In October 2021, Aryan Khan, son of actor Shah Rukh Khan, was arrested in Mumbai by the Narcotics Control Bureau in a drug racket case. Now, after many twists and turns in the case, on May 28, he and five others were given a clean chit by a special investigation team from Delhi. Besides highlighting the torment suffered by him and his family, Aryan Khan’s case also threw the focus on the countless victims of malicious prosecution, many of whom are resourceless. In a conversation moderated bySonam Saigal, Madan B. Lokur and Meeran Chadha Borwankar discuss whether those who have been implicated in false cases should be compensated. Among other things, they discuss reasons for wrongful and malicious prosecution, the role of investigating officers and agencies along with the judiciary, and whether India needs a new law to decide on the quantum of compensation. Edited excerpts:
We are increasingly seeing a lot of innocent people being booked. Why do enforcement agencies end up arresting and even charging the wrong people?
Madan Lokur:I would like to draw a distinction between somebody who has been falsely implicated and somebody who has been implicated but is eventually acquitted, either because the evidence is deficient or because of some other reason. In the case of Aryan Khan, as it appears from the newspaper reports and some statements that have come out, there was actually no reason to arrest him and keep him in custody for almost a month. It is all right for the investigating officer to say, ‘we are still investigating’, but the investigation must have some basis. Otherwise, tomorrow they can pick up somebody and say, we think this person is a terrorist, we are investigating, and until we complete our investigation, let that person remain in jail. I have no doubt in my mind that Aryan Khan has been falsely implicated, and therefore, he must be compensated.
There are several reasons why a person should be compensated if there is false implication, if there has been physical discomfort of being in jail because the person may have been in jail for many years. You have to consider the fact that our justice delivery system is painfully slow. There are instances where persons have spent eight, 10 or more years under trial. Then there is the mental trauma that not only a person, but also their family and children undergo. There is social stigma. In a village, where people know one another, maybe not intimately but they know who's who, the family of the one who is falsely accused gets ostracised. It may not happen in a big city like Mumbai or Delhi. Children also suffer. Can you imagine a child who is going to school and the teacher or some other child says that this boy’s father is a terrorist and he’s in jail. It is bound to affect the child. It is also important to look at mental health, emotional health, not only of the person, but also of the family.
Meeran Borwankar:Any case of deliberate, intentional arrest or booking of an individual in a criminal case should be compensated. But I would also like to add, when an agency arrests a person, it’s only for 24 hours, and then the person is produced before the court. So it is not the enforcement agencies alone, it’s also the judicial mind which is applied within 24 hours. If the judicial officer feels or thinks that the investigating agency does not have enough evidence or it’s going blatantly wrong, they should not hand over the custody either to the agency or to prison. A case in India ordinarily takes six to eight years to conclude. You have the financial, social and emotional burden of being involved in a crime, which in case you were falsely accused or maliciously prosecuted, you should be compensated for.
Having said that, would it be fair to say that a wrongful prosecution stems from a malicious probe that operates on a bias and prejudice?
MB:Maybe not always. I was once involved in the investigation of a case of murder, which later proved to be a case of suicide. So, sometimes there can be genuine mistakes. But a malicious and deliberate act on the part of an investigating officer should be viewed very seriously.
ML:It could be and it may not be. Nowadays, there are several instances of sedition. In a case of a harmless tweet, the prosecution books the person for a charge as serious as sedition — here it is clearly malicious. Another example is Section 66A (punishment for sending offensive messages through communication service, etc.) of the Information Technology Act that has been struck down by the Supreme Court (in 2015) as unconstitutional. But there are still a few thousand cases that have been filed even after that. How can the prosecution ever justify that? There is also a very heavy responsibility on the judiciary. The judiciary also has to be alive to the fact that it is just a simple tweet and nobody is trying to topple the government. Therefore, the judge must say, ‘why accuse the person with sedition’ and ‘I don’t agree with this.’ Similarly, with Section 66A, the judge should ask, ‘why have you filed a case under a provision that has been declared to be unconstitutional?’ Both the prosecution and the judiciary have to be very, very careful about this. Because at the end of the day, if the prosecution is not able to prove its case beyond reasonable doubt, which is a standard of proof that is required, then one can come to the conclusion that the prosecution has a malicious intent.
The Law Commission in its report number 277, titled ‘Wrongful Prosecution (Miscarriage of Justice): Legal Remedies’, has recommended enactment of a specific legal provision for redressal of such cases, covering the substantive and procedural aspects. How do you think we can calculate compensation?
ML:I can’t give an answer offhand. But there has to be some way of doing it. First, you have to accept the fact that compensation has to be given, then comes the calculation. There have been instances. In scientist Nambi Narayanan’s case (he was acquitted 24 years after Kerala police arrested him in a fabricated spy case), the Supreme Court gave him Rs. 50 lakh as compensation (in 2018). The Delhi High Court on a couple of occasions has said the person needs to be compensated for having been kept in jail even though he’s entitled to bail and all the papers are in order. So, there are a whole lot of factors which point unerringly to the fact that compensation must be given.
MB:Compensation is one extreme, which means we have come to a conclusion that it is a case of malicious prosecution. But we can also take steps in moderation; for example, more professional scrutiny by the senior officers of enforcement agencies. In Aryan Khan’s case, a senior officer could have applied his mind and maybe advised the overenthusiastic officers on the professional lines of investigation. The second role is of the prosecutors, as they are neither with the police nor with the investigating agencies; they are independent officers of the court. So, when the investigating agency or police are saying that a person is involved, and want his custody, even the prosecutors can point out to the enforcement agencies that they are wrong; that their case is not strong, so they should not ask for custody. But sometimes, and I can say from experience, agencies and investigators get very troubled by the thought that if we do not show the arrest of a person who is a very influential person or child of an influential person, adverse reactions shall be drawn by the media and by citizens. Therefore, the agencies sometimes err on the side of arresting; the role of the prosecutor and judicial application of mind will help against an error of judgment in prosecuting a person.
As seen in the case of Nambi Narayanan, we know that constitutional courts can exercise their vast powers in awarding compensation but there is also a remedy of filing a civil suit by the victim or the family members. But that is time consuming. Do you think that India needs a new law to ensure disbursement of compensation?
ML:I think we should certainly legislate on this, so that there is no ad hocism. It is possible that one court in a small State may think that giving Rs. 5 lakh compensation to someone is a good idea, but a High Court in a bigger State may say, what is Rs. 5 lakh? It’s nothing, we should give at least Rs. 10 lakh. So we need a standard which can be laid down by legislation for determining compensation. You have instances, in cases of death in a motor accident, where the Motor Accident Claims Tribunal says Rs. 5 lakh is good enough, but the High Court may say no, that is too little, it should be Rs. 7.5 lakh and the Supreme Court may say it should be Rs. 10 lakh. Similarly, in land acquisition cases, as seen earlier, the collector would give some amount, the High Court would double it, the Supreme Court would make it two and a half times or three times more. So, there are principles on the basis of which compensation can be determined and is being determined not only in motor accident cases, but also in land acquisition cases. I think in the long run it’s a good idea if you have legislation on this aspect.
MB:Yes, I agree with Justice Lokur but I would like to add that Section 211 of the Indian Penal Code talks of a false charge of offence made with an intent to injure. It can lead to two years of imprisonment, or up to seven years. This section, I think, is valid for malicious prosecutions, but further legislation for compensation would be a welcome step.
Given that the fundamental rights of the person implicated in a false case are infringed upon and violated, do you think that the state should have some legal or statutory responsibility?
ML:Yes, it should. One of the consequences of not adhering to that responsibility is compensation. Or it could be punishment in some other form; there can be a departmental inquiry against an errant officer or he can be dismissed from service.
MB:I also feel if the judicial officer at the time of trial, if not earlier, comes to the conclusion that the prosecution’s case is false, it can distinguish between a genuine error or a malicious one and the court can pass an order for compensation. The state must also take responsibility in case of wrongful confinement.
If the judicial officer feels or thinks that the investigating agency does not have enough evidence or it’s going blatantly wrong, they should not hand over the custody either to the agency or to prison.
We should legislate on this, so that there is no ad hocism. It is possible that a court in a small State may think that giving Rs. 5 lakh compensation to someone is a good idea, but a High Court in a bigger State may say, what is Rs. 5 lakh? So we need a standard which can be laid down by legislation.JUSTICE MADAN LOKUR
An official delegation from Pakistan was in New Delhi on Monday to hold talks with its Indian counterparts under the aegis of the Indus Water Treaty. In March, the Indians had gone to Islamabad to attend the previous meeting. Starting from February, India has been sending through Pakistan consignments of wheat, via the World Food Programme, to the Taliban-run Afghanistan.
Evidently, channels of communication between the two governments are working and open hostility has subsided, if not vanished completely. In his speeches, Prime Minister Narendra Modi no longer targets Pakistan as an enemy country or invokes it to target politicians of Opposition parties, a regular feature till a few years ago. This is not because of a sudden change of heart or out of great love for Pakistan. The change has been driven by realist considerations that surfaced during the Ladakh border crisis on the Line of Actual Control with China in the summer of 2020.
China forced the hand
The border crisis in Ladakh raised the spectre of a collusive military threat between China and Pakistan. As various military leaders have since stated, such a challenge cannot be effectively dealt with by the military alone and would need all the instruments of the state — diplomatic, economic, informational, and military — to act in concert. To prevent such a situation, India’s National Security Adviser Ajit Doval opened backchannel talks with Pakistan, using the United Arab Emirates (UAE) as an interlocutor.
This was confirmed by the UAE’s Ambassador to the United States, as the Indian and Pakistan armies agreed to a reiteration of the ceasefire on the Line of Control (LoC) in Kashmir in February 2021.
It was a U-turn for the Modi government, after the dilution of Article 370 in Jammu and Kashmir in August 2019, and the number of ceasefire violations along the LoC had reached a record high in 2020. In line with Home Minister Amit Shah’s statement in Parliament vowing to wrest back Pakistan-occupied Kashmir — and Aksai Chin from China — every other politician from the Bharatiya Janata Party politician was threatening Pakistan. By then, the Indian Army was boasting of its firepower on the LoC.
It thus came as a surprise that Mr. Doval had agreed in his backchannel talks with the Pakistan Army to undertake certain actions in Kashmir as part of a mutually agreed road map. Reports emanating from Pakistan Army Chief General Qamar Javed Bajwa made it clear that two actions by India were a precondition for any further steps by Pakistan: restoration of statehood to Jammu and Kashmir; and an announcement of no demographic change in the Kashmir Valley.
As the backchannel talks dragged on, the Indian side expressed its political inability to initiate these actions. With Imran Khan (now former Prime Minister) refusing to move ahead, it created a stalemate. By then, limited disengagement had occurred with the Chinese forces in Ladakh, thus stabilising the situation along the LAC to some extent. India gave assurances to Pakistan when the threat of escalation with China became very high in late 2020 following the Indian Army’s occupation of certain heights in the Kailash range in Ladakh. Pakistan had then not shown any inclination to mobilise its forces to the LoC, which would have created a nightmare scenario for the Indian security establishment. Even if there was no further progress in bilateral ties, the Indians were happy with this new status quo with Pakistan while the border crisis with China was alive. This bought them time to further consolidate the changes in Kashmir undertaken in August 2019.
Kashmir suffers
The delimitation of Assembly constituencies in Kashmir has been completed. The fresh making of an electoral map disadvantages Kashmiris, and new Assembly elections seem but a matter of time. That would bring closer the BJP’s dream of installing a Hindu Chief Minister in India’s only Muslim-majority region, an attempt made earlier after the sacking of Mehbooba Mufti as Chief Minister. If these efforts are successful, the statehood to Jammu and Kashmir could also be restored.
However, despite a harsh security-centric approach by the administration, violence in the region has gone up in the past year or so. All the resources of the Indian state have now been devoted towards a successful conduct of the Amarnath Yatra, with a record participation this year, even as the same administration bans Friday prayers at the iconic Jamia Masjid in Srinagar using the flimsiest of excuses. Congregational prayers were disallowed at the historic mosque last Friday after the sentencing of Kashmiri separatist leader Yasin Malik. His sentencing also earned a strong statement of condemnation from the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) that was rejected by India’s Foreign Ministry. Things have changed drastically from February 2019, when the then External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj was invited as the “guest of honour” by the OIC.
Islamabad’s rhetoric helps the Modi government make its case domestically that the crisis in Kashmir is solely of Pakistan’s making. While Pakistan’s use of violence by sending weapons and militants has been a major factor, exploiting it to overlook the political grievances of Kashmiris thwarts a lasting solution. The idea that Kashmiris have no agency of their own and are instruments in the hands of the Pakistan military defies both history and common sense.
No environment in Pakistan
The recent change of government in Pakistan, including Imran Khan’s removal, is seen as a positive in New Delhi. The official Indian establishment has had close ties with both the Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz and the Pakistan Peoples Party that are now part of the government. There are Indian businessmen who have acted as interlocutors with the Sharif brothers on behalf of the Modi government. Mr. Modi had himself made a sudden stopover at the Sharif household in December 2015 to attend a family wedding, and subsequently allowed Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) officials to visit Pathankot airbase for terror attack investigation.
Officials on both sides argue that there are some low-hanging fruits which can be plucked the moment a political go-ahead is given. These include a deal on the Sir Creek dispute, an agreement for revival of bilateral trade, return of High Commissioners to the missions in Delhi and Islamabad, and build-up of diplomatic missions to their full strength. Demilitarisation of the Siachen glacier is still seen to be off the table as the Indian proposal is believed to be unacceptable to the Pakistan Army.
The environment in Pakistan is, however, not conducive for any such move. Imran Khan is garnering big crowds in his support and has put the Shehbaz Sharif government and Pakistan Army under pressure. With the economy in doldrums, there is little room for manoeuvre with the new government. Even an announcement of talks with India, without New Delhi conceding anything on Kashmir, will provide further ammunition to Imran Khan. The current moment, where New Delhi and Islamabad seem willing to move forward but are restrained by Pakistan’s domestic politics, somewhat mirrors the lawyers’ protest against General Musharraf in 2008 which derailed the Manmohan-Musharraf talks after they had nearly agreed on a road map.
New environment
A window of opportunity would possibly open in Pakistan after the next elections, which are scheduled next year but could be held earlier. By then, the Pakistan Army would have a new army chief, as Gen. Bajwa’s three-year extension comes to an end in November. Gen. Bajwa’s successor may look at things differently. By then, if Jammu and Kashmir has a new State government after elections and the border crisis with Beijing is resolved, the ground would have completely shifted in India. As Mr. Modi goes for another re-election in 2024 with little to show on the economy front, a totally different dynamics on Pakistan would be at play in India.
Following the Balakot airstrike (2019), Pakistan was at the forefront of Mr. Modi’s election campaign in 2019. In a recent book chapter, Mr. Doval has written that Balakot “blew away the myth of Pakistan’s nuclear blackmail”. For the next strike on Pakistan, “domain and level will not be limiting factors”, he wrote.
