It now depends on how the team Boris takes the UK forward, without any hangover of the Brussels bureaucracy. And as the UK started its long solitary journey on January 1, 2021, the future of the UK lies in the hands of the Britons only
The United Kingdom (UK) has finally left the European Union (EU). The latest Brexit withdrawal agreement is officially titled the “Agreement on the Withdrawal of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Island from the European Union and the European Atomic Energy Community”. This historic treaty was concluded between the EU, the European Atomic Energy Community (EAEC or Euratom) and the UK on January 24, 2020. The three main signatories of the agreement are: Boris Johnson, the Prime Minister of the UK, and Charles Michael and Ursula von der Leyen for the EU and the Euratom respectively.
It’s a divorce, a bitter one, after four and a half years of hard bargaining accompanied by high-level diplomatic and political negotiations since June 23, 2016. The UK officially left the trading bloc on January 31, 2020, despite the EU being the nearest and largest trading partner. What the UK claims is that decades of tension with the neighbouring EU member-nations has been resolved amicably with a deal. Johnson said, “Having taken back the control of our money, our borders, our laws and our waters by leaving the European Union by January 31, we now seize this moment to forge a fantastic relationship with our European neighbours, based on free trade and friendly cooperation”. Further he reiterated that “at the heart of this bill is one of the biggest free trade agreements in the world”.
Now only time will tell whether the implementation of the deal has been fruitful, and what the UK could achieve from the dissociation from the trading bloc.
For Johnson, signing the agreement after the lawmakers from across the board gave their approval on the trade pact is a historic moment. It’s a hard-fought 1,200 pages document which landed in London after receiving the signature of EU Commission chief Ursula von der Leyen in Brussels.
The lawmakers in the House of Commons voted 521-73 in favour of the agreement sealed between the UK and the EU a day before the Christmas eve.
However, the pro-Europeans have lamented the departure of the UK from the EU. For them, this divorce will be too expensive and it might herald a doom for the country. It is bringing an end to the seamless trade and decades of partnership with the EU. But the vast majority of the MPs in the British Parliament voice that despite having all the odds ahead the post-Brexit, the current deal is much better than a chaotic rupture from the EU.
The EU claims it has respected the major red lines between both the signatories of the agreement. The EU has finally avoided the hard border on the island of Ireland. Thus it has been able to preserve the four freedoms of its cherished “single market” which are free movement of goods, services, capital and people. The UK gets its zero tariffs, zero quota goods trade with the EU that finally prevents the European Court of Justice in settling any trade disputes. On fisheries, the EU has agreed to give up 25 per cent of its existing quotas in the UK waters for a transition period of five and a half years after which annual renegotiation will be initiated. However, the free movement of people will be hit the hardest ever.
How is Brexit affecting India’s relations with the UK as well as the EU? En route to realise the vision of “Global Britain”, the relationship between the UK and India is turning to be more complex. Considering the growing change in the traditional UK-India ties, then UK Prime Minister Theresa May had visited Delhi as early in November 2016. In 2016, the UK was the fifth largest export partner of India behind the US, the UAE, Hong Kong and China.
However, it accounted for only 3.3 per cent of total exports, valued at USD 8.66. Whereas India’s exports to other European countries were almost 16 per cent in the year the Brexit referendum took place. And in the import zone, the UK is not a potential country for Indian goods. But the pragmatists say that much more than the formal export-import relations, overall bond between the two nations depends on investment from both the countries into each other and the level of shared innovation and research projects carried out by various entities in either of the nations.
By the end of the big deal signed between the EU and the UK, the bigger concern is whether it will end the special relationship between the two. The provisions relating to trade in the historic deal are almost entirely devoted to goods. This further implies that the agreement has hardly left any space for services which, in fact, consists of more than 80 per cent of Britain’s economy. And interestingly, this is the fastest growing area of global exports.
The major concern is that the EU is yet to deliver an equivalence ruling for financial services regulation. Even if such regulation is declared, it can be withdrawn within a short span of 30 days notice period. The global and the European economic experts say that what is more urgently required is an EU data adequacy decision to allow free flow of data, which is there at the centre of cross-country or cross-border trade regimes across the globalised world.
