Brute State Power
Tavleen Singh, In her weekly column in The Indian Express, writes about the alleged immolation of a 44-year-old woman and her daughter during an anti-encroachment drive in Uttar Pradesh's Kanpur.
"The officials who brought the bulldozer that tore it down say that the women died by suicide. Their family alleges that the hut was deliberately set on fire with them in it. In excellent reportage by India Today I saw the yellow mechanical arm of the bulldozer tearing into the mud and thatch hut just before it catches fire. What is beyond dispute is that Pramila Dixit, 46, and her daughter Neha, 22, did not manage to get out of their burning home," writes Singh.
"The question that needs to be asked is whether these things should be happening at all in the ‘mother of democracy’? There have been many instances in the past when the government has lawfully taken possession of someone’s property when it came in the way of a new highway or some other public utility. It was hard on those who lost their homes, but compensation was given and a process of acquiring the land was followed so that hardship could be minimised. The bulldozer policy started by Bulldozer Baba is totally different. It is brute use of state power and brutal crushing of the rule of law."Tavleen Singh
Live by PR, Die by PR
"Why would a democratic government call the BBC names and send Income Tax officers after it in painfully obvious retaliation?" asks senior journalist and author Mitali Saran in her opinion piece in the Deccan Herald.
"The Hindu’s former editor, N Ram, called the move ‘akratic’— akrasia being the Greek word for that state of mind in which you do something against your own interests, against your better judgement. One senior citizen called it a form of throwing your own interests, against your better judgement. One senior citizen called it a form of throwing your toys out of your pram when you don’t get your way," Saran writes.
"Today, an almost wholly domesticated national media sustains a loud PR campaign adoring the Prime Minister, vilifying his critics, and screeching about India’s coming golden age. So far, it seems to keep voters from noticing the nasty realities around them. But anyone with two working synapses could have told Modi that trying to intimidate the BBC puts the ‘crazy’ back in ‘akrasia’— it has only succeeded in getting every major newspaper in the world to recap his violent, sectarian rise to power, and mention the UK Foreign Office report that holds him “directly responsible” for the impunity of the 2002 violence."Mitali Saran
Leading With a Shaken Voice
Amit Bhaduri, in an opinion piece in The Telegraph, questions if India can have a political formation that can put forward a model of economic growth which does not depend on a handful of big business houses.
"There is no reason why people cannot be made to believe great things were achieved by Modi, including his fight against black money, his wisdom of sudden demonetisation (the destruction of innumerable livelihoods in the informal sector notwithstanding), the sudden lockdown during the pandemic along with his initial advice of lighting candles and banging kitchen utensils to keep away the pandemic," Bhaduri writes.
"India’s growth story has been similar if you consider growth not merely as a GDP number but the state of economic well-being of ordinary citizens. Natural resources were handed over at heavily subsidised prices to a few favoured corporations while the environment was degraded and poor people lost homes and livelihoods. There has been no success in creating jobs or alternative livelihood, no improvement in health, education and nutrition, except at the whimsical charity of the great leader."Amit Bhaduri
A League Of Their Own
In her opinion piece in The Indian Express, Supreme Court advocate Menaka Guruswamy writes about the Women's Premiere League and the opportunities it will offer for women's cricket in India.
"This is a historic time for women’s cricket. It finally is moving away from decades of poor funding and indifference, which also included a time when top cricketers would be asked “who is your favourite male cricketer?” at a post-game conference after a tightly-fought match. To put it mildly, while men’s cricket is remarkably well-supported, women’s cricket has been its poorly supported and much-neglected sibling. The likes of Jhulan Goswami and Mitali Raj, who were amongst the finest exponents of the game and have retired, did not have the benefit of a WPL, and we didn’t have the privilege of seeing them play enough cricket games."Menaka Guruswamy
Harmonious Bond
In his column in The Telegraph, Supreme Court advocate and former external affairs minister of India, Salman Khurshid reflects on the "nasty history" of the Bangla vs Urdu debate and how Pakistani politics used the Urdu language as one of the oppressive forces, along with military power, to capture the resources of the East Pakistan province, now Bangladesh.
