Editorials - 20-05-2022

If New Delhi does not take the lead, the region cannot respond to various crises collectively

After weeks of protests, Sri Lankan Prime Minister Mahinda Rajapaksa stepped down this month, but that is not the only big political non-electoral change in the neighbourhood in 2021-22. Just a month ago, it was Pakistan; a year ago, it was Nepal. Power changed hands through more coercive means in Myanmar and Afghanistan. Their polities have yet to settle down. How should India react to these changes? Is there a common strain running across the region in these developments? Shyam Saran and Srinath Raghavan discuss these questions and more withSuhasini Haidar. Edited excerpts:

Are these changes in the neighbourhood because of similar political cultures? Or due to the economic crisis caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, the global downturn and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine?

Shyam Saran:A bit of both, but I would place more emphasis on a much more challenging external environment which all of us are confronting. The COVID-19 pandemic of two years has not only caused economic disruptions, but also social disruptions. More recently, there’s the impact of the crisis in Europe. We are today a globalised, interconnected world, and South Asia is not an exception. And in some cases, several challenges have come together to create a kind of perfect storm. A certain brittleness of the politics of some countries has made the whole effort to cope with these kinds of external challenges much more difficult.

Srinath Raghavan:Political brittleness, along with democratic backsliding, an erosion of democratic norms and procedures are all to blame. There has been an attempt by executives in various neighbouring countries to assert their control over other agencies within the state to sort of devolve power more towards the centre away from federal sort of arrangements, and so on. All this has meant that the style of politics that now seems to prevail across the region is a form of authoritarian populism. And you overlay this change across the region over the past few years with the economic crisis, which is an important one. In fact, I would say that the only parallel that I can think of in recent history is the 1970s. Then we had a similar kind of global economic shock triggered by the oil embargoes which hurt practically every South Asian country, including India. When you put these together — a democratic backsliding, a turn towards authoritarian populism, an economic crisis — what you find is that there are very similar kinds of protests and forms of popular mobilisation taking place across the region. So, there’s something to be said about the sort of pan-South Asian quality to what we are seeing now, though the specifics of the political economy of each country differs.

It also seems there has been no collective response to these challenges. Has South Asia failed in collectively responding to so many similar crises?

SS:This is an old challenge — how to fashion a cooperative, collaborative regional response to the common challenges that South Asia faces. The only country which can actually take the lead in order to formulate collaborative responses and mobilise that kind of regionalism is India. But there is an absence of both the awareness and the willingness to play that role here. India appears to have given up on SAARC (South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation), and focuses more on BIMSTEC (Bay of Bengal Initiative for Multi-Sectoral Technical and Economic Cooperation). We have seen sub-regional cooperation under, say, the BBIN, i.e. the Bangladesh, Bhutan, India and Nepal forum, but it is partial. As far as the regional response is concerned, I’m afraid that simply does not exist. Even the limited kind of consultative process that we used to have before is missing. This is a failure. Because if India does not take the lead, it will not happen. We are now working much more at the bilateral level.

SR:There’s a wider deficit as well. Compared to, say, two decades ago, what is also striking is the level to which even civil society traction across the region has considerably dipped. There was never a time when you could say that there was a consultation type of civil society interaction which was very strong. But we are at a curious juncture where neither high politics nor civil society interaction seems to be going on. But popular movements and mobilisations do seem to be learning a little bit from each other. For instance, the current protests in Sri Lanka clearly have taken a lesson or two out of what happened in the farmers’ protests in India.

The pandemic has caused doubts about the Chinese system, about Chinese abilities. On the other hand, China has started a new South Asian outreach, delivered vaccines when India couldn’t. How has India fared in terms of its pushback to China in the neighbourhood?

SS:China has far more resources to deploy than India does. But over the last several months, Chinese preoccupation with its own challenges — in particular, what is happening with this zero-COVID policy, the economic disruptions and political stirrings — is growing. It is also preoccupied with the consequences and anticipated consequences of the Ukraine war... whether it had made a wrong bet in aligning itself much more closely with Russia. So, the attention being given to not just South Asia but also other parts of the world is less. Also, in South Asia itself, there is a certain new wariness about the China connection. It may be unfair to hold China responsible for the economic crisis in Sri Lanka, or to say that China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) or CPEC (China-Pakistan Economic Corridor) has not been a game changer. But there is a certain wariness about China, and there is a certain opening for India to emerge as a security provider, as an economic support to the countries which are in the middle of the crisis.

SR:China is certainly in a tight spot. Apart from everything else, it seems the Ukraine crisis will mean everything to the west of Russia is unlikely to be part of any kind of BRI connectivity. But that creates an incentive for the Chinese to double down on other parts of the BRI.

And the U.S., given recent outreaches in the Maldives, Nepal, Bangladesh? Do you see the U.S. in South Asia today as a force multiplier for India’s efforts or as a rival to both China and India?

SR:It is a good thing that the U.S. is helping some of these smaller South Asian countries get on their feet and be able to resist Chinese blandishments. At the same time, I wouldn’t assume the U.S. has too many interests at stake in South Asia. I wouldn’t put too much emphasis on what the U.S. is doing. Inasmuch as it dovetails with India’s interests and plans in the region, it’s something New Delhi will welcome. But a lot has to be done by India. That’s where the action should lie.

SS:I would be somewhat more nuanced in that respect. Look at, for example, the effort put in by the U.S. to get this $500 million MCC (Millennium Challenge Corporation) deal through with Nepal. This seems to indicate that certainly on the periphery of China, the U.S. is interested in maintaining and even expanding its spread, and perhaps in consultation or association with India. There is certainly an interest in the maritime part of South Asia, whether it is Sri Lanka or the Maldives. I see an interest on the part of the Pakistan army and the Pakistani elite in keeping the relationship with the U.S., and there is a certain sense of discomfort with too much dependence on China.

There have been concerns about the authoritarian moves in India. Is this trend going to make it that much more difficult for India to be a South Asian leader? Or is India fitting into the South Asian landscape where there are so many other authoritarian leaders?

SS:I don’t think it should be our ambition to become a part of that kind of a landscape in South Asia. We have always been able to aspire to a leadership position precisely because we have been a vibrant democracy. We have been able to demonstrate our ability to handle the incredible plurality and diversity in this country [with] vibrant political institutions, which are so important in order to anchor the democratic spirit. Any setback to that is going to make any aspiration for regional and global leadership harder. If there is a deficit of democracy in India and if policies are followed which instigate communalism and a lack of social cohesion in the country, then it would become very difficult to run any kind of foreign policy. It is very important that you should not let domestic political compulsions begin to influence your external policies, which should be based on a much more sober calculation of our national interest.

SR:Whether countries in the region are looking to India for leadership or not depends on the quality of India’s growth and economic prosperity. At this point of time, India’s economic position clearly is in no shape to enable it to play a serious leadership role in the region. We need to recognise that the ethnic landscape of South Asia does not follow its political boundaries. We may assume that there are some things that we do in India which are purely aimed at the domestic audience, but it will have a knock-on impact in terms of how our neighbours perceive it, how they react to it. If religious majoritarianism under the name of electoral campaigns is given free license in India, you can be almost sure that it will have negative consequences.

What does India need to do to re-imagine its region as a whole?

SR:There is a broader shift in the way that we think, for instance, on climate change, and the fact is that the destiny of South Asia hangs or falls together. Like the question about ethnicity, these are not things that can be segregated by international boundaries. We have to take a broader view of what kinds of severe challenges the region faces beyond political compulsions of the here and now. We need a much deeper engagement beyond government, at the level of civil society, even at very localised levels between India and its neighbours, because only then will you be able to act in ways that are meaningful to the people of the region as a whole.

SS:I do not think that the current approach of marginalising SAARC and giving priority to BIMSTEC is a good idea. I’m not saying BIMSTEC should not be pursued, or BBIN has not achieved some objectives, but these cannot be a substitute for a South Asian regional cooperative forum. The idea should be, how do we work out policies, which then present India as the preferred partner for our region, and India becomes an engine of growth for South Asia.

If there is a deficit of democracy in India and if policies are followed which instigate communalism, it would become difficult to run any kind of foreign policy.

Shyam Saran



Read in source website

India’s States need to act quickly in setting up a public health and management cadre for a healthier society

In April this year, the Union government released a guidance document on the setting up of a ‘public health and management cadre’ (PHMC) as well as revised editions of the Indian Public Health Standards (IPHS) — for ensuring quality health care in government facilities. For a country where politicians take pride in inaugurating super-specialty hospitals and where the health focus has traditionally been on medical care or attention on treating the sick, these two developments to strengthen public health services are welcome.

A background, the fallout

The ‘public health and management cadre’ is a follow up of the recommendations made in India’s National Health Policy 2017. At present, most Indian States (with exceptions such as Tamil Nadu and Odisha) have a teaching cadre (of medical college faculty members) and a specialist cadre of doctors involved in clinical services. This structure does not provide similar career progression opportunities for professionals trained in public health. It is one of the reasons for limited interest by health-care professionals to opt for public health as a career choice.

The outcome has been costly for society: a perennial shortage of trained public health workforce. The proposed public health cadre and the health management cadre have the potential to address some of these challenges. With the release of guidance documents, the States have been advised to formulate an action plan, identify the cadre strengths, and fill up the vacant posts in the next six months to a year.

The revised version of the IPHS once again underscores the continued relevance of improved quality of health services through public health facilities. This is the second revision in the IPHS, which were first released in 2007 and then revised in 2012. The regular need for a revision in the IPHS is a recognition of the fact that to be meaningful, quality improvement has to be an ongoing process. The development of the IPHS itself was a major step. Nearly two decades ago, in many countries including India, there was limited attention on ensuring quality. Increasing access to health services and improving the quality of care were perceived as a sequential process: first focus on increasing access and then a thought may be given to ensuring quality (which rarely happened).

Role and relevance

The voices for having public health services and workforce in India have always been few and feeble. Understandably, the need for a public health cadre and services in India rarely got any policy attention. Arguably, the reason was that even among policymakers, there was limited understanding on the roles and the functions of public health specialists and the relevance of such cadres, especially at the district and sub-district levels. At best, epidemiologists were equated with public health specialists, failing to recognise that the latter is a much broader and inclusive group of specialists. However, the last decade and a half was eventful. The initial threat of avian flu in 2005-06, the Swine flu pandemic of 2009-10; five more public health emergencies of international concern between years 2009-19; the increasing risks and regular emergence and re-emergence of of new viruses and diseases (Zika, Ebola, Crimean-Congo Hemorrhagic fever, Nipah viruses, etc.) in animals and humans, resulted in increased attention on public health. In 2017, India’s National Health Policy 2017 proposed the formation of a public health cadre and enacting a National Public Health Act. Yet, progress on these fronts was slow as usual.

The COVID-19 pandemic changed the status quo. For months together, everyone was looking for professionals trained in public health and who had field experience; they were simply far and few. It became clear that ‘epidemic’ and ‘pandemic’ required specialised skills in a broad range of subjects such as epidemiology, biostatics, health management and disease modelling, to list a few. In the absence of trained public health professionals at the policy and decision making levels, India’s pandemic response ended up becoming bureaucrat steered and clinician led. Every struggle in the pandemic response was a reminder that a clinician, no matter how skilled in the art of treating a patient, or a bureaucrat, no matter how experienced in administration, could not fulfil the role of the epidemiologists and public health specialists, who are specially trained to make a decision when there is limited information about a pathogen and its behaviour.

A continuing role in care

A public health workforce has a role even beyond epidemics and pandemics. A trained public health workforce ensures that people receive holistic health care, of preventive and promotive services (largely in the domain of public health) as well as curative and diagnostic services (as part of medical care). A country or health system that has a shortage of a public health workforce and infrastructure is likely to drift towards a medicalised care system. In 2022, there is greater clarity on the role of the public health workforce, which is a remarkable starting point. However, the delay in policy decisions on a public health cadre is also a reflection of a long and tortuous journey of policy making in India. These two new cadres have come up late but the focus now has to be on accelerated implementation.

The revised IPHS is an important development but not an end itself. In the 15 years since the first release of the IPHS, only a small proportion — around 15% to 20% — of government health-care facilities meets these standards. This raises a legitimate question on whether development (and revision) of such quality standards is ritualistic practice or whether these are considered seriously for policy formulation, programmatic interventions and for corrective measures. If the pace of achieving IPHS is any criteria, there is a need for more accelerated interventions. Opportunities such as a revision of the IPHS should also be used for an independent assessment on how the IPHS has improved the quality of health services.

Imperfect implementation

Drafting of well-articulated and sometimes near perfect policy documents, even though in a delayed manner, is a skill which Indian policymakers have mastered well. However, the implementation of most such policies leaves a lot to be desired. The IPHS implementation in the last 15 years is one such example. It is difficult to predict the outcome of the PHMC guidance document; however, the past can guide the process.

The effective part of implementation is interplay: policy formulation, financial allocation, and the availability of a trained workforce. In this case, policy has been formulated. Then, though the Government’s spending on health in India is low and has increased only marginally in the last two decades; however, in the last two years, there have been a few additional — small but assured — sources of funding for public health services have become available. The Fifteenth Finance Commission grant for the five-year period of 2021- 26 and the Pradhan Mantri Ayushman Bharat Health Infrastructure Mission (PM-ABHIM) allocations are available for strengthening public health services and could be used as catalytic funding — which should be used in the interim — as States embark upon implementing the PHMC and a revised IPHS.

The third aspect of effective implementation, the availability of trained workforce, is the most critical. Even the most well-designed policies with sufficient financial allocation may falter because of the lack of a trained workforce. As States develop plans for setting up the PHMC, all potential challenges in securing a trained workforce should be identified and actions initiated.

Helping States

One, the level of interest among States in implementing the public health and management cadres needs to be explored and a centre of excellence in every State should be designated to guide this process. States which are likely to show reluctance need to be nudged through appropriate incentives. Two, the idea of mapping and an analysis of human resources for public health and then scaling up of recruitment are logical. However, it needs to be ensured that in an overzealous attempt to achieve numbers, the quality of training of the required workforce is not compromised. Setting up these two new cadres should be used as an opportunity to improve and standardise the quality of training in public health institutions. Three, it would take a few years before the PHMC becomes fully functional in the States. However, the implementation process needs to be started in the next few months to avoid the risk of it becoming a low priority. Four, the success of the PHMC would be dependent upon the availability and the equitable distribution of health staff for all other categories at government health facilities. Therefore, as new cadres are being set, efforts need to be made to fill vacancies of health staff in all other positions as well.

Three years before the COVID-19 pandemic had started, the Indian government had committed, through NHP 2017, to achieve the goal of universal health coverage — which envisages access to a broad range (preventive, promotive, curative, diagnostic, rehabilitative) health-care services which meet certain quality standards, at a cost which people can afford. The public health and management cadres and the revised IPHS can help India to make progress towards the NHP goal. To ensure that, State governments need to act urgently and immediately.

Dr. Chandrakant Lahariya is a physician, public policy and health systems specialist and an epidemiologist, based in New Delhi



Read in source website

It is important to increase the number of biosphere reserves in South Asia to ward off a doomsday ecological scenario

Biodiversity is the living fabric of our planet. It underpins human well-being in the present and in the future, and its rapid decline threatens nature and people alike.

According to the Global Assessment Report on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services released in 2019 by the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) at the UNESCO headquarters in Paris, the main global drivers of biodiversity loss are climate change, invasive species, over-exploitation of natural resources, pollution and urbanisation.

The earth is under strain

Because of our collective excesses, the ecological carrying capacity of planet earth has largely been exceeded. This trend needs to be redressed, with cleaner air, high quality drinking water, and enough food and healthy habitats to ensure that ecosystem services continue to benefit humanity without critically affecting nature’s balance. Whether we look at nature from an environmental, from a cultural or even from a religious point of view, it is our responsibility and clearly in our interest to respect the environment.

In fact, the possibilities exist, and all is not lost. In the last 50 years or so, much has been accomplished for the protection of nature, including the establishment of conservation areas, and a number of international conventions have been signed and ratified.

