plant in Plachimada. The panchayat revokes the plant's licence.

2004: The polls to parliament -- and in some states -- see the rout of the biggest 'water reformers.' Of course, there are many reasons for their defeat. But water is on that list. Sadly for the World Bank, its puff job is already done. So its report "India's Water Economy: Bracing for a Turbulent Future" appears as it is -- a year later. It sings the praises of Digvijay Singh in Madhya Pradesh and N. Chandrababu Naidu in Andhra. And it claims they gained politically from the reforms. It says the water users associations were particularly good for Naidu. Because "farmers perceived this to be a reform which moved in the right direction." That is in 2005, a year after farmers in both states hand out some of the worst electoral defeats ever seen to the Bank's heroes.

2005: Bazargaon is a scarcity-hit Vidharbha village that has one sarkari well and gets tanker water once in ten days. It is also host to the giant 'Fun & Food Village.' An elite park which offers 18 kinds of water slides and uses millions of litres as a matter of course. All Bazargaon's water flows towards this 'village.' It's a story repeated in different ways in many places, across many states. Water as a commodity, flows from poor to rich areas.

In Yavatmal, a Maharashtra minister asks farmers at a meeting to "diversify into dairying." The crowd jeers. (Vidharbha has seen over 425 farm suicides in ten months.) The problems of water and irrigation loom large here. "You want us to take up milk production?" scoffs a farmer, rising to his feet. 'When you pay us a price of Rs. 6 for a litre of milk, but pay Rs. 12 for a litre of your bottled water?" The meeting ends early.

People pay more for water than corporates do. The bottled water brigade got treated and cleaned water in Hyderabad for 25 paise a litre for years. This goes into that bottle costing Rs. 12. In many parts of the country soft-drink giants get it almost free. Whole communities lose out as heavyweights like Coke step in. That company used 283 billion litres of water worldwide in 2004. Enough, points out the India Resource Centre, to "meet the drinking needs of the entire world's population for ten days." And the billions of litres it guzzles in India could meet the needs of whole districts. in Orissa or Rajasthan for a year.

Yet Coca Cola was the leading sponsor of the "World Water Forum" in Mexico this year. But Coke is not alone in the devastation it inflicts in India. Meet the Real Thing. Central and state governments in this country are privatising water. Coke is just one of the beneficiaries. Oddly, those selling out India's water almost never use the word 'privatisation.' They know how discredited that is. So the buzzword is 'efficiency.' Or 'public-private partnerships.' The real questions are never raised. Should anyone own water? How must it be shared? Who gets to decide? Is water a commodity to profiteer in or is it a human right? Is it more than a 'human' right? Countless other species also need it to survive.

The bazaar is large. And top water corporations figure in the Fortune 500 Global list. As Maude Barlow, one of the world's leading water activists, points out, the business "is already considered to be worth U.S. $400 billion annually". And there is lots more to be made. In her stunning book, Blue Gold, Barlow cites the Bank's own estimate of the market size. "In 1998, the World Bank predicted that the global trade in water would soon be a U.S. $800 billion industry, and by 2001, this projection had been jacked up to one trillion dollars." And these revenues are "based on the fact that only five per cent of the world's population are now receiving their water supply from corporations". So as the corporate grip on water tightens, "water could become a multi-trillion-dollar industry in the future. What if city after city privatises its water services?"

Now you know why our planners, Ministers and bureaucrats are eager to privatise. There's big bucks in it. Major `studies' and contracts are being awarded to private groups. As this deepens, people and governments will suffer huge losses. But government officials and private corporations will make giant gains.

The corporate hijack of water is on worldwide and one of the most important processes of our time. The World Bank and the IMF help ram it through. Water privatisation has often been shoved into their loan conditionalities in the past decade.

In few nations will the damage be as terrible and complex as in India. Here water use is already very unequal. Most irrigation and drinking water in India, for instance, has a clear caste geography. Even the layout of our villages reflects that. The dalit basti is always on the outskirts, where there is least access to water. Barring dalits from the main water sources of the village are not just about the 'social' horror of untouchability. It is also about curbing their access to this vital resource.

It is also closely tied to the framework of class. About 118 million households -- 62 per cent of the total -- do not have drinking water at home. As census household survey data analysed by Dr. S. L. Rao show, 300 million Indians draw water from community taps or handpumps. (Many World Bank and Asian Development Bank projects, by the way, will end up doing away with those community taps.)

About five million Indian families (roughly the population of Canada) still draw water from ponds, tanks, rivers and springs. This is a stratified society. The big dams that have displaced millions of Indians in the past decades have also narrowed control and access to water. Atop this structured inequity, we now install hyper-inequality.

A huge share of India's public health problems are linked to water-borne or water-related diseases. Diarrhoea alone claims lakhs of lives each year. Further reducing the access of poor people to clean water will sharply worsen matters. In State after State, the laws are being rewritten. A prelude to handing over control of both drinking and irrigation water to corporations. The Maharashtra Water Resources Regulatory Authority Act simply prices farmers out of agriculture. If the rates implied in the act are actually imposed, irrigation costs could be in thousands of rupees per acre. It would in fact be more than what most farmers earn per acre.

At the same time as more and more fields run dry, golf courses dripping pesticides and guzzling over a million litres of water a day come up in regions of high stress. Even in Rajasthan. (In the Philippines, there have been shootouts between farmers affected by golf courses and the hired goons of the course owners.)

India is a nation of subsistence farmers. When you privatise the rivers and the streams, the canals and the dams, you privatise rainfall. And you ask for a social tsunami. This is also the swiftest route to corporatisation of agriculture. In that sector, we are already forcing out millions of small private owners called farmers. The task is to hand it all over to large corporations. This policy-engineered agrarian crisis wracking rural India is also about the greatest planned displacement ever in our history. Water will be a major weapon used against farmers in this process.

Noble terms serve to whitewash the theft of water from the poor. In Angul in Orissa, the World Bank sought to hand over water to the rich. And called the process 'pani panchayats.' There, the 'rotation' of canal water use saw to it that poor farmers could have a rabi crop only once in two years. With people rebelling, this 'model' collapsed. But not before causing much misery. In Andhra Pradesh, too, the Water Users Associations were mostly headed by the biggest landlords and contractors of the region.

Just think of the trouble we're begging for. Almost every giant political headache in this country is linked to water. The single most explosive issue in South India is the Cauvery waters dispute between Tamil Nadu and Karnataka. Then there is the Almatti problem vexing Andhra Pradesh-Karnataka relations. There is the fight over the Kabini waters between Karnataka and Kerala. Even the 'Khalistan problem' had a distinct link to the struggle over the Ravi-Beas waters. Water conflicts in India also affect regions of the same state. The Krishna-Godavari water disputes drive conflict within Andhra Pradesh. The list is endless. Further, across the country, water conflicts of many kinds seep right down to intra-village battles and bloodshed .

