Views of a Nepali Economist

The following opinion piece was published in Republica on September 29, 2015 with the title "Great Indian Game." The direct link to Republica is here.


India has imposed an economic blockade on Nepal to please Madheshi leaders who believe a blockade would cripple Kathmandu. They are right. A blockade would cripple not just Kathmandu, but the entire country.

This is not the first time India has openly supported sectarian movement in its neighborhood. However, those happy with Indian support through the blockade have to understand that India often switches sides in such confrontations. A refresher in the sub-continent's history provides several examples.

In Bhutan, the Lhotsampas—the Nepali-speaking Bhutanese population who lived in southern Bhutan—had started a serious movement for democracy. Years earlier, in 1971, Bhutan had irked India by registering itself as a member of the United Nations. That soured the Indian plan to annex the country. Therefore, years later, supporting the Lhotsampas was an opportunity for India to hurt the Bhutanese monarch. So, India supported the democratic movement. Buoyed by the Indian support, the democratic movement gained further strength.

However, the Bhutanese monarchy was able to secure its longevity by brokering a pact with India. So, India switched sides. The Bhutanese monarch was able to subdue its people's democratic aspirations, and deport them out of their own country. India allowed the Lhotsampas to exit Bhutan and enter Nepal. Those who successfully re-entered Bhutan would be rounded up by Bhutanese soldiers, and put on Indian buses escorted by armed Indian security forces. They would be driven up to the Nepal border, and asked to walk into Nepal while the Indian security force aimed guns at their backs.

Although Bhutan remains an independent country today, and was able to foil India's plan to annex it, India effectively rules the country today by proxy—a price that the monarch was willing to pay to deny its people democracy.

In Sikkim, India came up with a grander plan. Although people in Sikkim had harbored democratic aspirations since 1947, the movement gained a boost in the late 1960s with funding and open support from India. Again, it was the majority Nepali-speaking Sikkimese population that was fighting for democracy in Sikkim. Lhendup Dorjee was the leader of the democratic movement at the time. Decades later, closer to his death, he would recount to several reporters how he received cash from the Indian government to fuel his movement.

While funding the democratic movement, India was also promising Palden Namgyal—then King of Sikkim—that India would not let the Namgyal monarchy end. Palden Namgyal took Indira Gandhi—then Prime Minister of India and daughter of Jawaharlal Nehru—at her word. Namgyal believed Nehru's daughter would never compromise a neighbor's sovereignty. He could not be more wrong. On one hand, Indira Gandhi had been promising to the Namgyal that the monarchy was there to stay. On the other hand, she had been funding the anti-monarchy movement.

The Indian establishment convinced Namgyal to hold elections in Sikkim to hand significant power to the parliament. Lhendup Dorjee's Sikkim National Congress party won 31 out of 32 seats in the 1974 election. Immediately, Lhendup's parliament voted to "merge" with India. The 300-year old Namgyal monarchy officially ended in 1975 when India annexed the Kingdom in broad daylight. Despite earlier jubilations at the ousting of monarchy, it did not take long for the Sikkimese people to realize that Lhendup had duped them. The result: Lhendup's party won zero seats in the 1979 election. However, the damage that had been done was irreversible. Sikkim's identity as a sovereign nation was forever erased.

In Sri Lanka, when the ethnic Tamils started their fight against the Sinhalese establishment, India felt a sense of obligation towards the Tamils, who had close relationship with the Indian Tamils in the South. Does this roti-beti relationship sound familiar? However, nationalistic politics took over—helped by increasing criminal activities by Sri Lankan Tamils in Indian soil (a charge that the Sri Lankan Tamils refuted)—and India switched sides. Sri Lankan Tamils felt betrayed.

Often history repeats itself. And, this time it is our turn. The Madheshi leaders and opinion columnists argue that India has played no role in the current struggle in Tarai. Yet Indian aggression through the blockade and pro-Madheshi sentiment speaks otherwise. However, history suggests the Indian support cannot be enjoyed for long. Pawns get used, and then discarded. Lhendup's career never recovered after the 1979 defeat. It is one thing to be called the "Father of the Sikkim Democracy," but another to have nobody attending your funeral. Lhendup Dorjee lived the remainder of his life in disgrace, and died in misery.

The South Asian experience shows that India's neighbors have to be cautious. We recently witnessed an overenthusiastic support for the current Indian Prime Minister from the Nepali public and polity. However, the Indian PM comes from a political history of oppression against minorities, and leads a political party that has used nationalism, jingoism and violence as political tools in the past.

A few analysts claim that India's current support of Nepali Madheshis is a tool to win the upcoming Bihar election. Let us hope they are right. If they are wrong, there is no question that Indian aggression in the border and involvement in a communal conflict in Nepal is a direct threat to Nepal's sovereignty and a direct question on our ability to resolve our own problems. Let us hope we don't have a Lhendup Dorjee among us to help them carry out their agendas smoothly.

