Amartya Sen at the Aspen Institute India's Conference in New Delhi - WSJ.com

India's approach should have been to push for what it considered to be a "fairer, juster deal" on climate change that all parties can agree to -- and if that means mandatory cuts, then so be it. "To say under no circumstances will we accept mandatory restraints is ridiculous," he said. "Our position should be we will accept a just agreement, an agreement that creates a better world." He said he was particularly disturbed at one point during the Copenhagen deliberations to see African and other developing nations side with China on the ramifications of an increase in global temperatures and to see India on the side of the U.S. and western Europe when "we have been traditionally the spokesman of the underdog." (via Snapshots from the Aspen Institute India's Conference in New Delhi - WSJ.com).

Inside Indian bedrooms

60years ago, an assault was made by foreign 'observers' into Indian bedrooms. Foreign 'observers'

1. Tied 'development aid' to India's population control.


2. Trained Indian 'health workers' to control India's human reproductive behaviour.


3. Paid for by Western Governments, soon after that, we had 'health workers' fanning out across the Indian country-side, conducting vasectomies /tubectomies on India's (especially poor) population.

It did not matter then, who the 'observers' were - foreign or Indian. Neither does it matter now. What matters is someone's monitoring. And I don't like that at all. Even if it done by a Brown.

Mirror, Mirror on the wall

Who is the most dubious of them all? And Carbon emissions is a very dubious subject. Sometime back, cows (read that as India) were targetted for carbon and methane emission. Will it be Indians and human beings next? Rhetorical you think?

Australia proves how this logic works. For Australians this has become a habit. They decided recently, in Australia to kill thirsty camels. Some time back, they were killing cane toads. Before that it was kangaroos. Before that it was dingos. And before that were humans.

Like last time

This time around, based on similarly dubious research, India is being pressured to accept monitoring of climate change. Climate control and the Copenhagen meet is that fast growing octopus which is spreading out. It tentacles can be found in all kinds of places. One of its tentacles has reached India - which was any way the target. The Aspen Institute, India (AII).

To 'soften' up India, the AII organized a gab-fest. Who could be a good candidate for a gathering of such worthies? At least, Nobel Prize winners. Rajendra Pachauri? Al Gore? Any better candidates. Yes.

Amartya Sen - who 'graced' this gab-fest, hosted by Aspen Institute, India (AII) - an 'associate' of Aspen Institute, USA. Amartya Sen is tenderizing up the media, the academia, to accept Copenhagen outcome - which is primarily International 'monitoring' of India's climate control and administration. Does Amartya Sen raise any of these questions? For his efforts to weaken Indian position and interests, Amartya Sen will soon qualify as a unique category of Indian passport holder - Non-Resident, Non-Indian, holding an Indian passport.

The AII-Board of Trustees reads more like Who's Who of Indian industry - Bajaj, Birla, Godrej, Thapar et al.

The carbon credits 'opportunity'

The rich fat-cats are already licking the chops. Estimates have been put out that the 'carbon-credits business s worth Rs.28,000 crores.

Interestingly, note one thing very carefully. No one, but none, is talking up about cleaning up on pollution. No industry is being asked to reduce their pollutants (think of inks, dyes and chemicals), manage by-products (sulphur from petroleum refining), eliminate contamination (paper plants), decrease waste (electronics), recycle (just imagine the number of mobile phone batteries).

Dada Amartya, you got a memory lapse! How come you don't talk about any of this?

Polluter cleans – not pay

One of the fundamental flaws of the Kyoto Protocol was the principal of ‘polluter pays’. Based on retributive justice logic, it was something that was bound to fail. Instead it should have been based on the Indic justice principle – ameliorative and make good. The operating principle should have been ‘polluter cleans and does not pollute again.’

Camels ... in the kingdom of heaven

Copenhagen is for the rich (from poor countries), by the rich (from rich countries) to the rich (from poor and rich countries) – and may the poor and common be damned. And one thing you can be absolutely, completely, definitely, positively, wholly sure of.

The poor will never, ever, at all, in any manner, benefit from climate control.

NGO to sue Lindsay over false claims

"Over 40 children saved so far... Within one day's work. This is what life is about... Doing this is a life worth living! Oh, and I'm talking about being in India," the Mean Girls star (Lindsay Lohan) had said on her Twitter page.

However, Bhuvan Ribhu, national secretary of the NGO says that the actress was not even present in the country when the rescue operation took place.

"The rescue operation took place on 8 December when she had not even arrived in India. Since she was not even in the country how can she claim she rescued the children," Ribhu told PTI.

"We were not involved with her as she was called by BBC although she visited one of our rehabilitation centres," Ribhu added. (via NGO to sue Lindsay over false claims).

Just how deep can this get?

There a been some 4 very curious 'incidents', originating in Britain and targetting India(ns).

