The horizon is not so far as we can see, but as far as we can imagine

Tag: India

Neoliberalism in India and Covid Deaths

I’ve had my eye on India ever since I found out that calories per capita had dropped in India over the last 30 years.

That’s not what happens when things are going well, unless a huge number of people have moved to sedentary jobs, which they had not.

Neoliberalism is about production and supply trains. They’re very complicated, and the parts for a finished good may be made in a dozen countries and shipped to a plant which does the final assembly. The IP holder often skims ten to 30 percent profit off of this.

Most countries currently industrialized didn not industrialize under neoliberalism. They ran protectionist trade policies and exported their way to mature economies. That was generally allowed because they were a military ally or satrapy. Japan was first Britain’s ally, then for the US. Taiwan and South Korea were American satrapies, etc.

China used a hybrid model. They got themselves into the supply chains by offering high profits to Westerners, generally through simple wage arbitrage (“our workers cost less”). They put heavy pressure on people who took those profits to give them their technological secrets (IP) in exchange. And for much of the early period, they also ran a protectionist policy, keeping their currency low against the US dollar. They turned neoliberalization into mercantalism, and because less than five countries have EVER industrialized under any system but mercantalism, they succeeded.

They were able to do this because they made it very worth the while for greedy Western elites to ship jobs to them; they made a lot of Western elites rich. They knew exactly the deal they were offering.

India was socialist for a long time. They felt it didn’t work, so they decided to try neoliberalism.

But, they ran into the fact that it made more sense to offshore to China, and they didn’t do neoliberalism smart — they didn’t control their currency properly or find another way to turn neoliberalism into mercantalism. China kept large parts of their economy state-controlled, and used those companies actively. Yes, state-controlled companies were less efficient, but they gave the State power, and they provided ways of spreading welfare to people that the private companies weren’t taking care of. Not immiserating too many people meant making sure that Chinese citizens saw the new industrial and trade policies as good for them.

India, on the other hand, got in mostly on service jobs. “We speak English, so we can do service center stuff,” and a fair bit of IT outsourcing and offshoring.

But they neoliberalized as if they were already a first world nation; they sold off public enterprise and gutted state control over the economy as if there were a huge surplus created by decades of good growth which could be cannibalized to create a rich class.

India did create a small new middle class and rich, yes, but they did so without creating widespread prosperity.

Because of the way human psychology works (we have a strategy, it has not worked, we must do it harder because we are always right until we are overthrown), when the old elites couldn’t really make this work, a toxic mix of neoliberalism and Hindu Nativism took control of the country, with the face of Modi.

Modi’s a right-wing nationalist, verging-on-fascist (some would take out the word “verging”). But he’s also a neoliberal’s neoliberal. Practically, his first act was to de-monitize: removing large bills from circulation and forcing poor people to use electronic money. This was sold as crushing corruption, but what it did was make sure that the government and financial elites could grab more money from more transactions, while crushing the informal economy most Indians live in.

Recently, he’s passed a law which allows farms to be bought more easily. And so they will be (farmers, not being idiots, have opposed this law).

So Modi’s run the same play you can see in right-wing parties around the world: He’s offered nativism and feel-good, right-wing identity politics (Hindus are the best, Muslims are scum, get rid of them, no Hindu girl should marry a Muslim, etc.), and then run policies which will, over time, hurt the poor and create more rich.

But these general policies were running long before Modi.

One of those policies that has now been brought to light by Covid is that the public health care sector was gutted under neoliberal governments, so that private healthcare could make more money. So now, when it’s needed, there isn’t enough public (or private) care around.

This is how neoliberalism works: It looks for a public good and then it gets rid of it. This can be a regulation which, if removed, allows profit (making it hard to buy farms means they can’t be bought up and turned into large cash farms; cutting pollution rules means someone makes more money, etc.) or it can be by making public services shitty, or selling them off to the private sector, or other variations.

Again, in a developed country with a large prosperity cushion like the US, France, or Canada, you can do this for a while, and it doesn’t look so bad.

If, on the other hand, you do this to a country which had never hit developed status in the first place, well, people eat less calories, and when a pandemic happens, hospitals turns away patients in droves.

