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The Nation

- Reopening of cinema halls in Kashmir evokes mixed reactions

- ‘There is collective participation’: Sachin Kumar

- Dolo controversy revives demand for regulating pharma marketing practices

- ‘Cinema is in the heart of every Kashmiri’: Vikas Dhar

- Schooling crisis in Haryana due to teacher shortage triggers protests

Reopening of cinema halls in Kashmir evokes mixed reactions

Media persons and Jammu and Kashmir government officials watch Laal Singh Chaddha in the INOX cinema hall after its inauguration in Srinagar on September 20. | Photo Credit: DANISH ISMAIL

Some feel it is part of the government’s attempt to project a sense of normalcy in the Valley.

Before militancy swept Kashmir in 1989, forcing cinema hall owners to bring down the shutters, films, especially English movies, ran to packed houses. But the last three calamitous decades have seen the romance fade. So much so that when the government decided to reopen cinemas in Kashmir recently, the response was tepid. The people of Kashmir fear the exercise is meant to stamp New Delhi’s normalcy narrative on them even as they live under threats of forced demographic realignment, incarceration of religious leaders, and criminalisation of dissent. However, some from within the film fraternity and bureaucracy and a section of the youth have welcomed the move, hoping it will generate jobs.

“Who doesn’t watch cinema? I am glued to the OTT platforms all the time. The opposition is to the government’s depiction of things as normal,” said a grocery store owner on Shopian Court Road. His customers nod in agreement. The consensus is that in the face of continuing discontent over the government’s 2019 decision to scrap Article 370, which granted special status to Jammu and Kashmir, what the people need is a dialogue on political issues rather than a dose of entertainment. The government remains deaf to this. For instance, these days, Kashmiris are worried about the fate of their apples, which are rotting in trucks stranded on the national highway. An apple orchard owner from Shopian said, “My merchandise of Rs.80 lakh is about to be wasted. You want me to watch a film and say everything is okay?”

Since the beginning of September, the J&K administration has begun to regulate the movement of fruit-laden trucks on the Srinagar-Jammu National Highway No. 44, allowing only a limited number of trucks to enter Jammu. By the end of the month, over 10,000 trucks were reportedly stuck at Qazigund on the highway, some of them for over 10 days. A National Conference spokesperson, Imran Nabi Dar, described it as a “devastating blow to our horticulture sector”.

A paramilitary soldier stands guard outside the first multiplex cinema hall of Kashmir in Srinagar on September 30. | Photo Credit: Dar Yasin

Meanwhile, Lieutenant Governor Manoj Sinha inaugurated the Inox franchise in Srinagar on September 20, and described it as a “historic day”. The Aamir Khan starrer  Laal Singh Chaddha, an expensive remake of the 1994 Hollywood film  Forrest Gump, entertained a motley group of youngsters who attended the show.

Located at Shivpora, the multiplex has three screens, at least two of which are equipped with 3D technology. A swanky food court gives movie-goers a taste of Kashmiri cuisine while an intricately designed roof made of  khatambandh, an indigenous wood, gives a sense of Kashmiri artistry.

Ideological opposition

But Kashmir’s myriad livelihood issues and general restlessness are such that even those who are keen to go to the cinema would perhaps not do so, fearing ostracisation from peer groups. More than a dozen interviewees from across Srinagar, Shopian, Pulwama and Budgam admitted that this was a problem. Said noted historian and political commentator Siddiq Wahid: “If entertainment is promoted in conflicted Kashmir as ‘development’, it is an irony that cannot be ignored by its citizens.”

Workers sort rotten apples, unloaded from a truck, at a wholesale fruit market in Jammu on September 28. | Photo Credit: -

There are also people who hold an orthodox view of cinema and label it as “un-Islamic”. A 40-something man in Shopian, who was detained under the Public Safety Act soon after the abrogation of Jammu and Kashmir’s special status and spent a couple of years in a Lucknow jail, said he was ideologically opposed to the opening of wine-shops and cinema halls in Kashmir.

ALSO READ:‘There is collective participation’

The government seems aware of these underlying dynamics: hence, in Shopian and Pulwama, where two small auditoriums are being readied, the focus is on infotainment and skill development features.

Suhail Ahmad Mallik, executive officer of the Shopian Municipal Council, said the auditorium there would run parallel shows on science and history for school and university students besides adventure programmes for kids. “Today videography and infographics work better than books. We intend to enhance school children’s learning experiences by using the auditorium for educational purposes, even as films will run on a daily or weekly basis, depending on audience reception,” he said. The small auditorium in Shopian town hall, where villagers used to be assembled during cordon and search operations in the early 1990s, can accommodate 63 viewers.

Social messaging

Using cinema to disseminate information or simply highlight the government’s initiatives is not a new experiment in the strife-torn Valley, where the State has battled generations of alienation. Mushtaaque Ali Ahmad Khan, a filmmaker and festival director, reminisces about a childhood in the 1960s and 1970s spent watching films at a makeshift auditorium in Srinagar’s Jawahar Nagar Park. “We loved cinema. Since the shows were free, there would always be a sizeable crowd. The information department of J&K used the opportunity to play reels of 10-15 minutes on the government’s development projects before a movie started. I remember watching  Dosti in that open-air screen,” he said.

Cinema hall in Shopian Town hall. The posters on kids’ adventure programmes convey the government’s focus on infotainment.

Ahmad Khan said he was happy that cinemas are reopening in the Valley. “As an artist I support the government’s decision. It will foster cultural and artistic pursuits in a State with a rich heritage,” he said. Asked about people’s apprehension that cinema would pollute young minds, he said, “There is nothing in cinema that is worse than what we have on social media. Cinema goes through censorship whereas anybody with a smartphone has access to any kind of obscenity.” According to him, today’s content-driven cinema has a potential to relay powerful social messages.

Rich theatre heritage

Right-wing ideologues frame Kashmiris’ discomfort with the reopening of cinema halls as an outcome of Islamic radicalisation. Vikas Dhar, whose father owns the INOX multiplex in Srinagar, said that of the 40 local people he employed at his multiplex, about 18 left because they were led to believe that “cinema is not good”.

Yet, experts cite the Valley’s centuries-old love for theatrical experiences that goes back to the 3rd or 4th century when singers and actors  called  bhands or  bhagats started performing in Hindu temples. Twelfth-century Kashmiri historian Kalhana, who authored  Rajtarangini, mentions that every  pargana had a theatre space and theatre was used not just as a medium of entertainment but also for expressing dissent or voicing hardships faced by the people.

The play,  Durze Paether, for example, was an outcry against the high-handedness of the Mughal rulers. There were brilliant plays like  Shikargah Paether, which helped promote ecological awareness, and  Watal Paether, a moving account of sweepers which spoke of the disadvantaged communities’ poverty.

Muslims imbibed the culture and soon shrines became the venue for plays and ballads. The  bhands, despite their new religious affiliation, retained the title  bhagat and even today it is not uncommon to find Muslims with that surname in the Kashmir Valley. Kashmiris’ passion for cinema remained alive through the 1970s and 1980s, said Mir Khalid, a medical practitioner and author of the book,  Jaffna Street. Khalid recalled that back then Al Pacino was a household name in uptown Srinagar and music trends were defined by Western compositions. He calls it a “pollination of cultures made possible by the influx of foreign tourists”. “While Delhi had only two theatres running English films, Srinagar had at least four: Regal, Palladium, Broadway and Khayyam,” he recalled. English plays were popular too:  She Stoops to Conquer ran for weeks at Tagore Hall in Srinagar in 1986, Khalid said.

ALSO READ:‘Cinema is in the heart of every Kashmiri’

When militancy erupted, English films were the first casualty. Dukhtaran-e-Millat, a militant outfit which debuted in 1987, defiled the posters of  Endless Love, a 1981 romantic drama starring Brooke Shields that was running at Regal. On August 18, 1989, Allah Tigers, a militant outfit led by Air Marshal Noor Khan, issued a handout to a local daily ordering a ban on cinema and wine shops. By December 31, 1989, all cinema halls had shut shop in the Valley.

After militancy somewhat down a bit in the late 1990s, there were attempts to reopen cinema halls, with the ruling National Conference offering interest-free loans up to Rs.45 lakh to cinema owners for renovation. But terrorist attacks foiled the move. In 1999, Regal cinema ran the Sunny Deol-starrer  Pyaar Koi Khel Nahin, but a grenade attack right after the inaugural show left one dead and 12 injured. In September 2005, when Neelam screened  Mangal Pandey, there was a violent tussle between security personnel and militants on its premises, with 70 people trapped inside the auditorium.

The terrorist shadow still looms large over the fate of cinemas in Kashmir, where targeted killings of Kashmiri Pandits and migrant workers continue. But Vikas Dhar downplays the threat. He says he is hopeful that cine-lovers will gradually pour in, taking the clock back to 1989. The perception, however, that cinema is part of the government’s PR overdrive remains.

The Crux

Highlights

- Cinema halls opened in Kashmir after more than three decades.

- Lieutenant Governor Manoj Sinha inaugurated the Inox franchise in Srinagar on September 20, and described it as a “historic day”.

- But Kashmir’s myriad livelihood issues and general restlessness are such that even those who are keen to go to the cinema would perhaps not do so, fearing ostracisation from peer groups.

- There are also people who hold an orthodox view of cinema and label it as “un-Islamic”.

- But the Valley has centuries-old love for theatrical experiences that goes back to the 3rd or 4th century.

- When militancy erupted, English films were the first casualty.

- After militancy somewhat down a bit in the late 1990s, there were attempts to reopen cinema halls but terrorist attacks foiled the move.

- The terrorist shadow still looms large over the fate of cinemas in Kashmir.

- The perception that cinema is part of the government’s PR overdrive remains.

Print edition : Oct 11, 2022 T+T-

‘There is collective participation’: Sachin Kumar

Sachin Kumar, District Commissioner, Shopian

Interview with the District Commissioner, Shopian, on the reopening of cinemas in Kashmir.

Cinema halls have reopened in Kashmir after 33 years. As the District Commissioner of Shopian, how do you view this move?

It was the initiative of LG Manoj Sinha to open cinema halls in every district of Kashmir, and for the first leg, Shopian and Pulwama were chosen. The idea is to add entertainment to the daily routine of the people. Our focus is equally on infotainment. The emerging young population of Kashmir is very talented. We want to run documentaries of academic importance for them. We are also hopeful this initiative will boost the economy.

What is the people’s response?

I feel there is no adverse public perception. The people have wholeheartedly welcomed and appreciated the government’s move and I can say there is collective participation too. It gives me confidence that the endeavour will be successful.

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Since the focus is on infotainment, are you planning on collaborations with schools and universities?

We will be holding a children’s film festival in the Shopian cinema hall, showcasing information-centric films and documentaries. Under the LG administration, people are willing to communicate with us. The administration is more transparent and accountable today, and there is more interaction with the people. The administration is responsive to the needs of the people, be it in terms of providing physical infrastructure such as roads, electricity and water connection, or in building more synergy with them.

People are saying they need development and redress for their grievances.

Our work is to meet the people and redress their grievances. In Shopian, earlier 20-25 people would visit the DC’s office in a day, but today that number has shot up to 120-150. They talk of their grievances and convey bigger developmental aspirations openly. This illustrates the paradigm shift in public perception. There are 178 services offered online and transparency is guaranteed. A major achievement is the digitisation of land records and disbursal of passbooks to land-owners, summarising land holdings.

We have increased fund allocation. Take the budget for Shopian, for example. The budgetary allocation made to Shopian in 2021-2022 was 3.3 times more than the previous year. The LG administration has earmarked Rs.600 crore for Shopian in the current financial year, which is again 1.5 times more than the previous year. There is also decentralisation of funding. Even in a small district like Shopian we now have road connectivity of 330 kilometres. There is electricity in rural areas for up to 22 hours, and during massive snowfall, power connection is restored in five to six hours.

ALSO READ:‘Cinema is in the heart of every Kashmiri’

Unemployment is a major talking point. What are you doing to redress that?

We have initiated self-employment schemes for the youth, disbursing loans to 6,000-7,000 local people. A youth from Tukroo village in Shopian, who was allocated a loan of Rs.10 lakh, successfully opened the Haja restaurant and is today earning a net profit of Rs. 60,000 a month.

There have been record tourist footfalls this year. But tourism is confined to a few pockets such as Pahalgam, Gulmarg and Sonmarg. Are you planning to widen that ambit?

The LG administration is working round the clock to upgrade and expand tourist destinations. There was a time when tourists, even local people, dreaded coming to Shopian because it was seen as a militants’ hotspot. But today there is considerable tourist footfall to the local peer ki gali. We had over 10,000 tourists here [in Shopian], and major infrastructure development projects are being planned. We are also developing Aharbal waterfall on the Shopian-Kulgam border.

Print edition : Oct 11, 2022 T+T-

Controversy

Dolo controversy revives demand for regulating pharma marketing practices

A 24x7 fever clinic in Coimbatore, a file picture. The sales of the antipyretic drug Dolo increased during the COVID pandemic. Its manufacturer, Micro Labs, denied any attempt to push its sale and said the drug was under price control.  | Photo Credit: PERIASAMY M

Recent raids revealed the extent of gifts given by a company to doctors.

The Hippocratic Oath aside, there are laws in place to check unethical doctors. However, that is not the case with the marketing practices of the pharmaceutical industry, which are governed only by a voluntary code of conduct. The demand for a statutory code has been a long-standing one and was made again recently after the Central Board of Direct Taxes (CBDT) issued a press release on July 13 regarding raids it carried out on a Bengaluru-based group “engaged in the business of manufacturing and marketing of pharmaceutical products and Active Pharmaceutical Ingredients”. The search operations were spread across nine States and 36 locations of the group, which has a presence in over 50 countries. The press release pointed to the group’s use of unethical practices to promote its brands.

The charge against the company was that it had in its books expenses for the distribution of freebies to medical professionals under the heads “promotion and propaganda”, “seminars and symposiums”, and medical advisories. The freebies were worth Rs.1,000 crore and included travel expenses, perquisites, and gifts to doctors and medical professionals.

Pharma marketing is governed by the Uniform Code for Pharmaceutical Marketing Practices (UCPMP), which is voluntary and has been in force since 2015. The Federation of Medical and Sales Representatives’ Associations of India (FMRAI) has been demanding that it be made a legal requirement. (See “Faulty Prescriptions”, Frontline, April 2016.) On August 18, at the hearing of a public interest litigation petition that the federation and the Jan Swasthya Abhiyaan, an NGO, filed last year, the petitioners shared the CBDT press release and media reports with the Supreme Court. During the proceedings it became known that the company in question was the Bengaluru-based Micro Labs Limited, which manufactures the antipyretic Dolo 650.

Dolo, available for Rs.30 for a pack of 15, was in huge demand during COVID and was recommended by doctors. According to market estimates, the company sold 350 crore tablets, earning it Rs.400 crore in revenue during that period.

Micro Labs did not refute the CBDT’s seizures but was emphatic that it had nothing to do with promoting Dolo 650. The company did not respond to Frontline’s request for an official response.

According to the company, the medicine was under price control and did not need promotion. On January 22, Dilip Surana, chairman and CEO of Micro Labs, was quoted in the media as saying that the brand’s popularity was unexpected. <FZ,1,0,24>On February 4, a report in a business daily described how Dolo “turned into a hit with the right dose of perception and prescription”.

Government’s response

On the issue of pharmaceutical companies providing freebies to doctors, the National Medical Commission (the body that replaced the Medical Council of India) wrote to the Income Tax Department on August 3 seeking details of doctors who are said to have received freebies. The conduct of doctors is covered by the Indian Medical Council (Professional Conduct, Etiquette and Ethics) Regulations, 2002, under the Indian Medical Council Act, 1956. Any complaint of professional misconduct by a medical practitioner is addressed by State Medical Councils.

In a written reply to the Lok Sabha on August 5, Bhagwanth Khuba, Minister of State for Chemicals and Fertilizers, stated that the UCPMP had been in operation since January 1, 2015. He said it had been adopted by all the major associations of pharmaceutical companies. He stated that complaints about code violations had been forwarded to the associations concerned for action.

The Minister also said the Department of Pharmaceuticals had not received “any representation in the recent past from civil societies and patents groups to make the UCPMP code mandatory and that the writ petition by the FMRAI was under the consideration of the Supreme Court of India”.

The FMRAI had made numerous requests to the government since 2005 to implement a statutory code for pharma marketing. When the UCPMP was introduced in 2015, the FMRAI had criticised its voluntary nature. Besides, in a reply to an RTI application by the FMRAI in 2017, a Deputy Director (Policy) of the Department of Pharmaceuticals had written that the Ministry of Law was looking into making the UCPMP statutory.

According to Khuba’s statement, the code was sufficient to address the concerns raised as it covered various aspects pertaining to medical representatives, textual and audiovisual promotional materials, samples, gifts, and so on. The code outlined the need to form ethics committees for complaints about marketing practices, an apex ethics committee for their review, and other complaint-handling procedures as well as penalty provisions.

He also listed out provisions of the Income Tax Act, the Drugs and Cosmetics Act, the Prevention of Corruption Act, and the Indian Medical Council Professional Conduct (Etiquette and Ethics) Regulations, 2002, as a sufficient and enforceable legal regime to counter, control, and disincentivise unethical marketing practices.

The Drugs and Cosmetics Act of 1940 and its accompanying rules govern the manufacture, sale, and distribution of drugs. Direct-to-consumer advertising is prohibited. However, there is no law to regulate the promotion of pharmaceutical products to health care professionals, which is the main contention of the FMRAI’s petition.

High-level committee

On September 12, the Department of Pharmaceuticals issued an office memorandum announcing the constitution of a five-member High-Level Committee “to consider various issues pertaining to the UCPMP and examine the requirement for a legally enforceable mechanism for regulating marketing practices by pharma companies”. The committee, with NITI Aayog member V.K. Paul as chair, includes the CBDT chairman, the Secretaries of Health and Family Welfare and the Department of Pharmaceuticals, and the Joint Secretary (Policy) in that department officiating as member secretary.

The Department of Pharmaceuticals has constituted a high-level committee to examine the provisions concerning pharmaceutical marketing practices and to make and implement interventions among health care providers and the industry. | Photo Credit: RAO G.N.

The committee will examine, one, the provisions with regard to pharmaceutical marketing practices and align the interventions for effective implementation among health care providers and industry, and, two, the need for a legally enforceable mechanism for regulating marketing practices, including a study of such practices across the globe. The committee has to submit its recommendations within 90 days.

The setting up of the committee coincides with the hearings on the UCPMP in the Supreme Court, which is still to receive the counter-affidavit it asked the government to file within 10 days of the last hearing on August 18.

‘Investment in doctors’

Micro Labs might not have needed to promote Dolo 650 by investing a lot of money, but it is possible that it did reach out to medical professionals.

According to an industry insider who left the industry after 2010 because the marketing style had become “difficult to digest”, nobody would spend money on Dolo to promote it. Dolo as a brand had a turnover of Rs.30-35 crore, which increased to Rs.500 crore because of the circumstances created by the pandemic. It now accounts for nearly 40 per cent of Micro Labs’ total sales.

However, he explained that in the medicine industry there was the chronic segment—hypertension, diabetes, cardiac conditions, neuro-psychiatry, skin and skin structure, and so on, which required long-term treatment—and the non-chronic segment. “Investments in doctors” made financial sense in the former segment, he said.

“Investment” in doctors happened in various ways. For instance, companies would sponsor a physician for a conference and sponsor travel and cost of stay for the physician’s family as well. Then there were personal forms of investment in doctors. For a long-term business relationship with a customer (the doctor) in the chronic segment, there would be a 10-15 per cent investment, and the contract would run for about a year. Micro Labs was said to be among the pioneers in segmented speciality-driven marketing.

Changed atmosphere

The nature of marketing in the industry has changed over time. Earlier, every company had only one division, but in the last one and a half decades, multiple divisions emerged, diversifying on the basis of speciality. From one banner of products, there were now multiple ones. Focussed marketing was the catchword.

Doctors also realised the value of their prescriptions. For example, a drug prescribed for a patient with cardiovascular disease was expected to be used at least for a year until a replacement arrived. The investment model suited both. Sales representatives who relied on knowledge-based marketing found themselves at sea as doctors increasingly turned to the Internet for information about a drug. There was little new that marketing executives could tell them.

A medical representative was evaluated on the basis of how much he could sell. Industries earmarked marketing expenses and made investments on the basis of territory and productivity of the medical representative. Those who brought in, say, a business of Rs.25 lakh a month would have their marketing expenses shored up accordingly. “If it was the doctor who was targeted for a period of seven days, the next seven days it would be the chemist,” explained the insider.

However, a minuscule percentage of doctors refuse to succumb to such incentives and will go to great lengths to ensure that their products are of high quality and that the patient benefited.

Pharmas go scot-free

While doctors’ licences are revoked for violating the code outlined in the IMC Regulations 2002, there is nothing to hold pharmaceutical companies accountable for the largesse doctors receive. There are numerous examples around the world of pharmaceutical companies being subject to stringent laws that prohibit and penalise unethical marketing practices.

According to the FMRAI petition, sales promotion expenses account for nearly 20 per cent of the cost of medicines. Unethical drug promotion may result in overprescription in terms of higher doses and longer durations, as well as prescriptions for irrational drug combinations, the petition says.

Despite the fact that several drugs were banned between 1983 and 2013, studies say that combination drugs accounted for 47 per cent of the pharmaceutical market. Experts such as Malini Aisola of the All India Drug Action Network estimate that unsafe Fixed Dose Combinations account for 25 per cent of the pharmaceutical market by sales value even today.

In order to control unethical pharmaceutical practices, in 2009 the then United Progressive Alliance government at the Centre called a meeting with stakeholders. Six years later, the UCPMP was established. Since then the FMRAI has sent several suggestions to strengthen the code, including making it statutory.

The 59th Report of the Parliamentary Standing Committee on the Functioning of the Central Drugs Standard Control Organisation, published in 2012, notes a link between drug manufacturers and medical professionals.

