Using Taxation to End Representation; Modi Toolkit is Breaking Down India’s Democracy; In Yogiland, Chronicle of Death Foretold
Racism & reality in Baltimore accident, UN hopes Indian elections are free & fair, godi media exhibit 404, HT as Delhi modernist icon, Ladakh turmoil, after NDTV deal Adani-Ambani openly join hands
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 29, 2024
Siddharth Varadarajan
Unfazed by the criticism of his party’s reliance on opaque election financing and his government’s use of corruption and tax evasion charges to arrest opposition leaders and cripple their finances, Narendra Modi is doubling down on his ‘victory at any cost’ toolkit for the upcoming parliamentary elections.
Top of the outrageous list of acts of commission and omission so far has to be the Putin-style ‘death by heart attack’ yesterday of Mukhtar Ansari, a politically-connected convicted criminal in Uttar Pradesh weeks after he moved the Supreme Court alleging the authorities were looking to kill him in custody. One of the claims the BJP makes in Uttar Pradesh is being tough on crime. Last year, two prominent politican-gangsters – Atiq Khan and his brother – were gunned down in the presence of policemen as they were being taken to hospital for a ‘check up’. In Ansari’s case, he had actually accused the authorities of sickening him by spiking his food with poison. The BJP hopes these obviously suspicious deaths/killings of Muslim strongmen will appeal to its support base at election time. Omar Rashid has the shocking details of the case.
The Congress, already reeling from the de facto freezing of some of its bank accounts, has been hit with a fresh demand for Rs 1,823 crore from the Income Tax department. It turns out the Communist Party of India, CPI has also been slapped with a tax notice for Rs 11 crore, and there is news that the Communist Party of India (Marxist) was also served an income tax notice. The party’s newspaper says the CPI(M) “had its tax exemption withdrawn for the year 2016-17 and ordered to pay a tax of Rs 15.59 crore for the mere technical lapse of not listing one of the hundreds of bank accounts that the Party has all over the country. The CPI(M) went to the Delhi High Court against this unwarranted action and the matter is sub-judice at the moment.”
The Congress alleges that for the very same violations for which the IT department has fined them Rs1,823 crore, the BJP “in the very same time period… should have been slapped with notices for Rs. 4,600 crores.” But they weren’t. Which means either the Congress has its maths wrong or the IT department is acting a little, er, unprofessionally.
Taking up a plea seeking Kejriwal’s removal as chief minister, the Delhi High Court asked the petitioner to show what “legal bar” there was to stop him being CM from behind bars. The petitioner had claimed that Kejriwal functioning as CM from jail would cause the constitutional machinery in the state to fail. “We don’t impose President’s rule, the executive does it,” the court said while declining to exercise judicial interference in the matter. But of course the executive is actively considering the matter. LG VK Saxena openly acknowledged this at a media company event yesterday and these official discussions are apparently “gaining momentum”. The BJP is pushing the narrative that Kejriwal wants his wife, Sunita, to occupy the CM’s post if his continuation jeopardises his government.
The arrest of a sitting chief minister is nothing but a “stain on India’s democracy”, says The Economist. “Despite the questionable timing of the moves against Mr. Kejriwal and others, the probes are still likely to inflict considerable damage on the opposition, while posing little electoral risk to Mr. Modi’s government.”
But then, some things are not even close to Chinese whispers.
Raghava Magunta Reddy – the Andhra businessman on whose statements the ED is said to have built the case against Kejriwal and the AAP – and his father Srinivasulu Magunta are busy campaigning in Andhra Pradesh for the Telugu Desam Party, which recently joined the BJP-led National Democratic Alliance. The junior Magunta had political ambitions but was himself implicated in the alleged liquor scam. He turned approver late last year, following which he was pardoned in the ED case. Now the TDP has gone ahead and fielded his father as its candidate for the Ongole seat.
Meanwhile, Nirmala Sitharaman by pleading that she does not have the “kind of money” required to contest a Lok Sabha election has stirred a hornet’s nest. What on earth does this say about Indian democracy?
India may have told the US that its comments on the move to freeze the Congress’s bank accounts and the arrest of the Delhi chief minister were “completely unacceptable” but the United Nations has now waded in saying the world hopes everyone is able to vote in the country’s parliamentary elections in a free and fair atmosphere. Stéphane Dujarric, the spokesperson for UN Secretary-General, said, “What we very much hope that in India, as in any country that is having elections, that everyone's rights are protected, including political and civil rights, and everyone is able to vote in an atmosphere that is free and fair.” When is the last time the UN had to remind India of the obvious before an election?
