Innholdsfortegnelse for January 13, 2020 i India Today

This month, the Indian Republic turns a stately 70 years. As we enter the third decade of the millennium, the focus of our policymakers will hopefully continue to be as enshrined in the opening lines of the Preamble to the Constitution—We, the People of India. That focus will be highlighted in this decade when India will outstrip China to become the world’s most populous country in addition to being the world’s largest democracy. The problems we face today are of a magnitude several times greater than those faced by the Republic’s founders seven decades ago. Ensuring a population larger than that of the entire African continent gets access to health, sanitation, security and livelihood will be a formidable challenge. The resources to fund these development goals can come only from…

The Bhupesh Baghel government’s gambit—to hold indirect elections to urban local bodies (ULBs)—has paid off. The Congress, which had won just four of the 10 municipal corporations in 2014, is set to control nine now, perhaps even bagging the tenth if behind-the-scenes negotiations work out. Ten municipal corporations, 38 municipalities and 103 nagar panchayats went to the polls on December 21. The last three polls to ULBs were held through the direct format, with the electorate voting for corporators and the head of the urban body (mayors in municipal corporations and chairpersons of municipalities and nagar panchayats) directly. The state government had amended the Chhattisgarh Municipal Corporation Act, 1956 and the Chhattisgarh Municipalities Act, 1961 in October 2019, the result of which was that heads of ULBs were now to…

ALMOST TWO YEARS TO THE DAY, in a similar year-ahead for this magazine, we had written that the problem with the dominant narrative explaining India’s economic woes then was that it had little to do with reality and therefore policies based on such a narrative were unlikely to work. In the last months of 2017 when the global economy was clocking its strongest growth rate since 2010, India was languishing. At that time, there was virtual consensus among analysts, the market and the government that the decline in growth was just because of bad timing. An unfortunate and unintended confluence of demonetisation, the shift to a national GST, and rising bad debt in banks had temporarily disrupted domestic supply chains but that it was only a matter time before these…

CHINA ALREADY LOOMS LARGE IN OUR CONVENTIONAL GEOPOLITICAL IMAGINATION—AS ‘CHALLENGE’, ‘THREAT’ OR ‘OPPORTUNITY’ FROM THE 1950S ONWARDS, at the beginning of each decade, if our geopolitical challenges and objectives were to be compared, the convergences would stand out. Vocabulary and terminological changes aside, continuities would easily outweigh any major changes or divergences of policy. From this perspective, for the decade ahead, our priorities look no different: securing the neighbourhood, maintaining stable relations with the big powers, having the freedom to take decisions in our own interest and, most of all, securing an external environment that is conducive to our economic development. In thematic terms also, the convergences would stand out: securing greater equity in international power and markets, addressing the challenge of climate change while keeping in perspective our development…

WHY DID NICNET, A FUTURISTIC GOOGLE-LIKE NETWORK, BECOME A MERE FOOTNOTE IN INDIA’S GOVERNANCE STORY? THE ANSWER, ALAS, IS ALL TOO PREDICTABLE—POLITICS WELL BEFORE TWO BRILLIANT graduate students met at Stanford in 1998 and wrote lines of code to trawl the World Wide Web, India had already created its own Google. And no, this is not another story of an ancient and once-great India where plastic surgery was performed on gods, or pushpak viman was the preferred mode of transport for asuras. NICNET, as it was known, existed in flesh and blood, brought to life in the late 1980s by a crack team at the National Informatics Centre (NIC) in New Delhi. Led by the technocrat Narasimhaiah Seshagiri, NIC built a “query-able”, nationwide database from which Indian officials could extract…

THE NEXT DECADE FOR INDIA will be momentous in terms of demography. If in 2000, we celebrated the birth of the billionth Indian, we will, in the next decade, celebrate the birth of a child who will help India overtake China as the world’s most populous country. The land of the Kama Sutra will finally reclaim bragging rights from its neighbour and that favourite phrase, ‘world’s largest democracy’ will be replaced by a simpler one—“world’s largest country”. Yes, India has managed to add a billion human beings on our planet since 1947 and, by most projections, is slated to stabilise its population only after several more decades, reaching upwards of 1.5 billion. This growth has come on the back of rapid mortality decline and a slow decline in fertility with…

