May 2020 Bring Real Change
In her column in The Indian Express, Tavleen Singh hopes that, in the coming decade, India goes from being a country often described as having the ‘potential to become prosperous and powerful’ to a country that’s realised at least some of its potential.
Highlighting the events of the past weeks, Singh adds that nationwide protests were the last thing we needed at “a time of deep economic uncertainty”.
Singh writes that the Modi government has gone from an agenda of vikas to one “supported mostly by upper caste urban Hindus”.
At least in his first term as prime minister Modi took unwieldy, expensive socialist welfare schemes and made them more efficient. At least he brought some fundamental changes in our filthy villages and towns by urging people to build toilets and stop our ancient practice of defecating in the open. At least he tried to speed up the building of our desperately needed roads. And, it was for this delivery on the ‘vikas’ front that he won a second term. But somehow this message never reached him and instead the message that did reach him was that he had won because he was seen as the great new Hindutva hope.Tavleen Singh in The Indian Express
The Young are Trying to Save the Idea of India
The young are protesting to defend the idea of India, writes Karan Thapar in Hindustan Times. He writes that the young have been the vanguards of India’s democracy through movements across India’s past.
From the JP movement to Indira Gandhi’s return to power in 1980, he writes that the youth have led the charge every time India’s democracy has undergone substantial change. He adds, the message they’re trying to send is “We’re all Indians, they’re saying, don’t divide us by religion.”
Yet, am I wrong in discerning a critical difference this time round? Earlier, for instance, during the struggle to overturn the Emergency, it was democracy and liberty they fought for. This time they’ve taken the fight to a higher level. This battle is to protect the idea of India. In other words, our identity as a people, the way we think of ourselves and the sort of people we want to be. This is more important than our democracy, because it’s the underpinning of it. If the idea of India is diluted, everything else is lost.Karan Thapar in Hindustan Times
State Elections Key to Stopping BJP
In a column in The Indian Express, P Chidambaram writes that elections to the state legislatures will be the key to stopping the BJP’s growth across the country in 2020-2021. He adds that the passing of the Citizenship Amendment Bill was the “final assault” on the basic tenets of the republic.
He points at Sharad Pawar and Mamata Banerjee’s pushback at the Modi-Shah duopoly and asserts that the outcomes of state elections “will force Mr. Modi to change course”. To work towards this end, he says, state-specific combinations will have to be worked out.
Mr Amit Shah has created the myth that the BJP is an invincible political machine. The BJP has its strengths, bolstered by money power, but it is also plagued by the usual weaknesses of all political parties — factions, dissidents, rival candidates and, in states where it is the ruling party, anti-incumbency. In the last two months, the BJP was dented in Haryana, denied in Maharashtra and defeated in Jharkhand. This success can be taken forward if non-BJP parties rally around the strongest party in each election-bound state. That would mean, for example, the Congress in Assam, Kerala and Puducherry, and the DMK in Tamil Nadu.P Chidambaram in The Indian Express
Anti-CAA Protests: India’s Return to Gandhi’s Principles of Non-Violent Protest
Christophe Jaffrelot writes in The Indian Express that India is witnessing a return to Gandhi’s principles of ahimsa, in its peaceful protests against the Citizenship Amendment Act and the National Register of Citizens.
He draws parallels between the protests in India and the Pashtun Tahafuz Movement’s protests in Pakistan and adds that the challenges before a protest of this kind are to remain non-violent inspite of provocation, and to sustain in the face of repression.
If ahimsa took India to the liberation path and helped Nelson Mandela to defeat apartheid, it failed in China where Dalai Lama could not prevent Beijng from fighting Tibetans and their culture. Non-violence can only work vis-à-vis states and societies which are accessible to moral pressure and likely to develop feelings of guilt; it is bound to fail otherwise, especially when the rulers and/or the majorities supported them have dehumanised their targets, be they ethnic groups, religious communities or political movements.Christophe Jaffrelot in The Indian Express
Smartphones Define the Past Decade
In her column for The Times of India, Amulya Gopalakrishnan writes that the smartphone is the one artefact that binds the past decade together. She says that over the past decade the cellphone has gone from a simple device used to make calls and send texts, to “a digital Swiss army knife”.
Multiple devices are loaded into one simple thing that has, in essence, become an extension of our minds. The extent of integration, she adds, has effected changes at breakneck speed leading to both new marvels and anxieties.