Mr. Doval does not mention it but last time, India lost a fighter aircraft, had its pilot in Pakistani captivity, shot down its own helicopter killing seven men, had another near-miss friendly fire accident over Rajasthan, and the two nuclear-armed countries threatened to shoot missiles at each other. That was in 2019. A reckless act in the future may have even more dire consequences. Unless that is what India desires, the Modi government must shift course from the belligerence it has displayed and profited from earlier in favour of proper diplomatic and political engagement with Pakistan.
Sushant Singh is Senior Fellow at the Centre for Policy Research
It is thoroughly disappointing to many that after its recent conclave at Udaipur, Rajasthan, which was convened after much deliberation to pave the way for a new journey, the Indian National Congress has failed to come up with a political game changer that is capable of effecting a paradigm shift to its fight against the current regime.
The Congress party has come under fire from many which includes poll strategist Prashant Kishor. Most political commentators have articulated their criticism against party leader Rahul Gandhi, by connecting the outcome of the Udaipur conclave with his rejection, just before the meet, of a plan of action that Mr. Kishor had designed to take on the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP).
Battle in 2024
Of course, the Congress leadership, and Rahul Gandhi in particular, deserve all criticism for weakening the party, and in the process, strengthening the BJP significantly. The frustration of commentators — liberals in particular — is not ill-founded as their perception is that the Congress leadership has shown little sign of gearing up to take on the BJP and instil hope in the Congress party in the run-up to the Lok Sabha election in 2024. After all, the results of 2024 have the potential of accelerating the far reaching changes that are being wrought upon the country’s political make-up.
What lies at the core
Yet, if Rahul Gandhi had indeed wielded his veto to reject Mr. Kishor’s plan of action, he does not deserve condemnation, as there is substantive reason for this. Mr. Kishor’s intention to unite the Opposition parties in taking on the Narendra Modi-led BJP might have been well-taken even if he (Mr. Kishor) was a catalyst in Mr. Modi’s rise on the national scene. It must be reckoned that he, more than anyone in the Opposition, has been responsible for not just Mr. Modi’s rise but also the brand of politics that represents Mr. Modi coming to the fore.
The reduction of politics to electoralism, and that too to arithmetic in a country of diverse ethnic groups and landscapes, is a key feature of Mr. Kishor’s calculus. In the last few years, this reductionism has taken the form of an addiction to numbers.
We do not know the entire details of the plan of action that Mr. Kishor presented to the Congress. But a gist is available.
Let us look at the Congress’s strike rate against the BJP in the Lok Sabha elections. For every 100 seats that the Congress had a straight fight with the BJP, it won only six in 2014 and only four in 2019. The bulk of its victories were in Tamil Nadu, Kerala, Punjab, where it did not face the BJP. So, though the Congress remains a principal force to oppose the BJP, it is still not a winning force.
Party’s gradual decline
The decline of the Congress is not a temporary phenomenon. It was last returned to power with an absolute majority in 1984 (it had won 404 seats then). In decades thereafter, though it was in power for 15 years during this period, its biggest success was in the 2009 parliamentary elections (it won 206 seats then). The decline was, therefore, a continuation of its fall in fortunes since 1984.
The Congress remained a principal force despite declining electoral performance because it has retained a decent 30% vote share consistently. But, currently, that has fallen to 19% as against the 40% core vote share of the BJP. The Congress has to double its vote share to get a majority and to do that, it has to win over votes that are now held by the regional parties.
The dynamics that kept the Congress as a decisive political force for three decades despite its electoral decline would on the other hand help the BJP remain a decisive political force for long as it has a higher core vote share of 40%.
This malady faced by the Congress has been identified with fair accuracy by Mr. Kishor. It is time for the Congress to stop functioning as just a distinct political party. It has to transform itself as an umbrella — under which all political parties, big and small, have to be assembled. It has to remember that the Congress before Independence, the legacy of which it claims so zealously, was nothing short of that. It should cease fighting the regional parties in States where it has no chance of coming to power and ally with them with the sole aim of dislodging its principal adversary in Delhi. This would bring in immediate electoral dividends.
A common feature
There is no doubt that it is a long and difficult journey to defeat the BJP in the cultural and political arena. A new federal narrative has to be created at the top and there has to be continuous contact with people at the base. The Congress should design a plan of action in the cultural and political realms and execute it thoroughly. The problem with Mr. Kishor is that he does not stop at identifying the disease as an astute lab technician. Rather, he dons the role of doctor and seeks to decide the course of treatment.
If one examines the electoral strategy model rolled out by Mr Kishor not only to help the BJP but also regional forces such as the Nitish Kumar-led Janata Dal (United), the erstwhile Capt. Amarinder Singh-led Punjab Congress, the Mamata Banerjee-led Trinamool Congress and the M.K. Stalin-led Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam, there is a strikingly common feature — to focus on a single leader’s popularity and to concentrate the power of the party and its narrative in one person at the helm.
A danger not cognisant to many lies in the point of the centralised power of political parties. While Mr. Modi tends to centralise the Indian state, government institutions and their style of functioning, Mr. Kishor is paving the way to achieve the same in respect of political parties and their style of functioning.
While this can bring transient electoral success, its simplistic mathematical nature as opposed to the more organic link between the party and the people is problematic and incapable of bringing substantial change in the fortunes of a political project. The other fallout is the consolidation of majoritarianism of particular castes and religions in Indian politics that does away with the consociationalism that is inherent in collective leadership and diversity.
To the extent that Mr. Kishor has identified the weaknesses of the Congress and its challenges, the party’s leadership must accept and address them. But it is another matter if it should take Mr Kishor’s lead in adopting the brand of politics that he has promoted in his role as a political consultant in the last decade. It may bring a sense of purpose to the Congress but it will be at the detriment of the alternative that the people desperately need and seek.
Samas is Editor for Arunchol.com, independent media. Translated by Venumani
We live in times when news ripples first on Twitter, barks at us through television before piping down and finding validation through print. Sport at large and cricket specifically isn’t immune to this trend and as events get distilled into hashtags, it is time for some frenetic words and endless speculation.
There was an era though when reflexive reportage wasn’t the drill. Decades ago, cricketers would catch up with the travelling media, perhaps over a drink in the evening. The number of correspondents was few and insights would be shared. The odd Leg-Before-Wicket dismissal was hotly debated. And off-the-record conversations remained just that.
Those were pastoral times when freshly cut grass on the outfield, some dragonflies whispering in the air and the thud of a ball against a piece of willow had a sense of timelessness. Cricketers lived their sporting dreams, writers chronicled them and all seemed fine. Utopia, however, was bound to crack once the 24-hour news cycle rode on the twin pivots of digital avenues and television channels.
The need for content at the speed of light meant that adequate filters weren’t at play and stories were manufactured. Once, during a hectic limited overs series between India and Australia, a television reporter asked Ricky Ponting whether the schedule was tight. The Aussie skipper answered in the affirmative. Next up was M.S. Dhoni and the same correspondent told the Indian captain: “Mahibhai, Ponting just complained about the schedule, how do you see this?” Dhoni offered some platitudes about international sport and how players have to adjust. Once the press conference concluded, the channel flashed the news: ‘MS snubs Ponting!’
The inevitable result was that the trust between players and scribes was ruined. This collateral damage perpetuated itself in different ways over the years. And we are at a point in which cricketers, like other sporting icons, would rather talk directly to the audience through their social media handles. The scope for a nuanced question or an essential clarification has been lost. Instead, press conferences have banalities being spouted such as “control the controllables”.
Announcements, be it retirements or captaincy resignations, are sprung on stunned writers. Dhoni retired from international cricket through a cryptic Instagram post at night and newsrooms lapsed into apoplexy. Did he do that? Did he really mean that? Oh hell, yes he did!
However, things were pleasantly different in the past. Rahul Dravid, known equally for his resolute batting and famous reticence, surprised many on a warm March night in Bengaluru. It was the summer of 2012 and citizens were busy ranting about traffic and the alleged heat in an otherwise salubrious city.
The phone rang. ‘Private Number’ flashed. It could only be ‘The Wall’ at the other end. A beverage was spilled, the phone grabbed, a quick hello muttered and a familiar voice spoke: “Hey Vijay, Rahul here, good time to talk?” And as a few yeahs were said, he continued: “Listen I’m doing a press conference at the Chinnaswamy Stadium this Friday, thought I will give you a head’s up. Let this stay between us. I told a few others too that I’m announcing my retirement that day. But nothing in print for now. Thanks.”
Being given two days’ notice for a significant announcement that would trigger pathos and respect in the cricketing world was too much to stomach. Plus the secret had to be held tight while the mind thought about possible tributes and memories flashed that were specific to this fabulous batter. India’s leading cricket writers were bound by the Code of Omerta. We knew ‘Jammy’, as Dravid is known in the inner circle, was leaving but the news had to stay under the radar till he made it official.
Those were different days. Now, we have one eye on the field and the other on Twitter and Instagram. You never know when another text will break the Internet.
vijayakumar.kc@thehindu.co.in
Nine civilians have been killed in targeted killings by militants in the past 22 days in Kashmir, including a Kashmiri Pandit employee, a Hindu schoolteacher from Jammu and a bank manager from Rajasthan. This has triggered a wave of protests in the Valley from the minority communities. Protesting since May 12 when Rahul Bhat, a Pandit employee, was killed in his office, over 4,000 Pandit employees recruited under a special package are on the verge of another migration as in the 1990s. Their leaders say they are contemplating mass exodus and resignations unless relocated outside the Valley. The abominable terrorist violence and the predicament of the Pandits and Hindus denote a grim reversal of all the gains towards peace and reconciliation in the last decade or so. The Valley had welcomed a subtle and slow return of Kashmiri Pandits, a segment of those who left in the face of a surge in violence and targeted killings in the 1990s. Their return was encouraged by the comprehensive policy of then Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, who in 2008 worked on a strategy: a political outreach to stakeholders of Kashmir’s political spectrum for creating a conducive atmosphere and, at the same time, extending permanent financial support to Pandits willing to return.
The Prime Minister’s Package for Return and Rehabilitation of Kashmir migrants not only offered jobs to Pandit youths but also doled out an initial financial assistance of Rs. 7.5 lakh per family, which was later increased to Rs. 20-Rs. 25 lakh — in three instalments for those who settled in the Valley. It is not a mere coincidence that a turn for the worse coincided with the Centre’s new push to alter Kashmir’s relations with India, starting with the termination of Jammu and Kashmir’s statehood and special constitutional status in 2019. On December 31, 2020, a Hindu goldsmith was killed; a series of targeted killings of members of the minorities, including Kashmiri Pandits, started from October 6, 2021 when Makhan Lal Bindroo who ran the famous Bindroo Medicate was killed in his shop in Srinagar. Guest workers in the Valley from other parts of the country have also been felled. Policies implemented by the Centre regarding land and government jobs are perceived in Jammu and Kashmir as disadvantageous to locals, increasing the sense of alienation that is being exploited by separatists and Pakistan-backed terrorists. The Centre must take measures to ensure the security of Hindus, and migrant workers in the Valley, at any cost as an immediate response. It must also think afresh its Kashmir policy and create space for political dialogue. It seems the dilution of Article 370 was not the end of the problem but the beginning of fresh challenges in Kashmir, which need careful handling rather than just muscular triumphalism.
On Tuesday, the Centre said it has released States’ outstanding GST compensation dues of almost Rs. 87,000 crore. The move marks a shift in stance as just a month earlier, the Finance Ministry had signalled that States’ dues worth over Rs. 78,000 crore, pending for the last four months of 2021-22, will be released ‘as and when’ adequate GST compensation cess collections accrue. By May 31, the Centre said there was about Rs. 25,000 crore in the GST compensation fund and forked out the balance from its own coffers to be adjusted from future GST cess levies on sin goods, such as cars. The stated intent for this changed strategy makes eminent sense — to help States manage their resources and ensure spending, particularly of the capital variety to pump-prime the economy, happens smoothly through 2022-23. States have been anxious about revenue inflows once the five-year GST compensation window expires this month. The gesture to remit dues without waiting for cess accruals will also help cool the temperature of the Centre-States’ fiscal parleys, that flared up afresh after some tangential remarks from the apex court on the nature of the GST Council’s recommendations.
For consumers, this could mean a further extension in the levy of GST compensation cess beyond March 2026 — by when borrowings made over the past two years to bridge shortfalls in cess collections, were to be repaid. The other important implication is that over April and May, the gap between revenues and the assured level promised to States under the GST compensation compact has narrowed to less than Rs. 5,000 crore a month, from over Rs. 19,600 crore averaged in the previous four months. The record GST collection of over Rs. 1.67 lakh crore in April helped, no doubt, and although May revenues have fallen 15.9% to Rs. 1.41 lakh crore, sustaining this two-month average could ease fiscal worries for both the Centre and the States. The Government, which had termed April revenues (for transactions in March) a reflection of a ‘faster’ recovery, suggested that the financial year end boosted those inflows, seeking to explain the dip in May. The elephant in the room remains ignored — high inflation, which the Government hinted could compel a pause in an impending rejig of the GST rate structure, has been a key factor for rising GST revenues (over Rs. 1.12 lakh crore for 11 months). Once that is acknowledged and the level of economic activity assessed minus inflation effects, the GST Council can take a more nuanced call on the next steps to reform the still-young tax system and sustain revenues. This must begin by assessing whether the GST rate restructuring should be deferred because of fears of higher inflation, or reoriented to lower inflation while broadening the tax net and easing compliance.
London, June 2: Queen Elizabeth II hailed the Commonwealth to-day as a globe girdling group held together by a “sense of community”. In a special message for Commonwealth Day to-morrow, also the Queen’s official birthday, she told heads of States that what remains of the British Empire still was a considerable piece of real estate. “We find that there are nearly 70 separate territories, of which over 30 are independent countries, spread over every continent and ocean,” the Queen said. “It may come as a surprise to some that their people add up to nearly a quarter of the population of the world.” The Queen praised Commonwealth countries of South East Asia, which she visited earlier this year, for the “impressive development.” And she added that “there is no aspect of our lives which is not touched and helped by the Commonwealth’s varied network of day to day exchanges.”
If you prick it, it will not bleed. If you tickle it, it will not laugh. And, perhaps most importantly, if you wrong it, it will not resent. The offspring of the future, if AI experts are to be believed, will be more sophisticated versions of Tamagotchis — the digital pets that were a rage in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Lines of code in the metaverse, digital babies will likely be able to grow, simulate age and development-appropriate emotion and even, perhaps, throw the odd tantrum. But unlike flesh-and-blood offspring, they can be turned off.
