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Topic: India rising (Read 1951 times)

India rising

Came across this thread during a walk.

Is India still rising? What consequences will that have?


Re: India rising

Reply #1 –
India will need to:

1. Recover from covid
2. Counter the Belt and Road Initiative somehow

Re: India rising

Reply #2 –
I've a friend, an immigrant from India, who today was irate, insisting Prime Minister Modi was responsible "for thousands of COVID deaths" because he didn't postpone the elections... Of course, my friend is Sikh, so he's never been enamored of Mordi or his party.[1] The BBC can tell you, ersi, what little can be known about India's recovery efforts.
The Belt and Road Initiative is perhaps the most pernicious "colonialism" plan the world has ever seen. But it's only one manifestation of China's (Xi's) ambitions. (Another is building and "selling" an alternate internet... Watch this space; and -I wonder-is the Epoch Times disregarded as a source? :)
1 I wonder what he'd have felt and said, if Modi had "postponed" elections over COVID fears?↵
进行 ...
"Humor is emotional chaos remembered in tranquility." - James Thurber
"Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts!" - Richard Feynman
 (iBook G4 - Panther | Mac mini i5 - El Capitan)

Re: India rising

Reply #3 –
It is a cult. Not only billionaires fond of going into media, so are cults. The Moonies and Washington Times is another example. People almost never went into publishing for the love of truth or anything like that, but now that most news media are financially dubious, cults and billionaires are likely entrants. It's like late stage Usenet when people left the field for the trolls and spammers, only that Usenet never was a vanity project. Somehow the Church of Scientology never got into publishing (unless you count Hollywood, which manages to be both sometimes-very-profitable and susceptible to cults).

So no, I have no regard for them.

"My enemy's enemy" has led the US in particular to strange bedfellows. "I am against regime X, they are against regime X, ergo these must be good people". There is no reason that they are, and often plenty good reasons that they aren't. Same of course goes for those organisations. When a new friend appears, willing to support or propagate your cause, that friend might not be so friendly after all.

And China is really no stranger to cults. There have been many, there are many, there will be many more.  (I don't know of India, but anecdotally it's a pretty similar story there.)

Re: India rising

Reply #4 –
You could call the Belt & Road Initiative a vanity project, more so than buying a newspaper or a football club, many have, but it will go on after Xi. You could call it neo-colonialism, again several have, but that would be mistaken (colonialism is far more insidious). 

But there are too many low-quality projects, BRI will lose momentum. In my view that would be the time for India (and the EU) not to beat them, but to join them. Europe/Middle East, South Asia, and East Asia are the three poles of  Eurasia, and we'll all benefit from a better connected continent. 

Quote from: jax on
I made a map of the Indo-Pacific (blue) overlaid with Eurasia (yellow). The regular geographic definition of Eurasia (Europe + Asia), and any country having any coast to the Indo-Pacific biogeographical region makes up Indo-Pacific. Countries matching both are in green. 



Re: India rising

Reply #5 –
Quote from: jax on
ou could call it neo-colonialism, again several have, but that would be mistaken (colonialism is far more insidious).
It's not unlike the factory network. Wikipedia took the words out of my mouth:
Quote
[Belt & Road Initiatives] have been seen, in retrospect, as the precursors of colonial expansion.

On that subject: "EU refuses to bail out Montenegro's China loan" https://euobserver.com/world/151512

Re: India rising

Reply #6 –
I don't think this is remotely like Europe 17th/18th century exploration (exploitation), more the pattern of US 19rh/20th century ditto if anything. There are some similar motivations, but the process and likely outcomes are different.

Of course there are pleasing reverberations. Sweden dug canals from Gothenburg to Stockholm/Södertälje at the Baltic Sea mid-19th century, mostly to avoid being under the thumb of Denmark. When the project was finished, at massive cost, it was effectively rendered obsolete by the next big thing, the railroad. But not trusting their neighbours, the lines were built inland at a safe distance (at the time) from enemy navies. Which made them less useful in the long run as Swedish cities too tend to be at the coast, so trains on the meandering lines couldn't compete with truck on straight motorways. Sweden has since built straighter, faster rail, but coastal rail is still lagging.

Like 19th century Sweden, 21st century China wants to avoid being encircled. BRI is a major part of this project, its a Eurasian backbone. But bit like the game of Go, avoiding being outflanked yourself means outflanking others. India is concerned about it, and frets about the string of pearls. Russia, the ultimate Eurasian inland power, until the Arctic ice melts anyway, hopes to gain. In SE Europe, Chinese interests in Greece and the Balkans, to the consternation of the Blue Banana in the NW. 

Much like North America, Eurasia has the coastal elites and the underdeveloped, barely populated and deeply corrupt hinterlands between the coasts. A Eurasian backbone through those hinterlands can be to the interest to all of us, and not just something though out in Zhongnanhai.

