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

Here is a compilation of the best opinion pieces across newspapers.  

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India
7 min read
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Indira, Kashmir, and the Foreign Sting

Meghnad Desai explains how the need for approval from the West was one of the main reasons Indira Gandhi called for an election in 1977, despite being in complete control of the government, army and judiciary. He writes in The Indian Express that she wanted to prove to the British that she was democratically popular. By and large, Indian politicians are all acutely aware of the western gaze; and the press of Asian, German or Italian countries do not matter.

Historically, Indians have never looked Eastwards. They do not think they are Asians. Sir William Jones discovered in the late Eighteenth century (while he was the judge for East India Company’s Law Courts) that Sanskrit had affinity with Greek and Latin and called them an Indo-European family of languages. It worked like magic and ever since Indians have thought of themselves as European. Indian leaders went Westwards to study — Mahatma Gandhi, Jawaharlal Nehru, Subhas Chandra Bose, Sardar Patel, BR Ambedkar, or even to preach as Vivekananda did. Rabindranath Tagore is the sole leader who went as readily to Japan and China as to the West.
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The Two-Nation Paradox: On Modi’s Watch, India Has Both Showcased Pakistan’s Weakness and Strengthened Its Cohesion

Sadanand Dhume answers the question: Would Pakistan and India have been better off had Partition not happened? He writes in The Times of India that six years ago, this was plausible as India offered people of all faiths economic opportunity and constitutional protections. However, in the past five years, India has morphed in the Pakistani imagination to a place where Muslims face mob violence and political marginalisation. Though Modi has attempted to weaken Pakistan, his dispensation has given boost to the country’s founding ideology.

The February Balakot airstrikes called Pakistan’s nuclear bluff and forced the Pakistani army to reconsider the use of its favourite weapon against India – jihadist proxies. At the same time, the growing economic gap with India, pressure from the Financial Action Task Force (FATF), and the handcuffs of an International Monetary Fund lending programme have also limited Pakistan’s ability to respond to Modi’s voiding of autonomy for Jammu and Kashmir and bifurcation of the state into two federally administered Union territories. Not only can Pakistan do nothing to force its claim, but the world knows it can do nothing to force its claim.
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What the Nobel Prize Really Means for India

The Nobel prize awarded to Abhijit Banerjee is great news for India, but we should earnestly learn from his work. Mark Tully writes in The Hindustan Times that the government can learn that the right approach can never be a centrally-planned scheme dumped on the poor, but instead the poor who should be allowed to choose the help they need. The government needs to encourage NGOs to overcome poverty. He also pointed out that the best of Indian education is world-class and we should create awareness to not allow an educational asset as valuable as JNU to be embroiled in controversy.

The rise of extreme right leaders in the West seems to me to be in part at least, due to poorer people feeling growth has enriched the rich and bypassed them. As for immigration, nation-states are tightening their borders rather than relaxing them, and so, immigrants are unlikely to be welcome anywhere. Whether I am right or wrong, surely the answer is that macro and micro-economics should flourish side by side, each enriching the other.
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Lucky Is the Country Without a Glorious History, Writes Ramachandra Guha

Recounting from his experience, Ramachandra Guha points out that India, England and the United States need to stop revelling in their glorious past to project a lofty self-image. In a column in Hindustan Times, he writes that Canadians might not have a great history to boast of, but we need to learn from them about how to build a robust economy, a caring society and working towards making universities and hospitals better.

For Boris Johnson to think of himself as Winston Churchill, or for Narendra Modi’s followers to think of their leader as a new Shivaji, a new Hindu Hriday Samrat, can scarcely help solve the structural challenges that England or India face today. This idea of a fantastic and uniquely glorious past continues to bedevil the fourth country I visited in September, the United States. And consider also Russia, with Vladimir Putin fancying himself as a new Peter the Great, or Turkey, with Recep Tayyip Erdogan thinking of himself as an Ottoman Sultan.
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The Subtle Humour in Paraprosdokians

Karan Thapar believes the best armour for tackling awkward opponents is paraprosdokians. In a column in Hindustan Times, he defines it as a figure of speech in which the second half of a phrase or sentence is surprising or unexpected. He pens some of the most witty and hilarious ones he has heard.

