So retails happened.....

Have a very Walmart morning, fellow Indians. The great bastion of India's socialist past that has been under assault from western retailers for so many years has finally fallen. India has opened up multi-format retail to foreign players.

Walmarts, Carrefours and Tesco's of the world are smacking their lips at finally getting a chance to sell to the discerning Indian buyer. According to the Head of the India-US Business Forum (the Americans must have felt a great sense of satisfaction considering they've lead the assault for years), d

"The singular act of opening the multi-brand retail sector to foreign direct investment will significantly benefit the Indian consumer by spurring the modernization of India's vast agri-retail marketplace," said Ron Somers, the President of the US India Business Council.

"Investments will now flow into India's farm-to-market supply chain, which will usher in expertise and bring efficiencies to India's supply chain infrastructure. Food price rise and inflation will now effectively be tamed," he said.

"Opening the retail sector will create a larger market opportunity for Indian farmers, increasing quality and choice for India's sophisticated consumers," Somers said.

Unfortunately, this western enthusiasm really makes me uneasy even if FDI in retail may be a good thing for the country, because there is still no consensus on the issue at all. So is it good for the poor Indian farmer or not?

According to Arun Jaitley, and this is probably the official explanation of the BJP as well,

"The services sector accounts for 58% of country's GDP. The retail chains in India, both small and big, account for a major segment of the services sector," Jaitley said. "FDI with deep pockets entering this segment will have an adverse impact on our domestic retail sector…"

Jaitley insisted that "fragmented markets" gave more choice to consumers than "consolidated" ones, adding that once they eliminate competition through predatory pricing, large global retain chains create monopolies.

While it is true that 51% FDI is now allowed in multi-format retail and India will soon see lots of Walmarts and Carrefours and umm, Harrods maybe, and Aldi's, and some other American chains such as Target and maybe even the likes of Lord & Taylor and Saks Fifth Avenue, I am curious to know how it will de-fragment the market. As far as I know, its up to the Indian consumer how de-fragmented they want their market to be, but at the same time, it is also true that they will go to a place with the cheapest goods, and if that happens to be Evil Walmart (couldn't resist that), then that's where they will go.

According to the big Walmart, this is the "first important step", and just thinking about that makes me shudder. First step to what?!? Its just like the sinister feeling I get when I think of that Coca Cola executive who once said that he wants to replace every traditional drink in India such as lassi, chaachh, coconut milk and sharbat with a Coca Cola product! Very scary indeed, and like I said, even if this is good for the retail scene in this country, the way these companies are smacking their lips should make anybody uneasy.

According to Sitaram Yechury, FDI in retail should be allowed if it follows three criteria - "generating employment, enhancing capacities and bringing new technologies." Each of these three could be a PhD subject, or in other words, are very elaborate and detailed explanations in themselves.

Many years ago, when the debate first started, the unifying thought against foreign retail was that it will kill the mom and pop stores and the neighborhood kirana's. The response was that foreign retail will bring in foreign expertise, best practices, and money to fill the huge, huge void in storage and transportation of perishable goods that results in India losing tens of thousands of crores worth of fruits and vegetables every year because they can't be stored. If the government can ensure that these big companies deliver on their promise to strengthen (or rather build from scratch in many cases) the back-end of the chain, I can only see the rural folk benefiting, apart from the middlemen that is. Actually, even middlemen then most likely will be on their payroll.

As the top Indian Walmartian (sorry, couldn't resist that either) said,

Jain said Walmart is "willing and able" to invest in back-end infrastructure that will help reduce wastage of farm produce, improve the livelihood of farmers, lower prices of products and ease supply-side inflation.

At such a time as this, easing of the supply-side inflation will sound like music to the government's ears, and now that i've said it, I greatly fear that the great CONgress propaganda machine will turn this into their great strategic move to get India out of this stagflation. $hit. As far as the livelihood of farmers is concerned, I think i'll still stand by what I think I had written many moons ago that only a drastic, structural, philosophical, mental change will improve the lives of farmers in the country because while they have had a good meal of lip service for decades, they are starving of real reforms, at least till after the Green Revolution, and that was 4 decades ago. Since then?

