On June 20, as the water level rose, Dipankar Dhar waded past a refrigerator, an LPG cylinder and scores of vintage books — all floating around his waist — after descending from the first floor of his three-storey house on College Road. A rescue boat was ready. Dhar and his family exited the house with a few clothes and basic necessities, climbed onto the boat, and sailed to the edge of Park Road. This was the nearest “island” in Silchar, a town where only about 10% of the land had been spared the sudden flooding close to midnight of June 19.
The Dhars were among the first to check into a hotel on Park Road. “We could have stayed on the first floor like many others marooned in our locality. But our kitchen on the ground floor went 6 ft under water and there was no way we could cook or organise our food,” said Dhar, a contractor based in Kolkata who had come home recently to settle a property dispute.
Shyamsundar Roy, a businessman, and Moushumi checked into the same hotel with their eight-month-old baby three days later. They had been banking on the water receding, as has often been the case with Silchar, within a day or two from the ground floor of their four-storey building on Bibekananda Road. “We shifted the ground floor tenants to the second floor and hoped for the best,” said Roy. “But it was becoming unbearable. After the inverter battery drained out, for three nights we had no power. We hired a boat to a point near the hotel, a 10-minute drive from our house on normal days. And here we are, on a forced staycation.”
Unlike most Silchar residents who were taken by surprise, Hemanta Bora said he was used to floods back home in a northern Assam village. The family of this former soldier, who handles security at an Oil and Natural Gas Corporation facility near Silchar, decided not to move from their rented, third-floor house. “We kept saving the inverter battery to charge our mobile phones and I waded chest deep occasionally to get provisions. My office had my family shifted to a hotel after nine days because my service was needed at the facility,” said Bora.
Never before had the hotels around Gandhi Bagh been booked for 10 days at a stretch by locals. “All our 21 rooms are booked but we are managing with less than 50% staff, many of whom are marooned. But we are only providing a few items on the menu because there is no one to prepare the fancy dishes,” said Amit Patoa, the manager of a starred hotel. “It would be wrong to say we are making the most of people’s misery. We have provided discounts on room rent and we have not charged extra for food despite having to buy fish, vegetables and everything else at 200%-300% more than the usual prices.”
Silchar, the headquarters of Cachar district, is the hub of the landlocked Barak Valley comprising three districts in Assam. Silchar got hit after landslides damaged the arterial railway line through Dima Hasao at 56 points in mid-May. A highway through Dima Hasao was similarly affected. The only other highway through Meghalaya connecting Barak Valley to the rest of the country was cut off less than a month later. It was made usable in about a week, but perishable items landed in Silchar rotten because the trucks had been stranded in Meghalaya. To make matters worse, 30%-70% of goods of most shops and warehouses in the town had been submerged way too long to be of use. As of July 1, 173 people had died due to the floods and landslide in Assam. Of Silchar’s 28 wards, 26 were badly flooded. More than 1,00,000 vehicles had been damaged. Property damage was estimated to be over Rs. 1,000 crore, said the Assam Assam Minister for Public Health Engineering, Entrepreneurship and Tourism, Jayanta Malla Baruah.
Thirsty people in flood-hit areas
No one in schoolteacher Bipul Sinha’s family had any appetite to eat on the first-floor house in Bhagatpur locality. They were barely 1.5 m above the water level. In just five days, the ochre coloured water that the overflowing Barak River had brought had turned a dull black and was stinking. Bathing was a luxury as there was no electricity to draw water from the underground tank. The family’s stock of drinking water had run out three days after the floods. “You can survive without electricity and even food, but not water,” Sinha said. “On the fifth day, I bought a dozen one-litre bottles of water at a premium, but it was peanuts compared to the Rs. 1,000 I had to pay the boatman one way to fetch it.”
Barely 900 metres from his house, on College Road, a ‘boat stand’ replaced the local taxi and rickshaw stand soon after the area turned, as Sinha put it, into “a sea”. Boatmen Rahamatullah and Gopal Das justified the charge — Rs. 100 per 100 m — to make up for their inability to fish or ferry people across the Barak River for a living.
Most used boats, or plyboards tied on tubes of truck tyres, or slabs of thermocol stitched in plastic sacks to fetch water at Rs. 500 for a 20-litre canister that would normally cost Rs. 70. Some boiled the floodwaters to survive.
The situation eased after three days when individuals, local NGOs and the Cachar district administration began distributing water along with biscuits, candles and matchboxes. Manipur and Mizoram pitched in while boat-mounted water purifiers were placed strategically. There were a few like Ajit Das, an optical store owner, who ferried water on his two-wheeler from his house on Public School Road for friends in need. “My house was not inundated and I tried to help the only way I could, by providing water to the nearest point from where my friends and relatives could collect it,” he said. Saurabh Chakraborty, a member of Prayash NGO, said the Barak River came visiting as a great leveller: “Everywhere, owners of swanky cars and tall buildings as well as the homeless were begging for water.”
Problems in providing relief
Water and relief material did not reach people due to non-availability but alleged mismanagement, many said. Samin Sen Deka, a reporter for a Guwahati-based TV channel, said relief did not reach his marooned locality for almost a week. He watched helplessly as his two young daughters cried due to hunger.
At the Silchar Government Higher Secondary School near the Cachar Deputy Commissioner’s office, about 500 inmates from the flooded Dhakaiya Colony complained about getting less than what was assured. “The board outside says we are supposed to get 5 kg of rice and 300 ml of mustard oil per head. We are getting 1 kg of rice and barely a few spoons of oil to cook. And how can 3 litres of (packaged) milk suffice for 15 people, many of whom are children,” asked Seema Biswas.
Few perhaps know about relief distribution better than Jaichand Das, a truck driver whose family of 12 has been living in a 10-wheel truck parked near a railway level crossing at Ramnagar on the outskirts of Silchar. In May, when the first flood of lower intensity struck Silchar and Cachar district beyond, he had driven his truck for the district administration to distribute relief material to the flood-hit people. “We swam to safety when our house in Durganagar went under water save the tin roof. Rukman Singh, the owner of the truck I drive to transport food grains (from the Food Corporation of India warehouse near Silchar), was kind enough to let us stay in the truck, but we are disappointed that the government could not provide any kind of relief to us. Had it not been for the Army, we would have died of thirst,” he said. The Army camp at Masimpur near Silchar remained inundated for more than a week as did parts of the Assam Rifles camp in the town.
“Whatever relief is being provided is by the locals themselves,” said Trinamool Congress MP Sushmita Dev, whose house on Station Road was inundated for a few days. “There has been total mismanagement of the situation. We have seen floods since childhood, but there was never any party politics during disasters until now. The BJP (local MP and MLAs belong to the Bharatiya Janata Party) has taken control of the operations and made a mess of it. They have to let the district administration work.” Neither Silchar MP Rajdeep Roy nor Silchar MLA Dipayan Chakraborty took calls, but local BJP leader Anita Choudhury denied that the party was “branding” relief material provided by the district authorities.
Cachar Deputy Commissioner Keerthi Jalli admitted the district machinery took time to respond, but said that was because most officials and employees were themselves marooned. “We lost no time in requisitioning dumpers and excavators, the only vehicles that could be used in most areas, to transport relief, move doctors and help the police patrol vulnerable areas,” she said.
Much of the patrolling on dumpers at night was to assure the townspeople that the law-and-order situation was being taken care of, said Cachar’s Superintendent of Police, Ramandeep Kaur Dhillon. “We have received SOS calls about burglaries in shops and houses closed for days. But there has not been a single case reported. People have panicked because the nights are pitch black without electricity.”
More than 4,000 transformers in Silchar and the district beyond were under water for about a week, leading to extensive power cuts.
Blaming Mahisha Beel
With a population of more than 2 lakh, the 27 sq. km Silchar town is protected by a long embankment on the Barak River, the lifeline of Barak Valley. At about 7 p.m. on June 19, the district authority issued a statement warning residents that the town could be flooded because some miscreants had cut a channel on the embankment at Bethukandi about 3 km from the heart of the town.
Ajit Das had been tipped off earlier by Ashis Das, a resident of one of the villages in the Bethukandi area and the mason who had built his optical shop at Rangirkhari. “I stacked most of the spectacles on higher shelves and placed the inverter and battery on a stack of chairs. I warned the shops in the area but none took it seriously,” Ajit Das said.
Tapu Pal, who runs a pharmacy near Rangirkhari, wished he had heeded the warning. Floodwaters destroyed the medicines on the lower shelves but the loss he suffered was much less than what the maternity hospital opposite his store faced. It is closed indefinitely.
The flood, which struck at a force, killed 16 people in the town while three remained untraced. The scale of devastation struck the people when a couple of bodies wrapped in polythene were found floating, possibly disposed of as the town’s cremation and burial grounds were submerged. Struck by this, Kumar Kanti Das, a popular doctor, temporarily allowed his Charitable Hospital ground to be used for cremation.
By the time the people realised what had hit them, a narrative had been built that the residents of Mahisha Beel had cut the embankment at Bethukandi to drain out excess water into the Barak River that flows down from Manipur and meanders into Bangladesh. The embankment topped by a partly metalled road is a barrier between the river and thebeel (wetland). The belief became stronger when Chief Minister Himanta Biswa Sarma, who visited the town thrice in a week, said the Silchar disaster was man-made. Bethukandi is a largely Muslim-inhabited area with a few Hindu pockets.
Arijit Aditya, the editor of Silchar-published Bengali dailyBartalipi , found something amiss in the district authority’s June 19 warning. While accusing some miscreants of causing the breach, it said the river water could inundate low-lying areas of the town despite efforts to repair the damaged stretch of the embankment. “For years, the people of Mahisha Beel have been under water for nine months. Why should they suddenly cut the embankment? There could be a case of incompetent officials shifting the blame on the villagers,” he said.
“How can anyone say the locals cut the embankment? Water was flowing out of Mahisha Beel towards the river through a drain near the point of the embankment where a sluice gate has been lying half-constructed for months,” said Gopal Das, the president of the Bagardor Borjurai Gram Panchayat, in May when the water level of Mahisha Beel was higher than that of the Barak River. The locals, he said, informed the authorities concerned about the ‘cut’ on the embankment. On May 23, Debabrata Pal, the executive engineer of the Water Resources Department, lodged an FIR against unknown miscreants under Section 427 (mischief causing damage) of the Indian Penal Code read with Section 3 of the Prevention of Damage to Public Property Act.
“Mahisha Beel was a small wetland. The excess water from Mahisha Beel used to drain out through Rangirkhal, Singirkhal and Longaikhal on the other side of the town. But encroachment constricted thesekhals (canals) and kept inundating our farmlands,” said Shaheen Hussain Laskar, a former farmer living under a makeshift tent on the embankment. “To say we breached the embankment to teach the townspeople a lesson for making us suffer all these years is a bit much. The strong current of the river washed away the weakened embankment around the under-construction sluice gate.”
