In 2014, commenting on the Bharatiya Janata Party’s landslide victory under Narendra Modi, The Guardian published an editorial that remarked: “Today … may well go down in history as the day when Britain finally left India.” The author read the writing on the wall accurately. The process began in 2014, but Modi outlined it eight years later in his 2022 Independence Day speech, Modi introduced the concept of Panchpran (Five Resolutions), outlining India’s vision over the next 25 years. One of the key resolutions is to rid the country of any remaining “colonial mindset.”

This renaming is not merely a symbolic act but represents a fundamental rethinking of policy-making and the nation’s role on the global stage. The decision reflects a significant shift in mindset, moving away from colonial-era thinking towards a renewed emphasis on India’s historical and cultural identity.

In keeping with this goal, the Home Ministry has recently renamed several locations in the Andaman and Nicobar Islands to honor Indian heroes and freedom fighters. One notable change is the renaming of a hill previously named after a British army officer’s wife to Mount Manipur, commemorating the resistance of Indian fighters exiled by the British.

The politics of symbolism

Renaming places is not a new phenomenon; throughout history, conquerors have imposed their names on cities, often erasing indigenous identities. Similar efforts are evident in other countries as well. For instance, in the United States, historic sites have been renamed to reflect their original cultural significance, such as Fort San Marcos, renamed Castillo de San Marcos to acknowledge its Spanish heritage. Likewise, in China, streets and areas have been renamed to reinforce a national narrative.

For a former colony like India, renaming places is a form of symbolic decolonization. It serves as a means of reinforcing a collective memory that honors resistance to oppression and celebrates autonomy. Yes, the decision to rename Port Blair to Sri Vijaya Puram is a symbolic gesture, but symbolism is not just words without effect. In politics, psychology and history matter.

This name change is part of India’s effort to reconnect with its maritime history. The Andaman Islands command a key choke point between the Bay of Bengal to the west and the Andaman Sea to the east. This places it close to the vital Strait of Malacca, the second busiest oil chokepoint in the world after the Strait of Hormuz.

Well before the oil trade, the islands were significant in maritime trade. They once served as a base for the Great Chola Empire, which extended its influence across Southeast Asia. In his book The Ocean of Churn, Sanjeev Sanyal highlights how the islands were connected to the broader history of maritime trade and power projection in the Indian Ocean. The islands’ geographical location made them pivotal for controlling sea routes, and they were home to thriving port cities, interacting with traders from across the Bay of Bengal and beyond. The renaming reflects a recognition of the islands’ historic and strategic role..

Moreover, Sri Vijaya Puram holds a crucial place in India’s struggle for independence. In the latter years of the colonial period, the city housed the notorious Cellular Jail where numerous freedom fighters were imprisoned. This site not only represented British oppression but also the indomitable spirit of those striving for freedom. One such figure, Vinayak Damodar Savarkar, foresaw that the islands would be critical to India’s defense.

India develops the islands’ strategic potential

The 2004 tsunami brought international attention to the vulnerabilities of the Andaman and Nicobar Islands but also showcased India’s capacity for disaster response and regional cooperation. In the aftermath, India led rescue efforts and initiated a tsunami early warning system, solidifying its role in maritime security.

In recent years, the government has launched substantial infrastructural projects aimed at transforming the islands into economic and strategic hubs. The introduction of undersea fiber-optic cables has improved connectivity, while the modernization of the local airport is expected to enhance tourism. Initiatives in eco-tourism and the development of deep-sea ports further underline the islands’ growing significance.

Sri Vijaya Puram is not yet the fully-fledged maritime stronghold that Savarkar envisioned, although India took an important first step in this direction in 2001, when Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee established the first tri-service theater command in the region. However, the renaming is a statement of purpose. It signals a commitment to India’s maritime heritage while also highlighting ongoing efforts to enhance the Andaman and Nicobar Islands economically. This transformation under current leadership aims to position the islands as pivotal assets for India’s future.

[Anton Schauble edited this piece.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

The post What’s in a Name? Port Blair Is Now Sri Vijaya Puram appeared first on Fair Observer.

Even as I write this, Bangladesh is in turmoil. Mobs stormed the Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina’s palace, and she has fled to India after 15 years of increasingly autocratic rule. Pakistan is not doing much better. Economically, it is definitely doing worse. In 2023, Pakistan’s per capita income fell to $1,407, from $1,589.3 in 2022. Bangladesh’s per capita income fell too, but to $2,529.1 in 2023 from $2,687.9 in 2022. In 1971, Pakistan’s per capita income was $175.2 while Bangladesh’s was $128. Clearly, the darker cousin outstripped the fairer one over the decades.

Anwar Iqbal, writing in Pakistan’s flagship newspaper Dawn, tells the tale of Pakistan going with a begging bowl to the International Monetary Fund (IMF) a staggering 23 times. Even as IMF bailouts continue, a kleptocratic elite lives opulent lives as latter-day Mughals. The Pakistani Army holds the country together with the barrel of a gun and by whipping up the fear of its larger neighbor, India.

Yet there are schisms even within the military. Two days ago, the military arrested Lieutenant-General Faiz Hameed of the fabled Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) in a historic first. The former ISI chief was close to cricketer-turned-politician Imran Khan, who became prime minister upending traditional parties but is now languishing in jail. Now, members of Pakistan’s traditional political families — lucky sperm club — hold elected offices after blatantly rigged polls. As Pakistani elites flee the country to safe havens like Dubai and London, this nuclear-armed country is becoming ever more Islamist.

India is doing much better but is in ferment

India’s per capita GDP has risen from $118.2 in 1971 to $2484.8 in 2023. India has avoided the instability of either of its Muslim-majority neighbors. Except for a brief two-year interlude in the 1970s, India has been a democracy with regular elections and a peaceful transfer of power.

Today, Indians are better-fed, taller and live longer than ever before. In 1947, when India won independence, an average Indian lifespan was a little over 32 years. Today, it is over 70. To be fair, life expectancy has also gone up in Pakistan and Bangladesh. If I go by numbers, independence has been a jolly good thing for the Indian subcontinent.

Yet for all the progress, Indians feel a sense of underachievement at the global stage. At the recently concluded Paris Olympics, 1.4 billion-strong India finished 71st, behind tiny Lithuania with a population of 2.8 million. Before independence, India had Nobel laureates like Rabindranath Tagore and C.V. Raman. Today, the country has none. 

Education has become a game of competitive examinations with private coaching companies making fortunes to train teenagers to crack exams for prestigious public universities generously funded by the state. Government hospitals are overcrowded and the country is currently up in arms after the rape and murder of a female doctor in Kolkata. Ironically, this state of West Bengal (population of over 100 million) is ruled by the Trinamool Congress’s Mamata Banerjee, one of the most prominent women leaders in the country. A day ago, a final-year engineering student was abducted, raped and dumped on the Agra–Delhi highway. This state is ruled by Yogi Adityanath, a Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) leader who has made his reputation for being tough on crime.

Part of the reason for high crime is the lack of police reforms since 1947. Also, courts take an eternity to decide upon cases. The structure of the state is still colonial and corruption is a way of life. In many ways, Indian democracy is skin-deep. At the district level, unelected officers of the imperial-era Indian Administrative Service (IAS) rule like feudal lords from colonial bungalows. They are assisted by officers of the Indian Police Service (IPS). Both the IAS and the IPS answer directly to the chief minister of the state. Local mayors have no real power.

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Strong chief ministers from almost all parties rule their states with two to five IAS officers and one or two IPS officers imposing their will on the people. They are elected monarchs with vast powers of patronage. Prime Minister Narendra Modi has taken this IAS model of governance to the national level. His ministers are ciphers with no power or even status. Favored IAS officers are Modi’s feudal barons who ride roughshod even over BJP politicians. In other parties such as the historic Indian National Congress or the Samajwadi Party, dynasts rule the roost. Indian democracy is proving resilient but is not in rude health.

India is not alone in experiencing institutional and moral degradation. South Africa does not have a Nelson Mandela; France is not led by Charles de Gaulle, and the US is far cry from the days of Franklin Delano Roosevelt or Dwight David Eisenhower. Yet with 1.4 billion people, urban squalor, rising unemployment, unmet expectations and social divisions along caste, region and religion, the Indian republic faces immense challenges ahead.

My father was born in 1942, five years before India’s independence. In the 1971 India–Pakistan War, he operated for 72 consecutive hours. In his old age, he views India’s post-independence story wistfully. India is doing much better than Pakistan or Bangladesh, but that is not enough for him. He takes the view that hospitals safe for women doctors and trains where toilets are clean are not that hard to achieve. That is the minimum I have to achieve as a people to make the sacrifices of those who spent years and even decades in British jails worthwhile.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

The post How to View Independence Amidst Ferment, Rape and Dirty Toilets appeared first on Fair Observer.

Lord Shiva is one of the most important gods in Hinduism. Shiva is a member of the trimūrti, the supreme divine triad, along with Brahma and Vishnu. He is associated with time and is the creator and destroyer of all things.

The rhythmic beats of Lord Shiva’s Damaru — a small drum-shaped instrument held by Lord Shiva — resonate deeply within the collective consciousness of Hinduism, above all in the annual festival of Maha Shivratri, which falls in late February or early March. The drum is a symbol of rhythm, time and cosmic sound. The rhythmic beats produced by its two ends symbolize the dualities inherent in existence: life and death, light and darkness, creation and destruction. At first glance, the Damaru’s shape resembles an hourglass, representing the eternal flow of time — a concept central to Hindu philosophy.

The Damaru with other symbols of Lord Shiva.

In Lord Shiva’s cosmic dance, known as the Tandava, the Damaru’s sound sets the rhythm for the universe’s perpetual motion, signifying the cycle of birth, death, and rebirth. With its simple yet profound design, this sacred instrument held a spiritual and historical connection that transcended time and space. It serves as a poignant reminder of the eternal cycle of life and death. Shiva, often depicted holding the Damaru, is particularly iconic in the Nataraja form, where the rhythmic beats of the Damaru accompany his cosmic dance of creation and destruction. Sometimes depicted in other dancing postures, Shiva’s presence with the Damaru remains a powerful symbol. The Damaru is tied to his Trishul or trident in certain depictions, further emphasizing its significance. The sound emanating from the Damaru symbolizes the primal sound of creation, perpetuating the universe’s eternal rhythm.

In Hinduism, particularly among Shiva devotees, it is firmly believed that Shiva’s beating of the Damaru heralded the first sound, known as “nada.” This inaugural sound emerged from the depths of the void, resonating with the essence of creation. As Shiva commenced his divine dance, guided by the rhythm of the Damaru, the cosmos sprang forth into existence. Moreover, the shape of the Damaru holds symbolic significance—the upper portion represents the male creative force (the Lingam), while the lower portion embodies the female creative energy (the Yoni). Symbolically, the convergence of the Lingam and Yoni at the midpoint of the Damaru signifies the genesis of creation, while their separation signifies destruction’s inevitable course. The beats of Shiva’s Damaru reverberated throughout the universe, setting the rhythm for the eternal cycle of existence. With each tap of the drum, the divine sound echoed the pulsating energy of creation, symbolizing the cosmic vibrations that underpinned all of reality.

Painting of Siva as Bhairava. Andhra Pradesh or Tamil Nadu, circa 1820. Via the British Museum.

Symbolism of the Damaru in Hindu iconography

Ancient Indian artists and sculptors have depicted the Damaru for thousands of years in their works. Its presence in Hindu iconography underscores its enduring significance as a spiritual awakening and enlightenment symbol. From Varanasi’s temples to Ellora’s caves, the image of Lord Shiva wielding the Damaru is a timeless reminder of the divine power that permeates the cosmos.

Moreover, the ancient yogic traditions of India revered sound as a powerful tool for spiritual transformation; hence, Lord Shiva’s association with Damaru evokes its significance. Through Nada Yoga, practitioners harness the vibrational energy of sound to unlock higher states of consciousness and commune with the divine. The rhythmic beats of the Damaru, when played with intention and devotion, have the power to transport the listener to realms beyond the material world, where the soul finds refuge in the eternal embrace of the divine.

Painting of Siva presenting the cakra to Vishnu. Andhra Pradesh or Tamil Nadu, circa 1820. Via the British Museum.

The Indira Gandhi National Centre for the Arts (IGNCA) recently showcased a special exhibition on the various types of Damaru, exhibiting the rich tapestry of India’s cultural and religious diversity. Beyond its symbolism, the Damaru manifests in multiple shapes, sizes, and materials, each imbued with its unique significance. This exploration not only sheds light on the diverse cultural heritage of India but also unveils the deep connections between the Damaru and various Shiva sects and devotees, including Aghoris, Nagas, and others.

In the holy city of Varanasi, the traditional wooden Damaru reigns supreme, its intricate carvings and embellishments reflecting the city’s rich artistic heritage. For Aghoris, the Damaru symbolizes Shiva’s cosmic dance and worldly attachments’ transcendence.

Similarly, among the Nagas, Damaru is sacred in their rituals and ceremonies. The Naga Damaru embodies the warrior spirit and the indomitable will to overcome adversity. In the southern state of Tamil Nadu, the brass Damaru takes center stage, reflecting the region’s vibrant cultural traditions and artistic craftsmanship. Here, devotees from the Shaiva Siddhanta tradition revere the Damaru as a symbol of divine grace and spiritual awakening. 

Cultural and spiritual significance of Damaru across India

In the mountainous regions of the Himalayas, the Damaru finds its most primal expression. The Himalayan Damaru embodies the raw power and elemental energy of the mountains. 

The diverse types of Damaru found across India showcase the country’s rich cultural heritage and highlight the deep spiritual connections between the instrument and various Shiva sects and devotees. 

Moreover, the Damaru’s shape is reminiscent of the lingam, a symbol of divine energy and fertility associated with Lord Shiva. Just as the lingam represents the union of male and female energies, the Damaru embodies the balance between opposing forces—Shiva and Shakti, Purusha and Prakriti. Through Damaru’s rhythmic sounds, Lord Shiva harmonizes these dualities, fostering the unity of opposites within the individual and the cosmos.

In Hindu mythology, the Damaru is often depicted alongside Nandi, Lord Shiva’s bull vehicle, further emphasizing its sacred significance. Nandi, a symbol of strength and stability, listens intently to Damaru’s beats, symbolizing the receptive aspect of creation. Together, the Damaru and Nandi embody the complementary forces of creation and receptivity, illustrating the interconnectedness of all beings in the cosmic dance of life.

Beyond its mythological and symbolic connotations, the Damaru holds practical significance in Hindu rituals and ceremonies. Devotees use it to accompany devotional songs and chants, invoking the presence of Lord Shiva and facilitating spiritual communion. The symbolism of the Damaru transcends its physical form. As Lord Shiva’s sacred instrument, it serves as a reminder of the eternal dance of creation, preservation, and destruction that animates the universe. Through its rhythmic beats, the Damaru symbolizes the cosmic vibrations underpinning all creation, offering devotees a pathway to spiritual enlightenment and divine communion. 

[Liam Roman edited this article]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

The post Divine Energy and Spiritual Communion Through the Damaru appeared first on Fair Observer.

What innovation India does have is driven by entrepreneurs wanting to create startup companies. These are uncommon, as graduates often seek employment at existing corporations out of school. Additionally, Indians confuse innovation with incubation. Many so-called “innovation centers” — collaborative hubs where groups exchange ideas and develop projects together — are really incubation centers, designed to aid the formation of startup companies.

Innovation is a teachable skill set that, unfortunately, the Indian education system does not encourage at any level. The current system focuses too heavily on information retention and rigid testing. Young minds should learn to be curious, ask questions and invent new ideas.

Fortunately, a new movement is emerging to improve India’s higher education: the maker space movement. It challenges students to design with their hands. The nationwide spread of maker spaces — collaborative work spaces in schools and public facilities, which provide professional tools and technology — offers Indian students a chance to experiment and invent. Its goal is to kindle an innovative spirit within them.

Maker Bhavan Foundation wants to fix India’s innovation

Maker Bhavan Foundation (MBF), founded by Director Hemant Kanakia and managed by President Ruyintan Mehta, is dedicated to reforming engineering education nationwide. It does so by teaching Indian student engineers creativity, teamwork, communication and problem-solving skills.

MBF is based on Kanakia’s experiences at India’s IIT Bombay and the United States’s Stanford University. He observed that Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs) were frozen in their pedagogy — the method and practice of teaching — unlike outside organizations like Stanford. The latter school has evolved and now emphasizes experiential over theoretical learning.

Indian institutions, on the other hand, teach theoretically instead of experientially. Thus, Indian graduates rarely have the practical skills to build technological devices and systems out of school. Many make great theoreticians but lackluster engineers.

MBF’s vision is to boost the education level by focusing on the top and middle tier of adult students. It modernizes the pedagogy so students work in teams, create things and develop an inventive spirit. MBF boosts its students’ confidence and teaches them a judgment of practicality through the building process.

Kanakia started the foundation at IIT Bombay in 2017. He had a dialogue with the IT officer in charge of technical education at the central government’s Ministry of Education. He was so enthusiastic that he started a similar mission called Atal Tinkering Lab, which provides the same service for children across a thousand Indian schools.

Mehta hopes to spread MBF’s movement to 50 higher education institutions covering over 250,000 students in the next five to six years. He desires to make India a land of deep thinkers who brainstorm, invent and work with their hands. In his words, MBF is about “learning by doing” and “learning by using.”

Tinkerers’ Labs and LEAP encourage creativity

MBF’s first and most important initiative is Tinkerers’ Labs. This comprises student-managed maker spaces that are open all day, every day. The labs enable students to experiment and exercise their imaginations. They can build prototypes of whatever they desire using a variety of sophisticated machines — 3D printers, laser cutters, vinyl cutters and more. This experiential education system pushes them to convert concepts into tangible, potentially workable products of engineering.

The intended goal is for students to find solutions for India-specific problems. For example, if a student’s family member had asthma, they might choose to build an inhaler tailored to the local conditions.

In the past few years, Tinkerers’ Labs has collaborated with another educational program: Learn Engineering by Activity with Products (LEAP). This project-based program helps students learn similar patterns of engineering, but operates in South Indian colleges that lack IIT facilities.

LEAP’s prototyping process goes like this: First-year students reverse-engineer products and craft small prototypes. Second-years receive mentoring to create more substantial prototypes. Third-years work on industry-provided problems, where their projects get progressively more complex. Fourth-years are instructed to go find a socially relevant problem and build a solution for it.

Over 10,000 students from more than 11 higher education institutions have flexed their creativity at Tinkerers’ Labs.

Invention Factory gets students building

Tinkerers’ Labs is not MBF’s only initiative. Invention Factory is a six-week intensive summer program developed in the US at The Cooper Union, which MBF has brought to India. In this program, undergraduate students from across India work in pairs to build prototypes for innovative inventions.

They first learn to pitch their ideas; concepts can only advance to the next stage once they are accepted by 75% of the participants and faculty. They then develop a working prototype and continually improve it. At the end of the six weeks, they pitch their creation to a panel of judges, who award the students first, second or third prize.

One notable team visited a local farm and asked farmers about the difficulties of mango picking. There is a 15% wastage, they learned, when plucking the fruit off its tree. They observed the standard-use picker and devised an improvement for it. The team’s simple instrument saved labor by both picking and packaging the fruits. As 45% of all mangoes are produced in India, this was indeed a solution to an India-specific problem.

Of the ideas prototyped at Invention Factory, to date, 104 have been patented in the US and India. Several of them had such great utility value that commercial companies approached the student teams, hoping to license or adapt their inventions.

MBF is working to develop an industry associate program, so it can place top students in industries where they can continue their work. This combats the issue of graduates discarding innovative pursuits in favor of immediate employment.

MBF funding: donors, corporations and eventually the government

MBF is a US-based nonprofit organization that Kanakia kickstarted with his own fortune. His work predominantly attracted passionate IIT workers who inspired donors to support the organization. US donors contribute 90% of its funds.

Mehta aims to get future funding from Indian companies through Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR). By law, Indian companies must spend 2% of their net profits on CSR — so companies could choose to spend their 2% funding MBF. So far, however, they have not.

Regardless, Mehta is confident that Tinkerers’ Labs and Invention Factory will attract Indian funds. These programs bring in industry leaders as judges, who are amazed by the students and consider supporting the organization.

MBF is currently in the “friends and family” phase. Its ambitions have expanded over the years, so the group needs to leverage the money that it has put in itself with a corporate sponsorship, like CSR.

MBF has not sought government funds, but Kanakia intends to change that in the next stage. The Indian government is good at allocating money but not monitoring its outcome or ensuring its continued success. It would want to send a minimum of 500 crore rupees (over $59 million).

It is easier to define a program as a public-private partnership; both sides chip in funds while the private portion manages the program. That’s the direction MBF will likely take with Tinkerers’ Labs and Invention Factory. But, no matter who funds it, MBF will continue to support the experiential learning and creative endeavors of young Indians.

[Lee Thompson-Kolar wrote the first draft of this piece.]

The views expressed in this article/video are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

The post FO° Talks: Make Sense of the Maker Space Movement in India appeared first on Fair Observer.

Rashid, popularly known as Engineer Rashid, has taken established political parties and people outside the Union Territory of Jammu and Kashmir (J&K) by total surprise. Conducting his campaign from prison, he won a parliamentary seat in this year’s Lok Sabha election. On July 5, he was officially sworn in.

There are indications that the J&K electorate angry at its pathetic condition and at unfulfilled promises punished established parties. 

The victory prompted political parties and the public outside the Union Territory of Jammu and Kashmir (J&K) to wonder who Engineer Rashid is and what factors prompted his dramatic victory. 

Who is Engineer Rashid, and why is he so popular?

Engineer Rashid was a Member of the Legislative Assembly from the Langate constituency in the now-defunct state of Jammu and Kashmir. (In 2019 the Modi government decided to repeal Article 370, a special provision of the Indian constitution that granted autonomy and statehood to J&K. It also granted powers to the state government on all matters except defense, external affairs and communications. Once the article ceased, the state became a union territory with a governor appointed by the central government.

Engineer Rashid is also the founder of the Jammu and Kashmir Awami Ittehad Party.

In 2019, the National Investigation Agency arrested him in a terror funding case. He has been in jail ever since. The jail sentence did not stop him, however, from contesting the election. 

Engineer Rashid’s decision to contest the Baramulla constituency made him hugely popular among the youth. Baramulla has been infamous for militancy and political dormancy. For much of the last 30 years, the district experienced large-scale armed violence. Though incidents of mass violence have declined from its peak in the 1990s, until recently, the district faced frequent breakdowns in law and order.

Despite promises by previous governments to improve law and order and the economic situation, locals in particular the youth felt that they hadn’t seen any real change or improvement in their lives. Engineer Rashid’s campaign tapped into this sentiment. 

His decision to contest from the constituency came as a rude shock to established political parties. Before the announcement, it was widely expected that the clash would be between the National Conference (JKNC) and Apni Party, both of whom had roots running deep through the constituency. While the JKNC is an ideologically secular party, the Apni Party aligns itself with Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party. 

The election campaign

With his father in jail, Abrar campaigned throughout the constituency. Like his father, he is also hugely popular with the party base and youngsters who accompanied him wherever he sought votes.

Abrar attributes his overwhelming support to his “father’s good work for the people of Jammu and Kashmir,” adding that he was “in the campaign only because [of his] father.” He expressed his frustration at “his father being behind bars for the past five years,” claiming that it was so “because he talked about Kashmir and its people” while “the rest of the parties used money and muscle power.” Abrar is of the opinion that “people were coming of their own will and that the credit for the entire campaign goes to them.”

Many of the individuals who attended his drive-through rallies shared their support for Engineer Rashid. Among them was Inayat Adil, a young man in his 30s who was of the opinion that, “For many years, or decades for that matter, people preferred to boycott elections as we did not feel that any leader was worth voting for. They would visit us during the election and soon vanish, but this time we feel that we should vote for Engineer Rashid.”  

Mohammad Yousuf Shah, an aged man from Pattan, stated that the “previous leaders made ‘fake promises,’ which is why we are supporting Engineer and participating at his rally.” He hoped that the Engineer could become the people’s voice in the parliament.

People waiting in a queue to cast their votes in Baramulla. Via Sajad Ahmed Bhat. Used with permission.

In a crucial development, Home Minister Amit Shah visited Jammu and Kashmir on May 16, a few days before voting was to take place. Shah is something of a legend due to his feat in in 2017. Then the BJP’s national president, he led the party to a victory in India’s most populous state, Uttar Pradesh. This year, it seems, the BJP felt the need to pull the big guns into J&K.

During his visit, Shah made an appeal to the party cadre to ask party supporters to vote against the JKNC, the People’s Democratic Party and the Indian National Congress, indicating that the Altaf Bukhari’s Apni Party and Sajad Lone’s People’s Conference were preferable options. He also expressed regret for not fielding BJP candidates in some seats. 

Election day

The atmosphere in and around the Baramulla constituency was different from usual. People were enthusiastic to vote rather than boycott the election as was the norm in J&K. 

An Elderly man, showing ink mark on finger and holding a voting slip in his other hand, after casting his vote. Via Sajad Ahmed Bhat. Used with permission

Unemployment, lack of development and dissatisfaction with successive governments not fulfilling their promises weighed heavily in the minds of many first-time voters. One such first-time voter was Mubasir Ahmed. He felt that the “government had not fulfilled its promises” adding that the voters had come out of their “homes in hope of a change” expressing faith in the vote they were “going to cast this time.”

Other voters expressed similar sentiments. They are fed up with “unemployment, long power cuts, hectic power bills,” expressing hope that their “chosen leader will solve all their issues” and “be their voice.” Yet another voter, Mohammad Ramzan, stated, “Voting is everyone’s right and that should be used, with the hope that my chosen leader will, God willing, win.” The voter’s yearning for a change was visible from the turnout. 

As per the data from the Election Commission of India, the turnout was 59.10%, the highest in eight elections. Interaction with locals and suggested a clear wave against the ruling BJP’s actions since the repeal of Article 370 of the Indian constitution and dissatisfaction with parties not doing anything about livelihood issues. First-time young voters, educated individuals and a group of elderly voters turned out in large numbers.

Engineer Rashid won by a margin of 472,481 votes. He defeated political heavyweights such as former Chief Minister Omar Abdullah, leader of the JKNC. Other defeated candidates were Sajad Lone from the People’s Conference and Mir Mohammad Fayaz from the Jammu and Kashmir People’s Democratic Party.

The results clearly indicated frustration with the status quo and a desire for change. It also showed that national heavyweights such as Shah were unable to change the result in a way that was favorable for the BJP. Last Friday, Engineer Rashid took his oath as a Members of Parliament. Rashid was granted parole to take the oath. The ceremony took place amid heightened security in the parliament complex.

[Aniruddh Rajendran edited this piece.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

The post An Electoral Stunner! How Engineer Rashid Suddenly Won From Prison appeared first on Fair Observer.

Even in a mature democracy like the United Sates, this level of narcissism, misogyny, and megalomania are not uncommon. Donald Trump, with a similar set of traits, will seek the highest office in the United States for the third time this November. However, unlike Trump, Modi’s vice-like grip on most democratic institutions make his messianic assertions a monumental challenge for India.

Narcissism

Three of India’s most populous states voted decisively against Modi this year in a stunning rebuke to his narcissistic leadership.

In Uttar Pradesh, by far India’s most populous state — with a whopping 80 seats out of the Lok Sabha’s 543 — Modi thought that he could launch ambitious reform schemes without paying attention to their effects on real people. His Agnipath scheme eliminated opportunities for young citizens to spend their career in the armed forces, replacing them instead with a four-year tour of duty after which a soldier would retire without a pension. Certainly, reform is much needed, given the rapidly changing nature of warfare. But Modi rammed the scheme through while ignoring the dismal job prospects young graduates would face due to his whimsical economic policies.

In Maharashtra, Modi assumed that he could redirect investments to Gujarat instead of letting the state administration attract investors, boost economic activity and create well-paying jobs. Marathas demanded reservations for their community and farmers suffered under adverse climactic conditions. These events should have served as warning signs to Modi about his failing policies. Yet in his make-believe world, there is no acknowledgment of failure, let alone ownership.

Modi’s treatment of West Bengal was perhaps the most egregious example of his narcissism. By meddling in the state’s affairs through the centrally appointed governor and selectively unleashing investigative agencies on opposition politicians, he thought he could subvert the mandate Bengalis gave to their immensely popular Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee. When that yielded limited success, he thought he could get away with blocking funds due to the Bengalis from the central government.

Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) fared dismally in all three states this year. Modi might have thought that he could rule the entire country like the state of Gujarat (his backyard) with no accountability, but voters in these states sent him a timely reminder about owning up to his failures.

As if the setback at the ballot box were not enough, even Mohan Bhagwat, the head of BJP’s ideological fountainhead Rashtriya Swayamsewak Sangh (RSS), subtly asked Modi to tone down his arrogance.

Misogyny

Despite these setbacks, Modi survives as prime minister. While the BJP lost its majority in parliament, the National Democratic Alliance coalition of which it is a part still controls the Lok Sabha. Perhaps they were able to survive this well because of the lack of an aspirational vision from the opposition.

On the other hand, Modi’s claims of building some mythical new India notwithstanding, the mixed message from this election indicates that his tenure, with some successes and some failures, is similar to almost all the previous administrations, especially in one important way: misogyny. Modi’s enablers, funders and blind followers, especially in the developed world, must now reckon with Modi’s attitude toward women.

India can take pride in having had women elected as Prime Minister and Presidents, but we remain a heavily patriarchal society. 

Since Modi was a foot soldier of the RSS — an organization that considered the patriarchal law code Manusmruti one of the guiding documents for Indian society — before entering politics, his treatment of women should not surprise anyone. He lied about abandoning his ex-wife for decades, acknowledging her existence only at the time of filing an election-related affidavit. He failed to address his own home ministry playing an active role in releasing the Hindu convicts sentenced for murdering the family of and then raping a pregnant Muslim woman. He used foul, tasteless language against Mamata Banerjee. He shielded BJP leaders accused of sexual assaults against women.

Sadly one can find these traits in politicians around the world, including opposition parties within India. It does not make Modi exceptional. However, his recent assertion, conveniently made after his mother’s passing, that he believes he is not biologically born to her, was truly exceptional and should worry even his most ardent supporters. The standard-bearer of a country making such bizarre and anti-women statements should concern those who live in more equal societies, root for women’s empowerment in India, and still unabashedly support Modi, especially when he is not the only person in the BJP to lead the country.

Megalomania

Lastly, it is high time the Indian mainstream media reflect on the way they have been feeding Modi’s megalomania.

Megalomania is more than just narcissism. As a narcissist, Modi thought that he was bigger than his own supporters. As a megalomaniac, he seems to think that he is bigger than India’s democratic institutions themselves.

Barring Indira Gandhi, who employed slogans like “Indira is India” and went on to declare a state of emergency, Indian Prime Ministers before Modi had the gravitas and humility to appreciate their role as democratically elected leaders. However, after ten years in power, Modi started believing that he was sent, to use his own words, by the Parmaatma — the divine, universal Self of Hindu philosophy — to serve those who have faith in him. With Pakistan next door, we don’t have to go too far to witness how invocation of god in discharging your duties towards a republic can destroy a system of representative democracy.

Modi sidelined the other institutions of the state and focused all attention on himself. One would think the Indian press, being the fourth pillar of democracy, would have demanded press conferences and posed tough questions to a democratically elected leader. Instead, most of the mainstream TV media caved and made a beeline for the scripted crumbs thrown at them by the self-appointed vishwaguru, or the master of the universe.

Since the central government’s advertising is the main source of revenue for most of the Indian media outlets, they have done the government’s bidding for decades. However, after the 1991 reforms and the subsequent entry of the private sector in broadcast media, India did see a steady growth in news channels holding their leaders accountable. Even a cursory look at the TV news coverage in the decade preceding Modi’s first national victory in 2014 would drive that point home. Yet it seems that most of these outlets abdicated their primary duty after 2014.

This was left to a handful of online outlets and civic-minded YouTube influencers — battling frivolous lawsuits, BJP’s online troll armies, attacks from friends and family and, in some cases, even jail time and death threats — to show the mirror to Modi. People in India and abroad who cared about Indian democracy kept hammering home the real issues facing India. As this author had pointed out as early as mid-2020, it was obvious to anyone following Modi’s use of public morality and religious tropes to defend inane economic policies that India was well on its way to losing its demographic dividend.

Luckily, Indian voters realized sooner than the media honchos sitting in comfortable offices on the government’s dime that one cannot eat religion for dinner. Modi’s megalomania might make him believe that he is serving God, but the voters need jobs for two square meals. They need due process and constitutionally mandated fundamental rights for a dignified life. And they need leaders accountable to them — not metaphysical entities — to achieve those goals.

Visionaries like Babasaheb Ambedkar, who led the drafting of India’s constitution, enshrined universal adult franchise to guard against the narcissism, misogyny and megalomania of leaders like Modi. Still, the 2024 elections are only a minor course correction. India remains more likely to squander the potential demographic dividend by getting older before it gets richer. And it is anybody’s guess whether Indian media will learn their lessons. Nonetheless, thankfully for India and sadly for Modi, his god does not vote.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

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The results are a bitter disappointment for Modi. He had been aiming for 400 seats in these elections. Still, Modi continues to be the most powerful leader in India. He campaigned across the length and breadth of the country, drawing big crowds. Millions voted for the BJP because of Modi and continue to support the party because of him. This is the first data point that much of the media seems to be ignoring. Note that the Indian National Congress (INC) has come a distant second with 99 seats.

Related Reading

The Truth About Why I Voted for Narendra Modi

The effectiveness of the safety net is the second valuable data point. The Modi government’s program to distribute five kilograms (11 pounds) of wheat or rice every month to over 800 million people. This has provided food security to the Indian masses. At a time when food inflation is raging across the world, the Modi government has saved millions of poor people from the pressure to earn enough to eat.

The third data point is that alliances saved the day for the BJP. The BJP’s new alliances forged in 2023–2024 helped the party to retain power. The alliances formed with Janata Dal (United) in Bihar, JD (Secular) in Karnataka and Telugu Desam Party (TDP) in Andhra Pradesh have saved the day for the Modi-led BJP. In 2004, the BJP lost power after its “India Shining” campaign bombed at the electoral box office. In 2024, the party avoided that fate.

The fourth data point is the BJP’s continued hold over Central India. The BJP retained its hold on Central India. In Madhya Pradesh, Shivraj Singh Chauhan led the BJP to victory in 29 out of 29 seats. The INC contested 28 seats and lost all of them. In Chhattisgarh, the BJP won 10 out 11 seats. The INC won just one seat in the state. Both states have BJP governments and, if the anti-incumbency factor had taken root, the BJP might have been in trouble.

The fifth data point is that the BJP has succeeded in its strategy of expanding east and broadening the base of the party. The BJP’s huge efforts paid off to win votes in Odisha, where the BJP won 20 seats and the INC won only one. The local Biju Janata Dal drew a blank. It is true that this electoral outreach did not yield big results in West Bengal. Mamata Banerjee’s All India Trinamool Congress won 29 seats; the BJP won 12, and the INC won one. Worryingly for the BJP, it lost six seats and its vote share fell from 40.64% to 38.73%.

The sixth data point is that the BJP has breached the opposition bastion of South India. The BJP made inroads into South India. In Karnataka, the party had lost the recent 2023 state elections. Of the 28 seats, the BJP won 17 seats and its ally JD(S) won two seats. The INC won just nine seats. In Telangana, the BJP won eight seats out of 17. The BJP also won three seats in Andhra Pradesh where it had won none in the last elections in 2024. The BJP also won the seat of Thrissur in Kerala, a historic first.

The seventh data point is that the Modi-led BJP still retains women support. Women voters continued to support Modi. By focusing on menstrual hygiene, toilets, piped water to homes and gas cylinders, the prime minister has won over women. Solid women support helped the BJP counter the youth disaffection arising from lack of jobs.

The eighth data point for the BJP is that a strong national security policy helped the BJP. Indians see the INC-led government from 2004 to 2014 as soft on Pakistan. Indians continue to trust Modi and the BJP with national security more than INC and its leader Rahul Gandhi.

The ninth data point for the BJP is fulfilling promises on core issues. The Modi-led government abrogated Article 370, which gave special status to the state of Jammu and Kashmir. This year, Modi also inaugurated the Ram temple in Ayodhya. This pleased many core BJP voters. Article 270 and the Ram temple are core issues for the BJP’s parent organization, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), In 2004, many RSS workers and BJP supporters were disappointed, leading to the fall of the BJP-led Modi government. 

The tenth and final data point for the BJP is that voters have rewarded the Modi administration for providing a relatively clean and competent national government. Before 2014, Indian voters always put corruption among the top three national issues. In fact, a national anti-corruption movement rocked the INC-led government in 2011 and decimated its public support. In contrast, Modi has won a third term like Jawaharlal Nehru, India’s first prime minister, and made history.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

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Indian democracy thrived despite economic headwinds

The success of democracy in India has dismissed the pessimistic auguries after Independence and the first election in 1952. But India is not an isolated case. Let’s look at the numbers. A little more than half of the world’s population lives in democracy. Let’s consider “rich” countries are to be those above the world average per capita income in purchasing power, around $18,000 per year. About half of the world population living in democracies lives in relatively poor countries like India, Indonesia and South Africa, while about half of the population living in dictatorships lives in relatively rich countries like China, Saudi Arabia and Russia.

The case of India has puzzled some traditional sociologists because it does not fit the classical doctrine that economic development must precede democracy. Analysts from Seymour Lipset to Adam Przeworski have made this observation; the latter has repeatedly predicted that India would become a dictatorship before 2030. Yet India is not an exception or an anomaly. The earliest modern democracies, such as Norway, Switzerland, the United Kingdom and the United States, had also enforced broad (male) suffrage for competitive elections in the nineteenth century, before industrialization and when they were fairly poor — as poor as India was in the mid-twentieth century or as it is now.

For about forty years after independence, when the Indian National Congress party, initially led by Jawaharlal Nehru, dominated the government, the centralized and closed Indian economy grew at an often-mocked annual rate of 1%. But since the early 1990s, when it has liberalized and opened to new technologies and globalization, India has enjoyed significant benefits from open trade and capital inflows. Against all expectations, the Indian per capita income at purchasing power has multiplied by six in thirty years.

Precisely because India was late in adopting more sophisticated institutions and policies, it has been able to adapt more readily to the global economy. In contrast to developed countries with old technologies and onerous preexisting social arrangements, India has not had to dismantle former industrial and bureaucratic structures that might have obstructed innovation.

Indian democracy is healthy in the 21st century

Consequently, Indian citizens declare that they prefer democracy to an authoritarian regime by a proportion of four to one. In the most recent international poll by the Pew Research Center, 72% of Indian citizens declared that they were satisfied with the way democracy works in their country — thus coming second only to Sweden and far above, for example, the United States at 33%.

The Congress Party, always led by Nehru’s descendants in the Gandhi family has traded power with the current incumbent People’s Party (BJP) led by Prime Minister Narendra Modi seven times.

The electoral system is a copy of the colonial British tradition of single-member districts with simple plurality rule, which permits a party with less than 40% of votes to get an absolute majority of seats in the lower chamber of parliament. Yet, while numerous minor parties run independently, the two larger parties run in very broad electoral coalitions: In this year’s election, the BJP ran with a National Democratic Alliance with 12 mostly state-based or ethnic parties, while the opposition Congress is ran the “India National Development Inclusive Alliance” (so named to fit the acronym INDIA) with 23 parties, including several on the far left. Their participation in federal politics also works as a factor of the Indian union.

