Census: Hindu share dips below 80%, Muslim share grows but slower

 The share of Hindus in India’s population has shown the sharpest dip in a decade since Independence and has dropped below 80 per cent.

According to figures of the religion census of 2011, yet to be officially released, Hindus comprised 78.35 per cent of the total population of 121.05 crore, compared with 80.45 per cent of the total population in 2001. In absolute terms, however, the Hindu population increased 14.5 per cent from 82.75 crore to 94.78 crore during the period (2001-11).

The 2011 religion census data also shows that the share of Muslims in the population has risen 80 basis points (one basis point is one-hundredth of a percentage point) from 13.4 per cent in 2001 to 14.2 per cent with some border states showing a high increase. This decadal increase in share, however, is lower than the 1.7 percentage points increase registered in the previous decade, 1991-2001.

In absolute terms, the number of Muslims increased 24.4 per cent to 17.18 crore from 13.8 crore during the period 2001-11. And during the previous five decades — 1951 to 2001 — their share rose from 9.8 per cent to 13.4 per cent.

The share of Hindus over the previous five decades — between 1951 i.e. post-partition and 2001 — dropped 3.65 percentage points from 84.1 per cent to 80.45 per cent of the total population. Again in absolute terms, the Hindu population more than doubled (172 per cent increase) from 30.36 crore to 82.75 crore during the 50 years till 2001. The drop in share of Hindus, due to a steady dip in the rate of growth of the Hindu population, comes on the back of rising education and income levels of the majority community.

Last Wednesday, Union Home Minister Rajnath Singh had announced that the religion data of census 2011 would be released soon. The data was ready in January 2014 but the UPA government, facing a resurgent BJP, took the decision not to release the data ahead of the Lok Sabha elections. In normal course, the data from the religion census is released within three years of the census enumeration exercise being completed. By this yardstick, the data should have been out by March 2014.

The share of other religious groups like Sikhs and Christians in the total population remained steady at a little over 2 per cent each, roughly in the same range as in the 2001 census.

The Census 2011 data shows that since independence, the share of Hindus has dropped by 5.75 percentage points while the share of Muslims has risen by slightly more than 4 percentage points. According to the 1951 census, Hindus comprised 84.1 per cent of the population post partition, after the inflow of Hindus from Pakistan and the outflow of Muslims at partition changed in the country’s demography. Hindus comprised just about 66 per cent of the population of India before partition.

Registrar General of India C Chandramouli briefed the Home Minister again on Thursday about the findings of the religion census before it is finally released. However, home

- ministry sources said with the dates for Assembly elections in Delhi and bypolls in six states already announced and the poll code of conduct in place, the announcement could be pushed to next month or even to after the Budget session of Parliament. Chandramouli, the officer who has dealt with the religion data since it was collated in 2011, was given a three-month extension in December 2014.

Don’t doubt your ability: Abdul Kalam to youngsters -

Former President APJ Abdul Kalam on Saturday asked youngsters never to doubt their ability as he recalled his “doubt and confusion” when then ISRO chairman Satish Dhawan had asked him to make a rocket system to put satellite into orbit in a period of seven years.

“One fine day he said, Kalam you can take the budget you want, the number of people want and anything needed I will get it sanctioned from the cabinet, but you have to do this.

“I was surprised and confused, there were many people senior to me in my establishment. Why me? Will I be able to do it? I was doubtful. You should not be,” the 83-year-old scientist told youngsters who thronged the Diggi Place here to hear his address at the ongoing Jaipur Literature Festival.

He gave the mantra, “I dream and I will fly one day.”

“I always dreamt of being a pilot, so I enrolled myself into a course of aeronautical engineering. When I went before the selection panel to become a pilot, there were 10 contestants and 9 seats and I was the one to be dropped.

“I was disheartened that I could not become a pilot but I became the President of India,” Kalam said during a session titled ‘The visionary: Dr APJ Abdul Kalam’.

“When I became the President I told the Air Chief to teach me how to fly and he trained me for six months. I did not become a pilot but I could still fulfil my dream of flying, because I dreamt that I will fly. Dreams transform into thoughts and thoughts result into action,” he said, as the crowd burst into a large round of applause.

Kalam  made the youngsters repeat after him and vow to make India and world a better place to live.

“When there is righteousness in the heart there is a beauty in the character…when there is beauty in the character there is already in the home…when there is already in the home there is order in the nation and when there is order in the nation there is peace in the world…,” he said as people repeated after him.