RECENT LIFE Chemould Prescott Road, Mumbai January 9-February 13 N.S. Harsha looks at agrarian life and its challenges. As the artist explains, “This show reflects many moments of recent life—human events, larger existential queries—and its relation with the idea of time” PERMEATED ABSENCE Nature Morte, New Delhi January 11-February 8 Dhruvi Acharya’s solo explores the artist’s experience of dealing with the death of loved ones. As she puts it, “Living with death is an odd experience.” The show also explores hot-button issues of feminism, particularly the female body INDIA ART FAIR New Delhi January 30-February 2 Catch up on the art world, both established and emerging talents in a classic celebration of Indian diversity. This annual art fair is a perfect platform for those interested in modern and contemporary art…

Playing mentor to an aspiring rapper in Gully Boy, Siddhant Chaturvedi never thought his debut would land him work with two of Bollywood’s biggest studios. The 25-year-old actor will next be seen in Yash Raj Films’ Bunty Aur Babli 2 and will also begin shooting with Deepika Padukone for Dharma Productions’ next soon. A rank outsider, it has taken Chaturvedi five years to get here. He lost action-comedy Mard Ko Dard Nahi Hota after months of martial arts training. He then gave up a superhero project because he was only the sidekick. When writerdirector Zoya Akhtar asked him to audition for the role of MC Sher at the success party of Amazon Prime series Inside Edge, Chaturvedi, who had earlier refused a casting call for the part, couldn’t say no.…

DEPUTY NO. 1 NCP leader Ajit Pawar has earned the distinction of being the only politician to become deputy to three chief ministers from three different parties in Maharashtra. He was Number 2 to the Congress’s Prithviraj Chavan twice between 2010 and 2014. Then, in a midnight coup on November 23, he was deputy to the BJP’s Devendra Fadnavis. That term lasted only 75 hours. Finally, on December 30, he accepted second place under the Shiv Sena’s Uddhav Thackeray. He’s unlikely to get the powerful home department--uncle Sharad Pawar reportedly offered him a choice between Deputy CM and the home portfolio. And he chose position over power. POWER GAMES UP’s two deputy chief ministers, Keshav Prasad Maurya and Dinesh Sharma, share a peculiar relationship. Sharma is Maurya’s senior in the…

Q Despite the acrimonious election campaign, you have started your chief ministerial stint by dropping your FIR against former CM Raghubar Das. Are you both friends again? The opposition plays a big role in giving direction to the state. I believe in constructive governance. I will work with them (opposition parties) both inside the assembly and outside. Q. The move, however, has been interpreted in some quarters as a signal that you may drop corruption cases. The law will take its own course [in corruption cases]. I have no vendetta against anyone, but that does not mean the guilty will be let off the hook. I am not going to spare anyone who has indulged in corruption. There will be impartial investigations and things will be taken to their logical…

Rajasthan chief minister Ashok Gehlot made news recently with his vocal opposition to the BJP leadership. On December 22, he led a 300,000-strong march in Jaipur to protest the Citizenship (Amendment) Act. On December 11, Gehlot took on Union home minister Amit Shah, who, during a discussion on the CAA in the Rajya Sabha, had implied that Gehlot had himself sought citizenship especially for Hindus and Sikhs who had migrated into Rajasthan from Pakistan. Accusing Shah of ‘misleading the country’, Gehlot said there were refugees from only those two faiths in that instance—and had there been others, he’d have recommended citizenship for them too. On December 16, he completed 11 years as chief minister of Rajasthan (1998-2003, 2008-2013 and 2018- ). Gehlot has continued his focus on welfare and retained…

IN AN ADDRESS TO WEST POINT cadets in February 2011, the US Secretary of Defense Robert Gates said, “When it comes to predicting the nature and location of our next military engagements, since Vietnam, our record has been perfect. We have never once gotten it right, from the Mayaguez to Grenada, Panama, Somalia, the Balkans, Haiti, Kuwait, Iraq, and more—we had no idea a year before any of these missions that we would be so engaged.” Military history is littered with ruined reputations of generals and strategists who attempted to predict how and where the next war would play out. Nonetheless, we have to undertake this exercise if we are not to fall into the trap of preparing to “fight the last war”. TODAY, NATIONS ARE ENGAGED IN ‘GREY ZONE’…

