Michael Balter is a contributing orrespondent for Science and Adjunct Professor of Journalism at Boston University. Image posted in album is from the lens of Balter. 

 India needs overhaul
Dear friends this article is incomplete and under-written 
India really needs overhaul. I divided all area into basically into three parts i.e. Political, Social and Economy.
 
Political –

National –It is very common notion that elections equal democracy. In Kenya presidential election both Ruling and opposition party were accused of vote-rigging after that a massive violence erupted. So there must be free and fair election for a progressive society and free and fair election can’t achieved without a free and independent judiciary, a free and a vibrant civil society and must have a credible dispute resolution mechanism in case of political crisis such as in Jharkhand assembly so that electorate trust maintained in political leader and democracy system 
Law and order-
Outdated laws 
Transparency and more accountable 
Regime of less subsidy to investment in agriculture and 
Stake holder in SEZ

International- India should have a clear cut notion about international matter
Strategic – Japan has a bigger economy compare to china but have central attention because of military prowess 

Social—Population control—By 2050 , the world population will be nine billion from today’s 6.5 billion, how can India ignore this major problem .This is because of extremist religious concerns. Politician and social activist have to show courage in highlighting the problem. Werner Fornes of Population Action Council said recently there is no leadersip in the population field. Population is closely connected to diminishing forest, wildlife, desert expansion, global warming , water shortages

Huge urban and rural divide-PURA is needed to bridge the divide
 Broad band is key infrastructure to bridge the rural-urban divide
 
Education and its policy- Drop out rate, literatecy rate only shows people are aware of alphabets, low moral values ( see Transparency International data),
Engineering college standard, standard is ok because of Medical council but there is no increase in no of medical college (compare 1947 and 2007)
New colleges or institution must be open in underdeveloped area. Like some city has so many research institutions and some state doesn’t have any. Political biases must be ignore during establishment of new Institution like IITs, IIM, IIScER. It was basically a very good initiative by sonia Gandhi to open NIFT at Bareily.


Balance of growth- there should not be developed pocket/patches in agriculture. India has all developed agriculture as in Punjab, Haryana or some south-Indian state, parallely jhooming and traditional agriculture practices.

Inclusive growth

Regional and religious intolerance


Uniform civil code
Overturning the judgment of Supreme Court in ShahBano Case during Rajiv Gandhi Prime ministerial ship has loosed a chance to change the different civil code. Passing the muslim women (Protection of rights on divorce) India moved one step back. 
Sikhs are facing so many problems with turban and it seems very hard to complete removal of this practice. Khuswant singh in an article suggested the Sikh community to eliminate the turban in a step wise manner. Turban people not preferred in Fashion industry, in entertainment sector so this custom should need flexibility. No of country have banned turban in schools. Recently one site was launched to teach Sikh youth how to be fashionable with turban. As per my opinion it should be left on person’s choice. If someone think he can do better with clean-shaven, it’s fine. What we need is productivity, a developed tolerant and liberal society.

Health-poor primary health centre, numbers of doctors/capita, less no of medical insurance, poor sanitary system, health and hygiene -193 polio cases alone in 2007 and along with Nigeria, Afghanistan and Pakistan is the only country where Polio is still endemic. 
 Poor connectivity- less no of mobile holders despite cheapest rate of call, poorly managed road, link with every village to at least district headquarters, crime-, and accident free roads,
Delayed justice is justice denied- lots of vacancies, pending cases in courts and judicial-faith among citizens

 
Economy-India is one of the major exporter of IT and ITES. But current trend shows decrease in market, companies shifting BPO jobs to another destination.

Lack of innovative product it needs extensive research infrastructure

Change in standards of quality products and regulatory body

Macrofinance

India has most no of (53) billionaires in Asia and Four Indians among worlds eight richest in Forbes magazine list but still …. No of BPL family is not going down. 

Infrastructure-On India road average speed is pathetic, costing fuel and motor services, facilities on national highway

Relatively low banking network in rural area both scheduled and co-operative banks 
Unorganized moneylenders- microfinance system

 

This article is bit old but still contemporary.