In November 2015, 10 months after the UCPMP came into being, the government admitted that the voluntary code was ineffective and that a statutory framework was necessary. In 2016, the FMRAI submitted the draft of an Ethical Code for Pharmaceutical Marketing and Practices to the Department of Pharmaceuticals. But nothing came of it.

A Comptroller and Auditor General report in 2016 found that there were 36 cases across seven States with a tax impact of Rs.55.10 crore in connection with freebies/gifts to medical professionals. In 2017, the Ministry of Chemicals and Fertilizers proposed a draft Drugs Control (Marketing) Order under Section 3 of the Essential Commodities Act, 1955, to the Ministry of Law. Nothing came of it too.

The issue is not whether an antipyretic drug manufacturer pushed for the drug’s promotion. The point is that even if it did there is, at present, little the government can do by way of prosecuting such a manufacturer.

- Pharma marketing is governed by the Uniform Code for Pharmaceutical Marketing Practices (UCPMP), which is voluntary and has been in force since 2015.

- The demand for a statutory code for the marketing practices of pharmaceuticals resurfaced with the Central Board of Direct Taxes raids on a Bengaluru-based pharmaceutical group. The group was reportedly using unethical practices to promote its brands.

- The Federation of Medical and Sales Representatives’ Associations of India (FMRAI) has been demanding that it be made a legal requirement.

- On September 12, the Department of Pharmaceuticals issued an office memorandum announcing the constitution of a five-member High-Level Committee “to consider various issues pertaining to the UCPMP and examine the requirement for a legally enforceable mechanism for regulating marketing practices by pharma companies”.

Print edition : Oct 12, 2022 T+T-

‘Cinema is in the heart of every Kashmiri’: Vikas Dhar

INOX MD Siddharth Jain with Vikas Dhar (right) inaugurated the new INOX multiplex in Srinagar on September 20. | Photo Credit: NISSAR AHMAD

Interview with Vikas Dhar, whose family started the INOX multiplex in Srinagar.

A multiplex in Kashmir was unimaginable even a while ago and now we have an INOX franchise here. Tell us about the efforts that went into it.

My father used to run the Broadway cinema hall, which was once a prestigious haunt in Srinagar. It shut down in 1989. Cinema is in the heart of every Kashmiri —their fashion, language, manners were dictated by the Indian film industry. We would go back home and enact Amjad Khan from Sholay or mimic Amitabh Bachchan. “Jwala boots”, designed after Jitendra’s mustard-coloured, knee-high boots, became famous. Michael Jackson’s jackets were all the rage. Even after cinemas shut down, that ethos never left us. I think cinema’s love for Kashmir did not wane despite the myriad issues that came up, and Kashmiris’ love for cinema also remained intact.

Also, my family runs a school here and based on my social interactions with a cross-section of the youth, I would say there is nothing for them to do in the evenings. Wholesome entertainment is required so that people can destress and lead a life like anybody else.

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What were the obstacles, if any?

The challenge was to bring the latest technology and equipment like Dolby Atmos, safety features such as a fire safety tank, which I think nobody in Kashmir has. The interactions with INOX were fruitful because they had the technique and the know-how. The people here and the agencies of the State and Central governments have been helpful. It ultimately turned out to be not half as difficult as I thought it would be.

It is a commercial endeavour and its viability depends on the audience. How hopeful are you of success?

For me, it is already a success because it came from the heart. We are not looking at making money out of it, it is just a dream come true.

ALSO READ:‘There is collective participation’

But security is a concern. The last time cinemas were reopened in Kashmir, it faced militant attacks. How are you going to deal with that?

The government and the people have been positive, they are looking at it as a step forward. I feel that if you do something which is good for society, you need not worry much. At present, I am not even concentrating on that [security question].

Print edition : Oct 11, 2022 T+T-

Education

Schooling crisis in Haryana due to teacher shortage triggers protests

Students of the Government Girls Senior Secondary School at Nindana protesting against the shortage of teachers, on September 27. | Photo Credit: Manoj Dhaka

The Khattar government’s new transfer and merger policy is worsening the shortage.

Samita is a teacher at a school in Shahpuriya village, Sirsa district, Haryana. She was recently transferred to Baliyala in Fatehabad, 127 kilometres from her home. As the mother of a differently abled child, the choice before her was to quit the job or stay home to look after her daughter. Like Samita, many women, who make up nearly 40 per cent of Haryana’s teaching staff, are caught in a bind because of the Teachers Transfer Policy-2016 that the School Education Department has been aggressively implementing since mid-August. Under this policy, teachers can apply online for transfer to their preferred schools. If no vacancies exist in the teacher’s preferred station, they are transferred anywhere in the State.

Worse, the government has decided to merge schools and create a “cluster” system, reportedly for resource efficiency and rationalisation in accordance with the National Education Policy.

For instance, a senior secondary school would be designated as a cluster school, covering an area of up to 7 km. Under this system, government middle schools with fewer than 20 students in Classes 6 to 8 and high schools with fewer than 25 students in Classes 9 to 12 will be merged with the nearest middle, high, or higher secondary school within a 3 km radius.

Schools located within a kilometre of each other will be consolidated into a single school unit but with different campuses. Primary and middle schools are to be made co-educational, surplus staff transferred, and headmasters rehabilitated in teaching posts with full protection of benefits.

As many as 288 schools (including 183 middle schools, of which 149 are girls’ schools) have been merged so far under the one village, one school policy, with more on the anvil. These moves have been done with the objective of maintaining the teacher-student ratio, but the mergers have led to the transfer of teachers, and the transfers, in turn, have resulted in a shortage of teaching staff in many schools.

On September 27, students and their guardians locked up the gates of the Government Girls Senior Secondary School at Nindana, Chief Minister Manohar Lal Khattar’s ancestral village in Meham Division, in protest against the teacher shortage. A local newspaper reported that five teachers of a total staff of 13 had been transferred recently. The school has not had an English teacher for the past three years. There have also been protests in Education Minister Kanwar Pal Gujjar’s constituency in Yamunanagar district.

State-wide protests

Students, parents, and teachers have been on the warpath since September 1 against what they see as the disruption of the school education system. On September 16, students from the middle school and high schools in Kharakbhura village, Jind, protested against the lack of teachers. The middle school only had a headmaster and a Sanskrit teacher, and the high school had teachers for only three subjects.

Four days later, students of the Government Girls Senior Secondary School at Bahu Akbarpur village in Rohtak district locked the school gates and blocked the Delhi-Hisar national highway. They were upset that their English, mathematics, and science teachers had been transferred on September 1 and no replacements had arrived.

At Malikpur village in Safidon district, the high school had only the headmaster on the staff, leaving 160 students, all from poor families, high and dry. In Chichdaana, Panipat district, there were complaints that there were only two teachers for 180 students for Classes 6 to 10. Five teachers had been transferred in August with no replacements. In Faridpur village of Hisar, some 100 students of the government high school sat on a dharna even while preparing for their exams. Their demand was that all the six transferred teachers be reinstated.

High teacher shortage

The government has been defending its teacher transfer policy and the school mergers. Teachers say they are not against transfers if it will address the imbalance of teaching staff across schools. The fact is that there are around 38,000 teacher vacancies. Teacher organisations such as the Adhyapak Shikshak Sangh say the figure is much higher.

Satyapal Siwach, an educationist, told  Frontline that the “transfer drive” was in fact a “school closure” drive. The mass transfers and mergers had rendered many schools redundant. His daughter, he said, was an English teacher but was asked to teach science because there were no science or maths teachers in the school.

Citing Education Department figures, Siwach claimed that 4,801 of 14,503 schools were slated to be merged or closed down. There was a huge backlog of vacancies in teaching posts. Of a total of 1,30,054 teaching posts, there were 38,957 vacancies.

Rather than through selection boards, the government recruits teachers on a contract basis through the Kaushal Rozgar Nigam (Skill Development Corporation). Currently, there are some 12,500 contract teachers. Though they were not initially part of the transfer drive, a circular issued on September 28 made it mandatory for guest or contract teachers to also submit their first choice for transfer district on the online portal. Sensing the unease among contract teachers over the transfer policy, the Khattar government assured them that they would be absorbed in schools near their homes. But there is no certainty.

While massive transfers occurred in 1970-71 during Bansi Lal’s reign as well, according to Siwach those were punitive in nature. The objective now is to reduce the number of teachers with scant regard to the quality of education.

Downsizing classrooms

The department has also claimed that by merging schools, 38,957 teacher vacancies had been reduced to 26,000. The Chief Minister has gone on record to say that a single teacher can teach four subjects.

The primary school wing of the Government Senior Secondary School at Ghaghas, Nagina, in Nuh. It has only two teachers for 320 students. | Photo Credit: SHIV KUMAR PUSHPAKAR

According to Siwach, such teaching was possible only at the primary level. From Classes 6 to 12, subject-wise teaching was the norm. According to him, the workload of individual teachers had gone up and the student strength per class had increased. Earlier, a primary section would have a maximum of 30 students; with the mergers, this had doubled but with no corresponding increase in teacher strength.

Moreover, the merger of schools has increased distances, making it difficult for children to commute to school. The unavailability of transport, the size of the villages, and the poor economic background of the largely agrarian families have not been taken into account in the merger process.

According to Jarnail Singh, a former school principal and convener of the Jan Shiksha Adhikar Manch, a State-level body of teachers and parents, the government was acting on the notion that regular teachers did not do any work and yet were paid a lot. In 1997, he filed a public interest litigation petition in the Punjab and Haryana High Court seeking directions to ensure that no teacher was arbitrarily transferred before completing a term of five years. Jarnail Singh, a former president of the Haryana Vidyalaya Adhyapak Sangh, the largest association of teachers in the State, said that successive governments had diluted the court order that protected the posting tenure of teachers.

Commenting on the transfer policy, Singh said its effects were visible in his own village, Tejli, Yamunanagar, where nine teachers were transferred out of a high school that was upgraded to a senior secondary school, but the vacancies were not filled.

Encouraging privatisation

Even as government schools are being merged, the government is supposedly silently promoting admissions to private schools. The government converted nearly 1,000 State government schools into Model Sanskriti Schools, had them affiliated with the Central Board of Secondary Education, and levied admission fees at all levels, including primary classes.

Under a second model launched in July 2022, known as the Chief Minister Equal Education Relief Assistance and Grant (CHEERAG), students from families with an annual income of less than Rs.1.08 lakh would be subsidised by the government if they wanted to move from a government school to a private school. Jarnail Singh said it was ironic that fees were being levied in government schools under the Model Sanskriti Schools programme while private schools were being subsidised by the government.

Another issue being raised is the introduction of skill kits from Class 6 upwards as part of the Skill Development Scheme to train children in their parental occupations. This has been done although the government is mandated to provide free education to children up to 14 years under the Right to Education Act.

When the BJP formed the government in 2019 for the second time, it had the help of the Jannayak Janata Party. It could not have won 40 seats on its own without the support of the Other Backward Classes and the Scheduled Castes. It is this segment today that is hugely affected by the school rationalisation project. Reports from the ground claim that there is considerable dissatisfaction with the transfers and mergers even among those teachers who are ideologically close to the BJP and the RSS. The government seems oblivious.

The crux

- The Teachers Transfer Policy-2016 that the School Education Department has been aggressively implementing since mid-August has affected a lot of teachers who are posted in faraway schools

- The government has already decided to merge schools and create a “cluster” system.

- The mergers have led to the transfer of teachers, and the transfers, in turn, have resulted in a shortage of teaching staff in many schools.

- As many as 4,801 of 14,503 schools were slated to be merged or closed down. Of a total of 1,30,054 teaching posts, there were 38,957 vacancies.

Print edition : Oct 14, 2022 T+T-

World Affairs

- Editor’s Note

- Could the Ukraine conflict be an opportunity for the global south?

- Europe scrambling to cope with energy crisis as winter approaches

- Russia-Ukraine conflict: Is this Cold War II?

- Ukraine war impact on the US dollar a challenge to American hegemony

- India offers nuanced response to changing tides of the Ukraine war

- Victory of Giorgia Meloni in Italy marks the return of fascists to power

Editor’s Note

It looks very much as if the world is looking at Cold War Ver. 2.

As Vladimir Putin announced in the Kremlin that Russia had taken control of four east Ukrainian regions, the West reacted with expected fury. Joe Biden announced a fresh set of sanctions and accused Putin of “trampling on the United Nations Charter”. The war that began in February this year had just taken another turn for the worse.

The “globalisation” that makes everyone ecstatic when it comes to trade also means that the fallout of such a prolonged war cannot remain contained. It impacts everything from food supplies in Africa to petrol prices in Asia to the production of neon for chips. There is an energy crisis and a refugee crisis in Europe. The grinding sanctions imposed by the US have disrupted supply chains and hiked commodity prices, slowing down global economic growth. As the war drags on, India too has been forced to change tack from the initial show of support for Russia to a more measured stand that takes into account its own geostrategic vulnerabilities.

Yes, it looks very much as if the world is looking at Cold War Ver. 2, so we roped in a range of experts to study the Russia-Ukraine conflict from various angles.

Meanwhile, Anando Bhakto visited Kashmir to track what the opening of cinema halls really means for the Valley, while Vikhar Ahmed Sayeed prepared a report card of the BJP government’s tenure in Karnataka ahead of the Assembly election next year.

I urge you not to miss the interview with graphic artist Sunandini Banerjee, whose covers for Seagull’s books have become practically collector’s items. Nor the special feature on Hrishikesh Mukherjee, the beloved director of classics such as Abhimaan, Anand, Guddi, Anupama, and more. His centenary falls this year.

All of which makes this issue of Frontline quite an edition for your library.

Print edition : Oct 11, 2022 T+T-

Could the Ukraine conflict be an opportunity for the global south?

Jomo Kwame Sundaram, Emeritus Professor, University of Malaya. | Photo Credit: The Hindu Archives

Interview with Jomo Kwame Sundaram, Emeritus Professor, University of Malaya.

Jomo Kwame Sundaram is Senior Adviser, Khazanah Research Institute; Fellow, Academy of Science, Malaysia; and Emeritus Professor, University of Malaya. He was UN Assistant Secretary General for Economic Development; Assistant Director General, Food and Agriculture Organization; Founder-Chair, International Development Economics Associates; and President, Malaysian Social Science Association. Sundaram has authored and edited over a hundred books, written many academic papers, research reports, and media articles. He received the 2007 Wassily Leontief Prize for Advancing the Frontiers of Economic Thought. In an interview to Frontline, he spoke about the impact of the Ukraine conflict on the global south. Excerpts.

Is the impact of the Ukraine conflict on the global economy a temporary situation or is it a crisis with deeper roots and longer term implications?

Many things can change, sometimes unexpectedly, but we may well be witnessing the beginnings of a protracted new Cold War after the US hegemony of the last three decades. Mikhail Gorbachev’s efforts to create the conditions for greater peace and international cooperation were based on a certain implicit trust. But this was betrayed with the ascendance in the 1990s of US unipolarism following the collapse of the Soviet Union and NATO expansionism despite the disappearance of its original rationale, the Soviet threat.

Multilateralism and its various post-Second World War institutions, mainly associated with the UN, continue to be undermined except when they serve US and NATO interests. Meanwhile, the sanctions against Russia and its allies have further disrupted international trade and cooperation in various ways. We live in times of militarised stagflation.

Trade liberalisation largely ended as real wages declined in rich countries at the end of the 20th century. Financial globalisation has nonetheless continued, with mixed consequences. Many Asian developing countries have grown even as inequalities rise in the global south. Opportunistic politicians all over have embraced ethno-populist politics, often invoking jingoist nationalist rhetoric, displacing the more progressive anti-imperialist multi-class popular fronts, or the old populism.

Reactions to the 2008-2009 global financial crisis quickly abandoned early fiscal efforts in favour of unconventional monetary policies, especially ‘quantitative easing’, an option mainly available to the US with its ‘exorbitant privilege’ of indefinitely lending by selling treasury bonds to the rest of the world, as it has done for more than half a century when Nixon ended the Bretton Woods system. Other rich economies have less policy space, leaving developing countries with even less. Much, of course, depends on developing countries’ own capacity for capital account and sovereign debt management.

Not just Europe but the global south is also affected by the conflict’s immediate consequences on the economy.

We have seen oil and gas prices rise sharply the world over following NATO’s imposition of sanctions, mainly hurting European economies, particularly those importing oil and gas from Russia. Russia has managed to get around this by offering huge discounts on its exports and increasing its reliance on the markets of China and other friendly countries. Thus, China’s alliance with Russia has been greatly strengthened. But most dangerously, we have seen the abandonment and postponement of long-promised transitions to cleaner, especially renewable, energy, thus accelerating global warming. Just months after last year’s Glasgow promises to stop using coal, Europeans are already leading the rush back to coal as they struggle to cope with energy shortages and prices as winter approaches. Both Russia and Ukraine are major wheat suppliers. Exports have been hit, not only by sanctions but also by the mines laid in the Black Sea ports. Cereal and other food prices have also risen.

ALSO READ:Is this Cold War II?

If this conflict is to eventually be a catalyst for undoing globalisation, as some commentators have suggested, would that be something the global south would welcome because it could weaken the structures of global inequality? Or, should it be feared because of the disruptive economic effects that would follow?

Trade liberalisation has slowed since the WTO was created in 1995. Although there is still a lot of talk about free trade agreements (FTAs), these mostly involve bilateral and plurilateral FTAs, which even free trade guru Jagdish Bhagwati has denounced as termites, undermining freer multilateral trade.

Most of FTAs today involve non-trade issues, such as investor rights and intellectual property, as in the case of the Comprehensive and Progressive Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPTPP). Worse, the TPP was originally pushed by Obama as a means to surround and isolate China, but Trump withdrew, citing the danger of its investor-state dispute settlement provisions. The closest US allies nonetheless went ahead with it, so we have the irony of the 6,350-page TPP, mainly drafted by US corporate advisers, which the US is no longer party to. Nonetheless, it poses a danger to developing country participants as powerful corporate interests have ways and means of taking advantage of it.

Overcoming Western dominance will not be easy because we have an inter-state system largely shaped by neocolonial arrangements negotiated among the big powers, especially after the Second World War. Then, there is private power. Over time, new modes of accumulating wealth have emerged, with some of it deployed to enable further capital accumulation. This happens at both national and international levels.

Western rejection at the WTO Council of the developing country-supported Indian-South African request for a TRIPS waiver during the COVID-19 pandemic reminds us of the actual exercise of such power. Collective action by the global South is unfortunately easier said than done. Hence, the choice is not really between globalisation and deglobalisation. In any case, this binary is not really the actual choice the world faces.

Is a new global financial architecture not based on the hegemony of the dollar a possible fallout?

Such an alternative monetary system is not only feasible, but also desirable. For instance, non-US participants at Bretton Woods in 1944 offered different proposals, of which we now know the most about Keynes’. Another possibility for change came up after President Nixon withdrew from the US’ 1944 commitments in August 1971 after the Eurodollar market undermined the greenback. With the end of the Bretton Woods system, what followed was a “non-system”.

The dollar’s position was somewhat secured after the US agreed with Saudi Arabia’s King Faisal bin Abdulaziz Al Saud’s collusion with OPEC partners to raise the petrol price on condition that oil and gas transactions be in dollars, giving rise to the term “petrodollars” and the belief that oil was the “new gold”. The dollar’s hegemony has since endowed the US with an ‘exorbitant privilege’, enabling it to borrow by selling bonds to the world, with buyers having little expectation of full redemption.

US and NATO sanctions against Russia, following the Ukraine invasion, have had some rather unexpected consequences. US-led efforts to exclude Russia and others from the international payments systems have forced them to consolidate alternative arrangements. They may well erode the dollar’s position as more and more economic transactions bypass the dollar, but this is unlikely to happen immediately. Already, US Fed interest rate hikes have served to strengthen the dollar.

ALSO READ:War impact on US dollar

What can developing countries do to ensure that in any emerging new world order their scope for autonomous action is enlarged?

Developing countries have had various historic opportunities to become a coherent third force, both during the Cold War and again now. From 1961, the non-aligned movement (NAM) embodied that possibility, and it became closely aligned with the G77 caucus of developing countries in the UN system. But the G77 has not been well organised, let alone institutionalised, beyond the UN segment of multilateral arrangements. And NAM has not been able to build upon or extend the Afro-Asian solidarity initiated at Bandung.

The variety of economic conditions in the global south continues to pose challenges to cooperation and solidarity. But these have not stood in the way of G77 cooperation, which has been especially clear with the G77 in New York, perhaps more than in Geneva and other UN hubs. The creation of the WTO outside the UN system, with its own unique governance and other arrangements, has exacerbated these problems. The creation of the South Centre following the South Commission’s report was expected to play a proactive role in providing analytical and policy coherence for advancing a shared vision of the global south. Sadly, this has not materialised.

If solidarity can be rebuilt and consolidated through the idea of ‘non-alignment’, it is possible for a third force to emerge and stay out of both NATO and the ‘Others’ camp, currently organised as the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation. Only by consistently staying clear of both camps can the global south become a force to reckon with, importantly, a force for peace.

Of course, it is easier said than done, especially at a time when leadership seems wanting.

Print edition : Oct 11, 2022 T+T-

Europe scrambling to cope with energy crisis as winter approaches

A Danish ship  monitors the mysterious gas leak that appeared in the Nord Stream pipeline in the Baltic Sea off the coast of Denmark on September 30.  | Photo Credit: DANISH DEFENCE COMMAND/via Reuters

To offset the loss of Russian gas, it is making deals with other nations while seeking alternatives.

Travelling through Germany and Slovenia at the end of August, I found it hard to see the effects of the worst energy crisis that Europe has been undergoing in recent years—a combination of the effect of Russia ceasing gas supplies and the worst drought the continent has faced in 500 years. Europe is deeply dependent on natural gas for its energy supply. Germany, the economic powerhouse at the centre of Europe, is particularly vulnerable. Gas from Russia accounts for as much as 40 per cent of its energy mix, essential for its chemical, steel, and carmaking industries, not to mention for domestic uses such as heating and electricity supply.

