Kejriwal Arrested But Deals Hidden in Electoral Bond Data Go Unprobed; Reliance Making Indic Democracy Index for Modi; Is Populism Waning?
A newsletter from The Wire | Founded by MK Venu, Seema Chishti, Siddharth Varadarajan, Sushant Singh, Sidharth Bhatia, Pratik Kanjilal and Tanweer Alam | Contributing writer: Kalrav Joshi, with additional inputs by Anirudh SK
Snapshot of the day
March 22, 2024
Siddharth Varadarajan
Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal was arrested by the Enforcement Directorate yesterday on charges related to the state government’s excise policy. His remand hearing was held today but as of 8 pm the judge has still not reached a decision on whether he goes in or stays out. The charge is that the policy was changed in exchange for gratification. A sum of Rs 100 crore is being mentioned though as yet the alleged payoff has not been located. But before his arrest, electoral bond data made public by the Election Commission shone the light on a company linked to another person accused in the same case, P Sarath Chandra Reddy of Aurobindo Pharma, a Hyderabad based company. It turns out that Reddy had donated Rs 5 crore to the Bharatiya Janata Party in 2022, just five days after he was taken into custody. The company donated a further Rs 25 crore to the BJP soon after Reddy turned approver in the case. And you got it right, the government or ED did not oppose his bail. The amount companies linked to Reddy paid the BJP in the form of electoral bonds is Rs 55 crore. That’s more than a third of the payoff Kejriwal is alleged to have received.
Fun fact: The former governor of Jammu & Kashmir, Satyapal Malik, had categorically stated that Kejriwal would be arrested before general elections. Malik broke with the BJP about two years ago but clearly was aware of a plan that has been long in the making.
Qwik Supply Chain, a company in which Reliance companies have stakes of over 50% and one of whose directors also heads five Reliance firms, donated at least Rs 375 crore to the BJP through electoral bonds. Other people and organisations tied to the conglomerate have donated Rs 170 crore to the ruling party.
The 2019 Lok Sabha polls were one the world’s most expensive elections and they were held a year after electoral bonds made their entry. Now, The Economist says the 2024 election could scale those heights too, as “big Indian companies have been buying “electoral bonds”, mostly for Narendra Modi’s ruling party”, which has amassed a huge war chest even though the Supreme Court finally ruled that no more bonds would be sold. The piece ends with mention of the CPI(M) which “was among the bond scheme’s legal challengers, advocating a German-style system of state funding for political parties. But its leader, Sitaram Yechury, says there is little support among other parties. ‘Nobody wants to stop corporate funding,’ he says. The risk now, he warns, is that if campaign costs continue to grow ‘parties like ours will find it very difficult to contest’.”
Meanwhile, how can poor Indians improve their lot? The Economist says the key is internal migration. For the nation to become richer, “the government could establish an inter-state migration council to help migrants and ensure their freedom of movement”.
There’s been so much breathless focus on ‘development in the Kashmir Valley’ that most Indians do not realise the situation on the ground is seen by Kashmiris as more dire than even the most tumultuous years of militancy experienced in the early 1990s. Peerzada Ashiq reports from and on darkness of the valley. “The long spell of power outages has added to the pangs of residents of Kashmir valley already worried about mandatory installation of smart meters. With no explanation provided by the authorities overseeing the generation and distribution of electricity, the unprecedented rise in power cuts this year during Ramzan have overwhelmed the residents.”
With darkness comes vandalism. Look at the before and after photograph of Amar Singh College in Kashmir and weep.
Globally, there is a deep concern that Sikhs are being targeted by hardline Modi supporters and possibly the Indian government itself. Down under, the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation (ASIO) met with Sikh activists to ask if they were aware of any “foreign interference” in Australia, which they “understood to mean agents working for the Indian government”. Last year, Prime Minister Modi raised the issue of graffiti scrawled on a Hindu temple with his Australian counterpart. Aussie intel officers now “believe that the graffiti may have been done by the Hindus themselves in order to generate police attention towards the Sikhs for Justice Group,” the documents say.
