Editorials - 11-06-2022

A spate of targeted killings of Hindus in Kashmir threatens to reverse years of efforts to rehabilitate Kashmiri Pandits to the Valley. Peerzada Ashiq reports on the fear in the community, which is once again faced with the dilemma of whether to stay or leave in the face of violence

It is easy to spot from a distance the curtains drawn on the windows. Many two-bedroom flats have their doors locked from the outside. The buzz of residents that should surround the 14 three-storey towers is missing at the protected Sheikhpora transit Pandit colony in Budgam, bordering the posh colonies of Srinagar. The families of around 300 Kashmiri Pandits, who returned to the Valley and took up government jobs after being forced to migrate two decades ago, live in these flats.

The anxiety of the residents is palpable. The additional security personnel, stationed at strategically located watch towers, have become more vigilant. Glittering spools of concertina wires have been placed on top of the walls of the towers. The only Muslims who regularly enter the premises are well-known milkmen and vegetable vendors. No unknown person from outside is allowed inside any more. Around 30 Muslim students, tutored privately by Pandit teachers, have stopped visiting the colony.

Life at the Sheikhpora colony was not dull and grim until May 12 this year. On that day, Rahul Bhat, a 35-year-old Pandit who lived in one of the vertical towers, was shot dead in his office chair by well-trained militants in Chadoora’s tehsil office in Budgam, about 12 km from the colony. This was followed by back-to-back targeted killings of a Hindu schoolteacher from Jammu’s Samba district, a Hindu bank manager from Rajasthan, and a Hindu wine shop employee from Jammu’s Rajouri district. Shock over the first killing quickly turned into unease. Today, Kashmiri Pandits, who are living on the edge, recall the violence of the 1990s when they were driven out of the region and fervently hope that the efforts that have been made towards ensuring peace and security since then do not end up futile.

‘We are again caged’

Almost a month has passed since Bhat’s killing. Rinku, a Class 9 student at the Kashmir Valley School, which is less than 5 km away from the Sheikhpora colony, has stopped going to school. He has already missed his term examination. Schools in Kashmir are planning online classes for students of migrant Hindu families. Rinku’s parents — Ajay Pandita, 45, and Sharda Bhat, 44, both government teachers posted in Srinagar — have also decided to stay home in their two-room flat. The silence in the flat is broken by Pandita’s 82-year-old mother, who insists that she should be shifted to the upper storey of her three-storey house where she lived before migration in 1990, at Dhar Bagh on the outskirts of Srinagar’s Harwan area.

“My mother has had dementia for many years,” says Pandita. “The only thing she remembers is her pre-migration house in Harwan. Little does she know that we are again caged (like in the 1990s).” He was 13 years old in July 1990 when his family was faced with a similar dilemma: whether to stay or leave in the face of violence. “I faintly remember Pandit killings,” says Pandita. “We decided to leave behind our house as well as 30 kanals of land. They have all been sold.” Pandita is still in touch with Muslim men from Dhar Bagh, many of whom were part of his cricket team.

Pandita quit his job in Jammu and joined the education department in Srinagar in 2017 to be with his wife. Sharda was among the first educated Pandits to get a job under former Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s package for the return and rehabilitation of Kashmir migrants in 2010.

It is on account of Pandita’s mother and his son that the family has decided not to migrate this time round. Around 50% of the 300 families living in the Sheikhpora colony have left to safer locations in Hindu-majority Jammu, after weeks of protests demanding a transfer outside the Valley until “the situation improves”.

“My son has grown up here, he likes Kashmir,” says Pandita. “He has Muslim friends. He has never felt out of place in his classroom. He does not like the Jammu weather; it’s too hot. I don’t want his education to suffer. We are not leaving.” His two-year-old daughter goes to a local preparatory school.

Pandita, like others in the colony, is staring at an unanswered question: “Why are we being targeted? Who has cast an evil eye on our healthy routine?”

‘The times have changed’

The last decade was peaceful at the Sheikhpora colony. Sanjay Bhat, now in his 60s, says he would walk in the Eidgah ground adjacent to the colony. Muslim boys played cricket and football while scores of Pandits ran around with no sense of fear, he recalls. “Pandits mingled with locals outside the camp. I would buy vegetables from shops outside the colony. I would go out to meet my Muslim friends and they would come to see me. All that has changed.” Attending weddings and final rites in the case of deaths of members of the other community strengthened bonds, love, respect and compassion, he says.

Pandita, posted at a government school in the Safa Kadal area of the volatile old city in Srinagar, says the community was harmed neither in 2010, when the killings of protesting civilians sparked a cycle of violence, nor in 2016, when Hizbul Mujahideen ‘commander’ Burhan Wani’s killing led to street protests for at least five months. He recalls how stone-throwing youth helped him get to safety in 2016: “I was caught in a clash between young stone-throwing men and security forces near Sheikhpora’s main road. The young men helped me to take the safe route home.”

Pandita’s daily routine changed on October 7, 2021, when militants shot dead the principal, Satinder Kour, and a schoolteacher, Deepak Chand, within the premises of the Government Boys Higher Secondary school in Eidgah, Srinagar. This is in the same zone where Pandita and his wife were posted. “I was in class when I heard about the attack. Sharda was in a state of shock. My staff accompanied me to my wife’s school. We were asked to leave for home by noon,” Pandita recalls. Sharda had to remove her bindi and cover her head to leave the downtown areas.

“Our colleagues miss us. Sharda still gets calls from the staff. Students, who always showed us respect, insist that we return to the classroom. The times have changed though,” Pandita says.

The killings reported in October 2021 and May this year have not only scared Kashmiri Pandits in the Valley, but also frightened other Pandits who were planning to return without government hand-holding. “My sister and brother-in-law were so encouraged by the situation earlier that we began looking for land to build a house,” Pandita says.

Sixty-five kilometres from the Sheikhpora colony, the Vessu transit camp on the Srinagar-Jammu national highway in south Kashmir’s Kulgam is home to more than 450 Pandit families. It also wears a deserted look. Much like in other transit camps, an officer of the rank of Superintendent of Police has been put in charge of security. Over 50% of the families have left for Jammu in the past one month and those who remain prefer to stay indoors. Sanjay Kaul and his wife, both teachers, work in the Qazigund area but have decided against re-joining school till their issues, especially concerning security, are addressed.

“Around 250 students from the Vessu transit camp study in different schools. My child is in Class 10. It’s a crucial year. He never felt unsafe earlier. There were times before these killings when I used to freely visit my ancestral property in the village,” Kaul says.

Scores of Kashmiri Pandits who owned orchards, including apple, in south Kashmir were able to look after the fruit till the harvest time in autumn. “I would help my Muslim neighbours pluck fruit from the orchards and they would help me. All that may come to an end if the killings continue,” says a worried T. Raina, a Pandit employee with ancestral land in south Kashmir.

Kaul, who was appointed in 2010 under the Prime Minister’s package, says the recent killings have made it clear that no place is safe in the Valley for the employees. “Of late, our sense of security is waning. I am not even safe in my colony, in spite of the security cover. An employee was killed in broad daylight in his office chair. We are killed because of our name and faith,” Kaul says. All the 1,200 Pandit employees who were living in rented accommodation in several districts have fled the Valley, he says. “They are the most scared lot,” he adds.

A series of killings

The new militant movement against minorities started on December 31, 2020, when a Hindu goldsmith, Satpal Nischal, was shot dead in his shop in the upmarket Hari Singh High Street in Srinagar, just weeks after the Centre’s new domicile law was implemented in Jammu and Kashmir. Later, from October 2021, a series of targeted killings of members of minorities, including Kashmiri Pandits, began. The first was on October 5, when Makhan Lal Bindroo of the famous Bindroo Medicate was killed in his shop in Srinagar. Eleven civilians became victims of targeted killings that month, including five non-local labourers and three members of minority communities. Four Kashmiri Pandits have been killed since October 2021 till date in the Valley by militants.

The string of killings followed the implementation of new land and job policies after the Centre’s decision to end Jammu and Kashmir’s special status and divide the State into two Union Territories. These new policies were widely opposed by the mainstream regional parties, including the Jammu and Kashmir National Conference (NC, and the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP). A website was also launched in September last year to address the grievances of Kashmiri Pandits related to land alienation, distress sale, encroachments and trespassing of Pandit properties in Kashmir.

The new security situation has also posed a threat to the 808 Kashmiri Pandit families who never migrated from the Valley. “If even one non-migrant Pandit is killed, they too will have no option,” says Sanjay Tickoo, president of the Kashmiri Pandit Sangharsh Samiti (KPSS), a caretaker body of the 808 families. Tickoo says many factors have together created a worrisome situation for the Pandits in Kashmir. “One of them was the government’s decision to end the role of civil society in Kashmir. In 2010 and 2016, civil society stopped many bids at sparking communal tension. Today, members fear that they will be slapped with the Public Safety Act and the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act for their activism,” he says.

Tickoo advocates an end to the muscular policy that New Delhi has pursued in Kashmir since 2019. “Danda (stick) will not work. The political process needs to be put in place in Kashmir now. We need to involve civil society and mosques to carry out a door-to-door campaign on the real teachings of Islam, co-existence and humanism,” says Tickoo, who had to go underground due to death threats last year.

Events outside Jammu and Kashmir are also causing anger, he says. Tickoo claims that the recent remarks by Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) leader Nupur Sharma about Prophet Mohammad, the Azan issue, the Masjid-Mandir disputes, and “bulldozer politics” all add to the volatility of Kashmir. “The wrong portrayal in The Kashmir Files of all Muslims in Kashmir as ‘jihadi’ and militants was the last nail in the coffin,” he says.

No intelligence agency in Kashmir can predict the next targeted killing, Tickoo warns. “Only The Resistance Front (TRF) knows who the next target will be.” The TRF, which the police believe is an offshoot of the Lashkar-e-Taiba, has warned of attacks against Pandits and non-local workers for “becoming a part of New Delhi’s design to change the demography of Muslim-majority J&K”. Officials say the pattern of killings makes it clear that militants are targeting not just Pandits but Hindus from Jammu too, especially those serving in Kashmir against posts reserved for Scheduled Castes (SC). Two SC teachers — Rajni Bala and Deepak Chand — and two shopkeepers from Jammu, including the son of the owner of the famous Krishna Daba in Srinagar, were among those killed in Kashmir in the last one year. Satish Kumar Singh, a driver living in south Kashmir’s Kulgam, was also killed on April 14 this year.

“It is sad that there is a lot of focus on Kashmiri Pandits, but not on the Hindus from Jammu who have also suffered at the hands of militants. More than anyone, we need a transfer policy. We are alien to the local culture. We will work here for a certain period, but eventually we should be transferred to our home districts,” says Rajiv Kumar, an SC employee posted in Kulgam.

According to the KPSS, 12 attacks were carried out on religious minorities from June 2020 till May 31, 2022. Nineteen targeted attacks also left 13 Muslims dead this year. Around 33 targeted attacks recorded last year left at least 20 local Muslims dead too, according to official figures.

What is at stake in Kashmir?

The resurgence of militancy is posing an unprecedented threat to the process of return of Kashmir Pandits since the Prime Minister’s package was implemented in 2010. The package aimed at recruiting 6,000 educated Pandits and housing them in transit colonies in Kashmir first, before they decided to shift to localities with the local population. The Rs. 1,876-crore package, conceived by then Prime Minister Singh in 2008, also offered an initial financial assistance of Rs. 7.5 lakh per family, which was later increased to Rs. 20-25 lakh. The migrant Kashmiri Pandit families from rural pockets were assured of a waiver of interest on loans and a cash assistance of Rs. 1-1.5 lakh for re-cultivation of agriculture and horticulture land.