And yet, in late August, there was a carnival air to Berlin. Partially, this was because of the unexpectedly high temperatures of summer. The catastrophic heatwaves in summer this year have claimed multiple lives in South Asia and seen unprecedented forest fires in the US, Spain, Portugal, and France, but in the colder countries of north-western Europe, many of whose residents go on holiday to warmer climes in summer, the warm weather came home this year. The extreme heat saw rivers drying up, trade slowing down, and energy plants, such as nuclear reactors in France, being forced to shut down as low water availability made cooling them more difficult. As industry passed on the resultant higher costs to consumers, there was a steady rise in prices even though this was not immediately visible.

Germany carried out a drastic experiment in the three months of summer (June, July, and August) of issuing monthly public transport tickets priced at €9. This meant that people could travel across the country for a fraction of the price they would normally pay. Here, passengers wait to board a train on a platform at Frankfurt Central Station on August 31, the last day of the scheme.  | Photo Credit: Ben Kilb/Bloomberg

One of the reasons for this was the drastic experiment that Germany did in the three months of summer—June, July, and August—of issuing €9 (roughly Rs.720) monthly public transport tickets. This meant that anybody—German, foreign resident, or tourist—could travel on any train, tram, or bus (excluding high-speed intercity ones) across the country for a fraction of the price they would normally pay. To put it in context, the normal price of a train ticket from Frankfurt airport to the city is €5.

Increased tourist footfalls

Unsurprisingly, this boosted the number of people travelling within and around the country and was a bonanza especially for students and other groups with limited means for extra spending. This, in turn, led to a large increase in spending on other things, increasing footfalls in tourist destinations that would normally have seen much fewer visitors. Furthermore, it lowered Germany’s emissions and meant even lower levels of pollution (much, much lower if one was coming from New Delhi like I was). As a means of offsetting the creeping inflation of prices, it was a wildly popular measure, racking up more than 60 million ticket sales in the first two months alone.

An employee at a bakery in Neu Isenburg, Germany, pushes rolls into a gas-heated oven, on September 19. As winter approaches, some small bakeries in the country are contemplating shutting down due to the energy crisis.  | Photo Credit: MICHAEL PROBST/AP

That said, the policy was not without its challenges. It reportedly cost the German treasury about €3 billion a month and led to great pressure on the transport system, with carriages being full almost all the time. While Germany’s enviable public transport system was able to handle the stress, it could not do so perfectly. In the five days that I was there, I missed two train connections owing to late trains, not that much of a problem as I could hop on to the next one within half an hour but still inconvenient. The federal and State governments are now debating on how to extend the scheme, with higher prices and greater investment in the transport system, as a way to make it more affordable to the state while building on this transition to cleaner commutes.

In the background, however, the fact remains that Germany and other governments in Europe are scrambling to deal with the long-term fallout of the energy crisis and to handle what they see as the coming winter of deep discontent. As the cooler months approach, north-western Europe will face the unavoidable challenge of heating homes. To offset the loss of Russian gas, they are scrambling to make deals with other countries. Norway has now replaced Russia as Europe’s main gas supplier. New deals with Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Azerbaijan, and other liquefied natural gas (LNG) suppliers are being negotiated. France derives more than half of its electricity from nuclear plants. Half of them have been shut down for maintenance, and hurried efforts are on to try and get them back up and running. While the EU’s gas reserves are nearly 90 per cent full because of these workarounds, they have been expensive solutions and have driven up gas prices around the world. Not to mention, LNG is significantly more expensive than the piped gas that flows in from Russia.

ALSO READ:War impact on US dollar

More problematically, it has led to other issues. Authoritarian regimes that have less than pleasant records when it comes to human rights and other issues, including blocking climate appropriate transitions, are being welcomed into the fold. Azerbaijan, emboldened by the new power dynamics, recently upped its assault on Armenia, with whom it has been contesting the Nagorno-Karabakh territories that both countries claim.

The gas that Europe has bought, and continues to buy, will have severe knock-on effects on inflation worldwide. BASF, the German chemical company and the largest in the world, is looking at possibly closing down some plants if costs exceed profitability. In the case of some of these, such as the massive 10 sq km Ludwigshafen plant, which has run non-stop for the last six decades or so, the outcomes are hard to assess. BASF is the world’s largest producer of ibuprofen, the common painkiller that the world buys. It also manufactures, among other materials, those essential for carmakers, including chemicals necessary to cut down emissions from diesel vehicles.

A general view of the Large Hadron Collider at CERN in the French village of Saint-Genis-Pouilly near Geneva in Switzerland in 2014. CERN needs almost as much electricity as a third of Zurich, and the LHC is the most energy-intensive piece of equipment housed there. | Photo Credit: Pierre Albouy/Reuters

As the winter approaches, everything from personal household expenses to large industry, and even science projects are threatened by the unfolding energy crisis. The Large Hadron Collider (LHC)—the world’s most sophisticated and expensive particle collider, which is at the CERN laboratory on the Swiss-French border—may have to figure out what to do. CERN needs almost as much electricity as a third of Zurich, and electricity will become far more expensive this winter. The LHC is the most energy-intensive piece of equipment housed there. Shutting it down for a long period will significantly degrade the results of long-term experiments, such as the one that found the Higgs boson, the so-called “God particle”, and it involves the cooperation of scientists from across 100 countries.

The problem for European policymakers is that they do not see much of a choice. The recent leaks in the Nord Stream I and Nord Stream II gas pipelines has underlined the fact that even if an agreement on gas supplies from Russia to Europe were to resume it would not be without hiccups. A recent dispute between Ukraine and Russia underlines this: Ukraine accused Russia of not paying it transit fees for gas travelling through the Naftogaz pipeline, and Russia threatened to sanction Ukraine in return. If this escalates and leads to the shutting down of the pipeline, the only gas pipeline continuing to pump Russian gas to Europe will be Turkstream, through the Black Sea.

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, while not readily evident in the easy life of Europe that visitors get to see, is always in the background of multiple conversations. Whether I was talking to American, Canadian, German, or other participants at the Global Diplomacy Lab in Ljubljana, Slovenia, or to my friend Elena Bratanova, who works with the German Interior Ministry on the management of refugees, the war is inescapable. A German diplomat said to me: “Every Russian tank that the Ukrainians destroy is one less that we have to fight. They are fighting our war.”

That stark understanding, that deep fear of Russia’s choice to invade Ukraine, underlie almost all decisions several European politicians make today. Unfortunately, this is still not being communicated properly. Olaf Scholz, the Chancellor of Germany, one of the key actors in the crisis, is a famously bad communicator. Other leaders are using the conflict for their own means. The closeness of Russian President Vladimir Putin to Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban and to Silvio Berlusconi, the former Italian Prime Minister and mentor to the new one, Giorgia Meloni, makes a common European position more challenging.

Mateusz Morawiecki, the Prime Minister of Poland and leader of the deeply illiberal Law and Justice party, is using his condemnation of Russia to whitewash his own party’s appalling policies domestically while hectoring the rest of Europe. Emmanuel Macron, the French President, is deeply concerned about the popularity of Marine Le Pen, another prominent Putin supporter, and by the experience of the gilets jaunes (yellow vest) protests, which were triggered by the rise in energy prices. The less said of the shambolic policies of the UK—which might have formally exited the EU but is inextricably tied to its political economy—the better.

Lack of cohesion in European policies

The lack of cohesion and coherence of European policies is going to add to the problems going forward, possibly engendering the very responses the EU fears: protests by a public that feels decisions are being made without consultation or that decisions have not been clearly communicated. This is likely to be exacerbated by Europe’s deeply hypocritical response to this war vis-à-vis wars in Africa or elsewhere and its response to Ukrainian refugees versus those from other nations, which has been met with sarcasm and rage. The presence across Europe of several large political parties with xenophobic agendas, some even in power now, provides ample fodder for troublemakers to oppose coordinating policies across the EU to deal with the crisis.

ALSO READ:An opportunity for the global south?

And yet, the outlook is not altogether negative. The catastrophic rise in electricity prices in the UK, accompanied by weak and inequitable support by the government, is forcing a new conversation on building better housing that will focus on heat insulation and lead to lowering the demand for energy use in the foreseeable future. The pressure to lower usage across Europe, whether due to a rejection of dependence on Russian gas or because of the high price of gas, is forcing an adoption of renewable energy faster than before, overcoming the objection of companies that were dependent on gas and other carbon-based fuel.

Energy alternatives

BASF is a case in point. As one of the companies deeply involved in and supportive of Russian gas supplies to Europe—it raked in impressive profits from its investment in a Gazprom gasfield in Russia this year—it is now being forced by public opinion, supply concerns, and pricing to look at energy alternatives rather than investing further in a carbon-intensive future. One of the issues that the EU has been deeply criticised for is its taxonomy or classification system that lists environmentally sustainable economic activities, in which it includes natural gas. Critics, many from the global south, see this as a clear sell-out, especially as the EU sets different standards for the use of natural gas within the EU and abroad, on the argument that lower standards abroad may lead to greater leakage and thus greater emissions. As the EU is forced to wean its industries and energy infrastructure from Russian gas supply, it will lower the need for it to keep arguing that natural gas is a “green energy” source, and more importantly, it may serve as an impetus for innovating beyond natural gas, which will be far more useful to developing countries.

BASF, the German chemical company, is looking at possibly closing down some plants if costs exceed profitability. Here, a view of its massive 10 sq. km. plant in Ludwigshafen. | Photo Credit: MICHAEL PROBST/AP

Many years ago, I was impressed by a talk where the economist Rathin Roy highlighted how the energy challenge for developed countries and developing countries was different. Quite often, he said, countries like those in Europe did not invest in energy efficiency simply because their use of energy was deeply invested in issues of comfort, whereas for poorer countries the expansion of energy supply was necessary for survival.

The shock of Russia’s Ukraine war, and the energy crisis that it has led to, is forcing Europe to reckon with these issues. In doing so, it is likely to see a painful winter running into a problematic next year. This will be made worse by its uncoordinated response, especially, when the support given is deeply inequitable, as is the case in the UK, rather than an initiative like Germany’s €9 train tickets. On the other hand, if Europe handles this well, it gets an opportunity to reinvent itself as an actor that will become a better partner for the developing world in managing the green transition, a consummation to be devoutly wished for.

Omair Ahmed is the Managing Editor, South Asia, of The Third Pole, which reports on river basins in the Himalayan region, with a particular focus on energy transition, climate risks, and regional and North-South cooperation.

The Crux

- Europe depends on natural gas for its energy needs.

- The combined effect of Russia ceasing gas supplies and the worst drought Europe has faced in 500 years means that the continent is facing its worst energy crisis in recent years.

- As the winter approaches, everything from households to industries, and even science projects, such as CERN’s LHC, are threatened by the unfolding energy crisis.

- Governments and policymakers are scrambling to deal with it, but there is a lack of cohesion and coherence in EU countries’ policies.

- Their search for alternative sources of gas has led them to make deals with countries that have problematic records when it comes to human rights and other issues.

- A positive outcome of the pressure to lower consumption of gas is that it is forcing a faster adoption of renewable energy than before the crisis. Also, there is more incentive now for countries to invest in energy efficiency.

Print edition : Oct 11, 2022 T+T-

Russia-Ukraine conflict: Is this Cold War II?

A rally marking the annexation of four regions of Ukraine by Russian troops, Lugansk, Donetsk, Kherson and Zaporizhzhia, at Red Square in central Moscow on September 30. | Photo Credit: AFP

As the war grinds on in Ukraine, there are no victors in sight.

The Russo-Turkish war of 1768-74 was one of the most consequential conflicts for the global balance of power in the 18th century. After the war, Russia, under Empress Catherine the Great, got access to the Black Sea through the Kerch and Azov seaports and officially became the “protector” of the Orthodox Christians of the Ottoman Empire. In 1783, nine years after the war was over, Prince Grigory Potemkin, a Grand Admiral in the imperial Russian Army and a favourite of the Empress, annexed the Crimean Peninsula that juts into the Black Sea in the name of protecting its Christians, amid violent clashes between Christians and Crimean Tatars (a Turkic ethnic group). The annexation gave Russia seamless access to the Black Sea’s warm waters, helping its rise as a naval power.

There are interesting parallels between the imperial annexation of Crimea in the 18th century and the Russian annexation of the peninsula in 2014. Prince Potemkin is credited to have built Russia’s Black Sea fleet in 1783 with Crimea’s Sevastopol being its principal base. Ever since, Russia has retained its influence over Crimea in one way or the other. During the Soviet period, Crimea was the centre of Russia’s Black Sea manoeuvres. When the Soviet Union disintegrated in 1991, Crimea became part of the newly independent Ukraine, but continued to host Russia’s Black Sea fleet. Moscow’s grip over the peninsula faced its first real threat in 2014 when the elected government of President Viktor Yanukovych in Ukraine was brought down by violent protests that were backed by the West. Six years earlier, the US had offered NATO membership to Ukraine and Georgia, both Black Sea basin countries and former Soviet republics.

Vladimir Putin is seen on a screen at Moscow’s Red Square as he addresses a rally on September 30. His speech was an all-out attack on Western imperialism. | Photo Credit: ALEXANDER NEMENOV / AFP

With the regime change in Kyiv, Russia, faced with the prospect of Ukraine having a pro-Western, NATO-friendly government hostile towards Moscow, moved quickly. If protection of the Orthodox Christians was the raison d’être of Prince Potemkin’s annexation of Crimea in the 18th century, protection of the Russian-speaking population was President Vladimir Putin’s official explanation for the annexation of the region in 2014. In the end, the annexation allowed Russia to retain a strategically important peninsula where it could project force through the Mediterranean Sea and the waters beyond. But there was one key difference. If the imperial annexation cemented Russia’s “great power” status and led to the rise of its Navy, Putin’s annexation of Crimea and his support for separatists in the Donbas region of eastern Ukraine (Donetsk and Luhansk Oblasts) marked the beginning of a prolonged conflict, which has snowballed into Europe’s largest security crisis, especially after the Russian leader’s decision to invade Ukraine on February 14, 2022.

Russia’s security concerns

Russia, the world’s largest country by land mass, lacks natural borders except the Arctic Ocean in the north and the Pacific in the far east. Its vast land borders stretch from northern Europe to central and north-east Asia. Its heartland, from St. Petersburg through Moscow to the Volga region, that lies on vast plains is a defender’s nightmare. Historically, expansion was the best defence for Russian leaders—as Catherine the Great once famously said: “I have no way to defend my borders but to extend them.” And this nightmare was proven right twice in the last two centuries when Russia saw two devastating invasions from its western borders—the 1812 attack by Napoleonic France and the 1941 attack by Nazi Germany. Russia defeated them both, but only after suffering enormous material and human losses.

After the Second World War, Russia expanded its buffer by re-establishing its control over the rim land in Eastern Europe, Caucasus and Central Asia, which it hoped would protect its heartland. But the disintegration of the Soviet Union, which saw Russia losing some 3 million square kilometre of sovereign territory, was the greatest geopolitical setback for Moscow in centuries. Having lost its territories and geopolitical influence and left with a free-falling economy and political instability at home, Russia had to force itself into a strategic retreat. It was at this point that Putin emerged as a strongman promising a way out for the “motherland” from this phase of chaos and humiliation.

ALSO READ:India offers nuanced response

In the Soviet Union’s last days, the West had promised Russia that NATO, created at the beginning of the Cold War to push back against the Soviets, would not “expand an inch to the east”. It was after getting these assurances that Mikhail Gorbachev, then the leader of the Soviet Communist Party, agreed to pull back Soviet troops from East Germany, which eventually led to German unification. But this assurance, which has been widely documented, was not a written agreement. And a weak, inward-looking Russia grappling with its own problems was not in a position to make sure that the West stayed committed to the verbal assurances it had made.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy (centre) with Prime Minister Denys Shmyhal (right) and the head of Verkhovna Rada (Supreme Council of Ukraine) Ruslan Stefanchuk, holding an application for ‘‘accelerated accession to NATO’‘ in Kyiv, Ukraine, on September 30. | Photo Credit: Ukrainian Presidential Press Office via AP

In March 1999, in the first expansion since the end of the Cold War, the Czech Republic, Hungary and Poland (all were members of the Soviet-led Warsaw Pact) joined NATO. Five years later, seven more countries — including the three Baltic countries of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, all of which share borders with Russia—were also taken into the alliance. If in the early 1990s, NATO’s border with Russia was limited to the northern fringes of Norway, now the distance from NATO’s Estonian border to St. Petersburg, the imperial capital of Russia, is less than 160 km.

But NATO didn’t stop there. In 2008, the US promised membership to Georgia and Ukraine at the Bucharest summit. Russia, coming out of the post-Soviet retreat, responded forcefully. For the Kremlin, both Ukraine and Georgia are critical for its national security calculations. If these countries join NATO, it will not only bring the trans-Atlantic nuclear military alliance even closer to Russia’s borders (the distance from the Ukrainian border to Moscow is less than 500 km), but also make Russia’s position in the Black Sea, its gateway to the world, more vulnerable. Turkey, Bulgaria and Romania, all Black Sea basin countries, are already NATO members. So, in 2008, Putin sent troops to Georgia over the separatist conflict in South Ossetia and Abkhazia; and in 2014, he annexed Crimea and threw his weight behind the separatists in the Donbas.

The road to war

Since 2008 Putin has made several calculated geopolitical moves seeking to address Russia’s security challenges and restore its role as a major global player. By sending troops to Georgia that year, he effectively stalled the country’s NATO ambitions. In 2014, he took Crimea through a referendum without fighting an actual war with Ukraine. In 2015, he took advantage of Barack Obama’s strategic ambivalence over Syria and sent troops to the civil war-struck West Asian country where the regime of President Bashar al Assad was on the brink. The Russian intervention helped Putin not only keep Russia’s Tartus naval base in the Mediterranean—its only naval base outside the former Soviet sphere—but also establish some leverage over Syria’s neighbours Turkey and Israel (both have stayed neutral in the Ukraine war).

Putin has also strengthened the Russian presence in Central Asia and the Caucasus—he sent “peacekeepers” to Nagorno-Karabakh to end the war between Armenia and Azerbaijan in 2020, and dispatched soldiers to Kazakhstan earlier this year to restore order in the protest-shaken country. While all these moves—exploiting geopolitical opportunities with limited forces for maximum gain—helped Putin reposition Russia, they appear to have been trial runs before his biggest strategic bet—the invasion of Ukraine.

The yard of a destroyed apartment building in the town of Sviatohirsk, Donetsk region, on September 30, amid the Russian invasion. | Photo Credit: ANATOLII STEPANOV

Why did Putin go into Ukraine? He had practically ended Ukraine’s NATO dreams in 2014. He had Crimea, and pro-Russian separatists controlled a substantial amount of territories in Ukraine’s industrially rich Donbas region, which could also act as a buffer for Russia. But Moscow was irked by the advanced weapons the West was supplying to Ukraine as also the military training it was giving to Ukraine’s forces. Besides, the Minsk II agreement, which called for a full ceasefire in the Donbas in February 2015, was a non-starter as Ukraine went back on key clauses, including amending its Constitution and giving more autonomy to the Donbas. New neo-Nazi militias sprang up in Ukraine’s east, which targeted the Russian-speaking populations in the region, accusing them of being “collaborators”. Of them, the Azov Brigade, a paramilitary battalion drawn from neo-Nazi groups and the Social National Assembly (SNA) that believes in a “final crusade of white races against Semite-led Untermenschen [inferior humans]”, was integrated into Ukraine’s National Guard in November 2014.

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When the crisis in Ukraine’s east persisted and Ukraine’s armed forces, began to gain strength with military assistance coming in from the US and the UK, Russia decided to escalate the pre-existing conflict into a full-scale war—with de-Nazification and demilitarisation of Ukraine as its declared goals.

Whatever Putin’s objectives, be it a total subjugation of Ukraine or capturing territories north, east and south of the country to carve out an arc of buffer land along Russia’s border to the Black Sea coast and render Ukraine land-locked, he wanted to meet them quickly and with limited forces. So he mobilised some 1,50,000 troops to invade Europe’s largest country. Russian troops opened multiple battlefronts and tried to make a sharp thrust into Ukraine towards Kyiv and Kharkiv from the north, Donetsk and Luhansk from the east, and Kherson, Mykolaiv and Zaporizhzhya from the south. But war, even for great powers, is an unpredictable business.

Gains and losses

With limited deployment, the Russians made substantial territorial gains in Ukraine but fell short of their actual goals. Seven months into the war, Russia has not got even the whole of the Donbas (it has the whole of Luhansk and some 65 per cent of Donetsk). It never managed to seize Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second largest city which lies roughly 40 km from the Russian border. In the south, the Russians took parts of Zaporizhzhya, including the eponymous nuclear plant, and the Black Sea port city of Kherson, but they stopped at the borders of Mykolaiv. Odesa, Ukraine’s pearl in the Black Sea, was not in their control.

A Russian reservist bids farewell to relatives before leaving to join the campaign in Ukraine, on October 1. | Photo Credit: REUTERS / IGOR RUSSAK

The Ukrainian resistance opened new avenues for Russia’s rivals in the conflict. The US and Europe, which had imposed crippling sanctions on Moscow, began to provide direct military assistance and intelligence to Ukrainian forces. Advanced weapons such as armed drones and High Mobility Artillery Rocket Systems (HIMARS) were flown in. Mercenaries travelled to Ukraine from the West to fight against the Russians. US Defence Secretary Lloyd Austin even commented publicly that the US wanted to see “Russia weakened”. Suddenly, Putin’s Russia found itself in the middle of a long war with a long front line (roughly 1,000 km long, stretching from the Oskil River in the northeast to Mykolaiv in the south) against a force armed, trained and supplied by the collective West.

