Editorials - 15-04-2022

Nurturing the real economy, not just tweaking the repo rate, is the need of the hour

India’s inflation, which is measured by the Consumer Price Index (CPI), has stayed above the Reserve Bank of India (RBI)’s upper tolerance limit of 6% for three months running. The central bank’s monetary policy committee decided to hold benchmark interest rates earlier this month, choosing to remain accommodative “while focussing on withdrawal of accommodation to ensure that inflation remains within the target going forward, while supporting growth”. Western economies such as the U.S. have begun raising interest rates. Is the RBI doing enough to arrest inflation? Ananth Narayan and Lekha S. Chakraborty discuss the question in a conversation moderated byK. Bharat Kumar. Excerpts:

Is the RBI behind the curve in reining in inflation?

Lekha Chakraborty:There needs to be a fundamental rethink on the efficacy of the inflation targeting framework itself. The crucial question is: are we able to anchor inflationary expectations properly? The sole mandate of the RBI is to look into price stability. So, now, what do we do? Do we revise the nominal anchor from the stated 4%? Or do we play around with that band plus or minus 2 percentage points? Or are we going to throw away this framework and adopt a prior inflation targeting framework?

Having said that, the context is important. Inflation is mounting. There is geopolitical uncertainty. The war in Ukraine led to supply-chain disruptions. Consignments are getting delayed. So, it’s a supply-side shock. Manoeuvring with repo rate adjustments to contain inflation may not work. The reverse repo rate itself is likely getting redundant, because the RBI has introduced a new tool — the standing deposit facility rate at 3.75% — to absorb excess liquidity. That’s a smart move, to work with the monetary policy corridor but leaving the rates untouched.

Ananth Narayan:I have a fundamental problem with the monetary policy framework. Monetary policy is extremely complex. All the macro variables that we care about — inflation, growth, jobs, external balance, financial stability — are interrelated; you cannot target one without touching the other. And each of these is impacted by multiple policy tools, such as interest rates (long term, short term, and everything in between), banking liquidity, fiscal balance, exchange rates, macroprudential regulations, RBI interventions and, of course, that lovely thing called sentiment. What we currently have is a simplistic monetary framework, where we pretend that CPI inflation can be controlled by the repo rate almost linearly. To just change the repo rate and expect to keep CPI inflation between 2% and 6% at all times... that is utter rubbish. We can’t legislate away economic complexity.

Now, is RBI behind the curve? There are areas where it feels like the RBI was behind the curve. One, in the February policy, the RBI said it expected FY23 CPI inflation to be 4.5%. That didn’t seem credible. It has revised the estimate to 5.7%.

Two, for long the RBI insisted that the 10-year government bond yield was a public good that had to be kept low. In FY21, both the central and State governments had a record borrowing programme. The FY21 weighted average government borrowing rate was a record low of just 5.8%, because the RBI effectively sat down on the curve. So, the returns for savers was brought down dramatically.

Our household inflation expectations are at 11%. Average deposit rates across all banks are at just 5%. With such hugely negative real rates, we’re pushing savers to the brink, into equity markets, into Bitcoin, and into gold. The resultant asset price inflation is also increasing inequality — the top 15% are doing very well and consuming luxury products, even as the bottom 40% are struggling.

But to be fair to the RBI, it’s not been an easy time. And to give credit, the RBI stopped its government bond purchases in October. It is only now that the U.S. Federal Reserve has stopped buying bonds. Likewise, our money market rates have already gone up quite a bit. One year ago, the one-year Treasury Bill rate was 3.7%. Today it is 4.9%. So, the RBI has allowed rates to come up. I don’t think repo rate could have helped in the current context.

Would you worry about GDP growth?

LC:The inflationary expectations and the output gap are unobserved variables. How do you deal with these variables within the rules-based monetary macro framework?

The output gap variable itself is controversial, because the basic assumption here is that you are experiencing cyclicity; and that once you correct the cyclycity through monetary policy, you’re going to get growth back to pre-crisis levels. This is dangerous, because if that drop in GDP is not cyclical, but a permanent scar, then monetary policy acting as a counter-cyclical policy tool will not work.

That’s why fiscal dominance is very crucial. Fiscal policy has been very accommodative. We have very high fiscal deficit and high debt numbers. But from a position of strength, the Finance Minister articulated that her high fiscal deficit can be substantiated through enhancing investment — through ‘crowding in’ private corporate investment.

AN:The context is very tough. Let’s agree for now that the RBI’s basic mandate is inflation targeting. Now, inflation is a problem. Even for the current fiscal year, FY23, inflation could well cross 6% if oil prices remain where they are. It’s not just oil prices, but also edible oil prices, fertilizers, chemicals, feedstock, and all-round supply chain disruptions.

Now let’s look at growth. The real GDP for FY22 is pretty much the same as it was two years ago before the pandemic. Effectively, two years have gone by with zero real growth. In the last two years, inflation has been 6% compounded annual; high inflation and zero growth are a disaster. The RBI’s growth estimate of 7.2% for the current fiscal is also at risk. High oil and commodity prices tend to reduce our growth. Exports might be impacted because of a global slowdown.

It is also a terrible situation with jobs. CMIE data suggest that over the last five years, we’ve lost two crore jobs outside agriculture. Even before the pandemic, we were losing jobs. Our fiscal situation is already stretched, our external situation is going to get tricky going forward, we are looking at a current account deficit possibly of $100 billion, it could be a record the next fiscal year because of elevated oil prices. FII flows look very iffy, given the global context. Even if FDI flows come in, we’re still going to see a very large outflow from the RBI which has to be made up. Of course, robust tax collections thanks to formalisation and record currency reserves offer us some buffer for now.

It’s a nightmarish situation for policymakers. Under such circumstances, what can they do to control inflation? Normally, pushing up repo rates and tightening liquidity makes sense when there’s a lot of credit growth. If we have 25-30% credit growth, which is creating aggregate demand and money supply, we have to arrest that by increasing the cost of money. For the last two years, however, we have had credit growth of just 7.5% annualised, which is lower than the nominal GDP growth rate. It is difficult to argue that credit growth is causing inflation. If anything, we need more credit in investments and job creation.

Market sentiment is a key factor. Most central banks are tightening monetary policy globally. If we stand out and say we’re not going to tighten, it does attract negative sentiment. We’ve got to give the credibility that we are focussing on inflation. Now the RBI has tried to bring back credibility, by reiterating its focus on inflation, which is great. Improving the return for long-term savers — by not repressing government bond yields — will go a long way in reducing inequality, controlling inflation, and managing financial stability.

The ultimate way to control inflation for India is for us to create jobs and output. The real economy is the only way to improve all our macro variables. Monetary policy cannot do much for either growth, jobs, or for inflation control. Eventually, it’s the real economy, which is where the government comes into the picture.

Is the CPI index appropriately represented? How relevant is the composition now?

LC:The real issue here is the divergence between the WPI and CPI and of course, the energy price volatility and food inflation. So, how the RBI is able to anchor these is key. In India, inflation is not strictly a monetary phenomenon. There are many supply-side shocks. So, can inflation targeting control or manoeuvre those supply side shocks through the ‘expectations channel’ is an important question. Credit infusion — the predominant narrative of economic stimulus packages — is not working very well, because if there is no corresponding growth in the economy, then this credit infusion can lead to mounting NPAs.

On the fiscal policy side, the government has to act as an employer of last resort through ‘participation income’ (not ‘basic income’) in the hands of people, by providing guaranteed jobs. This can be a very strong policy to tackle inflation rather than the government providing cash transfers, a huge fiscal stimulus, into the hands of people.

But at the same time, where is the fiscal space? A crucial question is whether we can do a fiscal-monetary policy coordination through the monetisation of deficit once again, because that’s exactly what Kaushik Basu and Nobel Laureate Abhijit Banerjee have highlighted; they are all arguing for the re-emergence of monetisation of deficit through better coordination of fiscal and monetary policy. So, we need to wait and see because that is again inflationary in nature. But heterodox economists always say that when you are below the full employment equilibrium, it will not lead to mounting inflation, but will lead to growth. My hunch is it’s not the CPI per se (or the core inflation or the headline inflation) that we need to focus on, on the RBI side; the question is a little bigger than that, and that’s about ‘employment’.

AN:The way in which the CPI basket is constructed, as I understand it, is you look at the Consumer Expenditure Survey, and you look at what people are consuming, and then you try and create a rural and an urban basket, which approximates to the average consumer as to what they actually consume; you try and arrive at the median. Now, the last consumer survey was done in 2011-12. There was one done in 2017-18, the results of which remain a mystery to us. There is one report that I saw in Ideas for India. Given that there’s no Consumer Expenditure Survey, they looked at the consumption pattern indicated by the Consumer Pyramids Household Survey (CPHS) of the CMIE. Their conclusion was based on the 2019 pre-pandemic consumer CPHS data; that the basket wasn’t off the mark. Of course, individual items like typewriters need to be corrected in the next Consumer Expenditure Survey, which hopefully will happen in 2022-23.

But the reality also is that people’s perception of inflation is far higher than what the CPI number indicates. It reflects in the household expectations survey that the RBI itself conducts. That’s not a very robust survey so that has its own limitations. But when I speak to folks in the industry, when I speak to even MSMEs, their perception of inflation seems far, far higher than 6%. I think that recent hikes in petrol prices and diesel prices will also add to that expectation.

The ultimate way to control inflation for India is for us to create jobs and output.

Ananth Narayan



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Data on migration and development indices show that there is a stronger case for English to be the link language rather than Hindi

Residents of only 12 of the 35 States and Union Territories (UTs) reported Hindi as their first choice of language for communication (Census 2011). But there is a caveat. “Hindi” is an umbrella term encompassing 56 languages (mother tongues) including Bhojpuri, Rajasthani, Hindi and Chhattisgarhi. While 43% of Indians speak “Hindi”, only 26% speak Hindi specifically as their mother tongue.

This begs the question whether Hindi needs to be made the link language. This is in the context of Union Home Minister Amit Shah saying that when citizens of States communicate with each other, they should do so in the “language of India”, with Hindi as an alternative to English. This sparked criticism from the Opposition. Karnataka Pradesh Congress Committee President D.K. Shivakumar said Bengaluru became India’s IT capital because of English.

The argument used for pushing Hindi as an alternative to English, because it is spoken by the majority, cannot be tenable as it is a majoritarian one. Instead, we need to answer a utilitarian question: which language would be beneficial for citizens as they seek better lives — Hindi or English? In other words, would native Hindi speakers benefit by learning English or should Hindi be imposed on the non-Hindi speaking population for their “benefit”?

A comparison of the Human Development Index (HDI) of States and UTs shows that regions with a higher share of English speakers also have higher HDI scores (Chart 1), while States with a higher share of Hindi speakers have relatively low HDI scores (Chart 2). This means there is a positive correlation between a higher standard of living and a higher share of English speakers.

This is also borne out in migration-related numbers. More people from the Hindi-speaking States have been migrating towards the non-Hindi speaking regions in search of better livelihoods. In the 2017 Economic Survey, an analysis of railways passenger data who travelled in unreserved compartments was used as a proxy to measure work-related migration. “This class of travel serves less affluent people who are most likely to travel for work-related reasons,” the report argued. Movements of nine million such passengers between 2011 and 2016 were considered and travel less than 200 km was ignored.

Map 4 shows the heat map of net passenger flows for FY2015-16 at the State level. In States such as Tamil Nadu, Maharashtra, Gujarat, West Bengal, Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka, Punjab and Delhi, there was net in-migration. The number of people who migrated into these States was higher than those who migrated to other States. Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, Jharkhand, Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan, Uttarakhand, Haryana, Himachal Pradesh and Chhattisgarh recorded higher net out-migration.

Juxtaposing this with Map 3 shows that the States which recorded net out-migration broadly correspond to the States which have a high share of Hindi speakers. In contrast, the States which recorded net in-migration broadly correspond to regions with fewer Hindi speakers. The exceptions were Kerala, Odisha and, to an extent, Maharashtra. Map 3 shows not just those who speak Hindi as a mother tongue, but also those who mentioned it as either a second or third language of preference (Hindi as an all-encompassing term).

An analysis of the 2011 Census data (Table 5) also shows that net in-migration for Hindi States, where Hindi is spoken by at least 50% of the population, is negative. This indicates that the migrant outflow was higher than the inflow in these States. In non-Hindi States, the net in-migration was positive. This pattern was observed for all types of migrations including those done for work and education.

To summarise, relatively more people from Hindi-speaking States migrate to non-Hindi States, and there is a strong correlation between a region’s HDI and a higher share of English speakers. This suggests a stronger case for English to be the link language rather than Hindi, contrary to what the Union government seems to imply.



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The spewing of hatred, in a new and menacing dimension now, is belittling the Constitution and betraying the people

The Gladstonian Liberal, John Morley (1838-1923), opposed imperialism and supported Irish Home Rule. But he had a dim view of India’s aspirations for freedom. ‘There is, I know,’ wrote Morley, ‘a school of thought who say that we might wisely walk out of India and that Indians can manage their own affairs better than we can. Anyone who pictures for himself the anarchy, the bloody chaos that would follow, might shrink from that sinister decision.’ Disapproving of reformist enlargements to Indian franchise and representation, he rebuked the ‘reformers’ with searing words : ‘When across the dark distances you hear the sullen roar and scream of carnage and confusion, your hearts will reproach you with what you have done.’

Quoting these two observations of Morley’s in an essay on the man, Winston S. Churchill wrote (in hisGreat Contemporaries ), ominously: ‘Only time can show whether his fears were groundless.’

