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Editorials - 26-03-2022

Eight people were burnt to death in a village in the State’s Birbhum district on March 21, as a retaliation to the killing of a local leader. What makes West Bengal so susceptible to vendetta politics and deadly violence? Why are factional feuds on the rise? Shiv Sahay Singh reports from Bogtui

As smoke from houses set on fire continues to rise, villagers are confronted with uncomfortable questions. How will people who have lost family members come to terms with their loss? Will they return? What will they return to? The answers are up in the air as Bogtui village in West Bengal’s Birbhum district witnessed an unprecedented violence on March 21. Eight persons — six women, one child and one man — were burnt to death.

In 48 hours, the fires have been doused, but there is simmering anger and grief. When Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee left Bogtui on March 24, after making elaborate announcements on compensation and rehabilitation to the violence-affected villagers, Sukhtara Khatoon could not hold back anymore. She began recounting the events of the night, as tears flowed. “I hid under the bed. They burnt my entire family to death before my own eyes. When I finally managed to break the lock to pull them out, they were in a terrible condition,” she said. A few other women joined her on the village road, weeping inconsolably, surrounded by policemen. “We don’t want any money, we want the perpetrators to be brought to justice,” they said. It is not unusual for men to flee villages in West Bengal after clashes or bouts of violence. But setting fire to homes where women and children were hiding, after locking them from outside, is a first for a State accustomed to violence over area dominance.

Spiralling out of control

There is little doubt that the violence at Bogtui, located more than 220 km from Kolkata, was in retaliation to the murder of the Trinamool Congress deputy pradhan Bhadu Sheikh, who was killed on the evening of March 21. In less than an hour, his supporters went on a rampage in the village picking and choosing houses belonging to rival Trinamool Congress camps in the village. It was at the house of Sona Sheikh, once an associate of Bhadu, that seven charred bodies were recovered on March 22.

Even though people had assembled in two groups (relatives of victims of the fire and Bhadu Sheikh’s family) at two different locations when the Chief Minister arrived, a majority of the villagers owe their allegiance to the State’s ruling party. The violence was the result of a factional feud brewing between supporters of the ruling Trinamool Congress, but this is not the only kind of violence which West Bengal has witnessed in the past few months.

Days before the Bogtui horror, on March 13, two elected municipal representatives were shot dead within hours of each other. Video grab from a CCTV showed Anupam Dutta, a Trinamool Congress councillor of Panihati municipality, riding pillion on a motorbike when an assailant emerged from nowhere and shot him in the head. The Trinamool Congress leader slumped to the ground. Hours before that Congress councillor Tapan Kandu was shot dead at Jhalda municipality in Purulia district. The municipality had thrown up a hung mandate in the civic polls and Kandu was allegedly under pressure to shift allegiance to the Trinamool Congress so that the ruling party could have a board at the civic body located in one of the most backward districts of the State about 300 km from Kolkata. The death of student leader Anish Khan in Howrah, where police personnel barged into his house in the early hours of February 19 and allegedly pushed him to death from the second floor, had exposed the link between local leaders and the police.

Violent thread

Over the past few years, there have been several incidents of violence, a similar thread running through each. The use of violence for area domination has been normalised, and it is linked to money and muscle-power, contends Anuradha Talwar, a social activist. Together with this, the thwarting of dissent helps the party in power during elections, at all levels, to sway votes in its favour. However, the politics of area domination creates bitter feuds and rivalries, sometimes in the same party, among leaders who are always competing with each other for a share of resources from the State-run panchayat and other government funds.

At Bogtui, the dispute was also about the share (‘bokhra’), the villagers claimed. “There was a dispute about the share [from panchayat funds, and businesses linked to sand, coal and stone chips]. These days everyone wants a share,” Marfat Sheikh, father of Bhadu Sheikh, said, when asked what led to the murder of his son.

The West Bengal police denied that the Bogtui incident was a case of “political violence” and said it may have been a “result of deep-rooted personal enmity”. However, political observers point out that in a deeply political society like West Bengal, political and personal lines are blurred. With the Chief Minister ordering the arrest of Trinamool Congress Rampurhat- I block president Anarul Hossain, the factionalism behind the violence is hard to miss. “Anarul asked the police not to enter the village as the miscreants went house to house attacking our family members,” Mihilal Sheikh, a grocery store owner who lost his mother, wife and child, alleged. His family had sought shelter in Sona Shaikh’s house when the attack began.

With the Opposition being decimated during the regime of the Trinamool Congress, there is a problem of plenty in the TMC ranks, leading to factional feuds or “gosti dwando”. “Even in the decades preceding the Trinamool Congress regime there have been instances of political violence. But this is the first time a massacre has taken place where only ruling party members are involved. Even in Nandigram or the Netai massacre in the 1970s during the Naxal movement, violence had erupted between two political groups, the ruling establishment and the Opposition parties,” Biswanath Chakraborty, political commentator and head of the department of Political Science at Rabindra Bharati University, said.

Court orders CBI probe

Taking note of the nature of violence, on March 25, the Calcutta High Court directed a probe by the Central Bureau of Investigation in the Bogtui massacre. The court has taken suo motu cognizance of the “brutal incident” at Bogtui village and in its order described the incident “one such exceptional case where requisite direction is required”.

“We are of the opinion that facts and circumstances of the case demand that in the interest of justice and to instil confidence in the society and to have a fair investigation to dig out the truth it is necessary to hand over the investigation to the CBI,” the order by a division Bench of Chief Justice Prakash Shrivastava and Justice Rajarshi Bharadwaj said. The court observed that the "shocking incident of burning of at least eight persons including a child and as many as six women has shaken the conscience of society” and had a “nationwide ramification”. Following the High Court order, Trinamool Congress spokesperson Kunal Ghosh demanded a “proper investigation by the CBI.” He said the ruling party would cooperate with the CBI but that if justice is not delivered, if there is an effort to save the BJP or attempt to shield the greater conspiracy… then there will be protests and mass agitation.” Banerjee has been claiming that there is a “greater conspiracy” to defame the State government.

Only seven months ago, the Calcutta High Court had asked the CBI to probe the post-poll violence in the State, when supporters of Opposition parties were targeted for weeks after the results of the 2021 Assembly polls on May 2 were declared. The court’s order was in response to a report by a committee of the National Human Rights Commission, which criticised the West Bengal government’s handling of the situation. It had referred to the post-poll violence as “retributive violence by supporters of the ruling party against supporters of the main Opposition party (the Bharatiya Janata Party)” and had alleged that the local police was “grossly derelict, if not complicit, in this violence.” The CBI has so far registered 56 FIRs in incidents of rape and murder in the post-poll violence and arrested scores of accused across the State.

As the BJP raised a strong Hindutva pitch to capture the State, Bengal also began to witness communal violence. After the 2019 Lok Sabha polls, communal riots broke out in the Barrackpur subdivision; in May 2020, there were riots in Telinipara. On March 13 this year, a Trinamool Congress councillor Anupam Dutta was killed at Panihati in Barrackpore. The recently concluded civic polls were also marred by allegations of electoral malpractices and intimidation by the Opposition.

Violence in speech

Violence in West Bengal is not only reflected in physical attacks, but also in the corrosive language used in public discourse. The latest in the series of comments was a phrase used by Trinamool Congress MLA and leader from Dinhata, Udayan Guha, who threatened those availing of the benefits of the State government scheme of “Duare Sarkar (government at the doorstep)” with “Duare Prahar (beating at the doorstep)” if they did not vote for the ruling party in the civic polls. Before the 2021 Assembly polls, the West Bengal BJP leadership, including the then party president Dilip Ghosh, regularly made remarks aimed at inciting violence like threatening to send “people to the crematorium”. Anubrata Mondal, the Birbhum district president of the Trinamool Congress, whose initial reaction to the Bogtui violence was that a television set had exploded triggering the fire, is known to speak in violent innuendos. The Trinamool Congress leader, who gave the party the much publicised ‘Khela Hobe (game is on)‘ slogan had in the past urged his supporters to “bomb the police”. In fact, the ‘Khela Hobe ’ slogan, is often used as a thinly veiled threat. Despite openly endorsing violence, neither the State’s ruling party nor the BJP have taken action against the leaders.

The number of incidents of crude bomb attack in villages across the State is indicative of how organised crime has spread over almost all districts of rural Bengal. Not only have a number of people died while assembling crude bombs, but on several occasions children have been injured in explosions as they have stumbled across these bombs while playing in their neighbourhood. On March 25, several crude bombs were recovered in Birbhum district after a search was launched by the district administration, not far from Bogtui.

Economic and social reasons

As the debate over the Birbhum violence rages, the Trinamool Congress leadership keeps referring to similar incidents in the Left regime. There is no denying that the last years of the Left Front government were violent — there was the movement for creation of a separate State of Gorkhaland and a Maoist uprising in the State’s Jangalmahal region (forests of Bankura, Purulia and West Midnapore). But, according to observers, what the Bogtui massacre shows is that the reasons for the violence have shifted from being overtly political to economic and to some extent social.

“If we trace the history of violence in West Bengal, we witnessed violence in the Left regime too but what we are seeing under the Trinamool Congress regime is more due to economic reasons than political. The economy which we are talking about is not the organised economy but an informal economy, established outside the legal framework, and full of antisocial elements,” political commentator Subhamay Maitra said.

Experts like Prof. Maitra emphasise that the Trinamool Congress model of governance is to give money in the hands of the people and the party has been successful to a certain extent but that the State has not been able to attract any major investment in the past few decades. Giving doles through cash- incentive schemes is not leading to development, he pointed out, and West Bengal is witnessing migration of people who are ending up in other States working as labourers in low-end jobs. “There are at least 5 to 6 crore people residing in rural parts of the State. The leaders representing them, rather than being committed to an ideology, are adept at area domination and can get votes for the party. In every pocket of the State we will find such leaders,” he said. From Canning in the south to Cooch Behar in the north, the presence of strongman leaders who can get votes and ensure that the Opposition does not create problems have emerged as a new phenomenon in the State’s politics. The rags-to-riches stories of leaders like Bhadu Sheikh and Anarul Hossain cannot be overlooked, villagers pointed out.

Even though the Bogtui violence has come as a major embarrassment to the Trinamool Congress government, the people who bore the brunt of violence have expressed their faith in the Trinamool Congress leadership. The Chief Minister announced a compensation of Rs. 5 lakh per affected family and Rs. 2 lakh to each family for reconstructing their houses which were burned down. She also promised jobs to a member of each affected family. “We know nothing about courts. But we have faith in Mamata Banerjee who has come to us and stood by us,” Mihilal Sheikh, who has lost his entire family, said after the Calcutta High Court announced the CBI probe.

Within hours of the court announcing the probe, a group of forensic experts visited the house of Sona Sheikh. Heaps of ashes and broken window panes are strewn around the one-storeyed house. The forensic team took 15 minutes to gather evidence. The villagers who are still on tenterhooks have not returned home. Meanwhile, the spiral of violence continues elsewhere. On March 23, a Trinamool Congress leader Sahadeb Mondal was shot at in Nadia district allegedly by political opponents. Mondal, husband of Trinamool Congress gram panchayat member Anima Mondal, is battling for his life at a city hospital. With each passing day, politics gets bloodier in the State.



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India’s assertion criticising the OIC Resolution on Islamophobia was valid, but could have made a reference to Indian Muslims

Last week, the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) adopted a consensus Resolution declaring March 15 annually as the ‘International Day to Combat Islamophobia’. Introducing the draft document on behalf of its main sponsor, the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation (OIC), the Permanent Representative of Pakistan to the UN, Munir Akram, said that the OIC had “extensively” discussed the proposal with interested delegations for a year and the same process continued once a draft text was introduced in February this year. There is little doubt that India and the European Union (EU), which had major difficulties with the very basis of the proposal, would have discussed it with the OIC, but obviously could not persuade it to their viewpoints.