After the end of the Cold War, India initially replaced its old foreign policy of “non-alignment” with one of “strategic autonomy.” India still lacks a permanent seat on the United Nations Security Council despite having become a nuclear power, and it is not a member of the Group of Seven despite being the fourth democratic economy in size. Nevertheless, India has become more dynamic in supporting the democratization of its neighboring countries in South Asia, which is still a poorly integrated region. It is also the oldest and most stable democracy of the so-called BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa) group, now enlarged to nine members, and has recently increased its relations and deals with the United States and the European Union in a world of fluctuating international coalitions. From a global and historical perspective, democracy in India is already one of the most remarkable contemporary achievements of humankind.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

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If you are reading me in Washington, New York or London, you will probably be shocked to read that I voted for Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who is gunning for a third term. How could a beef-eating, wine-drinking atheist vote for the Hindu fascist or, worse, Hindu supremacist Modi-led Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), which is purportedly planning a final solution to India’s Muslim problem?

After numerous conversations with my Indian American granddaughter, who is addicted to The New York Times, and is protesting in favor of poor Palestinians in Gaza, I have finally decided to explain why.

Yes, Modi is deeply flawed…

Today, mania has gripped India. Modi has millions of bhakts (devotees). In fact, “Modi Bhakt” is now a bona fide term in Hindi, India’s national language. Of course, bhakti (devotion) is not a new phenomenon in India. It goes back centuries. When I was young, India was in the grip of Indira mania. Indira bhakts ruled the roost. I hate to confess, but even I was a minor bhakt of India’s first woman prime minister. Yet people like me felt Indira mania had gone too far when her lackey Dev Kant Barooah said, “Indira is India and India is Indira.”

Today, I feel Modi mania has gone too far. If you say something critical of our prime minister, millions of Twitter warriors give you rank abuse. This is partly because of our national character. Indians tend to have a weakness for personality cults. They easily become bhakts not only of politicians but also film stars, cricketers and even boring bureaucrats. These bhakts forget that their heroes are human and start treating them as gods.

Let us take the case of the late Jayaram Jayalalithaa. She became chief minister of the southern state of Tamil Nadu because, as per rumor, she was the mistress of the charismatic film star-turned-politician Maruthur Gopalan Ramachandran. This Brahmin lady incongruously led an anti-upper caste populist party, the All India Anna Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (AIADMK) and Tamils treated her as amma (mother).

If Jayalalithaa was the mother of the Tamils, Modi is now the paterfamilias of over one billion Indians. This father figure Modi is certainly autocratic. A chap in Fair Observer recently published an attack piece on Modi that claimed that the prime minister was worse than Indira Gandhi. This author is wrong, but he has a point. Before I carry on, I must point out that this wealthy gentleman was living in the US and making money during the Indira years. In contrast, I was very much in India and had to live through the Indira years. I can attest on oath that they were much worse than current times.

While Modi may not be as bad as Indira, he is charismatic, paranoid and likes to keep a tight grip on the helm of the state. Hence, the Prime Minister’s Office (PMO) has expanded dramatically, ministers have become courtiers and Modi’s face decorates hoardings across the length and breadth of the nation. I know from friends and relatives in the BJP and the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), the BJP’s parent organization, that Modi has sidelined every leader with a mass base in his own party. This is exactly what Indira did to the INC. Such top-heavy personality cults are certainly not healthy for democracy but are part and parcel of Indian political culture.

There is truth to the argument that Modi is a divisive leader. Indians inside and outside of the country have deeply conflicting views about him. For millions, the prime minister is almost a god. He has rebuilt the Rama Temple in Ayodhya, which was smashed to smithereens by an invading Muslim army five centuries ago, and restored Hindu pride. Yet for people like my granddaughter and many in India’s anglicized elite, lower caste Gujarati and Hindi speaking Modi is the devil incarnate. They argue that he climbed to power on the corpses of thousands of Muslims who died under his watch during the 2002 Gujarat riots. For such self-identified secular Indians, Modi is uncouth, uncultured and uncivilized. More importantly, they see the former roadside tea seller as antithetical to the values of the Indian constitution.

If the defenestrated elites do not view Modi kindly, Muslims view him most unkindly. Maulana Syed Arshad Madani believes that Modi follows a majoritarian agenda, targets Muslims and triggers riots. Madani is the leader of the legendary Jamiat Ulema-e-Hind — a seminary in Deoband which our enlightened friends in the Taliban follow — and he believes that women and men should not study together. He takes the view that women playing sports is not a good idea. This learned Islamic scholar and many others less doctrinaire than him believe that Modi’s Islamopobic strategy helps the BJP win Hindu votes.

Even if we discount Madani’s trenchant criticism of Modi given his obvious bias, the prime minister has some obvious flaws. Like Indira before him, Modi is also arbitrary and autocratic. In 2016, the prime minister announced demonetization — the withdrawal of large-denomination banknotes — with little notice and no planning, leading to the death of thousands of small businesses. India’s GDP contracted and millions of jobs vanished. Arguably, this contributed to the unemployment crisis that plagues India today.

Under Modi, the Income Tax (IT) Department, the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) and the Enforcement Directorate (ED) have run a reign of terror. Together, they are now called ICE and, as per rumor, they are running an extortion racket in the name of their political master. These so-called loyal bloodhounds of the prime minister target opponents, harass them and even lock them up. 

Sure, India is corrupt. Major politicians often have stolen hundreds of millions of dollars. So, ED, CBI and IT should certainly target the corrupt. The thought of ICE turning the heat on rapacious thieves robbing the country is highly seductive. However, the ICE gang only seems to target opposition politicians. Furthermore, when these politicians ditch their parties and join the BJP, their corruption charges magically disappear. The opposition calls this the washing machine effect, and they have a point. Note that the opposition behaves no differently when it controls the apparatus of India’s colonial state. Under Indira, every opposition leader and troublesome journalist was simply locked away in a dark cellar.

Those who live in nice neighborhoods in the West like my bleeding heart liberal granddaughter have to realize an important fact. For centuries, India has functioned through rule by law, not rule of law. Modi offers India more of the same: an Indira-light beer.

…but he has some real achievements

Now that we have gone through some flaws of the Modi-led BJP government, we have to examine some of its virtues, too. Are hundreds of millions voting for Modi simply illiterate and indoctrinated? Are they, in the words of John Stuart Mill, “not in the maturity of their faculties” and hence are making bad choices? Doesn’t this logic sound just a touch undemocratic, patronizing or even colonial?

Even an upper-crust Brahmin like me does not believe that most people are stupid. The reality is that hundreds of millions of Indians are not idiots. They are voting because the prime minister has racked up solid achievements. Above all, the Modi government has pulled off a significant reduction in poverty. It has achieved this by successfully rolling out a national biometric identification system called Aadhaar. The INC does deserve credit for conceiving this system, but it is the Modi-led BJP that implemented Aadhaar with vigor since taking charge in 2014.

Aadhaar enabled the government to open millions of bank accounts for poor people and deliver direct cash benefits to over 900 million individuals. In the past, an INC prime minister named Rajiv Gandhi, the son of Indira and the father of the current leader Rahul, admitted that only 15% of the allocated funds reached the beneficiaries. By cutting out the middlemen and streamlining the delivery of benefits, Modi has made a tangible difference to the lives of the poor.

The prime minister has focused on low-income households and provided them with public services for the first time in India’s history. More than 800 million Indian citizens get five kilograms (11 pounds) of wheat or rice every month. By 2019, the Modi government had already built well over 100 million toilets. Millions, especially women, now no longer have to relieve themselves in the open, and they feel a lot safer as a result.

In addition, the government has distributed cooking gas to poor households. The percentage of households with access to cooking gas rose from 61.9% as of April 1, 2016, to 99.5% as of January 1, 2021. Cooking with firewood and dried cow dung is labor-intensive, not to mention terrible for women’s eyes and lungs. Cooking gas makes kitchen work a lot less onerous for women and extends their lives. As Christopher Roper Schell explained in 2022, distributing these gas cylinders and implementing other welfare schemes has made Modi popular with female voters.

In 2014, 88% of villages in India had access to electricity. By 2021, 99.6% did. Under Modi, power generation has increased dramatically. The prime minister has also bet big on solar power. India is now the third-largest producer of solar energy in the world. Modi’s government has cut the red tape for installing rooftop solar and is making a big push to increase solar power production dramatically.

The Modi government has also supplied piped water to millions of homes and built no less than 25 million homes since 2016. While the government has fallen short of its goal to provide clean drinking water to all villages, it has made commendable progress. Building homes, providing piped water, constructing toilets, supplying cooking gas cylinders and distributing food grains have won Modi the support of the poor.

There is one bold act for which Modi does not get enough credit. Speaking from the ramparts of the historic Red Fort on August 15, 2020, India’s Independence Day, Modi broke a big taboo by highlighting menstrual hygiene. He announced a scheme to start 6,000 centers to distribute more than 50 million sanitary napkins for just one rupee (₹1 = $0.01, so just one cent). India has had many women leaders, but no politician before Modi demonstrated the empathy or the courage to publicly address this issue. For centuries, millions of Indians have regarded menstruation and menstruating women as unclean. By making this issue a priority, Modi demonstrated great political courage and moved Indian society in the right direction.

Modi has not only succeeded in what Fair Observer’s Editor-in-Chief Atul Singh and geopolitical guru Manu Sharma call Sanatan Socialism — traditional Hindus like to call their religion Sanatan Dharma, the “eternal order” — but also followed decent policies on national security and the economy. The Modi government has acted more robustly against Pakistan and managed to control domestic terrorism so far. It has also delivered robust economic growth and built infrastructure at a record pace.

Even opposition leader Shashi Tharoor, a handsome devil rumored to have murdered one of his wives, has given Modi his due on the infrastructure front. In an op-ed for Project Syndicate, Tharoor lauded the Modi government for “the rapid construction of much-needed infrastructure, including new airports, ports, and highways, enabled by streamlined procedures, quick approvals, and extensive reliance on private contractors.” He went on to say that Modi’s “infrastructure boom has changed the face of many parts of India, and the work continues, with large new investments in modernizing India’s railway network.”

The Modi government has also won praise from American software gurus. I was struck by Wes Kussmaul’s piece in Fair Observer which lauded Indian achievements in building the “India Stack,” an indigenous set of technologies for the digital age. If you live in Europe, you are now living as a serf in what Yanis Varoufakis calls the era of technofeudalism. You search for everything via Google, use Google Maps to get from one place to another, buy your stuff off Amazon, post images on Instagram, send messages on WhatsApp and perhaps love your fancy iPhone. You operate very much within the system created by American tech giants who make your life convenient but squeeze every cent out of you for the privilege of doing so. In India, we are also living under the same technofeudalism, but at least we are trying to revolt.

India’s Unified Payment Interface (UPI) enables me, my driver and my vegetable vendor to buy everything from train tickets to onions using our phones. In our daily lives, we barely use cash anymore. Kussmaul tells us that India has been able to leapfrog Western economies and gone from cash to digital payment systems at extraordinary speed. In June 2016, UPI had no transactions. Fast forward to April 2024 and it recorded over 13 billion transactions in the month. Since 2021, India is the leader in the global real-time payment market followed by China and South Korea.

The Modi government is trying to develop BharOS, an operating system for use in government and public systems. In addition, it has been developing digital infrastructure called the India Stack. As per the International Monetary Fund (IMF), “the India Stack is revolutionizing access to finance.” The IMF estimates that 1.2 out of 1.4 billion Indians, nearly 90% of the population, have signed up for Aadhaar. Bank accounts are linked to this digital identity, enabling direct cash transfers to the poor. Payments through UPI enable the poor to engage in daily digital transactions using their phones.

Developers are building Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) based on the India Stack to solve many hard problems. This combination of public digital infrastructure and private entrepreneurship is unique in the world. The US has handed over its digital infrastructure to modern-day robber barons like Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk. As stated earlier, Europeans are serfs to American tech barons and Europe is a digital dinosaur. The Modi government has shown great vision in implementing Aadhaar, UPI and the India Stack as well as pushing for BharOS.

There is really no alternative

When Indira was the de facto queen of India, many said that she benefited from the “there is no alternative” (TINA) factor. In fact, they had a point. Indians had high hopes when Morarji Desai replaced Indira in 1977, becoming the first non-INC prime minister of the nation. However, Desai turned out to be an unmitigated disaster. Well-meaning but narrowminded, this doctrinaire Brahmin sold the Research and Analysis Wing down the river because he suspected India’s premier intelligence agency to be a touch too loyal to Indira. 

For good reason, Pakistan awarded this useful idiot its highest award: the Nishan-e-Pakistan. A late relative told me the story of Desai’s stupidity in the sort of gory detail that you do not get on Wikipedia or any online source. Sadly, we Indians do not put things into writing, and a lot of my relative’s knowledge is lost. Suffice to say, Desai was a dunce. His successor Charan Singh was worse. Unsurprisingly, Indira stormed back to power in the 1980 elections, barely three years after losing to Desai, Singh & Co, despite her god-awful track record during the Emergency.

Like Indira, Modi benefits from the poverty of credible parties and competent personalities in Indian politics. The INC is no longer the party of Mahatma Gandhi. It is a fiefdom of the Nehru dynasty. The remarkably handsome Rahul Gandhi, Indira’s half-Italian grandson, is the big boss of the INC. He has walked from the south to the north of the country, and this fit hunk is probably well-meaning too. Yet Rahul is wedded to the socialism his family imposed on India and is proposing what Atul Singh calls “Latin America-style populism” in India. Rahul is promising jobs for everyone, free cash every month to the poor and more. To pay for these freebies, his adviser Sam Pitroda is threatening an inheritance tax that is terrifying the middle class but would still cover a mere fraction of the lavish expenses the INC is proposing. In fact, Rahul’s promises threaten to make India a South Asian Argentina and send shivers down my spine.

There is also another tiny matter that bothers even a Brahmin like me. I see excessive dynasticism as the bane of Indian culture. It is rampant not only in politics but also law, business and Bollywood. Atul has incessantly mocked me for supposedly having higher status than him per our caste system. For far too long, caste was defined by janma (birth), not karma (deed). This caste mentality has led to the extraordinary power of the “lucky sperm club” in India. Rahul is the shiningest star of this club. Indira’s grandson may not be stupid, but he lacks real intelligence, judgment and experience. Surrounded by sycophants, Rahul has no dirt under his fingernails. He is the boss of the INC only because he belongs to the Nehru dynasty. This dynasticism afflicts politics in all of South Asia, not just India. In large part, I voted for Modi to keep Rahul out of power because I have had enough of the Nehru dynasty for one lifetime.

Apart from the BJP and the INC, we do not have national parties. Let us take a look at South India. Kerala, a state of over 34 million people on the southwestern tip of India, is ruled by communists. They have succeeded in increasing literacy and improved the state’s ranking in the Human Development Index (HDI). However, businesses find it tough to operate in Kerala, and jobs are hard to find. Malayalees, Kerala’s skilled people, work around the country and abroad, especially in the Persian Gulf. Fundamentally, the land known as “god’s own country” lives off tourism and remittances. Hence, communism sort of works. Elsewhere in India, communist parties are now practically extinct.

Tamil Nadu, a state of over 81 million people on the southeastern tip of India, is ruled by Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (DMK). The party traces its roots to a social equality and social justice movement that was rightly tired of discrimination by snooty Brahmins. Even as a Brahmin, I can see the appeal of DMK’s early subaltern philosophy. Ironically, the DMK is no longer a champion of equality or justice. Just as North Korean communists have installed a Kim monarchy, the DMK is in thrall to the Karunanidhi family.

Muthuvel Karunanidhi served as chief minister of Tamil Nadu for over five terms between 1969 to 2011. He was a gifted writer and canny politician. As early as 1937 (ten years before independence), he became a student leader opposing the imposition of Hindi as India’s national language. In a spectacularly successful career, Karunanidhi ruled Tamil Nadu for almost 20 years. His political rival was the once slim and then portly Jayalalithaa, whom I described above. Her party, the AIADMK, is now a spent force. In contrast, the DMK is still ruling Tamil Nadu and its leader is none other than Karunanidhi’s son. Believe it or not, his name is Muthuvel Karunanidhi Stalin, named after none other than the murderous Soviet tyrant Joseph Stalin.

M.K. Stalin is certainly not bloodthirsty like his namesake. However, the choice of the name reveals his dynasty’s preferences. To be fair, Tamil Nadu is a state that has done well in educating its people, boosting its industrial production and developing a decent economy. However, I have a nagging suspicion that Stalin is far too happy to flirt with Tamil nationalism to win votes. In 2022, he met with a Tamil extremist convicted of killing Rajiv Gandhi, the good-looking father of the handsome Rahul Gandhi, causing much disquiet among old Rajiv loyalists. Yet in 2024, Rahul called Stalin his “elder brother,” and both are part of the 28-party INDIA alliance seeking to topple the Modi-led BJP. Politics makes strange bedfellows indeed.

North of Tamil Nadu lies Andhra Pradesh (54 million people) where Yeduguri Sandinti Jagan Mohan Reddy rules as chief minister. Like Rahul and Stalin, Reddy is yet another member of the lucky sperm club where members inherit top political jobs from their fathers. From my fellow Indian Administrative Service (IAS) officers in Andhra Pradesh, I have heard many juicy tales about the Reddy clan’s corruption. Apparently, their Christian faith has not given these Reddys any sense of sin, and they fail to avoid the temptation of self-enrichment at the cost of taxpayers.

The other two southern states of Telangana (nearly 40 million) and Karnataka (over 64 million) are ruled by INC. In fact, there is only one other INC chief minister in the country, and he rules the northern Himalayan state of Himachal Pradesh (less than seven million) on the China border. All three INC chief ministers hail from humble backgrounds, but they are regional satraps who pay obeisance to Rahul just like Mughal governors did in the 18th century. The fact that the INC rules only three out of the 28 states of India is telling of how far the grand old party has fallen since 1947.

The space vacated by the INC has been filled by regional parties around the country. A full list of them would make this long piece even longer. So, I will highlight two parties that have a strong support base and will give you a flavor of India.

The first is the All India Trinamool Congress (TMC) founded by Mamata Banerjee in 1998. This ex-INC leader became the first woman chief minister of West Bengal in 2011 and continues to rule this state of over 100 million people. Didi (elder sister), as Banerjee is called, is a feisty and charismatic politician. Yet she is a regional leader with no appeal outside of her home state, just like M.K. Stalin. The Didi-led TMC defenestrated the communists who had been in power for many decades. Yet she has not been able to either increase per capita income or living standards during her time in office. My IAS friends tell me that her goons beat up her opponents more thoroughly than the infamous communist cadres. Didi yells at some of these friends from time to time. 

If Modi has cultivated the Hindu vote, Didi has wooed the Muslim vote. In fact, some TMC Muslim leaders are said to be criminals. In February, party leader Arabul Islam was arrested in a murder case. Later that month, another leader named Sheikh Shahjahan was arrested as well. Villagers of his native Sandeshkhali accused him of land grab and sexual assault, and celebrations broke out in the village on news of his arrest. A Bengali soldier in the Indian Army personally told me that Shahjahan had taken over his land. As per his account, this Muslim mafia boss had been taking over the land of serving soldiers in the defense and paramilitary forces. Our soldier went on to tell me that the TMC had been turning a blind eye to Shahjahan’s criminal activities because he delivered the local Muslim vote to Didi.

For all its faults, the TMC is a powerhouse that dominates West Bengal. So, the party has little incentive to play second fiddle to anyone in its backyard. Thus, forming an alliance with the imperial INC, which she quit to form the TMC, becomes difficult. Formally, the TMC is a part of the left-leaning alliance. However, Banerjee claimed that the INC proved unreasonable and so the TMC had “decided to go it alone in Bengal.” Although Didi is a Brahmin, she is self-made and has no intention of kowtowing to Rahul, demonstrating the superficiality and brittleness of the INDIA alliance.

It is time for me to shine the light on the second party: Arvind Kejriwal’s Aam Aadmi Party (AAP). Kejriwal emerged as one of the leaders of the anti-corruption movement against the INC, catching the fancy of many middle-class Indians. He began the AAP on the tailwinds of the movement and signaled national ambition from day one. In 2014, he ran for the Lok Sabha (House of the People) — the lower house of the Indian parliament — against none other than Modi. The BJP leader trounced the AAP leader in Varanasi, the temple town Mark Twain called “older than history, older than tradition, older even than legend.”

A year later, Kejriwal became chief minister of Delhi for the second time, winning 67 out of 70 seats. In 2022, the AAP won the Punjab elections as well. To some it seemed that the AAP would emerge as the national alternative to the BJP, replacing the moribund Nehru family-led INC. Instead, the AAP is embroiled in a scandal involving liquor licenses. Supporters argue that the BJP is stitching their leaders up in a politically motivated investigation. Another scandal, which has nothing to do with the BJP, is far more damaging.

AAP leader Swati Maliwal has accused Kejriwal’s aide of beating her in the AAP leader’s own home. From 2015 to 2024, Maliwal headed the Delhi Commission for Women. In January, she entered the Rajya Sabha (the Council of States) — the upper house of the Indian parliament — representing Delhi. Rumor has it that she was Kejriwal’s mistress and the AAP leader’s wife got the aide to give Maliwal a thrashing. That rumor may be entirely untrue, but it damages Kejriwal’s reputation as Mister Clean Anti-Corruption Crusader.

I have another more fundamental problem with the AAP. It is a populist party bereft of principle. The party has definitely improved Delhi’s schools; it has delivered some primary healthcare, and it has resuscitated Mahatma Gandhi’s ideas on local democracy. Remember elected mayors in India still lack any power. Unelected 30ish-year-old IAS officers rule cities, towns and districts like feudal lords with no accountability. They answer upwards to their chief ministers, not downwards to the voters. By championing local democracy, the AAP has done one good deed. Yet the party does not practice what it preaches. Kejriwal has purged the party of many of its founders, cut all the tall poppies and created such a personality cult in the AAP that makes Modi look good by comparison.

In a nutshell, Indians do not really have an alternative to the Modi-led BJP in these elections. The INDIA alliance is a polyamorous marriage that would dissolve immediately into infighting in the unlikely event it won power. Too many of the alliance’s leaders are corrupt, populist and incompetent dynasts. Democracy is always imperfect, as Americans know too well. As of now, they face a choice between a convicted felon and a doddering 81-year-old losing his mind. Indian voters have better options. Like me, they prefer the scruffy street dog to the palace poodles.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

The post The Truth About Why I Voted for Narendra Modi appeared first on Fair Observer.

The complex demographics of the Indian subcontinent, where country lines are blurred and communities converge, are at the core of the issue. Bangladesh shares a long, porous border with India across which both people and goods easily pass. The NRC threatens to upset the balance between the two neighbors.

To date, India has not executed its census scheduled for 2021 nor compiled an updated National Population Register, which is supposed to be the first step toward expanding the NRC. Additionally, in 2019, Prime Minister Narendra Modi publicly declared that the BJP had no plans for a nationwide NRC. However despite this statement, Modi’s recent move to implement the Citizenship (Amendment) Act (CAA), providing pathways to citizenship for non-Indian religious minorities, suggests a nationwide NRC scheme could be in the works. 

Initially introduced in the state of Assam, the NRC is to be implemented nationwide, according to India’s Union Home Minister Amit Shah of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). The BJP vowed to drive out all “illegal immigrants” before the 2024 Lok Sabha elections. The goal might sound nice for an election campaign, but does a nationwide NRC actually hold water?

The dark side of the NRC

In Assam, the NRC procedure has been a complete disaster. The Supreme Court of India received petitions from multiple Assamese organizations asking for a revision of the draft NRC. The high court put the process on hold. The state’s BJP-led administration themselves have declined to accept the current NRC draft as well, claiming that some names were erroneously included or excluded throughout the process.

An overwhelming amount of bureaucratic red tape and corruption will follow the already protracted process when people begin appealing to the Foreigner Tribunal (FT) to fix their NRC status. In the case of a nationwide NRC, this will be a living nightmare. A few years ago, Supreme Court senior advocate Sanjay Hegde commented on the measure, “How do you go about this entire exercise with a population of 1.25 billion people,” he asked, speculating that “700 to 800 million people may not even have birth certificates.”

The most bizarre issue, though, is that the nationwide NRC, which aims to identify the nation’s “true citizens,” will ultimately force Indians without documentation to apply through the CAA procedure by claiming to be Afghan, Pakistani or Bangladeshi.

The nationwide implementation of the NRC could also have far-reaching consequences for relations between India and Bangladesh. The two countries have had a historically complicated relationship, oscillating between harmony and conflict. A nationwide NRC could undo it all.

India has previously assured Dhaka that NRC is an internal matter and that Bangladesh has nothing to worry about. This intentionally delusional promise is not feasible as public and media discourse in India generally equates “illegal immigrants” to “Bangladeshis.” There are still no clear guidelines on what will happen to the so-called “infiltrators,” but it does not take much to conclude that their eventual fate will be eviction to Bangladesh.

The prospect of mass deportations from India is a grave humanitarian and diplomatic challenge. Bangladesh is already burdened with Rohingya refugees who are unlikely to be repatriated back to Myanmar. Despite already having the ninth-highest population density in the world, Bangladesh is currently hosting 1.1 million Rohingya refugees living in camps and is in no position to receive further arrivals. 

Friends to enemies?

Beyond the deportation issue, nationwide enforcement of the NRC could have a widespread impact on sectors such as trade and security as well as people-to-people exchanges.

India–Bangladesh relations seemed to enter a golden age in 2023 when bilateral trade was valued at $15.9 billion and India invited Bangladesh to the G20 summit; however, steps taken towards the NRC could also be steps taken away from Bangladesh. Any contention related to the NRC risks pushing Bangladesh further towards China, its largest trade partner. India risks losing Bangladesh, an emerging hub of connectivity important for its Act East Policy aimed at improving relations and connectivity with Southeast Asian countries. 

Furthermore, the potential displacement of millions could create fertile ground for radicalization and extremism. It’s no surprise that many people in Bangladesh harbor anti-India sentiments due to India’s alleged meddling in its internal matters, decades-long water-sharing issues related to the Teesta River and border killings by the Indian Border Security Force (BSF). This issue has created an atmosphere of public disdain and scorn directed towards India time and time again. The CAA and NRC are fanning the already burning flames of contempt between the two nations.

The last time the issue of immigrants gained such significant momentum was in 1979 in Assam, when tensions boiled over and resulted in the deaths of more than 1,000 residents of Bengali origin. Already enraged by CAA regulations, anti-Indian blocks in Bangladesh will see a nationwide NRC as further attacks on Islam, especially if the deportees are primarily Muslim. This may become the stick to target the Hindu population in the country. India’s curious case of xenophobia will pull Bangladesh into its dirty politics.

The BJP government must realize NRC is not an internal issue anymore if it risks causing a transborder humanitarian crisis. The mass deportations or the establishment of prison facilities for people classified as “illegal” is highly concerning and goes against India’s values as a democratic and humanitarian country. India must consider whether compiling a list of the country’s citizens is really worth the benefit if it comes at the cost of families being split apart, people being uprooted from their homes and vulnerable populations becoming stateless.

[Emma Johnson edited this piece.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

The post Citizenship Registration Could Blow Up India–Bangladesh Relations appeared first on Fair Observer.

The Varieties of Democracy Institute now classifies India as an “electoral autocracy.” India may very soon turn into a sham democracy or a total dictatorship, very far from the “mother of democracy” boast of Prime Minister Narendra Modi.

There are three main issues with India’s elections. The first is the way citizens cast votes at the ballot box. The current system is flawed and vulnerable. The second is campaign funding. There is little or no transparency, and spending is exorbitant. The third issue is the voting system itself — the first-past-the-post system. This system creates unrepresentative outcomes. Given the circumstances, only the SCI can remedy the situation. The fate of Indian democracy depends upon it.

Potential corruption with the voting method

India’s 18th parliamentary elections are ongoing. Voting started on April 19 and will end on June 1. The official results will be announced three days later on June 4. The Election Commission of India (ECI) is operating around 1.2 million polling booths across 543 parliamentary constituencies, with 960 million eligible voters. In the last general elections in 2019, 669 political parties and 3,469 independent candidates contested. This year is even bigger. It is a truly monumental undertaking.

The ECI uses Electronic Voting Machines (EVMs) which its own experts have hyped as the “global gold standard.” This system makes announcing the results much faster than manual counting. Results are available within just one day. However, the EVM system uses obsolete, vulnerable technology and requires millions of staff to function.

An EVM is made up of three devices: the control unit (CU), the voter-verifiable paper audit trail (VVPAT) and the ballot unit (BU). A polling officer will have the CU in front of them and when the voter is ready to vote, they will activate it. This allows the voter to press a button on the BU and register their vote. The VVPAT’s viewing window then lights up for seven seconds, displaying the printed vote, with the candidate’s name and symbol, for the voter to check that it is correct. The VVPAT then cuts the slip off and deposits it into the ballot box.

The ECI has made many claims about the EVMs’ functionality, but these claims are under fire from experts. Kannan Gopinathan, previously a member of the Indian Administrative Service and a Returning Officer (someone who is in charge of conducting elections in a district), is one of these critics. The ECI claims that EVMs are standalone systems, not connected to the Internet. It also says that they are designed to be programmed only once and cannot be reprogrammed. Gopinathan rejects both of these claims.

On the ECI website’s FAQ and presentation pages are details for how EVMs work. These show that the VVPAT machines contain programmable memory and that additional devices are needed for the EVMs to function.

In actuality, the District Election Officer in each constituency connects a laptop, via the Internet, to the ECI’s central server to download the candidate data file. The officer then copies the file into data drives called Symbol Loading Units (SLU). Field staff then take these SLUs to connect them to the VVPAT of the EVM in each election booth for “commissioning” the EVM. Thus, the system is exposed, albeit indirectly, to the Internet. Further, if field staff can connect an external device to the EVM, then, in principle, anyone could.

Whether through the Internet or physically with a data drive, a malicious person could insert a program and manipulate votes. While the central server may be under the ECI’s watchful guard, the EVMs themselves, distributed throughout the country, along with the laptops and SLUs, are vulnerable. A viral video circulated on social media recently demonstrated how hackers could game an EVM.

Back in 2019, polling stations returned many curious results. In a 2023 paper, economist Sabyasachi Das highlighted the statistical improbabilities of certain results. The ECI summarily negated all claims of irregularities or vulnerabilities on its website. However, it has shied away from answering criticisms like Gopinathan and Das’s in any detail. This raises suspicion that they may be aware the machines are vulnerable.

Although opposition leaders requested meetings with the ECI’s leadership, they were refused.

Opposition to EVM usage has now begun to pick up steam. Organizations such as the Citizens’ Commission on Elections and the Association for Democratic Reforms, among others, have filed petitions against the use of EVMs. Thousands of eminent citizens, including retired SCI judges, retired government secretaries, lawyers, activists and computer science professors have also signed petitions. Unlike the US Supreme Court, the SCI can issue legal decisions on petition without waiting for a lawsuit to come before it. (It may even issue decisions of its own volition, without a petition.) Yet the SCI refused to respond to these petitions for some time. On April 16, 2024 — just three days before voting began — it finally agreed to look at the petitions.

The deliberations took ten days, as the court had to receive some clarifications from the ECI. On April 26 — a full week after the voting had started — they issued their judgment. The SCI dismissed all the petitions and gave directions to the ECI: They must support a post-result audit of the EVMs and SLUs if a second or third-place candidate requests it. The candidate must request it within seven days of the results announcement, and the candidate can only choose a maximum of 5% of the EVMs used in the constituency for auditing.

According to the judgment, engineers are to audit certain parts of the EVMs and not everything. If they conduct the audit properly, they will easily find machines that are still in a compromised state. Thus, the audit will at least have some deterrent value, because low-level hackers are likely to get caught. However, hackers are capable of much more. There are programs that can erase themselves and leave no trace. To auditors, it would seem as though nothing were wrong.

Furthermore, the court ignored multiple other points made by the petitions. Petitioners had asked for introducing manual insertion of the voting slip by the voter and manual counting of the slips. The court made no decision regarding either. Without these fail-safes, there is still a substantial opportunity for hackers to succeed. The petitioners’ requests would have foiled all hacks.

The court’s decision is not the only legal roadblock to voting security. Current electoral law even makes it difficult for voters themselves to correct errors. If an EVM is hacked and behaves erratically, it may not print the correct vote for the voter. A voter can make an official complaint at the time and have an officer check the machine, but the voter then has to replicate the error. If the error is not replicable, then the voter can face a fine or even jail time. Someone manipulating an EVM can easily make it seem like everything is fine and then proceed after an officer has checked the machine, none the wiser.

Four changes would fix these issues:

1. Allowing the voter to pick up the VVPAT printed slip for verification and physically insert it into the ballot box. Alternatively, the VVPAT window should be lit up long enough for the voter to see the slip drop into the ballot box. This way, voters can verify that the paper is correct and know themselves that they inserted it into the ballot box.
2. Basing election results on a manual count of paper slips. In case of discrepancy between the manual count and the CU count, up to two recounts should occur. The manual count should prevail and not the CU count.
3. Disallowing the transportation of the CU and the ballot box together to the counting station. Transporting them separately ensures that the votes cast are safer from manipulation.
4. Ending the punishment for being unable to prove an error occurred when a voter makes a complaint. 

Implementation of these will aid in making the process fairer for all.

There is another way, though. India has the necessary digital public infrastructure to conduct online elections for a fraction of the time and cost. An online voting system would be many times cheaper, safer and more efficient than using EVMs. A smartphone app could replace EVMs, allowing citizens to vote from anywhere.

Modi is pushing for a “One Nation, One Election” reform, aiming to hold all elections either on a single day or at least over a shorter time frame. This will supposedly save both time and money, but an online voting system can save far more of both. Unfortunately, the opposition parties have not advocated for any sort of change either, leaving Modi and his government unopposed.

The pernicious political funding problem

Parties spent an estimated $8.6 billion on campaigning in 2019. The 2024 general elections are projected to cost $16.2 billion, which would make them the costliest in the world. Experts estimate that the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), the current ruling party, outspent all the other parties put together in 2019. This skew will likely be greater in 2024.

We can judge the relative amounts of money the BJP and other parties are able to mobilize by looking at the portion of their fundraising that qualifies as legally obtained “white money.” The BJP was able to mobilize large sums by means of electoral bonds (EBs). These financial instruments allowed donors to give money to parties legally and anonymously. Still, illegal black money vastly exceeds the amount of white money. Every party mobilizes and spends five to ten times as much black money as white money.

There is little or no transparency in political funding. It has always been fraught with quid pro quo. Parties habitually take funding from private firms and promise them government contracts in exchange. It has emerged that the Modi government, additionally, uses extortion by deploying multiple investigative agencies and tax authorities that it controls.

The SCI recently ruled EBs to be unconstitutional. It found that the bonds’ anonymity violated citizens’ right to know who is funding their political parties. The high court also forced the State Bank of India and the ECI to publish all details of EBs purchased by donors and deposited by political parties. The disclosures reveal that the BJP obtained the lion’s share of bonds. These ran into billions of dollars, and the contracts they awarded to donors ran into hundreds of billions of dollars. The disclosures also revealed the roles of so-called “independent institutions” who all participated in quid pro quo.

The ECI should mandate 100% disclosure of all funds mobilized by every candidate and every political party. In today’s world, this is easy. The party, individual candidate or the ECI should publish data on their respective website or on an ECI-provided platform. The minimum data provided should be the name of the donor, their identifier, the amount and the date.

Currently, parties need not disclose donations below 20,000 rupees ($240), they exploit this loophole. One party claimed that nearly all of its funding came from smaller donations. Requiring full disclosure would close this loophole.

Furthermore, the ECI should remove their imposed expense caps which apply to candidates. The expense caps are currently so low — 9.5 million rupees ($114,000) — that all candidates are forced to tell lies. They must spend much more money than the law allows, because those who do not have black money tend to lose. The existing system reduces the chances of honest and smart candidates winning elections and it rewards those who have a lot of black money and who can manipulate the system to get others to spend on their behalf via quid pro quo.

One excellent way to remove parties’ incentive to use black money would be the state providing free airtime on its TV channels — both national and regional — to all candidates. Thus every party could be sure that it is getting enough airtime for its views.

The state could also arrange debates between the leading three or four candidates so that voters know the candidates better before they vote. The candidates could select the moderators themselves. The recorded debates and statements could be available on the ECI’s portal after each debate aired. Citizens could make more informed decisions, and the candidates would be more accountable because citizens can recall their statements and compare their accomplishments.

The voting system is unrepresentative

Even if hacking and corruption do not taint the votes, the way that votes are used to allocate seats in parliament is itself problematic.

India uses the first-past-the-post system to decide who wins each seat. The plurality winner in each district gets the seat, even if the winner does not achieve an absolute majority. The winner might thus have only the support of a small fraction of the community. The rest of the voters, even if they are the majority, go unrepresented.

In the 2019 elections, 67% of the 900 million eligible voters voted. The BJP pulled the largest share of votes, but not a majority. They received 37.4% of the votes, yet they bagged 55.8% of the seats (303 out of 543) in the lower house of parliament, giving them an absolute majority.

A two-round system would ensure that the ultimate winner has the support of at least 50% of voters. In the first round, all qualified candidates would compete; then, the top two candidates would face each other in a runoff election. The winner of the runoff will not always be the same as the candidate who got the most votes in an open competition since many voters will switch to a second-best candidate if their preferred candidate does not win the first round. As an illustration, a supporter of party A may decide to vote for party B in the second round. Without a runoff, party A and party B may have split the vote between them, allowing the party C candidate to win — even if the majority of voters in that constituency would have preferred that the party C candidate not win.

India uses the runoff elections for the president and vice president, but not for members of parliament or state legislatures. With the runoff voting, opposition parties with similar ideologies — or at least those who share a rejection of the ruling party’s ideology — would fare better. If India had had two-round voting in 2019, opposition parties would have won the majority of the seats in parliament, representing 62.6% of voters rather than a mere 37.4%.

Changing voting systems would ensure a far more representative democracy in India, with coalitions that better represent the ideological makeup of the country.

As things are going, India is going down the path towards authoritarianism. The mother of democracy should not give birth to an autocratic regime. The reforms discussed would make India a truly fair democracy.

[Will Sherriff edited this piece.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

The post How to Save India’s Floundering Democracy appeared first on Fair Observer.

Garcetti also highlighted a telling anecdote about a US shoe manufacturing firm bypassing India in favor of Vietnam for its production needs, citing Vietnam’s more conducive business environment. This story underscored the challenges India faces in attracting foreign direct investment (FDI) and highlighted the need for reform.

India has been hailed as the “America of South Asia.” As Garcetti pointed out, there is immense potential for economic collaboration between the two nations.

Garcetti emphasized the importance of reforming export policies and export controls as key steps toward bolstering the trade partnership between India and the United States. He called for dismantling bureaucratic, taxation-related, regulatory and federal system barriers. “We want the foreign direct investment from China to shift, but FDI is not flowing into India at the pace it should be. Instead, it’s going to countries like Vietnam. I would selfishly like to see more of that happening in India,” Ambassador Garcetti said.  Removing these impediments, he argued, would pave the way for increased job creation, prosperity, investments and overall strength in both countries. 

India’s challenging business environment

Nicknamed the “graveyard of foreign companies” in recent years, India’s notoriety for its challenging business environment is famous, particularly for foreign enterprises. Indeed,  opaque market regulations and unpredictable law enforcement practices characterize its regulatory landscape.

