Bill's posts with tag: corruption
 A few days ago I wrote a blog post about fake drugs in India. And now Headlines Today runs a "sting operation" showing the actual mechanics of the fake drug racket.
The medical community and the people at large are "appalled"
Huh?
The fact that drugs were faked is nothing new; so nothing new that it was estimated years ago that about 40% of the medicines sold in this part of the country were fakes. Some were total fakes, others were expired drugs re-packaged and re-sold. But none of them were what they pretended to be.
So good was the packaging that it was virtually impossible to distinguish the fake from the real deal without a chemical analysis. So good was the packaging that it's obvious the same people supplying the genuine manufacturers with their packaging were supplying the counterfeiters as well. Nobody mentioned that, though. it was too obvious to mention. or perhaps the packagers are untouchable, for whatever reason.
The same media that's acting all horrified about the expose has written about fake drugs for years. It made no more than a ripple then, and it will make no more than a ripple now.
Because fake drugs are big, big business. So big that India makes a lot of money exporting them as well. So big that the Indian share in the global fake drug market was 35% - and that was back in 2003. It can only have grown larger now, with no oversight and enforcement of the law. Imagine the foreign exchange it's earning and the contribution to the national economy. Is there much of an incentive for cracking down on fake drugs? No.
"Appalled"? Ha.
For years, I, at least, have been telling my patients to insist on getting receipts from their pharmacists when they buy anything I prescribe. If the pharmacist gives a receipt, he will have to mention the batch number and date of manufacture. If it's a fake, it can be traced back.
Make no mistake - the pharmacist knows exactly which is a fake drug when he sells it. Genuine manufacturers will never want their own sales to suffer or their reputations hurt, so when they supply drugs they keep the chain tight all along. The fake drugs enter the system at the retailer level. The pharmacist is offered such high commissions (because the fakes cost almost nothing to make) that he agrees instantly. He would be silly not to, from his viewpoint.
I don't know how many of my patients take my suggestion. Probably not many. The reason is that the pharmacists act cute and say that they will have to charge more (sales tax) if they have to provide a receipt. The Indian is very cost conscious, even when he can afford it; and when it comes to medicines costing several hundred rupees, well, a 13.5% sales tax is something he will always try and avoid. Hell, a two rupee cost is something he will try and avoid.
And what happens when he buys fake drugs and doesn't recover from what he suffers from?
Do you suppose he will blame the drugs? The pharmacist?
No, of course, it's going to be the doctor's fault.
Now suppose the government actually tried to stop the fake drug racket. What will they really have to do?
First, they will have to hire more drug inspectors, hardly any of which exist now. Then they would have to pay the inspectors enough to make them want to do their jobs. And then they would have to go make some sort of vigilance commission to oversee the work of these guys, because they will otherwise take the bribes in with both hands.
Then, they will have to introduce genuine penalties for faking. The least that will suffice is the death penalty, like in China. Because the current penalties are laughable. It's been years since this was mooted, but of course they didn't do a thing about it. Instead they just condemned China for shooting counterfeiters. It's all in keeping with India's desperate attempts to ally with the US against China.
Also, of course, currently the law grinds so slow that the counterfeiter is sure of being able to evade whatever passes for his punishment for decades while the case wanders through courts and he - on bail - merrily continues counterfeiting. Will they set up special courts? No.
Then they will have to set up drug testing labs, few of which exist now, in each state. And they will have to introduce vigilance to stop the labs from being bribed as well.
And let me not forget the random checks on pharmacies...
None of which of course will ever happen. Ten days from now a new sensation will make sure this one's forgotten.
In any case, if you go by the current Indian right wing bandit-capitalist mindset, fakers are entrepreneurs. They provide a service and they have a right to make money.
And if patients die? Who cares, so long as I've got mine?
"Appalled"? Ha, again.
 So, they failed to get Ottavio Quattrocchhi extradited from Argentina.
They failed? Excuse me? it wasn't a failure. It was a shining success. They never wanted to get him extradited. As I pointed out here, the last thing this government wants is for Quattrocchhi to be interrogated and spill all the beans, and it went to a great deal of effort to make sure he would not be extradited, right from the beginning when his arrest in Argentina was kept under wraps. I can assure you that they will make sure to botch the appeal, as well. I shall not, after all, have to eat my Russian naval cap. I never expected to have to.
 (I apologise to non-Indians for this post. Just ignore it and move on. It's about a murderous drunk driving rich kid, grandson of India's most influential arms dealer, who ran over and killed six people in his BMW several years ago and has since been virtually let off because more and more witnesses have changed their version in court. Finally, it came out that the prosecution and police colluded with the defence so as not to call the most credible witness, the only one who stuck to his initial version, and who was then offered huge bribes to change his version - something he got recorded on hidden camera).