Prognoses, right or wrong

Today as we approach the 75th anniversary of India’s freedom, we may ask if time has disproved those grim prognoses contained in Morley’s keywords.

Is there ‘anarchy’ in India?

Absolutely not. Ours may be called by observers a turbulent democracy. True, some of our leaders often forget the laws, forget that there is such a thing as the Constitution of India. And many politicians speak with hatred in their minds and poison on their tongues with impunity. That does not make India a lawless desert.

Is there ‘bloody chaos’?

Of course not. Yes, there are moments of mayhem, hours of bedlam, days of havoc. Our legislatures know pandemonium. Our government offices know disarray. But bloody chaos? No way! Our chaotic moments can be bad, they are not bloody.

Is there ‘confusion’?

Yes, there is. It is something new. And it has been deliberately sown, assiduously nurtured. It is about what our national identity is, what we as a people are in our core beings. India has been, through the ages, about three ‘C’s — caste, creed and country. The first is a matter of kinship, the second about worship, the third about citizenship. The first two are about high sentiment, the third about a high ideal. Leaders of India’s renaissance did not want the first two to engulf the third. They wanted the first to become irrelevant, the second to become a private matter, the third to engage us. Today, caste and, more to the point, religion, are engulfing the country. The Hindu-Muslim divide is at its sharpest ever since Independence.

And do we hear the ‘sullen roar and scream of carnage’?

One has to be where, in W.B. Yeats’ words, ‘the blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and…the ceremony of innocence is drowned’ to hear that roar and scream. If these two fearsome sounds had been heard for the first and last time when India was partitioned, one might have let the horrible trauma recede in our collective memories. But no, just as it had happened many times before India became independent, and happened at the hour of freedom, it has happened afterwards again and over again. When did it happen last ? One can say ‘yesterday’. One can say ‘yesterday’ every day, knowing that the ‘yesterday’ can spew into ‘today’, any day.

Diminishing India

The Hindu-Muslim divides growing to a new and menacing proportion diminishes our country, debases its greatness, destroys its heritage of a shared Peoplehood.

Riots have invariably started over flimsy incidents, like fires generally are, but Hindu-Muslim riots have got quickly co-opted by other entities, with the help of mercenaries to serve sinister purposes. ‘Entities’ is a euphemism ; we know who those are. They belong to both denominations.

Who started the disturbances on Ram Navami day? We are unlikely to ever know. Who gained, we will and already do know — nameless, faceless, soulless manipulators. Who lost, who suffered, is tragically known as well — Hindu and Muslim innocents. But more, beyond those innocents, who bleeds? Our country, its cohesion, its coherence, its conscience.

Social media spread the news of early incidents with the speed of light. District authorities in Madhya Pradesh, according to reports, had houses of some of those implicated in the rioting demolished. They acted surgically. Who came under the ‘blade’? Destroyers of public property being made to pay for that destruction is sound, but is it sound to make the wives and children of the accused also pay by being rendered roofless?

Gandhi’s fast

In 1924, terrible Hindu-Muslim riots scarred the Muslim-majority district of Kohat, in the North-West Frontier Province. Gandhi went on a 21-day fast in Delhi by way of penance. Emerging from it, greatly weakened, he said in a feeble voice to those gathered around him: ‘We ought to be able to live together. The Hindus must be able to offer their worship in perfect freedom in their temples, and so should Mussalmans be able to say theirazan and prayer with equal freedom in their mosques. If we cannot ensure this elemental freedom of worship, then neither Hinduism nor Islam have any meaning.’

‘There is no point citing Gandhi today; he is ancient history’, I can hear the dejected reader say and my first instinct would be to say ‘I know.’ But there are many, many of them wielding great influence, who would demur. The stand on secularism taken by the Chief Minister of Tamil Nadu, M.K. Stalin, in recent policy pronouncements, citing Gandhi and Bhagat Singh, has been exemplary. The statements of the Communist Party of India (Marxist) in its just concluded conclaves in Kannur, have been salutary. These complement the traditionally strong positions on secularism taken by the Indian National Congress and many other political parties across the country. Very significant has been the statement of the former Chief Minister of Karnataka, B.S. Yediyurappa on the Ram Navami violence: ‘It is our desire that both Hindus and Muslims should live like children of the same mother.’

Courts must step in

It is time now for the courts of the land to take a stand, with the National Human Rights Commission and the National Commission for Minorities as their thought-partners to uphold the Preamble and Article 25 of our Constitution. InS.R. Bommai vs Union of India (1994), the Supreme Court of India held that secularism is one of the basic features of the Constitution. To weaken the freedom of conscience is to weaken a fundamental freedom. The spewing of hatred by inflammatory words and any abetting of those by elements in power belittle the Constitution and betray the people of India. It cannot be permitted. Communalism inverts our citizenship, perverts our humanity, subverts our Constitution.

Very recently, as many as 100 Muslim residents of Dalvana, a village in Gujarat’s Vadgam taluka were invited to offer Maghrib Namaz and break their fast during the Ramzan month on the premises of its Vir Maharaj Mandir, a 1,200-year-old temple. ‘When the heart is hard and parched up, come upon me with a shower of mercy....’ wrote Tagore.

In the prevailing aridity, Gujarat has shown that grace has not been lost.

We do not have to disprove Morley and Churchill. We have to prove ourselves to the conscience of our Republic.

Gopalkrishna Gandhi is a former administrator, diplomat and Governor



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The Aam Aadmi Party has the ideal opportunity to resolve the air quality issue in Delhi and Punjab

Over the last few years, the Delhi and Punjab governments have been at the receiving end of scathing criticism on the issue of air pollution. But the annual inter-State blame games have only served as a distraction even as residents in the two States continue to breathe polluted air. Now, with the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) governing both Delhi and Punjab, collaboration for clean air should be the mantra for both State governments.

While Delhi dominates the discourse on air pollution in India, Punjab is home to nine of the 132 most polluted cities in the country identified by the Central Pollution Control Board. In 2019, Delhi and Punjab together faced economic losses estimated to be approximately Rs. 18,000 crore due to worsening air pollution. Therefore, by collaborating for clean air, both States can ensure improvements in citizen well-being and labour productivity.

What needs to be done

So, how can the two States collaborate?

First, those in charge of the two States must talk. Setting aside their disagreements on the contribution of stubble burning to Delhi’s air pollution, the States should arrive at a common understanding of sources polluting the region. This would result in solutions that are amenable to both governments.

Second, create platforms for knowledge exchange. A common knowledge centre should be set up to facilitate cross-learning on possible solutions to developmental challenges in both States. Such a centre would especially benefit Punjab given the host of measures that the Delhi government has already taken to improve air quality in Delhi. For instance, Delhi has 40 continuous air quality monitoring stations. On the other hand, Punjab has only eight continuous monitoring stations while source assessment studies for eight of its nine non-attainment cities are under way. Information on air quality levels and source assessment studies are critical in developing long-term strategies for pollution mitigation.

Using proven solutions

Third, collaborate to execute proven solutions. The two States could co-design solutions that would improve air quality. They could jointly institutionalise a task force comprising experts from State-run institutions to pilot these solutions and assess their impact. This would ensure wider acceptance of the proposed solution, which has not been the case in the past. For instance, the PUSA bio-decomposer (developed by the Indian Agricultural Research Institute), touted as a solution to stubble burning by the Delhi government, has received mixed reviews from farmers. Further, the decomposer only makes sense for early maturing varieties of paddy, as even with the decomposer, stubble would take between 25 to 30 days to decompose. Therefore, it is of little use in high burn districts such as Sangrur, Punjab, where late-maturing paddy varieties are dominant.

Market for diversified crops

Fourth, create a market for diversified crop products. The persistence of stubble burning in Punjab and its contribution to toxic winter pollution in Delhi cannot be denied. Shifting away from the ‘paddy-wheat cycle’ through crop diversification is a sure shot solution to stubble burning. But, the lack of an assured market for agricultural products, other than wheat and paddy, has acted as a deterrent. For years now, the AAP government has toyed with the idea of introducing ‘Aam Aadmi kitchens’ in Delhi. These community kitchens could potentially incorporate crops other than wheat and paddy in meals offered. Scaling up such kitchens in the two States could signal demand and an assured market for diversified crop products.

Finally, both State governments should assert the need for extending inter-State cooperation to other States in the Indo-Gangetic plains in different inter-State forums. One such forum is the Northern Zonal Council which has representation from Chandigarh, Delhi, Punjab, Haryana, Rajasthan, Himachal Pradesh, Jammu and Kashmir and Ladakh. Both Delhi and Punjab must use this platform to highlight the need for coordination with neighbouring States to alleviate the pollution crisis.

AAP has an opportunity to showcase political leadership towards air quality improvement in Delhi and Punjab. However, while collaborative solutions exist, everything cannot be achieved this winter. This year, both State governments should focus on identifying clear metrics that they will use to evaluate their performance in the coming years. With a collaborative plan of action, we can be optimistic about cleaner air in the years to come.

Tanushree Ganguly is Programme Lead at the Council on Energy, Environment and Water (CEEW), an independent not-for-profit policy research institution



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France is facing one of its most crucial elections in decades

The first round of France’s presidential election on Sunday has shown how the country’s political landscape, once dominated by the traditional social democratic and conservative parties, has shifted to a more polarised direction. While Emmanuel Macron, the sitting President, came top with 27.8% of the votes, Marine Le Pen, a far-right, anti-immigrant leader, finished second with 23.1%. The conservative and socialist parties crumbled — with a combined 6.7% vote — while the far-right and leftist candidates won more than half of the polled votes. The run-off, on April 24, will determine who is to lead the European Union’s second largest economy. Opinion polls suggest that the race will not be easy for Mr. Macron as Ms. Le Pen, whose popularity was at 16% in February, has gained a lot of ground. If in 2017, Mr. Macron defeated Ms. Le Pen in the run-off with a whopping 32 percentage point margin, his lead now, say polls, is between two to six points. While resentment over inflation and the rising cost of living remains high, Ms. Le Pen is offering a cocktail of hard nationalism and anti-establishment politics to win over disaffected voters without losing her far-right base.

Five years ago, there was large-scale consolidation among the voters from across the political spectrum, often referred to as the ‘republican front’, behind Mr. Macron. They wanted to defeat Ms. Le Pen’s dangerous politics, which they believed was against the French republican values. The biggest challenge he faces today is in keeping this coalition intact while facing a more powerful rival. Leaders of the conservative and leftist parties have endorsed Mr. Macron for the run-off, but it is not clear, given the political changes under way, whether their voters would follow suit. In 2017, Mr. Macron was a new face — an outsider with a liberal, progressive heart. But as President, his pro-business policies have alienated leftist voters, who supported Jean-Luc Mélenchon in the first round. Mr. Macron’s decision to close down some mosques and crack down on religious organisations have also led to cracks in the social coalition that backed him in 2017. Ms. Le Pen, already powered by the anti-immigrant hard nationalists, is trying to win over the anti-capitalist voters angry with Mr. Macron. She has also taken a nuanced view of the Ukraine war. While she has condemned it, she is critical of the sanctions, which Mr. Macron supported in coordination with the EU and the U.S. Her argument is that the sanctions are hurting French consumers. She also wants to take French troops out of NATO’s military command. A Le Pen win would alter the character of France’s polity and challenge the combined efforts of the EU and NATO in opposing Putin’s war on Ukraine. This possibility is what makes the April 24 run-off one of the most consequential presidential elections in France in decades.



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Some headline indicators may be shining, but the recovery is still ragged and vulnerable

The World Bank pared its 2022 growth projections for South Asian economies to 6.6% on Wednesday, from an estimate of 7.6% released in January, emphasising that post-pandemic growth was already uneven and fragile before the Russia-Ukraine conflict triggered fresh challenges. The ripple effect of high oil and food prices that prevailed even before the war and were exacerbated since February 24, are key factors worrying the Bank as people’s real incomes take a hit. India’s GDP, the Bank reckons, may now grow by 8% in 2022-23, not 8.7% as it had earlier forecast, before dropping further to 7.1% in 2023-24. The Bank’s chief economist has said that their overall assessment is that GDP growth could actually be 1.3 percentage points lower, or 7.4%, but they refrained from making an adjustment of that magnitude in their headline projection due to some positive surprises in recent data such as strong digital services exports. The tepid post-COVID recovery in India’s household consumption will be further hemmed in by high inflation and the incomplete labour market revival. More importantly, a nowcast of high frequency indicators by the Bank’s mandarins suggests India’s growth was already experiencing a relative slowdown in the January to March 2022 quarter, compared to previous quarters. India’s recovery varies widely across sectors and manufacturing remains troubled due to weak demand and increasing input costs. This is borne out by the latest industrial output data.

The World Bank’s prognostications about India’s growth prospects seem more sanguine than some others. The Asian Development Bank expects India’s GDP for the year to rise 7.5% with retail inflation of around 5.8%. And the RBI reset growth hopes from 7.8% in February to 7.2%, while raising its inflation projection for the year more sharply from 4.5% to 5.7%. Economists expect inflation to trend much higher, even above 7% in the first half of the year, and well over the comfort threshold of 6% over the full year. Monetary and fiscal policy mandarins need to address inflation more aggressively, lest it derails the recovery which the Bank has warned could renew pressure on improving bank and corporate balance sheets. There is a need to rethink growth engines as well — the pursuit of free trade agreements indicates a fresh stance. The shunning of RCEP needs a revisit, as advised by key ally Japan — lest rivals like Vietnam dent India’s future exports in job-intensive sectors such as textiles. The farm sector, that has so far been resilient through the pandemic’s worst phases and could now gain due to high global food prices, needs careful handling too. While the normal monsoon forecast bodes well for thekharif crop and hopefully, rural demand, the cost of inputs — be it fertilizers or chicken feed — is rising sharply for farmers too.