Biosphere reserves are key

One of the best mechanisms that has been created is the World Network of Biosphere Reserves, created in 1971 by UNESCO. Biosphere reserves are places where humans live in harmony with nature, and where there is an effective combination of sustainable development and nature conservation. They represent pockets of hope and proof that we are not inexorably headed towards a doomsday ecological scenario, provided we take appropriate action.

In South Asia, over 30 biosphere reserves have been established. The first one was the Hurulu Biosphere Reserve in Sri Lanka, which was designated in 1977 and comprises 25,500 hectares within the tropical dry evergreen forest.

In India, the first biosphere reserve was designated by UNESCO in 2000 within the blue mountains of the Nilgiris. It stretches across the States of Tamil Nadu, Karnataka and Kerala. The network has gone from strength to strength, and it now counts 12 sites, with Panna, in the State of Madhya Pradesh, as the latest inscription in 2020.

We need many more biosphere reserves and pockets of hope, and the region offers countless options.

Diverse systems

South Asia has a very diverse set of ecosystems. To begin with, Bhutan, India and Nepal combined have thousands of glaciers, surrounded by lakes and alpine ecosystems.

The Khangchendzonga Biosphere Reserve, established in 2018, is a good model. It includes some of the highest ecosystems in the world, with elevations up to 8,586 metres. The reserve is home to orchids and rare plant species. At the same time, more than 35,000 people live there. Their main economic activities are crop production, animal husbandry, fishing, dairy products and poultry farming.

Bangladesh, India, the Maldives, and Sri Lanka all have extensive coastlines, with coral reefs and mangrove forests. These areas are exposed to extreme weather events (storms, floods, droughts), and sea-level rise.

The Maldives are recognised as the lowest-lying country in the world, with a mere elevation of 1.5 metres above the high tide mark. Together with UNESCO, the archipelago has embarked on a plan to establish pilot sites for the conservation and restoration of coastal ecosystems, and to enhance the population’s knowledge on climate change adaptation. Separately, three biosphere reserves have already been created in the Maldives.

Run on science-based plans

UNESCO Biosphere Reserves have all developed science-based management plans, where local solutions for sustainable human living and nature conservation are being tested and best practices applied. Issues of concern include biodiversity, clean energy, climate, environmental education, and water and waste management, supported by scientific research and monitoring. The aim is to detect changes and find solutions to increase climate resilience.

All biosphere reserves are internationally recognised sites on land, at the coast, or in the oceans. Governments alone decide which areas to nominate. Before approval by UNESCO, the sites are externally examined. If approved, they will be managed based on an agreed plan, reinforced by routine checks to ensure credibility, but all remain under the sovereignty of their national government.

Some of the countries in South Asia do not yet have any or enough biosphere reserves. In most if not all cases, the political will is certainly there but there is a lack of know-how and financial resources. Of course, more financial support from richer nations and from the private sector would be desirable for establishing biosphere reserves in these countries.

The priority countries

Bangladesh, Bhutan, and Nepal are on the priority list of UNESCO, because they do not yet have any biosphere reserves. Their governments are already working on their first nomination files. Our organisation also believes that it would be important to increase the number of biosphere reserves in India, the Maldives and Sri Lanka.

The point is that if these pockets of hope can expand, with at least one biosphere reserve per country, and with more and larger sites covering the terrestrial surface, including coastal areas with their offshore islands, it will give the realisation to millions of people that a better future is truly possible, one where we can truly live in harmony with nature.

On May 22 and on the occasion of the International Day for Biological Diversity, let us do what is right. Now is the time to act for biodiversity.

Eric Falt is the Director of the UNESCO New Delhi Office, which covers Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, Nepal, the Maldives, and Sri Lanka. UNESCO is a member of Team UN in India, together helping deliver on the Sustainable Development Goals



Read in source website

For reporters, the challenge lies in seeking the source’s willingness to be named

Many years ago, I set out to write a story on Mumbai’s critical water supply issue, faced especially by slum dwellers. In central Mumbai, when I was surrounded by a group of slum dwellers, most of them women, one of them said, “He [name withdrawn] is a part of this slum’s water mafia cartel. All those tankers that come here are fully or partially owned by him. I am sure he bribes officials to ensure we do not get enough water daily. He isn’t alone.”

Due to lack of water supply, the slum dwellers depend on water tankers, which are run by a cartel of mafias who charge the daily-wage labourers handsome amounts. Those who control the supply also play a major role in that slum’s politics. For me, then a cub reporter, the woman’s quote about a person affiliated to a political party was a treat. I immediately imagined the headline in the newspaper and wondered how this politician-bureaucracy nexus could be highlighted.

“This is terrible. I assure you that I will publish this. What is your name,” I asked. “My name? Why do you want my name,” she asked in return. I stopped scribbling in my notebook. “How will anyone believe me? I need to say who is making these allegations. Don’t worry. It’s just a name,” I said. “Don’t write about this. Do whatever you want. I am not giving you my name,” she said and vanished. I stood there helplessly, wondering how my editor would react if I attributed her quote to a ‘source.’

For reporters, interesting and informative quotes are not hard to come by; the challenge lies in seeking the source’s willingness to be named. Often on the field, I have heard solid stories and insights from strangers, but when it comes to being named, they tend to walk away leaving me well informed but disappointed.

The reason is mostly fear. Some years ago, I had joined a veteran political leader on his tour to inspect a cyclone-hit coastal part of Maharashtra. When the leader took a lunch break, the villagers came to narrate their ordeal. I spotted a man speaking loudly and explaining how coconut and mango trees were damaged by the cyclone. “The government is not offering anything. A tree takes 10-15 years to become financially beneficial and all that investment has now come to naught,” I heard him say.

After a while, we approached him. Assuming that he had suffered big losses, we asked him about his situation. “Me? I don’t have a single tree,” he said. “But you were giving so much information there,” I said. He laughed. “I am a government servant. Don’t quote me. It is better you ask the tehsildar about the actual loss,” he said and made his way out.

Similarly, when asked whether they have received insurance claims, farmers have often given me plenty of information, but this is almost always accompanied by a request to not quote them. “If my name appears, I will be targeted,” they all say. The only exceptions are those associated with farmers organisations.

While we reporters seek stories, for people, providing information can have consequences. Sometime ago, I met an architect for a story on a redevelopment project. He had invited someone who had approached him regarding problems in the project. The person narrated his issues with the proposal. “This plan will benefit the builder, not us,” he told me. “Right. We can do a story. How should I attribute you in the story,” I asked. “You cannot,” he said bluntly. Both the architect and I were surprised. Looking at our faces, he said: “You are a journalist, you won’t have any issues. The builder will target me when the story appears.” I was indignant. “Then why did you meet me,” I asked. “Just so you know what builders are doing to the city,” he said.

The answer to this dilemma lies in the story being told. Sometimes, depending on the story, we persuade the person to go on record, sometimes identify them by profession, sometimes leave out their quote and go with what we have, and sometimes even drop the story altogether.

alok.deshpande@thehindu.co.in



Read in source website

Reservations should serve a development purpose and not be a weapon of divisiveness

The Supreme Court has allowed Madhya Pradesh to implement 14% reservation for Other Backward Classes (OBCs) and notify the elections for nearly 23,263 local bodies within two weeks. The Court had on May 10 ordered the State to proceed with the elections without OBC quotas. The Court has since then reassured itself that the State has met the ‘triple test’ criteria it had established in 2010 for OBC reservation in local bodies — a commission that undertook contemporaneous empirical inquiry into the nature and implications of the backwardness in the context of local bodies, break-up of the reservation local body-wise, and adherence to the 50% ceiling on quotas. Madhya Pradesh had already provided for reservation for women besides Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes, and its proposed quota for OBCs is 14%, to keep the aggregate within the 50% ceiling. The State has convinced the Court that it had indeed met the triple test, but the validity and accuracy of the commission report remain open to further judicial scrutiny. The Madhya Pradesh government and the Bharatiya Janata Party have welcomed the order which they publicise as their success; the Opposition Congress has said OBCs deserve 27% reservation, and blames the BJP government for its failure to impress upon the Court, on the quantum.

Madhya Pradesh and Odisha are also facing judicial scrutiny of their plans for OBC reservation in local bodies, and this remains a controversial question on which the law is still evolving and public opinion is fractious. The Court has held that the criteria for reservation in job and education, which is social and educational backwardness, need not be applied for reservation in local bodies. Backwardness to be established for political reservation can be of a different nature, it had held. OBCs collectively form more than half the population of India and many communities want to be included in the category. The politics of the country is largely litigated among this segment, and suggestions and demands are raised on a regular basis. There is demand for removing the 50% ceiling on quotas, a caste-based census that the Centre is opposing but clamour for which is growing, and reservation in the private sector. While quotas have proven to be an effective instrument of empowerment and justice, competitive politics around them often leads to a paralysis of politics and governance. Making the reservation regime fair, objective, and empirical is a major governance challenge, and the Court’s attempts in that direction is welcome. Political parties and governments must act in tandem with the judiciary so that reservation programmes do not turn divisive but serve a development purpose.



Read in source website

Strict enforcement of rules in quarries alone can prevent environmental and human costs

Working in hazardous sites such as quarries, where explosives and heavy machinery are deployed, is fraught with risks. But human casualties in accidents caused at such sites due to greed-induced exploitation, violation of safety and operational norms, and collusion with regulators, involve an element of culpability. The death of three workers at the privately owned Venkateshwara Stone Crusher Unit, at Adaimithippaankulam in Tamil Nadu’s Tirunelveli district, bears tragic testimony to this. Here, a falling boulder trapped six workers and their heavy vehicles under debris in a 300-feet deep stone quarry on Saturday night. The management, according to the State Director of Mining and Geology, was served a closure notice last month and instructed to suspend operations, after violations. Yet, the operations went on illegally until the fateful night, which brought officials, politicians and rescuers to the site. Perhaps, a random inspection in the interregnum could have prevented the loss of lives. The preliminary inquiry suggests the crusher unit, which has facilities for the manufacture of M-Sand and blue metal, had compromised safety along the vehicle path. The breach in the mandated 10 feet distance between the upper vehicle path and the immediate lower path is believed to have caused the falling boulder to plunge deeper into the quarry, aggravating the tragedy.

The Revenue Secretary has announced a comprehensive safety audit exercise in all stone quarries. Given that a political nexus, quarry operations and the grant of licences are inseparable, such crackdowns have rarely been effective. The plundering of natural resources including in the ecologically sensitive Western Ghats due to excessive blasting and mining has been well documented by committees, either appointed by the government or by the courts. For instance, former IAS officer U. Sagayam, as the Madras High Court-appointed Legal Commissioner, had estimated Rs. 16,000 crore loss to the exchequer due to illegal granite mining in the Madurai region alone. There has been a mushrooming of unlicensed quarries too. Just last year the High Court had ordered the closure of 64 unlicensed stone quarries in Tiruppur district, based on the findings of an advocate-commissioner. The revenue loss aside, it is impossible to fix a cost to the resultant irretrievable damage to the environment and risk exposure to humans. The big sharks have been targeted mostly when a ruling party has an axe to grind. There is now a spurt in the quarrying volume in the Tirunelveli-Kanniyakumari region to meet the huge demand from Kerala, where an estimated 80% of quarried materials is transported. It calls for the enforcement of restrictions on such inter-State transport of minerals. Immediate responses to tragedies usually have a short life. Only a genuine administrative will to sustain the enforcement of rules in quarries is of real consequence.



Read in source website

New Delhi, May 19: Apart from the ICS Privileges Abolition Bill which entails the deletion of Article 314 of the Constitution, the Central Government is contemplating some more constitutional amendments in the near future to remove judicial impediments to executive decisions taken in the larger public interest. One of the Bills now under consideration seeks to bypass the recent Supreme Court judgment in regard to the fixation of car prices by inserting a new Chapter IIIB of the Industries (Development and Regulation) Act in the Ninth Schedule of the Constitution.The idea is to take away the powers of the courts to interfere in such matters as fixation of prices and quality controls enforced by executive action. The proposed amendment will empower the Government to safeguard the interests of the consumers in ensuring the supply of industrial products at reasonable prices, while taking suitable steps to regulate the development of the respective industries of the country. The Government is also thinking of amending Entry 56 in the Union List of the Constitution to give power to Parliament to legislate in respect of water disputes involving both riparian and non-riparian States.



Read in source website

Kangana Ranaut's remark against Bollywood's nepotism is well-taken. But the boiled egg doesn't deserve her chagrin

Who can quarrel with Kangana Ranaut over nepotism. Even her worst detractor, who is revolted by her pushing the victim card beyond its snapping point, would agree that Bollywood’s enfant terrible does the right thing by excoriating the industry’s hallowed circle for its casting choices and discriminating against outsiders. So, when Ranaut pitched into the recent debate on the north-south contest in the country’s tinseldom with a dig at Hindi cinema’s star kids, it seemed par for the course. “Dekhne me ajeeb se lagte hain jaise uble hue ande,” (they look weird, like boiled eggs) she reportedly said. Now that’s no way to refer to your colleagues — however, untalented. Body shaming aside, Ranaut also seems to have got her ande ka funda wrong — the charms of the boiled egg seem to have eluded her.

Agreed, it’s easy to go wrong with a boiled egg. From Julia Child to the newest cooking counsellor on the internet, advice — often conflicting — abounds on how to avoid rubbery whites, stuck-on shells or overcooked yolks. But ask those vendors with a pushcart or a tripod stand who are usually to be found close to bus stops, railways stations or even booze shops. For decades they have been getting the yolks buttery and sweet and the casing, pearly white. Sliced and tossed with chopped onions, coriander leaves, a dash of salt and pepper, and a bit of cumin powder, it makes for a snack that has revived the spirits of countless students, weary travellers and officer goers across generations.

Who can resist the pull of a hard-boiled egg with a spicy deep-fried coating of minced meat, dusted in flour and deep-fried till crispy? Call it by any name — Dimer Devil or Scotch Egg or the rich-gravy-laden Nargisi kofta. Or simply cook it in a pot with onions fried till brown, add tomatoes and your choice of spice and have them with appams, rotis, or parathas. Trust us, Kangana next time, you will look for a better simile for “weird” Bollywood babas and babies.



Read in source website

The verdict reaffirms a cardinal principle of the country's polity: “The Governor occupies the position of the head of the executive in the State but it is virtually the Council of Ministers in each State that carries on the executive Government.”

On Wednesday, a three-judge bench of the Supreme Court set free A G Perarivalan bringing a closure to the more than the three-decade-long battle waged by the 50-year old convict in the Rajiv Gandhi murder case. The relief provided by the Court was long overdue — Perarivalan’s prolonged incarceration was inhuman. But the verdict is also seminal for another reason: It clarifies constitutional issues that have resulted in numerous face-offs between state governments and governors in recent times, resulting in inordinate delays in policy implementation.

Perarivalan was sentenced to death by a TADA court in 1998, a verdict upheld by the SC a year later. In 2014, the SC commuted the sentence to life imprisonment. A year later, Perarivalan submitted a plea to the Tamil Nadu governor, seeking release under Article 161 of the Constitution. When this petition fell on deaf ears, he moved the SC which, in September 2018, put the ball back in the Raj Bhavan’s court. Days after this directive, the then AIADMK government of Tamil Nadu recommended the release of all the convicts in the Rajiv Gandhi assassination case. It would be another two-and-a-half years before the governor would forward the file to President Ram Nath Kovind. During this period, the governor was called out by the state high court as well as the SC for inaction. Now, the apex court has come down strongly again on the Raj Bhavan. On Wednesday, it ruled that the state government’s advice to the governor with respect to remission pleas under Article 161 is binding and there was no need to refer the matter to the President. The vacillation over Perarivalan’s petition was, therefore, “inexplicable,” and “inexcusable,” it held.

The verdict reaffirms a cardinal principle of the country’s polity: “The Governor occupies the position of the head of the executive in the State but it is virtually the Council of Ministers in each State that carries on the executive Government.” This should send a strong signal to governors in several states who have been stonewalling state government decisions. The recent friction between the two authorities in TN over the NEET exam is a case in point. In fact, according to a report in this newspaper, at least 20 bills or state government recommendations await the TN governor’s decision, as of March end. Raj Bhavans in West Bengal and Kerala too have collided frequently with governments over policy matters. The verdict should put an end to such bickering.



