South Asia Archives

It's Come to This: Pakistan is More Civilized than Russia

Filed under: Europe ~ Pakistan ~ Russia ~ South Asia

Andrei Illarionov has been conclusively proven right: Pakistan is more civilized than Russia.

An election has just occurred in Pakistan and that county's military dictator Pervez Musharraf has allowed not one but two viable opposition parties, both dedicated to ousting him from power, not merely to contest the election but to win the overwhelming majority of seats in parliament. As the New York Times reports: "Benazir Bhutto's the Pakistan Peoples Party was on pace to win 110 seats in the 272-seat National Assembly, while a second rival party, the Pakistan Muslim League-N, the faction led by Nawaz Sharif, like Ms. Bhutto a former prime minister, was looking to take 100 seats. Musharraf's party, the Pakistan Muslim League-Q, was crushed, holding on to just 20 to 30 seats." They could kill Bhutto, but they could not stop her from winning a plurality of seats in the new legislature.

Meanwhile, Russia has already held parliamentary elections where not one real opposition party was permitted to take a single seat, and will hold presidential elections the first week in March in which all the real opposition candidates, including former prime minister Mikhail Kasyanov and former first deputy prime minister Boris Nemtsov, have been excluded.

Vladimir Putin: Less democratic than a military dictator. Is that because he has more to fear from the voters?

How is it possible that country that is less democratic than a military dictator is a member of the G-8, one of the most significant democracy organizations in the world?

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Kim Zigfeld · February 18, 2008 2:55 PM · Comments (1) · TrackBacks (0)

It's Nanozilla, Al Gore's Worst Nightmare

Filed under: South Asia

"I observed families riding on two-wheelers - the father driving the scooter, his young kid standing in front of him, his wife seated behind him holding a little baby. It led me to wonder whether one could conceive of a safe, affordable, all-weather form of transport for such a family."

Those are the words of Ratan N. Tata, head of the Tata Motors conglomerate, shown above standing proudly next to his company's newest vehicle, the Tata Nano, which comes with a stunning sticker price of $2,500 and was designed to get all those Indian families (up to 600 million of them by the middle of the century) off their precarious scooters.

Al Gore's people are up in arms, as you can well imagine. Within a few decades, India could well have far more cars (over twice as many) on the road than America does, cars whose low cost means they have bare-bones emissions controls, making India a far greater incipient threat to global warming than the United States -- to say nothing of China. The billions of people in those countries don't give a rat's ass about carbon credits, and the Chinese probably like the idea of global warming. It means that Siberia will start melting, and that will give them plenty of extra space to move into (at Russia's expense) as their population explodes.

So perhaps Mr. Gore needs to learn a new language . . . or two.

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Kim Zigfeld · January 14, 2008 8:41 AM · Comments (8) · TrackBacks (0)