Innholdsfortegnelse for 26 September 2022 i India Today

Two months after the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) authorised Indian banks to open vostro accounts in a foreign partner bank (in this case, Russian) where payments for imports could be made in rupees, the latter remain hesitant to do so, worried as they are about widening western sanctions. A vostro account is one a bank holds on behalf of another bank in a different country. With banks reluctant, and an exchange rate yet to be fixed for a rupee-rouble trade, the stalemate could dampen trade ties between the countries, caution experts. In March, when the US and other western nations imposed sanctions on Russia after its invasion of Ukraine, several Russian banks were cut off from the SWIFT (Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication) payments system. The idea was…

In an otherwise depressed economy, you could call it a booming industry. On July 22, Jharkhand Police arrested Maoist leader Adesh ‘Mangra’ Ganjhu from the Serum forest in Latehar district. He was a big catch, but the arsenal he led the cops to was an even bigger surprise: 7,000 rounds of live cartridges, eight walkie-talkies, disassembled parts of sophisticated weapons, including AK-47 rifles. The real shocker, as superintendent of police (SP) Anjani Anjan describes it, was the seizure of 30 high-explosive (HE) hand grenades used only by the armed forces. A month earlier, on June 23, the Gaya police had arrested another Mao-ist, Ashok Singh Bhokta, and seized two AK-series guns and nearly 800 live rounds from him. In ordinary circumstances, the seizures would have raised a discomfiting question: where…

An early winter morning somewhere near the very heart of India, the sunlight getting so scattered in the mist as to become a luminous haze that seems to make time stop. The twitter of birds is soft, melodic, mostly collegial. Somewhere in the tall, straw-coloured grass, set high on a compact, pale buff face, a pair of topaz eyes burn with an inner glow. Held up by two dark teardrop-like streaks running down the face, as if by a pair of tongs, and powered by a bionic set of optic nerves, they are scanning a landscape that could well have been set anywhere from 72,000 years ago to early last century. On the far horizon, somewhere within its 210-degree vision, it spots action. Perhaps a chital doe, five kilometres away.…

Sheopur district, and in particular Karahal block where Kuno National Park is located, is one of the most economically and socially backward areas—not just of Madhya Pradesh, but also of the country. Around a quarter of its population belongs to the Sahariya community, which is classified as a ‘particularly vulnerable tribal group’. Agriculture is the mainstay of the district’s economy; manufacturing and tertiary sectors have a negligible contribution. “There are no industries in the region and land holdings are extremely fragmented. Those who migrate for work get only menial jobs as they don’t possess any skills,” says Hazrat Yadav, 50, of Sesaipura, the village nearest to the national park. The arrival of cheetahs could change that, at least as far as the hospitality sector is concerned, he believes. And a…

After the last round of the corps commander-level meeting recently, the Indian Army and the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) of China have agreed to pull back (or disengage) from the Gogra-Hot Springs area, one of the flashpoints in eastern Ladakh. But real peace on the icy heights of the Himalayas will remain elusive until both sides agree to de-inducting forces amassed close to the border to the pre-April 2020 position. The 28-month-long military standoff has posed multiple challenges for both sides. For Indian forces, the experience has been a wake-up call on the need for some critical weaponry. At the top of the list are light tanks, something entirely missing from India’s inventory, since Indian armour is meant to operate on the plains. The Chinese, for their part, have deployed…

Late last month, guitarist/composer/soundsmith Kartik Pillai dropped Service Animal, his seventh release under the JAMBLU moniker. Pillai is better known as the guitarist for indie rock band Peter Cat Recording Co., but he has also been putting out jagged, experimental soundscapes like JAMBLU since 2013. Recorded over six months in Kerala, where Pillai was stranded along with his family during the first Covid-19 lockdown, Service Animal is a collection of woozy lo-fi ballads. It is also the latest addition to the small but growing oeuvre of leftfield Indian electronica. Casual music listeners tend to think of electronic music as pure dance fuel. But the original aim of electronic music was to break music free from the tyranny of “natural” tone and timbre, to see how far you could push the…

September, it seems, has put a spring in the steps of India’s Opposition leaders. Another determined bid is on to forge an Opposition alliance that can take on the Narendra Modi-led BJP in the 2024 general election. The trigger this time has been Nitish Kumar’s exit from the BJP-led National Democratic Alliance (NDA) in August, and the Janata Dal (United) forming a government with the Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD) and the Congress in Bihar. On September 1, Telangana chief minister K. Chandrashekar Rao (KCR) visited Bihar and met Nitish and his deputy CM, the RJD’s Tejashwi Yadav, and called for a “BJP-mukt Bharat”. Four days later, Nitish met Rahul Gandhi in Delhi, ahead of the Congress leader leaving for his 150-day ‘Bharat Jodo’ yatra across the country. On September 8,…

