Cult Current

COVER STORY

#POSITIVE INDIA

UNSUNG HERO

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orn in a farmer’s family in Ahmadnagar, Adhik Kadam decided to visit Kashmir in the late 90s to gauge the situation first hand after interacting with his Kashmiri Pandit and Kashmiri Muslim friends in the university. In a grossly patriarchal society burdened by unemployment, women palpably lead lives as second-class citizens. Therefore, a child who has lost his/her father is considered an orphan. If the widow remarries, the new family often shuns the children from the first marriage.

Adhik Kadam

A Man from Maharashtra is educating the daughters of militants Killed in encounters in Kashmir

After experiencing the tumult in the Valley, Adhik thought it “was a sign for me to do something for the kids in Kashmir.” Cut to November 2016. Adhik is in California, being felicitated for his work in Kashmir. However, the journey has been adventurous, intimidating but extremely gratifying, says Adhik, who eventually founded the Borderless World Foundation (BWF). He decided on the name after witnessing a wedding at a village located along the LOC, where the bride was Indian and the groom from Pakistan Occupied Kashmir. l

3 JANUARY-2017

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 AGRO 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 l Arun Patel l Sandeep Kumar

REPORTING Art

CORRESPONDENT l Jaya Verma, l Sandeep Singh l Anirudha Singh

SPECIAL CORRESPONDENT l Vikas Kumar l Kamlesh Jha l Satish Mukhiya

CHIEFS OF BUREAU (INTERNATIONAL)

Art Editor Anwar-ul- Huque

CHIEFS OF BUREAU (NATIONAL)

l Akul Batra (USA)

l Sanjay Kumar (Lucknow)

l C. Sieuwratan (Netherland)

l Sandeep Kumar (Patna)

l G. Verma (London, UK)

l Vijay K. Pandey (Kolkata)

l Dr. Md. Faheem Akbar (Pakistan)

l Bharat P Yadav (Raipur)

WEB & IT ADMIN Anuj Singh PRODUCTION K KVerma

l A. Asgarzadeh (Iran)

l Kamal Mansoor (Bhopal)

l Dr. Nic Sheri (Malaysia)

l Anirudha Yadav (Guwahati)

l A. Abraham Sharjah (UAE)

l Shatrughna Prasad (Mumbai)

MARKETING GENERAL MANAGER R P Chauhan Manager (Operation) Rajesh Kumar

PHOTOGRAPHER Ravi Singh

CIRCULATION GENERAL MANEGER Uma Shankar Singh EXECUTIVE OFFICER TejendraJha, PriyanshuPandey

EXECUTIVE OFFICER l Om Prakash Dubey

DELENG19447

l Prem Hans Singh

Pre-Launch Issue, January-2017

Editorial/Business office

ADVERTISING ASSOCIATES Sanskritika Communication

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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.

4 JANUARY-2017

DYNAMICS

OIL MARKETS IS

OF

COVER STORY

24

VIRTUAL

LEADERS OF UNCERTAIN TIMES

20

Never End!

THE MAN WHO TOOK CONTROL OF THE FRENCH RIGHT

44

ASIA-PACIFIC REGION MEETING ZERO HUNGER CHALLENGE BY

WORKING FOR CHANGE OR CONSPIRING TO CAPTURE

14

THE ROCKY ROAD TO DEMOCRACY

30

WILL OGP ENSURE GOOD GOVERNANCE IN NEPAL

32

THE COMING WAR ON CHINA

36

FIDEL CASTRO : THE IDEAL THAT WILL NEVER DIE

52

DEMONETISATION MODI SCORES A SELF GOAL !

56

5 JANUARY-2017

CONTENT

18

Putin’s Joke Russia’s Borders

2030

16

Modi N Trump

FROM HERE AND THERE

TALE FOUND FEATHERED DINOSAUR

DIA MIRJA'S LOVE FOR DELHI The former crowned beauty and actor Dia Mirza is often spotted in Delhi. Reason? “My sasural (in-laws) is in Delhi,” she says with a genteel laugh. “The first time I came to Delhi was after I won the title of Miss Asia Pacific (2000) and later when I shot for my debut film RehnaaHai Terre Dil Mein (2001). I even remember meeting the then President of India, K R Narayanan and then, I have been here repeatedly for the promotions of my films,” says Mirza recollecting her several memories in the city.

Though she lives with her husband, Sahil Sangha in Mumbai and spends most of her time there owing to professional commitments, but when it comes to Delhi, she says, “Delhi has clearly more space and there is a certain social experience that this city provides. l

FACEBOOK HAS 166 MILLION USERS IN INDIA

Some 99 million years ago, a juvenile dinosaur got its feathery tail stuck in tree resin, a death trap for the small creature. But its misfortune is now giving scientists unique insight into feathered dinosaurs that prospered during the Cretaceous period. The dinosaur itself was no more than 15 cm long, about the size of a sparrow. l

SANATAN KRIYA CAN HELP KEEP LUNGS STRONG As Delhi is reeling under the pressure of severe pollution and the dip in temperature is creating havoc, you may need some simple techniques from Sanatan Kriya for 10 minutes daily to keep your lungs strong and system toxin free, says spiritual head of Dhyan Ashram Yogi Ashwini. Increase in pollution levels, takes a toll on lungs opening gates for a plethora of problems. One of the effective techniques is Nadi Shodhnam Pranayam a nostril breathing exercise.l

World's biggest social networking website Facebook has revealed that it has 166 million active monthly users in India. The company shared this information through its annual report that detailed how Facebook users used the site, what they read and what they talked. The report showed that Diwali and cricket were really popular topics with Facebook users in India. l

TATA HEXA LAUNCH THIS MONTH It was showcased at the 2016 Delhi Auto Expo. The flagship vehicle from the Indian manufacturer will be offered across 14 trims and can be had with either a six-seater or a sevenseater configuration. It sports all of Tata’s latest design philosophy which can be identified via the grille, head lamps and overall silhouette of the vehicle. The cabin of the Hexa is major update from other Tata models and has been fitted with things like climate control.l

ARIANA GRANDE TO FEATURE IN 'FINAL FANTASY' MOBILE GAME Singer Ariana Grande will be featured in the mobile game 'Final Fantasy: Brave Exvius'. The 23-year-old star announced the news on Instagram by sharing a picture of herself attending a meeting for the project.

"Pretty little thing holds her own in a room of men in suits. I'm SO so excited to finally share that I'll be featured in FINAL FANTASY BRAVE EXVIUS," she captioned the image.l

6 JANUARY-2017

BUZZ & TRIBUTE

SP TYAGI

THEY SAID IT

FORMER AIR CHIEF MARSHALL The Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) arrested former Air Force chief SP Tyagi in the AgustaWestland case.

Investigators have accused the retired Air Marshal of helping AgustaWestland bag the Rs. 3,727 crore chopper contract by tailoring specifications at the instance of his cousins.

VIRAL ACHARYA DEPUTY GOVERNOR, RBI Viral Acharya was appointed by the Government as the deputy governor of the RBI. He will be joining the ranks of Vishwanathan, S SMundra,Acharyacomes from an academic background.

His papers have been published in renowned finance journals. He was the recipient of numerous awards.

Narendra Modi

Angela Merkel Chancellor,

PM, India (31st Dec., 2016)

Germany (6th Dec., 2016)

India has gone through a massive cleansing process a purification drive with demonetisation.

Indians have been desperate to break free of corruption, but were never got a chance to do this earlier.

We will not allow any cherry picking. The four basic freedoms must be safeguarded the freedom of movement for people, goods, services and financial market products. Only then can there be an access to the single market.

TRIBUTE

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n icon of India's Communist upper middle-class family at Calcutta, West movement who could have Bengal. He was born as the third child to been the world's first demoNishikanta Basu and Hemalata Basu. He becratically elected Marxist Prime came the Deputy Chief Minister of West Minister of India; Jyoti Basu was Bengal in 1967 and 1969 in the United a charismatic and powerful political leader.

Front government. In the 1971 assembly By ruling West Bengal for unbroken 23 elections, CPI (M) was the largest party to years, he became the first longest serving win; however, the party refused to form a Chief Minister of any Indian state. He ruled ministry, and hence, the president's party the Left Front government in West Bengal came into power. With the 1972 elections, from 1977 to 2000. He was a politician who Congress came to power again and as held the political scene of India like a colossuch, Basu lost the elections from Baranasus for nearly six decades. He is rememgar Assembly constituency. With a victoriJYOTI BASU bered for establishing the Marxist wing of ous win in 1977 elections, Basu became the July 8, 1914 - January 17, 2010 the Communist Party of India (CPM) in 1964 Chief Minister of the Left Front government and his undying efforts for bringing peace which he held for 23 years, thereby creating to West Bengal after violence caused by Leftists, known as history in Indian politics. After being diagnosed with pneuNaxalites, in the late 1960s and 1970s. It was due to his secmonia, Basu was admitted to Hospital in Kolkata on January ularism that his state escaped religious clashes when the 1, 2010. Over the next 15 days, he suffered multiple organ whole country was undergoing violence between Hindus failure with his condition becoming critical. He died on Janand Muslims. Jyoti Basu was born as Jyotirindra Basu in an uary 17, 2010 at the age of 95.l

7 JANUARY-2017

AROUND THE GLOBE

AFGHANISTAN

DIPLOMACY

AFGHAN RETURNEE GIRLS FACE CHILD MARRIAGE

US LIMITS SUPPORT TO ARAB COALITION'S YEMEN CAMPAIGN

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oung girl of Afghan families returning from Pakistan, who don’t go to school and have no access to education, are increasingly at risk of early marriage and child labour, according to a new survey. The survey released by Save the Children on 2nd week of December reveals an alarming crisis in Afghanistan's eastern Nangarhar province, where the polling took place among returnees from Pakistan. It warns the situation could deteriorate further as more than 3,500 Afghans return from Pakistan on a daily basis, after Islamabad tightened regulations on those living illegally in the country. So far this year, more than 650,000 Afghans-a mix of registered and unregistered refugees-have returned from Pakistan, with the majority planning to stay in Nangarhar, at least until the end of winter.l

MEXICO

MYANMAR-BANGLADESH

MEXICO MARKS DECADE-LONG DRUGS WAR

ROHINGYA REFUGEES FROM TELL OF TRAUMA TALES

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t has been 10 years since Mexico's then-president Felipe Calderon declared war on the country's powerful drug cartels. Calderon had just taken up office in 2006 when he he declared an all-out fight against them. Ten days after taking office, Calderon deployed around 5,000 troops to his western home state of Michoacan - the start of a militarised campaign against drug trafficking. l

O

utside this town by the Bay of Bengal, we kept bumping into fresh arrivals when we visited the camps for Rohingya refugees fleeing a security crackdown in neighbouring Myanmar. Many of them said they were from the village of Kearipara in Myanmar.

From the sounds of it, that village has been utterly devastated.All of them shared similar stories: watching family members get murdered, hiding without eating for days, and having their homes burned down. l

REPORT

IS HAS HIGH GRADE WEAPONS IN IRAQ

I

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he United States has decided to limit military support to Saudi Arabia's campaign in Yemen because of concerns over widespread civilian casualties and will halt a planned arms sale to the kingdom, US sources say. An Obama administration official,

who spoke on condition of anonymity, told news agency that "systemic, endemic" problems in Saudi Arabia's targeting drove the US decision to halt a future weapons sale involving precision-guided munitions. "We've decided not to move forward with some foreign military sales cases for air-dropped munitions, PGMs " the official said.l

SIL has produced weapons on a scale and sophistication that matches national armies, standardising production across its self-styled caliphate, according to an arms monitoring group. The UK-based Conflict Armament Research (CAR) said the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) had a "robust supply chain" of raw materials from Turkey, and the technical precision of its work meant it could not be described as "improvised" weapons production. "Although production facilities employ a range of nonstandard materials and chemical explosive precursors, the degree of organisation, quality control, and inventory management indicates a complex, centrally controlled industrial production system," it said in a report.l

8 JANUARY-2017

INITIATIVE

RELIGION

FRANCE

BRAZIL SENATE APPROVES TOUGH AUSTERITY MEASURES

RUSSIA'S COMMUNISTS TURN TO ORTHODOX CHURCH

HOLLANDE WARNS AGAINST ULTRA NATIONALISM

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razilians have been on the streets protesting after the Senate approved a 20-year freeze on government spending that a UN official described as a "historic mistake". The upper house voted 53 to 16 on 13th December to lock in the spending ceiling. Centre-right President Michel Temer says tough measures are needed to get Brazil's finances back under control, but his austerity policies have drawn criticism & prompted violent protests. Opponents say the austerity measures, which will affect spending on education and social programmes, are an attack on the poor in a country.l

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esus Christ was the world's first Communist, Tamara Lavrischeva announced cheerfully. "Jesus said, 'Don't collect earthly wealth, you won't take it with you after death,'" the 78-year-old pensioner and Orthodox Christian told as she trudged through the snow-covered streets of central Moscow with thousands of other Communists during the November 7 rally that commemorated the almost-centennial anniversary of the 1917 Bolshevik revolution. "And Communists thought the same," she added, her voice drowned by the crowd chanting Soviet-era songs under red banners with hammers and sickles and portraits of Soviet leaders Vladimir Lenin and Joseph Stalin.

With a dismissive shrug and a condescending smile, Lavrischeva rejected the killings, imprisonment and persecution of millions of Orthodox Christian clerics and believers at the hand of Communists. What she said was not just an opinion of an elderly woman who wants to reconcile her faith with the ideals of her youth in the officially atheist USSR. Her selective amnesia about the persecution of believers - well-documented and brandished by Soviet authorities - reflects a seemingly paradoxical trend in the recent policies of Russia's Communist Party. l

FREEDOM OF PRESS

259 JOURNALISTS JAILED LAST YEAR

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French President Francois Hollande warned against the risks of nationalism in his last New Year address ahead of the election of his successor next spring.Hollande, who said this month he would not seek a second term in 2017, defended his legacy as president and addressed the policies of the anti-immigration and antieuro National Front, whose leader Marine Le Pen is set to make it to the second round of the election, if recent polls are correct.“There are periods in history when everything may change dramatically. We’re in one of them,” Hollande said.l

ore journalists have been jailed this year by governments around the world than at any time in nearly three decades, according to a media rights watchdog. The report by the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ), a nonprofit group that works to defend press freedoms, says a total of 259 journalists have been jailed in 2016, compared with 199 at the same time last year. That is the highest number since the group began keeping detailed records in 1990. The numbers do not include journalists who have disappeared or are held captive by non-state groups. After Turkey and China, Egypt, with 25 journalists incarcerated, is listed in third place by the report - the CPJ's annual census of imprisoned journalists.