Some of our worst troubles with neighbours have also been about water. The Kosi barrage with Nepal. The Farakka Barrage with Bangladesh. Indus waters with Pakistan. Over decades, we've made things a lot worse. The unregulated spread of borewells was an early form of privatisation. The richer you are, the more wells you can sink, the deeper you can go. It has proved quite disastrous. Many poorer farmers have seen their dug wells sucked dry as neighbours collar all the groundwater. In the end, it can destroy the entire village. Mushampally village in Nalgonda in AP has more borewells than human beings. The damage done to the aquifer has been terrible. Even the richest farmers also went bankrupt as water stress peaked.

In his bid to privatise water when chief minister, Chandrababu. Naidu wound up the irrigation development corporation of Andhra Pradesh. Which meant it was now each farm for itself. That led to lakhs of new borewells being sunk across the state. With disastrous results. Water shortages in many states have also led to the emergence of 'water lords' who make a fortune by selling the liquid. In Anantapur, some of these are former farmers who find this more lucrative than agriculture ever was.

In the cities, millions dwell in slums where they might pay the same rates others do for water. But they get far less and spend far more time in getting it. Against this deadly backdrop comes water privatisation. If even the upper middle classes of Delhi loathe it, imagine the plight of poor people in Chandrapur.

And get this. India could be the first nation in the world to nationalise its rivers and privatise their waters. That is if we go ahead with the great river interlining project. Nationalise? And privatise? The linking scheme would demand the former. The latter we are already deep into. Of course you can, like in Chhattisgarh, sell or lease the river itself`Sheonath's sorrow'.

Those bringing it to you include some of the top corporations in the world. Some of the companies now making a beeline for India have been turfed out of Latin America. Suez, one of the Big Three of water, told the Guardian that "it was almost impossible for it to work in Latin America or Africa. And so, instead, it would "be concentrating on China, India and Eastern Europe." The company did not mention that it had been tossed out of Grenoble in its native France as well. As Maude Barlow points out, that city also jailed its own mayor and a senior Suez executive for bribery.

As she also shows, it's not just any racket. It's scale is stunning. "Bottled water costs up to 10,000 times more than tap water in local communities. For the same price as one bottle, 1,000 gallons of water could be delivered to a person's home."

In Bolivia, when the MNC Bechtel took control of the water supply in the city of Cochabamba, it raised prices by 200 per cent. In cities in Peru, Chile and other nations too, water was priced out of the reach of the poor. All of them saw widespread unrest and political turmoil. Tiny Uruguay has set an example for the rest of the world. It amended its constitution in 2004 to bar private control of water and to declare water "a fundamental human right." This followed a referendum where close to two-thirds of the voters rejected privatisation.

The U.S. Ambassador calls for 'Public-private partnerships' (read privatisation) in India. Yet, as a report cited by Public Citizen points out: "About 85 per cent of all the water that comes out of a tap in the U.S. is delivered by a publicly owned and publicly operated system." That was and is the norm. Though the drive for profit will change things there, too.

Meanwhile, in India, the battles have begun. Protests across the country show that people will not take it lying down. Still, with so much money to be made, the privatisers will not just go away. The waters have just begun to get choppy. And we're in at the deep end.

P. Sainath is the rural affairs editor of The Hindu and the author of Everybody Loves a Good Drought. This piece initially ran in the Indian weekly Frontline. He can be reached at: psainath@vsnl.com.

History Lessons

The Partition of America

Niranjan Ramakrishnan

Coming from India, the only country in the world, as someone once observed ruefully, which would celebrate the loss of one fourth its territory and one third its people as 'Independence Day', I have often envied the United States for having been blessed with an Abraham Lincoln.

The loss of territory and population here is a reference to the partition of the nation. India had neither a sovereign state, nor (perhaps on account of not having a state) a leader of Lincoln's stature, at the time it was cut in two in 1947. The Muslim League, which was demanding a separate homeland for the Muslims of India, decided to show both the British rulers and their main opposition, the Congress Party, a glimpse of its growing clout -- calling for what it termed a day of Direct Action, to be observed on August 16, 1946. Within a year, India had been partitioned.

Flexing muscles, showing clout. Hearing terms like these in reference to the huge marches this weekend, I was further reminded of Direct Action Day when I heard one of the organizers of yesterday's marches talk of an upcoming Immigrant Power Day. That day, he said, immigrants would show, "Where would America be without us?". His TV interviewer asked, wryly, "And where do you think you would be without America?"

However unpersuaded one might be by the arguments and demands of the rallies that have convulsed America's major cities these past days, one may still admire their organizers and participants for how well they have mobilized and how peacefully they have expressed themselves. The illegal immigrants have shown themselves to be more aware of First Amendment Rights than the natives! (See also Liberty - Use it or Lose it).

They said they were sending a wake-up message to America, and they certainly succeeded in ringing the alarm bell loud and clear. Loud enough for Edward Kennedy to address their rally in Washington DC, Hillary Clinton (and Chuck Schumer too, if I recall) to grab the mike in New York and John Kerry to speak in their favor someplace else.

Note well, none of these Democrats could be caught dead near an anti-war or Impeach Bush rally in the past 3 years. But here they were, proud to participate in demonstrations where, only yesterday the crowds were waving the Mexican Flag (so much for that poor, ubiquitous, US lapel pin which all American politicians flaunt shamelessly after 9-11). One Hispanic newspaper even wrote the rally showed that LA had always belonged to Mexico! The word reconquista has by no means been retired from the Mexican Lexicon (pardon the pun). But focus for a second on the delicious irony here -- some of the nation's top lawmakers, speaking at rallies whose main demand, all said and done, is that lawbreaking be overlooked.

Is it any surprise that such leaders would also connive at changing the wiretapping law retroactively after the president began violating it three years ago? (See also Destination: Amnesty Nation).

But back to our history lesson. When the English first dropped anchor in India in 1607, and made their way to the court of the Mughal Emperor Jehangir at Agra, it was the capital of one of the (if not The) most fabulous empires in the world, and certainly pre-eminent in India. No one could have suspected that this small band of men, supplicants begging for a few trading rights, would one day topple the Mughal Empire and rule the subcontinent from the Hindu Kush to the Indian Ocean. But the tipping point came soon enough (on a historical scale), on a small battlefield in Bengal called Plassey, in 1757.

Take another story, from another part of the world, one that Prof. Michael Neumann and others like him have written about extensively. When the first Jews arrived from Europe, which Palestinian would have suspected that, in half a century, many of his compatriots would be roaming about the world, exiled from their own lands? Sovereignty is everything, as any Palestinian can attest.

Or consider a story a little closer to the issue, the European conquest of the Americas. A few explorers came at first, uncertain of what they would find. In a century, they were running large parts of the continent, imposing their language and their customs. In three centuries they had captured it all. The lives of the Native Americans were altered forever.

This is the real history of conquest. No one lands on a foreign shore or crosses a border declaring that he wants to rule the country. It always happens over time, and with the uncomprehending cooperation of the natives. Gandhi, never shy to examine one's own faults, taxed his fellow Indians thus, "The English have not taken India; we have given it to them...They had not the slightest intention (when they first came) to establish a kingdom. Who assisted the (East India) Company's officers? Who was tempted at the sight of their silver? Who bought their goods? History testifies that we did all this. In order to become rich all at once we welcomed the Company's officers with open arms. If I am in the habit of drinking bhang and a seller thereof sells it to me, am I to blame him or myself? By blaming the seller, shall I be able to avoid the habit? And, if a particular retailer is driven away, will not another take his place?"

