This essay was published by firstpost.com at https://stg.firstpost.com/opinion-news-expert-views-news-analysis-firstpost-viewpoint/shadow-warrior-the-us-midterm-elections-and-implications-especially-for-india-11146761.htmlThis is being written on the eve of the US midterm elections, and so far as can be gathered from voluminous punditry, it appears the Democrats are going to take a direct hit. Normally the ruling party loses seats in the midterms, but this time the loss could actually turn into a rout, especially because of inflation and high interest rates.If the opinion polls are correct, and there is no hanky-panky at the voting-booth, chances are that the Republicans will gain control over one or both of the upper and the lower house: the Senate and the House of Representatives. This means that Joe Biden will be a lame duck, and his far-left, ‘woke’ agenda will be stymied by continuous obstruction by the Republicans.US election issuesDemocrats are on the defensive on many issues that are top of mind for the US voter: * Inflation and the economy* Abortion and women’s rights* Immigration and border control* Climate change* Law and order* The war in Ukraine* The Trump factor and the 2020 electionUndoubtedly there are other, local issues that concern voters, but on the national level this is what they will bring to the voting booth on November 8th. In general, there is a backlash to the extreme-left politics espoused by the ‘progressives’ who appear to have hijacked the Democratic Party.Inflation is hurting people directly (at about 8%, a 40-year high, and very visible in the price of staples like food and petrol). Naturally, those in charge in times of trouble take the blame, whether it is deserved or not. As the Fed tightens, there will be job losses; there already are, in Big Tech, eg Twitter and Meta, including for other reasons. Small businesses are hurting, too. The abortion issue looked like a major galvanizing force a few weeks ago when the US Supreme Court overturned the legendary Roe v. Wade decision, but it has faded in importance except for the activist leftist faction within the Democratic party (the so-called ‘progressives’).Relatively uncontrolled immigration through the porous southern border is an emotive issue in border states such as Texas. With riots in several cities, ‘defund the police’, and general mayhem such as repeated school shootings, rampant gun violence, breakdowns in law and order may be an emotive issue. Climate change is less of a concern than it had been earlier, because it is increasingly clear that there will be pain to the general public in making a move to renewable energy. The Ukraine war, although it has some bipartisan support, is dragging on, and is correctly seen as a factor in increasing oil and gas prices, as well as food prices. Former President Trump is still a factor in the Republican party, and quite a few members of that party are convinced that the 2020 elections were flawed at best, and stolen at worst. Finally, one of the imponderables is the ‘swing vote’: groups that may be persuaded based on specific issues. Swing votersIt appears that there are only two genuinely committed votebanks: one is the mostly white, young-ish, college-educated ‘liberal’ Democratic cohort, that comprise the ‘progressives’ of both the East Coast and California. The other is the rural, again mostly white, older, non-college-graduate ‘conservative’ cohort, which has been dependably Republican for long.Black voters have been Democrat-leaning for years, and that will continue to be the case. Other groups, for example Latinos (Spanish speakers, or their descendants, often immigrants from Mexico, Central America, Cuba and so on), may well change their allegiance. Latinos were dedicated Democratic voters, but they have shown signs of defecting in droves because of the overly-socialist noises coming from the Democrats. Latinos who escaped from leftist ‘paradises’ like Cuba and Venezuela have no illusions about the pleasures of socialism and communism.Similarly, Indian-Americans in America have been dependably Democratic-leaning. That party was seen as immigrant-friendly, minority-friendly, etc. but as Indians (as well as other Asian-Americans) see the appalling deterioration in their cities, they are beginning to sour on extreme-left Democrats. For instance, Asian-Americans spearheaded the recall of school board members and a district attorney in San Francisco. Unfortunately, those Indian-American legislators (you know who they are) who are most woke and most anti-India are unlikely to be dislodged as their constituencies are leftist strongholds.Put all these factors together, and unless there is widespread voting fraud (the US equivalent of booth-capturing), it is hard to see how the Democrats are going to avoid a disaster. A lame-duck President Biden has consequences for the rest of the world, too.Global implications from a lame-duck US PresidencyWhat are the implications? On the one hand, a number of the problems facing the world at the moment can plausibly be traced back to the US, and to be fair, they were not all created by the Biden Administration. But Biden has certainly exacerbated things, leading to global pain.The four big problems are: 1. The coronavirus, 2. Inflation, 3. The Ukraine war, 4. Dependence on China. It seems increasingly likely, despite strenuous objections and attention-diverting tactics by the US medical establishment led by Anthony Fauci, that the Covid pandemic is the result of a lab-leak from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, where experiments in ‘gain-of-function’ were being carried on, with American funding channeled through Peter Daszack’s Ecohealth.Impact: Ideally, in a lame-duck Biden regime, the US comes clean on the whole virus conspiracy.The massive money-printing exercise and largesse (a few thousand dollars to every US taxpayer as stimulus payments) have led to too many dollars chasing too few goods, the textbook definition of inflation. This structural problem was exacerbated by supply-chain disruptions (read imports from China) due to the coronavirus and the Ukraine war. Impact: Instead of throwing good money after bad, as in the ill-considered and Orwellian Inflation Reduction Act, a chastened Biden regime might pursue more sensible fiscal policy.Speaking of the Ukraine war, neutral observers are hard pressed to see how it has helped anybody, other than the pals of the Deep State, for whom increased military spending means a windfall. Atlanticist Democrats with Eastern European ancestry have dragged the US into some obscure blood feud of theirs with the Russians. Starved of Russian energy supplies, Western Europe is likely to suffer a cold winter and find that its industry is severely damaged. Impact: With the prospect of a loss in the midterms, WaPo reports that the hitherto pugnacious Biden crowd is telling Zelensky to seek a negotiated end to this pointless war. That is a relief.Through a series of poor strategic decisions, the US has made itself almost fatally dependent on China as a supplier. While it is not impossible, a decoupling of supply chains (the China + 1 strategy) is difficult. Apple is the latest company warning that its production in China is taking a hit partly because of Foxconn’s well-publicized troubles with pandemic lockdowns. Impact: This is the one Biden policy that makes sense: isolate China and deny it technology. Biden has been China-friendly but the U-turn will get bipartisan support. There are some other secondary implications: for instance, the Republicans may probe the Hunter Biden laptop and its damning contents. This could potentially lead to a Biden impeachment, which would then make Kamala Harris the US President. That would be an outcome with many implications, especially for comedians and talk show hosts. The impact on IndiaIndia is low on Joe Biden’s priority list: he hasn’t even bothered to confirm his ambassador to India, although that may be a blessing in disguise. Eric Garcetti, the designate, is a Los Angeles party hack who is being kicked upstairs after a disastrous showing in his home town as mayor. In the 21st century, under Democratic Presidents Clinton, Obama and Biden, it has been clear that America is not exactly India’s friend. That was perhaps fortunate, given Henry Kissinger’s dictum: “It may be dangerous to be America’s enemy, but to be America’s friend is fatal”. Biden’s most prominent action regarding India was the futile effort to bully India into joining the US-NATO camp regarding Ukraine. His officials have taken ‘revenge’ in a number of petty ways, including the denial of visa appointments (when last checked, the waiting time for a visitor visa in Delhi was 880 days. Contrast this with just 2 days in Beijing).Then there was the announcement of $450 million worth of enhancements to their F-16 fleet to Pakistan, followed by the release of that country from the FATF gray list, as well as the approval of a billion-dollar IMF bailout package. A less woke, lame-duck US Administration may well be in India’s interest. The more worried the US gets about China, the more value they see in the Quad, as the Trump Administration did. In that sense, continuing frictions between the US and China would be useful to India, as indeed also a full-fledged Thucydides Trap of all-but-war between them.Similarly, a less cocksure US Administration may want to bring the Ukraine war to an end with a face-saving exit for all concerned. Nuclear brinkmanship is not good for business in general, and if pushed, the Russians may in fact use tactical weapons, or worse. Nuclear war always seems like a bad idea, including with China over the latter’s likely invasion of Taiwan. We don’t know the unintended consequences.On the other hand, any commercial pressure that the US puts on China is good as far as India is concerned. Presumably the chip wars, wherein the US is apparently intent on putting the brakes on Chinese development and manufacture of leading-edge semiconductors, will continue or gain momentum. That is in the US interest, and incidentally in India’s as well, as India tries to attract more investment into its own chip industry.On average, a lame-duck Biden Presidency is a reasonably good outcome for India. If 2024 brings back a Republican Presidency (not necessarily Donald Trump) that too may be a good thing. The decline of the woke ‘progressives’ is good; however the hostility of the Deep State and the Military-Industrial Complex is not going to diminish until and unless India becomes a major economic and military power; which of course will happen by 2047. 1720 words, Nov 7, 2022 This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit rajeevsrinivasan.substack.com

