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I am just as keen on universal civil liberties as the next Samizdatista, however I must concede that the case of India vis-à-vis the Danish cartoons made me briefly question my blanket commitment to the freedom of the press. I yearn for a major Australian newspaper to have the stones to print these cartoons in self defence and defiance, however I would argue that any editor of an Indian publication who allows them to be published is astonishingly irresponsible, given India's history and continuing record of bloody communal violence. If these cartoons found their way into a publication with a moderate degree of circulation, the question would not be "will there be deaths?", but "how many?" Upon reflection, I certainly do not believe that government censorship is the answer, however it is marginally more justifiable there than in any other nation I can think of. Because of this, it is crucial that Indian editors exercise their judgement wisely - and not publish the cartoons. Hopefully there will come a time when India is not the exception (regarding this issue) amongst countries governed by the rule of law.

I should mention that I have huge faith in the wisdom of Indians.

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One of the advantages of having a comments section is providing me with new ideas to write about, even when the comment in question is so flat-out wrong that it makes me gape with amazement at the screen. In my recent post about the economic fallacies surrounding immigration, a commenter opined that Indian immigrants into the UK were leeching money out of this country by not re-investing it in new businesses but merely writing cheques to "inactive" folks back in the old homeland.

It is a lousy argument on a number of levels, and I am not even going to dwell long on the obvious dangers of inciting distrust and hostility towards economically successful immigrant groups and accusing them of not being sufficiently "patriotic" by not spending all their profits in Britain. The argument also fails because it ignores the subjectivity of economic value. If a businessman earns a million pounds in profit from a drycleaning business in Birmingham and sends the odd cheque back to his aged relatives in Bombay, then how is economic value being destroyed? In the eyes of the businessman, helping his loved ones is worth more to him than investing that money in something else, even though other people might disagree with that decision and think him to be deluded. It is none of my business to force a change in that decision.

Also, that businessman is doing something that supporters of a liberal civil society have traditionally supported: philanthropy. How can it be wrong for a man to steer a portion of his wealth to his dependants, educate them, feed and house them? Who gives any entity the right, least of all the State, the power to say yay or nay to that decision? The argument that such transfers are wrong is an echo of the old Bethamite notion that the State is entitled to seize wealth if that maximises the "greatest happiness of the greatest number".

A final point. No doubt large sums of money are paid by immigrants and migrant workers back to the points of origin all the time. This has happened for centuries. These transfer often sustained people in great hardship.

I have come across some dubious economic arguments in my time, but the idea that immigrants paying money to their folks is some sort of parasitical waste has to be one of the weakest.

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On the anniversary of last year's tsunami, is it time to revisit the damage that this natural disaster may have caused in Myanmar? The secretive and totalitarian government is not known for providing welfare to its citizens. The official death toll was finalised at 86, although sources from within the country placed the number of deaths in the hundreds.

The official death toll was established by the International Federation of the Red Cross (IFRC) in co-operation with the Myanmar Red Cross. The Myanmar Red Cross (pdf file) works closely with the Myanmar state and 23 members of the 37 member governing council are appointed by the government or act as representatives of its ministries. The IFRC, the Myanmar Red Cross, the United Nations Development Programme, UNICEF and World Vision were already working within the country and inspected the affected islands in January 2005. Their conclusions were in line with the government's assessment:

The group concluded that Myanmar has been largely spared from the destructive forces of the earthquake and subsequent Tsunami, and that the initial emergency needs have been met by the Government and by the aid community. The group’s assessment of the scale of impact is in line with the Government’s own findings. The group confirms a death toll of 60-80, and estimates the longer-term affected population at 10-15,000, of whom 5-7,000 are directly affected......

Over the course of the last 10 days a series of assessment and verification missions were undertaken by one or more of the partners already working in Myanmar - to the Rakhine Coast, the Ayeyarwady Delta and the southern coast including the most populated islands of the Myeik archipelago and the islands off Kawthaung around Lampi Island.

