Maldives Not for India or China, Wants No Part of Their Rivalry; Global Economy Survived Ukraine War, But Can it Shrug Off Israel Strife?
ED like ‘swarms of locusts’, 20 lakh Bihar students struck off rolls, Narayana Murthy preaches 70 hour work week, teen makes robotic spoon for Parkinson’s, miso and futchka blitzes at home and abroad
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Snapshot of the day
October 27, 2023
Pratik Kanjilal
The Indo-Tibetan Border Police (ITBP) is increasing its presence along the LAC by establishing more than 50 new border posts, from the Karakoram Pass in Ladakh to Jachep La in Arunachal Pradesh, reports The Telegraph. To deal with growing tensions, the Indian government has approved the formation of seven additional ITBP battalions of 9,400 personnel for deployment. Sources report an escalation in Chinese troop strength along the Line of Actual Control in the Arunachal Pradesh-Sikkim sector, with instances of aggression. Notably, in December, over 500 PLA soldiers crossed the LAC, leading to a confrontation at an altitude of 17,000 feet in Tawang’s Yangtze region. Modi’s BJP government continues to do little to restore the status quo of April 2020 in Ladakh.
Following raids on two Congress leaders in the course of a money laundering probe, and a summons to his son in a foreign exchange violation case, Rajasthan Chief Minister Ashok Gehlot said that the BJP-led Union government of using the Enforcement Directorate like “swarms of locusts” because it knows that it is likely to lose Assembly elections, reports The Hindu. The Indian Express lists the nine people close to the chief minister who are in the ED’s crosshairs. The agency has made multiple raids and several arrests in Rajasthan, MP, Chhattisgarh and Telangana, all of which are headed for state elections. Apart from these, former West Bengal food minister Jyotipriya Mallick (he has the forests portfolio now) has been arrested for his involvement in a ‘ration scam’.
Business Standard has an explosive story. “The outstanding amount due from wilful defaulters has risen at a pace of over Rs 100 crore daily since March 2019.” Yes, you read that right. Rs 100 crore per day. That is, public money. The newspaper reports,
“The amount due from wilful defaulters has risen by at least Rs 1.2 trillion since March 2019, i.e. before the Covid-19 pandemic began to spread worldwide, it writes. The total amount due has risen more than 50 per cent to Rs 3 trillion as of June 2023, according to data from TransUnion CIBIL. nationalised and other government-owned banks still account for the largest amounts. Their share in wilful defaulter amount outstanding was 77.5 per cent in June 2023.” (via BS newsletter)
Apple has tied up with the Tata Group to manufacture iPhones for the domestic and international markets. The production line is expected to start rolling in two and a half years.
As the Maldives prepares to divest itself of Indian military presence (see below), the Chinese and Pakistani navies are preparing for Sea Guardians-3, their first joint exercise in the Arabian Sea since 2020, with the stated purpose of responding jointly to maritime security threats.
On social media, Kerala Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan has said that the proposal to replace ‘India’ with ‘Bharat’ in school textbooks is unacceptable and “a continuation of the recent arbitrary exclusion of portions including Mughal history and the banning of the RSS following Gandhi’s assassination” from the curriculum.
The Education Department in Bihar has struck 20 lakh students off the rolls of government schools for being absent three days in a row. Of them, over 2.66 lakh were to appear for Class 10 and Class 12 board exams in 2024. The cull, which is supposed to improve attendance, has been on since September 1. “If government schools in Bihar are facing acute shortage of teachers, students will have no option and they will certainly go for coaching institutes to complete their syllabus,” an Opposition BJP leader said.
Though it was expected to lift the mobile internet ban, the Manipur government of N Biren Singh has extended it to October 31, apparently because of “reports of incidents of violence like confrontation of the public with security forces, attempts to mob elected members residences and civil protests in front of police stations.”
Bengaluru school student Aarrav Anil, 17, has invented an affordable robotic spoon which cancels out the shaking of the hand holding it. The device, which he designed so that his uncle, who has Parkinson’s disease, could eat with dignity, is being tested at the RV College of Physiotherapy, reports The Guardian.