Read in source website

Unlike regular working folk, who struggle with job precarity and no pensions, an All-India Service officer is rarely told that he does not deserve institutional recognition and backing, that he is just one among the millions with a voice on the internet.

There are jobs at the higher echelons of government service that come with perks most working people can only dream of: Free healthcare, a pension for life, job security, etc. But perhaps the greatest privilege, the one that seems the hardest to shake off, is a socially-sanctioned sense of entitlement. For the officer, in his Ambassador (or its imported equivalent), people and traffic part like the Red Sea for Moses, queues disappear, train tickets are magically booked, thanks to the “lal batti” and all it stands for. Unfortunately, as former interim director, CBI, M Nageswara Rao recently discovered, not all privilege lasts forever.

Rao has now moved the Delhi High Court twice in as many months demanding that Twitter restore the “blue tick” — given to verified accounts — that his handle once enjoyed. On Tuesday, while dismissing his second writ petition, the court ordered that he pay a fine of Rs 10,000. Clearly, the petitioner did not understand rejection. Or, even more significantly, that a blue tick — like the lal batti — is a privilege that can be temporary. It is certainly not a matter over which a high court need exercise its original jurisdiction.

But perhaps the retired IPS officer should not be judged too harshly. After all, unthinking entitlement — in essence, confusing rights for privileges, discretion for discrimination — may just be the inevitable outcome of years in power. Unlike regular working folk, who struggle with job precarity and no pensions, an All-India Service officer is rarely told that he does not deserve institutional recognition and backing, that he is just one among the millions with a voice on the internet. Most people, the voiceless, find on places like Twitter — for better and often worse — a chance to be heard. For the babu, being a part of that cacophony itself appears to be traumatic.



Read in source website

An enthusiastic turnout of voters marked the mini-general election on May 19 with four states and 22 Lok Sabha and assembly constituencies reporting moderate to heavy polling. Barring stray incidents of violence in West Bengal and Haryana, the polls passed off peacefully.

An enthusiastic turnout of voters marked the mini-general election on May 19 with four states and 22 Lok Sabha and assembly constituencies reporting moderate to heavy polling. Barring stray incidents of violence in West Bengal and Haryana, the polls passed off peacefully. Over 60 per cent of the 52 million voters exercised their franchise in the election which is Mrs Gandhi’s first major popularity test after her resounding victory in the 1982 General Elections. While Kerala recorded a characteristically heavy turnout of 70 per cent, about 65 per cent voters cast their vote in Haryana and West Bengal. Voting struck a dull note in Garhwal where the Democratic Socialist Party candidate H N Bahuguna is making a bid to re-enter Parliament.

Falkland Tense

The UN Secretary General Javier Perez De Cuellar has warned that the Anglo-Argentine peace talks are in their last stage and there are reports of British commandos landing on the Falkland Islands to prepare for an invasion. Meanwhile, Britain’s war fleet is poised for an attack formation with an estimated 37 Sea Harriers and 8,900 troops waiting only a coded order from Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher.

Mirage For Pak

Pakistan is on the point of clinching a deal with French firm Dassault for the clinching of 80 Mirage Aircraft, according to media sources in the country. However, informed French sources say that negotiations on the deal have made no progress, though they concede that Pakistan has a “permanent offer” for the airport. Sources in Pakistan say that the delivery of the fighter planes should start in 1984, but French sources say that Dassault would be too busy fulfilling commitments to India and Egypt till 1988.



Read in source website

What Patel's exit will mean for Congress in a poll-bound Gujarat will be known as events unfold. But it will certainly not help the party in the face of a new Gujarat government, its Cabinet revamped barely eight months ago — and, of course, the BJP's juggernaut already on the move.

Hardik Patel, the young Patidar leader who quit the Congress Wednesday, may have discovered newer — and greener — pastures to further his ambitions. However, his parting statement holds lessons for the Congress, which had appointed him working president two years ago. Sure, his reasons for leaving aren’t original. They echo remarks made by leaders who have quit the Congress in recent times but the party and its leadership should not dismiss them as the whinings of an impatient, ambitious leader. All available evidence shows that it will do exactly that, reinforcing its image as a party that has place only for those who are neither impatient nor ambitious.

Patel, who shot into limelight as the face of the Patidar agitation in 2015, was a high-profile recruit to the Congress. He was appointed to the state leadership seemingly at the behest of Rahul Gandhi. Patel has now complained that the central leadership showed little interest in Gujarat and state leaders were busy appeasing visiting Central leaders. A more serious charge he has made is that the Congress acts as an “obstructive” presence and a “roadblock” on issues related to India, Gujarat and the Patidar community. In the first instance, it could well be that the central leadership wanted state leaders to act on their own own rather than wait for the party high command to issue instructions. If so, the latter clearly has failed to communicate it down the rungs. Since Indira Gandhi institutionalised the high command in the 1970s, the Congress has followed a top down leadership model with state units having limited autonomy in deciding party tactics, strategy and policies. Recent events in states such as Punjab indicate that little has changed: In Punjab, the Congress lost the recent elections and its star leaders, among them Amarinder Singh, and on Thursday, former state chief, Sunil Jakhar. The party has not had organisational elections in nearly two decades and state unit chiefs are nominated by the party high command. The nomination culture — senior leaders want to be in the Rajya Sabha than fight their way to Parliament by winning Lok Sabha elections — has bred not just complacency at the top but has also turned into a glass ceiling for young leaders from the grass roots. Patel’s description of the Congress’s failure in crafting a coherent narrative on national issues — Hindutva, Article 370, Ayodhya, etc. — has more than a ring of truth. Congress leaders in their individual capacity do speak and write on these issues, but as a party it has seldom articulated its stance on these matters. This breakdown in communication is reflected in leaders speaking in different voices and often out of sync with the positions the party claims to uphold.

What Patel’s exit will mean for Congress in a poll-bound Gujarat will be known as events unfold. But it will certainly not help the party in the face of a new Gujarat government, its Cabinet revamped barely eight months ago — and, of course, the BJP’s juggernaut already on the move. The Congress ran the BJP close in the 2017 assembly election, but failed to build any momentum. The high command’s ad-hoc appointments to the state leadership did not help either. Why did the party let go of Patel? Perhaps, someone in Cambridge, where Rahul Gandhi is scheduled to explain his idea of India in a few days, should ask him that question.



Read in source website

Even if trolls and bots helped juice anti-Heard mania, there are obviously plenty of real people participating in it

Written by Michelle Goldberg

There are ambiguities in the sordid conflict between divorced actors Johnny Depp and Amber Heard, but some things are clear.

Depp texted a friend that he wanted to kill Heard and then have sex with “her burnt corpse afterwards to make sure she is dead.” There is a video of Depp smashing kitchen cabinets while Heard tries to calm him, saying, at one point, “All I did was say ‘sorry’!” In an audio recording, she tells him to go put his “cigarettes out on someone else,” and he responded, “Shut up, fat ass.”

He admitted to head-butting her, though he said it was an accident. When Heard went to court to get a domestic violence restraining order against Depp, she had a bruise on her cheekbone from where she said he threw a phone at her.

In 2018, The Sun, a British newspaper, called Depp a “wife beater,” and he sued for libel. Proving libel is much easier in Britain than in the United States, because there the burden of proof rests with the defendant. Depp lost his case. A judge, evaluating 14 incidents of Depp’s alleged abuse of Heard, found that 12 of them had occurred and concluded that The Sun’s words were “substantially true.”

Now Depp is suing Heard in Virginia for $50 million, saying that she defamed him when she described herself, in a Washington Post opinion essay that didn’t mention Depp, as “a public figure representing domestic abuse.” His case seems absurd, since even if he were entirely innocent, the British verdict was well known, and Heard was referring to what she symbolized, not what she allegedly endured. (She is countersuing for $100 million.)

If Depp somehow prevails, one can expect similar lawsuits against other women who say they’ve survived abuse. Already, singer Marilyn Manson has filed a defamation suit against his ex-fiancée Evan Rachel Wood, one of several women who have accused him of sexual violence.

But Depp needn’t succeed in court to achieve his ends. In a 2016 email to his former agent, Christian Carino, Depp wrote that Heard was “begging for total global humiliation.” Now this televised trial has resulted in an explosion of hatred and derision directed at her. The volatile actress — who at times was violent toward Depp, and who never made good on a promise to donate her entire divorce settlement to charity — is very far from a perfect victim. That made her the perfect object of a #MeToo backlash.

Online, there is a level of industrial-scale bullying directed at Heard that puts all previous social media pile-ons to shame. Countless videos skewer Heard on TikTok; NSYNC member Lance Bass joined in the trend of mockingly reenacting her testimony. A makeup brand even took part in the anti-Heard melee, posting a TikTok video meant to contradict her lawyer’s description of how she covered up bruises. Meanwhile, every platform appears to be full of adoring pro-Depp memes. “Why Does It Seem Like the Entire Internet Is Team Johnny Depp?” said a Vice headline.

But it is not just the internet. “Believe all women, except Amber Heard,” Chris Rock joked recently. A “Saturday Night Live” sketch last weekend turned one of Depp’s wildest accusations against Heard into a skit, treating her as a figure of ridicule and him as a charming scamp.

This doesn’t mean that the case is entirely straightforward. Heard has admitted hitting Depp, and she has been recorded insulting and belittling him. The couple’s marital counselor testified that they engaged in “mutual abuse,” saying of Heard, “It was a point of pride to her, if she felt disrespected, to initiate a fight.”

Some domestic violence experts consider mutual abuse a myth, arguing that while both partners in a toxic relationship can behave terribly, one usually exercises power over the other. But even if you believe that Heard acted inexcusably, the idea that she was the primary aggressor — against a larger man with far more resources who was recorded cursing at her for daring to speak in an “authoritative” way — defies logic.

Indeed, one of the most salacious details from the trial — the one that has been used to jeer at Heard across every form of media — might just as easily fit into a story of her victimization. Depp, you may know by now, accused Heard or one of her friends of defecating in her bed as an act of revenge, and his bodyguard said she had confessed to a prank gone wrong. Heard testified that one of their dogs, incontinent since eating Depp’s weed as a puppy, defiled the bed. “It was not really a jovial time, and I don’t think that’s funny, period,” she said. “That’s disgusting.”

If she is telling the truth, one has to marvel at how thoroughly Depp and his team have sullied her name. When Depp testified, the hashtags #AmberTurd and #MePoo shot across the internet. The image of Heard, a woman whose brand is bombshell blond glamour, is now linked, perhaps permanently, to excrement. If she is not a psychopath, she is the casualty of a truly sadistic reputational hit job.

It is worth noting that in 2020, Bot Sentinel, a group that tracks online disinformation and harassment, was hired by Heard’s lawyers to analyze the social media campaign against her. “Everyone thinks that any activity against them is bots or whatever,” the group’s founder, Chris Bouzy, told me. But in this case, some of it was — Bouzy estimated that there were 340 “inauthentic” Twitter accounts devoted to defaming Heard and amplifying petitions calling for her to be fired from acting and modeling gigs. “A small number of accounts can drive conversations on Twitter,” he said.

Yet even if trolls and bots helped juice anti-Heard mania, there are obviously plenty of real people participating in it. Some of them are obsessive Depp fans; as Kaitlyn Tiffany wrote in The Atlantic, there is a history of online communities fixating “on theories that the male objects of their fandom were being manipulated and tortured by less-famous, female romantic partners.”

There seems, however, to be a broader misogynist frenzy at work, one characteristic of the deeply reactionary moment we are living through. “She will hit the wall hard!!!” Depp wrote in the email to Carino. Looks like he knew his audience.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.



Read in source website

Prannv Dhawan and Christophe Jaffrelot write: Upper castes dominate not just the state assembly, but also the government, while religious minorities find little representation

After the recent assembly elections, observers of the UP political scene have claimed that the winner, the BJP, had diversified its social basis to such an extent that it was now more representative of society than any other political party and that it could even appear as an embodiment of social engineering. Such conclusions need to be revisited on the basis of the empirical data which are now available.

First, the diversification in question is limited to some caste groups. The BJP, over the last five years, has coopted non-dominant Dalit jatis and non-dominant OBC jatis in order to counter the Jatav-oriented BSP and the Yadav-oriented SP. This tactic has found expression in the nomination of a large number of candidates coming from small Scheduled Castes and Backward Castes which were not significantly represented in the UP assembly — and which have seized this opportunity to send some of their leaders into the corridors of power. These jatis rallied around the BJP not only because they resented the way pro-Mandal forces had cornered reservations, but also because they appreciated the Hindutva ethos, including Sanskritisation. As a result, besides Jatavs, BJP MLAs come from all kinds of jatis, including Pasis, Lodhis, Kushwahas, Shakyas, Sainis, Koris, Nishads, Kashyaps, Binds, Kalwars, Telis, Sonars, Khatiks, Rajbhars, Dhobis and Valmikis. How much more plebeian and representative of society does the variety of the BJP MLAs’ background make the party?

If the BJP includes representatives of small castes, it excludes religious minorities: The ruling party has not nominated even one Muslim candidate, once again, in 2022. Interestingly, the massive underrepresentation of Muslims in the UP assembly is not seen as a problem by most of the observers who emphasise the BJP’s “inclusiveness”, as if it was now taken for granted. UP’s largest minority, which accounts for about one-fifth of society, is bound to become invisible.

But the BJP is not more democratic either, because upper castes remain dominant – and even hegemonic if one considers the composition not only of the assembly but also of the government. Forty-three per cent of the BJP MLAs come from the upper castes – who represent only one-fifth of the state society, whereas its OBC MLAs form one-third of its MLAs when OBCs are about 50 per cent of the state population. Among the upper caste MLAs of the BJP, 17 per cent are Brahmins and 16 per cent are Rajputs, whereas these two groups represent about 10 and 7 per cent of the society of UP. Their over-representation is even more dramatic in the government that Yogi Adityanath has made after being re-elected.

Certainly, much like the pre-election expansion of the Council of Ministers, UP’s new cabinet has a substantial number of OBC ministers (20) who represent 38.8 per cent of the total — and again, most of them come from non-dominant jatis. But two caveats need to be underlined. First, more than half of them (11) are sworn in as Ministers of State whereas upper castes, who hold 21 posts in the council, occupy powerful cabinet berths. Moreover, while the BJP has retained OBC leader Keshav Prasad Maurya as the deputy chief minister despite his electoral loss, unlike in 2017, Maurya’s powerful PWD portfolio has been given to Jitin Prasada. Besides, the Thakur chief minister holds 34 portfolios including Home, while the other powerful portfolios such as Finance (Khatri), PWD (Brahmin), Health (Brahmin), Agriculture (Bania), Urban Development (Brahmin), and Higher Education (Brahmin) remain with upper-caste cabinet ministers. By contrast, OBC ministers have secured the less powerful Labour, Animal Husbandry, Jal Shakti, and MSME portfolios. The only Dalit in the cabinet has got Women and Child Welfare. The near absence of religious minorities in the council of ministers is well in tune with the BJP’s Hindu majoritarianism. Like the last time, a solitary Muslim leader, Danish Azad Ansari, belonging to a backward class, has been sworn in as a minister of state, even as Baldev Singh Aulakh, the only Sikh MLA in the UP assembly, has been retained as a minister of state. This low representation (3.7 per cent) of religious minorities can be contrasted with the SP government in 2012 which had 22 per cent representation of religious minorities in the council of ministers.

In fact, during the “Akhilesh moment”, between 2012 and 2017, UP politics was much more representative of the state society, as Gilles Verniers shows in his PhD thesis. The presence of Muslims among the SP’s MLAs was proportionate to their demographic weight (at 19 per cent); the percentage of OBCs among the SP’s MLAs (27 per cent) was not as large as the percentage of OBCs in society, but it was larger than the share of upper caste MLAs (26 per cent) – and Yadavs represented a little bit more than half of them, with Kurmis, Kushwahas, Nishads, Jaiswals, Shakyas, Chaurasias, Gadaryas and Mallahs also represented. Certainly, the percentage of upper castes in Akhilesh’s council of ministers (33 per cent) remained higher than that of OBCs (31 per cent), but it was closer to the share of upper castes in society as in today’s cabinet: 45 per cent.

