I’ve been looking for a while now for evidence that Modi will make good on promises to his heartland base.
I noted some positive things like his campaign for better public sanitation and his clarity on Indian PIO visas.
Unfortunately, all of that must take a back seat to recent events that show exactly where and how Modi has sold out.
The recent visit of Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Face-book highlights the importance that social media platforms, long regarded as tools of intelligence, are going to have in Modi’s India :-
Facebook will be in every village and Twitter is to be harnessed for “anti-terrorism” campaigns.
Zuckerberg had also met Telecom and IT Minister Ravi Shankar Prasad. Zuckerberg is the third high profile CEO of a US-based firm, after Amazon’s Jeff Bezos and Microsoft’s Satya Nadella, to visit India in last few days. On Thursday, while addressing media persons, Zuckerberg had said he wanted to discuss the role Facebook can play in connecting villages and understand Modi’s Digital India vision.”
Mark Ame has written a revealing piece on the Indian investments of Pierre Omidyar (libertarian activist/lawyer Glenn Greenwald’s backer. Greenwald, remember, is Edward Snowden’s handler).
I don’t agree with everything Ames has written, least of all his facile characterizations of Hindu nationalists as “extremists” and “supremacists,” but the connections he’s dug up are very important and insightful.
They explain a lot about the success of Modi’s campaign to be PM.
Omidyar Network, as Pando readers know, is the philanthropy arm of eBay billionaire Pierre Omidyar. Since 2009, Omidyar Network has made more investments in India than in any other country in its portfolio. These investments were largely thanks to Jayant Sinha, a former McKinsey partner and Harvard MBA, who was hired in October 2009 to establish and run Omidyar Network India Advisors.
During Sinha’s tenure, Omidyar Network steered a large portion of its investments into India, so that by 2013, India investments made up 18% of Omidyar Network’s committed funds of well over $600 million, and 36% of the total number of companies in its portfolio.
In February of this year, Sinha stepped down from Omidyar Network in order to advise Modi’s election campaign, and to run for a BJP parliamentary seat of his own. Sinha’s father, Yashwant Sinha, served as finance minister in the last BJP government from 1998 (when his government set off the nukes) through 2002. This year, Sinha’s father gave up his seat in parliament to allow Jayant Sinha to take his place…………………..
…
Shortly after Sinha left Omidyar Network to help Modi win, Modi gave a speech calling for opening India’s e-commerce market to foreign companies such as Ebay, whose largest shareholder is Pierre Omidyar. The message was clear: Modi is the candidate of hi-tech India, violent ultranationalism notwithstanding.
At the same time, Sinha helped organize a summit meeting between Modi and major global investors like JP Morgan, Morgan Stanley and Nomura bank…..
…
Another NGO that Omidyar invested in, the Institute for Policy Research Studies (IPRS), was accused of illegally trying to lobby India’s parliamentarians to vote for opening up India’s e-commerce market in late 2012. The IPRS nonprofit ran a program in which their staffers provided India MP staffers with “nonpartisan” research. In 2012, India’s intelligence bureau accused the IPRS of “compromising national security” and described it as “shrouded in mystery.”
Omidyar Network had pledged $1 million to the IPRS, and the Ford Foundation pledged half a million more — but the Indian government rejected the IPRS’s application to register as a foreign-funded NGO, deeming it a threat to India’s parliamentary integrity, and its national security. Google’s corporate philanthropic arm, Google.org, had previously given $880,000 to the same NGO program, under Sheryl Sandberg’s watch. The co-founder of this controversial never-registered NGO, CV Mudhakar, is now, you might not be shocked to learn, Omidyar Network India’s director of investments in “government transparency.”
The previous, center-left Indian government not only nixed the Omidyar-Ford Foundation NGO-slash-e-retailer-lobby front, it also announced last year that it did not plan to allow e-commerce firms like eBay open access into its markets. … The answer to that business problem, of course, was changing India’s government — even if that meant installing a brutal figure like Narendra Modi, who spent nearly a decade on the US State Department’s visa ban list for his role in the violent persecution of minority Muslims and Christians.
That’s terrible and all from a human rights perspective, but when you consider the interests of eBay’s shareholders — like its number one shareholder, Pierre Omidyar — India presents not so much a problem as an opportunity. The majority of eBay’s revenues come from its overseas operations, and eBay has made no secret that it sees its future growth coming from India and the BRIC countries (Brazil, Russia, India, China).”
Unfortunately, Ames, being a partisan leftist, cannot speak truthfully when it comes to the church’s proven ties to Maoists and Naxals, as well as the red terror of Naxalite violence:
The India Foundation also argued tndhat Christian missionaries allied with “Maoists” to forcibly convert Hindus to Christianity — a typical BJP slur that has incited countless Hindu lynch mob attacks on India’s Christians…”
While there has been violence against Christians, it’s been – so far as I’ve looked into it – in the context of largely unreported violence against Hindus and attacks on Hindu temples.
When out of control mobs attack, innocents die, but the idea that violence is all one-sided and caused by Hindu fundamentalism as such is as bogus as the notion that Christian extremism caused the Communist revolution in Russia.
These “peaceful Naxals” killed over 10,000 people between 2005 and 2010, according to this report.
Thus, every part of the Western media, every part of the ideological spectrum, is filled with half-truths, spin, exaggeration, and lies, never retracted, never qualified…