Sonia Gandhi will have to accept that the era of supine partymen is over; the high command has been called to account. Only a split can save the Gandhi leadership
Sonia Gandhi’s consistency and determination are admirable. A firm believer in dynasty as a legitimising principle in politics, she first made her son the party vice-president in January 2013, thus indicating her intent, and in December 2017, despite a dismal performance in the 2014 general elections, anointed him as Congress president. This was accomplished with fulsome support from the rank and file, including veterans. For a while things seemed to be going well and the party, advised by the now defunct consultancy firm, Cambridge Analytica, won Karnataka, Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh in quick succession in 2018.
Matters went south only with Rahul Gandhi’s impulsive resignation from the post of party president after the resounding Lok Sabha defeat of 2019; his refusal to withdraw it despite the customary appeals; and Sonia Gandhi’s prolonged stay as interim president, with no resolution in sight. This forced 23 veterans, doubtless backed by many others, to demand a visible and effective leadership that is accessible to stalwarts and does not function by diktat delivered via a tiny caucus.
The Congress Working Committee (CWC) that met on August 24, 2020, to resolve matters revealed that the Gandhi family’s principal concern was to retain its grip over the party. The myth that Sonia Gandhi had “fought like a tigress” against Rajiv Gandhi’s becoming Prime Minister after the assassination of Indira Gandhi – stoically maintained by the spin doctors despite the fact that Rajiv Gandhi was already a Congress MP for three years before that fatal day – died with Sitaram Kesri’s ignoble exit via a bathroom. Similarly, the pretence that “power is poison” has ended with the averment that it is the elixir of political life.
Anand Sharma, deputy leader (Rajya Sabha), has explained how the total drift and lack of introspection after the 2019 defeat, Rahul Gandhi’s insistence that no one from the family should become president and Sonia Gandhi’s tenure as interim president ending on August 10, forced them to demand strategies for revival. Although it has never been stated publicly, Rahul Gandhi’s flight from Amethi, choice of Wayanad (Kerala) and total reliance on the Indian Union Muslim League to return to Parliament would have convinced the stalwarts that he cannot lead Congress out of the electoral wilderness. He cannot win from Wayanad again, or from Rae Bareli, if his mother withdraws from the arena.
At the CWC, as no one asked the Wayanad MP to return, Sonia Gandhi realised there was no time to lose in reinstating Rahul Gandhi at the helm. Her first moves, on August 27, indicated her resolve: Jairam Ramesh was appointed chief whip (Rajya Sabha), Gaurav Gogoi deputy leader and Ravneet Singh Bittu whip (Lok Sabha), and Ahmad Patel and KC Venugopal included in a committee that will decide Congress’s strategy in Parliament.
Then, one day before going abroad for a medical check-up, accompanied by the heir apparent, Sonia Gandhi announced a major reshuffle, tailored for Rahul Gandhi’s ascension. The dissident veterans were upstaged, at least for the present. The Central Election Authority (CEA) has been reconstituted to conduct the election of the party president. Headed by Madhusudan Mistry, its members include Rajesh Mishra, Krishna Byre Gowda, S Jothimani and Arvinder Singh Lovely (a letter writer).
While letter signatories Ghulam Nabi Azad, Anand Sharma, Mukul Wasnik and Jitin Prasada have been retained in the CWC, the demand for elections to this body, as opposed to the practice of nominating members, has been brushed aside. The 22-member CWC includes former Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, Rahul Gandhi, AK Antony, Ahmed Patel, Ambika Soni, and former Finance Minister P Chidambaram, who has been elevated from permanent invitee, a surprising move. The invitees include Digvijay Singh, Salman Khurshid, Jairam Ramesh, Pramod Tiwari and Chinta Mohan, all of whom will gladly rally behind Rahul Gandhi.
Jitin Prasada has also been given charge of party affairs in West Bengal and Andaman and Nicobar Islands, possibly in an attempt to woo back the disaffected cronies of Rahul Gandhi. However, Ghulam Nabi Azad and Mallikarjun Kharge have been removed as general secretaries and Randeep Surjewala (Karnataka), Jitendra Singh (Assam) and Tariq Anwar (Kerala and Lakshadweep) inducted. Others retained as general secretaries include Harish Rawat (Punjab), Priyanka Gandhi Vadra (Uttar Pradesh), Oommen Chandy (Andhra Pradesh), Ajay Maken (Rajasthan), KC Venugopal (organisation). That few office bearers have any electoral heft is not a factor in this round.
The Congress has long delegated authority to make appointments to the top leader. Sonia Gandhi is unlikely to relinquish this power at a time when the family is fighting for survival within the party. She announced a five-member special team to help her in day-to-day matters till the next session of the All India Congress Committee (AICC), to be held within six months. It includes AK Antony, Ahmed Patel, Ambika Soni, KC Venugopal, Randeep Surjewala and Mukul Wasnik.
Naturally, these moves have further dismayed the dissidents. Former minister Kapil Sibal lamented, “Nomination seems to be the rule and election is not even an exception.” The dissidents told the media that the changes made by the interim president “do not in any way” address the concerns listed in the August 7 letter and will not revive the party. In fact, many new persons joined their stock-taking meeting on September 12, 2020, which augurs ill for Sonia Gandhi’s authoritarian control of the party.
Observers note that the beneficiaries of this reshuffle include Rahul Gandhi loyalists such as Randeep Singh Surjewala, Ajay Maken and Jitendra Singh, amongst others, and the sole purpose is to smoothen the way for the Wayanad MP to become Congress president after Sonia Gandhi returns. But the fact that nothing has been done to address the ideological lopsidedness in favour of minorities, and the inability to attract leaders who can bring voters back to the grand old party, is weighing on the minds of many.
Checkmated by Sonia Gandhi’s absence, the dissidents have decided to focus on the Monsoon Session of Parliament to corner the government on topical issues and wait. In a sharp departure from Congress culture, they have not surrendered or diluted their stance on any issue, and have even augmented their strength. Sonia Gandhi will have to accept the fact that the era of supine partymen is over; the high command has been called to account: only a split can save the Gandhi leadership.
(The author is a senior journalist. Views are personal)
Its problems of infrastructure can be traced back to its sudden transformation into a major city and to the lack of attention paid to its planning
Karachi is Pakistan’s largest and the world’s sixth-largest city. It is the provincial capital of Sindh province. Known as Pakistan’s economic hub, it generates up to 65 per cent of the national revenue. It is also Pakistan’s major port city. It is a fact that only during disasters, such as the recent urban flooding, do most Karachiites realise that there is not one political or administrative authority in Karachi but many. The city Government, the Sindh Government, the federal Government and various local administrative bodies. The administrative structure of this mammoth metropolis is thus complex and multi-layered, with some absurd overlaps. Karachi is also Pakistan’s most ethnically diverse city. Even though this diversity continues to sustain the city’s metropolitan status, and its rather pragmatically formulated pluralistic culture, it can also make the city’s many political and administrative stakeholders pull their individual weights in opposite directions. This makes it almost impossible for them to strike any workable consensus.
This is reflective of the city’s segregated ethnic construct. Ever since the 1980s, various ethnic communities have ghettoised themselves in their areas of numerical influence. During times of ethnic tussles over the city’s resources, ethnic groups prefer to remain in their areas. However, since economic survival demands venturing out and interacting with other groups, bridges do emerge and communities return to interact with each other. No matter how pragmatic the nature of this interaction, it often results in the creation of an overarching culture of interaction and inclusiveness, only to recede once again during ethnic commotions.
Common economic interests are what drive this interaction, until one community begins to suspect the motives of the other. The suspected motive is usually about usurping more than one’s unsaid share of economic resources. But there are no such bridges between those who administer this city. Communication gaps remain and in case of emergencies, these cause uncoordinated, chaotic responses and futile finger-pointing. The city’s ethnic diversity works in a curious manner, generating an always-squabbling pluralism.
