RSS: Paleo-conservatism rules

This doesn't come as a surprise. But it'll disappoint those -- a large number of commentators -- who opined that BJP's debacle in Elections-09 might force the party to seriously consider transforming itself from RSS's political wing into a real political party.

“The silver lining in this electoral outcome is the unmistakable play of the national psyche and the emergence of a clear two-party system,” the editorial [in the latest issue of Organizer, RSS's in-house magazine] has said.

“There is no evidence to show that the ideology of the party has failed. There is also no evidence that the Modi campaign or the Varun Gandhi speech damaged its prospects. The BJP actually failed in presenting itself as a better alternative offering stability and a national vision. This has more to do with a mismanaged campaign and organisational weaknesses.”

Greg Mankiw: Subtle changes in teaching Econ 101

From latest column:

THE CHALLENGE OF FORECASTING It is fair to say that this crisis caught most economists flat-footed. In the eyes of some people, this forecasting failure is an indictment of the profession.

But that is the wrong interpretation. In one way, the current downturn is typical: Most economic slumps take us by surprise. Fluctuations in economic activity are largely unpredictable.

Yet this is no reason for embarrassment. Medical experts cannot forecast the emergence of diseases like swine flu and they can’t even be certain what paths the diseases will then take. Some things are just hard to predict.

Likewise, students should understand that a good course in economics will not equip them with a crystal ball. Instead, it will allow them to assess the risks and to be ready for surprises.

Obama and Onion

After going on and on about how mainstream comedians have such a great difficulty mocking Obama, the Economist gets to some of the good stuff coming out of the Onion -- "America's Finest News Source":

Bonus Link: Selfish Scientists Won't Share New Findings.

The writers of the Onion are unencumbered by any obvious party loyalty. To fit in, you have to hate everything around you, muses Joe Randazzo, the editor. Hence the headline that greeted Mr Obama’s election victory: “Black Man Given Nation’s Worst Job”. The Onion News Network, an online video venture, did a segment entitled “Obama Win Causes Obsessive Supporters to Realise How Empty Their Lives Are”. The camera showed pitiful young campaign volunteers lying comatose on a couch or wandering aimlessly through a park. “Who will take care of these people?” asked the anchor. “We really don’t know. Many have already driven away their friends and family with months of endless praise for Obama’s latest speech and constant reminders to vote,” said the breathless correspondent on the scene. “That does sound annoying,” said the anchor.

The Onion lampooned previous presidents, of course. No prizes for guessing who inspired the headline “New President Feels Nation’s Pain, Breasts”, or who regaled dinner guests with an impromptu oration on Virgil’s minor works. What sets the Onion apart, however, is that Mr Obama has not blunted its barbs at all. On the contrary, the way more serious journalists fawn over the new president offers an irresistible target. “Media Having Trouble Finding Right Angle on Obama’s Double Homicide”, the Onion reported last month. “‘I know there’s a story in there somewhere’,” said the editor of Newsweek, after Mr Obama brutally murdered a suburban couple. The Onion is better at spotting good yarns, which is why, despite the recession, it is prospering. The main threats it faces are that its staff might grow up—or that the earnest papers it parodies may go out of business.

Enough of BJP ...

... so how about libertarians -- especially the anarcho kind? [Hat tip: Dani Rodrik who has a great quote from an academic paper about Robert Nozick and the Sopranos]

If you wish to dig further, there's always Crooked Timber, and from the comments section there, this UnNews story.

A physics fraudster's story

The Rise and Fall of a Physics Fraudster is the title of the article which is an "abridged and edited" version of Eugenie Samuel Reich's Plastic Fantastic: How the Biggest Fraud in Physics Shook the Scientific World. Here's the blurb:

Seven years after rumours of massive fraud began to surface, the repercussions of Jan Hendrik Schön’s lies still reverberate. In her new book Plastic Fantastic, abridged and edited here, Eugenie Samuel Reich chronicles how his fraud shook the scientific world.

Here's an extract:

This dramatic end to Schön’s case brings us back to the question of whether science is, or is not, self-correcting. Science was corrected in the Schön case, but not by itself — only because individual scientists made corrections. From would-be replicators in dozens of labs to many sceptics, only a couple of researchers were transformed into whistle-blowers by the unlikely pattern of evidence. The correcting process turned out to be as human and haphazard as the fraud — and certainly less systematic than Schön’s single-minded commitment to keep trying to publish fabrications.

