That day is today because that discussion is the same as the discussion about the protests in Turkey. How could that be? After all, the ostensible reasons for protests in Turkey are so completely different than the 2013 protests against rape and the 2011 protests against corruption in India. This brings us to the old cliche about what you see, what you hear is what deceives you.
But even the eyes can see many similarities. The protestors in Turkey and India, as well as the initial protestors in Tahrir Square in Cairo, were mainly educated professional secular middle class people. Both Turkey & India are democratic societies where Governments are elected by the people in reasonably fair elections. Both Turkey & India are celebrated as economic success stories within emerging markets. Both have seen sizable inflows of foreign capital that has led to the development of a professional middle class.
Yet, it is that professional middle class that is seething with rage, the rage that the world saw this week in Istanbul and in January 2013 & August 2011 in Delhi.
3. Same Rage in Africa
Africa looks and probably is very different than Turkey & India to many readers. But Africa has come a very long way from where it was in 1980s & 1990s. Today, Africa is looked at as a region as big as India, with a billion people and with attractive opportunities for investments. Several African countries now proudly exhibit a young, professional middle class similar to their peers in Turkey & India. They must be optimistic about their future, right?$6.5 outflows from HY bond funds (2nd largest ever) (Table 2)
$2.5 outflows from EM debt (2nd largest ever); but Chart 2 suggests pace of outflows still trailing market sell-off
$1.5bn outflows from govt/tsy funds
$1.7bn outflows from munis (largest in 2013)
51 straight weeks into floating-rate debt ($1.5bn)




Sadly, a women gets attacked every day in India, in America and in virtually every part of the world. Jim Yardley hasn't cared much about all these unfortunate women and he rarely tweets anyway. So the fact that she is America must have been the reason for the tweet. That's fair, though. Every American should be concerned first about well-beings of Americans.
This Yardley tweet was followed almost immediately by a tweet by Indian reporter Neha Thirani Bagri of the New York Times.
We were disturbed and upset at the news. No woman, man or child anywhere should be subjected to attack or rape. So we read the NYT-India Ink article. But having read the article, we felt more upset about how Indian reporters of NYT-IndiaInk again targeted India.
1. The facts
According to the article by Neha Thirani Bagri & Vishnu Varma in the NYT,
While we feel deeply for the pain suffered by this woman, we simply cannot understand her adventurism. She was not in South Mumbai which is alive with people even at 1 a.m. in the morning. Manali is a relatively small resort town and Vashisht, about 2 miles north, is even smaller. Why did this woman find herself alone in such a small rural backwater area at 1 a.m.? And how utterly adventurous was she to jump into a truck driven by three men whom she didn't know?
Forgive us. We don't wish to hurt any sensibilities of any one. But frankly, very frankly, if you jump into a pack of hungry wolves alone, you are not going to fare well. This is a fact in every city in every country in the world.
2. Was this woman lucky? What could have happened to her in America?
Our first thought was that this woman was simply lucky to be alive. We thought so because we live in New York City and know Chicago well. If you get caught in certain areas of Chicago or New York at 1 a.m., chances are you might be killed. And you don't to have to look for such trouble as this woman did in Manali, India. Trouble comes looking for you past midnight in New York or Chicago, whether in a subway station, in parks or simply on the streets.
How random, violent and unbelievably tragic can life be in New York City? Let us share a story that we know personally. A few years ago, a young gifted Chinese graduate student in Columbia University was killed just outside the campus. This young man was crossing Broadway, a major avenue just outside the campus, at about 10:30 p.m. He was attacked by 3 American teenagers on the median. His death was mourned by his fellow students and by Columbia University.
We knew this young man and were deeply grieved at this wanton loss of life, a life of a young man in his prime, a life that might have meant a great deal to Mathematics & Statistics.
But no one in New York media, not even the New York Times, made a big deal about what happened to this young man. No one wrote about how dangerous America is and how American culture is so violent. If we recall correctly, the New York Times didn't even report this on the first page.