In late September, a lightning Ukrainian counter-offensive forced Russian troops to retreat from the Kharkiv Oblast, rendering a humiliating defeat to Putin’s superior forces in the battlefield. Caught between setbacks in the battlefield and political pressure at home, Putin ordered partial mobilisation—3,00,000 additional troops, which is twice the number of soldiers he mobilised to launch the war—on September 21, escalating the conflict.

The global disorder

For realists, the international system is essentially anarchic. And in an anarchic system, countries will constantly seek greater powers and security at the expense of the security of weaker powers because the more powerful you are the better your chances of survival. As the Athenians told the Melians during the Peloponnesian War, “the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must”. While the system’s essential character remains anarchic, there could be a balance of power created by great powers in order to install a semblance of order—it could be multilateral (pre-World Wars), bipolar (post-Second World War) or unilateral (post-Cold War).

While unipolarity is quite rare in the history of international relations, the US enjoyed unprecedented powers after the disintegration of the Soviet Union. But the US-led unipolarity did not last long. America’s inconclusive wars in the Muslim world, which ended with its ignominious retreat from Afghanistan in 2021, the rapid rise of China, an aggressive Russia, and the emergence of several middle powers have effectively brought an end to American unipolarity.

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But a new order has not emerged yet. The US’ economic primacy is being strongly challenged by China, which has already become the world’s second largest economy. While the US’s military pre-eminence remains, today it is wary of entering into open conflicts on account of its its experiences in the Muslim world, the need to refocus its resources to tackle China in the Indo Pacific, and the growing isolationist political tendencies at home. So the world is in a confused transition phase and its primal anarchic tendencies are dictating great power behaviour.

Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky leading a meeting of the National Security and Defence Council in Kyiv, on September 30. He said that he would not negotiate with Russia as long as President Putin remained in power. | Photo Credit: AFP / Ukrainian Presidential Press Service

It is this chaos that Putin tried to exploit when he went to war with Ukraine. He knew the old order was changing, which had opened an opportunity for Russia to make a military push to rewrite the post-Soviet security architecture of Europe. It is hardly surprising that Putin timed his invasion of Ukraine a few months after the US retreated from Afghanistan after 20 years of fighting, leaving the country at the mercy of the Taliban. But where Putin erred was in miscalculating the power of Ukrainian nationalism, the resolve of Ukrainian troops to fight back, and the capability and appetite of the West to sustain a prolonged proxy war. This miscalculation has left Putin, who appeared to be rebuilding Russia’s lost glory until February 2022, in a spot.

No victors

True, Russia has gained territories in Ukraine, but the slow progress of the war and the setbacks it has suffered have created a perception of weakness, which could create fresh geopolitical challenges for Putin. The decision by Sweden and Finland to seek NATO membership was the biggest geopolitical setback for Putin, who built his muscular foreign policy on the agenda of resisting NATO’s eastward expansion. For Ukraine, which resisted the Russians valiantly, even recapturing territories once held by Russian troops, the losses it suffered are irreparable. While reclaiming the whole of the lost land, including Crimea, remains Ukraine’s self-declared objective, it appears to be an unrealistic one.

A Russian infantry armoured vehicle captured by the Ukrainian Armed Forces near the town of Izium, Kharkiv region, Ukraine on September 30. | Photo Credit: STRINGER

For the US and Europe, the war offered an opportunity to weaken Russia. But the irony is that they cannot do it without weakening themselves. The economic costs of the war have been devastating across Western economies. Europe, struggling with a cost-of-living crisis and rocketing energy prices, has been particularly devastated. And far-right parties with neo-Nazi roots are on the rise in the continent, riding the wave of public dissatisfaction with the establishment parties.

As the war grinds on with no off-ramps in sight, the simultaneous security, economic and political crises across the trans-Atlantic world are expected to only get worse, which could dramatically remake the socio-political landscape of the West.

The Crux

- As things stand today, there are no victors in the Ukraine war.

- NATO’s eastward expansion has created serious security challenges for Russia.

- Since 2008, Putin has made several calculated geopolitical moves seeking to both address Russia’s security challenges and restore its role as a major global player.

- Russia got into Ukraine because it was unhappy with the way Ukraine was getting sustained military training and advanced weapons from the West.

- The presense of neo-Nazi groups, hostile to Russians, in Ukraine was also a cause for concern.

- Putin decided to wage war, taking advantage of a moment in history when the unipolarity of the US no longer rests on solid ground.

- But Putin had not bargained for the sustained resistance of Ukraine and the power of the West to persist in a prolonged proxy war.

- The war is also however taking a heavy toll on the West.

Print edition : Oct 13, 2022 T+T-

Ukraine war impact on the US dollar a challenge to American hegemony

The New York Stock Exchange, a file photograph. The rise in oil prices, induced by the war, is a major contributor to the acceleration in the inflation rate in the US, for controlling which, given the confines of orthodox economic thinking, a recession is being engineered in that country. | Photo Credit: John Minchillo/AP

The US dollar’s dominance is being challenged like never before in the last half-century.

Capitalism requires a stable medium for holding wealth—stable in the sense that the prices of commodities in terms of this medium must not be expected to rise “too much” (that is, at a rate higher than the “carrying cost” of commodities, for then commodities themselves will become the medium of wealth-holding). Gold has historically played this role, or some currency convertible to gold at a fixed rate, that is, some currency “as good as gold”. The pound sterling in the pre-war years had been one such currency; and the dollar under the post-war Bretton Woods system has been another.

Even after the convertibility of the dollar into gold was officially ended towards the end of the Bretton Woods system, the dollar continued to be considered by the world’s wealth-holders to be “as good as gold” because the dollar prices of goods in general were expected to be relatively stable. This was because the unit wage cost in the US (that is, money wage divided by labour productivity) was expected to be relatively stable, as was the dollar price of the most important current input, oil, notwithstanding its short-term dollar price fluctuations. The pre-eminence of the dollar owed so much to the stability of the dollar price of oil that the world may be said to have been on an “oil standard” of late, reminiscent of the Gold Standard of the old days.

Apartment buildings, with some of their windows lit, in Berlin, Germany, at twilight on September 8. Germany, long dependent on energy imports from Russia, is facing uncertain times as it seeks to pivot away from Russian gas, oil and coal. | Photo Credit: SEAN GALLUP/Getty Images

The United States, however, has upset this entire arrangement underlying the supremacy of the dollar, because of the sanctions it has imposed, along with the European Union, on Russia following upon the Ukraine war. In effect, the Western powers have scored several self-goals, one of which is the weakening of the dollar. (Europe’s closure of factories because of the absence of Russian natural gas is another, not to mention Europe’s prospect of freezing in the coming winter months.) Ironically, the sanctions were imposed with the confidence that the “rouble will be reduced to rubble” in no time, bringing Russia to its knees; and in the beginning it appeared that this prognostication had been right. The financial sanctions that basically constrained Russia from bringing back home the dollars it earned through its exports meant a dollar shortage in Russia that pushed up the price of the dollar against the rouble to astronomical heights. From a price of around 77 roubles in mid February 2022, the dollar rose to 136 roubles in mid March 2022.

Supporters of the left-wing Die Linke party in Leipzig, Germany, demanding measures to alleviate the impact of high food and energy prices, on September 5. Germany is likely to see a socially restive fall as people continue to struggle under the burden of skyrocketing inflation brought on by consequences from Russia’s ongoing war in Ukraine. | Photo Credit: JENS SCHLUETER/Getty Images

Dollar vs Rouble: Western miscalculation

Then two things happened: first, to stem the fall of its currency, Russia declared that it would sell oil in future only against rouble payments; and, second, the reduction in the volume of Russian oil exports, even though it was small, enabled speculative activity to push up the dollar price of oil in the world market. Both these developments contributed to a decline in the value of the dollar vis-à-vis the rouble. The insistence on rouble payment for oil did so for obvious reasons; and the rise in the dollar-price of oil did so because the dollar price of a barrel of oil suddenly went up relative to its rouble price.

So significant was the turnaround that on September 20, a dollar exchanged for 62 roubles, a far smaller figure than when the Ukraine war began. And because of the rise in the dollar price of oil in the world market, Russia’s export earnings have increased despite lower export volumes. The higher oil price is also a major contributor to the acceleration in the inflation rate in the U.S., for controlling which, given the confines of orthodox economic thinking, a recession is being engineered in that country and elsewhere, which would involve a significant increase in the unemployment rate.

A customer at a currency exchange bureau in the city centre of Liverpool, UK, on September 27. The UK’s stock and bond markets have lost at least $500 billion in combined value in September. | Photo Credit: Anthony Devlin/Bloomberg

This Western miscalculation has been a product of sheer hubris. First, it was believed that sanctions could be simultaneously imposed on any number of countries with impunity; at this very time, apart from Russia, several other countries like Iran and Venezuela (both oil producers), not to mention Cuba, are the victims of Western sanctions. Second, it was believed that a country as large as Russia, which accounts for 10 per cent of the world’s oil production and meets a substantially larger share of Europe’s oil needs, would be as helpless as the smaller victims of sanctions (and even the smaller countries have by no means been brought to their knees by these sanctions). And third, it was believed that most countries of the world would fall in line with the Western diktat. In fact, however, not only China, but a host of other countries including India, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Indonesia have carried on trade with Russia despite the Western sanctions.

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The consequences of this hubristic decision would not have been as serious for the West if the shortfall in Western oil imports from Russia had been offset through larger production, and hence exports, from other oil producers. But two of the oil producers are themselves under sanctions and would hardly be willing to help Western powers in their fight against Russia by producing more oil; and Saudi Arabia, despite being a close ally of the West, declined to raise its output, citing various logistical reasons. As a result, sanctions against Russia have lowered overall oil output and have boomeranged devastatingly on the West.

If the rouble price of oil is fixed, and can be kept fixed as Russia happens to be a major oil producer, while the dollar price of oil cannot be kept fixed, and has indeed risen, as the U.S. cannot overcome the demand-supply mis-match in the world oil market caused by sanctions, then the dollar effectively loses out to the rouble as a currency under the present de facto “oil standard”; this is exactly what has been happening.

Dollar woes: Bilateral arrangements

There is, however, an additional factor as well. The economic agents who hold dollars as their assets are of two kinds: private and public wealth holders; and central banks of different countries that hold dollar reserves. While the wealth-holders’ decision depends on expectations about the price of dollars, vis-à-vis both other currencies and also commodities, central banks’ decisions are influenced by an additional factor: since the dollar is the medium of transaction in much of world trade, they carry dollar reserves for settling accounts.

Now, one of the consequences of the sanctions against Russia has been the revival of bilateral payments arrangements between Russia and other countries, of the kind that used to exist between the Soviet Union and India in the old days. The dollar simply does not enter as the medium of transaction into such trade. In a bilateral arrangement between Russia and India, for instance, the exchange rate between the two currencies is fixed, and the balance of trade is simply held as a claim by one country upon the other. Such arrangements, therefore, eliminate the demand for dollars as a reserve currency, replacing it with a plethora of currencies, including the rouble.

A vegetable market in Madrid, a file photograph. Inflation in 19 European countries using the euro currency hits another record at 10 per cent as energy prices soar. | Photo Credit: Manu Fernandez/AP

It would be utterly premature, however, on the basis of the foregoing arguments, to start writing obituaries for the dollar. Dollar hegemony is certainly being challenged like never before in the last half-century but is nowhere near being replaced. Much of the world’s trade is still carried on with the dollar as the medium of transaction. Most of the world’s wealth-holders still see the dollar as a stable medium of holding wealth, and a move to the dollar as synonymous with “returning home”. True, the US is facing unprecedented inflation at the moment, but this problem, it is assumed with confidence, will be resolved at the expense of the working class (by engineering recession, and hence unemployment which reduces workers’ ex ante share in output and thereby controls inflation); and wealth-holders, needless to say, never shed tears over the fate of the working class.

An indication of this “returning home to the dollar” syndrome is provided by the other important development occurring in the world economy today. The interest rates in the US which had been close to zero for a long time are being jacked up as a means of controlling inflation (through ushering in a recession). This has the effect of sucking in finance from all over the world, especially from the third world countries, back to the US, causing a depreciation of their currencies vis-à-vis the dollar; the recent depreciation of the Indian rupee is part of this process.

To counter this outflow, the central banks in all these countries are also raising interest rates (and their governments will certainly pursue policies of fiscal austerity) which would transmit the recession of the “metropolis” to these countries. But even if such interest rate hikes stabilise their exchange rates vis-à-vis the dollar for a while (until the next round of exchange rate slides begins), the fact that the dollar continues to remain at the top of the hierarchy of currencies belonging to the rest of the world (leaving aside Russia for the moment) remains indubitable.

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Put differently, there are two different tendencies visible in world currency markets at the moment: one is the decline of the dollar vis-à-vis the rouble because of the sanctions against Russia that have backfired on the West; the other is the rise of the dollar vis-à-vis a host of other currencies because of the outflow of finance from countries of the third world to the U.S. The decline of the dollar on the one side is accompanied by its strengthening on the other. Paradoxically, the dollar has strengthened vis-à-vis the Chinese currency too in recent months.

I have so far discussed currency movements in purely economic terms, but the economic links are just mediations through which the underlying power relations make themselves felt. The hegemony of the pound sterling, arising proximately from the economic factors I have mentioned, such as expectations about its stability, was rooted in the reality of British colonialism which contributed to this stability in diverse ways. Likewise, the hegemony of the dollar was rooted in the reality of post-war American hegemony over the capitalist world as a whole (some have called it “American super-imperialism”).

The challenge to the position of the dollar we see today is in reality a challenge to this American hegemony over the world. In fact, the whole Ukraine war represents a major episode in this challenge, a crucial marker in the transition from a so-called “unipolar world” to a “multipolar world”. To believe that the dollar will remain forever hegemonic would be tantamount to believing that the current unipolar world will continue for ever. Democratic opinion, however, should wish not for a transition from one “pole” to just a few “poles”, but rather to a world where there are no “poles” at all, where countries come together through local, bilateral or multilateral arrangements to accept each other’s currencies for settling transactions among themselves.

Prabhat Patnaik is Professor Emeritus, Jawaharlal Nehru University.

The Crux

- The sanctions against Russia over the war in Ukraine are turning out to be counter productive for the United States and Europe.

- Among the self-goals scored by the West are Europe’s closure of factories because of the absence of Russian natural gas, not to mention Europe’s prospect of freezing in the coming winter months.

- Another self-goal is the weakening of the dollar, whose pre-eminence owed much to the stability of the dollar price of oil.

- The rouble price of oil can be kept fixed, as Russia happens to be a major oil producer, while the dollar price of oil cannot be kept fixed, and has indeed risen, as the U.S. cannot overcome the demand-supply mis-match in the world oil market caused by sanctions.

- The dollar is therefore effectively losing out to the rouble as a currency.

- One of the consequences of the sanctions against Russia has been the revival of bilateral payments arrangements between Russia and other countries, and the dollar does not enter as the medium of transaction into such trade.

- The fact that the dollar continues to remain at the top of the hierarchy of currencies belonging to the rest of the world (leaving aside Russia for the moment) remains indubitable.

- Yet, the dollar continues to remain at the top of the hierarchy of currencies belonging to much of the world.

- If the dollar has declined vis-à-vis the rouble, it has risen vis-à-vis a host of other currencies because of the outflow of finance from countries of the third world to the US.

Print edition : Oct 11, 2022 T+T-

India offers nuanced response to changing tides of the Ukraine war

Prime Minister Narendra Modi with Russian President Vladimir Putin at the Zvezda shipyard on September 4, 2019. For New Delhi, the Ukraine war has complicated its geopolitical calculation in many ways. Alexander Nemenov/Pool via REUTERS/File Photo | Photo Credit: REUTERS

The war dragging on and mounting pressure from the West appear to be behind India’s current stance.

Seven months into Russia’s war in Ukraine, New Delhi’s position on it has evolved. It appears today that there is a clear shift away from India’s (initial) subtle support for Russia. Going forward, India’s stand on the Ukraine war will depend on how and when the war ends ultimately.

For New Delhi, the Ukraine war has complicated its geopolitical calculation in more ways than one. First, it has frustrated India’s regional geopolitical interests. In the wake of the US withdrawal from Afghanistan in August 2021, India was keen on nurturing its interests in Afghanistan and Central Asia in cooperation with Russia. In fact, during President Vladimir Putin’s December 2021 visit to New Delhi, the two sides agreed on a number of joint projects in Central Asia and exchanged views on how to secure their respective interests in Afghanistan. This was significant, given the concern in New Delhi that the return of the Taliban to power would enable Pakistan and China to keep India out of Afghanistan and the larger region. Reaching out to old friend Russia was considered to be a way of overcoming the regional handicap after the US and its allies left Kabul in a hurry. However, the Russian invasion of Ukraine a few months later appears to have singlehandedly thwarted India’s “mission central Asia”, if not its interests in Kabul where New Delhi had exhibited great flexibility and reached out to the Taliban.

Secondly, the longer the war continues, the less able India will be to balance its relations with Russia and with the US-led coalition that is helping Ukraine resist the Russian invasion. Until the war started in February, India viewed Russia as a partner that would be helpful to have in the Asian continental theatre and as a steady defence supplier (even though the Russian share in India’s defence basket was already coming down). On the other hand, India looked at the US and its allies as helpful in the maritime domain in the Indo-Pacific in checking Chinese aggression. This useful balancing act that India adopted without too much pressure from either side came under immense stress immediately after the Russian attack on Ukraine.

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Thirdly, the ongoing war will further complicate India’s calculations regarding China. New Delhi knew that the growing Sino-Russian relations could potentially prevent Russia from standing by India in the event of a conflict with China. Yet, before the war there was hope that Russia might be in a position to mediate in a conflict between the two sides. More so since Russia itself was getting somewhat uneasy about the growing Chinese influence in its backyard, Central Asia. Russia, it was hoped, would increase its cooperation with India in its neighbourhood and in the broader region. The war has shattered both these hopes. A Russia weakened by the Ukraine war will not be able to either mediate between India and China or indirectly help India’s engagement of Eurasia, which will now be increasingly dominated by China.

Finally, the war has complicated India’s post-COVID economic recovery. Global oil prices have seen a steady rise since the February invasion of Ukraine. The cost of a barrel of brent crude stood at $99 on the day of the invasion. It rose by 25 per cent to $123 by the end of May. The global rise in crude oil prices has pushed up energy import bills. The war has also led to a significant outflow of foreign capital from India. In fact, the Indian rupee has witnessed considerable depreciation, and inflation has spiked. A particular concern has been the rise in food and commodity prices. The cumulative effect of the rising fuel prices, outflow of foreign investments, and the strengthening of the dollar has been the steady decline in the value of the rupee.

The evolving Indian position

India’s position on the Russia-Ukraine standoff has evolved over the years. When Russia invaded and subsequently annexed the Crimean peninsula in 2014, India’s stand was more sympathetic. National Security Adviser Shiv Shankar Menon said then: “We are watching what is happening in Ukraine with concern.... The broader issues of reconciling various interests [are] involved and there are, after all, legitimate Russian and other interests involved and we hope those are discussed, negotiated and there is a satisfactory resolution to them.”

India has come a long way from recognising the “legitimate interests” of all parties. In 2022, India put out a written explanation of its vote at the UN for the first time, which did not justify or support the Russian action. Thereafter various joint statements that India has issued with countries such as the US and Japan amply indicate that India is uneasy about the Russian aggression.

Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov with External Affairs Minister S. Jaishankar in Nusa Dua, Bali, Indonesia, where they held a bilateral meeting ahead of the G20 Foreign Ministers’ Meeting, on July 8, 2022. | Photo Credit: AP

During External Affairs Minister S. Jaishankar’s talks with Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov in early April, the Indian side “emphasised the importance of cessation of violence and ending hostilities. Differences and disputes should be resolved through dialogue and diplomacy and by respect for international law, UN Charter, sovereignty and territorial integrity of states.”

On April 6, Jaishankar stated in Parliament:  “We are, first and foremost, strongly against the conflict. We believe that no solution can be arrived at by shedding blood and at the cost of innocent lives. In this day and age, dialogue and diplomacy are the right answers to any disputes. And this should bear in mind that the contemporary global order has been built on the UN Charter, on respect for international law, and for the sovereignty and territorial integrity of all states. If India has chosen a side, it is the side of peace and it is for an immediate end to violence. This is our principled stand and it has consistently guided our position in international forums and debates including in the United Nations.”

India adopted a harsher tone on the civilian killings in Bucha. T.S. Tirumurti, India’s then permanent representative to the UN, told a meeting of the Security Council that reports of civilian killings in Bucha were “deeply disturbing. We unequivocally condemn these killings and support the call for an independent investigation.”

In another indication of India’s changing stance, Prime Minister Narendra Modi told President Putin on the sidelines of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) summit held in mid September in Samarkand, Uzbekistan: “I know that today’s era is not of war and we have spoken to you many times on the phone that democracy, diplomacy and dialogue are such things that touch the world.” Soon after, Jaishankar said at the United Nations Security Council in New York that the conflict was a matter of “profound concern” for the global community.

In other words, there has been a marked change in India’s response to the Ukraine war since February this year.

What explains India’s position?

First of all, let us understand what is not the rationale behind India’s refusal to outrightly condemn Russian aggression. It is, for one, not driven by any belief that Russia has a legitimate interest in Ukraine. Secondly, the Indian position is not a reflection of its view of values and norms in world politics. It is also not about creating a counternarrative against the US/West. Finally, the Indian position is not driven by the desire to procure discounted oil from Russia. What then is the rationale behind India’s position? I would argue that India’s position is a function of New Delhi’s perception of the national interest.

Indeed, New Delhi’s deft use of the rhetoric of “national interest” has, to a great extent, depressed criticism of its position both domestically and internationally. Jaishankar told Parliament that “India’s approach should be guided by our national beliefs and values, by our national interest and by a national strategy” and that India’s actions are driven by “legitimate pursuits of national interest”. He further said: “So what should India do in these circumstances? At the time when energy costs have spiked, clearly, we need to ensure that the common person in India is not subject to an additional and unavoidable burden. Similarly, fertilizer prices have a direct implication for the livelihoods of the majority of our population.”