With more and more people deciding not to have children, Catriona Campbell, author of AI by Design: A Plan For Living With Artificial Intelligence, believes that digital children, designed to resemble their “parents” will become increasingly acceptable. In essence, people will be able to enjoy parenthood in an immersive metaverse without actually having children. And they will certainly be more convenient. Irritated by the “terrible twos”? Simply fast-forward through that age. Want to hold on to the last precious years of childhood before the sullen teenage years begin? Just extend that period. Worried about which memories, which mistakes your Tamagotchi child will crib about to its shrink as an adult? Delete the wound that may cause a scar for life.
The only issue is this: Parenthood is not a customer-driven enterprise. Children can surprise and disappoint, turn out better or worse than their progenitors hope and expect. The decision to have them is at once selfish (to cast a piece of yourself into the future) and selfless (to agree to take care of a life). In fact, given the state of the digital world today, it’s likely that the prejudice of the physical world will be replicated. After all, there is already talk of “gene editing” biological children. A digital child is a toy, not a person, just as the Tamagotchi was no true replacement for a dog. But that doesn’t mean they won’t sell like hotcakes.
Soon after the return of Natwar Singh, Secretary in the Ministry of External Affairs from Pakistan, New Delhi said on Wednesday that India had an interest in Pakistan’s stability, sovereignty and independence. “We in India have an abiding faith in peace and friendship with Pakistan and we are steadfast in our faith.”, an Indian Government spokesman said in a statement which was conciliatory in tone. The Indian government, he added, regarded as imperative that there should be peace, friendship and co-operation between the two nations. The spokesman pointed out that a no-war or non-war situation was only a part of an overall relationship which India was working towards.
British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher ruled out any form of a negotiated Falklands settlement before a decisive battle for the capital, Port Stanley. Asked in a television interview how she viewed an appeal by the US Secretary of State, Alexander Haig to be “magnanimous in victory,” she said: “It is not a word I use in connection with the battle on the Falklands.” She saw little prospect of avoiding further bloodshed in retaking Port Stanley. “I don’t think there is anything more I can do”, she said. .
The four political parties’ alliance in Pakistan-occupied Kashmir has questioned the “annexation” of Gilgit, Hunza and Sakrdu areas of the state by Pakistan through a recent declaration by Gen. Zia-ul-Haq. “To call any part of the state of Jammu and Kashmir a part of Pakistan is a grave fallacy,’’ leaders of the alliance said in a letter to the General last month and released at a press conference . Gilgit, Hunza and Sakrdu are and have been a part of Jammu and Kashmir state, they said.
Days after the Enforcement Directorate arrested Delhi minister and Aam Aadmi Party leader Satyendar Jain in a money laundering case, it sent a summons to Sonia and Rahul Gandhi in connection with the National Herald case in which they are charged with misappropriating funds. The AAP and Congress have protested loudly but the predictable political noise must not distract from the imperative for AAP and Congress leaders to submit to due process — and for the law to take its course. All governments have wielded Central agencies like the ED, Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) and National Investigation Agency (NIA) for political purposes – remember, the CBI was called the “Congress Bureau of Investigation” under the UPA. References to agencies have invoked parallels with a parrot in a cage. And yet, the ED and the NDA government must also know this: Allegations of misuse of the central agency by today’s ruling establishment to settle scores with political opponents are becoming disquietingly frequent and familiar.
An overwhelming majority of the politicians under probe by the CBI, ED and NIA belong to the ranks of the Opposition, only rarely to the ruling party or its allies. In fact, there is hardly any Opposition party of significance today that does not have members under the scanner of these agencies, with the ED clearly being the most pro-active, or overzealous, of the three. That it has an abysmal record of convictions is also telling. In far too many cases, central agencies have moved against these leaders just ahead of elections, raising questions of not just political motivation but also political timing — the AAP has alleged that action against Minister Jain is a political move ahead of the assembly polls in Himachal Pradesh and similar questions over the remarkable coincidence of ED action and an electoral face-off have been raised earlier by parties and leaders ahead of other elections. There are instances, too, of leaders being probed by the central agencies while in the Opposition, subsequently crossing the aisle to join the BJP and finding themselves magically cleansed of the taint.
On paper and in principle, these agencies are supposed to work independently of the government, insulated from all political agendas and motives. The reality, however, is messier, and the NDA presides over a disturbing number of deviations from the norm. It needs to pay attention to, and address perceptions that it is enabling and choreographing political witch hunts. The trust in premier investigating institutions, their credibility, is at stake.
The all-party consensus in Bihar in favour of conducting a state-level caste census suggests that the time may have arrived, nationally, to take a fresh look at an old debate. The last caste census was held in 1931, and thereafter, successive central governments have rejected the demand for counting people on the basis of their caste. National parties such as the Congress and BJP have held that the reintroduction of caste as a census category could defeat the avowed aim to weaken, if not end, the debilitating hierarchies of the caste system. However, parties that trace their legacy to the Lohiaite political tradition and the Dravidian movement have consistently argued in favour of a caste census on the ground that such an exercise alone would give a reasonably accurate picture of Indian society to politicians and policy-makers. Groups such as the Janata Dal (United) and Rashtriya Janata Dal have been at the forefront of building the consensus for a caste census in Bihar. They have a strong case.
Caste is at the heart of India’s affirmative action programme. The Constitution acknowledges discrimination based on caste and provides for instruments such as reservation in employment and education to address social exclusion. In this context, accurate caste data would help the government to design its programmes better and maximise their outcomes. As of now, policies are tailored to suit social compositions constructed on the basis of extrapolations from partial or dated enumeration. The Indian experience underlines that the eradication of the ill effects of caste can’t be achieved by observing silence over its presence and role in society. The Mandal revolution in the 1980s ushered in a fresh conversation in northern India, that radically rearranged and transformed the polity in states such as Bihar. Historically disempowered castes are now entrenched in positions of power and there are rightful demands for a more accurate picture of society and greater fairness in how resources are shared.
Notably, the BJP’s state unit has been a part of the Bihar consensus even though the central government has expressed its opposition to a caste census in Parliament. The federal push against the Union is unlikely to stop in Bihar — parties such as the DMK, TDP, SP, RPI (Athawale), Apna Dal have already spoken in favour of including caste as a category in the census. In Bihar, going ahead, and despite the apparent unanimity for now, the issue could push apart the BJP and JD(U), allies in government, further. A wider debate on enlarging OBC reservation, a contentious issue in states such as Maharashtra and Gujarat, is also possible only if clear caste data is available. So far, the BJP has also held out against caste enumeration arguably because it is a fault line that can potentially unravel its efforts to re-imagine the Hindu society as a monolith. On this issue, however, it may well find it increasingly difficult to have its way.
Even a cursory look at the situation in Myanmar, post the February 1, 2021, military takeover, conjures up a picture of a country that is spiralling downwards. There are reliable reports of the strengthening of the People’s Defence Force, with the support of various ethnic militias. There is no sign of the restoration of normalcy as witnessed by one of the authors during a recent tour of the India-Myanmar border. For India, the putsch and its aftermath have seen an adverse impact on its Act East policy, which had since 2014 become more dynamic and result-oriented. With the present dispensation in Myanmar, the Act East policy is going nowhere. This has not only stymied New Delhi’s initiatives in terms of land outreach towards the vibrant economies of South East Asia, but has retarded development in the Northeast.
While New Delhi may contemplate at leisure the innumerable faux pas it has committed, especially after the putsch, pragmatism demands that an ambitious policy that had fired the aspirations of the Northeast does not become a casualty to the inertia of policymakers. This ambivalence has led to a series of unfortunate incidents that indicate a resurgence in anti-India posturing in the region. There seems to be a full-bodied recalibration exercise among insurgent groups operating from the Sagaing Division and Chin State in Myanmar. Elsewhere, in the north, the ULFA which was until recently in a submissive mood and had declared three back-to-back unilateral ceasefires has suddenly turned belligerent. And in May, it “executed” two suspected cadres, as spies of Assam Police. This is creating impediments to the Centre’s overtures for future peace initiatives. Also, reports of meddling by Chinese intelligence in supporting these militant groups are of concern and demand proactive action.
It is in this background that a fresh look needs to be taken at both the furtherance of the Act East policy, as well as the security matrix that governs the Northeast. The following is recommended :
First, favourable bilateral relations with Bangladesh, under Sheikh Hasina, offer an opportunity for opening a new axis of land-sea connectivity for promoting trade and commerce with Southeast Asia. There is a need to upgrade the multitude of land routes to the seaports of Mongla and Chittagong in Bangladesh, from Assam, Meghalaya, Mizoram and Tripura. The key land linkages from the Northeast are — Agartala via Akhaura, Dawki (Meghalaya) via Tamabil, Sutarkandi (Assam), and Srimantapur (Tripura) via Bibir Bazar. In addition, there is a need to use inland water transport (IWT) to exploit the shared river connectivity of the Brahmaputra and Barak rivers. These have been used earlier to move large machinery for the Palatana power station in Tripura from Chittagong port and for the transit of heavy barges and ships for repairs/maintenance ex Assam, through Bangladesh to the shipyards at Kolkata. The pandemic and the Russia-Ukraine conflict have further disrupted the existing supply chain linkages and this has created prospects for developing fresh trade linkages with the nations of Southeast Asia and the far east, on priority.
Second, the land gateway to South East Asia through the morass of the “killing fields” of Myanmar, does not seem likely in the near future. But there should be no dilution in our initiatives to ensure that peace and stability return to Myanmar at the earliest. For this, there is a need for continued engagement, both formal and informal, with the warring factions in Myanmar.
Third, appropriate infrastructure such as container depots, cold storage facilities and seamless highways will have to be developed on a war footing. Indian manufactured goods will have to be transported to the rail/roadheads in the Northeast like Guwahati for ready access to the seaports of Bangladesh.
Fourth, there is a need to raise an empowered department for monitoring and facilitating projects that support India’s Act East policy, transcending all critical Ministries like Home, External Affairs, Industry, Surface-River Transport, etc.
Lastly, to defang the strike capability of the insurgent groups there is a need to create “integrated defence zones”. These should be jointly manned by the Tatmadaw (Myanmar army) and the Indian Army/Assam Rifles. This force should dominate the 16-km belt of the “free move regime” on the Myanmar side of the border. Such a forward engineering exercise would not only enhance security but also provide sustenance to the locals and promote goodwill. To enthuse dynamism and empower the Assam Rifles, there is a need to retain its current structure of being officered by the Indian Army, as it ensures systemic command and control. This force needs to be mandated to undertake intelligence operations for greater transparency of the events within Myanmar and further the national strategy.
The Act East policy is intertwined with India’s Northeast policy. Let not the dismal scenario of Myanmar impede our vision for the actualisation of our ambitious Act East to go East, as alternates exist. To that end, there is a need to ensure the continued economic development of Northeastern states. Positive overtures by the Government of India will not only improve the security situation but reassure the locals that the region’s interest is paramount and kickstart the stalling economic outreach to the east.
(Sahni is a former General Officer Commanding-in-Chief of the Indian army’s South Western Command. Saikia is a conflict analyst and author.)
The recent ruling of the Supreme Court on the nature of recommendations made by the GST Council has attracted widespread comments because of the important observations made on Indian federalism, especially on it being a dialogue between cooperative and uncooperative federalism. The states, the court held, were free to use means of persuasion ranging from collaboration to contestation.
In retrospect, the controversy was wholly unnecessary. The Gujarat High Court had quashed the two notifications that levied IGST (Integrated GST) on the ocean freight component in a CIF (cost, insurance and freight) contract. Briefly, the high court held that these notifications were unconstitutional and amounted to double taxation. The Supreme Court, in appeal, had to merely consider the correctness of this judgment. The constitutional status of the GST Council and issues relating to fiscal, collaborative, and cooperative federalism were never raised before the high court. However, before the Supreme Court, the Union of India made far-reaching submissions that led to this landmark ruling on federalism in general, and fiscal federalism in particular.
Article 246A confers simultaneous or concurrent powers on Parliament and the state legislatures to make laws relating to GST. This article is in sharp contrast to the constitutional scheme that prevailed till 2017. It clearly demarcated taxing powers between the Centre and states with no overlaps. After 2017, several central and state levies were subsumed into GST. Each state was to have its own GST Act, all of them being almost identical to the Central GST Act. Inter-state supplies and imported goods are liable to IGST.
Under Article 279A, the GST Council has to make “recommendations” on various topics including the tax rate and exemptions. The Union of India argued that the “constitutional architecture” showed that Articles 246A and 279A, when read together, made the GST Council the ultimate policy-making and decision-making body for framing GST laws. The GST Council was unique and incomparable to any other constitutional body and its recommendations would override the legislative power of Parliament and state legislatures; neither of them could legislate on GST issues independent of the recommendations of the GST Council. The argument went further: On a combined reading of Article 279A, the provisions of the IGST and CGST Acts and the recommendations of the GST Council were transformed into legislation. In simple terms, a recommendation of the GST Council was law and binding on Parliament and state legislatures.
While rejecting these submissions, the three-judge bench made important observations on federalism. Delving into legislative history, the court ruled that a draft Article 279B, which provided for a GST Disputes Settlement Authority, was omitted because it would have effectively overridden the sovereignty of Parliament and the state legislatures, and diminished the fiscal autonomy of the states. Democracy and federalism are interdependent for their survival. If the states had been conferred less power, they could still resist the mandate of the Union by using different forms of political contestation as permitted by constitutional design. Such contestation is valuable as part of “uncooperative federalism”. It was desirable, the Court said, to have some level of friction, some amount of state contestation, some deliberation-generating froth in our democratic system. Therefore, the states could use various forms of contestation if they disagreed with the decision of the Centre. Putting to rest any controversy, the court held that the recommendations of the GST Council had only a persuasive value. To regard them as binding edicts would disrupt fiscal federalism because both the Union and states were conferred equal power to legislate on GST.
The GST Council has the Union finance minister as the chairperson and the Union minister of state in charge of revenue or finance as a member. While these two ministers from the Centre have one-third voting power, 31 states (including two Union Territories) share the remaining two-thirds of the vote. Thus, the GST Council has a total of 33 members. Out of a total of 33 votes, 11 belong to the Centre and 22 votes are shared by 31 states/UT, with each state/UT having a 0.709 vote. Any decision of the GST Council requires a three-fourth majority or a minimum of 25 votes. As the Centre has 11 votes, it requires an additional 14 votes. As each state has a 0.709 vote, at least 20 states must also vote with the Centre in favour of the resolution. Now, each state has one vote regardless of its size. Unlike so many statutes, Article 279A has made no provision to make the decision of the majority binding on the dissenting states. This was deliberate: Paragraph 2.73 of the Select Committee Report on the 122nd Constitution (Amendment) Bill, 2014, noted that this voting pattern was to maintain a fine balance as, in a federal constitution, the dominance of one over the other was to be disallowed. But the Supreme Court rightly noted that several sections in the state GST laws, CGST and in IGST, cast a duty even on dissenting states to issue notifications to implement the recommendations of the GST Council. Thus, the Court held that the state governments and Parliament, while exercising their rule-making powers under the provisions of the State GST Acts, CGST & IGST Acts, are bound by the recommendations of the GST Council. But even this did not mean that all recommendations of the GST Council are binding on state legislatures or Parliament to enact primary pieces of legislation on GST. In effect, states can amend their GST laws if they so choose.
