Globally, around 80% of wastewater flows back into the ecosystem without being treated or reused, according to the United Nations. This can pose a significant environmental and health threat. In the absence of cost-effective, sustainable, disruptive water management solutions, about 70% of sewage is discharged untreated into India’s water bodies. A staggering 21% of diseases are caused by contaminated water in India, according to the World Bank, and one in five children die before their fifth birthday because of poor sanitation and hygiene conditions, according to Startup India. As we confront these public health challenges emerging out of environmental concerns, expanding the scope of public health/environmental engineering science becomes pivotal.
Expanding the cadre
For India to achieve its sustainable development goals of clean water and sanitation and to address the growing demands for water consumption and preservation of both surface water bodies and groundwater resources, it is essential to find and implement innovative ways of treating wastewater. It is in this context why the specialised cadre of public health engineers, also known as sanitation engineers or environmental engineers, is best suited to provide the growing urban and rural water supply and to manage solid waste and wastewater.
The availability of systemic information and programmes focusing on teaching, training, and capacity building for this specialty cadre is currently limited. Both as professions and as practice, engineering and public health have been traditionally understood as different fields. However, together, these fields can offer a wide range of opportunities for the development of advanced wastewater treatment systems, for understanding complex quality and monitoring processes, designing and managing septic tank systems, supplying good quality water in adequate quantities, maintaining hygiene and access to water, and ensuring that water supply is sustainable, including the study of relevant industry standards and codes of practices.
Currently in India, civil engineering incorporates a course or two on environmental engineering for students to learn about wastewater management as a part of their pre-service and in-service training. However, the nexus between wastewater and solid waste management and public health issues is not brought out clearly. Most often, civil engineers do not have adequate skills to address public health problems. And public health professionals do not have adequate engineering skills. India aims to supply 55 litres of water per person per day by 2024 under its Jal Jeevan Mission to install functional household tap connections. In this regard, expansion of the pipeline network, identification of sustainable sources of water which have water available year-round, installation of online systems for monitoring the quantity and quality of supply, and collection and treatment of wastewater become increasingly important. The goal of reaching every rural household with functional tap water can be achieved in a sustainable and resilient manner only if the cadre of public health engineers is expanded and strengthened.
Following international trends
In India, public health engineering is executed by the Public Works Department or by health officials. This differs from international trends. To manage a wastewater treatment plant in Europe, for example, a candidate must specialise in wastewater engineering. With the Government of India starting to think along these lines, introducing public health engineering as a two-year structured master’s degree programme or through diploma programmes for professionals working in this field must be considered to meet the need of increased human resource in this field. For this, the role of medical colleges and public health institutes deserves a discussion. In the current scenario, optimisation and efficiency forms key words in all services. Refresher courses for health and engineering institutes with an updated knowledge in areas of environment science should be made available. Public health professionals can be groomed through in-service training.
Furthermore, public health engineering should be developed as an interdisciplinary field. Engineers can significantly contribute to public health in defining what is possible, identifying limitations, and shaping workable solutions with a problem-solving approach. Similarly, public health professionals can contribute to engineering through well-researched understanding of health issues, measured risks and how course correction can be initiated. Once both meet, a public health engineer can identify a health risk, work on developing concrete solutions such as new health and safety practices or specialised equipment, in order to correct the safety concern.
Public health engineering’s combination of engineering and public health skills can also enable contextualised decision-making regarding water management in India. For example, wastewater management systems, especially decentralised and onsite systems, have to be designed based on hydro-geological data and observations of climate patterns. From promoting a robust understanding of processes, trends, and the latest technology in water and wastewater quality monitoring, treatment, and management, public health engineering can help decision/policy makers explore the available options. Given the population growth, diminishing resources and risky exploitation of natural resources, various State governments and not-for-profit organisations are looking to hire environmental engineers through whom public health problems can be addressed.
There is no doubt that the majority of diseases are water-related, transmitted through consumption of contaminated water, vectors breeding in stagnated water, or lack of adequate quantity of good quality water for proper personal hygiene. Diseases cannot be contained unless we provide good quality and adequate quantity of water. Most of the world’s diseases can be prevented by considering this. Training our young minds towards creating sustainable water management systems would be the first step. Currently, institutions like the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras (IIT-M) are considering initiating public health engineering as a separate discipline. To leverage this opportunity even further, India needs to scale up in the same direction.
Ligy Philip is Institute Chair Professor in Department of Civil Engineering, IIT-Madras
What was initially assumed in New Delhi to be a quick confrontation between Russia and Ukraine, the war in Europe is now raging on with no end in sight, and with its long-term implications yet unknown. As for India, the initial phase of diplomatic rush is over and its geopolitical options are shrinking as the war drags on.
Diminishing options
For several weeks during late March and April, it seemed as though the Ukraine war presented a number of geopolitical options for New Delhi to choose from. The high-profile visits to New Delhi, the entreaties of these leaders for Indian support for their positions in the ongoing war, and India’s balancing act all seemed to propel the country to the centre stage of global attention.
And yet, instead of enhancing New Delhi’s ability to make strategic choices in its broader region, the Ukraine war may actually limit the number of options available to New Delhi for at least three reasons: one, Russia as a key strategic partner is no longer available to India for balancing purposes. Arguably, into the third month of its Ukraine invasion, Moscow is more dependent on India today than the other way round. Two, Russia’s sudden absence from the Asian balance of power equations has further enhanced Chinese influence in the region. By the time the war ends, whatever may be the shape of the global balance of power, the regional balance of power would have irretrievably shifted in Beijing’s favour. Three, given that the United States and its western partners are more interested on the Ukraine theatre today, their focus on China is already taking a hit, if not yet on the Indo-Pacific. These factors,ipso facto , will limit India’s regional geopolitical options.
India’s biggest dilemma today is not whether or not to continue its engagement with Russia. That it would engage Russia in the immediate to medium term is clear. However, as a second-order fallout of the Russian misadventure, New Delhi has other dilemmas to worry about in the medium to long term.
Growing China challenge
Managing the China challenge continues to be New Delhi’s biggest concern. For sure, the China challenge is not a product of the Ukraine warper se , but it has further complicated the China conundrum for India. While the Ukraine war has strengthened and revitalised the U.S.-led military and political coalition globally, it is bound to weaken the American influence in the Southern Asian region. While this process started even before the war, the war will quicken this process especially given how its preoccupations with the European theatre will further shrink its interest in the Southern Asian theatre. China is the biggest beneficiary of the U.S./western retrenchment from the region which gives it a free hand in it. So, for New Delhi, Moscow is no longer available for its pursuit of its regional interests, and the U.S.’s ability to produce favourable geopolitical outcomes for India in the region is shrinking as well.
For New Delhi then, the worry is no longer about how to please both sides in this war, but how to manage a China that is attempting to rapidly consolidate the region under its influence. How has it performed on that count so far? Take the recent visit of the Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi to New Delhi. Reports indicated that the External Affairs Minister, S. Jaishankar, and the National Security Adviser, Ajit Doval, impressed upon Mr. Wang that the normalisation of diplomatic and political ties can only happen after the disengagement of troops from the Indian side of the Line of Actual Control (LAC). But Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s decision to attend the BRICS Summit in China could potentially take the sting out of New Delhi’s stern messaging to Beijing. In other words, the harsh tone adopted by Mr. Jaishankar and Mr. Doval when responding to Mr. Wang’s normalisation offer could arguably be weakened by Mr. Modi’s attendance at the BRICS summit, even if virtually. But then, was it possible for New Delhi, faced with limited geopolitical choices in the region resulting from the Ukraine war, to have shrugged off the Chinese diplomatic overture?
Exploiting China-Russia ties
While there is little doubt that in the longer run, a war-fatigued and weakened Russia will become a junior partner to China, India today does have an opportunity to get Moscow to nudge Beijing to stop its irredentism on the LAC. Consider this. If the Chinese side, taking advantage of the Ukraine distraction, heats up the LAC, India would have to turn to the West and the U.S. for support (political, diplomatic, intelligence, etc.). This would invariably hurt Russian interests. So it would make sense for Moscow to request Beijing not to activate the LAC while the Ukraine war is still on. Mr. Wang’s visit to New Delhi and his request to India to get back to business as usual is perhaps an indication that Beijing also seeks to calm the tempers on the LAC. While China may have other reasons for seeking ‘normalcy’ with India (such as creating an impression that China is consolidating the South Asian region under its leadership when the West and the U.S. are busy with Ukraine), for Russia, it is important that two of its Asian friends — China and India — do not clash at least while the war is still on.
While this may be a useful way to manage the Chinese aggression on the LAC in the short term, this will depend on how China views its dynamics with Russia and that of Russia with India. Herein lies the challenge for India. If China were to stabilise the LAC at the nudging of Russia, it would also expect India to go slow on the Indo-Pacific, something India can ill-afford to do.
While, under normal circumstances, India could have utilised the many inherent contradictions between Moscow and Beijing, the Ukraine war has suspended those contradictions even if for the time being. More so, there is little India can do to enhance its geopolitical engagement with Russia until the war is over.
Consolidating Kashmir’s calm
India’s north-western continental strategy, in particular towards Afghanistan and Central Asia, too will get complicated due to the Ukraine war. On the face of it and for the time being, things seem advantageous to India. Consider this. For over a year now, the Line of Control (LoC) with Pakistan is calm and the violence in Kashmir has come down. The primary reason behind the current calm is because Pakistan was at first busy with consolidating its gains from the return of the Taliban, and now dealing with the unpleasant fallout from the Taliban’s return to Afghanistan. More pertinently, New Delhi’s presence from Afghanistan has entirely disappeared. So, to put it rather bluntly, it appears that the calm in Kashmir and along the LoC is aquid pro quo for the Indian withdrawal from Afghanistan. This might appear to be a good bargain; but it may not be so in the longer run. If this is a bargain New Delhi accepts, it will not only mean giving up its strategic interests in Afghanistan but also reducing its engagement in the Central Asian region as well at a time China is making feverish inroads into the region, right in the backyard of the Russian sphere of influence.
The consequences arising out of the Ukraine war will contribute to it as well. Had Moscow not been caught in the Ukraine war, it would have fended off Beijing’s attempts to take over its backyard (in one sense, China is doing to Russia using economic means what the North Atlantic Treaty Organization has been doing to Russia using military means). During the December summit, India and Russia had decided on a number of initiatives focusing on Central Asia and Afghanistan. They are unlikely to be revived anytime soon, ceding further ground to China and Pakistan.
The combined geopolitical impact of the ill-timed U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan, Russia’s Ukraine war, and the rapid expansion of Chinese influence goes to show how New Delhi’s geopolitical choices have suddenly shrunk due to the Ukraine war.
Happymon Jacob teaches India’s Foreign Policy at the School of International Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi
In India, the technical higher education sector — dominated by private players — can be best understood only in market terms: be it the exponential growth in institutions or in enrolment as well the dynamics of the decisions made by the regulatory bodies. It is no accident that much of the growth in the technical higher education has been after 1991, when the All India Council for Technical Education (AICTE) became functional in its present avatar.
Supply exceeds demand
During the three decades immediately preceding the present (1961 to 1991), the number of technical higher education institutions had increased five times to go up from 53 to 277. During the same period, enrolment in technical higher education had increased six times — 0.37 lakh to 2.16 lakh. Importantly, most of the growth has been in the government sector. During the past three decades (1991-2020) the institutions have gone up by 40 times (at 10,990), with the intake capacity rising 15 times to touch 32.85 lakh. Much of this expansion has been in the private sector.
Going by the number of students who appear for the joint entrance examination and other entrance tests conducted by various agencies and different higher educational institutions, the total demand for technical higher education appears to be no more than 20 lakh. Clearly, supply far exceeds the demand for technical higher education, probably in the hope that the supply would create its own demand.
It is no wonder that a large number of technical institutions have been saddled with sunk costs due to their inability to fill their sanctioned seats. Their capacity utilisation has been falling for a long time now to become 53.53% in 2020-21, as compared to 62.32% in 2012-13. Declining demand notwithstanding, these institutions have been adding more capacity, though some market corrections seem to have happened during the past few years. The number of institutions and intake capacity in 2021-22 have come down to 8,997 and 30.87 lakh, respectively.
Student-teacher ratio
The AICTE prescribes a minimum specific student-teacher ratio (STR), ranging from 7.5 to 20, depending on the type and level of programmes and disciplines under its domain. As an overwhelming majority of the institutions are unable to admit students to capacity, their STR, at least on paper, has gone down from 5.5 in 2012-13 to 3.0 in 2020-21.
A lower STR could mean better quality but in their case, this only means higher cost adversely impinging on their economic sustainability. Their revenue models adversely impacted, they are unable to create quality infrastructure and human resources and become trapped in a vicious cycle of mediocrity. In market terms, they are the price takers and should be willing to offer their products and services at the lowest possible prices.
In a typical market framework, such businesses would either improve their quality or slash their prices to survive. Apparently, it does not happen in the higher education market, except during the past two years when market corrections led to a drop of 18.3% and 6.01% in the number of institutions and intake capacity, respectively.
Appealing to the regulator
Instead, they prefer regulators coming to their rescue. In the past they urged doing away with the requirements of a certain percentage of marks in the school board. Recently, they could convince the regulator to abolish the condition of studying science and mathematics at the senior secondary/intermediate level in schools, though the AICTE retracted from the decision quickly. Such suasions have obviously been intended to widen the catchment for admission. Institutions have also been helped by raising the STR — from 15 to 20 in the undergraduate programme in engineering, for example.
The Veblen Effect
These apart, technical higher educational institutions are differentiated and highly hierarchical. The Indian Institutes of Technology, the National Institutes of Technology, the Indian Institutes of Information Technology, the Schools of Planning and Architecture, the National Institutes of Design, the National Institute of Pharmaceutical Education and Research and a few select universities are the most sought after. Taken together, they can admit a maximum of 40,000 students. An equal number of seats may be available in high quality private institutions.
Being highly selective, they are the price makers. Left to market forces, they may resort to an exploitative pricing policy. They generally resist capacity expansion ostensibly out of fear of dilution in quality. Artificial scarcity suits them fine and at times enables them to use higher fees as a strategy for brand building. After all, the Veblen Effect (what is expensive is perceived to be excellent), is as applicable to higher education as it is to luxuries.
Such institutions hate pricing regulations that limit their ability to charge as much as they wish. They are naturally disappointed with the news that the AICTE is contemplating prescribing a ceiling limit on fees that these institutions can charge from their students. A bulk of poor quality institutions are happy about the prospect of a certain minimum level of fees being made mandatory.
Steps for the AICTE
Technically, the AICTE is empowered to take ‘all such steps as it may think fit for the coordinated and integrated development and maintenance of standards’. Specifically, it can “fix norms and guidelines for charging tuition and other fees” as well. But would it be justified to prescribe a specific amount that must compulsorily be charged from students? Will this move not be construed as helping the institutes bettering their balance sheets, rather than safeguarding the interest of students. After all, the AICTE Act mandates it “to take necessary steps to prevent commercialisation of (in) technical education”.
Finally, would it be advisable for the AICTE to prescribe fees for all technical higher educational institutions spread across the length and breadth of the country? Cannot it just provide a broad framework and guidelines for determining the permissible level of fees? The rest could be left to the State-level fee fixation committees. This would be in the true spirit of federalism which expects States to be a responsible partner in the process.
Furqan Qamar is a former Adviser (Education) in the Planning Commission of India. The views expressed are personal
NITI Aayog’s 2020-21 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) India Index detailed the implementation of the United Nations’ SDGs in the country, States and Union Territories (UTs). It gave marks, between 0 and 100 points, to each region. In a significant marker of improvement, no State fared in the ‘Aspirant’ category, the lowest in the index. All the States managed to score above 50 points in SDG implementation, with 13 States featuring in the ‘Performer’ category and 15 in the ‘Front Runner’ category (the second-highest position). There was improvement in the overall performance of the country towards SDG implementation. India stepped into the ‘Front Runner’ category with a score of 66 points, though it dropped two ranks in the ordinal scale. However, our neighbouring countries performed better than us. India did well in implementing SDGs 6,7, 11 and 12, which are ‘clean water and sanitation’, ‘affordable and clean energy’, ‘sustainable cities and communities’, and ‘sustainable consumption and production’, respectively, but did not do well in many others.
