India, Canada and USA: Liberals say one thing in India and its opposite in the West

Posted on by Chaiwallah

A lightly edited version of this article, written with Karuna Gopal, appeared in News18 here.

Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel. On an average day, you can always find ‘patriotic’ BJP supporters getting schooled by Indian liberals with a line such as this. But do liberals believe it themselves? For instance, do liberals believe such things only in India? Or would these ideas apply equally to a Western country, such as the United States or Canada?

Last month, the editorial board of the New York Times published an official opinion saying that Kamala Harris, sitting Vice-President and candidate of the ruling Democratic Party, is “the only patriotic choice for President.” In other words, if you are an American and you disagree with your government, then you are a traitor. How exactly do you square this with what liberals are saying in India?

This is not an isolated incident. As the date of the US Presidential election approaches, American media is pitching in with shows of loyalty to the government in ways that would put North Korean state television to shame. On one show, the anchor sat down with the President and listed the names of his cabinet members one by one, thanking him for “giving” each one of them to the country. “Thank you, thank you, thank you,” the anchor repeated. This happened on The View, which the New York Times has called the most important political show in America. On another government aligned channel called MSNBC, the panel stood up and made heart shapes by putting their hands together in excitement, as the anchor talked about the sheer joy of listening to Kamala Harris.

It goes beyond usual news media or political talk shows. An article in Wired magazine, which caters to a tech crowd, suggests that one of Biden’s ministers might know how to solve a Rubik’s cube in 3 seconds (the current world record is 3.13 seconds). Then there is Hollywood with its massive cultural power. They are all pitching for the public to support Kamala Harris.  Such behavior is not new either. In 2009, a number of A-list Hollywood celebrities released a video statement pledging to be “servants” of President Barack Obama.

Wait a minute. Don’t liberals in India have a term for those who fawn over the ruling party like this? A slur that they use  against anyone who might say something good about Prime Minister Modi.  Liberals call it “godi media.” And they absolutely hate it.  On Youtube and other social media platforms in India, an entire ecosystem has grown up around this anger. On the streets, opposition party supporters heckle and shake their fists at anyone they see as “godi media.” The term has gone global. It now appears regularly in anti-Modi articles on liberal outlets such as the Washington Post, France24, or Al Jazeera. It appears in reports on media freedom by groups such as Reporters without Borders which claim that India is less safe for journalists than Iraq and Afghanistan. And as we now know, even in official Canadian government reports about threats to their national security. 

Yet, as far as we could see, nobody has cared to explain what the anger is really about. Is it that liberals feel the media has a duty to question those in power? Or is it that liberals just happen to like President Biden, but not Prime Minister Modi? Because it seems like they are fine with the American media cheering openly for Biden and Harris. Can you imagine the mockery if an Indian news anchor went on air to thank the Prime Minister for “giving” us each of his cabinet ministers? 

Speaking of Canada, India is having one of its worst diplomatic spats with them right now. Liberals have called on Canadian patriots to wave their little flags and unite against India, the big bad enemy. Prime Minister Trudeau is facing disaster in upcoming elections. Anyone on the outside can see that he is using the oldest trick in the book to distract his people. But not so in Canada. Liberal MPs in Canada are openly saying that anyone who disagrees with them is anti-national and an Indian agent. Could the ruling BJP get away with such rhetoric in India? No, Indian liberals would never let that happen. 

In case we have forgotten, this is the same Justin Trudeau who imposed a national emergency because some truck drivers protested in his capital. And he got away with it, thanks to his supporters in the liberal media. The Canadian government told people that truckers honking their horns is actually code for “Heil Hitler!” The media never challenged such wild claims. In 2016, Canadian state television “reported” that Americans were literally falling to their knees before Trudeau, begging him to take over as President of the United States. This is the image that Canadian liberal media has of how the outside world sees their dear leader. 

