Open Thread – 11/19/2021 – Brown Pundits

If this is the way Sikhs and Kashmiris behave, I don’t think Hindus are doing themselves a favor by insisting on keeping everyone in the Indian union.

I would say just carve out Hindu areas from Punjab and Kashmir and give the rest of it freedom. Kick out all Sikhs from other parts of India to their Khalistan and kick out all Kashmiri Muslims (and Rana Ayyub types) to independent Kashmir. Lets do a full population exchange. No half hearted measures this time like in 1947.

I dare say an independent Khalistan would not produce rice and do stubble burning since there would be no one in the international markets who wants to buy their pesticide laden produce.

That will save us from spending so much of our energy on these stupid fights and allow us to spend it on what really matters. Economic upliftment of rest of India cannot happen if we keep fighting medieval minded lunatics.

The other way is the China way. Keep the minority trouble makers under the heel instead of mollycoddling them. There should be an immense cost to being anti-India and anti-Hindu in India. I don’t think Hindus and India are strong enough for this though. This is beyond our ability.

I didn’t think I would ever say it. But I agree a lot with Ugra.

Lira keeps falling. Erdogan has two more years to go.

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Kanpur Metro to be operational by next month. If dumps like Agra and Kanpur can pull it off, I am sure every Indian city can.

~35 maybe even 40 Indian cities will have metro by the end of the decade. 35 systems in <15 years, that's progress.

https://www.reddit.com/r/IndiaSpeaks/comments/r05uik/jat_governor_satya_pal_malik_boasts_that_if_modi/

Like I have said. This is a caste revolt. Corrupt people are now openly bragging about possible treason. Fuck Modi. He let these bastards win. He has no resolve. Shutting down roads like this for so long isn’t protest. It is economic terrorism. Stubble burning, the plurality contributor to the smog, is ecoterrosim. He refuses to stand up to the evil leaders of these protests. Tikait should be jailed.

https://theprint.in/india/assam-groups-ready-to-resume-anti-caa-protests-next-month-after-modi-govt-u-turn-on-farm-laws/770675/

Assam groups ready to resume anti-CAA protests next month, after Modi govt U-turn on farm laws

India has a huge divergence between the number of people represented by an MP in North vs South.

There is going to be a delimitation in 2026 (Modi is building a new parliament for it too).

https://twitter.com/indiainpixels/status/1463109373148819466
https://twitter.com/indiainpixels/status/1463109385182318594

South Indians (especially Tamils) are absolutely losing their minds over it.

**For e.g.:** there are 39 seats for Tamil Nadu in Parliament and 80 seats for UP. If the delimitation is done proportionate to the population percentage, the numbers of MPs in TN will rise to 49(from 39), in UP will rise to 143(from 80), in Bihar will rise to 79(from 40) and in West Bengal will rise to 60(from 42).

I don’t think Modi has the balls to do it but even if half of it happens, South will become completely irrelevant in electing the Prime Minister of the country.

NPR accuses Mamta Banerjee of soft Hindutva. Lol

https://www.npr.org/2021/11/15/1049523021/mamata-banerjee-modi-india-politics

Astonishing how many Hindtards infest this site. Modi passed the bills as an economic reform measure. It was no reform at all but a sell-out of farm interests to his corporate cronies. When farmers organized themselves to protest they were showered with filthy communal abuse – typical of the Hindu right wing. The BJP communalized the protest. When the PM was forced to backtrack by circumstances his Hindutva fans, overcome with the vicious communal poison that infests their veins resorted to demands for another partition of the country. Such was the way of the Hindu Mahasabha in the 1930s that led to partition.
I have appended below a common sense view of the so called farm reform bills for those who want to learn the truth of the so called reform laws.
The Farm Laws and Farmer Protest.
All you need to know; what the journalists do not know and cannot tell.

