It's A Deal After All!

WOW. Amazing. How India is at the center of all this international trade. At the same time when I read articles relating Pakistan we are still talking about killing human beings just because or "Honor". WOW.
India does have its problem of poverty and religion and what not, however most of their leaders look forward in the future for their solutions, while in Pakistan we have been hijacked by the backwards looking mullahs.
I don't see Pakistan ever being able to get 100th time less of attention like this.
The only attention we get is by making noise and threats, and no body takes us seriously. I mean its time for us to grow up and look forward.

Some of the most significant spill-offs of the end of the nuclear apartheid for India may be in the non-nuclear fields:

Nuke deal will bring in restricted technologies, says top scientist

Manash Pratim Bhuyan in New Delhi | September 10, 2008 12:42 IST
With India gearing up to a new era of nuclear commerce, scientists at the Defence Research and Development Organisation and Indian Space Research Organisation say the Nuclear Suppliers Group waiver will not only address the country's energy needs but also help in getting critical technologies in diverse areas which have been denied for decades.

They believe apart from the nuclear energy, the waiver will result in flow of advanced technologies and a range of dual use items to India's way which would help various strategic programmes in many sectors including aerospace and defence.

Expecting the nuclear deal to go through at the US Congress, Chief Controller of Research and Development at DRDO, W Selvamurthy said the strategic partnership with the US will result in an environment that will encourage them to share with India critical technologies that were out of bounds for the last three decades.

"I think the strategic partnership with the US will result in an environment which will encourage them to share with us critical technologies whether they are in the civilian or military domain," the distinguished scientist told PTI.

He said "softening of attitude" towards India will lead to lifting of restrictions on advanced technology which will also help various programmes of the DRDO in many ways.

"When the denial regime is lifted in one sector it will have ripple effect in other sectors," Selvamurthy said.

ISRO's Director of Public Relations S Satish said the the Indo-US nuclear deal will result in a change of approach towards India by the US and other developed countries which will help in easing restrictions on dual use items and controlled technologies."The nuclear deal reflects recognition of India's scientific capability. Things will improve now. It should help our scientific programmes as key components for various strategic projects have been denied so far to India under the denial regimes," he said.


However, another DRDO scientist, observing that things would open up, said still there will be some kind of embargo on critical technologies and key defence components. "We can hope for a softening of approach in sharing critical technology. But still there will be some kind of embargo on critical technologies and defence components," the scientist, who wished not to be named, said.

Minister of State for Defence M M Pallam Raju said India was hopeful of getting access to dual use technology from America, if the nuclear deal goes through at the US Congress. "Access to dual use technology will definitely accelerate all the programmes in space, defence and other scientific areas. Even the private sector will benefit from it," he said. At present, there are restrictions on many dual use items and technologies which have applications in different sectors and if they are made available, the manufacturing industry is expected to get a huge boost.

Head of Business Development of Avionics, at Larsen and Toubro, Vinod Goley said the US will have to open up the core technology in certain areas as holding back the critical technology would backfire on them. "It will not be sustainable for the US to hold back technologies which have been denied to India so far," Goley said.

Vice President and Business Head of Godrej [Get Quote] and Boyce Manufacturing Co Ltd S M Vaidya feels the NSG waiver will certainly raise India's stature at the international stage which will create a more encouraging environment for business Indian business community. "It is a landmark deal and I think post deal, the international business community will look at India in a different way. It will create a more conducive business environment for Indian companies," he said.

About 40 private sector companies have initiated talks with overseas counterparts to set up nuclear power plants in the country, envisaging a total investment of about Rs 2 lakh crore. India received a waiver from the 45-nation Nuclear Suppliers' Group on September 6 to take up nuclear trade without signing the Non-Proliferation Treaty.

pinku:

Illegal bangladeshi immigration is a very serious issue and it would indeed be appropriate for someone with good knowledge of the subject to write an article on it.