Labels: Bhutan, blockade, deja vu, India, Lhendup Dorjee, nepal, Sikkim, Sri Lanka

• What's troubling the Indian economy?
• Secret bank accounts in Switzerland
• Great note on the manipulation of currencies
• More at stake than cricket: India hosts Pakistan
• The Myth of American meritocracy
• How to pick a pocket? (New Yorker article on the world's best pick-pocket)
• Rape and murder in Delhi

Labels: cricket, currency manipulation, Delhi, India, pickpocket, rape, switzerland, usa

China's economic development has a potential demography problem

Over the past 30 years, China’s total fertility rate....has fallen from 2.6, well above the rate needed to hold a population steady, to 1.56, well below that rate...... Because very low fertility can become self-reinforcing, with children of one-child families wanting only one child themselves, China now probably faces a long period of ultra-low fertility, regardless of what happens to its one-child policy.......Shanghai reported fertility of just 0.6 in 2010—probably the lowest level anywhere in the world. According to the UN’s population division, the nationwide fertility rate will continue to decline, reaching 1.51 in 2015-20........

Scotland is voting for independence from the UK in 2014. Is it a good idea?

The political and cultural issues around independence are hotly debated. Yet fittingly, in the birthplace of Adam Smith economic arguments seem to weigh heaviest. Opinion polls suggest that they will determine whether or not Scots go for independence. One poll found that just 21% of Scots would favour independence if it would leave them £500 ($795) a year worse off, and only 24% would vote to stay in the union even if they would be less well off sticking with Britain. Almost everyone else would vote for independence if it brought in roughly enough money to buy a new iPad, and against it if not.

Massive corruption in the Chinese military

...."Certain individuals exchange public money, public goods, public office and public affairs for personal gain, flouting the law and party codes of conduct, even resorting to verbal abuse and threats, clandestine plots and set ups," he said. "They physically attack loyal and upstanding officials, kidnap and blackmail party leaders, and drag in their superiors to act as human shields. They deploy all of the tricks of the mafia trade within the army itself." The way Liu describes it, the web of military cliques, factions, and internal knots of organized crime sounds more like the workings of warlord armies before the communist revolution than the rapidly modernizing force that is currently rattling China's neighbors.

Open border between India and Nepal is a cause of concern: Akhilesh Yadav, the newly elected Chief Minister of Uttar Pradesh

....the newly-elected UP CM said the 550km-long border with the state requires special policing arrangement to put a check on any possible anti-national activity....

Labels: border, china, corruption, economy, India, scotland

On the morning of 11 January Mostafa Ahmadi Roshan, the deputy head of Iran's uranium enrichment facility at Natanz, was in his car on his way to work when he was blown up by a magnetic bomb attached to his car door.......Since 2010, three other Iranian nuclear scientists have been killed in similar circumstances, including Darioush Rezaeinejad, a 35-year-old electronics expert shot dead outside his daughter's nursery in Tehran last July. But instead of outrage or condemnation, we have been treated to expressions of undisguised glee...........

......"On occasion, scientists working on the nuclear programme in Iran turn up dead," bragged the Republican nomination candidate Rick Santorum in October. "I think that's a wonderful thing, candidly." On the day of Roshan's death, Israel's military spokesman, Brigadier General Yoav Mordechai, announced on Facebook: "I don't know who settled the score with the Iranian scientist, but I certainly am not shedding a tear" – a sentiment echoed by the historian Michael Burleigh in the Daily Telegraph: "I shall not shed any tears whenever one of these scientists encounters the unforgiving men on motorbikes."

.....western liberals who fall over one another to condemn the death penalty for murderers – who have, incidentally, had the benefit of lawyers, trials and appeals – as state-sponsored murder fall quiet as their states kill, with impunity, nuclear scientists, terror suspects and alleged militants in faraway lands. Yet a "targeted killing", human-rights lawyer and anti-drone activist Clive Stafford Smith tells me, "is just the death penalty without due process".

  Libertarian Illusions

Libertarianism is the single-minded defense of liberty. Many young people flock to libertarianism out of the thrill of defending such a valiant cause. They also like the moral freedom that libertarianism seems to offer: it's okay to follow one's one desires, even to embrace selfishness and self-interest, as long as it doesn't directly harm someone else.

Yet the error of libertarianism lies not in championing liberty, but in championing liberty to the exclusion of all other values. Libertarians hold that individual liberty should never be sacrificed in the pursuit of other values or causes. Compassion, justice, civic responsibility, honesty, decency, humility, respect, and even survival of the poor, weak, and vulnerable -- all are to take a back seat........