“Take a vow…that whatever you do in life you will always think what I can give. All the trouble starts when we think ‘what I can get’ , that’s where the roots of corruption are,” he said.

Sharing his vision for 2020 and beyond, which are also the titles of his two books — Vision 2020 and Beyond 2020, Kalam said that the five key areas the country needs to focus upon are education, infrastructure, entrepreneurship, health and sustainable development.

“We need to transform our education system too. My suggestion is that 30 per cent of the syllabus in class 9-12 should be reduced and skill-based courses should be introduced in

- schools. “So, when a child passes out of class 12, he has two certificates one of his academic credentials and another of his school credential. “Similarly in colleges, there should be a concept of a degree plus diploma in the same fashion,” he said. Kalam said that entrepreneurship is the key to economic development of the country and to fulfilment of VISION 2020 as well. “We need more employment generators and not employment seekers. Our IT sector is doing well, pharmacy is doing well, our agriculture is just excellent. We need more infrastructural development,” he said - 

Intangibles and deliverables

When they meet, the core challenge before Narendra Modi and Barack Obama will be how best to harness their personal and national goodwill towards each other for positive outcomes that relate to the concerns of the common people

In two days, U.S. President Barack Obama will grace India’s Republic Day celebrations with his presence. Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s invitation to him to do so was not impulsive, though it took Mr. Obama by surprise. It is an affirmation of India’s willingness to invest in its relationship with the United States, and signals India’s belief that the two countries are good for each other. During his visit to Washington last September, Mr. Modi got a sense of the perception of India held by the U.S. leadership — its administration, business, and Congress. Finding positive resonance, he decided to request a return visit from Mr. Obama, who accepted the invitation upon realising its significance.

It is in its intangibles that this visit will be evaluated, not just on the balance sheet of deliverables. “The Obama visit served its main purpose simply when announced,” quipped Ambassador K.S. Bajpai. “It signalled that India can again be taken seriously, and that America is in the forefront of doing so.” Much of what will happen next will depend on India’s economic trajectory and the diligent management of relations by the leadership of the two countries.

A ‘two-way street’

India’s invitation to the U.S. President came at a time when both the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank predicted that India is on its way to overtake China’s growth. Indeed, the economic outlook has turned optimistic on both sides, a contrast to 2008-2009, when growth subsided and bilateral relations became ambivalent. With cheaper energy and recovery of manufacturing, U.S. industrial employment has increased. Mr. Modi’s meetings in New York and Washington convinced American businesses about a potential exponential spurt in India-U.S. commercial exchanges and investments.

U.S. mandarins and think tank experts remain somewhat sceptical, however. They insist that any relationship is a “two-way street,” and that a pronounced pro-American affirmation was missing in Mr. Modi’s discourse. During his interaction with the Council on Foreign Relations in New York, Ken Juster reflected these concerns when he asked Mr. Modi about India’s vision for a “strategic partnership” with the U.S., and the potential for collaboration between them to work on regional and global issues. Mr. Modi’s answer got lost in translation. Meanwhile, sections of the Washington élite are trying to muddy the optics of Mr. Obama’s visit by making fun of his lame duck tour to watch a parade, allegedly neglecting his domestic agenda.

“The U.S. government appears anxious about India’s regulatory environment, intellectual property rights protection standards, local content provisions, and the absence of a bilateral investment treaty.”

The bilateral relationship has considerably evolved from the early decades of estrangement, which were punctuated by positive exchanges that did not leave a long-term impact. The Cold War legacy of viewing India as a nuisance is long since over. Mr. Obama looks at India-U.S. ties as “one of the defining partnerships of the 21st century.”

Indeed, there has been a steady transformation of India-U.S. relations from about the end of Mr. Clinton’s presidency. Though modest, bilateral trade has shown a consistent upward trajectory. India is a serious buyer of U.S. weapons, and carries out more military exercises with U.S. forces than those of any other country. There are more Indian students in the U.S. than anywhere else, and the Indian diaspora is nowhere more prosperous than there. Among the great powers, the U.S. has done the most to extricate India from a technology denial regime, bringing the two closer than ever.

Bilateral drivers of the relationship
When they meet, the core challenge of the two leaders will be how best to harness their personal and national goodwill towards each other for positive outcomes that relate to the concerns of the common people.