Farming is a tedious business, and for urban folk an incomprehensible bucolic occupation they only know from their airconditioned cars, as they whiz along on the National Highways, or through the darkened windows of an airconditioned train. Many people understand vaguely that what appears on the dinner table has something to do with the toiling farmer, but they have as much knowledge of the process that leads to food on their plates as they do of the workings of the microchip in their smart phone – and as much interest. This is true of journalists as well, especially those who cannot stop telling us why the farm laws are such a good thing.
Are the farm laws good for the farmer? Emphatically, no! Are they good for the economy? No! So, why are there these continuing justifications that defy reality, history and economic theory, all at the same time? Sadly, if they do not spring from ignorance, misunderstanding or plain prejudice, it is (as in the case of the financial media) simply a vested or myopic self-interest that obscures the truth of the farmer’s case.
This piece is not about the constitutional issue. The constitutional illegality is self-evident, even though the Supreme Court has delayed pronouncing on it. Rather, the arguments below are about the badness of the laws – their innate inequity at best, and, at worst, their damnable malintent.
We need only a smattering of history and economics to understand why the laws are bad – the history first, and we won’t go back to feudal times or the British exploitation of plantation labour to grow Indigo in Bihar, or R C Dutt’s first protest on that inequity. We begin with modern times, and with the State of undivided pre-partition Punjab, which includes Haryana. It is this area that is leading the current unrest. We shall try to outline the problem first, and then see if the so called reform laws are a solution, or even a reform.
At the beginning of the 20th century the Punjab government realized that farmers, (and from whose ranks the bulk of the Indian army was drawn, were severely distressed because grain traders who were also moneylenders, were gradually taking possession of land in repayment of debt. The government realized that serious reform to protect the farmer was needed and in a series of orders spearheaded by Malcolm Darling of the ICS took steps to ensure that farmers did not lose their land to urban traders and money lenders. This gave birth to the Unionist Party which ran a secular movement for the protection of rural interests cutting across religious boundaries. The Alienation of Land Act stopped further transfer of their lands from indebted farmers to money lending traders.
While the agriculturist’s lands were saved from the money lender his exploitation on prices continued. Indebtedness continued to mount because collusive purchase by traders ensured that prices remained low or at bare subsistence level. In 1938 Sir Chhotu Ram the eminent Jat leader from Rohtak was Agriculture Minister in Punjab’s Unionist government. To him lies the credit for creating regulated agricultural mandis or markets which ensured that the trader was not able to exploit the farmer. All grain had to be sold in the mandi, with strict conditions governing the sale.. Earlier grain was purchased cheaply on various specious grounds, direct from the farmer. Now with the mandi system legally enforced, collusive purchase as well as underpricing on account of quality was much reduced. The mandi system made it difficult, even without mandatory minimum support prices for the trader to exploit the grain producer
Let us remember that these were times of grain scarcity. Demand was not lacking at a time when the country barely managed to feed a population of less than 400 million. Chronic malnourishment in rural areas was the norm and starvation deaths frequent. Yet farmers did not grow rich, nor rural society become prosperous. In fact, as we know, the situation deteriorated after independence when grain production could not cope with demand and Public Law 480 enacted by the US government kept India fed, ship to mouth. Those who lived through the famine stricken 60s, especially the great Bihar famine of 1964 will know what I am talking about. The private sector, by which is meant then, private traders, hoarded grain and profited hugely. The Hoarding and Profiteering Act was brought in specifically to unearth stocks of grain hoarded by traders for scalping the poor at a time of great scarcity. This is natural, need I say it, how markets always behave, even now for any commodity.
India was saved by the green revolution which came with the high yielding Mexican wheat varieties of Dr. Norman Borlaug and the high yielding rice from the International Rice Research Institute. Production began to rise because farmers, especially in Punjab and Haryana and west UP began to invest in tubewells, tractors, fertilizer and pesticides. A system of procurement prices was introduced. The regulated mandis ensured that all the grain was purchased at the support price. Traders could not exploit the grain producer because government was a ready buyer, even when production was surplus to need, initially to build up buffer stocks, and for price support. This led to higher farm incomes and eventually to over production of grain in Haryana and Punjab.
Over production of wheat however is not so much of an issue if the Government refrains from periodic bans on wheat export. The problem facing Union Government and the country is over production when it has to be bought and stocked. Current inventories of grain are in the region of 70 million tonnes. That is massive indeed with a humungous holding cost. 70 million tonnes is roughly what India produced annually in the mid-sixties. How do the farm laws solve the problem of over production? They do not, and cannot.
The next question is whether the farm laws reform anything. Reform implies improvement. The regulated mandi is a market. How is abolishing the kind of market that has helped farmers be good for them? This requires us to look closely at the economic arguments which are purported to support the Union government.
The economic reform argument rests on the old liberal principle that free markets must be allowed to operate without government interference. Added to this is the neo classical economic argument that perfect competition between infinite numbers of buyers and sellers establishes a correct market price. It was the liberal principle of free markets that forced Prime Minister Robert Peele in mid-nineteenth century Britain to repeal the corn laws which banned grain imports when a famine was raging in Ireland because of potato blight. Though it was a Conservative government Peele had to resort to Whig liberal support to ram through the repeal. So, can we suppose that this socially conservative BJP government has had some sort of liberal epiphany – to help the farmer in India’s case? No, not at all!
The Government has never been in favour of free international trade in agricultural commodities. It regularly bans export of cotton to favour mill owners, and wheat to favour urban consumers.
Markets are hardly ever completely free, and they are never perfect. The neo classical argument collapsed after the 1930s onwards when some brilliant economists at Cambridge University led by Joan Robinson demonstrated that markets were never free and competition usually imperfect. This meant that prices were not arrived through the market mechanism of supply and demand but through price fixation by underhand collaboration of buyers. We all know about monopolies, but thanks to Joan Robinson terms like monopsony and oligopsony entered economic parlance. These describe situations where markets fail to perform because buyers collude, or there are too few of them, oligopsony, or even only one, monopsony.
If there are just a few buyers, or only one, sellers must accept whatever price is offered. This is precisely the situation that the farm laws seek to bring about. They will leave the farmer at the mercy of the buyer. Government as monopsonist is acceptable to farmers. But when government stops buying, private oligosonic cartels will dictate the price – take it or leave it. This is the nub of the farmers argument and the reason why farmers are so agitated. It is just nonsense to say that the new laws will benefit farmers. Nothing could be worse for them.

