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Editorials - 26-02-2022

Kerala’s ambitious semi high-speed rail corridor project faces stiff resistance from environmentalists, villagers, prominent citizens and others.Hiran UnnikrishnanandM.P. Praveenreport on the arguments for and against the contentious project that the Pinarayi Vijayan administration is determined to complete

For three sultry days in January, there was a lot of commotion in the idyllic village of Parakkadavu on the banks of the Chalakudy river that flows through the northern outskirts of Ernakulam district in Kerala. It revolved around the controversial SilverLine project, the proposed 529.45-km semi high-speed rail corridor connecting Thiruvananthapuram in the south with Kasaragod in the north at an operating speed touching 200kmph. Votaries see it as a revolutionary move to upgrade travel, while detractors decry it as a vanity scheme, citing budget, technical and environmental concerns.

Growing protests

On January 19 morning, a posse of officials turned up at Triveni, ward 16 of Parakkadavu panchayat, for laying survey stones for the SilverLine project. They hardly expected to face stiff resistance from people with different political affiliations, and were forced to beat a hasty retreat.

Snubbed, the officials returned the next day, accompanied by the police. “We did not expect them to come back so soon. Most of the people who were part of the protest had gone back to work and the few who were present could not oppose the might of the official machinery,” said Nidhin Saju, member of Triveni and patron of the local K-Rail Virudha Samithi (anti-K-Rail protest committee).

Guarded by police personnel, the officials laid 15 survey stones, some of them in the middle of ripe paddy fields, that day. As discontent grew, it was decided at an emergency meeting of the Samithi that the protest would be amplified. All the survey stones were uprooted by January 21 afternoon. Wreaths were placed on many of them along the alignment of the proposed project.

“We have realised that the proposed rail will go right over our houses and property. It will divide our one-and-a-half acres down the middle. Till date, there has been no official communication from any authority about the acquisition that will leave us displaced from the land where our family has lived all along. Even a notification about a proposed Social Impact Assessment in the media was in English. A majority of the people here are ordinary farmers. How are they expected to understand it,” asked Abhiya Antony, an MBA graduate who passed on the information to others.

The land, she said, is not just immovable property but an emotion for the family. “My father raised us from the income he had made by breaking his back in the field farming nutmeg. We are not against development. But we cannot be evicted from our own land in such an arbitrary and undemocratic manner. We will oppose it with all our strength,” she said.

This emotion appears to only be growing, with village after village along the entire route of SilverLine joining hands to form a State-level movement against this ambitious project of the Pinarayi Vijayan government. The latest protest took place at Elavoor near Angamaly on February 21 where, armed with a High Court nod for continuing the survey, the authorities planted the boundary-marking stones under the watchful eyes of about 300 police personnel. With a total land requirement of 1,383 hectares, the project, according to the protesters, has the potential to evict at least 20,000 families. It will also force many small- and medium-scale commercial establishments along the route to close, they said.

For the state, the resistance at different locations to the project marks a sharp change from the usual protest marches or meetings organised by political parties. Along with this grass-roots antagonism, political support for the anti-project movement too has been forthcoming of late, with the opposition parties led by the Congress staging State-wide campaigns.

The recent clarification by the Union government that it has yet to give a final nod to the project owing to lack of certain details in the project report has served as an interim relief to the protesters. They, however, have decided to persist with the protests till the project is dropped.

Primary objections

The politically symbolic project has already run into serious controversy even as the State government presses ahead with its plan to complete SilverLine by 2025. Last month, the government announced a Rs. 13,265 crore compensation package that promises up to four times the market value of land that would be acquired for the project. It added that a one-time incentive of Rs. 4.6 lakh or Rs. 1.6 lakh along with a house built under norms of the LIFE Mission would also be provided additionally for those who stand to lose their homes.

Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan has emphasised that there is no alternative to the project. But critics, including the Left-leaning Kerala Sasthra Sahithya Parishad, or the People’s Science Movement of Kerala, continue to oppose it from various points of view.

D. Dhanuraj, chairman of the Centre for Public Policy Research, a Kochi-based think tank, cited the fast-ageing Kerala society and the rising trend of migration of youngsters as his primary reasons for opposing the project. “An ageing population generally travels short distances not exceeding 50-60 km. The argument is that faster travel would help the people up north quickly access better healthcare facilities, but ideally, the government should be able to provide these in their immediate neighbourhood. Further, the focus should be on providing quality higher education and employment creation if the government wants to reverse the migration of employable youth,” he said.

“The daily railway passenger traffic in Kerala was, on average, about 2.5 lakh in the pre-pandemic times. But daily ridership projection for the standalone SilverLine is 80,000. This means a chunk of daily train commuters will have to switch over to the new line for it to be viable,” Dhanuraj said. “Add to that the relatively low average salary in Kerala. How will everyone be able to afford the SilverLine ticket rates? Also, accessing the SilverLine stations, which have been planned well outside cities and mofussils in each district, is not convenient,” he said.

That this rail network envisages a standard gauge even as the Indian Railway network has almost entirely been converted to broad gauge has also drawn flak. There are differences between standard gauge and broad gauge in terms of the size of coaches/wagons, passenger/freight-carrying capacity, speed potential, etc. Kerala Railway Development Corporation Ltd (KRDCL or K-Rail) officials say that standard gauge is crucial to obtain loan from multilateral agencies. But the first feasibility report prepared by Systra, the Paris-based general consultant of the KRDCL, recommended a review of the KRDCL’s decision to build the rail line on standard gauge. Alok Kumar Verma, a former Indian Railway Service of Engineers officer, who was earlier a consultant with Systra, regards this as the biggest handicap of the project. “If you make it a stand-alone project, it will serve only those who travel during the day from one city to another within Kerala. As it remains cut off from the Indian Railways network, an inter-State passenger will have to switch lines at some point and the K-Rail authorities are silent about how this shift of lines will take place,” he said.

According to him, the existing alignment of the SilverLine that has been prepared using the Google Earth topographic data is completely unworkable and will amount to “throwing public money down the drain”. “When the KRDCL and its general consultant tried to adjust this rather imaginary alignment with the actual terrain and ground conditions, they ended up with a roller-coaster alignment having many horizontal and vertical curves,” he said.

As per his estimate, the route has 200 horizontal curves totalling 194.3 km in length, besides 236 vertical curves. The undulating elevation of the SilverLine project is worse than that of the Katra-Srinagar line, he said. It will be like a roller-coaster ride and so, put the brakes on the train speed.

Upgrading the existing Indian Railways line between Thiruvananthapuram and Kozhikode or constructing a new broad-gauge line between the two locations is what he suggests instead of a stand-alone line. Even if a new broad-gauge line between the two locations is constructed, the total cost will be less than Rs. 30,000 crore. And this will also ensure that the existing railway stations is part of the line, he said. “Beyond Kozhikode, you have enough capacity to run at least 10 pairs of new trains,” he said.

The project cost is also contentious. The KRDCL’s estimate is Rs. 63,941 crore, while detractors say the cost could escalate to Rs. 1.3 lakh crore by the time of completion. With about 60% of this amount to be sourced as term loans, they argue that the additional debt liability will be something that a cash-strapped State like Kerala will find tough to deal with.

Considering that it traverses the entire length of Kerala in a linear fashion, massive embankments erected to protect the railway line could have an adverse impact on the groundwater regime, the water bodies including rivers along its course, and the floodplains, say environmentalists. These are in addition to the concerns over a likely ecocide, triggered by the extraction of 28,60,000 cubic metres of stone ballast, and perimeter walls that are to come up on both sides of the rail embankment (292.73 km of the route length), tearing the State asunder.

‘If not now, when?’

The proponents of the SilverLine project, on the other hand, hail the line as a means of creating better transport links that will fire up industrial growth and help re-balance development across the State for years to come. They insist that people rejecting bold ideas are not going to have the right of way this time.

“If not now, when,” asked the Chief Minister on the new transport capacity, during an event organised by the Communist Party of India (Marxist) Kasaragod district committee in December last year. But the enthusiasm exuded by Vijayan and the CPI(M) has failed to rub off on the second largest constituent of the ruling coalition, the CPI. Although the party has come around to support the project lately, “as a corrective force within the Left front”, it wants the government to tread cautiously.

Pitching in to allay concerns over environmental destruction, KRDCL has argued that getting people out of cars and roads and on to trains will help in the battle against climate change. “The national highways of Kerala now carry over 1.5 crore vehicles and of this, 35.57 lakh are cars and other small vehicles. Road widening may give the State temporary relief. But the roads will once again be choked in another five years and the State will be forced to plan more highways or alternative express roads through its green corridor every 10 years,” argued Ajith Kumar V., Managing Director of KRDCL.

Conceding that the project is beset with protests at the local level, he said opposition to SilverLine comes primarily from an alliance of activists and hard-liners “who are against development projects of any kind and have been on a door-to-door campaign against SilverLine”.

So, would KRDCL be ready to redraw the alignment, as suggested by experts, as part of the measures to build confidence in the people? “That’s unlikely, as it might lead to further litigation,” said Kumar. He pointed to the traffic survey conducted as part of the preparation of the detailed project report to emphasise that the project would bring in an annual revenue of about Rs. 1,605 crore (with a ticket rate of Rs. 2.75 per km).

Proponents also often speak about how the project will generate employment and stimulate development in the State.

Fears of the project bisecting the State with an average width of just 70 km are unfounded, Kumar said. The railway line passes along an elevated viaduct on pillars and through tunnels for about 137 km, while there will be underpasses or flyovers at every 500 metres of the track in the remaining stretch, he said.

Environmental concerns

None of these points, however, looks good enough to convince the likes of R.V.G. Menon, environmentalist and academic, who, along with 36 other prominent personalities, wrote an open letter to the Chief Minister stating that the project will spell disaster for Kerala in multiple ways.

“That this fast access will bring extraordinary industrial and financial breakthroughs in Kerala, as claimed by K-Rail and the government, is only wishful thinking and not supported by any scientific study or analysis. The present trend is towards ‘working from home’ riding on ever-increasing communication accessibility and therefore, the undue emphasis on extra quick transport is problematic,” he said. Menon also served as president of the Sasthra Sahithya Parishad.

The high or semi high-speed line, in his opinion, has to be in broad gauge and be synchronised with the existing rail system to ensure interoperability. Further, tourism depends more on convenient and well-organised travel networks and not so much on high speed, he said. “In fact, since our USP is the scenic beauty of Kerala, fast-tracking at 200 kmph is hardly the best means to expose it,” he said.

Notwithstanding an assurance from the authorities that the project will not affect wetlands or ecologically sensitive zones as 88 km of the track passes through elevated highways, environmentalists have raised concerns over the project still affecting several ecologically sensitive spots, especially in north Kerala. Some of the places that may be most affected include the famed tourism destinations of Madayippara in Kannur district, the Kadalundi bird sanctuary in Kozhikode district, the Vallikkunnu-Kadalundi community reserve on the borders of Kozhikode and Malappuram district, and the famed Lotus Lake at Thirunavaya in Malappuram district. This is besides several tracts of wetland, paddy fields, rivers and lakes through which the line will pass. For instance, the authorities have claimed that the track will pass through a tunnel beneath Madayippara, which further raises concerns about the conservation of biodiversity there that includes a wide range of aquatic and semi-aquatic plants and even rare and endangered ones.

“The alignment in Kannur district is mostly along the existing rail track. But there is a deviation of around 30 km between Payyannur and Cherukunnu. If not for this deviation, Madayipara could have been spared,” said Vivek P.C, a lawyer who is part of the anti-K-Rail protest in Kannur district.

Amidst these raging waves of protests at various levels, there are certain curious exceptions as well. Jinson Jose, a 33-year-old employee with the Indian Railways, is a sympathiser of the CPI(M) and is willing to stand by the project if he is convinced about it and not kept in the dark as is being done now. “What is the point in holding meetings to explain the project to prominent personalities in society? It is the affected people who should be taken into confidence,” he said, hinting at the string of meetings held by the government across the State to sell the project.

The K-Rail authorities too look keen to address this shortcoming and seek to reach out to the local protesters in person. “Once the Social Impact Assessment is over, we will reach out to all the affected persons through meetings at the Panchayat level. Everyone’s concerns will be taken on board,” assured a top official with the KRDCL.

As the scientific discourse among domain experts and grassroots protests continue, the LDF is slowly, yet steadily, proceeding with this grand scheme, in order to cut road travel. The opponents, however, believe that things could finally tilt their way through the court’s intervention and political protests.