India and the U.S. need each other because better ties will help create more jobs, growth and development. Within the wide spectrum of the India-U.S. engagement, the areas of defence, energy, and technology hold the greatest promise. The employment-generating “Make in India” effort, focussed on power, communications, electronics, and high-technology engineering, is not for providing shoddy goods for the home market but to make India globally competitive. With the world’s best technology, the U.S. will be India’s preferred partner in this endeavour.

On defence cooperation, the challenge is to utilise the Defence Framework Agreement and the Defence Trade and Technology Initiative to propel co-development and joint production of defence equipment and platforms. On co-production, after initial reticence, India has indicated a willingness to proceed on four of the 17 items on offer, and has presented a supplementary list of 13 more. In the talks thus far, possible agreement is confined to two modest proposals, the short-range UAV Raven and a surveillance module for the C-130 Hercules aircraft. The rest will be considered only “down the line.”

India’s military modernisation cannot be done without proactive cooperation with the U.S. India needs greater deterrence capacity, including a bigger naval presence in the Indo-Pacific. A case in point on what more can be done is underwater drones. These can be used at ocean choke points, such as the Strait of Malacca, which abuts the Andaman Sea, through which a Chinese nuclear attack submarine passed last autumn. Following a joint U.S.-Singapore exercise last October, the U.S. Chief of Naval Operations confirmed U.S.-led underwater surveillance cooperation with Australia, Japan, Korea and Singapore. Can the U.S. help India develop and build undersea and high-altitude drones, or help us lease a nuclear submarine? That could capture the imagination of Indians.

The U.S. government appears anxious about India’s regulatory environment, intellectual property rights (IPR) protection standards, local content provisions, and the absence of a bilateral investment treaty. There is an exaggerated fear of compulsory licensing for pharmaceuticals. India’s exclusion from the Trans-Pacific Partnership negotiations is held as an example of India being a trade outlier.

The U.S. helped resolve India’s concerns about agricultural subsidy, thereby paving the way for the World Trade Organization’s agreement on trade facilitation. India has introduced market reforms in its own interest. Its recovery is being propelled by improved decision-making, targeted deregulation, increased infrastructure investment, and greater business confidence. India remains committed to an open, rule-based international trading regime. To expect it to accept a higher standard on IPR protection, above and beyond India’s existing multilateral commitments, will be unrealistic.

India has counter-concerns about protectionism and the new U.S. immigration law and has mildly protested in WTO discussions against the U.S. “Buy America” legal provisions. The U.S. refusal to negotiate a Totalization Agreement with India really rankles, when countries like Finland and Sweden have concluded such an agreement with India. Indian H-1B workers contribute, by way of “involuntary” deductions, an estimated $3 billion annually to the U.S. Social Security Trust Fund towards pensions they will never receive because their stay in the U.S. will not be long enough.

On climate change, the Sino-U.S. agreement is being held out as an example for India to emulate. China’s current emissions are four times larger than India’s and over twice that of the U.S. Given the wide gap between the emissions of India and China, as also the different levels of economic development, the question of India capping its emissions is premature. India’s focus instead will be on practical cooperative measures on energy efficiency and non-conventional sources of energy, again a key area of India-U.S. partnership.

The bilateral agenda is full and there are clear issues on the table from both sides. While officials have been labouring below-the-radar to untangle some of these, the directions from the leadership will provide breakthroughs over time, as India-U.S. exchanges have demonstrated, most notably on the civil nuclear agreement.

The strategic relationship

If the India-U.S. relationship is to become more robust, there has to be greater strategic entente. This must start with India’s neighbourhood, where the historic policy discordance has abated, but not been fully bridged. On China, though uncoordinated, there is now a remarkable similarity of approach. Both India and the U.S. seek comprehensive engagement with China, are reinforcing ties with countries on China’s periphery, strengthening their own military preparedness, and seeking to revitalise their economies.

In contrast, a telling hiatus has developed in India-U.S. strategic dialogue in other areas of India’s contiguity. It was so earlier in respect of Myanmar, and now on Bangladesh. At the time of elections there last year, China and India found themselves together against extremist and sectarian forces intent on disrupting the polls, while the U.S. seemingly stood on the other side. If the U.S. President were to go by the standard U.S. positions, he might suggest a course for Indian policy towards Pakistan — normalisation of relations, resumption of dialogue, and strategic stability. Instead, he might do better by discussing stability in both Afghanistan and Pakistan about which India has its worries. There is clearly room for a fuller India-U.S. dialogue on security in West Asia and Central Asia, the management of the Indian Ocean, and what U.S. rebalancing in Asia really means in material terms for India and the Indo-Pacific.