Concessions by OIC

Islamophobia connotes fear of and prejudice, discrimination and hate speech against Islam. Muslims worldwide complain about negative stereotyping of their faith which has got exacerbated since the al Qaeda’s 9/11 terrorist attacks and other instances of terrorist violence undertaken by Islamist groups. They assert that these acts are not in keeping with Islam. They also emphasise, as Pakistan Prime Minister Imran Khan did during his address to the UNGA in 2019, that “…that there is no such thing as radical Islam (and) there are radical fringes in every society”. Mr. Khan also regretted that “suicide attacks are equated with Islam” and the marginalisation of Muslims in European countries. He admitted, though, that the Western world does not “look at religion the way that we do”.

It is obvious that the OIC made many concessions till the last moment in order to achieve consensus. It stuck to its desire to get a resolution on combating Islamophobia, but in the process, had to place it in within the framework of previous resolutions of a general nature which seek to promote tolerance and religious freedoms and combat discrimination and violence flowing from a variety of reasons. In the Resolution’s operative part, the OIC had to agree to a call for a dialogue for peace based on “respect for human rights and diversity of religions and beliefs”. And significantly, while submitting the Resolution, the OIC had to withdraw its call for “high-visibility events” by member states, for curbing Islamophobia. It now only wants the observation of March 15 in “an appropriate manner”.

India’s stand

Immediately after the Resolution’s adoption, India’s Permanent Representative T.S. Tirumuti exercised his right to explain India’s stand. His statement criticising the Resolution has attracted media attention. The fact that by not breaking the consensus India, at least formally, accepted the Resolution, has become somewhat obscured. India’s basic contention was encapsulated in these words “It is time that we acknowledged the prevalence of religiophobia, rather than single out just one”. This was an entirely valid assertion. So was the contention that ‘phobias’ are just not against Abrahamic faiths but also against non-Abrahamic religions. Discriminatory, prejudicial and violent acts have taken place, as mentioned by Mr. Tirumurti, against Hindus, Sikhs and Buddhists. Non-Abrahamic faiths, though, perhaps do not evoke the same degree of fear and negativity worldwide but especially in the West as does Islam.

Mr. Tirumurti also mentioned India’s historical track record of giving refuge to the prosecuted members of different faiths. He specifically mentioned Zoroastrians, Jews and Buddhists. The reference to Buddhists was a not-so-subtle one to the Dalai Lama and his followers. While all this was fine, what was absent from Mr. Tirumurti’s intervention was any reference to Indian Muslims. This would not go without notice, especially as the Indian Muslim community is the second or third largest in the world.

Mr. Tirumurti did “condemn” Islamophobia along with all other religiophobia, but at that point he could have specifically added that India cannot but be concerned with Islamophobia because Muslims form a substantial part of the country’s plural society. Such a reference would have been appropriate for two other reasons too: one, the complaint that despite India’s desire, the word “pluralism” does not find any mention in the Resolution; and, two, that Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s vision of India’s polity and society and the path of progress he aspires to lies in “sabka saath, sabka vikas, sabka vishwas and sabka prayas”. That necessarily includes Indian Muslims as the ruling dispensation itself stresses to ward off allegations of anti-minorities bias. And a reference to Indian Muslims would not have detracted from Mr. Tirumurti’s basic warning that a focus on a single religion may lead to divisiveness when it is imperative that the UN is not divided into “religious camps”. India’s views in international fora have to be promoted with finesse and grace.

Like India, the EU’s opposition to the Resolution stemmed from “singling out a particular confession”, but its philosophical underpinnings were different. The EU placed its focus on individual rights and freedoms and not on protection of religions per se. Thus, its emphasis was on the rights of non-believers. The gulf between the EU and the OIC on the ambit of the freedom of expression is long standing and will not be easily bridged for, as Mr. Khan noted, the West does not see religion as “we do”. The EU’s views on an individual’s right to change religion may also not coincide with the view of traditional Islam which does not accept apostasy.

China’s position

The politics surrounding the Resolution was best illustrated by the late entry of China as among its sponsors. China’s abysmal record of treatment of its Muslims, especially the Uighurs, is well known. Yet, the OIC has always adopted a soft approach towards China. It has essentially overlooked the persecution of its Muslim minorities, particularly of the Uighurs who have been ‘re-educated’ in large camps. Thus, China’s approach to the Resolution was brazen. Perhaps as a quid pro quo, the OIC once again gave China a free pass during its Foreign Minister’s meeting in Islamabad on March 22-23; the Chinese mistreatment of its Muslims does not find any mention in the Islamabad declaration. Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi was invited as a special guest at this meeting. In this context it is useful to recall Pakistan’s great opposition to the UAE inviting the then External Affairs Minister the late Sushma Swaraj in 2019 as guest of honour to the Abu Dhabi OIC Foreign Minister’s meeting.

Vivek Katju is a retired Indian Foreign Service officer



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The Draft Data Accessibility and Use Policy is silent on the norms, rules, and mechanisms to bring to fruition its vision

In February 2022, the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MEITY) released the Draft India Data Accessibility and Use Policy 2022 (or Draft Policy) for public consultation. The Draft Policy aims at providing a robust scaffolding for harnessing public sector data for informed decision-making, citizen-centric delivery of public services, and economy-wide digital innovation. Specifically, it seeks to maximise access to and use of quality non-personal data (NPD) available with the public sector, overcoming a number of historical bottlenecks: slow progress on the Open Government Data (OGD) platform, fragmentation of data sets into departmental silos, absence of data anonymisation tools, insufficient attention to the development of data stewardship models; and lack of data quality standards, licensing, and valuation frameworks to support data-sharing.

Incomplete norms

This GovTech 3.0 approach — to unlock the valuable resource of public sector data — does upgrade the OGD vision of the National Data Sharing and Accessibility Policy (NDSAP), 2012. It seeks to harness data-based intelligence for governance and economic development. However, the Draft Policy’s silence on the norms, rules, and mechanisms to bring to fruition its vision of data-supported social transformation requires attention.

Ensuring greater citizen awareness, participation, and engagement with open data is mentioned as a core objective of the Draft Policy. In imagining such openness, the draft confines transparency of public data to non-personal data sets. Any attempt to promote meaningful citizen engagement with data cannot afford to ignore the canons of the Right to Information (RTI), and hence, the need for certain citizen data sets with personal identifiers to be in the public domain, towards making proactive disclosure meaningful. This does pose ethical and procedural dilemmas to balance privacy/risk of data misuse with transparency-accountability considerations. The unfinished task of the NDSAP in bringing coherence between restrictions on the availability of sensitive personal information in the public domain and India’s RTI, therefore, has been lost sight of.

Similarly, with respect to government-to-government data sharing for citizen-centric service delivery, the Draft Policy highlights that approved data inventories will be federated into a government-wide, searchable database. Given that citizen data sets generated during service delivery contain personal identifiers, the assumption here seems to be that adherence to anonymisation standards is sufficient safeguard against privacy risks. But even in the case of anonymised citizen data sets (that is no longer personal data), downstream processing can pose serious risks to group privacy. Considering that India has no personal data protection law, the convergent data processing proposed through the Draft Policy becomes especially problematic.

The Draft Policy adheres to the NDSAP paradigm of treating government agencies as ‘owners’ of the data sets they have collected and compiled instead of shifting to the trusteeship paradigm recommended by the 2020 Report of the MEITY Committee of Experts on non-personal data governance. When government agencies are cast as owners of public sector data sets, it means they have a carte blanche with respect to determining how to classify their data holdings into “open, restricted or non-shareable” sans any mechanisms for public consultation and citizen accountability. The lack of a data trusteeship framework gives government agencies unilateral privileges to determine the terms of data licensing. As such, predecessor policies ignore obligations for regular updation of public data sets. Taking on board a trusteeship-based approach, the proposed Draft Policy must pay attention to data quality and ensure that licensing frameworks and any associated costs do not pose an impediment to data accessibility for non-commercial purposes, while also protecting public sector data from being captured by large firms, especially transnational Big Tech, for economic innovation.

In the current context, where the most valuable data resources are held by the private sector, it is increasingly evident to policymakers that socioeconomic innovation depends on the state’s ability to catalyse wide-ranging data-sharing from both public and private sector actors across various sectors. The European Union, for instance, has focused on the creation of common, interoperable data spaces to encourage voluntary data-sharing in specific domains such as health, energy and agriculture. These common data spaces provide the governance framework for secure and trust-based access and use, in full compliance with personal data protection, and updated consumer protection and competition laws.

Creating the right conditions for voluntary data-sharing is a necessary, but not sufficient, condition for democratising data innovation. Competition law regulation has proven to be inadequate in the platform economy where first-movers entrench themselves owing to their intelligence advantage. And mandatory public access in exceptional cases such as public emergencies, suggested in the EU’s proposed Data Act (2022), cannot unlock the data enclosed by lead firms for public value creation, in general.

In this regard, the data stewardship model for high-value datasets proposed by the MEITY’s Committee of Experts in their Report on Non-Personal Data Governance (2020) is instructive. In this model, a government/not-for-profit organisation may request the Non-Personal Data Authority or NPDA (an independent institutional mechanism) for the creation of a high-value data set (only non-personal data) in a particular sector, demonstrating the specific public interest purpose for which such data is being sought as well as community buy-in on the basis of an appropriate public consultation process. Once such a request is approved by the NPDA, the data trustee has the right to request data-sharing from all major custodians of data sets corresponding to the high-value data set category in question – both public and private. Private sector custodians have a mandatory duty to comply with such requests for specific raw data fields. They can only claim trade secret protection in inferred data. In the case of refusal of a data trustee’s request by a data custodian, the NPDA has the final say in terms of resolving the dispute.

While the detailed checks and balances for such mandatory data-sharing arrangements are yet to evolve, the radical idea of high-value data sets as a social knowledge commons over which private data collectors have no de facto claim is vital to balance public use and private innovation.

What we need

What we need is a new social contract for data whereby: a) the social commons of data are governed as an inappropriable commons that belong to all citizens; b) the government is the custodian or trustee with fiduciary responsibility to promote data use for public good; and c) democratisation of data value is ensured through accountable institutional mechanisms for data governance. The Draft Policy needs to be revisited from this perspective, in order to seize the data opportunity before it is too late.

Anita Gurumurthy and Nandini Chami are with IT for Change, an NGO working on digital technologies and social justice



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Beyond stopgap measures such as enabling rupee-rouble trade, India must expedite FTAs

The Centre’s announcement that India’s merchandise exports have already surpassed the target set for this fiscal year, with overseas shipments crossing a record $400 billion mark by March 21, brings much-needed cheer to an economy still struggling to recover from the bruising impact of the COVID-19 pandemic. The export rebound, coming on the back of last fiscal’s pandemic-induced slump in global demand, is particularly heartening as the key value-added sectors of engineering goods and apparel and garments have done well this year. Engineering goods, in particular, have registered almost 50% year-on-year growth, while ready-made garments logged a more than 30% increase, in the April-February period, as per provisional data from the Commerce Ministry. However, in terms of the sheer scale of increase, petroleum products were the standout performer as the global surge in oil prices lifted the dollar value of overseas shipments of goods produced at India’s refineries by 150% over the first 11 months of the fiscal. The fact that the export growth has been achieved against the backdrop of persistent logistical challenges, including container shortages and port congestion that have pushed up freight rates, is laudable and reflects the concerted effort made by the government in coordination with industry and the country’s overseas missions. Interestingly, Commerce and Industry Minister Piyush Goyal made a pointed reference to the role played by India’s embassies and envoys in exploring new opportunities for Indian products, and if the current momentum in exports is to be sustained in the coming years, the diplomatic corps will need to enlarge their role in trade promotion.

Still, the cheer of attaining the milestone needs to be tempered by the acknowledgment that multiple challenges persist on the trade front. Imports have outpaced exports this year, almost doubling the trade deficit in the April-February period to more than $175 billion. The gap is wider than the pre-pandemic year of 2019-2020 as well and points to the pressing need to step up the pace of export growth if the deficit is to be shrunk meaningfully. While global inflation in commodity prices certainly contributed to enlarging the value of both exports and imports, the fact that project goods were the only item of import, among the 30 broad categories listed by the Ministry that contracted over the 11-month period, is also cause for disquiet. The lack of overseas purchases of capital goods for new projects is a clear indicator that private Indian businesses are still wary of making fresh investments given the lack of momentum in personal consumption. With the war in Ukraine and sanctions on Russia now posing fresh problems for exporters seeking to ship goods to not only these countries but other markets in Europe as well, policymakers must go beyond stopgap measures such as enabling rupee-rouble trade and expedite ongoing negotiations on the raft of free trade agreements so as to at least help lower some of the tariff walls.