Moreover, Kerry Howley, assistant editor at Reason, questioned these statistics on January 7th 2005. All of the organisations that carried out the assessments were unlikely to disagree with the government's figures since they wished to continue their own work.

I spent last year working with a weekly newspaper in Myanmar, where I attempted to cover some of the worst floods to hit the country in 30 years. Getting people to talk about the flooding, which left thousands homeless last August, was tantamount to asking them to denounce the dictatorship. Government officials hung up when my translator asked for specifics (except for one who helpfully explained, "it's not our culture to talk to the public.") The government's Department of Meteorology and Hydrology would not reveal the water levels or would simply lie. The local Red Cross representatives claimed they couldn't tell me about the floods because the branch office in that area was, in fact, flooded. Major International NGOs like WorldVision were afraid their operations would be halted if they so much as revealed how many blankets they were distributing. After much hand-wringing, WorldVision representatives gave me the story, at which point a government censor perused the piece and expunged all reference to death and destruction.

One Year on: when will we know how many died in Myanmar? A United Nations report that 'agrees' with the Myanmar government's own figures should be treated with grave suspicion. The final damage and death toll remains hostage to the murderers of Yangon.

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Once 1989 had passed, the West assumed that communism had lost its power and would trouble vast areas of the globe. Its effects were confined to a few reactionary holdouts such as Cuba or Corin Redgrave and within a few years Soviet symbols had moved from shock to chic. Even the last of the totalitarian movements, the Sendero Luminoso of Peru, had been smashed.

Yet, despite this process of forgetting, it appears that the twenty-first century may witness self-styled revolutionary movements establishing dictatorships of the proletariat and peasants. The most vulnerable country is Nepal and it is disheartening to read of peasants rising up against their communist oppressors.

However, the Maoists have also received several setbacks in recent weeks. People living in 12 village development committee areas in the Dullu region - a heavily Maoist affected villages 600 kilometers west of capital - revolted against the rebels. The uprising began after the Maoists started forcibly recruiting full-time cadres. More than 20,000 people spontaneously organized a rally in the areas denouncing Maoist atrocities.

The Nepalese Maoists, masking their plans behind a demand for a constituent assembly, pose as would-be democrats whilst terrorising the areas of the country that they control. Recalling the fate of the Socialist Revolutionaries in 1918, one would hold out little hope of a Nepalese 'Constituent Assembly' holding power.

Yet even graver is the rapid spread of the Maoist 'Naxalite' insurgency in India which has spread to nearly half of the country under the apathetic eyes of the government. These Maoists are linked to the Nepalese party and, by employing the same tactics, hope to enjoy similar success. This increase in political risk threatens the future of India since investment shies away from countries threatened by war or terrorism.

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There is an interesting article on Reuters about how the vast Indian film industry, or 'Bollywood' as it is widely known, is reflecting something of an improvement in relations between India and its neighbour, Pakistan. The article says that Pakistanis, once badly portrayed in Indian films, now get a more rounded image.

It is always unwise to make big conclusions about a few examples of popular culture, but bear in mind that in nations like India, the movie industry has enormous influence, particularly over the young. And if millions of young Indian people increasingly come to look at their Pakistani peers as regular, ordinary folk, then something very positive is happening in one of the fastest-growing movie and entertainment businesses in the world. It is all the more heartening given that only a few years ago the airwaves were thick with fears about a major military clash between India and Pakistan over the disputed territory of Kashmir.

Globalisation in action, perhaps?

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Recently the IEA sent me a flier about this book in praise of globalisation, and I went round there and bought a copy from them (at an enticingly reduced price – thank you Adam). That second link is to an IEA review of the book. So far I have only read the Introduction, so I cannot offer you a review of my own, but already I am impressed.

I found especially interesting what the book's author Martin Wolf had to say about the World Bank, and about its boss at the time that he worked for it, Robert McNamara.