The vexed issue of sharing the waters of the Teesta river between India and Bangladesh has always been a hot topic during polls for over a decade, especially in the eastern neighbour. Despite that, it has defied resolution. Now, possibly the most contentious issue between the two nations has again assumed significance in a trifecta of polls: Bangladesh prime minister Sheikh Hasina has a general election to face in 2023 and her Indian counterpart Narendra Modi has the Lok Sabha polls to contend with in 2024. Between them stands the high-octane figure of West Bengal CM Mamata Banerjee, who is gearing up for the 2023 panchayat elections, besides the general election. At the end of her four-day trip to India from September 5 to 8, the Bangladesh PM took home…

TENUOUS TRUCE It was a picture-perfect occasion, Kerala’s warring Congress leaders—PCC chief K. Sudhakaran, leader of the opposition V.D. Satheeshan and MPs Shashi Tharoor and K. Muraleedharan among others—lining up at the border in Parassala to receive the Rahul Gandhi-led Bharat Jodo Yatra as it entered the state on September 11. But the truce lasted just hours. Sudhakaran and Tharoor waited in vain for Rahul to arrive to inaugurate a Congress freedom fighter’s memorial at NIMS Medicity. The Gandhi scion couldn’t make it due to security reasons and both leaders were livid with the yatra organisers for their “insensitivity”. Muraleedharan, meanwhile, boycotted a function for Rahul at Nemom, after he was denied entry to the dais. Whether the Congress yatra unites India or not, it has clearly failed to unite…

A few months after India’s Independence, Ramanuj Pratap Singh Deo, the ruler of Koriya (a princely state that was under the Eastern States Agency and is now part of modernday Chhattisgarh), saw three cheetahs while driving at night. They were all sitting huddled together, perhaps blinded and scared by the lights. As per an account of the hunt, sent by the ruler’s secretary to a popular taxidermist, Van Ingen, “The first bullet killed one and the second, the remaining two. The second bullet, after having gone through one, struck the other, which was behind it, and killed it.” The cheetahs were almost identical—all males—and were believed to be from the same litter. It wasn’t known whether the animals were born in Koriya or had migrated from elsewhere. In his 1923 book, Wild…

Watching Autumn Leaves Fall Since summer gives way to winter in our cities almost without warning, not many Indians, sadly, are familiar with the joys of autumn. If, however, you wanted those seasons of extreme hot and cold to have a hyphen, simply head to Kashmir between late September and November. Beyond the kahwa and shikaras, Srinagar offers you the rare sight of chinar trees shedding autumnal leaves. The chinar was introduced to Kashmir by the Mughals, and it is, in many ways, the cynosure of Srinagar’s iconic gardens. During ‘Harud’ (the Kashmiri name for autumn), places like Shalimar and Naseem Bagh are all carpeted with brown leaves that crunch and crackle under one’s feet. If Srinagar is all about the brown, Shillong is all about the pink. Cherry trees that…

A bit of westernmost Arunachal Pradesh pokes out between Tibet and Bhutan, like a small nose. Near its tip is Zemithang village, in the Pangchen Valley. Think of a wide meadow beside the restless, hazel Nyamjang Chu river. We have driven about 90 km from Tawang over mountain roads—stopping for tea at the beautiful Sangetsar Lake with its prayer flags and golden ducks, and negotiating a 66 hairpin-bend descent—to this meadow. The village has laid out a lunch banquet, including the best pork I have ever had. I hope they fed the same dish to the Dalai Lama in 1958, when he stopped here to rest during his escape into lifelong exile. The sun is sharp at 8,000 ft, but the air is fresh, the beverages are cool, and the…

IT’S A BUSY TIME IN RAJAST-HAN’S Kota city, known as a hub of coaching centres for students aspiring to join India’s top engineering and medical institutes. After two years of the Covid-19 pandemic, coaching classes are abrim with students, and competition is heating up with the entry of new players, who are pioneers in online coaching and are now venturing into the offfline space. During lunch breaks or towards the end of evening sessions, large numbers of students wearing the uniforms of one coaching centre or the other crowd the streets, especially along a stretch of the Kota-Jhalawar highway, where some half a dozen institutes are located within walking distance of each other. The hostels, nearly all of them privately run, are full, and many more students have taken up…

