India’s Urban Elite Rediscovers Rahul Baba in Berkeley
Swapan Dasgupta weighs in on Rahul Gandhi’s recent controversial visit to UC Berkeley in his column in The Times of India. He begins with acknowledging that even though the bar of expectations was set really low after Rahul Gandhi’s cringeworthy interview with Times Now, at least the heir apparent of the Congress did not embarrass himself this time, scripted as his speech may have been.
Dasgupta’s main argument is that with his speech at Berkeley, the “liberals” (NGO members, academicians, journalists etc) rediscovered Rahul Gandhi as the opposition that can overpower the “larger than life” PM Narendra Modi. With increasing unemployment, a shrinking economy and people still reeling from destruction caused by reforms such as demonetisation and GST, Dasgupta doesn’t find it very hard to believe how a “dilettante” like Rahul Gandhi can come to be a viable anti-Modi rallying point today. Whether he stands a chance against him is an open question, but Dasgupta has a few ideas about why PM Modi must be concerned.
Yet, for Modi there are areas of concern. A reason why Rahul secured a relatively sympathetic hearing in the US was on account of the shrill campaign over India becoming an illiberal democracy and becoming unsafe for Muslims. Sustained indignation over hate crimes and comparisons with ugly incidents in Charlottesville and the anti-immigrant mood in parts of Europe has struck a chord in the cosmopolitan elite. This section, already experiencing marginalisation from the power structure, is now determined to wage a last-ditch battle to turn the clock back. Rahul personifies their values, fears and hopes. The imagery, however, is imperfect. Rahul persuades Berkeley; Amit Shah sits on the floor for lunch in a Dalit home.
Little Big Lies
Tavleen Singh calls out Rahul Gandhi for his recent comments during his Berkeley speech in her column in The Indian Express. Gandhi said UPA-led India was one of harmony and tolerance, while under PM Modi, it no longer is. Singh disagrees, rather scoffs at the claim.“My years as a reporter in India began in 1975 and continued for more than 20 years, during which time, I seemed to cover mostly conflicts and communal violence. So to say that [...] is not just a lie but a big fat lie,” she says.
Then, she segues to make a necessary point: Gandhi is right about the tension in India though, felt by both Muslims and Dalits. The PM has to intervene personally now, Singh opines, punishing the cow vigilantes who threaten the communities’ lives and livelihoods everyday. He cannot claim this “savagery” as his own.
The Congress party’s prime ministerial candidate seems to have some really lazy minders travelling with him or they would have advised him not to say what he did. There is not enough room in this column to list the incidents of communal violence that occurred in those long decades of Congress rule, but suffice it to say that nobody reading the list would dare speak of it having been an era of ‘tolerance and harmony.’ And, the list does not include details of that very unharmonious time in the ’80s when bad policies in Delhi created insurgencies in Kashmir and Punjab simultaneously.
Out of my Mind: A Dangerous Decision
Did you know? Just last week, the Home Ministry went back on its promise of citizenship to the Chakma and Hajong people of Arunachal Pradesh who have rights but are not regularised citizens of India. Why? Because other tribal communities indigenous to AP protested saying they should have a say in who gets to be a part of their state; that the Chakma and Hajong would upset the ‘demography’ somehow.
Meghnad Desai is positively appalled at this decision and shares his thoughts on the same in The Indian Express. What is ‘citizenship of Arunachal Pradesh’? Is this “veto” the citizens get a special rule for the state? Or can Marathis in Maharashtra and Tamilians in Tamil Nadu refuse other people since it would upset the ‘demography’?
“Is this not the cynical politics of reservations”, he asks, before ending with a stern note to the government– think again.
Take the case of the Chakma and Hajong. One lakh of them have lived in Arunachal Pradesh since 1964. They have limited rights but are not citizens. The Supreme Court ordered the government in 2015 to regularise their status. The Home Ministry decided to comply with the order. But then there were local protests by tribal communities. They complained that the communities in question would upset the ‘demography’ of the state if they were granted citizenship. It would seem that the citizens of Arunachal Pradesh think they have a right to veto who else becomes citizen of India despite the decision of the Supreme Court. The Minister of State in the Home Ministry has defended the decision therefore to renege on the promise to the Chakma and Hajong. The reason given is that the rights of the indigenous citizens of Arunachal Pradesh would be ‘diluted’ if citizenship was granted to the Chakma and Hajong. There is ‘constitutional protection bestowed’ on the citizens of Arunachal Pradesh which will be infringed if more people are admitted as citizens.
