Clinton India China Human Rights

Hillary Clinton’s recent visit to India saw her make an appeal for India to be more assertive in world affairs. She wants emerging India to have a foreign policy to match it’s vastly increased economic clout.

An instinctive reaction to this is to accuse the US of wanting a counter-balance to China. The US State Department is losing sleep over China’s rather intimidating growth and will warmly welcome any ally to stem it’s charge.

But is it a given that India will take a China negative stance? Despite the two country’s rocky history could India and China form an informal alliance against Western powers that still regard their military and economic dominance as a birth right?

I certainly feel that for India to tow the American line is no done deal. Indeed India may loosely join ranks with the Red menace. Disrespecting Clinton’s strong desire for India to go aggressively hard on countries that perpetuate human rights violations.

India can see Clinton’s wish is ridiculous. Both the US and India hold no true shining torch aloft for the rights of man. One a serial occupier of Muslim States where they habitually interrogate and torture suspects and India who in Kashmir and the North East are equally hospitable.

Sceptics would propose that this American preoccupation with human rights is because this moral high stand is used as a bargaining chip in international trade rather than any warm Christian spirit. I don’t know if it’s that contrived but certainly walking up to this lofty pulpit is terribly bad for business.

China is Africa’s leading trading partner. They conducted 120 billion dollars of trade with the oil rich continent last year. This was achieved in a handful of years without giving a moment’s pause to reflect on the niceties of dealing with militias that machete children and electrify peasant’s genitals. In fact that has been China’s huge advantage. Supplying raping and pillaging Sudanese fighters with anti aircraft guns pays off a million fold when oil exploration rights are awarded.

Obama said India is not emerging it has a risen, and in this new paradigm it is energy starved. If an already energy famished India is to have an even vague future semblance of the Western consumption of hatchbacks and stainless steel fridges this famine will become far more acute. India will have to become markedly more aggressive and take a page from China’s musket and blanket diplomacy.

India will have to flatly ignore American histrionic pleas for her not to trade with badly behaved States. This will be far easier to execute if India and China form a disobedient cooperative. Countries that refuse to interfere in other States human rights affairs and certainly a refusal to be assessed by other States. A sulking and anti-social, non-alliance movement.

Could this eventuate? Rather than India indulging the West by pointing a finger at China’s appalling human rights record I think they could, for a time at least, pretend to have a relationship of convenience with China. These countries could enjoy sharing the commonality of furiously wanting to reclaim their destiny, at what ever cost, no matter how dear.

For in the vast scale of history it is really only late yesterday evening that Western powers have become born again greenies and well dressed social workers. Much like the condemned murderer who, out of sheer terror, on the eve of his execution finds Jesus.

Australia, lately plagued by bribery cases and animal rights atrocities(My Hindu wife nearly passed out), is a classic example. They are struggling to be competitive in a world that has increasingly powerful players who don’t give a waterboarding about any rights abuse, or environmental agenda, in any form.

Australia’s competitively expensive and embarrassingly incompetent attempt to join New Zealand in some form of emissions trading scheme and it’s precursor the carbon tax is bewildering for a country that survives almost exclusively by embracing it’s carbon footprint. Expecting Asian countries, deprived of a hundred years of industrial progress, to follow the piper is a bedtime story. It is as futile as an Australian tourist visiting a Hong Kong gambling den and ill advisedly insisting that all the punters immediately stop smoking because you’d get a fine in St Kilda.

Another great example has recently presented itself. The Securency scandal has thrown several executives into a terminal state for allegedly bribing wonderfully colourful Colonels of shady intelligence agencies in every backwater of the world. India and China would see that as standard operating procedure, hardly worth the effort of a memo.

In Australia it is corporate armageddon and voluminous fill for newspaper broad sheets. This compels these companies to awkwardly compete in an international business environment that does not play by the Queen’s rules. Fighting bare knuckled Thai kick boxers with a pair of woollen mittens knitted by Mommy.

India needs to take full advantage of this handicap. She must enter countries that make Bihar look like Sussex. Build oil rigs on fields that no sane man would even spit on. Dam rivers with political prisoner labour, wipe out cute endangered otters and flood areas the size of the Waikato. Much like the Western hemisphere has done for hundreds of years. Allowing them to lord it over nations much lower down the food chain.

