The wonder-world of Dixit Brand Swadeshi!!

If India must participate in the process of globalization, critically and in her own interests, the first thing to do is to get rid of Dixit Brand Swadeshi.

Late Shree Rajeev Dixit (unfortunate death by heart attack) had gathered huge popularity & had created his clout, owing to his mesmerizing oratory.

He had created a magic potion, a blend of exaggerations, blatant lies, contents that are full of hatred & vengeance towards the British in particular & the West in general, demeaning modernity in general, encouraging fascist dictatorship, alarming pieces of ‘information’, abusing Indian leaders in outrageous language, supporting the monopolist & bureaucratic interests, spreading superstitions & so on. But this magic potion seems to be intoxicating many a patriotic minds. We must critically examine which blunders he commits while doing so.

He spends a lot of energy & time to ‘prove’ that, the products he recommends to boycott, (just because of their brand-names sounding non-Indian without going into workers, customers & even investors being Indians), are poisonous, third-grade & impious. He flouts science in the flow of proving so.

At one point he calls Pepsi-Cola is a psychotropic intoxicant. Pepsi-Cola is such an erosive compound that if you keep a tooth in it for four days it dissolves completely! He terms citric acid as poison in the flow. Height of it is that according to him, CO₂ is a poisonous gas! It is OK for CO (carbon monoxide) but CO₂  (carbon dioxide) is an integral part of our metabolism; about half of our blood is saturated with it at any moment in time. Milk, a pious drink according to him, is also bound to produce CO₂ when it reacts with normal hydrochloric acid in our stomachs.

In Dixit’s wonder-world, two college students are reported to die because they had participated in a Pepsi drinking competition & consuming about 9 (250 cc) bottles. The doctor to whom they are referred to, reports that it is too late, too much CO₂ is found in their bodies. Dixit says that science tells us to get that gas out of our bodies but here we are having its intake via aerated drinks. (Anyway science does not prescribe but only explains.)  He forgets the difference between taking in respiratory system & in digestive system. Furthermore there are locally made aerated drinks in cottage industry of which he does not take a note.

I have an objection to this on moral grounds. If it is a question of saving my nation I should boycott anything foreign (as per his theory) even if it is an elixir of immortality. That should be the nationalist spirit. Why prove the things to be boycotted are anyway useless, bad or poisonous? There is nothing righteous about opting out from bad products.

Same story repeats itself in case of tea & coffee as well. The basic resistance is against the supposedly exploitative companies like Nestle or Lipton. One can boycott them on that ground. However, Dixit claims that a cup of coffee contains equal quantity of nicotine as a cigarette does!

What about the employment of the workers in the plantations? Dixit replies, “we will export 100% tea & coffee.” If westerners are sinners because they dump their nasty products in our country, are we not doing the same thing? Dixit has a scientific answer to this moral dilemma. According to him tea & coffee are essential to survive in cold climate. If I remember right, Europe did exist before the discoveries of tea & coffee. But in his wonder-world, they are essential to survive in Europe & causing immediate death in India!

All the medicines of foreign companies are pure poisons. He reports that 25 million Japanese children got handicapped due to Polio which was induced by consumption of Paracetemol (a benign pain killer & antipyretic which is available over the counter.) All know that polio is an infection & is brought under control by vaccination

Dixit’s prejudice against Pharmaceutical companies leads him into an absurdity. He claims that even when 2 mg is sufficient they put 300 mg so that more is sold! If I can give remedy in 2 mg of my molecule why should I waste it & overdose the patient. Dixit argues as if medicines are sold on per mg basis. In fact a 0.25 mg tablet can be costlier than another 1 gram tablet. Dose varies from chemical to chemical. While trying to prove profiteering he in fact proves loss making. Economically rational companies (as they generally are) would prefer to make 150 times more tablets in same quantity of the drug with binders & bases.

