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Editorials - 15-09-2022

Near-universal social security pensions would be a good start to a radical expansion of public support for the elderly

Life expectancy in India has more than doubled since Independence — from around 32 years in the late 1940s to 70 years or so today. Many countries have done even better, but this is still a historical achievement. Over the same period, the fertility rate has crashed from about six children per woman to just two, liberating women from the shackles of repeated child-bearing and child care. All this is good news, but it also creates a new challenge — the ageing of the population.

The share of the elderly (persons aged 60 years and above) in India’s population, close to 9% in 2011, is growing fast and may reach 18% by 2036 according to the National Commission on Population. If India is to ensure a decent quality of life for the elderly in the near future, planning and providing for it must begin today.

Pensions help

Recent work on mental health among the elderly in India sheds new light on their dire predicament. Evidence on depression from a collaborative survey of the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL) and the Government of Tamil Nadu is particularly telling. Among persons aged 60 and above, 30% to 50% (depending on gender and age group) had symptoms that make them likely to be depressed. The proportion with depression symptoms is much higher for women than men, and rises sharply with age. In most cases, depression remains undiagnosed and untreated.

As one might expect, depression is strongly correlated with poverty and poor health, but also with loneliness. Among the elderly living alone, in the Tamil Nadu sample, 74% had symptoms that would classify them as likely to be mildly depressed or worse on the short-form Geriatric Depression Scale. A large majority of elderly persons living alone are women, mainly widows.

The hardships of old age are not related to poverty alone, but some cash often helps. Cash can certainly help to cope with many health issues, and sometimes to avoid loneliness as well. The first step towards a dignified life for the elderly is to protect them from destitution and all the deprivations that may come with it. That is why old-age pensions are a vital part of social security systems around the world.

India has important schemes of non-contributory pensions for the elderly, widowed women and disabled persons under the National Social Assistance Programme (NSAP), administered by the Ministry of Rural Development. Alas, eligibility for NSAP is restricted to “below poverty line” (BPL) families, based on outdated and unreliable BPL lists, some of them are 20 years old. Further, the central contribution to old-age pensions under NSAP has stagnated at a tiny Rs. 200 per month since 2006, with a slightly higher but still paltry amount (Rs. 300 per month) for widows.

Many States have enhanced the coverage and/or amount of social-security pensions beyond NSAP norms using their own funds and schemes. Some have even achieved “near-universal” (say 75%-80%) coverage of widows and elderly persons. That is now the norm, for instance, in all the southern States except Tamil Nadu — an odd exception since Tamil Nadu has been a pioneer in the field of social security.

Beyond targets

“Targeting” social benefits is always difficult. Restricting them to BPL families has not worked well: there are huge exclusion errors in the BPL lists. When it comes to old-age pensions, targeting is not a good idea in any case. For one thing, targeting tends to be based on household rather than individual indicators. A widow or elderly person, however, may experience major deprivations even in a relatively well-off household. A pension can help them to avoid extreme dependence on relatives who may or may not take good care of them, and it may even lead relatives to be more considerate.

For another, targeting tends to involve complicated formalities such as the submission of BPL certificates and other documents. That has certainly been the experience with NSAP pensions. The formalities can be particularly forbidding for elderly persons with low incomes or little education, who are in greatest need of a pension. In the Tamil Nadu sample, eligible persons who had been left out of pension schemes were found to be much poorer than the pension recipients (by more than just the pension). Moreover, even when lists of left-out, likely-eligible persons were submitted to the local administration, very few were approved for a pension, confirming that they face resilient barriers in the current scheme of things.

The problem is generally not a lack of effort or goodwill on the part of the government officials. Rather, many have absorbed the idea that their job is to save the government money by making sure that no ineligible person qualifies by mistake. In Tamil Nadu this often means, for example, that if the applicant has an able-bodied son in the city, they may be disqualified, regardless of whether they get any support from their son. In their quest to avoid inclusion errors, many officials are less concerned about exclusion errors.

A better approach is to consider all widows and elderly or disabled persons as eligible, subject to simple and transparent “exclusion criteria”. Eligibility can even be self-declared, with the burden of time-bound verification being placed on the local administration or gram panchayat. Some cheating may happen, but it is unlikely that many privileged households will risk trouble for the sake of a small monthly pension. And it is much preferable to accommodate some inclusion errors than to perpetuate the massive exclusion errors we are seeing today in targeted pension schemes.

Widening the net

The proposed move from targeted to near-universal pensions is not particularly new. As mentioned earlier, it has already happened in several States. Of course, it requires larger pension budgets, but additional expenditure is easy to justify. India’s social assistance schemes have low budgets and make a big difference to large numbers of people (about 40 million under NSAP). They are well worth expanding.

An example may help. In Tamil Nadu, social security pensions (typically Rs. 1,000 per month) are targeted and cover about a third of all elderly persons and widowed women, at a cost of around Rs. 4,000 crore per year. If, instead, 20% were to be excluded and the rest eligible by default, the cost would rise to Rs. 10,000 crore per year. That would be a modest price to pay to ensure a modicum of economic security in old age to everyone. It would be a fraction of the Rs. 40,000 crore Tamil Nadu is expected to spend this year on pensions and retirement benefits for government employees – barely 1% of the population. If the transition cannot be made in one go, there is a strong case for starting with women (the widowed or the elderly), who often face special disadvantages. This would also be a step towards the fulfilment of the Tamil Nadu government’s promise of a “home grant” of Rs. 1,000 per month for women.

The southern States are relatively well-off, but even some of India’s poorer States (such as Odisha and Rajasthan) have near-universal social security pensions. It would be much easier for all States to do the same if the central government were to revamp the NSAP. The NSAP budget this year is just Rs. 9,652 crore — more or less the same as 10 years ago in money terms, and much lower in real terms. This is not even 0.05% of India’s GDP!

Social security pensions, of course, are just the first step towards a dignified life for the elderly. They also need other support and facilities such as health care, disability aids, assistance with daily tasks, recreation opportunities and a good social life. This is a critical area of research, policy and action for the near future.

Jean Drèze is Visiting Professor at the Department of Economics, Ranchi University. Esther Duflo, a Nobel Laureate (2019), is Professor of Poverty Alleviation and Development Economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology



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An amicable solution could have been reached through social, rather than judicial, intervention

In its final judgment on the Ayodhya dispute, delivered on November 9, 2019, the Supreme Court accepted the argument of several historians that no temple, much less a Ram temple, had been demolished to construct the Babri Masjid. It held the demolition of the mosque illegal and sought the prosecution of leaders responsible for it.

A brief history of the dispute

However, it is also a fact that at least since the 19th century, there has been a popular local tradition associating the site with Lord Ram in different ways, and disputes arising from it have led to incidents of violence as well as compromises. On the cold night of December 22-23, 1949, small clay idols of Ram Lalla were stealthily placed inside the mosque with the complicity of the District Magistrate, K.K. Nayyar. These stayed there with the connivance of the Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister, G.B. Pant, a Congress strongman, despite Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru’s instructions to remove them. The mosque was then locked up for nearly 50 years and there was relative quiet on that front.

Things began heating up in the late 1980s, partly when Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi allowed the opening of the gate of the mosque up to the site in a corner where a Ramchabutra (plinth) lay, in order to balance his disastrous handling of the Shah Bano case. Later in the decade, the Bharatiya Janata Party took up the challenge thrown to it by Prime Minister V.P. Singh’s sudden announcement of the implementation of Mandal Commission’s recommendation of reservation of 27% seats in Central government services and educational institutions for the Other Backward Classes by raking up the Ram Janmabhoomi issue; it picturesquely came to be known as the ‘Mandal-Kamandal’ contest. The BJP put all its energies into mobilising people for the cause of the Ram temple.

There was no violence on the scene. Several attempts were made to resolve the dispute over the land on which the Babri Masjid stood, without violence. However, by then, the dispute had shed its colour of a political tussle between the BJP and the V.P. Singh government and had become a Hindu-Muslim imbroglio. The Hindu side offered to have the mosque, with its structure and foundation intact, respectfully moved to another site. The shifting of the whole structure was technologically feasible and had been accomplished in Egypt some years earlier when an old monument was similarly moved on rails to a neighbouring site in order to widen the Suez Canal; the shifting could only be done within a short distance of one or two kilometres. But the offer was spurned, for God’s site was not open to bargaining.

Things moved fast after that. The Muslim side relied on the historical evidence that favoured them and the impartiality of the judiciary; the Hindu side relied on mass mobilisation through L.K. Advani’s Rath Yatra and violence in its wake. The judiciary tried out some sort of compromise with the Allahabad High Court dividing the disputed piece of land between the two sides, if unequally — a solution that pleased neither.

Opening a Pandora’s Box

In the end, the Supreme Court determined that no evidence of temple demolition existed. It should logically have restored the site to the Muslims, for this was entirely a property dispute. But by a queer inversion of its own logic, it gave away the site to the Hindus. The judgment has lent huge power to the Hindu side, represented by its various arms — the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, the BJP as a party and its various governments, the Vishwa Hindu Parishad, the Bajrang Dal, etc. — to seek ‘justice’ in innumerable instances by filing cases about just any mosque having been constructed over the debris of an old temple. It would also have the advantage of seeking the ‘righting’ of past wrongs through peaceful, judicial means, putting opponents on the defensive for not demonstrating respect for the judiciary.

A Pandora’s Box is now wide open. This also consolidates the hold of Hindutva over the body politic for the next several years by placing centre stage the urgency of recovering old temples from the ravages wreaked on them by medieval Muslim rulers, the responsibility for which must be borne by present-day Muslim inhabitants; issues of the economy, education, health, freedoms, etc. can wait. Above all, the history of the dispute and the resort to judicial verdict has turned the two sides into two implacable adversaries in which the emboldened Hindu side finds the solution in more heightened aggression.

Let us now imagine an alternative scenario back in the 1980s. As the dispute grew in dimensions, peaceful solutions were still being sought. What if the Muslim side had firmly articulated the historical veracity of their claim that no temple was demolished to erect the Babri Masjid, but had also taken cognisance of the widespread belief among the Hindus of the Awadh region of the existence of a Ram Janmasthan (the Ramchabutra ) within the complex and a Sitarasoi (kitchen) within a few yards of it and thus, having asserted their property rights over the 2.7 acres, ‘offered to donate’ it in honour of Ram? Ideally, this could have been done by accepting the proposal to move the mosque within the vicinity of the new grand Ram temple. But even otherwise, this ‘donation’ had the potential to avert the pitching of the Hindus and Muslims as implacable adversaries. Muslims might have earned goodwill among the Hindus and the old slogan of Hindu-Muslim ‘bhai-bhai’ was likely to have received an energising shot in society. This would have made it extremely hard for the Hindutva rabble-rousers to succeed in their endeavour or for the BJP to rise to such heights. Above all, this solution could not have been seen as a victory or defeat but an amicable solution through social, rather than judicial, intervention. If anything, it had the potential of being seen as a great moral victory for the Muslims; after all, it is the sense of victory after the Ayodhya judgment that has made the votaries of Hindutva so aggressive. This would also have been in tune with the legacy of India’s composite culture.

Making space for one another

So much has changed now that the future holds little promise for the demonstration of bonhomie between both communities by joining each other’s festivals. Ways have to be found, even invented, of sharing substantial spaces between and indeed among communities. The primary requisite for this is to look beyond our own exclusivist straitjackets and make space for the inclusion of others along with their religious sentiments. Participation, rather than exclusion, is the way out.

Harbans Mukhia taught History at Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi



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Rural-urban water disputes are very likely to occur as scarcity grows, exacerbated by climate change

The UNESCO United Nations World Water Development Report of 2022 has encapsulated global concern over the sharp rise in freshwater withdrawal from streams, lakes, aquifers and human-made reservoirs, impending water stress and also water scarcity being experienced in different parts of the world. In 2007, ‘Coping with water scarcity’ was the theme of World Water Day (observed on March 22). The new Water Report of the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) sounded a note of caution about this silent crisis of a global dimension, with millions of people being deprived of water to live and to sustain their livelihood.

Growing water stress

Further, the Water Scarcity Clock, an interactive webtool, shows that over two billion people live in countries now experiencing high water stress; the numbers will continue to increase. The Global Drought Risk and Water Stress map (2019) shows that major parts of India, particularly west, central and parts of peninsular India are highly water stressed and experience water scarcity. A NITI Aayog report, ‘Composite Water Management Index’ (2018) has sounded a note of caution about the worst water crisis in the country, with more than 600 million people facing acute water shortages. The typical response of the areas where water shortage or scarcity is high includes transfer of water from the hinterlands/upper catchments or drawing it from stored surface water bodies or aquifers. This triggers sectoral and regional competition; rural-urban transfer of water is one such issue of global concern.

Increasing trans-boundary transfer of water between rural and urban areas has been noted in many countries since the early 20th century. A review paper published in 2019 reported that, globally, urban water infrastructure imports an estimated 500 billion litres of water per day across a combined distance of 27,000km. At least 12% of large cities in the world rely on inter-basin transfers. A UN report on ‘Transboundary Waters Systems – Status and Trend’ (2016) linked this issue of water transfer with various Sustainable Development Goals proposed to be achieved during 2015 to 2030. The report identified risks associated with water transfer in three categories of biophysical, socio-economic and governance. South Asia, including India, falls in the category of high biophysical and the highest socio-economic risks.