In the end, the attempt of the Union of India to make the GST Council’s recommendations have an overarching and binding effect was unsuccessful. But the Supreme Court’s decision ought to be a wake-up call and deserves careful consideration. The GST Council is founded on the bedrock of collaborative federalism. If the GST Council meets periodically as mandated and there is active participation of the states in making recommendations, no state will oppose a recommendation that has been carefully deliberated and is in the national interest. Indeed, there is little chance of cracks developing in the GST edifice as long as the spirit of cooperative and collaborative federalism prevails.
(The writer is a senior advocate. He appeared for one of the respondents in the concerned case before the Supreme court)
There is an unparalleled opportunity for Uttar Pradesh today to grab the lion’s share of both national and global investments. If Yogi Adityanath’s new focus on the economy sounds familiar, that’s because he’s done it before. The reboot of law and order in the last five years has played a huge role in perpetuating a changed perception of the state.
As a result of the CM’s vision of “Reform, Perform, Transform” under the guidance of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, the state has reaped the benefit of a “double-engine government” and emerged as one of the favourite destinations for investors.
One of the primary reasons for this is the UP government being at the forefront of embracing digital transformation and relentlessly pushing the PM’s vision of a Digital India. The UP government has relied on e-governance as it fosters a broader change in the relationship between the government and stakeholders. As part of this, a single-window clearance system has been implemented, which has made the investment process extremely user-friendly. The UP government came up with new policies with a focus on “ease of doing business”, particularly in the food processing, electronics, textiles and pharmaceutical sectors. As a result of this, the state jumped from the twelfth to the second position, in terms of ease of doing business in India.
Other investments combined with the Investors Summit resulted in a total investment of Rs 4.28 lakh crore out of which proposals worth Rs 1.05 lakh crore have materialised already. In the first phase of the ground breaking ceremony, investment proposals for 81 projects amounting to more than Rs 61,800 crore have materialised. This includes investments by top companies such as Infosys, Reliance and Paytm in crucial projects. Meanwhile, the second phase saw investment proposals for 290 projects amounting to more than Rs 67,000 crore. Of these, investment projects worth around Rs 96,000 crore are on the verge or have already started commercial operations.
As we get ready for our third ground breaking ceremony of around 1,400 projects worth Rs 80,000, it is one more step towards achieving the target of the state becoming a $1 trillion economy.
It has been one of our major tasks to reignite the true engine of the state’s economic growth — MSMEs. The government will see 805 units of the MSME department roll out projects worth Rs 4,459 crore. This investment is part of the 1,400 projects worth Rs 80,000 crore slated to be launched during the ceremony. The investment will give a big push to the state’s economy while creating jobs for people in their own districts and the targeted chunk of investment alone will generate over 5,00,000 jobs in the state.
The highest number of MSME units will be set up in Gautam Buddha Nagar and Ghaziabad districts where 309 units will come up with an investment of Rs 1,847 crore. Here, 3,800 employment opportunities will be created. It will be followed by Mathura where 67 units are coming up at an investment of Rs 547 crore. Together, they will create 2,153 jobs.
Projects worth around Rs 20,000 crore in the data centre sector, followed by projects worth around Rs 11,300 crore in the agri and allied sector, projects worth around Rs 7,800 crore in the IT and electronics sector will be launched besides many others in the textile, tourism, energy and pharma sectors.
Some prominent investors include: Adani Group’s data centre (Rs 5,100 crore), Hiranandani Group’s two data centres in Noida (Rs 9,100 crore), Microsoft’s software development centre (Rs 2,100 crore) and Dalmia Group’s cement manufacturing plant in Mirzapur (Rs 600 crore).
The huge interest shown in the state by top industrial houses across a variety of sectors will go a long way in boosting the state’s economy and is likely to create lakhs of jobs. This has been possible because of the sustained efforts of the state government to provide a conducive work environment to global and multinational companies.
This includes providing ease of doing business, starting with the setting up of companies to build infrastructure, provide security, human resources and a suitable environment to highly-skilled professionals and executives.
(The writer is Additional Chief Secretary, Department of MSME, Government of Uttar Pradesh.)
I am writing this on Maharana Pratap Jayanti (June 2) and puzzling through the history wars of the moment. In the common sense of the historical world that we grew up in, and that now seems to have all but disappeared, history was immense fun. It opened up the imagination to an incredible variety. Its purpose was never easy moral or political judgement or the search for comfortable narratives or simplistic explanations. It was not a world where the function of history was, to find, as is often said, a common delusion about kinship and a common platform for the hatred of the other. In the world of this history, one never had to choose sides. If you wanted a moral framing at all, you could be a votary of both Akbar and Pratap, trying to imaginatively see a certain kind of integrity in both their projects.
There was no hesitation in acknowledging Aurangzeb’s bigotry. But one did it in a slightly sotto voce voice, not for political correctness, but because of the realisation that the magnificence of the two historical cultures that I inhabited, Jaipur and Jodhpur, were often facilitated by deep collaboration with Aurangzeb. What would exorcising him even mean? Hunting down every collaborator who was at the frontlines of his army or provided him finance? Would Man Singh and Jaswant Singh also have to disappear as names?
Even the moral debates were wider. The battle over motives in history is one, that for the life of us, we could not understand. Was the desecration of temples, whether by Mahmud of Ghazni or Aurangzeb, driven by the motives of asserting political power or economic gain as secular historians want to assert or was it an act of religious bigotry? How does one even ascertain this? Would it make a difference? Would it make a moral difference if we said the demolition of Babari Masjid was politically motivated, not religiously motivated? Or as one of our history teachers used to say, he would be even more morally offended by temple desecration if it turned out it was done for mere opportunism rather than out of genuine conviction. It was a way of challenging the unexamined assumption that somehow a deed done under the sign of earthly functionality (power or riches) made it a less loathsome act than if it were done out of piety. At least the fanatic is not destroying lightly. He may be deluded, but he has not destroyed you for a trivial reason.
The point is not to settle these questions. It is to remember a context where they could be discussed without violence, censorship or community pride hovering in the background. In retrospect, what made that possible was a degree of detachment. One of the things we had to do in school was what used to be known as Socially Useful Productive Work. We read and recorded cassettes, and wrote exams for visually impaired university students, a practice we continued into the summers of our college days. In retrospect, this was an unexpected gift. It meant reading hundreds of hours of textbooks in Hindi and English. And two things stand out. I am genuinely puzzled by the idea floating around that dynasties like Cholas or Rahtrakutas were sidelined in North Indian schools and colleges. Often these textbooks were terrible introductions to the craft of history. They were compendiums of arguments. The good answer had to know what both Irfan Habib and Jadunath Sarkar or R C Majumdar and Romila Thapar had to say. The methodological premises were capacious. If I am recalling correctly, one popular set of textbooks, written by the widely read V D Mahajan would, in explaining the victory of Ghazni, invoke everything from their more agile military mobility to their discipline on account of the fact that Islam prohibited drink. But their very prosaically put together lists of arguments often up unexpected conjunctures and argumentative possibilities.
It is said we are entering new history wars, where the old shibboleths of Nehruvian and Marxist histories are being set aside. There is great non-academic but serious history being written. Academic historiography in India has a lot to answer for. It was often limited in the questions it asked, the methods it deployed, and the political ends it sought to sometimes serve. It was just not linguistically deep enough to explore the vast ocean of Indian history. Whole fields were sidelined — intellectual history, the history of science or just even political history. But this was not some vast conspiracy to sideline “Hindu” history or heroes, it was a limitation of the methods and training and cabal-like character of many academic disciplines. Though equally, it has to be asked, why so many of our well-endowed centres of traditional learning outside the academy, which had all the languages and manuscripts, did not also broaden their fields and horizons.
But the contemporary fire and brimstone over history is unlikely to lead to a deeper understanding. This is because we are confusing wars of history with the wars of memory. The distinction between history and memory can be overdrawn. But it is an important distinction. As Pierre Nora put it, memory looks for facts that suit the veneration of the main object of recollection, the task of history is always complication, analysis and criticism. Memory has an affective dimension, it is supposed to move you, and constitute your identity. It draws the boundaries of communities. History is more detached, and the facts will always complicate both identity and community. History is not a morality tale as much as a very difficult form of hard-won knowledge, always aware of its selectivity. Memory is easiest to hold onto as a morality tale. History, even if written from the present is about the past; Memory is a kind of eternal truth, to hold onto, and carry forward.
So when the next public discussion of Rana Pratap or Prithviraj or Aurangzeb or Shivaji takes place now, it will not be a battle of bad versus good historians (that is a good battle to have). It will be between forms of memory. The facts are at best props for the dramas of creating kinship and finding enemies. We can truly have true history wars only when we are we have a sense of wry detachment and equanimity about the past. Otherwise what we have are wars of memory, which are sometimes necessary. But they often devour both the present and the past in violent furies.
The writer is contributing editor, The Indian Express
There’s a scene in Anatomy of a Scandal, Netflix’s recent, rather clumsy political thriller-meets-courtroom-drama, in which her legal counsel helps Olivia Lytton, a parliamentary researcher who has accused her boss, the suave politician James Whitehouse, of rape, reconstruct the events leading up to the moment of the assault. The minister had been upset over a news article that had called him arrogant and had asked her if she subscribed to that view, too. Lytton did, and had said so, but she had also told him that arrogance could be “terribly attractive” sometimes. What had she meant? And, why did she follow the man who’d recently broken up with her after a consensual affair, into an elevator?
Lytton confesses she doesn’t quite have the answers. “But I did want to know what he wanted, and if he missed me,” she says, to the palpable consternation of the jury. Lytton is young, attractive, talented and ambitious. Was her allegation payback for a breakup she should have known was coming? Was it a case of lovemaking gone wrong? In following her former lover into that elevator with the hope that their relationship might resume, was she equally culpable?
The line between consent, manipulation and power is often so fine as to be indiscernible. While the OTT series makes a laboured point on the issue, it gets one thing right: Lytton is a woman that society finds hard to slot. And, as a real-life courtroom drama that played out over the last six weeks in the US has shown, for women deemed flawed by society, it continues to remain difficult to make themselves heard, MeToo’s watershed impact notwithstanding.
The Johnny Depp-Amber Heard trial has arguably been one of the most high-profile cases of our time, in which the Hollywood superstar sued his former wife for defamation for a December 2018 opinion piece she wrote in The Washington Post, describing herself as “a public figure representing domestic abuse” without naming Depp. The Pirates of the Caribbean actor has won the suit emphatically, but even if he hadn’t succeeded in the court of law, the besmirching of Heard’s reputation through the course of the trial would have ensured that she faced the full force of a culture’s wrath anyway.
Indeed, what the manic consumption of the unsavoury details of the case and the virulent pillorying of Heard show is society’s continued inconsideration towards “imperfect women”. The inequities of gender are so deeply ingrained in us that, at the best of times, the onus of making herself credible and normative lies with the woman. But, like the fictional Lytton, Heard, 36, was that difficult thing — a “bad victim”. Irrespective of country or culture, women who do not play by the rules, who want it all and who can claw their way back into the centre continue to be viewed with apprehension. It is easier to believe that bad things happen to bad people — the ones who deviate from the norm, who return verbal abuse with abuse, hit back when pushed around — than to accept the universality and unpredictability of violence against women, no matter how many women from how many starkly different circumstances come forward and say “Me too”.
Was Heard telling the truth? There is no way of knowing. Love can turn toxic, and a marriage gone sour is, if nothing else, seamy. But there is little ambiguity in the fact that the balance of power was never quite in Heard’s favour. Depp, a partner 23 years her senior, had the backing of fame, financial success and clout that far outweighs Heard’s.
One of the successes of the MeToo movement was the recognition that consent is a spectrum made elusive to women in societies rooted in patriarchy. Through their lonely, unequal but no less harrowing battle against misogyny, it created an overarching sisterhood. Yet, despite a 2016 restraining order against Depp, despite his loss in a 2018 libel case against the tabloid Sun that had referred to him as a “wife beater”, women have been among Heard’s strongest critics through the course of the trial. The triumph of Depp signifies many things, the power of social media to perpetuate harassment being just one aspect of it. But most of all, it signals how the MeToo movement could be unpicked by that one thing it had hoped to change — the obduracy in not recognising the many ways in which abuse, and trauma, work. Heard may or may not have been a victim, but in refusing to give her account any dignity, in withdrawing the solidarity that had set off tidal waves of change, this case has set a scary precedent for outliers and anarchists who hope for acceptance, if not for justice.
paromita.chakrabarti@expressindia.com
Three months into Western sanctions against Russia following its invasion of Ukraine, two outcomes are apparent. Initial expectations of the US and EU were over the top. In addition, it’s getting harder for the EU to keep its own flock together in its aim to cripple Russia’s energy sector. For example, EU leaders this week agreed after protracted negotiations to stop imports of Russian crude by the end of 2022. However, they were forced to grant Hungary an exemption from it. Even Bulgaria’s timeline is likely to be extended. And as for Russian gas, there’s no deadline at all.
A step back will make it clear why Western sanctions and the subsequent sermonising aimed at countries such as India were unwise. Let’s start with Iran, a country subject to US sanctions soon after the Islamic Revolution in 1979. Into its fifth decade, the conversation is still about changing Iran’s “behaviour”. For sure, when the world’s largest economy imposes sanctions, it limits the economic potential of the victim. But evidence shows that it doesn’t achieve its core aim. Also, the collateral damage on unrelated countries cannot be justified by convenient references to a rules-based order.
Another reason why sanctions don’t really work is that both sovereign nations and private firms have a powerful economic incentive to bypass them. US media reports on Iran’s “clandestine finance system” straddling the globe is an example. In the current context, IEA data showed that even in March, Russia remained the OPEC+ grouping’s second-largest crude oil supplier with 9.10 million barrels a day. A look at the predicament of Germany, EU’s economic powerhouse, provides an insight on this issue. Russia is the source for about 55% of Germany’s natural gas, which is harder to substitute than oil. A scenario analysis by the German Bundesbank on the outcome of an immediate halt of Russian energy imports estimated the economy would shrink by 2%. Moreover, Germany’s current inflation level of over 7% is a four-decade record.
There’s no case to support Russian actions in Ukraine. However, Western response smacks of both double standards and unsophistication. The proof for it are the exemptions within its ranks and growing cases of sanctions bypass. India was right to say, more than once, that Western lectures on buying Russian oil don’t square with Western purchase of Russian gas.
The sudden surge of Covid infections in Maharashtra (Kerala, too, is seeing a jump) in the past few days – over 1,000 cases being logged and positivity rate in Mumbai touching 8% on Wednesday – seems to have jolted the Maharashtra government out of its complacency. Since April masks have not been mandatory in the state, and that was an unwise move. Even when enforcement may or may not be stringent, this effectively sent a signal downrating Covid’s public health threat potential, even as more variants were being detected. Now state ministers are revising their position on masks.