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New Delhi, April 14: Mr. Bhutto, President and Chief Martial Law Administrator of Pakistan, having got himself elected President of the Pakistan National Assembly to-day declared Martial Law would be lifted on April 21 provided the Assembly approved the interim constitution on Monday. He was addressing the National Assembly which was elected on December 1, 1970 but began its session only to-dayin Islamabad on a stormy note. President Bhutto had fixed April 21 for convening the four Provincial Assemblies. The nation has been under martial law since 1958, when Field Marshal Ayub Khan established his military regime. Mr. Bhutto, who took over as President in January from Ayub’s successor Gen. Yahya Khan, had proposed to continue martial law until Aug. 14, to allow a gradual change-over to civil from military rule. He had been under pressure to end it sooner, however, and to-day’s announcement seemed something of a compromise. He had been under pressure to end it sooner, however, and to-day’s announcement seemed something of a compromise.He said to-day there still were “inherent risks” in an early end to martial law, but they were worth the risk in restoring democracy for the first time in 14 years.



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It has something for everyone: Drama, unforgettable clothes, and good, old-fashioned sentiment — all breathlessly live-tweeted.

First, there is the teaser. They make appearances in each other’s family photos. Next, the trailer, the intimate roka, followed by the close-friends-and-family-only engagement, top-secret mehendi and hush-hush sangeet, with all the photos ending up, accidentally-on-purpose, on MissBollyGossip.com. And finally, release day. The lead couple, dressed in the finest Sabya or Manish by the costume department, stares dreamily into each other’s eyes and/or laughs together as directed by the celebrity photographer hired to take exclusive images of the mega event. And an enraptured audience of a few million, which has been tweeting undying love for #RaAlia or #VicKat or whoever the couple of the moment is, sits back to enjoy the climax of yet another paisa vasool entertainer.

The Big Fat Bollywood Wedding is, in the immortal words of the Hindi film critic, a “family entertainer”. It has something for everyone: Drama, unforgettable clothes, and good, old-fashioned sentiment — all breathlessly live-tweeted. Admittedly, some of the appeal is in the thrill of seeing two beautiful and wealthy people come together in holy matrimony and — everyone secretly hopes — immediately generate fodder for the gossip mills with baby rumours, feuding in-laws and even conscious uncouplings. But the real reason anyone cares about these weddings is the same as why they watch a Bollywood film: Escape. With its glamorous cast — including guest and special appearances — extravagant outfits and gorgeous locations, a lavishly-produced Bollywood wedding guarantees a distraction from such distressing things as a pandemic, political mudslinging and the high price of lemons.

And the best part of all this? There will always be sequels. Because, as they say in the biz, picture abhi baaki hai, mere dost. Wedding bhi.



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High food inflation as well as wild fluctuation in food prices are fairly chronic events in India. The commodities keep changing through the year but the phenomenon remains the same.

With a single lemon retailing at anywhere between Rs 10 and Rs 15, across the country, lemon prices are squeezing household budgets. Reportedly, the supply of lemons has fallen due to a decline in overall production. Lemon orchards are very sensitive to excess moisture and the supplies took a hit after exceptionally heavy rains in September and October last year. Chances of a quick correction in prices are low because the next crop will come in only by October. From the policymaking perspective, however, it would be a mistake to view this spike in lemon prices in isolation. It would be equally erroneous to imagine that the solution lies in boosting production alone.

High food inflation as well as wild fluctuation in food prices are fairly chronic events in India. The commodities keep changing through the year but the phenomenon remains the same. The most recent example of this came earlier in the week when overall inflation rose by 7 per cent, driven primarily by a spike in the prices of food items. Food inflation rose by almost 8 per cent. Often, it is the prices of perishables such as fruits and vegetables that are the leading contributors to price rise. While high prices draw attention primarily because they hurt consumers, there is another side of the story — of excess supply and the resultant crash in prices, which, in turn, bring financial ruin to farmers. Breaking this cycle of supply gluts and shortages will benefit both consumers and producers. The key lies in boosting India’s storage capacity as it can reduce the frequent mismatch between supply and demand.

It is now widely accepted — a January paper from the RBI reiterates it — that “wastage of food products due to inefficient post-harvest practices is one of the important factors behind high food inflation in India”. The wastage happens for a variety of reasons but the lack of proper storage facilities is particularly important. If one looks at the warehousing stock per capita (measured in square meters), India at 0.02 lags far behind other big economies such as China (0.8), the UK (1.09) and the US (4.4). Not only is India comparatively deficient, but the existing warehousing is inefficiently distributed as well. According to the RBI, nearly 70 per cent of the country’s total capacity is limited to four states — Uttar Pradesh, West Bengal, Punjab and Gujarat — whereas states like Maharashtra and Karnataka, which have large export potential as well, do not have adequate facilities. Further, almost 70 per cent of all cold storage is for storing potatoes while only 30 per cent is used for multi-commodity storage, resulting in poor utilisation of existing capacity. Lastly, boosting cold storage capacity would be incomplete without a well-developed cold chain involving various stages from pre-cooling, pack-houses, refrigerated transport to refrigerated marketing display. This is where both the government and private sector need to invest to find a sustainable solution to repeated fluctuations and surges in the prices of everyday food items.



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In 2017, Macron promised a centrist “revolution”. Now, his hope is to chip away supporters from both the right and left, by becoming the default candidate for those fearful of a xenophobic Le Pen presidency.

In 2017, Emmanuel Macron was a relative outsider who held out the hope that in France in particular, and in Europe as a whole, the centre would hold. After the first round of the presidential election earlier this week — the run-off poll between the president and leader of the far-right National Rally, Marine Le Pen, will take place on April 24 — it is clear that Macron’s term in office has only polarised the French polity further. Macron received around 28 per cent of the vote, Le Pen 23 per cent and the Left candidate, Jean-Luc Melenchon was a close third, with 22 per cent. Both the far-right and the left have gained ground. And while Melenchon’s call to his supporters to ensure that Le Pen does not gain the presidency may ensure that Macron becomes the first French presidential incumbent since Jacques Chiraq in 2002 to win a second term, his pro-market, pro-EU centre-right plank has fewer takers than before.

Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine is only the latest challenge to surface during Macron’s presidency. Domestically, the gilets jaunes or “yellow vests” protests against income inequality, price rise and tax breaks for the wealthy that rocked France began in 2018, and have flared sporadically ever since. The killing of school teacher Samuel Paty deepened another cleavage in French society and Macron announced a programme to “strengthen French values” and introduced laws that are seen to target Muslims. The rise of China and Britain’s exit from the EU have made it all the more important for France to take a leadership role in Europe. Unfortunately, the far-right — especially Le Pen — have made pro-Putin statements and continue to be sceptical of the EU and NATO. Macron has tilted right whenever he has been under siege politically. Given that he has made combating Putin’s Russia a policy priority, and his opponent has called for a “reset” of NATO-Russia relations, the election results will have far-reaching geopolitical implications.

Most opinion polls predict a close race between Le Pen and Macron in this election. Data also points to apathy with the political system as a whole and Macron in particular among the young and rural working classes. In 2017, Macron promised a centrist “revolution”. Now, his hope is to chip away supporters from both the right and left, by becoming the default candidate for those fearful of a xenophobic Le Pen presidency. Given the fragile European unity, and the need for an outward-looking France in that context, the election results on April 24 will be closely watched in Brussels and beyond.



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Two-armed youth holding five persons hostage for nine hours in the South Avenue flat of Congress MP Dalbir Singh were overpowered by policemen in a swift 20-minute operation.

Two-armed youth holding five persons hostage for nine hours in the South Avenue flat of Congress MP Dalbir Singh were overpowered by policemen in a swift 20-minute operation. The five hostages, including two former members of the Madhya Pradesh assembly, were freed. The youth have been identified as Ram Narayan Kumar and Kumaraswamy from Andhra Pradesh.

West Asia Strike

At least 10 countries in West Asia and millions of Muslims elsewhere observed a day’s strike to protest against the killing of two Palestinians near the Al Aqsa mosque in Jerusalem by an Iraqi soldier. The strike was called by King Khaled of Saudi Arabia. An exception was South Yemen, where the Marxist government of President Ali Nasser Mohammed ordered a double-shift work day to raise money for the Palestinians.

Charan Relents

The Lok Dal chief Charan Singh will make a re-entry into politics on April 15, when he presides over the meeting of his party’s national executive convened especially for the May 19 “mini general elections”.

M S Returns Money

Celebrated Carnatic musician M S Subbulakshmi has decided to return the government a cheque of Rs 34,873 sent to her as remuneration for her inaugural concert at the Festival of India in London. In a letter to the chairman of the advisory committee of the festival, her husband T Sadasivam said, “it will be neither correct nor in keeping with our way of life to crave remuneration for a glorious service that Subbulakshmi was asked to render on behalf of our great nation”.



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Md Zakaria Siddiqui, Lekshmi Prasad and Sabir Ahamed write: While the government has significantly expanded its scope as the custodian of data, it is increasingly limiting the scope of access to it by responsible citizens and stakeholders

Data can improve people’s life in myriad ways, yet political factors thwart its dissemination and public usage. For example, data on migrants, meticulously collected during the pandemic, could have been used for effective public policy on migrants. While this year’s Economic Survey focuses on improving the quality and quantity of data for better and quicker assessment of the state of the economy, it pays little attention to access to the data by citizens, ignoring the criticality of data for a healthy and informed public discourse on issues of policy relevance.

Amassing of data by the government in itself will not lead to improvements, but its use by different stakeholders will. The mere fact that people have access to data is likely to act as a threat to the government to improve performance in many areas. However, generation of data doesn’t guarantee seamless access to people whose lives matter most in a democracy. Informed public discourse in any democracy is critical for accountable and transparent governance. The Right to Information is a useful instrument for citizens to access data, however it seems to be losing its teeth gradually.

The Indian state has been proactively strengthening the data architecture in the name of tackling corruption and better targeting of beneficiaries. Since 2014, the scope of UIDAI has seen a huge expansion. What we now know as JAM (Jan Dhan-Aadhaar-Mobile) has private details of citizens, breaching their fundamental right to privacy. When such integration of databases was questioned in court, the government resorted to artificial barriers and restrictions in accessing public services for those who are unwilling to share their details.

In short, the government is sufficiently empowered to collect and use information about its citizens touching all the spheres of their life. For example, an enormous amount of data was harvested by the government during the pandemic and immunisation process, conveniently overlooking privacy concerns and the risk of misuse.

Along with traditional instruments such as the Census, sample surveys and registers of various departments, the government is now armed with real time data. However, the citizen’s right to accessing relevant data for quality public discussion seems to be gradually eroding. In this process, the government has refused to hold itself accountable. This is evident from repeated events of delayed release of various survey data.

The effectiveness of state policies can be judged from the data produced by the statistical wings of the government, which have a reputation for being independent and credible. However, recent events have severely dented this perception. The government is increasingly intervening in the everyday functioning of data production for political convenience. For example, data from the consumption survey 2017-18 has not yet been released. The leaked summary results of the survey suggest some disturbing facts that may not be politically comforting for the government. Similarly, the first Periodic Labour Force Survey (PLFS 2017-18) was released only after the 2019 general election.

Further, instead of relying on the Annual Survey of Industries (ASI), a systematically designed survey for estimation of industrial sector GDP, the government has started to depend on self-reported, unverified data submitted to the Ministry of Corporate Affairs since 2011, muddling the actual status of Indian industry. Now that ASI is nearly redundant for official estimation purposes, the future of this database is uncertain. To date, ASI is the most reliable and in-depth data for research on productivity and regional patterns of the industrial sector.

Another example of undermining the scientific database is the delay in the release of Water and Sanitation Survey data 2018. The prime minister declared India open defecation free in October 2019 while the data was released much later depriving people of an opportunity to assess the status of the Swachh Bharat mission in a scientific manner.

The information gaps in the area of migration are well documented. While the JAM architecture and pandemic induced tracking tools allow for the mapping of individuals, researchers and the civil society do not have access to that information, which is useful to ascertain the level and prevalence of migration across regions within the country. The last NSS survey on migration is of 2007-08.

The indifference of the state towards the bottom half of the population is easy to gauge when one sees no effort by the government to produce data on the incidence of poverty and deprivation since the pandemic. In addition, the government has suppressed information on pandemic induced deaths.

The increasing gap in accountability of is stark in India. The autonomy of statistical agencies is compromised for immediate political gains at the cost of sustainability and quality of democratic governance. The Indian state is fast acquiring the characteristics of a surveillance state that collects data in an aggressive manner but hesitates in distributing it.

This data divide between the state and its citizens is a potential threat to the smooth functioning of a democracy. While the government has significantly expanded its scope as the custodian of data, it is increasingly limiting the scope of access to it by responsible citizens and stakeholders. Without bridging this data gap, the scope of modern technology for tracking development cannot be realised.

