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Editorials - 04-03-2022

The Russian actions open the door to reinvent multilateral institutions that have been failing

In a bid to isolate Russia, the world has imposed some of the most wide-raging sanctions seen in recent times, as the war in Ukraine enters the eighth day. But why has the international world order failed to prevent the war? To discuss the implications of Russia’s war on its neighbouring country, Asoke Mukerji and Mohan Kumar look at the human cost of the war in a conversation moderated bySuhasini Haider . Edited excerpts:

Looking at Russia’s attack on Ukraine, and the unprecedented sanctions and measures taken by Western countries, would you say the international post-world war order has failed?

Asoke Mukerji:The international order, created in 1945, rested on certain assumptions and obligations. The assumptions were that the international order would prioritise peace and development. And that there would be institutions — not only the United Nations (UN) as a universal institution, but the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, and the World Trade Organization (WTO) as three pillars — to sustain the peace and to provide mankind with a framework for sustainable development.

In 1946, the first jolt to this vision came with the Cold War, which I would date to Winston Churchill’s speech at Fulton, Missouri, where he talked about the “Iron Curtain” descending on Europe. When the Cold War ended, and the Berlin Wall came down, and the Soviet Union dissolved itself, there was an expectation that we would go back to the vision of 1945. But unfortunately, the U.S. and NATO [North Atlantic Treaty Organization] chose a path of containment and confrontation with Russia, which began to react to this after the NATO planned to include Georgia and Ukraine [in the alliance]. I’m not justifying what is happening; I’m saying there is context to it. And then, after endorsing the Minsk agreements, why did the United Nations Security Council (UNSC) not enforce it? I think this is the failure of the UNSC and the failure of European powers, which are equally responsible as the U.S. for carrying on with NATO in the 1990s.

Mohan Kumar:Such things have happened in the past. But two wrongs don’t make a right. This is the lowest point ever reached by the UNSC in terms of not being able to agree even on the most fundamental things. And I think it is also a reflection of the fact that we do not have a settled international order. We are moving from something like a unipolar moment to a very messy multipolar world order, which is yet to take shape.

Is Russia’s bombardment of Ukranian cities a violation of the UN Charter? And if the UN is so ineffectual, is it time to review it?

AM:It is a violation of the Charter. The violation of the territorial integrity of states and the sovereignty of states is one of the principles which binds the UN. Indians were one of the first victims of the violation of this principle in January 1948 when our territory was occupied by Pakistan. While today Russia has vetoed this resolution in the UNSC, which was co-sponsored by about 80 countries, not very long ago, the U.S. also vetoed a resolution condemning Israel’s activities in its occupied territories. Two wrongs never make a right, I agree, but it’s important to look at how we can move to bring back the vision of 1945. The Ukraine crisis should actually act as a catalyst for the UN General Assembly (UNGA) to agree on convening a general conference to review the Charter, because if there are issues with the veto, this is the place with the legal framework to do it.

MK:I think it’s long overdue. I see very slim prospects of that happening. There are no angels in this conflict. My deepest worry is the total irrelevance of the UNSC to the ordinary person in Ukraine. How does it matter what the UNSC does, if it is not going to protect your life, which is precious? I looked very closely at the Sino Russian joint statement (February 4, 2022). And the statement is all about preserving the existing world order. There is not a single word about UN reform in that statement. We’ve seen the UNSC, which is completely paralysed. I agree that this is the perfect moment to reform it. But if you asked me whether I would wager it will happen, my answer would be no.

Are we seeing a complete breakdown of the world order and the global economic order, given the kind of sanctions NATO countries are employing to “isolate Russia”?

MK:I think the global economic order is sought to be rearranged. These are the most wide-ranging sanctions that I have seen, but there are some loopholes. The energy exports from Russia are not forbidden for two political reasons. One, Europe will suffer and Germany will suffer if that happens. And two, the U.S. is heading towards a mid-term election, and I don’t think the U.S. would want gas prices to go up. You can deal even with Gazprom, provided you process the payment through non-American banks. Yes, there are some asset freezes and travel bans against individuals. There is the sovereign debt rating of Russia, which has been reduced to junk status overnight, because otherwise the sanctions would have meant nothing. But Russia controls supply chains in metals like titanium, palladium and neon. In other words, Russia is a full spectrum commodity superpower. So, it is not going to be that easy [to isolate it]. The sanctions are devastating. But I think the Russians are fully prepared for this. And we have to see whether China will come to the rescue of Russia or not.

AM:I’m not an apologist for Russia, but I do want to make this point that it’s for the first time that an initiative has been taken to weaponise the entire economic sector through the use of such wide-ranging sanctions. There are even calls from some Western nations to remove Russia from the WTO. The second point is the sanctions, which are not supported by the UNSC. They are unilateral sanctions. And when we look at unilateral sanctions, we have to make up our mind whether we as a country which fought against colonial rule and became independent will today accept the extraterritorial application of domestic laws of other countries. This is a political question. So, I think we have to actually call out these things.

Do consistent abstentions at the UNSC, the UN Human Rights Council and the UNGA behove India’s aspirations as a global leader?

AM:I think India’s abstentions are in India’s interest. We have abstained to create room for diplomacy. There is no military solution that can be sustained on the ground, it has to be a diplomatic solution, a political solution. And who will bring this political solution? You need a grey area for diplomacy to find solutions. I think that this point of ‘you’re with us or you’re against us’ does not hold water in terms of what the role of elected members of the UNSC is on issues of war and peace.

MK:I don’t feel that abstention comes with negative connotations of sitting on the fence. I think there are circumstances where abstention is a positive, strong decision. I think the larger issue is how effective the UNSC itself is. And if it doesn’t reform itself, I’m afraid the world will look at other things. You will have a brief period of time like this when people unilaterally do whatever they want to do, but then the world will seek a new order.

Isn’t there another message sent — that countries will keep their nuclear weapons, no matter what the UNSC says? Iran and North Korea have been isolated but not attacked, whereas Ukraine and Libya, two countries that gave up nuclear weapons, have been invaded.

AM:That’s a very valid point. Just six weeks after the UN Charter was signed, the first nuclear bomb was used by the U.S. on Japan. And therefore, it was not part of the Charter when the Charter was conceptualised, but it has definitely become a reality of our lives. And then the sleight of hand in which the nuclear weapon states derailed the negotiations on nuclear disarmament and brought in the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) to give themselves the right to have nuclear weapons in perpetuity while the remaining countries of the world, as you said, are dependent on guarantees of protection. Ukraine, Kazakhstan, and even Belarus were persuaded by the U.S. and the Russian Federation to give up their nuclear weapons in exchange for a guarantee. So, I think that Ukraine and probably other countries will very likely be rethinking their options.

MK:I agree, horizontal nuclear proliferation is a real challenge. The NPT has to be rewritten. This inability of multilateral institutions, whether it is WTO, the UNSC or the NPT, to rewrite the rules will make them irrelevant if they continue to be discriminatory. The UNSC has become irrelevant. The NPT has become irrelevant. The WTO has become irrelevant. And that’s why people are signing bilateral free trade agreements left, right and centre. So, it is a real challenge because this kind of a synchronised crisis can be found in all multilateral institutions which were set up in the aftermath of World War II. They have to be redesigned. That is the existential challenge for multilateralism.

COVID-19 had already dealt a blow to multilateralism, given refusals by big powers to waive patents, provide access to vaccines, etc. Have the Russian actions on Ukraine and Western sanctions now dealt a death blow to the UN?

AM:Well, probably not a death blow, but a major blow to the UN structures as they are today. But I would say that these actions also open the door to reinvent the UN. To do that, countries like India have to take a much more visible leadership role to articulate what the other issues are on the multilateral agenda, which also need to be looked at.

MK:This crisis provides an opportunity to change the structure, but the window is going to be very brief. The current structure means that the P-5 [China, France, Russia, the U.K., and the U.S.] veto-holders believe that the veto is what saves them from international scrutiny and for being able to do what they do and get away with it. And they will not give that up. Even so, there is this brief window given the Ukraine crisis, and India has nothing to lose and everything to gain by using this window, using the available instruments, going to the court of international public opinion and making our case strongly for a seat on a reformed Council.

I don’t feel that abstention comes with negative connotations of sitting on the fence. I think there are circumstances where abstention is a positive, strong decision.

Mohan Kumar



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In election-obsessed India, there is hardly any time to discuss the advances of modern science and the repercussions

In India, because of the election cycle, and because political events oscillate between their significance for an electoral democracy or their implications for an electoral autocracy, we spend little time discussing the advances of modern science and their repercussions for public life. There have been such fascinating developments in science and in technology, such as in artificial intelligence, but these have merely been reported and then have quietly faded from public view.

For India to ponder over

For example, there has been little discussion on the privacy implications of the new Ray-Ban/Facebook smart glasses/spectacles branded as ‘Stories’. These allow the wearer to video record or take photos of events and conversations without the permission or knowledge of those in the wearer’s vicinity. She has only to press an unobtrusive button and the recording starts. Each video recording can last 30 seconds. It is an elegant device that combines both high technology and high fashion. Reviewers of the glasses were unsure whether to regard the glasses as creepy or as cool. What are their implications for state interference in our privacy?

In India, such advances of science and technology get adopted without even a boo. They soon get normalised without their ethical implications even being debated. This is because the election cycle, a low hanging fruit, dominates our attention. We do not have to, therefore, deal with complex ethical questions that result from advances in science and technology. And yet we need to.

Direction of medical science

The advances in science that I would like to place for public debate come from the field of medical sciences. It is an area labelled ‘Xenotransplantation’, to refer to its technical name. I am a student of the human sciences and not of medicine and so I shall place the facts as I understand them, which I have culled from popular news forums such as BBC,Nature ,The New York Ti mes, andThe Guardian .

In the last four months, three news reports have caught my attention. The first case comes from a successful experiment, in September 2021, at the NYU Langone hospital in New York, one of the most advanced research hospitals in the field of medical sciences. A medical team there attached a kidney from a gene-edited animal to a person declared brain dead to see if the animal kidney was able to do the job of processing waste and producing urine. It did. The details are in theNYT , January 20, 2022.

The family of the person had given its permission for this experiment since the individual had donated her body for medical science. In the United States there are apparently 90,000 persons waiting for a kidney transplant and this successful experiment would go some way towards meeting that need (The Guardian , October 20 2021); another estimate is that there are 1,21,678 people waiting for lifesaving organ transplants in the U.S.).

The second case, reported on January 14, 2022, is from the University of Maryland where a team of doctors used the heart of an animal, which had genetically modified features, as a replacement heart on a patient who had run out of available options. By all accounts the operation seems to have been successful. The Director of the Cardiac Xenotransplant Program of the University of Maryland, Dr. Muhammad Mohiuddin, (originally from Pakistan) had this to say about the significance of the operation. “This is a game changer because now we will have these organs readily available … and the technique of genetically modifying them… We can thereby customize the heart or the organ for the patient” (the BBC, January 15, 2022).

The third case is the news report that a doctor in Germany, who has been working in the area of xenotransplants, plans to develop a farm to cultivate genetically modified organs for such transplants. In his view, this will ease the pressure on the medical system. In Germany alone there are 8,500 patients waiting for organ transplants (The Guardian , February 3, 2022) In all three cases the animal from which the tissue or organ had been taken was the pig. It is regarded by medical science as the animal whose organs are currently best suited for humans.

Moral and social issues

At the very least there are three ethical issues that these medical advances raise for human societies. In India these developments carry an additional sting. Should we discuss them or, given that they involve community sensibilities, should we pretend they are not there? Do these ethical issues pertain only to the individual or do they also concern the community? Which gets precedence? Are we obliged to discuss them, because Article 51A of the Constitution requires us “to develop scientific temper”, or can we ignore them?

The animal rights movement has objected to these advances in medical science, of xenotransplantation, because it ignores the rights of animals. They are hostile to the idea of animal farms with genetically modified animals for the purpose of harvesting organs for humans requiring transplant. Animals, they argue, also have rights and it is our moral responsibility to support these rights. We must, therefore, not walk down the road of organ farms. Such thinking, they argue, stems from a philosophy of anthropocentrism which places human beings at the centre of nature and regards all other living creatures as having only value if they can be of use to humans. Such anthropocentric thinking, they rightly declare, has been the basis of the ecological crises of climate change. Mahatma Gandhi, they add, was opposed to the practice of vivisection.

The animal rights perspective places on us the classic utilitarian dilemma of whether it is better to kill an animal and save a human being or to save an animal and let the human die. Medical science is having to work though such moral dilemmas. In India, where such questions do not even enter the portals of regulatory bodies, such as the Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR), I think the time has come for us to ask such questions (Nature , January 14, 2022).