Clinton had better pray India does not find this inner shark. Ambitious India is not the Ganga Din they know and love.

Ghulam Azad's Comments Against Homosexuals

Ghulam Nabi Azad’s startling statements about Indian homosexuals exposes not only an idiot but more importantly the cancerous chamcha culture that grips the Congress.

I met Azad many years ago at a function hosted by Sonia Gandhi, who had then not even hinted at her ambitions. Azad was pompous to the point of absurdity but when Mrs. Gandhi entered our midst I have never seen such a change in posture. He went from being the sultan of greater India to a groveling buffoon. He nearly head butted the floor with his whimpering bow and I’m sure if I had looked his knuckles would have been bright purple from the force he pushed together his namaskar. It was not dissimilar to someone on the brink of starvation begging at an intersection. When Mrs. Gandhi left our circle his fellow Ministers laughed their heads off and told him he was a chumcha, admittedly an excellent one.

When you are assessed for your ability to kiss royal posteriors and possession of obscure vote banks you will always get an Azad. Individuals who are so removed from reality that you have to purchase tickets to their world to have a conversation.

His statements that homosexuals were hard to administrate because unlike prostitutes they didn’t congregate in readily recognizable areas is sensationally bananas.

Azad, not yet even remotely discouraged, then generously bestowed another profound pearl of wisdom. Homosexuality was not only unnatural but that homosexuality was brought to India by foreigners.

Bring out the men in white coats with two straight jackets. One for Azad and one for Mrs. Gandhi.

Investing any responsibility in this incompetent (that involves anything more complicated than the demands of a rickshaw puller) is equally mad. Mrs. Gandhi’s constant five cents that the windows to Government need to be cleaned and MP’s held accountable is now a further heavily devalued currency. The window has not been cleaned as so much as it has been smashed and we have had an unsettling peek at her bathroom cabinet. Cabinet ministers that could not run a brothel.

If Azad had had the intelligence to remember mid sentence that his Empress was an erstwhile foreigner he would have died from a major cardiac event. That he didn’t is very unfortunate because he continues to administer the mortally important health portfolio, that he clearly does not, without a pinch of ambiguity, have the marbles for.

This fact is cold steel solid when you consider where the statements were made. In an HIV conference. The equivalent of rocking up to a Holocaust memorial in a Volkswagen or asking for a jumbo box of condoms at the Vatican gift shop.

Many of my dearest friends are Indian homosexuals. I am very proud to call them friends. For six years I lived next to a Delhi Hijira colony full of characters. Their sexuality is only a part of their identity. Though I will indulge in some bigotry.

My stereotype of an Indian homosexual is quite prejudiced in that I believe they are almost without exception above average citizens. High achievers in business and the corporate world with their strong sense of civil behaviour. I also believe in my prejudice that they have a predisposition for getting the job done right.

To alienate this community that could be at least 50 million Indians is not the brightest move. Twice the population of Australia could be natural dancers and know their flared jeans from their skinny jeans.

A phenomena I have witnessed is that a considerable amount of Indian students studying in Australia have come out of the almirah. It is of course much easier to do here rather than Rajouri Garden.

A gay friend very bravely went back to North Delhi, a bastian of conservatism, and shaking like a leaf told his parents he was batting for the other team. His Father’s reaction would have been less violent if he had told him he was batting for Pakistan.

Indians will forgive you for being gay but they will never forgive you for not procreating. His Father’s response?(After having a stiff peg and a lay down) “Beta, you have to stop being naughty and get serious”, as his Mother handed him some homeopathic medicine and told him about some girls she had lined up.

Azad’s jurassic attitudes help reinforce these impractical ideas. The Congress leadership needs to purge itself of unqualified dinosaurs living in fractured realities. Ministers who hold position for their chumcha skills not any administrative flair.

Indian gays need to be recognised in a society that badly needs them. They need to be embraced by competent members of the State and welcomed to share the exciting burden of lifting India higher and yet higher.