Odisha’s good show
While the national ranking dropped, Odisha saw a three-point improvement in its overall score and settled at 61 points. It topped in the implementation of two SDGs — 13 and 14, which are ‘climate action’ and ‘life below water’, respectively. In the ‘climate action’ SDG, which aims to integrate climate change and disaster risk measures with sustainable natural resource management into national development strategies, the State scored 70 points. Its disaster preparedness programme has been recognised multiple times by different UN agencies. Odisha managed to save 120.07 tonnes of CO2 per 1,000 population, by using LED bulbs, against India’s 28.04 tonnes. In the ‘life below’ water SDG, which aims to conserve oceans, seas and marine resources by preventing marine pollution and illegal fishing practices, Odisha scored 82. The State showed improved shore water quality and saw a 3.19% increase in the area under mangroves. Odisha’s rankings in these two goals come across as a highlight because, as per the Asia and the Pacific SDG Progress Report 2021, the Asia-Pacific region showed a decline/regression in its commitment to goals 13 and 14 of the SDGs.
Odisha’s improvement in these two goals and in the overall score can be attributed to several factors. One of the most important is that is has prioritised budgetary allocation towards these sectors. In the FY2021 Budget, the State introduced a Climate Budget, a first-ever feature. While highlighting the impact of climate change on various departments, including forests, fisheries, disaster management and agriculture, the Budget presented a way of tracking public expenditure for a clean climate. Odisha has been working in the area of climate change since 2010, when it put in place the State Action Plan on Climate Change. This was revised for 2018-23 and is under implementation.
In FY2022, the Odisha government submitted a separate SDG Budget, once again a first in India, indicating a significant development in its commitment towards implementing the SDGs. The SDG Budget provides cross-department linkages and shows the State’s commitment towards implementing SDG 4 (quality education), SDG 10 (reduced inequalities), and SDG 2 (zero hunger). These goals will be provided 16.8%, 15.4%, and 10.2% of the SDG Budget, respectively.
Odisha also scored 83 points on SDG 15, ‘life on land’ (protecting, restoring and promoting the sustainable use of terrestrial ecosystems). The increased budgetary allocation towards flood management and irrigation has also led to robust disaster prevention.
Hard work ahead
The NITI Aayog report presents myriad concerns to policymakers. Even with a significant improvement in many goals, India continues to be in the ‘Aspirant’ category for the implementation of ‘gender equality’ and ‘zero hunger’. Many others, such as ‘no poverty’, ‘quality education’, ‘decent work and economic growth’, ‘industry, innovation and infrastructure’, and ‘climate action’, need a lot more work so that the country can be pulled up to the ‘Front Runner’ category from the ‘Performer’ category. Partnership is the key to achieve this. The current level of collaboration with States, UTs, civil society organisations and businesses should be further enhanced by overlooking any differences in political ideologies. There is a need to aggressively implement SDG localisation efforts at the district, panchayat and village levels so that implementation feedback from the field is available, besides enabling true internalisation of the SDGs by the community. Only work at the community level can make SDGs truly achievable and deliverable.
Amar Patnaik is a Rajya Sabha MP from Odisha representing the BJD, and a former CAG bureaucrat. Views are personal
The Central government’s delay in permitting the Telangana government to raise funds through open market borrowings (OMBs) through the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) is turning out to be yet another contentious issue between the Centre and the State.
Telangana has been anxiously waiting for the Centre’s nod to raise funds through OMBs, which has not been forthcoming since the commencement of FY 2022-23. The State has several programmes lined up, including the Dalit Bandhu scheme, under which the government provides a one-time grant of Rs. 10 lakh each to eligible Dalit families to start a business venture of their choice. Payments are being made to 400 beneficiaries a day on average, which amounts to Rs. 40 crore a day, according to the State government. While the government is meeting its requirements through internal resources, it is likely to feel the pressure when payments under Rythu Bandhu start next month. Under this scheme, the government provides Rs. 5,000 an acre to over 60 lakh farmers enrolled under the scheme, twice a year. The outgo for the first installment is likely to be of the order of Rs. 7,400 crore, which the government will face difficulties in mobilising if permission is not granted before the onset of the kharif season. The State had accordingly proposed to raise Rs. 15,000 crore through OMBs in the auctions conducted by the RBI in six installments. But it is yet to avail of a single tranche of OMBs as the Centre has not given its nod in line with the provisions under Article 293 of the Constitution.
The Centre’s approval, a routine affair, became a complicated issue when the Union Finance Ministry raised questions about the State’s finances and off-budget borrowings. Union Finance Secretary T.V. Somanathan raised questions about the borrowings in the name of different corporations over and above the limits prescribed in the Fiscal Responsibility and Budget Management (FRBM) Act with a rider that the Centre would treat these borrowings as part of FRBM norms. The Comptroller and Auditor General (CAG) of India too expressed concern over the off-budget borrowings. In its report presented to the legislature in March, the CAG said the government was not fully disclosing its off-budget borrowings/liabilities and was circumventing the FRBM norms. Outstanding debt at the end of the year increased by 19% over the preceding year.
The State contended that the borrowed amounts were raised in the name of the Kaleshwaram Irrigation Project Corporation, the Telangana Drinking Water Supply Corporation and the State Water Resources Infrastructure Development Corporation. The expenditure, it said, should be treated as capital expenditure. It questioned the Centre’s intentions in raising questions about the State’s finances in a “retrospective manner,” asserting that it exposed the “discriminatory attitude” of the Centre towards Telangana, whose finances were returning to normalcy after being adversely affected by the pandemic.
Special Chief Secretary, Finance, K. Ramakrishna Rao was upset about the Union Finance Secretary’s claims that the off-budget borrowings too would be taken into account while assessing the State’s fiscal health in line with the recommendations of the 15th Finance Commission. The State wondered how the Union official was speaking about the finance panel’s recommendations when the latter had not given any such suggestion. Mr. Rao pointed out that it was the Centre which gave permission to the States to borrow Rs. 1.27 lakh crore outside the FRBM norms. The issue will hopefully be sorted out soon as the Centre has assured Telangana that the concerns flagged will be thoroughly examined.
rajeev.madabhushi@thehindu.co.in
The adage ‘every crisis contains the seeds of an opportunity’ could not have been truer for anyone than for Sri Lanka’s Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe. The severe economic crisis, which set off indefinite protests against President Gotabaya Rajapaksa and his brother, (now former) Prime Minister Mahinda Rajapaksa, has pitchforked Mr. Wickremesinghe to an office that he had no chance of occupying until last week. Given the turmoil, Sri Lanka needed a government that would work towards stability and economic recovery. With Mahinda Rajapaksa resigning in the face of determined protests, and the Opposition leader unwilling to work under President Gotabaya, a rare opportunity opened up for Mr. Wickremesinghe. The former premier’s political prospects had almost ended with the 2020 parliamentary election, when his United National Party won no seats, and he himself made it as its lone member in Parliament on the principle of representation in proportion to the total votes it had received across the nation. Much of the UNP’s support base has also gone with Sajith Premadasa, his erstwhile party colleague, who now runs the main Opposition party, the Samagi Jana Balawegaya (SJB). Mr. Wickremesinghe finds himself in an extraordinary situation, as he is dependent on lawmakers of the Sri Lanka Podujana Peramuna (SLPP), the party of the Rajapaksas that is the target of public anger. The SJB has offered conditional support to measures aimed at economic recovery.
Mr. Wickremesinghe brushed aside a question on whether he had the moral authority to hold his office, contending that his situation was no different from that of Winston Churchill becoming PM with just four members supporting him to stave off a crisis. There are many questions on the political morality of his assuming office; there is some justification for popular resentment against him for easing the pressure on the President to resign. However, the need to have a viable arrangement to tackle the economic crisis is quite urgent. He has spoken about putting together an international consortium to ensure financial assistance for the shortage-stricken country. His only strength now is the goodwill of the international community, which solidly backed his efforts to bring about peace and development in Sri Lanka in 2001-02, when he negotiated a ceasefire agreement with the LTTE and held direct talks. There is talk of speeding up political reforms, even to the point of abolishing the executive presidency through a fast-tracked constitutional amendment. Yet, such speculation about far-reaching changes does not inspire confidence, as many such opportunities in the past had been squandered. Mr. Wickremesinghe has the additional burden of proving to his detractors that he is working for political stability and economic recovery and not for reviving the political fortunes of the Rajapaksas.
Sport is not just about individual excellence; it is also about the collective joy gleaned from a team’s success when different individuals offer their varied skills and win together for the larger cause as representatives of a nation. India has always had iconic athletes with their fabulous milestones, but when it comes to team success in global events, the examples dwindle. To that limited cupboard displaying Olympic gold winning hockey squads featuring Dhyan Chand, the triumphant 1975 World Cup hockey team, the victorious 1983 cricket World Cup outfit led by Kapil Dev and the 2011 champion unit under M.S. Dhoni, Indian badminton added its golden chapter when the men’s team won the Thomas Cup at Bangkok on Sunday. This was a feather touch that would be felt all through India’s sporting history. Besides winning its maiden title, India also stunned fancied opponents Malaysia and Denmark, and defeated 14-time champion Indonesia in the summit clash. Previously, Indian badminton had offered sporadic joy starting from Prakash Padukone’s magnificent All England victory in 1980. P. Gopichand emulated Padukone in 2001 and just as another drought loomed, first Saina Nehwal and then P.V. Sindhu proved that they could do far better than their male counterparts, winning titles and medals. Finally, the men joined the winning bandwagon with their blend of aesthetics, control and athleticism on the courts.
Be it 20-year-old Lakshya Sen, the seasoned Kidambi Srikanth, the combative H.S. Prannoy and the doubles team of Chirag Shetty and Satwiksairaj Rankireddy, India had men who believed that winning the title was in the realm of possibility. In the final, both Lakshya and the doubles duo lost the opening games, and yet they dug deep to hoodwink the Indonesians. Once a 2-0 lead was secured, history beckoned and with remarkable fluency, former world number one Srikanth got past Jonatan Christie at 21-15, 23-21 as India clinched a team triumph for the ages. It was not easy, Lakshya had a stomach bug, and he and others had to cope with the constant pressure of expectations at every hurdle. The coaching staff deserve credit and so do the inspiring footprints left by Padukone and Gopichand, through their achievements and their inputs to their successors. When the Indians infused magic into the feathery shuttlecock, they also gifted an enduring memory to a country forever yearning for collective wins. In the past, Indian tennis had its moments in the Davis Cup but team achievements were often linked to cricketers and hockey stars of a distant era. Srikanth and company have ensured that Dhyan Chand, Kapil and Dhoni’s units will not remain lonely at the top. This surreal win could truly alter the badminton landscape across India.
The East German lobby in Delhi, which has been campaigning hard over the years for Indian recognition of the German Democratic Republic, has become active again following reports that there is now a good chance of ratification by the West German Bundestag of the non-aggression treaties with Poland and the Soviet Union. Despite increasing pressure from the left-wing of the Congress Party, the Government of India has been deferring recognition of East Germany until these treaties which open the way for a detente in Europe are ratified by Bonn. But now that the two Germanys have initialled the Four Power agreement signed last year by the United States, Britain, France and the Soviet Union for keeping open the access routes to West Berlin — and the principal Opposition party in the West German Bundestag, the Christian Democratic Union, has given a go-ahead for ratification of the treaties with Poland and the Soviet Union — the advocates of Indian recognition of East Germany are stepping up their campaign in Delhi.
The three-day Chintan Shivir of the Congress in Udaipur didn’t offer any surprises. It plotted a path to give a youthful makeover to the party and promises have been made that tickets will be restricted to one person in a family, with exceptions, of course, that help most existing families. These proposed structural changes in the organisation are necessary for the Congress, which has been in a free fall since the 2014 general election. Successive electoral defeats have turned many leaders restive. The emergence of the G-23, an informal group of dissidents, has put the spotlight on the leadership record of the Gandhi family. The Udaipur conclave, an admission of the crisis in the party, saw the invited crowd of senior leaders, parliamentarians and legislators deliberating on organisational and policy issues, but decidedly steering clear of questions concerning leadership. A clear takeaway from the conclave is that the Gandhis continue to exercise total control over the party. The G-23 fell silent.
Rahul Gandhi spoke at length in Udaipur and admitted that the party has lost its connect with the masses. This plain truth, self-evident to most people, has manifested repeatedly in the party’s inability to win elections but seems to have eluded the Gandhis all this while. Rahul Gandhi blamed a poor communication strategy for the disconnect and promised a revamp. However, the loss of touch with the masses may not necessarily be the outcome of strategy. The problem also lies with the message and the messenger. Despite being out of office at the Centre for over eight years, the Congress is yet to reinvent itself as a party of the Opposition. Its politics has been more reactive than a proactive one of setting the agenda or building its own narrative. The incapacity to articulate in a coherent manner what the party stands for is curious since there is no dearth of articulate leaders in that party. While the party’s message is incoherent and often contradictory, the messenger has been a failure in amplifying it or bringing clarity to the message. Rahul Gandhi, the party face for some years, will need to shoulder more than a little blame for this. The party has now announced two campaigns — a Bharat Jodo Yatra and Rozgar Do Yatra — to rebuild its ties with the people. The institutional arrangements proposed – a Social Justice Advisory Council to update the party chief on issues pertinent to the backward classes and disadvantaged social groups, a Public Insight Committee to conduct surveys on various issues and generate feedback from the public, a National Training Institute for ideological training, and an Election Management Committee — will be tested on the ground.
However, at a time when elections have also become about leaders and their image as much as their message, a party’s prospects will be shaped more by the commitment and vision of its leadership than bullet points from its committees. Ideological clarity would help, but a leadership that can work 24X7 and remain accessible is necessary to inspire workers and revive the Congress. The Udaipur conclave kicked this crucial can down the party’s bumpy, lonely road.
Not the one for hyperbole, Pullela Gopichand, the national coach and the man largely responsible for India’s rise as a badminton power, called Sunday’s Thomas Cup triumph the country’s greatest team sport achievement outside cricket. Vimal Kumar, the soft-spoken player-turned-coach, was quick to proclaim that this moment can be to Indian badminton what the 1983 World Cup was to Indian cricket. It’s hard to dispute both claims. There are shades of ’83 in ’22: The stories of personal struggles and redemptions, the underdog element, and beating the most successful nation in the tournament’s history, 14-time champions Indonesia, to reach the top.
Writing in these pages, Gopichand recalled how during his playing days, India lost to the likes of Sri Lanka and Pakistan, and were happy merely by qualifying for the Thomas Cup. To go on and win it then — only the sixth nation to do so, showing how competitive the tournament is — is special. And this is no fluke. The title comes on the back of years of relentless hard work and an outcome of a system that has constantly churned out players who, on their day, could upset the best in the world. That even players like B Sai Praneeth, a 2019 World Championship medalist, could not even make the team, coupled with the fact that India has seven players in the world’s top 50, points to the depth in men’s badminton right now.
The challenge going ahead is to build on this triumph and not let the momentum slip. Badminton is one of the few mass sports that’s played almost in every corner of the country. So, even though Hyderabad and Bangalore will continue to remain the hubs, it’s important to establish academies that can spot and harness players from other regions in the country. Like 1983, this title isn’t a culmination of a journey. It should be the beginning of a new chapter.
Last week’s blaze at a factory in outer Delhi’s Mundka area that snuffed out at least 27 lives, 21 of them women, adds to the long list of avoidable fire tragedies that show the country’s urbanisation story in poor light. The failings that have come to light in the four days since the incident evoke a sense of deja vu: The building did not have a no objection certificate from the fire department — more worryingly, the owners had not even applied for one — and it had only one escape route. The manufacturing unit’s licence had lapsed. Though the North Delhi Municipality had cancelled the permission after it was found that the building did not meet the required criteria, the industrial activities went on with impunity even after a Supreme Court monitoring committee raised red flags. Such omissions invite questions about the municipality’s enforcement mechanisms. It’s also apparent that the authorities have not learnt any lesson from the Anaj Mandi fire that killed more than 40 people in December 2019 — as well as several other mishaps dating back to the Uphaar Cinema Tragedy of 1997.