Re: # 16
majumder...
To some extent correct. But that should not have been the compulsion for signing the treaty. India was getting latest VVER reactors from Russia. It was fuel shortage, that is causing the actual problem....

Caste Studies by the West:

“In that Country the laws of religion, the laws of the land, and the laws of honor, are all united and consolidated in one, and bind a man eternally to the rules of what is called his caste�
—Edmund Burke 1

For Westerners when thinking of India it is hard not to think of caste. In comparative sociology and in common parlance alike, caste has become a central symbol for India, indexing it as fundamentally different from other places as well as ex-pressing its essence. A long history of western writing— from the grand treatise of the Abbé Dubois to the general anthropology of Louis Dumont; from the piles of statistical and descriptive volumes of British colonial censuses starting in 1872 to the eye-catching headlines of the New York Times— has identified caste as the basic form of Indian society. Caste has been seen by west as omnipresent in Indian history and as one of the major reasons why India has no history, or at least no sense of history.
In the year 1871-72 the first approach was made to the taking of a general census for the whole of India at a given date. Enumerations of the people had already been made in the North-West Provinces in 1853 and 1865, in Oude in 1869, in the Punjab in 1855 and 1868, in the Hyderabad Assigned Districts in 1867, and in the Central Provinces in 1866; while in Madras quinquennial returns have been prepared since 1851-52 by the officers of the Revenue Department, giving with more or less accuracy the numbers of the people in each district, and in British Burma also a tolerably correct census is made each year for the purpose of the capitation rate. Nor was the Government supposed to be without some means of forming an estimate of the numbers under its rule in Bengal, in Bombay, or in the minor provinces, though in Bengal at least the estimate has been found to have been utterly wrong. The Census of 1871 was, however, an attempt to obtain for the whole of India statistics of the age, caste, religion, occupation, education, and infirmities of the population.
In The Discovery of India, Jawaharlal Nehru wrote "Almost everyone who knows anything at all about India has heard of the caste system; almost every outsider and many people in India condemn it or criticize it as a whole." Nehru did not like the caste system any more than he admired the widely heralded "spiritual" foundations of Indian civilization, but even he felt ambivalence about it. Although he noted that caste had resisted "not only the powerful impact of Buddhism and many centuries of Afghan and Mughal rule and the spread of Islam," as also "the strenuous efforts of innumerable Hindu re-formers who raised their voices against it," he felt that caste was finally beginning to come undone through the force of basic economic changes. And yet Nehru was not sure what all this change would unleash. "The conflict is between two approaches to the problem of social organization, which are diametrically opposed to each other: the old Hindu conception of the group being the basic unit of organization, and the excessive individualism of the west, emphasizing the individual above the group."

Westerner will ask why it is that caste has become for so many the core symbol of community in India, whereas for others, even in serious critique, caste is still the defining feature of Indian social organization. For a long time, views of caste differ markedly: from those who see it as a religious system to those who view it as merely social or economic; from those who admire the spiritual foundations of a sacerdotal hierarchy to those who look from below and see the tyranny of Brahmans (all the more insidious because of the ritual mystifications that attend domination); from those who view it as the Indian equivalent of community to those who see it as the primary impediment to community. But an extraordinary range of commentators, from James Mill to Herbert Risley, from Hegel to Weber, from G. S. Ghurye to M. N. Srinivas, from Louis Dumont to McKim Marriott, from E. V. Ramaswamy Naicker to B. R. Ambedkar, from Gandhi to Nehru, among many others who will populate the text that follows, accept that caste— and specifically caste forms of hierarchy, whether valorized or despised— is somehow fundamental to Indian civilization, Indian culture, and Indian tradition.

