The election of a new government in Pakistan and the recent visit of newly elected Chinese prime minister Li Keqiang to India — the first country he has visited since his appointment — offers the scams-tainted Congress-led UPA-II government an opportunity to redeem itself in its last year in office, by resolving India’s long-pending territorial disputes with Pakistan and China.

Although it’s painful to admit, our geographical neighbours have arguable cases. It’s undeniable that following the first Indo-Pak war of 1948 in Kashmir, perhaps rashly, promises were made to the people of the valley and the international community guaranteeing maximum autonomy and special status to Kashmir, and a plebiscite to ascertain the wishes of the people about the state’s political future. But over the past six decades, this promise has been substantially diluted with the state of Jammu and Kashmir becoming “an integral part of India”. True, the precondition of the plebiscite is restoration of the status quo ante at the time of accession of Kashmir to the Indian Union and vacation of PoK (Pakistan occupied Kashmir) by Pak troops. But this is a legal quibble. A plebiscite can be conducted in Kashmir by the United Nations with Indo-Pak cooperation. An independent Kashmir — the likely outcome — jointly guaranteed by India, Pakistan and the United Nations, will become acceptable to the people of the two countries.

Likewise, it’s foolish and self-injurious to deny that the People’s Republic of China (PRC) has an arguable case in the Sino-India border dispute. It’s common knowledge that during the 18th and 19th centuries right up to the end of the Second World War, the British imposed arbitrary national boundaries upon the under-developed nations of Asia and Africa. There is some truth in the Chinese assertion that in 1914 when China was in “an enfeebled condition” the British India administration signed an “unequal treaty” with representatives of Tibet over which China enjoyed suzerainty during the entire Qing dynasty (1644-1912), demarcating the India-Tibet boundary. Even so China’s representatives of the time refused to accept the locus standi of the Tibet representatives and declined to sign the treaty (though they initialed it) and agree to the McMahon line as the boundary between India and Tibet, whose status as a province of China was conceded by India in 1950. In the circumstances, to dismiss PRC’s claims in the north-east as being baseless is less than honest.

In true imperial fashion, the McMahon line was drawn right across the foothills of the Himalayas to Aksai Chin in the north-west where it’s also disputed by China. After the Sino-Indian armed conflict of 1962, suggestions were reportedly made by China that it might settle for territorial concessions in Aksai Chin in return for respecting the McMahon line in the north-east. This suggestion offers a platform for new negotiations to settle the border dispute once and for all time. True there are strategic defence concerns in the north-west, but even if the price is steep it needs to be paid in the interests of the world’s largest child population in India which is cruelly deprived of basic nutrition, education and healthcare because of unaffordable defence expenditure. 

Mandate for politics as usual in Karnataka

The return of the Congress party to power in the southern state of Karnataka (pop. 61 million) with a near absolute majority in the legislative assembly election of May 5 represents the triumph of hope over experience. In the 65 years since independence, the Congress party has ruled in Karnataka for well over half a century and is overwhelmingly responsible for the state’s slide into a malodorous pool of open, uninterrupted and continuous corruption and near anarchy.

Ably administered and developed by the relatively enlightened Wodeyar princely family under the advice of distinguished technocrats and administrators such as Sir M. Visvesvaraya and Shafi Darashah, right up to the 1970s, Karnataka was commonly acknowledged as India’s most well administered state with clean governance and a prosperous peasantry. Bangalore, its capital, was the country’s cleanest, greenest and most well-governed state capital defined by good roads, excellent education institutions, reliable bus service, national connectivity and its numerous great parks and lakes.

The gradual transformation of Bangalore (and Karnataka) from garden into garbage city began in the early 1970s after Mrs. Indira Gandhi split the Congress party, nationalised the banking system, expanded the public sector and ushered in an era of neta-babu (politician-bureaucrat) socialism in India. Simultaneously, Mrs. Gandhi and her handpicked chief ministers in the states began practicing caste-based and minority politics — buying off historically neglected and gullible scheduled castes and tribes as also OBCs (other backward castes) and Muslims with meagre subsidies and handouts — for electoral support. In Karnataka, the art of playing caste-based politics in which regressive caste combinations are engineered for electoral success was perfected by the late Devaraj Urs who ruled the state as Congress chief minister for eight years from 1972-1980.

Since then, caste — rather than ideas or ideologies — based politics has dominated the public discourse in Karnataka which has transformed into a seething cauldron of caste antagonisms. With political formations which win hardly 25-30 percent of the popular vote elected to power in the state, the first priority of political parties is to infiltrate their supporters into government where they are given free rein to exploit the other 75 percent of the population. This sordid corruption has driven up the cost of doing business and has adversely affected investment and employment.

The first initiative of the new chief minister, K. Siddaramaiah — who boasts of having presented seven state budgets as finance minister representing various political parties — has been to announce a massive additional subsidy of Rs.4,400 crore to provide 30 kg of rice at Rs.1 per kg monthly to an estimated 14 million EWS (economically weaker sections) households. This in a state in which the education and health systems — which would enable citizens to learn to help themselves — are in urgent and desperate need of reform and investment. All indications are that for the foolishly optimistic public of the state, it will be politics as usual.