Neoliberalism doesn’t work when trying develop or industrialize countries, unless you game it so it turns into protectionist trade. China did that, India didn’t, and Indians are now paying the price.

Neoliberalism is designed to create rich elites while crushing ordinary people. In India’s case, it also created a small middle class (because that’s rich, really, in India, as anyone who’s spent much time there knows. Middle class means you have servants, for example. It’s not middle class like in The US or Europe.)

Neoliberalism is not designed to help anyone but the rich, except temporarily. Some asset holders will win (say, if you owned a house in 1980 in the US and didn’t sell until retirement, then moved somewhere cheap.)

But no other groups win for any length of time, because neoliberalism is the policy of looting, of pumping asset prices and of crushing wages. That’s the policy regime. It does what it’s meant to: It creates a rich class and, for a while, it keeps enough people supporting it who won’t win the end (unless they die soon enough) by giving them large, unearned asset price increases that are much greater than inflation.

India needs a new strategy. The overwhelming of its medical infrastructure is exactly the result of the neoliberal policies it has followed for decades. Modi is only the latest and worst, not the first.

I wish the Indians well. They have a very challenging few decades ahead of them, perhaps the most challenging of any non-African large country in the world. I hope they get their act together, ASAP, or a lot more Indians than Covid is killing will die, and die ugly, as climate change, ecological collapse, and water shortages hit.


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The Coming Ethnic Cleansing and Genocide in India

India is currently experiencing protests and riots over a pair of laws.

The state of Assam, in Northeast India, has a national register of citizens. It was recently updated, and 1.9 million residents weren’t on it. Most of those are Bengali Muslims, many likely from Muslim majority in Bangladesh. India is building camps in Assam for those 1.9 million residents, and will attempt to send the Muslim ones to other countries.

The government has announced it will extend the register through India: Everyone will have to prove their citizenship.

The second law is is the Citizenship (Amendment) Act of 2019. It allows a path to citizenship for refugees of,

 Hindu, Sikh, Buddhist, Jain, Parsi, and Christian religious minorities fleeing persecution from Pakistan, Bangladesh and Afghanistan

Now, if you’re familiar with India at all, you know that the bureaucracy is not the best at record keeping. When the registry is extended through the country a lot of people won’t be able to prove citizenship. But those who aren’t Muslim will be able to regain citizenship under this amendment.

Those who are Muslim will presumably be put in camps and sent to other countries. In many cases, countries they’ve never lived in–as with many recent cases in the US in which people who were born in the US, but who INS claims don’t have –or aren’t qualified for–American citizenship.

This is ethnic cleansing based on religion.

The people I know who support this say that the Muslims are violent and keep opposing Hindu majoritarian rule–things like rebuilding temples torn down by Muslims and banning the killing of cows. The Muslims, to them, are the remains of an invading army, still trying to impose their values and religion on a country where the majority of citizens don’t accept those values or that religion. Since they won’t stop their opposition, they must be gotten rid of.

In particular, there is much animus towards recent Bangladesh immigrants, who are, apparently, aggressively Muslim (this is a result of Saudi money, as an aside; I lived in Bangladesh in the 80s and it was relatively tolerant.)

But I want to focus on the longer game: Where does this leads?

Bangladesh as a country is Muslim and exists on the Ganges flood plain. Leaving aside island nations, it is one the lowest countries in the world, and will be one of the very first to flood. It is surrounded by two countries: India and Myanmar (which has been ethnic cleansing its Muslims.)

When Bangladesh starts going underwater, and it will, over 160 million people, mostly Mulim, are going to try to flee to India and Myanmar.

What are the Indians going to do? Build a huge wall with machine guns and machine gun them down? If they want no new Muslims, how is this going to play out? Ships won’t be sufficient to handle the volume of refugees, they have to leave by land.

Either they wind up in camps, almost 200 million of them by then, or they get killed. Or both. Most of them are going to run to India.

This is the sort of scenario that the end of secularism and the rise of majoritarian rule throughout the world makes more and more likely.

Before sneering too hard at the Indians, however, remember the response of the Europeans to a much smaller influx of mostly Muslim refugees: a lot of European countries closed their border entirely, and virtually none of the remainder have been welcoming.