Localities such as Mundka and Anaj Mandi have become a prominent feature of Delhi’s economic landscape — and that of several other parts of the country — in the aftermath of liberalisation. Factories exist cheek-by-jowl with warehouses, shops selling construction materials, banquet halls, and other multi-floor establishments. Largely unregulated, they are sources of livelihood for a substantial section of the city’s population, many of whom live at its margins. At a time the pandemic-induced economic downturn has shrunk household incomes and the absence of social security has aggravated the difficulties of the working and lower-middle classes, many such manufacturing units offer hope of a semblance of relief from poverty. They also seem to buck the post-pandemic trend of a large number of women falling out of the labour force — as revealed by the CMIE data. However, with employers playing short shrift to basic safety codes, these workplaces turn out to be not only exploitative, they also add to the hardships faced by their employees — and their dear ones. Several families, for instance, lost their sole breadwinner in last week’s fire tragedy.
Delhi’s Lt Governor Anil Baijal has ordered a magisterial investigation into the accident. The probe must, of course, fix accountability at multiple levels. But much more needs to be done. For far too long, a network of complicity has led to safety codes being flouted and building by-laws being infringed. It’s time such networks are taken apart.
A 30-minute preliminary exchange of views between the leader of the Indian delegation, Eric Gonsalves, and the leader of the Chinese delegation, Fu Hao, and the conciliatory speeches they made at the dinner Gonsalves hosted in honour of the visitors set the tone for the tone for the Sino-Indian talks opening the next day. Both Gonsalves and Fu, in their carefully prepared speeches warmly expressed their governments’ desire to improve relations. And significantly, both of them underscored the understanding the two governments have already arrived at that the border dispute is the central issue the resolution of which is important for the normalisation of relations between India and China. The problems that India and China faced in today’s world can be better faced if they devised a basis for cooperation and fully normal relations, Gonsalves said.
Ministry Guidelines
The Union Home Ministry has asked ministers of state governments not to make statements on communal disturbances in their areas. The Home Ministry has recently sent “exhaustive guidelines” on prevention and control of communal disturbances and for promotion of communal harmony to the states and union territory administration.” It has suggested that ministers should not comment on any agitation likely to lead to communal dissatisfaction. Once disturbances start, ministers should not express their views on the cause of the disturbances and they way they were being dealt with because this was bound to affect steps taken by the local administration.
Missing Candidates
West Bengal chief minister Jyoti Basu has asked police to intensify the search for the two election candidates and an agent who have been missing since May 14. Kashi Kanto Moitra, a Janata candidate, Gopal Chandra Sarkar, a Congress (J) nominee and Moitra’s election agent, Shibu Choudhury, did not return home after election campaigns. Police have meanwhile found the car in which Sarkar was reportedly abducted.
On April 28, the Indian Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT-In) issued “directions” under Section 70-B(6) of the Information Technology Act 2000 (IT Act) relating to information security practices, procedure, prevention, response and reporting of cyber incidents. These directions have brought about a wide-ranging expansion in the scope of obligations of the above requirements compared to the Information Technology (The Indian Computer Emergency Response Team and Manner of performing functions and duties) Rules, 2013 (Rules). Among the activities in which compliance is sought by service providers, intermediaries, data centres and body corporates are the synchronisation of computer clocks to the network time protocol set at the National Physical Laboratory and National Informatics Centre (NIC), mandatory reporting of all cyber incidents within six hours of noticing or being brought to their notice in the prescribed format, designating point of contact and notifying CERT-In and undertaking to perform such actions for cyber security mitigation when notified by CERT-IN, maintaining all logs of all ICT systems up to 180 days within Indian jurisdiction and for data centres, virtual private network service providers, cloud service providers and virtual private server providers to maintain all records of their users and usage for a minimum of five years.
While the overall thrust towards a robust cyber incident reporting and security regime is prudent, some of the provisions in the absence of clarification from CERT-In have raised concerns amongst industry observers and cyber security experts. For some time now, CERT-IN has been struggling to get information and incident reporting from service providers, intermediaries as well as body corporates as per the rules and its mandate under section 70B(4) of the IT Act. This was impacting its responsibility as a collector, analyser and disseminator of information on cyber incidents as well as coordinating incident responses and emergency measures. So, it took recourse to the directions, which strangely do not differentiate between the scales and nature of the incident. Some cyber incidents are far more common and occur regularly. An organisation might receive hundreds of phishing emails and the effort to notify each would drastically increase their compliance cost. It would also be interesting to know what CERT-In’s strategy will be for dealing with commonplace cyber incidents and its own capacity enhancement in terms of handling the compliance sought.
A window of 60 days has been provided before implementation of these compliances begins. Given the scale of the revamp, this might be too short a window. The government must look at the concerns that arise from such directions and work out a realistic time scale. The ugly episode of the Twitter incident around compliance with the Information Technology (Intermediary Guidelines and Digital Media Ethics Code) Rules, 2021, last year is a stark reminder of the pitfalls of rushing in compliances without factoring in concerns. In this case, there will be multiple companies even from the MSME sector that will take time to set up systems for compliances.
All covered entities also have to mandatorily enable logs and maintain them for 180 days within the Indian jurisdiction. At present, most entities maintain logs for around 30 days, and in order to maintain logs for 180 days, the additional data storage device cost would be huge. Similarly, data centres, virtual private server providers, cloud service providers and virtual private network service providers will need to retain additional information for five years or more after the cancellation or withdrawal of registration. The virtual asset industry too will have to maintain all KYC records and details of all financial transactions for five years. The compliance cost in each case is going to rise substantially.
Many of the entities will have to shift their servers geographically as well as add excess storage capacity. Most importantly, the recruitment of additional manpower for compliance may take far longer. A realistic timeline would be six months, which would allow the entities to effectively migrate to the new regime. The penalty for non-compliance is stiff (including up to one year of imprisonment and monetary fines). But it is also unfair to create unrealistic deadlines for industry.
This is also going to significantly affect organisations that have maintained their servers offshore, although the move is in line with the government’s stated objective of localising data storage. But what cannot be denied are privacy concerns. With VPNs and virtual asset wallets being asked to store and share KYC and transaction data, these concerns become evident. VPNs have been successful for corporates as well as individuals because they address privacy concerns. There have been very few instances where these tunnels have been used for criminal activities and support from the providers was not obtained by law enforcement authorities. In the absence of legislative backing for data protection, which has been on the anvil for more than two years, the question is: How will the user have any say on which information can be held back or how his sensitive personal information is being protected?
While CERT-In has been proactive in recognising the changing frontiers of technology and trying to deal with hitherto unknown cyber threats, it is wanting in terms of a graded approach to ensuring compliance.
This column first appeared in the print edition on May 17, 2022, under the title ‘The cybersecurity burden’. The writer is a defence and cybersecurity analyst
It is rare that the prime minister himself conveys, in a pending proceeding before the apex court, his clear and unequivocal views about respecting human rights, protecting civil liberties and further respecting the freedoms granted to the people of India. It was refreshing to find the categorical assertion by the PM in an affidavit: “One of India’s strengths is the diverse thought streams that beautifully flourished in our country.” In the 75th year of our Independence, as our nation is marking “Azadi ka Amrit Mahotsav”, PM Modi has appealed to Indians to work harder to shed our colonial baggage, which includes colonial laws and practices.
These are not empty words only for an affidavit. Under his leadership, nearly 1,500 old colonial-era laws have been scrapped. About 25,000 compliance rules which were creating hurdles, have been removed and many offences that were a hindrance to development have been decriminalised. There was also in the affidavit a profound statement of great intent: “Laws and compliances which reeked of a colonial mindset have no place in today’s India.”
With this background, it was conveyed, that the Government of India has decided to re-examine and reconsider the provisions of Section 124A of the Indian Penal Code which deals with sedition. The history of the sedition law in India is in many ways unique. During the British Raj, it was part of the penal law from the very beginning. The British government in India not only framed the law, defining various offences, but also made sedition a very serious offence, punishable with imprisonment for life and a fine. The definition of sedition was a little vague, whereby any attempt to bring hatred or contempt or attempt to excite disaffection towards the government constituted sedition. Disaffection includes disloyalty and feeling of enmity. Sedition was designed to perpetuate the hold of the British on the people of India, and any attempt at disloyalty was enough for the offence.
Great leaders of the freedom movement became the targets of the law. Bal Gangadhar Tilak was the first person to be convicted of sedition in colonial India because the British government thought that his writings in his celebrated Marathi newspaper, Kesari, were causing disaffection against the British Raj. He was imprisoned for 18 months. Even Gandhiji, in 1922, was sentenced to six years for his article in Young India on the charge of “attempting to excite disaffection towards his majesty’s Government established by law in British India”. Many others were also prosecuted and convicted.
Significantly, during the making of the Constitution, December 1, 1948, K M Munshi moved an amendment in the Constituent Assembly proposing sedition be dropped “as constituting a restriction on right to freedom of speech and expression particularly in the context of the painful experience to punish Indians by the British authorities for even innocuous expressions and criticism of colonial government.” Article 19 (1)(a)(g) provides for various freedoms including freedom of speech and expression while clause 19 (2) to (6) enumerates provisions for constituting reasonable restrictions on the exercise of such rights.
It must be noted that in none of the said clauses is the offence of sedition mentioned as grounds for “reasonable restriction”. There are expressions like “interest of sovereignty and integrity of India”, and security of state public order but not sedition. Sedition simply means “deshdroh”. Yet, it has continued in the IPC. There have been judgments from various high courts in this regard but a constitution bench of the Supreme Court delivered a judgment in 1962 (Kedarnath Singh vs The State of Bihar) where it held that “unless accompanied by incitement or call for violence criticism of government cannot be labelled Sedition”.
There has been genuine criticism about why this colonial-era provision should be a part of our statute. The Congress party, which claims to be the inheritor of the freedom movement, never tried to scrap this law though it ruled India for nearly 60 years. Certain freedoms are fundamental under our constitutional scheme.
There have been cases of rampant abuse and the latest is a hilarious instance from a particular state where singing the Hanuman Chalisa amounted to sedition. Surely, there is a need for a review of the law. India, in the 75th year of its independence, is strong and stable enough to decide in a free, fair and objective manner whether the offence of sedition is needed or not, and if so under what form with strong guidelines to prevent its misuse, and clearly enunciate the circumstances in which it can be invoked. The PM has trusted the process by which so many old laws have been repealed, offences decriminalised and thousands of compliance burdens removed. All this was done in a peaceful manner with due consultation. This is the institutional strength of India. I am quite sure the same process will entail a relook at the whole issue of sedition to the satisfaction of all concerned where a healthy balance is maintained between respect for human rights and civil liberties and the compelling need to fight terrorism, and separatism and whose clear agenda is to break India.
I must conclude with a word of gratitude for the PM for demonstrating extraordinary leadership in a matter that has divided the country for the last few years. Let’s hope the inner strength of the country will help us arrive at a healthy conclusion. Equally, the Supreme Court has shown judicial statesmanship by agreeing with the government’s request to give time for the review and by passing appropriate interim protections in the meantime.
This column first appeared in the print edition on May 17, 2022, under the title ‘On sedition, a beginning’. The writer is a BJP MP and former Union Law Minister
Recent developments — in Sri Lanka, Nepal, and Pakistan — underline the geographic imperative that binds India to its neighbours in the Subcontinent. Together, they should remind the region’s leaders that working with the logic of geography has become an unavoidable necessity amidst the deepening regional and global crises accentuated by Russia’s war in Ukraine.
As higher oil and food prices trigger inflation and popular unrest across the region, more intensive regional cooperation is one of the tools for managing the new dangers. The last few weeks have seen some positive trends in that direction as well as enduring negative policies that defy the logic of geography.
Last week, the Indian High Commission in Colombo was quick to scotch wild speculation that the former strongman prime minister of Sri Lanka Mahinda Rajapaksa was fleeing to India. We don’t know if Mahinda Rajapaka, a target of the people’s outrage for the terrible mismanagement of the economy, was actually planning to take a short flight out of Lanka. If he did, India would be the natural first destination given the geographic proximity.
Now put on the exit control list in Colombo, Mahinda might not be travelling any time soon to India and pay his regular obeisance to his favourite deity, Lord Venkateswara in the Tirumala hills. But India has had a long tradition of hosting political exiles from the region. Whether it was the Dalai Lama from Tibet or Prachanda from Nepal, Delhi has welcomed leaders from the neighbourhood taking shelter in India.
There is a dangerous flip side to this positive tradition in the Subcontinent. India has paid a high price for the decision in the early 1980s to train and arm Sri Lankan Tamil rebels. That, hopefully, is an exception rather than the rule in India’s emerging neighbourhood policy.
While India’s muscular meddling in the internal affairs of Sri Lanka did not succeed in realising the Tamil demands, it unfortunately contributed to the deep distrust between Delhi and the Sinhala nationalists. As a consequence, the geographic imperative became a casualty in Colombo.
But the current crisis in Sri Lanka raised hopes for transcending the internal ethnic divide in the island nation and rebuilding political confidence between Colombo and Delhi. To be sure, positive sentiments driven by crises do not always last. But Delhi’s unstinting support — both material and financial — for Colombo during this unprecedented economic and political crisis has generated much goodwill in Sri Lanka. This offers a major opportunity to reframe Delhi’s ties with Colombo.
If India’s relations with Sri Lanka underline the importance of continuous tending of political geography, Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s visit this week to Lumbini, the birthplace of Lord Buddha in Nepal, highlights the immense possibilities of cultural geography in reshaping the Subcontinent’s regional relations.
The idea of a “Buddhist circuit” connecting the various pilgrimage sites across the India-Nepal border has been around for a long time. Given the massive size of the global Buddhist population — estimated to be more than 500 million — and the wider international interest in the historic sites, it is surprising how long it has taken Delhi and Kathmandu to come together in developing the Buddhist circuit.
That China has built a new airport near Lumbini and Modi is avoiding it points to the turbulent triangular dynamic between Delhi, Kathmandu, and Beijing. Even more consequential has been the deep discomfort of a large section of Nepal’s political class — especially the communists that have dominated Kathmandu in the last two decades — with the India relationship.
The return of the Nepal Congress to the helm and its readiness to deepen ties with India has also opened the door for a recalibration of Delhi’s ties with Kathmandu. Revitalising the shared cultural geography inevitably involves better management of economic geography. The last few years have seen the Modi government step up on infrastructure development on the Indian side and accelerate transborder transport and energy connectivity in the eastern subcontinent.
Religion and culture are deeply interconnected in South Asia. Developing all religious pilgrimage sites across the region, and improving the transborder access to them could not only improve tourist revenues of all the South Asian nations, but could also have a calming effect on the troubled political relations between nations.
Despite their frozen bilateral political relationship, Delhi and Islamabad had agreed to open the Kartarpur corridor at the end of 2019 across their militarised Punjab border. The corridor makes it easier for Sikh pilgrims to visit the shrine in Kartarpur in Pakistan, where Guru Nanak founded the Sikh faith. There is much more to be done on reconnecting the Subcontinent’s sacred geographies — including the Ramayana trail and Sufi shrines.
While parts of the region are aligning their policies with the geographic imperative, Pakistan would seem to be an exception. Some would say, Islamabad’s policies are deliberately anti-geographic. Consider, for example, the recent controversy in Pakistan over the routine appointment of a “trade officer” in its high commission in Delhi.
Facing a barrage of media criticism, the new government led by Shehbaz Sharif had to clarify that it was not planning to improve trade ties with India. Given the depth of its macro economic crisis and massive inflation, one might have thought Pakistan would want to expand trade ties with India in its own economic interest. But Pakistan’s politics are hard-wired against the logic of geography.
An attempt at limited trade liberalisation with India after the two countries signed a ceasefire agreement in February last year was overruled at the last moment by Prime Minister Imran Khan. The Muslim League’s Nawaz Sharif and the Pakistan People’s Party’s Asif Ali Zardari — who back the present government in Islamabad — have, in the past, supported normal trade relations with India, but could not get the army’s consent.
