On June 14, the government announced the Agnipath scheme, which fundamentally transforms the process of recruitment of soldiers, sailors and airmen into the three services. Agniveers, the recruits, will be employed for four years, after which 25% of them will be selected for enrolment in the regular cadre, while the rest will be given a certain amount of money and be shown avenues to get back to civilian life. The scheme has generated a lot of debate, and protests against it have been violent in several parts of the country. To discuss and understand the nuances of the issue,Dinakar Peri spoke to Lt Gen D.S. Hooda (Retd) and AVM Manmohan Bahadur (Retd). Edited excerpts:
Can you provide an overview of Agnipath and put things in context, given the concerns?
Lt Gen D.S. Hooda (DSH):Let me try and take a very dispassionate view and look at both sides. Just like any scheme, there are advantages and concerns. Let me briefly cover both. The advantages, as have been brought out by the government and the military leadership… they’ve been talking about a younger military, the average age going down from 32 to 26. The rapid turnover of Agniveers in the system, they are hoping, will attract people who are more technologically savvy and are therefore more capable of handling new kinds of modern equipment. That is why they’re also hoping to exploit some people from the Industrial Training Institutes (ITIs) and other technical institutes. What has not been stated by the military and the government, but which is obviously a big factor for the adoption of this scheme, is the fact that at some stage, maybe not immediately, Agnipath is going to help reduce the salary and pension budgets. That could go into capital expenditure and for the modernisation of the three forces. Also, by picking 25% of the whole lot of Agniveers, you will possibly get people who can then be trained as non-commissioned officers (NCOs), etc. And with our shortage of officers, it is essential that we have better NCOs in the military.
There are genuine concerns. Will people who join only for four years, and who are possibly looking at the military as a stepping stone for a future career, have the same levels of morale and motivation that you find among soldiers who are permanently in the military? Is the scheme going to, in some ways, impact unit cohesion, which is absolutely essential? Is the shortened training period good enough to turn a recruit into a soldier who can fit in and function well within a unit?
There are also, in my view, different aspects of different services. Everybody is not going to face the same conditions. Someone in a technical service in a peace station is obviously not going to face the same conditions as someone who is going to spend two-three years deployed along the borders with an infantry unit. So, how will these different conditions impact the Agniveer? Some are saying it could have an impact, while some are saying it will not have an impact on operational effectiveness and readiness. I think it’s too early to tell. My suggestion would be that the scheme be put through a testbed. See how it works. Then we can adopt whatever lessons we learn from the testbed.
About treating it as a testbed, wouldn’t that have been a better way to begin? And then the scheme could have been rolled out on a larger scale?
DSH:The government has said that we are not going to roll it back, that we are going to implement it. So, even if you do it in this manner, use the first four years as a testbed. The argument that is being made is that the Defence Minister has the authority to make changes where required. But I think the approach to what we are doing currently, and to a testbed, would be different. If we say this is a testbed, I think we will be more open to major modifications wherever required. I am glad the Vice Chief of Army Staff did say something similar, that they are looking at it for the first four-five years as a pilot project.
With respect to the Navy and Air Force, which are highly technology-intensive, what is going to be the impact, given the short tenure of the scheme and only six months of training?
AVM Manmohan Bahadur (MB):When you’re talking about technology, and you have studied something in your school or college or an ITI, and then you’re absorbed into a military formation, the systems there are totally different. The basis may remain the same. And it takes a lot of time — in my experience, at least four-five years — for people to be trusted to work on systems in their own individual capacity. For four-five years, you’re actually under the tutelage of a senior person. No airman, no air warrior signs for his trade in the clearance form for an aircraft going for flight. It is similar for radars, anti-aircraft missile systems, and so on. I’m sure a similar thing goes for the naval systems too. So, at the ripe time of four years, when they are ready to be exploited to their full potential, you’re asking 75% of the people to go. And then you get a new lot coming in and you have to start from scratch. A person who would become a supervisor after five-six years of service leaves. A lot of money and, more importantly, effort and knowledge as well as wisdom are going out of the system. This is something that has to be catered for.
And since we’ve talked of a trial period, in my opinion, the initial lot who come in should go into non-critical streams of the Air Force and Navy. The same goes for the Army too. Let’s see how the people respond. And thereafter, in the next lot, or maybe from the third lot, you tweak the system and modify it to take into account the issues that may have arisen. For example, we’ve done this with the Short Service Commission. It was initially for five years. It was increased thereafter to 10 years, etc.
The terms and conditions state that Agniveers will form a distinct rank and will sport distinctive insignia on their uniform during the duration of their service before some of them come back into the regular cadre. This is a clear demarcation. How is that from the point of view of motivation, especially where there is close camaraderie?
DSH:I wish they had not done this. There is absolutely no difference in the kinds of jobs that they will do in units, there is no difference in how they will be treated. Having a separate insignia sort of signifies two classes of soldiers in a unit. You shouldn’t make any sort of distinction at this stage… Because when you do that, even individuals within the unit will look at each other as a separate class, which is not good. As I mentioned, one of the key factors is unit cohesion. That comes in with a sense of common purpose. Everybody feels that everybody is equal.
MB: A different rank or a unique insignia actually hits at the very basis of unit cohesion. The armed forces are a classless lot. You wear a uniform, whether in school or in college or in the armed forces, to remove all economic and societal disparities, and say all are one. And here you have two people fighting, say in the trenches, the enemy is in front, and you have one person wearing one type of uniform and the other one has an insignia signifying him to be somebody who is different. That is not right. I feel the government can do a simple modification, which is to remove this clause. In any case, when the Agniveer leaves after four years, you may call him Agniveer, but he’s not an ex-serviceman. The rule says he’s not an ex-serviceman.
A major concern that has been expressed on social media is the issue of national security as young military-trained men will be going back to civil society in large numbers every year.
DSH:I don’t think it’s as much a concern as it is being made out to be ... militarisation of society. First, the numbers are not that high that we’re looking at huge militarisation in society. There could be some who could be exploited [by anti-social elements], yes. And I think to allay these fears, if we are able to give them some decent, honourable second career, that to a large extent would help overcome these issues about how these armed forces-trained people will behave once they’re out in society.
MB:When we are talking in terms of militarisation, the pressures of a jobless existence weigh against the ethos, or the morality, that you may have learned in those four years. That really stretches the elastic, the malleability of one’s character, and some may, unfortunately, fall for it. So, the point is, it is not such a big problem — but to say that there is no problem, I think that too would be incorrect. And the way out is we have industry falling head over heels saying that we will give them jobs. I like former Navy chief Admiral Arun Prakash’s reply to a tweet from one of the industrialists, where he said, what have you been doing till now, please give us numbers? Even now as we speak, ex-servicemen are looking for jobs. We have to move beyond the optics and statements, and do something on the ground to help these people.
What would you say in conclusion?
DSH:I want to reiterate what I said in the beginning. This is a massive change that we have brought about in the recruitment process. I am not sure there has been enough discussion and debate even within the services on how we are going to take people, train them, inculcate in them the ethos of the military, and how long they will serve. I know the service chiefs and service headquarters have been discussing it. There have been discussions with the political leadership. But has it been debated enough within the organisation, at the level of commanding officers and company commanders who are actually going to be bearing the brunt of what is going to happen? My suggestion again is to put the scheme through some kind of a testbed and be open to major changes, if and when required. As AVM Bahadur has also said, you will probably find that there are certain areas, certain pockets, certain traits that are more suited for Agniveers, and some are not. So, this across-the-board option could also be changed a little bit.
MB:We need to look beyond four years. The issue — and rightly so — is that the decisions have been taken by people at the top. When you’re talking of the armed forces, the top brass would have retired in four years. And the fallout, if any, good and bad, will be faced by the next set of leadership within the military. I think they need to be taken on board in all the decisions that are going to be taken now — the way this scheme is going to be rolled out and implemented on the ground — because they’re going to face the proverbial music.
Additionally, do we need to set up another organisation to look after the people who go out? We have the Department of Ex-Servicemen Welfare, and there are enough [complaints] from the existing ex-servicemen that nothing much has been done. Now we have a larger mass going out every year, a younger lot.
The numbers are not that high that we’re looking at huge militarisation in society. If we are able to give them (Agniveers) some decent, honourable second career, that to a large extent would help allay these fears.
Lt Gen D.S. Hooda (Retd.)
India is a country of incredible religious, ethnic, and linguistic diversity. Muslims form an important part of that mosaic which would be incomplete without them. Muslim communities themselves are ‘diverse, with differences in language, ethnicity, and access to political and economic power’. But, lately, they have faced discrimination regardless of their internal differences in employment, education and housing. Many lack access to health care and basic services. Above all, they often struggle to secure justice despite constitutional protections and equal citizenship guarantees.
The ruling party, its politics
In general, Muslims are under-represented in public institutions and representative bodies in India. While there have been improvements in the representation of most groups, for example, the percentage of backward caste Members of Parliament in the Hindi belt had nearly doubled from 11% in 1984 to more than 20% in the 1990s, Muslims continued to be under-represented in relation to the general population. Upper castes remain the most over-represented in the Lok Sabha with nearly 29% and Other Backward Classes 22% in 2019. Most importantly, there will be no Muslim Member of Parliament in the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) when the terms of three of its Muslim MPs in the Rajya Sabha ends in July. It did not nominate any Muslim member to the Rajya Sabha in the recently concluded elections to the Upper House to recompense for their absence in the party contingent in the Lok Sabha. This marks an unprecedented moment in the history of our democracy as for the first time the ruling party will have no Members of Parliament from the largest minority in the Lok Sabha or the Rajya Sabha, signalling their distance from political power and curtailing their opportunities of getting heard where it matters.
The BJP has no Muslim Members of the Legislative Assembly in the States either. This is a direct result of a political strategy first implemented in Gujarat of winning a majority without minority support. This strategy has been extended to other States, most strikingly to Uttar Pradesh in the 2017 and 2022 Assembly elections, where it won huge majorities with negligible minority support. Muslims have thus been pushed out of the system first by rendering them irrelevant electorally and then rendering them invisible in the public sphere owing to their electoral inconsequentiality.
The erosion of the secular
This raises questions about how inclusive India is to its large Muslim minority population. What is at stake however is not the question of representation of Muslims as much as a series of questions about the new notions of representation in political life and the future of pluralism — which is the bedrock of India’s democracy. Pluralism was a way of demonstrating that India’s democracy represented everyone and this gradually became the cornerstone of Indian political practice. However, the transformational changes in Indian politics in the last decade have eroded the secular and pluralist basis of the nation. The failure to keep creed out of politics, a major fault line of Indian democracy today, is changing the structure and basis of representation. It is worth remembering in this context that the Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath had framed the 2022 Assembly election as an 80 per cent versus 20 per cent election, where the 20% group (a dog whistle for Muslims) represented supporters of mafias and criminals thus effectively delegitimising and derecognising a whole community.
The dominant template
This form of brazen majoritarian politics changes the very meaning of liberal democracy, reshaping it to provide expression through state power to the majority will while disregarding and excluding minorities. In these circumstances, parties that depend on the support of minorities too end up making them invisible in order to compete on somewhat similar grounds to fit into the dominant template. This approach denies the ‘legitimacy of political majorities forged with the aid of minority support or votes’. For this reason Rahul Gandhi was mocked and ridiculed for contesting from Wayanad in Kerala claiming that he has done so because it is a Muslim majority constituency.
As noted above, Muslims have remained under-represented in the legislative arena since Independence. The number of Muslim Members of Parliament has gone up marginally from 23 to 27 (roughly 4%), which is still very low compared to other groups. That modest increase took place even though the share of Muslims candidates decreased. Among the main parties, the overall number of Muslim candidates decreased, from 10.3% to 8%, the biggest decrease reported in State-based parties. The explanation for this cannot be found in the structural limitations of the first-past-the-post electoral system and the lack of winnability of Muslim candidates. It is political factors, that is to say the growth of majoritarian politics, that is aggravating the problem of under-representation. Over the last few years, majoritarian politics has changed the political landscape markedly in relation to Muslims. Hereafter, decline in representation is apparent in the States where majoritarian politics is a dominant force. In the event, most parties disregard their claims to tickets as they fear their rivals would accuse them of sacrificing the interests of the majority community. Hence, parties are busy reducing the tickets given to Muslims for fear of being branded anti-Hindu if they give fair representation to them or promote and protect their interests.
This trend directly relates to the privileging of the majority community and the ethnicisation of the state. It marks a shift from representative democracy based on inclusive politics in which everyone has equal rights, regardless of caste or creed, to an ethnic-majoritarian politics which treats accommodation of diversity as concessions to minorities at the expense of the majority community.
An instrument of protection
It is certainly not necessary or desirable for Muslim concerns to be represented by Muslims; in fact it is infinitely better for them to be represented by non-sectarian secular parties. But when parties are unwilling to stand up for them when they are explicitly subjected to hate speech or their constant targeting by the state is not countered or when institutions refuse to speak up for them when their homes and shops are illegally demolished and their livelihoods destroyed, then their presence in institutions matters. Instead of being understood as concession, political representation should be conceived of as an instrument of minority rights protection. The dwindling representation of Muslims in legislatures and public institutions matters also because substantive representation (of the interests of a group) is linked to descriptive representation (their numerical presence). The Indian experience shows that ‘access to institutions is a key element to obtaining the state’s attention. Interests tend to be better represented once a group has actual representation in public institutions’.