But it is the third set of questions that is so incendiary in India. In a society where the pig is considered a dirty animal, where eating pork is considered disgusting, where those who deal with pigs are given low social status, where even asking such questions is taboo, what should the medical fraternity do? If global advances in medical research are moving towards a consensus on the suitability of a pig’s heart for patients suffering from terminal heart decline, what should the medical authorities recommend to the government? Imagine that such a patient is a Jain, or a Jew, or a Muslim or just a vegetarian. Should they be allowed to die since their belief system forbids them to have anything to do with a pig, or should they be offered a choice of life?

Further, would not the wide adoption of xenotransplant procedures diminish the illegal and immoral market in human organs, where people, even children, are abducted so that their organs can be harvested? In school we were taught to memorise proverbs. I never quite understood the saying, ‘You cannot make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear’. Now I do. You can.

Peter Ronald deSouza is the D.D. Kosambi Visiting Professor at Goa University.

The views expressed are personal



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Foreign policy challenges and domestic hurdles confront U.S. President Biden in his quest for a policy legacy

When U.S. President Joe Biden stepped up to the podium to deliver his first State of the Union address before both houses of Congress this week, it was a historic moment for several reasons. Not only have none of his successors since 1945 delivered this address during an ongoing ground war of a similar magnitude to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, but the optics of his speech captured another rare event. The two top Congressional officials who stood behind Mr. Biden as he spoke, the Speaker of the House of Representatives and the Vice President, were both women for only the second time in the country’s history.

The hurdles, Ukraine too

Notwithstanding the epochal times marking this event, the reality is that Mr. Biden faces grim challenges on the foreign policy front and a steep upward climb to overcome domestic hurdles before he can claim credit for any policy legacy that purports to improve the lot of his fellow citizens.

On the foreign policy side, Russian President Vladimir Putin’s move to call the West’s bluff and kick off a military assault of Ukraine has posed complex strategic questions to the Biden administration, which are difficult to explain away to a U.S. domestic audience. Why did Mr. Biden leave Kyiv hanging in the balance without North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) membership and with a virtual target on its back vis-à-vis Moscow’s guns, when many among Ukraine’s neighbours are treaty allies of NATO? Why, despite so many explicit signs that Russia would invade Ukraine if NATO carried on expanding its footprint eastwards across Europe, did Mr. Biden’s administration not do more to either make it harder for Moscow to act in this regard or at least buy more time by persuading Mr. Putin to engage diplomatically?

Shadow of midterm elections

Now that the sweeping economic sanctions that Washington has slapped on Russian political elites and institutions associated with Kremlin have roiled the Russian economy and brought the rouble down to historic lows, how will the Biden administration contain the spill-over effects of economic collapse and prevent them from causing a broader global recession? With the conflict intensifying and the human toll rising fast as Russian troops march on Kyiv, the U.S.’s capabilities as a superpower nation will be scrutinised closely on the world stage in the days and weeks ahead. They will almost certainly be attacked by Republicans back home as the midterm election cycle gains momentum — former U.S. President Donald Trump has already set the tenor for the debate by describing Mr. Putin’s Ukraine invasion as “genius” and “savvy”.

At home, much depends on the outcome of the midterm elections, especially regarding the prospects for a Democratic White House to carry out any meaningful policy reform in the two years that the Biden administration will have from the time the midterms are complete. Democrats and Republicans are evenly split in the Senate with 50 seats each, while Democrats are clinging on to a narrow 221-212 margin in the House of Representatives, both of which advantages could be lost to Democrats if the 2022 midterm election results do not favour them.

Critical issues

The keystone issues that Mr. Biden needs to convince voters on, if he is to stave off a deleterious shift in the balance of power on Capitol Hill this November, include jobs and economic recovery in the post-COVID-19 climate of uncertainty, preventing the pandemic from wreaking further havoc in future waves, if any, inflation, and social security and education reforms to ease the financial burden on middle class budgets. Almost without exception, Mr. Biden will need the support of Congress to get the heavy lifting done in these policy areas, particularly where budgetary apportionments require lawmakers’ sign off. Certainly, it will matter in the foreign policy space. A recent example demonstrating the importance of Congress here is the fact that negotiations over a $6.4 billion security and humanitarian aid package for Ukraine hit a stalemate in the Senate over the source of these funds — military spending allocation already agreed, or emergency provisions above and beyond that level. Similarly, on the domestic front, Mr. Biden’s omnibus mega-bill in late 2021, seeking $1.85 trillion for social security and climate change, came to naught in the face of cohesive opposition from Senate Republicans and some rebel Democrats who voted across the line.

The Trump impact

At the heart of the Democratic conundrum is the fact that the Mr. Trump’s term in office unleashed forces that have tectonically shifted the ground under Washington politics. Whatever the charges of criminality or wrongdoing by the 45th President of the U.S., whether in terms of tax evasion or his role in spurring on the January 6, 2021 assault on the buildings of Capitol Hill, Mr. Trump’s nativist call to white America to reassert its purported supremacy has firmly embedded itself in the broader discourse and heralded a new era where political correctness is eschewed, and facts sometimes matter less than opinion.

Indeed, it is evident that Mr. Biden is seeking to walk a tightrope between traditional mainstream Democratic values and the new paradigm when he spoke at the State of the Union of “the rebirth of pride” and “the revitalization of American manufacturing”, which, if it materialises, could help his administration “Lower your cost, not your wages”, and ensure the U.S. builds “more cars and semiconductors in America. More infrastructure and innovation in America. More goods moving faster and cheaper in America. More jobs where you can earn a good living in America. Instead of relying on foreign supply chains, let’s make it in America”.

At the end of the day the old adage of “It’s the economy, stupid”, continues to resonate deeply across the country as the tagline for the American Dream. The realisation of this — the Biden administration appears to concede — will require the adoption of strong self-interest as a guiding value for policymaking even when it comes at the cost of a gradual erosion of the global rules-based order and the globalisation consensus, and the repudiation of older, constitutional values such as equal protection of the laws.

narayan@thehindu.co.in



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During past evacuation missions, officials quietly did their work and the media was tolerated at best

Why have you come?” shouted Ambassador Manimekalai Murugesan, a small but commanding figure at the Indian embassy in Tripoli, Libya. “We can’t look after you too!” The sound of gunfire was going off every few minutes, sometimes closer to, and sometimes further from, the embassy building, where a small team of officers were burning the midnight oil in tense circumstances. Their task was to ensure that every one of about 15,000 Indians working in Libya had their passport papers in order and received exit clearances from the Muammar Gaddafi government to leave the country, all within a quickly closing window, with armed militia ruling the streets. On February 15, 2011, protests had broken out in the eastern Libyan city of Benghazi. By March 1, the United Nations General Assembly suspended Libya’s membership in the Human Rights Council. Anticipating a war, and that Indians would need to be helped out of the conflict zone, my cameraman and I had been despatched to Tripoli, clueless of the kind of trouble we were headed for. When we landed, it was already clear to us that the city was emptying out, with most expecting a UN-authorised ‘no-fly zone’ over the country. Our flight via Amman had only four passengers going to Tripoli, and at the airport, an entire ‘tent city’ had been erected for lakhs of foreign workers fleeing the country.

For all the tough welcome, Ambassador Manimekalai and her team were more than hospitable. They helped us with numbers and directions for how to get around the city, even as they organised the thousands of Indian nurses, teachers, engineers and labourers for an exit from Libya by March 15, the unofficial date when the UN Security Council was due to consider a Chapter VII resolution, or force authorisation and was expected to begin a military intervention. Commercial flights had shut down. The Ambassador had to meet Gaddafi to ask him to allow special Air India flights to run services for the week so that Indians could be flown home, all part of ‘Operation Safe Homecoming’. The next ask was tougher: India had decided to send in a naval fleet, comprising two destroyers —INS Mysore andINS Aditya — and the biggest ship,INS Jalashwa , which had already set off from Mumbai on February 26, and the Ambassador needed permission for them to steam into Tripoli harbour, even as Gaddafi kept all international vessels in international waters. Since there was goodwill for India, Gaddafi agreed to make an exception for the Indian vessels, which arrived on March 8 and left a few days later, carrying about 2,500 Indians and other nationalities out of the war zone. NATO strikes on Libya began on March 19.

The operation had used the military’s experience of another evacuation I had been a part of, when the INS Mumbai and other ships went from Cyprus to Lebanon during the Israeli bombings of 2006. The Indian Ambassador in Beirut, Nengcha Lhouvum, and officials of the Ministry of External Affairs (MEA) back home negotiated a humanitarian “window”, when the Israel Defense Forces agreed to stop shelling Beirut and surrounding areas to allow the ships to enter and exit the harbour. When we entered Beirut, there were Indian embassy officials on the port floor, stamping passports and organising transport for Indians stuck in areas under fire.

The two operations are among at least 30 such evacuations, including the biggest one of 1.17 lakh Indians from the Gulf in 1990 during the Iraq war. They were carried out by the MEA’s diplomats worldwide, and Navy, Air Force and Air India personnel who often risked their own lives, quietly, and without the need or even the desire for press coverage (as the Ambassador in Tripoli made clear, we were actually in the way). The media was tolerated at best, and certainly not encouraged to glorify these missions, which were seen simply as the duty of Indian officers towards their fellow citizens. When we returned, the welcome was perfunctory, with no senior official, let alone minister, there to address returning citizens. Times have changed.

suhasini.haidar@thehindu.co.in



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India must pursue schemes for rehabilitation of children orphaned by the pandemic

Numbers can often be hustled to tell many tales; but it is the story that is picked on the basis of the desire to do what is morally right that sets the course for meaningful action. The recentLancet estimates of COVID-19-associated orphanhood, which put the number at over 19 lakh children orphaned as a result of COVID-19, has raised India’s hackles.The Lancet study generated numbers based on modelling, and therefore only estimates and not actual numbers are available. Globally, it estimated that 52 lakh children had been rendered orphans by the pandemic. The study, in its original period, March 1, 2020 to April 30, 2021 was revised, with updates based on excess mortality and fertility data used to model increases in estimates of COVID-19- associated orphanhood between May 1 and October 31, 2021 for 21 countries. Orphanhood was defined as the death of one or both parents; or the death of one or both custodial grandparents. The authors claimed their findings showed that numbers of children orphaned by COVID-19 had almost doubled in six months compared with the data after the first 14 months of the pandemic. India has objected strongly to the estimate of 19 lakh, terming it as “sophisticated trickery intended to create panic among citizens”. As per data collected by the National Commission for Protection of Child Rights and collated on the Bal Swaraj portal, the number of children orphaned during COVID-19 in India was far lower, at 1.53 lakh.

While the study does include revised estimates for all the nations, the message that it seeks to convey is the absolute urgency with which governments must incorporate childcare into any COVID-19 management programme. The state should proactively draw such children into the umbrella of care to save them from numerous adversities — poverty, violence, destitution, and lack of access to education and health care. The Indian government, to its credit, announced a grand plan of support for children forced into orphanhood by COVID-19. Many States announced rehabilitation plans, including provisions for adoption, foster care, education and health care; some admittedly more progressive than others, but the momentum was certainly built up in the country. It is time to update the status of such programmes, and information on the number of cases where intervention has occurred, and where it is pending, must be put out in the public realm. Well begun is half done, but the Centre and the States must expand efforts. The Government would do well to allow interventions for children to be informed by a ‘whole-life” care paradigm, and fresh data from time to time, especially in a pandemic that is not only rapidly evolving, but by all accounts, is nowhere near ending.



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India might have to engage more deeply with the Ukrainian war as the conflict deepens

With a convincing majority of 141 of 193 countries, the UN General Assembly voted on Wednesday for a resolution that deplored in the “strongest terms” Russia’s attack on Ukraine and demanded an immediate withdrawal of Russian troops. The resolution, which was discussed in a rare special emergency session and under the rubric of the “Uniting for Peace” resolution invoked after decades, came as a result of an aborted resolution at the UN Security Council, which Russia, as a permanent member, had vetoed. While the UNGA resolution carries little teeth, it does represent a common stand taken by the international public commons, with 96 countries signing up as co-sponsors of the resolution. Russia rejected the outcome as a political vote that came of severe “pressure” from the U.S. and European countries that were the drivers of the resolution, but it seemed clear that it was isolated on the global stage. Belarus, Eritrea, North Korea and Syria voted against the motion, and 35, including India, abstained. While the resolution also decried the Russian decision to recognise Donetsk and Luhansk as independent states, representatives of member states made it clear that it was the relentless bombing of Ukrainian cities that they could not turn a blind eye to.