The Kerala government on Thursday told the Supreme Court that the Centre was attempting to control its financial affairs and acting like an “executive”. A bench of Justices Surya Kant and KV Viswanathan was hearing a petition filed in December by the Kerala government that challenged the Centre’s decision to limit the additional money the state can borrow, saying that it violated the principles of fiscal federalism. The Communist Party of India (Marxist)-led state government had said in its plea that lowering the borrowing limit can potentially lead to a “grave financial crisis”.
Months after striking a deal with the Nicolás Maduro government, India’s Jindal Steel & Power Ltd. has taken over operations at Venezuela’s largest iron-ore complex, the first for a private-run firm in the South American country’s heavy industry in over a decade, reports Bloomberg. “Jindal aims to export 600,000 metric tons of the raw material per month by the end of the year, investing an initial $800,000 to upgrade existing equipment, according to one of the people. Terms of the deal aren’t clear since neither the Venezuelan government nor New Delhi-based Jindal have confirmed the arrangement.”
A Hindu Bengali youth has killed himself in Sonarpur, West Bengal. His family say that since the CAA rules were issued he was living in fear as he lacked the ‘necessary’ documents for citizenship. Who is responsible for his death? Surely the government.
It emerges that necessary documents were also denied to four films set in the Gaza Strip, Turkey, Hungary and Bhutan for screening at the 54th International Film Festival of India (IFFI) held in Goa in November 2023. The four films effectively censored by the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting were A Gaza Weekend, a satire directed by Basil Khalil set in a post-epidemic Israel where the Gaza strip becomes the safest place in the Levant; Dormitory, directed by Nehir Tuna, a drama about a teenager sent to a residential Islamic seminary by his father; Explanation for Everything, a Hungarian drama directed by Gábor Reisz that won the Orizzonti award for best film at the 80th Venice Film Festival; The Monk And The Gun, Bhutan’s official entry to the Oscars directed by Pawo Choyning Dorji.
Omar Rashid has more on the politics surrounding the brutal killing of two children, who happen to be Hindu – allegedly by a barber, who happens to be Muslim – in Uttar Pradesh’s Budaun. The seat’s Samajwadi Party Lok Sabha candidate and its incumbent BJP MP have been trading accusations over the double murders.
While the India-Israel relationship has gone from strength to strength, India’s support of UN resolutions critical of Israel has remained largely unchanged, finds Bashir Ali Abbas.
Zomato has said its vegetarian food delivery workers will no longer be called the ‘pure veg’ fleet but instead the ‘veg-only’ fleet. It also clarified that customers will not be able to choose delivery partners from communities of their choice.
Simon Burnton sums up all the goings-on that have transpired in the run-up to the IPL, which seems to now tower over the World Cup and may even leave the elections in the shade. The tournament opens tonight with a match between Chennai and Bengaluru.
In a report for the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, Arzan Tarapore says that though China’s aggression toward Taiwan makes things look dire, “China remains deterrable [and] a military attack on Taiwan is not inevitable”. He goes on to say that India, having the potential to lead a coalition of “non-belligerent states” in deterring Chinese aggression, is part of the solution.
Minerals such as cobalt, nickel, copper and manganese are essential for India to meet its renewable energy generation targets and there are concerns that mining on land is reaching a saturation point. The BBC reports on India’s race to access undersea mineral deposits. It has applied for licenses to mine two mineral sources in the central Indian Ocean. Some also say undersea mining is risky because of the lack of knowledge on the ecosystems in those depths.
Abir Dasgupta asks if Adani firms could be heading for a correction as high as 30%.
Instead of unequivocally denouncing the casteist remarks directed at TM Krishna who was recently awarded with the Sangita Kalanidhi from the Madras Music Academy, the highest award in the Carnatic music scene, Indian mainstream media has chosen to portray them as legitimate grievances, fueling a needless controversy. However, this thread from Pavithra Suryanarayan clears the air.