Similarly might we ask ourselves, "Who encouraged illegal immigration? Who wanted cheap goods at any cost? Who wanted to eat Florida Oranges and California Peaches at bottom dollar? Who wanted his yard landscaped for a song? Etc. And that's part of the truth.

But there are a couple of other things noteworthy in Gandhi's statement. Notice that he talks about the problem of addiction to bhang (an poppy intoxicant). Whenever I hear someone saying, "...but, for our economy, we need these workers...Americans won't do these jobs, so we need a guest worker program...", I wonder whether these leaders even think before they open their mouths. This is exactly the addiction Gandhi is talking about. Just as we live beyond our means in the financial arena, with a mounting budget deficit and trade deficit, we also seem to be runnning a labor deficit. Why have an industry if you cannot have Americans do a job? It is reminiscent of the old joke, "We will live within our means, even if we have to borrow to do so". Perhaps it wasn't a joke after all.

Second, the fact that Gandhi recognized Indian complicity in the loss of their country's sovereignty didn't cause him to throw up his hands and accept the Raj as a fait accompli. He fought against it with determination. He knew what the loss of sovereignty meant. It was not an elastic concept for Gandhi, as it appears to be to many of our intellectuals.

The lessons of history are obvious. A vacuum of state, usually accompanied by a weak and corrupt leadership, leads inevitably to the eventual disempowerment, sometimes even subjugation, of a country.

There are no words to describe adequately the cheap and tawdry grandstanding by the senators and congressman who attended these rallies. And when a Mexican president publicly demands a hand in crafting America's immigration policy, following which an American president goes to Mexico to assure the former that his will be done, it is time to ask, "Where is the American State?"

Out of commission, is the short answer. With Ronald Reagan, business began superseding what little was left of the American state, a development promoted vigorously by Bill Clinton, and revved up several notches by George W Bush. Whatever the fate of the 12 million illegal immigrants, a dissolute state renders that of America bleak.

'Prevention is better than cure', goes the adage. How did we miss that gem of wisdom? Perhaps because the saying is English, and we are, above all things, multicultural these days.

Niranjan Ramakrishnan can be reached at njn_2003@yahoo.com. His blog is at http://njn-blogogram.blogspot.com.

Bharati wept

Came across this extraordinary article on Aamby Valley, a monstrosity, not so much because it is a haven for the rich, but because it represents a private city largely outside the control of the Indian state. Read Randeep Ramesh's shocking piece in the Guardian, "A Tale of Two Indias", where he talks about the felling of 11000 acres of prime forest lands in the shadows of the Sahayadri hills for a gated city surrounded by an electric fence to keep out other Indians (if those living inside can be called Indians in any real sense).

Meanwhile, the article continues, there are Indian farmers selling their cattle, their lands, even their kidneys, to stay alive. See also P. Sainath's article about farmer suicides in Vidharba (in the same state as Aamby Valley) crossing 400 the same day the Sensex hit an all time high, "Where India's Brave New World is Headed".

Nor is this a phenomenon unique to Maharashtra. Read "Indian Villages for Sale" by Devinder Sharma. This is not about some parched outpost. It is about Punjab, the granary of India for fifty years. The villagers had exhausted other alternatives to raise money to live, and decided to sell their village.

The poet of Indian nationalism, Subramania Bharati, wrote that if a single person went without food we would destroy the world. That was in Brtitish times. Fifty years of freedom have robbed us of all sensibility, let alone sense.

Shame on all of us, and shame on Manmohan Singh and this false god of globalization.

Sovereignty, Rule of Law? What's all that?

Immigrants, Migrants, and Vagrants
Extricating the Issues in the Immigration Debate
by Niranjan Ramakrishnan

Every time I hear the words, "We are a nation of immigrants, but we are also a nation of laws", I am reminded of just how far along the road to idiocy we have traveled. That statement is as asinine a truism as ever left a politician's lips, almost akin to telling someone that just because they are wearing their shirt doesn't mean they should forget their pants. But, given our recent proclivity in tolerating official pap, this fresh accretion to the daily public discourse should occasion no surprise. In any case, enough emotion and vested interest are seeped into the immigration debate that one needs to make an effort to rescue the basic issues, which are, in fact, quite straightforward.

That the US is a nation of immigrants is largely true, but not in the sense the argument is usually deployed. After all, the US is hardly unique for being peopled by men and women from other lands: the Sri Lankan Tamils came from South India, the majority Sinhalese themselves came from northern India. England was settled by people from what are now Germany and France. In America itself, the native Americans came from Asia. South East Asia is full of people of Chinese descent. Arabs, Afghans, Persians, Greeks, all settled in India over the centuries.

This simplistic formula, wielded often as a clinching argument for not worrying overly about immigration, ignores the difference between immigration and migration. We have to remember that 'Immigration', as different from 'migration', presupposes a process, and a set of laws. The days when you could migrate anywhere as you pleased are long gone. Once there are international boundaries, you can only migrate within your own borders.

This difference is what nation states are all about. It is the law that prescribes procedures according to which people may enter, stay, gain citizenship, etc. So, to say it correctly, we are a nation of immigrants because we are a nation of laws. The laws under gird, and are thus more basic than, immigration. And while it does happen that a person or two might unintentionally stray across a border every now and then, no one seriously argues that 12 million people were vagrants who absentmindedly found themselves on the other side of the border one morning.

There are three ways in which one can be inside a country legally -- as a guest, as an immigrant, or as a citizen. In all these cases the country (supposedly) knows you are there. Anyone who is in the country by some other means is by definition illegal (technically, at least). Whether the person is hard-working or lazy, thrifty or profligate, has family values or not, none of this is germane (Graham Greene was not allowed into this country, for heaven's sake, forbidden by some law!).

When the law is weak, argue the facts, when the facts are weak, argue the law, as every young attorney is told. The law being unambiguous (you cannot work in the USA without an authorization), the opponents of immigration reform seek refuge in that oldest of American pablum's -- pragmatism. We have to recognize the fact that 12 million people are here illegally, they say in awe. And they contribute to the economy, they are vital to so many industries, they add, reverently. This is like telling a traffic cop that he should ignore your driving without a license because you are on your way to an important meeting. America was known for its uniform respect for the law, but this is one more casualty of our decline.

But all of us are complicit, my friend protests, confessing frankly that he had never asked the guy who painted his home if his two helpers were, er, legal. Let us say we are. Well? I was once told that the pizza business in some states was controlled entirely by the mafia. Since I like pizza, should I now oppose the FBI going after the mafia? How far does this ridiculous line of argument go?

It is a tedious task. So was tackling the depression, or fighting the cold war, all daunting enterprises. So are activities like elections, courtroom trials and preserving the rights of the accused. Do we jettison these too? If the number of 12 million seems staggering, do remember that we have over 100 million automobile drivers in this country, all of whom are issued driving licenses, and conform to a traffic system whose logistical sophistication is the envy of the world. Let us not underestimate ourselves, nor overstate the problem. What is needed is political awareness, and a will to sovereignty.