Tarsem Singh, the father of pro-Khalistani Amritpal Singh, who is in prison in Dibrugarh, was prevented from flying to Qatar from Amritsar on work for the family’s transport business, reports Deccan Herald. Earlier, his wife was prevented from flying to the UK.
A sword of Tipu Sultan, part of the war booty assigned to India’s governor-general Lord Cornwallis after the fall of Seringapatam has failed to secure the floor price in a Christie’s auction, where it was valued at GBP1.5-2 million.
The UN University’s ‘Interconnected Disaster Risks Report 2023’ has found that 27 of the world’s 31 major aquifers are depleting faster than they can be replenished. India is near the groundwater depletion tipping point, especially in the northwest, whose wells could be depleted by 2025. Punjab, in particular, has a long history of high-input farming, dating back to the Green Revolution.
Haryana is offering a pension for trees aged 75 and up, to encourage their owners to look after them.
“Naeem Khandaker believes he can see the future, and the future he sees is fuchka.” The punchier Bangladeshi avatar of paani puri, which Khandaker started selling from a street cart five years ago, has set off a street food fight in the Jackson Heights neighbourhood of New York City, which is associated with the community. Other fuchka carts now line the street, run by his former employees, and some of them claim to be the original, in the great tradition of Bengali sweet houses. “It was as if Ray’s Pizza, Ray’s Original Pizza, Famous Ray’s Pizza and World-Famous Original Ray’s Pizza had been herded onto a single city block,” says Andrew Keh in the New York Times.
And it seems that Hanuman was in flight during Dussehra.
Neither India nor China: Muizzi seeks influence-free Maldives
In the Maldives, the victory of president-elect Mohamed Muizzu over pro-India Ibrahim Mohamed Solih was read as the rout of Indian influence to the benefit of China. However, Muizzi has clarified a plain vanilla nationalist position: “Maldives first. That’s, I think, something that can be easily understood.” He explained that his response would have been the same to the military presence of any country, reports Bloomberg, and he wants out of India-China rivalry. A small number of Indian soldiers maintain aircraft and radar sponsored by India, and its navy patrols Maldivian waters. Muizzi, who will take office in mid-November, is in talks with India to remove these assets, but he says that this does not mean that China will get an entry ticket.
Right to choose partner constitutionally protected, says Delhi HC
Granting police protection to a couple facing threats from family after their marriage, the Delhi High Court has said the right to marry a person of one’s choice is indelible and constitutionally protected, and not even family members can object.
In a recent order, Justice Tushar Rao Gedela emphasised that the State is under a constitutional obligation to provide protection to its citizens and the High Court, being a constitutional court, is expected to further the constitutional rights of the couple. The court directed the “State to provide protection to both the petitioners and ensure that no harm befalls either of them, particularly from the parents or the family members” of the woman, and asked the beat officer concerned to periodically check on them. However, this is only for heterosexual people. Others can wait.
Narayana Murthy preaches nationalist work ethic: 70 hour week
Infosys founder NR Narayana Murthy has urged the youth of the country to work 70 hours a week in order to compete with countries like China and asked them to not pick up “not-so-desirable habits from the West.” Expressing concerns about India’s productivity, Narayana Murthy said: “Somehow our youth has the habit of taking not-so-desirable habits from the West… India’s work productivity is one of the lowest in the world. Unless we improve our work productivity, unless we reduce corruption in the government at some level, because we have been reading, I don’t know the truth of it, unless we reduce the delays in our bureaucracy in taking this decision, we will not be able to compete with those countries that have made tremendous progress. So therefore, my request is that our youngsters must say, ‘this is my country, I want to work 70 hours a week’,” he said.
But then Narayan Murthy is no longer an ordinary citizen. He is an oligarch now, and can ignore the inconvenient fact that a 12 hour working day would breach international labour standards.
