Cult Current, April 2017

COVER STORY

#POSITIVE INDIA

UNSUNG HERO

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Dr. Seema Saadikha

doctor by profession, 36-year-old Seema Saadikha is a resident of Bengaluru. As a student of medicine, she used to be a part of many health camps organised in different villages and it was since then that she developed an interest in going out of her way to help people. In May 2015, she started an NGO named Namma Mitra Foundation, which focusses on community development and rural empowerment in villages in Karnataka. They work on projects to address issues around health, hygiene, education, environment, employment, etc. The volunteers conduct surveys in different villages, find out what specific problems the villagers have to face, and come up with solutions for them.

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EDITORIAL

WE ARE

EDITORIAL DIRECTOR Prof. Pradeep K Mathur

EDITOR Srirajesh

OPINION EDITOR Sanjay Srivastava

CORPORATE EDITOR Gagan Batra

CO-ORDINATING EDITOR Dhirendra N. Srivastava NATIONAL EDITOR Dr. Raja Ram Tripathi

METRO EDITOR Manoj Bisaria

DIGITAL EDITOR Jalaj Srivastava

MANAGING EDITOR Tillan Richhariya

POLITICAL EDITOR Ram Shiromani Shukla

FOREIGN EDITOR Rosy Kashyap

SPORT EDITOR Vishwajeet Kumar

ASSOCIATE EDITOR Lokesh Sharma

COPY EDITOR Arun Patel Sandeep Kumar

REPORTING SPECIAL CORRESPONDENT Vikas Kumar Satish Mukhiya Kamlesh Jha

Art

CORRESPONDENT Jaya Verma, Sandeep Singh Anirudha Singh

Art Editor Anwar-ul- Huque PHOTOGRAPHER

CHIEFS OF BUREAU (INTERNATIONAL)

CHIEFS OF BUREAU (NATIONAL)

Akul Batra (USA)

Sanjay Kumar (Lucknow)

C. Sieuwratan (Netherland)

Sandeep Kumar (Patna)

G. Verma (London, UK)

Vijay K. Pandey (Kolkata)

Dr. Md. Faheem Akbar (Pakistan)

Bharat P Yadav (Raipur)

Ravi Singh WEB & IT ADMIN Anuj Singh PRODUCTION K KVerma

A. Asgarzadeh (Iran)

Kamal Mansoor (Bhopal)

Dr. Nic Sheri (Malaysia)

Anirudha Yadav (Guwahati)

A. Abraham Sharjah (UAE)

Shatrughna Prasad (Mumbai)

MARKETING GENERAL MANAGER R P Chauhan

Inaugural Issue

Manager (Operation) Rajesh Kumar

GENERAL MANEGER Uma Shankar Singh

EXECUTIVE OFFICER

EXECUTIVE OFFICER TejendraJha, PriyanshuPandey

Om Prakash Dubey

DELENG19447

Prem Hans Singh

Vol.: 01, Issue : 01, April-2017

Editorial/Business office

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URJAS MEDIA VENTURE India Office : G-84, 3rd Floor, East Vinod Nagar, New Delhi- 110091, INDIA, Tel: +91-11-2277-0485 USA Office: 14601, Belaire Blvd, Houston, Texas 77083, USA, Tel: +1 (832) 644-0054 E-mail: editor@cultcurrent.com, info@urjasmedia.com, Web:www.cultcurrent.com, www.urjasmedia.com Owned, published, and edited by Rajesh Srivastava at G-84, 3rd Floor, East Vinod Nagar, New Delhi- 110091, and printed at Royal offset, D 492 Patpargunj Industrial Area, New Delhi- 110092.

All right reserved and no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any means without the prior written consent of the publisher.

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COVER STORY

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Russia Policy

34

INADEQUATE NEW CHILD MARRIAGE LAW IN BANGLADESH

FUTURE IN THE ICC STILL UNCERTAIN 14 JAPAN'S NORTH KOREA OPTION

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CHINA AND INDIA SHOULD ENHANCE TRUST FOR ENERGY DEALS 36 HAS TRUMP LOST THE HEALTH-CARE FIGHT! 38 FUTILITY OF US INTERVENTION IN YEMEN 40

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MODI AND TRUMP BROMANCE?

DEATH KNELLS FOR PAKISTAN’S MUSIC INDUSTRY?

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MOST POWERFUL WOMEN OF BOLLYWOOD 5 |APRIL-2017|

CONTENT

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MODI’S NEW INDIA

Putin Might Not wait for Trump to sort out

SYRIA’S CIVIL WAR HOW TO END CONFRONTATION IN WEST ASSIA?

FROM HERE AND THERE

NASA UNVEILS ‘DARK SPOT’ ON JUPITER

BREAKS SILENCE ON PREGNANCY RUMOURS! Actress Bipasha Basu has denied the rumours about her being pregnant. Recently, a tabloid reported that the actress is pregnant but Bips soon took to her Twitter account to quash the report. Bipasha, in a series of tweets wrote, "The curiosity about me being pregnant...is sweet and a tad annoying. I am sorry to disappoint the people who are so eager for this to happen. We are not planning to have a baby right now. When we do plan..it will be joyous news which we will share with our well wishers then. The constant guessing game is tiring..as am more than straightforward person. So please do not believe anything that gets written. Thank you all." Bipasha recently also grabbed eyeballs for refusing to walk the ramp at a London fashion event at the last minute.

OUR BRAINS WILL CONNECT TO COMPUTERS

NASA revealed citizen scientist Roman Tkachenko enhanced the colour to bring out the rich detail in the storm and surrounding clouds. A NASA spacecraft on March 27 sent back an image of a “Dark Spot” found on the fifth planet, Jupiter, in our solar system. The NASA’s spacecraft Juno, orbiting around Jupiter, acquired the image of a “Dark Spot” through the JunoCam on Feb. 2, 2017, at 5:13 am PDT at an altitude of 9,000 milesabove the giant planet’s cloud tops.“

WORLD'S BIGGEST DINOSAUR FOOTPRINT DISCOVERED More than 100 million years ago, on a muddy stretch of land that is now Australia, nearly two-dozen species of dinosaur once roamed. There were duck-billed ornithopods, which left long, three-toed tracks in their wake. Heavy armored dinosaurs pressed large, tulip-shaped prints into the soil. Predators scratched the ground with their talons.

And the feet of gigantic, longnecked sauropods created bathtub-sized depressions in the dirt.

Elon Musk is at it again this week with news of yet another business venture in yet another futuristic field of research. He's given us electric cars, a company dedicated to space exploration, is working on clean energy tech, and is building a tunnel, but now he wants to connect our brains directly with computers. Musk's latest venture is called Neuralink.

SPECULATION OF TATA TIGOR The Tata Tigor is all set to be launched in India and you can read all about its features and variants here. The company had launched the new Tiago hatchback last year and the Tigor is a sub 4-meter subcompact sedan that has been derived from the Tiago itself. The Tigor is Tata's third subcompact sedan after the Indigo eCS and the Zest. With the Tiago doing really well for Tata, the company has its hopes pinned on the Tigor and our first impression of it was good, too.

DOES INDIA NEED STRINGENT HATE SPEECH LAWS? The Law Commission of India released a report that proposed new laws in order to further curb hate speech. Headed by former Supreme Court judge BS Chauhan, the report suggests making incitement to hatred as well as causing fear, alarm or provocation to violence punishable offences. The report argues that Indian law defines as well as penalises hate speech haphazardly.

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BUZZ & TRIBUTE

RAVINDRA GAIKWAD

THEY SAID IT...

MP, SHIV SENA Ravindra Gaikwad thrashed a Air India employee with his slippers for allegedly being disrespectful towards him. The MP lost his cool and refused to leave the flight after it landed in Delhi. He was upset over being forced to travel in economy class when he had a business class ticket.

YOGI ADITYANATH CHIEF MINISTER, UTTAR PRADESH Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath will be one of the star campaigners of the BJP for the MCD polls scheduled to be held on April 23. The party has prepared a list of star campaigners, including Union ministers, chief ministers of BJP-ruled states, senior party leaders.

Narendra Modi

Donald Trump

PM, India

President, USA

Similar to the freedom movement, we need a movement for development, where the collective aspirations propel the country's growth, We should get involved into building a new India, our dream mantra should be 'opportunity for all' and ‘development for all’.

Donald Trump President, USAI know we're going to make a deal on health care for Americans, that's such an easy one, at the end of the a day, I know that this month did much to change everything.

THE TRIBUTE

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n the 19th century India no one would caste system, he formed the Satya Shodhak have dreamt of educating their girls.

Samaj with the aim of protecting the soBut Mahatma Jyotiba Phule was a vicalled lower castes from exploitation and sionary much ahead of his times. A piinjustices. His unrelenting efforts to eradioneer in the field of women’s cate social inequalities earned him the title education, he is the one who opened the of “Father of Indian Social Revolution”. He first ever girls’ school in India. He was also was a pioneer in the field of women’s edumuch pained by the atrocities meted out on cation. At a time when women were among the people in the name of caste. Since he the most downtrodden sections of the sohad been born into a so-called lower caste ciety, Jyotiba’s endeavor to educate them family, he had experienced the tortures and came as a shock to everyone. But he perinjustices rooting out of the caste system sisted and built many schools for girls from first hand. An intelligent and idealistic man, different backgrounds. He was married as a JYOTIBA PHULE he refused to tolerate any unjustified behav- 11 April 1827 - 28 November 1890 young boy to Savitribai who was just nine ior from others and set his mind on reformyears old. His wife fully supported his idealing the society for the better. He realized the istic views and became a feminist and social importance of education; married at a young age, he began activist in her own right. The couple did not have any bioteaching his wife how to read and write. Fortunately, his wife logical children. They adopted one of the infants, a boy, from Savitribai, was a like-minded soul who supported and the home they ran for pregnant widows. The boy grew up helped her husband whole-heartedly in his social endeavors. to be a doctor and carried forward his parents’ legacy of soHighly distressed by the malpractices prevalent due to the cial service.

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NATIONAL

APPROACH AFTER ELECTION DEFEAT

MURSHIDABAD

RAHUL GANDHI TO REINVENT THE CONGRESS!

CHILDREN SET AN EXAMPLE IN LOCAL GOVERNANCE

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ignals from the Congress headquarters that Rahul Gandhi will soon be elevated to the top post, notwithstanding the party’s shocking debacle in the recent polls in Uttar Pradesh, is being seen in various lights in the grand old party. Detractors of the party vice president say that it is nothing but hara-kiri while the faithful feel that the attacks on Rahul will sooner or later make him a formidable leader. “Did Narendra Modi not come under attack for a dozen years before he became the prime minister,” a party general secretary remarked. Senior party leader Shakeel Ahmed said that “there is unanimity in the party that Rahul should take over as president of the party at the earliest but it depends upon him and our supreme leader and party chief Sonia Gandhi”. “It will be decided between them about the timing. Everybody in the party is of one opinion that Rahul should be our next party president,” he said.

METEOROLOGY

BABRI MASJID CASE

NO RELIEF FROM HEATWAVE ANYTIME SOON

MUST BE DECIDED BY COURT AND NOT THROUGH MEDIATION

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s India sizzles under the effects of an early heatwave, citizens have been cautioned to expect no relief anytime soon. Parts of northwest, west and central India have already seen temperatures soar by 4°C to 6°C “under the influence of prevailing winds and clear sky conditions”, the India Meteorological Department explained. According to AccuWeather, most of India, besides the Himalayas of northeastern India and coastal regions, will witness temperatures at or above 38°C.

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he recent observation by Chief Justice of India J.S. Khehar that the contentious, nearly 70-year-old Ram Janmabhoomi-Babri Masjid dispute should be settled out of court not only surprised the parties involved but also the legal community at large. The CJI’s offer to mediate the settlement talks himself is particularly startling since anyone acquainted with the law on mediation can vouch for the fact that a mediator who seeks to mediate a dispute cannot adjudicate the same matter if the mediation fails.

What is more, his comment – “this was a matter of sentiment” – gives away his mind on the merits of the case.

STING

UIDAI FILES FIR AGAINST JOURNALIST

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evising a development strategy is no child’s play.

Institutionalizing it on the ground is far more difficult.

When such a strategy is brought about by children in the age group of 10 to 19 years, it’s worth sitting down and learning. Mahesail II and Aurangabad I gram panchayats (village councils) are two rare examples under Suti II, a community development block in West Bengal’s Murshidabad district, where children are bringing the waves of change. At Mahesail II, the breeze of Bhagirathi is enigmatic that will draw people to the smart, confident children, always ready to help and above all greet with a smile.

he Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI), a central government agency that manages the Aadhaar authentication programme, has filed a first information report (FIR) against a CNN-News 18 journalist, after the television network aired a segment showing that it was possible to obtain two separate Aadhaar enrollment numbers with the same set of biometrics. According to multiple reports, the Delhi police registered what is possibly the first case filed under the Aadhaar Act after two separate persons were “found having the same parameters of biometric information”. “The incidents, prima facie, imply that a single person with the same parameters of biometric information has got himself enrolled under two different identities thereby impersonating in either or both the incidents presumably using fabricated documents.

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CLARIFICATION

TEESTA WATER SHARING

A START-UP

BITCOINS AND INDIA AND BANGLADESH NEED A PACT TEAM INDUS LEAD INDIA'S RACE TO VIRTUAL CURRENCIES THE MOON NOT AUTHORISED

BY RBI

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he government said the use of virtual currencies like Bitcoins is not authorised by the RBI and could result in a breach of antimoney laundering provisions. The RBI has already cautioned users, holders and traders of virtual currency, including Bitcoin, about the potential financial, legal and security risks arising from the usage.

“The absence of counter parties in usage of virtual currencies including Bitcoins, for illicit and illegal activities in anonymous/pseudonymous systems could subject the users to unintentional breaches of anti-money laundering and combating the financing of terrorism laws,” minister of state for finance, Arjun Ram Meghwal, said .

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uring the upcoming visit of Bangladesh Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina to India, from April 7-10, the most important issues the two countries are expected to discuss is the deal on releasing about 48% of waters from the Teesta river to Bangladesh. This despite the fact that, according to a news report in The Daily Star, “Teesta water-sharing treaty is not on the agenda”. Teesta is the fourth largest transboundary river shared between India and Bangladesh, after the Ganges, Brahmaputra and the Meghna (GBM) river system. The total catchment area of the GBM is about 1.75 million square km.

The Teesta originates in the Indian state of Sikkim and its total length is 414 km, out of which 151 km lie in Sikkim, 142 kms flow along the Sikkim-West Bengal boundary and through West Bengal, and 121 km run in Bangladesh. In Bangladesh, the river mainly affects the five northern districts of Rangpur Division: Gaibandha, Kurigram, Lalmonirhat, Nilphamari and Rangpur. According to a report on the Teesta by The Asia Foundation in 2013, its flood plain covers about 14% of the total cropped area of Bangladesh and provides direct livelihood opportunities to approximately 7.3% of its population.

UTTAR PRADESH

ABATTOIR CRACKDOWN LEAVES BUTCHERS CONCERNED

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ndia's Team Indus is one of five groups in race to put a privately funded spacecraft on the Moon.The start-up is competing against four other teams from around the world for the Google Lunar X-Prize. To stand a chance of winning the $20m (£16m) top prize, the teams will need to leave Earth by 31 December.The winner will be the first to roam at least 500m (1,640ft) on the lunar surface and stream hiresolution imagery back to Earth.

everal slaughterhouses and almost 100 meat shops have been shut in the northern Indian state of Uttar Pradesh after the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) comprehensively won state assembly elections in India's most populous state. The new chief minister, Yogi Adityanath, is a strong supporter of laws protecting cows, and has publicly opposed beef consumption. The slaughter of cows and consumption of beef is considered taboo

by India's majority Hindu population - and is illegal in most Indian states including Uttar Pradesh. Reports say that immediately after taking office, one of his first acts was to instruct police officials to crack down on "illegal" slaughterhouses in the state. Locals allege however, that many of them did not kill cows, but animals like goat and buffalo, the slaughter of which is legal. Most of the butcher shops and slaughter houses in Uttar Pradesh are owned and run

by Muslims who make up 18% of the state's population.