This essay was published by firstpost.com.The Hero’s Journey is a common metaphor used by storytellers from the Ramayana to the Iliad, and in innumerable modern works. You have the hero rising, then facing odds that are so overwhelming that he is on the verge of failure, but he often wins in the end, and is transformed or redeemed in the process. And indeed, for each of us, our own lives are heroes’ journeys, as the mythologist Joseph Campbell elucidated in a series of excellent documentaries.Both the recent films Kantara and Rocketry: The Nambi Effect, in my opinion, fall into this broad categorization; but what’s notable and different is that they are about very Hindu heroes, quite a departure from the standard Indian film (especially of the Urduwood variety) where overt Hindus are usually depicted with contempt or disgust. The two films are very different from each other, of course, but it is telling that they both resonate with audiences, in a visible departure from the conventional wisdom that holds that neither a Hindu nor a nationalist should be depicted with sympathy, and especially not a Hindu nationalist. There is another Hindu meme: the local and the national are not meaningfully distinct, just as the Atman and Brahman are not. Kantara, set in the Tulu-land of Dakshina Kannada district, Karnataka, is instantly understandable to Hindus anywhere; and Rocketry, the story of a patriot of Tamil origin living Thiruvananthapuram, who is attacked and to whom tejovadham is done by mysterious, malign forces, is understandable to any Hindu, we whose face hostility in India and elsewhere.When I saw Kantara, I was surprised by how normal the story was to me: of course, obviously, there are spirits, or demi-gods/daivas all around. This is something that I grew up with. I remember as a small boy being taken by my grandfather to the bharani festival of the village Devi temple in central Travancore: there were wondrous, magical things there then. Much later, I watched theyyams in Malabar, which is adjacent to Tulunadu, and the wonderful costumes are almost identical to those in the Bhoota kola depicted in the film; some of most impressive were thee-pothi (the fire-goddess) and the gulikan (the fierce deity identical to guliga in the film), especially as they performed at dusk. The belief in possession by spirits, as in the hypnotic sarpam-thullals (serpent-dances) of Travancore or of velichapads (oracles) in many parts of Kerala, holds no surprises for me. It is easy for a practicing Hindu to believe in them. It is not hard to imagine benign (and malign) spirits all around, for example as in O V Vijayan’s story The Little Ones, luminous ancestral spirits that help in times of trouble. I had a personal experience of the Divine, on my first trip to Sabarimala when I was a teenager. It was an incredible religious experience: for a moment, a glimpse of something extraordinary, a powerful vision of the Infinity of Grace. My friend, a doctor, tells me of medical miracles that can only be attributed to the power of prayer and Divine Grace.In Kantara, the protagonist Siva consistently and carefully avoids the bhoota kola, as he was traumatized by the unexplained disappearance of his father, the oracular dancer of the village. He tries to lead the life of a carefree youth, drinking, hunting wild boar and getting into fights; but the panjurli daiva calls to him in his dreams. Spoiler alert: his hero’s journey culminates in a spectacular finale.In Rocketry, the fictionalized story of the real-life Nambi Narayanan, the hero’s journey is even more evident. After early and brilliant success as a rocket engineer, his life and career were ruined in what was apparently a sordid combination of commercial sabotage by a three-letter acronym spy agency, and a power struggle among Congress politicians in Kerala, with some corrupt policemen in the mix.Even if it is a little exaggerated for rhetorical purposes, Nambi Narayanan’s efforts to convince Rolls-Royce’s head (a Scot), the French Ariane rocket program, and the Soviet cryogenic labs to transfer technology and know-how to ISRO are amazing stories that I too had not heard, even though I live in Thiruvananthapuram, where Narayanan and Abdul Kalam did their work on solid and liquid-propelled rockets. Despite Narayanan’s value to the Indian space program, and the evident holes in the 1994 Maldivian spy story (see my Rediff column Who killed India’s cryogenic engine?) it took a court saga of 24 years to clear his name, and to get the redemption he deserved (a Padma Bhushan in 2019). In the meantime, India’s cryogenic engine was delayed by 19 years. What is remarkable in the film -- and it is disturbing that this should even have to be highlighted -- is that Narayanan is shown as an unapologetic Hindu. There is nothing whatsoever that prevents an observant and pious Hindu from also being an engineer and scientist: no dogma. But the prevailing filmi wisdom, which has become “truth by repeated assertion” is that Hindu rituals are superstition, but Abrahamic superstition is somehow ‘scientific’. The very fact that such films are being made, and are becoming blockbusters, shows that the narrative is shifting (the so-called Overton window). There is pushback, though: a little-known band in Kerala is suing Kantara over the song ‘Varaha-roopam’, which has Sanskrit lyrics and traditional tribal music. Because traditional knowledge cannot be copyrighted, it is likely that their intellectual property claim is not sustainable.There were also people grumbling that Narayanan was lionized and that he wasn’t as key to ISRO’s success as the film makes him out to be. Maybe, but even if it was 50% exaggerated, he is still an amazing engineer and manager, and in any case it was unconscionable by any measure to torture him for 50 days, defame him, and destroy his career. Those who ordered the hit have never been named. My heroes have long been those among us who fight for Dharma and righteousness: Professor Eachara Warrier, Major Shaitan Singh. I am happy to now add Dr Nambi Narayanan to that list, and perhaps Siva, who brings to life the forest deities.1020 words, 3 Nov 2022 This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit rajeevsrinivasan.substack.com

A version of this essay was published by firstpost at https://www.firstpost.com/india/75-years-have-midnights-children-come-of-age-11093221.htmlIt is a bit of a coincidence that, just around the 75th anniversary of India gaining political independence from the British, Salman Rushdie should be in the news again, because he was stabbed in Chautauqua, a literary watering-hole in upstate New York. His book Midnight’s Children was, as is well known, a sensation when it first came out some forty years ago, in 1981.The central conceit in the book is that 100,000 children born all over India on or around midnight on August 15th, 1947, are endowed with magical powers. Their lives are an allegory for India’s progress. It is a picaresque romp centered around the protagonist, Saleem Sinai, who can telepathically connect with and organize them. When I first read the book, I was impressed by the verbal pyrotechnics, and more so the clever interweaving of contemporary events into the magical realism of the ‘children’s’ lives. The great human tragedies and triumphs of Bharat, that is India, are a rich mother-lode to mine for fiction, and another example is the re-telling of the Mahabharata by Shashi Tharoor in The Great Indian Novel. But over time, the book’s impact faded for me. Even though I didn’t pay attention to it on first reading it, now I see it as significant that Saleem Sinai’s principal rivals among the children are ‘Shiva’ and ‘Parvati-the-witch’. Interesting choice of names, wouldn’t you say? A bit like Deepa Mehta’s choice of Radha and Sita for Fire, which I criticized as dog-whistle Hindu-hatred at the time in The problem with Fire.Thank you for reading Shadow Warrior. This post is public so feel free to share it.Nevertheless, Rushdie’s and the book’s charm obviously did not fade for the Anglosphere, because it fit into their world-view of India, as an exotic, barbaric country where bizarre things happen. They awarded it a Booker Prize, and later a Booker of Bookers, basically dubbing it the best book to have been written in English in decades. Rushdie rode his new-found stardom to riches and influence, and became a sort of seer on all things related not only to India, but also literature in general. And he physically moved to the Anglosphere, all the better to suit his new status as an oracle. In this he trod a well-trodden path which, for example, Amartya Sen and V S Naipaul also followed. More on that by and by.If I am not mistaken, Rushdie’s output after Midnight’s Children is hit-and-miss. His only other work that gained fame (notoriety?) was The Satanic Verses, but that was for other reasons, not literary merit. Since I haven’t read that book, I have no particular opinion on it, and the politics is anyway complicated because of Shia-Sunni issues and internal Muslim issues of blasphemy. But I am now beginning to wonder if Rushdie is also a one-horse wonder, like Arundhati Roy. I have not read her The God of Small Things, but her trajectory has been similar to Rushdie’s: one hit, instant elevation to global stardom and a bully pulpit from which to spout all sorts of radical ideas. A pliant Anglo media piled on and lionized both, regardless of actual merit. Furthermore, I am struck by the parallels with Amartya Sen, who also parlayed fame from early works into global demi-god status, marriage into the Rothschild empire, and a Nobel Prize (although technically it is only the Swedish bank’s prize for economics). His theories about the ‘Kerala model’ of development turn out to be pure bunkum, but then who’s counting? Which reminds me, I suspect the always au courant Scandinavians will now award the Nobel Prize in Literature to Rushdie as a knee-jerk reaction to the stabbing, as they awarded the Peace Prize to Barack Obama basically because, he was, well…. black. Well, bully for Rushdie!That, of course, is pure speculation. But the comparison with Naipaul is interesting. Both made Britain their home, and both commented on India in less-than-flattering terms. Naipaul’s An Area of Darkness was fierce, disappointed, and condemnatory. But the difference is that Naipaul, over time, became convinced that India was on the rise. Rushdie, so far as I can tell, does not see any future for India, nor anything worth celebrating.Maybe that’s why I like Naipaul, because he agrees with my prejudices; but objectively speaking his writing has greater insight. Here’s an excerpt from Naipaul’s India Today article on the occasion of the 50th Independence Day. I think that within every kind of disorder now in India there is a larger positive movement. But the future will be fairly chaotic. Politics will have to be at the level of the people now. People like Nehru were colonial-style politicians. They were to a large extent created and protected by the colonial order. They did not begin with the people. Politicians now have to begin with the people. They cannot be too far above the level of the people. They are very much part of the people. The Nehrus of the world have to give way now to the men of the people...It is important, in this apparent mess, for two things not to be interfered with. One is economic growth. I would like to see that encouraged in every way. It is the most important news coming out of India, more important than the politics. I would like to see education extended and extended. If this were to happen, and I feel it might, gradually, the actual level of politics will reflect both the economic life and higher level of education.Rushdie doesn’t have that sympathy, nor the realization that there is something behind the chaos. Fair enough, he is entitled to his opinion. But the point at which I personally became annoyed with Rushdie was when he proclaimed (like Macaulay before him) that there is nothing worthwhile in modern Indian-language literature. I knew this to be false because there is proof of existence: I had read O V Vijayan, Thakazhi, S K Pottekkat, Basheer, Anand, and M Mukundan in Malayalam; Ashapurna Devi and Tarasankar Banerjee in translation from Bengali; S L Bhyrappa in Kannada and a host of other world-class writers. For Rushdie to blithely denigrate them all showed both arrogance and ignorance, typical of India’s ‘liberals’. In fact, it is India’s English-language output that is inferior and derivative. With the exception of a few tour-de-force works such as Vikram Seth’s Golden Gate and Amitav Ghosh’s The Shadow Lines, there’s nothing unique or noteworthy that will stand the test of time. Even Rushdie’s magical realism, I found out, pales before Vijayan’s 1960’s The Legends of Khasak with its shape-shifting odiyans and the disembodied flying oracular head of the ancient magician Kandath Nair; not to mention Gabriel Garcia Marquez’ 1970s English publication of One Hundred Years of Solitude.Thanks for reading Shadow Warrior! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.It also turns out that Naipaul was right: 25 years later India is finally on an upward trajectory (that graphic from the FT is interesting, although it misrepresents India’s external boundaries). The colonialists are dead and buried, and ordinary men are now taking India forward. With economic growth, everything comes your way; and yes, the education system still sucks, as it’s infested with English and anti-national woke leftism (alas, also derivative and unoriginal). A Rushdie, steeped in the groupthink of Lutyens and Khan Market, has simply failed to see this, which  may mean he lacks the empathy, understanding, and feelings the greatest writers possess. The children and grandchildren of ‘midnight’s children’, however, see this.And what of the real midnight’s children? Hat tip to @NAN_DINI:  they are honoring the flag. They believe. Now personally, I am a little ambivalent about the ‘fly the flag in every house’ request by Prime Minister Modi. Of course, in my neighborhood in leftist paradise Thiruvananthapuram, hardly anybody took up his clarion call. Besides, I feel a little queasy about the American kitsch of flag-waving jingoism. In addition, flying the national flag from temples bothers me. I believe in the separation of ‘church’ and state; and I honestly think the interference of politicians in temples is an abomination. But I guess this Magnificent Generation that suffered through fifty years of kakistocratic dynasty mis-governance (see my earlier piece The Nehruvian Penalty: 50 wasted years) deserves to be applauded because they still believe. I do, too, but maybe I am an old cynic. I am not as old as them, but I remember suffering through those awful years of PL-480 and war and shortages of everything. I left, but then I returned because I, too, do believe. Giving credit where it’s due, I applaud Rushdie for coming up with the vanity of ‘midnight’s children’ and giving it a lot of airplay. But I’m afraid they, and their children and grand-children, have left Rushdie behind. They have moved on. He hasn’t, like the rest of the Anglo-Mughlai elite. Rushdie, midnight’s child himself, stayed stuck in the past while the others moved ahead. And that can become an avalanche, an irresistible force, if all goes well.1470 words, 18 Aug 2022 This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit rajeevsrinivasan.substack.com

A version of this essay has been published by swarajyamag.com at https://swarajyamag.com/culture/cinema-as-metaphor-enough-with-trashing-hindu-sentiment-especially-as-streaming-largesse-fadesThe ongoing debate about three Hindi/Urdu films: Lal Singh Chaddha, Shamshera and RakshaBandhan is interesting. Social media is trending calls to boycott all three because they show Hindus and Hinduism in a bad light. They are not all released yet, so in some cases it is the antecedents of the principals, and their prior bad behavior, that is triggering boycott calls.This is intriguing for several reasons: one is that usually passive Hindus are standing up for their faith in peaceful dissent; two is that cinema has such deep visceral impact that they can manufacture the truth; three is that the financials don’t add up; four is that we may have passed peak Hindi/Urduwood; and five is the persistent hypocrisy of the ‘liberal’ crowd screaming about freedom of expression within weeks after they urged a boycott of The Kashmir Files and grumbled about devout Hindu Nambi Narayanan in Rocketry: The Nambi Effect. I confess I am not a regular film-goer, especially not someone who habitually watches Hindi/Urdu films, although at one time I was a fan of the New Wave of independent/realist films in Hindi, such as Bhuvan Shome, Albert Pinto, Aakrosh, Garam Hawa, Uski Roti. The last two films I saw in theaters were Tanhaji and The Kashmir Files. This is partly because I find the increasingly Urduized lingo in mainstream films simply incomprehensible. Streaming video’s subtitles do help.I used to see a lot of Malayalam films. Often New Wave, low-budget, realist (and outstanding) films, such as Piravi, Uttarayanam, Kanchana Sita, Vaastuhara, Elippathayam, Swayamvaram (but now I watch mostly mainstream films streamed on OTT). Malayalam mainstream film is where I first encountered what has now become endemic enough to outrage a lot of viewers: the casual or deliberate attack on Hindus and Hinduism. The specific film that first sensitized me was 1973’s Nirmalyam, which won national awards. The climactic scene has a velichapad, or temple oracle, spitting on the deity at the small, poor Hindu temple that he had served all his life, in despair that his life was ruined, and he falls down dead. Notably, the very fine actor was a Christian named P J Antony. (You might remember another Christian years later in Kerala who was accused of blasphemy and had his hand cut off.) What staggered me was that you would never see such a scene about any other religion in even the most ‘progressive’ Malayalam films, as it would be blasphemous, and there would be umm… consequences. But in the lexicon of leftist ‘intellectuals’, such a narrative demeaning Hindus is acceptable, and the director/writer went on to win the Jnanpith for his body of work about decadent Nair families: after all, the Akademi was dominated by people with similar views.I began to notice that Hindu swamis are inevitably portrayed as crooks, rogues or cheats in Malayalam films, whereas Christian padres are uniformly holy and kind, and Muslim mullahs always stern but with a heart of gold. That is a standard leftist narrative. Over time, the narrative has become rigid, and even in fictional retellings of real incidents where an Abrahamic hurt a Hindu, the roles are reversed, so that the villain is always a Hindu. Over time, as wealthy Christians began to fund the films, their stories began to take center stage, but the motif of Hindu-hatred continued. Now the majority of films are funded by wealthy Muslims, but the Hindu-hatred is unabated. I think this is pretty much the case in Hindi/Urdu films too now, where it is par for the course to mock Hindus, Hindu religious rituals and deities. The demonization in Malayalam is so extreme that a recent film, Meppadiyan, was attacked simply because it had a staunch and religious Hindu protagonist, and featured a Sewa Bharati-funded ambulance! This is reaching absurd levels of ‘cancel culture’, in effect denying Hindus the very right to exist. It is normalizing the idea of ethnic cleansing and genocide. The twitter handle @GemsofBollywood has documented widespread Hindu-hatred in Hindi/Urdu films, including surprising ones going way back into the 1970s. Certain script-writers specialize in mocking Hinduism; well-known actors too, including those with known sympathies to Pakistan, Turkey, Qatar etc. The evidence is overwhelming, and social media is making ordinary Hindus aware of it, whereas the mainstream media buried it. That is point number 1: Hindus, fed up with this attack, are reacting in peaceful, legal, Gandhian ways, boycotting them. It is both tactical (“I’ll put my money where my mouth is”) and strategic, because films with their visceral impact have an outsize chance of becoming ‘The Truth’. They mold and cement lasting public perceptions, which is point number 2, as with Hollywood’s creation of massive US soft power. For instance, there were several films in the works for the 2021 centenary of the Moplah riots and massacres, rapes, and forced conversion of Hindus in Malabar. Most of them planned to show the rioters as heroic figures; but a public outcry forced them to go slow. The only one that seems to be finished is sympathetic to the Hindu victims: it is From River to River (Puzha muthal puzha varey), and it is apparently planned for release. Obviously, boycotts will hurt films’ revenues, which brings up point number 3: it is not clear that things are on the level. There are hundreds of films being produced in Malayalam, Tamil, Telugu, Hindu and Urdu, and the vast majority of them will fail at the box office. So why are they being produced in the first place, if they incur losses? The obvious answer is that they are a front for financial hanky-panky, most likely money laundering.No, the financials simply don’t add up: something is fishy. Some films report massive collections in China. Which could mean Chinese money (or money from third countries) is being laundered for other, sinister, purposes. Similarly, some ‘house-full’ shows run to near-empty theaters, but they show pucca accounts to the tax authorities: lo, money has turned ‘white’. Thus point 4: that we may have reached ‘peak Hindi/Urduwood’. There are two good reasons to believe this. One is the success of films from outside that camp, eg. Bahubali, RRR, Pushpa, KGF, indicating that the film-going public is fed up with Hindi/Urduwood. I am personally not a fan of the excesses of RRR, preferring realism in historical times, but I understand its value as pure entertainment (and I loved the fantasy of Bahubali, a modern masterpiece set in the mythical past). Unlike RRR (which gained critical and apparent market success in the West), the Mumbai industry has not produced a single global hit… ever. That’s partly because of its dubious ideology, and partly because of lack of originality – almost everything is a second-rate parody of some Western film, as I expect Lal Singh is, although in its defense, at least it isn’t stealing intellectual property, being an authorized remake. Another reason is that, in addition to illegal hawala transactions, in recent times Hindi/Urduwood has depended on selling its output to the likes of Netflix, Amazon and