Re: India rising

Reply #7 –
Quote from: jax on
I don't think this is remotely like Europe 17th/18th century exploration (exploitation), more the pattern of US 19rh/20th century ditto if anything. There are some similar motivations, but the process and likely outcomes are different.
I don't think the 17th century factories were particularly exploitative. It wasn't until a Dutch privateer more or less accidentally captured a Spanish slave vessel that things went south.

Re: India rising

Reply #8 –
Many Western companies hires software developing to India. They are cheaper, faster and much better than the Europeans.
Since I see no perspective for ending software needs, I see no ending to India's rise.
A matter of attitude.

Re: India rising

Reply #9 –
Besides the cheaper that definitely doesn't correspond to my own experience. The company from the Netherlands that was replaced by one from India was much faster and much better — and I would suspect possibly cheaper too once you actually count all the costs.

Re: India rising

Reply #10 –
Software developers in India are not necessarily better. They are of course more hard-working, but often overworking so that the result is crap.

The software companies in India often sell themselves several times over to provide similar services or develop similar products to multiple clients/partners - whatever seems similar to the bosses, even when it is not, and so some deliveries end up iffy. And the salaries are low as everybody is in the race to make a cheaper offer.

If it matters to obtain a certain quality level, it always makes better sense to be able to verify everything in person, i.e. not to outsource. Outsourcing means quality does not matter.

Re: India rising

Reply #11 –
Quote from: jax on
Much like North America, Eurasia has the coastal elites and the underdeveloped, barely populated and deeply corrupt hinterlands between the coasts.
The coastal elites aren't corrupt? :) Do you seriously maintain that what U.S. leftists call fly-over country is "deeply corrupt" and "underdeveloped"?
Quote from: jax on
21st century China wants to avoid being encircled.
You mean, it wants the CCP to take charge of -- everything! Because whatever the Party doesn't control is a threat to it...
进行 ...
"Humor is emotional chaos remembered in tranquility." - James Thurber
"Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts!" - Richard Feynman
 (iBook G4 - Panther | Mac mini i5 - El Capitan)

Re: India rising

Reply #12 –
Quote from: OakdaleFTL on
Quote from: jax on
Much like North America, Eurasia has the coastal elites and the underdeveloped, barely populated and deeply corrupt hinterlands between the coasts.
The coastal elites aren't corrupt? :) Do you seriously maintain that what U.S. leftists call fly-over country is "deeply corrupt" and "underdeveloped"?
Quote from: jax on
21st century China wants to avoid being encircled.
You mean, it wants the CCP to take charge of -- everything! Because whatever the Party doesn't control is a threat to it...

Trump is a good example that you can be from the coastal elites and deeply corrupt. No, I was not serious, just trying to make the topic of Central Eurasia engaging to the readership from the New World. We as a species have an affinity to water. There are far more of us close to the coast than far away, and those coastals may not necessarily be elites, but they are also on average richer. Thus a map of accumulated wealth will to a large extent be a map of the land/water boundary.

The flip side is that we all have hinterlands. Australia everything but the coast, and most of the coast. Canada anything not close to the US border. Norway anything north of Trondheim (or, according to locals, anything north ot the Sinsen interchange in Oslo). Russia anything not by the Baltic Sea. Sweden anything but Södertälje. Africa the Sahel, China anything west of the Hu Line.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IUCeN7kelXs

Where you have fly-over country we used to have caravan-over country. Still do, with different caravans. In Eurasia much of that land was annexed by Russia, then Soviet Union. The rest by different current nation states. China has a good chunk. In North America the US annexed most of the land not previously annexed by European colonisers (and much of that land too). Here, of course, the history diverges. 



Changing geography by infrastructure has its limits. To some extent China is reaching theirs inside the country. India is far from there yet.

But caravan-over countries like Kazakhstan may benefit, and ultimately the rest of us.

China's government has no interest in "taking charge of -- everything", they merely want to be powerful enough for nobody inside or outside the country to be able to threaten or topple them. That is a goal they won't reach, but it won't stop them from trying. 

Re: India rising

Reply #13 –
Fun fact from the coast. Denmark scored number 1 as the least corrupt country in the world according to Transparency Intl CPI index in 2018. The same year, Danske Bank money-laundering scandal blew up, one of the biggest money-laundering scandals ever.

According to 2017 CPI index, Denmark was number 2 (after New Zealand). In 2019, Denmark and New Zealand shared the best score and they do so now too. Throughout the earlier decade, when the money-laundering is known to have been in full swing, Denmark was consistently number 1 or 2.

There might be something about the way corruption is measured, I think.

Re: India rising

Reply #14 –
Isn't that generally more about government corruption than about corporate corruption?