“There was a deeply strategic dimension to the package too. It is also for the majority community, which must see the importance of diversity. History has shown that when a society becomes homogenised, it creates fault lines within itself. Heterogeneity is a psychological enabler for young minds to get intellectualised early,” says Kapil Kak, a Kashmir Pandit who retired as an Air Vice Marshal and worked on a track-two dialogue with Prime Minister Singh on the return of Pandits. The package bore the desired results on the ground without much politics around it, with the NC and the PDP lending their support when in power in the erstwhile State of Jammu and Kashmir.

According to the latest official figures, 5,928 youths have been appointed under the package in various departments in different districts of the Valley between 2010 and 2022. Over 5,412 have already been posted. The number of Pandit employees is nearly 15% of the total Pandit families who migrated in the 1990s. As per Jammu and Kashmir government figures, 60,000 families migrated in the wake of unprecedented militant violence in Kashmir in the 1990s, which included 40,142 Hindu, 2,684 Muslim and 1,730 Sikh families.

The transit colonies came up without any opposition in the Valley. In south Kashmir, a transit colony was set up in Pulwama’s Haal, Anantnag’s Mattan and Kulgam’s Vessu areas. In north Kashmir, Pandit colonies were set up in Kupwara’s Natnusa and Baramulla’s Veervan. In central Kashmir, Budgam’s Sheikhpora and Ganderbal’s Tulmulla have transit colonies.

“A total of 1,200 transit accommodations are also coming up at Ganderbal, Shopian, Bandipora, Baramulla and Kupwara, and additional land for another 2,744 units [flats] has been identified at seven locations,” a senior official says, on the condition of anonymity. Among the new identified localities are Anantnag’s Marhama, Ganderbal’s Wandhama, Baramulla’s Fatehpora, Shopian’s Keegam, Bandipora’s Sumbal and Kupwara’s Kulangam.

The demand of protesting Pandit employees to be transferred to Jammu would, in effect, defeat the purpose of the package. None of the 5,412 employees has resumed duties even after three weeks of the killings.

“When these appointments were made, there was a clause that they will only serve in the districts where they were appointed. However, all those supernumerary have now been re-designated as divisional cadre posts. The employees cannot be posted in any district within the Valley now onwards,” Jammu and Kashmir Relief Commissioner A.K. Pandita says. “Pandits should treat the killings as accidents. The government will not accept the demand to transfer them to Jammu. The security situation has improved, as we saw the Kheer Bhawani Mela being celebrated smoothly in Ganderbal’s Tulmula area. The government will not allow such incidents to become a factor for the failure of the initiative.” Pandita hopes that 50% of the employees who left for Jammu will return soon. “Fifty per cent of the employees are already present in the Valley but not attending to duty. Their demands regarding promotions and postings have been considered and addressed too,” he adds.

Officials say Pandit employees who are couples have been transferred to a single district. Around 170 teachers have been already posted in ‘safer zones’ in Srinagar. The government has also increased the area domination of all the areas where around 4,000 Hindus, who did not migrate in the 1990s, live.

Back in the Sheikpora colony, Ajay Pandita is willing to join duty only after he feels secure. “It has to come from the majority community first. The government has to work towards creating a conducive atmosphere in Kashmir for the minorities,” he says.

The names of some Pandits have been changed on request



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A closer look at recent data on GDP shows that the numbers are flawed and recovery is incomplete

The Provisional Estimates of Annual National Income in 2021-22 just released show that GDP grew 8.7% in real terms and 19.5% in nominal terms (including inflation). It makes India the fastest growing major economy in the world. Further, the real economy is 1.51% larger than it was in 2019-20, just before the novel coronavirus pandemic hit the world. In nominal terms it is higher by 17.9%. These numbers imply that the rate of inflation was 10.8% in 2021-22 and 16.4% between the two years, 2019-20 and 2021-22.

Quarterly growth rates

This picture implies almost no growth and high inflation since the pre-pandemic year. So, the tag of the fastest growing economy means little. If an economy drops sharply and then rises equally fast to reach its earlier level, that cannot be taken as an indication of a rapidly growing economy.

The quarter to quarter growth currently may give some indication of the present rate of growth. In 2020-21, the quarterly rate of growth increased through the year. In 2021-22, the rate of growth has been slowing down. Of course in 2020-21, the COVID-19 lockdown had a severe impact in Q1 (-23.8%); after that the rate of growth picked up. In 2021-22, the rate of growth in Q1 had to sharply rise (20.3%). Ignoring the outliers in Q1, growth rates in 2021-22 have sequentially petered out in subsequent quarters: 8.4%, 5.4% and 4.1%. True, the last quarter (January-March 2022) data was impacted by the Omicron-related lockdowns in January and February. It was further impacted in March by the supply disruptions following the war in Ukraine and the severe COVID-19 lockdown in China. Going forward, while the lockdown in China is over, the war-related impact is likely to persist since there is no end in sight. Thus, price rise and impact on production are likely to persist. The rapid rise in prices will impact demand from the vast majority of citizens who are losing out. That will reduce growth further.

Data as the problem

More worryingly, the issue is about correctness of data. The annual estimates given now are provisional since complete data are not available for 2021-22. They may be better than the second advance estimates released three months ago as more data become available. There is a greater problem with quarterly estimates since very limited data are available for estimating it. So, the data for the fourth quarter of 2021-22 released now is even more problematic

The first issue is that during 2020-21, due to the pandemic, full data could not be collected for Q1. Further, for agriculture, quarterly data assumes that the targets are achieved. But in Q1, a lot of fruits, vegetables, flowers, milk and poultry products could not come to the market, and rotted and wasted. This is more than 50% of the agriculture output. Thus, the growth rate of agriculture was certainly less than the official figure of 3%.

Agriculture is a part of the unorganised sector. Very little data are available for it but for agriculture — neither for the quarter nor for the year. It is simply assumed that the limited data available for the organised sector can be used to act as a proxy. In other words the non-agriculture unorganised sector is represented by the organised sector. The data for the full organised sector are also not available so ‘high frequency’ data (listed in the press note) are used. For instance, Goods and Services Tax (GST) collection data are used. But, it is well known that GST is collected almost entirely from the organised sector. In brief: very little data are available for quarterly estimates; and even less is available for the unorganised sector. Since the same method is used to estimate the annual growth rate the errors get repeated.

Errors in total, components

If better data became available after the shock of the lockdown, and it got used, there should be substantial revision in the previous year’s quarterly data. But if one compares the Q1 2020-21 data in the latest release with the data released in May 2021, the change is 0.3%. Does this imply that the high frequency data used is very well able to predict quarterly GDP? This is unlikely to be the case when a shock is administered to the economy which changes the parameters of the economy. The data remaining largely unchanged implies that the same error is being carried forward.

The quarterly data is added up to yield the annual total. If a better method was used to estimate the annual data, it should not equal the sum of the quarterly data which as argued above is estimated on the basis of a limited data set. The implication is that the errors in the quarterly data are repeated in the annual data.

The method using the organised sector to proxy the unorganised non-agriculture sector may have been acceptable before demonetisation (2016) but is not correct since then. The reason is that the unorganised non-agriculture sector suffered far more than the organised sector and more so during the waves of the pandemic. Large parts of the unorganised non-agriculture sector have experienced a shift in demand to the organised sector since they produce similar things. This introduces large errors in GDP estimates since official agencies do not estimate this shift. All that is known is that the Micro, Small and Medium Enterprises (MSME) sector has faced closures and failures.

If GDP data are incorrect, data on its components — private consumption and investment — must also be incorrect. Most often, ratios are applied to the GDP to estimate them. But, if the GDP is in error, then the ratios will yield erroneous results. The other main components — government and external trade — may be assumed to be reasonably accurate even though this data is revised over several years.

Further, the ratios themselves would have been impacted by the shock of the lockdown and the decline of the unorganised sectors. Additionally, private consumption data is suspect since according to the data given by the Reserve Bank of India which largely captures the organised sector, consumer confidence throughout 2021-22 was way below (not marginally lower) its pre-pandemic level of 104 achieved in January 2020. So, consumption could not have come close to its pre-pandemic level.

In brief, neither the total nor the ratios are correct. Clearly, consumption and investment figures are over-estimates and very likely because the decline in the unorganised sectors has not been captured.

Possible correction

In the best possible scenario, let us assume that the organised sector (55% of GDP) and agriculture (14% of GDP) are growing at the official rate of growth of 8.2% and 3%, respectively. Then, they would contribute 4.93% to GDP growth. The non-agriculture unorganised component is declining for two reasons: first, the closure of units and the second the shift in demand to the organised sector. Even if 5% of the units have closed down this year and 5% of the demand has shifted to the organised sector, the unorganised sector would have declined by about 10%; the contribution of this component to GDP growth would be -3.1%.

Based on the above assumptions, the GDP for 2021-22 would have grown by only 1.8%, and not 8.7%, and it would be less than the pre-pandemic GDP of 2019-20 by 4.92%. Clearly, recovery is incomplete and India is not the fastest growing big economy of the world.

Arun Kumar is a retired Professor of Economics at the Jawaharlal Nehru University. He is also the author of ‘Indian Economy’s Greatest Crisis: Impact of the Coronavirus and the Road Ahead’, 2020



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The Government’s strategy to quell West Asia’s outrage must include the need to foster an understanding of other faiths

The strong and widespread targeting of India in the Islamic world over the past few days arose from a specific theological consideration. It was not directly related to the politics or policies of India’s ruling dispensation though its opponents within India would wish to give it that colour. The veracity of this assessment is borne out by the general apathy of the Islamic ummah towards India’s Muslim population. From time to time, the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) has criticised the Indian state’s alleged discrimination of its Muslim minorities. However, the organisation’s views have never formed the basis of its member-states’ bilateral ties with India. And, Islamic states have not been swayed by Pakistan’s consistent portrayal of the Narendra Modi government as fascist and anti-Muslim.

Indeed, India’s relations with some significant Muslim countries such as Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) have strengthened since Prime Minister Narendra Modi assumed office in May 2014. It is possible that the current resentment, even outrage, on account of the present controversy may lead to a greater scrutiny in the ummah of the Modi government’s policies towards the country’s Muslims. India’s social situation may come under a deeper focus but the governments of Islamic countries would not want their India policies to be determined by theological considerations; they have an array of interests at stake in their India ties.

There is a distinction

That the Islamic governments protested against the comments made regarding the Prophet by the former Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) National Spokesperson, Nupur Sharma, and the former media head of the party’s Delhi unit, Naveen Kumar Jindal, was not surprising. What was so though was that neither the Government nor the ruling party seemed to have realised the great offence they constituted to all Muslims worldwide and the anger the comments would generate. At least the astute External Affairs Minister, S. Jaishankar, who has been a distinguished diplomat in his earlier avatar, should have known that despite enormous differences within themselves, Muslims venerate the Prophet; they all find any perception of disrespect towards him to be intolerable. Thus, there is a distinction between criticising some social practices of Muslims and what is perceived to be an attack on the personality of the Prophet.

Ms. Sharma’s remarks during a talk show on a prominent TV channel were made on May 26. The next day a clip of these remarks was added to a tweet. That drew wide attention in India and Ms. Sharma complained of having received threats to her person and also her family members. At the same time a Muslim organisation lodged a legal complaint against Ms. Sharma. It was inevitable that in these times of instant communications and social media, Ms. Sharma’s comments would find an audience in Islamic countries; and, that anti-India elements would also seek to publicise them. Yet, it appears that the Indian establishment perhaps thought if attention was given to this matter at all, that Ms. Sharma’s remarks would be placed in the context of the shrill charges and counter-charges made daily on Indian TV, and would therefore not be taken seriously.

End misperceptions

Is this because the Indian system, including the ruling dispensation, has an inadequate appreciation of the sensitivities of different faiths? Is it because the Indian intellectual tradition as it has evolved after Independence does not pay sufficient attention to faith, perhaps, considering it backward? And, now while there is an assertion of religiosity, there is also a lack of curiosity about other faiths. This seems to cut across all segments of society and has led to a lack of knowledge of other religions, leading to misperceptions. This is illustrated in simple things such as innocently sending ‘happy’ messages on occasions of mourning of adherents of another faith or in works of art. But there is a darker side to society too which is witnessed in the reinforcement of prejudice about other faiths and the use of words and expressions which cause offence. This can also be witnessed in extolling the virtues of one’s own faith and putting another in an unfavourable light. Clearly, all this points to the need to foster an understanding in society at large of other faiths and their sensitivities. This is especially needed in our multi-faith society at a time when religiosity is rising sharply across the world.