Urban water use

According to Census 2011, the urban population in India accounted for 34% of total population distributed in 7,935 towns of all classes. It is estimated that the urban population component in India will cross the 40% mark by 2030 and the 50% mark by 2050 (World Urbanization Prospects, 2018). The urban population accounted for 50% of the total world population by the end of the last century. Although the pace of India’s urbanisation is relatively slow, it is now urbanising at a rapid pace — the size of the urban population is substantial. Water use in the urban sector has increased as more and more people shift to urban areas, and per capita use of water in these centres rises, which will continue to grow with improved standards of living.

Examining the urban water management trajectory, it is evident that in the initial stages when a city is small, it is concerned only with water supply; in a majority of cases, water is sourced locally, with groundwater meeting the bulk of the supply. As the city grows and water management infrastructures develop, dependence shifts to surface water.

With a further growth of cities, water sources shift further up in the hinterlands, or the allocation of urban water is enhanced at the expense of irrigation water. Almost all cities in India that depend on surface water experience this trend. City water supply is now a subject of inter-basin and inter-State transfers of water.

The case of Ahmedabad

Ahmedabad is an interesting case in this context. More than 80% of water supply in this city used to be met from groundwater sources till the mid-1980s. The depth to groundwater level reached 67 metres in confined aquifers. The city now depends on the Narmada canal for the bulk of its water supply. The shift is from local groundwater to canal water receiving supply from an inter-State and inter-basin transfer of surface water.

Dependence on groundwater continues particularly in the peri-urban areas in almost all large cities that have switched to surface water sources. While surface water transfer from rural to urban areas is visible and can be computed, the recharge areas of groundwater aquifers are spread over well beyond the city boundary or its periphery.

Whatever be the source, surface or groundwater, cities largely depend on rural areas for raw water supply, which has the potential to ignite the rural-urban dispute. Available studies covering Nagpur and Chennai indicate the imminent problem of rural-urban water disputes that the country is going to face in the not-so-distant future as water scarcity grows, which will be further exacerbated by climate change.

At present, the rural-urban transfer of water is a lose-lose situation in India as water is transported at the expense of rural areas and the agricultural sector; in cities, most of this water is in the form of grey water with little recovery or reuse, eventually contributing to water pollution. Rural and urban areas use water from the same stock, i.e., the water resources of the country. Therefore, it is important to strive for a win-win situation.

Such a situation is possible through a host of activities in the rural and urban areas, which is primarily a governance challenge. A system perspective and catchment scale-based approach are necessary to link reallocation of water with wider discussions on development, infrastructure investment, fostering an rural-urban partnership and adopting an integrated approach in water management.

Institutional strengthening can offer entry points and provide opportunities to build flexibility into water resource allocation at a regional level, enabling adjustments in rapidly urbanising regions. In India’s 75th anniversary of Independence, it is time to examine the state of its water resources and ensure that the development process is not in jeopardy.

Srikumar Chattopadhyay is former Scientist, Centre for Earth Science Studies, Thiruvananthapuram, and Indian Council of Social Science Research (ICSSR) National Fellow, Gulati Institute of Finance and Taxation, Thiruvananthapuram



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The story stands on shaky legs, but the controversy lays bare the problem of the pharmaceuticals-doctors nexus

Recently, a controversy bubbled up regarding the marketing strategies of Micro Labs, a Bengaluru-based pharmaceutical company. Micro Labs, the maker of Dolo-650, was charged of having bribed medical doctors with freebies worth Rs. 1,000 crore in one year to promote Dolo-650.

Dolo is an analgesic and antipyretic — a non-steroidal anti-inflammatory medication to help with fever and mild pain. It can be purchased from a chemist without a medical prescription. It is actually plain paracetamol, which is a particularly crowded market and fairly competitive too, in a manner of speaking. The Drugs (Prices Control) Order (DPCO) has established ceiling prices for over 850 medicines, including of brands of paracetamol. The ceiling price for a single 650 mg paracetamol tablet is Rs. 1.83 and for a single 500 mg tablet, it is Rs. 0.91. It is naturally more profitable for 650 mg to be sold. But how profitable, exactly? Do the incentives work out for the firm? In particular, does the economics work out in terms of giving away Rs. 1,000 crore of freebies?

The likelihood of freebies

The paracetamol API is mostly imported from China. There has been significant upward pricing pressure, mostly because of the difficulty of ensuring regular supply from China. But given the price ceiling and the level of competition, investing in the level of ‘freebies’ reported is unlikely. We are not suggesting that the problem of ‘freebies’ doesn’t exist. But the supply chain for freebies is much easier to manage for specialty drugs such as chemotherapy drugs, or when products such as stents and knee and hip implants are directly sold to hospitals. For paracetamol, given the price ceiling and the number of competitors, tracking prescriptions and rewarding doctors is challenging.

You might argue that Micro Labs may have been willing to take a hit on their margins in order to bump up sales. Perhaps the freebies could be justified if there are other benefits? Well, higher sales at lower margins to the selling company might make sense, but this is a strategy usually employed to beef up the financials, in order to make the valuation look better. The truth comes out eventually. Or you may argue that this was a brand-building exercise in anticipation of higher over-the-counter sales, to help push through a sale of the brand to a pharmaceutical major. Without these angles, the story stands on shaky legs.

Legal provisions

Yet, thinking about this scandal is still instructive, for it lays bare the extent of the problem, beyond the paracetamol segment, let alone the specific product (Dolo). The Uniform Code of Pharmaceuticals Marketing Practices explicitly prohibits gifts, payments and hospitality benefits to doctors on the part of medical representatives. Pharmaceutical firms have been declaring their compliance with, and adherence to, this code since 2015, if not earlier. The kicker? This code has been fully voluntary since 2015. There is also no enforcement mechanism. The Indian Pharmaceutical Alliance, which is meant to “enforce” the code, has promptly given Micro Labs a ‘clean chit’.

That being said, there are provisions that detract pharmaceutical firms from offering incentives. And they come from a somewhat unexpected source: the Income Tax Act, 1961. The Act explicitly disallows deductions for payments to doctors. Moreover, tax deducted at source (TDS) is applicable for all payments made to doctors. Workarounds are possible, but this acts as a huge financial disincentive for pharmaceutical companies.

There’s more. Para 1.5 of the Indian Medical Council (Professional Conduct, Etiquette and Ethics) Regulations, 2002 states that every physician should, as far as possible, prescribe drugs with generic names. It also states that there is both a rational prescription and use of pharmaceutical drugs. This is, of course, rarely done and there is no enforcement. This regulation also prohibits the disbursement of gifts. In this case, there is potential for enforcement — a reprimand, at the least — and even for cancellation of license, though this happens very rarely.

The solution is two-fold. First, a move to prescriptions without brand names should be the default practice. Doctors will then have no incentive to promote particular brands and pharmaceutical companies will have no incentive to give freebies to doctors. But even if doctors are not able to recommend a certain brand, pharmacists are. And their incentive is to recommend brands that give them the highest trade margins, which are based on the maximum retail price (MRP). We can remove this incentive by introducing a flat dispensing fee, regardless of MRP. This will restore agency to the patient.

Murali Neelakantan is an Indian advocate and English solicitor who was previously Global General Counsel at Cipla & Glenmark; Ashish Kulkarni teaches courses in economics and statistics



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Missing from the freebie debate are power subsidies, which constitute a significant share of the subsidy expenditure of many States

On July 16, Prime Minister Narendra Modi said, “There are some governments which are indulging in revri culture to secure votes.” Later that month, the Supreme Court admitted a petition which contended that the offer and distribution of “irrational freebies” amounted to “bribery and was unduly influencing voters”. During the hearing, Chief Justice N.V. Ramana said, “We are not just looking at this as just another problem during election time... We are looking at the national economic well-being.”

Mr. Modi’s statement drew criticism from the Opposition. Seeking to be made a party in the ongoing ‘freebies’ case, the DMK argued that the term ‘freebies’ could not be interpreted to restrict States’ competence in providing welfare. Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal retorted to the Prime Minister saying that “waiving off friends’ loans worth thousands of crores... were nothing but freebies.”

These exchanges were mostly focused on election-related freebies, which form a minuscule share of the subsidy expenditure. What was missing from the freebie debate was power subsidies, which constitute a significant share of the subsidy expenditure of many States. This is especially the case with States which are relatively more burdened by debt and also spend the most on subsidies. For instance, three States — Rajasthan, Punjab, and Bihar — spend over 80% of their subsidy expenditure on power.

Chart 1 shows the share of subsidy expenditure in four areas — power, food and civil supplies, agriculture, and industries — in the top five States which spent the most on subsidies between FY17 and FY21. The share of subsidy expenditure shown is as of FY21.

Various types of power subsidies are offered by the States targeting farmers, consumers, and industries. For the purpose of this analysis, all of them have been clubbed under one umbrella term called ‘power subsidies’. For example, Andhra Pradesh offers power subsidies under several heads including ‘free power to SC (Scheduled Caste) households’, ‘reimbursement of electricity charges,’ and ‘Y.S.R Nine Hours Free Power Supply.’

Rajasthan, Punjab, and Bihar are also the States that spend more than 25% of their own tax revenue on subsidies along with Chhattisgarh and Madhya Pradesh. Barring Bihar, all four spend close to 2% of the State Domestic Product on subsidies. The above figures are an average for the five-year period from FY17 to FY21.

All these States are also burdened with high levels of debt. Punjab, specifically, has the highest debt-to-GSDP ratio among the major States in FY22, crossing the 50% mark. The State’s debt has grown by more than 10% points since FY17.

In these five States, in FY22, the debt-to-GSDP ratio was close to or above 30%. Like Punjab, Chhattisgarh too had touched double-digit growth in the debt-to-GSDP ratio. Table 2 lists subsidy expenditure as a share of own tax revenue and GSDP between FY17 and FY21. It also lists the debt-to-GSDP ratio in FY22 and the change since FY17.

Among the big spenders, shown in table 3(a), subsidy expenditure dipped in FY20 and FY21. However, this trend got reversed in FY22.

Even among States which spent a relatively low share on subsidies, an increasing trend can be observed. Table 3(b) shows that States such as Gujarat, Andhra Pradesh, Jharkhand, and Uttar Pradesh (which feature in the bottom half of table 2) have increased their subsidy expenditure to more than 1% of GSDP.

More importantly, even in States which are gradually increasing their subsidy expenses, a major chunk of subsidy is devoted to power. For instance, Andhra Pradesh spent 94% of subsidies on power in FY21 (Chart 4).

In both cases — States which are high subsidy spenders and those which are gradually increasing their spending — power constitutes a dominant chunk of subsidy expenses. It is evident that meaningful intervention on this issue is possible only by addressing the power component of subsidies. Reducing other ‘freebies’ will not bring down the debt levels of the States significantly.

nihalani.j@thehindu.co.in



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The latest disengagement along the LAC is a welcome step, but the border crisis is not over

India and China on September 13 confirmed the disengagement of their troops from a fifth friction point in Eastern Ladakh along the LAC. With the latest withdrawal of troops from Patrolling Point (PP) 15 in the Gogra-Hot Springs area, buffer zones have now been established by the two sides in five locations, including in Galwan Valley, north and south of Pangong Lake, and at PP17A in Gogra. The arrangements in the four earlier established buffer zones have so far helped keep the peace over the past two years. No patrolling is to be undertaken by either side in the buffer zones, which have been established on territory claimed by both India and China. The latest disengagement came just three days before Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Chinese President Xi Jinping are to attend the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) Summit in Uzbekistan.

Reflecting the current state of relations, the two leaders have not directly spoken in more than two-and-a-half-years, an extraordinary situation for the world’s two most populous countries. Whether they meet at the SCO Summit — as of September 14, neither side had confirmed or ruled out a meeting — or at the G20 in Indonesia later this year, India will need to proceed with caution as it inevitably resumes high-level engagement with China. While the buffer zones may serve as a temporary measure to prevent a recurrence of clashes, the reality is that this is an arrangement that has been forced on India. The Indian military, by holding the line and showing its capacity to match China’s deployments, has been able to reverse China’s multiple territorial ingresses of April 2020 in the five areas. That has, however, come at the cost of India’s ability to access patrolling points that it was reaching previously, which, in the view of some military observers, might have been China’s game-plan all along, given the favourable logistics and terrain on the Chinese side that enable faster deployments. Moreover, China has neither agreed to resolve stand-offs in Demchok and Depsang, suggesting they pre-dated the current tensions, nor shown any intent to de-escalate, instead continuing to build forward infrastructure aimed at permanently housing a large number of troops closer to the LAC. Indeed, signs are that both sides are in for a prolonged period of uncertainty on the borders thanks to China’s decision to mobilise tens of thousands of troops in April 2020, in contravention of past border agreements. Unless Beijing reverses its recent, and still unexplained, moves to militarise the LAC and in the process undo the carefully constructed arrangements that helped keep the peace for 40 years, India will have little incentive to consider a return to relations as they were prior to 2020. The latest disengagement, while certainly a welcome step, by no means implies an end to the crisis on the border.



