Sunday View: The Best Weekend Opinion Reads, Curated For You
Ditch the papers on a Sunday morning; get all your weekend OpEd pieces on The Sunday View instead.
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BJP’s Insincerity Has Prompted Mehbooba Mufti’s Procrastination and J&K Political Impasses
Sayeed’s People’s Democratic Party (PDP) appeared to be grasping at straws as it began to feel the burden of an unpopular alliance with Hindu nationalist BJP, writes Sameer Arshad in his column, Gray Areas for The Times of India.
Its justifications for the alliance had not fructified in terms of either economic benefits or the peace process. There was not even hint of any “healing touch”, the phrase Sayeed had popularised during his earlier tenure. The rhetoric over revocation of draconian laws like Armed Forces Special Powers Act had been all but forgotten. In fact, many had started blaming the alliance for emboldening anti-Muslim elements when an 18-year-old was burnt to death amid Hindutva beef frenzy in Jammu.
Read the full opinion piece here.
Could Rohith Have Been Saved?
The ministers in the Modi government, who interfered in student politics should also have the grace to resign, writes Tavleen Singh in the ‘Fifth Column’ for The Indian Express.
One thing the Prime Minister can and should do is begin to dismantle the licence raj in education, that gives semi-literate officials too much power to cause too much harm in our universities.
Read the full opinion piece here.
‘My Birth Is My Fatal Accident’
Just as “No one killed Jessica Lall”, no one Is – or will be held – responsible for the death of Rohith, writes P Chidambaram, in his column, Across the Aisle, for The Indian Express.
It is a miracle of our times that a Dalit, son of a security guard and a self-employed seamstress and instructor, could climb the ladder of education and be admitted as a scholar in a central university. On the way, he did not drop out. He was not pulled out by his parents to find low-paying work in order to bring a few rupees to support the family. He was not failed in school or college. He was not rusticated for some vague misdemeanour. He was not accused of a crime and thrown into prison. But he failed at the last hurdle.
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Forget the Jetsetting, Modiji. Just Think Jobs in 2016
This is a make or break year for Prime Minister Modi. Unless economic growth picks up significantly in 2016 and jobs come in masses, we can forget about achhe din, writes Gurcharan Das, in his column, Men & Ideas, for The Times of India.
The standard recipe for making a poor country rich is to export labour-intensive, low-tech manufactured goods. It transformed East Asia, China and South-East Asia into middle-class societies. But India missed this bus and today is the poorest large economy in the world with ‘less than a sixth of the global per capita income, at a level lower than Laos, Zambia, and Sudan’, as T N Ninan reminds us in The Turn of the Tortoise. We elected Modi because he promised to catch this bus.
Read the full opinion piece here.
Cricket: Dhoni past Use-By Date as Skipper, Virat Can Bring Fresh Ideas
A good captain can make sensible tactical decisions, but if the team isn’t fully engaged, they won’t count for much, writes Ian Chappell for Hindustan Times.
When Dhoni started out in the job he was a shrewd captain in all forms of the game and experienced widespread success. However, over-staying your time as captain can have the same debilitating effect on a team as appointing the wrong player for the job in the first place.
Read the full opinion piece here.
Beer, Beef and Buses
Over time, the Centre has weakened, though it has financial clout. The states have become more powerful, writes Meghnad Desai, in his column, Out of My Mind, for The Indian Express.
We now have competitive federalism. States which are large enough to be independent nations have begun to experiment with governance and innovative policies. Not all the innovations are well designed. Yet, there is a value to local autonomy which should be prized. India is a nation of many nations, like Europe which is even now struggling to become an effective Union.
Read the full opinion piece here.
The Nine Lives of the Sedition Law
What unites Arundhati Roy and Hardik Patel, two individuals as different from each other as chalk and cheese? The answer is a provision of the Indian Penal Code: Section 124A, which defines and penalises the offence of “sedition”, writes Gautam Bhatia in Mint on Sunday.
Initially, the section only used the term “disaffection”, which was interpreted by colonial judges to refer to acts or speeches that incited people to disobey the government. However, once the British realized that clever Indian nationalists were taking advantage of the loophole in the law to frame incendiary speeches that made no mention of disobedience, they added the words “hatred” and “contempt”, more or less turning the offence into one for capturing thought crimes.
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My ‘Anti-National’ Brother
A respected journalist is gagged by goons on a university campus, writes Tunku Varadarajan, in his column, Reverse Swing, for The Indian Express.
How free is India? The country boasts of its democracy, often with reason. India’s record of regular elections is enviable, especially when one considers its political and linguistic diversity, the size of its population, and its shameful levels of education. We can all agree that the country gets the formal mechanics of democracy right – against heavy odds.
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Gujarat Tribals Turn Bamboo Plantation Owners
Tribals are the poorest, most oppressed community. Maoists say revolution is the only way forward for them. That’s dead wrong, writes SA Aiyar, in his column, Swaminomics, for The Times of India.
Since large forest areas were nationalised in colonial times, tribals have been treated by forest departments as encroachers in their own homelands. This changed with the Forest Rights Act, which granted tribals title to land they were cultivating in 2006. The forest departments own all timber in forests, but tribals have rights over minor produce, including grass. They also have the right to manage community forests.
Read the full opinion piece here.