India Rejects Green

The new prime minister of India, Narenda Modi, has announced he intends to remove virtually all those pesky environmental regulations India was ignoring anyway, in the name of progress (spelled 'p-r-o-f-i-t'). China, where I spent three years, has already tried this. It works great if you don't mind wearing gas masks full time when entering urban areas. (A hospital face mask seems to be the new required fashion accessory there).

India, of course, is a country where until recently wives were burned when their husbands died, girls are still killed for the crime of being raped, and dead bodies floating in your water supply is considered no big deal.

India, as a sidebar, was also the source of all the opium the lofty British insisted on enslaving China with for close to a century, back in the glorious Victorian reign. Now Afghanistan, on our watch, has taken over the opium trade but no worries, they're doing great, thanks to the C.I.A.'s watchful supervision, and that, too, is no doubt considered 'progress' in some quarters.

The C.I.A. is, as we all know,taking heat for their 'Enhanced Interrogation Techniques', otherwise known, in the formerly English language, as 'torture.' So their involvement in protecting the opium trade is nothing new; they simply picked up where the royals left off. China, at least, finally got wise to the undesirability of forced enslavement by drug lords disguised as The British Empire, even if it took a revolution or two to free themselves.

India, on the other hand, freed themselves under Gandhi. Remember Gandhi? He was that quaint revolutionary who believed in nonviolence. African Americans tried that under Martin Luther King, remember? And we all know where that got him. And them.

So India has now moved on from opium agribusiness and joined the industrial age. Lucky us. Too bad we only have one shrinking planet to live on, And I don't know about you, but I would really, really rather not to have to wear a gas mask all the time. Modi seems to feel differently.