Not just masks, Maharashtra’s vaccination drive has also slowed down and a staggering 1.7 crore people who got their first doses are yet to get their second doses. With an average of 35,000 second doses administered daily in the state in the past week it will take at least 500 days to fully vaccinate these 1.7 crore people. Such a slow pace defeats the purpose of vaccination, where full dosing and boosting must be done in the prescribed time period to ensure optimal efficacy.
Last year, when vaccination was a high political priority, officials were going door to door to root out vaccine hesitancy and motivate people. States like Maharashtra, Bihar, UP and Tamil Nadu with a higher proportion of partially vaccinated people must embrace this strategy again. Around 15 crore doses are lying unused because of the country’s 12 crore cohort of partially vaccinated citizens. The precaution dose programme needs a boost too. Over 15 crore adults are eligible nationally, but just 15 lakh in the 45-59 age group have been jabbed.
The discovery of BA.4 and BA.5 Omicron sub-variants and many re-infections require intensive disease surveillance. Experts still don’t know what to expect in the months ahead. Even the mild third wave scarred the economy: January-March quarter’s low 4.1% growth is a warning. A potential fourth Covid wave is an economically frightening prospect. Too many MSMEs are teetering on the edge, shocks from the Ukraine war and China’s lockdowns via inflation and supply bottlenecks will continue for a while. Governments must get smarter: Wearing masks and conducting neighbourhood vaccination are hardly burdens when compared with economic and healthcare costs.
A DNA test, using a blood sample, to assess a person's risk for cancer could well revolutionise the approach to oncological treatment. A pre-emptive measure to identify and then suggest precautionary treatment or behavioural changes to treat at-risk persons long before they may develop the dreaded disease is so very welcome.
But what perhaps makes this test developed at the Institute of Cancer Research, London, and currently undergoing trials truly remarkable is that it is slated to be available to citizens in Britain in about two years' time as part of their National Health Service (NHS) package. In other words, a general practitioner can suggest his or her patient such a test.
The DNA test will be looking out for 'actionable' mutations - genes that are 'faulty' and heighten risks of cancer. Depending on the result, action can be advised by the doctor and taken by the patient. Despite the simplicity of the test and its relatively low cost - currently estimated to be at just under ₹1 lakh (£1,000) - when compared to, say, full-blown oncological treatment, it will remain out of bounds for most people in countries such as India, unless a cheaper variant is found.
The test is to be presented today at a symposium at the 5-day 2022 American Society of Clinical Oncology (Asco) conference in Chicago. It would be worth its while for oncologists and genome sequencing scientists in India to follow the proceedings and literature of this Asco presentation. If the proverbial mountain of a cutting-edge, affordable, sturdy and inclusive health system cannot - yet - come to provide this future-changing breakthrough in cancer treatment to an overwhelming majority of high-risk Indians, then let the Muhammad of Indian bioscience go to the mountain.
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It is not enough to condemn the spate of targeted killings that have taken place in Kashmir Valley. Everyone is in agreement that terrorism needs to be stopped in its track before it starts feeding on itself again.
The blame game that has ensued the latest acts of xenophobic terror - eight killings over this week alone - helps no one, certainly not the migrant or minority residents in the Valley, who are understandably shaken.
The high-level meeting in Delhi with Amit Shah taking stock of the situation with J&K lieutenant governor Manoj Sinha on Friday comes a day after the home minister sat down with national security adviser Ajit Doval and intelligence officials.
This is the right way to go about things - gaining a clear picture of the ground in terms of logistics, security and law and order. This means not only bringing the outfit(s) responsible to book, but also using the intelligence machinery to avert future acts of terror, especially with the Amarnath Yatra set to resume end of this month after two years of Covid abeyance.
The primary purpose of acts of terrorism is to foment and ferment terror. While the priority to provide safety and security for Indians within an Indian Union territory is topmost, efforts to ensure that an atmosphere of panic does not lead to an exodus of non-Kashmiri and Hindu Kashmiris from the Valley.
At stake is not just the safety of the communities under attack in Kashmir but the larger objective of these terrorists to polarise the country. To this end, the alleged 'containment' policy of not allowing Kashmiri Pandits to 'leave for Jammu' would be ham-handed. The horse of making migrants and non-Muslims feel safe again must be placed before the cart of ensuring their willingness to stay.
The dangerous game of making lazy comparisons between past 'negligence' of beleaguered Kashmiri Pandits and present conditions must not cloud the real objective: to stop the people in Kashmir feeling terrorised before the Amarnath Yatra season and while initial assessments for assembly polls in J&K are being made.
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For over 100 days now, the Russian invasion of Ukraine has caused human suffering, triggered a global food and commodity price crisis, and destabilised the global geopolitical order. It has led to the United States (US) deploying military support to Ukraine, and crippling Russia economically. It has forced Europe to reset its strategic calculus, boost military spending, and take initial steps to reduce its energy dependence on Russia. It has strengthened the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, with newer members queuing up to join the bloc. And it has fundamentally weakened Moscow, which has failed to meet its war objectives. And the war shows no signs of ending, proving the old adage that conflicts may be easy to begin, but there is no knowing how they evolve or end.
India, a friend and well-wisher of Russia, is still absorbing the costs of Moscow’s misjudgment. Delhi wanted Washington and Moscow to get along in order to face an assertive Beijing; instead, the US and Russia are locked in a deep conflict. It did not want a Moscow that would be dependent on Beijing; instead, China, despite its stated ambivalence about the current moment, will remain among Russia’s strongest allies when the war ends. Delhi did not want its traditional military relationship with Russia to become the object of western censure; instead, Russia’s own ability to keep up a steady supply of spares and parts of existing weapon systems and provide newer weapon systems has come under a cloud even as the West expects India to speed up its diversification of arms imports. India did not want to be in a position where it had to make a choice between the West and Russia, and while it has diplomatically navigated the crisis with finesse, it has had to invest tremendous strategic capital in keeping both sides happy. India wanted a conducive post-pandemic economic climate to grow; instead, it is staring at a slowing of growth and spiralling inflation, which has political implications and narrows the government’s strategic choices. India wants an end to the war, but has little ability to influence its outcome.
In these 100 days, Delhi has offered a lesson in how best to safeguard national interests in adversarial circumstances. All it can hope for is that better sense prevails in Moscow, which created the crisis; Washington moderate its ambitions and refrain from escalatory steps; and Kyiv, while preserving its sovereignty, recognises the limits of what it can achieve on the battlefield. The war must end.
Two out of the last three cover stories of The Economist, among the most authoritative journalistic voices on modern capitalism, have been on India and China. The coverlines are self-explanatory: China’s slowdown: The Trouble with Xi’s new economic model and India’s moment: Will Modi blow it?
The Economist’s editorial judgment seems to be in sync with data from the World Economic Outlook (WEO) database of the IMF. Between 1980 and 2021 (for India these are fiscal years 1980-81 and 2021-22), India’s GDP growth rate has exceeded that of China only eight times. Four of these eight years have been under the Narendra Modi led government. There was a three-year period from 2014 to 2016 when India replaced China as the fastest growing major economy in the world. While China regained this position as the Indian economy experienced one of its worst ever slowdowns even before the pandemic hit, India has surged ahead of China once again with a growth rate of 8.7% in 2021-22 compared to China’s 8.1% growth.
If the IMF projections are to be believed, the best is yet to come for India. Although both Asian giants are expected to experience a moderation in growth rates, India will retain its fastest growing economy status until 2027, the latest period for which IMF projections are available at the moment.
To be sure, another set of statistics in the WEO database caution against any exuberance on the Indian side. The catch up in GDP growth rates notwithstanding, there is unlikely to be a convergence in living standards in China and India. China’s per capita GDP, in current dollar terms, was almost similar to India’s in the 1980s. It became twice as large as India’s in 2000. By 2010 the gap had increased to more than three times and it is more than five times at the moment. While this gap is not expected to increase any further, IMF data does not project a reduction on this count as well.
These statistical comparisons, to be sure, are not being made for the first time in these pages. Beyond this obvious reasoning in any India-China comparison, there are more difficult questions to be asked.
Is there a larger political economy story to be told about the current economic situation in India and China? Where does politics come into play in shaping the economic trajectory of these two countries? The difference in political systems notwithstanding, does politics seek a common economic goal as far as India and China are concerned? Can India replicate the upward economic mobility story in today’s world which China achieved when it pulled 800 million people out of poverty in the last four decades? Can China manage a soft landing for its economy where domestic consumption replaces exports and investment as the main engine of growth?
Given the importance of China and India in the world, there exists a large amount of scholarship on these questions. The best take on these issues is perhaps yet to come. However, one factor which lies at the heart of these questions is whether the regimes in China and India will be able to strike a balance while trying to nudge markets; sometimes in not so subtle terms, in what they think is the desired direction. Before dwelling on this point any further, a brief snapshot of the economic evolution of these two countries is useful.
The history of economic policies
India attained political independence two years before the Communist Party of China pulled off a revolution. While Communist China’s initial focus was understandably on redistribution, especially of land, India adopted a more conciliatory policy in class terms where the state’s focus was on marshalling as much resources as possible to build a modern economy. Neither India nor China were entirely successful or unsuccessful in their initial endeavours.
Abolition of land monopoly and initial investments in education gave China the base on which it could build its modern economy. In India, the state-led planning model was successful in achieving some sort of economic self-sufficiency, especially in critical sectors such as steel production.
However, political competition and associated decisions — in India’s case of the electoral variety and in China’s within the Communist Party — led to policies which would create major economic disruptions.
China had a tumultuous period from the late 1950s to the mid-1970s when Mao Zedong unleashed the policy experiments of Great Leap Forward – millions of people perished in a famine which was a result of forced appropriation of food production by the state – and the Cultural Revolution — where anarchy was unleashed in the name of purging ideological adversaries from the society at large. The fact that Mao’s successor Deng Xiaoping unleashed large-scale economic reforms almost immediately after Mao’s death clearly shows that even the leadership of the Chinese Communist Party was not really in sync with Mao’s radical ideas.
In India, a failure to deliver on the economic promises of the independence movement and stated objectives of five year plans (the plans in fact struggled to even find the required resources) led to a steady corrosion of the Congress’s support base and opened up political competition from multiple sides including the left, right and caste based parties often championing socialist rhetoric. Some parts of the country also saw the growth of armed secessionist movements. This growing political competition was accompanied by a growing asymmetry between foreign exchange receipts and requirements which ultimately culminated into the balance of payment crisis in 1991 and triggered large-scale economic reforms, a process which has enjoyed a bipartisan consensus (so far) and is still a work in progress.
The contrasting political climate
Why did economic trajectories of India China diverge so widely even though they adopted economic reforms at almost the same time? To some extent, the most clichéd answer to this question is actually right. The fact that the Chinese state did not have to worry about short-term democratic pressures meant that it had a lot more leeway in realigning the economy the way it wanted once reforms were kickstarted.
The most relatable example on this count would be the massive political opposition, especially on the question of land acquisition which erupted when India tried to replicate China’s Special Economic Zone (SEZ) model in the 2000s. Ironical as it may sound, the protests against SEZs dislodged the longest running communist party government in West Bengal. While the Communist Party of India (Marxist) or CPI (M)’s leadership might have been rightly awed by the role SEZs played in making China a global manufacturing powerhouse, they forgot that their comrades in the Communist Party of China did not have face elections where angry peasants whose lands had been confiscated could vote them out.
SEZs are not the only issue on which the Chinse communists have been more pro-reform than the Indian state. When the Narendra Modi government repealed the three farm laws (months before a crucial state election cycle) after more than a year of farmers’ protests, an article in the Global Times, a media outlet affiliated with the Chinese state took a dig at the state of economic reforms in India. “As there are always groups that stand to lose out in the face of reform, politicians are inclined to shun those unpopular policies for the sake of their own political interests, which, to a certain extent, may weaken the effects of certain policies”, the article said, adding that “reforms in crucial sectors like labour, land and agriculture are stalling, due to the obstruction of vested interest groups in the country”.
However, to infer from these examples that China’s economic success story is just the result of a bunch of party apparatchiks pushing a so-called reform agenda in the absence of democratic pressures would be akin to missing the woods for the trees.
China’s reset, block by block
Where China’s economic evolution is unique is in the fact that unlike the Soviet Union and its east European satellites, China did not experience an economic meltdown when it ultimately decided to move away from a socialist command and control economy system. Experts have attributed this to the existence of a successful domestic political-intellectual counter to shun “shock-therapy” recipes – basically a mix of sudden price deregulation accompanied by privatisation and fiscal austerity – which were advocated (and accepted by countries such as Russia) by institutions such as the World Bank and IMF in the 1980s and 1990s.
Isabella M Weber, an economist at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, has explained this very well in her authoritative book How China Escaped Shock Therapy: The Market Reforms Debate.
“To use a metaphor, if shock therapy proposed to tear down the whole house and build a new one from scratch, the Chinese reform proceeded like the game of Jenga: only those blocks were removed that could be flexibly rearranged without endangering the stability of the building as a whole. Yet, through this process, the building was fundamentally changed. As everyone who has played Jenga knows, certain blocks may not be removed lest the tower collapses”, Weber writes.
India and the manufacturing bus
In post-reform India, even though the policy apparatus has been careful in not unleashing some of the riskier reforms (such as capital account convertibility), the state does seem to have erred in believing that just getting rid of the license-quota raj would trigger an economic revolution, especially in manufacturing. This mistake was made despite a plethora of evidence to the contrary that there are hardly any manufacturing success stories in the world where the state did not play a hands on approach via an industrial policy.
To be sure, there are examples to the contrary as well, including in pre-reform India, where state control in the name of buttressing the economy eventually mutated into an inefficient economic structure which only thrived on rent seeking.
It is on this count the current government in India seems to be making a departure from what can be described as a more risk-averse approach to economic transformation by previous governments.
Not only has it been trying to experiment with various forms of incentives/support through programmes such as Make in India and Production Linked Incentive (PLI) schemes, there is also a concerted attempt at expediting what the pro-regime economists describe as a process of creative destruction in the informal sector, which it is argued, will catalyse the growth of formal sector takeover and unleash untapped efficiency gains for the economy as a whole.
The fact that the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has an ideological insurance in the form of Hindutva and the principle opposition party in the centre (Congress) is in a complete disarray has only added political confidence to this economic determination of the current regime. The current government has also adopted a tactful approach to welfare, which is focused on boosting assets rather than incomes lest bargaining powers go up in the labour market and there are labour-driven tailwinds to inflation.
Global capital’s view of Beijing and Delhi
The Chinese state, after having been able to achieve immense success in opening up its economy on its own terms, is dealing with what is best described as the tension of maintaining communist rhetoric in what is arguably world’s most dynamic and yet state controlled capitalist economy.
