THE WICKED PSYCHOLOGY OF NEW DELHI AND ITS ECONOMIC RAMIFICATIONS

 

Every sovereign country in the world that can be represented by some complicated combination of the political systems between the two extremities of Autocracy and Democracy, derives its sovereignty from its population periodically. Hence, to retain their legitimacy, the respective governments go to a greater extent to protect their citizenry. In recent decades, Indian Union had successfully transformed itself into a dreadful political system that has effectively nullified the necessity for the transfer of sovereignty from its people through the institutionalization of pre-programmed electronic voting machines. Hence, being the only “Chipocracy” in the world, the Delhi regime has mutated into a hegemonic force by indulging itself obsessively in anti-citizen policies.

While reasonably serious people around the world are debating whether investments worth millions of dollars on jpeg files (in the name of Non-Fungible Tokens) are an aberration in the intelligence of a modern human being, there are Delhi bureaucrats who are bailing out Sri Lanka with billions of dollars every time Colombo faces bankruptcy on the pretext of those monetary assistances being strategic investments. The foreign minister of Sri Lanka visited New Delhi last month for discussions about the next line of credit intended for servicing the debts of the Sinhalese country which is indebted to the tune of 85 billion dollars to various governments and investors. To the mortification of the Indian Union, the Sinhalese government had arrogated to itself the authority to auction off the boats of Tamil Nadu fishermen when the Sinhalese foreign minister was negotiating with his counterpart in New Delhi. There was neither a political reaction nor a diplomatic censure from the union government of India. Followed by this ignominious diplomatic debacle, the finance minister of the Sinhala regime visited India last week to secure another one billion dollars as an additional line of credit. Effectively, New Delhi has provided more than three and a half billion dollars to Colombo in just three months. Given the financial credibility and creditworthiness of Sri Lanka, attempts to bail out Sri Lanka is neither a financially nor diplomatically sound decision.

To understand the motives behind such bizarre decisions by the union government of the subcontinent, the psychology of New Delhi has to be understood. Given the precarious state of India’s economy, these efforts to service the foreign debts of Sri Lanka would certainly hamper the subcontinent’s ability to reclaim the growth trajectory from which it had been knocked off for the past few years. Yet, New Delhi is continuously involved in such financial antics.

TAMILNADU IS THE ECONOMIC HEARTLAND OF THE SUBCONTINENT

The post-industrial revolution era of human civilization is marked by its distinct willingness to accommodate multifarious social cooperation aiming to maximize the efficiency of development and improve prosperity. The beginning of the current millennia saw one of the pivotal moments in modern history. The monetary integration of European states came into fruition in the form of the European Union. Europe is a region known for its fierce rivalry and blood-smeared premodern topography. The Europeans’ motivation to coalesce into a unified political unit was not capricious, but a long-term grand strategy to retain their relevance in the emergent global order. They were willing to pay the short-term costs in every stage of the political union’s developmental phase. Immediately after the beginning of the cold war, the western powers met in London to write off the external debts of Germany, a generous attempt to relieve it of the extra burden and devout its resources in rebuilding the European economy. Then towards the end of the cold war, during the German reunification, the West German government aspired to maintain high-interest rates to fund the regional development of erstwhile eastern Germany. Despite finding it unfavourable, other European states obliged, as they understood that only a strong Germany can retain the relevance of the European Union in the post-cold war era. Germany’s role in Europe is central, its infrastructure and human resource are irreplaceable elements of European economic development. Today, Germany and France together play a major role in framing the political and economic policies of the developed European Union.

Tamil Nadu is to Indian Union what Germany is to the European Union.

When the arch-rivals of Europe started initiating long-term cooperation in the aftermath of the second world war, the New Delhi regime started indoctrinating rivalry between states of the Indian Union and hampered holistic development in the subcontinent. The union government has maintained a sustained uncooperative attitude towards the development of specific states like Tamil Nadu, Maharashtra, and Andhra. It had accelerated the population decline in these developing states and simultaneously encouraged the population explosion in the peripheral Gangetic plain states. It has been incentivizing such asymmetric economic development in the country by transferring the wealth from developed southern states to underdeveloped peripheral states in the north, thereby discouraging them to develop any political consciousness other than the rapacity to exploit the travails of the Tamils, Marathas, Kannadigas, and Telugu populations that aspired development. Hence, as a result, after a few decades, the voting rights of the population became uneven with such an obvious gradient in the demographic distribution. The political opinion of informed voters in the developed states such as Tamil Nadu and Maharashtra had been forcibly rendered void due to the overwhelming weightage being added to the votes concentrated in the underdeveloped peripheral northern states of the subcontinent.