India’s abstention, not a surprise, disappointed many western countries that have been lobbying for a shift in the Indian position. In the past week, India has abstained from three votes (including two procedural ones) at the UNSC where it is an elected member, one at the UN Human Rights Council, and another at the IAEA on resolutions critical of Russia. In an explanation of vote (EOV), India’s UN representative said that India is calling for dialogue, while officials say that India’s abstention has given it room to play a role in diplomacy with Russia and Ukraine. In a sign of some discomfort with Russian actions, the EOV also dropped the earlier references to the “legitimate security interests”, and included language on respecting the “territorial sovereignty” of members. India has also sent humanitarian aid to Ukraine although its vote of abstention indicates the Modi government still has many reasons not to vote against Russia, a strategic and defence partner that has stood by India. As the conflict continues, and the global community expresses its disapproval, however, India’s desire to remain an “abstentionist” power is being called into question. The Government has also said that it needs to remain on good terms with both sides as its primary focus remains the safe exit of Indians from the conflict zone. While evacuating Indians is an important priority, it cannot be India’s only focus in this crisis, given its aspirations for global leadership and the oft quoted motto of “Vasudhaiva Kutumbakam”. It may become necessary for India to engage more deeply with the conflict in Europe, which is now a global concern.



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New Delhi, March 3: The Palayamkottah-Tuticorin Road and the Bangalore-Mangalore Road via Kunigal and Hassan are among the six roads whose inclusions in the national highway system was announced here today by the Union Minister of State for Transport and Shipping, Mr. Om Mehta. The total length of these roads is 3,600 km and this is claimed to be the biggest ever chunk of roads to be added to the national highway system so far. With this addition, the total length of roads in national highway system will be 28,819 kms and the number of roads 56. The roads which have now been added are: the West Coast Road passing through the States of Maharashtra, Mysore, Goa and Kerala: Courtalim-Marmogoa: Palayamkottah-Tuticorin Road: Chas-Bokaro-Ranchi-Rourkela-Barakot-Talcher Road: Bangalore-Kunigal Hassan -Mangalore Road: and Pathankot-Amritsar-Ganganagar-Bikaner-Jaisalmer-Barmer-Kandla Road.



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Railway Minister P C Sethi agreed to lighten the burden of over Rs 260 crore imposed on railway users in his budget by a paltry sum of Rs 4 crore.

Railway Minister P C Sethi agreed to lighten the burden of over Rs 260 crore imposed on railway users in his budget by a paltry sum of Rs 4 crore. Prominent among the concessions announced in the Lok Sabha is the restoration of the age limit for free travel of children up to five years. In doing so, Sethi bowed to the severe criticism faced by him in the House for taking away a concession that had been given in the Year of the Child.

Bar vs Bench

A special bench of the Supreme Court virtually sought an apology from the five senior lawyers who made the controversial statement alleging bias against some sitting judges, of the court. When the lawyers showed reluctance, the judges asked them to submit in writing whatever they had to say before the next hearing so that the court could consider it “coolly and dispassionately”. Chief Justice Y V Chandrachud and four senior judges interrupted their normal work to take up the controversial statement made by A K Sen and other senior lawyers representing the Congress-I group of respondents in the Bengal poll case. Sen is also the president of the Supreme Court Bar Association. The CJI allowed only Sen to speak on behalf of the group.

UP Encounters

The alleged massacre of Harijans in false encounters in Uttar Pradesh rocked the Lok Sabha when the entire Opposition except the DMK staged a walk-out after making a vain bid to table an adjournment motion on the issue. The House witnessed noisy scenes for over 20 minuteswhen the Opposition demanded a statement by the government.

Firaq Is Dead

Raghupati Sahai Firaq Gorakhpuri, renowned Urdu poet, died in Delhi. His body will be taken to Allahabad, where he will be cremated.



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There are long-term consequences for equity and public health if vast numbers of students continue to be tripped by high price barriers and are forced to seek education outside India.

After anxious days and nights and many perilous journeys, thousands of Indian students are making their way back home from war-torn Ukraine. Around 4,000 Indians, mostly students in medical colleges, remain in cities under Russian attack and shelling. Their evacuation, under extremely difficult circumstances, must remain the foremost priority of the government of India. But the task does not end there. Looming over the 20,000-odd medical students, whose education now stands summarily disrupted, is the question of their future. The Russian assault on Ukraine has not only upended several certainties of the global order. Even the most optimistic strategic expert does not count on this conflict to be a short one. The likelihood of Indian MBBS students being able to resume their classes in Ukraine in the near future appears distant. But they cannot be left in the lurch. The governments, both at the states and the Centre, must consult with other stakeholders, from medical college administrations to teachers and hospitals, to find a way for these students to complete their studies.

The plight of the students in Ukraine has also turned the spotlight on the inadequacies of medical education in India, which leads thousands of MBBS aspirants to go abroad every year. The mismatch lies in the shortage of affordable medical seats. The parents of Naveen Shekharappa Gyanagoudar, who was killed in Kharkiv, are on record saying they did not have the finances to secure an MBBS degree in India. While government medical colleges are relatively more affordable, they account for only half of the 90,000-odd seats on offer — and demand extremely high NEET scores. To put this figure in context, seven to eight lakh students clear NEET, the eligibility test for medical education, every year.

India needs more doctors and medical professionals — as per WHO standards, the country must have 1.38 million doctors whereas, according to the National Health Profile 2021, it has just 1.2 million registered medical practitioners. Foreign universities have been beneficiaries of the shortfall in medical seats in India, a result of inadequate public investment in medical education — in the past five years, there has been a three-fold increase in the number of candidates taking the Foreign Medical Graduates Examination, the mandatory test that graduates from foreign universities need to clear to practise medicine in India. There are long-term consequences for equity and public health if vast numbers of students continue to be tripped by high price barriers and are forced to seek education outside India. In the long run, the government has to invest more in medical education. That is a significant takeaway from the ordeal of the students in Ukraine.

This column first appeared in the print edition on March 4, 2022 under the title ‘After the arrival’.



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Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov’s nuke-war talk makes Delhi’s challenge more difficult than it is, particularly with thousands of Indian students still stranded in Ukraine.

Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov is not a novice. He has been leading Russia’s relations with the world for nearly two decades, and before that he was his country’s Permanent Representative to the United Nations for a decade. He knows what impact the words of a senior functionary like himself can carry across the world, as the country that he represents has only days ago launched a military invasion of its smaller neighbour. So when he lets drop the sentence (in an interview to the Russian news agency RIA) that “if a third World War were to take place, it would involve nuclear weapons and be destructive”, he does so deliberately, knowingly. Read together with Russian President Vladimir Putin’s warning to the world as he sent his troops into Ukraine last week that any attempt to “interfere” with the Russian action would lead to “consequences never before seen”, his orders putting Russia’s nuclear forces on alert, and the Russian Navy’s reported drill, complete with nuclear submarines in the Barents Sea, Lavrov’s words are alarming.

Lavrov’s claims that Ukraine “possesses Soviet technology and means to deliver these weapons” and his accusations against the West for being “fixated” on a nuclear war are escalating the tensions in Europe. For the record, under a 1994 agreement, Ukraine gave up all the nuclear weapons stationed on its territory by the Soviet Union to Russia in return for monetary compensation, and joined the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. Russia, on the other hand, has the world’s largest nuclear arsenal, according to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute. The nuclear sabre-rattling by Lavrov can only shrink the space for peaceful conflict resolution. Despite tremendous pressure from the US and partners in Europe to join them in condemning the invasion of Ukraine, India was among 35 countries that abstained from voting on a resolution denouncing “Russia’s aggression against Ukraine” in the UN General Assembly on Tuesday and at the Security Council last Friday.

Delhi has many reasons to hold on to its independent position, not least its long partnership with Moscow. It has sought to explain the abstentions as an attempt to give diplomacy a chance and find a middle ground from which to reach out to both parties for peaceful resolution of the crisis. But Lavrov’s nuke-war talk makes Delhi’s challenge more difficult than it is, particularly with thousands of Indian students still stranded in Ukraine. A second round of talks between Russia and Ukraine got underway on Thursday. But Lavrov’s declaration right before that Russia will continue targeting and destroying Ukraine’s military infrastructure, is hardly helpful. Delhi must continue efforts to persuade Moscow to declare a ceasefire. That will not just enable Indian citizens to leave Ukraine safely, but also create the right conditions for a diplomatic resolution of the crisis.

This column first appeared in the print edition on March 4, 2022 under the title ‘The N-word’.



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There is something deeply humane about these stories of people who refuse to let any adversity — flood, fire, war — separate them from their cats, dogs, birds and fish.

There would be no journey home without Zaira: This much Arya Aldrin knew, even as she began to explore an escape route out of a besieged Ukraine. The medical student from Kerala walked nearly 20 kms in freezing winter weather to cross the border into Romania with her five-month-old dog. A photo of the young woman with her pet, waiting for a flight back to India, is one of the many images that tell a story of love, loyalty and warmth amidst the shock and horror of shelling and bombing — of people refusing to abandon their companion animals even as they flee the war zone.

In response, the EU authorities have removed hurdles such as the mandatory pet passports and vaccine certificates for the refugees who wish to keep their companion animals. The Indian government too, in a welcome move, has issued a memorandum giving a “one-time relaxation measure” for Indians stranded in Ukraine who wish to return with their cats and dogs. There’s a reason why stories of people walking across the border with their dogs or huddling in bomb shelters with their cats move us all — including the notoriously heartless bureaucracies. They remind us that love can give courage even to the most vulnerable. How else to explain why Aldrin and others like her, stuck in a dangerous, unpredictable situation in a foreign land, refused to board flights to safety if it meant leaving their pets behind? Or consider the story of the couple in Lviv who decided against evacuating to safety because it would mean shutting down their cat cafe, which is home to 20 felines.

There is something deeply humane about these stories of people who refuse to let any adversity — flood, fire, war — separate them from their cats, dogs, birds and fish. After all, in an increasingly lonely and scary world, animals offer us a measure of companionship and solace. That governments too have started to recognise it is a comforting thought.

This column first appeared in the print edition on March 4, 2022 under the title ‘Not without my dog’.



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Equality is about access to opportunities, wealth, resources. It’s about human rights enshrined in international conventions

Written by Srishty Anand

Oxfam’s report, ‘Inequality Kills 2022’, released in January ahead of the Davos meeting, revealed some shocking facts about the growing gap between the rich and poor in India and the world. For one, the 10 richest men doubled their fortunes in a pandemic while the incomes of 99 per cent of humanity fell. Politicians, journalists, economists and activists acknowledged and expressed grave concerns about the growing inequality. Some also countered this by alluding to the stance that an individual’s wealth is a function of their hard work. This is a dangerous assumption and a false equivalence that must be expelled. I will try to clear this by using two concepts, equality of opportunity and human rights. I also hope to explain why Oxfam India’s report ‘Inequality Kills’ (referred to as “the report”) starts with the claim that 98 Indians own the same amount of wealth as the bottom 55.2 crore Indian citizens.

Inequality as a sociological concept is an unequal distribution of wealth, resources, opportunity and rewards. These inequalities precede us because individuals, you and me, are born into unequal conditions — differentiation in levels of power, status and wealth, which is a reality of any society. In contrast, there is conscious and intentional planning to create equal opportunities as a means to offset inequality of conditions. This is done by budgetary allocation on social spending — education, pension, rural job guarantees to name a few. While the report begins with stating the wealth inequality, it later dives into societal conditions of healthcare, education and nutrition levels. The inaccessibility to these creates suffering and precipitates inequality of this magnitude.

One way of equalising these basic conditions would be to follow Amartya Sen’s “capacity framework”. It focuses on giving individuals actual opportunities (argued in the report as imparting quality education, better healthcare by reducing out-of-pocket expenses, access to adequate food) so that they have the freedom to pursue the life they want — the outcomes of life. That is why the report emphasises the basic levels of living and well-being for individuals to have control over their lives. To reiterate what the report said, we are not there yet. That is the fundamental inequality we need to recognise before blindly reading numbers. This should also help differentiate individualised “hard work” or “talent” from a socially structured spectrum of socio-economic conditions. Both exist: We are trained in the system of meritocracy (progress and success are based on ability) where the markers of the latter are invisibilised or erased.

Why is the report calling out the wealthy? Why are they responsible for undoing this inequality? The answer to that, simple yet powerful, is human rights.

A crucial point to remember when reading the list of top 100 wealthy Indians is that every individual in it (nearly all men) is the face of a thriving multinational business. Human rights discourse began in the post-war period when the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, was adopted by the UN General Assembly in 1948 “as a common standard of achievement for all peoples and all nations.” As the world was moving towards a system of self-regulating states these norms and practices were conceived to protect every person from threats by the state. In 1966, the aspirational goals of this Declaration were turned into obligations by two Covenants. They are the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights and International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. The former includes the right to work and to just conditions of work, participate in trade unions, to social security, adequate standards of living, health, education, leisure, etc and the latter refers to “right to life, liberty, and security of the person; fair trial and equal protection of the law; the right not to be subjected to torture or other forms of cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment; not to be subjected to slavery, servitude, or forced labour; freedom of movement, thought, and conscience; the right to peaceful assembly, family, and privacy; and the right to participate in the public affairs of one’s country.”

