Sunday View: The Best Weekend Opinion Reads, Curated Just for You

We sifted through the papers to find the best opinion reads, so you won't have to.

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Starting An Unprovoked War

In The Indian Express, senior Congress leader P Chidambaram writes about 'Hindi imposition' and the Centre's call to implement the 'Three Language Formula'.

"The central government has blown the bugle of another unprovoked war, this time on language. The so-called ‘three language formula’ (TLF) was first mooted by the Radhakrishnan Committee. It was dead-on-arrival. No state has ever implemented TLF," Chidambaram writes.

He adds: "The Union Education Minister has a glib argument. The NEP is a national policy and every state is Constitutionally obliged to adopt the policy. Further, while NEP mandates the teaching of a third language, it does not stipulate that the third language must be Hindi. Mr Dharmendra Pradhan feigned innocence when he asked, why is the government of Tamil Nadu opposed to the NEP and the teaching of a third language?"

Peace Falls to Pieces as Trump and Zelenskyy Spar

In The New Indian Express (TNIE), Shankkar Aiyar writes about what unfolded at the recent diplomatic meeting between American President Donald Trump and his Ukrainian counterpart Volodymyr Zelenskyy.

"In February 2022, at the start of the war in Ukraine, the Biden administration offered to evacuate Volodymyr Zelenskyy. The Ukrainian president tweeted, “The fight is here. I need ammunition, not a ride.” This week, the third anniversary of the war, Zelenskyy was in Washington to pursue a peace deal pitched by the Trump administration. In one of the ugliest slugfests ever streamed live across the world, Zelenskyy was virtually told by Donald J Trump to take a hike," writes Aiyar.

He adds: "Context is critical for comprehension. Trump had declared during his campaign that he would end the war in 24 hours. Trump and his MAGA base have clearly been up in arms against the flow of funds to Ukraine. For the self-confessed master of The Art of the Deal, the power equation is spelt by the what’s-in-it-for-us question. The answer his team came up with: a chunk of the rare earth minerals buried under Ukraine."

International Women’s Day: A Day to Celebrate, and Heed The Warnings

Journalist and author Namita Bhandare, in her column in the Hindustan Times, writes about India, its journey towards gender equality, the structural barriers, and how women’s rights across the world are under siege.

Bhandare writes: "Aspirational India gives cause for hope. The ASER (annual status of education report) released earlier this year lists the reasons why. Fears that the pandemic would disrupt learning proved to be unfounded. And despite one of the world’s longest school closures, learning outcomes improved measurably. Government schools, at least in rural India, have shown the most improvement with almost every child in school, and girls surging ahead of boys in such skills as ability to read."

"But if the education of girls is one of India’s great success stories, another survey tells us just how stubbornly resistant some things are to change. The 2024 Time Use Survey, released this week by the ministry of statistics and programme implementation, tells you how different are the lives of Indian men and women. Men spend their time making money through employment and related activities; an average of 473 minutes for women’s 341," she adds.

The Ghost of Bofors Returns

In The Indian Express, senior journalist Tavleen Singh writes about 'Boforsgate' — a new book by investigative journalist and author Chitra Subramaniam.

"Last week I read the most important book about India’s political culture that I have read in a long time. It is called ‘Boforsgate’ and has been written by Chitra Subramaniam without whose outstanding investigative journalism the truth about the bribes that Bofors paid to sell their howitzers to the Indian army may never have come out. Chitra risked her life, her marriage and her sanity in pursuit of the truth. But this is not just her story. It is the story of the ugly underworld below the surface of politics in Delhi. An underworld where criminals, corrupt politicians and compliant officials thrive," writes Tavleen.

"The reason why ‘Boforsgate’ is such an important book is because corruption is still India’s biggest political problem. It is to make money and not out of a desire to serve this country that most people come into politics today. Politics is the easiest way to make big money in our ancient land. This is why political leaders ensure that their constituencies pass onto their children. I have closely observed how these political heirs almost magically make enough money to be able to buy properties in foreign lands, stay in expensive hotels and send their progeny to fancy foreign schools."

Tavleen Singh in The Indian Express

India’s Economic Migrants and Their Invisible Enablers

In the Deccan Herald, Gurucharan Gollerkeri writes about the changing nature of Indian migration to countries such as the United States, Canada, Australia, and the United Kingdom.

He writes: "Towards the end of the twentieth century, the character of Indian migration changed, showing greater confidence, and rapidly moving up the value chain. Indian migration to the United States, Canada, Australia, and to a lesser extent to the United Kingdom was dominated by students, academics, scientists, doctors, and engineers, many of whom showed considerable entrepreneurial ability. A distinguishing feature of this recent phase has been the remarkable role of student mobility with the best and the brightest Indian students having a strong presence in the western countries, not least the US. Student mobility represents perhaps the best migration pathway, an exemplar of mobility in a globalising world."