Imagine for a moment a European Union with debt-ridden peripheral countries like Greece, and Italy dictating the economic policies, or radicalized countries like Poland dictating the political policies. As laughable and as ridiculous it might be, a comparable scenario is the political reality of the Indian Union for the past seven decades. States that substantially outperform the Indian union’s mean performance in almost all socio-economic parameters are at the receiving end of the policies while the states that are ideally sitting at the lowest levels of the developmental ladder get to dictate policies and abuse the federal setup of the country.

A country’s welfare can be broadly inferred from three major parameters such as human development index, GDP growth, and currency strength. As it is widely Known, Tamil Nadu politics heavily revolves around the improvement of the social welfare of its population and is preoccupied with performance sometimes better than the Scandinavian countries, as in the case of the Gross enrolment ratio in higher education. The peripheral states situated in the Gangetic plains are contended with competing with their cohorts in sub-Saharan Africa in those human resource development indicators. Tamil Nadu, Maharashtra, and Karnataka contribute to more than 50% of the country’s exports and imports. The strong Tamil, Malayalee, and Telugu diaspora in many countries make up for almost 40% of the remittance inflows into the subcontinent, a crucial factor in maintaining the demand for India’s currency. These parameters indicate the unique position of Tamil Nadu and the Tamil population in the context of the subcontinent’s economic infrastructure.

DELHI HEGEMONY IS CONSTRAINING THE FISCAL SPACE OF THE COUNTRY

The union government had usurped the fiscal sovereignty of the states by introducing the GST regime. When other states lacked a serious understanding of the economic impediments of such a hegemonic law, the then Chief Minister of Tamil Nadu, Ms. Jayalalithaa had pertinently explicated its antifederal nature. Her prophetic words were:

 “Tamil Nadu is concerned about the impact the proposed GST will have on the fiscal autonomy of States and the huge permanent revenue loss it is likely to cause to a manufacturing and net exporting State like Tamil Nadu.

GST Council as a constitutional body impinges on the legislative sovereignty of both the Parliament and the State Legislatures and completely jeopardizes the autonomy of the States in fiscal matters. We strongly object to the provision for the GST Council”

Today, the finance minister of Tamil Nadu, Dr. Palanivel Thiagarajan has emerged as the primary political defender of the legacy of Tamil Nadu in its fight against this hegemonic law. His perspicacious inputs about the political chicaneries of the Delhi regime in depriving the participation of developed states in framing policies at the federal level are encouraging dialogues regarding the economic prospects of such political outcomes. Whenever developed states in the peninsular expanse of the subcontinent are affected by natural disasters, the union government had made it a habit of not releasing the appropriate funds to alleviate the sufferings of the affected state and its population. It was quite evident during the devastating cyclonic storms and monsoonal floods in Tamil Nadu and Kerala. Even during the peak of the Corona outbreak, the requests from the Chief Ministers of Tamil Nadu and Maharashtra to release the pending GST compensation went unheeded in New Delhi. Recently, the finance minister of Tamil Nadu had said that the state government is unable to implement policy measures and carry out its democratic obligations due to the recalcitrant attitude of the Governor appointed by Delhi. On the contrary, the Sinhalese finance minister is easily able to extract billions of dollars worth of monetary assistance from Delhi.

The perpetual prioritization of the underdeveloped, debt-ridden, hyper-nationalistic, and anti-Indian Sinhalese government, while being uncooperative with Tamil Nadu, the most urbanized, educated, and industrialized state having one of the lowest Gini coefficients in the country, and other such developed states like Maharashtra, Telangana, and Andhra is heralding the onset of the countrywide long-term socio-economic disaster. Sri Lanka has made its anti-India posture obvious several times in the past. Considering this political dimension along with India’s financial and economic disconnection from the Sinhalese regime, New Delhi’s appetite to bail out Colombo lacks any rational premise. Germany bailed out Greece during its debt crisis because the major lenders to the Greek government were the German banks. Germany has a thriving economy and powerful banking system to withstand such black swan sort of financial events. India, on the other hand, has a fragile economy with a debt to GDP ratio well above 85%.

