Betraying Uttara
Mrinal Pande writes in her column for The Indian Express that with minimal consultation and a little outright deceit, most state governments maintain clear double standards for transfers and promotions of rural school teachers and health workers.
The bare bones of the story are as follows: Uttara Pant Bahuguna is a school teacher who was consistently posted in some of the remotest villages in Uttarkashi district since 1993. Separated from his family, her husband working in Dehradun had begun drinking heavily and she petitioned the department repeatedly for a posting to Dehradun on compassionate grounds. Her petitions failed and in 2015, her children lost their father.
Last week, Trivendra Singh Rawat held a Janata Durbar, where this 57-year-old widow, deeply upset about being denied a transfer repeatedly, approached the CM directly. During the questioning that followed, she got worked up and is alleged to have shouted at the CM after he threatened her with immediate suspension and arrest. Directly ordered by the CM, Bahuguna was then dragged away by the police. She has since been suspended, we learn, on grounds of insubordination. This ugly drama played out in front of journalists and cameras. It, however, received muted coverage in the mainstream media that the locals now call the “Godi Media”.
As happens frequently, the reports and visuals soon went viral in the social media and a furious debate broke out. This was embarrassing for a government repeatedly promoting the central government’s “Beti Bachao, Beti Padhao” and Holy Devbhumi campaigns.
Sushma Swaraj’s Reaction to Bitter Trolling Was Graceful but Inadequate
Sidharth Bhatia notes that the trolling episode was a good opportunity for Sushma Swaraj to come out and express her solidarity with other women victims. In his The Wire column, he writes that coordinated trolling is, after all, quite common and has been mainly directed at ‘enemies’ such as liberals, secular-minded individuals, journalists and all those who dare criticise or question this establishment. The ‘establishment’ in this case does not mean the government, but the larger ideological entity that includes the Sangh parivar and the prime minister, the BJP chief and a few chosen others. The trolls owe their loyalty to the cause and the individuals that exemplify that cause.
But the sheer force with which Swaraj has been targeted is unprecedented. The main grouse of her critics was that by helping a Muslim man and his Hindu wife, she had dared to be ‘secular’, which is perhaps the worst insult any Hindutva type can hurl. Giving Muslims any quarter, even for humanitarian purposes, is strictly verboten and for a BJP leader to do so puts her beyond the pale. Swaraj’s Twitter ratings have crashed – she is no longer a respected person for these people. Some of her trolls tried to voice their disapproval by stating that she had been unfair to the passport official, but that was a fig leaf to cover their own prejudices.
Hype will not help
In a column for Deccan Herald, Vappala Balachandran writes that we are often given the incorrect impression by some of our media vehicles that speeches by our leaders at multilateral conferences are “game changers”. Take for instance Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s keynote address at the Shangri-La Dialogue (June 1) in Singapore. It was claimed that he was the first Indian PM to have been given the distinction to deliver the keynote address at the Shangri-La Dialogue since its inception.
While this may be factually true, it was not mentioned that this is only a conference of defence ministers and not any higher level. Had this conference been that important, our then defence minister Arun Jaitley would not have skipped the Dialogue iin 2017. Similarly, an incredulous claim was made by some sections of our media that the US Pacific Command (Pacom) was renamed the “Indo-Pacific Command” (IndoPacom) by US Defence Secretary James Mattis on May 30 in recognition of the growing importance of India under the BJP-led government.
A luminous mind
In his column for The Telegraph, Ashok V Desai writes that he was not surprised by the resignation of Arvind Subramanian.
I gave no credence to the unspecified “personal reasons” he gave in his public statement – everyone who leaves for embarrassing reasons calls them personal and leaves it to readers to guess. For four years, I had read Arvind’s superb Economic Surveys – the last one got 9.5 million hits from 196,000 visitors from 163 countries in one month – and noted their complete disconnection with the budgets that followed them.
I read the finance minister’s speeches out of duty, and noticed how innocent they were not only of the enormous knowledge that went into the Economic Surveys, but of economics altogether; all that he did was hand out billions and billions to party favourites and supporters.
He did not need the CEA’s expertise to do this; and while the CEA defended the government’s economic policies when he could, he never defended his ministry’s patronage business. So I assumed that the finance minister and his CEA lived in different worlds, and went on separately to do what they wanted. And when Arvind resigned, I presumed that he had finally got tired of the ministerial cold shoulder and left for a more welcoming environment.