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INTERNATIONAL

HILLARY CLINTON

WHITE HOUSE

'I WILL NEVER STOP SPEAKING OUT'

TRUMP INSIST BORDER WALL

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peaking at a conference for professional business women in San Francisco on Tuesday, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton announced that she is back. “I am thrilled to be out of the woods, in the company of so many inspiring women," she said to a enamored crowd of about 3,500 at the Professional Business Women of California's annual conference, adding that there is no place she would rather be "other than the White House." Clinton has made few public appearances since losing the presidential election to Donald Trump in November. Earlier in March, she gave a speech to women in Pennsylvania and said she was "ready" to come out of the woods, speaking coyly to her low-profile as well as social media buzz over people spotting the politician on hikes near a family home in New York state. At the San Francisco speech, she articulated disappointment about the election but spent most of her time on stage sounding defiant tones. She called the advancement of women's and girls' rights "the great unfinished business of the 21st century” and concluded her speech by saying that she would be out in public fighting for progress on those fronts.

FRANCE

FILLON’S WIFE PENELOPE UNDER FORMAL INVESTIGATION

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he wife of French presidential candidate Francois Fillon was given preliminary charges over well-paid parliamentary jobs that investigators suspect she never performed. Fillon himself had already been charged in the case, which has deeply damaged the conservative candidate's chances for the two-round election April 23 and May 7.

He is suspected of misusing public funds, receiving money from the misuse of public funds, complicity in misusing public funds and improper declaration of assets, among other charges.

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he White House is calling for immediate budget cuts of $18 billion from programs like medical research, infrastructure and community development grants to help pay for the border wall that President Donald Trump repeatedly promised would be financed by Mexico.

USA

TRUMP MAY CUT FOREIGN AID DURING WORST HUMANITARIAN CRISIS

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he world's largest humanitarian crisis in 70 years has been declared in three African countries on the brink of famine, just as President Donald Trump's proposed foreign aid cuts threaten to pull the United States from its historic role as the world's top emergency donor. If the deep cuts are approved by Congress and the U.S. does not contribute to Africa's current crisis, experts warn that the continent's growing drought and famine could have far-ranging effects, including a new wave of migrants heading to Europe and possibly more support for Islamic extremist groups.

PARIS ATTACK

'CARLOS THE JACKAL' GETS THIRD LIFE SENTENCE

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The administration would eliminate $1.2 billion in National Institutes of Health research grants, a favorite of both parties. The community development block grant program, also popular, would be halved, amounting to a cut of $1.5 billion, and Trump would strip $500 million from a transportation project known as TIGER grants. Now, the White House wants the wall and Pentagon increases to be paid for using steep, immediate cuts to research into medical cures.

he man known as "Carlos the Jackal" has been convicted in a French court of a deadly 1974 attack on a Paris shopping arcade and sentenced to life in prison for the third time. The Venezuelan-born Ilich Ramirez Sanchez is already serving two life sentences in France for murders and attacks he was convicted of perpetrating or organizing on behalf of the Palestinian cause or of communist revolution in the 1970s and '80s. As the trial wrapped, the 67-year-old known worldwide as "Carlos" denounced "an absurd trial" for a 42-year-old crime. Carlos had denied involvement, saying there was no proof against him. Five judges found Carlos, the only defendant, guilty of throwing a grenade onto a shopping area, killing two and injuring 32.

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EXECUTIVE ORDER

PAKISTAN

LONDON

CLIMATE RULE ROLLBACK

AAMIR LIAQUAT APOLOGISES FOR ‘HATE SPEECH’

ANATOMY OF BREXIT

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resident Donald Trump has signed an executive order rolling back Obama-era rules aimed at curbing climate change.

The president said this would put an end to the "war on coal" and "job-killing regulations". The Energy Independence Executive Order suspends more than half a dozen measures enacted by his predecessor, and boosts fossil fuels.

Business groups have praised the Trump administration's move but environmental campaigners have condemned it. Outside the White House, a few hundred protesters gathered to vent their displeasure at the executive order. Inside, the president was flanked by coal miners as he signed the order, saying: "My administration is putting an end to the war on coal.

CHINA

FAKE FIGURES, REAL PENALTIES

akistan's media regulator has ordered a controversial televangelist to apologise on air for hate speech. Aamir Liaquat Hussain had accused liberal activists, bloggers and journalists of blasphemy and treachery. He and the Bol television channel which broadcasts his show have until the end of the month to say sorry to those he accused - or be taken off air.Such allegations can incite murder in Pakistan, where blasphemy is a crime that can result in the death penalty.Even the suspicion of blasphemy has seen victims attacked and in some cases lynched by mobs.Many say Aamir Liaquat courts controversy as a way of gaining popularity. His recent outbursts are seen as a tactic to catapult a nascent news channel into the public eye.As a televangelist, he has been popular with Pakistan's increasingly conservative urban housewives and his shows have topped the ratings in terms of advertising revenue.

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ens of thousands of Brexit protesters gathered executive order on 25th March, just four days before the British government officially starts the withdrawal process from the European Union (EU)..Prime Minister Theresa May will trigger Article 50 of the Lisbon Treaty to start the two-year 'divorce' process.

Since British voted to leave the EU by 52 to 48 percent on June 23, 2016, the country has remained divided.

IVORY COAST

SIMONE GBAGBO CLEARED OF WAR CRIMES CHARGES

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n Ivory Coast court has found former first lady Simone Gbagbo not guilty of war crimes and crimes against humanity after a trial on her alleged role in postelection abuses that led to the deaths of thousands. Judge Kouadio Bouatchi with the country's highest criminal court said a jury unanimously voted on Tuesday to free Gbagbo.

The prosecution had asked for a life sentence, saying she participated on a committee that organised attacks against supporters of her husband's opponent after the 2010 election.

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hina will punish companies if they are found to be reporting fraudulent trade data, the customs administration said on 28th March, as it published details on enforcement of a credit system for foreign trade enterprises. Companies considered "discredited" may be subject to more stringent inspections when applying for government tax rebates, or see an impact on their import or export quotas, while company representatives may be restricted from traveling abroad. "Only when discredited firms pay a high economic price can measures create the effect where firms 'dare not to be dishonest and cannot be dishonest'," said.

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DIPLOMACY

RUSSIA, CHINA LAY GROUNDWORK FOR BRICS TRANSACTIONS IN GOLD

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ecent progress made in streamlining trade in local currencies has brought Moscow and Beijing closer to creating a financial architecture that could facilitate transactions in gold. As we reported last week, Moscow and Beijing took another step towards de-dollarization with the opening of a yuan clearing bank in Russia. And earlier this month Russia's Central Bank opened its first-ever foreign branch in Beijing to allow for better communication between Russian and Chinese financial authorities.

FROM THE EDITOR'S DESK

I SRIRAJESH, Editor

WINNING THE WAR ON TERRORISM Time has therefore, come for an all out war on terrorism and this war has to be multi-dimensional and multi-pronged to be won. It should be more or less clear to us now that this war cannot be won by military might alone.

f the wars , massively destructive and dehumanising , were the curse of human race in the 20thcentury terrorism is the undoing of all that the human beings have achieved by way of scientific discovery and endless quest for knowledge. No doubt two world wars in the first half of the past century followed by innumerable regional wars and local conflicts caused a loss of millions of lives and trillions of dollars by way of loss of production and expenditure on armaments.

However, terrorism seems to be a bigger threat to humanity for its targets are innocent, unknown and unsuspecting who have no idea why they are being targeted by whom for what reason. At a philosophical level all violence is irrational but cult of terrorism is mad and product of sick minds.

Now it is almost 40 years since the civilised world has been fighting the scourge of terrorism and there is no end in sight to this war on terrorism. The cost of this war is enormous not only in financial terms but also in terms of mutual faith, love and understanding that binds human race together across the globe and sensitise us to the suffering of people who live far away from us, have nothing in common with us but for the fact of being fellow men and women. In simple terms terrorism is a war on our very consciousness of being a human being.

Time has therefore, come for an all out war on terrorism and this war has to be multi-dimensional and multipronged to be won. It should be more or less clear to us now that this war cannot be won by military might alone.

The reason is simple. Those who indulge in terrorism fight a relatively inexpensive war . Therefore, they are in a position to carry it for an indefinite period as we are witnessing in Palestine, Somalia, Chechen in Russian Federation, Uighurs in China and now unfortunately in

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Kashmir. In contrast those who fight these inexpensive terrorist have to spend billions of dollars on armaments and beefing up their security apparatus. The money so spend is urgently needed to generate employment and improve the living conditions of masses who live in relative poverty in these countries.

Those who wage wars on behalf of terrorist groups know that they fight a hopeless war which they are not going to win. However, their motivation level is so high that they do not mind giving up their lives for a futile exercise. If we have to conclusively win the war against terrorism we must de-motivate the highly misguided young men who are thrown into this war by their masters. This calls for a massive effort in understanding and educating ourselves as to what motivates these youngsters who should be in schools or colleges instead of dangerous battlefields for uncertain reasons. We have to devise ways to build communication lines and engage them so that their wrong impressions about a distorted version of history they are taught are dispelled and genuine grievances redressed. If we are able to engage these youngsters their manipulative masters who promote terrorism for their nefarious designs of economic crimes and religious bigotry will be isolated and destroyed.

Therefore , to win the war against terrorism we must have the components of a strategy to communicate and engage. Guns alone may not win us the war.

IF WE HAVE TO CONCLUSIVELY WIN THE WAR AGAINST TERRORISM WE MUST DE-MOTIVATE THE HIGHLY MISGUIDED YOUNG MEN WHO ARE THROWN INTO THIS WAR BY THEIR MASTERS.

Whatsapp your views with your name and topic to +91 8178 10 7120

srirajesh.journalist

@srirajesh

editor@cultcurrent.com

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SPECIAL STORY : SOUTH AFRICA

Dr Solomon Ayele Dersso

FUTURE IN THE ICC STILL UNCERTAIN

The South African government's position on these two substantive issues remains unchanged.

These issues are now to be a subject of parliamentary debate as South Africa's parliament considers the Repeal Bill. The ruling party, African National Congress, enjoys an overwhelming majority in the parliament and hence has the necessary numbers to pass the bill. If the bill passes and South Africa withdraws from the ICC, it would be a major loss for the court.

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S

outh Africa has been summoned to appear proval was a prerequisite for issuing a notice of withbefore the International Criminal Court on drawal and whether a law repealing the act implementApril 7 to answer for its failure to arrest ing the Rome Statute, the treaty that established the President Omar al-Bashir of Sudan during ICC, should be adopted before the withdrawal. There is his visit to the country in June 2015. This no indication that President Jacob Zuma's government announcement came only days after has abandoned the plan for withdrawal. South Africa's South Africa informed the United Nations of its decision reversal of its notice of withdrawal from the ICC does to revoke its withdrawal from the court. In October not thus mean that the matter is conclusively settled. It 2016, South Africa announced its decision to withdraw merely expressed acknowledgement that the particular from the ICC. But earlier this year, South Africa's High process followed was not legally acceptable. The ImpleCourt declared the decision, which was taken without mentation of the Rome Statute of the International parliamentary approval, as "unconstitutional and in- Criminal Court Repeal Bill (Repeal Bill) is currently bevalid" and ordered the government to rescind the no- fore parliament (PDF). The High Court which declared tice it sent to the UN. On March 7, the South African the notice of withdrawal unconstitutional found that government adhered to the court's decision and wrote the process for tabling this bill is "legitimately and propa letter to the UN secretary-general erly before parliament". In its officially rescinding its notice of judgement on the country's withdrawal from the ICC, the South withdrawal from the court. UnderThe issues it adAfrican High Court did not address standably, this has brought a sigh of dressed were the concerns that President Zuma's relief to the ICC and its supporters, whether parliamengovernment raised about the who feared of an African exodus tary approval was a court. The instrument of withfrom the Hague-based court, followdrawal deposited with the UN secing a spate of withdrawals in October prerequisite for issuretary-general pointed out that 2016 involving two other countries: ing a notice of withBurundi and The Gambia. Not surSouth Africa found its role in, and drawal and whether prisingly, The Gambia under its new obligation for, promoting a peacea law repealing the President Adama Barrow also overful resolution of conflicts to be inact implementing the turned his predecessor's decision to compatible with ICC's Rome Statute, the interpretation of the Rome Statute. withdraw from the ICC and treaty that estabSouth Africa is not alone on this. expressed his government's support lished the ICC, should There is strong view in Africa, for the court. At the moment, only be adopted before the which underwrites much of the Burundi's withdrawal remains opposition to the ICC, that pursueffective and there is no indication withdrawal. ing prosecutorial justice in ongothat it faces a similar prospect of reing armed conflicts impedes peace versal. While the fear of African exodus from the ICC is now partially eased with the efforts by hardening the position of key protagonists. reversals of withdrawals from The Gambia and South Related to this is also the policy debate on whether to implement dogmatic legal positions in the face of Africa, the issue is not conclusively resolved. impending violence or to facilitate negotiated peace 'PREMATURE CELEBRATIONS' deals in order to halt ongoing carnage and killings Many, particularly those supporting the ICC, welcomed arising from the continuation of armed conflicts. The the decision of South Africa's High Court to revoke the instrument of withdrawal also indicated South notice of withdrawal and the government's adherence Africa's decision to give effect to the rule of customto the decision. Some even saw it as a manifestation of ary international law in the apparent divergent legal the end of the so-called "African exodus" from the position between South Africa's Rome Statute of the court. The celebration may, however, be premature. The International Criminal Court Act, 2002 and the rule of South African High Court did not challenge the legality customary international law recognising immunity or constitutionality of withdrawal from the ICC per se. of heads of state.

The issues it addressed were whether parliamentary apDr Solomon Ayele Dersso is a legal scholar and analyst of African affairs..

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CIVIL WAR : SYRIA

O

ne year ago, Staffan de Mistura, the United Nations diplomat tasked with finding a peaceful solution to the war in Syria, described the subject of political transition as "the mother of all issues" in negotiations between the Syrian government and the opposition. Achieving political transition in the country has long been considered the most challenging part of ongoing diplomatic efforts to end the war that started in 2011 as a peaceful uprising demanding Syrian President Bashar al-Assad to step down, amid widespread uprisings in the Arab world. It quickly turned into a civil war between government forces and armed opposition groups made up of army defectors and ordinary civilians, after Assad's government responded to the protests with force. UN efforts have been hampered by the two sides' lack of willingness to compromise on their position with regards to political transition. The Syrian government has systematically refused to entertain any prospect of a transition that entails the removal of Assad, while, for the opposition, this step remains

SYRIA’S CIVIL WAR Zena Tahhan

HOW TO END CONFRONTATION IN WEST ASSIA?

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the only option for peace.

Three weeks ago, de Mistura brought Syria's warring sides to the negotiating table in the Swiss city, Geneva, for the third time over the course of the war, to discuss ways of ending the ongoing cycle of bloodshed that has killed close to half a million people. De Mistura promised another round of negotiations later this month to implement United Nations Security Council (UNSC) Resolution 2254, which serves as a framework for a political transition in Syria. But as Syria marks six years of war, the likelihood of achieving a peaceful, diplomatic solution to the war, rather than a military one, is becoming increasingly difficult.

Russia's military intervention in late September 2015 drastically changed the balance of power on the ground, placing Assad's forces firmly in control, with the help of Iranbacked fighters and the Lebanese Hezbollah armed group.

Last December, the armed opposition, trained and supplied by the United States, Turkey, and several Gulf states, was dealt its worst defeat of the war when it lost its stronghold of eastern Aleppo to government forces and Russian air bombardment. "The Syrian people did not lose militarily to the government. The Syrian people lost militarily to the second strongest army in the world - the Russian army," Zaki Lababidi, vice president of the Washington, DC-based Syrian-American Council, told Mediain Geneva, during the last round of talks.

