Aam Aadmi Party's win in Delhi

The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP - translates to Indian People's Party)  led by Narendra Modi won convincingly in the national parliamentary elections because Modi had a credible message of good governance and economic development.   This despite the "Hindu nationalism" charge constantly thrown against the BJP.   As M.J. Akbar narrated, Modi told people that they could have Hindu-Muslim fights and remain poor, or they could work together and prosper.

Now Arvind Kejriwal and his Aam Aadmi Party (Ordinary People's Party) have swept the state elections in New Delhi.  This despite Kejriwal's various previous missteps.  The promise again was of corruption-free governance, and of government attention to the needs of ordinary people.

While the punditosphere is full of analysis of what all this means for the BJP, the Aam Aadmi Party, for the Congress Party (which is now virtually wiped out), to me it seems that the Indian electorate has moved away from identity politics - voting for one's religious group or caste.  Perhaps not yet decisively, they may relapse a bit, in the two-steps forward, one-step backwards dance that is the nature of progress in real life.  Performance and ideas matter a little bit more than identity now. 

It is very fortunate that Communism is a spent force now, just when the Indian electorate, more open to ideas, might have become enamored with it.   Per the Marxist commentaries that I read, the Communists found that caste-solidarity overcame all their attempts to initiate a class struggle in India, and they were rethinking how to use caste struggles to bring about the glorious Communist Revolution.

I wish well both the parties, ruling Delhi and ruling India from Delhi.  Each has in its grasp a not-easy-to-repeat historic opportunity to transform India in a very good way.  All the indicators are positive; if they squander their opportunities, it will be a tragedy of global proportions.

The Cure to Racism?

Over on the Partition of India blog, is posted an excerpt from a paper by Venkat Dhulipala, which describes Maulana Shabbir Ahmad Usmani's Quranic/historic justification for Pakistan, that was influential in the founding of Pakistan.

One thing bothered me:

Usmani outlined Pakistan's significance to Islam in the modern world by declaring that Pakistan was the first step in the process of self purification of Muslims, purging them of all their earlier narrow identities based on race, class, sect, language and region and creating an equal brotherhood of Islam as had been the case in Medina.

The problem with this equal brotherhood is that it deals with differences by trying to eradicate them.  Eliminate differences in language by forcing everyone to one language.  Eliminate differences in tradition by eliminating all pre-Islamic literature and art.  Eliminate differences in dress by getting everyone into one costume. 

It is as though, since we all have different faces, any "narrow identity" based on the face can be dissolved by requiring everyone to keep their face covered with a strip of black cloth.  (Even so, some will try to decorate the black cloth.)

This equal brotherhood idea is not a way of living with being different.  It is closer to "if you are different, you don't live".    It as though religious edict can negate reality. 

This project has resulted in the colossal failure that is Pakistan.

Do Not Multi-Task!

http://www.theguardian.com/science/2015/jan/18/modern-world-bad-for-brain-daniel-j-levitin-organized-mind-information-overload

Russ Poldrack, a neuroscientist at Stanford, found that learning information while multitasking causes the new information to go to the wrong part of the brain. If students study and watch TV at the same time, for example, the information from their schoolwork goes into the striatum, a region specialised for storing new procedures and skills, not facts and ideas. Without the distraction of TV, the information goes into the hippocampus, where it is organised and categorised in a variety of ways, making it easier to retrieve.

Prime Minister Modi's answer to the question - Why do we need the state?

At the star-studded (Krugman, Bhagwati, Taleb included) Economics Time Business Summit, Prime Minister Narendra Modi provided an answer to American Libertarians and Republicans.

Why do we need the state? There are five main components:

.. The first is public goods such as defence, police and judiciary.

.. The second is externalities which hurt others, such as pollution. For this, we need a regulatory system.

.. The third is market power, where monopolies need controls.

.. The fourth is information gaps, where you need someone to ensure that medicines are genuine and so on.

.. Last, we need a well-designed welfare and subsidy mechanism to ensure that the bottom of society is protected from deprivation. This especially includes education and health care.


These are five places where we need government.

Read more at:
http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/articleshow/45914598.cms


PS: more excerpts from Modi's speech here.

21F

Je Suis Charlie - Sand Artist Sudarshan Patnaik

On the failure to engage with one's own traditions

Pakistan has a law punishing blasphemy that is quite horrible in practice.  Pakistan's tiny "liberal" elite, which is rather disdainful of their traditional systems (as is the Indian "liberal" elite) finds it impossible to change the operation of the law (e.g., do a full investigation instead of arrest first, investigate later), let alone amend it.  The Governor of Punjab, Salman Taseer, was gunned down four years ago by his own bodyguard, Mumtaz Qadri, for committing the blasphemy of criticizing the blasphemy law. Sherry Rehman got into trouble for proposing legislation about the blasphemy law.

