Some years ago when relations with Pakistan were in a good season, the Indian cricket team went on tour to the Islamic Republic. When they played in Lahore, many Indian cricket fans crossed the border to lend the team support. The Indian economy in those days was bursting with animal spirits. So among these fans were Indian industrialists who descended in private jets. A Pakistani friend said later that it was when they saw those private jets arrive that they first realised how far ahead of Pakistan the Indian economy had gone. It was good to see, she added, that it was not just Arab billionaires who were having all the fun. But, I knew from the way she said this that actually most Pakistanis were not happy about this.

As someone who knows Pakistan well, I learned long ago that nothing frightens Pakistanis more than the possibility that India could succeed and Pakistan fail. It may seem from Imran Khan’s recent rantings about the ‘fascist, Hindu Supremacist Modi government’ that it is Kashmir that Pakistanis care about more than anything. This is not true. Kashmir is not the ‘core problem’ between India and Pakistan as military men and jihadists next door like to say. The core problem is that if India becomes a mighty economic superpower and Pakistan remains a bankrupt nuclear power, then the whole exercise of breaking India to make a nation for the ‘pure’ could become meaningless.

India is already stronger economically, but we would have been much, much stronger if we had not reverted to economic policies that seek to redistribute wealth without first creating it. This is why for me the most important point that the Prime Minister made in his Independence Day speech was his tribute to India’s ‘wealth creators’. They are ‘the wealth of the country’, he said. True. And, they have been treated like criminals by regulators and tax inspectors who have been emboldened because of the search for ‘black money’ getting more importance than the creation of wealth.

The Prime Minister is now showing signs that he has noticed why the economy is in gloomy mode. He gave his first interview after winning his second term to a financial newspaper last week and said, “I want to motivate our industrialists to believe in the India story and in the long-term potential of the Indian market… I reassure all honest and law-abiding businesses of all possible support from our end.” There is a catch in the latter part of this message that he would do well to think about. The officials who adjudicate on which businessmen are ‘honest’ are often dishonest, greedy extortionists who revel in harrassing people who create wealth.
This is why we have seen businessmen publicly humiliated. They like to arrest people at airports. They like to conduct tax raids with TV reporters following their every move. What seems to add spice to their jobs is the fifteen minutes of fame they get from being momentarily in the public eye. This is probably why they never investigate why black money exists in the first place. If they did, they would quickly discover that at the root of it lie bad laws, asphyxiating red tape and intrusive regulations. Since the Prime Minister has now made it clear that he respects the men who create India’s wealth, it could be time for him to set up a task force in his own office to examine these things.

India has the capacity to become the richest country in the world if the business of doing business is left to businessmen. When Atal Bihari Vajpayee was prime minister, he unleashed the private sector and it was in that happy time that those private jets landed at Lahore airport, making Pakistanis nervous about what us infidels were up to. When they saw that it was prosperity that we were in search of, the planning for 26/11 began. It is no accident that it was Mumbai that was attacked and that Hafiz Saeed’s jihadists were sent to attack the Oberoi and the Taj. No accident that they had orders to target foreign tourists.

There is nothing that the military men next door would like more than to see the Indian economy collapse once more into that socialist sluggishness that kept us behind Pakistan right up to the end of the Licence Raj. I remember that when I first went to Lahore in 1980 I was stunned by how prosperous it looked compared to Delhi. At the height of those bleak socialist days, our capital city was defined by those bhavans at the foot of Raisina Hill. In their smelly, ugly corridors, officials beavered away at making India a place in which no businessmen would want to invest and no tourists would want to come. Those were times that were the exact opposite of ‘achche din’.
Indian Express

Dhaka, Aug 18 At least 40 people have died from dengue in Bangladesh, with over 50,000 cases reported throughout the country since January, authorities said Saturday, Efe news reported.

The number of confirmed cases recorded is more than five times higher than any other year in the South Asian country that has been struggling to contain the surge of dengue patients.

Dengue is a mosquito-borne viral infection, which causes flu-like illness, according to the World Health Organization.

The symptoms include headaches, muscle and joint pains, and body rashes.

Dengue, which is a potentially deadly complication, is transmitted by female mosquitoes mainly of the Aedes species.

According to official data, a total 51,476 cases of the disease have been reported this year, with 33,015 in the first 17 days of August, while 16,253 cases were recorded in July.

The figure included 1,460 patients, who were identified as having suffered from the fever in the last 24 hours up to 8 am on Saturday.

The highest number of dengue cases recorded in a single year in Bangladesh was 10,148 in 2018, said Abdur Rashid, an official at the Health Emergency Operations Center.

Among the affected patients, 7,864 remained in different hospitals across the country, while approximately 85 percent have already been discharged, according health department data.

The department said confirmed 40 deaths by the fever – 39 of them in the capital Dhaka.

Dengue peaked in September in last few years but authorities hoped the number of cases would gradually reduce following strong control measures.

“The situation is now stable. It did not stop, but it not getting worse,” said Meerjady Sabrina Flora, the director of the Institute of Epidemiology, Disease Control and Research.

“If the control measures are continued, which we have to as there is no other choice, so it may not linger until September,” she stressed.

Flora linked the high number of dengue cases this year to global warming, which she said changed the rain pattern, supporting the breeding of the Aedes.

“It is a part of a global problem. In tropical and sub-tropical countries like Vietnam, Malaysia, Thailand, Philippines, Malaysia everywhere the number of dengue cases now high,” she said.

“Overall it is an effect of climate change. Global warming changed the rain pattern. Because of the global warming, this year we did not see cats and dog rain, which normally helps us wash out larva,” she added.

The government official found high humidity as another factor as it helped the germ grow in the mosquito.

“Change of rain of pattern is obviously one reason. But I would say it is mostly a man-made disaster,” said Mizanur Rahman, chairman of the Department of Entomology at Sher-e-Bangla Agricultural University of Dhaka.

“We have a lack of awareness about personal hygiene while growing plastic waste blocked the drains to keep the water stagnant. The repeated use of the same insecticide led to creating resistance among the mosquitoes, which also contributed to this outbreak,” he said.

–IANS