"Russia came in; they used their air force, they used their navy, ballistic missiles, and they put ground troops. This is

how Aleppo was destroyed," said Lababidi, who was present in Geneva to advise the opposition delegation. Fighting both the Syrian government, on one front, and hardline armed groups including the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant ( ISIL, also known as ISIS) and Jabhat Fateh al-Sham(JFS) on the other, the opposition has steadily lost significant territory and leverage in Syria, which analysts say minimises the chance for a peaceful solution. "The regime refused to discuss the prospect of a meaningful political transition even when it appeared to be losing ground militarily, so there is no prospect of it choosing to do so now that it has momentum. Nor will the opposition concede its demand for such a transition - including Assad's departure - despite their weakening military hand," Noah Bonsey, Syria analyst for the Brussels-based International Crisis Group think-tank, told. Though aware of their shortcomings on the battlefield, the Syrian opposition, which consists of both political and military branches, believes that international law lies in their favour.

"For us, attending negotiations was never about the balance of power on the ground, but rather international agreements," Fares Bayoush, a Syrian armed opposition commander, told Media. In 2012, diplomats from the US, UK, Russia, China and France, among others, formulated the Geneva Communique under UN auspices, a plan for peace in Syria to include political transition. The document has since formed the basis for the corresponding resolutions passed by the UNSC, namely resolutions 2118, adopted in 2013, and 2254, adopted in 2015, both of which reiterate the need for political transition. Resolution 2118, though focused mainly on the use of chemical weapons during the war, is particu-

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CIVIL WAR : SYRIA

THE SYRIAN GOVERNMENT HAS SYSTEMATICALLY REFUSED TO ENTERTAIN ANY PROSPECT OF A TRANSITION THAT ENTAILS THE REMOVAL OF ASSAD, WHILE, FOR THE OPPOSITION, THIS STEP REMAINS THE ONLY OPTION FOR PEACE.

larly significant as it refers to Chapter VII of the UN charter, the foundational treaty of the UN, which all member states are bound to. According to 2118, in the event of "non-compliance" with the resolution, the UNSC member states, which include five permanent members: China, France, Russia, the UK and the US, as well as 10 non-permanent members, can "impose measures" on the warring sides in accordance with Chapter VII. "There are mechanisms in UNSC resolution 2118 which cannot be activated unless the regime rejects this resolution [2118]. The regime always claims that it is looking for a political solution - it does not reject the resolutions," Mohamed Sabra, chief negotiator for the Syrian opposition during the last round of Geneva talks, told to foreign media. "Our participation in Geneva is to discuss real mechanisms, either to implement the resolutions, or to demand that the UN and the [UN]SC activate the mechanisms in the UN charter, which allow for forcing the regime to abide by its obligations under international law," said Sabra. If proven to be in breach of resolution 2118, the Assad government could face an official international arms embargo, targeted sanctions, or other coercive measures under Chapter VII. This could isolate the Assad government within the international community, and possibly compel it to consider meaningful negotiations with the opposition. For such measures to be introduced, the UNSC would need to pass another resolution on Syria declaring that resolution 2118 had been breached and authorising the use of force, but a Russian veto would block that from happening, as it has in the past. Moscow has vetoed resolutions condemning Syrian government actions in the UNSC seven times in the past five years, most recently during a vote on a draft resolution threatening sanctions against parties using chemical weapons in Syria. Though both Assad's forces and the Syrian armed opposition groups have been complicit in committing war crimes, as was revealed in a recent UN investigation, neither are being pressured to stop. "The evidence of crimes against humanity and war crimes is overwhelming. The problem is that at the moment Syria is an accountability-free zone. All sides, but especially the government, continue to kill, bomb and even deploy chemical weapons against civilians with total impunity," Simon Adams, executive director of the New York-based Global Centre for the Responsibility to Protect, told to media.

"UNSC imposed sanctions would not only be legal, the fact that they haven't been imposed already is a disgrace. Russia's veto has created a cloak of impunity for Assad," said Adams, whose organisation works closely with the UNSC. "That's why the failure of the UNSC to uphold its responsibility to protect is so devastating. Russia's vetoes mean that more people will die, more cities will be destroyed, more refugees will flee, and the civil war will continue," he continued. But the Syrian govern-

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ment claims it must battle "terrorism" before discussing any diplomatic solution. It has succeeded in adding "counter-terrorism" on the agenda for the planned talks later this month, which, some analysts describe as a distraction ploy to continue its military offensive against the armed opposition. "The government's claim that it is committed to international law and achieving a political solution is necessary for the silence of the international community," Mohammad Alahmad, a professor at Georgetown University's Center for Arab Studies in Washington DC, told foreign media.

do not believe that Resolution 2118 can be triggered if the regime rejects the opposition's view of transition," Steven Heydemann, chair of Middle East studies at Smith College in the US state of Massachusetts, told to media. The issue of political transition in UN resolutions and the Geneva Communique is "left purposefully vague", Noha Aboueldahab, a Doha-based expert on transitional justice in the Arab region, told us.

The Geneva Communique, stipulates that a transitional governing body "could include members of the present government and the opposition and other groups and shall be "The Assad regime seeks the re-legitimisation of its rule formed on the basis of mutual consent". The fact that the docthrough 'negotiations', while conducting military action in parument "does not make any specific mention as to who exactly allel," added Alahmad. Besides the threat of Russian vetoes and in the current government should stay on" means that the the international community's "question of Assad's hold onto power paralysis on the war in Syria, anaremains a key sticking point," said lysts say the absence of a consensus Aboueldahab. Moving forward, the on what a political transition would opposition "can demonstrate that it "The regime's obstruction is look like is a major staller in the has international law on its side - that the same thing as rejecting process. its position is legally correct and that transition, but the important Assad may be violating international "The regime's obstruction is the point to keep in mind is the law," said Milena Sterio, professor of insame thing as rejecting transition, ternational law at the Cleveland-Marabsence of consensus about but the important point to keep in shall College of Law in the US state of what political transition is. mind is the absence of consensus Ohio. " about what political transition is. I

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DAMAGE CONTROL : RUSSIA

BY : Pavel K. Baev

I

n the first seven weeks of the Donald Trump administration, Russia has been as hot an issue as it gets. Amid the scramble to do damage control, the most reasonable advice for Washington is to take a breath, sort out the sequence of moves, and draw appropriate “red lines.” It’s often assumed that the Russian leadership will merely wait for the whirlwind of scandals to blow over—but there’s a real risk that President Vladimir Putin will take a proactive stance and throw another of his trademark surprises.

In principle (which in Russian political lingo means “in a different world”), it makes perfect sense for Moscow to be patient.

The scarlet letter marking He-Who-Spoke-With-The-Ambassador will fade, to be replaced by interactions with reliable interlocutors in the bureaucracy. Nevertheless, many experts in Moscow are now inclined to argue that the chance of striking a

deal with Trump’s team is lost, and that only tough tests of will are forthcoming.

Putin, quite possibly, holds a different opinion. Doing deals is what he understands best and excels at—he’d be reluctant to give up on Trump as a negotiating partner. Putin’s recent meeting with Darren Woods, ExxonMobil’s new CEO, was probably intended as a signal to U.S. State Secretary Rex Tillerson and his boss about Russia’s readiness to bargain. He probably is, but he might be pushed in a different direction.

Knowing little about social networks, Putin may be inclined to disregard the daily flow of tweets coming from the White House. What he certainly takes seriously are the decisions that point to new policy priorities, muddled as they might seem now. Four such decisions should be matters of serious concern

PUTIN MIGHT NOT WAIT FOR TRUMP TO SORT OUT RUSSIA POLICY

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in the Kremlin.

First of all, the intention to increase the U.S. defense budget by some $54 billion comes as a grave warning. Russia has been investing heavily in modernizing its military machine for the last five years, but now the country’s protracted economic decline has necessitated cuts to the over-ambitious defense plans. Many halfaccomplished programs—like the Yasen-class nuclear submarine or the “fifth generation” PAK-FA fighter—have been delayed, while the costs of ongoing interventions in places such as Syria and Ukraine keep piling up. Trump’s resolution to boost U.S. military capabilities is not only a reminder of Russia’s military-industrial inferiority, but also a confirmation of his proposition to deal with Russia “from a position of strength.” This doesn’t sit well in Moscow at all.

Second, Trump’s stated disinclination to engage in talks on strategic arms control caught Putin by surprise in the first (and so far only) telephone conversation since Trump moved into the Oval Office. The Russian leader had turned down every proposition from President Barack Obama on possible new cuts of nuclear arsenals, expecting it to be a more favorable topic for conversation with his successor. Now he has to assess the scope of U.S. nuclear modernization. On top of that, there is a substantiated accusation that Russia has violated the 1987 IntermediateRange Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty, which Moscow cannot make disappear by flat denials.

Third, Russian experts had eagerly predicted a deepening discord between the United States and its European allies and a profound confusion inside NATO. Instead, firm assertions by the vice president, secretary of state, and others on the U.S. commitment to the alliance have been accompanied by the demand that NATO allies increase defense spending. The Europeans see the need to take this demand seriously, and every euro of additional investments in their long-starved militaries buys new capabilities for containing the Russian threat. The top brass in Moscow are not amused, in particular, by NATO’s determined build-up of collective defense assets in the Baltic theater.

Fourth, there is now strong U.S. pressure on Russia’s most sensitive pain point: the price of oil. For many months, Moscow had been in negotiation with OPEC about production cuts, seeking to achieve some upward trend in this market—only to experience another price drop in the last couple of weeks. The primary driver of this volatility is the relaxation of regulations in the United States, bringing new drilling, which over-compensates all the OPEC cartel machinations. The Russian ruble has duly depreciated, and any promised economic stabilization before next year’s national election is unlikely at best. The economy will continue to stagnate.

Pavel K. Baev is Nonresident Senior Fellow, Foreign Policy Center on the United States and Europe

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MELODY : PAKISTAN

DEATH KNELLS FOR PAKISTAN’S MUSIC INDUSTRY? BY : Madeeha Syed

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ack in the 1980s, Alamgir and the Benjamin Sisters sung the iconic patriotic song Khayal Rakhna which was a directive to the youth to take care of things. Today, some three decades on, the trio have all migrated from Pakistan and Alamgir has been running from pillar to post in Canada, trying to collect money for his medical treat-

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ment. A music icon of the past lives in abject helplessness today — such has been the curse of being a professional musician in Pakistan.

But this time round, it is Pakistan’s music industry itself that is facing its worst crisis. Today, major record labels exist in name alone, album sales have dried up, the infrastructure to support music distribution has crumbled in the face of technological changes, television exposure for music has dwindled despite the overarching popularity of avenues such as Coke Studio, and public concerts — which have often been the bread and butter of the country’s musicians — are few and far between. Add to that the ever-present

dilemma of piracy which deprives artists of making a living from their creative efforts. In this atmosphere of gloom, the question most struggling musicians are asking themselves is whether there is a future for them. Will the vibrancy of Pakistan’s music scene of yore become just a faded memory?

For any artist, music production is no longer a straightforward process. First, there is the creative process — experimenting with lyrics, melody, instruments and the like. This is followed by countless hours of practice and perfecting the routine. Then comes the recording — artists tend to approach record labels or prospective investors to help them with studio space, equipment and production expertise.

Once the recording and post-production process is complete, the issue of marketing and distribution rears its

head. In the past, this was often handled by the recording companies which stocked the albums at stores and also often handled the publicity angle, funding videos that would air on dedicated music channels eager for new content. They had also made some headway in ensuring that at least their content was not pirated in the major metropolitan areas. Eventually this marketing would translate not only into greater sales — though musicians would get a raw deal even then — but lead to bookings for concerts which is where musicians actually earned, from ticket sales and sponsorships.

All of that has now changed. With big-name recording

companies such as EMI, Fire Records and Sonic now dormant or out of business altogether, musicians often must pony up the expenses for their recordings — which can be as substantial as up to a million rupees — and still not have the resources to stock their product at music stores or to combat piracy. Album sales have virtually disappeared with the advent of digital distribution which is far more geared towards the release of singles. Cassette tapes, which were the cheap staple of long-haul truckers and which led to the viral popularity of many once-obscure musicians such as Ataullah Essakhelvi, have become outdated. And the four main TV channels that were dedicated to music have folded.

Thanks to security fears and excessive taxation, public concerts have also dried up. ‘Security concerns’ have pushed music indoors back into smaller performance areas — the same venues they may have hired as college bands.

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COVER STORY

MODI’S

NEW INDIA

Alyssa Ayres

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W

hat a weekend for the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). On Saturday, March 11, the election results for five state legislative assembly contests came in, delivering the voters’ verdict. More than halfway through the Narendra Modi government’s term in office, and four months after a painful currency demonetization, voters delivered the BJP two resounding victories (Uttar Pradesh and Uttarakhand), two close calls that the party has converted into power (Goa and Manipur), and one defeat (Punjab). The victories extend the party’s reach across most of north India, and cement its position as the nation’s dominant political force. Veteran political journalist Shekhar Gupta wrote that “tectonic change” was a phrase “too mild for a power shift that resets not just the political geography of India, but also its sociology, psychology and ideological pathologies.”

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COVER STORY

In the largest and most consequential state, Uttar Pradesh (UP)—a colossus of 200 million, larger than most countries in the world—the BJP was voted into power by a landslide: they received more than threefourths of the assembly seats (312 of 403 seats). An election alliance between India’s Congress Party and the party controlling UP since 2012, the Samajwadi Party, proved a washout, as did the efforts of the Bahujan Samaj Party, a subordinate-caste-empowerment party that has previous held power in the state, and at one time held national ambitions. The BJP did not nominate a chief ministerial candidate to serve as the “hometown” front face for the election in UP. Instead, it was Modi’s show. The BJP’s overwhelming victory in India’s largest state affirms Modi as India’s most gifted politician of his era. Observers have already proclaimed that he has locked up another term when national elections take place in 2019. But the victory also, crucially, will slowly phase in a series of seat pickups beginning in 2018 in India’s upper house of parliament, since the upper house members are elected by each state’s legislative assembly. The BJP has not held a majority in the upper house and to date has struggled to pass some of the most contentious economic reform legislation it marched into government hoping to deliver. Over time the BJP can be expected to secure a majority there which will end its problems moving reforms requiring legislation. The Uttarakhand result, albeit in a much smaller state—indeed, one that was carved out of UP in a reorganization back in 2000—helped amplify the scale of the BJP’s growing national support. The state has around ten million people, so fewer seats to

India’s demographics require the creation of one million jobs per month to absorb new labor force entrants. According to the most recently available statistics, however, in 2015 only 135,000 new jobs were created in the organized/formal sector of the economy.

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elect to the upper house of parliament. It will only be able to help with one seat in 2018. Still, winning both Uttarakhand and UP so significantly contributed to the sense that Modi’s support has not diminished in the Hindi heartland, no matter the loss in Bihar back in 2015. In the small states of Goa (population 1.8 million) and Manipur (2.7 million), the BJP did not attain an outright majority, but quickly managed to secure support from others (defectors from parties or supporters from smaller parties) to form the government in both. Neither state has the political throw weight of UP, but two more BJP-controlled governments, from the western coast to the high mountainous northeast, extends the BJP’s visual map across the breadth of India.

March 12, Prime Minister Modi spoke at a victory celebration at the BJP headquarters in New Delhi. Online, he used the occasion to debut a new campaign, complete with a hashtag (#IAmNewIndia) asking voters to pledge themselves in service of the vision of a “New India” by 2022 (India’s seventyfifth year of independence).

LOOKING FOR A NEW INDIA On Sunday, March 12, Prime Minister Modi spoke at a victory celebration at the BJP headquarters in New Delhi. Online, he used the occasion to debut a new campaign, complete with a hashtag (#IAmNewIndia) asking voters to pledge themselves in service of the vision of a “New India” by 2022 (India’s seventy-fifth year of independence). The campaign’s list of causes map precisely onto the social issues Modi has championed, such as anti-corruption, a cashless economy, “Clean India,” drug-free India, women-led development, protecting nature, “Accessible India,” and peace, unity, and goodwill. While the #IAmNewIndia campaign was surely in the works regardless of the state elections outcome, Modi’s victory speech (Hindi) 35 minutes] at the BJP headquarters used the celebratory occasion to amplify the “New India” message. I was struck by the language he used throughout the speech. He thanked BJP workers and the country for the election results, but then shifted quickly to discuss the vision of the New India unfolding.