Haryana cops Killed 36 People in a Day, Yet There’s No Outrage
In The Times of India, journalist and author Robin David makes a point that missed our attention: what of the 36 civilians who were killed in the riots that followed the arrest of Dera Sacha Sauda chief Gurmeet Ram Rahim in Panchkula? That’s one-third of the total number of people killed by the police over several months during the 2002 Godhra riots- in just one hour, muses David.
And yet, no one’s talking about; everyone’s moved on. David attempts to refresh our memories. It was, in fact, a colossal administrative failure on behalf of the state government, backed by weak excuses, to allow thousands of Ram Rahim’s followers to congregate in one area on the day of the verdict. Haryana saw the highest number of civilian deaths by police firing in the country, even more than J&K last year. Perhaps, he says, the “disaster in Panchkula was foretold”.
Lovepreet and Angrej Kaur were among the 36 people killed in police firing in Panchkula that day. Barely a month later, their names seem to have become forgotten footnotes in Haryana government records. There is not even a whimper of protest for those who were shot dead by the police. The justification seems to be that most of the dead were dera followers who had turned violent in support of a rape convict.Many choose to ignore the fact that 36 is among the highest number of people killed in independent India in a single episode of police shooting at civilians in a riot. Haryana police virtually made history in Panchkula.
Why There’s No Stopping Virat Modi Despite the Sorry Innings
Aakar Patel is holding back nothing in this hard-hitting piece in The Times of India criticising “the halo of genius” that surrounds PM Narendra Modi despite hard facts (such as on economic growth, demonetisation and GST) suggesting otherwise.
He brings in Rahul Gandhi’s latest comment at a speech in USA where he says the main issue today is that PM Modi always points the finger elsewhere when things to awry, instead of fixing it. Patel disagrees vehemently and repeatedly. The biggest issue according to him is the Opposition’s inability to expose his “demonstrably shoddy” performance, especially in Gujarat, and convince the electorate to poke holes in their blind faith in the man. With Gujarat elections coming up and quite a few of Modi’s vote banks having turned against him in the state, Patel poses the question to you: will he still win?
We shall see, though reports of the GST execution being a total shambles — ‘good governance’ at work, no doubt — does not inspire similar confidence. But who needs performance when one has genius? One imagines that at his meetings, the table-thumpers begin screaming ‘wah-wah Modi saheb!’ before the next transformational idea is even fully pronounced. Now as a Gujarati I always knew the promise of sabka saath came with terms and conditions. Few Indians are innocent enough to believe that something calling itself Hindutva will be suitable for consumption by all Indians. But the sabka vikas bit most Indians swallowed. It is not easy to deny that Modi believed, and got the rest of us to believe, that he had what nobody else had: the secrets to making India a great economic power. And here we are then, at 5.7% growth, produced by something the BJP president calls ‘technical reasons’ (is incompetence a technical reason? Must check). The point is this: at a moment in time when numbers have spoken the truth and the data has stripped bare the performance, will the halo of genius evaporate?
Against Consumer and Good Economics
P Chidambaram accepts while he was Union Finance Minister in the UPA-led government, the prices of crude oil ruled high golbally. Even though he did his best to maintain a balance between taxing crude oil products to get revenue and softening the economic blow to people, nothing significant came of it. In his this week’s column in The Indian Express, he demonstrates by the way of hard data (always) how since 2014, even the the consumption and price of crude oil coming into India has remained the same, the prices have only risen! This, when prices of crude oil are at an oil-time low.
Why? Tax revenue worth hundreds of crores going into the government’s coffers. Chidambaram makes a case for why the NDA-led government should stop with this model of ‘tax and spend’ since it’s not helping decrease transportation costs or increased spending or consumption capacity in either case. He calls this level of taxation of crude oil products simply “anti-consumer, anti-competition and anti-economic.”
If we assume that the quantity of petrol and diesel consumed in the country has remained the same, the governments are garnering by way of tax revenue twice the amount they collected in May 2014. The main culprit is the Central government: on every litre of petrol it is collecting Rs 21.48 as against Rs 9.48 in May 2014, and on every litre of diesel it is collecting Rs 17.33 as against Rs 3.56 in May 2014. Actually, consumption has increased by 17 per cent in the last three years, so the gross collection at higher tax rates is even more!