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IPL is more than a money-making machine, and is likely to throw up new stars

Nearly a decade and a half since its inception, the Indian Premier League (IPL) has struck deep roots and acquired nimble feet. General elections in 2009, 2014 and 2019, and the pandemic lasting over two years, have never stymied the league. Irrespective of the external challenges, the tournament’s organisers have always conducted the IPL. Even as India remains the base, at varying points South Africa and the United Arab Emirates have chipped in as hosts. Cut to the present, the 15th edition will commence at Mumbai’s Wankhede Stadium on Saturday with defending champion, Chennai Super Kings, (CSK) taking on last year’s runner-up, Kolkata Knight Riders. And over two months, the IPL will monopolise prime-time television while its caravan will shuttle between Mumbai and Pune due to COVID-19 bio-bubble protocols. Mumbai’s Wankhede, Brabourne and DY Patil Stadiums and Pune’s MCA Stadium will conduct the games while the venue for the play-offs, including the final on May 29, will be announced later. Ever since that summer night at Bengaluru’s M. Chinnaswamy Stadium in 2008, when the IPL made its debut, its commercial value has found incremental gains. The latest outing has Tata as the title sponsor while multiple brands will jostle for space through the tournament and its 10 teams. Meanwhile, the two new squads — Gujarat Titans and Lucknow Super Giants — will enhance the novelty factor.

The IPL’s current version will have transition as an underlying theme. Most units have had a change of personnel and in some cases, there are new captains too. CSK, until now led by the talismanic M.S. Dhoni, will have a fresh skipper in Ravindra Jadeja. At 40, Dhoni will continue as a player but with him having relinquished the reins of captaincy, an era has ended in the league’s history. Having led CSK to four titles, the legend from Ranchi remains the IPL’s biggest player. While CSK will look at replicating its triumphs, Mumbai Indians, the most successful franchise with five trophies, will hope to excel in its backyard. Led by Rohit Sharma, who is now India’s all-format skipper, the outfit has Kieron Pollard in its ranks, reflective of the championship’s international flavour. However, the event isn’t just about youngsters grabbing attention, it is also about seniors reiterating their credentials. Virat Kohli is now seeking a fresh wind as a mere player. And this IPL will also help leading players such as Kane Williamson finesse their craft ahead of the ICC T20 World Cup in Australia, later this year.



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Bangladesh was peaceful as the Chief Martial Law administrator, Lt General Ershad, armed himself with drastic powers to forestall any opposition to his takeover.

Bangladesh was peaceful as the Chief Martial Law administrator, Lt General Ershad, armed himself with drastic powers to forestall any opposition to his takeover. Ershad issued martial law regulations giving himself the power to constitute a martial law tribunal and special and summary martial trial courts in such areas as might be specified in his notification. The administration has put a blanket ban on all political activities. Ershad has appointed a three-member council to advise him. Judgments of the martial law court cannot be challenged in the Supreme Court. There have been no reports of violence on the second day of military rule.

Hasina house arrest

The Awami League leader Hasina Wajed has been put under house arrest in Dacca after the promulgation of martial law. Also put under house arrest was former president Abdus Sattar, the vice-president and the speaker of the dissolved Jatia Parishad.

The Delhi Electric Supply Undertaking and the Archaeological Department have been held responsible for the gruesome tragedy inside the Qutub Minar on December 4 last year. This is the finding of the one-man inquiry commission headed by Jagdish Chandra, which probed the causes of the accident. The commission also indicted the Archaeological Department for the very bad and dangerous condition of all the stairs in the Qutub Minar. The stairs had become very slippery, uneven, and had dangerous depressions.

Britain relents

There seems to be no meeting point on major political matters between India and Britain, but on economic matters, there appears to be a large amount of agreement. Britain is willing to remove some of the aid cuts to India.



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Put plainly, William and Kate's two-day trip to Jamaica has been a PR disaster.

Every royal needs someone to tell them the truth, a la the child in the ‘Emperor’s New Clothes’. Otherwise, they tend to believe that the naked hypocrisy of their self-serving narratives is, in fact, fact. In Jamaica, the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge — Prince William is second in line to the British throne — realised that the reality show that is the royal family cuts little ice in the former Caribbean colony. As a poster held up by a young girl outside the British embassy said:“Kings, Queens and Princesses and Princes belong in fairy tales, NOT in Jamaica!”

Put plainly, William and Kate’s two-day trip to Jamaica has been a PR disaster. Before their arrival, leading politicians, academics and civil society figures demanded an apology from the British government and Crown for slavery, and reiterated the long-held demand for reparations. The tone-deaf royals, though, seem to believe they are still in the first season of The Crown. But 2022 isn’t 1937. The pictures — now heavily criticised on social media — of William and Kate waving and cooing in their designer clothes, to children who are behind a wire mesh fence, are a case in point. Neither rockstars nor movie gods, their celebrity and privilege is based solely on an accident of birth. And in a former colony, whose poverty is very much a part of the colonial legacy, the “white” gaze in the pageantry of unemployed billionaires has people incensed understandably.

On the last day, William did try some damage control and expressed “profound sorrow” at the history of slavery in the Caribbean. Profound sorrow, though, is not a formal apology and a royal tour is no substitute for reparations. Perhaps the loyal grandson ought to take a cue from his brother. The family business — being the symbol of a conservative order that holds up inequality — is providing diminishing returns. At least in Hollywood, there’s still some cache in being a fairy tale character.

This editorial first appeared in the print edition on March 26, 2022 under the title ‘No fairy tale’.



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Highhanded state action like arbitrary deportation of scholars would certainly disrupt such aspirations. The state government should step in and urgently clear the air because it has much to lose.

The deportation of Filippo Osella, professor of Anthropology and South Asian Studies at the University of Sussex, from Thiruvananthapuram on Thursday on the orders of the Foreigners Regional Registration Office (FRRO) is inexplicable and disturbing. Osella, an internationally renowned scholar who had arrived in India on invitation with a valid visa for an academic seminar, was summarily told to leave the country without any explanation. The incident is embarrassing for a country that claims to protect free speech.

Osella has been working on Kerala for nearly three decades and is widely published. He had arrived in Thiruvananthapuram to present the findings of a research project that had evolved through collaboration among various prestigious public institutions including the University of Sussex, Cochin University of Science and Technology, Kerala University Interdisciplinary Centre, and Centre for Development Studies, Thiruvananthapuram. The project sought to investigate the impact of climate change on the social and economic conditions of Kerala’s coastal communities and propose solutions to ameliorate their plight. In the past, he has published on reforms within Kerala’s Islamic traditions and the relationship between religious practice, politics and economic action. He had a valid research visa and a return ticket well within the visa period. What, then, provoked the FRRO’s extreme reaction? Osella and the universities that were hosting him continue to be in the dark about the reasons behind the deportation order even after four days. An FRRO official told this newspaper that “he was denied entry as per orders from higher officials”. Action against a scholar with a distinguished academic record must necessarily be backed by irrefutable reasons that need to be clearly spelt out; stonewalling questions should not be seen as an option.

The state government has ambitious plans to develop Kerala as an education hub. A vision document introduced at the state conference of the ruling party, CPM, envisages attracting private capital for the purpose. The state has several of the attributes required to emerge as a knowledge destination and centre of learning. Highhanded state action like arbitrary deportation of scholars would certainly disrupt such aspirations. The state government should step in and urgently clear the air because it has much to lose.

This editorial first appeared in the print edition on March 26, 2022 under the title ‘Spell it out’.



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Now that the spectacle of the grand swearing-in is over, and with fantasies and spectres of 2024 still in the distance, the newly re-elected government must get down to addressing the victor's challenge in the state.

The swearing-in of the Yogi Adityanath government in Uttar Pradesh for a second successive term on Friday marks an important moment for the BJP, the nation and the state. Coming alongside victories in three other states, it was the re-conquest of UP by the BJP that seemed to affirm, most of all, that its winning streak continues, that the Opposition still does not have a cogent response, and that accounts of the BJP’s national dominance being circumscribed by the states were vastly exaggerated. Adityanath 2.0 could also be viewed as an important milestone on the road to 2024, given the traditional centrality assigned to the Hindi heartland state in parliamentary polls. But now that the spectacle of the grand swearing-in is over, and with fantasies and spectres of 2024 still in the distance, the newly re-elected government must get down to addressing the victor’s challenge in the state.

The BJP has announced “Naye Bharat ka naya UP (the new UP of a new India)”, more than half of the ministers are new, but on the morning after, the government will have to deal with many of the state’s old problems congealed and sharpened by the economic slump and then Covid. In this election, even though it may not have become a vote for change, it was evident that there is distress on the ground, for which “berozgari (unemployment or joblessness)” and “mehengai (price rise)” became the shorthand — it will need to be addressed by a responsive policy and politics. The BJP reaped the reward of perceived successes on the law and order front in the first term of the Adityanath government — it was widely felt that the political tug of war at the thana (police station), seen to be a recurring feature of the SP regime, was significantly reduced. Adityanath 2.0 must build on that achievement by ensuring that the police is part of a system of rule of law, not rule by law, and that the so-called “gunda raj” of an earlier day is not replaced by a police state where due process gets short shrift. Government schemes — like the free ration scheme scheduled to end on March 31 — have played a significant role in the BJP’s victory. Here, the challenge for the new government will be to ensure that the state continues to touch the lives of citizens in ways that are enabling and enduring. Most of all, the Adityanath government needs to reach out to those who may feel excluded from its moment of triumph, and to ensure that the state’s minorities feel heard and represented as stakeholders, not just beneficiaries of the welfare scheme.

This is also an important moment for the Samajwadi Party in UP. In this election, the SP made large gains, and even though they could not lead it past the victory threshold, they are enough to make it a strong Opposition in the state — if only the party works hard and doesn’t slip into the slumber that marked much of the last term. Akhilesh Yadav has done well to resign his Lok Sabha seat and continue as Karhal MLA. He and his party must now use the Assembly floor to ask questions and stand vigil. The task is cut out — for both sides of the aisle.

This editorial first appeared in the print edition on March 26, 2022 under the title ‘The second term’.



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Tahir Mahmood writes: The former Chief Justice of India’s rulings struck a blow to the traditional understanding of the rules of talaq under Muslim law, and also corrected the grave misconceptions about its stand on bigamy

If any former CJI other than the Shah Bano architect, the late Y V Chandrachud, will be remembered by posterity for contribution to Muslim personal law reform in India it is Ramesh Chandra Lahoti who breathed his last on Wednesday. He had joined the apex court bench in 1998 and at the beginning of the new millennium pronounced judgments on two controversial issues in Muslim law — divorce and bigamy. This led to the judicial restoration of the true scriptural law by blowing away the cobwebs from several confused brains. Miles ahead of the Shah Bano verdict of 1985 which had fine-tuned only the law on Muslim women’s post-divorce rights, Lahoti’s rulings struck a blow to the traditional understanding of the rules of talaq under Muslim law, and also corrected the grave misconceptions about its stand on bigamy.

There has been an abominable practice in India under which when a deserted Muslim wife, after long years of waiting for reconciliation, approaches a court to seek financial relief, the unscrupulous husband tries to defeat her rightful claim by pretending to have quietly divorced her sometime in the past. In many old cases during colonial rule, the courts had accepted such a plea and denied relief to aggrieved wives. These precedents were followed by some high courts also after Independence. Deciding an appeal in one such case (Shamim Ara vs State of UP, 2002), Lahoti confidently held that under Muslim law there is a proper procedure for talaq and that unless the husband proves meticulous compliance with the prescribed procedure, his claim of having divorced the wife cannot be accepted.