If the Government says that India needs open up the retail sector to foreign firms which have been smacking their lips in the most creepy way, then are we to assume that only the western retailers are capable of bringing in the best practices into the country? Are the best practices that we are talking about a protected trade secret and only in the hands of Walmart and Carrefour? Are the western companies the only ones capable of spending the money on setting up the back end logistics in the retail sector?

The BJP raises a very valid point - first, it is true that India in a sense will end up corporatizing a lot of essential food item supply chain control into the hands of the private sector, which most likely will be dominated by the North Atlantic firms. Secondly, this whole talk of strengthening the food chain logistics has been talked about for decades, and yet the government has failed to take the lead in the creation of say cold storage's and encouragement of technology adaptation and utilization in the sector. Now the hope is that these companies will do all that. My question is that companies like P&G, HUL and ITC also sell their wares in the vast rural hinterland, so are they too using primitive and wasteful methods in supply chain logistics?

I also believe that there are some inherent constraints that even the entry of any player can't change. For example, a bad road is a bad road for a foreign player and a domestic player, and for a foreign truck with a 200 HP engine and an old Tata Truck with much less. The super duper supply chain logistics that these companies boast of in Europe or North America are backed by a strong infrastructure that India will probably not see for many many decades, if at all. So to expect those logistics operations being replicated here is naive and ignorance at best.

So let us see if the promise of creating thousands of jobs, inclusive growth, increasing farm productivity etc etc will hold true for a company that pays its employees some of the lowest wages in the US.

Quite a few things happened in the past ten days since i've written anything here. The two major tasks I was involved in at work - getting the annual report printed and the work related to the listing of the company I work for, both came to fruitation and it felt good to see some results come out of the numerous hours I spent on them.

Work's been keeping me really busy these days and it just becomes impossible to do anything else. For me, anything else is a lot of things these days, including waking up in the morning to go running, learning to play the guitar (which is going very slowly at the present unfortunately), learning more about photography, and well, trying to keep a social life going. When I am surrounded by so many activities and aims and hobbies and interests, I wonder sometimes what I should write about, considering my awareness of all things political has gone down considerably, and has been replaced by one common platform and that is hatred for the CONgress party and the fraud Gandhi cronies.

So as much as I hate them, ranting on and on about them gets repetitive, and when even I don't want to keep on writing similar rants about them, I would understand anybody else would not like to keep on reading the same rants about them. When I use the word rant, I know I am risking taking away some of the seriousness and authenticity of what I write, because a rant, more often than not, is more about displaying ones anger towards something, usually more heightened than normal and thus less factual and logical, but when I rant about how much I hate whats going on in the country, I try to follow it up with some bits of real news.

Nothing seems to be working for India these days. Its government had stopped functioning many years ago, and the global economic scenario mixed with bad economic management at home have been keeping everybody quiet. The only news items today are as usual, corruption and its many related subheadings, the economic scene in Europe, the falling Rupee, and gold. Just this morning, I read that India's gold demand for the last quarter fell 23%. That's a very big number if you look at it - they fell by 1/4th! India for all its love of gold can't be blamed, with falling rupee and inflation that is not looking to go down anytime soon.

Speaking of inflation, it has been said again and again that inflation is due to the supply side constraints, and raising interest rates can only do so much, but the reasons for the inflation will remain. As pointed out by me and many others, Governments in India are loathe to changing the supply side economics for whatever reasons, and India continues to remain a bottleneck country with bottlenecks and constraints in every conceivable sector of the economy, be it transport, housing, power, health care facilities, education, oh, and most importantly, food.

But real work on the ground needs one to pull up their sleeves and get down to work, and the Government of India and most state governments should never be expected to get their hands dirty. So the other option is to get the people to spend less, and thus when you can't affect the fiscal policy (perhaps because you have none), you attack the monetary policy. High interest rates will inflate what families are paying for their loans, the price of food remains high, so that means spending less on everything else. So basically the demand needs to shrink to match the supply.