The Declaration with the two covenants constitutes the “International Bill of Human Rights”. This is significant because India has ratified it and in its own constitution endows each person with inalienable and indivisible rights to work, wages, education as elaborated in the report. The state is obligated to ensure that these rights are met.

With the liberalisation of trade activities and privatisation throughout the world, people had to be protected not just from the states, as was preconceived, but also from businesses and corporations. These private entities by means of foreign investments and seamless communication were/are deepening their spread in the remotest corners of the world, across territorial borders. They are functioning as legitimate non-state actors across the world and these operations have both positive and negative outcomes. The positives have been recognised by so many readers of the report, job creation, competitiveness, choices of products and innovation. But not many are willing to see — primarily because of dissociation of the wealthy and their wealth by a network that is well masked under names and entities that takes 11.9 million documents (the number of leaked documents in Pandora Paper investigation) — to connect the dots for a handful of ultra-rich.

This is where governance issues – both at the national and international levels – crop up. The rights of MNCs to operate across the border and expand their profit-maximisation is surging, but the domestic laws and regulations protecting people have not kept up. The adverse outcome on the environment, communities that are ecologically sensitive and resist its exploitative use — this impinges on climate change as well — remains undiscussed. The power and actions of these MNCs are outside of what domestic governance was imagined to tackle and this gap has been recognised by civil societies. The wealth inequality in some ways is an accrual of this unchecked sustained exploitation that fails to be recognised as adverse or negative.

To sum up, as the report states, it is the responsibility and duty of the state and the wealthy who run the MNCs to start undoing the gap and restore the rights of people. Progressive taxation is definitely a recommendation that should be actualised but both global and local businesses need to be regulated without further harming human rights. Even if it is just a small start towards creating equal opportunities, that is strong enough to bring a favourable change. People ought to be educated to learn about how businesses — and the fortunes of certain individuals — are growing at this exponential rate. The lack of recognition of these human rights has globalised inequality.

Srishty Anand is a research and knowledge specialist at Oxfam India. Views are personal


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Sandip G writes: Assertive, fearless and ruthless, Kohli challenged and changed our definition of a sporting hero

Sportsmen are often just sportsmen, inhabiting their own rarefied space. Sometimes, they are metaphors for their milieu, both sporting and cultural. Sunil Gavaskar and Kapil Dev embody the coming-of-age years of Indian cricket, Sachin Tendulkar is seen as the face of India’s emergence as a marketing force in the game, in the backdrop of a liberalised economy, VVS Laxman represents an era of miracles and MS Dhoni mirrors the peak years of India as a white-ball superpower.

Virat Kohli is a symbol of the game’s global power shifting to India as well the country’s altering perceptions of a hero.

Kohli is the most powerful Indian cricketer — primarily because of his batting genius and partially because of his dominant personality — in the most powerful era of Indian cricket. The BCCI had been the wealthiest cricketing governing body since the late last century, but its emergence as a monarch of the cricketing empire, more so after the launch of the Indian Premier League, runs parallel to the rise of Kohli. The board’s wealth runs into two billion pounds, Kohli is the most followed Indian on Instagram (183 million followers and swelling), and behind only Lionel Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo as the most followed sportsperson in the world.

It might have been a coincidence — or destiny, the word the country is obsessed with — but the commonness of the definitive virtues of Kohli and the board is irrepressible. Kohli and his traits would have been slightly out of sync in a different era — for instance, the 90s. He would not have been the metaphor of those times, despite his gift of bending narratives.

Swaggering and aggressive, ruthless and fearless, Kohli strode out onto the field like the way the board functioned. Until the first fissures between them emerged openly some six months ago, he was the batsman-leader forged in the ideals and image of the board, just as his team was morphed in the spirit and convictions of the captain. And a delicious irony it was that Kohli took on the mighty board that could end careers, as only he could have, just as the board took on the mighty Kohli — he who could change perceptions with a hashtag – only as the Indian cricket board could have.

In essence, thus, Kohli is an atypical Indian sporting idol. The archetypal hero — sensibilities shaped perhaps from epics and folklore — was monkish, selfless and sacrificing, taking arrows on his chest and hiding the pain beneath a stoic face. Tendulkar was almost detached in his devotion to his art, an ascetic wedded to his dharma, pouring few emotions on the field. His great contemporaries, Rahul Dravid and VVS Laxman, too were sculpted in the Ramayana-Mahabharata ideals of heroism. Even Virender Sehwag, temperamentally so different to them, was a little Buddha with the wood when he batted in that impenetrable trance of his.

Kohli swaggers onto the field like a commander with his fleet. He is fazed neither by the occasion nor the arena and isn’t daunted either by the bowlers or the hostile crowd.

His batting captures his assertiveness. No stroke absorbs this spirit to the fullest as his cover drive. At his hands, it is not merely a stroke, but a tool of domination. The front foot striding out, the eyes hooked on the hurtling sphere of leather, the body following in balletic harmony, the bat bristling out and tracing the most symmetrical parabola, and ball crackling into the distance, fleecing the grass. Not the most picture-book cover-drive, but a shuddering punch on the face of the bowler. Viv Richards found his spiritual successor in him, just as The Don had Tendulkar.

He evokes different emotions from the audience. Tendulkar made the audience traverse a wide spectrum of emotions, from hope and joy to agony and anguish, Sehwag brought about a surge in adrenaline and Laxman’s batting was about peace. But Kohli was a hero from a film rather than an epic or a novel. He provokes rage, a happy rage. When he fumes, we fume as well. He doesn’t transport us to a different world or offer an escape from it. They infuse self-belief. His hundreds and double hundreds have not exhausted us, on the contrary, they have energised us. Few Indian batsmen have exuded a raw, transmittable energy as Kohli, and few have unfurled orthodox shots with a bat that seemed to be exhilaratingly alive. Even a defensive stroke is seldom a shot of passive resistance.

Kohli might embody all the brashness of the IPL generation, but he has also told the generation that cross-format mastery is achievable. His recent form in red-ball cricket might have slumped, but he has still performed at an all-format plateau beyond the reach of any other player in the current era.

Thus, he has changed the concept of an Indian batting hero. They are no longer cast in the Gavaskar-Tendulkar-Laxman-Dravid mould of monkish and selfless heroes. Like him, the generation-in-waiting has inked tattoos on their body, flaunt neatly-manicured beards, chisel their abs and pecs, exude an irresistible fearlessness, and want to attain cross-format mastery. Ganguly’s was a brave new India; Kohli’s a brash new India.

While Kohli belongs to the IPL generation, his devotion to Test cricket has helped sustain the format’s superiority in the T20 era. Thus, there is no better metaphor of the cricketing milieu, or the power invested in the hands of the Indian cricket board, than Kohli.

This column first appeared in the print edition on March 4, 2022 under the title ‘A cricketer for our times’. Write to the author at sandip.gopal@expressindia.com.



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Sarjan Shah writes: Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has proved this

The unexpected Russian military intervention in Ukraine is merely the latest symptom of an underlying cause of decay in the international ‘rules-based’ order. In order to fully appreciate the context in which Vladimir Putin has come to this dangerous point, it’s best to start with a little bit of history. First, where did this idea of an ‘international rules-based order’ originate? To what extent does a rules-based order really exist, to what extent is it merely a convenient illusion and to what extent do we think norms of international behaviour compel national leaders to constrain their policy choices?

In quick summary, it was the Diet of Westphalia (in the then Holy Roman Empire) in 1648 that first set out what our post-World War II global institutional framework established as the principle of ‘sovereignty’. Sovereignty was for a long time the singular bedrock, the very founding principle that the UN Charter sought to firmly establish, in order to make wars of aggression (as opposed to self-defense) illegal under international law, and liable to be punished by the international community via the UN Security Council and its right to use coercive force.

As most scholars of International Relations know, there has always been a theoretical debate in the discipline, drawing on elements of philosophy, psychology and even economics, on whether or not we actually live in an international society of states (i.e. a community that feels as one, accepts a set of common guiding principles and is constituted by member states who are willing to operate according to rules / norms of behaviour) or whether it is still merely a system of states – i.e. a very complex landscape consisting of individual actors who possess coercive power to varying degrees, have zero-sum ambitions to varying degrees, adhere to global ‘rules’ to the extent that they are convenient or exigent at a moment, while being willing to covertly and overtly bend and even break those rules, when core national interests are involved. In the second interpretation, states are engaged in game-theoretic, rational-utilitarian cooperation, competition and even conflict, depending on the specificities of each situation. This assumption of rationality is almost never fully true, as sub-rationality and even non-rationality are all too common when it comes to national identity, history, symbolism and patriotism or nationalism as emotive forces. In a nutshell, it is a highly complicated theoretical and practical situation wherein simplistic, moralising explanations and narratives about events are typically wrong and often misleading or counterproductive

Back in 2007-8, as a young undergraduate at the London School of Economics, I was still fairly idealistic and given to flights to fancy in which selective evidence of international relations was temporarily sufficient to convince me that state-to-state relations were now significantly constrained, curtailed even, by a complex set of global rules and norms, economic interdependence, and the court of global ‘public opinion’, such that I saw the general arc of the international system as tilting towards the formation of a genuinely global community. Forces like the internet and social media, combined with the cultural dominance of the West, portended a gradual spread of democratic values and a lot of us trained in the West were lulled into an innocent overconfidence.

The biggest challenge to this kind of perspective usually came from the ‘realist’ camp of International Relations researchers, who drew from philosophical and psychological assumptions about human nature to argue that in the absence of effective enforcement of rules, the notion of such rules was an empty idea – capable of little more than being fancy words that hardly exercise any sort of compelling power over the actual choices made in foreign policy by states. Enforcement was theoretically meant to happen by way of the Security Council. However, this plan was stillborn due to the fundamental unwillingness of the five permanent members to countenance a possibility of global action against themselves and the consequent injection of the notion of a ‘veto’ in the world’s highest security-focused body. This has meant that for the entirety of the UN’s existence, true Security Council intervention in an international crisis has only been possible in the rarest of rare exceptions when all five permanent members happened to agree. And, as is much more often the case, Russia and China veto American, French and British resolutions while their own are resolutely shot down by the three western members.

This dynamic begs the question – are the only real and ultimate arbiters of state action national interests and relative power positions between states? The realist-structuralist camp of IR scholars have argued this for decades, claiming that one could predict events in international relations almost solely based on an accurate understanding of the true intentions, ambitions and interests of a state, and its state power relative to any other states it may need to interact with on a particular issue or in a particular region.

Finally, a Constructivist add-on to this rather brutal theoretical lens would add the important layer of cultural, values-based and ideological commonality, that allows even powers with highly lopsided relative power to act honestly, transparently and cooperatively with each other (consider that Canada and Cuba in the 1960s were not dissimilar in terms of power relative to the United States, yet their relations with America were significantly different).

The foregoing analysis allows us to conclude that far from being an isolated incident that for the first time since the UN Charter was drafted has besmirched our rules-based order, the Russian intervention in Ukraine is a significant further erosion in the believability of anyone’s claims that such a thing actually exists. The true history of all great powers, including during and after the Cold War, consists of largely self-interested and fairly amoral approaches to foreign policy, driven by a desire for national security and even aggrandisement. All states have shown their willingness to conduct foreign policy at the cost of others. Most states in the last few decades have provided international rules with a lot of ‘lip-service’ while using clandestine methods to achieve their aims. This should surprise no-one.

However, another key source of stability in the international system was drawn not from rules, but the presence of nuclear weapons on our planet, in numbers that are capable of destroying human civilization. The notion of ‘mutually assured destruction’ created a tension that seemed to preclude even conventional warfare between two nuclear-armed rivals. Most interestingly, with the separation of seven decades between Hiroshima / Nagasaki and the present, a gradual shift in the calculus of defence planners seems to have occurred. From the sense that a mere conventional conflict would be sufficient trigger for a power to exercise a nuclear option, planners seem to have gained a new comfort with nuclear weapons in existence. They no longer seem to believe they will be used short of an existential threat.

So India now feels comfortable with cross-border airstrikes, calling Pakistan’s bluff on a nuclear response to merely an airstrike on militant targets. Russia equally feels confident that merely asserting its core security interests in Ukraine will not draw a nuclear response from NATO. Will China be wargaming a similar question related to Taiwan? And what does this imply for our system overall? Waning American dominance combined with a retreat of global norms and a lessening nuclear deterrent to armed conflict and the rise of new power centres in Asia are a potent mix of new dynamics in our world.