WHY IS IT NOT JUST A DEAL

Tokyo-based Daiichi is set to acquire a controlling stake around 51-62% in India’s biggest generic drug maker Ranbaxy Laboratories for $3.4-4.6 billion. Analysts called this deal as a very Bold Purchase. This is the first generic-proprietary partnership in global pharmacy. The deal would also extend Daiichi’s reach from 21 countries to 60, with much of the expansion in emerging markets. Surprisingly Pfizer was paying more, three years back but the deal did not come into existence. Ranbaxy will become debt- free after the deal and get $1 billion in cash.
In this scenario, when Ranbaxy is a leading player in the generic-drug market enjoying double-digit sales growth, the acquisition of Ranbaxy can not be seen as it is appearing. Question is why India’s biggest pharmacy major became a subsidiary of a Japanese company. One factor is, definitely, the heavy loan that Ranbaxy had to pay. There is tough competition among several generic drug maker companies at home as well as international grounds, resulting in decreasing profits. Losses in legal proceedings to brand-name drugmakers, strong rupee compare to dollar and ban on some generic drugs, all aggravated the problem. But only these few factors are not enough to explain this secretive deal. Indian companies have long been criticized, both in India and other parts of the world, for their low level of investment in research and development (R&D) and copying western products, aided by lax patent policies. Today, however, the situation has improved a little with a few companies leading the charge in the R&D. Ranbaxy was not very globally competitive in R&D. Even Daichi Sankyo management doesn’t take this deal merely as the expansion to the Japanese generic market, but as a short term gain, as Ranbaxy is very efficient in this field. Japanese Daiichi and Sankyo has been acquiring overseas rivals to expand their global presence amid stiffer competition and to boost their product pipelines with the expiry of some drug patents. Daichi Sankyo had $915.6 m net profit for financial year 2007 and think the long term value of this deal is most likely to be seen in the development of full scale R&D for Daichi Sankyo in india, creating a full-fledged global operation from there as in India heavy skilled human resources is easily and cheaply available. acquisition it is a good idea to outsource R & D activities Through route of in company which have brilliant human pool and environment with a good infrastructure. This is also seen as a better way to increase value and improve / out-source R&D than to buy one of the major up and coming companies in the low cost Indian environment. Daiichi is reducing the cost of drug discovery & clinical development and it is expected Ranbaxy R & D’s in future may become the Global Headquarters of Daichi’s Drug Discovery & Clinical Research.
Besieged by ever-increasing cost pressures, shorter product life cycles and numerous regulatory challenges in the Europe, US and other Developed nation, the industry is increasingly shifting its R&D base to these developing nations like India, China, South- Korea and Russia, to minimize the expenses, time and risk involved in R&D. Other factors includes dropping value of the dollar vs. Foreign currencies, the huge U.S. trade deficit and outsourcing successes drive up salaries and costs overseas. Bio-pharma firms are looking for ways to cut costs through outsourcing, and investors are provoking.  
  Actually this acquisition shows inefficiency of the Indian pharma industry which had not invested enough money in their R & D therefore is not competent enough to introduce new molecules and products to the ever-changing market. It is evident from this deal that only smart and intelligent enough players will survive. Indian companies have to learn a lesson and change their strategies and path. Indian software companies are successful because with just a little sum of money it is easy to catch outsourced business, but biotech and pharma industries are completely different. The cost of bringing one new molecule into the market amounts to USD 800.0 million. The European Federation of Pharmaceutical Industries and Associations (EFPIA) estimates that, on an average out of 10,000 molecules developed in laboratories, only one or two will successfully pass all stages of drug development and be commercialized. Are Indian companies ready enough to tackle this situation? Are they changing their own strategies? Now time has come to understand the nature of the problem and prepare themself as per situation and reap the opportunity. Investment of huge sum of money is not possible for Indian companies but they can divert their potential to the contract research organization (CRO) or research process outsourcing (RPO), as it is the demand of time and situation.
As the biotech industry crossed the thirty years it took a decade for the first wave of monoclonal antibody companies to move from contract production and service. In the past year, Merck and other biopharma firms have accelerated their profit making to collaborate or set up their own R&D centers in India, China and Singapore. Bharat Biotech, a Hyderabad based company, started out providing quality contract manufacturing, added in biogenerics and novel formulations, and now is working on proprietary pharmaceuticals and vaccines. This same firm recently cut a deal with ThromboGenics to in-license a Phase II thrombolytic in developing and some developed markets. Bharat Biotech will manufacture finished drug for all markets, and is responsible for the Phase III trials and getting the drug approved for market, initially in India. A similar March deal with Novavax encompasses a pandemic flu vaccine program. Roads have already opened and time has come to harness the benefits (See Table-1).
Another field where Indian pharma companies can do better is Medical tourism—India is preferred destination for health care and related services not only in underdeveloped or other developing country but also trends show some part of developed nation as well. Prior knowledge and experience of Indian population/demography and database of diseases and related information makes industry efficient and proficient. Ranbaxy decision to divert its money into family owned health care and related business Fortis Health Care, which has recently doubled its capacity by acquiring Escort Health Care System, is a smart idea.
Outsourcing is a two way concept. Indians companies are second to none and can be collaborate, invest, participate, Co-developers or Co-marketers, with MNC majors.
Another area where more space is available to work is value addition. Intense competitions among service providers for contracts have called for value-added services. Due to the vast expertise in Phase I studies of clinical trial, Indian companies can help a client design a drug development program which will minimize costs and save development time. For most pharma companies, speed is the key to success especially when the drug is patented and it is said that every day saved is valued at $1m. Other value added service is site management. This works as a link between the investigators and the CROs. The Site Management Organizations provide trained physicians, clinical research personnel and coordinators to monitor and coordinate the Phase II, III and IV clinical trials. Further, support services such as biometrics help in managing data. There are opportunities for clinical data management and statistical analysis of the clinical data. To facilitate the above, specialized IT solutions are required, which has triggered the growth of analytics industry in India. Organizations dealing in these services provide discovery software, database software and customized databases.
De-automation is the manufacturers outsourcing, where processes previously automated at great cost are returned to the older, labor-intensive system and moved overseas where labor costs make it more cost-effective. Firms specializing in animal testing, plant work in greenhouses and anything involving laborious cell culture or genotyping should especially consider de-automating their system. Custom antibody manufacturers, marker-assisted selection plant and animal breeders and pharma animal testing firms are all excellent candidates.  
Another emerging model in the pharmaceutical outsourcing sector is disease management. This is based on foreseeing demand and customizing treatment to enhance customer retention. A case in point is the Bangalore-based Medybiz which essentially is a distributor, but deals in patient relationship management (PRM). In a nut shell the prominent service Indian company can offer are in drug discovery, clinical trials, drug development activities, manufacturing & formulations, pre-clinical trials, bio-informatics and lab services. In addition, HR functions like finance are also being outsourced by pharma companies.
  Now time has come to think about our pros and cons of facilities and opportunities.
India has already built a repute in outsourcing of IT and IT enabled services and we are on the way to cash this repute.
India’s infrastructure can not compete with west or even China but India’s infrastructure work is in progress. However industrial-, biotech-, pharma– and science parks extend facilities like guarantee of power, water, and broadband internet access to high-level specifications. While many states of India and cities offer more lucrative support and incentives to firms to attract investment. The Southern states are the engine of India’s biotech sector, with Bangalore, Chennai, Hyderabad and Mumbai/Pune as the main destinations where the intellectual workforce tends to congregate and where services are most reliable. New Delhi and it’s abound cities like Gurgaon, Noida are also extending support to these industries.
 
