Kashmir Will Finally Elect an Assembly—One Which New Delhi Will Fully Dominate; Trumpian Temptation that India Must Avoid
Modi wants 'one nation, one election', but – convenienty for BJP – Election Commission decouples Maharashtra poll from Haryana, selective outrage over crimes against women
Note: There was no edition of The India Cable on Thursday, August 15, 2024, because of the Independence Day holiday.
A newsletter from The Wire | Founded by Sushant Singh, MK Venu, Sidharth Bhatia, Pratik Kanjilal, Tanweer Alam, Siddharth Varadarajan and Seema Chishti | Contributing writer: Kalrav Joshi, with additional inputs by Anirudh SK
Snapshot of the day
August 16, 2024
Siddharth Varadarajan
Ten years after they last voted in an assembly election, the people of Jammu and Kashmir will finally get to choose who will govern them. Or will they? Before their statehood and special status under the Constitution were done away with, Kashmiris elected legislators to represent them every six years. The scrapping of Article 370 in August 2019 was supposed to ‘fully integrate’ J&K into the Indian Union – where assembly elections are held every five years – but these ‘fully integrated’ Indians were denied their right to vote for five full years without a murmur of protest from any other part of the country.
Today the Election Commission announced that the long delayed assembly election will now held on September 18, 25 and October 1 but the representatives they choose will not have even a fraction of the power and authority they did when elections were held in 2014. J&K is now just a Union Territory, a centrally administered piece of real estate where all the key decisions about the region’s economy, ecology, land use and security will be taken by unelected officials acting on the instructions of the Union Home Minister and his representative, the Lieutenant Governor. This means the assembly will be akin to a glorified municipal council.
The Modi-led government had provided an assurance to the Supreme Court that J&K will eventually get back its statehood but there is no timeframe and, more importantly, no commitment about restoring full statehood. This means Jammu and Kashmir could well go the way of Delhi and Puducherry, where ‘statehood’ means the complete domination of the Union government and its LG.
That said, the upcoming elections are going to be keenly contested and will see a tripolar fight. In the fray will be (1) the three ‘mainstream’ opposition parties (i.e. the National Conference, the Peoples Democratic Party and the Congress), most probably fighting singly rather than in alliance, (2) the Bharatiya Janata Party and its allies and proxies, like the Apni Party, and (3) independent pro-Kashmir formations of the kind that saw Engineer Rashid win the Baramulla Lok Sabha seat from Tihar Jail. Until Rashid’s surprise win, the smart money would have been on the NC coming tops in the Valley. But things are more unpredictable now. Except for the likelihood of the BJP doing poorly outside of its Jammu strongholds.
Not so fun fact: Poor Ladakh, which used to elect representatives to the undivided J&K assembly, will remain disenfranchised.
Haryana will also elect its assembly on October 1, and the results of both J&K and Haryana will be declared on October 4. As of today, the Congress under Bhupinder Singh Hooda is the front-runner.
While India celebrated its independence yesterday, women in Kolkata, one of its largest metropolises, were forced to take to the streets to assert their freedom to walk the city without fear of being attacked. Angst, fraternity and hope all characterised the Reclaim the Night protest in Kolkata on Friday night, prompted by the brutal rape and murder of a doctor on the premises of the government-run RG Kar hospital. One magazine editor told Soutik Biswas: “There was no excitement, just a stoic determination to create an event which would become a symbol for the times to come.” Cherylann Mollan spoke to one woman doctor from the hospital on how the brutal rape and murder of her colleague – which took place just metres away from where she recently slept, just like her colleague – has changed her life.
There is plenty of politics at play too. The state government – run by Trinamool Congress – is accused of taking the crime lightly, a charge they deny by asserting that the West Bengal police promptly arrested the prime suspect and that they were willing to hand the matter over to the CBI even before the High Court intervenes. However, the government’s tardiness in dealing with the hospital administrator – whose callousness inflamed the hospital staff and wider civil society – is part of the record now. And Mamata Banerjee has not helped her case by allowing a mob to trash the ICU of the hospital and then claiming disturbing video footage of them swarming through the street was generated by ‘Artificial Intelligence”.
As the BJP and national media pile on the pressure, the Trinamool is ‘over-correcting’. One of its MPs known for being opposed to capital punishment tweeted a soundbite of Mamata Banerjee asking for not just the death penalty for the rapist but that he be hanged by August 25! Mamata Banerjee has now announced a rally to call for the death penalty.