For, have no doubt, a country that cannot enforce its borders is a country no longer. A blind acquiescence of the concept of immigration anytime, anywhere, without suitable forethought, is a far more pernicious threat than the downing of the World Trade Center. Illegal migration is a direct challenge to a nation's sovereignty, pure and simple. To throw epithets like racist, fascist, heartless, etc. at all those who hold this view, is no different than President Bush (representing the mother of all illegal squatting -- the vagrant in the White House) condemning those who protest his warrant less wiretapping felony as soft on terrorism. One cannot in good faith support the enforcement of some laws and not others, especially if one is doing so in the noble cause of reducing the cost of one's consumer instincts.

These basic premises should be form the basis upon which other considerations of pragmatism, personal stories, and compassion, may apply. To confuse the main issues of sovereignty and the rule of law with any subsidiary logic would be an act of imbecility as monumental as the many others we've committed in the past quarter century.

See also: Immigration Bill Stalls in Senate

Niranjan Ramakrishnan can be reached at njn_2003@yahoo.com. His blog is at http://njn-blogogram.blogspot.com.

Pardona me...

What we fight for

Destination: Amnesty Nation

by Niranjan Ramakrishnan

On a recent episode of the TV show, Boston Legal, a character spoke words which could scarcely be improved upon:

"When the weapons of mass destruction thing turned out not to be true, I expected the American people to rise up. They didn't. Then, when the Abu Ghraib torture thing surfaced and it was revealed that our government participated in rendition, a practice where we kidnap people and turn them over to regimes who specialize in torture, I was sure then the American people would be heard from. We stood mute.

Then came the news that we jailed thousands of so-called terrorist suspects, locked them up without the right to a trial or even the right to confront their accusers. Certainly, we would never stand for that. We did.

And now, it's been discovered the executive branch has been conducting massive, illegal, domestic surveillance on its own citizens. You and me. And I at least consoled myself that finally, finally the American people will have had enough. Evidentially, we haven't.

In fact, if the people of this country have spoken, the message is we're okay with it all. Torture, warrant-less search and seizure, illegal wiretappings, prison without a fair trial or any trial, war on false pretenses. We, as a citizenry, are apparently not offended.

There are no demonstrations on college campuses. In fact, there's no clear indication that young people even seem to notice. . . .

The Secret Service can now declare free speech zones to contain, control and, in effect, criminalize protest. Stop for a second and try to fathom that. At a presidential rally, parade or appearance, if you have on a supportive t-shirt, you can be there. If you're wearing or carrying something in protest, you can be removed.

This! In the United States of America."

The character is fictional but the words, unfortunately, are not.

No protests greeted the discovery that the WMD clamor was nonsense, and none when it was revealed that there were serious internal doubts about the administration's pre-war public certitude. We reelected the administration after Abu Ghraib was known, forever linking America with torture, something even its worst critics had never directly associated with it earlier. The attorney general appeared before the Senate and defended warrantless wiretapping with a supreme insouciance, defending the president's action and asserting that the president had this right and much more, for this was post 9-11 America. As Boston Legal said, no protests, no demonstrations, no gatherings. After five years of in-your-face criminality, on the third anniversary of the Iraq War, many newspapers noted, the protests were smaller than before.

So what issue would raise enough outrage to bring people into the streets in huge numbers? Today's New York Times has a headline that provides an answer: Groundswell of Protests Back Illegal Immigrants. According to the report, the response to the proposed bill to restrict illegal immigration has been overwhelming, across several cities including LA, Phoenix, Denver and Chicago.

Just so we understand our priorities. Five hundred thousand people turned out in LA to protest proposed attempts to deal with illegal immigration, a far larger number than demonstrations against anything the Bush administration has done in its five years.

The pro-immigration demonstrators may have a perverse point, even if they did not say so themselves. After all, when a president himself can break the law -- and publicly boast about it when caught -- with no fear of prosecution, why should a hapless illegal entrant be made to pay a price for his offense? Presidents, after all, are sworn to uphold the law; illegal immigrants, by definition, are not.

When you wink at lawbreaking, whether by president or by commoner, it impacts the entire nation. A felon administration and a conniving Congress can hardly proclaim with any ring of conviction that the law is supreme. The same impulse which causes senators to vamoose at the first mention of the word, 'Censure' (then to go on TV and offer meretricious pontifications on the need suspend judgement until we "get all the facts"), also makes them tread on eggshells when it comes to illegal immigration.

Recall that we live an era of amnesty (and of amnesia). An administration lies us into war, opens our mail, spies on us without warrant, and then resorts to calling critics of its actions traitors. Congress responds to this garrotting of the statute in letter and spirit by proposing to change the law -- we are ever-so-user-friendly -- retrospectively!

Is it not also logical, then, to extend the same formula to illegal immigration, and grant amnesty to those who broke into the country? A political class that is simultaneously effete and venal cares little about the long term effects of such compromises. It answers to a higher power than the Constitution -- to paraphrase Michael Chertoff's words on the Port Deal, business must go on, and the state has no greater duty than to protect the free flow of commerce.

The writing on the wall (no pun intended) is clear: When a state is so obviously paralyzed by political calculation as to abdicate its very purpose, it is but one more piece of evidence that the we have slipped into classic third world mode, with the line between private and state interest disappearing at one end, and that between the country and the next one vanishing at the other.

Related Reading:

GOP Senators seek deal on Immigration Bill

Tuning in to anger on Immigration

The Great Senate Immigration Debate by Dana Milbank

Niranjan Ramakrishnan can be reached at njn_2003@yahoo.com. His blog is at http://njn-blogogram.blogspot.com.

The March of Folly, 21st Century

A fine article by Robert Fisk. Reproduced here for fuller dissemination only.

With Novices in the Saddle

IT is the march of folly. In 1914, the British, French, and Germans thought they would be home by Christmas. On April 9, 2003, corporal David Breeze of the 3rd Battalion, 4th US Marine Regiment — the very first American to enter Baghdad — borrowed my satellite phone to call his home in Michigan. “Hi you guys, I’m in Baghdad,” he told his mother. “I’m ringing to say ‘Hi, I love you. I’m doing fine. I love you guys.’ The war will be over in a few days. I’ll see you all soon.”

They were tough, those marines, big-boned men with muck on their faces and ferocity in their eyes — they had been fighting for days without sleep — but they too were on the same lonely journey of despair that the Old Contemptables and the French poilus and the Bavarian infantry embarked upon almost a century ago.

Was this because we no longer have leaders who have experienced war at first hand? When I grew up, Churchill and MacMillan were prime ministers, men who fought in the First World War and who led us through the Second World War. Eden had been in the wartime cabinet with Churchill. Tito had been wounded by German shellfire in Yugoslavia, Jack Kennedy had commanded a torpedo boat in the Pacific, de Gaulle fought in the Great War, and later helped to liberate France from the Nazis. But Blair, however much he may claim to be a friend of God, has no such distinction; nor Bush, who dodged Vietnam; nor Cheney, who also dodged Vietnam; nor Gordon Brown, nor Condoleezza Rice; nor John Howard of Australia. Colin Powell was in Vietnam; but he has gone, trailing his ignominious February 2003 UN performance on weapons of mass destruction.