This year marked the first time since 2008 that Iran was not among the top five worst offenders. Accroding to report many of those sentenced in a post-election crackdown in 2009 have served their sentences and been released. The CPJ says that at least 81 journalists were imprisoned in Turkey as of December 1. A state of emergency is still in force in Turkey following a July 15 coup attempt, with a resulting government action against alleged coup sympathisers landing thousands in jail and forcing tens of thousands of people from their jobs. l

9 JANUARY-2017

ACROSS THE INDIA

FOR IMAGE BUILDING EXERCISE

DISPUTE

MOVE TO HIRE JOURNALISTS FLAYED

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he Andhra Pradesh government’s decision to outsource the public relations for chief minister N. Chandrababu Naidu’s office to journalists has drawn flak from various quarters. Media practitioners and democratic activists have said that at a time when the curse of paid news is haunting the independence of the media, the state government’s move legitimises bribing journalists for favourable reporting. Following the recommendations of the state’s information and public relations department, the Andhra Pradesh government agreed to hire 25 journalists on December 7 on a one-year contract “to carry out the publicity and other works as back office of hon’ble chief minister’s office”. The government order also mentioned that each journalist would be paid a monthly salary of Rs 51,468 and would cost the exchequer Rs 12,86,700 per month. While the names of the journalists have not been disclosed yet, media watchers see this as a clear case of poaching by the government, which has been continuously trying to attract journalists with monetary and non-monetary perks. l

DEMONETISATION

CHHATTISGARH

WRECKED THE AGRARIAN ECONOMY IN BUNDELKHAND

NAXAL-BASHING BALLIES BY SALWA JUDUM LEADERS

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n Bundelkhand, one of the poorest regions in India, farmers are deprived of cash, seeds, fertilisers and diesel for the sowing season.

Farmers are suffering and are pushed back into a debt cycle while groups not as affected by the cash crunch are saying that demonetisation will be for the greater good of the nation.The new monetary policy has crippled the rural agrarian economy across India, and has hit the poor and working class the most.l

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bizarre brand of orchestrated public protest has been playing out in urban areas in the conflict-torn Bastar region in Chhattisgarh in recent months.

Children as young as ten are being made to miss school to swell the numbers at lurid orgies of Naxalbashing with macho names like ‘Lalkar rally’ and ‘Dhikkar rally’, which come packaged with risqué commentary by DJs, selfie-taking sessions and vast amounts of food to draw crowds. These rallies would have been just peculiar, rather than sinister, had it not been for the fact that they are led by the leaders of the Salwa Judum. l

DECISION

T

INDIA, PAKISTAN BITTER ON INDUS TREATY RESOLUTION

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n December 12, 2016 the World Bank was due to announce the appointment of both a neutral expert and the chairman of a court of arbitration to resolve the outstanding disputes over the design features of the Kishanganga and Ratle hydropower dams located in the Indian state of Jammu and Kashmir. Instead,

the president of the World Bank, in letters to the finance ministers of both India and Pakistan, announced a pause to the two processes. The president of the World Bank, Jim Yong Kim, stated, “This is an opportunity for the two countries to begin to resolve the issue in an amicable manner and in line with the spirit of the treaty rather than pursuing concurrent processes that could make the treaty unworkable over time. l

he BJP government in Assam has decided to bring out its own population policy early next year. Among other things, the policy plans to deny jobs to those who have more than two children. Though according to the state government, the decision has been taken keeping in mind “Assam’s unique social, economic, ethnic and geographical diversity”, senior commentators and political experts in the state have termed it a policy aimed at mainly addressing the rising population of the Bengali-speaking Muslim migrants residing in the chars or sand bars. “The proposed policy is obviously meant to target people in the whole of Assam.l

ASSAM TO GET ITS OWN POPULATION POLICY

10 JANUARY-2017

ABILITY TO LEND

PRIME MINISTER'S CONSTITUENCY

AIADMK

RECAPITALISATION AN OPPORTUNITY FOR BANKS

ALARMING RISE IN AIR POLLUTION IN VARANASI

CHINNAMMA'S DAY OUT IN NEW ROLE

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espite the crisis in several parts of India following demonetisation, which sucked out 86% of the currency in circulation overnight, one of its obvious outcomes is the recapitalisation of banks. Last week, the Reserve Bank of India announced that old Rs 500 and Rs 1,000 notes worth almost Rs 11.85 lakh crores had been deposited into banks since November 8, when the demonetisation policy was announced.

Last month, Finance Minister Arun Jaitley said the inflow of funds into banks had strengthened their ability to lend. Jaitley was quoted in the media as saying: “Suddenly the banks are now flush with funds coming into the banking system and these are low-cost funds. l

E

ver since Varanasi became Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s constituency, it has been claiming more space in the national media besides being frequented by various union ministers on an almost weekly basis. However, certain critical issues of the temple city have remained unresolved; for instance, the alarmingly rising level of pollution in its air. According to the November 2016 World Health Organisation data, PM2.5 levels have been at more than 20 times the WHO’s limit in Varanasi.

According to a post-Diwali study conducted by the Whistleblower Trust, a citizens’ organisation that runs a state-wide campaign called Care4Air, air quality data collected from 13 major locations of the city on October 31 showed that “PM 2.5 particles rose much above even the alarming levels, and in certain parts of the city like Sonarpura, Machhodari, Lanka, Godauliya and Sarnath, the levels were 15 to 20 times above the norms set by the government of India.” In a press meet, members of the trust said, “The Centre has set a standard of 60 micrograms per cubic metre (mpcm), but in the Sonarpura area the PM 2.5 reached as high as 999 mpcm.” Central Pollution Control Board data, released in 2015, ranked the air of Varanasi as one of the most toxic in the country. Keeping the alarming data in mind, prominent members of various political parties came together at an event organised by the trust along with other concerned citizens in Varanasi on December 9. l

DEBATE ON PATRIOTISM

FROM REALM OF POLITICS TO JUDICIAL DICTATE

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Sasikala, the backroom operator who was always at Jayalalithaa's side for three decades, stepped out into the open today, taking charge as AIADMK general secretary and delivering her first public speech on last day of 2016. "I shall follow in the footsteps of Amma without wavering an inch," she said in an emotional speech at the party headquarters. Sasikala appeared confident and made all the right signals. She wiped the tears streaming down her cheeks, waved her forefinger to make a point, and made the required eye contact with the party officials seated in the hall.l

his was perhaps not the first time that the battleground for nationalism and patriotism was redefined when the ‘national anthem’ sought a hearing from the Supreme Court. In one stroke, the debate was moved from the realm of politics to the realm of highest judicial dictate, leaving no further ground for differing minds or competing conceptions. That the legitimacy of the Supreme Court remains fallible, not least because of increasing individuality of specific judges on the bench, has been deplored, and perhaps rightly so. While the meaning of the law ought best to distance itself from sentiments and moral indignation, it would be wrong to suggest that a purely positivist conception of the law is per se desirable. Pure positivism, devoid of political philosophy and a socio-economic construct, will remain myopic, distant and feckless. As the court displays a near judicial bankruptcy of reasoning, it is extremely difficult to position one’s response to the court’s invocation of “national identity, national integrity and Constitutional Patriotism” as either an exposition of pure sentiment or political philosophy. Arguably it is both and has inflicted yet another blow to the court’s standing and authority. l

11 JANUARY-2017

FROM THE EDITOR'S DESK

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s democracy the best option for the betterment of the world as we have always believed ?The West European countries and the United States consider democracy as a solution to solve all political conflicts even though they know the complex political situation in many countries in the Middle East and the Arab world which has been defying a solution since the end of the second world war. The question is – do Western democracies believe in “the cult’ that is called democracy in total disregard to the geo-political situation in these small countries which are engrossed in wasteful conflicts..

American jurist Louis de Brande says, "in a country they can have either democracy or concentration of great nth in the hands of a few, but both cannot coexist." In other words it is impossible to keep up with democracy as well as economic inequality because later gradually destroys the former or distorts it. Louis Brande's statement applies to the entire world, therefore, it is natural to ask if such democracy is really required outside the Western world ?

DEMOCRACY REAL OR FLAWED? In India the number of billionaires has increased dramatically after economic liberalization but for the overwhelming majority of the population the real change is negligible.

In the western world democracy implies freedom and human rights. However, democracy is not possible without strong sociopolitical institutions. When we assume that personal freedom and human rights come with democracy, then we ignore an important fact that democracy, individual freedom and human rights are three different things. It is possible that in certain circumstances all three sustained.

In Russia democracy was applied without protecting human rights.

In the 19th century in Britain the human rights were ensured before accepting something like democracy? Today in in Egypt, parties such as the Muslim Brotherhood stand in the elections to end the dissent and impose specific lifestyles which are generally not acceptable by majority. In such a situation, democracy threatens human rights rather than protecting these.

In India the number of billionaires has increased dramatically after economic liberalization but for the overwhelming majority of the population the real change is negligible. The World property report issued by Susie Research Institute says that in India overall wealth is growing rapidly but this development is not inclusive hence poverty is still a major problem .In fact at present rapidly growing economic inequalities make democracy very vulnerable.

12 JANUARY-2017

Some time ago in New York, a report was issued by an American think tank Demos in the name 'stacked the deck'. The report highlights the fact that the way politics is being dominated by the rich and the capitalists. The report drew attention to the fact that how the bourgeois and entrepreneurial power by the larger political donations have created a new kind of alliance. That makes political equality or inclusion of the concept of democracy weak.

India's Constitution ensures each citizen's participation in its democracy. Its Preamble says : “We the people of India - having solemnly resolved to constitute India into a sovereign socialist secular democratic republic and to secure to all its citizens: justice, social, economic and political; liberty of thought, expression, belief, faith and worship... . "We the people of India" has been rooted in it, but it is only the formal side.

The truth is different because of the fact that the real power of democracy lies in that system which, in democracy index, is only around 50 per cent.

The Economist Intelligence Democracy report t says that only 15 percent countries are able to adopt full democracy or only 11.3 per cent of the total population of the world is closer to real democracy, the rest is either under defective democracy or under the rule of different systems.

At this point it has been noted that those countries score 8 to 10 on democracy index are considered as full democracies. Those scoring less are in fact not a real democracy, but a flawed democracy.India's score since 2006 so far is in between 7 to 8. This means that democracy in India is flawed, not full democracy.

Despite being the largest and a stable democracy India is facing many difficulties and challenges and is still not in position to resolve its various problems. Economist Kristia Freeland in his book Plutokrets: The Rise of the New Global Super-Rich says “ what in the nineteenth century was considered as golden era for USA is since the 1990s occurring in India . But to Kristia , William Fasej says that to make it a golden era an entire race of America was finished. Let us hope India’s poor teeming missions do not suffer this fate. l

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

srirajesh.journalist

@srirajesh

editor@cultcurrent.com

13 JANUARY-2017

Dhirendra Nath Srivastava Coordinating Editor

Why

Cult Current?

Cult Current is being brought and to proved high-quality journalism to readers around the globe. It provides indepth analysis, news and opinion about nationalinternational issues, business, culture and politics.

Cult Current provides readers with a composite unbiased picture of the world around us. It has ensured that there is something for everybody. We are irreverent in the good old tradition of independent journalism, curious, and questioning. We don’t believe in giving clean chits to governments. Although some governments and the ruling establishment are far better than us, but we do make a serious effort to inform you of the news on the ground, the reality of the poor, marginalized India and of policies that impact our masses.

We bring you information and news on gender, daily with Queer rights as important to us as women's empowerment. We work hard to ensure that the underprivileged, victimized, harassed sections of society find a voice through Cult Current, and that injustice is not buried but spoken of loudly.l

SECRET CORNER

WORKING FOR CHANGE OR

CONSPIRING TO CAPTURE BY : Onyekachi Wambu

We have all been in those discussions. Africans gathered around having lively, angry but strangely reassuring exchanges about the world. During the conversation an excellent analysis emerges about the problems confronting Africans in the world, and the impossibility of progress because of the different groups of powerful people who conspire in modern “secret societies� to control the world and its resources.

14 JANUARY-2017

I

f the group of discussants are African intellectuals the analysis has a surface sophistication, and is given an added historical context and theoretical underpinnings, whether Marxist, anti-imperialist or post-modernist. If the discussants are barbershop non-intellectuals, the analysis is more esoteric, involving cabals of “illuminati” or Babylonian Masonic lodges based in Western capitals such as Washington, London or Tel Aviv. Whether Marxist colonial ruling elite or illuminati shape-shifters, these cabals always have ultimate control of our lives. Such total control even becomes reassuring to the discussants, the reassurance lying in the belief that in the face of the complete power and efficacy of whichever conspiracy theory is being discussed, our helplessness and powerless is guaranteed. There is nothing we can do except pray to God for a change in our fortunes. This familiar African trope needs urgent disrupting. A simple way to disrupt it is to remind the discussants that any two or more people gathered together discussing a plan of action, are de facto a conspiracy. The important question is why few other people, including ourselves, are concerned about the conspiracies that Africans hatch when two or more of us gather together? Is it because others know that rather than gather in our secret societies to discuss implementation of our action plans for cornering the world gold market or ensuring control of oil and other resources we own, all we do is expend our energy, marvelling at and analysing the plans of those who conquered, enslaved and colonised us?

Why this lack of confidence and belief in the agency of even our own conspiracy theorising? Is it ultimately connected to the same lack of belief and confidence that pervades so much of our societies – everything from our spiritual beliefs, to our political, legal and financial systems?

The important question is why few other people, including ourselves, are concerned about the conspiracies that Africans hatch when two or more of us gather together?

The novelist V.S. Naipaul used to refer to post-colonial societies as “halfbaked”. Many of us in the 70s and 80s took umbrage at this characterisation of our societies, but increasingly the point the dour and angry Trinidadian was making is becoming clearer. A “half-baked” society is one with severe self-esteem, confidence and agency issues. Its realities (dreams and nightmares, even conspiracy theories) lie elsewhere, amongst those oppressors it embraces and simultaneously, angrily lashes out at for their oppression. It idealises things its does not produce, whether cars or phones. It has little confidence in its economy or currency, its elites frequently outsource the country’s capital to foreign banks where ‘real’ economies exist. And worst of all in such societies is the attitude to the citizenry, where opinions are frequently disregarded, given the way elections are conducted, with violence and rigging; and the laws and legal systems that emerge from such poorly contested elections are treated with equal disdain given corruption’s prevalence. A conspiracy takes place where two or more are gathered.

Families are conspiracies of a kind, as are villages, towns, cities, countries, even businesses. Some conspiracies are more successful than others because the conspirators take themselves seriously, focusing on delivering their action plans. A business like Google, with a worldwide staff of just under 50,000, has now overtaken Apple as the largest US company, with a market capitalisation in May 2016 of $547bn.

The founders of Google would have begun as a small conspiracy. Its current success is linked to it being a well-run business, able to mobilise, socialise and inspire its staff around a set of goals/targets and to deliver on them. Meanwhile, Nigeria, with a population of 170 million, is Africa’s largest economy with a GDP of $515bn in 2015, smaller than Google’s market cap. This suggests that Nigerians and other Africans need to focus less on Google’s conspiracy, and more on their own action plan, if indeed they have one. l (Onyekachi was educated at the University of Essex and completed his M.Phil in International Relations at Selwyn College, Cambridge.)

15 JANUARY-2017

OIL MARKET

DYNAMICS

OIL MARKETS IS

OF

VIRTUAL BY : Leonid Bershidsky

It’s hard to blame Russia for using its propaganda machine to help build a post-fact world when its economy depends on a post-fact market — the oil one. The market’s reaction to news from the Organisation of Petroleum Exporting Countries (Opec) highlights its spurious mechanics.