The decline of upper castes in the UP politics under the SP was precisely the reason why they rallied around the BJP – as evident from the fact that more than 70 per cent of them voted for the party in 2022 – and why they supported Hindu nationalism: communal identity was clearly the best antidote to caste (and class) politics. Instead of mobilising against the savarnas, Dalits and OBCs were requested to fight “the Other par excellence”, the Muslim. It worked fine, largely because the BJP targeted those who had not benefited from reservations as much as Jatavs and Yadavs – because quota politics had divided SCs and OBCs along jati lines, a development BSP and SP leaders need to acknowledge if they want to reunite their traditional core constituencies.

This column first appeared in the print edition on May 20, 2022, under the title ‘Not a rainbow’. Dhawan is a student of National Law School of India University, Bangalore. Jaffrelot is senior research fellow at CERI-Sciences Po/CNRS, Paris, professor of Indian Politics and Sociology at King’s India Institute, London



Read in source website

Pratap Bhanu Mehta writes: In the long run, something creative may emerge from this crisis as economies restructure. Under present conditions, the second-order effects of the war have magnified a great deal

Is the war in Ukraine entering a new and, perhaps, even more dangerous phase? The answer to this question depends on seeing Ukraine as a two-front war. There is the battle being fought in Ukraine, where the country has admirably held back Russian power, and cut it to size. But it is still not clear what the endgame of this struggle is going to be. It is not very likely that Ukraine will be able to enforce all its territorial claims. Nor is it likely that Russia will want to simply walk away from this war under a narrative of total defeat. How much territory in Ukraine will Russia want to hold on to so that the war does not count as a complete political disaster for Vladimir Putin is an open question. What means it is willing to deploy to devastate Ukraine is also an open question. In many ways, Ukraine has suffered immense devastation already, with more than 10 million people displaced and the country’s infrastructure destroyed. It has found immense reservoirs of national resolve, and support from the West. But whether that will be enough to achieve its objectives is not clear. The risk of Ukraine overplaying its immense success is real. There could be a protracted stalemate, but one that will continue to impose immense humanitarian costs on Ukraine. Putin could escalate, not for purposes of winning but to inflict punishment.

What may be more decisive for the war is the second front — the political and economic effects that are being played out in the rest of the world. On this front, it is not clear that Putin is losing as badly as the West might like to think. Putin has driven Sweden and Finland into the arms of NATO and for a moment resuscitated the idea of the West. But from a longer-range perspective, several things on this second front are becoming clear. First, the West has not been able to secure as deep and meaningful a consensus on isolating Russia as it might have hoped. So, the idea that global pressure or sanctions will work on Putin has turned out to be something of a non-starter. It might have worked if China, India and the rest of the world had exerted more pressure on Russia. But operationally, it is the West that found itself more isolated.

Second, the Western resolve has proved to be half-hearted at best. There is something reassuring about publics not wanting to rush to war. But what we have seen play out in countries like Germany is the refusal of the political class to invoke even the slightest whiff of a language of political sacrifice. Big objectives like standing by a proud independent country of 40 million, or pushing back against autocracy (if that is the objective), do not come without forthright talk about some necessary sacrifice. That unwillingness has been striking. Even in the US, most recent polling is showing slipping support for the effort in Ukraine.

Third, the United States was in this bind — for prudential reasons it sought to avoid a direct confrontation with Russia. The risk still exists that if Russia escalates, it could force the US’s hand. But even standing by Ukraine meant telling some grand story or narrative that could rally support for it. But this sweet spot — showing enough resolve to rally domestic support behind Ukraine, sending a signal to the Russians about American resolve but not risking all-out war or a path of no return for Russia — is not an easy one to sustain. It has been sustained up till now, but that window could close very fast indeed.

Fourth, the disruptive effects of the war are now beginning to reverberate throughout the world. The global economy is facing a serious and unprecedented crisis: Inflation at the highest levels in a generation, unpredictable supply shocks, very little global political coordination, deep intellectual disarray about what ails the major economies, and even deeper political polarisation. Inflation was already an issue before the war started. In fact, the war may have provided some political cover for an incipient economic crisis in many economies. Across the world, there were too many complacent assumptions about monetary policy and the economy. After the 2009 financial crisis, G-20 was supposed to adopt something of a role as a steering committee for global capitalism and the stability of the global economy. But the closing in of China, the intensification of America First policies, have meant that the world is without credible mechanisms of global economic coordination. To top it all you have China’s continued insistence on zero-Covid policies, which just increases the probability of supply-related shocks.

Something creative may emerge from this crisis as economies restructure. But that is in the long run. Under present conditions, the second-order effects of the war in Ukraine have magnified a great deal. In the US, inflation could potentially deepen America’s political woes. It certainly hands Republicans an advantage. A slump in European growth could still produce unexpected political outcomes. If Russia is going down, it is not going down without inflicting serious costs on the rest of the world. If Putin’s endgame has always been to assert Russian relevance by not just playing spoiler, but causing disruption in the rest of the world, he has managed enough — even when he is being humiliated in his own backyard.

How much of this disruption is the world willing to endure? Will the uncertainties on the second front — global economic disarray, and deepening political uncertainty — actually prompt a rethinking in the West about the endgame in Ukraine? Does the calculation shift from the need to show resolve to an understanding that even the current hard-won gains in Ukraine may be frittered away the longer the war drags on? No Western leader can count on the deep and continued support of their publics. President Joe Biden is just embarking on a tour of Asia. But it has been characteristic of the Biden Administration that it tries to conduct global diplomacy without committing any serious economic resources behind its efforts. So is it the moment, where both West and Ukraine become conscious of how to walk away with major gains, or risk that time and the disruption of the global economy, produce a debilitating stalemate that takes everyone down? The only trouble is, no one knows what is Putin’s endgame: An apocalyptic vision of a world in disarray, or is he amenable to a respectable way out? It is not a comforting thought that any answer to this question is just speculative.

This column first appeared in the print edition on May 20, 2022, under the title ‘The long war’. The writer is contributing editor, The Indian Express



Read in source website

Divya Spandana writes: Those of us who are actors need to be responsible about what we put out on social media: Let's be honest, let's be real. Let's not make ourselves look thinner, leaner or fairer. The silence is not worth a life.

I don’t think Chethana Raj is the first person in the industry we have lost to plastic surgery. There was another incident that involved a Telugu actor, some years ago. She also died due to complications after liposuction in the US.

Chethana’s death is a harsh reminder of the reality of the entertainment industry: There are unrealistic standards for “beauty” when it comes to women. This is not just a result of the industry’s demands. It is also, I believe, a consequence of the pressure that is placed on girls since childhood — to dress well, to be “presentable”, to look good. Take the fashion and retail clothing industry. It appears as though the responsibility to look good is on women alone.

I know of so many colleagues who have undergone surgeries. And a vast majority have undergone laser or chemical treatments to get rid of body hair, which isn’t considered “sexy” on a woman. For men, of course, it’s completely okay. Laser treatments, skin lightening, chemical peels, lip fillers, botox, liposuction – we do all of it to keep up with the “standards” of beauty. Ever since my tumour removal I have struggled with weight as well. There are so many quick fixes out there, it’s easy to get carried away.

The need to diet, to look a certain way, is always there.

Films are supposed to be a reflection of society. Unfortunately, that’s rarely the case. The heroine rarely looks like a regular person, someone you would encounter in your daily life. Nobody dresses that way, or wears that kind of makeup. But the on-screen persona has slowly become the aspiration, and everyone wants to aim for perfection, like in Instagram filters.

A man, on the other hand, can be 65 and potbellied. He can lose his hair, wear a wig and still be a “hero”. If a woman in the public eye puts on a little weight she is trolled and fat-shamed. A woman in the entertainment industry pretty much loses the spotlight by her late 30s. Things are slowly changing, of course, but there’s a long road to travel. Is there a Size Zero for men?

In this regard, the Malayalam film industry must be commended for the kind of roles written for women. Actors are portrayed sans makeup, in regular clothes that do not accentuate their figures. Their hair isn’t blow-dried, and they’re not wearing extensions or fake eyelashes. And it shows in the performances — real and honest.

The bias against women on screen isn’t just about how they look. In the South Indian film industries, men are usually paid in crores, women in lakhs. Only a few people have managed to change that. The “hero” always gets the major role. In the posters and credits, his name almost always gets top billing.

It’s time both men and women have these conversations. Filmmakers, producers – and all those in the entertainment industry who have the power to bring change – must not keep brushing these issues under the carpet. Those of us who are actors need to be responsible about what we put out on social media: Let’s be honest, let’s be real. Let’s not make ourselves look thinner, leaner or fairer. The silence is not worth a life.

As I look at Chetana’s photographs, I see no flaws in her. She looks like any of us — that leaves me with a slew of questions, but none of us know what she was going through and the pressures she faced. Sometimes, young women like her are the sole breadwinner in the family. To “make it” in the film industry, to have to look a certain way could have pushed her to opt for liposuction surgery. None of us can judge her. At the end of the day, every individual makes her own choices. But I am left with one question: Was it really worth it?



Read in source website

K Chandru writes: Successive governments subverted the constitutional scheme to deny relief to convicts in the Rajiv Gandhi assassination case

The Supreme Court’s action in exercising its inherent power under Article 142 of the Constitution and ordering the release of A G Perarivalan, a convict in the Rajiv Gandhi assassination case, has resulted in mixed reactions. A Congress spokesperson in Tamil Nadu called the verdict a victory for terrorism and money power. His reaction was strengthened by the state Congress Committee calling for a peaceful protest for one hour, with protesters standing with their mouths gagged.

Notwithstanding these small ripples, the Supreme Court’s verdict was broadly welcomed as it put an end to travails that lasted more than two decades. It also brought an end to the battle between the Raj Bhavan and Secretariat.

After the assassination of Rajiv Gandhi, the assailants were tried under the notorious Terrorist and Disruptive Activities (Prevention) Act, 1987 (TADA) under which an in-camera trial was conducted. The Act also allowed confessions made before a police officer not below the rank of a Superintendent as admissible in evidence, in contrast to the trial for offences under the Indian Penal Code. To the shock of everyone, all 26 accused were given the death sentence by the Special Court for various offences, including under TADA (1998).

The provisions of TADA prescribed only an appeal to the Supreme Court. Fortunately, the SC held that the offences under TADA were not made out since there was no case to proceed for acts of terrorism. It also modified the death penalty for 22 persons and confirmed the same only for Nalini, Perarivalan, Murugan and Santhan (1999).

They petitioned the governor of Tamil Nadu for mercy under Article 161. Fathima Beevi, then governor of Tamil Nadu, and earlier an SC judge, dismissed their petition without any advice from the cabinet headed by M Karunanidhi. The Madras High Court ruled that the governor cannot exercise the power of pardon without the advice of the council of ministers. The ball was back in the government’s court. The Karunanidhi government was being targeted as being soft on the LTTE. The cabinet advised the governor to give reprieve only to Nalini Sriharan and rejected the case of the other three, including Perarivalan.

Giving reprieve to persons sentenced to the death penalty, even in the exercise of the plenary powers by a governor, has limitations. In 1978, Parliament amended the Criminal Procedure Code and introduced Sec 433A by which in such cases, prisoners cannot be released from prison unless they had served a minimum of 14 years in prison. Perarivalan and the two other convicts appealed to the president with a mercy plea under Article 72. Two successive presidents of India – K R Narayanan and APJ Abdul Kalam — did not pass any mercy orders. But all of a sudden, their mercy pleas were rejected after a delay of 11 years by President Pratibha Patil. At this stage, the T N Assembly took the extraordinary step of passing a resolution requesting the president to grant pardon to the seven accused (2011).

When they were about to be executed, the convicts moved the Madras HC challenging the execution of the death warrant issued against them. The cases were transferred to the SC, which decided that the president’s action in not considering the mercy plea within a reasonable time was improper and since the three prisoners had been on death row for 11 years, it was a fit case for commuting their sentence to life imprisonment.

Meanwhile, on February 19, 2014, the TN cabinet advised the governor to grant reprieve to all seven accused. The Union of India filed a petition and got the cases transferred to the SC. The constitution bench opined that a life sentence means imprisonment for the remainder of one’s life but the convicts can apply for remission under Sec.432, CrPC. This applies to cases where death sentences are commuted.

Once again, all of them applied for remission from the governor. The state cabinet also advised the governor to grant pardon. As there was no response, Nalini moved the court. The Madras HC declined to give any direction and held: “…the Governor of the State is insulated from being questioned or made answerable to the Courts with respect to discharge of his constitutional functions and duties.” When Arputhammal, Perarivalan’s mother, filed a case for parole, the court noting the inordinate delay observed: “the Governor of T N, a constitutional authority, cannot sit on the state’s recommendation on the release of all seven life convicts in the Rajiv Gandhi assassination case for so long” (July 2020). The court was informed that the governor was awaiting the final report of the CBI’s Multi-Disciplinary Monitoring Agency (MDMA). The MDMA was set up in 1998 at the recommendation of the Justice M C Jain Commission of Inquiry, which had probed the conspiracy aspect of Rajiv Gandhi’s assassination.

The role of MDMA itself came up for criticism by the SC in January 2018 and it observed that the agency did not appear to have made “much headway”. Assuming its final report will contain some adverse material to the seven accused waiting for remission, the question of reopening the case against them will not arise as they had been already convicted for murder and conspiracy. Article 20(2) of the Constitution guarantees that no person can be prosecuted and punished for the same offence more than once.

Once again, the process of granting mercy to the seven accused began with a resolution passed by the T N Assembly on September 9, 2018. On the same day, the state cabinet advised the governor to give reprieve to all seven prisoners. No action was taken by the governor. On being compelled by the court, the governor stated that the matter was to be dealt with by the President. It was at this stage the matter went back to the SC. It was finally decided that the authority to grant pardon is with the governor and he is bound by the advice of the state government. The court also ruled that the action of the governor in delaying the matter for more than 2.5 years was unacceptable. Exercising its power under Article 142 as well as considering all the relevant circumstances, the SC ordered Perarivalan’s release.

India’s penal system is undoubtedly reformatory and not retributive. The SC ruled on this issue by stating “a barbaric crime does not have to be visited with a barbaric penalty.” Those who speak against the reprieve given to Perarivalan neither understand India’s penal system nor are they willing to see the reason behind the SC order. Ultimately, in this country, when an offence has political overturns, it is political considerations rather than criminal jurisprudence that deals with the penalties for it.

It is unconscionable that the successive governments ruled by the Congress and BJP were able to manipulate the office of the governor with directions from the Union home ministry. This perverted the constitutional scheme. It is also surprising that the successive governments at the Centre appeared to be guided in this case by geopolitical considerations rather than this country’s laws. It is their indecision – or rather the abdication of their responsibility — which led to the court deciding the issue. It is not as if Justice Nageswara Rao is not exposed to these issues. As a senior lawyer, he defended several cases for the State of Tamil Nadu headed by Jayalalithaa before the review committee deciding the maintainability of POTA offences against Tamil nationalist leaders like P Nedumaran, Vaiko and others.

The question now is whether the six other prisoners will receive the same relief or will there be an ugly confrontation between the state government and governor once again. Let us hope that wisdom prevails and the governor’s office is not manipulated for narrow political considerations.

The writer is a former justice of the Madras High Court



Read in source website

Chintan Chandrachud writes: Being raped by someone in whom you have reposed trust is likely to have an indelible emotional impact. Marriage does not change that

On 11 May, two judges of the Delhi High Court handed down separate judgments in RIT Foundation v Union of India. The issue before the Court was straightforward. Section 375 of the IPC defines “rape” as when a man has sex with a woman without her consent. However, an exception to Section 375 provides that it is not rape for a husband to have sex with his wife, regardless of consent. The effect of the law is that no husband can be prosecuted for the rape of his adult wife. Four petitions challenging the constitutional validity of the “marital rape exception” were filed at the Delhi HC.