Government Regulations, Incentives and dealing with any governments or bureaucracy in India or Asian country is not that easy so Western mind faced a lots of troubles though with increasing awareness, democratic value and heavy media presence, increasing the transparency in dealing. On the path of Software Technology Parks of India, Indian government also offers some tax bonuses, endorsement but only to a limited extent. Himachal Pradesh offers one of the more generous tax incentives at a 5-year holiday while most states offer little or none. Unlike Chinese incentives which are focused on export-oriented firms, India still needs to introduce a lot of measures. Regulations regarding the development and sale of biotechnology products are quite lax. Establishing a high-end biotech facility in any Indian state is no simple although government official’s claim cost savings for outsourcing biotechnology are enormous, to the tune of 80% on labor and 50-75% on facilities and equipment. Recent amendments to Schedule Y of Drugs and Cosmetics Rules of India, 1945, signify a progressive attitude on the part of the Indian Government, clarifying the environment for clinical research in the country
Malvinder Singh became a member of the senior global management of Daiichi showing the faith in Indian human resources. China and especially India often thought their millions of technical graduates and hundreds of thousands of postgraduates as their key strength. India lags behind when it comes to innovation despite the country's proliferation of research graduates. Some upsetting trend emerging in India like the availability of experienced PhDs as compared to lower level researchers and technicians is so low that the salaries of high-end researchers have shot up to near US levels. Second, the massive influx of investment has led to headhunting between biotech firms for experienced researchers at all levels, which is a disastrous situation considering the long project times in biotechnology. Firms now are focusing on non-financial motivations for keeping staff, such as high-tech campuses and benefits packages
The cultural and language barriers are significant for any industry. The Indians have a considerable advantage in this regard with substantially better English than the Chinese or Thai. Further, one could expect better written or email English as India holds the edge due to superior communication skills and IT talent.
Animal handling especially primates is very difficult in India because of heavy presence of animal right activist and some religious sentiments.  
Most equipments India uses are manufactured in the US or EU, with some from South Korea, China or Japan. They are usually not well supported by local suppliers; poor in after-sale services, with an import surcharge make more costly.
  India is definitely a big market but consumption wise it’s not that much attractive and mature for biotech and pharma and only few biotech firms make products that would be consumed by an average Indian.
  India is a Priority Watch country for IPR. A major concern for biotech firms is not just the infringement on their products but also the outright theft of their research data. Rule of law is strongest in India, with a well-established democratic tradition and western-style legal code. The only major issue is the timeliness of legal proceedings and extreme bureaucracy. India is a signatory to the TRIPs agreement and is committed to protect the product patents.
 