The problem is that when data are fraudulent, they are designed to elude all the self-correcting processes of science. Keen to oblige, Schön tuned his data to pass quality-control checks and fulfil expectations for his research programme. Fraud was able to stifle questions about Schön lab technique that would otherwise have been asked, and to turn review processes at journals into opportunities for additional fabrication. Other scientists’ support of the fraud was unwitting, but the decision to place so much trust in a colleague was a conscious rationalization that continues to be defended in science to this day.

That is where the danger lies. Even now, Schön would be happy to work in science again. Somewhere in science, there must be a place for a logical, intelligent, literal and meticulous person who is not brilliant, who does not quite “get it”. Schön’s gift for agreeing with whatever others want to hear, his uncanny ability to pick up on any demand in any environment and duplicate answers that seem to work well, and to be plausible and friendly as he goes; these qualities will not go away. A couple of years after this article is printed, his ban by the German Research Foundation will expire. Then maybe he will find an opening. If not him, maybe others, and would science fraudsters less extreme, less literal, less once-in-a-generation than Schön be any less dangerous than he was; or more?

T.T. Ram Mohan on Elections-09

Understanding the results of the 2009 elections:

3. The results are a vote for "reforms" and the Congress-led UPA should, therefore, fast forward "reforms": The Congress benefited from a rise in rural incomes and prosperity driven by growth in agriculture, an area that is least touched by reforms. It also benefited from measures that "reformers" relentlessly fought: NREGA, the farm debt waiver, the Sixth Pay Commission award, an increase in subsidies and OBC quotas.

The one formation that lost heavily from its attempt to push through "reforms" was the Left in West Bengal which tried to usurp farm land in order to push ahead with industrialisation. (SEZs are an important item on the "reforms" agenda). It is fair to say that the UPA benefited from measures associated with the Left while the Left lost because of measures associated with the "reformers'!

And a follow-up: A cohesive and stable government?:

I do hope good sense prevails in the Congress and the finance portfolio stays with a politician and doesn't go to a technochrat. It wasn't the pro-reform brigade that helped the Congress do well in the 2009 elections, it was the solid political instincts of the Gandhi family, much of which goes against the spirit of "reforms".

Hero of the day ...

Manish Pandey.

A huge fan of the Royal Challengers right from the first day of IPL-08 (what a disappointing season that was!) our seven-year old son adores Manish Pandey for his heroics yesterday. He also loves R.P. Singh for dropping that catch (when Pandey was at two) and making that fantastic century possible ...

Though my inner Chennaiyan continues to like the Super Kings (especially for their super-cool captain), he has wisely chosen to to yield to the father in me, and will be rooting for RCB in their semi-final against CSK tomorrow.

Quality time, intra-family harmony, bonding, &c ...

Sunil Mukhi and Rahul Basu on Elections-09

First, Sunil Mukhi: Time to Gloat:

I'm savouring every moment. In a few days India will go back to being the mess that I love to complain about, but today it is a country where democracy has triumphed and stability is more or less assured. Moreover, some people have got what they richly deserved and I wish to gloat about their forthcoming political demise.

His list of 'some people' who "have got what they richly deserved" is pretty interesting; it includes, in addition to Advani and Karat, a couple of minor journalists.

Rahul Basu: The Indian Elections 2009:

Having said that though, I believe that the left has a very constructive role to play, not just in secular matters, but also indeed in economics, if it could only get more pragmatic and less dogmatic and ideological. The tendency to follow a laissez-faire capitalist model with no regulations, allowing the markets to correct itself is a view propagated by many of our business houses and right wing economists, with results that are now there for all to see. Relaxing labour laws, in a country with no safety net, allowing private banks to play with people's hard earned pension funds are actions that are ill-suited even to the US, let alone India and it helps to have a gentle restraining hand to curb some of these excesses. The Montek Singh Ahluwalias of this world, (tipped now to become the Finance Minister) trained in some of the discredited policies of the IMF and World Bank need this control and now with the left having, well, left, we hope that Mr Ahluwalia has learnt some lessons from the disastrous actions of his Wall Street friends to not try and emulate that environment.

Paleo-conservative Right's critique of BJP's electoral strategy

I'm sure you have seen all kinds of post-poll opinion pieces -- in blogs as well as newspapers -- about what BJP should do to stop its electoral slide and gain broader acceptance. Most of them advise BJP to dump Hindutva and become a proper Right Wing Party (conservatism in the economic sphere); some have suggested the model of Christian Democratic Party (whatever that means ;-).