With inputs from Aabha Raveendran



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The Russian President’s actions this week may yield tactical gains but scarcely pass the test for strategic victory

Diplomacy has retreated as the smouldering Ukraine crisis took a decisive turn this week. On February 24, Russian President Vladimir Putin launched “special military operations” with the objective of “demilitarising Ukraine” but not “occupying” it. Just days prior to this, Russia had upped the ante by recognising the sovereignty of the Peoples’ Republics of Donetsk and Luhansk, two of Ukraine’s easternmost provinces and deploying Russian peace-keeping forces in these territories. A meeting between United States Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov stands cancelled and the prospects of a summit between U.S. President Joe Biden and Mr. Putin have evaporated into thin air.

The Russian actions have been strongly condemned and sanctions imposed by the U.S., the European Union (EU), the United Kingdom, Australia, Canada and Japan. After 1945, this is the second time that national boundaries are being redrawn by force; the first was the 1999 North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) air strikes on Serbian forces that led to the creation of Kosovo. Russian and Chinese protests about NATO undertaking “out of area operations” without United Nations Security Council approval carried little weight.

A crisis in the making

In the post-Cold War world that promised a rule-based liberal international order, clearly the message from Thucydides’ Peloponnesian Wars still held — “the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must”.

In 2022, Russia has fired the first shot but NATO is not blameless either. The Ukrainian crisis has been in the making for over a decade. After the fall of the Berlin Wall in late-1989, then U.S. Secretary of State James Baker was meeting Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev in Moscow in February 1990 to help ease the way for German unification. He assured Mr. Gorbachev that NATO understood the “need for assurances to the countries in the East”, adding that even with Germany a part of NATO, “there would be no extension of NATO’s jurisdiction one inch to the east”.

By end-1991, USSR had broken up into 15 countries; Mr. Gorbachev faded into history and a change in the White House was under way. Rather than look for a new European security framework, the newly independent Baltic and central European states sought security in a U.S.-led NATO. The old caution that the cost of expansion goes up as it reaches closer to the Russian border was discarded and NATO adopted an ‘open door’ policy.

Beginning in 1999, NATO has added 14 new members in stages. At the NATO summit in 2008, at U.S. President George Bush’s urging, an in-principle opening for Ukraine and Georgia was announced, though France and Germany, conscious of Russian concerns, successfully opposed defining a time frame. It was a bad compromise and the damage was done.

Later that year, Russia intervened in Georgia on the grounds of protecting the Russian minorities and took over the northern provinces of Abkhazia and South Ossetia. In 2014, following the Euromaidan protests against the pro-Russian President Viktor Yanukovich, Mr. Putin annexed Crimea. For Russia, Crimea is vital as the peninsula hosts Russia’s Black Sea fleet, providing it access to the Mediterranean and its bases at Latakia and Tartus in Syria. At the same time, pro-Russia separatists, assisted by Russian mercenaries, created autonomous regions in the Donbas region.

Despite no timeline for membership, Ukraine was made a NATO Enhanced Opportunity Partner in 2020. The presence of British and U.S. warships in the Black Sea began to increase. In 2019, the U.K. entered into a cooperation agreement with Ukraine to develop two new naval ports, Ochakiv on the Black Sea and Berdyansk on the Sea of Azov, a move that Russia saw as potentially threatening.

Clearly, Mr. Putin’s grievances, beginning with NATO’s bombing of Serbia in 1999, interventions in Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya and colour revolutions to engineer regime changes, the U.S.’ unilateral withdrawal from the Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty in 2002 coupled with missile defence deployments in Poland and Romania that Russia perceived as offensive, were accumulating.

Faltering Euro-diplomacy

France and Germany initiated talks between Ukraine and Russia under the Normandy format leading to the Minsk agreements, in 2014 and 2015. The first was for a ceasefire between Ukraine and the Russian-backed separatists and the second was between Ukraine, Russia, the two separatist regions of Luhansk and Donetsk and the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE). Supportive declarations by France and Germany were intended to address Russian security concerns. Ukraine undertook to introduce certain constitutional amendments to provide a degree of autonomy to the two provinces and Russia was to assist in withdrawal of all foreign forces. However, neither side implemented and positions have only hardened since.

In the intense diplomacy during the last six weeks, particularly the back-to-back visits by French President Emmanuel Macron and German Chancellor Olaf Schulz to Moscow and Kiev, there was talk of reviving the Normandy format. But Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky was in no mood to oblige with over 1,50,000 Russian troops poised on his border and Mr. Putin was looking for his own face saver. Mr. Macron has a difficult re-election coming up in April and Chancellor Schulz has already been criticised for being soft on Russia because of energy dependency.

Mr. Biden faces a critical mid-term election in November that could see the Senate shift to Republican control and had already faced considerable flak for the messy withdrawal from Afghanistan last year. His aim was to ensure trans-Atlantic unity in NATO. Russia’s threatening moves made NATO members, especially the Baltic states (Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania) and the central Europeans like Poland and Romania, especially nervous. Finally, NATO remained united but unable to provide an off-ramps solution.

Putin’s chess gambit

With a military force of 2,00,000 and an equal number of reserves, prudence dictates that Mr. Putin would not want to take over Ukraine. However, the separatist groups that currently control only part of the provinces of Luhansk and Donetsk would want to extend their territory beyond the current Line of Contact dividing the separatists and the Ukrainian forces.

Along the Black Sea coast, Russia could seek to extend a coastal corridor to the Crimean Peninsula. This would cement its hold on the Sea of Azov, giving it control over Mariupol and Berdyansk and restrict Ukraine to Odessa in the west.

Ideally, Mr. Putin would have liked to bring about a regime change in Kiev, but that seems unlikely now. Domestic troubles in Belarus have made President Alexander Lukashenko, in power since 1994, dependent on Russian support. Both countries announced that the 35,000 Russian soldiers, in Belarus for joint exercises that concluded on February 20, would stay on for ‘training cooperation and inspections’. A Russian military presence in Belarus puts pressure on the 65-mile long Suwalki corridor that constitutes the boundary between Lithuania and Poland and more importantly, separates Belarus from Kaliningrad, the Russian enclave on the Baltic Sea that hosts its Baltic fleet.

Mr. Putin may claim victory in the near term, but in the long term, he has over-reached himself. NATO has been rejuvenated, the trans-Atlantic unity strengthened and Russia’s economic ties with Europe have been adversely impacted. Given Russia’s considerable foreign exchange reserves, of nearly $640 billion, sanctions imposed by the U.S. and EU may not hurt immediately but eventually will begin to bite both the oligarchs and the common people. Worse, Russia will become more dependent on China — for political support as well as a market for its energy exports. This will eventually weaken its hand in central Asia.

Russians have been the greatest chess players and President Putin knows that a move on the chessboard will close certain options while opening up others. The challenge is to constrain the adversary’s options while increasing one’s own options and space for manoeuvre. His actions this week may yield tactical gains but hardly pass the test for strategic victory.

Rakesh Sood is a former diplomat and currently Distinguished Fellow at the Observer Research Foundation



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Its future will be defined by how it responds to the crisis in Ukraine, and in the shadow of growing Russia-China ties

The Ukraine crisis has come to a head with Russia biting the bullet and launching “a full-scale invasion of Ukraine.” Even as the United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres was warning that the world was facing a “moment of peril” and calling for “restraint, reason and de-escalation” to avoid “a scale and severity of need unseen for many years”, Russian troops that had massed on Ukraine’s borders for months now were preparing to launch an assault on Ukraine — after Russian President Vladimir Putin recognised the Russian-backed, rebel-held areas of Donetsk and Luhansk as independent and even challenged the historical right of Ukraine to exist.

Mr. Putin continued to insist that he was open to “direct and honest dialogue” but with every step of the escalatory ladder he climbed, he ensured that dialogue was becoming difficult to sustain. And the Russian Foreign Ministry even suggested that the idea that Russia is to blame for the crisis in Ukraine is an invention by the West. But the invasion has now happened in full view of the international community, with Mr. Putin saying that Russia did not plan to occupy Ukraine and demanding that its military lay down their arms. Launching a “special military operation” and alleging that Ukraine’s democratically elected government “had been responsible for eight years of genocide”, Moscow’s seeming goal is demilitarisation and a “denazification” of Ukraine.

Putin versus the West

Hours before the invasion, the western countries had imposed a new round of sanctions against Moscow (targeting Russian individuals and banks linked to Mr. Putin’s regime), and German Chancellor Olaf Scholz suspended certification of Nord Stream 2, a major gas pipeline between Russia and his nation. But clearly it had no real impact on Mr. Putin’s calculus.

United States President Joe Biden, in his response to the invasion, has suggested that Washington and its allies would respond in a united and decisive way to “an unprovoked and unjustified attack by Russian military forces” on Ukraine. But the future course of action for the West remains rather murky. Perhaps because of this, Charles Michel, the head of the European Council, has continued to insist on the need “to be united and determined and jointly define our collective approach and actions”. The European Union has announced a “massive” package of sanctions as it comes to terms with “the darkest hour in Europe since the Second World War”.

Where Mr. Putin has shown resolve and a single-minded sense of purpose, the West has been incoherent in its response — not being able to present a united front, and worse, not even speaking the same language at times. For Mr. Putin, this is a moment to use Ukraine to highlight his broader demands of restructuring the post-Cold War European security order. For the West, this has been a moment when it has been found wanting — a lack of imagination, lack of will and lack of leadership, all rolled into producing a lackadaisical response to the one of most serious security crises in decades.

General disarray

Mr. Biden’s leadership has been found wanting. For all his talk of leading through coalitions, all he has to show for is a disarray in the European ranks. Where Germany has been reluctant to allow North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) allies to ship German-origin weapons to Ukraine, France has used this moment of crisis in trying to showcase its own leadership credentials. French President Emmanuel Macron has been talking of the European Union taking decisions independent of the U.S. in an attempt to showcase its ‘strategic autonomy’. The trans-Atlantic alliance has barely functioned despite all those who had argued that it was the fault of U.S. President Donald Trump fracturing this partnership. It turns out that even Mr. Biden has not been able to build the trans-Atlantic engagement around common objectives to be pursued collectively.

The energy factor

Moreover, the EU’s energy dependence on Russia is a reality that has to be factored into strategic considerations. With the EU importing 39% of its total gas imports and 30% of oil from Russia, and with the Central and Eastern European countries being almost 100% dependent on Russian gas, the reasons for internal EU dissonance are not that difficult to fathom.

Where Russia repeatedly made it clear that it remains willing to even use the instrumentality of force to attain its diplomatic objectives, the singular refrain from the West has been that it has no intention of escalating. In such a scenario, the initiative is always with the side that can demonstrate a willingness to ratchet up tensions. Mr. Putin is willing to take significant strategic risks which the West is not ready to do. And, as a result, the initiative since the very beginning of this conflict has been with Russia. The West has been left to respond reactively to the developments around it. And it is in the very nature of great power politics that smaller and weaker nations such as Ukraine struggle to preserve their very existence.

A strong Beijing

This ineffectual western response has emboldened not only Russia but also China as the focus of the West is in danger of moving away from the Indo-Pacific. The Russia-China ‘axis’ is only getting stronger as the two nations seem ready to take on the West that seems willing to concede without even putting up a fight.

It was this week in 1972 that U.S. President Richard Nixon shook hands with Chinese Premier Zhou Enlai and radically altered the contours of the global order by reshaping the extant balance of power. It allowed China to emerge as the leading global economic power and helped the U.S. in winning the Cold War.

Today, the balance of power is once again in flux, and as China develops a strategic partnership with Russia, the future of the West-led global order will be defined by how effectively it responds to the crisis in Ukraine. The tragedy of great power politics is unfolding in Europe but its embers will scorch the world far and wide, much beyond Europe.

Harsh V. Pant is Director of Research at the Observer Research Foundation,

New Delhi and Professor of International Relations, King's College London



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Russia’s Ukraine gambit could unravel key assumptions driving India’s economic policy

The combative advent of the Russian military into Ukraine early Thursday has predictably spooked markets across all asset classes the world over. Oil prices surged to an eight-year high of around $105 a barrel, stock markets tumbled with the Indian bourses crashing nearly 5% on Thursday and the rupee dipping perilously close to the 76 to a dollar mark. The flight to safety amid all this mayhem propped up India’s favourite yellow metal to a 15-month high. Domestic stock indices that have already been witnessing tumultuous swings in recent weeks as global inflation flared up and the US Federal Reserve signalled faster throttling of ‘easy money’ liquidity, did pare some of these initial losses on Friday. But multi-layered uncertainty will keep investor nerves on edge, as will the diplomatic fallout of how the UNSC decides to tackle Russia in its vote, with the western world seeking strict condemnation and sanctions, while India has thus far preferred not to take a side. There could be double-edged economic ramifications for those sitting on the fence if the extent of sanctions against Russia are intensified. This could deter Indian interests, be it in terms of trade financing, investment flows and even banking transfers as calls to bar Moscow from the SWIFT global payment network grow louder. For now, Russia’s oil exports have not been explicitly targeted yet.