For some reason I have never really paid proper attention to the World Bank. I knew that I was vaguely against it. I suspected it of doing too many of the things that the globalisers who are the target of Wolf's book still complain about it not doing. But I had never really got to grips with the story. So this bit of Wolf's Introduction really struck home to me:

By the late 1970s, I had concluded that, for all the good intentions and abilities of its staff, the Bank was a fatally flawed institution. The most important source of its failures was its commitment to lending, almost regardless of what was happening in the country it was lending to. This was an inevitable flaw since the institution could hardly admit that what it could offer - money - would often make little difference. But this flaw was magnified by the personality of Robert McNamara, former US Defence Secretary, who was a dominating president from 1967 to 1981. McNamara was a man of ferocious will, personal commitment to alleviating poverty and frighteningly little common sense. By instinct, he was a planner and quantifier. Supported by his chief economic adviser, the late Hollis Chenery, he put into effect a Stalinist vision of development: faster growth would follow a rise in investment and an increase in availability of foreign exchange; both would require additional resources from outside; and much of these needed resources would come from the Bank. Under his management, the Bank and Bank lending grew enormously. But every division also found itself under great pressure to lend money, virtually regardless of the quality of the projects on offer or of the development programmes of the countries. This undermined the professional integrity of the staff and encouraged borrowers to pile up debt, no matter what the likely returns. This could not last – and did not do so...

Wolf's next paragraph starts predictably:

By that time I had had enough...

But then Wolf goes into a bit of detail, on the subject of India.

... I had worked on India as senior divisional economist for three years. During that time, my chief function, so far as the Bank was concerned, was to justify the provision of significant quantities of aid, even though this money was helping the government of India avoid desperately needed policy changes. As it turned out, those changes were made in a midst of a deep foreign exchange crisis in 1991, almost two wasted decades later...

And then Wolf hammers home the further point that his Indian experiences illustrate:

Unfortunately, lending too much was not the Bank's only fault. It also had to lend to governments. This had two undesirable consequences: it had to assume that the government represented the interests of the country; and it reinforced an unjustifiably collectivist view of that national interest. Bank lending made it easier for corrupt and occasionally vicious governments to ignore the interests and wishes of their peoples. By the end of my time at the Bank, I came to the conclusion that its borrowers fell into three categories - those that did not need the help; those that would not use the help; and those that needed the help and would use it. The Bank was constitutionally incapable of concentrating its efforts on this third, often quite small group. As a result, its efforts were often either unnecessary or wasteful. I therefore came to agree with most of the criticisms of aid that had long been made by the late Peter (Lord) Bauer.

Who he? (As the IEA's former editorial supremo Arthur Seldon would say.) He.

Wolf continues:

The realization that the institutions designed to oversee aspects of the global economy might fail, even though integration was an important element in successful development, has stayed with me to this day. To defend a liberal world economy is not to defend the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, the World Trade Organization or any specific institution. These must be judged - and reformed or discarded - on their merits...

The important thing to understand about foreign aid (which is what stupidly soft loans are) is that they do not merely fail to do good. They do active harm. They help to keep in place destructive policies and to keep in office vicious and destructive politicians and officials which and who might otherwise have been done away with. They do bad.

And the World Bank is all part of that sad story, and a very big one I should imagine.

Apologies if I am the last person who writes for or who reads Samizdata.net to have heard this item of news. But no apologies for posting what Wolf says about it, because he is not just saying it, on a blog or something. He is saying it in a big and important book which has the air of establishment-think about it. So the news here is not just that the World Bank is harmful and dangerous, but that People Who Matter are starting seriously to realise it. This is very good news indeed.

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One of the better ways to learn about policy trends, in any policy area, in any country, is to read something by someone who disapproves.

This article, about what its author thinks is wrong with all the various directions which Indian education is heading in, reads to me like a catalogue of all that is right about it.

Two trends in particular struck me as especially encouraging. First this:

A self reliant India needs very different intellectual support from the kind of intellectual labour envisaged by a government that in its enthusiasm for selling out to multinationals could only dream of bringing some outsourced functions of these multinationals into our country. …

"Self reliant" reads to me like "futureless backwater". So, what I take this to mean is that Indian education is now turning out people who are very employable indeed, and on the world market where the real money is to be made and where so much of India's economic future will be created.