A costly lesson!
Ranbaxy acquisition has taught Indian company a costly lesson. Pharma and biotech industry is rapidly evolving and is taking sharp twist and turns. Outsourcing is increasingly becoming necessary for pharma companies. A major paradigm shift is on the anvil, as more companies are now moving up the value chain from tactical to preferred to strategic outsourcing. It’s high time that the industry had undermined the importance of alliance with academia. This would enhance the “translational research” and in turn bolster industry’s R & D and revenue. Small industries should collaborate among themselves and should share their infrastructure, information and skilled manpower for survival in the ever changing market.

Table-1 Leading service providers
Manufacturing & Formulations Jubilant Organosys (speciality chemicals/bulk drugs), Shasun Chemicals (Custom Synthesis), Medreich, Elder, Divi'sLaboratories
Clinical Research Quintiles, Syngene, Chembiotek, Aurigene, Synchron, Reliance, Covance, Parexel
Bio-informatics and other IT services Strand Genomics, TCS, Satyam, Infosys, GVK Bio, Ocimum, Jubilant Biosys
Drug Discovery/Medicinal Chemistry Aurigene, Divi's Laboratories, Syngene, Suven Lifesciences, GVK Bio
Pre-clinicals Vimta Labs, Lambda Therapeutic Research, Lotus Labs
Central Lab Services SRL Ranbaxy, Vimta Labs

 


 
 


 

1. I love you not for whom you are, but who I am when I’m by your side.

2. No person deserves your tears, and who deserves them won’t make you cry.

3. Just because someone doesn’t love you as you wish, it doesn’t mean you’re not loved with all his/her being.

4. A true friend is the one who holds your hand and touches your heart.

5. The worst way to miss someone is to be seated by his/her side and know you’ll never have him/her.

6. Never stop smiling, not even when you’re sad, someone might fall in love with your smile.

7. You may only be a person in this world, but for someone, you’re the world.

8. Don’t spend time with someone who doesn’t care spending it with you.

9. Maybe God wants you to meet many wrong people before you meet the right one, so when this happens, you’ll be thankfull.

10. Don’t cry because it came to an end. Smile because it happened.

11. There will always be people who’ll hurt you, so you need to continue trusting, just be carefull.

12. Become a better person and be sure to know who you are before meeting someone new and hoping that person knows who you are.

13. Don’t struggle so much, best things happen when not expected. 

Ashis Nandy- Indian among worlds'100 top intellectuals

dear friends I like to remind above headline which you had missed! 