The Chinese economy faces two central challenges today.
The first is an opaque state controlled financial system where the monetary policy arm is at the beck and call of the communist party dictatorship to pump prime the economy even at the cost of further adding to what many believe is a hugely leveraged economy. Even as it deals with the threat of a bust in domestic real estate bubble, China is looking to build an infrastructure empire in a large number of Asian and African countries.
On this count, as least as of now, India has made a discernible improvement, although not without a cost, in bringing down bad loans on books of public sector banks.
China’s second challenge, and here the state is being pro-active rather than reactive, is the uncertain outcome of its effort to dictate both consumer and entrepreneur behaviour to seek conformity with the notions of propriety set by the communist party or perhaps just its supreme leader. These efforts include decisions to ban or regulate things such as online videogames and tuitions to prohibiting Chinese companies, sometimes among the biggest in the world, from floating public issues in share markets abroad.
Among these two challenges, it is the latter which causing more concern to the champions of free capitalism, as it could deprive rentiers of capital in advanced countries of future profits in the rapidly emerging technology driven commerce, knowledge and entertainment industry complex. An earlier piece by this author in these pages has discussed in detail how the Sino-US economic relationship has been extremely beneficial for US capital.
In India’s case, because the forced formalisation of the economy is bringing hitherto unavailable opportunities for large businesses (potential investors), global capitalism stands to gain from the regime’s stance.
To be sure, neither India’s nor China’s new economic approaches are guaranteed to achieve success. Not only does China have to find a sustainable anchor for growth in domestic consumption without replicating the speculative boom in real estate, the political regime also faces the challenge of renewing its political hegemony especially among those whose living standards are still way below high income country levels, even as it is clear that growth rates have already started coming down.
In India’s case, the state has decided to unleash a purge of the informal sector at a time when the employment generation ability of the modern sector, especially manufacturing, is a small fraction of what it used to be in the past. Because this is a result of technological evolution across the globe, there is little that can be done to change this.
The real Chinese challenge
This is exactly why the world is worried about the dark side of realpolitik taking over in both these Asian giants. In India, the BJP is widely seen as ratcheting up the communal rhetoric (directed against the more than 200 million strong Muslim population) when the economic situation becomes difficult for the government. For China, the venting route is directed at the outside world. American investor Jim Chanos articulated this well in a 2021 interview published on The Institute for New Economic Thinking’s website.
“As all of this is happening on the financial and economic front, along with the crackdown on business elites, we’ve seen a commensurate rise in bellicosity, in saber-rattling toward Taiwan, India, and Tibet. We’ve seen a much more aggressive posture from Xi in relating to the West. Now every day there’s a warning in one of the Chinese Communist Party organs threatening Australia if they come to Taiwan, threatening Japan. I don’t know if the Party is preparing the citizenry for a “them.” Someone to blame”, Chanos said.
Because India and China are neighbours, India will have to guard against the possibility of not just the domestic economic bet going wrong, but also maintain vigilance against China deciding to find a bogeyman in India to distract attention from its domestic problems. This is why a successful economic transition in China is also in India’s economic interest.
Every Friday, HT’s data and political economy editor, Roshan Kishore, combines his commitment to data and passion for qualitative analysis in a column for HT Premium, Terms of Trade. With a focus on one big number and one big issue, he will go behind the headlines to ask a question and address political economy issues and social puzzles facing contemporary India.
The views expressed are personal
This month marks the second anniversary of the skirmishes that gravely damaged relations between India and China. What prompted Chinese belligerence in that instance remains a puzzle. But there can be no mistaking a broader pattern of growing hostility. This raises a pressing question: What do hardliners in China, who support confrontation, hope to achieve?
As the hardliners see it, because India considers itself as a great power, it expects to be treated as China’s equal. However, since it lacks discipline and unity, India will actually lag far behind China. The growing disparity between India’s ambitions and its abilities will, the hardliners fear, compel it to draw in outsiders, who will then use India to keep China off balance. This disconcerting prospect must be prevented, they conclude, by imposing punitive costs on India, which will break its will and reconcile it to its “rightfully” subordinate role in Asia.
In India, this hardline view is met with bravado (the claim that India will soon catch up with China) or tact (the promise that India will rely on bilateral diplomacy, rather than outside aid, to resolve future disagreements). Since Chinese hardliners disbelieve these claims, they have ramped up the pressure to teach India a historic “lesson”.
But is their conclusion sound — will punitive measures chasten India? If we reflect on modern India’s trajectory, which began not in 2014 or 1991, but in the recesses of the 19th century, we will see that its ambitions are a product of choices made long ago. Seen on this scale, there is relatively little that China can do to change the convictions that drive India’s ungainly but persistent rise. If anything, the use of coercion will only accelerate India’s embrace of great power politics.
To refresh our memory, consider India’s position in the early 19th century. Decades of war, initially among the remnants of an earlier era, and then between the battered survivors and the East India Company, had reduced the country to ruin. Poverty was nearly universal, famines were commonplace, hereditary vocations were endangered, and traditional authorities lay emasculated. “Men who, but for us, might have been governors of provinces”, Thomas Munro wrote, “are now regarded as little better than menial servants.”
In spite of the dispiriting circumstances, leading elements around the country began, almost immediately, to reflect upon the causes behind India’s subjugation — and to seek out the means of its salvation. Thus, it was that the earliest English language schools in India were established in Tanjore and Travancore — decades before they appeared in British India. The missionaries that operated these schools soon learnt who was using whom. The natives, they despondently wrote home, were only interested in their “temporal welfare”. Then, it was the turn of the denizens of British India. Having comprehended that it was to “the power of knowledge that we must trace back the vast superiority of England over this country”, they petitioned furiously for schools and colleges for their “mental advancement”. This is why British retrospectives would later concede that “before Macaulay set foot in India native opinion had declared so strongly for English teaching, in place of the old traditional learning, that Macaulay’s eloquent Minute merely played the part of the shout at which the walls of Jericho fell.”
After this epochal development, came the original “million mutinies”. Stubborn habits that would have otherwise defeated legislators were voluntarily shed almost overnight. Dress and diets were supplemented, irrational social and religious diktats were challenged, and then Indians, who for centuries had refused to leave their locales, flooded out in every direction—to England and the United States, to Germany and Japan — seeking new skills and expertise. From there they returned as doctors, lawyers, engineers, and scientists, leading Bholanath Chandra, one of the great observers of the age, to proclaim, “a widely diffused enterprising spirit is always the antecedent to that widely diffused national prosperity, by means of which alone can our nation ever hope to occupy a conspicuous position in the eyes of mankind. Such was the state of India once, such ought to be the state of India again”.
In the closing quarter of the 19th century, India’s reigning intellects discerned the need for still more. India’s subjugation would not end simply by acquiring knowledge and reforming mores. A bracing summary of the missing ingredients came in Bankim Chandra Chatterjee’s influential essay, Bharat Kalanka (The Shame of Bharat). The long subjugation of the people of Bharatvarsha, he declared, owed to their being “devoid” of the desire for “freedom” and their utter “lack of unity”. But it could be otherwise — as Shivaji showed when he made Marathas “brothers to one another”. “If the rise of the idea of a nation in only a part of Bharatvarsha could have achieved so much”, Bankim asked, “what could not have been possible if all of Bharatvarsha had united as a single nation?” As it happened, Indians now had a chance to find out. Forcibly brought together by the British, they were inadvertently learning the value of freedom and nationhood. “The British are our beneficiaries”, Bankim archly observed, for “they are demonstrating to us how to walk on a path we have never walked before”.
This rapid sketch conveys that India’s rise stems from choices made nearly 200 years ago: To learn, to adapt, to unite. Since then these ideas have been transmitted by means that are subtle but effective: Discussions in homes, clubs, and newspapers, which have moulded minds over two centuries. This is unlike contemporary China, where the ruling ideas descend from singular events — rebellions and revolutions — and are carefully chaperoned by a disciplined Party. Topple the Party in China, and there will be immense confusion. But the same is not true in India: The sources of its conduct are not reducible to an individual or a party.
This brings us back to where we began. Perhaps hardliners in China believe that scooping up pieces of territory or inflicting a military defeat will fatally embarrass the present government, and thus bring its troubling adroitness to an end. If so, they have misidentified their adversary. The current regime is only a manifestation of a much wider awakening that has been gathering steam since the early 19th century. How exactly this awakening should proceed may be hotly contested but the broader objective is unmistakable. As Chandra observed as long ago as 1867, no enlightened Indian “thinks of anything so much” as to see the country take a “conspicuous position” among the nations of the world. Can a Chinese foray across the border overturn such a long-cherished ambition? It is far more likely to spur India to deepen alliances that will make up for shortfalls in its current ability to realise its dream. And so, by failing to understand the deep sources of Indian conduct, Chinese hardliners will bring about — indeed are already bringing about — the very outcome they so dread.
Rahul Sagar is Global Network associate professor at NYU Abu Dhabi. This essay draws on his new book, To Raise A Fallen People: How Nineteenth-Century Indians Saw Their World and Shaped Ours
The views expressed are personal
Imagine a married couple without any children. The husband and wife work their whole lives, build their property and stash away savings in a joint bank account – hoping it will help in taking care of their ageing parents. Yet, when they die suddenly, without a will, all of their movable and immovable property is transferred to the husband’s parents. The wife, though economically independent and empowered, fails to provide for her parents because the 1956 Hindu Succession Act (HSA) which applies to 80% of India’s population including Buddhists, Sikhs, and Jains, dictates different schemes of property devolution for men and women if they do not have a surviving spouse or children: All of the husband’s property goes to his natal family, but the women’s property devolves to her in-laws.
Sections 15 and 16 of HSA are a point of contention in two landmark cases, one before the Supreme Court (SC) and another before the Punjab and Haryana High Court. In the first case earlier this year, the SC asked the government for its views. Shockingly, the government backed these provisions, failing to take into account the increased role of women in the economy, vastly changed family structures since 1956, and the blatant gender discrimination that this law legitimises. On the one hand, laws such as the Maintenance and Welfare of Parents and Senior Citizens Act, 2007 hold “all children” equally responsible for the welfare of ageing parents but, on the other, provisions in the HSA take away this right from daughters.
The changing demography adds more urgency to the need for reform. India’s Total Fertility Rate (the number of children an average woman will bear in her life) is 1.6 in urban areas and 2.1 in rural areas, indicating that fewer couples have children, and those who do have fewer children. In addition, the proportion of couples with only two daughters who accepted sterilisation more than doubled from 16% 1992-1993 to 33.6% in 2015-2016 (National Family Health Survey-4/NFHS-4), indicating higher acceptability of daughters as only children than earlier. Further, 42% of women own a house, and 32% of women own land jointly or independently. All these numbers indicate that women now hold more assets, they are the sole providers for their aged parents more often, and they do not leave behind children after their death as often. So, the number of people affected by HSA will only increase over time. HSA perpetuates the belief that women belong solely to their “married household” - a commonly cited reason for the preference for a male child.
A paper published by National Institute of Public Finance and Policy in 2020 examined these provisions in HSA and suggested an amendment along the lines of the Goa Succession, Special Notaries and Inventory Proceeding Act, 2012, and the Indian Succession Act, 1925, which put men and women on par when it comes to devolution of property.
The government must amend the law to correct this injustice in HSA. States should also consider amending these provisions since succession is a concurrent subject. In the absence of sincere efforts to root out patriarchal biases from our laws, campaigns such as Beti bachao, Beti padhao (Save and educate the girl child) will fail to change prejudices. We owe India’s daughters and their parents the same right to care for each other and be cared for by each other as we have for sons in our society, in life or death.
Aparajita Bharti is founding partner, The Quantum Hub
The views expressed are personal
On May 13, 27 workers, including 21 women, were killed in a blaze that swept through an illegal factory in the Mundka area of Delhi. While most news stories termed it a disaster, the deaths of so many female workers show the asymmetries in the working conditions for women. The deaths also show that while the thrust of policies has been to get women into the workforce, there is an absence of discussion on the terms women are compelled to accept when they join it.
Speaking to one of the authors of this piece, the workers stated that they assembled, soldered, and packed 1,000 to 1,500 pieces of CCTV cameras, Wi-Fi routers, and circuit adapters daily in three assembly lines run on two floors of the factory. They earned ₹6,500 per month in cash. They had no pay slips, contracts, or provident funds. In April, they negotiated a pay increase of ₹1,000, taking the monthly wage to ₹7,500 ( ₹288 a day). Even after the raise, their pay was less than half of Delhi’s minimum wage, which is ₹16,064 a month ( ₹618/day) for unskilled work, and ₹17,693 a month ( ₹681/day) for semi-skilled work. Despite the low pay, the factory attracted women workers because the employers allowed them to work in shifts (10 am to 7 pm). This meant that the women could do household work before starting paid work. In addition, the company allowed them to sit while working and installed fans on the assembly line. The women described these as improvements over many other factories they had worked in, including in textile export units where they stood for nine to 10 hours a day.
Successive central governments have projected women as the latent labour force to propel India’s economic growth. In a bid to improve India’s low female labour participation rate – which fell to 19% in 2020 from 26% in 2005 – the current government changed labour laws to make it easier to hire women in night shifts. But with its silence on appropriate treatment and preventative measures to ensure dignity at the workplace, the government appears to be more interested in projecting a seemingly progressive outlook to facilitate the entry of cheap female labour into the economy, than empowering women. This incident and the daily life struggle of millions of working-class women testify that no government has any agenda for dignified employment and well-being for women.
The apparent lack of consensus on this model can also be gauged from incidents when workers have stepped out to fight for their rights. For example, protests by Foxconn workers against their living conditions temporarily shut down the Chennai plant in December 2021. In Bangalore, garment workers demonstrated for days in 2016 for their right to access their provident fund accounts.
Each of these protests expose, like the Mundka fire, the unsettled questions of decent working conditions, lack of social security, theft of minimum wages, and even the threat of loss of lives for working women. Despite the claim of women’s empowerment ringing through State discourse, the reality is different: Even when there is employment generation for women, it is primarily as casual, informal workers, with no minimum wage protections, or social security. Their working conditions are unregulated, they are often employed way below minimum wages, routinely paid less than male workers for the same work despite working more than eight hours a day, and often, the work entails long hours of standing, without any access to toilets.
The Maternity Entitlements Act, which provides 26 weeks of paid leave to women employed in the organised sector, leaves out women working without written contracts. This is when, as per the Periodic Labour Force Survey, only less than a third of all of India’s workers have written contracts. Further, the lack of State-led provisions for child care (crèches) means that women are either forced to let go of work, or depend on kinship or other neighbourhood support, and find it more “suitable” to work in a factory such as in Mundka where the burden of housework can be “adjusted and balanced” along with paid work.