This is the future. Climate change is going to cause a lot of refugees. In the hundreds of millions. Countries are not going to accept most of them. And it’s going to get violent and leave the number of people in camps as, in aggregate, one of the largest populations in the world.

Fun future we’re creating.


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The Palestinian Option for Kashmir?

Back in 1980, I visited Kashmir with my parents. This was before the troubles, and it remains perhaps the most beautiful place I’ve ever been.

Last week, India’s PM, Modi, abrogated clauses in the Indian constitution relating to Kashmir, which does not allow non-Kashmiris to buy property. As Margolis says:

Modi is clearly copying Israel’s Netanyahu by encouraging non-Muslims to buy up land and squeeze the local Muslim population. Welcome to the Mideast Conflict East. China is also doing similar ethnic inundation in its far western, largely Muslim, Xinjiang (Sinkiang) region.

Dai Lake, Kashmir

By their friends, you shall know them. I’ve never liked Modi, his demonitization was incredibly damaging to the Indian economy and hurt the poorest Indians. That he spends all his time buddying up to Israel’s Netanyahu tells you all you need to know about whether he’s more good than bad. (If it doesn’t, you need to self-reflect a bit.)

But Indians did vote for Modi in droves. It’s another episode of people, who are scared and have shitty lives, voting for the tough guy, thinking he’ll be tough for them, rather than for his core supporters. In Modi’s case, hard-right Hindus.

It’s worth remembering that the UN called for a referendum in Kashmir and that India never held it, because they know that, given a choice, Kashmiris would rather be part of Pakistan.

So, ethnic cleansing time! This is the world we live in, more and more, a place where the weak do as they must and the powerful do as they will (ever has it been thus, but sometimes it is less thus). For now, India’s the powerful one. Soon enough, it won’t be–because this BS is a distraction from actual existential threats to India, mainly around water. I can’t think of any major nation which is going to get hit harder than India.

Meanwhile, of course, both the Pakistani and Indian militaries are on hair-trigger alert, and both have nuclear weapons. Because India has a much larger army, if war does break out, Pakistan either goes to nukes or loses.

Brilliant.

 

 

Water Wars And the Great Indian Die-Off

Humans can go without food for weeks. Water, a few days:

The core fact of climate change and human mismanagement of resources that a lot of people don’t seem to understand is that the worst of it is going to be about water.

Consider the Indian subcontinent. It is under three main water threats:

  • As glaciers go away, glacier fed streams and rivers dry up.
  • There has been vast depletion of aquifers, and within twenty to thirty years this will reach a crisis that devastates agriculture. There is no water to replace this aquifer water.
  • Climate change will change wind and rainfall patterns. Much of Indian agriculture is based on the monsoon cycle. If it fails even a few times in a row, agriculture will be devastated.

These items often feed into each other: for example, depleting groundwater is one of the culprits in drying up the Ganges, and if the Ganges goes dry, India dies.

Meanwhile, how do you think Pakistan is going to react, when, as things get worse, they realize that their agriculture, or people, are dying because India has decided to take upstream water they need?

India isn’t the only nation that will be hit hard by all this, but it’s going to be one of the worst. I am almost entirely positive we will see a famine in India which kills literally hundreds of millions of people.

Perhaps it won’t include a war between Pakistan and India; nuclear armed states, over water.

We are now in the triage period of an oncoming catastrophe. A lot of people are going to die, more will be immiserated, and the question now is who, and to a lesser extent how many.

This isn’t to say that nothing can be done to decrease the death count slightly, and to reduce the odds of human extinction, but we are past the point of no return on Climate Change. It will happen, the large stores of methane in permafrost (and probably in the arctic) will be released and climate, including rainfall patterns, will change. Large numbers of rivers and streams will dry up, and sea-levels will rise.

This will not happen on an even schedule of +X every 10 years, when it goes bad, it will go ballistic, and events like ice melts and changes to ocean and wind currents will happen quickly. Some of them may happen like switches flipping. It will go from “sucky” to “catastrophic” fast, with little warning.

So, I know that many people are stuck. No money, no health, no youth and too many obligations.

But be aware of this and plan for it if you can.

And if you live in India or any of the nations around the Indian subcontinent, please be particularly careful as there is even less possibility of India avoiding the worst case scenario than there is for most countries.


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