“We are very clear in our mind that a mere plea taken in the written statement of a divorce having been pronounced sometime in the past cannot by itself be treated as effectuating talaq,” Lahoti ruled. “There are no reasons substantiated in the justification of talaq and no plea or proof that any effort at reconciliation preceded the talaq,” he said and declared that in the case before him neither had the marriage been dissolved nor had the husband’s financial liabilities towards his lawfully wedded wife come to an end.

The celebrated judgment in the case marked the beginning of the judicial restoration of the true Muslim law on divorce in India. Lahoti threw into the dustbin of history the practice of Muslim husbands using a divorce plea as an afterthought in their wives’ legal cases desperately seeking relief. Honouring me by citing my scathing critique of past judicial decisions in which a mere statement by a married man that he had divorced his wife was accepted by the courts, the learned judge overruled all such precedents. This was the ruling which ultimately led to the apex court’s constitution bench decision in the Shayara Bano case of 2017 setting aside the practice of the so-called triple talaq (followed by legislation outlawing it). One of the five judges on the Shayara Bano bench, Kurian Joseph asserted: “I expressly endorse and re-iterate the law declared in Shamim Ara.”

An unconditional permission for polygamy is erroneously believed by sections of common Muslims to be a part of their religion and personal law. Under this mistaken impression, they think that having children from each of the multiple wives should also be deemed a religious privilege. Any general law of the country which even in the remotest way curtails their alleged “freedoms” in these matters is seen by them as contrary to their personal law of professedly divine origin, and they seek exemption from it.

A Haryana state law of 1994 had laid down that gram panchayats members having more than two children will be ineligible to seek election to the zila parishad. The restriction was meant to promote smaller families and planned parenthood. An aspiring Muslim contestant pleaded that having multiple children was a natural corollary to the freedom for polygamy under Muslim personal law. Challenging the state law under the religious freedom clause of the Constitution, he sought exclusion from the two-children norm. Deciding his appeal, Lahoti rejected the foolish plea (Javed vs Haryana State, 2003). “No religious scripture or authority has been brought to our notice which provides that marrying less than four women or abstaining from procreating a child from each and every wife in case of permitted bigamy or polygamy would be irreligious or offensive to the dictates of the religion,” he declared and upheld the constitutional validity of the Haryana law.

The learned judge was absolutely right. The Quran had not enjoined or even encouraged polygamy. It had just allowed it, with a “better not” caution, to be resorted to in special circumstances and subject to rather insurmountable restrictions. And, certainly, there is no religious injunction under Muslim law making it mandatory for the polygamists to have children from all wives.

Lahoti immortalised himself by crafting these commendable rulings into the Muslim family jurisprudence of India. He will remain alive in the hearts of social reformers of the country and true well-wishers of the community.

This column first appeared in the print edition on March 26, 2022 under the title ‘A reformer on the bench’. The writer is a professor of law and ex-member, Law Commission of India



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Shilpi Gulati writes: If the archives do not remain autonomous public institutions, they will undoubtedly be tampered with, damaged, or destroyed forever

The importance of film archives has been the subject of much debate across the world since cinema’s invention in the late 19th century. Through the decades, filmmakers and archivists have argued that every country must preserve great works of cinema, especially in the celluloid format, and establish systems of exhibition where the public can freely access them. By the mid-20th century, countries including the USA, France, UK, Belgium, Canada, Czechoslovakia, Italy, Poland, Sweden, Norway, Switzerland, and the USSR had all accorded cinema the status of art, and much like historical museums and public libraries, recognised film archives as repositories of national treasure. While the first film archives of India were set up in this broader historical climate, the attitude of the Indian state towards film has been fundamentally different. Our government still views film as a medium for information and broadcasting and often neglects its cultural and historical value. This is brought into sharp focus in recent developments where the government has decided to shut down four of its oldest and most reputed film units – the National Film Archives of India (NFAI), Films Division (FD), Children’s Film Society of India (CFSI), and Directorate of Film Festivals (DFF) – providing no information to the public about the future of thousands of historic films and filmic material preserved by them.

What are these film archives, and why are they important? The Indian government established the Films Division in 1948. Given the task of producing and distributing newsreels and documentary films, FD was an archive of eminence right from the beginning. Post-Independence, films made by the erstwhile colonial agencies of Information Films of India, Indian News Parade, and Army Film and Photographic Unit were handed over to FD. In the following years, it preserved audio and visual records of India’s history of decolonisation and the process of nation-building, and today it safeguards nearly 8,000 newsreels and documentaries on historical events and political figures. These also include rare works of stalwarts like Satyajit Ray, MF Husain, Mani Kaul, Pramod Pati, and more recent films by contemporary filmmakers. The NFAI was established much later in 1964 with the mandate to trace, acquire, and preserve the heritage of fiction cinema in India. Built under the supervision of the renowned curator P K Nair, the NFAI has reserves of several thousand films, books, scripts, posters, and photographs dating back to the 1910s, and it actively promotes film research and scholarship on Indian and South Asian cinema. Apart from FD and the NFAI, the other two film units of significance include the CFSI, established in 1955, and the DFF, established in 1976. While the former is responsible for producing children’s films, the latter organises the National Film Award, Dadasaheb Phalke Award, and the International Film Festival of India (IFFI). All four of these institutions have historically provided original prints from their archives for screenings at film festivals, film societies, and educational institutions around the world. However, despite their contribution to preserving and promoting the national heritage of India, their future looks precarious.

In its most recent orders in December 2021, the Ministry of Information andBroadcasting (MIB) has decided to close all regional and national offices of FD, NFAI, CFSI and DFF and bring them under the workings of the National Film Development Corporation (NDFC). The NFDC is a public sector undertaking established in 1975 to promote filmmakers outside the mainstream film industries of India. In the past, NFDC has been recognised for its contribution to parallel cinema, and also criticised for its failure to provide exhibition infrastructures to independent films. In 2018, the Niti Aayog evaluated the workings of the NFDC and declared it a loss-making unit. Subsequently, the matter of its closure was proposed in Parliament, and the need to evaluate FD, NFAI, CFSI, and DFF was also discussed. Three years later, without any consultation with the film fraternity of India, the MIB decided to merge them with NFDC. This arbitrary and opaque decision of the MIB was severely criticised at different public forums at the International Film Festival of Kerala (IFFK) where renowned filmmaker Adoor Gopalkrishnan warned the government against “killing film institutions by merging them with a moribund body like the NFDC.”

What is the problem if a public corporation like NFDC manages our archives? While any attempt of the MIB to bring greater efficiency to public institutions is welcome, the suspicious manner in which the merger is being carried out raises concerns. First, the MIB has not been able to explain why four public-funded bodies are being merged with a loss-making corporation. Second, it has largely been silent on the matter of handover of the archives and has released no plan on how the transfer of fragile and inflammable material like celluloid will be carried out. In recent months, the MIB has also dismissed more than eight RTI inquiries, a writ petition by FD employees, and ignored numerous articles, public debates and open letters written by concerned filmmakers, historians and archivists that seek clarification on the matter. Could the move towards making archives into profit-oriented entities mean that the government might try to disinvest from them in future if they do not perform “up to the mark”? Within such a dismal scenario, what will happen to the free and unencumbered access that the Indian public enjoys to the historical films made in our country? Would they always remain free?

Unaware of the gravity of the situation and misled by the garb of digitisation, some naïve filmmakers disregard the importance of physical archives. They argue that in recent years, both NFAI and FD have uploaded rare Indian films, posters and photographs on their YouTube and Instagram accounts to increase public access and therefore it will not be a problem when these archives don’t exist in the future. It is almost laughable when we forget that big multinationals own social media sites and that there have been innumerable examples of interviews, reports, and articles being taken down when these sites have given in to the pressures and demands of governments and interest groups. Are we fooling ourselves into believing that our films will remain online forever? Or do we imagine a future where we will crowdfund a public archive from our individual hard drives? How many films would we be able to keep, and for how many years would our hard drives survive?

We must remember that archives are repositories of our history. And it is important to safeguard them from the vested interests of political regimes that aim to re-write national histories in their favour. If our archives do not remain autonomous public institutions, they will undoubtedly be tampered with, damaged, or destroyed forever. We are now in a time when the rhetoric of nationalism is thrown around in various public forums; we need to understand this particular aspect of preserving our film heritage is a matter of national interest. Therefore, the government must urgently declare our archives as national heritage cannot be monetised under any circumstance. They belong to the people of India and must be protected and insulated from any commercial pressures.

This column first appeared in the print edition on March 26, 2022 under the title ‘Our film, our history’. The writer is a National Award-winning filmmaker, currently teaching at the Tata Institute of Social Sciences



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Sayandeb Chowdhury writes: The party has virtually no opposition in West Bengal. This has led to an entrenchment of violent elements

A spectre should be haunting West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee — that the Trinamool Congress (TMC) is increasingly mirroring its original other, the Left. Her party is showing a frighteningly familiar concoction of arrogance and arithmetic, which became the governing logic of the Left for much of its tenure in office in West Bengal. Arrogance, because there was virtually no opposition to much of the Left rule in the last two decades, and hence very little accountability. And arithmetic, because a predictable equation of voting patterns, booth-wise intelligence, ground-level surveillance and discreet economic reliance assured the Left of electoral returns for years. Something similar now seems to be the case with the TMC. After the assertive electoral win against the BJP last May and the subsequent desertions in the West Bengal unit of the BJP after the polls, the TMC, equally unchallenged by the Left leadership, has realised that there is scarcely any political threat to it. And that same arithmetic of steady electoral returns is now reportedly being ensured by its hierarchy of hoodlums.

The macabre arson near Rampurhat or the murder of the popular young protester Anis Khan or the daily pattern of entrenched lawlessness in Bengal’s hinterlands are clear hints that toxic political skullduggery within the TMC is now spilling over. One must also point out that post the party’s victory in the assembly elections last year, several local polls, including municipal elections, saw a disturbing absence of opposition, giving criminal elements free control of the sinewy network of profits that are attached to electoral gains in several parts of the country. In this, too, the state of things reminds one of the Left when it was at its peak.

Political violence of the worst kind is certainly not new under this regime or even the Left, for the latter inherited it from the Congress. There have been too many cases but within that list Baranagar-Kashipur, Sainbari, Morichjhapi, Keshpur, Nanoor, Gorbeta, Chhoto Angariya and, of course, Nandigram, were horrifying acts of wanton violence. The last was state-ordained, making it perhaps the worst kind, and there is a long history of that too. The pastoral charm of Bengal’s tranquil villages often hides predatory killing fields. And like her precursors, Mamata has shown no inclination in trying to end the internecine nature of this grassroots violence. It is quite likely that she is unable to do so because it is on these runaway spoils that the architectonics of her regime appear to have been built. If she reins in one, others might go rogue, and the domino effect could unsettle the TMC beyond repair. And the BJP, if not also the Left, will be too happy to feed on the ensuing anarchy. Mamata Banerjee’s national ambitions may also have made her less attentive to the violent elements in her party at the grassroots level. But since she has meticulously built the TMC in her own likeness and since so much power is invested in her name, every bit of disgrace that is directed at her party must also be directed to her. There is no escape.

When faced with dissent or insurgency within her party or criticism from other quarters, Banerjee has never failed to display her impatience with debate and reason. On the other hand, when faced with the threat of the pandemic, and then the BJP — last year for instance — she played the ear-to-the-ground next-door custodian of things Bengal apparently holds close to its heart. These two sides feed on each other. Such a performance in a double role has paid the TMC chief political dividends so far but is unlikely to give her much leeway in the future. This is primarily because there is no tangible development in Bengal, beyond decorative festivity and governance by dole. The TMC’s less-than-decent performance in Goa makes that evident. The AAP has sold its model of post-ideological politics in Punjab while the otherwise clueless CPM can showcase its electoral performance, if not governance record, in Kerala. But Bengal can be counted as an exemplar in nothing, for the state has been so poorly governed in the last many decades, its performance across verticals is so abysmal, that there is no reason why any other state would want to emulate Bengal. That perception is too real. And Banerjee may want to note that.

The sum total of these blunders makes the TMC look like an auto-immune disease that targets itself in the absence of foreign bodies in the body politic. This leads not only to an unavoidable comparison with the Left at the height of its power but also to that moment when the same malady put the once-mighty Left on the path of its eventual and inevitable demise. The West Bengal chief minister should know that well. She saw it up close.