A litmus test
To conclude, diversity in public institutions is essential to promote stability and integration of the state as an institution of governance since an underlying premise of democracy is power sharing along multiple axes — religious, linguistic, regional, caste, tribal, etc. The extent to which ethnic or racial minorities are present in legislatures can be viewed as a litmus test for the effectiveness of a country’s democratic system and for redressing ethnic inequalities or addressing discrimination. At the same time it underlines the complexities of democratic politics with regard to the relationship between formal and substantive equality and the question of whether it is enough to give people formal equality, or whether there is a need also to address the structural obstacles that prevent certain groups from making full use of their equal rights, as said in a paper on ‘The Political Representation of Ethnic and Racial Minorities’, New South Wales Parliamentary Library. One thing is clear from recent Indian experience. Rights without participation in public institutions have been largely ineffective.
Zoya Hasan is Professor Emerita, Centre for Political Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University and currently Distinguished Professor, Council for Social Development, New Delhi
On June 10, India’s power demand touched a record high of 211 MW even as the coal shortage continued with coal stocks available only for eight days. In the last two months, as temperatures soared and the economy recovered, the power demand breached the 200 MW level on several occasions. But the coal stock position at power plants remained worrisome. Consequently, the Ministry of Power sprang into action. To bridge the gap between shortage in domestic supply and increasing demand, power-generating companies or ‘gencos’ were directed to use imported coal for 10% of their requirement, failing which their domestic supplies would be cut.
How did India get here?
India is the second largest producer of coal, with reserves that could last up to 100 years. Despite that, year after year, the shortage of coal supplies continues to be an issue. Why does India have a recurring power crisis? As seen in chart 1, the domestic production of coal stagnated between FY18 and FY21, but revived in FY22. The power demand too surged owing to economic recovery and hotter weather conditions. In a press release published on May 27, the Ministry of Power noted that “despite efforts to increase the supply of domestic coal, there is still a gap between the requirement of coal and the supply of coal.”.
Until FY20, domestic sources contributed to about 90% of the power sector’s coal receipts; the remaining was filled by imports. But by FY22, the reliance on imports dwindled to 3.8% which built pressure on domestic supplies. As chart 2 shows, the coal imported by power plants declined to 27 MT in FY22 from 66.06 MT in FY17. Coal imported for blending purposes by power plants that run on indigenous coal declined to 8 MT in the last financial year, from 19.7 MT in FY17. Past data show that importing coal for blending has always seen few takers. A bulk of imports was made by power plants designed for imported coal. Notably, their share of imports too saw a decline of 60% in FY22 since FY17. Out of 15 such import-based power plants in India, five had little or no coal stock as of June 15.
This dip in imports can be attributed to the skyrocketing prices of coal in the international markets (chart 3). The price of imported coal is nearly 5-6 times higher than domestic supply. It is in this scenario that the Power Ministry asked the gencos to import coal. However, States are wary of using imported coal as it would raise the cost of power substantially. The shortfall in domestic supplies and the rising cost of imports have put power plants in a precarious situation (chart 4). About 79 of the 150 plants that depend on domestic coal had critical stocks (<25% of the required stock) as of June 15. Eight import-based coal plants were also at critical levels.
Perennial bottlenecks
The use of imported coal will also push up the price of power supply to the power distribution companies or ‘Discoms,’ often dubbed as the weakest link in the power sector chain. Discoms owe long-standing dues to the tune of Rs. 1.16 lakh crore to the gencos. Delays in payments by discoms create a working capital crunch for generating companies which in turn inhibits them from procuring an adequate quantity of coal.
According to the 2019-20 report by the Power Finance Corporation, discoms had accumulated losses up to Rs. 5.07 lakh crore and were therefore unable to pay generators on time. Discoms in Tamil Nadu, Rajasthan and Uttar Pradesh are the most financially stressed (see chart 5).
Discoms are bleeding because the revenue they generate is much lower than their costs. This is evident from the gap between the average cost of supply and average revenue realised (see chart 6). Tamil Nadu, Jammu and Kashmir, and Rajasthan have the widest gap between revenues and expenses of discoms. Apart from providing power at cheaper rates, some State governments do not revise tariffs periodically. Further, the delay in getting compensation from the government also compounds the woes of cash-strapped discoms.
nihalani.j@thehindu.co.in
The Ukrainian Parliament — the Verkhovna Rada — passed a Bill on June 20 ratifying the Council of Europe Convention on preventing and combating violence against women and domestic violence. Better known as the Istanbul Convention, it is the most far-reaching international treaty designed to set legally binding standards for governments in Europe for the prevention, protection, and prosecution of gender-based violence. According to official numbers, 259 deputies voted in favour of the bill, eight voted against it, 28 voted blank and 47 abstained.
It will make a difference
While the convention was first signed by Ukraine in 2011 — despite repeated calls from activists to ratify it — the government, for years, remained stubbornly mute on the subject and continued to delay its ratification because of opposition by religious and conservative groups over the term “gender” used in the document, as a recent article by Asami Terajima in theKyiv Independent on Ukraine’s ratification makes clear. Ukraine in fact, came close to ratifying the convention in 2016 but failed after a majority in Parliament voted against it. As a result, until today, Ukraine was one of the 11 countries that had signed but never ratified the Istanbul Convention.
However, the government’s recent decision to ratify the convention is a huge step forward for the protection of women and girls from all forms of violence, whether in Ukraine or abroad, and could not be more timely for a number of reasons.
Gender-based violence
To begin with, the risk of women becoming victims of gender-based violence in Ukraine has increased immensely over the course of Russia’s eight-year war. In fact, the increasing number of reports that have emerged since the beginning of Russia’s invasion in late February 2022 only suggests that the Russian troops have been using rape and sexual violence as a weapon of war and instrument of terror to control civilians. These fears were further crystallised following Russian withdrawal from Bucha, when some nearly 20 women and girls were assaulted by forces in a basement, nine of whom became pregnant from the assault.
Although, the Russian authorities have denied alleged sexual abuse by their troops, the truth is that women in Ukraine have been disproportionately affected by the war. And as the tensions continue to rise, the risk of gender-based violence will also be heightened, with survivors suffering more severe levels of abuse. The prompt implementation of the convention could thus equip the Ukrainian authorities to deal with these atrocities and serve to reassure the survivors and provide them with the confidence to seek justice.
Besides, women’s rights activists in Ukraine have long been calling for changes — as highlighted in Ms. Terajima’s article — in legislation to ‘impose harsher forms of punishment against the offenders of gender violence. For instance, domestic violence has been an administrative offence in Ukraine since 2003, which is punishable by a fine, community work of up to 60 hours or by imprisonment of up to 15 days. Then in 2019, systematic domestic violence was criminalised, which in practice meant that criminal charges will only be imposed if the abuser commits three offences in a year’. However, these pieces of legislation and forms of punishment often fell short of what the victims anticipated as being fair prosecution, discouraging them and others to go through the process of seeking justice.
In this sense, the convention’s ratification will not only expand ‘the list of abuse against women punishable by law in Ukraine — including but not limited to psychological abuse, stalking, forced marriage, physical and sexual abuse, forced abortion, sterilisation’ — but also provide the authorities with the opportunity to bring about changes in its legislation and institutional procedures. In furtherance, it will also mean that Ukraine will be responsible for financing more shelters for women, training social workers to adequately handle cases of sexual violence, and increase resources of assistance available for victims.
Aiding EU integration
Apart from being a decisive step in the fight against gender-based violence, the adoption of the Istanbul Convention will also help in Ukraine’s European integration. Guaranteeing human rights is the most important aspect that is considered when European Union (EU) membership is being extended to a country. It has thus been crucial for Ukraine to demonstrate actions that will bring the country closer to European legislations and values. And a good way of doing this is through the ratification of the Istanbul Convention. The decision is in fact, of particular significance for the Netherlands and Sweden, two ‘sceptical’ countries that were initially blocking Ukraine’s candidate seat but have now eventually agreed to back EU member status for Ukraine.
The ratification, as Ms. Terajima’s article highlights, is thus, a big milestone for Ukraine and has been applauded by many institutions, including the United Nations Human Rights Commission and the EU Commission of Human Rights in the hope that it will decrease both the number of gender-based violence and domestic violence cases. It will also bring Ukraine closer to other countries that have already ratified the convention. However, an important thing to keep in mind is the fact that the proper implementation of the convention will require financial resources, which seems like a challenging goal for a country already facing economic downfall due to the Russian invasion.
Akanksha Khullar is the Assistant Manager, Ministry of Women and Child Development Desk at Invest India
With a majority of the party legislators joining a rebellion led by Eknath Shinde, the Shiv Sena appears to be slipping out of the control of its chief and Maharashtra CM Uddhav Thackeray. The MVA, the ruling tripartite alliance of the Shiv Sena, Congress and the NCP, is unravelling, and it is unclear what will take its place. The Congress and the NCP have pledged the continuation of their support to Mr. Thackeray, who has in turn expressed his willingness to step aside in favour of another leader from the party. The Congress has even offered to provide outside support to the government should it help the Sena put its house in order. Mr. Shinde, until he turned rebel, was a key Sena leader, and has couched his rebellion in ideological terms; the Sena has drifted away from its Hindutva mornings by aligning with the NCP and the Congress, according to him. Mr. Thackeray has responded by reiterating his steadfast commitment to Hindutva, in an emotional appeal to party MLAs to stay together. But that seems to have done little to soothe frayed nerves in the party, and more leaders are flocking to the rebel tent. The MVA alliance was formed after months of political machinations, including the dramatic swearing-in of a short-lived government of the BJP and a section of the NCP that returned to the party quickly. The BJP is waiting for the opportune moment to make its next move, after using its governments in Gujarat and Assam to abet the revolt.
The Sena severed its ties with long-term partner BJP, even overlooking their ideological bonding of Hindutva to reclaim its eroding primacy in State politics. Despite the ideological mismatch among the allies, the MVA partners had compulsions to stay united — until the resentment within the Sena snowballed to challenge the authority of the Thackeray family. This crisis has been in the making for a long time, and the CM’s blind trust in the loyalty of his warriors has turned out to be misplaced. To be fair, these MLAs had been complaining about lack of access to the CM and his son and Minister Aaditya Thackeray. The junior Thackeray’s attempts to reshape the party as more palatable to the upper-class sensibilities disturbed the rustic, often restive party base that used to be kept on a constant boil by his grandfather and party founder Bal Thackeray. Mr. Shinde is one of the very few mass leaders in Sena, after the Thackerays. He is perceived to be accessible, and holds sway in two districts neighbouring Mumbai, almost six municipal corporations and an equal number of smaller local bodies. He felt sidelined in the new scheme of things, and was waiting for the right opportunity to strike. The Sena is at a crossroads and could even head to a dead end.
The victory of Gustavo Petro, a former guerrilla, in Colombia’s presidential election is one of the most decisive shifts in the South American country’s modern history. At war with leftist guerrillas for decades until a few years ago, Colombia had never voted a leftist to power in the past. Even when a wave of leftist victories was sweeping across South America in the early 2000s, it remained a fort of centrist and conservative politics. But Mr. Petro, armed with his promises of overhauling the country’s economy and governance, broke into this fort and captured power. He won 50.4% votes in Sunday’s election against his rival Rodolfo Hernández’s 47.3%. A host of factors, including internal political changes and economic challenges, helped him script history. In Colombia, where a decades-long civil war between the state and the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) had had a devastating impact on the public psyche, even mainstream leftist politicians had struggled to win popular support. But FARC’s decision to lay down arms and join the political mainstream as part of the 2016 peace agreement widened the scope for leftist politics in the country. Mr. Petro was quick to mobilise this newly created momentum with an economic programme that broke from the Bogota consensus. He vowed to “democratise land”, renegotiate free trade agreements that were inimical to the interests of Colombian farmers, expand the country’s social security measures, tax the rich more and reduce Colombia’s reliance on fossil fuel.
In a country where annual inflation is 10%, the youth unemployment rate is 20% and the poverty rate is 40%, Mr. Petro’s promises of change helped him strike a chord with voters. Colombia, despite high economic growth, has one of the highest inequality rates in Latin America. While the civil war has come to an end, drug cartels continue to pose serious security challenges. The way ahead is not going to be easy for Mr. Petro. True, he has the presidency, but the Colombian right, which has ruled for decades, has an outsize influence over the state and Congress. Mr. Petro’s leftist bloc has only 25 seats in the 188-member lower House. His promise to reduce the country’s reliance on fossil fuels and shift to renewable energy could trigger opposition from the powerful oil industry, besides economic impacts. His move to hold talks with the drug cartels and end the drug wars could attract strong opposition from the U.S. Washington would not sit idly if Mr. Petro takes Colombia, the cornerstone of the U.S.’s Latin American policy, towards the left. So, he should brace for challenges emanating not just from his right-wing opponents but also from the world’s most powerful country. Mr. Petro, however, should stay focused on the issues at hand and seek to unite the country that has been pulverised by civil conflict, drug wars and economic inequality.
New Delhi, June 23: The Retreat, the week-end refuge of the Viceroys from the tiresome gaiety of Simla during the heyday of British rule, is one of the stately homes with an aura of imperial past which are being hastily refurbished and given a quick face-lift for the Indo-Pakistan summit next week. A 100-year old country house with a chequered history, it was originally built by an enterprising British medical officer before it was extensively remodelled and converted into an official residence for the Chief Commissioner of the Simla Hills. Nestling amidst giant oaks, pines and maples in a secluded estate aside the India-Tibet border road, it commands a panoramic view of the Himalayan snow-line.After Lord Elgin acquired the property in 1896 for viceregal use, it was decorated by Lockwood Kipling, father of Rudyard Kipling, who at that time was Principal of the Mayo Art College in Lahore. During the days of Minto, Hardinge, Chelmsford, Reading, Lytton and Curzon to Irwin, Willingdon, Linlithgow, Wavell and Mountbatten, it served as a rendezvous for official conferences in a country home atmosphere away from the stuffy atmosphere of the Viceregal Lodge in Simla. When Dr. Radhakrishnan gave up the old viceregal residence in Simla, the Retreat was retained as a modest summer residence for the President. But it has been seldom used since Independence except for a few brief spells of holiday by Mr. Nehru.
