Innholdsfortegnelse for May 7, 2018 i India Today

The signs were out there. India took extra care to honour Chinese sensitivities on the Dalai Lama, and China endorsed India’s demand to include a specific anti-terrorism section in the BRICS’ Xiamen summit in September, barely a week after the sudden end to a 72-day border stand-off. The bluster gave way to quiet diplomacy and the sabre-rattling was replaced by low-key communication. China’s English newspaper, The Global Times, a mouthpiece of the government, even invoked an old Chinese proverb to describe the relationship between China and India today: Friends are often made after a fight. After the Doklam stand-off on which india today did a cover story asking if there would be war, there was a calm interrupted only by a series of high-level visits beginning with Chinese foreign minister…

Growing public anger over the rape of an eight-year-old Muslim girl in Jammu and the rape of a teenager in Unnao, UP, has prompted the government to bring in an ordinance enabling courts to sentence those convicted of raping girls under 12 to death; it is unclear if the ordinance applies to boys. Critics claimed the order was a populist sop. Is there evidence, the Delhi High Court asked in response to a petition, that the death penalty serves as a deterrent? The Justice Verma commission, formed in the aftermath of the 2012 Nirbhaya case, argued that it didn’t. National crime statistics show sexual violence against children is on the rise. Nobel laureate and child rights activist Kailash Satyarthi calls it a “national emergency”. 39,068 Victims of rape in 2016,…

Our Food, Their Food The Union ministry for health took a standard image–a well-meaning stock photo of the food choices that supposedly make some girls slim and others less so–and posted it as health advice. Coming from a government-approved handle, this naturally ruffled feathers. The ‘good’ choices were fresh fruit and vegetables, including, for most Indians, such outré selections as raspberries, kiwis and avocados. While the ‘bad’ included doughnuts, fizzy drinks, fries, sausages, bread, butter and eggs. The advice is, of course, scientifically dubious. Some deplored the “fat-shaming”. Others wondered if this was an attempt to promote vegetarianism by stealth. More paranoid still were the occasional foreign ‘India-watchers’ who noted that the unhealthy foods were all “firangi”. It sticks in the craw of some to receive banal dietary ‘advice’ from…

What do the Bakarwals do this winter? Do they dare return to Jammu? There is no other land they can go to. Winter will force them from the high meadows The rape and murder of an eight-year-old girl has put the spotlight on a group of people most of us know little about—the Indian pastoralist. Much of the recent conversation is rightly focused on the brutality of the act and the need for justice. Reports speak of the violence as an attempt to intimidate. And to the extent that this little girl’s family of Bakarwals started on its summer migration a month early, that objective appears to have been met. The truth is that pastoralists in India—estimated to be 34 million—have always been an easy target. Across the country, migratory…

1. BOUNDARY DISPUTE The Doklam standoff between India and China highlighted the strains on the undemarcated 3,500 km-long border. The process of clarifying the LAC remains stalled and a solution remains elusive, even as both sides are discussing ways to strengthen border mechanisms to prevent the recurrence of face-offs. Meanwhile, efforts to beef up infrastructure on both sides of the LAC continue apace, with India moving to close the gap. 2. TRADE Trade is growing, but so is China’s surplus, which crossed $50 billion last year. Indian IT and pharma companies complain of no market access in China, while Chinese investments have been pouring into India, but not where Delhi favours them: Chinese companies are buying Indian start-ups, while they are slow to invest in the Make in India programme.…

On the rainy evening of April 23, Sikkim chief minister Pawan Kumar Chamling was anxiously waiting in the living room of his official residence in Gangtok for a letter from the PWD department. Two days ago, during his 32-day-long statewide visit, he had met a 32-year-old mother of three at Bermiok, West Sikkim. She had recently lost her husband, had no source of regular income, and sought the CM’s help to find her a livelihood. Chamling, who travels with his entourage of ministers and secretaries during such mass connect programmes, immediately asked the PWD secretary to give her a job in his department at a monthly salary of Rs 9,000. It was not just a politician’s promise to be forgotten later. He wanted to see the appointment letter. It’s this…