This New India is the dream of India’s “youth power,” a New India that “fulfills the aspirations” of “women power.” Unlike the rhetoric of other parties, which often recite a litany of welfare sops to show their utility to voters (here is an official video from one party showcasing the fans and food mixers it handed out to voters), Modi’s speech instead contained a passage about the New India representing a change in mentality. He said that if earlier the poor asked for something to be given to them, today they ask for the opportunity to do work themselves. The interrelated themes of development and jobs have been central to Modi’s political language, and appear likely to become even more amplified through the New India campaign. Modi’s campaigns will need to start delivering jobs soon, however. His government’s big foreign economic policy initiative, the Make in India campaign to encourage foreign direct investment and manufacturing in India, has reeled in the pledges, but the payrolls do not yet reflect job creation.

India’s demographics require the creation of one million jobs per month to absorb new labor force entrants. According to the most recently available statistics, however, in 2015 only 135,000 new jobs were created in the organized/formal sector of the economy. Jobs will preoccupy the Indian government for the foreseeable future; to date voters have been willing to give the BJP a chance to deliver. Does the “New India” tagline tell us anything about where India might be headed on the world stage? Modi’s Sunday speech didn’t explicitly address foreign policy. But I’d bet that the Indian government, now reassured of its strength for the remainder of its term and with wind in its sails looking at 2019, will press harder on the economic reforms it has struggled to enact, such as with land acquisition and labor law reforms. Both will help increase the country’s economic growth and job creation prospects. I’d also bet that the New India will press forward internationally to secure a larger place for India in the world. Indian leaders— and this is not a new preoccupation, but one that has accelerated with Modi—seek recognition for the country as one among the world’s great powers. The New India wants the world to acknowledge its ascent and indeed its transformation, and find an appropriate reform process to ensure it a voice commensurate with its size and accomplishments. That means on the UN Security Council, the remaining nonproliferation regimes it seeks to join, the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, and others. Look for continued, perhaps even expanded, international diplomacy on this front as the confident New India ups its game.

Alyssa Ayres is senior fellow for India, Pakistan, and South Asia at the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR).

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COVER STORY

HINDU BY : Pradeep K Mathur

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W

hether it will be good or not for the future of India can be a matter of opinion. After the spectacular victory of his Bhartiya Janata Party(BJP) in the recent Assembly elections in five states Prime Minister Narendra Modi said that a new India is being born. All those who know BJP and its ideological spring source the Hindu fundamentalist RSS know that what Modi really meant by a new India was a Hindu rashtra. The fact is that the ideologues of Hindu Rashtra seem to have succeeded at last , at least for the time being. The relentless efforts of RSS-BJP brigade to attack liberal values imbibed, practised and preached by freedom fighters in the era of battle against the British Raj seems to have finally borne fruit for them.

Being on the political fringe of Indian society during the long and formative years of the Gandhi-Nehru era how votaries of Hindu Rashtra could undermine the vast multitude of liberal opinion is a matter of introspection and study .But more important than this is to accept the fact that we now live in the shadow of an illiberal society which will not be happy if we question obscurantism and irrationality of socio-ethical norms and moral policing which is the hallmark the Establishment that is ushering in a New India.

However, there is an in-built contradiction in the RSS-BJP concept of the Hindu Rashtra. While they talk of India’s ancient glory and the great achievements made by Indians in various branches of knowledge like medicine, astronomy ,architecture and spiritualism in Vedic and post Vedic periods three thousand to four thousand years ago, the model of Indian society engraved in their minds is of medieval era ( 12th century to 17th century) when Indian society—Hindus or Hindus converted to Islam were in their worst socio-economic condition because of their relentless exploitation by feudal lords and thugs. Till two thousands and so years back there was no caste system and, s therefore , no swavarn( upper caste and twice born) non-swavarn division of society.

There were no caste marriages as there were no castes and women had freedom of sex and were in no bondage. The domination and persecution of north India by Muslim invaders from Central Asia in 11th century and aftser constitute the psychological make-up of the Hinduvat brigade.

The big question before us is whether this new dispensation of Hindu Rashtra that is being presented by the BJPRSS establishment of the Modi govt. in the garb of a new India will last ? Perhaps at this stage none can provide an answer to this. The reason is simple. Any attempt to answer this question will have an ideological undertone and, therefore, the answer is sure to be biased. However, certain observations can be made without fear of contradiction which can help provide an insight into the matter. Let us analyse

Political reality and political opportunism may have prompted many parties to tie-up with BJP but such parties do not really endorse BJP’s hard line Hindu Rashtravad as prescribed by RSS. At best they are fair weather friends of this ” new India” philosophy. these observations point wise : 1.

Whatever the reality of political supremacy at no given time in the history of democratic India the govt of the day has had the popular mandate of more than 50% of the electorate. The BJP government of Modi at the Centre and in 16 states is no exception to this general characteristic of Indian political scenario. In fact despite resounding victories first in the 2014 Lok Sabha elections and then in the 2017 Assembly elections its vote share has not touched even 40 per cent. Therefore, any mandate for Hindu Rashtra does not have approval of an overwhelming majority of Indian masses.

2.

Political reality and political opportunism may have prompted many parties to tie-up with BJP but such parties do not really endorse BJP’s hard line Hindu Rashtravad as prescribed by RSS. At best they are fair weather friends of this ” new India” philosophy.

3.

BJP’s sudden rise has created a crisis not only for the Congress but also for a whole lot of other parties both national and regional. They will sooner or later come on a single platform to oppose BJP for their sheer survival. This process will start much sooner than expected, certainly well before the 2019 parliamentary elections. BJP is already aware of this and RSS chief has already spoken about it.

4.

Many opposition leaders and intellectuals often talk of tendencies of Fascism and Nazism taking over India. While talking symbolically about fascism when hinting at RSS-BJP’s authoritarianism is all right one should remember that India is not Germany or Italy or even Japan.. In a multi-layered , pluralistic society like India no single one-dimensional ideology can hold sway over the whole sub-continent. Nor can it be ruled by state power as the Emergency regime of Mrs Indira Gandhi realised to its cost in 1970s.

5.

Those who talk of Hindu-Muslim divide and cite partition of India as example forget that there had been no partition of Indian sub-continent between Hindu India and Muslim Pakistan had British not instigated and conspired to divide India as part

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COVER STORY

of their global imperialistic design.

6.

The philosophy of Rashtravad is all right to sway the masses into voting for a certain party in the emotionally surcharged atmosphere of an electoral battle. But its appeal in the normal times is extremely limited.

It is unlikely to change social settings which have their roots in complex intertwined rural and small sector economy and their production patterns.

7.

Many people live in the mistaken belief that the RSS-BJP philosophy of Hinduism embraces the entire Hindu fold. Nothing can be farther from truth. VHP-BJP-RSS Hindu brand is not all inclusive. It hardly embraces 30% of upper castes Hindus or sawarns . Whenever there is a powerful and strong OBC or Dalit leader majority of Hindus abandon BJP and go after him or her Dr B R Ambedkar, Chaudhury Charan Singh, Kashi Ram, Lalu Prasad Yadav, Mayawati,Nitish Kumar and Mulayam Singh to name a few.

Therefore, the concept of Hindu Rashtra is a distant dream as far as the mutli-dimensional society of India is concerned. However, it has the potential to create entirely avoidable irritants and impede progress of India towards an economically powerful modern world power. For instance the entirely irrelevant but high decibel campaign to ban cow slaughter is costing the country dearly in terms of meat exports, leather goods manufacturing and exports and job opportunities. But none can dare to raise such issues as these can arouse passions. Similarly the decision of the newly elected U.P. Government to ban illegally –run abattoirs is another case in point. It is going to shrunk meat supply , make it costly, deprive many people of cheap and nutritive food and render quite a number of people jobless.

The philosophy of Hindu Rashtra cannot be furthered by such half baked ideas and their shoddy implementation. The RSS version of Hindu Rashtra was basically a protest against the subjugation of Hindu society by Muslim rulers – a situation that has long ceased to exist. Yet the Islam phobia of an era bygone still dominates the minds of votaries of Rashtravad. This unwittingly makes them undermine the very greatness of Indian culture which they so proudly talk about to impress the world. Indian architecture, cuisine, fabrics, literature, music, dance forms and handicraft which we want to showcase to the world cannot have a Hindu-Muslim division. They are essentially Indian and therefore, a product of the social reality which was first undermined by the divide and rule policy of the British Raj and then zealots of the Muslim League and Hindu Mahasabha. But that has been an exercise in self denial of shared Indian ethos which has caused deep civilisational wounds, both in India and Pakistan.

Any attempts by the present political dispensation in Delhi to make India a Hindu Rashtra have to be based on higher values of Hindu religion and spiritualism. This will need a serious exercise in pursuit of higher values of humanism , universal love, mutual respect and search for lasting world peace .

For this we will have to build a truly-genuine knowledge society and inculcate scientific temper so as to create an atmosphere of meaningful debate, intelligent discussion and spiritual discourse. If Prime Minister Modi’s vision of a new India is based on these lines none can have any dispute with him.

But is it Mr Modi’s way of ushering in a new India, the term he uses to camouflage the RSS objective of making Hindu Rashtravad a reality ? Only time will tell.

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YOGI THE MASK HAS COME OFF BY : Alyssa Ayres

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ndia’s ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) received a landslide victory in the state assembly elections of Uttar Pradesh (UP), India’s most populous state, and arguably one of the country’s most politically important arenas. The day after the election results, Prime Minister Narendra Modi delivered a celebratory speech at the party headquarters in New Delhi, and heralded the dawn of a “New India.” As I wrote in previous story, his New India remarks, along with a campaign unfurled to encourage citizen involvement, pointed to a focus on jobs, development, anti-corruption, “Clean India,” protecting nature, peace, unity, and goodwill, among other priorities.

Modi has expended enormous political capital in domestic and foreign policy highlighting the urgency of India’s development, and during his nearly three years in government has initiated countless initiatives geared toward providing better sanitation and infrastructure for the whole country, encouraging more foreign direct investment, enticing manufacturers to set up in India, calling for “women-led development,” plumping for greater innovation, and positioning India as a new “leading power” on the world stage. These emphases can be summed up in his party’s national campaign slogan, sab ka saath, sab ka vikaas—everyone together, development for all.

The BJP conducted their campaign in UP without naming a chief minister candidate for the state. Over the weekend, the chief minister was selected, and let’s just say his claim to fame to date has not been development. Instead, Yogi Adityanath, the new chief minister of UP, is a popular, five-time member of parliament who leads a Hindu religious order in Gorakhpur, in the eastern part of the state.

Adityanath has attained fame in India due to his

Adityanath has attained fame in India due to his oratory, nearly always described as “fiery,” with him frequently described as a “firebrand” leader of Hindutva, or Hindu nationalism.

oratory, nearly always described as “fiery,” with him frequently described as a “firebrand” leader of Hindutva, or Hindu nationalism. I will refrain from enumerating some of the many speeches he has given over the years that illustrate his antipathy for Muslims. You can learn more about his public remarks and about the pending criminal charges against him. The point is that he will now be responsible for overseeing the development of this critically important state, one with enormous problems and enormous needs, and one in which Hindu-Muslim tensions continue to be a concern.

Indian parties do not choose their politicians with a view to what the world might conclude, but there is no denying the signal this pick sends: with a huge mandate, the BJP has decided to lead with the face of religious nationalism— not the forward-looking, twenty-first century face of the New India—in their most important state. Some Indian commentators have used the phrase “the mask has come off” or “bait and switch” to describe this abrupt shift from a development-focused platform. I hope this does not signal that UP will become enmeshed in religious conflict, unable to advance its development agenda.

Adityanath supporters will say he deserves a chance to prove

himself. He does, but his past inflammatory remarks—the reason for his national notoriety—are surely cause for concern.

He has earned high marks for asking questions in parliament, and for his strong anti-corruption stance. As a member of parliament, his legislative focus has been on matters such as cow protection, renaming India as “Bharat,” calling for a uniform civil code, banning religious conversion, and adding a court bench in his city.

After his swearing-in as UP’s new chief minister, he said he would work to eliminate goondaraaj, or thug rule, from the state, which has serious law and order problems, and that he would focus on development for all, as Modi has repeatedly emphasized.

His first acts as chief minister have been to seek a declaration of assets from state government ministers, and to end the use of red lights on official government vehicles, a step toward ending what many describe as the “VVIP culture” of special privileges for those in office.

The Modi government has two years left in office, and despite having initiated many development programs, has a long way to go to see them fulfilled. Let’s hope the new leader of India’s largest state adjusts his perspective and his public rhetoric to befit the new office he holds, one charged with the welfare of more than 200 million people, of which some nineteen percent are Muslim. All citizens of UP, no matter their religion, deserve a chief minister who will seek development for all, regardless of their background.

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SPECIAL FEATURE : JAPAN

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arlier this month, North Korea launched four ballistic missiles toward Japan. Three of them landed within Japan’s exclusive economic zone, less than 200 miles from the country’s coast, in an area frequented by Japanese fishing boats. The missile test, North Korean state media claimed, was aimed at “the bases of the U.S. imperialist aggressor forces in Japan.” By demonstrating that it could carry out a so-called saturation attack—one in which a massive barrage of missiles would overwhelm Japan’s defenses—Pyongyang sought to weaken the credibility of the military deterrent that Japan, the United States, and South Korea have erected against it.

North Korea has conducted dozens of missile tests and three nuclear tests since Kim Jong Un took office in late 2011.

Over the same period, Pyongyang’s missile capabilities have grown and its arsenal’s vulnerability to attack has diminished.

Last August, North Korea successfully tested a submarinelaunched ballistic missile. In February, it tested an intermediate-range ballistic missile propelled by solid fuel—a technological leap that would allow Pyongyang to dramatically reduce the signs of an impending launch, helping to insulate its missiles from preemptive strikes. The Kim regime is now attempting to create a nuclear warhead small enough to attach to the tip of a missile, a step toward its ultimate goal of creating an intercontinental ballistic missile that could deliver a nuclear bomb to the continental United States. Through an elaborate shell game involving mobile missile launchers and the diversification of its launch sites, North Korea has sought to sow doubts in the United States, Japan, and South Korea about the potential efficacy of preemptive action.

All of these developments have worried Japanese policymakers, deepening a long-standing debate in Tokyo over the country’s security posture. At issue is whether enhancing Japan’s missile defense capabilities will be enough to meet the threat and whether Tokyo should equip itself for a preemptive strike against North Korea—a move that could raise China’s ire and create domestic controversy due to Japan’s

own constitutional constraints.

Japan’s current defense against North Korean missiles is based on a two-tiered system. In the Sea of Japan, Japanese destroyers equipped with the Aegis missile defense system serve as the country’s frontline interceptors. Land-based Patriot Advanced Capability-3 (PAC-3) batteries provide a second layer of protection. This system is effective in some respects, but it is becoming increasingly insufficient in light of the North’s expanding capabilities—especially its potential capacity for a saturation attack in which multiple missiles would be launched at different targets.

As Japan’s strategic position has deteriorated, Japanese policymakers’ interest in new military capabilities has grown, placing a long-standing technocratic debate over how to respond to the North Korean threat at the center of the country’s politics. On the same day as Pyongyang’s missile test, Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe told the Diet that the threat posed by North Korea had reached a “new stage.” A day later, Itsunori Onodera—the chair of the ruling Liberal Democratic Party’s committee dealing with the North Korean missile threat and a former defense minister—underscored the need for Japan to start considering offensive options. “If bombers attacked us or warships bombarded us, we would fire back,” he told Reuters. “Striking a country lobbing missiles at us is no different.” (Many opposition politicians, such as Akihisa Nagashima, a key Democratic Party member of the Diet and a former vice-minister of defense, agree that Japan’s defense posture is in need of reform, though the nature of the changes is contentious.)