But then there are foreign hands and helping hands that are foreign and who doesn’t love the latter?
Talking about democracy, Sreenivasan Jain reports about India’s captured media: how large swathes of the country’s press have become propagandists for the Modi regime.
Godi Media Exhibit No. 404: The major news channel ABP published two online articles by Rajeev Kumar recently, one saying electoral bonds had become a ‘noose’ for the BJP and that Modi was having a tough time responding to the controversy; the other on Modi’s stance on a ‘weak rupee’. Both have vanished; the links return error pages.
Billionaires Mukesh Ambani and Gautam Adani may have joined hands behind closed doors to help effect a regime change at NDTV last year but they have now collaborated openly for the first time with Reliance Industries Limited (RIL) picking up a 26% stake in Mahan Energen Ltd (MEL), a subsidiary of Adani Power Ltd. The New Indian Express reports that the deal will give Reliance Industries 500 MW of electricity from MEL’s Madhya Pradesh-based power plants for captive use. According to RIL, the investment is in compliance with the provisions of the Electricity Rules, 2005, which say a captive user must own a 26% stake in the captive unit. “One unit of 600 MW capacity of MEL’s Mahan thermal power plant, out of its aggregate operating and upcoming capacity of 2,800 MW, will be designated as the Captive Unit for this purpose,” Adani Power said in an exchange filing, as per the report. Further, RIL will pick up 5 crore equity shares with a face value of Rs 10 crore from MEL. A mono-duopoly one-of-its-kind.
Why does Big Tech draw more antitrust action than big ports, airlines or big media? Menaka Doshi writes about India and the curse of bigness in this week’s The Bloomberg Newsletter. “We may have democracy, or we may have wealth concentrated in the hands of a few but we can’t have both.”
Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba has urged India to stand by Kyiv, saying the nation’s close ties with Russia are based on a Soviet legacy that is evaporating, reports The Financial Times. India has traditionally had close economic and defence ties with Moscow and refrained from criticising Russia over its February 2022 invasion of Ukraine, instead increasing purchases of Russian oil to record levels. Kuleba said India has much to gain from expanding trade and technology ties with Ukraine and offered Indian companies a role in postwar reconstruction. “The Chinese-Russian relationship should be of particular attention for India.”
The National Investigation Agency has arrested Muzzamil Shareef, a resident of Karnataka’s Chikkamagaluru, for “extending logistic support” to the two main accused in the Rameshwaram Cafe blast. The anti-terror agency had conducted raids in many places in Karnataka, Tamil Nadu and Uttar Pradesh in relation to the blast on Wednesday. The two main accused, Abdul Matheen Taha and Mussavir Hussain, are also accused of masterminding the 2022 Managluru cooker blast.
A group of American professionals has accused Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) of firing them and replacing them with lower-paid Indian workers on H-1B visas, reports The Wall Street Journal. At least 22 former employees have filed complaints with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission against TCS, alleging illegal discrimination based on race and age. Despite positive performance reviews, the Americans say they were abruptly removed from projects last year. TCS’s global HR head’s reported comments suggest a strategy to reduce American employment in favour of Indian nationals in the U.S. One complainant claimed TCS planned to use savings from closing a unit with American workers to hire more Indian nationals.
After the Manipur government’s order declaring tomorrow and Easter Sunday (March 31) as working days for public offices drew much ire, it has backtracked on this decision and “clarified” that only Saturday will be a holiday. The order once again reopened the old fault lines drawn between Hindu-majority Meiteis and Christian-majority Kukis and Nagas. The ethnic violence which broke out on May 3 last year has so far claimed over 200 lives and has displaced over 50,000 people. Soon after the flip, Prakash Javadekar responded to Congress criticism of the order by asking the party when it would “condemn [the] Hamas attack and [the] terror attack in Russia”.
Wages for the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme or MGNREGS (which is often still known as NREGA) have been revised for the upcoming financial year. The Hindu BusinessLine points out that in most major states except Gujarat, MGNREGS daily wages for FY24 are lower than the minimum daily wage for agricultural labour in FY23. The gap between the two wage values was the highest in Kerala, where the MGNREGA daily wage was Rs 333 while the agricultural daily wage for men was Rs 764.3 – a Rs 431 difference. As for the revised wages, Haryana continues to enjoy the highest daily wage in the country at Rs 374 per day. Nagaland has the lowest, at Rs 234.