A

ccording to a report that Russia as a country made $6 billion (Dh22 billion) just by talking to Opec about cutting its oil output: News about the negotiations drove up the price. Now, Russia has agreed to a cut by 300,000 barrels per day by January “if technically possible”. It looks like a lot — a quarter of the total cut Opec members have agreed among themselves — but then Russia’s output increased by 520,000 barrels a day between the end of August and the end of October, reaching an absolute record level.

Russia has been making money on the increasing price while growing production — the best of both worlds thanks to some deft news manipulation and nothing else. Now, even if Russia cuts output by about 2.7 per cent of the current level, as it has promised, it will still reap a profit if the price of crude holds at the current level — about 7 per cent higher on December 1, 2016 than three days before.

That kind of gain is not commensurate with the real-world effect the production cut will have on oil inventories. As Bloomberg Gadfly’s Liam Denning calculated, by the end of the third quarter of 2017, Opec members’ full compliance with the November 30 deal can cut developed nations’ stock of crude to 56 days of forward demand from the current 65 days. From a practical point of view, this means nothing at all: The world’s strongest economies will still have about two months’ supply of crude in reserve. To speculators, however, that’s a huge drop and an obvious trade. If the current price doesn’t stick, Russia and the Opec countries simply won’t make the promised cuts. There’s no mechanism within Opec, and certainly none in the case of an outsider like Russia, to punish non-compliance. Saudi Arabia used to operate an ad hoc mechanism, raising its own production to punish smaller rivals with lower prices, but the kingdom can’t do that effectively today without losing market share to Russia and the resurgent Iran. It’s because of the non-binding nature of the deal that the Saudis have, after a lot of hand-wringing, agreed to allow arch-

16 JANUARY-2017

rival Iran to increase rather than cut output. For Opec and Russia, it’s a matter of finding a balance between the real-life cuts necessary to maintain market faith in a supply reduction and the price effect these cuts continue to have. If the effect is smaller than needed, the oil producers will make up for it by pumping more oil, as they have always done in the past: No Opec output-cutting deal has ever been followed to the letter.

They can always talk about cuts again in a few months: A price bounce is guaranteed. In contrast to ordinary people who eventually catch on to being fast-talked, oil traders don’t care as long as they have a story to trade on. This is the ultimate fake news market — it’s even more lucrative than the political one, where voters’ reactions aren’t as predictably knee-jerk. The Saudis and the Russians are masters of this game: The regimes, more than anyone else in the world, depend on being good at it. Problems begin when the US fracking industry, which consists of numerous non-state players, tries to ride on the big tricksters’ coattails. When the frackers see prices go up, they start making optimistic plans and ratcheting up production. As soon as they achieve a significant increase, this gets reported, becomes a tradable story, prices go down and the state actors increase their output so they can still balance their budgets. The frackers’ projections prove false, hedging becomes costlier, creditors and investors abandon them and they end up extracting less oil.

US crude output is now about 1 million barrels per day below the historic maximum achieved in June, 2015. Without any loudly announced deal, it has dropped by about as much as Opec now promises to take off the market by early next year. What undercut it was the disconnect between the reality of extracting and selling physical oil and the virtual market that sets the prices. In that virtual market, state actors are the more confident players — like poker pros with bigger stacks of chips and serious skin in the game. They can bluff successfully, and they can take some pain when necessary. The frackers are minnows at the big table — which doesn’t mean they can’t benefit in a small way from the state players’ largesse. In the last month, US crude production has gone up by about 200,000 barrels a day. If it goes up much higher, though, and begins to affect prices, the frackers will find themselves on the receiving end of Opec and Russian punishment again as state actors try to make up for falling prices with more production. Those who believe a deal has been made should also admit to believing every bit of nonsense Macedonian fabricators passed off as news during the US election campaign. l

17 JANUARY-2017

Russia has been making money on the increasing price while growing production — the best of both worlds thanks to some deft news manipulation and nothing else.

FAR PAVILION

“The history of Russia is the story of a country that colonizes. The sphere of its colonization expands along with the territory it governs.

Falling or rising, it is a centuries-long movement that continues to this day.�

18 JANUARY-2017

Putin’s Joke Russia’s Borders

Never End! BY : Pavel Aptekar and Andrei Sinitsyn

Every joke contains a kernel of truth — especially if President Vladimir Putin is telling it. At a recent awards ceremony of the Russian Geographical Society, Putin asked a 9-year-old boy if he knew where Russia’s borders end. The boy began saying something about the Bering Strait when Putin made the grandiose reply that “Russia’s borders never end!” True, he immediately added: “That is a joke.”

I

t is difficult to view such a comment as only a joke, however, because he uttered it at the prestigious Russian Geographical Society and those words are consistent with the Kremlin’s current geopolitics and, in general, are a variation of other, seemingly graver remarks Putin has made.

For example, he said that the Soviet Union “was the selfsame Russia, only with a different name,” and once promised to help Russian-speaking populations in other countries — a pledge he once made good on with the use of military force.

According to culture scholar Daniil Dondurey, Putin’s remark about Russia’s limitless borders indicates that his thinking is a throwback to the last century when states measured their greatness and wealth and leaders gauged their wisdom according to the size of their territories and the power of their weapons.

It turns out that the National Leader views Russia as a timeless empire with mutable borders subject to the influence of demographic, military, and political factors. “The history of Russia is the story of a country that colonizes. The sphere of its colonization expands along with the territory it governs.

Falling or rising, it is a centuries-long movement that continues to this day.” So wrote late 19th and early 20th-century historian Vasily Klyuchevsky. Would he have said it any differently if he were alive today? The era of colonial conquest is a thing of the past, but today’s rulers — and a significant part of the Russian population — continue to derive a great deal of satisfaction from superpower swagger and territorial expansionism.

This indicates certain priorities in terms of how the state is structured. Whereas Putin previously liked to cite the ideas of Alexander Solzhenitsyn, particularly with regard to saving the people by ensuring a decent standard of living, quality health care, and education, it seems that, now that he has failed to achieve those goals, he is placing his bets on imperial visions.

The Kremlin has taken to convincing the population that Russia is the center of wholesome and true values, that the “Russian world” is unlimited, and that it requires the acquisition of new territories. l

19 JANUARY-2017

DEFENDER

THE MAN WHO TOOK CONTROL OF THE FRENCH RIGHT BY : Khatya CHHOR

20 JANUARY-2017

Former premier François Fillon won the conservative primary to become Les Républicains’ candidate for the 2017 presidential election. A social conservative and a proponent of the free market, he is known as “France’s Margaret Thatcher”.

FRANÇOIS FILLON

F

rançois Fillon's victory means he will likely face off with National Front leader Marine Le Pen and a Socialist candidate for the presidency next year. Polls suggest that Fillon and Le Pen will go through to a second round but predict an eventual win for Les Républicains. (Socialist President François Hollande has said he will not seek re-election after watching his approval rate sink to the low single digits.)

Fillon was born on March 4, 1954, in Le Mans in northwestern France to a notary father and a historian mother of Basque descent. He began his public career in 1981, when at the age of 27 he became the youngest member of parliament and then mayor of Sablé-sur-Sarthe in 1983.

He later served nationally as minister of higher education (1993-1995), minister of technology (1995) and telecommunications minister (19951997). In his role as labour minister between 2002 and 2004 Fillon launched several contentious reforms, including making the 35-hour workweek more flexible and raising the retirement age – two proposals that he is seeking to revisit as president.

After returning to the post of higher education minister in 2004, he became known for a controversial reform of the education system (the “Fillon Law”) that introduced a core curriculum for certain

21 JANUARY-2017

subjects – including French, mathematics, foreign languages, humanities, science and communications – but which excluded the arts.

In 2007, then president Nicolas Sarkozy asked Fillon to serve as his prime minister, a post he occupied until Sarkozy lost to Hollande in 2012.

A social conservative and a Catholic, Fillon was once the candidate of choice for France’s “Manif Pour Tous” movement opposing gay marriage because he shared many of their views. Although he has said he will not seek to overturn the 2012 law legalising same-sex marriage, he wants to restrict gay couples from adopting children unless the child maintains some links with the birth family (known in France as l’adoption simple).

But Fillon, 62, is not your typical conservative. A lifelong racing enthusiast as befits a man who grew up in Le Mans – home of the 24-hour race of the same name – Fillon once appeared on the “Top Gear” TV programme.

And while he is personally opposed to abortion, he rejects any suggestion that he might seek to overturn the 1975 law legalising the procedure.

Fillon lives in a 12th-century castle near his hometown with his Welsh-born wife, Penelope Clarke, and their five children. l

Courtesy:dw.com

POPULIST AND EXTREMIST

Legitimization or Confrontation

Controversy Over Debate with

Right-Wing Activist The question whether right wing populists and extremists should be confronted in public debates or shunned has come up yet again in Germany.

22 JANUARY-2017

A

German theater caused a scandal just by announcing the line-up for an event on the Surge of Right-wing movements across Europe, shortly before it was cancelled after a public outcry against one of the invited guests. For a debate on the surge across Europe, the theater of Magdeburg had invited not just Saxony-Anhalt's minister of the interior, Holger Stahlknecht, but also Götz Kubitschek. As the owner of a small right-wing publishing house and head of a far-right think tank, he is one of the central intellectual figures of Germany's New Right, an ultra-right nationalist conservative movement. The event would have marked the first time a "mainstream" German politician would have shared the stage with Kubitschek, who has close ties to both the populist AFD party and the the anti-democratic, white nationalist Identitarian movement.

Sharing the stage with an extremist The tax-funded public theater of Magdeburg received criticism for giving Kubitschek a platform as did Stahlknecht, a member of the moderate conservative CDU. The minister initially defended himself, saying that his intention was to face people like Kubitschek head-on. "I don't want to shy away from a debate," he argued. "My intention is not to help Kubitschek's cause, I just want to use the opportunity to directly confront him, to negate his political views and show that they are a danger to our democratic society."

Less than a day after the event was announced, the state chancellory cancelled Stahlknecht's participation in the event. A spokesperson said that a theater would not be the right place for this type of debate. The theater in turn cancelled the event, saying that a balance of opinion could no longer be assured without the minister's participation.

The fear of radicalization With the rise of the anti-Islam Pegida movement and the populist AfD in Germany, many experts and left-wing activists have been worried about a shift to the right. Kubitschek is part of the German-right-wing media industry.

While outlets, like the magazine Compact and the blog Politically Incorrect News, agitate their readers with broad anti-Islam and nationalist headlines like "An Islamist in the living room – wake up Germany!" or "Who's making money with the asylum junk in Saxony", Kubitschek's pub-

lishing house, think tank and blog display a more intellectual, subdued tone, aimed at conservative elites.

A wolf in sheep's clothing?

Sociologist Dennis Eversberg from the University of Jena says that the rate of people in Germany who hold racist and extremist sentiments has not grown significantly in the past few years. But the AfD party and the anti-Islam Pegida movement have provided outlets for many people, since they are perceived as less extreme than prefvious neo-Nazi organizations, like the NDP (National Democratic Party).

Eversberg is worried that views that were once seen as too extreme are increasingly perceived as acceptable standpoints. "Giving someone like Kubitschek a platform at this point is extremely dangerous, because it legitimizes him," he says. "The only way to fight the surge of the far-right is to ostracize them and to argue against their views, not with them."

Simone Rafael is the editor in chief of netz-gegen-nazis.de, an online platform against right-wing extremism. Like Eversberg, she believes that inviting Kubitschek to a public debate sends the wrong message. "We have to ask ourselves: If we seek out the dialogue with ring-wing extremists, what message does that send to people who are threatened by that ideology?"

Not the first controversy This is not the first time a scandal has erupted in Germany over the inclusion of right wing activists in a debate. This summer, a school in Rostock caused a stir when two politicians from the AfD and the NPD were invited to an event as part of a class on right-wing extremism. Both politicians had previously been criminally convicted, one for hate speech, one for demagoguery.

In January of this year, the Greens and SPD threatened to boycott TV debates if the AfD was included ahead of six state elections – with success. The premier of Germany's most populous state, North Rhine-Westphalia, Hannelore Kraft, also said that she would not visit TV panels with AfDpoliticians.

Christian Lindner, head of the Free Democrats (FDP), in turn called Kraft's statements undemocratic. He argued that the AfD should be included in public debates because the party lacked substance, so that one should "give them as much room as possible to embarrass themselves."l

23 JANUARY-2017

COVER STORY

Prof Pradeep K Mathur

T

he ascendency of Donald Trump on the seat of power in the White House has been as unexpected as that of Narendra Modi in South Block two-and –a-half years ago.

Till the time election results were out nobody really believed that they will be voted to the seat of power. Both of them were dismissed by political analysts as unfit for the job they were seeking .

None of them was recognised as a national leader and none had served in the government at the national capital. More over neither of the two had a distinguished academic record nor a name as a renowned professional. Trump no doubt made money as a real estate entrepreneur but had no achievement as a public man. Narendra Modi was basically a RSS volunteer hardly known for any political acumen till he was chosen by Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee as chief minister of Gujarat as a gesture to RSS bosses.

The big question is that why political analysts --students of political science, editors and political correspondents, media researchers , mass communication experts and various stakeholders of democratic polity -- failed to see the writing on the wall. Why were they so oblivious of the mass mood and could not read voter psyche ?

Two factors are basically responsible for the failure of the political class to foresee the coming to power of first Narendra Modi and then Donald

Modi N

LEADERS OF UN 24 JANUARY-2017

COVER STORY

Trump -- the two leaders of two most important countries in the world .These are the inability of the political class to change its mental framework of understanding of socio-political process and the change in mass psyche and mass perception which is difficult to see from outside. Let us take the second factor first. Popular dissatisfaction of the masses against the government of the day has traditionally been expressed in terms of workers’ rallies, mass agitations, strikes, labour unrest and labour disputes. All these things cause financial loss and inconvenience to the working class. Therefore, they no longer take recourse to these measures and express their anger at the dustings. Poor voters in India and the United States were most certainly not happy with the Congress or Democratic governments something they did not reveal during the tenure of the two governments.

The other factor pertains to the inability of the political class to change its mental outlook. Traditionally they have viewed society into compartments – lower, lower-middle, middle class , upper middle and upper class on the economic scale and Swavarna, OBC, Dalits and Minorities on social scale in India and Whites, mixed, blacks and Hispanics in the United States. Not only this the social attitudes , psychological disposition and aspirations too have been bracketed with their social or economic class. Clearly this stratification does not hold good anymore.

Trump

NCERTAIN TIMES 25 JANUARY-2017

COVER STORY

Any pre-poll analysis of voter behaviour with outmoded tools of analysis was destined to go wrong. Little wonder we found ourselves wide off the mark both in case of Modi and Trump.

Any pre-poll analysis of voter behaviour with outmoded tools of analysis was destined to go wrong. Little wonder we found ourselves wide off the mark both in case of Modi and Trump. Moreover there is little hope of any accurate understanding of voter behaviour in future too if the tools of analysis remain the same.

The fact is that both Indian as well as American societies are in a state of flux of course for different reasons. Indian society is passing through a painful and partly forced transition from a traditional society to a modern society . The feudal values are making a reluctant way to the values of a capitalist society where knowing the art of money making is more important than inherited social status. While old ideological framework is crumbling the new one is still not in place. In a climate of uncertain social norms studying voter behaviour is certainly tough.