One of the primary concerns for foreign businesses operating in India is stringent tax inspections. Companies like Foxconn, Samsung and Walmart face hefty fines for alleged concealment of investments, tax evasion and falsification of accounts. The Indian government employs these tax issues as policy, using them toregulate and restrict foreign investment.

In June, Indian regulators slapped Amazon with a hefty $24 million (two billion rupee) fine for obscuring its investment in a retail group. Japanese and South Korean firms have faced similar probes. Last year, Foxconn was raided for concealing income and evading taxes. Regulators handed giants like Nokia and IBM exorbitant fines, and others like Vivo and Wistron have encountered hurdles in the Indian market.

Tax enforcement has become a tool for Indian authorities to regulate foreign investment. The phenomenon has even earned the moniker “tax terrorism.” India’s aggressive stance on tax compliance underscores its determination to safeguard revenue and scrutinize foreign corporations. However, critics argue that the heavy-handed approach could deter foreign investment and stifle economic growth.

The scale of these tax investigations and fines is leading to growing apprehension among Western nations and investors. Between 2014 and 2021, nearly 2,800 foreign firms operating in India terminated their operations, amounting to approximately one sixth of the total number of multinational companies registered in the country, as per Indian government data.  As India seeks to position itself as a favorable destination for foreign investment, addressing these regulatory challenges is imperative to fostering trust and confidence among international businesses. 

India must overhaul its business environment to attract foreign companies 

Despite India’s allure as a sizable and promising consumer market, the reality for foreign investors is fraught with uncertainties and obstacles. The exodus of companies reflects a growing perception among foreign firms that the risks of doing business in India outweigh the potential rewards. This sentiment raises concerns about India’s ability to fulfill its potential as a preferred destination for foreign investment and economic growth.

To reverse this trend, India must address the systemic issues undermining its attractiveness to foreign investors. This entails implementing reforms to improve market transparency, enhance infrastructure development, upgrade labor skills and foster a more conducive business environment. 

By addressing these challenges, India can regain the confidence of foreign companies and reposition itself as a competitive and sustainable investment destination on the global stage. As India aspires to position itself as a global economic powerhouse, it must address these systemic issues to foster an environment conducive to sustainable economic growth and foreign investment. Failure to do so will not only jeopardize India’s economic prospects but also undermine its credibility as a reliable partner in the global business community.

[Mitchelle Lumumba edited this piece]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

The post India’s Overbearing Regulators Are Choking Foreign Business appeared first on Fair Observer.

We are in the midst of India’s parliamentary elections, which will determine who has power in the Lok Sabha, the lower house of Indian parliament. I had the opportunity to interview a young man about the Bharatiya Janata Party’s (BJP) chances. The interviewee, Tahoor Ahmad, sat on a bench in Lal Chowk, a busy town square in the city of Srinagar, Kashmir. He held his face in his hand while responding to my questions.

An elderly voter poses for a picture after leaving a polling station in downtown Srinagar. Photo by Sahil Mir.

Has the BJP lost ground in the region? Will they win the primary elections? I asked Ahmad for his opinion. He did not want to answer directly; as a Kashmiri resident, he could face threats and backlash if his negative comments about the party were publicized. I assured him that he would remain anonymous, as I was only recording his voice. With this promise, he relaxed and shared his thoughts.

Ahmad says the elections are not as simple as the BJP losing ground or contesting results. In many constituencies, the BJP is not running candidates. Rather, it supports candidates from certain other parties. These include Altaf Bukhari, president of the Apni Party, and Sajad Lone, chairman of the People’s Conference.

“Everyone knows the fact that BJP is supporting both the parties, but these parties are declining the claims,” Ahmad said. “Now after the Lok Sabha elections in Srinagar, it’s clear that BJP has supported these parties, as yesterday a Kashmiri Pandit and a BJP member gave this message clearly to local media that BJP supporters are being ordered by higher-ups to cast their vote” in this way.

A queue of voters young and elderly wait at a polling station in Soura, Srinagar. Photo by Sahil Mir.

Ahmad continued: “The BJP has not filed their nomination in Kashmir directly but have indirectly filed for the Apni Party and People’s Conference along with the Azad Democratic Party. They have realized that they have lost the electoral grip in Kashmir on ground zero. The BJP has ceased democracy here in the Valley and no one here is ready to speak against them.”

Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi is finding himself entangled in a political quagmire in Kashmir. It is widely expected that Modi will win a third term in the parliamentary elections. Modi’s recent campaign has been rife with anti-Muslim rhetoric, causing concern in Muslim-majority areas like Kashmir. It appears he wants to solidify a Hindu majority in India.

During a rally in Srinagar after Modi’s first visit in March 2024, he assured the crowd that he was striving to win their hearts. However, reports suggest that many attendees were government employees or BJP workers, seemingly coerced into participation under the threat of job loss.

Voters come and go at a polling station in Srinagar. Photo by Sahil Mir.

This time is particularly critical for Jammu and Kashmir. In the past, calls from separatist leaders could shut down the region, but now those calls have lost significance. Elections, once seen as a means to protest, have become another tool for politicians to pursue their agendas.

After many years, people, especially Muslims, are eager to vote against Modi’s unfulfilled promises and fake commitments.

Frustration with the BJP’s broken promises

The BJP’s strategy to secure electoral dominance backfired, revealing deep-rooted discontent among Kashmiri residents. The party sparked controversy in the region when it chose not to field candidates in Kashmir. Local residents say it is part of a grand plan to secure 370 seats in the general elections. This symbolic gesture is linked to the contentious abrogation of Article 370 of the Indian Constitution, which revoked Kashmir’s autonomy in 2019. This move remains extremely unpopular with Kashmiris.

A long queue of voters forms outside a polling station in Srinagar. Photo by Sahil Mir.

As the elections draw to a close, the move has encountered formidable obstacles. The party has struggled to gain ground in the region. The division of Kashmir into two union territories — Ladakh and Jammu and Kashmir — further complicated the electoral landscape, fueling tensions and widening societal rifts.

Khalid Ahmad, a middle-aged local from Srinagar, commented on the BJP’s past vows. It has promised to create jobs each year starting in 2014, when it rose to power. But the party has never delivered.

“The BJP promised 20 million jobs per year from 2014, and nothing such has happened as of now,” Khalid stated. “It seemed to be a false promise, as India tops the unemployment list globally and Modi can only give fake promises and nothing else.”

A satisfied senior poses for a picture after voting in Srinagar. Photo by Sahil Mir.

“We have many grievances like unscheduled power cuts, the high bills because of smart meters and other issues … which can be resolved only if we choose our representative today, and with the hope that our representative will resolve our grievances,” said Roohi Ismail, a voter at the polling station in Nowhatta, Srinagar.

The All Parties Hurriyat Conference has historically issued calls boycotting elections in Kashmir. This time, however, it did not. Mirwaiz Mohammad Umar Farooq, Kashmir’s chief religious cleric, explained the situation: The Hurriyat was “not against the idea of elections” in the region, because of “serious alterations in the ground situation” following the BJP-led government’s abolition of Article 370. “Under these changed circumstances, issuing a boycott call, unlike before 2019, does not seem to carry the sense and effect that it did before. Besides, the people of J&K, baptised by fire from decades-old conflict, have gained enough political maturity and wisdom to know what best to do in the current situation,” Mirwaiz stated.

I spoke to an eager voter in the Sonwar area of Srinagar. “It’s my first vote and I am excited to cast it today,” he said. “As I came out from my home today, there was a hope that with today’s vote, something will change here in [the] Valley. We have witnessed many things in Kashmir … BJP has lost ground in Kashmir, and that’s the reason [it] didn’t contest [the] election here. They have failed to resolve issues [for the] people.”

A young man poses for a picture after voting in Zadibal, Srinagar. Photo by Sahil Mir.

Srinagar’s constituency is a game changer

The Srinagar Parliamentary Constituency has the highest number of candidates compared to other segments in Kashmir. It witnessed an interesting showdown on May 13, when the 1.74 million-strong electorate cast votes in five districts of the Valley.

Tanvir Sadiq, the Chief Spokesperson of Jammu and Kashmir National Conference, addressed local media. “This election is important as people have faith in democracy,” he said. “What happened in 2019 they are against, and people [want] development. The overall scenario about [the] Lok Sabha elections in Srinagar suggested that people have come out from [their] houses and have cast their vote.” Ergo, those who oppose the repeal of Article 370 and vote against it will win this election.

Voters line up outside a polling station in Khanyar, Srinagar. Photo by Sahil Mir.

Bukhari shared his thanks to the voters on Facebook: “Gratitude overflows to the voters of Srinagar Parliamentary seat for their historic participation, a testament to the resilience of democracy. Heartfelt thanks to the Election Commission of India, UT administration J&K and all those involved for ensuring a smooth and hassle-free process throughout the day. Kudos to our J&K Apni Party leaders, workers and well-wishers also for their tireless efforts to mobilize the voters. Due thanks also to the Chief Electoral Officer J&K for ensuring transparent and smooth conduct of the process. This monumental turnout reflects a renewed faith in the democratic process. Let’s cherish this win-win situation for our country’s democratic ethos.”

Election data revealed that Srinagar experienced a 37.99% voter turnout. Chadoora, Charar-i-Sharief, Ganderbal, Khan Sahib and the Shopian Assembly constituency recorded a turnout of over 45%; Kangan topped them all with a 58.80% turnout. As expressed on DailyExcelsior, “The fourth phase of voting for General Elections to 18th Lok Sabha concluded peacefully … with 37.99 % voting in the districts of Srinagar, Ganderbal, Pulwama and Budgam and Shopian partly.”

A woman poses for a picture after voting in Srinagar’s Rainawari area. Photo by Sahil Mir.

Officials claim this is the highest election turnout in decades. But will it prompt real change? India will have its answer when the parliamentary elections close on June 4.

[Lee Thompson-Kolar edited this piece.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

The post Modi and BJP See Colossal Surge of Kashmiri Counter-Votes appeared first on Fair Observer.

Now, this vital resource is under threat. Due to climate change, temperatures are rising and precipitation is declining. The snow- and rainfall that normally build up the glaciers in wintertime are insufficient to make up for the summer melt. This has caused the glaciers to shrink, threatening the downstream communities that rely on the summer flows.

The water levels of the Jhelum River are getting shockingly low. Author’s photo.

Many areas down the slopes are particularly feeling the pinch. The northwestern Indian union territory of Jammu and Kashmir, which relies on its famously scenic mountain landscapes to draw in tourists from the rest of the country, is now facing economic pressure.

The Himalayas are drying up

According to an analysis by the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s National Centers for Environmental Information, 2023 saw the warmest global temperatures since records began. The heat has put strain on water resources across the world. The Himalayas are no exception.

A May 2022 study conducted by Zahid Majeed and Muneer Mukhtar of the Geological Survey of India along with Manish Mehta of the Wadia Institute of Himalayan Geology, revealed that the Kolahoi glacier has lost 23% of its area since 1962 and has fragmented into small parts. The glacier is the main source of the Jhelum River, which originates in Jammu and Kashmir and waters a part of the Punjab region of Pakistan.

Low water levels in the Jhelum River. Author’s photo.

A March 2022 study published in Environmental Science and Pollution Research on 77 glaciers in Drass, a cold desert region in the western Himalayas, reveals that the total glacier area shrunk by 5.32 square kilometers between 2000 and 2020. The study attributes the melting to increased greenhouse gas emissions and pollutants including black carbon.

Francesca Pellicciotti of the Institute of Science and Technology Austria explains that glaciers can “fight back” against global warming, at least for a little while. The increased temperature difference between the cold mountain air and the warmer incoming air creates increased turbulence. This, paradoxically, increases the rate at which the glaciers cool the surrounding air and creates cold winds that can protect the glacial surface. However, this short-term benefit is offset by another effect. As the cold air sinks and blows down the mountain surface, it pushes storms down as well and causes precipitation to occur at lower altitudes. This hinders snowfall from replenishing the glaciers. “Thus, perceived cool temperatures flowing down from glaciers are an emergency reaction to global warming rather than an indicator of glacier long-term stability.”

Changing wind patterns also play a role in the decreased rainfall. Normally, storms called western disturbances bring large amounts of rainfall to the Himalayas. Wind coming from the West picks up moisture over the Mediterranean. The airmass then drops the water when it hits the Himalayas. In recent years, however, the frequency of these storms has declined by 43%.

A 2019 study conducted by the American Meteorological Society found that the diminishing frequency and intensity of western disturbances would result in a 15% reduction in mean winter rainfall over northern India.

Scientists say that the situation in the Himalayas could still get a lot worse, putting additional pressure on the region’s already strained irrigation and hydropower systems. 

The mountain paradise of Kashmir is looking shabby in the heat

The Kashmir valley, which lies between the Himalayan slopes in Jammu and Kashmir (J&K), is among those regions experiencing hardship. In 2023, Srinagar, J&K’s summer capital, recorded its hottest June in 18 years. On June 23 it witnessed a peak of 35.0° C (95° F). On the same day, Qaxigund recorded its second-highest temperature in 33 years at 34.2°C (93.6° F). Similarly, other well-known tourist destinations like Kokernag and Pahalgam broke records last June.

Gulmarg, Kashmir, a well-known ski resort, without snow. Author’s photo.

In the winter of 2023–2024, the vital annual rainfall was weak. The Kashmir Meteorological Department recorded Srinagar’s driest January in 58 years. Furthermore, the annual “Chillai-Kalan” the traditionally harsh 40-day winter period ending on January 29, saw the driest conditions in Srinagar since 2015.

According to independent weather expert Faizan Aarif, J&K experienced a 7% deficit in rainfall in the past winter. The region received 1,146.6 millimeters of precipitation, significantly beneath the average of 1,232.3 millimeters.

I spoke to Aarif to learn more. “Winter snowfall is important for the Kashmir valley, as it freezes on the mountains and provides water for horticulture and agriculture in the summers when it melts. If there is a deficit, it will hit crop production in the valley,” he told me.

Shakil A. Romshoo, a prominent glaciologist and climate change researcher, told me more about the situation. Romshoo expressed concern over below-average winter snowfall and an extended dry spell in Kashmir. He warns of potential water shortages in summer, impacting water-intensive paddy cultivation.

A fisherman struggles in the low waters of Wular Lake, Kashmir. Author’s photo.

I also spoke to Suhaib A. Bandh, an assistant professor of environmental science. He highlighted the diverse and significant potential consequences of the drying, including threats to Kashmir’s lakes, rivers and ecosystems.

This spring, I traveled to the lakeside village of Laharawalpora and spoke to Mohammed Sultan, 43, a local fisherman. He told me that “the dry winter has affected our livelihood as the fish catch and chestnut production have decreased. The banks where we extract chestnuts in the winter have dried up. The lake is at a historic low level, and this will affect the future production as the seeds have also dried up on the banks.”

A fisherman’s boat stuck in a dry lake bottom. Author’s photo.

Special prayers have been held in several parts of Kashmir as the people fear that the absence of snowfall in the region will affect crop production and lead to water and food scarcity in the summer months.

The dry weather is affecting more than just the fishing and agricultural industries. With the high temperatures, many of Kashmir’s gorgeously snow-capped peaks are now bald. Millions of tourists visit J&K every year to view its renowned landscapes. Now, famous tourist destinations like Gulmarg and Pahalgam are strangely empty. The valley saw 80% of its bookings canceled this winter.

If the weather does not change soon, these Himalayan vacation paradises may soon become ghost towns.

[Aniruddh Rajendran edited this piece.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

The post Kashmir Now Faces Water Scarcity as Himalayan Glaciers Melt appeared first on Fair Observer.

Indira was the daughter of Jawaharlal Nehru, India’s first prime minister from 1966. Note, she was not related to Mahatma Gandhi, the father of the Indian nation. Conveniently, many of the hundreds of millions of illiterate Indian voters and ignorant foreigners never realized that fact. Indira destroyed internal democracy within the Congress Party, centralized all power in her hands and designated her sons as her anointed successors.

Infamously, Indira ruled India as a de facto dictator for 21 months from June 25, 1975. During this period, she locked up journalists, political opponents and even eminent Gandhians (the Mahatma’s followers) who had participated in India’s freedom struggle. Indira did not even spare the elderly Jayaprakash Narayan, the most eminent living Gandhian in the 1970s, packing him off to prison just like the British once did. Her son Sanjay forced millions of men to go through sterilization, anticipating the fixation of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) with population control.

In 1977, Indira called for elections, which she thought would result in a massive victory. Instead, voters booted her out and opted for a ramshackle opposition coalition. This was the first time the grand old Congress Party lost power in New Delhi. Since then, India avoided another brush with Indira-style authoritarianism for decades.

Sadly, Prime Minister Narendra Modi of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has changed that since he was voted into power in 2014. He has been particularly overbearing since winning a second term in 2019. Millions in India now argue that we are living through a second emergency and for good reason.

Modi’s measures have made him an Indira-like figure

Modi has engaged in a power grab of historic proportions. It is an open secret in Delhi that the Prime Minister’s Office (PMO) rules the country with an iron hand. Even ministers in Modi’s cabinet have no real power. Favored Indian Administrative Service (IAS) officers, largely from Gujarat (Modi’s home state), are the new barons and dukes who rule in the name of the prime minister.

Just as Indira weakened the Congress Party, Modi has undermined the BJP. Home Minister Amit Shah is the only one with any real power. Members of the BJP and its parent organization, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) refer to Modi and Shah as “Ranga and Billa,” two ill-famed criminals who kidnapped and killed two siblings in 1978. Their argument is that Modi and Shah have kidnapped the BJP and the RSS, and their absolutism might kill both these organizations, which have historically been grassroots-driven organizations.

Just as Modi has sidelined the BJP and the RSS, so too has he undermined the institutions of the Indian state. Democratic principles of decentralization, accountability and separation of powers no longer matter in Modi’s India. Everyone in the government has to dance to his master’s voice.

Modi has used the Enforcement Directorate (ED) and the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) to persecute anyone who does not toe his line. The Modi government has used the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act (UAPA) and the Prevention of Money Laundering Act (PMLA) to hound business leaders, journalists and political opponents. Before the Supreme Court of India intervened on March 21, 2024, those accused under the PMLA did not even have the right to get bail. Selective use of UAPA, PMLA and other legislation has created a culture where rule by law, not rule of law, dominates. Simply put, the government uses the law to lock up or harass individuals it does not like.

Institutions are now Modi’s instruments to target his opponents. In March, the government froze the bank accounts of the Congress Party for failure to pay outstanding taxes. Authorities also arrested Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal, who is the leader of the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP), on corruption and money laundering charges. Even many BJP/RSS leaders admit that the ED and CBI are now hounds who hunt hares for Modi and Shah. After Indira, India is once again in the grip of a climate of fear.

Freedom of the press has cratered. Modi has not given a single press conference since becoming prime minister. The Adani Group, his financial backers, has bought New Delhi Television (NDTV), the anglicized television channel that opposed Modi most. Former NDTV stars now ply their trade on YouTube or on Al Jazeera. No local television station is hiring them.

Print media is completely under the thumb of the Modi government, and social media bends to its will. After all, Twitter and Facebook make big money in India and are loath to antagonize the Modi government, which could and would hurt their bottom line. Furthermore, the Modi government has a sophisticated social media operation that disseminates propaganda, misinformation and even fake news.

Modi’s dangerous lies and anti-Muslim propaganda campaign

Modi’s social media team has bombarded WhatsApp with stories that Nehru’s grandfather was a Muslim. According to these stories, this grandfather was born in a red-light district — that part of an Indian town where prostitutes live — and the family remains closet Muslims to this day. The campaign paints Nehru to be a lover of beef, alcohol and nubile young women. As per this narrative, Nehru was a man of moral turpitude unfit to lead pious Hindus.

Numerous analysts have pointed out how the Modi-led BJP has imposed Hindu fascism in India. Note that Modi has never once expressed regret, leave aside apologized, for the 2002 Gujarat riots. These happened under his watch when he was chief minister and the US State Department barred Modi from entering the US for his suspected involvement in these brutal riots.

This year, Modi has inaugurated a temple to the Hindu god Ram on the site of a medieval mosque, which was allegedly built on a previous Hindu religious site. Modi participated in an elaborate religious ceremony personally in a blatant religious appeal for votes.

The Modi government plans to implement the Citizen Amendment Act (CAA) offering Indian citizenship to non-Muslim refugees from India’s neighboring countries. Opponents question why Parsis or Muslim sects such as Ahmadis are not included in the CAA. The answer is simple: Modi is mobilizing Hindu votes and weakening the secular fabric of the Indian republic. 

For good reason, the BBC has just published a story of India’s 200 million Muslims becoming invisible in their own country. Hindu vigilantes have lynched Muslims suspected of consuming beef. Mosques are increasingly under threat. Talk of “love jihad” — Muslim men marrying Hindu women and converting them to Islam — is rife. Anti-Muslim hate speech has skyrocketed, especially in states ruled by the BJP.

This victimization of minorities makes India more like Pakistan. India’s secular democracy has been a beacon of hope to countries around the world as a shining example of how different religions and diverse communities can coexist. The Modi-led BJP government and the RSS have been slow dripping poison into the veins of Indian society. If this continues, India would make Yugoslavia look like a firecracker. By deepening and widening the Hindu–Muslim divide, Modi threatens the very idea of India.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

The post Narendra Modi Is the New Indira Gandhi, Only Much Worse appeared first on Fair Observer.

In Indian elections, a diverse set of regional interests coalesces around the states. Thus, a large number of regional and national parties that oppose the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) came together to form the Indian National Developmental Inclusive Alliance (INDIA) in July 2023.

Across the various states, there are four different kinds of challenges that the opposition faces:

1. In some states, the BJP and more broadly the National Democratic Alliance (NDA) are not a serious contender, namely, Tamil Nadu, Kerala and Punjab. 
2. In some states, the Indian National Congress (INC), as the main political party in INDIA, takes on the BJP directly, namely, Telangana, Karnataka, Chattisgarh, Madhya Pradesh, Gujarat, Rajasthan, Haryana, Himachal Pradesh, Uttarakhand and Assam. 
3. In a third group of states, INDIA faces off with the BJP, but led by parties other than the INC or even non-INDIA parties. These states are West Bengal, Jharkhand, Bihar, Uttar Pradesh, Maharashtra and Delhi. 
4. In the last group of states, regional non-INDIA parties face the BJP, or the the BJP is a junior partner in an alliance. These states include Andhra Pradesh and Odisha. 

INDIA should take into consideration the varied political dynamics across these four groups if it is to have any hope of competing with the BJP at the national level. 

For the sake of brevity, this piece will examine each of these four groups by using a few large states as examples.

States where the BJP is not a serious contender

The three states where the BJP is not a serious contender are the South Indian states of Tamil Nadu, Kerala and the Western Indian state of Punjab. 

In the case of Tamil Nadu, significant shifts have marked the political landscape due to the All India Anna Dravida Munetra Kazhagam (AIADMK)’s decision to end its alliance with the BJP. Among other factors, BJP state leader Kuppuswamy Annamalai’s vociferous criticism of AIADMK leadership led to the split. Significant efforts by the BJP national leadership to maintain the alliance did not succeed.

For the AIADMK, the move may be an attempt to reclaim its independent political identity. For the BJP, the split makes building its presence in the state an uphill battle.

In contrast, INDIA in Tamil Nadu, led by the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (DMK), has concluded seat-sharing talks with its alliance partners. INDIA has been undertaking a vigorous political campaign against national government’s the economic agenda, including the implementation of many welfare schemes. The DMK, for its part, has also strongly critiqued the overall performance of the Modi government. 

There is a strong possibility that the AIADMK–BJP split will favor INDIA. As a result, alliance is likely to perform strongly in the 39 Lok Sabha seats of the state.

In the state of Kerala, the principal contest is between the INC-led United Democratic Front (UDF) and the Left Democratic Front (LDF) to the UDF’s left. Although both the UDF and the LDF are part of INDIA, they do not have seat-sharing arrangements for the national elections.

The Kerala BJP, on the other hand, is narrowing its focus on six of the total 20 Lok Sabha seats in the state. This approach involves assigning national government ministers to oversee these constituencies directly.

In recent years, the INC has compromised with certain BJP policies, such as the Citizenship Amendment Act, 2019 (CAA), that have been perceived as disfavorable to religious minorities. This has enabled the BJP to attempt to polarize the electorate along sectarian lines. Though the effort has not completely succeeded, the BJP has gained an opening to exploit in the state.

The political opening comes at a time when LDF, which is in government in Kerala, enjoys popularity due to its defense of the welfare system. Thus, the INC will likely have to share seats with LDF in this state. Despite its efforts, the BJP will at best emerge as a distant third.

Finally, in Punjab, the INC is in opposition to the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP). Although both parties are part of INDIA on the national level, have not formed an alliance at the state level. There was speculation about a possible alliance between the BJP and Punjab’s third party, Shiromani Akali Dal (Badal), but disagreements over seat-sharing have prevented any electoral understanding.

Punjab remains the epicenter of the peasant upsurge that forced the BJP national government to overturn three farm laws that were seen as enabling corporate encroachment into agriculture. Thus, it is unlikely that the BJP will be able to make much headway in the state.

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A brief glance into the political dynamics in the three states reveals the various reasons the BJP has a marginal presence. As a result, INDIA is in a position to exploit the BJP’s weakness to maximize its seat tally.

States where the INC faces the BJP directly

The states where the INC faces the BJP directly are Telangana and Karnataka, which belong to South India, as well as Chhattisgarh, Madhya Pradesh, Maharashtra, Goa, Gujarat, Rajasthan, Haryana, Himachal Pradesh, Uttarakhand and Assam, which belong to the eastern, central and western parts of India.

In the last two Lok Sabha elections, held in 2014 and 2019, it was these states that helped the BJP attain a two-thirds majority in the Lok Sabha rule the nation for ten years. A close look at the dynamics in these states in this group may provide an clue about whether this may happen a third time.

In Telangana, the INC leads both INDIA and the state government. While the INC has been able to achieve a seat-sharing arrangement with the Communist Party of India (CPI) there is no such arrangement with the CPI(M). Both leftist parties have a long history of popular support in the state, so an incomplete seat-sharing arrangement may not be optimal for INDIA.

The Bharat Rashtra Samithi (BRS) which is the principal opponent of the INC in Telangana, has a significant presence, and so does the BJP. The defeat of the BRS in the state assembly elections late last year has weakened the party to an extent. Factors responsible for the defeat include neglect of education, unemployment and rising autocratic tendencies of the BRS leadership. The electoral prospects of the INC and BJP depend on which of these two parties will emerge as the principal beneficiary of the weakening of the BRS.

In Karnataka, the political landscape ahead of the 2024 elections has witnessed significant developments, with the BJP and the Karnataka-based Janata Dal (Secular) (JD(S)) forming an alliance. As a result, the JD(S) has been allocated four out of 28 Lok Sabha seats. Despite the challenges this alliance poses, INDIA has some reasons to be hopeful.

Sections of the JD(S) have broken away to gravitate towards INDIA. The BJP has recognized the diminished political stature of the JD(S). Perhaps this is why the party has been allotted such a paltry number of seats. Moreover, as the governing party in the state, the INC has restored some degree of welfare policies to push the electorate towards it.

In order to consolidate its position, INDIA may need to aim for the widest possible unity of non-BJP parties in the state, articulate alternative, non-neoliberal policies that challenge the BJP and where necessary focus on a selected number of seats in order to try to be victorious.

Related Reading

How to Beat the BJP by Overcoming the INC’s Organizational Challenges

Haryana as well has seen a change in political alliances with respect to the previous election. The alliance between the BJP and the Jannayak Janta Party (JJP) has collapsed. Meanwhile, the INC and AAP have come together as part of INDIA. The AAP has been allotted one out of the 10 seats in the state.

INDIA may choose to politically challenge the BJP on a number of issues including the promise of guaranteed minimum support price for crops. INDIA could also if required selectively target some seats in the state.

The electoral contest in Rajasthan involves some novel developments. In a break with past practice, the INC has entered into seat-sharing agreements with the Rashtriya Loktantrik Party (RLP) and the Communist Party of India (Marxist) (CPI(M)) as part of INDIA. Furthermore, the INC has entered into an alliance with the Bharatiya Adivasi Party (BAP).

The INC has also recently formed a strategic alliance with the Bharatiya Adivasi Party (BAP), which espouses issues of tribal people and is influential in a few districts in southern Rajasthan. The collaboration aims to consolidate tribal votes, which is pivotal in these regions. However, there is some internal resistance within INC to the alliance due to fears that BAP’s rise might undermine INC electoral prospects in future elections.

The BJP in Rajasthan is afflicted by some internal divisions, with Vasundhara Raje, who was the most important in the state level, seeming to have been sidelined by the party. 

To enhance its electoral prospects, INDIA may need to consider the possibility of forging alliances with the widest possible number non-BJP forces and also politically challenge the BJP on livelihood issues such as a guaranteed minimum support price for crops and conduct of a caste census in the state. 

In Madhya Pradesh, the INC, as part of INDIA has entered into an alliance with the Samajwadi Party. However, factionalism has severely impacted the state party, with reported differences between Kamal Nath and Digvijay Singh, the two most important leaders of the INC in the state.

In general, the BJP has performed strongly in the past few elections. Hindutva ideology is popular here, providing a strong platform for the BJP. The Madhya Pradesh INC must avoid the temptation to turn to soft Hindutva in order to win votes. The state party should instead focus on livelihood issues, thus decisively challenging the BJP politically while seeking to deal with problems of internal factionalism. Where required, INDIA could seek to selectively target some seats to try and increase its seat tally in the state.

Gujarat will see direct competition between the INC and BJP in all 26 Lok Sabha seats. A BJP political stronghold, Gujarat gave the party all 26 seats in both the 2014 and 2019 general elections. In the state assembly elections of 2022, the BJP retained power with a commanding majority, winning 156 out of 182 seats.

However, the INC and the AAP have entered into a seat-sharing pact for the 2024 Lok Sabha elections, with AAP contesting from the seats of Bharuch and Bhavnagar and the INC fielding candidates for the remaining 24 seats. This move aims to consolidate opposition votes and challenge the BJP stronghold, hopefully thereby preventing a repeat of the previous elections. INDIA may seek to concentrate resources on selected seats and focus on livelihood issues in order to try and deal with the organizational cum political strength of the BJP.

In Chhattisgarh, the BJP has indirectly sidelined its top state leader, Dr. Raman Singh, by getting him elected as the speaker of the state assembly.

The Chhattisgarh INC faces divisions, though to a lesser extent than in Madhya Pradesh. The state party is seeking to improve its electoral prospects by nominating prominent state-level leaders as candidates. The INC may seek to challenge the BJP by focusing on livelihood issues while being open to building a wider alliance with non-BJP parties.

In Assam the INC is leading a coalition of 16 political parties called the United Opposition Forum, which behaves like the state-level INDIA alliance. The alliance has agreed on common candidates in all the 14 Lok Sabha seats.

A principal challenge confronting INDIA is the CAA. For decades, Assam has received many migrants from neighboring Muslim-majority Bangladesh. Issues of religious identity, citizenship and land ownership intertwine, making the CAA a particularly divisive issue in the state. The United Opposition Forum may seek to politically challenge the BJP on the CAA while also focusing the political debate on livelihood issues.

In the present group of states, the fundamental challenges faced by INDIA are threefold. One is the organizational weakness of the INC. The second is the political weakness of the INC in the battle of ideas, with the party struggling to formulate an alternative to the BJP’s neoliberal and Hindutva policies. The third is the lack of opposition unity. With the exception of Telangana, the states in the current group are those where the BJP had established an overwhelming dominance in the Lok Sabha elections of both 2014 and 2019. Unless INDIA finds a coherent strategy to challenge BJP in the present group of states, a majority in the parliament may be out of reach for the alliance.

States where parties in INDIA other than the INC face the BJP

The states where parties in INDIA other than the INC face the BJP are the eastern states of West Bengal, Jharkhand, Bihar, Uttar Pradesh, the Western Indian state of Maharashtra and the Northern Indian state of Delhi.

The results may depend on the way in which both the NDA and INDIA deal with the multiple political parties in their midst.

Bihar is the third-most populous state in India. It has seen Chief Minister Nitish Kumar quit INDIA to rejoin the NDA. Likewise, Chirag Paswan’s Lok Janshakti Party (LJP) has rejoined the NDA, while the BJP has marginalized another party led by his uncle Pasupathi Paras within the NDA. Seat-sharing talks in the NDA are complete.

Seat-sharing talks within INDIA are also complete, as the opposition announced through a press conference in March. The Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD) lead INDIA in Bihar. The INC, the CPI, the CPI(M), and the Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist Liberation) also form part of the alliance.

The principal political issues that INDIA could touch upon include the inequities that were documented in the recent state-level caste census, the extension of the rural employment guarantee scheme to urban areas and guaranteed minimum support prices for agricultural products.

In Jharkhand, the Jharkhand Mukti Morcha (JMM) has already finalized its seat-sharing plan with the INC as part of INDIA. The RJD and the CPI(M) also form part of the alliance in this state. However, the exit of the CPI is a setback.

The NDA in Jharkhand principally consists of the BJP and JD(U). The incarceration of former Chief Minister Hemant Soren (belonging to the JMM) by the national government has raised questions as to whether the arrest of a sitting chief minister so close to elections politically motivated. However, INDIA may need to foreground livelihood issues to effectively combat the NDA.

Uttar Pradesh is the most populous state of India and thus elects the largest number of Lok Sabha seats. In the last few months, the NDA has added a number of small parties as its allies, notably including the Rashtriya Lok Dal, many of whose voters supported the 2020 farmer protests. INDIA in the state consists of the Samajwadi Party (SP) and the INC.

Another party is the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP), whose support base seems to be in persistent decline. However, the decline of the BSP is not the only issue that the opposition needs to worry about in Uttar Pradesh. Competition for the same key voter groups between INDIA, the BSP and alliances like the PDM Nyay Morcha may fragment the electorate. The broader political fragmentation might impact the opposition’s functioning as the non-INDIA parties behave as spoilers in certain areas rather than as substantial contenders.

There are three circumstances under which the opposition has a chance to challenge the BJP: (1) The SP successfully consolidates the electoral support of oppressed communities who were formerly BSP voters; (2) A broad opposition coalition is able to bring all parties together against the BJP; (3) INDIA runs a campaign grounded on livelihood issues such as employment and raising the guaranteed minimum support price for crops.

Maharashtra is the second-most populous state of India. Here, INDIA principally consists of the Shiv Sena (Uddhav Bal Thackeray) (SS(UBT)), the Nationalist Congress Party (Sharad Pawar) (NCP(SP)) and the INC. At the state level, INDIA is known by the name Maha Vikas Aghadi (MVA). However, the Vanchit Bahujan Aghadi (VBA) which was one of the partners within INDIA in Maharashtra could not be accommodated within INDIA.

The MVA, which includes Shiv Sena (UBT), the INC and the NCP, finalized a seat-sharing deal for the Lok Sabha elections, with Shiv Sena (UBT) deciding to contest 21 seats, Congress 17, and NCP (SP) 10 respectively.

The NDA in the state consists of the BJP, Shiv Sena (Eknath Shinde) (SS(ES)) and the Nationalist Congress Party (Ajit Pawar) (NCP(AP)).

The schism of Shiv Sena has resulted in a situation where the bulk of its activists and support base remains with the SS(UBT) while the bulk of its legislators are with the SS(ES). The Nationalist Congress Party split has resulted in the bulk of junior leaders supporting the NCP(AP) while the support base of the party is relatively more committed to the NCP(SP). This is reflected in the use of Sharad Pawar’s portraits by the NCP(AP) during the election campaign which the NCP(SP) halted through judicial intervention.

The principal issues in the state revolve around livelihood. INDIA may try to stitch together the broadest possible unity of non-BJP forces in order to achieve significant electoral success.

In Delhi, the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) and the INC, as part of INDIA, have entered into a seat-sharing agreement. A principal issue that is confronting the state is the sudden arrest of Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal by e central government.

Other issues confronting the state include the persistent efforts by the central government to stymie the Delhi government and livelihood issues such as employment. For INDIA to be competitive in Delhi, it needs to challenge the BJP on the ideological plane.

In West Bengal, INDIA has not been able to arrive at a seat-sharing agreement. The Trinamool Congress (TMC), which is the ruling party in the state, has announced its own candidates for the Lok Sabha elections, but the leftist parties (led by CPI(M)) and the INC have entered into an electoral agreement.

The BJP is facing a setback due to internal divisions. The key political issues in the state revolve around the CAA and livelihood issues. If possible rise in the vote share of INDIA impacts the BJP more than the TMC, then the BJP is unlikely to achieve a meaningful advance in the state.

For INDIA to challenge the BJP in this group of states, it may need to resolve a few issues. One issue is the absence of broad-based opposition unity in Uttar Pradesh. More generally, the issue is whether the opposition will be unite to challenge the BJP in all of these states. These issues may well determine the results of the elections.

States where non-INDIA parties face the BJP

The states where non-INDIA parties face the BJP are the southern state of Andhra Pradesh and the eastern state of Odisha.

In Andhra Pradesh, the alliance of the Telugu Desam Party (TDP) and the Jana Sena Party (JSP) with the BJP has resurrected the NDA. The parties have reached a seat-sharing agreement for the upcoming elections.

This alliance faces the Yuvajana Sramika Rythu Congress Party (YSRCP) which is heading the government in Andhra Pradesh. INDIA is the third coalition, which has reached a seat-sharing agreement. The principal issues in the state revolve around livelihood and the resource crunch confronting the state after the bifurcation of united Andhra Pradesh into Andhra Pradesh and Telangana.

In Odisha, there was a serious possibility of electoral unity between the Biju Janata Dal (BJD) (the party in government in the state) and the BJP (that is the principal opposition party in the state). However, this did not transpire due to lack of agreement on seat-sharing. The INC is the third alternative in the state.

The BJP may try to weaponize the advancing age of beloved Chief Minister Naveen Patnaik (of the BJD) to further its prospects in the state. The INC can only confront this effort by re-centering the political debate in the state around livelihood issues.

The YSRCP, TDP and BJD may unexpectedly reorient themselves after the elections in the case of a close outcome where neither the BJP nor INDIA achieves a clear majority.

A myriad of regional dynamics, strategic alliances and ideological battles will shape India’s 2024 elections. The formation of INDIA marked a significant attempt by opposition parties to consolidate their collective voter bases in order to challenge the BJP, which won two supermajorities in 2014 and 2019. If the opposition is able to function as a unit, deftly navigate state specific political issues and present a substantial ideological and policy challenge to the BJP, it has a solid chance of success.

[Aniruddh Rajendran edited this piece.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

The post The Indian Opposition Now Faces Modi State by State appeared first on Fair Observer.

Three distinct structures that are emblematic of the UAE’s approach: the I2U2 Group (India, Israel, the UAE and the US), the Negev Forum (Bahrain, Egypt, Israel, Morocco, the UAE and the US) and trilateral cooperation initiative between the UAE, India and France. These platforms are not just for discussions; they are carefully designed to enhance the UAE’s diplomatic and economic influence. Through these efforts, the country demonstrates its belief that minilateralism can effectively achieve diplomatic and strategic goals.

What is minilateralism?

Traditional multilateralism strives to achieve unanimous agreement among a wide array of countries, a process that often moves slowly. It aims to promote global unity through comprehensive agreements involving a wide range of stakeholders. It emphasizes broad inclusivity and consensus.

Minilateralism, on the other hand, is characterized by its deftness and efficiency. It takes a more streamlined approach by bringing together a select group of countries with shared interests to address specific challenges. This method allows for quicker, more targeted and adaptable responses to global issues. It also promotes deeper cooperation among countries with aligned strategic goals.

