Day: December 7, 2007

Islam’s Silent Moderates

The nation of India and the ideology of Islam have a long history. India was subjugated by Islam for many centuries and it bears those wounds till date. Now the entire globe is feeling the pain that Islam inflicts on what it calls “Dar ul Harb” or the “Land of War” (as opposed to it’s own dominion the “Dar ul Islam”.) India is unfinished business for Islam — as many high-ranking officials of Islam do remind us from time to time. In the Islamic division of humanity into two distinct factions, India is the land of infidels that must be brought under the sword of Islam. And that attempt is bleeding India. That explains why I occasionally focus on Islamic terrorism and triumphalism on this blog which is primarily concerned with India’s economic growth and development.

I am opposed to violent ideologies. I make no distinction between religious or secular ideologies. If it is violent, I am opposed to it. It’s ideology I oppose, and not people. I have nothing against Germans, for instance, but I am against Nazism. But Nazism is dead and Germans today themselves oppose Nazism. That ideology has been defeated by rationality and humanity — backed by superior fire power. Communism is not as violent on the surface but it inflicts incalculable harm on human society. I am opposed to it. Communism is dead around the world except in India where it persists in its cancerous influence. Islam is a religious ideology, and from all evidence historical and contemporary, causing harm to humanity. The people who follow it to the letter cannot coexist with non-believers. The fundamentals of that ideology do not allow peaceful co-existence — only subjugation or war. As subjugation is not possible at present, it is war by Islam against the rest.

Yes, the majority of Muslims are not violently opposed to non-Muslims all the time and in all places. But that does not in any way indicate that Islam itself is willing to compromise with non-believers. Surely there are moderate Muslims — just as there were Germans who did not fully subscribe to the Nazi supremacist dogma. But their mere existence did not moderate the horrors that Nazism inflicted on “undesirables”. The question was where were they? Why didn’t they prevail? Or at least, why didn’t they get heard? The question today is where are the moderate Muslims? Why don’t we hear from them as vociferously as the true believers of Islam? Ayaan Hirsi Ali opines about that in NY Times op-ed recently. I reproduce it fully here.
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Solar Power Investment — Followup

In the earlier post on Public Investment for Solar Power I had advocated that the government of India should spend a huge deal of money in research and development of the technology for using solar power.

This is a brief response to a couple of comments to that post. First, let’s recognize that the current state of the art does not allow the harnessing of solar energy on a scale that will make conventional fuels obsolete or even make a significant dent in their demand. That is precisely why more research and development is required. If doing the R&D were cheap and easy, we would not be having this discussion because it would have been done by some enterprising corporation already. The reason I put the figure around US$100 billion is because it is going to be a hard problem — you have to solve all sorts of related issues, from storage technology to fabrication of photo-voltaic devices to the mass manufacture of associated equipment.

Second, public investment does not mean that a bunch of government entities will be doing the R&D. Funding is public but the actual work can be entirely in the private sector. The hard problem is to create the mechanism which would allocate the funds to the most productive teams. One way would be to create an independent authority or an institution along the lines of the National Science Foundation or NASA of the US.

Technology does not spontaneously arise out of thin air. Someone somewhere at some time has to have the will to make the effort to develop it. So far for all practical purposes all the modern technologies are developed in the West, particularly in the US. It is time for us to pause and wonder why it never happens in India. Are Indians incapable of developing technology? Surely they are not dumber than any other large aggregate of people. Are they lacking resources? Not really, because India is a large country, even though it is poor in per capita income and wealth. So what is the missing ingredient? I think it is a lack of vision, a lack of national pride. Sometimes in a dark mood I think that Indians are a nation of followers, not leaders.