And second, there is this:

A self reliant and democratic India also needs its citizens prepared for the globalised world not as cogs in the wheel, fulfilling some technical function, but as thinking beings able to defend and safeguard democracy. …

... which the guy put in italics of his own, meaning that this was his biggest point. "Preparing for the globalised world not as cogs in the wheel" sounds to me like preparing them against the globalised world. So what this all says like to me is: "The education system isn't turning out enough political mischief-makers."

There is also much complaint in this article about "para-education", which sounds to me like free enterprise education, rather than the state-provided shambles which most Indians were stuck with until recently.

So, then: India doing really well. This has been one of the decade's great Global Stories. Long may the story continue.

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Paul Staines has some views on the interesting changes going on in India.

My initial disappointment (and surprise) that the world’s largest democracy had rejected the right wing BJP-led coalition for the Congress party, the former home of Gandhian-Nehruvian socialism, has turned to near joy with the news that Sonia Gandhi has stood down in favour of Manmohan Singh, a man described by the Grauniad as "the poster boy of India's reforms, the architect of policies that turned India from a socialist behemoth into a regional economic power."

Manmohan Singh as Prime Minister means India will have an avowed admirer of Margaret Thatcher in charge. In 1991, with India facing financial crisis, he convinced Rajiv Gandhi to implement liberal reforms in one month.  He has described the changes he made:

We got government off the backs of the people of India, particularly off the backs of India's entrepreneurs. We introduced more competition, both internal competition and external competition. We simplified and rationalized the tax system. We made risk-taking much more attractive... [and] much more profitable. So we tried to create an environment conducive to the growth of business. We removed a large number of controls and regulations, which in the past had stifled the spirit of innovation, the spirit of entrepreneurship, and restricted the scope for competition, both internal competition and external competition. As a result, in the '90s, productivity growth in the Indian industry has been much faster than ever before.

He is pro-globalization and a critic of US and EU agricultural subsidies:

Globalization creates opportunities. As I said, freer trade, if it is genuinely free, and India's labor-intensive products can find markets abroad that will help to get new jobs in our country. That will help to relieve poverty.

I am sure he faces many challenges, the Congress party is allied with communists, but international investors and Indian entrepreneurs are sure to welcome a man once voted "Finance Minister of the Year" by European bond investors. Indeed his first mission has been to re-assure that he would implement a "responsible macro-economic policy... We'll bring in policies that will not hamper India's progress - policies that are pro-growth."

Paul Staines

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Free market people should not be depressed by the result of the Indian general election. The BJP government borrowed money hand over fist (India has a large government deficit) and spent the money on government road building projects and other such.

Of course the new Congress Party government (plus its socialist allies) is not going to be any better - but that is democracy.

If anyone knows of any government (democratic or undemocratic) that is cutting government spending I would be pleased to hear of it.

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India has closed the deal for the purchase of the 'Admiral Gorschkov', a Cold War era Russian aircraft carrier. It is expected this ship will come into service with the Indian Navy around 2008, just in time for the retirement of the INS Viraat, their current aircraft carrier.

It is quite interesting that there is a continuing armaments relationship between the Russians and India, despite the seismic geopolitical changes of the last decade. An untutored alien landing for the first time on Earth would make no sense of it. The roles of the US and the USSR in that region should be reversed, Russia should be partnered with the alternating military dictatorship and semi-democratic kleptocracies of Pakistan and the US with India, the oldest liberal democratic state in Asia.

Relations between nations have layers within layers and oft-times deep and conflicting historical roots, I am aware of some of the public history of the region, but cannot help wondering if there is a bit more to it, an unspoken geopolitical undertext.

India has centuries of liberal European traditions behind it. It is also not likely to change very much even under severe pressure. Generations would come and go before the paperwork for change was properly submitted, checked, authorized and filed. In a Cold War world the risk of India actually going Red was rather slim and thus of less worry than perennially unstable Pakistan.