Sadly, outrage in India often hinges on the victim's social standing. Violence against women is abhorrent, yet the nation’s conscience barely stirs if the survivor is from a marginalised community—Dalit, Adivasi, Muslim, or Christian. While the country protests the horrific rape and murder of a 31-year-old woman doctor in Kolkata, the recent rapes of two minor Dalit girls in Uttar Pradesh and Bihar have been met with silence. This disparity forces us to confront a disturbing truth: Where is the outrage for Dalit victims? Why is their suffering ignored? “That's primarily because we largely accept rape as a tool for political and social revenge. Until we change this, there will never be justice — not for the doctor in Kolkata, neither for the 14-year-old Dalit girl from Muzaffarpur,” says journalist Himanshi Dahiya.
An unprecedented low in Bihar’s deteriorating law and order situation was reportedly reached when a 14-year-old Dalit girl was kidnapped from her home, gang-raped, and killed in the Muzaffarpur district. On August 12, a 57-year-old government official was arrested for allegedly raping a 6-year-old Dalit girl in her home in Bulandshahr, Uttar Pradesh. The accused, Gajendra Singh, who served as an Agriculture Development Officer, has been arrested and suspended from his position. The neighbour’s child recorded the horrific act on their mobile phone.
In his longest-ever Independence Day speech, Prime Minister Narendra Modi expressed his concern over the safety of women, emphasising the importance of instilling fear among the culprits. Following which, All India Majlis-e-Ittehadul Muslimeen (AIMIM) chief and Hyderabad MP Asaduddin Owaisi today questioned the hypocrisy of such theatrics:
In today’s speech @narendramodi expressed concern over women’s safety. His own govt approved the release of Bilqis Bano’s rapists & murderers of her family. She spent 15 years fighting for justice. Modi was Gujarat CM for most of this time. Modi has campaigned for a candidate in Karnataka who is accused of the most heinous crimes against thousands of women. BJP’s high command reportedly knew of these crimes much before they were made public.
If the Prime Minister himself doesn’t take women’s safety seriously, then how can we expect social change? When the ruling party releases convicted rapists, and they’re garlanded on their release, what’s the message going to criminals?Modi also said in his speech that Indians have spent the last three-quarters of a century living under a “communal civil code” and that what we need to attain freedom from religious discrimination is a “secular civil code”. Do his allies in the NDA trust him to deliver a truly secular code? Their spokespersons’ statements to Nistula Hebbar indicate some reticence. “Unless there is a concrete proposal, we cannot possibly comment on the issue,” Sanjay Jha of the JD(U) said; an unnamed individual from the TDP said there have been no meetings on a uniform civil code within the NDA.
Listening to the prime minister’s remarks from the fifth row of the audience was Rahul Gandhi, now leader of opposition in the Lok Sabha. The Congress said that Gandhi ought to have been given a seat further ahead as per protocol – but many front-row seats were occupied by India’s Paris Olympic medallists. The party was not amused. “Modi ji, it’s about time you wake up to the new reality post-June 4 … While Olympians deserve every bit of respect, I wonder how Cabinet Ministers like Amit Shah or Nirmala Sitharaman ji get front row seats ahead of them,” KC Venugopal said on X.
Despite a decrease in overall counterfeit currency detection, the Rs 500 and Rs 2,000 notes, introduced post-demonetisation in 2016, now account for over 50% of all fakes, as per the data submitted to Parliament by the Ministry of Finance. Alarmingly, counterfeit Rs 500 notes have nearly quadrupled from 2018-19 to 2023-24, and fake Rs 2,000 notes have tripled since 2022-23. This surge is particularly concerning given the Modi-led government’s claim that demonetisation aimed to curb fake currency.
Fifty-year-old Dulon Das, who is among those “rare Bengali Hindus who furnished proof of his origins in Bangladesh”, is the first person in Assam to have earned Indian citizenship under the Citizenship (Amendment) Act, Rokibuz Zaman reports.
In the LIC office in Dharwad, Karnataka, a whiteboard for daily news headlines was a staple until the BJP came to power in 2014. Government spooks used to casually monitor it, but in 2015, BJP supporters took offence at mentions of inflation and petrol prices, deeming them to be criticism of the government. They threatened the manager, and soon after, the local union chief received a call from the finance ministry. Fresh from heart surgery and unable to bear the stress, he gave in. The whiteboard, once a symbol of free speech, was unceremoniously erased—apparently, rising prices aren’t newsworthy anymore!
Janam TV, a Malayalam-language news channel that is known to be associated with the BJP, came under fire today after a poster with freedom fighters it uploaded depicted Mahatma Gandhi as the smallest of all. Things escalated when it came to light that an initial version of the poster showed Bhagat Singh pointing a gun at Gandhi, The News Minute reports.