If I think about it, its always a good idea to cool the consumption juggernaut down and perhaps give the earth some breathing space. On my way to work this morning, I was thinking that India is perhaps of the world's worst utilizers of space. Our cities are in a sprawl without planning, our agricultural lands produce less crop and food then many other nations of the world, our potable water's running out and there is no urgency to save it, and in general, the common Indian is unhappy and only thinking about money. What I have been wishing on the wild west - that perhaps its time they realigned their lifestyle and conspicuous consumption, could be wished upon my own countrymen.

The conundrum here is that the countrymen I am talking about are 1/4th of this country's population. The middle class is too engrossed in making their own lives better through more money to think about anything else, but what kind of a lifestyle adjustment do I talk about with the millions of poor who live under the open skies and have no steady source of income? What kind of a lifestyle adjustment should the hungry and malnourished children of this country bring?

I ask a question and there seem to be a dozen truths that respond to it in a dozen different ways. I think the chaos around is enough for most of us to just shake our heads and hope for the worst. In this "free for all" India of today, the only truth that remains for most people is that you have to fend for yourself. The slums of Mumbai have no proper sanitation and every morning thousands and thousands of people defecate in the open, but their small living holes which they will return to will have cable television which will be beaming a lifestyle of utmost luxury and consumption which they will watch with gusto.

I heard somewhere, either on television or from a friend, that an issue with Indian election process is that it is first past the post, so in a simple example, if there are a hundred people who can vote in a voting zone, and there 3 candidates, and only 60% vote, so that is 60 people voting out of the hundred. Now one candidate gets 25 votes, and other two get the remaining, that is, 35 votes. So the candidate with the 25 votes wins, but she represents only 25% of the population of that voting zone she stood up in. Again, there can be two issues here, first, that the system needs to change so that a candidate must represent if not at least 1/3, but some percentage of the population in that zone, or second, there needs to be something done so that the abysmal 60% voting percentage rises to at least 80%.

We know that the people who vote today are the most economically disadvantaged, and they are the ones who are always short changed by the people they vote in. Quite ironic really. The same with caste politics. Perhaps a poor person belonging to a caste protected by the constitution would rather live on the 'pride' of having an MP from his or her caste than in a better home with food for the family and school for the kids. At least this is what the politics of India today seems to suggest. The politically disinterested middle class, often blamed for so many of the ills that plague today's politics because of their non-participation and focus on wealth and only wealth was said to have stirred epitomized by the rise of Anna Hazare, and it remains to be seen what levels of participation will be seen when India goes to elections for the national government. I am also curious to see what happens in the many state elections that are coming up, including that of Uttar Pradesh. Rahul "Voted in or not, i'll be made PM of this banana republic by mom" Gandhi has started campaigning against the tyranny of Mayawati, who by the way plans to divide UP into 4 new states! I always advocated for the division of UP into two, but wouldn't 4 be pushing it? India's federal structure already leaves so much to be desired with the states rarely seeing eye to eye with the center. The problem with state politics, as I had written long ago, was that most are simply incapable of thinking from a broader point of view. Their narrow interests sometime go against the interest of this country, and more often than not, they win.

So while I continue to feel worthless and overwhelmed by everything that seems to be going around me, I suppose the only way I can respond is by making my life more meaningful than being just a corporate slave that I am. I'm looking forward to my family visiting me next week and perhaps like millions of others like me, will continue to make my life better, hope for the best and leave the rest to God.

There is a general sentiment being permeated by the over-zealous and narrow visioned Indian media that the men and women of the armed forces who defend our lands on our borders are the villains who have terrorised the local populations and they do whatever they want on a whim without fear of repercussions.

The materialistic and bohemian Indian urban youth readily buy this glib that the best of the best in the business, the business of media that is, peddle day in and day out on the airwaves and in print. Unfortunately, there are very few who stand up to rebut this dangerous propaganda purveyed by the yellow media. Television news more often than not never allows airtime to opinions that go against the picture that they are trying to draw in the minds of the viewer and the articles written in the print media simply never get the eye balls to open the peoples' eyes to to the truth. Considering that the general population of India is increasingly averse to reading real news and takes its daily dose of information, I should say infotainment, from the likes of the Tabloid of India and its posse, the space for people who actually speak for this country and for the truth shrinks even further.