The way ahead

India’s fractious democracy and its fundamental asymmetry with the U.S. will constrain its capacity to meet U.S. expectations of full reciprocity. This relationship must be painstakingly built, brick by brick. It can be done with commitment at the highest level, and sensitivity for each other’s concerns.

India-U.S. ties are rooted in common values and in increasingly convergent interests. Necessary and sufficient conditions do exist today for resetting this vital partnership. The ideological polarisation of their domestic politics does not impact adversely on its present and future trajectories. What the two countries need are steady hands to steer a proper course — Mr. Modi and Mr. Obama are preparing the ground for it by their positive narrative.

Carbon tax to meet climate concerns

India can display bold leadership by imposing a carbon tax on all fossil fuels in proportion to carbon dioxide emissions

Oil prices have plummeted since June 2014 by almost 60 per cent. This has obviously proved to be a bonanza for oil-importing countries like India just as it has seriously hurt oil-producing nations like Russia and Iran. The fall has been unexpected and what has added to the mystery is the behaviour of Saudi Arabia, the traditional “swing producer” in OPEC which has chosen not to cut production in order to boost prices.

The main reason now being adduced for the oil price decline is the re-emergence of the U.S. as a major hydrocarbon producer because of exploitation of its substantial shale deposits. Lower than anticipated demand, especially from countries like China, and anaemic economic growth in Europe have added to the pressure. As to the response of Saudi Arabia, the best guess is that it does not want to lose market share like it did the last time when it cut output to keep prices up. There are, of course, the usual conspiracy theories — that the Americans have put pressure on major OPEC oil producers not to cut output so that Russia could get hurt from falling prices. Another Byzantine view is that Saudi Arabia is not too unhappy with these prices since its arch-rival Iran is getting hurt and because over the medium-term it would discourage the development of new sources of supply that would threaten the Saudi position.

Revisiting an old idea

Whatever be its backdrop, the current oil price scenario offers the right moment for the international community as well as for major carbon emitter nations to revisit an old idea that has been around for quite some time as a way of dealing with the challenge of climate change — and this is a carbon tax. Economists mostly agree that such a carbon tax is the way to go, but it has faced tremendous political resistance, especially in the U.S. A couple of days ago, however, the influential economist Larry Summers, who has been a close adviser to both President Barack Obama and former President Bill Clinton, came out publicly in its favour, pointing out that a tax of $25 per tonne of carbon would add just 25 cents to the price of gasoline. There have been other intellectually weighty voices in the past who have advocated a carbon tax, William Nordhaus being perhaps the most prominent amongst them.

It is the political resistance to any form of taxation (what the late Sukhamoy Chakravarty, the distinguished Indian planner, had called the emerging fiscal sociology) that has led to systems of cap-and-trade being adopted to deal with the emissions problem. The EU has such a system, the Chinese have seven pilots and have announced a national initiative beginning next year, and the Americans too are putting it in place for carbon emissions from power plants. A cap-and-trade system puts a cap on the quantity of emissions (which is flexible) and the “rights” to emit are then traded for a price among classes of consumers. It has considerable appeal since it is “market-based” and it has actually been used very effectively to deal with the consequences of sulphur dioxide emissions from power plants in the U.S. (the “acid rain” problem as it is usually called). The cap-and-trade system does provide incentives for emission levels to decline. On the other hand, a carbon tax is much simpler and straightforward to design and administer since it does not involve fixing emission “quotas” for each emitting industry, which is technically very cumbersome.

“A carbon tax is simple to administer since it does not involve fixing emission 'quotas' for each emitting industry, which is technically very cumbersome”

William Nordhaus himself in his classic “The Climate Casino,” after an elaborate analysis of the two approaches, writes: “If I were put on the rack and forced to choose, I would admit that the economic arguments for carbon taxation are compelling, particularly those relating to revenues, volatility, transparency and predictability. So if a country is genuinely unsure, I would recommend it use the carbon tax approach.” Dale Jorgenson, one of the pre-eminent economists of our times, has taken the Nordhaus approach and asked the question: how to make it politically acceptable? In “Double Dividend: Environmental Taxes and Fiscal Reforms in the United States,” Mr. Jorgenson and his colleagues make out a persuasive case for a carbon tax in the U.S., but with a twist: that the revenues be used for a capital tax reduction with other countries free to recycle revenues in the matter they deem fit.