This column first appeared in the print edition on April 15, 2022 under the title ‘Widening data divide’. Siddiqui and Prasad are associated with Gulati Institute of Finance and Taxation, Thiruvananthapuram, Kerala and Sabir Ahamed works with Pratichi (India) Trust



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Harish K Puri writes: Garlanding his statues or worshipping him while ignoring his warnings would be hypocrisy

As we celebrated the 131st birth anniversary of B R Ambedkar, several interesting and conflicting perceptions of his role as one of the makers of modern India came to mind. He is one leader from the pre-independence times who has gained phenomenal after-life recognition, respect and popularity, not only as a messiah of the Dalits but also as one of the greatest Indians of the modern age. He was a nation-builder with a difference. Unlike Gandhi, Nehru, Subhas Bose and Bhagat Singh, he didn’t fight against British imperialism. In fact, he supported British rule and until mid-1946 struggled to ensure that the British did not leave India so early.

His primary fight was against the evil of untouchability and casteism in the Hindu community. He was a severe critic of Mahatma Gandhi and the politics of the Indian National Congress for fighting only the external evil of foreign rule while ignoring the cancerous disease within the Hindu community. In his very first meeting with Gandhi, Ambedkar told him that he had no faith in great leaders and mahatmas. “History tells that mahatmas, like fleeting phantoms, raise dust, but raise no level.” Gandhi, on his part, expressed “the highest regard” for Ambedkar, and added, “He has every right to be bitter. That he does not break our head is an act of self-restraint on his part”.

The central question for Ambedkar was: Why was it that during their whole history, the Hindus did not feel ashamed about the practice of untouchability? Why did the great men of that faith not rise in revolt against such abominable caste inequality? Following a deep study of Hindu religious texts, he came to the conclusion that because of the religious sanctity provided to casteism, it was not possible to remove it. His undelivered lecture, later published as The Annihilation of Caste, was a severe critique of Hinduism. In 1935, he declared that though he was born a Hindu, he would not die a Hindu and indeed a few months before his death he led his flock of more than 4,00,000 to convert to Buddhism. But he remained deeply concerned that India was internally divided, that Hindu society was undemocratic and that it emphasised inequality and exclusion. He was worried that “if Hindu Raj does become a fact, it will, no doubt, be the greatest calamity for this country”. Indeed, it was his effort to make this country a better place that underlay his labour in drafting the Constitution of India.

The role of chairman of the Drafting Committee of the Constitution of India came to him as a pleasant surprise. He believed that law was a powerful instrument for social change and he brought to his task the vision of a new social order. Ambedkar worked to embed the objectives of liberty, equality and fraternity and the concept of dignity of the individual at the heart of the Constitution. He could not carry through some of his strongly-held ideas. He had to compromise on several issues; even nursing a resentment about having to work as a hack, and do what he was asked to do in the larger interests of the nation. In the end, though, the Constitution’s text, as it was finally passed, carried his stamp.

In his final speech in the Constituent Assembly on November 25, 1949, a day before it was adopted on November 26, 1949, he exuded a great sense of achievement. One of Ambedkar’s most important contributions, however, was a set of sharp, categorical warnings. His first warning was, “In politics, we will have equality and in social and economic life we will have inequality… We must remove this contradiction at the earliest moment, or else those who suffer from inequality will blow up the structure of political democracy which this Assembly has so laboriously built up”.

The second problem he highlighted was the complete absence of the principle of fraternity in our country: “How can people divided into several thousand castes be a nation?” Respect for the dignity of the individual is central to a good society. As a member of the Nehru Cabinet, Ambedkar felt that the prime minister was more focused on issues of economic development and not as much on social reconstruction. Rights are protected not by law, but by the social and moral conscience of the society.

Another warning was against the peculiar Indian habit of devotion or hero-worship of leaders, that is bhakti. As he emphasised, “Bhakti, in religion, may be a road to the salvation of the soul. But in politics, bhakti or hero-worship is a sure road to degradation and to eventual dictatorship.”

Given his deep sense of history and culture, Ambedkar was worried that there was a danger in India that democracy may give place to dictatorship. As he underlined, “It is quite possible for this new-born democracy to retain its form, but give place to dictatorship in fact. If there was a landslide of popular support, the danger of that possibility becoming an actuality is much greater”. It seemed almost prophetic. Critics are taking note of Indian democracy turning into electoral autocracy. The cumulative effect of corporate power, increasing inequality, communal hatred and the allowance given to mobs to humiliate others, poses a real danger.

Babasaheb warned that we need to recognise the evils that lie across our path and “which induce people to prefer government for the people to government by the people”. He asked us to be on guard against these evils and said “that is the only way to serve the country”. This warning from Babasaheb is particularly relevant now. Garlanding his statues or his ritual worship and ignoring his warnings would be hypocrisy.

The writer is retired professor of political science and head, B R Ambedkar Chair, Guru Nanak Dev University, Amritsar



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SY Quraishi writes: It is at the root of many forms of violence that are being perpetrated and has become one of the biggest challenges to the rule of law and to our democratic conscience

What is to be done when the Indian republic, committed to working within the framework of constitutional democracy and the rule of law, starts to accommodate elements that are stridently anti-constitutional and anti-secular? What once belonged to the fringes of Indian society now has increasingly become mainstream, their disruptive actions being registered in the public sphere more frequently and viciously. Hate speech is at the root of many forms of violence that are being perpetrated and has become one of the biggest challenges to the rule of law and to our democratic conscience.

One of the most visible consequences of hate speech is increased electoral mobilisation along communal lines which is also paying some electoral dividends.

Hate speech must be unambiguously condemned and the law must take its course, although not merely because it can lead to events of violence in the future. Hate speech, in itself, must be understood and treated as a violent act and urgently so, for it has become an indispensable resource for the ruling powers. No wonder, during the elections, it becomes louder.

Several instances of hate speech and religious polarisation have been reported in Yogi Adityanath’s poll campaign in the recently concluded UP elections, for instance. In 2019, the Supreme Court reprimanded the Election Commission, calling it “toothless” for not taking action against candidates engaging in hate speech during the election campaigns in UP. The Commission responded by saying that it had limited powers to take action in this matter. So far, the Supreme Court does not appear to have acted decisively in response to allegations of hate speech in electoral campaigns, indicating that the EC must assume more responsibility and the EC has argued that in matters of hate speech, it is largely “powerless”. In any case, the EC’s role is confined to the election period. So who is responsible for the non-election times?

Is the state powerless? Not at all. There are a whole bunch of laws meant to curb hate speech. The Indian Penal Code, as per Sections 153A, 295A and 298, criminalises the promotion of enmity between different groups of people on grounds of religion and language, alongside acts that are prejudicial to maintaining communal harmony. Section 125 of the Representation of People Act deems that any person, in connection with the election, promoting feelings of enmity and hatred on grounds of religion and caste is punishable with imprisonment up to three years and fine or both. Section 505 criminalises multiple kinds of speech, including statements made with the intention of inducing, or which are likely to induce, fear or alarm to the public, instigating them towards public disorder; statements made with the intention of inciting, or which are likely to incite, class or community violence; and discriminatory statements that have the effect or the intention of promoting inter-community hatred. It covers incitement of violence against the state or another community, as well as promotion of class hatred.

While examining the scope of hate speech laws in India, the Law Commission in its 267th report published in March 2017, recommended introduction of new provisions within the penal code that specifically punish incitement to violence in addition to the existing ones. In my view, any recommendation for more laws is a red herring and provides an excuse for inaction. It’s the lack of political will, blatant inefficiency and bias of the administration and shocking apathy of the judiciary that is killing the secular spirit of the Constitution.

Another watchdog should have been the media. In recent years, hate speech in all its varieties has acquired a systemic presence in the media and the internet, from electoral campaigns to everyday life. Abusive speech directed against minority communities, particularly Muslims, and disinformation campaigns on media networks have made trolling and fake news significant aspects of public discourse. By desensitising the citizenry with a constant barrage of anti-minority sentiments, the ethical and moral bonds of our democracy are taking a hit.

This epidemic of “mediatised” hate speech is, in fact, a global phenomenon. According to the Washington Post, 2018 can be considered as “the year of online hate”. Facebook, in its Transparency Report, disclosed that it ended up taking down 3 million hateful posts from its platform while YouTube removed 25,000 posts in one month alone.

On April 2, amidst unconcerned police officials and cheering crowds, Mahant Bajrang Muni Udasin, the chief priest of the Badi Sangat Ashram in Uttar Pradesh’s Sitapur district, publicly threatened sexual violence against Muslim women and against Muslims in general — “you and your pigsty will cease to exist”. Although this particular video went viral recently, and he has now been arrested by the Sitapur police, Udasin has had a long history of spewing hate and stoking communal polarisation with apparent impunity. In the past, Udasin celebrated Dara Singh, a Bajrang Dal member who is currently serving a life sentence for leading a mob on January 23, 1999 in Orissa and setting fire to the wagon in which the Christian missionary Graham Staines and his two sons were burnt to death. Likening Dara Singh to a godman, Udasin appealed to Hindu monks to declare him a Shankaracharya. With this, Udasin joins the ranks of a multitude of “holy” men and women, most prominent among them being Yati Narsinghanand, Pooja Shakun Pandey and Jitendra Tyagi, who have been at the forefront of the politics of fear and hatred.

With elected members currently sitting in the legislative assemblies and Parliament giving political sanction to these self-styled mahants, and ordinary citizens mobilised into mob violence and complicit public officials, hate speech is becoming the dominant mode of public political participation. Two people died in the Ram Navami violence recently while many were arrested across states. Shocking images also surfaced from JNU of students injured during a face-off between two groups on Ram Navami on campus.

This should prick the conscience of the nation. Enough damage has been done. We cannot wait another day to address this growing challenge.

This column first appeared in the print edition on April 15, 2022 under the title ‘Calling out hate’. The writer is former Chief Election Comissioner



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Suanshu Khurana writes: Her rendition of a Hafiz Hoshirpuri ghazal, made immortal by Mehdi Hassan, has won a Grammy. It is only right to acknowledge its origins

Mohabbat karne wale kam na honge, teri mehfil mein lekin hum na honge. (There won’t be a dearth of those who will cherish you, but in that gathering of your admirers, I won’t be there.)

For over half a century, this Hafeez Hoshiarpuri ghazal was brought to life by Pakistani ghazal maestro Mehdi Hassan. He presented it with such nuance and tenderness that for years, the pangs of separation in this piece have transcended even the geopolitics of the Subcontinent. The ghazal became so popular that it was sung by other greats such as Farida Khanum, Iqbal Bano and Jagjit Singh. But it was Hassan who etched this ghazal — along with “Ranjish hi sahi” — in our common consciousness. For “Mohabbat karne wale”, he used Tilang, the raga that stems from the folk melodies of Rajasthan, where Hassan was born and learned music.

So, when Brooklyn-based Pakistani musician Arooj Aftab walked away with a Grammy earlier this month — a first for any Pakistani woman — in the Best Global Music Performance category for the “neo-Sufi” version of this ghazal which she calls “Mohabbat” in her 2021 album Vulture Prince (New Amsterdam Records), it became a moment to cherish for the Subcontinent.

But for “Mohabbat”, which has musical influences from diverse worlds of jazz, Hindustani music, Sufi and folk music, Aftab does not acknowledge — either in the album’s digital versions or in her acceptance speech— the poet or the composer, even though the basic tune is used in its entirety. The only difference is pace, orchestration and of course, Aftab’s voice and style. The Recording Academy’s award is for her performance of the ghazal but the onus to acknowledge its origins is on Aftab.

Vulture Prince, Aftab’s third album, came at the back of years of struggle in Pakistan amid a family that enjoyed musical baithaks at home but preferred their daughter to not make music. In it, she pairs the pain of famous ghazals with hushed orchestral arrangements created with the harp, flugelhorn, double bass, violins and synth. She sings Mirza Ghalib’s “Diya hai” where the poignance of the poet’s words finds release through her voice — the last song she and her brother shared before he passed away during the making of the album. The elegy and its pain aren’t lost on the listener. There is also Sudarshan Fakir’s “Kuch toh duniya ki inaayat”, which found itself with Begum Akhtar back in the day. Ghalib, Fakir and Begum Akhtar aren’t credited either. She gives a new tune to Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan’s famed “Suroor”, but Anwar Farrukhabadi, the poet, does not find himself anywhere in the seven-track album. The album, however, does advertise a perfume oil created by Dana El Masri, inspired by the music. As of now, the oil is sold out.

Barack Obama picked “Mohabbat” as one of his favourites for 2021 and the piece was called one of the best songs of 2021 by the New York Times. But I’d rather listen to Hassan’s version. Mostly because of its quality but also because of its sincerity. He would almost always credit the poet. “Ye Hafiz Hoshiarpuri saab ki ghazal hai…”

Aftab hasn’t put out any statement or explanation. But she shared a post by a friend on her Facebook page that read: “For those who are asking Arooj Aftab to give credits… either they are jealous or they do not understand that you can pick up any old poetry and compose it yourself, then there is no cover left.” This isn’t a new composition. It’s the same tune sung with different orchestration. Because she is trained in western forms of music, she’s stripped the ghazal of classical ornamentations and created a new setting for it. Hoshiarpuri’s words give context to her pain. This is why credit is necessary.

In 2018, at Lahore’s Gurmani Centre for Languages and Literature, an 89-year-old Farida Khanum sat in a wheelchair and sang the same ghazal, diving into Hoshiarpuri’s anguish and sarcasm. Musician and author Ali Sethi, who was in conversation with her, was visibly awed. So were those present. But before Khanum began, she said, “Ye Mehdi bhai (Hassan) ne gaaya hai. Aur badi gayaki ke saath gaaya hai. Maine isko light music ki tarah gaaya hai”. (Mehdi bhai has sung this. And has sung it with a lot of dexterity. I have sung it like light music). Even though Khanum’s version is immaculate, she does not let the moment go without that mention.