In the coming months, the Liberal Democratic Party will present a report to the government outlining Japan’s options for dealing with the North Korean threat. Tokyo has already committed $1 billion to upgrading its PAC-3 interceptors, and it is also considering deploying land-based Aegis systems to complement its sea-based capabilities. In February, Japan conducted a successful joint test with the United States of the Standard Missile-3 Block IIA system—a missile interceptor tied

JAPAN'S NORTH KOREA OPTION

BY : J. Berkshire Miller

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to the Aegis system that, if deployed in Japan, would improve the country’s missile defenses both on land and at sea.

Many in Tokyo are now considering adding a third layer to Japan’s missile defenses by asking Washington to deploy the Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) system to Japan.

THAAD’s sophisticated radar and its ability to destroy incoming projectiles at a high altitude would reduce the leakage produced by intercepted missiles, limiting the damage that their debris would cause in populated areas—an advantage that would be even more valuable in the event of a nuclear attack.

(The United States is currently deploying THAAD to South Korea, in a move that China has opposed.)

Such measures would be useful, but they might not be enough to deter a North Korean attack or to withstand a particularly sophisticated one. That is why Japanese policymakers are also debating acquiring weapons that would allow their country to destroy North Korean missiles before they are launched, perhaps in conjunction with the United States—a capability that Japan now lacks. Japan could buy Tomahawk missiles from the United States, for example, or it could use the F-35A fighter, which Japan is slated to procure in the coming years, to strike North Korean targets. Precision guided missiles, such as Lockheed Martin’s Joint Air-to-Surface Standoff Missile, are another option. The best choices among these preemptive options are those pieces that would work well with Japan’s destroyers in the Sea of Japan, such as the F35A and Tomahawk cruise missiles.

But there are challenges to gaining preemptive strike capabilities that go beyond the constitution. First, it’s not clear whether such capabilities—even when combined with a U.S.led surgical strike—would be able to neutralize Pyongyang’s missile programs, which are being developed to withstand preemptive attacks. Second, the costs associated with such a strike, which would probably include retaliatory actions by North Korea against Japan and South Korea, may outweigh the benefits. And finally, Japan’s development of preemptive capabilities would raise eyebrows among pacifists in Japan and among officials elsewhere in the region—especially in China—and help feed into false narratives about Japan’s alleged remilitarization.

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GROUND FORCE : BANGLADESH

INADEQUATE NEW CHILD MARRIAGE LAW IN BANGLADESH BY : Soumya Guha

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n February 27, the Bangladesh government passed a law that would allow for child marriage to occur in "special circumstances". While there are many laws and acts that get enacted every day all over the globe, not all can claim to have influence over the lives of 30 million girls. While the government maintained the legal marriage age for children (18 for girls and 21 for boys), there is a new provision in the act which would allow child marriage to take place under "special circumstances" - with parental consent and with permission from the courts, deemed in the "best interest of the underage female or male".

The consent or permission from the child, however, is not required, and no definition of these "special circumstances" are yet given. Bangladesh has had one of the highest rates of child marriage globally, and certainly in South Asia. For years, various organisations have worked alongside government and communities to lower the rates of child marriage.

According to UNICEF, the number of girls who marry below the age of 18 in Bangladesh remains at about 52 percent. This number is still remarkably high, but it shows a significant decrease from 2000, when that number ranked at 65 percent.

This shows that we have made progress to reduce child marriage in our country. But now, I fear that the new child marriage law with this special provision will send us backwards, affecting progress we've made in the last nearly two decades.

Bangladesh has made regional and global commitments to end child marriage. The government even committed to ending all child marriage by 2041. How are we meant to achieve these goals when we will allow child marriage to occur in certain circumstances?

Members of parliament have stated that allowing girls

and boys to marry in special circumstances will ensure they are not being ostracised or discriminated in communities. Many believe that if a girl bears a child out of wedlock or is involved in sexual relations at a young age, she will be shunned or at risk if she is not able to marry.

Understanding social and cultural contexts is important, but I continue to revert back to basic human rights. The act, as it currently states, does not require the consent of the girl or boy, in order for a marriage to occur. Her parents and the court may approve if the decision is in the "best interest of the under-aged girl or boy".

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Why not ask the child? Why is his or her consent not important, or even considered?

This special provision is not only a step backwards for the eradication of child marriage in the country, but also demonstrates a harmful violation of a child's right to be heard, informed and involved in decisions that impact on her life. As one of the leading organisations committed to ending child marriage, we know that a lack of education is one of the largest drivers of child marriage. Families, guardians, and members of the community often do not know or understand the risks and consequences that child marriage has on the life of a girl or a boy.

The previous law enabled us to work with communities to prevent and stop child marriage. Working throughout the country, we have successfully stopped some 2,000 child marriages in the last three years alone and has reached around 700,000 young people. These are now 700,000 young people who are educated and informed about the risks and consequences of child marriage, and who should be empowered - and given the opportunity - to say no to marriage. The empowerment of young people, particularly girls, has been fundamental in addressing this ongoing problem. Children in Bangladesh established groups called the Wedding Busters, which target parents considering marriage for their children and inform them of the risks and consequences. With the support of the old law, the Wedding Busters were empowered to alert authorities if an illegal marriage was about to take place. In some of our working areas, we saw a drop in child marriage from 70 percent to just 20 percent. We believe that when young people take action themselves, their attitudes change and, with that, the mindset of the future generation also changes. We have also seen local government officials champion and support these young people. Together, they are a potent force for change. The key is educating families and communities about the risks and consequences, and empowering children to raise their voices and become active change-makers.

Soumya Guha is the Acting Country Director in Bangladesh for the global child rights organisation Plan International.

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SPECIAL STORY : CHINA

CHINA AND INDIA SHOULD ENHANCE TRUST FOR ENERGY DEALS BY : Lin Boqiang

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C

hina and India accounted for approximately 60 percent of incremental world energy demand in 2015.

The two countries share a lot of similarities in regards to energy including a rapid increase in demand, unitary coal-dominated energy structure, shortage in oil and gas and a high dependence on foreign oil. To ensure energy security, both China and India are looking for longterm and stable energy import sources and are seeking to cooperate with oil producers in the Middle East, Central Asia and Africa.

China and India are competing to secure energy investment overseas, especially in oil and gas. They have vied for the right to develop oil in Angola in Southwest Africa and Ecuador in South America. Whoever wins the bids, both countries will inevitably pay a high cost.

With growing economic and trade ties as well as stepped-up energy diplomacy, China and India have seen greater scope for cooperation in energy. Chinese and Indian firms have already cooperated on developing oil and gas resources and acquiring overseas assets. Further, in October 2016, the two countries held the fourth strategic economic dialogue in New Delhi, India and pledged to cooperate in areas such as renewable energy, coal development and power station operation and maintenance centers.

In all, there are a number of areas that China and India can work together to take their energy cooperation to the next level.

China and India could strengthen cooperation in investments in energy technology and products. China is ahead of India in energy technologies including coal-fired power generation technology, nuclear energy, wind and solar energy technology as well as equipment manufacturing. China also has huge funding resources.

In contrast, India has an edge in energy information management and wind energy, and also has a large energy market. In addition, Indian firms are more internationalized. Their complementarities offer great opportunities for the two countries to jointly invest in the energy sector. For example, China has advanced solar energy technologies and the cost of its solar energy equipment is low while India has abundant solar energy resources but its solar energy equipment sector is still in the fledging stage. The two countries can jointly invest in the solar photovoltaic industry through joint ventures and technology transfer to expand their solar energy market. Also, China has expertise in the design and construction of large power stations, manufacturing of complete sets of hydropower equipment and coal-fired generation equipment as well as construction and management of power grids, whereas power supply and grid construction has always been the bottleneck in the development of India's power sector. The two countries can jointly develop and invest in power generation projects.

Meanwhile, the two countries can jointly bid for contracts to acquire and develop overseas oil and gas resources. Compared with international oil giants, Chinese and Indian oil companies are still behind in terms of management, technology and capital

China and India could strengthen cooperation in investments in energy technology and products.

China is ahead of India in energy technologies including coal-fired power generation technology, nuclear energy, wind and solar energy technology as well as equipment manufacturing. China also has huge funding resources. strength. Cooperation between Chinese and Indian firms would allow them to gain bargaining power in negotiations in the international oil and gas market. Back in 2006, China and India signed memorandums of understanding for possible joint acquisition and development of overseas oil and gas assets, but the agreements have no binding force and the two countries only worked together on bids when they didn't have an obvious advantage. The governments of the two countries should push for a cooperation framework that has greater binding force and provides legal protection for cooperation in energy exploration, production and extraction and reduces unnecessary competition among firms from the two countries. This will help minimize investment risks and achieve better economic benefits.

Another key area for energy cooperation is pushing ahead with construction of oil and gas pipelines. Both China and India need reliable transmission pipelines as they import oil and gas from Russia, Central Asia and the Middle East. So far, China has built a gas and oil pipeline network which connects with its neighboring countries to the north and west. India is also working to build multiple energy pipeline routes but has experienced some difficulties due to the conflict between India and Pakistan. India urgently needs China to join in its effort to build the pipeline network. Meanwhile, overland transportation routes that China expects to build to its west and southwest cannot bypass South Asian countries.

India's prominent role in South Asia makes it even more necessary for China to cooperate with the country in building overland energy routes.

Apart from bilateral cooperation, the two countries should also launch multi-level cooperation and build an energy cooperation framework among the BRICS countries, the Shanghai Cooperation Organization and South Asian regions.

The author is dean of China Institute for Studies in Energy Policy at Xiamen University.

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SPECIAL REPORT: HEALTH CARE

HAS TRUMP LOST THE HEALTH-CARE FIGHT! 38 |APRIL-2017|

BY : Damon Linker

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ongress' push to repeal and replace Obama Care is about to wallop working-class Trump voters. That's a terrible economic and medical problem for these voters, an enormous political problem for the GOP and President Trump, and an awfully dangerous democracy-destabilizing problem for the rest of us.

That the Republican Party may be willing to pass a bill, the American Health Care Act, that leads the total number of people covered by health insurance to drop by 24 million over the next decade, and all so that a small number of wealthy families can enjoy a sizable tax cut, is bad. But that they would pass a bill that inflicts considerable pain on the very voters who propelled Donald Trump to victory last November is far more than the cruel irony that some critics are saying it is. It's the political equivalent of throwing lit matches on a powder keg — an act that could end up blowing up core aspects of American democracy itself.

Trump won the Republican primaries and then the presidency because a significant portion of the American electorate is angry about the status quo over which both parties have presided in recent years. The anger these voters direct at the GOP has many sources, but among the most significant is frustration about the tendency of party leaders to talk like populists but pursue plutocratic policies that benefit rich donors while leaving most Republican voters behind.

Trump's populist appeals resonated with these voters because the candidate directed them at the leaders of his own party, and not just at the Democrats. The real estate mogul sounded like an (unlikely) champion of the long-suffering working class, which suggested that he might actually call the rhetorical bluff of party elites and govern like the populist he claimed to be during the campaign.

At times, President Trump seems to understand that this is the core of his appeal — when he talks about turning the GOP into a "workers party," when he denounces globalism, and when he promises to renegotiate trade deals, impose import taxes, protect entitlements, stop low-skill immigration, spend generously on infrastructure, and persuade CEOs to stop outsourcing jobs. Whether Trump will follow

Trump won the Republican primaries and then the presidency because a significant portion of the American electorate is angry about the status quo over which both parties have presided in recent years. through on these promises, whether doing so would actually improve quality of life for the white working class in a noticeable way, and whether any of it is compatible with his typically Republican (plutocratic) desire for cutting income taxes — all of this remains unclear.

But regardless of the results, the very fact that these voters came together in support of Trump, helped to carry him over the finish line, and see him making an effort to help them is significant. For the first time in a long time, these angry, neglected members of the electorate have an outlet, a tribune, someone who's convinced them that their grievances are being heard and responded to at the highest levels of government.

Or at least they did until Trump decided to tie himself to House Speaker Paul Ryan's American Health Care Act.Nothing we know about Ryan suggests that he cares about the bill's likely consequences for Trump voters — except in the completely abstract sense that his ideological certainties lead him to presume (without evidence) that showering the rich with tax breaks will automatically benefit everyone else. In the real world, cutting insurance subsidies and state Medicaid allocations will actually hurt a lot of the very people whose anger led them to support Trump in the first place. Some of these voters will lose the ability to pay for insurance, while others will end up without insurance when the ObamaCare exchanges collapse, as they're likely to do over the next year or so, in large part due to uncertainty and instability injected into the system by the GOP. We should all hope it doesn't come to that. But the fact is that Trump's foolish, reckless decision to screw over his already angry supporters is setting up conditions that will be ripe for further exploitation and radicalization over the coming years.

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INTERVIEW

FUTILITY OF US INTERVENTION IN YEMEN BY : Zachary Laub States, but still have extraordinary lethality. We should not discount how destabilizing they can be.

U.S. President Donald J. Trump has escalated counterterrorism strikes in eastern Yemen against the al-Qaeda affiliate there. But his administration is no more likely than President Barack Obama’s to be successful in degrading the group, says Barbara K. Bodine, a former U.S. ambassador to Yemen.

“Even when a drone takes out al-Qaeda leaders, it doesn’t dislodge the organization or affect why people support it,” Bodine says, noting al-Qaeda’s steady territorial gains. Similarly, she says, the separate Saudi-led air campaign to restore the government of Abed Rabbo Mansour al-Hadi has little prospect of defeating Houthi rebels. There should be a new U.S.-driven effort for a political settlement to the civil war, she says, but barring that, the United States and other major international actors should consider a “humanitarian intervention of sufficient duration and size to try to forestall catastrophe.”

AQAP is still a terrorist group, but it is taking on much more of a domestic focus. It has held significant territory for a long time, including Mukalla, the third-largest port in Yemen. That is unlike al-Qaeda and its franchises, which tend to be small groups that favor terrorist incidents rather than holding territory, trying to govern, and providing basic services.

The United States has been regularly carrying out air strikes in Yemen since 2011. Does this long campaign have results to show?

Drones are a tool, not a strategy. Do they keep al-Qaeda long-footed? Maybe. But have they deterred or diminished al-Qaeda? No. Al-Qaeda’s numbers have increased, the territory it controls has increased, and it seems to be increasingly well dug-in. When the drone strikes were coupled with Yemeni ground forces, in 2012 to 2013, AQAP was dislodged from Abyan [province, east of the southern coastal city of Aden]—but they just moved east. Even when a drone takes out al-Qaeda leaders, it doesn’t dislodge the organization or affect why people support it. We can drive AQAP out of a village, but then no one goes in afterward to rebuild the structures destroyed and provide food and water.

There have been more than thirty U.S. air strikes, as well as a Special Operations raid, since Trump took office. That seems a marked uptick from those that occurred under Obama. Why the change?

It’s a way for the Trump administration to show a muscular approach to counterterrorism. The media is reporting that the current uptick predates in planning whatever intelligence might have been picked up by the SEAL raid; these [plans] had been sitting on the shelf for a while. From what I understand, many of these were proposed by the military during the Obama administration but had not been greenlighted.

Late March will mark two years since Saudi Arabia launched its campaign to restore Hadi’s government, and it seems to have hardly moved the frontlines. Does it have an endgame?

The Saudis did not have a clear idea of an endgame beyond putting the Hadi government back in charge. Securing the border between Yemen and Saudi Arabia was a strategic objective, but [most of] the fighting has been in the south.

What their endgame is, beyond a Yemen that doesn’t threaten its borders and isn’t controlled by Iran, is pretty unclear. There has not been any real reconstruction—political reconstruction, physical infrastructure—and there is no “day after” plan. The Saudis went in with the hubris that given the size and sophistication of their air force and the prowess of Emirati ground troops, this would be a short war; the Houthis, a ragtag insurgency, would collapse after “shock and awe.”

U.S. officials often called al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) the terrorist group that posed the greatest threat to the United States. Was that true before, and is it true now?

It is a threat, but the greatest? I’m not sure how you measure that. In terms of aspiration, there was the “undie bomber,” who attempted to bomb a plane over Detroit [in 2009], and an attempt to smuggle explosives on printer cartridges [on to U.S.-bound cargo planes in 2010]. Operationally, they have not been successful at all.