Afresh round in the fight for federalism is unfolding in Tamil Nadu, with the control over its universities emerging as the apple of discord. On August 30—in a first—the ruling Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (DMK) government called the vice-chancellors of all 22 state-run universities for a conference in Chennai. Governor R.N. Ravi—who also serves as the ex officio chancellor of these universities—was conveniently left out of the list of invitees. Chief minister M.K. Stalin, speaking at the conference, asserted that the universities “must abide by the policy decisions of the state government”, and the V-Cs “should act accordingly”. Just about five months back, on April 25, the state legislature had adopted two bills that sought to empower the government to appoint the V-Cs, thereby curtailing the governor’s powers. At present, the…

The country’s oldest regional party—Shiromani Akali Dal (SAD)—is battling for survival, and so is its ‘first family’. Ever since the Punjab assembly election results were declared in March this year, the 102-year-old party is witnessing internal rumblings of discontent against the leadership of the Badals. From 56 seats in 2012, the SAD has been reduced to just three seats in the 117-member state legislative assembly. The Aam Aadmi Party wave that swept Punjab (it won 92 seats) also flooded the bastions of both the SAD president, Sukhbir Singh Badal, and his father and former five-time chief minister, Parkash Singh Badal. Besides the Badals, Sukhbir’s two brothers-in-law—Adesh Partap Singh Kairon and Bikram Singh Majithia—also lost their seats, while the party could muster just over 18 per cent of the votes polled—its…

AFRICAN CHEETAH  Conservation status: Vulnerable  Family: Felidae Speed: Maximum 120 kmph  Numbers in the world: 7,100 estimated African Cheetahs and less than 50 Asiatic Cheetahs in Iran  Average life span: Up to 14 years (in the wild); up to 20 years (in captivity) Grouping: Cheetahs live as ‘coalitions’ of males, females with cubs or individually Gestation period: Three months Litter: They give birth to three or four cubs that attain independence in around 18-20 months FOOD: Gazelles, impalas, other small-to medium-sized ungulates and calves of larger ungulate species are the primary diet, apart from hares, small mammals and birds HABITAT Cheetahs are found in a range of habitats—from shrublands, grasslands and savannahs to temperate and hot deserts 1947 The last cheetah hunt is reported from the Koriya princely state in…

THE GROWTH NUMBERS FOR THE INDIAN economy in the April-June quarter of the current fiscal were not expected to throw up any surprises. Given that the comparable period in the previous year had seen a big lull in economic activity due to the second wave of the Covid-19 pandemic, growth in Q1FY23 was expected to be 15 per cent or more; the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) had predicted 16.2 per cent. So, when the numbers came in at 13.5 per cent, and economists continued to flag high net imports, persistent inflation, sluggish rural demand and lower government spending, it did not bode well for India’s yearly growth. The fear is, it could well be under the much-touted 7 per cent. “That is a very low rate of growth for a…

If you watch a certain vintage of Bollywood film, chances are you would have heard of the Rampuri chaaku. Perhaps, you’ve crossed paths with a Rampuri kabab at a culinary pop-up, or you might even be a cynophile given to slavering over the Rampur greyhound. That said, it is likelier you’re still waiting to discover the delights of this former princely state, lying 200 km east of Delhi, just beyond Moradabad. The state of Rampur was formed in 1774 by Nawab Faizullah Khan, a Rohilla Pathan, under British protection. The Nawab wanted to name the city he was founding Faizabad, after himself. However, since there were many other places known by that name, he had to content himself with Mustafabad. Sadly, for the Nawab, it’s really the name Rampur that…

Home to the second-oldest fort in Rajasthan, Jaisalmer was founded in 1156 by Rawal Jaisal. It once stood at the crossroads of important trade routes, including the Silk Road. In 2013, this ‘living fort’ was declared a UNESCO World Heritage Site, grouped under the ‘Hill Forts of Rajasthan’. About 40 km from the golden fort lie the shimmering sand dunes of Sam, at the edge of the Thar Desert. This is a different sort of crossroads—where excitement and adventure intersect. There’s no better way to explore the desert than on a 4X4 jeep safari. It is thrilling and more efficient than being on a camel’s back. Apart from a healthy dose of off-roading and dune bashing, the safari also takes you to villages lying deep in the barren grandeur of…

It’s not often that a national park boasts a Unesco World Heritage fort within its precincts, but Ranthambore has that honour. It is believed that the Ranthambore Fort was constructed over a thousand years ago by the Chahamanas for their capital. They called it ‘Ranastambhapura’. Today, hundreds of visitors pass the fort daily on their safari jeeps, eager for a sighting of the elusive tiger. If they’re lucky, they might even see one on the ramparts of the fort. The town of Sawai Madhopur is the gateway to Ranthambore, the most popular national park in Rajasthan. Spanning an area of 1,334 square km and bounded by the Banas and Chambal rivers on the north and south, respectively, Ranthambore is noted for its large population of tigers. Machli, one of the…