Caste, as we know it today, is not in fact some unchanged survival of ancient India, not some single system that reflects a core civilization value, not a basic expression of Indian tradition. Rather, caste (again, as we know it today) is a modern phenomenon, that it is, specifically, the product of an historical encounter between India and Western colonial rule. It was under the British that "caste" became a single term capable of expressing, organizing, and above all "systematizing" India's diverse forms of social identity, community, and organization. This was achieved through an identifiable (if contested) ideological canon as the result of a concrete encounter with colonial modernity during two hundred years of British domination. In short, colonialism made caste what it is today. It produced the conditions that made possible the opening lines of this book, by making caste the central symbol of Indian society. And it did its work well; as Nehru was powerfully aware, there is now no simple way of wishing it away, no easy way to imagine social forms that would transcend the languages of caste that have become so inscribed in ritual, familial, communal, socioeconomic, political, and public theaters of quotidian life.

Colonial conquest was not just the result of the power of superior arms, military organization, political power, or economic wealth— as important as these things were. Colonialism was made possible, and then sustained and strengthened, as much by cultural technologies (to be tried in Iraq after occupation by US) of rule as it was by the more obvious and brutal modes of conquest that first established power on foreign shores. The cultural effects of colonialism have until recently been too often ignored or displaced into the inevitable logics of modernization and world capitalism; and this only because it has not been sufficiently recognized that colonialism was itself a cultural project of control. Colonial knowledge both enabled conquest and was produced by it; in certain important ways, knowledge was what colonialism was all about. Cultural forms in societies newly classified as "traditional" were reconstructed and transformed by this knowledge, which created new categories and oppositions between colonizers and colonized, European and Asian, modern and traditional, West and East.
Through the delineation and reconstitution of systematic grammars for vernacular languages, the control of Indian territory through cartographic technologies and picturesque techniques of rule, the representation of India through the mastery and display of archaeological mementos and ritual texts, the taxing of India through the reclassification and assessment of land use, property form, and agrarian structure, and the enumeration of India through the statistical technology of the census, Britain set in motion transformations every bit as powerful as the better-known consequences of military and economic imperialism. British colonialism played a critical role in both the identification and the production of Indian "tradition." Current debates about modernity and tradition fail to appreciate the extent to which the congeries of beliefs, customs, practices, and convictions that have been designated as traditional are in fact the complicated byproduct of colonial history. Bernard Cohn has argued that the British simultaneously misrecognized and simplified things Indian, imprisoning the Indian subject into the typecast role it assigned under the name of tradition.

A society based on caste could not be more different from modern Western society, for caste was opposed to the basic premises of individualism, and it neither permitted the development of voluntarist or politically malleable social institutions nor worked to reinforce the modern state. Further, caste conferred citizenship only in social and ritual rather than in political contexts, and opposed the ideas of both individual action and social mobilization. According to some, caste actively resisted the modern state even more than it did the old, for the modern state opposed rather than supported the dharmic order of things. At the same time, many British officials were convinced that caste would stand in the way of nationalist mobilization, claiming as it did primordial loyalty from its members.

Under colonialism, caste was thus made out to be far more— far more pervasive, far more totalizing, and far more uniform— than it had ever been before, at the same time that it was defined as a fundamentally religious social order. In fact, however, caste had always been political— it had been shaped in fundamental ways by political struggles and processes; even so, it was not a designation that exhausted the totality of Indian social forms, let alone described their essence. What we take now as caste is, in fact, the precipitate of a history that selected caste as the single and systematic category to name, and thereby contain, the Indian social order. In pre-colonial India, the units of social identity had been multiple, and their respective relations and trajectories were part of a complex, conjectural, constantly changing, political world. The referents of social identity were not only heterogeneous; they were also determined by context. Temple communities, territorial groups, lineage segments, family units, royal retinues, warrior sub castes, "little" kingdoms, occupational reference groups, agricultural or trading associations, devotionally conceived net-works and sectarian communities, even priestly cabals, were just some of the significant units of identification, all of them at various times far more significant than any uniform metonymy of endogamous "caste" groupings.
Indian society that clearly appealed to British colonial interests and attitudes; they also secured for Indians pride of place in a civilization lexicon of cultural reconstitution, reaffirmation, and resistance. The idea that Varna— the classification of all castes into four hierarchical orders with the Brahman on top— could conceivably organize the social identities and relations of all Indians across the civilization expanse of the subcontinent was only developed under the peculiar circumstances of British colonial rule. Hierarchy, in the sense of rank or ordered difference, might have been a pervasive feature of Indian history, but hierarchy in the sense used by Dumont and others became a systematic value only under the sign of the colonial modern.