The still-unfolding scenes of the dramatic political crisis in Maharashtra, stretching from Mumbai to Guwahati via Surat, frame a government in freefall in an important state, and its rippling echoes. The Uddhav Thackeray government would appear to be coming undone by, on the one end, its own weakness, the inability or unwillingness or both of a family-run party to accommodate the rising ambitions within, and on the other end, by its partner-turned-foe’s aggressive fishing in murky waters. That the Sena rebels who have rallied behind Eknath Shinde have been ferried and locked into hotels in BJP-ruled states, first Gujarat and now Assam, tells its own story. There has been visible rancour between the Sena and BJP ever since 2019 assembly election, in which the BJP emerged as the single largest party but after which the two long-standing allies went their separate ways. The rift inaugurated a battle over the “real” flagbearer of Hindutva against the arresting backdrop of the country’s financial capital. At that time, the Sena went on to join hands with Sharad Pawar’s NCP and the Congress, and formed a coalition government. Now the Shinde-led group of rebels are pointing to that unlikely alliance and the need to go back to a solo, undiluted Hindutva as reason for their revolt, but they protest too much. After all, unlikely alliances are not unusual in Indian politics and, time and again, power has proved to be a strong glue. In all likelihood, therefore, the current unravelling in Mumbai has more to do with a Sena, having lost Bal Thackeray, finding it difficult to hold together and a BJP, in power at the Centre and not above weaponising its control of central agencies against political rivals and opponents, that is seizing the opportunity.
In the coming days, the prospect of a vertical split in the Sena, and the endgame for the Uddhav Thackeray government, will pose a test for the institutions of the Speaker and Governor. The Deputy Speaker — since the Maharashtra assembly does not have a full-time Speaker since 2020 — could be called upon to assess the claims and counter claims and determine the status of the Sena factions under provisions of the anti-defection law. The governor could play a critical role in resolving the political instability, even as, after the Bommai judgement in 1994, the Supreme Court has laid down that the place for deciding whether a government has lost its majority is the floor of the assembly, not Raj Bhavan.
The fate of the Uddhav Thackeray government in Maharashtra will also send signals that resonate beyond the state. With less than two years to go for the general election in 2024, and given that the Opposition is struggling to rally together to put up a fight against a formidable and predatory BJP, the loss of a crucial state will be consequential. Maharashtra, which has been one of the most prominent sites in the fight against Covid — during which, incidentally, the Uddhav Thackeray government kept a remarkably calm head — is now, amid the political tug and pull, again ground zero.
This editorial first appeared in the print edition on June 24, 2022, under the title, ‘The meltdown’.
Israeli war-planes attacked Syrian positions in the mountains east of Beirut after renewed artillery exchanges shattered a cease-fire that lasted for less than 24 hours, the state television and radio reported. The Israeli war-planes in action for the second day in a row, struck six different locations along a 14-kilometre stretch of the Syrian-held territory between Aley and Hammana near the vital Damascus highway eight to 22-km east of Beirut, the broadcasters said. The air raids touched off fires in the hillsides but there were no immediate reports of casualties, the radio and TV said.
The Lok Dal president, Charan Singh, the Congress (J) president, Jagjivan Ram, and other opposition leaders gave a call to the people to wage a relentless war to “save democracy” which they alleged was being “trampled” by the Prime Minister, Indira Gandhi. The leaders, however, appealed to the people not to violate prohibitory orders or get provoked while demonstrating when the new assembly meets here for the first time. The rally was organised by eight opposition parties of Haryana and the Akali Dal (Longowal) in protest against the installation of the Bhajan Lal Ministry a month ago. Charan Singh announced that very soon, opposition parties would evolve a programme which will show a new way to the country and save it from constitutional breakdown.
The Army, defying Navy and Air Force opposition, took over the Argentine Government in an internal coup and appointed retired General Reynaldo Bignone to become the President of the country. General Bignone, 54, will take office on July 1, replacing former President Leopoldo Galtieri who resigned following Argentina’s defeat in the Falkland Islands war.
A Formula 1 driver is always wired to a backroom full of experts, football players keep looking at hand-waving managers on the sidelines and in cricket, drinks duty also means ferrying strategy messages to the pitch. For all these years, tennis was different. It was a sport that encouraged players to think on their feet on the court. Now, in a six-month experimental move, including at the US Open, tennis has permitted “off-court coaching”, something that many believe has been happening surreptitiously anyway. “The trial aims to create additional points of intrigue and insight to enhance the fan experience,” the ATP wrote of the change.
While the move can see coaches hand-hold their players in times of crisis or change strategy during the game, it threatens sports’ egalitarian charm. The fear is that players with bigger budgets can have better brain banks and wiser counsel during a game. Spoon feeding from the sidelines might also come in the way of players conjuring those moments of inspired magic. History shows that it is only when a player is trapped in a cul-de-sac of sapping spirit, and the match seems lost, that something stirs inside, ingenuity kicks in and they come up with a new way to get out of jail. Such riveting episodes enrich the narrative of sports, enhance the drama and increase its appeal to fans. In some cases, it also gives an idea of the limitless nature of human potential.
In the sporting ecosystem, tennis was an outlier. It left the player to find a way out of the mess on their own. That was one of its charms. Why make it like every other sport? To watch someone try and fail or succeed, or give up without trying — that is sport at its core. A coach shouting out ideas and instructions comes with the risk of reducing a tennis game into a battle of automated machines reeling out the shots. That would be a pity.
This editorial first appeared in the print edition on June 24, 2022, under the title, ‘Spoonfeeding the game’.
Even as Assam becomes the site of the political turmoil in Maharashtra, people in the Northeastern state are facing the fury of the Brahmaputra, Barak and their tributaries. Nearly 100 people have lost their lives in the rain-induced landslides and floods that have engulfed 30 of Assam’s 35 districts, a geographical sweep described as unprecedented by experts. The Centre and state government have commenced relief operations but the raging rivers have hobbled these activities. Assam Chief Minister Himanta Biswa Sarma has reportedly said that once the waters recede, the government will find a permanent solution to the state’s flood problem. Similar statements have been made before, including in 2020, by then CM Sarbananda Sonowal. But words have rarely been matched by action.
For more than half a century, Assam has relied on embankments to stave off the swelling rivers during the monsoons. A growing body of literature shows that these walled structures — most of them have not been repaired for decades — are ill-equipped to tackle floods, especially at a time when climate change is complicating the state’s hydrology. Assam’s flood management data shows that it needs to take such studies seriously. Last year, the state’s water resources minister, Pijush Hazarika, informed the Assam assembly that close to 1,300 cases of embankment breaches have been recorded since 2000. Reports of the state’s Disaster Management Authority show that the problem has intensified in recent times. Floods ripped apart nearly 200 embankments in 2020. This year, they have destroyed nearly 300 such structures. A report of the Parliamentary Standing Committee on Water Resources last year advised the state government to strengthen flood protection structures, address soil erosion and de-silt rivers. But these measures continue to be on the to-do list of the Assam government. In fact, the state’s flood management outlay has come down in the past two years.
Assam has received nearly twice its average June rainfall in the first three weeks of the month. The state’s rainfall for March-May was 62 per cent more than the normal average. Destruction of natural wetlands and outmoded sewer systems in the state’s cities — including in Guwahati, projected to be a smart city by 2025 — have made these urban centres susceptible to water logging. Waterbody restoration and sewer system overhaul might take time. Meanwhile, the state government would do well to build people’s resistance to the elements in cities, towns and villages. Such measures include putting flood warning systems in place and shifting people and livestock to safer locations. The state’s annual suffering must end.
This editorial first appeared in the print edition on June 24, 2022, under the title, ‘Same suffering’.
James Carville, a political advisor to Bill Clinton, had famously quipped that if there were such a thing as reincarnation, he would like to come back as the bond market because you can intimidate everyone. Reincarnation as the central bank wouldn’t be any less exciting. After all, they are the “only game in town”. The rule of law appears rather staid in comparison, but the law is fast catching up.
Modern inflation targeting central banks are often bound by explicit statutory mandates. Spiralling inflation is therefore likely to bring the law into sharp focus. This phenomenon is currently playing out in India. Critics have argued that the RBI ignored its statutory inflation targeting duty. The central bank appears to have ventured into uncharted legal territory by possibly targeting the exchange rate instead.
Separately, critics have also highlighted broader regulatory governance challenges at the RBI. For instance, its alleged use of informal nudges to restrict a foreign player’s access to the Indian payment ecosystem appears to fly in the face of an adverse Supreme Court ruling. Another recent instruction abruptly prohibiting loading of prepaid instruments from credit lines has been criticised for causing confusion among market participants. Such criticisms underline an urgent need to improve the credibility of the central bank’s rule of law quotient.
In this context, the recent report of the Regulations Review Authority 2.0 (RRA) offers useful suggestions to improve the central bank’s regulation-making process. The RBI had set up the RRA in April 2021 to streamline its regulations. The RRA has recognised that preparation of regulatory or supervisory instructions is akin to legislative drafting, which is both an art and science. It has therefore advocated for skill development in regulatory drafting inside the RBI.
The RRA has also made several important suggestions to improve regulatory governance at the RBI. For instance, its regulatory instructions should be issued only after public consultation, except if they are urgent or time sensitive. They must contain a brief statement of objects and reasons clearly explaining the rationale behind their issuance. They must be accompanied by a press release with the necessary background, brief rationale, and objective of the regulatory prescription. Finally, a structured mechanism for periodic review of the RBI’s regulations has also been suggested.
These seemingly straightforward suggestions hold great significance for a central bank. Prior to the 1990s, central banks thrived on secrecy. The common wisdom was that the efficacy of monetary policy depended on taking markets by surprise. This belief started changing gradually with the adoption of inflation targeting. Targeting inflation required central banks to influence households’ and firms’ decisions. This could be done better by transparently communicating with them rather than surprising them. Thus emerged the need for central banks to be transparent and predictable.
During the same period, there was growing international recognition that central banks as monetary authorities should enjoy a relatively higher degree of de facto or de jure independence from their elected governments. In a democratic polity, this could only be expected in exchange for increased accountability. As a result, regulatory governance gradually emerged as a relevant consideration for independent central banks over the last three decades.
The regulatory governance discourse in India gained salience with the report of the Financial Sector Legislative Reforms Commission in 2013. It considered statutory regulators to be mini-states. Like a state, regulators usually enjoy significant legislative, executive and judicial powers and should be subject to appropriate accountability mechanisms. These should include internal separation of powers; a well-structured regulation making process overseen by the board, through public consultation and cost-benefit analysis; duty to explain its actions to regulated entities and public at large; regular reporting requirements; and judicial review. Based on these recommendations, the Ministry of Finance released a handbook in 2013 for voluntary adoption of these enhanced governance standards by all financial sector regulators.
These developments turned the spotlight on the RBI’s regulatory governance. A 2019 research paper authored by Anirudh Burman and Bhargavi Zaveri found the central bank’s legislative functions to be the least responsive in comparison to three other regulators – SEBI, TRAI and AERA. During the period under study – January 1, 2014 to April 30, 2016 – the RBI held formal public consultations for only 2 per cent of all legislative instruments it issued.
Its consultation papers usually presented only one solution and did not offer merits and demerits of multiple possible solutions. The paper attributed this low responsiveness to deficiencies in the formal legal framework.
Weak regulatory governance resulted in weak regulations, inviting judicial scrutiny. In 2019, the Supreme Court effectively rewrote RBI’s master circular on wilful defaulters to provide additional procedural safeguards to borrowers. In 2020, the court struck down an RBI circular that sought to ban its regulated entities from dealing or settling in virtual currencies. The court found that the RBI had neither adduced any cogent evidence of the likely harm, nor had it considered any less intrusive alternative before issuing the circular. Consequently, the circular was held to be a disproportionate restriction on the fundamental right to conduct business in India.
Against this backdrop, the RRA’s recommendations assume significance. Although much softer than the FSRLC standards, they nevertheless signal a progressive step forward. Unlike the FSLRC or the Ministry of Finance, the RRA was a serving RBI Deputy Governor. Its recommendations would hopefully find greater acceptance within the central bank.
The RBI should heed these recommendations. It should ideally hardcode the suggested principles into a secondary legislation that is binding on itself. That would be the best way to signal that the central bank takes regulatory governance and rule of law seriously.
This column first appeared in the print edition on June 24, 2022, under the title, ‘Policy, not diktat’. Datta is a Senior Research Fellow at Shardul Amarchand Mangaldas & Co., New Delhi. Views are personal
Food security is one of the core indicators of economic development. The modernisation of agriculture has brought huge dividends in terms of ensuring food security to large swathes of people, apart from improving crop production.
A key element of sustainable food production is healthy soil because nearly 95 per cent of global food production depends on soil. The current status of soil health is worrisome.
Soil degradation on an unprecedented scale is a significant challenge to sustainable food production. About one-third of the earth’s soils is already degraded and alarmingly, about 90 per cent could be degraded by 2050 if no corrective action is taken. While soil degradation is believed to be occurring in 145 million hectares in India, it is estimated that 96.40 million hectares — about 30 per cent of the total geographical area — is affected by land degradation. Globally, the biophysical status of 5,670 million hectares of land is declining, of which 1,660 million hectares (29 per cent) is attributed to human-induced land degradation, according to the Food and Agriculture Organisation’s ‘State of Land, Soil and Water’ report.
The time has come for collective global action involving governments and civil society to reverse this alarming trend. Apart from natural causes, a variety of human activities lead to soil degradation. With the threat to food security looming large globally, compounded by the attendant hazard of serious damage to the environment, the need of the hour is to adopt innovative policies and agro-ecological practices that create healthy and sustainable food production systems.