The American society has a different psychological crisis.

Having lived in the grandeur of a unipolar world since the fall of the Soviet Union about three decades ago it is now realising that the world has become not only bi-polar but multi-polar.Besides China and India economies of many countries are on the upswing, Brics has emerged as a counterweight to the UScontrolled IMF as a funding source for international development. Russia, despite its poor economy , is emerging as a major military power which can defy American dictate – something which was hardly done by any country in the last three decades. Certainly the American dream is in doldrums .

Little wonder average American voter is a disillusioned guy.

But why the time tested tools of analysis failed our political class ? The reason is not difficult to find. Riding on the shoulders of media, new technology and new economy has made a nonsense of our understanding of social order as we are accustomed to see it. While high salaries in professions like IT and retail has disrupted the link between money, social status and seat of authority, internet has disrobed the class of scholars and academicians of the respect as well as the influence they exercised on the

26 JANUARY-2017

people who matter. In a way it is free for all in societies which have been governed by rule of law and social conventions. For quite some time we have been accepting it in the name of liberalism, new knowledge and democracy. However, we were safe in the belief that the emerging reality will not impact our super-structure.

Both Modi and Trump are products of this phenomenon. They are asking questions against the established beliefs and settled issues without the right intellectual capability to do so. Trump talks of building a boundary wall to stop illegal immigration from Latin America while Modi questions Article 370 of Indian Constitution giving Jammu and Kashmir a special status while his camp followers praise Nathuram Godse, killer of Mahatma Gandhi and wants those who have lived in India for 800 years to leave the country.

Such tendencies have been in both Indian and American societies for quite some time. But these were considered as an aberration. Now this aberration seems of have become a majority view . The political class cannot be blamed if it did not believe that such irrational views will ever get majority support . But this is the political reality which has emerged out of Modi and Trump victories.

The American society has a different psychological crisis. Having lived in the grandeur of a unipolar world since the fall of the Soviet Union about three decades ago it is now realising that the world has become not only bi-polar but multi-polar.

But why the electoral mass is behaving in this manner in what we believe to be knowledge society ? Perhaps in their impatience to become big and rich the average man in the street views established institutions and those controlling these as the biggest hurdle. Anybody attacking these becomes a rallying point for them. In India’s parliamentary elections in 2014 three forces were mainly responsible for the unprecedented victory of Narendra Modi. These were : a. forces of extreme right-wing Hindu communalism called Hindutva b. forces of crony capitalism who wanted an unbridled right to make money c. professionally untrained and semi-qualified young men and women who wanted a good and glamorous life without the ability to earn to afford such life style. All the three forces have been on the

27 JANUARY-2017

COVER STORY

28 JANUARY-2017

Since the American civil war no U.S. statesman of any consequence had spoken against any section of America’s multi-racial society as openly as Trump spoke against Muslims. fringe of socio-economic life before 2014 elections.

BJP’s constantly aggressive propaganda against Dr Manmohan Singh’s Congress government and the inability of his government and party leaders to adequately defend itself gave strength to these forces and they became strong enough to give Modi the image of a superman.

Something roughly similar to this has also happened in the United States. A total political upstart , Donald Trump challenged the time-tested values and intelligently drafted policies of the Obama Administration and appealed to the peripheral sections of American society. Since the American civil war no U.S. statesman of any consequence had spoken against any section of America’s multi-racial society as openly as Trump spoke against Muslims.

None had suggested building a boundary wall to stop immigration and none had shown such love for Russia . Trump did all this and got away to the chagrin of the saner sections of American society.

While in India Modi and his arch supporters show marked impatience with Pakistan and China in international affairs and minorities, liberals and secular forces at home , Trump and his supporters show similar dislike for China, Palestinians and liberal Europeans. Trump’s call to the Taiwanese leader was as unprecedented as it was shocking. It will certainly upset the delicate balance of power in South East Asia. On the economic front the impact of Chinese hostility towards the United States may be roughly as unsettling as Modi’s demonetisation has done to India.

The question is what will be the lasting impact

of this upheaval. It is difficult to say anything at this stage. But it is highly unlikely that the two leaders will be able to change the direction of society and the course of polity in their respective countries . The reason is simple. The offbeat political course taken by these two leaders have either been without any serious thought or is highly prejudiced . In both cases the directional change they seek is in total disregard to the harsh realities of life.

With no serious understanding of diplomacy and international affairs the two leaders have tried to translate their make-believe world into real politic . The economic policy pronouncements of the two leaders are equally unrealistic . Modi’s war on black money is as likely to fail as Trump’s move to create more jobs for Americans by immigration curbs and visa restrictions. The two leaders are creations of uncertain times when the societies of their countries are in a flux because of directionless transformations. Once things settle down these societal aberrations will disappear along with the mass appeals of leaders like Modi and Trump. l

29 JANUARY-2017

RESTORATION

University students and members of civil society had begun to play a pivotal role in the anti-Ershad movement. On December 4, 1990.

The Rocky Road to Democracy December 6 is observed as Democracy [restoration] Day in the Bangladesh, marking an end to the autocratic rule of HM Ershad in early December of 1990. On the 26th anniversary of the fall of Ershad and the restoration of democracy, we present a timeline of events in Bangladesh's tumultuous journey on the path towards democracy.

I

n 1982, Ershad seized power in an army coup by ousting the then elected government led by Justice Abdus Sattar.

He proclaimed martial law and suspended the Constitution. He declared himself as the Chief Martial Law Administrator and installed a Supreme Court justice as the president. He takes over as President the following year and in 1986, won the presidency in a rigged election amid a climate of unrest and allegations by opposition parties of voting fraud and malpractices.

30 JANUARY-2017

The Anti-Majid Khan Education Policy emerged as the first major opposition to his regime in 1983. At least five people were killed in anti-Ershad protests at Dhaka University. In 1987, opposition groups organised various mass public demonstrations demanding Ershad's removal from presidency.

Sheikh Hasina and Khaleda Zia met, marking a new phase of cooperation between Awami League (AL) and Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP). By 1990, university students and members of civil society had begun to play a pivotal role in the anti-Ershad movement. On December 4, 1990, Ershad stepped down after almost a decade in power. Chief Justice Shahabuddin Ahmed was appointed as vice-president who acted as the president.

1991

BNP wins the parliamentary election of Feb 27 and Khaleda Zia is sworn in as the country's first woman prime minister.

2005

AL MP and former finance minister Shah AMS Kibria is killed in a grenade attack at a political rally.

1994

The AL and other opposition parties start boycotting parliament accusing Khaleda Zia of rigging a by-election in the western district of Magura. .

2006

Amid growing political turmoil former Chief Justice KM Hassan declines to assume the office of the chief adviser.

1996

Khaleda Zia is sworn in as PM for second term following BNP's win in the one-sided general election of February 15 amid a boycott by AL and other opposition parties.

Khaleda Zia resigns as PM. Former Chief Justice Habibur Rahman took oath as the chief advisor of the caretaker government. The parliamentary election is held in June and Sheikh Hasina is sworn in as prime minister after AL emerges victorious in the polls.

2007

State of emergency is declared on January 11 amid violence in the run-up to the election scheduled for January 22.

2008

AL captures more than 250 seats in parliament in the general election held on Dec. 29. Sheikh Hasina is sworn in as PM.

2011

The non-partisan caretaker government system is abolished by constitutional amendment.

2012

Muslim rioters attack Buddhist villages and shrines after an image showing a Quran burning was posted on Facebook (the case is still ongoing)

.2013

A Bangladesh court declares as illegal the country's main Islamic party, Jamaat-e-Islami, effectively banning it from a general election due early next year.

2014

On January 5, AL wins parliamentary elections as about half the seats are uncontested due to a boycott by BNP as it is held under the AL-led government. At least 21 people are killed in election-related violence

2015

During January-February, following the first anniversary of January 5 election, the opposition holds nationwide blockade which turns violent resulting in more than a hundred deaths

2016

BNP gives a reform proposal of the Electoral Commission. Sheikh Hasina rejects it and claims that only a decision taken by the president regarding the EC will be accepted.l

2001

2002 2004

Sheikh Hasina hands power to caretaker government led by Justice Latifur Rahman.

Khaleda Zia returns to power following the victory of BNP's four-party alliance in the general election of October 1.

President AQM Badruddoza Chowdhury resigns in June after BNP accuses him of taking an anti-party line. In September, Iajuddin Ahmed is sworn in as president.

AL calls 21 general strikes in the year to have the BNP government removed from office.

Grenade attack on opposition AL rally in Dhaka kills 22 people.

Input from The Daily Star, Bangladesh

31 JANUARY-2017

NEPAL

WILL OGP ENSURE GOOD GOVERNANCE IN NEPAL BY : Pranav Budathoki

"Nepal might as well join this initiative, after all we have tried everything else to stop corruption"

H

ow many of us knew that Nepal is a signatory state to Outer Space Treaty? A country that cannot run a proper national airline has signed on to a treaty on ‘Principles Governing the Activities of States in the Exploration and Use of Outer Space, including the Moon and Other Celestial Bodies’? Why go to outer space. Back in terra firma, the union of South Asian nation states – ‘The Unmagnificient Seven’ otherwise known as SAARC -- is an abandoned Third World orphan in glad rags, decaying with each passing day in its Kathmandu secretariat. Yet we gloat ritually every few years and get the run of the mill leaders of South Asia together to hold hands and pretend all is hunky-dory.

Nepal signs on to just about anything when it comes to treaties and club membership. Yet, we are badly informed on something that has the potential to radically change the way government works for the Nepali people, make government actually deliver and check corruption while at it.

32 JANUARY-2017

It is called Open Government Partnership OGP a new multilateral initiative that aims to secure concrete commitments from governments to promote transparency, empower citizens, fight corruption, and harness new technologies to strengthen governance. While that may sound a bit philosophical, underneath is actually a solid plan to get the government and communities together to fight against chronic corruption that countries like Nepal currently reel under.

Signing on to the OGP can ensure accountable and transparent governance to the poorest, where everything else has failed. The government’s anti-corruption watchdog (CIAA) indulges in investigating petty bribes of government store keepers and junior hands amounting to a few hundred dollars while multi-million dollar scams involving the political class are conveniently ignored.

No amount of anti-corruption laws and treaties or policy prescriptions is going to change lives of those in the last mile. Those with power will continue to leech, and poorest of the poor will forever put up with it. But what if there was a way to effectively get the citizens to demand better services? What if we hyper-localised the spending information down to the last VDC ward, and inform the father how much the public school that he sends his daughter to is getting this fiscal? There surely must be a way to just inform a patient what medicines are available free of -cost for her at the government

health centre? Surely they would start asking questions and demand accountability?

We need to join OGP not just because we are eligible in the region - some are not - but it promotes a culture of innovation like these. Gone are the days of confronting the government and trying to achieve change. If you want the government to work for you, work with it, rather than

No amount of anti-corruption laws and treaties or policy prescriptions is going to change lives of those in the last mile.

Those with power will continue to leech and poorest of the poor will forever put up with it. against it. OGP is that collaboration vehicle, where everyone and anyone who has an idea to make governments work for the poor can do so, but without the usual sponsored criticisms.l Pranav Budhathoki is CEO of Local Interventions Group, a civic innovation company working at the intersection of data, technology and governance.

33 JANUARY-2017

RONDEAU

BATTING AGAINST CANCER

SKIPPER'S

STEPS BY : Champika Fernando

On October 2, 2016, a 28-day odyssey from Point Pedro in Jaffna down to Matara, covering the entire length of the country began to collect funds to establish a cancer treatment facility in Karapitiya.

Among the celebrities, who joined this venture was Mahela Jayawardena, the former Sri Lanka skipper who trail blazed the entire 670km along with hundreds of other people to support the venture. In a candid interview Jayawardena speaks of the journey and what motivated him to embark on a painful journey.

The 28-day journey from Point Pedro in Jaffna down to Southern Dondra Head near Matara was a remarkable effort by the organizers to fund a cancer treatment facility in Karapitiya. Walking 670 km in 28 days is no mean task and it certainly needs a big heart to do that.

How did you motivate yourself to do this?

Well, I have always engaged in charity for the last 15 years and I felt that for me the best way to help society is by doing such things. For me politics is something that does not interest and I feel I can contribute a lot in this manner and in my own little way. Sure, I have control of what I am doing and at the same time I can be part of events through which I feel I can help people. And to be involved with good people like Nathan, Sarinda and every volunteer who was part of this and were fantastic people. I have learned a lot from them.

Was it what happened to your brother that led you to take up this mission of walking nearly 670 km?

What happened to my brother 20 years ago did make a huge impact on my life and opened my eyes knowing what life is all about and what people go through, and for me to be involved in things that could help people. The satisfaction I get from that is immense and it is tough when you lose your loved ones. It is never the same. For me I lost a friend who I wished I had all these years. But that is life and for me it has given me a

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path to be a better person and a way to help others. Yes, he definitely helped me to find that space.

them, helping them and especially for me to have her alongside me really helped me to get through the 28 days. It was tough for us to leave our little daughter but we made sure when we could we had her around. And I think for her as well it was a great experience to be part of a group who was doing this walk. One day she will grow up knowing that we walked and were all part of something special. I think that’s what life is all about, the memories of things that you’ve done and that you could be satisfied with. Big thank you to my wife.

How tough was the walk and how did your body take up the challenge?

Well, it was tougher than what I initially thought. I thought it was just walking and I could get through, but every day was a grind. There were pain barriers I had to go through not just me but everyone. Some did get injured and could not complete.

There were blisters, sore legs and swollen ankles. Mentally you get fatigued to go through the same routine everyday but it was a great experience and I would not exchange anything else in the world. It was something special which we all enjoyed, whoever who walked and everyone who came and walked with us on a daily basis. Yes, the body took its toll but it was for a good cause.

I read a Facebook post saying “rich cricketers’ walk to collect money from poor people to build a hospital”.

Even though there were hundreds of thousand people behind the project, some may have felt that way. How do you respond to such comments?

Well I can’t help everyone. If I were rich enough to build a hospital by myself I would have definitely done that. Unfortunately I am not that rich. But at the same time I did contribute not just by walking but by money and we gave an opportunity to each and every Sri Lankan to be a part of this project. I think there were a lot of Sri Lankans who have lost their loved ones and were affected by cancer and we gave them an opportunity to be part of something that would help them in their healing process. We tried to try and get people to see light at the end of the tunnel and to walk with them in that end. But unfortunately there were some, who did not want to come out of those caves and would like to stay in the dark. We cannot help each and everyone but we tried our best to help people see the light.l

How many kilos did you shed at the end of the journey?

I probably lost about three kilogrammes not more than that.

But it was very healthy 28 days. I managed to stay on a strict diet and try and be very disciplined with what I did. It was very good for me to do that. Yes, the body took a huge beat but it was for a good course.

Your wife was part of this journey right through and leaving your daughter at home and joining you in the journey was appreciated by everyone? How do you look at her contribution?

Yes. Christina was absolutely brilliant. She walked the entire distance and she was amazing with others as well, encouraging

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THE

COMING

WAR ON CHINA

Courtesy: New Internationalist

STORY OF THE MONTH

A major US military build-up–including nuclear weapons is under way in Asia and the Pacific with the purpose of confronting China. John Pilger raises the alarm on an under-reported and dangerous provocation.

