Fools like many other things come in a large variety and generally live ordinary and inconsequential lives with some or no deleterious effects on the lives of others except their families, friends and a few others. It is when they acquire power or are hoisted to it by a combination of chance, opportunity ambition, desire or sometimes talent, that they like Enterococcus Coli, metamorphose from being commensals to deadly pathogens causing debility, disease or death of their host, society or nation. 

A prime example is Manmohan Singh, the current prime minister of India. He is honest, educated, sincere, ambitious but unthinking. He has never been elected to any office and lost the election when he contested one. He got his doctorate from LSE in England and held positions at the World Bank and the Reserve Bank of India and became the finance minister of India under the rule of the Congress under Narsimha Rao.  

He was not a civil servant or bureaucrat and by taking up a minister-ship in a parliamentary government, had to subscribe to the party platform and philosophy. The Congress was running a license Raj with severe socialistic policies and limitless corruption. His ambition and desire for power trumped his good sense and high ethics. He had no personal economic beliefs or principles and did a 180 degree turnaround to capitalism, free markets and the neoliberal Washington consensus in 1991. Economic meltdown and collapse of the Soviet Union were responsible as well, but his behavior showed no fealty to economic or personal philosophy. After a few years as a private citizen, his lust for power still remained. He could not or did not win an election, but when Sonia Gandhi offered him the post of the prime minister, he grabbed it knowing full well that he would be a puppet. He lacked the confidence to even run in a bye-election.

Since then he has committed blunder after blunder to jeopardize India’s independence and national security. He made the ridiculous statement that Muslims must be given priority economic help over the rest of the citizens. He voted to take Iran’s case to the UN Security Council and nixed the Iran-Pakistan-India gas pipeline under American pressure. Under the same pressure he refused to attend the Shanghai Co-operative Organization meeting and wasted his trump card by alienating Russia and China. The crowning folly was the lying and subterfuge he used to sign the civil nuclear agreement with the US. He got no enrichment technology when the US reneged recently. He set India up for sanctions if it tests again and thus became subject to the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty without signing it. Recently the US twisted his arm to join the NPT as a non-nuclear power. Pretty soon he will be forced to sign on to the Fissile Material Control Treaty limiting the number of nuclear weapons. The backdoor acquiescence to the CTBT already limits the quality of India’s nuclear weapons because of the 1998 thermonuclear fizzle.

His meek willingness to resume talks with Pakistan and acknowledging Pakistan as a victim of terror instead of the perpetrator of terror at the Non-Aligned meeting in Cuba showed how foolish he is. To make it even worse, he once again meekly if not wrongly accepted the Pakistani statement that India was fomenting terrorism and separatism in Baluchistan at the Sharm-el-Sheikh meeting in Egypt. Under American pressure he nixed the testing of ICBM and Agni3-4, with no retaliating missile capability which can hit Beijing. He has delayed acquisition of attack helicopters, multi-role combat aircraft, howitzers and a modern air defense system, while Pakistan and China are rapidly upgrading their offensive capabilities. The Peoples’ Daily, an organ of the Chinese Communist Party recently published that India is best broken up into 20 or 30 different countries. China claims Arunachal and the claim is publicly repeated in India by the Chinese Ambassador and meek Manmohan Singh remains silent or did he apologize to China? The Chinese Ambassador should have been declared persona non grata and sent home.

The latest debacle is the recent discovery that some Chinese nationals came to India on a business visa and are working at some construction jobs possibly even airports. The Chinese Ambassador requested that their business visas be changed to work permits and we hear that the Indian home ministry is considering the request favorably. China on the other hand refuses to stamp Chinese visas on the passports of Indians from Arunachal and Kashmir and staples them as separate attachments. The implication is that it does not consider Kashmir and Arunachal as part of the Indian nation. Does the prime minister wants to exercise his favorite strategy of meekly knuckling under and apologize on behalf of the Indian nation. It would be compatible with his favorite role of being a puppet.

Another example of a puppet is the ideological one called Buddhudev Bhattacharya, the chief minister of the Indian state of West Bengal. The Indian army spokesman admitted that there have been Chinese incursions in to Arunachal and Ladakh. This ignorant ideological fool of a chief minister makes a public statement contradicting the Indian army and makes the absurd claim that the US is spreading lies about Chinese incursions in Indian territory to poison India’s and China’s relations. Somebody should make the idiot realize that the Chinese Ambassador to India claiming Arunachal, is not an American ventriloquist’s dummy. The reality is that he and the Indian Communist parties are China’s dummies. They are such fools that they don’t even realize that China is not even a communist nation. It is a capitalist dictatorship and the ruling party in West Bengal are fools if not traitors to the nation. 

These interesting species of idiots rule after winning elections so one wonders about the sanity of the majority of the state’s residents. Of course I understand that West Bengal is a poor state with high literacy like Kerala and its people vote their pocketbook. Why else would the Congress rule at the center to the whims of a foreign born Empress? The power lust of the corrupt crooked and shameless hacks who constitute the ruling coalition is part explanation, but NREGA, forgiveness of farmers’ debts and paltry pensions for the elderly are smart strategies and show greater decency than the fanatic religiosity and similar crooked corruption and equal lust for power of the B(loody) J(oothaa) P(akhandi)s.

A third variety of Indian fools, intoxicated partly by their histrionic or literary talent and by the accolades of western pseudo-liberals, lecture tours, publishing, music or film royalties and CIA or FSB funded NGO praise, pontificate without understanding history, realpolitik or human nature and encourage fissiparous proclivities in a multi-ethnic, multilingual nation (possibly inadvertently) and parade for unilateral disarmament of India. Some of them are well meaning but their concern for the poor and oppressed is mostly patronizing like that of cruise missile liberals of Harvard’s Carr Center urging humanitarian military intervention, but only when convenient.

Lastly, a recent event revealed a Hollywood bunch’s utter hypocrisy shared by some well known writers, journalists, Polish and French philosophers and politicians and other faux liberals. Roman Polanski, a prominent film director had taken a thirteen year old girl, plied her with champagne and Qualude and then raped and sodomized her without consent, thirty years ago when he was 43. He ran away from the US and settled in France using his French passport. He was born in Poland and presumably has a Polish passport as well. Over thirty years have passed and a few days ago he went to Switzerland to accept an award at the Zurich film festival. The US authorities asked the Swiss police to hold him on a still standing warrant for an absconding fugitive. The Swiss court will rule on the case. In the meantime a hundred prominent Americans and other Western nationals including a French philosopher, a French minister, Hollywood actresses and directors, a Polish minister, sundry US journalists, British writers sent a letter to the US and Swiss authorities to drop the case and free the criminal Polanski. Justice is meant to pursue and haunt the poor and powerless, not the rich, powerful and famous, who are exonerated by courts or congressional ethics committees. They like Bush, Cheney, Nixon, Kennedys are exempt from laws and punishment. No wonder people believe in god and afterlife and some even unfortunately and wrongly resort to terrorism.