Since ancient times in India, mother earth has been considered a divine entity and her worship is an integral part of the country’s civilisational ethos. One can find numerous reverential references to mother earth in the Vedas. In tune with this divine knowledge, Indian farmers since ancient times have followed sustainable and holistic agricultural practices. With changing times and a growing population, agriculturists adopted modern scientific techniques. Extensive use of fertilisers and pesticides led to the deterioration of soil health and contamination of water bodies and the food chain, which pose serious health risks to people and livestock.
Stressing the urgent need for action to reduce dependence on pesticides worldwide and to promote policies advocating healthy and sustainable food systems and agricultural production, “A Healthy Planet for Healthy Children’’ published by the United Nations Institute for Training and Research and the World Future Council highlighted success stories from various countries — including Sikkim in India, which became the first organic state in the world. It said: “The small northeast Indian state has succeeded in phasing out chemical pesticides and fertilisers gradually but resolutely and has converted the entire state to organic agriculture.”
As soil is a fragile and finite resource, sustainable land management practices are essential to ensure healthy soil. They are critical not only to preventing degradation but also to ensuring food security. Every effort must also be made to prevent soil erosion as it not only affects fertility but also increases the risk of floods and landslides.
The FAO’s latest ‘State of the World’s Land and Water Resources for Food and Agriculture’ says: “…soil pollution is also an issue. It knows no borders and compromises the food we eat, the water we drink and the air we breathe.
The excessive or inappropriate use of agrochemicals is one cause of the problem. The global annual production of
industrial chemicals has doubled since the beginning of the 21st century, to approximately 2.3 billion tonnes, and is projected to increase by 85 per cent by the end of the decade. Another challenge comes from salinisation, which affects 160 million hectares of cropland worldwide.” Soil degradation needs to be urgently addressed and reversed.
As stated by the Director-General of the FAO, Qu Dongyu in his address to the Global Forum for Food and Agriculture on January 28, “reversing soil degradation is vital if we want to feed a growing global population, protect biodiversity and help address the plant’s climate crisis”.
I compliment the Union government for having introduced the revolutionary soil health card scheme. Under the programme as of date, soil health cards have been distributed to about 23 crore farmers. The scheme has not only helped in improving the health of the soil, but has also benefited innumerable farmers by increasing crop production and their incomes. I am pleased to note that India is well on course to achieving the restoration of 26 million hectares of degraded land by 2030. A study conducted by the National Productivity Council in 2017 on this programme revealed that there has been a decrease in the use of chemical fertilisers in the range of 8-10 per cent as a result of the application of fertilisers and micro-nutrients as per the recommendations on the soil health cards. Overall, an increase in crop yields to the tune of 5-6 per cent was reported as a result.
Several studies have established that natural farming and organic farming are not only cost-effective but also lead to improvement in soil health and the farmland ecosystem.
I would also like to extend my deepest appreciation to Sadhguru for his “save soil campaign” and for completing 100 days of solo biking, traversing through 27 nations. His attempt to engage with heads of governments, experts and government officials for concerted action on saving soil is laudable.
From ordinary folk to those in the highest positions in governments, from farmers to CEOs, from scientists to school children, everybody must join this campaign to save the health of the planet and ensure food security. Each of us has a stake in this movement because our survival depends on dependable, sustainable food security.
This column first appeared in the print edition on June 24, 2022 under the title ‘Preparing soil for the future’. The writer is the Vice-President of India
Recently, the Government of India’s Mission Karmayogi programme to build civil service capacity received a $47 million boost from the World Bank.Prime Minister Narendra Modi championed capacity building in 2004 when, as the chief minister of Gujarat, he launched the “chintan shivir” to discuss policies with his ministers and bureaucrats. Today, his government must build capacity of a far more complex nature.
Before 1985, capacity building of the higher civil services primarily involved two-year induction training. For the lower civil services there were no trainings. In 1985, the then government recognised that a two-year induction training was insufficient for senior officers. IAS officers were mandated to attend a week-long training annually, and periodic four-week trainings to allow reflection and learnings.
In the early 2000s, the government launched a year-long professional programme in public policy at IIM-Bangalore followed by programmes in IIM Ahmedabad, MDI Gurgaon and TERI University. The government further strengthened the mid-career training for IAS officers by introducing Phases III, IV and V programmes at three different points of their career, in addition to Phases I and II (induction training). The rationale was that while the induction programmes equipped IAS officers to be good field officers, they needed different competencies at more senior levels.
Today, given our growth ambition, a massive scale-up in capacity-building is needed both at the political and bureaucratic levels. As democracies mature, elected representatives will play a more proactive role in policy making. It is, therefore, imperative that representatives are able to understand the nuances of policy making.
Such a programme must build capability to envision the future and work towards realising it. It must equip the entire chain of command to coordinate and steer the ship towards a national goal. A forward-looking mindset that can quickly seize opportunities and foresee threats is critical.
Capacity building must aim at building professionals in all domains, from technical experts to generalists. As policymaking gets more complex, respect for data and evidence-based decision making will gain importance. We won’t be able to afford top-level officials with little experience in the subject of their departments. Political leaders too would need to choose areas of specialisation.
Finally, building morale and self-respect among the frontline workers is critical. They include people like police constables, patwaris, gram sevaks, frontline clerks, office peons, postmen, etc. They must recognise that they are important members of the larger public management system, not mere cogs in the wheel.
Way back in 2004, while serving as Joint Secretary (Training) in the Union Department of Personnel and Training, one of us witnessed a three-day programme organised for safai karamcharis of the Satara Municipal Corporation. In scenic Panchgani, nearly 600 sanitation workers participated in the workshop, which included complimentary health checks, interactive problem-solving exercises, and other customised edutainment programmes. The participants left the session feeling respected, with a promise to put their newly acquired learnings to use. A month later, when our team visited Satara, they found that the workers had proactively set up a waste segregation system by educating each household within their ward. When asked if they were concerned that a drop in garbage collection would render them jobless, a woman employee replied: “Our job is not to clean the city, but to keep the city clean”. This change in attitudes is the power of training.
The good news is that India already has everything it needs to scale up capacity building. The existing institutions and educational centres, as well as the available expertise and knowledge base, can appropriately support trainings for various grades of civil servants. However, at the heart of such a massive capacity-building exercise is logistics — if existing institutions are used to their full capacity, there won’t be a need to invest in more brick-and-mortar establishments. Investments in high-quality learning material and using a pedagogy that is appropriate to the group, rather than standard classroom lectures, will be a better use of funds.
This column first appeared in the print edition on June 24, 2022 under the title ‘How to train a Karmayogi’. Agarwal is CEO, World Resources Institute India. Kaushik is head, Communications, WRI India. Views are personal
No country has as much area under farming as India. At 169.3 million hectares (mh) in 2019, its land used for crop cultivation was higher than that of the US (160.4 mh), China (135.7 mh), Russia (123.4 mh) or Brazil (63.5 mh). With its perennial Himalayan rivers and average annual rainfall of nearly 1,200 mm – against Russia’s 475 mm, China’s 650 mm and the US’s 750 mm – India has no dearth of land, water and sunshine to sustain vibrant agriculture. Which it has for 3,000 years and more.
But there’s one resource in which the country is short and heavily import-dependent — mineral fertilisers. In 2021-22, India imported 10.16 million tonnes (mt) of urea, 5.86 mt of di-ammonium phosphate (DAP) and 2.91 mt of muriate of potash (MOP). In value terms, imports of all fertilisers touched an all-time high of $12.77 billion last fiscal.
That figure, however, presents an incomplete picture. In 2021-22, India also produced 25.07 mt of urea, 4.22 mt of DAP, 8.33 mt of complex fertilisers (containing nitrogen-N, phosphorus-P, potassium-K and sulphur-S in different ratios) and 5.33 mt of single super phosphate (SSP). The intermediates or raw materials for the manufacture of these fertilisers were substantially imported.
Take urea, whose primary feedstock is natural gas. In 2021-22, India imported 23.42 mt of liquefied natural gas (LNG) valued at $13.47 billion. As per the petroleum ministry’s data, the fertiliser sector’s share in the consumption of re-gasified LNG was over 41 per cent. The industry’s LNG imports would have, then, been worth more than $5.5 billion.
For DAP, domestic manufacturers import intermediate chemicals, namely phosphoric acid and ammonia. Some even produce phosphoric acid by importing rock phosphate and sulphuric acid. The latter can be further made from the import of sulphur. During the last fiscal, 6.44 mt of phosphoric acid, 2.31 mt of ammonia, 9.66 mt of rock phosphate, 1.92 mt of sulphuric acid and 1.90 mt of sulphur were imported into the country.
Table 1 shows the total value of fertiliser imports by India, inclusive of inputs used in domestic production, was a whopping $24.3 billion in 2021-22. There are two costs here. The first is foreign exchange outgo: Imports are mostly from China, Oman, UAE and Egypt (urea); China, Saudi Arabia and Morocco (DAP); Belarus, Canada, Russia, Israel and Jordan (MOP); Qatar, US, UAE and Nigeria (LNG); Morocco, Jordan, Senegal and Tunisia (phosphoric acid); Saudi Arabia and Qatar (ammonia); and Jordan, Morocco, Egypt and Togo (rock phosphate). The second cost is fiscal. Fertilisers are not only imported, but Indian farmers also pay below what it costs to import or manufacture using imported inputs. The difference is paid as a subsidy by the government. That bill was Rs 1,53,658.11 crore or $20.6 billion in 2021-22 and projected at Rs 2,50,000 crore ($32 billion) this fiscal.
Both costs are unsustainably high to bear for a mineral resource-poor country. We are feeling it, especially with global prices of urea, DAP, MOP, phosphoric acid, ammonia and LNG soaring two to two-and-a-half times in the last year (they have softened a bit of late). There was a time farmers had to be incentivised to use chemical fertilisers for boosting crop yields. Today, they have to be restrained from over-application. Farmers should know India imports half of its natural gas requirement – that will only go up – and hardly has any mineable rock phosphate, potash or elemental sulphur reserves.
There is a need, first of all, to cap or even reduce consumption of high-analysis fertilisers – particularly urea (46 per cent N content), DAP (18 per cent N and 46 per cent P) and MOP (60 per cent).
One way to do this is by incorporating urease and nitrification inhibition compounds in urea. These are basically chemicals that slow down the rate at which urea is hydrolysed (resulting in the production of ammonia gas and its release into the atmosphere) and nitrified (leading to below-ground loss of nitrogen through leaching). By reducing ammonia volatilisation and nitrate leaching, more nitrogen is made available to the crop, enabling farmers to harvest the same, if not better, yields with a lesser number of urea bags. Together with products such as liquid “nano urea” – their ultra-small particle size is conducive to easier absorption by the plants than with bulk fertilisers, translating into higher nitrogen use efficiency – it is possible to achieve a 20 per cent or more drop in urea consumption from the present 34-35 mt levels. That works out to 6.5-7 mt fewer imports, equivalent to $4.5-5 billion at current prices.
A second route is by promoting sales of SSP (containing 16 per cent P and 11 per cent S) and complex fertilisers such as “20:20:0:13” and “10:26:26”. DAP use should be restricted mainly to paddy and wheat; other crops don’t require fertilisers with 46 per cent P content. India can also import more rock phosphate to make SSP directly or it can be converted into “weak” phosphoric acid. The latter, having only about 29 per cent P (compared to 52-54 per cent in normal “strong” merchant-grade phosphoric acid), is good enough for manufacturing “20:20:0:13”, “10:26:26” and other low-analysis complex fertilisers.
As regards MOP, roughly three-fourths of the imported material is now applied directly and only the balance is sold after incorporating into complexes. It should be the other way around. India, to re-emphasise, needs to wean its farmers away from all high-analysis fertilisers. That movement, to use more NPKS complexes and SSP, is already happening (Table 2). It requires a concerted push, alongside popularising high nutrient use-efficient water-soluble fertilisers (potassium nitrate, potassium sulphate, calcium nitrate, etc) and exploiting alternative indigenous sources (for example, potash derived from molasses-based distillery spent-wash and from seaweed extract).
Finally, no plan to cap/reduce consumption of high-analysis fertilisers can succeed without farmers knowing what is a suitable substitute for DAP and which NPK complex or organic manure can bring down their urea application from 2.5 to 1.5 bags per acre. It calls for agriculture departments and universities not just revisiting their existing crop-wise nutrient application recommendations, but disseminating this information to farmers on a campaign mode.
Prasad is a fertiliser industry veteran and Damodaran is National Rural Affairs & Agriculture Editor of The Indian Express
Although the latest virtual Brics summit hosted by China sought to exhibit cohesion between the group members, the cracks were all too visible. While Chinese President Xi Jinping spoke about win-win cooperation and the need to reject Cold War mentality, Prime Minister Narendra Modi highlighted the need for cooperation for post-pandemic recovery and emphasised the various areas – from vaccine R&D to the establishment of a shared satellite constellation – where the platform is delivering for the people. But the fact that the summit was being held against the backdrop of the continuing India-China border tensions and the Russian invasion of Ukraine could not be missed.
There is no escaping the fact that Russia and China have formed a special compact between them to rewrite the rules of the global order. And for the foreseeable future the two countries will use their combined resources to achieve their mutual strategic goals. But these goals are likely to be against Indian interests. Already Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has put a huge strain on India’s defence sector which is significantly dependent on Russian weapons platforms. Similarly, the rise of an assertive China under Xi means that Beijing will not compromise on the border issue and keep pushing New Delhi on this as and when it politically suits it. In fact, these developments have already shrunk the scope of cooperation between India and China, and India and Russia.
Nonetheless, nothing is permanent in international politics. The course of the Ukraine war remains unpredictable whereas China’s political trajectory has hardly been linear. Thus, it makes sense for Brics countries to maintain contact and cooperate wherever possible. But as things stand, India’s interests lie in aligning more with the West to counter Chinese aggression and diversify away from Russian military equipment.