Because America is a simple straight country. America's message to visitors & tourists is simple - come to America and live here at your own risk. And above all, be smart, sensible and practice safety. If you get hurt by your stupidity, it is, frankly, your own problem. The police will do what they can to find and punish the people who attacked you but only as a part of their normal routine.
Getting back to the young Chinese student who was killed because of the assault, the three teenagers were found and put in jail. We recall a mother of one of these men claiming loudly that they were innocent and were railroaded because they were of a minority. No NY newspaper reported whether justice was served or whether the young teenagers escaped with a minor punishment.
The Chinese student died in the simple act of crossing a major avenue just outside Columbia University. He was not being adventurous or foolhardy. He was simply going home. In contrast, the young American woman in Manali was foolhardy enough to go to a relatively isolated area 2 miles away from a small resort town and then utterly stupid to get into a truck with 3 unknown men inside.
Yet, the New York Times made it appear as if this is a shameful blot on India and on all Indians. The same New York Times that didn't bother to display any anguish about the death of a bright Chinese student in Columbia University, the pride of New York City.
3. The Racist Behavior of Indian Police & of Indian Government
If you read NYT-India Ink or WSJ-IndiaRealTimes, you will notice that the police in Manali and the state went into high gear to find the men who raped the American woman. This is only because the woman was an American and because the Indian Government was under intense pressure to find & punish her rapists.
Unfortunately, this also means that Indian victims of other crimes in the area take a back seat. The Indian police force is notoriously understaffed and cares little for ordinary Indians anyway. And with the pressure to find the rapists of an American woman, we can imagine the police telling other victims in Manali that their complaints will ignored while the American woman's case is being handled.
If you doubt us, just read the NDTV story about a Delhi girl allegedly gang-raped in Ghaziabad, blackmailed with video. The police effort in this case is described as "a case has been registered and efforts are on to arrest them". Typical Indian police behavior with ordinary Indians.
By the way, no Indo-American blog reported this case. But wait, we might be too harsh. After all, NYT-IndiaInk, Reuters & WSJ-IndiaRealTime are all American entities and so they should be mainly concerned about Indo-US stories, right?
Fair enough. That leads us to ask whether these Indo-American Blogs have ever written a story about violence experienced by Indian tourists or visitors in America. We haven't seen even one such story in NYT-IndiaInk, Reuters or WSJ-IndiaInk. Not one Indian reporter, not Neha Thirani Bagri of NYT-IndiaInk, not Tripti Lahiri of WSJ-IndiaRealTime, not Anuja Jaiman of Reuters has cared to investigate or report on how Indian tourists can get into trouble in America.
Getting back to the Indian police, what happened to the intense efforts of the Indian police to find the men who raped the American woman? A Big Story in the Associated Press tells us India Court Jails 3 Suspects in Rape of US Woman:.
We sincerely hope we are wrong but this article does bring to mind various scenes of police investigations from Bollywood films. In these scenes, the police round up suspects and put them in jail to satisfy their senior officers and government officials who are clamoring for arrests in high profile cases. Then the police beat up these suspects in jail and try to coerce confessions which can then be used as evidence before a judge who is also under pressure to close the high profile cases with convictions.
We deeply and sincerely hope that this sort of stuff is only for Bollywood films and not for real cases like the rape case of the woman in Manali.
By the way, no progress has been reported in the case of the Delhi girl who was gang-raped and then blackmailed with a video.
4. Why a moral appeal to European-American women to not travel to India?
The Indian police and the Indian Government care far more about "white" visitors than about Indians. So they will spend far more time and effort on handling your cases than they will on handling even more serious cases of ordinary Indians. And they are understaffed any way.
So if you get into trouble in India and approach the Indian police, you will in effect hurt and damage legitimate complaints of at least 3-7 Indian families in that area. Do you really want this on your conscience? Do you want to be responsible for hurting the citizens of the country you visit for your pleasure?
If you don't, then heed our appeal. Choose some other country for your tourist travel. Just avoid India.