When I told my secretary, Santosh Kumar, I was going to write about paraprosdokians he did a bit of research and came up with a few delightful ones. They’re both witty and clever: “Where there’s a will, I want to be in it”; “Since light travels faster than sound, some people appear bright until you hear them speak”; “To be sure of hitting the target, shoot first & call whatever you hit the target”; “You’re never too old to learn something stupid”; “I’m supposed to respect my elders, but it’s getting harder & harder for me to find one now”.
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Down with Looters

Wealth creators must never be forced to live at the mercy of looters, writes Tavleen Singh in The Indian Express. She criticises the complexity in filing taxes and the vast paperwork necessary for GST. The daily menace of predatory tax inspectors, that is a direct consequence of the prime minister’s quest for black money, has pushed several small businesses to shut down.

The vast majority of Indians who evade paying taxes do it because the process of paying is so complicated. I do not pay GST in my line of work but those who do tell me that it is a Kafkaesque nightmare of rules and paperwork. Millions of small businesses have closed down because GST has driven them out of business. There has long been talk of ‘rationalisation’ of this many-layered tax but this has not happened yet. Very rich Indians, of the honest kind, evade taxes because they often have to keep money aside to pay politicians at election time. Mr Modi knows well that despite his determination to end corrupt practices, the money that fuels the BJP’s formidable election machine is as black as it comes.
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Congress Ambivalence Has Allowed BJP to Walk Away with Liberal Agendas

The next few months are extremely crucial for the institutional formation of Indian secularism as the Ayodhya judgment is expected, followed by the Citizenship Amendment Act, possible extension of the National Register of Citizens, introduction of a Common Civil Code Bill and a national legislation to regulate conversion. Pratap Bhanu Mehta writes in The Indian Express that these issues that have existed for 70 years are a reminder that the Congress’s cardinal sin was not letting the BJP walk away with nationalism; it was letting BJP walk away with liberalism.

On many of these issues, particularly on UCC, there has been a lot of sophisticated thinking. But the Congress’s tainted record drowns out all other positions. Amit Shah will stand up and announce that the BJP is realising all the dreams the Congress did not have the courage to fulfil. The Congress will again be like a deer caught in headlights. What will it say? It will draw the erroneous conclusion that it lost credibility because it was soft on nationalism. No, it lost credibility because it betrayed liberalism. In this crunch moment for Indian secularism, which will be a crucial test for the Opposition, the Congress will be the cross we all have to bear. Fighting for secularism against the BJP is hard enough; being tarred with the legacy of Congress makes it even harder.
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The Cheerleaders for Nobel Prize Winners Aren’t Noble at All

Swapan Dasgupta writes that what we are witnessing in the guise of liberalism are intellectuals who debunk those they disagree with, for being wrong and culturally challenged. In a column in The Times of India, he contends that it is condescending for scholars to explore the dynamics of poverty and believe the choices made by ordinary voters are uninformed. In this context, it is technically the cheerleaders who should be blamed for these transgressions, not the Nobel Prize winners.

The belief that lofty principles are involved in otherwise mundane competitive politics has often served to keep intellectuals in the ring. This is more so when the fight is perceived to be against the populist rabble, often driven by xenophobia. In the US, the East and West coast establishments and the campuses are outraged that Donald Trump is in the White House. They are also aesthetically offended that he enjoys large public support. Likewise in Britain, there is a fierce determination in the establishment to ensure that the verdict of the 2016 referendum is set aside and Brexit subverted.
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Indian Population Bomb Is Ticking

Population growth is a liability, explains Anand Neelakantan in a column in The New Indian Express. Today, our country is staring at a demographic nightmare with a youthful population having no jobs, no skills, a skewed sex ratio, illiterates, and a society yet to come out of the feudal social structure. The focus needs to move from giving tax rebates to corporate giants to social parameters like literacy, health, family planning and skill development.

The states, which are having explosive population growth, are the ones that are having the worst sex ratios. These states are also having the most number of illiterates and unskilled workers and facing bigger law and order problems. The service industry that was the engine of Indian growth for the last two decades has scant presence in these states, which are basically dependent on agrarian income. These states account for the most votes and parliament seats in the country.
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