My blog

Tag: Policy

  • How media sells secular demands as pro-Hindu

    How media sells secular demands as pro-Hindu

    This is the second article in this series on explaining the problems with emergence of a real Hindu party. Read Part 1 and Part 3.

    The media and intellectual environment has been so anti-Hindu in India that most issues which pass off as pro-Hindu issues hardly pass the smell test when looked at carefully. Given this hostile environment, it is no surprise that entire generations of Hindus have been brainwashed and converted into such meek cows that they have lost the mental faculty to challenge and question the narrative which goes around as pro-Hindu.

    The benchmark criterion to decide whether a policy is pro-Hindu or not is to look at it and ask the question: are Hindus the only beneficiaries of this policy? If a policy helps all Indians then it cannot be pro-Hindu, so call it a nationalistic policy. Similarly, all policies which bring Hindus to a level playing field with other religions are again not pro-Hindu as they only correct historical bias against them, so call them secular. Using this criterion we can now look at some long-standing issues to understand whether they are pro-Hindu issues or not.

    1. Uniform Civil Code: It does not help Hindus explicitly in any way. Hindu civil law is almost modern and Hindus will hardly gain anything if Muslims cannot divorce their wives through triple talaq or have four wives. It is a secular issue and if India really is a secular country, as the libtards claim, then they should support implementation of UCC. Implementation of UCC will not really help Hindus but it will definitely bolster the secular image of India by dismantling religion-specific civil laws.
    1. Article 370: J&K as a region is important for national security given that it can connect India to Central Asian republics and also provides a connection between India’s two big rivals, China and Pakistan. It is in India’s interest to integrate J&K completely into the country and wrest back PoK. So again, repealing Article 370 does not help Hindus alone and is an issue of national importance. Any person opposing it is helping Pakistan and China against India and weakening India’s security environment.
    1. Right to Education Act: Hindu institutions are taxed under this law while minority institutes have no obligation to give quotas to SC/STs or follow the stringent requirements of this law. Minority institutions are thriving thanks to this law while thousands of Hindu schools have closed down. So again, repealing this law will put Hindus on par with other minorities. It is therefore a secular issue and not pro-Hindu in any way. In any other country with a basic framework of law, this discriminatory tax on schools operated by the majority would have been quashed by the courts on first hearing. It was in fact quashed by the courts before Congress brought in the 93rd Amendment to strangle and kill Hindu schools.
    1. Temple Control: Money from Hindu temples is siphoned off and used by greedy governments while they pay Hajj subsidies to Muslims. Churches and mosques are free to receive all donations they can and use their own funds in whichever way they deem important. Hindu organizations, on the other hand, are helpless against this state intervention and watch meekly while government takes away their donations. So freeing temples and putting them on par with other religious institutions is not a pro-Hindu but a secular agenda, requiring the state not to rob money from temples and hand it out as Hajj subsidy.
    1. Jallikattu ban: This is an assault on local traditions while minorities are allowed to mutilate small children under freedom of religion. A secular state has no mandate to dictate how religious festivals should be organized. Freedom to practise one’s religion and celebrate festivals in ways one deems important is not a place for government intervention, which again makes it a secular issue. If Muslims can slay thousands of meek goats on Bakrid, it reeks of hypocrisy when courts challenge healthy Jallikattu bulls under the pretext of animal rights.

    Some of the above-mentioned issues have been paraded around as pro-Hindu issues, but a careful look demolishes the whole narrative. Most gospel truths about pro-Hindu policies are taken at face value by gullible Hindus, while actually they hardly help Hindus in any way. It is like asking a runner to start 20 metres behind everyone else in a 100-metre race. When this runner demands to start at the same position as everyone else, the thekedars in the racing fraternity rule against him, citing that they cannot put him on par with other runners as it gives him an undue advantage, completely ignoring the initial bias.

    Given the above-mentioned policies don’t explicitly help Hindus, what can be classified as pro-Hindu policies?

    1. Ram Temple: This is a long-standing issue and important for collective Hindu consciousness given the importance of Lord Ram in Hindu history. Hindus are the rightful owners of the land in Ayodhya. One random mosque hardly counts for Muslims and they don’t think twice before demolishing one in the Islamic nation of Saudi Arabia. It is Muslim iconoclasm which stands in the way of showing a big heart and allowing Hindus to build the temple of one of the most important Hindu icons at his birthplace. In case government decides to solve this issue in favour of the Hindu temple using its legislative powers, then it can be classified as a pro-Hindu issue. However, current litigation in the Supreme Court just makes it another property dispute rather than a pro-Hindu issue.
    1. Ban on proselytization by non-Hindus: A policy which disallows missionaries from converting the local population would fall under this category. Banning conversions for all religions does not make it pro-Hindu. Only a policy which bans conversion out of Hinduism while allowing Ghar Wapsi can be called pro-Hindu. Under the current Constitution, covert policies can be implemented to stop missionaries. For example, in tribal belts under the garb of protecting local culture, missionaries can be denied entry into the whole region while allowing Hindus to target Christian converts. This is not explicitly pro-Hindu but covertly achieves the same agenda.
    1. Birth-control restrictions on Muslims: To maintain demographic superiority of Hindus, it is very important to reduce the current boom in Muslim population. Any policy which explicitly or implicitly reduces Muslim births while having no impact on Hindus can be called pro-Hindu.
    1. Force minority institutes to implement reservations: Reservation benefits are restricted to Hindus in most cases, so if minority institutes are forced to educate SC/STs, it will increase opportunities for Hindus while reducing them for minorities. If a 50% quota can be implemented in minority institutes, it can be called a pro-Hindu policy as it will educate Hindu masses while minorities foot the bill. This is not a big tax given minority institutes will still get a chance to preserve their culture, but at a small cost of educating backward Hindus.
    1. Throw out illegal Muslim immigrants from Bangladesh and give citizenship to minority Hindus from Bangladesh and Pakistan.