John Pilger

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W

hen I first went to Hiroshima in 1967, the shadow on the steps was still there. It was an almost perfect impression of a human being at ease: legs splayed, back bent, one hand by her side as she sat waiting for a bank to open. At a quarter past eight on the morning of 6 August, 1945, she and her silhouette were burned into the granite. I stared at the shadow for an hour or more, unforgettably. When I returned many years later, it was gone: taken away, ‘disappeared’, a political embarrassment. I have spent two years making a documentary film, The Coming War on China, in which the evidence and witnesses warn that nuclear war is no longer a shadow, but a contingency.

The greatest build-up of American-led military forces since the Second World War is well under way. They are

To counter this, in 2011 President Obama announced a ‘pivot to Asia’, which meant that almost two-thirds of US naval forces would be transferred to Asia and the Pacific by 2020.

Today, more than 400 American military bases encircle China with missiles, bombers, warships and, above all, nuclear weapons. From Australia north through the Pacific to Japan, Korea and across Eurasia to Afghanistan and India, the bases form, says one US strategist, ‘the perfect noose’.

A study by the RAND Corporation – which, since Vietnam, has planned America’s wars – is entitled War with China: Thinking Through the Unthinkable. Commissioned by the US Army, the authors evoke the Cold War when RAND made notorious the catch cry of its chief strategist, Herman Kahn – ‘thinking the unthinkable’. Kahn’s book, On Thermonuclear War, elaborated a plan for a ‘winnable’

on the western borders of Russia, and in Asia and the nuclear war against the Soviet Union.

Pacific, confronting China. The great danger this beckons is not news, or it is news buried Today, his apocalyptic view is and distorted: a drumbeat of shared by those holding real propaganda that echoes the psypower in the US: the Pentagon milchopathic campaign embedded in Today, more than 400 itarists and their neoconservative public consciousness during much collaborators in the executive, inAmerican military bases of the 20th century. telligence agencies and Congress.

Like the renewal of post-Soviet Russia, the rise of China as an economic power is declared an ‘existential threat’ to the divine right of the United States to rule and dominate human affairs.

encircle China with missiles, bombers, warships and, above all, nuclear weapons.

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The current Secretary of Defense, Ashley Carter, a verbose provocateur, says US policy is to confront those ‘who see America’s dominance and want to take that away from us’.

CHINA

'Punish' China In Washington, I met Amitai Etzioni, distinguished professor of international affairs at George Washington University. The US, he writes, ‘is preparing for a war with China, a momentous decision that so far has failed to receive a thorough review from elected officials, namely the White House and Congress.’

This war would begin with a ‘blinding attack against Chinese anti-access facilities, including land and sea-based missile launchers, satellite and anti-satellite weapons’.

This war would begin with a ‘blinding attack against Chinese anti-access facilities, including land and sea-based missile launchers, satellite and anti-satellite weapons’. The incalculable risk is that ‘deep inland strikes could be mistakenly perceived by the Chinese as pre-emptive attempts to take out its nuclear weapons, thus cornering them into “a terrible use-itor-lose-it dilemma” [that would] lead to nuclear war.’

In 2015, the Pentagon released its Law of War Manual. ‘The United States,’ it says, ‘has not accepted a treaty rule that prohibits the use of nuclear weapons per se, and thus nuclear weapons are lawful weapons for the United States.’

the nuclear weapon policies of the United States are the most prominent external factor influencing Chinese advocates for raising the alert level of China’s nuclear forces.’

In China, a strategist told me, ‘We are not your enemy, but if you [in the West] decide we are, we must prepare without delay.’ China’s military and arsenal are small compared to America’s. However, ‘for the first time,’ wrote Gregory Kulacki of the Union of Concerned Scientists, ‘China is discussing putting its nuclear missiles on high alert so that they can be launched quickly on warning of an attack… This would be a significant and dangerous change in Chinese policy… Indeed,

Professor Ted Postol was scientific adviser to the head of US naval operations. An authority on nuclear weapons, he told me, ‘Everybody here wants to look like they’re tough. See, I got to be tough… I’m not afraid of doing anything military, I’m not afraid of threatening; I’m a hairy-chested gorilla. And we have gotten into a state, the United States has gotten into a situation where there’s a lot of sabre-rattling, and it’s really being orchestrated from the top.’

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I said, ‘This seems incredibly dangerous.’

‘That’s an understatement.’

Andrew Krepinevich is a former Pentagon war planner and the influential author of war games against China. He wants to ‘punish’ China for extending its defences to the South China Sea. He advocates seeding the ocean with sea mines, sending in US special forces and enforcing a naval blockade. He told me, ‘Our first president, George Washington, said if you want peace, prepare for war.’

In 2015, in high secrecy, the US staged its biggest single military exercise since the Cold War. This was Talisman Sabre; an armada of ships and long-range bombers rehearsed an ‘Air-Sea Battle Concept for China’ – ASB – blocking sea lanes in the Straits of Malacca and cutting off China’s access to oil, gas and other raw materials from the Middle East and Africa.

Handed millions of dollars in arms and military equipment, the then government of President Benigno Aquino broke off bilateral talks with China and signed a secretive Enhanced Defense Co- operation Agreement with the US.

It is such a provocation, and the fear of a US Navy blockade, that has seen China feverishly building strategic airstrips on disputed reefs and islets in the Spratly Islands in the South China Sea. Last July, the UN Permanent Court of Arbitration ruled against China’s claim of sovereignty over these islands.

Although the action was brought by the Philippines, it was presented by leading American and British lawyers and can be traced to then US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

In 2010, Clinton flew to Manila. She demanded that America’s former colony reopen the US military bases closed down in the 1990s following a popular campaign against the violence they generated, especially against Filipino women. She declared China’s claim on the Spratly Islands – which lie more than 7,500 miles (12,000 kilometres) from the United States – a threat to US ‘national security’ and to ‘freedom of navigation’.

Handed millions of dollars in arms and military equipment, the then government of President Benigno Aquino broke off bilateral talks with China and signed a secretive Enhanced Defense Co-operation Agreement with the US. This established five rotating US bases and restored a hated colonial provision

that American forces and contractors were immune from Philippine law.Under the rubric of ‘information dominance’ – the jargon for media manipulation on which the Pentagon spends more than $4 billion – the Obama administration launched a propaganda campaign that cast China, the world’s greatest trading nation, as a threat to ‘freedom of navigation’. CNN led the way, its ‘national security reporter’ reporting excitedly from on board a US Navy surveillance flight over the Spratlys. The BBC persuaded frightened Filipino pilots to fly a single-engine Cessna over the disputed islands ‘to see how the Chinese would react’. l

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FOR CITIZEN

It's Time for Zero Tolerance BY : Sandra Laville

The police are still ignoring sexual abuse by officers

W

hen British media exposed how police officers in England and Wales were abusing their power to sexually assault and exploit victims of crime, we had no idea of the scale of the problem.

Today, we have more of a clue as Her Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabulary has revealed that hundreds of police officers are being accused of sexually abusing victims and suspects – and inspectors believe the problem is even more prevalent than the numbers suggest.

The original investigation was more than four years ago and was prompted by the conviction and subsequent jailing of Northumbria police constable Stephen Mitchell, who raped and sexually assaulted vulnerable women he met on duty. Examining the details of that case, various themes emerged; a lack of supervision, a failure to properly vet officers and the turning of a blind eye to the sexual exploits

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A police service in which a macho culture had existed for decades, where profound sexism was publicly expressed, had bred generations of officers who were able to be openly predatory.

of male officers, in a still macho police service.

With that thought in mind, we felt there had to be more officers out there abusing their position in such a way. Using the Freedom of Information Act we asked forces for figures on how many officers and community support officers had been convicted or disciplined for sexual assaults, rape and abusing their position to carry out sexual relationships with vulnerable women and girls.

We revealed that 56 officers from 2008 to 2012 from 25 forces had been found to have raped, sexually assaulted, harassed or groomed victims or were waiting to be disciplined for their behaviour. They included constables and officers all the way up to deputy chief constable level. It seemed a large number. Indeed, one officer who chooses to exploit a victim of domestic violence in the hours after she has been attacked, when she is bruised and battered and at her most vulnerable, is an officer too many.

But such predatory abuse of power was – as Claire Phillipson, from Wearside Women in Need said – “the untouched tip of an iceberg”.

For decades in her work running women’s refuges in the north-east, she had witnessed officers turning up to the secret addresses and taking advantage of vulnerable, beaten, abused and terrified women who had fled violence. There was little anyone could do. It seemed unlikely that anyone would listen to the words of a drug addict, a prostitute, a woman with no money and no home, over a police office, even if she was brave enough to make a complaint.

A police service, in which a macho culture had existed for decades, where profound sexism was publicly expressed, had bred generations of officers who were able to be openly predatory. And as a police officer they had access to the personal information about victims to allow them to carry out their abuse.

Subsequent inquiries over the years by the Guardian into the scale of this kind of police corruption were not willingly answered by the service. Some forces refused to supply figures on how many officers were under investigation for such offences, claiming to so could prejudice their inquiries, others said they did not have the information available and in doing so exposed a failure at the top to monitor and record such complaints.

Some senior female officers embraced the information that the media reports had released into the public domain. In Nottinghamshire DS Jackie Alexander, then head of professional standards in the force, confronted the issue head on and raised it at the most senior levels within the service.l

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INDIA

INDIA’S HOPE TO BECOME RENEWABLE ENERGY POWER OF THE WORLD BY : Varun Sivaram

Under Prime Minister Narendra Modi, India hopes to become the “renewable energy power of the world.” So far, India’s ambitious targets for solar and wind deployment—second only to those of China—have attracted a flurry of foreign renewable energy companies eager for the business-friendly contracting policies promised by the government. Announcing aspirational goals to elicit a windfall in foreign financing could prove a clever strategy to bootstrap a thriving renewables industry—but beyond the fanfare, few details are forthcoming on how the government will actually improve the investment climate and why renewable energy will meet India’s underlying energy needs.

W

hen , Finance Minister Arun Jaitley released India’s budget- 2016-17, which presents more questions than answers about how the government plans to fund the push for renewable energy. The major news is a proposal to fund renewable projects by doubling the coal tax for the second consecutive year, this time from ~$1.60 to $3.20 per metric ton (for context, the new tax is about 10% of the price of coal). Although this would bring in about $2 billion per year, a staggering gap remains to meet the $100 billion commitment that Prime Minister Modi made toward reaching his renewable energy targets of 100GW of solar and 175GW of total renewables by 2022. .

In assessing Modi’s emphasis on clean energy, some questions come to mind: l Are the renewable targets achievable?

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PLAN TO POWER 60 MILLION HOMES BY SOLAR ENERGY

I

ndia is on schedule to be the world’s third biggest solar market in this year.

Images have been released showing the sheer size of a new solar power plant in southern India. The facility in Kamuthi, Tamil Nadu, has a capacity of 648 MW and covers an area of 10 sq km.

l

Assuming the targets are not achievable, is it wise to set aspirational but unrealistic goals?

Each question is in itself a serious research project, but we can develop some intuition around the answers. Specifically, it looks like the Modi government may be using aspirational goals as a clever but risky tool to fast-forward development of its renewable energy sector. Renewables may also be particularly convenient to rally the nation around a “win-win” on energy security and environmental protection, though their value as the primary policy instrument for those goals is questionable.

Probably not—the targets are likely too ambitious. Consider solar, the centerpiece of the renewable goals: the government raised the solar target from 20 GW to 100 GW by 2022. For context, today India has installed somewhere between 3 and 4 GW—achieving 100GW will require more than a 50% CAGR for the next 8 years. Germany, the world leader in installed solar, is only targeting 66 GW by 2030; although India is right to assert that its sunnier climate makes it a more natural solar world leader, it isn’t so easy to leapfrog decades of German industry growth and maturity.

The problem is that, despite the sun, India is not a great place to finance capital projects. Although foreign companies recently pledged over double the 100GW goal, those commitments do not mean much—foreign equity investors will still have to produce the lion’s share of capital to finance these projects, and most are wary given India’s high rate of stalled capital infrastructure projects. Market, credit, and counterparty risk all increase the cost of capital, making it difficult for solar to compete with coal even as the cost of solar in India has tumbled over the last five years.l

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This makes it the largest solar power plant at a single location, taking the title from the Topaz Solar Farm in California, which has a capacity of 550 MW. The solar plant, built in an impressive eight months and funded by the Adani Group, is cleaned every day by a robotic system, charged by its own solar panels. At full capacity, it is estimated to produce enough electricity to power about 150,000 homes.The project is comprised of 2.5 million individual solar modules, and cost $679m to build.

The new plant has helped nudge India's total installed solar capacity across the 10 GW mark, according to a statement by research firm Bridge to India, joining only a handful of countries that can make this claim. As solar power increases, India is expected to become the world's third-biggest solar market from next year onwards, after China and the US. Despite the fast-growing solar power industry, India will still need to increase its take-up of solar panels if it is to achieve the ambitious targets set by the government. By 2022, India aims to power 60 million homes by the sun. It is part of the government's goal to produce 40 percent of its power from non-fossil fuels by 2030.

This aim has been praised by environmental groups and is hoped will also help reduce the country's problem with air quality. At the beginning of this month, the pollution level in the capital New Delhi reached its worst levels in 17 years. l

ASIA-PACIFIC REGION MEETING ZERO HUNGER CHALLENGE BY

2030

AGRICULTURE

Dr.Raja Ram Tripathi

Agricultural censuses are sources of structural information that, through comparison at different points of time, can contribute to the monitoring of environmental changes around us.Data on the use of environmentally-friendly practices, collected through the census of agriculture, helps decision-makers and planners adopt measures to mitigate adverse effects. According to the agricultural censuses will help to Asia Pacific region to meet the zero hunger challenge by 2030.

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I

n today’s age, environmental impacts of agriculture cannot be ruled out. The negative effects include ploughing, crop rotation and sources of high greenhouse gas emissions.

Through the help of censuses, emissions can be analyzed that can help countries improve their ability to plan effective climate change responses and agricultural productivities.

Twenty one countries are participating in a roundtable discussion as part of the Food and Agriculture Organization’s (FAO) World Programme for the Census for Agriculture 2020 (WCA 2020). The census, held once every 10 years since 1930, provides a snapshot of the current state of agriculture in different countries. According to Senior FAO Statistian Jairo Castano, the WCA 2020 presents flexibility in the type of data to be collected by the participating countries. It recommends the collection of 23 essential items that are imperative for national purposes and international comparability. The introduction of a new round of agricultural censuses in the Asia-Pacific region will help countries meet the zero hunger challenge by 2030, experts feel.

Acording to media report castano told that “By collecting at least the essential items, countries ensure that agri census results are internationally comparable, allowing them to benchmark their performance against others.”

According to Mukesh Srivastava, senior statistician at the FAO regional office for Asia and the Pacific, there are two aspects to international comparison. First, all countries should cover the information on similar data items. Second, the countries follow the same concept and definitions to collect data. Apart from recommending minimum essential items for all countries, the WCA guidelines provide a set of standards to be followed for data collection to ensure comparability.

