First is the ” Chasing the Mirage: The Tragic Illusion of an Islamic State”. The book traces the political dynamics and the interwinding of the religion since the early days of the Islamic world. It deconstructs the much romanticised notion of an “Islamic nation”, Caliphate and Islamic state. In fact, so powerful is the work that Tarek has become the hate figure of Islamists and the book was dropped by its Indian publisher after the first print citing potential for communal disharmony! His second book “The Jew is not My Enemy: Unveiling the Myths that fuel anti-Semitism” takes on the demonization of the Jews in the Muslim world. He is also a columnist and a regular appearance on the talk shows on Islam and Islamism.

At the age of 63, he is on his first visit to India with his wife. In his own admission, he feels like coming back to his “Janambhumi”. He is here to do the research on the his upcoming book ” Jinnah’s Orphans” which traces the many of the problems facing the Indian sub-continent- political, social or religious- to the Muslim separatism of the last century. Be it Kashmir, Pakistan, ongoing decimation of the Indian civilization including Indo-Islamic culture, stateless Bihari Muslims in Bangladesh, genocide of Balouch and Shias, purging of the local cultures of Sindh and Punjab due to Urdu supremacism, rising Islamic extremism and fascism, all can be traced back to the Muslim separatism and the dream to create Islamic supremacy in India.

He was invited by Jamia Millia Islamia, Delhi to deliver a lecture in the shamelessly named “Yasser Arafat” hall on 11th April, 2013. But his talk was cancelled at the last moment due to “unavoidable reasons”. The story is that gang of several Islamofascist students had threatened to disrupt the speech. Also, many of the Islamic “academics” also had reservations about allowing a “Secular Muslim” to speak in what Tarek has aptly called “Mini-Pakistan” in Delhi. As expected, the usual statement deploring the “unfortunate incident” by liberal and academic establishment was not heard who are otherwise quick to breath fire on almost any issue anywhere in the world. No left activists, organisations like Sahmat and others, no alumni association, no liberal group has come forward to defend Tarek’s right to speak and student’s right to listen him.

But fortunately, the whole incident has once again brought to light the rising power of the Islamofascism in India. This is not an isolated incident but comes in the backdrop of monthly communal riots in U.P, ethnic cleansing of tribals by illegal Muslim Bangladeshi settlers in the North-East, Owaisi’s speech in Hyderabad, violence in Azad Maidan in Mumbai, vandalism of Buddha’s statue in Lucknow to protest for Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar and banning of films, plays and exhibitions even remotely critical of Islam or even Muslim extremists. It seems that today, Muslims are the only religious group, who are totally incapable of listening to any criticism, not only of Islam but anything related to the Islamic history and polity.

They protest if you criticise Ghaznavi and Aurangzeb, they defend the Islamic Imperialism by citing “benefits” it brought in the form of Taj Mahal! Imagine Indian Christians springing to a fight if you call British foreigners and plunderers! And at the same time, Muslims don’t think twice before criticising the others and their religion & society even to the point of demagoguery, not only Zakir Naik, Owaisi and the cheering crowds but the Muslim academics, journalists too.

Why do Muslims suffer from such extreme self-righteousness and supremacism is a curious question in itself? Why such a naked double standard and hostility towards non- Islamic people and cultures? The reasons must be explored in the depth if one wishes to understand and rectify it. Otherwise strains of fascism will assert themselves again and again like they did in 1947 India, in 1990 Kashmir or today in what is left of India.

First reason is the very philosophical nature of Abrahmic religions. The messianic religions wedded to the prophetic cult of one true God and only one true path are behind the most of the horrors inflicted upon the humanity in recorded history. By their very nature they are not about simply believing in one supreme power, as it is claimed, but in an idea of God which mandates the belief in prophets, book of the God, God-made rules for humans to order their social and political life etc. The claim of believing only in God is only so much true.

This belief in God-made social and political laws leads to attempts to impose the true interpretations of the true book of the true God which in history has led to nothing but wars, death and destruction of entire civilizations and regression of scientific and rational thoughts. It must be understood that intolerance towards what is considered heresy or kufr, Inquisition and Jihadi vandalism, like in Timbuktu or Bamiyan are not an aberration but a zealous expression of the Abrahamic monotheism. From the belief that God is infallible, to that his book is infallible, to that his prophet is infallible, to that his religion is infallible, and to that followers of that God’s religion are infallible is but a short step.

Second reason goes back to the earliest history of Islam itself. Within a very short period early Muslim Arabs had carved out a huge Empire for themselves. The tribal fierceness, unity provided by zeal of the newfound expansionist religion, capable charismatic leaders and other geo-strategic reasons ensured that Muslims emerged victorious in their assaults on established powers of Iran, Byzantine Middle-East and others. Egypt, Syria, Berber states, Iran etc fell with ease to the forces of Islamic Imperialism.

Ultimately, this victorious march was halted in southern France in the west, desert in the South, Byzantium in the north and Battle of Rajasthan in the east. But the early victories had affirmed in the collective consciousness of the Muslims that these victories were due to their faith and steadfastness on the God’s true religion. Sovereignty belongs to Allah and he chooses followers of his rightful religion to rule and establish his divine order in the world. The halt was temporary as the victorious march of imperialism began with new vigour in 12^th century.

The Indian lines were breached by the Turks who succeeded in establishing the Delhi Sultanate and at the same time Turks were increasingly successful in rolling back the power of Byzantium which culminated in the conquest of the Constantinople in 1453.

Islamic Imperialism was the order of the day and even Europe cowered under the shadow of “Sword of Islam” until late 17^th century. In India, the early Muslim period was that of wholesale death and destruction, brutal repression and religious persecution. Buddhism was all but wiped out from Bamiyan to Bengal. The depopulation of the older urban centres and founding of new settlers colonies was an important feature of this period. All this imbued the ruling upper-caste Muslims with an unshakable sense of superiority over the dark skinned coward Hindus who could be crushed at will.

This indeed was true until 14^th century when Vijaynagar and Rajput confederacy under Rana Sanga began to reverse the fortunes. The game began to change by 18^th century, Marathas and Sikhs decisively broke the power of the Imperialism in India and European states were embarking on their own Imperial endeavours, routing the forces of the Islamic Imperialism wherever they went. It may be lost to the people cheering likes of Owaisi that Muslims have suffered defeat after defeat whenever they met the “Hindu Baniya” in the battlefield in the last three centuries.

Battle of Panipat, 1761, was an aberration and anyway from 1771, the Saffron flag of Marathas unfurled over Red Fort (Mughal Emperor ruled under Maratha protection) while Afghans were thrown out of the equation after the war. But still the myth of invincibility and bravado remains among a large section of the Muslims of the sub-continent especially among Jihadist and Armed corps of the Pakistani army. The false sense of being the rulers for a thousand years is deeply entrenched and gives rise of intense contempt for the pagan Hindus.

Third factor has to do with the social structure of the Muslim society. It is not usually acknowledged that Muslim rule on India was the Imperial rule of the foreign dynasties entrenched in the urban centres like Delhi. Turani, Irani, Mughlani had all the powers concentrated in their hands with some crumbs thrown for the Hindustani nobility. The ruling feudal upper-caste Muslims were the ones who were hit hardest by the eclipse of the Islamic Imperialism. It was hard enough to be under the heels of the British but it was abhorrent to see the “dark skinned Hindus” returning to the power.

In fact, genesis of the Muslim separatism and Pakistan goes back to the early 18^th century. Besieged by the Marathas in the Deccan, rising British power in Bengal, Sikhs on the North-East and “Kafir Shia” Iran in the West, the landed gentry of the upper-caste Muslims were later horrified by the idea of the democracy in the non-Muslim majority India. This complex interplay of the superiority complex, fear and now inferiority complex of being out of power has resulted in the sulking of the entire community. Add to this the massive undercurrents of the assertion of rights and pride by the Pasmanda Muslims and one have the upper-caste Muslim elites running for the cover of religion. This is the class to which likes of Owaisi belongs.

It is a last ditched attempt to safeguard the old power and privilege by whipping up the religious passion and uniting Muslim population by raising that eternal cry of  ”Islam in Danger“. Otherwise it is clear that forces of democracy and modernisation will sweep the old guard including Mullahs and Maulavis off their feet. Therefore, it is necessary to shield the Muslims masses from any rational discourse on religion, history & politics and keep perpetuating the myths of glories of past and blaming others for their misfortune. How on the earth, then, can persons like Tarek Fatah be allowed to speak?

Also, the collapse of their imperial glory has left the Muslims perplexed. Why are they behind dis-believers in each and every aspect? How come God’s true followers are being defeated by the kafirs everywhere? Has God abandoned them? But why? Surely, Muslims are best of the people and if they are falling behind others then it certainly must be wickedness and treachery of dis-believers, that Hindu Baniya and eternal Jew, which has robbed them of their rightful place in the world! The superiority complex and self-righteousness has prevented them from any rational examination of their faults.

Certainly, people who are on the right path by following the true religion can do no wrong! So, it must be the wickedness of the others, which has succeeded because Muslims have strayed from the true message of Islam. Hence, there is an upsurge of the revivalist and puritan movements in the Islamic world. The increasing conservatism, textual orthodoxy and desire to establish the seventh century laws to find that right path which once propelled them to the top of the power pyramid is all too visible. It can be seen even in the relatively moderate Muslim communities of India, Indonesia, and Turkey etc.

It has led to the remarkable increase in the intolerance towards non-Muslims and secular/liberal Muslims. Any criticism of Islam or Islamic world or personalities immediately incites huge protests and violence. Muslims, even educated ones, are increasingly becoming “touch me not” type, who are quick to anger and prone to threats of violence if they disagree with anyone on matters even remotely related to Islam. That is why people like Tarek Fatah are treated with such hostility as they deconstruct the dominant narrative of the Islamic world which glorifies imperialism and conquests and harbours sympathy with terrorist groups like Taliban. Also, intolerance towards non-Muslims is reaching the boiling point, be it in Europe or India or the Muslim countries themselves.

Only recently, The Hindu reported that Muslims are objecting to the Hindu festivals in the villages where they are in majority, case of Islamisation of Kerala is all too well known to be repeated here. The No-Go Sharia zones are mushrooming in Europe at an alarming rate with the majority of the second generation Muslims wanting sharia to be imposed on the secular democratic countries of their residence. None of this is a good indication for the future of both Muslims and non-Muslims alike.

But what is more surprising is that Left has abandoned whatever wisdom it had to become the running dog of Islamic Imperialism. It has abandoned the protesters at the Shahbag Square in Bangladesh, tribals of the North-East, its fellow leftist in Iran, Egypt, North Africa, ex-Muslim writers like Taslima, Rushdie etc., it has sided with the Islamofascist of Kashmir, Jamaat-e-Islami, with theocracy of Iran , terrorist groups like Hamas and “understands where the Taliban is coming from”!

It is quick to defend the Islamofascists by labeling any criticism as Islamophobic, racist, communal and fascist! Not surprising given that it was the communists who had provided sophisticated arguments to the Muslim League by converting the communal demand for Pakistan into a struggle between Muslim peasantry and Hindu zamindars.

It was the communists who sided with the Islamofascists during the Islamic Revolution in Iran, 1979. In both cases they paid a heavy price as they were the first to be eradicated, both in Iran and Pakistan. But still it seems that they have not learnt any lessons from history. I don’t think that they side with Islamists simply because of the old dictum of the enemy of the enemy being a friend. I think that the rot runs much deeper but this is not the place to elaborate on it. What matters is that Jamia Millia incident has once again exposed the alarming rate with which forces of fascism are taking hold in the country and how they are being greeted by the deafening silence.

Bharat Ratna (or India’s jewel) is the highest civilian honour granted by the Government of India to its citizens. Since its inception in 1954, government has awarded Bharat Ratna to 41 people. Given that the Congress party-led governments have been at the Centre for almost 54 years, out of 66 years since independence, it is not surprising that about 60 percent of the Bharat Ratna recipients have been closely associated with the Congress. In fact, almost all of them have been members of the Congress. Strikingly, none of the members belonging to any other political party has been given Bharat Ratna. Jayaprakash Narayan, a former Congressman who opposed the dictatorship of Indira Gandhi had to wait for a non – Congress government to come to power to get it, while Congressman from Pakistan, Khan Abdul Gaffar Khan, got it in 1987!

The recommendations for Bharat Ratna are made by the Prime Minister to the President. Amusingly, Jawaharlal Nehru and his daughter Indira Gandhi appear to have proposed their own names for Bharat Ratna! Other PM from the dynasty, Rajiv Gandhi was awarded Bharat Ratna when Congress came to power.

Let us look at their contributions. While Nehru is widely acknowledged for putting India on the path of socialism (which destroyed India’s economy), Indira Gandhi is well known for introducing ‘emergency’ or dictatorship in India. Rajiv Gandhi, on the other hand, instigated and even justified anti-Sikh riots of 1984, and subsequently lost power when found deeply mired in corruption. Whether their contributions were positive is questionable.

The above evidence gives credence to the hypothesis that civilian honours can be used by political parties to patronize their party workers and loyalists. Congress appears to have used Bharat Ratna to glorify its loyalists by placing them in the esteemed company of eminent personalities like Dr. Abdul Kalam and Bhimsen Joshi. Recipients like Lata Mangeshkar, Pandit Ravi Shankar and J.R.D. Tata who have made immense contributions should be seen as providing legitimacy to ‘Bharat Ratna‘ (and thereby to other Congress loyalists who received it), rather than Bharat Ratna being used to acknowledge their contributions. In other words, Bharat Ratna needed Lata Mangeshkar and her ‘likes’ to be legitimate.

Congress might have lost the moral case by failing to uphold the sanctity of Bharat Ratna and exploiting it for its own benefit. However, its behaviour, in theory, is not unexpected. James Buchannan, a Noble prize winner in economics, emphasized that it is fallacious to assume that governments work for the welfare of the people. In fact politicians only care about winning the next elections; so it makes sense for them to hand out national honours to loyalists and glorify their party. It is silly to assume that political parties would bother to honour and acknowledge the contribution of its citizens.