During a VIP visit

It was unfortunate that the situation arising out of Ms. Sharma’s remarks occurred at a time when the Vice-President of India, M. Venkaiah Naidu, was on a three-nation tour of Gabon, Senegal and Qatar. Mr Naidu left India on May 30 and after visiting the two African countries, was to reach Doha on June 4. Clearly, the Indian foreign policy establishment led by the External Affairs Minister missed the sentiment brewing in the Islamic world because of Ms. Sharma’s comments. If the External Affairs Minister had assessed what was happening, he would have surely taken action to prevent any embarrassment to the Vice-President on foreign soil. It can hardly be disputed that the President of India, the Vice-President and the Prime Minister, should never be put even in an uncomfortable position when they are abroad. Did this lapse occur because of a lack of appreciation of how Islamic sentiment is roused because of a perception of an insult to the Prophet?

According to a report in this newspaper, the “damage control” process began when the Vice-President was flying from Senegal to Doha and the Qataris conveyed that the ceremonial banquet of Mr. Naidu’s host, the Deputy Amir of Qatar, would have to be called off because he was suspected to have been exposed to COVID-19. In such circumstances a very senior person hosts the customary banquet but it is not cancelled. It also appears now that the Indian side was taken aback when the Indian Ambassador in Doha was called in on June 5 and Qatar while appreciating the action taken against Ms. Sharma and Mr. Jindal by the BJP demanded that India issues a public apology for Ms. Sharma’s remarks against the Prophet. There is no question of making one for the remarks of a party functionary.

This can only be called a very offensive action against India by Qatar. It could only have caused the greatest embarrassment to Mr. Naidu. It is to his credit that he proceeded with the visit. After the Qataris went public with their action, other Islamic countries lodged protests too. India did well to reject the statements of the OIC and Pakistan for they reeked of political considerations.

The last word

There is a mutuality of interests between the Arab states and India, and hence when the temperature cools, the flow of relations will go on. But India must take the obvious lessons from this entire episode, beginning with greater sensitivity to all faiths both for social harmony and promotions of India’s external interests.

Vivek Katju is a former diplomat



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The BJP’s nominee will be the next President, but the election is crucial for the Opposition

With President Ram Nath Kovind’s term set to end on July 24, the process to elect his successor has been kicked off with the Election Commission’s announcement of the schedule on Thursday. The electoral college for the presidential elections has 4,809 members, which includes 233 Rajya Sabha and 543 Lok Sabha members, and 4,033 MLAs of State Assemblies. Each member has a certain vote value based on the strength of the population they represent. The voting is on July 18. The total value of the votes that will be up for grabs is: 10,86,431. The BJP-led NDA’s tally is 5,25,706, around 20,000 votes short of the majority mark, but there is no doubt that its nominee will occupy Rashtrapati Bhavan. The Biju Janata Dal with 31,686 votes and the YSR Congress with 43,450 votes have conveyed to the Government their wholehearted support. The Odisha CM Naveen Patnaik, on May 30, and YSR Congress chief and Andhra Pradesh CM Y.S. Jagan Mohan Reddy, on June 2, met the PM, reportedly committing their votes to the BJP’s choice for the highest office.

Even though the outcome is foretold, the contest will have many layers of political meaning and symbolism, and therefore will be keenly watched by the country and the world. The new President will take over at a time when the country is faced with a crippling religious polarisation and other challenges. This is the second presidential election where J&K’s legislators will not participate, but the first after it became a UT in 2019. In the nomination of Mr. Kovind, a Dalit from the heartland, the BJP sent a political message five years ago. It will certainly have another one this year, that is being anticipated eagerly to read into what the BJP’s strategy will be, going into the 2024 general election. The presidential poll will also be a test for the Opposition in terms of its unity, leadership and talking points. The Congress has the highest number of votes among the non-BJP parties but its acceptance among other parties is at the lowest in a long time. The TRS chief and Telangana CM, K. Chandrashekar Rao, and the TMC leader and West Bengal CM, Mamata Banerjee, want to lead the Opposition coalition and hence appear unwilling to concede the leadership to the Congress, though they have not made any public statement on the question. AAP leader and Delhi CM Arvind Kejriwal who is relentless in his attacks on the BJP, is equally opposed to the Congress. Considering these divergent views and conflicting ambitions, it will be a tall order for the Opposition to devise a united front and coherent strategy. All told, the presidential election will be a demonstration of how political forces are aligned in the country.



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Sri Lanka will be well served by a return to parliamentary democracy

The resignation of Sri Lanka’s Finance Minister Basil Rajapaksa as Member of Parliament on Thursday did not come as a surprise, given the adverse public mood he and the rest of his family, including his brothers President Gotabaya Rajapaksa and former Prime Minister Mahinda Rajapaksa, have been facing. But what was surprising was that he took a month to quit after unprecedented violence in Sri Lanka. The violence was an outcome of the attack unleashed by supporters of the ruling Sri Lanka Podujana Peramuna (SLPP) on peaceful anti-government protesters, who have been running the campaign “Go home Gota [Gotabaya Rajapaksa]” over the country’s worst economic crisis. It needs no reiteration that Basil Rajapaksa, regarded as the livewire of the SLPP, was perceived in certain quarters as one of those responsible for the attack on the protesters. His political departure comes at a time when efforts are on to get Cabinet clearance for the proposed 21st Constitutional Amendment, which is aimed at empowering Parliament over the executive President, apart from barring those holding dual citizenship from entering the legislature. Basil Rajapaksa, who holds American citizenship too, would have been affected and realisation may have dawned on him.

The development should provide a breather to Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe, who has been batting for significant changes in the Constitution. Needless to say, he would like the complete restoration of the 19th Amendment, which was adopted by Parliament in April 2015 when he was the PM; Maithripala Sirisena was the President. Gotabaya Rajapaksa, who assured his country days after the violence that he would take steps to amend the Constitution to bring back the 19th Amendment, should honour his word. He should not be influenced by voices within the SLPP that the economic agenda should take precedence over the political agenda of constitutional amendments. The two agendas have become so intertwined that the government’s performance in the context of the political agenda would create a conducive climate for the international community to consider investing in Sri Lanka in a big way. The President, who has said that he would like to complete his remaining term of two and a half years, should keep this in mind and facilitate the task of Mr. Wickremesinghe in reconstructing the beleaguered economy. One should not forget that the 19th Amendment, while in force, was no bar for then President Maithripala Sirisena to effect a constitutional coup. This is why the demand for the abolition of the office of executive President assumes significance. There may still be a long way to go for abolition but, in the event of the proposed 21st Amendment being passed, the experience gained should be used by all stakeholders constructively to pursue the goal of bringing back the parliamentary form of government, which was in existence in Sri Lanka for 30 years since Independence in 1948.



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The more hardline sections of the BJP are making a case for standing up to the censure coming in from India's allies and friends abroad.

India learnt this week that its domestic politics does not exist in a silo separate and disconnected from its relations with the international community. On visits abroad, Prime Minister Narendra Modi has talked up this country as a plural, diverse and democratic nation, as if the open minority-baiting by his party men and women did not exist. Not only have the remarks against the Prophet by two BJP leaders — one has been expelled and the other suspended by the party subsequently — made it difficult to sweep under the carpet the incivilities in the politics of the ruling party at the Centre, the fallout is also bringing home to Delhi that they can create problems for some of its best friends in the world, to the detriment of those friendships. What someone says in a television studio in India can fast turn into a political hot potato in another country, putting governments well disposed towards India on the defensive in their home turfs. Pakistan, of course, may need no excuse to have a go at India. But it was hoped that the United Arab Emirates, with whom India has excellent ties, would not follow its brother Islamic nations in upping the ante on the issue. That it did, one day after several other countries had expressed their condemnation, says a lot about how this incident has put pressure on governments around the world. Only in 2018, the UAE rulers had granted permission for the building of a Hindu temple in Sharjah, and its construction is proceeding apace. Iran, among the earliest to condemn the controversial remarks, did not cancel the visit by its foreign minister, Amir Abdollahian, but the differing readouts from both sides showed how important it was for the visiting functionary to signal to constituencies back home that the issue had come up in discussions, as much as Delhi tried to play it down.

If looking the other way as outrage swept the Gulf countries was not an option for authoritarian regimes in the UAE, Oman and other friendly nations, the political pressures in a democracy, even a small one like Maldives, can well be imagined. Indeed, Maldives, where protests against India are banned by presidential decree, tried at first to stave off the Opposition’s attempts to force the issue. Like the UAE, the pro-India Solih government issued a statement much after many other countries, after it became clear that not doing so would carry significant political risk. Former president Abdulla Yameen, whose pronounced tilt towards Beijing had given India cause for worry during his term in office, hopes to make a comeback in the presidential election next year on the back of an anti-India campaign.

The more hardline sections of the BJP are making a case for standing up to the censure coming in from India’s allies and friends abroad. Meanwhile, at home, the protests that erupted in several cities on Friday run the risk of leading domestic politics into the polarisation trap. After this episode, the responsibility of sobriety and restraint and course correction rests on the BJP government, of course. India is going to be watched by other countries, even and especially by its friends. But the larger imperative of keeping the calm also devolves on non-BJP groups and parties.

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June 11, 1982, forty years ago: Antulay loses case - Indian Express

An appeal filed by the former Chief Minister, A.R. Antulay, and the state of Maharashtra against the judgement of Justice B. Lentin in the cement case was dismissed by a division bench of the Bombay High Court comprising Justice S.K. Desai and Justice B.J. Rele.

An appeal filed by the former Chief Minister, A.R. Antulay, and the state of Maharashtra against the judgement of Justice B. Lentin in the cement case was dismissed by a division bench of the Bombay High Court comprising Justice S.K. Desai and Justice B.J. Rele. Justice Rele’s indictment was even stronger than Justice Lentin’s judgement last January. Justice Desai was no less strong. He said that “the manner of allocating cement revealed, indicated and illustrated an assorted spectacle of unreasoned arbitrariness and capricious discretion resulting in unprincipled favouritism which remains unexplained and appears to be unjustified.” The bench upheld that nexus and quid pro quo had been established between allotments of cement to certain big builders and the donations made by them to the trust floated by Antulay, and ruled that both the former chief minister and the state had acted in an illegal, arbitrary and capricious manner “while distributing cement from the Mantralaya”.

Falklands war

British plans for an assault on the main Argentine garrison at Port Stanley, the Falklands capital, received a setback when Argentine planes crippled two British landing ships in the first low-level air strike for 10 days. Two bombs hit the 4,470 tonne fleet auxillary, Sir Galahad. One exploded astern, rocking the vessel as thick black smoke billowed high above Fitzroy settlement, about 23 km south-west of Port Stanley, British reporters in the Falklands said.

Israel persists

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Continuous waves of Israeli fighter-bombers pounded Palestinian and Syrian positions in Beirut and scattered leaflets warning that Israeli troops planned to seize the Lebanese capital within hours. Israeli land, sea and air forces continued to hammer at targets in and around Beirut long after the US President Ronald Raegan had called on Prime Minister Menachem Begin to order an immediate cease-fire in the five-day-old offensive. The state-run Lebanese television said Palestinians stopped the Israeli tanks at Khalde, 1.2 km south of Beirut international airport.

TDP vs YSRCP in Andhra Pradesh over Class 10 results is a good face-off. It has pointers for other states, other parties. - Indian Express

On Thursday, TDP general secretary and son of former chief minister Chandrababu Naidu, Nara Lokesh Naidu, upped the ante and reached out to students and parents over Zoom, but was interrupted by ruling party (YSRCP) leaders, who accused the TDP of politicising school examinations and students.