Instead, the little men dressed up in the clothes of dead titans. Bush and Blair thought they were Churchills or Roosevelts. They flaunted themselves along with Aznar of Spain as the Big Three: Churchill, Roosevelt, and Stalin; though I never discovered which of them was supposed to play the Soviet mass, murderer, as they conspired in the Azores for war. They claimed that Saddam was the Hitler of Baghdad. My old, messianic friend Tom Friedman, a New York Times columnist, got it right when he described Saddam as part Donald Duck and part Don Corleone, but this was not the kind of reality that Bush or Blair were interested in.

They were the quick-fix men, the instant statesmen, the guys who had a handle on war. Post-war control and reconstruction? Forget it, the Iraqis will do as we tell them after they have greeted us with roses and songs. Winston Churchill set up a British cabinet committee to organise the administration of post-war occupied Germany in 1941: four years before the end of the Second World War, and at a time when we still expected a Wehrmacht invasion of Britain. The Churchill frauds had not even bothered to create such a committee for days before their invasion of Iraq. For this was to be an ideological war. From its creation by the loonies of the American right — as a pro-Israeli policy to aid Likud Party leader Benjamin Netanyahu — and then foisted on Bush, to the hell-disaster that Iraq now represents, the real war had to be turned into myth; nightmares into dreams; destruction into hope; terrible truths into profound mendacity.

Even today the occupation powers tell awesome lies. Democracy is taking hold when the “Iraqi” government controls only a few acres of Baghdad greensward. The insurgency is being crushed when 40,000 armed Iraqis are ripping into the greatest army on earth; freedom is taking hold when thousands of Iraqis are dying each month. “Operation Swarmer” is now supposedly targeting those who want a civil war in Iraq. Some of the men who are trying to provoke civil war however, work for the Iraqi interior ministry, and are paid, ultimately, by us.

For the truth, we should turn to a well-known analyst who warned us that in Iraq, the British have been “led into a trap from which it shall be hard to escape with dignity and honour. They have been tricked into it by a steady withholding of information. The Baghdad communiques are belated, insincere, incomplete. Things have been far worse than we have been told. Our administration more bloody and inefficient than the public knows ... We are today not far from a disaster.” This is the most concise and accurate account I have yet read of our present folly.

It was written about the British occupation of Iraq in 1920 by Lawrence of Arabia. In the long nights of 2003, when the dangers of each day under US bombardment were replaced by the insomnia of bomb-blasts in the Baghdad darkness outside. I would curl up like an animal in my bed and thumb through the predictions of this present folly.

I read a fearful prophecy by the evangelical preacher Pat Buchanan written five months before we illegally invaded Iraq. “This invasion will not be the cakewalk neo-conservatives predict,” he said. “Terrorist attacks in liberated Iraq seem as certain as in liberated Afghanistan. For a militant Islam ... will never accept George Bush dictating the destiny of the Islamic world ... Pax Americana will reach apogee but then the tide recedes; for the one endeavour at which Islamic peoples excel is expelling imperial powers by terror and guerrilla warfare.”

There were the dreary precedents. Muslims drove the Brits out of Palestine and Aden; the French out of Algeria; the Russians out of Afghanistan; the Americans out of Somalia; and Beirut, the Israelis out of Lebanon. As Buchanan wrote, “we have started up the road to empire, and over the next hill we will meet those who went before.” However, we shall not count the bodies.

What was it Bush told us a few weeks ago? That 30,000 Iraqis had been killed since the invasion, his very words a racist admission; for what he actually said was: “30,000 more or less”. More or less, give or take a few hundred. Would he have dared to say that US casualties were “2,000 more or less”? Of course not. Our dead are precious; they are individuals with widows and children.

The Iraqis? Well, they are lesser beings whose casualties cannot be revealed to us by the Iraqi ministry of health, on orders from the Americans and British; creatures whose suffering, far greater than our own, must be submerged in the democracy and freedom in which we are drowning them; whose casualties “more or less” are probably nearer to 150,000. After all, if 1,000 Iraqis could die by violence last July — in Baghdad alone; and if they are being killed at 60 or 70 a day, then we have a near genocidal bloodbath on our hands. Iraqis, however, are now our Untermenschen for whom, frankly, we do not greatly care.

Civil war? There never was a civil war? It is a tribal, not a sectarian society. Some organisation wants a civil war; oddly, it was an occupation force’s spokesman, a certain Dan Senor, who first warned of civil war in Iraq at an Anglo-American press-conference in 2003. Why? We talk of civil war far more than the Iraqis do. Why? Repeatedly, we are told that Iraqis and westerners are kidnapped by “men wearing police uniforms” or by “men wearing army uniforms”.

What is this nonsense? Are we really to believe that there is a vast warehouse in Fallujah containing 8,000 made-to-measure police uniforms for potential insurgents? No! The truth is that many of the policemen and soldiers of Iraq, upon whose loyalty and courage our retreat, according to Bush, depends, are themselves insurgents. So deeply have the nationalists/Islamists forces infiltrated these men that the Bush-Blair promises of withdrawal are the very opposite of the truth. We are on our own. We may persuade our ex-spooks, like the former “interim prime minister” Iyad Alawi, who obediently claimed the other day that there was a civil war in progress, to try to frighten Iraqis. The reality is that our armed presence in Iraq is destroying an entire people.

So we proceed down the crumbling staircase. Let us forget the weapons of mass destruction; the 45-minute warning; the links between Saddam and 11 September 2001; the dossiers; and the lies; and our torture — yes, torture, at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay; and the ever-widening chasm between Blair’s tomfoolery and the truth. Bush told us that “More sacrifices will be required”. You bet they will be if we continue this march of folly. — (c) The Independent

Demonstrations on 3rd Anniversary of Iraq War

All over the world, there have been demonstrations against the Iraq war. As the sun has risen across the globe this weekend, from Sydney to San Francisco, people have protested against the US invasion and continued presence in Iraq. But this is rather in the nature of the American festival of Mother's Day and Father's Day (ignore the parents for 364 days and celebrate them for one). Bush and Blair can easily grit their teeth and endure one day of effigies being burned. What they cannot tolerate is each country being forced by its demonstrators to seek that US leave Iraq. Until this happens, there will be little impact.

Dr. Sultan - Wafa or Be-wafa?

Last weekend there was a New York Times article on Wafa Sultan, an outspoken critic of Islam from Los Angeles. She made news when she debated an Egyptian cleric on Al Jazeera. The LA Times also featured her. The full transcript of her debate is carried on MEMRI.

What is Wafa Sultan saying? It doesn't matter what. She may be right on one point and wrong on another. What matters is that she is saying it.She says that she has left Islam because it stifles her. Her critics say she has no business criticizing Islam since she has left it. Criticism, they say, has to be from the inside, not outside. Really? In that case, what business do the Islamists have to criticize communism, since they are not communists, or to criticize Hinduism, say (since they are not Hindus)?

