Trump’s pivot

Why the dog did not bark?

If I remember my Sherlock Holmes right, this question was a key riddle in one of the mysteries penned by Arthur Conan Doyle.

Well, I am not equating the US president to that dog, but I think the shoe fits, particularly in finding a reason for Trump’s selective nyet (yes, he is pivoting strongly towards Russia; it was nyet in the USSR and now, post-USSR, too) for admitting people from Muslim-majority countries that are “terrorism-compromised”. Of course, no non-Muslim country has been or is likely to be so done in. Let us forget for the moment the Irish Republican Army, which as per reports had strong sympathizers in the US (the New England states). Israel? I will let that too slide.

I could never have been a media reporter. I had a strong urge to post this piece but I was procrastinating. In media terms, I let slip a chance for a scoop. Who did scoop? The venerable Washington Post, the proud inheritor of Robert Redford-Dustin Hoffman (Bob Woodward-Carl Bernstein) scooping legacy. So, I am OK with this, to be beaten to the punch by one of the Grand Masters of the business.

There were many hopeful sentiments about Trump doing a presidential pivot once ensconced in the White House. Yes, sure Trump did pivot, but not in the direction at least some hoped for. His pivoting resembled doubling down, if anything.

With the half-hearted mandate he has got, he has to assert himself in other ways, and pivoting contrary to expectations helps. How does he do it? He brings in his spokespeople (such an ugly phrase, so PC) to do the job of spinning. You have Kellyanne Conway and Sean Spicer doing it, in tandem.

I was quite sure why Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Egypt and Turkey too, were left out of the list of nyets. Cairo is a good city to have a Trump Tower. Of course, you also have Alexandria and Sharm el Sheikh – Trump Tower in the former and Trump Resort in the latter make good business sense.

Saudi Arabia would help make up the cost-cutting demanded by Trump on Air Force One by stiffing that Muslim-majority and “terrorism-compromised” (Remember Osama bin Laden was from Saudi Arabia) country.

Pakistan? Oh, that is a little bit tricky. Trump is addicted to tweeting. He is afraid that one day he may run out of issues to tweet on. Then, Pakistan is the reserve topic. And, it would be like two-birds in one stone. He would tweet at 3:30 AM (EST/EDT) how Obama cheated the nation by falsely claiming (Obama is a habitual liar; after he lied about where he was born) that Osama bin Laden was killed in Pakistan. Obama, oops, Osama, is still alive in Iraq. Of course, the tweet would end, “Sad”.

What about Turkey? Besides potentially lucrative branding deals in Ankara, and sea-side resorts (Black Sea) Trump can strike with Turkey (Trump will ignore that Erdogan is a Muslim and has already been compromised), if you remember the Cuban Missile crisis, it all started with the US positioning missiles in Turkey. Trump is not a student of history but he would get this tidbit, from Breitbart (or, is it Breitfart?). So, when (not if) Trump sours on Putin, Turkey would be a nice option to have. Hence, no nyet to Turkey. Oops, it will then be a resounding NO! To Russia.

So, it is not a single dog not barking. It is whole bunch.

But, thinking aloud, it may indeed be a single dog. Trump’s business.

Raghuram Ekambaram

   

Commentariat stupidity

Prologue

The above is the cover of the October 5^th-11^th issue of The Economist, suitably edited to stress upon the point I wish to make; how badly the country in question, the US, is being run in the context of the ongoing standoff between the two parties of governance. The Federal Government has shut down, more than in name. What exactly the Federal Government employees are advised to do till they are called back to work? The Economist in its characteristic in-your-face response says, “Put your feet up, open a beer and watch Congress implode” as the title of the infographic in its inside pages screams (see below)!

In short, the US is being deemed dysfunctional and the blame is squarely put on its politicians and also its system of governance, with checks and balances where, as of now, only checks are visible. There is no balance, to be explicit about it.

Introduction

It is typically people with a head full of gray hair or no hair who write columns / blogs / opinions in newspapers and e-news sites. Well, I have 7/8 head-full of gray hair and that is the reason I limit myself to quasi-public forum like my own blog space. In this post I am going to take on a bald media eagle whose column I unfortunately stumbled upon in a fully public space.