While General Qamar Javed Bajwa, the current Chief of Army Staff, had called for a reset of relations with India, Imran Khan pulled the plug on trade liberalisation. His argument was that Pakistan can’t trade with India unless Delhi reversed its 2019 constitutional changes in Kashmir.
Now Imran is on the streets campaigning against the “imported government” (from the US which, according to the former PM, conspired to oust him from power). He could chew the government up if it opens up to trade with India. The army, long viewed as a decisive arbiter in Pakistan’s political and policy disputes, seems divided on how best to manage the current crisis.
This leaves Shehbaz little room for creative policy making that can ease some of Pakistan’s current economic problems. Meanwhile, the young Bilawal Bhutto Zardari, who has taken charge of Pakistan’s Foreign Office, is tied down by his bureaucracy’s staple of Kashmir cliches.
Delhi had little reason to believe that Pakistan’s new government can alter its self-defeating policy towards India. But it must continue to bet that the geographic imperative will eventually prevail over Islamabad’s policies. Pessimists in Delhi will say the word “eventually” means nothing for policy-making today. But optimists would say India must continue to find ways to work with Pakistan.
Realists might want to argue that current trends in the Subcontinent point to India’s growing agency in shaping its neighbourhood and that Pakistan will not forever remain an exception. For Delhi, the policy question is whether India can do something to hasten the inevitable change in Pakistan.
This column first appeared in the print edition on May 17, 2022, under the title ‘Bound by geography’. The writer is Senior Fellow, Asia Society Policy Institute, Delhi and a contributing editor on international affairs for The Indian Express
The fire at Delhi’s Mundka, with a death toll of 27 persons so far— a majority of whom are women workers in informal manufacturing units — underscores yet again the invisibilities and insecurities of informal workers in the city. The fact that the antecedents of those who died are still unknown points to the invisibility and lack of identity of informal sector workers.
Reports on buildings catching fire leading to fatalities, followed by discussions on illegal constructions and unplanned infrastructural development in urban centres, have become a somewhat repetitive subject. With every such mishap, reports on how these buildings do not have required fire clearance and no-objection certificates from concerned authorities surface. Yet, such incidents keep on repeating; the harrowing stories of those who lost their dear ones are matters of public attention only for a few days, till the headlines shift.
Incidents of this sort are also opportunities for political leaders to display their concern for those who lost their dear ones with compensation and promises coming one after the other. Enquiry commissions and assurances of tightening procedures are all part of a larger script, with no substantial change at the ground level.
By now, it is understood that the root cause of the Mundka mishap is a serious lapse in following the norms in construction as the whole building had only one staircase. While this accident shares similarities with earlier incidents, the site and the victims this time deserve special mention. Of the 27 who lost their lives to this massive fire, 21 were women workers, employed in a company that manufactured and assembled CCTVs and WiFi routers. As per reports, the manufacturing unit at Mundka employed about 100 people, half of them women. Many of them are young women and the sole or primary earners in their households. The predicament of women workers here has similarities to those in the garment units of Bangladesh — including disturbing parallels with the victims of the Rana Plaza collapse.
There are thousands of unregistered/informal industrial units in cities like Delhi without any data on the number of workers employed and the conditions of their employment. These workplaces are known to violate all norms, including basic labour laws. Informality and precarity define such workplaces where the quality of jobs is not a concern for those who are looking for employment. Women’s work participation rates have declined sharply over time, with Delhi having one of the lowest (14.5 per cent for age 15 and above as compared to 28.7 per cent all-India in 2019-20). The pandemic has added to women’s difficulties in finding jobs and such workplaces reveal the conditions under which women workers get employed. The profile of workers shows that many are young in their 20s or 30s — the age categories that suffuse our discourse on women’s development and empowerment. They are forced to join the labour market in low-paid and highly-informal jobs because of their migrant status and poor economic conditions. There is often a clear separation of tasks for men and women. Women workers are mostly into packing or are helpers — categories that are the lowest skilled as per the job classifications in such units.
Owing to the perception that workers employed in packing or as helpers undertake jobs that do not require much skill, wages are kept very low while the labour pool remains massive. With the pandemic and the resultant decline in work opportunities and household income, women are compelled to join employment to compensate for the loss of employment or declined income of male household members. Many of the workers who died joined the factory after the pandemic, pointing to the desperation that many poor households are facing. Working conditions, in general, are not often defined in such units with low and varying wages, long working hours, absence of any leave, including maternity leave and a lack of other basic facilities. In a city where living expenses have soared, with a monthly wage of Rs 6,500-7,500, a dignified life is beyond imagination. It is important to note that many women workers are often the sole earners or primary earners of their households. Working in contested spaces in dusty, shady and stingy rooms, without any safety precautions, gloves or masks is a common scene in these sweatshops. Basic workplace requirements such as the provision of drinking water and toilet facilities are often denied to workers.
Exposure to such employment provides limited opportunities for personal or economic advancement, with monotonous repetitive work filling the day. The large turnover and women’s withdrawal from the labour market are signs of extremely poor working conditions that many women cannot sustain for long. Absence of leave, including maternity leave and long working hours, are important concerns for women workers who also have to shoulder the housework and care responsibilities of their families, forcing them to eventually leave such workplaces.
Poorly ventilated workplaces, operating from dilapidated buildings are aplenty in the city and even by basic norms of occupational safety requirements, these workplaces are not to be “operational”. Such workplaces are often a source of additional income for the enforcement machinery, with employers and the administration least bothered about the lives of workers. There are anxieties about how the new labour codes will add to the vulnerability of informal workers. The Occupational Safety, Health and Working Conditions Code, 2020 (OSHWC) would replace existing regulations soon and this would worsen the conditions of informal workers as many of these small units would be left to themselves to follow prescribed safety conditions and can go unaccountable.
These sweatshops, which are part of our understanding of economic development are traps for women workers. The fact that it offers some respite from poverty and also from cultural restrictions on women also needs to be understood. But without any accountability of employers and a lack of political will to improve working conditions, we might end up allowing many more such horrific accidents.
This column first appeared in the print edition on May 17, 2022, under the title ‘Capital Fire’. The writer is professor, Centre for Women’s Development Studies, New Delhi
As the average Indian reels under fears of Covid and battles the bitter inflation, many noticed with worry and consternation that a court in Varanasi at the instance of a group of women petitioners (seeking permission to pray in the premises of the Gyanvapi Mosque) directed a survey to be conducted of the mosque, by a lawyer commissioner, one Ajay Kumar Mishra. The said directions to conduct the survey were challenged by the Anjuman Intezamia Masjid Committee, which manages the Gyanvapi mosque before the Allahabad High Court. Unfortunately, the Court upheld the order leading to the filing of a Special Leave Petition.
On Friday, mentioning this matter, the Senior Advocate appearing for the Anjuman Committee requested the Supreme Court that it stay the survey. However, the apex court declined and instead listed the matter for the coming Tuesday. In surprising haste, the Varanasi court, on May 16 has gone ahead on the basis of submissions made by the Court Commissioner that a Shiva Linga was found in a portion of the mosque, to seal that portion. One would have expected — as is normally the case in civil suits — that the trial court stays its hand and does not precipitate the matter further while the Supreme Court is seized of it. The haste of the trial court was accompanied by statements made by the judge concerning his own safety, which in itself raises concerns around judicial independence.
The Places of Worship (Special Provisions) Act 1991 declares under Section 4 that the religious character of a place of worship existing on the 15th day of August 1947, shall continue to be the same as it existed on that day. It further provides that any suit or proceeding filed with respect to the conversion of the religious character of any place of worship existing on August 15, 1947, is not maintainable and if pending, would abate. The only exception created to this rule is the Ram Janmabhoomi-Babri Masjid dispute.
On December 6, 1992, anti-social elements defied the rule of law and brought down an Archaeological Survey of India-recognised monument, popularly known as the Babri Masjid. The demolition of the Babri Masjid was held to be an act of criminal conspiracy by the Supreme Court in State through CBI vs. Kalyan Singh and Others [2017 (7) SCC 444]. The demolition was followed by communal riots that spread across the country leading to the death of many innocent citizens on account of the communally-charged atmosphere. Unfortunately, despite extensive video coverage of this criminal act, the trial court failed to convict the ring leaders on the ground of lack of evidence.
The civil dispute over the ownership of the property between the Sunni Waqf Board, the Nirmohi Akhara and the faction on behalf of Ram Lalla was put to rest by the Supreme Court in M. Siddiq vs. Mahant Suresh Das and others [(2020) 1 SCC 1]. The proceedings of the Court were watched by citizens in the hope that the constitutional morality would prevail over any emotive and sentimental considerations. However, the Constitutional Bench exercised Article 142 jurisdiction and chose to decide this dispute in a manner that appeared to appease the majoritarian sentiment: Despite not finding any archaeological evidence that the structure below the mosque was a Hindu temple, the Court decided to give the disputed land to the Hindu petitioners describing them generically as Hindus. The description and discussion of the parties in this dispute as Hindus vs. Muslims discounted the reality that 70 per cent of Indians had no voice, whether through referendum or otherwise, to offer an opinion on the dispute.
The Supreme Court defended its judgment calling it a “peace judgment”; that this long-festering dispute once put to an end in favour of the majority would buy long-term peace. This hope was also discernible from their observation that all other instances of a dispute over the historic character of the monument would be strictly governed by the Places of Worship (Special Provisions) Act, 1991 and would not be entertained.
The optimism demonstrated by the Supreme Court in this was not shared by most jurists. The judgment was widely critiqued as an act of appeasement to the majoritarian sentiment which, though not subscribed to necessarily by most Hindus, was the sentiment of a certain ideological group. The judgment was also found to be contrary to settled principles of civil law and constitutional morality. The sceptics feared that emboldened by this appeasement, the Hindu right-wing would further its divisive agenda, despite thin evidence to justify its rhetoric. The slogan “Ayodhya toh jhaanki hai, Kashi Mathura baaki hai” began to do the rounds.
Wiser in hindsight, one hopes that the Supreme Court will put a firm end to the Gyanvapi Mosque suit filed in Varanasi and quash this completely illegal survey by Court Commissioners. The Places of Worship (Special Provisions) Act, 1991 firmly prohibits any such suit or survey and it is time that the Supreme Court enforces peace by the rule of law and not by appeasement of a particular ideological group or sentiment that may currently be in the majority.
Rahul Gandhi’s assertion that only Congress and not regional parties can lead the ideological fight against BJP and RSS flies in the face of their comparative track record in recent elections. Since its three-state victories in the Hindi heartland in 2018, Congress has lost successive head-to-head electoral contests with BJP. In the same period, regional parties like TMC, DMK, AAP and BJD have checked further advances by BJP. Congress, meanwhile, stands exposed as the weak plank in opposition unity efforts after its failure to tap anti-incumbency against BJP in Assam, Uttarakhand, Goa and Manipur. Neither could it retake Kerala from CPM.
GOP, ironically, has had better success playing second fiddle to JMM in Jharkhand, DMK in Tamil Nadu and Shiv Sena-NCP in Maharashtra. Instructively, Congress wringing too many seats from RJD boomeranged in Bihar. Consequently, regional parties no longer consider Congress their spearhead. None of these parties is obsessing overtly with ideology, as Rahul would want them to. They are betting on welfare policies, organisational strength and popular connect.
TMC, for instance, ran a hard-fought campaign slotting BJP as an outsider to Bengal and harping on Mamata’s welfare record. AAP is hard selling its Delhi model of service delivery and preaching patriotism and middle class virtues against BJP’s politics. Naveen Patnaik has held off BJP in Odisha solely on administrative improvements. True, personality cults, nepotism and indiscipline are a weakness for most regional parties that BJP is poised to exploit sooner than later. Nonetheless they are still better off than Congress, which doesn’t have enough workers in most states to even organise a flash strike against inflation, forget carrying a long-haul ideological message to voters.
Rahul’s obsession with ideology isn’t shared by voters either. The Lokniti 2019 post-poll survey revealed that less than 1% of respondents listed Hindutva and various communal themes as the most important political issue for them while voting (economy and good governance were cited the most). With its weak organisational presence and finite resources, Congress will be wasting time and effort if it operates by Rahul’s “ideology” thesis. BJP’s adeptness at filling political vacuums, identifying under-represented castes, wooing talents from other parties and keeping netas on their toes is a lesson for both Congress and regional parties. Lazy diatribes on ideology – in a country where just 5% of citizens file income tax returns and crores more could do with a leg up via better governance – just isn’t good oppositional politics.
In what can only be described as a truly historic feat for Indian badminton, Team India shuttlers put up a spectacular performance to not only reach the final of the Thomas Cup but also defeat Indonesia – the most decorated team in men’s badminton. Indonesia, which has won this tournament 14 times, had history and reputation on its side. But that failed to overwhelm Lakshya Sen, Chirag Shetty, Satwiksairaj Rankireddy and Kidambi Srikanth who took India over the finishing line with an incredible 3-0 score.
The victory underscores the depth of Indian badminton today. While the sport has had outstanding individual performers for some time now, putting together a world-class team reflects the true health of the game in the country. In fact, all the players who played the final rank among the top 15 in the world. Things truly started changing for Indian badminton after Saina Nehwal won the Commonwealth Games gold in 2010. Subsequently, her bronze at the 2012 London Olympics took the popularity of the sport to a whole new level. With PV Sindhu’s successes at the international stage following shortly, Indian badminton had arrived.
That said, over the years two hubs have emerged for Indian badminton – the Pullela Gopichand Academy in Hyderabad and the Prakash Padukone Badminton Academy in Bengaluru. While these two are responsible for producing and nurturing almost all of India’s top shuttlers, for continued success quality training infrastructure needs to be broad based throughout the country. Second, badminton’s success is underpinned by efforts of former stalwarts of the game like Gopichand – who is the current national coach – Padukone and Vimal Kumar. They have been handpicking, guiding and transforming players into champions. A similar approach in other sports where former icons of the game are given a free hand and supported to nurture talent is worth trying out. Given India’s size and youth bulge, there’s no reason why we can’t emerge as a sporting powerhouse.
Frankly, it's getting a bit tiring now. And if one is not getting bored by yet another revelation - confirmed or concocted - of a buried past lying under a ho-hum present, then one may be showing signs of addiction to this kind of communal - in the sense of community-bound - nostalgia. Before yet another court hearing of what is essentially a property dispute - this time involving the Gyanvapi mosque in Varanasi - petitioners have claimed the existence of an ancient object of worship, leading to the sealing of the entire structure.
Of course, this is not the kind of archaeological revelation being propounded by the petitioners that saw, say, Alexander Cunningham discovering the Ashokan pillar in Sanchi in 1851. Even if confirmed, the discovery of a shiv lingam in the Gyanvapi masjid structure would be swept away by triumphalism of a kind far removed from the wonderment of an archaeological find. In 2022 India, it increasingly seems that the past - confirmed or concocted - is becoming the go-to place, even a happy space, for those who find the present, never mind the future, wobbly and insecure.
From a larger psycho-social angle, such a trend shows a nation taking solace in various ideas of its past. Verification becomes secondary, even redundant, in this mass exercise of the will. To will something is, in this variant of Golden Ageism, is as good as is existing. The problem with this kind of thinking - apart from the potentially dangerous social and civic consequences of a majoritarian 'We were here first' and 'They destroyed our structures' trope - is that it essentially runs the risk of, at best, neglecting, at worst, ignoring the future. There is nothing, of course, that stops ambitious, successful societies from looking Janus-faced at both past and future. It is, in fact, a healthy sign when pride in history, or even mythology, is used to spur progress and development. But this balance falls by the wayside when 'pasting' becomes obsessive, turns into a national project from a party game. It is the future, then, that becomes relegated to the dustbin of history.
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Banks are seeking a narrower definition of fraud to free credit from litigation that slows down both business as well as banking. As it stands now, the definition of fraud is wide, encompassing any diversion of funds by a borrower for use not stipulated in the loan agreement even if there is no mala fide involved. Moreover, fraud detected in forensic audits of overdue loan accounts is made public by the lender, and every other lender to the same borrower has to label their loans as such. This flies in the face of logic. A small irregularity is amplified across the credit profile of a corporate borrower, affecting its business. Banks, on their part, get embroiled in litigation that may not necessarily involve loans they have extended. This ties up their lending capacity.