He is not off the mark. ‘Barak Riverscape: Ecological status and Trends’, a document of the Wildlife Institute of India under a project of the National River Conservation Directorate, found the Barak River system fragmented by the construction of four dams, six medium irrigation projects, three hydroelectric projects and barrages. The report says the 900-km river provides several ecosystem services but is “threatened due to developmental activities in its basin, increased water abstraction, sand mining, heavy metal pollution, increase in invasive species and climate change”.
The basin has undergone considerable land-use changes in the last three decades. Between 1988 and 2018, the water area decreased by 23.48% while the urban area increased by 73.76%, and the riverbed increased by 134.62% although a dredging project was undertaken in 2018.
“Without going into the details, it would suffice to say that the need to construct the Bethukandi sluice gate to let the excess water of Mahisha Beel drain out into the Barak was felt long ago,” Aditya said. “Thebeel became a milch cow during the Congress regime through invisible schemes until former Chief Minister Tarun Gogoi sanctioned the sluice gate. The work on that stagnated after the BJP won the elections in 2016 and Silchar has now paid for that.”
The way forward
S.R. Swami, a retired chief engineer of the Water Resources Department, said Silchar needs many sluice gates with proper maintenance, regular upkeep of the embankments and better risk assessment besides overhauling of the drainage system. “Even if Barak Valley does not experience rain, heavy showers in the hills around make it vulnerable. And the planning has to be long term if such a disaster has to be avoided,” he said. The Bethukandi breach could not have been the only cause of the unprecedented flooding, he added.
The mindset of officials and the political class needs to change too, said Mantu Das, a Silchar-origin engineering designer now working with the National Bank for Agriculture and Rural Development. In 2016, he had proposed a project under the Atal Mission for Rejuvenation and Urban Transformation to bail the town out of its waterlogging and sewage issues. He had even organised a workshop for the town planners. “What they wanted was stop-gap arrangements, not elaborate projects to separate the sewage system from the rainwater drainage system,” said Das. “They failed to understand that one has to study the hydrology of the valley as well as the hills around and analyse rainfall and flood patterns in these areas over more than a century besides factoring in climate change to come up with a set-up that can last for at least 100 years.”
Such studies could be facilitated if the Assam University in Silchar has a centre for disaster management, noted Parthankar Choudhury, who teaches ecology and environmental science at the university. “This centre, the proposal for which was submitted to the University Grants Commission, should be a top priority in view of the unprecedented floods in Silchar,” he said.
For the time being, the focus is on preventing post-flood water-borne diseases, with medical teams fanning out to check the health of relief camp inmates and those marooned in their homes. Help is also pouring in from organisations such as Dharmanagar and Kanchanpur Chemist and Druggist Association in adjoining Tripura.
For those who were forced to leave home, a bigger worry is how soon they can go back with the Barak River starting to rise again: on July 1, the gauge at the town’s Annapurna Ghat recorded 19.87 m after dipping to 19.85 m (0.02 m above the danger level) on June 30. The fear that the gaping hole in the embankment at Bethukandi could cause another flood is palpable, although the district authorities have sought to assure people that the repair work would be completed fast.
“Finding labourers who are charging Rs. 1,000 per day instead of the normal Rs. 300-400 to clean the house is tough. Tougher still is to get clean water to wash the muck and filth left behind by the floodwaters,” Dipankar Dhar said.
In a period of just one week, we have had three important public statements being made by three of the most important government functionaries in India that have emphasised India’s stronger credentials as a secular democratic polity. The context is the reactions to the controversial remarks on the Prophet made by a (now former) spokesperson of the ruling party. In the first instance, the External Affairs Minister, S. Jaishankar, stated that the negative reactions of many Muslim countries over the controversial remarks on the Prophet “... was an issue where the sensibilities and the sensitivities of people were impacted”. Next was the National Security Adviser (NSA), Ajit Doval, who candidly accepted that the controversy has damaged India’s global reputation, but also arguing that “India has been projected or some disinformation has been spread against India — which is far from the reality. Probably there is a need for us to engage them [Muslim world] and talk to them and convince them”.
An ‘inclusive upbringing’
Most importantly, we had the Prime Minister, Narendra Modi, mentioning in his blog his childhood friend, one Mr. Abbas Ramsada, to highlight his (the Prime Minister’s) mother’s selfless nature. Reminiscing their childhood, the Prime Minister mentioned Mr. Abbas having stayed with Mr. Modi’s family “after the untimely death of my father's close friend who stayed in a nearby village” (i.e., Mr. Abbas’s father) . Though the Prime Minister did not directly address the controversy over the derogatory remarks made about the Prophet, the very reference to Mr. Abbas is an indirect acknowledgement that more damage should not be done to India’s image as a country that celebrates its diversity and plurality. That Mr. Abbas was a part of his (the Prime Minister’s) household, that Mr. Modi’s mother took care of Mr. Abbas just like her own children, and that she also prepared favourite dishes during the festival of Eid must be seen as emphasising Mr. Modi’s inclusive upbringing and the level of societal integration between Hindus and Muslims in India. And, finally, it was the Supreme Court of India that held the discredited former spokesperson “single-handedly responsible” for igniting emotions while asking her to “apologise to the country”.
Then there was the timing of the diplomatic firestorm over the remarks: India’s Vice-President M. Venkaiah Naidu was to reach Qatar on the last leg of a three-nation tour, and Iran’s Foreign Minister was to arrive on his first official visit to India. The Modi government has also taken remarkable initiatives to improve ties with many West Asian/Gulf countries, in part to ensure energy security and to attract investment from there in the infrastructure sector. But there is another dimension that should not be forgotten.
Whether Mr. Jaishankar was hinting at global jihadist organisations or Pakistan’s security establishment is not known, but he did acknowledge that there are elements desperate to “fish in troubled waters”. It needs to be mentioned that immediately after the controversy erupted, the Al-Qaeda in Indian Subcontinent (AQIS) issued a letter that has warned of suicide bombings in many Indian cities to protect the honour of the Prophet. The language it has used to denigrate the Indian government illustrates its efforts that are aimed at a transnationalisation of local political tensions and conflicts.
Then and now
Even before and after Independence, communal riots have occurred across India with disturbing regularity. But here, the Indian government did not have to apologise to the Muslim world as the issues triggering the riots were seen to be local. While it has been relatively easier for sympathisers from the Hindu religious right wing to brand Indian Muslims as anti-nationals and to exhort them to become more nationalist in their world view, it is now quite difficult to move away after indecorous remarks were made against the most respected figure in Islam. The Prophet unites all Muslims, irrespective of their political, ideological, sectarian, ethnic and linguistic differences. The mobilising potential of this issue is truly ‘transnational’.
We never forget to mention that Muslims are closely integrated in Indian society, and have never empathised with jihadist organisations and their transnational aims. Even in these organisations, foreign fighters from India are disproportionately outnumbered by their American, French or British counterparts or by people from countries where there is a sizeable Muslim population. While Indian Muslims may have taken to streets protesting the persecution of their co-religionists in many conflict zones across the world, they have also done so against terrorism perpetrated in the name of Islam.
While the social, political and economic concerns of India’s Muslims have been too local to have any reverberations outside India, their religious anxieties have also been too Indian to have any resonance in any transnational organisation, be it Islamist or Jihadist. And it must remain so because the transnationalisation of issues pertaining to Indian Islam will always be challenging for the Government, while also making Indian Muslims extremely vulnerable to the political use of Islam, known as Islamism.
Islamism, jihadist landscape
Various scholars have convincingly held that Islamism is not about Islam or Islamic faith, but it is about a remaking of the political order. Islamism thrives on a transnationalisation of issues pertaining to the Islamic faith and practices, which are not a monolith. ‘Religionisation of politics’ and ‘politicisation of religion’ is the root of Islamism, the same perilous politics that led to the creation of Pakistan. And, most disturbingly, what unites Islamists and Jihadists is their vision of a Sharia-based Islamic state as a desired political order. Muslims have always found the charm and the influence of India’s constitutional order premised on secular nationalism more powerful than the fatal attraction of radical Islamism. Many experts will still underplay the threat posed by the global jihadist movement, arguing that neither AQIS nor the Islamic State (ISIS) has gained any traction in India. Fortunately, that is true since there has been no noticeable increase in the number of radicalised recruits despite the growing sense of political alienation among Indian Muslims. Can this make us complacent? The ISIS is also severely damaged, its various Indian franchises and offshoots do not pose any significant threat, and its capacity to draw recruits in India has also become questionable. But the AQIS would like to capitalise on the ideological vacuum in the regional jihadist landscape, particularly after the Taliban’s return to power in Afghanistan.
Conflict ecosystem
The Taliban’s relationship with al Qaeda has often been marked by mutual suspicion. But despite many complexities, they have often adopted successful ways to cooperate for mutual strategic and tactical benefits. Even when the Taliban entered the Doha talks with the United States for America’s eventual exit from Afghanistan, the two groups continued to coordinate till the end. After the Taliban’s takeover, al Qaeda’s jubilation has been understandable. Notwithstanding the fact that their relationship will remain fraught, they will still do their best to cooperate and coordinate.
Though it is unclear how the Taliban will stop al Qaeda from using Afghan territory for transnational jihadist operations, Kabul’s new ‘Islamist’ rulers are nonetheless unlikely to restrain al Qaeda’s regional ambitions, due to their inability or unwillingness. This makes the Taliban a highly suspect or unreliable partner in regional or global efforts to counter al Qaeda — we all know that the Afghanistan-Pakistan region has been the birthplace of many jihadist organisations including al Qaeda. The Pakistan factor too comes into play as Pakistan’s security establishment has been a long-time patron of the Afghan Taliban. There is also the kind of role Islamabad is expected to play by Washington in post-exit Afghanistan. While the Pakistan state itself seems to be bearing the brunt of the Afghan Taliban’s success in Afghanistan with the reorganisation and reinvigoration of the Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP), the temptation will never dissipate in Rawalpindi to manipulate the complex jihadist landscape of the Afghanistan-Pakistan region to meet its own geopolitical needs.
The Taliban, al Qaeda and the Islamic State Khorasan (IS-K) are three of the most important Islamist groups operating in Afghanistan’s conflict ecosystem. Though the Taliban have consolidated their hold over the Afghan state since coming to power, their continued relationship with al Qaeda makes strategic sense for them because of the all-important dimension of collective effort. Both can effectively band together to combat their common foe, ISIS or the IS-K. Thus, despite growing international pressure, the Taliban regime does not have any incentive to undermine its own limited capabilities to counter the IS-K threat by either expelling or immobilising al Qaeda who have been its partners.