For those of you who don't know about it and don't want to know - forget it, it isn't worth it. For the rest of you...why are you acting so shocked? Like we didn't know that prosecution, defence and judges colluded with police in this country to get murderous criminals off the hook, so long as they have money? Like this is the first time someone's lawyer bought off witnesses? Like this is the first time that cars have changed into trucks and guns mysteriously multiplied in court? Like this is the first time rich kids are going to get away with their crimes? Face it - justice in India is a saleable community. Police lives are saleable too, because three of the six people Nanda killed were cops. So much for police solidarity against cop killers. Shall I hazard a guess as to what's going to happen? To the Nandas - nothing. They will ride it out, as will the lawyers involved. For the others - sting operations will likely be banned quite soon. Politicians are already buying video camera detectors, and lawyers and judges will likely follow suit. And fixing cases, naturally, will go on.
Some times things get so damned much to tolerate that one begins to wonder if one is the only sighted person in a blind world.
In order to deal with the phenomenon of perpetual traffic jams in Shillong (topmost of the three photos below) they introduced - as I mentioned - traffic lamps which no one knew how to follow. As you can see in the second photo, the traffic lamps are now switched off because no one was following them anyway and because following them could well get you killed.
There's talk now that these lamps will be operated after a formal inauguration. Yes, and suddenly they will work fine and we'll have no more people driving through red lights, and so on. Tell me another one.
Who made money out of installing these lamps? Someone must have. Who was it?
Then, someone had the brilliant idea of installing road dividers. This is a hill town. Roads are narrow and there is literally no space, no scope, for widening them. We have narrow roads further narrowed by low, unmarked road dividers. Which are a death trap especially for fast running lorries driving at night. And not just them - remember my post about hitting one of them and falling over on a car on April 13th?
Also, just check out the state of the dividers in the third photo below, which I took this morning. These are dividers constructed less than a month ago. Look at them!
Who made money out of these low, unmarked, crumbling death traps?
How come no one, in the media or in politics, cares to ask these questions?
Am I the only one who wants to see?
 
I thought I knew something about the constitution, but, apparently, I was wrong.
Back in school civics classes, I was taught that the Prime Minister was supposed to be the leader of the party or coalition with a majority in the lower house of Parliament (Lok Sabha). I was also taught that members of the Upper House, the Rajya Sabha, were elected as representatives of their states by the legislators of those states.
And what do we have?
We have a technocrat who has never, in the whole of his political life, dared face an election even at the local council level. We have this guy who - in order to find some footing in Parliament - has repeatedly got himself "elected" by the pliant legislators of Assam, a state in which he never lived - to the Rajya Sabha (big surprise - like him, they are all Congress Party hacks). We have this guy who - when challenged on this - first rented a residence in Guwahati city which he never inhabited, to show he "lived" there, and then, when that got too much bother, got the law changed to remove the residency clause for election to the Rajya Sabha.
And this is the guy who is our Prime Minister.
Now that his third successive term as Rajya Sabha member from Assam is due to expire, and given the widely disseminated propaganda that he is a popular and honest person, one would think he would find the cojones to stand for popular election to the Lok Sabha, even if from a safe seat, and validate his rule.
Nothing doing. He'll get "elected" from Assam again.
Why is Manmohan Singh the Prime Minister anyway, given that he obviously is admitting by his actions that he is unelectable?
First, he is a safe bet for his party. Utterly without spine or moral convictions, he can be relied on never to buck de facto party proprietor Sonia Gandhi's orders, taking the flak when it comes his way, and passing on the credit if ever it comes.
Then again he is a Sikh and this is a perfect act of tokenism to prove to the world that India is secular. Y'know, we have a Muslim president, a Sikh prime minister, another Sikh as army chief, a Parsi air force chief, so who dare say we aren't secular? So what if Muslims picked up off the street are blown away to foil terror plots invented out of the thin air?
Of course, since as everyone knows the Congress party is a Gandhi family business, and Rahul Gandhi the heir apparent. Manmohan Singh can be relied upon to warm the chair for Gandhi and quietly stand aside for his accession to the throne if and when the time comes. He admitted it himself in Uttar Pradesh when he introduced Rahul Gandhi as the future leader.
Fourthly, Singh is cravenly pro-big business and so resoundingly pro-American he makes his BJP predecessors look non-aligned. This is hardly news - back in the early nineties, when he was Finance Minister, he had presented a document written for him by the World Bank as his own, not even bothering to change the American spellings on it to English. I therefore find nothing shocking about his rubber spined servility to Bush and privatisation. He is - and has forever been - a comprador par excellence.
Since these "skills" are not likely to resound favourably with the Indian public - our people, our real people, not the scum who inhabit TV studios - prefer Chavez' politics to Bush's, and proved it in their very different reactions when the two came visiting, it isn't likely that Singh will ever dare face an election.
If he has to, I guess the law can be changed to suit him there as well.
In The Telegraph of 30 April, Canadian columnist Gwynne Dyer wrote this article on Boris Yeltsin:
LAST ACTION HERO
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| Gwynne Dyer |
|
He
was always a heavy drinker, but until his health problems got bad in
the mid-Nineties, he could usually hold his liquor. The real problem
was that he was a man of action who did not have an idea in his head. A
lot of people kept trying to put ideas in there, but they just fell out
of the other side. So he freed Russia from communism, but he did not
give it much else to work with instead.