In a protracted and unusual hearing, the Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS) has dismissed Vinesh Phogat’s appeal for a joint silver medal, following her disqualification for failing the weigh-in at the Paris Olympics by 100 grams. After two deferments, the judgment was leaked to the media on Wednesday, two days ahead of its official announcement. With the suspense now over, it’s time for India to introspect as a sporting nation—or at least one that aspires to be. India's journey to becoming a true sporting powerhouse demands nothing less than a comprehensive overhaul. The Khelo India program, despite its good intentions, is failing our athletes. Jayant Pankaj highlights two key issues: unequal funding and the low efficiency of the Khelo India program. The Rs 10,000 stipend is woefully inadequate for those representing India on the global stage, as seen in the 2024 Paris Olympics and 2022 Commonwealth Games.
Accepting the pleas by Phogat and other wrestlers, the Delhi High Court today faulted the Modo government’s sports ministry for tacitly approving the dissolution of the ad-hoc committee of the Indian Olympic Association (IOA) that was tasked with overseeing and supervising the Wrestling Federation of India’s (WFI’s) operations last year. It has ordered reconstitution of the body.
Of course, one issue which won’t go away so easily is the near-total stranglehold of politicians over the administration of all sports in India. Just look at the charts below:
Glitches and freezes plague the Civil Registration System, the Union government’s centralised online portal for the registration of births and deaths. A district official in Chhattisgarh said that the portal sometimes freezes for hours at a time and that it can take up to a day to revive it. Bihar’s chief registrar for births and deaths wrote to the registrar general earlier this month saying the portal’s problems had caused “a huge backlog in all registration units in the state”. Vijaita Singh and Abhinay Lakshman report on the multitude of technical issues that officials have faced so far.
The Vaclav Havel Center, a non-profit organisation based in the United States, has named author and activist Arundhati Roy as one of its two 2024 “Disturbing the Peace” Award winners.
The 70th national film awards have been announced. The Malayalam film Aattam has won the Best Feature Film award. The award for Best Non-Feature Film has been bagged by Ayena (Mirror); Murmurs Of The Jungle gets the award for Best Documentary. Rishab Shetty has been adjudged as Best Actor in leading role for the Kannada language Kantara and Nithya Menen wins the award for Best Actress in a Leading Role for Thiruchitrambalam. Pavan Raj Mallhotra wins the award for Best Supporting Actor and Neena Gupta wins the Best Supporting Actress Award.
Gujarat govt helping Adani Ports ‘secure monopoly’ claims Congress
The Congress has reiterated its demand for a joint parliamentary committee probe into the Adani issue and alleged that the Gujarat government was helping Adani Ports to “secure a monopoly” on the state’s port sector. Congress general secretary in-charge communications Jairam Ramesh said the Gujarat government grants private ports a 30-year concession period on a build-own-operate-transfer, or BOOT, basis. When the concession period lapses, the port’s ownership is transferred to the state government, he says.
“On the basis of this model, Adani Ports currently has control over Mundra, Hazira, and Dahej ports,” Ramesh said. “Before the 2024 Lok Sabha Elections, Adani Ports requested the Gujarat Maritime Board to extend this concession period by another 45 years to 75 years in total.”
India lags behind US, China in AI research with only 1.4% paper contribution
Despite the country’s huge pool of technology-trained talent, India stands 14th – far below other countries such as the US and China – when it comes to Artificial Intelligence (AI) research, according to a study by AI accelerator and ecosystem builder Change Engine. The study revealed that the US and China currently top AI research with 30.4% and 22.8% shares, respectively whereas India’s global share is just 1.4% (2018-2023) when it comes to paper contribution in the top 10 AI conferences in the world. It added that India needs to grow AI research by at least 40% a year to get to a 5% global share in the next five years and create a world-class innovation ecosystem.
Dark days for Surat’s diamond workers
Surat’s diamond industry is in distress. Demand for polished diamonds worldwide is down, causing companies to declare extended vacations or, if they cannot afford to do that, lay off workers. The Surat Diamond Workers’ Union told Mahesh Langa that a suicide helpline it set up last month has received 1,600 calls already from workers who had lost their jobs or were struggling to meet ends following pay cuts. The union’s president said that media reports indicated 65 workers have died by suicide in the last 15 months. The city’s diamond industry employs around seven lakh people.
The Long Cable
The Trumpian temptation that India must avoid
Harish Khare
“As far as the personal attacks, I’m very angry at her because of what she’s done to the country. I think I’m entitled to personal attacks. I don’t have a lot of respect for her. I don’t have a lot of respect for her intelligence, and I think she’ll be a terrible president.”