Minutes of the June meeting of RBI’s Monetary Policy Committee (MPC) provide an inkling of the probable impact on GDP following the 0.90 percentage points increase in repo rate since May. Currently, RBI estimates GDP in 2022-23 will grow 7.2%. There are likely to be more repo rate hikes in future MPC meetings. Given this scenario, one estimate in the MPC minutes points to the possibility of an average GDP growth rate of 6-7% till end March 2024. Monetary tightening is inevitable but smart fiscal policy can ensure the average growth is higher.
The surge in inflation is not because of excess demand. If anything, demand is tepid. For example, the per capita private consumption in 2021-22 was Rs 61,215, a level below the pre-pandemic year. The source of inflation is the supply side. RBI is forced to tighten policy to head off second-round effects. If the supply side is the source of the problem, the remedy lies in fiscal policy. To give an example, extra cereals issued free to counter the pandemic fallout are likely holding down the pressure for higher wages. Similarly, the two cuts in fuel taxes since November quickly influenced survey results of household inflation expectations.
The current surge in inflation is fundamentally different from the last one during the UPA era, which was triggered by loose fiscal policy after five years of high economic growth. This round of inflation calls for readjusting fiscal policy to counter a growth slowdown. It can be done without threatening debt sustainability as inflation will push up nominal GDP growth and help GoI and states overshoot budgetary tax estimates.
Governments need to carefully time the removal of post-pandemic welfare and also fulfil capital expenditure commitments. The latter will offset uncertainties faced by private firms and, thereby, crowd in new investment. This effect is important to limit the negative impact of rising interest rates on economic growth. Disinflation can be brought about without burying growth impulses. Average growth rates can be above 7%, the minimum India needs in the medium term.
Already in the midst of a humanitarian crisis since Taliban’s takeover last year, Wednesday’s earthquake, which killed 1,000-plus people in initial estimates, has put Afghanistan on the brink of an even bigger disaster. Rescue efforts are reported to be inadequate, and food and medicines in severe short supply in the area. Afghanistan needs a massive aid effort and countries that can afford to help, India included, must act fast. That Taliban has asked for help is a first step. Aid-givers must be aware however that the challenge is huge.
Afghanistan’s disaster management system was poorly resourced even before Taliban came back. There are few aircraft and helicopters available to rescuers, and some reports suggest even for these qualified pilots are not easy to find. The pre-Taliban, US-backed Kabul government is, of course, responsible for this, because billions in financial help were lost to corruption. Nearly $19 billion was eaten up by “fraud, wastage and abuse” according to the US Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction. This, in a country where over 7,000 people have been killed in quakes over the last decade. Worse was to follow – Taliban’s takeover led to mass exits of foreign staff of humanitarian organisations operating in Afghanistan, since there were genuine security concerns. This led to a near collapse of the Afghan healthcare system even before the quake.
Theoretically, the lack of trained staff can be tackled by India and other countries sending personnel along with rescue machinery, medicines and food. But Taliban doesn’t seem to be in full control of the security situation in Afghanistan, as highlighted by the recent IS terror attack on the Karte Parwan Gurdwara in Kabul. So, even if Taliban is eager to receive help, sending personnel to Afghanistan is a tough call for any government. And it’s particularly tricky for India. The quake-affected region borders Pakistan, and any Indian rescue and aid team will be in constant danger of opportunistic attacks by Pakistan-backed militant groups. New Delhi’s best option is to be very generous but work through the UN.
The Beijing Declaration issued at the 14th Brics Leaders' Summit demonstrates the role India can play on the global stage. That the outcome of a group that includes China and Russia should not have any anti-Europe or anti-US reference in any shape or form is to India's credit.
This should make New Delhi's position on the Russian invasion of Ukraine abundantly clear ahead of Narendra Modi's participation at the G7 leaders' summit in Germany beginning this weekend. India, along with South Africa, Argentina, Indonesia, Senegal and Ukraine, are special invitees to the G7 summit at Schloß Elmau.
The Brics joint statement takes a balanced line on Ukraine focusing on the humanitarian situation. The statement reiterates commitment to the principles of the UN Charter. Clearly, anything more would be difficult given the membership of Brics, and that Xi Jinping virtually blamed Ukraine for the invasion in his address to the business meet of the summit.
Rather than allowing Brics to become a platform for the 'anti-US or anti-EU' sentiment, India was successful in guiding the group towards its original intent - reforms and democratisation of existing multilateral and intra-governmental bodies. The joint statement reiterates the call for reforms in the UN, particularly the Security Council, as well as other multilateral governance bodies.
There is a growing need to make governance of international and multilateral bodies more open and democratic, and allow for its structures to be more reflective of the changing world. This is the message India needs to drive home at the G7 meet, too. Maintaining its place in groups completely at odds with each other can be a strain. But, for now, India is playing its role to keep temperatures down with aplomb.
( Originally published on Jun 24, 2022 )<
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The median salary for chief executive officers (CEOs) in India, according to a recent survey by audit and consulting firm Deloitte, climbed 19% in 2021-22 after declining by 7.25% in 2020-21. This compares with a 19% rise in nominal GDP in 2021-22 after a 1% decline in the prior year.
But over these two years, the market capitalisation of Indian stocks has gyrated wildly - from a low of 56% of GDP in 2019-20 to 104% of GDP in the following year and 112% in 2021-22. The question, then, is how effectively is CEO remuneration linked to company performance?
Indian CEOs earn a few basis points of the profits that they deliver to shareholders. This leaves them with little skin in the game, although half their pay is at risk. A ₹100 crore business bet gone right or wrong would increase or decrease their wealth by a few days' earnings. Yet, the shareholder, who has outsourced managerial risk-taking, is affected much more profoundly.
The usual commentary swirling around manager salaries tends to be drowned out by the noise over their level. Instead, it should focus on how the pay is structured. Managers are required to create wealth, rather than have shareholders handing them a part of theirs. Without the right indexation, CEO salary hikes can become a bureaucratic exercise that neither rewards excellence nor penalises failure, which goes quite against the hallowed notion of the free market. The degree of flexibility in pay of company bosses does not actually differ much from that of their subordinates as it would appear on paper.
India gets around this conundrum by keeping the managerial talent pool within business families. The promoter-manager drives a balance between investor and executive interests. But that is self-limiting - it stifles entrepreneurship. India has not been able to build a cadre of managers that gets exposure to business decisions they would, for instance, receive in the US. Indian professional managers shine there, but find it limiting at home. Some of these issues have manager remuneration at the core.
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When leaders of seven of the world’s wealthiest nations meet at a resort in Germany’s Bavarian Alps this weekend, the focus will be on the war in Ukraine and its fallout, which has exacerbated the global economic crisis triggered by Covid-19. The United States (US) is expected to raise the challenges posed by China at the G7 Summit to be held during June 26-28 at Schloss Elmau, a castle located an hour south of Munich. Germany, the current chair of G7, has invited the leaders of India, Argentina, Indon-esia, Senegal and South Africa as part of the group-ing’s efforts to broaden engagement with the global South. Prime Minister Narendra Modi will partici-pate in two special sessions devoted to the climate crisis, energy and health, food security and gender equality. Though Ukraine is expected to be at the top of the agenda, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz has said that the war should not shift the focus from other challenges, such as the continuing pandemic and the climate crisis.
The US is expected to present proposals to keep up the pressure on Russia to end the war with Ukraine, while outlining its vision of a free and open world order capable of standing up to the challenges from China. The US focus on Russia and China is evident from the fact that President Joe Biden will head from the G7 summit to a summit of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization in Madrid (June 29-30), which is expected to endorse a new strategic concept to address threats emanating from Russia and, for the first time, China.
The inclusion of countries such as India and Indo-nesia is an acknowledgement by the world’s most industrialised nations that some global problems — such as the climate crisis and food and health security — cannot be addressed without the involvement of the developing world. While there may be calls from some quarters at the summit for India to change its position on the conflict in Ukraine or to reduce the accelerated purchase of discounted Russian energy, New Delhi has shown it is more than capable of standing up to such pressure. For the Indian side, the focus at the summit and bilateral meetings that Mr Modi will hold on the side-lines will be on the challenges in the Indo-Pacific, including the sluggish post-pandemic economic recovery, and China’s assertiveness. In an increasingly uncertain world, these meetings may set the contours of what a rules-based order may look like in the years to come.
Depending on who you talk to in Maharashtra, there are many explanations for the Shiv Sena palace coup.
Some argue that the man often described as the wiliest and most opaque strategist across parties, Sharad Pawar, has been in on the plan all along to try and topple the Uddhav Thackeray-led coalition (Maha Vikas Aghadi). The signs were clear, they say. During the recent elections to the Maharashtra legislative council, when both Sena and Congress legislators allegedly defied party orders and cross-voted, Pawar’s Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) sailed through comfortably, getting five extra votes than it had. In the end, the MVA won one seat less than what it should have, based on its assembly strength.
The other point of suspicion is that the state home ministry is with the NCP, leading many to ask how scores of Sena legislators could make their way to Gujarat without a whiff of intelligence about the move with the police. And then, of course, there is the role of his nephew, Ajit Pawar, which has been under scrutiny for almost three years now. The man who famously joined hands with the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)’s Devendra Fadnavis in 2019 for an early morning swearing-in ceremony, only to be described as a Trojan horse as the experiment unravelled, has once again raised eyebrows for his inscrutable behaviour. He recently shared a stage with Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Fadnavis at the inauguration of a temple in Pune.
Another conspiracy theory is that Thackeray was a protagonist in the orchestrated move to break the counter-intuitive coalition with non-BJP parties, ahead of the critical elections to Mumbai’s cash-rich and influential civic body. But the beleaguered chief minister (CM) was overwhelmed by what Sena leaders call “backstabbing by his closest lieutenant [the state urban development minister Eknath Shinde]”. His visible sense of injury and shock belies this theory. So now, Thackeray has decided to fight to the finish. Legal action has been sought against 16 of the rebel MLAs, and clearly, the calculation is that those remaining will not want to resign their seats (a requirement to escape anti-defection laws) and, hence, will return to the family fold.
The abandonment of Hindutva, though touted as a critical reason by the Shinde camp, is a camouflage for the relentless nature of realpolitik. After all, Shinde, as a senior leader of the Sena, was among those who drafted the common minimum programme for the coalition government.
In politics, the most obvious and mundane reason is often the likeliest one. In this case, though Thackeray positioned himself as an approachable, grounded CM, winning accolades during the pandemic from citizens who may have been otherwise ideologically opposed to his party, he did not offer the same access to his party colleagues.
As a result, the Sena’s legislators — as opposed to Sainiks on the streets who are still loyal to the Balasaheb Thackeray legacy — grew increasingly miffed at the coterie around the CM. “We will look within, of course,” Priyanka Chaturvedi, Sena Member of Parliament told me, “but be very clear, there is only one Sena and that is the Sena of Uddhav Thackeray, a man regarded as the best chief minister in India”.
Despite those rallying behind the Thackerays in loyalty, there are essential lessons for not just the Sena, but all political parties, especially family-based regional outfits. The Maharashtra debacle is an instructive reminder from the BJP, yet again, to its challengers. Fadnavis, the former CM, has been chafing at the Sena for walking away from him and his party since 2019. After the cross-voting in the legislative council — and a similar spectacular victory in the Rajya Sabha elections the week before — he triumphantly called out how the BJP got votes from its opponents. Yet, the Sena-led government was complacent. Despite a similar collapse of non-BJP governments in Madhya Pradesh and Karnataka in recent years, the Thackerays got too comfortable.
The Maharashtra Mahabharata is another illustration of the 24x7 machinery that is the BJP, which considers no battle too small to attempt a fight. It is also a warning to all dynasty-driven parties built on power inherited down the generations and concentrated within one family. You may be your party’s biggest brand, but you can still be ousted or come perilously close to it, much like founders of companies have been abruptly eased out by shareholders and venture capitalists. The family name is a shield, but one that is not bulletproof to the assaults from the competition, both within and from outside.
Uddhav Thackeray is counting on the law to live to fight another day. But while he may prevail legally — and it could yet be a protracted war of technicalities — he will still have to manage the politics that brought him to the brink.
What is over is his presumed invincibility as the undisputed leader of the Sena. And for family-run parties across India, that is the message in the tea leaves they need to read.
Barkha Dutt is an award-winning journalist and author
The views expressed are personal
It’s yet to stream into India, but Good Luck to You, Leo Grande is already top on my must-watch list. A 60-something-year-old played by 63-year-old Emma Thompson looking for sexual pleasure! A nude scene!! It’s Armageddon.
Or, depending on where you stand, high time someone spoke up. “Women and their bodies — period, menopause — we’re not talking about any of this yet,” Thompson told Glamour magazine.
While we’ve been chipping away at the traditional silence around menstruation — tennis player Qinwen Zheng blamed menstrual cramps for her defeat in Paris and closer home, we even have a mainstream film on pads and menstrual hygiene — its progression to menopause is still deemed too awful to talk about.
Yet, menopause is real; its consequences and symptoms experienced by half this world’s population.
A recent survey in the United Kingdom (UK) finds that one in 10 women has quit a job due to menopausal symptoms. The Indian Menopause Society estimates that 150 million women in India live with it, symptoms of which could include hot flushes and night sweats. With the average age of 46.2 (lower than the global 50), a woman who lives to full life can expect to spend a third of it living with menopause.
One third of our lives. But when was the last time you heard someone, anyone — in a movie, in a play, in a public speech, in a survey, in an ad — talk about it?
Netflix’s Bombay Begums has a scene where the 49-year-old female lead, Rani, abruptly walks out of a meeting to rush to the washroom where she splashes water on her face. That’s what a hot flush looks like. And it’s telling that even in fiction, Rani wants to hide it from her colleagues.