Laughter is all we are left with. Nothing can stand against an assault of laughter!” Canadian playwright Gabriel Emanuel imagines Mark Twain concluding during an 1896 talk at the Novelty Theatre in Bombay. To recover from financial losses, the much loved writer of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and the Adventures of Huckleberry Finn came to India as part of a global speaking tour. Over a century later, Emanuel has recreated the lecture he might have given in Bombay, though he had no written record to follow. Appropriately, Mark Twain: Live in Bombay! opened last week in the city of its title, though director-actor Vinay Sharma is based in Kolkata. At the opening at Prithvi Theatre, the audience chuckled through Sharma’s impersonation of the sharp-witted author who, in Emanuel’s imagination,…

China is moving ever closer to India with its moves to expand its presence in the South China Sea The almost 4,000 km-long undemarcated land boundary that separates India and China tends to occupy much of the attention when it comes to the thorny bilateral relationship. But increasingly, it’s not just on land but at sea where the two Asian powers are rubbing up against each other with growing frequency, whether in the Indian Ocean or in the South China Sea. And unlike on land, where both countries have painstakingly come up with as many as four different agreements that lay out detailed confidence-building and conflict-reducing measures, there is, till date, nowhere close to an understanding on managing their encounters on sea. The problem is any prospect of addressing this…

LABOUR ISSUES SANGH ORGANISATION: Bharatiya Mazdoor Sangh, Laghu Udyog Bharati KEY MOVERS: Saji Narayanan, Vrijesh Upadhyay, B. Surendran, Jitender Gupta ISSUES OF INTEREST: Labour reforms, PSU selloffs, railway/ defence production MOST RECENT WIN Revival of National Social Security Board for Unorganised Workers (got three members on board), halted PM Modi’s labour reforms, PSU sale EDUCATION KEY ORGANISATION: ABVP, Shiksha Bachao Andolan, Shiksha Sanskriti Utthan Nyas, Vidya Bharati, Rashtriya Shaikshik Mahasangh et al KEY MOVERS: Sunil Ambekar, Dinanath Batra, Atul Kothari, Kapil Kapoor et al ISSUES OF INTEREST: New education policy, alternative history MOST RECENT WIN: Hindutva ideologues appointed in key educational institutions ECONOMY SANGH ORGANISATION: Swadeshi Jagran Manch, Laghu Udyog Bharati KEY MOVERS: Ashwani Mahajan, Kashmiri Lal, Bhagwati P. Sharma ISSUES OF INTEREST: Alternative economics, trade balance with China, GST,…

Q. How did you build such a long innings in politics? A. Without people’s trust, I’m nothing. They appreciated my work and I got an opportunity to serve them. Q. What are your big achievements as chief minister? A. Today, Sikkim is a clean, prosperous state, where there is no poverty. The second big achievement is that today Sikkim is emotionally integrated with India. When I came to power in 1994, I coined a slogan: “Desh hamara Hindustan, Sikkim hamara Sukhistan (Our country is Hindustan, Sikkim is our land of peace)”. Among all the northeastern and border states, Sikkim’s the most peaceful. We’re drafting a law to declare basic needs—housing, water, power, roads, schools, hospitals—as a legal right holding the state government and local bodies responsible for providing these. Q.…

At the beginning of Ankush Saikia’s new novel, More Bodies Will Fall, detective Arjun Arora is hunkered down in Delhi, off booze for a month, when the brutal murder of an office worker transplanted from Nagaland draws him back into the turbulent politics of the Northeast. As detective novels go, it’s a familiar scenario. But over the course of three Arjun Arora books, Saikia has raised the bar for Indian noir—evoking the grim banality of lawless India with literary flair. It’s a peculiar challenge, says Saikia, who helps run his mother’s bakery, Moinee’s Bakes, in Shillong when he’s not writing. In safer societies, like crime novel-crazed Sweden, the murder tale is a titillating flirtation with danger and disorder, wrapped up in a nice bow at the end. But Indians are…

“We understood there was a market for local craft.” CHHAYA SRIRAM Director, Usha International The sewing machine is at the centre of the universe,” says Chhaya Sriram, director of Usha International, nodding at the N.S. Harsha painting of astronauts floating around a sewing machine on the wall by her office window. “We see it like that.” This month, Usha is trying to get India to see things that way, too, with the launch of a high-street fashion label, Usha Silai, that’s designed to promote creativity and highlight the talents of women from rural India. In partnership with 50-odd NGOs, Usha runs some 16,000 Silai Schools across India, training women in stitching, tailoring—and repairing machines. Now, with IMG Reliance, the company has tied up with designers Soham Dave, Amit Vijaya,…