5. Why Indian Government should ban tourism by European-American women?
This is very simple. You, the Indian Government, are a diffident cowardly bunch. You don't, for example, have the candor or guts of America which essentially tells all visitors that they visit America at their own risk, that they should practice safe & smart tourism in the interests of their own safety and that they will not get any favored treatment if they get in trouble.
And the American press is in an attack mode against you. No matter what you, the Indian Government, do, it will not be enough. Some "white" tourist will get into trouble by being stupidly adventurous and that will broadcast all around the world as the fault of Indian Government, its culture and its society.
In case, you haven't found out already, these attacks have registered and they are having an impact on your ratings. So it is time to cut your risks and simply ban all tourist visits by single European or American women to India. Simply not worth the hassle.
Of course, you don't need to ban all such tourists. Allow by all means rich Western women who will only stay in 5-start hotels and travel in escorted limousines. Frankly, one such tourist can bring you more revenue than 50 tourists who will live in guesthouses and get you into trouble by their adventurous behavior.
And by the way, by all means encourage travel by African and Middle Eastern women. Reporters of NYT-IndiaInk, WSJ-IndiaRealTime or Reuters don't care what happens to non-white women in India.
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Lawrence McMillan turned negative on Friday morning:


But this same principle does not apply to Bangladesh and the attacks there on Buddhists & Hindus, not for the New York Times, Reuters, Washington Post or the Wall Street Journal. These newspapers, though totally silent about attacks against Buddhists & Hindus in Bangladesh, have been on a sustained campaign against the attacks on Muslim Rohingyas in neighboring Myanmar.
If you want to see the contrast in coverage, simply search for Myanmar & Bangladesh in nytimes.com. Then search for Myanmar & Bangladesh on Reuters.com. Or just click on the four links we have provided. You will see what we mean.
This doesn't mean that NYT, Reuters and their American media colleagues are pro-Muslim in any serious way. Just hark back to the NYT article by Declan Walsh about attacks by Muslims on the Christian minority in what the NYT calls the land-of-the-spiritually-pure. Declan Walsh was so against that regime and its religious intolerance that he was literally banished by the Islamabad regime.
But wait. Declan Walsh, as far as we can recall, never wrote against persecution of Buddhists & Hindus under that regime in Islamabad. And the entire Af-Pak region has systematically attacked Buddhists and Hindus minorities. Stories about young Hindu girls have been kidnapped and forcibly converted to Muslims have surfaced and documented by Hindu organizations. But the New York Times has steadfastly deemed these attacks as "unfit to print".
So what is the pattern here?
5. A hierarchy of religions, perhaps?
What you see above and what we have felt & experienced for a long time, is a classic pattern of coverage in the New York Times, Reuters, Washington Post and other American newspapers. It is as if there is a defined and accepted hierarchy of religions in the American media:
When a lower ranked religious community attacks a higher ranked religious community, that is very big news and American media covers it aggressively. But when a higher ranked religious community attacks a lower ranked religious community, that's just par for the sociological course and not worth the ink or web-space in an American newspaper.
Notice something interesting in the above rankings? They also fit the European-American hierarchy of color. Europeans are fairer than Middle Eastern people who are also generally fairer than Asians. And religions ranked 1 & 2 are collectively people of the book, to quote that great religious thinker, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran. And religions ranked 3 are outside the collective people of the book.
Think about this and you will see that this hierarchical model is a great fit to the historical practices & conceptual framework of American media. This is important because it takes the morality of Declan Walsh, morality of New York Times, morality of Reuters out of the discussion.
So when Declan Walsh writes about attacks on Christians by Af-Pak Muslims and when he studiously ignores the attacks on Af-Pak Buddhists & Hindus by Af-Pak Muslims, he is not being morally decrepit. No, he is just following the religion-hierarchy model of the American media.
Similarly, when the NYT Editorial Board writes against attacks by Buddhists against Muslims in Myanmar, we should not expect them to write against attacks by Muslims against Buddhists & Hindus in neighboring Bangladesh. Because that would be against the above religion-hierarchy model of American media, which they lead.
But hierarchy of religions is too much of a mouthful. What is a simpler, more familiar word for this concept of hierarchy? A Religious Caste System, perhaps?