In real life, in her 2020 podcast, former US first lady Michelle Obama talks about dealing with a hot flush aboard the presidential helicopter. Women of a certain age, she added, lose their value in society “unlike men, who gain value the older they get. And those images are propagated on television where you see the frumpy, funny, old guy with the young, vivacious…or even if she’s our age, she’s perfect.”
Those perfect images surely miss the point. The challenge is not to look 25 at 50, but to normalise looking 50 at 50. Well into her late 60s, the late feminist Kamala Bhasin asked why people assumed it was a compliment to tell a woman she didn’t look her age. Certainly, all of us, women of a certain age, would relate to the patently false “compliment” of being told at every birthday: But you don’t look 40 (or 50, or 60, or whatever age we’re supposed to be ashamed of owning).
On June 7, ministers and civil servants in the UK signed a Menopause Workplace Pledge. Its message is simple: To recognise the impact of menopause and support women who are affected.
It’s a tiny beginning. But a good place to start.
Namita Bhandare writes on gender
The views expressed are personal
The image of angry young men has been an essential part of the popular culture in post-independence India.
With time, however, the nature and texture of these images have changed. And in these changes lies the political economy story of independent India.
1950s: Mother India’s Birju and the vexed agrarian question
The earliest, and, till date, one of the most powerful, images of an angry young man in popular culture is that of Birju played by Sunit Dutt in Mother India, a 1957 cult classic.
There is a scene in the film where Briju, armed with a spear, confronts the village moneylender, who has come to take his usury-based share in Birju’s family farm’s produce. The conflict between hapless farmers and the predatory money lender, who was often the local landlord as well, which was shown in Mother India, was the central economic contradiction in India’s villages in the first few decades after independence. Birju, after he has killed the money lender, is eventually killed by his mother in the climax of Mother India, perhaps in keeping with the social hegemony against the idea of class violence in those times.
Debates around these issues were not confined to films alone. However, Mother India was ahead of its times. Ten years after Mother India’s release, peasants in a North Bengal village called Naxalbari unleashed what was to become the first in a long chain of Maoist violence in India, which was initially targeted against the epitome of feudal oppression, the village landowner.
To be sure, India had seen violent conflict between peasantry and the landlord class even before the Naxalbari violence.
Whether or not Indian agriculture was feudal or was it already moving towards a capitalist mode of production was the subject of among the most interesting and polarised debates the Indian economic landscape has ever seen. Most of this debate was carried in the pages of the Economic and Political Weekly (EPW).
In 1990, the Samkeeksha Trust which brings out the EPW, republished the important papers in this debate in a book form. In her introduction to Agrarian Relation and Accumulation: The 'Mode of Production' Debate in India, Utsa Patnaik, one of India’s most eminent Marxist economists, who was herself a participant in the Mode of Production Debate, underlines the larger question around such a debate.
“The starting point of the broader debate lay in a dual dissatisfaction as far as this author was concerned: first, with the idea that the mechanisms and trajectory of development of an ex-colonial country like India were in their essentials the same as those for the western capitalist countries; and secondly, with the idea that India was part of a world capitalist ‘periphery’, a mere appendage integrated through exchange, with the western world”, Patnaik wrote.
Patnaik’s argument in favour of Indian agriculture already showing capitalist tendencies and her theorisation of the “rent barrier” in Indian agriculture – where the rich landlords had the capacity to invest but did not have to incentive to, and the poor peasantry wanted to invest but did not have the means to it – continues to be relevant even today in some ways, as has been argued in a recent paper by Srishti Yadav, the findings of which were discussed in an earlier version of this column.
That agrarian politics is a lost cause in India was best portrayed in a 2010 film Peepli Live, where the protagonist, Nattha, is anything but an angry young man and runs away from his village (and farms) to overcome the agrarian crisis. Nattha’s fate is in keeping with the fact that construction work has emerged as the biggest source of non-farm employment in India in the post-reform period.
1970s: Deewar’s Vijay against India’s rotten and shackled licence quota raj ridden economy
By the 1970s, both the post-independence planning honeymoon and the Nehruvian hegemony which gave the Congress its political carte-blanche, were over. The Indian economy was facing problems of food shortages, high inflation, low growth and to top it all, widespread corruption abetted by the state itself. Even though the Congress had failed to deliver, progressive politics, at least of the Left-leaning trade union variety in the cities, was not getting anywhere close to capturing political power.
It must have been a coincidence but the in 1975, the year Deewar was released, India’s powers-that-be felt so scared of the growing democratic anger that the central government, under Indira Gandhi’s leadership, imposed the Emergency the same year.
It was this anger and betrayal which Yash Chopra’s Deewar sought to capture, where Vijay, played by Amitabh Bachchan, the son of a coerced but compromised trade union leader, takes to the world of crime – smuggling goods, an inevitable byproduct of India’s trade restrictions then – to carve out a better life for himself even as his brother Ravi, played by Shashi Kapoor, decides to brave the odds within the system and becomes a police officer. Even though it is Ravi who is the proverbial hero, as an honest policeman who shoots his own brother to uphold the law, it was the rebel Vijay who captured public imagination of the angry and disappointed youth in the country.
Deewar was as much about an angry young man’s anger, as it was a subtle critique of the economic system. You could not do well in business unless you were willing to break the law. As far as taking up progressive or revolutionary politics was concerned, it was by and large a lost cause. Once again, economists have written extensively on the mutation of what was intended to be a state-led planning based model to make the most of India’s limited resources at independence into a rotten, corrupt and widely unfair licence raj rent seeking based system.
1990s: DDLJ’s Raj and the reforms-sparked rebellion rebel against social conservatism
In 1991, India did away with most of its licence permit raj system as finance minister Manmohan Singh announced a new industrial policy. In 1993, Infosys, India’s first IT Sector Giant, had its IPO, which, in more ways than one, signalled the forthcoming IT sector boom. This boom would not only make billionaires out of entrepreneurs but also create millions of white collar workers from humble Indian families and literally open the gates of the first world for them.
It is not surprising that the typical Indian angry man was rebelling not on economic issues but against social conservatism. The best portrayal of it was in the character of Raj, played by Shahrukh Khan in the 1995 mega hit Dilwale Dulhaniya Le Jayenge, taking all troubles to win parental approval from a conservative Indian father; even though the latter is a successful businessman in London, to marry his lover.
Once again, popular culture was not speaking in a vacuum. The 1990s was the decade of the retreat of the macro class question from the economic landscape. Mumbai, the seat of popular culture in India, had seen its biggest manifestation in terms of the unsuccessful textile mill strike of the 1980s, which left hundreds of thousands of workers defeated and destroyed.
Caste and communalism became the driving factors behind politics and somewhere within their subconscious, the architects of popular culture wanted people to believe that the promise of economic reforms will make these problems disappear. While a section of the Left intelligentsia kept arguing against the so-called ill-effects of “neoliberal policies”, there was enough upward mobility within the system or at least the promise of it to make sure that they were largely seen as naysayers.
2000s: Rang De Basanti and the volcanic eruption against corruption
Released in 2006, Rang De Basanti painted a political landscape which would play out five years later. It pointed to corruption at the highest levels (the film shows this with the Defence Minister), called out the system for not being able to do anything about it, showed the opposition as being complicit, and portrayed corruption as something completely antithetical to the idea of the nation. The Anna Movement of 2011, which demanded a radical Lokpal legislation was very similar to Rang De Basanti, as least in terms of its rhetoric.
Once again, the larger macroeconomic message was difficult not to see. India’s problem was not some structural macroeconomic question. It was still corruption at the high table – the United Progressive Alliance (UPA) government was seen as having destroyed Indian economy’s dream run because of rampant corruption – and what was really needed was fresh politics. In some ways, Mani Ratnam’s Yuva which preceded Rang De Basanti by two years also conveyed the same message.
The vacuum in the post-Modi phase
If there is something to be said about the proverbial hero in the popular culture under the Modi government, he shows determination and commitment, rather than anger against the State and the system.
There have been films portraying the surgical strikes (Uri), India’s successful 1998 nuclear tests; also under a BJP government (Parmanu), heroes taking it upon themselves to promote erstwhile taboos such as menstrual health (Padman) and even championing government schemes to boost local level entrepreneurs (Sui Dhaga: Made in India).
While it is easy and tempting to brand such efforts as being pro-regime, what is equally true is that such portrayal in popular culture was only in keeping with the popular aspiration and optimism that the current regime’s policies have the potential to economically uplift mass of the people. The fact that the Bharatiya Janata Party has been winning election after election despite the Indian economy losing growth momentum since 2017-18 and even after the pandemic forced a contraction (with most independent economists criticising it), speaks volumes against such a belief.
2022: The unemployed angry young man fighting austerity
To be sure, unemployment is not a problem which has arisen in 2020s in India. However, if one were to go back just a decade ago, it was increasingly believed that India’s unemployment wars would be fought as reservation wars. One erstwhile dominant peasant caste after another — from the Jats in Haryana to the Patidars and Marathas in Gujarat and Maharashtra — was out in the streets demanding reservations in government jobs. They were not averse to destroying public property in this pursuit as well.
The reason was simple. A false sense of complacency about land ownership being enough to take care of their economic needs, these intermediate castes did not invest enough in education earlier and therefore suddenly found themselves unable to partake in the new economy private sector employment story. The only way to prevent economic ruin was to ask for reservation in government jobs and ensure a soft landing for the current generation.
The fact that the opposition has been gunning for demands such as caste census, that the BJP government at the Centre has constituted a committee to re-stratify OBC reservations, and terms such as dominant and non-dominant OBCs have entered the political lexicon in India, are testimony to these factors.
However, six months into 2022, things are suddenly looking different. In January 2022, there were large scale protests, including some violent ones over delay and irregularities recruitments for blue-collar railway jobs. This month, we have seen a replication of the railway protests, only on a bigger scale, against apprehensions over armed forces changing their recruitment model to a more casual (aimed at resource saving) variety.
To be fair, the Narendra Modi government has not created the impossible-to-climb austerity wall of hopelessness, which millions of India’s unemployed young men and women are finding themselves against. Almost all states regularly see massive protests of casual workers such as para teachers, which are a creation of austerity measures in state employment. Because railways and armed forces are nation-level employers, protests against austerity measures in related employment have grabbed national and not just regional headlines.
The larger macroeconomic contradiction is crystal clear. The Indian state’s fiscal concerns or lack of capacity does not allow it to offer assured public sector employment of the kind it has been offering in the same numbers anymore. The job-seekers, devoid of skills which would make them competitive in the best parts of the Indian labour market, are seeing this is as signs of a future disaster and also frittering away of benefits which movements reservations, for instance, have or would have ensured for them.
Both politics and popular culture are still coming to terms with this new anger. One can say with a lot of confidence that this anger is not going anywhere anytime soon.
It remains to be seen which one among politics and popular culture catches up with the mood of the masses first. The latter of course, will find it easier, because it does not necessarily have to solve it to find popular traction.
Post Script: It is this author’s lack of linguistic capabilities rather than a belief in Hindi being the be all and end all of popular culture in India which has made him choose examples from Hindi films to describe popular culture.
Every Friday, HT’s data and political economy editor, Roshan Kishore, combines his commitment to data and passion for qualitative analysis in a column for HT Premium, Terms of Trade. With a focus on one big number and one big issue, he will go behind the headlines to ask a question and address political economy issues and social puzzles facing contemporary India.
The views expressed are personal
What lessons on moving through the world might we harvest from the film dances of Sridevi and Madhuri Dixit? A few days ago, I used Instagram to ask friends a highly charged question: Sridevi or Madhuri Dixit?
Specifically, I was interested in how they were perceived as queer icons. The responses weighed overwhelmingly in favour of Sridevi, though both actors had passionate fans. Sridevi created surreal and absurd figures, who are rather like the theorist Donna Haraway’s cyborg in their rejection of rigid taxonomies or boundaries. She would take camp 80s costuming to new heights as she portrayed unreal characters doing unreal things in unreal spaces.
Madhuri Dixit was the fresh-faced girl-next-door, whose characters stood out for tiny sparks of rebellion, yet often returning, ultimately, to safe, plausible conformity. Her dancing, though, was singled out for praise, for its fluidity and effortlessness, whether she danced for a lover on a dark night or for a crowd of appreciative people. In dancing, she was at home in her body and at ease with the world. Dance like her, and perhaps you could find a home in the body too, feeling utterly secure in your own skin.
Over the weekend, I did a deep dive into the world of Sridevi and Madhuri, reflecting on the cinematic universes they created, and on how their movement sat in my own body. Growing up in the 90s, I was obsessed with embodying the exaggerated femininity of Bollywood dancing, and each filmic reference — a televised song, a photoshoot in the Bombay Times, or a magazine interview with an actor — assumed an amplified significance.
Though I had little access to full-length films and was expected to devote my time to schoolwork, Bollywood was ubiquitous enough for fantasy embodiments to go unchallenged and unnoticed. Aged eight, I channelled my inner Madhuri in a spirited but not very age-appropriate performance of mera piya ghar aaya (my lover is home) from Yaarana (1995) for an enthusiastic audience of family elders on Raksha Bandhan. This hip-thrusting, bosom-heaving femininity was, quite thrillingly, at odds with how I was instructed to behave and dress in school, the contours of my body obscured by a pleated pinafore that mandatorily ended two inches below the knee.
I was never proficient with the lyrics and the steps, and sought to make up for the absence of textual and choreographic form with an excess of speed. Clad in limp nightclothes, I manifested an umbrella-cut ghagra whirling around me as I spun, the speed of my movement keeping gravity at bay. When I stopped, there was a thrilling and unfocused transition between the end of the movement and the reappearance of gravity, as I struggled to find my balance. Sometimes, to recover, I would spin the other way, almost as if I were unspooling myself from the fantasy I had just embodied. Bollywood dancing, in its ubiquity and unfamiliarity, offered an escape from steady composure and poised verticality.