Most large cities, even in developed countries, face a plethora of administrative and infrastructural problems. But lessons and data from their historical evolution aid them to adjust and resolve these problems. But unlike most cities, Karachi did not evolve as a city, as such, but it imploded into existence. Twice.
The region that became Karachi has an obscure history till the 18th century. According to ancient Greek texts, the Greek commander Nearchus, who accompanied Alexander during his invasion of India in 326 BC, called the region “Krokola”, a place by the sea inhabited by a tiny community of “primitive people.” However, 16th century Turks and Arabs called it “Kaurashi.” But it does not appear on any map until Sindh’s Kalhora dynasty annexed it in 1759. It was “gifted” to Balochistan’s Khan of Kalat in 1767 before being annexed by Sindh’s Talpur dynasty in 1794. By all accounts, it was still a small fishing town with less than 10,000 inhabitants, mostly Sindhi and Baloch, who called it “Kolachi.”
The British invaded and occupied Karachi in the early 1840s and then annexed the rest of Sindh. They made Karachi and Sindh parts of the Bombay Presidency. The British rapidly developed Karachi’s port and infrastructure. This led to migrations from the rest of India. From a population of less than 15,000 during the time of the British takeover, it witnessed a manifold increase. By 1856, the population had jumped to 57,000.
Suddenly, within a matter of a few decades, the rugged fishing town of 15,000 people became a rapidly-emerging port city. By the 1930s, the British were calling Karachi the “Queen of the East” and praising its enterprising, tolerant and diverse character. The city’s sudden urban emergence and swift increase in population did create issues but the British introduced an effective model of city governance that continued to upgrade Karachi’s infrastructure. The city governance system eschewed politics based on religion or ethnicity and succeeded in managing the city’s resources in such a manner that major and minor stakeholders felt included. In 1936, Sindh was restored as a province and Karachi was made its capital. According to the 1941 census report, Karachi’s population then was 435,887. Over 50 per cent were Hindus, 40 per cent were Muslims, while the rest comprised Buddhists, Zoroastrians, Christians and Jews. Over 65 per cent spoke Sindhi.
In 1947, the city imploded into another form of existence, this time as a capital of Pakistan. Karachi’s demographics witnessed a dramatic shift when millions of Urdu-speaking Muslims (Mohajir) migrated to it. There was a 161 per cent increase in Karachi’s population. The infrastructure left behind by the British could not accommodate the massive increase, and began to crumble.
In 1958, the Ayub Khan Government chalked out a resettlement plan which was to be accommodated by an ambitious industrialisation project. New low-income housing schemes emerged but factories and businesses were slow to reach these areas and there was lack of transport. Pashtun and Punjabi migrants also began to arrive in droves. Slums began to sprout. Failure to effectively adjust the city’s infrastructure to accommodate these changes led to ad hoc arrangements. In 1965, Karachi witnessed its first ethnic riot. In 1970, it once again became the capital of Sindh. In 1972, it witnessed another round of ethnic riots. Unable to check the influx of more inner-Pakistan migrations to Karachi, and stall the mushrooming of slums, the ZA Bhutto Government, in 1975, devised a “Karachi Master Plan” to upgrade the city’s failing infrastructure. It planned to build new road networks and housing; construct transport terminals, warehousing, mass transit and so on. But the plan was not implemented after the 1977 coup of Zia-ul-Haq. This resulted in the growth of the informal sector and mafia that emerged to serve a growing population of a failing city. Across the 1980s and 1990s, Karachi witnessed brutal ethnic and sectarian violence. Ethnic communities and mafia fought running battles to gain access to the city’s dwindling resources. In 2000, the Musharraf dictatorship launched a Karachi Development Programme. But this plan departed from the “social democratic” tenor of the previous (unimplemented) plans and adopted “neo-liberal” ideas. This meant putting more money in extravagant building schemes and less on the city’s degrading infrastructure. For example, according to Hasan, whereas in the past slums became the source of clogging drains with sewage, in the last two decades, the same is being done by high income areas.
Construction of residential areas, both high and low income, on natural drainage routes also continues. Due to clogged drains, these natural routes now go through residential areas and roads, flooding them over and again. Rain run-offs have used these routes for thousands of years but builders fail to take this into account by building on them without any adequate drainage facilities. Ancient Greek texts quote Nearchus as saying “a great storm was raging” when his army reached Krokola, and the storm waters were emptying into the sea. Of course, at the time, there was nothing coming in the way of these waters.
(Courtesy: Dawn)
In the rush to clear pending Bills, the Govt has shrunk debate space but the Opp is working on a joint strategy to make itself count
Given the deliberative nature of democracy, the “sanitised” monsoon session of Parliament is expected to rob all the colour and fire of debate and mostly go about the tepid business of pushing necessary legislation. Yet it is an experiment in the new normal with both Houses conducting sessions at different time slots and shifts and sharing their chambers and galleries for purposes of social distancing. The Parliament will be going paperless with members given login IDs to access the relevant portals of documents, there will be audio-visual exchanges between them given the spread out nature of proceedings and they will be partitioned by fibreglass barriers. Of course, e-participation was once considered to ensure vibrancy but turns out the Government’s video-conferencing platform can only accommodate 600 people at one time. Besides, senior parliamentarians, who literally command the floor with their speeches, will be absent as most of them have preferred to stay away for health reasons. The limitations of a truncated timeline and the shadow of the pandemic would undoubtedly help the Government wiggle past the discomfort of facing questions on its crisis management, the economic slump, GST compensation, the migrants’ exodus and the border standoff in Ladakh. As it is, it has structured a schedule favouring itself. Apparently, it wants to avoid a larger discussion on the Ladakh incursion, preferring to keep the negotiations with China backdoor, with Defence Minister Rajnath Singh making just a statement. Although the Government had suspended Question Hour initially, it buckled to Opposition pressure and has now allowed 30 minutes of it for only unstarred questions, thereby escaping the live grilling and the verbal duels that starred questions demand. Unstarred questions seem rather anodyne as the MPs need to submit them digitally to the presiding officer, who gets the written response from Ministers. This then would become a bland handout affair as cross-questions and counter-arguments actually show up the strength of logic of both the ruling party and the Opposition and help the citizenry judge for themselves. Apart from unstarred questions, up to 10 special mentions would also be taken up to bring matters of importance to the Government’s notice. The Government, lest it be accused of pushing through its agenda in a rush and in an autocratic manner, has provisioned for short-duration discussions and calling attention notices but without the latitude and depth of time, these too would be chaperoned exercises, more in the nature of convention followed than actually letting others to hold it to account. It’s not that a live Question Hour was impossible. It anyway has a structured format, with MPs required to submit a questionnaire 15 days in advance. So there could have been a staggered roster of Ministers and their officials to answer them. Besides, even the nature and tenor of questions are regulated by several rules before they are cleared and scheduled. The Trinamool Congress had argued that considering the Parliament’s overall working hours would remain the same and no private members’ Bill would be moved, a regular Question Hour was not difficult to factor in. The Question Hour is the only time that allows the Opposition equal standing and allows it to keep a check and balance on the executive. A legislator asks questions on behalf of the constituents who elect him and any democratically-elected Government is, therefore, duty-bound to respond. Without a healthy Question Hour, there will be no accountability. And if the pandemic continues its run till 2022, as experts are suggesting, then this democratic convention could become a casualty. Of course, safety is important but can’t live televised debates be possible in a digital India?