The Class 10 examination results have triggered a war of words in Andhra Pradesh (AP) with the Opposition blaming the government for over two lakh students failing in the boards: The pass percentage of 67.26, coming in the wake of the pandemic, is the lowest in the last 20 years. On Thursday, TDP general secretary and son of former chief minister Chandrababu Naidu, Nara Lokesh Naidu, upped the ante and reached out to students and parents over Zoom, but was interrupted by ruling party (YSRCP) leaders, who accused the TDP of politicising school examinations and students. The TDP shut out the YSRCP voices and continued with the video conference. But the TDP initiative as well as the YSRCP challenge mark a good moment in public political discussion, in which issues such as school education usually take a backseat, if they figure at all. School education is far too serious a matter to be left to the bureaucracy; it ought to feature more in the agenda of political parties.

That the YSRCP, which has been sweeping elections at all levels in AP since the state was bifurcated in 2014, felt it necessary to intervene in the discussion over exam results, however, could also point to the traction the issue of education has traditionally had in Andhra society. In fact, education has been something of a possible gamechanger in elections in some of the southern states for some years now. If the socialisation of educational institutions polarised Kerala in the late 1950s, leading to a mass movement and the undemocratic dismissal of the CPI government in 1959, the AIADMK under MGR enhanced its pro-poor image and cemented its electoral appeal by introducing a mid-day meal scheme in Tamil Nadu in the early 1980s. In recent months, the DMK in Tamil Nadu has found in NEET, the entrance exam for medical and pre-medical courses, an issue to corner both the BJP and AIADMK. Elsewhere, Nitish Kumar in Bihar and Arvind Kejriwal in Delhi have cultivated constituencies by focusing on school students and their parents. Free schooling and bicycles for girl students have allowed Nitish Kumar to carve a niche in a polity defined primarily by caste whereas Kejriwal has made the work done by his government in schools a calling card as AAP seeks to expand beyond Delhi.

Hopefully, other political parties will take a cue from TDP, YSRCP, DMK, JD(U), AAP, and bring education to the forefront of political debate. It would be a necessary departure from the polarising talk on identity and religion that mostly dominates it.

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Japanese scientists have invented a robotic digit with living skin. The dystopias of science fiction writers are set to come home - Indian Express

Advocates for the machine-people argue that the more human-like they are, the more easily they can be useful as nurses, crossing guards, and for dangerous jobs

It is, in essence, just a set of mechanical joints, wrapped in collagen, human dermal fibroblasts and epidermal keratinocytes. Yet, the “slightly sweaty” finger developed by Japanese scientists — the first robotic digit with living skin — is a breakthrough that makes the utopias and dystopias of speculative fiction straddle the edge of prophecy. The small pink digit is a likely precursor to humanoid androids. Coupled with advances in AI and machine learning, it points to the question: What does the future hold for humanity’s relationship with the machine-people it is on the path to creating?

Advocates for the machine-people argue that the more human-like they are, the more easily they can be useful as nurses, crossing guards, and for dangerous jobs. Making machines seem sentient is particularly important to traverse the “uncanny valley”, especially to have them perform tasks that require human interaction. Simply put, the uncanny valley is the odd, unsettling feeling when machines and audio-visual simulations closely resemble humans. But there’s a reason that tools that look like us make humans uneasy.

Imagine an almost-sentient nurse. Just because its mind works through a code, does it not have personhood? Making it work without rights or payment will amount to slavery. Then there’s the justifiable fear that futurists have raised for the better part of a century — the machines, as they become more human-like (in their behaviour as much as their look) are likely to take over. When it comes to the ruthless exercise of power, they will learn from the best — their creators. Finally, those who believe this pessimism in based on the unfounded suspicion of technology would do well to remember that social media began with the promise of “connecting people” in the ether, and is now, sometimes, a threat to democracy. A sweaty finger could be much more dangerous than an algorithm.

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What India must do to protect its ties with the Islamic world - Indian Express

K M Seethi writes: New Delhi should not stop engaging the Gulf countries and strive to move beyond damage control

India’s diplomatic dilemma over the outrage from the Muslim countries — in the wake of remarks on the Prophet by two BJP leaders, one of whom has been expelled and the other suspended — is unprecedented, but not quite unexpected. This is the culmination of a series of incidents in the country in the last decade when Muslims were targeted and accused of fomenting violence and fanaticism — in the name of love jihad or food and dress. Hate speeches and mob lynching were other traits of this communal frenzy. Yet, the country has not witnessed widespread communal violence or anti-Muslim outrage in the recent past, save a few cases during the anti-CAA agitation.

What apparently infuriated the regimes in the Muslim world, this time, was the text and context of the anti-Islamic slur. Representatives of the BJP made disgraceful references to the Prophet, which the regimes in these Muslim countries, irrespective of the sects in Islam (as the Saudi and Iranian responses clearly indicated), could not cope with. The context was equally important: The comments came from two responsible ruling party officials in the country’s capital. That’s why they attracted attention. Yet, the agencies to monitor such sensitive issues remained calm until Qatar and Kuwait stepped in by summoning the Indian envoys to protest. In response to the outrage, the BJP acted swiftly by suspending Nupur Sharma and expelling Naveen Jindal, both Delhi-based party functionaries. Later, the party also issued a notification reminding its rank and file to be cautious in public remarks on religious issues.

Yaswant Sinha writes |India had won global respect. The Nupur Sharma row has dented it

Meanwhile, social media platforms in India and the Gulf are abuzz with disparaging trolls and there are sickening calls for the boycott of Indian goods. There are also calls on social media for the boycott of Arab goods and services in India. But everyone knows that these are impulsive responses. We have seen such responses in the context of tensions with China. There was never any “exodus” of Chinese goods from India though there was a high-voltage campaign for several months against these goods and some Chinese apps were banned.

Campaigners (including a few GCC regimes) demand that Prime Minister Narendra Modi should tender an apology for all that happened. But New Delhi’s stance is categorial and legitimate insofar as the Union government has nothing to do with such unsolicited comments. More importantly, the ruling party did what it was expected to do. Though belatedly, a case was also registered for hurting the sentiments of Muslims. The Gulf regimes have apparently understood the message behind these measures.

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Even as the South Block’s engagements with the Muslim countries continue — with damage-control exercises at different levels — there are countermoves to browbeat the Islamic world. Obviously, the ruling party is aware of the implications of this move for the upcoming elections in some states, besides the 2024 general elections. Hence, the party is likely to follow a carrot and stick policy on crucial political issues.

The Modi government knows that its foreign policy strategy — which includes strategic bargaining with regional and international actors — would fetch reasonable dividends. The response to its Ukraine war strategy has convinced South Block that it has adequate manoeuvrability in global affairs. Countries in West Asia and North Africa (WANA) region do not have a fixed position vis-à-vis India. Delhi has vibrant economic and strategic ties with almost all regimes in the region, irrespective of the brand of Islam or their relative ideological depth. That’s precisely the reason these countries are unwilling to join the Islamabad-led chorus or go beyond passing resolutions. India’s signing of a free trade agreement (FTA) with the UAE and the ongoing negotiations for a wider FTA with the GCC could be an eye-opener for the country’s detractors.

Also Read |Why PM Modi should talk of inter-faith harmony in Mann ki Baat

Much has been said and written about India’s energy dependence and trade interdependence across the countries in WANA. As much as 40 per cent of oil and an equal share of gas requirements are met through India’s strategic cooperation with the Gulf regimes. India and the WANA regimes know that there is a mutuality of interests in these transactions which cannot be substituted by any other segments of the world system. Equally important is the role of the more than eight million-strong Indian diaspora in the WANA region. The “Gulf remittance” is an important part of the Indian economy, as important as the Indian investment in the GCC and GCC investment in India.

India’s External Affairs Minister, S Jaishankar, has said that the Indian diaspora is “a unique living bridge between India and the world and should be valued accordingly”. He also said that “from time to time, their interests and well-being are a subject of our conversation.” New Delhi should not stop engaging the countries, especially the ones in the WANA region, that host a significant number of them. Therefore, South Block must go beyond a mere damage-control exercise.

The writer, an ICSSR Senior Fellow in Diaspora Studies, is the Director, Inter University Centre for Social Science Research and Extension (IUCSSRE), Mahatma Gandhi University, Kerala

What IPEF offers India: Opportunities, tough negotiations - Indian Express

Karthik Nachiappan writes: Indo-Pacific Economic Framework will generate fierce regulatory battles amongst bureaucrats and regulators in each country to ascertain which commitments advance and which hurt domestic interests

The official launch of the Biden Administration’s Indo-Pacific Economic Framework (IPEF), the US’s de facto foreign economic policy for Asia, has been lauded and welcomed. Countries like India that hew close to the United States have ostensibly breathed a sigh of relief after months of waiting for the administration to deliver a regional economic strategy to accompany its security focus. IPEF proponents, which now include the US and a dozen Asian countries, extol its purpose and potential, particularly given some doubts over whether the US administration could sustain its focus in Asia as war broke out in Europe. Besides Ukraine, the IPEF’s importance also owes to China’s patent economic footprint across Asia that could be checked by an alternative economic paradigm that emphasises openness, flexibility, and integration. Can the IPEF deliver on its promise? What drives its logic? And can the framework yield gains for the United States, India, and other signatories?

The IPEF is not a trade or investment agreement between 13 signatories. It’s a framework or a starting point for these Indo-Pacific countries to regulate trade and commerce across four key pillars: Digital economy, supply chains, clean energy, and governance. The IPEF’s focus on these pillars reflects the Biden administration’s desire to address constraints left by Covid-19 globally, namely inflation and supply chain shocks, and devise new standards to advance Biden’s domestic economic agenda, specifically climate change, tax evasion, worker rights, and retaining America’s technological primacy.

Also Read |Somit Dasgupta writes: Avoiding the coal scarcity trap

Globally, the IPEF signifies the first multilateral attempt to boost supply chain resilience to ease global inflationary pressures and mitigate effects of future disruptions, particularly key raw materials, critical minerals, and semiconductors. The IPEF also represents an effort to negotiate “high-standard” rules between like-minded countries to govern the digital economy, particularly data flows, propel climate mitigation through carbon removal purchasing commitments, and tilting power in the global economy toward workers through equitable global tax, anti-money laundering and anti-bribery provisions.

The IPEF, in a nutshell, internationalises Biden’s economic agenda to protect and prolong America’s economic leadership across Asia while chipping away at China’s ascendance through compelling signatories to negotiate domestic standards that comport with Washington’s vision. Biden wants to play the long game — introduce a 21st century economic arrangement that reinforces a domestic growth agenda embracing labour rights, productivity, and using market incentives and fiscal spending to reduce inequality, deter environmental damage, foster digital openness and connectivity, and expand tax compliance.

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Yet, the merits of Biden’s economic agenda to uphold American primacy could dent how other signatories regulate their domestic economies. IPEF commitments and standards that other signatories like India have to accede to, while negotiating broad commitments and internalising them domestically as standards, will likely facilitate US MNCs’ access to Asian economies at the expense of domestic preferences. The IPEF’s pillars — climate, digital, supply chains, and governance reforms — could clash with and supersede these countries’ policy preferences on such issues.

For instance, the US’ preference to allow free and open data flows under the digital economy pillar will constrict India’s ability to regulate data for domestic purposes. India’s long delayed data protection legislation favours government regulation and handling of data despite recent concessions made to share this burden with foreign and domestic firms. Should US officials push for a liberal data flows standard, it will create a difficult choice for Indian officials given their inability to settle prevailing data governance quandaries. Nor are Indian officials generally open to syncing their tax policies to mesh with the Biden push for a global tax standard amongst US partners to mitigate tax avoidance and evasion despite calls that the measure would generate additional financial resources for developing countries. Qualms aside, the IPEF remains attractive for India given its flexibility and open nature, allowing Delhi to demonstrate its political commitment to the United States to jointly shape the rules governing the Indo-Pacific’s economic future even as competitors lurk.