It cannibalised other physical things like cameras and diaries and music players, and nestled in our palms. We filled our phones with photos, music, books and entertainment. We browse and buy our stuff through them. We swipe our phones for romantic connections, we summon and see our loved ones when we want, wherever they are. They guide us on the roads, robot voices telling us where to turn. We spend all our time with our phones, checking them incessantly, holding them close. They mediate our relationships, they are an extension of our minds.Amulya Gopalakrishnan in The Times of India
Are We Living in a Simulation?
Mukul Kesavan ponders over the possibility that the past 30 years of Indian politics has been a simulation, drawing an analogy to science fiction novel Counterfeit World. In The Telegraph, he asks, what if we were all “characters in a counterfactual simulation intended to test the plausibility of a Hindu turn in Indian politics that hadn’t actually come to pass in the real world?”
The more I thought about it, the likelier it seemed. There was a cartoon-like coarseness to the last thirty years that lacked the fine-grained nuance of real life. Take the absurdness of the rath yatra: a man with a grey Chaplin moustache riding a pink chariot around UP asking for bricks to build a temple with? Then there was that Ramsay Brothers luridness to what came afterwards: the tearing down of the mosque and the vileness that followed. Only some dyed-in-the-wool liberal, viscerally hostile to the potential of the Jana Sangh, would programme a scenario where the ultimate triumph of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh would be dominated by a triumvirate of unsympathetic heavies like Modi, Shah and Adityanath.Mukul Kesavan in The Telegraph
Despite Electoral Setbacks, Contemporary India More Saffron Than Ever
Contemporary India looks more saffron ideologically than at any point since Independence, writes Rahul Verma in The Times of India. He argues that despite the BJP’s recent electoral setbacks, the party’s rise has led to a shift in the ideological makeup of the country.
The developments in the first six months of the Modi government’s second term in power, namely the abrogation of Article 370, the push for construction of a Ram Temple, the passing of the CAA and enactment of the NRC in Assam, despite a declining economic situation, are enough “to draw parallels with signs of creeping electoral authoritarianism.”
The above-mentioned developments are enough to draw parallels with signs of creeping electoral authoritarianism in India as suggested by Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt in How Democracies Die. The authors eloquently write that the “tragic paradox of the electoral route to authoritarianism is that democracy’s assassins use the very institutions of democracy—gradually, subtly, and even legally—to kill it”. They use economic crises or terrorist attacks “to justify anti-democratic measures”. Is India heading to electoral authoritarianism?Rahul Verma in The Times of India
The Preamble : A Reminder of The Constitution’s Ideals
In the protests against the Citizenship Amendment Act, a number of Indians recently clothed themselves in text from the Preamble to the Constitution. In the 70th year of the Republic, Pratap Bhanu Mehta writes, the preamble is “a reaffirmation of the radical message of the Constitution”.
In The Indian Express, he writes, that in times when even simple practices of reading are tied to declarations of partisanship, the preamble offers a refreshing escape. It serves, he adds, as a reminder of the basic tenets of the Constitution and the ideals it represents.
The Preamble has a context, of 1949, and, more controversially, of 1973. But it is crafted in a way that deliberately transcends context, and rises above a mean partisanship.Like a stotra, the Preamble lets you concentrate on the basics: liberty for what? Equality of what? And fraternity between whom? And, the answers to the three are mutually supportive: one concept cannot be operational without the other.Pratap Bhanu Mehta in The Indian Express
Crack in Majority Government’s Hard Shell?
Meghnad Desai, in his column in The Indian Express, points out that the Modi government’s hard shell may be cracking in the face of continued protests. But, he says, that the larger threat isn’t from what’s happening across India, but from what’s happening in Assam.
He says that granting Assam a “cultural definition of citizenship” could lead to revolts in every ‘linguistic’ state. He adds that the demand in each revolt, would be a state specifically for those rooted there culturally and ancestrally.
Maharashtra for Marathis, Tamil Nadu for Tamils etc. The slogan would be ‘Karnataka for Kannadigas, foreigners out’. This is, of course, a secular definition of citizenship since it is not religion but cultural belonging which is the criterion. In worrying about the “the Muslim Question”, the entire political system has missed the potent danger lurking in the unresolved Assam question. Neither the Hindu Rashtravadi nor the Secular, Constitutionalist doubts that India is one. The Assamese have been agitating for the idea of multiple Indias since the mid-1970s. Could they be right?Meghnad Desai in The Indian Express
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