Haryana’s Ashoka University said it “deplores expressions of hatred directed against any individual or group” after videos emerged of students shouting slogans such as ‘Brahmin-Baniyavaad murdabad’ (‘down with Brahmin- and Baniya-ism’) on campus. This occurred during protests in the university demanding a caste survey and reservation. According to data accessed by The Hindu, just about 7% of the university’s undergraduates are SCs, STs or OBCs.
It seems that Indian venture capital investors “have oversold India to global limited partners. The reasons are many – and complex”, says The Morning Context, which has put out a ‘report card’ containing eight stories.
Racist cartoonists in the US are having a field day mocking the all-Indian crew of the cargo container ship which brought the Baltimore harbour bridge down this week. But the crew were actually heroes: their timely message to the authorities about the loss of steering control ensured the bridge was promptly closed to traffic, thus saving dozens of lives.
India, China hold border talks; No breakthrough
At the 29th round of talks under the Working Mechanism for Consultation and Coordination (WMCC) on India-China Border Affairs, senior Indian and Chinese diplomats held another round of talks in Beijing on the stand-off in the Ladakh sector of the Line of Actual Control (LAC), with no immediate signs of a breakthrough. According to the MEA, the two sides had “an in-depth exchange of views on how to achieve complete disengagement” and resolve remaining issues along the LAC. China’s foreign ministry said in a separate press release of the WMCC meeting that both countries “positively evaluated the progress made in the management and control of the situation in the China-India border area”. “The two sides agreed to focus on the relevant issues on the ground along the border, reach a solution acceptable to both sides as soon as possible and promote the transition of the border situation into a normalised phase of control and management,” it continued to say.
Despite four rounds of disengagement from Galwan Valley, Pangong Tso, Gogra (PP-17A) and Hot Springs (PP-15), the Indian and Chinese armies still have tens of thousands of troops each and advanced weaponry deployed in the Ladakh theatre. However, the Chinese side has refused to undertake any disengagement at Depsang or Demchok, the two areas where soldiers of both sides continue to block each other.
“Not a single Ladakhi recruited in gazetted post in past 4-5 years”
Apart from Sonam Wangchuk’s 21-day fast, a wider grassroots movement in Ladakh is underscoring deep-seated anxieties about economic marginalisation and cultural erosion. When Ladakh’s autonomy ended (along with the rest of undivided Jammu and Kashmir) in 2019, Shia Muslims in Kargil opposed the move, while Leh's Buddhists welcomed it. More than four years later, with limited political representation and no protective laws for resources, both communities are demanding restoration of statehood and tribal safeguards, writes Betwa Sharma. Activist Sajjad Kargili has highlighted widespread unemployment and fears of corporate land takeover since the region lost statehood, claiming that “not a single Ladakhi has been recruited in a gazetted post in the past 4 to 5 years.”
Child labour in India fuels paving stone production
A few years ago, there was a crackdown on child labour in the Indian sandstone industry. Then businesses found a workaround: rather than bringing the children to the mines, they brought the mines to the children. Despite assurances of reform, exploitation persists in the country’s sandstone industry, where children engage in hazardous labour for meagre wages. Their efforts often contribute to the adornment of driveways and gardens located miles away. Romita Saluja has this excellent long-report for The Guardian.
The Long Cable
Breaking Down India’s Democracy
MK Venu
The BJP has described the US State Departments’ comment on Delhi CM Arvind Kejriwal’s arrest as a “slur on Indian judiciary”. This is classic distraction being deployed disingenuously by a party which knows the entity under scrutiny – nationally and globally – is the executive and not the judiciary. The US merely suggested it was watching Kejriwal’s arrest and the freezing of Congress’s bank accounts closely as it comes against the backdrop of the Lok Sabha elections.
The US “encourages fair, transparent, timely legal processes”, State Department spokesperson Mathew Miller said.
Coming from India’s most trusted strategic partner, the statement hardly casts any aspersion on the judiciary as the BJP claims.
It seems more like a piece of friendly advice to the world’s largest democracy from the world’s oldest democracy, both of whom are currently in a historic geopolitical embrace which, ironically, is projected as PM Modi’s biggest foreign policy achievement.