Thesis

Let me take you to the bald headed member of the commentariat. Given below is the piece I am going to shred to pieces. It is about ten days old, the time lag to be attributed to the time to gather my multi-dimensional outrage dimension by dimension and also the wait for the US system to implode. Now that both have happened, I am off from the gates!

The piece starts with what the young people of India want. This is a promising start because the young of today are the leaders of tomorrow, as the saying goes. But, what they want must be moderated by the wisdom of the baldies. No, the piece does not help. Instead, it takes their wishes at face value and as validating the core ideas of our republic. The youth are the republic and they want a presidential form of governance; who are you to say no, the article asks the other baldies and gray haired.

The article says that “Coalitions and concomitant pork barrel politics [my italics] increases uncertainty and impacts national interest and growth.” The stressed phrase, pork barrel politics is of American origin and that led me to understand that the author is enamored of the US system. Now, the logic of putting up the prologue must make sense. That model presidential form of government is creating chaos out of nothing. This is what our youth want. Good!

The “Westminster model of democracy is unsuitable for a stable government in India.” The piece is big on the requirement of stability, repeating it many times (I counted half dozen!). Two things. First, the presumption of the virtues of stability and the requirement of a stable government in a democracy.

Second, the issue that I will address first, the claim that there is a suitable model of democracy that is suitable to India. Barack Obama is comfortably ensconced in the White House and will not be evicted till January 2017. That is stability for you. And, that is why the Federal Government is undergoing such severe governance convulsions. Take that.

OK, if not the US model of democracy, what other models can we adopt, preferably without any adaptation to suit our genius? I need to explain a portion of the previous sentence. If we adapted any system, the commentariat will be upon us in a flash, just as it has done with the Westminster model. No adaptations; true to the original, in letter; spirit be damned.

The focus is on centralization of powers of governance; the fewer the better. This is absolute trash, particularly in such a severely heterogeneous country such as India. There are a number of statements that celebrate such centralization and I will pick only one. The objective of the Sri Lankan system is to “eliminate smaller parties from parliament so that a few major parties could populate the house.” In the recent elections in the northeast of Sri Lanka, the smaller party asserted itself, and could not be “eliminated”. The use of word “eliminate” in a conversation about governance! Abrades like sandpaper. I am wondering whether the writer ever read what he wrote. He is calling for the situation that led to the infamous Emergency!

If you have a powerful figure in governance without an effective counterbalance, you get Emergency. If you have a system of checks and balances, you become dysfunctional. Pick your poison, please.

The other systems mentioned in the article are those adopted in France, Germany, and for God’s sake, South Korea! Citing Germany, the writer calls for, at least wistfully, a unified government of the Congress and BJP. The communists may want to say something about that. Then, he calls for scaling up our own system as obtained in the panchayats encompassing areas of quite severe homogeneity to the whole nation, characterized by a more severe heterogeneity! Comparing Germany and India! He talks approvingly of the French system without ever giving even a nod to its negatives! The only acceptable point he made was that in Germany, “parties usually select competent people”, and that too only for nominated positions. Indeed, this undermines the writer’s thesis that it is the system that is to be set right! He, unfortunately, did not catch that irony.

Now, to the first point, about stability and democracy. Democracy is inherently chaotic, balancing the interest of the numerous competing groups. If a country experiences stability of government, there are only two possibilities. One, it is not a democracy. Two, the balance has been fine tuned. Obviously, rather, I would assume that the writer wants democracy for India. Therefore the first alternative is out. The second alternative is about the working of the system and is not a characteristic of the system itself.

This can be brought out by looking at the systems the writer did not deem necessary to mention, address. South Africa, Israel, Italy, Greece, Ireland. Why did the dog not bark, to ask the question that Sherlock asked of himself. Israel is a coalition of an uncountable number of parties and the government survives only because of the external threat. South Africa has such a dominant party governing the country, that it does not feel the need to be answerable to its own constituency. The less said about Italy or Greece, the better. Ireland is another fine example of democracy to be skipped over.

Why was Switzerland model of governance through referendum not mentioned? What about Japan? No democratic government has been able to extricate the country out of what indeed appears to be stasis. The UK, that hot seat of Westminster model is swinging on a vicious pendulum, between Labour and Tories, with Liberal Democrats adding fuel to fire.