Al Qaeda’s ability to navigate Afghanistan’s jihadist landscape may or may not be of major interest to the Afghan Taliban or other western countries, but it is very important for India. Opinion remains divided as to whether India can be a direct target of al Qaeda or an indirect one, with most opinion tending toward the second view, i.e., India is secondary to their real struggle. Nevertheless, it is the possibility of the Taliban and al Qaeda jointly waging a fight against the IS-K in the same operational battlespace that should alarm Indian authorities. This also explains India’s recent diplomatic efforts to engage the Afghan Taliban and maintain its presence in Afghanistan.
The transnationalisation of local tensions and the Islamisation of local politics have always exacerbated deadly conflicts. At a time when three of the most visible faces of the Indian government and the highest judicial institution of the country have directly and indirectly highlighted India’s civilisational heritage of inclusivity and tolerance, as well as the non-discriminatory nature of the current political regime, it must be hoped that the ‘fringe’ elements in the ruling party will be forced to abandon their Islamophobic vocabulary and religious prejudices.
Vinay Kaura is Assistant Professor, Department of International Affairs and Security Studies, Sardar Patel University of Police, Security and Criminal Justice, Jodhpur, Rajasthan, and a Non-resident Scholar at the Middle East Institute, Washington DC
Humour is ubiquitous; it bursts out even in the face of death. Niccolò Machiavelli, Italian political mastermind, cracked a joke before his last breath: “I desire to go to Hell and not to Heaven. In the former I shall enjoy the company of popes, kings and princes, while in the latter are only beggars, monks and apostles!” As a double-edged sword, humour is capable of inducing light-hearted moments and heavy thoughts. It is a mighty weapon in political and social discourse, an example being Socrates and his subtle and scorching critiques of decaying Athenian society and politics.
The danger today
Like the glory that was Greece fell apart, the wonder that is India is in danger of imploding. India’s constitutional cornerstone, which is the Rock of Gibraltar of the Republic, is being shaken. The darkness of totalitarianism seems to be falling upon the edifice of our Republic. We can either cry over the evidence of the downfall of the beloved country or crack jokes to detonate the darkness.
Arvind Narrain, in his book,India’s Undeclared Emergency: Constitutionalism and the Politics of Resistance , is of the opinion that India is slouching towards a totalitarian future. He observes: “the ambitions of a totalitarian government are far wider and its abilities far deeper than those of an authoritarian one. A totalitarian rule goes beyond retaining total control over the State to trying to ‘politicize the masses’ and shaping individuals in accordance with its ideology. It draws its strength and support not just from its control over the levers of the State but also from organizational fronts which work at the societal level, aiming to transform society in terms of its ideology. A combination of these factors — of having an ideology as well as many organizational fronts — results in totalitarianism having an ‘appeal’, compared with the ‘generally passive acceptance of authoritarian regimes’.” India experienced an authoritarian regime during the Emergency. But the Republic’s metamorphosis into a totalitarian political system is a dark novelty that demands innovative paraphernalia for the politics of resistance.
In herOrigins of Totalitarianism , Hannah Arendt discerned two contradictory popular responses towards totalitarianism — a mood of ‘reckless optimism’ and a belief in ‘unavoidable doom’. Arvind Narrain points out that in “India today, where the dominant mood in progressive circles is hardly one of ‘reckless optimism’, what one is left with is ‘reckless despair’. To find hope in the midst of this despair is difficult.” Here lies the weightiness of humour. Humour can inspire hope, as hope is a powerful thing. It inspires us to do the impossible and helps us carry on during difficult times.
Three days after the Emergency, there was this obituary published among the classified advertisements inThe Times of India , on June 28, 1975. It read: “O’Cracy, D.E.M., beloved husband of T. Ruth, loving father of L.I. Bertie, brother of Faith, Hope and Justicia, expired on June 26.” Journalist Ashok Mahadevan, then 26, punched the authoritarian regime with an obituary of 22 words that mourned the sad demise of democracy, along with its allied ideals of truth, liberty, faith, hope and justice. The death of democracy was duly dated in 1975.
In our times, constitutional democracy is inching towards a persistent vegetative state, a death without a date of demise, an obituary, mourning, and a funeral. ‘Operation Lotus’, a machination to torpedo elected governments in States, has become a quotidian affair and elections and democratic civility, in danger of becoming a black comedy. The citizenry cannot laugh at the Gallows speech of constitutional democracy; nor can it be a silent spectator.
Mahatma Gandhi said, “If I had no sense of humour, I would long ago have committed suicide.” He exposed the vanity and the pomp of the British Empire at the cost of India’s destitution by explaining why he had so little clothes on. In this example attributed to an event around the Round Table Conference in London, he said: ‘The king had enough [clothes] on for both of us”.
The ingredients needed
Anarchism and democracy are the anti-theses and antidotes for totalitarianism. Anarchism conceives the state to be unnecessary and any form of government undesirable. It presumes that man is basically a rational, honest and just animal. Therefore, if society is organised properly, then there will be no room for any kind of coercion. It is a utopian ideology indeed but it has some practical relevance.
An anarchic vision of society is non-violent, self-managed and non-hierarchical. Anarchist thinkers hold dear to the ideal of democracy — rule by the people. “The State represents violence in a concentrated and organized form. The individual has a soul, but as the State is a soulless machine, it can never be weaned from violence to which it owes its very existence,” said Mahatma Gandhi, who was a blissful anarchist. Democracy would be perfected by imbibing some idyllic dreams from anarchism.
Anarchism and democracy espouse humour; whereas totalitarianism demands the silence of the grave. Works like The Good Soldier Švejk, by the Czech anarchist author, Jaroslav Hašek, which is a hilarious satire of military life, ridicules war and the state. So is Ivan the Fool by Leo Tolstoy who was a Christian anarchist, a pacifist who renounced the state as violent and deceitful. Charlie Chaplin’s film,The Great Dictator , and Sacha Baron Cohen’s film,The Dictator (2012), are black comedy films that underscore that humour can mercilessly humiliate totalitarian and authoritarian despots and debunk their larger-than-life image.
The virus of totalitarianism which is highly fatal has almost infected India. The immune system of the Republic, the constitutional ideals and structure, has to fight off the virus. The antiviral medicines, a few souring pills of Gandhian anarchism at a minimal dose, and the sweet syrup of humour and democracy at maximum dose, would be an advisable course of medication.
Faisal C.K. is an independent researcher interested in constitutional law and political philosophy
The formation of a new government in Maharashtra on Thursday, led by Eknath Shinde, followed a nail-biting and unique script. The BJP conceded the CM’s post to Mr. Shinde who led a revolt in the Shiv Sena to unseat Uddhav Thackeray. Former CM Devendra Fadnavis has settled for the post of Deputy CM. The political churn in Maharashtra is unlikely to settle with this, however. When the Shiv Sena, the Congress and the NCP formed an unlikely alliance, the MVA, to form the government in 2019, it was seen as a new possibility of politics by some and crass opportunism by many. As it turned out, Mr. Thackeray, son of Sena founder Bal Thackeray, could not manage the turmoil that his daring to experiment triggered within the party. Initially, it had appeared that the provincialism represented by the Sena might act as a counter to the totalising politics of Hindutva. The MVA’s unravelling shows that the BJP’s ideology, backed with instruments of state power, and the capacity to mobilise resources, could railroad regional politics when the situation is favourable. This is one sabotage of a government that has a credible ideological defence — Mr. Shinde, and his BJP backers have argued that the Sena-BJP alliance had fought together in 2019, with Hindutva as their bonding ideology. That Mr. Shinde unseated Mr. Thackeray to uphold the people’s will and fidelity to the ideology is a strong argument. For all his mild demeanour and inclusive image, Mr. Thackeray could not command sufficient chutzpah to remake the Sena. The assumption that the Sena could be re-engineered into a benign political outfit seems to have been misplaced. And he failed to notice the resentment that was bubbling up right under his nose.
The Maharashtra episode proves yet again the BJP’s capacity to play the long game. Soon after the patriarch Thackeray’s passing in 2012, the BJP’s plans to gain an upper hand in its relations with the Sena began to roll out; by 2014 the party was ahead of the Sena. By winning a consecutive election in 2019, in alliance with the Sena, it reinforced its position. All this should have tempered the ambitions of the Thackerays — which by then included a third-generation scion, Aaditya. When they claimed power by forming the MVA, the BJP harnessed the resentment among Sena MLAs, finally toppling the Thackerays. But the BJP and the Shinde-led Sena faction have been careful not to bruise the sentiments of the Sena cadre that still holds the founder’s family in high esteem. Which faction will win the legal battle to own the party name and symbol and which one will win the hearts of the party workers are two different questions. It is not impossible that the Sena could dissipate and its cadres dissolve into the BJP. The concession of the CM’s post to Mr. Shinde is not an act of political altruism, but cold strategy. Having deflected the potential hurt and anger of the Sainiks for now, the BJP will now wait for the best time for its next move. The next episode of the Maharashtra saga will then play out.
The GST Council met over two days this week — its first ‘regular’ meeting after a nine-month break — with much on its plate, stemming from four ministerial groups’ recommendations to fix various aspects of the indirect tax regime that remains a work in progress five years on. It ratified three of the four reports, put off one for further deliberations based on concerns flagged by a State, with a commitment to reassemble and resolve the impasse holistically in little over a month. A new ministerial panel is being tasked with figuring out the long-pending constitution of an appellate tribunal for GST disputes, to move ahead. Based on an ‘interim’ report of a panel to rationalise tax rates, exemptions have been scrapped on several items and rates altered for others to correct inverted duty structures. This may translate into higher prices on many goods and services (and reductions for a few) from July 18, although their impact on inflation is difficult to ascertain. However, a larger restructuring of the GST’s multiple rates’ structure, with an increase in levies to bolster revenues that have fallen short of expectations, partly due to rate cuts earlier effected as electoral tools, has been put off. With inflation expected to remain buoyant, that exercise may have to wait longer.
Apart from the fine print of the Council’s decisions, which include tighter norms on the horizon for registering new firms and closing of tax evasion loopholes, there is a more critical takeaway. That the deliberations were constructive and not combative, especially amid the brewing trust deficit between the Centre and States in the past few meetings and the prolonged pause since it last met, bodes well for the necessary next steps to make GST deliver on its original hopes. Not a single member raised the recent Supreme Court order that some States believed had upheld their rights against ‘arbitrary imposition’ of the Centre’s decisions in the Council. Moreover, over a dozen States brought up an ‘extra agenda item’ — their anxieties about the sunset of assured revenue growth from July 1, on which even Ministers from BJP-ruled States spoke up to seek the continuance of GST Compensation for some years. That States are no longer driven by party whips in this critical forum, should enrich the quality of dialogue and outcomes. That the Centre ‘heard them out’ and left the issue open, unlike the last Council meet when its response was akin to an outright ‘No’, is most refreshing. Taking a clear call, one way or the other, on continuing this support, will be ideal for the Centre and States to plan their fiscal math better. Just as sustaining and nurturing this fledgling federal compact is critical to make the GST work better for all, sooner rather than later.