That would be our vote.
6. What about American NGOs, Human Rights NGO?
Perhaps we should use the singular because the only one we know of is New York based Human Rights Watch (HRW). We have tried to approach them via Ken Roth, their head honcho, and via a couple of their Directors. The response is deafening silence just like the response from our friendly editors at the venerable New York Times.
On April 22, 2013, HRW declared attacks by Buddhists against Muslims in Myanmar as "Ethnic Cleansing". According to Phil Robertson, deputy Asia director of HRW,
We do not object to this characterization. But we do point out that HRW has never accused the NonPakistani regime or the Bangladeshi government of ethnic religious cleansing against Buddhists & Hindus. We don't have specific figures about how many Buddhists have been "cleansed" out of Bangladesh, a neighbor of Myanmar.
But thanks to the BBC article, we do have a figure of the number of Hindus "cleansed" out of Bangladesh, their ancestral home for 25 centuries:.
10% of today's roughly 150 million = 15 million and 30% of 1947 population of roughly 70 million = 21 million. So 21-15 = 6 million Hindus have been "cleansed" out of Bangladesh in the past 65 years.
Six million is the rough number used for Jewish victims of the Nazi Germany holocaust and six million is the rough number of Hindus attacked, beaten& driven out of Bangladesh. Yet, HRW refuses to call this a "religious cleansing"!
Look, HRW and their sister NGOs are honorable institutions. Their refusal to touch human rights crimes and "religious cleansing" of Buddhists & Hindus in Bangladesh & Af-Pak is not because they lack morals or basic human values.
It's just that they seem to follow the religious caste system model. And according to that model, Buddhists and Hindus are the lowest or the untouchable caste of that religious caste system. So who among the highest religious caste care about what happens to religious untouchables?
Certainly not HRW, New York Times, Reuters or any of their media, NGO cohorts. At least, not in our experience.
Editor's Note: The above opinions have been based on articles published by the various news organizations and on the tweets of NGO executives. We seek and welcome feedback or response from NYT, Reuters, HRW and any organization referenced above. We will publish all responses verbatim.
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Then came President John F. Kennedy and the 1962 defeat of India by China:
Relations soured during the LBJ administration & its handling of the 1965 war in the subcontinent:
The Nixon Presidency & the 1971 War
Riedel's conclusion at the end of this Cold War chapter is poignant:
Chapter Four - The Carter & Reagan Years
These years were dominated by the Soviet invasion & occupation of Afghanistan. Bruce Riedel was a "junior player in that war effort", as he describes himself:
Then came the Reagan-Casey team:
There is no question that America's war against Soviet Union through NonPakistan was well extremely successful & enormously consequential. In fact, as Bruce Riedel writes:
But success itself sows the seeds of future failure. Especially in this case, because, in Riedel's own words, "The American-Pakistani alliance had been built on sand".
Chapter Five - From Crisis To Crisis - Bush and Clinton
The Indian Subcontinent was virtually ignored by the Bush (41) Administration which was guiding America through the collapse of the Soviet Union and the transformation of Europe. As Riedel notes:
The Clinton Administration was another story:
Just think what the Clinton Administration dealt with - the nuclear tests by India & NonPakistan, the Kargil War and the emergence of Al Qaeda as America's foremost enemy. "It was Clinton's genius", as Riedel notes, " to recognize that in adversity, opportunity beckoned" And,
Then came another transformation; the al Qaeda attacks on American embassies in Africa. As Riedel writes:
Within a few months, came Pakistan's intrusion & occupation of about 500 square miles in the Kargil-Drass sectors. The Vajpayee government ordered a counteroffensive at the point of attack. Riedel was fully involved in this conflict:
Chapter Six - Bush, Mush and Sonia
The NonPakistani policy towards Washington also changed in a big way. When given a choice to be with America against the Taleban or with the Taleban against America, Musharraf chose America. Riedel writes:
We recall the speech Musharraf made to his people in 2001. As we recall, he told them he was not siding with America to damage Taleban but he was siding with the Americans to protect and help is Taleban brothers. He proved true to his word. Riedel writes;
Then came the nuclear deal:
Bush also took a major step against NonPakistan:
Riedel's concluding comment about Bush is sort of negative and revealing, we think.