As an adult, this recklessness is what I look to Bollywood dancing for. My primary movement training is in the classical dance style of Odissi. Except in snippets of stylised movement or narrative, Odissi is relentlessly vertical, made up of a vocabulary of movements across space — footwork, spins, gaits, and leaps.
Your relationship to gravity is reinforced as you spring out from the earth to project a performative presence, outwards and upwards, your feet stamping sharply to punctuate this relationship and tether you to gravity, balance, and control. Conversely, “Bollywood dancing”, for me, as an evolving pastiche of borrowed and improvised movement, offers a counterpoint to the pressures of verticality. Danced mostly in familiar or private spaces, it affords a heady loss of control. The body is constantly playing catch-up, simultaneously embodying and feeling the after-effects of that embodiment.
I write this after a pandemic that has given us a new awareness of how our bodies perform social codes. Through instruction and observation, we learn how to be in social spaces. Stay at a distance when you speak to someone. Spread out your arms and stand still as you are frisked at security points. Stand up for the national anthem. We are constantly being told how to occupy space. The loss of verticality, then, is the possibility of temporarily resisting this relentless instruction.
I am mindful of my privilege in finding safe spaces for the loss of verticality and control within Bollywood dancing. Yet, I am also fascinated by how my body can shake off decades of somatic, social and cultural conditioning to move recklessly. What does it mean to rehearse recklessness as resistance?
Classical dance spends a great deal of time training the body to move effortlessly. Performance is framed as the pointed absence of effort; it takes a lot to be dancing, but the audience needn’t know that. Madhuri’s dancing epitomises that effortlessness; it looks so easy and feels so good, even if your body doesn’t hold the movement quite like hers does.
Sridevi is all about the effort. You see the toll the dancing takes on her body as she spins deliriously in Chaalbaaz, the movement continuing to reverberate through her body as she comes to an abrupt stop after slapping her uncle mid-performance. This sense of studied effort persists in the awkwardness of Hawa Hawai from Mr India (1987), where she pretends to be a Hawaiian dancer. She seems to try out the movement instead of dancing it, and that highlights how fragile the pretence is. There is a treacherous chasm between the actor and the character she portrays, and you are constantly reminded of it — in how she crashes into guests at the party, or teeters forwards and backwards, testing the limits of her balance.
The loss of verticality, of human-centric control, might also be a means of considering interdependence and shared ecologies, beyond human exceptionalism. Many humanities scholars, including the British anthropologist Tim Ingold, speak of “leaky bodies”. We are driven by action, Ingold argues, and the moment we stop doing, or breathing, we’re done — bluntly put, dead.
I was reminded of this leakiness as I blitzed through decades of Sridevi’s films in the span of a few days. In Nagina (1986), Sridevi plays an icchadhari nagin (shape-shifting cobra) who falls in love with the man she set out to kill. On hearing the been (a wind instrument), she is drawn back into her snake form, her eyes changing colour as her human body accommodates a tussle between the happy wife and the vengeful serpent. She is the leaky body of Ingold’s writings, seamlessly reconciling past and present, or the human and non-human.
To leak is to give of oneself, and as a dancer, I am drawn to what it takes to move as she does. My body unconsciously goes through the motions of finding out; my abs crunch as Sridevi yanks herself up from a deep backbend, and I sense the tautness in my upper back when she slithers across a length of the carpet. Losing control is hard work.
Ranjana Dave is an artist and writer based in New Delhi. She is the editor of Improvised Futures: Encountering the Body in Performance (Tulika Books, 2021)
This is part of a special HT Premium series, spanning personal essays, reportage and analyses, to mark Pride Month
The views expressed are personal
First, I present you with two conversations:
I
Student: During my admission, when I learned that the campus had a pride walk, I knew this was where I wanted to study.
II
Part-time student: My 12-year-old daughter is passionate about LGBTQ+ (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer) issues, and she identifies as an ally. I’m an ally too. While I’m happy for her, her grandmother disapproves. I’ve told my daughter that she’ll have to speak up for what she believes in.
While these were snippets of two separate conversations with students who demonstrated their enthusiasm, foresight, and care, they also reflect the effect of having conversations around gender and sexual diversity in educational spaces.
When our personal lives merge into our digital lives through social media, anecdotes from different lived realities are shared, and varied life stories become public. The private-versus-public seems to merge, allowing for more nuanced ways of understanding people. Over the years, people of different genders, sexualities, castes, and classes become comfortable with themselves and visibly navigate and negotiate their identities. Moreover, there is an expectation in several studies and work cultures to bring our “whole selves” to study and work.
While focusing on diversity, foregrounding specific diversities to the exclusion of others can be a slippery path. For example, as gender equality attains critical attention through Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) in several educational campuses, particularly management institutions, our inquiries into (the performance of) genders and sexual orientations need critical introspection. There seems to be resistance towards acknowledging a plethora of genders that exist.
Often transgender, non-binary or cis-gender folks who transgress gender norms are more likely to be at the receiving end of bullying, stigma, policing, and shame — as they do not conform to stereotypical expectations. Having conversations in our institutions is a way of bringing about awareness and support.
Additionally, identities are mostly viewed from a singular lens, while in reality, we inhabit different intersectional identities. For example, while a woman from a non-English speaking tribal community studies along with a non-binary bisexual student from a low caste community, both of them, in their ways, negotiate each of their identities differently. If SDGs are to be truly meaningful, they need to be inclusive, non-binary, and holistic of the different dimensions of being human.
To work towards gender diversity, all people need to voice their differences, vulnerabilities, and marginalisation because it brings a different perspective to the fore. We often navigate social spaces assuming we have a shared reality, but that is not the case.
For instance, some of us might not, a) be interested in being partnered; b) feel comfortable wearing particular clothes; c) have an emotional or financial support system in times of necessity; d) be able to present ourselves or perform in ways that are expected of us.
Sharing different perspectives enables us to envision multiple alternatives for different people. The focus is not reiterating this difference in everything we do, but disrupting categories for understanding or boxing people, thereby ridding society of stigmas. Pedagogically, by sharing different narratives from multiple vantage points, we allow for commonly held beliefs or stereotypes to be broken down.
Fostering a spirit of empathy by engaging with multiple viewpoints is a process involving time, effort, patience, and care. Yet, it also builds confidence in people and brings about greater social cohesivity. Eventually, we are expected to be mindful of our language, our choice of words, our tone, and the impact of our words. For example, while it might seem quite common to suggest another person start dating or get married or groom themselves, it can be discomforting for the other. A world with fewer clones of ourselves is undoubtedly a more colourful one to inhabit.
Creating diverse environments is a commitment, a slow evolution, and not a pet project. It does not happen merely by comprising classes or teams with different backgrounds. We also need to make people feel included and comfortable in their skin. This entails acting when needed and respecting people and their needs to thrive in their work or educational space.
Some ways of practising gender and sexual diversity in the classroom are:
Using inclusive language: It is preferable to use words like team, folks, colleagues, people (Not: Ladies and gentlemen, guys and girls); Partner, spouse, significant other (Not: husband, wife, boyfriend, girlfriend); Asking: What pronouns do you use? (Not: What are your preferred pronouns?); Using police officer, chairperson (Not: policeman, chairman); Using first names (instead of Mr, Ms, Mrs).
Implementing fair practices: Everyone likes to be treated fairly and valued for who they are. Allowing everyone to share their points of view and speak from their vantage point allows different positions to be voiced and critiqued. Most importantly, making people feel safe to make errors without judgment creates a healthy growth space.
Learning from different sources: There are constantly newer stories through articles, films, documentaries, and television series. Series like Sex Education (2019), Transparent (2014), and Made in Heaven (2019) have depicted different genders and sexual identities. Articles on In Plainspeak — Tarshi and Agents of Ishq depict myriad perspectives on sex and gender.
Form LGBTQ+ alliances: There is power and solidarity among groups of people coming together and committing towards a single cause. This commitment allows for empathy through conversations that make others walk in the shoes of people who are different from themselves. It also demonstrates conviction by bringing a point of view that is singular and unvoiced. And it creates candour by voicing points of view that no one else will.
Being an ally: It helps show our support to different people and causes through our presence, speaking up for a cause that affects people’s lives, or letting others figure out how to be in this world. It might mean amplifying the voices of those in difficult situations — or standing up for others, even when we feel scared.
Through all our efforts in enhancing an inclusive and diverse culture, we can perhaps take tiny steps of significant change versus bringing about an absolute change. As much as we would like to be superhumans championing change for a better world, we could begin being those agents of change ourselves.
Andy Silveira is an assistant professor at the Goa Institute of Management and a member of the Centre of Creativity, Innovation and Design Thinking
This is part of a special HT Premium series, spanning personal essays, reportage and analyses, to mark Pride Month
The views expressed are personal
Earlier this week, while reading an article on the cheetah introduction controversy, I scoured the internet for photographs of the Kuno-Palpur National Park (KNP) in Madhya Pradesh’s Sheopur district. Among the 10 surveyed sites in five central Indian states, KNP has been rated high on the priority list for being the home of the cheetah because of its suitable habitat and adequate prey base, Government of India’s Action Plan for Introduction of Cheetah in India, released in January, said.
I had been to Sheopur in 1999-2000, and I remember the place as a small, nondescript town in a plateau region on a small tributary of the Chambal River. KNP was then only a wildlife sanctuary, and I don’t remember anyone even remotely suggesting that I visit it.
It was a big miss. It is a majestic park, as I recently found out.
An elegant and evocative documentary — The Forgotten Pride by Nishant Kapoor and Farhan Khan — captures KNP in all its splendour and majesty. KNP is indeed a rare jungle; an oasis in an otherwise rocky desolate and vast Vindhyan landscape. The river Kuno meanders through the lush forests and past ancient forts, dominated by the “Kardhai”, “Khair” and “Salai” trees. The list of faunal species is also impressive: Spotted deer, sambar, barking deer, leopard, wild dogs, striped hyaena, Indian wolf and jungle cats, to name a few. It is also a birders haven.
Awaiting the King
But it is a jungle without a king.
KNP came into prominence in the 1990s when a plan was chalked out to make it the home of Asiatic lions. As per the plan, lions would be relocated from Gujarat’s Gir sanctuary, currently the only home of the Asiatic lions in India.
To make the jungle ready for the lions, the Madhya Pradesh government relocated 23 villages comprising 1,547 families, mostly from the dirt-poor Sahariya tribes, from KNP, between 1996 and 2001. As the poor tribals moved out to make way for animals, making the space inviolate, the jungle regenerated at a feverish pace, and a prey base for the lions was built up.
But in 2009-2010, the lion plan gave way to the cheetah plan, and since then a lot of water has flown down the Kuno.
Unveiling the cheetah plan, Union minister for environment, forest and climate change, Bhupender Yadav said that “Project Cheetah aims to bring back independent India’s only extinct large mammal – the cheetah. As part of the project, 50 cheetahs will be introduced in various National Parks over five years.” India will source cheetahs, which went extinct in India in 1952, from Southern Africa.
More than jungle lore
The cheetah plan has sparked a major controversy.
Last week, the Vidhi Legal Centre for Legal Policy and Rainmatter Foundation organised a talk on the cheetah plan with noted wildlife conservationist Maharaj Kumar Ranjitsinh, a key force behind the scheme, as the guest.
Speaking to Debadityo Sinha, senior resident fellow, Vidhi Legal Centre for Legal Policy, Ranjitsinh started the discussion on an emotional note: “He who goes away becomes a little dearer than the one you have”.
When asked why it is important to get cheetahs from Africa, and not focus on the other big cats India has, he said: “…it is not just the cheetah but what goes with it. And that is the habitat, you can have the habitat without a wild animal but you cannot have the wild animal without the habitat. The habitat, in this case, is the grassland-forest mosaic. Conservation, by any means, is the utmost priority.
On a question on man-animal conflict (cheetahs are low-density animals), Ranjitsinh said that unlike the lions and the tigers, there is no record of a cheetah ever killing a human being.
“In case there is a food security concern, the cheetah is likely to attack the domestic sheep and goats that humans raise. There will be some amount of conflict but if maintained properly for cheetahs to develop a viable population, the Kuno National Park area will be transformed,” he argued.
The counter-argument
However, not all are buying these arguments.
Faiyaz Ahmad Khudsar, a wildlife biologist who worked for several decades in KNP, starting in the 1990s as a young researcher, says the national park is not ready ecologically for the African cheetah.
KNP was identified as the preferred location as it has large grasslands, suited to the cheetah’s need to build up speed without worrying about obstacles. These grasslands were formed, in large part, through the removal of villages and rewilding of agricultural land to make way for the relocation of the Asiatic lion, writes Simon Evans, Principal Lecturer in Ecotourism, Anglia Ruskin University, in The Conversation.
“There is a general perception that most of the grasslands, especially in central India, are ‘cultural’, which means official intervention was required to relocate people from these areas, following which they became grasslands with heavy inputs. But when you look at Kuno, the farmlands, over time, have been taken over by plants that are woodland species such as Ziziphus nummularia or Jhar Beri, Acacia leucophloea or Reonj and Dichrostachys cinerea or Birbira. These farms are now woodlands,” he told me during a phone interview. This kind of habitat is not suitable for cheetahs from Africa, who stay in the Savannahs,” Khudsar told me during a telephone interview on Wednesday.
As for food, Khudsar explains, that if one looks at 20th-century documents, Indian cheetahs largely depended on blackbucks and chinkaras, sometimes on chital and rarely on nilgai. Today, blackbucks and chinkaras are not present. “This means the prey base is very weak. And it is not that people have killed these animals. They have gone out due to ecological succession,” he adds.
Khudsar also thinks, if there is a competition with the tiger/leopard, cheetahs will lose, and could be driven out of parks.