Koenraad Elst says all that is bunkum; it should, instead, get back to its Hindutva core: "only a clear ideological profile, mature but distinct, could have won the election for the BJP."

I mean, I have seen BJP getting walloped by people to its left (if not *the* Left). But the way the party is being criticized from its right -- imagine that! -- is interesting. It is this that makes me link to this piece.

[Don't forget to read the comments; there are three as I write this post]

Here's Elst's opinion of L.K. Advani:

In 1991 already, right after the election victory that made the BJP the leading Opposition party, it discreetly disowned the Ayodhya movement that had earned it this breakthrough. The media scapegoated Mr LK Advani for the subsequent Babri Masjid demolition, though everybody knew that it had taken place in spite of him. He had gone there to demonstrate to the secularists that he was the one man who could control Hindu anger and prevent it from demolishing this symbol of secularism. When the crowd bypassed him, he broke down in tears, and ever since, he has been deploring the event as the ‘blackest day’ of his life. Disowning his role of flag-bearer of Hindutva, he should have bowed out gracefully. Instead, his clinging on to the leadership reminds us of Mr Jean-Marie Le Pen, the aged French Rightist leader who has sacrificed his party to his own pitiable ambitions.

To be compared to Jean-Marie Le Pen? This is too cruel. Even to Advani.

Gush!

Ever wonder if a decidedly unspectacular vote share (say, less than 30 %) can make a professional pundit gush? Wonder no more; heeeeere's Pratap Bhanu Mehta:

There are moments in the life of nations that are harbingers of deep changes. The Congress has achieved what even so many of its friends thought was unthinkable: not just a return to power, but a return with such aplomb. No amount of psephological quibbling can take away from this achievement. They put a lie to the proposition that this was not a national election, but a sum of state elections. The swing towards them across large parts of the country is too significant to be dismissed as a conjuncture of lots of local factors. But this is also a moment where the nation is also entitled to some degree of self-congratulation. Small exceptions apart, this election represents a big defeat for the politics of opportunism, obfuscation and obscurantism. Those political forces that thought that mere political bargaining with others was a substitute for an electoral strategy have lost. Instead a message has been sent out, loud and clear, that playing spoiler, switching sides in order to pre-empt the people’s mandate, changing positions at the last minute are simply not on. Elections are fundamentally about comparative credibility, and those who were foolish enough to assume that mere words could hoodwink electorates have been cut to size. A large number of parties have been punished for this reason and rightly so.

For someone who wrote this extremely harsh pre-poll assessment of Manmohan Singh and his government, Mehta's post-poll views are very surprising, to say the least.

Siddharth Varadarajan calls for "humility in victory" and "introspection in defeat"

There's a lot of stuff in his The Hindu opinion piece that I agree with, especially on BJP and Congress. Here's an excerpt about the latter:

the party needs to guard against the hubris that usually accompanies the kind of dramatic, unexpected victory it has just received. The INC defeated the Left fair and square but must realise that its success owes more to the social-democratic elements of its economic policies than to the ‘reforms’ the party’s more affluent backers espouse. Second, vanquishing the politics the BJP stands for requires more than electoral success. The socio-economic and administrative support structures on which the politics of communalism thrives need to be dismantled through careful, sensitive intervention. The party must resist the old Congress way of pandering to identity politics as a low-cost way of doing the right thing by India’s diverse electorate. India’s Muslims, for example, want equal opportunities and justice, not the banning of a book or the expulsion of a Taslima Nasreen. Providing these will involve taking on entrenched interests and attitudes, especially in the police and administration, something the Congress has always shied away from doing.

Finally, the re-election of the UPA must not be seen as a licence to indulge in the ‘Congress culture’ of the past. The public got a glimpse of that culture when some leaders started pushing for Rahul Gandhi to be made Prime Minister as soon as the scale of the party’s victory became apparent. Sonia Gandhi did well to nip these demands in the bud. If she can go further by pensioning off entrenched interests and democratising the functioning of the party’s leadership, the Congress will be better placed to meet the expectations of those who have voted for it.

The stuff about "Congress culture" is quite scary. Just look at the kind of hardball they play with people like Lalu Yadav and Mulayam Singh Yadav; heck, look at the way they are dealing with Karunannidhi! If the arrogance is so palpable even without a UPA majority, just imagine how much worse it could get if Congress had the majority all by itself ...