.....By taking an extreme view -- that liberty alone is to be defended among all of society's values -- libertarians reach extreme conclusions. Suppose a rich man has a surfeit of food and a poor man living next door is starving to death. The libertarian says that the government has no moral right or political claim to tax the rich person in order to save the poor person. Perhaps the rich person should be generous and give charity to the neighbor, the libertarian might say (or might not), but there is nothing that the government should do. The moral value of saving the poor person's life simply does not register when compared with the liberty of the rich person.

Most ethical and political systems find the libertarian position abhorrent, indeed preposterous. Most would hold that the government can, should, and indeed must, tax the rich person to save the poor person. That's because most ethical and political systems hold that liberty is only one value among many important values, and that the value of the indigent's life takes priority over the liberty of the rich individual.

 Leading by Example: The presence of female politicians boosts aspirations, educational achievement of young women.

A newly published study co-authored by MIT economist Esther Duflo, along with three colleagues, shows that the increased presence of local female political leaders in India has had a marked impact on adolescents and their families, raising the career aspirations and educational performance of young women.

.........having women serve as the leader, or pradhan, of a village council erases the prevailing “gender gap” that tends to work in favor of young men, provided that female politicians remain visible in local government for an extended period of time..........due to a role-model effect: Seeing women in charge persuaded parents and teens that women can run things, and increased their ambitions............

Fake malaria drugs putting millions at risk

Fake and poor quality anti-malarial drugs are threatening efforts to control the disease in Africa and could put millions of lives at risk.........counterfeit medicines could harm patients and promote drug resistance among malaria parasites..........

New findings on Heisenberg's uncertainty principle

Heisenberg's Uncertainty principle is arguably one of the most famous foundations of quantum physics. It says that not all properties of a quantum particle can be measured with unlimited accuracy. Until now, this has often been justified by the notion that every measurement necessarily has to disturb the quantum particle, which distorts the results of any further measurements. This, however, turns out to be an oversimplification, new research suggests.

10 reasons the US is no longer the land of the free--Washington Post

Assassination of U.S. citizens
Indefinite detention
Arbitrary justice
Warrantless searches
Secret evidence
War crimes
Secret court
Immunity from judicial review
Continual monitoring of citizens
Extraordinary renditions

Labels: freedom, heisenberg, India, Iran, jeffrey sachs, libertarian, libertarianism, malaria, nuclear

The Economist has an article on the Universal ID that is being championed in India by Nandan Nilekani, the co-founder of the Indian IT giant Infosys. Some highlights:

Poverty has many causes, and no simple cure. But one massive problem in India is that few poor people can prove who they are. They have no passport, no driving licence, no proof of address. They live in villages where multitudes share the same name. Their lack of an identity excludes them from the modern economy. They cannot open bank accounts, and no one would be so foolish as to lend them money.

The government offers them all kinds of welfare, but because they lack an identity, they struggle to lay hands on what they have been promised. The state spends a fortune on subsidised grain for the hungry, but an estimated two-thirds of it is stolen or adulterated by middlemen. The government pays for an $8 billion-a-year make-work scheme for the rural poor, but much of the cash ends up in the capacious pockets of officials who invent imaginary “ghost workers”.

.........

This month India’s unique identity (UID) scheme will enroll its 200 millionth member, having had almost none only a year ago (see article). By the end of this year, says Nandan Nilekani, a former software mogul who runs the project, the tally could stand at 400m, a third of all Indians. The scheme is voluntary, but the poor are visibly enthusiastic about it. Long lines wait patiently in the heat to have their fingerprints and irises scanned and entered into what has swiftly become the world’s largest biometric database.

For the poor, having a secure online identity alters their relationship with the modern world. No more queueing for hours in a distant town and bribing officials with money you don’t have to obtain paperwork that won’t be recognised if you move to another state looking for work. A pilot project just begun in Jharkhand, an eastern state, will link the new identities to individuals’ bank accounts. Those to whom the government owes money will soon be able to receive it electronically, either at a bank or at a village shop. Ghost labourers staffing public-works schemes, and any among India’s 20m government employees, should turn into thin air. The middlemen who steal billions should more easily be bypassed or caught.

............

Companies—and their customers—stand to gain from the system too. Mr Nilekani talks of India stealing a march on other countries if firms have an easy, secure way of identifying their customers. Banks will be more likely to lend money to people they can trace. Mobile-phone firms will extend credit. Insurers will offer lower rates, because they will know more about the person they are covering. Medical records will become portable, as will school records. Ordinary Indians will find it easier to buy and sell things online, as ordinary Chinese already do. Just as America’s Global Positioning System, designed for aiming missiles, is now used by everyone for civilian navigation and online maps, so might UID become the infrastructure for India’s commercial services.