The Bharat Ratna fiasco points out that government faces a conflict of interests when it comes to acknowledging the contributions of its citizens. Should it then be allowed to do so?

It might seem utmost desirable to give the Government the power to honour its citizens. However, Friedrich Hayek, a Noble prize winner in Economics, advises us to be cautious. In his book, “The Constitution of Liberty“, he points out that you just can’t give power to the government and then assume that it is going to use it in ways you’d like them to. His advice holds out in the case of Bharat Ratna.

Assume there is a hypothetical situation where we have politicians who are blind to their self-interests. Even then, quantifying and comparing the contributions of people in different fields would involve a degree of arbitrariness. For example, the Prime Minister will have to decide which field, for example, deserves Bharat Ratna more – entrepreneurship or music? And how does the Prime Minister compare and evaluate the contributions of an entrepreneur with those of a musician? As a matter of fact, most of the Bharat Ratna recipients have been politicians affiliated with the Congress – which seems to create the impression that ‘Congress politicians’ have contributed the most to the nation!

Surprisingly, Sachin Tendulkar, the single most unifying and inspiring person in a country as diverse as India, has not made it to the list! Since eventually, Prime Minister has to make a recommendation for the award; the award reflects the preferences and prejudices of the Prime Minister. It does not reflect the preferences of the citizens.

By giving legitimacy to awards like Bharat Ratna, we might do injustice to people whose contributions either went un-noticed or were ignored by the Prime Minister’s Office. A government is not required to recognize the contributions of eminent personalities. For example, it did not take a Bharat Ratna for people to recognize the achievements of Sachin Tendulkar.

It is ridiculous for an institution which is short of credibility and faces conflict of interests to hand out recognition to others. We should be suspicious of people who receive such awards, not hold them in awe!

Times of crisis are supposed to drive innovation in a firm. WWI and WWII saw the rapid innovation in defence. Recently, if we look at the example of Israel, we see that the country’s defence research teams have progressed by leaps and bounds in the face of the consistent threat from Palestine. Even though India is in a similar precarious position because of threats from Pakistan and China, the lack of innovation has been appalling. The military spending by Israel in 2012 has been a mere 16 billion dollars as compared to India’s military spending which was close to 50 billion dollars!! But there is absolutely no doubt that technologically, the Israeli military is far superior to India’s.

One of the reasons for this is because India procures most of its equipment from countries like Russia, Israel, etc. This is a huge security risk for India during wars. A sustained domestic production of defence equipment is essential for the country to be able to upscale its defence output when faced with war. Recently we came across the news that till 2015, the submarine forces would be severely compromised because of the delay in the delivery of the units. 13 submarines is too low a number to defend such a larger coastline. So, reliance on imports drastically increases the defence spending as well as increases the dependence on other nations to maintain timelines.

The solution for this predicament seems to be pretty simple; to encourage indigenization of the defence research. But the monopoly of the public units (DRDO and the Defence Ordnance Factories) has existed for more than 50 years! And the rate of innovation has been appalling. Projects are delayed beyond imagination. Results are abysmal. Month after month, we read about the delay in induction of a tank, submarine, propulsion unit, fighter jet, etc. (Example: Link 1, Link 2, Link 3). Each such delay directly affects the capabilities of the defence forces because the shelf life of the existing defence equipment is limited.

Adding another public wing for defence research isn’t going to help matters. The entire funding for such units only goes into setting up rigid bureaucracies with poor innovation capability. All public units end up as being mere employment providers with little desired output. If we look at any public utility, we find that it is overstaffed. And this overstaffing is skewed in the sense that there are more people around to push files rather than on the field to carry out the ground work (traffic police, police, power utilities, etc.). An innovation-driven unit would need to be agile, free from bureaucracies and flexible in terms of budget considerations. For example, testing and experiments should not be delayed for want of critical parts. Plus, freedom should be given to the newer generation (new engineers) to be able to design and get projects approved faster. Fresh minds are more capable of thinking out of the box and are a little more up-to-date on latest technologies. It is difficult to envisage a public utility that would be able to adapt to this kind of a working environment. Hence, it makes a case for private investment in defence capability development. With private investment, the available funds for defence research immediately increases. This enables the country as a whole to take up multiple projects which converts to more successes even if we consider the failure rate as a constant (which should reduce because the private sector would woo quality manpower through the remuneration packages).

Given the demand of advanced military equipment by the Indian defence forces, this may open up a whole new innovation driven business opportunities. This would also help new techies to aim at knowledge intensive; technology based productive employment opportunity other than the existing IT industries. Given the competitive nature of the businesses, this will also increase the value of the top engineers in India.

There would be regulation issues that would need to be tackled for this endeavour. The USA has managed private investment very well in this sector. Continuous interaction between the armed forces and the private sector would be important for this to succeed. Of course, the shadow of shady deals and corruption would always lurk with the opening up of the sector. But these are operational issues that can be addressed given the will power of the political establishment.

The rightwing (being clever and cunning) knew that social media was someday going to come into prominence. It positioned its activists strategically in places like Twitter right from the beginning. Soon enough, as social media matured, these lackeys of rightwing organizations are all over the place running their propaganda. They strut about as a dominant force on these media, with the larger aim of creating an illusion of being a dominant voice in society itself. (Which they are not, as we all know, because the Idea of India is solidly socialist and stubbornly secular). Moreover, these activists are abusive. Driving away neutral voices with abuse is part of their strategy.

And now the Congress is also wising up and getting into the game. (Poor, naive, dumb-in-a-cute-sort-of-way Congress! It allowed itself to be beaten by the rightwing in putting technology to devious use!). Realization has dawned upon it that it has been outmaneuvered by the wily rightwing. So it is also injecting its activists into social media, who are successfully out-shouting the entrenched Right. If you have seen the Feku-Vs-Pappu stand-off, you sure understand what I mean.

The conclusion therefore is that social media is at best a battlefield of partisan and funded activists, and at worst a generator of random noise and abuse. (By the way, to contain this abuse, we need to start thinking about regulating social media). If you rely on social media for information, you’d only know what activists want you know, not what really is going on in our society. In contrast the mainstream media, whatever be its faults (and being reasonable I agree it has some), will always remain the bona fide barometer of public opinion.

Those who advance the aforementioned critique clearly believe that the apparent dominance of the rightwing on social media is the result of a conspiracy. I argue below that they believe so partly out of ignorance, and largely out of the need to live a comforting denial.

The conspiracy theorists are unaware that the rightwing had a strong presence in the Indian quarters of cyberspace from quite early on, from the time when the internet was almost unknown in India. Networks resembling social media existed even before World Wide Web came on the scene, except that the terms “social media” and “social networks” were not coined yet. One such pre-historic social network is Usenet, popular in the ’80s through early 90′s. It perhaps originated the “user-level publish-subscribe” messaging model that is at the heart of modern social networks like Twitter. This model meant that a user could publish content addressing no one in particular, and any number of subscribers could consume it.

The India-centric parts of Usenet buzzed with rightwing activity. Kashmir, Ram Janmabhoomi, Common Civil Code, secularism, communalism etc were the raging topics of the day. No prizes for guessing which viewpoints had the most backers: right-wingers trumped opposition, of course. (I believe journalist Chidanand Rajghatta, then reporting to Indian Express from Washington DC, observed and commented in Indian press on this phenomenon). Note that internet in those days, and therefore Usenet itself, was confined largely to universities and research institutions in the developed world. It would stretch credulity to argue that this early dominance of the Right on Usenet was the result of a deep conspiracy. The internet was hardly known in India, and it made no sense to “strategically” “invest” in it. But if one must set aside reason and argue thus nevertheless, then a bigger conspiracy must be proposed: that the rightwing coached and trained its members to infiltrate universities around the world. Obviously, it is an absurd argument.

Our conspiracy theorists, for many of whom internet is still a novelty, are ignorant of this history. Conspiracy does not account for this rightwing skew on Usenet, but relating it to the demographic that used it does. This demographic is the creme de la creme of urban Indian middle-class, for Indian students in foreign universities came from the aspirational section of this segment. By late 80′s, in the pre-economic-liberalization era, this class was disillusioned with the Congress party, its corruption-soaked socialism and divide-and-rule secularism. The BJP at that point in time was on the ascendant, at least as far as capturing the imagination of the middle-class is concerned.

Following this line of thought further, we must surmise likewise that today’s social media approximates the views of the demographic that patronizes it. This demographic as at the moment still the urban middle to upper middle-class. And evidently, it is disillusioned with UPA government. The question hence to ask is not why the online segment of the middle-class is beholden to rightwing views, but how is that mainstream media of the English language variety has no place for the sentiments of the market segment it sells into.

This leads us to the denial angle of the aforementioned critique. One of the means by which mainstream media tries to derive its legitimacy is by claiming to reflect public opinion. But for MSM to acknowledge that the views prevalent on social media are indicative of any significantly sized segment of population, let alone of public at large, is to contradict decades of its track record, to admit that journalists and social pundits were deceiving us all along. Cognitive dissonance therefore compels the ancien regime of opinion industry to persuade itself that rightwing dominance on social media is the result of conspiratorial activism.

Left-liberals are particularly stricken with this denial disease, because the stark reality of social media busts their long-propagated myths. Indeed, their denial borders on the schizophrenic. For example, they explain away Modi’s popularity on Twitter and Facebook as an optical illusion created by fake followers and (supposedly miracle-working) PR firms like APCO. They insist with great vehemence that the contempt for the UPA regime seen on social media is not the result of UPA’s poor performance, but merely the propaganda of rightwing activists. The Left particularly sets much in store by propaganda. It believes that people’s lived experience can be negated by sustained campaigns constantly blaring out a blatantly untrue message that contradicts that experience. (And, looking at opponents through tinted glasses, the Left also believes that they are on to the same propaganda mischief as it is!) But time and again such a belief was proved wrong. No matter how shrill is the campaign that Modi is “feku” and his development works are a myth, the people who voted him in a third time were not swayed by it because their lived experience told them a different story.

Social media, unfortunately for the propagandists, mirrors and approximates this lived experience. Those who do not have first hand experience develop perceptions on the basis of reports of those who do. Reports and perceptions reinforce each other in a positive feedback loop at the same time that falsehood and error are detected and filtered out. In the context of any piece of information, there is eventually a state of equilibrium, in which that piece of information is as accurate as it can get. This is not to say that crowd-sourcing of information does not have its pitfalls. Sure it does. For example, it is possible to succeed in propagating false or misleading information on social media for a short while. But in the end, the angularities cancel each other out. The net result is no poorer, if not superior, in accuracy and reliability to that MSM can achieve. Wikipedia is a good example of this phenomenon: the system is self-correcting and self-examining to the point of transparently discussing its own performance: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reliability_of_Wikipedia .

All of this also does not mean that social media is not susceptible to manipulation. Networks like Twitter, after all, are commercial entities much the same way as mainstream media outfits are. If Twitter can be bought out, yes, why not, the game can be rigged. But then it may cease to be a credible medium. Moreover, at $10 billion valuation, Twitter is a less cost-effective proposition than buying out, with the same budget, approximately 5 crore swing voters at Rs 1000 apiece.

 (Image Courtesy- cartoonistsatish.blogspot.com )

“What’s the point, adding to the flurry of words? You better decide not to write on this.” This was but a rather reasonable response from a friend, when I called him up, some ten days back to know what led to Sudipto Dasgupta’s death, so that I could write on it.

Lots had indeed been said and written. All shed their share of tears.

News channels, both locals and national ones, have had their routine debates with loquacious panelists jabbering their insincere and predictable gibberish. TRP s had gone sky high. My liberal friends, who of late, have been taking fancy in ‘mourning’ deaths, found a variation from Mudassir Kamran, in this young Communist ‘martyr’ from Bengal; quite an issue, without a doubt, to ‘discourse’ about, over a lazy weekend. Social media was already set abuzz about the mishap. Our urbane, sensitive and politically correct poets had gone ahead to pen lines on the collective complacency, just before they had to get back to their pending assignments of writing mush ditties for the approaching Bengali New Year.

And we of course had taken much care to locate and ‘like’ all those status updates on Facebook that seemed to be such snappy expressions of rightful political angst. On the whole, each one of us, felt pretty smug, having done our bit to show how deeply concerned, we all are, about our social circumstances. Honestly, there wasn’t much left to write about and I wouldn’t have been writing this perhaps, if I had not come to my city for a visit,now.

 I had been reading about the sporadic political scuffles, every now and then. But printed words turned dreadful with my mother’s frantic phone calls on that evening when I reached Kolkata. She was worried that I might get caught in some tussle while on my way to home. My town is tucked away, pretty far, from the din of the metropolis and is usually calm. Here, people still prioritise personal relationships over political colours and I have always felt at peace, amidst my rather naïve folks, but the “times they are a changing”!

My supposedly serene nook too was tense with a political brawl. Ever since the news of the manhandling of the chief minister and the finance minister of the state, by SFI and CPIM cadres, had reached the banks of the Hugli, CPIM party offices were being vandalized. One such office was wrecked in my neighbourhood as well. It was difficult to get hold of a cab, but I still could manage scuttling my way to home. All of us hoped that notwithstanding how outrageous, these were but skirmishes that would get better by the next day. I went off to sleep thinking of visiting my college to catch up with old friends the next day.

Who would have thought that a truckload of goons would arrive at Presidency College the next day, with gas cutters and spoil the Baker Laboratory while threatening the common students?

I wish I could jerk it all off as media’s exaggeration. I would have perhaps, if I were away. But since many of those students, whose interviews were featured in the newspapers, are personally known to me and one of the journalists, is a very close friend, I must accept that whatever came out in the media, no matter how contentious it seems, was but true.

Supporters of both CPIM and TMC have been doing their best in these past few days to prove their non-involvement in these fracases and hence establish their innocence by passing the blame on, to the other group. If Ritabrata Banerjee, the SFI general secretary has gone ahead to brief the press about how SFI had absolutely nothing do with the shameful act of beating up Ms. Mamata Banerjee and Mr. Amit Mitra at New Delhi; the TMC leadership have also made their best efforts to wash their hands off running havoc at Presidency.