When JRD Tata called for a Strong Opposition
Historian Ramchandra Guha has a riveting snippet of history for the readers of his column in Hindustan Times. He recounts India in May, 1961, when politician C Rajagopalachari persuaded JRD Tata to fund the Swatantra party which was to become a strong opposition to the Congress, then “dominated by one man”. This, despite the fact that Tatas had been funding the Congress party and their election spending.
JRD Tata agreed and wrote a detailed letter to then PM Jawaharlal Nehru explaining why he believed in Rajagopalachari’s idea to fund two parties: he would fund the Swatantra party so that India could grow to become a democracy where neither party leans to the extreme Left or Right and offers a check on the other. “‘I am one of those who believes that the single party regime under which we have lived since Independence”, mulls JRD Tata in his letter to Nehru, but accepts it was only a matter of time people would want a change of government. To keep them from turning to the Communist Party, they must be otherwise substantially engaged with a party that is “conservative, not reactionary or communal or extreme rightists”, Tata wrote. Then came Nehru’s reply and it’s a lesson to all Indian politicians, Guha writes.
The Tata/Nehru correspondence of 1961 seems strikingly relevant today, at a time when Narendra Modi’s BJP has become the dominant force in Indian politics, displaying in the process the same arrogance that Jawaharlal Nehru’s Congress once did. But can one imagine an Ambani or Adani writing to Modi in the manner that J. R. D. Tata wrote to Nehru, declaring that, in the larger interests of Indian democracy, they would fund another party in addition to the BJP? Of course not. There is no Indian industrialist alive today who has the political sagacity or moral courage of J. R. D. Tata. No industrialist now would have the guts to tell the Prime Minister so frankly that he, his party, and his Government were not flawless or perfect.
A Requiem for Old India
Art critic and curator Gayatri Sinha has a sunny morning read for you in The Hindu. “By now as you all must know we have moved to New India. It’s difficult to time precisely when this momentous shift took place, if we all moved at the same time, where we have moved to and what exactly is new in India, but we are assured that we have made the transition.” She used this tongue-in-cheek start to take us to the Old India– specifically Old Delhi. Even though its havelis are crumbling as we speak, Red Fort still demands the respect it did back in the day. Real estate is still more expensive in Delhi-6 than in swanky New Delhi and it beats all markets, serving as a nerve centre for trade and commerce.
She has a point behind the nostalgic imagery she lays out for you. Another thing about Old Delhi is crumbling: its books. Hundreds of years of Hindi and Urdu writings and rare manuscripts are languishing in neglect due to a severe lack of funding. This New India, whatever it is and wherever we’re headed to, Sinha says– it must accommodate the old.
Described as ‘Old’ in contrast to Lutyens’ Delhi, it continues to bear the marks of age, such as the lingering association with Urdu that wafts in the air, like the smell of jalebis frying in ghee. Even in its overcrowded narrow galis, a few havelis survive, with their tehkhanas or basements, stories of buried wells and murmurs of resident ghosts of past begums.If the original number of 500 havelis has dwindled to barely 50 habitable ones, we are presented with a memory of a magnanimous past and a cruel reminder of how the old is allowed to crumble and self-destruct.
Inside Track: Double Portfolios
To end your Sunday morning reading sessions, here is Coomi Kapoor, in The Indian Express, with her weekly report on the gupshup that goes on within the hallowed halls of the Indian parliament. Look out for why the NDA government is keen on keeping Feroze Gandhi’s memory alive, Kannada actress Ramya’s first few days handling Congress social media cell and other bits!
Along with their heavy duties as Railway Minister and HRD Minister respectively, Piyush Goyal and Prakash Javadekar have another weighty responsibility. In fact they could end up spending as much time on party work as they do on official duties. Party president Amit Shah has appointed both men in-charge of Karnataka, which goes to polls next year. Shah has set the BJP a target of winning 150 of the 224 seats in the state. When he was last in Karnataka, on a three-day visit, Shah scolded the state party leadership for not showing proper will to fight the Siddaramaiah government. Shah’s target is an ambitious one and the two ministers have to now make frequent trips to Karnataka to meet party functionaries and work out a strategy to defeat the state’s street-smart chief minister.
From The Quint:
(At The Quint, we are answerable only to our audience. Play an active role in shaping our journalism by becoming a member. Because the truth is worth it.)