Modi Blinks, Farmers Implacable; Turning Point For Strongman Politics
J&K bodies returned to families, India escapes CPC taint, talks with China more civil, only 13% of workers can save, Paytm stock bombs and desperate TN Brahmins seek north Indian brides
A newsletter from The Wire & Galileo Ideas | Contributors: MK Venu, Seema Chishti, Siddharth Varadarajan, Sidharth Bhatia, Sushant Singh and Tanweer Alam | Editor: Pratik Kanjilal
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Snapshot of the day
November 19, 2021
Pratik Kanjilal
Modi capitulates, farmers win. On national television this morning, the PM announced that the three controversial farm laws will be repealed in the forthcoming session of Parliament (which will meet on November 29). The farmers have said that their protests will continue till other demands are met. But there was not a word of remorse or regret from Modi, who only ‘apologised’ for being unable to convince a section of farmers. He even claimed that the laws were passed after a vigorous parliamentary debate, though the bills were steamrolled through the Rajya Sabha without a count. More than 750 farmers have already died in the protests, and a Union minister’s son allegedly ran over farmers with his jeep and opened fire on them.
Editors who hailed Modi for standing firm behind these ‘reformist’ laws and not bowing to ‘terrorists’ will be hailing today’s move as a ‘masterstroke’. Here is an example, with another one stating that this was done in the national interest. And here is the state of play in the Supreme Court. It is obvious that the humiliating U-turn is dictated by prospects of a massive loss in the forthcoming UP Assembly polls, but it also reaffirms the power of protest, dissent and struggle against authoritarianism.
The Samyukt Kisan Morcha has said that they “welcome this decision and will wait for the announcement to take effect through due parliamentary procedures. If this happens, it will be a historic victory of the one year long farmers’ struggle in India. SKM also reminds the Prime Minister that the agitation is not just for the repeal of the three black laws, but also for a statutory guarantee of remunerative prices for all produce. “This is still pending, along with withdrawal of the Electricity Amendment Bill.”


More than 300 cases of violence against Christians were reported in India this year, with UP faring the worst, says Frontline. They reveal a systematic attempt to incite anti-conversion sentiments and facilitate attacks on the innocent.
On Wednesday, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken decided not to label India as a “country of particular concern” on religious freedom despite growing violence against Muslims and Christians. The US Commission on International Religious Freedom had urged Blinken to designate India a CPC for “systematic, ongoing, and egregious violations of religious freedom.” Among the countries designated are China, Pakistan, Myanmar, Iran, Saudi Arabia and North Korea. Is this the cost Biden is willing to pay because he needs India to counter China?
The government has been forced to exhume and return the bodies of two businessmen killed in Jammu & Kashmir to their families. Md Altaf Bhat and Dr Mudasir Gul were among four who died in an anti-terror operation at a commercial complex in Srinagar on Monday. However, the body of the third slain local, Amir Magray, son of Abdul Latief Magray, who won a bravery award for killing a militant with a stone, has not yet been exhumed or handed over to his family.
These deaths have shone an exceptionally harsh light on the state machinery in Kashmir. The New York Times reports that “activists and rights groups have long accused the Indian forces of killing civilians with impunity, because the law protects them from prosecution, and gunfights are sometimes staged so that soldiers can earn rewards and promotions.” There have been three complaints in two years.
With India’s export restrictions on syringes till the end of this year, experts say the world could experience a shortfall of 2-4 billion needles through the end of next year. Shortages are expected to hit African countries the hardest, reports New York Times.
The Pegasus Project, in which The Wire collaborated, has won the Reporters without Borders 2021 Prize for Impact.
In the remote Shi Yomi district of Arunachal Pradesh, China has illegally constructed a second enclave, satellite images show. It lies in Indian territory between the LAC and the official boundary of India, 93 km east of a China-built village in Arunachal Pradesh, a big encroachment confirmed by a Pentagon report days ago. The enclave did not exist in 2019.