It’s only an unbiased, investigative procedure that can reveal who the actual culprits were and I do not intend to make any conjectures, here. But the manner in which a death has been used to justify the infliction of recurring violence, is the most disgusting.

If Sudipto’s death was unfortunate, the manner in which, his memories have been mutilated to score political brownie points, is the most tragic. A prematurely lost life is always a matter of grief but it is far more disheartening to see, a dead boy becoming the winning card for political gamblers. His party has endowed him with the recognition of a ‘martyr’ not to exalt him in honour, but to murder him over and again. This titular ‘martyr’ is nothing but a pawn in the hands of the leaders, higher up on the party hierarchy. Once the purpose is met, he will be forgotten, just as we forgot Souvick Hazra, the student from Asutosh College, Kolkata, who lost his vision, in a similar broil, in 2010.

Overuse has ripped off the word ‘martyr’ of its significance. At the risk of being vehemently criticized, I would argue that Sudipto isn’t a martyr. Let us not glorify his death. He has achieved nothing by laying down his life. He was yet another victim of a reckless fanaticism called Communism.

The wearer knows, where the shoe pinches the most and one who has fallen into a pit, can best ascertain how bottomless and dark it is. I have myself been in students’ politics. I have seen, over and again, how purposeless these agitations are. From what I can gather, Sudipto and his ‘comrades’ must have provoked the police, which eventually resulted in a confrontation that claimed a young life, while another student almost lost his hand and an young home guard was severely injured.

Two young men crucially injured. One dead. Meaningless destruction. All for nothing as the leaders and the left liberal intellectuals are busy in omphaloskepsis… What has been happening in my state, over the last few weeks, seem like an act being performed out of the pages of an absurd play. I wish the curtain drops soon. 

I have been one of your avid readers over the last few months. Let me express my unadulterated admiration for the style of your exposition, which becomes all the more engaging as you compellingly use the personal anecdotes that you acquired during your Gujarat sojourn. More importantly, though, I find your columns educational because I disagree with many of the perspectives you present. You must therefore indulge me for taking the liberty to try and engage you in an open dialogue over the differences in our ideological positions.

I learned a little about Gujarat during a month long trip that I undertook to satiate my wanderlust. A highlight of my trip has been the engaging conversations that I had with the blue-collar Gujaratis who I would not normally encounter had I been on an academic conference circuit. I started with Ahmedabad, visiting the Nal Sarovar bird sanctuary on December 9, 2012, the morning that I flew in from Philadelphia. I entertained myself with conversations with my boatman in between the bird sightings. He aired his grievances about business slowing down due to the recent prohibition on tourists from driving up right to the lake. I desisted from sharing the environmental ground that I believed motivated the above move in order not to impede his candor.

Little later his cousin ferried me in his motorbike to another viewing location. Emboldened by my success with the first stranger, I initiated a political conversation with my chauffeur. I asked him who would win the impending state elections – he would not hazard a guess. I unabashedly trespassed on his privacy by asking him who would he vote for. Pat came the answer, “Kangress “(Congress). He went on to tell me that the political choices in his village were divided, with some support- ing Bhajpa (BJP). I never asked either about the faith they profess, but, their names told me they were Muslims. The point, Zaheer, you would have noted by now, is that they did not hesitate to reveal their grievances or political choices, to a rank outsider, even though the choices evidently were against the ruling dispensation which was very likely to be voted back.

I could continue with similar stories, for example, that of the auto-rickshaw driver in Vadodara, also a Muslim by faith, who did hazard a guess on the electoral outcome, that in favor of BJP. But, I will fast forward to my Gir safari in a post-election Gujarat. You may know that the limitations in the habitat is threatening to arrest the growth spurt in the Asiatic lion population in Gir. Some neighboring states like Madhya Pradesh have offered to host a part of the Asiatic lions in its forest premises. Gujarat government has so far refused to oblige. I asked the guide and the driver of my safari of what they felt about the prospect of translocation of some royal residents of Gir.

My guide summarily rejected the possibility asserting that “sher bhi nahin denge, unke baal bhi nahin denge “. My driver was more measured in his response, yet in full agreement with his colleague. Incidentally, Zahir, the guide was a Muslim and the driver a Hindu. I would not digress to articulate the opinion that I hold regarding the merits of such a translocation, but rather dwell on the fact that I observed in my guide a confident Gujarati Muslim, an equal stakeholder in his state’s economic progress as his Hindu brethren By now, you must be contemplating on whether I talked only with Muslims during my trip – not quite – I just highlighted my interactions with them since they revealed a mindset which is in stark contrast with your observations.

In this connection, Zahir, you voiced your concern on the Gujarat government’s refusal to disburse the scholarship for students who are religious minorities. I wonder why religion ought to constitute the basis for selective economic empowerment – shouldn’t current economic status suffice? Wouldn’t such selective benefits be perceived discriminatory and exacerbate the religious chasm in our society? Granted, India has since independence administered economic protection based on castes; it is debatable if this has substantially empowered the target population. Regardless, it is undeniable that a citizen (read Hindu) can not alter her caste, but can migrate to a new faith. Will it be acceptable then if religious conversions are motivated through selective economic benefits?

I will move on to the actual trip now. Starting from Ahmedabad, we, that is my mother and I, completed the Northern circuit enjoying the splendid sun temple at Modhera, the unique artwork at Rani ki Bhao at Patan, the Buddhist ruins of Vadnagar, and paying obeisance to Goddess Ambaji. The northern loop was followed by a day trip at Varoda, the Indus valley ruins at Lothal, and a couple of days at the Blackbuck national park at Velvadar, one of the best places for viewing the black bucks amidst a dense grassland. We proceeded to the Jain pilgrimage of Palitana and ascended the 3800 odd steps up to the exquisitely carved Shatrunjaya temples, subsequently opted for a brief foray out of Gujarat into Diu and returned for the Somnath pilgrimage.

Another pilgrimage followed, that at the last abode of the Asiatic lions, Gir, of which I wrote before. We alternately celebrated faith and reveled in nature as we treaded into Dwarka and the unique Marine national park in Jamnagar; a fascinating marine-animal safari in the latter while wading into the sea during a low tide remains etched in my memory. The highways were among the best I have come across and the landscape was dotted with windmills, a pleasant reminder of the government’s focus on alternate energy. The last stop was the incomparable Kutch, devastated in the earthquake of 2001, but now a resurgent industrial hub. Kutch is also a tourist’s delight what with the Ranotsav at the white Rann, the spectacular Indus valley ruins at Dholavira and the wild ass sanctuary at Little Rann. And, thanks to the splendid local road network, acquisition of exquisite block-printed shawls, or Ajraks as they are locally known, from the Muslim artisan villages around Bhuj have become remarkably facile.

A combination of public and private transport helped us realize this odyssey.We found our hotels mostly through the world-wide web and sometimes through helpful auto-rickshaw drivers, and organized our onward travels and local sight- seeing without availing of the services of a travel agency. We traveled at odd hours, at times, and I ventured out in the streets well-past midnight, sometimes by choice and at other times by compulsion. Yet, we felt safe throughout.

My confidence led me to not so advisable course of actions of disagreeing vociferously with service providers who I thought were fleecing us. And, more often than not, a rank outsider like me, who also happens to be a woman traveling without a male companion, would comfortably win in the debates, without any knowledge of the local language whatsoever. My mother wisely counseled that I will not get away with such recklessness in my hometown, Howrah, a suburb of the progressive metropolis of Calcutta. But, I did, in Gujarat. I was therefore naturally surprised to read that most women you know no longer feel safe in Gujarat. Have my experience then been a fortuitous coincidence, more of an exception than a norm? The conversations I had with fellow women travelers  students, mothers of teenaged daughters, however discredit the above conjecture. More conclusively, media groups like India-today, ABP-news and IBN7, some of which have not been particularly supportive of the current ruling dispensation have felicitated Gujarat for ensuring safety of the residents (1)

I was very disappointed to note from your articles that housing discrimination is prevalent in Gujarat. Having spent only one month, that too as a tourist, I would of course not have a first hand knowledge of the gravity of the challenge. But, let me take you instead to my home state where I do have a firm knowledge of the ground realities. West Bengal is typically associated with socially progressive values in public perception owing to the three-decade long left regime there.

Even there, I can assure you that Muslim families will be discriminated against if they seek rentals at suburban middle-class family homes. Similarly, there are large Muslim neighborhoods where Hindus will not be accommodated. Moving South, we learn from the Hindu (April, 11, 2013), that Hindus and Muslims live in separate neighborhoods in V. Kalathur, a village in the Perambalur district of Tamil Nadu; worse, Muslims are objecting to Hindus holding religious processions through the streets in their neighborhood. Note that housing discrimination is not limited to faith-based-distinction but includes many other considerations: single women, and likely single men too, will have similar plight locating rentals of their choice.

Extrapolating, housing discrimination and ghettoization constitute sad realities of entire India, but then, are these phenomena limited to India?

It is worthwhile to note that in many states in US housing discrimination based on gender identity, marital status, sexual orientation continues to remain legal. I am certain you have been to China-towns throughout US, and individuals not of Chinese descent are rarely welcomed to houses in the China-town of Philadelphia.

There are also predominantly Indian, Bangladeshi, African-American neighborhoods throughout US; without further elaborating on this unseemly phenomenon, it is therefore safe to conclude that segregation has gone global. The large scale prevalence of this social evil does not make it right though, for example, I have deliberately chosen a cosmopolitan, multi-ethnic neighborhood of Phildelphia as my home if only to avoid being cloistered. It is however unreasonable to attribute this evil to the social structure of one specific state, and even more, to the policies of one government. It is my understanding that segregation existed in Gujarat long before Mr. Modi or even his party assumed office.

I did notice that you associated Modi government with misogynistic practices. More specifically, you mentioned that Modi is seeking to distance himself from misogyny which in effect insinuates that he was associated with the same. I learned from you in a social media platform, where we have recently connected, that your statement has been motivated by the failure of the Gujarat government to control the rapes that were perpetrated during the unfortunate riots in 2002.

Rapes constitute one of the most barbaric violation that members of our species inflict on each other, but should the failure to control them in one ghastly event of mass-violence constitute sufficient basis for concluding misogyny?

By that rationale, many other governments in the world ought to be accused of this social evil. For example, US forces have been accused of rapes in Afghanistan as late as December 2012, which ought to implicate Obama of misogyny, more so, because he is their commander-in-chief, while the rioters do not report to Modi. I would have hoped that an author of your reputation would have alleged the same somewhat less cursorily. Regardless, to assess the veracity of your preconception, I delved into governmental policies subsequently. I share my findings below.

India has had a checkered record of gender sensitivity: on one hand she has been one of the first to be governed by a premier who was a woman. On the other hand, as late as 1987, a hapless bride, Roop Kanwar, all of 18 years of age, was burnt in the pyre of her husband; worse, all those who cheered as she reduced to ashes have been acquitted in a court of law.

The young, progressive and western educated prime minister, Rajiv Gandhi, incumbent when this atrocity was perpetrated, had also negated the spousal maintenance that a 62 year old Shah Bano had secured from her former husband through a verdict of the Supreme Court of India. The negation was accomplished through the Muslim Women Act, 1986, enacted by Mr. Gandhi’s government which en- joyed absolute majority in the Indian parliament at the time. While several empowered women have succeeded as entrepreneurs, academics, scientists, engineers and doctors in the 21st century India, many unborn female foetuses are routinely aborted leading to an alarming gender imbalance nationwide.

Thus, a comprehensive agenda that seeks to ensure the (1) social and physiological well-being of women (2) their economic empowerment and (3) participation as equal partners in decision processes is imperative.

Above and beyond, women’s empowerment initiatives ought to focus on the most economically disadvantaged woman since her more fortunate sister would likely be equipped with the tools to contest and even win against gender discrimination as and when she chooses to. It was heartening to note that the empowerment drive in Gujarat has been structured accordingly.

But, presuming that by now I have already overstayed my welcome on your indulgence, I will mention only a few flagship initiatives of the Gujarat government that seek to accomplish the above goals. The beti bachao andolan (“save the girl child”) has arrested the severe decline in child sex ratio noticed be- tween 1991 to 2001 (from 928 to 883 women per 1000 men), and in fact slightly enhanced it to 886 per 2011 census.

The trend is therefore positive though restoration of the gender balance will need a sustained effort. Modi utilizes many of his highly publicized addresses (eg, Google hangout in 2012 August, address to the women’s wing of FICCI) to draw public attention to this men- ace confronting Gujarat, as also the entire country. Gujarat government has undertaken the Kanya kelavani initiative for furthering girl child education, which is now in its tenth year of operation. I learned that that the literacy rate of girls has increased by 13% and the school dropout rate has dropped by 29.77%; the dropout rate in primary schools is now 2% (per census 2001 and 2011 data). The chief minister auctions the gifts he receives every year and contributes the proceeds towards this initiative; the auction in February 2012 fetched 2.04 crore Indian rupees.

The Chiranjeevi Yojana that has substantially reduced the infant mortality rate has been awarded the Asian innovation award by Singapore Economic Development Board and The Wall Street Journal. A whopping amount of 1094 crores has been provisioned annually for the Mission Balam Sukham initiative that seeks to counter malnutrition by attending to the needs of 44 lakh beneficiaries including pregnant women, nursing mothers and girl children. The CAG report on integrated child development scheme has revealed that Gujarat has reduced its percentage of malnourished children from 70.69% in 2007 to 38.77% in 2011.

Regarding economic empowerment, the sakhi mandal project provides a micro finance platform for funding initiatives of rural women in the lowest rung of the socio-economic strata. Skill development and entrepreneurship are being promoted among single women, particularly widows. To incentivize property ownership, property registration fees have been waived for women. Gujarat is striving to provide 50% reservation for women in local bodies.

Towards enhancing the electoral participation, in an election address, the chief minister had publicly appealed to women for voting in large numbers (voting percentage has traditionally been substantially lower among women). That, and concerted efforts by the election commission, ensured that the percentage of women voters in Gujarat increased from 57% per cent in 2007 to 68.9% in 2012. Not surprisingly, some of the worst media critics of Modi, like Aakar Patel, Mahesh Langa, Rajdeep Sardesai have ceded that Modi commands a strong support base among the women in Gujarat. In a fitting tribute to his contribution to women empowerment in Gujarat, Modi was invited to address the annual general body meeting of the ladies’ wing of the industry lobby Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industry (FICCI).