Colgate Company acquires the calcium phosphate required for their toothpastes from powder of bones of dead animals, as per Dixit. One may think of profiteering but no, it is for Christianization of Indians! He asks, how material from dead animals can remedy the foul smell of your mouth? This is simply a disagreeable association attached & no logical connection. He is silent over whether Promise Tooth pest by Balsaras (some Indian company) also promises to not use this source of material. Not concern for consumers but hatred of westerners is the main stay of his argument.

In the wonder-world of Dixit, paper required for 500 cigarettes destroys one tree. Even if you consider total weight including tobacco as coming from paper, this tree comes out to weigh only 1 kg, a bonsai! Furthermore this small tree emits oxygen worth of 1.5 million Rupees (current prices of 1997). He does not tell how much this oxygen weighs. What rate is applied? Is it the rate of oxygen cylinders used for critical patients?

All this wastage of trees is committed by ITC simply because it is a multinational. Charminar by Vazeer Sultan (a popular Indian brand) is not guilty.

There is a practice of rubbing a rough powder for cleaning teeth in India. Is it a better practice for teeth? No! Its purpose is to use acupressure technique beneficial for whole body even if only a fingertip is getting pressed. I remember that there are supposed to be varied pressure points defined for various ailments in that technique.

In Dixit’s wonder-world, drinking water from a refrigerator is a sure cause of constipation & according to him Europeans can not pass motion for four days at a stretch. In spite of this, according to him, the real need of refrigerators is not in hot countries like India but it is rather more in the cold countries. Reason is again very exotic. Women in India are great home-makers for they roast hot Chapatis whenever needed, which European women are not. Second, Europe is devoid of fresh green vegetables because it does not have as fertile land as India.

According to Dixit, westerners intentionally sent Kalvinator Company to India only after they discovered that chlorofluorocarbons cause erosion of Ozone layer causing more exposure to ultra violate radiations, which in turn causes cancer. Kalvinator in India has been there since long before this discovery was made. It is as if there are nationalistic zones of ozone! A fridge in India would cause a hole on India & fridge in Pakistan would cause it for Pakistan.

In Dixit’s world India had refrigeration technique 500 year ago (No pumps, no compressors, but Yes refrigeration was achieved). India rejected it because she knew the harms caused by this technique & also its redundancy. Why she developed it in the first place if she knew everything?

A small plant of Tulasi is situated in front of many houses in India & women do, sort of, worship it. Dixit finds great scientific temper of Indian women on this basis for, according to him, this plant does not simply stop at photosynthesis like all other plants but it carries out Electrolysis of water into Hydrogen & Oxygen & Indian women, of course know all this. He puts special emphasis on that they ‘water’ this plant.

Fantastic Statistics with un-crosschecked Mathematics

Audiences are generally lazy in cross-checking calculations. This is especially so when they gather in order to get enchanted. Dixit must have had surety of this. So he bombards statistics. Even if we ignore the question of authenticity of such statistics, we can find internal contradictions in the arguments based on his statistics.

He says that Pepsi earns 2.4 billion rupees profit. This money, according to him is sufficient for solving drinking water problem in Indian villages. He also says that there are 200 thousand such villages. By simple division ‘money’ available for each village would be Rs.12,000/-. Leaving aside permanent solution to the drinking water issue, this money is not even sufficient for rent of ‘tankers’ that go & supply water to these villages. The main point is that, by not drinking Pepsi, how the saving made out of this can be diverted towards village water supply?

As people buy Pepsi the price has a large component of excise & sales tax. There is at least a theoretical possibility of governments spending this revenue for such villages. Boycotting Pepsi would stop the profit of Pepsi. But at the same time wages of (Indian) workers working in various stages, right from bottle making to restaurants will also stop. This factor is completely ignored by Dixit.

Dixit himself says that production cost of Pepsi bottle is 70 paise only while profit going to Pepsi is Rs.7/-. (He commits a slip of tongue by saying ‘Hundred times’ while it is 10 times even as per his figures).

Now, let us cross-check. With Rs.7 per bottle to earn 2.4 billion, how many bottles would be sold in a year? The number comes to be about 3.4 million. Out of Indian Population, only middle & higher class section would be buying Pepsi, which was about 1.7 million when he was speaking. So it seems, only two bottles are sold per potential consumer, including the versions like Miranda, 7Up etc, in a year.