Disney. They have managed to convince OTT channels that their product sells well in India, thus in effect gaming the OTT guys into paying good money for not only anti-Hindu but also anti-India trash. That gravy train is now grinding to a halt. Slowing subscriber uptake and plunging valuations have forced Netflix et al to take a hard look at what actually sells: the carte blanche to local partners will end. The Financial Times had a detailed article on this titled The Great Netflix Correction: loss of subscribers throws streaming business model into question.The growing and visible ruckus about Shamshera etc, and several recent films that bombed badly, means that Hindi/Urduwood will have a hard time monetizing deadbeat scripts that piss off the public, as the OTT folks will ask more penetrating questions about viability and return on investment. There will be more demand for the likes of the patriotic Family Man on Amazon Prime. Amazon with its billions is less troubled than Netflix and Disney, but it will surely also ask hard questions.Finally, point number 5: the hypocrisy of the ‘intellectual’ ‘liberal’ class of India. They are quick to shout down and ‘cancel’ anything that they do not like (remember the ‘ghar wapsi’ dramas?), but when the same happens in reverse, they play the victim card. Not any more, folks. The NYT and WaPo may buy your crocodile tears, but the average film-goer is on to you. You have to make money the old-fashioned way, by earning it, not by arranging a suspension of disbelief.1450 words, 6 Aug 2022 updated 11 Aug 2022.Errata: Corrected the name of the Nirmalayam actor to P J Antony. Earlier, I had mentioned it incorrectly as ‘Joseph’. See also: * https://esamskriti.com/e/National-Affairs/For-The-Followers-Of-Dharma/Bollywood-colon-s-passive~aggressive-attitude-towards-Hinduism-1.aspx hat tip @KartikV* https://www.indiafacts.org.in/culture-wars-hindus/ This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit rajeevsrinivasan.substack.com

A version of this essay has been published by firstpost.com at https://www.firstpost.com/opinion/from-caatsa-waiver-for-india-to-chastened-visit-to-saudi-arabia-why-biden-is-making-conciliatory-noises-10961801.htmlSamuel Johnson once said: “When a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully”. Going by POTUS Biden’s recent hyperactivity, it seems that the prospect of imminent electoral catastrophe has the same effect. For, the hitherto imperious Democrats have been backpedaling so furiously that it is a wonder to watch.Consider just a few events: the importunate, chastened visit to Saudi Arabia (after having trashed it for the Jamal Khashoggi murder); the CAATSA waiver for India (after blood-curdling threats by the sorely missed Daleep Singh et al regarding Ukraine); and the noises being made by several parties about bringing hostilities to an end in Ukraine. Behind all these is the realization that pandemic management has been royally screwed up (the much-vaccinated and Pfizer-oral-vaccine-medicated Biden himself caught the Wuhan virus), and that Anthony Fauci, Peter Daszak et al surreptitiously funding gain-of-function research in Wuhan was a major mistake. To be fair, even formerly lionized New Zealand now has significant numbers of covid deaths, but that is hardly comforting to Americans. Printing trillions of dollars as the panacea for covid was an even greater mistake, because the blowback has been raging inflation at 9.1%, hitting the average voter in the pocketbook. I personally endured the previous bout of high US inflation in the late 70s, but as a poor student it didn’t affect me much; as a family man I am sure I would have been pinched badly if I were a US resident and voter now. I remember petrol at $1-2, not $5 as it is now. This does not bode well for the Biden Democrats in the November midterm elections.Inflation is not fun, as the Turkish voter is also finding out. Someone will take the blame.I don’t think blaming Vladimir Putin for inflation is quite working; nor is blaming Donald Trump, who, after all, was the only recent POTUS who didn’t go to war. Biden’s ratings may continue on a downward trajectory. The abortion rights issue roused some of the faithful, but I don’t think this has staying power till November. Thus the U-turns, amusing to the impartial observer. The energy squeeze (and related inflation) explains the Saudi visit. The European Union, in particular Germany, is in bad shape, as is evident from the Euro dropping to a historical low of parity to the dollar. Germany’s GDP shrank for the first time in, well… a long time. If there is no renewed supply of Russian gas, Europe is going to freeze this winter. So it is imperative for NATO to beg or cajole or threaten OPEC, especially the Saudis, into increasing production.There had earlier been the unedifying spectacle of Biden seeking help from Saudi Arabia, Venezuela and even Iran, all of whom his staff had demonized earlier. If I am not mistaken, the Saudis and the Venezuelans literally refused to take his phone call, which is humiliating. There is a more subtle reason the Saudis are important to Biden: petrodollars. Who outside the US is going to want all those trillions printed by the US Fed other than to buy petroleum products? The fact is that, having been lured by the siren-song of the Chinese, the US has de-industrialized to such an extent that there's not much global demand for dollars to buy American goods, except for armaments and high technology. If petroleum were to be traded in any other currency than the US dollar, it would depreciate, maybe even collapse. That is a scary prospect, which could trigger a serious global recession. Saudis have to be mollified and/or terrified so they don't even think of accepting other currencies in payment. Both Gaddafi and Saddam Hussein talked about accepting payment in Euros etc, and we all know what happened to them. Besides, there is an interesting little trick: the ‘Tipu Technique’. I believe the British tacitly encouraged Tipu to invade and loot the temples of Kerala, which had grown rich through centuries of lucrative spice trading. The British saw this opportunity, and allowed Tipu to haul the loot to Srirangapatnam. Then they killed him, and took all the riches in one fell swoop instead of piecemeal. And the clever British came out smelling of roses, as the good guys.They also charged the entire cost of their war with Tipu to Travancore, paupering the latter, while maintaining the fiction that they were ‘protecting’ Kerala. Absolutely brilliant tactics. Nice transfer of wealth from India to Britain. This is similar to the American playbook in 1973, when OPEC suddenly tripled oil prices. The US didn’t invade, which is a surprise. Why? The reason is that though the US also had to pay higher prices (consumers and industry felt the pain), the Deep State (and the US economy) made most of it back by selling weapons aplenty to OPEC. It was, and is, a zero-sum dollar-recycling game for them. But it was, and is, also a massive transfer of wealth to OPEC from developing countries who could least afford it. The Third World took it on the chin. Once again, brilliantly done. Thus it is imperative for the US to maintain good relations with Saudi Arabia. Moral grandstanding by the Democrats has reached a point of seriously diminishing returns. Onwards to the CAATSA (Countering American Adversaries Through Sanctions Act). It is intended to deter other countries from doing things the US administration of the day doesn’t like, as in the fashionable ‘social-justice warrior’ tropes of the day, although sanctions are clearly a blunt instrument. India was threatened with these because it is buying Russian SA-400 anti-missile defense systems, instead of US analogs like THAAD and Patriot.As Gautam Sen of the London School of Economics said in a penetrating commentary on Why the West is so uncomfortable with a rising India and happy to sponsor its enemies, India is important to American plans for continued world dominance, unfortunately in a negative way as a permanent vassal, a low-caste neo-feudal flunky that exports raw materials and labor and imports manufactured goods. And weapons, especially weapons. There has been a full-court press on India to buy increasing amounts of US armaments, and the Ukraine war provided a good excuse to bully India (which is easily shamed by the West chiding it) into dumping perfectly good Russian weapons like the SA-400 (and presumably the Indo-Russian joint venture, BrahMos). India becoming a minor exporter of weapons (not just a big consumer) is not part of the plan. India has been the third-biggest weapons buyer in the world, accounting for 11% of global purchases in the recent past. Reversing itself on bullying India to buy nothing but American weapons is another tactical U-turn by the US.Evidently Atlanticist-minded Biden is not serious about the Indo-Pacific, as seen in his evisceration of the Quad. But it must have dawned on his foreign policy types that India and Japan are the cornerstones of any possible response to China’s rampant imperialism in the region. Besides, India has endured American sanctions and technology denials before (supercomputers, cryogenic engines) without collapsing; and probably will do so again. On balance, better not to piss India off totally. But Biden has no love lost for India: it was his Biden Amendment that messed up India’s cryogenic engine deal with Russia, which is the central theme of the movie Rocketry: The Nambi Effect. I wrote long ago about this in Who killed the ISRO’s cryogenic engine?, as it happened in my hometown. It ruined eminent aerospace engineer Nambi Narayanan’s career and delayed India’s heavy rocket GSLV by 19 years. As far as the Ukraine war is concerned, even the war-mongering Deep State mouthpiece The Economist, which was gung-ho in the beginning, is now making conciliatory noises. Foreign Affairs, a notably optimistic outlet, had a story titled Ukraine’s Implausible Theories of Victory: The Fantasy of Russian Defeat and the Case for Diplomacy.The fact is that Russia has (certainly in the short run) weathered the vaunted sanctions rather well, and the rouble is the best-performing currency against the dollar. The unintended consequence of the war has been widespread pain, especially in the ‘First World’, that is, Western Europe and North America. It would be better, as India has been saying all along, for there to be a negotiated settlement. A stalemate is still a win for Russia, as it has captured the disputed Russian-speaking parts of eastern Ukraine, created a land bridge to Crimea, and now controls the ports on the Sea of Azov. That is the most likely outcome, as Europeans tire of the war, and Biden’s plans to fight Russia to the last Ukrainian seem to have unraveled. It is time for the Great Reset. And that may not help the wokes; they are being consigned to the trash-heap of history at a record pace. It is the end of the Woke Century, after just a year and a half. And deservedly so. 1500 words, 25 July 2022 This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit rajeevsrinivasan.substack.com