This logic of national interest can be seen in the major geopolitical changes that are taking place in the broader region. New Delhi, in the context of these changes, feels it must be agile in its response to developments such as the Ukraine war. In particular, the US withdrawal from continental Asia and, to some extent, from West Asia, will, New Delhi reasons, will lead to a potential rise in China-led regional orders. Given that India is geographically located at the confluence of these geopolitical shifts, New Delhi while making its geopolitical choices, will need to keep in mind the US’ diminishing role and China’s rising influence in the region.

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In the broader region, India is caught in the whirlwind of a number of geopolitical contestations: China’s aggressive rise, displacing India from its traditional sphere of influence in South Asia and in the Indian Ocean region; the Taliban’s return in Afghanistan, where India suddenly finds itself friendless after having invested over US$3 billion in development assistance; the potential coming together of countries such as China, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iran and Russia to fill the regional power vacuum under Chinese leadership. All this has put India in an unenviable spot. Russia, perhaps, is the only country that is not unfriendly. While it may not go to the extent of opposing China in trying to help, India can ill afford another unfriendly neighbour in the region.

If India were to condemn Russia, it would end up with another hostile power in an already hostile neighbourhood. If it supported Russia, it would have lost the political and diplomatic support of the US and the West vis-à-vis China. New Delhi’s response to the Russian aggression against Ukraine appears to have been shaped by harsh geopolitical circumstances.

Looking forward

Its early position on the war, which reflected an intention to balance the two sides, was possibly shaped by a belief that the war would be a quick affair. However, with the war dragging on, Russia facing military reverses, and pressure mounting on India from its partners in the West, New Delhi appears to be slowly changing its stance. No doubt, this war will not only have implications for India-Russia relations but also for India’s geopolitical interests, particularly in continental Asia.

Happymon Jacob is Associate Professor, Centre for International Politics, Organisation and Disarmament, School of International Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi.

The Crux

- India’s position in the Russia Ukraine conflict is evolving and New Delhi seems to be moving away from the its initial implicit support of Russia.

- India was unable to outrightly condemn the invasion because of geopolitical considerations.

- India’s stand is dictated by what the government perceives as the national interest.

- The longer the war continues, the harder it will become for India to balance its relations with Russia and the US-led coalition that is helping Ukraine to resist Russian aggression.

Print edition : Oct 14, 2022 T+T-

Victory of Giorgia Meloni in Italy marks the return of fascists to power

Giorgia Meloni holds up a placard saying “Thank you Italy” at her party’s electoral headquarters in Rome on September 26. | Photo Credit: Gregorio Borgia

The win for Brothers of Italy is a shot in the arm for nationalist right-wing parties in Europe.

After nearly a century, the fascists have returned to power in Italy. On October 28, 1922, the fascists had marched to the capital Rome, forcing the king to send a telegram to Benito Mussolini inviting him to form the government. Mussolini ruled with an iron hand, tolerating no dissent for the next two decades. Many Italians, as is evident from the results of the latest election, have a lingering fondness for that era in which Italy was considered a major European power, with several colonies in the African continent.

In the election held on September 25, the neo-fascist Brothers of Italy (FdI) party together with its two far-right coalition partners decisively won the election. The FdI is a direct descendant of the Italian Social Movement (MSI) that was formed after the Second World War, under the auspices of the occupying Allied forces led by the US. Washington had allowed the defeated fascist party of Mussolini to regroup almost immediately after the end of the war in 1945.

Many of Mussolini’s close collaborators were let off by the US, which at the time was pre-occupied with the rising popularity of the Italian Communist Party (PCI), the most powerful communist party to emerge in western Europe after the war. Western intelligence agencies actively enlisted the help of the fascists and the Italian mafia to keep the PCI out. The US had employed similar tactics in post-war Japan and other countries where left-wing parties were strong. In Japan, war criminals and collaborators were pardoned and made leaders of the Liberal Democratic Party.

Turn of fortune

In this year’s Italian general election, a large number of voters chose to abstain, disillusioned with the wheeling and dealing of the major political parties in the last couple of years and the lack of a genuine progressive alternative. Usually, voter participation is very high in Italian elections, but this time only around 63 per cent of the electorate bothered to vote as against over 70 per cent last time. The turnout was especially low in the south where centrist opposition parties, including the populist Five Star Movement party, still have considerable influence.

A marble statue holding a fasces—a bundle of rods tied together around an axe—adopted by Italian dictator Benito Mussolini as a symbol of power, adorns the Stadio dei Marmi (‘Stadium of the Marbles’) in the sports complex, the Foro Italico, in Rome. | Photo Credit: Andrew Medichini

The Brothers of Italy led by Giorgia Meloni got over 26 per cent of the votes polled. The vote share of the main opposition party, the centre-left Democratic Party (PD), collapsed to a historic low of 19 per cent. The Five Star Movement bagged around 16 per cent of the votes. The victorious right-wing coalition got 46 per cent of the votes all around. Meloni’s two right-wing coalition partners are the Forza Italia led by the former Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi and the League Party led by another extreme right-winger, Matteo Salvini. Together, the coalition partners control both the upper and lower houses of the legislature.

It has been a dramatic turn of fortune for Meloni, who will be the first female Prime Minister of Italy. In the general election held four years ago, her party had won only a paltry 4 per cent of the votes cast. The leading right-wing figure in that election was Salvini. But he made the mistake of entering into a coalition with the Five Star Movement and later became part of a broader coalition under the leadership of the PD. That government consisting of disparate parties was very unpopular with the Italian public. The pandemic had devastated the economy; inflation and rising unemployment were other major factors.

ALSO READ:Star of the Italian far right

Meloni refused to join the coalition government and emerged as the main voice of the extreme right as well as the opposition in Italian politics. While Salvini’s League Party, formerly known as the Northern League, got a dismal 9 per cent of the votes this time, Forza Italia fared even worse, with around 8 per cent. But their support is crucial for Meloni to maintain her parliamentary majority. A leading figure in the PD, Debora Serracchiani, said that though the right wing has a majority in parliament today, it does not have the support of the majority in the country.

The Italian President plays a big role in the selection of the Prime Minister. The current President, Sergio Mattarella, had a crucial role in the formation of a centrist coalition government led by the technocrat Mario Draghi after the collapse of the government led by the Five Star Movement and the League. This time he has no option but to invite Meloni, and she is expected to be sworn in sometime in late October.

League leader Matteo Salvini, Forza Italia leader Silvio Berlusconi and Brothers of Italy leader Giorgia Meloni at the end of the electoral campaign rally of the centre-right’s coalition in Piazza del Popolo on September 22. | Photo Credit: YARA NARDI

When Meloni was still on the fringes of Italian politics, she made several racist comments and disparaged immigrants. She believes in the “great replacement theory”, a conspiracy theory propagated by the European Right that claims that the white population is being slowly but steadily replaced by non-Christian immigrants from Africa and other parts of the world.

She has mellowed only slightly. In a speech she delivered earlier in the year at a conference hosted by Vox, another far-right party which may soon come to power in Spain, Meloni spelt out her world view: “Yes to the natural family. No to the LGBT lobby, yes to sexual identity, no to gender ideology, yes to secure borders, no to mass migration. No to international finance, no to Brussels.” She had previously described European Union officials as agents of “nihilistic global elites driven by international finance”.

But when the likelihood of her becoming Prime Minister increased in recent months, Meloni changed tack. In August, she released a message in English, French and Spanish, saying that the Brothers of Italy party is more similar to the Conservative Party in the UK, the Republican Party in the US, and the Likud in Israel. But the party’s emblem is the same as that of the MSI, the successor of the fascist party. They have not bothered to change it in the last 70 years. Mussolini’s granddaughter, Rachele Mussolini, is a rising star in Meloni’s party.

American concerns

The Biden administration has serious concerns about the new government. Senior administration officials feel that there is a danger of the West’s unity on Ukraine fraying as the harsh European winter sets in. Meloni, along with Salvini and Berlusconi, had made laudatory statements on Russia and President Putin not too long ago. Meloni has a special relationship with Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban, another leader who is close to Putin. The Hungarian Prime Minister’s political adviser, Balazs Orban, was quick to congratulate Italy’s right-wing parties on their electoral victory. “We need more than ever friends who share a common vision and approach to meet Europe’s challenges,” he said.

In the US, the Trump wing of the Republican Party has been the most effusive in praise of the victory of fascist forces in Italy. Mike Pompeo, former Secretary of State, said that Italy “deserves strong conservative leadership”. The Trump administration’s policies on immigration and the banning of travellers from Muslim countries are much admired in right-wing circles in Europe. The Trump administration is, in fact, a role model for the putative authoritarian leaders raising their heads in Europe.

Supporters of Brothers of Italy party at rally in Rome on September 22. | Photo Credit: Mauro Scrobogna

There will be pressure on the new government to reassess its policies vis-a-vis Russia as the economic situation in Italy deteriorates. Berlusconi recently defended Russia’s decision to launch its “special operations” in Ukraine, while Salvini questioned Western sanctions on Russia. Italians, like their compatriots in other parts of western Europe, are likely to face a very cold winter as a result of Moscow cutting off energy supplies to most EU nations. Energy prices started soaring soon after the conflict in Ukraine started. In the coming months they are expected to soar even further.

In recent statements, Meloni has sworn fealty to the EU but until last year, she was advocating the withdrawal of Italy from the bloc to “regain” Italian sovereignty. Berlusconi has threatened to walk away from the coalition if attempts are made to distance the country from the EU. In 2014 Meloni had said that the time had come for Italy to leave the Eurozone; now she is only demanding that Brussels renegotiate the terms of the 20 billion euro loan the EU extended to Italy in the wake of the pandemic. The Italian economy is already the second most indebted in the Eurozone.

Meloni stressed that she will continue supporting the government in Ukraine and the US-led moves to defeat Russia on the battlefield. The new right-wing government, according to most Italian and European commentators, is unlikely to re-calibrate relations with the EU at this juncture. Ursula von der Leyen, the EU chief, had issued a warning before Italians went to the polls stating that Brussels had “the tools” to deal with Italy if it went in the wrong direction.

It will be immigrants and the LGBTQIA+ community that will be targeted in the short term by the new government. Meloni has said that she wants to impose a naval blockade on Libya to stop refugees from entering European waters.

In her first speech after the election results were out, Meloni said she would rule on behalf of all Italians, irrespective of their political affiliations. But far-right rulers all over the world, once in power, tend to ride roughshod over press freedom, an independent judiciary, and other checks and balances. Within the EU, this trend has been evident in countries like Poland and Hungary.

European trend

The election results are the latest shot in the arm for the resurgent nationalist right-wing parties in Europe, which are gearing up to take power in other key European nations. In Sweden, an upstart extreme right-wing party, the Sweden Democrats, came second in the polls held in August. They are lending outside support to the right-wing government which has displaced the Social Democrats. Twenty-two per cent of first-time voters aged between 18 and 21 cast their votes for the Sweden Democrats, a party with clearly established neo-Nazi links. Sweden, which produced leaders like Olof Palme and is the birth country of Greta Thunberg, is on the verge of becoming like Hungary and Poland, where immigrants are unwelcome and Islam-bashing is popular.

In neighbouring Finland, the ultra-right is surging. In the last general election, the nationalist True Finns party running on an anti-immigration platform, won 20 per cent of the votes. Both Sweden and Finland till recently were not part of NATO. After the Ukraine conflict started, both countries formally joined NATO.

ALSO READ:Growing threat of racism and xenophobia

In the Czech Republic, which is also heading for the polls, a right-wing party with ideology similar to that of the ruling Fidesz party in Hungary, is gaining ground. As in other European countries, inflation and the high cost of living have sent many Czechs below the poverty line and into the arms of populist right-wing parties. As in countries like France and Italy, it is the working class and the poor who once used to vote for the left, who have shifted to the right. Earlier this year, the French far right under the leadership of Marine Le Pen put up its most impressive show so far, getting more than 40 per cent of the votes in the final round of the presidential election. In the election to the national assembly her party emerged as the second biggest opposition bloc.

In Spain, the Vox has made tremendous gains and is now the third biggest party in the country. Many observers feel that it is only a matter of time before the party emerges as the biggest in Spain. The Alternative for Germany (AfD), another party with neo-Nazi links, has set the political agenda in Germany on key issues like immigration. It has been consistently polling around 10 per cent of the votes in national elections since 2017 when it first entered the Bundestag.

The Ukrainian government is dominated by the far right. The Azov regiment doing much of the fighting has not shied away from displaying its Nazi emblems. Leading members of the Azov brigade were welcomed recently by US Congressmen and Biden administration officials during an official visit to the US. The extreme right is expected to do well in Bulgaria, another EU member state, where election is scheduled to be held in October.

Fascist and xenophobic governments are acceptable to the Western elite as long as they are anti-Russia and anti-China. A similar attitude was prevalent a century ago. Leading politicians, including Winston Churchill, initially expressed admiration for the fascists. The consequences of treating fascists and racists with kid gloves have proved to be calamitous for humanity in the past. History could repeat itself.

The Crux

- On September 25 , the neo-fascist Brothers of Italy (FdI) party with its two far-right coalition partners won the election in Italy.

- The FdI is a direct descendant of the Italian Social Movement (MSI) formed after the Second World War.

- It has been a dramatic turn of fortune for Meloni, who will be the first female Prime Minister of Italy.

- When Meloni was still on the fringes of Italian politics, she made several racist comments and disparaged immigrants.

- The election results in Italy are the latest shot in the arm for the resurgent nationalist right-wing parties in Europe, which are gearing up to take power in other key European nations.

Print edition : Oct 11, 2022 T+T-

Politics

- The rise and fall of the Popular Front of India

- BJP rule in Karnataka: Corruption Inc.

- ‘Bharat Jodo Yatra is not an outreach programme’: Pawan Khera

- Congress president elections: A case of fragile unity

- Are Uddhav Thackeray and his Shiv Sena fighting a losing battle?

The rise and fall of the Popular Front of India

Outside the PFI office in Navi Mumbai on September 22 when the National Investigation Agency held a raid on its offices in 11 States. | Photo Credit: PTI

While a large majority supports the ban on PFI, some question the vague justifications given for it.

When the Union government banned the Popular Front of India (PFI) and its associate organisations on September 27, it was not the first time that a government was doing so. On February 21, 2018, the then Bharatiya Janata Party government in Jharkhand banned it saying that some of its members were internally influenced by the ISIS. The State government imposed the ban under Section 16 of the Criminal Law Amendment Act, 1908.

In August 2018, the Jharkhand High Court revoked the ban noting that the State had not followed due procedure before announcing the ban. The PFI worked on the grey areas of the law, technicalities and lacunae in the administrative and judicial system, and the lack of diligence on the part of police personnel in preparing the grounds for the ban and managed to stay ‘legal’.

The PFI, like the Rashtriya Swayamsewak Sangh (RSS), maintains no formal membership, has not contested for political office, and claims to have been founded for social and religious work. Hence, law-enforcement agencies have found it difficult to track down its members although its activists are said to be responsible for heinous acts. Chopping off the arms of T.J. Joseph, a Kerala professor, in 2010, alleging blasphemy, was a particularly gruesome act of theirs.

This time, ahead of banning the organisation for five years, the National Investigation Agency conducted a series of raids, and Government of India officials worked through the night to publish the gazette notification just before 6 a.m. on September 27. “The Central government… is of the firm opinion that it is necessary to declare the PFI and its associates or affiliates or fronts as unlawful association with immediate effect…,” said the notification signed by Praveen Vashista, Additional Secretary in the Ministry of Home Affairs.

Reasons for the ban

The ban was necessary, it stated, because the organisation would “(I) continue its subversive activities thereby disturbing public order and undermining the constitutional set-up of the country; (ii) encourage and enforce terror-based regressive regime; (iii) continue propagating anti-national sentiments and radicalise a particular section of society with the intention to create disaffection against the country; and (iv) aggravate activities which are detrimental to integrity, security and sovereignty of the country.”

Surprisingly, the political arm of the PFI, the Social Democratic Party of India (SDPI), which claimed that it had no ties with the PFI, was not banned. Affiliate organisations that were banned include the Rehab India Foundation, the Rehab Foundation, Kerala, the Campus Front of India, the All India Imams Council, the National Confederation of Human Rights Organisations, the National Women’s Front, the Junior Front, and the Empower India Foundation.

The Union government listed seven reasons to ban the group: (1) The PFI was involved in several criminal and terror cases, disrespected constitutional authority, received funds from abroad, and posed a major threat to national security; (2) its cadre repeatedly engaged in violent and subversive acts; (3) they were responsible for several terrorist acts and the murder of 10 persons between 2016 and 2022 done in order to disturb peace; (4) it had linkages with the ISIS and the Jamat-ul-Mujahideen Bangladesh; (5) its office-bearers sought to raise funds through banking channels and hawala, and route these funds in suspicious ways; (6) it did not function according to its objectives and its sources of funds were not supported by the financial profile of account holders; and (7) Uttar Pradesh, Karnataka, and Gujarat had recommended a ban on the PFI.

These reasons, according to PFI representatives and political parties that do not support the BJP, were too broad and vague and could apply to many organisations, especially Hindutva organisations, which still function with impunity in India. The murder of 10 persons, they say, cannot form the basis for banning an outfit and claim that in some cases in Kerala and Karnataka the murders have been retaliatory in nature.

Retaliatory murders

On April 15 this year, A. Subair, 44, the PFI’s Elappully (Palakkad district) area president and a member of the SDPI, was killed outside a mosque. The BJP and the RSS claimed innocence. Local police said that a vehicle left behind by Subair’s killers was registered in the name of Sanjith, a Sangh Parivar activist, who was killed last November, allegedly by PFI and SDPI members.

On PFI Ban

The Polit Bureau of the Communist Party of India (Marxist) has issued the following statement:https://t.co/97Eash5xC6

— CPI (M) (@cpimspeak) September 28, 2022

Just a day after Subair’s murder, an RSS hand S.K. Sreenivasan, 45, was killed in broad daylight by five men in his shop in Melamuri in Palakkad, a Sangh Parivar stronghold.

The ruling Left Democratic Front (LDF) warned that the retaliatory killings would escalate to a point of no return. In a statement, the CPI(M) Polit Bureau said: “The PFI and the RSS have been engaged in killings and retaliatory killings in Kerala and coastal Karnataka, vitiating the atmosphere, with a view to create communal polarisation. There are also extremist organisations like the Sanatan Sanstha and the Hindu Janajagruti Samiti, elements of whom have been implicated in the killings of noted secular writers and personalities.”

Presence in Kerala

The PFI is most visible in Kerala, where Muslim-oriented political parties have been part of the ruling dispensation from the time of the formation of the State. Just as in other parts of the country, Muslim youth began looking for options outside these political parties, the Indian Union Muslim League (IUML) and the Indian National League (INL), which many perceived as status quoists and who did not stand for the uplift of the poor and the downtrodden Muslims.

The PFI came into being in 2006 with the merger of the Karnataka Forum for Dignity and the National Development Front. Its stated goal was to empower people to ensure justice, freedom and security. In 2009, the SDPI was formed; its aim was to become the political voice of Muslims, Dalits, and other marginalised communities. It gained traction in south Tamil Nadu and in some parts of Kerala, apart from coastal Karnataka.

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In 2018, the SDPI won 121 local body seats in coastal Karnataka. By the next round of elections, in 2021, it managed to win three local councils in Udupi. At the Legislative Assembly level, while it has made some impact, the SDPI is yet to win a seat.

Significantly, the PFI and the SDPI took opposing stands on the issue of women visiting the Sabarimala temple. The PFI claimed that the Supreme Court ruling permitting women entry into Sabarimala in October 2018 was an interference in the religious matter of Hindus. The SDPI welcomed the court order.

Both the LDF and the United Democratic Front governments in Kerala have opposed the activities of the PFI, which they felt were only adding fuel to the communal fire in Kerala. In 2012, the UDF government told the High Court that the PFI was “nothing but a resurrection of the banned outfit Students Islamic Movement of India [SIMI]”.

Muslim parties’ responses

While I have always opposed PFI's approach and supported democratic approach, this ban on PFI cannot be supported

— Asaduddin Owaisi (@asadowaisi) September 28, 2022

All India Majlis-E-Ittehadul Muslimeen leader Asaduddin Owaisi claimed that he opposed the PFI’s approach, but “this ban cannot be supported”. In a tweet, he noted: “A draconian ban of this kind is dangerous as it is a ban on any Muslim who wishes to speak his mind. The way India’s electoral autarky is approaching fascism, every Muslim youth will now be arrested with a PFI pamphlet under India’s black law, UAPA [Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act].”

The IUML, which has been steadily losing ground to the PFI in Kerala, reacted with caution. The party’s senior leader and MLA M.K. Muneer said that the ban may not “solve all problems” because, in the past, after such a ban, leaders simply changed the name of the outfit. He also raised the question of Hindu fundamentalist organisations.

In a statement, Manithaneya Makkal Katchi leader M.H. Jawahirullah said that it was possible that some members of an organisation took part in illegal activities but the solution for this was not to ban it. Such a ban was against the basic principles of democratic functioning, he said.

The Crux

- On September 27, the Union government banned the Popular Front of India (PFI) and its associate organisations.

- Affiliate organisations that are banned include the Rehab India Foundation, the Rehab Foundation, Kerala, the Campus Front of India, the All India Imams Council, the National Confederation of Human Rights Organisations, the National Women’s Front, the Junior Front, and the Empower India Foundation.

- Some see the reasons given for the ban as too broad and vague and which could apply to many organisations, especially Hindutva organisations.

Print edition : Oct 11, 2022 T+T-

BJP rule in Karnataka: Corruption Inc.

A rally in Belagavi on April 29 against the alleged corruption in the BJP government.  | Photo Credit: BADIGER PK

Ahead of elections in 2023, a look at how Yediyurappa and Bommai have played their respective hands.