Another part of the Congress culture is the shameless sycophancy to the "Ruling Family." To be fair, both Sonia Gandhi and Rahul Gandhi appear -- so far -- grounded enough to rebuff attempts by immature Congresswallahs (including one by Arjun Singh about a year ago) about making the latter the PM. Rahul has also made the right noises about institutionalizing democracy within their party. Let's hope they stick to their views in spite of their obsequious partywallahs.

Sensible Sensex?

Five years ago, just after the results of Elections-04 were out, the stock market's reaction was one of utter horror. The Sensex lost over 17 % in two consecutive trading sessions.

That initial reaction proved to be a horribly poor indicator of where the Sensex and the broader economy were headed during the following five years.

The stock market's first reaction to Elections-09 was euphoric; the Sensex went up (17 %) so fast that trading was stopped within a minute of the opening of the markets last Monday.

Let's just hope the markets got it right this time.

Vote shares

In Elections-09, Congress had a vote share of 28.6 % in 2009; up about 2 % over 2004. BJP, on the other hand, ended up with about 18.8 %, down about 3.5 % from 2004.

The vote share difference widened, then, from 4.5 % in 2004 to almost 10 % in 2009.

This statistic, however, is not all that useful, because these two parties contested in alliance with others, so we really ought to look at the performance of these alliances -- UPA and NDA. Also, the number of constituencies in which the two parties (and perhaps the two alliances) contested are likely different.

This statistic also doesn't take into account the diversity of contests in our States. At one extreme, we have straight fights (in Delhi, for example); and at the other, we have multicornered contests (in UP, for example) with multiple players with roughly equal strength.

In Delhi's one-on-one contests, your vote share has to be close to 50 % to win (indeed, Congress did get 57 % against BJP's 35 % or so).

In UP, on the other hand, we had a four-cornered contest. Thus, BSP, SP, and Congress got 27.4, 23.3. and 18.3 %, respectively. They won, respectively, 20, 24 and 21 seats.

In other words, even though BSP had a 4 % and a 9 % lead in votes over SP and Congress, its seat tally was less than theirs! No wonder Mayawati is upset.

In between these two extremes, we have situations where a minor (third place) player whose small vote share is also larger than the difference between the winner and the runner-up. In AP, for example, Chiranjeevi's party played such a role. Or, Raj Thackeray's MNS in Maharashtra. P. Sainath alluded to a similar role by BSP in Vidarbha region of Maharashtra. In many constituencies, rebel candidates also play this role.

I'm looking for some state-wise analysis of vote shares to see how things panned out for the UPA and NDA. Similarly, I'm also looking for some data on how the women, different caste, religious, income and age groups voted in different states. (I'm not yet ready to buy all the glib TV talk about Muslims switching to Congress in UP ...).

In the meantime, all I have found are these pieces.

Gender, Money, Criminal Profile of the 15th Lok Sabha

Some quick numbers from The Telegraph (numbers in bold have been added):

The 15th Lok Sabha will have 46 women [8.5 % (or) about 1 in 12], the second highest after the 13th Lok Sabha’s 49 [9.0 %]. Uttar Pradesh elected 12 women, and Bengal and Andhra Pradesh six each. Only 556 of the 8,070 candidates (6.9 per cent) were women, but they had an 8 per cent success rate (one in 12 won) compared with 6.5 per cent for the men.

Some 300 of the new MPs are crorepatis compared with the previous House’s 154, shows an analysis by civil society group Association for Democratic Reforms. Economically backward Uttar Pradesh has thrown up 52 of them, followed by Maharashtra (37), Andhra (31) and Karnataka (25). The Congress accounts for 138 and the BJP for 58. Four own more than Rs 100 crore. Telugu Desam’s Nama Nageswara Rao, who defeated Renuka Chowdhury, is the richest at Rs 173 crore, followed by Naveen Jindal (Congress).

Some 150 of the new MPs — more than one in four — face one or more criminal cases, compared with 128 in 2004. Some 73 are charged with serious offences. The BJP has 42 such MPs, followed by the Congress (41). Among states, UP tops with 31, followed by Maharashtra at 23. Eight face at least 10 cases. Those with five or more cases include Varun Gandhi and Tapas Pal.

How good were the exit polls?

Exit pollsters should join BJP and the Left parties in doing some serious introspection. As Churumuri shows, their record has been quite pathetic in both 2004 and 2009.

Vinod Mehta, Editor of Outlook, tells us why he stopped doing exit polls: "In 2004, all of us pundits and pollsters had their reputation in shreds. And I personally decided that Outlook would no longer be part of this hazardous prediction game."