There is something else about Wafa Sultan's argument that bears a second look. Most commentators, who try to impress upon us that there are no problems with Islam, assert it is just that the great religion has been 'hijacked' by terrorists and 'evildoers'. This is rather like customer support offering consolation to an irate user that there is nothing wrong with the product since the User Manual is perfectly written. By this token (see The Trouble with Infallibility, by Niranjan Ramakrishnan), every religion is perfect, only people are flawed. Wafa Sultan has a basic problem with the tenets of the religion itself, and brings up a good point -- does one have to accept everything a religion says in order to adhere to it, or can one be eclectic and still belong? Is there a way in which a religion can be updated with new ideas and experiences?

At any rate, Wafa Sultan, who has stood by her arguments despite death threats, is a brave woman, and the argument is good for clearing the air of the increasing choke of hypocrisy-filled air that has prevailed in the last few years.

The Action Thing

Liberty - Use it or Lose it
by Niranjan Ramakrishnan

Some items in the news in the past month:

• Thousands of demonstrators took part in huge and emotional demonstrations in various Arab countries, and other countries with large Muslim populations, including Nigeria and Indonesia, to protest the cartoons in the Danish paper, Jyllands-Posten, and their subsequent appearance in sundry European publications.
  
  
• Huge protests greeted President George W. Bush during his visit to India, in New Delhi and Hyderabad, cities he visited, but also in other major cities including Madras, Calcutta, Bombay and Bangalore.
  
  
• Demonstrations in Pakistan, which had commenced with the Damadola bombing where the US drones got civilians while believing they were getting Ayman Al Zawahiri, got melded with the subsequent cartoon controversy and then continued on to greet President Bush during his short visit to Pakistan. Here too, the rallies were not only in places Bush visited, but throughout Pakistan, including Karachi, Lahore and Peshawar.
  
  
• In 2005, China had 87,000 protests, demonstrations and other "mass incidents" (International Herald Tribune, March 6, 2006).
  
  
• In Venezuela, "President Hugo Chavez's supporters and opponents were out in force, taking advantage of the holiday and their freedom to demonstrate." (from the Register-Guard, Salem, Oregon)

When crowds assembled in Lebanon and Syria, people from every side pooh-poohed the poor saps who were expending so much energy over some silly cartoons. The protests in India were dismissed by commentators as an unholy combination of muslims and communists. Every protester was debunked as being led by some tinpot leader, a false ideology, or plain backwardness.

Let us allow that it is worthless to spend the day in the sun shouting slogans against a faraway paper. While doing so, let's also ask: are there more worthy reasons to protest? And if so, what might they be?

The abridgment of liberties, you reckon? The nation being committed to a criminal military adventure, with deliberate falsehoods fed to the people to gain support for the venture, perhaps? Illegal surveillance, inside the US, possibly? The death of tens of thousands, maybe? Jeopardizing a secret agent to settle personal scores, by some chance? The rendition of future generations to the shackles of debt, could it be?

Yet, how many demonstrations of any kind have we seen in the US? What exactly do you suppose are we saving ourselves for?

It would seem that the people in all these foreign parts hold the liberties enshrined in the US Constitution in far greater esteem than do its own citizens, even as we look down on them for their lack of freedoms. Imagine that for a second... We who have, without protest, countenanced members of the public being thrown out and harassed for wearing a T-Shirt critical of the president to a public meeting addressed by this putative public 'servant'!

Rep. John Conyers (Why We Act) writes of this phenomenon, "For some time, I have opened some of my speeches with a fairly standard line about how great democracy is because hardly anyone votes but everyone complains. There is a new variation on this problem among some in the progressive community and it goes like this: nothing we do matters, nothing we do changes anything so why bother doing anything..."

Everyone seems to be standing around waiting for someone else to do something. The Congress and the media are the favorite (and deserving) targets of much of our ire, but doesn't each of us have the duty to ask what we are doing? What could be sillier than to diagnose a problem in great detail and then sit back as though you had solved it?

To start with, we can help roll the impeachment ball up the (Capitol) Hill: Rep. Conyers has a resolution, currently signed by 28 House members, calling for a select committee to explore impeachment. Twenty eight House members have signed on. Has yours? Why not call and write -- and knock on your Representative's office door to ask that he join Conyers? It would be a good and meaningful act.

Niranjan Ramakrishnan can be reached at njn_2003@yahoo.com. His blog is at http://njn-blogogram.blogspot.com.

English Media in India downplays Anti-Bush Protests

NPR' All Things Considered (Philip Reeves from New Delhi) said today that the English language media in India buried news of the huge demonstrations against the Bush visit, placing the reports somewhere in the inner pages. He termed the demonstrations "huge", and referred to the fact that they were widespread.

 

Dan Froomkin, in the Washington Post, asks if Bush got ambushed (not his words) on the nuclear deal, and whether he had given away too much. In a previous post (yesterday), we have an Indian government quote that they had no conditions imposed regarding the military program. Bush was perhaps desperate to be able to present something as a success in view of all the fresh problems that have surfaced during his short absence.

 

Nuclear Agreement Reached, Protests of Bush visit massive

PM Manmohan Singh and President George W. Bush announced at a joint news conference the reaching of an agreement to share nuclear technology. India would be taken off the 'outlaw' list and provided with key nuclear assistance by the US. In return, India would open up 14 of its 22 nuclear establishments to international safeguards. According to the New York Times, Mr. Bush called it a "historic" nuclear pact that would help India satisfy its enormous civilian energy needs while allowing it to continue to develop nuclear weapons. The Indian side cryptically added that "Under the agreement India will not subject its military nuclear programme and fast breeder reactors to international safeguards. Classification of India's future nuclear reactors into civilian and military will be its sole decision and there will be 'no debate' on these." [Malayalam Manorama]

Meanwhile, massive protests marked Bush's visit throughout [See Slide Show showing protests from across the country - Delhi, Calcutta, Bombay, Madras, Bangalore, Hyderabad, Ahmedabad...]. It looks as though the ordinary people grasp the enormity Bush's crimes better than their governmment.

Bush is expected to travel to Hyderabad tomorrow, and then to Pakistan on Saturday. A US diplomat was killed in an attack near the US Consulate in Karachi today. But President Bush said he would not let that deter him from visiting Pakistan.

Katrina: Bush caught on tape

Officials supplied a detailed briefing to President Bush and Secretary of Homeland Security Chertoff a couple of days before Katrina made landfall. The possiblity of levees breaching was brought to his attention. Bush did not ask a single question, but kept assuring the briefers that every arrangement was being made to meet the situation. The AP (see report) has obtained a videotape of this briefing.

 

Why is this important? Here's why. The following week, Bush told ABC Good Morning America that "No one could have anticipated the breach of the levees". What does it prove?

 

Say it.

 

Bush Lied.

 

Again.