“Cheetahs in KNP will never be free-ranging animals; they will end up in the enclosure built for them. It’s a pity”.
The views expressed are personal
In an ideal world, where all political parties and politicians operate only for an ideology, horses would be found only in stables, nepotism would have no place in political parties and perfect democracy would be reflected in every aspect of life. But the simple truth is we don’t live in an ideal world.
Political parties as a building block of our polity is an unchangeable reality; and so long as we have political parties, which have an inertial strength and influence, with their cadre, offices, organisation, money, clout, symbol, flag, colour, and quite often, a family at the helm of its control, intra-party democracy would remain a fable.
Living under a scion benefiting from the lottery of the ovary at the cost of the more deserving political leader or cadre in decision-making is a fact of life for most politicians most of the time. But occasionally, like a unicorn rises from a start-up founded by a disgruntled former corporate employee, in politics too, arises a star who takes the highly risky route of rebellion.
Rebelling against the party leadership often means risking being dismissed, sidelined and, quite often, losing your identity. Most rebels end by the wayside of political reality.
But some rebels make it. Some, like Sharad Pawar, Mamata Banerjee, K. Chandrashekar Rao or Y. S. Jagan Mohan Reddy, end up establishing a new party, win power and acquire uncanny heights. Most end up eating humble pie in the next election and return to the parent party, more loyal and subservient than ever before — Indian politics has too many examples of such failed rebels.
Few, like Indira Gandhi, J. Jayalalithaa or N. Chandrababu Naidu, rebel and win total control over the party itself, turning the tables on the leadership. Will Eknath Shinde, a former auto driver, who rose from the humblest of backgrounds, achieve the high of becoming CM? Will he take control of the Shiv Sena party? Only time will reveal these.
But rebellion is the last hope of democracy within political parties which believe in using democracy to come to power but not in practising it within their own organisations.
The impasse at the general council of Tamil Nadu’s prime Opposition party, the AIADMK, on Thursday may, at its worst, lead to a split in the organisation but is unlikely to hamper its political activities. For, the core of the organisation is still intact under the wing of Edappadi K. Palaniswami, the Leader of the Opposition in the state Assembly.
Vignettes at the stormy general council clearly indicated that the rank and file was not with rebel leader, O. Panneerselvam, who is technically, as coordinator, the head honcho of the party. But his bete noire, Mr Palaniswami, through his tactical moves, could not ease Mr Panneerselvam out of the top position that day since a Madras high court bench, which sat from midnight to the small hours ahead of the GC to hear a petition, prevented the moving of a resolution on what had come to be called the ‘single leadership’ formula.
‘Dual leadership’ came to haunt the party, which has a hoary tradition of being spearheaded by indisputable unitary colossal leaders like M.G. Ramachandran and J. Jayalalithaa, after a special arrangement had to be made in 2017 when the Panneerselvam faction merged with the then ruling AIADMK with Mr Palaniswami as the chief minister.
Since Mr Panneerselvam was first made a stopgap chief minister for six months from September 2001 to March 2002 and then for eight months in 2014-15 when Jayalalithaa had to step down following convictions in corruption cases, he had come to perceive himself to be a top rung leader though he did not have the necessary grassroots support.
Following the death of Ms Jayalalithaa in 2016, he was sworn in for the third time as CM when he came to believe that he was entitled to the job. But he had to step down to pave the way for V.K. Sasikala, who aspired to become chief minister, so much to his chagrin that he rebelled and lost another opportunity when Ms Sasikala was packed off to jail. It was then Mr Palaniswami who was chosen by Ms Sasikala for the job and he, too, came to believe that he was destined to lead.
So a power struggle started when Mr Panneerselvam was taken back into the party fold and given the deputy chief minister’s post and the coordinator position in the party in a compromise formula. Though they put up a show of unity as they wanted to keep Ms Sasikala, who was thrown out by Mr Palaniswami, at bay, after they lost power in 2019, the urge to wrest control of the party brought back the power struggle.
Mr Palaniswami had meticulously cultivated a support base for him in the party unlike Mr Panneerselvam who remains more a regional leader. The party that has seen several power struggles, starting with that of Ms Jayalalithaa after the death of M.G. Ramachandran in 1987, will overcome the present crisis, born out of a lopsided fight.
“O Bachchoo let’s define narcissism
Did the fellow see himself through vanity’s prism?
Or did he, when gazing at the surface of the stream
Think that the world’s injustice was a dream,
A nightmare from which he would soon awake
He was only human — give the guy a break!”
— From Yunani Bahaana, by Bachchoo
Since I was introduced to modern poetry in my late teens, I have been addicted to the verse of T.S Eliot. I don’t much care for Ezra Pound. I read, even then, that Pound was locked up for Nazi sympathies and that Eliot was accused of anti-Semitism. I hadn’t at the time read their biographies.
I was aware that in Gerontion Eliot wrote: “And the Jew squats on the window sill, the owner.”
It did appeal to me as unfair because the Jew in the poem is the only character — others are mentioned — portrayed cruelly. It’s not a crime to be a landlord but a window sill seemed a peculiar place to squat.
At the same time, I read Sweeney Amongst the Nightingales. In its final verses it displays the compelling musicality of Eliot’s poetry combined with unique memorable images:
“The host with someone indistinct/ Converses at the door apart,/ The nightingales are singing near/ The Convent of the Sacred Heart,/ And sang within the bloody wood/ When Agamemnon cried aloud/ And let their liquid siftings fall/ To stain the stiff dishonoured shroud.”
What puzzled me about this poem were the earlier lines: “Rachel nee Rabinovitch/ Tears at the grapes with murderous paws”.
Why is some poor girl, eating grapes, characterised as having “murderous paws”?
I didn’t miss the fact that her name characterised her as Jewish. So why?
And now a fresh biography of T.S. Eliot, among other things, catalogues his anti-Semitism in distressing detail. Eliot: After the Waste Land, by Robert Crawford, reproduces the statements Eliot made, publicly, in letters and to friends. The statements he made in print and verbally to people who reported them are disgraceful manifestations of irrational hatred, symptoms of the dementia of prejudice.
Here are a few samples: “Reasons of race and religion combine to make any large number of free-thinking Jews undesirable in society”. And then: “Why is there something diabolic about so many Jews?”
And after Hitler’s genocide: “To suggest that the Jewish problem may be simplified because so many may have been killed off is trifling: a few generations of security and they will be as numerous as ever.”
In Prufrock, Eliot says: “Time for you and time for me,/ And time yet for a hundred indecisions,/ And for a hundred visions and revisions,/ Before the taking of a toast and tea.”
No indecision here — having read these quotes, would I invite the unpleasant Mr Eliot to take a toast and tea? Rhetorical question!
Religious and regional rivalries, breeding even genocidal prejudice, have bedevilled history and been the shame of it. In my boyhood in Pune in western India, there was a community of Jews who had fled Iraq and settled in Mumbai, Pune and other cities. I went to school with their boys and one of my best friends was George Iny. We went to an Anglican school and the only anti-Semitism I came across was in history books.
Not that there wasn’t antagonism and prejudice directed against certain communities. One of these was the Sindhi community — Hindus who had fled Sindh which was handed over to Pakistan when India was partitioned in 1947. The Hindu Sindhis, driven from their homes and lands, lost everything and millions arrived as penniless refugees in India. The community proudly redeemed itself and built a life for itself. And yet there was a prevalent undercurrent of resentment at their arrival and even at their hard-earned prosperity. I never understood it.
And now the researched revelations on Eliot’s views and opinions pose a dilemma. We live in an age — or is it just a decade? — of “cancellation”. Some schools and universities refuse to read Harry Potter because J.K. Rowling doesn’t believe that transwomen are really women. She hasn’t physically attacked any transwomen, but has simply made her opinion known. Unlike the anti-Semitism of Eliot, which emerges in a couple of lines and phrases in his oeuvre, Rowling’s opinions on transgender don’t seem to have in any way crept into her popular, magical work.
There are other writers, painters, singers and artists of different sorts who are proven criminals and whose crimes are not reflected in their works. It is absolutely right that, if they are alive, they should be behind bars for these crimes and not on university platforms.
But what shall we do about Eliot? Should his work be banned from schools and universities? Should his books, which have been sold in their millions, be publicly burnt? I can understand a Jewish school doing both but have to admit I won’t be burning even his collected works as I have found in it some of the profound satisfactions that poetry offers.
An what then of Charles Dickens who, in a letter to a friend after the Indian Mutiny (or the First War of Independence?) of 1857, advocated the genocide of the Indian “Hindoo” race. For good measure, he also openly despised Americans. Shall we stop reading his brilliant novels?
Burn them?
Can we not separate the dancer from the dance?
Gopalkrishna Gandhi, 77, onetime diplomat, former West Bengal governor and a grandson of the Mahatma, has sensibly said “No!” to accepting the most prestigious post in India — President of the Republic. Congratulations, Sir. Like sex, accepting a presidential nomination has to be consensual. An act between adults who are on the same page, chasing the same objective. Or else, it is not pleasurable. Sex under pressure does not always add up to rape, per se, but becoming the President of India under pressure is equally repulsive. How many public figures would have the moral courage to refuse such an honour? Well… Gopal Gandhi is one. There have been others in the past, as well. These individuals are rare. And very smart. They know what comes with the territory, and they aren’t interested. Simple. There’s no such thing as a free lunch, as the cliché goes, and there’s no such thing as being chosen for the highest office in the land without strings attached.
Our Presidents are no longer the Presidents of an earlier era — who also had their share of dirty politics to deal with back then. But the blatant and very cunning choice of a few during the past 20 years has devalued the most glorified position in India, reducing it to a rubber-stamp job, more ceremonial than worthwhile. Unless, of course, the chance to occupy a residence that is bigger and grander than Mukesh Ambani’s Antilia becomes the ultimate perk worth compromising all else for. The grandeur of Rashtrapati Bhavan, with all the pomp and show that goes with the job, is nothing short of awe inspiring. It was designed to dazzle the peasants, and it continues to dazzle the peasants — us! An invitation to Rashtrapati Bhavan is undoubtedly thrilling, no matter how cynical and blasé one might be. I got a huge kick being there during my sole visit a few years ago, when Pranab Mukherjee was the privileged occupant in that gigantic space. Since Pranabda was a pretty tiny and compact man, watching him arrive for that brief and far from impressive encounter was an amusing sight. A diminutive figure, flanked by strapping guards and handsome ADCs, walked slowly towards the assembled guests, who had been instructed to line up and behave themselves. Feeling like a delinquent schoolgirl, I was tempted to disobey and flirt outrageously with Pranabda, perhaps try and impress him with my far-from-impeccable Bangla. Well… I tried. The only line our worthy President uttered was: “It is bery bery hot today.” Understatement! That was it. And he was gone after posing for an official portrait with our motley group.
We know why Pranabda opted to become President of India — it was a consolation prize for not fighting for the prime ministership and shrewdly shifting the goalpost, leaving Dr Manmohan Singh to play footsie with Sonia Gandhi as her obedient colleague. Given Pranabda’s extraordinary political trajectory — from an upper division clerk to election manager, powerful minister, seven-time MP and finally the country’s President, here was a highly cerebral man who knew how to keep his emotions out of the political equation. Indira Gandhi said about him (according to Prithviraj Chavan): “Whenever Pranab is given any confidential information, it never comes out of his belly. What comes out is only the smoke from his pipe.” She should know — Indira Gandhi’s exaggeratedly secretive nature cost us plenty!
Even while Pranabda continued as President, after Narendra Modi became India’s Prime Minister, it is interesting to read his comments during the turbulent time when India faced widespread protests against the citizenship law and the proposed National Register of Citizens. Said Pranabda: “Democracy thrives on listening, arguing and even dissent.” He followed that up with: “The present wave of largely peaceful protests will once again help to deepen India’s democratic rules.” Well, India is facing waves of protests right now.
With the government bringing in the “Agnipath” scheme, the protests have turned violent and ugly. Let’s see how this crisis pans out, as we anoint the next President. Citizens are busy sharing their opinions in chatrooms. Said one: “Agniveer should be introduced for our MPs and MLAs in Karamveers and Savaveers categories respectively. No pension or other privileges/benefits should paid at the end of five years. Only 25 per cent would be considered eligible for re-election at the end of the period. Citations like ‘Maha Sevaveer’ to be given to those who make it as Cabinet ministers…” It’s a super suggestion. Till then, we’ll have to keep up with the games that Presidents and governments play.
Draupadi Murmu’s credentials cannot be doubted or questioned. In one stroke, the BJP-NDA government has once again established its shrewd political acumen. The former Jharkhand governor comes with the right “signalling” material, being a tribal Santhal woman, who has bravely coped with enormous personal tragedies after losing her husband and two sons. She is mother to a daughter, and has the respect of the entire nation for her service to society. The BJP can flash both cards proudly and legitimately — her appointment will successfully court Adivasi and women voters, and show the world how progressive India is, if one can only overlook the obvious conflicts.
Gopalkrishna Gandhi’s stated reasons for opting out are significant. It is also important to note that Sharad Pawar (“always the bridesmaid, never the bride”) and Farooq Abdullah (“Motorcycle Diaries”) both said “no, thank you!” to the Opposition bloc’s offer. For one, the Opposition candidate does not stand any chance, given the numbers game. Poor Yashwant Sinha was a goner from the word go. But more than just that, read what Gopal Gandhi said before turning down the proposal: “Having considered the matter deeply, I see that the Opposition’s candidate should be one who will generate a national consensus and a national atmosphere, besides Opposition unity. I feel there will be others who will do this far better than I.” It was a graceful and dignified slap in the face which cannot be ignored. There is a much deeper and bigger message that needs to be understood in the right context — the obligations and critical role played by the President of India in a democracy during a national crisis that demands fair play and not lip service.