Boris
Yeltsinwas brought to Moscow in 1985 to clean up the corruption in the
capital by the man he eventually removed from power, the communist
reformer, Mikhail Gorbachev. But the times were right for ambitious men
to aim a lot higher, and Yeltsin was nothing if not ambitious. So, by
1988, he had quit from the communist party’s ruling body, the
politburo. He ran for the all-Moscow seat against the official
communist candidate in the first free election in Soviet history, and
won in a landslide.
I
first met Yeltsin soon after that in the basement cafeteria of the
Supreme Soviet, just inside the Kremlin walls, which was the easiest
place for foreign journalists to find and interview deputies to this
new-fangled beast, the Congress of People’s Deputies. It was one of the
stars of the nascent Russian democratic movement, Galina Starovoitova,
who introduced us, and the contrast between the two of them was quite
stunning.
Starovoitova
(who was murdered some years ago in a contract killing) was a genuine
democratic hero, an intellectual who dedicated her life to the ideal of
a free society. Yeltsin was a charming bruiser who ran mostly on
instinct and was all too aware of his considerable charisma. Yet he was
in practice the leader of her little band of democrats, the
Inter-Regional Deputies Group.
Big decisions
The
IRDG flourished for less than a year, and it had less than a tenth of
the deputies to the Congress, most of whom were still communist party
hacks. Its leaders, including famous dissident figures like scientist
Andrei Sakharov and historian Yuri Afanasiev, were using their
unprecedented access to the media to spread democratic ideas to the
furthest corners of a country where such notions had been suppressed
for seventy years. But they knew those ideas alone would not produce a
democratic majority in any Soviet election in the future.
Yeltsin,
on the other hand, could win the election, but he had no ideas at all.
So they made him their leader, and, during that year, you rarely saw
him without some leading light of the IRDG by his side Everybody meant
well, I think, but the transplant did not take place, and by 1990,
Yeltsin had moved on.
In
the following two years, he did two things that should have earned him
the gratitude of both Russia and the whole world. Standing on a tank
outside the White House in Moscow in August, 1991, he turned back the
hardline communist coup attempt that almost reversed the flow of
history. And he did it practically single-handedly, by the force of his
own personality.
The
coup was amazingly incompetent, but it could have succeeded
nevertheless, in which case we would still be dealing with a ramshackle
communist-ruled Soviet Union, sinking ever deeper into poverty and
corruption and fighting insurgencies all around its perimeter.
Yeltsin’s
other great accomplishment was to wind up the Soviet Union and set all
of its constituent “republics” free. He did it for purely tactical
reasons, but it was the last great act of decolonization, and it spared
us a generation of bloody struggles as the old Russian empire gradually
fell apart. But then Yeltsin should have died or at least retired
because he was a disaster and an embarrassment as the president.
But
he did get the two big things right and that counts for a lot. History
may take a kinder view of him than Russians do today.
|
|
Here is the letter I wrote in response. I'm sure they won't print it.
Gwynne Dyer, in his column published in The Telegraph of 30 April, claims Boris Yeltsin did the world a great service by helping destroy the Soviet Union. It is an opinion one can expect from someone, like Dyer, who claimed that Ronald Reagan was a hero.
The facts speak for themselves. The Soviet people had voted in a referendum in 1991 overwhelmingly in favour of retaining the USSR. Mikhail Gorbachev was in the process of formulating a new treaty between the constituent Soviet Republics. It was Yeltsin and his cohorts who provoked the coup against Gorbachev, and, far from being incompetent, the coup most unfortunately failed simply because it was not carried out severely enough. One mini Tiananmen Square shooting (and much more supportable than Tiananmen Square) would have seen the coup through, and the Soviet Union would have been preserved. It was Yeltsin and his cronies, who, simply to gain power for themselves, and against the express wishes of the Soviet people, promoted the disintegration of the Soviet Union.
Dyer claims, ingenuously, that the USSR would have "sunk deeper into poverty and corruption with insurgencies around its borders." What actually happened after the breakup of the USSR was that the new Russia was (with enthusiastic American help) allowed to fall into such dire poverty and corruption that the economy was gifted away to oligarchs, the average life span imploded, savings collapsed in hyper-inflation, insurgency began ravaging Chechnya, and "democrat" Yeltsin was by 1993 actually shelling his own Parliament in Moscow, something the coup "plotters" could have done but did not. By 1999, Yeltsin, whose popularity ratings were down to 2%, and who had been re-elected in 1996 only because of American help, had to leave office because the scandals around him had grown so great he had a choice of facing revolution and trial or resignation. He chose the latter because he was promised immunity from prosecution by his successor, Vladimir Putin. But because he had throughout been a toady to the US, he is still called a "democrat" today.
It of course goes without saying that had the USSR still been in existence today the current military and economic global wars being waged against the poor and innocent of many lands by the American imperium would have been impossible.