A Delhi Assembly committee has asked Facebook India to furnish records of complaints about content posted on the platform upto one month before and two months after the northeast Delhi violence of February 2020. Shivnath Thukral, public policy director of Facebook India (now Meta) was asked for records and details about the complaints redressal mechanism, community standards and definitions of hate speech.
The Competition Commission of India is expected to release the findings of a two-year probe which may indict Google for abusing its dominant position. In June, it had ordered a probe into its practices to push Android in the smart TV market.
Responding to a legal notice from Jodhpur law student Jade Jeremiah Lyngdoh, flagging privacy concerns about the ‘Pensioner’s Life Certification Verification’ app, Meghalaya has said that the use of facial recognition technology was “not mandatory”. It added that the use of FRT did not “require any anchoring legislation”. Anushka Jain of the Internet Freedom Foundation, which assisted Lyngdoh with the notice, said it was worrying that the government thought they could use such invasive technologies in the “absence of any law or regulation” for personal data protection.
The Thamizhnadu Brahmin Association has launched a special drive to find brides for 40,000 men from the community from north India, including UP and Bihar, due to a shortage of potential partners in Tamil Nadu. The problem is a decade old, according to the November issue of the TBA’s magazine.
As India opened its doors to vaccinated foreign tourists, New York-based social activist Prem Bhandari has called on India to restore valid visas issued earlier. India is issuing the first 5 lakh foreign tourist visas gratis. They will be single-entry and valid for 30 days, while tourist visas issued before October 6 will remain suspended.
Suriya, the star of Jai Bhim, has been provided an armed police guard after threats of violence. The film was briefly the highest-ranked film on IMDb, beating Hollywood classics like The Godfather and The Shawshank Redemption.
Govt to refund taxes to Cairn
Moving to end a retrospective tax dispute with the firm that gave India its largest onshore oilfield, the government has accepted Cairn Energy PLC’s undertaking, which would allow for the refund of taxes, reports PTI. In November, Cairn had given undertakings indemnifying the Indian government against future claims and agreed to drop all legal proceedings. In a bind after losing arbitration cases and with its overseas assets under threat of forfeiture, the Modi government has committed to refund retrospective taxes.
India-China talks end on less hostile note
India and China held the 23rd round of the working mechanism on border affairs, which agreed that the 14th round of Corps Commander talks would happen soon. This was the 9th round of WMCC talks in the last year, since the Galwan incident in June 2020. Since 2012, when the mechanism was launched, bi-annual meetings were the norm. While the MEA statement sought “complete disengagement”, the Chinese readout did not mention the term, but said it “agreed to consolidate the existing outcomes of the disengagement” and “prevent the situation on the ground from relapsing”.
India has been keen to complete disengagement in areas like Hot Springs, Demchok and Depsang where massive deployments continue well into winter, but China has been reticent about further disengagement after the agreements on Pangong Tso and Gogra. Despite differences, the releases after the WMCC talks offer a pleasant contrast to the openly accusatory language in statements following the 13th round of Corps Commander level talks.
“We need land in Leh,” Konchok Stanzin, councillor of Chushul on the China border in Ladakh, told Defence Minister Rajnath Singh. He requested Singh to allot alternative land for the border residents in Leh city since a “warlike” situation had prevailed for a year. He said that while Chinese graziers had access to pastures, the Indian Army has barred locals since 2020, further weakening India’s territorial claims.
Paytm stock bombs on IPO day
Paytm raised $2.5bn in India’s biggest-ever IPO, but its stock plunged 27%. It’s a reality check ― Paytm has failed to convince some investors about its ability to return a profit. Its first-day slump gave pause in an environment witnessing “an IPO frenzy as shares sit near record highs”. Despite the economy stuttering, the BSE index has risen 25% this year.
The road ahead for IPOs? If the secondary market falters and institutional money withdraws, there may be a wave of selling of recent IPO stocks. After that, investors may not be in a position to either sell or hold.
The Long Cable
The strongman blinks, now there may be no looking back
Seema Chishti
In 1789 in France, it was the Grande Peur or the great fear. In the provinces, peasants rose against their lords, attacking châteaus and destroying feudal documents. To puncture their power, the National Constituent Assembly decreed the abolition of the feudal regime and introduced the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen.