I conclude this rather long monologue with the hope that we continue this discussion further, and learn from, if not agree with, our divergent perspectives. I will look forward to get together with you whenever you happen to visit Philadelphia.

Regards
Saswati Sarkar

Footnote

(1) They have adjudged Gandhinagar and Surat as the best cities in India in the category of crime and safety, Rajkot as the safest for women and Gujarat as the best big state for ensuring citizen security.

You can find a PDF version of this post here.

Undoubtedly, these groups bicker much among themselves and are not part of any monolithic Right; however, they all have their place in national politics as long as they represent a community of interests and values within the state. CRI recognizes this diversity and welcomes it, and The Right People tries to talk to different people to better understand their views and aims.

In the seventh episode of The Right People, CRI editor Jaideep Prabhu talks to Shailesh Pandey. He is the man behind #Alakh2011- A quest to bring unknown heroes their due respect and attention.

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In February 2009, British philosopher Phillip Blond’s essay “Rise of the Red Tories,” published in London’s Prospect magazine, sparked a transatlantic discussion about the failure of politics, both Left and Right, to address our most pressing social problems. “We are a bipolar nation,” he wrote, “a bureaucratic, centralized state that presides dysfunctionally over an increasingly fragmented, disempowered, and isolated citizenry.”

Each side has had its revolution. Liberals’ cultural coup overthrew traditional mores and installed government as the fount from which all blessings flow. Conservatives swore allegiance to the market, enthroning capitalism as arbiter of ultimate worth. In so doing, both enslaved the individual to forces beyond his reach and leveled the intermediate institutions that once grounded and valued him.

Blond’s call for a new dynamic civic movement based around association has become a book, Red Tory ^[1], just released in Britain. He explains, “Red because it caters to the needs of the disadvantaged and believes in economic justice; Tory because it believes in virtue, tradition, and the priority of the good.”

During Blond’s recent American speaking tour, New York Times columnist David Brooks observed that in this country, rising contempt for the political class has taken a more libertarian expression, most recently in the Tea Party movement, but allowed that civic association might be more effective in restoring public trust.

Here we offer a taste of Red Toryism, along with a discussion of whether these ideas could gain traction in the U.S.—or whether they even should.

We live in a society of decreasing circles. More and more of us know fewer and fewer of us. We live alone and eat by ourselves, often with a TV or computer rather than a human being for company. If we do marry, the time an average relationship lasts decreases with each passing year.

In the Anglo-Saxon world, we abandon our old and increasingly care badly for our young. Our grandparents can recall a vivid life in which aunts and uncles, nephews and nieces wove together the social fabric of a stable, mutual society. Nearly half of all children are born out of wedlock. Many grow up without a father, some without any loving parent at all. The young people emerging from this background, denied any real education in public and private virtues, are easily seduced by glamorous dreams that promise consumption they cannot afford. Untouched by ideals of love and fidelity, they operate free of commitment, discipline, and responsibility. These unreformed teenage idioms become adult habits and ruin lives by creating people unable to bond or relate.

For men, especially those at the bottom of the social scale who are increasingly losing out in education and career advancement, an emasculated life at the margins of society awaits. For successful young women, having a degree is fast becoming an indicator of a childless future. No one would choose this outcome nor wish it upon anyone else, not least because it drains the energy from domestic life and compounds the terrifying fate of getting old alone. Everywhere we look, the ties that bind are loosening, and the foundations of a secure and joyful existence are being undermined.

What is the origin of this degradation? Looking back over the past 30 years, we could blame longer working hours that families must put in, a situation itself compounded by the financial necessity that in most households both adults must work, higher levels of personal debt, job insecurity, distrust of institutions, and fear of each other. Our society has become like a ladder whose rungs are growing further and further apart so it is increasingly difficult to ascend. Those at the top have accelerated away from the rest of us by practicing a self-serving and state-sanctioned capitalism that knows no morals and exists only to finance its own excess. Those in the middle are being crushed by bureaucracy and the effort of squaring stagnating wages with higher demands. Those at the bottom are more isolated and despised than ever before.

But decisive as these factors are, they do not add up to the social disaster that we are living through and that many, perversely, increasingly regard as normal. A healthier society could have resisted these trends. A society that still had strong families could have ensured a lifestyle that secured rather than undermined the economic base of the household. A society that still had neighbors who knew one another could have created trusting communities, and they could have produced institutions that served the needs of people rather than the bureaucratic demands of a distant and hostile state.

But through the privileging of alternative lifestyles, the prioritizing of minority politics, and the capture of markets by monopolies, we have destroyed the sustained and sustaining society. Little wonder that in a world in which binding norms, civil behavior, and notions of the common good have ceased to exist, frightened, isolated individuals call upon an increasingly authoritarian state to impose the order that we can no longer create for ourselves.

The loss of our culture is best understood as the disappearance of civil society. Only two powers remain: the state and the market. We no longer have, in any effective independent way, local government, churches, trade unions, cooperative societies, or civic organizations that operate on the basis of more than single issues. In the past, these institutions were a means for ordinary people to exercise power. Now mutual communities have been replaced with passive, fragmented individuals. Civil spaces have either vanished or become subject-domains of the dictatorial state or the monopolized market.

Neither Left nor Right can offer an answer because both ideologies have collapsed as both have become the same. Those who construe the libertarian individual as the center of current rightist thought actually draw upon an extreme Left conception that finds its original expression in Rousseau, who held that society was primordial imprisonment. It was Rousseau whose social theory forced the diversity of the world to conform to the general will—which was but this same individualism writ large—thereby sponsoring the rationalist and secular red terror of the French Revolution. In fact, any anarchic construal of the self requires for its social realization an authoritarian statism to control the forces that are unleashed. Collectivism and individualism are but two sides of the same devalued and degraded currency. And this has been the history of recent modernity—an oscillation between the state and the individual that gradually erodes civil association, which is in reality the only check on the extremes of either.

The 1960s New Left, to counter the authoritarian state it created, built a personal zone free of control in which to repudiate all standards and sell the poisonous idea of liberation through chemical and sexual experimentation. But when these New Left individualists preached personal pleasure as a means of public salvation, they were not resisting state control. They were, through their demands for freedom without limit and life without responsibility, undermining all autonomous self-governing structures, leaving a dreadful legacy of anarchic individualism that required state authoritarianism as the only way to re-impose order and society. Contemporary libertarian individualism and statist collectivism created each other and are locked in a fatal embrace that destroys the civic middle and the life and economy of the associative citizen.

This whole scenario dawned on me when I realized that my left-wing friends didn’t really believe in community. They only believed in choice. They supported abortion because they found it validating, a demonstration of real personal autonomy. But they think that fox hunting is terribly cruel and so should be ardently opposed. No doubt the same dispensation finds similar expression in the United States.

The Left harbors a deep and abiding hatred of fixity and tradition, a loathing of anything settled. In Anthony Giddens’s Third Way—the book that was behind the Blair revolution in Britain—he talks about how a new cosmopolitanism will free people from nature, and one gets the sense that Cool Britannia so envisaged is the permanent destruction of taboo and tie. According to the Blairite radicals we have to constantly rewrite ourselves by a willful assertion that wipes the slate clean and lets us begin again through the permanent act of choice—as long as such volition shows no teleology or direction. Nobody is told what to choose because the moral act in our contemporary paradigm isn’t what is chosen, it’s the act of choosing itself. Indeed, to choose is to repristinate and repeat the idea of oneself as an isolated, atomistic agent.

The contemporary Right all too often believes exactly the same thing, but expresses it through economics. The dominant actor for right-wing theory is the self-interested individual. The invisible hand is meant to mediate goods and allocate resources according to the price system and the efficient market cycle. But that “free” market produced a massive centralization in capital, and it fed an asset bubble whose expansion and disastrous contraction has been underwritten by the state.

What has been exposed is the shared agenda of cultural libertarianism on the Left and economic libertarianism on the Right. There really was no difference between them because both were upholding the same perverted liberal ideology.

The breaking of that ideology began in the United Kingdom when David Cameron was elected as Conservative leader and began using the phrase “broken Britain” to refer to the dislocation that was happening in our society. Suddenly conservatives were talking about social justice, and it wasn’t the failed form of “compassionate conservatism.” It was a revival of an original One Nation Toryism that was acutely concerned with the interests of the bottom half of the population.

This was violently attacked by the Left. Liberal journalists were caught in a bind: “This is nonsense. The lives of the poor are fine. Oh no, we can’t say that: we’re left-wing. Well, it’s not broken, it’s just different. If people want to have seven partners in one week and to take drugs in front of their children, that’s their choice. But wait, that can’t be right. We just won’t talk about it then.” The Left was completely wrong-footed, and conservatism, which had been out of power for three elections and could easily have been out for another, rose to the top of the polls by adopting the mantle of social justice.

This was not wholly unique. During the 19th century, the Tories were far more radical and more inclined toward the cause of the poor than were the liberal Whigs. It was the conservatives who largely led the campaign against slavery, who argued that the conditions of the white working class in the mills were analogous to those of black slaves, and who pushed for reduced working hours. It was the Tories who through the factory acts opposed the Whigs forcing women and children to work 16 hours a day.

Conservatives need to look back to William Cobbett, Thomas Carlyle, and John Ruskin, who were critics of authoritarian statism as well as denouncers of self-serving capitalism. As conservatives, they hated the cultural consequences of industrialization—the creation of a landless, dispossessed mass forced to work at subsistence levels, cut off from any cultural enrichment. Then came Hilaire Belloc’s 1912 tour de force, The Servile State, in which he denounced both capitalism and socialism for instituting master-slave relations. The capitalist monopolizes land, ownership, and capital, forcing the formerly self-sufficient to work for subsistence wages. The socialist dispossesses in the name of general ownership and communal monopoly. For the worker, both have the same result.

Because this new conservatism echoes a nobler and more radical past, it has great resonance. But it is still allied with the idea of the old neoliberal model of markets. Conservatives can care for social justice, but they still have to support the political economy that had done great damage to the bottom half of society. In 1976, the bottom 50 percent of the British population had 12 percent of the wealth (excluding property). By 2003, that percentage had fallen to 1 percent. So much for the idea that assets and equity will through market mechanisms evenly distribute themselves. A recent UK government survey showed that asset inequality between the 90th percentile and the bottom tenth was 100 to 1—a massive capture of assets by those at the top of the tree.

Now I view myself a pro-market thinker who advocates a popular capitalism and is persuaded by what the utopic thought on the Right wanted: a market economy of widely disbursed property, of multiple centers of innovation, of the decentralization of capital, wealth, and power. But neoliberalism has delivered none of these things. It has instead produced centralization; reduction in plurality; the driving upward, not the driving downward, of opportunity, leverage, and innovation. It has re-inscribed the very things it purported to end.

A vast body of citizens has been stripped of its culture by the Left and its capital by the Right, and in such nakedness they enter the trading floor of life with only their labor to sell. These individuals created by the market-state settlement cannot form a genuine society, for they lack the social capital to create such an association or the economic basis to sustain it. All neoliberalism has done is change class to caste and cut people off from the means whereby self-improvement can result in a genuine change in circumstance.

But most people don’t know what has unhinged their lives, what has driven them and us apart from each other. We don’t know why the ideology we spout and the language that we claim as our own has delivered a situation radically different from what they purport. Liberalism has linked Left and Right into the most illiberal political formation we have yet crafted. I attack it in my book from the point of view of liberty itself:

I am in part appalled by the legacy of modern liberalism precisely because I take myself to be a true liberal. I believe in a free society, where human beings, under the protection of law and guidance of virtue, pursue their own account of the good in debate with those who differ from them and in concord with those who agree. Since in this life we cannot know all that can be known and all human knowledge is conditioned by our own lives and the culture in which we are immersed, we can never transcend this condition and know directly and completely the ultimate principle of everything that exists…

But it does not follow that there is nothing to be known. Unfortunately, all too many British students, who have suffered the misfortune of ten weeks of bad French philosophy, or empiricistic analytic philosophy of a more homegrown kind, emerge from university with the deep and abiding conviction that there is no such thing as objective truth and that everything cultural is arbitrary. They carry into their twenties and beyond the view that any claim about truth is hierarchical and therefore synonymous with fascism and all manner of evil and conservative consequences. Happily convinced by the radical import of this message, too many of our talented young people give up on the possibility of transformative politics and assiduously work their way into the managerial and governing class of our country. Once there, with self-interest duly satisfied, they repeat and institutionalize the same compliant liberal nostrums, which ironically translate into increasingly centralized and bureaucratic procedures that exclude the poor and those who have not been so well-positioned or so well-advantaged to work the system. While the idea of a universal relativism doesn’t survive the first brush with serious rational reflection, such juvenile dictums have permeated our governing elite and undermined the foundations of all our great institutions…

If we are just empty, atomized individuals whose only mode of progress is whim and personal inclination, then no common bond can exist between us, because bonds limit will and subject us to something other than ourselves. For the liberal, there is no more profound violation than that. Moreover, a self-interested individual needs the state to police relationships with other individuals. Ergo, extreme individualism leads to extreme collectivization—and back again.

This defines our political life. The Left loves collectivization: the state is a moral proxy for anything I do; the state protects my rights so my little individualisms can subsist and my cultural liberalism can then be defended by the Supreme Court. Meanwhile, the Right enforces an economic system that supports exactly that vision.

Those dominant oscillations in the West—between the extreme liberalism of the Right and the extreme collectivization of the Left—are one in the same and subtend from the same origin: from a violent, secular liberalism that broke with the antique model of liberty and has essentially destroyed both the Left and the Right.

I want to suggest three ways to move forward: economic, political, and social.