That said, tough policy choices, like the one on data and taxation, must be made by Indian officials while negotiating the terms of the IPEF accession without sufficient carrots from the US to draw in and sustain countries like India. The IPEF does not grant market access to the United States or include tariff reduction provisions, ostensibly due to the perils of trade politics in Washington. Instead, the IPEF empowers the Biden administration to shape rules across several critical pillars that will condition America’s economic engagement in the Indo-Pacific amid competing economic paradigms, notably the Chinese through the BRI and Europe through a bevy of digital policies and standards.

What’s clear is that the IPEF represents both a mirage and aspiration. Collectively, it represents a leap into an unknown that has to be negotiated amongst partners that share interests and some values. And individually, it will generate fierce regulatory battles amongst bureaucrats and regulators in each country to ascertain which commitments advance and which hurt domestic interests. Washington should hope that the conditions for the former trump the latter when the negotiations begin.

The writer is Research Fellow atthe Institute of South Asian Studies, National University of Singapore

Badminton legend Aparna Popat writes: Protecting young sportswomen from predators is our duty - Indian Express

Aparna Popat writes: Alleged sexual harassment incident involving young woman cyclist, national coach, highlights the problem: Girls enter sporting arenas with hope, a sense of fun – those destroying it must be held to account

We usually assume the sporting arena to be a safe space. We ask our kids to go out and play. For me, that’s about enjoyment, as much as winning. But when young athletes are sexually harassed, basic safety becomes a big concern. It’s just not fair that a person with experience can take the fun out of sport for them.

What happened in US gymnastics with Simone Biles and other top gymnasts shook me to the core. That it had been so obvious, and was reported but ignored, and that the US gymnasts are now suing the FBI is so unreal. They took on the US gymnastics establishment and went to the Senate. In other cases in America, athletes have taken on the bigwigs as well. That’s possible in systems such as the one in America. But in the final analysis, what gets affected is women’s sport. On the one hand, we are encouraging more girls to go out and become sportswomen. On the other hand, instances like the one involving the alleged harassment of a young cyclist by a national coach can make parents reconsider their daughters’ participation in sport.

Also Read |Coach threatened me, said he wants me as wife: Cyclist complains to SAI

What has changed now is that athletes have more of a voice. They are more aware and there’s greater conversation about women in sport. Avenues are now available — even if these are anonymous — to voice their concerns. Earlier, the process itself was a deterrent. But the underlying set of conditions that make harassment possible have not gone away: Trainees shift out of their homes when still young, there’s homesickness and performance pressure, extensive travel for training and competitions — all of this makes them vulnerable.

While we encourage girls to participate in sport, we must remember that their dignity is more important than everything else. We must educate them about what is okay and what isn’t. The next step is to empower them to speak out when they feel uncomfortable about anyone during training or on the field. Finally, they must be provided with adequate redressal mechanisms. Even then, a young woman might win the battle but lose the war. The offenders might have some level of action taken against them but it is our duty to ensure that in the long term, complaining does not affect the sportsperson’s career, and she can go on to fulfil her potential.

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What is unique to sport is the age group of the victims — they are dependent on those in the system and around them. They are almost always very young. How will they even know what is to be done? The power differential between them and those around them is key.

Those dealing with these young athletes need to be sensitised against casual body-shaming or saying inappropriate things. I understand that at times such gestures can be unintentional but that does not make them acceptable. Hence, those who are around the athletes too should be provided with adequate guidance and there should be a forum to resolve such issues when they arise. India is culturally different because we take pride in the relationship of reverence between the “guru” and “shishya”. We celebrate Guru Purnima, and are taught to be obedient. But that doesn’t give anyone the license to do as they feel. Research shows that the best coach-athlete combinations work when there’s mutual respect. Trust is all-important in creating champions. Once trust is taken away, and the bond based on mutual respect is broken, it harms performance. The dos and don’ts have to be strictly followed. You just can’t cross the line.

In my time as an athlete, we just heard stories, nothing was verified or validated. But after hearing about the recent cases, I would encourage all parents of athletes to have a conversation with their daughters and encourage them to speak up if they feel uncomfortable. My constant dilemma is whether this means drawing the child’s attention to something that’s not there right now. Should we let it be? Will we be taking the fun out of the game for her by sowing this seed of possible doubt in her head and colouring her perception, when all we want is for her to enjoy sports? It’s a hard conversation to have and a tough call to make.

Most of these instances happen during travel or at hostels or in camps where a parent isn’t even at hand to gauge what’s happening with the child. It breaks my heart that it’s our beloved sport that exposes girls to this danger. Of course, sexual harassment is a larger crisis. #MeToo, casting couch revelations at the highest levels of administration and among corporates – women (and men) today face this scourge everywhere.

Sport is, by and large, an unorganised sector. The punishment for such offenders needs to be discussed. Dismissal of the offending coach, physiotherapist or official is what the institutions usually do, even where more legal action is necessary. But legal costs can be debilitating in case the latter course of action is adopted. A speedy resolution of such cases is imperative.

What is most important is to remember that the victims are often minors. There must be clear repercussions for the guilty.

The writer is a former national badminton champion

Menaka Guruswamy writes: My grandmother’s house - Indian Express

Menaka Guruswamy writes: Summer vacations in Hyderabad connected me to my beloved grandmother, my family's journey, my roots. Those memories continue to shape who I am

Ammamma, my maternal grandmother, had a row of jasmine plants in her home in Hyderabad. One of my earliest memories is of sleeping outdoors with Ammamma in the summer. I would wake up in the early morning to the scent of jasmine flowers, “malle puvvu” as we call them in Telugu. The monsoon rains would arrive by early June, bringing down the temperature and leaving the jasmine flowers flecked with tiny water droplets. The beds would now be shifted back into the house and I would wake up and run outside to watch the aftereffects of the rain on the grass and plants outside, while Ammamma would be in her pantry warming up milk for me.

My grandmother lived by herself in this large old home, where she and my grandfather had raised their three children. All three eventually flew away to live in other towns and countries. But I would head back every year from a sizzling Delhi to spend the summer in Hyderabad. As an only child, with few cousins of my age in the city, my summer playmate was the old house itself. I spent my days making up games, cycling all over, and reading Tarzan comics. I would play tennis against the side of the house — I was Martina Navratilova winning Wimbledon, or John McEnroe throwing a tantrum with the referee. I always beat the wall and developed a good forehand in the process. In the evenings, we would sit on the veranda where she would make me do exercises to improve my handwriting. Eat neatly and write neatly, she insisted.

Also by Menaka Guruswammy |How to solve crimes better

My grandfather, a well-known criminal lawyer, built this large rambling home in the heart of the city, close to the high court. He had set up his office in one part and his home in the other — as many lawyers do. I never met him, for he passed away before I was born. My grandmother maintained her independence by living in her own home even after he passed away, refusing all requests from her loving children to move in with them.

At 1:00 pm exactly, I was expected to be at the table for lunch, where Ammamma and I sat at the same dining table that my mother ate at as a child. Black-and-white pictures of stern-looking ancestors watched over us. Over the summer, I would be fed a series of Hyderabadi delights: Shikampur — little kebabs made of keema, channa dal, coriander and dahi. Ammamma also made a fine yakhni pulao and that quintessential Hyderabadi dish, muttila kebab. Everything was served along with the ubiquitous rasam that went with all foods. Life couldn’t get better than this!

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One summer evening, her best friend Kamar Ahmed sent over a tray of badam ki jaali for me. Named for the old-style jaali architecture, badam ki jaali is an iconic Hyderabadi sweet. Ammamma and Kamar aunty had been best friends since primary school at Mehbubia Girls School on Abids Road. Kamar called Ammamma “Sharu”, short for Sharada. Their long friendship spanned girlhood, marriage, the birth of children and grandchildren. They watched as India became independent, Operation Polo brought Hyderabad into the Republic and the city eventually became the capital of the newly-reorganised State of Andhra Pradesh.

Ammamma knew that those we love came with their own surprises. She adored me — her granddaughter who preferred t-shirts and shorts to dresses. She took me for my preferred short haircuts and indulged my love for the Bruce Lee films that played at Amravati, the local theatre. Those summer vacations connected me to my beloved grandmother, my family’s history, my hometown, and my roots. Their teachings contributed to who I am.

My summers eventually changed. Ammamma’s home is now a commercial building on a busy street. Andhra Pradesh was divided into Telangana and Andhra Pradesh, and the high court where my grandfather practised law is now the Telangana High Court. In the summer of 1992, I went away to college to study law in Bangalore. Ammamma came to drop me off at the college hostel. She would die battling leukaemia in my second year of law school.

Ammamma’s passing represented the end of one phase of my life. A life which children have with their grandparents, where we learn of the journeys that they have made — of migration, of their friendships and the evolution of our country across generations. Those summer breaks of my childhood today have been replaced by the summer breaks of the courts, when we lawyers reflect on the year that passed and the court term ahead. We rest and recuperate. Importantly, today’s summers always remind me of those of my childhood — for we are our memories.

(The writer is a Senior Advocate at the Supreme Court)

Houses and fights: Oppn fought hard in RS polls. But BJP fights all polls hard - Times of India

The four hotly contested seats among the 16 Rajya Sabha spots up for grabs saw Congress in Rajasthan, Haryana and Karnataka and Shiv Sena in Maharashtra put up a determined fight against BJP. The en masse rejection of Congress Haryana legislators’ votes in the Rajya Sabha (RS) contest between media baron Subhash Chandra and lawyer RK Anand in 2016 and Ahmed Patel’s agonising struggle in 2017, when Gujarat Congress MLAs were lodged in a Karnataka resort, was a wake-up call for GOP. It realised to much dismay that stakes could suddenly become high even in otherwise placid RS polls.

BJP’s approach hasn’t changed. Since 2014, it has never rested on its comfortable numbers and keeps its rank-and-file in constant battle readiness – by fighting every election from panchayats to Parliament with utmost zeal. Except for TMC in Bengal, no opposition party matched up. Congress, SP and RJD learned this the hard way. But huffing and puffing to victory in RS is also a warning of the intensity and resourcefulness needed against BJP in larger elections. After all, RS electors are a small community of MLAs who can be clumsily shielded from poaching efforts by cutting off their communication modes. This is at best a vindication of political troubleshooting skills, not winnability quotient.

BJP has excelled in key departments like disseminating narratives, mobilising cadre and wooing voters. Winning direct elections to assemblies and Lok Sabha involving lakhs and crores of voters is the big ask. When RS polls’ dust settles down, recent debacles in UP, Uttarakhand, Manipur and Goa and the disarray in Gujarat and Himachal Pradesh should give the opposition much fodder for thought. There’s, perhaps, a lesson for BJP too: bearing down too hard on rivals can scale up the index of opposition unity, as in Maharashtra, and end up hurting it.



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Thailand, often referred to as the land of smiles, gave some of its citizens another reason to be happy – by being the first Asian nation to decriminalise marijuana for medical and industrial use. Although it is stopping short of examples set by Canada and Uruguay, which have decriminalised recreational marijuana as well. What Thailand’s move means is that farmers will be able to grow the plant while entrepreneurs can sell cannabis-infused food, drinks and cosmetics. There are two caveats – smoking pot in public will still be outlawed while possession and sale of cannabis extracts containing more than 0.2% of its psychoactive ingredient, tetrahydrocannabinol (THC), will not be allowed.

Still, Thailand’s part decriminalisation of marijuana is expected to fetch the industry as much as $435 million by 2026. That’s an economic high amid the Covid-induced downturn. India continues to stick to a grey area where only certain parts of the plant (bhang leaves) and certain uses (medical and scientific) are allowed. This system came about because India had given in to American pressure in the 1980s and banned all narcotic substances. But since then the US has reversed course and today 19 American states allow recreational marijuana.