    The above examples clearly show that many other similar policies can be designed with explicit benefit for Hindus. But it is essential for Hindus to push back on unnecessary tags awarded to policies which do not pass the pro-Hindu criterion. Policies that do not exclusively help Hindus need to be declassified and placed under secular or national policy headings. Implementation of pro-Hindu policies will only be feasible after Hindus dismantle the narrative and repeal anti-Hindu policies. But the first step is to stop classifying secular policies under the pro-Hindu basket. This brings us to the million-dollar question: is there any political party which can really claim to be pro-Hindu?

    Read Part 1 and Part 3 of this series.

  • Why odd-even policy will fail in Delhi ?

    Why odd-even policy will fail in Delhi ?

    Indian population has been brought up on such a steady diet of government intervention and socialism that feel-good but ineffective policies are not only passed unopposed but actually appreciated widely. Odd-even car rationing system is one such law which is hailed blindly not only by Aaptards but also by some serious economists!

    Here is another long but inconclusive study by IIT.

    But there are serious issues with any policy evaluation study. The biggest problem usually faced under such evaluation is to make sure that apples are compared with apples and not with oranges. What it means in the case of pollution study is that you need to find a comparative group similar to Delhi 1-15 January 2016 to benchmark performance of odd-even rule. You cannot use the data from last year because it was another year and had different weather conditions. The above mentioned Harvard-Chicago study carefully addresses this problem by comparing Delhi’s pollution with Faridabad because the two are geographically pretty close and one implemented odd-even rule while the other did not. The IIT study although more comprehensive does not do well from an empirical perspective.

    But guess what- while this study does well in the textbook sense of evaluating a policy, it comes really short on economics principles. Why? Because it does not take into account the behavioural changes such a policy implementation will induce.

    Many if not most economic policies can lead to behavioural change and this is what makes any policy evaluation difficult. And what is the behavioural change in this case? It would be captured by pollution reducing measures like car pooling, people using more public transport etc.- the good things that a policy maker would expect. But on the other hand it would also lead to other behavioural changes like buying extra car, switching to two wheelers, etc which would effectively reduce the impact of this policy i.e. increase pollution again. It is the latter which socialism infected brains do not get.

    Another important point to notice here is that while the good behavioural changes will happen immediately in the short run because people need some time to adapt to policy change. Also, at least during January the uncertainty about the implementation of this rule ensured that people did not buy new cars immediately for the 15 day period and game the system because they were not sure that government will implement this policy permanently. But once government commits to implement this policy permanently, people will show bad behavioural changes and buy new cars or find other ways to overcome the system in the long run.

    Given the fact that behavioural changes will take some time to be adopted, it is foolhardy to even resort to any such policy evaluation studies based on short term. If you read the above studies before going through the whole article- sorry for wasting your time.

    So given that these short term evaluation reports can be trashed into junk, the question still remains- should Delhi go forward with the policy or not? Thankfully, the world is full of AAP style Tuglaq governments, which gives us a sneak peak into the results of any such policy. New York city grappled with the same problem in 2007 and evaluated car rationing systems around the world and its impact on pollution levels. Similar systems had been tried and tested in Mexico City, Bogota, Sao Paolo etc and this case study is based on these experiments.

    So, how did the Mexican experiment fare in the end? Well, people were smarter than the government thought and they just bought old vehicles from outside Mexico city, which effectively increased the pollution. In the Indian context, you should expect both purchase of old vehicles and two-wheelers to again increase the pollution levels after a temporary reduction.

    What makes this whole experiment even more stupid is that 4-wheelers contribute very little to the overall pollution levels in Delhi. Here is the break-up of particulate matter emissions from IIT study:

    Out of the transport sector, 4-wheelers contribute 16% to PM 2.5 emissions i.e. 3.6% of total emissions. Even if we say that odd-even policy would lead to 20% drop in PM emissions from cars, it would lead to 0.72% of total emission reduction in the long run.

    So now comes the biggest question that all Delhites need to ask themselves, is it worth buying a new car for 0.7% reduction in PM emissions? Is it worth the total cost that poor middle class families have to pay for buying extra cars, if this policy will only lead to 0.7% reduction in emissions? The bedrock of any policy evaluation exercise is what are the total benefit vs the total losses. All the above mentioned studies, short or long term, look at decrease in pollution levels as the only outcome. But there is welfare loss due to penalties like being forced to use public transport system or buying a new car. It is important to also calculate these efficiency losses for complete welfare evaluation of any policy. Reduction in pollution level should be compared against inconvenience and efficiency loss due to any such policy.

    But as the saying goes: The road to hell is paved with good intentions. So good intentions do much more harm in the end than one expects. Once accounting for all the pain people have to go through to implement odd-even policy, it seems like one more good intention will go wrong. Sadly, in the last 70 years India has seen enough of these good intentions go haywire. So why not just bear one more!