The transformations associated with modernity in India were over determined by the colonial situation. On the one hand, what was useful for British rule also became available for the uses of many Indians who were recruited to participate in one way or another in the construction of colonial knowledge. On the other hand, new forms of and claims about knowledge, products as they were in large part of early colonial Orientalism and late colonial state practices, could take root only because colonial interventions actively obliterated the political dynamic of colonial society. Ironically, it was the very permeability and dynamism of Indian society that allowed caste to become modern India's apparition of its traditional being. Under colonial rule caste— now systematic, and systematically disembodied— lived on. In this new form it was made appropriate and reconstructed by colonial power. What Orientalist knowledge did most successfully in the Indian context was to assert the pre-colonial authority of a specifically colonial form of power and representation.
British interest in the institution of caste intensified in very new ways after 1857 revolt. The crises of early conquest and rule began to give way to other issues of control. This was so particularly in the wake of the Great Rebellion of 1857, after which the Company's ambitions of complete conquest were necessarily curtailed, and the British state assumed "direct" rule. For issues of control the primary reason to divide the society along caste so that they can never come together politically and threaten the sovereign power of the British rule. They were successful for a large measure. District-level manuals and gazetteers began to devote whole chapters to the ethnography of caste and custom; imperial surveys made caste into a central object of investigation; and by the time of the first decennial census of 1872, caste had become the primary subject of social classification and knowledge. Although the village continued to be seen as the dominant site of Indian social life, it became understood as more a setting for caste relations than the primary building block of Indian society. By 1901, when the census commissioner H. H. Risley announced his ambition for an ethnographic survey of India, it was clear that caste had attained its colonial apotheosis.

Recounting the history of caste, in other words, is one way of narrating the social history of colonialism in India. This is a history in which the past itself was colonized, in which the domain of civil society was abandoned to theories about the weight of tradition, in this case the totality represented by the caste system. Caste became the colonial form of civil society; it justified the denial of political rights to Indian subjects (not citizens) and explained the necessity of colonial rule. As India was anthropologies in the colonial interest, a narrative about its social formation, its political capacity, and its civilization inheritance began increasingly to tell the story of colonial inevitability and of the permanence of British imperial rule. If caste occupied the place of the social and constrained the possibility of the political, colonial rule could consist largely of the enumerative technology of the census and the ethnographic survey, producing by the late nineteenth century the "ethnographic state."

This colonial knowledge about caste after independence was still being used by Indian government as well as western institutions and universities. The western scholars were again able to gain leverage and control over the caste discourse and politics around them in India by gaining influence over those communities in the 70s. This was the most important event in the history of the independent India, which created social upheaval never seen in the Indian society. The colonial stratification created sub national political communities with grievances which US government found very receptive to their human rights initiative in the late 70s under Carter administration. In the 90s Dalits became the significant community which was receptive to the state department initiative to create political and social movement inside India which disrupted any consolidation of single party rule at the center. The primary aim of the western strategic community is to make sure that India will never have a solid majority for a single party rule that means a single political unity. This use of caste communities may be considered as the biggest weapon which the superpower has on India in the 21st century; which it can use in the future to unmake the nation as we know as India.

http://www.npcil.nic.in/nupower_vol18_2_3/pg051-57.pdf

Re: # 15
Ekal...
In Middle-East Iraq and Iran was India's traditional ally and were little more cvivilised than other countries in that region. Iran has very good business relationship with India, specially they supply Gas and Oil and India provides some low tech knowhow.
Iran is the only gateway for India in Central Asia. Why USA is keen to see Pakistan help India? In that circumstance, India need not depend upon Iran to get access to market and bases in central asia. India needs either transformed Pakistan or Iran. In the current scenario, the first option is almost unlikely.
The geo-political reality is China wants to prevent India and USA to get access to Central Asia. Pakistan is the potent tool for that. If India gets alieneted from Iran, it will end Indian presence in Afg and other CA countries. Russia taking passive role, China will almost get everything. They are definitely going ahead very aggressively. India should not sit and watch.


