From non-alignment to 'none'-alignment?

India is going through another great Renaissance, as ordained by a gentleman whose own educational qualifications are shrouded in doubt and about which RTI questions will never be answered. All our learnings of the past 2,000 years have to be discarded and a new learning, as enshrined in the NEP (New Education Policy) and prescribed by the UGC, CBSE and NCERT will re-enlighten this land.

I must confess that, having already forgotten most of what I had learned in the last 70 years (which wasn't much to begin with), I am excited at the prospect of being educated again. And I have been making some progress, and as evidence of that, would like to share some of these nuggets with my long suffering readers.

Remember that phrase 'carrying coal to Newcastle' coined by John Graunt in 1661? It denoted a meaningless action, to take something to a place where it's not needed because there's plenty of the stuff already there. Well, in amrit kal, that phrase has been replaced by 'carrying coal to Godda'.

Godda is the place in Jharkhand where Mr Adani has set up a 1600 MW thermal power station which exports all its power to Bangladesh (or used to, until Hasina was given a one-way ticket to exile). Now, Jharkhand has the largest coal reserves in the world, so you would expect that the millions of tonnes of coal required for this power station would be mined in Jharkhand itself, right? Wrong.

Here is where the gaps in your education become visible — for Adani does not mine the local coal, instead, he imports it from 6,000 km away, from his Carmichael mines in Australia! And still manages to sell the power at four times the usual price to Bangladesh, thanks to getting his plant declared an SEZ by amending the rules, liberal loans from banks, and environment clearances to bring river waters from 100 km away.

Management schools across the world are still trying to figure out why the coal was not sourced more cheaply locally, how a totally unviable project became so profitable, not realising that the answer to that question lies in politics, not economics.

But in the meanwhile, the English language has been changed forever, and John Graunt banished — 'carrying coal to Godda' is the new phrase, and don't let anyone tell you that you can't make a handsome profit by doing something conventional wisdom tells you is stupid.

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Most of us will remember the haircut from our childhood days, that monthly visit to the barber when we were cut to size. I now go just once a year, for old times' sake, because the ravages of time and shouldering the brown man's burden for 35 years have ensured that my hair raising days are now firmly behind me. Which is a good thing too, because a haircut is no longer what it used to be. It is now a euphemism for fiduciary castration of banks, which is usually you and me because it is our money, after all.

This is how it works in New India: a 'haircut', in today's parlance, is the money the banks lose (forego) when a company becomes insolvent by siphoning off the bank loans to Bermuda or St Kitts, and someone else takes it over by paying the bank a fraction of the money owed, say, 10 per cent or 20 per cent.

The apotheosis of rogue capitalism, an ingenious way to transfer public money to private individuals, isn't it? Especially as the new owner is just a proxy for the original, defaulting owner: he gets to keep both the bank's money and the company! The bank takes what is called a haircut, while the barber gets a facial in Monte Carlo.

The country has had Rs 6 lakh crore worth of haircuts in the 612 cases resolved so far under the Insolvency and Bankruptcy Code. which is why we now have more billionaires than Anupam Khair has hair follicles on his polished nationalistic pate, or Kangana Ranout can count on her manicured fingers (when she is not pointing them at the farmers, that is).

Nowadays fat cats don't laugh all the way to the bank, they laugh on their way back from the bank. Which is why the Indian banking system is now on its knees, waiting for something worse than a haircut.

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Most people of my generation grew up priding ourselves on India's policy of non-alignment. It gave us and the Third World moral stature in the company of stalwarts like Sukarno, Nkrumah, Tito and Nasser. No more. For our prime minister, non-alignment is now a dirty word, to be trashed abroad, its meaning completely changed because history has to be distorted to suit, and justify, his personal predilections and hubris.

In a brilliant article for The Wire on 28 August, S.N. Sahu explains that the essence of non-alignment was "active engagement with all countries with a spirit of friendship, equality and reciprocity.... and neutrality towards military alliances."

Speaking recently in Poland, however, Mr Modi has deliberately distorted and misconstrued it to mean (in his own words) "to maintain distance from all countries". He went on to boast "Today India's policy is to maintain close ties with all countries. Today India wants to connect with everyone." 

Sure. Ask the Palestinians, Sri Lanka, Nepal, Ukraine, Iran. By all means, if it's in our national interest to refuse to vote at the UN against the genocide and atrocities by Israel and Russia in Gaza and Ukraine, to continue to bolster the Russians by buying their oil, to keep on the right side of a Zionist state so we can buy Pegasus from them, sell them drones or get lucrative contracts for some cronies — if that benefits us, embroider it in gold in the tatters of our foreign policy.

But for God's sake, don't misinterpret the concept of non-alignment or denigrate an enlightened policy India followed right up till the time of Vajpayee. It was because of non-alignment that we were the leader of the South, looked up to by the Muslim nations of the world, a role model for other decolonised nations, secured the independence of Austria first and Bangladesh later, were successful in obtaining the Civil Nuclear Cooperation deal with the USA even while most of our weapons came from Russia.

We were much better connected with the world in pre-Modieval times than we are today. In comparison, today we are shunned by the global South, distrusted by the West and considered a bully in our own backyard. Nehru's non-alignment has served this country much better than Modi's neo-alignment has.

Don't criticise what you can't understand, said Bob Dylan in his song The times they are a-changin'. To which one may also add that distorting history or changing its vocabulary is not history, as Ed Koch observed, it's psychiatry, and a bad case of that too.

Views are personal

Avay Shukla is a retired IAS officer and the author of Disappearing Democracy: Dismantling of a Nation and other works. He blogs at avayshukla.blogspot.com