While Khanum’s reference is deferential, all we want from Aftab is some courtesy.

This column first appeared in the print edition on April 15, 2022 under the title ‘The courtesy of credit’. The writer can be reached at suanshu.khurana@expressindia.com



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Madhav Godbole writes: Indira Gandhi’s intransigence prevented the transfer of the city to Punjab in the 1980s. The Centre must correct this anomaly, and also reconsider the status of other Union Territories

I am surprised that it took so long for Punjab to reiterate its legitimate demand for Chandigarh. The usual political drama of the legislative assembly of Haryana holding a special session to oppose the demand was only to be expected. The question is whether the leadership of the BJP is prepared to do justice to Punjab, or deny it only because the AAP is now in power in Punjab and would get the credit. I have argued for some time that Indira Gandhi had done injustice to Punjab by denying its claim to Chandigarh.

In my book, Indira Gandhi: An Era of Constitutional Dictatorship (2018), I referred to what Zail Singh had written in his book, Memoirs of Giani Zail Singh — The Seventh President of India: “On my return from tour of the three foreign countries, I was met by Swaran Singh (who was asked by the government to negotiate with the Akalis), who gave me the tidings that an understanding had been reached between the government and the Akalis. It was, inter alia, agreed upon by the two sides that the Anandpur Sahib Resolution would be referred to a parliamentary committee and the contentious city of Chandigarh would be transferred to Punjab… I was told by Swaran Singh that the central government had accepted these propositions and was about to make an announcement to this effect… The Akali Party had also accepted the arrangement. But the government changed its stance and sprang a surprise. An altogether different statement was made by home minister, P C Sethi, in Parliament… I came to know later that it was due to the intransigent attitude of Darbara Singh… who took the oft-repeated line, that if these solutions were accepted, things would go out of his control. He also thought that if Swaran Singh got the credit for solving the tangle, it would lower the prestige of the state government. Obviously, the Punjab state leaders were more interested in their prestige than in finding an acceptable solution to the long-standing problem.”

I have given this long quotation to bring out the inner workings of the state and central governments. It also bears out the criticism of opposition leaders that Indira Gandhi was not able to assert herself in finding a lasting solution to the Punjab problem. Indira Gandhi in her last term as prime minister was quite a contrast of what she was prior to 1977. In spite of a resounding popular mandate, India was let down by Indira Gandhi in tackling the Punjab problem. More importantly, she paid for it with her own life.

For years the Chandigarh question has become linked with the Fazilka-Abohar area. This is because of Indira Gandhi’s insistence that Chandigarh can be given to Punjab only if Punjab agrees to give the Fazilka-Abohar area to Haryana, as compensation. A G Noorani in his essay “A White Paper on a Black Record”, included by Patwant Singh and others in Punjab — The Fatal Miscalculation, brought out several aspects that have rarely come into public discussion. When the linguistic states were created in 1956, only two states were excluded from it, namely, East Punjab and Bombay. Later, after prolonged agitation, Bombay city was given to Maharashtra and the separate states of Maharashtra and Gujarat were formed. But Punjab’s demand for Chandigarh continued to be overlooked. On 22 January 1984, some 150 eminent Punjabis highlighted that Chandigarh was built to compensate Punjab for the loss of its capital, Lahore. There was no reason for that decision to be altered.

B R Ambedkar was fond of saying that boundary marking is the job of a surveyor; boundary making is the task of a statesman. This is amply brought out by the Chandigarh imbroglio. At no time the decision of the Centre to link it up with Fazilka and Abohar was justified. There was no justification for making Chandigarh a Union Territory (UT). A new capital could easily have been constructed for Haryana. The latest example is that of Andhra Pradesh where Chandrababu Naidu, with his astute leadership and commendable statesmanship, decided to build a green-field capital for the state at Amaravati. Even in this case, suggestions were made to declare Hyderabad a UT, and following the example of Chandigarh, make it the capital of both Telangana and Andhra Pradesh. Fortunately, wiser counsels prevailed.

If Indira Gandhi had taken a reasonable position on the subject and Chandigarh given to Punjab, the Punjab agitation would have taken a different and a more conciliatory turn. For all that I know, even Operation Blue Star could have been avoided.

It is unfortunate that even after Indira Gandhi’s assassination, this issue has remained unaddressed. A new beginning should be made by announcing the transfer of Chandigarh to Punjab and building a new capital for Haryana. As for the future of other Punjabi and Hindi speaking areas in dispute, a boundary commission may be appointed with a clear guideline that, as in all other cases so far, village should be adopted as the unit, subject to the other usual criteria such as contiguity, communications, cultural ties etc.

I have urged in my latest book, India — A Federal Union of States: Fault Lines, Challenges and Opportunities, that the continuance of other UTs needs to be considered afresh. At present, there are eight UTs. The justification for the continuance of these UTs has never been examined so far. I am sure Delhi would have to be continued as a UT, whichever political party comes to power at the Centre. For strategic considerations, Andaman and Nicobar, and Ladakh would have to continue as UTs. Kashmir valley and Jammu region, which were converted into a UT in 2019, should be upgraded and given statehood soon after the delimitation question is addressed. The remaining UTs should be merged with the adjoining states. In view of its history as a French colony, Puducherry should be made a separate district of Tamil Nadu to maintain its identity.

This column first appeared in the print edition on April 15, 2022 under the title ‘City beautiful, historical wrong’. The writer is a former Union Home Secretary



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Hardik Patel, fresh from a reprieve from the Supreme Court which stayed his conviction in  a Patidar agitation case, has put the Congress leadership on notice, claiming that though he was working president of the Gujarat Congress, he has been sidelined. Former Congress president Rahul Gandhi responded by summoning Gujarat Congress in-charge Raghu Sharma for an emergency meeting, where the possibility of Patidar leader Naresh Patel’s entry to Congress was also reportedly discussed.

If Hardik were to exit, the optics would be damaging for Congress ahead of the Gujarat elections with AAP on the upswing in the state and BJP appearing more reassured than 2017 when the GST rollout had earned it the ire of the trading community. Congress’s inability to attract young leaders and keep them in the fold is also a telling commentary of its declining political fortunes and its larger struggle to woo young voters during elections. From Jyotiraditya Scindia and Sachin Pilot’s rebellion to the intra-party resistance that new entrants like Hardik and Kanhaiya Kumar face, Rahul Gandhi’s failure to force the pace of generational change within the party and mount a credible challenge to BJP is proving to be a big stumbling block for Congress.

Leadership change is also overdue in other state units like Bihar and Odisha while dissension is growing in Jharkhand, Jammu and Maharashtra. Sachin Pilot has also had repeated meetings with the high command, reportedly over Rajasthan affairs. Unless Congress can put its house in order soon there’s little likelihood of the party being able to mount a serious challenge to BJP in 2024. With opposition leaders like MK Stalin trying to assess the credibility of AAP’s national expansion plans, time is running out fast for Congress and Rahul Gandhi to make a comeback.



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KS Eshwarappa, Karnataka’s minister for rural development and panchayat raj, has said that he will resign today. Earlier he had been booked by the police in a case pertaining to abetment to suicide. The victim was a civil contractor who claimed the state government hadn’t paid him. The events surrounding the case provide a glimpse into the link between civil contracts and political power. For sure, it’s neither new nor unique to Karnataka. However, what’s eye-catching is that the Karnataka state contractors association had threatened to stop ongoing work as a mark of protest against the level of corruption.

At the political level, Eshwarappa’s announcement that he would resign is the right step. Given the allegations and the FIR, he couldn’t be in government while the investigation was being carried out. As a political party, BJP’s electoral success has partly been built on a perception of providing a clean government. Its government in Karnataka has to face the electorate next year and the events surrounding this development aren’t going to help. Therefore, the announced exit of Eshwarappa is smart politics on BJP’s part. In addition, political propriety required his exit.

The other dimension to the case has been the form in which corruption is alleged to be taking place. A report in this paper showed that emergency provisions which were originally meant to deal with natural calamities are used to award contracts without floating a tender. It’s a way of sidestepping e-procurement restrictions. Subsequently, other aspects of the political economy of corruption in civil infrastructure contracts kick in.

Corruption is a hydra-headed phenomenon. It can’t be tackled by a single law or a sweeping gesture. Combating it requires both institutional improvements and process refinements. Governments are the largest spenders on civil contracts. Higher official echelons have enormous discretionary power, while lower levels of bureaucracy and police lack meaningful autonomy. In this mix, the political executive and governing parties have opportunities to subvert the system. At the level of states, anecdotally, this is common. It’s worse in some states than others, but universal. Fighting corruption, therefore, is a journey and not a big bang event.



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A Dausa gynaecologist’s tragic suicide after Rajasthan police booked her for murder over a pregnant woman dying during childbirth and the severe assault on two Howrah district hospital doctors after a patient with severe kidney disease died, reveal a broken system. Dausa’s police chief was shunted out for the careless murder charge meant to placate the dead patient’s protesting relatives. These confrontations are a relatively recent phenomenon. With both doctors’ and patients’ kin demanding justice when such incidents occur, police must proceed with caution and ensure public order until medical experts deliver a conclusive opinion.

NCRB data indicates 552 cases of medical negligence between 2018 and 2020. But given patchy healthcare coverage that hurts poor people and rural India disproportionately, actual incidence of medical negligence and deaths avertable with nearer-to-home healthcare facilities would be significantly higher. There’s no accountability for such governance failures. Decrepit government hospitals and hefty monetary demands of private hospitals leave the average low-income Indian citizen in no-man’s land. This may explain the periodic outbursts of violence. To make matters worse, due process and procedure are still evolving, decades after Independence.

Last year, National Medical Commission issued guidelines requiring police, prior to making arrests, to send medical negligence criminal complaints to the district medical council’s medical board. The board must send recommendations within two weeks and an aggrieved party (doctor or prosecuting agency) can approach the state medical council’s board for another opinion, again not exceeding two weeks. NMC must ensure every district has these medical boards in place and local police internalise such processes. Eighteen states have a special law prescribing three years imprisonment for assaulting doctors, the amended Epidemic Diseases Act prescribes harsher punishment, but police are failing to ensure deterrence. So doctors demand writing these penal provisions into IPC, the handy rule book in thanas. For patients, approaching consumer courts for civil remedies to medical negligence is futile because of horrible backlogs. Meanwhile, NMC Act allowing appeals from doctors but not patients to the national-level Ethics and Medical Registration Board against state medical council decisions aggravates patients’ disenchantment. For doctors’ professional wellbeing and to deter medical negligence, let’s have even-handed rules – and better public health facilities.



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For higher education and global communication, English remains the oyster. Its monopoly as a social status tool diminishing, it is now more effective as a doors-opening key.

The matter of whether Hindi should or should not replace English as a link language in India can be perceived as a red rag. But it's really a red herring. In the free market of interpersonal communication, Hindi has slowly, surely, anecdotally and empirically become firmer both as a link and power language. Artificially pushing for its wider use is not only unnecessary but counterproductive. What holds Hindi's popularity has been the same for decades - the Hindi film and television industry. This means proficiency in a certain kind of Hindi far more organic than the 'Queen's Hindi'.

At the same time, social mobility markers have shifted enough for Hindi to be a language that allows its users to feel empowered alongside English. Aided by a pushback against a certain strand of English-speakers carrying a 'brahminical' marker of exclusivity once found universally alluring, the cache value found in non-English languages like Hindi has risen up the socioeconomic ranks. Hindi has become more acceptable, indeed preferable in many non-native Hindi-speaking places, as a means of common communication than it was, say, 30 years ago. The proliferation of Hindi, even if in romanised script, in brand advertising is a trend-teller.

While English may be less hegemonic than before, it has a head start that is hard - and unnecessary - to beat. For higher education and global communication, English remains the oyster. Its monopoly as a social status tool diminishing, it is now more effective as a doors-opening key. Language acceptability is determined by popular desire to communicate. Ability follows. With more professionals not obsessing about how they speak English, all that increasingly matters is whether they are being understood and understand others. Whether Hindi's usage is shudh or chalta hai, official or street, its growing currency across regions - and classes - already makes it a lingua franca. Which means lok bhasha in sabir, once the link language of commerce and diplomacy across West Asia and the eastern Mediterranean.

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Irrigation and water storage capacity have not kept pace with crop demand. The farmer will have to make do with readings that Pacific and Indian Ocean weather patterns won't change in the next few months.

Prediction of a normal monsoon could offer some respite from rising food prices, which, with dearer fuel, is pushing up inflation. The effects are expected to be felt directly in vegetable prices and through some amount of import substitution in edible oils. But fertiliser prices, held hostage by the war in Ukraine amid a commodity super-cycle, are likely to keep pushing on food inflation. A good kharif crop will sustain the growth momentum in agriculture, which has benefited from a string of 'normal' monsoon seasons and has absorbed a workforce fleeing cities during the pandemic.

This has, however, suppressed wages in the countryside, leading to a compression of demand. And it is compounded by rural inflation being steeper than urban. Food prices are outrunning farm wages, and this is showing up in languishing demand for products from soaps to motorcycles. As urban services resume after lockdowns, farm workers are expected to recover some of their wage negotiation power in over half the country that relies on rain-fed agriculture. Resumption of migration could also affect the summer acreage. In any case, farm workers need to rebuild the consumption they have lost over the pandemic. India's economic recovery depends on it.