Of course, there’s the urgency of clearing legislation. Around 40 Bills are awaiting deliberation and passage by one or both Houses. Five of these are still being processed before parliamentary committees. And some of these are of sensitive nature, including the ones on DNA technology, social security and personal data protection. Of basic rights concerns, the Pension Fund Regulatory and Development Authority (Amendment) Bill 2020, Foreign Contribution (Regulation) Amendment Bill 2020, Assisted Reproductive Technology (Regulation) Bill 2020, Prohibition of Employment as Manual Scavengers and their Rehabilitation (Amendment) Bill and the Juvenile Justice (Care and Protection of Children) Amendment Bill need attention. The 11 ordinances that the Government promulgated during the lockdown, related to agricultural markets, insolvency proceedings and economic policy, are likely to be used as ammunition by the Opposition. It has already moved statutory resolutions against these. Farmers are unhappy about the corporatisation model implied in farm reforms and could set off a new pan-India stir and allied politics. In fact, the Opposition, which had in the past disrupted the Question Hour repeatedly, is now committed to making use of the limited time and is avidly working on a joint floor strategy to nail the Government. Congress president Sonia Gandhi, who recast her party on the eve of the session to work up a sense of urgency, has asked senior leaders to contact UPA allies and like-minded parties to put up a united fight against the Government, both inside and outside Parliament. Will the post-pandemic session be an adhesive for the Opposition that it desperately needs? Or will the Government sail past by heaving down with its executive powers?
But Jaishankar-Wang’s joint statement doesn’t mention the restoration of status quo on LAC as it existed in April or set timeframe for complete disengagement
India and China have formulated a five-point plan for speedy de-escalation and disengagement from the friction points at the tense Line of Actual Control (LAC) in Ladakh. The broad outline to diffuse the tension at the LAC was arrived at the meeting between External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar and his Chinese counterpart Wang Yi in Moscow on the sidelines of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) meet. But in the statements issued by both the countries, there was no mention of the restoration of the status quo on the LAC as it existed in April or set any timeframe for completing the disengagement and de-escalation.
Jaishankar expressed concern over amassing of the Chinese troops at the border while his counterpart Wang Yi claimed the Indian troops opened fire thereby worsening the situation at the border. The meeting between Jaishankar and Wang Yi lasted more than two hours. This was the first direct meeting between them since the stand-offs began in early May on the LAC. They had talked to each other on the phone two days after the bloody brawl in the Galwan valley on June 15 leaving 20 India Army personnel, including the commanding officer dead. Incidentally, this was the second political-level parleys at the ministerial level to break the four month long logjam.
Defence Minister Rajnath Singh held detailed discussions on the issue last week with his Chinese counterpart Wei Fenghe in Moscow. However, things did not improve on the ground with the Chinese on September seven opening fire at the LAC for the first time in the last 45 years. Though no breakthrough was expected in the latest round of talks between the two Foreign Ministers, the two sides exchanged views on the current hostilities at the LAC. The joint statement issued later said the two Ministers agreed that both sides should take guidance from the series of consensus of the leaders on developing India-China relations, including not allowing differences to become disputes.
Secondly, the two Foreign Ministers agreed that the current situation in the border areas is not in the interest of either side. They agreed therefore that the border troops of both sides should continue their dialogue, quickly disengage, maintain proper distance and ease tensions.
The third part of the plan saw the two Ministers agreeing that both sides shall abide by all the existing agreements and protocol on China-India boundary affairs, maintain peace, tranquility in the border areas and avoid any action that could escalate matters.
Fourthly, the two sides also agreed to continue to have dialogue and communication through the Special Representative mechanism on the India-China boundary question. They also agreed in this context that the Working Mechanism for Consultation and Coordination on India-China border affairs (WMCC), should also continue its meetings.
Lastly, the Ministers agreed that as the situation eases, the two sides should expedite work to conclude new Confidence Building Measures to maintain and enhance peace and tranquility in the border areas.
The consensus came days after a fresh confrontation between the Armies of the two countries on Monday in eastern Ladakh. It triggered a massive military build-up by both sides in almost all friction points along the LAC. Sources said the five-point agreement will guide the approach of the two countries in tackling the current border situation. The five-point agreement has not mentioned any timeline for disengagement and restoration of peace and tranquility.
The Indian delegation highlighted its strong concern over amassing of troops and military equipment by China along the LAC besides referring to “provocative behaviour” by Chinese Army personnel at numerous incidents of friction, Government sources said. They said the Chinese side could not provide a credible explanation for the troops buildup. The Indian side insisted that the immediate task is to ensure a comprehensive disengagement of troops in all the friction areas and that it is necessary to prevent any untoward incident in the future, the sources said.
A Press release issued by the Chinese Foreign Ministry in Beijing quoted Wang as having told Jaishankar that it is normal for both the countries to have differences but it is important to put them in proper context and take the guidance of the leaders. “Wang noted that it is normal for China and India to have differences as two neighbouring major countries. What is important is to put these differences in a proper context vis-a-vis bilateral relations,” the release said.
Wang stressed that as two large developing countries are emerging rapidly, what China and India need right now is cooperation, not confrontation; and mutual trust, not suspicion, the release added. “Whenever the situation gets difficult, it is all the more important to ensure the stability of the overall relationship and preserve mutual trust”,Wang said. “China-India relations have once again come to a crossroads. But as long as the two sides keep moving the relationship in the right direction, there will be no difficulty or challenge that can’t be overcome,” Wang added.
Government sources here said the Indian side clearly conveyed during the talks that it expected full adherence to all agreements on management of border areas and would not countenance any attempt to change the status quo unilaterally. It was also emphasised that the Indian troops had scrupulously followed all agreements and protocols pertaining to the management of the border areas.Jaishankar also conveyed to his Chinese counterpart that the recent incidents in eastern Ladakh inevitably impacted the development of the bilateral relationship. Therefore, the Indian leader told Wang that an urgent resolution of the current situation was in the interest of both the nations, sources said.
Buckling under US pressure, India banned cannabis while the former colonised our resources and began to sell their goods at huge profits. This bio-piracy must end
Should we hang Rhea Chakraborty for alleged “possession of 59 grams of marijuana (ganja)” in Shiva’s India? The noose may be a stairway to heaven sans the egregious indignation, torture and obloquy. Legally speaking, India’s Narcotic Drugs and Psychotropic Substances (NDPS) Act treats 1 kg or less of marijuana or ganja as a small quantity, pardonable after being fined. Rhea reportedly had 5.89 per cent of that limit and yet she is locked in prison during the COVID-19 lockdown, endangering her life.
Criminalisation of marijuana is a sin committed against our ethos, wisdom of our ancestors and heralds the complete colonisation of India’s mythology, culture and gods. Marijuana is one of the five sacred plants of our civilisation since Atharvaveda. It’s a healing plant, ritually associated with Lord Shiva but thanks to Lord Macaulay’s disciples, India has been weaponised against its own indigenous knowledge and traditions. Meanwhile developed countries, from Switzerland to Canada, have completely or partially decriminalised cannabis. Nevertheless Rhea becomes another sacrificial lamb in the “war against drugs.”
Would the drug enforcement agency then arrest millions of sadhus who possess and use cannabis as part of their worship of Shiva? Since eternity, Benaras has been Shiva’s city and bhang and marijuana have been a sacred part of its culture. The NDPS Act allows for seizure of properties where the “drugs” are used, so would the Government also seize the entire Kumbh Mela ground in Allahabad as year after year millions of Naga sadhus have openly consumed and stored marijuana (possibly more than 59 grams)? Meanwhile, NCB may also arrest thousands of dying cancer patients who are using cannabis-based medicines illegally in India.