"The comparison to track development process among countries is advisable not only for the countries themselves, but it is equally useful for monitoring the development pace globally for directing international support to national efforts. Internationally, comparable data helps to compile regional and sub-regional aggregates for use of bodies like the SAARC and UN agencies," Srivastava said. The new round of national censuses takes place between 2016 and 2025.

An agricultural census can focus on fishery and aquaculture activities, which are well integrated with agricultural practices in Asia, for instance fsheries commonly carried out by agricultural households to make viable living.

“The use of land can have environmental consequences that range from pollution of waterways to global warming and the census of agriculture is the main source of data on the actual land use in a country,” Castano said.

Under the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, countries should regularly report their emissions from all sectors and this includes agriculture.

An important use of census information to measure environmental impacts is with reference to water management and irrigation, the FAO expert added.

A module on fisheries has been included for the first time in the WCA 2020. According to Castano, there is a strong demand for data on household subsistence fishing and the module suggests items that will collect data on small-scale fishing activities at the household level. It is not intended to target large-scale commercial fishing.

An agricultural census can focus on fishery and aquaculture activities, which are well integrated with agricultural practices in Asia, for instance the rice-cum-fish culture or such small-scale fisheries commonly carried out by agricultural households to make viable living, Srivastava added.

"Very often, particularly in east India, fish-related activities are combined with farming activities of agricultural households on their land. " Agriculture censuses contribute to this process in a number of key areas: e.i. Promotion of agricultural production and investments to stimulate economic growth, Agricultural data is used for the preparation of rural development programmes, specifically for supporting the market orientation of agricultural producers and programmes for infrastructure development, Census collects various items needed for analyses on how agricultural holders get access to land and on the structure or distribution of the agricultural land in a country, Agriculture census is the main data source for classifying holdings by type of farming system.l

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OPINION

TRUMP IS ‘GREATER EVIL’ THAN HILLARY —NOAM CHOMSKY

BY : Subi Shah

The relationship between Noam Chomsky and US Presidents has never been idyllic, but it recently became a whole lot more critical. The renowned scholar and award-winning author is witnessing the 16th president of US over the course of his lifetime, and has spoken up against many of the previous ones in the past – but according to him, Donald Trump signals a new low in American politics. In an interview with Gulf Media house, Chomsky called Trump an ‘ignorant, thin-skinned megalomaniac’ and a ‘greater evil’ than Hillary Clinton.And being one of the most cited scholars in history as well as a political activist, with an influence on academic fields ranging from linguistics to politics to philosophy, when Chomsky speaks, he rarely repeats the obvious or the cliché…

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You recently described the US Republican Party as the most ‘ dangerous organization in world history.’ Can you explain why?

Global warming is a very severe threat to the survival of organized human society. The Republican Party is dedicated to racing to disaster. In the primaries, every candidate either denied that what is happening is happening, or said that maybe it is, but we should ignore it.Their elected leader describes climate change as a hoax, calls for increased use of fossil fuels, dismantling regulations, refusing the call to poor countries seeking to shift to renewable energy, and in other ways accelerating the race to disaster.The effects of Republican denialism already had a dangerous impact on the international negotiations COP21 and COP22. It’s hard to find a case of an organization in history that has been dedicated with such commitment to the end of organized human society in any decent form.

You have been active in US peace and social movements for more than half a century. How do you assess the current state of these movements following Trump’s election?

They are mobilizing, organizing, considering ways to move forward in dangerous times.

You have written about the influence on your thought and politics of the libertarian socialist tradition. Do you believe the influence of such ideas have grown or diminished in your lifetime?

That is hard to estimate.

It is 28 years since you co wrote Manufacturing Consent with Edward Herman. Does Bernie Sanders candidacy and Jeremy Corbyn’s election as Leader of Labour Party indicate that the corporate media is losing its influence and that social media now provides a voice for social movements in the way that the mass circulation labor press did a century ago?

The book did not deal with the impact of the media product, but rather with its nature. Social media doubtless have an impact, with mixed consequences.

Some have compared growing nationalist sentiment in Europe, Brexit and the election of Trump to the political turmoil of 1930s.

In what appears to many a bleak outlook, which developments still give you hope for the future?

Take just the US, and the US elections on 8 November. Clinton won a majority of the popular vote, a large majority of the under-25 vote. Sanders won an even larger majority. Many Trump voters had voted for Obama, believing his promise of ‘hope and change’. When they found it to be false, they voted for Trump’s message of hope and change, and can be reached by an authentic effort to bring about a badly needed reversal of harmful policies. There are many opportunities that can be grasped and pursued. l

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Their elected leader describes climate change as a hoax, calls for increased use of fossil fuels, dismantling regulations, refusing the call to poor countries seeking to shift to renewable energy, and in other ways accelerating the race to disaster.

FLASHBACK

Amma’s Legacy

Queen of Cult Politics BY : Vikas Kumar

J. Jayalalitha remained an enigmatic personality in Indian politics. Her legacy will always be remembered as mixed one. And contrary to popular perception, she was certainly not ‘Amma’ to all.

J

ayalalitha, Amma, the queen of cult politics, finally passed away. Her persona remained shrouded in mystery since beginning and she remained an enigma from start to death. Terming her as a matinee idol would be denigrating her personality and her overall contribution in Indian politics. She was Amma to electorate. She was, perhaps, one of the most impactful regional leaders in the last three decades who affected various twists and turns of Indian politics. Her power and impact was felt by many national leaders of high stature, ask A.B Vajpayee and other leaders.Outlook Magazine,

while describing her personality aptly writes, “His career as a caring administrator bolstered the screen image. It wasn’t really an image that he built to trap the masses but a welfare machine he created to supplement and complement the scripted character on screen. So, the real-life MGR made the reel-life MGR look better, rosier.”

It would be difficult to evaluate her contribution without considering the circumstances she faced. She was vociferously attacked in public after her mentor’s death, assaulted in assembly, and also jailed for corruption. But the rise Jayalalitha as

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Amma could not be stopped. The more she was attacked, stronger she emerged as a leader.

One reason behind her immense popularity was actually the failure of Dravidian politics. People found them utter selfish who were no more concerned in public welfare, and was engaged mainly in running their own enterprise. Dalits situation almost remained stagnant in the position. It was Amma, who always came to their rescue and support. Both MGR and Jayalalitha embraced Dalits and other marginalized section of society while their opponents kept attacking them. But it is also a truth that the policies of AIADMK constantly empowered them.

One constant accusation on her was pursuing the politics of vendetta. It was manifested in her various rollback decisions of Karunanidhi. The most clear example is of third term when she announced to turn Karunanidhi’s 1000 crore assembly building into a hospital and medical college. The other, which was stayed by the court, was her attempt to convert the newly constructed 375,000 square foot Anna Centenary Library into a paediatric hospital.

She also never shied away from attacking media. MGR never hesitated in slapping the reporter on being displeased by any story. Amma,too, took a leaf from his books. The weapon for Jayalalitha was filing defamation cases. More than 100 defamation suits were filed against press in her first term . In August this year, the Tamil Nadu government informed Supreme Court of 213 defamation cases between 2011 and 2016, 55 of these against the

media. Despite the charges of corruption and the politics of vendetta, Tamil Nadu tops in many indicators in India, According to Firstpost, It has the lowest fertility rate — which is even lover than lower than Australia, Finland and Belgium — and the lowest crime rates against women and children. It has more factories and more industrial employment than any other Indian state.

Though she also resorted to the politics of gimmicks and never shied away from doling out freebies. She did not begin it but expanded. This politics of freebies also came at a cost.

She promised 100 units of free electricity to every house hold, free laptop for class 11 and 12, a gram of soverign gold as marriage assistance, and four goats and sheeps for people below the poverty line.

The laptops had images of “Amma (mother)”, as Jayalalithaa was popularly known. Other programmes also carried that name, such as Amma canteens (for subsidised food) and Amma medicals (for subsidised medicines).

Though some of these programs had social effect such as the midday meal scheme, such schemes also resulted in fast indebtness of the state compared to any other Indian state.

The career of Jayalalitha was controvertial and full of visionary decisions. She showed clever politicking and also made costly mistakes. She never hesitated from taking tough decisions and always fought gender abuse in a male-dominanted political scene. She had an icy-exterior and demanded complete loyalty from her followers.

While analyzing her legacy, which is not straightforward, She was a fine mess of imperfections, acumen and blunders.

It will difficult to fill the shoes vacated by her and her legacy will be remembered in the history of the state and independent India. l

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SPECIAL STORY

Alyssa Ayres

INDIAN YET TO OVERTAKE BRITISH ECONOMY Is the Indian economy now bigger than that of the United Kingdom (UK)? Despite what you may have read, the answer to that, right now, is no.

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No one knows what the actual effect of the November 8 demonetization will do to the Indian economy. Signs clearly point to a dampening effect, but actual metrics are not yet available.

O

ver the past few days, the Indian press has been brimming with articles proudly proclaiming this new “fact.”

The Times of India, the Indian Express and the Economic Times, among others, have hailed the milestone of India overtaking its former colonial ruler for the first time in 150 years.

India’s minister of state for home affairs tweeted the story as fact. A national vice president of the ruling Bharatiya Janata Partyretweeted the story with a photo of Prime Minister Narendra Modi as evidence of his government’s success. Not to be outdone, a whole slew of global outlets ran with it: Sputnik International, Irish Independent, the Daily Mail, theIndependent. A similar story even made it to the U.S.-based Foreign Policy magazine. “India Overtakes Britain as the World’s Sixth-Largest Economy,” declared the headline. In all of these stories, nowhere did anyone question the basis of the “news” or where the underlying data originated—except for one paper, The Hindu. How this meme spread illustrates a failure in the most basic function of reporting: factchecking.

Here’s the anatomy of the media failure. Nearly a week ago, Forbes.com ran an opinion piece titled, “India’s Economy Surpasses That of Great Britain.”

The author reasoned that the decline in the value of the British pound post-Brexit had reduced the size of the UK’s gross domestic product (GDP) in dollars at market exchange rates to around USD 2.29 trillion.

The author then provided back-of-the-envelope calculations to show that the Indian economy, assumed to be INR 153 trillion for 2016, would be larger than

the UK’s using an exchange rate of INR 66.6 to USD 1, delivering a projected size of the Indian economy of USD 2.30 trillion.

This conclusion, which appears never to have been anything other than a rough comparison to make a point, is extremely sensitive to exchange rate fluctuation. On the actual date the Forbes.com opinion piece ran, the INR to USD exchange rate was not 66.6 but rather 67.8, so the conclusion was wrong even as it was published, since India’s GDP would not be larger than the UK’s at that rate.

This would have been a very easy fact to check.

Secondly, as TCA Sharad Raghavan uncovered through appropriate fact-checking, it is not entirely clear that the figure of INR 153 trillion as the size of India’s GDP for 2016 is correct. Sharad Raghavan reports that IMF estimates from the most recent World Economic Outlook database update (as of October 2016) for the size of the Indian economy at constant prices, and Indian government half-year statistics for 2016, would put the Indian economy between INR 122 and 143 trillion. As importantly, these are all moving targets. No one knows what the actual effect of the November 8 demonetization will do to the Indian economy.

Signs clearly point to a dampening effect, but actual metrics are not yet available.

As far as I can tell, the Forbes.com opinion piece, with its proclamation that the Indian economy had overtaken the UK’s, morphed into a “report” in the Indian press articles. Then India’s minister of state for home tweeted one of these. Some international news outlets ran the story on

the basis of the Indian minister’s tweet. Foreign Policy ran their story based on the Indian press reports. Some more international news outlets ran the story based on theForeign Policy contribution to this fact-free meme. In this way, one thought experiment turned into an international story divorced from any firm basis in fact.

Now, I understand why the story caught fire. There’s a just-rewards aspect to the notion that the once-colonized India has overtaken the once-colonial power. And that is going to happen, very soon, just based on differential growth rates. The standard IMF estimate sees this taking place in 2020; who knows, it could happen sooner. As I argue in my forthcoming book, Our Time Has Come: How India is Making Its Place in the World, the Indian economy has grown much larger than many people realize or acknowledge, and it still has terrific headroom for further growth. At market exchange rates, India is already the world’s seventh largest economy, ahead of Canada, Brazil, and Italy. (Russia isn’t even in the top ten.) In purchasing power parity terms, India became the world’s third largest economy in 2011, behind the United States and China. So India is a major global economic force and appears poised to grow even further into that role.

But as of today, the Indian economy hasn’t overtaken the UK’s. Sorry, Indian media, you will have to wait a bit longer for that.

(Alyssa Ayres is Senior Fellow for India, Pakistan, and South Asia in Council on Foreign Relations)

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REMEMBRANCE

FIDEL CASTRO

THE IDEAL THAT WILL NEVER DIE

BY : Vanessa Baird

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Feted as a revolutionary hero and demonised as an enemy of the free world, Fidel Castro also played an unexpected role in global literature. There was a minute’s silence at Adelante, the yearly gathering of Latin America activists in London on 25 November, who had woken up to news that Fidel Castro was no more.

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nd then another minute’s silence at the end of the day, rich in tributes to the towering figure of socialism and internationalism. It was fitting. Just one minute would barely reflect the revolutionary leader who rarely gave a speech lasting less than four hours and ruled Cuba for five decades. But the achievements that most people kept coming back to during the day, were not leadership or longevity but two ordinary areas of everyday life: health and education.

if there was torture in Cuba, to which he replied ‘the only place that has torture in Cuba today is Guantánamo Bay’ – inside the US detention centre. Without doubt, many Cubans living on the island today want more freedom. There has been some loosening of the state’s grip on several aspects of life. Under Fidel’s brother, the current President Raúl Castro, a reform programme has lifted many restrictions on freedom of movement and to do business. Most political prisoners have now been released. Freedom of expression and of the press remains restricted, though.

But in a world full of human rights abuses, with the US and Britain systematically taking part in torture in their ‘war on terror’, Cuba hardly features as a major violator. The continued domination of the Cuban Communist Party and reluctance to embrace a multiparty system, needs to be seen in context. The fear that the benefits of the revolution could be swiftly undone is real and underpinned by decades of extreme US hostility and interference, a crippling trade embargo, and the continued occupation of Guantánamo Bay. Not to mention the many CIA plots to kill Castro himself. There are few shining examples of successful and enduring revolutions that you can point to in the world today. But Cuba is a candidate. The small island has been a David to the US Goliath; a source not only of inspiration, but of practical and generous support to the those around the world who are struggling for justice, equality or just a basic quality of life. Take, for example, the thousands of people who were going blind but who can now see thanks to Operation Miracle, a Cuban programme to deliver cataract operations to people in some of the poorest and most remote parts of the world, such as the Bolivian high Andes.There were many moving tributes to Fidel Castro during the course of Saturday’s conference, from Latin American activists and politicians, and British figures including former London mayor Ken Livingstone and Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn. But one of the most rousing came from George Galloway, who delivered a long list of Castro’s living legacy around the globe, concluding: ‘Fidel Castro is not dead… he lives on in the hopes and dreams of poor people everywhere.’ l

Under Castro’s leadership, Cuba went from being a country of poor and largely illiterate people, to one that puts most of the rest of the Western world to shame with its impressive health and education statistics. As rich countries, such as the US and Britain, have fostered growing inequality and are failing to meet the public health and education needs of their populations, Cuba has for years provided high quality free health care and education for all. The result: a literacy rate higher than the US’s and life expectancy that equals it. Through its international programme Cuba has exported teachers and health workers around the world, most recently to West Africa to tackle the Ebola epidemic. In Kashmir, Cubans were the first international responders to the country’s earthquake, and the last to leave.