So how do our liberals here at home feel about these double standards? It is not like they do not know what is happening in the United States, or Canada, or Qatar. In fact, they work closely with their colleagues in the West, writing for the New York Times, Deutsche Welle, the Guardian and others. They have worked hard to create this exact narrative that Western media and governments should have privileges that Indians should not. That anything goes as long as you are against Modi. And we do not need to get started on the irony of Indian liberals going to Qatar’s Al Jazeera to criticize Indian democracy. We understand that being an oil and gas rich kingdom comes with a free certificate of “liberalism.” It is also fascinating how many liberals see Al Jazeera as some kind of rebel against the military power of the US and Israel. Do they know that Qarar hosts the largest US military base in the Middle East? And they just renewed that arrangement recently. It doesn’t matter. Liberal media understands that their followers do not need to know everything. Otherwise, they would start asking questions.

And so it is that Indian liberals are leading a double life of almost unbelievable hypocrisy. If you question election results in America, you are a crazy conspiracy theorist. They call you “election denier,” and public enemy number one. If you question election results in India, you are a proud liberal. The American liberals won’t even let you say that subway trains in New York City are dirty. Apparently, that is unpatriotic. An American freelance journalist tried saying that the metro in Moscow is cleaner. They accused him of having “Russian handlers,” and explained that dirty subways are “the literal price of freedom.”  Not kidding.

The same goes for the role of religion in public life. President Biden makes a show of his Catholic faith every chance he gets. But Indian liberals throw a fit every time the Indian Prime Minister makes it known that he is a Hindu. In the ultimate irony, liberals now believe that Hindutva is a global conspiracy. Remember the “Dismantling Global Hindutva conference” in America? It uncovered things such as a possible secret pact between Hindutva and “trans queer elites.” This was in 2021, slightly before Trudeau got the idea of accusing India of “transnational repression.” The same liberal elite who say Hindutva is a global conspiracy will tell you that there is no such thing as an American deep state. 

What foreign interference? There is no foreign interference in India. And definitely not from America. We are told to stop with the cold war style conspiracy theories. Meanwhile, America and its “five eyes alliance” (US, UK, Canada, Australia and New Zealand) see an RSS hand behind everything. They see it in Khalistani gang wars in Canada. And in riots in Leicester in England. And more recently in activities of the Hindu American Foundation in the USA. In the eyes of the West, the Hindus are the new Jews.

Indian liberals have been given the job of making sure that this system of privilege stays in place. If you want to know whether liberals actually believe any of the things they say in India, just keep an eye on what they are saying in America. Usually, it is the exact opposite. So if you want to short circuit the liberal narrative, just touch the wires, close the loop and watch it all smolder away. 

Oxfam report on GST is wrong and mathematically impossible

Posted on by Chaiwallah

This article, written with Karuna Gopal, appeared in The Financial Express (Oct 25, 2024)

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Is it possible to have 2+2 =5 ? Of course it is. Just imagine that the second “2” is contributing more to the addition than the first “2.” Did you think that makes no sense? In that case, why would you or anyone else believe the Oxfam report that says the poorer half of India pays almost two-thirds of all the GST collected by the government? 

That Oxfam report has been out in public for almost a year now. And it has been repeatedly debunked. But of late, there has been a renewed effort to make it viral again on the internet. A careful calculation by Vidhu Shekhar shows that the bottom half of the population pays closer to 10 percent of all the GST collected, instead of the 64.3 percent claimed by Oxfam. But the Oxfam report is wrong for a much stronger reason. It is mathematically impossible.

Think about it. The GST is a consumption tax. The GST rate on an item is the same no matter who buys it. The Oxfam report divided the population of India into two equal parts: the poorer half and the richer half. So if one half of the population is paying more GST than the other half, it must also consume more than the other. 

Now is there any item that you think the poorer half of the population is consuming more on a per capita basis than the richer half? Perhaps shirts, shoes, cars, food, toothpaste, travel, entertainment, anything? Not really. That means it is impossible for the poorer half of the population to pay more GST than the richer half. 