Although Karnataka is considered the Bharatiya Janata Party’s (BJP) “gateway to the south”, the party has never been able to come to power in the State with a clear mandate. The only time it managed to stay in power and complete its term was between 2008 and 2013, when it used “Operation Lotus” to lure independents and opposition MLAs after falling short of the majority to form a stable government. The man who engineered this strategy at the time was the party’s long-time mass leader B.S. Yediyurappa.

The Lingayat strongman repeated this in a far more dramatic and spectacular way in 2019, when he lured 17 MLAs of the Janata Dal (Secular) and the Congress to form the government.

From the beginning of his tenure, it was clear that Yediyurappa had a strained relationship with the BJP’s central leadership. At 76 then, he was well past the unofficial age limit of 75 for occupying active positions in the BJP. What also set Yediyurappa apart from other BJP Chief Ministers at the time was the fact that he had single-handedly built up the party in Karnataka over the previous two decades by anchoring it among Lingayats and gaining support from sections of the backward castes, the Scheduled Castes, and the Scheduled Tribes. He did so without resorting to the hawkish allure of Hindutva in an era that preceded the meteoric rise of Narendra Modi and Amit Shah.

B.S. Yediyurappa is credited with building the party without resorting to the hawkish allure of Hindutva in an era before the rise of Narendra Modi and Amit Shah. | Photo Credit: The Hindu Archives

Even during his most recent tenure as Chief Minister, Yediyurappa engaged in only two actions that can be considered to have been dictated by Hindutva interests: first, he cancelled the celebrations associated with the birthday of 18th century Mysore ruler Tipu Sultan; and second, he ensured the passage of the Karnataka Prevention of Slaughter and Preservation of Cattle Act. To his credit, he ensured that the more rabid elements within the BJP did not run amok during his tenure.

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Saddled with three Deputy Chief Ministers against his will and a part of his tenure imperilled by the COVID pandemic, Yediyurappa lurched from one crisis to the other while stubbornly holding on to his chair even as he made ineffective policy interventions. He also had to ward off dissidence within the party and deal with neophyte MLAs who had joined the BJP solely for the prospect of power.

The Yediyurappa stint was also marked by charges of corruption and accusations that his son, B.Y. Vijayendra, was interfering in party affairs. In a widely criticised move, he also set up the Veerashaiva-Lingayat Development Corporation for the benefit of his dominant fellow caste members even though such boards have in the past been set up only for marginalised caste groups. It was in these circumstances that Yediyurappa resigned as Chief Minister after two years in power, but not before he ensured that a fellow Lingayat succeeded him.

Bommai’s tenure

When Basavaraj Bommai emerged as the dark horse Chief Minister in July 2021, political journalists expected that aggressive communalism, as seen in other BJP-ruled States, would remain contained in the State. They wrote extensively about the antecedents of Bommai, and his father, S.R. Bommai, who was a staunch socialist influenced by the radical humanist M.N. Roy. These commentators supported their argument by pointing out that Basavaraj Bommai was initiated into politics in the company of secular Janata parivar stalwarts such as Ramakrishna Hegde and J.H. Patel.

Basavaraj Bommai, Chief Minister. Communal temperature has risen during his tenure. | Photo Credit: MURALI KUMAR K

Bommai, also a Lingayat, is a three-time MLA from Shiggaon in Haveri district, and his appointment seemed to signify that the politics of caste had triumphed over the politics of communalism in Karnataka once again. Even though members of the politically dominant and numerically significant Lingayat community are reputed to be ardent BJP supporters, Bommai was not a home-grown leader of the BJP with roots in the Rashtriya Swayamsewak Sangh (RSS) but had only moved over to the saffron party from the Janata Dal (United) in 2008. Given this legacy, political observers felt that Bommai would not easily toe the hard right-wing line.

In contrast, Bommai’s tenure has seen a consistent rise in the communal temperature. This has been accompanied by serious allegations of corruption against his government. While corruption charges were levelled against the Yediyurappa government too, they have escalated now, with the opposition and ordinary people derisively referring to the government as the “40 per cent sarkara [government]”, alluding to the percentage of bribes demanded by elected representatives of the ruling party.

Muzaffar Assadi, professor of political science at the University of Mysore, said, “There is a premise that large-scale corruption cannot take place along with the aggressive spread of a communal ideology. Yediyurappa’s tenure was marked by a series of corruption allegations but there was no state endorsement of a communal ideology. Bommai’s tenure has seen the aggressive implementation of Hindutva ideology and large-scale systematic corruption go hand in hand.”

Contractor allegations

D. Kempanna, the 80-year-old president of the Karnataka State Contractors’ Association (KSCA), representing more than one lakh Class I and II contractors, has made shocking allegations of corruption against the government. According to him, the amount of bribes given to various elected representatives and officials across government departments has skyrocketed since the BJP government came to power in the State in 2019.

“There was corruption earlier too, but it was restricted to 5-10 per cent of the project cost; now it is 35-40 per cent. We have written to Prime Minister Narendra Modi [in 2021], the Governor, Chief Ministers [both Yediyurappa and Bommai] and other important political leaders regarding this issue, but it has not had any effect,” said Kempanna. “Before we even do the puja to commence any project such as road works or any other work allotted to us, we are supposed to pay 10-15 per cent of the project cost as bribe to the MLAs. When the tender is approved, we have to pay 3 to 4 per cent of the cost. Similarly, graft has to be paid at every level as the project progresses. To get the payment due to us after completing the work, we have to pay a bribe of 5 to 10 per cent. Totally, it comes up to around 35 to 40 per cent of the project cost.”

Congress leaders Siddaramaiah and D.K. Shivakumar pasting a ‘PayCM’ poster, targeting Basavaraj Bommai during a protest against the government over alleged corruption, in Bengaluru on September 23. | Photo Credit: PTI

Corruption exists in all departments, and rules regarding the tendering process are not followed, he said. “How will contractors do quality work?” Kempanna asked, pointing to how Bengaluru’s infrastructure collapsed in parts during the recent heavy rains. The name of Santosh Patil, a contractor from Belagavi district, came up often. Patil committed suicide in April this year alleging non-payment of dues and blaming Rural Development and Panchayati Raj Minister K.S. Eshwarappa, who later resigned.

Government circular

Members of the KSCA raised their concerns with Bommai in April. Following this, the Finance Department issued a circular stating that there should be greater transparency in the procedure for calling tenders and the payments made to contractors. This official order has not been implemented, said Kempanna.

“Instead of addressing the issue, the Chief Minister and other Ministers are accusing us [KSCA] of having a political agenda and are dividing our association. One of the Ministers said he intended to file a defamation case against me. Let him do that, I welcome the move and we will reveal all our evidence of corruption in the court,” said Kempanna. (Since this interview was conducted, Horticulture Minister Muniratna has filed a defamation suit against 19 members of the KSCA.)

Asked why he was not showing proofs of corruption in his possession, Kempanna said, “Do you get a receipt when you pay a bribe? No! In spite of this, we have managed to gather evidence of graft in 30-40 cases. If the evidence is revealed now, the contractors who have trusted us with this material will be targeted. Let the government appoint a commission of inquiry and we will ensure that all the evidence is provided to it.” He admitted that corruption had always existed, but the extent to which it has risen now is what compelled the KSCA to go public.

Other charges

Members of the Registered Unaided Private Schools Management Association in Karnataka have also spoken out against corruption in the Education Department. In another case, the government was embarrassed when it came to light that senior police officials were involved in a recruitment scam to rig the examination for the appointment of Sub Inspectors. This was alleged to be done in collusion with BJP Ministers.

“Corruption has been a serious issue for the BJP in the past in Karnataka, and Yediyurappa had to step down as Chief Minister [in 2011] because of allegations of corruption, said A. Narayana, political commentator. “BJP members have been waiting to come to power for many years and the party’s profile has changed. In the past, it was people like the Reddy brothers [Ballari-based iron ore mining barons] who were known for their corrupt practices, but this time even those MLAs whom the BJP has lured from the Congress and the JD(S) want to make money.”

Citing the case of the contractors, Narayana said: “Contractors are the geese that lay golden eggs. It is a symbiotic relationship, but for the first time in the country, contractors have come out against a government because they are fed up. Can you imagine the level of graft being demanded in such a scenario? The BJP is killing the goose that lays the golden egg.”

Communal distractions

Assadi believes the rise in communal tensions since Bommai took over is “a tried and tested strategy of the BJP to distract the people’s attention from issues of corruption and misgovernance”. The number of flashpoints in the past year has increased to the point where each instance can be summed up in a single word: hijab, halal, boycott, anti-conversion, textbook, murders, Idgah maidan.

Bommai’s attitude towards the rising cases of Hindutva vigilante activism became clear early in his tenure, when in October last year he justified these instances by calling them a “reaction”.

The spate of attacks on churches by Hindutva groups such as the Bajrang Dal and the Vishwa Hindu Parishad towards the end of 2021 was reportedly not investigated thoroughly as a consensus was being built for the passage of the Karnataka Right to Freedom of Religion Bill, or what is popularly known as the anti-conversion law. It was passed in December 2021 in the Legislative Assembly and in the Legislative Council in September this year.

ALSO READ:Communal cauldron

The disturbances around the wearing of hijab in classrooms began at one government college in Udupi, but the situation spiralled in February when the government issued a government order (GO) banning all garments and accessories that were not part of the prescribed uniform.

The GO thus created a false equivalence between Muslim girls who wear headscarves as part of their faith and Hindu students who took to wearing saffron shawls as a counter-measure.

Next, Hindutva organisations issued calls to boycott Muslim traders in temple fairs in coastal Karnataka and districts in the Malnad region of the State. Around the time of Ugadi celebrations in April, a calculated effort was made by the Hindu Janajagruti Vedike to ensure that Hindus shunned halal meat; many of them cook a special non-vegetarian meal to celebrate the festival.

Muslim girls wearing the hijab and Hindu students wearing saffron shawls to counter them outside MGM Pre University and MGM Degree colleges in Udupi on February 8, 2022.  | Photo Credit: By SPECIAL ARRANGEMENT

Around the same time, the government also effected major changes in school textbooks in the State. Certain revised chapters are said to further the Hindu supremacist ideas of the RSS.

Three communally provoked murders took place in Dakshina Kannada district in July. Of the three victims, two were Muslim, while one, Praveen Nettaru, was Hindu. Bommai chose to visit only Nettaru’s family and even compensated them monetarily. Hindutva groups have also made concerted efforts to take over the Chamarajapet Idgah Maidan, which has historically been used by the Muslim community for congregational Eid prayers.

Aggressive Hindutva

Speaking to Frontline, P.S. Jayaramu, former professor of political science at Bangalore University, said, “Looking at all these developments, it is clear that the Bommai government’s larger design is to win the 2023 Assembly election by aggressively advancing the Hindutva agenda, but I wonder whether Bommai has ever thought about how history will judge him.”

According to Assadi, Bommai has failed to contain both corruption and communalism and is, by his silence, tacitly supporting both. “For the first time in the history of Karnataka, we have a symbolic leader. He does not have an independent voice; he cannot even shuffle his Cabinet or remove or appoint a single Minister,” he said.

The BJP seems to be increasingly on the defensive. The fact that it felt compelled to bring back Yediyurappa, who was relegated to an undefined role after his resignation, as a member of the BJP’s national parliamentary board and central election committee since August this year is a clear indication of the pressure on the party to also assuage the Lingayats before the elections.

The Crux

- In his tenure, B.S. Yediyurappa lurched from one crisis to the other while stubbornly holding on to his chair even as he made ineffective policy interventions.

- Although he cancelled the celebrations associated with the birthday of 18th century Mysore ruler Tipu Sultan; and ensured the passage of the Karnataka Prevention of Slaughter and Preservation of Cattle Act, he ensured that the more rabid elements within the BJP did not run amok during his tenure.

- In contrast, Bommai’s tenure has seen a consistent rise in the communal temperature.

- While corruption charges were levelled against the Yediyurappa government too, they have escalated now. The government is derisively referred to as the “40 per cent sarkara [government]”, alluding to the percentage of bribes demanded by elected representatives of the ruling party.

Print edition : Oct 11, 2022 T+T-

‘Bharat Jodo Yatra is not an outreach programme’: Pawan Khera

Pawan Khera. | Photo Credit: The Hindu Archives

The Congress spokesperson says the Bharat Jodo Yatra is a movement of Indians to reclaim India.

Rajasthan goes to the polls next year as does Karnataka.  In June, the Congress appointed Pawan Khera as chairman of the party’s Media and Publicity Committee. A popular face in the media, Khera has been accompanying Rahul Gandhi on the 3,500-kilometre Bharat Jodo Yatra. Khera describes the yatra as a movement of Indians to reclaim India, with the Congress serving as a facilitator. In an interview to Frontline, he spoke about why the yatra should not be seen solely from the point of view of elections. Excerpts:

What does the Bharat Jodo Yatra hope to achieve in concrete terms?

Processes do not have an immediate tangible outcome. The Bharat Jodo Yatra seeks to highlight the record unemployment, stark economic disparities, social polarisation, and over-centralisation of political power that India is witnessing. This isn’t just an outreach programme of a political party. The Bharat Jodo Yatra is a movement of Indians to reclaim India. The Congress is a facilitator of the movement.

There has been criticism on the unequal spread of the campaign, with the duration of the yatra being longer in the southern States than in the north, where the party historically has had a sizeable organisational and electoral presence.

The criticism on the duration in the various States is misplaced. How else does one do a Kanyakumari to Kashmir yatra?

ALSO READ:A case of fragile unity

If the Congress’ main opposition in ideological and other terms is the BJP, does it not make political sense to regain lost ground and concentrate on States where the party needs to rejuvenate itself?

To bring in elections as an objective of the yatra would be to limit the scope and vision of the Bharat Jodo Yatra.

The Finance Minister reportedly said that the reforms of the 1990s were half-baked. The BJP wants to implement comprehensive reforms. Does your party agree with the BJP formula of reforms or is it time to undo the baggage of the legacy of economic reforms that many believe has brought the Congress to this pass and is responsible for the state of the economy today?

The Finance Minister’s comments on the 1991 reforms come from a person who has zero understanding of either the economy or reforms. We have seen the mess she has made of an economy that not just saw double digit GDP but also saw 23 million people being lifted above the poverty line under Dr Manmohan Singh.

What has changed in the Indian masses that they will gravitate towards the Congress? The Aam Aaadmi Party is, rightly or wrongly, seen as an alternative to the Congress in BJP-ruled States. Then there are the regional parties.

Voters have a right to experiment with their choices. Having given two opportunities to the Narendra Modi government, people feel cheated when they see the 45-year record high unemployment; when they see the government indulging in full-time blitzkrieg and part-time governance; when they see insensitive handling of dissent; when they see state-sponsored polarisation at play.

ALSO READ:Bharat Jodo Yatra the Congress gamechanger?

The organisational elections have also become a talking point. The timing coincides with the Bharat Jodo Yatra. Though the two seem unconnected, is it possible the yatra may have an inadvertent effect in sorting out the grey areas in leadership issues?

The Bharat Jodo Yatra and the election of the Congress president have no bearing on each other whatsoever.

Print edition : Oct 12, 2022 T+T-

Congress president elections: A case of fragile unity

Mallikarjun Kharge, flanked by Digvijay Singh and Ashok Gehlot, files his nomination papers for the post of party president at the AICC headquarters in New Delhi on September 30.  | Photo Credit: Ravi Choudhary/PTI

Nobody knows where Shashi Tharoor’s caravan will lead in the contest against Mallikarjun Kharge.

Organisational elections of political parties may be internal affairs, but in the age of 24x7 television and social media, they are more in the public eye than ever. This is more so when the party concerned has governed India for more than six decades. In the election for the post of Congress president, the media focus has been on whether a member of the Nehru-Gandhi family will continue to occupy the top post.

On September 30, that question was answered with the filing of three nominations, proposed and seconded multiple times as an indicator of widespread intra-party support, and none of them was a Gandhi. The three contestants were former Union Minister and Leader of the Opposition in the Rajya Sabha Mallikarjun Kharge, Thiruvananthapuram MP Shashi Tharoor, and former Minister from Jharkhand K.N. Tripathi. Tripathi’s nomination was rejected at the scrutiny stage. On October 17, Pradesh Congress Committee delegates will vote to elect either Kharge or Tharoor as party president provided neither withdraws his nomination, the last date for which is October 8.

On September 28, senior leader Digvijay Singh declared that he would file his nomination papers as well. Tharoor, who by then had announced his candidature, described it as a friendly contest. He shared a photograph of himself and Digvijay Singh in a fraternal embrace. A day later, Digvijay declared he would not contest.

Kharge and G-23 support

Indications are that a consensus might emerge in favour of Kharge and that a contest might not happen. However, for a party that once had a pan-India presence, it was perhaps important to have at least one nomination from the Hindi-speaking belt to correct the regional imbalance. Tharoor is from Kerala and Kharge is from Karnataka.

Shashi Tharoor filing the nomination papers at AICC in Delhi on September 30. | Photo Credit: SUSHIL KUMAR VERMA

It was not lost on anyone that there was a marked difference when the candidates filed their nominations. Leaders like Digvijay Singh and many from the Group of 23, or G-23, which had pushed for organisational reforms, were among those who proposed Kharge’s nomination. The G-23, which includes Tharoor, was led by Ghulam Nabi Azad; Azad left the party eventually.

ALSO READ:Congress in survival battle

Kharge was accompanied by an entourage of top Congress leaders, including G-23 members, whereas Tharoor had mostly party workers cheering for him. After filing his nomination, Tharoor held a press conference to stress that he represented change while Kharge (for whom he expressed deep respect) stood for the status quo.

Speculation is rife that the multiple nominations were simply a form of posturing to show that the party respected everyone’s right to contest and that there could be more than one alternative to the Gandhis. Interestingly, none of the Gandhis appeared personally when the three leaders filed their nominations, which also happened to be the day when Rahul Gandhi and his Bharat Jodo Yatra entered Karnataka.

Rebellion in Rajasthan

The week before the nominations was marked by rebellion in the State unit of the Congress in Rajasthan. For almost a month, it was assumed that three-time Rajasthan Chief Minister Ashok Gehlot was the preferred choice for the Congress president’s post, and he played along with this perception. Considered a loyalist, the low-profile Gehlot was portrayed as one who was close to the Gandhis. He had risen from the ranks and steered the party for nearly three decades.

He, however, took some things for granted. He was perhaps given the impression that he could hold two posts, that of Chief Minister and party president. This impression was dispelled when Rahul Gandhi publicly declared, during his yatra, that there was no going back on the resolution adopted at the party’s Udaipur conclave that no one could hold more than one post. The reiteration of the principle of one man, one post conveyed a message. Maybe this served as the catalyst for the developments that unfolded in the last week of September.

In the first place, many aspects were unclear when Ashok Gehlot’s name began doing the rounds for the Congress president’s post. One point was who would be appointed Chief Minister if Gehlot moved to the centre. Rajasthan and Chhattisgarh are the only two States that have a Congress government. It was evident that the party could ill afford to take a chance in installing someone in Jaipur who did not enjoy the confidence of the legislators. Once it became clear that Gehlot, despite his wishes, could not be both Chief Minister and party president, the stage was set for a putsch by legislators close to Gehlot, presumably with his approval.

ALSO READ:‘The process will be fair, transparent’

Two central observers, Mallikarjun Kharge and Ajay Maken, who is the general secretary in charge of Rajasthan, were deputed to oversee the smooth transition of leadership in the State. The Congress Legislature Party (CLP) was to meet at a place and time in consultation with Gehlot as chair and find a successor to his post by consensus. Both the place and time were fixed, but Gehlot did not turn up. Instead, legislators close to him, three of whom were to get show cause notices later, held a parallel meeting.

The observers had hoped that the CLP would pass, as was usual, a one-line resolution empowering Congress president Sonia Gandhi to appoint a new Chief Minister from among the legislators. However, no meeting was held and the observers returned empty-handed, but not before publicly pointing out that it was an act of indiscipline.

Gehlot’s show of strength

Gehlot had for all practical purposes sabotaged the meeting. The apprehension that he and his band of loyalists expressed, and not without reason, was that their bete-noire, former Deputy Chief Minister Sachin Pilot, would be installed in Gehlot’s place, nixing Gehlot’s own chances of retaining the post or of appointing someone close to him in the Chief Minister’s chair. All this left the central leadership red-faced.

Meanwhile, Gehlot’s supporters in the party told the media that they would not tolerate someone who had betrayed the party for the top post in the State, in a reference to Sachin Pilot’s rebellion in 2020. They placed conditions that the observers found unreasonable. It was also a show of strength by Gehlot’s loyalists to convey that irrespective of what the central command felt, he was not dispensable as far as the State Congress was concerned. It was a clear ploy to scuttle any chances of one, Sachin Pilot becoming Chief Minister; two, of Gehlot moving to the centre; and three, of the possibility of anyone other than a Gehlot loyalist occupying the Chief Minister’s post.

It did not matter that they themselves had engineered a rebellion, not very different from what Sachin Pilot was accused of doing in 2020. He had refused to attend a CLP meeting, defied a party whip and stayed away with his own band of loyalists, giving rise to speculation that he was in touch with the BJP. Although the issue was settled, Gehlot and his former deputy were not on cordial terms. Intra-party tussles became ridiculously apparent.

If Sachin Pilot’s revolt was the first chapter in the story of the crisis in the Rajasthan Congress, the open rebellion by Gehlot’s loyalists was the second. Gehlot apologised to party president Sonia Gandhi and publicly expressed his regret for the episode. He even took moral responsibility for his failure to convene a CLP meeting. With a public apology he may have bought peace with the central leadership. At the same time, he ensured that the Chief Minister seat was not under any imminent threat.