Actually, India has a carbon tax of sorts. It is not called as such but the United Progressive Alliance government’s budget of 2010-11 introduced a cess of Rs. 50 per tonne of both domestically produced and imported coal. Last year, this was doubled. However, the idea of this cess, it must be admitted, was less to curb carbon emissions but more to raise revenues for the National Clean Energy Fund. Of course, the Fund itself could well support carbon mitigation initiatives but its take-off has been slow so far since Finance Ministers see it as a source of mitigating not carbon but the fiscal deficit. The Fund has close to Rs. 15,000 crore already accumulated in it and this will grow rapidly as coal consumption increases. But the important point is that India already has an important half-step, even though its version of a carbon tax is not economy-wide and it is far below the levels that are generally accepted as being desirable (around $20-25 per tonne of carbon).

Mr. Summers’ plea comes with a catch: he wants the U.S. to impose a carbon tax on its own as well as a tax on the carbon tax on its imports, in order to goad other countries to adopt the carbon tax route. Perhaps he has China in mind since it has been estimated that at least a fifth of China’s emissions are because of its export sector. He seems to think that this will be World Trade Organization-compatible. But it will pose a huge threat to the world trading system which has produced tangible benefits for those who have harnessed its potential — like China and India — if it were to be used to meet climate policy objectives.

Requiring a different response

Some years ago, drawing inspiration from no less a person than Lord Keynes himself, the Nobel Laureate James Tobin proposed a tax on short-term currency transactions. This was later expanded to cover all short-term financial transactions and is widely known as the Tobin Tax. But it remains on paper as to which periodic obeisance is paid. The carbon tax is a similar development deity but it is an idea whose time has undoubtedly come given the current and expected oil price situation. In the past, oil prices have declined as they have in recent months; the commitment of countries to make the transition away from fossil fuels has perceptibly wavered. This time around, however, given the climate change imperative, our response has to be dramatically different. A carbon tax imposed on all fossil fuels in proportion to carbon dioxide emissions would signal that transformed thinking. It would generate the needed resources for low-carbon investments in a manner that does not add to the fiscal deficit and provide the impetus to a meaningful global agreement in Paris later this year in December. This could well be India’s moment of bold leadership

Meteorite’s magnetic memory gives clues to Earth’s future

Scientists have studied the magnetic memory contained in ancient meteorites, offering a tantalising glimpse of what may happen to the Earth’s magnetic core billions of years from now.

Using a detailed imaging technique, the researchers were able to read the magnetic memory contained in ancient meteorites, formed in the early solar system over 4.5 billion years ago.

The readings taken from these tiny ‘space magnets’ may give a sneak preview of the fate of the Earth’s magnetic core as it continues to freeze.

Using an intense beam of X-rays to image the nanoscale magnetisation of the meteoritic metal, researchers led by the University of Cambridge, UK, were able to capture the precise moment when the core of the meteorite’s parent asteroid froze, killing its magnetic field.

These ‘nano-paleomagnetic’ measurements, the highest-resolution paleomagnetic measurements ever made, were performed at the BESSY II synchrotron in Berlin.

The researchers found that the magnetic fields generated by asteroids were much longer-lived than previously thought, lasting for as long as several hundred million years after the asteroid formed, and were created by a similar mechanism to the one that generates the Earth’s own magnetic field.

The results help to answer many of the questions surrounding the longevity and stability of magnetic activity on small bodies, such as asteroids and moons.

The particular meteorites used for the study are known as pallasites, which are primarily composed of iron and nickel, studded with gem-quality silicate crystals.

Contained within these chunks of iron however, are tiny particles just 100 nanometres across – about one thousandth the width of a human hair – of a unique magnetic mineral called tetrataenite, which is magnetically much more stable than the rest of the meteorite, and holds within it a magnetic memory going back billions of years.

The researchers’ magnetic measurements, supported by computer simulations, demonstrated that the magnetic fields of these asteroids were created by compositional, rather than thermal, convection – meaning that the field was long-lasting, intense and widespread.