Wait a minute, you might say. Are there not more poor people than rich people? So even though poor people might consume less per capita, they would still consume more overall, and hence have to pay more GST. But read carefully what Oxfam said. They divided the population into two halves, the richer half and the poorer half. Believe it or not, the poorer half of the population has exactly the same number of people as the richer half. Just like the taller half of Bengaluru has the exact same number of people as the shorter half of Bengaluru. Just like a kilogram of cotton weighs exactly the same as a kilogram of steel. 

You might want to add here  that GST rates on “luxury” items are higher than on “essential” items. This is of course true, but less important to the argument you might think. Again, take any item, say cars. Who buys more cars per capita, the poor or the rich? Evidently, the rich. Hence, the richer 50 percent pays more than half of the GST collected from car sales. The same reasoning works for every item, including toothpaste and soap. The richer 50 percent are buying at least 50 percent of all the soap consumed in India. And hence, the richer half of the population pays at least 50 percent of the GST collected from sales of soap. Observe that the exact rate of GST on cars or soap does not matter here. 

Now there are some items which you could argue that the poor would consume more on a per capita basis. Railway tickets, for instance. But once you put this inside a larger category such as “travel,” the confusion goes away. The richer half of the population spends more on travel than the poorer half. So even if all kinds of travel were taxed at the exact same rate, the richer half would pay more. 

In conclusion, Oxfam’s claim that the poorer 50 percent of the population pays 64.3 percent of all the GST collected in India is not just unlikely, but mathematically impossible. It is time for basic arithmetic to put an end to this rumor, once and for all.

Why the Muslim world should stop holding a grudge against Israel and move on

Posted on by Chaiwallah

A lightly edited version of this article, written with Karuna Gopal, appeared in News18 here.

Have you ever heard of the biggest ship disaster of all time? Six or seven times worse than the Titanic. On Jan 30, 1945, the Wilhelm Gustloff left the Baltic Sea port of Gotenhafen in northern Europe, now in Poland. They were carrying a number of German military officers. But ninety percent of those on board were German refugees, fleeing the horrors of World War 2. The Soviets spotted the ship, fired three torpedoes, and all of them struck. That night, ten thousand people drowned in the icy waters of the Baltic Sea. For comparison, 1500 people died when the Titanic sank. 

This is what happens when someone like the Nazis or Hamas mixes the military among the civilians. It is sad. But such is the harsh reality of war. So why the outcry against Israel over the high civilian death toll in the war in Gaza?

As the war in Gaza makes headlines in India, several commentators have been feeding us with a simple explanation for what is happening. They say that Israel is occupying Palestinian land. The Jews are oppressors, the Arabs are victims. Therefore, we must side with the Arabs. 

But the history is a lot more complex. The Arabs started the war in 1948-49, which Israel won. After that, Israel took 78 percent of the land, as opposed to the 55 percent given to them by the UN partition plan. But what happened to the rest of the land? Egypt occupied Gaza and Jordan occupied the West Bank in the exact same war! So the Arabs snatched land from their fellow Arabs in Palestine. Do the Arabs ever talk about that? No, because it does not fit their narrative.

So when Israel was again forced to fight the Arab countries in 1967, there was no Palestinian state anywhere. In the 1967 war, Israel overcame the combined forces of five countries: Egypt, Syria, Jordan, Iraq and Lebanon. They attacked Israel from all sides, but Israel still won. In that war, Israel captured large amounts of territory. But almost all of it was given back to these countries in return for them giving diplomatic recognition to Israel. The enemies of Israel could hardly have asked for a more fair deal.

But what about the 700,000 Palestinian refugees? Yes, they had to leave their homes. And it was very unfortunate. But that is what happens when you lose a war of annihilation. The Germans launched a war of annihilation against the Soviets in 1941. So when the Germans were defeated in World War 2, the Germans lost a lot of land. As many as 12 million Germans had to flee their homes in Eastern Europe, from Poland, Czechoslovakia, Romania, Hungary and Yugoslavia. At least 1 million of them died. Do the Germans also get to call this a “nakbah,” or whatever is the German word for “catastrophe”? 