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Inflation disproportionately affectsthe economically weaker sections

The latest retail inflation data from the National Statistical Office is a sobering reminder that accelerating price gains still remain the single biggest challenge to policymakers as they try to steer Asia’s third-largest economy to a more durable recovery from the pandemic-induced slump. Inflation based on the Consumer Price Index (CPI) quickened in August to a provisional 7%, from 6.7% in July, as the pace of gains in food prices as measured by the Consumer Food Price Index accelerated by a sizeable 93 basis points to 7.62%, from July’s 6.69%. And rural consumers bore a disproportionately higher burden: with month-on-month changes in both food prices and overall inflation appreciably greater at 0.88% and 0.57% respectively, compared with the 0.50% and 0.46% rates of urban inflation. Of particular concern is that inflation in the prices of cereals — staple grains in every household — surged to 9.57% from the preceding month’s 6.9% rate. Month-on-month the pace was a disconcerting 2.4%. Withkharif sowing of rice this year undershooting last year’s acreage and uneven distribution of rainfall further roiling the crop’s production picture, the outlook for inflation in this ‘heavyweight’ food category remains far from reassuring, the Centre’s recent imposition of tariff and other curbs on export of non-Basmati rice notwithstanding. In fact, eight of the 12 food items that combine to constitute the food and beverages category of the CPI saw sequential price upticks, with vegetables (13.2% year-on-year and 2.5% month-on-month) and dairy (6.39% and 0.9%, respectively) being two other vital foods that contributed to the faster inflation.

The Finance Ministry was quick to assert that the increase in headline inflation was “moderate”, even as it sought to downplay the significance of food price pressures by terming food and fuel prices as “transient components”. It also pointed to the steps by the Government to cool prices, that could help tame inflation in the ‘coming weeks’. And it cited oils and fats and pulses as two items where prices had begun to ease in response to the Centre’s steps. However, the prices of pulses and products quickened by 1.7% month-on-month, with the pace trailing only that of sequential inflation in spices, cereals and vegetables. Services categories including housing, health, education, recreation and personal care too witnessed sequential increases in price gains as these services saw demand gradually revive. The challenge going forward would be for providers to tread carefully so as not to yet again depress consumption by raising prices too quickly. Policymakers would do well to heed the dictum of a former RBI Governor, who never tired of reiterating that ‘containing the build up of price pressures is the best anti-poverty programme’ as the poor ‘have no hedge against inflation’.



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Madras, Sept. 14: A five-month-old child died in a city hospital following the administration of a paediatric drug with propylene glycol as the base solvent. If the drug, whose properties are being examined, is proved to contain toxic elements, it may become another “child-killer”, doctors fear. The male child, which died in the hospital, was admitted with complaints of anuria (failure to pass urine due to malfunctioning of kidney). Investigations by attending doctors revealed that the child was prescribed the drug along with a combination of other medicines to control fever and stomach pain. The doctors suspected the efficacy of the drug as there were already several complaints of complications on its administration. Following the death of the child, the matter was discussed by the doctors at an urgent meeting and the State Drugs Controller was notified. The doctors expressed the fear that if the drug proved to contain toxic elements the damage because of its administration might be alarming. For the drug, manufactured by a Bombay firm, was in the market throughout the country and it would be quite sometime before the particular batch was withdrawn. The results of the tests are expected in two or three days.



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In the petulance of his reaction to ink staining his hands, Charles III was as relatable as a king can be

In the petulance of the moment, the new king of the United Kingdom and other Commonwealth realms, was the most relatable he has ever been. A viral video of Charles III, frowning at hands stained with ink that had escaped the confines of a fountain pen, rings true for precisely this reason: Who hasn’t, as a child and/or an adult, fallen victim to the malfunctioning fountain pen, its ink smearing all over the writer’s hands and face? No doubt many commiserate with the new king in this time of great irritation. A monarch, by definition, cannot be “one of us”, but his “God, I hate this pen” and “every stinking time” was the closest Charles III has come to being one of the great unwashed.

The fountain pen is a peculiarly frustrating relic from the pre-keyboard/pad analogue years. It is, perhaps, no longer so widely used as it once was for its original purpose, that is, writing. It is used now instead more to signal something about the user — often their status, sometimes their “seriousness”. And the more expensive a pen, the likelier the chance that its only purpose in this world is to nestle in the breast pocket of a custom-tailored suit, from where it can announce its presence with a slowly growing and hard-to-remove ink stain.

In fiction, of course, the fountain pen has done double or even triple duty as a spy cam, recorder and weapon (Q’s exploding pen from GoldenEye being the most notable example). In real life, such things are unnecessary frills. All that the long-suffering public demands — including Charles III — is a pen that is utterly and under all circumstances, leak-proof. Is that too much to ask?



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Centre has been pushing for investments, but private sectors seems hesitant to take the plunge

A few weeks after government data showed that the Indian economy was growing at a slower pace than expected, Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman exhorted the private sector to step up investments in the country. Sitharaman, who was speaking at the Mindmine Summit, drew a direct contrast between foreign investors, who she argued were confident about investing in India, and the domestic private sector, which appears to be hesitant. “Since 2019 when I took charge of the finance ministry, I have been hearing industry doesn’t think it (environment) is conducive… I want to hear from India Inc. what’s stopping you?” she said. The minister listed various steps that the government has taken over the years to encourage investment activity in the economy — from cuts in the corporate tax rate to production linked incentive schemes. Yet, despite these, there isn’t concrete evidence of a broad-based pick up in investments.

Investment activity has remained muted since 2015-16, with the share of gross fixed capital formation, which connotes investments in the economy, hovering around 28 per cent of GDP. While activity did bounce back from the depths of the pandemic, at the end of 2021-22, investments were only 3.7 per cent higher than their pre-pandemic levels of 2019-20. And there aren’t enough indications of a significant uptick in investments in the near term. As per CMIE, in the first quarter of this year, investment proposals for adding new capacities in industrial, infrastructure and services, added up to Rs 3.57 lakh crore. This is only marginally higher than the average investment proposals in the preceding three quarters.

In the past, the twin balance sheet problem — an over-leveraged corporate sector and banks saddled with bad loans — was thought to have been holding back investment activity. Since then corporate and bank balance sheets have improved, but large parts of the economy continue to struggle. As per a report in this newspaper, 16.4 per cent of the loans availed by MSME under the ECLGS facility during the pandemic have turned bad as borrowers are not able to service the loans due to financial distress. Among the informal units, with no access to formal sources of finance through which government support was made available, the stress is likely to have been even more severe. Considering that the MSMEs account for a sizeable share of employment, this impacts both employment and income prospects. The clearest sign of the persisting labour market distress comes from the continuing reliance on MGNREGA. This uncertainty over job and income prospects reflects in consumer sentiments remaining in the pessimistic zone, which in turn affects business sentiment and investment decisions.



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The inflow into the BJP is as much a result of the Opposition's failure to offer hope to ambitious leaders in its ranks as it is the outcome of the former's approach of winner should take it all

In February this year, Congress appealed to the divine. All its candidates in Goa were shepherded, with great show, by the party’s central leaders to a temple, church and a dargah to take a pledge of loyalty that they will not leave the party after the Assembly elections due in March. Eleven of them won their seats. On Wednesday, eight of them, including seven-time MLA and former chief minister Digambar Kamat, joined the BJP. When reminded of that pledge, Kamat invoked God. “I went to the temple again and asked God what to do. God told me do whatever is best for you.” Fidelity to a party or an ideology is rare in Goan politics: centred around leaders who command a few thousand votes in tiny constituencies, it has allowed legislators to party-hop brazenly without facing the censure of their voters. However, the latest cross-over in Goa, which follows similar developments in Arunachal Pradesh (2018), Karnataka (2019), Madhya Pradesh (2020), West Bengal (2021), Gujarat (2018-19) etc., deepen a vulnerability in the political system.

For, at its heart lies the inability of the opposition parties to keep their flock together in the face of the BJP’s predatory instinct to expand its footprint and win new territories. It is disturbing, of course, that the ruling party, in the event of its winning no majority or only a thin majority in an election, wants to overturn that mandate in its pursuit of total domination of the polity: The BJP’s slogan since 2014 — Congress-mukt Bharat — seems to have transformed into Opposition-mukt Bharat. However, none of the Opposition leaders is a political spring chicken, it will be lazy and wrong on the part of the Opposition to lay all the blame at the doors of the BJP behemoth. It is increasingly evident that the only glue that seems to be holding the non-BJP parties together is power, since these outfits have long transformed into fiefs of individual leaders and their families rather than grass-roots political organisations built around ideologies that have an ear to the ground and know how to work in defeat and hibernation. In the case of the Congress, which has been bleeding cadres and leaders across India, the crisis has also been organisational — a rudderless central leadership is unable to inspire or consolidate the party’s declining support base.

Clearly, the inflow into the BJP is as much a result of the Opposition’s failure to offer hope to ambitious leaders in its ranks as it is the outcome of the former’s approach of winner should take it all. The anti-defection law, legislated in the 1980s with the aim to discourage political defections, has in the process lost its edge as legislators are either shifting in large groups even at the risk of getting disqualified. Aya Ram Gaya Ram was coined way back in the late 1960s to reflect the shifting winds in Haryana’s local politics but, clearly, the challenge now is deeper — and national.



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Girish Kuber writes: Maharashtra's repeated loss of projects to Gujarat appears to indicate Centre's preference, damage to federal structure

“Once is happenstance. Twice is coincidence. Three times is enemy action,” Ian Fleming famously wrote in the James Bond classic Goldfinger. Change the words “enemy action” to “trend” and it will explain what’s going on between Maharashtra and Gujarat.

It was first seen in 2015, nearly a year after Narendra Modi and Devendra Fadnavis had assumed charge at the Centre and in the state of Maharashtra, respectively. The Modi government enacted a law to govern the International Financial Services Centre (IFSC). Soon after, the Gujarat International Finance Tec-city (GIFT) submitted its proposal to set up India’s first international finance centre. While presenting the 2015-16 Union budget, the then Finance Minister Arun Jaitley shifted the Centre’s focus from Mumbai to GIFT as a potential global financial centre, like Singapore or Dubai.

Previously, the Congress-led UPA government had focused on developing Mumbai’s Bandra-Kurla Complex (BKC) as a financial hub. In 2007, a government-appointed committee led by former World Bank official Percy Mistry recommended making Mumbai a financial centre along the lines of New York, London and Singapore with BKC at its centre. Since then, the state government-run Mumbai Metropolitan Region Development Authority (MMRDA) developed and promoted BKC as a destination for global companies to house their Indian branches.

However, with the Modi government at the helm in the Centre, India’s financial capital, which was the natural choice for the IFC, lost its most ambitious project to neighbouring Gujarat. Shortly after the budget announcement, India’s securities market regulator, the Securities and Exchange Board of India (SEBI), announced enabling guidelines for entities setting up in an IFSC. And GIFT was right there.

Next was the National Academy of Coastal Policing. The deadly 26/11 terror attack on Mumbai had triggered the idea of setting up a marine police academy and a special commando training centre. For the former, Palghar was picked as the location, considering its proximity to Mumbai. The academy was conceptualised as the first-its-kind school in the country to train police and paramilitary forces personnel in sensitive and vulnerable coastal security. The ambitious project was about to take off nearly a decade after threats to the Indian coast came to the fore during the 26/11 terror attacks in 2008. Accordingly, the state government initiated the process and acquired 305 acres of land to set it up. However, without offering any good reason, the Union home ministry decided to shift it to Dwarka in Gujarat.

There can’t be anything bigger than the state of Maharashtra losing the Rs 1.54 lakh crore Vedanta-Foxconn project to Gujarat which, like the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation, is expected to go to polls later this year. What’s ironic here is the fact that it was the BJP’s Devendra Fadnavis who had been chasing the project for Maharashtra. Fadnavis, in his first stint between 2014-19, had set his eyes on another mega project, again by Foxconn. That unfortunately didn’t materialise. He then set his sights on the Foxconn-Vedanta plant when he regained control of the reins of the state after dislodging the Uddhav Thackeray-led government. Fadnavis, with Chief Minister Eknath Shinde in tow, had a series of meetings with the Vedanta team, the last meeting taking place on August 30. It was all destined to be in vain, though, with Vedanta preferring Gujarat to Maharashtra for reasons better left unstated.

Other than “successfully” diverting Maharashtra’s investment to Gujrat, there are quite a few examples where the Modi-led Centre either delayed or refused clearance for some important projects, apart from the “political” delay caused by governor Bhagat Singh Koshyari in approving the nomination of 11 members to the state legislative council. The Uddhav Thackeray-led government submitted the list of 11 members to governor Koshyari in November 2020. The governor, for reasons easy to guess, couldn’t find the time to clear it till the Maha Vikas Aghadi government collapsed in July 2022. Now the Eknath Shinde-Devendra Fadnavis government is expected to submit a fresh list. It will not be surprising if Koshyari wastes no time in approving it.

Besides such political delays, one of the important projects that was held up was the Dharavi redevelopment. Asia’s largest slum is partly spread on land belonging to the railways. The Centre rightfully asked the state to pay up for the land, which it did. What’s intriguing is that even though the Maharashtra government deposited Rs 800 crore towards the land cost, it never received the requisite green signal from the Centre. What’s not at all surprising is the BJP-backed Eknath Shinde government’s recent statement indicating how expeditiously the Dharavi redevelopment project is being cleared by the Modi government. It’s anybody’s guess whether the project will take off before the BMC elections.