In his judgment, Justice Rajiv Shakdher concluded that the marital rape exception violated the rights to life, equality, non-discrimination, and freedom of speech and expression under the Constitution. His analysis is sound, even if not surprising. There is no reasonable basis to distinguish between married and unmarried women. Marriage is a relationship of equals, and women do not forfeit their agency and sexual autonomy upon marriage. It is no answer to say that a man who rapes his wife may be prosecuted for other offences, such as cruelty. Rape must be called out for what it is.

Justice C Hari Shankar took a different view, concluding that the marital rape exception is constitutionally valid. Five aspects of his opinion are particularly striking. First, the judge held that it is the wrong starting point to assume that a husband who has sex with his wife without her consent “commits rape”. The judge noted that the effect of the exception to Section 375 of the IPC is that any sex between a husband and wife, whether or not consensual, is excluded from the definition of rape. That analysis does not bear scrutiny. Sex within marriage is carved out (by exception) from the definition of rape. It follows that, in the absence of that exception, non-consensual sex within marriage would be rape. More fundamentally, the judge allowed semantics to impede robust constitutional analysis. It makes little difference whether the starting point is that non-consensual sex within marriage should be characterised as rape or, for example, sexual assault. The critical question is whether it is unconstitutional to exclude non-consensual sex from the definition of rape.

Second, Justice Shankar’s opinion elevates marriage to a status that is anachronistic. The judge held that the marital rape exception was “aimed at preservation of the marital institution, on which the entire bedrock of society rests”. The difficulty with that proposition is obvious — is it the policy of the law that marriage is to be preserved at all costs, even when a man has non-consensual sex with his wife? If so, does that withstand constitutional scrutiny? The judge then observed, on a lighter note, that neither lawyers nor judges would be around to examine this issue absent the institution of marriage. Scientists might disagree.

Third, the judge rejected the challenge to the martial rape exception based on the right to equality on the spurious assumption that the impact on a woman who is raped by her husband cannot “be equated with the impact of a woman who is raped by a stranger”. Indeed, he goes so far as to say that “disagreements” (a euphemism for non-consensual sex) in marriage are “but natural” and “may even lend strength to the marital bond”. No evidence is cited in support of those claims. They also defy logic. Being raped by someone in whom you have reposed trust is likely to have an indelible emotional impact. Sadly, it is relatively easy to find many first-hand accounts that confirm this. It is perplexing to understand how non-consensual sex can ever strengthen a marriage.

Fourth, the judge concluded that, as a practical matter, a “majority of Indian women” would be reluctant to file a complaint of rape against their husbands in any event. Even if that were true, it is no reason to disempower, by the operation of the law, women who do have the resolve to make a rape complaint against their husbands from doing so. No one expects tens of thousands of rape complaints to come out of the woodwork after the marital rape exception is declared unconstitutional. But some will, and they will inspire others.

Fifth, Justice Shankar held that it is not within the court’s power to create a new offence, and striking down the marital rape exception would have that effect. There is no question of creating a new offence — the court would simply be striking down an exception carved out of an existing offence. The only principled basis for the judge’s objection is that it may be unfair to punish someone for rape for conduct that was excluded from the definition of rape when it was undertaken. But that is not a reason to avoid striking down the marital rape exception. The easy solution is for the court to declare that its judgment will apply only to conduct after the date of the judgment.

An appeal is now pending before the Supreme Court. Asking Parliament to revisit the marital rape exception may be the path of least resistance. However, as Justice Rajiv Shakdher observed in his judgment, “it is incumbent on courts to take decisions concerning complex social issues and not dribble past them”. Whether the marital rape exception violates fundamental rights under the Constitution is a question that falls within the Court’s core competency. There is only one reasonable answer to that question.



Read in source website

With a dazzling performance in which she beat Tokyo Olympics quarterfinalist Jutamas Jitpong of Thailand 5-0, Nikhat Zareen gave India its first Women’s World Boxing Championship gold since Mary Kom won the title in 2018. This win means that Zareen has definitively emerged out of the legend’s shadow. But she has kept it no secret that her ultimate goal is an Olympic medal.

Like so many of Indian sportspersons’ success stories hers has seen the family play the key role, long before public institutions stepped in with support. She has often talked candidly about how in her Nizamabad community girls are expected to get an education only to get married and look after the family, and the freedoms that she got to pursue her ambition were exceptional.

Read also: Nikhat Zareen scripts history, clinches gold at Women’s World Boxing Championship

A few days ago India’s historic Thomas Cup win showed that its badminton chops have acquired a lovely new depth.  Does the fact that Nikhat Zareen is the fifth Indian woman to win a boxing world title suggest similar plenitude being achieved in this sport too? But after Sarita Devi, Jenny RL and Lekha KC all won golds in 2006, there has been only Mary Kom. And now there is Nikhat Zareen. We have even greater expectations from the country’s women’s boxing ecosystem and her.



Read in source website

India’s indirect tax architecture received a massive jolt yesterday when a three-judge Supreme Court verdict overturned the commonly understood remit of a critical constitutional body: GST Council. In the five years since GST has been rolled out, the GST Council chaired by the Union finance minister and having representatives of all states, has been the decision-making body on all key matters such as tax rates. Decisions of the Council are put to vote and seen to be binding on both GoI and states. SC’s verdict now says the Council’s decision is merely recommendatory.

It’s a tectonic shift, unsettling India’s indirect tax architecture. “To regard them as binding edicts would disrupt fiscal federalism,” said the judgment of GST Council’s decisions. In practice, it’s the other way around. To now regard the GST Council’s decisions as just recommendatory in nature will undermine the current fiscal order which was painstakingly created across governments. For economic agents, including firms and individuals, it introduces a level of uncertainty which is bound to undermine confidence. This, in turn, will act as a drag on economic activity. This is why SC’s judgment is such an unwelcome intervention.

The origin of this verdict goes back to a decision handed by a division bench of the Gujarat high court in January 2020. Companies that import coal for domestic industries challenged a tax levied by GoI under two statutory laws that are a part of the GST architecture. Gujarat HC ruled against GoI, which subsequently brought the matter to the apex court. In the apex court, GoI did categorically state that GST Council’s decisions are binding on both legislature and the executive. This argument was rejected by the apex court, thereby overturning the well-established hierarchy of decision making in GST.

The situation is now untenable. If the GST Council’s decisions are not binding it opens the door to states cherry picking. That will defeat the whole purpose of transitioning to GST that aimed to create a common market in India by dismantling fiscal barriers between states. States voluntarily subsumed their unilateral powers over indirect taxation to usher in GST. For sure, there have been disagreements within the GST Council but the binding nature of its decisions have never been in question. This verdict is clearly one of judicial overreach and intrudes into the domain of the legislature. GoI should file a review petition right away.



Read in source website

With at least 959 Ukrainian defenders of the Azovstal steel works plant surrendering to Russian forces in Mariupol, Moscow now has effective control of the battered Ukrainian city. Mariupol’s fall makes it the biggest city to be captured by Russian forces in the ongoing war and gives Moscow total control over the Azov sea coast. It also enables a strategic land bridge from Russian-controlled Crimea in southern Ukraine to the separatist Donbas region in the east. But this has come at a huge price for Moscow. The stubborn Ukrainian resistance in Mariupol for 82 days bogged down a huge amount of Russian military resources.

In short, Russia’s military plans have gone horribly wrong. Ukraine continues to be militarily replenished by the US and EU. Hitherto neutral Finland and Sweden have applied to join Nato. And Russia stands increasingly isolated in the comity of nations. Yet, Vladimir Putin can’t be seen to be losing face and hence has pushed on with his military operations. But the fall of Mariupol potentially gives him the face-saver he desperately needs.

With Mariupol Putin should have enough to justify his Ukraine gambit and call off wider hostilities. True, Ukrainians will continue to claim Mariupol. But this would be akin to Kyiv’s claims over Crimea and Donbas since 2014. Besides, it’s in Moscow’s self-interest to pause now. After all, it’s clear that the US has shifted its goalpost from defending Ukraine to definitively weakening Russia. Plus, there is still some daylight between EU and US over Russia. But if Russia continues with the war, EU and US positions will coalesce. Halting the war in Ukraine will also provide succour to the international community reeling from rising energy prices, disrupted trade and growing food shortages. India, which has been forced to walk a diplomatic tightrope on the war, will certainly breathe a sigh of relief if hostilities cease. It’s a long shot, but Moscow should play smart and cut its losses now.



Read in source website

A higher share of imported coal in the blend should slow the need to open new mines. This would help avoid increasing investment into new domestic mines that would either bind India to continued, and increased, use of coal, or create a whole class of stranded assets.

GoI's use of the emergency provision of the Electricity Act to direct the Central Electricity Regulatory Commission (CERC) to give power plants the ability to increase the use of imported coal will help bring more generating capacity online. This is a necessary move, given the rising demand with large parts of the country experiencing a heatwave. But GoI must go beyond firefighting mode. It should seize this opportunity to push for power sector reforms, especially with regard to tariff structure, market design and subsidies.

A higher share of imported coal in the blend should slow the need to open new mines. This would help avoid increasing investment into new domestic mines that would either bind India to continued, and increased, use of coal, or create a whole class of stranded assets. GoI's directive will increase the cost of electricity for distribution companies. According to power minister R K Singh, using 10% imported coal in the blend leads to an increase of 50 paise per unit in tariff. Even so, it will avoid a situation of unmet demand. Rather than allowing another downward financial spiral for discoms, structural changes that could lay the foundation of financially sustainable discoms should be made. This includes doing away with perverse cross-subsidies where commercial and industrial units underwrite lower residential tariffs. Reforms should also correct the existing market design that privileges fossil fuels over renewables. Regulatory and infrastructural framework that would make rooftop solar a viable and attractive option should be put in place.

This directive creates space for GoI to work with stakeholders to make the changes that will improve energy security and human and environmental well-being, allowing for the transition to a low-carbon energy development pathway. Rather than fight it, states and other stakeholders must see the increased use of imports in the coal blend as buying time to focus on measures such as energy efficiency, jettisoning harmful subsidies, to lay the groundwork for a robust power sector.

<

Read in source website

Despite this, the impression is that India first committed and then backed off, a reputation India can ill afford. While not a fair comparison, during the second wave of Covid, India said it would not be able to undertake new export commitments as it had to meet domestic requirements.

India's decision to limit export of wheat has not gone down well with its trading partners. With wheat from Russia and Ukraine accounting for a third of global exports now out of reach of many markets, many countries were looking to India to help meet the supply gap. India stepped in allowing for exports. However, successive extreme heat events meant that India's wheat production was 10-15% below projections, leading to a rethink on exports. India has subsequently made it clear that exporting wheat to food-deficit countries on request from governments will be allowed, and private companies are free to meet existing commitments to export nearly 4.3 million tonnes of wheat through July.

Despite this, the impression is that India first committed and then backed off, a reputation India can ill afford. While not a fair comparison, during the second wave of Covid, India said it would not be able to undertake new export commitments as it had to meet domestic requirements. It is nobody's case that India - or any other country - ignores its domestic needs. But better projections, assessment and planning could have prevented the blowback. The need for improved planning and clarity in messaging is critical for India, especially as it set the goal of becoming a global hub for clean energy and wants to be part of the reordered and diversified global supply chains.

India is slated to be the fastest-growing economy for the better part of the decade, and it is natural that it would want to play a bigger role in the world. For that, it must ensure it acquires the capacity to do so and become the reliable, dependable trading partner it seeks to be. If it wants to sit at the big table, India must act as a big player others can depend upon.

<

Read in source website

In a judgment that may have well overreached, a three-judge bench of the Supreme Court (SC) ruled on May 19 that the recommendations of the Goods and Services Tax (GST) Council should be seen as having persuasive value rather than be considered binding on the Centre and the states. HT reported that the order appears to have been interpreted differently by the Centre and some non-Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)-ruled states such as Tamil Nadu (TN) and Kerala. While the former maintains that it does not drastically change the status quo, the latter believes that it will allow for greater autonomy in GST matters. The picture may become clearer once the detailed order is analysed. If it doesn’t, the court might be asked to weigh in again.

Uncertainty about GST (and the authority of the GST Council) is something India can ill-afford. The ruling comes at an interesting time. GST is the single biggest tax reform in post-Independent India. Its fundamental premise is that both the states and Centre merge their tax sovereignty (except in the case of fuel and liquor) to make doing business easier, reduce the cascading impact of taxes, and boost growth. GST’s adoption proved difficult because states believed it tilted the scales against them in what was already a skewed fiscal federalism framework. The agreement was clinched by promising guaranteed revenue to states for the first five years after the implementation of GST. This period is coming to an end in 2022. With some non-BJP-ruled states demanding an extension of the guaranteed compensation period, tensions are expected to rise in the GST Council. Guaranteed or timely payment of revenue is not the only bone of contention. States have alleged that the functioning of the GST Council is often dominated by the Union government (with the help of states ruled by the BJP) and is often dismissive of the spirit of cooperative federalism. TN’s finance minister raised some of these issues in an interview with HT on May 13.

These issues are not related to the SC’s order, but they do underline the fact that there are good reasons why the GST regime needs to follow a consensus-building approach while allowing for state-wise disagreements where it does not undermine the first principles of the overall framework. Any attempts to remove this safety valve will only trigger political discontent against the tax reform, which continues (as it should) to evolve. The ruling may well be the biggest threat the GST regime has faced in its existence – one best addressed by the Centre and the states working together.



Read in source website

The 2022 edition of the India Art Fair opened the doors to a brand new art world. Old values were shaken up to reveal a present and future shaped by radical new ways of collaboration and a mandate for representation and inclusion. After two challenging years of the pandemic, the fair returned with enthusiasm, with everyone from artists, galleries, institutions, students, first-time-collectors, and patrons taking part in the celebration. It was a huge commercial success but was also a space for collective healing for many of us.

All through the exhibition halls, the diversity of voices from South Asia resounded loud and clear. From the interior corners of India, spanning Santiniketan in West Bengal to Vadodara in Gujarat to international cities such as Sydney, Brasilia, New York, and London, artists and artworks made their way to New Delhi. It was as if South Asia, including its rich diaspora, had converged for their shared love for art, yet each stood out with their unique perspectives, stories, and styles.

Many galleries supported artists through various collaborative online initiatives such as South-South, InTouch, and TAP India. These are now beginning to translate into sustainable models offline too. Besides the incredible work by grassroots institutions in supporting the arts ecosystem through grants, residencies, and so on, this spirit of collaboration among galleries and peer-to-peer support initiatives among artists have been vital to the Indian art market.

In tandem, the interest in Indian and South Asian art has taken off internationally, with more and more exhibitions of South Asian contemporary art making waves in global art capitals. A new show, Conversations of Tomorrow, of four Indian galleries — Vadehra Art Gallery, Experimenter, Chemould Prescott Road, and Jhaveri Contemporary — opened in London this month, a first-of-its-kind format, alliance, and model to showcase Indian art internationally.

More than ever before, bold young artists are leading the way, reframing our understanding of art and addressing questions of gender and sexuality, caste, class, mental health, the climate crisis, and sustainability in their work with great thoughtfulness, intensity, and rigour. We were able to see this at the fair. Be it Kumar Misal’s woodcuts on handmade paper, reflecting on the farmers’ struggles, Madhukar Mucharla’s large portrait of BR Ambedkar using leather scraps, Sangita Jogi’s imagination of womanhood, family and village life in pen and ink drawings or Divya Singh’s large and introspective paintings, reflecting her various states of mind during the lockdowns, each artist provoked new thought and imagined new futures.

We also saw that the appetite and market for art are at an all-time peak. The market continued to expand through the pandemic, and the 2022 edition of the fair broke all records with galleries selling works across price points, starting from 10,000 for artist prints and going up to crores for modern masterpieces. Most galleries sold out on the first of four days at the fair and exhibited new works in their booths for the subsequent days — a sign of a thriving and vibrant art scene.

And what’s more, there is an ever-growing base of collectors visiting from across the region, be it private patrons, interior designers or architect groups, identifying large paintings and sculptural installations for public spaces, hotels, and corporate offices. Our Young Collectors Programme, too, was a major hit, with a large contingent of first-time art buyers starting their collections at the fair and participating in our curated programme of special walkthroughs and social events.

