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www.newsindiatimes.com – that’s all you need to know Dr. Sudhir M. Parikh Founder, Chairman & Publisher Ilayas Quraishi Chief Operating Officer Ela Dutt Editor Archana Adalja Contributing Editor T. Vishnudatta Jayaraman Advisor Arun Shah Ahmedabad Bureau Chief Peter Ferreira, Deval Parikh, Freelance Photographers Bhailal M. Patel Executive Vice President Chandrakant Koticha-Rajkot, India Executive Director Business Development Jim Gallentine Business Development Manager - U.S. Shahnaz Sheikh Senior Manager Advertising & Marketing Sonia Lalwani Advertising Manager Shailu Desai Advertising New York Muslima Shethwala Syed Sheeraz Mahmood Advertising Chicago Digant Sompura Consultant for Business Development Ahmedabad, India Hervender Singh Circulation Manager Main Office Editorial & Corporate Headquarters 1655 Oak Tree Toad, Suite 155 Edison, NJ 08820-2843 Tel. (212) 675-7515 Fax. (212) 675-7624 New York Office Tel: (718) 784-8555 E-mails editor@newsindiatimes.com advertising@newsindia-times.com subscription@newsindia-times.com Website www.newsindiatimes.com Chicago Office 8846 Lavergne Ave, Skokie, IL 60077 Tel. (773) 856-3345 California Office 650 Vermont Ave, Suite #46 Anaheim, CA 92805 Mumbai Office Nikita Ajay Pai Goregaon, West Mumbai Ahmedabad Office 303 Kashiparekh Complex C.G. Road, 29 Adarsh Society Ahmedabad 380009 Tel. 26446947 F ax. 26565596 Published weekly, Founded in 1975. The views expressed on the opinion pages are those of the writers and do not necessarily reflect those of News India Times. Copyright © 2025, News India Times News India Times (ISSN 0199-901X) is published every Friday by Parikh Worldwide Media LLC., 1655 Oak Tree Toad, Suite 155 Edison, NJ 08820-2843 Periodicals postage paid at Newark, N.J. , and at additional mailing offices. Postmaster: Send address change to News India Times, 1655 Oak Tree Toad, Suite 155 Edison, NJ 08820-2843 Annual Subscription: United States: $28 Disclaimer: Parikh Worldwide Media assumes no liability for claims/ assumptions made in advertisements and advertorials. Disclaimer:The views and opinions expressed on this page are those of the authors and Parikh Worldwide Media does not officially endorse, and is not responsible or liable for them. She’s Big, She’s Green, And She Has AMessage For America W hen I was in middle school, my class visited the Statue of Liberty. Our first stop was the museum, filled with old pho- tographs of ships packed with immigrants sailing into NewYork Harbor. Some of the kids looked our age … and one of them looked just like me. In truth, this experience was a role- play scenario from a choose-your-own- adventure book, a popular genre among preadolescents decades ago. The stories turn the reader into the main character, who makes plot-altering decisions every few pages. In this one, as I stared at my doppelgänger, the museum began to shake, knocking me down. Suddenly, the floor was a wooden deck; I had been transported onto the boat in the picture - as an immigrant and an orphan. Then, decision time: “If you go below deck to meet some of the other immigrants, turn to Page 40. If you go to the front of the ship to meet the passengers who are trav- eling first-class, turn to Page 10.” Your fate is in your hands. By pre- senting conflicting options wrapped in entertaining scenes, these books require young readers to prioritize their values and face the consequences of their deci- sions. Readers are also encouraged to consider matters from another person’s perspective - an important practice for democratic societies. Those skills would be useful now. Poli- cy questions about immigration place the destinies of others in our hands. Today, efforts to deport undocumented people must reckon with “dreamers,” those brought illegally to the United States as children and knowing no other home. Proposals to end birthright citizenship - the Constitution’s most color-blind provi- sion - would strip away someone’s rights simply because of who their parents were. Better policy ideas can result from walking a mile in other people’s shoes. In crafting immigration policy, “what would a dreamer do?” is not a bad place to start. That impulse doesn’t always come naturally, but perhaps it should for Amer- icans. The Statue of Liberty is a declara- tion that the story of the country is a story of immigration. Around the turn of the 20th century, much of the nation’s rapid population growth was because of the more than 12 million people who sailed past the lady and her torch, alongside other newcomers who debarked in places like San Francisco, New Orleans, Philadel- phia and Boston. Every surge of immi- grants has reshaped the nation. They’ve included those escaping persecution as well as those just searching for a place to make a living. Hoping to be welcomed - and maybe even accepted. This defining decision in the book - meet the people like me or visit first class - offers a choice between social belonging and economic opportunity. Immigrants