Several states, such as Andhra Pradesh, Telangana, Karnataka, Bihar, Jharkhand, Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan and Uttar Pradesh, faced an acute currency crunch in recent weeks, with thousands of ATMs running dry—a throwback to the post-demonetisation days in 2016 when a severe scarcity of currency notes led to serpentine queues at ATMs and bank branches across the country. This time, the government found itself on the backfoot. “The temporary shortage caused by sudden and unusual increase in some areas is being tackled quickly,” said Union finance minister Arun Jaitley. Although the government initially estimated the shortfall at Rs 45,000 crore, a subsequent State Bank of India (SBI) report pegged it at Rs 70,000 crore. It was attributed to all sorts of reasons: the forthcoming assembly elections in Karnataka, a tendency to hoard…

The Aam Aadmi Party, as if to remind voters that it plays a role in governing Delhi and is not forever embroiled in conflict with the Centre, has made the capital the first city in India to force errant distribution companies to pay compensation for unscheduled power cuts. Anil Baijal, the lieutenant governor, approved the proposal last week. According to the policy, Delhi’s discoms must resolve unscheduled power cuts within the first hour, or pay customers for each subsequent hour of blackout. The effective fine will be reflected in customers’ bills. Delhi chief minister Arvind Kejriwal gleefully tweeted that the policy was “revolutionary and very innovative”. It puts pressure on the discoms, pressure they should welcome since they claim to be meeting Delhi’s demands at unprecedented levels. 1 Hour given…

After BJP president Amit Shah’s lacklustre campaign in Karnataka, the party was looking to Prime Minister Narendra Modi to hit the high notes on the campaign trail. The state unit even tweeted ‘Modi is coming’ Ned Stark memes from Game of Thrones to warn the Congress. Modi is coming, but only for a very truncated campaign. The PM’s Europe tour and now his two-day summit meet with Xi Jinping in Wuhan are eating into his campaigning. From a planned two-dozen rallies, Modi will now attend scarcely a dozen public meetings in Karnataka until May 10 when the campaigning ends, spending a little over a week. But a week, as they say, is a long time in politics. HARVARD BUSINESS REVIEW If actor and Makkal Needhi Maiam (MNM) chief Kamal Haasan…

When I took over the responsibility of Wipro in 1966, I had no experience of working in business. I was 21 then, having left Stanford with my degree unfinished, in the wake of the tragedy of my father passing away at a relatively young age. The first few years at Wipro were bewildering. Everything was new and had to be learnt. There were many good people to help and support me, but eventually the responsibility was mine and I felt that acutely. I learnt most by accompanying the salespeople in the street. We would go from shop to shop, to convince the owners to stock the vegetable oil that we used to make at that time. This gave me an intimate view of the industry, from its human to its…

Crime novelist Hideo Yokoyama’s Seventeen is billed as a thriller. But it’s really a newsroom drama, andassuchnothinglike Six Four—the first of the bestselling author’s novels to be translated into English. Set in the offices of the fictitious North Kanto Times in 1985, it centres on the trials of the journalists covering the crash of a Japan Air Lines (JAL) jumbo jet that killed 520 passengers—a real story that Yokoyama covered when he worked at the Jomo Shimbun newspaper in Gunma Prefecture. On August 12, 1985, newspaper offices across Japan went into a frenzy changing layouts for the next day’s paper as stories of a crashed JAL flight trickled in. At the fictional North Kanto Times, desk editor Kazumasa Yuuki finds himself the reluctant supervisor of the crash coverage, attempting to…

Q. Speaking of Kashyap, tell us about your role in Sacred Games, which he and Vikramaditya Motwane have directed. I am a R&AW agent who gets involved in a case and works with Sartaj Singh (Saif Ali Khan) to crack it. I am also doing another Netflix show Ghoul.It’sastorythatwill be better appreciated on a platform like Netflix. Q. What was it like to work with Rajinikanth(Kabali)andAkshay Kumar(PadMan)? Both are extraordinarily professional, disciplined and down to earth. You feel like you are with a co-actor and not a co-star. Akshay is extremely punctual, works for eight hours. I wish everybody worked like that. Q. Any difference in working on a small, independent film and one with a bigger budget and mass appeal? There is more intellectual com-promise in some of the…