India’s imports of petroleum products from Russia are only a fraction of its total oil import bill and thus, replaceable. But getting alternative sources for fertilizers and sunflower oil may not be as easy. Exports to Russia account for less than 1% of India’s total exports; pharmaceuticals and tea could face some challenges, as will shipments to CIS countries. Freight rate hikes could make overall exports less competitive too, but it is the indirect impact on the trade account that is more worrying. The surge in crude oil prices will drum up India’s inelastic oil import bill, and gold imports could jump back up and keep the rupee under pressure. Trade and current account deficits may be jeopardised, although forex reserves are healthy. The biggest concern, for India, however, remains the impact of oil prices on inflation, and the unravelling of the Budget math which hinges on average oil prices of $75 a barrel. The RBI’s assertion that retail inflation had peaked at 6.01% in January, as well as its growth-accommodative stance may need a rethink with oil prices 11% higher since its February 10 monetary policy review. On the fiscal side, the Government, which has been conservative in its revenue assumptions in the Budget, has the room to pre-emptively cut domestic fuel taxes to nip inflationary expectations, stoke faltering consumption levels and sustain India’s fragile post-COVID-19 recovery through this global churn.



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India and Sri Lanka should find a lasting solution to the issues facing their fisherfolk

Fishermen from Tamil Nadu keep getting caught with alarming regularity in the territorial waters of Sri Lanka for “poaching”. Yet, the stakeholders concerned have yet to demonstrate the alacrity required for well-known solutions. In the latest development, the Sri Lankan Navy arrested 22 fishermen who are from Nagapattinam and neighbouring Karaikal, on Wednesday. There are already 29 fishermen in custody in Sri Lanka, as pointed out by Tamil Nadu Chief Minister M.K. Stalin in his letter to External Affairs Minister S. Jaishankar a few days ago. As per an estimate, Sri Lankan authorities have also impounded 84 boats. The frequency with which Tamil Nadu’s fishermen allegedly cross the International Maritime Boundary Line, despite being aware of the consequences, highlights their level of desperation driven by livelihood concerns. This is, however, not to absolve them of their culpability in endangering Sri Lanka’s marine biodiversity, which is of vital importance to Tamil fishermen of the Northern Province, who suffered in the civil war. The vexatious problem has also been aggravated by events over the past month — the reported death of two Jaffna fishermen following “mid-sea clashes with their Tamil Nadu counterparts” on January 27 and 29, subsequent protests by northern Sri Lankan fishermen, and the reported auctioning by Sri Lanka of 140 impounded boats even before a Tamil Nadu government team and fishermen’s representatives could visit Sri Lanka to finalise modalities on the disposal of unsalvageable boats. There has been no word from Colombo on permitting fishermen-devotees to attend, in March, the annual festival of St. Anthony’s Church at Katchatheevu.

Apart from getting the arrested fishermen released, the governments of the two countries should fix a date for an early meeting of the Joint Working Group, last held in December 2020. They should also facilitate the resumption of talks at the level of fisherfolk, especially from Tamil Nadu and the Northern Province. Sri Lanka should be proactive as its citizens in the North bear the brunt of the alleged acts of transgression. Besides, its positive actions would be in tune with what the Prime Ministers of India and Sri Lanka agreed at the virtualsummit in September 2020 — to “continue engagement to address the issues related to fishermen through regular consultation and bilateral channels”. New Delhi should also consider providing additional incentives and concessions to fishermen of the Palk Bay districts of Tamil Nadu to elicit a better response from them for its deep sea fishing project. It could also propose assistance for the fishermen of the Northern Province as a gesture of goodwill. There is no paucity of ideas in the area of the Palk Bay fisheries conflict, but adequate action on the part of the stakeholders is found wanting.



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External Affairs Minister P V Narasimha Rao told the Rajya Sabha that Agha Hilaly’s objectionable statements in the Human Rights Commission had vitiated the atmosphere for further talks on the specifics of the no-war pact and a treaty of peace and friendship.

External Affairs Minister P V Narasimha Rao told the Rajya Sabha that Agha Hilaly’s objectionable statements in the Human Rights Commission had vitiated the atmosphere for further talks on the specifics of the no-war pact and a treaty of peace and friendship. Making a statement in response to a call in attention motion by H C Rawat, Rao said by his contentious reference to Jammu and Kashmir, the Pakistani delegate had done a disservice to the proposed talks between foreign secretaries. He said it will take much time to undo the damage created by the Pakistani diplomat’s speech. In this vitiated atmosphere nothing will be served by the foreign secretary’s visit to Pakistan. Pakistan ambassador Abdus Sattar was in the visitor’s gallery when Rao was delivering his speech.

Ambush In Nagaland

Insurgents of the Nationalist Socialist Council of Nagaland led by T N Muivah and Issac Chishi are said to be responsible for the ambush on the Imphal Ukhrul road which resulted in the death of 21 security force personnel. But it is still suspected that the ambush was a joint operation between the NSCN and the PLA with the latter playing a secondary role. The weapons used were of Chinese origin. Combing operations are in progress all over the district inhabited by the Tangkhul Nagas. No arrests have been made.

Tremor Mystery

Experts do not rule out the possibility of experimental underground tremors behind the series of mysterious loud bangs heard in Mandsaur in Madhya Pradesh and adjoining districts in Rajasthan and Gujarat on February 22 and 24. Although authorities have assured people that there’s no reason for panic, they seem to be disturbed. Experts have ruled out the possibility of earthquakes because Mandsaur is not an earthquake-prone area.



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As the situation develops, it cannot be ruled out that Delhi’s position may change or get calibrated further, especially if confronted by large-scale civilian casualties.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s phone conversation with Russian President Vladimir Putin underlined that Delhi will for now stick to a path of strategic ambivalence on the Ukraine crisis. This is a pragmatic choice, one that reflects the complexities of a realist world and Delhi’s own positions on territorial integrity and sovereignty, its own concerns about its unresolved borders, its difficult relationship with its two northern neighbours.

Russia remains India’s biggest and time-tested supplier of military hardware. At the height of the crisis with China in Ladakh, it was to Moscow that Defence Minister Rajnath Singh travelled to ensure that there would be no cut-back in military supplies. And since then, Russia has boosted India’s defence capability against China with the S-400 air defence system. Moscow is also a reliable ally in the UN Security Council. India-Russia ties have ensured that Delhi has not been entirely left out of the conversation on Afghanistan, and in Central Asia, while also providing some leverage with the US. At the same time, the US, the European Union, and UK are all vital partners, and India’s relations with each of them, and the Western world in general, go far beyond the sum of their parts. Moreover, in the UNSC, India has counted on France’s unstinted backing on many issues. It has relied on western support as it deals with an aggressive China on the Line of Actual Control. Prime Minister Modi’s appeal to President Putin on Wednesday night for a “cessation of violence” and for all sides to return to the dialogue table was certainly a notch up from India’s earlier explicitly neutral stance, and carried a hint of the compulsions to get off the fence, though still largely maintaining a balance.

As the situation develops, it cannot be ruled out that Delhi’s position may change or get calibrated further, especially if confronted by large-scale civilian casualties. A vote is scheduled soon on a UNSC resolution on Russia’s “special military operations” in Ukraine, and India’s line will be tested. Delhi must talk continually to all sides, and engage with all of its partners, keeping in mind that there is no justification for the violation of any country’s territorial sovereignty, and that distance from the theatre of conflict no longer insulates any country from its effects — India’s economy has already felt the shock of this “regional” conflict in a corner of Europe, and other consequences are apparent, as in the ongoing evacuation of thousands of students. For the same reasons, India must also make it clear to coercing countries that their “with us or against us” formulations are hardly constructive. There are no innocents in this conflict. The best course is for all parties to step back and focus on preventing an all-out war, rather than divide the world and return it to the days of the Cold War.

This editorial first appeared in the print edition on February 26, 2022 under the title ‘Stay the course’.



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Parties like the NPP and KPA have indicated that as regional voices they are better placed to highlight local concerns than the national parties, which prefer to subsume them under the rubric of national security etc.

Elections in Goa and Manipur have seen the arrival or revival of regional outfits that hope to tap into the disillusionment among the electorate with the national parties. This is a welcome trend for it promotes competition and suggests a deepening of electoral democracy.

The Congress and BJP have dominated politics in Goa and Manipur for a long time. In the last few years, the BJP has taken over the pole position from the Congress and formed coalition governments with smaller parties. In office, however, the BJP has sought to contain the smaller parties and thwart their ambitions for a greater role in state politics, something that the Congress too had done when it headed governments. This tendency of the national party, the big brother in state politics, to stifle the smaller, regional players, has forced the latter to make their voice distinct and heard. Outfits like Goa Forward Party and Goa Suraksha Manch were formed as a platform to articulate regional aspirations and did attract voters though they could not find sufficient traction to end the dominance of the national parties. Even the Maharashtrawadi Gomantak Party (MGP), the original regional face of Goa that headed the government in the state in the 1960s, has seen a minor revival. In Manipur, the National People’s Party (NPP) is attempting to emerge as an independent regional voice by contesting 39 of the 60 assembly seats. The NPP, which heads a coalition government in neighbouring Meghalaya, wants to be seen as a secular, Northeast voice, and is fighting polls independent of its senior ally, the BJP. In fact, former Lok Sabha Speaker P A Sangma had revived the outfit in 2013 with the agenda, One Northeast, One Voice. In 2017, the NPP won four of the nine seats it contested in Manipur. A new, interesting entrant in the fray in the Kuki tribe dominated hill districts of Manipur is the Kuki People’s Alliance (KPA). The emergence of KPA suggests that this tribal minority, which has been home to a violent insurgency, is exploring a new agency to assert their rights and aspirations within the framework of democratic politics. This is a trajectory that many insurgency affected areas — in Mizoram and Tripura, for instance — have followed in the past. Parties like the NPP and KPA have also indicated that as regional voices they are better placed to highlight local concerns — for instance, the popular demand for the repeal of Armed Forces Special Powers Act — than the national parties, which prefer to subsume them under the rubric of national security etc.

The claim to represent regional aspirations rather than fidelity to any political ideology also allows these parties to freely negotiate with the national parties post results. However, the willingness to compromise for office may also diminish their potential to emerge as pole parties in the manner the Dravidian parties or the Shiv Sena could in their prime.

This editorial first appeared in the print edition on February 26, 2022 under the title ‘The native voice’.



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It is regrettable that creatures as useful — indeed, critical — as spiders should be embroiled in a needless controversy.

Luckily for those who recently objected to the naming of a spider species after a community icon, arachnophiles are a peaceful lot. They won’t, for instance, beat their chests over the decision to rechristen the Palpimanus narsihmehtai after certain sections of the public objected to the name of the poet-saint Narsinh Mehta being associated with a mere arachnid. They might quite justifiably have asked: What is so bad about spiders? Instead, most, including the researchers at Bhakta Kavi Narsinh Mehta University in Junagadh who discovered and named the species, seem to have shrugged off the incident and continued with their good work of peering under leaves and rocks in search of more eight-legged specimens.

It is regrettable that creatures as useful — indeed, critical — as spiders should be embroiled in a needless controversy. Do those who are objecting to the naming of the species not know that spiders are responsible for keeping under control populations of insects, such as fleas, flies and cockroaches, which can cause actual harm to human beings? Or that they are a keystone species whose disappearance would cause the collapse of entire ecosystems? The problem is that when offended feelings are invoked, facts find few takers.

It is common practice around the world for researchers and scientists to name discoveries after someone they idolise or love — that is why we have examples such as Shireplitis tolkieni (a wasp genus), Scaptia beyonceae (a rare horsefly) and Agra katewinsletae (a beetle). Indeed, many who are angry about the Palpimanus narsihmehtai have admitted that those responsible for the naming were probably motivated by their admiration for the seminal Gujarati poet. Alas, in the outrage economy, if facts have few takers, good intentions have even fewer.

This editorial first appeared in the print edition on February 26, 2022 under the title ‘Web of outrage’.