Never since the establishment of our post-war global system has it been under such significant threat. Most nations are planning for environmental disaster, shortages of key resources, multipolarity and instability by turning inward. Ironically, it is at perhaps the most critical moment in human history, when the forces of technology and ecological disaster arrive together, that we seem to be disintegrating into pieces rather than coming together as one. India must take stock and with extreme vigilance approach its entire gamut of cooperative, competitive and adversarial options while navigating this wholly new world out there.

This column first appeared in the print edition on March 4, 2022 under the title ‘A disturbing new world’. Shah is an alumnus of London School of Economics, Cambridge and Harvard, and lives and works in Mumbai



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Shamika Ravi, Mudit Kapoor write: Study reveals that more than 90 per cent of rural and urban non–SC/ST/OBC households will meet the government’s criteria for economically weaker sections

On January 31, 2019, the Government of India (GoI) issued a circular, which guaranteed 10 per cent reservations in civil posts and services of the GoI to the Economically Weaker Sections (EWS) of the society, who were not covered under the reservation scheme for Scheduled Castes (SCs), Scheduled Tribes (STs), and Other Backward Classes (OBC). The GoI used two criteria for the definition of the EWS: One, the gross family income from all sources — agriculture, business, professional, etc. — for the financial year preceding the application should be less than Rs 8 lakh; Two, if the family owned or possessed assets, such as five or more acres of agricultural land, or residential flat of 1,000 square feet or more, or a residential plot of 100 square yards or more in notified municipalities, or a residential plot of 200 square yards or more in non-notified municipalities, then irrespective of the income criteria, the family would be excluded from the definition of EWS. The family includes those who seek the benefit, their spouse, parents, siblings, and children below 18 years.

However, the Rs 8 lakh cut-off has come under the scrutiny of the Supreme Court (SC). The SC has sought clarification from the GoI regarding the basis for the income cutoff. We explore this issue using earnings data from the Periodic Labour Force Survey (PLFS) from July 2018 to June 2019. The GoI conducts the PLFS to measure labour force participation, employment status, hours worked, and earnings for the usual and the current weekly status (CWS). The geographical coverage of the PLFS is the entire country, except for villages in Andaman and Nicobar Islands that are difficult to reach. The PLFS covers all sectors of the economy, agriculture, secondary, and tertiary, and employment status, whether individuals are self-employed, have a regular wage/salaried job, or are casual workers. In addition, it also collects data on earnings based on the CWS. The ultimate stage units of the PLFS were households, where information on employment and unemployment is sought from all family members of the household. In addition, data is also collected on socio-demographic characteristics of the household, such as the religious and social status of the household, whether it belonged to SC/ST/OBC or the general category. Our analysis is based on the PLFS conducted between July 2018 and June 2019, covering 101,579 households, of which 31,796 (31 per cent) households did not belong to SC/ST/OBC. In addition, we exploit the sampling methodology to arrive at the estimates.

Based on data on non-SC/ST/OBC, we found that 99 per cent of rural households and 95 per cent of urban households had monthly earnings less than Rs 66,667, which would translate to approximately Rs 8 lakh annually. Moreover, the median household monthly earnings in rural areas were Rs 9,000, which was about seven times less than the earnings cutoff for EWS, while in urban areas, it was Rs 15,000, which was approximately four times less than the earnings cutoff for the EWS set by the GoI.

However, suppose we were to exclude households with zero earnings. In that case, our analysis reveals that for non-SC/ST/OBC households, 99 per cent of rural households and 94 per cent of urban households had monthly earnings less than Rs 66,667, which would translate to approximately eight lakh rupees annually. Moreover, the median household monthly earnings in rural areas were Rs 10,000, which was about six and a half times less than the earnings cutoff for EWS, while in urban areas, it was Rs 20,000, which was approximately three and a half times less than the earnings cutoff for the EWS set by the GoI.

Given the sensitive nature of the issue, it is essential to highlight the limitations of the earnings data from the PLFS. First, the PLFS data is based on the current weekly status; there is a possibility that the household had positive income at other times of the year but not the week preceding the survey. Therefore, the earnings data is an underestimate. To overcome this limitation, we did the second analysis of including only those households with positive earnings and found that the underlying results did not change significantly; that is, more than 90 per cent of rural and urban non- SC/ST/OBC households had monthly earnings less than the cutoff set by the GoI for EWS income criteria. The second limitation of the study is the definition of family. The PLFS defines a household as a group of persons who usually stay together and take food from a shared kitchen. It is hard to assess how differences in the definition of family would impact the analysis. Our guess is that household or family definition in PLFS is more inclusive than GoI definition of family for the EWS criteria, which would suggest that these estimates are likely to overestimate the distribution of household monthly earnings.

In the absence of any objective data on the family’s earnings, we use the PLFS data from 2018-2019 to estimate the distribution of monthly family earnings from all sources (self-employment, regular wage/salary, and casual work). Our primary objective was to compare the EWS cutoff of income criteria set by the GoI at Rs 8 lakh annual income (approximately Rs 66,667 monthly income) with the distribution of household monthly earnings from the PLFS data. Our analysis reveals that more than 90 per cent of rural and urban non–SC/ST/OBC households will meet the EWS criteria.

This column first appeared in the print edition on March 4, 2022 under the title ‘Counting the EWS’. Ravi is Vice President, Observer Research Foundation, and Kapoor is Associate Professor, Indian Statistical Institute.



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Sajjid Z. Chinoy writes: Surging oil prices constitute discernible terms of trade shock and will necessitate deft macro management

Economic policymakers globally can’t seem to catch a break. 2020 witnessed the largest contraction since World War II. Just as economies began to recover, 2021 was the year of intransigent inflation. Just when markets began to internalise that the Fed may be on a rate hike spree, 2022 brings with it worrying geopolitical developments, with significant economic implications.

Prima facie, there are several channels through which the Russia-Ukraine conflict will impact India’s economy, but it’s important to separate the wheat from the chaff. The first order impact, in our view, emanates from the negative terms of trade shock from higher commodity prices, particularly oil. To be sure, there are several other channels: A direct trade channel to the affected region, an indirect trade channel from weaker global growth, and a tightening of financial conditions and capital flows as global risk appetite wanes. These , however, can be expected to be more second-order vis-à-vis the commodity price shock.

Crude prices have surged well past a $110/barrel and though there will be an element of overshooting, there is a growing expectation that, as the conflict gets more entrenched, crude could remain elevated for much longer and average close to $100/barrel in 2022, vis-a-vis $70/barrel in 2021. This would constitute a large, negative terms of trade shock to India to the tune of 1.2 per cent of GDP. Put simply, the economy would be transferring out an incremental 1.2 per cent of GDP for the same net oil imports. The size of the commodity shock rises once higher prices for coal and gas imports are included.

Unfortunately, this is akin to an adverse supply shock to the economy that simultaneously impacts growth, inflation and the current account deficit (CAD). The growth impact will manifest through constraints on fiscal space, household purchasing power being impinged and firm margins coming under pressure. That said, the quantum of the growth impact will depend on how the shock is distributed across the fiscal, households and firms because of the different marginal propensities to consume. For example, the excise duty cuts last November have already absorbed about one-third of the shock from oil (0.4 per cent of GDP). The cost of this, however, is commensurate pressures on fiscal expenditures and growth, agnostically assuming a fiscal multiplier of 1. This year’s budget, therefore, forecasted lower excise duties collections but also had less spending space. In contrast, the marginal propensity to consume/invest out of income/earnings is typically lower than 1 for households/firms.

So, the greater the fraction of the shock absorbed on the fiscal, the greater the hit to demand and growth. This is not to suggest that policymakers should not consider any excise duties cuts, because higher retail prices could further harden inflationary expectations. However, when calling for fuel tax cuts this trade-off needs to be recognised. All told, the hit to growth in 2022 from oil at $100/barrel can be expected to be between 0.9-1.1 per cent of GDP depending on the burden-sharing between the public and private sectors.

Growth apart, oil at $100 will leave a tangible imprint on India’s external balances. The CAD averaged just 1.1 per cent of GDP in the seven years before the pandemic, helped by lower commodity prices, enabling large BoP surpluses and creating a “problem of plenty” for policymakers. But those dynamics are fast changing. The October-December CAD is tracking 3 per cent of GDP and the CAD is likely to stay close to those elevated levels in the coming quarters if crude is in triple digits. The RBI has a war chest of foreign currency reserves, so there is no imminent threat to macroeconomic stability. But the current account and balance of payments will need close monitoring, after a long time.

Finally, higher commodity prices can pressure inflation. 2022 was supposed to be the year that supply chains normalised and goods prices disinflated, offsetting rising services prices as the pandemic faded and consumers switched expenditures away from goods towards services. But if energy and other commodity prices remain elevated, firms will remain under pressure to eventually pass on input costs.

So how should policy respond in the wake of a terms of trade shock and what are the associated trade-offs?

Perhaps the clearest prescription is on the external front. The widening of the CAD and associated BoP pressures will create some depreciation pressures on the rupee. More fundamentally, a persistent negative terms of trade shock will argue for a weaker equilibrium real effective exchange rate. Policymakers should let the rupee reach this new equilibrium – albeit in a gradual and non-disruptive manner – and not prevent this adjustment because it will facilitate the necessary “expenditure switching” to reduce imports, boost exports and help narrow an elevated CAD. A real depreciation of the currency that acts as a shock absorber for the economy is the optimal response to a negative terms of trade shock.

That said, while a real deprecation can be expansionary, it can also be inflationary on account of a greater pass-through of imported prices and generating an aggregate demand boost in the wake of an adverse supply shock. All this will contribute to inflationary pressures, and will warrant a commensurate monetary policy response.

On the fiscal, there are no easy choices. Cutting excise duties would buffer the impact on households and protect consumption, but potentially result in a larger hit to demand by shrinking fiscal space to spend. If the government doesn’t cut duties, it has resources that can potentially be used to more directly target affected households at the bottom of the pyramid. But this will mean higher retail prices that can harden inflationary expectations, increasing the challenges for monetary policy. Finally, policymakers could always cut duties, not cut spending and let the deficit widen commensurately — effectively pushing out some of the terms of trade costs to the future — but negative surprises on the fiscal during periods of heightened macro uncertainty can generate significantly risk premia in markets. All told, the fiscal will confront several trade-offs, and should try avoiding corner solutions. What should be clear is that as soon as markets begin to stabilise, authorities must plough ahead with planned asset sales/disinvestment to create more fiscal headroom, without trying to perfectly time the market.

A persistent adverse supply shock is complicated and challenging to respond to, and the new equilibrium will inevitably need some combination of a weaker rupee, higher rates, and judicious fiscal management. Beyond the very near term, policymakers must seriously consider systematically hedging crude price imports in global markets to protect the economy from periods of outsized volatility, apart from the medium-term objective of reducing our dependence on imported crude.

For now, the key is to weather the storm.  We can pick up the pieces when the clouds begin to clear.

This column first appeared in the print edition on March 4, 2022 under the title ‘Crude pressures’. The writer is Chief India Economist at J.P. Morgan. All views are personal



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Anubha Yadav writes: Big-budget Bollywood has had its trysts with infidelity before, but Shakun Batra’s film makes a significant departure.

Big-budget Bollywood has had its trysts with infidelity before, moving away from its benign family dramas and romances, gently tickling the edges of the darker side of relationships.

In almost all Hindi films on infidelity made till now, the story is propelled by one or both parties being married. The conflict comes from the moral tension of leaving a marriage for passionate love. Of duty against desire. Of order against chaos. Of negating the self for the sake of keeping the family together.

Earlier, the story started with marriage and ended with loss of the passionate relationship, with the moral order restored. Shakun Batra’s film Gehraiyaan moves away from this. Here too, the end goal might be marriage, but the plot points and conflict emerge from other sources symptomatic of our times.

Alisha (Deepika Padukone), a yoga instructor, is working on an app and is struggling to find investors while providing for her “unemployed” writer boyfriend, Karan (Dhairya Karwa). Much of the tension in their relationship comes from both of them wanting to pursue their ambitions. In the neoliberal economy, the “creative” is a zealous entrepreneur, a self-driven technocrat on an innovation adventure.

Alisha resents his never-ending “writing” sojourn. Karan wants her to let go of her big app dream, a startup idea in which a lot of money has already been buried. She feels exploited. He feels burdened.

They are their work. Wherever they go, the app and the novel go along — the mark of the new creative entrepreneur, who is always doing a pitch, for whom life itself is a work-pitch.

Then enters Zain (Siddhant Chaturvedi), with the myth of the “self-made” entrepreneur. We see the spectre of this image being destroyed by Zain’s fiance’s mother, who constantly reminds him about his past, his class, who breaks the myth of his atomic genius. Zain, the person, resents it. Zain, the entrepreneur, knows better all along. Just after Zain and Alisha start their secret affair, he decides to put money in Alisha’s app and yoga studio. This is meant to be evidence of his passionate love for her. Being with her is not enough show and tell, but investing capital in her dreams is.