This is ridiculous. This anomaly arises because Dixit ignores excise, sales tax, & whole chain of backward linkages in the production of Pepsi in India. If his costing were true, Parle would have competed out Coca-Cola rather than merging into it.

According to Dixit’s information, out of total fabric sold in India only 1% is Khaadi (hand spun & hand woven fabric) and still about 1.5 million workers are employed in it. So by simple ratio-proportion he claims that if 100% fabric is Khaadi, it would employ 150 million workers. At the time when he was delivering these lectures, India’s employable age group size was only 300 million. Thus half of the employment goes in garments alone. That means half of aggregate wage income goes to fabric sector. This implies that every worker would have to spend half of his income in purchasing fabric! Would this be affordable? Furthermore Khaadi industry is sustained by government subsidy which is not taken into account. “More labor intensive commodities are cheaper”, is a myth.

If tractors etc. are removed from agriculture & it is also made more labor intensive, apparently it will seem to increase employment. Question is

wherefrom the wages will come? Working itself is not an employment. Somebody affording your work is employment. Dixit completely ignores the wage affordability side of employment problem.

According to Dixit, 60% of goods transport in India is carried by bullock-carts. (?). He suggests that if ball-bearings are used in bullock-carts the share of bullock carts in Indian goods transport would rise to 80%. This would result in getting rid of ‘oil pool deficit’. Dixit forgets to note that efficiency of bullock-carts is restricted due to friction between paws of bullocks & land. Ball bearing can not eliminate that. 80% transport at the speed of bullock-carts will hamper the economic activity almost to a stand-still. Wherefrom the ball-bearings come if not from multinationals like SKF? As the original assumption of 60% is drastically wrong the further argument dose not matter anyway.

Same statistics used in opposing directions

According to Dixit, the share of India in world export was 33% in year1850. He praises Indian industry for the fact of having large share in world export & goes on blaming post independence governments for bringing it down to 0.01% (actually this figure is much more but too less than China). Here he treats lowering of exports as regress.

He goes on to say later that, as of now 4000 multinationals are plundering 4000 fold more than what a single East India company was doing. If export is only 0.01% what is being plundered? As the export in colonial era was forced & not voluntary, how come Indian goods then were getting prices good enough to make 33% share in world export in money terms? As export is voluntary after Independence, still exporters are getting so meager prices to be plundered 4000 times with only 0.01% share in export?

He is indecisive about whether export is a sign of glory or sign of misery & changes his position as per convenience of the charge that he wants blame on at that point of his lectures. Wherefrom he got this data of 33% in 1850, is beyond my imagination.

Surprisingly the same anomaly appears in a Leftist booklet by Abhyankar-Bedekar-Barhme with less exaggeration. According to these leftist thinkers, the share of India in world export was 4.5% in 1838 & has come down to 0.5% in 1990. If export is the root of exploitation why don’t you rejoice that it has dwindled? If export is sign of glory why don’t you support export promotion policy like China, rather than supporting self-dependant-Swadeshi?

The similarity between Hindu-fundamentalist booklets & leftist booklets is a political miracle, arising out of economic ignorance.

Dixit commits another anomaly about capital inflow as well. He says that advanced countries receive $725 billion external capital while developing countries receive only $500 billion. He completely ignores capital trade amongst & within rich countries. Thereby he implies as if all inflow of capital in rich countries is coming from poor countries! How come, poor countries become capital exporting at this high rate while their share in trade itself is so meager?  ‘Received’ in rich countries is fallaciously interpreted as ‘sent from poor countries’.

Dixit goes further to make a more astonishing statement. Rich countries are suffering by recession & hence they want more & more capital from outside! Recession implies a need of vent for surplus & not inflow. In fact they are flooded with capital & are seeking investment opportunities outside. Dixit is simply not ready to come out of the logic of colonial era.