This, as the legendary Fleming notes, is enough to underline a trend that seriously undermines our federal structure. It’s always heartening to see states vying for investments, but it’s equally damaging to see the powerful Centre favouring one state over the other. It not only makes the battle unfair, but also threatens the federal fabric of the nation. However, Maharashtra politicians undoubtedly owe explanations for their consistent flip-flop over mega projects, beginning with Enron’s ambitious power project. It was the Sena-BJP government that had scrapped the project, only for it to be revived later. It was again the same combination that sealed the fate of the Nanar oil refinery, a joint venture between India’s state-owned PSUs and Saudi Arabia’s Aramco. The over Rs 3 lakh crore project was stayed ahead of the 2019 state assembly elections. If the BJP’s opposition was responsible for the Enron imbroglio, it was its now-estranged partner Sena that was behind the Nanar fiasco. Though at loggerheads with each other now, these two saffron siblings both have a fair share of responsibility in pushing Maharashtra back on the investment front. This made Modi’s task of wooing investors easy — a task that was made even easier by his elevation to PM.

This episode, however, exposes a fallacy in PM Modi’s electorally popular “double engine” theory. It implies faster development if the “same party” — obviously, the BJP — is in power in the states and at the Centre. As one senior government functionary put it, “Only the first one matters in double engines, the second one has nothing to do except to follow the first one.” Maharashtra would know this by now.

The writer is editor, Loksatta



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CUET ended up going down the same path that any hyper-centralised exercise in the last few years has gone down. In the process, I had to experience a loss of agency

The ongoing CUET postgraduate (PG) examinations came as a jolt to most fresh graduates. I am one of them. With a growing sense of anxiety about the new format, and major universities opting out of the new entrance examination system, many of us found ourselves constantly checking for updates on social media platforms and the news.

My experience was marred by delays. For months after graduating, I didn’t hear anything about the date-sheet for the upcoming examinations. Having enough time and tools to prepare is a crucial need that remained unmet due to delays from the administration’s end. Additionally, reading about the experiences of students applying to undergraduate courses, with last-minute changes in centres and technical glitches, left me worried and afraid.

CUET also came with the promise of a revised format. As a graduate with a social science degree, I didn’t know what to expect from the 25-mark section on mathematical reasoning and general knowledge. A new wave of books hit the market, claiming to prepare students on how to crack an examination that had never been held before. Soon, I witnessed my peers (those of us who could afford to) rushing to purchase material that would help them wade through the uncertainty of having to appear for a freshly-created exam. The market was full of competitors promising us success.

However, what was more worrying than the revised format was the daunting task of filling out the application form. The website routinely crashed while I was on the payment window and often popped an error notification, which said “duplicate session”. The process of having to check one’s course code in a 200+ page document was time-consuming and unnecessarily complicated. With all the delays and frustrations of filling up an elaborate form, came the disappointing yet inevitable limitation of this hyper-centralised exercise — time. Many exams for different courses were scheduled to be held on the same day at the same time, owing to which I could only choose one course between the two I originally wanted to sit for. I wanted to appear both for MA (Sociology) and MA (Mass Communication). However, I had to choose between the two. I had to compromise on my options this early on in my academic and professional life through no fault of my own. The choice was simply not mine.

In the first week of September, about two days before our entrance exam, we received admit cards. Thankfully, my centre aligned with the location preference I had applied for. The crowd was well-managed and there were checkpoints where we could drop off our bags, although students were charged a sum of Rs 30 for the same. We were disallowed from carrying anything inside and the officials on exam duty provided us with masks, paper and a pen on our way in. The centre seemed comfortable and expansive. Drinking water and washroom facilities were hygienic and the centre was air-conditioned.

However, every student had to mandatorily submit their thumb impression, after which the candidate’s attendance was marked and they were allotted their cubicle. This seemed unnecessary for an entrance exam and I did not see any space where students were able to exercise their agency, or give consent, in matters related to biometric data-sharing. On my floor, the exam went smoothly and there were no technical glitches. The instructions were not explained or read out. We had to follow what was flashing on the computer and the centre was equipped with an IT team that promptly helped a student whose system crashed towards the end.

Unexpectedly, the 25-mark section carried mathematical questions on profit, loss, simple interest and compound interest. Most of the questions were too heavy to qualify as reasoning sums. The domain paper was of moderate to high difficulty, with some questions on the year of publication of academic works and other trivia.

As I experienced it, the CUET — in its first year — has failed the students it was meant to help. From planning to implementation, the hurdles involved were unnecessary and entirely avoidable. The question of access here is crucial too. With a hastened process, the disbursal of information was scanty and inaccessible to many on the other end of the digital divide. The CUET ended up going down the same path that any hyper-centralised exercise in the last few years has. In the process, I had to experience a grave loss of opportunity and agency.

The writer is a graduate in sociology from the University of Delhi



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Amrit Gangar writes: Cinema lovers all over India loved him and his works

In 1982, Jean-Luc Godard was in the cans being carried on our shoulders, on a Bombay local train, as our film club Screen Unit had scheduled his debut film, A bout de souffle (Breathless, 1960), for a screening. The 16-mm prints had come from the National Film Archive of India, Pune. Those were not the days of CDs, DVDs or the ubiquitous “links”. Godard was an analogue man who could navigate his way through technological transformations. He adapted them the way he wanted and combated the hegemony of “capital”. All his practising life, he remained a model of inspiration for young cineastes across the world.

Eight years ago, I was at the gallery Espace Croisé in Roubaix in northern France, presenting an Indian film programme. Someone said that Godard was conducting a masterclass at a nearby art centre. I rushed there but he had left by then. I wanted to tell him about the strange chemistry that I had curated and created through my “Shakespeare and Cinema” sessions in Mumbai, including Grigori Kozintsev’s Russian Hamlet (1964), Akira Kurosawa’s Japanese Macbeth, Throne of Blood, (1957) and Godard’s French King Lear (1987). Godard would have laughed at this cocktail. The Dogme 95 version of King Lear (The King is Alive by Kristian Levring in 2000) wasn’t yet born then. Godard’s King Lear imbued the Shakespearean play with the experimental verve of the French New Wave.

The “virus” as he called the pandemic, had actually made Godard’s “virtual” presence global, as if he was intimately talking to us from his far-off Lake Geneva home in Switzerland, smiling and cracking jokes at 91 like a 19-year-old boy! He imbued our ideas with youth, igniting them. Only three years ago, in 2019, he was at Lausanne (Switzerland) receiving the Lifetime Achievement Award from the International Federation of Film Archives (FIAF). In the conversation, he was his usual witty and intellectually agile self. “Everything is archive,” he said, adding, “And in real life today, the present can be archived, and the past can be (archived), we could call it renewed, resuscitated. There’s almost the same relationship as the one between fiction and documentary.” What Iranian film critic Youssef Ishaghpour, in his conversation with Godard aptly calls the “urgency of the present, redemption of the past”.

Godard never came to India and apparently, he knew almost nothing of Indian cinema, but cineastes all over this country loved him and his cinematographic works, as well as his thoughts about life and language. His film Adieu au Langage (Goodbye to Language, 2014) experimented with 3D, narrating two simultaneous stories of nature and metaphor, focusing on two couples along with Godard’s dog Roxy. It is a melange of many references to literature and science, philosophy and political theory.

Godard’s eight-part video project titled Histoire(s) du cinema, which began in the late 1980s and was completed in 1998, is a 266-minute-long quintessentially complex work. It explores and examines the history of the concept of cinema and how it relates to the 20th century, resulting in typical Godardian critique. This film is considered to be Godard’s magnum opus. He enjoyed playing with language and words in French. Histoire(s) du cinema could, for instance, mean both “history” and “story”; the letter “s” in parentheses would suggest a sense of plurality. All through his filmmaking practice, Godard struggled to get back to the roots. In Le Gai Savoir ( Joy of Learning, 1969), for instance, a character says, “The problem is: To get back to zero.” The film that was banned by the French government adapts Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s treatise on education.

We thought Jean-Luc Godard would hit a century in the game of life, but he chose to bid a peaceful goodbye to us on September 13, 2022 at his Swiss home. During his lifetime, he thought, wrote and spoke extensively, he smiled at the “virus” and remained busy all his life. Godard’s last film Le Livre d’Image (The Image Book, 2018), examines the history of the modern Arab world. He broke the rules, innovating new ways of provoking cinematographic images and sounds — an oeuvre that will, in every way, make an epical textbook for students of cinema.

We had screened most of Godard’s popular iconic films, including Le Petit Soldat (The Little Soldier), Vivre Sa Vie (My Life to Live), Les Carabiniers (The Carabineers), Week-end (Weekend), Le Mepris (Contempt), etc. Of all his films, My Life to Live emotionally moved us the most as we saw the young Parisian woman in her twenties, Nana (Anna Karina) crying while watching The Passion of Joan of Arc in a cinema house in one of the film’s scenes. As an artist, Godard had this ability to move both your heart and mind.

Inside the cans on our shoulders on the 17:05 Borivali local, Breathless is getting restless and wants to “jump cut”. With his very first film, Godard created new ways of editing to narrate an elliptical story. Breathless renewed the cinematographic innovation which continued through his 63-year-long journey. Until the summer of 1959, G wrote regularly for Cahiers du Cinema. He suspended all critical activity to film Breathless between August and September 1959 — the year same year that marks the birth of the French Nouvelle Vague (New Wave).

We won’t say “adieu” to you, Monsieur.

The writer is a Mumbai-based film theorist, curator and historian



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Sanjib Baruah writes: It is time we consider having a moratorium on the engineering of the world’s last remaining free-flowing rivers–some of which fortunately, are in these parts of the world -- and rethink the framework of regional cooperation on water-related matters

One of the claimed achievements of Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina’s visit to India last week – and the only one in the contentious area of the equitable water-sharing of common rivers — was a memorandum of understanding on the withdrawal of water from the Kushiyara river, a branch of the Barak on the border between Assam’s Karimganj and Bangladesh’s Sylhet district. The agreement will enable the operation of the Rahimpur canal, which is expected to irrigate significant farmland areas in Bangladesh.

But even before Prime Minister Hasina arrived in Delhi there was scepticism in some Bangladeshi quarters about this agreement’s timing. The International Farakka Committee (IFC) — a non-governmental body consisting of native and overseas Bangladeshis — issued a statement saying that water-sharing of the Kushiyara was not a priority for Bangladesh. The sudden move to have an agreement on the Kushiyara issue only serves to divert attention from the impasse on the far more urgent and consequential issue of sharing the waters of the river Teesta. Questions have already been raised in the Bangladeshi media on whether the prime minister’s visit to India has yielded any substantive gains for Bangladesh.

The IFC’s name bears testimony to the long history of water disputes in the country’s relations with India. The Farakka dispute precedes the founding of Bangladesh. The Farakka barrage across the river Ganga was commissioned in 1975, but its planning began soon after the Partition. By the time of the start of its construction in 1962, the barrage’s potential adverse effects on what was then East Pakistan had become a contentious issue in the relations between India and Pakistan.

The IFC’s name also evokes the May 1975 Long March led by the “Red Maulana”, Abdul Hamid Khan Bhashani, from Rajshahi in Bangladesh — near the Indian border — to the Farakka barrage in West Bengal. Bhashani’s goal was to focus attention on the supposed desertification of large areas in Bangladesh allegedly caused by the substantial reduction of the flow of water as the result of the Farakka barrage. Bhashani’s Farakka march, the IFC believes, has lessons for today since instances of unilateral diversion of water by constructing dams on shared rivers have only increased since then.

PM Hasina is often criticised by political opponents for her pro-India stance. Her failure to return home with an agreement on the Teesta issue makes her vulnerable to political attacks in the country’s general elections next year. To understand the reasons for the impasse on Teesta — the river that originates in the Himalayan mountains and flows through the states of Sikkim and West Bengal before entering Bangladesh — it may be rewarding to look back at a time when the two countries came close to signing an agreement. That was in 2011 just before the then Prime Minister Manmohan Singh visited Bangladesh. West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee famously bowed out of the Indian delegation at the last minute because of reservations about the amount of water stipulated as the share of Bangladesh according to the draft agreement.

Since then, Banerjee has stated her position publicly on several occasions. In 2017, describing the Teesta as “the lifeline of north Bengal”, she said, “The Teesta does not have water to be shared”. But West Bengal will be happy to share with Bangladesh water from rivers that have water to spare, she said. Many commentators assume that Banerjee’s calculations are political. But the political landscape of today is very different from the one in 2011; yet Banerjee’s stance on the issue has not changed. Is partisan politics all there is to it?

Writing for The Third Pole — a platform covering the Himalayan watershed and the rivers originating there — Jayanta Basu has noted that, while the water flow on the Teesta has been decreasing, the demand for water from the river in north Bengal for paddy cultivation, tea plantations, and drinking water for the city of Siliguri, has been going up.

Basu cites scientific studies that point to the retreat of the Himalayan glaciers feeding the Teesta as a factor in the significant reduction in the water flow. Moreover, the Teesta now is a heavily dammed river. Several hydropower dams have been built in the upper catchment area of the river in the mountainous terrain of Sikkim. They are run-of-the-river plants that are not supposed to hold back water. But in their operation, they typically “impound” water for most of a 24-hour period to generate electricity during peak hours. The short periods during which water is released aren’t exactly designed to meet the water needs of agriculture and of urban water users. The political difficulties that chief minister Banerjee faces are clearly not going to be easy to get around for her, or for any other future leader of the state.

This summer, like the rest of the world, South Asian countries experienced extreme weather events that were very likely caused by climate change. The vulnerability of hydropower dams to melting glaciers as the result of climate change has also become quite apparent, not only in Sikkim but more dramatically in China’s heavily hydropower-dependent Sichuan province, where the rationing of electricity led major global manufacturers to suspend operations.

The late Ramaswamy R Iyer, a visionary thinker on water issues, once observed that water disputes rarely come up when a river is free flowing; they occur only when river engineering projects enter the picture. He lamented that official cooperation between countries on water-related issues takes place mostly in the context of harnessing rivers as a water resource. Other important matters such as the protection of waterbodies and aquifers from pollution and degradation, the preservation of wetlands, improving and maintaining water quality, drainage of river basins, the occurrence of arsenic in aquifers, coping with floods and riverbank erosion, water-harvesting and watershed development do not get the same kind of attention.

Perhaps it is time we consider having a moratorium on the engineering of the world’s last remaining free-flowing rivers — some of which, fortunately, are in these parts of the world — and rethink the framework of regional cooperation on water-related matters.

The writer is professor of Political Studies at Bard College, New York



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Bibek Debroy writes: Flexibility in laws, labour reform is being stymied at the state level

To increase employment, one needs growth. There cannot be growthless jobs. Simultaneously, down the years, the employment elasticity of growth has declined. Without burdening a column with unnecessary numbers, employment elasticity is roughly half of what it used to be two decades ago. This isn’t quite jobless growth. If an economy grows at 7 per cent, unless productivity grows at 7 per cent, there will be some employment growth, though it might not be as much as one wishes for. In assessing this, one shouldn’t get bogged down in transient dislocations caused by Covid-19. Why isn’t employment elasticity of growth higher? Why aren’t labour force participation rates higher?

Theses have been written, and will be written, on this. One part of the puzzle is rigid labour laws. Labour is in the Concurrent List. Until recently, there were 50-55 Union-level labour laws, of which, the labour ministry administered around 40. Enacted at different periods of time, these needed to be rationalised and harmonised. Definitions differed, increasing litigation and complicating case law, making it inconsistent. They made labour markets in the organised sector rigid while imparting less-than-desired protection in the unorganised sector.

Contrary to some perceptions, this wasn’t only about an exit policy for labour, that is, offending sections of the Industrial Disputes Act (IDA), relating to lay-offs, retrenchment and closure. The inspector raj associated with labour laws affected an enterprise in all three stages of its life cycle – entry, functioning and exit. All this has been discussed threadbare in the literature. Since non-wage transaction costs associated with hiring labour were high, and not just wage costs, production became excessively capital-intensive. In 2021, Teamlease documented 30,000 compliances and 3,000 filings associated with labour laws. That apart, production was fragmented, to bypass coverage of organised sector labour laws.

Since labour is in the Concurrent List, some states introduced reforms. These include Andhra Pradesh/Telangana, Delhi, Gujarat, Haryana, Himachal, Karnataka, Madhya Pradesh, Maharashtra, Punjab, Odisha, Rajasthan, Tamil Nadu, Uttar Pradesh and Uttarakhand depending on how one interprets labour market reform. The Economic Survey 2018-19 classified states into those with flexible labour laws and those without, and the list above is that of those with flexible labour laws.

Flexible doesn’t always mean statutory changes. Flexibility can also be imparted through flexible orders and regulations – the domain of the executive. If flexibility and harmonisation, leading to lower compliance costs, are desirable, what effects have these changes led to? Beyond superficial correlations, few will hazard to answer that empirical question. There are several reasons for this.

First, there isn’t a long enough time-series. Such changes are of recent vintage, say, post-2014. Second, what is the data source? The only possible source is the Annual Survey of Industries (ASI), which imparts some sampling biases. Third, does one mean manufacturing, or services too? Services are essentially covered by state-level Shops and Establishments Acts. Ipso facto, one primarily has manufacturing in mind. Fourth, as an exogenous shock, the Covid-19 pandemic disrupted matters. Fifth, labour intensity in production is a function of relative prices of labour (not simply wage costs) and capital. Thus, it is influenced by subsidies (tax exemptions) that encourage capital usage. Sixth, technology is such that modern manufacturing has turned increasingly capital-intensive and there is also a trend to increasingly use contract labour.

With those qualifications, what does tentative empirical probing show? Flexible labour laws have a positive impact on employment and the setting up of new units, but they aren’t a magic wand. They matter at the margin, underling the need for broader reforms, such as infrastructure, law and order and skills and education.

Against this background, after the recommendations of the Second National Labour Commission (2002), and several other reports, the Union government unified 29 statutes and passed (2019, 2020) four Codes on wages, safety (and health), industrial relations and social security. Note that this was after a lot of discussion and debate, after the Bills had been referred to a Standing Committee. These are statutory changes, to be followed by new rules under the new Codes and one can accept, because of the preceding debate, that these statutory changes are desirable. As the Prime Minister recently remarked (in August) at the National Labour Conference, the onus is on the states.

How nimble have states been in announcing new rules? Let’s focus on the larger states, ignoring the smaller ones for reasons of space. For the Code on Wages (2019), the only major state that has not yet announced Rules is West Bengal. For the Code on Industrial Relations (2020), the list has Rajasthan and West Bengal. For the Code on Social Security (2020), it is Rajasthan, Tamil Nadu and West Bengal. For the Code on Safety, Health and Working Conditions (2020), it is Rajasthan and West Bengal. The mention of Tamil Nadu and Rajasthan is somewhat odd since they had introduced labour market reforms earlier, as mentioned in the Economic Survey 2018-19.

Across the four Codes, the one that really sticks out is West Bengal. In passing, there is a Model Shops and Establishments Act, framed by the Union government in 2016. Labour market rigidities and complex procedures also exist in state-level Shops and Establishments Acts and in accordance with the spirit of the changes incorporated in the four Codes and Model Shops and the Establishments Act, these too need to be made more flexible. Evidence doesn’t quite suggest states are eager to impart that flexibility. Surprisingly, or perhaps not, this lack of eagerness typically characterises the states presumed to have a labour cost advantage. Some states evidently labour under an illusion.

The writer is chairman, Prime Minister’s Economic Advisory Council. Views expressed are personal



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Pooja Pillai writes: The moral of the story from this year's Emmy winners: The great, big capitalist machine might make you all the money in the world but you won’t be any happier than the gig worker.

In 2021, as Hurricane Ida battered the northeastern US, a video of a delivery man, wading through waist-high water to make a delivery in Brooklyn, New York City, went viral on social media. The image showed the extremes to which the precarity of the gig economy pushes those on whose labours it is built. It is a precarity that, in recent memory, has been best captured in the South Korean drama series Squid Game. The show became one of the biggest hits of all time for Netflix, and made history at the recent Emmy Awards, where it was nominated in 14 categories, with a Best Actor win for its lead Lee Jung-jae.

Would a show with Squid Game’s sharp, unsparing depiction of late capitalism and the bleakness of lives driven into crippling debt have been as popular if it had come out before the pandemic? With millions of lives and jobs lost, Covid-19 exposed the brutal inequalities that drive the global economy. Squid Game, released in the middle of the pandemic, hit the right nerve. How much longer, it seemed to ask, would we submit to this machine that grinds down the vast majority of us, for the benefit of the privileged one per cent?

Different, but related questions about the nature of the capitalist beast seem to have been asked by the other two shows that dominated the Emmys this year. HBO’s Succession is about more than just the super-rich Roy family’s infighting and chaotic relationships. The story unfolds around the media company Waystar Royco, which gets bigger by swallowing smaller companies, making more and more money for its owners who only seem to get more monstrous in their dissatisfaction and pettiness. Dollars, even in the billions, evidently don’t bring happiness and avarice, in the ultimate count, does not serve even those who make a success of it. The White Lotus, the other HBO show which won top honours at the Emmys this year, differs sharply in tone from Succession, even if it tackles a similar subject — the messy, unhappy lives of the rich and privileged, juxtaposed against the lives of quiet desperation led by the far less privileged. The pursuit of money, we learn, is uniquely empty and the game is always rigged.

It’s not as if anti-capitalist commentary, whether as satire or serious drama, hasn’t been made on the screen before. Movies like The Big Short (whose director Adam McKay is an executive producer on Succession), American Psycho, Glengarry Glen Ross, Parasite and The Wolf of Wall Street tried to do just that. Even Wall Street, the Oliver Stone film starring Michael Douglas as the ruthless Gordon Gekko, was meant to be a screed against the “decade of greed” that was the 1980s and the criminality it engendered (mostly insider trading). The difference between these movies, however, and the current crop of small screen shows is that the message in the former was all too often lost in the trappings of glamour and “wealth porn” that they indulged in (Parasite being a notable exception). This is best exemplified by Gekko’s famous “greed is good” speech — written as a dark manifesto of capitalism that is supposed to incriminate him, it ended up seducing viewers with its vision of “steak lunches, hunting and fishing trips, corporate jets and golden parachutes”.

Succession and The White Lotus, the shows that come closest to falling into the “wealth porn” trap, evade it by keeping their focus on the emptiness of ultra-rich lives. Succession, in particular, resists making anti-heroes of its villains (pretty much all of the Roy family) by refusing to turn them into larger-than-life figures who might, like Jordan Belfort in The Wolf of Wall Street, be misconstrued as idols or inspirations. The Roys, as we see in episode after episode, are petty, bored people, dissatisfied with their lives, as are the vacationers on The White Lotus and the almost-caricaturish rich viewers of “the game” in Squid Game. The moral of the story: The great, big capitalist machine might make you all the money in the world — or nearly all of it — but you won’t be any happier than the gig worker forced to work during a storm just to keep his head above water.

Write to the author at pooja.pillai@expressindia.com



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Rakesh Sinha writes: PM Modi’s determination to remove the symbols and structures of colonial oppression will strengthen the civilisational idea of India.

The installation of the statue of Subhash Chandra Bose at the India Gate in New Delhi does more than just honour a hero of the freedom struggle. It is among the more significant outcomes of the protracted battle of ideas underway to define the nature of the anti-colonial struggle and India’s past. This debate is not confined to Indian elites — the common people too remain intrinsically engaged with it. The perception gap between the elites and common masses on vital cultural and social issues exists in almost all post-colonial societies. However, this gap is minimal in African countries due to the salience of cultural concerns in their struggles against colonialism. Intellectuals and the ruling elites in Africa understood the value of indigenousness. Kenyan novelist Ngugi wa Thiong’o became famous after his work, Petals of Blood, switched from English to a Kenyan language, Gikuyu, in 1977. This proved exemplary for African authors. Such an impulse was lacking in Indian intellectuals as well as ruling elites of the Nehruvian era. A critic of Hindi literature, Namvar Singh, succinctly articulated this as the missing “attitude of militant decolonisation”.

The moral mandate from the masses for Narendra Modi’s rigour vis a vis decolonisation is obvious from their support of his deconstruction of Eurocentrism. He uses resources from the Indian knowledge tradition and this, in turn, has had an indelible impact on new generations and discourses in campuses. He quotes, in a relevant way, the Vedas, Upanishads, Smritis, Mahabharata and the writings of great saints and poet-philosophers like Thiruvalluvar and Tulsidas. He is committed and consistent in his approach. This has encouraged research on Indian cultural themes and heralded a climate for India-centric discourses. The failure of the elites to realise their dissonance from this reality has earned them the ire of the masses. This has also made their opposition to the RSS and Modi increasingly feeble.

Ideological conversations in the West impacted our narratives about the freedom movement. The Indian National Army (INA) led by Subhas Chandra Bose remained unwelcome by the dominant elites of the Indian National Congress because it solicited support from Germany and Japan for India’s war against British imperialism. It was considered to be legitimising fascism and militarism — as if Britain was doing philanthropy in India. British brutalities had crossed all limits. There are several unrecorded incidences of their barbarism. We know of a few like Jallianwala Bagh, Ashti and Chimur through our history books. They killed innocent children, like 12-year-old Baji Rout in Odisha and Tileshwari Barooah in Assam. The seven school students who hoisted the tricolour at the Patna secretariat on August 11, 1942, were killed by the bullets of the colonial forces. It is they who called the INA and Bose as the “Fifth Column”.

Congress’s attitude towards Bose remained unchanged. In 1939 he was compelled to resign from the elected position of the Congress Presidentship by the Gandhians at the Tripuri session of the Congress. The Servant of India, published from Poona, reported that Bose who came to attend the session despite running a high fever was accused of placing onions in his armpits to increase his body’s temperature. None of the big leaders, including Nehru, came to his rescue.

After Independence, the demand for installing Bose’s statue in the capital was rejected by Congress governments. On November 3, 1965, this demand was made in the Rajya Sabha – not the first such occasion. This was finally done by Modi in 2022. The state under Modi is not shy in expressing its ideological position just as the Nehruvian state was assertive about its social philosophy. This is what divides Independent India into two distinct eras represented by Nehru and Modi.

Nehru used ancient Indian history to support his arguments for liberalism and humanism. However, his European sense of modernity was a limitation in convincing those who considered colonialism as a rot that needed to be rooted out completely. In essence, the Nehruvian state was both a lazy and unwilling decoloniser. The government had no answer to the question raised by Dattopant Thengadi on November 3, 1965, in the Rajya Sabha about the continuing presence of the statues of King George, King Edward and Queen Victoria in New Delhi. The Nehruvian state and its philosophy had the support of the institutions and intellectuals, which were systematically cultivated over the decades.

Modi’s decolonisation project has a clear focus and target. The government has repealed several colonial laws that continued for decades after Independence. Cultural decolonisation was recognised as a concern in the early decades of the 20th century but it was systematically suppressed by the colonial forces and the western bias in the Indian leadership. Rabindranath Tagore in Gora (1910) and K C Bhattacharya (1931) in Swaraj in Idea argued for its necessity. Bhattacharya said: “Man’s domination over man is felt in the most tangible form in the political sphere. There is, however, a more subtle domination exercised in the sphere of ideas by one culture on another, a domination all the more serious in the consequence, because it is not ordinarily felt.” The Congress had shown complete apathy concerning this “slavery of the spirit”. It passed no less than 423 resolutions on the minority question during the freedom movement but could not do the same in defence of India’s culture and education.

Modi’s determination to remove the symbols and structures of oppression has a unique similarity with the outlook of Frantz Fanon, an anti-colonial thinker. Fanon wrote that “imperialism leaves behind germs of rot which we must clinically detect and remove from our and but from our minds as well”. The Central Vista project declaims the colonial legacy. The RSS considers India’s past the foundational basis of the nation and it perceives history in its continuity. Unlike Nehruvians and Marxists, for the RSS, India is a civilisational nation. This distinguishes it from the West and gives ample opportunities to unfold its creative energy in the fields of art, culture, social sciences and philosophy. The Indian masses cherish the memory of the early 20th century when Indians demonstrated excellence in art, literature and social sciences. The era was led by people like Tagore, Lokmanya B G Tilak, B C Pal, Maharshi Aurobindo and others. This reclamation is a collective aspiration of the people and can be achieved through collective effort — beyond the limits of ideology and party. It carries the potential to resurrect India’s superior status via philosophy, art and culture. The idea of India cannot shine without it.

The writer is BJP Member of Parliament in the Rajya Sabha



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In another blow for Congress, eight of its 11 MLAs in Goa switched over to BJP. Such defections are not new in Goa and Congress suffered similar desertions in the previous state assembly as well. But what is surprising is that the deserting Congress MLAs had taken a public oath on the Constitution before the assembly elections earlier this year to not defect in case they got elected. In fact, they had made a similar pledge at places of worship. Therefore, the defectors can rightly be accused of being driven by greed for power and money. Hopefully, voters will remember their chicanery when the next election comes along.

That said, the defections also highlight a larger problem faced by Congress today. Sans a clear and effective leadership, party workers are either listless or don’t see any opportunities for career advancement. This is why they are easily induced by a well-resourced and functionally robust BJP. Thus, Congress must sort out its leadership issue as soon as possible. True, it is about to hold elections for its party president post. But Rahul Gandhi today is on a ‘Bharat Jodo’ yatra. Which begs the question: Will the new Congress president call the shots or will Rahul and the Gandhi family continue to play puppet masters? The old duopoly arrangement for the party won’t work anymore, especially in the face of today’s aggressive BJP. Thus, Congress has to put its house in order. Otherwise, defections like those in Goa will continue to recur.



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After Maharashtra lost the Rs 1.54 lakh crore Vedanta-Foxconn semiconductor project to Gujarat, Mumbai has seen high-decibel political fights between the opposition and the government. But this is good politics. It’s the kind of politics that puts pressure on state governments to court private investment aggressively. Even better politics will be jobs, investment and standards of living becoming regular top-of-the-list issues that parties debate and voters pay attention to. Politics around competing promises of freebies, on which the PM’s comments started a national debate, is the worst kind because if freebies dominate policy thinking in the present, the future will inevitably be bleak.

The good news is that despite freebie politics, some states are vying for big-ticket foreign investment, and doing so by hard-selling their human capital resources, road and digital connectivity and multimodal infrastructure. Even economically backward UP has joined the battle, betting on improved road connectivity. And the point to note is that Maharashtra didn’t lose the Vedanta-Foxconn project because it didn’t offer incentives. It lost because Gujarat did better. Most states have electronics and manufacturing policies offering standard incentives like power and water tariff concessions, exemption from stamp duty and property tax, capital subsidies etc. So, and this is a good thing, states have to constantly up their game to attract projects. Indeed, the narrowing of the gap between Maharashtra and states like Gujarat and Karnataka tells the story of how competition works.

However, a bigger problem for India as a whole is diversification. Services, computer software/hardware and telecom have dominated new projects. New investment is needed in manufacturing, especially light manufacturing. FM Sitharaman has asked industry to be more positive about manufacturing investment. But states have to play their part, too. UP, Odisha, Chhattisgarh, Andhra, Jharkhand, Rajasthan, Bengal and MP have the potential to attract manufacturing investment but are yet to crack the industrialisation puzzle. Andhra consistently tops ease of doing business rankings but this isn’t reflected in investments. There’s a massive skew in investment destinations. Nearly 87% of FDI inflows go to just five states. One lesson comes from Tamil Nadu, where the industrial policy is stable irrespective of who’s in office. The other lesson is that land acquisition must be sorted out by some states – that’s, for example, the difference between Gujarat and Bengal. Politics of freebies and agitation always costs dear.



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India’s presidency of G20 beginning this December – it hosts the leaders’ summit in September next year – comes at a complex moment in global politics. The world today is being increasingly divided by the strategic security competition between US-led G7 and the China-Russia compact. Caught in the middle are a large number of developing nations who are being forced to choose sides despite this not being in their best interests. It is against this backdrop that G20 aims to serve as a vital platform to voice concerns of the Global South.

True, challenges before the forum are many. From climate change and reforming global finance to tackling the current energy and food crises, the G20 agenda under India’s presidency is expected to be full. This will give New Delhi the perfect opportunity to showcase its leadership skills. That Bangladesh is on the guest list along with UAE and Oman for the leaders’ summit highlights India’s regional prioritisation. But a dispute is already brewing over Russian President Vladimir Putin’s expected attendance at the Bali leaders’ summit this November. Some Western leaders want to exclude Russia from G20 until the war in Ukraine abates. The Indian presidency will inherit this problem. Remember, though, that kicking Russia out of G8 not only failed to deter Moscow vis-à-vis Ukraine but also pushed it closer to China. Therefore, India must make it clear that isolating Russia is not the answer.

Meanwhile, on substantive matters, the Indian presidency should ensure that the G20-OECD pact on a 15% minimum global tax rate for large corporations should stick to the 2023 delivery schedule. MNCs’ tax avoidance via using multiple geographies can only be tackled by multilateral, coordinated action. Getting this tax going will be a test of G20’s efficacy.



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European courts have upheld antitrust rulings in two of three cases that imposed a total Rs 8.25 billion in fines against Google related to online shopping search, the Android operating system (OS) for mobile handsets, and its AdSense advertising service.

European courts have upheld antitrust rulings in two of three cases that imposed a total Rs 8.25 billion in fines against Google related to online shopping search, the Android operating system (OS) for mobile handsets, and its AdSense advertising service. This strengthens the European Union's (EU) antitrust authority's decade-long effort to enforce competitive behaviour not just on Google but also on US Big Tech overall. It also eases apprehensions that a new set of rules, the Digital Markets Act, will not be tied up in drawn-out litigation. Google has another appeal open to it in both cases, which offers some insight into how much time tech giants have to benefit from market dominance in the jurisdiction that they are most under scrutiny.

Big Tech is escaping similar scrutiny in the US, which is a considerable dilution of oversight since the landmark ruling against Microsoft allowed the present crop of technology giants to acquire their dominance. The bar in the US antitrust investigations is set higher in terms of harm to the consumer, and free services that are overwhelming the internet tend to get off easily. Then there is the argument that technology companies make over delivering innovation, which remains by and large a Silicon Valley monopoly. US administrations have taken various lines, from Barack Obama's emphatic defence of American technology firms to Donald Trump's trust-busting rhetoric. Commercial interest creeps into the transatlantic regulatory arbitrage over the internet.

The balance will be tilted by how the rest of the world interprets innovation versus dominance. Technology permits a breathtaking pace of concentration of market power, and countries are in the process of equipping themselves with the laws to protect their consumers. Giant technology companies, on their part, will have to take their cue from legislative constraints imposed across the globe. Antitrust action can work as a trade barrier for the digital economy. Dispersing innovation across markets and economies would be one way to counter this.

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The pre-packaged insolvency resolution process (PIRP), a debtor-initiated reorganisation plan in advance with creditors on board, has reportedly not found many takers. That is unfortunate. PIRPs give MSMEs a window to rebuild themselves, leading to speedy deployment of assets trapped in failing companies, and preserves jobs.

The pre-packaged insolvency resolution process (PIRP), a debtor-initiated reorganisation plan in advance with creditors on board, has reportedly not found many takers. That is unfortunate. PIRPs give MSMEs a window to rebuild themselves, leading to speedy deployment of assets trapped in failing companies, and preserves jobs.

Disruptions in business operations are minimised when the pre-pack process is underway as promoters continue to manage and control the company, while the resolution professional (RP) monitors the resolution. Industry suggests that the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) could earmark certain MSMEs and give the banks the mandate to bring about a resolution that does not involve bankruptcy courts. But the process would be time-consuming and not cost-effective either. The decision on using this route should be left to the corporate debtor.

Easing some of the rules is a better solution. One rule requires members of the corporate debtor to pass a special resolution, or at least three-fourth of the total number of partners, to pass a resolution to initiate PIRPs. Another rule mandates unrelated financial creditors representing not less than 66% in value of debt due to them to approve the RP's appointment.

Experience in Britain shows that pre-packs have been successful in preserving enterprise value. But Indian bankers are reticent, due to the fear of being in the crosshairs of enforcement agencies for accepting haircuts to clean their books that may be questioned later. Credit decisions require judgement of risk, and all haircuts are not mala fide. Senior management in banks must be shielded from individual accountability for decisions. Lenders, in turn, must work with debtors to ensure that PIRPs gain wider acceptance.

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In a bold experiment, eight African Cheetahs will be translocated to Madhya Pradesh’s Kuno National Park (KNP) from Namibia on September 17. There is excitement and apprehension about the project, which the Supreme Court green-lighted in 2020. The species was declared extinct in India after the last cheetah was killed in the 1950s.

There are several reasons why India is keen to reintroduce cheetahs into the wild. One, they are top predators and would benefit biodiversity and ecosystem services, including preserving grasslands. Second, it is the only mammal species to go extinct in Independent India, and their presence in Kuno could boost local tourism, with potential benefits for local communities. Three, it will be a mark of national pride in the 75th year of Independence. The goal is also to establish a viable cheetah population within its historical range. According to assessments, KNP can support 20 cheetahs, and with restoration, protection and management, this number can go up to 40. For now, cheetahs will be kept in an enclosure.

Several conservationists, however, feel the project is risky because the park is not ideal for cheetahs, the prey base is weak, and once released in the wild, the cheetahs may not be able to compete for food with leopards and hyenas. But the government and conservationists feel that African Cheetahs will adapt to KNP due to the similarity of habitat and that enough safeguards — enhanced protection, prey and predator base assessment, grassland and water management, and personnel training — are in place to ensure the smallest of the big cats find their feet in Kuno. India has experience with such management, and with strict monitoring and requisite safeguards, the safety and longevity of one of the world’s most charismatic species can be ensured.



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Some of the world’s top health experts, writing as part of the Lancet Commission in a report released this week, blamed governments the world over for “widespread, global failures” in their response to the Covid-19 pandemic. The report said global leaders needed to face “hard truths” that they failed to adhere to basic norms, rationality, and transparency, and that nations failed to collaborate meaningfully to tackle the emergency.

The report was also particularly damning of the World Health Organization (WHO) for not declaring a public health emergency on time, for faltering to include a warning about the virus’s human transmissibility, and for not recognising the airborne spread of the virus in time. On India’s handling, it said that variants such as Delta and massive crowd events proved devastating. It also said that based on seropositivity surveys, both the number of infections and deaths in the country were likely to be “vastly higher” than what has been officially reported. The criticism was met with quick rebuttals. On Thursday, the WHO said the report contained “several key omissions and misinterpretations” regarding the speed and scope of the body’s actions. Indian officials have maintained that there was no underreporting of Covid-19 deaths.

In underlining some glaring flaws in the pandemic response, the report lays out some key lessons moving forward: Quick and clear global responses are important, vaccine development and scientific progress need to be followed by efforts to ensure equitable access, policymaking must be guided solely by science, and public messaging should be unambiguous and evidence-based. Global bodies should start working on ways to dissuade policymakers from various nations from instinctively hoarding shots and create new pathways so that medicines and shots can flow into poorer, less-developed regions of the world and “vaccine nationalism” doesn’t blight the battle against another disease in the future. What is important to note is that this is not a moment to apportion blame — after all, the report has the benefit of hindsight, and in the chaos and confusion of the early months of the pandemic, with scientists scrambling to understand the virus, there was little clarity on the right path — but to take lessons and apply them in earnest to the next big health emergency, or the many exigencies that afflict the world today.



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When Prime Minister (PM) Narendra Modi endorsed the Indo-Pacific Economic Framework (IPEF) in May, the decision seemed to resonate with the government’s newfound confidence in forging trade agreements with partner countries. At the end of last year, Union commerce minister Piyush Goyal announced that India was negotiating eight comprehensive economic partnership agreements, a much-enlarged version of the traditional free trade agreements (FTAs). One of these agreements, with the United Arab Emirates (UAE), is being implemented, while the first step towards another with Australia has also been taken. Further, agreements with the European Union, the United Kingdom, and Canada, among others, are currently being negotiated. Amid these engagements, Goyal’s recent announcement that India will stay away from the trade pillar of the IPEF while joining the other three sounds a discordant note, although the minister indicated that this decision could be reviewed.

The IPEF, essentially a Joe Biden administration brainchild, is working towards a set of rules for enhancing engagement between 14 countries. The rules cover four pillars — fair and resilient trade, supply chain resiliency, clean energy decarbonisation, and tax and anti-corruption. The trade pillar includes issues intimately linked to the United States’ (US) trade agenda — labour standards, environment and climate, digital economy, agriculture, transparency and good regulatory practices, competition policy and trade facilitation.

Labour standards usually entail conforming to the fundamental conventions of the International Labour Organization (ILO), which include freedom of association and right to collective bargaining, abolition of forced labour and child labour, and eliminating discrimination in employment and occupation. In short, the strengthening of labour rights. As the US views them, rules on environment and climate will require conformity with the principles of the Paris climate convention that seeks to limit greenhouse gas emissions.

There is no mention of tariff liberalisation in the IPEF, which is usually integral to trade agreements. The Biden administration clarified that the IPEF is “intentionally designed not to be a same old... traditional trade agreement”. Its primary objective is to ensure a high degree of regulatory coherence and to make market access contingent upon conformity to regulatory standards.

If the rapid elimination of tariffs, which has been India’s bugbear, is not part of the IPEF’s trade pillar, why is India reluctant to engage? The answer was provided by Goyal in his interview with this paper. Apparently, India’s reluctance arises from the possibility that the trade pillar “may involve certain binding commitments” about meeting labour and environmental standards, “which have traditionally not been a part of [India’s] agreements”. The minister also hinted that the government is unsure about digital trade.

This is hardly surprising given that the government is yet undecided about whether to limit cross-border data flow by insisting on data localisation or to meet the demands of global digital companies and allow unimpeded cross-border free flow of data.

Of course, for India, the most sensitive issue in the trade pillar is agriculture, which the minister didn’t elaborate on. Securing larger markets for its agricultural products has always been a top priority for the US in its bilateral and regional agreements. Should the US seek to realise the same objective via the IPEF, India would find it difficult to accommodate the interests of foreign players, especially given the fragility of its farming communities.

While flagging the areas of concern, Goyal emphasised that India would be participating in “resilient supply chains”, which is one of the key objectives of the IPEF. India’s stance raises three sets of questions, the resolution of which is imperative for India to remain meaningfully engaged with the IPEF supply chains.

First, supply chains are organically linked to trade rules agreed to under bilateral and regional agreements, and the IPEF will be no exception. Second, it is important to recognise that conducting trade with advanced countries via bilateral and regional agreements is well-nigh impossible without conforming to labour standards. The US and the EU do not endorse agreements that don’t include provisions on labour standards. And, third, some EU members are now adopting labour standards to monitor the functioning of supply chains, thus making these standards even more potent in an interconnected world.

Globally, supply chains have expanded on the back of supportive rules on trade and investment, besides conforming to technical standards. Just-in-time operations, without which supply chains cannot function, are critically dependent on liberal trade rules, an enabling environment for companies to operate freely, and ensuring that components and final products emerging from supply chains meet requisite technical standards. Labour and environmental standards are increasingly getting enmeshed in these rules. The trade pillar in IPEF has been tasked with designing these rules to make supply chains more resilient and well-integrated.

The EU members are in the process of adopting guidelines to ensure that companies respect labour rights and the environment when they are part of supply chains. Once adopted, companies will be required to “identify and, where necessary, prevent, end or mitigate adverse impacts of their activities on human rights, such as child labour and exploitation of workers, and on the environment”. Germany went a step further by enacting the Supply Chain Act in 2021. From 2023, companies must ensure that human rights, including workers’ rights, are not violated in their business operations and supply chains in the country. Businesses in India need to give close consideration to these emerging sets of rules so that they can remain meaningfully engaged in global trade.

Biswajit Dhar is professor of economics, Jawaharlal Nehru University

The views expressed are personal



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Some crimes can never be forgotten or fully forgiven. Not all western European countries understand the scale of the tragedy that Poland saw during World War II (WWII). From a western perspective, the war was a series of battles, troop movements and political decisions. For Poland, it was a set of crimes, atrocities and destruction, and lost opportunities for development.

From the beginning, WWII was a cold-blooded crime planned with the goal of physical elimination and destruction of countries. But in eastern Europe, the situation was far worse. Although it is hard to imagine, three generations ago, Nazi Germany denied Poles the right to live. The Germans regarded us as a race of enslaved people on whom crimes and experiments could be carried out with impunity. Racial prejudice, a sense of superiority and the colonial ambitions of the Third Reich led to the greatest tragedy in the history of Poland.

Poland is still reeling from the effects of the war today. And it will continue to struggle with them even after the last eyewitnesses of that inhumane time are gone.

According to the German Generalplan Ost, Poles were to be mostly exterminated, and the small portion left alive was to be used as slaves. This criminal plan was implemented from the first days of WWII. Even the first bombs, which fell on Poland at 4:40 am on September 1, 1939, were not aimed at military facilities, but a hospital and residential buildings in Wieluń. The Germans dropped 380 bombs, weighing around 46 tonnes, on the quiet town. It was genocide.

As early as the first days of the war, the Wehrmacht and auxiliary units, consisting of ordinary Germans, burned defenceless children and women alive.

In a famous photo from 1939, American photographer Julien Bryan captured a 12-year-old Polish girl, Kazimiera Kostewicz, grieving over the body of her sister, Anna, whom a German soldier shot. Millions of such children in Poland mourned their parents, siblings, and friends.

The reality of Poland under German occupation consisted of massacres of civilians, massive looting of Polish property, and the theft of more than 500,000 paintings and sculptures. The criminal acts of violence were planned in detail and had names: Intelligenzaktion, Sonderaktion or Außerordentliche Befriedungsaktion. These were all organised operations that the Germans directed against the elite of the Polish nation — professors, lawyers, doctors, engineers, teachers and architects. In Operation Tannenberg, the Germans murdered some 55,000 Polish citizens. During the six years, more than 5.2 million Polish citizens were murdered, and the population was reduced by about 12 million. By the end of the war, Poland had a ruined economy, destroyed industry, and its cities were razed to the ground.

And what happened to those who waged terror in Poland? They became local elites in post-war West Germany, and lived in affluence, avoiding any responsibility for the crimes they committed. For example, Heinz Reinefarth, one of the executioners of the Warsaw Uprising, became mayor of the town of Westerland on the famous island of Sylt, and later became a member of the Landtag in Schleswig-Holstein.

That is why today we raise the issue of reparations, the issue of compensation for German crimes against the Polish people and citizens. Furthermore, we have prepared the report on the losses suffered by Poland due to German aggression and occupation during WWII 1939-1945. This three-volume report is a result of more than four years of work by experts. It is an account of Poland’s stolen future.

The lesson we should learn from WWII is that crimes that go unremembered, unnamed, unjudged and unpunished can only be a harbinger of more. The war crimes unleashed today on the Ukrainian people by the Russian forces only corroborate this fact. Today’s barbarians must know they will not escape responsibility for their genocide, destruction and looting.

Germany has taken the position that the subject of war reparations was settled long ago. Yet recently, it compensated the Herero and Nama ethnic groups for the genocide in Namibia over a century ago. After almost 50 years, Germany also agreed to pay reparations to the families of victims of the terrorist attacks on Israeli athletes during the Munich Olympics. It doesn’t matter whether 10, 50 or 100 years have passed since the crimes. What matters is whether they have been truly accounted for.

The victims of Germany’s totalitarian war machine deserve the same respect and remembrance as the victims of colonialism or terrorism. The unimaginable scale of the destruction inflicted on Poland between 1939 and 1945 makes reparations for losses a process that stretches over the years.

In an existential sense, these losses cannot be valued or compensated. After all, who can estimate the price of human life? This is where only history can judge the perpetrators. However, there is also the responsibility of societies and States. This responsibility can be measured and counted. We believe this responsibility for the wrongs committed is the foundation for building a shared future between nations. The only path that leads us forward is the path of truth. I hope that this is the path we are embarking on. I hope we can close one of the darkest chapters in the history of Poland, Europe and the world.

Mateusz Morawiecki is prime minister of Poland

The views expressed are personal



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As the global economy slows down amid a vortex of uncertainties — two years of the pandemic, a war in Europe, and a recession on the anvil — there is a striking exception, India. We have not just moved completely out of the shadows of our colonial past, but have also leapt over the United Kingdom (UK) to claim the fifth spot in the league of the world’s largest economies. India is now the fifth-biggest equity market as well, with our global market capitalisation at an all-time high of 3.5%.

This has set the ball rolling for the top spot. Just a decade ago, India’s economy ranked 11th, and the UK’s 5th. In the next five years, India can overtake Germany as the fourth largest economy. Germany’s nominal Gross Domestic Product (GDP) is estimated at $5.36 trillion by 2027, while India’s would be a $5.53 trillion economy by then. If we stay steady, before the end of this decade, India could outpace Japan to take the third position (where India’s GDP will rise to $8.4 trillion by 2030).

At this rate, history will repeat itself. The share of the economy in world GDP will most likely return to the early 19th century levels by 2047 (in 1820, the share was 16.1% vis-à-vis the current 3.5%).

This has been a story of the slow and steady winning of the race. The growth levers were put in place strategically, and well in time. It started by rolling out relief measures with a cautious approach, prioritising those who needed them the most. Contrary to the joint chorus by some to “spend, spend, spend”, India chose to be open to providing stimulus only after assessment of the exigencies of the pandemic, and the right time to rev up demand. As a result, debt was kept under check, fiscal space was rationed, and inflation, which for the UK may top 22% next year, has been relatively balanced, and is currently on a decline for India. Simultaneously, investment and consumption have shown a rebound, jump-started by the world’s largest Covid-19 vaccination campaign. The fear of a liquidity crisis for micro, medium and small enterprises (MSMEs) has now transformed into the golden age for Indian startups. The prime minister’s (PM) call for an Atmanirbhar Bharat (self-reliant India) has paved the path for achieving the milestone of the second-highest number of unicorns in the world.

As the economic shock of the pandemic subsides, the government has slammed the accelerator on the most strategic growth-inducing areas, introducing PLI schemes. Capex that averaged around 1.7% of GDP in the 2010s now amounts to 2.9% for 2022-23. 28% of the capex budget has already been spent. This, combined with the push to infrastructure (a 35% y-o-y increase in capex and proposed infrastructure spend of over 10 lakh crore) that will be created through PM Gati Shakti, will allow private investments to kick in — a model championed by PM Narendra Modi in building the Gujarat model of development as the state’s chief minister. It is noteworthy that he has not only focused on reviving sectors critical for employment generation, but also is giving a push to nascent-yet-high-potential sectors, such as drones. Like drones, the foundations for Digital India were laid through the JAM (Jan Dhan-Aadhaar-mobile number) trinity and the Bharat Net Programme between 2012 and 2015. These solid foundations will be utilised for ensuring inclusive and sustainable growth in the future.

Thus, what seemed like an endgame for India’s story in the last two pandemic-stricken years, emerged as a game changer instead. Those who predicted India could land up in a Sri Lanka-like situation or criticised this government for setting highly ambitious (unachievable) targets, underestimated the potential of India’s growth. The fact that the Indian economy, which was $2 trillion in current US dollars in 2014, has jumped to $3.2 trillion today, serves as proof.

In all this, a formidable combination precedes India’s rising global position, which is that of a leader whose vision captures the collective imagination of 1.4 billion Indians, and a growing young population that continues to exhibit tremendous osmotic capability to absorb new technology, ideas and ways of living. One of the Panch Prans (five pledges) laid out by PM Modi to transform India into a developed country by 2047 is to learn our lessons from the past, but do away with colonial remnants. The new engisn of the Navy, and the reincarnation of Rajpath as the Kartavya Path, hence, are not isolated events, but mark the beginning of India’s re-arrival as a global superpower.

Jyotiraditya Scindia is a Union minister

The views expressed are personal



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There is a popular saying in Indian politics that the road to Delhi passes through Lucknow, the capital of Uttar Pradesh (UP). Until 2022, Congressmen lived up to that belief.

But after the abject failure of all experiments — from a lucrative alliance with a regional force, the Samajwadi Party (SP), in 2017, to an energetic “main ladki hoon” campaign in 2022 — party workers bereft of any local leadership with a mass appeal are now pinning their hopes on senior Congress leader Rahul Gandhi’s ongoing Bharat Jodo Yatra (Unite India march).

The Gandhis have been the face of the party in the state since the days of Jawaharlal Nehru, as rarely any chief minister or state president could evolve as a mass leader. A few who became popular like Hemvati Nandan Bahuguna or Vishwanath Pratap Singh drifted to other parties.

Thus, the rampant feeling in the rank and file is that Rahul Gandhi’s Bharat Jodo Yatra will pull the reverse gear.

“The politics of the country is changing. Now, the road to power will move from Delhi to UP, not vice versa. The BJP's win at the Centre in 2014 paved the way for the saffron party's resurrection in the state in 2017. Similarly, once the Congress regains its strength at the Centre in 2024, the voters, fed up with regional forces and their opportunistic politics, will look at the Congress as a viable option against the Bharatiya Janata Party [BJP],” said a Congress worker.

The Grand Old Party today falls behind regional outfits with pockets of influence such as the Apna Dal and the Suheldev Bharatiya Samaj Party (SBSP).

It’s quite ironic that in 2022 the Rashtriya Lok Dal (RLD), confined to West UP, won eight seats in the state assembly, the SBSP and Nishad Party, with their respective bases restricted to Varanasi and Gorakhpur regions, won six seats each. The Apna Dal with its base among Kurmis (a backward caste) of East UP captured 12 seats, while the Congress ended with two.

As of now, one doesn’t see the revival of the Congress in the state.

While many party workers are pinning their hopes on Rahul’s yatra, political experts like professor Badri Narayan find a major problem with the tone and tenor of the entire exercise. He says the Congress will have to change its public discourse as people are smitten by the personality of Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his nationalistic appeal. This “fear and divide” strategy will not impress a large section which is now driven by the politics of Hindu majoritarianism and welfarism.

And while Bihar and Telangana chief ministers Nitish Kumar and K Chandrashekar Rao are on a countrywide move to unite a fragmented Opposition, including the Congress, many are sceptical about its success as there is going to be a clash of political interests — a sample of which was evident during the Bharat Jodo Yatra.

Soon after Rahul Gandhi left Tamil Nadu and entered Left-ruled Kerala, the chinks in the Opposition were too apparent to be ignored. The ruling CPI(M) wanted to know why Rahul was spending 18 days in Kerala and just two days in UP, where “secularism is under threat”.

Rightly so, as the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS)-BJP is not only the strongest in UP, but the state also sends the party’s leader, Modi to Parliament. And here exist the three shrines of Ayodhya, Kashi, and Mathura, which pitchforked the BJP to immense political heights and have also led to the Congress’s doom.

The issues are alive even today, to the advantage of the BJP for the same religious issues are dominating the country’s political discourse today. The Ram Janmabhoomi temple in all probability will be complete and thrown open to the public before the general elections. On the sidelines, the legal battle to reclaim the Krishna Janmabhoomi and Kashi Vishwanath temple will add to the religious fervour.

But for the Congress, the same religious issues will remain a grim reminder of their misadventure for the alienated Muslims.

To recall, the Congress started vacillating between secularism (redefined as the appeasement of Muslims) and soft Hindutva (appeal to Hindus, especially Brahmins) during late Prime Minister Indira Gandhi’s tenure as she sensed the growing threat from the rising Right-wing organisations. Soon, her soft Hindutva lost its traction as the BJP, born in 1980, along with its saffron allies, stepped up its campaign for the liberation of three shrines in Kashi, Mathura and Ayodhya.

Indira’s “Garibi Hatao” vote bank started shifting.

After her demise, her son Rajiv Gandhi prompted by Arun Nehru, ML Fotedar, along with the then chief minister Vir Bahadur Singh, decided to unlock the doors of the disputed shrine in Ayodhya in 1986, which depleted the Congress's strength and added steam to the BJP’s religious campaigns that they linked with pride of the Hindus and the country. Muslims questioned their secular credentials, while Hindus opted for the BJP’s aggressive Hindutva.

The second blunder was the state’s permission to the Ram Janmabhoomi Nyas and Vishwa Hindi Parishad to lay the foundation stone of the temple in 1989.

The Congress decline, and the BJP’s rise, began.

The Congress started losing election after election with the demoralised cadre shifting to the parties in power — the SP, the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) and the BJP. In a caste-conscious society, the Congress failed to win castes, lost minority support, and could not hold on to its secular plank.

Now, when the knives are out for Rahul Gandhi within the party, UP looks for a recipe for revival. Can it match the energy, synergy, strategy, and size of its rivals as it also lost the Opposition’s status to regional forces decades back?

A senior party leader said, “Yes, we need surgery as the decline of the Congress in the country started from UP and the adjoining Bihar.” Till 1989, the Congress ruled both the northern states that account for 120 Lok Sabha seats. Jagannath Mishra was the last Congress chief minister in Bihar and Narain Dutt Tiwari in UP.

A political expert once told me during elections, “The generations born after 1989 have not seen Congress rule in both the states as 33 years have gone by now.”

Can Rahul Gandhi pull the reverse gear in such a complicated scenario?

From her perch in Lucknow, HT’s resident editor Sunita Aron highlights important issues related to the elections in Uttar Pradesh

The views expressed are personal



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The violent protest march on the state secretariat in Kolkata mounted by the BJP from multiple locations simultaneously is of a kind not seen in a long time in West Bengal’s capital, which is no stranger to street-level militancy displayed by political outfits of different stripes.

In light of the visuals seen on television, the newspaper reporting and the eyewitness accounts of journalists that couldn’t find their way into print due to space constraints, it seems a stretch to sustain the claim that the police had without provocation cracked down harshly on a peaceful demonstration held by the state’s leading Opposition party to protest against “corruption” in the running of the state’s affairs by the ruling Trinamul Congress led by chief minister Mamata Banerjee.

A photo in a prominent daily shows a “peaceful” protester violently kicking a helmeted police officer sprawled helplessly on the pavement. It turns out he is an assistant commissioner of police who has been very seriously injured. Demonstrators set fire to a police vehicle, displaying hooliganism with a sense of abandon. Bricks and other missiles were hurled freely. It would have been dereliction of duty on the part of the law and order authorities if they had not stopped the violent protesters from reaching the secretariat. Regrettably, some leading BJP figures have also been injured, besides the police on duty.

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Instead of letting loose retaliatory violence by TMC cadres in keeping with the unfortunate culture of political violence in West Bengal, the chief minister would do well to appoint a commission of inquiry by a sitting judge of the Calcutta high court to focus on the violence aspect that was so conspicuous. In such a case, the commission would need to turn in its report in a matter of weeks rather than months in order to be meaningful.

The commission should also be asked to look into what is commonly

Alleged -- that the Opposition party imported large numbers of cadres and hooligans from neighbouring states for the so-called peaceful march. This is needed all the more in light of dire warnings issued by senior BJP members in Odisha that a Kolkata-style march would also be held in that state to oust the Naveen Patnaik government and to fulfil the party’s aspiration to double its tally from the state in the next Lok Sabha polls. Such a threat can hardly be brushed aside.

For a variety of local reasons, the BJP did strikingly well in the last Lok Sabha polls in West Bengal, bagging 18 of the state’s 42 seats. This led it to believe it could win the 2021 Assembly election, whose result was an anti-climax for the BJP.

Evidently, the saffron party is smarting under the crushing defeat a year ago. It had thrown its most powerful leaders, including Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Union home minister Amit Shah, into the campaign but the outcome was disappointing.

After the walloping, the ruling party at the Centre is evidently seeking to keep the morale of its rank and file in the state boosted through high-profile actions even if these stretch law enforcement to the limit. This is a pity. A problem with the West Bengal BJP is a paucity of credible local leaders who keep political standards high.

Desperate actions are a recipe for lawlessness.



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The meltdown of the Congress Legislature Party in Goa has triggered less concern within the leadership of the grand old party of India than it ought to. The new acolytes of the Sangh Parivar had taken oath on the Constitution and religious texts before they were made candidates that they will not switch their loyalties post-election. The Congress owes the electorate which picked those very same people an explanation, even if it takes the losses in its stride.

The Congress has been adrift politically ever since it lost the 2014 Lok Sabha elections and the situation has worsened after its dismal showing in 2019. The party lost its governments in Karnataka and Madhya Pradesh when the BJP with its deep pockets chose to throw all democratic norms to the winds and have its own governments in those states. Its coalition government in Maharashtra also collapsed.  Still, the party has no plans to protect itself or the other Opposition from the relentless onslaughts the NDA has made a part of its politics. In fact, the Congress sided with the BJP when the Central agencies went hunting the AAP government in Delhi and the LDF government in Kerala.

Though it runs governments in only two states, the Congress is the main Opposition force in many others, including Gujarat which is going to polls soon. It had given the BJP a tough fight in the last Assembly election. The party leadership seems to have taken no note of the political significance of the key state even as the AAP has been actively seeking to occupy the Opposition space there. The long march the Congress has undertaken now will have little resonance among its own supporters unless the party takes itself seriously.

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How I miss Khushwant Singh when a famous person passes away! Had Khushwant Singh been alive, he would have penned the most sizzling obituary of Britain’s longest-serving Rani, Queen Elizabeth II, who died on September 8 at the age of 96. Much has been written in our media, but nobody can match KS’s trenchant style.

“How has India responded to the news of the Queen passing away?” The voice on the phone was clear and clipped. It was a lady from the BBC World Service. I was in a rickety car driving up to Ooty, with a driver who was talking on the phone and not wearing his seat belt. I would have worn mine had it been there! The three-hour drive on NH-181 from Coimbatore airport to Ooty (86 km away), up the steep Coonoor ghat with 48 hairpin bends, is hair-raising, with stray bison and baby elephants halting the traffic. It was too vast a question to respond to given the circumstances. I replied honestly, and perhaps a bit too bluntly, by telling the lady:“Well… we do have several other major concerns to deal with, besides, we also have mixed feelings about the Queen, given the love-hate relationship with your nation.” There was a brief pause. She continued:“I understand you have met King Charles and the Queen Consort…” Indeed, I had. “What are your views on our new King?” The car I was in had narrowly missed a family of langurs, and the driver had only one hand on the wheel. I gulped. And quickly said:“He is a wacko, an eccentric with strange political views… besides, the world has moved on. His job description has also changed over time…” The lady reminded me that their country was in mourning and the mood was somber across Britain. I softened my views and added: “The Queen was seen as a matriarch trying her best to keep a large, dysfunctional family together. Much like matriarchs of joint families here. She reminded me of the key protagonist in an Ekta Kapoor saas-bahu saga — a naani and a daadi stuck in a thankless job. In India, we place great value on family, tradition, and emotional ties that bind generations. We are sentimental and forgiving, when a family elder passes away…” There was a long “Hmmmm”. By now the driver had started an animated conversation with his wife. But I wasn’t done:“The young in India remain largely indifferent to British royalty. They have heard of the Queen, thanks to OTT platforms, and the success of The Crown. They are definitely more interested in gossipy tidbits about Meghan and Harry, and will probably tune in to see what Meghan wears to the funeral. She’s perceived as a wrecker of the family… and therefore a vamp.” The lady then asked a rather surprising question: Does race and caste figure in the way the Queen’s passing has been underplayed in India?” Huh?

I watched the gun carriage as the Queen’s cortege made its way to Westminster Hall. All that pomp and pageantry seemed so out of sync with today. A made-for-television spectacle, starched, rigid and cold. We are accustomed to rona-dhona and emotional displays of grief. There were far too many stiff upper lips around on TV, and the solemnity seemed forced. All those absurd rules! The protocol! Who gets to wear the military uniform and who doesn’t… A revered lady is dead. Her children and grandchildren being sifted and divided up for public display appears cruel and humiliating to me. Then there were those distasteful questions about whether or not Meghan the American Witch had come with hidden microphones under her fitted black dress during the staged walkabout.

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I am neither a hater nor a baiter. Reading all the outpouring of anti-British feelings in India right now, I am frankly pretty bored. Someone wants an apology, someone else wants the Kohinoor. Yes, India was plundered and looted by the Brits… but look at the tatters the Empire is in today. And look at us! Look ahead… Not back. I doubt King Charles III will be able to keep the monarchy on track, or even whether he will be accepted as a worthy successor to his mother, given the changed public sentiments. I am against this business of coercing apologies out of public figures for past sins of omission and commission. These forced “sorrys” are pretty meaningless and fake. History cannot be reversed, so why go down that path? The evil that men do lives after them…etc, etc. There is enough evil all around us right now in our own backyard — why not focus on the present day and look after our own, instead of going back in time and demanding apologies left and right?

The Queen had shrewdly adhered to the priceless advice (“Never explain, never complain”) given to her ancestor, Queen Victoria, by her astute adviser and Prime Minister, Benjamin Disraeli, the first Earl of Beaconsfield, in the late 1800s. Significantly, Disraeli is the only Prime Minister of Jewish origin and a novelist who continued to publish his work even after he became Prime Minister. It is a motto which, royal watchers say, was adopted by Queen Elizabeth’s mother (the universally beloved Queen Mum, who died aged 101, in 2002) and subsequently by Queen Elizabeth II herself. I’d say it’s a fabulous mantra to follow even without being the Queen of England. The more you explain, the worse it gets. Silence has more power than confessions and admissions. Where has opening the gab benefited anyone? Look at Prince Harry’s “haalat”. Worse, see Prince Andrew (popularly known as “Randy Andy”, for obvious reasons) marching in tailcoats — resembling a royal butler — behind his mother’s gun carriage, and cutting such a pathetic figure.

The state funeral on Monday will undoubtedly attract a record number of eyeballs worldwide. We will be represented by our President, Droupadi Murmu — an apt choice. But before that, we will be treated to our Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s birthday celebrations on Saturday,when he turns 72, which will go on for a fortnight and end on Mahatma Gandhi’s birth anniversary (October 2). Remember folks, it’s “Sewa Pakhwara” time. Follow the leader: Gird your loins and toil away. Janam Din Mubarak, Modiji! Glad you also follow half of Disraeli’s anmol advice by never explaining.



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