This cultivated disagreeableness was displayed by the former American president and the current Republican presidential candidate, Donald Trump, during a press conference on Thursday. The “she” he refers to is the current vice-president and the Democratic Party’s presidential nominee, Kamala Harris. Trump has marketed himself as a rough bruiser and an unapologetic abuser. Eight years of Trump’s pre-eminence in the US presidential stakes have not only turned American democracy into an extremely unattractive model for other democracies round the world but have also normalised meanness and bad manners as unavoidable by-products of political contestation.
This in-your-face regression is relevant to us because the Modi crowd has always sought inspiration and legitimacy from the America-based diaspora. Many Modi watchers have suspected involved prompting and tutoring from North America-based Hindu radicals. This may or may not amount to a “foreign hand” at work but there can be little doubt that all this balderdash about “vishwaguru” has its origin from New York and beyond.
Just as the Trump crowd has not been able to reconcile itself to the 2020 defeat, Modi’s handlers in the US seem to be telling him not to get disheartened by the rebuff voters administered to him in June 2024. According to a report in the Indian Express, the truncated prime minister will be feted at a “mega diaspora event” in Long Island next month when he travels to New York at attend the annual UN General Assembly.
Denied a clear-cut majority—and a number far from the war-cry of “aab ki baar 400 paar”—Prime Minister Modi’s advisers and handlers in India seem keen to garner validation and applause from the “global community.” The incongruity of a 56-inch deshbhakt seeking respectability from those who have chosen to abandon Mother India and recuse themselves from its trials and tribulations can only be explained by the Nagpur-based commissars; but, democratic India needs to keep a vigil against bad American political habits and practices seeping into our narrative-culture.
Some can argue that it is already too late in the day to try to firewall the ruling dispensation from Trumpian temptations. Those who had hoped that the BJP and its various power-centres would be able to pull Prime Minister Modi back from his natural confrontationist impulses have lost the battle. His August 15, 2024 performance was deeply disappointing on more than one count.
Relegating the Leader of Opposition to the last row at the Red Fort was unmistakably a trick out of the Trumpian tool-kit. Petty and small-minded. That the responsibility for the Independence Day show at the Red Fort is the administrative burden of the Ministry of Defence suggests that Trumpian spitefulness has perhaps seeped into our vital institutional fabric; or, worse, defence ministry officials were acting under instructions. Slice it either way, the Modi crowd has normalised shabbiness in our public life. Trump, though, would approve.
More than where Rahul Gandhi was made to sit, what was disappointing was where Narendra Modi chose to pitch his faded rhetorical tent. This Independence Day, the prime minister had one and only one duty – in fact, a sacred obligation – to indicate to the nation that he was willing to mobilise democratic energy and enthusiasm to repair our tattered national consensus. But the truncated PM seemed oblivious to the changed mood and expectation among the masses.
Like Trump, Modi too subscribes to the view that divisiveness—along any kind of local sore points and ethnic cleavages – can be tapped to garner electoral dividends and political consolidation of “the base.” His rhetorical posturing and positions, especially of the mangalsutra variety, in the recently concluded Lok Sabha election, were calculated investments in the power of divisiveness. It is a different matter that Modi’s dog whistling went largely unheard in the very Hindi heartland for which he had intended it.
Yet like Trump, the prime minister is unwilling to eschew divisiveness as is evident in his call for a “secular civil code”, an ill-disguised euphemism for the original “uniform civil code.” Clever guys are always in thrall of their own cleverness. Narendra Modi is no exception.
Trump’s relentless fulminations against his opponents at home and abroad are not just a whimsical trait; this is “strategy,” devised and finessed by highly-paid consultants and advisers. The allure of divisiveness, insults and abuse is now as American a fixture as hot dogs, baseball and apple pie. Like Hollywood’s movies, it is also an exportable item – Washington’s gift to democracies around the world.
The Modi establishment has been shopping at the American political supermarket of discord and divisiveness. Just as Trump has made boorishness and rudeness part of his political persona, Modi too has re-defined the art of insult and invective, belittling the historical contribution of nation-builders, mocking his rivals, and demeaning the dignity of his own office.
It is now the responsibility of democratic voices and constitutional institutions to not allow a truncated prime minister to further coarsen our national political culture. Donald Trump is that quintessential Ugly American of yore, and we do not need to ape him or his pugnaciousness. The nation needs healing, not more of the same meaningless and bogus communal slogans.
(Harish Khare is a former editor-in-chief of The Tribune.)