The latest first. Lindsay Lohan comes to India - to fight child trafficking, in India. Why did BBC think that Lindsay Lohan was appropriate! Fighting her own demons of alcoholism, drugs, family conditions, was she even in position to make any contribution? On what basis did the BBC select this topic.

Importantly, did anyone in India ask for BBC or Lindsay Lohan's help in fighting child trafficking?

What about your own backyard

After all closer home to the BBC there are some really interesting topics.

For instance, the national industry of Spain is prostitution? Just where are all these women coming from? Just why does the Spanish society need so many prostitutes? BBC would do well to put Lindsay Lohan on this job.

Slice and dice ...

1. Now Spain has a population of 40 million people.


2. There are a 13 million of these between the age of 15-64 years.


3. Assume that half of these 13 million are the right gender - that is 6.5 million women.


4. Assume further that a quarter of these 6.5 million women cannot 'qualify' to become prostitutes due to age, health, infirmity, deformity, appearance, etc.


5. That leaves us with roughly 4 million 'eligible' candidates - of which 400,000, i.e. 10% of 'eligible' women are prostitutes.

Western propaganda

Spain is a part of the EU, the Developed World, the OECD, etc., etc. Makes one think ...

Coming to the UK, Amnesty International says,

Home Office research found that up to 1,420 women were trafficked into the UK for sexual exploitation in 1998. The figure was based solely on reported cases

Maybe BBC can help Amnesty and the UK Home Office to estimate the 'unreported' cases.

Nail 'em and jail 'em …

Even closer home, right in the UK is the rather disturbing statistic. Britain has imprisoned 10,000 Muslims as prisoners. Out of 670,000 British Muslim male population aged between 20-60 years of age

A survey estimates British-Muslim population at 2.4 million. Chop and slice the data and the picture gets scarier. This survey by The Times says "high number of Muslims (are) under the age of 4 — 301,000 as of September last year". The same study estimates that 942,000 of British Muslims are 19 years or below. Of the remaining another 124,000 are above 60 years of age. Half of the remaining 1.34 million (i.e. 2.4 million less 1.06 million) are women - an unlikely target for imprisonment. Of the remaining 670,000, a 10,000 are in prison – which means about 1.5% of the 'eligible' British Muslim population is in prison.

Aviation safety, for instance gives standard advice - 'save yourself first'. Then save others. And by this time, you folks should have known better. So, BBC and Lindsay Lohan have their hands full.

Oh!

And by the way! We pagan sinners cannot be saved.

The Maldives trojan

Britain executed a well planned maneuver, by putting up President Nasheed of Maldives against India, at the Copenhaen Climate Change talks. Propping up Maldives as ‘fifth’ column was done over the last more than 20 years. Based on excellent PR and media management skills, the Maldives was the British Trojan horse that India was blind-sided on.

Intelligent British media

In the last 10 years, as some jobs moved 'offshore' to India, there was fear about India(ns). Then came the hatchet jobs.

So much so, The Sun and the Channel 4 mounted elaborate sting operations on Indian call centres, carrots were dangled, Indian call centre employees were tempted - and when the penny dropped, there was gleeful celebrations about the lack of security in India. 'We told you so' was the popular, smug, self-satisfied refrain, with smirks in British media.

Not to overlook responsible British media, which clearly spelt out that

"fraud is a bigger problem in UK institutions, a fact largely overlooked by the media. It is also more likely to occur in any other developed market we choose to do business with." The same article went ahead and pointed out how "Accountants Ernst & Young found in a survey of Western corporate managers that almost two thirds expected to encounter more fraud in emerging markets than at home. Yet 75 per cent of fraud occurred in developed markets, the firm said. Forrester Research found in 2005 that the UK and US suffered more computer security breaches than India."

The ‘prequel’

Nearly 15 months ago, a Scottish newspaper, The Sunday Herald ‘revealed’ that an Indian hacker had broken into the credit card database and stolen some 8 million records. The supposed ‘victim’, Best Western Hotel immediately rejected this claim, and revealed that 10 (ten only) records had been stolen. If you check this story today, The Sunday Herald has (of course), removed the Best Western rebuttal of this story. How did the newspaper identify the nationality of the hacker? A journalist’s ‘secret’ sources!

So, it was evidently planted and created for the Indian media. The story was dated August 23rd, 2008, Saturday, and carried the next day, on a Sunday for maximum impact – and for the business press to pick up and run the story on Monday morning. The story was planted through IANS, a supposed ‘pro-Indian’ news agency. Did anyone come back and retract this story? Of course, not!

The Great Indian hacker hoax

In modern times, India is not a big player in spamming or in software virus – though a power in computing industry. In August 2008, a hoax story alleged that an Indian hacker, had broken into a credit card database, and sold it to the European underworld. Some ‘experts’ feared that this would spark of a crime wave across Europe.