Conclusion

To make it short, there is no system as of now that will provide a stable government that is guaranteed to be democratic and also answers to the competing forces in a democracy. And the writer did not even give a hint how such a system could be devised, what are its parameters. Then, why did he choose to write that piece? Is it worth the paper it was written on or the number of bytes it occupies in a server somewhere in the Information universe. No, but he has his acolytes and what do they say? See below:

Matches the guru's inanities,to be mild about it!

On the whole, I am thankful that he did, though! I could add to the list of my posts!

Raghuram Ekambaram

  

Rape, patriarchy, commodification of women, missing females, son preference etc.

I was planning to post this a few days ago and I am going to pay the price for the unconscionable procrastination. Given that a terror strike happened last evening, women issues have to take a backseat for now. That is, readership of my posts will reduce beyond zero. Let that be, I am resigned.

In India, women are raped at the rate of on(c)e every 20 minutes [1]. This translates into an annual rate of 26,300 (rounding off) rapes. This number seems to be OK as Wikipedia gives the number for 2010 at 22,172 [2]. Assuming that the national population stands at 1.21 billion, the annual rate reifies to 2.17 rapes per a population of 100,000. This again compares OK with what is given in the Wikipedia article, at 1.8 per 100,000.

For the sake of discussions, let us take the higher number. Oh, you say it is not high enough. I would not dispute you.

As far as estimating the prevalence of rape, the metrics stand confused and confusing. There are the questions of under- and over-reporting, simultaneously. Given that inconsistent definitions of rape, different rates of reporting, recording, prosecution and conviction for rape create controversial statistical disparities, the claim that  "no other major category of crime – not murder, assault or robbery – has generated a more serious challenge of the credibility of national crime statistics" than rape may not be all that far off from the true situation. Further, the India-specific cues, like rapes in rural areas, of women of disadvantaged groups, must add more, indeed more significantly. Therefore, let us take the higher number; indeed take it higher, by a factor of, say, 1.5. All said, let us settle at 35,400 rapes per year, 2.9 rapes per 100,000 population.

If you looked at the Wikipedia table, you would see that the rates for the various countries are all over the place. And, there are huge surprises. The stand out amongst what we would consider anomalies is Sweden, coming in at 63.5 rapes for 100,000 population. At a population of 9.3 million, 6,050 women were raped annually.

This is so surprising that Wikipedia deemed it necessary for Sweden to be given a separate sub-section in the article! It quotes the Swedish National Council for Crime Prevention “that it is not ‘possible to evaluate and compare the actual levels of violent crimes... between countries’, but that in any case the high numbers are explained by a broader legal definition of rape than in other countries, and an effort to register all suspected and repeated rapes.” This is what I took as the justification for raising the Indian rate by about 50%.

Let me now shift southwards and get to the Levant, Israel, from the Nordic country, Sweden. Why Israel? In the aftermath of the recent-horrific-gang rape-of-a-23 year old-female-student-in-a-moving-bus-in-Delhi, the Indian situation was blamed on patriarchy, son preference, commodification of women etc. On all of these, I have a strong feeling Israel leads the way. Hence, Israel.

Israel and Satan

I do not know what came over me one day when I was browsing titles in a book shop in a mall. My eyes happened on the book The Last Temptation by Nikos Kazantzakis (faber and faber, ISBN 0-571-17856-1) and I reached for it and made myself poorer by Rs. 450/-. After suffering through the book, I now realize that the Satan made me do it. As per the book, Satan almost succeeded with Jesus.

I was lucky the first time, when I escaped from the grips of Satan, after daring to watch the movie based on the book, directed by Martin Scorsese: for better or worse … a Catholic filmmaker. "I'm a lapsed Catholic. But I am Roman Catholic -- there's no way out of it" [3]. “Scorsese … seems unable to escape the mark of his formative faith.”

I saw the movie in 1988 and in the middle of a huge furor fuelled by Christians, denouncing the movie as blasphemous. But luckily I had moved away from any and all religions by that time.

I took a risk and let Satan tempt me again. As I remember now, after 24 years after seeing the movie, some portions of the story as given in the book seem to have skipped me. Or, perhaps the director felt too uncomfortable to include them in the movie.

On page 529, I read Satan in the guise of an angel consoling and counseling Jesus thus: “Only one woman exists in the world, one woman with countless faces… Mary Magdalene died, Mary sister of Lazarus waits for us, waits for you… Within her womb she holds–holds for you, Jesus of Nazareth-the greatest of all joys: a son, your son.”