Just like I find Hinduism bashing to be the past time of choice for most of the media, it is also very prevalent for them to question the integrity of the Armed Forces and other paramilitary. A single crime is enough for the media to club the entire organization in the same light, and the ignorant masses join in. Unfortunately, the Indian media currently simply does not seem to have the wherewithal to delve deeper into issues and actually try to represent some semblance of truth, which in turn is probably because the common population does not look for serious truth, they simply look for infotainment.

When the topic of Kashmir is discussed in the media, I have more often than not seen the media portray the Army there as the villain who victimize the local population in the garb of fighting terror. While Bollywood has showcased the Indian Armed Forces as the brave and honourable institutions that they are, there have been some instances where this liberal bleeding heart, Wagah candle kissing comes to the full fore, with themes such as 'bad' soldiers not wanting the peace loving people of India and Pakistan to be united, or a Hindu nationalist Army Officer posted in Kashmir killing innocents simply out of his hatred for Islam. Yes, such movies have been made too and in the name of intellectual freedom aim to harm the very moral fabric of the Armed Forces that holds them and in turn this supposedly great country together. Irony is that those in the political circles and the media who profess to be the most secular are the most divisive of all.

Irom Sharmila has been on a hunger strike for the past 11 years and was barely a blip on the national media, and has now gained prominence once the Kashmiri politicians raised their pitch to repeal the act. While the "Iron Lady of Manipur" has every right to be heard, and justice be done for the act that was committed by the jawans of the Assam Rifles in Manipur over a decade ago, and I personally do not know the details of the Act, but as a retired Colonel Athale wrote in Rediff.com, this is one of the few pieces of legislation that tries to protect the soldiers themselves without putting them at the mercy of the states' civil administration which needs no proof of its incompetence and lethargy in responding to a call for help of any kind from any citizen.

Kashmir in my opinion is a very strange conundrum in the minds of the Indian media and population. Correct information and news rarely comes out of the state without first being dipped in religious connotations or allegations or rebuttals. Thus, I believe that every Indian knows that there is a problem in Kashmir, but the way the Indian media portrays the situation, everybody is unclear of whether its really Pakistan's pathological hatred for all things Indian that's the problem or whether the problem is somewhere else. Most unfortunately, there are many ignorant youth out there who view their country as the occupier and will voraciously advocate that India should leave Kashmir and make peace with the already suffering Pakistan. Yes, the must sought after India-Pakistan partnership that will beat the rest of the world in everything.

I had written a few weeks ago about how the current Government of J&K is pushing through for the removal of the Armed Forces Special Powers Act which they say gives too much power in the hands of the Army. I had written that the Indian media due to some strange affliction view the Army as the largest perpetrator of human rights violations in J&K while the AK-47 toting terrorists remain "alleged" militants/terrorists/rebels in the eyes of the world media. The Indian media does nothing to correct this untruth. What I am simply saying is that with the political class and the media and the watching population only too eager to hold an entire institution responsible for the act of a few, should the safety and security of the greater masses be held to ransom because of denial of justice to the ones that were wronged? I feel a major issue is that justice is denied in India to those who deserve it, and because justice is denied, the tendency is to blame the laws under which the act was committed, and instead of focusing on the specific injustice, a sweeping generalization is made that should change the laws themselves. I think that means most simply miss the target of their ire.

There is a meeting today between Omar Abdullah and the United Command of the Armed Forces in Kashmir where he will raise the issue of removing the Act in certain parts of the state. Let us see how that goes. Its quite easy for politicians to make the people believe what they think is good for them, and I believe for many people, afraid of facing up to the terrorists, find the easy target to vent their frustrations with their situation, and turn towards the group that by law can't respond - the police and the Army. I think it is similar to the sentiment among the many Muslim organizations who focus on preaching that Islam is a religion of peace but shy away from taking a stronger stand against the terrorists themselves.