Therefore, it makes little sense to keep marijuana in the proscribed list, clog up courts by prosecuting low quantities of possession, drive the trade underground and eschew legitimate revenue. Before the ban, India had a centuries-old tradition of marijuana use as part of its culture. Decriminalising marijuana fully makes legal sense, as well as an economic one.



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From the down-to-the-wire Rajya Sabha election on Friday — where, keeping with a trend seen in recent years, a largely anodyne event turned into a thrilling political fight due to the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)’s inclination to take no election for granted — there are four takeaways.

One, the Maha Vikas Aghadi continues to be a work in progress in Maharashtra, and despite the best efforts of Nationalist Congress Party chief Sharad Pawar and chief minister Uddhav Thackeray, kinks in coordination (cross voting, the cancellation of one vote) and the inability of two jailed ministers to vote hurt the coalition which has been battling choppy waters and the arrest of senior ministers on corruption charges. Counting in the state, and in Haryana, stretched late into the night after a slew of challenges by both sides but the loss of a seat it expected to win will hurt the unlikely alliance.

Two, for an enfeebled and centralised Congress, the election is yet another lesson in the importance of strong regional leaders. That the party managed to pull through in Rajasthan is almost solely due to Ashok Gehlot, who led the fight from the front. For a party that has been haemorrhaging state-level leaders for a decade, the results should be an opportunity to pause its protracted leadership crisis and focus on empowering grassroots leaders instead. Three, the fight in Karnataka indicates that politics continues to be fluid in the state. With elections due next year and the Janata Dal (Secular) in some trouble — its candidate received the lowest votes for the fourth Upper House seat from the state — it appears that the state election will see a keen contest between the incumbent BJP and the Congress.

But as entertaining as the contests in these four states were, they cannot distract from the bigger picture: That, at the end of the day, the BJP has bolstered its hold on national politics and created a smooth glide path for any legislative agenda. The Opposition may have done well to hold on in some states, but its position on the ground has not been strengthened (indeed, it has only managed to win what it should have got automatically due to its assembly strengths and has suffered two embarrassing defeats), and its parliamentary challenge is bound to be even weaker between now and 2024. With the largest arsenal of members in the Upper House in a generation, the BJP is set to, once again, change the contours of Indian politics. That is the fourth, and most important, takeaway from the polls.

Two reads on the crucial India-China relationship - Hindustan Times
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It’s a paradox that China is by far our most powerful neighbour. Yet, we know little and understand even less of how this country views us. Two excellent books, published in the last 12 months, have done a lot to open our eyes. What they reveal is, arguably, discomforting but clearly worthy of attention. Yet, I wonder if these books will get the attention they deserve?

Of the two, the first was Kanti Bajpai’s India versus China: Why They are Not Friends. He’s the Wilmar professor of Asian Studies at Singapore’s National University. It was followed by Shyam Saran’s How China Sees India: The Authoritative Account of the India-China Relationship. He’s an illustrious former foreign secretary. The two make similar points but also different and contrasting ones.

Saran starts with how ignorant we are of China. “India and China have for centuries been strangers to one another… how little we really know about a country which is now a contiguous neighbour, a powerful adversary and a challenge which manifests itself in multiple dimensions.” More starkly, Bajpai’s introduction points out how complicated the relationship is: “India-China relations are darker and more complex than most observers appreciate or acknowledge.”

Saran says: “India is a retreating image in China’s rear-view mirror”. An evocative phrase, which not only suggests India is behind, but falling further and further away. He adds, “China would like to see India slotted into a subordinate role in an Asia dominated by itself.”

Bajpai agrees. “Clearly, China does not see India as a fellow great power” and, therefore, “from a position of strength, China does not see the need to accommodate India... My sense is that mutual perceptions and the power asymmetry may be the most serious problems between the two countries.”

Despite how different the relationship was till 1000 AD, when India’s influence was greater, Saran’s book explains how China’s attitude has changed. “China look(s) upon India as a ‘slave nation’ ruled by a foreign power during the British colonial period.” Worse, “in the various British military assaults against China in the nineteenth century it was Indian soldiers who served as shock troops for the British. It was Indian opium traders who flaunted their wealth in the new urban centres of Shanghai and Hong Kong.” Much of China’s negativity, Saran concludes, flows from this.

Bajpai makes a more disturbing point. In the one area where we believe we’re ahead, China is actually the dominant country. “As a soft power, contrary to the generally held view, China betters India.” He adds this “looks set to persist for a long time.”

Saran explains how China’s view of itself as the Middle Kingdom at the centre of the world is “imagined history” but, post-1962, has expanded to include India as part of the periphery that owes obeisance to Beijing. He tells me the ease with which China defeated India in 1962 and the humiliation that followed has convinced China that India is not the power it hopes or, at times, claims to be.

This is a point Bajpai picks up. China is nearly a $15 trillion economy. India is around $3 trillion. Bajpai concludes “China’s comprehensive national power is about seven times that of India.” The gap, he tells me, is likely to get wider.

“India will need a near-civilisational change”, Bajpai adds, if it’s going to catch up. He doesn’t believe that’s likely. And “until India substantially closes the power gap there’s little prospect of a lasting rapprochement.”

Saran’s concern is about India’s present direction under Prime Minister Narendra Modi: “The rise of narrow nationalism, the deliberate stoking of communal discord… devalue the very assets which make India distinctive… I believe that India has a better chance to meet the Chinese challenge by remaining committed to the values enshrined in its Constitution.”

I found both books fascinating. They’re easy to read. Every page is rewarding. When I finished I felt I understood China well. This illusion is proof they made a huge impact.

Karan Thapar is the author of Devil’s Advocate: The Untold Story 

The views expressed are personal

What Rajya Sabha polls tell us about Indian politics - Hindustan Times
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The outcome of the recent round of elections for 57 Rajya Sabha seats offers significant political insights into the lay of the land in India’s states and at the Centre, and highlights the institutional paradoxes at the heart of India’s bicameral parliamentary system.

Take the political story first and four features are apparent.

The first is a confirmation of what has been known since 2014. The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) fights to win; it fights even when the existing arithmetic would suggest restraint may be better than valour; its aggressive politics exposes the underlying contradictions within opposing ranks and puts other parties on the defensive; and it is willing to use every political and institutional tool at its disposal to achieve this victory. This playbook helped the party get a third candidate elected in both Maharashtra and Karnataka (where it had enough legislators for two seats when the contest started), and enabled the victory of an independent candidate in Haryana. It sent out yet another message of BJP’s political dominance and will continue to give the party not just a numerical but also a psychological edge in the Upper House.

Two, non-BJP forces struggled when it came to the seats on the margin. The Shiv Sena-Congress-Nationalist Congress Party alliance in Maharashtra appears stable, but there is enough room in the state for the BJP to push back. The Congress in Haryana has a problem of abundance at the top (even as its footprint on the ground diminishes), and the inability of all of its senior state level leaders to get together has cost the party yet again. In Karnataka, the gulf between the Congress and Janata Dal (Secular) did not just help the BJP in this round, but will give the party an advantage as the state heads to polls next year despite the clear governance deficits of the current state administration headed by it.

Three, Rajasthan offered a lesson to the non-BJP end of the political spectrum on how to take on the national hegemon. And once again — like Ahmed Patel had shown in the Rajya Sabha elections in Gujarat in 2017 — it was the Congress’s old guard that delivered. A rooted and aggressive chief minister (Ashok Gehlot), who micromanaged every legislator and monitored voting on a minute to minute basis, was able to secure the election of the third Congress candidate and foil the BJP’s plans of getting an independent elected. This was also the only state where the gulf within the BJP — a party that otherwise is able to enforce discipline — once again hurt its political ambitions. But while the election has implications for the internal power struggles underway in both the Congress and the BJP in the run-up to the 2023 assembly polls, any larger conclusions from this episode about how the election will pan out will be premature.

And finally, the BJP will continue to have an edge in pushing through its legislative agenda in the Rajya Sabha, along with its visible and invisible friends (regional parties which claim to oppose the BJP but mysteriously end up backing it on every crucial vote). It will also give the party a cushion for the presidential elections in July. Remember, this was not a given when the party lost a string of state assemblies or saw a reduced presence in these assemblies in the last few years.

But beyond the immediate, it is useful to examine the institutional story.

When the drafters of the Constitution envisaged the Rajya Sabha, there were two underlying impulses. The first was the creation of a House that would be immune to the day to day popular pressures that are, by design, at the heart of the directly elected Lok Sabha. The Rajya Sabha — because of the indirectly elected nature of the chamber — was meant to insulate the lawmaking process from immediate party-political imperatives and act as a Council of Elders. The second was ensuring that India’s states had a voice in the national legislature. The constitutional design itself was tilted in favour of the Centre in terms of power-sharing. But the legislative check on the central executive — which drew its strength from the Lok Sabha — would come from the Council of States — as members drew their presence and strength from the balance of power in states.

On both counts, the recent elections have reinforced structural infirmities that have deepened over the years. The Rajya Sabha polls are not immune to immediate political imperatives — but, in fact, are often driven by them. The selection of candidates is not driven by an eye on who would be able to contribute most effectively as a lawmaker, but by a political party’s patronage requirements and question of winnability. And there is a clear tension between the efforts of parties to institute discipline in order to expand their presence in the Upper House, and the role of the individual agency of the legislators who often seek to use the power of their vote to send a message to their parties, extract rent from candidates in the fray, or open the doors to defect. All of this means that there is little basis to expect that the Rajya Sabha can play an effective countervailing role as a guardian, on the basis of principles.

And while the balance of power in state legislatures is key to the election, this does not mean that the voices that are heard in the Rajya Sabha are a true reflection of the priorities of the states. They are a reflection of the respective party’s political agenda in both the state and at the Centre at any given point. The stance of a Rajya Sabha member is dictated by the relationship that the member’s party has with the ruling party at the Centre. This is not good or bad in itself, but it does mean that those who expect the Upper House to be a true Council of States will continue to be disappointed.

Amid the political noise that the Rajya Sabha elections have generated, the larger institutional story does not change. India’s Upper House is struggling to be either a Council of Elders which qualitatively transforms the process of lawmaking and deliberation for the better, and it is struggling to act as a Council of States which can effectively intervene on the most significant issues that affect their states and Indian federalism in general. With 57 members either newly elected or returning to the House, the Rajya Sabha may wish to reflect on how to make the institution more effective in meeting the original constitutional vision.

letters@hindustantimes.com

The costs and liability of celebrity endorsements - Hindustan Times
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Queen Victoria married Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha on February 10, 1840. She chose to wear a resplendent white satin gown to her wedding, thus becoming the first woman of prominence to wear white to the event.

It is hard to believe, but every woman who has chosen to wear white to her wedding since 1840, has taken a leaf, mostly unconsciously, out of Queen Victoria’s stylebook. Her singular act, 182 years ago, has created and sustained a global wedding gown industry worth billions of dollars every year. Wouldn’t we, shouldn’t we credit, and hold accountable, the once Empress of India for this mammoth, enduring success?

For all of recorded history, human beings have been enraptured by the lives and lifestyles of those above them in the social hierarchy. They believe, quite reasonably, that adopting the personal habits or accoutrements of people they venerate, might bestow some of these celebrities’ ineffable charm upon them. It is no wonder, therefore, that when large-scale product promotion became formalised into advertising, in the 19th century, celebrity endorsement was among the earliest approaches to find widespread acceptance.

Other tropes and conceits come and go in the world of advertising, but celebrity endorsement has remained a reliable mainstay for brands in every conceivable category and geo-demographic segment. It was in the fitness of things, then, that the lucrative revenues which celebrities earn from commercial endorsements came with some obligations. Obligations, above all, to those consumers who would be affected favourably by the messenger, even more than the message, and procure the product endorsed.