Chasing the cannabis dollar
But our neighbours are neither irreverent nor sluggish. Pakistan, in a progressive move to boost its economy by $2 billion, has legalised industrial hemp and cannabis. Nepal MPs have appealed for its legalisation. Bhutan is already in a joint venture mapping out its marijuana genetic diversity and China is way ahead with a dedicated R&D department and thousands of acres under cultivation. The US cannabis industry has reported a 40 per cent jump in sales as by December 2020, the cannabis dollar wave may hit $15 billion in the US alone.
We must also revisit 1985, when the US government, led by the then President Ronald Reagan, held a gun to India’s head and said, “Ban it or we shoot.” Buckling under US pressure, India, Nepal and other countries had to forcefully ban cannabis and allow for appropriation of our seeds, biological heritage and culture. As compensation, India pleaded for the exclusion of bhang due to its religious significance. In 15 years, using the ban as cover, the US industrial empire brought itself up to speed, studied every aspect of the plant and began rampant commercialisation. Each part of the plant was genetically modified and as early as 1996, California, despite the international treaty, legalised medical marijuana. While India was still trying to deracinate cannabis from its culture, the “American East India Company” had successfully colonised our cannabis resources and began to sell their goods to India and the world at huge profit margins.
In 2020, market reports indicate that the global marijuana industry may touch $100 billion as more countries are opting for legalisation and exports. Israel and Germany are already importing millions worth of medical cannabis flower. But this is only the tip of our iceberg. Marijuana is a super industrial raw material with uses from sustainable clothing to bio-fuel.
And what is India doing about this opportunity? Almost nothing. Progressive states like Odisha and Uttarakhand have taken baby steps but the Central government is reticent without taking into account that India has a vast plant genetic resource (PGR) of the Cannabis Indica varieties. We are threatened by bio-piracy and contamination of our seeds and biological heritage. Illegal under drug control treaty, Marijuana PGR was not covered in the Convention of Biological Diversity. It gave bio-pirates and mafia agents a chance to travel across India and smuggle out our native wealth to private germplasm repositories across the world.
Billions of dollars are being made on R&D based on the sweat of our ancestors and not even a single repository of cannabis germplasm or seed exists in India. Bhang is legally sold in India, yet the private sector has not been allowed to research and conserve cannabis. With a frugal research budget, ICAR or CSIR can’t do this efficiently. So what can the cash-strapped Government do? Perhaps look again towards the US where private industry has soared. US States have filled up their treasuries with the cannabis dollar from Colorado to California. Developing countries like Pakistan, Uruguay, Peru and Thailand are not behind either.
India needs to deregulate hemp (fibrous non-intoxicating variety) for farmers and private industry. The Uttarakhand model should be expanded. Agricultural universities, biodiversity and NGOs should be encouraged to take up conservation, while Indian seed companies should be allowed to set up research stations and given permission to conserve and co-evolve new varieties of both hemp and marijuana. The next step? Create a custom export policy linking the farmers, processors and ports to meet international demand, which is growing every day. This will ensure the cannabis dollar starts coming to India.
India can not only meet the world’s cannabis and hemp demands but also allow our universities and research institutions to tie up with foreign companies for “research and make-in-India” and get the awaited funding.
The full potential of cannabis is hard to gauge but experts believe that very soon marijuana will enter most parts of our economy. It has already been embraced by the pharmaceutical and cosmetic industry and once its full potential is realised, the cannabis dollar may be a trillion dollar high.
Shiva’s India
Marijuana is deeply embedded in our culture. The West has only recently discovered what our sages and healers have been saying for 5,000 years. We need to bestow sacredness on this plant again. We need to decriminalise personal possession like in many enlightened countries such as Portugal, Peru, Netherlands and so on. This will reduce addiction and illegal smuggling. The Government will also gain a huge revenue boost from it and our children will be saved from the mafia and drug trade. We need to go back to the pre-1985 policy for marijuana. Through legalisation, India can regulate the marijuana trade and provide employment in remote and eco-sensitive zones such as Himachal Pradesh, Uttarakhand, Northeast States and so on, boosting the incomes of their farmers, too.
It’s about time our cancer patients and other terminally ill people can receive the benefits of this miracle plant. The cannabis pharma industry can be developed along the lines of the opium pharma sector. The introduction of hemp will also bolster the textile sector and offer an alternative to the ecologically destructive King Cotton.
We need to cast out Anglo-Saxon prudence as America and Britain themselves have embraced marijuana for its sacredness and the cannabis dollar. Rhea and thousands of other people languish in our prisons for personal possessions. It’s about time justice is done and cannabis is decriminalised.
India needs to be safeguarding its traditions and not allow further corporatisation of its resources. Corporations are already patenting products created from PGR from India, when will we wake up and prevent this bio-piracy? Have we not learnt our lessons when neem, turmeric and basmati rice were being patented? Marijuana is a blessing of Shiva for the Indian sub-continent. The lists of benefits of this plant are endless and India’s biological diversity gives us the potential to become leaders, but we go on dishonouring cannabis and along with it our culture and religion.
(The author is Director, Policy and Outreach, National Seed Association of India)
A live LAC not only forces us to keep troops deployed along it but also compels the PLA to do the same despite the constraints of distance and internal disturbances that its soldiers already confront
On the occasion of World Suicide Prevention Day on September 11, a newspaper report informed us that a suicide is committed every four minutes within our borders. That is truly horrendous, overwhelming and tragic, even more so given how little attention is paid to this issue. However, the frenzy surrounding the alleged suicide by young and upcoming actor, Sushant Singh Rajput (SSR), is a spectacle we could have certainly done without. It reflects very poorly on us as a society and of the times we live in, especially in view of how blatantly this tragedy is being used to further personal agenda and selfish interests. Nobody, but nobody, connected in any manner to this unfortunate episode, comes out clean, least of all his family, his so-called friends and well-wishers, the politicians and their handmaidens, including of course, the police and investigative agencies.
For all practical purposes, the very foundations that go towards making of a just and caring society, like the rule of law and ethical conduct, have been thrown out of the window. In all of this, the worst offenders, and that too by a huge margin, of course, have been some media channels. Their unseemly behaviour and the utter lack of professionalism expected of them just cannot be excused. They have acted as if they are covering a one-day match, reporting every little twist and turn as they occur, with expert comments and all. Worst of all, the way they have pandered to those propagating the most outlandish of conspiracy theories, clearly motivated by rewards they see within their grasp, has been bizarre, to say the least.
Some would suggest that in their rush to garner TRP, some of the players in the mainstream media no longer know any better and have plumbed depths that were inconceivable just a decade ago. But to draw such a conclusion may be patently incorrect given the fact that some of the smartest minds on the planet are associated with these channels. Obviously, what is in short supply is the spine required to stand up for what is correct. It is not that those working in this field are the only ones short of moral courage; in fact this malaise has greatly impacted all our public institutions. But what distinguishes the fourth estate from the rest is that it is supposed to be the conscience keeper of the people and it is this quality that gives them the moral authority to hold the powers that be to account. Even those of us embodied with just modest intelligence fully understand that the media’s focus on the most inconsequential of issues at this critical juncture, when lives and livelihoods are at stake and unwanted conflict looms large on the horizon, is a diversionary tactic to keep public attention from these very issues. Suspicions that this is being done at the behest of the Government cannot be overlooked.
One understands that given the complex challenges it faces, the Government has no interest in being further buffeted by the onslaught of public sentiment. However, that is neither here nor there because such an abrogation of one’s duties allows governments, both at the Centre and States, to avoid accountability for their lacklustre performance and moribund attempts at controlling the pandemic and kickstarting the economy. It is now fairly obvious that the Union Government has concluded that our only hope of controlling the pandemic rests on how quickly an effective vaccine is developed and distributed. It believes that competing priorities of life versus livelihood no longer allow it the luxury of resorting to draconian lockdowns of the kind we had earlier. They are now leaving it to individuals to take protective measures such as social distancing, wearing of masks and hand-washing to prevent the spread of the virus and avoid getting infected. In that sense, the Government has raised the white flag and has resigned itself to whatever fate awaits us. Such a hands-off attitude obviously cannot bring our economy back on the rails or help us confront the challenges we face on our northern borders.