What was mixed about Bush's record? Riedel describes it as below:
The only way this record is "mixed" is if one believes that America's relationship with India and NonPakistan should be roughly on par. In other words, American policy of the past 6 decades of constantly balancing India & NonPakistan is the right one. But isn't that the same policy that, as Riedel argues, has been a total failure?
Frankly, this "mixed record" comment of Riedel seems revealing to us. It leads us to wonder how he looks at the history of the Indian Subcontinent and how he thinks about the future. That we will discuss in our next article.
Regardless of his own "mixed" feelings, Bruce Riedel has written a book that is panoramic in its view of the past 6 decades and that is full of interesting details. It is a book that is a must for understanding how American policy looked at and continues to look at the Indian Subcontinent.
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About two hours later, we saw the following tweet exchange:
Below is the chart from the ECRI article:

With a little bit of search, we found this comment on stocktwits.com attributed to Gundlach:
It seems that Alix Steel, Becky Quick & Sara Eisen react just like Seinfeld's blond date when some one tells them they are invested in Treasuries. Thankfully, they don't say to their Treasury-investing guests what Seinfeld's date said to him:
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"His military was integral to him; He had two means of achieving his goals,This is exactly how great societies operate. This is also how societies that aspire to greatness operate. This is what China did last month in Ladakh. China wanted India to stop building up its defenses in the strategic sector of Depsang in Ladakh. When India didn't listen to their arguments, China sent a military incursion and provoked a military confrontation. Prime Minister Singh's government went into a panic and agreed to withdraw Indian army from India's own territory to appease China.
intelligent discourse based on logic-science or with the string of the Bow [meaning his military]" - Raghu-Vamsha I.19
This is exactly the bet regional Indian Kings made 250-200 years ago when they bet on appeasement of the British East India Company as the way to deal with the increasing might of that British private company. And the appeasement of this Indian Government is even worse than that of their ancestors 250 years ago. As C. Raja Mohan writes:
Such appeasement is in Indian blood. As we wrote last week, Indian leaders always react with panic during a military crisis with an invader and post-crisis gloss over their defeats with verbose rhetoric. Mr. Raja Mohan seems to share our views because he advised this week:
So what should the Indian Government do?. Mr. Raja Mohan opines:




We are not taking it personally. Heck, Tepper doesn't even know we exist. He is probably addressing the cognoscenti like Rick Santelli. And we wouldn't mind if he did and called us stupid to our face. So many have done so that it doesn't even register. But we stick to our stand. We cut our investment teeth on Q2 of 1994 when the bond market got destroyed and Cisco, our favorite stock then, was cut from 37 to 19. The experience has instilled in us a very healthy respect for a big break in the bond market.
Bill Gross said this week that leverage in today's bond market is 2-3 times what it was in 1994. And we bet that the leverage in the JGB market is a multiple of the leverage in the US bond market. We would be absolutely petrified if the JGB market broke down. It was a relief to see Rick Santelli share our concerns about the JGB action.
And it seems that Japanese authorities also shared our concern. Because they stepped in on Japan's as Michael Novogratz said:
Their intervention worked. JGB yields not only stabilized but they fell a bit on Thursday & Friday. So now we can go back to the "Tepperian" view.
4. The U.S. Treasury Market
David Tepper was lukewarm about the long end of the Treasury market:
Michael Novogratz had a different viewpoint:

Again this seems utterly insane to the point of being a human rights violation of the entire male population of Delhi. You are a stalker if your accuser claims you caused "distress" in her mind? Or if she claims you "interfered" with her "mental peace"? Think of yourself as the accused. How could you defend yourself? How could you disprove what distress she felt in her mind? How could you disapprove that her mental peace was interfered with?