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Pratap Bhanu Mehta writes: The brutal truth is that despite outrage in the West, the appetite for doing what it takes to put pressure on Putin is not yet in evidence.

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine poses unprecedented risks for the global system. It brings back the spectre of a major war to Europe. If the Ukrainians manage to resist, the war will be long drawn; if they don’t, the precedent of an important country of the size of Ukraine being reabsorbed will haunt Europe. Russian actions create more uncertainty in Great Power politics. The trustworthiness of vital agreements will be up for grabs. China may be tempted to exploit the opportunities provided by a Western entanglement with Russia. When wars start, the risk of one or another country’s hand being forced by events rises substantially. This crisis will certainly lead to significant economic realignment. Every country in the world will now start reassessing the gains and risks of economic interdependence. But if the crisis continues, everything from energy to fertilisers might be potentially affected.

No one quite knows how the situation will unfold. One should be cautious about psychologising. But Putin’s chilling speeches, staged public choreography indicate a leader convinced by delusions of grandeur, unwilling to let any consideration of means restrain him, and willing to see in diplomacy a sign of his opponent’s weakness. If anyone thinks deeply authoritarian leaders can never succumb to this syndrome, they have not read recent history. If you take Putin at his word, his fantasy of cementing Russian nationalism by creating the glories of a pre-Bolshevik Russia, then the whole international system and the hard-won and fragile stability of the nation-state system is up for grabs.

But the chances of Putin leaving quickly are unlikely. Once the war has started, the dynamics are not necessarily under Putin’s control. The Ukrainians may put up better resistance than he anticipated; the pro-Russia groups he supported precipitate action to keep him in; his suspicion of covert operations by the West makes him wary of simply being satisfied by teaching Ukraine a destructive lesson. If, as is being speculated, the main reason for Putin’s action is not rooted in strategic logic but to shore up his credentials as a nationalist leader, he will have to continue to play up the spectre of Western threat. The intangible thing in this is Russian public opinion, whether it has any chance of turning against Putin. But authoritarian leaders see any public opinion turning against them as itself a sign of a foreign conspiracy, an invitation to double down on repression. So Russia could end up paying a bigger price for this. The ramifications of this crisis on American domestic politics are not clear either.

But this is not a moment for feeling superior by harping on the hypocrisy of the West or revelling in schadenfreude. This would be nothing but an excuse to let Putin off the hook, a temptation both the Right that admires Putin, and a Left that is so singularly focussed on American evil that it won’t see anything else, are tempted to succumb to. One can believe that American foreign policy was misguided: Its invasion of Iraq and its possible mishandling of the politics of NATO expansion dented its credibility. But these criticisms detract from the most important fact at hand — that Putin has decided to destroy a large independent country with sovereign rights.

In this instance, it is not even clear that the West’s missteps on NATO have significant explanatory power. That issue has been around for more than a decade, and would have been kicked around for another. Putin wants not only to undo the legality of the post Cold War order, he even criticised the  Bolshevik concession to Ukrainian identity within the Soviet Union. In part what makes this dangerous at this moment is that there are many more leaders who are tempted by the plausibility of this vision, who want to dismantle the constraints of the nation-state and recreate themselves as civilisational states. China may formally talk about sovereign states, but the imaginary is shaped by repositioning at the apex of a civilisation; Turkey, which was sympathetic to Putin till Putin’s fantasy came back to haunt them; Trump, Bannon and the right-wing in the US seems to be implicated in it as well. Even the Indian Right loves this fantasy. What is shocking about this episode is how Ukraine seems not to really matter to anyone. The dominant framing is Russia versus NATO and/or Europe, as if Ukrainians or half a dozen other smaller states are irrelevant to the whole global moral calculus.

The brutal truth is that despite outrage in the West, the appetite for doing what it takes to put pressure on Putin is not yet in evidence. The first round of sanctions that the US and the EU have announced seem astonishingly tepid; it does not even attack Russian offshore finance fully. Exempting Russian energy and food from any sanctions seems designed to inflict minimal pressure on Russia and almost no cost on the West. But will this only embolden Putin? Or can one do an optimistic reading that they still signal the willingness to give Putin a way out. But if Putin’s occupation of Ukraine continues for long, then sanctions will have to be ramped up or the West loses face totally.

China has reiterated the principle of respecting sovereignty. But in the end, it will be tempted to use this occasion to diminish American power. The spin that India is playing realpolitik and securing its interest may be accurate. But it is also a reflection of India’s weakness. Instead of being the “swing state”, it has been reduced to a constantly swinging state — too dependent on Russia, so scared of China that it needs to court Russia, standing for a rules-based open world order but not being able to say in simple words that the Russian invasion is the clearest, most egregious and risk inducing violation of international norms at hand. So the net result of this crisis may be to deepen the world’s cynicism to the point where no meaningful international cooperation is possible on any subject that matters. All great powers are, in the end, too self-absorbed. Putin is counting on that truism.

This column first appeared in the print edition on February 26, 2022 under the title ‘The world at risk’. The writer is contributing editor at The Indian Express



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Shah Alam Khan writes: He worked towards building a world where everyone has a doctor.

My mother says that those who die in their sleep are divine. Dr Paul Edward Farmer died in his sleep on Monday. He was only 62 years old. He had dedicated his life to improving the health of the poorest. A physician by profession, he was also a trained anthropologist, a prolific writer and was the Kolokotrones University Professor and chair of the department of Global Health and Social Medicine at the Harvard Medical School. He was the co-founder of the non-profit organisation, Partners in Health (PIH).

I never met Farmer but followed his work, writings, interviews and other material which emerged from his years of working in Haiti, Rwanda and the impoverished regions of West Africa. His death is devastating news for the tiny tribe of global physicians and healthcare workers who have defied capitalist greed and dedicated their lives to the poor and underprivileged. Farmer was the lighthouse for this endangered tribe.

As a trained anthropologist, Farmer had a knack for asking simple yet important questions which unpeeled the layers of social stratification. Many of his books revealed how poverty works in the modern world. It puzzled him how common people in countries like Nicaragua, El Salvador and Haiti were able to put their lives on the line for dignity and social justice. His last book Fever, Feuds and Diamonds: Ebola and the Ravages of History (2020), deals with the Ebola epidemic in West Africa and traces the origins of this region’s neglected healthcare to centuries of colonial rule. This ability to logically trace the epidemic to an end point in the colonial history of the region shows a teacher in command of his skill and with the ability to reveal the “visibly invisible” to his students.

Having said this, it is extremely difficult to follow the massive yet meaningful canvas of Paul Farmer, the author. His books address not only the sociopolitics of healthcare but also spirituality, liberation theology, hope, political economics and even culture and society. His book Infections and Inequalities examined not only the link between poverty and disease but also revealed how developed countries like the United States treat poor, “invisible countries” like Haiti. His papers on tuberculosis and HIV form an important medical resource for physicians. Mountains Beyond Mountains, his biography by Tracy Kidder, is an inspiring book which all budding doctors should read. In Pathologies of Power, Farmer addressed the disparities in access to existing medical technologies.

With the Covid-19 epidemic ripping apart the healthcare systems of the world and opening up gaping holes in our interpretation of public healthcare, Farmer’s work becomes a guiding light, particularly for resource-challenged environments like India. He believed that the social construction of epidemics and the lived experience of sickness are very different and that poverty is not some accident of nature but the result of historically determined and economically driven forces. In India many of us work in set-ups which have been called “clinical deserts” by Farmer. These are hospitals without the tools of the trade. Farmer asked if such clinical deserts can be irrigated and concluded that they can. He believed that if a MASH hospital can be built adjacent to a battlefield, then one can certainly be built after the battle is over — for example, in Sierra Leone, Liberia, Peru or Guatemala after the civil war. He believed in pragmatic solidarities with partners in health.

Kidder writes in Mountains Beyond Mountains that on a trip to Cuba, Farmer revealed that he didn’t believe in Marxism but was fond of the then-Cuban President Fidel Castro, mainly for protecting the sick and the vulnerable. He writes that when they finally got to their hotel in Havana, Farmer said, “I can sleep here. Everyone here has a doctor.”

As Farmer goes to his eternal sleep, it is the responsibility of each one of us to ensure that his legacy is nurtured. Let us promise him that everyone on this planet will have a doctor.

This column first appeared in the print edition on February 26, 2022 under the title ‘A healer and guiding light’. The writer is professor, Department of Orthopaedics, AIIMS, New Delhi.



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Indrajit Roy writes: UP is a case in point. The state’s progress in overcoming decades, if not centuries, of social exclusion is noteworthy.

The ongoing elections in Uttar Pradesh have resurrected claims that caste politics undermines development. The BJP and its supporters in the commentariat argue that caste politics, as allegedly practised by opposition parties such as the BSP and the SP, led to the state’s social and economic backwardness. But NFHS data on human development since 2004 suggests quite the opposite: UP fared as well as, if not better than, its neighbours among the BIMARU states.

Political instability has marred UP since India’s independence in 1947. Although the Congress won decisive majorities in legislative assembly elections held in 1952, 1957 and 1962, no chief minister completed a full-term in the state. After 1967, political instability became even more acute, as power rotated between the many parties that competed for dominance in the state without, however, managing to complete a full term. It was only as late as 2012 that Mayawati became the first chief minister to complete a full term in office.

With an eye on improving life for Dalits, BSP took development very seriously. Its inclusive vision was outlined by the party’s campaign slogan “sarvajan hitay, sarvajan sukhay”, which in English translates into “may everyone benefit, may everyone be prosperous”. Mayawati introduced and implemented a housing scheme for the urban poor. Of the 1,00,000 housing units promised, over 90,000 were constructed by the time her tenure as Chief Minister expired in 2012. She also inaugurated an integrated rural development programme to supply water, electricity and roads in villages with Dalit majorities. Almost 25,000 villages across the state saw improvements within their jurisdictions, and even her worst critics admitted there had been some development compared to previous regimes. Even though the BSP government was unable to introduce structural reforms that would transfer more productive assets to Dalits, its development programmes did reach populations that had hitherto been largely marginalised.

Learning from the experience of neighbouring Bihar, the state government distributed one million bicycles to girls across the state in a bid to improve their access to schooling and general mobility. However, allegations of corruption overshadowed the developmental interventions introduced under her tenure and Mayawati was voted out of power in 2012.

The new government, formed by the SP, borrowed a page from the BSP’s success at forging social coalitions. It cemented its own Yadav-Muslim coalition that lay at the foundation of the party’s ideology with support from the “upper castes”. Muslim representation in the UP Vidhan Sabha was at the highest since Independence and more closely reflected the community’s population than ever before. Although Akhilesh Yadav scrapped many schemes introduced by Mayawati, he also introduced several new social welfare programmes, including housing subsidies, pensions and unemployment allowances. Furthermore, he distributed 1.5 million laptops to students who completed their secondary and senior secondary education across the state. Perhaps, the highlight of Yadav’s chief ministership was the successful eradication of polio in the state. By 2013, and undoubtedly building on the success of Mayawati’s regime, the state had not reported a single case of polio, a major milestone in global health improvement. The involvement of Muslims in the SP’s social coalition helped to overcome worries from community members that the polio vaccine was aimed against them.

The human development outcomes of social coalitions that governed UP between 2007 and 2017 are clearly discernible. Several of these outcomes pertain directly to the effectiveness of the state in delivering services. It is instructive to compare the National Family Health Surveys 3 and 4. NFHS-3 pertains to data collected in 2005-6, just a year before the BSP came to power in UP. NFHS-4 data pertains to the period 2015-6, or a year prior to the SP losing power in UP. Both sets of data offer a useful insight into the changes in human development in the state through the governments of the BSP and SP.

For example, the proportion of children under five years whose births were registered increased from a mere 7 per cent in 2005-6 to over 60 per cent. Among its neighbours, only Bihar has a similar track record. The proportion of births in a public facility similarly increased from 6.6 per cent in 2005-6 to over 44 per cent in 2015-6. Immunisation rates improved. Mortality rates were reduced. A larger proportion of women reported a follow-up visit from a paramedic after the delivery. Indicators of human development pertaining to women’s status registered an improvement. Women’s literacy rates increased to 61 per cent, the highest among the BIMARU states, except Chhattisgarh. The proportion of women with at least 10 years of education also increased, placing UP ahead of the other BIMARU states.

Between 2005 and 2016, UP reduced the incidence of multidimensional poverty by almost 28 percentage points, from 68.8 per cent to 40.8 per cent. Given the size of the state and its enormous social heterogeneity, this was no mean achievement. Not only did UP decrease the incidence of multidimensional poverty during this period, it also reduced its intensity. Alongside Jharkhand, the state reported the lowest intensity of multidimensional poverty among the BIMARU states.