Motivated by its strong Tamilphobia, New Delhi is desperately trying to prevent a meaningful involvement of IMF in Sri Lanka through such financial interventions. Shortly these attempts could contribute to the worsening of India’s debt crisis.

For context, in the backdrop of the Russian Invasion, the United States of America had released monetary assistance to Ukraine only after obtaining approval from Congress, an attribute of a democratically federal polity. Currently, the foreign policies of the Indian Union and monetary assistance to foreign countries are exclusively decided by an incompetent group of bureaucrats with no involvement from concerned state governments. This situation has been completely counterproductive to the subcontinent. Indian Union’s stature on the global stage can be improved only if the competent states make political choices on such external issues.

SUPERIORITY OF TAMIL STATESMANSHIP

One might wonder whether the development of Tamil society is the effect of it being a part of the centralized regime in Delhi or a result of an autonomous potential manifesting irrespective of the country to which it belongs. Singapore is a tiny country lacking any geographic or demographic advantage. But today it is one of the highly developed and wealthiest countries in the world wielding enormous financial power in its neighbourhood. Its successful survival in a hostile geopolitical environment at the peak of the cold war tension was made possible due to the political adroitness of the legendary Tamil statesman Rajaratnam.

Being one of the founding fathers of Singapore, Rajaratnam was instrumental in creating the diplomatic foundations of the country that was immensely successful in bringing the country out of its political uncertainties and taking it on the glorious path of exponential economic growth. The most prominent example of the mastery of his diplomacy was the amalgamation of fragmented Southeast Asian countries into a strong economic force under the umbrella of the ASEAN grouping.

This ambitious project of his became the scaffolding of the contemporary economic order of the southeast Asian region. Singapore along with other southeast Asian countries has been the epicentre of the economic growth model of the liberal world since the turn of this century. His prescient assessment of the capabilities and innate nature of the Sri Lankan state while rejecting its application to join the ASEAN group has proven time and again to be true. The current economic crisis of Sri Lanka is one such proof of his political ingenuity. The triumph of Singapore is a major testament to the intrinsic qualities of Tamils in achieving political and economic development, without any exploitation of coexisting societies, and also independent of the countries to which they belong. If such a tiny island county can benefit from a few million Tamil populations, the Indian Union with tens of millions of Tamils could drastically benefit from Tamil Statesmanship and could avoid embarrassing extortions from radical countries like Sri Lanka.

STATES  OF THE INDIAN UNION SHOULD STRIVE COLLECTIVELY FOR COMPLETE FISCAL AUTONOMY AND DICTATE CONCERNED FOREIGN POLICIES

The apparent disparity in the degrees of development between the states of the subcontinent has always been politically arbitraged by a particular cartel in New Delhi to their advantage. The states in the Gangetic plains must understand that reality and the unreliability of the Union Government. The divergence of development in the subcontinent will always be used by the Delhi cartel irrespective of its trend in the south and north. In the coming decades, if the southern states reach saturation of development while the northern states simultaneously gain momentum in development, the union government will usurp their state capacities to quell the pace of progress and thereby impose the same constraints that are being currently thrust on the southern developed states.  A Union government with hegemonic fiscal powers would always try to unbalance the pace of development between the states and arbitrage such differences for exploiting its citizens. The relief from the travesty of this vicious cycle lies in the cooperative approach between all the states in their quest to achieve complete fiscal autonomy from the Delhi regime and attain veto powers in crucial foreign policies. Lacking such initiatives would result in the enhancement of the rifts between the societies. A political system having such destructive political interferences between its primary components will resonate with external forces. To avoid such resonations leading to a radical change in the status quo of South Asian politics, the disproportionate concentration of political power and capital in New Delhi has to be decentralized by intensifying the federal attributes of the Indian Union.

Tamil Nadu is to Indian Union what Germany is to the European Union.

இந்த கதையை தமிழ்நாட்டில் உள்ளவங்களுக்கு சொன்னால் நம்ப மாட்டார்கள் அவர்களின் பலம் அவர்களுக்கே தெரியாதபடி திராவிட மாயை பரவி உள்ளது .