This column first appeared in the print edition on March 26, 2022 under the title ‘The TMC, opposition-mukt’. The writer teaches at the Ambedkar University Delhi. Views are personal



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Sanjib Baruah writes: The ambivalence of many countries in condemning Russia has made the fault line between Europe and non-Europe visible

“Like sex in Victorian England . . . race is a taboo subject in contemporary polite society.” This is how the late R J Vincent, a highly regarded British international relations theorist, began his 1982 article, ‘Race in international relations’. Behind the diffidence about race, he said, there lurk dire apprehensions about racial divisions in international affairs. Apparently, Alec Douglas-Home, British prime minister in the early Sixties, was among the few politicians to publicly acknowledge such forebodings. Douglas-Home is reported to have said, “I believe the greatest danger ahead of us is that the world might be divided on racial lines. I see no danger, not even the nuclear bomb, which could be so catastrophic as that”.

His fears were not unfounded. It was during his brief tenure as prime minister (1963-64) that radical Black American leader Malcolm X appealed to the leaders of newly-independent African countries to place the issue of the persecution and violence against Blacks on the UN agenda. “If South African racism is not a domestic issue,” he said, “then American racism also is not a domestic issue.” US officials worried that if Malcolm X were to convince just one African government, US domestic politics might become the subject of UN debates. It would undermine US efforts to establish itself as leader of the West and a protector of human rights.

Two years ago, the worldwide protests against racism and police violence sparked by the police killing of George Floyd reminded everyone that the influential Black intellectual W E B Du Bois’s contention that America’s race problem “is but a local phase of a world problem” still resonates in large parts of the world.

Perhaps America’s Ambassador to the UN, Black diplomat Linda Thomas-Greenfield could have given some thought to DuBois’s prophetic words before commenting on the large number of African abstentions in the UN General Assembly vote deploring the Russian invasion of Ukraine. She vigorously rejected any analogy with the non-aligned stance of former colonial nations during the Cold War. The resolution was supported by an overwhelming majority of countries: 145 to 5 with 35 abstentions — India, China, and South Africa among them.

Since many UN member countries have tiny populations, there is a growing tension between the “one country one vote” and the “one person one vote” doctrines. Many regard the latter as more truly democratic. To be sure, small countries having their own voice is an important democratic safeguard. But it is surely significant that countries that abstained in the UN vote constitute the majority of the world’s population. They come from all regions of the world except for Europe and its North American offshoots. Moreover, the abstainers include major non-Western democracies, which contradicts the US official framing of the war in terms of democracy versus autocracy.

Commentators have mostly speculated on the interests of the abstaining countries rather than try to understand their positions. One lesson of Vincent’s essay is that the Cold War was not the only thing that captured the attention of newly independent countries. He drew on the work of the Kenyan-born political thinker Ali Mazrui and pointed at the significance attached to “the principle of racial sovereignty” by many former colonial countries. Mazrui believed that it was the recognition of “the inherent sovereignty” of “peoples recognisable in a racial sense” that led many African and Asian leaders to welcome India’s annexation of Goa in 1961 since the colonial power ruling the territory — Portugal — was of a “different racial stock”.

To the newly-independent countries, says Vincent, “the dignity and worth of the human person” was a far more important foundational principle of the UN than peace and security, which for the Western powers were its “master purposes”. That is why defeating the apartheid regime in South Africa became a more urgent issue for the UN than matters of territorial aggrandisement.

Ukraine has a long history as a rebellious borderland resisting aggressive Russian nationalism. This happened even in Soviet times since, in the hands of the Bolsheviks, as the Indian-born colonial cosmopolitan revolutionary M N Roy put it, communism became “nationalism painted red”. Roy’s phrase appears on the title of a book on this period of Ukrainian history by Stephen Velychenko.

Ukrainians now strongly identify with “Europe” and “the West”. Unfortunately, these concepts are haunted by the memories of colonialism and racial segregation. Orientalism, as Edward Said put it memorably, “is never far from… the idea of Europe, a collective notion identifying ‘us’ Europeans against all ‘those’ non-Europeans”.

The Treaty of Rome, the European Union’s founding act, limits membership of the Union to “European” states. In 1987, Morocco’s application for admission to the European Communities — the precursor of the EU — was rejected on the ground that it was not a “European state”.

Yet the geographical borders of Europe are not self-evident. The EU’s nine “outermost regions” are not in Europe. These are France’s Guadeloupe, French Guiana, Réunion, Martinique, Mayotte and the overseas Collectivity of Saint Martin, Portugal’s Azores and Madeira, and Spain’s Canary Islands. Kuouro in French Guiana, on the northern tip of South America, is where the European Space Agency has its satellite-launching site. Moreover, three EU member states, Denmark, France, and the Netherlands possess non-sovereign “Overseas countries and territories”.

The sheer existence of these territories and possessions, say Swedish scholars Peo Hansen and Stefan Jonsson, is “fundamentally at odds with the EU’s dominant self-understanding”. EU’s moves to turn itself into Fortress Europe —by militarising its external borders and maintaining a liberal commitment to the free movement of peoples across internal borders — is not a pretty picture either.

That the scramble among some countries to join Europe or to “return to Europe”, would be a source of some ambivalence in “non-Europe” should hardly be surprising. One can’t expect the struggle for recognition as privileged “Europeans” to inspire warm sentiments of solidarity in non-Europe. In these circumstances, abstaining from the vote to reprimand Russia for its war on Ukraine was not an untenable position.

This column first appeared in the print edition on March 26, 2022 under the title ‘Not the world’s war’. The writer is professor of Political Studies at Bard College, New York



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S. Jaishankar: It must ensure national security, help citizens in pursuit of their aspirations and help build the country’s image abroad

Let me begin by emphasising what a great pleasure it is to be back in college. It is natural that the theme of my talk should be on foreign policy. But rather than inflict another learned analysis of the state of the world, what I would like to do today is to approach that subject from a different perspective.

A good foreign policy must work for you all. Your everyday needs from the world must be better met. And since we are a collective as a country, our national security must be assured. As that is done, the pursuit of our aspirations must be facilitated. Foreign policy being the link to the outside, it should enable us to draw what we seek. This could be in terms of technology or capital, best practices, or even work opportunities. And obviously, we would all like to be strong; we would like to look good and we would like to feel appreciated. Any policy which ensures all these goals has a lot going for it. It does not necessarily have to sound nice; it must simply pass the smell test.

Now think for a moment as an Indian student who happened to still be in Ukraine on February 24. Concerned about your educational prospects, you have now found yourself in the middle of a serious conflict. And it is not just you; 20,000 more of your fellow nationals and millions of Ukrainians are also trying to get out of the country. This is when you really look to your government for support and extrication. And indeed, this is when the entire foreign policy apparatus swings into action as it did through Operation Ganga. It does so by facilitating transport, and this includes trains and buses. It intervenes at the highest levels in Russia and Ukraine to ensure the ceasing of fire for safe passage.

An example in public health is equally instructive. When the first wave of Covid hit India in 2020, we scrambled across the world to secure PPEs, masks and ventilators. And we did so in a seller’s market as the demand far exceeded supply. Ingredients for the pharmaceutical industry with escalating requirements were also greatly sought after. And commerce by itself was not adequate in such circumstances; in fact, contacts were needed for effective access. The second wave in 2021 saw a similar spike in demand for oxygen and specialised medicines from abroad. Locating, negotiating and contracting supplies became the priority for Indian diplomacy. And it bent its back to deliver.

Now, let me explore what foreign policy could mean for you personally. As an Indian student, for example, it may be the ease of getting visas, the ability to travel during times of Covid, and perhaps even employment after studies. If you are a businessperson, it could help with access to foreign markets, receiving information about regulations and practices, and where circumstances demand it, assistance to solve problems. For the professionals and workers, this may be visible in ensuring fair employment contracts, a stronger sense of protection and welfare measures in times of difficulty. And for a stranded tourist, a sympathetic embassy provides much-needed succour and support, and in more threatening circumstances, examples of which I gave you, even evacuation. But you do not have to be abroad to need foreign policy; it matters at home just as much.

When it comes to security, external or internal, diplomacy could be a preventive, a mitigator or a problem-solver. It can help raise awareness of a shared threat, just as it can find partners against common dangers. So, if you are a soldier guarding our frontiers or a policeman grappling with terrorism, a good foreign policy makes your life a little safer. And then there is the economy, with its search for investment, technology and best practices. In each of these sectors, foreign relationships can accelerate India’s progress. And cumulatively, they expand employment and improve your quality of life.

But also think for a moment how much the big issues of our times — pandemics, terrorism, climate change — impact your very existence. And ask yourself whether we should not have a greater say in the search for solutions. It also matters to all of us what other nations think of India, our culture and our way of life. So, should we not then shape our image and influence the narrative? These are but a sample of how in an increasingly interconnected world, the attitude, perceptions and interests of others are so relevant. If they have to be managed, if they have to be leveraged, then it is all the more necessary for a sharper realisation at home that foreign policy really matters.

The world being what it is, self-interest and convergence cannot be fully counted upon, especially with neighbours. Their ambitions and emotions are not always predictable, nor indeed their risk-taking propensity. Few would have anticipated, for example, the turn that India’s relations with China have taken in the last two years. Any prudent policy, therefore, backs its posture with capabilities and deterrence. A big responsibility of Indian diplomacy, therefore, is to create the widest set of options for such contingencies.

Increasingly, foreign policy facilitates the creation of new capacities at home. In Asia, all modernising economies have single-mindedly focused their external interactions on obtaining capital, technology and best practices from abroad. Japan was the pioneer in this regard during the Meiji era, while China after Deng Xiaoping was the most successful in terms of scale. In recent years, India too has embraced this mindset. It may be information technology or auto manufacturing, food production or food processing, metros or bullet trains, space capabilities or nuclear energy; the fruits of foreign collaboration are there today for all of us to see. Newer challenges like green growth and climate action have started to open up still more possibilities. All this happens because of our ability to identify, engage, negotiate and leverage opportunities of interest abroad across many many domains. The most effective foreign policy is one that delivers on development.

The cumulative impact of eight years of an ambitious yet practical foreign policy is now there for all of you to see. To appreciate the full extent of this change, the profound consequences of 2014 have to be understood. A different worldview propelled a comprehensive review of our foreign policy. There was a conscious effort towards a “whole of the government” approach and more effective budgeting to back that up. The oversight of initiatives and projects — it’s called Pragati within the government — has become a regular occurrence. The six broad objectives that were spelt out to the policy-makers and implementers were clear. One, we must bring about a change of thinking in the world about us. Two, the partnerships we should create should be on more equal terms, and with smaller countries, more generous. Three, the global agenda and the big issues of our times should be shaped by India as much as possible. Four, foreign relationships should be actively explored and leveraged for domestic development and progress. Five, the very conceptualisation of foreign policy should be more people-centric. And six, our culture, traditions and thoughts should percolate our own articulation as well as influence international debates and initiatives. Yoga and Ayurveda were obvious examples in this regard.

What I have presented before you today are the building blocks that are dissected in a manner that their impact on your lives is discernible. Do connect the dots and look at the picture that emerges. A stronger and more capable India — one that is truer to its roots and culture — is a key factor in the larger rebalancing that characterises our contemporary world. As we mark 75 years of independence, Azadi ka Amrit Mahotsav, there is good cause to be confident about our prospects. But to be so, it is equally important that all of you be fully aware of the opportunities and challenges that the world currently presents. And surely, we can be so once we appreciate how much foreign policy really matters.

This column first appeared in the print edition on March 26, 2022 under the title ‘Foreign policy and You’.

Edited excerpts of the inaugural St. Stephen’s- MRF Distinguished Alumni Lecture delivered by India’s External Affairs Minister at St. Stephen’s College, Delhi on March 24.