The evidence from Uttar Pradesh is clear. Caste politics, of which the SP and BSP are accused, did not undermine the state’s human development indicators. If anything, the state’s progress in overcoming decades, if not centuries, of social exclusion is noteworthy. It is time our commentariat give credit where it is due.

This column first appeared in the print edition on February 26, 2022 under the title ‘Casting the welfare net’. The writer is senior lecturer, University of York.



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Sonalde Desai writes: It is time for us to focus on empowering all women, including Muslim women, by ensuring their access to education, employment, and public safety.

After two years of living behind a mask and trying to decode muffled voices and hidden expressions, one begins to develop empathy for millions of women hidden behind face coverings. Whether they are called ghunghat, pallu, burqa, or hijab, face coverings with varying levels of restrictions are a fact of life for 58 per cent of Hindu and 88 per cent of Muslim women in India. Imposing them on young girls in educational institutions seems particularly worrisome. Hence, one can understand the impulse that drives educational authorities in Karnataka to ban the hijab, although the head covering imposed by hijab is much less restrictive than full burqa or ghunghat. However, external interventions tend to have the opposite effect when it comes to cultural transformations.

The Indian opposition to the colonial Age of Consent Bill, setting the minimum age at marriage to 12 for girls, best illustrates this challenge. Lokmanya Bal Gangadhar Tilak, who was highly progressive in his personal life, summed up his crusade against this law in an 1891 editorial: “We have often pointed out that we are not against the particular reform advocated. Individually, we would be prepared to go even further than what the Government proposes to do. Still, we are certainly not prepared to force our views upon the large mass of orthodox people… We have every confidence that in time most of the reforms now preached would be gradually accepted.”

Demands for veiling in the guise of modesty are unlikely to disappear until women themselves seek change. Arguably, the most impressive demonstration comes from Haryana. In a state known for its solid adherence to ghunghat, a quiet revolution began a few years ago when Manju Yadav, a schoolteacher, started a campaign to get women leaders together to cast off their ghunghats. This campaign faced initial hurdles but gained momentum when one of the largest khaps, the Malik Gathwala Khap, asked women to give up ghunghat.

However, mobilising to protest veiling is not easy in the Muslim community. Sania Mirza has faced considerable criticism from fellow Muslims for refusing to play tennis while being covered head to toe. Shabana Azmi was told to stick to singing and dancing by clerics for seeking a debate on whether face covering was ordained by Quran.

Ironically, gender seems to be a crucial battleground for the culture wars, making for strange bedfellows and creating situations that make the oppressed complicit in their own subjugation. Demanding freedom from oppressive gender norms requires release from external pressures that force women to choose between their gendered interests and banding together to protect their communities.

As Flavia Agnes notes, following the anti-Muslim riots in Mumbai, Muslim women’s groups found themselves cancelling anti-domestic violence programmes for fear of providing additional ammunition to the police to harass Muslim men. The Karnataka hijab incident has framed the debate in such a way that the lawyers for the plaintiffs, the media, and civil society at large, portray the hijab as being a central tenet of Islam and, hence, protected from control by educational authorities. This unfortunate conflation between religion and dress code will make it difficult for Muslim women to follow Najma Khan, pradhan of Dhauj village in Haryana and a member of Manju Yadav’s movement, in casting off their veils.

Education is a crucial resource in women’s ability to resist oppressive gender norms. Whether among the Hindus or the Muslims, data suggests that education is associated with a lower prevalence of purdah or ghunghat. About 67 per cent of women with less than a Class V education practice ghunghat or purdah compared to 38 per cent of college-educated women. However, requiring the abandonment of the hijab to obtain education puts the cart before the horse. For Muslim girls, this is a troublesome development. The National Statistical Office estimated gross attendance ratios in secondary education for Muslim women to be 43 per cent compared to 63 per cent for all Indian women. The education systems should be doing all they can to encourage participation among Muslim girls rather than placing obstacles in their way.

The timing of the hijab storm in Karnataka is regrettable. Schools and colleges have been closed for nearly two years. Returning to education will be difficult for all students, most of all for those already falling behind in learning. Data from the India Human Development Survey, conducted by the National Council of Applied Economic Research and the University of Maryland, shows tremendous inequalities in learning outcomes among various social groups. Whereas 68 per cent of forward caste children aged 8-11 can read a short paragraph, the proportion is barely 47 per cent for Muslim children. These inequalities are likely to have been exacerbated as students struggled to learn on their own during the lockdown. At a time when schools and colleges need to focus on bringing children back to classrooms and helping them overcome the learning deficits that are likely to have accumulated, the diversion created through the hijab controversy is counterproductive for all students, most for the students who were already burdened by the learning gaps.

It is time for us to focus on empowering all women, including Muslim women, by ensuring their access to education, employment, and public safety. With enhanced power will come increased agency to transform gender norms if and when women themselves choose to do so.

This column first appeared in the print edition on February 26, 2022 under the title ‘The hijab hurdle’. The writer is professor of Sociology at the University of Maryland and the National Council of Applied Economic Research. Views are personal.



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Olha Vorozhbyt writes: My country is being invaded, suffering in a war not of its making. Russia must see reason not just for Ukraine’s sake, but for the global order.

I am writing these lines as my country, Ukraine, resisted the first day of full-scale war started by its Slavic neighbour – Russia. I am writing this and still cannot believe in it. Moscow started attacking Ukraine not only from multiple directions around our border, but also from the territory of Belarus, which makes the other Slavic country accomplice in this humanitarian catastrophe. “137 Ukrainians died, 316 injured”, said Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyi during his late-night address to the nation. Russian missiles hit our capital, Kyiv, the second-largest city Kharkiv, and the southern city of Kherson. Russian tanks were trying to cross the border with Ukraine from multiple directions. The Russian operation was successful in some directions, but Ukrainian defenders also repelled a lot of these activities. The Russian army suffered much and lost several military vehicles.

When I close my eyes, trying to rest after 24 hours without sleep, I see images of the father who mourns his son near the apartment block in Chuhuyiv, which Russia attacked the morning before. Among those who died, there were children. It is still difficult to believe that this is what happened to me and my country in the 21st century, in the middle of Europe. Russia started a war against Ukraine on February 24. But the process began eight years ago when Russia annexed Crimea and started operations on the Donbas. I do hope that it is now crystal clear that these were not “pro-Russian separatists”, but Russian forces that killed Ukrainian soldiers and volunteers at the Donbas.

Over the last century, it becomes vividly clear that Russia has constantly tried to place Ukraine under its influence. Like in other Central European nations, Ukrainians struggled to create their own state after World War I. We were successful, declaring independence in January 1918 and then uniting with the Western Ukrainian Republic a year later. Yet, unlike other Central European nations, we did not have much opportunity to celebrate living in our own state. The Bolsheviks and the Red Army took control of Ukraine in 1920 (except the region on the West that became part of Poland). This is how the “Soviet” period for Ukraine started. Among historians, there is a consensus that the existence of Ukraine as a separate nation was not put into question by Soviet authorities. This is what Russian President Vladimir Putin now denies with his neo-imperialist rhetoric, claiming that Ukrainians and Russians are “one people” or that it is Vladimir Lenin who “created” Ukraine. That is why, pro forma, the USSR was a federal state. But, it was also a totalitarian regime and Ukraine paid a devastating cost as a part of it.

During 1932-33, Ukrainians suffered the great famine which we call Holodomor (holod – means hunger and mor from moryty – to die). Between 3-4 million Ukrainians died because of it, roughly 13 per cent of the population at that time. Today, more than 13 countries (among them the US and Canada) acknowledge Holodomor as a genocide of the Ukrainian population. Soviet collectivisation policies forced Ukrainian peasants to send their harvest to the Soviet authorities. They were banned from moving out of their villages in search of food. The notorious Law of Five Spikelets that prohibited peasants from gathering food meant death by starvation for a lot of them. Those who attempted to “rebel” and were looking for food were either imprisoned or shot. My husband’s family preserves the terrible story about his great grandmother, who collected potato peels that a rich family threw away and fed her children with them. Many Ukrainian intellectuals, musicians and academics were sent to prison — concentration camps, where their lives tragically ended. The Second World War brought devastating loss as Ukraine was in the middle of what Tymothy Snyder calls “Bloodlands” – the territory stretching from what is today Poland to Western Russia — which suffered at the hands of both Soviets and Nazis.

So, when at the end of the 1980s, glasnost and perestroika brought about change, Ukrainians were inspired. Interestingly, the first push was from the Donbas. In 1989-90, Donbas coal miners started a big strike. The reasons were mainly economic — they were not paid salaries for a long time, working conditions were poor and they looked at the possibility of decisions being taken in Kyiv, and not Moscow. Those protests are often seen as a precursor to the collapse of the USSR and the independence of Ukraine. On December 1, 1991, 90.92 per cent of the voters (including those who lived in Crimea) answered “yes” to the question: “Do you agree with an Act of Declaration of Independence of Ukraine?”. Just a week later, the USSR was dissolved.

Thirty years of independence have not been smooth. But Ukraine proved its peaceful approach. At the time of the dissolution of the USSR, Ukraine held the third-largest arsenal of nuclear weapons. In 1996, Kyiv gave up all its nuclear weapons. There are just two examples of peaceful nuclear disarmament and one is Ukraine. In return for this, in 1994, the Budapest Memorandum was signed and Russia, together with the UK and US, guaranteed Ukraine’s territorial sovereignty. In 1997, Ukrainian President Leonid Kuchma and his Russian counterpart Boris Yeltsin signed a friendship agreement between our nations. These are just two among the row of bilateral agreements where Moscow showed respect to Ukraine, its sovereignty and territorial integrity.

The talk about the “Ukraine crisis” in the international media is a recent development and is deeply misleading: Russia created this crisis, not Ukraine. I hope that the world will finally call this “crisis” by its true name — a war. A war in which Russia attacked its neighbour, in a cowardly manner at 4 am — as the Nazis did during World War II.

Since 2014, Ukraine has changed a lot. Even while living with war, it became more European, had more opportunities, a visa-free regime and deep and comprehensive free trade agreement with the EU that gave more options to our entrepreneurs. Most importantly, Ukraine has been a democratic state. For the Kremlin, having a democratic neighbour while it targets opponents is not a preferable option. That is why Ukrainians are so eager to enter the EU and NATO. According to the last poll, 67 per cent of Ukrainians want to join the EU and 59.2 per cent, NATO. These numbers are a result of Russian aggression. In 2013, less than 20 per cent of Ukrainians wanted to enter NATO.

This may sound strange but Putin’s aggression made Ukrainians more patriotic. Both Russian-speaking and Ukrainian-speaking people see themselves as Ukrainians. And the full-scale war that started yesterday would only make Ukrainians hate their neighbour in the coming years. Yet, the protests against Kremlin’s war with Ukraine all over the world, including in Russia, gave me a bit of hope that ordinary Russians would try to reverse this horrible situation. Hundreds of Russian mothers lost their sons just yesterday. Are they ready to stand up to Putin for the sake of their sons?

India has been very cautious with its statements about the war. Yet, India has a painful history that may help it understand Russia’s claims against Ukraine. Kremlin wants its empire back and sees Ukraine as the jewel in this regard. Ukrainians never agreed with this and severely fought against it. Now, could you imagine a Britain that claims India is in its empire? It is just impossible. But that is what Russia is doing now. It strikes missiles on our cities and our capital Kyiv with an intensity unseen since World War II just to achieve this impossible end. Please, help us bring it back to reality. It is not just Ukraine that needs this. The global order is shaking after the explosions in Ukraine.

This column first appeared in the print edition on February 26, 2022 under the title ‘A letter from Ukraine’. The writer is Deputy Editor-in-Chief of Ukrayinskyi Tyzhden, a weekly magazine in Ukraine.



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As has been widely noted, US sanctions on Russia are likely to have severe implications for India’s defence supplies. Military platforms of Russian-origin constitute at least over 50% of India’s overall military assets and cut across all three services. Over 90% of the Indian army’s 3,000-plus main battle tanks are Russian T-72 and T-90S. India was also in advanced talks to procure another 464 Russian T-90MS tanks. Meanwhile, a large portion of India’s air force fighter squadrons comprise Russian aircraft like 272 Su-30MKI. The Indian navy has a Russian aircraft carrier (INS Vikramaditya) and nine Russian diesel-electric submarines among other platforms. All of these require periodic upgrades, maintenance, spare parts and ancillary support. This entire supply chain will become very difficult to obtain under the new sanctions regime. And as and when CAATSA bites, India’s plans on S400 missile systems and other possible acquisitions will be effectively dead.