Self-refuting arguments & information

He says India’s rate of saving is good at 24% of national income. (This is nearly a true statement, for a change.) Inflow of foreign capital is negligible as compared to Indian investment. If this is so what are you worrying about? He reaches a height of self-refuting when he says that multinationals bring only 5% of their capital from abroad & they get the remainder from Indian investors! Aren’t they mainly Indian & not foreign in such case? In fact the demand of Indian lobby is not to let the foreign share increase more than 50% so that control remains in Indian hands. Dixit’s appeal to Indian investors is that they should not invest in multinational & boycott them investment-wise. So by implication let more & more control go in foreign hands!

Dixit tries to portray the accumulation of capital of various companies since their entry, as something drastic. For example Bata started at 7 million and has now reached 1150 million. But rate of growth per year is Nth root of the ratio. Bata achieved this in 66 years. The rate of growth per year comes out to be 8% only. In all these years there was considerably high rate of inflation which offsets this rate in real terms. Rate of inflation is patently absent in all such comparisons. Fortunately he declares years of entry & the year in which the grown value is noted for each company. All these spans were before the 1992 economic reforms declaration to which he is offering fervent resistance. Thus such data remain irrelevant to the issue at hand.

On the other hand he believes that applying high rates of taxation is harmful to nation. He claims that British imposed 127% tax rate on Indians & that is how Indian trade vanished. (from where 27% over and above the income are supposed to come?) He also alleges that post independence governments were guilty of imposing 97.5% tax rate.

This was only once & on the very high slab when Morarji Desai was finance minister & obviously failed. Morarji Desai was also a staunch Swadeshi man. Then how did he behave with Indian industry like British? To the contrary, Chidambaram who was finance minister while Dixit was delivering his speeches, brought a ‘low rate high recovery’ tax regime successfully, but Dixit calls him traitor no1 of India.

Height of shouting big numbers

According to Dixit, a single one-day-cricket-match wastes 2.5 billion Rupees of the ‘nation’. Without going into figures we must at least remember that expenditure by someone is always income to some others.

In the wonder-world of Dixit, 70% of the children getting born in Europe are orphans & abandoned! Any viewer of TV  witnesses 72000 rapes in twelve years. That comes out to be 6000 per year & 16.4 per day. If one is sitting before TV for 5 hours a day, he is compelled to watch a rape after every 18 minutes.

In the wonder-world of Dixit, there were 10,000 steel plants in India & were producing 9 million tons of steel, while today, owing to poor western technology the mega-steel-plants are producing only 7.2 million tons.

In 1835, only in Madras Presidency there were 1500 thousand colleges of Surgery. All produced M.S. level surgeons. Then he divulges that all of these were in fact barbers & Indian social order did not keep them deprived of knowledge, so they could achieve this feat.

In Harshad Mehta scandal the Nation lost 600 billion Rupees. (In fact some speculators lost in the game to other speculators & had nothing to do with economic fundamentals)

When Manmohan Singh became finance minister for the first time, inflation rose threefold in one month!

In Dixit’s world anything can happen. His claim is that when the British were sending vessels to carry the plundered goods from India, they had to bring them back empty. A ship is not stable if it is empty. In order to add counterweight to the empty ships, British used to fill them with ‘made in England’ salt. Gandhi had to launch his Salt-Satyagrha because Indian salt market got flooded with salt.

In fact it takes long seashores & hot sun to make salt. But he counts Britain as salt-surplus nation to this extent. Everybody knows that the British imposed a tax on making salt in India & that triggered the salt movement by Gandhi. This counter-weight theory of salt is one of the most ridiculous things that Dixit has blurted out.

World as big conspiracy  

Indeed there are conflicts of interests between developed & developing countries on the matter of international trade. Dixit simply denies the possibility of resolution of such conflicts mainly because he does not deem British as selfish, but deems them as perverse or sadistic. They seem to have an intrinsic pleasure in somehow ruining India without any consideration of what British stand to gain.

For example, they would have stolen a good technique found in India & benefited from it. Here they simply destroy the good techniques without using them. It is believed that India had technique of making rust-free steel exemplified in a famous age old pillar.