In my way of thinking, the above is an endorsement of commodification of women – women are not differentiated, they are there only to produce sons of men. This, the Satan tells the Son of Man! Further, it obviously also endorses son preference.

In addition, Kazantzakis has Jesus saying these words, admittedly when the latter was hallucinating on the cross: “An infant sits mute and numb in the womb of every woman. Open the doors and let him out. He who does not beget, murders …” [p. 534]. The longing for son pervades the book. We know that Jews practice patriarchy; it is, after all, the patriarchs who are venerated in that set up, Abraham at the top. Of course, defenders of the faith will point out that to be acknowledged a Jew by the state of Israel one has to prove that his/her mother is a Jew, no matter who the father is.

I was wondering whether Christians were taking exceptions to these small vignettes in the movie! Were they arguing that Jesus never espoused such misogynist views? I suppressed these thoughts and let other facts that stared me in my eyes dominate my mind.

I did raise my eyebrows when I noticed that Israel is way ahead of us in the Wikipedia table, at 17.5 rapes per 100,000 population in 2008 when the population was around 7.3 million (some quick back-of-the-envelope and backward calculations). The total number of rapes in 2008 then works out to about 1,300. About 4 per day, about one in six hours, vis-à-vis three per hour in India.

Now, this sent me into a tizzy. One way of looking at the numbers, India comes out on top of Israel, one sixth of the rate per 100,000 (it does far better against Sweden, if you can believe it). The other way, for every Israeli woman raped, 27 Indian women are. So, where do we place ourselves?

What the numbers do not tell

The numbers do not help in establishing the cause-effect connection. India and Israel stand shoulder to shoulder in lowering the status of women in society – son preference, patriarchy, commodification of women. Historical and cultural legacy. But Sweden is in a different league by itself, a lot more enlightened on gender equity – they have mandated paternity leave! Yet, the numbers speak so totally ill of that Nordic country. On every developmental metric Sweden is near the top among the comity of nations. Yet, the rape numbers seem to murmur a different story.

Do the numbers lie?

We have to say yes.

What comparison, if any, can be made between India and Israel? None. The basic, undeniable conclusion I come to is aggregate or average /per capita numbers are most irrelevant in discussing as involved an issue as status of women and its consequences for them in society. No, this is not a call to put up one’s hands in total surrender.

Suppose, as a consequence of the current, highly justified huge cry for ensuring safety of women in public places, we find that crime reporting gets better. The numbers will show an uptick, will they not? This must be taken as good. But, if your position on the issue is pre-decided – that is, the government has failed in its efforts to provide a safe environment for women – you would skew the argument towards the higher number sans any further analysis.

This is precisely what the talking heads on TV channels do, to garner higher TRPs. It is not in their interests to let you think through the issues. The more passive you are the better it is for them. Now, they want the numbers to do their jobs. The fact that the numbers can be made to tell any story that you want them to tell is exploited to the hilt by motivated analysis and analysts, from the media, from the party in power, parties out of power, progressive as well as regressive (including religious) social outfits. Do you like to be buffeted by such winds?

Moral of the story

If you noticed, unlike any of my other posts, I have thrown a lot of numbers at the readers in this one. These were not well calculated, yet carried, even if only I were to say so, pseudo-legitimacy, merely by obfuscating the issue. This was deliberate.

If one wants to be a concerned citizen, the first thing to be done is to avoid seeking solutions from others. Develop a solution based on one’s own analysis and see what ideas that are floating fit best with it. Source numbers widely and analyze them independently. Then, give oneself to that line of thinking and take it further and take others along. This is “Satan avoidance”.

This is what Jesus failed to do on the cross when he cried, “Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani? that is to say, My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?” [4]

Never, even in moments of extreme distress like discussing highly fraught issues, never go begging to the media. If it is commodification of women, son preference, patriarchy that you wish to see the world rid of, do it yourselves at the scales you think you are capable, within your family even if only as pushing the ignition button. Never take the help of media. Verify numbers.

Raghuram Ekambaram

Reference

1.    http://shaktivahini.org/shakti-vahini-2/india-a-woman-raped-every-20-minutes

2.    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rape_statistics

3.    http://www.adherents.com/people/ps/Martin_Scorsese.html  

4.    http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Matthew+27%3A45-50&version=KJV