This speed is vital in today’s multipolarity world, where global power is spread across various centers of influence. In such a landscape, the ability to form effective partnerships within a smaller, more manageable group is essential for success. Nations that collaborate through minilateralism can better navigate the complex interplay of international relations and collectively exert more influence on global affairs.

Strategic implications and global leadership

The UAE’s involvement in minilateral initiatives aligns with its broader geopolitical goals. The country enhances its influence and shapes international discussion by holding strategic dialogues, trade agreements and collaborations on issues like climate change and health crises. These efforts highlight the UAE’s capacity for leadership and innovation in global diplomacy. The country’s foreign policy must contend with volatile issues of renewable energy and artificial intelligence; it must be able to make quick decisions and cannot allow a vast group of actors to slow it down.

Despite its benefits, concerns persist that minilateralism might overlook important perspectives and lead to a fragmented global governance structure. Nonetheless, the UAE’s adept handling of these criticisms reflects its commitment to a balanced, inclusive approach to international relations. By combining minilateral and multilateral strategies, the country demonstrates its versatility and innovation on the world stage.

Minilateral ventures

The I2U2 Group and the Negev Forum showcase the UAE’s strategic vision and commitment to practical collaboration. These platforms enable the country to work with major global and regional powers, utilizing each country’s strengths and resources. Such collaborations play a crucial role in improving regional security, fostering economic growth and addressing common challenges with creative approaches.

Additionally, the trilateral cooperation between the UAE, India and France underscores the UAE’s ambition to be a key player in both regional and international affairs. This initiative, which focuses on areas such as maritime security, climate change and renewable energy, highlights the country’s strategic positioning. It also showcases its capacity to form alliances with major powers from different continents.

These engagements diversify the UAE’s foreign policy tools and show its adaptability and forward-thinking approach. This strategy leads to more efficient and impactful outcomes, elevating the UAE’s reputation as a proactive, innovative and cooperative state.

The UAE’s minilateral initiatives indicate its strategic balancing in international relations, engaging with diverse states to navigate global uncertainties. This approach highlights the country’s ambition to influence the geopolitical landscape through dynamic minilateralism.

The country’s shift towards minilateralism represents a significant evolution in diplomacy, emphasizing strategic flexibility and pragmatic cooperation. The UAE is a trailblazer. It has set a precedent for navigating contemporary international relations and shaped a new diplomatic paradigm for the 21st century.

[Lee Thompson-Kolar edited this piece.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

The post UAE’s Revolutionary World Diplomacy Is Quick, Efficient and Innovative appeared first on Fair Observer.

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What Happens When Nationalists in Israel and India Team Up

The authors then delved into Indian society, claiming that the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), a Hindu organization formed in 1925, engages in violence against “unarmed, unsuspecting civilians … using batons, machetes, strangulation, sulfuric acid to the face and rape, among other horrors.” They drew an ill-considered comparison between Israel’s illegal settlements in the West Bank and the actions of cow vigilante groups affiliated with the RSS.

The authors also referenced the horrors of the 2002 Gujarat riots but presented a biased account of the train compartment burning, an event that incinerated 58 Hindu sadhus. They labeled the communal riots as “state-sponsored terrorism.” The authors further alleged that the US has turned a blind eye to the “antidemocratic and all-too-violent national visions” of India and Israel.

As an Indian student, I’ve identified numerous inconsistencies in the article. I find many of these allegations baseless and inconsiderate. Therefore, I am presenting a point-by-point rebuttal of the article.

Muslims receive special treatment despite Islam’s violent past

India’s geographical landscape has a complex history shaped by over a millennium of military campaigns. During these, the Islamic invaders progressed relatively slowly compared to the rest of the world. For instance, the Arabs invaded Sindh multiple times starting in 636 AD, and finally seized the province in 711 AD. It took Islamic forces over 300 years to capture Kabul and nearly 500 years to conquer Delhi. Nonetheless, after a valiant resistance, the Brahman Shahi Sultanate of Kabul fell to the Ghaznavid Empire in 1026 AD.

After that, Islamic invasions in the Indian heartland became more brutal and frequent. After the Second Battle of Tarain in 1192 AD, Islamic rule was established in Delhi. It lasted until 1858 when the Mughal Empire was replaced by the British Empire. During these 650 years, it was the minority Muslims — mostly Turks, Central Asians and Persians — who ruled over the majority of Hindus. During this period, the official language of India was Persian and the religion was Sunni Islam. Muslim rulers desecrated and demolished countless Hindu temples. Surprisingly, this historical context is completely overlooked in contemporary debates of Hindu-Muslim relations.

From 1858, the British exhibited a preference for Muslims, recruiting them into civil and military positions in disproportionate numbers. This is evident in the Census of India, 1911 data: Muslims constituted only 21.24% of India’s total population but made up 41.94% of the “service of the state,” and 50.33% of the police force. Even in higher salary ranges, Muslims were disproportionately represented, with 37.9% earning more than ₹400 salaries compared to 41.3% for Hindus. According to Pakistani military historian Major Agha H Amin, this policy of preferential recruitment became a fundamental reason for the Partition of India.

The extraordinarily tolerant Republic of India

Driven by the demands of the Muslim League, the Partition of India resulted in the bifurcation of the ancient geography along communal lines. Post-partition India embraced Hindu values of inclusivity, tolerance and peace. This is reflected in Part III of the Constitution, containing four articles under fundamental rights to protect the freedom of religion. These articles serve as the foundation for India’s engagement with all religions, granting every religious group the right to manage their religious affairs without state interference.

Furthermore, the constitution safeguards the rights of minorities under Articles 29 and 30, with the latter specifically designed to protect the rights of religious and linguistic minorities. However, the world’s longest constitution does not define the term “minority.” This empowers the Muslim community to establish and manage religious and educational institutions such as madrasas — schools that specialize in Islamic teachings — with little or no oversight. These schools also receive funds from the secular government of India, yet the state is not empowered to decide their curriculum and recruitment patterns.

Additionally, madrasas also receive largely untraced foreign funding. India even allows establishments such as Darul Uloom Seminary, situated in Deoband, Uttar Pradesh. This madrasa is infamously known as the ideological origin of the Taliban. After independence, India disregarded any perceived animosity towards Muslims and granted them equal rights, if not more, in the newly established democratic republic.

Indian Muslims are governed under the Sharia

While independent India granted equal rights to all citizens, it faced challenges in reforming the Muslim society. The successive governments did not replace the British-era Shariat Application Act of 1937. Initially designed to create distinctions between Hindus and Muslims in the lead-up to the partition, this legislation granted numerous privileges to Muslims.

The act permits a Muslim man to have up to four wives, stipulates that Muslim men only need to pay alimony for three months, allows double inheritance for sons compared to daughters and includes several provisions that can never be permitted in other democracies. (Triple talaq, an Islamic form of divorce whereby a Muslim man can legally end a marriage by saying “talaq” — “divorce” in Arabic — three times, was allowed until the Indian Government repealed it in 2018.) The successive governments also viewed Muslim society as a vote bank. They continue viewing Muslims through the lens of maulvis, Muslim doctors of law. This meant abhorring any possibility of reforming the Muslim Personal Law. Hence, Muslims of the world’s largest democracy are still governed under Sharia.

In 1973, the Muslim society formed the All India Muslim Personal Law Board (AIMPLB). This body acts as the highest religious and legal authority over Islamic laws in India. The AIMPLB’s stated objective is to “eradicate all non-Islamic rituals and customs in [the] Muslim community.”

This body is predominantly filled with ulemas, groups of Muslim scholars with special knowledge of Islamic theology and law. Their qualifications are generally shady. The AIMPLB has a checkered history: The organization has opposed yoga, the right to education, an increase in women’s marriage age and interfaith marriages. They support Taliban return to Kabul and desire to open sharia courts in a constitutional democracy, the latter of which would create a second judicial system that would diminish the value of the first. Most recently, the body called Hamas terror attacks a “natural reaction to Israeli atrocities.”

While AIMPLB lacks executive powers, their influence on Muslim voters makes them an extremely important part of Indian politics.

The Government of India also introduced a distinctive safeguard for Muslim religious bodies through the Waqf Act. First implemented in 1954, this globally unparalleled legislation grants governing rights over religious and charitable lands to Muslims. No other religious group in India has such a favorable regime for religious land management.

The necessity for this legislation arose in the aftermath of the Partition of India. Many Muslims migrated to Pakistan, leaving their properties in India behind. Consequently, the Indian Government decided that their properties should be allocated exclusively to Muslims. The Wakf Act, 1954 established waqf boards, Muslim committees that dedicate property permanently to religious or charitable ends, to oversee this process.

This act was later replaced by the Waqf Act, 1995. It granted expanded powers to the waqf boards. Under this act, waqf boards practically have the authority to claim any land in India as their own. Unsurprisingly, they rank as the third-largest landowners in India, following the army and railways. The shrewd nature of this act has drawn criticism from legal luminaries and scholars, with concerns about its constitutionality. Regardless, it is still in effect in India.

As a result, the Muslim society enjoys not just constitutional equality but also preferential treatment in the form of Sharia-driven laws, AIMPLB and the Waqf Act, from the Indian state. Considering this, writers who make exaggerated allegations about discrimination against Indian Muslims demonstrate a poor understanding of history and contemporary events. When the Indian Government decides to reform Muslim personal laws, regulate the obscure functioning of madrasas and form AIMPLB to ensure proper representation of Muslim society, it is blatantly ignorant and hypocritical to claim oppression.

Too many communities engage in hate speech but the Indian state does not discriminate

In recent years, India has witnessed several incidents of hate speech against Muslims. The judiciary and central government have understandably noticed such events and have enacted stringent legislation to address this menace.

Regrettably, acts of hate speech have been a facet of India’s ugly political landscape, given its multi-ethnic composition. In South India, social activist EV Ramaswamy was known in his heyday for making vociferous hate speeches against the Brahmins. A spokesperson from the DMK, the ruling party of the state of Tamil Nadu, recently made a speech calling for Brahmin genocide.

Radical Muslim groups are equally involved in several incidents of hate speech. Just two years ago, Muslim groups rioted, committed arson and openly called for the beheading of Nupur Sharma after she quoted Ḥadīth verses — statements of words and actions of the Prophet Muhammad — from Sahih Bukhari, a key Islamic text. In some parts of India, every few months, radicals call for “sar tan se juda.” This Islamic slogan means, “separate the head from the body,” and is a call for the decapitation of blasphemers.

Therefore, it is essential to understand that these incidents of hate speech do not necessarily reflect the larger policy of the state or a community. Many such incidents arise due to the politicization of local sentiments. Hence, these hate speeches should more appropriately be viewed as law and order issues rather than indicative of the national sentiment.

The status of Indian Muslims remains unchanged, resembling the situation before. Consequently, India is a unique place where all varieties of Muslims, including Shia, Sunni and Ahmadiyya coexist as equal citizens in the republic. They represent diverse ethnicities such as Pashtun, Punjabi, Bihari, Gujarati, Bengali, Kannada, Kashmiri, Tamil and more. They have equal opportunities for education, work, mobility and sustenance, like other religious groups. In fact, Indian Muslims have far greater rights than Ahmadis in Pakistan, Sunnis in Iran and Shias in Saudi Arabia. Critics of India in The Atlantic, The Washington Post, The New York Times, the BBC, Al Jazeera and Fair Observer might do well to note that everyone in India, including Muslims of all denominations, are equal in the eyes of the law.

[Lee Thompson-Kolar edited this piece.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

The post Does India Oppress Muslims? Not Now, Not Ever. Here’s Why. appeared first on Fair Observer.

The updated guidelines of the plan assign clear responsibilities, set measurable targets and define multiple performance indicators, thereby allowing India to embrace “city making” modeled on accountability and transparent civic engagement.

India’s transition to collaborative solution-building represents more inclusive governance, marking a departure from traditional top-down approaches. SUMP involves a wide range of policy stakeholders that allows for increasingly diverse and holistic solutions.

The importance of citizen involvement

Sherry Arnstein’s 1969 “ladder of citizen participation” model highlights the importance of meaningful engagement and power redistribution to counteract government manipulation. Her analysis urged a shift in focus towards empowering citizens to shape outcomes and influence policies in participatory democracy effects. She highlighted the need for policymakers to prioritize mechanisms that truly redistribute power.

In the Indian context, historical challenges in urban participation stem from outdated laws, often hearkening back to the colonial period, and limited state funding for development projects. This underscores the need for a strategic approach at the state level to address institutional, legislative, and political support for grassroots engagements.

The Participatory Research Authority of India’s report Institutionalising Online Citizen Consultations for Public Policymaking in India outlines three stages necessary to get the public involved in local governance:

1. Preliminary Engagement: Creating awareness through campaigns, advertisements, informal house visits, and formal consultations with specific groups.

2. Secondary Engagement: Consultations at the administrative level in wards, nodal centers in educational institutions, and stakeholder management at the local level for public sector scheme evaluation and coordination.

3. City Development Strategy Workshop (CDS): Involves updating the public on policy efforts and gathering active inputs from stakeholders and representatives.

This outreach could culminate in a citizen charter, a document which would formally lay out the commitments between the local government and its stakeholders. Clear and measurable commitments would promote transparency, accountability and regular review. Public awareness campaigns, feedback mechanisms, training for officials and independent oversight would be essential components to ensure the charter effectively strengthens the citizen—government interface.

Material progress, political stagnation

India’s economy and its cities are rapidly growing, but local democracy is not growing in order to keep pace with this development. The state is getting larger as oversight remains minimal.

The healthcare sector has witnessed a remarkable 137% increase in budget allocation, resulting in the implementation of new health policies and the introduction of voluntary health insurance schemes such as the popular National Health Insurance Initiative, also known as Aayushman Bharat.  Additionally, there is a projected 2.5% increase in public health expenditure by 2025.

In education, the landscape has evolved with the growth of private aided and unaided educational institutions alongside government schools. Notably, advancements in data management systems have enabled better monitoring of student enrollment and dropout rates.

The power sector has achieved has now achieved 100% electrification rates in rural and semi-urban areas, underscoring the increasing viability of the industry. Year on year, there are significant additions to record capacities in electricity generation, indicative of the sector’s growth. The transmission system has also been bolstered, contributing to enhanced efficiency.

Yet despite all of this progress, institutional reform is not keeping up the pace. There remains a need for more organized approaches to address the complexities of citizen engagement. A lack of consensus on community development projects hinders progress for urban programs and public engagement. Meanwhile, an insufficient system of subsidies and incentives regulate participation. 

Public engagement has declined, with less than 50% participation overall and less than 20% female involvement.

Inclusive development and community consultation through empowerment, awareness and collective training programs could go a long way to directing resources where they will really help. With the right balance of active governance and civic engagement, India’s urban sectors will flourish.

What the cities of India’s future might look like

To provide context, the McKinsey Global Institute Report of 2010 projected a four-fold increase in urban economies, reaching 147 million people and contributing to 70% of India’s GDP by 2030. This growth hinges on reducing the cost of delivering public services and unlocking potential savings. Local democratic oversight is necessary to ensure that this happens and that India’s urban population does not miss out on the benefits of this growth.

Globalization and industrialization have already kickstarted independence from socio-cultural restrictions in India. A growing urban class is beginning to assert itself as a political force. Yet it needs outlets to express itself in a constructive way. Streamlining citizen engagement processes can help the people who are driving India’s growth ask for the things that will enable them to keep doing so.

One key way to do this is expanding physical access to resources and job by improving urban transportation. Affordable and accessible transportation solutions can reduce inequality and enable broader participation in the economy. With greater economic opportunities come education, healthcare and social interactions.

Improved public transit, cycling lanes, walkable sidewalks, and carpooling initiatives boost options for marginalized communities and low-income groups. Sustainable transport infrastructure offers enhanced mobility options for various population segments, including marginalized communities and low-income groups.

Some promising steps have already been taken. Under the Sustainable Urban Management Accords (SUMA) of the Government of Karnataka in 2020, the southern state took steps towards introducing sustainable transport systems.

The key is to give the people access to their own cities — political access, economic access and physical access. All of these are mutually reinforcing. If we take charge of the moment and enable cities to guide and drive their own growth, we can create a more equitable and prosperous future for all Indians.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

The post Catalyzing Vibrant Growth Through Inclusive Local Politics In India appeared first on Fair Observer.

I am proud to have had the opportunity to study at an Indian Institute of Technology (IIT). At the age of 16, I was completely transformed by this intellectually challenging and life-building experience. Afterward, I built a successful career in the US for over forty years. I have now returned home and begun making a contribution to improve our country’s Human Development Index by contributing to many worthy causes. These include helping to improve primary healthcare, education and equipping Indians with skills to build careers. With some colleagues, I have set up a platform that helps how these program interventions can have measurable outcomes. Mirroring the United States, I ask if we can adopt affordable technology and most importantly, sustainable funds for our projects. In order for our country to get a seat at the UN Permanent Security Council or a Seat at the G7 (+1), we cannot have 250 million citizens living on less than $ 2/day. We cannot have 35% of our children under 5 years stunted. We cannot have a Global Hunger Index ranking of 111/125. And we cannot have 58.9% of adolescent women suffering from anemia.

I heard your speech at the India Today Annual Conclave in Delhi. It reminded me of when I heard your speech at the 54th Convocation of IIT Kanpur on December 28, 2022. Hearing your intervention back then made me nostalgic for my experience at IIT. But I was surprised at some of your statements. You said that no general development took place in India during the first 25 years after independence. You claimed that our country made no effort to rebuild itself after 200 years of being pillaged by Britain. I am sure the young graduating students must have believed what you said about our country. I am concerned about how your words may affect their perspectives. I give you the benefit of the doubt since this seems to be an error on the part of your speechwriters. If you could hand over this letter to them, as a guideline for your next speech, I would be grateful. After all, one cannot erase history.

I was even more shocked when I heard your speech at the Conclave. You said that whilst your government has done more for India’s development in its eight years of governance than in the entire 75 years since independence, you enumerated the first 75 days of 2023. The highlights were winning an Oscar and the Women’s Under-19 World Cup in cricket. In fact, you made me wonder if we perhaps had gained independence in 2014 and you were the lone freedom fighter. Very few leaders in the last 100 years have single-handedly taken the credit for the success of their country on a global platform except for a few who should not be named. This to me seems like a questionable and audacious move.

Here are some stellar examples of the solid foundation laid down by our visionary leaders:

1. The construction of the famous dam Bhakra Nangal began in 1948 and finished in 1964. The dam’s irrigation provided the backbone of the Green Revolution which allowed our country to have surplus food grains. The Food Corporation of India was established on January 10, 1964.

2. Five IITs (one in every region of the country: Kharagpur, Bombay, Madras, Kanpur, and Delhi) were started from 1950 till 1964. There are now 23 IITs that produce engineers who work at the world’s leading corporations and academic research institutions. 

3. Three Indian Institutes of Management were started in the first 25 years, providing post-graduate studies in business administration. They operated on par with Harvard Business School and University of California, Berkeley. There are now 20 IIMs that provide senior leaders to the world’s largest corporations.

4. Many prestigious national laboratories for fundamental scientific research were started during the infancy of the republic, like the National Chemical Laboratory, the Indian Institute of Science, the Central Salt and Marine Chemical Research Institute Jamnagar and the Physical Research Laboratory.

5. Atomic research started with the establishment of the Bhabha Atomic Research Center under the Atomic Energy Commission. Thus, we became self-reliant in atomic energy.

6. Crucial research laboratories like the Defence Research and Development Organisation, Armament Research and Development Establishment, Akron Rubber Development Laboratory and the like were started with a vision to make our country self-reliant in defense.

7. Many companies and organizations of strategic importance were started. Hindustan Aeronautics Limited, Bharat Electronics, Central Electronics Limited, Bharat Heavy Electricals Limited, Hindustan Antibiotics Limited, Oil and Natural Gas Corporation, Indian Telephone Industries Limited and many more were established in the first 25 years of independence.

8. The Indian Space Research Program was launched and the Indian Space Research Organisation was established during this period. This has paid rich dividends to our country! We are now not only Aatmanibhar (self-reliant) in all our space missions, but we also provide this service to other nations.

9. The Indian Council for Medical Research was established in 1948. Many research and medical institutes set up under the Council in various areas of health sprouted across the country during the first 25 years. India Institute of Medical Sciences, New Delhi was set up in 1956.

Sir, the list goes on and on. Our democracy invested its energy, blood, sweat and toil in the first 25 years to lay the foundation of this country. All this was done in spite of being raped by our colonial rulers. Poverty (75%), illiteracy (72%), lack of primary health care, a short life expectancy (27 years), epidemics and natural disasters leading to famine tested the strength of the Indian people and continue to the present. Hats off to the vision of our freedom fighters and leaders of our young country who made great strides despite the odds. As Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru said, as the clock struck 12:00 midnight on August 15, 1947: “Long years ago we made a tryst with destiny, and now the time comes when we shall redeem our pledge, not wholly or in full measure, but very substantially.”

I don’t know what to make of it. All I know is, without exception, everyone seems to be afraid, afraid of the outcome of the upcoming elections. Emotions are everywhere. What will happen to our lives if you retain power? When you do not respect the truth of India’s history, you really make a mockery of our intelligence.

As Indian citizens, let us recall the opening sentence of our constitution: “We the people.” India is the world’s largest functioning democracy. Our leaders should know this, and we will remind them of it collectively, lest they forget.

Prime Minister, I must speak my mind. To call it what it is. Even if I am labeled unpatriotic or an anti-national, I say this with confidence: I am really, truly proud to be Indian!

[Gwyneth Campbell edited the piece.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

The post An Open Letter From an IIT Graduate to Narendra Modi appeared first on Fair Observer.

The CAA has proved controversial. Both the foreign press and much of the English-speaking media have accused the act of being anti-Muslim. The US State Department has said that it is concerned about the implementation of the CAA. In response, India’s Ministry of External Affairs has dismissed the US statement as “misplaced, misinformed, and unwarranted.”

It is time to take a step back and examine this legislation coolly. In fact, we must ask the operative question about the CAA: Why did the government pass this legislation? 

The dark view of the CAA

Asaduddin Owaisi, the leader of the All India Majlis-e-Ittehadul Muslimeen party claims “CAA is meant to only target Muslims, it serves no other purpose.” In his long post on social media site X, this Muslim leader asserts, “Once religion is accepted as the basis of Indian citizenship, the next step is to deny it on religious grounds.” Note that Owaisi’s party wanted the then feudal Hyderabad state ruled by an autocratic Nizam to join Pakistan in 1947, The Nizam’s militia, the Razakars, conducted genocide of the ruler’s own Hindu majority population before Indian troops liberated the long-suffering Telugu, Marathi and Kannada people in his realm.

Kerala’s ruling Communist Party of India (Marxist) has called for state-wide protests as has the All Assam Students’ Union. Opponents take the view that the BJP is weakening the secular character of India. The communists blame the ruling party for practicing the politics of what Indians call “communalism” or what some in the West might call majoritarianism. Opponents of the BJP argue that the party has announced the CAA rules as an opportunistic move to mobilize the Hindu votes just before the election.

Most international outlets such as the Qatari-funded Al Jazeera and the British government-backed BBC have also termed the CAA anti-Muslim. In fact, the BBC’s headline says it all, “CAA: India to enforce migrant law that excludes Muslims.”

The context of the CAA

Given the sound and fury generated by the CAA, examining the context behind the parliamentary act becomes critical. The legislation aims at  expediting citizenship for refugees who have suffered as members of persecuted minorities in three neighboring Islamic countries, one of whom is ruled by the Taliban. 

The CAA does not pertain to Muslims who are Indian citizens. The legislation does not exclude a single Indian Muslim from citizenship, making the BBC’s headline far from true. 

All the CAA does is give Hindus, Sikhs, Buddhists, Jains, Parsis and Christians living in India after having fled from Afghanistan, Pakistan and Bangladesh a fast track to citizenship. Members of these persecuted minority religions must have migrated to India before December 31, 2014. The BBC makes a big deal about the fact that “the new law does not cover those fleeing persecution in non-Muslim majority countries, including Tamil refugees from Sri Lanka.” It also says that the CAA does not cover Rohingya Muslim refugees from neighboring Myanmar.

Such arguments are specious because existing provisions allow all refugees to claim citizenship,including Muslims. In 2016, India granted Pakistani singer Adnan Sami citizenship. The Indian government grants other Muslims like him Indian passports too.

Both the BBC and the State Department could do well to note that the CAA is only emulating the 1990 Lautenberg Amendment. The US Congress passed this legislation to facilitate the resettlement of Jews from the former Soviet Union. It was “later expanded to include persecuted religious minorities in other countries, such as Jews, Christians, Baha’is, Sabaean-Mandaeans, and Zoroastrians from Iran.”

India is only offering an expedited path to citizenship to refugees from minority groups who have been subjected to ethnic cleansing, not just discrimination. Afghanistan, Pakistan and even Bangladesh have practiced a conscious policy of exterminating non-Muslim minorities for decades. 

The reality of Islamist South Asian nations

In 1992, Sikhs and Hindus numbered 200,000 in Afghanistan. Even before the Taliban took over a second time, this number had dropped to 500 by 2018. Today, there are practically no Sikhs or Hindus left in Afghanistan. The Taliban views both these communities as pagan kafirs who can be raped, tortured, enslaved and killed. 

The Sikhs and Hindus who lived in Afghanistan for decades have now fled to India as have the handful of Buddhists, Jains, Parsis and Christians. The Taliban did not even spare statues and destroyed both the priceless ancient Bamiyan statues of the Buddha. India owes these persecuted people of minority religions in fundamentalist Afghanistan some responsibility. The CAA seeks only to fulfill India’s moral duty. It is hypocritical and self-serving of Islamists and leftists to criticize a profoundly humanitarian legislation.

Pakistan is hardly more tolerant than Afghanistan. When British India was partitioned into India and Pakistan in 1947, the countries signed the Nehru-Liaquat Agreement, promising minorities equal rights. India has abided by that agreement and given all minorities equal rights. In fact, India gives minorities multiple protections that the Hindu majority lacks. For instance, minority educational institutions are run entirely by their religious organizations and many of them do not admit students of any other religion. This privilege is not available to Hindu institutions that are overseen and even administered by the state. In contrast, Pakistan is an expressly Muslim state where minorities are often raped, killed or forced to convert to Islam.

Innumerable reports have chronicled Pakistan’s genocidal treatment of its minorities. During the original sin of the partition in 1947, Pakistan engaged in ethnic cleansing of Hindus and Sikhs, which the state still celebrates. While the Indian state became a secular and democratic entity, Pakistan has become a factory for jihad, exporting violent terrorists around the world. Note that the Taliban was backed by Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence and Pakistani society has become increasingly more radicalized over time.

Unsurprisingly, minorities in Pakistan fell from 23% in 1947 to 3.7% in 2014. The figure today is even lower. Note that the population of Muslims in India both in absolute numbers and in percentage has grown since 1947. In other words, both the BBC and the State Department appear to be either mistakenly or deliberately maligning India for being anti-Muslim when in reality its policy is guided by the principle of giving refuge to minorities fleeing death and destruction in fundamentalist Islamist nations.

In 1971, India liberated Bangladesh despite opposition from the US. Henry Kissinger famously ignored the “Blood Telegram” of his own diplomat who detailed mass rape, brutal torture and mass killings by Pakistani troops. The Indian army chief was a Parsi, a Zoroastrian community that fled from Iran when Islam took root in  the country. The general commanding troops on the eastern front was Sikh and Indian troops came from a variety of religions, regions and races.

Despite the contribution of such diverse actors in liberating Bangladesh, today this country has become intolerant. Non-Muslim communities are often killed and forced to convert. Their women are frequently raped. In 2001, no less than 200 of them were raped in a single incident. The United Nations has expressed alarm over the fast-dwindling population of non-Muslim minorities in Bangladesh as a result of de facto ethnic cleansing. 

India’s only concern is to give those who fled before 2014 a long overdue safe haven. Thanks to its reputation as a democratic, tolerant and inclusive society, religious minorities have fled to India for centuries as the cases of the Gujarati Parsis, the Kerala Jews and Syrian Christians demonstrate. Non-Muslims in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Bangladesh have no place to go other than India. Those who came here before 2014 need a sanctuary. India has done the just and right thing by implementing the CAA, which the BBC, Al Jazeera and the State Department could and should make the effort to understand.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

The post Western Press Gets CAA Wrong: Here Is the Truth About the New Law appeared first on Fair Observer.

— Allama Mashriqi (“Quol-e-Faisal”, 1935)

The Khaksar Movement played a major role in challenging British colonial rule in India until its culmination. Led by Allama Mashriqi, it was notable for being a social movement that recruited women. The pivotal role these women played in shaping the demise of the British Raj has been largely overlooked in historical narratives. They are mentioned only briefly. To address this historical oversight and pay homage to their valor, I have penned a book entitled “The Khaksar Women: Warriors for Independence,” scheduled for release soon. With International Women’s Day on March 8 and Khaksar Martyrs’ Day on March 19, 1940 this article is dedicated to honoring the resilience and sacrifices of Khaksar women, shedding light on their activities, and remembering the victims of March 19. Another reason for writing this piece is to commemorate the bravery of the Khaksar martyrs who laid down their lives in Lahore for freedom.

In the Indian subcontinent, women were largely restricted to domestic roles in a male-dominated society with few exceptions. Their duties revolved around managing households and caring for the family. This trend was mirrored in America by the 1955 article “The Good Wife’s Guide” in Housekeeping Monthly, which emphasized wives attending to their husbands’ needs, writing: “Arrange his pillow and offer to take off his shoes. Speak in a low, soothing and pleasant voice. Don’t ask him questions about his actions or question his judgment or integrity. Remember, he is the master of the house and as such will always exercise his will with fairness and truthfulness. You have no right to question him. A good wife always knows her place.”

Allama Mashriqi was born into an enlightened family; apart from the men in his family. Even his mother and sisters were educated, a rarity at the time. Mashriqi emerged as a pioneering Muslim leader who recognized the crucial role of women’s empowerment not only in advancing societal progress but also in liberating India from the shackles of British rule. After Mashriqi founded the Khaksar Movement, his first wife, Wilayat Begum, played a significant role in its launch, as documented in Mashriqi’s book titled “Isha’raat” and the journal named “Al-Islah” dated August 12th, 1938. Despite resistance from orthodoxy, Mashriqi took a monumental step towards fostering female emancipation in 1935 by launching the feminist movement through his groundbreaking and revolutionary work “Quol-e-Faisal.” This marked a significant departure from prevailing societal norms.

Women in large numbers joined the Khaksar Movement throughout India. Among them were Mashriqi’s daughters, Khaksars’ wives, sisters, daughters and other relatives. These women proudly donned the Khaksar khaki uniform, adorned with a shoulder band bearing the inscription “Akhuwat”, meaning brotherhood. They attended Khaksar Camps, underwent military training, drills and parades and carried spades on their shoulders as they marched beside men or in independent groups. In the 1930s, even in the American military, women were mainly restricted to nursing and clerical roles. Khaksar women in India were allowed to pioneer combat training, street marches and political activism—a groundbreaking movement that captivated thousands, reshaping women’s roles in Indian society and elsewhere.

Some of these extraordinary women held prominent positions and titles within the movement, delivering public speeches and recruiting more Khaksar women. Additionally, preteen Saeeda Bano and the Khaksar women, both holding titles as mainstream members, played a crucial role in community service initiatives. During the 1943 Bengal Famine, they were instrumental in saving lives, providing essential aid and aiding in the rehabilitation of tens of thousands alongside the men Khaksars.

Women agitators against colonial rule

In addition to their humanitarian endeavors, these women were deeply involved in anti-British rule activities. They distributed Khaksar literature to promote the movement’s goal of ending British rule and organized women’s meetings to propagate Mashriqi’s message. In 1939, they played a pivotal role in paralyzing the Government of United Provinces (UP), leading the British governor of UP to sign a peace agreement on Mashriqi’s terms. Following this agreement, Mashriqi established a parallel government and appointed Khaksar governors. These included women who were appointed to Punjab and United Provinces to assist the Khaksar Governors.

Following the brutal murders of Khaksars on March 19 in Lahore, Khaksar women participated in protests and joined their Khaksar brothers when they launched the Civil Disobedience Movement. Their demonstrations became so nerve-wracking for the British Government that they had to induct women police to control them, a first in the history of British India. The Khaksar women attended the historic All-India Muslim League Session held from March 22 to 24, 1940, in Lahore, where the Pakistan Resolution and Khaksar Resolution were passed. At the session, alongside men, these women demanded the release of Allama Mashriqi and Khaksars and the removal of the ban on the Khaksar Movement.

On May 31, 1940, in a tragic turn of events, Mashriqi’s son Ehsanullah Khan Aslam died as a result of police brutality. Women in uniform paraded with Aslam’s body, some of them were in burqa, in a massive funeral procession comprising over 50,000 people. It was the largest funeral for any child in British India. 

During the ban on the Khaksar Movement and Mashriqi’s imprisonment, these women also played roles as spies, conveying messages between Mashriqi’s home and Khaksar leaders, and vice versa. They continued to hold secret meetings and engage in activities to keep Mashriqi’s mission of seeking freedom alive. Young women also played a role. Saeeda Bano, a 10-year-old girl from Delhi, played an amazing role in the freedom movement. She was a daring and a fiery, eloquent speaker. She led women’s marches and protest demonstrations. During these public demonstrations, they repeated anti-British rule slogans such as “Down with the British Raj” and “Death to the British Government.” As a result of their anti-British activities, several freedom-fighter women were threatened, harassed and even beaten, yet they persevered. 

Saeeda Bano’s involvement gained national recognition. On June 18, 1940, Bano, along with men and women Khaksars, marched in uniform and belcha towards Punjab Premier Sir Sikander Hayat Khan’s house to hand over a letter to the Premier. However, Bano and others were arrested. The Tribune (Lahore) reported on June 19, 1940: “They were taken into custody…the ten-year-old girl…took out a letter from her pocket addressed to Sir Sikandar Hayat Khan, premier of the Punjab, and began reading it in the Kotwali. The letter contained a reference to the Premier and the Khaksar agitation. The letter was seized by the police.”

The next day, when Khaksar men and women along with Bano were presented to the Duty Magistrate, The Tribune dated June 20th, 1940 reported: “[W]omen after arrest were persuaded by the police officers to go back and not to join the Khaksar movement in future, but they did not agree as a result of which they were sent to female jail…they are also persecuted for alleged parading in military formation and being members of an unlawful association…” Despite imprisonment, they would not surrender. Instead, they continued to bear the atrocities of prison all the while separated from their families, who remained vulnerable to persecution by the British. On August 19, 1940, the Magistrate gave his verdict and released Bano on the grounds that she was a minor. He issued orders for the release of other women as well under certain terms. According to The Tribune dated August 30th, 1940: “One woman consented to furnish security, and the rest refused…and preferred jail”.

Khaksar women’s influence transcended their involvement with the Khaksar Movement, inspiring other organizations. Hindu leader Subhas Chandra Bose integrated women into his Indian National Army in the early 1940s. Mohammad Ali Jinnah’s All-Indian Muslim League established the Women’s National Guard in 1944. It is evident that Khaksar women’s courage and dedication reshaped women’s roles in the Indian subcontinent.

Furthermore, in the mid-1940s Mashriqi incorporated talented Khaksar women into the team that contributed to the framing of the constitution known as “The Constitution of Free India, 1946 A.C.”. Others distributed copies or delivered lectures on the publication’s contents to garner support. Mashriqi’s constitutions found favor among the public as they safeguarded the rights of Muslims and non-Muslims to maintain India’s unity—a sentiment shared by the majority who never desired their country to split apart. Based on the support for the said document and other favorable factors, throughout the 1945-1946 elections both men and women Khaksars campaigned vigorously for Khaksar candidates. Despite their efforts, the British establishment ensured that Khaksars did not emerge victorious. The British went to great lengths to secure the All-India Muslim League’s sweeping triumph, establishing their party as the legitimate sole representative of Muslims. Mashriqi, fellow leaders and Khaksar men and women protested vehemently against the electoral rigging. Unsurprisingly, their grievances remained unaddressed by the British establishment. For further details, read my work titled, “Jinnah Paid Subsidy for Pakistan: 1945-1946 Elections Manipulated.”

In 1947, when Prime Minister Clement Attlee announced the transfer of power to Indians no later than 1948, according to Mashriqi, the delay gave violent elements time to carry out horrific killings of Muslims, Hindus and Sikhs. These killings were exploited as the justification that Indian people were not ready for freedom and self-governance. Mashriqi’s assessment was bolstered by reality. The British had no plan to leave India for many more years. Aware of British intentions, Mashriqi ordered 300,000 Khaksars to reach Delhi on June 30th, 1947. This action alarmed the British and Lord Mountbatten hastily accepted. The partition plan before the assembly of the Khaksars. Yet, in June, despite strict restrictions and the enforcement of Section 144, well over 100,000 — The Tribune (June 04, 1947) reported 70,000 to 80,000 — reached Delhi, including Khaksar women. The omission of Mashriqi’s role in ending the British rule and other facts highlights the selective nature of historical narratives chosen for presentation. Furthermore, the important work of Khaksar women — protecting lives and rehabilitating Muslims and non-Muslims in refugee camps remains virtually unknown. To discover the reasons behind Mountbatten’s acceleration of the partition plan and the swift transfer of power, it is crucial to watch the documentary The Road to Freedom: Allama Mashriqi’s Historic Journey from Amritsar to Lahore from beginning to end. Additionally, reading my article titled “The British Chessboard: Jinnah, Gandhi and the Strategic Divide of India” will provide further insight into this historical context.

The legacy of Khaksar women

In conclusion, the Khaksar Muslim women stood firm in their fight against colonial power until its rule came to an end, which was no mean achievement. Moreover, despite the patriarchal challenges they faced, Khaksar women overcame disapproval and played a crucial role in the Khaksar movement by providing vital organizational support. They exhibited exceptional confidence, individualism and pride. They inspired other women and boosted morale. The role of women in the Khaksar Movement in India was indeed groundbreaking and way ahead of its time, prompting other organizations everywhere to follow suit. 

The credit for this indeed goes to the visionary Allama Mashriqi who, despite heavy criticism from non-Muslims and conservative Muslims, stood firmly in his belief. In the 1930s, Mashriqi empowered women during a period in the East and West when they did not have equal rights. He was ahead of his time and his efforts had a profound impact on the country. Mashriqi’s actions laid the foundation for the global movement that eventually integrated women into various fields including the Indian armed forces of today.

Allama Mashriqi’s Khaksar Movement, founded on a self-help basis, is a compelling case for the establishment of an army without national training. The Khaskar Movement consisted of over five million male and female members. Mashriqi was able to accomplish this despite the British Raj and without financial support from either domestic or foreign sources. This feat is particularly remarkable given the absence of modern communication technologies and the anti-Mashriqi British-controlled print media.

[Gwyneth Campbell edited the piece.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

The post The Khaksar Women Who Fought for Indian Independence appeared first on Fair Observer.

Bengaluru is not the only Indian city facing a water crisis. Chennai, the southernmost Indian metropolis, faced a dire crisis in 2019 when all its water sources completely dried up. Not only India but also other countries face such crises. South African metropolis Johannesburg has faced a recurring shortage of water and so have other cities in Africa and the Middle East.