Advertising regulation, both statutory and self-administered, has directly addressed the numerous issues surrounding celebrity endorsement for several decades now. The US Federal Trade Commission policy on celebrity endorsement makes it clear that “endorsements must reflect the honest opinions, findings, beliefs, or experience of the endorser”. In a similar vein, the United Kingdom’s Advertising Standards Authority’s advice to celebrities makes it clear that, inter alia, “endorsements must be genuine” and “claims must be accurate”.

India notified new guidelines applicable to celebrity endorsers on Friday, in continuation of rules framed under the Consumer Protection Act 2019. The new guidelines don’t exactly break new ground, to be sure. Celebrities are made directly liable for carrying out “specific due diligence” before they spout homilies about brands. And, should they fail to do so, they may face fines of up to 10 lakhs for a first offence, and 50 lakhs and simple imprisonment of up to five years for subsequent offences. Do these numbers sound like a lot to you? Even the 100th most valuable celebrity endorser now probably charges more than 1 crore per year to promote a brand. The least paid in the top 10 would still pull north of 5 crore every year.

Is this policy – of making it statutorily incumbent upon celebrities to do their homework before rushing to encash their popularity – fair and reasonable? In the immediate post-World War II period, Carl Hovland, a professor of psychology at Yale University, defined source credibility as “a communicator’s positive characteristics that affect the receiver’s acceptance of a message”.

This definition has played a critical role in developing “propaganda” models since. To the credit of Hovland, his research insights have been used, consciously or unconsciously (mostly the latter) by millions of brand communicators and produced billions, or rather trillions, of dollars in consumer spending. Endorsements often produce a much larger income than the income directly attributable to a particular celebrity’s primary vocation. Cricket stars in India began earning crores from endorsements a decade or two before their direct incomes from the sport were anywhere close.

Advertisers pay nothing out of a generosity of spirit. Return on marketing investments is closely monitored in every business. Big ticket endorsers are able to sustain their commercial prices only because their economic worth to the brands is a very attractive multiple of what they charge. In the current era, when millions of newly minted influencers have, in some sense, democratised the previously exclusive enclaves, the task of ensuring that consumers are not duped by misleading claims and untruthful representations is more urgent than ever.

Can a statutory regulator actually do this job: Of keeping a close, broad spectrum watch on the goings on in the world of celebrity (or influencer) endorsement, effectively and efficiently?

The good news is, it is not alone. The Advertising Standards Council of India put in place its own guidelines for celebrities a few years ago. This was followed up, logically, by guidelines for the nouveau celebrities, aka influencers. The council handles a raft of complaints on these issues every month, which mirrors the buoyancy celebrity endorsement continues to exhibit. Celebrities should stop complaining and start showing responsibility towards those fans and followers, who unquestioningly follow wherever their role models lead.

Paritosh Joshi is a media professional 

The views expressed are personal

Women at the helm of climate adaptation efforts - Hindustan Times
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A major factor in climate adaptation is sustainable habitat, which greatly affects women as most of them spend the greater part of the day in their homes. But how much say do they have in the construction and upkeep of their homes? The Centre for Science and Environment (CSE), through investigations in the tribal belts of West Bengal and Odisha, has come up with information on how women form the core of rural communities and lead the struggle for climate adaptation. In most of these villages, the construction and upkeep of homes are done largely by women. These locations are dominated by houses made of thatch, bamboo, and mud. From sourcing materials to thatching, walling, and plastering, women take the lead, leaving only roofing to men.

Women prepare a mix of red and black soil with water to form a sticky clay called “daub”. This daub is applied to an interwoven frame of wooden strips forming the wall panel. It is through these techniques that these communities withstand the harsh, hot, and humid climate of the region.

Climate-sensitive materials and housing play a key role in creating a thermally-comfortable living environment. Excess exposure to heat is directly proportional to the frequency and number of health issues. Women recognise the importance of their homes made with locally sourced materials. “Mitti ghar keeps us warm during the winter and cool during the summer” says Radhika, a resident of Semiliguda of Koraput district in Odisha. This is echoed across different locations in Odisha and West Bengal. The World Health Organization housing and health guidelines have compiled several studies that point to the health outcomes of excessive indoor heat — sleep disorders, blood pressure, respiratory, and cardiovascular disease, mental health issues, and even complications in pregnancy.

Traditionally prevalent climate-appropriate housing has economic benefits as well. Locally sourced natural materials and negligible requirement of hired labour bring down the cost of building such houses. Such housing also cuts down the operational cost by eliminating the need to buy appliances, such as fans, coolers, and refrigerators.

Climate-appropriate housing cultivates ownership and a sense of belonging among the womenfolk of the tribal belts of Odisha and West Bengal. These houses are plastered with mud and natural colours by the women annually. This reinforces a sense of identity among them. “But, we can see the beginning of a transition from mud houses to cement and clay brick houses in these regions, which is fuelled by the financial support being extended under the government housing schemes for a pucca ghar,” says Mitashi Singh, programme manager, Sustainable Habitat Programme, CSE.

Sourcing locally seems to be the answer to access and affordability, even though women have to travel some distances to source different types of soil and wood. “Climate-appropriate housing is crucial for India to meet its thermal comfort goals under the India Cooling Action Plan 2019,” says Rajneesh Sareen, programme director, Sustainable Habitat Programme, CSE. Women must be skilled in using new materials and building techniques that are more resilient. Schemes like Pradhan Mantri Awas Yojana (Grameen) or Deen Dayal Upadhyay Grameen Kaushal Yojana must internalise this.

This way, the women will not lose their autonomy and can play a leading role in the village community. They will gain an alternative skill and livelihood, while contributing to India’s climate goals.

lalita.panicker@hindustantimes.com

The views expressed are personal

Farrukh Dhondy | Why royalty in Britain works: Few in favour of a republic… - Deccan Chronicle

Aurangzeb
Wove a tangled web,
Saying “naming roads after me
Is tantamount to idolatry!”

Shivaji Maharaj
Didn’t build the Taj --
He is better known for
Resisting tyranny and more!

 

So, give me a name
Not related to fame
Like “Bachchoo” -- doggerel merchant unknown
Others have “followers”, he’s on his own!

From The Love Song of Shikant Singh Tr, by Bachchoo

Getting rid of the monarchy has throughout history been, to say the least, a messy business. I suppose the public stabbing of Julius by honourable noblemen was an attempt to stop him from declaring himself a dictatorial monarch. His sometime pal Brutus says he was ambitious and his loyal apostle Mark Anthony acknowledged that that was a grievous fault. Nevertheless, the Empire was soon revived and Julius’s successors mounted imperial thrones.

 

Something similar happened when the rebel Oliver Cromwell waged a war against Charles Stuart, defeated, captured and beheaded him. He declared the first modern republic in Europe, only to have the monarchy restored by public will soon after.

Sorry, the monarchy was not restored -- royalty was. And that royalty persists to this day with Queen Elizabeth II celebrating her platinum anniversary -- 70 years on the throne – last week.

This year, her ninety-sixth, she was incapacitated when it came to reading out what is known as the “Queen’s Speech”. Her son Charles, Prince of Wales, stood in for her and read what is still known as her speech, though she has nothing to do with it. It’s entirely formulated by the Prime Minister, in this instance BoJo and his Uncle Tom’s Cabinet. Monarchy? No! gentle-hand-waving royalty? Yes!

 

Historical records demonstrate this slow surrender of power and authority by the monarchy and its evolutionary path to being royalty. Queen Victoria didn’t oversee the acquisition of the Indian empire though she was crowned empress of it. Subsequently, Edward VIII, who abdicated, and his brother George VI had nothing to do with Neville Chamberlain’s appeasement or Winston Churchill’s war. They watched, though we now know that Edward (by then Duke of Windsor) actually advised the Nazis to bomb London in order to end the war. Monarchy? No! Treachery and treason? Yes!

 

Edward VIII got rid of himself. Czar Nicholas II of Russia and his family didn’t. The Bolsheviks did.

Was Stalin a revived Czar? And Vladimir Putin?

And so, to the Shahs of Iran: Reza I deposed by the popular rising of Mossadegh and, when that republic was subverted by the CIA and the UK, Reza II was overthrown by Ayatollah Khomeini, though he read the writing on the mosque wall and fled to the United States.

France uniquely abolished its monarchy with the execution of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette and, though Napoleon Buonaparte restored it in all but name, it ended as a republic after Napoleon III’s exile.

 

In the last week, for three officially designated days, Britain celebrated the Queen’s Platinum Jubilee. (Incidentally, the word is bandied about in Bollywood as marking the survival of a film in the theatres for three or six months, the enthusiastic pronouncement being: “kya kamaal, dzooblee ho gayi”!) It was a grand occasion with street parties in every city and crowds of over 20,000 on the roads around Buckingham Palace outside which there was a grand stage on which the stars of past years, including Diana Ross of the Supremes, performed, backed by a full orchestra, with a light show over the façade of the palace and holograms in the sky as fascinating as any technical display to date.

 

Yes, the royal family is dysfunctional -- divorces galore, adultery, paedophilia, complaints of racist remarks from one prince’s mixed-race wife, rivalries between the brothers…

And yes, the royal family is subsidised by the taxpayer. They do cut ribbons on occasion, lend their names to good causes and worthy and necessary charities and have full schedules of appearances. Perhaps because of this, or perhaps because Britain is and always has been a society with a tribal subconscious or tribal yearnings, there is no significant republican movement and, despite Cromwell’s revolution and reform, never has been.

 

It’s necessary to note another significant occurrence in the UK’s body politic over the last week. Over 54 Tory Members of Parliament, the minimum number required, sent in letters to the party’s designated officials asking for Boris Johnson to resign the prime ministership.

This triggered on Monday June 6 a vote of confidence in which 148 Tory MPs voted to oust BoJo while 211 voted to keep him in office. Bojo thus survives for now, but it’s still bad news. The “Bojexit” voters will persist and, if the precedent of Margaret Thatcher, John Major and Theresa May is anything to go by, they will succeed. Then BoJo will be, as they say, toast -- badly burnt.

 

And just for some speculative entertainment, let’s imagine that there was a powerful republican movement in the face of which the Queen, assessing that her successors would be poor replacements for herself, declared herself to be the last reigning monarch of Britain and herself constitutionally abolished the monarchy. In its place the Lords and the Commons, by a majority vote, would appoint a President of the UK, a titular head. Gentle reader, consider that 211 Tory MPs voted for Boris. Also, that he has sent very many of his “friends” (read “donors of money to the party and to himself”) to the Lords.

 

Gentle reader, I remain, for now, a non-republican.

...


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Last month came news of tomato flu in Kerala and monkeypox flu and newer variants of Covid in other parts of the world. Then came a text message on my phone saying that it was time for me to take my booster dose for Covid, that I should report to the nearest vaccine centre on such-and-such a date to take it. I’d heard much about the booster dose, both good and bad, and I looked it up on the Internet. That provided a flood of information so full of contradictions that it gave me a headache, and I thought maybe a little good scotch — purely medicinal, of course — would help me deal with it.

That evening, just as I was uncorking the bottle, the bell rang, and there on the doorstep stood my friend Murthy, with his uncanny knack of dropping in just in time to demolish my supplies of scotch. I asked him in, sat him down, and poured him a large slug while my wife busied herself in the kitchen with samosas.

 

When his hunger and thirst had been assuaged, I thought it was time to ask him whether he thought I should take the booster dose, what with the new pox and the flu and the new strains of Covid. “Not sure the booster’s any good?” he asked. “Most people find themselves confused.”

“Yes!” I said. “You get so much conflicting information on the Internet. There are people who say you shouldn’t take the booster, and others that say you should, and they offer all kinds of reasons that I don’t understand. Then there are reports that some vaccines are 70 per cent effective, others that the same vaccines are 10 per cent effective… I don’t know what to think! Maybe you…”

 

He smiled kindly at me as if I were a differently-mentally-abled five-year-old. “I don’t know how I can help,” he said.

“You could tell me whether you’ve had your booster,” I said.