Another sticky area which is missing in the deal is the mutual recognition of qualifications demanded for professional services in the EU member nations and the UK.
Besides, the new deal has nowhere mentioned anything related to foreign policy cooperation between the EU and the UK. It seems the current British Government has hardly paid any attention to building a more robust foreign policy dialogue with the EU in the near future. It has mentioned some provisions about domestic security but the experts feel that Britain will probably have not much leverage on its access to the EU security database and the Europol system of police like before. Once the deal is operationalised, the UK will lose its natural way of using the European Arrest Warrant (EAW). This arrest warrant is valid in all the member countries of the EU. Once such a warrant is issued, it demands other members to arrest and transfer a criminal or an offender to the issuing nation so that the detainee can be put on trial. Such a system of arrest helps fast-tracking the legal process and enhances mutual understanding and trust among the EU member countries. Now, of course, the UK will not have unhindered rights on this particular front.
Clearly, what comes into the immediate picture is the loss of free movement of the British citizens across the EU member nations. This deal will bring home some travel and work restrictions in the EU nations and the existing facilities in regard to health insurance and car insurance regime are likely to be over now.
Though some kinds of scientific and research collaborations will continue, what hits hard Britain is its immediate exclusion from the Galileo Satellite Positioning Network. Even the uncertainties hovering over the participation in the “Horizon Europe” research programme is bringing more disillusionment to the scientific fraternity of Britain. EU’s next funding programme for research and innovation will run from 2021 to 2027, covering a proposed budget of 100 billion Euros. The participation of the scientific community from Britain in this signature research project would have opened much more space for collaboration, innovation and trust building in future for an immediate help, on the event of any crisis situation.
Again, the British student community will also be dropped from the much-acclaimed student exchange programme, called Erasmus Programme (European Region Section Scheme for the Mobility of University Students). It is an EU-funded programme that organises student exchange across all the EU nations. Unlike the UK, Northern Island will have full access to the EU single market and to the Customs Union. Many experts opine that the customs and border checkpoints on the Irish Sea are going to become future bone of contention between Britain and Northern Ireland.
Are we all going to experience a “Global Britain”? Succinctly, Boris Johnson will find it too tough to craft a new role for Britain. It is better for him to sustain first as his country is badly affected by the Covid-19. Today Britain’s economy is seriously paralysed. He must try bringing the country’s economic powerhouse back on track. Besides, a pandemic, accompanied by a looming trade war between the US and China is disturbing the global power calculus. And it’s going to continue.
“The destiny of this great country now resides firmly in our hands,’’ Johnson said moments after the post-Brexit trade deal received the Royal Assent on December 31. It now depends on how the team Boris takes the UK forward. And as the UK started its long solitary journey on January 1, 2021, the future of the UK lies in the hands of the Britons.
(The writer is an expert on international affairs)
The new decade may witness a more advanced stage of digitisation of health sector infrastructure and services
The year 2020 was an extremely eventful one for the healthcare and pharma industry, and for humanity as well. The world faced the deadliest pandemic in recent history which killed 18,00,114 people worldwide and, it seems, will continue to wreak havoc in 2021, too. As we enter the new year, it is time to look at some of the trends that could dominate in terms of health technologies, organisations, businesses, regulatory authorities, products and services. One overarching theme that flows right through this whole transformative process is technology in the form of Artificial Intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML), big data, robotics and cloud computing, among others.
