Anil Kohli PRESENTS NEWS ON SOCIAL MEDIA 04th NOV2015

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In his finely calibrated speech at the Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi (IIT-D), Reserve Bank of India governor Raghuram Rajan said "debate and dissent are critical for India's economic progress".

He concluded his address by quoting Mahatma Gandhi: "The golden rule of conduct is mutual toleration, seeing that we will never all think alike and we shall always see truth in fragments and from different points of vision."

Tolerance is the essence of democracy. Dissent is inviolate. The only restriction to free speech, as I said on a recent TV debate, is this: "Your freedom ends where my nose begins." By that standard, as I said on the same show, the Shiv Sena's act of inking Sudheendra Kulkarni's face qualified as criminal assault.

Also read: Raghuram Rajan on the economics of tolerance

And yet, tolerance has nuances. Raghuram Rajan himself showed subtle intellectual intolerance to others' views by delaying interest rate cuts for far too long against colleagues' wishes, damaging India's economic growth impetus and the revival of investment by corporates weighed down by high-interest debt. Tolerance cuts both ways as the RBI governor knows.

The debate over intolerance in India has, in recent weeks, taken on an unfortunate if predictable communal colour. Fringe elements on the Left and Right have captured the middle ground. They must be forced to vacate it. The middle ground in a democracy welcomes dissent and tolerance for views from both sides of the ideological spectrum.

Religion, however, has long been misused in India to score political points. Shah Bano began the modern descent into communal politics thirty years ago. Babri Masjid intensified it. The cycle of religious violence and counter-violence has continued.

Over decades, the appeasement of Muslims has - ironically - angered both Hindus and Muslims. From the Shah Bano case in 1985 to today, Muslims have been treated as "objects" to be patronised: by politicians for votes, by liberal Hindus out a sense of noblesse oblige.

Also read: Does SRK have the right to speak of extreme intolerance in India?

Outcome: Muslims remain economically backward and socially straitjacketed, seeking empowerment but receiving only appeasement. Meanwhile, the average Hindu resents the preferential treatment given to Muslims, even though it amounts only to tokenism. As this resentment builds up, communal polarisation sets in. A vicious cycle begins. Genuine secularism is the victim.

In an article titled The Ayatollahs of Secularism, this is what I wrote:

On a cool spring day on a Californian university campus in 1950, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, a tall, angular man of 22, was in a garrulous mood.

He told my father: "Ah, Pakistan. See what we will do with my wonderful new country. Join Habib Bank. You'll be chairman one day. How many Berkeley MBAs does Pakistan have?"

My father, like young Bhutto, a student at the University of California, Berkeley, was unimpressed. "A country founded on theocracy," he told Bhutto, "will never work." My mother, among the first Indian women-students on the Berkeley campus, agreed. Bhutto walked away in a huff.

Those were heady days following independence. After graduating from Berkeley with a bachelor's degree in political science, Bhutto went on to Oxford University to study law. He became Pakistan's youngest cabinet minister, at 30, in 1958. My parents returned to India after four years of graduate study at Berkeley and got married. My father took charge of the family's chemicals business which, thankfully, he was later liberal enough never to coerce me to join.

Also read: Our Left-liberals are a figment of imagination

The secular veil

Cut to today. My daughter, a designer, often visits areas in Mumbai to source raw material for her work with artisans. Most of these artisans are Muslims. Most are very poor. Most live in buildings which could collapse any moment. She asked me a few years ago: "Why hasn't the government in Maharashtra, which wins elections based on votes from poor Muslims, done anything to improve their lives?"

The answer: because poor Muslims, who have no time to think beyond the next meal, are deliberately fed a false narrative of secularism - which really is communalism masquerading as secularism. What can be more communal than keeping, through wilful economic neglect, nearly an entire community of 180 million people in poverty for over six decades?

Also read: Death of secularism: This is Modi and Hindutva's dream of India

That brings us to the third angle in this infamous triangle: the liberal, secular Hindu. Where does he stand in all this? He is naturally secular in the truest sense of the word: religion is a private matter, he rightly believes. It has no place in politics.

But he is also swayed by the plight of many of his fellow-Indians who happen to be Muslims: impoverished, illiterate, ghettoised and discriminated against. For every Azim Premji and Aamir Khan, there are millions of weavers in Uttar Pradesh and spot boys in Mumbai who have no place in corporate India's organised labour force.