RECENT STUDIES HAVE PROJECTED that India will face an unprecedented scale of urbanisation—350 million Indians will move to cities by 2030; a number likely to double to 700 million by 2050. This is 2.5 times the size of the US’s present population and will be the largest urban movement in the world. This implies that every minute during the next 20 years, 30 Indians will leave rural India for urban areas. The late management guru C.K. Prahalad had emphasised the imperative need for India to create 500 new cities to accommodate and provide a better quality life to its migrating people. Otherwise, every existing city would become a slum. In the modern-day world, it is cities and not countries that compete for resources and investment; they are the centres of…

THE KISANS ARE ONE OF THE central figures of our populist political imagination, but will they survive in blood and flesh or become relics? The peasants are in distress. The genesis of this agrarian crisis lies in the failure of the land reform programme. As public policy shifted focus from land reforms to Green Revolution to solve the food crisis, it also gave away the imperatives of social justice and equity to the pragmatics of technocracy, creating an agrarian apartheid. The technocrats wanted Green Revolution to succeed and, accordingly, chose the rich farmers with large landholdings and money to invest as the beneficiary. Since then, the policy bias has been permanent. India has created a politically entrenched class of landowners and farmers who have developed an elaborate mechanism to capture…

AS INDIA ENTERS THE DECISIVE DECADE for achieving the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs, adopted by all UN member-states in 2015) by 2030, the health goal (SDG3) poses the biggest challenge. Envisioning health and wellbeing for all at all ages, it sets several targets which encompass all domains of health. What must India do to achieve these? Maternal and child health remains a continued commitment, carried over from the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). We are on track to reach the targets for maternal mortality ratio (70 per 100,000 live births) and under-5 mortality rate (25 per 1,000 live births) but need stronger health system performance to reach the neonatal mortality target (12 per 1,000 live births). High levels of undernutrition in women and children (low body weight, anaemia and child stunting)…

IMITATION GAME Aamir Khan plays a desi Forrest Gump in Laal Singh Chaddha; David Dhawan ropes in his son Varun to remake Coolie No. 1, also starring Sara Ali Khan THE REAL DEAL Deepika Padukone’s Chhapaak is inspired by acid attack survivor Laxmi Agarwal. Vidya Balan plays ace mathematician Shakuntala Devi; Janhvi Kapoor essays the feted IAF pilot Gunjan Saxena and Kangana Ranaut dons prosthetics to be Jayalalithaa. Shershaah pays tribute to Kargil War martyr Capt. Vikram Batra; Shoojit Sircar hails Sardar Udham Singh DIGITAL DEBUTS Netflix will premiere three films with compelling female characters in Mrs Serial Killer (Jacqueline Fernandez), Tribhanga (Kajol) and Guilty (Kiara Advani) MAKING HISTORY The trend of going back in time to celebrate the legend of India’s heroes has lately gained traction. The year 2020…

#IndiaSupportsCAA On December 30, Prime Minister NARENDRA MODI launched a hashtag on Twitter conflating the whole country with his government and those who support the CAA. If India supports the CAA, are those protesting tens of thousands out on the streets not Indian? “ This bhagwa (saffron) is not yours... It is a symbol of the Hindu religion... In that religion there is no place for anger, violence and revenge ” Having capsized the country’s news agenda by accusing the UP police of manhandling her, PRIYANKA GANDHI VADRA reminded reporters that the more serious issue was the Yogi Adityanath government’s extreme aggression towards protesters. Without irony, UP deputy CM Dinesh Sharma warned her not to start “a clash of religions for your politics” No one will be stripped of their…

FAST FORWARD TO THE INDIA TODAY issue of December 2029 reviewing a tumultuous decade in Indian politics. A 79-year-old Narendra Modi has been elected for a fourth consecutive term and, this time, imperiously, is planning a move to Rashtrapati Bhavan. The Constitution has been amended to create a presidential form of government, and the electoral system has undergone a drastic change. Supervising the makeover is Amit Shah, deputy prime minister for the past five years. Simultaneous Lok Sabha and state assembly elections have been held, but ultimate power vests in the office of a directly elected president. Other constitutional changes have seen the word ‘secularism’ being dropped from the Constitution: India is now unofficially a Hindu Republic. And then, suddenly, just as the decade draws to a close, there is…