A version of this essay was published by Swarajya magazine at https://swarajyamag.com/world/does-roe-v-wade-foreshadow-the-end-of-the-american-dreamThere are only two US Supreme Court judgments deemed epoch-making enough to be called ‘landmark’ every time they are mentioned. One is Roe v Wade, and the other is Brown v Board of Education. Both favorite liberal causes, one about abortion and therefore about womens’ rights; the second about ending systemic black segregation in education, which had a signal impact on the rest of their Civil Rights movement. On the face of it, both were unexceptionably positive. Roe surely reduced the number of young women bleeding to death when some backstreet quack terminated their pregnancies with a coat-hanger. Brown made it possible to end the ‘separate-but-equal’ idea of racial segregation. When the SCOTUS overturned Roe v Wade recently, that was another landmark. There are legitimate questions as to whether things have regressed badly in the US: the worry is that whatever women have managed to achieve over a century, in what is frankly a conservative Abrahamic patriarchy, is suddenly in jeopardy. Is the US going back to Stepford Wives and suffragettes struggling for the vote?It is also true that despite decades of protests and hard work, and Betty Friedan and Gloria Steinem, the American woman still has miles to go. Despite the Pill and the sexual revolution and equal rights, I believe the average woman gets paid only about 70-80% of what an average man gets paid for the same job: not very different from the Biblical worth of 30 shekels to a man’s 50. Vast numbers of women struggle in single-parent households. Curiously, American women, despite failure. bravely export their feminism. This is a sort of recursive feudalism, where white men and white countries treat white women and non-white (‘Third World’) countries as lower castes they are entitled to dominate. And the white women market their nostrums to Third World women as the ‘White Woman’s Burden’. An entire cottage industry of grifters and true believers is now offering these panaceas to India.. What is bizarre is that Professor S N Balagangadhara in “What Does It Mean to be an Indian?” pointed out that this is all old hat for Indians. India has been suffering from a surfeit of identity politics for half a century and the results are not pretty.This stuff is not going to end well for the US. But it’s also true that their framing of issues elsewhere is laughable: and here’s a sarcastic take on the kind of breathless negativity the US media applies to other countries. The US Supreme Court is providing a backlash to an excessive move to the Left by the entire political class. That is a benign interpretation. There is a more malign interpretation of a wholesale retrogression by the Court (and some politicians) that will take the US back to some benighted era of racism, bigotry and unabashed patriarchy. The fact is that the SCOTUS has in quick succession issued several significant rulings: Roe, then it refused to curtail gun rights, and most recently, it ruled that the Environmental Protection Agency cannot regulate greenhouse-gas emissions that cause climate change. In a single week, it has hit three of the Left’s hot buttons: abortion, guns, and climate change.This may suggest a sharp ideological shift engendered by ex-POTUS Trump “packing the court”. In that case, given SCOTUS judges don’t retire until they die or quit, the Left is in for a long dry spell. Which is a good thing. They have driven the average US voter to distraction with their gender antics, climate fanaticism, law and order craziness, victimhood narratives, fiscal imprudence, and tendency to go to war on what appears to be a whim.Therefore, if it is a useful corrective to deranged Left certainties, it should be welcomed. On the other hand, some observers, including Indians living in the US, have painted a darker picture of regression to some mythical golden past, which would have been golden mostly for white males. I defer to Indian-Americans on this as they live it, and two of them I follow had warnings for all of us. The first, a finance man, wondered if the US will revert to a point where immigrants, especially non-whites, would not be welcome. It reminded me of the 1900-era decisions that a) offered citizenship only to ‘Caucasians’ to exclude Chinese, and b) when some Indians got naturalized on the basis of being ‘Caucasians’, they amended the rule to restrict it to ‘white Caucasians’, thereafter revoking their citizenship.The second, a journalist, painted a picture where the coastal ‘liberals’ were being overwhelmed by rural, white, working-class voters (he didn’t call them that, but he did mean ‘rednecks’). Both are voicing a concern that cannot be ignored. There were, for example, the shooting deaths of two Indian-Americans in their new SUVs just this week: 25 year old Nakka Sai Charan on a freeway in Baltimore on June 22nd, and 31 year old Satnam Singh, in Queens, New York on June 28th. I also remember a spate of shootings of Telugu-speakers in the US a few years ago.An America that reverts to its undeniably brutal and racist past would be extremely unfortunate. Its soft power will diminish, and its standing in the world will diminish as a result. Its institutions, including the SCOTUS, have been held up as role-models all over the world. They all seem to be under attack: e.g., the SCOTUS, once held in breathless reverence, is now being berated by many Americans on the Left.The Federal Reserve is another. I remember times when its chairmen like Paul Volcker and Alan Greenspan were spoken of in hushed tones, and their every utterance was pored over as though they were magic incantations that had the power to move markets. Many observers treated them as though they were as inscrutable as the Kremlin or the Forbidden City in Beijing.Greenspan’s reputation was ruined after the 2008 crash; and now, along with POTUS Biden, the hapless Jerome Powell, and his immediate predecessors are all being criticized for having failed to anticipate or prevent roaring inflation, and it is feared, an imminent Recession. The NIH, FDA and other medical bureaucracies also suffered loss of face as the result of the Wuhan virus. Francis Collins and especially Anthony Fauci were accused of gross irregularities including being on the payroll of Big Pharma, and of secretly funding biowarfare research (‘gain of function’) in Wuhan. Like The Lancet and the NEJM, they too suffered loss of credibility.If one were to extrapolate from all this, it seems like a fin-de-siecle malaise is afflicting all of America. Is it really the end of the American Century, despite its extraordinary endowment, with all the resources of a vast continent, and its human resources constantly renewed by the best and brightest from around the world? As someone who loves the US, I hope this isn’t so. I hope this is a passing phase brought on by bad politics and the military-industrial complex. I really hope this is not the end of the American Dream. 1173 words, 30 June 2022 This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit rajeevsrinivasan.substack.com

A version of this essay was published by firstpost.com at https://www.firstpost.com/opinion/requiem-for-a-japanese-statesman-who-loved-india-abe-shinzo-10896211.htmlAbe Shinzo will be remembered as Asia’s greatest 21st century statesman. He recognized early that the Indo-Pacific will (re)occupy center stage as it did throughout most of history, barring a brief Atlanticist interregnum. And then he did something about it, by proposing the Quad and the “free and open Indo-Pacific”. He realized that China would revert to imperialism, and would have to be contained.Abe-san understood that America would withdraw into its comfort zone (“Fortress America”) as its economic and military dominance diminished. It was up to Asians to defend themselves, and not depend on cross-Pacific partnerships. This may have driven his nationalist sentiments. Japan, with its proud history, could not forever be anybody’s junior partner. It would have to assert itself, and it could no longer be hobbled by the pacifist Article 9 imposed by the US, that prevented it from arming itself. All of this has come to pass, more or less. After Obama’s content-free “pivot to Asia”, Biden’s obsessions with Russia, Ukraine and AUKUS, and China’s consistent saber-rattling along its entire periphery, it is evident that the old “liberal, rules-based international order” with its Euro-American bias can no longer protect Asia’s democracies. A muscular Quad, or even an ‘Asian NATO’ is necessary.This is critical for India’s very survival, and Abe helped turn around Japan’s official attitude towards India. Even his grandfather, former Prime Minister Kishi Nobusuke, had been positive towards India, but Abe-san turned out to be a true friend. Under him, relations bloomed; and from a stance of anger at India’s Pokhran blasts, Japan has now become India’s most, and in fact only, trusted partner. This endeared Japan’s longest-serving PM, Abe-san, to many Indians. He believed in India, and it showed. So much so that some of us are in personal mourning. India has lost its best friend, and in a world where it has no friends, that is a tremendous loss: even after he resigned the PM position on health grounds, Abe-san continued to generate goodwill for Indo-Japanese partnerships. The last time the death of a foreign leader affected Indians so much was when John F Kennedy was assassinated in 1963.Prime Minister Modi put it well in a personal note, “My friend, Abe-san” https://www.narendramodi.in/my-friend-abe-san-563044. He also declared a day of national mourning. Among his greatest gifts to us and his most enduring legacy, and one for which the world will always be indebted, is his foresight in recognizing the changing tides and gathering storm of our time and his leadership in responding to it. Long before others, he, in his seminal speech to the Indian Parliament in 2007, laid the ground for the emergence of the Indo-Pacific region as a contemporary political, strategic and economic reality - a region that will also shape the world in this century.There is a starkly different, and possibly grossly unfair, characterization of Abe-san in the US media, as some kind of ultra-nationalist. The left-leaning NPR was positively churlish. But then this goes back to the Manichean/Abrahamic “with us or against us” dualism put about by US sources. They portray Japan as being particularly wicked, with Pearl Harbor as Original Sin, and the “Yellow Peril” as being particularly dangerous, deserving of the ultimate horror of the atomic bombs in Hiroshima and Nagasaki.Remarkably enough, this was along the same lines as the vitriol from China.I can understand China being extraordinarily mean. That’s just par for the course. But an American outlet saying this is a little surprising, that too a public-sector, publicly-funded, non-commercial entity. Are there wheels within wheels?But wait, here’s more:Growing up in India, I too was subject to this negative barrage, but I had the advantage of reading Malayalam translations of Tanizaki, Kawabata and Lady Murasaki