It is odd that Yeltsin, whose popularity levels were abysmal and who spent most of his years in office in an alcohol befuddled haze, should be called "democratic" while Putin, who enjoys popularity ratings of over 80% and under whom a newly emergent Russia is again finding a voice in world affairs, is suddenly called an "antidemocratic autocrat" by the same Western media that had brought us the lies about WMD in Iraq.
 Poor Babulal Katara.
The poor guy obviously has got a bad deal.
See, what did he do? He was going abroad. Well, gee whiz, as our American friends would say, if he had a visa to Canada he could visit Canada, couldn't he? It was his right and all? And if his wife and son had visas as well, they could go along, of course.
All right so far?
Now we know Mr Katara is a busy man, a national level politician and a Member of Parliament. How can he go around arranging visas, buying tickets, and so on? He has a secretary to do those things for him. So when he went to the airport, he went along perfectly innocently in the knowledge that his secretary had arranged everything. Of course, since his wife and son were travelling with him, they went along.
And now let us remember that Mr Katara is a busy man. Of course he is. He works hard all day and night for his constituents. In his line of work, he meets thousands of people every day. How can he remember individual faces and voices? How can anyone expect it of him?
So, is it really to be wondered that Mr Katara is - and was - honestly unaware of the fact that the woman travelling with him on a diplomatic passport was not his wife? Can it really be held against him that he failed to register the fact that the boy with her was not his son?
Not at all. The man is innocent. The facts speak for themselves.
It was all - all - the secretary's doing. Human trafficing bastard. Biting the hand that feeds him.
(OK, enough of the comedy. For those who don't know what I am talking about, check out this link.)
Now, I know Indian politicians are scum. But this time they have surpassed themselves, especially as nothing is going to be done about this. No party is clean. They are all criminals.
And in this India which is "booming, confident, globally in the ascendant," we have people still so desperate to go abroad for a "better " life (how? by loading garbage trucks in Toronto? I wonder if these people even speak a word of English, let alone French?) that they are willing to do anything to get there.
Some India Shining.
Good news from two sources.
First, El Commandante is back at work. Wasn't he dead, dying, or moribund? Wasn't his death a matter of "months, not years"? Or is the Fidel who is meeting people and administering the country again a double, like the fake doubles Saddam Hussein was supposed to have - and what happened to them, anyway?
Bummer for the CIA.
On the other hand, the Dipsomaniac is dead.
In 1991 I was a student in Lucknow, almost cut off from the world except for newspapers (I did not patronise the hostel's TV room) and therefore I could only watch at second hand, at one remove, the tragedy of the wilful destruction of the Soviet Union. I cheered on the coup "plotters" as they tried to save their country from falling apart and being reduced to poverty and irrelevance; and I mourned when, entirely because they were not severe enough (they should certainly have done a Tien An Men Square - and it would have been far more justified), the "coup" collapsed. That was the time when I first heard of Boris Yeltsin in detail...among other things, one of my teachers took time off from a Pharmacology lecture to expatiate on the coup ("And Yeltsin had the courage to stand on a tank and say, This is not right") . I don't really think that my personal detestation of pharmacology and the fact that this teacher had some...odd...views on everything from lecture schedules to exam questions coloured my reactions.
Anyway. The coup - so called - collapsed (and the "plotters" were all exonerated in the few cases they went to trial), the USSR ceased to exist, America got a free hand to impose its agenda on the world (could Bush have carried out a single of his crimes if the USSR still existed?), Yeltsin made himself "democratic" boss of Russia (wonder how the collapse of the USSR was democratic, since the people of the country had voted overwhelmingly to preserve it? But then anything that comes in handy for the West is "democratic", and Hugo Chavez is a dictator despite repeatedly winning free and fair elections) - and handed over the economy lock, stock and barrel to his cronies. The welfare state crumbled, the economy imploded, the promised American aid never arrived, the average lifespan collapsed, Yeltsin attacked protesters and shelled the White House in Moscow when parliamentarians refused to obey his dictates, he got so drunk he could not even get off the plane in Ireland, he did not even back up his threat in defence of Yugoslavia, bombed by Clinton. His personal popularity collapsed to 2%, but he still clung on to power. But he was a loyal camp follower of Washington, therefore, he was a democrat.
When he - finally - left office in 1999, his successor Vladimir Putin felt forced to give him immunity from prosecution - else he would have been gladly executed by the Russian people he had humiliated, beggared, and destroyed.
And now - now that Russia is again in the ascendant, now that it can no longer be ignored, now that it is again a superpower in the making, suddenly Vladimir Putin - who has approval rates in the eighty percents, who has been repeatedly voted to power, who is set to voluntarily relinquish power next year despite the wishes of his people - this Russia is a "non-democratic" regime and Putin is a "vile Stalinist autocrat."
Going by the standards of US media outlets, anyone damned by them can't be all bad.
Now if we could only rewind the clock to 1991...
To
Ms Indra Nooyi
Chief Executive Officer
PepsiCo India.
