Head Buried in the Sand
Questioning the “self-congratulatory” tone of the Monthly Economic Review, published by the Ministry of Finance (MoF), former Union Finance Minister P Chidambaram, in his piece, for The Indian Express, calls out the “grave dereliction of scholarly duty” by the six economists for omitting the words “unemployment, malnutrition, hunger and poverty” from the review.
He writes, "What has been said in the Review, though biased and self-congratulatory, may be forgiven because the document will be history in a few weeks. What is infuriating is the cynical and callous disregard of matters that concern millions of people. On the day he assumed the office of Prime Minister of U.K., Mr. Rishi Sunak warned of a “profound economic crisis”. Even an imperious President of China, Mr. Xi Jingping, characterized China’s economy cautiously as “resilient”.
While highlighting the unemployment rate at 8.02 percent and India’s rank in Global Hunger Index at 107 out of 121 countries, Chidambaram writes, “The Review does not pay even lip sympathy to the issues of unemployment, malnutrition, hunger and poverty. Nor does it acknowledge the strong headwinds of global slowdown, de-globalization, protectionism, high interest rates, inflation and currency depreciation.”
A New Cong President. Really?
Outlining the “Congress we need today”, Tavleen Singh, in her piece for The Indian Express, writes, “despite having lost two general elections and nearly every other election in the past eight years, Congress leaders have lost none of their arrogance.”
Expressing her eagerness for the Congress to “become a real political party again instead of being a courtiers’ club,” Singh adds, “I do not believe this can happen if the party is run not by its elected president but by the family that turned the party of our freedom movement into a private limited company.”
She concludes:
“When Congress Party spokesmen say that the Gandhi family is the ‘core’ of the party, do they understand what an insult this is to the values this party once represented? It remained in power for seventy years because it represented ideas and an ideology that were devoid of dangerous religiosity and violent hatred. That is the Congress we need today.”
Colour Blind Politics
What does Rishi Sunak’s elevation to becoming the UK prime minister tell us? “Are we mistaking tokenism for representation?” Mukul Kesavan asks, in his piece for The Telegraph.
Stating the obvious, Kesavan writes that Rishi Sunak’s appointment as the United Kingdom prime minister is less important in order of magnitude than Barack Obama being elected the US president.
While Sunak’s elevation does tell us “That the colour of a politician’s skin and his or her nominal faith don’t disqualify them from high political office,” Kesavan questions if that is “too low a bar.” He adds, “It has been argued that Sunak, Braverman and James Cleverly, the foreign secretary, are so fervently conservative that they present as honorary whites, that they have been assimilated and bleached by their rightwing beliefs.”
However, pointing out the counter “that non-white identities don’t come hardwired with progressive beliefs,” Kesavan writes, “The interesting thing about Sunak is that he is avowedly Hindu, from the band of red thread on his wrist to his Diwali celebrations. And that is interesting because non-Christian minority politicians in the Conservative Party tend not to talk about their religious beliefs.”
He concludes:
“The precedent of Scandinavian social democratic parties moving to the right in response to the racist populism of parties like the Sweden Democrats is a reminder that the diversity of a country’s conservative party is the best measure of its political health.”
The Chancellor, the Government and the Higher Education in Kerala
Writing on the confrontations between Kerala Governor and the Left Democratic Front (LDF) government, Dr J Prabhash, points out in his piece for The New Indian Express, how a majority of universities in the state will remain rudderless for at least the next year.
“The move of the Chancellor seeking the resignation of nine Vice-Chancellors based on the Supreme Court Judgement in the APJ Abdul Kalam Technological University case is the latest and by far the most aggressive one. Notices were also served on the ViceChancellors of SNG Open University and Digital University. This means that 69 percent of the State Universities will soon be without a regular Vice-Chancellor.”
Apart from the calamity the ongoing confrontation will be for the children’s educational future, Prabhash adds:
“It is more worrisome for it (the LDF government) is the possibility of a new set of Vice-Chancellors, toeing a different political line, assuming office once the Chancellor sets the appointment process in motion. This will, no doubt, open up a new channel for the BJP to penetrate the higher education sector of the state, making inroads into its cultural arena as well.”
Optics of Rankings and Data Deficits
“Global rankings typically come embedded with bipolar effects. Either they are loved and endorsed or hated to be rejected,” writes Shankkar Aiyar, in his piece for The New Indian Express, while stating that “the Global Hunger Index ranked India at 107 out of 121 countries.”