Detecting fraud is not an exact science, and auditors can be ambiguous. A system-wide fraud tag, once attached to a company, has a domino effect on both debt and equity. Bank profitability is affected by attendant provisioning requirements even if their exposure has zero value at risk. Then there is the matter of damaged reputation.
The extraordinary deterrence built into bank lending is in reaction to widespread abuse that led to a bad loan crisis. The economy has emerged from that at a big cost to the taxpayer and regulators are naturally extra vigilant over public money. But deterring wrongdoing should not impose an excessive cost on doing business. Particularly for banks, where improved governance can deliver the same outcome. The banking clean-up undertaken over the better part of a decade was meant to free up credit flow to the economy. The system is now subject to more sophisticated policing, and some moderation of the regulatory impulse is in order.
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Narendra Modi's day-long visit to Nepal, which included talks with Prime Minister Sher Bahadur Deuba and marking the 2,566th birth anniversary of Gautam Buddha at Lumbini, is part of the rework-in-progress in India-Nepal ties. Changing geopolitical contexts, Nepal's domestic political dynamics, global challenges such as climate change and energy transitions - all these require the India-Nepal relationship to evolve from 'traditional cultural ties' to fit the needs of the 21st century. Modi's visit to Nepal, just like Deuba's India visit earlier in April, is laying out the elements of this being-updated relationship.
The bilateral relationship hit a low post-2016. Anti-Indianism emerged as an expression of Nepali nationalism. Some political parties, in particular the Nepal Communist Party (NCP), exploited this to their advantage. Building on these dynamics, during 2018-21, Beijing's influence in Nepal grew. By 2019, China had replaced India as the largest foreign investor in Nepal. Deuba's appointment as PM in July 2021 provided an opportunity to rework the bilateral relationship. His April visit focused on energy and infrastructure. His counterpart's current visit looks at leveraging historical ties to drive economic growth for both countries.
As Kathmandu and New Delhi work towards their net-zero emissions targets, Nepal and India have the opportunity to leverage their relationship to push for economic growth. Increased energy partnerships and improved rail connectivity, along with strengthening infrastructure and logistics for religious tourism, are bulwarks of this model. Partnering to build a Buddhist centre at Lumbini as a net-zero-emissions building underlines that this is not a reset, but an update for the times.
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The decision to ban the private export of wheat could have been triggered by the consumer price index (CPI) for April, which showed that inflation in the price of wheat at 9.59% is running far ahead of the rate for cereals overall at 5.96%. Cereals have a weight of 9.67% in the CPI, and the restriction - government-to-government exports are still kosher - could be an attempt to dampen food inflation, which has accelerated to 8.38% in April from 7.68% in March. The other two food groups that saw runaway inflation are vegetables at 15.41% and edible oils at 17.28%. These three groups have a combined weight of almost 20% in the CPI and the Union government was seeking policy levers to tame prices. Vegetable price surges are transient, given the duration of the harvest. Edible oils are heavily dependent on imports, and raising acreage for local substitutes can only deliver results with a lag.
Wheat became the object of the government's food price intervention as production and procurement this year are both expected to suffer on account of a severe heatwave across the country. Crop estimates for this season are below earlier projections. And procurement is likely to halve from a year ago. This follows an extended period of drawdown in the country's grain stockpile to subsidise food to over half of the population over the course of the pandemic. The special subsidies on rice and wheat will run till September. The subsidies could have been optimised by switching one for the other. Higher procurement prices would also have helped bring in wheat stocks that farmers and traders are sitting on as international prices rise.
The move by India, the world's second-largest producer of wheat, has had an effect on international prices, which reached a fresh record high immediately after the decision was announced. Exporting food inflation during a global crisis does not add to the country's reputation as a reliable trading partner. It also does not go down well with farmers whose livelihood is being squeezed at a time of rising prices.
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A swirling dispute over the Kashi Vishwanath Temple-Gyanvapi Masjid complex reached the Supreme Court (SC) on Tuesday, at a time when tensions are at a tipping point over the recovery of a “Shivling” — as claimed by Hindu petitioners — in the ceremonial ablution tank of the mosque. Tension has been building for a year, since a local court admitted the petition of five Hindu women — who wanted the right to worship idols installed within the premises — raising a larger question around the 1991 Places of Worship Act, which froze the “religious identity” of any site of worship on the day of India’s Independence. It was further ratcheted up after the local court ordered a survey of the premises in April — opposed by the Muslim side — and reiterated its decision weeks later.
In the hearings on Tuesday — both in the SC and 800 km away in the Varanasi civil court — two things became clear. One, in cases involving sensitive disputes, legal processes must be firewalled from the weight of public opinion or emotion, and strictly follow established procedure. The top court was right in underlining that no worshippers could be stopped from offering namaz on the premises as a consequence of the lower court’s order, which the Muslim side said was passed without hearing its arguments. The Varanasi court also removed the person in charge of the survey for allegedly leaking details of the exercise. But the second, and bigger takeaway, is that the SC has to expeditiously decide on the mandate of the Places of Worship Act, which, prima facie, bars the kind of petitions that lower courts in Varanasi and Mathura admitted and heard over the past year. The case of the Muslim petitioners hinges on the 1991 legislation, meant to forestall attempts to follow the Ram Janmabhoomi-Babri Masjid template and lay claim to places of worship through the courts. In the 2019 Ayodhya judgment, the court held the law protects and secures the fundamental values of the Constitution by providing confidence to every religious community that their places of worship will be preserved. The top court must clarify if this continues to be its position, and then communicate to all levels of the judiciary to abide by the decision.
This newspaper previously noted that an erosion of this law’s mandate can open a Pandora’s Box of religious strife, discontent and potentially, violence. The top court took up challenges to the law in 2020 but hasn’t heard it since. Two more petitions against it are also pending. The Gyanvapi Masjid dispute is building up to be a landmark case. The Hindu side believes the 1991 law carves out an exception specifically for such structures. The Muslim side argues that any survey is a violation of the law. At the heart of the dispute is a short but crucial three-page legislation. The court must take a call on it at the earliest.
The killing of government employee Rahul Bhat in Jammu and Kashmir’s Budgam district last week marked a disturbing escalation in violence against Kashmiri Pandits and struck panic in the hearts of a community still struggling with the horrors of an exodus. Bhat, who moved to the Valley under a decades-old government rehabilitation scheme for Kashmiri Pandits forced to leave the region, was gunned down in his workplace, uncovering a serious breach of safety protocols and underlining how fragile the social, political and security atmosphere continues to be in Kashmir.
Till last year, government data showed 3,800 people took up jobs under the rehabilitation scheme, and 520 candidates returned to Kashmir for these jobs since the nullification of Article 370. The scheme also included financial incentives for housing, cash relief and transit accommodation. Yet, the killing of Bhat – he was the second Pandit targeted in two months after a medical shop owner was shot at and injured in April – and the protests that swept the region show that a fraught social atmosphere and lack of political initiatives are seriously hindering the rehabilitation and reintegration programmes.
Since the scrapping of the region’s special status, the administration, police and security forces have focussed on eliminating militancy. The government told Parliament last year that terror incidents fell since the effective abrogation of Article 370. But the targeting of Pandits, their continued residence in temporary transit camps, and the pervasive fear and panic among community members indicate an urgent need for political initiatives and attempts to bridge the sectarian divide, and a cessation of rhetoric that can exacerbate communal emotions. Of course, local communities in the region have an active role to play, as do local politicians who must assure vulnerable Pandits of their safety and repair broken trust. But the lead must be taken by the administration to ensure that no innocent lives are lost to terrorists again.
It requires no doctorate in political science to understand what exactly ails the contemporary Indian National Congress: Lack of full-time leadership, strong party organisation, self-confidence, and a credible narrative to counter the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)’s governance boasts and muscular majoritarianism.
Brain-storming sessions or chintan shivirs of the kind held in Udaipur help but only to show that the party isn’t entirely comatose; that it’s alive and attempting to resuscitate itself to action. To that extent, the Congress’s promised push to inject fresh blood in party structures, in states where it has governments and in poll candidatures is a delayed yet welcome initiative.
The carving out of the Gen-X or the Millennials for tomorrow’s leadership will address as much the imperative of sifting or retiring — through proposed age bars and niche roles — some of the old-guard perceived as easy targets for their past malfeasance. The worry on that score was to the fore with Rahul Gandhi’s averment against the run of his speech at Udaipur, that he wasn’t scared of fighting the BJP-RSS for he had nothing to hide: “I haven’t taken a single rupee of Bharat Mata….” An easily drawn inference from his claim is that there are others in the party who perhaps have, or are charged with.
Be it as it may, the point needed to be made and the correctives applied, more so when scores of state legislators are pressured or purchased after winning elections. Graft isn’t a patent of any political party, but the trend is endemic to the Congress.
The narrative conundrum
That said, the Udaipur confabulations threw little light on the party’s proposed messaging in the upcoming polls beyond the stock issues of inflation, unemployment, and jobless growth.
The narrative conundrum is crucial. A party with a seemingly paralysed tongue cannot possibly capture popular imagination in competition with an adversary that’s forever in a hyper-nationalistic talking mode, its assertions force-multiplied by countless mainstream/social media platforms to carry home the rhetoric often without fact check or scrutiny.
The sanjivini of an electoral win the Congress direly needs to stay relevant in our crowded multi-party democracy will remain elusive without a confident narrative enabled by a robust outreach. A party bashful of its past cannot possibly make people rally around its lure, its promise of being a better bet than its rivals. Only a wider, uninterrupted debate focused on educating the cadres on the party’s governance record which, on balance, is formidable, can prepare it with cogent responses to its principal rival’s fact-agonistic propaganda that the post-Independence Congress-era was a zero sum game.
On the nationalism front, the party must enunciate upfront and with greater force and commitment its definition of nationalism. How its rashtravaad is distinct and better informed by historical experiences than what's popularised by the BJP. Politics is the game of explaining issues and offering people choices which the Congress ceased doing with any degree of regularity and seriousness after losing power in 2014.
This makes inescapable the question: Has Udaipur helped find an ideological riposte to the Narendra Modi-led BJP’s success in subsuming the welfare state that’s India in its brand of Hindutva welfare-ism astride the much-hyped free ration scheme? The “Ram-Roti” combination helped the religious right retain power in Uttar Pradesh and Uttarakhand, not to speak of Goa and Manipur where the Congress was done in as much by its defection-inducing organisational infirmities accentuated by its lackadaisical ways. Have the washout results shaken the party out of its self-image of being a permanent default option that it was till the 1980s when Mandal destroyed its social base which it is unable to reconstruct till date in the Hindi belt?
The Udaipur session is a pointer that the grand old party finally is in a reflective mode and for good reasons. If the BJP registered landmark back-to-back wins in UP and Uttarakhand, a new kid on the block, the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) did wonders in Punjab with its unprecedented landslide victory while the Congress set its own house on fire in the run-up to the polls it seemed certain of winning at one stage. The element common to its defeats in these states — barring UP where it wasn’t a mentionable player despite Priyanka Gandhi Vadra's gutsy campaign — was its proclivity to fall on its own sword.
One will have to wait a while to ascertain whether the Congress has emerged wiser from the shivir convened in the backdrop of such stunning debacles.
The first portents weren’t the least reassuring. Amid the Udaipur huddle, the party’s foremost Hindu face in Punjab, Sunil Jakhar quit the Congress and Gujarat’s Hardik Patel vented grievances in public. Prone though the duo might be to overplaying their angst, they are useful human resource any party should desist losing.
One must admit that certain initiatives the Congress mooted and adopted at Udaipur look promising on paper. Much however will depend on how adroitly and quickly are the decisions executed on the ground. For instance, will the party have an elected full-time president other than Sonia Gandhi vide an organisational election by September? Will elections also be held to the Congress Working Committee?
Bharat Jodo Yatra
The Congress has to steadfastly adhere to the organisational election, scheduled to have in place its lead marcher, be it Rahul Gandhi or anyone else, before the October 2 Gandhi Jayanti launch of the Kashmir to Kanyakumari “Bharat Jodo” yatra announced from Udaipur. If creatively done, the proposed march could be a potent platform to purvey the party’s ideological messaging which at once can bolster its campaign in the November-December Himachal and Gujarat elections. A test of its political savvy will be the way it front-loads its achievements, inclusive of the contribution of its icons, notably Jawaharlal Nehru whose demonisation has been high on the BJP’s agenda.
It is ironical yet true that Nehru was best remembered in recent years not by the Congress but the AAP’s Arvind Kejriwal. Cocking a snook at the BJP in a 2018 speech, he said: “It’s our good fortune that we got Nehru who had the vision to lay the foundations of a modern India. Had he made a 182 meter statue (of Sardar Patel) instead of IIT Kharagpur, I wouldn’t have been able to study there. If he’d made a temple instead of BHEL, would the country have progressed?”
There’s a pertinent lesson here for Rahul Gandhi who in his Udaipur address sought to discount the relevance of regional parties to showcase the Congress as the sole ideological bulwark against the BJP. The age of his party playing solo is long over. It’s about time he learnt to play doubles or be a team player to mount a forceful challenge to the leviathan sangh parivar he keeps daring for a fight. His other failings apart, besides the Congress and the Left, Lalu Yadav is one regional leader who hasn’t forsaken his secular beliefs to cut deals with the BJP like other provincial chieftains.
For its part, the Congress would be better off recognising the relevance of regional force in power in several states. It cannot deride them and yet pretend to unite India, the road to which is regaining the popular-connect which by Rahul Gandhi’s own admission that party has lost.
The Congress’s Bharat Jodo call has to be a yugal geet, a chorus for it to fetch a pan-Indian resonance. A set of attendant slogans that’ll help draw the youth to the party must celebrate social harmony and jobs, or call it pyar aur roozgar if you like, with a ready reckoner on how the ruling dispensation's social policies aren't in synch with its economic ambitions. For a society shorn of peace cannot attract capital.
HT’s veteran political editor, Vinod Sharma, brings together his four-decade-long experience of closely tracking Indian politics, his intimate knowledge of the actors who dominate the political theatre, and his keen eye which can juxtapose the past and the present in his weekly column, Distantly Close
vinodsharma@hindustantimes.com
The views expressed are personal
Kurukshetra is the holy land where the epic battle in the Mahabharat, also called dharmyudh, was fought between the warring brothers, the Pandavas and Kauravas, likely in 3000 BC. The Pandavas won because dharm (law) was on their side. Five millennia later, the police forces of three states faced off at the same place over the arrest of a political activist. But no one emerged victorious, because dharm favoured no one. Each came back, sober and apprehensive. Meanwhile, an intense debate raged over the conduct of the police going beyond the ambit of law and accepted norms, presumably at the behest of the political executive.
A tweet in Delhi attracted the ire of someone in Mohali and the Punjab Police, moving with alacrity, entered Delhi to arrest Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) leader Tajinder Pal Singh Bagga. No transit remand was sought, but as they cruised along the highway towards Punjab, they were waylaid at Kurukshetra by the Haryana Police, armed with a warrant and a kidnapping case lodged by the Delhi Police. The tensions continued till Bagga was brought back home on the warrant of a Dwarka court.
Other states are doing no better. The Assam Police whisked away a Member of the Legislative Assembly (MLA) Jignesh Mevani from Gujarat because someone in Kokrajhar got charged up over his tweet. Amaravati Member of Parliament (MP) Navneet Rana and her husband, MLA Ravi Rana, were hauled up for sedition in Mumbai, while attempting to chant the Hanuman Chalisa outside the chief minister (CM)’s residence. While no case was made out against Bagga and Mevani, except perhaps defamation, the Ranas, at best, could have been charged with public nuisance.
This is a theatre of the absurd with the police actors going well beyond the script. The Supreme Court (SC)’s orders have come to the rescue of the criminal justice system. A recent order on dharma sansads (religious parliaments) pushed states into taking action against inflammatory speeches and, in some cases, preventing such conclaves in future. Putting the sedition law in abeyance till the government articulates its stand on the matter is another, though the judges could have gone ahead with the hearings on the constitutionality of the law in today’s world, where freedom of speech is guaranteed.