British, as per Dixit, imposed a law for banning the aboriginals in India to use iron ore & destroyed the technique (but did not steal it).

Another example of this sadistic attitude is that India had spinning & weaving technique of such a splendor that long & broad sheets of fine fabric could be smoothly passed through a finger-ring with almost no effort. British cut the thumbs of artisans to put an end to this technique but did not appropriate it for their benefit.

The techniques claimed to be practiced in ancient India are so mysterious that they can not be resurrected. Generally when a society achieves a technique it becomes generalized & impersonalized. The so called smoke of gold era had no method of documentation or publicly used practice. It is impossible to believe that you had air-crafts without a single mention of its fuel.

In their ruthless pursuit of destroying India, the British bought in Democracy which is necessarily corrupt according to Dixit. British consulted astrologists to decide the most inauspicious date for the handover.

The Bhopal Gas Tragedy was not negligence due to profiteering but was a weapon test by American military & the chemical weapon so proved was used against Iraq, confirmed news by Dixit’s intelligence bureau.

He calls European civilization as demonic & adds that adultery is not a sin in Christianity, in spite of a clear mention in the famous Ten Commandments. He time & again attacks Christianity because he believes that purpose of imperialism was not economic but that of a crusade. Under British rule the incidence of Christianization was so low that his theory does not hold good. But he keeps on repeating that impoverishing India was to facilitate the missionaries.

TV channels only for sabotaging moral character

One of his boycotts is boycott on TV (all channels). At first glance it would be taken as opposition to consumerism which is supposedly induced due to Globalization. But that is not the main point.

The main logic of his anti-TV stand is “They (multinationals) know that land of India is capable of producing Vivekanandas. Even if one emerges he will drive us away”. (Vivekananda was not such a parochial nationalist. His main contribution was to introduce missionary zeal in Hindus) How to stop the generation of Vivekanandas? By inducing sexual arousal in the youth and thereby destroying their moral character!

Dixit is so vexed about sexuality that he attributes only purpose to all channels, the one of spreading eroticism. While appealing to people that they ought to boycott TV he claims that an English boy of age 11 became a father due to supposedly free sex in England. He goes on to say that France has jammed US channels by using satellites to protect French youth from US eroticism. He praises General De Gaul for banning TV, cinema & restaurants while he was ‘building his nation’. I wonder how French can be so conservative about this issue.

He appeals to burn the issues of Time of India. You may think that its policy might be pro-globalization. But, no, every issue of Times of India contains at least one picture of half nude girl, according to Dixit. This is a blatant lie.

At another place he claims that in US 2.7 million Americans are engaged in anti-India conspiracy. (The very idea of conspiracy put far stringent restriction on number of participant as I understand the word ‘conspiracy’.) These 2.7 million are secluded in Pentagon & are being brainwashed to think of India as something evil. They are deprived for the opportunity to watch TV so that no different opinions may seep in. Well, it seems there are some things on TV other than eroticism too!

He asks the audience, if a boy can become Gandhi by seeing Harishchandra (a mythological king who lost all his belongings including clothes on his & Queen’s body to fulfill a promise given to a sage in his dream). What your children will become if they watch TV serials?

In the whole series of Dixit’s lectures, Gandhi’s only thought that “parliament is a sterile prostitute.” is quoted. Dixit concedes that even if he comes to power he can do hardly anything because democracy is intrinsically doomed. His praise of De Gaul, Hitler, Zirnavosky etc is clearly encouraging authoritarianism. He explicitly says few people who are ready to sacrifice their lives for the nation can only bring about a revolution by extra-constitutional way.

All others are Meer Jafars (Meer Jafar was a traitor who made Lord Clive victorious)

According to Dixit multi-party system is divisive to the society. In his own home, mother says vote X while father says vote Y (Which is a healthy sign for me). “If I cannot hold my home together, how can I keep nation together?” He asks.

According to him the Constitution of India is nothing but a copy of “Government of India Rules” by British. Gigantic efforts by Dr. B. R. Ambedkar & whole constitutive assembly are bluntly negated. Nehru & Patel were so hungry of power that they accepted every British system in the haste of takeover.

