- Godman’s Burden
Swami Agnivesh, in a column for The Indian Express, highlights the pressures that overtake the spiritually inclined. He says the suicide of Bhayyuji Maharaj, who had a substantial following — including powerful politicians — urges us to rethink about godmen and god women. We are used to thinking of godmen and god women as spiritual luminaries. That is based almost entirely on the fact that thousands flock to them for comfort. Many believe they receive such help too. But we never ask, “How is the godman faring?”
The most difficult burden for a human being is having to sail simultaneously in two boats going in opposite directions. That is precisely the plight of our prosperous and powerful godmen. The corrosive burden of hypocrisy is inevitable. I do not want to imply that the spiritually enlightened should shun politics. To me, spirituality is also political. But “political” in what sense? The spiritual light should shine in the sphere of the political, as a radical call to practise a culture of governance based on the universal values of love, truth, justice and compassion. Seeking power and profit is utterly contrary to this credo.
- Bailout or not, the sugar industry’s boom-bust cycle will continue to crush Indian farmers
Commenting on the current scenario of our sugar industry, Devangshu Datta writes a column for Scroll.in today. He says about 25 years ago, in 1993 the so-called license raj was being dismantled in bits and pieces at that time and everyone thought the sugar industry would be among the beneficiaries.
The license raj was a pernicious beast. Over decades, the government nationalised multiple industries – mining, banks, airlines, telecom – and turned them into monopolies. The 2015-’16 harvest was barely 25 million tonnes – just about meeting demand. The 2016-’17 harvest was 20 million tonnes, and an undersupply sparked a bull run in prices. So the Union government, in its wisdom, has organised a bailout, which will not actually be much of a bailout. The Cabinet Committee on Economic Affairs approved Rs 7,000 crore as an intervention package and fixed a minimum selling price of white sugar at Rs 29 a kg – more price controls. And this price is way below production cost.
There is just no way that these dues can be cleared, and voters in those 60 Lok Sabha seats will be exercising their franchise next year. Two seasons of mounting distress will also result in less acreage being planted in 2019-’20. In turn, that will mean lower production and presumably, higher market prices. So this boom-bust cycle will continue.
- The BJP’s Dangerous End Game in Kashmir
Prem Shankar Jha critically analyses BJP-PDP fall out in an article for The Wire. He says in the two decades during which she first helped build and then serve her father’s Peoples’ Democratic Party, Mehbooba Mufti has demonstrated time and again that she has the courage of a lioness and an incorruptibility that makes her a virtual alien in Kashmiri politics.
But by resigning precipitately after meeting Governor Vohra without first considering why the BJP had chosen that moment to break the coalition, she has also shown that she is not a born politician. For in doing so, she has fallen into a trap very similar to the one that the BJP had laid for her father Mufti Mohammed Sayeed, three years earlier.
If pulling out of the alliance without even informing Mehbooba is the first step in BJP’s plan, the second will be to replace Governor Vohra, who has already tendered his resignation, with a hardline Sanghi. The third will be to unleash the full might of the security forces, with their recently acquired cyber capabilities to ferret out and hunt down and eliminate militants and their sympathisers.
If Mehbooba Mufti is wise, she will use the two months’ respite she will now have, to explain to her party and the people of the valley why she, a Kashmiri nationalist, stayed so long in the treacherous embrace of the BJP; and what she intends to campaign for in the coming months. This must be nothing less than a full return to the commitments made in 1947 and enshrined in Article 370 of the Constitution, buttressed by the Delhi agreement of 1952. This is not only a reform that is achievable, having now been endorsed by every political party including, for one brief moment in 2016, by Prime minister Modi, but it is the best guarantee of peace for not only Kashmir, but India and Pakistan as well.
- The Kind of Chest Size India Really Needs
Writing a column for The Wire regarding the showcase of bravery by Gagandeep Singh, an Uttarakhand police officer, Basant Rath says the unimpeachable integrity of India’s public servants is the only guarantee that our democracy won’t turn into majoritarianism.
The brave act of sub-inspector Singh carries that touch of sacredness in its heroic context. If India’s public servants start limiting themselves to the notion of accountability in a strictly legal sense, it will be extremely difficult for our democracy to survive and prosper. Singh could have resorted to inaction using the pretext of being alone in front of a charged mob, but he didn’t, unlike hundreds of police officers who did nothing to save the helpless citizens during the 1984 Delhi massacre, the 2002 Gujarat riots and other communal incidents.
No IPS officers being punished for their role in the 1984 Delhi massacre and the 2002 Gujarat riots is again a case in point. Irrespective of what the central IPS association and its state-level wings say of the great job IPS officers are doing for the country, they will have to live with this uncomfortable fact.
Sub-inspector Singh’s chest size matters for the idea of India. As a narrative. As an image. As a metaphor.
- BJP-PDP relationship was doomed from the beginning
Rajdeep Sardesai, in his opinion column for Hindustan Times, says neither the Valley-based PDP nor the Jammu-based BJP could offer a solution for peace and reconciliation that went beyond their well-defined, mutually antagonistic political constituencies.
For the Hindus of Jammu, the Kashmiri Muslim was always the ‘other’, a sense of permanent grievance that has been nurtured by the historical wrongs of a partitioned subcontinent and a contemporary narrative in which terrorism emanating from the Valley has been a festering wound. For the Kashmiri Muslim, the Jammu Hindu is also a potential enemy who seeks to seize power and deny the people of the Valley the special status guaranteed by Article 370 of the constitution.
So, when Mehbooba Mufti rolled out an amnesty scheme for nearly 10,000 stone-pelters in the Valley, she was immediately targeted as anti-national by the BJP’s rank and file; when BJP supporters lined up to support the alleged rapists and murderers of an eight-year-old girl in Kathua, there was a similar wave of anger in the Valley and beyond. When cow slaughter rumours in Udhampur led to a petrol bomb being thrown at a Kashmir-bound truck, it only reinforced the belief in the Valley that the BJP wanted to impose a Hindu majoritarian culture across the country. When a mob lynched a policeman in downtown Srinagar, the terrifying images only confirmed the stereotype of a radicalised Muslim community for whom violence was a weapon of supremacy.