Meanwhile, Cuban support for liberation struggles in Angola and Mozambique, played a key role in the defeat of apartheid in South Africa. On his release from prison, one of the first trips Nelson Mandela wanted to make was to Cuba to thank Fidel Castro. But anyone listening to the BBC’s mealy mouthed and biased coverage of Castro’s death on 25th November morning, would not have come away with a sense that Castro might been one of the good guys.

Disproportionate time was given to right-wing Cuban exiles in Miami and their supporters in the media. According to one of the conference speakers, journalist Victoria Brittain, the BBC used clips that were several years old. She urged people to complain to media outlets if they were unhappy about the coverage.

Former MP George Galloway commented that every interview he had given on Fidel’s death during the day was dominated by the issue of human rights in Cuba. One US journalist asked him

(Vanessa Baird is a senior journalist and associated with New Internationalist as a co-editor )

53 JANUARY-2017

ENVIRONMENT

IS CLIMATE CHANGE REALLY ‘HOAX’?

BY : Varun Sivaram

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.S. President-Elect Trump has made clear that he does not believe climate change is a serious—or indeed even a real—phenomenon, calling it a “hoax,” a “very, very expensive form of tax,” and a “money-making industry.” His America-First Energy Plan reflects this belief.

In it, he pledges to end U.S. participation in the Paris climate deal, cancel all U.S. payments to United Nations climate change programs, rescind the Clean Power Plan (President Barack Obama’s signature emissions reduction policy), shore up the U.S. coal industry, open federal lands to fossil fuel exploration, and back expansions of U.S. energy infrastructure, including authorizing the Keystone

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pipeline. Many of these policies were sufficiently important to the candidate to make their way into his plan for his first one hundred days in office.

The United States has been the central actor in international climate diplomacy for the past thirty years.

Where it has exercised leadership—in securing consensus around the 1987 Montreal Protocol controlling ozone-destroying gases, or the 2015 Paris climate accord—it has been easier to galvanize international cooperation. Where the United States has hung back—failing to ratify the Kyoto agreement, for example—entire accords have collapsed.

It is far from clear that any other country could successfully assume the United States’ central position in climate policy. China, the world’s largest carbon emitter, has criticized Trump for threatening the Paris deal and signaled that it will seek a leadership role in international climate diplomacy. Next year’s Clean Energy and Mission Innovation Ministerials (Obama administration initiatives to convene major economies to ramp up investment in clean energy technologies) will take place in China. And its intensive efforts to develop and deploy affordable solar and wind technologies put China in a strong position to lead by example. China’s willingness to step up abroad is at least in part a reflection of the intense domestic political pressure driving Beijing to clean up its heavily polluted air and water at home. But it is also a reflection of China’s careful but increasingly overt drive to expand its influence and diplomatic power to a level commensurate with its economic heft.

ing or able to take up the slack if the United States ends its climate financing, as Trump has promised to do, or have the diplomatic clout to induce China, India, Brazil, or other major emerging economies to contribute. If that is the case, the assistance will simply not materialize, leaving millions of impoverished people to face their fate alone.

Abdicating leadership in mitigation and adaptation, finally, will have ripple effects that extend far beyond international climate policy. If the United States demonstrates that it will not fulfill its commitments in one realm, countries will have little reason to trust its word in others—and indeed, Candidate Trump gave no indication that climate agree-

It remains to be seen, however, how leadership in climate diplomacy would square with the other elements of China’s international agenda. Beijing has in recent years been criticized for its mercantilist relationships with natural resource suppliers in Africa, illegal island-building in the South China Sea, and territorial spats with several critical neighbors.

It has also, Paris agreement aside, demonstrated that its main domestic goal remains economic growth and political stability; local officials have been caught falsifying air quality data in major Chinese cities to meet environmental standards without sacrificing economic performance. In other words, China may be willing to take the lead in international climate diplomacy, but that is no guarantee that other countries will follow.

Mitigating carbon emissions, meanwhile, is only half the puzzle. Countries are already grappling with the need to adapt to climate change, and with how to pay for it. Small island states such as Kiribati command attention because of their near-existential plight, but abnormal climate conditions have caused serious damage from the Arctic to Louisiana and beyond. The agenda for the 2016 UN climate summit in Marrakech included, among other things, setting up a financing mechanism to help poor countries adapt to the expected effects of climate change in the next few decades. Many were already skeptical that countries would be able to mobilize the $100 billion per year of public and private funding they pledged in Paris. It does not seem likely that cash-strapped Europe will be will-

ments would be the only ones under threat. The Iran nuclear deal, trade agreements, and even core military alliances could all be on the chopping block.

Trust and leadership are fragile things. National reputations built over the course of generations can be demolished astonishingly quickly through careless and destructive stewardship. Will Trump pull back from his campaign rhetoric and maintain faith with the United States’ international partners?

Climate change policy may prove to be the canary in the coal mine. l (Varun Sivaram is the Douglas Dillon fellow and acting director of the Program on Energy Security and Climate Change at the Council on Foreign Relations.)

55 JANUARY-2017

SPECIAL FEATURE

DEMONETISATION

MODI SCORES

A SELF GOAL !

BY : Anand Teltumbde

Will demonetization boomerang on the BJP? It seems the unprecedented hardships faced by average people may make it tough the party in the forthcoming assembly elections in five states.

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tories of devastation and deaths, caused by Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s decision to demonetise ₹500 and ₹1,000 currency notes, are pouring in from all over India. In a country where 97% of all transactions (by volume) are done in cash, the summary demonetisation of 86.4% of its currency value was bound to create chaos. As I write, 70 deaths have already been reported. The entire informal economy that accounts for 94% of India’s workforce and 46% of its gross domestic product (GDP) has almost halted. The already distressed rural masses are aghast at their savings being reduced to worthless paper. Many of them have not even seen the inside of a bank. Long queues of people, clutching their hard-earned money, are seen in front of banks all over the country. The initial euphoria of the middle classes and Modi-philes also has melted away in the heat of this harsh reality.

The harshest comment, however, has come from Manmohan Singh, who has perhaps the best possible credentials in the country, as ex-governor of the Reserve Bank of India (RBI), ex-finance minister and ex-Prime Minister for two terms, to assess this Tughlaq-esque action. Describing the implementation of the demonetisation drive as “monumental mismanagement” and a case of “organised loot and legalised plunder,” he said in the Rajya Sabha that it would drag down the country’s GDP by 2 percentage points. He is not alone; a host of economists, experts and think tanks revised their growth outlook for India downwards, some of them lowering it to a mere 0.5% for the six-month period ending 31 March 2017. Modi, however, would not budge and instead called all those who questioned this calami-

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tous move as anti-nationals, reminding us of Samuel Johnson’s famous adage: “Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel.”

No one has any doubt about the real motivation behind such outlandish bravado. It was meant to be a stratagem to bolster his image for the forthcoming elections in Uttar Pradesh, Punjab, Goa, and Manipur. All the pre-election promises remain undelivered, and most of his actions, including the so-called surgical strike, have flopped; people, bored by the empty verbiage and hyperboles, needed some dramatic action. The opposition parties were sure to remind people during the elections about Modi’s 2014 poll promise to get them ₹15 lakh each from the black money stashed in the Swiss Banks within 100 days of his being elected. This demonetisation was certainly meant to show that the government is determined to take courageous action to cleanse the economy. Alas, it has boomeranged on the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) badly. The unprecedented hardship it caused people has surely paved the way to the BJP’s Waterloo in the forthcoming assembly elections in some crucial states. This, despite its success in reducing the cash stacks of the opposition parties to trash, and thereby weakening them.

COUNTERFEIT ECONOMICS Modi claimed that demonetisation was done to attack black money and corruption, neutralise fake currency, and curb terror money. By now, many economists have competently exposed the fakery of these claims. As the data on raids reveal, the cash component of the disproportionate assets, inclusive of jewellery (counted as cash), has been just 5%. As such, the demonetisa-

tion has had an impact, if at all, on a minuscule percentage of illicit money. This small cash is held by the rich only as lubricant for the big machine that produces and reproduces black money. Black money is generated in overseas operations through under-/over-invoicing (businessmen), rentier operations (politicians, police, bureaucrats), and various means of hiding income (realtors, private hospitals, education emperors). There are many ways to convert black money to white, ranging from small-timers (many charity institutions that are only on paper indulge in these scandals) to the big fish who route black money through tax havens to India as foreign direct investments. These channels of production and reproduction of black money are not affected by the demonetisation of currency.

Fake money, if its incidence is alarming enough, may be curbed by demonetisation. However, as per the report of the Kolkata-based Indian Statistical Institute (ISI), it is only ₹400 crore or just 0.002% of the total currency value in circulation, not enough to threaten the economy. The ISI report never suggested demonetisation as a measure to counter counterfeit notes. If counterfeit currency was the concern of the government, the new currency being printed to substitute the demonetised ones should have had better security features. According to the RBI’s admission, the new ₹2,000 notes are being released without any additional security features.

The “terror money” argument is absolutely untenable.

If terrorists have a way of sourcing cash, they will always

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SPECIAL FEATURE

INDIA TOWARDS CASHLESS OR LESS CASH ECONOMY BY : Siddharth Singh

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HESE ARE CASHLESS days in India.

Soon after the Union Government withdrew high-denomination notes in early November, the debate on India moving towards a cashless economy—or more plausibly, a less- cash economy—has gathered steam. In the days immediately after the decision, many urban residents switched to digital payments online due to sheer necessity, as notes of Rs 100 and less suddenly became scarce. ‘Scarcity’, however, is the wrong word to describe what happened. The Rs100 note has over the last 15 years been edged out by Rs 500 and Rs 1,000 notes, so when the latter were withdrawn, it resulted in a shock of sorts. Are these just the pangs of a transition to a cashless economy? Or is this a far-fetched goal in a country where cash transactions still account for most business undertaken? In the interim period, both answers could be correct. But one thing is more or less certain: the Government and a large number of Indians will shift to the digital domain if they get the right ecosystem for carrying out electronic transactions. l

have ways to deal with new currencies too. Then, there is the additional cost of printing new notes, estimated to be in the range of ₹15,000–₹18,000 crore, as well as the aggregate losses due to disruption to the economy, which are to be borne until the situation stabilises.

‘SWACHH BHARAT’ Modi rhetorically associated the demonetisation decision with his Swachh Bharat campaign, knowing full well that little has come out of that very campaign. If he had given half the amount of money spent on just advertising the campaign to the Dalits who actually do the sanitation work needed to keep the country clean, much could have been accomplished. He claims to be freeing India of corruption and dirty money. One of the reasons for his being voted to power was the spate of corruption scandals that took place when the

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United Progressive Alliance (UPA) II was in power, which he had effectively exploited promising the country transparent and “minimal government with maximum governance.” Halfway through his tenure, the sources of big-ticket corruption appear to be thriving more than ever.

The political parties, the fountainheads of corruption, still stay opaque and out of the purview of the right to information (RTI) net. The names of 648 traitors given in the “Panama list” are yet to be divulged. His government has written off ₹1.14 lakh crore in corporate loans owed to banks in the name of non-performing assets (NPAs). The NPAs of the public sector banks have crossed ₹11 lakh crore, but there is no action whatsoever against the corporate thugs. The direct tax arrears of corporate billionaires hover over ₹5 lakh crore, but Modi never spoke against this. The tax exemptions to them during the last

decade exceed ₹40 lakh crore, the annual rate of which during Modi’s regime has crossed ₹6 lakh crore, as against ₹5 lakh crore during the UPA rule. Modi as such has been hugely supportive of corporate corruption, the real generator of black money.

Even the implementation of the demonetisation is suspected to be engulfed in corruption. The dramatised secrecy of the decision is for public consumption; it was known to the inner circle of the BJP, comprising politicians, bureaucrats and businessmen. It could be clearly seen from the spurt in bank deposits during the quarter ending 30 September 2016. The West Bengal unit of the BJP is reported to have deposited a total of ₹3 crore in its bank accounts in the hours before the announcement. A BJP leader posted pictures of wads of ₹2,000 notes much in advance of the demonetisation, and a digital payments company printed a full-page advertisement lauding the demonetisation move in a newspaper on the morning following the announcement at 8 pm on 8 November 2016. Actually, the demonetisation gave impetus to an entirely new business of converting demonetised currency notes for a commission. No wonder that there has not been a change in India’s rank by Transparency International, at 76 out of 168 countries, during Modi’s regime.

PROFESSIONAL INCOMPETENCE The demonetisation move has showed up India’s institutional character, which is ready to buckle before the powers that be. Leave aside Modi, it speaks badly of the calibre of the finance ministry mandarins, particularly RBI Governor Urjit Patel, who has not only failed to preserve the prestige of his office, but also earned the ignominy of having his professional incompetence exposed. It is unlikely that the monetary experts in the RBI could not have seen

the flawed economics of the decision, but they obviously fell before the emperor’s will. Demonetisation is no cure for corruption. However, it was tried out by rulers at various times in history, but never with the currency of the common people. The last time that it had taken place was when Morarji Desai had demonetised the ₹1,000 note in 1978, which was hardly seen or used by the common people. It constituted just 0.6% of the money in circulation then, as against the 86.4% of that today.

Modi, during his foreign visits, always brags about his achievement of the Jan-Dhan Yojana (JDY), which is just an extension of what the UPA called financial inclusion. He forced the banks to open accounts, just to score a Guinness world record. Most bank branches are moreover bunched in tier 1 and tier 2 cities and vast rural areas are scantily served. It is a delusion to dream of a cashless economy in India in such a situation. It would be utterly ignorant to think that such a decision could endear the BJP to the people.

Needless to say, that the lower strata, the Dalits and Adivasis, are the worst hit and they will never forgive the BJP for it. The BJP has variously tried to project through its hanumans that the demonetisation decision was as per the advice of B R Ambedkar. It is a white lie. But, even if Ambedkar had said such a thing in some context, can it override the actual sufferings of the masses or alter the nature of reality? It would have been better if the BJP had heeded Ambedkar’s more pertinent advice that the bigger-than-life leaders in politics are the biggest danger to democracy. l (This article first appeared in EPW & Anand Teltumbde is a writer and civil rights activist with the Committee for the Protection of Democratic Rights, Mumbai.)

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"MODI DIDN'T THINK OF THE POOR" BY : Vaibhav Sharma

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n November 8, as the world waited anxiously to find out whether Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump would be the next president of the United States, in India, a radical economic decision was announced

by Prime Minister Narendra Modi.

It has been described by Lawrence Summers, the former US treasury secretary, writing in the Financial Times, as "the most sweeping change in currency policy that has occurred anywhere in the world in decades". The rationale for the decision, the government explained, was a war against unaccounted cash, known as "black money". The ban would counter "antinational and anti-social elements", Modi said, and combat the widespread use of counterfeit currency and illicit income.