The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire in America, which killed 146 garment workers, the majority of whom were immigrant women, propelled a new movement for safer work conditions. The Rana Plaza disaster in Bangladesh (2013), which killed 1,132, awoke the world to the hardship and working conditions of the majority of young women. It led to a global effort to transparently calculate the loss of income payments, as per International Labour Organization conventions, and take action on appropriate health care and compensation to the victims. India witnesses industrial accidents daily due to the criminal negligence of administrators and elected officials. The death of these young women workers in Mundka must lead us to proactive steps. The government must acknowledge the value of women’s lives, their work inside homes and offices, and guarantee their safety at the workplace.
Anumeha Yadav is a journalist. Arya Thomas is a trade union activist and researcher
The views expressed are personal
The Covid-19 pandemic has left profound impact on the lives of children that go beyond the challenges of lockdowns and school closures. Children experienced isolation, uncertainty, and grief. Grief that acquired different dimensions for children who lost their parents, it meant the struggles to cope with the loss of the first lifeline of affection, care and protection: The parents
Family is the natural unit of society and is pivotal for children’s overall development. Losing a parent or a primary caregiver is associated with mental health problems, reduced schooling, lower self-esteem, and increased risk of suicide, violence, abuse, and exploitation. Several global studies such as the Bucharest Early Intervention Project (BEIP, Nelson et al., 2007), highlight the harmful impact on children of growing outside a family environment, and the rapid improvements when the situation is reversed.
The National Commission for Protection of Child Rights estimates that 147,492 children lost either parent between April 2020 and January 2022, of which 10,094 lost both or the single surviving parent. While the worst of the pandemic is over, difficult journeys lie ahead for the girls and boys who lost parental care.
India has a strong legal and policy framework for child protection. The Juvenile Justice (Care and Protection of Children) Act 2015, provides the foundation for the protection of the most vulnerable children. This Act, following international principles, emphasises the importance of ensuring that children grow in a family environment. The principles of institutionalisation as a measure of last resort and the importance of growing up in a family environment have been further underlined in Mission Vatsalya, the recently announced umbrella scheme of the ministry of women and child development.
The Government of India has advanced significant initiatives to provide protection to children who lost parents to Covid-19, with at least 16 state governments setting dedicated schemes. It is in this context that PM-CARES for Children was launched by Prime Minister a year ago, when the country was fighting against the scourge of the second Covid-19 wave. The scheme, which has reportedly benefited 4,345 children from 557 districts, has a set of provisions to ensure children receive protection, health and education, and lays the foundation for self-reliance once these children reach adulthood.
In addition, the Supreme Court of India, recognising the vulnerabilities faced by children in need of care and protection, especially those in institutions, ordered the release of children after completing due diligence, and when conditions allowed so. As a result, over 145,000 children in need of care and protection returned to their homes or communities. This could open an opportunity to advance path of an Alternative Care Reform in India that encourages deinstitutionalisation of children and expands opportunities for more children to be placed in family-based care, including foster or kinship care.
So what does this government support mean for the children whose lives have irreversibly been changed by Covid-19?
For Vidya and Rekha (names changed), the support has allowed them to continue their education and remain in a known and supporting environment to cope with the grief. A year ago, the lives of these two adolescent sisters were upended. After losing their father in the first wave of the pandemic, the mother succumbed to Covid-19 in the second wave. Their aunt arrived just on time to honour her sister’s dying wish of taking the girls back home. Mother of five, she was as committed to carry her sister’s wish, as concerned about how to make ends meet. At this critical juncture, the village child protection officers in their native district in Mangalore, Karnataka, helped them access benefits under PM CARES for Children Scheme and the Bala Seva Yojana scheme.
The loss of a parent or a caregiver is a trauma difficult to overcome. However, it should not mean children grow up deprived of love, care, protection, nutrition, education and opportunities to thrive.
To the extent possible, it should not mean growing away from a family environment and in a community where children can develop stronger social connections and sense of belonging. UNICEF is committed to continue to support the Government of India's efforts towards this goal. Because children are India’s greatest assets, and to their protection we owe the greatest efforts we can collectively offer.
Soledad Herrero is chief of child protection, UNICEF India
The views expressed are personal
Multipolarity is the state in international relations in which no one or two countries dominate world politics. Rather, many countries come together to deliberate on important global issues. In such a setup, power and influence are effectively concentrated in many hands, across the world. It is often considered an effective system to ensure that the international order is not abused by any one country in particular.
India has been a votary of a multipolar, rules-based democratic world order. Its diplomatic history is a testament to the belief that a just and democratic international order is in the interest of every nation. The Covid-19 pandemic and the Russia-Ukraine crisis have, in their own ways, underlined the importance of multipolarity — instead of a minuscule minority of elite nations — to mitigate crises through broad-based cooperation and consultations.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s recent tour of Europe and the warm welcome extended to him by a host of European countries can be seen as ushering in a new era of multipolarity in the world order. That India can be a steady force in this era of world politics, is a potential being recognised by other countries.
In the coming months, multipolarity will become the operative term and Asian matters will come to the forefront, after being briefly eclipsed by the Ukraine crisis. With the Quad Summit held on May 24, the BRICS Summit on June 23-24, and the G7 Summit on June 26-28, for which India is also invited, Asiaa matters will likely be a key focus.
The reason for this is clear: The locus of international relations has shifted away from the transatlantic region to the Indo-Pacific. Though the Ukraine crisis has kept the world concentrated on Europe, this is bound to change. In this context, India's participation in Quad and BRICS — two seemingly opposite groups comprising the United States (US) and China along with Russia respectively — is a diplomatic tightrope, and the diplomatic deftness of India will be tested because of India's stance on the Ukraine war, and its historical dependence on Russia for its defence requirements. But why do the delicate tightrope walk at all?
International relations have always been conducted with an acute sense of the awareness of domestic compulsions and national interests. For every country, national interest is often the guiding principle that forms international ties and alignments. In the Ukraine crisis as well, the support to either party is given with a cautious cost-benefit analysis of the relative strategic gains.
The US and Europe see it as the moment to, once and for all, reduce Russia's power in the international order. China sees it as testing waters for its Taiwanese adventure and the US’s resolve to protect its allies. The situation in Europe and Japan is far more complex, as they have not completely done away with the Russian oil. If anything, it is a grim reminder of their national interests preceding their moral considerations. Therefore, if other countries are being asked to pick a side by those who have not quite picked a side themselves, it is all but a cruel joke.
India has, however, articulated its position on Ukraine and has communicated it in no uncertain terms. India has called for equal treatment regarding the imposition of economic sanctions on Russia and Russian entities against the background of European and Japanese purchases of Russian oil in comparison to India. This issue became clearer with two separate visits, one by deputy national security adviser to Joe Biden, Daleep Singh, to India, and the other by external affairs minister S Jaishankar to the US, where Jaishankar laid out the Indian position clearly and effectively, focusing both on the humanitarian crisis in Ukraine and India's dependence on Russia without conflating the two issues.
Beyond Ukraine, the issue with Afghanistan is also clear. Proximity in international affairs matters and this area is as proximate to India as it can be. The spillover effect of the US's unilateral exit from Afghanistan and the takeover by the Taliban, coupled with the volatile relations at the Indo-Chinese border, cannot be overlooked in the South Asian region. The superimposition of multipolarity is also informed by the fact that we can choose our friends, but we cannot choose our neighbours.
In the Russia-Ukraine crisis, the Indian position has been consistently on the side of peaceful resolution of the dispute, cessation of all kinds of violence, and adherence to international rules. PM Modi also telephoned leaders of both countries to end the hostilities. It can be argued that the Ukraine crisis could have taken the world back to the Cold War days when countries were asked to pick sides. However, by resisting choosing sides like India has, focusing on national interest while rooting for international peace, the "bloc mentality" has been resisted.
This brings us to the question of multipolarity in the world today, where increasing interdependence among nations has reduced the chances of exclusive groups. This multipolarity is not only India’s posture of choice, but it is being exercised by other countries as well.
Take the US, for example. It could have become the lone ranger in the Western Pacific Ocean bordering the Indian Ocean region in the bygone era, but it seems unlikely now, especially after its actions in Afghanistan and Iraq, and the shock of the Covid-19 pandemic. That the US needs like-minded democratic countries like India, Australia, and Japan — and hence, the resurrection of Quad — to create a rules-based free and open Indo-Pacific can be interpreted as the moment of multipolarity in the US context.
In the case of China and Russia as well, going alone is increasingly looking unlikely, especially with Covid-19 and the grim situation in Ukraine after more than 100 days of aggression, with no clear end in sight. International pressure is bound to rise for Russia. With crippling sanctions, the clock will set its economy backwards and general development.
Today, no country is bigger than the system. Active support and cooperation among nations is a pre-condition, as the international system becomes increasingly interdependent. Since multiple countries have a say in global decision-making, the rules-based democratic international order is the only solution to the present predicament.
In this context, Indian advocacy of multipolarity with one eye set on its national interest is a practical policy orientation. And when PM Modi goes to these summits, he will be symbolising this thrust of multi-alignments without antagonism.
Amritpal Kaur is a doctoral scholar at Jawaharlal Nehru University and contributing fellow at the Centre for Integrated and Holistic Studies, New Delhi
The views expressed are personal
The Indian government is considering a proposal to introduce the “Tour of Duty (ToD)” scheme, under which soldiers will be recruited only for three to five years. The model is somewhat similar to the short-service commission that allows officers to serve for 10 to 14 years.
While the plan is radical in many ways, critics feel that ToD’s implementation will affect the cohesion and effectiveness of the armed forces. While it is true that the concept is new for the Indian defence forces, similar schemes have been implemented in several other countries, without any adverse impacts.
Initially, the concept was meant for officer ranks, but now the scheme will be only for Personnel Below Officer Ranks (PBOR). However, the final contours are yet to be announced, and so those criticising the plan must wait for the final guidelines on the selection process, Terms of Service, severance package for those who are not intended to be retained beyond the initial planned period, and subsequent absorption in the Central Armed Police Forces/private sector/who want to start their ventures.
I have culled out some features of the scheme from open source documents:
•The scheme is only for PBOR.
•Intake will be from All India All Class (AIAC), even for units with a fixed-class composition.
•While yearly vacancies will be announced, this will be the primary mode of recruitment in due course of time.
•Initial service will be for four years, including six months of training.
•There will be a severance package after completing four years of service for all those who are not retained.
•Approximately 25% will either be retained or re-inducted to complete balance service on par with soldiers with current terms and conditions.
•Since partial medical cover is already available to all non-pensioners, except those out on disciplinary grounds, the same level of medical care can also be extended to this category.
•While there may not be assured side-stepping in paramilitary forces or in any other government organisation, help and guidance will be provided to soldiers for their employment, including in the private sector. There will also be provisions for easy access to loans and skill development opportunities.
If the ToD concept comes even close to those mentioned above, it could unleash several benefits.
•While officer corps undergo a stringent selection process, PBOR primarily moves on a length of the service-based model. The real selection is done at the subedar major level, too little and too late. The proposed concept will give an immediate qualitative surge in the units as only 25% will be retained/re-inducted. This qualitative edge will result in better leadership at the NCO level, besides better equipment handling capability and technical orientation.
•Some units have a specific class composition, which has been modified over the years because the intake process has not been proper. As we rise as a nation, national integration will be the key to handling both external and internal threats. The All India All Class (AIAC) will be better as a nationalistic model as ethos will be related to the unit and the country against laying too much focus on class composition.
Since ToD soldiers from AIAC composition will have representation from all the classes, some course corrections can be done as and when needed. Many countries have successfully implemented this model, and there is no reason why India can’t. The proposed model will also eliminate the possibility of class-based units revolting/leaving the lines.
•There are varying training models for officers’ entry into the Indian Army (10-12 to 18 months). There is no document that shows those who have been trained for a lesser period perform less than those who have been prepared for a longer duration. Each category is mandated to be given similar tasks in peace or counter-insurgency areas. Therefore, it is fair to induct these soldiers after six months of training as time spent in the unit also remains part of the “on job training”.
In any case, their numbers will be small in a unit initially. By the time their strength increases, bulk would have been adequately trained and experienced and, therefore, there will be no adversity by adopting this model with six months of training. The planning committee can further look at inducting National Cadet Corps-trained cadets who have already been trained to a reasonable degree.
• Certain skill sets are common in civil and armed forces. Picking ToD soldiers from those skill sets will be advantageous for the armed forces. However, TOD soldiers trained in those skill sets can also be employed outside the Army. These areas need to be identified as manpower and equipment/ infrastructure should have multiple uses, at least dual uses.
•With even ₹10 lakh as the minimum severance package, part Ex-Servicemen Contributory Health Scheme facilities on the lines of non-pensioners and facilitation for subsequent employment make the proposal a reasonably attractive package.
• ToD soldiers will ensure a large quantum of dedicated and skilled workforce, thus enhancing the output of the government/ private sector organisations.
• ToD soldiers can be employed in merchant shipping (since they would be more capable of taking on emerging threats such as piracy) and protection duties for key infrastructure projects.
Major General Ashok Kumar, VSM (Retd) is a Kargil war veteran and defence analyst. He is visiting fellow of CLAWS and specialises in neighbouring countries with a special focus on China
The views expressed are personal
Even as the world observes Earth Day and World Environment Day, scorching heatwaves rampage through major parts of India, recording the highest maximum temperatures in over 100 years. In recent years, globally and in India, the world has witnessed a higher (and increasing) frequency of extreme weather events. Heavy downpours have caused floods even in landlocked cities; people are experiencing extreme heat or more drought-like situations; and cyclones and hurricanes have become more common. The climate crisis has begun impacting our lives in more ways than we can imagine. The latest Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) assessment sounded a strong warning. The report looked at risk as well as adaptation in context of the climate crisis plus non-climatic global trends, including demographic shifts, rapid urbanisation, social and economic inequalities among others.
Where are the elderly in the climate change discourse? For a country like India, this emerges as a pertinent question. With approximately 1.40 billion people, which is over 17% of the global population, India is home to nearly 140 million senior citizens. We have the second-highest senior citizen population today, and it is expected to jump to 194 million by 2031 and 300 million by 2050.
Elderly and the Climate Crisis
How are elderly and the climate crisis linked? At an overall level, ageing and the climate crisis are two mega trends that have multi-generational impact. The passing of baton from one generation to another is embedded in what gets transferred in terms of mindset, behaviour, practices and values, and inextricably linked with its impact on use of resources and sustainability. At a specific level, there are two areas where the climate crisis and elderly connect.
First, older people are disproportionately at risk and affected by climate change events, be it heatwaves or disasters. Age-related vulnerabilities increase risk (as it did during pandemic due to lower immunity and co-morbidities), as well as reduced ability to respond quickly to get out of harm’s way, particularly during earthquakes, floods, cyclones, or as we are seeing in man-made disasters such as in the war zone in Ukraine. During the Chennai floods in 2015, a newspaper carried out a report on how many elderly were left defenceless. Particularly impacted are 8-10% of India’s elders (over 10 million) who may have mobility challenge, are bed ridden or home-bound, or living alone. Livelihoods are also impacted for rural elderly, many being small and marginal farmers, due to their dependence on agriculture and its strong linkages to the climate crisis. Unless approached differently, the elderly get left behind, become lost and typically are last in line, for accessing relief.
