The hypocrisy of our Foreign Secretary

The Indian government has taken great umbrage at David Miliband linking terrorism in Mumbai with India's continued problems in Indian controlled Kashmir.

It does seem odd that India cannot see that what happens in Kashmir is a continual recruitment banner for any Islamist who wants to radicalise younger Muslims or who wants to hang their hatred of India on to something tangible. Anyone who cannot see this is blind to the problem and will never solve it.

The odd thing though is that Miliband is part of the same government who cannot see a linkage between growing radicalisation of Muslim youths in Britain and the invasion of Iraq ? Utter hypocrisy from Labour and Mr Miliband yet again.

We cannot go around lecturing others on problems and solutions whilst we choose to ignore the lessons we are giving others. It seems that wee are too keen to act like an old colonial power who knows best rather than a modern country that has learned from its own mistakes.

Why are we subsidings India's Nuclear Weapons Programme ?

An interesting point made by many people after my last posting about India is that India is, according to them, a poor country that needs our support, which is why we are given them £825 million.

Looking on the internet though brings up some useful information about what India considers to be its priorities. Unlike the UK government, India does not consider its poor to be its main concern. Instead, an expensive nuclear programme is India's number one issue.

India gets away with not supporting the poor in its society because we (the UK) does it for them, and what happens to this money the Indian government saves ? It goes on weapons. India could introduce a proper education system throughout the country with the money it spends on nuclear weapons, but alas no.

According to the South Asian Journal ;

"A very conservative estimate of the cost of an Indian nuclear weapons programme suggests that at a minimum this would costs Rupeess. 800 billion over a decade at 1998-99 prices, or Rs. 700-800 billion a year. This is equivalent to an incremental cost of 0.5 percent of India's GDP every year. The dollar costs over a decade on an Indian nuclear weaponisation programme will be around US$. 16-19 billion (at the average 1998-99 market exchange rates) or US$. 81-93 billion (at the 1999 purchasing power parity, PPP, exchange rate). The larger component in these costs would be the outlays on delivery systems (missiles and nuclear submarines) and on a command and control system.

To give an idea of the financial implications of a Rs. 700-800 billion Indian nuclear weaponisation programme spread over a decade:

India's defence expenditure (revenue and capital) in 1998-99 was Rs. 398.97 billion, which was equivalent to 2.23 percent of GDP. (If India had begun a 10-year programme in 1998-99 to complete development of its nuclear arsenal then this would have raised this outlay by about 20 percent.)
The Government of India's own tax revenues in 1998-99 were Rs. 1046.52 billion. This means that every year 7-8% of every rupee collected as taxes would have to be used for creation of the nuclear arsenal.

An Indian nuclear weaponisation programme that would cost 0.5 percent of GDP a year is equivalent to the annual cost of introducing universal elementary education in India. This 'high' cost was for years cited as one of the reasons for not universalising elementary
education in India. The question then is of choosing between sending every Indian child to school and acquiring nuclear weapons, both of which are going to make similar financial demands on the Government of India. Although India's Parliament in 2001 enacted an amendment to the Constitution guaranteeing elementary education to every Indian child, the initial financial allocations suggest that the government is giving a greater importance to nuclear weapons than to universal elementary education."

I do find it odd that the Lib Dems who argued against me are in favour of getting rid of the UK's nuclear weapons but support us giving £825 million to India whist it spends $19bn in US dollars in its nuclear programme.

If another person writes a comment telling me India is poor when it could afford £10bn in UK sterling on weapons then they are living in cloud cuckoo land.

I am not against UK overseas aid, but I want to see it spent on poor areas which don't have £10bn to waste on weapons, not on rich countries that care little for their own poorer citizens.

Why are we giving £825 million to India ?

Here is some warped logic for you. India, which by some measures is now the fourth largest economy in the world, is going to be given £825 million in aid by Britain, which by the same measure is the 7th largest economy in the world.

The next time someone asks why they have to wait for an operation, why they can't get a certain drug on the NHS, why there are no police in their street, why their village cannot get a bypass, indeed, why we in the UK have to wait for anything when the country pays £825 million to India, I would refer them to the ballot box.

Of all the bizarre political deaths, this is a new one on me

An Indian politician died yesterday in rather tragic circumstances. The usual way you might expect a politician to die early, not from natural causes, in the Indian subcontinent might be through the hand of an assassin, a terrorist or by some other fould human deed.

But no, in this most unusual and tragic deaths, he was attacked and killed by a group of monkeys !