True, India has tried to diversify its defence imports over the last 15 years as best exemplified by the purchase of Rafale fighters from the French. But price competitiveness, relatively generous technology transfers, and familiarity between Indian and Russian forces meant that Russian platforms remained the preferred choice. Neither armed forces nor their political masters had enough incentive to go for big changes. Plus, the well-thought Make in India defence plan was ill-executed, and has had hardly any big successes. It hasn’t helped either that thanks to the forces’ pension burden, defence capital expenditure has taken a hit.

With Russia in US crosshairs, Russia getting closer to China and even Pakistan squeezing in, India needs to find alternatives now. Incentivising Western arms manufacturers and revisiting indigenisation are obvious steps in a complex process. It’s a process that will require multi-stakeholder smart strategising that’s not really been New Delhi’s forte till now.



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Jab miya biwi razi, toh kya karega qazi. That pithy observation is of course ignored not just by many parents in India, but by so called communities as well as netas. Love jihad laws and rhetoric take this to a darker place. Some BJP governments have made religious conversion upon marriage a matter of criminal inquiry. So, when the MP Ulama Board decided that any interfaith nikah will require parental consent, sending a directive to qazis across the state, the MP government has, naturally, welcomed it.

Whatever the reason behind the ulama’s decision, maybe it was seeking safety from harassment, it takes away the agency of women. And this is just one example. Patriarchal establishments across communities want to deter relationships outside the rules of caste, religion and gotra. The control of marriage and mating is essential to keep each community sealed and intact. So-called guardians of social order, who want to safeguard what they deem as purity as well as property and lineage, cast women as docile and preyed upon by malevolent outsiders. And these elders often sanctify violence against such couples, especially women.

But women are humans and citizens, with wills, desires and rights. If the Constitution comes first, no compact between religious elders or a state government or indeed parents can nullify a woman’s right to marry anyone she wants and practise any faith she chooses.



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Although I haven’t given the matter a great deal of thought, I’ve begun to believe one of the critical differences between Indian industrialists and their Western counterparts is what they say of their governments in public. Few in the West hesitate to criticise. In India, often contrary to what they privately profess, their public pronouncements are eulogies.

This is why Naushad Forbes’s recent book is so refreshing. What he says of the relationship between industrialists and government holds up a mirror to his tribe. The rest of us can learn from its revealing reflection.

“We must deal with the government as equals, praising where praise is due but criticising when criticism is called for”, he writes in The Struggle and the Promise. “It is time to shed this culture of supplication, of deference, of vassaldom.”

Forbes’s analysis suggests two reasons for this pusillanimity. First, the dependence of industrialists on the government makes them supplicants. “For industry to operate without fear, it must also operate without favour”, he writes. “We cannot speak truth to power if we plead for favours and special privileges.”

The second reason for this cowardice is the government’s response. “I will make an assertion. I know no industrialist today who thinks this government is open to criticism.” Journalists would not disagree but, unlike hacks, industrialists are rich people. Their wealth should give them the spine to stand up. Forbes does not explain why it doesn’t.

Instead, his book reveals the deception industrialists and ministers practise. “I have little time for the minister who tells you in person what he really thinks and then gets on a public stage and says the opposite. And I actively distrust an industrialist who recites one-on-one what a disaster the government has been and then on the dais praises it in the tones of the hallelujah chorus.” Obviously, this suits both sides because it continues.

Naturally, Forbes doesn’t pull his punches. As president of the Confederation of Indian Industry, when he was regularly meeting ministers, he kept “a daily journal… [to record] what was notable and how it made me feel.” It reveals: “I was depressed by how unprepared, unmindful of international best practice, diverted by optics over content and petty some of these great minds were.”

In contrast, he was rather impressed by the governments in Hanoi and Jakarta. But when he writes about them, he also seems to praise his colleagues in India. “The senior members of the government we met just seemed to be more articulate, worldly and capable than their industry. I was struck by the contrast with India.”

Let me pick one other issue. It’s Forbes’s critique of our government’s belief we are “vishwa gurus”. He believes this is the wrong attitude for a country like India. “If we think we are the best why bother to learn from anyone else?… What we do not need is the rhetoric and hubris of tall claims, which keeps us from learning.”

In fact, it’s acceptance of the gap between us and the developed countries that will propel progress. Citing Japan, South Korea and Taiwan as examples, he writes: “The will to develop came out of a sense of backwardness, a sense that one had to catch up.”

So, what is the remedy or antidote Forbes offers? “We must constantly remind ourselves that we are among the world’s poorest one-third of countries, of our abysmal record in child nutrition and stunting which has got worse since 2014, of the fact that Bangladesh overtook us in per capita GDP in 2020 (and) that China is five times richer than we are.”

Perhaps India’s proud politicians might disagree, but I doubt its people will. The poor know they’re poor, the uneducated know they need to learn and what frightens the ill is the fact they can’t afford treatment. This is the reality for the majority, no matter how hard we avert our eyes. We’re at the “shishya” stage of development and there’s an awful lot still to learn.

Karan Thapar is the author of Devil’s Advocate: The Untold Story 

The views expressed are personal



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March 24 will mark the anniversary of the prime minister’s broadcast which launched the first lockdown aimed at curbing the spread of the coronavirus. The nation was only given four hours’ notice of the lockdown, and panic ensued. Because transport services were suspended, thousands of migrant workers started to walk home. Some of them faced journeys of more than 1,000 kilometres. The great exodus from cities showed the insecurity of the lives of migrant workers and the scant security that the State provides them.

Some migrant workers get no security from the State. Among them are the migrant brick kiln workers who live amid the forest of tall chimneys belching smoke between Badri and Jhajjar in Haryana, one of India’s most prosperous states. The state’s chief minister recently announced a measure protecting jobs for citizens of Haryana, but he provides no protection for the brick kiln migrants. I reported on their plight about three years ago and I went back recently to see how they had survived the lockdowns.

The brick kilns are antiquated, and their business model is dependent on a plentiful supply of cheap labour. As soon as I got out of my car, a group of men, women and children, who mould bricks by hand and lay them out to dry before baking, gathered. They came from Gaya district in Bihar. One small boy had no trousers, and a girl was playing with a dead mouse. The workers were housed in hovels with barely any room to stand up in. The walls, made of loose bricks, bulged dangerously. The tin roofs trapped the heat. The workers told me there was one hand-pump for 100 families, and there was no drinking water and lavatories. They live in these miserable conditions because there is no work in Gaya.

There was no work between March 2021 and February 2022 in the brick kiln. So, the workers earned nothing in that time because they are paid on a piece-work basis.

This means that the government’s minimum wage provides no protection for them. They said that during the lockdown, each family was given 1,000 every 15 days to buy food, but that money will be deducted from their earnings when they are paid, which will not be until the end of the season. And, 1,000 doesn’t go as far as it should because their ration cards are registered in Bihar and they don’t know about the new provision making the cards transferable.

When I asked whether government officials came to ask about their welfare, they replied, “Officials come, but they only speak to the munshi (manager) they don’t meet us.” The munshi was present throughout my interview, but he never contradicted the workers.

The only encouraging development I saw this time was a large group of children sitting on the ground under a tree being taught by a young woman. She was not a government teacher. She came from a civil society institution.

How can it be that those tall chimneys are still a blot on the Haryana landscape? Why is manufacturing so heavily dependent on exploited labourers who are effectively bonded to survive? There have been campaigns against child labour and bonded labour ever since I can remember.

An Indian, Kailash Satyarthi, shared the Nobel Peace Prize for his campaigns against the exploitation of children, but children still work alongside their parents in brick kilns. There are laws regulating the employment of migrant workers, but they are not enforced. Do the brick- kilns survive because of the corruption and lassitude of India’s bloated inspector raj? Are the brick kiln workers perhaps ignored because they are not voters in Haryana?

Then again maybe the renowned linguist, philosopher, and social activist, Noam Chomsky, was right when he said, “What is striking in India is the indifference of the privileged.”

The views expressed are personal



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At 5am Kyiv local time on Thursday, Moscow launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine. In what sounded like a thinly veiled nuclear threat, Russian President Vladimir Putin angrily warned that if anyone comes in his way, Russia’s response will be unrelenting. He has turned the geopolitical clock back by decades, flouted international norms, and started a war whose outcomes are beyond his control. The invasion, still panning out, has generated pushback by Ukraine, invited condemnation and sanctions from the United States (US) and the European Union (EU), near endorsement from China and authoritarian States such as Iran and Myanmar, and calls for de-escalation by States caught in the middle — such as India.

Though the direction this war takes remains to be seen, Putin’s decision has led to a readjustment of neo-bloc politics which could leave middle powers on the side. For instance, the US’s mind and resources will refocus on Europe even if it remains committed to the Indo-Pacific, the EU will have to rethink its collective security, and the Sino-Russian alignment has been strengthened by the crisis.

In this context, India’s abstention at the United Nations Security Council (UNSC), coupled with Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s terse focus on bringing an “immediate end to violence” during a call with Putin — an apparent sign of India’s unhappiness with the methods used — seeks to balance Moscow and Washington DC, ensure the safety of Indian citizens in Ukraine, and obviate a harder Russian tilt towards China in an Asian context.

Russia’s war in Ukraine brings India’s conflicting interests in the Transatlantic and the Indo-Pacific into the spotlight. It belies India’s attempt to de-hyphenate these theatres in a bid to focus global attention on China. If the act of war is insufficient to show that these political geographies are inter-connected, the Russian foreign minister clarified it in so many words during a meeting with his Pakistani counterpart on the day of the invasion. The impression that China and Russia are coordinating to hurt India, and its allies, undermines New Delhi’s bid to balance China externally without considering how geopolitically corrosive Moscow’s alignment with Beijing truly is for its own interests.

Even if Russia supplies arms to India during a conflagration with China (a matter of when and where, and not of if), it is unlikely to tilt in India’s direction diplomatically — or even play the discrete arbiter as it did at the peak of the Ladakh standoff during June-September 2020 — given its own geopolitical dependence on Beijing. Moscow demurred during the 1962 war, despite the Sino-Soviet split, because it valued support from its communist adversary more than its non-aligned ally during the Cuban missile crisis. The situation post-Ukraine is likely to be analogous, if not absolutely similar.

In this context, regardless of India’s current position, there are two contradictions that it will need to tackle: One, its excessive dependence on Russian arms in the light of growing geopolitical divergence. Two, its alignment with Quad countries when their appetite to support the “rules-based order” for domestic reasons is decreasing — and their propensity to offer top-end military hardware to India still remains limited.

On the first contradiction, India’s armed forces are predominantly equipped with Russian weaponry, Moscow has been a historic supplier, and is open to technology transfers. Given the ongoing military standoff with China and tense relations with Pakistan, India can ill-afford to alienate Moscow and jeopardise its arms supply lines. Such dependencies are acceptable if lubricated by geopolitical alignment, as was broadly the case during the Cold War and the 1990s, but that is not systematically the case. Russia’s strategic dependence on China (regardless of the competitive undercurrent of this bilateral relationship), sharpened by its need to escape the sanctions regime, and deepening ties with Pakistan, including in Taliban-run Afghanistan, puts it increasingly at odds with India.

Both sides try to manage differences.

India’s determination to procure the S-400 missile system even at the (now-heightened) risk of Countering America’s Adversaries Through Sanctions Act (CAATSA) sanctions by the US is a case in point. Russia’s support for India’s positions at the UNSC remains undiluted, if under stress. However, while India criticises its western partners for failing to take its concerns on Pakistan seriously (as witnessed in the US’s botched withdrawal from Afghanistan), it shies away from plain speak with Moscow for enabling Rawalpindi and the Taliban. This is surprising given India’s own leverage over Moscow as one of its largest arms customers and knowing that defence exports are central to Russia’s economy.

India’s inability to call a spade what it truly is with Russia — or even to do so privately, given the limited effects — is a marker of a toxic dependency that limits, not enables, India’s strategic autonomy. For, if Russian misadventures make New Delhi worry about a possible US-China détente or losing a trusted arms supplier, then it’s a sign that something is lacking in India’s strategy as an Asian counterweight. It is true that reducing defence reliance is neither an easy nor quick process, and India must not rock the boat with Moscow prematurely. But, having excused Russian excesses in Hungary (1956), erstwhile Czechoslovakia (1968), Afghanistan (1979), Georgia (2008), and Crimea (2014), the Ukraine war should make India reconsider its arms dependence on Moscow.