Col. Athale writes in Rediff.com:

there is a clamour of late about the 2,000 odd graves in Kashmir... mostly of militants who infiltrated but no mention of the 5,000 Indian soldiers who died during the same period!

It appears that the Left-liberal dominated government may well succumb to this concerted campaign and remove the legal protection of soldiers who are engaged in fighting a guerrilla war launched by our neighbour. This is a last ditch attempt inject some sense of realism in the debate by an author who has been studying this form of war in the north-east, Kashmir, Sri Lanka, South Africa and Northern Ireland for the last 25 years.

The first and foremost fact that must be understood is that the armed forces have NO powers to act within the country other than in aid to civil authority. These powers are defined by Sections 129 to 131 of the Criminal Procedure Code. The CrPC sections dealing with riots empowers the local magistrate/police commissioner to call army in 'aid to civil authority'. The local military commander is under legal obligation to obey this demand. However, the quantum of force and methods to be used are at the discretion of the military commander.

The civil authority has to give this requisition in writing. Section 131 that was added in 1973, gives a power to a commissioned officer to act even when a magistrate is not present, but must contact a magistrate at the earliest. This genesis of this section was that in West Bengal the armed forces were came under criticism when in their presence mobs destroyed government property, while the army watched helplessly since a magistrate was not present. These are the only powers available to the armed forces.

The Assam Special Powers Act 1958 was promulgated when the Nagas revolted, civil authority collapsed and armed and organised Naga rebels controlled vast stretches of territory and began a guerrilla war against the state. It is not aid to civic authority but a virtual army rule because of breakdown of state or inability of the state to deal with armed challenge... this is NOT for crowd control but fighting an armed group intent on overthrowing the state.

AFSPA is merely an enabling provision and the forces act at the behest of the government and not on their own. This is meant for use in a 'disturbed area' where the writ of the state has ceased to exist and its existence is challenged by an armed group. The purpose of this act is to fight a guerrilla war.

In this war ambushes, raids, combat patrols are the tactics used by the army. These actions are not covered under the CrPc and IPC. The armed forces have no other police powers so it is not special.

Can a guerrilla war that is supported and even fought by foreign citizens on our soil be faced in any other manner, should the NSG not have been used in Mumbai attack on 26/11? In Kashmir the army faces a 26/11 situation on a daily basis.

Does the Indian Army use excessive force? Funny that countries that preach to us like the US have been using drones, helicopters, artillery, fighter aircraft etc as so also Pakistan! The Indian Army has never used heavy weapons against civilians due to fear of causing collateral damage and is yet being criticised. The Indian Army fights with one hand tied, non use of full force. Some want it to fight with both hands tied!

The third issue is can it be removed from some parts in Kashmir that are undoubtedly peaceful. The problem in this case is what if the militants commit violence somewhere else and take shelter in these areas? Knowing fully that the army cannot operate here!

What am I angry at? As much as I am angry at the politicians who are simply unable to comprehend the long term repercussions of their selfish and dangerous actions today, I am even angrier at the dumbed down population which has lost its ability to seek the truth and question what they are being force-fed. Much of the urban youth of today is lost in the land of the lotus-eaters, and they could only care about fornication and consumption. I generalize of course, but I see it as the truth. The media has succeeded in making the people feel ashamed of their heritage and their culture and replaced it with a North Atlantic pop culture where everybody is happy driving cars, hanging out with women (this works very well for the male-centric society), wearing nice clothes and sipping alcohol. I wish something would happen that made this society stop taking for granted the blood and sweat of our armed forces.

In the end, since we are a true blue democracy, the people have got to make better choices, but then again, probably nobody thought that the Fraud Gandhi's led CONgress government would take the rape of the country to such an extreme level that I shudder to think that these buggers still have 3 years left. So unfortunately, while our soldiers continue to patrol our borders and face the bullets from enemies who do not have the spine to stand up and fight face to face, we continue to be ignorant of what it takes to defend this nation, and our ignorance shows right at the top of the food chain, the Parliament of India.