A short scene is added to give dignity to Alisha. She can’t be redeemed if she takes his money as she sleeps with him secretly. So, she asks Zain, “You are not doing this as a favour right?” (As she sits in the luxury of a bathtub in his yacht.) He pops a bottle of champagne, and says, “Alisha, the partners loved the idea. Now shut up and make me some money.” (They seal it with a kiss in the bathtub).

Neoliberal feminism is convinced. There is no other kind of love.

Alisha buys it because that is the kind of love she wants. A love that invests in her dreams and makes them possible. Zain has done the same before, is still doing it with his fiance (Ananya Pandey) as he cheats on her. Somehow, Alisha does not see that. Somehow, we also don’t wish to see it that “way”.
Zain is an equal opportunity gold-digger. Alisha can’t be the same — as she will then be reduced to being a vamp. A man can be a gold-digger and still be a fair play character. A woman can’t.

The final collapse is again stirred by forces of capital. The mythical genius of Zain erodes now. The mask comes off. He needs his fiance, if he wants to keep his company. If he walks away and chooses ruin, he can start again with Alisha. It sounds improbable, almost impossible even to the most old-school romantic. No millennial would have advised him to do it. But that is exactly what Alisha’s father, Vinod Khanna (Naseeruddin Shah), chose a generation back. The family split. Alisha’s father left it all to start again in the mofussil, Nagpur. Thus, Alisha is struggling while the cousin is living a splendidly rich life in America.

No one is left untouched by capital in this world. Every relational conflict is framed by it. The only person who rejects it totally, who refuses to partake in that world is Alisha’s father and he pays a heavy price for it.

Families forgive. Here too, in the end, there is forgiveness. But we must wonder what shape it takes in this world.

This column first appeared in the print edition on March 3, 2022 under the title ‘For the love of money’. Yadav is a writer-academic-filmmaker, who teaches at Kamala Nehru College, DU.



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The latest meeting of Quad leaders has clearly exposed differences in the grouping over Ukraine. The US, Japan and Australia have been forthright in their condemnation of the Russian invasion and are applying sanctions on Moscow. However, India continues to take a relatively neutral position on the issue and has been abstaining in votes on UN resolutions condemning Russia’s actions in Ukraine. This has created an odd situation within the Quad. True, the platform was initially conceived to ensure a free, open and prosperous Indo-Pacific in light of China’s growing belligerence and expansionism in the region. But in recent weeks the US has made it clear that it expects to apply the same principles driving the Quad to the European crisis.

And in that regard, Washington wants New Delhi to abandon its neutral position and join the other Quad members in condemning Moscow. Of course, this isn’t easy for the Indian side given historical strategic ties between New Delhi and Moscow. Bilateral relations run deep in critical sectors such as defence and nuclear. But the reality today is that Russia with its invasion of Ukraine is being shunned by the vast majority of the international community. Moscow and Russian President Vladimir Putin will be treated as pariah for the foreseeable future. And as sanctions start hitting the Russian economy, doing business with Moscow will become increasingly difficult.

In such a scenario, India cannot possibly maintain the same level of strategic relations it previously enjoyed with Russia. And with China and Russia now expected to form an even deeper partnership due to current geopolitical circumstances, New Delhi can no longer count on Moscow for its strategic security needs. After all, China is India’s main security threat today. Therefore, if Russia and China form a compact, India will be hurt. In other words, India must accept the reality that Russia and China will now be in the same camp for the foreseeable future. Hence, New Delhi must reorient its approach to Moscow and move closer to Washington’s line. We need the US to counter China. Otherwise, what are we even doing in the Quad?



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A week into Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, its economic fallout is coming into sharper focus. The immediate fallout is the impact on energy and commodity prices. That’s global in nature. A problem that may linger for a while is further disruptions to global supply chains, partly due to the boycotts of the Russian logistics network. Finally, there is a problem specific to India which is the loss of supplies of sunflower cooking oil from Ukraine and Russia. The combined impact of these factors will show up most prominently in the form of an upward pressure on inflation.

The India basket of crude was $111.9/barrel on March 2, about 49% higher than the level that prevailed at the beginning of the year. All signs point to the price being elevated for a while, which will feed into retail and wholesale inflation. Along with crude prices, commodity prices have been rising, particularly aluminum and nickel where Russia is an important producer. Disruptions in sourcing these commodities will have a cascading effect on some industrial products. RBI, in its February monetary policy, forecast retail inflation in 2022-23 to be 4.5% with risks broadly balanced. The environment has changed significantly in a few weeks and very likely the forecast will be reworked.

Another fallout of the current situation is that uncertainty looms large. In this scenario, risk aversion will prevail and potential private investment will be shelved. This leaves the government with the task of doing the heavy lifting for another year to build on this fiscal’s recovery. It can be done without running huge debts. Higher inflation will push up nominal GDP which, in turn, will result in tax collections exceeding budget targets. This gives both GoI and states space to overshoot their spending targets which were conservatively pegged.

To illustrate, in FY 2021-22, GoI’s tax collections are set to exceed budget targets. It’s partly because the nominal GDP is likely to be four percentage points higher than budget estimates at 19.4%. For the next fiscal, 2022-23, there’s a strong likelihood that nominal GDP will be higher than the budget estimate of 11.1% growth. This will give GoI the space to exceed its FY 2022-23 forecast of a mere 4.6% nominal growth in budget expenditure, without jeopardising debt sustainability. Even though the September-December GDP data showed that private consumption has just exceeded the pre-Covid level, aggregate demand remains tepid. GoI and states will need to support it for a while longer.



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Only 22% men and 24% women say that there is a lot of discrimination against women in India today. This is quite a comforting number in a new Pew study of how Indians view gender roles these days. After all, it suggests that a significant majority of citizens now see gender equality everywhere they look. But like humans, numbers make sense only in relation to each other. So combine the above finding with as many as 88% Indians completely or mostly agreeing that a wife must always obey her husband, and what is the takeaway?

Despite our society’s progress in recognising gender equality as desirable, with 79% men and 82% women agreeing it is very important for women to have the same rights as men, big blinkers remain in terms of how this translates into specific behaviours, relationships, freedoms. This core dichotomy explains many anomalies. For example, while in other countries rising education and income levels and falling fertility rates have led to rising shares of women in jobs, here female labour force participation has languished even in the same opportune conditions. The Pew study, citing data from NFHS and other surveys too, points to specific discriminatory attitudes being a major factor in fettering women’s access to paid work.

Below only Tunisia, India sits at the top of 61 countries when it comes to completely agreeing that when jobs are scarce, men should have more rights to a job than women. Among 34 countries, Indians are the third most likely to say that marriage is more satisfying when husband provides for the family while wife takes care of the house and children. Why such gender-discriminatory social attitudes still persist is a vital question for India. And the extra painful irony here is how many women share attitudes that diminish them.



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The Supreme Court, for the third time, rejected Maharashtra’s plea to allow reservations for Other Backward Classes (OBC) in local body polls — after scrapping the provision last year, and then refusing to review its verdict on the issue. The state government is now considering its options and has said it is committed to holding the elections only when seats are set aside for OBCs. That the state executive is again willing to risk a potential clash with the judiciary should be instructive in understanding how important the issue is politically for the ruling dispensation.

But why? The answer lies in the predictable, if somewhat unfortunate, proclivity of political parties to use affirmative action to paper over cleavages emerging from social and economic churn. In Maharashtra, eroding economic and social heft precipitated the agitation by the Marathas for quotas, which, in turn, sparked push back from OBC groups. The government possibly sees quotas as a way to stave off OBC discontent over Maratha demands, and hopes that by freezing their representation — a quota means a certain number of OBC members will always be elected no matter what the political mood – they won’t face ire from the communities that make up roughly half the state’s population.

Reservations were introduced in India as a way to correct historical wrongs but now seek to be deployed by governments as a stop gap measure to ease economic pain (domicile quotas in jobs) or reverse perceptions of crumbing dominance (hence the agitations by Jats, Patels, Gujjars and Marathas, among others). As previously noted by this newspaper, this not only yields indifferent results but also dilutes the core philosophy of affirmative action. Moreover, as the experience of political reservation for Scheduled Castes shows, quotas can get more leaders elected without any real devolution of powers from the hands of upper caste leaderships of political parties. This is not an argument against political reservations but a call for wider democratisation of political power. It should be instructive that there appears to be political consensus on OBC quotas — the Bharatiya Janata Party government in Madhya Pradesh is attempting to enforce the same rule — while such agreement eludes the demand for counting these communities. Political power is important for marginalised communities in charting their own social, economic and political destinies. They deserve an honest attempt at democratisation of political power, not just efforts driven by electoral considerations.



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At the Conference of the Parties (COP 26) in Glasgow in 2021, India announced a target of 500 GW of non-fossil fuel capacity by 2030. This announcement builds on the previous target of 450 GW of renewable energy (RE) capacity that was announced by Prime Minister Narendra Modi. The 2030 India Report published by the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory concluded that deploying 450 GW of total installed solar and wind capacity along with resources such as battery storage will be a cost-effective way of meeting India’s 2030 load and its second COP commitment of 50% clean electricity generation.

As of January 2022, India installed 105 GW of renewable capacity, of which solar and wind power added up to 90 GW. Another 55 GW of solar, wind and hybrid capacity is in the pipeline. This rapid pace of installation has been enabled by a bouquet of central and state-level policies and regulations, including national solar and wind mission targets (175 GW of RE by 2022), Renewable Purchase Obligation (RPO) at the state level, solar parks to facilitate land acquisition and grid connectivity, bulk procurement and payment guarantees via the Solar Energy Corporation of India (SECI) to reduce offtake risk, waiver of inter-state transmission charges, competitive bidding resulting in low prices and must-run status.

However, as India ramps up its renewable ambition, a new set of policies will be required to propel deployment to the next orbit. Policy measures that integrate renewables into the core of power system planning and operations are the need of the hour. Second, grid-scale battery storage would be key to utilising RE generation for meeting demand during peak hours. Without large-scale deployment of battery storage, more coal capacity would be needed to meet peak load, which would run at low capacity factors, increasing the risk of stranded assets.

Given the trade deficit with China and energy security concerns, the bulk of plant components must be domestically manufactured. Accelerating the pace and scale of renewable energy deployment will require large volumes of affordable debt to be mobilised. Depth in power markets will be crucial, and so will grid flexibility close to real-time. Therefore, five key policy and regulatory measures are needed to address these challenges.

One, adopt a 500 GW non-fossil capacity target along with a battery mandate. The central government should enshrine this target in policymaking by adopting inward-facing “mission” capacity targets for the solar and wind mission. This mobilises the government machinery to work towards it. Based on the 2030 India Report, a mix of about 300 GW solar and 140 GW installed wind capacity is recommended. A battery storage trajectory of about 50 GWh by 2025 and 250 GWh by 2030 could provide a strong signal to industry for deployment as well as domestic manufacturing.

Two, integrate renewables into state-level planning and procurement. Institutionalise a least cost integrated resource planning framework at the state level, thereby integrating renewables into the mainstream of power system planning. The ministry of power and the Central Electricity Regulatory Commission have already initiated work on a Resource Adequacy (RA) framework for the states.

An RA framework will ensure that states can meet their demand reliably and enable them to share their resources. This can be complemented by all-source procurement at the state level, where different types of resources compete in the same procurement process and economic models are deployed to determine the least cost portfolio.

Three, ramp up domestic manufacturing and investment in research and development (R&D). The production linked incentive (PLI) scheme allocating around $5.5 billion over five years to incentivise manufacturing of solar cells, panels and batteries is a welcome development. This was followed by a slew of announcements by industry for setting up about 20 GW of new photovoltaic (PV) cell and module manufacturing capacity and bids adding up to 130 GWh of battery manufacturing capacity. Streamlining the implementation of this scheme, along with enhancing investment in R&D, will be critical for fuelling job growth in the sector.

Four, increase availability and reduce the cost of finance. Additional renewable energy and battery capacity and associated transmission infrastructure required in line with deploying 450 GW will require over $20 billion of annual additional debt deployment. The sectoral lending constraints on banks imply that there is a need to seek new sources of capital such as the domestic bond market, foreign debt markets, and greater investment from domestic and international institutional investors.

While risks on receivables exist, using public money to incentivise these capital flows, in the form of credit enhancement and other risk-sharing mechanisms, will offer the required buffer to attract investment.

Five, build upon ongoing market reforms. The last couple of years have seen several power market reforms, including a real-time market, green day ahead market and ancillary services market. Battery storage is a distinct type of resource which can act as a generator or load, warranting a novel set of market rules to compensate for the full range of services it can provide. SECI has issued draft guidelines for competitive procurement of battery storage systems, which is a great first step. But to achieve large scale deployment, other facilitating business models will be crucial.