However, even the SC’s directives on police reforms have largely been circumvented by the states. Seventeen states have either formulated or amended their police acts, but only for compliance purposes. The draft Model Police Act, 2006, crafted by the late jurist Soli Sorabjee was amended by the Centre in 2015 after 10 years and now awaits introduction even in the Union Territories. The SC’s directives were resisted by the states from the outset. A contentious issue is the selection of the director-general of police (DGP). No CM would let go of his or her power to select the DGP. To some extent, they are right too, since in a democracy, the police chief has to report to an elected government.
The last London Metropolitan Police chief, Cressida Dick, resigned over differences with mayor Sadiq Khan, who considered her ineffective against continuing racial prejudice and slurs against women. The London police chief is appointed by the home secretary and works closely with the mayor, reporting to him on important matters. The mayor is from the Labour Party while the government is Conservative. No wonder glowing tributes were paid to the outgoing chief for her astute stewardship and professionalism by home secretary Priti Patel and well as the prime minister.
While political factors are ubiquitous in such appointments, nevertheless, in advanced democracies such as the United Kingdom or the United States, the police chiefs profess their loyalty and accountability to the law. Hence, only differences over budgets, policies, attitudes and performance lead to sacking or resignation of chiefs. There is hardly ever any dispute over the institution of cases or investigation and politicians keep away from commenting or analysing investigation details.
Indian politicians revel in debating police matters. Quite a few owe their fame or name and rise in their careers to confrontations with the police and the resultant media coverage. All operational posts in the police are under the scanner of the political executive. In most states, the ruling party cadre wields influence over the police working in their areas.
The Uttar Pradesh DGP, Mukul Goel, who was recently transferred on grounds of ineffectiveness and non-cooperation, was on a fixed tenure. The charge against him has not been explained. Do people have a right to know the detailed reasons as to why a state police chief has been sacked?
With political leadership wresting control of the police, the practice of foisting criminal cases on adversaries for political reasons is bound to continue. As a result, outstanding work done by the bulk of police officers escapes the notice of the media and public.
Where does the solution lie then? A few good men need to stand together — from the media to question all major appointments and apprise the public of their suitability for the post, from the judiciary to question all cases of arbitrary arrests and actions, from the police to resist illegal acts and remain accountable to the law while aggressively pushing through internal reforms within their ambit, from the bureaucracy to facilitate people-oriented policing and fight for honest policemen, and from the polity to reflect seriously on the rule of law and the future of our democracy. Such good men are there in abundance and need to stand tall.
Yashovardhan Azad is a former IPS officer, who served as special director, Intelligence Bureau, secretary (security), Government of India, and Central Information Commissioner. He is presently chairman, Deepstrat, a New Delhi-based think tank
The views expressed are personal
The world, to use a Shakespearean phrase, is out of joint. There have, of course, been astonishing technological and scientific achievements over the last few decades. We are now routinely travelling into space, landing on the moon, and reaching out to the planets. We have been able to see the unbelievably large through galactic telescopes and the unbelievably small through our new instruments. We can communicate instantly with anyone anywhere on the planet through the ubiquitous mobile phone. In a hundred other ways also, our lives have been positively influenced by science and technology.
Nonetheless, the planet faces three major calamities, two of which are upon us. The first is the calamity of the climate crisis and global warming. The weather has gone haywire with extreme conditions around the world, leading to hurricanes, tsunamis and massive forest fires. The glaciers are melting much faster than was expected and within the next decade, several island nations will have simply disappeared below the sea; with deforestation, thousands of species go extinct every year. There is little chance of the global community meeting the 1.5 degree Celsius ceiling spelt out at the Paris climate meet, which means that global warming is set to accelerate with all its disastrous implications. International conferences and resolutions are useful in creating public opinion regarding the climate crisis, but in themselves, they are not sufficient unless they are followed up with concerted and effective action by individual nations.
The second calamity is the global pandemic. Tens of millions of lives have been lost, cutting across all barriers, including in those countries which thought they had fully developed medical infrastructures. Probably the most lethal pandemic since the great plague swept through Europe several centuries ago, it is a warning that if we continue to indulge in risky behaviour such as eating bushmeat or animals not usually consumed for food (but which are available in the so-called wet markets), such infections can jump species and affect human beings with disastrous consequences. We need to ramp up our health and medical infrastructure but we must also be prepared to produce vaccines in record time. In this area, India has an advantage because of its strong vaccine manufacturing capability which we must now expand.
The third calamity, which has not hit us yet, is the threat of a nuclear conflagration. Since 1945, when nuclear weapons were first used, there has been an alarming proliferation around the world, including on the subcontinent. Although even one of the new massive nuclear weapons would be enough to destroy millions within the first few seconds, it seems that we are never satisfied with the minimum required for deterrence. The major proliferators, of course, are the United States (US), Russia and China. The trigger for a nuclear war we thought was confined to North Korea, but with the unending fratricidal conflict between Russia and Ukraine and the fact that nuclear weapons in Russia, the US and Europe were put on full alert is an ominous sign. A slight miscalculation on either side can set off a nuclear conflict whose immediate and long-term consequences for the human race are terrifying. The doomsday clock is moving forward inexorably due to the three calamities.
All of this brings up the larger question of the future of the human race. We have reached where we are after two billion years of evolution from the slime of the primaeval ocean and are moving steadily into Artificial Intelligence. However, at the moment, the negative factors would seem to be overwhelming. There are alternative scenarios in this regard. Arthur Koestler in Janus-A Summing Up, published late in the last century, holds that the human race is programmed for self-destruction because of an engineering defect in the human cortex, whereby the thinking and feeling aspects are inadequately integrated. As a result, although we know what should be done, we do not do it. As Duryodhana says in the Mahabharata: Janami Dharman Na Ch Mey Pravarti, Janami Adharma Na Ca Mey Nirvati (I know what is right but I am not attracted to it? I know what is wrong but I am attracted to it).
In this scenario, Koestler feels that it is only a matter of time before we blow ourselves up or suffer some such disastrous fate. Against this, the great evolutionary philosopher, Sri Aurobindo, holds that the human race is a race programmed for evolution. According to him, we are now only halfway between the animal and the divine, and are, by no means, the final product of evolution. The evolutionary thrust will not end with human consciousness but will push it on from mind to supermind, through which alone can the problems facing humanity finally be solved. This is, of course, a more optimistic scenario, but the trouble is that the timeframe is so prolonged as to make it look as if it is not something that can be achieved in the near future.
The jury is out regarding these two scenarios, but I will end this rather grim essay with an amusing limerick that I heard many years ago, it runs as follows:
God’s plan made a hopeful beginning/But man spoilt his chances by sinning/We know that the story/Will end in God’s glory/But at present the other side’s winning.
Karan Singh is a senior Congress leader and the son of former Jammu and Kashmir ruler Maharaja Hari Singh. He has been a member of both the Lok Sabha and the Rajya Sabha The views expressed are personal
India is literally melting these days, hitting temperatures inconceivable a few years ago. This is not surprising — global warming-related heatwaves were predicted. But the heat is so intense and its escalation so rapidly, that it has left us gasping. Plans to counter heatwaves exist. Most of them focus on a few issues: Identifying a heatwave in the context of local conditions; public awareness; illness prevention and public action. Despite these plans, a significant chunk of urban India’s population will get singed. This is the informal workforce.
About 80% of the workforce in urban India is informal (90% in rural India). We know them as cobblers, workers in construction and waste, and street vendors, among other people who make cities liveable. They are vulnerable to the heat; their work requires them to be on the streets, facing the elements, for the most part, without any cooling comfort. Most live off a daily wage, forcing them to work despite the cold or heat. Their urban homes remain informal shanties, made of cartons, bricks, tin roofs and plastic sheets. These provide almost no protection against the heat, or even the cold. Most don’t even enjoy access to cold water, far less any of the prescribed means of recovery from heat injuries. India is in real danger of loss of lives from the heat pandemic. A study in Lancet projects the deaths from heat in India at 83,700 per annum. As workers push themselves to work, data shows their productivity falls. A McKinsey report projects that by 2030, outdoor work hours lost in India will be 15%, which could result in a $150-250 billion risk to the Gross Domestic Product.
What is to be done? The International Labour Organization in its Working on a Warmer Planet report, pointed out that construction workers are among the more vulnerable. In India, building infrastructure is a key strategy for economic growth. The 2022-23 Budget allocated ₹20,000 crore for highway expansion. Who will build these roads if even 10% of the approximately 50 million workers’ productivity nosedives?
Prior to this heatwave, several workers I spoke to asked why they couldn’t start working at 5 am and ending at 1 pm? Coupled with workplaces designed for frequent rest, shade and hydration, this could be a first step. Other professions are also challenged. Brick kiln workers are always likely to be near intense heat, or in brutally hot, enclosed spaces. Waste pickers soldier on in sizzling landfills. We must look for improved conditions for workers. But it isn’t enough protection. Decent housing is key to surviving intense heat, cold and rain. While government housing schemes struggle to provide more of the poor with pucca houses, interim measures are vital. Many of these are simple fixes: For example, setting up community cool spaces, including near slums, or, opening up public and private spaces such as stadiums and empty college hostels to provide cool spaces. Urban India’s informal workers live hand to mouth. They have barely any savings, no real homes, nothing to hold onto. Despite progressive steps such as the e-shram portal, the wrath of the climate crisis shows that systemic shifts are the only way to blunt the impact.
Urban India needs a reset to prevent a meltdown. Housing for everyone, including the poor, must be designed to be cooler; it cannot be business as usual. Cities must densify green cover. On the one hand, old trees and open spaces are key to combating the heat island effect. These must be preserved. Creating densely shaded areas in every ward could reduce the local experience of brutal heat as workers typically walk, cycle or wait at bus stops. To survive these heatwaves and grow our economy, we need a moratorium on cutting down trees altogether. On the other hand, societal prejudices must break, so the poor can share resources. Today, few urban neighbourhoods accept the plumber or cobbler resting in a shady park. Work times, too, must shift. To create societal acceptance and a smooth transition, why not move to an Indian summer time? The vocal middle class might detest it, but for millions of other Indians, such an overhaul could be a means of staying alive.
Bharati Chaturvedi is founder and director of Chintan Environmental Research and Action Group The views expressed are personal
Here's a story about the Gaddi shepherdess, a pastoral woman, who walks in the mountains of the Himalayas. She collects jadi-buti and saag, brings water for her animals, cooks, makes dera (makeshift temporary home) on the road and also stays up all night to guard the animals in her dera. In an occupation that is so physically demanding, the shepherdess performs many laborious tasks outside of her care work for the family. In addition to this, the household work she is supposed to do is even more physically challenging during migration undertaken to find pastures.
But where do we see the shepherdess, except maybe in photo essays? Amid all the conversations on working women, which often feature on various platforms, where do we find the pastoral women? The labour of the pastoral woman somehow remains unseen in economic surveys and academic work. An attempt to look at the life of pastoral women beyond the photos shows us the complexity and the invisiblisation of their labour at multiple levels.
Working or labouring is a significant part of a pastoral woman’s life, which is fundamental to the pastoral community. There is a certain understanding of pastoral woman’s labour that is deeply embedded in her body and her agility. The idea of shram/kaam (labour/work) is often invoked when speaking to pastoral women. A certain form of physical labour, and thereby, a certain type of body becomes an essential part of a pastoral woman’s identity. To be able to walk for months on difficult terrains, negotiate through different types of ecosystems, people and institutions, and relate to different aspects of life through labour, are an integral part of pastoral identity.
A significant part of a pastoral woman’s identity is derived from her care and responsibility toward the flock. Relationship with her animals is more fundamental to her sense of identity. In most cases, this relationship of the pastoral woman with her flock is one of intimate care and nurture. Her care for the animals informs her work. She often says that she cares for the animals just like her own children, in a motherly way. Sometimes she has to become like an animal to “work” with the flock. Her flock, in some ways, mediates her relationship with various elements of the ecosystems. Providing this kind of care requires bodily labour. This labour is often invisibilised in studies and surveys on women, and their work gets understood primarily through the lens of settled communities. Pastoral women in movement tend to fall outside of this framework.
The relationship of the pastoral woman with her body is influenced by many factors. There are strong notions about which bodies can do such labour and which ones cannot.
In that sense, a major part of the onus is put on the labour embedded in the physical body; be it through the amount of labour required in the herding work or in keeping the body healthy and fit. Thus, old age and the diminishing physical capacity to do labour are the only possible exit routes allowed in the life of labouring for a pastoral woman.
The aging of the pastoral woman worries her and makes her nostalgic about the times when she was agile enough. She remembers her body and a sense of fear takes over her when she isn't able to walk or climb the mountain at the same speed she did earlier. The aging woman reminds herself of the difficult nature of her work, and feels at a loss because of not being able to work. She tells us about her fatigue with work, but also takes pride in having done, and honing her knowledge about, the pastoral work. As she swirls in that pride, she dismisses the younger generation for not knowing how to do the work of a ghumantu pashu-palak mahila.
Many changes, especially those related to sedentarisation, have been occurring in the world of a pastoral woman. Pastoral women now have to negotiate with modern notions around labour. This is also accompanied by changes in laws, movements around conservations and forest rights, and the inflow of tourism in the region. This has further led to changes in the nature of the pastoral economy, which impacts the notions of the labour of a pastoral woman. The mobility of pastoral women has significantly reduced because of these changes and the increased concerns around the safety and security of women. Nonetheless, the labour of a pastoral woman remains unchanged.
This informs how the understanding of a pastoral woman’s labour is intrinsically tied to the question of the body, which is also seeing changes because of a changing society. Our conversations with pastoral women point to how their bodies become significant in defining their identities as well as the work that they do as pastoral women.
At the same time, changing bodies and changing notions of labour keep their identities in a continuous process of transition. This complexity of women’s work doesn’t find space in the counting of work. And hence, the life of a pastoral woman offers us that conduit to understanding the invisibility of women’s work in a more nuanced way.
Gurpreet Kaur, Prateek and Saee Pawar are researchers working with the Institute of Social Studies Trust, Delhi. They are working on research titled Understanding Pastoral Women's Work which opens up the questions around the work of pastoral women and their relatedness with various ecosystems.
The views expressed are personal
Oppressive heat is experienced differently by each one of us and that may be why the government’s response to extreme heat has been slow and patchy so far. India’s spring heatwave spell, when maximum temperatures went up to 46-47 degrees Celsius over several parts of northwest, central, and east India, made the global scientific community take note of the unprecedented event.
The World Weather Attribution (WWA) network, a global collaboration of leading climate scientists who work on analysing whether a particular extreme weather event is linked to the climate crisis, will submit findings of their study on this year’s spring heatwave in India and Pakistan (in March and April) within the next fortnight. WWA is expected to sum up the extent to which the climate crisis may have contributed to such an unprecedented heatwave event. WWA’s statement will be significant to recognise India’s vulnerability to extreme climate disasters.
But, we need much more than that now. Prime Minister Narendra Modi, earlier this month, chaired a meeting on heatwave preparedness where he directed states and districts to come up with heat action plans. The urgency of developing heat action plans will never be understood until officials study how different people in different regions experience extreme heat. On days when the maximum temperature is beyond 45 degrees Celsius, the heat takes a heavy toll on the health of people on the margins of society.
To understand how domestic workers experience heat, I asked some women in Govindpuri’s slums to describe what they did to survive the heat. Most of them said they experienced low blood pressure, possibly linked to dehydration and throbbing headaches. Some of them longed to be in the air-conditioned homes of their employers, while some desperately needed a break from their work.
Of the women I spoke with, Renu Singh, a migrant worker from Bihar faces multiple challenges because she is also a caregiver to her son who has cerebral palsy. “I leave him for hours during afternoon hours in extreme heat. He cannot even drink water himself. What if he feels completely dehydrated?,” asked Renu, while she has been dealing with dizzy spells on hot days for the past two months. Both of them cannot sleep well at night because they have to sleep by the door so that at least a little bit of air from outside keeps them cool. They have a tiny desert cooler that can only help them during spells of dry heat. Most women also avoid drinking too much water because they may not have access to toilets where they work and public toilets are usually far away. Just getting to the public toilet can lead to a heat stroke.