Modi rolled back curbs on laptop, computer imports due to US pressure
India rolled back a decision to impose import restrictions on laptops, tablets, and certain types of computers after pushback from the World Trade Organisation and the US in August 2023, Reuters reports. The move to impose import restriction rattled several companies, including US-based Apple, Dell, and HP. The US Trade Representative urged India to rescind the licensing requirement. A USTR briefing paper, according to Reuters, said that although Tai “raised concerns” about the policy and “noted” that stakeholders needed to be consulted, she privately told Goyal during the meeting that the US wanted India to “rescind the requirement”. India’s “surprise” announcement “prompts US and other firms to think twice about doing business in India,” said the “talking points” of her briefing paper, the news agency reported.
At the same time, a US diplomat for trade in New Delhi, Travis Coberly, told his USTR colleagues that Indian officials had conceded the sudden rollout of the laptop licensing policy was a mistake, the news agency reported. India’s IT ministry “understands they (India) screwed up. They admitted as much. American companies here have been hammering them about this,” he wrote.
Govt asks Reliance-funded ORF to make new democracy ratings index
The national decadal census continues to be on hold and reliable economic data is in short supply as the Modi government prioritises work on an ‘Indic’ democracy ratings index which it hopes will help it counter the bad press it gets for doing so poorly on global freedom indices. This being a corporate friendly regime, the task has been outsourced to the Reliance-funded Observer Research Foundation (ORF), Al Jazeera reports. “The Democracy Index being prepared by ORF went through a peer review process and expert analysis on the methodology a few weeks ago … it is likely to be released soon,” a second source familiar with the development told Al Jazeera. The NITI Aayog, the government’s internal public policy think tank responsible for carrying out discussions within the Modi government regarding global rankings, said that it was not directly involved in creating the index. According to the report, this exercise started in 2021 after Freedom House, a US-based government-funded NGO, downgraded India’s status from ‘Free’ to ‘Partly Free’. It attributed the downgrade to “a crackdown on expressions of dissent by the media, academics, civil society groups, and protesters”.
The joke is not only alive but kicking in, quite literally.
Om Shanti Om
For Time magazine, Sunita Vishwanath of Hindus for Human Rights takes to the road. She writes that “the brave Hindu leaders I have met, guardians of inclusive traditions that have survived millennia, are quick to admit that India is going through a dark period. But, they say, it will return to the path of secular democracy and unity. I hope that comes sooner than later.”
Her focus is on those who are doing their best to prevent the faith itself to be damaged and appropriated by Hindutva and defined by whom it hates, rather than what it is.
The Long Cable
Is the Wind Turning Against Populism?
Jamal Mecklai
If an asset is outlandishly priced – say, gold was suddenly $10 an ounce – everyone would immediately know that something is seriously wrong. While some will try to take advantage of this, the market would rapidly reverse and the price would shoot upwards towards “normalcy”. That’s the nature of markets, which run in cycles.
Indeed, everything runs in cycles, including politics. And if something as outlandish as 10-dollar gold were to happen in the world of politics, it would be a definitive signal that the existing “ism” is either already or on the way to being changed.
The last turning point in the global political cycle was in 2008 when years of liberalism ended with an African American man in the White House (in a patently racist country). That cycle began about 20 years earlier (in the late 1980’s) when the Reagan/Thatcher juggernaut of conservatism was in full flow. And here we are already 16 years from 2008 with populism in full flow and something even more outlandish than 10-dollar gold shaking up the world of politics. [Drum roll] …I give you, the Pope of Populism, Donald Trump!
That someone as grotesque as Trump was actually president of the most powerful country on earth and has a reasonable chance of being re-elected is, to my mind, a signal that the wave of populism that has been plaguing the world for the nearly two decades or so has not disappeared but is peaking. It can’t get worse from now on and is perhaps on its last legs.
As evidence, there are many straws in the wind. Look, for instance, at the recent travails of Viktor Orban, Hungary’s populist prime minister and supreme leader since 2010. The proximate cause of his problem was the discovery that a former official convicted of covering up sexual crimes at a state-run children's home had been granted clemency by the President, who, together with two senior figures in Orban’s ruling party, have been compelled to resign. Given Orban’s loud preaching of conservative values – same sex marriage is banned and civil rights of LGBTQ+ Hungarians are constrained – as part of his agenda, the hypocrisy stands out like a rotten egg on his sour face.