Despite concerns, the asset quality of the Indian banking system has continued to improve. According to the Reserve Bank of India’s latest financial stability report, gross non-performing loans (GNPAs) of the banking system have declined from 7.4 per cent in March 2021 to a six-year low of 5.9 per cent in March 2022. While public sector banks continue to be more stressed than private banks — for the former, bad loans stood at 7.6 per cent of advances, while for the latter, the figure is lower at 3.7 per cent — the improvement is broadbased. Alongside, banks have also witnessed an improvement in their capital position, with the capital to risk weighted assets ratio rising to 16.7 per cent at the end of March 2022. This is good news. It is also comforting that the central bank’s stress tests indicate that banks are well capitalised and are “capable of absorbing macroeconomic shocks even in the absence of any further capital infusion by stakeholders.”
Data presented in the report shows that banks have seen an improvement in their asset quality across all major sectors. Bad loans have declined even in sectors such as engineering goods, gems and jewellery, and construction — sectors where they have been significantly elevated in the past. And even as fresh slippages into the bad loan category have declined, banks have been increasing their provisioning for bad loans. Further, the restructuring of loans under the resolution framework was at only 1.6 per cent of total advances in December 2021. The RBI report also shows that the share of large borrowers in the banks’ loan portfolio has been declining, falling to less than 48 per cent of banks total advances, indicating a “reduction in concentration and diversification of borrowers”. Bad loans of these large borrowers have also declined to 7.7 per cent of advances at the end of March 2022. As a consequence, their share in bad loans of all banks stood at 62.3 per cent in the second half of 2021-22, much lower than the levels witnessed in September 2020. However, the continuous rise in the SMA-0 and SMA-1 categories (loans where the principal or interest payment is overdue for upto 30 days are characterised as SMA-0, while where they are due between 31 to 60 days are SMA-1) requires close monitoring.
The central bank has also conducted stress tests to gauge the strength of banks’ balance sheets against macroeconomic shocks. Under a baseline scenario, it estimates that banks’ bad loans may fall further to 5.3 per cent by March 2023. If the macroeconomic environment worsens, bad loans may rise to 6.2 per cent in a medium stress scenario, deteriorating to 8.3 per cent in a severe stress scenario. However, even under the severely stressed macroeconomic environment, the RBI doesn’t expect the capital position of any of the banks to fall below the minimum regulatory requirements.
Track and field tragics and those who fell in love with javelin throw since Neeraj Chopra made history at the Tokyo Olympics nearly a year ago have been keenly watching the 24-year-old with floppy hair, a trademark tumble and a golden arm. Instead of sitting on his laurels, Chopra has gone from strength to strength by breaking the national record twice last month with two 89 m plus throws. Thursday night’s 89.94 m in the first round at the prestigious Diamond League in Stockholm had everyone on the edge of their seats in anticipation of him touching 90 m. Chopra has shown his Olympic gold was no flash in the pan. His consistency in an injury-prone sport makes it worth travelling hundreds of miles to watch him live. In his first three competitions this season, Chopra has thrown over 85 m in eight of his 10 legal throws, which is akin to an Indian regularly running sub-10 seconds in the 100 m.
Chopra is a rare athlete with a calm head and no signs of fraying nerves on big occasions. At the Olympic Games, he outclassed the 97 m thrower, Germany’s Johannes Vetter. This year Chopra has the upper hand going to the World Championships in Eugene in three weeks’ time after bettering the defending world champion Anderson Peters of Grenada twice and only narrowly being edged out the third time. Chopra allayed fears of those who thought he would struggle to get back in shape after two months of felicitations around the country after the gold in Tokyo.
If Chopra also becomes a world champion, it will mark the first time any male has held both titles simultaneously since Norway’s Andreas Thorkildsen way back in 2009. Thorkildsen followed in the footsteps of the legendary Czech Jan Železný, a three time Olympic champion. The good news is Chopra is primed for a 90 m throw and another podium finish.
Nero was famously accused of fiddling while Rome burned. Today, some leaders are doing worse. They are throwing fuel on the fire. Literally. As the fallout of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine ripples across the globe, the response of some nations to the growing energy crisis has been to double down on fossil fuels, pouring billions more dollars into the coal, oil and gas that are deepening the climate emergency.
Meanwhile, all climate indicators continue to break records, forecasting a future of ferocious storms, floods, droughts, wildfires and unlivable temperatures in vast swathes of the planet. Fossil fuels are not the answer, nor will they ever be. We can see the damage we are doing to the planet and our societies.
Fossil fuels are the cause of the climate crisis. Renewable energy can limit climate disruption and boost energy security. Renewables are the peace plan of the 21st century. But the battle for a rapid and just energy transition is not being fought on a level field. Investors are still backing fossil fuels, and governments still hand out billions in subsidies for coal, oil and gas — about $11 million every minute.
There is a word for favouring short-term relief over long-term well-being — addiction. We are addicted to fossil fuels. For the health of our societies and planet, we need to quit. The only true path to energy security, stable power prices, prosperity and a livable planet lies in abandoning polluting fossil fuels and accelerating the renewables-based energy transition.
To that end, I have called on G20 governments to dismantle coal infrastructure, with a full phase-out by 2030 for OECD countries and 2040 for all others. I have urged financial actors to abandon fossil fuel finance and invest in renewable energy. And I have proposed a five-point plan to boost renewable energy around the world.
First, we must make renewable energy technology a global public good, including removing intellectual property barriers to technology transfer. Second, we must improve global access to supply chains for renewable energy technologies, components and raw materials. In 2020, the world installed five gigawatts of battery storage. We need 600 gigawatts of storage capacity by 2030. Clearly, we need a global coalition to get there. Shipping bottlenecks and supply-chain constraints, as well as higher costs for lithium and other battery metals, are hurting the deployment of such technologies and materials.
Third, we must cut the red tape that holds up solar and wind projects. We need fast-track approvals and more effort to modernise electricity grids. Fourth, the world must shift energy subsidies from fossil fuels to protect vulnerable people from energy shocks and invest in a just transition to a sustainable future. And fifth, we need to triple investments in renewables. This includes multilateral development banks and development finance institutions, as well as commercial banks.
We need more urgency from all global leaders. We are already perilously close to hitting the 1.5°C limit that science tells us is the maximum level of warming to avoid the worst climate impacts. We must reduce emissions by 45 per cent by 2030 and reach net-zero emissions by mid-century. But current national commitments will lead to an increase of almost 14 per cent this decade. That spells catastrophe.
The answer lies in renewables — for climate action, energy security, and providing clean electricity to the hundreds of millions of people who currently lack it.
There is no excuse for anyone to reject a renewables revolution. While oil and gas prices have reached record price levels, renewables are getting cheaper all the time. The cost of solar energy and batteries has plummeted 85 per cent over the past decade. The cost of wind power fell by 55 per cent. And investment in renewables creates three times more jobs than fossil fuels.
Of course, renewables are not the only answer to the climate crisis. Nature-based solutions, such as reversing deforestation and land degradation, are essential. So too are efforts to promote energy efficiency. But a rapid renewable energy transition must be our ambition.
As we wean ourselves off fossil fuels, the benefits will be vast, and not just to the climate. Energy prices will be lower and more predictable, with positive knock-on effects for food and economic security. When energy prices rise, so do the costs of food and all the goods we rely on. So, let us all agree that a rapid renewables revolution is necessary and stop fiddling while our future burns.
The writer is Secretary-General of the United Nations
<Several articles published of late have been uncharacteristically harsh about the RBI’s inflation management. Writing an epitaph for such articles reminds me of a recent interaction with RBI Deputy Governor Michael Patra at an event in Delhi. When the DG was specifically asked about how much interest rates will rise, he recalled the tale of Albert Einstein landing in heaven. When Einstein was introduced to people across the strata with very high and very low IQs, he said that he will discuss interest rates only with persons with the lowest IQs!
Recently Arvind Subramanian and Josh Felman have asserted that the RBI has been missing the inflation target since 2019 by not raising rates (‘The RBI’s misdiagnosis’, IE, June 15). Interestingly, Subramanian, while he was the Chief Economic Adviser, had taken the opposite position by arguing for rate cuts from the RBI. In the Economic Survey, he strongly argued for more fiscal dominance by stating that the RBI was holding significant excess reserves that could be given to the government.
Inflation has been largely the result of supply side shocks from vegetable prices, caused by crop damages due to unseasonal rains (tomato, onion and potato) in late 2019 and widespread supply-side disruptions after the outbreak of the pandemic. A narrow-minded focus on inflation caused by supply shocks would have constrained the MPC from supporting growth amidst the unprecedented loss of life and livelihood. Therefore, it was necessary to provide a lifeline to the economy at that juncture by focusing on the recovery. The MPC shifted to policy tightening to control inflation when growth impulses became more definitive and entrenched across sectors. Moreover, the wide tolerance band of 200bps +/- in the inflation targeting framework was specifically designed to accommodate such supply shocks, which provided the flexibility in the flexible targeting (FIT) framework (Patra and Bhattacharyya, 2022). In contrast to a pure inflation targeting framework (inflation nutters), the amended mandate of the RBI under FIT reads as “price stability, taking into account the objective of growth”. Therefore, the MPC was justified in looking through the higher inflation print during the pandemic while trying to resurrect growth. And it worked.
Rajeswari Sengupta (‘What MPC says, what RBI does’, IE, June 22) has raised some contradictions between the Governor’s statement (GS) and the MPC resolution.
First, the MPC highlighted inflation concerns and voted to raise the policy repo rate. However, as per Sengupta, the governor’s statement of the same day noted that the RBI will ensure an orderly completion of the government’s borrowing programme. This, according to Sengupta, created confusion as lowering inflation and lowering government bond yields are contradictory objectives. This justification is redundant as an orderly completion of the borrowing programme does not imply lowering yields. It basically ensures that the borrowing programme is completed seamlessly at low costs (ensured through auctions). The bids in auctions are based on the prevailing macroeconomic and financial conditions. The RBI only ensures cost minimisation among the bids, given that it’s the debt manager of the government by statute. Moreover, from a theoretical perspective, this is not inconsistent because controlling inflation and lowering inflation expectations bodes well for the term premia of bond yields — which moderate once expectations are anchored. Therefore, if inflation is reined in, the government stands to gain in terms of lower interest costs.