Police, High Court deny permission for Muslim Mahapanchayat in Delhi
The Delhi High Court has refused to direct the Delhi Police to grant a no-objection certificate for holding an All India Muslim Mahapanchayat at Ramlila Maidan on October 29 in the national capital. The court said the event could inflame communal tensions, because several Hindu festivals coincide in that period. Justice Subramonium Prasad said permission cannot be granted, saying that the poster for the event suggests it has communal overtones, and that the gathering would be in Old Delhi which, he said, is communally sensitive. Although permission for the gathering was granted earlier by both the Delhi Police and Municipal Corporation of Delhi, it was later withdrawn.
The Long Cable
Global economy survived Ukraine war, but can it shrug off Israel strife?
MK Venu
India’s stock market index has lost nearly 5% over the last six days as global markets also turned jittery over the possible consequences of the Israel-Hamas war. The emerging market stock indices were already weakening for about 12 weeks before the Hamas attack, as weakness in the global economy seemed to persist.
A perfect storm is building as crude prices harden and the American dollar strengthens on the back of very high US 10-year bond yields, which have touched 5%, which was last seen in 2007 before the global financial crisis. High bond yields signal higher inflationary expectations. Given this background, there is little likelihood of the Federal Reserve pausing its interest rate hike cycle anytime soon. India’s RBI too has indicated that inflation will have to be watched more carefully, following the Hamas-Israel war and its potential spread to the broader Middle East region. This is not particularly good news for ruling regimes across the world which are approaching general elections.
The markets may not take kindly to Israel’s excessive bellicosity towards UN Secretary General António Guterres, which is pressing for the observance of international law and the rules of war. The markets are psychologically impacted by words used by top global leaders. For instance, US President Biden advising Israel to eschew rage in its response may have caused nervousness in the markets. If Israel continues to act aggressively over the next few weeks, sharpening the brinkmanship between the Western powers and the Iran-Russia-China axis, one could well witness another round of spikes in inflation and interest rates globally.
Some reputed Wall Street analysts have made the contrarian argument that the markets are taking the Israel-Hamas war in their stride and there is some optimism that it wouldn’t spread to the larger region. Perhaps this optimism flows from the manner in which the Russia-Ukraine war avoided the worst economic consequences simply because nations ranged against each other chose to minimise damage by letting Russian oil come into markets via the backdoor. Surely there was an economic backlash in terms of the hardening inflation and interest rates, but the worst case scenario was avoided.
There is hope that a similar cycle may play out during a prolonged Israel-Palestine conflict. It is true that the powerful political-business elites in US, Europe, China, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Iran and Israel are heavily invested in global financial assets and their instinct would be to minimise economic damage. But as President Biden observed, any response characterised by rage and vengefulness could upset such rational calculations. The collective market intelligence is well aware of this, too. Things can easily spiral out of control in a war that increasingly becomes part of big powers rivalry. Such accidents do occur in history. Hence the continuing nervousness seen in the behaviour of stocks, bonds, crude and gold, all of which can have a profound impact on the real economy. India will not be insulated from this. A lot of foreign institutional money has left the Indian stock market in the past several weeks. Foreign equity money is leaving most emerging markets in search of safer investment options. US bonds are seen as offering good risk-free returns.
The foreign direct investment (FDI) into India has also slowed down considerably, because events like Ukraine and Gaza urge global investors to hold back until there is clarity on what is likely to happen in the near future. India’s foreign trade ― both imports and exports ― have slowed sharply in the last quarter, reflecting shrinking economic activity. Imports and exports together constitute nearly 50% of India’s GDP. PM Modi and his economic policy advisors were hoping that private sector investment would finally pick up after nine years of a drought in new corporate investments. But negative global events ― first in Ukraine and now in the Middle East ― seem to have put another spoke into possibilities of any meaningful recovery in the global economy. India will also likely see a holding operation in the coming months as the nation prepares for the Lok Sabha elections in 2024.