Obituary of a culture (scholarly article by Ashis Nandy shows his caliber)

ASHIS NANDY

THE massive carnages at Rwanda and Bosnia have taught the students of genocide that the most venomous, brutal killings and atrocities take place when the two communities involved are not distant strangers, but close to each other culturally and socially, and when their lives intersect at many points. When nearness sours or explodes it releases strange, fearsome demons.
Those shocked by the bestial or barbaric nature of the communal violence in Gujarat would do well to read some accounts of the carnages in Rwanda and Bosnia. In both cases, the two communities involved were close to each other and ethnic cleansing took the forms of a particularly brutal, self-destructive exorcism. And the same thing happened during the great Partition killings in 1946-48. The ongoing death dance in West Asia, with the Arabs and Israelis locked in an embrace of death, is another instance of the same game.
Gujarat was being prepared for such an exorcism for a very long time. It is a state that has seen thirty-three years of continuous rioting interrupted with periods of tense, uncomfortable peace. During these years, a sizeable section of Gujarat’s urban underclass has begun to see communalism and rioting as means of livelihood, quick profit, choice entertainment, and as a way of life. Riots have, in addition, ensured temporary status gains for this underclass; they are considered heroes in their respective communities during riots and for brief periods afterwards – an important reward for persons at the margins of society.
Rioting everywhere is pre-eminently an urban disease. Demographers of riots – from Gopal Krishna to Asghar Ali Engineer, and from P.R. Rajgopalan to Ashutosh Varshney – have shown repeatedly that it is even more so in India. The icing on the cake is that the urban middle class in Gujarat is now the most communalised in the country; it has become an active abetter and motivator of communal violence. Sections of it participate in the loot enthusiastically, as we have seen in the course of the recent riots; those that do not often participate in the violence vicariously.
(For the last hundred years or so, the so-called non-martial races of the subcontinent – Bengali babus, Kashmiri Muslims and Gujarati upper castes, for instance – have had a special fascination for violence, particularly if someone else was doing the fighting and risking their lives. However, in recent years, this fascination and the search for redemptive violence, which bestows heroic stature by being expiation for one’s own ‘passivity’ and ‘effeminacy’, have often found direct expression in public life.)


Unlike in places like Uttar Pradesh, cities matter in Gujarat. Urbanity is a crucial presence in Gujarat’s political life. The state has fifty cities, many of which have already become cauldrons of communal hatred and paranoia. The result is that Gujarat is now a classic instance of the urban-industrial vision, decomposing and spitting out in a blatant form the violence that the vision has always hidden in its belly. The state has not only been riot-prone but at war with itself. Even after the present riots die down – available data show that riots last longer in Gujarat than in other states – it would be at best a temporary truce. Tension and hatred will persist and both sides will remain prepared for the next round. Gujarat is and will continue to be an arena of civil war for years.
This situation has come about not because the Inter-Services Intelligence or the ISI of Pakistan – omnipotent, omniscient and omnipresent like God himself, according to many Indians – has planned it that way. Nor because the minorities have been the main victims in the recent riots. This situation of civil war has arisen because minorities now know that they cannot hope to have any protection from the state government. Lower-level functionaries of the state government have been complicit with rioters many times and in many states. But this is probably for the first time after the anti-Sikh riots of 1984 that the entire state machinery, except for some courageous dissenters among the administrators and in the law-and-order machinery, has turned against the minorities.1
The minorities of Gujarat are by now aware that, for good or worse, they will have to prepare to protect themselves. This is a prescription for disaster. It will underscore the atmosphere of a civil war and create a new breeding ground for terrorism. More than Operation Blue Star, the anti-Sikh riots spawned terrorism in Punjab in the 1980s; the two decades of rioting in Gujarat has by now similarly produced the sense of desperation that precedes the breakout of terrorism.


In the early 1960s, when I first went to Gujarat as an adolescent student, it was difficult to believe that Gujarat could ever have a major riot. People talked of riots that had taken place in the past and the state did have a history of small riots and skirmishes. Many Ahmedabadi Hindus seemed afraid and suspicious of the Muslims, but they were afraid and suspicious mostly of non-Gujarati Muslims, many of them labourers in the huge textile industry of Ahmedabad. They took the Gujarati Muslims, a large proportion of them business castes, as a part of Gujarat’s landscape, though there was clear social distance.
In retrospect, the picture was remarkably similar to that of Cochin, which I studied a few years ago as a city of religious and ethnic harmony.2 The only difference probably was the more than moderate dislike for the Muslim as representing a tamasic principle in Ahmedabad’s predominant Jain-Bania culture. That dislike was, however, ‘balanced’ by a similar dislike for the westernised outsiders congregating in the new, fashionable institutions being established in the city. Traditional Ahmedabad kept away both.
The 1969 riots began to change the city radically, though at the time the changes were not that obvious. Like all riots in South Asia, that one too was organised, and it was organised with great managerial panache by the RSS. The violence paid rich dividends. So did the imaginative hate campaigns unleashed by the Vishwa Hindu Parishad and the RSS. Together they gave a kick-start to the process of ghettoisation of the Muslims and the growth in the power of Mafia-like bodies in both communities, always itching for a fight and acting like protectors of the Hindus and the Muslims at times of rioting.