Liberal, well-meaning Hindus ask: Why? And the answer they come up with is: communal discrimination. Yet the liberal Hindu doesn't dig deeper. The more politicians sequester Muslims into vote silos, the more the average Hindu (not the liberal, well-meaning, Stephanian Hindu) resents them. Discrimination, petty or large, mounts. So does anger.

Also read: Gandhi would not have agreed with today's Indian seculars

The real culprits - communal politicians dressed up as upholders of secularism - get away scot free in this narrative. The liberal, secular Hindu's angst over anti-Muslim communalism is therefore misdirected - far away from these real culprits.

Influential sections of the media are part of this great fraud played on India's poor Muslims: communalism dressed up as secularism. The token Muslim is lionised - from business to literature - but the common Muslim languishes in his 68-year-old ghetto. It is from such ghettos that raw recruits to Indian Mujaheedin (IM) are most easily found.

Cycle of religious violence

When the Modi government took office in May 2014, the defeated opposition predicted "riot after riot". When riots did not break out as prophesised, church attacks were manufactured. When those were proved bogus, the beef controversy came in handy. Though murders over cow slaughter have occurred with shocking regularity in India since independence, the horrific murder of Mohammad Akhlaq in Dadri, UP, became a rallying cry for the opposition.

Also read: Pssst... Hindus, I know a way to save our religion

The NDA government handled the Dadri murder badly. Its mid-rung leaders made inflammatory statements, playing right into the hands of the sophisticated and ruthlessly determined "secularate" - the coalition of those who use Muslims, beef, Christians and churches as fodder for their politics.

Journalists used to monthly cash envelopes, foreign junkets and unfettered access to South Block are especially incensed these days. So are out-of-power lawyers, corrupt bureaucrats and disenfranchised opposition leaders. They have banded together to restore the status quo ante. For them, Bihar is the beacon of hope. Victory there, they believe, will open the gates to the comfortable and lucrative world they lost where everything, pre-2014, had a price.

Their weapon of choice to bludgeon the Modi government? Thecharge of "growing intolerance". The aim: defame, demonise, discreditand delegitimise the government.

A response to Aakar Patel’s “call to action” to Bollywood

The Fault my dear Aakar is literally not in your stars or why major movie stars have not joined the award return bandwagon.

Dear Aakar,

I read your piece comparing Hollywood’s response to Senator Joseph Mc’Carthy’s witch-hunt in the 50’s to the Bollywood stars “silence” in today’s India. I spent a couple of minutes whether to let this one go or not, but then your post provides so many opportunities to make fun of, that I simply could not resist.

First of all, my impression is your entire knowledge of Mc’Carthy affair is based on a single viewing of George Clooney’s “Good night and Good luck”. Unfortunately, my dear Aakar, the “witch-hunt” of the 50s is not as cut and dried as you imagine it was. It is true Senator Mc’Carthy was censured, and it is true that he died a broken and discredited man. But now investigations have revealed that many of the people he suspected of spying were indeed complicit in aiding the Soviet cause and today many conservatives criticize Mc’Carthy, not because he went on a wild goose chase, but because his approach destroyed the credibility of a legitimate concern and allowed the spies to thrive.

However, this is small change compared to your assertion that today’s Bollywood has, in your words, chosen to remain silent (on the “intolerance” in the country) through calculated and deliberate cowardice. But are they right wing (or BJP or Hindutva, pick your mode of slander please) sympathizers? Oh please! For ages Bollywood has sucked up to Congress and the left socialism in ways too numerous to count. But allow me to recount a few anyway:

Think India has become more communal under Modi? The numbers will disappoint you

In July 2013, communal violence flared in Nanglamal near Meerut in Uttar Pradesh (UP). Two people died and a dozen were injured when Hindus and Muslims clashed over complaints by the latter group of music blaring from loudspeakers outside a temple. The incident erupted into violence when a few Muslims switched off the temple loudspeaker and a Muslim mob beat up a few temple-goers.

This is but one example of communal violence in the tinderbox state of UP. The state is replete with incidents of communal violence over flashpoints such as music, procession routes, rumours of cow slaughter, of temple idols or the Quran being desecrated and so on. In each case, there’s a spark which lights the tinder, police are either inept or look the other way and local politicians who are leaders of different communities try to profit from the mayhem.

The most recent such incident which galvanised the nation was the lynching to death of a Muslim man in Dadri by a Hindu mob because he was suspected of having cow beef in his home.

In October 2014 in Bangalore in Congress ruled Karnataka, a well-known anti-cow slaughter activist was attacked and beaten by a Muslim mob for merely distributing his book arguing against cow slaughter.