Given this backdrop, the BJP could have been more objective in assessing the US statement that it would like to see a “fair and timely legal process” in the Kejriwal case.
In fact, the US or for that matter Germany, which also spoke out only yo be criticised by the Ministry of External Affairs, are both merely reflecting the anxiety of the opposition parties and the vast majority of those who voted for these parties in the 2019 elections.
Ensuring a timely and fair legal process is, first and foremost, the responsibility of the Modi regime which oversees the law enforcement and prosecution of cases. If the fence starts eating the crops, as is happening now, then the judiciary can’t do much. It is not so much the judiciary that is on test here. It is much more the investigative agencies and the selective political bias so openly displayed by them as well as the prosecution system that is primarily under question.
The BJP is trying to fire from the shoulders of the judiciary when the problem lies squarely in the backyard of the ruling party which has made a mockery of the criminal justice system by letting loose Union government agencies against the opposition so close to the Lok Sabha elections.
There is no personal money trail yet established in the Delhi liquor scam except for statements from some accused who have turned approver. Incidentally, a businessman accused of being part of the liquor scam who turned approver after receiving bail is now a candidate for the BJP-TDP alliance in Andhra Pradesh for the upcoming Lok Sabha elections.
Kejriwal’s lawyer Abhishek Manu Singhvi has rightly argued that such evidence from an accused who turns approver after getting bail is untenable unless other corroborative evidence is brought to establish a specific money trail deriving from the proceeds of the crime. Singhvi has cited key Supreme Court judgments to press this point. More pertinently, Singhvi argued that the timing and manner of Kejriwal’s arrest have a serious impact on our “democracy and fair elections” and therefore violate the basic structure of the constitution.
The freezing of the bank account of the main opposition party just before the Lok Sabha elections also has the same negative effect on democracy and fair play. The income tax department initially began with a notice to the Congress party for violation of the deposit of Rs 14 lakh cash by some 24 Congress members. In a normal tax case, a tax demand would be made on Rs. 14 lakhs and a maximum penalty of 300% would be imposed. The case would be closed. That is how tax departments work in the normal course. But in this case, when the Congress reportedly offered to pay up the maximum penalty, the tax department refused to settle the matter and brought other issues on board. Is it impossible to continue the tax investigation and yet let the Congress party spend whatever is needed for the ongoing polls? Even a high school kid would know the answer to this question.
All these actions which are deeply worrying for the health of our democracy are emanating from the executive. The judiciary has nothing to do with them. Even when the judiciary tried to right some of the wrongs, for example by striking down the patently illegal electoral bonds system, it is the executive that used proxies like the State Bank of India to subvert the intent of the Supreme Court. Therefore it is quite rich for Harish Salve to lead a petition signed by some 600 lawyers which claims that the judiciary is being browbeaten by some civil society forces. All one has to do is listen to the unedifying exchange between the CJI and Salve in the electoral bonds case to figure out who was browbeating whom and on whose behalf.
The Modi government would do well not to fire from the shoulders of the judiciary in targeting the opposition or civil society as the people are well aware of where the real problem lies. Congress President Mallikarjun Kharge rightly recalled the unprecedented press conference by four senior-most Supreme Court judges who claimed that democracy was in peril. Nothing has changed since then. Democracy is still in peril.
We all know who is undermining the Supreme Court and overturning its considered judgments via fresh ordinances or legislation. It is certainly not the opposition or civil society.
For 10 years now, Modi has been at the helm of affairs. He has run the most centralised and autocratic government since the emergency. His government has launched a relentless assault on the opposition and civil society. It is a bit rich for such a regime to claim that the opposition parties and civil society are undermining the judiciary. Even post-truths must have some limits.
Reportedly
The deceased Mukhtar Ansari is being defined as a ‘gangster-turned-politician’ in an effort to make light of his death in custody. His hold on eastern UP, in an area which is right next to Modi’s constituency and in close proximity with Adityanath Gorakhpur is not lost on anybody. But he is not the only bahubali in UP politics. The ‘mafia’ or gangster-element is not the preserve of any social group in UP. You could call it a “way of life”. There are serious Brahmin dons, deeply threatened by a Thakur-friendly regime in place now, goes the whisper. There are very significant Rajput dons too. Raja bhaiyya and our very own Brij Bhushan Sharan Singh—last seen fending off accusations of sexual harassment by India’s wrestling champions—are key to the BJP’s election machine at present. Ansari’s brother, fighting on a BSP ticket, comfortably defeated the current J&K Lieutenant Governor Manoj Sinha in the 2019 Lok Sabha polls from Ghazipur. And in the 2022 Assembly elections, the BJP managed zero seats from region, with all 22 going into the opposition bag.