Fortunately, on the issue of the Chinese border tangle, we have finally taken some positive action, albeit rather late and still only incremental in nature. Yet, this was wholly unexpected by the Chinese and has clearly pushed them on to the backfoot and forcibly swung the spotlight directly on President Xi. Whichever way this confrontation goes from here, he cannot avoid being held directly responsible. In this context, while his survival may not be at stake at present, he will undoubtedly find the going very tough if this initiative, obviously engineered by him, is seen as unsuccessful. Clearly, available force levels suggest that the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) underestimated Indian resolve and just does not have the requisite troops to go in for a full- fledged offensive to throw out our troops from the dominating heights that they occupy or even throw us out of Ladakh, as some analysts envisage, at least not before the next campaigning season. The Foreign Minister’s meeting with his Chinese counterpart on the sidelines of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation meet, and their mutually-agreed statement, suggests that the Chinese are buying time and the statement is probably not worth the paper it is written on.
This is not to suggest that the PLA might not still attempt limited offensive action either against our positions in the Pangong Tso heights or elsewhere in an attempt to wrest the initiative for which we are undoubtedly fully prepared. The additional commitments that have been thrust on us should not be seen as detrimental to either our economic health or our military capabilities. Our military has been neglected for far too long and it has taken Chinese perfidy to open Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s eyes and force him to provide it the requisite funds to upgrade capabilities. It has also made clear that economic development and military capabilities are directly linked, and we cannot build up one at the cost of the other. Being the politician that he is, Modi will no doubt figure out ways in which the military can be funded to meet future threats without greatly impacting our economic development.
In this context, the manner in which the formal induction ceremony for the first Rafale Squadron had been organised, with the Defence Ministers of both countries being present, is instructive. In the normal course of events, the formal induction ceremony would be kept to the level of the Chief of Air Staff with representations from the concerned embassy in attendance, with the ceremony being kept low-key. This was the process followed when the Jaguars were inducted in 1979, the Mirages in 1985 and the Sukhois in 1995. However, we know that Narendra Modi has never shied away from taking political advantage from military endeavours to enhance his nationalistic credentials. It is indeed ironical that while in his previous tenure he used the military to enhance his political credibility, as the Balakot operation and surgical strikes show, without improving their lot, Modi now finds himself cornered with his future dependent on how the military performs in the days ahead.
Finally, a live LAC not only forces us to keep troops deployed along it but also compels the PLA to do the same despite the constraints of distance and internal disturbances that its troops already confront. In effect, China has converted Tibet into an unstable Kashmir for itself, with an intransigent neighbour to boot. More so, if we refuse to accept Chinese sovereignty over it and use the Tibetan diaspora to our advantage. It also gives us an opportunity to mirror Chinese actions that have resulted in a gradual loss of territory over the years and improve our defensive posture, thereby ensuring that as and when the LAC is finally delineated, we are not at a disadvantage. One is hopeful that Modi has the stamina to go the distance.
(The writer, a military veteran is a Consultant with the Observer Research Foundation and a Senior Visiting Fellow with The Peninsula Foundation)
The vicious legacy of the Civil War, which ended slavery but not ‘White Privilege’, is finally being dragged out into the open
To lose one parent...may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose both looks like carelessness,” wrote Oscar Wilde in his play, The Importance of Being Earnest, in 1895.
In somewhat the same spirit, British journalist Robert Fisk wrote last week: “At some point in the next two months, we are going to have to decide whether we absolve the American people if they re-elect Donald Trump.” Losing one election to Trump is unlucky; losing two in a row may be saying something about the national character.
Fisk has been the Middle East correspondent of various British newspapers since 1976, so he was not on familiar ground when he wrote that about the US in The Independent recently. On the other hand, he was expressing a mostly unspoken but widespread attitude among all Europeans except the extreme Right. Let me quote some more: “Like all snobs, we’ve taken the view that Trump did not really represent American values — any more than the Arab dictators reflect the views of their people. We’ve hoped and prayed and fooled ourselves into believing this was only a temporary autocracy, a deviation, an old and reliable friend suffering from a serious but ultimately curable mental disease. Yet...I wonder how we are going to react to Americans if the Trump years become the Trump era; or if his dreadful, ambitious family transform themselves into the Trump Caliphate....if the America we felt we could always ultimately rely on — once they’ve straightened out their little Trump misadventure — turns into the nation we can never trust?”
I grew up in Canada, and Canadians, like Mexicans, while fond enough of individual Americans, are by nature mistrustful of the American State. “It’s like sleeping with an elephant,” as Pierre Elliott Trudeau put it. If it just rolls over or wakes up cranky, you can get badly hurt.
Europeans have a different perspective. Fisk grew up in the UK, which, like France, remembers (most of the time) that it would have lost both World War-I and II without American help. Even if the US was years late to both world wars, it showed up both times in time to save the day. And US troops stayed in Western Europe to protect it from Soviet power throughout the Cold War. Most Eastern Europeans see the US as the instrument of their liberation from the Soviet Union, even though it did not in the end involve a hot war.
So there is still a deep well of respect and trust for the US in Europe. Fisk is probably right that a second Trump election victory would finally poison that well, which would be a pity. Another four years would also see him complete the destruction of the existing international order (without giving a single thought to a replacement). Trump is, as Michael Moore noted in 2016, “A wretched, ignorant, dangerous part-time clown and full-time sociopath.”
But would two terms of Trump mean the end of American democracy? Not necessarily. Not even likely. What Trump has triggered — and somebody was bound to trigger it around now, because every political niche, like every evolutionary niche, is always filled — is a final reckoning on the “race problem”, about 150 years after the American Civil War.
At the time of the Civil War (1861-65), Black Americans accounted for around 12 per cent of the total population and four-fifths of them were slaves. Whites accounted for almost all the rest; only a quarter-million were Native Americans. African-Americans still account for the same 12 per cent share of the population today, and many of them are still victims of the same White fear, exclusion and official violence that their ancestors experienced (mainly because they were slaves) 150 years ago. But since US immigration law changed in 1965, allowing people from the entire world to immigrate, the non-Hispanic White share of the population has dropped to only 60 per cent.
That share will to drop to 50 per cent by 2044, according to forecasts based on current birth rates and immigration trends. This has triggered a huge panic among the working-class White Americans, who often compete for the same jobs and used to depend on their whiteness as a competitive advantage. Trump is personally a racist, if his remarks and behaviour are any guide, but he is a cynical populist and would be exploiting White fears right now even if he really loved non-White Americans.
That is why the vicious legacy of the Civil War, which ended slavery but not “White Privilege”, is finally being dragged out into the open. Having been so exposed, it will probably finally be extinguished — but not necessarily in time to thwart Trump’s re-election. This is not the end of the US, nor the advent of a new Hitler either. It is a necessary evolution of American history, for which some people living elsewhere may also pay a substantial price.
(Gwynne Dyer’s new book is ‘Growing Pains: The Future of Democracy and Work.’)
For world economies to get back up on their feet after this crisis, globally coordinated monetary policies become very crucial. Trade barriers and geo-political rivalries must be done away with
The finance ministries and monetary authorities of some of the heavyweight nations, members of G20, were still battling the consequences of the 2008 economic downturn and other financial emergencies caused by its aftershocks — like the Euro financial crisis of 2010-2012 — when the Coronavirus pandemic hit the world. They were absorbing the lessons, assessing and understanding the impacts and side-effects, trying to redevelop strategies and policies to create a resilient financial sector but then their coordinates changed. Due to the unprecedented worldwide spread of the virus, all these designs have stopped dead in their tracks. Consequently, the focus of the G-20 countries has shifted from creating strong and buoyant but routine financial policies and mechanisms to firefight and embrace exceptional and extraordinary actions to fight the damage unleashed by this contagion.
