Fifth Column: Beware Of Defectors
The defection crisis faced by the Congress in Goa and Karnataka is definitely telling of the organisational failures within the party. But what does this poaching of MLAs say about the BJP? In this week’s edition of her weekly column for the Indian Express, Tavleen Singh explores how toppling elected governments could be the BJP’s undoing, just like it was Indira Gandhi’s in the 1980s.
Toppling state governments may not have been at the root of our oldest political party being rejected by India’s voters, but it was the reason why this party came to be seen as dishonest and duplicitous. Indira Gandhi was the master of this political manoeuvre. When she used it to topple Farooq Abdullah’s government in 1984, she began, in my view, the current phase of our problem in Kashmir. Farooq was removed in a deceitful, cynical way and this reminded Kashmiris that they would never be allowed to have real democracy. Just months later, when Mrs Gandhi toppled NTR’s government in Andhra Pradesh, she managed to unite every opposition party against her. NTR did not take his dismissal lightly. He turned up in Delhi with more than 160 MLAs to prove to the President that he had been wrongly dismissed. Mrs Gandhi ended up sullying her own image.Tavleen Singh in The Indian Express
Inside Track: Who Is In Charge?
Is Motilal Vora really the new working president of the Congress? In this week’s column for The Indian Express, Coomi Kapoor gives us more information on this, the new Lok Sabha speaker Om Birla’s soft-corner for first-time MPs, Kumaraswamy’s ill-timed foreign trip, Arvind Subramaniam’s latest career plans and Jan Sangh founder S.P. Mookerjee’s sparsely-attended birth celebrations in the Parliament.
The 90-year-old Vora has a new spring in his step as he modestly accepts congratulations, though he admits that he has not received any formal intimation of his new role. Those who have blithely bestowed the position on Vora fail to comprehend that when the constitution mentions the most senior general secretary, it does not connote the age of the individual, but the one who is the longest-serving. Mukul Wasnik, who took over when Sonia Gandhi became party president, is the longest-serving general secretary. Vora was for decades party treasurer and was made general secretary only last year. Ghulam Nabi Azad has more years as general secretary than Wasnik, but not in one unbroken stretch. The president’s resignation is effective only after it is accepted by the Congress Working Committee (CWC). But no one is sure who has the authority to call a CWC meeting. Some members have suggested that it is organising secretary K C Venugopal’s job. But the most junior general secretary is too intimidated to take the call.Coomi Kapoor in The Indian Express
Tackling Climate Change Needs Strong Political Will
In his column for The Hindustan Times, Mark Tully cites two reports to highlight the need of concerted government action to tackle climate change. There’s enough overwhelming academic evidence, Tully says, to ignore climate change nay-sayers like Trump.
There’s also enough academic research to show how political dispensations can impede this crisis by implementing simple practical measures- provided there’s the will to do so, of course.
The two reports I read suggest practical measures which can be taken to provide protection from the impact of climate change and clean the air we breathe. They both require governments to broaden their vision beyond the bickering over the amount of climate change producing gases they will allow each country to produce and concentrate on these and other long-term measures. To bring about that change will require popular pressure on politicians. As Crowther has said, “we the people need to get directly involved too.” In India we need to revive the Chipko Andolan movement on a country wide scale, and this time by planting new trees as well as defending existing ones.Mark Tully in The Hindustan Times
Out Of My Mind: What About The Muslims?
The mandate for Prime Minister Narendra Modi at the 2019 General Elections surprised many because of the overwhelming support he received from almost all social and economic groups. However, the present dispensation won only 15 percent of the Muslims votes and presently, there are only 25 Muslim MPs in Parliament.
In this week’s column for The Indian Express, Lord Meghnad Desai argues against the notion that only Muslim lawmakers can represent the Muslim electorate. Any lawmaker, he says, represents their entire electorate- Muslims included. How has that worked out thus far? Well, read the piece to see if you agree with him.
Someone in London, a well-informed fellow member of the House of Lords, expressed to me the horror that no Muslim had been elected to the Lok Sabha this time around. I told him that was not the case. Twenty-five Muslim MPs are in the Lok Sabha, as many as in 1952. But that is way below their proportion in the population. True, but that has always been the case. There have been one or two fewer, and during the long coalition period in the 1989-2014 period, more than 30 sometimes. At 15 per cent share in the population, it would require 75 Muslim MPs for proportionality, which has never been the case.Lord Meghnad Desai in The Indian Express
Across The Aisle: Trapped In 7 Per Cent Growth
In her Budget speech, Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman promised to deliver a 7 or 8 per cent growth in GDP in the year 2019-20. But the difference between this 7 or 8 per cent is not merely one percentage point but the difference between ‘continued moderate growth’ and ‘potentially accelerated growth’ , says P. Chidambaram.
In his column for The Indian Express, Chidambaram explores the factors required to register such an economic growth, and assesses whether these factors are indeed running at full throttle.