Tens of thousands of ordinary Hungarians gathered in Budapest in the largest protest against Orban in recent years. To be sure, with almost complete control of most media outlets, he remains popular despite high inflation, low growth, and severe rural poverty. However, corruption is pervasive and, while elections are still two years away, the mood appears to be changing. This is what Reuters reported:
"We have had enough. We need change, this government is full of lies and hypocrisy," said Jozsef Molnar, 64, who added that his 19-year-old son was also out protesting. Molnar said the last time he went to a protest was in 1989 during the time when communism collapsed.
In addition to his domestic woes, Orban has steadily alienated most other members of the EU over his close relationship with Putin, another populist who is beginning to stagger under the weight of his expansionary ambitions. The fact that he (Putin) had to have his main political opponent, Navalny, allegedly killed in prison – as seems most likely – just a month before the presidential election speaks to his nervousness and/or irrationality. The “murder” has triggered the most serious protests in Russia since the start of the Ukraine war, confirming that Putin’s authoritarianism, too, is beginning to fray, although, horrifyingly, people are being killed every day because of him.
And then, of course, there’s Netanyahu. While most Israelis feel the war against Hamas is justified, even more of them realize that the moment the war is over (and perhaps sooner), Netanyahu is finished. In Israel, the families of hostages are rapidly losing patience as are Israel’s till-now staunchest ally, America. Chuck Schumer, the Majority Leader of the Senate and the first Jewish Majority Leader in the US, has called on Israel to hold new elections, saying he believes Netanyahu has lost his way and is an obstacle to peace. It couldn’t be more clear that Netanyahu’s number is up; it’s tragic that he is prolonging this genocide against Palestinians simply to cling to power.
These are pretty egregious examples – particularly, Putin and Netanyahu, who will each be awarded a vicious and bloody end – but a much wider spectrum of leaders, populist or otherwise, are already feeling the pressure. Farmers are protesting all over the EU, in India, and in several countries from the heretofore Soviet bloc; in some of these (Czech Republic, Poland), the protests have been the largest since the fall of communism. It is clear that people in most countries, particularly in the West, are hugely dissatisfied with the way things are going, even without considering the horrific wars that are burning the globe. Clearly, things are going to change.
Change takes time. But the good news is that more and more people are now able to see that populist leaders, who target outsiders (minorities, immigrants), control the media, and brandish authoritarianism, rapidly build a new elite once they come to power with ordinary people getting short shrift in terms of any real benefits.
Till very recently, India seemed to be an exception in that, even though Modi fits the populist definition to a T, there haven’t yet been any earth-shaking waves of dissent. However, the recent disclosure (as a result of the Supreme Court order on Electoral Bonds) that the BJP has been trying to institutionalise crony capitalism has put paid to Modi’s “na khaunga na khane dunga” credentials. This, together with the fact that ongoing price rises are steadily pushing living standards down for most people, suggests that, despite the huge money/media/organisational power the BJP wields, the future of India as a “Hindu rashtra” is most definitely not assured.
Zooming out to the global picture, with Trump remaining loudly in the news, whether as the next President of the US or as a contentious revolutionary tilting at the windmills of the US political system, people across the globe (including India) will be continuously reminded, particularly when they feel the pressure on their wallets, of the foolishness of mistaking a media circus for genuine governance.
Clearly, populism is giving way. Hopefully, a new democratic socialist order will begin to gain ground. The leaders should not take their longevity for granted.
Jamal Mecklai is a leading consultant on Treasury and Forex risk management.
Reportedly
Today is a bleak (and boring) Friday for those of us who wait for new releases. Some really rubbish propaganda is set for release, with names like gazette documents. Not even like The Kerala Story or The Kashmir Files. Now it is JNU, Bastar, Article 370. Yawn.