Violence around consumption of meat need not even have a communal angle. In September 2014, in Bhopal in BJP ruled Madhya Pradesh, a group of female Muslim activists from the People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, calling for a vegan Eid, were threatened with stoning and stripping by a mob of Muslim men. One of the activists was badly roughed up.

In UP alone, incidents of violence associated with rumours or allegations of cow slaughter, which is illegal in that state as in many other Indian states, are legion. For instance in 2008, in Agra, riots broke out between Hindus and Muslim, after the mysterious deaths of seven cows. According to one report, a Hindu group present on location claimed they were protesting peacefully when stones were pelted at them by a Muslim mob.

It’s noteworthy that a firestorm of criticism has been directed towards the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) after the Dadri incident, some of it justifiably because of irresponsible statements made by some of its leaders and Modi’s prolonged silence. But the commenting class has completely let the Samajwadi Party (SP) in power in UP off the hook. One is led to believe that somehow Modi and the central government are to blame for a law and order failure in SP-ruled UP.

To put matters in perceptive, data from the Ministry of Home Affairs on communal violence tells a very sobering tale. As summarised here, there were 668, 823, and 644 incidents of communal violence nationwide in the years 2012, 2013, and 2014 respectively, the last three full years for which we have data. In each of these three years, UP recorded 118, 247, and 133 communal incidents, which resulted in 39, 77 and 26 deaths respectively, and, 500, 360 and 374 injuries respectively.

While UP has the dubious distinction of leading the nationin these statistics in absolute numbers, it must be noted in per capita terms, the state is not always the worst performer because it’s a large state.

Looking at incidents, UP’s share of the total is 18%, 30% and 20%, in these three years respectively. Given that UP accounts for approximately one fifth of India’s total population, you would expect incidents of communal incidence in the state to be in accordance with its population share. In 2012 and 2014 that was indeed the case, but in 2013, the year in which widespread communal violence took place in Muzaffarnagar, its share was much higher.

We can get more precise information on which states exhibit more communal violence than their population share by comparing each state’s incidence of communal violence with its share of the population over each of the last three years. (See charts for all states and union territories for the years 2012,2013 and 2014 respectively. Each dot represents the incidence of communal violence in a given state in a given year from which is subtracted its share of the total population of the country. The line through zero would be a state, which has the same incidence of communal violence as its share of the total population. Dots above the line represent states that have greater incidence of violence than their population share would suggest, and similarly, for dots below the line representing states that have a lower incidence of communal violence than their population would suggest.)

This statistical exercise reveals that as noted UP is slightly above average in 2012, 2014 but a huge outlier in 2013, a year after Akhilesh Yadav of the Samajwadi Party became chief minister.

Moody's Upgrades Modi Government's Bank Ratings From 'Negative' To 'Stable'

HuffPost Staff  |  By        Jacob Koshy

Rating agency Moody's Investors Service revised its outlook on India's banking system to "stable" from "negative" on Monday. This comes after a separate report by another of its divisions warned PM Modi that he ought to keep his party members “in check or risk losing domestic and global credibility.”

Moody's had downgraded India's banking system outlook to "negative" in November 2011 but upgraded India's sovereign outlook to "positive" in April, while retaining its rating at "Baa3."

Today's improved ratings came with the caveat that any recovery in asset quality would be gradual given the high debt levels in Indian companies. The World Bank Doing Business Report 2016, that was recently released, also noted a 4 point increase in India's position relative to other countries on the overall climate for business from last year.

Indian banks, particularly state-run banks, have been saddled with bad loans estimated at nearly $50 billion as the economy slowed sharply in the last three years.

But recent earnings reports, including from top private sector lender ICICI Bank, suggested asset quality may be stabilising.

Moody's said it expected India's economy to grow around around 7.5 percent in 2015 and 2016 each, supported by low inflation and gradual implementation of structural reforms.

"The stable outlook on India's banking system over the next 12-18 months reflects our expectation that the banks' gradually improving operating environment will result in a slower pace of additions to problem loans, leading to more stable impaired loan ratios," Moody's said in the statement.

"However, the recovery in asset quality will be U-shaped rather than V-shaped, because corporate balance sheets remain highly leveraged."

Moody'salso noted that capital levels remained weak for state-owned banks, with commonTier 1 ratios of only 6 to 10 percent, though lenders retain plentiful ofaccess to funding and liquidity.