Most Exalted Madam
Your Highness, this is to remind you of the
last meeting where you had asked me to chalk out a way forward for the company
in the light of increased oversight of the courts over our operations,
interference by environmental groups, and – increasingly – concerns expressed
about the effects on health of our products.
I have, accordingly, decided to focus on
particular issues and possible solutions.
In the first place, it’s likely – now that
the courts have ordered an investigation - that we can no longer bribe,
threaten, or pull enough political rank to stop serious investigations being
launched into the pesticide content of our products. It's most unlikely that, as in the past, we can successfully continue to disobey court orders and obfuscate the issue. This means that we will
have to both discredit the accusers so that the findings will be lost in a fog
of accusations, counteraccusations, and
white noise, and also find a way of pitching the so-called “negative points” of
our products as winners and USPs.
We should immediately hire a private detective agency to dig up all possible dirt on the Centre for Science and Environment and most of all on its director Sunita Narain, who has apparently begun a personal crusade to expose the fact that our products contain unacceptable levels of pesticides. We need to find everything we can target her with. There should be no mercy. She is trying to affect our profits, after all. If nothing can be found we could explore options to frame her. I am attaching a short list of organisations which I think can serve our purposes.
It is of course true that the amounts of pesticides in our product and that of our competitor have increased very sharply over the last few years. But that is the price to be paid for the sake of cutting costs enough to make a profit. It's estimated that we make only a 900% profit on every bottle of soft drink we sell. If we had to actually clean the water we use of all pesticide residues the profit might fall to 800% or even 700%. I should point out that this would be unlikely to go down well with our head office. Whereas right wing Indian columnists had been successfully bribed in the past to pass off our product as standardised, unfortunately, these same columnists are now badly compromised over their earlier support to the invasion of Iraq and for setting up special economic zones. No one really believes anything they say any more and they have become a liability.
Also, we have to confront the accusations that we are sharply depleting groundwater levels in order to create a premier product catering to the rich. Of course we are, and we're getting the water free. We have to protect our access to this water. Otherwise our profits will again take a hit. This can only be managed by large scale bribes to local politicians whose business it then becomes to protect our access to the water. In the meantime, we can continue to pass on the toxic sludge left over in our factories to local farmers as "fertiliser" to mollify them about the water. We should also launch a PR campaign saying that we are recharging the water table at a greater rate than we are discharging it. However nonsensical it sounds, we will find the media willing to back us up on this one. We are, of course, more chic and camera friendly than unshaven farmers and wild-eyed activists. Then, we have to meet the "health-related issues" head on. We have to remember that this is India and we can easily find doctors who can be paid to say that Pepsi is actually good for health, but there is the unfortunate fact that the Internet has brought to people the knowledge that retrograde institutions worldwide have banned our products.
Therefore, I suggest we turn the issue on its head. We pitch the health damage as a USP. We say, yes, our product contains pesticides, but all this does is kill off germs and parasites, so this is a positive thing. We say loudly that, yes, our product does contain carbonic acid that destroys tooth enamel, and does contain empty calories - but we say, drink Pepsi, accept the damage, rebel against society! You drink alcohol, you smoke to proclaim your rebellion, drink Pepsi! As far as that goes, I also suggest we begin a new advertising campaign. We can, in the aftermath of the World Cup, no longer use cricketers, of course; it would be the kiss of death. Instead, we should use Salman Khan. He's popular among young people and he can say, "I shoot blackbucks, I run over and kill people with my SUV, I get drunk and beat up my girfriends and competitors, I get away with it all. I drink Pepsi!"
At the same time, we must build bridges with our "competitors" from Coca Cola. United we stand, divided we fall. We must join hands to crush this wimpish attempt to make us conform to "rules" and "regulations". Hoping for a quick response and a large raise of salary,
I remain,
Your most obedient slave
A S Likker Public Relations Officer
TOP SECRET
To
Malcolm Speed,
President
International Cricket Council (ICC)
From
Sharad Pawar
President
Board for the Control of Cricket in India (BCCI)
Sub: Repercussions of India's exit from the World Cup
Dear Malcolm
I have to convey to you our serious concern at the likely repercussions of India's untimely defeat and exit in the first round of the ongoing World Cup.
You will of course be well aware that this was not supposed to happen. The first round was just meant as a shedding of blood of minor qualifiers to whet the appetite and give our teams some match practice. In fact, India's defeats are not just catastrophic but a serious threat to the ICC as well. Let me explain how.
You are aware that the funds in the ICC accounts are almost entirely due to the marketing of cricket in India. Indian cricket revenues are based on television earnings and brand endorsements. Of course Indians are not interested in watching some basement dweller team from some corner of the Carribbean play some peasants from Bangladesh. Indians watch cricket for just one thing - to watch India beat the opposition. If they are deprived of that pleasure, they will not watch cricket. They may even be drawn to other, real sports like football or hockey (God forbid). Bob Woolmer's murder has made enough bad publicity as it is.