Much of this is predicated on the spatial distribution of the rain and its timing. The meteorological department now has a drier normal, reflecting the impact of climate change on the unirrigated northeastern parts of India. Precipitation is now more volatile, which increases run-off in a water-scarce nation. Irrigation and water storage capacity have not kept pace with crop demand. The farmer will have to make do with readings that Pacific and Indian Ocean weather patterns won't change in the next few months.

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In several parts of India, cases of Covid-19 are inching up. For instance, in Delhi, the average number of daily new cases over the past week was 201. Just 11 days ago (for the week ended April 3), this number was a mere 95. A similar trend holds in Delhi’s suburbs as well — the average in Gurugram has grown from 45 for the week ended April 3 to 114 in the past week. At present, the pattern is limited to a handful of urban pockets while at the national level, the number of new cases recorded every day continues to decline. At 986, the average of daily cases recorded nationwide in the most recent week is at its lowest in nearly two years.

This is not unexpected. In many parts of the world, cases have risen as restrictions are wound down. The United Kingdom, France and Germany are countries that have recorded or are currently in the grip of an increase in infection rates after they ope-ned up cities. In much of the world, except, notably, China, there is a sense of freedom not felt since early 2020. In almost all such places, cases have trended upwards but deaths and hospitalisation rates are in control. This is what is now regarded as “living with Covid”, a state in which some level of disruption may be inevitable, but in which hospitalisations are rare, and deaths, rarer still.

The key to living with Covid-19 — and the virus is here to stay — lies in striking balances. This will be needed because neither immunity nor evolution is linear or constant. Among the billions of people, there will be different sets whose immunity wanes at different rates. The virus itself, as seen in the past three waves, could still pack an evolutionary surprise. Experts expect the high level of immunity from previous infections and vaccinations to protect people from a large surge, but periodic resurgences are inevitable, much like it is for seasonal flu. In this context, it is important to remember that we are in a new normal, not the old normal. With threats from the coronavirus still being real, masks remain the most low investment, high-yield tool that can be made a part of this new normal, especially when indoors with strangers. Similarly, schools, offices and indoor recreational spaces need to think about ventilation, another key infection-prevention tool. Importantly, people must remember to take their booster dose as soon as they become eligible. And governments need to evolve a new response protocol based on new metrics (positivity rate, for instance, is no longer relevant), and the imperative of ensuring minimum disruption in lives and livelihoods.



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At least four states in India saw incidents of communal violence on the occasion of Ram Navami, an important Hindu festival in the country. In National Capital Delhi, the municipal corporation tried to shut meat shops during Navratri, the nine-day period which ends on Ram Navami. The southern state of Karnataka has been witnessing one communal flare-up after another for the past few months.

What do these incidents signify? The easy answer is that all of these are signs of the politics of polarisation playing out.

The more difficult question, however, is the following. Does an overwhelming majority in India agree with such politics? If there is such support, does it mean that the fate of secularism, or more importantly, communal harmony in the country is doomed? If the majority does not support such acts, why are there no protests when they happen?

For whatever it is worth, findings from a 2019-20 Pew Survey suggest that while an overwhelming majority of Indians border on conservatism and segregation when it comes to religion, they are also committed to respecting other religions. “Across the country, most people (84%) say that to be “truly Indian,” it is very important to respect all religions. Indians also are united in the view that respecting other religions is a very important part of what it means to be a member of their own religious community (80%). People in all six major religious groups overwhelmingly say they are very free to practice their faiths, and most say that people of other faiths also are very free to practice their own religion”, the survey found.

If the findings are indeed accurate, we seem to be in the proverbial situation of the (communal) tail wagging the (secular) dog in our society. But, is this the case?

Answering this requires clarity on one more question. How does one know whether people are being truthful in responding to surveys such as the one conducted by Pew?

One does not, shows research. A 2016 Social Psychology Quarterly paper by sociologists Phillip S Brenner and John DeLamater found that “direct survey questions about normative behaviour (such as voting or attitude towards other religions) are pragmatically interpreted to be about the respondent’s identity, asking whether he or she is the “kind of person” who conforms to the norm”. This kind of interpretation, the authors argued transforms the question “from an inquiry about “what I do” to ask about “who I am.” Importantly, this self-view may not be rooted in the actual self. Rather, it may be strongly reflective of the ideal self—the person the respondent aspires to be, the paper added.

In their 2019 book Good Economics for Bad Times, Nobel Prize winning MIT economists Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo cite research based on an experiment, which suggests that people feel more confident in showing their true selves in the aftermath of a favourable political verdict. The experiment asked Americans to donate to an anti-immigration charity and found that the prospect of others learning about such a donation was likely to reduce the chances of people agreeing to make such a donation. This difference between willingness to make such donations, depending on whether others came to know about it or not, however, disappeared after the 2016 election victory of Donald Trump, whose campaign championed anti-immigrant politics.

The findings cited here open up the possibility that many people might have become vocal about their Hindu majoritarian views with the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) gaining political strength. While this is unlikely to have had an effect over the Pew Survey numbers, it can help explain a massive exodus of political leaders from other parties to the BJP.

To be sure, neither of the two arguments cited above — namely people lying about their normative choices in surveys or becoming more vocal about their majoritarian beliefs after favourable political verdicts — necessarily imply that majority of people in India are happy to see communal harmony is disturbed. However, if one does assume that the majority supports mutual respect for religions, the question to ask is, why do people not protest when attempts are made to disrupt communal harmony? And why has communal politics not suffered in elections?

Answering these questions necessitates delving into the subjective factor in politics. It also brings into play the role of the so-called secular parties in the country today. To understand the importance of both these factors, historical facts can offer important insights.

Before delving into contemporary research which can help us answer such questions, it is worth asking a question that goes back into India’s history. Is communalism, or at least communal violence, a new thing in India or has it always existed? A large section of Left-liberal scholarship claims that communal harmony was the norm in India, and the seeds of what is described as communalism today were sown by our colonial rulers to suit their political ends.

While it is nobody’s case that the British Raj did not encourage fissures between Hindus and Muslims in India, blanket claims of communal harmony have been questioned by many Indian scholars.

One such academic is the historian Sunil Khilnani. “Religious conflict was restrained by distinctive methods: not, as later nationalists fondly liked to suppose, on the basis of a genuinely ‘composite’ culture founded on an active and mutual respect among practitioners of different religions, but on routine indifference, a back-to-back neglect, which on occasions like religious festivals could be bloodily dispensed with,” Khilnani argues in The Idea of India.

Another academic who has questioned such claims is one of India’s most famous economic historians Dharma Kumar. In a polemical piece called Left Secularists and Communalism, which was published in the Economic and Political Weekly in 1994, Kumar argued that claims of existence of a composite culture during the period of Muslim rulers in India might be a half-truth as such accounts only captured the culture of the royal courts rather than lives of people at large. “Undoubtedly, a courtly culture in art, architecture, music and literature evolved under certain rulers welding various strains—Hindu, Persian, Saracemic and so on…Undoubtedly this north Indian courtly culture can accurately be termed as composite culture, and in my view its achievements in architecture and music are glorious. But this was a very small part of north Indian life. The beauty of the Taj tells us nothing about the absence of conflict between Hindus and Muslims at the time it was built,” wrote Kumar.

It is important to note that Kumar declared herself as a “modern unbeliever” and passionate believer in secularism and was trying to point out that the Left Secularist take on history vis-à-vis communalism in India was not just wrong history but also “bad politics, since these histories have alienated many Hindus who should support a secular policy”.

In retrospect, Kumar had an unlikely ally in Aijaz Ahmad, one of India’s most prominent and partisan Marxist intellectuals, who passed away recently. In a lecture delivered days after the demolition of the Babri mosque in 1992, Ahmad warned his peers from the Left against relying on history to assume favourable political outcomes in the present. “When you don’t have the initiative in the struggle and the struggle itself comes eventually to be identified with a series of defeats…real will takes on the garments of an act of faith in a certain rationality of history”. Ahmad quoted the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci to argue that “History, does not, in other words, lead automatically to Reason, Progress, Socialism; it may, and often does, equally well lead to mass irrationality and barbarism”.

Does an acceptance of the fact that India’s past has not been as harmonious as it is claimed to be mean that communal harmony can never be achieved in a country like India? Not necessarily.

Research by Brown University political scientist Ashutosh Varshney offers an interesting answer to this question. In his 2002 book Ethnic Conflict and Civic Life: Hindus and Muslims in India, Varshney tries to answer the question why some Indian cities saw riots whereas others did not. He argues that the usual response of blaming complicity or apathy of the administration and police is not enough, as the communal situation varies even within states, which have by and large similar administrative machinery. The book argues that “it is the environment of a peaceful city that makes the police and administration perform its law-and-order functions better, irrespective of the biases or the level of professionalism”.

One of the examples Varshney cites to make his argument is the role of neighbourhood committees comprising Hindus and Muslims in preventing communal riots in Bhiwandi, a town just outside Mumbai which had a troubled communal history in the 1970s and 1980s. After such committees were made in the late 1980s, Bhiwandi managed to avoid communal violence despite major communal riots in Mumbai in the aftermath of the Babri mosque demolition.

The idea, while it appears to be completely intuitive, does not seem to have many takers today, even within the ranks of so-called secular parties. Even in states where the BJP is in power, it is worth asking whether the recent violence could have been contained if there were efforts to engage members of both Hindu and Muslim communities beforehand.

This brings up the last question we want to answer. Why are there no large-scale protests when efforts are made to disrupt communal peace?

The secular cause might have become a victim of its weakness, suggests research by political scientists Selim Aytac and Susan Stokes. In their 2019 book, Why Bother? Rethinking Participation in Elections and Protests, Aytac and Stokes have tried to develop a theory of why people participate in protests. A critical factor that determines participation or lack of it in protests is the cost of abstention, the authors argue.

“Individuals who care about the protest’s goals will bear higher costs of abstention, and thus will be more likely to participate, the larger the (expected or actual) size of the protests…Larger crowds might signal that “success” is imminent, and not participating in these circumstances would lead to greater psychic dissonance than when fewer people are participating. Still others might be drawn emotionally to protests when large crowds are involved; they might experience enthusiasm when they agree with their goals, driving up costs of abstention,” the book says.

Their research suggests that every instance of a muted protest against attempts to disturb communal harmony is likely to increase the probability of bringing down participation in similar actions in the future as a perception of lack of support for the secular cause will bring down abstention costs even for people who support the cause.

While there is no point in arguing whether Indian society will become completely immune to communal flare-ups, it can be said with a reasonable degree of confidence that the tactical silence of most anti-BJP political parties on such instances might be bringing down the abstention costs for people who could have stood up for communal harmony in India.

Antonio Gramsci’s belief that history does not automatically lead to reason did not make the Italian Marxist an escapist. In fact, Gramsci always believed in the dictum of pessimism of the intellect and optimism of the will and spent the last 10 years of his life in prison. But, unfortunately, India’s secular parties seem to have reversed Gramsci’s principle. While they continue to wax eloquent about India’s composite culture and the eventual defeat of communalism, there seems to be extreme reluctance to make efforts on the ground to counter communalism.

The views expressed are personal



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All seems calm at the moment on the Covid-19 front. Cases are down, hospitals no longer have Covid-19 wards, schools and colleges are finally open, and we are back to worrying about inflation and the price of petrol. Given the experience of the past 25 months, concerns lurk in the background as we go about our daily lives. Will there be a fourth wave? Do we need boosters? At what interval? Is it okay to send young children to school without vaccines? Can the elderly travel? Do we need masks?

Earlier in the year, we had confident predictions of a fourth wave to arrive by the middle of the year. This week we have news of variants XE, BA.4 and BA.5, which have followed the global spread of BA.2, which transmitted at rates faster than the original Omicron. If we have learnt anything, it is that we’re living in an evolving situation. We need to learn and adapt quickly, because preparedness to detect and measure, and speed are essential components of an effective response with a rapidly spreading infection. What, then, is the way forward?

Today, we are not where we were a year ago. The adult population of India has been vaccinated with two doses. It is clear that following the Delta and Omicron waves, that vaccines protect well against severe disease, hospitalisations and deaths, but not against infection. In other parts of the world with other vaccines, it has been shown that, particularly in the elderly population, protection against severe disease declines with time, but these data have come from countries with a much larger older, at-risk population and a different infection history from India, having seen the Delta wave after their populations were vaccinated, unlike India where vaccination covered a small proportion of the population in the first quarter of 2021, when the Delta wave hit.

The national serosurvey in June 2021 showed that about 60% of the population had been infected and 2022 post-Omicron serosurveys from states show up to 80% seropositivity in children who had not received vaccination, indicating the high level of infection in India. Nonetheless, the decision to introduce precautionary doses has been taken, despite the lack of evidence of the need for boosters in the Indian population. Does this mean boosters are not needed or will never be needed?

Since boosters are usually given when vaccines are demonstrated to be no longer protective, we need to be able to measure protection in order to show that protection has declined to a level that needs boosting. The United States Food and Drug Administration has proposed a decline to less than 80% protection against the disease as a trigger for boosting. We should consider whether such a strategy would be appropriate for India, and if yes, there need to be mechanisms to assess vaccine effectiveness. With the integration of CoWin and the testing databases, this is feasible, but needs to be a real-time ongoing exercise measuring vaccination status and timing of all Covid-19 patients admitted to hospitals.