This reassessment should not happen because the US wants India to do so, but because there is a geopolitical need to do so. Large-scale indigenisation coupled with increased diversification of arms supplies is critical to expand India’s policy choices in such circumstances. There is political will and movement in these directions, but such reforms must be expedited. Increased support to and higher quality assurance benchmarks for the Defence Research and Development Organisation (DRDO), coupled with deeper exploration of technology transfer options from France and other European vendors might work.

This brings us to the second contradiction i.e., the limits of Quad. The irony of the Ukraine situation is that the US and most European capitals, despite their outrage, will most likely not be able to reverse Russia’s invasion. Sanctions, though painful, will not overhaul Russia’s domestic political or external strategic calculus in relation to the West. But it’ll push Russia further into China’s orbit, complicating India’s balancing strategies.

This leaves India with the uncomfortable question: What happens if China decides to grab more Indian territory and escalate the Himalayan standoff in the near-term? There’s no guarantee that a distracted US will divert military resources towards India (beyond rhetorical support), or that Russia will be able to play the role of an arbiter. This scenario could entail an incredibly lonely place for India to be in, and one India can hopefully prevent.

Avinash Paliwal teaches at SOAS University of London and is the author of My Enemy’s Enemy: India in Afghanistan from the Soviet Invasion to the US Withdrawal 

The views expressed are personal



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Russia hasn’t invaded Ukraine. Russia is addressing its legitimate security concerns in Ukraine and eastern Europe. Don’t blame Moscow. Blame Washington, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and the complex historical context of the Ukraine issue and interplay of many complicated factors for all that’s happening.

That’s been the crux of China’s argument as its authoritarian ally Russia with its big public squares and a history of class struggle bombards a weaker Ukraine from land, sea and air with arrogance, aggression and ammunition.

It is China. Which is always committed to promoting peace, negotiation and seeks peaceful resolution of hotspot issues.

It is China. Whose principles of foreign policy include mutual respect for sovereignty and territorial integrity, mutual non-aggression, non-interference in each other's internal affairs. Etc.

Clearly, some territorial sovereignties are less important than others.

(Case in point: China’s lack of respect for India’s territorial sovereignty.)

Let’s rewind a few months.

Two official readouts were issued after President of Ukraine Volodymyr Zelenskyy had his first phone conversation with Chinese President Xi Jinping on July 13 last year.

One readout said: “Volodymyr Zelenskyy confirmed the invariability of Ukraine's position on the issue of a united China. The Chinese President, in turn, stressed that China respects the path of independence chosen by the Ukrainian people, supports the sovereignty and territorial integrity of Ukraine.”

The other readout — from China — made no mention of the words of “sovereignty and territorial integrity of Ukraine” though it conveniently said, quoting Zelenskyy: “Ukraine firmly adheres to the one-China policy…”

State Councillor and foreign minister Wang Yi attempted to clarify China’s stand on the rapidly evolving situation in Europe at the Munich Security Conference earlier in February.

“The sovereignty, independence and territorial integrity of any country should be respected and safeguarded. Ukraine is no exception… We hope a solution can be found through dialogue and consultation,” Wang said.

It gets intriguing here.

Wang also told US secretary of state Antony Blinken that China insists on respecting “the legitimate security concerns of all countries”.

The statement clearly showed Beijing’s sympathy for Russia’s consistent opposition against the US-led military alliance NATO’s eastward influence in Europe.

The seemingly contradictory statements — though Beijing will never agree to the argument of contradiction — are indications of the awkward diplomatic dilemma that China has had to face as it negotiates the ongoing tension between Russia and Ukraine — and much of the world.

Statements from the Chinese foreign ministry have focused on the line “legitimate security concerns”, and at every opportunity blamed the US for the situation.

At the same time, China’s ties with Moscow have come under scrutiny especially after President Vladimir Putin visited Beijing for the inauguration of the Winter Olympics and met Xi in the backdrop of the unfolding game in eastern Europe.

China and Russia have put up a mostly united front in the face of what both view as western interference in their affairs, pushing back on US-led sanctions and supporting each other on “core” concerns.

Sino-Russia cooperation was further underlined in the February 4 joint statement, which did not mention Ukraine, but clearly showed Beijing’s support for Russia's central demand in the ongoing crisis, with both sides “opposing further enlargement of NATO.”

China’s ties with Kyiv are in the background too — it’s important to remember that Ukraine joined Xi’s trillion-dollar trans-continental Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) in 2017.

Both sides signed an agreement in June 2021 to deepen cooperation in infrastructure construction, China’s state-run Xinhua News Agency reported.

“China leapfrogged Russia to become Ukraine's biggest single trading partner in 2019, with overall trade totalling $18.98 billion last year, a nearly 80% jump from 2013,” according to data from the State Statistics Service of Ukraine quoted by Reuters.

“Ukrainian exports to China, mainly commodities such as iron ore, corn and sunflower oil, stood at $8.0 billion in 2021, while imports from China, largely machinery and consumer goods, totalled $10.97 billion,” the data showed.

From 2016 to 2020, China was the largest recipient of Ukrainian weapons, receiving 36 per cent of Ukraine’s total exports, according to a 2021 report by the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute.

But how will China deal with the situation in the backdrop of its close, if historically checkered, ties with Russia?

Chinese official media has all but backed Russia in the crisis without explicitly supporting a full-fledged Ukraine invasion.

Ming Jinwei, a senior editor at China's official news agency, said it is in China’s interests to support Russia without getting involved as Beijing will need Moscow’s support when it wants to force its hand on Taiwan independence.

China has long claimed the island nation of Taiwan, a self-ruled democracy, as part of its territory.

“China has to back Russia up with emotional and moral support while refraining from treading on the toes of the US and EU,” Ming wrote, according to a translation of his opinion published by Business Insider.

“In the future, China will also need Russia's understanding and support when wrestling with America to solve the Taiwan issue once and for all,'' Ming wrote, adding: “Therefore, with regard to the Ukraine crisis, China should understand Russia's legitimate security concerns”.

China has already made public its view that there is no comparison between Ukraine and Taiwan, saying basically – contradictory as it may sound -- that it’s all right for the mainland to invade the self-ruled democracy because it has always been “an inalienable” part of the mainland.

The support for Russia is visible everywhere on Chinese state media.

“Most countries realise that Russia is defending its own territory, trying to stop the intrusion of US-led NATO. The US is the true source of trouble. US hegemony is the root cause of the threat the world is facing today,” Shen Yi from the School of International Relations and Public Affairs of Fudan University wrote for the state-controlled tabloid, Global Times.

But was Beijing caught unawares about Moscow’s decision to suddenly invade Ukraine?

Chinese state-controlled media had repeatedly criticised the US, accusing it of hyping war — even mocking the prediction — when western intelligence reports consistently said Putin was ready to attack.

Chinese experts were also saying that despite US provocation, there would be no war.

Yun Sun, director of the China programme at the Stimson Center, told The Washington Post that the Chinese policy community appeared to be in “shock” at the sudden escalation of fighting after having “subscribed to the theory that Putin was only posturing and that US intelligence was inaccurate as in the case of invading Iraq.”

Also, China had evacuated many of its nationals from Kabul ahead of the Taliban takeover in Afghanistan last year.

But in this case, China had initially only issued advisories for its 6,000 nationals living in different parts of Ukraine to stay alert and fix Chinese flags on their vehicles.

They were yet to be evacuated until Saturday.

Of course, if China had begun evacuating its citizens in the days ahead of Russia’s invasion into Ukraine, it could have been a sure sign of the dangers ahead in “…the path of independence chosen by the Ukrainian people.”

Sutirtho Patranabis, HT’s experienced China hand, writes a weekly column from Beijing exclusively for HT Premium readers

The views expressed are personal



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The elections in Uttar Pradesh (UP) are being fought at different levels: The caste cleavages, rural-urban divide, issue-specific pro-incumbency and the pro-changers acting as a class guided by their relative truths.

There’s no tangible wave of the kind that lifted the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) above the rest in 2014 or the 2017 assembly polls and the 2019 general elections, when Opposition alliances seeming invincible on paper failed to manage even honourable defeats. The “Aayega to Yogi (Adityanath) hi” chorus is consistent, but evidence on the ground is increasingly thin. The reason: The BJP’s forward-caste base sustains; its worry, the discordance in the backward class social combine that had made the party the leviathan so difficult to humble.

What makes the battle complex for the ruling dispensation is the emergence of an identity distinct from that of caste and religion. They’re the nowhere-to-go unemployed youth with deep resentment over the establishment’s lack of empathy. “We’re cane-charged while seeking jobs,” bemoaned Amit Khushwaha of Phulpur’s Jhusi. His angst: The use of force against students who hit the streets in Prayagraj (Allahabad) against a last-minute change of rules for tests for railways jobs.

Khushwaha had butted into a roadside conversation this writer was having over tea with a girl studying medicine, her father and a high-caste advocate and a local Muslim. Their gripe: lack of livelihood opportunities compounded by rampant corruption at all tiers of the state administration. The worst sufferers of it were the educated jobless, some among whom became overage during coronavirus-induced lockdowns. A widely aired demand’s for age bar waiver to help them appear in competitive exams.

Young voters' mood is a sea-change from the past

The despondent talk marked a sea-change from the 2014 elections when hordes of youth rooted for Narendra Modi across the state. Asked what drew them to a leader from faraway Gujarat, the stock reply was about the jobs he promised: “Woh naukri dilwayenge….” That commonly-shared hope and the Congress’s veritable no-show in the contest gave the now Prime Minister’s maiden pitch for power in Delhi a thrust which so comprehensively pulverised his opponents. The powwow continued till five years later, the BJP wresting a brute majority in 2019 besides its unprecedented 2017 capture of power in UP.

The time period in which UP’s now going to polls is sullied by un-kept promises breeding disillusionment, the gravity of which will be a factor determining the outcome. In more ways than one, it’s the BJP’s MY (Modi-Yogi) versus the MY (Muslim-Yadav base) of the Samajwadi Party. Making Akhilesh Yadav’s dice on the board look like a possible winner is the value-add of Jat votes through Rashtriya Lok Dal’s Jayant Chaudhary and allies such as OP Rajbhar’s Suheldev Bharatiya Samaj Party.

The turning point in the polls was the resignation from the Yogi regime of heavyweight weaker/backward community ministers: Swami Prasad Maurya, Dara Singh Chauhan and Dharam Singh Saini. The concomitant defections of nearly a dozen other assembly members to the SP changed radically the campaign narrative.

In the words of a plain-speaking BJP insider the revolting legislators were like ‘drunken fireflies’ facing-off the sun: “Jugnuon ne sharab pe li hai, ab woh Suraj ko gaali deinge.” On a serious note, he felt the way the disaffected ministers drafted their resignations hit Yogi where it hurt the most. They accused him of giving a short shrift to small businessmen, the unemployed youth and the backward communities: “Each of these letters was equal to Modiji’s five poll rallies. They gave the SP the political script it needed.”

Diminishing crowds and the BJP’s labharthi card

On the sticky wicket the BJP finds itself, the one card that has traction among the poor, especially women, is the free monthly ration scheme going by the name of Pradhan Mantri Garib Kalyan Anna Yojna (PMGKAY). Launched in March 2020 during the pandemic, it has, with an eye on elections, been extended till March this year.

Across the districts of Kaushambhi (three seats) and Pratapgarh (seven seats) adjoining Prayagraj (12 seats), people talked about free foodgrain, pulses, cooking oil and salt for lower-income groups. It’s on this category of the electorate called “labharthis (recipients)” that the BJP’s pinning its hopes besides the forward castes’ vocal support for the way Yogi reined in mafia dons, land grabbers and extortionists who allegedly got a “free run” in the 2012-2017 rule of Akhilesh Yadav.

Doubts linger however about the party’s prospects on account of diminishing crowds at meetings and rallies addressed by Modi and other top-rung BJP leaders. Only the poll results will tell whether it’s a sign of constituency-centric dejection or a wider loss of people-connect. What created a big buzz in Prayagraj (Allahabad) city on February 22 was the lackadaisical response to Amit Shah’s rally and the huge crowds Akhilesh Yadav drew in rural Karchana where SP veteran Rewati Ram Singh’s son, Ujjwal Raman is defending his assembly seat.

Dilating on the urban-rural divide, Allahabad’s ubiquitous political pundits advised visiting journalists to travel 30-km from the central square (Ghanta-Ghar) of any city, towards the countryside, for a “real feel” of the public mood. This writer took the counsel and undertook an 80-km drive to Sirathu via Chail and Manjhanpur, covering Kaushambhi’s three assembly constituencies.

The BJP had made a clean sweep of these seats in 2017. But it’s now facing tough contests, especially in Sirathu where deputy chief minister Keshav Prasad Maurya is a candidate at the expense of his party’s sitting legislator. His fight there is with the Apna Dal (Kamerawadi)’s Pallavi Patel.

The seriousness of the challenge he faces could be gauged from the fact that Pallavi’s sister, Anupriya Patel, whose Apna Dal (Sonelal) is aligned with the BJP, had to be pressed into action in Maurya’s support. She pleaded with her Kurmi clansmen to vote for the Dy CM the way they’d have voted for her.

But at Rohi chowk a few km off Sirathu, a clutch of young voters saw a potential winner in Pallavi: “Woh chamak rahi hai….” Making light of the BJP’s free ration scheme (which will end in March), they also predicted a victory in Chail for the alliance’s another woman candidate, the SP’s Pooja Pal.

This group sipping tea at a kiosk comprised two Yadavs, a Maurya, a Dhobi and a Muslim. They were one in agreeing that the ration scheme barely compensated for their crop destroyed by stray cows and cattle. As they talked, a fruit-vendor nearby complained loudly about being forever bullied by the local cops: “The poor don’t count, the BJP’s police only serves the rich and influential forward castes.”

An aggressive pro-changer in the motley group was Ramakant Diwakar, a washer-man who spent thousands of rupees to make his way home from Mumbai during the first lockdown. In Bollywood-style hyperbole, he said the government has sold everything, leaving people to fend for themselves: “Sab kuch bik gaya hai, bus hum aur aap bachey hain.

The BJP-RSS’s last-mile push

That said, the RSS cadres are proactively connecting with urban/rural voters at their doorsteps to convert the dithering or the undecided among them. Their tactics: putting the fear of the Yadav hegemony of the past to make BJP seem better in comparison. For its part, the latter’s pumping in extra resources to enhance its finishing power.

Given their organisational superiority over the SP, BSP and the Congress, the last mile push makes sense from the Sangh Parivar's standpoint. That’s more so when the margins of victories and defeats could be wafer-thin in many constituencies.

HT’s veteran political editor, Vinod Sharma, brings together his four-decade-long experience of closely tracking Indian politics, his intimate knowledge of the actors who dominate the political theatre, and his keen eye which can juxtapose the past and the present in his weekly column, Distantly Close

vinodsharma@hindustantimes.com

The views expressed are personal



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“Don’t rage against the dying of the light
It’s a waste of emotion and quite absurd
I think ‘inevitable’ is the word
So, smile in the mirror and say goodnight…”

— From Dylan to Dhillon, by Bachchoo

Without any intention, gentle reader, to seem immodest, I venture to tell you about my latest foray into fiction. I am engaged in writing a book with the mildly derivate title “Uncle Tom’s Cabinet”. No, it’s not a book about an antique cupboard, it’s a foray into the world of UK politics under the prime ministership of a character I have named Gojo.

In this yarn, in deference to modernity, Gojo has recruited ministers from the Asian, black and Middle Eastern stock of British citizens. Even though these are elected members of Parliament and, by definition, representative of the constituencies that elected them, they are certainly as representative of the ethnic communities of Britain as Jeff Bezos or the electric car fellow Elon Musk is of the poor and starving of the world.

Readers may have noticed the similarity of my intended title to that of the famous nineteenth century novel by Harriet Beecher Stowe called Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Ms Stowe subtitled her novel “Life Among the Lowly”. I can’t use that subtitle because the characters in it are almost all millionaires and as government ministers have power and influence.

No, the reason I have chosen this elegant title is because, over the decades, the central character of Ms Stowe’s book, Uncle Tom, a suffering slave, has come to represent the most subservient of humans from an oppressed race. To be an “Uncle Tom” has come to mean to be an arse-licker and someone whose cowardice and attitudes amount to a betrayal of his or her own people.

Take, for instance, the leading female character of my literary enterprise whom I have so far, in this first incomplete draft, called Uglii “Clueless” Motel. She is so called because her Asian parents inherited the surname by running a motel in Uganda before they were expelled from that country by Idi Amin. She is an extremely strong character — one can’t have weak women in novels these days without being pilloried and cancelled — and as home secretary is the most virulent anti-immigrant minister Britain has had since Heinrich Himmler! (That was Germany, you idiot! — Ed. Arrey, this is fiction, yaar… sub koochh chalta — fd)

Her daddy was an immigrant himself and stood as a candidate for the uniquely anti-immigrant party UKIP. Uglii follows his ideological stance but is a Tory who once held pro-hanging views and suggests that would-be immigrants who risk their lives crossing the English Channel to seek shelter from persecution should be sent to concentration camps in St Helena, where Napoleon was once imprisoned.

Her boss Gojo gets into deep trouble in the plot by blatantly defying laws he himself initiates. Perhaps he should be under police investigation and should really resign, but then Uglii supports him down the line because if he goes under as a result of hitting this iceberg, she goes with him.

In our story, Uglii also runs a scheme whereby Russian oligarchs who bring £2 million or more into the country can get “Tier 1 Golden Visas”. Afghan refugees bring nothing and are meet with gunboats.

The main male character of Uncle Tom’s Cabinet is called Hedgie Moonak. Gojo has given him the finance portfolio. Hedgie has made his money through speculation in the money markets rather than by any entrepreneurial acumen — unlike Bezos or Musk.

At one climactic point in my novel, there is a crisis with the Czar of Russia threatening to invade neighbouring countries. Gojo and his Western allies say they won’t send troops to defend the invaded territories but will apply economic sanctions. Under Hedgie’s jurisdiction and certainly under his nose, Britain has become the global hub for money laundering as property worth £1.5 billion is bought by Russians with links to the Czar. Hedgie has allowed these Russians to register their ownership anonymously in UK overseas territories: 2,189 of these companies registered in the UK are linked to 48 multi-million-pound corruption cases.

In my novel, a respectable journal such as The Times newspaper reports that these figures are only the tip of the iceberg. Gojo and Hedgie have resisted all calls to force overseas companies to reveal their ownership. It also says that the money laundering that has been overlooked by Uglii and Hedgie amounts to probably £82 billion — all of it transacted by a Russian mafia oligarchy through bribery, rigged procurement, embezzlement and the unlawful acquisition of Russian state assets.

Uglii and Hedgie are the main culprits in my projected novel, but there are other “Uncle Tom” characters such as health secretary Sadist Covid, another defender of Gojo, hoping that the discarded Covid masks, which he has decreed are no longer required, can be fabricated into a raft to save him when Gojo’s ship goes down.

Another minor character is Quasi “hung-drawn” Quartered, a business secretary who defends Gojo in the most obsequious way and maintains that the fraud which has, in the story become widespread during a universal plague, is not really a serious crime, not really comparable to shoplifting.

And I think I’ll add a character called Games Stupidly and make him minister for Europe.

That’s like Hindu ambassador to Mecca. Should be fun!



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The February-March 2022 Assembly elections in five states — Uttar Pradesh, Punjab, Uttarakhand, Goa and Manipur — seem different from any other state polls since Prime Minister Narendra Modi took office in 2014, and that can leave the RSS with a giant-sized headache. A big part of the RSS’s expected concern is that these elections potentially cast a shadow on the BJP’s chances in the 2024 Lok Sabha elections.

In the earlier Assembly polls on Mr Modi’s watch, the expected results were usually a matter of guesswork, with clear bets hard to make. Else, they were thought to be weighted in the BJP’s favour even if the outcome turned out an anti-climax. We saw the latter most vividly in Gujarat in 2017 when the Congress nearly snatched the state from the saffron party though its campaign was led all the way by Rahul Gandhi, who had been written off as a bumbling spectacle.

In contrast with preceding elections, this year’s polls seem to have a very different flavour. No matter what the end outcome — in the Modi era this usually means the BJP buying up MLAs of other parties post-election and earning praise for this from the elite for showing chutzpah — there is an emerging feeling that the ruling party is not looking dominant on the ground. In public perception, its stock is down.

In Uttar Pradesh in particular, there appears to be a wide measure of agreement among observers -- a shared belief almost -- on these lines. UP is always important, but is especially so this time around. Most BJP MPs, the PM included, won from this state. Hinduism’s most vaunted pilgrim sites and religious symbols, which the BJP has sought to milk to buttress its communal appeal, lie here. The BJP won the state by a yard and more in the 2017 Assembly polls.

In short, if there is a setback for the ruling party in UP, ominous signs for it are likely to be read nationally, affecting all-round political dynamics, casting gloom in the ruling party’s top leadership as well as its rank and file, even if state polls aren’t necessarily a predictor of national results.

Ordinarily, after seven years in power, an electoral setback is deemed quite normal. Anti-incumbency is common in democracies. But Mr Modi has run the show in a highly personalised, super-dominant style, with a centralising, homogenising, focus. He has built a cult of personality. He lives in many avatars simultaneously. He has sought to create an aura of being unstoppable. If the voter administers a shock even to this carefully manicured personality despite its “charms”, then there’s a question: Is the BJP’s future safe with him? The RSS can hardly duck that question.

The Sangh, which sets the BJP’s ideological moorings and — away from the glare — guides its political destiny, lives in the shadows. It is thought to be a careful tracker of the public mood. Without being conspicuous, and frequently shunning overt publicity, it manipulates the BJP’s organisational strings. Its silent cadres work hard to shape opinion to advance the BJP’s agenda, through calibrated media interventions and social media bold-facing.

In the months before the 2014 Lok Sabha elections, in pursuit of the Hindutva agenda, the RSS decided to hand the baton in the PM stakes to Mr Modi, then Gujarat’s CM. This was accomplished by ensuring the sidelining of potential rivals like Lal Krishna Advani, Murli Manohar Joshi, Nitin Gadkari, Rajnath Singh, and from among the younger set Arun Jaitley and Sushma Swaraj.

No one was left in any doubt that it was the Gujarat CM alone that the RSS was pitching for. Then everything fell into place in the BJP. The episode established yet again that only the RSS’s writ runs in the BJP.

If anything prospered under Mr Modi’s stewardship as PM, it was the Hindutva agenda. There is a question mark on nearly everything else —most notably the economy, the employment and inflation situation; even the handling of national security; until six months ago the handling of the Covid-19 pandemic; and decidedly the mishandling of the farmers’ question and of their year-long agitation.

Also, Centre-state relations have nosedived. Social cohesiveness has taken a beating due to the attempt at deepening fissures as between religious as well as social communities. Official data cannot hide the fact that nearly every section of India, except the very rich, has been pushed down at least one step on the economic ladder. Impoverishment of the people is the motif of the Modi Raj.

On the plus side for Hindutva, Ayodhya was a low-hanging fruit but Kashmir was not. But it’s now in the bag, thanks to the PM’s manipulative cleverness. The RSS cannot but be very satisfied. For the foreseeable future, however, there is no clear objective of a similar order in view which needs to be worked at right away.

Indeed, Mr Modi himself appears to have moved on to other things — such as perpetuating his agenda of continuance in office through the outsize use of relentless propaganda.

Is this in accord with the RSS’ organisational ethos, that places primacy on the utility value of leaders in its constellation rather than their image or aspirations? Remember, Atal Behari Vajpayee — whose persona had a spread outside the RSS’s cloister system — is not an automatic favourite of the Sangh Parivar due to his perceived catholic temperament.

Mr Modi has lived his politics and governance on his own terms so far. How does the RSS view him? The answer isn’t evident, although we do know that its leader Mohan Bhagwat, in an address from New Delhi’s Vigyan Bhavan, had made barely camouflaged critical observations on the government’s handling of the pandemic last summer. On the year-long farmers’ agitation too, the RSS had to intervene at various levels to get the government off its high horse.

It appears that in the RSS’s reckoning, the Modi government has adopted a work agenda that hasn’t brought dividends, and this is a serious error of tactics, disenchanting voters, especially in UP. While being the BJP’s organisational mainstay and its ideological mascot, the Sangh is known to take steps to shield itself from the downside of government policies since it has to live among the people.

To make assumptions about how the RSS will view Mr Modi if UP goes badly will be speculative. But in the field of politics allies like Bihar CM Nitish Kumar could get restive. At the BJP’s top levels too, there could be unease leading to a search for other options.



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