Since no country is in this pandemic alone, and almost all of humanity is hit, it is essential for the world to act in coordination and cooperation, with the G-20 playing a major role here. These unusual and unexpected times require exceptional management and a strategy to create policies, interdependent monetary, fiscal and prudent strategies to sail through and be ever-ready for any future uncertainties. The economic aftermath will far outlive the health consequences, forcing governments to develop a strong anti-Covid long-term strategy, which should be more permanent in nature than just a knee-jerk reaction to the present situation, knowing that most of the world’s economies have been pushed back by more than a decade.
Nonetheless, some of the lessons of the last few decades can come in handy while creating new strategies, getting around earlier oversights, reducing the risk of financial uncertainties and enabling a steady transition into the “new normal” after ascertaining the damages caused by Covid-19. Therefore, taking into consideration the experiences of major countries, and the requirements of handling these enormous jolts, monetary policy strategies should be narrowed down. The G20 should step up and help develop these conceptual points and implement them as practical measures. A monetary policy, conventionally, has been used by governments around the world to control the money supply in the economy, which, in turn is used for adjusting inflation and stabilising prices. During an economic slowdown or recession, there is a substantial decline in consumer spending. The production levels dip due to general fall in demand and low capital expenditure by companies, unemployment increases as firms lay off the existing workforce to save costs and stop any fresh recruitments, and foreign investments dry up. So, there is an overall downturn in the economy in terms of new investments and consumption. Governments have to respond to this situation through policy changes that have the responsibility to reverse the prevalent situation.
So, a monetary policy, which is essentially counter-cyclical and expansionary in nature, helps in increasing the money supply and boosting the demand for products, building confidence and credibility and ensuring overall stability. However, for a monetary policy to work effectively, the central bank has to be independent of the elected Government. In addition, to the monetary policy, the fiscal policy — public expenditure and taxation — is another tool for governments to try and come out of an economic crisis. Immediate actions to face the shock: In the first stage, the interplay between demand and supply and any imbalance between them can lead to major concerns. Supply shocks, caused globally during this pandemic, due to production delays caused by major lockdowns worldwide and interruptions in supply chain and logistics, have a domino effect and initiate demand shocks, in turn leading to disruptions to cash flow and the entire payment cycle. Some companies unable to face this short-term disruption will face financial distress and as result, rise in unemployment is expected.
To help firms and people tide over this period, the central banks should infuse liquidity into the economy by creating policies to drive commercial banks to provide loans to businesses and households alike. Liquidity is needed for the securities market, too, which is feeling the heat due to the turn of events during the outbreak. Additional support by a slew of supplementary measures, like decline in interest rates and an extensive credit support for SMEs, should be provided by governments. The monetary policies should be well-supported by fiscal and prudential policies. Bad loans is one such area and governments should make provisions for such requirements in their budgets. To escape any financial meltdown, central banks should also step in to buy bonds and commercial paper. Since this pandemic is unprecedented and the extent of it is still unclear, international cooperation and the role of the G20 is very crucial here in providing liquidity to global economies. This could be achieved through swap arrangements under the auspices of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) as a dedicated alternative financing arrangement for Covid-19 emergency, especially for Emerging Market Economies (EMEs) and Least Developed Countries (LDCs). An action that is lacking or is wrong could spark a financial crisis that could have ramifications that are graver than the repercussions of the global financial crisis.
Long-term strategy for healing: The impact of the shocks faced by the global economies is expected to linger, both in the financial and other sectors of economies. There will be dampness in investment, consumption and growth due to still existing uncertainties, disparity in resource allocation due to unemployment and firm closures. Therefore, this second stage should focus on helping individuals, companies and countries resume normalcy in their operations and any hope for growth. This stage will be longer than the first stage. Here, fiscal policies take the lead from monetary policies and would take charge but with sustained support from monetary policies. Several measures like public expenditure, transfers, tax reliefs will play a major role in this stage. The monetary policy must play a supporting role at this stage by keeping a close watch on liquidity and keeping the interest rates low. Sole reliance on monetary policies can be untenable, unproductive and very serious, with one of the grave problems being excessive inflation. In addition, political frictions and trade barriers can create disruptions. One of the key roles of the G20 is to help resumption of economic integration among various countries. The G20 can help by overseeing the coordination by central banks of different countries, leading to stable exchange rates and reducing any potential currency wars.
The new normal: This third stage will be post the Covid crisis and a revamp of the regular policies followed for decades would require a hard rethink. All the policies of a country monetary, fiscal and prudential will have to work in full coordination. The role of the monetary policy should be two-pronged and should include macro-financial stability and not just price stability. The final step is to gradually de-leverage the global economy by reducing the debts and increasing the interest rates in a phased manner. This will be, by far, the most difficult step for any country. It should be an important and coordinated effort to increase the interest rates but at the same time ensuring that the liquidity does not dry up. Prudential policies, at the same time, should focus on capital and leverage ratios. Clear fiscal measures should slowly reduce public debt and reverse any excessive tax incentives. All these measures should be implemented, keeping a definite finger on the pulse of the nation’s economic condition.
Therefore, it can be inferred that for the global economies as a single unit, the following strategies can be crucial to help them revive economically from the Covid-19 pandemic. First, the monetary, fiscal and prudential policies must work in a coordinated manner with the aim to achieve financial stability. Second, at the global level, the indebtedness, which was already at the higher side before the commencement of the pandemic, would have further increased during stage two. So, financial instabilities will be here to stay for a long term and governments have to be very careful in reducing leverages in future, in stage three.
For global economies to get back up on their feet after this pandemic, internationally coordinated monetary policies become very crucial. Trade barriers, geo-political rivalries and hostilities must be done away with. Although economic instability appears similar around the world, it is, in reality, dissimilar, in nature due to different structural aspects of each nation. Therefore, the role of international bodies like the G20 becomes very important here.
(The writer is Associate Professor, Amity University, Noida)
Jaishankar meets Wang Yi, insists on peaceful solution. China may not want a war but will continue its pinpricks
Bonhomie visuals are always good but how much of them means anything at all? Will Russia, in the end, be able to make China see reason, the risks of alienating India over its border imperialism and the threats to a bipolar world order as it pushes more nations towards the US? At least it has nudged the two for another round of talks after Defence Minister Rajnath Singh’s meeting with his Chinese counterpart hardly translated to any action on the ground. Instead it further aggravated the situation in Ladakh where India and China are at daggers drawn. Has External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar, given the depth of his understanding of and experience with China as a career bureaucrat, convinced Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi about the cost of Siachenisation at the icy heights? Of course, he is very hopeful of diplomacy winning at the end of the day on the sidelines of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) meeting. He is betting big on linking the perceptional differences of the Line of Actual Control (LAC) and sorting them out as central to bilateral relations, primarily the economic one. He is hoping to drive home the point that China had emerged as one of India’s biggest trade partners and had deeply penetrated Indian markets only because there had been peace and quiet on the LAC for over 30 years. Disturbing it would mean hurting Chinese expansionism in business, a fact that has already been demonstrated with the Government banning the highest revenue-yielding Chinese apps. But as multiple rounds of talks at both the political and military level, including that of Singh’s, have failed so far, and the Chinese are adamant about not going back to their earlier positions in April, one wonders what will they extract for a breakthrough and what will India have to yield without both sides looking bad to their domestic audience. Besides, China won’t easily give up its newly-acquired spurs in the Pangong Tso region simply because it doesn’t want India to have a strategic edge in monitoring its designs in the Karakoram, by way of the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC), and Aksai Chin. And it knows that Indian troop capabilities and ramped up border infrastructure are a big deterrence for its covert incursions into and usurpation of our land. Besides, there is a history of trust deficit, where the Chinese have changed the rules of disengagement almost overnight. For example, the Chinese commander at Chushul had spoken to his Indian counterpart about following established protocol and ceasing movements at night. Yet, that very night, People’s Liberation Army (PLA) troops stealthily moved towards our posts. And with PLA directly taking orders from Chinese President Xi Jinping, nothing could have higher official sanction. So, there is a possibility that China would settle for pin-pricks, just under the escalatory threshold, and activate new flashpoints along our shared Himalayan border to stretch us out militarily. That it doesn’t want war stems from the understanding that it had sought a meeting with Singh in Moscow. But then given its current goodwill deficit and India’s acknowledged compliance with the “rule of law” globally, it perhaps wants to show that it is faultless about diplomatic behaviour, attempting negotiations but blaming India for failure. Or it could continue to hold positions but cease provocations for the time being.
