- Market intellectuals
Mukul Kesavan, in his column for The Telegraph says that selling Air India is shorthand for economic rationality. Economic rationality is a mantra which, chanted loudly enough, builds a wall of noise which keeps the soundtrack of lynchings and suicides off-stage. These casualties can be waved away as acceptable collateral damage, the price India must pay for a muscular leader capable of selling the short-term pain of market rationality to the masses.
Elected sadhvis, sadhus, mahants and pant-shirt bigots tell us exactly what they think of Muslims, Christians and Dalits and what they plan to do to them; WhatsApp mobs kill people in the name of protecting cows from slaughter or children from abduction; a vigilante with a history of violent affray is elevated by the ruling party to the chief ministership of India’s most populated province and still these opinion-mongers see and hear nothing. Where others hear mobs shouting ‘maar’, ‘ kaat’, these high priests of the invisible hand, these pragmatic centrists, these world-weary veterans of the wars against the License Raj, cup their ears and and hear the aspiring masses chanting ‘Mar-ket, mar-ket, mar-ket!’
When this blindness became hard to sustain in the face of the violence and public bigotry that limn this government like a sulphuric halo, this sort of pundit tries to recast himself as a reasonable critic of the State. He either becomes the chiding well-wisher trying to restore the regime to its economic senses or casts himself as the champion of political common sense, a man of the moderate centre, opposed to the knee-jerk, impractical dogmatism of (take your pick) the left or liberal left or naïve bleeding hearts.
- Across the aisle: Calculate price of a trade war
P. Chidambaram writes in his article for The Indian Express that it is in India’s interests to be one of the adults in the room and stand up for an open trade order. True, India is not the US or China but is big enough to count… What the world requires is a coalition of sensible countries that will anchor world trade while a few countries disrupt world trade.
It is not the Third World War, but the consequences will be serious and will hurt all countries of the world. On the trade front, the world’s biggest player, the US, has gone rogue. US President Donald Trump’s policy shifts have rocked the boat of world trade, that had for decades been sailing steadily away from the harbours of protectionism. What should India’s response be? India fired the first shots in December 2017 by raising tariffs on a number of products, ostensibly to bolster the revenues. In the Budget for 2017-18, a desperate-for-revenue government raised tariffs on more products.
In view of Mr Trump’s past pronouncements, it is difficult to believe that the government’s December 2017 and February 2018 steps were unrelated to, and without anticipation of, the decisions that the US government took later.I am afraid the context has now changed. We seem to be in the middle of multiple trade wars and India has allowed itself to be dragged into the war by imposing tariffs on 28 goods from the US that will yield, if import volumes remain the same, an additional USD 240 million. This is a huge risk for India. I offer unsolicited advice: here is an opportunity for India to avoid the path of retaliatory tariffs and negotiate with the US with the offer of more trade and lower tariffs, not less trade and higher tariffs.
- So who is an Indian? The answer, my friend, is on your thaali
In his column for The Times of India, Aakar Patel writes who or what is an Indian? Ideally it should be: Indians are all who say they are Indians. But we live in a time when there is an insistence on sharpening identities.And so I thought I should try to see if we can arrive at a definition. This should be relatively easy, since we have been around for so long. All right, let’s do this.
Perhaps we could define Indians as those who live in India. But that includes many Nepalis, Tibetans, Bangladeshis and the Rohingya, whom we definitely don’t consider Indian and perhaps not even human.How about those who are born here? This excludes two fine citizens I know: Soniaji and Advaniji. It also leaves out the millions of Indian Americans and those who want to, quite understandably, own some element of ancestral identity.
Clearly, this is a difficult problem. I have given it a lot of thought (at least 40 minutes) during the writing of this column. Even if it did not capture everyone, what definition would include most of us? I was chewing this over and then I had it. The answer lay in food. In a substance that is used liberally today in everything from sai bhaji to salan and from beef curry to baingan bharta.Indians are the people who eat garam masala. Yes, that is it. The definition excludes those who don’t cook with the substance, like Kashmiris and Northeast wallahs. But don’t we exclude them anyway?
- Who’s afraid of viral videos on the drug menace in Punjab?
Are you not filled with dread every time another video of a young man ravaged by drugs surfaces on social media?, asks Aarish Chhabra in his column for Hindustan Times. What’s the price of heroin in Punjab? It’s high, so high that it’s solid proof that the drug menace is on the wane, if you believe those who rule the state. But the argument works only if you measure the price of drugs in money terms, and see the fight against drugs as a law-and-order, demand-and-supply, smuggler-and-buyer issue. Is it just that?
In the last two weeks, new videos have been emerging from all corners of Punjab. In one such video, a man who looks hardly 25 is sitting next to a bike off which he has fallen in a drug-induced nothingness. Three men have gathered around him — one of them is washing his face, another is urging him to open his mouth so he can give him water, and the third is shooting the video, also providing running commentary about the drug menace.
After each such video, the government’s image-defence forces seek to shoot it down with data bullets. We are told that thousands of peddlers are behind bars. We are also told that it’s a complex problem and cannot just be wished away. What if the people, high on grief and anger, turn into mobs and start lynching alleged peddlers, not even sparing addicts and politicians, and thus Punjabi society launches a full-fledged, no-holds-barred surgical strike on itself? Will that be the price this menace extracts?
Don’t tell me I’m being alarmist. The issue is more complex than that, you know.
- Zero Day looms as India consumes, poisons and wastes more water than any nation on earth
Emphasising on the prevailing water crisis situation in the country, Samar Halarnkar writes in his column for Scroll.in that the government just issued a dire warning of looming shortages. But it’s the government that needs to listen.
Like a few million privileged Indians, I live in a fool’s paradise. It is a paradise because unlike more than 600 million of my fellow citizens, I have no problems getting enough water, either to drink, bathe or flush. But only a fool would ignore the fact that Bangalore is among 21 Indian cities that may run out of groundwater in less than two years, according to a new government warning.
I am dimly aware that piped, municipal water is intermittently available, sometimes only once a week, usually twice. It is brought in from the river Cauvery through 200 km of pipes and pumps. This infrequent supply does not affect my life because, like most of Bangalore’s elite, my building has a storage tank and borewell, the pump to which automatically kicks in whenever Cauvery water disappears, smoothly making up the shortfall from the veins of water running under the city.
But the larger problem is that the government undercuts or ignores its own warnings, as it is doing in Delhi, where not far from the Niti Aayog’s office another branch of government is planning to chop “only 14,031 trees” to redevelop government housing colonies – oh, and another 2,000 to widen a road to the airport. The government sabotaged its own law, arguing that only a new project needed such a study; the char-dham highway, it insists, is merely a collective expansion of existing roads. Such creative accounting merely hastens the arrival of India’s Zero Day.