still cite these as principal motivations for coming to the United States. But they also report encountering racism and nativism By Theodore R. Johnson Opinion News India Times (January 4, 2025 - January 10, 2025) January 10, 2025 3 Manmohan Singh Taught AGeneration Of Indians To Dream M anmohan Singh was the face of India’s transforma- tion. As finance minister in the early 1990s, and from 2004 as its prime minister for a decade, his reforms loosened excessive state controls, opened up the economy, pulled millions out of poverty, and made theWest accept the nuclear-armed nation as an ally. Or at least, that’s how his legacy will be remembered glob- ally. But to my generation of Indians, Singh, who died at 92 Thursday (December 26) night in a New Delhi hospital, was above everything else the embodiment of hope. He instilled in us a strong belief that a market economy would work. Not just for a tiny elite in New Delhi and Mumbai, but for a major- ity scattered across smaller towns and villages, battling against overwhelming odds of economic and educational poverty and social discrimination. His own story gave us confidence. A 15-year-old Sikh refugee boy in newly independent India, whose family had fled from Pakistan during the subcontinent’s 1947 partition, he went on to study economics at Oxford and Cambridge and built an impressive career as a top technocrat. Singh and his colleagues were able to convince us that in a post-socialist, market-led economy, we, too, would be free to chase our dreams. With edu- cation and hard work, our lives, too, would be vastly better than our parents’; upward mobility would no longer be an exclusive preserve of the privileged. Through the 1990s, the reform project stayed on track even as governments changed. But the promise started to fray during Singh’s second term as prime minister. The unwieldy Congress- led coalition government he ran from 2009 was besieged, from one side, by crony capitalists gorging on debt from state-owned banks only to siphon off money into their Swiss bank accounts. From the other side, it was under attack by a political opposi- tion that blamed Singh’s indecisive leadership for rampant cor- ruption, high inflation, slowing growth and a falling rupee. “I do not believe that I have been a weak prime minister,” Singh said in one of his last press conferences, just a few months before the Hindu right-wing leader Narendra Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party swept the 2014 election. “I honestly believe that history will be kinder to me than the contemporary media or for that matter the opposition in parliament.” That prediction didn’t take too long to get tested. In Novem- ber 2016, Prime Minister Modi banned 86% of India’s currency overnight. Singh, who described the move as “organized loot and legalized plunder” said it would crush economic growth. He was right. With his death, India has been deprived of sage counsel at a time when growth is once again anemic, policymaking has be- come whimsical, many industries are facing extreme concen- tration of economic power, the middle class is feeling weighed down by taxation, and the poor are being excluded from gov- ernment programs in the name of plugging leakages. Religious strife is on the rise, and politicians of all hues are bribing voters to capture power where they can, without sparing a thought for how best to use national resources for development. After 10 years in the top job, Modi’s personality cult is weakening, but to his supporters, the belief in a prosperous India has become an uncritical act of faith. That wasn’t the effect Singh intended when, in his first budget speech in 1991, he channeled Victor Hugo: “No power on earth can stop an idea whose time has come,” he said. “The emergence of India as a major economic power in the world happens to be one such idea.” Well, India is now the world’s fifth-largest economy, on track to becoming the third biggest in a few years. But that’s largely a statistical artifact: a product of extremely unequal growth that’s making a tiny section of 1.4 billion people very rich. On average, it’s still a lower-middle-income nation with per-capita income of $2,500 last year, nowhere near South Korea’s $35,000. Korea, which used to be as poor as India in the 1960s, inspired Singh’s vision. He couldn’t replicate the “miracle on the Han” in his lifetime. But a bigger worry is that New Delhi, lurching once again toward protectionist trade policies, is no longer even on the path to that goal. And that will be a shame, if by choos- ing to replace rational analysis with empty slogans, and genuine reforms with nationalistic chest-thumping, the country lets down the memory of its quiet internationalist. Andy Mukherjee is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering industrial companies and financial services in Asia. Previously, he worked for Reuters, the Straits Times and Bloomberg News . -Bloomberg By Andy Mukherjee - Continued On Page 4 PHOTO:@andymukherjee70