Notes from India (11) - Jerry Rao on upcoming India elections and creeping wokeism in India educational institutions.

I have excerpted Mumbai based Indian businessman and political commentator Jerry Rao's recent pithy and insightful comments on India from a political email forum and incorporated them into my Daily Blog (Notes from India #11). Though I returned from three weeks in India on 17 April 2024, Jerry writes from India, giving my claim of " [SDT] notes from India" quasi legitimacy! SDT

Bad American ideas soon conquer the world. The Congress Party in India (roughly analogous to the Democrats in the US) has talked about giving minorities special attention in education, for scholarships, for jobs and for government contracts. And this is in a country where we already have caste quotas for disadvantaged castes. Muslims are according to this argument below national averages in achievements and that is the fault of the country. No mention that Christians, Sikhs, Zoroastrians, Jains and Jews all perform above national averages. No mention of the fact the social traditions within the Muslim community like early marriage, higher than average fertility rates, discouraging girls education, neglect of English etc. may even remotely be causal factors. Muslims are classified as being “oppressed” and that is sufficient reason to give them “the first right to the nation’s resources”, according to Congress leaders.
Apart from bad imported ideas from America, the Congress Party has bad ideas of its own. The Congress is talking about a national financial survey where they will X-ray households and will re-allocate resources to the poorer sections. Their opponents have raised the question as to whether such an X-ray would involve tracking down gold ornaments that Indian women keep hidden in innocuous kitchen utensils and whether the ornaments that women wear will be taken away. After wasted decades of 90 plus percent marginal tax rates, high “wealth tax”, 80 percent estate duty, “super-profits taxes” on businesses, India in the last few decades is slowly but surely getting prosperous. Clearly the Congress Party wishes to return the country to destitution. If Congress wins, I may turn up in Utah. Watch out!! Jerry Rao, 30 April 2024.


Jerry, you, of course, would be welcome here in Utah. I didn't need to spend the last three weeks in India to know that Modi has a 75% approval rating and BJP looks like a shoo-in following next month's national elections. But, even if you don't have to move to Utah, pay us periodic visits! Still, are you not worried about Modi/BJP rising authoritarianism? It seems that growing authoritarianism (Xi, MBS, Erdogan, Putin and trending Modi) is crowding out democracy for most people in today's world. Steve Taylor 30 April 2024

Steve: it is interesting that you hold that view.

People like me feel that Modi has not been strong enough. He has withdrawn many needed reforms because of pressure from vested interests. You could call that as democracy in working or as appeasement.

Modi continues to preside over a raucous, quasi-anarchic, noisy polity.

The Leftist opposition has allied with the BBC, NYT, NPR, WAPO, Le Monde to portray Modi as dictatorial. It is a false position.

Modi’s government has lost several cases in the Supreme Court. Large sections of the English, Hindi, Tamil, Bengali, Marathi, Kannada media are bitterly anti-Modi. Modi’s party has lost elections in several large states. To me all that does not appear authoritarian at all. Modi is disliked by the globalist elite because he is not fluent in English, he is from a lower caste, he did not go to an elite university, and he is not ashamed of being a Hindu. He combines an open love for our traditional culture with a love for modern technology and markets (although, not sufficiently, in my opinion). The older English-speaking Oxbridge-oriented elite do not like him, and their leftist friends abroad cheer them on. Jerry Rao, 30 April 2024

PS Incidentally, I don’t think he is a shoo-in. India has a parliamentary system, multiple states and constituencies where first-past-the-post prevails. His national approval ratings may not be sufficient to get past the system which has been constructed this way.

India’s well-known IITs (Institutes of Technology) are under great pressure to go woke. The previous Director of IIT Bombay (where I teach) told me that most of the pressure comes from students and faculty of the Social Sciences Department. The Electrical Engineering and the Metallurgy Departments are too busy in their labs to worry about wokeness! A new private university Ashoka, of which I was one of the early funders of (my name is still on their website) has created gender-neutral toilets. I believe this was at the urging of an Indian faculty member who has a PhD from Yale. I am now hesitant to recommend to my friends as to whether they should have their daughters apply to Ashoka. The US is important and powerful. I have been arguing in my columns that we should learn good things from the US, not their weaknesses (we have taken the silliest IRS rules and incorporated them in our tax code). But unfortunately, fashion seems to prevail.
Jerry Rao 01 May 2024