Challenge for Congress

Everyone knew that the party would not effect a leadership change at this point, paving the way for a vertical split. Rajasthan goes to the polls next year as does Karnataka. At the moment, the Congress faces the challenge of putting up a fight in Gujarat and Himachal Pradesh, where elections are due later this year. It already faces an uphill task in these two States following the death of two of its troubleshooters, Ahmed Patel in Gujarat and Virbhadra Singh in Himachal Pradesh. Abandoning Gehlot at this stage, therefore, was not an option.

Rahul Gandhi with Congress leaders of Karnataka as the party’s Bharat Jodo Yatra enters the State at Gundlupet in Chamarajanagar district, on September 30. | Photo Credit: PTI

There is no doubt that the Congress is working hard to project a picture of intra-party unity, however fragile it may be. The public endorsement of Kharge’s nomination by most of the G-23 leaders, including Anand Sharma, Bhupinder Singh Hooda and Manish Tewari, may suggest something. Tewari even told reporters that a consensus would be the best way out.

Kharge’s personality

It seems that Kharge, 80, would most likely be the choice of the PCC delegates on the day of voting. In an atmosphere dominated by identity and woke politics, the fact that he is a Dalit will also matter. Besides, he is considered a hands-on, no-nonsense person with more than adequate organisational experience. His reasonable fluency in Hindi and mass base in his home State might be just some of the reasons that make him an apt candidate. He is a nine-time legislator, having held positions both in the State and at the Centre. With the Karnataka Assembly election slated next year, having Kharge in the top post could help the party’s prospects, especially as it faces an aggressive BJP.

ALSO READ:‘Bharat Jodo Yatra not an outreach programme’

The Congress will have a new head by October 19. Given the public display of intrigue and power politics that characterised the run-up to the organisational elections, which was fought more on personalities than issues, there is nothing to suggest that the Congress can present an alternative to the BJP. With fissures within, will the Congress be able to provide leadership to a unified opposition is a question that will come up at some stage.

The other question is whether the Bharat Jodo Yatra will be able to address the ideological vacuousness in the party and rein in personal ambitions of its leaders. As part of his campaign, Tharoor posted a popular Urdu couplet by the leftist poet Majrooh Sultanpuri: “Main akela hee chalaa tha janib-e-manzil, magar log saath aatey gaye aur karwaan bantaa gaya” (I began my journey alone, but people joined me along the way and the caravan grew). Nobody knows where Shashi Tharoor’s caravan will lead, but if the leadership that ultimately gets elected is directionless, it is a no-brainer where the Congress caravan will find itself.

The Crux

- Mallikarjun Kharge and Shashi Tharoor file nominations for Congress presidential election

- Ashok Gehlot was projected to be the presidential candidate but the week before the filing of nominations was marked by rebellion in Rajasthan by legislators close to Gehlot about choosing a successor to him.

- Gehlot ensured that the Chief Minister seat was not under any imminent threat.

- Rajasthan goes to the polls next year, and a leadership change at this point would have paved the way for a vertical split.

Print edition : Oct 13, 2022 T+T-

Are Uddhav Thackeray and his Shiv Sena fighting a losing battle?

Uddhav Thackeray addresses a party meeting at Goregaon, Mumbai | Photo Credit: PTI

The Shinde-Fadnavis government in Maharashtra is determined to see the end of the Maha Vikas Aghadi.

After two months of withdrawn silence, Shiv Sena chief Uddhav Thackeray has emerged, apparently recharged and energised, using the militant language that the Sena is known for. He has been addressing the Sena cadre all over Mumbai, urging them on for the big fight of the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC) election. His speeches are a combination of his trademark droll, powerful digs at his opponents and flashes of vitriol that his father, the late Bal Thackeray, was renowned for.

It was the loss of the Rs.1.5 lakh crore ($20 billion) Vedanta-Foxconn semiconductor project that brought Thackeray out of his shell. The project, which the Maha Vikas Aghadi (MVA) had nurtured almost to fruition, suddenly shifted from Maharashtra to Gujarat on September 13. The opposition MVA lashed out at the Eknath Shinde-Devendra Fadnavis-led government saying they had deliberately let the big-ticket project go to a Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)-ruled State.

Maharashtra’s debt has been growing and, after the lockdown, now stands at Rs.6.50 lakh crore. The semiconductor project would have given the much-needed impetus to job creation as well as served as a flagship to attract new investments to the State. Thackeray spoke plainly when he said the company had been influenced by the Centre and the move to Gujarat was a slap on the face of Maharashtra. He said the government was a puppet that had no pride in Maharashtra and that Shinde had betrayed the State. Forced to admit the loss, a flustered Shinde promised the State a bigger investment soon, but what actually happened was that the State lost one more company—PhonePe, a financial technology application company, announced that it would be shifting to Karnataka.

ALSO READ:BJP’s toppling game

Since it came to power on June 30, the government has determinedly set about upturning the work of the MVA. An incomplete list would include getting “all necessary clearances” for the Mumbai-Ahmedabad bullet train, a pet project of the Prime Minister; permitting a car shed for the Mumbai metro in a forest area, an idea that had been shot down by the MVA; removing and then arresting Sanjay Pandey, Commissioner of Police in Mumbai; changing the law for local body elections to allow direct election to the post of sarpanch; retracting the renaming of Aurangabad to Sambhajinagar–a privilege the new government probably wants to claim for itself; reversing the decision to delimit municipal wards in Mumbai; letting the construction rights of one section of the Sena’s coastal road project in Mumbai be administered by the Centre and the Dharavi redevelopment project.

The MVA allies have pointed out what they term as “revenge decisions” of the government but have not been a proactive opposition otherwise. However, small victories have come their way. After a tense fight in the courts, the Sena won the right to hold its traditional Dussehra rally at Shivaji Park. The Shinde-led government will have to make do with the MMRDA grounds, which are larger but do not resonate as much as the historic Shivaji Park where Bal Thackeray’s memorial is situated.

Shiv Sena activists celebrate on September 23 after the High Court directed the BMC to allow the Uddhav Thackeray-led Sena faction to hold a Dussehra gathering at Shivaji Park in Mumbai. | Photo Credit: PTI

The Shivaji Park win was like an infusion of blood for Uddhav Thackeray, who threw a challenge to the government saying, “Fadnavis said he would fight for the BMC election as if it would be the last election. I’ll make sure it is his last election…. But I will appeal to all of you to fight as if it is our first election. Asha Bhosle used to say that she sings every song as if it is her first song. I want every one of you to fight like that… every shakha should be open…. The PM is coming for the BMC election campaign. There is also the Home Minister, our traitors and also Munnabhai [Raj Thackeray]. I am waiting for them all to attack us. I challenge Amit Shah to come and fight us. We will show them what war is.”

Shaky Sena

All this was music to the ears of his supporters but the reality is that the Sena and MVA are still very shaky. The 40 Sena MLAs who followed Shinde and caused the disintegration of the MVA continue to be with the government. In the aftermath of the BJP wave there was a rush of  sainiks joining the Shinde camp. Of late there has been a trickle of “returnees”: people who left but were disappointed by the unfulfilled promises of the government. Corporators from Shinde’s stronghold of Thane are returning to the Sena, and Thackeray, true to his word, is welcoming them back. Two former Sena corporators from Thane who went with Shinde have returned to Thackeray. Another who had joined the BJP a while ago and was promoted to the post of vice president of the party’s Mumbai unit has surprisingly quit and returned to the Sena.

Thackeray actually has little choice but to accept them. The party has been mum about its grass-roots losses, but apparently it bled cadre in the immediate aftermath of the fall of the MVA. For example, all except one of the Thane corporators extended support to Shinde. And the results of the recently held panchayat election for the post of sarpanch showed that the Shinde-Fadnavis government still holds the reins. In August, the government passed a law allowing direct election to the sarpanch’s post. Previously panchayat members voted to elect the sarpanch. The Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) and the Congress called this a “plot” to forcefully gain power.

Strong-arm tactics

The Shinde faction tried to use the NCP’s powerful showing in the sarpanch elections to drive a wedge between Thackeray and Sharad Pawar by saying it was always Pawar’s intention to outmanoeuvre Thackeray. Shinde reportedly said: “Right from the start we warned Uddhav Thackeray that the NCP was set on finishing the Sena but he never listened. He was blinded by the post of Chief Minister. Now see what the NCP has done. It has been consolidating its position ever since the MVA was formed.”

Eknath Shinde, Devendra Fadnavis and Maharashtra Labour Minister Suresh Khade (left) being garlanded at a programme in Navi Mumbai on September 25, 2022. | Photo Credit: PTI

The MVA’s real opponent is not the State government but the BJP government at the Centre. And considering the armoury at the Centre’s disposal, Thackeray’s brave words may not count for much. The Centre has used all the agencies at its command to try and squash the MVA. A special investigation by an English daily showed a “four-fold jump in Enforcement Directorate cases against politicians” since 2014. About 95 per cent of the ED cases are against opposition members, with the Congress, the Trinamool Congress and the NCP the “top three in the net”.

The sarpanch election has showed that the real battle in Maharashtra is between the BJP and the NCP. The BJP has already singled out Pawar as the man behind the MVA. They rightly know that if any opposition can be drummed up against them, it will be via Pawar. This is perhaps true not just for Maharashtra but also at the national level.

ALSO READ:Will Uddhav Thackeray survive?

Attempts are being made to include Pawar in ED investigations. The veracity of the accusations seems to be secondary to the government. What’s more important is that they put Pawar and his party on the defensive, leaving them with little time for aggressive politics. The BJP has also been sending its senior leaders to Pawar’s home ground, Baramati. Union Finance minister Nirmala Sitharaman has been deputed to take Baramati from the Pawars. “Discredit the family and discredit the party” is the simple political line of attack. Two senior NCP leaders–Anil Deshmukh and Nawab Malik–are already in jail on charges of corruption. The name of Sharad Pawar’s nephew, Ajit Pawar, has come up in connection with sugar factories that were recently raided by the ED in cases of alleged scams involving the Maharashtra State Cooperative Bank. The BJP is also threatening to reopen a 2012 scam in the State irrigation department when Ajit Pawar was the Minister for Water Resources.

The BJP’s plan clearly is to make Thackeray a has-been. As individuals, neither he nor his son, Aaditya, are seen as political threats. They carry the name and history of the Sena but as proved by Shinde, what really matters is the seat of power. Cutting off Thackeray’s lifelines is the BJP’s strategy of isolating and thereby politically annihilating Thackeray. Two of his mainstays are on the BJP’s hitlist. Sanjay Raut has already been arrested and pressure is mounting on Sharad Pawar.

The Crux

- After two months of withdrawn silence, Shiv Sena chief Uddhav Thackeray has emerged, apparently recharged and energised

- After a tense fight in the courts, the Sena won the right to hold its traditional Dussehra rally at Shivaji Park. The Shinde-led government will have to make do with the MMRDA grounds

- In the aftermath of the BJP wave there was a rush of  sainiks joining the Shinde camp. Of late there has been a trickle of “returnees”

- The MVA’s real opponent is not the State government but the BJP government at the Centre

- The sarpanch election has showed that the real battle in Maharashtra is between the BJP and the NCP

- The BJP has already singled out Pawar as the man behind the MVA and attempts are being made to include Pawar in ED investigations

- The BJP’s plan is to make Thackeray a has-been

Print edition : Oct 11, 2022 T+T-

Arts & Culture

- Eminent scholars launch report on 12,000 years of Indian history

Eminent scholars launch report on 12,000 years of Indian history

G.N. Devy, Zoya Hasan, and Ashok Vajpeyi, at the launch.

The project is a counter to the right-wing establishment’s push of a singular narrative.

Several eminent scholars on October 9 launched a 600-page report on 12,000 years of Indian history and civilisation, prepared by a collective of more than 80 scholars worldwide, including experts in genetics, archaeology, anthropology, linguistics, philosophy, and history.

Noted professor and literary critic G.N. Devy, who conceptualised the project, said that there has been an increased attempt to rewrite history in India in recent years. “When the government appoints a committee to redefine history in a way that there is no space for Dalits, Christians, Muslims, and women, in it, the next generation of Indians will grow up thinking very differently,” he said. Prime Minister Narendra Modi reportedly appointed a committee in 2018 to rewrite Indian history as a “larger plan” to revise “certain aspects” of Indian history.

According to Devy, history should not be seen as static. He said: “History keeps changing. As a discipline, it was born only in the 19th century. There is also no one history, there are only histories. India is a republic of histories. For a lie to be seen as truth, the scale of the lie must be mind-boggling.”

Noted academic Zoya Hasan, writer and poet Ashok Vajpeyi, CPI(M) leader Sitaram Yechury, historian Narayani Gupta and political psychologist Ashis Nandy spoke at the launch.

Referring to the 2018 committee formed to “rewrite” Indian history, Ashok Vajpeyi said that it was an attack on the diverse languages, cultures, and people of India. He said: “This is a direct attack on the democratic values of India. The problem is that this is being done in the name of nationalism, the kind where someone can be killed for not chanting ‘Bharat mata ki jai’.”

Zoya Hasan said that in recent times, a singular, monolithic Hindu identity was being pushed in the country in the name of nationalism. “This majoritarian project is problematic in a society as spectacularly diverse as India.”

The report, titled India since the Holocene: The past Twelve Thousand Years of Environment, People, Life, Thought, Expression, Formations, Movements, Traditions and Transformations, presents a comprehensive picture of civilisation and history in India. It will be published in English as well as Tamil, Hindi, Kannada, Marathi, and Bengali.

The report covers important themes such as population migrations, emergence of social organisations, evolution of the state system, and the development of philosophies and languages. It also features major social movements of India and the impact of colonialism on Indian culture.

The Indian sub-continent has had a human population for the past 45,000 years. As the climate here slowly became more favourable for human life, it became a hotspot for activity and movement some 12,000 years ago. This period is referred to as the Holocene.

Narayani Gupta said that it is important that school students are taught a rich history of the pluralistic and diverse Indian culture instead of a singular narrative.

Ashis Nandy said that history, like all disciplines, should always be open to criticism. “All history is contemporary history, it is never independent of the present. The whole significance of the past and future is in the present,” he added.

Print edition : Oct 11, 2022 T+T-

Social Issues

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Books

- A scholar’s midlife sojourn

A scholar’s midlife sojourn

A philosophical novel about the experiences of a visiting Indian scholar in a foreign country.

How does an Indian researcher providentially find her way to a university town in the United States? What does she learn from its free bus services and thrift stores? In P. Sivakami’s Language of the Mirror, Bhuvana, an academic in her fifties who believes that “the meaning of life is to live every second consciously”, visits the US on a research fellowship. What distinguishes this novel about the everyday experiences of a visiting scholar in a foreign land are its philosophical underpinnings.

Language of the Mirror

By P. Sivakami

Emerald Publishers, 2021

Pages: 337

Price: Rs.600

Sivakami remarkably synthesises her personal experiences with her research through the mode of fiction. Language of the Mirror abounds with a myriad indefatigable women who bring vivid, diverse perspectives, beliefs and convictions to bear on its narrative. The third-person narrative, which also has elements of memoir and travelogue, moves back and forth across time and space,  deftly weaving themes of gender, caste, race, friendship, motherhood, poverty, loneliness, suffering, personal loss, education, mindfulness, and leadership.

Sivakami deploys humour with a sharp irony and, at times, anger. Take, for instance, this observation about how, despite being emancipated by education, Bhuvana is not immune to discrimination: “How often people try to dominate others through caste! How could she expect basic respect from such a person? A beautiful, smart woman in her fifties, dressed in simple and elegant designer salwar suits, wearing exquisite pearls in her ears and speaking in a cultured, low tone had to fall back on caste to convince others of her real worth.”

Bhuvana’s admiration and awe of the public libraries and museums, the shopping sprees (tinged at first with guilt) which soon become an indulgence, the temporary redemptions offered by thrift stores, the cooking experiments, the weekend clean-ups … these experiences are universal to visiting Indian scholars in the US.

Library as haven

Is reading a luxury or a necessity? The library and museum are quite special to Indian women scholars who rarely find the time or space to read back home, what with the mounting pressures of academic work, domestic chores and family responsibilities. Eager not to miss out, Bhuvana would “greedily grab those books that bedecked the shelves fearing someone would make off with them. She would stack those books against her chest like a rare treasure on the long table”. The university library is a haven and books are panacea to the Bhuvanas of the world.

The novel also talks of Bhuvana’s experiments with mindfulness and reflection following the death of her son Guna in a road accident. The lines “Bhuvana admired the Buddha. Why was his serene expression difficult to replicate?” seem to suggest that transcendence is man’s sole privilege while the woman’s lot is that of immanence.

Scholar as emissary

Sivakami’s commitment to social change is rooted in her rich experience as an administrator, thinker and activist. She writes: “Poverty is contextual, cultural…to be poor and to be a Dalit is one and the same. And in the hierarchical order of caste, Dalit women are placed at the lowest rung and the most exploited.” In the end, Bhuvana emerges as an emissary between the two countries, interrogating the social evils of caste and race on the one hand and celebrating the richness of cultural diversity on the other.

Bhuvana’s journey to the US is based on Sivakami’s own experience as a Fulbright scholar. For the aspiring researcher, she provides inspiration and information, right from the selection process, the interview, accommodation, travel, applying for a Social Security Number and details of the local Indian grocery store down to the final submission of tax documents. As a novel of ideas, Sivakami sums up through her characters: “Wisdom is self-realisation through different mediums. It is a continuous process. But what’s more important is to bring the entire humanity on to this path as humans are interconnected.” These lines are testament to the ordeals and aspirations of an ambitious thinker and leader who tries to trace a trajectory between the Indian belief in diversity and the American concept of multiculturalism.

P. Mary Vidya Porselvi teaches at the Department of English at Loyola College, Chennai.

Print edition : Oct 11, 2022 T+T-

Columns

- Ramayana a living and contemporary narrative for the Kunkanas of Gujarat

- Federal Reserve move to check inflation could impact less-developed countries

- Brahmastra: The missing awe

Ramayana a living and contemporary narrative for the Kunkanas of Gujarat

A Kunkana tribal dance during a tribal festival at Saputara. | Photo Credit: Vipul Kapadia

The Kunkana Adivasi community lives on the border between Maharashtra and Gujarat.

Literature responds to wider social phenomena in a strange way. Within a few weeks of the demolition of the Babri Masjid, writers in the Sahitya Akademi elected the Kannada novelist U.R. Anantha Murthy as the Akademi’s president. In order to reduce the gap between literature and society, he brought in a greater awareness of Dalit literature. He asked me if I would do a series of books on the oral literature of Adivasis. I agreed and set out looking for substantial literary works in languages spoken by Adivasis. One of the first that came to my notice was the Ramayana in the Kunkana language. Lest Kunkana is mistaken for Konkani, spoken in Karnataka, Goa, and Maharashtra, let me add that the Kunkana Adivasi community lives on the border between Maharashtra and Gujarat.

I first met the Kunkanas at Saputara—a really tiny hilltop stretch of houses—in the Dangs district of Gujarat. The Kunkana singers and musicians gathered there were led by Dahyabhai Vadhu, an extremely gifted culture-enthusiast and a bank employee. He told me that the Kunkana language has an entire Ramkatha, substantially different from the Valmiki Ramayana. When the singers accompanying him presented an episode, I realised that it was indeed different. The story was amazingly humane and far more sensitive to the women’s perspective. The orientation of the Kunkana audiences to their Ramkatha stands in sharp contrast with the use of the Sanskrit Ram towards political gains. It led me to ask Dahyabhai to publish the Kunkana Ramkatha.

Kunkana version

In the Kunkana epic, Sita is depicted as Ravana’s daughter, though her progenitor is Siva. Ravana, born without arms or legs in a family of robbers, decides to go to Kailash and undertake a penance for pleasing Siva. After 12 months of penance, as Siva notices the formless child, Ravana expresses his desire to be a complete human. Just then, Siva has to go away to attend to his ‘worldly’ duties. He allows Ravana to stay in the Kailash palace, but forbids him from entering a certain room in which, as Siva warns him, a “black bee” may sting him to death. Unable to tolerate the delay in his wish fulfillment, Ravana decides to disobey Siva. It contains a pool of nectar. Inadvertently, he falls into the pool and starts drowning in the nectar. Nine sips of nectar enter his belly, and nine new heads sprout on his body, making him a 10-headed monster. On Siva’s return home, Ravana complains to him, and in order to repair the damage, Siva promises Ravana the kingdom of Lanka.

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As he is leaving Kailash, Ravana happens to see Parvati. He immediately returns and pleads with Siva to give away Parvati as his wife, as no girl may like to marry a 10-headed being. Siva, true to his generous nature, allows Parvati to go with Ravana. But this creates a panic among gods. Krishna is given the duty of rescuing Parvati from Ravana. So Krishna, dressed as a villager, waits on the path on which Ravana and Parvati are walking and tells Ravana, as they meet, that Siva had cheated him by handing over a maid working in Siva’s household and that the real Parvati was still at Kailash. Ravana returns to Kailash for settling accounts with Siva. Meanwhile, Krishna creates a Mohini, a woman who looks more charming than Parvati. Siva himself feels attracted to this one. When Ravana enters Kailash, he notices Siva and Mohini together. He takes her away, believing her to be Parvati, and leaves the real Parvati with Siva.

The worries of Krishna and other gods are not set to rest completely as yet. Since Ravana has drank the nectar at Kailash, there was no possibility of his death. Therefore, Krishna tricks him once again. He tells Ravana that just as Siva had given him some ordinary woman instead of Parvati, he had given him only the kingdom of Lanka instead of making him the king of the Kingdom of Death. So, once again Ravana returns to Siva, and asks for Death, this time in writing. Here is how the Kunkana poem narrates the episode: “‘O Elder one, you have once again made a fool of me. You are a great god, you have given me the throne of Lanka and its neighbouring regions and all the seven oceans. Do you wish me to be content with just that? I wish to possess the throne of Death.’ Quite exhausted by Ravana’s pestering, Siva writes (the Kunkana Adivasis believe Siva writes all his boons): ‘The king of Ayodhya will have a queen named Kaikeyi. She will give birth to Rama. At that moment Ravana will get pricked by a thorn, and the pain of the thorn-prick would shoot all the way up to his head. Ravana will then be seized by malarial fever. Eventually, Rama will kill Ravana.’”