India has demonstrated cost-effective renewable capacity deployment through innovative policy measures. Now it is time to build on this strong groundwork by bringing renewables from the margins to the core of power system operations. The aforementioned measures together will offer strong tailwinds to this mammoth task, and help India realise the vision of a clean grid as the foundation of a clean economy.

Shruti M Deorah is senior energy policy analyst at UC Berkeley Goldman School of Public Policy. Kanika Chawla is Programme Manager, UN-Energy, SEforALL 

The views expressed are personal



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In the note he wrote before he jumped to his death from the balcony of his home in Faridabad on February 25, the 16-year-old wrote: “The school has killed me… especially higher authorities.”

Police have arrested the headmistress of DPS, Greater Faridabad. A police complaint lodged by the boy’s mother, a teacher in the same school, alleges that he was harassed over his sexuality and the school took no heed, a charge denied by the school management.

But, the unpalatable truth is that bullying remains the most common form of violence across schools.

“School can be a very hostile place, one of the worst places to be. I have had a very bitter personal experience of bullying both of my sister and younger daughter just because they were not good at science and maths,” says Nilakshi Roy, a school teacher. “My sister was called ‘commode’ and my daughter would return home to lie down sobbing on her bed. Unfortunately, the teachers were party to this bullying.”

If you identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans, queer, intersex (LGBTQI), then that bullying is intensified with more than half, 54%, of LGBTQI students in Europe saying they had been bullied as a result of their sexual orientation, according to research released by Unesco in May 2021.

In India, the National Human Rights Commission found that 82% of transgender people in four Uttar Pradesh districts had never been to school or dropped out by Class 10.

Often, teachers are ignorant about issues around sexuality, diversity and inclusion. In November 2021, the National Council for Educational Research and Training (NCERT) had a chance to set that right when it uploaded its first training manual to sensitise teachers to different gender orientations. But within a week, the manual was inexplicably taken down, reportedly over fears of ‘moral pollution’ voiced in several quarters, including by the chairperson of the National Commission for Protection of Child Rights (NCPCR).

“Teachers should be sensitised. We have a stronger, large-hearted role to play,” says Roy who started an online petition to have the NCERT manual restored. Nothing happened; not one person she wrote to bothered to reply.

Yet, now is the time to act. Schools need to set up monitoring systems to check bullying for which there must be zero tolerance, much in the manner that colleges have set up anti-ragging policies. Students must be able to access online portals where bullying can be reported to the school management. And counsellors must be available to talk to both those who bully and those who are.

The Madras high court, in a recent order, directed the state government to take measures ‘needed for eliminating prejudices’ in schools and colleges, among other places. This directive must be followed not just in Tamil Nadu but across the country.

A boy is dead apparently because he did not fit social ideas of what is “normal”. His mother is fighting for accountability and justice. No parent should have to ever go through this again.

Namita Bhandare writes on gender 

The views expressed are personal



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In the summer of 1991, I travelled to St. Petersburg, Russia, to recruit a professor, Andrey Terekhov, and his research teams at St. Petersburg State University and Novosibirsk, Siberia. Terekhov, a world renowned mathematician, was literally growing potatoes to survive because he had not received his meagre $60 a month salary for nearly a year. This was the fate of most professionals in the former Soviet Union, the empire that Russian President Vladimir Putin is trying to rebuild by invading peaceful neighbouring States.

In addition to teaching and mentoring Russia’s best scientific minds, Terekhov had created the KGB’s critical telecommunications systems and technologies which were used to reverse engineer software systems of companies such as IBM. This combination of mathematical and engineering skills was not something I could find in the United States (US), but they were common in the Soviet Union, as in India — which tried at the time to replicate its education and economic models.

For my startup in North Carolina, the acquisition of this talent was a bonanza, something that led to the creation of a public company with $120 million in revenues, from technology that enabled western firms and the US government to modernise their legacy computer systems.

This is why my advice to United States (US) President Joe Biden is to go beyond the imposition of financial sanctions, to literally destroy Russia’s ability to innovate. The US can do this by welcoming Russian engineers and scientists with open arms, offering them a green card and a plane ticket.

Immigration has always been America’s greatest advantage, it has driven its economic development and technological innovation. Through the internet technology boom, immigrants founded 52% of Silicon Valley’s startups. In the last decade, they founded 55% of America’s startup companies valued at $1 billion dollars or more and hold key management or product development positions in 80% of these companies. Some of America’s most innovative companies, including Google, Intel, AT&T, Pfizer, and Tesla, were launched by immigrants. More than one-third of all Nobel Prizes won by Americans since 1901 have gone to immigrants.

US immigration policy is the velvet sledgehammer that could deal a death blow to Putin’s vision of a militaristic Russia. Without brains, Russia will fail in every significant scientific and technological endeavour. Right now, the precious talent pool of Russia is primed to bolt. America should offer them a helping hand — and help itself while making the world a safer place in the process.

As it was for India after it stopped trying to mimic some of the disastrous policies of the Soviet Union, skilled immigration to the US has been a net positive for both the country of egress and the country of arrival. Immigrants who forge careers, make scientific discoveries, and form companies, tend to reach back to their places of origin to form bridges and economic relationships that are mutually beneficial. Both China and India have reaped tremendous gains from the networks of immigrants outside their shores; China has even attempted to turn the tables by aggressively recruiting ethnic Chinese US citizens with expertise in desired fields such as Artificial Intelligence and genetics to return to China.

In the case of Russia, however, a rapid brain drain would be a zero-sum body blow for a variety of reasons. To start with, the country is losing population swiftly as women have fewer and fewer children. Due to a large contraction in births during the lost decade from the fall of the Soviet Union to the end of the 20th century, there are far fewer young Russians in their early 20s. This will become more crucial because it delivers the double whammy of reducing the potential intellectual pool for scientists and technologists, and also presages a further decline in population when this generation hits prime child-bearing years.

To make matters worse, the once-vaunted Russian education system is on the decline due to a lack of funding and inattention by the political elites. While Russia continues to churn out scientists, their training is not what it once was, and many of the academic institutions that once flourished have withered. Should older Russian scientists and engineers bolt across the Atlantic, this will leave Putin with a brain drain that will reduce his capacity to develop arms, build innovative rockets, or create vaccines against future pandemics.

We have already witnessed the impact of the combination of hubris and scientific weakness when the Russian government refused more effective mRNA vaccines in favour of home-grown vaccines which failed to fully protect the rapidly aging population. We are about to witness more impacts due to the crisis. Many of Russia’s major oil fields will struggle to continue functioning efficiently without foreign support due to the relative backwardness of Russia’s own petroleum engineering and geoscience capabilities.

What’s good for the US (or other destinations for Russian skilled immigrants) is good for the world. Freed from the repressive confines of Putin’s coffin, these talented engineers can be expected to contribute more to the world in the form of scientific breakthroughs, jobs created, and innovative new products. Maybe it will be a cure for cancer. Maybe it will be a new form of AI that finally nails the driverless car problem. Maybe it will be a new company that delivers breakthroughs in solar energy and batteries. If America lets Russian scientists and engineers and innovators in, their futures will be brighter and so will the world’s. The alternative for them, after all, in Putin’s Russia, may be to plant potatoes for survival.

Vivek Wadhwa is the author of From Incremental to Exponential: How Large Companies Can See the Future and Rethink Innovation 

The views expressed are personal



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The Russian special military operation launched against Ukraine is raging. Much of the action by forces on both sides is observable on land, in the air, maritime and cyber domains. Curiously, few — if any — details are emerging about the role of outer space in the conflict. 

However, Indian interest peaked when Russian State space company chief Dmitry Rogozin speaking of the International Space Station (ISS)’s fate said on social media that a 500-tonne chunk of the ISS could possibly fall to earth over India, China, the United States (US) or Europe. 

Apart from chiding nations that have moved to impose sanctions and high-tech export controls, Rogozin was highlighting the impotence of Russia to the operational environment in outer space. As a pioneering space power, Russia’s cooperation and non-belligerence in space are crucial to the safety of all space-faring nations and their assets in orbit.

In the context of the current crisis, it is eerily worrying that a Russian military communications satellite, the Meridian-4 has allegedly gone offline. Although it may not be a catastrophic loss for Russian warfighting capabilities, it represents a risk. There is a distinct possibility that If counterspace capabilities come into play, a lot of disruption can be inflicted on all sides, including non-belligerent and neutral nations. Interestingly, Rogozin has also drawn a line declaring that Russia can treat adversaries disabling its satellites and related space infrastructure as a just cause of war. 

The US-led North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and Russia both rely on data streams enabled by space-based Earth observation and navigation capabilities. The already stagnating advance of Russian forces would likely be hindered further if their access to navigation through their own high-precision military GLONASS and less capable civilian GPS navigation signals were cut off. 

This can also lead to further collateral damage and humanitarian catastrophe as Russia is increasingly stepping up the use of aerial munitions like cruise missiles and aircraft deployed ordnance. These weapons rely on precision guidance supplied by the same data streams enabled by satellites and other assets in orbit, knocking them out could lead to many more innocent lives being lost.

There are other threats like nations dazzling and degrading the remote sensing capability of adversarial satellites, which can result in miscalculations and escalation, especially when it comes to early warning systems. With the implicit Nuclear threat involved from the Russian side, things can go apocalyptic if a country’s nuclear “launch on warning” capability is compromised.

Generally speaking, any verification and attribution for counterspace activities rely heavily on either Space Situational Awareness (SSA) data being released by governments or amateur space watchers and astronomers. This makes military use of space a grey zone, especially with regard to intelligence and counter-intelligence activities by nation-States. 

Russian satellites have been in the past accused of snooping on and inspecting the US and French space assets during close passes and proximity operations. 

Russia also recently demonstrated a glimpse of its kinetic counterspace capabilities with a Direct Ascent Anti-Satellite (D-ASAT) weapon test in November 2021. Russia’s latest test left behind debris that poses a significant threat to safe operations of artificial space objects belonging to all space-faring countries. 

Destructive Anti Satellite (A-SAT) tests should be banned in peacetime, and any A-SAT use should be declared an act of war by international consensus. However, there is a clear and emerging need for countries to develop point defence capabilities against objects falling from space. 

Last year, China intentionally let a large chunk of its Long March 5B rocket return to earth in uncontrolled re-entry. The risky re-entry could have affected several artificial space objects and indeed smaller debris pieces could have caused loss to life and property on Earth. 

In the latest whitepaper on space, China indeed mentions defence against near-earth objects, this could mean asteroids that might be on a trajectory to hit the earth or large chunks of space debris. While India neither has a near-earth object defence capability, nor does it have plans to develop or acquire one, this represents a gap in India’s defence planning that should be debated and filled at the earliest.

India’s recently set up Defence Space Agency (DSA) is not involved in the current crisis but would presumably be a keen watcher as events unfold. The lessons from the ongoing Russia-Ukraine war could be decisive for securing India’s own use of space in a future war. 

Aditya Pareek is a research analyst at the Takshashila Institution

The views expressed are personal  



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In late 2019, when India withdrew from the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP) – a trade agreement involving Southeast Asia, China, Japan, South Korea, Australia, and New Zealand – it was perceived as New Delhi stepping away from global trade. The pendulum has now swung, with India concluding a trade agreement with the United Arab Emirates (UAE), and in negotiations with Australia, the United Kingdom (UK), Canada, and Israel. The shift reflects the increasingly political character of international commerce. Concerns about further dependence on China, particularly given RCEP’s lax rules of origin, stand in stark contrast to the prospect of greater integration with more complementary (and friendly) advanced economies.

Yet trade agreements are but one means to what is arguably a more important national objective: Increasing the global share of India’s exports. Creating goods and services not just for India, but for the world, is critical to ensuring large-scale employment, wealth creation, and human development that takes fuller advantage of India’s favourable demographics. Additionally, as the pandemic has underscored, globally competitive manufacturing is critical to ensuring national resilience, particularly in critical sectors such as health, energy, and digital technologies. China has demonstrated, much as colonial powers did in a prior era, how export power can be leveraged for political purposes.

Admittedly, India’s quest for exports has faced adverse headwinds. It is not rich in natural resources such as oil and gas. Politics has created further hurdles. India today accounts for around 3% of the world’s economy (ranked 6th) yet contributes only about 2.2% of global exports (ranked 12th) and barely 2% of merchandise exports (ranked 14th). Over half of Indian goods exports come from refined petroleum products, gems and jewellery, pharmaceuticals, machinery, organic chemicals, automotive parts, and iron and steel. These are (with few exceptions) not generators of large-scale employment.

Today, two developments have collectively created an opportunity to redress India’s anaemic exports. First, Beijing’s growing assertiveness and economic nationalism have caused some governments to reconsider their dependence on trade integration with China. This extends to the United States (US), Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, UK, and Australia, as well as some European countries. Some see Southeast Asia and India as potential alternatives, although they recognise that diverting value chains away from mainland China will take many years, given sunk costs. A second factor has been the coronavirus pandemic, which has offered an opportunity for a reset, as trade and supply chains have been disrupted.

