1.The second best democracy money can buy? How the Indo-US nuclear deal was done
2.The new banana republic

EXTRACT: ...the perception that this government is cosy in bed with the MNCs.. took root when Manmohan Singh and George Bush announced the US-India Knowledge Initiative in 2005. That agreement was ostensibly aimed at ushering in a second Green Revolution in India, but what it brought into the frame was the overwhelming presence of American corporations: giant traders, seed companies and retailers. The ultimate goal, critics of the initiative have warned us, is to spread farm biotechnology and tighten the grip of intellectual property rights over Indian agriculture. (item 2)

NOTE: Monsanto, Wal-Mart and ADM are on the board of the US-India Knowledge Initiative.
---
---
1.Satish Sharma aide showed U.S. Embassy employee cash to be used as 'pay-offs' in confidence vote
Siddharth Varadarajan
The Hindu, March 17 2011
http://www.thehindu.com/news/the-india-cables/article1544204.ece

*'Two chests containing cash' part of a bigger fund of Rs. 50 crore to Rs. 60 crore

[image caption: BJP MPs show the wads of cash they had allegedly been bribed with to switch sides on July 22, 2008, the day the Manmohan Singh government faced the trust vote. ]

Five days before the Manmohan Singh government faced a crucial vote of confidence on the Indo-U.S. nuclear deal in 2008, a political aide to Congress leader Satish Sharma showed a U.S. Embassy employee "two chests containing cash" he said was part of a bigger fund of Rs. 50 crore to Rs. 60 crore [about $25 million] that the party had assembled to purchase the support of MPs. The aide also claimed the four MPs belonging to Ajit Singh's Rashtriya Lok Dal had already been paid Rs. 10 crore each to ensure they voted the right way on the floor of the Lok Sabha.

In a cable, dated July 17, 2008, sent to the State Department (162458: secret), accessed by The Hindu through WikiLeaks, U.S. Charge d'Affaires Steven White wrote about a visit the Embassy's Political Counselor paid to Satish Sharma, who is described as "a Congress Party MP in the Rajya Sabha ... and a close associate of former Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi considered to be a very close family friend of Sonia Gandhi."

Mr. Sharma told the U.S. diplomat that he and others in the party were working hard to ensure the government won the confidence vote on July 22. After describing the approaches the Congress leader said had been made to the Bharatiya Janata Party and the Akali Dal, Mr. White drops a bombshell of a revelation:

"Sharma's political aide Nachiketa Kapur mentioned to an Embassy staff member in an aside on July 16 that Ajit Singh's RLD had been paid Rupees 10 crore (about $2.5 million) for each of their four MPs to support the government. Kapur mentioned that money was not an issue at all, but the crucial thing was to ensure that those who took the money would vote for the government."

Lest this should be construed by the visiting diplomats as an empty boast, Mr. Sharma's aide put his money where his mouth was: "Kapur showed the Embassy employee two chests containing cash and said that around Rupees 50-60 crore (about $25 million) was lying around the house for use as pay-offs."

Independently, Mr. Sharma told the Political Counselor "that PM Singh and others were trying to work on the Akali Dal (8 votes) through financier Sant Chatwal and others, but unfortunately it did not work out." He said "the Prime Minister, Sonia Gandhi, and Rahul Gandhi were committed to the nuclear initiative and had conveyed this message clearly to the party." Efforts were also on to try and get the Shiv Sena to abstain. Further, "Sharma mentioned that he was also exploring the possibility of trying to get former Prime Minister Vajpayee's son-in-law Ranjan Bhattacharya to speak to BJP representatives to try to divide the BJP ranks."

The cable makes it clear the Congress campaign to buy votes was not confined to the cash-filled war chests that Nachiketa Kapur and Satish Sharma had gathered.

“Another Congress Party insider told PolCouns that Minister of Commerce and Industry Kamal Nath is also helping to spread largesse. ‘Formerly he could only offer small planes as bribes,'” according to this interlocutor, ‘now he can pay for votes with jets.'”

Despite these efforts, the U.S. Embassy concluded that the UPA maintained only a “precarious lead” in the forthcoming confidence vote. “Our best guess at this time show the government maintaining its slim majority with the anticipated vote count at about 273 in favor, 251 opposed, and 19 abstentions.”

The prediction was impressively close to the mark. Prime Minister Singh got 275 votes in favour with 256 against and 10 abstentions.

Just before the vote, the BJP produced cash on the floor of the House and alleged that this was the money the government had used to try and buy the support of MPs. But subsequent investigations ran aground. The secret U.S. Embassy cable, however, is likely to reignite Opposition allegations that bribery was resorted to on a massive scale to ensure the UPA won the 2008 vote of confidence.

