[paulerdos]

The article is pretty much confused drivel with no clear substantiating data. My observations are that India is unable to control the growing fundamentalist Islamic element within its population. Recent riots and pogroms against native North-Eastern Indians (they have a significant East Asian component to their appearance) by Islamic groups is a clear marker of rapidly increasing instability. India as a state is one of those mixed stable-chaos types that is teetering on the brink of disaster. A mafia driven monarchy (Antonina Malno aka Sonia Gandhi) has effectively injected massive corruption into India's state bureaucracy and destroyed the improvements/gains made in the 1990s by civil society types. It is a mess. I would not invest any hope in India unless there's some massive change in their politics.

[intended]

Huh?

While you do use words that are technically correct they stand on the far edge of understanding or reflecting the underlying ground realities.

First your take on the Recent riot and pogroms in NE/Manipur/Assam and the rest of the seven sisters seems to indicate that Islamic fundamentalists are the chief culprits.

Yes it is Islamic adherents who are involved. But their presence is not because of religion but because they are illegal refugees/immigrants from Bangladesh who are encroaching and settling in the traditional lands of the indigenous tribes and Indians who live in those areas.

But this is a situation that has been building up for years, and has at its core a socio-economic cause and the religious coherence of the encroachers is a secondary thing.

I could go on about how the Mumbai riots and later the exodus but that is a separate point.

Secondly - Saying that Sonia Gandhi "has effectively injected massive corruption in India's state bureaucracy" is to take the latest head of state and blame her for the creation of a beast that reared its head first in the time of Indira Gandhi in the 1960s (License Raj)

Saying that it is a mafia driven monarchy further simplifies the situation and ignores the effects of the many corrupt parties and their respective leaders in the coalition government.

If anything India was MORE corrupt in the 1990s just prior to the reforms and a short while after.

It was only with the dismantling of power centers and places for the corrupt to seek rents that a lot of the old guard found themselves shunted out.

If anything I would hold Sonia and Congress responsible for being gutless and focusing on consolidating their power base.

But most of all I would single out the swing coalition partners from Bengal above all.

The Communist party that supported the Govt in the first few years constantly and consistently stymied each and every forward thinking disinvestment and reform oriented bill.

Then came Mamta Bannerjee and her equally if not more anachronistic ideas. IIRC she managed to get rid of the TATA Nano plant which would have created large amounts of employment in her home state. Creating a text book lose-lose situation.

I hold these people far more accountable as they crushed a huge amount of political capital and mired the country down into survival and further casteist politics.