 

Thousands Protest Bush Visit in India

Huge crowds protested the visit of George W. Bush to India. "Go back, Bush", "Bush is a killer", "Bully Bush, buzz off", "Bush, stop the ambush", they shouted as hundreds of policemen in riot gear kept watch. (Reuters, Khaleej Times). Protests were taking place throughout India, including Delhi, Bombay, Calcutta, Bangalore and Hyderabad.

America, however, seems to have a favorable rating among Indians, according to a new poll. Some 71% of those polled say they had a favorable impression of the United States. However, 72% of those polled by the Indian newsmagazine, Outlook, said they thought America was a 'bully'.

In an op-ed piece in the Guardian, Arundhati Roy says, "It is not in our power stop Bush's visit. It is in our power to protest it, and we will." Here's some more from her article -- apparently Bush is going to address a public meeting at the Purana Qila, which also houses the Delhi Zoo. Arundhati Roy:

"Since the Purana Qila also houses the Delhi zoo - George Bush's audience will be a few hundred caged animals and an approved list of caged human beings who in India go under the category of "eminent persons". They're mostly rich folk who live in our poor country like captive animals, incarcerated by their own wealth, locked and barred in their gilded cages, protecting themselves from the threat of the vulgar and unruly multitudes whom they have systematically dispossessed over the centuries."

Material Progress, Moral Pauperization

President George W. Bush is visiting India this week.

The India that can (no longer) say No

The Paradox of Prosperity

by Niranjan Ramakrishnan

"Where freedom is menaced or justice threatened or where aggression takes place, we cannot be and shall not be neutral."

-Jawaharlal Nehru, addressing a joint session of US House and Senate
October 13, 1949

Let us put Nehru's words in context: here is the leader of a country still dependent on foreign aid for food, militarily negligible, a country of crushing poverty, invited to address the Congress of the United States. We watch him treat the superpower as an equal, recalling it to its highest values. It lionizes him. JFK's first State of the Union speech invokes the "soaring idealism of Nehru". In 1962, C. Rajagopalachari (also known as Rajaji, an associate of the Mahatma and a political opponent of Nehru) visits the US and the USSR promoting the importance of nuclear disarmament. President Kennedy listens with rapt attention, later recalling his meeting with Rajagopalachari as "one of the most civilizing influences on me".

It was an era when India was regarded everywhere as a moral superpower, even if it was poor in material wealth. The authority India wielded on the world stage was lopsided, totally out of proportion to its military or economic power. Why was this so? Every country wants its people to eat well, but India, like America, represented something more -- the inspiration of high purpose. Gandhi's freedom movement set minds everywhere on fire. This was followed, after independence, by Nehru's forging of the entirely new paradigm of non-alignment where India refused to trade political allegiance for economic blandishment.

Paradoxically, today, when India is an expanding power, exporting not just food but steel, with rising incomes, foreign acquisitions and a nuclear bomb, she is often viewed as nothing more than 'a country with a middle class of 400 million'. And the moral voice? it hasn't been heard from in years. There was courage in rags, but there is only meekness and timidity in riches. And the bomb, far from emboldening us, seems only to have induced servility. This week, for regularizing a nuclear deal with the US, among other economic aims, India rolls out the red carpet to an American president who has sullied everything inspiring about America.

When Bush invaded Iraq in 2003, India remained mute, likely weighing the forfeiture of any potential contracts in post-war Iraq. How electrifying it would have been for India to resume its role as the world's moral superpower, to condemn the invasion from the rooftops, to recall its ambassador from Washington? India would have become the beacon of the world.

But all that is unimaginable today. For we are now rich, nuclear -- and fearful. In the words of my father, KG Ramakrishnan, "where there was the torment of the soul, there now was the swagger of the body."

Where the country of four hundred million 'subjects' overthrew the mightiest empire known to history, the weight of four hundred million 'consumers' forces a free nation to acquiesce in a fresh imperialism. Far from not remaining neutral in the face of aggression, as Nehru said, India this week is actually feting the aggressor! As Mahatma Gandhi wrote, "How heavy is the toll of sins and wrongs that wealth, power and prestige exact from man."

Niranjan Ramakrishnan can be reached at njn_2003@yahoo.com..

Silence! Cave-in in Progress

Business as Usual

The devil, said Sen. Schumer, was in the details. He was being asked about the reports of Dubai World Ports itself insisting on a 45 day review of the management contract. No report of what Sen. Hillary Clinton thought. Only Sen. Bob Menendez said that there was no question of acceding to such a deal, which was bad in principle. Sen. Bill Frist backed off from his criticism of the deal (no surprise -- according to the Washington Post, he helped broker it!) making favorable noises. So did Rep. Peter King, who had been so vocal in his opposition earlier. And so was Denny Hastert, Speaker of the House.

This issue, as much as anything, will be a test of Democratic savvy, leave alone principle. They have given a free pass to the administration on security, all the way since 9-11. This incident is the most luminescent example what the Bush Administration thinks of security, be it funding the Coast Guard or protecting the land borders. If they want to win, they must show that they can provide real security, unlike the administration, which has used the 9-11 attack as an opportunity to impose draconian measures, shower financial benefits on its friends, all while actually ignoring security.

What happened to Sen. Clinton's move to pass a law stating that ports -- all US ports -- will be under the control of the United States? Will she still stick by it? Or will the 45 day review provide everyone cover while some other issue-of-the-week redirects the public's attention?

Had I but served my God with half the zeal...

An article (When the Ingrates Met the Hypocrites) in the Times of London points out how Tony Blair's dogged devotion to George W. Bush's has been rewarded. Leave alone the fact that Bush has equated America's relationship to Britain to that with Dubai, putting paid to decades of harping on the "special relationship". The columnist, Irwin Steltzer, begins his article with these words:

"TONY BLAIR only recently learnt something that his critics say should have been obvious to him for years: gratitude is not a virtue that George W. Bush has in abundance."

He continues:

"Blair’s decision to stay with the US on Iraq in the face of enormous domestic political opposition was only the latest of his demonstrations of solidarity with America. Before that, and immediately after the attack on the World Trade Centre, he flew to America to offer his condolences at a Mass at St Patrick’s Cathedral, and attended a joint session of Congress to demonstrate publicly Britain’s determination to join America’s War on Terror. Bush pledged eternal gratitude. And proceeded to ignore Blair’s loyalty and his own pledge.

"First came steel tariffs, hardly a proper reward for a trading partner’s loyalty. Then came the awarding of contracts for the reconstruction of Iraq, a process in which the Bush Administration made no distinction between nations that had supported the German-French onslaught on American policies and allies such as Britain and Poland.

"There is more of this sort of thing — most lately, cancelling plans to purchase Rolls-Royce engines for new fighter planes and refusing to share sensitive technology with Britain — but you get the idea."

Blair's shabby role will be examined both in sorrow and in pity by historians. That a person of high intelligence and talent chose to side with the most retrograde administration in Washington's history will be the first thing on his record.