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India’s double abstention on both the Russia-moved and Russia-critiquing UN resolutions ensured some daylight between New Delhi and Beijing, which voted for the pro-Russia resolution, but it didn’t answer the question whether costs of continued neutrality on Moscow’s aggression will outweigh benefits – purely by national interest calculations. Foreign minister S Jaishankar defended India’s stance in Parliament. However, while national interest definitely means keeping an eye on Russian supply of arms to India, that dependence, as this newspaper has already argued, works both ways. As the largest buyer of Russian arms, New Delhi too has leverage over Moscow. Therefore, if India did take a principled stance on Russia, it is unlikely the latter will retaliate by making arms supply difficult. After all, despite EU nations sanctioning Russia and actively aiding the Ukrainian resistance, they continue to buy Russian energy and Moscow is happy to supply it. And Russia needs arms exports even more given the cost of sanctions on its economy. This is a bargaining power India can use diplomatically.

India’s primary concern ought to be geopolitical implications of the conflict. Two points need consideration. Given that the Russian military operation hasn’t gone according to plan, suppose Moscow ups the offensive ante in awful ways to crush Ukrainian resistance. Will it reflect well on India then to have taken such a cautious position? Will India still sit out another UN resolution? Second, however the Ukraine invasion ends, if Putin is increasingly shunned by most of the democratic world, with which India has much business to conduct, and China continues to be in his corner, what might be the implications for India down the line as geopolitical stances harden all around? New Delhi must keep an eye on Russia’s actions in Ukraine as well as America’s and China’s future responses and be ready to change its mind – in national interest.



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As part of a growing, just and constitutional pushback against the marital rape exception, a single judge bench of the Karnataka high court has refused to quash the rape charges framed against a husband. Further, it has laid out in clear and biting terms how the statutory immunity for rape committed by a man on his wife, is categorically out of place in India.

Exception 2 to Section 375 of IPC, like most of the penal code, is a colonial intervention rather than some immutable native tradition as some votaries profess. Specifically it emerged out of the ponderous English “doctrine of coverture”, relating to husband’s ownership of wife. Leaving aside that in the UK itself marital rape has long been criminalised, India’s Constitution treats woman equal to man and considers marriage as an association of equals, as pointed out by the HC.

The court has left it to the legislature “to delve upon the issue”. Ideally, its ringing words should indeed impel Parliament to do so with urgency: “A man is a man; an act is an act; rape is a rape, be it performed by a man the ‘husband’ on the woman ‘wife’.” But the HC’s own actions suggest that courts need not wait for others’ precedents or even Parliament, to do the right thing. Uphold equality as enshrined in Article 14, hear the “voices of silence”, and thereupon strike down the marital rape exception as unconsitutional. Over to Delhi HC, which is hearing the consequential plea on criminalising marital rape.



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With Yogi Adityanath being sworn in as the chief minister (CM) of Uttar Pradesh (UP) for the second time, this round of the electoral cycle in India’s largest state is over. But it only inaugurates a new phase of politics in the state — for, as all serious politicians know, the task of attaining (and in this case retaining) power is only the first step. Exercising power — when, how, for whom, and with what goal — is a 24/7 job.

For the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), the political goal is clear: Ensuring that the momentum generated by the 2022 win is used to sustain its electoral hegemony in the state in 2024. The target has already been set, of winning over 75 of the 80 seats on offer. Till a decade ago, such an ambition would have been laughable. But the BJP has, in 2014, 2017, 2019, and 2022, shown that it can set audacious goals and achieve them.

For the residents of the state, the normative goal is clear — order, peace and justice through a more effective State machinery, harmony through better management of inter-community relationships, a better quality of life through access to improved public services, and higher income levels through more employment opportunities.

In this quest, there are two empirical political challenges, and three normative governance challenges for the party.

Yogi Adityanath’s first political challenge is to maintain the inclusive Hindu social coalition that brought him to power. Sustaining the support of all upper-caste groups at a time when contradictions among them were visible in the run-up to the polls; reassuring other backward class (OBC) sub-groups of the BJP’s commitment to their political empowerment at a time when they await delivery on the promise of a change in the affirmative action architecture through sub-categorisation; and expanding the party’s support among all Dalit sub-groups, both Jatav and non-Jatav, who continue to suffer from both identity and class-based deprivation, will continue to require careful political management and organisational outreach.

On this count, the BJP has started well, as seen in the composition of the council of ministers. With 21 representatives from upper-caste groups, including a Brahmin deputy CM, 20 from OBC groups, including a Maurya deputy CM, and nine Dalit ministers, including two Jatavs, the party has sent out a clear signal. Unless there is a major social churn, the BJP should be able to maintain this coalition at least till 2024.

The fact that the politics of UP has now turned fundamentally bipolar — with the Samajwadi Party (SP) as the other pole — is the second challenge. Akhilesh Yadav’s decision to quit his Lok Sabha seat and lead his party by staying on in the legislative assembly shows a higher level of political commitment than the former CM displayed so far. And his campaign vocabulary, where the SP did make a conscious effort to create a wider social coalition of backward communities, indicated that Yadav recognises the need to break out of the old, largely Muslim-Yadav social coalition, that propelled the SP to power repeatedly in the past, but is now too limiting to enable its growth.

On this count too, the BJP starts with a tremendous advantage. 2024, in some ways, will be easier for the party than 2022 — the electoral campaign will be largely fought on national issues where regional parties have a tougher time framing their challenge; the election will be a direct referendum on Narendra Modi, whose appeal remains intact; and no other leader, including Yadav, is seen as national-level contender for print ministership and therefore, even those, except the most loyal party voters, willing to give him a chance at the state-level will rethink their support when it comes to the Lok Sabha.

The fact that the BJP is politically strong should give the party the confidence to think about a set of normative goals that will help the state.

The first such normative goal is reconciliation among UP’s Hindus and Muslims. The BJP has succeeded in UP without winning the Muslim vote; in fact, it has won without even appealing to the minority vote. And therefore, it will find no reason to change its formula. But the lack of engagement between the BJP and Muslims, and even the active effort to stoke hostility against Muslims, has resulted in 20% of the state’s population finding themselves unrepresented in power structures. In a system where voters often rely on intermediaries for access to power — especially for employment opportunities and justice — this deprives them of a link to the State structure. They have also found themselves as the target of laws and policies. On the other side, the lack of deep engagement and deep roots in the community also deprives the BJP of an effective channel to hear grievances and aspirations of Muslims.

On this count, as tempting as it is for the party to continue with status quo, the BJP must use its fourth consecutive electoral victory in the state to fashion a more confident political vocabulary. The appeal of its leadership, its organisational machine, its deep penetration among Hindu social groups, and the disarray in the Opposition leaves the BJP in a pole position to win in 2024. Its challenge is finding a way to do so without taking recourse to the kind of sharp rhetoric that marked the campaign, or divisive policies that marked the last tenure. Yogi Adityanath should have a personal incentive to do so too; if he is eyeing a larger national role, he has to go beyond appealing to the party’s base to coming across as a figure not wedded to a certain form of politics that can often be laced with bigotry. Whether the BJP is confident enough, and the CM is willing enough, to do so has to be seen.

The government’s second policy challenge is improving public education and health care. Covid-19’s second wave was a stark manifestation of the deficits in the state’s health care mechanisms; and any visit to any village across the state is enough to show the crisis in government schools . Surveys have indicated that the pandemic has led to a shift, where due to reduced income levels, poorer families are sending their children back to government schools — even though the aspiration to send kids to private schools is now universal.

On this count, the BJP has the opportunity to go a step beyond its remarkably effective policies of cash transfers for gas cylinders, house and toilet construction, and provision of piped water connections and free ration. The task of improving public education and public health is much harder because of the investments it requires in infrastructure, quality of personnel, and a reset in incentive mechanisms for those who are responsible for these services. But if India is to meet its developmental goals at the national level, the residents of UP need to be able to access education and health — not just through private operators but through the State, given the scale of the challenge. And if the BJP is able to veer public policies to focus on these goals, it will mark a new chapter in the state.

And the final normative goal for the BJP has to be improving incomes. For decades, UP’s best have left the state. Adityanath’s focus on enhanced investments in the state is a good step. But a single-minded pursuit to improve incomes — through investment in infrastructure, targeted boost to manufacturing plants in every regional hub of the state, smarter agricultural practices, skilling, among other moves — is essential if India is to achieve its national goals.

A new term for the Yogi government catapults the BJP into pole position for 2024. Politically, this will require work and deft social management. But beyond the electoral calculus, if the state government can reduce divisions and make a concerted outreach to Muslims, improve health and education, and work on enhancing incomes, it will change UP, for the better.



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Perhaps because it was published during the dark days of the pandemic, Ishtiaq Ahmed’s monumental biography of Mohammad Ali Jinnah hasn’t got the attention it deserves. Over 800 pages long and crammed full of references to Jinnah’s speeches, statements and messages, it questions, if not debunks, many widely held beliefs. For us in India, perhaps the two most important are the claims Jinnah intended the 1940 Lahore Resolution’s call for Partition only as a bargaining chip and that his August 11, 1947 speech to the Constituent Assembly is proof he wanted Pakistan to be a secular State. Ahmed raises deep and convincing doubts about both.

“Jinnah never, even once, showed any interest in a united India and in a power-sharing deal with Hindus and Muslims as equal nations sharing power at the Centre,” asserts Ahmed in Jinnah: His Successes, Failures and Role in History. Then, in a full frontal attack on Ayesha Jalal, who first claimed Partition was just a bargaining chip, he adds: “Jalal omits all those speeches, statements and messages where ad infinitum he reiterates that the Lahore Resolution means the division of India into Hindustan and Pakistan.”

The proof seems overwhelming. On November 23, 1940, Jinnah said: “It’s not a counter for bargaining”. On March 2, 1941: “[Pakistan] is a matter of life and death to the musalmans and it’s not a counter for bargaining”. On April 3, 1942: “Our firm determination and our only goal is one – Pakistan, Pakistan, Pakistan”. As Ahmed sums up: “Jinnah never hinted, even obliquely, that he was prepared to agree to a power-sharing deal with the Congress.”

In fact, Ahmed goes further. He says, “Jinnah was obsessed with having India partitioned”. Again, he seems to be able to prove this. On March 30, 1941, in Kanpur, Jinnah said he was prepared to sacrifice the 20 million Muslims who would be left behind in India “to liberate” the 70 million in a majority in what became Pakistan. On April 14, 1941, Jinnah spoke in support of Dravidastan. He also said he would support a Sikh State. But Jinnah went even further. “He tried to woo even Hindu-majority princely states ruled by Hindu maharajas to join Pakistan. Such an irrational approach derived from his basic political goal: To bring about the division of India and get as much territory as possible out of India for Pakistan.”

Indeed, Ahmed expresses surprise that historians can believe the Lahore Resolution was simply a bargaining chip. Jinnah’s speech a day earlier made clear it wasn’t. “Muslims are a nation according to any definition of nation, and they must have their homelands, their territory and their state.”

On the August 11, 1947 speech, Ahmed has an interesting, if less well-proven, interpretation. He doesn’t believe it affirms Jinnah’s commitment to secularism. Instead, he says: “It is imperative to underline that its primary aim and purpose was to convince the Indian government that the minorities would be safe and have equal rights in Pakistan with a view to convincing the Indian government not to expel the 35 million Muslims who were to remain in India.”

To bolster his point, Ahmed adds: “If Jinnah wanted Pakistan to emulate Turkey, he should have mentioned it explicitly. The term secularism is missing in his speech and that too is a major omission if he wanted a conceptual transformation to take place.”

Finally, the fact the speech was suppressed is used by Ahmed as corroboration. Dismissing the belief this was to erase Jinnah’s commitment to secularism, Ahmed writes: “To believe his speech was suppressed against his will is preposterous … more probable was that Jinnah and his advisors decided not to publicise it because it was meant primarily for the Indian government and leaders.”

Now, I’m not a historian so I won’t judge the validity of Ahmed’s re-interpretations. But they definitely need to be better known. A debate around them would be fascinating. With the dark clouds of Covid-19 parting, perhaps this is the moment for their day in the sun.

Karan Thapar is the author of Devil’s Advocate: The Untold StoryThe views expressed are personal



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The Russian invasion of Ukraine took me back to a novel called Winston’s War by Michael Dobbs. Endorsing the novel, the outstanding political journalist, Anthony Howard, described Dobbs as, “an author who can bring historical happenings so vitally back to life, and make all the more impressive by being historically accurate in every respect”.