The power of those who produce food for all is well documented. The present farmers’ stir outside Delhi has been historic, perhaps the world’s largest and most sustained. The state machinery and propaganda were unleashed upon them, jail sentences followed, and concrete walls were built across national highways to protect the capital. At least 700 farmers lost their lives.
The sudden decision to repeal is a firman, a prime ministerial declaration made for television masquerading as an act of benevolence. But when regimes function as this one has done, particularly since 2019, riding successive parliamentary majorities, retreats have consequences. Governance and policy have been non-deliberative, discussion and accommodation derided as the ways of effete regimes of the past. The Strongman is constructed by ending dialogue. It is about not letting anyone with a contrarian view speak. A government run like the present one does not tolerate the popular will. Its constituents and mouthpieces work on the assumption that whatever the Great Leader does, by his whim and without consultation, is good for the people. Retreat under popular pressure is unthinkable.
The move is highly unlikely to increase the Great Leader’s acceptability amongst the peasantry. It will instead enliven politics of pressure and protest and restore democratic tendencies (which is not the BJP’s aim). The Strongman imagery has taken a big hit. Anil Ghanwat of the Supreme Court Farm Laws committee has already done the unthinkable. He has said that the “Centre's decision” to repeal farm laws is “regressive”.
The second takeaway is that general and state elections must never be aligned. Over the years, governments have been sensitive to public opinion due to the accident of state elections coming in phases (they didn’t, after Independence). Today, this phasing is an ‘accidental institution’ when all other institutional checks and balances have been sandpapered to conform to the Union government. UP elections are ahead and BJP leaders are not able to even enter large areas in Western UP, forcing the BJP’s hand. The BJP has lost a crucial caste component in the Hindu mosaic it stitched. Non-simultaneous Union and state polls have forced this move.
Statistics from a survey done before the five Assembly elections this spring go largely undiscussed. On May 11, CSDS reported that “a section of the BJP’s own supporters, and its vocal middle class base, appears opposed to the farm laws.” The agency said that “post-poll survey data showed high awareness about the farmers’ protests across the four states surveyed.”
It concluded that the protests resonated across the country because of the social media outreach of supporters. Very few were unaware of the issue. In each of the five poll-bound states, barring Assam, the BJP fared badly despite pulling out all the stops.
On November 26, the protests will complete a year. In 1949, November 26 was also when ‘We the People’ was established atop the Preamble of the Constitution. The coincidence could not have been overlooked by a government at its wits’ end, battling the grit, logic, resistance and fearlessness of its food-growers.
Reportedly
Three contemporary books are making waves. Aakar Patel’s Price of Modi Years is a best-seller on Amazon. Christophe Jaffrelot’s Modi’s India: Hindu Nationalism and the Rise of Ethnic Democracy was rated by Financial Times as one of the books of the year. And now we hear that To Kill a Democracy: India’s Passage to Despotism by Debasish Roy Chowdhury and John Keane is going to be published in India by Pan Macmillan India, after Oxford University Press (India) chickened out.
Relax, everyone’s broke
A recent EY-Refyne survey titled ‘Earned Wage Access in India: The final frontier of employee wellbeing’ found that 62% employees are unsure of their financial status,
80% exhaust their salary before the month ends and 34% are broke by the middle of the month. Only 13% can set aside decent savings. The study surveyed 3,010 employees.
Prime number: $10.1 trillion
That’s the amount India needs to achieve net zero emissions by 2070. It could face a shortfall of $3.5 trillion, according to
a study by CEEW Centre for Energy Finance
.
Deep Dive
An online survey of British Indian eligible voters shows that while they widely self-identify with the liberal Opposition Labour Party, support appears to have eroded in recent years. This shift appears to be largely driven by Hindus and Christians, many of whom have drifted away from the Labour Party, even as their Muslim and Sikh counterparts have remained steadfast supporters. British Indians have a poor opinion of BoJo and in future elections, could play the role of a swing constituency.