High and accelerated growth requires all four engines of growth to be fired up and running at full throttle. Exports (merchandise) crossed the mark of USD 315 billion — set in 2013-14 — only in 2018-19 and, even then, the growth rate was a modest 9 per cent over the previous year. Government expenditure on the revenue account (net of interest payment and grants) was only 7.18 per cent of GDP in 2018-19. Private consumption depends on a number of imponderables including expectations about inflation, employment, economic disruption, security, etc. The perennial dilemma before a householder is ‘shall I save or shall I spend’? For example, it is the decline in private consumption that has hit so hard sales of automobiles and two-wheelers.P. Chidambaram in The Indian Express
Budget Has Failed To Create An India That Can Compete
Much like Chidambaram, Swaminathan Aiyar in his weekly column for The Times Of India points out the shortcomings of the Annual Budget. Aiyar argues that no economy can grow without buoyant exports. The Budget, he says, does not address the factors that impede India’s exports like high costs in terms of land, labour, capital, electricity, railway freight rates, air freight, corporate and income tax rates that make it difficult for Indian manufacturers to compete with their cheaper Asian peers.
Back in 2007, finance minister Chidambaram grasped the importance of being competitive, and decreed that import duties should be reduced till they approximated the Asian norm of 10%. That was achieved by a series of cuts till 2008, and helped fuel India’s biggest boom. Then Arun Jaitley said India would cut its corporate tax rate to 25% to compete with Asia.This vision has been abandoned by Nirmala Sitharaman. She has done nothing to bring down the high costs of so many items. She has yet to cut corporate tax to the promised 25% rate for large companies with revenue of over Rs 400 crore. Meanwhile corporate tax in many Asian countries has fallen to 15-20%.Swaminathan Aiyar in The Times Of India
Statutory Warning: Newsprint Duty Is Injurious To The Health Of Our Democracy
Keeping with the Budget, Aakar Patel in his Times Of India column draws attention to the increased customs duty on newsprint which has been hiked by 10 per cent. A hike, that Patel says, will not bring any significant revenue to the government but will significantly affect the cost of newspaper production.
What are the reasons for this hike then? Patel tries his best to explain, without much speculation.
India has the cheapest newspapers in the world (Jefferson would approve). The Guardian in London costs Rs 150, and the New York Times Rs 175 though both these newspapers use the same amount of newsprint that this paper does. Nearer us, Sri Lanka and Bangladesh charge their readers twice as much, often for papers that are half or less in size than this paper. The Pakistan daily that I used to write a column for some years ago costs Rs 40 a day. These are Pakistani rupees, which are worth less today than half an Indian rupee. But it still means that the reader in Lahore and Karachi pays four times what you and I pay for a newspaper in Delhi or Mumbai. A very segmented media space for advertising means that today, newspapers have to compete with many other sources for the same spends.The government’s hike in customs duty is going to burden all newspapers with higher input cost in this sort of market and that doesn’t make sense unless… look, I’m not going to speculate about why this was done. This column is about something else.Aakar Patel in The Times Of India
For Cricket’s Brave New World, We Have IPL And England To Thank
One of the biggest disappointments for Indians this week (and I’m being generous when I say ‘one of the’) was the Indian Men’s Cricket Team crashing out of the ICC World Cup 2019. So while we begrudgingly watch New Zealand and England battle it out for the Cup today, here’s Amit Varma in his column for The Times Of India, explaining why the game, which seemed to have fallen into a rut a decade ago, has England and our very own IPL to thank for its new, bold and aggressive comeback.
Cricket has changed in the last few years in glorious ways. There have been new ways of thinking about the game. There have been new ways of playing the game. Every season, new kinds of drama form, new nuances spring up into sight. This is true even of what had once seemed the dullest form of the game, one-day cricket. We are entering into a brave new world, and the team leading us there is England. No matter what happens in the World Cup final today — a single game involves a huge amount of luck — this England side are extraordinary. They are the bridge between eras, leading us into a Golden Age of Cricket.I know that sounds hyperbolic, so let me stun you further by saying that I give the IPL credit for this.Amit Varma in The Times Of India
Here Is My All-Time India One-Day Eleven
Finally, if you’re still disappointed over Team India’s loss, join Ramachandra Guha in this fun Sunday exercise where he chooses his all-time favourite Indian players to create a ‘dream ODI eleven’, in this week’s column for The Hindustan Times.
My All Time India One-Day XI therefore reads: 1. Virendra Sehwag 2. Rohit Sharma 3. Sachin Tendulkar 4. Virat Kohli 5. Rahul Dravid 6. Yuvraj Singh 7. Kapil Dev 8. MS Dhoni (captain) 9. Anil Kumble 10. Zaheer Khan 11. Jasprit BumrahRamachandra Guha in The Hindustan Times
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