At the heart of India’s crisis is criminal water mismanagement. Groundwater tables have been falling over decades thanks to overexploitation. According to a Punjab Agricultural University (PAU) study, Punjab’s groundwater fell by over a meter every year in 18 of its 22 districts from 1998 to 2018. In two decades, groundwater went from being available at three to 10 meters to below 30 meters. Tubewells in Punjab have been pumping out water thanks to subsidized electricity to grow crops India no longer needs and the government procures these crops at guaranteed prices. Such distorted incentives are putting future generations at risk.

India is running dangerously short of water

India’s struggle with water scarcity is a complex issue. Central to this challenge is the severe mismatch between the country’s limited water supplies and its rapidly expanding population. Despite housing 18% of the global population, India has access to only 4% of the world’s water resources. Historically, the country has relied heavily on the monsoon rains. Just one bad rainy season sometimes led to drought and famines. Over the years, climate change has made the monsoons more erratic, exacerbating India’s water crisis. 

Groundwater extraction has reached dangerously high levels. Rapid urbanization has increased demand and the rampant exploitation of both surface and groundwater. Bengaluru, once renowned for its numerous lakes, has become a concrete jungle where residents are running short of water. India’s NITI Aayog, the apex think tank of the government, has a composite water management index as per which 21 major Indian cities are on the verge of depleting their groundwater. These include cities such as Delhi, Bengaluru and Chennai.

Needless to say, water scarcity profoundly affects daily life. Lack of water means many people cannot cook or clean properly. Sanitation suffers. Inevitably, the risk of diseases rises. Indian cities, where millions are packed together in tiny spaces, face great peril during any water crisis.

The author remembers a three-day water cut in a major Indian city. To meet basic needs, he resorted to buying expensive bottled water, costing about $2.00 (165 rupees) per five liters. Note that most Indians cannot afford to buy such water. The author also has memories of watching people squabble for clean water in slums and a 2020 report found that 78% of toilets in Mumbai lacked reliable water supply. 

Wasteful water usage and terrible policy cause water crisis

On a national scale, India grapples with a fascinating paradox. Despite an acute national water crisis, farmers in Punjab and Maharashtra persist in cultivating water-intensive crops. In Punjab, rice cultivation continues unabated, despite each kilogram of paddy requiring a staggering 15,000 liters of water. Experts point out that efficient water management could slash this figure to a mere 600 liters. If farmers transitioned to millets, that would save water further. It takes just 250 liters of water to produce one kilogram of millets. Yet farmers in Punjab are sticking to rice. The government subsidizes electricity, which allows farmers to use tube wells wantonly. They pump out free water using cheap electricity to grow rice, which the government buys at a fixed price. Ironically, Punjab was traditionally a wheat and millet growing state but misguided government policies have distorted incentives, which is leading to a dangerous depletion of groundwater.

Not only Punjab but also Maharashtra is wasting water. On the leeward side of the Western Ghats where rainfall is low, farmers are growing sugarcane, a water-intensive crop. As a result, a small fraction of cultivable land guzzles a disproportionate share of the state’s irrigation. Reforms have proved impossible because a powerful sugar lobby is addicted to easy money through sugarcane cultivation. Like diabetes, Maharashtra’s sugar addiction is a disease with disastrous consequences for the state.

At the heart of the water crisis lies a failure of governance. Water is a finite resource but neither politicians nor Indian Administrative Service (IAS) officers who form policy acknowledge that fact. They pay lip service to water conservation without overhauling agricultural practices. Truth be told, politicians and IAS officers are not entirely to blame. The nation needs a collective shift to crop diversification. Growing millets and pulses as well as building ponds, tanks and bunds to capture monsoon rains and replenish groundwater is the need of the hour. Many farmers are dead set against reforms though. They prize the immediate over the important. In fact, farmers only recently blocked one of the major highways to demand higher government support prices for wheat and rice.. 

Farmers are behaving in a short-term manner in part because of human nature. Our cognitive limitations foster a sense of complacency towards long-term changes. We are wired to respond swiftly to imminent threats. This leaves us ill-prepared for the creeping menace of environmental change that unfolds over decades and centuries. 

This challenge is compounded by hyperbolic discounting, a tendency to prioritize the present over the future. While we may acknowledge the theoretical threats of climate change and water scarcity, practical action often falls short. A water crisis needs collective, not individual, action and coordination costs in a stratified populous society are high. Hence, India suffers from societal inertia in the face of a dire crisis. 

India’s problems are exacerbated by the lack of institutions focused on long-term planning. Third World countries like Egypt, Nigeria and India lack planning, in part because of a colonial past during which they developed a sense of learned helplessness. The people focus on day-to-day survival while the matters of the state are the realm of the leaders. In India, social media handles and YouTube videos are proof of how society looks up to IAS officers in particular to act as oracles for every problem. Tragically, IAS officers have no domain expertise and few even care about water management. 

These days, IAS officers turn to consultants with fancy degrees for policy formation. These consultants have little domain expertise themselves. They prize Microsoft PowerPoint slides over substantive knowledge or practical action. As a result, India lacks an institutional framework to come up with a sane water policy and the criminal mismanagement of water resources continues.

What citizens and governments need to do

Both India’s central government in New Delhi and state governments around the country have been making noises and taking action on water. Indeed, they have focused on supply-side policies and actions to solve the water crisis. Initiatives like the prime minister’s Jal Jeevan Mission, which seeks to provide every rural household with tap water connection by 2024, and the Vrishabhavathi Lift Irrigation project, which seeks to fill up 70 lakes near Bengaluru in the first phase, are coming up with supply-side infrastructure solutions. 

Schemes such as the Atal Bhujal Yojana and Paani Bachao, Paisa Kamao incentivize community efforts to conserve water. In fact, Prime Minister Narendra Modi has been a vocal advocate for water conservation. He has repeatedly called for a shift in mindset during his radio addresses through Mann ki Baat and promoted 60,000 Amrit Sarovars as community-driven models for water conservation.

These policies primarily focus on improving infrastructure to ensure a nationwide water supply. However, India’s water crisis is acute and worsening. Our glaciers are melting, rivers are drying up and groundwater levels are falling. The author is from Agra and recalls witnessing the drying of the river Yamuna in his hometown. Other rivers in different regions of the country are drying too. There is the added problem of ever-increasing plastic pollution in the Himalayas and riverbeds in our mountains are inevitably full of plastic, a fact that Satya Prakash Negi, one of the nation’s finest Indian Forest Service officers has pointed out clearly. 

Given the scale of the crisis, India needs an almost wartime-like mobilization. The complacent chalta hai (anything goes) national attitude of colonial learned helplessness no longer suffices. We have to blend traditional wisdom with modern innovations. We need to combine both demand and supply-side solutions. Traditional models of water conservation, as pioneered by Rajendra Singh, the Water Man of India, are good models as are reforms to failed policies that are causing India’s groundwater to disappear. Importantly, it is time for India to implement a water consumption tax. Even as the underprivileged queue for hours to secure a few liters of water, golf courses run sprinklers even in water-stressed Bengaluru. India can no longer afford rice in Punjab, sugarcane in western Maharashtra and golf courses in Bengaluru making demands on a scarce natural resource.

As per the World Bank, India’s per capita income was $2,410.90 (about 200,000 rupees) in 2022. So, advanced technological solutions such as waterless and odorless toilets, as well as smart taps and showers, will not see mass adoption. Yet people can use water more frugally. This modification of demand would require communication and messaging, which the author’s professor at IIM Bangalore advocates. Training minds to conserve water is doable. India’s political and civic leaders have to work together to increase public awareness, change policies and foster behavioral changes. Water is the essence of life and we as a nation must treat it as a finite valuable resource.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

The post India Now Faces a Scary Water Crisis appeared first on Fair Observer.

On the other hand, new drug shortages in the US have increased by nearly 30% between 2021 and 2022, according to the report “The Health and National Security Risks of Drug Shortages (March 2023)” commissioned by the US Senate. At the end of 2022, drug shortages experienced a record five-year high of 295 active drugs being in short supply.

India’s drug manufacturers have run afoul of US safety standards

India is the world’s largest provider of generic drugs by volume. Over the years, Indian pharmaceutical companies have created trailblazing innovations, especially in getting lifesaving medicines at the most affordable prices to regions across the globe. As many countries turn to India to make the best medicines available to millions around the world, India’s pharmaceutical sector is all set to attain new heights. However, there are still concerns which remain unresolved.

Moreover, in the US, with nearly 32% of generic drugs and 45% of active pharmaceutical ingredients being sourced from India and China, several concerns have been raised that the US heavily relies on sourcing from foreign manufacturers, who often do not meet the expected safety standards.

Other than concerns about the safety regulations in Indian factories, challenges about quality assurance and data integrity still remain. In the past, the United States Food and Drug Administration (FDA) highlighted that India has the lowest percentage of acceptable inspection outcomes at drug manufacturing facilities, when compared to all other countries.

Since India has the highest number of FDA-approved manufacturing plants outside the US, it is fairly typical for the FDA to carry out mandatory planned inspections as well as unannounced investigations. In doing so, most recently in December 2022 after a period of pandemic-related decline in its overseas inspections, the FDA discovered contaminated drugs, unsanitary conditions and shredded paperwork at the manufacturing sites of Intas Pharmaceuticals in Gujarat. These lapses come as India’s pharma industry faces intense scrutiny in light of the global fatalities in Gambia and Uzbekistan linked to cough syrup.

Not only does the Indian pharmaceutical industry run the risk of not meeting the FDA’s required quality standards, but there have also been multiple drug recalls in the US between 2022 and 2023. These include the recall of eye drops, skin ointment for the treatment of various conditions and other capsules from Lupin Pharmaceuticals used in the treatment of tuberculosis, blood pressure, anti-bacterial and pain medication.

The bar of compliance is constantly being raised to improve quality. The FDA has been attempting to collaborate with the Indian government to facilitate access to safe, effective and high-quality medications manufactured in India.

How Indian drug manufacturers raise supply, and lower prices, in the US

Toward converging on mutual interests in August 2023, at the G20 Health Ministers meeting, the US Department of Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra acknowledged that the US has a very strong and dependent relationship with India for its pharmaceuticals. He also stated that India and the US will collaborate to form an accord for the safety and availability of medicines as well as work towards improving the quality standards of the pharmaceutical industry to meet the US standards for carrying out exports.

In the backdrop of this mutually beneficial relationship of aiming to reduce drug shortages in the US and to improve safety standards, it appears that India is all set to salvage the situation. It can alleviate the shortfall of critical, lifesaving drugs in the US and build its overall reputation of being a reliant supplier of pharmaceuticals everywhere in the world.

Keeping with this projection, Reuters reports that India’s pharmaceutical exports are set to grow nearly twice as fast as last year, to reach an estimated $27 billion in sales, as a result of strong US buying. Further, sales to the US, which represents India’s largest market with 30% of its overall pharma exports, rose 6.2% to $7.5 billion in the last fiscal year. According to Policy Circle, “India’s pharmaceutical exports are expected to reach $28 billion in 2023-24, a remarkable growth of 10.2%.”

An additional factor in favor of Indian pharmaceutical companies is the upcoming patent cliff in the US for top-selling drugs, which is estimated to take place over the next five years. A “patent cliff” is said to occur when a patent expires and the name-brand product thus goes off-patent. Patent expiration is one of the main reasons for the growth of generic drugs — once a pharma patent expires, generic manufacturers are allowed in the market, and they often sell at a lower price than the name-brand drug, which increases competition and gives better choice to consumers in the market. The last patent cliff occurred in the US between 2011 and 2015 when big pharma saw increased growth in generic competition for several large pharmaceutical products. 

In addition to pharmaceutical manufacturers, it is anticipated that other players in the Indian pharmaceutical ecosystem will also reap the benefits of a patent cliff. This is because a significant number of US pharma companies will typically look to outsource their non-core activities to emerging markets. It is also anticipated that the patent cliff, along with the need to reduce healthcare costs, will eventually help in the continued growth of the Indian pharmaceutical industry. In turn, a boost in supplies could also help in bringing down the shortages of certain medications in the US and thus aid in the symbiotic relationship between the two countries.

Stakeholders have stressed the need for swift action similar to the rapid response seen in COVID-19 vaccine development. They emphasized global cooperation, clear guidelines for clinical development and engagement with patient advocacy groups as key takeaways from the G20 summit.

If these concerns are addressed by markets in India and if its ability to respond to global market dynamics is enhanced, then India can counter the shortages of generic drugs in the United States and rightfully retain its jeweled crown as the “pharmacy to the world.”

[Will Sherriff edited this piece.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

The post Can India Rescue the US From Scarce Drug Supplies? appeared first on Fair Observer.

The act was amended a few times since independence in 1947. But the amendments were mostly formal: for instance, offenses by or relating to public servants under sections 161–165A were repealed by section 31 of the Prevention of Corruption Act, 1988. Corruption was instead to be punished under sections 7–16 of the Prevention of Corruption Act.

On the rare occasion that substantial amendments were made to the code itself, they were done as a knee-jerk response by the government of the day to public outcry over a heinous crime. This is true of the Nirbhaya case, a 2013 criminal case in which a student was gang raped and murdered. The case resulted in a radical redefinition and punishment of rape under sections 375 and 376 of the IPC. It also created new provisions dealing with rape in aggravated form, such as rape on a women under 12 years of age and gang rape etc, prescribed under new sections 376A–376E.

A new law, Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita (“Indian Justice Code”), 2023, replaces the Indian Penal Code, 1860, on December 25, 2023. Similarly, Bhartiya Nagrik Suraksha Sanhita (“Indian Civil Protection Code”), 2023, and Bhartiya Sakshya Adhiniyam (“Indian Evidence Act”), 2023, replaced the Code of Criminal Procedure and the Indian Evidence Act, respectively.

The new justice code is to be welcomed if only because it constitutes an exercise in independent India’s complete review of a partly obsolete colonial law, presumably crafted to serve the interests of the colonial power, and supplants it with a new, substantive law that retains what has proven effective post-independence but amends existing provisions. Additionally, it adds fresh ones that consider 76 years of experience in the operation of the repealed law. At one stroke, the Sanhita retains the bulk of the Code but introduces significant new provisions. So the approach to the repealed colonial law is not ideological and radical, but adaptive and reformist.

Sedition penalized

One of the main concerns reflected in the amendments of IPC provisions and the introduction of new ones in the Sanhita is the security of the Indian state. Ever since independence, the experience of the Indian state has been not only one of external enemies aiming to annex its territories, but of the debilitation of the state by instigating constant internal violence. Since the 1990s, the destabilization of India by its enemies witnessed a marked increase as the country dealt with internal turbulence of all kinds. There have been secessionist movements in Jammu and Kashmir, the northeast and Punjab. Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) and Army and China’s People’s Liberation Army have promoted terrorism and insurgency. The country has been a victim of cross-border terrorism and Maoist violence. Existing laws including the IPC were found to be inadequate at preventing the subversion of the Indian state. The Sanhita seeks to redress this weakness.

The first step in defeating the ISI’s campaign to undermine India was to nip it in its most nascent stage: advocacy. This advocacy could be through propaganda or ostensibly intellectual articles, in print or digital, attempting to foment separatism and secession under the guise of free expression and legitimate dissent. The Indian state often invoked section 124A of the IPC, which prescribed the offense of sedition, to counter secessionist movements. However, the wording of that section punished exciting “disaffection towards the government established by law in India,” which was a colonial legislative exercise designed to protect the colonial regime from disaffection by its subjects. The wording was wholly inappropriate to deal with secessionist literature and speeches in independent India. Section 124A was thus subjected to virulent criticism on the grounds that it stifled dissent against an incumbent government.

The Sanhita seeks to remove this anomaly with the new section 152. It eschews the word “sedition,” in view of its contentious past, and describes the offense as an “act endangering sovereignty, unity and integrity of India.” The section imposes a life sentence of imprisonment or imprisonment up to seven years and a fine for anyone who by written or spoken words “excites or attempts to excite, secession or armed rebellion or subversive activities, or encourages feelings of separatist activities or endangers the sovereignty or unity and integrity of India.” It dispenses with the words “brings … into hatred or contempt or excites … disaffection towards the government established by law in India” of section 124A.

Section 152 thus makes explicit the acts it seeks to punish: those that advocate secession, armed rebellion, subversive activities, separatist tendencies and any act that endangers the sovereignty, unity or integrity of the Indian state — not threats to British colonial rule. It is extremely surprising that this legislative change was undertaken 75 years after the establishment of Swarajya — self-governance.

Abetting murder in India or abroad

The Sanhita has removed two other colonial relics in the IPC. The illustration to section 108A dealing with the abetment in India of offenses outside India has been replaced. In its stead, there is now an illustration that takes cognizance of the significance of the Liberation of Goa from the Portuguese in December 1961.

The old illustration to section 108A read as follows: “A, in India, instigates B, a foreigner in Goa, to commit a murder in Goa, A is guilty of abetting murder.” Evidently, the illustration to section 108A suggested that Goa is outside India and not a part of the country. Section 47 of the Sanhita, which corresponds to section 108A, removes this anachronism. The illustration to the new section 47 now reads as such: “A, in India, instigates B, a foreigner in country X, to commit a murder in that country, A is guilty of abetting murder.”

For 62 years (1961–2023), the main substantive criminal statute has by legislative neglect treated Goa as a foreign territory. The Sanhita mercifully reflects the reality that Goa has been a part of India since 1961.

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Another colonial legacy consigned to the dustbins of history is affected by section 48 of the Sanhita. It creates the offense of “Abetment outside India for offence in India.” The illustration to section 48 made it clear why the acts prescribed as an offense by section 48 did not find favor with the British. If a section corresponding to section 48 in the Sanhita existed in the IPC, a British native instigating someone to commit a murder in India would be liable for punishment in India for abetting murder. This effect was unacceptable to the colonial government.

Section 48 of the Sanhita makes a person outside India liable to be tried and punished in India for abetting offenses in India. Most significantly, the illustration to section 48 would permit the Indian government to try and punish the masterminds behind terrorist offenses in India. The aim of section 48 is to facilitate the trial and punishment of several militants: Hafiz Saeed and Sajid Mir of the Lashkar-e-Taiba jihadist group, and Gurpatwant Singh Pannun of the separatist Khalistan movement. These men conspire, abet and instigate the commission of serious offenses in and against India.

Crime and terror strongly punished

To further ensure the security of the Indian state, the Sanhita contains provisions pertaining to defining and punishing organized crime (section 111) and terrorist acts (section 113). States like Maharashtra have witnessed a rash of crime syndicates indulging in kidnapping, robbery, extortion, contract killing and the like. To counter this, they have enacted legislation — the Maharashtra Control of Organised Crime Act, 1999 (MCOCA) — containing stringent provisions against persons arrested and charged under the act. These provisions pertain to bail and burden of proof. Some of the syndicates perpetrate their unlawful activities on a pan-India basis, so the Union of India has adopted the provisions of State Acts, such as Maharashtra’s MCOCA. The provisions of section 111 of the Sanhita are in line with those of the MCOCA.

Similarly, section 113 of the Sanhita defines and punishes terrorist acts. Again, the provisions of this section are in line with the provisions of Chapter VI of the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act, 1967 (UAPA), which defines a terrorist act and prescribes the punishment for it. It also punishes a host of other acts concerning terrorism, such as conspiring or abetting terrorist acts, organizing camps to train terrorists, recruiting persons for committing terrorist acts, becoming a member of a terrorist organization and harboring or concealing terrorists.

So which of the two provisions — the UAPA or section 113 — will be applied in a given case of terrorism? This question is answered by the explanation to section 113: “The officer not below the rank of Superintendent of Police shall decide whether to register the case under this section or under the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act, 1967.” The discretion of the officer in the explanation will presumably be governed by his opinion, deciding whether a specific case requires investigation by the National Investigation Agency (NIA). The NIA is vested with exclusive jurisdiction to investigate offenses under the UAPA.

Women empowered and punishments redefined

Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s declared resolve to usher in an era of Nari Shakti — women’s empowerment — first expressed in the Constitution (One Hundred and Sixth Amendment) Act, finds further impetus in the Sanhita.

The IPC, profuse with Victorian morality, is replete with provisions displaying patriarchy. Thus, the offenses of outraging the modesty of women, sexual harassment, forcible disrobing, voyeurism, stalking, rape and gang rape were all to be found in Chapter XVI of the Code dealing with offenses affecting the human body. These were grouped together with offenses such as murder, suicide, culpable homicide, causing death by negligence, grievous injury, wrongful restraint and wrongful confinement. Even within Chapter XVI, offenses against women were subsumed under a sub-chapter titled, “Of criminal force and assault.” Offenses such as cohabitation caused by a man deceitfully inducing a belief of lawful marriage found its place in Chapter XX, titled, “Of offences relating to marriage.” Thus the IPC did not recognize that there was a genre of offenses distinct to women.

The Sanhita, on the other hand, devotes the entirety of Chapter V to offenses against women and children. The Sanhita recognizes women and children as a distinct category of victims who are subjected to degrading and unspeakable crimes. It accepts that their investigation and trial require sensitive procedural safeguards and enhanced punishment.

Regarding punishment, the Sanhita displays a judicious blend of various principles. For the heinous crime of gang rape of a woman under age 18, the death sentence is introduced as an option. Another punishment allowed is imprisonment for the remainder of the guilty party’s natural life. This sentence incorporates the principle of deterrence as well as the expressive function of punishment that reflects total societal disapproval of such a monstrous crime.

For the offense of causing death by any rash or negligent act, a deterrent punishment of imprisonment for up to five years and a fine is prescribed. This likely is to reduce the avalanche of road accidents that the country has witnessed in more recent times — spoiled young adults in turbo-charged vehicles hitting and killing pedestrians and pavement-dwellers. Simultaneously, doctors are spared the enhanced punishment, as death by their negligence is punishable with a maximum imprisonment of two years and a fine. This is presumably on the grounds that their negligence is far less culpable than that of the brats in fast cars.

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The Sanhita also introduces a new punishment: community service. It prescribes this for a few petty offenses including, conspicuously, the offense of defamation. This offense is now punishable under section 356(2) of the Sanhita.

The IPC imposed fines as a punishment, be it as the entire penalty, as an alternative to or an addition to imprisonment. These had not been increased, in some cases, since their inception in 1860. Thus the fine for voluntarily causing pain extended to a maximum of 1,000 rupees ($12). The Sanhita has enhanced these fines to a maximum of 10,000 rupees ($120). Section 338 of the IPC also punished human endangerment resulting in grievous injury to others with a maximum fine of 1,000 rupees. The Sanhita likewiseenhances the fine to 10,000 rupees. The maximum punishment under the IPC for wrongful restraint was 500 rupees ($6) and for wrongful confinement was 1,000 rupees. These offenses are now both punishable with a maximum of 5,000 rupees ($60). In like vein, fines unchanged in 81 other offenses since 1860 have now been appropriately enhanced by the Sanhita.

Correcting words and laws

Admirably, the Sanhita eschews the use of offensive and pejorative terms peculiar to a colonial age. Words like “lunatic,” “insane” and “idiot” are absent in the Sanhita. For instance, section 89 in the General Exceptions chapter contains the heading, “Act done in good faith for benefit of child or insane person or by consent of guardian.” Section 27 of the Sanhita replaces the words “insane person” with a more benign expression, “person of unsound mind.” Section 305, which deals with the “abetment of suicide of child or insane person,” uses the terms “insane person” and “idiot.” The corresponding new section 107 of the Sanhita omits these and uses the expression “person of unsound mind.”

Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita, 2023 is an eminently erudite law enacted after deep consideration and wide-ranging discussions with all stakeholders. It is long overdue legislation that seeks to break the shackles of a law belonging to a colonial past — a law that is out of touch with independent India’s needs. The Sanhita enhances the security of the state, the safety and dignity of women and law and order in general.

The Sanhita’s critics are primarily those who replaced the colonial government but failed to replace colonial laws during their tenure. Their legislative neglect is culpable for India having to endure an obsolete and inefficacious law from 1947 to 2014. This colonial law allowed criminals to escape punishment and victims to suffer injustice. In hindsight, perhaps that was their intent. After all, some of the biggest crimes were committed by those rulers who succeeded the colonial regime and perpetuated the looting and exploitation of India just as their colonial predecessors did.

[Lee Thompson-Kolar edited this piece.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

The post India’s New Justice Code: What You Need to Know appeared first on Fair Observer.

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The INC claimed victory in Telangana, but the BJP secured victories in Chhattisgarh, Madhya Pradesh and Rajasthan. The INC’s failure to effectively engage and accommodate potential allies led to the electoral setback. INDIA’s strategy aimed to maximize seats for each party rather than maximizing the seats for the alliance as a whole by fostering a broad collective opposition effort.

INDIA cannot win if it acts like a softer version of the BJP

The INDIA alliance encounters several political and organizational constraints when it comes to countering the BJP. First and foremost, the INC and several of its INDIA partners are struggling to effectively counter the BJP by proposing genuine alternative policies on crucial matters like urban employment and public healthcare. The INC state party in Rajasthan did put forth some alternative policies, but it failed to implement them enthusiastically, introducing them at the butt end of the administration’s tenure. So, the proposals had little lasting impact.

For lack of its own policy proposals, the INC has sometimes aped the BJP’s proposals. An INC policy advisor went so far as to publish an article recommending that the party drop its defined benefit pension scheme, deeming it fiscally irresponsible. The INC in Madhya Pradesh even tried to adopt a soft Hindutva approach that, unsurprisingly, ended in failure.

The INC and its INDIA allies need to understand that defeating the BJP in the battle of ideas will be extremely challenging as long they compete within the realm of neoliberalism. The ruling party has strongly established its ownership over the neoliberal project. Any opposition to the BJP’s neo-fascism must necessarily oppose neoliberalism as well.

Even if INDIA is willing to declare intellectual independence from neoliberalism, it must still have the courage to put its ideas into action. The INC, regrettably, exhibits a great deal of organizational pusillanimity, particularly in states where it directly competes with the BJP.

The INC’s lack of the courage to take decisive action is further exacerbated by internal conflicts, factionalism, poor coordination between the central and state units, insufficient presence at the electoral booth level, disempowered grassroots workers, errors in ticket distribution, and habitual refusal to accommodate other non-BJP parties, even those who are part of INDIA. This is why the INC keeps losing in state elections. Following the announcements of the election results in Chhattisgarh, Madhya Pradesh and Rajastha, INDIA member parties Janata Dal-United and Rashtriya Janata Dal voiced their concerns regarding the Indian National Congress’s bullheadedness. Ultimately, Janata Dal-United to exited INDIA and formed a government in Bihar with BJP. This recent move by the CM of Bihar has tipped the scales in favour of the BJP.

Proposals for a winning policy platform

INDIA must get serious if it wants to beat the BJP.

It is imperative for INDIA to swiftly develop a unified set of principles that will serve as the foundation for clear messaging. This common agenda should encompass a reaffirmation of constitutional principles, safeguarding democracy, promoting secularism, revitalizing federalism with a focus on decentralization within states, ensuring genuine and authentic social justice by establishing gender rights, ensuring caste census and reclaiming national institutions from subversion by the BJP. 

But broad values need to translate into specific policy initiatives. These include a comprehensive employment guarantee program, reintroduction of a universal public distribution system, establishment of a universal public healthcare system, expansion of public housing and infrastructure, implementation of a universal social security system and the enhancement of ecological sustainability.

In order to ensure the success of these policies, additional legal reforms will be crucial: combating hate crimes and bringing offenders to justice, implementing a one-third reservation for women in legislatures, and prohibiting policy and regulatory capture. Unless these happen, progress may be illusory.

While state governments have limited powers compared to the union government, those state governments led by INDIA’s constituent parties might consider immediate implementation of some of these ideas as policies.

INDIA’s ability to operate as a cohesive force relies heavily on the INC recognizing its inability to beat the BJP independently. The INC should consider contesting fewer seats in the 2024 elections to strengthen the alliance’s presence on the ground. Concentrating effort where it matters most will yield better results than dividing energy on contested Lok Sabha seats. INDIA must strategically evaluate and analyze the “winnable” seats, focusing on resources to gain a competitive advantage. Retaining and mobilizing incumbent voters is paramount to succeed in the 2024 elections. Finally, in states and on seats where the BJP is a significant contender, avoiding “friendly contests” is imperative.

The proposals we put forth are not unrealistic and align seamlessly with the continuous democratic movement that opposes the policies of the BJP-led union government. This authoritarian administration has pushed the constitutional order to the brink. The stakes are high, and INDIA cannot afford to fail. However, amidst the challenges, there is still a window of opportunity for INDIA to make a significant impact in 2024. The need for collective action and strategic initiatives is more pressing than ever to safeguard the democratic fabric of the nation.

[Valentina Ortiz Elian edited this piece.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

The post How to Beat the BJP by Overcoming the INC’s Organizational Challenges appeared first on Fair Observer.

Other commentators reject the terms of this debate. They argue that it oversimplifies a complex issue and stokes imaginary regional differences. The issue at hand is the delicate balance between states. India’s significant diversity traces its roots to prehistoric times. Genetic research shows that modern Indians came from at least four waves of migration into the subcontinent. This has resulted in persisting genetic differences between people from different parts or communities of the country. For example, some researchers have found that people from lower castes have lower Central Asian and European genetic ancestry than those from higher castes. Similarly, the Dravidian-speaking populations of South India show noticeable genetic differences from the Indo-European-speaking populations of North India. Only in recent times has there been some exchange of vocabulary and grammar.

As deep-rooted as they may be, these differences are only ancillary to the project of the modern Indian republic. Forged in the collective resistance to British colonialism and the millennia of deep cultural exchange that preceded it, the country’s unity is enshrined in its constitution’s first words, “We, the people of India.”

Today, any recent Hindi-language superhit movie has drawn inspiration from the South’s regional cinema, and vice-versa. Athletes from various parts of the country powered India’s history-making medal tally in the recent Asian games. The national government seeks to further solidify this convergence through policy initiatives like a unified tax system and large, centralized welfare schemes.

Regional differences are growing

These successes of national integration should not lull even the staunchest “unionists” into a false sense of complacency. Underlying the modern Indian republic is a fundamental and growing chasm between its different regions. The differences between Indian states on many socio-economic parameters are more significant than between countries in other parts of the world. The South Indian state Kerala’s infant mortality rate is within striking distance of that of the US. In contrast, the North Indian state of Madhya Pradesh’s rate is closer to the rates of war-torn and violence-ridden Afghanistan and Niger.

Economic disparities between regions are not unique to India. In the UK, if one excludes London, the country has a lower per-capita income than Mississippi, the poorest state in the US. However, India is unique in one aspect. In other countries like the UK and the US, the economically more robust regions are also more populous. These regions subsidize the poorer, less populous parts of the country. In India, the poorer North is far more populous than the richer South, and this asymmetry is growing. In a democratic system based on the “one person, one vote” principle, the richer southern states are thus losing political power.

South Indian state Karnataka contributes 2.12 rupees to central taxes for each rupee it receives from New Delhi. In contrast, the North Indian state of Uttar Pradesh — India’s most populous province — contributes only 0.56 rupees to the national treasury for each rupee it receives. Clearly, South Indian states subsidize their North Indian counterparts.

In 2026, the long-pending delimitation of parliamentary constituencies is due. When that happens, the South Indian state Karnataka will likely lose 7% of its seats in the Lok Sabha, the lower house of India’s parliament, whereas Uttar Pradesh will gain 14%. Other South Indian states like Tamil Nadu, Kerala, Telangana and Andhra Pradesh will lose out in the 2026 delimitation as well. Even as South India subsidizes North India, this more prosperous part of the country is losing political power.

Political preferences are exacerbating regional differences

The growing dichotomy between economic and political power poses a significant threat to the stability of the Indian Union. After all, citizens from South India have already begun asking whether their diminishing clout at the national level is fair. The reason South India’s population growth has slowed down is that southern states have implemented better female literacy and family-planning initiatives since independence in 1947. These states feel they are being penalized instead of rewarded for succeeding in their developmental goals. 

Despite its recent growth in Karnataka, only 9% of members of the legislative assembly (MLAs) in South Indian states belong to the BJP. In contrast, the figure for the INC is 27% while 64% of the MLAs belong to regional parties. 

Not only South India, but also some eastern states, like Odisha and West Bengal, and even northern states like Himachal Pradesh, Punjab, and Uttarakhand will lose national political power in the 2026 delimitation. The BJP represents only 15% of MLAs in the “losing” states. This new delimitation will benefit the BJP while hurting the INC and India’s regional parties.

The BJP dominates the “gaining” states, which include Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh, Jharkhand, Haryana, Gujarat, Delhi and Chhattisgarh. In these states, 56% of the MLAs belong to the BJP. Except for Delhi, India’s saffron party rules all of these states.

This growing crisis of Southern representation is already clear in Parliament. Fewer than 10% of BJP’s MPs in the Lok Sabha are from the five southern states. Note that South Indian MPs comprise nearly 25% of the Lok Sabha. This number tells us that South India is suffering a double whammy. Not only are southern states losing their parliamentary clout in the coming delimitation, but they are also not adequately represented in the BJP government. The BJP’s support comes mainly from North India. Therefore, its incentive is to bestow financial largesse to the Hindi heartland states, which have fueled the party’s rise to power and will become even more important after the 2026 delimitation.

Some solutions to the North-South problem

It is entirely plausible that this looming North–South crisis may not come to pass. States in North India and South India might converge faster economically and demographically than expected. This would reduce the divergence between their political preferences. Or the national government of today and tomorrow might not covertly or overtly favor the states from which it draws power. Yet India can ill afford to leave the future stability of its political structure to these uncertain factors. Instead, structural solutions that prevent the build-up of political friction within the country are the need of the hour.

One solution is diminishing the overwhelming dominance of the national government by changing its country’s fiscal structure. Today, about two-thirds of the tax revenue goes to the national government in New Delhi even though it accounts for approximately one-third of the national expense. Instead, states must retain more of the tax revenue they generate. Then, they will feel less of a sense of injustice from the central government allocating tax revenues to different states

These reforms will bring financial decision-making to a lower level of government, where each voter has a more significant say than when voting for a national government far away in the national capital. Such financial devolution is likely to improve social outcomes because state governments are structurally more responsive to voter preferences.

Our founders were not complacent about national integration at independence. Partition accompanied independence in 1947. India’s diversity raised fears of disintegration and the founders opted for a strong national government. Initially, this government chose socialism, slowing down the economy because of the license-permit-quota raj. Liberalization in 1991 unleashed economic growth, and now India needs a competitive federalism that can unleash the next wave of growth. Greater fiscal power for state governments will defuse the tensions between the North and South over the 2026 delimitation, boost growth, and increase national integration.

[Liam Roman edited this piece.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

The post India’s South Has Wealth, but the North Has the Numbers appeared first on Fair Observer.

The bench of five judges penned four separate opinions, introducing confusion. Nevertheless, it multi-vocal result undoubtedly fits the temperament of the Indian Constitution. Chief Justice of India Dhananjaya Chandrachud, deserves praise for instituting a bench that allowed such colorful and varied arguments during a hearing.

Justice Chandrachud’s argument

The Supreme Court made a sincere attempt to recognize as many rights as were feasible within the parameters of their jurisdiction. Chandrachud deserves special recognition for his dissenting opinion. In it, the chief justice tried his best to elevate a civil union between two people to parity with the status of marriage. Chandrachud emphasized the functional and operational aspects of Articles 19(1)(c), (e), (a), 21 & 15(1) of Indian constitution. He acknowledged that marriage cannot be declared a fundamental right; rather, it is an issue for the parliament to decide. The court is also unable to recognize the marriage rights of members of the LGBTQIA+ community within the current legal framework.

The court considered whether such a right may have been created by the Special Marriage Act, 1954. Building his arguments on the cases of Navtej Singh Johar v. Union of India, Shakti Vahini v Union of India, National Legal Services Authority v. Union of India and Justice K.S. Puttaswamy & Anr. vs. Union of India & Ors., Chandrachud underlined that the act’s wording is not clear enough to establish this reading.

In his detailed ruling, Chandrachud provided broad guidelines for defending the civil union between members of the LGBTQIA+ community. These guidelines include educating the public about the group’s rights to prescribing the standards, such as opening a joint bank account, ration card, etc. In a nutshell, Chandrachud went all out to grant the civil unions of members of the LGBTQIA+ community status equivalent to marriage, including adoption rights.

The majority vs. Chandrachud

To concisely summarize Chandrachud’s methodology, we should apply an approach based on Alan Dershowitz’s book, Rights From Wrongs: A Secular Theory of the Origins of Rights. Every asserted right is thought to have roots in an earlier injustice. Germany is one example: The current German constitution is centered on human rights and upholds them as fundamental. Germany learned from its horrific Holocaust and built a more stable society that upholds human dignity.

Throughout his ruling, Chandrachud underlined the marginalization that the LGBTQIA+ community experiences due to insensitivity. As restitution for previous wrongs, they were granted equal status as a civil union, complete with all the benefits.

However, the majority judgment, led by Justice Ravindra Bhat, did not support Chandrachud’s stance. Justice Hima Kohli and Justice PS Narasimha concurred. The basic structure of constitution includes the separation of power; so, they argue, it would be erroneous for the court to establish an institution legally or morally comparable to marriage on its own authority.

Bhat underlined unequivocally that, as much as the court can set a legal precedent, a right does not always translate to a positive legal obligation. In other words, the state is not required to establish the socio-legal framework to support the right to civil unions simply because they exist. The political branches will have to choose the best moment to repair this, as the judicial branch is incapable of doing so.

Examining the verdict

I examine this verdict from legal, moral and sociological angles. From a legal perspective, the judgment is entirely valid, as it closely adheres to the fundamental tenets of the Indian constitution.

From a moral perspective, we must first ask, “Why does a court exist?” This addresses its ethical obligation. As I previously stated, a court is crucial in providing a voice for those who go unheard in a democratic nation. The ethical requirement for an impartial arbitrator to dispute an individual’s rights against the state is what gave rise to the entire concept of judicial review.

The judgment somewhat succeeded in this area: It elevated the conversation about LGBTQIA+ people and their rights to a public forum where it will be discussed across the nation. Even if the verdict did not provide the intended outcome, a conversation about the voiceless can start creating a path to that goal. A dissenting position may soon become jurisprudential.

From a sociological perspective, the question is whether the verdict is widely accepted by the LGBTQIA+ community and the affected legal diaspora. Although there have been conflicting comments about the ruling, most LGBTQIA+ community members are discouraged. Several leading legal blogs have criticized the judiciary for failing to protect LGBTQIA+ groups’ marriage rights.

This criticism is unfair. The supreme court has performed remarkably, to the extent that was legally feasible.

[Lee Thompson-Kolar edited this piece.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

The post Supreme Court of India: No Unlimited Right to Marriage appeared first on Fair Observer.

It’s a match made in heaven (or do we mean hell?) because the two nations have similar “problems” they’re trying to “solve.” Israel has long been engaged in the violent suppression of Palestinians whose lands they occupy (including the current devastation of Gaza, an assault that 34 UN experts have labeled a “genocide in the making”). Meanwhile, India’s Hindu nationalist government continues the harsh oppression of its minorities: Muslims, Christians, Dalits and indigenous people.

About the time Zionist settlers were beginning their occupation of Palestine in the early 1920s, Vinayak Damodar Savarkar, a right-wing Indian politician, fashioned the ideology of Hindutva (“Hindu-ness”). Today, right-wing Hindu nationalists employ Hindutva and physical violence to further its vision of India as a nation for Hindus and Hindus only. Similarly, Zionism views historic Palestine as a land for Jews and Jews only. These parallel visions, along with the two governments’ increasingly authoritarian tendencies and ready use of violence, have drawn them into a dark alliance the consequences of which are unpredictable.