These meteorites came from asteroids formed in the first few million years after the formation of the Solar System. At that time, planetary bodies were heated by radioactive decay to temperatures hot enough to cause them to melt and segregate into a liquid metal core surrounded by a rocky mantle.

As their cores cooled and began to freeze, the swirling motions of liquid metal, driven by the expulsion of sulphur from the growing inner core, generated a magnetic field, just as the Earth does today.

“In our meteorites we’ve been able to capture both the beginning and the end of core freezing, which will help us understand how these processes affected the Earth in the past and provide a possible glimpse of what might happen in the future,” said Dr Richard Harrison of Cambridge’s Department of Earth Sciences, who led the researc

The eco-fundamentalists

The recent furore over the Modi government's ban on the Indian branch of Greenpeace receiving funding from its foreign parent raises some important issues. What should be the role of foreign NGOs in Indian democracy - particularly since, as I have argued at length in my Reviving the Invisible Hand, a host of the environmental ones are the stormtroopers of the anti-globalisation movement? What are their true aims? Is there any international civil society of which they can be taken to be the spokesmen, as they claim? And what are we to make of their local representatives who seek to influence their countries public policy to the agenda of their foreign sponsors?

NGOs are pressure groups which have been a part of the political process in the UK and US for over 200 years. The American "pluralist" school of political sociology has considered them to be benign, with perfect competition among interest groups, and the state acting as umpire, leading to the political analogue of the perfect competition paradigm of the economist. This benign view was punctured by Mancur Olson who showed that they are predatory: aiming to use the political process to obtain special benefits for their members at the expense of the common weal.

But, within the domestic domain, such distributional games need only concern the domestic polity. What is different about the international NGOs (particularly the green ones) is that instead of promoting sectional interests they are dealing with particular causes whose resonance comes from some form of universal moral claim. They are, in the apt phrase of my former University College of London colleague David Henderson (in his Misguided Virtue), "global salvationists", who resemble religious fundamentalists.

Anna Bramwell in her Ecology in the 20th Century: A History emphasises that the stronghold of environmentalism has been in Protestant Europe (Britain and Germany) and the United States. Its origins lie in the death of the Christian God with the scientific and Darwinian revolutions. As I argued in my Unintended Consequences, the West has been haunted by St Augustine's City of God. Carl Becker in his The Heavenly City of the Eighteenth Century Philosophers showed how the philosophesof the Enlightenment demolished Augustine's Heavenly City, only to rebuild it with more up-to-date materials. The Garden of Eden was replaced by Greece and Rome, and God became an abstract First Cause - the Divine Watchmaker - and instead of Holy Writ, God's laws were recorded in the Great Book of Nature that the scientific revolution of the 19th century had begun to decipher. But when Darwin showed that the Divine Watchmaker was blind, the Christian God died, as Nietzsche proclaimed from the housetops.

This did not, however, end variations on the theme of Augustine's City. There were two further mutations in the form of Marxism and Freudianism - and the more recent mutation in the form I have labelled Eco-fundamentalism (see my article in International Affairs, July 1995). This carries the Christian notion of contemptus mundi to its logical conclusion. Humankind is evil and only by living in harmony with a deified Nature can it be saved. As Professor Bramwell puts it, in the past the West was "able to see the earth as man's unique domain precisely because of God's existence…When science took over the role of religion in the 19th century, the belief that God made the world with a purpose in which man was paramount declined. But, if there was no purpose, how was man to live on the earth? The hedonistic answer, to enjoy it as long as possible, was not acceptable. If Man had become God, then he had become the shepherd of the earth, the guardian, responsible for the oekonomie of the earth". (p. 23).

The religious nature of the Green movement is further supported by its failure to admit that its predictions have been wrong, eg its Malthusian beliefs which have been belied by the "demographic transition" now spreading through the developing world. Based on faith rather than reason, it has great similarities with the religious fundamentalisms sweeping the world. For though it may appear that the environmental movement is "scientific" and hence "modern", whereas religious fundamentalists are "non-scientific" and "pre-modern", they both share a fear and contempt of the modernity whose central features are rightly seen to be an instrumental rationality that undermines humankinds traditional relationship with God or Nature.