In fact, it took seven long years to finalize the constitution on 26^Th January 1950. One can have difference of opinion about policies but Dixit simply calls all national leaders as traitors. For him Nehru was a womanizer & Lord Mountbatten used his wife to bring Nehru to his terms.

   

Madhavrao Scindiya was a minister in the Congress government. Dixit had every right to criticize the minister on merit. Dixit furthers an idea of rotten-bloodline to demean Scindiya. He claims that Madhavrao Scindiya is descendent of Scindiyas who defected from the revolutionary Queen of Zanshi at the time of 1857 uprising.

This is not historically true in the first place. But even by assuming so, how can the blood-line be blamed? Once you enter into blood-line theory you are not far away from Aryan-blood etc.

Manmohan Singh is an intellectual prostitute. Chindambaram must be stoned at sight. Such are the abuses blurted out by Dixit.

Many of the lectures in this set of cassettes are delivered before Jain audience. “You are the most religious among Hindus. Once you are spoiled it is very easy to spoil Hindus. If you accept minority status you will be beggars like Muslims & Christians”

How this is relevant to globalization? Products of multinationals invariably contain some non-vegetarian item or the other. Hence Jain community is endangered.

Dixit tells us that Gorbachev was pro-globalization & therefore Soviet Union collapsed! For this he translates Glasnost (transparency) as globalization! He declares that Yeltsin is Swadehi-wala & is trying to revive Russia in that way!

More fables  

He leaves no fantasy unused while proving British as perverse & Indian leaders as fools. Another victim of his is Raja Ram Mohan Roy (the modernist social reformer who brought Sati Ban). He describes a dialogue between Roy who was convincing villagers to learn English.

Villager: “What is the use of learning English?”

Roy: “So that you can wear a neck-tie.”

Villager: “What is the use of wearing a neck-tie?”

Roy: “Weather is cold in England. They often suffer from colds. Neck-tie is handy for wiping the mucus dripping out of your nose.”

Villager: “But there is no cold weather in India.”

Roy: “-----” Has no answer & goes back defeated.

As per Dixit, Roy was supposedly an Agent of the British. The shrewd British employed such a stupid agent, is simply amazing.

Another emphasis of Dixit is that children should go to non-English medium schools. This is OK. But he translates Convent as Orphanage & says that sending your child in Convent is making him/her orphan.

Dixit explains why Americans are telling us to control population. This is in order to keep our natural resources unused & hence available for plundering. This implies that we must increase population to finish off our resources, no matter what misery of life we may have to suffer. He prefers to let fellow countrymen suffer but not let America benefit, if at all.

Dixit never looks at systemic drawbacks. His only diagnosis is that there are traitors. Siraj Uddoula who was Nawab of Bengal was very simple & innocent person. (At many places he says that Muslims were innocent but British spoiled everything). His chief of army was Meer Jafar who ordered 18000 soldiers to surrender before 300 soldiers of Lord Clive because he was sold out to Lord Clive.

Had Meer Jafar such an absolute authority of the Army why he did not topple Siraj Uddoula in the first place & waited for Cile to arrive? But treachery is the only diagnosis available in Dixit’s repertory.  

  

British could achieve Industrial revolution because they plundered India. India was being plundered by lot many aggressors like say, Mehmood of Gazani. Why any other plunderers could not achieve Industrial revolution? Dixit has no inkling about what it takes to achieve Industrial revolution.

All the technology transfer by multinationals is nothing but potato chips (not computer chips). Dixit reports that prime minister Rajiv Gandhi wept aloud in parliament because westerners did not give him the technology of cryogenic engine! Thank God he does not say that “thus the name cryogenic!”.

For him all the misery of India started with the first step of a European, Vasco de Gama, as if all the rulers up to that time & non European rulers after that were not at all exploitative.

There is only one point over which I completely agree with him. He says that higher technical education does not increase your reasoning power. He is an M.Tech from IIT Kanpur. With such strong evidence it is proved beyond doubt that education has noting to with reasoning power.