But that’s a narrow aperture. AQ-inspired groups like alShabab, Boko Haram, and [al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb] have focused less on Americans and the United

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INDO-US

MODIAND TRUMP

BROMANCE? BY : Andrew North

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ith Donald Trump now ensconced in the White House, self-styled, anti-establishment populists are in charge of the world’s two largest democracies: India and the United States. Trump’s chief strategist, Stephen Bannon, believes that this is no coincidence but rather proof of a global "centerright revolt," And in 2014, as chairman of Breitbart News, Bannon singled out that year’s election of India’s Hindu nationalist prime minister, Narendra Modi, as an early indicator.

After Trump promised to be a “true friend” to India and praised Modi during the campaign, some commentators claimed to see a "bromance" on the horizon. Since Trump officially became president, the two men have spoken, and the Indian prime minister even tweeted about their “warm conversation.” There have also been meetings between key foreign policy and security officials from both sides. And, according to Pramit Pal Chaudhuri, foreign editor of Hindustan Times, Trump administration officials have been telling their Indian counterparts that they are under “orders that this relationship must be good.”

Their boss has not spelled out exactly why he is so keen on India, although it is worth noting that there are five Trump Tower projects already underway in India making it one of the company’s biggest investments outside North America. Arguably, Trump is simply expressing his signature enthusiasm for a relationship that has been on an upward trajectory ever since former President George W. Bush signed a landmark nuclear cooperation deal with India. The mutual suspicions of the Cold War era have subsided as the interests of the two democracies have increasingly aligned over issues, such as confronting China and combating terrorism. India has also opened up its fastgrowing economy to outside investment. One sign of the shift is a jump in the United States’ arms sales to India, both in quantity and sophistication—it is increasingly supplanting Russia as India’s key weapons supplier.

Yet beyond the overlapping interests, there are also intriguing similarities between the two leaders’ styles, the basis for their popular appeal. Namely, both have triumphed electorally by selling themselves as saviors of the nation while pursuing what one could call “majority grievance politics.” With Trump, that means appealing to his mostly white American base while Modi has tapped into anxieties within India’s Hindu majority about losing out to minorities, particularly the country’s Muslim population. “Good days are coming,” Modi promised the massive, frenzied crowds who attended his 2014 campaign rallies.

Over the six months of reporting on Modi’s campaign, I watched his brand of macho politics develop—he once boasted of having a 56 inch chest—and the singular way in which he con-

nected with voters. He used powerful, straightforward language to communicate stirring nationalist ideas, which resonated with tens of millions of Indians frustrated with their country’s progress. He was offering them not just greater prosperity but an India with greater international clout—one that was en route to becoming a superpower. Modi made much of his humble origins in his home state of Gujarat, selling himself as a Delhi outsider who would sweep into the capital to shake up the old order, dominated by an elite revolving around the Gandhi dynasty-led Congress party then in power. His slogan might as well have been “Make India Great Again.”

The Indian prime minister, who has more Twitter and Facebook followers than Trump, has also long used social media to bypass the mainstream media. Unlike the U.S. president, he has not targeted the media, but has kept it at arm’s length since 2002, when bloody religious riots broke out in Gujarat while he was in charge of the western state, leading to widespread accusations that he allowed the violence to occur. In 2015, he launched his own app, offering constant updates on his activities. A vast army of online trolls have sprung up to pounce on any critics. Much of this trolling is orchestrated by his own party’s social media cell, according to a former insider. This all contributed to a burgeoning cult of personality around Modi.

One senior Indian government official who has worked with Modi sees a clear similarity with Trump, noting, “They have both proven immune so far to all criticism or legal challenges.”

An Indian-American donor to the Trump campaign, Shalabh Kumar, claims to have facilitated the first face-to-face meeting between the two leaders last July– though there is no detailed record of the event. Kumar has past ties to Modi and has been working overtime to make the “bromance” happen. He believes that New Delhi and Washington have shared interests, including in trade and fighting radical Islam. Kumar is the founder of the Republican Hindu Coalition, a lobbying group that pushes for deeper ties between Republicans and American Hindus as well as with India itself. It organized the glitzy New Jersey 2016 campaign event during which Trump heaped praise on Modi. Most recently, Kumar penned an op-ed for Breitbart, calling the two leaders “kindred spirits” prepared to stand up to “political elites” to get things done. Terrorists were now running scared, he claimed, because India and the United States have a “shared yearning to eliminate, once and for all, the scourge of Islamic extremism.”

Despite the apparent rapport between Trump and Modi, most of the conversations and meetings between their officials have been pro forma stuff—the sort of diplomatic niceties one would expect at this stage. The two leaders are expected to meet later this year, perhaps in May or June, but Chaudhuri says he has been told by Modi officials that “there is no rush.”

Courtesy with Foreign Affairs

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DECLINE OF UNEMPLOYMENT : INDIA

BJP’S CLAIM OF DROP UNEMPLOYMENT

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n March 5, 2017, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) tweeted that “unemployment rate falls sharply, as Modi government’s efforts to create rural employment are yielding results”. The tweet claimed that India’s unemployment rate had fallen from 9.5% in August 2016 to 4.8% in February 2017, based on a report by State Bank of India (SBI) Ecoflash. The unemployment rate in Uttar Pradesh registered the maximum decline during August 2016 to February 2017 from 17.1% to 2.9%, followed by Madhya Pradesh (10% to 2.7%),

CONFUSING DATA BY : Devanik Saha

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Jharkhand (9.5% to 3.1%), Odisha (10.2% to 2.9%) and Bihar (13% to 3.7%), Indian Express reported on March 5, 2017. A FactChecker analysis of various data sets reveals that unemployment data in India is either outdated or unreliable, as multiple government reports and analyses give different figures. India’s unemployment rate was 4.68% as on March 5, 2017, which is in sync with the BJP’s claim, according to real-time data from the Bombay Stock Exchange (BSE). Urban India reported a higher unemployment rate (6.13%) than rural

India (3.9%). On August 31, 2016, India’s unemployment rate was 9.7%; urban India had higher unemployment (11.14%) than rural India (9.01%), the BSE data reveal.

India’s unemployment rate was reported to be 3.7% in 2015-16, according to data presented in the Lok Sabha (lower house of Parliament) on February 6, 2017, by labour minister Bandaru Dattatreya.

However, on the same day, minister for state for planning Rao Inderjit Singh informed the Rajya Sabha (upper house of Parliament) that the unemployment rate was 5% and rising in India, especially among the backward classes (OBCs), Hindustan Times reported on February 6, 2017.

If the unemployment was declining as per the SBI report, why did the government admit to rising unemployment in the Parliament?

Over 30% of youth aged 15-29 in India are not in employment, education or training (NEETs), according to this 2017 report by Organisation of Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), Livemint reported on March 6, 2017. India needs 23 million jobs annually, according to a Kotak Securities report, but over the last 30 years, the country has created about seven million jobs every year, IndiaSpend reported on February 23, 2016. The government needs to focus on improving the measurement of employment and wages even as it works towards improving the ease of doing business and enhancing India’s manufacturing and employment capability, economists Dharmakirti Joshi and Dipti Deshpande from CRISIL had written in a column for Financial Express in June 2015. “In July 2014, the Labour Bureau released the provisional results from its sixth economic census. This data pointed towards an increase in job creation rate in India in the last 5-6 years—a finding not supported by the NSSO data, sending out a contradictory message,” wrote Joshi and Deshpande.

(Saha is an MA Gender and Development student at Institute of Development Studies, University of Sussex.)

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POLITICS : INDIA

E

NOW BJP

LOOKS AT

KERALA 46 |APRIL-2017|

mboldened by its emphatic win in Uttar Pradesh and stunning electoral gains elsewhere, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) is now looking to expand its spread in the south just as it did in new turfs such as the North East, especially in Kerala where the parent outfit, the RSS, has more than 5,600 shakhas, the largest figure for a single state. According to the RSS, there are 56,859 shakhas across the country.

Though the RSS has picked up in organisational strength in the state since the end of Emergency in 1977, the BJP, its political arm, or its predecessor Bharatiya Jana Sangh, has had far disproportionate electoral success. The BJP opened its account in the state assembly for the first time only in the 2016 assembly polls, winning one seat in the 140-member House.

Senior BJP leader O Rajagopal was elected from the Nemom constituency in Thiruvananthapuram district with a majority of 8,671 votes, eating into traditional Congress votes to batter his key opponent who belonged to the Communist Party of India (Marxist) (CPM).

Though the CPM-led Left Democratic Front cruised to a near two-thirds majority in the last year’s polls, the BJP saw its vote share rise significantly from 6% in the 2011 state election to more than 15%. The party, which had aligned with Bharath Dharma Jana Sena (BDJS) led by Sree Narayana Dharma Paripalana Sangham general secretary Vellappalli Natesan to pull in the numerically preponderant Ezhava votes, came second in seven assembly seats, much to the anguish of the Left and the Congress-led United Democratic Front (UDF). The ruling party at the Centre, which expects to open an account in the state in the 2019 Lok Sabha polls, has also vehemently campaigned to highlight the ongoing violence between its cadres and those of the CPM, which rules the state, as a witch hunt by the Marxists. The BJP and the RSS contend that the CPM is resorting to murderous ways to stem in the growth of the BJP which has made deep inroads in the state, securing huge gains even in local bodies polls. Ever since new chief minister Pinarayi Vijayan took over last May, the BJP and the RSS have launched an aggressive nationwide campaign claiming that CPM was out to physically eliminate their cadres for fear of losing their turfs. The Sangh also dispatched a handful of ‘observers’ to Kannur -- which it has termed as the epicentre of political violence targeted at RSS and BJP activists -- to ‘capture’ the plight of its workers and to initiate a nationwide campaign against the Left in Kerala. Crime records show that both the RSS and the CPM cadres were equally responsible for a spate of violence in the northern district and elsewhere.

Between 2000 and 2016, RSS lost 31 workers and the CPM 30.

However, the RSS-steered blitz successfully managed to project workers of the Hindu nationalist party as more of victims than perpetrators. Meanwhile, in recent weeks, RSS and BJP workers have taken out public processions against “Redtrocity”, a

Crime records show that both the RSS and the CPM cadres were equally responsible for a spate of violence in the northern district and elsewhere. Between 2000 and 2016, RSS lost 31 workers and the CPM 30

Sangh nomenclature for violence unleashed by the Left against its workers, from Bhuj in Gujarat to Kanyakumari in Tamil Nadu to Korba in Chhattisgarh and Dibrugarh in Assam to Shimla in Himachal Pradesh.

The RSS and the BJP have claimed that neither the Left nor the Congress, which have shared power since the formation of the state in 1956, have protected the interests of the Hindus; the state accounts for over 54% Hindus while close to 45% are either Muslim or Christian. The prosperity of the minorities in the state many of whom have hit pay dirt thanks to the Gulf Boom has triggered much jealousy. Christians and the Muslims also enjoy enormous political power. As of now, the CPM wields tremendous clout among the Hindus of Kerala, which prides itself for its high social indicators. Yet, hopes are high in the BJP that the appeal of its campaign spearhead Prime Minister Narendra Modi and the tactics of party president Amit Shah will help it pull off stunning poll gains in 2019 in a state whose political narrative has so far been defined by bipolar contests between the Left and the Congress-led coalition.

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NORTH EAST : INDIA

NAGALAND MAKING CHILDRENS RESPONSIBLE

T

he Nagaland Board of School Education (NBSE) has asked schools affiliated

to it to ban junk food in and around schools. The circular issued by the NBSE on March 14 mentions the report of the working group constituted by the Ministry of Women and Child Development in 2015. Stating that the report of the working group has direct bearing on schools, the circular advised all schools to implement the recommendations made in the report.

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THE NOTIFICATION BY THE NBSE ALSO ASKED SCHOOLS TO CONSTITUTE CANTEEN MANAGEMENT COMMITTEES TO ENSURE THAT NO JUNK FOOD CAN GAIN ENTRY INTO CAMPUSES. BY ISSUING THIS CIRCULAR, NAGALAND FOLLOWED STATES SUCH AS PUNJAB, ODISHA AND MANIPUR IN BANNING JUNK FOOD IN SCHOOLS.

The NBSE in Nagaland is an autonomous body under the Department of School Education in Nagaland and regulates higher school education between Classes 9 to 12. The Chairman of the Board, Asano Sekhose, says “We received a circular from the Department of School Education, which mentioned the report of the working group of the Ministry of Women and Child Development.” She adds, “The NBSE is the leading educational board in Nagaland. We decided to issue a circular on healthy eating habits to more than 700 schools affiliated to the NBSE.” Besides banning the sale of junk food, including chips, soft drinks and fried food, both in school campuses and within 200-metre radius of each school, the circular asked schools to make children and parents aware about obesity. The notification by the NBSE also asked schools to constitute canteen management committees to ensure that no junk food can gain entry into campuses. By issuing this circular, Nagaland followed states such as Punjab, Odisha and Manipur in banning junk food in schools. Earlier in 2012, the Department of School Education and the NBSE, in separate circulars, had highlighted the issue of increased consumption of junk food and carbonated drinks in adolescents. Both the circulars indicated that remedial steps should be taken to address this. In January 2016, the Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE) had issued a circular with detailed measures to curb availability of junk food in school canteens.

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COMPARISON REPORT : CHILDBIRTH

US AND INDIA FALL SHORT ON CARE OF WOMEN DURING CHILDBIRTH BY : Neel Shah, The Conversation

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These parallels have their limits. On average, health outcomes in the United States are significantly better than those in India.

But this mode of comparison misses a critical point. Dignity is a consequence of appropriate care, and appropriateness cannot be easily determined by population statistics.

A

fter eight years of practicing obstetrics and researching childbirth in the United States, I know as well as anyone that the American maternal health system could be better. Our way of childbirth is the costliest in the world.

Our health outcomes, from mortality rates to birth weights, are far from the best. The reasons we fall short are not obvious. In medicine, providing more care is often mistaken for providing better care. In childbirth the relationship between more and better is complicated. Texan obstetricians, when compared to their counterparts in neighboring New Mexico, are 50% more likely to intervene on the baby’s behalf by performing a cesarean section. Nonetheless, Texas babies still have a lower survival rate than New Mexican babies.

I long assumed that our most puzzling American health care failures were idiosyncrasies–unique consequences of American culture, geography, and politics. But a trip to India for the 2017 Human Rights in Childbirth meeting led me to a humbling realization: when it comes to childbirth, both countries fall short in surprisingly similar ways. I take care of patients in at a well-funded teaching hospital in Boston, where pregnant women seem well-respected and have clear, inviolable rights. I’ve read about the gender-based violence, the profoundly disturbing cases of disrespect and abuse that too many women in India and around the world experience. But these are not things I have deep experience with. I initially hesitated when I received an invitation to speak at a human rights meeting. Still, the opportunity to scrutinize my profession alongside international experts from a broad range of disciplines was compelling. Over 200 activists and scientists, midwives and physicians, journalists and attorneys planned to discuss strategies to advance justice, dignity, and respect for pregnant women. So I got on the long flight from Boston to Mumbai.The meeting began with Indian women describing their experiences of care gone wrong. Many were heartbreaking stories of women receiving too little care too late – failures to provide antibiotics, blood and other forms of resuscitation in a timely way. Others were equally heartbreaking examples of women receiving too much care too soon – unnecessary inductions of labor, episiotomies and C-sections. Beyond instances of clinically measurable harm, the stories illustrated routine misappropriations of care that these women felt deprived them of basic dignity.Throughout, I was conscious of the fact that Indian clinicians have different training and face different constraints than I do. Indian women often have less agency to advocate for themselves compared to American women. Nearly half of Indian women are married before the age of 18 and have limited capacity to make independent decisions regarding reproduction. Indian women also have less access to basic social

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COMPARISON REPORT : CHILDBIRTH

services than American women, though they are far more likely to require them. Higher rates of chronic and infectious diseases, higher rates of illiteracy, higher rates of abject poverty are all factors contributing to avoidable suffering in childbirth.