The fact that Congress politicians could speak so freely to American diplomats about their bribing spree during the run up to the confidence vote ”” and that the latter could be so blasé about the subversion of democracy ”” underlines the all-encompassing but ultimately corrosive nature of the “strategic partnership” the two governments were trying to build.

As for Mr. Kapur, his candid display of crores of rupees to be used by the Congress as “pay offs” for the trust vote was not seen by the U.S. Embassy as compromising his democratic credentials in any way. In November 2008, he was sent to the U.S. under the State Department's I-Vote 2008 programme as an observer for that year's presidential election. “The move to invite international observers”, he wrote in a blog post, “reflects the open and democratic nature of the American society.”
---
---
2.The new banana republic
Latha Jishnu
Down to earth, September 15 2010
http://www.downtoearth.org.in/node/1900

*If India is a growing economic power why is it so eager to put the interests of foreign businesses first?

All governments need to be watched. You never know when one of them will slip in a nasty tax on the quiet or pass a seemingly simple notification that can be the undoing of entire communities or of the environment. That is the nature of the beast. But how vigilant can people be with a government that will try to alter the entire complexion of a critical law-in-the-making by sneakily replacing a clear-cut ‘or’ with a lethal ‘and’””under the very noses of the MPs opposed to legislation?

That small alteration would have been a huge gift to the handful of foreign companies that are poised to supply nuclear reactors and equipment to India””the Arevas, the Westinghouses, the Toshibas, the GEs and the Atomstroyexports who control the global business. These companies would have been neatly let off the liability hook in the event of a nuclear accident had it not been for two Left MPs who spotted the subterfuge. Few governments have been as brazen in the defence of foreign commercial interests as the UPA government of Manmohan Singh. That it should go to such lengths to protect suppliers in the Civil Liability for Nuclear Damage Bill 2010 is all of a piece with its readiness to put the interests of foreign businesses before that of its own people and, at times, of domestic enterprises, too.

Yet, it shocks even the most cynical of cynics. Has India well and truly turned into a banana republic? The chicanery in Parliament was exposed just as Planning Commission deputy chairman Montek Singh Ahluwalia was being hauled over coals by the media for emails he exchanged with US deputy national security adviser Froman Michael about enhancing India's borrowing limits from the World Bank. In response, Froman had written that "we are hearing a lot of noise about the Dow Chemical issues”¦ I think we want to avoid development which put a chilling effect on our investment relationship."

The issue here is not whether India did anything about the 'noise' but that Ahluwalia thought fit to raise the issue of a quid pro quo in his correspondence with India's representative at the World Bank. What is most embarrassing in all this is the far from flattering regard in which the US holds its new ally.

Terms like banana republic tend to be used loosely and far too readily by the anti-corporate brigade which suffers from a variation of the Reds-underthe- bed syndrome of American society. Indeed, a vast numbers of Indian civil society organisations and grassroots activists suffer from a pathological dislike of multinational corporations that tends to cloud their thinking. But it is also an aversion that has been deepened by the perception that this government is cosy in bed with the MNCs””a view that took root when Manmohan Singh and George Bush announced the US-India Knowledge Initiative in 2005. That agreement was ostensibly aimed at ushering in a second Green Revolution in India, but what it brought into the frame was the overwhelming presence of American corporations: giant traders, seed companies and retailers. The ultimate goal, critics of the initiative have warned us, is to spread farm biotechnology and tighten the grip of intellectual property rights over Indian agriculture.

Several other factors have deepened this perception. Apart from the notorious corporate ghosts of the Bhopal gas leak that are still haunting the Congress party, there is a growing conviction that critical laws””on seeds, biotechnology, nuclear power, pharmaceuticals, among others””are being formulated in such a way as to allow a handful of foreign companies to have free run in these sectors. The main source of concern are the Seeds Bill, the Biotechnology Regulatory Authority of India (BRAI) Bill couple with the fears that domestic laws covering pharmaceuticals, agrochemical and biotech sectors will be watered down to benefit MNCs in the free trade agreements under negotiation with India’s major trading partners. So let’s come back to the central question: is India a banana republic? The original definition referred to small countries in Central America whose economies were dependent on a single export commodity””bana nas, of course, and sugar””and were governed by dictatorships servile to exploitative foreign companies.

Over time the term has come to be used for any country that is under the economic control of foreign-owned companies or industries. The Encyclopedia of Business says, “Its usage has also expanded over the decades to even refer to the control of part of a country’s bureaucracy by an opposing bureaucracy of the same country.”

Can a country that has an impressive export portfolio (from software services to automobiles) and is a potential economic superpower be referred to so derogatively? Welcome to the new banana republic where so much has changed and yet much remains the same.