Labels: India, nandan nilekani, UID

. Nepal PM to seek $1bn loan during India trip

The 57-year-old, who will be heading a 34-member entourage including his wife Hisila Yami and six ministers, said though there is no fixed agenda for the visit, the Nepal side is keen to have free and frank discussions on a wide gamut of issues which will focus on economic development, greater investment in Nepal, infrastructure, improved border management and review of past bilateral agreements between the two countries.

WB to give $400m over next two years

The assistance will come mainly on 15 major areas, including roads and power transmission and development projects, education, micro-finances, poverty reduction, agricultural sector and climate change and disaster mitigation, among others.

Nepali folk sensation Kutumba will play benefit concert in Madison, Wisconsin this Thursday

Kutumba is a six-person ensemble that marries indigenous Nepali music with more contemporary sounds. The group was founded after its members recognized the impacts of the caste system on traditional music in Nepal. Each caste primarily focuses on a single instrument, but the traditional folk music that had been passed down from generation to generation was slowly being replaced by modern music. Kutumba wanted to find a way to preserve traditional Nepali folk music, but also attract a younger generation by integrating modern influences.

Google helps track Nepal typhoid

Researchers say they have used GPS signalling and the latest DNA sequencing techniques to plot the course of the disease -- and have discovered the source of outbreaks is usually communal water spouts....Health workers visited typhoid patients' homes and used GPS technology to capture the exact location, which was then plotted onto Google Earth, which maps the Earth by superimposing images from satellites and aerial photography....They took blood samples from hospitalised patients to isolate the organism -- which mutates as it spreads -- and allow analysis of its genetic make-up to identify where the disease had started....The researchers found that people living near communal water spouts and those living at a lower elevation were at by far the greatest risk of contracting the disease.

Brokeback Everest: Nepal's Film Industry Embraces Gay Romance

From the end of a bloody armed conflict, to major political reform that turned the country into one of the world's youngest republics, to a massive social movement that formally recognized lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and intersex (LGBTI) rights, the country of 26 million has moved ahead of many of its South Asian and Western counterparts.

US appreciates progress in Nepal's peace process

The US officials said that they are keen to see Nepal develop a close partnership with the US in economic development, and specifically pointed out that Nepal and US can cooperate in hydropower and civil aviation sectors.

Nepal to put Mount Everest experience online

Nepal is preparing to launch a website allowing users to make a virtual tour of the country's popular tourist spots, including the world's highest mountain, officials said Wednesday. The site will contain computer-generated graphics of monuments and places of interest, allowing the web visitor to guide the viewpoint through a virtual tour, the Nepal Tourism Board said.

Labels: Everest, India, Kutumba, LGBT, Madison, typhoid, US, world bank

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Union leads to closure of Fire and Ice restaurant

Asian Development Bank projects four per cent growth in 2012 for Nepal Nepal slips eight positions down in the Economic Freedom rankings

Nepal has slipped eight position down to be ranked at 129th among the 141 economies with a score of 5.50 in this year’s Economic Freedom of the World report released here today. Last year, Nepal was at 121st rank with a score of 5.54.

World Development Report 2012: Gender Equality and Development shows that closing gender gap boosts growth

“Countries that create better opportunities and conditions for women and girls can raise productivity, improve outcomes for children, make institutions more representative, and advance development prospects for all,” it said, adding that in Nepal as many as 14 per cent married women are largely silent on how their earned money is spent. “But they are more actively involved in the decision making recently,” according the World Bank that revealed that women’s greater public voice not only benefits women and children but also men. “Giving women bigger say in managing forests in Nepal has significantly improved conservation outcomes too,” it added. “The disparities between boys and girls in primary education have almost closed over the past 25 years, and at the secondary level, the gaps are shrinking rapidly,” it said, lauding Nepal’s efforts in closing the gender gap.

National Information Technology Centre to be established in Hetauda

The Centre’s building will be constricted at the estimated cost of Rs. 300 million with the grant assistance of the Korean government

India set to overtake Japan as world's third largest economy

India is now the fourth-largest economy behind the US, China and Japan. Last year, Japanese economy was worth $4.31 trillion, while India´s was at $4.06 trillion. But after the devastating tsunami and earthquakes in March, Japan´s economy is expected to contract while India´s economy will grow between 7-8 percent this fiscal year.

Earlier, a report by PwC suggested that the Indian economy would surpass the Japanese economy in 2012. The IMF expects the Japanese economy to contract 0.7 percent this year while India is expected to grow 8.2 percent.

BFIs told to insure deposits up to Rs 500,000

Banks and financial institutions (BFIs) that were required to compulsorily insure deposits up to Rs 200,000 will now need to insure all deposits up to half a million rupees.

Labels: banks, central bank of nepal, china, gender inequality, India, IT, Japan, labor unions