Reportedly
One nation, one election? Really? The PM bleated about it on I-Day, but we saw a few hours ago how the Election Commission can barely manage simultaneous elections in states already twinned as bound to go to the polls at the same time. What earthly reason is there to delink Maharashtra from Haryana, which voted together in 2019? ‘Security’, Ganesh Chaturthi, rains and Diwali as reasons are hardly credible and prove that the EC is not really an autonomous body. Perhaps the EC is waiting for another set of schemes like the Ladki Bahin Yojana to be announced and implemented by the BJP-led government in Maharashtra before it announces polls?
Deep dive
In Pakistan, protest music and lyrics have been around since before its birth. From rebel anthems and satire to poetry that has moved generations, Dawn has a great piece in an ode to Pakistan’s resistance music across nearly eight decades. Deep dive into it here. Health warning: Included is a brilliant Spotify playlist, so be prepared to get lost!
Prime number: Rs 5 Million stolen = Ram Rajya Logic
In a stunning heist worthy of Bollywood, 3,800 bamboo lights and 36 projectors from Ayodhya’s high-security area, worth over Rs 50 lakh have been stolen. The only thing brighter than the stolen lights are the police’s prospects of 'solving' the crime, as an FIR was swiftly filed. Presumably, the usual suspects – dus numbarees in police patois – will be rounded up.Opeds you don’t want to miss
Syed Affan recounts his brush with Hindu supremacists aboard an Aligarh-Delhi train.
“Why should our public policies promote a race in which so much energy and resources are spent?” asks Ashok Lavasa, who makes the case for reducing the upper age limit for applying for the civil service exam from 25 and to convince young Indians that government service is hardly the only way to serve one’s country.
There is a churn in Maharashtra’s politics ahead of the assembly elections slated for later this year. Sunil Gatade and Venkatesh Kesari write of the tussle over three ‘T’s that is brewing in the state.
Independence Day 2024: The popular image of the refugee is one of upper caste, upper class people, who have lost everything, says Ravinder Kaur, what is overlooked are the narratives of Dalit refugees during Partition.
Size does matter, between India and China and while talking about GDP. So who was bigger in ancient times, China or India, asks Richard Baldwin.
The Gujarat model? It raises several health alarms, writes Atman Shah.
On Bangladesh, Isaac Chortiner interviews Subho Basu on the history behind the powerful student movements.
Taking stock of the Bangladesh upheaval, Shyam Saran writes that India must knit its neighbours together in a web of interdependencies to pursue its global ambitions.
The arrest of former ISI chief Faiz Hameed in Pakistan is “a signal to the military fraternity—especially retired and serving officers who supported Imran Khan and stood against the current chief, General Asim Munir—to mend their ways,” says Ayesha Siddiqa.
Bharat Bhushan speculates that the Bharatiya Janata Party seems in no hurry to appoint a president to replace JP Nadda.
Buddhadev Bhattacharjee, the second communist chief minister of West Bengal, “had a dream that could not survive the battle with his past and his party,” writes Rudrangshu Mukherjee.
Deshdeep Dhankar pays tribute to James C. Scott, the “Professor who studied resistance and learnt from peasants.”
To what extent has Wes Anderson, maker of the Darjeeling Express and other films, been influenced by Satyajit Ray? Raj Ajay Pandya explores this question.
Listen up
Does the Labour Party’s 2024 election victory spell the end of the United Kingdom’s foreign policy interest in Asia? And how will its ‘progressive realism’ foreign policy paradigm shape its democracy promotion efforts in this region? Listen to Ben Bland as he talks to Petra Alderman about the UK’s post-Brexit tilt towards Asia, the new Labour government’s foreign policy priorities, and the tensions the ‘progressive realism’ paradigm might pose to the UK government’s democracy promotion activities in Asia.
Watch out
In a hard-hitting interview, Sucheta Dalal, Managing Editor of Moneylife and perhaps the country’s most highly regarded commentator on capital markets, says SEBI’s response to the recent Hindenburg allegations has “no credibility, zero credibility”. Speaking about the regulator’s handling of the Hindenburg allegations since January 2023, when they first broke, Dalal calls them “a textbook example of how not to handle such a situation”.
Over and out
India’s education system builds and reinforces a view that the arts and sciences are wholly separate. “A new gallery in Bangalore hopes to bridge that chasm, provoke new questions and inspire new ideas,” says The Economist.
Speaking of independence and the people of India. Amitava Kumar has organised some postcards.
Bhrigu Sahni and Annette Philip, both products of the Berklee College of Music, have just dropped a stunner, ‘Higher’. Listen and be entranced.
That’s it for today. We’ll be back with you on Monday, on a device near you. If The India Cable was forwarded to you by a friend (perhaps a common friend!) book your own copy by SUBSCRIBING HERE.