The Incident

“A Sunday Herald investigation has discovered that late on Thursday night, a previously unknown Indian hacker successfully breached the IT defences of the Best Western Hotel group’s online booking system and sold details of how to access it through an underground network operated by the Russian mafia.” reported The Sunday Herald from Scotland.

The ‘venerable’ Scottish newspaper, went on to quote a security expert, Jacques Erasmus, an ex-hacker who now works for the computer security firm Prevx. Erasmus declared,

“The Russian gangs who specialise in this kind of work will have been exploiting the information from the moment it became available late on Thursday night. In the wrong hands, there’s enough data there to spark a major European crime wave.”

The Sunday Herald had no hesitation in saying that the

“nature of internet crime makes it extremely difficult to track the precise details of the raid, the Sunday Herald understands that a hacker from India – new to the world of cyber-crime – succeeded in bypassing the system’s security software.”

What got me wondering was the motivation of this story? How did this story land up in IANS agency? Where did the ‘original’ writer, Mons. Iain S Bruce, get to know that an Indian was behind this ‘heist.’ Who was behind this ‘leak’ to Bro.Iain S Bruce? What are the ‘sources’ of Shri Iain S Bruce?

Chickens ... home ... roost

A team of researchers including professors of University of Brighton published a report in July 2009 titled “Crime online — Cybercrime and illegal innovation”. It was picked up by online news channels and quoted in news items to propagate lies about so-called cybercrimes in the business process outsourcing (BPO) industry of India. The report tries to present data from the annual reports of the Indian Computer Emergency Team, and Symantec in a way that suits its story, of India being a centre of cybercrimes and in general being a weak state. (via Phishing study: Bunch of lies).

Plodders – all of you!

NASSCOM investigated this scam report -and wrote a few articles in India media.

I got bad news for you, Mr. Kamlesh Bajaj!

Nasscom, your team and maybe you should include yourself. Plodders! All! The report you quote came out in July – and you are responding to it it after 3 months. What more, if you had dug deeper, you would have come out with more – dirt, that is.

I am waiting.

In the meantime, I believe that this was a dry run.

Funding India NGOs

Statistics released by the home ministry regarding ‘foreign funds to NGOs’ show that India, which has a total of 33,937 registered associations, received Rs 12,289.63 crore in foreign contributions during 2006-07 as against Rs 7,877.57 crore in 2005-06, a substantial increase of nearly Rs 4,400 crore (56%) in just one year.

The US, Germany, the UK, Switzerland and Italy were the top five foreign contributors during 2006-07. These five countries have consistently been the big donors since 2004-05. Spain, the Netherlands, Belgium, Canada and France are the other countries which figure prominently in the list of foreign donors. (via Foreign funds to Indian NGOs soar, Pak among donors-India-The Times of India).

What does this mean …

Rs 12,289.63 crore is roughly US$3 billion – based on average dollar value for 2008.

And it is a lot of money.

That is more money than what the US Govt. gave as aid to more than the 100 poorest countries. Till a few years ago, India annual FDI was US$ 4 billion – just a little more than the US$3 billion that India received as charity through various NGOs in 2008.

The total US Official Development Assistance to the whole of sub-Saharan Africa (more than 40 countries), in 2007, was “US$4.5 billion was contributed bilaterally and an estimated $1.2 billion was contributed through multilateral organizations”.

What is the source of these funds …

The rich, the poor and the middle class in these ‘charitable countries’ are themselves deep in debt. Where are they getting the money from? Why are they being so liberal towards India? What is the source of these funds?

Where this money going …

Is it going as thinly disguised aid to Naxal affected areas – where some ‘Christian’ missionaries are working to ’save’ the tribals? Is it going towards publicity for causes which are thinly disguised trade issues. For instance, child labour - which is, in many cases, a system of apprenticeship for traditional skills.

Or are these NGOs promoting policy frameworks which are distorting India’s social systems? The Population Myth /Problem /Explosion for instance was promoted for the first decade by Ford Foundation, the Carnegie Foundation and USAID. Are they behind the NGOs which are promoting Section 498 laws as a legal solution – a solution that ‘benefits’ about 5000 women and creates about 150,000 women as victims.

These are laws and policies which are undermining the Indian family system. Which country in the world has a stable family structure with such low divorce rates as India?

The Clintons, The Gates, The Turners, et al

The ‘progressive liberal’ establishment in the West is viewed rather benignly in India – and seen as ‘well wishers’ of India. Many such ideas are welcomed in India without analysis. These ideas are viewed positively, as the source of such initiatives is seen as well-intentioned.

A ‘tolerant’ and ‘open’ society like India can be a complacent victim to trojan horses.