The audiences consuming art are growing increasingly vast and varied, each realising the importance of art not just as a product, but as entertainment and therapy. As a result, art lovers flocked to the fair in large numbers. From the biggest collectors and patrons such as Kiran Nadar, Abhishek Poddar and Sunil Munjal, all of whom are opening new museums in different cities in India soon, to cultural icons such as Mira Nair, Rajeev Sethi and Ritu Kumar, and young parents, college students and school children, the fair was buzzing with energy. The aisles and booths saw people looking, engaging, speaking to the gallerists, making enquiries and enjoying their days out. Workshops led by art education organisations such as LAND and Access for All were fully signed up, with people walking out of doors with their handmade works and new tools to bring art into their own lives.

The 2022 fair marked a tipping point for Indian and South Asian art. As we rejoice, we must also accept the immense power and responsibility in shaping the Indian and South Asian art of the future.

There is a lot to look forward to this year, from wonderfully curated world-class shows at Kochi Muziris Biennale, Serendipity Arts Festival in Goa and Dhaka Art Summit, which will make way for the next edition of the India Art Fair.

Jaya Asokan is director, India Art Fair 

The views expressed are personal



Read in source website

When activist Dipti Ghosh came out about her sexuality in Michigan in the early 1980s, she knew no other South Asian lesbian. Then, her mother said she had seen an “Indian lesbian” on television.

In 1990/91, Ghosh went to Michigan Pride and found to her astonishment that the “Indian lesbian” was the keynote speaker. Her name was Urvashi Vaid, executive director of the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, the first woman and the first Indian American to head the organisation in a movement often seen as a White gay men’s club.

Vaid was born in New Delhi in 1958. She emigrated to the United States (US) in 1966 when her father, noted Hindi writer Krishna Baldev Vaid, found a job teaching English literature in New York. In high school, she was giving anti-war speeches. By the time she graduated from Vassar College, she had come out as a lesbian.

Her obituaries list her long activist career. She instituted the Creating Change LGBTQ+ (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer) conference, created a Donors of Colour network, and co-founded political action committees and projects dealing with LGBTQ poverty. “She believed the LGBTQ movement needed to be part of a larger social justice movement,” says Ghosh who became a long-time friend.

That’s why Vaid moved to mainstream progressive politics. But at heart, she was always an activist. In 1990, when AIDS was ravaging the gay community, she disrupted a speech by then President George HW Bush with a placard saying “Talk is cheap, AIDS funding is not.” In a Facebook post, activist J’aime Grant remembers wealthy Task Force donors revolting when she opposed the Gulf War, asking what gays had to do with the war, but she held her ground because she believed fiercely in intersectionality. Her book Virtual Equality made the case that the pursuit of mainstream acceptance had come in the way of the LGBTQ+ movement becoming a true civil rights movement.

At a time when South Asian queers were hardly visible, seeing her at the forefront of the US LGBTQ+ movement, unapologetically queer and South Asian, was electrifying. When the South Asian LGBTQ+ group Trikone honoured her with their first Pink Peacock award in 1995, writer Minal Hajratwala, at that time a board member, remembers Vaid telling the audience half-jokingly, “if you’re going to come out to the extended family, the cover of Time Magazine is the way to do it.” She had just been named one of Time’s 50 leaders of the future.

Later in an interview with Samar Magazine, Vaid recalled meeting officials from the Federation of Indian Associations who were refusing to allow the South Asian Lesbian and Gay Association of New York to march in the India Day parade. After a long debate about homosexuality, the official asked if she knew the Indian woman who was “the head of all gays.” It took her a while to realise he was talking about her. Vaid said she thought it was “wonderful” that at least he knew an Indian woman was “the head of all gays”. For her, it was an opportunity to keep pushing the envelope.

Vaid died on May 14 at the age of 63. She is survived by comedian Kate Clinton, her partner of more than 30 years. She was aunt to gender non-conforming performance artist, Alok Vaid-Menon, who remembered her on social media, saying, “She fought so vehemently because she loved us more than they could ever hate us.”

Sandip Roy is a writer and broadcaster 

The views expressed are personal



Read in source website

Has the Congress bottomed out at 20% vote share in national elections? Or, could its performance dip further? The arithmetic of emerging competition indicates a higher possibility of further erosion in 2024. The party is in no better shape in many states than it was in 2019 (and is worse in some). This has created a situation in which the party’s base is now like an unguarded vault, tempting raiders to make a play for its support.

Seventy years of Indian politics has shown us that the Congress rarely makes a comeback in any state after going below the 20% vote-share mark. Below this threshold, the vote base becomes vulnerable, and the psychological and mechanical vagaries of the first-past-the-post system in multi-cornered contests severely damage the prospect of any revival. The expansionist ambitions of the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) are likely to bite off a chunk of the Congress’s base in all bipolar states such as Delhi and Punjab. And, the less said about the party’s chances of improving in bigger states such as Uttar Pradesh (UP), Bihar, and West Bengal, the better.

So, how can the party hope to revive itself ahead of the 2024 polls? This question was at the core of the chintan shivir the party held in Udaipur last week, and yet, the contours of a clear plan are yet to emerge. To do better, the party must seriously consider five things.

First, it must make an honest assessment of its current strength and set realistic expectations. The Congress contested in around 75% of the seats in 2014 and 2019; and of this, its candidates forfeited their deposit in one-third seats, ie, won less than one-sixth of the total votes polled. This means the party was not an effective player in around half of the Lok Sabha seats. Given this situation, the party should consider itself lucky if it even manages to hold on to its current position and not fall any further. Any addition would be a bonus.

Second, the Congress has been misinterpreting the political mandate since 2004. The party misread the reasons behind both its victory in 2009 and its defeat in 2014. It won merely two percentage points more votes in 2009 than it had in 2004. In fact, the party’s vote share in 2009 was 1% lower than in 1999, but it won almost twice the number of seats. There was indeed a positive rating of the United Progressive Alliance (UPA) government’s performance and its welfare programmes among the voters, but the extent of the party’s victory in 2009 was largely due to systemic features of the political structure rather than anything of the Congress’s own making.

In their paper, Between Fortuna and Virtu, Yogendra Yadav and Suhas Palshikar termed the 2009 Congress victory “ambiguous”. The Congress read this victory as an affirmation of its rural welfare policies such as the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (MGNGREGS) and a negation of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)’s majoritarian politics. On the contrary, an analysis of the election results and survey data suggested that the Congress made serious gains in India’s urban pockets and among the middle class. The party’s victory in 21 seats in UP even made it believe that it had buried the ghost of Mandir and Mandal together. However, as Pradeep Chhibber and I outlined in our book, Ideology and Identity: The Changing Party Systems of India, the sentiments that propelled the BJP’s rise in the 1990s had not dwindled despite the party’s electoral stagnation in the 2000s.

Third, this mischaracterisation of the 2009 victory led the Congress to make historical blunders. It inflated the party’s mythical belief that the Congress was the default party of governance in India. The UPA-II made policy choices that were unlikely to go well with urban middle-class preferences. The Congress delayed Rahul Gandhi’s elevation within the party and he chose to play the de facto power centre of the ruling coalition. On top of that the charges of policy paralysis, massive corruption allegations, leakages in welfare schemes, and poor governance robbed all the goodwill generated in the first term. It failed to deflect the growing majoritarian sentiment through these five years and half-heartedly tried organisational reform measures (including its communication strategy) that could not match the formidable machine that BJP was building after its 2009 loss.

Fourth, the Congress continues to believe that the party lost in 2014 (and 2019) because it failed to communicate its achievements along with the BJP’s success in polarising the electorate on the religion-nationalism axis. The party also believes that Prime Minister Narendra Modi managed to hypnotise a section of society through false promises. The Congress must realise that the party’s continuous shrinking since 2014 is not merely due to a set of electoral defeats. It has lost a substantial portion of its political appeal and legitimacy. Its brand is now associated with negative images such as dynasticism, corruption, and indecisive leadership, among others. It is in a state of near-collapse and much of it is its own making. Recreating the party’s brand value that could be associated with positive images cannot be done with mere tweaking of organisational nuts and bolts, as the party decided in Udaipur. It needs a complete overhaul.

Finally, continuous losses in states since 2019 have further constrained the party’s ability to raise resources. The Congress must urgently find able replacements for senior leaders, many of whom have died over the past few years, who can swiftly mobilise significant resources. While it is common to find political dynasties in all democracies, South Asia is unique in this respect because most political parties in the region are dynastic — tightly controlled by members of a single family. The biggest challenge for dynastic parties such as the Congress is that it is often hard to separate the financial resources of the party from that of the family. It is no surprise then that mere cosmetic changes came out of Udaipur chintan shivir, but more serious demands such as reconstitution of the parliamentary board and the Congress Working Committee were rejected. As electoral victories become more sparse, this distinction of resources becomes further complicated. The party must find ways to separate them.

Political parties can overcome successive electoral defeats. We have several examples of that. The Congress must recognise that examples of a party’s revival after near-collapse are much rarer. It must get to work, and soon.

Rahul Verma is with the Centre for Policy Research (CPR), New Delhi 

The views expressed are personal



Read in source website

The second in-person summit of Quad is all set to be held in Japan on May 24. The leaders of the four countries are expected to announce future partnerships and projects across various sectors. As many as 12 working groups have been created thus far as part of the Quad grouping. Among them is the critical and emerging technology working group that was established in March 2021 to foster technological collaboration.

The official statement released by the White House post the first-ever in-person Quad summit outlined the broad areas that the partners were looking at. From 5G and semiconductors to biotechnology, critical areas were identified for the alliance to develop a strategic advantage. With the launch of the Quad Semiconductor Supply Chain Initiative, the group signalled its intent to establish itself in the technology domain.

Fast forward around nine months from the first summit in September 2021 to the upcoming one in May 2022, there still exists uncertainties regarding the commitments made on the technology front. There is also the question of the extent to which progress has been made by the member states regarding critical and emerging technologies. With the remnants of the Covid-19 pandemic and new geopolitical events such as the Russia-Ukraine war still affecting several technology supply chains, Quad has to move forward in its actions to make a mark. There are three main areas of focus that Quad should focus on to create an immediate impact in the technology domain.

Bubbles of trade

Extending the concept of the “bubbles of trust” approach that envisages better diplomatic relations between like-minded states, Quad should set up a mechanism for the free flow of goods, labour, and capital related to strategic technologies. Taking the example of the semiconductor industry, it is clear that key technology sectors have burgeoned globally and have relied on international cooperation for their growth and sustainability. This ensures that they cannot be restructured in such a short period. A robust infrastructure and an efficient value chain has been developed in high-tech sectors due to the existence of free trade.

But the current situation has thrown up several key challenges for Quad to navigate. This includes protectionist measures resulting in high import tariffs and export control regulations preventing access to critical components for building key technology ecosystems. The military applications of these technologies have also raised the fears of weaponisation resulting in lesser collaboration efforts.

Quad should aim for creating a more liberalised and open market policy that helps the four countries indulge in a greater exchange of goods, labour, and capital related to strategic technology sectors. Favourable trade policies encouraging the exchange of technology sector centric trade must be a priority. The governments of Quad should focus on developing a comprehensive trade policy suited or catered to building strategic technology ecosystems across all the states.

A robust IP protection regime

With the technological rise of China and the fears of economic espionage, there has been a restriction in the transfer of critical technology between states thereby hampering the level of growth and innovation in certain fields. This can be addressed by Quad coming together to build a strong intellectual property (IP) protection framework. It can help in formulating transfer of technology agreements in critical technologies between the states without fears of IP theft.

Securing technology supply chains have become a challenge due to the intrinsic dependencies that have been created in several areas. Technology transfers remain a solid solution to build resiliency in these value chains themselves. However, the qualms of the IP owning countries has been the fear of these critical technologies leaking out and reaching adversaries.

A starting point for Quad would be to introduce and ensure the enforcement of strict IP theft rules and regulations to facilitate technology transfer agreements. Prevention of exports, restrictions on domestic operations, and levying fines or penalties for specific firms violating IP theft guidelines will ensure innovation-based competition and create a favourable environment for multilateral collaboration. It must be noted that almost all modern-day technological powers have benefited from the transfer of technology from more advanced states. Hence, it remains in the interest of Quad to share critical technologies between its alliance members.

Joint standards development

The race for technological superiority has moved from the domination of market share to the establishment of governance mechanisms of certain critical technologies. This is where technology or technical standards come into play. Setting standards in crucial technologies have allowed states and companies to reap economic and geopolitical benefits. Quad has the collective technical expertise to formulate and set technical standards in various emerging technologies.

In recent times, there has been a steady increase in governments’ participation in the process of standard-setting. States are now openly advocating for certain technical standards to be adopted as the global ones which would eventually benefit the state and its domestic private sector. Quad, as a group, must prioritise pre-standardisation research as well as advocate and push for jointly developed technical standards at international standard-setting bodies.

An increase in Chinese influence on these global standard-setting bodies has set alarm bells ringing in the West. Quad can take over the mantle and establish committees to spearhead standard development activities in technologies like advanced communications, quantum technology, and artificial intelligence. This would put the alliance in the driver’s seat to set and formulate standards that will end up shaping the way future technologies might work.

The emerging technology working group by Quad is one of the few internal groupings within the alliance that can effect a positive impact in a faster duration of time. Free trade in critical technology areas, seamless technology transfer between the four countries and joint efforts in creating technical standards frameworks are all low hanging fruits that the group can use to its leverage. All the member states of Quad must leverage their technological prowess in stitching together a tight-knit multilateral technology alliance. This would effectively put Quad as a force to be reckoned with in the technology sphere.

Arjun Gargeyas is a researcher with the High Tech Geopolitics programme at the Takshashila Institution

The views expressed are personal



Read in source website

In 2020, an India Spend analysis of data from around the world stated that early education in a child’s mother tongue can improve learning, increase participation, and decrease dropout rates. Over the past few years, as debates on the criticality of regional languages continue to crop up, these statistics prove, at the very foundational level, why local languages hold one of the keys to a well-rounded education.

The National Education Policy (NEP) 2020 also stressed the need to bridge the gap between the language spoken by the child and the medium of education. This is by ensuring that all children from classes 5 to 8 are taught in their mother tongue. In the school system, teachers are crucial players, which is why the policy also highlights the need for quality recruitment and the personal and all-round development of teachers.

A major concern that emerges with the implementation of the NEP 2020 is the quality of educational content in regional languages along with the skill levels of teachers, especially at the primary level. This is where education technology (edtech) can step in to fill implementation gaps to train and assist teachers.

This becomes crucial especially today due to the learning loss that many students have faced due to the unprecedented Covid-19 pandemic, which disrupted the education system. With personalised content on various edtech platforms, the ease of tailor-made classes in native languages will aid in future-proofing India's school system through technology.

However, while the NEP has regarded three years old to be the age of a "formal entry point in education", it is only after about 20 years that the person is ready to enter the job market. Therefore, there is a need to inculcate soft skills and holistic learning early, to ensure that in 20 years, every student is employable. To achieve this, children must be exposed to educational content that is innovative and interactive, along with content that contributes to elevating their conceptual understanding. Here, vernacular solutions bridge the language gap in understanding and education, thereby democratising education at a foundational level. Since the best learning happens when communication is seamless, regional language education contributes to guaranteeing better comprehension. Edtech platforms offer these simple solutions.

The boom in edtech is not new; digital learning has been a part of our education system for some time now. The renewed focus on education because of the fallout caused by Covid-19 has just catapulted the attention needed to tier-two and tier-three cities. Where once edtech companies focused on bringing cutting-edge technology and innovative solutions to an English-speaking audience, the current startups are turning their focus to one of the key obstacles in Indian education: The language barrier.

 

As per the 2011 population census, 96.71% of the Indian population speaks 22 languages and more than 19,500 dialects. With increasing digital penetration in India and the popularity of platforms such as YouTube and Instagram among others, the way for a widely accessible medium of expression has been paved. In the education sector, creating greater demand for edtech can create an education boom in tier-two and tier-three cities.

As the learning-employment wheel turns, e-courses in vernacular languages are aiding in job creation, thereby, further fuelling the demand for vernacular content. While knowledge of English is still a crucial job skill, especially in urban India, it should be taught as an addition to an existing system. The employability gap that was created by a lack of its knowledge needs to be filled in languages that ease comprehension for learners and job seekers.