Initially hailed as a masterstroke by many in India's upper and middle classes, it seemed that Modi, who campaigned in 2014 on an agenda of economic transformation, was finally delivering on his promise. It has proved to be anything but, however, as it quickly became clear that the policy was poorly thought out and its execution chaotic.At the time of the announcement, only a fraction of the replacement notes had been printed. Moreover, the new notes were smaller in size than the old currency, which meant that the approximately 220,000 cash machines across the country would have to be modified. l

DESIRE

Where Adversity

Ascends Aspirations BY : S.R. Shaw

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here are many special characteristics that make North-East India natural. It is an ideal place for growing unique, exotic and specialty plants.

Small subsistence farming is the lifeline. 82 per cent of the population depends on agriculture as a livelihood. A variety of climate zones with plenty of fresh spring water create an environment conducive to growing a wide variety of crops. Besides being botanically diverse the region is also ethnically diverse and culturally rich. The area is pristine with fresh rivers and clean air.

Much of the land is untouched by pesticides and chemical fertilizers.

The social world of small farmers, which includes women, in North-East is often subsumed within the dominant discourse of security and conflict. Land and natural resources shape the everyday relations in various ethnic conflict areas. Yet, the lives of subsistence farmers, where

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a sizable number of them are women headed households, do not feature in the discussions about the future and development of North-East. They constitute one of the most vulnerable groups who bear the brunt of the social, political and the economic transformation that is unfolding in the region. The agriculture is becoming an increasingly unviable practice due to the realities of land alienation, starvation, and debt.

In Nagaland and Assam, the daily interaction between buyers from Assam and subsistence jhum cultivators from Nagaland, who bring their produce at the weekly markets along the foothills, the official and contested border between the states of Assam and Nagaland has always been a salient feature.

Irrespective of the ecological and demographic distinctions between the Brahmaputra valley and the hills of Nagaland, there is an increasing clarity on how the state

plans to reorganize the agricultural sector across North-East in the near future. While the state in the valley had always extracted revenue from agriculturalists, the marginal farmers in the hills were exempted from paying agricultural taxes to the hill states. However, the increasing pressure to generate revenue independently of the grants provided by the central government, has pushed hill states in North-East to come up with policies that look at the farmer as a source of revenue and an agent of agricultural modernization. This requires, among other things, transferring to cash crop production and the privatization of land. Here, one has to exercise caution not to pigeonhole the experiences of marginal and subsistence cultivators as a onedimensional story of tilling the land.

Anthropologist James Ferguson argues that agriculture is only one of the many things people do with land. Explaining this rationale, Ferguson points out that how small and marginal farmers in South Africa who are giving up farming since it has increasingly become an unviable

The experiences of women farmers, who trade in the weekly markets, show how the vulnerable and the poor in society are invisible in the dominant narrative of community rights and guarantees.

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occupation, continue to nurse the desire to own and have access to land. Therefore, the ongoing global transformation of agriculture calls our attention to address the larger politics of land distribution, ownership, and land as an important distributive resource.

The experiences of women farmers, who trade in the weekly markets, show how the vulnerable and the poor in society are invisible in the dominant narrative of community rights and guarantees. Furthermore, these vulnerable social groups will be further marginalized, as constitutional rights and guarantees for citizens, are solely interpreted through an archaic understanding of customary laws that reinforce class and gender hierarchies.

This is especially true in hill states like Nagaland, where under Article 371(A), women’s rights over inheritance and ownership of land and participation in traditional decision-making forums remain deplorable. Across rural NorthEast, households engaged in subsistence agriculture improvise to generate income from the land because it is impossible to sustain the household solely from farming. During the lean season, many households along the Assam-Nagaland border lease out their land to neighbors and itinerant groups, who would otherwise be denied access to forests and community land.

The monetary transactions for such arrangements are meager and are supplemented with other activities. Communities in NE, particularly women folk have a rich tradition of foraging for wild herbs, yams, mushrooms, and plants. They barter or sell them in the neighborhood and the weekly markets. This practice has been disrupted in several places as large tracts of community lands and the common reserves have been bought by corporations and private individuals for commercial ventures like mining, educational institutions, plantations, and for setting up factories. Nature in North-East as that which has to be exploited and used as vehicle to transport the remote, primitive, and backward region of North-East, while culture is categorized in the realm of the exotic tribal who sits in the weekly market detached from the social and political world.l

TECH WORLD

ROBOT ECONOMY

clerk inside activate any of the pumps outside. Selfserve pumps didn’t catch on until the 1970s, when pump-makers added automation that let customers pay at the pump, and over the next 30 years, stations across the nation installed these task-specific robots and fired attendants. By the 2000s, the gas attendant job had all but disappeared. (Two states, New Jersey and Oregon, protect full-service gas by law.)

ROARING IN USA BY : Akul Batra

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ext time you stop for gas at a self-serve pump, say hello to the robot in front of you. Its life story can tell you a lot about the robot economy roaring toward us like an EF5 tornado on the prairie. Yeah, your automated gas pump killed a lot of jobs over the years, but its biography might give you hope that the coming wave of automation driven by artificial intelligence (AI) will turn out better for almost all of us than a lot of people seem to think. The first crude version of an automated gas-delivering robot appeared in 1964 at a station in Westminster, Colorado. Short Stop convenience store owner John Roscoe bought an electric box that let a

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That’s hundreds of thousands of jobs vaporized—there are now 168,000 gas stations in the U.S. The loss of those jobs was undoubtedly devastating for the individuals who had them, but the broader impact has been pretty positive for the rest of us. As has happened throughout the history of automation, some jobs got destroyed by automated gas pumps, but new and often better jobs were created.

Attendants went away, but to make the sophisticated pumps, companies like Wayne Fueling Systems in Texas, Bennett Pump Co. in Michigan and

IT IS THE START UNEMPLOYMENT LINE

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ruck driver is the most common job in the world—3.5 million of them in the U.S. alone. Over the summer, the Dutch government ran a successful test of driverless trucks crossing Europe. Uber recently paid $680 million to buy Otto, a startup working on auto-drive trucks and founded by former Google AI specialists. Consulting company McKinsey has predicted that within eight years, one-third of all trucks on the road will drive themselves. In maybe 15 years, truck driver will, like gas station attendant, be an anachronism. Uber invested in Otto not just to operate trucks but because Uber wants to run fleets of self-driving cars. In September, it began testing such a fleet in Pittsburgh. Canada’s postal service wants to send drones instead of vans to deliver rural mail. Millions of driver jobs of all kinds could swirl down AI’s drain before Trump finishes his four-year term. Within maybe five years, AI will be better than humans at diagnosing medical images and better than legal assistants at researching case law, Surya Ganguli, a leading AI scientist at Stanford University, tells me. Hawkins says we will eventually make machines that are great mathematicians. l

A generation of gas station attendants got smoked, but the automation sent some clear signals that relying on such unskilled jobs isn’t a great career plan.

Gilbarco Veeder-Root in North Carolina hired software coders, engineers, sales staff and project managers. Station owners took their extra profits and turned their stations into mini-marts, which needed clerks, and built more gas stations, which needed more pumps from Wayne, Bennett or Gilbarco, and those companies then hired more people.

Consumers spent less money on gas because they weren’t paying for someone else to pump it. That left them more money for iPhones or fish tacos ordered on Seamless, creating more new kinds of employment. A generation of gas station attendants got smoked, but the automation sent some clear signals that relying on such unskilled jobs isn’t a great career plan. Those signals led to more parents encouraging their kids to go to college. In 1970, 14 percent of men held four-year college degrees, and 8 percent of women did. By 2015, that was up to 32 percent of men and women. So over time, we took hundreds of thousands of people out of the pool of those who might want a gas station attendant job and pushed them up, toward the professional job market, adding a lot of value to society and -their wallets. While technology is partly responsible for years of middle-class wage stagnation, it has mostly hurt the less educated and helped the more educated.

Economists have shown time and again that automation helps overall standards of living rise, literacy rates improve, average life span lengthen and crime rates fall. After waves of automation—the Industrial Revolution, mechanization, computerization—we’re way better off in almost every way. As Matt Ridley details in his book The Rational Optimist, in 1900, the average American spent $76 out of every $100 on food, clothing and shelter; today, he or she spends $37. To buy a Model T in 1908 took about 4,700 hours of work; today, the average person has to work about 1,000 hours to buy a car that’s a thousand times better than a Model T. The United Nations estimates that poverty was reduced more in the past 50 years than in the previous 500. If progress has been less kind to the lower end of the workforce, it still helps that segment live better than before, at least by making products more affordable and better at the same time.l

63 JANUARY-2017

ENTERTAINMENT

VIDYA BALAN

ANGER AND THE AN ACTRESS BY : Renuka Bisht

I

n an interview with Vidya Balan , Anshul Chaturvedi explored how she is getting to be the poster girl of Bollywood – in the literal sense where Kahaani and Kahaani 2 posters only have her, the Bobby Jasoos poster has multiple versions of her, and she is the central figure in the film posters for Ishqiya and Dirty Picture. Her answers emphasize this evolution is not happenstance. She said, “Khoon khaulta tha mera.” At male actors getting paid more even when she had the bigger role or at endlessly waiting for them on the set. “So I said to myself, why should I cower down? Why should I accept the second position?” She talks about being driven by anger. She admits to feeling anger even when people call her Mrs Siddharth Roy Kapur or how they sometimes invite him and say let Vidya know. She questions why she is asked again and again when she is going to have a child. Meanwhile married male actors are never asked, “When are you impregnating your wife?” The gendering of anger is fascinating.

To begin with, across the world the girl child continues to be socialized to suppress anger. This socialization is reinforced by stereotypes such as the shrill wife and the feminazi, all coded as destabilizing familial and social harmony. l

AAMIR KHAN

I’M MR PASSIONATE, NOT MR PERFECTIONIST

H

is meticulous choice of films, attention to details, has given him the title of Mr Perfectionist but superstar Aamir Khan feels it is not a correct name for him and says he should rather be called Mr Passionate. Aamir, 51, says he never feels the burden of being called a perfectionist as he does not believe in the tag. l

64 JANUARY-2017

RUTH NEGGA

I'M TERRITORIAL OVER MY IDENTITY

JHANVI KAPOOR

NEW GOLDEN GIRL OF BOLLYWOOD

I

rish-Ethiopian actress Ruth Negga said she is protective of her identity as its been 'hijacked' it over the years. The 'Preacher' star was born in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia to an Irish mother and Ethiopian father, moving to Ireland, when political violence broke out when she was four. Ruth said she feels passionately about her dual identity, especially as others like to try and pigeonhole her."People have always made assumptions about me. I become very territorial about my identity because it's been hijacked by so many people, with their own projections," Ruth said.l

S

he's all of 19, but already one of the most talked about star kids in Bollywood and guess that has a lot to do with her impeccable fashion sense and good looks, which she seems to have inherited from her Greek Goddess mother, Sridevi. The young lady became the talk of the town recently when she attended fashion designer Manish Malhotra's 50th birthday bash along with her beautiful mother and pretty sister Khushi Kapoor. Jhanvi, who's all set to debut in a Karan Johar production wore a Sonakshi Raaj short golden dress along with golden pumps.Her little sister, Khushi matched up to Jhanvi's bling to perfection in a wrap Zhivago mini dress.l

HIMESH RESHAMMIYA

RUMOURED WITH SONIA

A

ctor-composer Himesh Reshammiya was snapped with his rumoured girlfriend Sonia Kapoor at superstar Salman Khan's birthday bash. Earlier this month, Himesh Reshammiya filed for divorce from his wife Komal. It was widely speculated that the reason behind Himesh seeking legal separation might be his affair with Sonia Kapoor. According to reports, Himesh and his wife Komal had been staying separately for quite some time. Rumour is that an extramarital affair might be the reason behind the Aap Kaa Surroor hitmaker seeking legal separation.l

65 JANUARY-2017

LAST WORD

Mari Marcel Thekaekara

FIGHTING SEXISM I grappled painfully with Germaine Greer’s The Female Eunuch in college and read The Women’s Room by Marilyn French without putting it down. They left me livid at the world in general, and men in particular.

I

was working as a flight attendant through the midsons from Giant Killers author, friend and mentor, David 1970s – at time when no-one had coined the term ‘sexCohen. ‘Use the NIMBY factor.’ Not In My Backyard. All your ual harassment’. When men in the workplace made anger and moral conviction won’t win you battles. lewd comments, we survived by ignoring their remarks An angry woman says: ‘Why should these young girls if they were sexually loaded, supposed ‘jokes’, and by go out after six? They are asking for trouble.’ We reply: ‘your telling them to f—- off if they were personal attacks. If you daughters, sisters, walk to the hospital for night duty. tried to fight issues like sexism you were told to grow up, Shouldn’t our roads be safe for them?’ Forget about argudeal with it and not to blow things out of proportion. ing that the girls should be able to walk into town for a cofThree decades later, when dealing with a sexual mofee if they want to. We are cultural aliens here. We cannot lestation case, I realized grimly that nothing I ever read or bring our western-educated baggage on board if we want wrote had prepared me for the reality on the ground. A 21to win gender battles. We are taking one small step at a year-old adivasi woman, Badichi (name changed), reported time, fighting merely for safety for these women. Fighting a sexual molestation by a forest against wife-bashing, domestic violence guard. Horrified, young women coland alcohol related abuse. leagues rushed to her aid, only to A feminist friend, Kamla Bhasin, Were people in the find the village wanted nothing to do once said wearily: ‘I’ve been fighting community really with it. A protest march was planned. dowry deaths and violence against turning their backs on The adivasi village refused to particwomen almost all of my life – 45 years or ipate. ‘She has had two kids, by two more. Abortion of female foetuses has an adivasi woman? different men. She gave her kid away. almost eliminated the girl child from They were not She is not a decent girl so why should Haryana and Punjab; dowry deaths connormally judgmental we fight this case?’ the community tinue unabated. But we must go on.’ about sexual mores. asked. The young women on our I remember how 30 years ago, I team were aghast. raged, raved and ranted when I heard Were people in the community that a drunken husband had kicked his really turning their backs on an adivasi woman? They were pregnant wife in the stomach, causing her to lose her baby. not normally judgmental about sexual mores. They were, I waved an article at the group of women and asked them however, outraged that the woman in question had given to form a vigilante team to beat up drunken men who enaway her baby to a non-tribal person. That went against aditered the village, as women in Nagaland had done, accordvasi tradition. ing to a newspaper report I had read. An old woman calmly Or were they being coerced by the forest department said to me: ‘You are very young. But don’t say such (silly) into backing out of the fight, because many of them dethings to our women. If a woman joins a mob to beat up pended on the department for employment and liveliher husband, how will she face him the next day? How will hood? A colleague who supported Badichi was thrashed life go on?’ by her drunken husband because forest department bosses And so we continue. Thirty years later. l asked him why he couldn’t keep his wife in line.

Talking to angry young women colleagues, I tried to (Mari is a writer based in Gudalur, in the Nilgiri hills of Tamil think coherently. How best could we move this forward?

Nadu. She writes on human rights issues with a focus on dalits, Think strategically, I advised. I remembered advocacy lesadivasis, women, children, the environment, and poverty. )

66 JANUARY-2017

COVER STORY

100% Natural Herbal Nutritional Food Supplement

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67

JANUARY-2017

COVER STORY

68 JANUARY-2017