Re: India rising

Reply #15 –
Well, their vision or mission page states, "...our mission is to stop corruption and promote transparency, accountability and integrity at all levels and across all sectors of society." They are basically acknowledging a problem in the methodology,

Quote from: https://www.transparency.org/en/news/cpi-2020-trouble-at-the-top-cases
Shocking headlines and bombshell news reveal that even during a global pandemic, huge corruption scandals persist. Much of this corruption, however, is not captured on the 2020 Corruption Perceptions Index (CPI), which measures only public sector corruption.

And then they mention five cases, each involving major corporations. I'd say that corruption in the Western countries is not low. The legal loopholes are nicely fine-tuned, which makes the corruption officially unacknowledged. Danske's money-laundering scandal, even though it involved the stepping down of CEO's in Denmark (with their bonuses intact!), was still fully blamed on a rogue subsidiary in Estonia - which is right in a sense, because the subsidiary was indeed rogue and had its own peculiar history, but it makes a mockery of the due diligence principle: When a bank can fail to know properly its own subsidiary, then there's nothing really to say about understanding customers or pass-through transactions.

Re: India rising

Reply #16 –
Quote from: ersi on
Fun fact from the coast. Denmark scored number 1 as the least corrupt country in the world according to Transparency Intl CPI index in 2018. The same year, Danske Bank money-laundering scandal blew up, one of the biggest money-laundering scandals ever.
By the way, does this specific organization state or imply that being the least corrupt is anywhere near good? I know a lot of those kinds of lists phrase being the least bad as being barely adequate, so being #1 isn't exactly something to be proud of.

Re: India rising

Reply #17 –
The best possible score is 100 points. Denmark and New Zealand keep hitting 88~89 out of 100. I guess you could say not too bad. But when you hit low, it's not too good, is it?

Edit: And let's not forget that CPI is a big deal in internationally. Moody's and S&P and the entire banking and insurance sector ranks countries based on it, among other factors.

Re: India rising

Reply #18 –
Corruption is in the first place a main argument to make people pay more taxes. Denmark, Finland, Sweden, Switzerland... the less corruption they have, the more taxes they pay.


A matter of attitude.

Re: India rising

Reply #19 –
Corruption, tax evasion and money laundry is a case of means, motive and opportunity. Banks and other financial institutions often have plenty. Not only Danske Bank but also the Swedish banks Nordea, Swedbank and SEB. They all had Baltic connections, particularly Estonia, but the real money is Russian, some Ukrainian, some directly connected to Putin. Not only the Scandinavian banks, Deutsche Bank's Russian connections are well-known.  Or British banks. Barclays Bank have had their Russian dealings, HSBC have primarily funneled Chinese/Asian black money.

Though there is a reason it is a corruption perception index. The banks getting caught is a good thing. If they keep getting caught would be even better. Russian banks don't have this particular problem.

Re: India rising

Reply #20 –
Yes, in the Baltics (and Cyprus) it's the Russian money (embezzled state funds) that gets laundered. In Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania there used to be, until these Scandinavian scandals, banks specifically geared to servicing Russian oligarchs. Scandinavian banks got caught because they gobbled up those oligarch-serving entities, not fully realising or caring what they were doing - nevermind that the Baltic units bring in disproportionate profits, the more profits the better.

The series of scandals started with UkioLeaks (the bank was stormed by policemen and raided, which resulted in the "leaks") and kept escalating ever since. Now this market segment is drying up and a few recent attempts to get this segment going again have been blocked.

Ha, another one!
Quote from: https://www.svd.se/swedbank-tilldelas-boter
Publicerad 2021-05-05

Swedbank åker på ytterligare en smäll från penningtvättskandalen som briserade 2019 när Sveriges Television avslöjade bankens affärer i Baltikum.

Swedbank tilldelas böter på totalt 46,6 miljoner kronor av Stockholmsbörsen, motsvarande tolv årsavgifter, för att inte ha meddelat aktiemarknaden om viktig information banken satt på internt.

Re: India rising

Reply #21 –
It's the old one, just the punishment that keeps on coming, belatedly. Launder Russian money in 2007-2015 (the Danske bank interval), get exposed in 2019, get fined in 2021.

Suspected money laundering in Swedbank (20 February 2019)

Quote
One of the largest banks in Sweden, Swedbank, may have been used for extensive, systematic money laundering for nearly a decade. A total of USD 5.8 billion has been funneled between suspect accounts in Swedbank and Danske Bank in the Baltics. Of this, USD 26 million is linked to the Russian tax fraud that was uncovered by accountant Sergei Magnitsky.
[ :rip: ]


Re: India rising

Reply #22 –
Yes, it all goes under the umbrella of the decade, but each of the fines is with a slightly different angle or from a different institution. This was the first AML-related fine from the stock exchange.