Novy Kapadia leaves the field
Noted sports enthusiast, commentator and football specialist Novy Kapadia died yesterday. His passing is the end of an era in football commentating. Kapadia wrote several books including Barefoot to Boots and The Many Lives of Indian Football, and was also a professor in SGTB Khalsa College, Delhi University.
Ponting ducked coach offer
Former Australia skipper Ricky Ponting reveals that he was approached for the job of Team India coach but turned it down for lack of time. Ponting said on the Grade Cricketer Podcast that he had a conversation about it during the IPL. “I’m very surprised that Dravid has taken this job. I’m not sure about his family life, but I’m sure he has young kids… but as I said, the people I spoke to were sure they got the right person, so they were probably able to get Dravid to do it,” Ponting said.
Op-Eds you don’t want to miss
Neera Chandhoke writes that Hinduism is faith, while Hindutva is politics in search of power. Since Hinduism is a collage of our dialogical, spiritual, intellectual and poetic traditions, which tradition of Hinduism does Hindutva speak for?
What Glasgow accomplished was necessary, if not sufficient, for accelerated climate action. The meeting hit many procedural benchmarks. But the real determinant of success rests on national politics and popular support within countries, writes Navroz K Dubash.
Universities, homes for dissent and nurseries for ideas, are the real trustees of the democratic imagination. They must stand up to the regime, not tolerate its illiteracy, writes Shiv Visvanathan.
Julio Ribeiro writes that no regime likes criticism, but the present one has taken hostility beyond reasonable limits. It is now openly proclaiming, if we are to interpret Doval, that NGOs are under siege.
The way the laws impacting Indian farmers were bulldozed through Parliament last year says a lot about India’s democracy, writes Namita Singh in The Independent.
Priya Ramani writes that most people now rarely open the boxes titled ‘Country’ or ‘Religion’. Call it a defence mechanism for coping with PTSD, or something less kind, but as history is rewritten and hate spreads like fire, these boxes gather dust in a forgotten place.
Is incentivising pliant bureaucrats at the helm an admission of the government’s shrinking legitimacy in the broader ranks of the bureaucracy itself, asks Bharat Bhushan.
Himanshu writes that the government may have few options for inflation control, but it clearly has the resources and institutional structures to protect citizens from its worst effects.
Judges need to start writing judgments in plain language that is easy to understand for the small proportion of English speakers in India, and easy to translate for the rest, writes Vikram Hegde.
Binoy Viswam writes that in the 75th year of Independence and before the 72nd anniversary of the Constitution, ordinances are no longer just ordinances. They are forerunners of harsher things.
Nirupama Rao’s The Fractured Himalaya gives a clear distillation of a complex and consequential period, one that continues to cast a Himalayan shadow over India-China relations, writes Kyle Gardner.
Anumita Roy Chowdhury on the CSE report which found that Delhi’s air pollution is mostly fuelled by vehicular pollution.
Sharda Ugra writes that Rahul Dravid has a halo on his head and a target on his back. India’s new cricket coach will have a lot on his plate, but it’s nothing he’s not seen before.
Listen Up
Navroz Dubash talks about what the Glasgow climate accord means for India, and the world.
Watch Out
At the Yale Jackson Institute for Global Affairs, Sushant Singh (a contributor to The India Cable) discussed Indian and Chinese affairs with historian and Director of Yale’s Institute of Strategic Studies Odd Arne Westad.
https://jackson.yale.edu/video/event-recording-sino-indian-affairs-competition-and-conflict/
Over and Out
Read this fascinating account of how for centuries, indigenous groups in the Northeast have crafted intricate bridges from living fig trees. Now, this ancient skill is being adopted by some European cities.
Sophia Ali of Grey’s Anatomy, along with Manisha Koirala and Adil Hussain, stars in India Sweets and Spices, which looks at an Indian-American family and turns expectation on its head, providing a more nuanced, complicated and problematic look at the phenomenon, says the Washington Post.
Paneer is making major inroads in the US, even though it’s been around since the 1500s.
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