“I won’t,” he said. “You should decide independently, not going by whether I’ve taken the shot. You shouldn’t be influenced by anyone else’s decision.”

“But I trust your judgment!” I said. That was true, in a way. I intended to do exactly the opposite of what he’d done, but there was no need to tell him that.

 

“Right!” he said. “That’s why I won’t tell you. When you’re going to invest in the stock market or bet on a cricket match you should go by what you know and not by what someone else has decided to do.”

“But this isn’t a gamble!” I said.

“Of course it is!” he replied. “Every decision is a gamble.”

“All right!” I said. “Then tell me how you decided.”

“Sure,” he said. “I read up on Covid variants, and something about the names struck me. They’re named with Greek letters, alpha and beta and gamma and delta and mu and omicron. A series, if you see what I mean. Then I started wondering about the basis of the differences between these series of variants.

 

What was the principal difference between, say, the omicron series and the delta series? So I looked it up.”

“And what did you find?” I asked.

“Omicron spreads faster than delta but is less likely to do serious damage,” he replied.

He looked at me expectantly, and I obliged. “What else did you find?” I asked.
“So I looked at all the variants and found that classification could be based on lots of things. It could depend on severity, for instance, or the region where it spread. It could be based on what they call the spike protein, which enables it to get into a cell into your body, or how easily it spreads, or even the sets of common symptoms.”

 

“Then it struck me that all these variants might have been named like cars. Like you have BMW’s 3 series and 5 series and 7 series… But then that seemed strange because car manufacturers name their series based on the kinds of clients they attract. So BMW’s 5 series is more expensive than their 3 series, and attracts a buyer with different concerns. You see what I mean?”

“About car manufacturers, yes,” I said, “but what’s that got to do with the strains of Covid-19?”

“What started me thinking about it differently,” he replied, “was when they named one of the variants a ‘stealth’ variant. When do you talk of stealth?”

 

“In war, and hunting,” I said.

“Exactly!” He smiled. “So then I went back to how they named the variants, and then I realised it was exactly like car manufacturers.”

“What do you mean?” I asked. “I still don’t get it.”

“Imagine how you buy a BMW. You go to the dealer and tell him what you want, and how much you intend to spend, and, based on all that, they suggest a model.

If you want to drive yourself, for instance, they’ll probably suggest a different model from the one they’d suggest if you intend to keep a chauffeur. Right?”
“Right,” I said, “but what does buying a BMW have to do with coronavirus variants?”

 

“Oh, everything!” he said. “Whoever developed it made it to sell. To countries, or very rich organisations. So you can choose the variant you buy from them depending on whom you want to damage and how much. That’s bio-warfare.”

That vision of breathtaking evil left me speechless. When I recovered, I asked, “But what does this have to do with the booster shot?”

“Everything!” he said. He finished his drink and got up to leave. “Take the booster! If the bloody virus is manmade, it makes sense to develop a vaccine for it, too, don’t you think?”

 

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Ret Samadhi, Geetanjali Shree’s remarkable work of fiction, has won the International Booker Prize this year. This prize is given to a work in any global language, provided it has been translated into English and published in the UK. Daisy Rockwell, an American, translated this monumental work, and found a publisher in the UK. Hence it qualified for consideration, and became the first book in Hindi to win this prestigious prize.  

Naturally, this is a matter of great pride. But there are troubling questions that must be confronted. Geetanjali, whom I know personally, is not new on the Hindi writing canvas. She has published four novels and two collections of short stories earlier, apart from a magisterial book on Munshi Premchand. Within Hindi literary circles she has won recognition and acclaim. But why did she become a literary superstar only when she won a foreign award?  

 

This is an important — and uncomfortable — question. Somehow, foreign recognition is very important to us Indians. When the question of giving titles to loyal Indians was being discussed in the British Parliament in 1876, British PM Disraeli argued that Indians attach enormous value to such distinctions. The Booker, of course, carries considerable prestige, but that prestige is magnified a hundred times in India. Rabindranath Tagore deservedly won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1913, but his literary genius was fully accepted in India only after that. Ravi Shankar became a household name only after his association with the Beatles. Satyajit Ray became a legend for his own countrymen only after his films were hailed abroad.

 

Only when Arvind Adiga won the Booker Prize in 2008 for his novel The White Tiger — and received the prize in full British attire of a tuxedo and bowtie — did Indians recognise him as a literary hero.  Something similar happened with the film Slumdog Millionaire.  When the film won the BAFTA award in Britain for best film, it had not even been officially released in India. Even though most Indians had not seen the film, and could not, therefore, judge it on merit, the media was euphoric at this achievement. After the film won the Oscar in February 2009, all sense of proportion was lost. We went hysterical. Banner headlines announced the great victory for a film, which was, incidentally, made by a British film director.

 

For most Indians, winning the Booker is like being recognised where it matters, of being vindicated in the right quarters, of having glamorously arrived. But what about the departure lounge left behind? A leading Indian publisher pointed out in an interview that if an author gets the prestigious Sahitya Akademi Award in India, it makes a difference in sales of perhaps ten copies! In the case of the Crossword Prize, or the Jnanapith Award, there may be an additional sale of 1,000 copies. But with the Booker sales go up exponentially — anything from 50,000 to 150,000 copies. Booker winning novels leap out of shelves in India, bought by customers eager to read what the English have recognised.

 

Geetanjali’s Ret Samadhi was published in India by Rajkamal Publications in 2018. I spoke to Ashok Maheshwari who runs Rajkamal. He confirmed to me that until the Booker, the book trudged along fairly listlessly, selling far below its potential, and that Geetanjali herself was frustrated at the unremarkable response.  Why should this be so?  After all, technically, India is the third largest book market in the world. Hindi has a great lineage, and numerically at least, a very large market. Geetanjali’s first novel, Mai, was shortlisted for the Crossword Book Award in India, and translated in 2017 into English by an Indian. But none of this made her a “celebrity” author, widely read and admired by Indians, until she won the International Booker in the UK.  

 

All this should make us seriously think. We are legatees of a great civilisation, where literature flourished when in most parts of the world people were still learning to speak. Why then is there such little literary discussion, reviews, appreciation and readership of our own authors in our own country? Do we really have to wait for an American, Daisy Rockwell — and she has, indeed, done an excellent translation — to bring our own books to our own readers? In a multilingual country where some 80,000 new titles — some of them showing great talent — are published in 24 different languages every year, why are good translations so rare? There is nothing wrong in foreign recognition, but that cannot be the only reason to awaken Indians to their own talent.  

 

In particular, there needs to be much more of good translations in India. In the absence of this, works of great merit in our many languages remain limited to their specific linguistic silos, and are deprived of a wider readership and appreciation, including abroad. I have myself translated four volumes of Gulzar Saheb’s poetry into English, which have been published by Penguin. I have also rendered in English the poetry of Kaifi Azmi, Atal Bihari Vajpayee, and Ghalib, also for Penguin. Apart from English, there is a dire need to translate books from one Indian language to another. In fact, the government should seriously consider setting up an institute of excellence only to encourage translations. Geetanjali, who would otherwise have been only read in Hindi, was lucky to get a Daisy Rockwell. We need more Daisy Rockwells of our own.

 

Incidentally, the deafening silence from the BJP to Geetanjali’s milestone achievement is indicative of a small-mindedness that is depressing. The BJP otherwise portrays itself as a champion of Hindi. But when a Hindi novel gets the International Booker for the first time, they are shy of felicitating the author apparently because in some of her books she has — rightly — been critical of communal divisiveness. Our PM, who tweets at a drop of a hat, lost his voice.
I am proud and very happy for Geetanjali. She fully deserves this belated recognition. But I would have been even happier if her creativity was more befittingly recognised in her own country before the Booker Prize. 

 

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Congress president Sonia Gandhi has been house-bound for over a week after she tested positive for Covid. With plenty of time on her hands and unable to step out, the Congress chief used this period during her recuperation to watch the well-known and popular Danish series Borgen. The television drama must have struck a chord with Sonia Gandhi as it follows the journey of a woman politician whose party wins a surprise victory, enabling her to stake claim to the Prime Minister’s post. The gripping series shows the backroom negotiations the female protagonist undertakes with potential allies, how she manages the different political parties in the government and the push for key policies. But what perhaps should inspire Sonia Gandhi, whose party is currently going through a particularly lean patch, is how the fictional Danish Prime Minister takes on powerful men and manages to bounce back despite a string of setbacks. Clearly, the series holds out hope for a down-and-out Sonia Gandhi that all is not lost yet and that a better tomorrow is not beyond reach.

The decision to deny a Rajya Sabha seat to Mukhtar Abbas Naqvi created quite a stir since he is the only Muslim minister in the Narendra Modi government. Though it initially appeared that Mr Naqvi’s political future was in a freefall, the outrage triggered in the Arab world over Bharatiya Janata Party spokesperson Nupur Sharma’s remarks about the Prophet could help rehabilitate Mr Naqvi.

 

This episode has opened up prospects of a comeback for Nr Naqvi as the Modi government is under pressure to demonstrate that it does not discriminate against minorities and is ready to accommodate them in key positions.

Consequently, there is a buzz that Mr Naqvi could be the BJP’s choice for the vice-president’s post in next month’s election. Or else he could be appointed governor, failing which Mr Naqvi could find himself back in the Rajya Sabha as a nominated member. But the manner in which his name is being bandied around, he could even end up losing, given Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s penchant for springing surprises.

 

Ghulam Nabi Azad, a leading member of the group of 23 Congress leaders (G-23), pressing for an organisational overhaul of the party, appears to have been put on notice by the leadership. Mr Azad’s two closest aides were recently issued show cause notices on some flimsy grounds after they did not turn up for the state-level Chintan Shivir held recently in Jammu. This move has led to confusion and uncertainty among Mr Azad’s supporters in Jammu and Kashmir.

They had been pressing Mr Azad to leave the Congress and float his own political outfit but the senior leader had held off in the hope that party president Sonia Gandhi would renominate him to the Rajya Sabha. Now that he has failed to make the cut, Mr Azad has to weigh his options. The formation of a regional political party is very much on the table but Mr Azad is hesitant to take the plunge as word is out in his home state that he is being backed by the Bharatiya Janata Party, which has the potential of compromising his Muslim support base. Mr Azad obviously has a tough choice to make.

 

Is Bahujan Samaj Party leader Mayawati making overtures to Azam Khan, the high-profile and controversial Samajwadi Party legislator? And is Samajwadi Party chief Akhilesh Yadav’s estranged uncle Shivpal Yadav mediating between the two sides? This is currently the talk in Uttar Pradesh’s political circles. It is well known that Azam Khan has serious differences with Akhilesh Yadav leading to constant chatter that the all-powerful politician from Rampur is exploring other options. At the same time, Mayawati is looking afresh at reaching out to the Muslims instead of focusing all her attention on wooing Brahmins. Shivpal Yadav has also been sulking since he was virtually ignored by his nephew after the assembly polls. Finding themselves on the same side, Azam Khan and Shivpal Yadav are said to be working in tandem to derail the Samajwadi Party chief. It is precisely for this reason that Akhilesh Yadav took care to call on Azam Khan in Delhi recently and declared Mr Khan’s close aide Asim Raja as the party’s candidate for the coming Lok Sabha by-election from Rampur.

 

There appears to be no end to the tussle between Madhya Pradesh chief minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan and his home minister Narottam Mishra who enjoys the patronage of the Bharatiya Janata Party’s Central leadership. This tension surfaces periodically. For instance, when BJP president J.P. Nadda attended a function on his recent visit to Bhopal, Mr Mishra found there was no chair for him when he climbed on to the stage. Mr Mishra sat with the audience but was persuaded to join the others on stage after someone vacated a seat for him. Mr Chouhan is fighting with his back to the wall as Mr Mishra uses his proximity to home minister Amit Shah to set the agenda in the state. Little wonder then that Mr Nadda made an unscheduled halt at Mr Mishra’s residence on this trip.

 

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