From an industry standpoint, as per a MarketsandMarkets estimate, the global edtech and smart classroom market size is expected to grow from $85.8 billion in 2020 to $181.3 billion by 2025, at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 16.1% during the forecast period. The major factors driving this growth include the increasing penetration of mobile devices and the resultant increase in internet users, the gaps in education caused by Covid-19 which prompted the growth of blended learning — a combination of online and offline learning to keep the education system from halting if another crisis emerges.

As Covid-19 highlighted this urgent need for online learning, it also exacerbated the digital divide and pushed for an urgent impetus to get digital learning solutions to every corner of India. At such a time, the need emerged for platforms to not only offer learning within the confines of one's home, but also to ensure that digital accessibility — in terms of language as well — was available.

The task ahead to ensure and promote digital literacy among India's youth is becoming clearer every day. The country's edtech companies must leverage the existing market in smaller towns and cities, expand their businesses, and work with the government to ensure that public-private partnership results in advanced pedagogy. Private players can work with the government and ensure easy, accessible, and affordable technological solutions in the academic space. As Union education minister, Dharmendra Pradhan, recently highlighted, there is a need to empower the youth by providing them with skill development and digital training. He further said that India’s potential is the 53-crore youth of the country. He also emphasised that students must aspire to become employers, instead of studying to be employees.

The need of the hour, therefore, is to harness the existing potential and usher in an educational revolution riding on the wave of digitisation in India. Only then can one ensure that, in matters of education and learning, no child is left behind.

Himanshu Gautam is the co-founder and CEO, Safalta

The views expressed are personal



Read in source website

“No English. No Hindi. How?”, is what K Kamaraj, one of the biggest leaders of the Congress of his times, is supposed to have told the party leadership when he was asked to take over as the Prime Minister (PM) of India after Lal Bahadur Shastri’s death in 1966. Kamaraj’s view of ability to speak Hindi being a necessary skill for a politician who were to become the India’s PM came barely a year after southern states, especially Tamil Nadu, had seen massive language riots.

To be sure, Kamaraj was never seen as a pro-Hindi figure in his own state. Even the most radical of the Tamil leaders, E V Ramasamy or Periyar, despite political differences, praised Kamaraj has a worthy son of the soil for Tamil Nadu. The only way to interpret Kamaraj’s statement is to see this as a democratic acknowledgement of the fact that it was politically expedient for an Indian PM to be able to speak in a language which people beyond his state would be able to understand.

Almost six decades after Kamaraj’s famous words, another politician from his state, K Ponmudi – he is the education minister in the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (DMK) government – made a statement regarding Hindi. “We were told that learning Hindi could land us with jobs. Is that so? You go and see in our state and in Coimbatore. Who are those people who sell pani puris?,” Ponmudi said while speaking at a convocation last week in Tamil Nadu.

Factually speaking, Ponmudy’s comments are not very far from the truth. India’s southern states have made far more economic progress than their Hindi speaking counterparts. This has triggered a massive outmigration of labour, both skilled (especially in the IT sector) and unskilled, from the Hindi speaking regions to the southern states. To be sure, similar states such as Maharashtra and Gujarat have also seen a large-scale migration, especially of the blue-collar workforce from Hindi speaking states. Thanks to the regional diversity in India’s demographic transition, India’s southern states are already much older than their northern counterparts, which also means that they will need more workers from their Hindi-speaking peers in the future. In other words, more and more sundry jobs in the south will be taken up by Hindi speakers.

Politics, however, is not an exercise in stating unpalatable facts. More than anything, it has to be about appealing to your electorate and tapping into their sentiment, which will potentially translate into electoral support. It is not very difficult to understand that Ponmudi’s remarks will not be music to the ears of a lot of poor Hindi-speaking voters.

What is also equally true, however, is that the views of Hindi-speaking voters will hardly matter as far as the political fortunes of the DMK in Tamli Nadu are concerned. In fact, the minister’s remarks are likely to work to the DMK’s advantage because they were made in the presence of the governor of the state (who comes from a Hindi-speaking state) and were aimed at attacking the pro-Hindi statements by leaders of the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP).

How is the issue even relevant then? It matters because the opposition has been trying to build a coalition of regional parties which are electorally successful in some of India’s largest non-Hindi speaking states. This includes the DMK in Tamil Nadu, the Trinamool Congress (TMC) in West Bengal, the Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) and perhaps even the Shiv Sena in Maharashtra, and the Communist Party of India (Marxist) or CPI (M) in Kerala.

Congress leader Rahul Gandhi has been the most vocal champion of this line, which can be seen in his repeated assertions of the fact that India should be seen as a union of states rather than a monolithic nation. Most commentators accept that the cultural alternative such parties have been able to sell in opposition to BJP’s Hindi-dominated nationalism push is an important factor in the BJP not being able to capture these states.

The BJP, as is to be expected, has been attacking the Congress for such a line, and this campaign has been particularly shrill in the Hindi-speaking states. While parties such as the TMC and DMK have very little to fear with such a campaign, the Congress and Mandal based Hindi-belt parties such as the Samajwadi Party (SP) and Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD) will not be immune to the potential pain of such a campaign. They will have to answer questions about siding with political parties which “insult” Hindi and Hindi-speakers. There is a very thin line which separates Hindi nationalism from nationalism at large in the Hindi-speaking states. The fact that the BJP’s propaganda machine is far better and effective than any other political party will only make this charge more difficult to counter.

The electoral implications of such a politics, or the tailwinds it will generate for the BJP is crystal clear. Both in 2014 and 2019 general election, a majority of the BJP’s halfway mark tally of 272 came from the Hindi-speaking states . The Congress, on the other hand, has had a very poor showing in Hindi states. Given the fact that Hindi-speaking states have a much larger share of the total population today, there is a good chance that their share in the Lok Sabha will only increase once India takes up what will be an extremely controversial delimitation exercise (for a detailed discussion, see https://bit.ly/3lgji48). While any formula which drastically reduces the representation of southern states is bound to trigger political discontent in these regions, the current regime’s proclivities have shown little concern for maintaining a larger balance at the cost of political gains.

The ticking time bomb of delimitation and its potential fallout in non-Hindi states only increases the importance of initiating a non-antagonistic political dialogue between political parties and voters of the Hindi speaking and non-Hindi speaking regions. Such a conversation and alliance can only happen when political forces from both regions offer each other mutual respect.

The Hindi-speaking states have to recognise that even empty rhetoric of Hindi imposition is bound to create a backlash in the non-Hindi speaking states. The non-Hindi states, especially the prosperous ones, most also realise that they cannot be seen as denigrating their relatively less well-off Hindi-speaking citizens while claiming to fight Hindi chauvinism. A preservation of status-quo on this question – where the BJP indulges in occasional Hindi chauvinism rhetoric and portrays counter-attacks on this issue as an attack on Hindi and Hindi nationalism itself – only works to the advantage of the BJP.

Can this status quo be challenged? Any effort to do this must understand the roots of the basic contradiction between political-intellectual space between Hindi and non-Hindi states, especially ones such as Tamil Nadu. Two factors can be underlined.

States such as Tamil Nadu saw very strong social reform movements, which later adopted the political route. They opened up political and socio-economic opportunities for hitherto discriminated sections of the population. That Tamil Nadu’s politics revolves around two splinter groups of the Dravidian movement is the biggest testimony to this fact. The reason such a movement was extremely successful electorally in a state such as Tamil Nadu is also rooted in the fact that the “oppressor” upper castes which were the target of progressive politics were a miniscule minority in the state.

This is unlike states such as Bihar and Uttar Pradesh, where the “upper-castes” had a significantly higher share in population. This made a fundamental difference to state-level politics in Hindi-speaking states in the formative years where conservative upper caste politicians were able to marginalise their more radical peers in the electoral game. The isolation of Swami Sahajanand Saraswati – he was among the founders of the All India Kisan Sabha and a strong supporter of peasant rights and land reforms – in the Bihar Congress is one such example. The gap between class and caste politics in the Mandal dominated states has only grown since independence and the BJP has successfully exploited the resentment among the lower Other Backward Classes (OBC) who rightly feel short-changed by the dominant OBCs who came to control Mandal based parties.

This historical fact has a direct bearing on the limitations of current efforts to forge some sort of a pan-India OBC coalition with a Dravidian party such as the DMK as the most successful OBC politics experiment in the country. Not only are there significant limitations on the ability of the reservation route to usher in upward economic mobility because of a sharp reduction in the state’s economic footprint compared to what it was when Dravidian politics took shape in a state such as Tamil Nadu, Mandal-based parties are extremely reluctant to champion the kind of rationalist politics with the Dravidian movement preached and established a hegemony for in its early years.

Simply speaking, the absence of a rationalist ideology makes subaltern politics in the Hindi speaking regions a poor caricature of the south. Unlike the cultural counter assertion against Hindutva in the south, northern social justice parties only have the (diminished) economic promise in their political appeal.

To be sure, these factors are not exactly hidden from the regional politicians in non-Hindi speaking states such as Tamil Nadu. However, an organic engagement with such political constrains will require going beyond the comfort zone of (rightfully) progressive narratives of politics in these states rather than outsource the management of the so-called Hindi belt to the Congress and Mandal parties such as the RJD and the SP.

The fact that no such efforts are being made to do so suggests that the non-Hindi speaking progressive camp has chosen self-righteous posturing in its own stronghold rather than a vanguardist approach to politics which will take this battle to the Hindi-speaking states. More than anything, this betrays a lack of political ambition. This is what explains the difference in tones of K Kamaraj in 1966 and K Ponmudi in 2022.

The views expressed are personal



Read in source website

Nikhat Zareen has struck another blow for Indian women in sport by winning a gold medal in the 52-kg category in boxing. She joins the sport’s iconic Mary Kom as only the second Indian woman boxer to win a world championship gold medal outside India. It seems unremarkable today that so many Indian women should be in sport and competing internationally. Athletes like Nikhat who had to fight the resistance her community put up had to bear even greater burdens on the road to achievement.

It is a sign of maturity of attitude in parents that they have been allowing girls to enjoy the same freedoms as the males of their age groups in taking to sport, which nowadays is a virtual avocation. But then Indian women have been at it, not only in fighting for their rights to equality in all spheres, including in the armed forces, for decades now but have also broken the glass ceilings consistently to show they are a force to be reckoned with way beyond traditional homemaker duties that had kept so many millions tied down for centuries in conservative Indian society.

 

The years Nikhat has stayed glued to the sport of her choice until realising her dream of a world championship boxing medal after a breakthrough victory in junior ranks 11 years ago with a silver medal in Bulgaria tells a story of dedication to a cause. Boxers of Nikhat’s generation are fortunate, however, to have had before them the likes of Mary Kom, L. Sarita Devi, Jenny and Lekha, as inspirational figures who had hit stardust at the worlds while enjoying the fruits of exposure to evolved, universal training methods.

Notwithstanding their having made their point emphatically in all spheres including in such physical sports like boxing and wrestling, total freedom to express themselves is all too important for women who make up nearly half the population. What they have had to fight, besides meeting sporting targets, can be gleaned from the fact that, in a male-dominated setting, even the superrich cricket board is just setting up a women’s T20 league in 2022 to present a modicum of equal opportunity.

 



Read in source website

In the age of climate change, seemingly disparate phenomena are actually deeply connected. This makes joining the dots and thinking beyond silos not only desirable but imperative. Take one of the hottest headline items of the day — the surging price of wheat in the country.

One reason wheat prices have shot up has to do with the intense heatwave that struck parts of India from March. That affected the wheat crop just as the global wheat supply had shrunk due to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Ukraine is one of the world's top wheat exporters. Russia and Ukraine together have nearly 25 per cent share in the global wheat market.

 

Geopolitical developments in Europe meshed with international trade and the heatwave in India. The result affects everyday life in the country, including the contents of Delhi resident Kumar’s tiffin box.

Kumar, 45, packs three rotis instead of five for lunch when he leaves for work in a South Delhi beauty parlour. Ten kg of Shri Bhog atta, which cost Rs 180 six months ago, now costs almost Rs 100 more, he says. The soaring price of even the cheapest brands of wheat flour or atta has forced him to cut down on his intake: “The three children must be fed first.” Kumar doesn’t have a ration card which would entitle him to subsidised wheat and rice from the public distribution system. His wife and three children depend solely on his monthly earnings of Rs 15,000.

 

Heatwave is in the news, but is by no means the only extreme weather event striking India. As I write, landslides and floods are wreaking havoc in the Northeast; nearly 500,000 people have affected in Assam alone.

Not every extreme weather event can be definitively linked to climate change, but scientists say climate change is leading to more frequent and more erratic and extreme weather — rising number of heatwaves, cyclones, droughts, unseasonal and heavy rainfall, lightning strikes, landslides, rise in sea level and more that is happening in the country and around the world.

 

There is a wealth of data that makes it obvious that these extreme weather events are worsening and that they are impacting the Indian economy — both the city and the countryside — with knock-on effects on human lives and livelihoods.

According to an analysis by Abinash Mohanty of the Council on Energy, Environment and Water (CEEW), an Indian think tank, over 75 per cent of India’s districts, home to over 638 million people, are now extreme climate event hotspots.

The 2020 CEEW study, the first-of-its-kind district-level profiling of India’s extreme weather events, notes that the frequency of landslides, heavy rainfall, hailstorms, thunderstorms and cloudbursts, associated with floods, has surged by over 20 times between 1970 and 2019. In the last 15 years, 79 districts recorded extreme drought events year-on-year, exposing 140.06 million people annually. The yearly average of drought-affected districts, the study says, increased 13 times in this period.

 

Since 2005, 24 districts in India have seen extreme cyclone events every year. This meant 42.50 million people being exposed to storm surges, intense cyclones and other associated events.

One trend flagged by the study that leaps out — the pattern of extreme events such as flood-prone areas becoming drought-prone and vice-versa — has changed in over 40 per cent of Indian districts.

All these trends have consequences for the economy and India’s workforce. The ongoing heatwave in parts of the country has brought to the fore many data points about the impact of heat stress on the world of work. There is a International Labour Organisation study that says India is one of the countries most affected by heat stress, and that it lost 4.3 per cent of working hours in 1995. More worryingly, India is projected to lose 5.8 per cent of working hours in 2030, says the ILO.

 

That climate change-fuelled “extreme weather events” is becoming a pressing economic concern can be gauged by what the Reserve Bank of India has to say. The April 2020 RBI Bulletin notes climatic conditions, comprising the two key indicators, precipitation and temperature, play a crucial role in the overall health of the Indian economy. It says that the occurrence of extreme weather events like floods/unseasonal rainfall, heatwaves and cyclones has gone up in the past two decades, and that some of the key agricultural states in India have been the most affected by such events.

 

The RBI references two separate indices that were constructed at the all-India level — the temperature index and precipitation index — to gauge their impact on food inflation and economic activity indicators.

The results, it says, indicated that weather conditions, especially rainfall, has a strong influence on the food inflation trajectory. Among food items, vegetable prices are the most vulnerable to rainfall shocks. The results also showed that weather conditions have a significant impact on key indicators of economic activity such as demand for electricity, trade, tourist arrivals, and tractor and automobile sales.

 

India’s earth sciences ministry recently issued an open-access publication about climate change which points out that “in response to the combined rise in surface temperature and humidity, amplification of heat stress is expected across India, particularly over the Indo-Gangetic and Indus river basins”. It also points out that sea surface temperature (SST) of the tropical Indian Ocean has risen by 1°C on average during 1951-2015. This, it notes, is “markedly higher than the global average SST warming of 0.7°C, over the same period”.

 

Given the deep connections between extreme weather events and the economy, it is vital that policymakers do not think in silos and that all development plans factor in climate change and its impacts. As of now, there is a growing awareness about the challenges ahead. But the responses are still in silos.

Rising heat, for example, has serious implications for water security. How seriously are we working towards managing water? How are we storing it effectively and reducing losses due to evaporation? And the moment you think water, you must factor in energy and food — there is a clear nexus between the three.