However, the growth of this criminal sector was disproportionately high among the young, unemployed Muslims. Understandably. The existing social distance between the communities had already acquired another tone. Facing discrimination in job situations and housing, many among the unemployed Muslim youth began to take to professions in which slum youth everywhere in the world specialise – illicit distillation, drug pushing, protection rackets and petty crime. And they always seemed ready for street violence. The situation worsened once Ahmedabad’s famed textile industry collapsed. The changing political culture of the city ensured that this collapse, too, affected the Muslims more.3
The dragon seeds sown by the 1969 riots have sprouted over the years. Gujarat’s regular annual harvest began to include gory communal clashes and mob violence. We saw the full flowering of this culture during the Ramjanmabhoomi movement. As the great charioteer Lal Krishna Advani moved through Gujarat, he left in his wake a series of riots in which, according to Achyut Yagnik, for the first time, women and children were seen as legitimate targets of attack and atrocities. Riots were now becoming more brutal and barbaric.


During the last decade, Gujarat has kept up with that tradition. In the ongoing riots, women and children have not only been attacked but also often killed with a sadistic glee that will be inconceivable in a civilised society. Even in the attack on karsevaks at Godhra, the one that precipitated the riots, it now transpires that the main victims were women and children. The following is an extract from a widely circulated eyewitness account, which some of the readers might not have seen. It is written by an officer of the Indian Administrative Service:
‘Numbed with disgust and horror, I return from Gujarat ten days after the terror and massacre that convulsed the state. ... As you walk through the camps of riot survivors in Ahmedabad, in which an estimated 53,000 women, men, and children are huddled in 29 temporary settlements, displays of overt grief are unusual. ... But once you sit anywhere in these camps, people begin to speak and their words are like masses of pus released by slitting large festering wounds. The horrors that they speak of are so macabre, that my pen falters... The pitiless brutality against women and small children by organised bands of armed young men is more savage than anything witnessed in the riots that have shamed this nation from time to time during the past century...
‘What can you say about a woman eight months pregnant who begged to be spared. Her assailants instead slit open her stomach, pulled out her foetus and slaughtered it before her eyes. What can you say about a family of nineteen being killed by flooding their house with water and then electrocuting them with high-tension electricity?
‘What can you say? A small boy of six in Juhapara camp described how his mother and six brothers and sisters were battered to death before his eyes. He survived only because he fell unconscious, and was taken for dead. A family escaping from Naroda-Patiya, one of the worst-hit settlements in Ahmedabad, spoke of losing a young woman and her three month old son, because a police constable directed her to "safety" and she found herself instead surrounded by a mob which doused her with kerosene and set her and her baby on fire.
‘I have never known a riot which has used the sexual subjugation of women so widely as an instrument of violence as in the recent mass barbarity in Gujarat. There are reports every where of gangrape, of young girls and women, often in the presence of members of their families, followed by their murder by burning alive, or by bludgeoning with a hammer and in one case with a screw-driver.’4
Gujarat disowned Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi long ago. The state’s political soul has been won over by his killers. This time they have not only assassinated him again, they have danced on his dead body, howling with delight and mouthing obscenities. The Gandhians, in response, took out some ineffective peace processions, when they should have taken a public position against the regime and the Nazi Gauleiter ruling Gujarat. One is not surprised when told by the newspapers that the Sabarmati Ashram, instead of becoming the city’s major sanctuary, closed its gates to protect its properties.5