Renu, however, points out that they are far better off than their family in Bihar who has to work outdoors no matter what. More than half of India may be experiencing a traumatic summer as the government chalks out how to deal with the crisis.
The first thing to do is study the impact of the heatwave on both mortality and morbidity. The National Centre for Disease Control (NCDC)’s study for some heat-affected states shows a clear correlation between the increase in the total number of deaths when maximum temperatures spike above 40 degrees Celsius. But when it comes to surveillance, NCDC is particular about the diagnosis of exclusion to determine if a death was only due to heatstroke or not. “We use a checklist to exclude any other conditions that may have caused the death. That is how surveillance works,” said Dr Aakash Shrivastava, National Programme on Climate Change and Human Health at NCDC during a heat stress training for journalists last week. Expectedly, NCDC has found only seven deaths linked to spring heatwave in India.
But for anyone tracking heat stress in India, it's common knowledge that heat first kills those with co-morbidities — the elderly and infants are at great risk. Hence, a strict criterion of exclusion may not always work. It's also understandable that with a lack of resources, India’s public health system is in a precarious state and cannot spare people to track the overall public health burden of heat.
This year’s heat spell should have been an opportunity to document the health burden of heat and come up with a humane plan for persons most exposed to this slow disaster. India will need cooling shelters; staggered work timings; cool roofs in slums; retrofitted architecture for passive cooling and a robust public health system to deal with the spike in heat-related illnesses and deaths. Time is running out.
From the climate crisis to air pollution, from questions of the development-environment tradeoffs to India’s voice in international negotiations on the environment, HT’s Jayashree Nandi brings her deep domain knowledge in a weekly column
The views expressed are personal
In December 2021, the joint parliamentary committee on personal data protection re-introduced a recommendation of heavy penalties for serious data violations, with fines up to ₹15 crore, or 4% of global turnover, while lesser offenses will have a limit of ₹5 crore, or 2% turnover.
Recently, the United Kingdom proposed to deviate from the standards that apply in the European Union (EU) under the General Data Protection Regulation (the EU GDPR), and incorporated GDPR into domestic law by way of the Data Protection Act 2018 (the UK GDPR). The EU GDPR is widely accepted as the gold standard of data and privacy.
While the EU has its share of disputes over GDPR and the proposed Digital Services Act, India mimicks the EU. But it is turning out to be a “licence raj” version of GDPR.
The preamble of the personal data protection bill (PDPB) adheres to the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. This multilateral treaty commits states parties to respect the civil and political rights of individuals, including the right to life, freedom of religion, freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, electoral rights and rights to due process and a fair trial.
But in PDPB, this “freedom” is overshadowed by the list of do’s and don’ts for data controllers. Unsurprisingly, the industry has been opposing the various parts of the ill-fated bill, mooted in 2019. The criticism has been the heavy burden of localisation of the data and the lack of clarity on what constitutes personal data.
Technically, voluntarily provided data may cease to be personal data. However, the onus is on the data controllers to protect private data and localise such data storage.
The Indian Penal Code does not have extra-territorial application as a general principle. In short, the competent authority (government) would like to know what is being stored as data by the data controller. It would have discretion in the determination of what data is private and what is not.
This, by far, defeats the key principle of being citizen-oriented toward data protection as the government would like to decide on “sensitive data” and whether it should be stored or discarded. The construction of PDPB and the recommendations from the joint parliamentary committee suggest that effectively regulating “data” and, thereby, regulating “privacy” is the government’s job and cannot be left to data controllers.
This leads to an important question: Would the government have the capacity to handle requests on a minute-to-minute basis from the data controllers?
This arrangement also puts the data principal in a risk zone. While the data principal may think that certain data may be classified, the queuing at the government’s IT desk may jeopardise the benefit of the doubt to the data principal, hence making them susceptible to unauthorised data access by third parties.
Second, such legislation, rather than safeguarding the citizen, operates in a mechanism where the government has a transparent film to look at what is being entered in the data owner’s device as this information would be shared with the government until the issue of what private data is, effectively settled.
Last, this creates an arduous amount of burden on any company, which by any form or means is collecting data from a data owner to transition the compliance with the standards set out. While the transition is an overhaul, a step-by-step approach toward this transition would be worthwhile.
India has over a billion smartphones and thousands of applications that use and collect data. Therefore, all the companies must transition to the new norms immediately and provide opt-in or opt-out for the user. This effectively means that consumers or the data owners must decide to opt in or opt out about the data they intend to share with the application. The scenario is fatal for a user, who may share the data for quicker access but may realise the folly after the consequential effect. This is one piece of legislation that India should get right by all means, lest we legalise snooping and profiling by the government.
Srikant Parthasarathy and Amirthalakshmi R are professors of International Law. Parthasarathy is an alumnus of The Hague Academy. Amirthalakshmi R is a principal counsel at Chambers of Dr Srikant Parthasarathy
The views expressed are personal
One of the surprise US bestsellers of the last 12 months has been Both/And, a memoir by Huma Abedin. It is written by the woman who rose to become one of Hillary Clinton’s closest aides and who, if Hillary had won the election, would have been a major figure in her White House, possibly her chief of staff.
Abedin attracted some attention in America a few years ago when her husband, the Congressman Anthony Weiner, was caught sexting women. (They have since separated.) That wouldn’t have mattered so much by itself except for an unexpected consequence. The New York State attorney’s office, which was investigating Weiner, found e-mails on his computer that appeared to be copies of correspondence between Hillary Clinton and Huma.
Shortly before polling day in the presidential election in the US, the then FBI director James Comey, wrote to Congress to say that the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) was examining these emails. This amounted to re-opening an investigation into Hillary’s emails which had already ended with the FBI concluding that she had committed no illegality.
Historians will debate how much difference that announcement made to the result of the election, but at the time it was seized on by Donald Trump to suggest that new incriminating evidence against Hillary had been found. That caused Clinton to lose the momentum her campaign had acquired and, according to some assessments, contributed to her eventual defeat.
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Clinton won the popular vote but not the electoral college which elected Trump; one of the peculiarities of the American system where the total number of votes polled does not necessarily matter. Abedin says she blamed herself for the events that led up to Hillary’s defeat.
She must have felt even worse when the FBI eventually concluded that the emails on Weiner’s computer were merely copies of emails it already had. In other words, it had all been for nothing. There was no new evidence. But by then, Trump had already become president. (And in a bizarre turn of events, he fired James Comey and described the FBI director as a showboat who loved being in the news.)
It is Abedin’s account of these events plus the stuff about Weiner that was expected to sell the book —and judging by its bestseller status, it probably did — but, for me, the best parts of the memoir were the early sections that dealt with growing up in a South Asian family in Saudi Arabia and in Middle America. Given the current public mood in America, I found it striking that Abedin made so much of her Muslim faith and emphasised how important it is to her. It is her faith, she suggests in the book, that sustained her through the low points in her life.
Abedin’s memoir captures what it means to be South Asian and live abroad. Her family regarded Mumbai as home. Her father was opposed to Partition. But then, when they faced hostility in the workplace in India, her family moved abroad.
Many immigrants who have grown up in these circumstances, turn their backs on the cultures they have left behind and settle on an entirely American identity. Some of them join politics; there are lots of South Asians in US politics now. Kamala Harris is the most notable example though there are others who have gone the full American politician route. Bobby Jindal became governor of Louisiana after converting to Christianity. Nikki Haley (often mentioned as a potential presidential candidate) spent a long time playing down her Indian origins.
Abedin’s book suggests that she rejected that approach. Instead she embraced the notion of multiple identities; an idea that all of us in India embrace in our everyday lives almost automatically, without even realising it. For instance, I am an Indian first and foremost. But I also have an ethnic identity — Gujarati – and a religious identity — Jain — all of which co-exist in harmony.
That can be more difficult to do for an immigrant who enters the American political system. And yet, reading the book, there is no doubt that Abedin has managed to effortlessly balance her many identities. When she talks about US politics, she speaks as an American. There is no sense there in which you feel that she writes as a child of South Asian immigrants who spent many years in Saudi Arabia till she returned to the US for college.
Watching her at the Soneva edition of the Jaipur Literary Festival (JLF), it was also clear that she had retained her South Asian cultural identity. She followed a session on Urdu poetry with an educated interest (her family spoke Urdu at home) and when she was listening to the rock band Kabir Café, who set Kabir’s dohas to music, I was surprised to discover she recognised many of the dohas.
Then, there is the matter of her Muslim identity. She was a leading light of Hillary’s campaign at a time when Donald Trump was calling for a ban on all Muslims entering the US. But she never played down her faith or made apologies for it. She continues to do that. For instance, she is leaving the JLF event early because she is co-hosting an Eid party in New York (at Sona, the restaurant Priyanka Chopra is associated with).
Watching her at JLF gave me a sense that a new kind of global South Asian is emerging. Abedin says that her father told her that now that she was an American, she had to throw herself into the life of her adopted country. There could be no half-measures. On the other hand, there was also no need to deny her cultural origins or the heritage she shared with other South Asians or with Muslims. It is a marked difference in style from Bobby Jindal’s and Nikki Haley’s approaches.
You can’t really meet Huma Abedin and not ask her about the email controversy that may have led to Donald Trump’s election. So, I asked her for her perspective and based on what she said and what else I have read, I think I may now understand what really happened.
The New York State’s attorney had custody of Anthony Weiner’s computer. Shortly before the election — and weeks after they had got their hands on the computer —they told the New York office of the FBI that they had found Clinton’s emails on the device. The New York office of the FBI probably leaked this to Rudy Giuliani, the city’s former mayor and Trump’s lawyer. Giuliani went public with the claim that revelations that would blow Hillary’s campaign out of the water were coming.
The New York office of the FBI then forwarded the emails to the bureau’s director. James Comey now had two choices. He could wait to check to see if these were new mails. (They were not.) Or he could immediately declare that the FBI was once again re-examining Clinton’s emails. He chose the safe option of going public, and wrote to Congress.
In Comey’s defence, it could be said that perhaps he feared that given that the existence of the mails had been leaked to Giuliani he had to act immediately because otherwise he would be accused of a cover-up. And, so, he wrote to Congress, knowing fully well that letters of this nature are always leaked.
And, of course, Comey’s letter was leaked. And Trump used the existence of the tapes to suggest that new evidence had been found.
While Abedin still seems to blame herself, there are some worrying questions still to be answered. Did the New York attorney’s office wait to reveal the existence of the mails it had sat on for weeks till the revelation could have the most impact? And was the New York branch of the FBI out to get Hillary?
These are important questions because those decisions may have contributed to the election of Donald Trump. And there can be little doubt that the world would be a very different place today had Hillary become president.
I guess we will never be sure; just as we can’t even be certain of how much Comey’s announcement contributed to Trump’s victory.
What is clear though is that despite the trauma of the investigation and the electoral defeat, Abedin seems to have come out of it, head held high. The massive success of the book has probably helped. She says that writing it all down was liberating. And I imagine it will help rid her of the baggage of the past as she goes forward.
And she will go forward. I think we will read and hear more about her in the years ahead.
The Supreme Court has put a stay on the sedition law, and the Union government has also said that Prime Minister Narendra Modi wants the colonial-era legislation to be phased out. This is a good moment. The law says, “Whoever, by words, either spoken or written, or by signs, or by visible representation, or otherwise, brings or attempts to bring into hatred or contempt, or excites or attempts to excite disaffection towards the Government established by law in India, shall be punished with imprisonment for life”.
The website Article-14.com has done great work in compiling the misuse of this law by the government and is responsible to a large extent for the issue being in the public domain. Experts have cautioned that first, sedition cases can still be filed by the government, and second, that there are many other laws that are problematic and can be misused. Both of these are true. However, we must rejoice and take heart in the general direction. Once it dawns on the judiciary that some laws are out of place in a 21st century democracy, then problematic laws will fall. Nations reform themselves internally when they realise such truths.
India has many laws that need to be examined in light of individual liberties guaranteed to us in the Constitution. Sedition is not the only type of colonial law that we face. The Rowlatt Act, that Gandhi opposed and which led to the massacre at Jallianwala Bagh, did away with the fundamental principles of the rule of law. It could detain people without charge or trial and it did away with jury trials, in favour of in-camera trials by judges. This is called administrative detention, meaning the jailing of someone without a crime having been committed, merely on the suspicion that they will commit a crime in future.
But we have several such laws in India today. In 2015, over 3,200 people were held in “administrative detention” in India. Gujarat has the Prevention of Anti-Social Activities Act 1984. It allows for detention without charge or trial for a year. Uttar Pradesh has the National Security Act allowing detention without charge or trial for a year to “prevent a person from acting in any manner prejudicial to the defence of India, the relations of India with foreign powers, or the security of India”, or “from acting in any manner prejudicial to the security of the State, or from acting in any manner prejudicial to the maintenance of public order, or from acting in any manner prejudicial to the maintenance of supplies and services essential to the community”.
This law has been used to jail Muslims accused of cattle smuggling and slaughter in Madhya Pradesh.
Tamil Nadu has the Prevention of Dangerous Activities of Bootleggers, Drug-offenders, Forest-offenders, Goondas, Immoral Traffic Offenders, Sand-offenders, Sexual Offenders, Slum-grabbers and Video Pirates Act 1982. It allows the state to jail without trial or charge “any bootlegger or drug offender or forest offender or goonda or immoral traffic offender or sand offender or slum-grabber or video pirate… to prevent him from acting in any manner prejudicial to the maintenance of public order”.
Karnataka has the Prevention of Dangerous Activities of Acid Attackers, Bootleggers, Depredator of Environment, Digital Offenders, Drug Offenders, Gamblers, Goondas, Immoral Traffic Offenders, Land Grabbers, Money Launderers, Sexual Predators and Video or Audio pirates Act 1985.
It allows for detention without charge or trial of up to 12 months of “any acid attacker or bootlegger or depredator of environment or digital offender or drug offender or gambler or goonda or immoral traffic offender or land-grabber or money launderer or sexual predator or video or audio pirate… to prevent him from acting in any manner prejudicial to the maintenance of public order”.
Assam has the Preventive Detention Act 1980. It can jail individual for two years, without charge or trial.
Bihar has the Conservation of Foreign Exchange and Prevention of Smuggling Act 1984. It allows for “detention without charge or trial for up to two years to prevent a person from i) smuggling goods, or (ii) abetting the smuggling of goods, or (iii) engaging in transporting or concealing or keeping smuggled goods, or (iv) dealing in, smuggled goods otherwise than by engaging in transporting or concealing or keeping smuggled goods, or (v) harbouring persons engaged in smuggling goods or in abetting the smuggling of goods.”
Jammu & Kashmir has three laws, one allowing detention without charge or trial for six months, another for a year and third for two years. West Bengal has the Prevention of Violent Activities Act 1970. Journalists in Chhattisgarh are regularly jailed under the NSA and kept in prison for a year for their reporting.
As we can see from the dates, none of these are so-called colonial laws. These are laws we have gifted ourselves. Every state uses them liberally and there is no resistance from the judiciary. These days we have classified sections of the Indian people as the enemy through the use of the phrase “anti-national”.
We do not have Jallianwala Bagh-type gatherings today and if we did, against such laws, we would be called anti-national. But that does not change the fact that these laws are as out of time and place today as the Rowlatt Act was a century ago. Once that realisation dawns on us as a nation, and especially in the higher judiciary, we can expect that there will be reform of the sort that we have just seen with sedition. And that is something to be hopeful about for our future.
Between the war in Ukraine and the Covid-19 pandemic now swirling in China, the world has had little time to worry about the public uprising in Sri Lanka. Prime Minister Mahinda Rajapaksa was compelled to resign, but his younger brother, President Gotabaya Rajapaksa, is still clinging on to his post, hiding behind the fiction of a national unity government, as he has sworn in Ranil Wickremesinghe as the Prime Minister. It remains to be seen if the public anger against the Rajapaksas will abate to allow this transitional arrangement to let the beleaguered nation negotiate a rescue deal with the International Monetary Fund (IMF).