But as I sat there, listening to case after case, aware of the differences between the American and Indian context, much of what I was hearing also sounded uncomfortably familiar. Fundamentally, providing too little care too late or too much care too soon are challenges that all maternal health systems are confronting, including the American system. And in America, India, and many other countries, the standard approach to address these challenges is similarly limited. The principal way my profession aims to improve care is by issuing guidelines that spell out the things we should be doing more of. But simply advocating that we start to do more things may be inadequate. In many cases doing more can actually be harmful.

In a recent Lancet commission on maternal health, 77 researchers from around the world, including me, concluded that our primary struggle in maternal health care is to find the appropriate balance – to provide the right patient with the right care at the right time.The testimonies during the conference revealed a startling set of facts.

In India, as in the United States, the biggest risk factor for getting an avoidable and potentially harmful c-section appears to be which facility a woman goes to for care, not her personal preferences or medical risks.In India, as in

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the United States, those facilities that are better at achieving the right balance of interventions rarely share best practices with others. And in India, as in the United States, efforts to elicit and attend to the legitimate preferences women may have during childbirth are the exception rather than the rule.These parallels have their limits. On average, health outcomes in the United States are significantly better than those in India. But this mode of comparison misses a critical point.

Dignity is a consequence of appropriate care, and appropriateness cannot be easily determined by population statistics. In our intense focus on mortality rates, we often overlook the obvious fact that childbearing women have goals other than emerging from birth alive and unscathed.

Childbirth is a moment of identify formation as a mother. It is a moment of profound self-agency (or lack thereof). It is a moment that nearly all my patients tell me has long-lasting and nuanced effects on their lives, though we do not have good ways of measuring such things. The stories of care gone wrong in India gave me an uncomfortable feeling that even the routine, seemingly respectful and safe care I provide in Boston may occur in a system that may not be designed to prioritize the dignity of my patients.A large part of the challenge is that many women may not know what they deserve when it comes to the experience of having a baby. An impoverished Indian woman who treks to civil hospital, only to give birth through an avoidable episiotomy, with minimal labor support, on a dirty metal cot, in a room crowded with other patients, may see that as normal. She may even expect it. Of course, an American woman who labors in a clean, private room, within a state of the art hospital, only to receive an avoidable c-section will often see that as normal as well. In both cases, as long as the baby is healthy, women are almost always grateful. Those of us in the birth community could do better in helping women understand what they deserve, and in developing systems of care that deliver on this promise. But first we have to be willing to link the ideas of appropriateness and justice, of patient experience and dignity. In other words we have to be willing to see childbirth through the lens of human rights.

As an obstetrician, I understand the hesitation. There’s a part of me that still bristles at this framing. In practice, knowing when to intervene in the course of an otherwise healthy woman’s labor can be incredibly difficult. Perfect accuracy may actually be impossible. Yet there are certainly broad ways that the American maternal health system can do better. About 50 percent of U.S. counties lack any qualified childbirth provider, limiting access to necessary care. Paradoxically, when we do provide access to care, we tend to provide too much. In the case of unnecessary c-sections, the error margin is again about 50 percent. While perfection may not be a reasonable goal, delivering appropriate care with the same success rate as a coin flip is not reasonable either. In fact, it is unjust.

The writer is an assistant professor of obstetrics, gynecology and reproductive biology, at Harvard Medical School.

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PSYCHOLOGICAL SCARS : GUJRAT

THEY WISH EVERY DAY TO BE DEAD BY : Avantika Mehta

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'I

THE CHILDREN OF THE GUJARAT’S RIOTS CONTINUE TO SUFFER PSYCHOLOGICAL AND PHYSICAL SCARS, WHICH NO ONE IN THE ADMINISTRATION HAS ATTEMPTED TO UNDERSTAND, LET ALONE HEAL.

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haven’t had a drink in five months,” said Javed Shaikh. His voice slurs and hands shake as he spits back into a tiny glass, the mango juice his wife had placed before him. It has been 15 years since the moment that defined Shaikh for life: then 14, Shaikh witnessed a Hindu mob rape and burn a pregnant Muslim woman to death during the 2002 Godhra riots in Gujarat. That day, as he hid under a pile of dead bodies, Shaikh had seen both his parents and his older sister killed. He has told his story since to the courts, to politicians, to the numerous journalists who have sought him out – but has never spoken with a counsellor or psychiatrist about the things he saw as a child.

Since 2002, he has moved from place to place seeking comfort. Each time, he has returned to Ahmedabad.

Fifteen years later, there is no official count of how many children were orphaned during the riots. Those who were left alive, like Shaikh, “wish every day to be dead because they die slowly every day,” said Hozefa Ujjaaini, a social worker who works with the riot victims through the nonprofit organisation Jan Vikas. The children who survived relive the atrocities in their nightmares.

Between February 28 and March 2, 2002, the three-day-long spate of violence across Gujarat left – even by the State government’s conservative estimates – hundreds dead and over 98,000 people dispossessed. Though the state claims to have moved on, the riot-affected are stuck in time and place at the rehabilitation camps – once meant to be temporary, but which have since transformed into homes for most survivors. Many of those who remember the riots have grown weary, beleaguered from years of being ignored, displaced and overlooked. The residents of one such camp Citizen Nagar wonder when they will finally be treated like actual citizens of the country. Their children continue to suffer psychological and physical scars which no one in the administration has attempted to understand, let alone heal. Some trials, such as the killing of Kausar Bano, witnessed by Shaikh, have been concluded – in 2012, a Gujarat court ruled that Kausar was hit with a sword and killed

by Babu Bajrangi. Judge Jyotsna Yagnik, however, ruled Shaikh was too young to know whether the

PSYCHOLOGICAL SCARS : GUJRAT

Rashida Ansari, a survivor of the riots and now a social worker with Jan Vikas, who helps the displaced living in Citizen Nagar, echoes the concern for the children. “No one remembers these children, the government ignored them,” she said.

Workers like Ansari have invested in learning counselling techniques themselves, so they can provide relief to others suffering from posttraumatic stress disorder.

pregnant woman’s foetus was actually ripped out. This, along with other cases relating to the Naroda Patiya massacre, in which Shaikh was caught, are still pending before the Gujarat High Court.

Rehabilitation colonies like Citizen Nagar, Vatva and 67 other sites across Gujarat lack basic amenities like running water, electricity and trash collection. The 130 homes in Citizen Nagar depend on a single tanker for their daily water needs. The roads are unpaved and water is scarce, a mountain of trash – all of Ahmedabad’s waste collected over decade – rises high. Black smoke spews out of the aluminium factory nearby, darkening the sky and making the air putrid. The riot-affected of Ahmedabad have been, quite literally, moved to the outskirts of the city where they cannot be seen or heard. “Many people have died,” said Moinuddin Sheikh, another survivor and witness of the Naroda Patiya massacre. “We have trouble breathing, the number of heart patients have increased since we came here in 2002.”

Sheikh was a policeman at the time of the riots. He quit right after. He recalled feeling helpless as he watched people being killed by men he has since identified in court as members of the Vishwa Hindu Parishad and Bajrang Dal. “There was no order to stop them from the Commissioner,” he said. “The police ran

away first because they wanted to save their own lives.” Sitting outside his one-storey makeshift building with a wrought iron roof, Sheikh recalls his family’s struggles in the first five years after the riots – an ordeal which has not yet ended. Sheikh has two sons and one daughter, none of whom went to school after the riots. A graduate himself, the former cop wanted his children to be educated and to be placed in a government jobs, but this became impossible after 2002. The children were too psychologically scarred – like many child survivors of the riots – to concentrate on school or do much else.

“For the first five years, they were in a coma, you could say,” he said. “They would not move or do anything. If they would fall asleep, they’d wake up screaming, ‘Pappa, the mob is coming to kill us; Pappa, the mob is coming to burn us.’ What they saw plays in their minds even now, like a film that’s stuck in place.” His children, and the hundreds who witnessed the brutal violence firsthand, are yet to receive any form of counselling or psychological treatment. “Survivors of the riots say things like how many times will we be victimised?” said Hozefa. Working with the riot-affected people through Jan Vikas for a decade and a half, he asked why it should take the State government so long to intervene in their conditions. “Tata got its

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stepped up to provide safe havens for the affected and bereaved children. “Agar government ne ek orphanage bhi banaya hota jahan yeh bacche reh sakte; jahaan inki rehabilitation ho sake, abhi yeh bacche kuch aur hi hote,” she said – if only the government had provided orphanages for these children to live in, they would have been very different people today.

Today, the education and restoration of the riot-affected children is a matter of individual luck and circumstance. Shaikh Sahir Sabir Hussain is fresh-faced, with close-cropped hair and sharp eyes. He’s 16, and was seven-months-old at the time of the riot. Hussain lives in Citizen Nagar with his parents and two brothers. His brothers, 30 and 25 respectively, dropped out of school after the fifth grade. Hussain travels half an hour every day to reach the Irish Presbyterian Mission high school in Raikandh, where he is determined to finish his schooling. Until grade 10, he went to a private school, but had to move out because there were no facilities for senior classes there. “I want to study,” he said smoothening his green kurta-pyjama, “I want to study and become someone of consequence.” Hussain’s friend Yakub is sixteen too, but dropped out of school after the eighth grade. The two boys spend their evenings together, but in the mornings, when Hussain is at school, Yakub makes furniture. “Meri mujboori thi,” Yakub said, indicating that his circumstances did not allow him to study. Yakub is the only working member in a household with five sons. His parents never objected when he stopped going to school – it was five kilometers away, and with eight mouths to feed, there were only so many textbooks and auto rickshaw rides the family could afford. Seeing that lack of education is a growing crisis, several young men within Citizen Nagar have put together hour-long tuition classes for those who do not go to school. Students, mostly boys, gather together to learn the basics: writing their names, reading signs, simple math. Their teachers are college-going young men who donate time to help out their neighbours. The girls have it worse. Most girls are pulled out of school after the eighth grade, with families citing various reasons, from societal norms to a fear of the Hindus living near the high schools. Most girls are married off even before they turn eighteen, never given a chance to excel at anything. In Vatva, a few girls voiced their discontent with the situation, but were resigned to the idea that this was the only way. None of them wanted to be identified – their parents had bigger problems at home, they said.

factory in a matter of months. These survivors have been living without a home to their name, without water or any facilities since 15 years. You cannot say it is because the government is slow to act.”

Sheikh has given up the fight for his children: his daughter was married as soon as she turned 18, his sons are day labourers and he drives an auto rickshaw. A parent’s regret loomed large on his face as he shook his hennaed head, recalling the first few years in Citizen Nagar. “We have gone before the counsellors here, the MLA here to request water, a government hospital, a school for our children... it feels like its fallen on deaf ears,” he said. The next generation, he added, which was born after the riots in the rehabilitation colonies, will continue to suffer just like his children did. “The school is far, sending children there is expensive. Recently there was an accident and several of the colony’s children died on their way to the school, so now parents are even more scared to send their kids there.”

Rashida Ansari, a survivor of the riots and now a social worker with Jan Vikas, who helps the displaced living in Citizen Nagar, echoes the concern for the children. “No one remembers these children, the government ignored them,” she said. Workers like Ansari have invested in learning counselling techniques themselves, so they can provide relief to others suffering from posttraumatic stress disorder. Ansari received her training under Action Aid, an NGO that has worked closely with the riot-affected women and children since 2002. But there is only so much she can do without formal education. “Hum baatein sunte hai,” she said – all I do is listen. Ansari wonders why the government never

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SENTIMENTS : ANTI-INDIA

ANTI-INDIA SENTIMENT IN THE US! BY : Bennett Voyles

T

he whiskies were a little suspicious, beer being the standard post-work drink for males in the US. The cigarettes would mark them as slightly foreign as well: most American professionals don’t smoke. Otherwise, Srinivas Kuchibhotla and Alok Madasani fit right in, an ordinary part of an ordinary scene—the smoking patio of Austins Bar and Grill, a sports bar in Olathe, Kansas, a town of 125,000 about 32 km southwest of Kansas City, Missouri. In fact, they were regulars; the staff reportedly thought of them as ‘the Jameson’s guys.’

Unfortunately, that’s not who everyone saw.

A little after 7 pm on Wednesday, February 22nd, a drunk man started questioning them about

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hoodscout.com.

Immigration isn’t really a problem in Olathe either. The truth is that a lot of the town’s prosperity depends on people like the Jameson’s Guys, two of many Indian engineers who’ve built the city’s leading company, Garmin, a maker of Global Positioning hardware and software.

their visa status. “They tried to tell him that they had done their [master’s degrees] in Kansas in 2006 and had been staying there with valid work permits,” a relative of one of the men told a reporter. He started shouting racist slurs at Kuchibhotla and Madasani, and making enough of a nuisance of himself that someone threw him out.

But the guy came back a few minutes later. He had covered his head in a grey and black scarf. Some people said he had military medals pinned on his white shirt. He walked up to the Jameson’s guys, shouted “Get out of my country,” and shot them both, killing the 32-year-old Kuchibhotla, injuring Madasani, 24, and also injuring Ian Grillot, a White 24-year-old who tried to stop him as he left.

The event seemed to come entirely out of the blue in the quiet, prosperous town. As Madasani told a BBC reporter, he’d never heard a racist comment in Olathe. Like nearby Overland Park, where Kuchibhotla and Madasani lived, Olathe is America at its best, home to Whites, Blacks, Hispanics, and a growing number of South Asians.Crime is low, people make good money, and most people are doing well: the average household earns $126,000 a year, nearly double the $70,000 national average. It is 85 per cent white-collar, well above the national average, and 45 per cent of adults have a Bachelor’s degree, compared to 21 per cent nationwide, according to Neighbor-

Immigration isn’t really a problem in Olathe either. The truth is that a lot of the town’s prosperity depends on people like the Jameson’s Guys, two of many Indian engineers who’ve built the city’s leading company, Garmin, a maker of Global Positioning hardware and software.

Kuchibhotla and Madasani were Telugu speakers from Hyderabad who came to the Kansas City area to pursue their Master’s degrees in the 2000s, and stayed back to work. Like a lot of America’s tech companies, Garmin itself is an immigrant success story. It began in 1989 as an acronymic partnership between an American and a Taiwanese engineer, Gary Burrell and Min Kao. The two started in 1989 in an office that consisted of two folding chairs and a card table, and over the next decade, built an enormous, globally listed company.

Today, Garmin is a $9.7 billion business, part of which is housed in a 140,000 sq metres building on a 96-acre campus in Olathe. It employs 2,800 people in its local offices alone.

When a 70,000-sq-metre addition is finished next year, the company plans to hire another 2,800 employees.

But that’s the objective reality, the kind that Garmin is good at navigating. More difficult to map is the shadowy landscape of rage and alternative facts where Adam Purinton, the man who shot Kuchibhotla and Madasani, seems to have lived. Purinton is a registered Republican and a Navy veteran.

Although he looks the part of the crazed hillbilly now, the role seems to be new to him. Purinton lived in a large house on a cul-de-sac of three-and-four-bedroom homes, some over 20 years old, seven or eight km away in Overland Park, with a view of a pond. The average list price of homes in his zip code is $621,000.

This frustration has had consequences, the kind you can see etched in the face of Purinton, who though only 51, looks at least 10 years older. From 1978 to 1998, the mortality rate of US Whites fell by 2 per cent a year, according to a 2015 Princeton study. After that, death rates have begun to rise by 0.5 per cent a year, even as other country’s death rates continue to fall. The causes tended to be suicide or related to alcohol and drug abuse. Professor Sheth believes this present wave of hostility against Indians will pass once the US economy picks up steam and both the stock market and the home market boom. “The negative impact on people’s desire to come to America due to current hostility will be only temporary,” he predicts. “I think the United States will be always attractive to immigrants,” he adds. “It is because it has structural flexibility to adjust and it is a great place to put your roots for the children and the grandchildren”.

Bennett Voyles writes on global trends. He was formerly with The Economist Intelligence Unit.

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TECHNOLOGY : INDIA

INDIA'S FUTURE IN

TECHNOCRACY BY : Parag Khanna

T

he election of Donald J Trump, a many times failed businessman and selfpromoting reality TV star, as President of the world’s most powerful country has proved to the world that America is just winging it. Rather than steadily improving governance over time, the country is caught in a hapless cycle of flip-flopping parties and policies while overall national welfare stagnates.