Second, we need to implement in full measure the testing strategy proposed by the government which covers testing of all cases of serious respiratory infections, a proportion of milder infections, outbreaks of respiratory illnesses and risk groups such as travellers. This testing requires clinical and vaccination data to be collected so that the consequences of new variant infections can be picked up early. The separation of sequencing from clinical data must be narrowed so that treating teams on the frontlines and public health professionals are empowered to act. In all testing, the data must be rapidly available to those nearest to the infections, unlike the delayed and centrally controlled practice that hampered local response in the first two years. New variants are a certainty, and if a variant that breaks through vaccine-induced immunity and causes more severe disease does emerge, a rapid response could help contain or slow the spread.

Third, we need research. Diagnostics have been a success story, but we will need to keep up with variants. Research is needed for existing vaccines to understand when to boost and with which combinations, and in what age- and risk-groups. Research is needed for new vaccines that induce longer lasting and broader protection. Antiviral drugs are now available but with a rapidly mutating virus, chances of resistance are high, so we need to understand what is the best way to use anti-viral drugs and monoclonal antibodies to preserve their utility as well as develop new drugs. We need clinical research to identify the best strategies to manage long Covid-19 in adults and children. The list of unknowns is long and addressing the key issues is urgent. Finally, in all of this, we must remember that Covid-19 is not going to go away and we cannot manage it as a special silo forever. In many ways, we have been lucky that this very transmissible virus had a low level of severity and we were able to make good vaccines quickly. We now need to integrate care for Covid-19 into routine health care, and not ignore other infectious and chronic diseases, and build preparedness — not just for the future of Sars-CoV2 and its variant, but for the next outbreak. We have a long way to go.

Gagandeep Kang is professor, Christian Medical College, Vellore The views expressed are personal



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The India-United States (US) 2+2 dialogue that took place in Washington DC against the backdrop of the Russian invasion of Ukraine concluded in a satisfactory manner and is testimony to the recently acquired resilience in the bilateral relationship. Recently, because the bilateral relationship was long described as one that was “estranged”.

For almost five decades, deeply held divergences related to security and strategic issues kept the two major democracies apart and the page was turned only in late 2008 when the India-US civilian nuclear agreement was concluded. In the larger US politico-military framework that classifies the world into allies and adversaries, India is neither fish nor fowl and is designated as a major or important partner nation.

Security dissonances have not been totally erased and what is evident is a larger and shared correspondence. Much of this has been reflected in the focus on the Indo-Pacific as a region, which has acquired considerable political traction under President Joe Biden.

This dissonance in the security-strategic domain and the ability to contain it within a larger ambit of shared concerns was discernible at the 2+2 deliberations. Bilateral resilience was tested over the Washington-Delhi dissonance apropos the Ukraine war and clearly a tentative modus vivendi was forged. This is reflected in the comprehensive joint statement and the consensus is to be welcomed.

Security and strategic determinants were at the core of the bilateral partnership when then US President George Bush took the radical initiative to end the “estrangement”. This was driven in no small measure by the Beltway’s assessment of the long-term strategic challenges posed by a rising China.

Certain sections of the joint statement and defence minister Rajnath Singh’s observations in Washington provide a template for a preliminary review of the macro policy opportunities and challenges that can impact India’s profile in the military-security domain. In the yet to crystallise post Covid-post Ukraine world (dis)order, India occupies a vulnerable perch and the numbers are stark.

Among the top 10 global economies (2021), the US is at the top of the ladder with a nominal Gross Domestic Product (GDP) of $20.9 trillion; China is second at $14.9 trillion; and India is at sixth spot at $2.7 trillion. It is pertinent to note that the other seven nations (Japan, Germany, the United Kingdom, France, Italy, Canada and South Korea) are allies of the US and are assured of military support and inventory cooperation. China is both economically and militarily robust and is a major exporter/supplier with a credible military manufacturing ecosystem. Russia, for the record, is at 11th position.

India is in an unfavourable spot, for while it has the potential for economic growth ($5 trillion GDP is the current aspiration), it is militarily very vulnerable, for it has no meaningful indigenous capability to design and manufacture critical military inventory items that are combat-worthy: Tanks, guns, ships and fighter aircraft. Even personal weapons such as Kalashnikov rifles are imported or, at best, will be assembled in India. As is well-known, Russia remains a major supplier of India’s military equipment (almost 70%) and in the last decade , the US has also become a significant supplier.

Thus India’s claim to strategic autonomy and becoming a leading power on the global stage has to be contextualised against this glaring vulnerability. This is analogous to the Indian predicament in the 1960s when it adopted a strident post-colonial posture on the world stage and often voted at the United Nations (UN) against the US — but was a major importer of food grains. Paradoxically the primary food supplier to India at the time was the US.

Then Prime Minister (PM) Indira Gandhi resolved to redress this “ship-to-mouth” national ignominy and embarked upon a major macro policy initiative — the Green Revolution. The paradox continued, for India sought and obtained US assistance from the latter’s proven agricultural competence and leading American universities were part of this sustained effort.

This successful cooperation led to India not only becoming self-sufficient in food production but also generating surplus produce and today Prime Minister (PM) Narendra Modi is in a position to offer Indian wheat to nations affected by the Ukraine war — if the World Trade Organization rules permit.

This transformation from vulnerability to excess capacity in food production was enabled by the high -octane political resolve of PM Indira Gandhi and a steady hand on the tiller provided by two Cabinet ministers — C Subramaniam and Jagjivan Ram.

In the current context, India’s visible military import dependency index needs to be reduced and PM Modi’s focus on atmanirbharta (self-reliance) must be commended. But for this transmutation to be realised, the domestic ecosystem must be receptive to foreign investment and technology transfers — which alas, is not the case.

Rajnath Singh was spot on in calling for “increased investments by US defence companies in India under the ‘Make in India’ programme” and adding that the “participation of US entities in industrial collaboration and partnership in research and development will be critical” for the success of this initiative. Galvanising the ministry of defence to rise to this challenge is imperative.

Commodore (retired) C Uday Bhaskar is director, Society for Policy StudiesThe views expressed are personal



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The death of a 14-year-old girl on the night of April 4 in West Bengal’s Nadia district after attending the birthday party of 21-year-old Braja Gopal, son of Trinamool Congress (TMC) leader Samarendra Gayali, has sparked a political storm.

The details are, as yet, murky, but the girl’s family says she died of excessive bleeding caused by rape. Chief minister Mamata Banerjee has dismissed the incident as a “love affair”, even as Braja Gopal and one more person have been arrested.

This is not the first time India’s sole woman chief minister has displayed such insensitivity with regard to a rape victim. In 2013, Banerjee and her senior minister Kakoli Ghosh Dastidar dismissed a gang rape as a concocted story, hinting at a “deal” gone wrong. The case was cracked by an ace cop, Damayanti Sen, vindicating the stand of the “Park Street victim” who insisted on being called by her name, Suzette Jordan.

In any event, Banerjee should know that even if this was a “love affair”, even if the girl was pregnant, as she has hinted, it would still be rape because 18 is the age of consent under the laws of India that she has sworn to uphold.

Victim-blaming is not new. Survivors continue to be asked what they were wearing, why they were out, why they didn’t put up a strong enough fight. They continue to be subjected to banned practices like the two-finger test. If the case ever reaches court, they are asked humiliating questions; sexual history, for instance.

This victim-blaming cuts across party affiliations, and Banerjee is now in the same category as the Samajwadi Party’s Mulayam Singh Yadav (“boys will be boys, they make mistakes”) and the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)’s Babulal Gaur (“rape is a social crime…sometimes it is right, sometimes it is wrong”).

Even more reprehensible is the proclivity of political parties to take convenient stands based on expediency rather than morality.

The BJP has set up a fact-finding team to examine the allegations of rape against the TMC leader’s son. Yet, in 2018, the gang rape and murder of an eight-year-old Muslim girl in Kathua led to protests in favour of the six accused Hindu men. These were attended by two BJP ministers who resigned in the face of outrage.

A decade after the 2012 gang rape of a medical student in Delhi, we need to ask why a culture of rape still persists. How is it so easy for a Bajrang Muni to threaten to rape Muslim women, a threat recorded on video, and why it should take over a week for him to be arrested? Why is a rape threat the default option of online trolls seeking to silence outspoken women?

In the end, it is our convenient, shifting attitudes to rape, our unrelenting focus on the victim, not the crime, that make us all complicit. That an elected head of a state is part of this mob makes it tragic.

Namita Bhandare writes on gender

The views expressed are personal



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Turtuk is a small, picturesque hamlet at the far end of Ladakh's stunning Nubra Valley. One of the main “tourist attractions” of this border village, which is hemmed in by the turbulent Shyok River and mighty Karakoram ranges, are “natural fridges”. Known as “nangchung” (cold house) in the local Balti language, these stone bunkers preserve perishable food items such as meat and butter in the summer months. A home-grown solution, nangchungs are built on underground glacial streams and they utilise the gaps between natural stones to allow cold air to pass through, keeping the room much cooler than the outside summer temperature. This simple eco-friendly measure is an excellent example of how people have been adapting to warmer temperatures.

As the world warms up, India will need many more such localised low-cost solutions.

The recently released Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s Working Group III report has already sent out a grim warning: The world will witness more intense and frequent heatwaves.

The tell-tale signs of the climate crisis are already evident.

India, on average, recorded its warmest March days in 121 years, with the maximum temperature across the country clocking in at 1.86°C above normal, an analysis by the India Meteorological Department (IMD) has shown. Climate experts said the trend, the outcome of unusual wind patterns could be linked to the climate crisis. The first two weeks of April saw back-to-back heatwave days.

Heat stress, health and the economy

Extreme heat is not merely an inconvenience. Extreme heat exposure is a public health emergency in India. Health risks from heat stress are hazardous for specific populations, including older people, city dwellers, and those living with chronic health conditions or in slums and low-income communities because of the combined effects of heightened heat exposures, health vulnerabilities, and limited access to affordable cooling options. Other than health impacts, high temperature also reduces an individual's earning potential and harms the economy.

A 2021 research by the Energy Policy Institute at the University of Chicago showed that rising temperatures could hurt economic output by reducing the productivity of human labour. “The damage is greatest when already warm days become hotter. If India wishes to succeed in becoming a manufacturing powerhouse using cheap labour, we need to think hard about how we can adapt to a hotter world,” says Dr Anant Sudarshan, South Asia Director, Energy Policy Institute, University of Chicago. This multi-year study indicates that climate control in the workplace removes productivity declines but not absenteeism, presumably because workers remain exposed to high temperatures at home and outside.

Keeping it cool

The danger of loss of productivity due to heat stress led the Ahmedabad-based Mahila Housing Trust, which works with underprivileged women to drive progress in their under-served communities and to think about low-cost, local solutions to tackle rising heat.

“For poor women, a house is not just a place to stay, but it is also their workplace because many work in the informal sector. Therefore, uncomfortably high temperatures impact their productivity,” says Bijalben Brahmbhatt, director of MHT.

When the productivity issue was discussed in the meetings, MHT asked its women members to assess their climate vulnerabilities. Unsurprisingly, the top assessment was that homes are becoming heat traps. In addition to the health impact of heat, there were other hidden collateral charges that people incur: Food items are spoiled; they pay higher electricity bills, and personal funds are spent on products such as prickly heat powder and cold drinks.

To beat the heat, MHT and The Natural Resources Defense Council are popularising “Cool Roofs” across several cities in India. Cool roofs offer a cost-effective and straightforward solution to urbanisation challenges. MHT is painting roofs of selected slum households with solar reflective paint.

Cool roofs reflect sunlight and absorb less heat. Depending on the setting, cool roofs can help keep indoor temperatures lower by 2 to 5°C (3.6 - 9°F) as compared to traditional roofs. Moreover, cool roofs can cost as little as 0.5 per square foot for a simple lime-based paint, to more expensive reflective coatings or membranes.

Why focus on roofs?

The roof is an important component of the building envelope that directly impacts the building’s energy needs and the thermal comfort of the occupants. Cool roofs function primarily by absorbing less heat and reflecting more sunlight on the roof back to the atmosphere than a regular roof surface.

Cool roofs have multiple co-benefits: They save energy and costs by reducing cooling load requirements in a building; reduce the urban heat island effect, improve air quality and combat climate change; enhance durability and appearance of roofs; increase energy access by reducing peak load on the grid; and build community resilience to extreme heat.

Besides using reflective paint, MHT has also used other models — bamboo roofs, MOD roofs (made of paper waste and coconut husk) and air-light ventilation — to keep the home temperatures at comfortable levels. In addition, some households have put a layer of vegetation over the roof. This not only keeps the room cool but also works as a kitchen garden for the family.

“The efforts in India are part of a global movement to embrace a range of heat-health adaptations. Cool roofs are being used internationally, as a low-cost, low-tech way to promote more livable cities. For tens of millions of people globally faced with heat-health challenges, there are now more options in how to respond to the climate crisis,” says Manish Bapna, President and CEO, NRDC.

Across India, extreme weather temperatures are becoming more frequent and are occurring in geographies that do not have a history of heatwaves such as Himachal Pradesh and Kerala. As many as 23 states are known to have been affected by heatwaves. Cool roofs must be mainstreamed into state and city heat action planning through focused efforts so that people don’t have to pay a high price.



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Every state leader wants to be a bulldozer baba. And our two-pence wager — if it was originally conceived as a plot for a Bollywood or south Indian film, it would have been a hit, too. Not surprisingly, politically too, it seems to be perceived as a successful ploy worth emulating; and thus the bulldozer travelled, quickly, from Uttar Pradesh to Madhya Pradesh.