THE FOCUS ON MODERNISING mass transport in keeping with new technology paradigms that we have witnessed over the past five years is probably best symbolised by the bullet train and the urban electric bus projects. Yet, as we enter the next decade, their true value may come into sharp focus and face some searching questions. There is no doubt at all that high-speed passenger train linkages between large urban centres is an imperative for better distributed economic growth with orderly urbanisation. But rail engineering experts are divided over the question of whether more appropriate and cost-efficient technologies would have fit the bill better. Developments in the Advanced Driver Assistance System (ADAS) technologies have already moved from the automobile industry to ensure higher levels of safety and productivity from existing locomotives.…

THE YEAR 2019 may be the one when climate change became a here-and-now problem that no responsible country can ignore. This is not, unfortunately, the same as saying that 2020 is the year when every country will finally address this challenge. It is in this gap between growing global realisation and continued national foot-dragging that India must locate its response to climate change. In 2019, a drumbeat of scientific reports told an ever grimmer story of climate impacts. A report for the UN Secretary General’s Climate Action Summit finds 2015-2019 on track to be the warmest of any five-year period on record, at about 1.1°C above historical levels. This seemingly modest increase is enough to start destabilising natural systems. For example, sea levels are rising, both due to thermal expansion,…

THE WORLD OVER, we are witnessing a rise in ethnic nationalism, rampant xenophobia that targets refugees and long-term immigrants, chasmic inequality between the rich and the poor and a powerful majority that has been rendered into a wounded majority that claims victimhood. These developments have come alongside dizzying volleys of contrasting and conflicting claims—news, fake news, counter news. Along with these, we have seen a blurring of the boundaries between truth and falsity, real and fake and science and pseudoscience. In the guise of challenging science and the elite and powerful, ‘fake news’ has been mobilised by authoritarian leaders to claim unlimited political powers. Every day, we seem to hear politicians use the famous lines from the Marx Brothers’ movie Duck Soup, “Well, who ya gonna believe? Me or your…

SOUTH MUMBAI’s artsy cafes aren’t for Sudhir Patwardhan. He prefers the modest canteen at the National Gallery of Modern Art (NGMA) for his evening cuppa. Outside, labourers busy themselves with roadwork. You can smell his milky brew, but also their toil. This is precisely the kind of Mumbai Patwardhan has devoted his life to capturing. We meet a day after the city, his beloved muse, has witnessed massive demonstrations. The Citizens (Amendment) Bill has just been passed. “The way in which such an important bill was passed is condemnable,” he says. He is soft-spoken. You have to lean in to hear him. “But the violence in Jamia, the arrests of intellectuals for speaking their mind and also what’s happening in Kashmir—one is absolutely against this kind of injustice.” Though a…

UEFA Euro Championship The mega summer offering opens with the Euros in June. The tournament will be held across 12 countries to mark the 60th anniversary of the championship. The draw in November has set tongues wagging already. In Group F, defending champs Portugal have been drawn alongside World Cup winners France and Germany. Besides, England, Croatia and the Czech Republic have been clubbed together in Group D. Enough said? Olympic Games In Tokyo this summer, there will be no Usain Bolt or a Yelena Isinbayeva. Instead, look to athletes such as hurdler Karsten Warholm and swimmer Caeleb Dressel to scorch the competition. The Games will see the introduction of four new disciplines—skateboarding, surfing, sport climbing and karate. Konnichiwa, Japan! Paralympic Games Two weeks after the Olympics end, the action…

Q. What has been the biggest learning from your Gully Boy Oscar campaign? You realise that the system is divided into phases, at least for the best international feature. You have to get publicists that guide you through it. You have to have screenings for members and you need a bit of muscle there. Our film has gone out, but a lot of very good things happened as well. Slowly we’ll learn. You just start making better films, work harder. Q. You are a member of the Academy that votes for the Oscars. Have you started watching the screeners to vote for the awards? They have started arriving. The minute I am done with the promotions of Ghost Stories, I will get around to it. Q. How was it working…