Speaking of JNU, terrified at election results which are likely to reveal how things are with students, the administration has banned Swati Singh, the general secretary candidate of the United Left alliance from contesting this morning. People can see the Chandigarh mayor election’s Anil Masih’s gaze into the CCTV here, all over again. We don’t know if a film called Chandigarh will be released soon.
Deep dive
In the first part of this two-part series on the India Forum, Pulapre Balakrishnan and M Parameswaran presented an assessment of the performance of the Indian economy on macroeconomic indicators. In this piece here, they focus on well-being indicators – including those pertaining to health, sanitation and housing, poverty, and food security – followed by a discussion of the likely change that may have occurred in the distribution of income.
Prime number: 1.29
India's fertility rate dropped from nearly 6.2 in 1950 to just under 2 in 2021, and is projected to fall further to 1.29 and 1.04 in 2050 and 2100, respectively, according to a new global study published in The Lancet. These numbers were found to be in line with global trends, where the Total Fertility Rate (TFR) was over 4.8 children per woman in 1950 and fell to 2.2 children per woman in 2021. These figures have been projected to fall to 1.8 and 1.6 in 2050 and 2100, respectively.
The South China Morning Post has more, on another recent study which shows that infertility affects roughly 10-14 per cent of Indian couples, and is more common in cities, where one out of every six couples is seeking help with conceiving. While infertility still carries social stigma in many parts of India, more couples are turning to methods such as surrogacy, egg donations and IVF to tackle the issue.
Opeds you don’t want to miss
Sushant Singh writes on how India’s Defence secretary’s “entreaties” over China put the Modi dispensation in a very poor light.
Some blame the Manusmriti for caste, some blame the British. But the primary sources tell a weirder story: of traders, artisans and mercenaries wielding it as a political tool during the fall of the Chola Empire, writes Anirudh Kanisetti.
Although corruption allegations make a lot of noise, Indians seem to prioritise other factors while voting. That’s why the electoral bonds revelations probably won’t hurt the BJP, Shoaib Daniyal says.
Supreme Court advocate Sanjay Hegde and former Supreme Court judge Justice Deepak Gupta parley on judges taking up official positions after retiring, a higher retirement age for judges and possible alternatives to retired judges heading tribunals and commissions.
It is Shaheed Bhagat Singh’s martyrdom day tomorrow. S Irfan Habib remembers him for his revolutionary ideas, his vision for a secular, pluralist and egalitarian India. But it also is a reminder over the years how far away the nation has travelled from his inheritance.
Priya Ramani proposes that instead of global institutions issuing reports lamenting the death of democracy, offering ineffective suggestions to stop its erosion and the rise of autocrats, India should just update the dictionary meaning of democracy.
By ending the government’s Viksit Bharat campaign on WhatsApp and enforcing the removal of the prime and chief ministers’ photos from official sites, the ECI is recognising the importance of digital influence on voters – but it has so far not extended this understanding to social media platforms, Srinivas Kodali points out.
Listen up
On the IHRB podcast, Salil Tripathi speaks to Usha Ramanathan about the state of human rights and business, privacy and much more. Listen here.
Watch out
Weeks before the Indian elections, Arvind Kejriwal – a prominent opposition leader – has been arrested on charges of corruption. Why are so many opposition politicians behind bars? In the 10 years Modi’s government has been in power, more than 400 opposition leaders have been targeted by federal agencies. Watch this episode of ‘The India Report’ on Al Jazeera by Sreenivasan Jain.
Over and out
Chew over how the fruit of a ‘chaunsa-kesar’ mango sapling could serve as a bridge for India-Pakistan peace. Katherine Abraham has a report on peace activists carrying a Pakistani ‘chaunsa’ sapling across the border and grafted it with a kesar mango plant at the Peace Hill Garden in Maharashtra.
The relentless Phunsukh Wangdoo of 3 Idiots! The Aamir Khan character was based on the real hero, Sonam Wangchu in Ladakh. He is on the 17th day of the Climate Fast, where he wished everyone a Happy World Water Day. The least we can do is hear him.
That’s it for today. Happy Holi to all. We’ll be back with you on Tuesday, March 26 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.