First, we must acknowledge that the whole of our free-market economy has been captured by the Chicago School. Because we’re only focused within competition law on price utility as the interpreter of what would be a good outcome, the bigger your company, the cheaper you can deliver goods. So we pursue monopoly in the name of freedom and asset capture in the name of wealth extension. What we have produced as a result, from the Right, is a whole ideology of competition but no competitors. We’ve created a condition in which large businesses dominate—via a rigged market of rent-seeking capital—in an economy that cuts off for the majority the path to mobility and prosperity.

What do you do for people who aren’t that clever, or that well positioned, or that rich, but who are hard-working? Well, it’s permanently low wages for you—and for your children, and your children’s children. You say you would like to open a store or a business, to have some financial autonomy? Well, we can’t have that. The truth is, we can’t create a situation in which you could prosper because you can’t compete—you can’t bully suppliers, you can’t cross subsidize, you can’t access the supply chains that are already controlled by the new monopolies, so you can’t capture the price utility that those big concerns can. (No matter that the corporate model is subsidized by various tax breaks.) Consequently, there is no route out for many of those in the bottom half of the population.

Until we can change that economic structure, we cannot break the law. So staying within the private sector, we need to adopt an older liberal model and broaden it with a Catholic, distributist, or even Austrian account of the notion of various plural senses to give human beings a chance at a stake in the world. An economy not wedded to a single market model susceptible to the winds of global finance could spread wealth throughout the sectors, creating a resilient and plural economy capable of self-sustaining in the face of the collapse of one segment.

I believe in the free market, but we haven’t had a free market. In a brilliant paper, the head of monetary stability at the Bank of England, Andrew Haldane, recently asked why the speculative economy has done so well. Because the state has taken all the risks. Capital will always seek the highest return, and if you look at the rise of the state and the way it has legislated the banking sector, it has essentially (through deposit, capital, and liquidity insurance) taken on the risk of investment banking activity. Investment bankers can take any risk and not pay any price. Because of this, all capital is centralized. Why would you go to Wisconsin to open a smelting plant when you can get a much safer and higher return in Wall Street or the City of London because you are engaging in the highest return activity at a risk premium covered by the taxpayer? The most you can lose in high finance is your original stake, and sometimes not even that, as there seems no limit to what the state will do for finance capital. If you add up all the debt in the UK—personal, state, and corporate—it comes to 468 percent of GDP. This could mean 10 to 20 years of de-leveraging—a generational economic contraction. There’s nothing free about that.

Along with the private sector being captured by big capital, the public sector has been captured by the big state. The public sector should be broken up—not privatized out, so that big-money interests could essentially gain the difference between the wages of those in the public sector and the wages they were prepared to pay, but turned into employee-owned co-ops. Let’s have worker buy-outs instead of multi-leveraged management buyouts that game both stakeholders and workers. Let them de-layer and de-managerialize their own professions, and let them have a stake and deliver the service they’ve always wanted.

In terms of public assistance, I argue for a power of budgetary capture. Millions of welfare dollars are spent, yet all that ever does is make recipients passive. Ordinary people, recipients of public largesse, can’t in any way create the associations and culture that can be part of their own renewal. So why not allow citizens’ groups to take over government budgets and run them for themselves? Imagine women bonding together because they don’t want to see their children fall into crime and degradation. In giving these people power over their own communities with the public money that has been subsidizing rather than transforming their lives, we will be giving the poor capital. And if they can gain access to the market, they might really create the free economy that everyone has been claiming but no one has been delivering. Then we’ll have a situation in which the state won’t regulate the small and the intermediate out of existence, a situation in which people can genuinely compete.

In the political realm, we have to admit that democracy doesn’t work particularly well, mainly because it’s hugely centralized and substantially captured by vested interests. We need to turn it upside-down—a doctrine of radical democratic subsidiarity that would allow local associations both to select and vote for their own candidates. We can’t do that in the current political settlement. It’s too locked; there are too many vested interests. But if, like budgetary capture, we had a democratic capture, we could send democracy back to the streets. If we could ally that political economy with actual democracy, we could really have bottom-up associations and render the central state increasingly superfluous.

This sort of subsidiarity isn’t a fetishization of the small. It’s a belief in the most appropriate, and that can even be large transnational corporations. I don’t, for example, believe in a localized nuclear industry. In addition, there will always be a role for the state as a kind of ultimate guild or virtue culture that can step in when things go wrong. In that view, it’s not Robert Nozick’s night-watchman state nor is it the centralized state of the Fabian socialists. The state becomes a facilitator of the sort of outcome it wants, but it has to be agnostic as to how people realize that outcome. And only if the outcome isn’t being realized—for instance, if poor people aren’t being educated—should it step in.

Finally, the real recovery has to come in civil society itself. Society should be what rules, what regulates, what is sovereign. Both the state and the market must be subservient to renewed civil association. This requires a restoration of social conservatism that recognizes the claim of the common good over the free agency of the individual. Rather than being a reactionary force that makes war on minorities or vilifies one-parent families, it should, for example, promote the understanding of the family as a feminist institution that because of its reciprocity and mutuality liberates both men and women to pursue the ends that most of them want, which is human flourishing, probably involving children. It should also reach beyond the family to restore the social square. Placing people in relational matrices recreates for those who don’t have a nuclear family the possibility of a civic and extended one.

In Britain, there’s a part of Birmingham called Castle Vale that has had no government money. But they drove from their streets the drug dealers, the prostitutes, the criminals. They took complete control of their area purely through social capital and self-organization, and all the indices of crime and violence dropped to rates unseen by any sort of state action. By having that social capital, they were able to capture political and economic power.

This is the essence of the Western liberal tradition: the rise of association—a state that isn’t dictated by the oligopolies of the market and the central government. The task of a radical conservative politics is to recover this: the middle life of civil society. Villages should run villages, cities cities, and neighborhoods their own streets and parks. Additionally and most importantly, a transformative conservatism must take on the rampant individualism of the self-serving libertarian, not least because an individualism that undermines all social goods by denying a virtue-binding code and moral belief is not a conservative philosophy. On the contrary, extreme individualism is a leftist construct and should be recognized and abandoned as such.

The future is there to be gained. It is the politics of the middle, the life of the civic, and the empowerment of the ordinary. It is to be hoped that a radical conservatism embraces this opportunity and creates and facilitates this future for us all: free association and a self-organizing citizenry producing the norms and the universals that alone license a civic state, a plural society, and a participative economy.

Phillip Blond is director of ResPublica in London. This essay is partially adapted from a speech delivered at the Tocqueville Forum at Georgetown University.

This article has been reprinted with permission.  Copyright TheAmericanConservative.com. You can find the original here

China’s academic performance has been just as stunning. The 2009 Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) tests placed gigantic Shanghai—a megalopolis of 15 million—at the absolute top of world student achievement.¹ PISA results from the rest of the country have been nearly as impressive, with the average scores of hundreds of millions of provincial Chinese—mostly from rural families with annual incomes below $2,000—matching or exceeding those of Europe’s most advanced and successful countries, such as Germany, France, and Switzerland, and ranking well above America’s results.²

These successes follow closely on the heels of a previous generation of similar economic and technological gains for several much smaller Chinese-ancestry countries in that same part of the world, such as Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Singapore, and the great academic and socioeconomic success of small Chinese-descended minority populations in predominantly white nations, including America, Canada, and Australia. The children of the Yellow Emperor seem destined to play an enormous role in Mankind’s future.

Although these developments might have shocked Westerners of the mid-20th Century—when China was best known for its terrible poverty and Maoist revolutionary fanaticism—they would have seemed far less unexpected to our leading thinkers of 100 years ago, many of whom prophesied that the Middle Kingdom would eventually regain its ranking among the foremost nations of the world. This was certainly the expectation of A.E. Ross, one of America’s greatest early sociologists, whose bookThe Changing Chinese looked past the destitution, misery, and corruption of the China of his day to a future modernized China perhaps on a technological par with America and the leading European nations. Ross’s views were widely echoed by public intellectuals such as Lothrop Stoddard, who foresaw China’s probable awakening from centuries of inward-looking slumber as a looming challenge to the worldwide hegemony long enjoyed by the various European-descended nations.

The likely roots of such widespread Chinese success have received little detailed exploration in today’s major Western media, which tends to shy away from considering the particular characteristics of ethnic groups or nationalities, as opposed to their institutional systems and forms of government. Yet although the latter obviously play a crucial role—Maoist China was far less economically successful than Dengist China—it is useful to note that the examples of Chinese success cited above range across a wide diversity of socioeconomic/political systems.

For decades, Hong Kong enjoyed one of the most free-market, nearly anarcho-libertarian economic systems; during that same period, Singapore was governed by the tight hand of Lee Kuan Yew and his socialistic People’s Action Party, which built a one-party state with a large degree of government guidance and control. Yet both these populations were overwhelmingly Chinese, and both experienced almost equally rapid economic development, moving in 50 years from total postwar destitution and teeming refugee slums to ranking among the wealthiest places on earth. And Taiwan, whose much larger Chinese-ancestry population pursued an intermediate development model, enjoyed similar economic success.

Despite a long legacy of racial discrimination and mistreatment, small Chinese communities in America also prospered and advanced, even as their numbers grew rapidly following passage of the 1965 Immigration Act. In recent years a remarkable fraction of America’s top students—whether judged by the objective winners’ circle of the Mathematics Olympiad and Intel Science competition or by the somewhat more subjective rates of admission to Ivy League colleges—have been of Chinese ancestry. The results are particularly striking when cast in quantitative terms: although just 1 percent of American high-school graduates each year have ethnic Chinese origins, surname analysis indicates that they currently include nearly 15 percent of the highest-achieving students, a performance ratio more than four times better than that of American Jews, the top-scoring white ancestry group.³

Chinese people seem to be doing extremely well all over the world, across a wide range of economic and cultural landscapes.

Almost none of these global developments were predicted by America’s leading intellectuals of the 1960s or 1970s, and many of their successors have had just as much difficulty recognizing the dramatic sweep of events through which they are living. A perfect example of this strange myopia may be found in the writings of leading development economists Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson, whose brief discussions of China’s rapid rise to world economic dominance seem to portray the phenomenon as a temporary illusion almost certain soon to collapse because the institutional approach followed differs from the ultra-free-market neoliberalism that they recommend.⁴ The large role that the government plays in guiding Chinese economic decisions dooms it to failure, despite all evidence to the contrary, while America’s heavily financialized economy must be successful, regardless of our high unemployment and low growth. According to Acemoglu and Robinson, nearly all international success or failure is determined by governmental institutions, and since China possesses the wrong ones, failure is certain, though there seems no sign of it.

Perhaps such academics will be proven correct, and China’s economic miracle will collapse into the debacle they predict. But if this does not occur, and the international trend lines of the past 35 years continue for another five or ten, we should consider turning for explanations to those long-forgotten thinkers who actually foretold these world developments that we are now experiencing, individuals such as Ross and Stoddard. The widespread devastation produced by the Japanese invasion, World War II, and the Chinese Civil War, followed by the economic calamity of Maoism, did delay the predicted rise of China by a generation or two, but except for such unforeseen events, their analysis of Chinese potential seems remarkably prescient. For example, Stoddard approvingly quotes the late Victorian predictions of Professor Charles E. Pearson:

Does any one doubt that the day is at hand when China will have cheap fuel from her coal-mines, cheap transport by railways and steamers, and will have founded technical schools to develop her industries? Whenever that day comes, she may wrest the control of the world’s markets, especially throughout Asia, from England and Germany.⁵

A People Shaped by Their Difficult Environment

Western intellectual life a century ago was quite different from that of today, with contrary doctrines and taboos, and the spirit of that age certainly held sway over its leading figures. Racialism—the notion that different peoples tend to have different innate traits, as largely fashioned by their particular histories—was dominant then, so much so that the notion was almost universally held and applied, sometimes in rather crude fashion, to both European and non-European populations.

With regard to the Chinese, the widespread view was that many of their prominent characteristics had been shaped by thousands of years of history in a generally stable and organized society possessing central political administration, a situation almost unique among the peoples of the world. In effect, despite temporary periods of political fragmentation, East Asia’s own Roman Empire had never fallen, and a thousand-year interregnum of barbarism, economic collapse, and technological backwardness had been avoided.

On the less fortunate side, the enormous population growth of recent centuries had gradually caught up with and overtaken China’s exceptionally efficient agricultural system, reducing the lives of most Chinese to the brink of Malthusian starvation; and these pressures and constraints were believed to be reflected in the Chinese people. For example, Stoddard wrote:

Winnowed by ages of grim elimination in a land populated to the uttermost limits of subsistence, the Chinese race is selected as no other for survival under the fiercest conditions of economic stress. At home the average Chinese lives his whole life literally within a hand’s breadth of starvation. Accordingly, when removed to the easier environment of other lands, the Chinaman brings with him a working capacity which simply appalls his competitors.⁶

Stoddard backed these riveting phrases with a wide selection of detailed and descriptive quotations from prominent observers, both Western and Chinese. Although Ross was more cautiously empirical in his observations and less literary in his style, his analysis was quite similar, with his book on the Chinese containing over 40 pages describing the grim and gripping details of daily survival, provided under the evocative chapter-heading “The Struggle for Existence in China.”⁷

During the second half of the 20th century, ideological considerations largely eliminated from American public discourse the notion that many centuries of particular circumstances might leave an indelible imprint upon a people. But with the turn of the new millennium, such analyses have once again begun appearing in respectable intellectual quarters.

The most notable example of this would surely be A Farewell to Alms, Gregory Clark’s fascinating 2007 analysis of the deep origins of Britain’s industrial revolution, which was widely reviewed and praised throughout elite circles, with New York Times economics columnist Tyler Cowen hailing it as possibly “the next blockbuster in economics” and Berkeley economist Brad DeLong characterizing it as “brilliant.”

Although Clark’s work focused on many different factors, the one that attracted the greatest attention was his demographic analysis of British history based upon a close examination of individual testaments. Clark discovered evidence that for centuries the wealthier British had left significantly more surviving children than their poorer compatriots, thus leading their descendents to constitute an ever larger share of each generation. Presumably, this was because they could afford to marry at a younger age, and their superior nutritional and living arrangements reduced mortality rates for themselves and their families. Indeed, the near-Malthusian poverty of much ordinary English life during this era meant that the impoverished lower classes often failed even to reproduce themselves over time, gradually being replaced by the downwardly mobile children of their financial betters. Since personal economic achievement was probably in part due to traits such as diligence, prudence, and productivity, Clark argued that these characteristics steadily became more widespread in the British population, laying the human basis for later national economic success.