The new decade may be witness to a more advanced stage of digitisation of healthcare infrastructure and services. With the Government and private players, both ploughing in a substantial amount of money with the intention of wholesale overhauling of legacy Information Technology (IT) systems, hitherto chiefly used for recording payment of bills, the next decade will be marked by a greater number of services related to healthcare being delivered through advanced IT-based systems. While digital therapeutics could increasingly underpin remote diagnosis and treatment, digital solutions such as Electronic Health Records (EHRs) and Electronic Medical Records (EMRs) would become more routine. Purely in terms of infrastructure, a combination of traditional brick-and-mortar hospitals and a modular and scalable network of healthcare givers and community healthcare hubs will come into being. Traditional hospital buildings would more likely be fronted by unmanned reception facilities, face recognition systems and automated disease screening kiosks. There could even be robotic and autonomous healthcare assistants in hospitals, a phenomenon highly likely in developing countries which typically face a shortage of healthcare professionals. At the same time, remotely guided tele-ICUs and Smart ICUs would become more common. Although foldable and portable hospital units have already been developed in our country, they would become more sophisticated and advanced in the coming decade. Rising on the back of connected devices — remote monitoring devices and wearables, combined with applications and software — the resultant Internet of Medical Things (IoMT) would increasingly become the change agent in the coming decade. With wireless technologies such as Wi-Fi and Bluetooth establishing a 24X7 connection between patients (using stationary medical devices, implanted and wearable external ones) and practitioners and caregivers, virtual/remote care would visibly become more commonplace. Some of these devices such as blood pressure monitors, pulse oximeters and blood glucose monitors would also give a fillip to self-monitoring of health. Significantly, AI-based mental wellness medical-grade chatbots are already being used to help people with psychiatric disorders such as anxiety and stress. They would become more commonplace in the coming decade.
Also, with increasing digitisation and application of advanced analytics across the value chain including research and development (R&D), manufacturing, quality, supply chain and sales, the pharma industry is set to wear a new look. With the need for instant delivery of pharma products regardless of the location and time, companies would need to strengthen their supply chains and align with hospitals and care centres evolving a new integrated model for ePharma. The coming decade would see a large-scale shift to digital marketing tools such as videos, mobile marketing, digital content, social media, high impact visuals and live sessions on social media for pharma products and services. The new decade would also witness a greater collaboration and partnership between drug companies and health technology firms. This would be a natural development. Technologies such as AI, big data and ML would not only compress the time required between drug research and product development, including clinical trials, testing and so on, these would also be able to churn a staggering amount of data previously unheard of for R&D while also streamlining processes and reducing wastage. In the coming decade, drug R&D would also entail more of gene-based experimenting which would map how the genetic makeup of a person responds to a medicine. Related to the above, genomics in combination with AI and big data would be increasingly deployed for treatment of a patient accounting for the individual characteristics of a person in terms of variability in genes, environment and lifestyle. By the next decade, these technologies would have to a great extent found answers to several forms of cancer, neuro-degenerative diseases and so on. At the same time, as R&D in biotechnology and biopharma including vaccines, therapeutics and diagnostics get spurred by the unprecedented pandemics, AI and big data would also be used in epidemiological research and forecasting on a larger scale.
The coming decade will see the legalisation of medical marijuana by more countries in addition to the existing ones. Finally, taking lessons from the outbreak of Covid-19, given the commonality of the challenge posed to humanity, the pharma regulatory authorities across the world would increasingly evolve a more cooperative framework to deal with any future pandemic.
(The writer is president, Council for Healthcare and Pharma. The views expressed are personal.)
Both India and China must shed their nationalistic stand; else the border dispute would remain unresolved. A lot of confusion was caused by politics after the Galwan incident
Amid the COVID-19 pandemic and lockdown in India, the month of June brought a rude shock for the country when Chinese and Indian soldiers confronted each other in the disputed area on the Galwan river valley. There were casualties on both sides and a violation of decades of mutual faith and understanding between the countries on the use of firearms.
The Indian perspective: New Delhi maintains that the territorial dispute has been elevated by China by claiming that it was related to the latter’s sovereignty. Further, Beijing’s negative comments on the abrogation of Article 370 of the Indian Constitution and terming of the creation of Ladakh as a Union Territory as “illegal” have not gone down well with New Delhi. For India, these are all internal issues. It calls for fairness in understanding of the situation as India did not react when China reorganised the Tibetan provinces in 1965. India is also concerned about the repeated mention of Arunachal Pradesh as southern Tibet since 2005.