Second, as per Sengupta, the MPC kept repo rates unchanged while the RBI changed the reverse repo rate during the pandemic, meaning that the fixed width of the corridor was lost and the MPC lost its role in setting interest rates and so, its credibility.
This argument does not stand scrutiny. During the pandemic, the policy repo rate was cumulatively reduced by an unprecedented 115 bps and the interest rate on the overnight fixed-rate reverse repo was reduced cumulatively by 155 bps. These dissimilar adjustments rendered the policy interest rate corridor asymmetric with a downward bias. This measure was not incongruous with contemporary wisdom as an asymmetric corridor has been justified, particularly during crisis times (Goodhart, 2010). It may be noted that under normal circumstances, the reverse repo rate and the marginal standing facility (MSF) rate are mechanistically linked to the policy repo rate by a fixed identical margin. Hence, any changes in the policy rate automatically, symmetrically adjusts the entire corridor (without changing its width).
During the pandemic, the RBI activated other segments of financial markets to keep the lifeblood of finance flowing as muted demand and heightened risk aversion broke down the traditional credit channel of policy transmission. Given that elevated inflation concerns precluded the possibility of any further repo rate cuts (cumulatively reduced by 250 basis points since February 2019), financial conditions were eased substantially by reducing the reverse repo rate, which lowered the floor rate of interest in the economy. Analogous to almost all central banks during the pandemic, the operating target thus aligned with the lower bound of the corridor instead of being in the middle. Since the mandate of the MPC is to control inflation for which the policy instrument is the repo rate, the RBI had used the LAF through changes in the reverse repo rate to alter liquidity conditions. The intent was to reactivate the credit channel by encouraging banks to explore opportunities for extending credit.
We must remember that inflation-targeting countries, because of their sole focus on inflation, experience lower inflation volatility but higher output volatility. Higher output volatility entails a higher sacrifice ratio — the proportion of output foregone for lowering inflation. For an emerging economy, the costs of higher output foregone against the benefits of lower inflation must always be balanced as potential output keeps on changing given the shift of the production function. Developed countries, on the other hand, operate near full employment — therefore, sacrifice ratios are lower. As a result, smoothening inflation volatility is relatively costless for them.
The RBI has innovated admirably under its current stewards during the pandemic, keeping in mind the task of reinvigorating the economy. Despite the existing targeting framework, it did not get fixated on a one-point agenda, daring to look beyond the inflation print. Had the RBI followed the advice of its critics by sticking to textbooks, perhaps the Indian economy would have been in a quagmire today.
The writer is Group Chief Economic Advisor, State Bank of India. Views are personal
My grandfather, Balram Jakhar, was amongst the pioneers of citrus plantation in North India in the mid-1950s. In 1972, when he first became a member of Punjab’s legislative assembly, he had promised to transform the bleak near-arid, barren sand dunes into California. As his days came to a close, he loved to talk of the promise and similarities of the much-diversified farming in the area, when asked about it. We farm in village Maujgarh, in the Khuian Sarwar block of Fazilka district in Punjab.
In the block, of the 1,50,000 acres of land, about 37,000 acres are under perennial kinnow citrus plantations, while another 5,000 acres are cultivated for other fruits and vegetables. Approximately 1,00,000 acres of wheat is grown in the rabi season and 75,000 acres of cotton and 28,000 acres of paddy in the kharif season, probably making it amongst the most diversified agricultural landscapes in Punjab. Yet, this region is crying for another transformative vision, confronted as it is by the spectre of climate change. The lessons from this one speck of India, where my son and I farm, surrounded on three sides by Rajasthan, Haryana and Pakistan, are massive and frightening to those who care to know.
Come extreme winter, the flaky ice coating on the top of plants provides a lovely sight for city folks. It spells doom for farmers because that pretty coat of ice is frost and it literally burns the plants where it forms. By the time the January frost set in this year, 40 per cent of last year’s kinnow crop had been harvested and sold. The remaining fruit suffered from a frost attack, more vicious than ever before. About 20 per cent of the fruit was destroyed in a week and of whatever did survive, the damaged fruit needed to be harvested immediately, for it too started to deteriorate fast.
In mid-January, farmers would normally have had another two months of the harvesting window till mid-March. But the frost shortened the harvesting season to one month. Further, the quality of the fruit had deteriorated to the point where its shelf-life was reduced to a few days. This double whammy meant that the kinnow could not be transported to the traditional far-off markets of south India. Thus, geographically, the market for the kinnow was reduced to Uttar Pradesh. As a result, there was a glut of the fruit in the market. Consequently, the farmgate price — which had initially been hovering at a historical high of over Rs 23 per kg — fell by over half, amounting to a loss of over Rs 300 crore to the farmers of just one administrative block in India.
Having come out of a particularly harsh winter with the long spell of January frost devastating hopes and the citrus crop, the first week of March brought hope for a new beginning in the spring. The tens of thousands of citrus orchards provided a magical sight — trees with millions of sweet-smelling white flowers and ripening wheat fields turning a golden hue, ready for harvest in April. But, within a fortnight, in the third week of March, an unexpected blistering heat wave set off uncertainty, gnawing at every farmer’s mind. It was not unusually hot but it was particularly hot for March. The farmer’s world was coming undone — wheat kernels would not fully ripen and the citrus flowers would not mature into fruit. Sure enough, the wheat yield plummeted over 20 per cent and the loss to farmers growing wheat was about Rs 100 crore. All the crops got impacted, and half the citrus crop was lost. Even by the most conservative kinnow price of 13 /Kg, approximately Rs 300 crore worth of kinnow crop was again destroyed. The resilience of the farmers has reached a breaking point.
My father, who has been living on the farm for 80 years, does not recollect suffering two extreme events within 60 days. Agriculturally, the 49 villages of the block are amongst the least prone to risk as they receive an assured supply of canal water for irrigation. In living memory, the area has never been wrecked by natural calamities like floods, cyclones, drought or earthquakes. But, with a slight variation in temperatures, it suffered an estimated loss of about Rs 700 crore. Everyone lost out in the process — including the farm workers, small shopkeepers, tailors, etc — not just the farmers. The economy was devastated. Children’s weddings are being postponed at one end and medical operations for the elderly at the other. Let that sink in for a moment.
Climate change is not a distant nightmare that will unfold when the earth crosses a statistical threshold of no return of 1.5°celsius. We are living in an era of a fast-changing climate, but just do not grasp it fully enough to be scared. Generations of knowledge were not enough to prepare us for the climate crisis in the village. Indeed, much of what we have been taught over the last few generations will need to be unlearnt. This year has been a rude awakening. New knowledge to confront the billions of excruciating interdependencies of climate change challenges needs to be collated and tested in the fields.
Martin Wolf recently wrote: “… given the immense political and organisational challenges, the chances that humanity will prevent damaging climate change are slim.” For all practical purposes, I am convinced that irrespective of what we do in India — which is precious little anyway — the process of climate change is irreversible. The terrifying aspect is that in India, not only are we unconcerned about preparing for the inevitable (2-degree Celsius rise in 50 years), we have absolutely no clue about how events will unfold and impact us. There seems to be no substantive policy for preparation as the country enters a dark zone of political bankruptcy, bureaucratic stagnation, public ignorance and corporate trickery of garnering climate change incentives. We don’t choose the times we live in, the only choice we have is how we respond to the circumstances. And we are failing miserably at it. Our worst nightmare is yet to appear in our dreams.
The writer is chairman, Bharat Krishak Samaj
<Disrespect is an unfortunate human trait and particularly when it is expressed towards the gods and faiths of fellow human beings. Recent months have seen a tumultuous rise in this phenomenon. Nupur Sharma’s offensive response to Tasleem Rehmani’s hurtful words about Lord Shiva on an Indian TV news channel was directed at the most revered Prophet of Islam. It was a competitive verbal diatribe: I am hurt, so I will hurt. It led to protests, violence and cases being registered across the spectrum.
Ancient Indian traditions of vada encourage mutual respect as an essential element of debate, while allowing for gentle and polite questioning: If we don’t question, how do we grow or resolve or reform? This spirit of respectful probing also extended to the religions and gods of all people within Indic cultures. It is proving difficult in the debating square today. Why?
Nobel-prize-winning mathematician John Nash’s game theory comes to mind. Remember the movie A Beautiful Mind, starring Russell Crowe? It was based on Nash’s extraordinary life. Nash essentially laid out how rational decisions are made in strategic interactions. The key insight: People calculate the cost-benefit accruals of their decisions, but not in isolation. They also keep in mind the cost-benefit returns to others playing with them.
India is currently facing this knotty issue of competitive insults to religions. Or gods. Or prophets. Game theory will hold that if the gods/prophets/scriptures of one religion are treated with respect and those of another are treated with noxious disrespect, it will create a state of disequilibrium. Equilibrium — the Nash Equilibrium in game theory — will be re-established either if the gods/ prophets/scriptures of all religions are treated with equal respect, or if they are treated with equal disrespect.
This is not the prevalent situation in India. Indeed, it is not so in much of the free world. In the West, one can see the untrammelled disrespect of the radical woke Marxists (who sometimes self-identify as “left-liberals”) for Christianity. It offends me, and I’m not Christian. At the same time, these radical woke Marxists treat with extreme respect religions that they either favour or fear — “wokeism” and Islam. In India, the situation is similar: Radical woke Marxists routinely criticise Hinduism. Recently, lewd remarks were made on the sacred Shivling by journalists (from leftist and Twitter-based “fact-checking” websites) and politicians (mainly from West Bengal and Maharashtra). Such noxious comments have pained and offended innumerable Hindus. At the same time, these same people called for the head of Sharma for her noxious words on the Prophet of Islam.
The common theme is that the religion of the majority in the land — Christianity in the West and Hinduism in India — is attacked. It is easier to gain traction when hitting out against the “dominant” majority group from an appropriated position of self-victimisation. But this rule does not apply in Islamic majority nations/states (think Pakistan or Turkey) or woke majority nations/states (think California).
Going forward, this situation can move in two directions: Either the radical woke Marxists and radical Islamists treat all religions with equal disrespect/respect or believing Hindus in India and believing Christians in the West (and even developing countries like Nigeria) eventually begin using the same tactics against those who insult their revered figures, such as police cases in India under Section 153A. The world will then be staring at a spiralling cancel culture, destruction of careers, police complaints, court cases, and sometimes even violence. On all sides of the debate. Not just one side. Shockingly, the tragic blasphemy killings of Kamlesh Tiwari in Lucknow (2019) and Kishan Bharwad in Ahmedabad (2022) are freely used as examples by radical Islamists to spread fear, even as their radical woke Marxist Indian allies airbrush these from mainstream media. You, dear reader, may not even be aware of these two killings. And now we have Kanhaiya Lal in Udaipur.