Dobbs suggests that World War II could have been avoided. He tells the story of Churchill’s eventual victory over Prime Minister (PM) Neville Chamberlain and Viscount Halifax, who was the Viceroy of India, and was by then foreign minister back in London. The King and Chamberlain wanted Halifax to take over as PM after Hitler invaded Poland, going back on the commitment he had made to Chamberlain in Munich.

It was known that Halifax would have negotiated with Hitler whereas Churchill was determined to fight him. In the last chapter of the book, Dobbs quotes a diarist who served as private secretary to Chamberlain and Churchill saying, “Seldom can a Minister have taken office with the Establishment so dubious of the choice.” If Halifax had won, World War II could well have come to a halt before it got underway. A million lives would have been saved, but what would have been the fate of Europe?

Now this same question could be asked of President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine. Did he have to fight Vladimir Putin or could he have negotiated with him? Ukrainians have watched Putin’s brutality in Chechnya, his Georgia campaign, and then his annexation of Crimea, and support for separatists in Donbas. So Zelensky surely had every reason to seek support from the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) when Putin made further demands on him. But was it wise to sign a charter on strategic partnership with the United States (US) in 2021? The charter says, “A commitment to Ukraine’s implementation of deep and comprehensive reforms necessary for full integration into European and Euro Atlantic institutions.” This was like a red rag to a bull. It confirmed Putin’s worst fears that Ukraine would bring NATO right up to his border. He demanded that Zelensky must commit never to join NATO and made other demands that the Ukrainian leader could not agree to.

NATO leaders were united in warning Putin against invading Ukraine and in condemning the invasion when it came. But was this the right reaction? There was an alternative. Zelensky could have chosen not to challenge Putin, but to negotiate with him. America and the rest of Europe could have watched while the two leaders negotiated. Although Zelensky is a pugnacious leader, a Churchillian, he is now calling on Putin to talk to him. But NATO leaders are opposed to Putin. US President Joe Biden is trying to recover from the drubbing he received for his handling of the withdrawal from Afghanistan by putting himself forward as the leader of the anti-Putin army. President Emmanuel Macron of France is playing the Ukraine card and European unity for all it’s worth in his election campaign to return for a second time in office. For Britain’s Boris Johnson, the invasion of Ukraine has saved him from the threat of the Partygate scandal ending his brief career. But last weekend, he again went too far by telling his Conservative Party conference that Ukrainians are like Brexit Britons “because it is their instinct to choose freedom every time.”

By now, Russia has committed appalling atrocities in Ukraine and Putin appears determined to have his way no matter what it costs. The western media is rock solid behind Zelensky, so any suggestion that there might still be a Halifax way of handling this crisis would be drowned by sympathy for the appalling suffering of the people of Ukraine. But what is to be the end of this? How can the Churchillian way win if its leaders are unwilling to fight?

The views expressed are personal



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Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Gati Shakti plan is a forward-looking programme. Straddling seven sectors — roads, railways, airports, ports, mass transport, waterways and logistics infrastructure — the project could be a massive gamechanger for the general public. To maximise the benefit of the project, however, the government needs to add one more dimension to the existing plan: Accessibility, which must be at the heart of all future transport and built-environment projects.

To do so, the government must re-energise the Sugamya Bharat or Accessible India campaign. The nationwide campaign for achieving universal accessibility for Persons with Disabilities (PwDs) was launched in 2015. It has three important components: Built-environment accessibility; transportation system accessibility; and information and communication ecosystem accessibility.

In addition to re-energising the campaign, it is important to expand it to include persons with reduced mobility to achieve the plan’s vision. This is important to do so because advancements in medical science, health care and sanitation facilities have increased life expectancy of Indians: From 32 years in the post-Independence era to 69 years in 2019. So, the question we must ask is this: Are we doing enough to improve the quality of life of this cohort? Are the elderly able to lead independent and barrierfree lives? Today, India has 138 million elderly people, which is set to rise by 41% to 194 million by 2031, and 319 million by 2050.

The Accessible India campaign is governed by the Rights of Persons with Disability (RPwD) Act, 2016, and was implemented from 2017. It targets to achieve its objectives by 2022. With an objective of empowering persons with disabilities in the country, in 2007, India also ratified the United Nations Conventions on the Rights of Persons with Disability (UNCRPD), 2006. Article 9 of UNCRPD is the accessibility clause that mandates member-States to take all possible steps to enable persons with disabilities to live independently and participate fully in all aspects of life.

But seven years since the launch of the Accessible India campaign, where are accessible public buildings, transport systems, hospitals, schools and colleges? Where is the inclusive environment that encourages persons to come out of their homes independently to access education or earn a living? It is also important to remember that the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development states that disability cannot be a reason or criteria for lack of access to development programmes and the realisation of human rights.

Other than PwDs and people with reduced mobility due to age or injuries, a barrier-free environment is important for pregnant women, the sick and injured and children. There has also been a rise in the number of PwDs in the country. The 2011 Census data shows that at 21.9 million, PwDs make up only 2.1% of the population. Since 2011, the number of recognised disabilities has been expanded by the government from seven to 21. A logical computation then would put the figure at 6.3%, which is still far lower than the global average rate of 15%. So, if one adds the needs of the persons with reduced mobility to this number, the total number of people requiring accessibility support is much greater than we think.

Recent projections estimate close to half of the country’s population will live in urban areas by 2047, when India marks 100 years of freedom. If we want to reap the demographic dividend of a young nation, we must make public transportation, public playgrounds, sidewalks, pedestrian crossings, and other spaces and facilities accessible for everyone so that they can meet their life goals and also contribute to the nation’s socio-economic well-being. Rethinking infrastructure design with an accessibility-first approach will be a gamechanger for our country.

Sminu Jindal is managing director, Jindal SAW Ltd, and founder chairperson, Svayam.The views expressed are personal



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The decision of the University Grants Commission (UGC) to introduce a Common University Entrance Test (CUET), to be conducted by the National Testing Agency for admissions to undergraduate programmes in all the 45 central universities from academic year 2022-23 is a big change that comes with definite advantages while raising some serious concerns, too.

As per the UGC, the test will have a compulsory general paper and six subject-specific papers which the students can choose from a large bouquet. The scores in the test will be the sole criterion for admission to undergraduate courses, making the marks a student scored in the school board examination inconsequential. The scores can be used by private and state universities for admissions, as per the UGC. It has been clarified that there will be no change in the reservation patterns in the admission process.

The CUET will undoubtedly bring in some uniformity in university admissions in a country where there are one too many agencies supervising school education and examinations. There has hardly been a standardised format for the education or the examination and valuation patterns. The CUET will introduce a single platform on which the skills of the students will be tested and scores given.

It will also obviate the need for the students to appear for multiple tests for admission; a single scorecard will now enable a student apply for admission in all the 45 central universities.

But there are some concerns, too. Universities admit students based on several factors, and the entrance test score is usually one of them. Board exam scores, which are arrived at by assessing the performance of the student over a period of time and over various modes of testing also offer a clue to the student’s academic abilities. Doing away with it completely could lead to a situation where students reduce the importance they attach to classroom learning and instead rush to coaching centres.

India has of late witnessed a mushrooming of entrance coaching centres which are as much about drilling in the skills required for responding to questions as they are about deepening the understanding of the subject. This could demand investing of more time and money, which could impact students from socially and educationally backward communities as well as girls. The digital divide is another factor. As per the National Statistical Office, only four per cent of rural households have access to computers, compared to 23 per cent in urban households, raising concerns about the new system further widening the urban-rural divide in higher education. There are also doubts as to whether the same pattern would fit all streams including science, humanities and language studies.

A level playing field is a great idea as long as the players come from similar turfs. Hence the UGC must reconsider its plan to make all undergraduate admissions on CUET scores and discard the board exam marks altogether. The commission and the Union government must initiate discussions on ways to make university admission fairer. Education is too important a topic to be left to individual agencies that manage it.



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More teams, new combinations, minor tweak in rules which are mostly sensible and the biggest contracts in the game that will make instant millionaires of many a journeyman cricketer are the highlights as Season 15 of the Indian Premier League gets its bat versus ball encounters going from today.  This thrilling ritual of tribal loyalties will keep a nation in thrall for the next 60 days when other mediums of entertainment will take a back seat with evenings reserved for T20 thrills.

Such has been the pull of a 14-year ride from 2008 that some teams are nestling in a billion-dollar valuation club while the IPL is itself the biggest sporting brand of them all globally. With TV and digital rights to be sold, bundled or separately, the league is looking at the stupendous figure of around Rs 7,000 crores per year from its 16th season. No wonder then that one of the new entrants, Lucknow Super Giants, was willing to pay as much as Rs 709 crores a season as franchise fee to BCCI.

All the success is not in money terms alone as IPL offers the biggest stage for young national talent to break through in the white ball game as most young recruits will be from the local talent pool. There are reputations to be made among the captains, too, with many new ones, including Ravindra Jadeja of the defending champion CSK who takes over from his most successful mentor M.S. Dhoni, aiming to hit a high even as team combinations were given a thorough reshuffle in the mega auction for 10 teams.

Returning full time to India after being forced to beat a retreat midway in the face of the Covid pandemic last year, IPL-15 will be notable because the wishes of Indian fans to be on-site can be fulfilled, to begin with to 25 per cent capacity of large stadiums in the west where the IPL is restricted to venues in Mumbai and Pune. Fans will lend the colour and atmosphere the competition may have lacked in its sterile, bio-bubble environment. Cricket has marketed itself well as glitzy entertainment through the IPL but it must not forget the fans who contribute to its success story.

 



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On March 10, 2022, the director-general of Pakistan’s Inter Service Public Relations (DGISPR) Major General Babar Iftikhar and Air Vice Marshall Tariq Zia held a rather unusual Press conference. In that briefing they said that on March 9 at 1843 hrs a high speed flying object originating from somewhere around Sirsa in India and travelling at a height of close to 40,000 feet and at an estimated speed of 2.5-3.0 Mach (thrice the speed of sound) crossed the international border between India and Pakistan landing 124 kilometres inside Pakistani territory at a place called Mian Channu.

The object in all probability a supersonic missile was in Pakistani airspace for three minutes and forty-four seconds before fading away, i.e., hitting the ground.

The total travel time of the missile was six minutes and forty six seconds out of which it spent approximately three minutes and two seconds in Indian airspace.

The Pakistani officials further accused India of endangering both international and domestic air craft that ostensibly were in close vicinity of the missile.

Almost a week later on March 15, 2022, defence minister Rajnath Singh acknowledged in Parliament, “I’d like to tell this House about an incident that occurred on March 9, 2022. It’s related to an accidental missile release during the inspection. During routine maintenance and inspection of the missile unit, around 7 pm, one missile got accidentally released. While this incident is regretted, we are relieved that nobody was hurt due to the accident.”

He further went on to add and reassure the house that “[I can assure the House that] the missile system is very reliable and safe. Moreover, our safety procedures and protocols are of the highest order and are reviewed from time to time. Our Armed Forces are well-trained and disciplined and are well-experienced in handling such systems.”

Earlier, on March 11, 2022, the ministry of defence in a statement had stated that “in a statement, the MoD said, ‘On March 9, 2022, in the course of a routine maintenance, a technical malfunction led to the accidental firing of a missile. The Government of India has taken a serious view and ordered a high-level court of inquiry. It is learnt that the missile landed in an area of Pakistan. While the incident is deeply regrettable, it is also a matter of relief that there has been no loss of life due to the accident.’”

Writing on the online platform, The Wire, Rahul Bedi picked up the discrepancy in the two statements and opined that “They said that while Singh’s account essentially duplicated what his ministry said two days after the March 9 incident, it ‘revealingly’ differed in one respect which could provide a clue to what led to the projectile’s chance launch into Pakistan. In his statement, the defence minister omitted any reference to the ‘technical malfunction’ of the missile in the course of ‘routine maintenance’, which his ministry claimed had led to the missile’s inadvertent liftoff.”