Populism has prevailed over pragmatism. With American democracy declining as a role model and Indian democracy leaving much to be desired, the rise of an elected technocrat such as Narendra Modi comes not a moment too soon for India’s masses More broadly, the most recent World Values Survey reveals that from World War

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II to today, the percentage of people in Europe and the US who feel it is ‘essential to live in a democracy’ has fallen from two-thirds to under one-third.

Meanwhile, the proportion of Americans who believe that experts should decide what is best for the country rather than the government has risen from 32 per cent to 49 per cent. In other words: Americans are craving a better government—one that balances democracy and technocracy.

America today, however, far better represents degenerative politics than good governance. Many American intellectuals celebrate the theatre of politics as if it is the embodiment of Tocqueville’s praise for civic democracy. But democracy is not an end in itself. The greater goal is effective governance and improved national well-being. Because Americans no longer sense collective progress, they don’t trust their institutions anymore, whether the White House, Congress, political parties, the Supreme Court, big business, or church. These organs of American leadership are passing down to the next generation a less well functioning government and society rather than the one they need to manage a complex future. Modi has also been accused of overly personalising diplomacy. While Modi has no doubt been good for India’s image, even a cursory glance at US President Obama’s eight years in office offer a powerful reminder that soaring speeches, selfies and bear-hugs carry foreign policy only so far American democracy could be made far more effective through the technocratic toolkit being deployed around the world in better-run countries from Switzerland and Germany to Singapore and China. There are three things that the best governments do well: Respond efficiently to citizens’ needs and preferences, learn from international experience in devising policies, and use data and scenarios for long-term planning. If done right, such governments marry the virtues of direct democracy with the effectiveness of managed technocracy—a model I call ‘direct technocracy’. Now that the US has unilaterally abdicated its position as the most competent and capable government, the race is on to construct this ideal regime for the future.

With American democracy declining as a role model and Indian democracy leaving much to be desired, the rise of an elected technocrat such as Narendra Modi comes not a moment too soon for India’s masses. Leaders

The greater goal is effective governance and improved national well-being. Because Americans no longer sense collective progress, they don’t trust their institutions anymore, whether the White House, Congress, political parties, the Supreme Court, big business, or church.

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TECHNOLOGY : INDIA

with provincial experience confronting local needs and testing ideas almost always wind up as better national leaders than those who have merely represented constituencies but never actually governed them. All of the newfound confidence and credibility India has gained in recent years owes itself to this technocratic shift. It is well-known that Prime Minister Modi is a longtime admirer of first-world Singapore and superpower China, Asia’s two archetypal technocratic states. As Prime Minister, Modi saw how little weight being a poor and disconnected democracy carries in geopolitics, which is primarily concerned with coherent power projection, and understood that India’s democratic chaos, while charming for tourists, holds little appeal to foreign investors. For India to truly graduate from Asian laggard to a global leader, it has to continue to advance down the technocratic path. As it seeks to absorb lessons from the East, India is finally breaking from comparisons with its third world South Asian neighbours. Asia’s major democracies—India, Indonesia and the Philippines— whose combined population is nearly 1.7 billion, are all in the process of getting their act together in the hopes of emulating the region’s better run technocracies. This means not just Singapore but even Malaysia, Vietnam and Thailand. Malaysia is mired in corruption but is a stable, modern multiethnic state with first-world infrastructure and rising prosperity. Vietnam is a single-party regime yet has massively modernised the country and reduced poverty, with foreign investment pours in employing its hard-working and skilled population. Thailand’s 2014 coup ousted incompetent democratic leaders in favour of a military junta, and Thais backed a permanent political role for the military in a constitutional referendum in 2016. These aren’t ideal regimes, but they are an order of magnitude superior in their postcolonial performance than what India has delivered.

It is precisely because India, Indonesia and the Philippines have each endured decades of forgettable or regrettable governments that they have all in recent years elected leaders with explicitly technocratic pretensions. Indians, Indonesians and Filipinos are no longer content to be part of vibrant commercial societies but with dysfunctional governments. Fed up with patronising

clichés about how they thrive despite their political systems, they have voted in governments with no-nonsense agendas focused on infrastructure, jobs, education and technology. Success need not be an accident.

With respect to Pakistan, cross-border altercations should not lead to a cessation of progress towards most-favoured nation trade status and taking advantage of opportunities such as the Iran-Pakistan-India pipeline. Technocratic diplomacy never holds bilateral relations hostage to a single issue In Asia, technocracy has become a form of political salvation. Democracy eventually gets sick of itself and votes for technocracy. Think about it: These three countries have had functional democracy for at least a generation, but only now is the world paying attention to their progress in cutting red tape, establishing special economic zones, and investing in social welfare. Because Asian societies are modernising and increasingly liberal, they will evolve towards better governance that balances political openness with goal-oriented technocracy.

Good technocracies are equally focused on inputs and outputs. Their legitimacy comes both from the process by which the government is selected and the delivery of what citizens universally proclaim they want: Solid infra-

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structure, public safety, clean air and water, reliable transportation, ease of doing business, good schools, quality housing, dependable childcare, freedom of expression, access to jobs, and so on. The technocratic mindset is that delay in getting these things done is itself a form of corruption. Instead of perpetual blame games and acceptance of stasis as the norm, good technocracies are always out to solve their problems.

Let’s take away from all of this not that democracy is undesirable, for it is not only a crucial foundation of legitimacy, but also a vital pillar of successful technocracy. Instead, democracy has to be seen not as a universal solution but a principle to be observed in the quest towards the higher objective of good governance. The elements of good governance—accountable leadership, national stability, political inclusion, effective service delivery, regulatory quality, transparent rule of law, low corruption, impartial judiciary, civil liberties, protection of rights, provision of economic opportunity and other variables—are touted by all modern societies. What matters is execution as measured by the process for determining laws, the autonomy of the bureaucracy, and the effectiveness of policy delivery, among other metrics. It must be stated very clearly that numerous important technocratic measures predate Prime Minister Modi’s ascent. For example, it was under the UPA Government that the revolutionary Aadhaar digital ID scheme began, as well as the process of amending the Constitution to initiate a GST system. The previous Government also appointed Raghuram Rajan as RBI governor who undertook serious bank reform and fought inflation, and made progress on the India-Bangladesh land-swap deal. On some matters, therefore, Modi has been pushing matters across the goal line rather than initiating interventions.

And that too is part of smart technocracy: Continuity. Or, in Modi’s words, “De-linking issues and decisions from elections.” National infrastructure in roads, railways and power, to which Modi has pledged nearly $200 billion in long-term funding, are existential priorities, as are GST and FDI reforms and the #MakeInIndia campaign to create high-quality jobs in growth sectors. Successful states are ones where there is continuity across administrations in matters of national interest.

To take another example, while the BJP government’s support for the Aadhaar program hasn’t been consistent, the payment app feature is now being rolled out.

In any multi-party parliamentary democracy, particularly a poor country with fragmented and feudal provincial politics, some degree of horse-trading and handouts cannot be eradicated from the system overnight. That is why embedding technocratic practice in federal institutions should be a top priority. Here the Modi agenda is at a very early stage, with plenty of room for improvement.

Good technocracies are equally focused on inputs and outputs. Their legitimacy comes both from the process by which the government is selected and the delivery of what citizens universally proclaim they want: Solid infrastructure, public safety, clean air and water, reliable transportation, ease of doing business, good schools, quality housing, dependable childcare, freedom of expression, access to jobs, and so on.

Demonetisation, for example, is a brilliant leapfrog that will certainly benefit the population as a whole, but it need not have been done so hastily without first enrolling hundreds of millions more citizens in digital banking to alleviate significant inconveniences. The effort has not backfired, but easily avoidable oversights have opened up the government to accusations that the whole programme was rushed to influence the upcoming Uttar Pradesh election. In a good technocracy, each stage of the execution process is considered and planned for in advance.

Modi has also been accused of overly personalising diplomacy. While Modi has no doubt been good for India’s image, even a cursory glance at US president Obama’s eight years in office offer a powerful reminder that soaring speeches, selfies and bear-hugs carry foreign policy only so far. True technocracies empower functional agencies rather than overshadowing them. This way they are deeply involved in major decisions such as defence acquisition programmes and commercial tieups. This is the hand-in-glove approach that characterises Germany, Brazil and other leading countries with smart economic diplomacy.

Another issue India might be surprised to find lessons from abroad on is Kashmir. Countries such as Indonesia and Colombia have made major strides in recent years towards resolving decades old civil wars (Colombia’s president Juan Manuel Santos was just awarded the Nobel Peace Prize) by using a mix of political autonomy, infrastructure development, peace-building measures and military stabilisation operations. The BJP Government has much to learn if it hopes to resolve India’s longest-standing domestic wound.

Parag Khanna is a Senior Fellow at the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy at the National University of Singapore.

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ENTERTAINMENT

MOST POWERFUL WOMEN OF BOLLYWOOD

PRIYANKA CHOPRA

DEEPIKA PADUKONE

Miss India at 17, a National Award holder, Bollywood megastar… she’s now left Hollywood gasping for air with her talent and beauty. She is slayin’ them one Jimmy Kimmel, one Good Morning America and one Oscar at a time. The television ratings of her American debut show, Quantico stand testimony. And the fact the she’s the negative lead for Baywatch with Zac Efron and Dwayne 'The Rock' Johnson is sign of a huge Hollywood career ahead.

Where do you begin to explain the magic and reign of a goddess? She came, she saw, she’s conquering and is now on a world domination tour, we’d say. The glorious 2013 year with 4 backto-back hits and her depression-fighting phase is what success and bravery stories are made of. The box-office collection of xXx: Return of Xander Cage speak for themselves.

ALIA BHATT Girls want to be like her, boys want to be with her and the 70mm just dazzles with her presence. At 24, this lil’ powerhouse performer is making the nation go mad about her.

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KANGANA RANAUT She doesn’t need a Dharma or Yash Raj movie to woo the masses. Her acting chops, mysterious persona and wild mane are just enough.

She’s the hero of her film, ones that make a whopping 150 crore. Name any film she’s done and it’s been carried on her strong shoulders.

The most powerful of the lot.

KAREENA KAPOOR KHAN After all, the size zero transition and the ‘Kareena’ tattoo on hubby and Pataudi prince Saif Ali Khan were both one of the most talked about topics in Bollywood history. She grew from Bebo to Begum Bebo in the most divalicious way possible. And if memory serves us correctly, she was the first actress to start charging in crores. And mind you, she has changed the game of the ‘married actresses’.

ANUSHKA SHARMA Who said a Bollywood actress needs to be all coy and damsel-y? Here’s our tomboy lady, versatile bundle of talent, producer of her own films and a subtle slayer. A debut with Shah Rukh Khan comes with its own expectations but she shone bright and kept her game strong throughout. She made it to the 300 crore club with PK and shone bright in a Salman Khan film (Sultan) which otherwise are restricted to arm candies.

KATRINA KAIF Without knowing a single crow in Bollywood or a single word of Hindi, for that matter, Katrina Kaif carved her way into showbiz and tamed India. Arm candy she is, but one with a midas touch. In fact her item numbers become the USP and marketing strategy of some films. She’s always admitted that she’s not the best actress in town but yet she challenges herself with films like Rajneeti and Phantom. She’s so massy that she’s called the female Salman Khan of Bollywood.

AISHWARYA RAI BACHCHAN Flashback to the ‘90s and the world recognized India with her face. A regular at the prestigious Cannes Film Festival, directors and producers still fighting to sign her on. A power persona without even being present in the media glare all the time, Aish is a megastar in her own dainty ways.

SONAKSHI SINHA SONAM KAPOOR She is synonymous to fashion in India.

She’s the rare breed of Bollywood actress who doesn’t like to mince words at all. Yes, she was always known for her fashion game but Neerja has changed the game for her at the movies. And a social influencer of the highest order (Prem Ratan Dhan Payo dubsmash anyone?)

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She is the quintessential masala heroine of her time and a proud one for that matter. Mind you, like no other! Every pot boiler she signs banks a 100 crore at the box-office. For all those who slammed her for being just another arm candy, bam! she did a Lootera. And she shams body trolls with equal style.

She’s the ‘bindaas’ kinda gal.

LAST WORD

PLEASE HAVE MERCY ON THIS OLD MAN

A

Prof Pradeep K Mathur

sition—who did not like to see him climb the political ladder so ll of us want to live full 100 years. But a longer life fast. As he did favours to journalists demands for more favours span often becomes a liability as in case of Narain grew. Those whose demands could not be met became his deDutt Tewari. A four time chief minister, Union tractors. minister, Governor and someone who closely Keshav Dev Malaviya ,Oil and Petroleum Minister In Prime missed to be the Prime Minister of the country , Minister Nehru’s cabinet had a love male child born out of wedthis veteran leader is leading a life of neglect and lock. The boy grew to be quite a loafer .He will come to ridicule at the ripe old age of 91. For his big contribution in many Malaviyaji’s ministerial bungalow and ask for money. Journalists fields he deserves to be venerated as an elder statesman. But knew this but out of regard for Malaviya record as a freedom luck has willed it otherwise for him. And this is not only his misfighter and for his landmark contribution to India’s energy sefortune. It is a sad commentary on politics of our time. curity no one ever talked about it .However, it was the decade Narain Dutt Tewari’s human weakness for women is well of 1950s. The tone and temper of media changed in the decade known. And nobody how close one feels to him can defend him of 1970s and after , especially after the Emergency . Journalists on this count. But this is not all about him . The problem is that , mostly of language media , were not willing to adhere to self most of the persons who talk about him do not have any idea restraining norms. Tewariji , therefore , has not been so lucky. of his erudition, his scholarship, his academic brilliance and his In his active years Tewariji always kept himself posted with vast contribution to political thought and government adminthe latest advances in technology. I have istration. Not only this he is a highly polseen in him a hunger for knowledge. Workished gentleman whose personal ing as an Associate Professor in The Indian etiquette is worth emulating. Tewariji is Institute of Mass Communication(IIMC), not the only person in the higher echeOur media have done New Delhi, I was assigned in 1990-91 to orlons of power with a stray eye. A lot many quite a bit to denigrate ganise a seminar on autonomy for Govt.people occupying high positions indulge his image. Though he controlled broadcast media in Lucknw. Since in womanising. But their work and contriwas always courteous the Chief Minister was out of town I rebution does not get overshadowed by and respectful to jourquested Tewariji, a former Chief Minister, to this . Tewariji is singularly unfortunate in inaugurate the seminar. His inaugural adthe sense that his entire contribution has nalists, many of them dress surprised us as he quoted from books been forgotten and he is remembered in Lucknow always and papers , which were not available even only for his human weakness. mocked him perhaps in IIMC library, the best in the country on Our media have done quite a bit to because he was too soft. mass communication. denigrate his image. Though he was alUnknown to most of us Tewariji conways courteous and respectful to journaltributed a lot to the computer revolution ists, many of them in Lucknow always which overtook India in Rajiv Gandhi’s tenure. As Union Industry mocked him perhaps because he was too soft. Hardly any jourMinister he worked to ensure that computers and other IT nalist in 1960s or 70s mentioned Tewariji had a brilliant acaequipment are within the reach of common professionals and demic career and was a topper in Allahabad University. But quite do not become a possession only of the rich .As Labour Minister a few journalists spread the stories that in jail senior leaders like in the Centre Tewariji also contributed a lot for the welfare of C.B. Gupta and Mohan Lal Gautam had relations with him. It the working classes by legislative measures which the corporate was said that he was impotent and ……. Nar hai na nari hai world and their political representatives now find difficult to do narain Dutt Tewari hai was a commonly heard couplet. Much away with in order to maximise their profits. was made of his sycophancy of Sanjay Gandhi which was someAt this age and this time Tewari needs no name, fame or pothing essential for survival in the Emergency era. sition . It will be enough if we let him pass his remaining time in All this was as unkind as it was vulgar. But Tewariji never took this world with the care and respect which a man at his age it to heart. He avoided controversy like a civil servant. But unlike needs. a civil servant he had enemies –within his party and the Oppo-

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RNI TITLE CODE : DELENG19447