India makes new friends

The Republic of India and the State of Israel were born nine months apart in 1947 and 1948, each the offspring of partition. The British-ruled Indian subcontinent was split into Muslim-majority Pakistan and Hindu-majority India, while Israel was carved out of a portion of the British Mandate for Palestine.

Throughout the Cold War, India was a leader of what came to be known as the nonaligned movement — formerly colonized nations that sought to develop independently of both American and Soviet influence. In the 1980s, it also became the first non-Arab nation to recognize the state of Palestine. A similar recognition of Israel didn’t come until 1992, around the time India was shifting away from its nonaligned social-democratic stance toward its current adherence to neoliberalism.

In recent decades, India and Israel have established strong trading relationships, especially in the military sphere. In fact, given the massive militarization of its borders with China and Pakistan and its suppression of occupied Kashmir and its people, India has become the top importer of weapons and surveillance equipment from Israel. In 2014, the Hindu-supremacist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) won power and its leader, Narendra Modi, became prime minister. In the process, India and Israel grew ever closer.

By 2016, as The Washington Post reported, “after Indian commandos carried out a raid inside Pakistan-controlled Kashmir in response to an attack by militants on an Indian army post, Modi trumpeted the action, saying: ‘Earlier, we used to hear of Israel having done something like this. But the country has seen that the Indian army is no less than anyone else.’”

Today, the Israeli weapons/robotics firm Elbit Systems has even established a drone factory in India and now has a $300 million contract to supply drones to “a country in Asia,” most likely India. Meanwhile, Modi and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu have established a mutual-admiration society, dubbed by the media of both countries the “Modi–Bibi bromance.” And New Delhi has all but abandoned the Palestinians.

Economic alliances

When, on October 27, the UN General Assembly passed a resolution calling for an “immediate, durable, and sustained humanitarian truce leading to a cessation of hostilities” in Gaza, only the US, Israel and a handful of small nations voted “no.” India abstained. (Apparently, the Modi–Bibi bromance wasn’t quite enough to sustain a “no” vote.) Modi, however, immediately responded to the measure’s passage by declaring his “solidarity” with Israel.

Economic, political and diplomatic relations between New Delhi, Tel Aviv and Washington (all nuclear powers, by the way) had been strengthening even before the current conflict. Last year, for instance, India, Israel, the United Arab Emirates and the United States formed the “I2U2 Group” to attract corporate investment for their mutual benefit. Projects now underway include “food parks across India” with “climate-smart technologies” and a “unique space-based tool for policymakers, institutions and entrepreneurs” (whatever in — or out of — the world “food parks” and “space-based tools” might be).

Then, in September, the G20 summit of the group of 20 major nations, meeting in New Delhi, approved an India-Middle East-Europe Economic Corridor which, according to Voice of America, would “establish a rail and shipping network linking the UAE, Saudi Arabia and Jordan to the Israeli port of Haifa on the Mediterranean Sea.” And guess who now operates that very port? A company led by Gautam Adani, India’s richest person and (naturally!) a Modi buddy. Foreign Policy notes, “It is also palatable for the Middle East to have India as a major energy market to diversify its exports and offset Chinese influence over critical commodities such as oil and gas.”

But not surprisingly, the war in Gaza has thrown plans for such a new Indian-oriented economic corridor through the Middle East into limbo.

High-, medium- and low-tech warfare

Militarily, the conflicts in occupied Palestine and occupied Kashmir are both lopsided mismatches. In each, a powerful nation-state is assaulting resource-poor populations, though the scale of slaughter, displacement, immiseration and death wrought by the Indian regime doesn’t faintly approach what’s currently being done by Israel in the Gaza Strip — at least not yet. While the cases have similarities, magnitude isn’t one of them.

In Gaza, you have the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF), a massive high-tech killing machine financed in large part by the world’s richest nation, facing off against Palestinian resistance groups, including the Qassam Brigade, whose most effective weapons are homemade Yassin antitank grenades and whose defenses largely consist of a network of fortified tunnels. Instead of engaging in face-to-face subterranean combat with the Qassam fighters — something that could turn out badly indeed for the IDF — the Israelis have been carrying out an industrial-scale bombardment of densely populated areas. As of December 20, the result was approximately 20,000 civilians killed (including more than 8,000 children) and the displacement of 1.9 million people, over four-fifths of Gaza’s population.

In India, the Hindu nationalists’ onslaught against non-Hindu minorities has not been carried out by the Indian Army itself, but by a paramilitary organization, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), in partnership with the BJP. That unofficial army, founded almost a century ago and modeled on Italian fascist Benito Mussolini’s “blackshirts” and Adolph Hitler’s Nazi stormtroopers, has a membership of five to six million and holds daily meetings in more than 36,000 different locales across India. Its shock troops rarely even carry firearms; their weapons are low-tech, crude and exceptionally cruel, and their targets are unarmed, unsuspecting civilians. They kill or maim using batons, machetes, strangulation, sulfuric acid to the face and rape, among other horrors.

Such attacks by Hindu nationalist gangs, different as they are from the military assault on Gaza, do have parallels in the occupied West Bank. There, Israeli settlers, some carrying government-supplied small arms, maraud through parts of that area (where they live illegally), beating, torturing and killing Palestinians, including ethnic Bedouin families. They have expelled people from their homes, stolen their money and possessions, including livestock and destroyed houses and schools. It is now olive harvest season and Jewish settlers have attacked Palestinians in their olive groves, sometimes forcing them off their ancestors’ land, perhaps permanently. More than 200 Palestinians have been killed this way since October.

Common language

One of the worst atrocities perpetrated against Muslims since India’s partition occurred in 2002 in the western state of Gujarat. (Not coincidentally, that state’s chief minister at the time was Narendra Modi.) Following the alleged torching of a train compartment in which 58 Hindu nationalist “volunteers” were traveling, Hindu mobs inflicted state-sponsored terrorism on the Muslim community across Gujarat. More than 2,000 Muslims were killed. Speaking in the aftermath of that horror, Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee offered a perfunctory admission of regret for the carnage, only to ask rhetorically, “Lekin aag lagayi kisne?” (“But who lit the fire?”) The implication was that, since some from their community were accused of committing the initial crime, all Gujarat Muslims were responsible and that that, however regrettably, justified their slaughter.

Similar allegations of collective guilt and justifications for collective punishment have a long history in Israel, as in the current conflict. In October, Israeli President Isaac Herzog claimed that “there is an entire nation out there that is responsible.” That comment earned Herzog a place in a greatest-hits video of Israeli leaders attempting to defend atrocities inflicted on Gaza’s 2.3 million inhabitants. Similarly, a former Israeli ambassador to the UN told Sky News, “I am very puzzled by the constant concern which the world … is showing for the Palestinian people, and is actually showing for these horrible inhuman animals.”

Within mere hours of the October 7 attack in Israel, BJP politicians and Hindu nationalists in India were spreading propaganda on social media, including accusations that Palestinians were “worse than animals” and were cutting fetuses from wombs, beheading children and taking girls as “sex slaves.” This started in India before IDF spokespeople began spreading similar claims.

An unnatural disaster

Drawing a comparison to the ethnic cleansing of 1948, the Israeli agriculture minister, a member of the security cabinet, recently explained his government’s goal to a reporter this way: “We are now rolling out the Gaza Nakba.” (Nakba was a reference to Israel’s forcible expulsion of 800,000 Palestinians from large portions of their territory in 1948.) When the incredulous reporter tossed the minister a lifeline, asking if he really meant what he’d said, he doubled down: “Gaza Nakba 2023. That’s how it’ll end.”

As of now, it certainly looks that way. The IDF bombed apartment blocks, shelters, schools and hospitals in northern Gaza to force the migration of the population there toward supposedly “safe” south Gaza. Large groups of other Gazans were forced to make the long journey south on foot through narrow IDF-designated corridors. As The Guardian reported in mid-November,

Those walking south under the tense gaze of Israeli troops, through a hellscape of tangled rubble that had been buildings two months ago, along roads shattered by weapons and churned to mud by tanks, had little hope of rest when they reached the south. Shelters are crammed, food and water supplies are so low the UN has warned that Palestinians face the “immediate possibility” of starvation, infectious diseases are spreading and the war there is expected to intensify in coming days.

Israel soon began bombing parts of South Gaza, too, clearly trying to drive the refugees further south, possibly even through the Rafah gate into Egypt. But Egypt has refused to participate in such an ethnic-cleansing campaign. So, figuratively speaking, millions of desperate Palestinians have their backs to the wall, or in this case, fence, with nowhere to run.

As economic and geopolitical ties among Israel, India and the US have only continued to strengthen, Joe Biden has chummed it up with both Netanyahu and Modi, averting his eyes from their antidemocratic and all-too-violent national visions. He has backed the assault on Gaza all the way and as late as November 18 was still arguing in The Washington Post against a ceasefire. At the same time, he called for increasing the flow of humanitarian assistance to Gaza to remedy critical staggering shortages of food, water, housing and fuel. In other words, the Biden administration is treating the catastrophe there like a natural disaster, acting as if there’s something terrible happening, something beyond his (or anyone’s) power to prevent, so all that can be done is to aid the survivors.

In truth, administrations in Washington have been treating Israel’s occupation and immiseration of the West Bank and Gaza like a natural disaster for more than half a century now. Liz Theoharis, co-chair of the Poor People’s Campaign, recently pointed out an incident that suggests just how disingenuous that claim is. In November, Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant came under withering criticism for permitting a few small, wholly inadequate truckloads of humanitarian aid to enter Gaza from Egypt. As Theoharis noted, Gallant defended his decision to allow the aid this way: “The Americans insisted, and we are not in a place where we can refuse them. We rely on them for planes and military equipment. What are we supposed to do? Tell them no?”

This puts the lie to the idea that Washington has no influence over the progress or outcome of this war. It does have influence over Israel — more than $3 billion worth in the form of military aid provided by Washington every year, not to speak of the $14 billion the Biden administration still wants to reward Israel with.

As we write this, we don’t know what will happen to the people of Gaza as the war develops. But rest assured that the governments of India and Israel will continue to feed off each other as they develop new strategies, tactics and propaganda for their respective campaigns of occupation and oppression, campaigns the US government, through both action and inaction, is endorsing. Consider them now three nations under god(s) of hell.

[TomDispatch first published this piece.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

The post What Happens When Nationalists in Israel and India Team Up appeared first on Fair Observer.

India is working to strengthen its national power through foreign policy. The national security strategy is a big part of this effort, helping to enhance India’s overall strength and improve its security approach in a changing global landscape. If we look at India’s national security strategy, we can see a shift from being cautious to being more proactive. This change demonstrates India’s determination to tackle global security challenges and those specifically coming from the Afghanistan-Pakistan region and West Asia. In the past, India was hesitant and unsure in its security strategy, showing restraint in using force. However, this approach was not effective in dealing with cross-border terrorism and challenges from Pakistan.

An example of India’s defensive approach is evident in its response to the November 26, 2008 terrorist attacks, perpetrated by Lashkar-e-Taiba, a Pakistani Islamist group. Instead of launching a counterattack or taking retaliatory measures against Pakistan, India pursued diplomatic solutions. This defensive stance was rooted in doubt and an unwillingness to use force, coupled with a lack of understanding of the security and strategic dynamics in the neighborhood and global politics. The defensive strategy not only reflected a passive attitude in India’s national security approach,  but also exposed India’s perceived weakness due to its soft stance. In contrast, Pakistan adopted an offensive approach, utilizing unconventional warfare tactics. This asymmetry undermined the effectiveness of India’s national security strategy in dealing with Pakistan, as India remained defensive while Pakistan took an assertive stance.

The excessive strategic restraint in India’s national security approach proved to be a significant mistake, providing an opportunity for hostile neighbors to exploit. Recognizing this, there was a pressing need for doctrinal changes and a makeover of the national security strategy. In 2014, when Ajit Doval assumed the role of National Security Advisor in India, a doctrinal change took place. Doval introduced a strategic doctrine that now bears his name: the Doval Doctrine or double squeeze strategy. This new approach aimed to rectify the shortcomings in India’s national security calculations by injecting a realist perspective. The Doval Doctrine embraced a more assertive outlook, marking a departure from the previous defensive stance and signaling a shift towards a hawkish approach in India’s national security strategy.

Understanding the Doval Doctrine

The Doval Doctrine encompasses two primary dimensions: Offensive Defensive and Defensive Offensive.

Offensive Defensive — this involves a preemptive approach to offense with a defensive purpose. The idea is to take offensive actions to put a larger adversary on the defensive from the beginning, seizing the initiative. India has demonstrated this stance through its commitment to pre-emptive strikes, such as surgical strikes targeting terrorist safe havens in Pakistan-occupied Kashmir. These actions reflect an offensive defensive posture aimed at proactively addressing security threats.

Defensive Offensive — this focuses on countering adversaries by exploiting their internal conflicts and employing diplomatic efforts at the international level, including sanctions and isolation. This posture also involves deterrence through offensive means, known as offensive deterrence. A good example of this is India’s air strikes in Balakot in February 2019, which were carried out as part of a defensive offensive strategy to deter and counter threats.

India’s shift in national security strategy is set to enhance its firepower and, most importantly, its comprehensive national power. The persistent challenges hindering India’s strategic ascent from a security perspective are gradually diminishing. However, the evolving national security approach, supported by ongoing efforts to incorporate technology and upgrade the security infrastructure of the military, paramilitary, and security agencies, demands cutting-edge strategies to confront the growing threat from China, especially in the context of challenges arising from the Pakistan–China alliance on both conventional and unconventional fronts.

The transformed national security strategy implemented since 2014 effectively addresses security concerns at the tactical level. This includes tasks like detection, prevention, and mitigation that were previously hindered by undue restraint. As India continues its journey towards becoming a major global power, it is crucial for the nation to closely monitor its national security strategy. In addition to intensifying geopolitical competition, the threat landscape and security challenges are expanding into various technological domains, escalating the tempo of grey zone warfare in an already conflict-ridden geopolitical landscape and making the threats more real and lethal. A vigilant and adaptive national security craft is essential to safeguard India’s interests in this complex and dynamic security environment.

India’s need for a comprehensive national security strategy

India still does not possess a comprehensive national security policy or strategy on paper. As strategic affairs analyst Krishnaswamy Subrahmanyam wisely said, “It is now well recognised all over the world that India does not have a tradition of strategic thinking… mainly due to the incapacity of our political leaders and top civil servants to take a long-term view of national security. This is compounded by their consequent failure in giving a lead to the armed forces in preparing the country to face its long-term need for defence preparedness.”

India is working on boosting its strategic coercion and overall national power. However, there’s a need for India to develop a comprehensive national security strategy. Currently, the focus on military, paramilitary, and security/intelligence agencies is scattered. While efforts for theaterization are in progress, they are futuristic and pose challenges. A national security document could offer clarity and strategic foresight for the modernization and integration crucial for India’s national security.

As the world’s conflicts expand across various domains, India must also monitor its domestic front closely. Concerns about psychological operations (PSYOPS), cyber-attacks, narco-terrorism, and economic terrorism loom over India’s internal environment. Urgently, the perception of threats needs integration because threats are crisscrossing between internal and external fronts in India’s security. The lines between internal and external threats are blurring, demanding an integrated and comprehensive approach to secure all dimensions of India’s national security. General Bipin Rawat, the former CDS, rightly noted that India may face challenges on two and a half fronts, and NSA Ajit Doval highlighted that civil society is the new frontier of warfare. These statements recognize the changing security dynamics and evolving threats, but this realization has yet to materialize into reality.

The two-front nightmare scenario creates a need for a robust security strategy that addresses both traditional and non-traditional threats. The establishment of a national security policy is essential for achieving this. Past efforts, like that of the Kargil Review Committee, proposed integrating India’s security spectrum, and some steps have been taken, such as the formation of the Defence Intelligence Agency (DIA). The Naresh Chandra Task Force on Security in 2011 also emphasized the need for a national security strategy at the doctrinal level, but there’s still a considerable distance to cover.

India must take a hard look at its coordination of intelligence

Efforts to integrate are evident in our intelligence setup. While the Kargil Committee acknowledged the Research and Analysis Wing’s role during the Kargil war, it raised concerns about the lack of inter-agency coordination, leading to recommendations for intelligence reforms. Many proposed measures, however, remain on paper, indicating the necessity for concrete steps in shaping a comprehensive national security strategy for India.

In 2020, a significant incident occurred in Galwan, a disputed region between India and China. The clash involved border tensions escalating into a violent confrontation that resulted in casualties on both sides. The Galwan incident is often viewed as an intelligence failure, but it was really as a failure in managing intelligence. This underscores the need for an Integrated Intelligence grid to enhance coordination. Although India has entities like the Joint Intelligence Committee and Multi-Agency Centre (MAC), these haven’t been adequately upgraded or equipped with strategic foresight. Instances where states hesitated to share intelligence have disrupted the intelligence-gathering chain.

There are grey areas requiring reflection within India’s security establishment. While there are objectives for national security, the absence of a policy paper makes it challenging to respond effectively to the heightened threat matrix. A synergized national security strategy is essential to provide integrated attention, strategic foresight, and enhance the capabilities of military, paramilitary, and security/intelligence agencies, solidifying India’s Comprehensive National Power.

India’s national security architecture has objectives, yet the absence of a policy paper hinders addressing the heightened threat matrix. A synergized national security strategy is crucial, offering comprehensive attention and strategic foresight. It enhances the capabilities of military, paramilitary, and security/intelligence agencies, solidifying our Comprehensive National Power.

Hence, India requires a well-foresighted and comprehensive national security strategy. Despite an increase in firepower and coercion abilities, the blurring lines between external and internal threats demand acknowledgment. India’s domestic environment faces a heightened threat perception, particularly with the escalation of grey zone warfare. A synergized and comprehensive approach in India’s national security strategy becomes imperative in the evolving strategic and security landscape of the global order.

[Madelyn Lambert edited this piece.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

The post India’s National Security Evolution: Urgent Need for Comprehensive Strategy appeared first on Fair Observer.

Yet it also creates dangers. The road to global spotlight for New Delhi may be difficult. The Russia–Ukraine War, the Taliban takeover of Afghanistan and the growing impoverishment of India’s South Asian neighbours, Sri Lanka and Pakistan, all hinder India’s place in international affairs.  

These adversities demonstrate the lack of consensus and the sheer neglect of dialogue and diplomacy in the international community. In the words of Samir Saran, the President of the renowned Observer Research Foundation (ORF), “When the pandemic first broke out there was a rise in protectionist sentiments and countries scrambled to protect their citizens and close off borders.”

India’s foreign policy may be characterized as realpolitik, but it is also a blend of both pragmatism and morality. Its job in this decade is to navigate the now post-COVID environment both to pursue its own interests and also foster a lacking collegiality among nations.

Strategic multilateralism in the Indo-Pacific 

Writing for the think tank Gateway House, Indian Ambassador Rajiv Bhatia raised a fundamental question: Is India a middle power, a great power or an in-between power? That is a question that is currently still being decided as India finds its place in the world. But the uncertainty means that India, committed to multilateralism, will have to balance its focus on its neighbors with its focus on the great powers.

India seeks to tie regional and global partners together by participating in organizations like the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue (India, Australia, Japan and the US), BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa) the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, (which includes China, Russia, Iran and most of Central Asia), or SCO, and, of course, the G20. Through these organizations, India tries to lead by example and encourage partnership between all nations on equal terms, opposing China’s attempts to exclude the West and establish hegemony in the East.

In a similar vein, India has revived and expanded its “Look East Policy,” strengthening trade ties with its neighbors in Southeast Asia. Leaders from India and the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) declared 2022 the “ASEAN-India Friendship Year,” marking 30 years of relations.

Central to the Indian foreign policy has been a larger focus on developmental and economic issues. Writing for The Diplomat, Raymond E. Vickery, Jr. points out that India’s priorities at the SCO were three “pillars of cooperation,” viz., startups, science and technology, and traditional medicine.

India’s domestic circumstances have given impetus to its leadership initiatives. However, this has also imposed additional responsibility to work actively with the international community in line with her larger objectives of “One Earth, One Family, One Future,” or Vasudeva Kutumbakam (The World is one Family). This can be done through a consensus on both political and apolitical issues, as seen in initiatives of vaccine diplomacy during the COVID-19 pandemic.  In supporting faster, sustainable and inclusive growth by highlighting international support for diverse social and economic sectors, India can impact the most vulnerable and disadvantaged.

As the world’s largest democracy, the third-largest economy in purchasing power parity terms and the second most populous country, India will undeniably be a central pole as the international community continues to develop.

Challenges, Solutions and the Way Forward

Despite the strategic positioning of India, the exercise of international leadership won’t be easy. The actions of India’s long-standing ally Russia and its regional competitor, China, in the context of the Russia–Ukraine War marked a return to Cold War politics. As gaps continue to open between the East and the West, India will struggle as it tries to draw the two worlds together.

As the nation embarks upon a new journey, the global challenges do not seem to lessen; neither must India’s commitment to dialogue, international consensus and harmony slacken.It falls upon India to assert her demands more vocally as a key international player and potential global superpower, for its own sake and for the sake of the broader developing world.

[Cheyenne Torres edited this piece.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

The post India: A Promising New Power in the Global Arena appeared first on Fair Observer.

But not everyone in India enjoys it. Approximately 800 kilometers from the Indian capital of New Delhi, in a hamlet in the Ganderbal district of Jammu and Kashmir (or simply Kashmir), a gruesome event of horrific proportions takes place. Wandhama village is home to roughly 200 farmers, with about two dozen being Kashmiri Pandits — a minority community living in a few homes surrounded by Muslim neighbors. On this day, foreign mujahideen and domestic terrorists enter the village. These radicals pluck Kashmiri Pandits, assemble them in a line, and shoot them dead one by one. The deceased include four children, nine women and ten men. The sole survivor, a boy, escapes death because other victims fall over him and the killers assume the boy is dead. In the hamlet of Wandhama, the centuries-old Kashmiri Pandit community is wiped out in minutes.

Ghastly as the Wandhama tragedy is, an even more heinous crime took place a year earlier. On June 15, 1997, in the Ramban district, about 130 kilometers south of the state capital of Srinagar, terrorists stopped a bus carrying passengers from Ramban to the nearby village of Gool. Four terrorists entered the bus and asked Hindus to step out of the bus. Six Hindu passengers did so. The mujahideen then shot three of them. All three victims were Kashmiri Pandits who were teachers in the Gool Higher Secondary School. The three Hindus spared were not Pandits.

The Wandhama tragedy of 1998 was followed by another massacre. On March 23, 2003, mujahideen members massacred all Kashmiri Pandits in Nadimarg village, located in Kashmir’s Pulwama district. Of the 24 killed, 11 each were men and women while two were young boys.

An little-known story about a great tragedy

Western, especially American, media tends to forget one key fact about Kashmir. Fanatical Islamic mujahideen terrorists perpetrated genocide of Kashmiri Pandits. This fact was even forgotten by Indian media until the film The Kashmir Files came out in 2022.

Only a year ago did Indian moviegoers grasp the horrors of the genocide. Behind this brutal ethnic cleansing, lies a tale of betrayal and deceit. The dominant groups in the country — Indian political leaders, Indian media, Indian non-governmental organizations (NGOs) — did their best to hide this genocide. Their cover-up efforts were effective. To this day, even many Indians question whether Kashmiri Pandits faced genocide. Wikipedia erroneously still defines this genocide as an exodus.

Even today, Kashmiri Pandit massacres of the 1990s remain unsolved. Importantly, the Indian state in the 1990s was well aware of what was going on. On June 10, 1999, the National Human Rights Commission (NHRC) concluded that the Kashmiri Pandit experience had been “akin to genocide.” 

Only in the last couple of years — 30 years after the Kashmiri Pandit genocide — has the Indian government finally started investigations into the killings of only a few victims. Even talk of genocide ignores the extent of the tragedy that Kashmiri Pandits experienced. They experienced their own version of Kristallnacht (the “Night of Broken Glass”) that Jews experienced on November 9, 1938, in Berlin. The Kashmiri Pandit Kristallnacht occurred in Anantnag district of Kashmir on February 20, 1986. Their homes, shops, temples and other property were desecrated or burned in the district.

The government shamefully failed to act in Anantnag. After the Kashmiri Pandit Kristallnacht, there was no arrest, no investigation and no trial. Murderers, arsonists and ethnic cleansers got away scot-free. The morale of fanatical Islamists shot up. They now rightly assumed that Kashmiri Pandits were on the menu.

In 1986, the Congress Party was in power in New Delhi. In 1989, a ragtag opposition coalition took charge. A certain Kashmiri politician took charge as home minister, the top job in the cabinet that oversees internal national security. Ironically, Mufti Mohammad Sayeed — the new home minister from Kashmir — was the rabble-rousing politician who instigated the Kashmiri Pandit Kristallnacht in Anantnag.

Sayeed belongs to the elite Kashmiri Muslim ruling class. Supposedly, he is a direct descendant of Muhammad, the prophet and founder of Islam. This ruling Muslim elite first systematically persecuted Kashmiri Pandits, then subjected them to a brutal campaign of violence, intimidation and terror, and then ethnically cleansed Kashmir of its original community: the Kashmiri Pandits. New Delhi appeased the Kashmiri Muslim elite, gave them a clean chit and turned a Nelson’s eye to the genocide of the hapless Kashmiri Pandits. Justice has not only been delayed but denied to these tragic victims by successive Indian governments.

Murderers got away scot-free, appeasement did not work

Sayeed and other members of the Kashmiri Muslim elite got away with murder. National politicians in New Delhi pursued an appeasement policy with this murderous elite. The Congress Party and the coalition that succeeded them wanted to retain support of the Kashmiri elite to keep control of Kashmir. They also thought this elite would be useful for getting the Muslim vote in the rest of the country. So, they colluded with national media to keep the genocide of Kashmiri Pandits out of the press.

During this period, Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) was in the ascendant. They were training jihadis to foment trouble in Kashmir. Since 1947, Pakistan has wanted control of Kashmir. As a Muslim-majority region, Pakistan sees Kashmir as a natural part of the nation. Kashmir is part of Pakistan’s foundational myth. Hence, the genocide of Kashmir Pandits is part of the grand plan of Islamizing this region and reclaiming it for the pure nation of Islam.

Before the genocide began, Kashmir had 350,000 Kashmiri Pandits. By 2016, this number had declined to 2,764. Note that the genocide of Kashmiri Pandits has been a long, drawn-out affair. It began as early as the 14th century when Islam first came to Kashmir. The difference between earlier waves of violence and the one in the 1990s is the fact that this genocide occurred in the sovereign territory of secular, democratic and multiethnic India.

Two questions arise. 

Was the 1990s genocide of Kashmiri Pandits inevitable? Yes, given the stupidity of national politicians and the weakness of Indian democracy. 

Was this genocide avoidable? Yes, if leaders had acted bravely and wisely against fanatical Islamists, a messianic Pakistan and a diabolical, duplicitous local Muslim elite.

[Lee Thompson-Kolar edited this piece.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

The post Were 30 Years of the Slaughter of Kashmiri Hindus Inevitable? appeared first on Fair Observer.

Today marks 365 days since India assumed the presidency of the G20. It is a moment to reflect, recommit, and rejuvenate the spirit of “Vasudhaiva Kutumbakam — One Earth, One Family, One Future.”

As we undertook this responsibility last year, the global landscape grappled with multifaceted challenges: recovery from the Covid-19 pandemic, looming climate threats, financial instability, and debt distress in developing nations, all amid declining multilateralism. In the midst of conflicts and competition, development cooperation suffered, impeding progress.

When India assumed the presidency of the G20, it sought to offer the world an alternative to the status quo. We pushed for and achieved a paradigm shift from a GDP-centric to a human-centric progress. India reminded the world of what unites us, rather than what divides us. India changed the global conversation, which had to evolve. Under Indian leadership, the interests of the few gave way to the aspirations of the many. This required a fundamental reform of multilateralism as we knew it.

Indeed, four words — inclusive, ambitious, action-oriented, and decisive — these four words defined India’s approach as G20 president. In fact, the New Delhi Leaders’ Declaration (NDLD) was unanimously adopted by all G20 members and is testimony to our commitment to deliver on these principles. 

A true multilateralism

Note that Inclusivity has been at the heart of our presidency. For this reason, we championed permanent membership of the G20 for the African Union (AU). The inclusion of the AU into the G20 has integrated 55 African nations into the forum. Now, the G20 has expanded to encompass 80% of the global population.

India’s more inclusive stance towards the AU and the Global South has fostered a more comprehensive dialogue on global challenges and opportunities. The first-of-its-kind ‘Voice of the Global South Summit,’ convened by India in two editions, heralded a new dawn of multilateralism. India has brought the Global South’s concerns into mainstream international discourse. Our country has also ushered in an era in which developing countries have taken their rightful place in shaping the global narrative.

Inclusivity also infused India’s domestic approach to G20, making it a people’s presidency that befits that the world’s largest democracy. Through “Jan Bhagidari” (people’s participation) events, India’s G20 activities reached 1.4 billion citizens. India’s national government partnered with all 28 of India’s states and all eight of its union territories to boost people’s participation. 

A clear developmental agenda

On substantive elements, India focused the international attention on broader developmental aims. As part of the 2030 Agenda, India delivered the G20 2023 Action Plan to Accelerate Progress on the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). This plan adopted an integrative, proactive strategy along with a cross-cutting, action-oriented approach to interconnected issues involving SDGs, including health, education, gender equality and environmental sustainability.

A key area driving this progress in SDGs is robust Digital Public Infrastructure (DPI). On the DPI front, India’s recommendations were decisive. Even in the West, people are now realizing the revolutionary impact of digital innovations such as  Aadhaar, UPI, and Digilocker on the Indian economy and daily life. Through G20, India successfully completed the Digital Public Infrastructure Repository, making a significant stride in global technological collaboration. This repository, featuring over 50 DPIs from 16 countries, will help the Global South build, adopt, and scale DPI to unlock the power of inclusive growth.

For our One Earth goal, we introduced ambitious and inclusive aims to create urgent, lasting, and equitable change. The NDLD’s Green Development Pact addresses the challenges of choosing between combating hunger and protecting the planet. This pact outlines a comprehensive roadmap in which employment and ecosystems are complementary, consumption aligns with climate consciousness, and production is planet-friendly. 

Simultaneously, the G20 NDLD calls for an ambitious tripling of global renewable energy capacity by 2030. Coupled with the establishment of the Global Biofuels Alliance and a concerted push for Green Hydrogen, the India-led G20 has demonstrated bold ambitions to build a cleaner, greener world. Sustainability and conserving the environment have always been central to India’s ethos. In this G20 Summit, India pioneered Lifestyles for Sustainable Development (LiFE). This new LiFE initiative could greatly benefit the world through India’s age-old sustainable traditions.

The question of climate, gender and equity

The NDLD also addressed the burning issue of our times: climate change. India highlighted the need for climate justice and equity, urging substantial financial and technological support for the Global South from the Global North. For the first time, the Global North recognized the need for a quantum leap in the magnitude of development financing. Under India’s leadership, this figure moved upward from billions to trillions of dollars. In fact, the G20 acknowledged that developing countries require $5.9 trillion to fulfill their Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) by 2030.

Since countries need monumental financial resources for their NDCs, the G20 emphasized the importance of better, larger, and more effective multilateral development banks (MDBs). Key MDBs include the World Bank, Inter-American Development Bank, Asian Development Bank, the African Development Bank, and the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development. In addition to improving MDBs, India is taking a leading role in reforming the United Nations. In particular, India is working to restructure principal organs of the United Nations such as the Security Council to create a more equitable global order.

Concerning equity, the NDLD put gender equality center stage. India has pioneered the formation of a dedicated working group on the empowerment of women, which will commence work next year. India’s Women’s Reservation Bill 2023 reserves one-third of the seats in the national parliament and state legislative assemblies for women, epitomizing India’s commitment to women-led development that could serve as a model for the rest of the world.

The NDLD embodies a renewed spirit of collaboration across key global priorities, focusing on policy coherence, reliable trade, and ambitious climate action. It is a matter of great national pride that the G20 achieved 87 outcomes and adopted 118 documents during India’s presidency. Note that this is a marked increase from the past. Under India’s leadership, the G20 certainly got a lot done.

India also led deliberations on geopolitical issues and their impact on economic growth and development. One such issue is terrorism, which kills innocents and causes severe economic damage. It is clear that the senseless killing of civilians is unacceptable, and we must address it with a policy of zero-tolerance. The world must prize humanitarianism over hostility and ensure that our era does not turn into one of terrorism, violence or war. 

In conclusion, I am delighted that India achieved something extraordinary during its presidency. We revitalized multilateralism, amplified the voice of the Global South, championed development, and fought for the empowerment of women, everywhere.

As India hands over the presidency of the G20 to Brazil, we do so with the conviction that our nation’s collective steps for people, planet, peace, and prosperity, will resonate with the world for years to come.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

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The post India’s G20 Presidency Is the Dawn of New Multilateralism appeared first on Fair Observer.

India took on the leadership of the G20 to improve international cooperation and development. That is why its motto was “Vasudhaiva Kutumbakam,” a classical Sanskrit phrase that means the world is one family. It evokes the spirit that not only human beings but also all living beings and nature are interconnected. This phrase implies that we have to be mindful of the interconnectedness of cause and consequence.

The G20 Summit was held in New Delhi on September 9 and 10 this year, after months of meetings and events in various Indian cities. There were fears that the Russia-Ukraine War had proved so decisive that the customary joint statement at the end of the summit might prove elusive. Countries would not be able to agree upon it. However, India proved its mettle as a consensus builder. Furthermore, it championed the voices of the marginalized and welcomed the African Union (AU) as the 21st member of the G20. India’s focus on the challenges of the future and developmental diplomacy were a triumph in a trying year for the world.

India’s success in developmental diplomacy 

India’s presidency of the G20 proved to be the most ambitious and action-oriented leadership of this young grouping of nations and supranational organizations. With 112 outcomes, India has more than doubled the substantive work from previous presidencies. Thanks to deft diplomacy, the Delhi Declaration was unanimously adopted on the inaugural day.

The World Now Needs the India-Led G20 to Succeed

This 83-paragraph declaration proposes to scale up inclusive action against climate change with a green development pact and sustainable development goals. It also admits the AU, puts crypto-asset regulation on the global agenda, and commits to reforming multilateral development banks (MDBs). Given the massive developmental challenge facing African countries, reforming the MDBs is a top global priority and India, to its credit, has put it on the global agenda.

The declaration also emphasizes counter-terrorism and anti-money laundering efforts because security is a prerequisite for development. To a limited degree, the declaration overcame the trust deficit that has emerged after the Russia-Ukraine War. Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s message — “today’s era must not be of war” — resonated strongly with almost everyone who attended the G20 Summit.

India’s use of human-centric approach

Modi also called for a human-centric approach to address global challenges. What does this really mean? Simply put, the prime minister believes that we must put the common man’s needs of food, water, shelter, clothing, clean air, jobs and basics at the center of all developmental action.

This approach led to major outcomes such as the Green Development Pact and the Action Plan on Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). India also promoted its plan for Digital Public Infrastructure (DPI) as a technological solution for financial inclusion. This DPI plan could help millions of people in developing countries in Latin America, Africa and Southeast Asia.

To improve food security, this summit agreed upon research cooperation on climate-friendly nutritious millets. The Modi government has single-handedly introduced the millets initiative, which has now gained acceptance worldwide. Clearly, India’s developmental diplomacy is bearing fruits.

The Delhi Declaration was forward-looking and launched two landmark initiatives. Both the Global Biofuel Alliance and the India-Middle East-European Union Economic Corridor (IMEC) might prove to be historic. The former addresses the critical challenge of lessening reliance on fossil fuels and thereby cutting down on toxic emissions destroying the planet. The latter could connect the EU, the Middle East and India in a closer economic relationship, creating millions of jobs and boosting economic growth in all three regions.

Modi deserves credit for providing a new vision and clear direction for the G20. As retired CIA officer Glenn Carle has said, India is now growing confident in its new role as a powerful nation. As per Carle, “India has become one of the world’s three great powers. It ranks next only to the US and China in global significance.”

The G20 Summit demonstrates that a new great power is on the rise. With its new developmental agenda and leadership of the Global South, India is a force to reckon with. Modi has emerged as a global leader and India will play a consequential role in making the world a better place.
[Throvnica Chandru edited this piece.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

The post India Sets the Bar High for G20 Presidency appeared first on Fair Observer.

India-Canada relations have reached a nadir. On October 20, Canada withdrew 41 diplomats and their families from India. This came after the Indian government threatened to revoke diplomatic immunity for Canadian diplomats. India’s action came after Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau claimed that there were “credible allegations” that India was behind the killing of Hardeep Singh Nijjar in suburban Vancouver. Trudeau made this claim in the Canadian parliament, triggering off an international furor.

Nijjar was a naturalized Canadian citizen who immigrated from India in 1997. He first arrived in Canada on a fraudulent passport and his citizenship application was rejected many times. His attempt to claim citizenship through marriage failed because Canadian ‘immigration officials considered it a marriage of convenience.’ After ten years of reapplying repeatedly, Nijjar became a Canadian citizen in 2007.

Nijjar was an outspoken advocate for the creation of Khalistan, an independent state for Sikhs to be carved out of Indian territory. Sikh extremists waged a bloody insurgency in the 1980s demanding Khalistan. Two of them killed Indira Gandhi, the then prime minister of India, in 1984. In 1987, a research paper by the CIA concluded that Sikh extremists posed “a long-term terrorist threat” that would prove impossible for India to stamp out. It also went on to say:

“Sikh extremists will continue to rely on violence—in particular, assassination—as their principal tactic for gaining a Sikh state.”

In Indian eyes, Nijjar was a Sikh extremist. In 2020, India designated Nijjar as a terrorist, and, two years later, India’s National Investigation Agency (NIA) accused him of plotting to kill a Hindu priest in Punjab. Even before Canada granted Nijjar citizenship, the Interpol had issued a Red Notice against him. The Interpol defines a Red Notice as “a request to law enforcement worldwide to locate and provisionally arrest a person pending extradition, surrender, or similar legal action.”

Canada’s dodgy record on backing Sikh terrorists

Much history lies behind India’s strong reaction to Canadian accusations. India has long held that Canada has provided refuge to Sikh terrorists. The memory of Air India (AI) flight 182 still lives strong for the country. On June 23, 1985, Sikh terrorists blew up this flight to India, which exploded off the Irish coast. All 329 people on board died and only 131 bodies were retrieved from the sea.

While AI 182 was still in the air, another explosion at Tokyo’s Narita airport killed two Japanese baggage handlers. If it had exploded over the Pacific, another plane would have disappeared, leading to hundreds more deaths.

Canadian authorities arrested Talwinder Singh Parmar, the leader of an extremist group called Babbar Khalsa that is now banned in Canada and India and Inderjit Singh Reyat, an electrician, on various weapons, explosives and conspiracy charges. Both were acquitted of all charges. Pierre Trudeau, Trudeau’s father, refused to extradite them as prime minister.

It is now clear that Canadian authorities did not do enough to prevent these attacks. They also bungled the investigation. After much public pressure, the Canadian government set up a public inquiry in 2006 headed by a former Supreme Court judge. In 2010, this inquiry concluded that a “cascading series of errors” had led to the “largest mass murder in Canadian history.”