Instead, Singh specifically told the Lok Sabha on March 15 that the Indian military’s standard operating procedures (SOPs) with regard to missile handling, though unmatched and of high calibre, would be revised — if needed — following the ensuing court of inquiry (CoI) into the incident. Senior service officers and defence analysts interpreted this to indicate that the government is suggesting “human error” — and not some technical inefficiency or shortcoming in the missile system — may well have precipitated the mishap, the first ever of its kind between two nuclear weapon states (NWS).

He further added “industry officials also pointed out that the authorities were 'commercially conscious’ of the fact that any hint of a ‘technical malfunction’ in the BrahMos triggering its chance flight could adversely impact the $375 million deal which Delhi signed with the Philippines in January for three of its land-attack batteries”.

Bloomberg News in two separate stories reported as follows, “An accidental missile fired by India last week prompted Pakistan to prepare a retaliatory strike, people familiar with the matter said, showing how close the nuclear-armed neighbors came to blows over a potentially disastrous mistake”.

“Several planes passed through the direct trajectory of the missile that day, which flew from the Indian garrison town of Ambala and ended up in Mian Channu in Eastern Pakistan. They included a Fly Dubai jet heading to Dubai from Sialkot, an Indigo plane from Srinagar to Mumbai and an Air Blue Ltd. flight from Lahore to Riyadh. All crossed the missile’s trajectory within an hour of its accidental launch, data from flight-tracking application Flight radar24 show. Other international flights in the vicinity of the missile’s trajectory — and within its range — included a Kuwait Airways Co. jet heading to Guangzhou from Kuwait City, a Saudi Arabian Airlines flight to Riyadh from New Delhi, and a Qatar Airways service from Kathmandu to Doha, the data show. No advisory to pilots operating in the vicinity — known as a notice to airmen or NOTAM — was issued. A time-lapse video of the airspace — prepared by Flight radar24 on request from Bloomberg News — showed busy activity in the skies within an hour-and-half of both sides of pm local time on March 9, which India said was the approximate time of the accidental launch.”

Thirty years ago, on September 26, 1983, the world was saved from probable nuclear misadventure. At the threshold of morning Soviet Union's early-warning systems identified an incoming missile strike from the United States. Computer readouts indicated several missiles had been launched. Standard Operating Procedure for the Soviet military would have been to respond with a nuclear attack of its own. The officer on duty Stanislav Petrov — whose job it was to catalog ostensible enemy missile launches took a considered call not to report them to his superiors dismissing the flashing screens as a false alarm. Petrov’s judgement probably averted a third world war that day.

Had the Pakistanis reacted to the missile launch with a retaliatory strike of their own it would have been game and match over in three to seven minutes — that is the missile flying time between India and Pakistan. Both countries could have been nuclear toast.

Given the various ominous implications of this missile launch whether due to a technical malfunction or during routine maintenance and inspection it presents a very strong case for an institutionalised dialogue between India-Pakistan on nuclear issues and a regular exchange of strategic force commanders.



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The aphorism “This too will pass” is something I hear often these days. It’s from people trying to be kind. I first heard it though from our biology teacher in school, who liked to give us a thought for the day. The minute she wrote it on the blackboard, we were stunned by its simplicity and larger truth. Looking back, I wonder if it was a note to herself that this class would be over soon!

Dealing with grief is hard enough by itself, but often it is others who find your grief harder to deal with. It reminds people of what they may lose, what they have lost and their own mortality. Grief scares us, especially that of other people. Inside your own bubble though, the world looks different: you may want to wallow, remember, grieve in your own space. I keep close to me this line that Saul Bellow, one of my favourite authors, apparently wrote to writer Martin Amis. I find no provenance of this quote but it resonates none-the-less: “Losing a parent is something like driving through a plate-glass window. You didn’t know it was there until it shattered, and then for years to come you’re picking up the pieces — down to the last glassy splinter.”

But grief alone cannot sustain you and it does limit you. My editor suggested that I write about spring flowers, as I sit looking at my parents’ garden. A friend has tasked me with buying a plant that both my parents would have loved, and to plant it close to where we have buried their ashes. These are too jobs that may distract better than wondering what will pass and what will not.

Bad joke: at some point, we will all pass so maybe that’s what my biology teacher meant?

A Twitter friend does a daily blog on flowers, painstakingly taking permission from all of us who post photographs of flowers. Many contribute, there’s always some advice, something new to learn. I’m not good at WhatsApp groups so I share elsewhere.

Someone once pointedly reminded me that flowers are just the reproductive organs of plants. But come on, they are pretty. And they do provide a little soul-balm. Even if you’re not searching for it or in need.

Since I’m a bit of a show off — cannot lie, it is true — I have learnt a couple of Latin names of flowers, so I can throw them around here and there. I promise that the names I have learnt are real though I do have friends who accuse me of making them up. Who knows, maybe I do. Not everyone cares about the difference between dieffenbachia and dimorphotheca. Here I go again. Look it up and correct me and my weakness for alliteration. The term dimorphotheca has of course been replaced by Osteospermum. Yeah, reproductive indeed!

Long ago, in the early 1970s, when Bombay Doordarshan was starting out, a family friend — a few years older than me — did a pilot for a children’s programme. Lots of us kids, most under 11, were given parts. Two lines of one of the songs we had to sing has since got stuck in my head: “Flowers, flowers fragrant and gay, cosmos of every hue”, as we skipped about an imaginary flower garden.

The problem is with cosmos though. I plant them every year, I buy seeds of every hue. But all that comes up are orange cosmos. I fear that this is a sad lesson for our times? O no, no politics, remember. But does “this too will pass” work better here than it does for me today?

I don’t mean “the” Cosmos. That’s a whole other ballgame and another major point of interest. Well, not one point but all points because there it is around us, doing its own thing as we act like idiots who matter. Our knowledge of the Cosmos does tell us that colours of the flowers we love look the way they do because our star emits light mainly in the visible range. On another planet, around another star or set of stars, who knows what we could see or sense or absorb in any other way? Show off, I did warn you.

In trying to be tolerant, I have allowed some flowers that I dislike but everyone else apparently loves. Like the pink or white Vinca or periwinkles or “sada bahaar” or as I call it, “dead man’s flower”. I remember that awful scratchy milky fluid that leaks out, yeah, not for me. But there it is staring at me right now, a gift that I did not have the heart to refuse. It’s not going anywhere near my parents, that’s for sure. Even if there are lots of newer varieties which are not so annoying.

Instead, this spring, I have poppies, red and pink and the brilliantly sunshine yellow California poppies. I have snapdragons and larkspur and honesty and lupins and godetia. The lilies are in full array. The tulips were a bit of a disaster. The daffodils are gone. The freesia and harlequins never came up at all. The grape hyacinths may well be hiding amongst the weeds.

The flowers of weeds look good too! Yellow, pink, white and purple, they mimic the cultivated flowers. I have let them have their way in the grass. All my Mother’s expensive grass is gone. Green cover comes from the wild and weedy (they’re not weaky though, o no, tenacious as hell. Or an orange cosmos!) The traditional gardener would be horrified! My Mother I think would have approved. Saves water, allows everyone to flourish too. My Father definitely approved.

That leaves me with my task: the right plant. It has to thrive without too much sun and it must withstand the cold. It has to be different. It has to have been liked by both. It mustn’t make me cry.

As these lines from Christina Rosetti’s “Let Me Go”, do. Sent by a friend of my parents which I read out at my Father’s Memorial lunch. Made me cry but also laugh a bit. Like parents often do:

“When you are lonely and sick at heart

Go to the friends we know

Laugh at the things we used to do

Miss me, but let me go.”



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“See what you think,” they said to Bachchoo

— But the thoughts wouldn’t turn into images.
He waited for them to becomes visual, but
The curtain was lifted and the stage was empty.
“See how you feel,” they enjoined Bachchoo
And yes, love became a vision —
But not in the mind.”

— From Akela Khaathai! by Bachchoo

Bureaucracy”, as Karl Marx once said, “is the enemy of freedom”. George Orwell added that “bureaucracy is the weapon of the feeble minded”. And, of course, Wittgenstein, with mathematical rigour, had said that “bureaucracy is the lyric of the bureaucrat” And then who can forget Emoji Feromonereplacementwalla’s memorable metaphor: “Bureaucracy is like a cucumber!”?

Actually, gentle reader, none of them said anything of the sort. I made up these feeble aphorisms suggested to me by a paradox in the affairs of today’s Britain. The news and recent trivial personal misadventures and annoyances have made me dwell on the subject.

But first, the paradox on the Brit political landscape. BoJo was elected Prime Minister on the promise to “Get Brexit Done”. On forming a government, he has appointed people to be ministers of this and that Brexit portfolio. While his propaganda, even through the right-wing papers which support Brexit, insist that breaking with the European Union’s “bureaucracy” has bestowed great gifts on the UK, the opposite is manifestly evident. The shortages of labour in several industries — the fruit and vegetable harvesting work force, truck drivers, nurses, doctors, etc. One could go on and on.

But the real irony of this getting away from “bureaucracy” is that it has imposed a lethal burning fiery amount on Britain’s imports and exports, while the EU’s form-filling was, to coin a metaphor, like being safely in the frying pan. (This is ridiculous! Get a grip! — Ed)

Apart from the fact that every import from Europe has now to undergo several bureaucratic procedures, causing massive tail backs and even headaches at the exporting and importing terminuses, there is the insoluble Northern Ireland Protocol.

What’s that? It’s a clause which BoJo hastily signed in order to Get Brexit Done. In effect, it means treating Northern Ireland, which is, to date, very much a part of the UK, as though it were a part of the European Union. As the Unionist politicians of Northern Ireland say in protest, it draws a border in the North Sea and in token makes Northern Ireland a part of the Irish Republic. There’s no resolution and in normal times it would have contributed to a severe questioning of BoJo’s policies and even his position as PM.

But Vladimir Putin to the rescue! His invasion of Ukraine has deflected all pivotal criticism from BoJo who now poses as the Churchill -- not of warfare but of economic sanctions. BoJo vows publicly to destroy Putin. Putin inadvertently saves BoJo’s skin. Kya tamasha, kya daastaan!

The war in Ukraine, the bombing of civilian targets, has led to millions of Ukrainians fleeing the country. Putin’s criminal war has caused the largest refugee crisis Europe has known since the Second World War. The countries neighbouring Ukraine — all except Belarus — have responded with open doors and mostly commendable generosity. Poland has welcomed over a million refugees and its government pays subsidies to Polish citizens who take them into their homes. Slovakia has accepted 160,000 to date and tiny Moldova 83,000, which is about three per cent of its own population — a gigantic increase in a week! So why did I use the phrase “mostly commendable”? Because I have read reports that Indian and African citizens studying or working in Ukraine and fleeing from its bombed cities have not been treated the same as the “white” Ukrainians. They have been refused permission to cross the borders out of the path of devastation and death. I admit that this may not be a complete report, but the attested incidents in the news embolden me to relay it.

The EU has also thrown open its doors to the Ukrainians fleeing the war, allowing them access across all borders without hindrance and an assurance that they can remain and work for three years.

Ukrainians trying to get to Britain hit a wall of bureaucracy. UK’s home secretary (Ugly Clueless?) determined at first that only those with relatives already living in Britain would be allowed in. There was a massive protest. The government, wanting to preserve its winning political stance to “keep Johnny foreigner out”, the substance of the Brexit vote, may have miscalculated. Even so, Home Secretary Clueless persists. The number of Ukrainian refugees wanting access to Britain piles up at Calais. They not only have to pass several bureaucratic criteria by filling in forms, they have to wait to get an appointment at a visa station in Paris.

By March 7, 9,000 Ukrainians had applied for asylum and 760 had been admitted. Good going, Clueless!

And my brush with bureaucracy? Trivial. Every time I leave India I stand in slow queues to present my passport to immigration officers. In other countries I only encounter such scrutiny on entering the country, not on leaving it. What on earth are these queues and this examination for? Is it meant to stop criminals leaving the country? Wouldn’t it be like good riddance instead of spending taxpayers’ money on jailing them? Or is it to provide additional employment to immigration officers? Or is it to deter citizens from leaving under-populated India?



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