The sense of loss with modernity's "disenchantment of the world" of the ecologists is paralleled by the fundamentalist's fear of losing cherished traditional lifestyles. Both are also pre-modern, claiming to have a privileged view of reality which brooks no discussion. Both too have adherents willing to use coercion (including violence) to impose their beliefs, as witness the various threats of physical violence and arson by animal rights activists on university medical researchers, and Greenpeace's own antics like the recent desecration of an ancient pre Inca World heritage site in Peru. These eco-fundamentalists are not Charlie Hebdo, but closer to the Islamist fundamentalists who slaughtered its journalists. As such the Modi government is right, in my view, in preventing foreign financing of their activities in the country.

Nor is their claim that they represent the world's citizens and thence an international civil society whose interests they serve, sustainable. There are no world citizens as there is no world polity. There are only citizens of nation-states to whom in democracies their governments are accountable. The chief characteristic of a state is the monopoly of coercive power, which in democracies is given to governments elected by the electorate, and only they can be responsible for making domestic and international laws.

What of the local agents of these eco-fundamentalists? They are best seen as what the Chinese called "Rice Christians". As citizens of the country they are free to pursue their secular religion as they see fit, but as with other religions in a secular state they can have no privileged position, nor can they use intimidation to enforce their beliefs. Their oft repeated claim that they represent the popular will was tested when the last government adopted much of their program under the aegis of a National Advisory Council stuffed with their activists, creating an environmental Permit Raj. The overwhelming rejection of this programme at the last elections showed their claim to be serving the popular will to be wrong. Moreover, to correct the damage the environmental license Raj has done to India's growth prospects, it needs to be repudiated along with the eco-fundamentalists - both foreign and local - who have promoted it.

Pointing at billionaires

The World Bank, in its report on inequality in South Asia, says that India has a disproportionate share of dollar-billionaires, and that they own a disproportionate share of the country's wealth. Almost all those billionaires - some 50 to 60 of them - hold the bulk of their wealth as shares in the companies they manage. As those share prices rise and fall, so does billionaire wealth.

Imagine what would happen if the government banned foreign institutional investors (the famed FIIs) from the stock market. Or, which comes to the same thing, the FIIs decided to exit India for reasons of their own. Since FIIs have long been the prime movers of the market, the stock marketwould collapse with their wholesale exit, and share prices would drop by a half or two-thirds. That is what happened in 2008-09, when the North American financial crisis caused the FIIs to pull their money out. The Sensex crashed from 21,000 to 8,000 in 14 months. That made many billionaires into mere millionaires, and naturally reduced wealth inequality.

I'm sure the poverty-stricken millions who have no wealth were very pleased, since inequality of wealth had come down. It may be a small matter that economic growth also slowed, as did the job market. How that helped the poor, we will have to ask the World Bank. You get the drift? There are many valid ways of assessing inequality in a society, and the World Bank looks at quite a few. But using the number of billionaires and their wealth as a proxy makes little sense, and it is a surprise that the World Bank should adopt this populist logic.

If India has more billionaires than before (15 years ago, it had only four), it is because the Indian economy began to look more attractive to FIIs. As they bought up stock, prices went up; the market value of all listed companies rose from less than 40 per cent of GDP to more than 80 per cent today. Naturally, the largest owners of stock, ie the promoters of companies, have been the biggest beneficiaries.

So why do the other countries of South Asia not have so many billionaires? That's simple; they don't have companies and economies that interest FIIs to the same degree. Pakistan's market capitalisation-to-GDP ratio is just 25 per cent. What about China? That's simple too; most of China's largest companies are owned by the state or its surrogates. In India, it is entrepreneurs who have been in the driving seat. To be sure, some of them have exploited opportunities in sectors where the government has a heavy controlling hand, which puts a shadow on the ways in which they have created their wealth. But they are in a minority. In any case, the government simply has to list companies like the Life Insurance Corporation, for the billionaires' share of stock market wealth to shrink.

Finally, bear in mind that, according to Credit Suisse's annual wealth report, 85 per cent of wealth in India is held in the form of physical assets like land; only 15 per cent is in financial form, and of that the bulk is in bank deposits. It's different in wealthy countries, where about half the wealth is held in financial form. When you look at billionaire wealth in India, remember that it is a small part of the 15 per cent. If you go by Credit Suisse, wealth inequality in India is less than in most countries.

And yet, there should be an agenda for action. India's taxes on wealth have two large gaps. The estate duty (abolished by VP Singh) should be re-instated; so should the tax on long-term capital gains in shares (abolished by Mr Chidambaram). Two thoughts for Mr Jaitley as he prepares his second Budget.