It seems that the political configuration in Pakistan doesn't want to hear about freedom of speech, secularism, etc., etc., it prefers its blasphemy law.

But it seems that the blasphemy law, as it stands, is not in accord with Islamic tradition.   This article by Arafat Mazhar goes into it in some detail, but briefly,  Pakistan follows the Hanafi school of Islamic law; and while the Hanafi law makes blasphemy an offense, it makes it a pardonable offense; it certainly does not carry the mandatory death sentence that the Pakistani law has.  Why does the Pakistani law carry a death sentence?  I think it is because few of the people in charge have seriously engaged with their own tradition.

If the Pakistani liberals want a state that has laws that look like a modern secular European state, they are going to fail; if they want a state that has justice, regardless of what the laws look like, and that has the support of the generally Islamized population, they are going to have to engage seriously with their traditions.

PS: Part 2 of Arafat Mazhar's article.

There is a similar problem in India; a lot of the intellectuals at the top do not engage seriously with the Indian traditions.  Most of the Indic traditions are a embarrassment to them; and they basically engage in exercises of trying to wean people off of them.  Michel Danino points out this failure in an article in the Hindu.

Language and Genetics in the British Isles

The British Isles might be a good case to examine for the relationship between population genetics and languages.   In that context, I found this article in the popular press: Myths of British Ancestry, by Stephen Oppenheimer, Prospect Magazine, October 21, 2006.  No doubt science has advanced some more in the past eight years, but this might be a good starting point.

Notice that the Celtic languages are Indo-European and per this author they spread with agriculture, not with the horse. (Supposedly horses were being domesticated in the Eurasian steppes 6000-5500 years ago.)

Given the distribution of Celtic languages in southwest Europe, it is most likely that they were spread by a wave of agriculturalists who dispersed 7,000 years ago from Anatolia.... 

 Moreover, the conventional invasion & genocide theories are deprecated.

The other myth I was taught at school, one which persists to this day, is that the English are almost all descended from 5th-century invaders, the Angles, Saxons and Jutes, from the Danish peninsula, who wiped out the indigenous Celtic population of England......

The genocidal view was generated, like the Celtic myth, by historians and archaeologists over the last 200 years. With the swing in academic fashion against “migrationism” (seeing the spread of cultural influence as dependent on significant migrations) over the past couple of decades, archaeologists are now downplaying this story, although it remains a strong underlying perspective in history books.

Whither Pakistan? Tarek Fateh with Dr Baland Iqbal

Sorry, Urdu/Hindi speakers only. Tarek Fateh dissects and examines under the microscope the Pakistani mindset. He sees as the only solution the dissolution of Pakistan into its four provinces.

Update: for the Hindi/Urdu challenged, my rough notes below the fold.

Indo-European Invasions into Europe

http://www.theguardian.com/science/2014/sep/18/ancient-ancestors-europeans-dna-study

The findings suggest that the arrival of modern humans into Europe more than 40,000 years ago was followed by an influx of farmers some 8,000 years ago, with a third wave of migrants coming from north Eurasia perhaps 5,000 years ago. Others from the same population of north Eurasians took off towards the Americas and gave rise to Native Americans.

Genetically speaking, there seems to be no trace of any genetically significant movement of Indo-European people into Europe either (unless it is the farmers, but linguists think that 8000 years ago is too far back.  The last population-genetically significant influx of people into India was 12,000 years ago or earlier.)  On the other hand, the vocabulary of a language like Greek is estimated to be more than 30% non-Indo-European (e.g., compared to less than 4% of the 10,000 word vocabulary of the Rg Veda), so a elite dominance language replacement theory might work for Greece, where it can't work for the language of the Rg Veda.  The only way it might work is if an Indo-European language was superposed on a previous Indo-European language.

Replies to climate-change deniers

A good resource with replies to some of the more "scientific" climate-change deniers.

Bee on the Scientific Method

Bee (Sabine Hossenfelder) has an essay worth your time: Does the Scientific Method need Revision?

IBM's predictions from December 2009

IBM's predictions for today from five years ago:

ARMONK, N.Y.     - 17 Dec 2009: Today, IBM (NYSE: IBM) unveiled a list of innovations that have the potential to change how people live, work and play in cities around the globe over the next five to ten years:
·         Cities will have healthier immune systems
·         City buildings will sense and respond like living organisms
·         Cars and city buses will run on empty
·         Smarter systems will quench cities’ thirst for water and save energy
·         Cities will respond to a crisis -- even before receiving an emergency phone call

Lessons from a school shooting

Both houses of the Indian Parliament observed a moment of silence and passed resolutions condemning the killing of school children in Peshawar, Pakistan.