"Despite this remarkable legal migration past, with planeloads of undocumented Indians deported by the Trump administration in recent weeks, illegal migration has in almost solitary splendour gained visibility, captured the public imagination, and received policy attention. Prime Minister Modi said India would take back its nationals who were in the US illegally and also crack down on the ‘human trafficking ecosystem’."

Gurucharan Gollerkeri in Deccan Herald

An Orchestra of Chaos, a Conductor Like No Other

"Donald Trump is unlike anyone before him though he does share characteristics with some of the autocrats of the past," writes Captain GR Gopinath (retd) in his column in the Deccan Herald.

Gopinath, in his piece, says that Trump has been described as "deranged, despotic, narcissistic, racist, unpredictable, and misogynist."

He adds: "Trump’s actions as president hark back to his days as a real estate mogul and reality TV star. He thrives by creating chaos and derives power from it. He surrounds himself with people who have conflicting views, he listens to everyone bypassing hierarchical structures. No one can second-guess him. There’s only one constant – he’s unpredictable."

Repositioning God as a Marketable Product

In The Tribune, former IAS officer Avay Shukla writes how the spiritual and ascetic in Hinduism has been 'replaced' with the commercial and extravagant.

"Marx missed the full picture when he described religion as an opiate of the masses. So did George Carlin when he claimed that God was fiction. For, today, neo-capitalism and right-wing fundamentalism have assigned God a new role and turned Him into an FMCG (Fast Moving Consumer Good): far from being an opiate, He is now a stimulant for consumption on a gigantic scale, the driver for GDP and GST growth," writes Shukla.

"If, along the Laffer curve, a few consumers die in a stampede or fire, that is acceptable collateral damage, a tax write-off where the public picks up the bill while the high priests of Mammon go chuckling to the bank. The Maha Kumbh, which the UP government claims will add Rs 2 lakh crore to the state’s GDP, is the apotheosis of this new divine role."

Avay Shukla in The Tribune

The Incomplete Feminism of ‘Mrs’ and ‘The Great Indian Kitchen’

Film scholar and critic Aakshi Magazine, in a column in The Indian Express, writes about the upper caste anxieties reflected in Arati Kadav’s Mrs., a remake of Jeo Baby’s The Great Indian Kitchen (2021).

"At the heart of the films, though, lies a problematic worldview. This can be seen in the difference in how the films view cooking and how they view cleaning. In both films, there is a running sequence of a clogged sink and a leaking drain pipe. This plot point is very important to the film’s climax, but the imagery it relies on to evoke our disgust is troubling. Our sympathy towards the protagonist comes from the fact that we do not think she should be the one doing this work. In fact, early on in Mrs., Richa tells her mother-in-law that she could leave the kitchen work for the 'kaamwali' who will come to work in the morning. Would it have been okay if the underpaid domestic worker did this work?" she writes.

"As the film proceeds, smell and touch become important. We watch extended sequences of the upper-caste protagonist unclogging the sink, touching the overflowing dustbin and frantically washing her hands (almost up till her elbows in The Great Indian Kitchen) in order to rid herself of the smell. She is disgusted that she has to touch waste."

Aakshi Magazine in The Indian Express

Seriously Funny: A DOGE of Our Own

In the Deccan Herald, academic Aakash Singh Rathore writes about the a DOGE (Department of Government Efficiency) counterpart in India.

Rathore writes: "DOGE is not merely a quasi-governmental department cobbled into tenuous quasi-legal existence; no, it is also in itself a sort of joke. For, Musk created the acronym DOGE to reflect the name of his favourite memecoin, DogeCoin. And Doge, now a top-10 cryptocurrency by market cap, was itself created as a joke to mock the speculative nature of cryptos. That’s layers of jokes built on jokes. To review, the meme of Trump sucking Musk’s toes is a joke about DOGE, and about who really leads the USA, and DOGE was a joke of Musk’s own to troll governance, naming a powerful government quasi-department after a memecoin, one that was itself originally a joke on crypto."

"Now, many in India are proposing that we need a DOGE of our own. As we all know, our government is profoundly inefficient, bureaucratic, arbitrary, and any amount of government efficiency that could be achieved in India would do us a world of good. Very true. But this argument fails to recognise the turtle in the room. That is, unlike Britain or the USA, we in India do not erect our institutions on jokes and memes," he adds.

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