Pakistan borders China and is within spitting distance of Russia across a ultra thin panhandle of Afghanistan. The region is wild and uncontrolled and right in the hotspot is the contested Kashmir Province. Given the location and the consistant interest in access to the oil and southern oceans shown from Tsarist through Soviet days, Northern Pakistan was absolutely ripe for fun and games with the KGB. It seems obvious checkmating this move was of far more Realpolitik value than telling the Indians how much we admired their history.

With the end of the Evil Empire, much of Geopolitics changed, but the full extent of the re-alignment of interests in this part of the world did not really click into place until September 11th, 2001. Islamic fundamentalists were already a clear and present danger to the Russians. Nutcases don't even have to board an airliner to get to Moscow. They can drive there. After 9/11 they were also top priority to the US.

Over the last century or so, the Russians have ticked off a lot of people on their borders and they know it. They've done a far better job at this than the US... so it is somewhat in their interest for the US to take the brunt of whatever direct ire is caused by sorting out the problems. Otherwise they would have to deal with it, and given their level of success in Afghanistan and Chechnya, I would not have much hope for solutions from that direction.

From the Russian viewpoint, it is ideal if the US stabilizes Pakistan and acts as the lightning rod for fundamentalist ire; meanwhile they help arm India so that in the worst case, a fundamentalist takeover of Pakistan, India can keep Pakistan occupied and looking away from Russian territory.

The Russians see the regional problems up front and personal; they are damned pretty much whatever they do and aren't very good at building stable liberal democracies. They haven't even worked the bugs out of their own yet. The US is somewhat less at risk from the downsides of action in the region since it is far, far away and bordered by oceans and democracies. Not that such is a total protection. It just means the crazies have to expend more energy and more resources to carry out their attacks. To put it bluntly, the US stands to lose a smaller number of cities to the fundies than would Russia.

So there is method to this madness. You just have to sit a moment in everyone's chair and ask 'what's in it for me?'

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More than 10,000 people, falsely declared dead in northern India by greedy relatives and corrupt officials in order to steal their land, are trying desperately to prove that they are really alive.

Fifty of the 'dead' staged a protest last week by shaving their heads in front of the state assembly building in Lucknow, the capital of Uttar Pradesh state. Lal Bihari Mritak, secretary of a pressure group, the Association of the Dead said:

The state refuses to accept that they are alive. If it did, it would mean altering the district revenue records and restoring to them their properties, which is something that dishonest officials oppose.

Mata Prasad, a petitioner explains how court cases can get bogged down for years in the over-burdened and corrupt judiciary.

I haven't had a hearing of my case simply because I can't afford to pay a bribe. My documents disappeared from court overnight and I now have to start from the beginning.

Lal Bihari fought for eight years to be declared alive again, and a Bombay producer now plans to make a film about his struggle.

I finally won the battle and was brought back to life in the revenue records.

It seems that the Indian state has achieved nirvana all states aspire to - the ability to literally decide about the life and death of their citizens.

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Thanks to Alex Knapp of Heretical Ideas for the link to this, which says that peace may have broken out between India and Pakistan. They aren't yet talking to each other about it, but touch wood, for the time being, they're doing it.

NEW DELHI (Reuters) - India said on Thursday it had begun pulling back its soldiers from the border with Pakistan and that the withdrawal would take about six weeks.

"The process has begun. This will take about one-and-a-half months. We are trying to do it faster," Defense Minister George Fernandes told reporters after addressing a conference of coast guard commanders.

The withdrawal will end the longest and biggest peacetime deployment in India's history. Pakistan has also announced it would withdraw its forces in response to the Indian decision.

The two countries massed nearly a million troops along their common border after a deadly raid on India's parliament last December that New Delhi blamed on Pakistan-based militants fighting its rule in Muslim-majority Jammu and Kashmir.