 

The government has set up structures for coordinated responses. Every state government has a climate change cell, and there is the Prime Minister’s council on climate change at the top. In November, the media reported that the council had not met since its first meeting on January 19, 2015. In almost every state these cells are ignored by other ministries.

The climate crisis is here. Our governance model needs an overhaul to tackle the biggest threat of the century.



Read in source website

Pakistan, the so-called “land of the pure”, was carved out of India as a homeland for Muslims, a fact that was doubly ensured by the “cleansing” out of most of the non-Muslims who were living within it. Yet India continued to be homeland for all Indians, Hindu and Muslim, Christian or Sikh, from Assam to Rajasthan, from Kerala to Kashmir — and hoping to become a modern, democratic and secular nation of many faiths and nationalities. Even those Hindu nationalists who for long took a simplistic view of the 1947 Partition as India for Hindus and Pakistan for Muslims had till the advent of the Narendra Modi government in 2014 largely come to accept this as the reality. Not anymore.

One of the greatest ironies of Muslim separatism and the Partition that it culminated in was that those who wanted it least got Pakistan where they are known as Mohajirs, and those that wanted it the most got mostly left behind in India. Separatism was most vehemently espoused by the aggressive and fanatical Muslim elites of Uttar Pradesh and Bihar. The Punjabi, Sindhi and NWFP Muslims who for long had little to do with the politics of separatism got swept up by the communalism that was unleashed by the UP and Bihari Muslim Leaguers. The RSS and other Hindu fanatics had since September 27, 1925 been preparing for this. Partition was anointed by a bloodbath.

 

The Muslim separatists who stayed on in India for various reasons soon joined the “secularist” bandwagon of the Congress Party. In due course, nationalist Muslim leaders made way for communalists. It did not take long for the Muslim community to become a vote bank to be represented and manipulated by the former separatists who now began to project it as nation within a nation.

The Hindu communal elements in the Congress — and they were a majority — began to define secularism as mere tolerance, instead of being a modernising philosophy. Secularism is not mere tolerance of other faiths, but a belief in modern values and reason. We misread it and are reaping the bitter harvest now.

 

We have to only look at the manner in which the Congress Party reacted to the Supreme Court’s Shah Bano judgment, and thus negated the impetus it would have had provided to the enactment of a common civil code. When Arif Mohammad Khan spoke in the Lok Sabha, with the encouragement of Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi, he was applauded by all except the orthodox and neo-separatist Muslim lobby. Then Rajiv Gandhi, like a typical “secular” politician, panicked at the thought of the Muslim vote bank dwindling and unleashed the likes of Zia-ul-Ansari in the Congress. Soon, neo-separatist Muslims all over the country joined in the attack and Arif was manhandled, jostled and jeered in an organised manner wherever he went. Khan quit the Congress. The term “pseudo-secularism” entered our political lexicon shortly thereafter.

 

Arif’s travails did not end there. Things were no better in the V.P. Singh-led Jan Morcha. Syed Shahabuddin had a precondition to campaigning for V.P. Singh in Allahabad. If Arif, till then V.P. Singh’s closest associate and co-founder of the Jan-Morcha, were to campaign in Allahabad, then he would not campaign. Suddenly, Arif Mohammed Khan was made taboo in Allahabad and Syed Shahabuddin joined V.P. Singh’s battle to change the system!

In the period of intense discussion on whether the Babri Masjid should be there or not, most well-meaning people, some of them very naïve, sought a compromise solution. People like editor Kuldip Nayyar used to constantly pull out drawings suggesting what could be used by Muslims for their prayers and what space could be allowed for prayers to the infant Ram Lalla. Others suggested “secular” structures varying from a hospital, an educational institution or a park and so on. Nobody ventured to suggest that it was an ASI-protected monument and cannot be disturbed. That would have been the truly secular position.

 

Tempers rose, people became deliberately provocative. Syed Shahabuddin, Atal Behari Vajpayee’s onetime protégé, demanded that the Hindus prove that Ram ever existed, and if they did Muslims would allow a temple to be raised. Meantime, the courts allowed “Ram Lalla” to be a plaintiff, but apparently not being cognisant of the fact that it was no more than a conception carved in stone.

The Babri Masjid was destroyed on December 6, 1992. Then came the question of what would come up there again? For Hindus, the Ayodhya site is important. For Muslims, the building was. Yet the Muslims insisted on the site not accepting that as long as Hindus are a majority in this country, no confluence of political compulsions could come about that would allow the site to be given back to the Muslims for building a mosque there once again. The Supreme Court’s judgment, while deeming the demolition illegal, was more Solomonic than constitutional.

 

Another issue which aggravates Hindu-Muslim ties is the apparent lack of concern for the national position on Kashmir displayed by the Muslim leadership so far. If the only region in India where Muslims are in a majority wishes to secede because they belong to a different faith, it becomes incumbent on the Muslims in the rest of India to make known their position to it. The future of Kashmir has a vital bearing upon their future as well. If Kashmir were to be lost, the risks of the old and now discarded idea of India for the Hindus and Pakistan for the Muslims will gain momentum again. Yet Muslim leaders, who are quick to make an issue over relatively trivial issues like the movie Bombay, have preferred to remain silent on this vital national concern. Prime Minister Narendra Modi has shown us how much he cares by endorsing the movie The Kashmir Files, an unhesitatingly partisan movie about the ethnic cleansing of Kashmiri Pandits from the Valley.

 

Sensitivity to each other’s feelings and aspirations has to be a mutual affair. An essential precondition to this is to share a common perception of history. Dr B.R. Ambedkar had postulated that a shared perception of history is one of the essentials of a common nationality. This could only be when Amir Khusrau and Tansen, Bismillah Khan and Bhimsen Joshi, Taj Mahal and Meenakshi temple, Akbar and Shivaji, Krishnadevaraya and Mohammed Quli Qutb Shah are equally reason for pride and respect, and considered by all as our common heritage. But will this be allowed to happen? The RSS expects a hat-trick of Ayodhya, Kashi and Mathura to crown its century when it made its tryst with destiny.



Read in source website

Union home minister Amit Shah’s statement that universities “should not become wrestling grounds for ideological battles” and that they must instead become “platform for exchange of views” comes as an antithesis of what democracies would like their institutions of higher learning to be in order to design their atmosphere of intellectual discourses.

Mr Shah prefers “exchange of ideas” and despises “ideological battles”. That he welcomes ideas and their exchanges is routine and only rings an alarm when the home minister of a country of 136 crore people, made up by every possible shade of human race, says the idea of ideologies wrestling, even in universities, is frowned upon.

 

Mr Shah, being a practitioner of the ideology that RSS has been propagating for more than 90 years, may not want ideological conflicts because diversity is not an idea the Sangh Parivar may be comfortable with because of its belief that only uniformity would take the nation forward. “One nation-one culture”, at the end of the day, is what it most looks forward to and this concept may be propelling the thought that India is a single geo-cultural entity.

The home minister may not be the first person to sit on the seat of power and prescribe the contours of civil discourses. His words simply reflect everything that proponents of totalitarian ideologies have been known to profess in all parts of the world. They may believe their ideologies are complete and the gold standard, needing no addition and reform.

 

Human progression is not a linear one; it keeps evolving. This evolution is made possible when there is a conflict of ideologies, and hence anyone who is interested in it must welcome it. There may be universal condemnation of violent manifestations of ideologies but their conflicts, whether on campuses or outside, is part of the democratic paradigm.

Any totalitarian view would suffer from another infirmity, especially in the Indian context. This country defeated the first major challenge to democracy and its institutions when campuses erupted against the Emergency in the mid 1970s. The universities were the breeding ground of Opposition ideologies and several seniors in the current crop of leaders had their baptism by fire in that period. If the universities had ended with being a platform for exchange of ideas, India’s course of history would have been different.

 

The problem with a prescription against ideological conflicts in universities is it tends to spur instruments of state into attempting crackdowns on what they see as dissent. University students have had various charges thrust on them, including sedition, when they opposed the policies and actions of the government. But such crackdowns are unlikely to strengthen the idea of democracy in this country.

When the tools to muffle ideological battles are unsheathed and universities tend to follow the trend, democracy will suffer. Learning should be inclusive and campuses must encourage all schools of thought so that the individual may discern the best path for himself and the society that he is part of.



Read in source website

The Supreme Court invoked special powers under Article 142 of the Constitution to set free Rajiv Gandhi assassination case convict A.G. Perarivalan. The ruling is no validation of his innocence, which the court of public opinion may believe had been established. The verdict is more an indictment of the stubbornness of the Centre opposing a state in a federal setup and using its plenipotentiaries as well as dilatory tactics to ensure its point of view prevails in executive action.

The convict, who escaped the noose as capital punishment originally ordered was commuted to life in jail, may have been on the periphery of the diabolical conspiracy to kill a former Prime Minister of the country. But by no means has his innocence been established even if his task in a big plot on foreign soil by Sri Lankan separatist militants was just to buy a couple of nine-volt batteries that may have been used in triggering the waist bomb of the suicide bomber assassin Dhanu.

 

Perarivalan was a model prisoner who even took a master’s degree while incarcerated for 31 years after having been ensnared into the conspiracy as a teenaged LTTE sympathiser who ran small chores for the movement in Sri Lanka. The cause celebre around him has done much towards bringing a new definition to the federal structure while upholding the right of a state to decide its own course on pardons or remission of sentences with regard to IPC 302.

The powers of the governor are circumscribed by such a verdict, which is to be welcomed because a governor appointed by the Centre to a state was never meant to be much more than ceremonial and tasked with conveying the wishes of the states, besides an observer’s role as a representative of the President of India. Ambiguities that have been creeping in may have been exploited through interpretations allowing the Centre’s views to prevail, failing which pinpricks through Raj Bhavans have been the norm.

 

The popular outcry in Tamil Nadu among the people and their political parties may not be construed as a blanket endorsement in the remaining cases, too, as the question of freeing the other six, including non-Indian citizens, may have to be assessed individually. The overwhelming argument in their cases would, however, be that they, too, have served more than their time, much as Perarivalan had done and it’s a period twice and over that of the standard 14 years for murder.

It’s in no one’s interest to disown the Centre’s view either, as an act of terror against such a high symbol of State as the Prime Minister of the land is not to be treated lightly. But, considering the passage of time in which the conspirators have recanted and the family of the slain have pardoned them, mercy might be a quality to consider when the cases of the six others come up. It’s a different matter that each and every issue is made to await judicial intervention even while the executive is either too obstinate or finds the need to take decisions too burdensome.



Read in source website

“How many waves are in the choppy seas?
How many leaves are on the waving trees?
How many blades of grass sprout from the land?
On all the beaches how many grains of sand?
These questions and their answers are a tease
They can be counted, they’re not infinities…”

— From Sand Bolo Sanveetz, by Bachchoo

 

If, gentle reader, you came across a book called The War on the West, you’d perhaps think it contained some description or contention about Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. You might think, as I did, that it contained wise, if judiciously careful, words about the West, by and large, consisting of nations with democratic systems of government, capitalist free trade, some commitment to freedom of speech and opinion and other developments which characterise the contemporary West.

You wouldn’t be far wrong to speculate that several of the former Soviet republics have gratefully escaped from the grip of Russia, which is undemocratic and dictatorial in so far as its “news” is entirely state-controlled propaganda, it rigs its supposed elections, jails and poisons any Opposition and is openly run by a mafia of oligarchs who cream billions off its economic assets and place them in banks, yachts and properties in the West.

 

Nations such as Belarus have attempted to break away from this controlling vice (pun intended), only to have the will of the people brushed aside by a rigged election and what was virtually a military coup. And then there are those nations such as Ukraine who have attempted, perhaps not cautiously enough, to agitate for free elections, a free press and an economy that can trade with or within the West — in its case the European Union.

The Russian mafioso government don’t want that. Their “President” has told his people that they are fighting Nazis in a nation that has elected a Jewish head of state whose relatives died in Nazi concentration camps. He tells his people that Nato has “surrounded” Russia with aggressive weaponry. Bad geography, bro! Russia has six per cent of common borders with Nato countries. But then a population brought up on daily lies may not bother to check their atlases.

 

So, Russia wages war on Ukraine and threatens war on Finland, Sweden and even announces that it will nuke London. Your interpretation and mine of what a book with such a title, published by the West’s Rupert Murdoch’s HarperCollins (I declare an interest — so are some of my books!) may contain is — wrong!

That recently published book is by someone called Douglas Murray who happens to be an associate editor of a weekly, doggedly-and-pathetically-right-wing British magazine called the Spectator. And what’s he saying? Here’s what: “In recent years, it has become clear that there is a war going on: a war on the West.” What does he mean? His entire diatribe is aimed at the figurative culture wars with the weapons of “wokery”, the toppling of statues, questioning slavery and its historical legacy, the “cancelling” of speakers at some universities and other pseudo-political irritants which poor old Murray characterises as “an assault going on against everything to do with the Western world”.

 

If I hadn’t told you what the book was about, you might imagine that that sentence alludes to the trumpeting mob that attempted to invade the US Capitol in Washington on January 6, 2021, and overthrow the legitimately elected government of the United States. It doesn’t. That mob attacking the fundamental values of the West doesn’t get a mention, so you can guess where Murray, and perhaps some contributors and readers of the Spectator, stand on that scandalous attempted insurrection by what Donald Trump would call “losers”.

 

Douglas Murray is terrified by the likes of misguided juveniles who want to substitute “they” in the language for the male and female pronouns. I would advise Murray not to lose sleep over it — they won’t win. Besides, he doesn’t like the recent questioning of slavery and colonialism or the toppling of statues that I can bet he hadn’t ever looked at and didn’t even know existed. He writes: “Everything connected with the Western tradition is being jettisoned…” By whom? Where?

Again: “the history of the West has been entirely rewritten…” By whom? Where? Have Andrew Roberts’ books been burned by a rally led by Nasty Patel? Did people vote for a Tory government with an 80-seat majority? Will the critical attack, however foolish, on Rod Liddle, one of Murray’s co-writers in the Spectator, at a university, really put an end to the tradition of free speech in the West and prevent the Spectator, the Times, the Telegraph or even the Guardian and the BBC venting and vending their points of view (spleen, anyone?)?

 

The essence of Murray’s argument — and one doesn’t even have to read between the lines, just read the lines themselves — is an objection to the rhetoric by some offended people against “whiteness”. If this is what is sending him to the pharmacist for sleeping pills, he should in a recently popular phrase “chill”. The fact that a black actor is chosen to play Julius Caesar is not going to damage Shakespeare’s pre-eminence.

Anyway, what dear Douglas identifies as a recent phenomenon isn’t. Indian historians have been rewriting and telling the truth about colonial history for at least a century. And this erosion and abolition of the legacy of empire is… er… am I writing this and you reading it in Ardhamagadhi?



Read in source website

Technology is a great leveller; it can reach the fruits of governance to the masses and change the lives of people at the lowest strata of society in a way that could nary have been imagined even two decades earlier. As Prime Minister Narendra Modi emphasised the other day, the ushering in of 5G communication and technologies can positively impact governance of the nation, as well as vastly improve ease of living and ease of doing business while benefiting every critical area including education, health, agriculture and infrastructure. It could ensure better quality services and products, both in the public and private sectors, and address the burning issue of unemployment.

As Prime Minister, Mr Modi was pointing to the opportunities 5G and 6G could bring in. Nevertheless, the government he heads has a responsibility to ensure that the digital divide that exists in the country today is bridged instead of being widened at every single critical point.

 

The pandemic and the lockdowns that accompanied it exposed the chinks in India’s digital armour. It may be argued that India fared better than many other nations but the reality is that we, as a nation that boasts of being on the frontiers of technology, have failed our people. The Covid-19 vaccination programme hit a roadblock since thousands of villages had no access to the Internet even while the Supreme Court asked the government what alternatives it had kept open to ensure that the decisive weapon against the virus reached the last village. Reports and studies have meanwhile shown that the education of a large number of children suffered irreparably owing to their inability to access online classes.

 

The 5G testbed that Mr Modi launched is sure to ignite the imagination of the young crowd and the startups that will come up with products and services that could command global respect but the government’s job is to see that the country invests sufficiently so that its results reach India’s vast unserviced villages.



Read in source website