The nation had come to this pass due to a combination of bad policies and other factors which Sri Lanka had little control over. Two of these developments overlapped after the newly elected President in 2019 took the decision to cut taxes. The Covid-19 pandemic hit the world in 2020, followed by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February this year. An already economically challenged Sri Lanka was dealt a fatal blow by the war escalating the price of energy overnight, while Covid-19 engendered lockdowns in China disrupted the global supply chains. In addition, the government, as if enough problems already did not dog them, cut the import of synthetic fertilisers to shift farmers to organic farming.
The reason Sri Lanka has been hobbled seriously is the subsisting structural problems in its economy from its independence in 1948. Easy foreign exchange was earned in the 1950s by its primary exports like tea, rubber and coconut. Industrial development was not emphasised, leading to over-dependence on these few commodities that were always subject to international demand fluctuations. As a result, Sri Lanka earned less foreign exchange in 1968 than in 1958 as demand for rubber and other commodities fell.
When J.R. Jayawardene was elected President in 1977, he tried to reform and liberalise the economy. He removed the restrictions on international migration as jobs opened up in the Gulf for workers. Thus, workers’ remittances became a new source of foreign exchange. But Sri Lanka was unable to handle its Tamil problem through domestic accommodation and consensus. The Indian military intervention in 1987, with New Delhi dispatching the Indian Peace-Keeping Force, only further complicated the situation. Sri Lanka then slipped into a hyper nationalist phase and battled against the LTTE, which led to the rise of the Rajapaksa clan.
Luckily for Sri Lanka, the Congress-led UPA government assumed power in New Delhi in 2004, giving Colombo the freedom to eliminate the Tamil Tigers without any Indian meddling. The civil war finally ended in 2009, leaving the ascendant Rajapaksa clan with a choice. They could revert the nation to a consensus-based resolution of the issues troubling the minorities, or resort to jingoistic majoritarian politics, laced with militant Buddhism. They chose the latter.
In the process, the Rajapaksa family also decided to hedge their diplomacy by inviting a rising China to step in and balance India’s traditional influence in that nation. China, by then seeking to enlarge its reach in the Indian Ocean, brought investment and infrastructure projects, many unlinked to their ability to repay the investment. Thus began the debt-trap buildup which brought Sri Lanka to a state where it would collapse with one more blow. Fate, instead, dealt them two, with the lethal consequences that we see today.
The Covid-19 pandemic led to a collapse of the entire tourism sector. When tourism constituted 5.6 per cent of Sri Lanka’s GDP in 2018, it contracted to 0.8 per cent in 2020. Similarly, remittances of expatriate workers were 10 per cent of GDP in 2019, but collapsed in 2021.
They are estimated to further halve this year. Simultaneously, the war in Ukraine increased global oil prices, hitting the common man as inflation spiked. It was a perfect storm that a family-controlled enterprise had no ability to handle.
India has a great opportunity to rebuild its hold in its crucial maritime neighbourhood, when the Opposition has begun an anti-India chant in the Maldives. Besides quickly transferring $2.4 billion to help Sri Lanka avoid a loan default, India is now giving 65,000 metric tonnes of urea, helping reverse the sudden jolt to Sri Lanka’s agro-economy.
Some lessons are obvious from the meltdown in Sri Lanka. One is the peril of populist leaders combining nationalism and religion. Even peace propounding Buddhism has been turned into hate spewing faith by some monks in Sri Lanka, Myanmar and Thailand. The consequences have been the stifling of democracy and erratic decision-making. It is a lesson that the BJP needs to introspect on as its Hindutva project moves ahead.
Next is the tendency of populist leaders to take impetuous decisions without debate and analysis. India’s economy managed to survive the demonetisation move of November 2016 but not without taking a hit. China and India are facing the consequences of top-down decision-making to handle the Covid-19 pandemic. India is still quarrelling with the World Health Organisation about WHO’s figures of epidemic-related deaths. China is stuck between lockdowns hitting its economy and the fear that ineffectual vaccines may allow the spread to mushroom if China relaxes its “Zero Covid” protocols.
It is doubtful that Sri Lanka can be completely pulled away from Chinese influence. Imagining it as a “Quad” member will be impractical. But limiting China’s military access to its ports while India strengthens its presence in Trincomalee on the east coast of Sri Lanka would be a gain. India also needs to push for less majoritarian politics.
But there lies the catch. How does a majoritarian BJP teach a small neighbour the values of consensus and democracy? The Easter Sunday bombings of 2019 had brought Islamic terror to the island nation. Tamil militancy may have been squashed, but at the cost of altering the basic values of Sri Lankan politics.
A national unity government is a good starting point of national rejuvenation. But like Donald Trump in the United States, the Rajapaksa clan may not give up their pursuit of power very easily. China would back them materially, in direct proportion to the increased Indian influence.
Thus, the race between India and China is not over yet. It has just got a whole lot more complicated as the Sri Lankan people will decide what kind of a government they want after the next election, which may come sooner than it is due.
Till then India has to remain more agile and proactive. Diplomacy will get tested the most in India’s immediate neighbourhood.
The cordial welcome that the Indian Prime Minister received on his latest visit to the Federal Democratic Republic in the Himalayan region is a pointer to how India-Nepal ties have mended since the awkward time two years ago when, during the Communist regime of K.P. Sharma Oli, territorial claims were made and a border dispute whipped up by Kathmandu. It is to India’s credit that it seized upon the opportunity to restore relations to earlier levels by close interaction with Sher Bahadur Deuba’s government.
The signing of a number of India-Nepal pacts may have had more to do with religious exchanges pertaining to the ancient Buddhist connection between the two countries. Those ties may be further extended by the active promotion of Buddhism’s holy sites in the two nations by creating a circuit to facilitate spiritual journeys of half a billion Buddhists from around the world.
Tech transfer with regard to tapping hydroelectric power sources to help the power-deficient nation with rich hydro resources is a necessity. It’s likely to help at a time when the world itself is reeling under the impact of the Ukraine situation with fuel and food costs going through the roof just as global food shortage is being feared as the granary of Europe is embroiled in war thanks to Vladimir Putin’s aggression.
Regional imperatives have seen India play an active role to try and help Sri Lanka during its worst ever economic crisis while the Maldives put out a presidential decree to stop the “India Out” campaign by the combined Opposition.
There is very little India can do regarding Pakistan’s historical attitude and not even the return of the Sharifs and the Bhuttos can end old dreams regarding the Kashmir Valley while China will remain among the prickly neighbours’ category.
India’s policy to earn regional trust appears to be paying dividends, including in ties with Bangladesh, despite the obvious presence of the Chinese hand ready to fork out funds in exchange for influence. India might not have huge monies to hand out in what is a difficult time of runaway inflation for all but reassuring diplomacy through the optics of visits of the Prime Minister seems to be helping to change the perspective in the subcontinent.
There is an old turn of phrase in Hindi — Tu ser, toh main sawa ser (If you are base, I am ace). This game of one-upmanship had recently been played between the BJP and the Aam Aadmi Party. The “ball” in this case is the spokesperson of the Delhi BJP unit, Tajinder Pal Singh Bagga, and the “forwards” of the two teams are the police forces of Delhi, Haryana and Punjab. The police personnel of the first two states were trying to ensure that Mr Bagga remains “free” to do what he has always done in politics — whip up melodrama. Likewise, the Punjab police force was trying to “pocket” him, to enable the AAP leaders to send a clear message to the BJP brass that they have now “arrived” and can leverage a state police force, unlike in Delhi, where the control of the police lies with the Central government (read BJP), through the lieutenant-governor, despite Arvind Kejriwal’s party being in “power” in the city-state for the past seven years.
There are “midfielders” too in this disquieting drama which spells danger with a capital “D” for Indian democracy — the members of the judiciary at various levels. More often than not, they pass orders that please their immediate masters. Mr Bagga, for now, has got protection from arrest till July.
Barely a few weeks prior to this tug-of-war over Mr Bagga, a somewhat similar drama was enacted, with Independent Gujarat MLA Jignesh Mevani as the “catch”. The difference, however, was that the police forces of the two states where the repugnant and high-handed saga unfolded — Assam and Gujarat — were on the same side, both ruled by the BJP. Eventually, a rare district court judge spoke up for the MLA and declared the Assam police case against him as “fabricated”. In the episodes involving Mr Mevani and Mr Bagga, there was a striking similarity — the police forces of the states were not acting on their own volition, but only following the verbal diktats of the state governments.
Noticeably, Mr Mevani was detained at the BJP’s behest for freely articulating his opinion. But the BJP stepped in for Mr Bagga after the Punjab police, at the AAP’s prodding, felt he had crossed the line. Several editorial columns can be filled by itemising the cases of high-handedness from the past when state police forces acted as puppets in the hands of the state governments to browbeat political opponents.
These two instances, and almost every similar episode, play out at two levels — the political arena and the nagging issue of politically dominant parties in states, and the Centre, misusing the police for partisan ends. Indians have got used to a single narrative running endlessly. Parties in power in the states or the Centre misuse the police and convert it into a department or division of the political establishment and the Indian Penal Code and other questionable laws like UAPA are used as weapons against opponents who are detained, as Central forces, the state police and other investigating agencies routinely violate the spirit of federalism. They cross into territories over which their jurisdiction is restricted or questionable. This unspools in a changed political culture where the principle of a person being considered innocent till proven guilty has been replaced by the belief that a person is guilty till she/he can prove innocence.
In the latest cases of the thumbing down of democratic and institutional norms, Mr Mevani is problematic for the BJP as Assembly polls are due in Gujarat in November, and this explains why he had to be penalised. In contrast, the BJP had to keep Mr Bagga safe from the AAP’s designs not due to any standing within the party, but for his high-decibel value on the social media and television.
Mr Bagga’s defence underscores the importance of trumpeters in the BJP’s rise. Also, the AAP’s offensive has to be repelled for two reasons. One, the free run for Mr Bagga was ordered from the top and his arrest was an affront to the BJP’s top brass. Two, after its success in Punjab and getting off the block in Goa, the AAP has entered the battleground in Himachal Pradesh and Gujarat. The BJP is nervous as in Arvind Kejriwal they see a potential rival and a challenger to the Congress and Rahul Gandhi’s position as the potential fulcrum of an anti-BJP front for 2024.
The repeated use of questionable tactics by state police forces points to a deeper malaise. It is routine for all political parties, whether the BJP or Opposition parties, to weaponise the police in targeting adversaries. This leads to politicisation of the law and order machinery, and undermines the primary nature of democracy.
The need to insulate the police, and agencies’ investigative wings, from various governmental pulls and pressures, has been felt for long. The Janata Party government appointed the National Police Commission in 1977 and gave it wide terms of reference. Besides scrutinising the police organisation, its role, functions, accountability and relations with the public, it was also asked to examine political interference in its work as well as misuse of its powers. This commission, the first at the national level after Independence, penned eight voluminous reports between 1979 and 1981 and suggested across-the-board reforms in the existing police setup. Little has been done since.
Over a quarter century ago, in 1996, two retired directors-general of police, Prakash Singh and N.K. Singh, filed a PIL in the Supreme Court asking if any recommendation was ever implemented. The court in its wisdom took a decade to come up with the ruling that is referred to as the Prakash Singh case. It issued seven binding directives which were to be complied with. The court’s utmost concern was with ways to limit political control of the police by the government of the day. In the Supreme Court’s view, the main role of the police was as primary protectors of the rule of law. For this, it was essential that the force remained apolitical and incontestably fair and unprejudiced.
Sixteen years after that landmark ruling, only lip service is paid to the issue of police reforms. As recent events demonstrate, every party prefers having the law enforcers acting as a private militia. If this practice is to be ended, the initiative must come from the Centre. The BJP must stop misusing the police and investigative agencies to wage political battles. If this practice continues, there will be serial incidents and the BJP will have to repeatedly rise to defend its rank and file.
It was dubbed as the country’s biggest political conclaves, where the highest collective leadership of the Grand Old Party, would meet, meditate, introspect, debate and decide on a disruptive and revolutionary set of changes to not only one of the biggest dormant political organisations in the country but also set an action-packed agenda ahead for India, one in which the Gandhi family-led Indian National Congress would lead the challenge against the Narendra Modi-led BJP in the elections of 2024.
The three-day party affair began with the right noises, including the first issue of trying to change being a dynastic party, run by a small group of largely unelected, (and perhaps unelectable), operating like a coterie, with a grand declaration on one family, one ticket only. It did not materialise, because the fine print was pretty glaring — the exception was provided to the members of the Gandhi family, and later, revised and released publicly as a laughable condition; if the second, or third, or entire family, has been active in Congress for the last five years, the rule would not apply.
The Congress also blunted its biggest media power — exclusive stories and reports based on leaks from internal meetings, which led story hungry journalists, still licking wounds at the near total ignore rule enforced by the BJP camp, by banning mobile phones. The irony is mind numbing.
The Congress party and its top leadership, which accuses, perhaps rightly, that most media in the country parrot the agenda of the saffron right and ignores the Opposition, or is hostile to them, actually now wants to ignore the media totally. The clamp on leaks worked. The media largely ignored the proceedings.
By day two, it became apparent that nothing earth shattering would come out of the proceedings anyway. There was a resolution on women reservation, with a caste-based pro rata proportion within it. The BJP and other parties did not even react to the announcement.
On day three, the finale, had Rahul Gandhi expound to his leaders of how they had lost connection with the people and must reach out to the common folk on the ground. He further spoke of how the BJP could not be challenged adequately by the regional parties and, how only the Congress was equipped to do so, armed with an ideology. He also warned them that it would not be an easy battle.
The biggest official takeaway — the Udaipur declaration — too, did not materialise in the form of a formal declaration; and it was left to the minions to construct its import from the two speeches of the highest leaders — party president Sonia Gandhi, and past president, Rahul Gandhi.
The Congress never realised when the BJP went to a spree to usurp its icons, from Sardar Vallabhai Patel to P.V. Narasimha Rao, and are now trying hard to save the final piece of the family silver — Gandhi. The national yatra from October 2 is a valiant announcement, but will a march modelled on the Mahatma yield results, and is the Congress still worth its Gandhian salt, will be answered in future but the Udaipur baithak did not inspire a nation, or even the part of it, that was looking for a sign of a challenge to Modi’s BJP.
India’s victory in the men’s badminton team championship for the Thomas Cup is a seminal moment for Indian sport. This win over reputed Indonesia, with an Indian team entering the final for the first time in the 73-year history of the championship, is definitive vindication that Indian sportsmen, given proper scientific training in academies and sustained exposure to international competition, can become world beaters.
Indian badminton history is full of fine individuals emerging to be world beaters in Nandu Natekar, Prakash Padukone, Pullela Gopichand and many others. On the distaff side, players like Saina Nehwal and P.V. Sindhu, burst on the scene to perform creditably for years and won medals in prestigious competitions like the Olympics.
What is unusual in the Thomas Cup triumph is that India now boasts of quality players among the top echelons of the sport in Laskhya Sen and Kidambi Srikanth, besides a reputed doubles pair in Chirag Shetty and Satwiksairaj RamkiReddy. The conjunction of such contemporaneous talent led to this sweeping 3-0 performance in the final on top of sustained competitive zeal in beating Malaysia and Denmark along the way.
The victory is akin to Kapil Dev’s team winning the 1983 Prudential World Cup to turn the cricket world upside down in achieving what seemed then like an impossible dream. The 2007 triumph of MS Dhoni’s team in the T20 worlds was another similar moment that was not only ground breaking but also opened a flood tide of sponsorships and untold riches for the performers.
The 2020 Tokyo Olympics, held in 2021, was also significant for the first ever track & field gold Neeraj Chopra won in javelin. What the sum total of these victories means is Indian sportsmen, working in dedicated fashion to a more universal regime in training, including under foreign coaches, are beginning to achieve world class results, beginning with Abhinav Bindra in the 2008 Olympics in shooting.
The trend of sporting achievements in individual and team events beyond the willow game in our cricket-crazed nation should lead to near cricket-like funding for competitions like professional leagues.
Many of them already exist in different disciplines but they need sustaining at far higher levels of rewards besides taking live all sporting action to a billion-plus TV audience to not only appreciate but also inspire the young to take to sport and a more active lifestyle.