I seem to recall not a disagreement exactly, more like a friendly exchange of his fears and of my hopes which both of us shared – "I hope I'm wrong", "I hope I'm right", that kind of stuff - between me and David Carr about India and Pakistan. The trouble with predicting peace and of then getting (a little slice of) it is that peace isn't very newsworthy. War, on the other hand, gets absolutely everyone who ever told us so saying I told you so.

So anyway, I told you so.

Cue a nuclear attack by India. The Indians were withdrawing their forces because they didn't want to bomb them. No, please, no.

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Question: if someone wanted to swathe you in cloth dipped in turmeric water and then bury you alive in a pit, what would you say? Awww, c'mon, it's only for a minute or so, and in the 400 years of this tradition, no one has died yet (they say). Actually, the participants on the sharp end (or is it in the deep end?) are typically young children, it being far too terrifying a procedure to subject adults to. They say it's completely consensual, and after all, if the gods are not appeased, who knows what might happen! Naturally, the police don't want to intervene, because no one is calling them to do so.

Hang on a minute, one of those little children is bound to place a call to her local police station or submit a complaint in writing if there is any problem, isn't she? The fact that her parents are making her submit to being buried alive by putting the fear of the gods into her is neither here nor there, is it?

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India and Pakistan. Will they? Won't they? Will there be mushroom clouds over Peshawar or will it all amount to nothing more than sporadic mortar fire, vigourous fist-shaking and some spectacular face-pulling before all parties come grudgingly to the table to thresh out their differences? I couldn't tell you because I just don't know.

The preponderance of opinion, though, seems to be that it won't go all the way. That both parties have far too much to lose from all-out, balls-out war and, consequently, the instinct of self-preservation, if not common humanity, will win the day. I don't regard this as a misapprehension. After all, both India and Pakistan do have a lot to lose from all-out war, particularly if it escalates to the point where plutonium bhajias are being lobbed over the Line of Control, and I am sure that this is not lost on the polity of either protagonist. But just because war would be a disaster, that doesn't mean it won't happen anyway.

We in the West find it very difficult to contemplate true catastrophe so we tend to assume rather too glibly that such catastrophe is not possible because catastrophe leaves a vasy body-count in its wake, not to mention the damage it causes to many investment portfolios. But have we not been lulled into a false sense of guarded optimism by the 20th Century? The Century that saw the Nazis buried by the Allies in Word War II, the Soviet Union laid low by capitalism and France beaten by Senegal in the World Cup (Alright the last one happened in the 21st Century but I am just too pleased not to mention it).

In other words, our generation has become well used to seeing the world in terms of the rise of badness and madness being overwhelmed by the onward march of goodness and reason. Those of us born post-WWII have been particularly fortunate to have lived through an era of relative peace where 'war' is played out on TV and mostly consists of a bit of a fracas followed by a peace process. So many times have we seen these melodramas played out that they have become the topography of conflict. We assume that the men in uniforms will be free to do their thing for a short period before everyone calms down and the men in suits step in to press flesh and hammer out some sort of deal. But we may forget that this is a manifestation of our era and not an eternal truth and all eras have to come to an end sooner or later.

'Jaw-jaw is better than war-war' has been the axiom of our age. 'There is no substitute for victory' may be the axiom that replaces it.

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With all attention focussed on the Middle East, it might be easy to forget the India .v. Pakistan conflict which, according to this report has moved another half-notch up the ratchet.

Of course, it may be nothing more than a brief intensification of the sporadic skirmishes that have been bubbling under for the last few months but, coming on the back of the news that Delhi has expelled the Pakistani Ambassador, a lot of the ingredients of all-out, balls-out war look like they're falling into place.

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Suman Palit over on The Kolkata Libertarian has been prognosticating with considerable plausibility on various nightmare scenarios for the Indian sub-continent. His view on where some of those scenarios could lead are:

In 2050 A.D., Sudan and Botswana surpass the Indian GDP, organize pop-rock concert to deliver food aid to Calcutta.

Not vastly optimistic then, Suman?