Accordingly, there will be a catastrophic fall in ad revenue and TV viewership. Foreseeing that, I did try to get the cricket board of Sri Lanka to understand that, in the interests of us all, Sri Lanka should have lost to India and allowed India to go through to the second round. However, in an appalling show of selfishness, Sri Lanka's cricket board refused to ask their players to throw the match. I want to lodge an official protest against this attitude of theirs.
Also, I think I am within my rights to demand that there should be format changes in all future world cups to allow India passage through to the second round and further in order not to lose revenue. In this respect I demand that you immediately introduce resolutions to make changes in the law so the Indian team (which, as I pointed out to our Supreme Court, is not a national team but a private team sent by the BCCI) shall have the right of direct entry into the semi-finals if not the finals. The future of cricket depends on it.
If you do not do this, we will withhold all future monies from the ICC. What will you do then? Beg Bermuda for financial help?
Please do not make the mistake of taking this threat lightly.
Yours sincerely,
Sharad.
Strange are the ways of our military establishment.
A couple of years back there was a big brouhaha when it came out that, in order to get promotion, the army was faking killings of "terrorists", since the policy then was that any unit which killed enough "terrorists" got across the board promotions.
In one such instance, a colonel in North East India forced villagers to pose as dead insurgents, with bottles of ketchup poured over them as blood. (They were lucky too - it would have been easy to have shot them because as per the Armed Forces Special Powers Act the army has blanket amnesty for all acts of violence committed by it and there would have been nothing anyone could have done.) The colonel, who became known as the Ketchup Colonel, and his immediate boss, a brigadier under whose direct orders he was acting, were ultimately court martialled and, in June of last year, sacked.
So far so good, but what would have happend if it had not come out in public? Answer: nothing.
Well now. It's no secret that the US armed forces are not the only ones who are having trouble meeting their quotas. Despite repeated ad campaigns and a lot of fancy promises, India's extremely officer dependent army, which gives no leadership roles to its noncoms, is short almost twelve thousand officers while the navy and air force have their own shortages.
So, it's no surprise that the Ketchup Brigadier has been reinstated. Hell, he's even been promoted.
With the increasing number of courts martial of corrupt, murderous, delinquent and just incompetent officers and the already crippling officer shortage, expect more and more forgiveness of sins along these lines.
Political links and sycophancy were always tickets to high rank in our army. Now - like our politicians - a little crime might help as well.
I wonder what our Army chief, who's in "Israel" to buy equipment (he was apparently mightily impressed by the "Israeli" performance in their defeat to Hizbollah last summer in Lebanon) thinks about it.
Not much, I'd say.
 Some things just never go away.
There is a man called Ottavio Quattrocchi. Once, from the sixties to the eighties, official representative of Italian construction firm Snamprogetti in India, he was very influential in Indian official circles due to his extremely close friendship (nowadays strenuously denied) with then Prime Minister Indira Gandhi's son (and later successor) Rajiv Gandhi and his Italian born wife Sonia (now de facto leader of India). This stood him...well...in securing business contracts.
Then, in 1987, it was revealed that Bofors AB of Sweden had paid bribes to Indian "middlemen" to secure the selection of its FH 77B 155mm howitzer for the Indian Army the previous year (the gun was trailing in second place when suddenly it was selected ahead of its rivals). Allegations flew thick and fast that Rajiv Gandhi himself was among recipients of the slush funds. While Gandhi was an arrogant, insensitive, frequently puerile individual (I recall him on TV taking part in a marathon for publicity purposes roughly shoving aside those in his way with both hands, declaiming in parliament that anyone questioning the scale of defence purchases was automatically anti-national, driving over peacocks in the way of his speeding car, and holidaying on the Indian Navy's then aircraft carrier Vikrant) it is true that there is no evidence proving that he personally received a single rupee of the "kickbacks" paid.
However, he, and his wife, were quite undoubtedly instrumental in helping guilty individuals evade justice, among whom were Ottavio Quattrocchi, into whose accounts the money had been paid. Quattrocchi's passport, despite investigative agency CBI's requests, was not impounded; in July 1993, he was allowed to flee India after being mysteriously tipped off that his arrest was imminent. There is an Interpol red corner warrant against him.
In the meantime, in 1991, Rajiv Gandhi had been blown in half by an LTTE suicide bomber after he lost an election fought primarily on the corruption issue, and after his successors made such a mess of things he would have been voted back to power as the least of available evils. His Congress party had won the subsequent election and PV Narasimha Rao was the new Prime Minister. Sonia Gandhi had bided her time to make a play for power behind the throne, which role she plays now. Bofors was quietly buried; another set of accused, the Hinduja brothers, were acquitted after insufficient evidence was produced against them in the High Court (deliberately?) and the CBI, as it could have, did not appeal to the Supreme Court. (For non-Indians - the CBI is a political animal; it can't move a step without government approval). Here is what Wikipedia has to say on what happened afterwards:
On October 22, 1999, with the BJP-led NDA government in power, the Central Bureau of Investigation
(CBI) filed a chargesheet against Quattrocchi, naming AE Services as a
front company run by Quattrocchi and his wife Maria. Based on 500
documents released by Swiss banks after protracted legal delays, the CBI
framed charges against Quattrocchi and his wife, Maria; WN Chadha and
his wife, Kanta. Among the conspirators named in the case were Rajiv
Gandhi, and some other party functionaries. It is believed that
Quattrocchi had been paid 3% of the sale, about US $ 7 million, as
commission.