Think of the common American insult "your Mama". Well, if you said that to a woman in Delhi, her mother could claim that you caused "distress" in her mind and you "interfered" with her "mental peace". And then she could send you to jail for up to three years for being a "stalker", all because you said "your mama". At least that is what the law reads, as quoted by Ms. Raina.
This is so insane and the stalking claim is so tenuous that it makes us wonder why Ms. Raina went to such lengths to think of punishing the taxi driver with a three-year jail term.
Ms. Raina doesn't seem to understand that Delhi is a teeming city of 18 million people, people with as much right to the city as she does. And the vast majority of Delhites are far poorer than her and work harder to support themselves and their families. They do not owe Ms. Raina anything. And when Ms. Raina steps out into the streets of Delhi, either in her car or on foot, she is on her own.
But she is not alone in her sense of entitlement from Delhi. As we wrote about another professional woman in Delhi, Ms. Raina seems firmly in that ,
But the sheer intensity of Ms. Raina's reaction points us to a more serious issue, an issue that is the unspoken reality in India, especially in Delhi. That is racism, pure and simple.
Racism of Delhi's English-Educated Indian class against the ordinary, poor, non-English speaking, manual labor class. This EE-Indian class has actually become a caste in that children of this caste members become EE-Indians and marry other EE-Indians. Their professions are virtually barred to people from the non-EE caste which is treated as a lower or servant race for EE-Indians. These non-EE people are not expected to be uppity towards the EE-Indian caste, forget being insulting.
This contempt, this deep sense of "how dare he insult me like that" is what we see in the intensity of Ms. Raina's anger against the taxi driver. We wonder whether Ms. Raina would have reacted with the same intense anger had a professional EE-Indian, a Doctor, a Lawyer, a Businessman driving a fancy car yelled the same obscenities to her. By the way, the really rich and powerful of Delhi use sexually derogatory phrases that are far worse than those used by ordinary Delhites. Faced with same obscenities from such EE-Indians, Ms. Raina would have been angry, hurt and upset. But would she have reacted with same fury, the same sense of "how dare he" anger that she felt against the poor uneducated taxi driver? We don't think so.
Frankly, her intensity reminds us of stories we have heard from deep American south where "white" women still react with same intense anger at "uppity" behavior of men of darker skin color. That feeling is now recognized as racism and that is exactly the same feeling Delhi's EE-Indians have against uppity behavior by non-EE, usually darker colored ordinary Indians.
The above is our sense, our opinion after reading the two articles written by Ms. Raina in NYT-India Ink. Until we speak with her in detail or interview her, all we can offer are our opinions which is what we have done above. We have tried on a few occasions, both directly to India Ink & via Corporate Communications of The New York Times Company, to speak with NYT reporters. But our requests have always gone unanswered.
So we hereby publicly invite Ms. Raina or her colleagues at the New York Times to share their point of view with our readers. We will print their response verbatim. And if they show us the error of our opinions, we will publicly retract them.
5. What about NYT Editors?
Maureen Dowd and Helene Cooper are two well-known writers in the New York offices of the New York Times. Unless they are always driven around in Limousines, these two professional women come into contact with ordinary New Yorkers. They understand the loud, crass and direct nature of New York City, we think.
Would either of them react so intensely when a man screams obscenities at them in the streets of New York? Would they publicly air their anger in their articles in the New York Times? Would they publicly raise the specter of 1-year jail term for the man who screamed at them? We don't think so.
And even if they did, would the editors of the New York bureau authorize publication of such personal claims of "mental distress" in their paper? We seriously doubt it. Because they would be driven out of town if they did. You see, "how dare he" feelings are not tolerated in New York City.
This brings us to the editors of the India Ink blog of the New York Times. Their journalistic standards are so different from those of New York based editors, their prejudice against the ordinary people of India, their culture, their religion is so deep and intense that articles like Ms. Raina's seem perfectly acceptable to them. Because, in our opinion, they think the EE-Indians are the only Indians who deserve rights as individuals. That is what we have argued to them both in private communications and via our published opinions in this Blog.
And in our opinion, they know their own reality. That is why they will not sit down to talk with us.
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