Economists who support the farm laws have either forgotten the elementary principles of their discipline or are being wilfully obtuse. In a situation of scarcity private buyers would have been expected to pay high prices, but they do not, as we know from the experience of undivided Punjab before Sir Chhotu Ram’s reforms in 1938. If the lessons of history are not enough, we have the experience of our own times. If farmers were not safe from underhand deals of traders even during times of scarcity how safe are they when production is massively surplus.
Potatoes were going for 75 paise per kilo at the farm gate when consumers paid twenty times the amount to the sabziwala. Onions and tomatoes are regularly left to rot because the private trade would rather pursue high profits than fair practice. Sugar cane growers go unpaid for years for up to two years as the sugar barons grow fat on the interest of sums due to the farmer. Kinnow growers in Punjab get ten rupees for a kilo. The fruit rarely retails at under fifty rupees a kilo. Under Imran Khan his supporting fat cats have gotten even fatter profiting off sugar and wheat while farmers and consumers both cry themselves hoarse. Why does Government think that traders will act any differently now?
In the time of scarcity, the fifties and sixties, traders and dealers of food grains were regularly raided and prosecuted under the Defence of India rules for hoarding and price scalping. This time around it is the farmer who is the villain, the anti-national, the Khalistani, not because he exploits the consumer but because he wants to protect himself and his family. The maledictions of a well-honed machine spit out obloquy as a weapon of first resort to damn honest toilers who now happen to produce more than the nation can consume because they have been historically asked to produce large surpluses.
The farm laws will lead the farmer to produce less, because he will not be able to produce more. His income will drop drastically. Farm suicides will increase because the farmer does not have the option to escape to London or one the Caribbean Islands. In any case farmers are honourable folk who feel dishonoured by debts they cannot pay off unlike the businessmen who scam their country of thousands of crores and fly away when asked to repay. One rarely hears of a businessman taking his life because of business debts.
India’s economy will suffer too. Demand for tractors, fertilizer and pesticide, and farm equipment will collapse. There will be a general lessening of demand for other consumer items and white goods which a prosperous rural sector engenders, with a corresponding decrease of jobs in the rural economy. The urban consumer cannot expect to benefit. There is no link between prices paid to farmers and those paid by consumers at retail. A kilo of branded maize flour sold by one prominent business house retails for Rs. 150/ per kilo. Farmers complain that they get no more than ten rupees for it. This is what consumers can expect from these revolutionary farm laws.
And there will be large scale rural unrest. The government may concede nothing to this agitation, but it cannot prevent mass unhappiness. Even a government as quick as this one is to set its watchdogs on those who cross it will find it hard to suppress expressions of country wide rural distress; for, make no mistake, if farm prices fall in Punjab and Haryana, they will pull them down everywhere in the country.
There are solutions to the problem of agriculture surpluses, but the one government has chosen is not one of them. It will cause them to disappear of course, that much is clear, for reasons outlined, but it won’t do anyone any good, least of all the government. Even those investing in the farm business will not profit for long.
The problem of agriculture pricing is not unique to India. Everywhere Governments subsidize farming. It is the nature of the product that requires it. China, Japan, the US and Europe are al into heavy agricultural subsidies. That is why we had PL 480, wine lakes and butter mountains in Europe and such expensive rice in Japan.
BJP is a bania party at heart, and it operates with a bania mentality of its support group – buy cheap sell dear. The corporate form of baniahood is what the current Union government caters to in the form of Adani and Ambani.
Post-colonial India under the BJP has forgotten the solutions that the colonial state found for the problems of agriculturists. It now blames farmers for the problems that successive Indian governments fostered and nurtured. It has even forgotten the experience of post independence Congress governments. The farm reform laws, like the GST is an ill-considered measure, and like the demonetization, not sufficiently thought through. No good can come of them.

https://swarajyamag.com/politics/i-am-a-victim-of-love-jihad-says-dalit-woman-who-accused-a-muslim-man-of-faking-identity-and-raping-her

No such thing as “love jihad.”

This is Rape Jihad.

Counter the argument. Give up this ad hominem business. That is all Hindtards know.
“You mean apart from 47 and 71? Yeah , true they have never wanted it”
Who voted for independent Bengal in ’47’ and ’71’ ? Hindtard distortions again. You guys live off them.

https://www.google.com/amp/s/yourstory.com/2021/11/global-semiconductor-shortage-fabless-hub-saas/amp

Can fabless be the next SaaS for India?

Counter the argument. Give up this ad hominem business.

You spoke as if you knew a lot more about farming than the rest of us, so I just wondered if you’re from a peasant-class family. Surely you must have more experience than my uncles who have been farming for 60+ years, yes?

You get to call us unaware/ignorant, but it’s ad hominem if we question your credentials?

“counter the argument”
What argument? All you did was romanticize mandis and tell us that every single corporation out there wants farmers to commit suicide. Going by your hatred for greedy corporates, I’m sure you’ve never even set foot on American soil : )