Attempts to extradite Quattrocchi from Malaysia failed owing to lack
of compelling evidence and in 2003 Quattrocchi returned to Italy. Around this time, two accounts owned by Quatrocchi were discovered in the British branch of a Swiss bank; they were frozen till in December 2005, the Indian government itself, in which Sonia Gandhi is now the ruler behind the throne, asked for the freeze to be lifted. By the time a hue and cry was raised, Quattrocchi had naturally withdrawn the $4million in the accounts.
A friend in need is a friend indeed... Remember that all this time Quattrocchi still had an Interpol red corner notice against him. He may himself have forgotten about it; in any case, he travelled to Argentina and the current leftist government arrested him on 6 February. The arrest was communicated instantly to the Indian embassy, and on 9 February to the CBI, and India was told an application with evidence for Quattrocchi's extradition might be favourably received (there being no extradition treaty between India and Argentina).
What happened? The CBI sat on the news for two weeks. Not a peep came out of it. Then the news came out, and the CBI claimed that it took them two weeks to translate the arrest news from Spanish to English! Further ridiculous "explanations" followed. The fact remains that the Indian authorities have till 5 March to present evidence to the Argentinians or they will let Quattrocchi go. Even reaching Argentina takes not less than 20 hours of flying, without making allowance for flight delays. And the latest is that a team of two CBI people will leave for Argentina on February 28. They will presumably arrive on March 1 or 2. The third is Saturday and the fourth, Sunday. So it leaves them precisely a day or two at the most to get him extradited...assuming they are actually carrying any evidence at all.
If that team succeeds in bringing Quattrocchi back, I shall consider eating my Russian naval cap.
As I said, a friend in need is a friend indeed, especially when by helping they cover their own complicituous ass. If only, they must be saying, the dead would just stay dead.
 I don't own shares and I will never own shares. I don't subscribe to that philosophy. But just because you aren't personally involved, when you see a man crossing the road and a big articulated truck coming at him, you don't hesitate to yell "Look OUT!"
So, I'm taking a vicarious interest in the Indian stock markets, which our news media are (as usual) extolling in orgasmic tones as the bellwether of our emerging superpower. You can see them peeing in their pants in ecstasy at the new heights scaled by the share price index (Sensex) - today at Rs 15000, tomorrow at thirty thousand? Is the sky the limit?
But isn't it a good thing if share prices rise? Won't all the shareholders benefit?
Do you know what proportion of the Indian people own shares?
Answer: Three per cent.
So. How does such miniscule share ownership translate into big stock market gains?
Because, in this country, the small stockholder is less than a cipher. Most stocks are held by monetary institutions - especially Foreign Institutional Investors (FIIs), which, because of an odd Indian reciprocal arrangement with Mauritius, do not have to pay taxes in India if they are registered (which means paying taxes) in Mauritius. What this means is that all an FII has to do is open a hole in the corner office in Mauritius, and pay rent and a farcical tax, and all its profits in India are tax free.
Sweet deal, isn't it?
So the stock market rises, then crashes, but not too much, and rises again. The FIIs know exactly what to do. They let the prices rise, sell out, take in their profits and let the prices fall, and buy when there is the usual panic selling. It's manipulation at its most transparent.
Why don't our politicians (among whom even "communists" own shares) scrap the deal with Mauritius and at least force these corporate leeches to pay a tax on their obscene profits?
Do you really have to ask?
In that case, I have a stock option on a gold mine to sell you.
 Blood is thicker than water.
Well, obviously. Even if you take water that is not thrice distilled and contains any amount of dissolved contaminants, blood, with its serum and its erythrocytes, leucocytes and thrombocytes, wins hands down when it comes to specific gravity. But that's not exactly what I am talking about.
Back in the days when I was a third year student in medical college, it was not legal for someone who had joined a private medical college to switch to a government run-or-funded one (like mine, for instance). The reason for this regulation was simple and excellent. In order to join a government college, one would have to qualify through an entrance exam, which was pretty tough (though amazing numbers of dodos ultimately got through) and highly competitive. Private colleges, on the other hand, would let in anyone able to pay the exorbitant fees. Not very surprising therefore that private colleges don't, how should I put it, command the confidence of the average person (which is why they have difficulty even getting patients for their students to work their magic on).
But...
Teachers wanted their own children to follow in their footsteps.
I have never made a secret of the fact that I detest family traditions, especially when it involves children being given no option but to do what their father (it is never the mother, not in this country) does. But I am not talking of me.
Now some of these teacher's kids were already in the college, having qualified by the usual method, and naturally we'd grown used to them walking away with all the awards. It was totally to be expected. A simple quid pro quo, one teacher promotes another's child in the expectation of the favour being returned tomorrow. We were disgusted when we thought of it, but normally we did not think of it. Even if the "child" was an ignoramus, like Lalu Prasad's daughter Misa Bharati, he or she would get the top position. So what? In later years, it means doodly squat.