The Nash equilibrium will be achieved in one of these two directions. However, as a follower of Dharmic traditions, I am unhappy with both these equilibriums. Respectfully questioning human pursuits, including religions, must be enabled, indeed nurtured. But in doing the latter, why insult the gods, prophets or rishis? Why not practice civility and politeness?
There are some among all religious groups, including Muslims and woke Marxists, who present an alternative model. They protest if their religious/revered figures or scriptures/doctrines are disrespected. But their demand for respect is not a one-way street. Even India’s Permanent Representative to the United Nations, T S Tirumurti, has been making a case for treating phobias against all religions equally.
This model can bring peace and is certainly preferable to senseless and diabolical violence (and even situations akin to civil war). But even this alternative model is not ideal. For peace may prevail but modernity and a scientific temper would be difficult to build. The latter begs a rational, inquiring spirit.
All religions can be treated with respect and also questioned and reformed with gentle nudges, as propounded by Richard Thaler. Casteism in modern Hinduism can be quizzed using the sterling words of the Bhagavad Gita; misogyny in modern Islam can be questioned using the inspiring example of Lady Khadija, and child abuse in the Church can be interrogated using the true message of Jesus Christ. This is not impossible to achieve. Let us confidently push back against radical woke Marxism and radical Islam.
Let us take conscious charge of the movement towards a healthy equilibrium. Something our dharmic ancestors taught us.
Roy is a writer and has most recently co-authored ‘Dharma’ with Amish
As the BJP’s top leadership gathers in Hyderabad for its national executive, it will have one more trophy to display on its wall: The state of Maharashtra. Even though former Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis played a key role in hunting down over two-thirds of Sena cubs from the Thackeray den, he may not be striking happy poses in the aftermath. For, he has been deprived yet again, this time of the coveted prize of chief ministership. In a day of dramatic developments, the real surprise was not the BJP’s choice of chief ministerial candidate, Shiv Sena defector Eknath Shinde, but the public snub to Fadnavis, the BJP’s tallest leader in Maharashtra. The clearly avoidable rebuff under full media glare has the BJP’s, to use their new catchphrase, eco-system, rattled, while leaving the overall political establishment baffled.
Before we dig deeper in the present political minefield, revisiting the state’s recent electoral history will help us understand the ongoing high-stakes battle.
It was in 2019 that the BJP’s central leadership first appeared cold to Fadnavis’s efforts to placate the Shiv Sena, with whom it had an alliance, after the BJP fell short of a majority to form the government on its own. In the 288-member House, the BJP under Fadnavis’s leadership had bagged 105 seats while the Sena had 56. The combine easily crossed the half-way mark of 144. However, the Sena’s claim on chief ministership became a contentious issue, which eventually scuttled the saffron alliance’s chance to retain power. The Sena, interestingly, at no point looked unmanageable. A call or two from PM Narendra Modi or Amit Shah would have been enough to placate Uddhav Thackeray. But it never came, even as the BJP leadership was seen taking every possible step to retain Haryana that went to polls along with Maharashtra.
The BJP’s reluctance was striking vis-a-vis its efforts to grab Haryana that sends just a dozen MPs to Parliament, while ignoring Maharashtra that has four times the number of parliamentary seats of Haryana. It was inexplicable that the BJP’s central leadership was seen engaging much smaller parties, even trying to win over new allies in the northern state and at the same paying no heed to its 30-year partner in Maharashtra and at the Centre. That was the first visible sign that all was not well between Fadnavis and the BJP’s top duo. But why would the BJP risk losing Maharashtra?
The answer to this question is directly linked to this week’s developments. Besides, it also underlines how the central leaderships of national parties, be it the Congress or BJP, view leaders from Maharashtra.
First, about the Sena-BJP tussle. The BJP’s strained relationship with the Sena after the former developed its home-grown Hindu Hriday Samrat is no secret. Till Narendra Modi arrived on the scene, Shiv Sena founder Bal Thackeray was seen to be the Hindu heart-throb. His cordial relations with the BJP’s Atal Bihari Vajpayee and Lal Krishna Advani helped both parties stay together for well over three decades. However, after the rise of Modi-Shah, the BJP became more and more unwilling to accommodate any other partner in its Hindutva space. This resulted in friction between the two saffron siblings. Such was the BJP’s zeal to eliminate anyone sharing its Hindutva plank that it had no inhibition in showing willingness even to forge a truce with the NCP to deprive the Sena. With this in mind, the BJP’s central leaders wanted Fadnavis to go solo in the 2019 assembly elections.
In turn, it was Fadnavis’s mistake not to take the cue from the Centre while insisting on a pre-poll alliance with the Shiv Sena. The Uddhav Thackeray-led outfit was a bigger critic for the Fadnavis government than the Opposition. The Sena’s politics of having the cake and eating it too had the BJP leadership enraged. Still, due to Fadnavis’s insistence and the RSS’s wish to avoid a division of Hindu votes, both parties went to polls together only to become each other’s foe in the post-poll scenario. The Sena, citing the 50-50 power-sharing agreement with the BJP, staked its claim on chief ministership, which the latter was unwilling to part with. Thus came into being the three-party alliance in November 2019 wherein the Shiv Sena, Nationalist Congress Party and Congress came together to keep the BJP away. Since then the unforgiving BJP was waiting to settle scores with its former partner and punish the Thackerays.
It did exactly that by installing Eknath Shinde, a veteran from the Thackeray court, in the chief minister’s chair. And while doing so it snubbed its own man, Fadnavis, for his decision to go with the Sena in the 2019 elections. In the process, it also sent a message down the line not to take any position for granted. For the last two-and-half years, Fadnavis had become the face of the state BJP and was on a mission to dislodge the three-party alliance government. He and everyone around him assumed Fadnavis would be chief minister once the Uddhav Thackeray-led government was toppled. It was, however, not to be.
Politically, too, it suits the BJP to have Shinde, a Maratha, as the face of its alliance government instead of Fadnavis, a Brahmin. Fadnavis’s government had to face Maratha wrath and it was believed that the Sharad Pawar-led NCP was instigating the politically dominant community. Shinde’s rise, the BJP thinks, will neutralise the NCP. Besides, it will be much easier for the BJP to beat the Shiv Sena with one of their own. This is the easily visible political optics.
But there’s much more than meets the eye. Capable and promising Marathi leaders, be it in the Congress or in the BJP, have always had their wings clipped the moment they tried to become “national”. In the Seventies it was Yashwantrao Chavan who was not only sidelined but humiliated by Indira Gandhi. Later it was Sharad Pawar with whom the Congress’s first family had uncomfortable ties which eventually forced him to quit the party. And now Fadnavis faces the same fate. If the political grapevine is to be trusted, Fadnavis is paying the price for some of his overzealous supporters’ mistake of coining a slogan ahead of the 2019 elections: “Devendra after Narendra”.
For the Marathi manoos, Delhi continues to be door (faraway), as Fadnavis would have realised by now.
The writer is editor, Loksatta
The Shiv Sena rebellion has put the anti-defection law back in focus. The Constitution’s Tenth Schedule, inserted in 1985 and amended in 2003, hasn’t really killed the market for legislature members. It’s just made the reserve price higher. Some argue the law must be made even tougher. Others say the law kills intra-party debate. Some MPs, in fact, bemoan the inability to have principled dissent from the party line because of the disqualification threat. They cite problematic disqualification criteria like voting against a party whip. What should be done? Keep the law but clear the muddle.
First, the law’s provisions give no time frame for taking decisions and are generally badly drafted. Second, speakers and governors aren’t neutral umpires. Third, courts have also muddied waters with differing interpretations. In Maharashtra, 16 random Sena rebel MLAs received disqualification notices though the Shinde faction had crossed the two-third threshold to evade disqualification. This reveals weaknesses in the anti-defection law. It was a clear attempt to break a “legitimate” rebellion by reducing the rebel contingent’s numbers. Sometimes punishment is quick, as in 2019, when the Karnataka speaker disqualified 17 Congress-JD(S) MLAs despite their resigning house membership. He also overreached by barring them for the assembly’s tenure, which the Constitution doesn’t prescribe. At other times, proceedings have been inexplicably slow, for example, against AIADMK rebels in Tamil Nadu and Congress defectors in Manipur and Madhya Pradesh.
Then there are confusions created by the likes of the 2016 SC judgment that restored a Congress government in Arunachal Pradesh, though rebels who had crossed over to People’s Party of Arunachal under Kalikho Pul met the two-third threshold. Sometimes verdicts are delayed, defanging the law. Tenth Schedule raised the bar on defections. But Parliament, presiding officers and courts must create a more elegant version of it.
As reproductive rights were set back by half a century in the US, there have been understandable references to India’s liberal abortion laws. The Medical Termination of Pregnancy Act in the 1970s passed without politics and was amended for the better in 2021. But it’s the practice and add-ons to the law that are the problem.
A UN Population Fund report estimates that around eight women in India die every day because of unsafe abortions, and between 2007-11, 67% of abortions were classified as unsafe. It is among the top three causes of maternal death. Unsafe abortions are far higher among poor and marginalised populations. As for the law, the original MTP Act did not require a board of medical practitioners. They evolved out of judicial interventions – even though the Supreme Court has noted that it deprives women of reproductive freedom, which is a dimension of the right to personal liberty.
This medical board is infeasible in rural areas, given the lack of gynaecologists or radiologists and indeed, most healthcare professionals. A recent study found an 84.2% shortfall of OB-gyns in rural north India, and a 57.2% shortfall in south India. All of this becomes more of a systemic hurdle given the still-present stigma around reproductive issues, deterring women from seeking safe abortions. India’s good law needs to lose some paraphernalia and needs to be backed up by health infrastructure and commitment.
Last Tuesday, the US Supreme Court ruled in a case allowing vouchers to be used to pay for religious-based private schools that had been restricted by the state of Maine. The 6-3 verdict essentially ruled in favour of allowing schools run by religious denominations to participate in publicly funded education programmes. Dissenting justices argued that the ruling dismantles the wall of separation between ‘church and state’, a cornerstone of the US Constitution, something that also takes on greater importance as religious diversity in the US rises.
The assenting bench argued that the ruling does not require states to support religious education but bars preventing religious schools to participate in taxpayer-funded programmes. The case arose from a challenge to the state rule that it will provide tuition assistance for parents to send their children to private schools if there is no secondary school in their school district — with the condition that the private school must be non-denominational. The three dissenting judges disagreed, arguing that it paves the way for taxpayer money flowing into religious schools.