Regarding Iran ignoring Indo-Israel defence pacts, the fact is Iran has to think about India as well. Now, Iran gets protection from Russia. So, they don't need to bother about Israel, unless and until USA gets directly involved. Israel is still a small fry compared to Russia.
The real tragic situation will be something different. If US defence manufacturers use India as low cost manufacturing hub and US marines uses these equipments in Iran. This is not very unlikely, if the economic situation within USA worsens....God bless USA to keep India out off these troubles...

[it will be difficult to ignore Pakistan’s demand for a similar deal once it establishes a clean record of nuclear safety and non-proliferation. ]

Absolutely true! In fact, that day will follow soon -- right after the day that all Pakistani women grow shaggy beards!

Dost mittar,

read the link below:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/7603984.stm

Write on this problem if you can. And I am not talking about appeasing Islamic idiocy, where their (muslims') right to land is more than other people's right for land.

We need to force Indian government to start handling this situation. Muslims are all over Assam, from zero they have grown to majority in border areas. We have tons and tons of our own poor people, we don't need to import them from Bangladesh. Send them back whatever way you can.

Re: # 24

My hyperlink was swallowed by chowk ... here is the progress summary on thorium design nuclear reactor in india.... http://nextbigfuture.com/2008/08/indias-thorium-nuclear-reactor-and.html
.

Re: # 23
This is a reasonable summary - but there are too many pieces that
must "magically" fall into place. Parasites like communists are
capable of mischief. Besides, there are going to be elections in a
year or so. Thorium cycles need time to be perfected. I am not sure
if the process is too difficult - but I am pretty sure its not
easy.
There is some good progress though -

This is going to be a win win situation for India. I also have some concerns about US trying to drive India & Iran apart. Current political situation is such that Obama and McCain are in a close fight. If Obama comes to power he will focus all his energy on Pakistan and indirectly help India. If McCain comes to power he will likely focus on Iran in conjunction with Israel. In that situation Iran will need India a lot more than it presently does and would open up a host of opportunities for India to be benevolent towards Iran. Indian diplomacy did successfully get Iran to ignore the fact that Israel has become one of India's largest arms suppliers in last 10-15 years.

In either situation this deal will give a big boost to power production in India and encourage even more investment in India. I think the expectation is that India will not test any further. If China tests then India will have a good excuse. India already has enough nuclear deterrent to meet its regional security needs for the next decade. they can continue research work on supercomputers that are already in place to refine the technology like Americans. Once thorium cycle is perfected then India will not need to import Uranium and will have the ability to do testing and withstand consequences if the need arises.

Majumdar:

Why would the GOI abandon this research; is it only cost or other factors are involved?

DM sahib,

On the contrary it could speed it up too by making uranium available for the thorium cycle- quantities of U are needed to get it started. But that would depend upon whether the GOI continues the path or abandon it (like it did with domestic telecom switches).

Regards

DM Sahib, in twenty years, I am hoping for Suri Cruise....:P

kidding aside, there is definitely a multipolar world we can look forward to...but with China calling the shots...probably not.

majumdar#16:

That was quite informative. Yes, it would be to the advantage of the bidders to use local contractors to the extent possible; however, making it as a condition of contract forces them to search harder for efficient local partners.

You are right that nuclear fuels are not a substitute for transportation, at least not yet. And the IPI can still go ahead; my point was that it reduces the urgency of the project and improves Indians' bargaining position in that deal which is stuck on pricing issues.

By the way, some people have noted that the deal might slow down India's reasearch for Thorium based nunclear plants.