Leaving aside whether or not the historical evidence actually supports Clark’s hypothesis—economist Robert C. Allen has published a strong and fairly persuasive refutation⁸—the theoretical framework he advances seems a perfectly plausible one. Although the stylistic aspects and quantitative approaches certainly differ, much of Clark’s analysis for England seems to have clear parallels in how Stoddard, Ross, and others of their era characterized China. So perhaps it would be useful to explore whether a Clarkian analysis might be applicable to the people of the Middle Kingdom.

Interestingly enough, Clark himself devotes a few pages to considering this question and concludes that in contrast to the British case, wealthier Chinese were no more fecund than the poorer, eliminating the possibility of any similar generational trend.⁹ But Clark is not a China specialist, and his brief analysis relies on the birth records of the descendents of the ruling imperial dynasty, a group totally unrepresentative of the broader population. In fact, a more careful examination of the Chinese source material reveals persuasive evidence for a substantial skew in family size, directly related to economic success, with the pattern being perhaps even stronger and more universally apparent than was the case for Britain or any other country.

Moreover, certain unique aspects of traditional Chinese society may have maintained and amplified this long-term effect, in a manner unlike that found in most other societies in Europe or elsewhere. China indeed may constitute the largest and longest-lasting instance of an extreme “Social Darwinist” society anywhere in human history, perhaps with important implications for the shaping of the modern Chinese people.¹⁰

The Social Economy of Traditional China

Chinese society is notable for its stability and longevity. From the gradual establishment of the bureaucratic imperial state based on mandarinate rule during the Sui (589–618) and T’ang (618–907) dynasties down to the Communist Revolution of 1948, a single set of social and economic relations appears to have maintained its grip on the country, evolving only slightly while dynastic successions and military conquests periodically transformed the governmental superstructure.

A central feature of this system was the replacement of the local rule of aristocratic elements by a class of official meritocrats, empowered by the central government and selected by competitive examination. In essence, China eliminated the role of hereditary feudal lords and the social structure they represented over 1,000 years before European countries did the same, substituting a system of legal equality for virtually the entire population beneath the reigning emperor and his family.

The social importance of competitive examinations was enormous, playing the same role in determining membership in the ruling elite that the aristocratic bloodlines of Europe’s nobility did until modern times, and this system embedded itself just as deeply in the popular culture. The great noble houses of France or Germany might trace their lineages back to ancestors elevated under Charlemagne or Barbarossa, with their heirs afterward rising and falling in standing and estates, while in China the proud family traditions would boast generations of top-scoring test-takers, along with the important government positions that they had received as a result. Whereas in Europe there existed fanciful stories of a heroic commoner youth doing some great deed for the king and consequently being elevated to a knighthood or higher, such tales were confined to fiction down to the French Revolution. But in China, even the greatest lineages of academic performers almost invariably had roots in the ordinary peasantry.

Not only was China the first national state to utilize competitive written examinations for selection purposes, but it is quite possible that almost all other instances everywhere in the world ultimately derive from the Chinese example. It has long been established that the Chinese system served as the model for the meritocratic civil services that transformed the efficiency of Britain and other European states during the 18th and 19th centuries. But persuasive historical arguments have also been advanced that the same is even true for university entrance tests and honors examinations, with Cambridge’s famed Math Tripos being the earliest example.¹¹ Modern written tests may actually be as Chinese as chopsticks.

With Chinese civilization having spent most of the past 1,500 years allocating its positions of national power and influence by examination, there has sometimes been speculation that test-taking ability has become embedded in the Chinese people at the biological as well as cultural level. Yet although there might be an element of truth to this, it hardly seems likely to be significant. During the eras in question, China’s total population numbered far into the tens of millions, growing in unsteady fashion from perhaps 60 million before AD 900 to well over 400 million by 1850. But the number of Chinese passing the highest imperial exam and attaining the exalted rank of chin-shihduring most of the past six centuries was often less than 100 per year, down from a high of over 200 under the Sung dynasty (960-1279), and even if we include the lesser rank ofchu-jen, the national total of such degree-holders was probably just in the low tens of thousands,¹² a tiny fraction of 1 percent of the overall population—totally dwarfed by the numbers of Chinese making their living as artisans or merchants, let alone the overwhelming mass of the rural peasantry. The cultural impact of rule by a test-selected elite was enormous, but the direct genetic impact would have been negligible.

This same difficulty of relative proportions frustrates any attempt to apply in China an evolutionary model similar to the one that Gregory Cochran and Henry Harpending have persuasively suggested for the evolution of high intelligence among the Ashkenazi Jews of Europe.¹³ The latter group constituted a small, reproductively isolated population overwhelmingly concentrated in the sorts of business and financial activity that would have strongly favored more intelligent individuals, and one with insignificant gene-flow from the external population not undergoing such selective pressure. By contrast, there is no evidence that successful Chinese merchants or scholars were unwilling to take brides from the general population, and any reasonable rate of such intermarriage each generation would have totally swamped the selective impact of mercantile or scholarly success. If we are hoping to find any rough parallel to the process that Clark hypothesizes for Britain, we must concentrate our attention on the life circumstances of China’s broad rural peasantry—well over 90 percent of the population during all these centuries—just as the aforementioned 19th-century observers generally had done.

Absence of Caste and Fluidity of Class

In fact, although Western observers tended to focus on China’s horrific poverty above all else, traditional Chinese society actually possessed certain unusual or even unique characteristics that may help account for the shaping of the Chinese people. Perhaps the most important of these was the near total absence of social caste and the extreme fluidity of economic class.

Feudalism had ended in China a thousand years before the French Revolution, and nearly all Chinese stood equal before the law.¹⁴ The “gentry”—those who had passed an official examination and received an academic degree—possessed certain privileges and the “mean people”—prostitutes, entertainers, slaves, and various other degraded social elements—suffered under legal discrimination. But both these strata were minute in size, with each usually amounting to less than 1 percent of the general population, while “the common people”—everyone else, including the peasantry—enjoyed complete legal equality.

However, such legal equality was totally divorced from economic equality, and extreme gradations of wealth and poverty were found in every corner of society, down to the smallest and most homogenous village. During most of the 20th century, the traditional Marxian class analysis of Chinese rural life divided the population according to graduated wealth and degree of “exploitative” income: landlords, who obtained most or all of their income from rent or hired labor; rich, middle, and poor peasants, grouped according to decreasing wealth and rental income and increasing tendency to hire out their own labor; and agricultural laborers, who owned negligible land and obtained nearly all their income from hiring themselves out to others.

In hard times, these variations in wealth might easily mean the difference between life and death, but everyone acknowledged that such distinctions were purely economic and subject to change: a landlord who lost his land would become a poor peasant; a poor peasant who came into wealth would be the equal of any landlord. During its political struggle, the Chinese Communist Party claimed that landlords and rich peasants constituted about 10 percent of the population and possessed 70–80 percent of the land, while poor peasants and hired laborers made up the overwhelming majority of the population and owned just 10–15 percent of the land. Neutral observers found these claims somewhat exaggerated for propagandistic purposes, but not all that far from the harsh reality.¹⁵

Complete legal equality and extreme economic inequality together fostered one of the most unrestrained free-market systems known to history, not only in China’s cities but much more importantly in its vast countryside, which contained nearly the entire population. Land, the primary form of wealth, was freely bought, sold, traded, rented out, sub-leased, or mortgaged as loan collateral. Money-lending and food-lending were widely practiced, especially during times of famine, with usurious rates of interest being the norm, often in excess of 10 percent per month compounded. In extreme cases, children or even wives might be sold for cash and food. Unless aided by relatives, peasants without land or money routinely starved to death. Meanwhile, the agricultural activity of more prosperous peasants was highly commercialized and entrepreneurial, with complex business arrangements often the norm.¹⁶

For centuries, a central fact of daily life in rural China had been the tremendous human density, as the Middle Kingdom’s population expanded from 65 million to 430 million during the five centuries before 1850,¹⁷ eventually forcing nearly all land to be cultivated to maximum efficiency. Although Chinese society was almost entirely rural and agricultural, Shandong province in 1750 had well over twice the population density of the Netherlands, the most urbanized and densely populated part of Europe, while during the early years of the Industrial Revolution, England’s population density was only one-fifth that of Jiangsu province.¹⁸

Chinese agricultural methods had always been exceptionally efficient, but by the 19th century, the continuing growth of the Chinese population had finally caught and surpassed the absolute Malthusian carrying-capacity of the farming system under its existing technical and economic structure.¹⁹ Population growth was largely held in check by mortality (including high infant mortality), decreased fertility due to malnutrition, disease, and periodic regional famines that killed an average of 5 percent of the population.²⁰ Even the Chinese language came to incorporate the centrality of food, with the traditional words of greeting being “Have you eaten?” and the common phrase denoting a wedding, funeral, or other important social occasion being “to eat good things.”²¹

The cultural and ideological constraints of Chinese society posed major obstacles to mitigating this never-ending human calamity. Although impoverished Europeans of this era, male and female alike, often married late or not at all, early marriage and family were central pillars of Chinese life, with the sage Mencius stating that to have no children was the worst of unfilial acts; indeed, marriage and anticipated children were the mark of adulthood. Furthermore, only male heirs could continue the family name and ensure that oneself and one’s ancestors would be paid the proper ritual respect, and multiple sons were required to protect against the vagaries of fate. On a more practical level, married daughters became part of their husband’s household, and only sons could ensure provision for one’s old age.

Nearly all peasant societies sanctify filial loyalty, marriage, family, and children, while elevating sons above daughters, but in traditional China these tendencies seem to have been especially strong, representing a central goal and focus of all daily life beyond bare survival. Given the terrible poverty, cruel choices were often made, and female infanticide, including through neglect, was the primary means of birth control among the poor, leading to a typical shortfall of 10–15 percent among women of marriageable age. Reproductive competition for those remaining women was therefore fierce, with virtually every woman marrying, generally by her late teens. The inevitable result was a large and steady natural increase in the total population, except when constrained by various forms of increased mortality.

Remarkable Upward Mobility But Relentless Downward Mobility

The vast majority of Chinese might be impoverished peasants, but for those with ability and luck, the possibilities of upward mobility were quite remarkable in what was an essentially classless society. The richer strata of each village possessed the wealth to give their most able children a classical education in hopes of preparing them for the series of official examinations. If the son of a rich peasant or petty landlord were sufficiently diligent and intellectually able, he might pass such an examination and obtain an official degree, opening enormous opportunities for political power and wealth.

For the Ming (1368–1644) and Ch’ing (1644–1911) dynasties, statistics exist on the social origins of the chin-shih class, the highest official rank, and these demonstrate a rate of upward mobility unmatched by almost any Western society, whether modern or premodern. Over 30 percent of such elite degree-holders came from commoner families that for three previous generations had produced no one of high official rank, and in the data from earlier centuries, this fraction of “new men” reached a high of 84 percent. Such numbers far exceed the equivalent figures for Cambridge University during all the centuries since its foundation, and would probably seem remarkable at America’s elite Ivy League colleges today or in the past. Meanwhile, downward social mobility was also common among even the highest families. As a summary statistic, across the six centuries of these two dynasties less than 6 percent of China’s ruling elites came from the ruling elites of the previous generation.²²

The founding philosophical principle of the modern Western world has been the “Equality of Man,” while that of Confucianist China was the polar opposite belief in the inherent inequality of men. Yet in reality, the latter often seemed to fulfill better the ideological goals of the former. Frontier America might have had its mythos of presidents born in log-cabins, but for many centuries a substantial fraction of the Middle Kingdom’s ruling mandarins did indeed come from rural rice-paddies, a state of affairs that would have seemed almost unimaginable in any European country until the Age of Revolution, and even long afterward.

Such potential for elevation into the ruling Chinese elite was remarkable, but a far more important factor in the society was the open possibility of local economic advancement for the sufficiently enterprising and diligent rural peasant. Ironically enough, a perfect description of such upward mobility was provided by Communist revolutionary leader Mao Zedong, who recounted how his father had risen from being a landless poor peasant to rich peasant status:

My father was a poor peasant and while still young was obliged to join the army because of heavy debts. He was a soldier for many years. Later on he returned to the village where I was born, and by saving carefully and gathering together a little money through small trading and other enterprise he managed to buy back his land.

As middle peasants then my family owned fifteen mou [about 2.5 acres] of land. On this they could raise sixty tan of rice a year. The five members of the family consumed a total of thirty-five tan—that is, about seven each—which left an annual surplus of twenty-five tan. Using this surplus, my father accumulated a little capital and in time purchased seven more mou, which gave the family the status of ‘rich’ peasants. We could ten raise eighty-four tan of rice a year.

When I was ten years of age and the family owned only fifteen mou of land, the five members of the family consisted of my father, mother, grandfather, younger brother, and myself. After we had acquired the additional seven mou, my grandfather died, but there came another younger brother. However, we still had a surplus of forty-nine tan of rice each year, and on this my father prospered.

At the time my father was a middle peasant he began to deal in grain transport and selling, by which he made a little money. After he became a ‘rich’ peasant, he devoted most of his time to that business. He hired a full-time farm laborer, and put his children to work on the farm, as well as his wife. I began to work at farming tasks when I was six years old. My father had no shop for his business. He simply purchased grain from the poor farmers and then transported it to the city merchants, where he got a higher price. In the winter, when the rice was being ground, he hired an extra laborer to work on the farm, so that at that time there were seven mouths to feed. My family ate frugally, but had enough always.²³

Mao’s account gives no indication that he regarded his family’s rise as extraordinary in any way; his father had obviously done well, but there were probably many other families in Mao’s village that had similarly improved their lot during the course of a single generation. Such opportunities for rapid social mobility would have been almost impossible in any of the feudal or class-ridden societies of the same period, in Europe or most other parts of the world.