They added that religious schools are free to impart education in line with the world view of their faith, and that the practice of their faith is protected by the US Constitution. But allowing public money to fund religious education could very well undermine this freedom.
The danger of the ‘Carson v Markin’ ruling is that, as one of the dissenting judges Sonia Sotomayor warned, it opens the door for greater entanglement of the state in matters of religion. Breaching the wall separating state and religion jeopardises the functioning of open, diverse and democratic societies. And might we add, all democratic societies.
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India Inc is preparing for a surge in festival consumption on pent-up demand after subdued sales in two years of Covid-related restrictions. Car dispatches are zooming as chip shortages ease with wait periods for popular models stretching well over a year. Mumbai, the country’s most expensive housing market, is setting new records for the number of property registrations. An airplane ticket from Delhi to Mumbai costs half as much again as it did at the beginning of the year. Hotels are full up on revenge tourism. The Big Indian Spender is back in action, shrugging off the odd twinge of discomfort over mounting food and fuel prices, rising credit costs and supply disruptions. This should be heartening news to policymakers trying to nurse a fragile economic recovery.
The resilience of big-ticket consumption in an adverse macroeconomic environment is captured by high-frequency indicators that signal capacity utilisation is improving, peak electricity generation is at a new high, freight haulage is rising, and goods and services tax (GST) revenue is robust. The pandemic has accelerated formalisation of the Indian economy and income redistributed by the health crisis is feeding suppressed demand. A further redistribution is in play as an energy shock moves wealth further away from wage-earners towards profit-earners.
This calls for a bigger role for GoI in ensuring equitable development. But pockets of high growth need a free run to sustain the chugging economic momentum. Consumption at the top of the pyramid is as important as at the bottom. That it is surging of its own accord should not be taken as a default condition. The wealth redistribution that feeds this demand was assisted by accommodative monetary and fiscal policy, and as the policy cycle turns, there could be effects on spending habits in the top decile of the population. More spending must be coaxed out of this segment even as languishing demand at the lower end is aided through income transfers. The Big Indian Spender should be cajoled to go ahead and splurge.
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Fifty years ago — plus or minus a few minutes — India and Pakistan formally ended the 1971 war. While the document shows the date as July 2, 1972, Indira Gandhi and Zulfikar Bhutto did not sign it until shortly after midnight: 12:40 am on July 3, 1972. In exchange for a Pakistani commitment to a peaceful, bilateral resolution of their disputes, India agreed to withdraw Indian forces to its side of the international border. The ceasefire line in Kashmir became the Line of Control (LoC).
Gandhi and Bhutto, with only their closest advisers in the room, reached a last-minute accord following days of negotiations, after the rank and file of both negotiating teams had concluded the summit at Simla (which is now called Shimla) would end in failure.
In the intervening 50 years, the Simla accord has taken a fair share of criticism. There was and remains a sense that India — or more precisely Gandhi and her advisers — had squandered a great victory by the military. KN Bakshi, a young diplomat present at Simla, was tasked with producing a typed copy of the agreement for final signature. When he finally saw the text that Prime Minister (PM) Gandhi and her principal secretary, PN Haksar, had accepted, he said, “I read it and cried.” Bakshi felt India demanded too little and conceded too much. “We had all the cards,” he said later. “We had the POWs [prisoners of war]; we had the Pakistani territory; Pakistan was broken up; world public opinion was very much with us. We had defied the Americans; the Soviet Union was supportive. Even then, we could not achieve much.”
Despite Bakshi’s account, the evidence that a better deal was possible is thinner than critics might lead us to believe. The negotiations, by all accounts, were about to break down when PM Bhutto proposed a final, private conversation with his Indian counterpart, which, in turn, resulted in the surprise deal.
It is true that India held territory, but much of that territory was a barren desert. It is also the case that India held more than 90,000 Pakistani POWs. Yet, in criticism of Simla, there is a certain collapsing of time that occurs that seems to imply Gandhi also returned the prisoners on July 2. That was not the case. The prisoners would remain in Indian custody — technically joint Indian-Bangladeshi custody — for another 14 months. Similarly, while India and Pakistan agreed to resume trade, communications, and diplomatic relations, all of those details were left to subsequent talks. India could and did use its considerable remaining leverage in the years ahead.
Many critics seem most angry that Gandhi did not use her leverage to force Bhutto to turn the ceasefire line into a border. Certainly, some in Gandhi’s team believed a written agreement to that effect was a prerequisite for an agreement. What Gandhi secured instead was a commitment by Pakistan to pursue peaceful, bilateral negotiations. If both parties had kept that commitment, then the Kashmir divide would have become a de facto border. Additionally, several sources — contemporaneous and subsequent — indicate that Bhutto made a secret commitment to convert the LoC to a permanent border within three to five years. He did not meet that commitment. Within five years and two months of signing Simla, Bhutto was under military arrest. Less than seven years after Simla, Bhutto was hanged by General Zia-ul-Haq’s government.
Gandhi was restrained in Simla based on Bhutto’s pleas — as well as discreet backchannel messages from Bhutto’s large negotiating party — that he would be ousted from office if he made serious concessions on Kashmir. Gandhi’s close adviser, Haksar, felt the lesson of the Versailles Treaty was that national humiliation could lead to fascistic revanchism. Subsequent critics see this as naivety. They argue that Bhutto was “a great actor” who “fooled” Gandhi. His pleas to the Indian negotiation team not to ask for more concessions lest they destabilise his young government were merely well-delivered lines. Bhutto certainly had no problem lying, but his end in a hangman’s noose more than suggests his stated concerns about his precarious position were not entirely instrumental. A senior Indian diplomat posted in Islamabad during this period told me that Bhutto had been “removed without question because the Army felt he was too soft on India”.
In the years after 1972, Bhutto justified his occasional rhetorical excesses after Simla, this diplomat recounted, as merely the necessary zigging and zagging required to fulfil his secret obligations. Who knows? Perhaps not even the opportunistic Bhutto may have known whether he ever intended to settle the Kashmir dispute along its present lines permanently.
Could India have pushed harder? Here it is worthwhile to consider what failure might have meant. It would have meant ignoring the advice of the Soviet Union, which had just helped ensure India sufficient time to prosecute the war without extra-regional interference. Soviet diplomats worried renewed confrontation would invite United States (US) or Chinese adventurism. Moscow, off-balance from the Sino-Soviet split and US-China rapprochement, was working to give détente with the Richard Nixon administration a chance. It is hard to imagine the Soviets would have welcomed a failed summit.
Upon reflection, too, the POWs may have been less of a bargaining chip than they appear in popular memory. Even for a populous country such as India, caring for 90,000 prisoners is hardly an easy task. Further still, Bhutto would show in the many months of post-Simla negotiations that he was obsessed with avoiding political disadvantage at home. If that led to a prolonged stay for Pakistani prisoners, that was a cost he seemed willing to bear.
After he discovered a minor coup plot in 1973, Bhutto stressed to Indian negotiators that summer that he would not accept war crimes trials against 195 prisoners in exchange for receiving the remaining 90,000-plus. “So far as prisoners of war are concerned you can throw the whole lot in the Ganges, but I cannot agree to the trials,” he told the Indians privately.
What India got in Simla in 1972 was an imperfect peace. Bhutto soon found space to recognise Bangladesh, renormalise relations with India, and resume trade. All along the way, he was fiercely focused on ensuring those concessions did not jeopardise his hold on power. He removed dozens of generals, drafted a new constitution, and ruled Pakistan ruthlessly. His fear of political enemies contributed to his overreach and eventual downfall. Yet the Simla understanding largely held in Kashmir. Bhutto’s departure in 1977 and India’s seizure of the Siachen Glacier in 1984 — surely a violation of Simla’s spirit, Pakistanis allege with some merit — did not cause widespread violence along the LoC. That would only come later, after deeply flawed elections in Kashmir in 1987.
Fifteen years of imperfect peace is hardly a transformative victory, yet it is not trivial either. Simla may have been an imperfect peace, but the record suggests that an imperfect peace may have been the best deal possible, given the fractious nature of Pakistani politics. In the intervening decades, nuclear weapons in India and Pakistan likely have made any future decisive victory unobtainable. Fifty years after Simla, India may still need leaders willing to accept imperfect peace.
Christopher Clary is an assistant professor of political science at the University at Albany and a non-resident fellow of the Stimson Center in Washington, DC. His book, The Difficult Politics of Peace: Rivalry in Modern South Asia was published in June by Oxford University Press
The views expressed are personal
Twenty-five is an interesting age. You can contest a Lok Sabha election, the doors of all bars are open and people no longer think of you as a boy or girl. At 18 or 21, you’re considered young. At 25 you’re an adult. Well, that’s how old this column is today!
What pleases me is sometime during the last quarter century, it’s become part of the architecture of this page. It’s there every week. Hopefully, people like what they read, but the column’s presence is no longer a surprise. However, I trust familiarity has fostered fondness.
Of course, the content keeps changing. First, there’s the juvenile side of me. Part of me is an adult, but another is a child at heart. But alongside a spoilt brat, I can also be pretentiously sage. Sententiousness comes to me as easily as silly jokes and weak puns. I suspect it’s this peculiar combination that’s contributed to the column’s longevity. If you don’t like the Sentiments that appear on one Sunday, there’s a good possibility you’ll like the column the week after.
I’ve often been asked what is “the true story” of Sunday Sentiments. This morning I’ve decided to give you a potted version. It’s an interesting tale.
Sunday Sentiments began as a diary. The first, on July 6, 1997, boastfully recounted a dinner with then Prime Minister Inder Gujral. I couldn’t hide the fact I was delighted to have been invited. Sadly, beyond that point and a few other details, I didn’t have very much else to report. Showing off was my real intention!
Over the years, Sunday Sentiments developed in many directions. First, it’s travelled right across the Hindustan Times. It began on the outer page of one of the weekend supplements. At that stage it was a diary. Then, developing wandering feet, it entered Brunch, but only for a brief sojourn. Perhaps feeling out of place, Sunday Sentiments fled the magazine for the op-ed pages of the main paper. There it’s stayed ever since.
Here, surrounded by the wise, Sunday Sentiments developed its present form. It became a single-issue column, although its length, under pressure of space, kept shrinking. It also acquired a split identity. On occasion it transformed into an eccentric, if not idiosyncratic, column.
This schizophrenia permitted me to speak with two voices: One for serious reflections on major issues of the day, the other to ventilate quirky ideas and even, occasionally, jokes and frivolous thoughts.
This is my 1,300th column. I have written one every single week. There wasn’t a Sunday I missed out.