But in order to garner those awards, a teacher's child actually has to be in the college. Right?
What now, if he or she is too dumb to pass the qualifying exam? What then?
Solution: private college. Pay their way in.
Ah, but, you see, private colleges have no credibility.
Well, now, this being India and all...
What they did was transfer their kids to the second year of our college (the year junior to mine) directly from private college. There were about four or five of them that I remember, two or three teacher's children, one senior bureaucrat's daughter, and the daughter of UP's then BJP chief, Kalraj Mishra. It was illegal, but they went and did it anyway. Obviously no one from the student body would dare to protest (we would never have been able to pass their exams in that case, and we knew it all too well - we were not even allowed to have a student's union). Then they went and had it legalised somehow or other, so the law said they could transfer if they had done one year in a private college.
But by the time this rigmarole was all done, the year end exams were approaching, and none of these VIPs had the requisite attendance to appear. What to do, what to do?
I must admit it - their solution was brilliant.
They managed to "lose" the attendance records of most of the class. Not all - that would have had to draw the attention of the Lucknow University authorities, under whom the medical college then was (it is now itself a deemed university and manufactures its own rules). Just most. So most of the class would not be able to appear for the University run year end exams. A problem, don't you think? What would the logical solution be?
Yeah, you guessed it. The whole lot were allowed to appear, regardless of their attendance, including the VIPs...who naturally shared between them all the top places. Except for the bureaucrat's daughter, who was made to fail, probably as a warning to her father not to rock any political boats.
If nepotism be the food of success, lay on.
 
 Every time politicians here warn of mayhem as a result of someone not following up on their demands, they sound off (it’s thinly disguised blackmail) on how it will result in "blood on the streets". Ironic, in view of the fact that blood stains the Indian streets on an average of once every five minutes.
That’s how we lose a hundred thousand dead a year in road accidents alone.
Those of you who deign to read my blog: if you’re not Indian, that is, please take the trouble to guess the procedure one goes through to get a driver’s licence here. I suppose you’d say one should get a medical test done to screen vision problems, get a learner’s licence, then attend a driver’s training course, get instructed in the laws of the road, and then pass a test both in the theory and practice of driving. And only then would you get given a licence. Right?
Wrong. Dead wrong.
Here is what the typical driver in India does. He goes to a Road Transport Authority office, and pays some guy hanging outside the going fee. That guy is always an agent for officials inside. He goes in, gets the paperwork done – for a fee – and hey presto, there is a brand new driver’s licence issued! Mr Typical Driver may be a colour blind hemiplegic who has never got behind a wheel in his life, but he still has a quite official and valid licence allowing him to drive where he wants. I kid you not.
OK, now let’s assume Mr Typical Driver (henceforth referred to as TD) wishes to learn how to actually drive. He scouts around for a driving school, and settles on the one in his neighbourhood with a garish signboard outside and some decrepit cars mounting large MOTOR TRAINING SCHOOL boards and L plates. He has little option, really, because recognised and properly equipped driving schools in India (like this one) are slightly rarer than snow at sea level on the Equator. (In my city, a provincial capital, there is only one, with three vehicles and about fifteen student drivers, with places reserved de facto for Catholics only.) So TD, instead of waiting maybe years for his chance to come around at one of these institutions, wishes to begin driving at once. He is bright enough to understand that buying a licence doesn’t mean he can begin actually roaring down the road, not yet. He has to go through the mill at these teaching shops, which are ubiquitous and unregulated, and which of course make a good deal of money out of fulfilling a market need.
So he goes through a week or three of "instruction" which is "practical"…how to overtake everything else, how to squeeze past everything he can, how not to obey any rule of the road so long as a cop is not actually watching. Learning road signs, let alone the laws? Oh, please…he has a licence. What does he need to know all that useless stuff for? Get real. Only sissies follow the rules.
So, TD, in his new or used car, goes out at night after a few stiff drinks with his friends, runs off the road onto the pavement, crushes a few people to death, and maybe, if he has no political protector, he might do a few months for it. If he does have those protectors, of course, he’s fine. At most he might lose his licence. Well, all he has to do is go to the Road Transport Authority in the next state and buy a new licence. There is no national database, and he can continue killing whomsoever his heart should desire.
Lest I forget, it’s not just TD – I should mention the ill-lit roads with nothing in the way of pedestrian crossings, the reckless increase in numbers of private vehicles sold, the total absence of enforcement of laws, the drunken lorry drivers, the unmanned railway level crossings, and more…and the indirect victims of the tons of vehicular pollutants (did I hear someone mention emission checkpoints run by schoolgirls?) who die like flies from carbon monoxide and so on.
I wonder what the next year’s toll will be. If I’m lucky I won’t be on it. But I can assure you of one thing.
If a politician talks of blood on the streets, traffic is not going to be what he will refer to.
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