However, the flip-side of possible peasant upward mobility was the far greater likelihood of downward mobility, which was enormous and probably represented the single most significant factor shaping the modern Chinese people. Each generation, a few who were lucky or able might rise, but a vast multitude always fell, and those families near the bottom simply disappeared from the world. Traditional rural China was a society faced with the reality of an enormous and inexorable downward mobility: for centuries, nearly all Chinese ended their lives much poorer than had their parents.

The strong case for such downward mobility was demonstrated a quarter century ago by historian Edwin E. Moise,²⁴ whose crucial article on the subject has received far less attention than it deserves, perhaps because the intellectual climate of the late 1970s prevented readers from drawing the obvious evolutionary implications.

In many respects, Moise’s demographic analysis of China eerily anticipated that of Clark for England, as he pointed out that only the wealthier families of a Chinese village could afford the costs associated with obtaining wives for their sons, with female infanticide and other factors regularly ensuring up to a 15 percent shortfall in the number of available women. Thus, the poorest village strata usually failed to reproduce at all, while poverty and malnourishment also tended to lower fertility and raise infant mortality as one moved downward along the economic gradient. At the same time, the wealthiest villagers sometimes could afford multiple wives or concubines and regularly produced much larger numbers of surviving offspring. Each generation, the poorest disappeared, the less affluent failed to replenish their numbers, and all those lower rungs on the economic ladder were filled by the downwardly mobile children of the fecund wealthy.

This fundamental reality of Chinese rural existence was certainly obvious to the peasants themselves and to outside observers, and there exists an enormous quantity of anecdotal evidence describing the situation, whether gathered by Moise or found elsewhere, as illustrated by a few examples:

‘How could any man in our village claim that his family had been poor for three generations? If a man is poor, then his son can’t afford to marry; and if his son can’t marry, there can’t be a third generation.’²⁵

… Because of the marked shortage of women, there was always a great number of men without wives at all. This included the overwhelming majority of long-term hired laborers… The poorest families died out, being unable to arrange marriages for their sons. The future generations of poor were the descendants of bankrupted middle and rich peasants and landlords.²⁶

… Further down the economic scale there were many families with unmarried sons who had already passed the customary marriage age, thus limiting the size of the family. Wong Mi was a case in point. He was already twenty-three, with both of his parents in their mid-sixties; but since the family was able to rent only an acre of poor land and could not finance his marriage, he lived with the old parents, and the family consisted of three members. Wong Chun, a landless peasant in his forties, had been in the same position when he lived with his aged parents ten years before, and now, both parents having died, he lived alone. There were ten or fifteen families in the village with single unmarried sons.²⁷

… As previously mentioned, there were about twenty families in Nanching that had no land at all and constituted the bottom group in the village’s pyramid of land ownership. A few of these families were tenant farmers, but the majority, since they could not finance even the buying of tools, fertilizer, and seeds, worked as “long-term” agricultural laborers on an annual basis. As such, they normally were paid about 1,000 catties of unhusked rice per year and board and room if they owned no home. This income might equal or even exceed what they might have wrested from a small rented farm, but it was not enough to support a family of average size without supplementary employment undertaken by other members of the family. For this reason, many of them never married, and the largest number of bachelors was to be found among landless peasants. Wong Tu-en, a landless peasant working for a rich peasant for nearly ten years, was still a “bare stick” (unmarried man) in his fifties; and there were others in the village like him. They were objects of ridicule and pity in the eyes of the villagers, whose life [sic] centered upon the family.²⁸

Furthermore, the forces of downward mobility in rural Chinese society were greatly accentuated by fenjia, the traditional system of inheritance, which required equal division of property among all sons, in sharp contrast to the practice of primogeniture commonly found in European countries.

If most or all of a father’s property went to the eldest son, then the long-term survival of a reasonably affluent peasant family was assured unless the primary heir were a complete wastrel or encountered unusually bad fortune. But in China, cultural pressures forced a wealthy man to do his best to maximize the number of his surviving sons, and within the richer strata of a village it was not uncommon for a man to leave two, three, or even more male heirs, compelling each to begin his economic independence with merely a fraction of his father’s wealth. Unless they succeeded in substantially augmenting their inheritance, the sons of a particularly fecund rich landlord might be middle peasants—and his grandchildren, starving poor peasants.²⁹ Families whose elevated status derived from a single fortuitous circumstance or a transient trait not deeply rooted in their behavioral characteristics therefore enjoyed only fleeting economic success, and poverty eventually culled their descendents from the village.

The members of a successful family could maintain their economic position over time only if in each generation large amounts of additional wealth were extracted from their land and their neighbors through high intelligence, sharp business sense, hard work, and great diligence. The penalty for major business miscalculations or lack of sufficient effort was either personal or reproductive extinction. As American observer William Hinton graphically described:

Security, relative comfort, influence, position, and leisure [were] maintained amidst a sea of the most dismal and frightening poverty and hunger—a poverty and hunger which at all times threatened to engulf any family which relaxed its vigilance, took pity on its poor neighbors, failed to extract the last copper of rent and interest, or ceased for an instant the incessant accumulation of grain and money. Those who did not go up went down, and those who went down often went to their deaths or at least to the dissolution and dispersal of their families.³⁰

However, under favorable circumstances, a family successful in business might expand its numbers from generation to generation until it gradually squeezed out all its less competitive neighbors, with its progeny eventually constituting nearly the entire population of a village. For example, a century after a couple of poor Yang brothers arrived in a region as farm laborers, their descendents had formed a clan of 80–90 families in one village and the entire population of a neighboring one.³¹ In a Guangdong village, a merchant family named Huang arrived and bought land, growing in numbers and land ownership over the centuries until their descendants replaced most of the other families, which became poor and ultimately disappeared, while the Huangs eventually constituted 74 percent of the total local population, including a complete mix of the rich, middle, and poor.³²

The Implications for the Chinese People and for American Ideology

In many respects, the Chinese society portrayed by our historical and sociological sources seems an almost perfect example of the sort of local environment that would be expected to produce a deep imprint upon the characteristics of its inhabitants. Even prior to the start of this harsh development process, China had spent thousands of years as one of the world’s most advanced economic and technological civilizations. The socioeconomic system established from the end of the sixth century A.D. onward then remained largely stable and unchanged for well over a millennium, with the sort of orderly and law-based society that benefited those who followed its rules and ruthlessly weeded out the troublemaker. During many of those centuries, the burden of overpopulation placed enormous economic pressure on each family to survive, while a powerful cultural tradition emphasized the production of surviving offspring, especially sons, as the greatest goal in life, even if that result might lead to the impoverishment of the next generation. Agricultural efficiency was remarkably high but required great effort and diligence, while the complexities of economic decision-making—how to manage land, crop selection, and investment decisions—were far greater than those faced by the simple peasant serf found in most other parts of the world, with the rewards for success and the penalties for failure being extreme. The sheer size and cultural unity of the Chinese population would have facilitated the rapid appearance and spread of useful innovations, including those at the purely biological level.³³

It is important to recognize that although good business ability was critical for the long-term success of a line of Chinese peasants, the overall shaping constraints differed considerably from those that might have affected a mercantile caste such as the Ashkenazi Jews of Eastern Europe or the Parsis of India. These latter groups occupied highly specialized economic niches in which a keen head for figures or a ruthless business sense might have been all that was required for personal success and prosperity. But in the world of rural Chinese villages, even the wealthier elements usually spent the majority of the lives in backbreaking labor, working alongside their families and their hired men in the fields and rice paddies. Successful peasants might benefit from a good intellect, but they also required the propensity for hard manual toil, determination, diligence, and even such purely physical traits as resistance to injury and efficiency in food digestion. Given such multiple selective pressures and constraints, we would expect the shift in the prevalence of any single one of these traits to be far slower than if it alone determined success, and the many centuries of steady Chinese selection across the world’s largest population would have been required to produce any substantial result.³⁴

The impact of such strong selective forces obviously manifests at multiple levels, with cultural software being far more flexible and responsive than any gradual shifts in innate tendencies, and distinguishing between evidence of these two mechanisms is hardly a trivial task. But it seems quite unlikely that the second, deeper sort of biological human change would not have occurred during a thousand years or more of these relentlessly shaping pressures, and simply to ignore or dismiss such an important possibility is unreasonable. Yet that seems to have been the dominant strain of Western intellectual belief for the last two or three generations.

Sometimes the best means of recognizing one’s ideological blinders is to consider seriously the ideas and perspectives of alien minds that lack them, and in the case of Western society these happen to include most of our greatest intellectual figures from 80 or 90 years ago, now suddenly restored to availability by the magic of the Internet. Admittedly, in some respects these individuals were naïve in their thinking or treated various ideas in crude fashion, but in many more cases their analyses were remarkably acute and scientifically insightful, often functioning as an invaluable corrective to the assumed truths of the present. And in certain matters, notably predicting the economic trajectory of the world’s largest country, they seem to have anticipated developments that almost none of their successors of the past 50 years ever imagined. This should certainly give us pause.

Consider also the ironic case of Bruce Lahn, a brilliant Chinese-born genetics researcher at the University of Chicago. In an interview a few years ago, he casually mentioned his speculation that the socially conformist tendencies of most Chinese people might be due to the fact that for the past 2,000 years the Chinese government had regularly eliminated its more rebellious subjects, a suggestion that would surely be regarded as totally obvious and innocuous everywhere in the world except in the West of the past half century or so. Not long before that interview, Lahn had achieved great scientific acclaim for his breakthrough discoveries on the possible genetic origins of human civilization, but this research eventually provoked such heated controversy that he was dissuaded from continuing it.³⁵

Yet although Chinese researchers living in America willingly conform to American ideological restrictions, this is not the case with Chinese researchers in China itself, and it is hardly surprising that BGI—the Beijing Genomics Institute—has become the recognized world leader in cutting-edge human genetics research. This is despite the billions spent by its American counterparts, which must operate within a much more circumscribed framework of acceptable ideas.

During the Cold War, the enormous governmental investments of the Soviet regime in many fields produced nothing, since they were based on a model of reality that was both unquestionable and also false. The growing divergence between that ideological model and the real world eventually doomed the USSR, whose vast and permanent bulk blew away in a sudden gust of wind two decades ago. American leaders should take care that they do not stubbornly adhere to scientifically false doctrines that will lead our own country to risk a similar fate.

This article is republished from The American Conservative with permission. Find the original here

The Delhi Noida Toll Bridge popularly known as the DND flyover is the result of a PPP (Public Private Partnership). This bridge marks the shortest route between Noida and Delhi. It is 9.2 km long with 8 lanes (4 lane dual carriageways) and 31 lane Toll plaza at the Noida end and 11 lane Toll plaza at the Mayur Vihar end. It is one of the three bridges across the Yamuna River connecting Noida with Delhi and is the only one which is tolled.

IL&FS, NOIDA and the Delhi Administration (DA) reached an in-principle agreement for the construction of DND Flyway on Build, Own, and Operate & Transfer (BOOT) basis. A tripartite Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) was signed between IL&FS, NOIDA, and Delhi Administration on April 7, 1992 for establishing the new bridge and defining the scope and mutual obligation of the various partners. As a consequence of this agreement, IL&FS received a mandate from NOIDA/Delhi Administration.

According to the MoU, a Steering Committee consisting of representatives of Government of Uttar Pradesh (GoUP), Delhi Government (DG), the Ministry of Urban Affairs and Employment, Government of India, Delhi Development Authority (DDA), NOIDA and IL&FS was established for monitoring the Delhi Noida Toll Bridge and taking decisions relating to the development of the DND Flyway. Pursuant to the decision of the Steering Committee, NTBCL was incorporated on April 8, 1996 under the Companies Act, 1956 for the purposes of developing, establishing, designing, constructing, operating and maintaining the DND Flyway.

On November 12, 1997 a Concession Agreement was entered into by NOIDA, NTBCL and IL&FS conferring to NTBCL, the right of implementation of the Delhi Noida Toll Bridge. The major components of the Delhi Noida Toll Bridge comprise of 552.5 Meters long, eight lane, short span box, continuous girder based bridge across the Yamuna river, approach ways to the bridge with cloverleaf interchange points at both ends to inter face with the existing road network, three minor bridges over existing watercourses, 28 lane toll collection plaza at the Noida end and a flyover with interchanges at the Ashram crossing in South Delhi.(built as per the support agreement with Delhi Govt. to augment traffic to DND flyover)

Construction of the Delhi Noida Toll Bridge was completed after 25 months, 4 months ahead of schedule. The Delhi Noida Toll Bridge was opened to traffic on 7 February 2001.The Ashram Flyover was opened to traffic on 30 October 2001.

The PPP provides that concession would last until NTBCL recovered the total project cost plus a return of 20% per annum of the total project cost and tolls would be fixed accordingly. Moreover, in case of toll revenue short fall concessionaire will be granted development rights by government to augment its revenues or concession period will be increased as per the requirement. Therefore, it warrants a clearly and rationally defined Total Project Cost (TPC). The Total Project Cost is defined in the Concession Agreement to mean the aggregate cost of the project, any major maintenance expenses plus any shortfall in the Return in any specific year. It also includes the other costs of commissioning. Other Costs of Commissioning means “all costs and expenses of whatever kind, as specified in the accounts maintained by the Concessionaire, NOIDA, Sponsor, Govt. of UP, and Delhi Government in the format approved by the Independent Auditor and are duly audited by the Independent Auditor, incurred in respect of the Project, prior to the Project Commissioning Date, other than the Cost of Construction, including but without being limited to: (a) cost incurred in relation to the acquisition and preparation of the land upon which the facilities shall be located (including all lease rentals payable) (b) all pre-operative expenses incurred by NOIDA, the Sponsor and the Concessionaire prior to entering into the Agreement, (c) management overheads such as corporate office expenses, salaries to staff, traveling expenses, administrative overheads, and management and legal expenses, (d) all consulting and advisory service fees incurred prior to the Project Commissioning Date, including all site investigation charges, Independent Engineer and other engineers’ and architects’ fees incurred in relation to the implementation of the Project, (e) expenses incurred by the Concessionaire for mobilization of financial resources, in whatever form for funding the Project, including but not limited to, brokerage, commissions, upfront discounts on debt, merchant banker’s fees, legal fees, publicity and travel expense, financial advisory charges and other related charges and fees including charges and fees payable under the Financing Agreements, (f) any duties (including stamp duty payable on the Financing Agreements), taxes, levies, fees and commissions, duly grossed up, (g) other specific expenses as agreed upon and incurred by the Concessionaire, Sponsor, NOIDA, GOUP and DG under the Support Agreement or their respective agencies during implementation of the Project, (h) all costs of the insurance required to be obtained in connection with the Project prior to the Project Commissioning Date, and (I) the Management Fee (the Management Fee is 1% of the Project Cost, payable to the Sponsor (IL&FS) upon financial close).