Trudeau has carried on his father’s policy of not extraditing terrorists to India. Over the years, Canada has become home to Sikh extremists who want to dismember the Indian state. Almost a year ago, these extremists organized the Khalistan Referendum. Extremist Sikhs in Canada voted for the secession of the state of Punjab from India. This 2022 referendum posed a simple question: “Should India governed Punjab be an Independent Country?” Trudeau has remained deaf to Indian concerns and protests, claiming that free speech in Canada includes even the dismemberment of India, hate speech and promotion of terrorism. He conveniently forgets that every country, including liberal Canada, puts reasonable restrictions on freedoms, which are never absolute.

Trudeau and the Anglosphere have an ax to grind

It is utterly unclear as to who killed Nijjar. Sikh terrorists have now split into many cults, many of them with violent gangs. Often, they raise money for Sikh independence to fund their lavish lifestyles. Musicians have joined these cults, glamorizing violence and propagating hedonism. Many glorify gun culture and terrorism. A rival gang could have killed Nijjar. So could have an intelligence agency in a false flag operation to discredit India after a successful G20 summit.

Hence, it is surprising that Trudeau is making such a big deal about a citizen who arrived in Canada on a false passport after committing crimes in India. Irritatingly, Trudeau is mobilizing the Anglosphere against India. US National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan waded into the controversy, promising that India would not get any special exemption for its actions. Australia’s intelligence chief has also supported Trudeau’s accusations on Nijjar’s murder.

The Anglosphere has formed the “Five Eyes,” a multilateral intelligence-sharing network of over 20 different agencies of Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the United Kingdom and the United States. The Five Eyes includes both surveillance-based and signals intelligence. The Anglosphere seems to be alluding there is proof of Indian involvement but, so far, has been unwilling or unable to offer any evidence.

More importantly, the actions of the Anglosphere reek of hypocrisy. Let us assume for a moment that India killed Nijjar even though this is a preposterously untrue assumption. Nijjar was a terrorist conspiring to kill Indian citizens and dismember the Indian state. The Anglosphere killed Iranian General Qasem Soleimani in Iraq, terrorist Saudi Osama bin Laden in Pakistan and thousands in drone strikes around the world. Trudeau, Sullivan & Co do not have the privilege of outrage over so-called Indian actions, especially when they lack any evidence.

The Anglosphere is reflexively slipping into old colonial habits in condemning India. This condemnation might have ulterior motives. The Anglosphere is unhappy about Indian leadership of the Global South, which has come at the cost of these Western English-speaking countries. India has led the G20 successfully and admitted the African Union into the organization. The Anglosphere failed to get a condemnation of Russia at the G20 summit at Delhi. Tarnishing India’s reputation is in the interest of the Five Eyes because they might be seeking leverage for the Anglosphere.

Why is Trudeau recklessly undermining India-Canada relations?

Trudeau has a history of poor judgment, especially in foreign policy. Unlike Henry Kissinger or Deng Xiaoping, he is ideological, not realistic. In 2018, he accused Saudi Arabia of human rights violations and demanded the release of imprisoned activists. This led to a breakdown in Saudi-Canada relations, which were only restored this year.

To understand Trudeau’s actions, we have to understand his ideology. He is the head of the Liberal Party of Canada, which the Conservative opposition has accused of a “radical woke agenda.” In September, retired lieutenant général Michel Maisonneuve and his wife argued that Trudeau’s woke agenda was destroying Canada.

According to this agenda, India’s ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) is a Hindu fascist political force that oppresses minorities. Trudeau sees himself as standing up to dark rightwing forces threatening democracy. He has a white savior complex, which motivates him to take on the BJP. The left-leaning press in the Anglosphere fills the wind in his sails, enabling Trudeau to position himself against Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi. In the gray world of foreign policy and international relations, this Manichean goodie versus baddie pantomime is childlike, immature and destructive.

Trudeau’s woke ideology sees Canada as a liberal democracy that stands for Western values such as democracy, minority rights and freedom of speech. Therefore, Sikhs who form 2.1% of the Canadian population — a higher percentage than in India — have the right to argue for dismemberment of the Indian state. This extreme ideology also gives extremist Sikhs the right to support and conduct violence and terrorism for the secession of Punjab from India.

Trudeau’s ideological absolutism on this extreme version of Canadian version liberalism has led to terrible consequences for the country. As The Guardian details, “Canada has a dark history with Nazis,” who took advantage of lax immigration laws to come into the country. Sikh extremists and terrorists did the same. Note that Sikhs form 57.69% of the population of Punjab and the vast majority of them do not want to secede from India. Despite forming just 1.7% of the Indian population, Sikhs occupy the highest offices of the state, achieve great success in business and are revered cultural figures. Manmohan Singh, an erudite Sikh economist, was prime minister from 2004 to 2014.

Ideology is not the only reason for Trudeau’s reckless Russian roulette with India- Canada relations. Like other parliamentary democracies, the Canadian prime minister has to command a majority in the lower house of the parliament. Out of the 338 seats in the House of Commons, Trudeau’s Liberals have 158. This is short of the required majority of 170. Trudeau is in power thanks to the New Democratic Party (NDP), which has 25 seats.

Jagmeet Singh, a charismatic and dapper Sikh, is the leader of the NDP. He has long supported the creation of Khalistan. Last year, he supported Sikh peoples’ right to seek independence and the Khalistan Referendum. It is Singh’s consistent support for Khalistan that led the Sikh-led Manmohan Singh government to deny him a visa to India in 2014.

Trudeau is in trouble at home. The speaker of the Canadian House of Commons recently resigned “after he praised a Ukrainian veteran who fought for a Nazi military unit during World War II.” Trudeau needs the NDP’s support to stay in power. As any good politician, Jagmeet Singh is therefore extracting his pound of flesh. For sheer political survival, Trudeau has little option but to wave the Khalistan flag to stay on as prime minister.

What is the way forward?

India regards Canada as an important partner. Thousands of Indians study and live in Canada. The country has a good education system, a dynamic economy and fantastic healthcare. Indian and Canadian businesses are working closely on some of the world’s most pressing matters. India’s Reliance Industries and Canada’s Brookfield Asset Management will soon be manufacturing renewable energy and decarbonisation equipment in Australia. Brookfield and other Canadian funds have invested billions of dollars into the Indian economy.

Until recently, India and Canada were discussing a free trade agreement. On September 1, Trudeau’s government paused these talks. The way forward is to renew these talks, sign a trade agreement and deepen the economic relationship between two of the world’s leading democracies.

Trudeau is living on borrowed time. Even if his coalition government does not fall, he is likely to lose the 2025 elections. Till then, India will have to keep calm and carry on. Things have moved on from 1985 and India is a much greater power that has to stand up for its interests against Canada until Ottawa embarks on a more sensible India policy. If Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre becomes prime minister, he must control Khalistani terrorists on Canadian soil, improve ties with India and conclude the win-win India-Canada trade agreement as a top priority.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

The post Justin Trudeau Is Now Playing a Risky Game With India appeared first on Fair Observer.

It turned out that elements close to the top of the Indian government of Prime Minister Narendra Modi were aware of my arrival and had decided to “invite” me on a tour. Eventually, they told me that they were dissatisfied with the image the American media presented of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) government of Prime Minister Narendra Modi. The Modi people wanted to show me “what India is really like,” and what the BJP government was seeking to accomplish.

They insisted that they were not intolerant, much less the fascistic, anti-Muslim nationalists some observers were describing them to be. Those were the biased criticisms of the anglicized, socialistic English-speaking Congress party elites with whom foreign journalists interact. For three weeks, they took me all over western and northern India and gave me better entrée to the corridors of power than most senior diplomats could ever hope to obtain. They showed me how India’s power elites, both BJP and Congress party supporters, see India, as well as what the Modi government wants for the country. 

India’s national self-image is changing

For a thousand years, India was ruled by Muslims, like the Mughals, and later by the British. Hindus were powerless subjects. But Modi’s BJP government sees India as a Hindu nation. This is the concept of Hindutva, a view of Indian society and government, first enunciated during India’s struggles for independence against the British, which has guided the BJP since 1989.

Hindutva considers the Hindu religion as the basis of Indian culture and society. This is a powerful nationalistic break from the millennium of colonial subjugation and from the first sixty years of Indian independence, in which India embraced a secular, civic nationalist identity.

The Congress-party opponents of the BJP consider this concept of Indian society and government to be a dangerous betrayal of India’s multicultural, tolerant and socialist post-colonial democracy. A majority of Hindus seem to feel empowered by Hindutva, however. Modi and the BJP consistently win substantial support at the polls and in opinion polling, and Modi’s reelection in 2024 seems likely.

Hindutva strikes me as a powerful resurgence of national pride, but nationalism also can foster dangerous intolerance. Human Rights Watch finds that there has been an increase in protests against alleged government human rights violations since Modi’s election and that government use of violence to suppress dissent has also increased. The BJP dismisses such criticisms: “The BJP is at least as democratic as the corrupt and totalitarian Congress party and the Gandhis,” I was told repeatedly by BJP supporters. 

FO° Talks: Rank Hypocrisy: Do Global Rankings Misrepresent India?

India is a rising world power

One sees evidence of India’s economic dynamism everywhere. Partially finished new highways and skyscrapers loom overhead even as cows continue to sit placidly in the middle of major roads. Most educated Indians see themselves as citizens of a nascent world power. I was told repeatedly that “over 250 million” Indians have risen from extreme poverty in recent years, the BJP supporters intimating that this was due to Modi’s economic liberalism and industrial policies. The United Nations Development Programme presents a more nuanced picture, showing a decline in poverty that, while indeed impressive, began long before the BJP came to power. 

Many Indians do feel that India’s bureaucratic sclerosis continues to slow economic development. Yet the World Bank now ranks India 63rd in its 2023 “Ease of Doing Business” report, up from 140th in 2014. When I was there, I sensed a country defining itself more by a burgeoning world-class economy than by timeless squalor, pre-modern stasis and colonial bureaucracy.

An Indian Entrepreneur Talks Growth, Regulation and Corruption

Much of India’s media expresses a simplistic, jingoistic nationalism due to pressure from the BJP according to government critics. Old ways of thought die hard, too: I heard many statements about how Russia remained a “trustworthy friend” and that the US was predatory and had sided with Pakistan for over sixty years.

These are vestigial echoes of a defensive, postcolonial, anti-Western, Congress-party-led India. The power elites with whom I met proudly highlighted India’s growing confidence as a global power. India is involving itself in the geopolitics of the Caucasus and the Indo-Pacific, aspiring to set global standards for semiconductor chips, building a world-class space program and diversifying its arms purchases as it develops its own arms production industry. 

Many of the foreign policy experts with whom I spoke now consider India’s top strategic priority to be counterbalancing China. India’s leadership in the “Global South” or the non-aligned movements, participation in the BRICS organization (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa) and increasing involvement in Indo-Pacific military maneuvers and in US-centric organizations such as the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue all seek to strengthen India as a nascent, independent global peer to the US, China and Russia, but above all they seek to counterbalance China. This is why Indian External Affairs Minister Subrahmanyam Jaishankar talks of India as a “south-western power” — part of the Global South — but with “very strong bonding” to the West and to Western norms.

India has long sought a seat as a permanent member of the UN Security Council. The UN is nearly unreformable, though, and as a result, the world’s powers will slowly create alternative arrangements to address some of the problems of global governance. The G7 grouping of the world’s richest democracies has taken on increased strategic importance following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. One can thus expect India to pursue, and probably achieve, G7 membership, making a “G8.”

The death of Hardeep Singh Nijjar signals new audaciousness from a rising India

Nothing shows more strikingly India’s new bold and assertive attitude than the recent incident that occurred between New Delhi and Ottowa over the death of Hardeep Singh Nijjar.

Nijjar, a Canadian citizen, had been active in Sikh separatist politics. He organized an unofficial referendum among Sikhs resident in Canada on the independence from India of a new Sikh “country” named Khalistan. In June, Nijjar was gunned down in British Columbia. Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau declared the killing had been an assassination, planned by India.

FO° Exclusive: Indo–Canadian Tensions Signal New Indian Assertiveness on Global Stage

India, of course, denies having assassinated Nijjar, but for years has characterized him as a “terrorist.” India accused him of conspiring to organize a terrorist attack in 2018. India says that Trudeau has made his accusation in order to curry domestic political favor among Canada’s large Sikh population. It is likely, however, that Canada is telling the truth, given the diplomatic costs to Canada’s international standing of making spurious allegations about assassination and Trudeau’s explicit references to “credible allegations” collected by Canada’s intelligence agencies. The countries mutually expelled diplomat to show their anger. Relations between Canada and India have never been worse. 

More significant than the tensions between India and Canada, however, is what the assassination says about the “stronger” India of Prime Minister Modi and about the Indian intelligence service’s apparently more aggressive role in India’s foreign policies.

“They need to understand that this is not the same India,” said Vineet Joshi, a senior BJP official. India now, he asserted, “is much stronger under the leadership of Prime Minister Modi.”

India’s foreign intelligence organization is the Research and Analysis Wing (RAW). Its mission is the same as those of the American CIA, the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service, or Britain’s MI6: to collect foreign intelligence on countries of strategic interest. But the RAW, like these other organizations, also conducts “covert actions.” Traditionally, the RAW has carried out covert operations against targets, including Sikh terrorists, within or near Indian territory. These operations are reputed to have included assassinations, but Nijjar’s assassination would be the first that the RAW is believed to have committed in a Western nation.

States often believe that covert actions offer them solutions to otherwise intractable problems. They believe that there will be no political cost because the actions are “covert.” The reality, however, is that most covert actions are eventually traced to the service that conducts them. When they become publicly known, they cause significant unintended negative consequences — just as we are observing with India’s likely assassination of Nijjar. 

It is too early to know whether the “benefits” of the RAW’s assassination of Nijjar — eliminating an individual threatening India’s political integrity — outweigh the damage to India–Canada relations, to India’s standing and influence in the world and the possible increased hostility of India’s long-disgruntled Sikh population in consequence. Nijjar’s death, however, surely signals that India sees itself as “stronger” and freer to pursue its objectives unilaterally than at any time since Indian independence in 1947.

The event illustrates how India is now flexing the sometimes-obtuse muscles of a superpower. It also reveals a significant global expansion of the RAW’s covert actions, transgressing international and democratic norms in pursuit of what India considers vital national interests.

A newer, bolder India moves into the future

I never so much as glimpsed the Himalayas during my three weeks in India. Instead, I saw an India that will soon be the world’s third-largest economy, that is proud to now be the fourth nation to land on the Moon and that is playing a progressively large and confident role in international affairs. I saw an India that seeks influence in the “Global South” and closer relations with the West to counterbalance China. I saw an India that is struggling to overcome its colonial and socialist bureaucratic legacy and historical hostility to the West. I saw an India that, as it recently demonstrated, is ready to pursue its perceived national interests globally in spite of the costs.

It seemed to me that the BJP, in its efforts to free India of the harmful effects of a thousand years of foreign domination and three generations of socialist torpor and crony leadership, risks alienating its non-Hindu populations and sliding into intolerant majoritarian rule and a strong-man system of government. We will have to see.

[Newsweek Japan first published a version of this piece.]

[Anton Schauble edited this piece.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

The post India Is Growing Confident in Its New Role as a Powerful Nation appeared first on Fair Observer.

India is currently experiencing a significant increase in Foreign Direct Investments (FDIs), which are funds invested by entities from various parts of the world into a wide array of sectors such as Health-Tech, Education, Fintech, and Renewables. This influx of FDI indicates a growing interest from international investors in India’s economic opportunities.

At the same time, India’s economic potential is only getting bigger. A recent article in The New York Times underlines the shifting demographic tides across the globe. with India poised to become the foremost contributor to the global workforce by 2050. Kearney ranked India second — only after China — among emerging markets on its FDI Confidence Index this year.  With the upsurge of funding and opportunity, it is time for us to take a step back and evaluate how these investments can be handled to do the most good.

To make an impact in India, you need to look at employment

So, India is not merely an investment prospect; it is an impact destination. How can we change the lens through which we look at investing in India to make the most of this fact? The first step is to recognize that impact investing is not just about trendy initiatives such as green bonds and ESG-centric investing. At its base, doing good is about employability.

India’s growth is marred by persistent unemployment. In 2022, unemployment was 7.3%. With a labor force of 524 million, this translates to a whopping 38 million jobless individuals — more than the entire population of Poland. The Indian state is under considerable strain providing livelihood, basic education, healthcare and shelter to this substantial demographic. The solution to the problem cannot lie solely with the government. Private capital must mobilize to ensure higher employment. 

All these unemployed people are a cost for India, but they are also a huge potential opportunity. Entrepreneurs must only do what they do best — connect people to resources and make them productive, for themselves as much as for investors and for society at large. Ramraj Pai, CEO of the Impact Investors Council in India, suggests that the Indian market offers ample latitude for social entrepreneurs to engineer impact at scale while turning a profit. Existing impact investments in India have made a compelling case, Pai says.

Equity impact investments in India, with a typical holding period of around 5.2 years, have generated an overall internal rate of return of around 30% over the past decade while impacting more than 500 million lives across the country.

Numerous success stories like LEO1, BluSmart and Svasti have shown how entrepreneurship in India can make real progress in employment, with a transformative impact.

Impact investing can work for India, but we need to act fast

The solution is so simple that it may sound like a no-brainer, but it works. Do you want to make people’s lives better? Do you want to make investments that will do real good? Instead of pouring money into greenwashed, feel-good investments or shallow political ploys designed to make some salesman a quick buck, give people jobs.

World Bank President Ajay Banga has recently said that India’s path to growth lies in creating more jobs. India is a great place to do this. Banga highlighted the potential for capitalizing on the “China Plus One” strategy, an increasingly popular approach in which companies are diversifying their manufacturing capacities beyond China.

India can imitate much of China’s success, but it has to act fast. According to Banga, the window of opportunity will not be open 10 years from now. India has a three- to five-year opportunity to attract the money that private investors can bring before circumstances change and investors move on to other pastures.

The future, as things stand, looks bright. Impact investors and India are becoming aware of the opportunities that each affords the other. If we can take advantage of the moment, we can make it a reality out of the slogan, “doing good while making money.”

[Anton Schauble edited this piece.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

The post Impact Investment Is a Promising Way Forward for India appeared first on Fair Observer.

Indeed, the G20 summit in New Delhi carries significant diplomatic importance for India. It offers a prime opportunity for Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Minister of External Affairs Subrahmanyam Jaishankar to showcase India’s role on the global stage. Welcoming delegates from a multitude of member nations, including prominent figures like US President Joe Biden and UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, presents a substantial diplomatic undertaking for India. The absence of leaders such as Russian President Vladimir Putin and Chinese President Xi Jinping cannot go unnoticed, and it will be intriguing to observe the outcomes and agreements that emerge from this pivotal summit.

The absence of Xi is particularly noteworthy. Chinese Premier Li Qiang will instead attend the event. The snub is telling, given that India is one of China’s greatest regional rivals. Perhaps China is having trouble grappling with India’s economic growth and recent achievements in space exploration, including a historic landing on the moon’s South Pole. Xi’s decision could also spring from a desire to strengthen China’s role in the newly-expanded BRICS forum, where he appeared more comfortable during a recent summit. Or Xi may have been kept home to address China’s economic challenges, notably the precarious situation which saw one of the nation’s largest property developers on the verge of default.

Xi’s absence raises questions about China’s diplomatic strategy and global posture. It suggests a reluctance to engage in an event where he might face difficult inquiries regarding China’s economic trajectory, military activities concerning Taiwan and support for Russia following its invasion of Ukraine. This decision also adds to concerns among investors about the increasing unpredictability of China’s policies, with US Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo recently noting that abrupt shifts in Chinese policy have made the nation appear nearly “uninvestable.”

India is a nation committed to democracy and multilateralism, and its presidency will be a significant milestone as it seeks to find practical global solutions for the benefit of all and embody the idea of Vasudhaiva Kutumbakam.

Will India’s G20 presidency leave an imprint on the forum’s global agenda? New Delhi is highly optimistic of a declaration with India’s clear stamp on it. India wants the G20 to be a group for the global public good and not just an economic cooperation body. Vasudhaiva Kutumbakam literally means “the world is a family,” and not just the human world, but the environment from plants and animals down to microorganisms. 

India’s priorities at the G20

In more concrete terms, India’s goals at the summit are six:

This first wave of BRICS enlargement was riven with tensions. While China favored the diffusion of its influence through the enlargement of the group, Brazil and India had pushed back against enlargement. They were more interested in deepening coordination between the existing members.

Although diplomatic coordination was never easy within BRICS, the group’s founding members used to share the objective of counterbalancing Western dominance. However, this shared objective has been shattered with the recent group’s enlargement.

China in charge

The manner and selection of countries for the enlargement of BRICS made clear China’s unchallenged ability to transform the group as an agent of an increasingly Chinese-led emerging global order. The selection of several autocracies as new members is telling of China’s view of how the global order should be shaped: an ad-hoc multilateralism that aids its own global ambitions.

With this autocratic turn of BRICS, the group’s previous rhetoric of reformism of global institutions is now replaced by a new narrative. China sees BRICS as a way to promote a global governance model that downplays liberal-democratic values and weakens the global rules-based order. As BRICS turns autocratic, the bloc is likely to start opposing US influence more emphatically, and Brazil and India will be isolated within the group.

Brazil and India’s acquiescence to the enlargement of BRICS has been possible with China’s support to the permanent membership of both countries in the UN Security Council. Brazil and India were never shy about their dream to permanently sit in the UN Security Council. However, neither country had imagined that China’s support for their entry into the UN’s selective club would result in their diminished influence in BRICS.

Two democracies in an authoritarian club

Unlike their autocratic fellow members of BRICS (both old and new), Brazil and India have a natural inclination to embrace the principles of equality and liberty both domestically and internationally. These principles, or the lack thereof, determine how democratic or autocratic regimes govern their countries, and, as a result, how they shape their foreign policies.

BRICS until now lacked an ideological or political orientation. What seemed to hold these countries together, apart from being large and prosperous emerging economies, was the shared experience (except for Russia) of colonialism and economic dependence. This experience is no longer enough to keep BRICS united. Brazil and India have made democratic governance part of their development as nation-states. The road towards democratic development has been tortuous, but Brazil and India have both succeeded in embracing democratic methods to guide their domestic governance and their international behavior.

Under democracy, Brazil and India have prospered greatly, achieving impressive levels of economic development. These countries increased their human capital with more educated populations and reduced poverty and inequality, although slowly, over the past decades. Indeed, democracy has given these countries the opportunity to shine globally.

The World Should Learn From Poverty Alleviation in India

As democratic reformers of the fragile liberal order, Brazil and India will continue their efforts to become more influential in international multilateral institutions. And if these institutions welcome both countries by giving them more relevance, Brazil and India’s level of commitment to the now-autocratic BRICS will wane. In the meantime, BRICS will become the dream group of autocrats who want to find political and economic support in an increasingly chaotic international arena.

[Anton Schauble edited this piece.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

The post What Good Is China’s New BRICS For Brazil And India? appeared first on Fair Observer.

India announced its goal during its G20 presidency as “Vasudhaiva Kutumbakam,” glossed in English as “One Earth, One Family, One Future.” On the surface, this seems like an agenda based on global inclusivity, but behind this are India’s far-reaching ambitions of solidifying its influence as a leader of the Global South and one of the rising powers in the world.

The invitation of Bangladesh holds special importance as this is the first time the country will attend the summit and it is also the only South Asian country to be invited this year. India has also stated that it expects Bangladesh’s “active participation” in the G20 meetings to promote the issues of mutual interest in the global arena.

Why Bangladesh?

The Modi government has dreamt big and its invitation to Bangladesh is a part of the strategy. But where does Bangladesh fit in? Why now, 18 summits after the formation of the G20? The answer lies in Bangladesh’s exponential economic growth, as well as its physical location. 

Bangladesh was the 35th largest economy in 2022, with a GDP size of $460 billion. Its economy has grown 5–7% each year over the last decade (with the exception of 2020, the year of the Covid pandemic). PwC projects Bangladesh be the 23rd-largest economy by 2050. Bangladesh has passed up its larger neighbor India in many social and economic indicators. It is no tiny nation, either; with a population of 160 million people and a rapidly developing economy, Bangladesh is a potential golden goose.

Bangladesh has emerged as a regional hub for trade. Goods from China, Myanmar and elsewhere make their way from Bangladeshi ports to Nepal and Bhutan by land through India. So, investing in Bangladesh is in India’s interest to prevent China from instead consolidating influence in the region. If India is to project power globally, it must secure its own backyard by keeping its neighbors close.

In March, India and Bangladesh inaugurated the project to build the India-Bangladesh Friendship Pipeline, which will carry diesel fuel from a hub in Siliguri, India, to Parbatipur, Bangladesh. Along with Japan, the two countries held a meeting this April to discuss developing physical links between Bangladesh and Northeast India, which is landlocked and largely separated from the rest of India by Bangladesh.

Given both the lucrative opportunities for development and the increasing attention paid to the Indo-Pacific region by powers like China and the US, it is in India’s best interest to adopt a “good neighbor policy” towards Bangladesh.

Not only India has its eye on Bangladesh

Where India sees Bangladesh as both an economic and a strategic investment, other major powers have their own goals with Dhaka. 

China wants Bangladesh to be a part of its expansionist string of pearls. Beijing has successfully enrolled Bangladesh into its Belt and Road Initiative. China’s non-interference policy and Bangladesh’s non-alignment policy have kept their relationship smooth. Beijing’s massive investment in Bangladesh, its extension of duty-free access to most goods from Bangladesh, the countries’ growing trade and their political collaboration on the Rohingya issue have helped bring Bangladesh closer to China.

The cooperation of countries like Bangladesh can help China both to extend its influence in South and Southeast Asia and create alternate routes to the Strait of Malacca, a choke point that is currently a major vulnerability for China.

The US has also shown a keen interest in Bangladesh, but its policies are complicated by Washington’s ever-consistent need to interfere in the internal matters of others. On one hand, the US wants Bangladesh to join the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue to restrain China’s growing influence in the Indo-Pacific. On the other hand, has targeted Dhaka with accusations about the security of its democracy. The growing frustration caused by incidents like this is pushing Bangladesh more towards China and India. Still, Bangladesh has not formally chosen sides yet.

That is plenty enough reason for the G20 to want Bangladesh at the table. As former colonies are rising as alternatives to the old powers, Bangladesh, like the rest of the Global South, finally has an opportunity to be a player instead of a pawn in the game. Dhaka must continue what it has started, build strong infrastructure, alleviate poverty and cautiously steer through the multilateral platforms like G20 to keep a good number of friends close. If Bangladesh plays its position well, it can be a real factor in the power politics of the world.

[Anton Schauble edited this piece.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

The post What’s Behind Bangladesh’s Invitation to the G20 Summit? appeared first on Fair Observer.

The future is not necessarily clear. A decade ago, many analysts expected to follow in the steps of China’s explosive growth, but this never happened. Sceptics argue that India’s current development did not come from sustained long-term development, but merely its recovery from the economic downturn caused by the Covid pandemic.

But there are good reasons to think that the trend is well-founded and here to stay. India has a young, growing and increasingly educated workforce; and an expanding consumer market. It has the makings not of a temporary boom but of a sustained growth with a solid foundation.

Strong bones, strong growth

According to the World Bank’s latest India Development Update, titled “Navigating the Storm,” India’s economy has demonstrated continuing resilience despite a troubling external environment. “A tightening global monetary policy cycle, slowing global growth and elevated commodity prices,” the report states, are expected to impact India. Nevertheless, “the economy is relatively well positioned to weather global spillovers compared to most other emerging markets.”

The update expects India to “experience lower growth in the 2022-23 financial year compared to 2021-22,” due to the aforementioned difficulties. Despite these obstacles, however, the World Bank forecasts a substantial increase in India’s gross domestic product (GDP). This positive outlook is primarily attributed to “robust domestic demand” within the country. The World Bank modified its GDP forecast for the 2022-23 fiscal year to 6.9% from 6.5%, noting a serious upturn during the second quarter (July–September) of this period.

In other words, India is not merely experiencing the good fortune of a post-pandemic bounceback. It was able to weather the pandemic and recover well because it has a strong foundation. The update quoted Auguste Tano Kouame, the World Bank’s Country Director in India, who emphasized that “India’s economy has been remarkably resilient to the deteriorating external environment, and strong macroeconomic fundamentals have placed it in good stead compared to other emerging market economies.”

There are a number of factors that explain India’s economic resilience and its prospects for strong future growth:

The report takes a multidimensional approach to poverty. Since national governments use vastly different definitions of poverty, a multidimensional approach is necessary to assess poverty in an accurate and objective way. This captures information that might be obscured or skewed by a one-dimensional analysis, such as an analysis of income. The report takes the following ten dimensions of poverty into account: nutrition, child mortality, years of schooling, school attendance, cooking fuel, sanitation, drinking water, electricity, housing and personal assets.

It is worth noting that, since the UNDP did not collect data from every country in the study at the same time, it is not possible to directly compare countries within a single year. The study is more useful for assessing trends within countries over time. This goes especially for India, for which we have three periods of available data. The report details India from 2005–2006, 2015–2016 and 2019–2021.

India’s impressive poverty reduction

In the period from 2005–2006, 55.1% of the Indian population—or some 645 million people—were suffering from multidimensional poverty. A decade later, this figure had dropped to 27.7% percent—370 million people—in 2015–2016 after 10 years. In other words, the rate of decrease in the percentage of poverty was 5.4% per year on average.

By the period of 2019–2021, the proportion of people suffering from poverty had declined further to only 16.4% of the total population, or 230 million people. In just five years, 140 million people moved out of poverty. This means that the pace of poverty reduction had accelerated to a whopping 9.1% per year. Stunningly, India achieved this record in spite of the Covid pandemic. Although full post-Covid data are not available for nearly any countries in the report, more than one year of the worst pandemic in India is included in the period covered.

From 2005–2006 to 2019–2021, India’s multidimensional poverty index (out of a total of 1.000) plummeted from 0.283 down to just 0.069. The report also includes scores for each of the ten dimensions of poverty considered by the study. The proportion of people without adequate sanitation dropped impressively from 50.4% to 11.3%, and the proportion of those without adequate drinking water plummeted from 16.4% down to just 2.7%. Deprivation in terms of school attendance dropped from 19.8% down to only 3.9%. Conditions in India are dramatically improving. Not only the frequency, but the intensity of poverty is substantially lower than it was 15 years ago.

This is good news for India, and the country can justifiably feel proud of its achievement. But it is also an important lesson for the world. India’s efforts to alleviate multidimensional poverty can be a model and inspiration for the world.

Narendra Modi’s Indian model

Narendra Modi’s government has had a special focus on the determinants of multidimensional poverty.

According to UNICEF, the child mortality rate in India has come down to just 30.6 per 1000 live births as of 2021, down from 46.2 in 2014. This is living proof of better health for Indian children. There has also been a huge improvement in nutrition, with deprivation of nutrition coming down from 21.1% in 2015–2016 to only 11.8% in 2019–2021, according to the UNDP report. To turn to housing, we can note that about 30 million houses, both in urban and rural areas, have been built so far in the last 8 years under the Pradhan Mantri Awas Yojana program thanks to 5 trillion rupees ($60 billion) in assistance from the central government.

Har Ghar Nal Se Jal (“Piped Water to All Homes”), another ambitious scheme of the Modi government, has worked swiftly, cutting the number of those without access to water by more than half from 2015–2016 to 2019–2021, according to the report. 110 million latrines and 223,000 restroom complexes have been constructed in the last eight years. Under the Pradhan Mantri Ujjwala Yojana program, 95.9 million impoverished women have received liquified petroleum gas (LPG) connections. The total number LPG connections has doubled in the last 9 years to 312.6 million.

Various efforts of the government in the context of hunger and nutrition are also bearing fruit. Due to a free grain ration for 800 million people that will continue throughout 2023, all Indians, in principle, will have access to food. Electricity, too, has reached even the remotest villages in the country. According to the UNDP report, indeed, 97.9% of Indians had access to electricity during the 2019–2021 period. That number will continue to get closer and closer to 100%. Already, Modi says, there is not a single village in the country that is without electricity.

This is a lesson for the world. Multidimensional poverty can also be removed if the political will and the necessary effort are there.

[Anton Schauble edited this piece.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

The post The World Should Learn From Poverty Alleviation in India appeared first on Fair Observer.

I’m an Indian teenager and have lived and studied in India all my life. I am ashamed to say that until I was 12, I also thought that Africa was a country. I likened it to the Australian situation, where the country and continent are more or less the same.

Could you blame me, though? Much of what I had read until then, whether in textbooks or the news, spoke of Africa as an undifferentiated whole, an exotic landmass roamed by wild animals and exotic people, all sporting face paint on a dark canvas. Sprawling savannahs and exposed ribs were the images associated with the continent, pitifully ridden with disease, poverty and civil unrest. I never once read something that referred to the thriving middle class that constitutes about a third of the African population or the rolling beaches of this vast continent, let alone an individual reference to any of its 54 distinct countries.

The stereotype lives on

This very pigeonhole — or “shithole,” as Mr. Trump likes to say — of Africa as an outlandish jungle is what a 2019 New York Times (NYT) job ad for a Nairobi bureau chief position invokes. When it announces the exciting opportunity to cover “unexpected stories of hope” from the “pirate seas of the Horn of Africa” and the “forests of Congo,” it reduces Africa to the very stereotypes—dating to colonial times—that a correspondent reporting from Africa should aim to topple. The LAM Sisterhood, an African feminist content studio, topples this applecart brilliantly with a brilliant satirical reading of this NYT advertisement.

However, this video wasn’t easy for me to find. At first, when I searched for it on Google I was not able to find it. Indeed, when I think about this wonderful video, I haven’t encountered, as far as I can remember, any content online produced by Africans. Why are young Indians like me so unexposed to African voices? If we don’t learn about Africa from Africans, from whom do we learn about the continent and its expansive culture?

The answer, as it turns out, is that we just don’t. And when we do, it’s almost always negative. While Western media are often criticized for their coverage (or lack thereof) of developing countries like Nigeria and Tanzania, Indian media are no different. Even today, the press of the world’s largest democracy tends to pander to well-established African typecasting — that is, in the rare instance that African news even makes it to print. 

Western bias and pessimism

Prabhat Kumar and Dorcas Addo published a paper titled “A Study on the Coverage of Africa in Indian Print Media” which revealed that, out of the entire sample of 185 stories on Africa from The Times of India and The Hindu, two leading English-language newspapers in India, only 62 were positive. Even these few optimistic human-interest stories were permitted only a small space in the newspaper.

The authors propose that the primary reason for this scarce and skewed representation is a lack of Indian media correspondents on the ground in Africa and a resulting reliance on Western media for African news and stories. Kumar and Addo’s study found that, from August 2014 to August 2016, all stories about Africa, except for opinion pieces and editorials, had been taken from Western sources such as Agence France-Presse, the Associated Press, Bloomberg and the New York Times News Service. 

Another interesting finding from the study was that the single country receiving the highest coverage in the newspapers examined, more than any of India’s neighbors, was the US. It is an open secret that India is fixated on America. Unsurprisingly, the study found that the US featured in the greatest number of lifestyle and entertainment pieces. 

Related Reading

Mandela: Gandhi’s Heir and Africa’s Greatest Son (Part 1/3)

Africa is more than three times the size of the US. In 2022, Africa’s population was over 1.4 billion compared to the US population of 333.3 million. So, why do Africans get disproportionately less representation in Indian media than our American friends?

In Indian media, the most intuitive reason for this distortion in coverage is that the media give the people what they want. As the media are nothing but a business setup following the principle of supply and demand, they only supply what their audience demands. So the underrepresentation of Africa in Indian media is merely a reflection of the Indian audience’s indifference towards African stories.

The most plausible explanation for this disregard is the average Indian reader’s fascination with the West in general and the US in particular. This is why coverage of the US is disproportionately high in Indian media. People in developing countries tend to look at developed countries with awe. They are keen to emulate the economic, military and sociocultural conditions that have led to the success and influence of developed countries.

Perhaps, this is an intrinsic human trait. We tend to mirror those we think are doing better than us. In the Indian case, this trait is amplified by the legacy of colonization. India was the jewel in the crown of the British Empire. As Atul Singh has said repeatedly in his conversations and lectures, Indians have internalized their inferiority. This feeling is now embedded in their psyche. Hence, the Indian fixation with the West stems from a deep-rooted perception of Western superiority.

The most plausible explanation for this disregard is the average Indian reader’s fascination with the West, which as a result receives markedly more coverage in Indian news. Maybe it’s not unusual to look with awe upon more developed countries, eager to learn more about them to emulate the economic, military and sociocultural conditions that have earned them reverence and influence worldwide. It is likely an intrinsic human trait to mirror those one thinks are doing better than themselves. Or perhaps the Indian mindset’s captivation with the West stems from a deep-rooted perception of Western superiority, a gem that colonialism has securely embedded into the Indian psyche.

None of these explanations, however, can do away with the importance of Africa as a source of learning. Unless we start exposing ourselves to African narratives, we risk falling prey to what author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie calls the danger of a single story, the dominant one of the once-imperial and mercifully civilizing West.

Africa is a landmass where the earliest known Homo sapiens emerged, teeming with natural resources and home to a panoply of cultural traditions and some of the fastest-growing economies in the world. The continent and the significance of its stories are not to be underestimated.

[Lane Gibson edited this piece.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

The post The Great Omission: Why Don’t Indians Talk About Africa? appeared first on Fair Observer.

The distinction between the real world and the digital world is getting blurrier by the day, especially in technologically advanced societies. India is no exception. Today, 840 million Indians are online and another 400 million Indians will enter the digital world by 2025.

Adoption of digital technology is accelerating in India

India being India, some of the numbers are truly mind-boggling. Internet connections have increased by 250% in the last nine years. The cost per gigabyte of data has dropped by a dramatic 96%. Under the Pradhan Mantri Jan Dhan Yojana financial inclusion campaign, Indian banks have opened 500 million new accounts and issued 330 million debit cards powered by India’s financial services and payment system, RuPay.

Today, India is the world leader in global digital payments with 90 million transactions in 2022. The Unified Payments Interface, an instant payment system, has taken off with transactions worth 35 trillion rupees ($430 billion) to date. A striking 46% of global digital payments are made in India.

India has issued 1.38 billion Aadhaar national identity cards, creating the world’s largest digital identity system. This allowed for the vaccination of 2.2 billion people during the COVID pandemic.

Not only the scale, but the pace of digitalization has been breathtaking. Transaction volume has increased by 50 times in the last five years. With over 600,000 km of fiber optic cables already laid, India has become a digital nation overnight. It has also been unique in setting up a public-private partnership to create an open-access digital public infrastructure for its people. Pioneers of the internet in the US have lauded India’s approach.

India Boldly Asserts Independence with New Technology

Global risks in the digital world

New technologies create new opportunities for crime.

The 2022 Interpol Global Crime Trend Summary Report declares “very high expectations of future escalation” for ransomware, phishing, online scams, hacking and online child sexual abuse. Terrorists now use the dark web to hide their identities and spread radical material. They use cryptocurrencies to move money around. The metaverse, too, is creating new opportunities for propaganda, recruitment and training. AI is making deep fakes ever more difficult to identify.

Cyberattacks, notably ransomware and distributed denial of service attacks, are leading to “disruption, data breaches, and financial loss,” according to Interpol. Digital extortion has become the newest form of blackmail. Critical information and financial systems are at grave risk. Given how much of our lives is now digital, the disruption of an online network—banking, airlines, identity systems et al.—could bring nations to a standstill. The worst scenarios of digital disruption could include crashing planes, setting off missiles or worse.