The government dismissed the rankings, calling it “an erroneous measure of hunger and suffers from serious methodological issues”.
Aiyar points out that such a face-off is not the first time and won’t be the last as India’s “data landscape is pock-marked with faultlines.”
He states:
“The inevitability stems from data deficits afflicting state and central governments…The repeated encounters with deemed truths and disputed falsehoods necessitate a review of the presentation of India’s development narrative not only to global purveyors of perception but, more importantly, to its own citizenry. India needs to restructure the landscape of data collection to craft a credible and coherent chronicle of where it is and where it aims to be.”
Why Are We Living With Masks
Pooja Bedi, in her column for The Times of India, compares the traditions of Halloween to real life, and writes on the “masks” people wear during first impressions.
Bedi writes, “’Trick or Treat’ of Halloween seems to represent an era of masks, dread and social anxiety that we are slowly and confidently saying good-bye to.”
“The new generation wants a robust reality. They are all about transparency, choices and options, and impermanence doesn’t faze or scare them. They are happy to meet a mask, happy to explore what’s beneath it and happy to toss it and move on if it doesn’t work for them. No time to waste on the wrong person, the wrong job or even putting on masks is the mantra of a new and growing and increasingly fearless mindset. They are breaking shackles of limiting traditions and mindsets of compromise and social diktat. They are looking in the mirror and liking who they are, and they want to wake up to a job and person they like as well,’ she concludes.
Ambedkar and His Idea of the Caste of Land
Awanish Kumar, in his piece for The Indian Express, writes on “Ambedkar’s ideas for rural transformation…to realise social justice and agricultural development.”
Pointing out that while historically, Dalits were prohibited from holding land because of their caste-status, reforms have failed to distribute land to the landless, which, “is not simply about individual asset-ownership but is constitutive of economic freedom and social dignity.”
Kumar writes, “In his framework, widespread poverty in India was due to the preponderance of uneconomic smallholdings that, along with the scarcity of capital, resulted in low levels of productivity and poor standards of life. Additionally,India’s village society was segregated on physical and social lines, wherein Dalits lived in the “ghettoes”. Dalits remained “economically dependent” on village society due to the latter’s almost complete monopoly over productive resources, especially land.”
He concludes, “Land for Dalits can be a step in dislodging caste hegemony in villages and dignity and citizenship for Dalits. It can also be the meeting ground of hitherto disparate movements working towards an egalitarian India.”
Ladies Right To Get Tight
Leher Kala, in her piece for The Indian Express, writes about her encounter with a female bouncer outside a bar in Gurgaon and raises her glass to “the end of tedious hypocrisy — women may drink, serve, get high just as much as men.”
After having spoken to the bouncer, Kala writes, “In this woke era, when denying someone access means risking loud cries of discrimination on Twitter, out-of-control female revelers have to be tackled delicately, and never by men. Rowdy women are such an anomaly in Indian society that the slightest, unhinged behaviour would terrify the burliest of male bouncers.”
However, she adds, “In our imaginations, beating up people, or a bust-up in a watering hole automatically signifies (toxic) masculinity. Women won’t wear this behaviour as a badge of honour but unlike a previous generation, they’re not afraid of occupying space and being combative when they have to."
Pay Parity? Shuttlers Smashed It Long Ago
In the backdrop of Indian cricket’s latest announcement of equal match fees for women, Shivani Naik, in her piece for The Indian Express, writes how badminton broke the pay parity ceiling long back.
She writes, “Badminton has always known pay parity… The last decade, dubbed the golden generation of women’s singles — of which P V Sindhu and Saina Nehwal were a part and where Chinese domination was cut down by shuttlers from across the world, where crowds thronged stadiums to watch Tai Tzu Ying, Ratchanok Intanon, Carolina Marin, Nozomi Okuhara, Chen Yufei, Akane Yamaguchi and An Se Young play — further accentuated the belief in true parity of women’s sport.”
However, highlighting the difference in the basic retainership in Indian cricket for example, Naik states, “It’s why ‘pay parity’ — while admirable in intent and a good start — cannot be the goal pursued by women’s sport, though even getting there seems ambitious.”
She concludes, “Women’s sport should not have to struggle for achieving pay parity. Or what passes off as the well-worded press release on pay parity. If you’ve watched female badminton players fill stadiums all these years, you’d know women’s sport, in a world craving inspirational role models, has been a marketeer’s miss. Pay parity doesn’t even begin to describe blazing ambition.”
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