Deep dive
Did Periyar call for a genocide of Brahmins? “In hierarchical societies, reformers challenge the status quo with provocative and uncivil speech. Accusing them of hate speech is ill-intentioned”, writes Karthick Ram Manoharan. “The accusations of propagating genocide laid on Periyar are ludicrous, and to even respond to these is an insult to the tens of thousands who have been and are being killed for belonging to the wrong social group in oppressive states and conflict zones across the world”.
Prime number: 444
That’s the (astonishing) number of opposition MLAs who’ve defected to the BJP since 2014, with a whopping 226 from the Congress alone, calculates Sunetra Chaudhary. And in this election frenzy, 41 of them have joined the bandwagon. Looks like it's shaping up to be BJP vs. a dwindling shadow of the once formidable Congress. Will it be a battle of ideologies or just Old Congress vs. New Congress? [LINK]
Opeds you don’t want to miss
“It used to be asked how long can a liberal democracy be throttled before electoral democracy itself comes into serious question,” writes Ashutosh Varshney on the arrest of Arvind Kejriwal on the eve of the general election. “Short of some major surprises, which can’t be wholly ruled out, India may well be heading in that direction.”
Nilotpal Basu writes on the criminality that electoral binds have exposed. How are loss making companies buying bonds worth crores?
Jawhar Sircar says that there are irregularities in the movement of cash across the political spectrum yet India's investigating agencies are focussing only on those who oppose the regime.
A few recent instances of judicial plainspeak and actions are cause for cheer, writes Sriram Panchu about judgments by Justices Oka, Nagarathna, Venkatesh, Vinay Joshi and Valmike Menezes.
Did the electoral bonds scheme enable extortion? Read this excellent interview with Subhash Chandra Garg (a former finance secretary who still tries to defend the sceneme) and transparency activist Anjali Bhardwaj.
Putin is forcing Indian workers to fight his war, writes Kavita Krishnan, so why is PM Modi silent?
Modinomics’s focus on maximising tax revenue is adding to filing and reporting requirements. This is “killing entrepreneurship by discouraging small businesses and first-time entrepreneurs and in turn aggravating India’s job crisis”, Ritesh Kumar Singh says.
Congress leader Anand Sharma's opposition to a caste census shows that upper caste leaders from all parties still do not subscribe to ideas of social justice and do not want to share political power with marginalised castes, says Kancha Ilaiah Shepherd, urging Rahul Gandhi not to abandon the demand.
“The tendency of undermining the lower castes and minorities is also witnessed in the University Grants Commission (UGC) draft proposal that wants to remove reservation in higher education recruitments”, writes Amrita Dutta on caste and its colony.
Listen up
In a podcast with Anurag Minus Verma, reporter Shoaib Daniyal speaks “on the pathological obsession Indians and Savarnas in particular have about purity to which vegetarianism is key (not overlapping with the logics of veganism but part of caste endogamy)”.
Watch out
Journalist and writer Aakar Patel delivered the JP Memorial Lecture — The paths of justice and liberty after 2024.
Over and out
Among those in the fray from Tamil Nadu’s Dharmapuri constituency is veteran candidate K Padmarajan. Despite having lost a reported 238 elections since 1988 and being dubbed the world’s “biggest election loser”, Padmarajan – who has gone up against AK Antony and BS Yediyurappa in the past – remains undeterred.
Mumbai gets The New York Times “36 Hours” treatment. Saumya Roy captures its pluralistic, core, crazy contradictions and ongoing transitions — through poetry, food, walks, culture and more.
The Hindustan Times may be past its prime as a newspaper but the building it operates from near Connaught Place is one of Delhi’s modernist landmarks. Built in 1974 by architect Habib Rahman and Uttam Singh Duggal as contractor, HT House will soon be emptied of its newspaper offices as the media company relocates elsewhere. The architect’s son Ram Rahman pays tribute to the building.
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.
Who's there to stop Modi? Unless until Gandhi family abstain from Congress party there is less possibility congress would revive. But Rahul Gandhi is shamelessly stubborn. They should gracefully retire .