A different Sita

Having lost the real Parvati, and having lost his immortality, Ravana starts his journey to Lanka together with the woman he believes to be Parvati. She is already pregnant, having spent some time with Siva. But she drops the foetus while bathing in a river as she gets terrified by the roaring voice of Ravana. The foetus floats down the river and lands where a gardner named Jambumali, described as a king, resides. Sita is born. The fame of her lustre and courage spreads far and wide. Later, from Jambumali’s home, King Janaka takes Sita to his palace. While on an expedition, Dasharatha visits Janaka’s palace. While he is resting there, Sita takes up Dasharatha’s mighty bow and turns it into a toy-horse for her to play with. Dasharatha is stunned by her power. Janaka, Dasharatha, and the entire kingdom of Janaka stare dumbstruck at the divine strength of Sita. Only a great and mighty warrior could possibly have lifted such a huge bow and a two-and-a-half-ton, sword-like arrow. Sita was just a child. As he departs from Janaka’s house, Dasharatha leaves the huge bow behind for Sita to play with. The Kunkana epic does not forget to mention that it weighs ‘two-and-a-half-tons.’ The soldiers of Janakapur guard the huge bow. Day after day passed by. Night after night passed by. The story continues with its many departures from the plot of the Valmiki Ramayana.

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The epic in Kunkana is narrated during the months following the long monsoon, which lasts for several months in the Dangs, by bards who engage in agricultural activities during the monsoon. They do not follow the text inscribed in their memory and learnt through oral tradition handed down by their ancestors. The members of the Kunkana community have a full familiarity with the storyline and the songs interspersed over the narrative. The Kunkanas believe that the Rama story indeed took place within the confines of the Dangs territory. The place names in the narrative tally with geographical locations within the district. Similarly, the narrative style works towards bringing the listeners and the narrative closer. All these factors help the Kunkanas fully internalise their Ram epic.

While the Valmiki poem belongs to the realm of myth for the present generation listeners, the Kunkana Ram epic is seen by the community as part of their immediate ethos. Scholars of Indian literature may like to describe the Kunkana Ram epic and similar epics elsewhere, such as the Bhartari epic in Chattisgarh and the Madeshwara epic in Karnataka, as “little traditions”. The fact, however, is that they have still not ossified into “traditions”. These enchanting poetic creations are even now “contemporary” literature for them. They are the real literature, in this side of India.

G.N. Devy is a cultural activist, and chairperson, The People’s Linguistic Survey of India.

Print edition : Oct 12, 2022 T+T-

Federal Reserve move to check inflation could impact less-developed countries

Jerome Powell, Chairman, US Federal Reserve Board, during a news conference following the meeting of the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) on September 21 in Washington. | Photo Credit: Drew Angerer/AFP

The move entails increasing its benchmark interest rate to a projected 4.4 per cent by the year end.

In its meeting in late September, the Open Market Committee of the US Federal Reserve announced a third 0.75 percentage point interest rate increase, lifted its target for its benchmark rate to 3-3.25 per cent, and put out a “dot plot” chart projecting the rate to rise to 4.4 per cent by the end of this year and a peak of 4.6 per cent next year.

Given recent history, this is a dramatic rise. The Fed funds target rate had been reduced from an already low 1.75 per cent in February 2020 to less than 0.25 per cent a month later in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. That so-called “zero interest-rate policy” was in place until the March 2022 meeting of the Federal Open Market Committee, when it began an inflation-induced rate hiking cycle with a 0.25 per cent increase in the Federal funds rate. Starting from that hesitant increase, a series of rate hikes have followed, taking the target Fed funds rate from 0-0.25 per cent before March, to 2.25-2.50 per cent in July and 3-3.25 per cent in September.

Clearly, rattled by inflation, estimated by the US Department of Labor at 8.3 per cent for the 12 months ended August 2022, the Fed has turned hawkish on interest rates. Combined with a March decision to end bond purchases as a way of injecting liquidity into the economy and a plan to shrink its balance sheet by divesting bond holdings, the era of cheap and easy money initiated after the 2008 financial crisis has come to an end. According to an estimate from Bloomberg Economics, G7 central banks are likely to shrink their balance sheets by about $410 billion between May and December 2022. That is a sharp reversal when compared with the addition to Fed assets of $2.8 trillion in 2021 and more than $8 trillion since COVID hit.

Turmoil in financial markets

The Fed’s moves have created turmoil in financial markets, not least because of the expectation that the Fed’s effort at reining in inflation would result in collateral damage in the form of a real economy recession. Fed officials have reportedly forecast that the US unemployment rate would rise from its current rate of 3.7 per cent to 4.4 per cent in 2023, and gross domestic product (GDP) growth would fall to 0.2 per cent by the end of the year and recover to around 1.2 per cent in 2023. This “hard landing” is not good news for the world hegemon, but it is not altogether disastrous for it if realised. What would be a disaster is the impact of the Fed’s monetary policy manipulations on less-developed or underdeveloped countries, especially the many heavily indebted among them.

ALSO READ:Financial markets at a turning point

A direct effect of the US hike in interest rates is that it forces other countries, developed and not-so-developed, to raise their own rates to levels more than warranted by the inflation-targeting commitments of their own central banks. If the differential in a country’s interest rate vis-à-vis that in the US widens in favour of the latter, capital flows to dollar-denominated assets would spike. The resulting outflow from the rest of the world would exert downward pressure on their currencies that can depreciate steeply. To at least partially stall such depreciation, central banks world over are revising upwards their own policy rates. To the extent that such rate increases squeeze credit-financed investment and consumption demand in those jurisdictions, they too experience recessionary tendencies that are anyway under way because of the global slowdown in growth.

Needless to say, poor countries are victims of this tendency. Distressed debt in these countries is estimated at more than a quarter of a trillion dollars. While Sri Lanka led in the current cycle of default, El Salvador, Ghana, Egypt, Tunisia, and Pakistan are among those seen as vulnerable to default. But now, the higher cost of holding external debt because of the rise in interest rates portends an even more severe crisis in vulnerable countries. But not all less-developed countries are vulnerable. The more developed among the less-developed countries seem capable of sailing through.

According to the Institute of International Finance, global debt exceeded $305 trillion by mid 2022, or around 350 per cent of GDP. But not all of this debt is a problem because large chunks are held by countries like the US that can manage the burden. Borrowers from developed market economies as a group (consisting of governments, financial firms, non-financial corporations, and households) accounted for around two-thirds of the total. While some borrowers in these countries may be debt-stressed, the problem is not as yet systemic.

Traders on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) in New York City, U.S., on September 26. | Photo Credit: Brendan McDermid/Reuters

Further, of the $100 trillion or so held by borrowers in the emerging market economies (EMEs) group, a substantial share is with the more developed among them, especially China. Finally, a significant share of emerging market and developing economies’ (EMDEs) debt consists of local currency borrowing. Foreign currency debt is estimated at 10 and 15 per cent of GDP in China and India respectively, whereas local currency debt are at highs of 336 and 164 per cent respectively. This seems to suggest that actual or potential external debt crises, even if severe in some countries— Sri Lanka in South Asia; Ghana, Zambia, and Tunisia in Africa; and El Salvador and Argentina in Latin America—do not portend a systemic crisis of global dimensions.

No room for complacency

However, these characteristics do not give cause for complacency for a number of reasons. To start with, the recent sharp hike in interest rates and the slowdown in global growth as a result will affect a range of countries that are already burdened by balance of payments difficulties following the pandemic, which squeezed forex earnings, and the invasion of Ukraine, which raised food and energy import costs. Moreover, private financial investors are pulling out of emerging market economies in the wake of the monetary tightening in the developed countries. Because of the foreign exchange squeeze, no country with exposure to hard currency liabilities is insured against a crisis.

Second, even among the more developed among the less-developed countries, some have exposure to external debt that is high. Thus, the ratio of foreign exchange debt to GDP is 97 per cent in the case of Turkey, 62 per cent in Chile, 48 per cent in Argentina, 31 per cent in South Africa, 28 per cent in Brazil, and 26 per cent in Mexico. Some of these countries are already in default, and others could find themselves in a similar situation if global economic conditions worsen or do not improve soon.

Third, financial firms and institutions from the developed countries are significantly exposed to debt in poor countries. Bloomberg reported in July that emerging-market governments are holding $1.4 trillion of outstanding sovereign external debt denominated in dollars, euros or yen. More than $230 billion, or nearly 20 per cent of that, consists of debt held by bondholders which is currently trading in distress, or at interest rates that are 10 per cent higher than US. Treasuries of similar maturity. A debt default in these countries will have ripple effects in the financial sector and markets in the developed world, which in any case are in turmoil.

ALSO READ:End of an era of cheap money?

Moreover, resolving debt crises by reducing and rescheduling debt will prove extremely difficult when a number of players with a small but significant share of external debt need to agree on a bailout package. If there are defaults in the more developed emerging markets as well, especially among financial and non-financial firms that borrowed heavily abroad when interest rates were low but have to repay when interest rates are high, the probability of severe ripple effects is greater.

Finally, a large number of debt-stressed developing countries are also climate vulnerable and need to undertake large expenditures to cover for private losses from extreme events and adapt to worsening climate conditions. If they are unable to do that because of debt stress, and if developed countries are not willing to cover these expenditures, the crisis in these countries may be longer term, with implications that can be far more damaging than a pure external debt crisis needing resolution.

Central Banks’ role

The responsibility of central banks in developed countries for this situation goes beyond the impact of their decisions to raise interest rates in response to inflation. Part of the reason for accumulation of external debt in less-developed countries was the easy availability of credit from abroad. This, in turn, was the result of easy money policies adopted by these central banks. Financial speculators in search of high yields could borrow cheap in advanced country markets to invest in lucrative bonds issued by sovereigns and corporations from the less-developed countries. The poorer and/or riskier the country, the larger the share of sovereign borrowing in the total.

When this process was under way, neither did foreign lenders exercise due diligence, nor did the IMF recommend that these countries should shut off inflows to prevent the excess build-up of foreign liabilities in the form of debt or footloose capital. In the event, the era of easy money justified by the low rates of inflation during the “Great Moderation” of the 1990s and 2000s resulted in debt accumulation at a rapid pace even before the pandemic and the war in Ukraine intensified the balance of payments strain. Low inflation encouraged a policy stance on the part of central banks in the developed world that led to debt accumulation. The return of inflation is triggering a policy shift that renders that debt unsustainable.

This pattern is, however, not new. During the late 1960s and 1970s, financial liberalisation and loose monetary policy in the US and the surpluses deposited by oil exporters in the international banking system resulted in surplus liquidity that found its way to the developing countries. The result was a sharp increase in debt. Lending by US commercial banks to Latin America rose from less than $30 billion in 1970 to $159 billion in 1978 and $327 billion in 1982. However, when inflation raised its head in the US and Paul Volcker was put in charge of the Federal Reserve, interest rates were hiked massively, precipitating the debt crises of the 1980s and after.

A similar fate is likely to overwhelm poor nations this time round as well.

C. P. Chandrasekhar is Professor at the Centre for Economic Studies and Planning, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. He has published widely in academic journals.

Print edition : Oct 12, 2022 T+T-

Brahmastra: The missing awe

A still from “Brahmastra: Part One–Shiva” , starring Ranbir Kapoor. | Photo Credit: By Special Arrangement

Many critics found the visual effects of Brahmastra excellent, but what does that mean?

Having spent hours every week through the years in the dank, rippling darkness of a film theatre, exposed to imaginations that shock our fundamental smallness of being, I often ask myself, what is awe, have we lost the capacity for it, and will there come a day when we can learn to preserve it?

Brahmastra sprung from the eye of a storm, a tectonic shift in the way Indian cinema wanted to posture its 56-inch chest alongside Marvel Cinema’s blast of releases. Few moments from these films, however, left an aftertaste of awe, that lingering spike in the mind, that mushed sigh, that exaggerated memory of something so tender.

A still from S.S. Rajamouli’s RRR, featuring Ram Charan and Junior NTR. | Photo Credit: SPECIAL ARRANGEMENT

S.S. Rajamouli’s RRR moved between pageantry and awe with such swift narrative sledgehammers that you could only submit to Rajamouli’s feral imagination and eat from his hand in the theatre. When the two heroes, brothers who hold one in each other’s gaze like lovers, dance off, with the dust rising to leather-footed feet thumping, suspenders plucked and tucked, your mind is stuck between wondering how they shot it, the labour behind the limbs moving so energetically, and experiencing that wonder, while trying to stop wondering.

This isn’t awe. It is compelling pageantry, which is itself a disappearing thing from the movies, and must be celebrated for what it is. But this isn’t awe. I wanted to walk out of Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, so dull and explained its pixellated world, so boring and sincere its politics. I started, and immediately stopped, Thor: Love and Thunder multiple times on my laptop. Not today. Tomorrow, perhaps.

The one time I felt something strong in my heart, weak in my stomach, was in Chloe Zhao’s Eternals—when two lovers held each other, and we could see sunlight dappling through the fibres on their sweaters, getting caught, trying to dance. Tender as the world it is made in. I wept.

But when every source of light in a frame looks created—the thick traffic-signal reds, the macabre icy blues, the greens lost somewhere between fluorescent and lime—every lit face looks bruised by “soft lighting”, every sputtering fire looks like sprinkles erupting, what do we react to, the labour or its effect?

Actors Rahul Bose and Tripti Dimri in a still from Bulbbul. | Photo Credit: Special Arrangement

Last year, a Netflix film Bulbbul was hailed for its new look, a striking redness of being. The red moon was integral to the narrative, and scenes were bathed in that aforementioned traffic-light red, a colour so synthetic, so unnatural it produced the feeling of looking at something concocted on a computer screen. It was the kind of beauty that required you to imagine the labour behind it.

Looking at the film, at its reception among critics, I was reminded of film critic Pauline Kael’s scathing review of West Side Story (1961), which she called “a piece of cinematic technology”. While most critics and audience members walked out in an ecstatic hum, she asked, instead, a subversive question: “Is the audience so impressed by science and technique, and by the highly advertised new developments that they accept this jolting series of distorted sounds gratefully—on the assumption, perhaps, that because it’s so unlike ordinary sound, it must be better?” To be striking is different from beauty, from awe.

What, then, is awe?

Part of awe is renouncing the need to explain it. It is a feeling that doesn’t ask for context, for meaning, for replication.

Part of this loss of awe is, perhaps, the dictionary. We have categorised almost every emotion into meaning, we have begun to reach out to other languages to pull out more specific words to describe more specific feelings. Joy is not enough. It is petrichor on a monsoon day. Silence is not enough. It is kasa kasa to describe the sound of desert heat. There is this awful fear to have everything stated, a fear best expressed in Edouard Louis’s autobiographical novel A History of Violence: “If a person never heard anyone talk of love, maybe they would not be able to fall in love.”

A friend once sat me down and explained the meaning of “sublime” to me for I had been using it all wrong. It wasn’t just any kind of beauty. It was beauty that put the fear of God in you. To see something so beautiful it terrifies you. Staring at the Pacific waters at Oceans Beach at dusk, the sky a shade of Prussian blue I had never seen before, had never known could exist, the jolt of cheap weed, the ocean so vast, it was so scary. I wept.

Experiencing the sublime

Maybe, then, to feel awe, is to experience the sublime, where the fear of that beauty, the pungency of it, renders you incapable of asking for more of it, looking for reasons where none exist. The Soviet film director and film theorist Sergei Eisenstein thought colour was “capable of profound psychological revelation”, that to stare into the abyss of colour was to feel unmoored enough to feel vulnerable, for something dormant or non-existent to be exhumed.

Mark Rothko. | Photo Credit: Wikimedia Commons

The painter Mark Rothko, who from the 1950s until his death in 1970, only painted fields of hazy full-bodied colour stacked on top of each other, thought this complete lack of narrative in painting allowed for “the elimination of all obstacles between the painter and the idea, and between the idea and the observer.” It was radical. It was gorgeous. It was wasteful. Millions of dollars were spent in acquiring what millions of people thought was childish, unremarkable flinging of paint over canvas. And yet, when people stood in front of Rothkos—imposing as they are—they wept.

The American art curator Sarah Urist Green boils it down to three things: monumentality; simplicity; stillness. Looking at Rothko’s paintings, divorced from the world, from memory, from silhouettes, from meaning, something primal throbs. Like when looking at the shadow of vapours when boiling water for your morning coffee. Like when walking looking up at a cloudless summer sky, lost, and bumping into a pole. Like looking at a glass window on a train, sunlight streaming through days, weeks, months of grime collecting at the edges, filtering the yellow.

But what about cinema—where is awe in cinema? Paul Valery in the 1960s noted that “profound changes are impending in the ancient craft of the Beautiful”. From what I see, this reliance on technology has begun to confuse scale for sweep, budget for beauty. Awe is leaking out, slowly, steadily.

Many critics found the visual effects of Brahmastra excellent, but what does that mean? Everything looked real enough for you to not question its validity, but not beautiful enough for your eyes to stammer and stagger, so you just sit there unmoved as a piece of adequate technology unfurls?

It is impossible to feel what theological lecturer Jessica Frazieris calls “our vast imaginations [pulled] in the opposite direction from our small, frail bodies”, for there is no pull, no push, we sit and the pixellated imagination does its cartwheels on the screen, out there, beyond us.

Print edition : Oct 14, 2022 T+T-

Others

- Mulayam Singh Yadav (1939-2022): A steadfast opponent of communal politics

Obituary

Mulayam Singh Yadav (1939-2022): A steadfast opponent of communal politics

SP founder Mulayam Singh Yadav in 2017. | Photo Credit: PTI

He cut his teeth in politics as a follower of Ram Manohar Lohia’s socialist ideology.

Samajwadi Party leader Mulayam Singh Yadav, known as “Netaji” and a quintessential dhartiputra (son of the soil), passed away on October 10. He was 82. Mulayam Singh had been battling illness for over two years. He had been undergoing treatment at Medanta hospital in Gurugram since August and was in a critical condition since October 2.

The SP founder was born in a poor farmer family on November 22, 1939, at Saifai in Uttar Pradesh’s Etawah district. A strict administrator who went the extra mile to maintain law and order, he even ordered police firing at kar sevaks in Ayodhya in 1990 but paid a huge political price for his bold decision, although he never regretted it. But for his bold decision, the Babri Masjid might have been demolished in October-November 1990 itself.

After the Babri Masjid demolition, his entire political focus was on preventing the BJP from coming to power in Uttar Pradesh. To ensure this he tried the most unconventional and unimaginable path at that time: joining hands with the BSP, his social and political opponent, after deserting the V.P. Singh-led Janata Dal. Defying all political analysts, he defeated the BJP which looked set to regain power in the 1993 Assembly election in the wake of the demolition. Once ousted, the BJP could not capture power in UP for a decade, even after trying various arrangements with the BSP at various stages. It was only in 2017, when the nation was riding the Narendra Modi wave, that BJP came back to power in UP.

Mulayam Singh will always be remembered for standing up for the rights of Muslims, even at the cost of being called “maulana Mulayam”. He cut his teeth in politics as a follower of Ram Manohar Lohia’s socialist ideology. He won his first election from Jaswant Nagar in 1967 when he was barely 28. From then on, he never looked back. He bloomed under the guidance of Charan Singh but he fell out with him after Charan Singh passed on the Lok Dal leadership to his US-returned son, Ajit Singh.

He then joined hands with V.P. Singh and became the State Janata Dal president, before going on to become UP Chief Minister in 1989 with BJP support. When the kar sevaks were fired upon in 1990, the BJP withdrew support but Mulayam’s government survived, with the support of the Congress, a party against which he had campaigned aggressively in 1989.

Mulayam Singh never compromised on his opposition to right-wing communal politics. But he was known to be friendly even with political rivals. Who can forget his last speech in the Lok Sabha before the 2019 general election, when he wished Prime Minister Modi the best and said he wanted to see him back in the top seat.

If there was one thing he regretted, it was his lack of acceptance by the national media as a national leader. He often told this writer that the media in Delhi lampooned him just because he was not proficient in English.

He came within kissing distance of being Prime Minister during the United Front government but was denied this chance by opposition from Lalu Prasad. He regretted this but did not let it come in the way when Lalu Prasad came seeking a matrimonial alliance with Mulayam’s grand-nephew for his youngest daughter. He belonged to the rare breed that believed in keeping the political and personal apart.

Print edition : Oct 11, 2022 T+T-

Table of Contents

Frontline

The Nation

Reopening of cinema halls in Kashmir evokes mixed reactions

‘There is collective participation’: Sachin Kumar

Dolo controversy revives demand for regulating pharma marketing practices

‘Cinema is in the heart of every Kashmiri’: Vikas Dhar

Schooling crisis in Haryana due to teacher shortage triggers protests

World Affairs

Editor’s Note

Could the Ukraine conflict be an opportunity for the global south?

Europe scrambling to cope with energy crisis as winter approaches

Russia-Ukraine conflict: Is this Cold War II?

Ukraine war impact on the US dollar a challenge to American hegemony

India offers nuanced response to changing tides of the Ukraine war

Victory of Giorgia Meloni in Italy marks the return of fascists to power

Politics

The rise and fall of the Popular Front of India

BJP rule in Karnataka: Corruption Inc.

‘Bharat Jodo Yatra is not an outreach programme’: Pawan Khera

Congress president elections: A case of fragile unity

Are Uddhav Thackeray and his Shiv Sena fighting a losing battle?

Arts & Culture

Eminent scholars launch report on 12,000 years of Indian history

Books

A scholar’s midlife sojourn

Columns

Ramayana a living and contemporary narrative for the Kunkanas of Gujarat

Federal Reserve move to check inflation could impact less-developed countries

Brahmastra: The missing awe

Others

Mulayam Singh Yadav (1939-2022): A steadfast opponent of communal politics