Significantly, Jaishankar met his Russian counterpart Sergey Lavrov before his meetings with the Chinese side. And though officially Russia has described the Ladakh standoff as a matter of bilateral concern, it is trying to bring some sort of an alignment within the framework of the SCO. The Russia-India-China (RIC) trilateral axis can hold off the US and the West and maintain some sort of multi-polarity but Ladakh has jeopardised such prospects. Particularly for Russia, its failure would rob it of its counterweight potential in world politics. While India has used the RIC to emphasise the need for respecting each other’s sovereignty, China is pressuring Russia to scale down its defence supplies to India in view of the border escalation. Caught in the middle, Russia is delicately trying to assuage both without upsetting the autonomous bilateral relationship each nation has harboured with it. Besides, it also needs India to counterbalance itself against Chinese heft and its mega ambitions. Already, it is in China’s economic trap with Beijing investing heavily in Russian infrastructure and gas lines, the latter already funded for a 30-year supply. China is also working with Russia on a mutually beneficial East-West transport corridor to Europe and opening up the Arctic Circle route. So its hands are somewhat tied. Of course, it acknowledges India’s $5.4 billion S-400 deal but beyond defence and given India’s pro-US tilt, there has not been much growth in our non-defence trade. While we are aiming to scale up trade to $30 billion by 2025, bilateral trade between Russia and China is already at $110 billion. India has recently stepped up investment in the Russian far-east to strengthen its economic footprint. The maritime corridor between Chennai and Vladivostok should significantly boost bilateral trade and keep Russia invested in taking up our advocacy in current geo-strategic contexts. The challenge for India will be to not upset the US, which keeps on extending a mediatory hand. If Russia, with its intent compromised beyond a point, isn’t able to convince China to simmer down, then we would still need the US to fight our wanton neighbour.
With the closure of schools, India’s underprivileged students are missing out on mid-day meals and are on the verge of malnourishment
India’s Mid-Day Meal (MDM), a free school lunch programme, is one of the world’s largest anti-poverty initiatives. Despite its many shortfalls, it feeds 120 million of the country’s poorest schoolchildren and since its launch in 1995, has been a direct cause for increased enrollment of children in schools. In India, nearly 100 million children receive free lunch every school day. These meals reduce protein deficiency by 100 per cent, calorie deficiency by 30 per cent and iron deficiency by 10 per cent. School meals have additional benefits as they reduce household food expenditure, in turn alleviating poverty to a certain extent. They also act as safety nets, maintaining food consumption by children during a crisis, like a drought.
While MDMs saved the day for children during other crises, the outbreak has disrupted services due to prolonged closure of schools for a whopping 115 million children dependent on school lunches for their daily dietary requirements. Of these, 59.6 million are aged between five to 13 years and study in primary and upper primary classes.
When the pandemic hit, schools shut down, effectively ending access to MDMs, thereby leading to an increase in hunger, putting many of these children on the verge of malnourishment, according to a report published in the journal New Scientist. These meals, in remotely-located schools, were the only source for a wholesome meal for these children in a day. The unavailability of these MDMs, even temporarily, may have serious health implications for school-going children like acute malnourishment. Already, the scenario for children’s health in the country is dismal, as at least one in five children, under the age of five, is wasted, which means they have extremely low weight for their height, reflecting acute undernutrition, according to the Global Hunger Index 2018. Research shows that when schools are closed for long periods, such as during the lockdown, 30 per cent households struggle for food security. The Coronavirus is pushing already hungry communities over the edge as the March shutdown and call for social distancing has caused job losses for unskilled, daily wagers and caregivers. As the economy moves towards normalcy at glacial speed, gainful employment for this sector seems unlikely. This means an uncertain future, no income on an everyday basis and no food in their homes. In such a scenario, depriving them of school meals will prove catastrophic for the health of children. They do not get meals comprising different types of food groups to fulfil required dietary diversity. Since the shutdown of schools, children and their families have eaten lesser food. And that which they do eat is poor in nutrition, a phenomenon known as “lockdown hunger.” The absence of school meals even during holidays has been found to contribute to reduced academic performance by five per cent. According to the United Nations, 10,000 more young lives will be lost in a month as small farms are cut off from markets, villages are isolated from food and medical aid and MDMs are stopped for children.
Protecting children from the pandemic is necessary. However, proper care needs to continue for the most marginalised so that they can continue to participate in educational opportunities in the future. Children are unable to learn optimally when they are hungry, undernourished or unwell and this affects their future. Collective efforts across governments, organisations and communities need to be scaled up to ensure that due diligence will be shown towards providing nutrition to our children. We need to look towards creating a holistic solution which addresses the nutrition and health of kids through healthy meals and the introduction of well-trained social workers, counsellors and community involvement into the schooling system. Through the MACHAN (Mother And Child Health And Nutrition) programme, the poorest children have been prioritised for food and social security initiatives during the lockdown and the subsequent months in over 200 Anganwadi Centres, active in 24 districts across 15 States. A scientific approach was used towards identifying the beneficiaries, analysing wealth quintiles, school gender disparities and communities which typically suffer from food insecurity. The beneficiaries were provided dry rations, health support and linkages with Government schemes as a stop-gap measure. Thankfully, quite a few governments have already recognised the need to address the gaps in food provisioning in the absence of school meals and have facilitated transfer of the cash value of school lunches to families.
In several States, dry rations have been delivered to the homes of children and volunteers are working as a catalyst to ensure smooth distribution through the Public Distribution System. In many locations schools are acting as feeding centres providing take-home rations and intensifying pre-positioning (with a minimum buffer stock of two months) of essential commodities for the prevention and treatment of child wasting (e.g. ready to use supplemental foods, multiple micronutrient powders, and micronutrient supplements) and routine medicinal supplies. While continuing to support the nutrition requirement of the families along with Iron, Folic Acid and Calcium tablets, we must ensure that to reduce the gap between health and malnutrition for children, the solutions need to include the family’s economic stability which ensures a child’s food security. A steady economic source will also ensure that a child will be able to join school when the time arrives, and not be pushed into labour due to monetary hardships. Therefore, there are increased efforts for long-term rehabilitation of small farmers and migrant, daily wage-earning families for assured livelihood through skill building and entrepreneurship opportunities. They are being supported through provisions of seeds, manure and appropriate training to create an alternative income source. The focus is on empowering women migrant workers, too, by including them in poultry farming interventions. This enables them to become financially educated entrepreneurs who set up collectives to engage with external businesses. Until MDMs start again, we must collectively work towards innovative solutions to provide economic and nutrition security to marginalised families and only then will India be able to lessen the burden of malnourishment.