There was, of course, a Sunday when the column didn’t appear, but that wasn’t my fault. A quarrel with the then editor led to his spiking it. It’s long forgotten and best not recalled, but I mention it to underline my point that I haven’t missed a “Sentiment” for 25 years!
At a conservative estimate, I have written well over a million words. Some of these columns have been published in collections by different publishing houses. Two were produced by Wisdom Tree, a third by HarperCollins.
On quiet afternoons I sometimes browse through them. I’m always surprised how much better I wrote when I first started. Age has made me ponderous although, I hope, and wiser. The lightness of touch that once came easily now has to be worked upon. Occasionally it even feels contrived.
Have you enjoyed these columns? After all, they are written for you. More than anything else, it’s your approbation they seek. So, this Sunday, I want to thank you, my readers, for your loyalty and support. But also, my colleagues at the Hindustan Times, who have stayed with this column for two-and-a-half decades. Those are the real reasons this column has survived.
Let me end by saying the day you turn this page without pausing to read these Sentiments, I’ll know the end has come. I hope I have the wit to realise that before someone else breaks the news!
Karan Thapar is the author of Devil’s Advocate: The Untold Story
The views expressed are personal
For more than a century, Maharashtra has been the battleground for two competing ideological currents. It was the virtual birthplace of modern Hindu nationalism with popular leaders such as Bal Gangadhar Tilak and VD Savarkar building the ideological foundation of Right-wing politics. Further, with the establishment of KB Hedgewar’s Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) in 1925, a disciplined cadre-based organisation emerged to help instil the ideas of militant Hindu nationalism among the masses. But the state is also a fountain of rationalist, progressive, reformist politics, with the powerful legacy of Shivaji Maharaj, Mahatma Jyotiba Phule and BR Ambedkar.
In the post-Independence churn, Right-wing forces found themselves squeezed. The Jana Sangh, seen as a Brahmin-Bania party, had little success. It was only in 1966, with the arrival of the maverick Bal Thackeray that Right-wing ideology found a firm footing in the state. The Sena quickly became popular among unemployed young men and small-time toughs, many of whom acted as strike-breakers during a wave of union shutdowns in the city’s industrial heartland. To many, the Sena was a B-team of the Congress that helped the Maratha-dominated ruling party curb the influence of trade unions.
In the 80s, the Sena reinvented itself — this time as a front for the average Marathi manoos (human), forging a muscular Marathi identity, using the emotive image of Shivaji that helped draw smaller backward groups and Kunbi Marathas, who believed the party represented its regional and cultural ethos. At the same time, towards the middle of the decade, it pivoted to Hindutva (which handed its cadre an emotive pitch for the masses) and started building a grassroots network that helped galvanise its connection with the working classes. In Mumbai, especially, the Sena ran an almost parallel government through its shakhas, mass organisations, social clubs and cultural units — this network helped it keep its citadel safe even after Bal Thackeray’s demise in 2012.
It is against this backdrop that allegations of the Shiv Sena, under Uddhav Thackeray, having deviated from its militant ideology must be evaluated. As evidenced by its journey, the Sena has always shown a nuanced understanding of political ideology and adopted pragmatic and even paradoxical strategies to build a powerful regional organisation, mainly to serve the interests of the poor Marathi working class and the the backward communities in the Maratha fold.
Admiring the Sena’s creative strategies to engage and mobilise poorer sections, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) made overtures to Bal Thackeray in the early 90s. The alliance appeared natural, but as assembly elections since 2014 have shown, it did not benefit the Sena, which remained locked in the Mumbai-Thane-Konkan belt, and some pockets in Aurangabad.
With Uddhav Thackeray’s resignation this week, the political turmoil in Maharashtra has entered a new phase. The BJP has cleverly appointed rebel Sena leader Eknath Shinde as the chief minister (CM) and asked Devendra Fadnavis to serve as his deputy. With this move, the BJP has moved to erase its image as a party opposed to Maratha interests — remember that Fadnavis faced strident protests for Maratha reservation towards the last two years of his tenure, and the Marathas, who comprise about a third of the state and form as high as 40% of the electorate in large swathes of western Maharashtra, were angry that a Brahmin was made the CM by the BJP — and sought to project Shinde, a Maratha, as the Hindutva face in the state.
As the dominant community in the state, Marathas are largely divided into three sections: The affluent, ruling class, the well-off, but largely agrarian, landholding group and the poorer, landless underbelly. The first group has always backed the Nationalist Congress Party (NCP), whose strongholds are in the rural areas. The second and third groups are party-agnostic, but have started to slowly move from the Congress-NCP alliance towards the BJP. With Shinde’s support, the BJP believes that it can turn the tide and bring backward Maratha votes to itself. Add that to its already sizeable base among other backward class (OBC) communities — which helped it sweep the Marathwada and Vidarbha regions in 2014 and 2019 — and the BJP is close to becoming a pan-Maharashtra party in a state where it had only an uneven presence a decade ago.
What about Uddhav Thackeray? He walked out of the National Democratic Alliance in 2019, trying to offer a moderate version of Hindutva politics and reinvent the Sena’s lost legacy of being a pragmatic organisation committed to the majority Marathi public. He spoke almost exclusively in Marathi, and tried to position the Sena as a progressive regional force, centred around the ideas of social justice, good governance and strong leadership. His ideological options are limited — he cannot move to the Right because hardliner Shinde will have him outflanked. His only option appears to be to stick to his moderate Hindutva message, hark back to his father’s legacy, and position himself as a servant of the Marathi manoos. Whether this will work will be seen in September, when Mumbai votes in the municipal polls. For now, the BJP is in the driver’s seat.
Harish Wankhede teaches at Jawaharlal Nehru University
The views expressed are personal
The coup d’état in the Shiv Sena in Maharashtra leading to the ouster of the Maharashtra Vikas Aghadi government once again underscores the complete redundancy of the anti-defection legislative mechanism. The first private member’s bill that I had moved when I entered Parliament was to relax the rigours of the 10th Schedule of the Constitution of India colloquially called the anti-defection law.
Seeing the whip-driven tyranny that drove legislative process had convinced me very early in the day that though well-intentioned this particular legislative fiat had backfired. It had sucked democracy out of the legislative institutions. No longer could Parliamentarians or legislators exercise their judgement according to the dictates of their conscience, constituency or even common sense. They were prisoners of a rather quixotic system where the electors who had put them into public office had no influence upon the legislative choices they were compelled to make.
A brief background may just be in order. The Constitution (Fifty-Second Amendment) Act, 1985, added the Tenth Schedule to the Indian Constitution to proscribe the increasing propensity of party-hopping and defections by elected representatives post elections. The introductory delineations of the statement of objects and reasons of this anti-defection legislative instrument bemoaned this rather sordid situation vividly. It stated, “the evil of political defections has been a matter of political concern. If it is not combated it is likely to undermine the very foundations of our democracy and the principles that sustain it.”
The original anti-defection legislation of 1985 chastised acts of individual defection. It conversely acknowledged the norm of differences in political parties. It mandated that if one-third of the members of a parliamentary or legislative entity created a separate faction or even merged themselves into an analogous political outfit, their membership of whichever legislative organ they were elected to would continue without ‘interruptus’.
Why the bar for defections to be legitimate was set at one-third was elucidated in paragraph three of the Tenth Schedule. It can be described as the doctrine of “honest dissent”, i.e., not less than one-third of the strength of a parliamentary or legislature party could collectively have reservations about the ideological or political direction adopted by their original political party and, therefore, may decide to go their own separate way. However what this law accomplished in reality was transmuting a retail malady into a wholesale malaise. The reasons for splits continued to remain opportunistic not ideological.
The NDA government tried to plug this loophole vide the Constitution (Ninety-First Amendment) Act, 2003. It deleted paragraph three from the anti-defection law that permitted one-third of the elected representatives to separate from original political outfit. The Amendment Act, however, allowed paragraph four to hold the field. It authorised two-thirds of the elected representatives of a political party, should they choose so, to merge with an existing political party or form a new political party as a consequence of such a merger. This would not impact their legislative status under the 10th Schedule. Effectively what this constitutional amendment achieved was raising the bar of wholesale defections from one-third to two-thirds.
All this Constitutional jiggery-pokery, however, does not answer a fundamental question. Did the founding fathers who wrote the Indian Constitution countenance a paradigm whereby the right to choose a representative would vest in an individual elector but what he does with his elected status on a legislative platform would be hostage to the ditkats of a political party?
Given that in Re. Kesavananda Bharti, the Supreme Court by a 7-6 majority held parliamentary democracy to be basic structure the 10th schedule of the Constitution, it negates very tenet of the basic structure doctrine, i.e., parliamentary democracy both in letter and spirit. The little person who stands in the scorching sun to press that EVM button to elect a representative has really no role for the next five years.
Coming to the private member’s bill that I had introduced in 2010 and have reintroduced again in 2020, labelled The Constitution (Amendment) Bill, 2020 (Amendment to the 10th Schedule), it envisages that whips can be issued only for that legislative business that threatens the stability of government. It would perhaps be instructive to reproduce the salient aspects of the Statement of Objects and Reasons of the 2010 Bill which are pari passu with the 2020 bill. “The disqualification of a member of a House should be only on the grounds that he votes or abstains from voting in the House with regard to a confidence motion, no-confidence motion, adjournment motion, money bill or financial matters contrary to the direction issued in this behalf by the party to which he belongs and in no other case.”
The core of the bill states: “A person shall cease to be a member if he votes or abstains from voting in such House with regard to a motion expressing confidence or want of confidence in the Council of Ministers, motion for an adjournment of the business of the House, motion in respect of financial matters as enumerated in Articles 113 to 116 (both inclusive) and Articles 203 to 206 (both inclusive), a money bill, contrary to any direction issued by the political party to which he belongs or by any person or authority authorised by it in this behalf.” This would free up the legislative space for better and more diligent lawmaking.
However, even with these proposed amendments to the 10th Schedule, the fact remains that over the past 37 years the anti-defection law has failed to fulfil the foremost objective for which it was enacted, i.e., proscribing the menace of defections.
It has, in fact, created another problem by vesting arbitrary discretionary powers in the hands of the presiding officers of the legislative institutions in terms of deciding petitions under the anti-defection law. These presiding officers are not at all autonomous much as the Constitution would want them to function independently. At the end of five years or six years they have to seek re-election on the ticket of the political party that has put them there in the first place. Anti-defection petitions keep languishing without a decision for years on an end if it suits the convenience of the ruling party or the personal predilections of a particular presiding officer as legislators keep merrily party-hopping at times changing multiple parties during a five-year term.
The time, therefore, has come to rip the veneer of this legislation-driven morality. The 10th Schedule must be repealed. Parliament must apply itself to a new modus vivendi for enforcing political probity.