A much-cited 2019 report by Accenture estimated that cybercrime could cost the world $5.2 trillion over the next five years.

In a nutshell, the risks are immediate, serious and rising.

We must establish basic rules of internet governance and public digital infrastructure security. Governments will need to more precisely define digital ownership, monitor the dark web and provide guidelines for responsible AI use. 

Prime Minister Narendra Modi has outlined a uniform cyber strategy for the country. This involves building capacity, systems and expertise throughout the country to deal with cyber threats. Detection and prevention is the name of the game instead of chasing the horse after it has bolted from the gate.

But no nation can control cybercrime alone. The international community must work together to formulate uniform legal standards and best practices. We need global cooperation, not unilaterality, on cyber security benchmarks. This will increase interoperability, trust and reduce the agency protocol and resources gaps. Real-time cyber threat intelligence sharing between governments is indispensable. In fact, governments alone will not be able to achieve cyber security. We need the active involvement of corporations too.

Together, we must create a cyber success world, not a cyber failure world. The promise of new technologies must outweigh the peril. Let us come together in the spirit of Vasudhaiv Kutumbukam—the world as one family—to create a secure and prosperous digital future for all.

[This piece is based on a speech given by Home Minister Amit Shah at the G20 conference on “Crime and Security in the Age of NFTs, AI and the Metaverse” on July 13, 2023, in Gurugram, India.]

[Anton Schauble and Lane Gibson edited this piece.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

The post Amit Shah Says Global Cooperation Is Now Essential for Cybersecurity appeared first on Fair Observer.

Nowhere is this more visible than in the Indo-Pacific. Most prominent is the revived Quadrilateral Security Dialogue (Quad), a strategic security forum between the United States, India, Japan and Australia. The 2021 foundation of the AUKUS (Australia, UK and US) technology-sharing alliance has also manifested the phenomenon of minilateralism. In both cases, increasing cooperation has been spurred on by an increasingly threatening China.

It remains to be seen whether these organizations will be able to contribute to stability in the region by improving cooperation and governance or destabilize relations by building up opposed blocs.

The need for nuanced international cooperation 

Minilaterals are emerging as a consequence of the shifts in underlying power in the region. China, certainly, has become more belligerent in the last 30 years, but other nations such as South Korea, India and Singapore have been growing and are also asserting their influence in a region no longer dominated by Western powers. For its own part, the West, especially the United States, France and the United Kingdom, has been making efforts to maintain its foothold in the region. These shifts in the underlying power structure have created the need for an intricate cooperation structure that can balance so many overlapping interests.

On the economic front, diplomatic prospects widened with the signing of the Indo- Pacific Economic Framework (IPEF) by 13 countries with interests in Southeast Asia, including the QUAD allies headed by the US, last year. The signatories hope to advance sustainable economic development and strategic inclusiveness for the overall peace and stability of the region.

“The future of the 21st century is largely written in the Indo-Pacific,” observed US President Joe Biden. The IPEF reflects the spirit of the Trans-Pacific Partnership as a part

of the US’s so-called “Pivot to Asia.” policy as manifest in the revamped entity of the QUAD. The US has also been pursuing US-Japan-South Korea and US-Japan-Philippines trilateral dialogue. Meanwhile, Australia is strengthening ties with India and Indonesia.

Pou Sothirak, an expert on International affairs at the Asian Institute of Policy Studies, cites a breakdown of trust in the ability of multilaterals to operate effectively and represent member nations’ interests as a major driver of the proliferation of minilaterals.

The inertia and stagnation of multilateral organizations such as the United Nations compromise the effectiveness of these more formal political structures. Meanwhile, the changing nature of contemporary threats, coupled with the rapid development of information technology, has undeniably paved the way for more informal means of dialogue and negotiation, something which the minilaterals promise to incorporate.

More concretely, the Indo-Pacific’s democratic nations find themselves facing a Chinese threat that exceeds their capacity. This requires them to seek outside help and adopt a more aggressive collective stance than was previously necessary.

Challenges and criticisms

However, the picture is not as rosy as it may seem. Despite the strategic viability of these minilaterals, critics allege that they have diminished the sanctity of multilateral frameworks such as the United Nations, as well as their own credibility.

This aspect has three facets. Firstly, the increased preference for minilateralism has disrupted international interdependence and globalization, leading to the fragmentation of global governance mechanisms. The Quad’s relatively informal and ambiguous strategic interests in curtailing Chinese belligerence provide an example of this.

Secondly, disparity of threat perceptions between minilaterals has the potential to duplicate the competition and power-building inherent in unilateralism. The increased role of China in the SCO and BRICS, as opposed to regional forums of the ARF (ASEAN Regional Forum) and the G20, illustrate how this can disrupt the process of consensus-building.

Lastly, incompatibility of interests, coupled with centralizing nature of such institutions, have fostered accountability and compliance issues, arising from non-binding targets and commitments in mutually institutionalized, exclusive power blocs, as opposed to legally sanctioned ones, accentuating the existing differences in the Ind0-Pacific.

It could be said that minilateralism as a process cannot remain isolated and has to complement the existing multilateral institutions. Moreover, successful outcomes can only be materialized should member nations endeavor to bring about the very atmosphere of discourse that exists within minilaterals into the larger regional and multilateral framework as well. A lot still needs to be worked upon, given the tremendous hegemonic shift in present-day international affairs.

[Anton Schauble edited this piece.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

The post Diplomacy in the Indo-Pacific and the Rise of Minilateralism appeared first on Fair Observer.

The rate of growth of India’s economy has slowed and inequality has risen along with poverty and unemployment. India faced an unprecedented public health setback during the Covid-19 pandemic, with up to 5 million deaths, although the national government has only officially acknowledged a tenth of that figure. Meanwhile, two well known business conglomerates are said to be the principal beneficiaries of the post-2014 trajectory of economic growth, which, if true, would result in the majority of Indian businesses and millions of people effectively being left behind.

India’s political landscape has been reshaped by the coalition government led by the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). Religious prejudice, casteism, patriarchy and other signs of social inequity have been unleashed to an unprecedented degree. It is scarcely deniable that these trends have taken hold of the public sphere in the country.

BJP takeover of Indian institutions and the opposition response

There has been a wide-ranging crackdown on the democratic rights of the people that has principally taken two forms. Firstly, the state has subjected dissenters to arbitrary arrest, employing extended pre-trial incarceration in (deliberately engineered) harsh conditions as a means of deterring public “disaffection” towards the current order. Convictions in almost all such cases are never attained. Vigilante groups affiliated in varying extents with political leaders have used violence to silence opposition as well.

Secondly, the administration has employed political re-engineering whereby other political parties are often either coerced into compliance or re-carved up as acolytes of the BJP.  The most recent episode of political re-engineering was the recent splitting of the Nationalist Congress Party into two segments headed respectively by the party president Sharad Pawar and the other headed by his nephew Ajit Pawar. Ajit Pawar’s segment of the Nationalist Congress Party has joined the BJP-dominated Ekanath Shinde government in Maharashtra state with ministerial portfolios.

However, unlike in the case of the political re-engineering of the Shiv Sena (another large party in Maharashtra) where there has been an acrimonious split, there have been some (seemingly inconclusive) meetings between the leaders of both segments of the Nationalist Congress Party. The implications of these meetings between the two segments of the Nationalist Congress Party are possibly difficult to discern at present. We argue that these meetings are vitally connected to the functioning of the current political system in India.

As the Lok Sabha (parliament) elections loom in 2024, there has been a move towards a fledgling alliance of opposition parties. Many opposition parties in India—including the Aam Aadmi Party, All India Trinamul Congress, Communist Party of India, Communist Party of India (Marxist), Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist Liberation), Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam, Indian National Congress, Janata Dal (United). Jharkhand Mukti Morcha, National Conference, Nationalist Congress Party, People’s Democratic Party, Rashtriya Janata Dal, Samajwadi Party and Shiv Sena (Uddhav Bal Thackeray)—met in the city of Patna on June 23, 2023. This was followed by another meeting of 26 opposition parties in Bengaluru on July 18, 2023 where they constituted themselves into the Indian National Developmental Inclusive Alliance.

However, some other parties such as the Bahujan Samaj Party, Yuvajana Sramika Rythu Congress Party, Telugu Desam Party, Biju Janata Dal, Janata Dal (Secular) and Bharat Rashtra Samithi absent from both of these meetings. The non-attendance or non-invitation of these parties are at least partly the result of the political re-engineering process.

Those parties who did attend the meetings on June 23, 2023 and July 18, 2023 have decided to meet again to try and take this process of opposition unity forward. Seemingly in response to this process of consolidation of opposition unity, the BJP organized a meeting of its acolyte parties, but this is unlikely to have the same political impact as the coming together of opposition parties.

Feasability of an opposition alliance

Lok Sabha elections in India are based on the first-past-the-post voting system, with 543 available seats. Since India is possibly the most diverse among the large countries of the world, the Lok Sabha elections tend to be influenced decisively (but not exclusively) by state-specific factors, especially outside the Hindi belt. 

In terms of electoral dynamics, the various states of India may be classified into these four types:

1. States involving, more or less, a straight contest between the BJP
and the Indian National Congress (Congress). These states
include: Chattisgarh, Madhya Pradesh, Gujarat, Rajasthan,
Uttarakhand and Himachal Pradesh. The total number of Lok
Sabha seats involved in these states is 100.

2. States involving a contest between two coalitions involving,
namely the BJP and Congress. These states include: Assam,
Tripura, Tamil Nadu, Puducherry, Karnataka, Maharashtra,
Bihar and Jharkhand. The total number of Lok Sabha seats
involved in these states is 186.

3. States involving a contest between the BJP and a non-Congress
opposition party (or coalition). These states include Odisha,
Uttar Pradesh and West Bengal. The total number of Lok
Sabha seats involved in these states is 143.

4. States where the BJP is not a significant contender (either by itself
or in a coalition) and therefore the principal contest is between
two (or more) other parties (or coalitions). These states
include Punjab, Kerala, Andhra Pradesh and Telangana. The
total number of Lok Sabha seats involved in these states is 75.

Each of these four types of states require a different strategy if the objective of the opposition parties is to minimize the seat tally of the BJP.

In type 1 states, the BJP made a virtually clean sweep in both the 2014 and 2019 Lok Sabha elections. The near total capitulation of Congress in these 100 seats is the foundation of the BJP’s recent electoral strength. In order to make a dent in the dominance of the BJP in these type 1 states, Congress would firstly need to mount a political challenge to the BJP. This has utterly failed to happen in these states, especially in Gujarat. Secondly, Congress would need to advance an alternative policy platform, but in most respects the economic policies of Congress and the BJP tend to converge; thirdly, it would need to achieve a working unity of the party organization on the basis of the first two points; fourthly, it would need to work towards an accommodation with other (usually electorally smaller) non-BJP parties in these states. 

Many type 2 states have seen political realignments since the last Lok Sabha election in 2019. The scope for a unity of opposition parties is possibly unmatched here compared to elsewhere. For instance, in both Bihar and Maharashtra parties that were previously aligned with the BJP—namely the Shiv Sena and Janata Dal (United)—have gone on to join the ranks of the opposition, resulting in formidable alliances in both states. It may be noted here that the fraction of Shiv Sena that is allied with the BJP may currently have the majority of the legislators of the undivided Shiv Sena, but it may not have the support of the majority of the party’s base. Opposition parties need to be alert regarding the political consequences of recent moves by the BJP to “reconnect” with previously estranged acolyte parties in states such as Bihar. 

In Assam, Tripura, Tamil Nadu, Puducherry and Jharkhand, there are already alliances of opposition parties of varying degrees of cohesion and significance. In the state of Karnataka, Congress won the recent assembly elections in a triangular contest. However, the opposition should be alert to the possibility of a tie-up between the BJP and the Janata Dal (Secular) before the Lok Sabha elections in 2024. In fact, in Karnataka and all type 2 states, Congress would further opposition unity if it did not try to irrationally maximize the number of seats it could contest. Rather, adopting an accommodative stance towards other parties in these type 2 states could maximize the number of seats Congress could win. For instance, Congress would gain from adopting an accommodative stance towards actual allies, such as the Shiv Sena (Uddhav Bal Thackeray), and the Sharad Pawar segment of the Nationalist Congress Party in Maharashtra and Jharkhand Mukti Morcha in Jharkhand), or potential allies such as the Janata Dal (Secular) in Karnataka.

It is self-evident that no matter how rationally accommodating the posture of Congress is towards seat adjustments, no other opposition party is capable of singly exceeding the number of seats that Congress is likely to obtain in the next Lok Sabha elections. Unless the seat tally of Congress exceeds 100 (with possibly a third being from type 1 states), the BJP (alone or as part of a coalition) will end up forming government in 2024.  

Type 3 states are those where Congress has a limited role. In Uttar Pradesh, the principal rival of the BJP is the Samajwadi Party, while in Odisha, the Biju Janata Dal plays the same role. In West Bengal, the BJP is pitted against the All India Trinamool Congress and the Left Front. In these states, the principal task confronting the opposition is twofold: firstly, articulation of an alternative policy platform to the BJP; secondly, rationally broad-basing the opposition coalition to the BJP. The parties of the opposition need to be alert regarding efforts by the BJP to consolidate newer acolyte parties in states such as Uttar Pradesh.

In type 4 states, there are other types of challenges to the opposition. In Andhra Pradesh, the possibility of the BJP entering into an electoral adjustment with the Telugu Desam Party cannot be ruled out. Likewise, in Kerala, sections of the state leadership of Congress are not above conniving with the BJP and the broader phalanx of related organizations in order to try and politically counter the Left Democratic Front. These moves may lay the foundations of future growth of the BJP in these states and are evidently detrimental to opposition unity.

Lessons from past experiences and the example of Tamil Nadu.

In its quest for unity, the opposition could draw some lessons from the experience of the opposition alliance in Tamil Nadu. Though the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam is the leading component of this alliance, it has made an effort on its part to accommodate other parties in the coalition. This accommodation spans both political-organizational and electoral domains. It is noteworthy that the electoral domain spans elections to the Lok Sabha, Rajya Sabha, Legislative Assembly and local bodies. 

However, it remains undeniable that the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam drives a “hard bargain” in accommodation measures (possibly due to apprehensions about possible political re-engineering) and also at least partially reneges on its pre-election acquiescence in the concession of leadership positions in particular local bodies. The state government of Tamil Nadu that is led by the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam has not hesitated to institute policies adopted from the neoliberal playbook, but it is also known to have pulled back some of these measures when faced with opposition from its own coalition partner parties. 

An important reason why the alliance has held together in Tamil Nadu until now is the convergence among all its constituents, by and large, in adopting a posture which puts their mutual opposition to the politics of the BJP at the forefront. This posture is both a cause and effect of their joint efforts to combat the BJP, both in terms of popular movements as well as the quotidian battle of ideas. 

Any unity among the opposition parties can turn out to be politically significant only if the parties act accommodatingly with respect to each other in terms of political-organizational and electoral considerations. Instead of trying to maximize the number of contested seats per party, it would be more rational to maximize the number of seats won by all of the parties through the widest possible span of the opposition alliance within each Indian state and therefore across the country.

The emphasis on state-focused electoral strategies does not imply that political policy issues are in any way less significant than political-organizational matters. The opposition parties in their meeting on July 18, 2023 have decided to set up a coordination committee of 11 members in their next meeting in Mumbai. Along with this, a central secretariat will also be set up for handling tasks such as campaign management, joint rallies et cetera.

The opposition parties have put out a declaration that they will fight against attacks on “foundational pillars of the Indian Constitution—secular democracy, economic sovereignty, social justice and federalism.” But the crystallization of such principles in a common minimum program will be politically relevant only if there are participative mass movements presently instituted for their eventual political realization after the displacement of the BJP-led union government in the 2024 Lok Sabha elections.

[Christian Hadjipateras and Anton Schauble edited this piece.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

The post How to Make an Alliance That Can Beat the BJP appeared first on Fair Observer.

Current drawbacks of adoption laws in India

Without the UCC, there are currently different adoption laws for different religious communities. There are a number of drawbacks, including:

— Lack of uniformity in the rights of adopted children. The rights of
adopted children vary depending on the religious community.
Under Hindu law, an adopted child is considered to be the
natural child of the adoptive parents. Under Islamic law, an
adopted child is not considered to be equivalent to a natural
child of the adoptive parents.

— Discrimination. The different laws governing adoption can also
lead to discrimination against certain groups of people, such as
single people, same-sex couples and interfaith couples. This can
make it more difficult for these groups of people to adopt a
child.

— Lack of clarity. The different laws governing adoption can be
complex and confusing. This can make it difficult for people to
understand their rights and responsibilities as adoptive parents or
children. For example, in Rajwinder Kaur & Anr v. Central
Adoption Resource Agency (CARA), the Delhi High Court ruled
that if a child is adopted in accordance with Hindu Adoption
and Maintenance Act (HAMA) rules, it is not necessary to use
the rules of the Juvenile Justice Act, 2015, to ensure that the
adoption is legal. Without assistance from anybody else, without
acknowledgment from CARA or any governmental authority,
an adoption carried out in accordance with the conditions
outlined in HAMA would be valid.

— Difficulties in transferring parental rights. The process of
transferring parental rights from the biological parents to the
adoptive parents can be complex and time-consuming. This can
be especially difficult for children who are orphaned or
abandoned. 

— Unreasonable delays. Tens of thousands of childless people
approved by CARA are still waiting to adopt, more than half of
them for over three years. True, there are fewer children
available for adoption in recent years, but administrative delays
must also take a good share of the blame. While law-abiding
prospective parents await their children, a black market for
children thrives. Just over a month ago, West Bengal witnessed
the shameful case of a couple that sold their 8-month-old son for
the price of an iPhone. 

— Inconsistency in eligibility requirements. The eligibility
requirements for adoption vary depending on the religious
community. This can make it difficult for prospective parents to
navigate the adoption process and can also lead to disparities in
the treatment of adopted children. For example, under Hindu
law, a married woman cannot adopt a child, while under Islamic
law, only a man can adopt a child.

This last issue has been partly remedied by case law, namely Shabnam Hashmi v. Union of India. Hashmi, a Muslim woman, adopted a child, which Muslim law does not allow. She filed a petition for recognition of the right to adopt, regardless of religion. The Supreme Court held that the Juvenile Justice Act gave her the right to do so and noted that the act aims at achieving the purpose of a UCC.

While Hashmi provides a precedent for the right to adopt, it needs to be codified in a more general law.

How can the UCC help?

The UCC would help to overcome these problems by providing a single, uniform set of adoption laws for all citizens of India. This would make adoption law both more fair and more effective.

The UCC would ensure that all children have the same opportunities to be adopted and that all competent adults have the same rights to adopt. It would reduce discrimination against single people, same-sex couples and interfaith couples. It would make it easier for prospective parents to adopt children from other religions.

Once adoption had been completed, the UCC would ensure that all adoptive parents and children have the same rights and responsibilities. The rights of adopted children would be clearer and more consistent, regardless of their religious affiliation. This would give adopted children greater certainty about their legal status and their rights to inherit property and other assets. It would also make it easier for adoptive parents to obtain financial assistance for their children.

In addition to making adoption more fair, the UCC would also streamline the process for everyone. By using the same procedure for everyone, adoption would be simpler and faster, making it easier for adoptive parents to bring children into their families. The UCC would simplify the process of transferring parental rights and make it easier for adopted children to inherit property and other assets. By providing clarity and certainty for adoptive parents and children, the UCC would make it easier for them to access the legal system.

Finally, the UCC would help to increase social acceptance of adoption. It would help to reduce the stigma associated with it, making adopted children equal to their peers. This would make it easier for adoptive parents to raise their children in a supportive environment.

The way forward is not without its obstacles. There is opposition to the idea of a uniform code, particularly from religious and tribal groups. However, the potential benefits for adoptive parents and children outweigh the challenges. Ensuring that all children have the opportunity to grow up in a loving and stable home is something worth fighting for.

[Anton Schauble edited this piece.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

The post Why the UCC Is Important for Adoption in India appeared first on Fair Observer.

A good starting point would be the Arthashastra (composed some time between 200 BC and 300 AD) one of India’s most prominent literary collections. Its author, Kautilya, can shed light on India’s strategic logic, as some critics are accusing India’s foreign policy of following a hyper-realist approach. Others have even gone so far as to blame a Hindu nationalist mindset, referring to it as “Hindutva realism” and sometimes casually portraying India as an ally of Russia. Therefore, the key to understanding the nuances of Indian strategic thinking lies in Kautilya’s ancient writings.

The Arthashastra stands out among its peers since it details the grand strategy and tactical maneuvers we see in today’s foreign policy practice. Its role as a didactic text that acts as a moral-strategic compass for decision-making (both subconscious and conscious) has also contributed to its relevance in the present day. Traces of the Arthashastra can be found in Kamandaki, Somadeva, Sukranti, Panchtantra, all ancient Indian texts. Its influence is also present in Mughal, British, and independent Indian writings; and is especially visible in India’s first Prime Minister Pandit Nehru’s moral politics.

Indian foreign policy and Kautilyan thought

Kautilya’s ideas have been an essential inspiration for scholars involved in India’s strategy. Although their interpretation may have branched out through various subcultures, the phenomenon highlights the wide scope of schools of thought within the broader umbrella of strategic thinking. Today, when we see India engaging with the global community to shape international developments, Kautilya’s strategic thinking is never too far away. Most of India’s engagements with other states have been shaped by its national interests. Here, Indian thought conforms to the principle of yokagshema (assurance of welfare), a notion that encompasses both the prosperity and security of citizens.

This is not new, as we have seen this approach even in India’s stance on climate change negotiation: domestic considerations have shaped its international position and obligations which have prioritized the citizens’ needs over moral obligations. Kautilyan thought puts the onus on expanding and maintaining the power capabilities of the state while protecting its citizens and giving them the tools to prosper. We see this phenomenon playing in India’s interaction with Russia, but also in its relations with the US, China and other countries. 

This political approach undertaken by the Modi government differs from the moralistic one other states have followed. The latter tend to focus explicitly on normative values such as human rights and liberal rules-based order. Today, Kautilya’s focus on a mixture of political morality and rationality comes into play in India’s approach. The latter is obviously not oblivious to issues of low politics, but overarching domestic factors that play into the international order do shape India’s worldview, which harks back to Kautilyan’s thought. Lately, the COVID-19 pandemic has also pushed up domestic factors in the list of priorities. In other words, India’s foreign policy and diplomatic approach is never divorced from its internal politics.

Kautilya’s sadgunya (Six Foreign Policy Measures) have also influenced India foreign policy. One of those measures is known as Yana—building up one’s capacities and capabilities in order to prepare for the worst scenario: war. As India builds its military capabilities, its focus is to make sure that it protects its interests rather than entangle itself with the US to isolate Russia, which would push Russia towards China. India’s focus is now locked on China. Any action by the West that strengthens the Russia-China axis will prove to be detrimental to India’s long-term interests.

Hence, India remains cautious in its relations with Russia and the US. Another argument is that Kautilya teaches his readers to prefer a friend or ally that is more consistent in its approach. India’s dependence on Russia for its defense inventory is just one part of the equation. Russia has consistently been more supportive of India’s interests than the US, a much more recent partner. Currently, a careful, introspective debate is underway in New Delhi to determine where the US and Russia fit in India’s grand strategy. 

Keeping the balance

India does not want its ties with the US to upset Russia, since adding another rival that can exacerbate current issues does not make any sense. At the same time, strengthening the partnership with the US is also important, but India would rather not compromise on its objectives (public welfare and independence).

The partnership with the US is more about increasing India’s relative power while refusing to surrender its bargaining power. This is a carefully balanced strategy that aims to protect and expand its partnerships while sticking to the best scenario that minimizes India’s vulnerability and maximizes its prosperity vis-à-vis China. India recognizes that any form of increased partnership leading towards an alliance with the US will put India in a compromising position, which will affect the welfare of its people. 

India focusing on fostering diverse and better relations with other countries is just an updated version of Kautilya’s foreign policy approach that fits perfectly in today’s context. Here, multi-alignment serves India’s objectives to engage with multiple countries to achieve its foreign policy goals and attain its economic objectives. This is a major part of building up its capacity and capabilities as part of its strategy regarding China.

To understand India’s strategic policy, one must be aware of the holistic approach that connects external and internal policies in order to attain grand objectives and of the preference given to the latter in the strategic-planning equation. It seems that in a world governed by what Kautilya called Matsyanyaya (“the law of the fish,” where the big fish eats the smaller ones), India is once again banking on Kautilya’s Arthashastra. Kautilya has always been the key to make sense of India’s foreign policy and diplomacy, and this is especially true in today’s context where the dichotomies of good/evil, democracy/authoritarian, and moral/immoral have muddied our analysis.

[Thomas Isackson edited this piece.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

The post Here Are the Secrets Behind India’s Strategic Behavior appeared first on Fair Observer.

Great men and women are a product of time, place and circumstance. The exceptional demands of the situation in which they are thrust bring out the abilities that set them apart. Yet there are individuals who rise so much above what their predecessors have done that they become world figures.

Examples of unparalleled leaders in the military sphere include Hannibal, Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar, Genghis Khan, and Napoleon. Of these, Caesar was also an author. I have admired his direct style in the memoir De bello Gallico, known in English as The Gallic War.

I believe there is no ruler in world history who equals the intellectual achievements of Bhoja, who ruled a vast empire from his capital at Dhārā from 1010 to 1055 CE. Not only was he a military leader who defeated many kings, but he was a person of acute intellect, a polymath who wrote 84 books on subjects that include chemistry, grammar, architecture, astronomy and even robotics.

A successful conqueror

At its greatest extent, Bhoja’s empire stretched from Vidisha in the east to the Sabarmati River in the west and from Chittor in the north to Konkan in the south—i.e., most of middle India—although the Udaipur Prashasti inscription, written by Bhoja’s successor Udayaditya, claims that his rule covered most of India. His armies fought as far afield as Sindh and Afghanistan.

The rule of Rājā (or King) Bhoja may have begun somewhat before 1010. The earliest known reference to him is from the copper plates found at Modasa in North Gujarat, dating to 1010. A contemporary account of his rule is in Dhanapāla’s Tilaka-Mañjari. Merutuṅga’s Prabandha-cintāmaṇi, completed in the fourteenth century, states that he ruled for 55 years, 7 months and 3 days, indicating that his rule may have begun as early as the year 1000. Another important source is Ballāla’s Bhoja-prabandha, composed at Varanasi in the 17th century.

Bhoja’s military campaigns and conquests were in all directions. We have inscriptional evidence of his campaign in Gujarat in 1018 and in Konkana in 1020.

He was a contemporary of the great Chola emperor Rājendra I (r. 1014–1044), who conquered Sri Lanka and large parts of Southeast Asia. In 1019, the two formed an alliance to conquer East India and thus dominated most of India together. According to one inscription, the alliance also included the Kalacuri king Gangeyadeva. The allies also defeated Indranātha, the Somavamshi king of Kalinga.

Perhaps the statement of Bhoja’s rule covering most of India in the Udaipur Prashasti inscription is to indicate the extent of the empires of the two allies. This zone of domination was certainly considerable in a subcontinent so prone to political division.

The Udaipur Prashasti inscription also claims that Bhoja’s armies defeated the Turks. Bhoja is said to have sent troops to the Kabul Shahi ruler Ᾱnandapāla in his fight against the Turkic Ghaznavids. This campaign may be legendary, but legend or not, the image of the great Bhoja resisting Turkish invaders became a powerful symbol for later generations of Indians who resisted Muslim rule.

A polymath and scholar

Bhoja wrote 84 books. These include the following texts, most of which were written in Sanskrit:

— Two books on astronomy and astrology.

— A treatise on chemistry dealing with the extraction of metals from
ores and the production of various drugs.

— A prosimetric retelling of the Ramayana.

— Several poems composed in Sanskrit and Prakrit.

— A major commentary on the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali.

— A treatise on Śaivite philosophy that is also a synthesis of certain
tantras.

— A treatise on Sanskrit grammar that includes a discussion of Vedic
forms.

— A treatise on lexicography.

— A treatise on poetics and dramaturgy. Disagreeing with the
aesthetic hedonism developed by Anandavardhana and
Abhinavagupta, Bhoja sees śṛṅgāra, beauty and cleverness, as the
fundamental and motivating impulse both in the universe and in
drama. This view may have influenced the Kashmiri scholar
Mammaṭa.

— A treatise on medicine:

— A treatise on horses, equine diseases and their remedies.

— A treatise on personal health and well-being.

— An encyclopedia on several topics including statecraft, politics,
city-building, jewel-testing, characteristics of books and ship-
building.

— A treatise on secular and religious architecture, iconography,
painting and machines in 83 chapters. The machines discussed
include mechanical toys or robots. There is also a description of
a flying machine:

Build a great bird of light wood, with a tight sheath, in it place a rasa-yantram as a receptacle for fire with the power of mercury and the force of air from the wings in unison, a man atop may travel far through the sky, painting pictures [in the clouds] with a mind serene.

It is possible that Bhoja made models of wooden aircraft and saw the need for an engine with fire to obtain forward motion by pushing back air. Even if he came up with the description based on theory alone and no models were built, it remains a remarkable description.

The same chapter also has a section on hydraulics:

The flow and water pressure of water can be converted into motion. The water flow moves the machine with the effect that increases with height, pressure, and speed. If water is conserved, it can be used again effectively. It is the way that water flow can be converted into power.

Lastly, a work attributed to Kumbha names Bhoja as an authority on music, which suggests that he also wrote a work on it.

A great builder

Merutuṅga, in his Prabandha-Cintāmaṇi, states that Bhoja constructed 104 temples in his capital city of Dhārā alone. Of these, the Bhojeśvara temple in Bhojpur, about 30 km from Bhopal, appears to be the only one that has survived.

The Bhojeśvara temple was never completed. Dedicated to Shiva, its lingam is 7½ feet tall and 17¾ feet in circumference, set on a square platform with a side length of 21½ feet. The total height of the lingam, including the platform, is over 40 feet. Detailed architectural plans for the temple are engraved on the rocks in the surrounding quarries that indicate that the original intention was to build a massive temple complex with many more temples. Had these plans been executed, this would have constituted one of the largest temple complexes in India.

This great temple features several peculiar elements, including the omission of a mandapa hall leading to the inner sanctum, or garbhagṛha, and the rectilinear roof instead of the typical curvilinear shikhara. It has been proposed that the temple was a funerary temple, or svargārohana-prāsāda.

Its great size may have been inspired by the scale of the Bṛhadīśvara temple in Thanjavur that was built by the father of his ally Rājendra, Rājārāja I, between 1003 and 1010. The Bṛhadīśvara temple, which is 208 feet tall, was the tallest free-standing building in the world when it was constructed.

Bhoja, together with the Solanki king Bhimdev of Gujarat, rebuilt the temple at Somnath between 1026 and 1042 after it was sacked by Mahmud of Ghazni in 1024. This temple was later destroyed.

Another notable construction was the civil engineering masterpiece of Bhoj Lake, which was built by damming and channelizing the Betwa River. On its bank stood the Bhojeshwar Temple.

Bhoj Lake,18½ miles long and 7½ miles wide, was constructed using three now-breached dams. Bhoja first built a 98-foot-high dam over the Betwa River; its thickness at the base is over 300 feet, reducing to about 164 feet at the top. The earth-filled dam was encased by stone slabs of average thickness of 30 feet. Two and a half miles north of Bhojpur, near the village Mendua, a second wall over a half mile long was raised in a natural gap between two hills. The third wall, which changed the course of the Kaliasot River, was about eighteen miles from Bhojpur. This man-made lake existed until the 15th century when Hoshang Shah emptied the lake by breaching two of the dams.

He also built the reservoir Bhojapāla, and the city that arose near it became Bhopal.

The Shiva temple ascribed to Bhoja in the Chittor Fort has an image that was named Bhojasvāmindeva.

In his capital city of Dhārā, he presided over a great Sanskrit school called Sarasvatī sadana or Bhāratībhavana. Today, this place is popularly called Bhojshala.

Legacy

Bhoja’s fame lasted in India in many ways. He has been portrayed in legends, in written works and, more recently, in film.

Bhoja founded the city of Bhojpur. The city eventually lent its name to a language, Bhojpuri, which is widely spoken in India and as far away as Fiji and the Caribbean.

So, Rājā Bhoja’s name lives on in India in many forms: from the Bhojpur and the Bohojpuri language to Bohpal, the Bhojshala and Bhojanagar, in Rajasthan. 

Bhoja was revered as the ideal and perfect king, and many who followed him, such as King Arjunavarman (circa 1210–15), were taken to be his reincarnations. The great Krishnadevarāya of the Vijayanagara Empire styled himself as Abhinava-Bhoja (“the new Bhoja”) and Sakala-Kalā-Bhoja (“Bhoja of all the arts”).

When Bhoja was alive, it was said:

अद्य धारा सदाधारा सदालम्बा सरस्वती।
पण्डिता मण्डिताः सर्वे भोजराजे भुवि स्थिते॥

Today, the stream (dhārā) of Sarasvatī is steady in Dhārā,
All the scholars are honored in the land of King Bhoja.

[The author published the first draft of this piece on Medium.]

[Anton Schauble edited this piece.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

The post Rājā Bhoja: India’s Greatest Scholar-King appeared first on Fair Observer.

However, navigating the complexities of this nascent industrialization required a delicate balance between fostering domestic growth and safeguarding against the influx of cheaper imports. To that end, Nehru implemented a policy of imposing high import duties, thereby erecting a protective barrier around domestic industries.40

In the 1990s, India, under the leadership of Prime Minister P.V. Narasimha Rao, confronted a pressing foreign exchange crisis that required urgent action. The government turned to the International Monetary Fund (IMF) for assistance, securing loans that would ultimately have far-reaching implications for the nation’s economic trajectory. The conditions attached to these loans marked a decisive turning point, as they compelled India to embark on a path of liberalization and open its economy to the world.

​​In compliance with the IMF’s prescriptions, India embarked on a momentous journey of economic liberalization, dismantling trade barriers and embracing free trade. Over the span of a mere decade, the government drastically changed its policy. It slashed import duties for industrial goods to the bone. The reduction, however, occurred without commensurate comprehensive reforms.

Amidst the rapid decline in import duties, the manufacturing industry found itself grappling with a confluence of factors that eroded its competitiveness. 

The costs of essential inputs for manufacturing, including furnace oil, power, loans and infrastructure, witnessed a notable uptick. Often, government-backed entities supplied these inputs. The cost escalations imposed a significant burden on domestic manufacturers, impeding their ability to compete on a level playing field.

Further red tape and corruption have plagued the implementation of a number of laws, including the Factories Act and the Environment and Pollution Control Act. This impedes the growth of the manufacturing industry and hinders its potential.

​​To meet local demand, look overseas

In the early 2000s, a noticeable trend emerged within India’s business landscape. An increasing number of domestic companies opted to outsource their manufacturing operations overseas and import products.

This strategic decision aimed at minimizing costs and capitalizing on global supply chains. Simultaneously, however, it contributed to the closure of numerous domestic industries that were unable to compete with the influx of cheaper imports.

Despite its vast size and burgeoning population, India finds itself heavily reliant on imports to meet a significant portion of its domestic demand. This has forced many industries in India to shutter their operations, as they are unable to withstand the onslaught of more cost-effective imports.

A notable example can be found in the calcium carbide industry, where Indian companies have increasingly turned to foreign suppliers for imports. By 2004, this had led to closures in the domestic industry due to the inflow of cheaper foreign sources, despite the presence of a heavy import duty.

The soda ash industry also outsourced production in the early 2000s as many big names like Tata Chemicals and Nirma bought plants overseas and imported soda ash into India rather than expanding their domestic operations.

Another striking example is India’s status as the largest importer of PVC resin globally. There has been no concurrent expansion of domestic companies. Neither have there been foreign companies establishing their own plants in the country.

These dynamics contribute to a business culture in India in which non-technocrats occupy leadership positions; their primary focus often lies in navigating the business environment rather than spearheading technological advancements. 

Subsidies, taxes and red tape

The decline of India’s manufacturing sector can be attributed, in part, to the comparatively higher input costs imposed by the Indian government. This discrepancy in cost has made it arduous for domestic companies to thrive amidst global competition.

A glaring example of this disparity lies in the freight costs incurred for transporting goods. It is almost twice as expensive to ship goods to the north of India from the south of India than it is to ship them from China! This is largely due to the burdensome 100% taxes levied on petrol and diesel.

Remarkably, it is less expensive to fly from Mumbai to Dubai than to travel the same distance from Mumbai to Calcutta. This is due to the exemption of aviation turbine fuel taxes for international flights.

India’s practice of subsidizing the government without yielding significant benefits has also become evident. The case of calcium carbide in the late 1990s exemplifies this. Despite a substantial duty on the chemical, imports of calcium carbide from China are far cheaper than domestically manufactured calcium carbide.

This is due to the exorbitant power costs imposed by State Electricity Boards in India. These elevated power costs significantly inflate the cost of producing calcium carbide domestically, rendering it less competitive compared to its imported counterpart.

India’s high indirect taxes also contribute to the burdensome costs of the manufacturing sector. It should be noted that the World Trade Organization (WTO) has recommended that exports should be exempt from such taxes.

Lastly, the acts and regulations governing the manufacturing industry in India often take on a policing approach rather than fostering a partnership for growth. 

For instance, in the airline industry, companies seeking regulatory approval to operate are not only required to obtain licenses but must also pay the regulation agency’s employees to develop the necessary skills for certification. Generally, these authorities lack the expertise of the industries they oversee.

This necessitates a reevaluation of the regulatory framework in India. By fostering a collaborative and supportive approach, authorities can align themselves with the needs of the sector. This entails developing a deep understanding of the specific industries they regulate and providing necessary guidance.

While I have not exhausted all of the factors, these are the core reasons why manufacturing is less than 15% of India’s gross domestic product. Despite the country’s abundant natural resources and a large pool of human talent, outdated methods of governance have continued to hinder the growth of the manufacturing sector. It is crucial to address these issues comprehensively.

Regulators can do better

Addressing the decline in manufacturing requires proactive measures from the government. 

• Establishing a collaborative body: Creating a Ministry of International Trade and Industry-style body, similar to post-World War II Japan, can facilitate closer collaboration between businesses and industries.
• Drastically reducing indirect taxation: Reducing the burden of indirect taxes can significantly alleviate the cost pressures on manufacturers. Additionally, allowing for the set-off of all indirect taxes at different stages of the production process would further enhance their competitiveness.
• Embracing blockchain technology: Removing regulations and encouraging the adoption of blockchain technology can enhance transparency and efficiency in the approval process. By leveraging blockchain, the government can create a transparent and traceable system that streamlines regulatory procedures and reduces bureaucracy.
• Incentivizing foreign investment: Providing attractive incentives to foreign companies can encourage them to invest in India’s manufacturing sector. Foreign investment can bring in advanced technologies, expertise and capital, leading to job creation and economic growth. Drawing lessons from Margaret Thatcher’s approach in the 1980s, India should embrace foreign ownership of companies to revitalize the manufacturing sector.

Implementing these strategies requires a change in mindset and a commitment to prioritizing growth. Government officials and policymakers need to adopt a proactive approach that encourages and supports industry rather than excessively regulating it. By fostering a conducive environment for manufacturing, India can move closer to achieving the goal of self-reliance—atmanirbharta—and become a global manufacturing hub.

[Naveed Ahsan edited this piece.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

The post Here Is Why Indian Manufacturing Is Struggling appeared first on Fair Observer.