in my teenage days. I understood Japan as a unique but Dharmic civilization with integrity and codes of honor. Later, I read about Subhas Bose’s perspective on imperial Japan, and its support for the Indian National Army. Many years later, I went to Nair-san’s Indian restaurant on the Ginza in Tokyo: he had been Rash Behari Bose’s interpreter. The dichotomy of reactions persists. The Western-Chinese narrative against Japan was one of convenience; on the one hand, the Chinese realized that they just needed to shout “Rape of Nanjing”, and the Japanese would give them money to shut them up. On the other hand, the famous “liberal rules-based international order” (see my deconstruction thereof at ) consistently tried to keep Japan down as a low-caste vassal even when it was the world’s second largest economy.There was an enormous fuss about the fact that Abe-san visited the Yasukuni Shrine, the memorial to Japan’s war dead. I could never quite understand this. Every country is entitled to remember its warriors, and most do, with gratitude. Why is it that Japan, alone, was prohibited from doing so? In 2019, I visited the shrine myself. It is a stately, mournful, quiet place of introspection. It has a magnificent torii, a museum, and a shrine. It is pure gaslighting to claim this place is somehow loathsome.And it has a memorial to Justice Radhabinod Pal, the Indian jurist who was part of the War Crimes Tribunal post World War II. He was the only dissenting voice in what he more or less said was a kangaroo court. Its intention, from the victors’ point of view, was to extract revenge rather than to arrive at the truth about the war. If some Japanese military men were deemed war criminals, were William Calley of My Lai and Henry Kissinger who ordered the carpet-bombing of neutral Cambodia any less?It was an honor for me to stand before Justice Pal’s memorial. Many older Japanese are grateful to Justice Pal for what he did then; Abe-san, though he was born a few years after the trials, may have heard from his grandfather Kishi-san about it. There are several other connections to India. I used to visit Japan frequently on business in the 1990s, and I found a number of links old and new. Kabuki, for example, is rather similar to Kathakali in concept. Sanskrit is still chanted in Japan’s Buddhist temples, and they write it in the Siddham script that is extinct in India, but seen in temples in Japan.I found actual Devanagari written on the Peace Bell in Hiroshima: it is one of the sutras that constitute prayers for the dead. In Nara, where Abe-san was assassinated, there is the famous great bronze Buddha in the Todaiji temple. In the adjacent park, where a lot of tame deer roam, there is also a reproduction of the Ashoka Stambha, the Lion Capital of Sarnath, the emblem of the sovereign republic of Bharat/India.The links between India and Japan go back a long way, at least to Daruma, or Bodhi Dharma, the preceptor of the Zen school of Buddhism, who took kalari payat and Buddhist philosophy to the Shaolin monastery in China, around 500 CE. He was reputedly a Pallava prince, who embarked from Muziris or Kodungallur in Kerala. There is the famous Zen koan, “Why did Bodhi Dharma go east?”.Is that why Abe-san came west to India? To repay an ancient debt? Moksham praptirastu, Abe-san. You were a good man. We miss you. 1150 words, Jul 9, 2022 This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit rajeevsrinivasan.substack.com

A version of this essay was published by firstpost.com at https://www.firstpost.com/india/a-tale-of-two-supreme-courts-best-practices-from-the-us-and-india-need-to-be-adopted-10875201.htmlI must confess a little shamefacedly that I watched the godawful fuss in the US following the SCOTUS’ overturning of Roe v Wade with some smugness. That was because, at long last, the Supreme Court of India finally threw the book at Teesta Setalvad, R B Shreekumar, Sanjiv Bhatt et al, in what had long been a travesty of justice. I began to think that maybe the Indian system, although glacially slow, has a thing or two to teach the much-ballyhooed Americans.Sadly, my joy was short-lived. Within a week, there was the spectacle of a two SC judge-bench in India harshly criticizing Nupur Sharma. They denied her plea to bundle various FIRs filed in far-off places like Calcutta, expressed personal opinions not germane to the plea, and lectured her on how a blasphemy allegation against her was her fault. They had apparently made up their minds without considering any evidence. I am properly chastened, and I am eating crow. Hubris before nemesis. I should have known. India’s institutions are severely compromised. Even the CJI implied in a speech in the US that India’s institutions are less developed because India is not a “mature democracy”.Thanks for reading Shadow Warrior! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.Earlier, I used to stand in awe of the Indian judiciary. My great-uncle was a Chief Justice, and a family friend was on the Supreme Court. Two friends are or were High Court justices. I have always had a good impression of them. But over time, I began to see problems in the Indian system, and I wrote in 2018 about urgently needed judicial reform in Can We Fix the Deeply Troubled Judiciary?. The PIL (Public Interest Litigation) system has been weaponized, for one thing. The backlog of cases is daunting, for another. Several years later, the same problems have gotten worse, including structural issues about the Supreme Court straying far beyond its remit of interpreting the Constitution. But in India, a judge recently condemned ‘social media’ for alleging that he had violated both decorum and propriety in what an impartial observer might consider extraneous comments.In the US, those who were upset with the SCOTUS’ action roundly abused it; for instance an Indian-origin politician named Congresswoman Pramila Jayapal. I don’t know about the merit of her argument (and based on her ultra-woke-ness, it may have none), but it is very interesting that she could say rude things like this about the court and judges. In India, draconian ‘contempt of court’ provisions would be applied, and the critic jailed, for even mild criticism..That is one of the differences between the US judiciary and the Indian. There are several others. To begin with they are a) selection, b) tenure, c) ambit/remit and jurisdiction, d) appraisal and termination.Thank you for reading Shadow Warrior. This post is public so feel free to share it.Selection and AccountabilityIn the US, quite a few judges are elected: I have seen their names on election billboards, and so far as I can tell this is for state judge positions. That sounds odd to Indians partly because the US is a federation of states, whereas India is a union, and that makes a difference. Anyway, I am under the impression that most judges in say, the California state judiciary, are directly elected by the public. On the other hand, federal judges are appointed by the government, but they also have to go through a confirmation process wherein they are basically grilled by the Senate, i.e. the equivalent of the Rajya Sabha. Thus, elected officials representing individual voters do ‘elect’ the judges. This brings in a level of accountability.There is the obvious flaw that a determined government can “pack” the courts with people they like, especially if they have an ideological ax to grind. This only works, of course, if the Executive Branch can convince a majority in the Senate, i.e. the Legislative Branch. In fact, it is alleged, and it is likely, that ex-POTUS Trump packed the courts with people he liked. Even then, it is hard to make the case that the US Supreme Court is representative of public opinion. Look at how the old school tie works, and how a discreet endorsement here and there might have worked.In India, it is much worse. Judges themselves select new judges, and will not tolerate the Executive branch or Legislative branch getting involved in this. So far as I know, this is unique in the whole world. When the Indian Government suggested a National Judicial Appointments Committee (NJAC) that would have input from the other branches, the judicial branch shot it down claiming it was unconstitutional. I wonder if a National Judicial Service is a good idea, because the obvious rot in the Indian administrative services gives one pause. Common sense suggests a selection mechanism where there is a level of outside input. Without that, there is every incentive to promote friends and relatives of current judges. In fact, it turns out that many current Supreme Court judges are indeed related to former judges or politicians. It would be better to adopt the US system of confirmations by the legislature following a nomination by the government, of course with advice from the judiciary. TenureOnce selected, a US Supreme Court judge is in place for life, until he/she retires voluntarily, or dies, or is impeached. This means judicial appointments can have a very long impact, because a judge may be on the SCOTUS for fifty years. But judges have also been known to change in office, for instance moderating extreme views they might have entered with.In India, Supreme Court judges retire at 65, state High Court judges retire at 62.  On the face of it, this seems like a more sensible system, because the judges are still relatively young and vigorous while on the court. However, there is a pernicious loophole: retiring judges are then absorbed into other positions, which means there is an incentive for them to write judgments that make them attractive to possible future employers. Judges get such substantial pensions and other privileges that it would not be a hardship to place a moratorium on them accepting post-retirement employment. In the US case, it is unlikely that a SCOTUS judge would take up post-retirement employment, even though I wonder if they are explicitly forbidden from doing so. (Even post-retirement POTUSes don’t take up new jobs. They just sort of fade away).A via media on tenure may be a better idea: raise Indian judges’ retirement age to, say 70, considering that people are healthier and live longer these days, and that they have valuable expertise, but strictly forbid any post-retirement employment of any kind, including commissions, arbitration, etc. Ambit/remit and jurisdictionIn my earlier essay, I pointed out the need to bifurcate the top court and to clearly specify its scope. Here the US structure is clearly superior, and could be adopted more or less in toto.For, in the US, the Supreme Court hears Constitutional cases, and only Constitutional cases. All other cases go elsewhere: Federal Circuit Courts that are courts of appeal, and Federal District Courts that are trial courts. I think this fine distinction can be ignored, and India should institute four regional Courts of Appeal that will hear cases that exceed the state High Courts’ jurisdiction, for instance inter-state disputes. One of the issues today is that the SC seems whimsical in what cases it decides to hear, and what it drops. For instance, it declined to hear a case brought by Kashmiri Hindus about their genocide