Almost nothing reveals the decline and degeneration of Gujarati middle class culture more than its present Chief Minister, Narendra Modi. Not only has he shamelessly presided over the riots and acted as the chief patron of rioting gangs, the vulgarities of his utterances have been a slur on civilised public life. His justifications of the riots, too, sound uncannily like that of Slobodan Milosevic, the Serbian president and mass murderer who is now facing trial for his crimes against humanity. I often wonder these days why those active in human rights groups in India and abroad have not yet tried to get international summons issued against Modi for colluding with the murder of hundreds and for attempted ethnic cleansing. If Modi’s behaviour till now is not a crime against humanity, what is?
More than a decade ago, when Narendra Modi was a nobody, a small-time RSS pracharak trying to make it as a small-time BJP functionary, I had the privilege of interviewing him along with Achyut Yagnik, whom Modi could not fortunately recognise. (Fortunately because he knew Yagnik by name and was to later make some snide comments about his activities and columns.) It was a long, rambling interview, but it left me in no doubt that here was a classic, clinical case of a fascist. I never use the term ‘fascist’ as a term of abuse; to me it is a diagnostic category comprising not only one’s ideological posture but also the personality traits and motivational patterns contextualising the ideology.


Modi, it gives me no pleasure to tell the readers, met virtually all the criteria that psychiatrists, psycho-analysts and psychologists had set up after years of empirical work on the authoritarian personality. He had the same mix of puritanical rigidity, narrowing of emotional life, massive use of the ego defence of projection, denial and fear of his own passions combined with fantasies of violence – all set within the matrix of clear paranoid and obsessive personality traits. I still remember the cool, measured tone in which he elaborated a theory of cosmic conspiracy against India that painted every Muslim as a suspected traitor and a potential terrorist. I came out of the interview shaken and told Yagnik that, for the first time, I had met a textbook case of a fascist and a prospective killer, perhaps even a future mass murderer.
The very fact that he has wormed his way to the post of the chief minister of Gujarat tells you something about our political process and the trajectory our democracy has traversed in the last fifty years. I am afraid I cannot look at the future of the country with anything but great foreboding.
The Gujarat riots mark the beginning of a new phase in Indian politics. We talk of terrorism in Kashmir and the North East and proudly speak of subduing the terrorism that broke out in Punjab. The total population involved in these cases, particularly the section that could be considered sympathetic to militancy, has always been small. Even if we believe that Pakistan’s ISI and the Indian Army between them have persuaded all Kashmiris in the Valley to support militancy, these Kashmiris add up to only three million, one-third the size of the city of Delhi.
The forces the Gujarat violence might have released are a different kettle of fish. They seem to have done what the Partition riots did. Also, given that they have been arguably the first video riots in India – riots taking place in front of TV cameras – their impact will be pan-Indian and international. The minorities all over the country have seen the experiments in ethnic cleansing and the attempts to break the economic backbone of the Muslim community. The sense of desperation brewing among the Gujarati Muslims is likely to be contagious.


I wonder what we should do with 120 million bitter Muslims, a sizeable section of them close to desperation. Will it be another case of Palestine now onwards, at least in Gujarat? Prima facie, Modi has done his job. The Sangh Parivar’s two-nation theory is genuine stuff and has already initiated the process of a second partition of India, this time of the mind. We, our children and grandchildren – above all, the Gujaratis – will have to learn to live with a state of civil war. The Gujarati middle class will have to pay heavily – culturally, socially and economically – for its collusion with the recent pogrom.

Getting a doctorate (PhD) is much better than getting an Oscar'

Akshay Kumar (Bollywood actor) was a very surprised man when he came to know of his honourary doctorate.
The 40-year old actor landed in Toronto, Canada, on Wednesday to receive to his honourary doctorate degree from 'Assumption University', which is scheduled to be held on Friday at a special ceremony in Windsor on the US-Canada border.
While staying with businessman Ajay Virmani, President of Cargojet, who nominated Akshay for the degree, Ajit Jain caught up with the very jetlagged star (Akshay flew directly from Bangkok where he is currently shooting his latest film Singh is Kinng) for this exclusive 75-minute interview.
Akshay was all smiles as he chatted in Punjabi and English. Excerpts from a conversation:
So, how do you feel about this prestigious recognition?
It is an honour to get something this big. It is very close to my heart. For me getting a doctorate is much better than getting an Oscar. I am getting a doctorate without doing my Masters.
  

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