Deep dive
In the first week of October, Vithya Ramraj, an athlete from Tamil Nadu who was running in the heats of the 400-metre hurdles at the Asian Games, equalled a 39-year-old record held by PT Usha. The previous month, speaking to Scroll, Ramraj had acknowledged that an obscure figure, the physical education teacher in her school in Coimbatore, had inspired her to pursue athletics. “We would simply play around on the ground, but this teacher saw something in us that we [she and her twin Nitya] did not see ourselves,” Ramraj said. “My teacher told our mother that she was certain that we had the abilities to compete professionally.” In ‘Common Ground’, Scroll explores the lives and work of these unheralded figures who help India’s athletes and sportspersons take early steps that, in some cases, lead to great achievements. They struggle with insufficient resources and make great personal sacrifices to be able to serve their students.
Prime number: $1,130
El Salvador is charging passengers from Africa or India a $1,000 fee, apparently to curb migration to the US through its territory. Including VAT, the additional cost for landing in the country is $1,130, payable before boarding. “El Salvador President Nayib Bukele this week met Brian Nichols, US assistant secretary of state for Western Hemisphere affairs, to discuss “efforts to address irregular migration,” among other topics. US Customs and Border Patrol encountered a record 3.2 million migrants across the country in the fiscal year 2023, which ended in September,” says Bloomberg.
Reportedly
As India finds itself increasingly isolated in the world, the conversation about ‘strategic’ play, about being brilliantly placed to take advantage of ‘multipolarity’, or being the leader of the ‘Global South’, doesn’t wash any more. World events are moving at a punishing pace and India is clearly not able to keep pace. Indian diplomats may well be feeling the heat of the events directly. In a report on the Indian naval veterans who were sentenced to death by a Qatar court yesterday, there was the casual mention of an Indian diplomat, too, who was seen to be connected to the alleged spying case. “An Indian diplomat was quietly asked to leave the kingdom for his ties with the group.” The group being the naval veterans and the firm they worked for. Who was that diplomat?
Opeds you don’t want to miss
The Palestinians had tried every avenue to end the Israeli occupation and found every door closed before breaching the bounds set by Israel, says former Vice President Hamid Ansari.
Entertainment media in India has become a much more sophisticated game than Mickey Mouse TV and theme-park merchandise. There will be one big winner in a multi-billion-dollar deal, writes Andy Mukherjee, and that’s Reliance’s Mukesh Ambani.
Indian markets are not made for unicorns which burn brightly and burn out but for camels ― boring, steady, frugal companies like Zoho and Zerodha which just soldier on, and make a killing, says The Economist.
The Israel-Hamas conflict has deferred global recovery to 2024, at the least, as investors hold back and turn risk-averse, says an editorial in The Hindu.
It’s a shame that Indian MPs are no longer being sent to the UN, which was an opportunity for capacity-building and understanding diplomacy, but the BJP has scuppered it, says Derek O’Brien.
Manuraj Shunmugasundaram writes that progressive social reform movements have succeeded in delivering gender justice within religious spaces, that the march of the law supports the state control of temples.
It can only be hoped that the marriage equality case will also be looked at sooner rather than later by wise and empathetic judges, says Saurabh Kirpal.
Care and concern are civilisational imperatives, a plural intelligence that India desperately needs to follow, writes Shiv Visvanathan.
For people in a war-torn nation, their team punching above their weight at the CWC23 in cricket, a sport they only recently took up, provides comfort like nothing else. Muska Najibullah provides an Afghan perspective on the meteoric rise of his country’s team.
Listen up
On The Hindu’s ‘In Focus’ podcast, Dipika Jain shares insights on the recent Supreme Court decision to deny a woman’s plea for termination of pregnancy and the myriad obstacles hindering access to safe and legal abortion in India.
Watch out
Just over a month after The New Yorker published a story in which it was revealed that Hasan Minhaj embellished some of his stand-up routines, the comedian has responded in a 20-minute video in which he calls The New Yorker’s exposé “needlessly misleading.” After this clarification, the piece certainly seems far from what it posed to be — an earnest exploration of the line between truth and fiction in standup. Breaking news: Comedians embellish stories for dramatic effect. Who knew that?
Over and out
In a blitzkrieg, miso has rippled through India’s fine dining restaurants and reached home kitchens. En route, it has touched dal, khichdi, baingan bharta, dosa, ice cream and even cocktails, says the South China Morning Post.
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.