(The writer is a health specialist at Child Fund India)
India, like the rest of the world, is now confronted with a brewing pandemic of mental sickness. But we are almost as ill-equipped to handle this crisis as the outbreak
The battle against the Coronavirus, fought with social distancing and enforced isolation, is taking a psychological toll on many of us. India, like the rest of the world, is now confronted with another brewing pandemic of mental sickness. But we need to be aware that we are almost as ill-equipped to handle this crisis as we have proved to be in the handling of the outbreak. As the world commemorates the World Suicide Prevention Day today, it is imperative to understand mental health issues and their impact. Anne Harrington, the pre-eminent historian of neuroscience, says that the medicine and science related to the mind and brain have not come as far as we all would like to imagine or wish.
The death of ambitious actor Sushant Singh Rajput (SSR) in the middle of a pandemic that shattered his professional life and schedule, shook us all, making us realise that we need to work on inner fitness as much as we do on physical well-being. It is a well-know fact that the actor had been on medicines for his mental health issues. At the end of the Central Bureau of Investigations (CBI) probe, if a murder is excluded, then the next question that arises in our minds is: Who killed SSR, the depression or the medicines/drugs he was on? Many of the psychiatry medicines, the “mind fixers”, have side effects that may precipitate or aggravate the very symptoms/disease they are meant to relieve or cure.
For over half a century, renowned psychiatrist Thomas Szasz insisted that illness, in the modern, scientific sense, applies only to bodies, not to our minds, except as a metaphor. A body part or an organ, say, the heart, can be diseased, but to be heartsick or homesick, though real enough, is not to be medically, but only metaphorically, ill. Equally metaphorical, said Szasz, were such supposed mental illnesses as hysteria, obsessional neurosis, schizophrenia and depression. Unlike surgeons and oncologists, psychiatrists don’t have the privilege to peer into a microscope to see the biological cause of their patients’ suffering, which arose, they assumed, from the brain. They are stuck in the pre-modern past, dependent on the apparent mental condition as judged from the outward manifestations to devise diagnoses and treatments.
Challenges to the legitimacy of psychiatric diagnosis forced the profession to examine the fundamental question of what did and did not constitute mental illness. Homosexuality, for instance, had been considered a psychiatric disorder until the seventies, but now it’s accepted as a natural phenomenon in humans and animals. In the late 19th century, researchers explored the brain’s anatomy in an attempt to identify the origins of mental disorders. Such studies ultimately could find no specific anatomical location causing such disease. Researchers those days analysed autopsies of patients, who had suffered from mental illness, but the brain anatomists found that the mental illnesses left no trace in the solid tissue of the brain. Anne Harrington frames this outcome in the Cartesian terms of a mind-body dualism: “Brain anatomists had failed so miserably because they focussed on the brain at the expense of the mind.”
The pathological basis of almost all mental disorders remains as unknown today as it was in the 19th century. It’s unsurprising, given that the brain is one of the most complex objects in the universe. When you follow evolution of psychiatric disorders, you’ll see that in every disease, the treatment came first, often by accident, and the explanation never came at all. Psychiatrists prescribe a range of treatments, though none of them can be sure why any of these biological therapies actually work. Antipsychotic drugs are routinely prescribed to depressed people, and antidepressants to people with anxiety disorders. However, one needs to be aware that the medications have risks that outweigh the benefits for more patients than you probably realise. As antidepressants became more commonly prescribed for anxiety and obsessive compulsive disorder, the reports of patients’ suicidal thoughts and actions became more worrisome to physicians and family members.
In 1990, Harvard researchers reported that six patients had developed intense and violent suicidal preoccupations soon after starting to take fluoxetine (Prozac), which had been approved for the treatment of depression only two years earlier. The warning adds that patients and families must be advised of the risk, and that the patients taking antidepressants must be closely observed for worsening symptoms. The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) admitted in 2007 that the SSRI (selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors) group of drugs (common names used Prozac, Zoloft) can cause madness and that the drugs are very dangerous. “Families and caregivers of patients should be advised to look for the emergence of such symptoms on a day-to-day basis, since changes may be abrupt,” stated the report. Researchers in a few other studies also found evidence that individuals taking antidepressant medication seem to be at even higher risk of suicide than individuals whose depression is easing for other reasons. That controversy has not yet been completely resolved.
Psychiatry remains an empirical discipline, its practitioners as dependent on their (and their colleagues’) experience to figure out what will be effective or not. Sigmund Freud commented that there was an intimate connection between the story of the patient’s sufferings, his upbringing and social conditions, the severity and type of mental trauma undergone and the symptomatic manifestation of his/her illness. Freud also stated that case histories of a psychiatric patient should read like short stories without the serious stamp of science. In 1954, the FDA, for the first time, approved a drug as a treatment for a mental disorder: the antipsychotic chlorpromazine (marketed with the brand name Thorazine). The pharmaceutical industry vigorously promoted it as a biological solution to a chemical problem. By 1964, some 50 million prescriptions had been filled in the US. Next approved were the sedatives in 1955. Meprobamate was hailed as a “peace pill” and an “emotional aspirin.” Within a year, it was the best-selling drug in America, and by the close of the fifties, one in every three prescriptions written was for meprobamate. An alternative, Valium, was introduced in 1963 and became the most commonly prescribed drug in the US until 1982.
One of the first drugs to target depression was Elavil, introduced in 1961, which boosted available levels of norepinephrine, a neurotransmitter related to adrenaline. Then the focus shifted from norepinephrine to the neurotransmitter serotonin, and in 1988, Prozac appeared, soon followed by other SSRIs. In America, the final decade of the 20th century was declared the “Decade of the Brain.” But, in 2010, the National Institute of Mental Health reflected that the initiative hadn’t been able to move the needle in reducing suicide rates or overall recovery of mental illnesses. Anne Harrington calls for an end to triumphalist claims on treatment of mental illnesses and urges a willing acknowledgement of our limitations in diagnosing and treating the mentally diseased.
Having stated the above, it’s important to reiterate that although psychiatry is yet to find the pathogenesis and specific medicines of most mental illnesses, it’s useful to know that medical treatment is often beneficial even when pathogenesis remains unknown. This is very comparable to the case of peptic ulcers where we now know that stress doesn’t cause ulcers but it can exacerbate the symptoms and hence controlling stress can help a patient. This was seen in other pathological conditions where medical advice and treatment of a disease helped patients much before the discovery of the cause/pathogenesis; for example in AIDS, advisories of safe sex practice had helped even before the causative agent HIV was discovered and drugs developed.
The search for pathogenesis in psychiatry continues. Geneticists may one day shed light on the causes of schizophrenia, but in all likelihood, it would take years for therapies to be developed. Recent interest in the body’s microbiome has renewed scrutiny of gut bacteria; it’s possible that bacterial imbalance alters the body’s metabolism of dopamine and other molecules that may contribute to depression.
More importantly, we’d do better not to set so much store by the idea of a single key solution to mental sickness. It’s more useful to think in terms of cumulative advances in the field by being more knowledgeable about the range of treatments available and lifestyle recommended. Plus there have been other approaches such as cognitive-behavioural therapy, which was propounded in the seventies by psychiatrist Aaron Beck. He posited that depressed individuals habitually felt unworthy and helpless, and that their beliefs could be “unlearned” with training. An experiment in 1977 showed that cognitive behavioural therapy outperformed one of the leading antidepressants.
Words are another powerful tool in healing of the mind as they can alter, for better or worse, the chemical transmitters and circuits of our brain, just as drugs or electro-convulsive therapy can. We still don’t fully understand how this occurs. But we do know that all these treatments are given with a common purpose based on hope, a feeling that surely has its own therapeutic biology.
(The writer is an author and a doctor by profession)
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