The Arabs launched three wars of annihilation against the Jews (in 1948, 1967 and 1973) and lost them all! This means that the Arabs must come to terms with losing some territory. Unfortunately, that is what happens in war. For instance, the city of Konigsberg, the capital of East Prussia, had been a German city for 800 years. Today, it is part of the Russian oblast of Kaliningrad. At the end of the Second World War, the Russians expelled the Germans from Konigsberg and took the city. Why should it be any different if Israel wishes to annex the West Bank or Gaza tomorrow?

In fact, those who single out the plight of Palestinian Arab refugees do not seem to know how the borders of countries everywhere were redrawn after World War 2. At the time, the universal formula for peace seemed to be that of forming ethnically homogeneous states. For example, Ukraine was given territory from Poland, and the Polish minorities were expelled from Ukraine. In turn, Ukrainian minorities were expelled from Poland. While the Polish had to leave Lithuania and Belarus, the Lithuanians and Belorussians had to leave Poland. Also, Poland was given land from Germany, and the Germans were expelled from Poland. Many Hungarians had to leave from the Transylvania region of Romania. The Italians were expelled from what is Croatia today. In May 1945, the President of Czechoslovakia called on his people to “eliminate the German problem.” Nearly 2 million Germans were expelled from the country, and thousands of Germans died in the process. 

When seen in this light, the victimhood of the Palestinian Arabs is real, but hardly exceptional. In fact, they seem to be the most privileged of all ‘victims’ in the world, perhaps the only refugees that the world still cares about. Has anyone ever asked about a right of the Italians to return to Croatia? Or a right of the Poles to return to Ukraine? So what makes the Palestinian Arabs special?

We all know the answer to that last question. The Palestinian Arabs are Muslims. And we have all become used to treating Muslims as special. But there is no logical reason for this. 

The Jews themselves were the worst victims of World War 2. If anyone deserves a state, it has to be them. So they were given a state in their most ancient homeland, where the Jews had lived long before anyone else. How could anyone have a problem with that? 

And for what it’s worth, let us not forget that the Arabs have done a “nakbah” on the Jews several times over. Once upon a time, Egypt had 80,000 Jews. Today there are less than 10. What happened to the Jews of Algeria or Libya? In the 1950s and 1960s, the Jews were forced to leave all the Arab lands. In any case, where is “Arab land”? The original inhabitants of Algeria or Libya are the Tuaregs, the Kabyles, the Chaoui peoples and others that the Arabs classify as Berbers (barbarians). They were all colonized by the Arabs long ago. So everyone can find a grudge against everyone else if they go back far enough. That is what history is. 

For the Palestinian Arab refugees, the best thing to do is forget and move on. The Germans moved on. Their country is flourishing today. Their economy is the biggest in Europe, indeed the third largest in the world. A million French were expelled from Algeria in 1962. They started new lives in France and flourished. The Arabs have everything. They have land, and a young population. And so much of the world’s oil. They could achieve so much if they got over their obsession with fighting Israel.

For the rest of the world, here is a reality check. You may not like to be called “anti-Semitic” simply for criticizing Israel. But what else is it when you obsess over finding fault with one tiny Jewish state, and ignore everything else? At least 500,000 people have died in the Syrian civil war since 2011. Since 2020, Azerbaijan has forced 100,000 ethnic Armenians to flee the Artsakh region, but how much world attention did that get? Perhaps because there was no way to blame the Jews for it? 

Yes, there are a number of Jews (including numerous Israelis) who disagree with the policies of the State of Israel. But that is to be expected in a democracy. The correct question to ask is not why so many Israelis disagree with what their government is doing. Instead, one should ask why Muslim societies everywhere seem so united on the issue of Israel. Why the uniform show of hostility towards Israel by one community from the streets of Lucknow to the streets of London and Michigan? 

Israel is not perfect. But its enemies are far worse than Israel in almost every way, In terms of civil liberties, freedom of expression, scientific inquiry, minority rights and democracy. If the Muslim world could get over its grudge against Israel and move on, the world would be a better place. And the “liberal” intellectuals who back them could think of more worthy causes that might need their attention.