"Contemporary politics has been forced to spare languages despite the law of nature that old habits die hard; occasionally, we see some unruly assertions to capture power using languages also. We recently witnessed the arrest of a government school principal in Uttar Pradesh’s Bareilly district after a video that was circulated on social media showed school children singing “Lab pe aati hai dua banke tamanna meri” during the morning assembly, a poem penned in 1902 by the Urdu poet, Muhammad Iqbal (1877-1938). This is disturbing because it was very much a prayer sung during morning assembly throughout my childhood in the whole of North India and, in later years too, whenever I visited a school, I joined the students in singing it. Fortunately, Urdu was not part of any separatist movement after Partition, even by Muslim politicians. The Urdu-speaking masses too tried to keep a safe distance from atavistic politics. But they also made a blunder in not supporting the languages that were suppressed by major languages. And for this, they paid the price — whenever Urdu was bulldozed, especially in North India after Partition and thrown out of the formal education system, no language group came forward to support it."Salman Khurshid
Abandoning The Poor
Senior Congress leader P Chidambaram, in his weekly column in The Indian Express, criticises the 2023-24 Union Budget for "punishing the poor."
"Is there any surprise that in the 90-minute speech, the FM mentioned the word ‘poor’ just twice? There is a Tamil proverb that describes the budget best: it hit the poor in the belly," writes Chidambaram.
"It is only if the allocated amount is spent that jobs will be created or welfare benefits will accrue. Besides, any allocation which is seemingly more than the allocation in the previous year has to be adjusted for inflation and, in many cases, it will be found that the allocation is actually less. Every programme which directly benefits the poor has been given less money and, adjusted for inflation, it will be even less. Add to the above, there is no cut in GST (64 per cent of the total collections come from the bottom 50 per cent). There is no reduction in the tax on, or the price of, petrol, diesel and LPG. It is as if the FM is blissfully unaware of post-pandemic rise in poverty, inequality, unemployment, lay-offs, malnutrition, anaemia and child-stunting and child-wasting."P Chidambaram
The Fallacy of 'Opposition Unity'
Congress leader Praveen Chakravarty, in his article in the Deccan Herald, writes about how the idea of opposition unity in Indian politics stems from a "misinterpretation" of India's electoral math.
Chakravarty says, "This whole idea stems from a misinterpretation of India’s electoral math that only 37 per cent of all Indians voted for the BJP in the 2019 election and hence, if the remaining 63 per cent can unite, it can oust them. First, the BJP only contested 80 per cent of seats in 2019, leaving the rest for its alliance partners, and so roughly one-fifth of all voters did not even have a BJP candidate on their ballot."
"In the last four decades, no winning party has secured more than 40 per cent of the national vote share and even in the greatest ever victory in India’s electoral history, the Congress party in 1984 secured only 49 per cent national vote share, not even half. So, the BJP’s 37 per cent vote share in 2019 has to be read in the context of India’s multi-party democracy and not naively as an absolute number of all Indians’ voting preferences."Praveen Chakravarty
Ukraine War: One Year On
Pankaj Saran, former deputy National Security Advisor (NSA) and former Indian ambassador to Russia, in his article in the Times of India writes about the Russia-Ukraine war and the trouble it continues to bring to the rest of the world, including India.
"Among the myriad facets of the year-long conflict that have been discussed and analysed threadbare, the most troubling one for the ‘rest’ of the world, and that includes India, is whether the East and West can ever coexist," Saran writes.
"It is a sobering thought that the contradictions we believed had been settled with the end of the Cold War have resurfaced with more than full force. But worse, that Europe’s problems still have to be our problems. It is this combined sense of helplessness and frustration that explains a lot of the initial Indian thinking and reaction to the conflict. Indian positions and strategy have steadily evolved as the conflict progressed. Today, India has the agency to express itself, and it did. This is qualitatively different from the kind of recusal a much weaker India sought from bloc politics in the mid-20th century."Pankaj Saran
In The US, a Big Step Against Caste Discrimination
In Dalitality, a weekly column in The Indian Express, Prachi Patankar and Kshama Sawant write about significance of the first US legislation to ban caste discrimination introduced by the co-author of the article — Kshama Sawant, a socialist Council member.
"If passed, the law will prohibit caste discrimination in employment and housing, retail, public accommodation, and transportation. This historic proposal recognises the pervasiveness of caste-based injustice and marginalisation in the United States. It is also an acknowledgment of the fact that as the Indian-American population grows, the deep-rooted divisions that migrated with them will also become readily apparent," the columnists write.
"The last decade has also seen a surge of anti-caste consciousness and advocacy in America. Dalit and anti-caste activists have led a movement in the South Asian American diaspora to carry forward Dr. Ambedkar’s call to “educate, agitate, and organise”. This has gone hand in hand with the dramatic shifts to the left in the American consciousness, as demonstrated by the multi-racial and working-class Black Lives Matter movement in 2020, which became the largest street protest movement in United States history. Millions of young people in America are drawing connections across various types of oppression. For progressive Indian Americans, this has included seeing the links between racism and casteism."Prachi Patankar and Kshama Sawant
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