The underlying psychological ploy is to recast the image of the head of the government of a state into a larger than life rebel, who works with means outside the playbook, beyond the rules of the system, to target and punish, quickly, those who would otherwise get away from punishment within the purview of law. There is a certain irresistible appeal for the frontbenchers amongst the cineaste to whistle at such a Robin Hood approach to setting things right.

Removing the sentimental manipulation involved, rational analysis shows that structurally this is a manner of one pillar of democracy, the executive, de facto empowering itself to bypass both the legislative and the judiciary.

It is a statement of accusation that the executive feels neither the laws passed by the legislative house, nor the speed of delivery in the criminal justice system, are good enough to meet the muster of popular confidence; and therefore both necessitates and justifies, arm-twisting of law and brazenly bulldozing the House.
It is both problematic and dangerous to play this game for just that reason; in a democracy the rule of law is the core and most sacred value to ensure a society is civilised and modern.

Thus, mobs demand instant bulldozing and the chief minister, in this case, of Madhya Pradesh, Shivraj Singh Chouhan, gives a go ahead for this tactic for the first time in his fourth term as the leader of the government.

The move to bulldoze homes of those who are suspects in cases of communal violence, or any other heinous crime, is beyond the ambit of law; and refuting the politics of whistling and jeering mobs, their dark visceral motive does democracy no good.

But it is only half the story. The propensity to weaponise street and instant justice to politically appeal to those who seek it and to allow the agents of the State, armed with government power and near-immunity against action, sanctions State-powered lynching.

This is the closest we have gotten to the possibility of a communal-inclined government or ruling party inflicting huge damage on some people, purportedly because they are accused of certain crimes, and also psychologically inflicting huge damage and instilling fear amongst a much larger group it does not approve of.

This must be seen as removing the role of our independent judiciary systemically, by not even bringing cases before courts, or even having to register them, but punish those accused, in violation of a sacred, fundamental, natural canon of justice — of allowing the accused a fair trial and opportunity for defence.

The policeman cannot be fused into a superhero — who can charge, judge and punish — and wreck our system and bulldoze the house. In this case, the House would be Parliament, the courts and our Constitution.



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The Consumer Price Index — also called retail inflation — in India shot up to a 17-month high of 6.95 per cent in March 2022. The rise in prices was across the board, including food, footwear, health, transport, recreation and personal care items.

The Reserve Bank of India believes that its trajectory will depend upon the evolving geopolitical situation and its impact on global commodity prices and logistics. The decision of domestic manufacturers to pass on higher fuel costs also contributed to the higher inflation in the country.

Though the inflation remained above six per cent for the last three months, the RBI preferred to support economic growth by restraining itself from increasing interest rates to curb inflationary expectations. Unlike in advanced economies like the United States, the RBI believes that global supply shortages have contributed largely to higher commodity prices in India.

Inflation has remained above five per cent in 78 out of 109 Emerging Markets and Developing Economies — largely because of higher prices of imported goods caused by currency depreciation, global shortages and supply chain issues.

Inflation has also remained above five per cent in 15 of the 34 advanced economies, which includes the United States and the United Kingdom. The United States recorded 40-year-high inflation of 7.9 per cent in March. However, unlike developing economies, the advanced economies are hit by excess liquidity infused by their central banks to fight the Covid-induced slowdown.

Though inflation is likely to technically cool down in the months to come because of the base effect, the world is unlikely to see any drop in prices in the wake of the ongoing geopolitical turmoil in Europe and its ripple effect on crude oil prices and muted movement of money across the world due to lesser risk-appetite among investors. The world must, therefore, learn to live with elevated prices.



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“Bachchoo, last night you dreamt of crows
They don’t belong in verses
They are creatures of prose:
As the sun went down they took flight
Their cries to me were croaking curses
In thick flocks they formed the night
Then implausibly they turned
And were harnessed to black hearses.”

From Gul Pey Laath, Tamboo Mey Ghubraaht, by Bachchoo

I have to admit that I am a bit of a “dom”. That’s not to claim any fraction of the talent or achievement of the poet, the late Dom Moraes. Neither is it a claim to any part of the weirdo Dominic Cummings, late adviser to BoJo, who was ejected from 10 Downing Street after some contretemps with Carrie Antoinette, the PM’s new wife.

No, dear hearts, I am compelled to declare myself a “dom” because recently I received a reminder from Her Majesty’s Revenue Service asking me to fill in my tax returns for the previous year. I haven’t done it yet, but have discovered, from reading the headlines and following the latest issues on TV, that there exists a perfectly legal way of evading tax on one’s income from abroad by declaring that one is a “non-dom” -- not domiciled. On further enquiry I am told that this is a status afforded to those who say they might live in the UK, but their primary place of residence is elsewhere. In this way they can avoid -- again perfectly legally -- paying tax on anything that they earn by writing a column for newspapers in, say, India.

It now emerges in the British press that the finance minister of the UK, otherwise known as the chancellor of the exchequer, currently one Hedgie Sunak, has the ultimate responsibility of determining the tax laws that apply to these “non-doms”. Under the laws that he oversees, these non-doms pay no taxes on what they declare is their income from overseas.

Now, gentle reader, I publish books through vibrant Indian publishing firms and that gives me sometimes a few rupees. I also earn some very generous fee for this weekly column, paid as Indian earnings. I have to declare these meagre (No, no, editor sahab, I mean ‘fantastic, fabulous’ fees --fd. Rein in your nonsense, ungrateful dog --Ed) earnings and be taxed on them because I am a “dom”.

The “non-dom” who has been in the news -- and who has in part occasioned this column – is one Akshata Murthy. She can also be known as Akshata Sunak as she is married to Hedgie, the UK’s intrepid chancellor. The news about her “non-dom” status was that she had an income from shares worth £700 million in her father N.R. Narayana Murthy’s company Infosys.

These shares brought her a yearly income, this last year at least, of £11.5 million. If this was taxed at the rate which her husband has set, she would have to pay around £4.4 million to Her Majesty’s exchequer. She didn’t. Not until the news of her registration as a “non-dom” hit the headlines and even then, through clever maths accounting, not that much.

It’s clear that Ms Murthy intended, quite shamelessly but perfectly legally under her husband’s dispensation, to keep this status quiet and pay no tax on this chunk of her income at all.

Obviously, the scam of her “non-dom” status wouldn’t have been the subject of Himalayan embarrassment if she had been plain Mrs Botany B. Being the chancellor’s wife caused the embarrassing facts to scale the heights of Everest.

Hedgie, in charge of taxes, ignored the income that the exchequer could have received if he had abolished or modified the “non-dom” status law. Instead, his last Budget has raised the level of taxation for the average “dom” (yours truly included) by 11 per cent. Are the voters pleased?

To be fair, Ms Murthy, pressured by the exposure, announced that she would pay some tax on her foreign income to avoid the impression that she and her husband were conniving, shameless (though perfectly legal under his jurisdiction) billionaires.

There’s more, gentle reader. In all the years of Covid, Hedgie launched a popular “furlough” scheme to help businesses pay their employees during the lockdown. The scheme certainly assisted small businesses who had to lay off their workers.

Ms Murthy owns a share in Digme Fitness, a company that runs gyms in London and Oxford. She has, reputedly, more money than the Queen. But, of course, she took advantage of Hedgie’s furlough and claimed and received £100,000 from the relief fund.

Hedgie’s money comes from the super-gambling enterprise of hedge funds. Akshata’s wealth is from dividends in shares. Neither of which can legitimately be called “earnings” if that’s a word applied to the product of blood, sweat and even tears. You don’t get that rich by working hard, you get that rich by gaming the capitalist system and by making other people work hard.

There’s still more. Poor Hedgie’s popularity with the public is now at an all-time low as inflation hits seven per cent and taxes and the price of fuel are the highest since the late 1990s.

And apart from the revelation that till recently, even as a candidate for Parliament, Hedgie kept a US Green Card, there is “Partygate”. Hedgie and his boss BoJo have been fined £50 each by the police for partying at 10 Downing Street during the Covid-19 lockdown that their government imposed.

Gentle reader, I paid £80 last week for driving 20 yards in a bus lane. Imagine how I feel?



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We desis have always nurtured a love-hate relationship with our neighbours (padosis) through the ages. Way back in 1941, V. Shantaram had made a social drama titled “Padosi”. Be honest. Do you like your neighbours? Do you even know who they are? Dead or alive -- do you care? Mumbai is one of the world’s most personal/impersonal cities. We get personal about everything, and yet stay cold-bloodedly detached when faced with a “situation”.  The padosi complex extends to how we view our neighbouring countries -- it’s with a mixture of suspicion and fascination, especially when it comes to India’s bete noire, Pakistan. This week witnessed heart-stopping turmoil and excitement across the border, what with a brand new Prime Minister (Shehbaz Sharif) displacing the blustering, bombastic Imran Khan, who created history but for all the wrong reasons (174 members of the Opposition voted in favour of the motion that resulted in Imran Khan’s removal). Unable to handle this rejection and defeat, the bumbling Khan tried every tactic at his command to hang on to his kursi. Friends from Pakistan say that at present he is licking his wounds in “Banigala”, but the Kaptaan ain’t done just yet. As padosis, we displayed admirable restraint for once, and didn’t offer unsolicited advice in patronising tones, as was anticipated. Kuch toh akkal dikhayi…!

Besides, Imran had serious competition in the sticky eyeballs race -- we were feverishly monitoring a much, much bigger and far more momentous national event back home -- the Ranbir-Alia shaadi (that was affectionately dubbed #Ranlia), which impacted the lives of every Indian in the days that led up to the mandap, the location of which was kept guarded like a nuclear site. Here’s where we get over-personal, and behave like it is a family wedding that we need to micro-manage. Since we love shaadis, it is only appropriate that we wish the golden couple of Bollywood many wonderful years of “Love and Light” … the standard IG way of showering pyaar on newly-weds.

England is only 7,544 km away from us, but given our colonial connections we continue to feel a certain neighbourly concern, now more so than ever, given how shabbily the Brits are treating “our” Rishi Sunak. He is India’s precious Jamai Babu, okay? We show great respect to our sons-in-law. Besides, his wife Akshata is India’s beloved beti -- being Sudha and N.R. Narayan Murthy’s daughter. The Murthys are amazing people -- not like the other show-off billionaires. We are sure they’ve brought up their daughter with all the right “sanskars”.

Why would she indulge in dodgy hera-pheri and jeopadise her husband’s future? We have poora-poora faith in this “made for each other” couple. If truth be told, this is definitely a conspiracy to scuttle Rishi Sunak’s chances of becoming the next Prime Minister of the UK -- how cool! Imagine the first non-white PM singing God Save the Queen with conviction. But his nasty critics are crowing: “From Dishy Rishy to Slippery Sunak….!” Meannnn! Poor chap, his ratings have dropped a bit, but the loyal wifey will have none of it. She has decided to pay her taxes on the Rs 11.56 crores she earns as a dividend from Infosys (she owns 0.93 per cent of the company), as also from her earnings from any other country. Note: as a “moral obligation”, not because she’s required to, being a “Non Dom” person. Yes, it’s complicated. Imagine! The “Non Dom” thingy was recognised in the UK since the French Revolution. And she’s not the only “Non Dom” accused of being naughty -- there are actors, bankers, business peeps and athletes who claim the same privileges. That compounds our sneaking suspicion about the Brit public being biased and racist.

Sunak’s skin is of the wrong shade, mate! His father is a medical practitioner in the NHS and his mother owns a pharmacy. The Sunaks are solidly Brit. And he is a very bright spark himself, as he has demonstrated since his appointment as Britain’s chancellor of the exchequer in 2020. Hey -- does it matter?

We definitely want to see our boy shine as PM once Boris Johnson moves on. And we don’t really care if Sunak partied with the boss on the lawns of 10, Downing Street during the wretched pandemic. All of us behaved rather strangely during that difficult period. Besides, Sunak kept his clothes on, as did the other party-goers drinking a beer or two or twenty… why beat him up for it? I tell you, these cheeky Brits… how wrong they get us!!! Just watch Bridgerton to get their take on “doing Indian” -- the Sharmas call their father “Appa”, sport mud-coloured foundation and are given the most ludicrous lines to mouth. But as someone pointed out on IG when I trashed Season 2 – “It’s a ‘What if…’ show… anything goes.” Sure. But as another commentator snarkily noted: “What if they’d cast a viscount with a better butt? In Season 1, it was the duke’s butt that won all the acting honours…” Noblesse oblige!

But here’s a better story from the land of warm beer and cold handshakes. There he was, on March 30, Dr Pillarasetti Raghu Ram from Hyderabad, dressed in a smart bandhgala -- with the Bonny Prince Charlie conferring an OBE on the 55-year-old, making him one of the youngest surgeons of Indian origin to have received this recognition in over 100 years. He sent me the conferment video, taken in the King’s Drawing Room at Windsor Palace, which shows Prince Charles moving away from strict Brit protocol and reciprocating Dr Raghu’s traditional namaste with his own namaste. Eight years ago, I had visited the KIMS-Ushalakshmi Centre for Breast Diseases when it was launched by the good doc in 2014.

We are all waiting to see how the Sunak saga pans out. It will be a shame if he is made the fall guy for being seen as Boris Johnson’s “boy”. Meanwhile, Akshata dearie, just pay up sweetly and get those mean-spirited critics off your case. But dude, an alleged evasion of around Rs 197 crores in taxes, as the accusation goes, isn’t exactly small change… It could easily finance Imran Khan’s re-election. Soch lo… it ain’t really over till the fat generals sing.



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