Is India set to seize this opportunity? Not yet. The challenges are that certain policies intended to promote self-sufficiency, rather paradoxically, risk moving India further away from that objective. Boosting Indian exports will require further integration into global value chains, and thus recognition that production will still be dispersed across borders. India consequently faces at least three major obstacles to fully realising its export potential: Restrictions on imports, regulatory uncertainty, and inadequate infrastructure. These concerns have been identified both by domestic manufacturers and multinational corporations (MNCs) interested in further investment in India.

The most immediate challenge involves recognising that increasing exports requires facilitating imports. Final assembly in India necessitates importing raw materials, as well as intermediary goods until full domestic manufacturing ecosystems can be established. After all, China and Germany – which enjoy enormous trade surpluses – are also two of the three largest importers. Yet Indian manufacturers confront a series of challenges to importing necessary components, including high import duties, complicated licensing procedures, large penalties, double-taxation on reimports, price controls, and local content requirements in products lacking local suppliers.

A second challenge relates to regulatory uncertainty, which deters long-term investment, often with implications for pricing. In certain sectors, customs duties are applied arbitrarily, often to the disadvantage of the Indian private sector. Similarly, the electronics sector – a government priority – faces constantly changing regulations and certification requirements. Local standards are often in conflict with prevailing global norms, creating further disincentives for exports.

Finally, while India’s infrastructure has improved considerably, constraints remain. These extend to port congestion and inadequate dedicated freight corridors, and also such hurdles as a lack of electronic forms for necessary paperwork. Such factors raise costs, often rendering Indian exports non-competitive. By one reckoning, the real cost of logistics in India is almost twice that of some competitors.

There are certainly other challenges, such as inadequate human capital, land, market access, arbitration, and low-interest financing. But facilitating the import of intermediary goods, generating regulatory certainty, and addressing infrastructure bottlenecks would go a long way towards making Indian manufacturing more competitive, relative to its real competition like Vietnam, the Philippines, and Mexico.

Global value chains are a two-way street: For exports to rise, imports must be facilitated, albeit in a manner that prevents dumping. Creating a self-sufficient manufacturing and export ecosystem cannot happen overnight and will need to be nurtured with policy predictability and efficient infrastructure. Addressing Indian manufacturers’ concerns is paramount. In this matter at least, the Covid-19 pandemic and China’s belligerence offer perhaps the last opportunity for India to take full advantage of its demographic dividend.

Dhruva Jaishankar is executive director, ORF America

The views expressed are personal



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OF CABBAGES AND KINGS

“Buddha has a curly hair style
Ganesh has an elephant’s head
Krishna the flautist does beguile
And Yama the god of the dead
Has a frightening face, a terrible sight
With an outstretched tongue, blood red
Though we -- One-God-wallas -- say God is light
And worship the abstract instead.”

From Histry ki Isstry, by Bachchoo

“Sweet are the uses of absurdity,
Which, like the toad, ugly and self-righteous,
Wears yet a precious jewel in his head;
And these critiques, exempt from common sense,
Finds unexplored writers, prizes to give them,
‘isms’ in books and offence in everything”!

I must confess that the above is a quote from a dead, white, male writer from a country engaged in colonial adventures. He is best known for writing tragedies, histories confined to the annals of white, male kings, comedies without jokes and sonnets to a boyfriend. Before his works are banned for sexism, racism, etc, I urge you to get hold of his complete works and keep it hidden from the thought police. His name is, or was, William Shakespeare. (At the time of writing, Amazon still sells copies!)

I admit that I’ve distorted his quote, substituting “absurdity” for the original “adversity”. And whereas his toad was venomous, mine is self-righteous. And so, with other phrases with which I have taken this warranted liberty.

Which warrant was occasioned by the fact that the Royal Shakespeare Company has appointed a sort of czar to point out to schoolchildren the racism, sexism, ageism, homophobia, misogyny, anti-Semitism, sizeism in Willy’s works.

Jacqui O’Hanlon is the director of learning at the RSC. She recently said: “There is language that is racist, there is racism through the plays, there is sexism through the plays. There is ableism through the plays. The worst thing we can do is deny that that exists.”

Now I really don’t want to do this worst thing and deny that these attitudes may exist in the plays. Ms O’Hanlon’s department has formulated a curriculum for schools which intends to expose these aspects of Willy’s works. As the modified quote at the top of this column says, there is a certain absurdity in this approach and yet I concede it can boast a certain necessity and critical virtue and acumen. The danger is that this emphasis will turn the tried and applauded accuracy of the portrayals and drama in Shakespeare into a litany of victimisation.

This RSC caper, as the passengers on the Titanic would say, is only the tip of the iceberg.

The Scottish University of the Highlands and Islands, which constitutes 13 research institutions and colleges, has issued a “content warning” for Ernest Hemingway’s classic novel The Old Man and The Sea. The warning to students, which is expected to put them off reading the books, says it contains violent allusions to fishing. It’s not the only book the university issues caveats about.

It has targeted several classics. The list includes Homer’s The Iliad, written in the eighth century BC, and Beowulf, an English poem from 1025 AD, with warnings that they contain “scenes of violent close combat”. Meanwhile, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein is said to contain “violent murder and cruelty” and Shakespeare’s classics Hamlet and Romeo and Juliet allegedly contain scenes of “stabbing, poison, and suicide”. A university spokesman defended the warning notes, saying that they “enable students to make informed choices”.

Far be it from me to be listed, or thought of, as an anti-woke warrior, but in my critical understanding there is woke, and there is what has to be labelled “Jwoke”!

Why would I, who have spent my adult life in the UK characterised as a British-Indian writer, some of whose work is about the new communities of Britain, not see the virtue in bringing black, Asian and other minority ethnic writers to the reading public and onto the literary prize lists?

Though I don’t believe in the stars, I thank my lucky ones that I was one day approached, in the staff room of the school where I taught in the 1970s, by a young man in a grey suit.

At the door of the staff room, he asked: “Are you Farrukh Dhondy?” I said “does he owe you money”; and when he said “no”, I asked if he was from the police.

He said his name was Martin Pick, and he was from Macmillan’s publishing house. He contracted me that very day to write a book of short stories set in the Asian and black communities of Britain about which I had written pieces in agitational newssheets and pamphlets that he had read.

Now, decades later, there are departments of literature at universities who promote the writings of women and the “minorities”. Some of them indulge the idiotic idea that dead white male writers should be shunned or banned. I suppose they mean Shakespeare, Charles Dickens, Karl Marx, Freud, Conrad, Proust, George Eliot (Idiot! That’s a woman called Mary Ann Evans! -- Ed. Oh dear, sorry yaar, thought George was a man’s name -- except of course in a book I once read where it was short for Georgina, by a writer called Enid something… -- fd)!

I, for one, would hate to be in a list of women, black and ethnic writers that excluded white males. Though it’s unlikely, I’d much rather be mixed in even at the very bottom, with Shakespeare, Dickens, Faulkner, Eliot, Naipaul…



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India’s chattering classes are behaving like they’ve just discovered a country called Ukraine! Maybe they really have. After all, Ukraine isn’t as glam as France or Italy. It’s amusing to follow the emotionally charged exchanges between self-styled intellectuals swapping “forwards” plucked from WhatsApp groups, as they take positions on a crisis threatening the world as much as Covid-19 did three years ago. Instead of a tiny virus that crept into unsuspecting lungs and killed a lot of people, we have a Russian strongman who wants to show pretenders who’s the asli duniya ka boss! Clearly, it ain’t Joe Biden! This is Vladimir Putin’s moment in history, and he isn’t about to blow it. Neither will he blow up Ukraine, as people fear. He doesn’t have to. The message has gone out loud and clear: Putin has secured his place in history books merely by flexing his martial arts-toned biceps. And firing a few missiles, of course.

Back in India, the sabjantawalas are busy creating their own narratives. We talk like overnight experts on geopolitics. Bored, idle urbanites are obsessing on the crisis, almost as if their own future hangs on how many missiles and tanks are deployed in Ukraine before a sensible “setting” is achieved, and we go back to worrying about rising petrol prices and what happens in Uttar Pradesh if the BJP loses. Memes and jokes galore are doing the rounds, even as our dynamic ministerlog fly in and out of Europe to ensure that Indian students in Ukraine get home safely. This is a timely move by the government and shows how proactive we are, even if we chose to remain non-committal by abstaining during the critical anti-Russia UN vote. Sending our airliners to bring back our kids is easier, and shows Ukraine in a very poor light. If they can’t ensure the safety of 18.000 Indian students studying in their universities, they must be really bad people, who deserve to be pounded by aggressive Russians out to grab their country, right? Desi students added to the discourse by recounting how rude the Ukrainians were to them. Stories of starvation and scary escapes to the border are making more news today than the equally poignant plight of thousands of migrant workers trudging back to their villages during the pandemic ever did.

But our sense of humour stays intact.  A recent meme offered an instant solution: “Change the spelling from Ukraine to UKKKRENNE and the problem will be solved,” it read, in a dig at a popular numerologist who minted millions by advocating spelling changes, involving the letter “K”.

Most of us living in our Mumbai-bubble have a sizzling story or two featuring attractive Ukrainian ladies. Quite a few high society marriages took a hit, a decade ago, with the “other woman” being a beauty from Kyiv. Special charters from Ukrainian cities with gorgeous young girls on board would regularly land in Mumbai and be met by canny talent scouts who’d herd the lot for auditions with Bollywood producers looking for backup dancers in elaborate “item songs”. Some of the taller girls would turn to ramp modelling, while others slightly lower in the pecking order would get jobs as scantily-clad ushers in grand-scale weddings. At one point, no Ludhiana/Jalandhar shaadi was complete without Ukrainian bar girls serving drinks to lusty shouts of “Balle Balle”. Let’s not go all the way to Goa, with entire villages taken over by Ukrainians plying various nefarious trades as cops looked the other way.

This has nothing to do with our sympathy for the country under siege. The very thought of Ukraine’s President winning major dance contests and carving out a successful career as a stand-up comic is most inspiring. Pappu can dance, saala! Russia’s foreign minister Sergei Lavrov has generously and disingenuously said his country “recognises Volodymyr Zelenskyy as Ukraine’s legitimate President”. Spasibo! But it’s angry with the popular President for “lying to his people”. Russian leaders never lie to their people, okay? It’s the same Zelenskyy who hasn’t abandoned his citizens and fled after being offered asylum. He is there on the streets, wearing a helmet and promising to defend his country till the last bullet. But hey… he also messed up evacuation plans. Why didn’t he take Putin’s threats seriously and put out an advisory to citizens to vacate homes well in advance?

Talking to a top dog in the Indian Army, who retired recently and is considered a good military strategist/tactician, I was interested to read his comments on the media coverage, providing detailed statistics about the conflict. He says such “accuracy” is totally off, if not impossible. As he put it: “Casualty reports on either side are never accurate, seldom truthful and (often) deliberately falsified. I wish our reporters understand they are giving figures of something very different than a profit and loss statement of an MNC after the AGM.” He went on to scoff: “EU and Nato are like any RWA (residents’ welfare association) watching two neighbours fighting bitterly. But they daren’t discontinue water and electricity supply of those homes.” I have still to come across a better perspective!

Kaun jeetega or kaun harega in this dark, dismal scenario is impossible to predict, as the real war is being fought slyly behind the scenes between players whose identity isn’t known to the world. Stealth and secrecy have always determined the outcome of battles through time immemorial. Russia doesn’t like to lose wars, as history has established. Putin is way too alpha to back down regardless of sanctions and threats from other European nations, with leaders calling him a “dictator”, “criminal” and worse. The hypocrisy and double standards are there for all to judge. Who will ever forget the blatantly racist coverage on TV channels, with anchors talking in outraged terms about “white people with blue eyes and blond hair being killed by other whites”! In this White vs White war it's only Vladimir Putin who will make history and change history. What he launched against Ukraine isn’t new. Americans can be accused of this and worse. Besides, for all his belligerence and chest-thumping, Joe Biden comes across as a wimp. And why is Barack Obama’s role being overlooked? Saat khoon maaf? Like another apt meme stated: “When Russia sends tanks and soldiers into another country, it’s called INVASION. When America does it, it’s called LIBERATION”.

Till peace is restored, let’s seek comfort and inspiration from poetry, as Ukrainian soldier Zhenya Peripelitsa did, standing in a field covered in snow, as he recited a poignant poem by Hamid Mosadegh: “What are you thinking? Who would believe your love turned to ashes, the jungle of my soul…

As long as poetry can soothe us and act as a salve, there’s hope for peace!



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