We see that definition of TPC is open-ended despite including practically everything in it. Moreover, TPC is calculated ex-post which means that concessionaire was given an open hand in construction of bridge. It created an incentive for cost-maximization rather than cost-minimization and efficiency. It was like handing over a blank cheque at the cost of the public which will have to pay for whimsical number filled in by concessionaire. Noida authority had guaranteed a rate of return on unknown amount.

It also include “without limitation” attorneys’ fees associated with the settlement of pending or threatened suits/claims (other than suits/claims resulting from the negligence or breach of the concession agreement by the concessionaire). Allowable O&M expenses also include such items as “fines” on the concessionaire. While company will incur the expenditure of any major repair work that too will be added to the Total Project Cost. So if a section of road breaks down due to low quality of construction material used, its repair cost will be included in the Total Project Cost and if authorities decide to impose fines on company that too can be included in the Total Project Cost. If authorities impose a fine on concessionaire for that low quality work then it will too be added to the TPC. And if authorities wake up to this travesty and try to take legal action against concessionaire for the same, it will too be part of the TPC!

Since any deficit in returns significantly increases the total cost of the project, this can create a vicious cycle in which the shortfall in achievement of required returns and the compounding thereof results in a repeated need to lengthen the concession period and/or raise toll rates or grant Development Rights. It will have rights to undertake additional projects to either increase the traffic flow or supplement the revenue via additional projects altogether. And such a situation has already come to pass. We have seen that company suffered heavy losses in the initial years of its operation. Therefore, it undertook the construction of Mayur Vihar link to divert the traffic of densely populated East-Delhi towards the toll bridge. Plus, it had already undertaken the construction of Ashram flyover under the support agreement with Delhi to ensure smooth dispersal of traffic and increase traffic from the Delhi end. Cost of both these were added to the TPC.

Losses in initial years due to overestimated projections have opened the way for super profits now. The ‘Magic of Compounding’ is now at work. Dues (shortfalls) as of FY09 end stood at Rs.14,875 Mn. The figure only keeps getting larger as 20% on this would be approx Rs.3,000 Mn while even at the present day satisfactory level of profits; ‘Return’ is about Rs.530 Mn. In fact, it has been estimated and loudly proclaimed by the company itself that concession period “may be” needed to extended to 70 years “unless development rights” are granted to reduce that time period.

It is important to note that no proper standard of traffic estimates. The shortfall between actual and project traffic and revenue in the initial years is given below:

Table: Actual and Projected Traffic and Toll Revenue, 2000-01 to 2002-03

*There were 53 days of operation in 2000-01, Source: Aim Admission Document

Such huge difference between actual and projected figures cast a shadow over both the intent and competence of the parties involved in the planning exercise. When we compare this with steady and stable increase in traffic, the whole scope of arguing “unexpected” behavior or fluctuation in traffic flow falls flat. The table below gives a fairly stable rising traffic and revenue on the bridge:

Table: Traffic and Average Toll per Vehicle

Source: Annual Reports of NTBCL

The traffic has grown from about 17K vehicles (ADT–Average Daily Traffic) in 2001 to almost 100K in 2009, a CAGR of about 24%. Average Toll realization per vehicle has also grown handsomely from 2005-06 as can be seen in the chart above. It is inconceivable that such a stable trend in traffic flow could not be estimated with acceptable degree of error.

Second issue of importance is that concessionaire has been absolved of almost all the risks involved in the project. The whole argument behind BOT-Toll model is that it spares the government from risks which are then borne by the private partner. But here we see that concessionaire has been guaranteed 20 % rate of return. And shortfalls in the revenue will be added to TPC which is to be recovered with profit. But the story does not stop here. Under the Concession Agreement, the Company has the ability to request NOIDA to grant it development rights over the land surrounding the Delhi Noida Toll Bridge which is not anticipated to be required for the operation of the Delhi Noida Toll Bridge. The Company may request the grant of development rights if the Independent Auditor upon reference by the Company determines that there has been a shortfall in the toll revenues derived by the Company from the Delhi Noida Toll Bridge project. In fact, Company has requested the grant of development rights under the Concession Agreement and got the ‘in principle’ approval dated 16 May 2001.

Company has a leasehold title on approximately 99 acres; 65 acres on the Delhi side of the bridge and remaining on the Noida side. These lands are not required for the operation of the toll bridge. A valuation study by Jones Lang LaSalle in 2004 estimated the potential value of this land at $82 million if it were developed. The Company is so sure of it that it has already acquired a wholly-owned subsidiary, DND Flyway Limited, with the intention that this subsidiary would undertake any future exploitation of any development rights granted to the Company. The Company has begun to liase with real estate developers in addition to various Government departments, to explore the ways in which the Company could commercially exploit the land. It believes that the association of a leading real estate developer will provide impetus to the process of procuring development rights. The realization of development income in the near term is contingent upon receipt of final government approvals and the nature and extent of developments permitted.

All this practically removes all the risks which should have fallen upon the concessionaire. And like TPC, the provision of development rights too is ambiguous. Although it is given that an Independent Consultant (IC) will assess the shortfall and recommend the granting of developmental rights, it is nowhere mentioned that at what level of shortfall this provision will be invoked. On what basis would the Auditor decide whether an extension to the concession is unlikely to generate “sufficient revenues” to recover Total Cost of Project and the necessary Return? Also, what will be the proportion of revenues from developmental rights, increase in tolls and extension of concession period in compensating the shortfalls? And what will be the monitoring provision of the revenues accruing from such developmental activities?

Since, these developmental activities will be undertaken by concessionaire or other real estate developers (to whom NBTCL may sub-lease the land) the question arises that who will retain the ownership of structures erected after end of the concession period? Will Noida buys it or private developers will retain it after paying for land? Anyways even if they will compensate NOIDA, it will amount to anarchy in use of scarce land resources in such an important economic hub of the country.

The company has already bagged land lease to build Mayur Vihar link to augment the toll revenue which was to be constructed in accordance with the Debt Restructuring Agreement. Besides this the Concession Agreement contains no competition clause. It compels NOIDA, Delhi & U.P Govt “not to propose, recommend, implement or permit to be implemented without prior written consent of the Company (which is not to be unreasonably withheld) any toll-free bridge or other service network, which does or does not involve the collection of tolls, fee or other charges or fee or other charges which are lower than the fee being charged on the Delhi Noida Toll Bridge and which spans across the Yamuna river within the area between the Okhla Barrage to the south of the Delhi Noida Toll Bridge site and the existing Nizamuddin Bridge to the north of the bridge site for a period of 10 years or till the Delhi Noida Toll Bridge achieves full rated capacity (With Delhi government partial capacity of 60%), a peak hour movement of 16,000 passenger car units, whichever is later.” This effectively grants the NBTCL a monopoly right over road infrastructure. The most quoted argument in favour of private participation is to remove/dilute the monopoly enjoyed by the state by bringing in competition which will increase efficiency. But we see that here (and in most PPP) no completion clause is the first one to be demanded and granted!

In fact, NTBCL issued a legal notice to PWD, Delhi Government and contractor of under-construction Kalindi Bypass, on 15^th December 2005, asking them to stop the work. It was argued that Kalindi Bypass would affect the traffic flow to the Toll Bridge. It proposed to re draw the plans such that its commercial interests remain unaffected. Kalindi Bypass was built after a delay with re-alignment in consultation with NTBCL.

Under provisions of termination of the contract in event of default, in all cases it is NOIDA which ends up paying the concessionaire even if it is the concessionaire who terminates the contract. The concessionaire does not even have to bear the risk of natural calamity. Moreover, no distinction is made in terms of compensation between a concessionaire event of default which occurs prior to entry into operation of the bridge (i.e., before construction has been completed) vs. one that occurs after commercial operation has commenced (i.e. post-construction). Therefore, even the risks associated with the construction phase were borne by the NOIDA and not the concessionaire.

Thirdly, it is not clear that what standards/process was used to decide upon the rate of return. Since, it was a negotiated award, there should have been a pre-determined benchmark and process to decide the rates as same cannot be discovered via a competitive bidding in this case. The NTBCL has been giving much higher rate of return to the equity holders as rate is determined on the basis of TPC. The interest rate on debt has been reduced following the Debt Restructuring Agreement, which means the margin between the average interest rate payable on the company’s Term Loans (9.5%) and the assured return of 20% would accrue as an additional return to equity holders. In addition, any increase in total project cost (e.g., due to shortfalls in returns) would result in higher returns being due to the concessionaire (since the base upon which returns are due would increase). As the amount payable to debt is fixed, the returns allocated to equity would increase disproportionately. This despite the fact that concessionaire has undertaken practically no risk in this project.

Fourthly, for Operation and Management (O & M), Intertoll Management Services BV, Netherlands, a 100% subsidiary of M/s Intertoll Holdings (Pty) Ltd., South Africa, has been hired in December, 1998. The O&M contract has three distinct components.

• Fixed equipment supply including systems hardware, related software, and traffic & telecommunications systems.
• Periodic maintenance including road surface overlays, replacement and maintenance of bridge equipment and
• Toll collection and management.

The fees payable to O&M Contractor are entirely variable for the first 10 years and for the rest of the period a substantial portion of the fees is linked to the actual number of users of the facility. This has been done to provide an incentive to the operator to effectively collect tolls. The maximum permissible leakage specified in the O&M contract is 0.1% and anything beyond that will be compensated by the O&M Contractor. In addition, Intertoll’s 8.64% has equity stake in the Company which provides additional incentive for proper discharge of duties. Therefore, the risk of leakage of traffic either due to under reporting of fees or due to non-payment of fees by certain users too has been transferred to another party. NBTCL will only pay for the major repair work, which, we have already seen, will become part of the TPC. The question arises, if it is the government which is taking all the risks, why couldn’t it construct road and hire a private player for the O & M which has surely been a major problem with government agencies?

It can be clearly seen that, whole PPP is designed for the enrichment of the concessionaire without it taking any risk. From deciding the base for calculation of rate of return to deciding rate of return, nowhere a clear and standard procedure was followed. Concessionaire gets public land for “free” for constructing a project for public good but has the unrestricted right to mortgage its interest in the project assets, including the project site. This, plus, the provision of more lands for developmental rights and constructing link roads to augment its toll revenue. But the list does not end here.

IL&FS, a project sponsor, was fully involved in conceptualizing the project and as a member of the steering committee that decided that the project should be implemented by a corporate entity promoted by it. It is also one of the lenders to the concessionaire and a major shareholder in the company. It has a major say in decision making regarding the constitution of oversight board, Independent Consultant and Auditor etc which are provided for by the concession agreement to ensure proper compliance with the agreement and prevent frauds. It is like saying, let me award the project to myself and then let me audit/verify the implementation and operations as well.

In this case the final power to determine the user fee/toll is vested with the concessionaire unlike other projects where it vested either with the government or with the joint committee of both. Taking full use of this privilege, concessionaire has indexed the toll rates to CPI rather than WPI which reflects inflation in its costs more closely. Also, debt is fixed in nominal terms; hence the real value of debt repayments declines with inflation and there is no need to index the share of revenues allocated to debt repayment to inflation. Therefore, there is no reason for tolls to reflect full impact of inflation. But exactly same is happening leading to period hike in toll rates. It has led to wide spread discontent among the users and has even forced authorities to intervene.

All this while concessionaire continues to enjoy profits without any risk as shown in the table below:

Table: Earning and Profit of NTBCL

Source: Annual Report of NTBCL

And is almost sure of getting developmental rights on land, potentially worth billions of rupees after development, along with extension of concession period to 70 years!

No wonder Delhi-Noida Toll bridge is seen as the model PPP projects by developers, the project which confirmed the viability of the PPP in road sector. It is the only toll road to be listed on the stock exchange.

The DND brings out the traps in which nation may fall while adopting the route of the PPP for road development. It is a direct outcome of the corruption and weak institutions for implementing PPP and other market based approaches. As it was one of the first such projects to be undertaken, the lack of any coherent policies, clear guidelines for investors and government agencies, lack of clarity about government support and risk sharing framework were the main cause of this. Also, unpreparedness and lack of capacity of the government agencies can also be blamed. But since then several corrective steps have been taken.

In 2005, it was decided to come out with a new and clear policy regime regarding PPP. As a result a new institutional framework has taken shape. Government has come out with a Model Concession Agreement (MCA) for PPP projects. It has also put forth standardized samples of other documents like Request for Qualification (RfQ) and Request for Proposal (RfP). These have been prepared separately for large and small projects, BOT-Toll and BOT-Annuity models. Since, 2007, all contracts are being awarded on the basis of MCA which has considerably removed confusion regarding the bidding process and made the process more streamlined. It has also reduced the scope for arbitrariness in the contracts. Dispute resolution is governed by the 1996, Indian Arbitration and Conciliation Act, it incorporates UNCITRAL provisions.

PPP has been integrated into the planning process itself. Government has taken steps to facilitate fast clearances of various kinds like environmental clearance. Government has also taken responsibility of land acquisitions and all the costs associated therein. A major restructuring of the Ministry of Road and Highways and NHAI has been undertaken to make it more oriented towards the private sector participation. Capacity building of government agencies, both at the centre and state, is being sought under the Asian Development Bank’s Technical Assistance Facility and various other programmes of other agencies like World Bank etc. One hopes that mistakes of the earlier projects like DND will not be repeated but a detail study of more individual projects is required to affirm that nexus between corporates-bureaucrats-politicians is broken.