Beyond the natural empathy one feels at the cruel loss of young lives, there are some sharp lessons to be learned.

The Invasion That Never Was

Anand Rangarajan, here:

But it was the publication in 2011 of a path-breaking study that ultimately sealed the fate of the Aryan Invasion or Migration theory. Analysing 600,000 SNPs from as many as 30 ethnic groups – thereby extending the 2009 Nature ANI study through the inclusion of more European samples – Toomas Kivisild and co-workers discovered that both components of Indian ancestry, ANI and ASI, predate the Aryan Migration event by at least 9000 years. This was because the so-called k5 component, that bestows ancestry to South Asians, was found to contain no regional diversity differences; its spread across the Indian subcontinent must have happened well before 12,500 years ago (the detection limit) and not through a recent gene-flow event.

 In 2013 Singh and co-workers extended the Kivisild study with some acute observations, namely that the ANI and ASI populations mixed robustly between 1900 to 4200 years ago and that these two groups didn’t mix either before or after this window. The authors, by analysing genomes of 571 individuals representing 73 ethno-linguistic groups, also ruled out Eurasian gene flow during this time period, concurring with the finding of another study that such an event could not have happened before 12,500 years. Moreover, argued the scientists, 3500 years ago India was a already a densely populated region with well-established agricultural practices and therefore the Eurasian migration would have had to be immense in order to explain the fact that half the Indian population is derived from ANI.

The Aryan Migration event of 1500 BCE has also been questioned based on an authoritative haplogroup U linkage study wherein scientists found an extensive and deep late-Pleistocene link between Indians and Europeans, suggesting a coalescence near the time when Asia was initially being peopled. The migration that led to the Indo-Eurasian stock, according to these scientists, happened not 3,500 years ago but rather 12,500 years or earlier.

Another study, this time involving Y-DNA haplotyping, rules out substantial gene-flow from Europe to Asia at least since the mid-Holocene period, i.e. the last 6,500 years. It has also been shown that the gateway to the subcontinent, the Hindu Kush – where the earliest archaeological evidence of human remains dates back to 26,500 years before the Rig Veda – was a confluence of gene-flows in the early Neolithic period as opposed to an indigenous population.

There is one other way to corroborate that Eurasian migration happened much before the time-point vouched for by AMT proponents – skin colour. It has long been known that a single mutation, rs1426654, in the human pigmentation gene SLC24A5 accounts for the lighter skin tone of Europeans. A year ago, scientists discovered that an allele of the rs1426654 mutation was shared among many South Asian and Western Eurasian populations. The coalescence was calculated to be 22000-28000 years ago, with the frequency of occurrence of this mutation – called the allele frequency – found to be significantly higher in the ANI compared to the ASI.

The verdict of population genetics is clear, and profound, as pointed out subsequently by the lead author of the Nature study Dr Lalji Singh himself: “There is no genetic evidence that Indo-Aryans invaded or migrated to India. It is high time we re-write India’s prehistory based on scientific evidence.”

The Morning Moon

Fear

The transcript of the proceedings of the grand jury that examined the death of Michael Brown at the hands of police officer Darren Wilson, on August 9, on the streets of Ferguson, MO, is interesting on many counts.  

Here is one excerpt that caught my eye.

Another Aatish Taseer Essay

Must-read: A Historical Sense: What Sanskrit has meant to me
http://www.openthemagazine.com/article/art-culture/a-historical-sense

Excerpt beneath the fold.

A telling Twitter exchange

FYI:

On twitter, I followed Sonia Faleiro, who is an author, and writes commentary on India for the New York Times and such.

I was blocked after this exchange:

Sonia Faleiro:
"Lakhs of years ago Sage Kanad conducted a nuclear test" says BJP MP determined to take India back lakhs of years: http://www.hindustantimes.com/india-news/ancient-india-conducted-nuke-tests-claims-former-uttarakhand-chief-minister-ramesh-pokhriyal-nishank/article1-1293029.aspx

Me:
@soniafaleiro LOL, back to the Sat-Yuga, I suppose!
@soniafaleiro Tho ancients having technology lost till modern times is a bit more rational than parting of Red Sea or man rising from dead

I wouldn't have mentioned it except that I noticed this morning that this "liberal" has blocked me.

That is, if the BJP MP said that "lakhs of years ago Sage Kanad conducted a nuclear test" is how he reads and interprets his "religious scriptures", and so is a part of his "religious belief", it is still irrational and inadmissible and wrong;  but God's parting of the Red Sea for Moses or the resurrection of Jesus, that is a legitimate matter of Christian belief and my saying it is less rational than the (non-supernatural) idea that the ancients had technology that was lost and that we again have only in modern times is bad manners.

Prof. Shivaramakrishnan discusses Dharampal

One must absolutely listen to these.

Part 1/3: