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Editorials - 20-04-2022

Tamil Nadu Chief Minister M.K. Stalin could spark a broad-based challenge to the BJP’s centralising moves

The recent speech by Tamil Nadu Chief Minister M.K. Stalin at the 23rd party congress of the Communist Party of India (Marxist) in Kannur, Kerala will go down in political history for at least two reasons. First, Mr. Stalin, in both this speech and in prior statements and actions, has put forth a profound challenge to the model of ‘federalism’ that has become the foundational basis of public policy under Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)-led government at the Centre.

Second, his speech could be considered an early signal of potential convergence — at least in an ideological, if not tactical, sense — of two radical-revolutionary political paradigms, Dravidianism and communism. This development might fuel momentum for a coalition of dissenting voices at the State level against a ham-handed Central government that appears to be penalising non-BJP-led State governments by weaponising certain aspects of public policy. Both dimensions of Mr. Stalin’s challenge are worth considering in closer detail.

Threats to State autonomy

First, as he elucidated at the CPI(M) congress in Kannur on April 9 — to thunderous applause for his allusion to the historical cultural connections between Tamil Nadu and Kerala — Mr. Stalin’s challenge to the model of federalism in vogue today is to question whether, in its current form, it is a cause and consequence of excessive concentration of power in the Central government. The ‘so what’ of his argument is that this comes at the cost of denying States their rightful place in the scheme of things as envisioned in the Constitution of India. This change is located in the context of implementations of the Goods and Services Tax (GST) and the National Eligibility-cum-Entrance Test (NEET), dissolution of the Planning Commission and the status of the National Development Council.

Among the greatest concerns voiced by Mr. Stalin and Kerala Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan at the CPI(M) congress was that the conduct of revenue sharing between the Centre and certain States has been less than satisfactory, out of line with Finance Commission recommendations, and that it has effectively cut off funding for policy implementation, which is the life blood of State administration.

It is not only Mr. Stalin’s speech. His recent visit to the nation’s capital was aimed precisely at attempted redress for the Tamil Nadu public exchequer suffering shortfalls owing to this situation: although the 14th Finance Commission had recommended Rs. 2,524.20 crore in performance grant to Tamil Nadu during the period from 2016-17 to 2019-20, the Union government released Rs. 494.99 crore for 2016-17. According to the memorandum Mr. Stalin handed over in person to Union Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman, “Despite compliance with the conditions and furnishing of utilisation certificates, the grant for 2017-18 has not been released. Subsequently, the grants for 2018-19 and 2019-20 have also not been released.”

On Governors

In recent times Mr. Stalin has also flagged — as indeed have Mr. Vijayan and other non-BJP Chief Ministers — an alarming tendency for Governors of their respective States to break with hallowed constitutional tradition. This is taking the form of Governors getting involved in the minutiae of administration — normally considered the sole domain of the State executive — or holding up specific processes involving their office in a manner that tips political circumstances against the State government in question.

For example, in his Republic Day address this year, Tamil Nadu Governor R.N. Ravi set off a political firestorm when he called for States to adopt a three-language formula. This was a move that the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (DMK) leadership clearly considered an affront to the State’s cherished Tamil linguistic identity and cultural ethos. The apparent gubernatorial overreach stung even more in the context of the 2019 protests in Tamil Nadu, which led to the dropping of a clause in the draft National Education Policy requiring mandatory Hindi lessons in schools.

Another instance of the Governor stepping beyond the routine constitutional duties and engaging in what some have described as pressing a thumb on the scales of State politics in favour of the Union government policy position is the inordinate delay by Raj Bhavan in Chennai in sending the Tamil Nadu NEET Bill for presidential assent. In these two cases, the rightful indignation of Mr. Stalin and his colleagues stems from the fact that education, after all, has been on the Concurrent List since 1976.

Unity among dissenters

Tussles between the Centre and States are hardly new. State autonomy, as supported by the Sarkaria Commission, has been fiercely fought for across many decades and by Chief Ministers of every political hue — including vociferously on Twitter and beyond by the erstwhile Chief Minister of Gujarat, Narendra Modi, prior to 2014. Yet for Mr. Stalin and the DMK, the drive for self-determination of a people has a deeper meaning than mere squabbles over policy.

The resistance of both the DMK and the All India Anna Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (AIADMK)to the very notion of Hindi imposition stems from decades of experience negotiating with an elitist, upper caste-dominated government entity in faraway Delhi — and pushing back against the latter’s repeated attempts to make inroads into the politics of a State that has largely been impermeable to its machinations. Indeed, the essence of the impulse that animated the Dravidian movement and in 1967 enabled the remarkable mobilisation of a smorgasbord of middle and lower castes against Brahmin dominance of the organs of the state came from the very same rejection of ‘Delhi politics’ that we are seeing the DMK battle today.

Regardless of whether it was the DMK or the AIADMK at the helm of affairs in Tamil Nadu, since the late 1960s, the ‘social contract’ of Dravidian party leaders with their constituents has revolved around mass welfare policies as a key vector of resource allocation, specifically redistribution towards poorer and marginalised sections of society.

This historical trend has resulted in Tamil Nadu consistently performing well in terms of human development indicators — provisioning of public goods such as health and education has always been consistent with this form of ‘paternalist populism’. It leaves a few unanswered questions in terms of financing for these worthy policies. To what extent can revenue from an over-regulated liquor sector offset the considerable dent in public finances that these policies entail? To what extent do these policies cripple the working population from looking beyond ‘freebies’ towards productive employment and income-generating activities? These are tough questions that the Dravidian movement is yet to provide satisfactory answers for.

Pro-poor impulse

But it explains why the question of public finance support from the Central government matters greatly in Tamil Nadu at the present juncture — as it does in Kerala, where there is a class element undergirding public policy based on the pro-poor redistributive intent of the CPI(M). It drives leaders like Mr. Stalin and Mr. Vijayan to take on the Central government for under-delivering on their revenue-sharing promises, especially at a time when State taxes are at a low ebb owing to the moribund state of economic activity in a post-COVID economy.

In batting on the front foot for clearly defined values of this unique social movement, Mr. Stalin has made a strong claim as a deserving legatee of the mantle of his late father, former Chief Minister and Dravidian movement stalwart M. Karunanidhi. While there were genuine questions in May 2021 about his capability to govern an entire State when he took up the Chief Ministerial berth, Mr. Stalin proved that his days as Mayor of Chennai and Deputy Chief Minister under the tutelage of his father only honed his political instinct. Along the way he appears to have genuinely imbibed something of the spirit of Dravidian politics. If this spirit finds resonance in States such as Kerala and West Bengal, perhaps even Andhra Pradesh and Telangana, there is a possibility that an alternative governance ethos to saffron politics may be around the corner.

narayan@thehindu.co.in



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The bulldozing of houses in M.P. was to impose collective punishment on the alleged rioters

Communal clashes broke out during Ram Navami processions in several parts of the country including at Khargone in Madhya Pradesh. Subsequently, the Madhya Pradesh government bulldozed the houses of those who were allegedly involved in rioting. The State government claims that these demolitions are in response to illegal encroachments. However, the fact that these arbitrary demolitions are being carried out against the alleged rioters of one particular community and in the immediate aftermath of the riots shows that their purpose seems to be to impose collective punishment.

The bulldozing machines— the new symbols of brute state power — are not just demolishing houses and shops but also bulldozing rule of law and our constitutional order. This idea of serving ‘justice’, quick and cold, through bulldozers emanated in Uttar Pradesh. In the wake of protests against the Citizenship (Amendment) Act, 2019 the Uttar Pradesh government passed orders to recover damages from those who were allegedly involved in destroying public property. This process has been further institutionalised through the enactment of the Uttar Pradesh Recovery of Damages to Public and Private Property Act, 2020. Several commentators have already pointed out that the use of such brute state power violates various domestic legal provisions. Our purpose is to illustrate that the act of bulldozing houses without due process and legal sanction also amounts to a breach of India’s international law obligations.

Right to adequate housing

The right to housing is not only a fundamental right recognised under Article 21 of the Indian Constitution, it is also a well-documented right under the international human rights law framework, which is binding on India. For instance, Article 25 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) states that “everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and of his family, including food, clothing,housing and medical care…”.

Likewise, Article 11.1 of the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ICESCR) recognises “the right of everyone to an adequate standard of living for himself and his family, including adequate food, clothing andhousing , and to the continuous improvement of living conditions”. Furthermore, under Article 11.1, countries are under an obligation to take “appropriate steps” to ensure the realisation of these rights such as the right to adequate housing. The rights recognised under ICESCR, according to Article 4, can be restricted by States only if the limitations are determined by law in a manner compatible with the nature of these rights and solely to promote society’s general welfare. However, any limitation imposed on the rights given in the Covenant such as the right to adequate housing cannot lead to the destruction of these rights. This is categorically recognised in Article 5 of ICESCR.

Besides, international law also prohibits arbitrary interference in an individual’s right to property. For instance, Article 12 of the UDHR states that “no one shall be subjected to arbitrary interference with his privacy, family,home or correspondence, nor to attacks upon his honour and reputation”. Article 12 also stipulates that “everyone has the right to the protection of the law against such interference or attacks”. This same right is also provided under Article 17 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR). Article 17 further provides that everyone has the right to own property alone as well as in association with others and that no one shall be arbitrarily deprived of his property. Thus, arbitrary interference with an individual’s property is a gross violation of the ICCPR.

Forced evictions

The Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) commonly known as the United Nations (UN) Human Rights Office — whose mandate is to promote and protect human rights guaranteed under international law — has elaborated on the content of the right to adequate housing.

According to the UN Human Rights Office, an integral element of the right to adequate housing is ‘protection against forced evictions’. Building on the right to adequate housing, given in Article 11.1 of ICESCR, the UN Human Rights Office defines ‘forced evictions’ as ‘permanent or temporary removal against the will of individuals, families and/or communities from the homes and/or land which they occupy, without the provision of, and access to, appropriate forms of legal or other protection’. The right to adequate housing also entails freedom from arbitrary interference with one’s home, privacy, and family.

The bulldozing of the houses by the Madhya Pradesh government of the alleged rioters amounts to forced eviction and arbitrary interference with an individual’s home, thus a breach of Article 11.1 of the ICESCR. This action can be defended under international law only if it can be shown that the forced eviction is as per the law and in conformity with the provisions of the human rights covenants. Also, other requirements such as whether the state action was necessary and proportionate will have to be examined. It is unlikely that these forced evictions can be lawfully defended given the timing of the eviction. One wonders that if these demolitions were against illegal encroachments, then did the authorities get the eviction order on the day of the riots, or did they have an eviction order earlier, but decided to act only after the riots? Also, were the eviction orders limited to the Muslim locality?

Judicial incorporation

Moreover, the international human rights law identified above has been judicially incorporated by the Supreme Court of India into the Indian legal system. The apex court in cases likeBachan Singh vs State of Punjab ,Vishaka vs State of Rajasthan, and recently in the famousPuttaswamy vs Union of India has laid down the principle that the fundamental rights guaranteed under the Constitution must be read and interpreted in a manner which would enhance their conformity with international human rights law.

As the custodian of India’s constitutional order, it is high time that the judiciary acted and imposed necessary checks on the unbridled exercise of power by the executive. Courts should use international law to counter the nationalist-populist discourse.

Prabhash Ranjan is Professor at O. P. Jindal Global University. Aman Kumar is Assistant Professor at IFIM Law School



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Otto Braun’s letter to A.C.N. Nambiar seems relevant still to know Europe’s dilemma of choosing the U.S. over Russia

A.C.N. Nambiar (left in picture ), who was the Berlin correspondent ofThe Hindu during 1926-1934, shifted his residence to New Delhi in late October 1984. Then Prime Minister Indira Gandhi had insisted on his return from Zurich as she was worried about his health. From 1927, Jawaharlal Nehru and Indira Gandhi had treated and considered Nambiar to be a close family friend. For them, he was “Nanu”. Nehru had appointed him as India’s Ambassador to Sweden and West Germany. However, Nambiar chose to retire from diplomatic life in 1958 and resume his life as a journalist from Switzerland.

By 1933, Nambiar had become Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose’s trusted confidante in Europe. It was in the same year that Hitler’s police had expelled him from Germany after arresting him on February 27 for involvement in the Reichstag Fire along with Communists. In 1942, Bose brought Nambiar back to Berlin to join his team to carry on with his Indian independence struggle from Berlin. In 1943 he designated Nambiar as his successor for his European campaign when he secretly left for the Far East to lead the Indian National Army (INA). After the Second World War, the Allied Powers imprisoned Nambiar from 1945 to 1947. He was the only Indian freedom fighter to have been arrested by Hitler and the Allied Forces.

Soon after his arrival, Nambiar met Indira Gandhi on October 21, 1984. On October 22 he received a warm, handwritten letter from her, welcoming him and assuring him of all support including an offer to send him home cooked food from her house! However, on October 31, 1984 the world shattered for him. He was left staring at an uncertain future with Mrs Gandhi’s assassination. His only anchor in life had suddenly gone. He did not know India, which he had left 75 years ago. It adversely affected his health. He had to be in and out of the hospital repeatedly. He passed away on January 17, 1986.

A lifeline

What kept him going for a year after 1984 were letters he received regularly from European friends and his long conversations with persons (like this writer) on the difficulties of German politics to adjust to American thinking. One such friend who kept in touch with him constantly was Dr. Karl Otto Braun, a lover of India and a former German diplomat. Braun described himself as a “revisionist historian”, who he said, was “seeking the truth”, reflecting the traditional German dilemma of aligning too much with America, despite their admiration for American leadership.

Braun’s letter to Nambiar, dated April 11, 1985, seems relevant even now to understand the European dilemma of choosing Americavis-à-vis Russia at a time when a common front to help Ukraine is being forged by Washington DC. One could thus appreciate the present Ukrainian criticism of the traditional German foreign policy towards Russia even by former German Chancellor Angela Merkel. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky had recently invited her to visit Bucha to see for herself “what the policy of 14 years of concessions to Russia has led to”.

At the Institute for Historical Review, Newport Beach, California, a controversial publication for “Holocaust Denial”, which organises the “Historical Revisionist Congress” has said that Dr. Braun, who passed away on August 21, 1988, was in contact with Netaji Bose, while in Germany. It has mentioned Braun’s role in “arranging Bose’s dramatic submarine voyage from Europe to Asia”. However, I could find no confirmation of this in my 10 years of research to write Nambiar’s biography.

Stalin and the Americans

What is interesting in Braun’s letter to Nambiar was the detail about his visit to the Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Museum in Albany, New York. In its secret archives, he found how F.D. Roosevelt had sent his trusted emissary Harry Hopkins to Stalin on July 31, 1941, to list out all the weapons that Stalin needed. Hopkins had said that Stalin wanted Roosevelt to know that he would welcome American troops on “any part of the Russian front under the complete command of the American army”. Stalin frankly admitted in the November 1943 Tehran Conference that “we Soviets would have lost the war” without American help.

By February 1945, this relationship had sunk when the Yalta Conference was held. Former Newsweek editor Jon Meacham has described this phase in his masterly work,Franklin and Winston (2003), regarding how Stalin insisted on his “Sphere of influence”, echoing Russian President Vladimir Putin’s position on Ukraine now.

Vappala Balachandran is a former Special Secretary, Cabinet Secretariat, and author of ‘A Life in Shadows: the Secret Story of A.C.N. Nambiar’. The views expressed are personal



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India should focus on reducing cost of doing business

One of the key objectives of reforms has been to reduce the distortions generated by the earlier excessive micromanagement of the economy. With internal economic liberalisation, openness to international trade and investment, an open free market economy has emerged. Improving the ease of doing business continues to be a major priority. But even more important is the cost of doing business. For this, action is needed to reduce government policy-induced pricing distortions which add to the cost of doing business. In our open economy, these pricing distortions have become a source of competitive disadvantage to domestic value addition and job creation. India’s relative lack of success in manufacturing and employment generation is the outcome.

As with all reforms, it would need leadership and investment of political capital in generating a consensus and steering change. Reformers, who advocate that a crisis is the best time for difficult reforms, take an irresponsible undemocratic view and serve the political leadership poorly as the nation has discovered with the three farm laws which came through ordinances. The origin of government policy induced pricing distortions lie in the political need to find a way out for a cash-strapped government to raise resources. Or, to provide affordable goods and services to those in need through a cross subsidy within the sector without having to find money for direct subsidy payments. It is time for an informed discussion on these distortions.

Pricing distortion in petrol, diesel

Energy is the basic requirement of the modern industrial economy and the key to competitiveness. Its pricing distortions are onerous. In the early days, cars were considered luxury goods and high excise duty was levied on petrol, but it was lower on diesel to make it cheaper for the essential needs of transport. The price difference between petrol and diesel led to a surge in the supply and use of diesel cars and SUVs. This distortion led the government to increase the price of diesel gradually. The price difference has since been marginal. But the exceptionally large revenues that came to the government from the high taxes on petrol and diesel created such a dependency that these have been kept out of GST. More recently, the central government has been raising taxes on these to raise additional revenues to moderate the fiscal impact from COVID. This has given an inflationary impetus. But the real adverse impact is on the cost of road transport of goods which makes the cost of logistics about twice that of our competitors. Petrol and diesel, therefore, need to come under GST. Even at the highest rate of 28%, the price of petrol would be around Rs. 60 per litre. The discussion needs to be on how to manage government finances thereafter.

Electricity pricing is also highly distorted. A cess of Rs. 400 per tonne on coal was levied to generate resources for promotion of renewable energy and decarbonisation of the economy. When GST was introduced, the receipts from this cess were suddenly diverted for making good the shortfall in tax receipts of the States. The present consumption of about a billion tonnes of coal generates revenue of around Rs. 40,000 crore. About two thirds of this additional cost is borne by the electricity sector. As the Railways have been unable to raise passenger fares to cover their costs, they need to cross subsidise passenger traffic from goods freight. They, therefore, charge about twice the actual cost for carrying coal to thermal power plants. This distortion adds to the cost of coal for thermal power plants and further increases the price of electricity for the distribution companies. They, in turn, cross subsidise most domestic household consumption by having higher tariffs for industrial users. This increases the cost of industrial production vis-a-vis competitors in other countries. The consequential loss of competitiveness results in lower manufacturing growth and the creation of fewer jobs.

User friendly processes

Not only is it difficult to get land for business enterprises, but prices are also higher than they need to be. India has had a real estate asset price bubble with return on land assets by way of rents or returns on farming being around 2%, far lower than the cost of capital. Land use conversion and redevelopment processes need to be made user friendly. Combined with public provision and upgradation of quality infrastructure this would reduce supply side constraints and lower prices in real terms. Unless this happens, India would continue to generate far fewer jobs than it can.

Only private investments can create jobs for our young generation. Government jobs are a mirage. The sooner we realise this and start grappling with feasible pathways for reducing the cost of doing business and getting a surge in private investment which creates jobs, the better. Our demographic dividend is fast becoming a nightmare.

Ajay Shankar is a former Secretary, DIPP, Government of India



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Governor’s silence in not sending the Bill to the President seeking NEET exemption is inexplicable

Silence has its own power. This seems to be the case with regard to the controversy over the Bill, seeking to exempt government seats in undergraduate medical and dental courses from the National Eligibility-cum-Entrance Test (NEET). Though over two months have passed since the Tamil Nadu Assembly returned the Bill to Governor R.N. Ravi to be forwarded to President Ram Nath Kovind for consideration, the Governor has not yet sent it to the President. Mr. Ravi has not even publicly given any explanation why he is taking time in forwarding the Bill. It is this “silence” that made Chief Minister M.K. Stalin and his Cabinet stay away from tea — “At Home” — hosted by the Governor on the Tamil New Year Day (April 14) as also the unveiling of the statue of the nationalist poet, Subramania Bharati.

Though Tamil Nadu too has a track record of differences between Chief Ministers and Governors, it is not frequently that the two dignitaries avoid each other. In January 1994, the then Chief Minister Jayalalithaa and her Cabinet boycotted the customary tea hosted by the then Governor M. Channa Reddy on Republic Day. Unlike this time when two Ministers Thangam Thennarasu and Ma. Subramanian met Mr. Ravi to seek clarity on the NEET legislation issue, there was no such interaction between Ministers of the State and the Governor then. The then Chief Secretary T.V. Venkataraman did take part in the tea, along with senior government and police officers. Earlier, in the day, Jayalalithaa and only two of her colleagues V.R. Nedunchezhian (Finance) and E. Madhusudhanan (Handlooms and Textiles) were present when the Governor hoisted the national flag on the Marina. Differences between Raj Bhavan and the government arose on a host of issues including the selection of a candidate for the post of Vice-Chancellor of Madras University. In January 1994, a Bill was adopted by the Assembly, making the Chief Minister Chancellor of universities instead of the Governor.

This time, Mr. Stalin followed up his absence with a well-drafted letter to the Governor in which he justified his decision not to attend the event. He pointed out that since no positive assurance was given during the discussion between his two Ministers and Mr. Ravi, it was deemed “inappropriate” to attend the tea hosted at the Raj Bhavan, “where the collective will of our society as well as our Legislative Assembly have not been given its due regard”. Mr. Stalin, in hissuo motu statement before the House on Monday, also mentioned that while his personal ties with the Governor were smooth, the decision to boycott the tea was made from his understanding that it was his duty to defend the dignity of the century-old Assembly.

The Bill was adopted by the Assembly on September 13 while it was returned by Mr. Ravi on February 1 for reconsideration of the House. A week later (February 8), the Assembly sent back the Bill to him without amendments. What is pertinent here is that the piece of legislation has to be sent to the President, given the situation that the Bill, envisaging the exemption from NEET is in conflict with the central law that makes it mandatory and, therefore, can only be saved by the President’s assent. The popular view is that the Governor, under the given circumstances or Article 200 of the Constitution, has no option other than sending the Bill to the President for his eventual decision. The people of the State are eagerly awaiting the day when Mr. Ravi will break his silence and send the Bill to the President, especially in the light of Mr. Stalin’s observation in the Assembly, referring to reports that the Governor had made up his mind to send the Bill to Mr. Kovind.

ramakrishnan.t@thehindu.co.in



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The SC has done well to assert victims’ rolein criminal proceedings against offenders

In cancelling the bail granted by the Allahabad High Court to Ashish Mishra, son of Union Minister Ajay Mishra, and an accused in the Lakhimpur-Kheri murder case, the Supreme Court has reaffirmed the basic principles that govern bail jurisprudence. The High Court’s failure to hear the objections of the victims of the Lakhimpur-Kheri violence, in which eight people, including four farmers and a journalist, died during a protest organised by farmers against the Union Minister, is a key reason for setting aside the bail order, but it has also been criticised for “taking a myopic view” of the evidence and going into the merits of the case. It is settled law that while granting bail, courts only ought to take a preliminary view as to involvement of the accused in the offence, its nature and gravity, and the severity of the punishment if there is a conviction; besides the possible effect of giving bail to the accused, such as the scope for tampering with evidence, intimidating witnesses, influencing the outcome or the possibility of the accused fleeing justice. The Supreme Court has rightly pointed out that the High Court had needlessly gone into the nature of the evidence relating to the incident, in which a vehicle was driven into the crowd, and stressed the absence of any firearm injury among the victims. The apex court's conclusion that irrelevant material was considered for grant of bail, while ignoring established parameters, is unexceptionable.

The more significant aspect of the order is the emphasis it places on the right of victims to be heard at every stage of criminal proceedings. The Court has recorded its disappointment with the High Court for not acknowledging this right. The victims’ right is not limited to filing an appeal in the event of the acquittal of the accused, but extends to being heard even in the bail stage. By describing the rights of a victim of a crime as “substantive, enforceable and another facet of human rights,” the Court has advanced the cause of victimology as a part of criminal law. As a result of both changes in the law and emerging jurisprudence, victims are now in a position to get compensation as well as the status of a participant in the prosecution of offenders. The verdict should lead to greater participation by victims in the criminal process and thus help the cause of justice. The cancellation of Mr. Mishra’s bail is also an indirect indictment of the Uttar Pradesh government, which did not file an appeal against the grant of bail, despite a recommendation to that effect by a judge monitoring the probe. The Supreme Court had declined to hand over the case to the CBI, reposing its trust in a Special Investigation Team of the State police. While the accused will get another chance to apply for bail as the matter has been remanded to the High Court, the SIT must do nothing to undermine the Court’s faith.



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India must get experts to independently investigate excess deaths

The visit of Tedros Ghebreyesus, Director-General of the World Health Organization, to Gujarat for the Global Ayush Investment and Innovation Summit coincides with a simmering dispute between India and WHO on its forthcoming report on excess COVID-19 deaths between 2020 and 2021. In 2020, the organisation had computed three million deaths globally from the pandemic, much more than the 1.8 million officially reported by countries. It was due to update this estimate for 2021 by the year-end but could not, and reports suggest, because of ‘stalling’ by India. A report inThe New York Times claims that WHO estimates India accounted for four million deaths, or about eight times the current official toll of 5.2 lakh. The report drew a sharp response from the Centre, with the Health Ministry criticising WHO’s use of mathematical extrapolation and assumptions that did not capture ground realities in India and its reliance on ‘unverified’ data sources. WHO is set to release its estimates for most countries in the near future but the disclosure of India’s displeasure again shines the light on a long-standing discomfort with independent estimates of the death toll. A high death toll undermines India’s official discourse that it has performed better than several western countries with better developed health infrastructure.

While India has traditionally been a laggard in health statistics, largely due to the wide disparity in health services across States, it has, in recent years, improved medical registration of deaths to as much as 92% in 2019. States such as Tamil Nadu, Kerala and Mizoram, for instance, have nearly 100% death registration; but even in these States, the percentage of certified deaths ascribing a cause is lower. States such as Bihar, Jharkhand and Uttar Pradesh have less than 67% and even fewer certified deaths. The infectious, pervasive nature of the pandemic continues to strain and overwhelm the most resilient health systems and there will never be an exact count of the toll. While it is possible that researchers could use indirect methods that may overestimate the toll, it is indefensible on India’s part to maintain that its official estimates offer a more accurate picture. While it may be difficult to make death estimates for all States, India should view them not as an indictment but as a marker for future generations that they may be better equipped and so invest appropriately to improve preparedness against inevitable blights. India must also officially commission a team of experts, supply them with the best available data, and have them independently investigate excess deaths, publishing their methods and numbers, without fear or favour, in reputed journals. This would go a long way in burnishing India’s health credentials.



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Palghat, April 19: The chances of survival of the 20-year-old tusker, Bhaskaran, now fighting a grim battle against death on the sands of the Chittupuzha river seem bleak. The huge pachyderm which is about nine feet in height was convalescing when it met with the present stroke 20 days back. According to Dr. K. Ramachandran, veterinary surgeon who is attending on the animal, it is completely debilitated and has swelling in its forelegs. Though it took food normally, he said, it could not easily survive its present ailment which had not yet been diagnosed. With a view to enabling the animal to pick up energy to stand up on its own again, vitamin pills and B complex tablets were being given. To-day with two other tuskers brought from Palghat, the ailing Bhaskaran, who has been lying in one posture for the last 20 days, was turned over the other side to make him feel at ease.It is stated that Bhaskaran suffered a stroke about two months back while it was returning from Kongad. It stood at a particular place and would not move for hours together. It was treated immediately and was advised rest. The veterinary surgeons attending on the animal attempted to lift it up with a giant crane.



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Mr. S. Satyamurthi in the course of his impressive address in Tamil confined himself to tracing the political history of the national movement and national work during the past three or four years indicating the programme of work before the country, especially work that lay before all Nationalists and Congressmen. He gave a rapid review of the circumstances which led to the starting of the Satyagraha movement consequent on the introduction of the Rowlett legislation and of its equal in the Punjab and elsewhere in India. He next referred to the enactment of the Montagu Chelmsford Reform Scheme which the Congress considered as unsatisfactory and unacceptable. The manner in which the Government of India and the Secretary of State dealt with the Punjab wrongs and the Khilafat question created a revulsion of feeling even in this respect in the country, and under the lead of Mahatma Gandhi the Congress at its Special Sessions in Calcutta in 1920 decided to boycott the Councils and adopt a programme of Non-Co-operation.



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The Indo-Saudi summit talks ended on Monday with both sides agreeing to usher in a new era in their political and economic relations, and to work jointly to curb superpower attempts to influence and pressurise countries of the region.

The Indo-Saudi summit talks ended on Monday with both sides agreeing to usher in a new era in their political and economic relations, and to work jointly to curb superpower attempts to influence and pressurise countries of the region. The Saudi side appreciated India’s willingness and efforts to normalise relations further with Pakistan in the interest of durable peace in the sub-continent.

Maharashtra Bandh

The call for Maharashtra bandh on Monday evoked poor response. Trains, buses, taxis and private vehicles were plying and most of the commercial offices, factories, banks, government offices, and shops and restaurants were open. The police registered a dozen cases of stone throwing and about 70 stray incidents of violence in Bombay. The response to the bandh in the rest of the state was also poor. The state police reported that life in the state was not affected by the bandh. State transport buses were operating normally and no untoward incidents were reported. All national and international flights operated normally. Loading and unloading operations at the Bombay docks were unhampered. The refineries too operated normally and work at ONGC offices and terminals were unaffected.

New Language Policy

The Karnataka government on Monday adopted a language policy making learning of Kannada compulsory in schools up to the matric level. The new three-language formula was adopted in the face of a state-wide agitation demanding primacy to Kannada. The decision of the government, announced by Chief Minister R Gundu Rao, following a cabinet meeting, gives primacy to the mother tongue as the first language.



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Indeed, the craving for this humble mineral has been weaponised by the processed food industry to the extent that it has become, along with sugar and fat, the chief villain in the dietary nightmare that is the modern age.

In Good Omens, Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett wrote: “Civilisation is 24 hours and two meals away from barbarism”. Remove salt, and that would probably come down to 12 hours and one meal, as anyone who has been on a diet would attest. There is a unique joylessness to a saltless existence — bitter-tasting vegetables and bland soup — which can transform even the most compliant citizens into rioters and revolutionaries. Salt has been one of the most sought-after commodities for much of civilisational history and anytime a government has tried to monopolise control over, or impose taxes on salt, there have been consequences, whether in Dandi, Gujarat or El Paso, Texas.

It’s not just that the human body needs salt for proper functioning — it hankers for it. Indeed, the craving for this humble mineral has been weaponised by the processed food industry to the extent that it has become, along with sugar and fat, the chief villain in the dietary nightmare that is the modern age. Which explains why a professor in Japan has invented a pair of chopsticks that uses mild electricity to deliver saltiness to the mouth. The chopsticks “adjust the function of ions such as sodium chloride and sodium glutamate to change the perception of taste by making food seem to taste stronger or weaker” and enhance the saltiness of food by one and half times. No doubt, a useful pair of implements to have around the house.

But as much as it is demonised, salt’s ability to elevate any food, including desserts like chocolate and ice cream, cannot be denied. In an episode of the sitcom Seinfeld, the lead character declares, “Anytime anyone says, ‘Oh, this is so good. What’s in it?’ The answer invariably comes back: cinnamon.” Not really. The real answer, as anyone who has ever eaten saltless food knows, is salt.

This editorial first appeared in the print edition on April 20, 2022 under the title ‘Salt of the earth’.



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Recent events have underlined that politics in Kerala, despite the apparent consensus in the mainstream against disturbing communal harmony and for articulating concerns in a secular idiom, is looking increasingly vulnerable to the pull and tug of communal undercurrents.

Two political murders in Palakkad in the last week have sharpened communal faultlines in Kerala. The killing of an activist of the Popular Front of India (PFI), allegedly by members of the RSS, and the subsequent murder of an RSS functionary, allegedly by members of the PFI, have threatened to deepen the divide between religious groups. In this backdrop, senior CPM leader and state minister, M V Govindan’s, remark comparing majority and minority fundamentalisms is unwise and unwarranted. The government needs to bring those responsible for the heinous violence to book, irrespective of who cast the first, or larger, stone. The chief minister, who also holds the home portfolio, must send out the unambiguous message that no organisation, whether it claims to represent the majority or the minority, will be allowed to disrupt the rule of law and expect impunity in the aftermath.

Both the RSS and PFI claim to be non-political actors involved in community service, relief and welfare, and nation building. They mostly influence politics from the shadows. This way, they also escape the public scrutiny that political parties are routinely subjected to. For the law enforcement machinery, however, it should not matter whether those accused of crime are political actors or belong to social organisations. The police needs to be, and needs to be seen to be insulated from political interference.

Recent events have underlined that politics in Kerala, despite the apparent consensus in the mainstream against disturbing communal harmony and for articulating concerns in a secular idiom, is looking increasingly vulnerable to the pull and tug of communal undercurrents. Political parties seem all too willing to patronise communal interest groups, and sometimes, even criminals, to polarise the electorate. The recent campaigns against love jihad — the latest instance is of a former CPM MLA speaking out against an inter-faith marriage involving a local party leader — and the framing of economic distress in communal terms seem to have the tacit acceptance and backing of the political mainstream. Parties need to isolate the forces that seek to reimagine Kerala in communal terms. The spirit of fraternity and inclusion that was last seen in the state during the 2018 floods needs to be revived and restored.

This editorial first appeared in the print edition on April 20, 2022 under the title ‘Crime and politics’.



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At a time when, by all accounts, more and more people in the country disdain nepotism and when promises of equal opportunity are emphatically made by popular leaders to audiences filled with fresh and young faces, it appears that the BCCI continues to live in a bubble.

Over the years, players, rules and formats have changed but the family names of those at the helm of India’s cricket establishment haven’t. Back in the day, there were Scindias in Madhya Pradesh, Rungtas in Rajasthan, and Mahendras in Haryana. More recently, it is the Shahs in Gujarat and the Dalmiya-Ganguly combination in Bengal. The tradition of the state cricket unit passed down as a family heirloom, a residue of feudal times, has survived the days of safari suits and is flourishing even in times when cricket is said to be corporatised. In the aftermath of the Justice RM Lodha committee’s intervention, with aging satraps disqualified by the new tenure or age clauses in the constitution, over one-third of the BCCI’s state units, as reported by this paper, saw a smooth transfer of power within the family.

At a time when, by all accounts, more and more people in the country disdain nepotism and when promises of equal opportunity are emphatically made by popular leaders to audiences filled with fresh and young faces, it appears that the BCCI continues to live in a bubble. They remain aloof to the idea that organisations run by coteries foster complacence and mediocrity. The BCCI also refuses to learn from its past mistakes. The Lalit Modi affair and the N Srinivasan saga were mishaps that happened primarily because Indian cricket was a cosy club of family and friends. Each had looked the other way when a rule was tweaked for individual benefit. They all went back a long way, no one raised the red flags at BCCI meetings. Elections did take place but the loyalty of the core group got passed from father to son. When outsiders are seen as obstructionists, organisations can’t grow. They collectively stop thinking, and are bereft of new ideas.

An Indian cricket official has several perks. They have the power to direct the stream of ample funds — each state unit gets roughly Rs 40 crore annually. In a cricket-crazy country, a match-day ticket has the power to magically open doors. No wonder, then, that influential politicians, lawyers and administrators see this as the preferred career option for their sons. It provides perfect photo-ops with cricket’s swish set, and tremendous goodwill in being seen to be promoting the gladiators pulled out of obscurity by field-level scouting. The cricket board can also be an excellent finishing school, to learn the tricks of the trade, before being launched onto the bigger canvas of politics. Cricket stadiums are a networker’s dream — an evening at the game can exhaust a thick wad of business cards. But power in the hands of a few isn’t good for the game. The new BCCI family photo isn’t flattering. It gives world cricket’s most powerful board the appearance of a fiefdom, rather than the image of a professionally run, transparent and accountable sports organisation.

This editorial first appeared in the print edition on April 20, 2022 under the title ‘Family game’.



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Aditi Nayar writes: Healthy tax revenues and disinvestment proceeds will allow the government to absorb the risks related to increased spending this year.

Just as the stress created by the Covid-19 pandemic was tapering off, the Russia-Ukraine conflict has heightened geo-political uncertainty. Higher commodity prices, a consequence of this conflict, have upended projections of India’s growth, inflation and the external account balances. Accordingly, we have revised our forecasts for the ongoing financial year (2022-23), lowering our forecast for growth to 7.2 per cent, down from our earlier estimate of 8 per cent, while raising our forecast for inflation to at least 5.6 per cent, up from 5 per cent before. However, notwithstanding this deterioration in the macroeconomic environment, the central government will be able to restrict its fiscal deficit for 2021-22 (data for March will be released next month) and 2022-23 to the levels it had projected in its recent Union budget.

For 2021-22, the provisional data released by the Controller General of Accounts (CGA) indicates that the Centre’s fiscal deficit eased to Rs 13.2 trillion during the April-February period. This was due to a sharp rise in revenue receipts (30.7 per cent), accompanied by a moderate rise in revenue expenditure (10.2 per cent) and a relatively higher expansion in capital expenditure (19.7 per cent). In the weeks thereafter, the Centre’s fiscal position has only strengthened. A few days ago, the government revealed that its gross tax revenues stood at Rs 27.07 trillion in 2021-22, significantly overshooting its revised estimate of Rs 25.2 trillion.

A large portion of this upside in collections has been shared with the states. The Centre has devolved a massive Rs 2.4 trillion to the states in February, including Rs 431.7 billion towards net devolution arrears that were due to states for the period FY1997-FY2018. As per another release from the Ministry of Finance, the Centre devolved an additional Rs 950.8 billion to the states in March 2022. Accordingly, the actual tax devolution to state governments in 2021-22 stood at Rs 8.8 trillion — a considerable Rs 1.4 trillion higher than the revised estimates of Rs 7.4 trillion. In fact, even after removing the payment for past years, aggregate devolution to states overshot the revised estimates by around Rs 0.95 trillion.

These numbers also imply that the tax devolution of Rs 8.2 trillion budgeted for 2022-2023 is quite conservative. We assess the upside to the states at roughly Rs 1.1 trillion above the 2022-23 budget estimates. To put this number in perspective — this is even larger than the size of the special assistance loan for capital investment provided by the Centre to state governments. However, if the release of this additional devolution gets back-ended to the last quarter of this year, state governments may not have enough time to firm up their plans for additional capital spending. Thus, perhaps, the release of a realistic figure each month by the Centre would embolden states to speed up capital spending, boosting the fiscal impulse to the economy.

From the Centre’s point of view, even after considering the recent dividend pay-outs and prepayments by telecom operators, and the sharp shortfall in disinvestments receipts this year, we assess a net cushion of Rs 200 billion relative to the revised estimates for 2021-22 presented in the budget. Further, considering that capital spending is likely to have undershot the revised estimates, and even accounting for higher revenue expenditure, the Centre’s fiscal position in 2021-22 appears comfortable, and the deficit is unlikely to deviate meaningfully from what it had projected in the Union budget a few months ago.

The current year’s (2022-23) fiscal deficit is, however, likely to be adversely affected on account of high fertiliser and food subsidies, potential cuts in excise duty, and lower growth in direct taxes considering the likely squeeze in corporates’ profit margins. The fertiliser subsidy requirements are expected to rise and the subsidy outgo is most likely to overshoot the budget estimates of Rs 1.1 trillion by a sharp Rs. 950 billion.

Similarly, the extension of free foodgrain under the Pradhan Mantri Garib Kalyan Ann Yojana till September 2022 will cost another Rs 800 billion. While this will increase the food subsidy outgo, it will provide welcome relief to households’ food budgets. Moreover, the procurement bill for wheat may reduce meaningfully if exports are healthy.

Interestingly, the nominal GDP growth assumed in the budget is now only 9.1 per cent higher than the National Statistical Office’s second advance estimate for 2021-22. Considering this conservative assessment — we expect nominal GDP to expand by 14 per cent — this will create additional space for the government. Moreover, it will also help to moderate the size of the fiscal deficit relative to the nominal GDP this year.

On the revenue side, the government’s gross tax revenue of Rs 27.07 trillion (2021-22) is only marginally lower than the budget estimate of Rs 27.6 trillion for 2022-23. In fact, even if we assume a potential loss of Rs 920 billion on account of lower excise collections — the government could scale back excise duties on petrol and diesel to pre-pandemic levels — the net tax revenues of the Centre may end up overshooting this year’s budget estimates by a significant Rs 0.8 trillion.

Including the anticipated inflows from the LIC IPO — there are reports that the government is likely to decide on its timing soon — we expect the government’s revenue and disinvestment receipts to surpass the budget expectations by at least Rs 1.2 trillion (depending on whether excise duty is eventually reduced). This will create some fiscal space for the government, allowing it to absorb a large part of the risks related to additional spending that are evolving at the current juncture.

This column first appeared in the print edition on April 20, 2022 under the title ‘Making fiscal room’. The writer is Chief Economist, ICRA



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Feroze Varun Gandhi writes: MPs are encouraged to blindly follow the party whip. The executive is less accountable and laws are passed with inadequate scrutiny.

The Monsoon Session of the Indian Parliament in 2021 saw the Lok Sabha clearing over 18 bills with about 34 minutes of discussion for each. The Essential Defence Services Bill (2021), enabling the government to prohibit strikes, lockouts and lay-offs in units in the defence industry, saw 12 minutes of debate in the Lok Sabha, while the Insolvency and Bankruptcy Code (Amendment) Bill (2021) had just five minutes of debate (PRS India, 2021). Not one bill was referred to a parliamentary committee. And with the voice vote becoming the norm, MPs were rarely mustered in the House to record votes. The Parliament’s productivity is notable (129 per cent for the Lok Sabha in the last session in 2022) but a tradition of debate has been lost. Has Parliament become a mere post office?

Deliberation on legislation is a design feature of parliamentary democracy. In the US, Senator Ted Cruz was given the opportunity to speak for 21 hours and 19 minutes in the Senate House, against Obamacare in 2013. When parliamentary proceedings have time set aside for such debates, the quality of legislation improves, while enabling consensus. Meanwhile, in India, the Farm Laws Repeal Bill (2021) was passed in just eight minutes (three minutes in the Lok Sabha, five minutes in the Rajya Sabha), reducing MPs to a mere headcount. It doesn’t have to be like this — India’s constituent assembly debates to frame the Constitution were initiated in December 1946 and went on for 166 days, wrapping up only by January 1950. Ideally, parliamentary conventions would be upheld and strengthened, with free votes allowed for MPs, and the process of deliberation revived. Additionally, MPs rarely have adequate resources to conduct in-depth research — a typical MP gets an allowance of Rs 40,000 per month to hire a legislative assistant. Meanwhile, in the UK, the average MP salary is £84,144, while in 2021, they got an allowance of £193,000-2,16,000 to hire legislative assistants. To revive deliberation, the government should raise funding for parliamentary research.

A parliamentary democracy, by design, should ensure government accountability. In Westminster, the British prime minister is required to answer questions from MPs in the House of Commons every Wednesday, from 12 pm to 12:30 pm. This can be a mix of tabled and un-tabled supplementary questions, with the prime minister not knowing what queries will be asked. The result — as often seen on television — is a raucous set of probing questions and hesitant answers, with the government kept on its toes. Even during Covid-19—induced lockdowns, PMQs were held virtually, enabling accountability (India, notably, scrapped Question Hour during this period). In India, this tradition has rarely been considered, with the prime minister and ministers often given queries in advance.

Meanwhile, another avenue of ensuring accountability is the parliamentary committees — in the US, Senate and House Committees scrutinise laws, confirm government appointments, conduct investigations, and hold hearings. In the UK, the House of Commons ran a public reading mechanism in 2013 where members of the public could add comments to draft legislation via a web portal, with 1,000 individuals participating with over 1,400 comments. In India, long-term development plans are simply not subject to parliamentary scrutiny, with just annual outlays approved. Where such committees have taken initiative, they have had an impact (for example, the JPCs on allocation and pricing of Telecom Licences and Spectrum in October 2013, on irregularities in Securities and Banking Transactions in December 1993, etc). New Zealand makes it compulsory for all bills to be referred to a select committee for scrutiny.

Ideally, we would have Department Related Standing Committees (DRSCs) reviewed periodically, with all bills referred to them — such committees would have the power to elicit public views and call-in advisors (PRS Legislative, 2011). Major reports of such committees would ideally be read and debated in Parliament.

Another feature of parliamentary democracies is allowing MPs to take initiative. Sometimes, this can take the form of private member bills. The UK has passed seven private member bills since 2019, while Canada has passed six bills. In India, meanwhile, just 14 private member bills have been passed by both Houses since 1952 (six of them when Nehru was in power). While limited, such bills serve as a reminder of what could have been — the Women’s and Children’s Institutions (Licensing) Act, 1956 (No. 105 of 1956) by Rajmata Kamlendu provided for the “licensing of institutions established and maintained for the reception, care, protection and welfare of women or children”. The Code of Criminal Procedure (Amendment) Bill (1953), introduced by Raghunath Singh, sought to empower higher courts to stay or suspend orders passed by lower courts. Ideally, we should set up mechanisms to enable private member bills to gain a hearing and even to be put to vote.

Beyond Parliament, for most MPs in India, the ability to drive change in their constituencies is limited. Consider the Members of Parliament Local Area Development (MPLAD) scheme, which enables MPs to recommend select development initiatives to the local district authority, with a maximum cap of Rs 5 crore. With about 6,38,000 villages in India, the average parliamentary constituency ends up having 1,000 each. If one were to equitably divide the sum, it would add up to Rs 15,000 per locality (barely enough to have three metres of concrete road). And even this amount was suspended over the past 1.5 years, with the government reportedly “saving” Rs 6,320 crore. Meanwhile, in the Philippines, the Priority Development Assistance Fund provides funds to senators for small-scale infrastructure and community projects. Such schemes unlock constituency-specific development, enabling bottom-up democracy.

Instead, we have institutional mechanisms to stifle debate and remove initiative for MPs. The anti-defection law punishes any errant MP or MLA who leaves one party for another – going against the party whip could lead to an MP losing his seat. The consequence has been chilling, with MPs rarely getting access to any legislation prior to it being tabled. This law has disincentivised MPs to have a distinguished voting record. MPs simply look to press the button highlighted by the whip, with the party system determining one’s stand as a parliamentarian. Consider this: Of India’s 543 Lok Sabha seats, 250 are occupied by politicians who profess to be farmers. And yet, few, if any, of these “farmers” were able to raise their voices on the debate on the three farm laws in Parliament. A vote for one’s conscience has become a rarity in India’s august forum. The anti-defection law has not served its purpose and should simply be scrapped. If not, MPs will not be lawmakers who ideate and debate.

Future portents are grim. The average MP in India represents over 25 lakh citizens — larger than the population of countries like Botswana, Slovenia, Estonia and Bhutan. In comparison, each MP in the UK represents 92,000 citizens, while each member of the US House of Representatives is accountable to 7,00,000 people. With such numbers, no MP can ever adequately represent the interests of their constituents. Of course, by 2026, the Lok Sabha could reportedly end up having over 1,000 seats. While ensuring representation is key, with this, MPs are unlikely to have significant speaking time, let alone space to influence debates or take initiative.

In 1956, Feroze Gandhi introduced a private member’s bill advocating press freedom to cover parliamentary proceedings; this was later codified as the Parliamentary Proceedings (Protection of Publication) Act (1956). Ideally, Parliament and its members would seek to drive an accountable government. Our Parliament must reflect the changing aspirations, restlessness and ambition of the new India, driving accountability and not suborning itself to the executive — it should be a true centre of inquiry.

This column first appeared in the print edition on April 20, 2022 under the title ‘Living in a shrunken House’. The writer is a BJP Lok Sabha MP



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Vikram Patel writes: It is in everyone's interest to settle discrepancy between scientific and official estimates.

The question of the number of people who died in India as a result of the pandemic has been festering in recent months. Scientists estimate this number by counting the total number of people who died during the pandemic and comparing this with the number of people who were expected to have died based on historical data on mortality. The difference between these two figures is referred to as “excess mortality”, which could be attributed to the pandemic. Not all these additional deaths are directly due to the virus; some could also have been due to indirect effects of the pandemic, such as people dying of hunger or of other diseases because of the shutting down of the economy and routine health care during the lockdown. Nevertheless, it can be assumed that, had the pandemic not happened, there would not have been any of these additional deaths.

Two diametrically opposing narratives have emerged around the answer to this question: On the one hand are the official data published by the government and on the other, the estimates published by every other source. The government has held firmly to its estimate that just over half a million people have died because of Covid — that is, people whose infection status was confirmed close to the time of their death. But, of course, many people who died during the pandemic never had a chance to get their Covid tests done or could have died for indirect reasons mentioned above, and this is true for all countries. This is why the “excess mortality” method has been accepted globally to get to the truth of the actual numbers who were struck down.

The search for this truth has involved many different actors and includes journalistic accounts of funeral pyres and bodies floating down rivers; civil society accounts of the numbers of dead bodies brought to crematoria and morgues; the government’s own data on the numbers of families claiming compensation for a Covid death; and a series of studies involving hundreds of scientists and institutions, and published in the world’s leading journals. All of these diverse sources tell a similar story.

The earliest of these studies were focused on specific locations, such as cities or states; these were the first to report far greater numbers of the dead than those recorded officially. These have now been supplemented by three large, scientifically peer-reviewed, estimates of the mortality at the national level, two of which are global studies. The first study was published in Science in January; it estimated that the true number of people who had died in India exceeded three million, a figure six to seven times higher than reported officially. The second study, published last week in the Lancet, reports that even this massive number was an under-estimate: The total number of excess deaths was four million. India alone accounted for nearly a quarter of the global excess mortality, with more deaths than the next four countries (US, Russia, Mexico, Brazil) combined. Assuming that most of these excess deaths are due to Covid, India’s under-counting of Covid is of the order of eight-fold, in comparison to the global average of about three-fold. There is, unsurprisingly, a huge variation between states, with a handful (Bihar, Assam, UP, MP) under-reporting deaths by as much as twenty-fold while Kerala under-reported just two-fold (the one outlier is my home state of Goa, estimated to have fewer Covid deaths than those reported by the government!). The third report, still to be made public, is the product of a year-long research by experts from around the world convened by the WHO. It also reports that excess mortality in India was about 4 million and that more than a third of the additional nine million deaths globally occurred in India.

It is hard to believe that all these studies, from different authors in India and abroad, using different estimation methods, all leading to similar results and, importantly, consistent with local studies using actual death registries, are incorrect or the result of a well-orchestrated global conspiracy against India. These data not only remind us of the terrible losses in these past two years but also dramatically upend the widely held belief that India was miraculously less affected by the pandemic or that, within the country, states with far weaker health systems did better than those with better health systems. The truth, it appears, was the opposite: The problem was that we were simply not counting the dead. Yet, the government’s position has been to reject all of this science, even refusing to approve the WHO’s report on excess mortality (apparently, ours is the only country to push-back the WHO estimates).

There is no shame in admitting that India was horribly hit by the pandemic. This was an extraordinary humanitarian crisis, the worst to befall the country since it was partitioned 75 years ago. But it seems that we are once again appearing to look the other way and move on, hoping that the sands of time will cover up our memories and that the deep wells of resilience our communities have built will help us heal. As a mental health professional, I don’t think this is likely to happen without the truth.

Trauma, especially of the kind we have experienced collectively, rarely vanishes on its own, and this is even less likely when there is a denial of the tragedy. The flourishing of hateful feelings on both sides of the border is a signal of how unresolved trauma poisons our society and haunts future generations. Long-term recovery will need resolution of the pent-up rage and grief through truth and reconciliation.

It is time for the government to release the data on total numbers of deaths due to any cause in the past two years to settle this matter. I suspect that the truth will lie somewhere between the official estimates and the scientific estimates, perhaps closer to the latter. And then, the government should commission a truly independent inquiry. This is not an exercise to allocate blame to any individual or political dispensation, for the tragedy spanned all sectors and states, and the devastating Delta wave was not predicted by most people (including many public health experts, such as this author); the need is for the truth to be acknowledged in the spirit of transparency, accountability and rebuilding trust between the state, scientific community and people.

It is in everyone’s interest to know the truth, not only to better prepare our country for future pandemic but also to heal our wounds from the past. Above all, we owe it to those who died to dignify their passing by, at the very least, counting them.

This column first appeared in the print edition on April 20, 2022 under the title ‘The dead must count’. The writer is The Pershing Square Professor of Global Health at Harvard Medical School



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Guru Prakash Paswan writes: They want to speak on behalf of subalterns. But why should they?

Can the subaltern speak? This rhetorical question has dominated the hallowed precincts of academic institutions worldwide and especially in India, in the context of social justice movements in the last few decades. There are two prisms through which to look at this question — the subaltern and the right to speak. Socially marginalised communities like Dalits and extremely backward groups did not enjoy the means to articulate and express themselves because of historical reasons and systemic exclusion. Therefore, the politics of “behalfism” has captured a prominent place within the subaltern movement in academia. Sadly, the lack of representation of marginalised communities in universities, civil society and think tanks is a key reason that this “behalfism” is sustained.

Who has been speaking on behalf of the subalterns? Clearly, elites who belonged to socially-privileged communities and were close to the structures of power. They crafted a narrative in favour of the ruling class for a long time under the guise of giving voice to the silenced. They continue to maintain a robust grip over academic spheres and are unwilling to share the space of thought leadership with true subalterns. This came to light when an event to which I was invited on the occasion of Ambedkar Jayanti was cancelled by one of the premier institutions of higher education, Lady Shri Ram College in New Delhi. The theme of the event was “Ambedkar beyond Constitution” and it was being organised by the SC-ST Cell of the college. I was informed only a day prior to the event that it was cancelled.

At a time when the nation is celebrating “Azadi ka Amrit Mahotsav”, an institution of eminence in the capital is forced to cancel an event at the behest of a student union. This is an assault on the idea of free speech and expression. The reason cited for the cancellation was my political affiliation: It was next to impossible for them to see a Dalit as the youngest-ever national spokesperson of the largest political party in the world to come and speak before them. The student body in this case is the SFI, the student wing of the CPM. This is the same CPI (M) that for the first time in its history, inducted a Dalit, Ramchandra Dome, to its politburo earlier this month. The insensitivity of the leftist intelligentsia towards the marginalised is not a recent development. In the ideal scenario, instead of de-platforming me, they would have called and exposed me in the course of the discussion. Rationality must be the hallmark of any institution and we must not allow our institutions to become echo chambers. We come from a culture that believes in letting noble thoughts come from all directions.

Ambedkar does not belong to any particular idea, ideology or institution. No one can claim to be the exclusive repository of his legacy. He belongs to every person who wants to develop a world based on inclusivity and empathy. A world that does not seek to advance on the premise of “othering”. LSR, in particular, is a crucible where the next generation of women leaders is taking shape. They will become policymakers, administrators, thinkers and activists of the future. To close them off from ideas coming from all directions is a disservice not only to the academic community but to the entire nation. The nearsighted political consideration of depriving one man of a stage is also an attempt to dilute the legacy of Ambedkar and the spirit of the Constitution.

On November 25, 1949, Ambedkar gave three warnings as we began our collective journey as a constitutional democracy. His third warning on deepening constitutional values for realising a social democracy remains salient as liberty, equality and fraternity of those from marginalised communities continue to be at the mercy of intellectual elites. Regardless, they now stand exposed and I want to make it clear that I will continue to speak, write and articulate the assertions and aspirations of my community.

This column first appeared in the print edition on April 20, 2022 under the title ‘Why I was cancelled’. The writer is assistant professor, Patna University and national spokesperson, BJP



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The Delhi Disaster Management Authority has done the right thing today by bringing back the mask mandate for public places and the Rs 500 fine for violating it. This begs the question, did states remove or dilute mask mandates prematurely? Yes. In Delhi for example, which is now seeing an uptick in Covid infection numbers, some experts are connecting this directly to the DDMA decision on March 31 that there would no longer be any fine for not wearing a mask.

To be sure the government also said at the time that this did not mean that it endorsed people not wearing masks, and indeed it would be conducting intensive campaigns to promote the wearing of masks. But this kind of mixed messaging is extremely poor pandemic governance. India, unlike say several countries in East Asia, did not have a pre-existing masking culture. It took long months of sustained efforts by different social stakeholders to persuade the masses of the necessity of masking against Covid. Rushing to add doubts to this fragile matrix was very irresponsible.

Among the other states where a rise of infections has now been flagged by the Centre, Haryana, Maharashtra and Uttar Pradesh also did away with the penalty for not wearing the mask in public places at the beginning of this month. The trend in infections since then has forced Haryana and Uttar Pradesh to bring back the mask mandates in select districts. But both for people and enforcement agencies, this patchy mandate is again a recipe for confusion. More than two years into the present pandemic, all governments should have internalized the importance of clear messaging.

The way in which the question of closing schools has once again come back to the table in NCR is furthermore a reminder of everything that is at stake in the premature ditching of the first and most inexpensive line of defense against Covid-19. Thankfully the overall caseload continues to be small and there are no worrying signs on the hospitalization front either. By putting the guard back up in a timely way, we can hopefully regain safe ground.



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Uttar Pradesh chief minister Yogi Adityanath’s directive to the state police that prior permissions must be mandatory for processions underscores the need for smarter policing amid rising communal tensions. Adityanath’s is an important political signal to directionless cops amid violent incidents reported from Delhi, MP, Gujarat, Uttarakhand, Karnataka, Maharashtra and Andhra Pradesh. He has also asked local cops to seek mandatory affidavits from procession organisers pledging they will maintain peace and harmony, and to initiate dialogue with influential local citizens and religious leaders.

Strong police regulation of processions can effectively nip communal mischief in the bud. The Hanuman Jayanti procession in Delhi’s Jahangirpuri during which rioting occurred reportedly didn’t have police permission. A big mistake by police forces everywhere is to allow weapon-bearing processions to proceed. Police personnel failing to uphold powers given to them to maintain public order only serves to embolden mobs. The Delhi Police Act clearly empowers an inspector-rank officer to specify how members of a procession must conduct themselves.

Ultimately, cops end up at the receiving end as had happened in Jahangirpuri, having to come between violent mobs raining stones and bricks; one officer even sustained bullet injuries. Policing is an unenviable task, even at the best of times. True, police forces in India are understaffed and overworked, require better training, and are in dire need of structural reforms. But the axiomatic truth about communal riots in India is that they are allowed to happen. Anti-social elements rear their heads only when the police are hobbled by dangerous political signalling. Enforcing laws without bias, nurturing social networks and developing reliable intelligence are key to community policing. Therefore, police forces across states that are now struggling to bottle the communal genie could certainly do without the constant political refrain of majority-minority binaries.

Adityanath’s commandment directing police to only give permission to those processions that are traditional and reject new/unnecessary events is important in today’s context where a violent, hate-spewing fringe is trying to dictate terms to the state and upsetting communal harmony and public order by hijacking random religious events, symbols and sites. Countries in India’s neighbourhood like Pakistan, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka strained by religious fundamentalism serve a cautionary note. While ordinary citizens have little control over the politics of their countries, they mustn’t lose faith in policing. It’s the rule of law that keeps individuals, communities, businesses and livelihoods safe. We forget these basics at our own peril.



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Lt General Manoj Pande’s upcoming elevation as the next army chief will make him the first-ever officer to be commissioned in the Corps of Engineers to head the 12-lakh-strong force. His promotion comes at a tricky juncture. Not only do our troops continue to be engaged in a border standoff with China in eastern Ladakh, the war in Ukraine is forcing militaries around the world to re-evaluate their strategies and defence preparedness. After all, nobody expected the Russian military operation to last this long – the conflict will soon complete two months – and face such high losses against a much smaller Ukrainian force.

It is widely acknowledged now that the Russian military has been bogged down by poor planning and logistics. Despite its overwhelming firepower, its supply lines have been stretched with convoys often being stuck in thawing muddy terrain. This allowed the Ukrainian resistance to pick off Russian mechanised units. Add to this, reports of Russian soldiers carrying expired rations and a significant number of Russian tanks breaking down due to mechanical failure.

All of this goes to show the importance of combat-support arms in any military operation. The Corps of Engineers that Lt Gen Pande was originally commissioned into – he later opted for general cadre – is one such arm of the Indian army. And along with Artillery, Air Defence, Aviation and Signals, it forms the critical support backbone of the forces. The US army deploys 10 support soldiers for every combat soldier, highlighting the importance of combat-support units. Lt Gen Pande’s elevation, therefore, is expected to sharpen this aspect of India’s defence preparedness. In 2019, the Armed Forces Tribunal had directed the government to allot additional vacancies in the brigadier and major general ranks to officers in the combat-support arms. Given the lessons of the Ukraine conflict, that certainly was a prescient judgement. Besides, with China as our immediate security challenge across a mountainous LAC, upgrading our combat-support arms should receive top priority.



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The ability of manufacturers to pass on the rise in costs is aided by a concentration of industrial output among large producers, since small enterprise fared worse during the Covid pandemic.

Wholesale inflation averaged nearly 13% in 2021-22, more than double the rate of retail inflation. This happens to be the highest annual number in three decades. Inflation based on the wholesale price index (WPI) spiked to 14.55% in March, the second-highest level since 2003-04, as crude petroleum shot up by 83.56%. Manufacturing, which makes up for the bulk of the index, returned to an inflation rate of above 10% after a two-month hiatus. And, core inflation, excluding volatile food and fuel prices, accelerated from 10% in February to 10.9% in March. Food inflation has moderated from the previous month to 8.06%. However, this has been more than offset by 34.52% fuel inflation during March.

The ability of manufacturers to pass on the rise in costs is aided by a concentration of industrial output among large producers, since small enterprise fared worse during the Covid pandemic. Large enterprise is protecting its margins, and this is showing up separately in buoyant tax collection. Small and medium enterprises (SMEs) play a key role in converging wholesale inflation to the retail rate. But with their loss of agency, the trend could well be reversing. The longer it takes for small business to revive, the prospects of the consumer price index (CPI) being pulled up by an elevated WPI remain high.

The WPI is indicating inflation has become generalised. The trajectory of wholesale inflation is unlikely to reverse as long as expensive energy pushes up input, transportation and logistics costs. Supply chain disruptions and conflict are expected to keep commodity and fuel prices elevated, no thanks to the war in Ukraine. Additional pressure could arise if food inflation works its way into wage hikes as the economy unlocks post-pandemic. The markets are factoring in a hard landing on interest rates before consumption and production at the base of the pyramid recover fully. The knock-on effect on growth could eventually subdue producers' pricing power.

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The goal is to create a system with universal access and acceptability, based in science, which uses technological advances, focuses on well being, prevention, diagnosis and treatment by deploying the best available solutions, be they 'traditional' or 'modern' medicine.

The establishment of the World Health Organisation (WHO) Global Centre for Traditional Medicine (GCTM) is a major step that could help achieve the 2030 goal of universal healthcare. Nearly 80% of the world's population relies on traditional medicine. Despite that, there has been little effort to base traditional medicine in evidence and data.

Much of traditional medicine is based on received knowledge and home remedies. Faith and transgenerational anecdotal evidence have been its mainstay, remedies a free market for anyone with persuasive skills. The WHO GCTM is a concrete step to change this by working on four strategic areas: evidence and learning; data and analytics; sustainability and equity; and innovation and technology to optimise the contribution of traditional medicine to global health. Ensuring that traditional medicine in rooted in evidence, data and analytics will give it equal footing with modern medicine systems. A solid evidence base for traditional medicine will help countries integrate it as appropriate into their health systems. The collaborative nature - 32 memoranda of understanding (MoUs) with universities and research centres across WHO member countries - of the centre will make this possible. Traditional medicine must not remain the option for those who do not have access to modern medicine or the ignorant.

Health systems are about maintaining health, preventing disease, diagnosing and treatment. The goal is to create a system with universal access and acceptability, based in science, which uses technological advances, focuses on well being, prevention, diagnosis and treatment by deploying the best available solutions, be they 'traditional' or 'modern' medicine. With its strong base in traditional medicine, India is a natural home for this endeavour.
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There’s no reason to panic (yet), but reports of the adverse impact of the early summer on the wheat crop should concern agricultural policymakers. It turns out that a dry and hot March may have reduced yields by at least 10%, perhaps more. That this has happened at a time when India hopes to fill the gap in the global wheat market caused by the disruption of Russian and Ukrainian exports is merely incidental (although that has seen a sharp increase in wheat prices, with farmers, naturally, preferring to sell to private firms rather than the government, as evident in early procurement numbers from the Food Corporation of India).

It would be a mistake to dismiss what happened this year as an aberration. This is what climate scientists have been warning against. Climate change, as evident from last month’s temperatures in the Antarctic, is not as linear or gradual a transformation as everyone thought it to be. Time and again, existing models of the climate crisis have been shown to be wanting. And, it has long been known that the two most obvious fallouts of the climate crisis — rising temperatures and sea levels — pose a threat to agriculture (among other things).

The question is: How are we preparing for this? And how climate-resilient is Indian agriculture? Given its dependence on the monsoons (another weather event very likely to be impacted by the climate crisis), the answer would be: Not very. The policy response to making agriculture climate resilient may range from drought-resistant seeds to, at a more macro-level, an entire change in cropping patterns, depending on water availability (this could immediately rule out basmati in Punjab, for instance) and temperatures. Hard decisions need to be taken — and we need to start talking about them now.



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In a lecture on the annual day of Delhi School of Economics, 15th Finance Commission Chairman NK Singh set the cat among the pigeons on the issue of fiscal federalism. If states continue to disregard the question of fiscal prudence and intergenerational equality in distributing freebies to win votes, has the time come to consider the idea of sub-national bankruptcy in India, Mr Singh asked.

The suggestion is both drastic and provocative. Our constitutional framework does not provide for such a mechanism. Given the fact that it took almost two decades to get the states to agree to the Goods and Services Tax (GST), the states agreeing to the idea of sub-national bankruptcy is extremely unlikely, if not impossible. To be sure, the states have their share of genuine grievances on the fiscal federalism front. They are left with very little sovereignty in revenue generation after the roll-out of GST and the Centre has shifted a large part of its taxes out of the divisible pool. The latter means that states’ share in central taxes is much lower than the finance commission mandated figure of 41%. These caveats notwithstanding, it is equally true that the political race to offer more and more freebies to win votes has emerged as a major threat to the quality and sustainability of state finances, and by extension the Union’s fiscal health. Money which should be spent on improving physical and social infrastructure is being frittered away on populist doles with an eye on the elections. Such expenditure is harmful in both the short- and long-run. In the former, it deprives genuine requirements of resources, and in the latter, it leaves a debt burden for future generations without endowing them with any long-term gains out of such spending (which, for instance, spending on an asset would do).

Is there a way for India to stop the proliferation of this self-destructive freebie culture? The question, as Mr Singh correctly pointed out in his lecture, cannot be left to economists alone, and has to be seen from the intersection of politics and economics. A good way to initiate a healthy dialogue on such issues would be to rejuvenate a platform in addition to the NITI Aayog and GST Council, where both the Centre and the states discuss issues concerning federalism in an amicable continuum.



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Back in 2014, while covering the elections in Bahraich in central Uttar Pradesh (UP), I went to a Muslim professor’s house in a densely populated and diverse area. The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) had declared Narendra Modi as its prime ministerial candidate. He had flown from Gujarat to Varanasi — the abode of Shiva — to contest his maiden election to the Lok Sabha, in a move that would be the beginning of a new era in Indian politics.

It was early evening. Sitting in his drawing-room, I strained my ears to decipher what he said about the emerging poll scenario in the state.

Because of its geographical closeness to Ayodhya, and with about 35% of its population being Muslim, it had been grievously impacted by the demolition of the contentious Babri Mosque on December 6, 1992, tearing apart the fragile social fabric of the state.

The professor was articulate, but his voice was drowned by the blaring loudspeakers right across the road. And there were not one, but two loudspeakers — atop a mosque and the adjacent temple — broadcasting religious orations. Perhaps no one understood the meaning or message of these sermons as they competed in decibels.

Asked how they lived in such a noisy area, many Hindus and Muslims quipped, “We are actually suffering from a hearing problem, but it’s now a matter of our survival.”

Blaring loudspeakers are not a new tool used by the Hindus and Muslims to display their assertiveness. And these seem more deliberate and forceful in communally tense districts like Bahraich.

For years, Muslims have been using loudspeakers for azaan (call to prayer), but their volume has been increasing by the day, unchecked by any authority or religious leader. Hindus, who initially used loudspeakers for special religious occasions such as Devi Jagran and Akhand Path, started using them for daily aarti (offering) in temples.

Today, it's a story of every locality. 

Today's communal clashes

At the time when disturbing news of communal clashes across the country — from BJP and non-BJP states — UP, infamous for divisive politics, remained peaceful, mercifully. Chief minister Yogi Aditynath’s diktats were clear: No communal disturbance.

He promptly imposed restrictions on religious processions and loudspeakers which were raising communal temperatures.

The order came amid a demand in Aligarh to install loudspeakers at Hanuman temples on 21 road crossings. The permission was denied to firebrand Hindu leaders. Soon thereafter, the BJP Member of Legislative Assembly (MLA) in Aligarh, Mukta Raja, in a provocative action, sought details from the district administration about the number of mosques in the district and their compliance with the Supreme Court order on loudspeakers.

The chief minister’s directives were clear on two fronts. One, no new processions will be allowed — Hanuman Jayanti had created tensions in Delhi and Mumbai. Even for processions that have been organised for years, permission would be required along with a mandatory affidavit pledging the maintenance of peace and harmony.

The state government also ordered that loudspeakers should not disturb others in the vicinity and their volume should not be heard outside the premises.

Loudspeakers have been triggering communal tension over the years and across the state, with BJP leaders themselves demanding a uniform policy for both the communities without any bias while granting permission.

In 2004, when the state was besieged by scuffles and brawls over loudspeakers, some Muslim leaders had approached Darul Ifta (Department of Issuing Rulings-Fatwa) of Nadwatul-Darul Uloom for a fatwa (edict and not diktat) on the two contentious issues of the “use of loudspeakers” and on “encroaching public spaces for offering prayers.”

The fatwa had said, “If a place to offer the Namaz-e-Janaza is available elsewhere in the vicinity, prayer should be offered at that place. In case of dire need and when there is no other way out, the namaaz may be offered on the road, but to cause inconvenience by blocking the thoroughfare is anyhow a wrongful act.”

In another ruling, the premier institute had also advised the community to check the use of loudspeakers as non-Muslims and sick persons should be given due consideration. If required, its use may be done for a brief period only, according to the fatwa.

Nadwa had issued the fatwa on a query by the late Col (Retd) Mohsin Shamsi, a Lucknowite, who had been spearheading a movement to check the rampant use of roads and loudspeakers for namaaz.

Col Shamsi, who was also associated with the Nadwa, quoted Justice Maulana Mohammad Taqi Usmani, Chief Justice of Sharia high court in Pakistan. Usmani, in his collection of reformatory lectures titled Isahi Khutbut published by a premier Islamic centre of India, Deoband, in UP, stated, “If your recitation disturbs the sleep and peacefulness of any person, then the act is wrong and unlawful. Recitation of Quran on loudspeakers at a time when someone wants to sleep or take rest or is sick is not proper.”

But then the community had raised the counter-question: “When the peace of others is not disturbed by kathas, kirtans, Akhand Ramayan, when traffic is not obstructed by rallies or VVIP visits, how can their namaaz that takes a few minutes actually cause public inconvenience?”

By then, the Hindus had also started using loudspeakers in their temples.

Religious leaders, come forward

Now, it’s time for the religious leaders of both communities to come forward while the government will have to ensure fair disposal of the applications that it will receive.

A day after the chief minister issued the guidelines, the mahants of Sri Krishna Janmabhoomi in Mathura decided to shut down their loudspeakers, installed at Bhagwat Bhavan to broadcast Manglacharan aarti from 5-6 am. “For us, any direction issued by chief minister Yogi Adityanath is a sant vachan (command of a saint) and, thus, we are bound to follow these directions. He has suggested that loudspeakers should not be used at cost of inconvenience to others,” stated Kapila Sharma, the secretary for Sri Krishna Janambhoomi Trust at Mathura.

The Gorakhnath temple has also lowered the volume of the loudspeakers and so have the mosques in Lucknow. The state administration has organised meetings with religious leaders before using force, as the next step would be notices and the forcible removal of loudspeakers.

Around 17 years ago, the Supreme Court issued orders on these issues. But the successive governments, immersed in the politics of the land, did not implement the order thoroughly, notching up communal tensions and volatility in the region.

In July 2005, the Supreme Court observed that no one will use a loudspeaker, beat a drum or tom-tom or blow a trumpet or beat or sound any instrument or use any sound amplifier at night (between 10 pm and 6 am) except in public emergencies.

The then Chief Justice of India, RC Lahoti, and Justice Ashok Bhan observed that the law-enforcing agencies must be equipped with necessary instruments and facilities, of which sound level meters conforming to the Bureau of Indian Standards (BIS) code are a bare necessity.

The apex court further observed that loudspeakers and amplifiers or other equipment and gadgets which produce loud sounds, once detected as violating the law, should be liable to be seized and confiscated by making provision in the law.

Noise Pollution (Regulation and Control) Rules, 2000

To curb the growing problem of noise pollution, the Union government has enacted the Noise Pollution (Regulation and Control) Rules, 2000, according to which a loudspeaker or a public address system should not be used except after obtaining written permission from the authority and the same shall not be used at night between 10 pm and 6 am.

The state has woken up to its responsibilities. It’s time religious leaders of all faiths realise their duties. Let peace return.

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

The views expressed are personal



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In six eventful days, Pakistan’s prime minister (PM) Shehbaz Sharif and his son earned a unique distinction. Sharif assumed office on April 11, the day he was supposed to be indicted and imprisoned in a multi-billion rupee money laundering case. And on April 16, his son Hamza Shehbaz — also set to be indicted in the same case — became the chief minister (CM) of Pakistan’s most-populous province, Punjab, amid an unprecedented pandemonium that saw then-speaker Pervez Elahi — also a CM candidate — beaten up in a physical brawl among rival Members of Parliament (MPs).

Meanwhile, 1,500 kilometres away in Karachi, former PM Imran Khan upped the ante by staging the biggest ever public rally in the city. This came a week after an equally impressive rally in Peshawar, marking the start of the campaign by the ousted PM’s Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) towards building mass pressure for early elections. Overwhelmed by the thunderous response of the Karachi crowd around midnight, Khan renewed his claims of a “US (United States)-instigated regime change” conspiracy against his government. “My life may be at risk but your independence is far more important for me than my life,” he said, referring to his relentless attack on Washington and its allies, who he believes disliked his bent towards China and Russia.

During his February 23-24 Moscow visit, Khan elicited an offer of 30% cheaper Russian oil and wheat (Pakistan’s annual oil import bill hovers around $20 billion). It was this Russian offer that perhaps prompted Khan to announce on February 28 that fuel prices will not be raised until June 30. The pressure resulting from PTI’s public mobilisation became evident on PM Sharif when he rejected a fuel price hike, saying he wouldn’t like to burden the poor during the month of Ramadan.

Khan’s unceremonious exit through a controversial no-confidence vote on April 9 — his governance shortcomings and disagreements with the military establishment notwithstanding — stemmed from what is now referred to as lettergate, an account of a lunch conversation on March 7 between then Pakistani ambassador Asad Majeed Khan in Washington and US assistant secretary of state for South and Central Asian Affairs, Donald Lu. Ambassador Khan’s cable back home was based on official notes from the meeting. It reportedly said the Biden administration was upset over PM Khan’s Moscow visit; that Islamabad should also have “considered Washington’s sensitiveness”. Another point related to the no-confidence motion tabled on March 8. What intrigued ambassador Khan was that it was March 7, and nobody in Washington was even aware of the Pakistani Opposition’s move the next day.

It is no surprise then that an increasingly besieged PM Khan interpreted the cable as a conspiracy against him. The Opposition — buoyed by the military establishment’s claim that it is “apolitical” — played it down as a “concoction” invented to fend off political pressure building up.

Imran Khan’s conspiracy narrative has clearly split Pakistan into two camps. With appeals to bring Pakistani flags to the rallies and project his campaign as a battle for Pakistan, he has infused a new spirit into his followers. The entire nation, he exhorted, needs to stand up against the “imported government” — a reference to the new Sharif administration. Imported Hakoomat Namanzoor (reject the imported government) is a top trend among Pakistanis across the globe. Overseas Pakistanis in western countries, including the US, are staging almost daily protest rallies against Khan’s removal, chanting “No Imran Khan, No remittances”.

Then, there are a dozen political parties and their followers. Now in power, they dismiss Khan’s views as shallow rhetoric by someone who lost his equilibrium. Khan, for his part, dubs them as status quoists with deep commercial interests in Pakistan’s political economy. On April 15, the head of the army’s public relations, General Babar Iftikhar, acknowledged the existence of the disputed letter (cable) — as opposed to the Opposition which had called it a “concoction”. But this has done little to stem the wave of anger — at least among PTI workers and its sympathisers. Pakistan finds itself, perhaps, at a defining crossroads.

Is history repeating itself with parallels to Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto, who too had spoken of a threatening American letter in the summer of 1977? Bhutto was eventually overthrown by General Zia ul Haq in July the same year in a military coup, and executed in April 1979. The ensuing brute oppression by the military dictator largely neutralised street agitation, his actions quietly endorsed by the US then (because of the impending Soviet invasion of Afghanistan).

2022 is different. Now, China and Russia — members of the United Nations Security Council — are closely aligned with Pakistan, a key reason for divisions between the PM and the army. Khan stated on numerous occasions that the country’s future was tied to China. During his Beijing visit in 2019, he agreed to a Pakistani rupee-yuan deal, covering semiconductors, transformers, and broadcasting equipment. He and his team also discussed, during the controversial Moscow trip, a rupee-ruble deal.

While Khan resisted western pressure to condemn President Vladimir Putin for invading Ukraine and advocated Pakistan’s neutrality in the conflict, army chief, General Qamar Javed Bajwa, on April 2, slammed the Russian military aggression and called for its immediate cession. It is evident that the military leadership believes in the need for balancing relations between China and the US.

The divergence has triggered a dynamic that sees Khan’s popularity on the rise, pitching him against an all-encompassing Opposition. Will he be allowed a free run in the impending elections? This is the big question looming in Pakistan. Eventful weeks ahead indeed.

Imtiaz Gul is a political and security analyst and author of several books including Pak China Relations: What Lies behind the Iron Brotherhood 

The views expressed are personal



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In a recent development, admissions through special provisions schemes were held in abeyance by the Kendriya Vidyalaya (KV) Sangathan. The decision to stop admissions through various quotas, although ad interim, was an expected upshot of the animated discussions on the issue in the recently concluded Budget session. While this reveals progress in the government’s deliberations on the controversy, a decisive stance remains pending.

Admissions under the special schemes comprise 21 distinct quota categories of which two — the Member of Parliament (MP) quota and the sponsoring authority quota — are concerning. Both allow admissions over and above the class strength of KVs and have an unaccountable discretionary element.

Every MP has a quota to recommend 10 admissions to KVs. Additionally, there’s a quota of at least 17 seats per KV with sponsoring authorities, exercised mostly by the district collector (DC). Thus, across the 1,248 KVs, 30,000-odd seats remain restricted every year to serve the discretionary powers of MPs and DCs.

As India commemorated BR Ambedkar’s 131st birth anniversary on April 14, the suspension is pertinent because the quota has been a blemish on his espoused principles of social justice and inclusion. It has continued despite a flagrant disregard of constitutionally mandated reservations and has been denying marginalised and socially disadvantaged students their right to education.

In 2021-22, of the 7,301 admissions under the MP quota, a paltry 8.34% went to Scheduled Castes (SCs) and 2.9% to Scheduled Tribes (STs) — less than half of the constitutional provision of 15% and 7.5% accorded to SCs and STs respectively. Without any allegiance to the reservation policy, the quota also ignores the right of disabled students to 3% horizontal reservation.

Beyond delivering a mere utilitarian goal of education, government schools such as KVs facilitate an institutional setting for social inclusion. It is essential that they embrace the constitutional principles of reservations and are free from arbitrary admissions. Time and again, the issue has arisen in parliamentary parlance as legislators and judiciaries have wavered over the quota’s validity. Amid the recent salvos of competing views, it is opportune to reassess the relevance of such special admissions.

With over 1.4 million students benefiting from these subsidised schools, the ethos of meritocracy is imperative to sustain their stellar quality. Discretionary quotas bring in distortions as they are not governed by fair considerations for merit. Such powers are an anachronism in today’s India and hardly square with democratic principles.

The debate has two views. One side seeks the enhancement of the quota because the seats allotted to an MP are insignificant and fall short of reasonably meeting the demands of a populous constituency. On the other side, parliamentarians demand the outright scrapping of the quota, citing the infeasibility of exercising this power with fairness.

The clamour for enhancing the quota rightly acknowledges the problem that the allotted number serves almost no purpose, but is misguided in remedying it. The historical trajectory of the MP quota reflects the systemic flaw inherent in it. Notwithstanding three abolishments, including a high court strike-down, the quota has been increased thrice since its inception: From two to five in 2011, from five to six in 2012, and then from six to 10 in 2016. Yet, problematic issues have persisted.

An MP gets a barrage of admissions requests, often at least an order of magnitude higher than the allotted quota. As the quota increased, so did the number of contenders, but disproportionately. Enhancing it further will exacerbate the issue of inciting public dissatisfaction as legislators will be flooded with even more requests, which they will be forced to turn down.

It’s high time such discretionary quotas for admissions in KVs are retired. Prone to either random choice or personal whims, their exercise has been unconstitutional and discounted both merit and transparency.

It is practically infeasible for an MP to comprehensively evaluate every request and select the most-deserving ones. In a democracy, people accord power to representatives on the premise that the person ascertains its best use. Whether an MP or a sponsoring authority has exercised the discretion after adequately assessing each of the multitudes of cases is an open contention and, therefore, gets a lot of flak including allegations of corruption.

It’s tempting to retain the power to exercise discretion, especially when it allows for doling out favours to people in a constituency. Maybe that explains the quota’s continued persistence despite its erratic history. But the fact that we have successfully abolished many discretionary powers in the past, augurs well. Even the Union education minister has relinquished his quota in KVs when admissions through it inflated 27 times to 12,295 from the recommended limit of 450.

The current suspension is welcome, but a revision of the relevance of each of the 21 quota categories and the permanent scrappage of the two quotas will be apposite to the times.

Sushil Kumar Modi is former deputy chief minister of Bihar and Member of Parliament, Rajya Sabha 

The views expressed are personal



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The conflict between Russia and Ukraine has prompted the Union government to articulate a new vision for internet governance in India. It believes that the key pillar of any such framework must be aatmanirbharta (self-reliance).

Some commentators have termed it a protectionist attitude towards technology governance. Our view is the exact opposite. We believe initiatives such as the Production Linked Incentive (PLI) scheme and the emphasis on using only trusted supply chains for the tech sector demonstrate the globalisation-oriented attitude of the government.

The call for an aatmanirbhar internet stems from concerns about the ability of technology firms to manipulate public debates. The misinformation pandemic has been acknowledged by India’s political class, cutting across party lines. Last month, Congress president Sonia Gandhi spoke in Parliament about how tech companies were interfering in India’s democratic processes. In February, Ashwini Vaishnaw, the minister for electronics, and information technology (MeitY) told the Rajya Sabha that the government was willing to frame even stricter rules for social media companies.

India must not confuse the objective with the means. We must aim to ensure that both the sanctity of our electoral processes and plural public discourse are preserved. Building rigid walls will only make our defences prone to collapse in the digital age.

It is a well-established convention that the marketplace of ideas flourishes when competing propositions clash with each other. Multiple points of view enrich public discourse and ensure that no single entity becomes an arbiter of right or wrong. In short, the smaller such a marketplace is, the higher the risk to democratic principles. Take India’s policy towards foreign direct investment (FDI) in the broadcast news media. As it stands, the FDI policy makes it near impossible for international organisations to invest in TV news. At the same time, you have a broken TV news ecosystem, that is homegrown, where some channels peddle fake news, gimmickry, and partisan agendas instead of elevating public discourse. Not a single Indian news channel has global influence.

There are two other lessons to be learnt from the Russia-Ukraine conflict. First, India can and should use its homegrown technology companies as instruments of influence in digital societies, just like the US has. Soon after the current conflict broke out, the US government imposed sanctions on Russia to blunt its economic might. Tech giants such as Apple, Google, Twitter, and Meta took this as a cue to impose sanctions of their own. Meta prevented Russian State media outlets RT and Sputnik from running ads on its platforms. Google removed Russian State-organisations from its news-related features and the Google News search tool. Apple stopped the sale of its products and Twitter paused ad sales in Russia. Would we not want Indian companies to reflect and strengthen our interests abroad?

Second, self-reliance will yield minimal positive outcomes if it cannot be used to create both a sphere of influence and a circle of economic resilience when a country needs it the most. North Korea is a prime example. It is self-reliant but has no constructive influence on world affairs, and is always on the brink of disaster. India must avoid walking down that path by learning from the evolution of its globalised Information Technology (IT) industry. Just as foreign tech majors look to India for growth, our IT industry derives strength from access to advanced markets. In this case, the time-tested principle of reciprocity represents an equilibrium that we needn’t disturb.

Like it is doing with hardware, India needs trusted supply chains in digital communications and software. It must learn to work with technology companies from the West. The government should facilitate a partnership among the State, domestic companies, and international technology firms. And, India can leverage initiatives such as Quad to build safe digital corridors through which it can engage with, harness and eventually lead global markets and societies.

Vivan Sharan and Aayush Soni are tech policy experts at Koan Advisory Group, New Delhi 

The views expressed are personal



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In Jorge Luis Borges’ masterful short story, Funes, the Memorious, readers are introduced to a memorable character who, by dint of suffering an accident, has lost the ability to forget. Funes can remember everything. He is a storehouse of facts and details that he recites instantaneously. He is akin to a living search engine.

It is something that all of us may have wished for at one point or other in our own lives. But to Funes, this condition is not a blessing, it is an affliction. In Borges’ story, Funes faces information overload. His brain is flooded with memories and is paralysed by thoughts.

It is only fitting then that Borges’ exemplary story is mentioned in Dr Scott Small’s new book, Forgetting: The Benefits of Not Remembering. Dr Small is a neurologist who is the director of the Alzheimer's Disease Research Center at Columbia University in New York. He mentions that Borges’ story foreshadowed modern research on forgetting. Remembering everything is hardly desirable.

It is a refreshing idea also found in a perspective written in the scientific journal Neuron in 2017 by Blake Richards and Paul Frankland of the University of Toronto and the Hospital for Sick Children (Toronto). They tell us that there’s constant interaction between remembering and forgetting that allows us to make decisions in a world where there’s too much information. According to them “the goal of memory is not the transmission of information through time, per se. Rather, the goal of memory is to optimize decision-making.”

The crux of the matter is that creativity requires a balance between remembering and forgetting. Some of the most creative people in history were forgetful. Albert Einstein was notoriously forgetful and absent-minded. I must confess that I face a similar affliction without the countervailing intelligence to excuse my inability to remember. But as I tell chiding friends and family, it’s not that that I’m inattentive. My attention is usually somewhere else.

Remembering is an act of filtering what we pay attention to, since there is constantly a barrage of stimuli hitting our senses. And since we cannot store every memory, we must choose what we pay attention to and to what we try to remember.

Some memories are needed to be able to form unique associations that are thought to be key to the creative process. But too much information can hamper creativity by leaving no cognitive room for the unexpected. As the saying goes, when we remember too much, we run the risk of missing the forest for the trees. The very specific becomes the enemy of the ability to generalise.

After a traumatic incident, forgetting can be a part of the process of resuming normal life. Dr Small notes that seeing the face of a bully decades later might trigger earlier responses. Fearful associations seem to have salience. He notes that negative emotions tend to stick longer.

Not being able to forget emotional distress and fear causes sustained anxiety. Post-traumatic disorder (PTSD) is a condition in which the ability to remember certain events is disadvantageous. One of the ways to deal with PTSD is to allow the person to forget the debilitating details of their trauma.

Dr Small is careful to make the distinction between pathological memory loss (such as that experienced during Alzheimer’s disease and dementia) and more routine forgetting. Indeed, there is a “good forgetting” that is beneficial to well-being that we must contrast from the “bad forgetting” which we associate with not being able to function properly.

But what is worth remembering is that just as there is a mechanism for creating memories, there is also a process for dismantling them. Not all forgetting is pathological or a result of faulty memory. There’s a biological system to enable normal forgetting. This “forgetting toolbox” works in tandem with our “memory toolbox”. The act of sleeping plays a part in strengthening memories, and it might also be the time when a lot of “smart forgetting” happens too.

Those with truly “photographic” or eidetic memory are very rare. People can improve memory only within the constraints of their own biology. In that way, memory is like height in that there’s a distribution of people with different natural abilities, and each of us falls somewhere on the curve. There are, of course, those with truly superior memory who can recall all the notes in a piece of music or the various combinations on a chessboard that they’ve faced before. But that is not something that the rest of us will achieve through apps or memory tricks.

“Forgetting is a cognitive gift,” writes Dr Small, and it’s a positive way to look at something that, as we get older, we tend to dread daily.

Anirban Mahapatra, a scientist by training, is the author of COVID-19: Separating Fact From Fiction

The views expressed are personal 



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The Union health ministry, in its direction to the Kerala government to update data on the Covid-19 pandemic on a daily basis, has pointed out that “daily and diligent reporting of data is critical to arrive at a meaningful understanding of pandemic in the districts, state and national level and ensure that any anomalies, surge or emerging trends can be captured in a timely manner”. The Union ministry, while pointing out that the delayed reporting by the state “has impacted and skewed the status of India's key monitoring indicators like cases, deaths and positivity”, was rightfully concerned more with the relevance of the data on Covid-19 “as it is a highly infectious disease and also has an associated risk of emergence of new variants".

There is enough reason for India to take the daily data on the pandemic seriously, even though it has negotiated three waves of the pandemic. The number of total new infections crossed 1,000 on Tuesday and several states, including national capital Delhi, Maharashtra and Uttar Pradesh have shown signs of an uptick in the numbers and test positivity rates.  Delhi has reported more than 500 new cases for the second consecutive day on Tuesday against the daily average for seven days of around 300, and has tightened Covid precautions for schools. Uttar Pradesh, after seeing the numbers going up, has made masks compulsory in public places in five districts; Haryana and the Union Territory of Chandigarh have followed suit. An unmistakable point of relief is that there is no significant rise in the number of hospitalisations.

These trends emerge amid a series of reassuring developments that suggested an end to the vice grip of the pandemic on human lives. It was only the other day that the number of daily air passengers crossed four lakhs in India; a US court ordered that masks are no longer mandatory on flights and the Joe Biden administration said it will no longer enforce mask mandate on public transport.

All these developments go on to prove that despite the remarkable achievements humanity has made against the fight against the SARS-CoV-2 virus, there still are weak points and, as the Union health ministry pointed out, need to constantly update and analyse the data to arrive at correct conclusions every day. Every single point on which we have an upper hand against the pandemic has come the hard way, be it vaccines, medicines or the evolution of the treatment protocol. They must be put to use as and when required based on current data, and hence the import of the health ministry missive.   

India escaped the third wave of the pandemic basically on the strength of the lessons it has learnt in the first two and the alacrity with which it responded to the new one. The universal vaccination programme which covered a lot of ground also helped us. The governments at the Centre and in the states are required to show the same kind of alertness should we aim to avoid a repeat of the first two waves. Any decision on further relaxing the Covid-19 protocol must be made taking the latest trends in account.



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All things considered, you are more likely to win a lottery, get a selfie moment with Big B or SRK, or have your video featured on the IPL virtual wall, than lose weight.

If you believe in destiny, then consider this: if God had wanted you to have a tall, slim, fit, strong physique naturally, you would more likely have been born in Kenya, Netherlands or some such place.

If you believe in calories instead, there is absolutely the slimmest of chances that you will walk, run, lift weights, jump enough to burn more calories in a day than you will end up eating in the land of paratha, jalebi, butter chicken, butter masala dosa, cheese sandwich, pav bhaji, rasmalai, biryani, dahi bhalla, and those chocolates and ice cream you have hidden in your fridge. And you would own a treadmill, not a couch, and actually use it too.

Ideally, at the point of reading this piece, by now, you would have started doing push-ups, but no, you are more likely thinking about those onion pakoras or fish cutlets, and let us have it: you will in the end follow your heart to being overweight than being fit.

Of course, there are exceptions. That guy who always finds time to go to the gym, no matter what, and says he loves working out. Or that lady, who between consuming green tea, salads, brown rice or organic ragi is also actually doing yoga, running, cycling, swimming and all. But they are exceptions. You, and I, are not.

It is the most tragic heart-breaking story of our times: more women and men will fail in their most significant annual goal, which is to lose weight, and get fitter, than any other.

Envy those six pack abs on other people, eat and drink and be merry. And just learn to live with those extra size clothes.



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The more things change, the more they remain the same —  or so goes a popular truism. However, will it be so in the context of the vexed state of India-Pakistan relations after the recent ouster of the Imran Khan government in Islamabad? This does engage the minds of people and strategic analysts on both sides of the border between the two nations. Historical precedent, of course, points to the continuation of turbulence in varying forms and intensity as unnecessary mistrust and animosity have been the hallmarks of the two nations carved out of undivided India in 1947. Will Pakistan’s new rulers — the combined Opposition under newly-appointed Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif and backed by the Pakistan Army — change tack vis-a-vis India or persist with its traditionally myopic and self-destructive policies towards its larger neighbour to its east.

Analysing the likely future contours of troublesome India-Pakistan ties is, however, shorn of unpredictably as past history portends. To the conservative watcher, Pakistan will continue to adopt the same policies towards India as the latter consistently looms large in all of Pakistan’s politico-strategic formulations.

Pakistan’s anti-India and Kashmir obsessions coupled with the export of terror remains the cornerstone of its foreign policy. It posing a threat to India along with a hegemonistic China appears to be a sturdy pillar of the anti-India stratagem of both countries.

Before surmising the likely future contours of India-Pakistan relations, it will be worthwhile to study the recent events in Pakistan which propelled a change of guard in Islamabad. That even charismatic cricketer-turned-politician Imran Khan could not complete his full term as Prime Minister was in keeping with Pakistan’s unenviable record — of none of its PMs having ever completed a full five-year term. That Imran Khan assumed office by a narrow majority in 2018 was indeed helped by the Pakistan Army and Pakistan’s Deep State — though this is denied by both.

That the gradual worsening of relations between Imran and Pakistan’s most powerful institution had substantially contributed to Imran forfeiting his prime ministership cannot be dismissed either. It is also a fact that Imran Khan, despite his ouster, retains credible public support in his country and has reinforced it by citing the “foreign conspiracy” angle in his removal as Prime Minister.

Referring to his differences with the United States as the primary reason, Imran Khan had stoutly defended his Moscow visit two months ago to meet President Vladimir Putin on the very day the Russian Army invaded Ukraine (February 24) and his refusal to criticise Russia for it had, reportedly, angered the US administration. Meanwhile, Pakistan’s Army chief Gen. Qamar Javed Bajwa, delivering a public lecture, appeared to extol the country’s traditionally warm relationship with the United States and had sounded at variance with his own PM.

Additionally, according to reliable media sources, Imran Khan had also earlier scuttled Gen. Bajwa’s efforts to resume trade ties with India and improve its overall relations with it. However, Gen. Bajwa, who was also trying for an extension, also fell out with his Prime Minister on the contentious issue of the next chief of the Pakistan Army, with just-retired Inter-Services Intelligence chief Lt. Gen. Faiz Hameed reportedly being groomed to replace Gen. Bajwa by Prime Minister Imran Khan himself. After a long standoff between Imran Khan and Gen. Bajwa on this issue, the relatively little-known Lt. Gen. Nadeem Anjum was appointed as the next ISI chief.

Meanwhile, Gen. Bajwa’s recent eloquent statement at the Islamabad National Security Dialogue 2022, in which he stated that “I believe it is time for the political leadership of the region to rise above their emotional and perceptional biases and break the shackles to bring peace and prosperity to nearly three billion people of the region”, has made waves all over. By all accounts, Imran Khan and his government would have not liked their Army chief making politically loaded statements and stealing their thunder. Thus, the inevitable had to happen and it was just a matter of time.

Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif reportedly enjoys cordial relations with the Pakistan Army and thus, at least in the initial part of his tenure, could bank upon the support of the military establishment. Pakistan’s new PM making various references to Kashmir should not bother us too much – we know, after all, that J&K is an integral and inalienable part of India, and we must realise that the Pakistani leadership has a political compulsion to refer to it off and on — it really does not matter.

The next general election in Pakistan is just over a year away. Imran Khan has already sounded his electoral bugle, exhorting the Pakistani masses to stand up to the “American bullies” and the Pakistan Army.

Whether Mr Sharif’s Pakistan Muslim League (Nawaz) and Bilawal Bhutto’s Pakistan People’s Party will be able to share the spoils of power equitably and fight effectively together against Imran Khan’s Tehreek-e-Insaaf party, supported by the many minor political conglomerates, will be evident in the coming months. Imran Khan may have been removed from power, but he has certainly not been finished politically.

Notwithstanding the political travails in Pakistan and whoever comes into power in Islamabad, the formidable stranglehold of the Pakistan Army onto the levers of power and decision-making is unlikely to change anytime in the near future. New Delhi must, therefore, endeavour to develop direct contacts with the Pakistan Army — that is the only way in which India-Pakistan relations might mend, or seen any improvement. A robust democracy in Pakistan remains a pipedream, but that is something the Pakistanis must decide for themselves. If the Pakistan Army, directly or indirectly, can contribute to peaceful and terror-free relations, it would be of help. From Gen Bajwa’s very recent statements it appears the Pakistan Army establishment has realised the precarious situation their country is in, especially economically, and has felt the dire need to mend fences with both India and the United States. Let India, without dropping its guard and ensuring security preparedness of a high order, give the Pakistani establishment another chance. Pakistan too must never cross the “red lines” which antagonise India, and thus ensure, as Gen. Bajwa put it, “keep the flames of fire from our region”. Only the immediate future will show the Pakistan Army’s sincerity or otherwise in this regard.



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