Second, given the adverse impact as well the important role for intergenerational responsibility, the elderly can and must play a leadership role in climate action movements. It is as much for youth and the likes of Greta Thunberg to fight for the future as it is for seniors wanting to ensure a lasting and sustainable legacy. At both national and local levels, elders’ action on climate and partnerships has the potential to be an important force. At HelpAge, we see this in our work in villages and cities, where Elder-Self-Help-Groups are embracing and promoting organic farming, zero based natural farming, vermicomposting and taking the lead in tree plantation which also serves as livelihood support, and senior citizen associations in cities advocating against pollution.
Key Focus Areas & Actions
Towards advancing health, wellbeing and resilience of elderly, several urgent actions are needed. We need to change the frame towards ageing – recognise and respond to the challenges and needs of an ageing population and at the same time advance opportunities for them to be in the mainstream and have their own voices and choices. The government under its National Action Plan for Senior Citizens (NAPSrC) has taken some notable steps.
There are certain key focus areas that need serious attention today. Some of them are as follows.
Strengthen financial security. Then, there is the impact of the climate crisis on the financial situation of the elderly population involved. The SECC 2011 had estimated 50% of rural elderly living in poverty, and data shows majority dependent on agriculture and animal husbandry for livelihoods support, which are adversely affected during natural disasters. The current old age pension system is inadequate both in coverage and amount (about 30% eligible receive).
The pandemic brought out the systemic shortfall in social security and urgent attention to direct resources for enhancing pensions for vulnerable as well as promoting livelihoods. On the latter, the government has taken steps through the ministry of rural development and ministry of social justice to scale up elder self-help-groups, an idea pioneered by HelpAge India. However, on pensions, the central government can take the lead in setting a national minimum social pension floor of ₹3000 per month for poor elderly. Currently, the central government contributes a meagre ₹200 (unchanged over last 14 years) on which states make their addition. On an average, pension amount is about ₹500, with some between ₹1000-2000.
Promote an enabling environment: The lives of older people are likely to get worse due to the climate change, and it would be important to involve them in policy making, implementation and addressing gaps in their living environment. Age friendly cities need to be part of city planning, to bring in smart plus sensitive cities. The digital adoption has accelerated across society but elders are struggling to navigate.
During pandemic, lack of information became a challenge. A special scheme from ministry of electronics & information technology focused on digital literacy for elders would be welcome, along with family and community making efforts at their level to train. Youth particularly can play a big role through volunteering. The other important areas are disaster mitigation, response and rehabilitation where elders can contribute to plans, and add perspectives based on their experience, capabilities and vulnerabilities. We also need much greater research on effects of climate change on elderly with data separated by age, gender and disability (mobility). The senior citizens of today and future are valuable members of the society with immense potential to contribute and make a difference.
Rohit Prasad is CEO, HelpAge
The views expressed are personal
Eight years on, very interesting narratives and counter-narratives are being attempted to be set for Telangana, the youngest state of India. Unlike Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand and Uttarakhand formed in November 2000, Telangana retained the powerful economic engine and mega-city of Hyderabad, and had a surplus budget. On cue with the oft-used moniker of a start-up, it was more a high pedigree unicorn on the day of its birth.
The TRS narrative, since its inception, has consistently held that the exploitation and injustices meted out to Telangana region, its people and culture, had to be ended by the creation of a separate state. Besides the political and economic deprivation, the constant attack on the self-respect of the people, of a part that had seen great heights in the past before it was merged with Andhra to create India’s first “linguistic state”, was unconscionable.
The state’s first chief minister K. Chandrashekar Rao led one of Independent India’s most fascinating political struggles to give the people of Telangana their most cherished dream, and almost immediately set the course for its development, promising to make it “Bangaru” (golden) Telangana.
The future of the state and of its people was locked with the most popular slogan of collective aspiration — neellu, nidhulu, niyamakalu (water, resources and jobs) for everyone. It continues to be the narrative of KCR that Telangana can achieve these aspirations only under his rule and that the onslaught against Telangana continues even now; this time, the culprit is not Andhra exploiters and rulers but the Central government led by Narendra Modi and the BJP.
The TRS promises to protect the plural tradition of happy cohabitation of the Hindu-Muslim brotherhood, with secular credentials as the only recipe for the betterment of Telangana.
In stark contrast, Amit Shah led the BJP in setting a historical context of when the Hyderabad state, under the Nizam, had designs of being either a separate nation or become a tributary under the suzerainty of Pakistan.
Mr Shah sets the start of Hyderabad’s journey with Operation Polo, when Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel saved the region from disaster, ensuring it was a part of India. By not celebrating the Liberation Day, the BJP argues, the current dispensation is appeasing Razakar tendencies, who, they allege, possibly still view the merger with India as a negative.
Added to it, the BJP forwards its “party with a difference” argument, set against family-ruled corrupt parties, and pitches how the truest aspirations of the region are best trusted for fructification in the able hands of the saffron party.
The Congress, which calls the creation of Telangana a gift from Sonia Gandhi, has pitched its own brand of past good governance, with great focus on free education and healthcare for all, as the mantra for seeking the mandate in the next polls.
It would be interesting to see the arguments unfold over the next 18 months, as each side portrays itself as the sole trustworthy party the people must repose faith upon along these fault lines. But the battle promises to be interesting, because it is not just for the heart or mind, but the very soul of the newest state of India, one that came to exist because of its people’s indomitable will and action.
“Oh Bachchoo, Bachchoo tell me true
Does God welcome all human prayer?
And if he does, what does he do?
--The evidence is he doesn’t care!”
From Classic Nasik, by Bachchoo
When Michelangelo was asked how he went about carving the statue of David, he is reported to have said “well ah gets ‘old of a large slab of marble and then ah gets me chisel and ‘ammer and ah chips away all de bits dat don’t look like David”.
Well, OK, he didn’t exactly say that, I made it up, but he might, or could have!
Statistics show that one and a quarter million people visit and view the statue each year. They are perhaps there to gaze upon the art of perfection -- of the human form. Maybe some of them have some interest in or allegiance to the Biblically historical figure of David, who fought against the giant Goliath and won.
It may be that all or most of the visitors to the statue are there in obeisance to the power of the story, in which the seemingly weaker good overpowers the heavily armed evil.
All statues commemorate some such real, legendary or imagined virtue.
Recently, the local government of the city of Grantham in Lincolnshire, UK, spent £300,000 on a statue of Margaret Thatcher, Britain’s first woman Prime Minister. Hours after it was installed it was pelted with eggs. The reason was that Lady Thatcher was a lower middle-class revolutionary. She primarily represented that class and its animosity to basic wage workers and as a Tory she, as a matter of course, embraced capitalism, even of a global kind. She was not very popular with the working classes.
I earned my living as a teacher at the beginning of her ministership in government, as Britain’s secretary of state for education, when she abolished the provision of free milk in primary schools to poor children. We demonstrated with the slogan “Margaret Thatcher -- milk snatcher!” It was a cry of disappointed antagonism, but didn’t get the poor kids to have their daily half pint of guaranteed nourishment for growth.
She was unpopular in many other ways and when the statue was installed in Grantham, 13,000 people volunteered on a website to turn up and throw eggs at it. Rumour has it that several street stalls selling rotten eggs sprang up in the locality.
At the height of support for the Black Lives Matter movement the statue of Edward Colston, a 17th-18th century slave-owning philanthropist of Bristol, was taken off its pedestal, carried by a crowd and thrown into the River Avon. The four people who were actually responsible for handling the statue were prosecuted by the police for it, but were later acquitted by a jury.
Gentle reader, imagine the fury, the outrage, the despair and exaggerated reaction of the right-wing press Douglas Murray, journalist and right-wing complainant (I’ve featured him in previous columns) even said in his book that this toppling of statues was like a rewriting of history. His apocalyptic despair said it was the end of Western history and, by implication, civilisation.
History is not transmitted through the presence of statues. There are things called books written by people called “historians”: there are archives and documents of record.
Of course, Douglas may have a point. Perhaps this “Wokery”, as they call it, has gone too far. I mean, let’s say, last week, had I on my travels alighted at a railway station of a city which has been renamed “Personchester”. I’d be confused. And then on the way back to Londonna, if I passed through Birmingsoyabean…? Oh, this assault on the statues of language! Where will it all end? Will poor Queen Elizabeth II during her Platinum Jubilee have to be redesignated as “Royalperson” Elizabeth?
Yes, yes gentle reader, I may have a gone a bit too far to prove the point that “wokery” is an adoption that won’t alter Western civilisation. A fresh, principled, factual insight into history, especially of the colonial period, may alter to a degree our perception of it.
My friend Tariq Ali (I declare an interest by claiming our friendship) has written a book called Churchill, His Times and His Crimes. It challenges the idea that Winston Churchill, Britain’s wartime Prime Minister, should be universally revered. There is a cult of Churchill in Britain and the nationalist tendencies of the UK are entitled to it. After all, in other countries there were figures who openly and ideologically sided with fascism and militarily with Hitler who are revered as icons by some in their countries.
I can with confidence only say that there won’t be a statue of Churchill erected in any Indian city, though there is a very dignified and emotion-provoking statue of Mahatma Gandhi at Tavistock Square in London.
Perhaps it is time that we surpass the categories of “left” and “right” in politics. Ask yourself what the fate of a statue of Vladimir Putin in Moscow or St Petersburg is likely to be? Do the latest Prime Ministers of India merit statues?
There is, I suggest, a new world order of opinion. There are The Erectors who put up statues. Then there are the Egg Throwers who disagree with the person being worthy of a statue. And then there is the third category -- The Take-Downers and Drowners.
These are the categories that will define and divide humanity in the future. I haven’t decided to which of these three I belong.
The Rajya Sabha elections for 57 seats to be held next Friday, June 10, has shown the jostling for space in a new light. The Samajwadi Party’s decision to back Kapil Sibal, the Supreme Court lawyer and a famous Congress dissident till a few months ago who is contesting as an Independent, as well as Rahstriya Lok Dal president Jayant Chaudhary instead of Akhilesh Yadav’s wife Dimple Yadav; or the BJP deciding to support media baron and Independent Subhash Chandra, or another media owner from Haryana, Kartikeya Sharma, reveals the thinking of the party bosses, whose hands could be tied much more in a Lok Sabha or a state Assembly election by caste and regional factors. Akhilesh Yadav has shown a spirit of generosity, which is part of a good political strategist. In the case of the BJP, the move to support Mr Chandra seems to be the tactic of torpedoing the chances of a Congress candidate.
The Rajya Sabha election has also turned out to be a way to offer space for talented individuals who can speak out but who do not stand much of a chance in a popular election. So, we have the BJP renominating finance minister Nirmala Sitharaman and commerce, industry and railway minister Piyush Goyal, and the Congress picking former finance minister P. Chidambaram and former environment minister Jairam Ramesh to go to the Rajya Sabha. The BJP sent Jyotiraditya Scindia to the Rajya Sabha when the Congress could not because of internal party tussles, and in the bargain Mr Scindia’s exit from the Congress with his followers brought the BJP back to power in Madhya Pradesh.
So, politics of fairly high stakes are being played out by various parties in choosing candidates for the Upper House.
The Narendra Modi government over the last eight years had been rather frustrated by the lack of a majority for the party in the Rajya Sabha. It is only now that it has secured the numbers and therefore has the privilege of being in the majority in both Houses of Parliament. It will thus not be dependent on other parties to get various bills passed.
However, the focus of interest in this year’s Rajya Sabha elections has been on how the Congress would deal with the unrest in party, as the people who became dissidents and who led the G-23 were members of the Rajya Sabha, including Ghulam Nabi Azad, Anand Sharma and Kapil Sibal. Mr Sibal has found his way back with the help of Akhilesh Yadav in Uttar Pradesh. There had been speculation that Mr Azad and Mr Sharma might also be accommodated. But it was not to be so. The Gandhi family’s seal of disapproval is evident in the denial of tickets to Mr Azad and Mr Sharma, who had functioned as leader and deputy leader of the party in the House. It can only be speculated that the Congress has now closed the chapter of dissidence by snubbing Mr Azad and Mr Sharma. But dissidence has a way of raising its head, and the Gandhis can’t hope to have completely ended it, especially when the party is not in power in the vast majority of states in the country, and it is in a bad shape in both Houses of Parliament.
What is the message that the BJP is sending by not renominating the long-time Muslim in the party, Mukhtar Abbas Naqvi, minister for minority affairs? The BJP has shown that it doesn’t have to play the Congress card of accommodating a member of the religious minority, and that it can win elections without a Muslim. It has proved so in the last two Lok Sabha elections. It appears that by dropping Mr Naqvi, it is almost declaring that it is a party only of the majority community. And it also seems to believe that the interests of the Muslim community can be served by other communities, a dangerous trend despite its apparently benign intent.
However, the BJP is very sensitive on the representation of Scheduled Castes (SCs), Scheduled Tribes (STs) and Other Backward Classes (OBCs). It tried to attract members of these groups as a way of establishing its foothold in these segments in the country at large.
Former Rajasthan chief minister Vasundhara Raje Scindia, a senior BJP leader in her own right, was supposed to have found a place in the Rajya Sabha list, but did not. This is being read as a snub. This time around the party is looking to find a new chief ministerial face for the Assembly election in Rajasthan next year and, given Mr Modi’s penchant to look for surprise replacements, Ms Scindia stands to lose out. Mr Modi’s style has been a ruthless one of dropping the old guard and picking new ones. So, as part of this policy, Prakash Javadekar, who has had a good run in New Delhi since he came in 2003 from Maharashtra, seems to have come to a dead end as well, along with Mr Naqvi. So has been Dr Vinay Sahasrabuddhe, chairman of the Indian Council of Cultural Relations (ICCR), and a man with strong RSS connections. Mr Modi is looking for ways of minimising the presence of not just the old-timers but also the upper castes as part of his social engineering, which has been an ongoing process in the party for decades, something that former BJP ideologue Govindacharya had championed in the 1990s. Mr Modi seems to be quietly, and often not so quietly, bringing forward SCs, STs and OBCs. The RSS has been doing this for a long time, and Mr Modi, like a good RSS preacher, is carrying forward the evangelical work with greater zeal.
Given the populist propensities of most political parties, it seems that they find the Rajya Sabha a useful place, but they fail to recognise its constitutional importance as a “House of Elders”, which is meant to keep a critical eye over legislation passed by the Lok Sabha. Political leaders, especially those in power at the Centre, want the Rajya Sabha to simply rubber-stamp all that the Lok Sabha passes without any scrutiny. But unintentionally and unconsciously, they send members to the Rajya Sabha who perform a critical role without saying so, though very rarely do bills passed by the Lok Sabha actually get sent back to the Lower House for reconsideration.