saying the matter was too old, but paradoxically it agreed to hear a case about the Mahatma Gandhi assassination, even though that was much older. And it likes to take up cases on cricket! Besides, certain influential lawyers (and certain NGOs) can get the SC to hear their clients at midnight, while others languish for decades. There must be clear guidelines provided by Parliament perhaps through a Constitutional Amendment. This should also put paid to such quaint notions as “constitutional morality” (Constitutions are not moral documents) or “original intent”, the US version of “basic structure” (who knows what was going on in the minds of the Constituent Assembly; only what they wrote down can be discussed).In addition, the PIL mechanism should be dropped, and all cases required to be filed at the District or Magistrate court, and they should bubble up through the system in case they have merit. It is deeply offensive to watch those with deep pockets, especially malign foreign-funded NGOs, getting their way with little effort by just waltzing directly into the SC.Appraisal and terminationJudges are extremely important members of society, and the Supreme Court in particular is the last refuge for a common man. There should be mechanisms to ensure that the judiciary does not go off on tangents, but that they are working towards the common good of the nation. An ancient judge was executed and flayed alive. His skin was used to upholster a judge’s chair. What is more, his successor, his son, was forced to sit in that chair, on his dead father’s skin, to deliver his judgments. That is barbaric, but it does make a point. Judges must be immaculately neutral and scrupulous.So what is the metric for appraisal? In India, one should be the quick disposal of cases. Pendency is a huge problem, and a good bit of it is because of too few working days: too many holidays, and a two-month vacation in summer and a two week vacation in winter. These days there is no reason not to run the courts in multiple shifts, including a night shift. And most work should be done online, so that litigants needn’t waste time waiting around courthouses all day.There should be clear Key Result Areas, and judges need to be measured on meeting them. These metrics can be determined by Parliament through a Constitutional Amendment. Justice delayed is justice denied, after all.What if a judge fails in these metrics, or in other ways? There was a High Court judge, with the memorable name of Karnan, who was sent to six months’ imprisonment for contempt of Supreme Court. The rules for impeachment should be made more transparent. At the moment, it looks like judges can close ranks and prevent impeachment, or at least make it very difficult in India, and possibly even in the US. There has been only one successful impeachment of a SCOTUS judge so far as I can tell: one Justice Samuel Chase in 1805. But the US senate acquitted him, so he returned to service. I am not aware of a single Indian judge who has been impeached, but surely some deserve to be. While India’s democracy “matures”, there is nothing wrong in taking some lessons from the US about what works. There is no need to import everything wholesale, but pick and choose judiciously. As has been discussed by many, it would be a good idea to also emulate the structure of the US Constitution, a brief document of 10 or so pages. A new Constitution is needed in India, as the prolix version we have now is failing to stand the test of time, as the many Amendments indicate. All the more reason why we need a better-designed Supreme Court to interpret it, and it alone. 1900 words, 5 Jul 2022 This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit rajeevsrinivasan.substack.com

A version of this essay has been published at https://swarajyamag.com/world/the-rules-based-liberal-world-order-or-whatever-is-coming-apart-at-the-seamsI don’t know about you, but I have long been a fan of the ‘liberal rules-based international order’, although to be quite honest, I have had only a rather vague idea what it meant. It sounded pretty good, though. I mean, how could any reasonable person be against ‘liberal’, ‘order’, and ‘rules-based’? It is only lately that I have learned this is strictly a marketing moniker.It’s a bit like the Moral Majority, which has a nice ring to it, and made waves as a bunch of fiery literalist Bible-thumpers some years ago. It turned out, alas, that they were neither particularly ‘moral’ and certainly not a ‘majority’.  If I recall correctly some of its brightest stars were found in flagrante delicto, including one fire-and-brimstone preacher who was caught twice in cars with street prostitutes.Just like the ‘Holy Roman Empire’ was neither holy, nor Roman, nor an empire.Similarly, the ‘liberal rules-based international order’ is neither liberal, nor rules-based, nor an order. It is essentially a post-World-War-II mechanism to perpetuate the rule of the victors in that conflict, giving them a free pass in world affairs for as long as possible. In particular, it was an arrangement that assumed that the US would remain the paramount global power for the foreseeable future. That ‘order’ almost immediately fell  apart because the Soviets and the Americans started a rivalry for spheres of influence, including the Soviet evangelization of communism. The Americans embraced the Domino Theory and began counter-evangelization of democracy as the antidote to all the evils of society. This ended up in the Cold War, although to be fair, the US did help a number of its allies to prosper. They were mostly white European countries, but also East Asians. Through the power of suggestion (hurrah, New York Times and Hollywood) we have been led to believe that the world is moving steadily towards the triumph of ‘democracy’, which turns out to be a euphemism for a world where Western European/American dominance is written into law.Note how this means the United Nations Security Council has France and Britain, who really don’t deserve to be there; but not Germany and Japan, who do, along with Brazil, South Africa and India. Similarly there is a (written or unwritten?) rule that the World Bank’s President has to be an American. This was followed scrupulously until a South Korean (presumably a friend of America) was given the job in 2012. It is now back to an American.Along the same lines, the IMF’s Managing Director has always been a Western European, with the current incumbent being a Bulgarian former World Bank acting President, with a bit of a chequered past: she was found to have inflated Chinese data to make it look better during her term at the World Bank.Similar stories, I suspect, can be told about all the other major multinational organizations, for instance the WHO which the Chinese have turned into their fiefdom. The Russians, who probably did more to defeat the Germans in WW2 than anybody else, have been denied much of a role. Thank you for reading Shadow Warrior. This post is public so feel free to share it.That old caste system has a ‘First World’ consisting of the US and Western Europe, a ‘Second World’ consisting of the Soviet Union/Russia and Eastern Europe, and a ‘Third World’ consisting of everybody else. There have been some minor changes, such as Japan, South Korea, Singapore and the UAE becoming honorary (but not full-fledged) members of the First World. The other side of the picture is a certain feudalism that this caste system perpetrated, and that has persisted throughout the last 75 years. Feudal First Worlders dominate the serfs of the Third World. Today, First Worlders decry the neo-feudalism of the techno-billionaires, without irony and without recognizing that they continue to apply it to the Third World, most notably India, which has been kept out of the NPT, MTCR, and so forth.And have you noticed that the very term ‘Third World’ has fallen out of favor, to be replaced by the anodyne but meaningless ‘Global South’? This is because the creators of narratives didn’t want to attract unwarranted attention to their straightforward caste system. In this context, let us recall that ‘caste’ itself is a European construct, derived from the Spanish ‘casta’, and applied most intensely to mixed-race people in the Spanish and Portuguese colonies, classifying them based on skin color and thus race. They obfuscate this by conflating it with the Hindu jati system. That is blood libel along the lines of them deeming the Christian Hakencreuz to be the Dharmic Svastika. Thanks for reading Shadow Warrior! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.Of course, the other side of the picture is that the Chinese have crashed this party, and have pretty much jumped into the First World from the Third World. And they are mounting an intense challenge to the so-called ‘rules-based order’, partly by buying up opinion makers, and quite possibly by interfering in US elections in discreet ways: see recent revelations about the theft of US consumer data by Tiktok. This ‘order’ is clearly being challenged by China; but the Ukraine war is also showing how tattered it is, especially as the ‘First World’ struggles to contain nasty inflation and to delink its supply chains from China’s vice-like grip. Ominously, there is increasing political turmoil all over the ‘First World’.In the US, Biden and company are flailing about trying to find a theme that would cover up consumer anger over food and fuel price inflation, shortages (eg baby food and tampons), and rising law and order problems. Paul Krugman even tried to explain that inflation is an (optical) illusion. They have tried, successively, abortion rights, gun control, and now they are falling back on the tried and tested January 6th outrage. None of this is raising Biden’s abysmal ratings going into November’s midterm elections. In Britain, Boris Johnson just barely survived a no-confidence motion; the polls forecasting by-election results are not encouraging to the ruling Tories; inflation is a burning issue, and should reach a crescendo in the winter months with sharp rises in fuel costs. And they have a bruising rail strike as well. In Australia, Scott Morrison was suddenly replaced by Anthony Albanese. To add insult to injury, they have decided to dump the British Queen as Head of State.In Canada, Justin Trudeau’s image took a beating when he showed a dictatorial streak and walked all over the Freedom of Expression of truckers who were mostly protesting over extra-strict covid regulations.In New Zealand, Jacinda Ardern came down from the delirious heights of being the Woke Queen when she was forced to abandon her imperious zero-covid policy; and now she’s boycotting the British Commonwealth, preferring instead to attend a NATO meeting as a guest.The Pacific states are also concerned about China’s security pact with the Solomon Islands.So much for the Five Eyes, the US’s closest allies. Things are not so hot with the second tier of allies, either. In France, Emmanuel Macron was re-elected as President, but voters have punished his party in elections, sharply curtailing his room for maneuver.In Israel, Naftali Bennett’s government has just fallen, and they will go for yet another general election, the 4th in 5 years. Binyamin Netanyahu may yet come back.In the EU in general, and Germany in particular, there is great uneasiness about the US fiat about cutting off Russian energy imports. The EU has bought the vast majority of Russian exports, while the US bullies mostly innocent bystander India which is a minor sinner. And of course Biden is reluctant to chide China over its purchases.All this leads me to believe that the already-moribund so-called ‘liberal rules-based international order’, a thinly-veiled vehicle for US-Western European neo-feudalism, is on its last legs. Francis Fukuyama spoke memorably of the ‘end of history’; in fact it is the ‘end of Atlanticism’ that we are seeing.The future, and indeed the present, is the Indo-Pacific century. India is right to not throw in its lot with the declining West, or the rampaging but shaky China. There is good reason to aspire to be a third pole in a multi-polar world. The end of European and American exceptionalism. The beginning of Indian exceptionalism. No more neo-feudalism, tech or otherwise. 1350 words, June 22, 2022 This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit rajeevsrinivasan.substack.com