Shock and AWE: Depleted Blairium

As if Blair's above contributions were not enough, reports are just coming in of the effects of depleted uranium being felt in the UK, scientists think as a direct result of the Iraq war. Two articles, on in the London Times (UK Radiation jump blamed on Iraq Shells) and Robert Fisk's Is The Problem Weather, Or Is It War? talks of the same topic. From the Times article:

"Each detector recorded a significant rise in uranium levels during the Gulf war bombing campaign in March 2003. The reading from a park in Reading was high enough for the Environment Agency to be alerted."

Fisk says:

"A British scientist, Chris Busby, has been digging through statistics from the Aldermaston Atomic Weapons Establishment which measures uranium in high-volume air samples. His suspicion was that depleted uranium particles from the two Gulf wars - DU is used in the anti-armour warheads of the ordnance of American and British tanks and planes - may have spread across Europe. I'm not a conspiracy theorist but here's something very odd.

"When Busby applied for the information from Aldermaston in 2004, they told him to get lost. When he demanded the information under the 2005 Freedom of Information Act, Aldermaston coughed up the figures. But wait.

"The only statistic missing from the data they gave him was for the early months of 2003. Remember what was happening then? A little dust-up in Iraq, a massive American-British invasion of Saddam's dictatorship in which tons of DU shells were used by American troops. Eventually Busby, who worked out all the high-altitude wind movements over Europe, received the data from the Defence Procurement Agency in Bristol - which showed an increase in uranium in high-volume air sampling over Britain during this period."

And who, do you think, runs the Aldermaston Atomic Weapons Establishment? Here's an extract from an article by Lauren Moret (Depleted Uranium Contaminates Europe) on the same subject:

"Out of concern for the public, the official British government air monitoring facility, known as the Atomic Weapons Establishment (AWE), at Aldermaston, was established years ago to measure radioactive emissions from British nuclear power plants and atomic weapons facilities.

"The British government facility (AWE) was taken over 3 years ago by Halliburton, which refused at first to release air monitoring data to Dr. Busby, as required by law."

Attaboy, Tony. Now we don't need to bother fighting 'em 'over there'.

The Starboard Side

Justin Raimondo is one of the most powerful political writers today. His site, AntiWar has been stalwart in its opposition to the Iraq War. In his last two articles, he has blasted critics of the Dubai Ports World deal, accusing them of being anti-Muslim and anti-Arab. His views deserve to be excerpted:

From Hating Arabs (Feb 22, 2006)

I have a suspicion that the current ruckus reflects the economic interests of not only the unions, but also Eller & Company, the Miami-based business formerly a partner of Peninsular that is now suing for being forced into an "involuntary" partnership with those feelthy Ay-rabs. The suit raises the security canard, and one wonders what sort of economic interests the smear campaign is intended to mask. A press conference held Tuesday decrying the ports deal was held in Miami, and the Miami-based nature of the smear campaign tells me that something is afoot in the land of the hanging chad. In any controversy like this, the first rule is to follow the money, and this AP report hints at the stakes:

"The lawsuit represents the earliest skirmish over lucrative contracts among the six major U.S. ports where Peninsular and Oriental runs major commercial operations: New York, New Jersey, Baltimore, New Orleans, Miami, and Philadelphia. The lawsuit was filed moments before the court closed Friday and disclosed late Saturday by people working on the case."

It wouldn't be the first time a corporate entity tried to take out the competition by raising a bogus threat to "national security." Led by a disparate coalition of mindless opportunists, anti-Arab racists, and warmongering politicians, an effort to scare the American public into making a few ruthless "entrepreneurs" obscenely rich by giving them a virtual monopoly on America's port facilities shows every sign of apparent success. The victors will be laughing all the way to the bank.

Today Raimondo trains his guns on Arianna Huffington's writings in the Huffington Post. Here's an excerpt:

From Arianna Huffington, Racial Profier (Feb 24, 2006)
Huffington and her fellow Bush-haters want us to abolish the international maritime trade, introduce racial profiling into the process of deciding who can do business in the U.S., and issue a gratuitous insult to Arabs the world over, when maritime experts – and common sense – tell us that DPW is being unfairly targeted by bloviating politicians and pontificating pundits.

Parading her ignorance with all the arrogance of a wealthy dowager flashing her diamonds, Arianna doesn't even begin to realize that her polemics could have dangerous – and even deadly – consequences. By ratcheting up the atmosphere of hate and hysteria that has characterized the relations between the Arab world and the West in recent weeks, she is lining up with the War Party. In open alliance with neocons like Michael Ledeen, Frank Gaffney, and the National Review/Weekly Standard crowd, Huffington and her fellow "progressives" are poisoning American politics to the point that "World War IV" – the wet dream of every neocon – becomes a distinct possibility.

Raimondo is a limited government enthusiast, but not (I think) a free trader. The opposition should not be merely to Dubai taking over port management, but to handing over such operations to foreign companies anyway. A well-argued case for this controversy to be a mere blip in a larger patter appears in today's Counterpunch. Written by Dave Lindorff, the article points out the stupidity of the Democrats:

The port of Long Beach, California was long ago turned over to a state company owned by the Communist government of China--a country it might be recalled, whose military leaders not long ago threatened to attack the U.S. with nuclear weapons if America were to interfere with China's efforts to capture the island nation of Taiwan. Nobody's fussing about that.

Sometimes it takes a symbolic incident to crystallize attention to a larger problem. Gandhi's salt satyagraha was one such example. It would be sad if the debate deteriorated into an anti-Arab or anti-Muslim feeding frenzy. Indeed, as Raimondo pointed out brilliantly:

The worst demagoguery over this issue is coming out of Sen. Chuck Schumer's mouth. The Democrat from New York avers:

"Just as we would not outsource military operations or law enforcement duties, we should be very careful before we outsource such sensitive homeland security duties."

Yet it seems as if the security-conscious senator isn't against outsourcing when Israel is the beneficiary: Israeli companies, as well as direct input from the Israeli government, practically dominate the burgeoning homeland security industry. And the newly installed congressional phone system is franchised to an Israeli company, yet no one is making much of a stink about the security concerns raised by people like Philip Giraldi, who writes:

"One of the more intriguing aspects of the federal investigation into the activities of Washington lobbyist Jack Abramoff is his Israeli connections. His large $2.2 million bail is reported to be due to fears that he would flee to Israel, as some of his business associates have already done, to avoid prosecution. Abramoff, an Orthodox Jew and ardent Zionist, set up a charity called Capital Athletic Foundation, which illegally provided $140,000 worth of weapons and security equipment to hard-line Israeli settlers.

"Abramoff also allegedly convinced Congressman Robert Ney, House Administrative Committee chairman, to award a contract worth $3 million to a startup Israeli telecommunications firm called Foxcom Wireless. The contract was for the installation of antennas in House of Representatives buildings to improve cell-phone reception. Not surprisingly, such equipment can be designed to have what is known as a 'back door' to enable a third party, in this case Mossad, to listen in. That an Israeli firm should be given such a contract through a selection process that was described as 'deeply flawed and unfair' is inexplicable, particularly as there were American suppliers of the same equipment, and it suggests that the private conversations of some of our congressmen might not be so private after all."

When Schumer starts questioning this sweet deal, I'll listen to him when it comes to DP World.

Today's News: DWP Offers to Hold off Implementing Deal.