A version of this essay was published by firstpost.com at Nupur Sharma, neo-feudalism and the geopolitical squeeze on IndiaThe commentariat has rightly focused on the specifics of the Nupur Sharma incident, such as the alleged blasphemy, the apparent provocation, the possibly pro-forma outrage and the street-veto (cheered on by certain politicians who spoke ominously about tinder and spark). I couldn’t possibly improve on their perspectives. For instance Utpal Kumar wrote an excellent piece excoriating the cringe-inducing and thunderous ‘liberal’ response https://www.firstpost.com/opinion/nupur-sharma-has-erred-no-doubt-but-why-are-liberals-mutedly-supporting-islamist-challenge-to-her-right-to-life-10767521.html; and I would add that ‘feminists’ were also notable by their absence. The blood-curdling death threats being hurled at Nupur, the fact that she has been hanged in effigy, and the related riots that appear to be astroturfed, are all deplorable.  I would like to look at the whole thing from the point of view of geopolitics. India is in the process of being squeezed badly.Thanks for reading Shadow Warrior! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.Soft StateThere are a couple of perspectives of interest. One is a throwback to the dark days of 1989-90, when the fall of Afghanistan to the Taliban induced the most recent genocide of Kashmiri Hindus, because the terrorists Pakistan had assigned to their Afghan battle were (as they are now) available; and this time, thanks to Biden’s largesse, they have billions worth of weapons. A related historical incident is the hijack of Indian Airlines 814 in 1999, and what, in hindsight, was a strategic blunder committed by India, with Jaswant Singh personally escorting the freed terrorists to Kandahar, who then proceeded to wreak general havoc.  In both cases, the Pakistani takeaways were predicated on triumphalism. They could see the dictum in their Brigadier General SK Malik’s The Qoranic Concept of War being put in place. “Terror struck into the hearts of the enemies is not only a means, it is the end itself.” They could with good reason argue that they were on a trajectory towards a final victory, and urge a final thrust that would bring the house of cards down.The result was the Parliament attack, 2001. Operation Parakram. Godhra, 2002. And eventually 26/11 Mumbai in 2008.Pakistan and its friends in India have been nothing if not lucid: they openly declare their intent to wreak havoc on India, balkanize it, massacre people, do gazwa-e-hind. There is every reason to believe that they mean what they say. To pretend otherwise is to repeat the US folly vis-a-vis China: China kept saying what they intended to do, and the US kept pretending not to hear; and we know where that got Obama and Biden. The point is that every capitulation, every demand conceded, is viewed as a sign of weakness, and invites the next, ever more outrageous demand. India today may be going down this slippery slope, again. As it did repeatedly in the 20th century. The deep freeze on CAA was a capitulation. The withdrawal of the Farm Bills was a capitulation. And now the silencing of Nupur Sharma is a capitulation. If the State blinks on Agnipeeth, that would be another capitulation. There may well be good reasons for all of them, but the fact is that they perpetuate the notion that India is a Soft State.Thank you for reading Shadow Warrior. This post is public so feel free to share it.Neo-Feudalism and the Serf StateThe second perspective of interest is global. Sociologist and demographer Joel Kotkin writes in his latest book The Coming of Neo-Feudalism that we are slipping into a period where there is a stark contrast between the ruling elites, in particular the tech billionaires, and the ruled proletariat. In other words, a return to the European era of feudalism, where a ruling class lorded it over the serfs, who basically had no rights. On Singularity Radio, leftist and former finance minister of Greece, Yanis Varoufakis, echoes the same sentiment and argues it is ‘techno-feudalism’. He goes one step further to state that Capitalism is dead, whereas Kotkin only goes so far as to argue that a zaibatsu-ization of the US economy is happening, and the economic systems of the US and China are converging.In a Hoover Institution podcast based on his Foreign Affairs article, geo-strategist John Mearsheimer suggests a convergence from a political angle too. He argues that the difference between a democracy and an autocracy are limited so far as great-power rivalries go, and that the US made an extraordinarily foolish move to enable China to rise. Says he: Engagement may have been the worst strategic blunder any country has made in recent history: there is no comparable example of a great power actively fostering the rise of a peer competitor. And it is now too late to do much about it.Put these two arguments together, and you get an interesting picture. On the one hand, feudalism requires an upper class and a lower class. It could be argued that feudalism never in fact went away in Europe, or even the supposedly class-less US. Social mobility there is far less than one has been led to believe, according to research by Raj Chetty, then at Stanford. There indeed are traditional elites in the US: the East-Coast Wall Street types, for instance. Their kids all go to prep school like Philipps Andover or Exeter, then on to Ivy League colleges, and then on to Goldman Sachs or Morgan Stanley, and eventually maybe to government. This is, for all intents and purposes, an upper caste, which is also largely endogamous. Just try breaking into it: it is well-nigh impossible. Then there are the lower-caste serfs, the plebeian yahoos who are subjected to ‘manufacturing consent’ on a daily basis. They were earlier manipulated via the big newspapers, but now the tech platforms do an even better job. If you don’t believe me, see how the Overton window has shifted sharply in favor of woke tropes over the last few years. Or, for a more tactical shift, note how the topic of heated discussion has gone from Roe v Wade to school shootings to Jan 6 within days. I am reminded of a line from Pink Floyd, Welcome to the Machine: “What did you dream? It’s alright, we told you what to dream”.In contrast to Kotkin, I would argue that there is no neo-Feudalism, it is the same lovely practice that never went away. Kotkin also said, in passing, “Silicon valley is full of indentured servants from Asia”. He meant India. He is right, and that is the role of India in the game: producing raw materials, including serfs, for the consumption of the upper caste feudal lords.Feudalism applies also to nations. Whites have for a few centuries been the feudal lords, and their colonies, especially India, have been the untermenschen serfs. That is their pre-ordained role. As Mearsheimer candidly admits, the US blundered in allowing China to escape from serfdom. And it is too late. But of course it is not too late to contain India! They have no intention of blundering again, or allowing India to rise to be a great power as well. China has become an honorary upper caste country by bulking up its economy and especially its military. But applications are now firmly closed for membership in this club. Even rich Japan has only a tenuous membership. It is in the interests of the feudal lord countries to keep the serf countries as they are.In this, the US and China are as one: there is no way India can be allowed to gain power. This may explain the fury with which US and European commentators (eg Bruno Macaes) greeted India’s stance in the Ukraine war, of keeping aloof from it. That’s not how a serf state is supposed to act: it should do the Gunga Din tango.This mindset is why the US has continually armed and financed Pakistan, propping up a failed state that should have been dismantled long ago: it is meant to contain India. This is also why you have the likes of Thenmozhi Soundararajan running rampant in the US shouting about caste. This is why a propagandist like Audrey Truschke is not ejected from polite company. This is why USCIRF, an evangelist propaganda body, gets free rein to pontificate about India. This is why India is marginalized in the Quad, and the upper caste countries (Anglosphere is by definition upper caste) close ranks to form AUKUS. India must be put in its place, and that’s why a million mutinies are funded by the Ford Foundation and George Soros, and Xinhua and other CCP arms. There are plenty of sleeper cells armed and ready to riot on command. Add to this mix the oil states of West Asia. Qatar has its giant natural gas reserves, and India is increasingly addicted to LNG including for its newly-minted rural women consumers of cooking gas. Furthermore, Biden is genuflecting at the feet of Saudi Arabia, as Glenn Greenwald writes in a stinging comment on substack. Having successfully prevented India from buying cheap Iranian oil, and pushing hard to prevent it from buying cheap Russian oil, the Americans are forcing India to be ever-more dependent on West Asian states. Never mind that India has buyer power: of course the sellers have to sell the stuff to somebody to keep their economies ticking over.Also never mind the fallacy of the argument that India must kowtow to these Gulf states, in case they send back the Indians working there. Well, that is not charity, either. If the Indians were ejected (let us recall what happened to Uganda in Idi Amin’s time), the serfs running everything would be gone, and the feudal lords would actually have to get their hands dirty doing something other than being rich and idle. The fact that India has not asserted itself forcefully means that the pressure tactics are working: the malign forces have drawn first blood. Chances are that worse is yet to come. 1600 words, Jun 15, 2022 updated Jun 19, 2022 This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit rajeevsrinivasan.substack.com