China has also expressed its criticism over India building a feeder line from Daulat Beg Oldi to Darbuk-Shyok in 2019. On the other hand, China has continued to build such feeder lines for the last 20 years. Hence, New Delhi does not understand the logic behind Chinese objections to India’s construction activities. It realises that China would not want the Indian Armed Forces to reach the Line of Actual Control (LAC) swiftly.
However, Beijing wants smooth movement of Chinese patrol personnel belonging to the People’s Liberation Army. If China continues with such a stance, India believes that the border negotiations would not be very fruitful.
Another area of contention is Chinese investment in the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) in the Gilgit-Baltistan area which is a sovereign territory of India and the subject of a long-running conflict between Pakistan and India. Beijing has retorted that these are commercial investments but India is not convinced because China has deployed over 36,000 security personnel in this area.
There is a feeling in New Delhi that China wants to teach a lesson to India because it has decided against joining the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) and instead focussed on improving US-India ties, especially amid the 2+2 dialogue process, foundational defence agreements, Quadrilateral Security Dialogue or QUAD and other such arrangements. Also, because of the asymmetry in power relations, China is showing its military might to India.
The Chinese perspective: While the June event was acknowledged as being unfortunate, the official position of the Chinese leadership was that the Indian side triggered the confrontation, which raised tensions. Unlike New Delhi, Beijing did not announce the casualties on its side in the Galwan clash because of the understanding that the situation would be blown out of proportion through the media.
The fundamental reason that the border continues to be a disputed matter between India and China is the asymmetry in the thinking that prevails on both sides. While India seeks to verify the LAC first and then engage in discussing veritable solutions, China’s thinking is top-down. It wishes to arrive at a mutual understanding first and then build a mutual political consensus to demarcate the LAC. Beijing fears that if it agrees to the Indian line of thinking, then China would lose a large part of the territory.
In China’s strategic calculations, India’s position is that of a rising power guided by its increasing national military strength. Despite this, for Beijing, India is not a competitor, especially after the US has become a strategic challenger for China. Further, its aims to maintain peaceful ties with New Delhi because its BRI network has to pass through India on land and in the Indian Ocean.
In fact, during a webinar conducted by the RAND Centre for Asia Pacific Policy, it was clear that the Chinese have refuted the prevailing narrative in the international western media that China was making use of the pandemic to become more assertive and aggressive.
A renewed vigour in the QUAD ties arising out of concerns of aggression by China has also been dismissed by Beijing, as each of the four countries, India, Australia, Japan and the US would not compromise their bilateral relations with it.
The warmth in Indo-US ties has also been downplayed by China as “superficial.” According to Chinese analysts, China does not want US involvement in the dispute.
While there is no need for China to make use of its military strength to prevail over India at any time through border skirmishes, yet with all clarity it subscribes to the notion that the size of the territory is immaterial but what holds immense value in its strategic calculations is honour, interest and fear.
The way forward: According to the Indian perspective, it is important to respect the previous agreements of 1993, 1996, 2005 and 2013 and to ensure disengagement and tranquillity along the border by ensuring the retreat of 60,000 troops in violation of the previous agreements.
There is a need to define and clarify the LAC to avoid such incidents again. It is necessary to have new Confidence Building Measures as was decided in the Xiamen BRICS meeting of 2017.
However, the Chinese think that under no circumstances should either side fire in the sky or at each other. They must reduce frontline deployment of troops unlike the current situation. There has to be an increased coordination of the soldiers at the frontier to avoid confrontation by giving them authority to resolve tensions. And finally, setting up a hotline between the two countries is pertinent as China has such a communication channel with the US, Russia and other countries.
Conclusion: India and China must take a step forward and shed their nationalistic stand; else the border dispute would remain unresolved. A lot of confusion was caused by politics after the Galwan incident. Therefore, it is important to understand the situation with a bipartisan view. Perhaps, they can take lessons from their own recent history, wherein they had demonstrated their maturity to resolve border disputes in exchange of peace and tranquility.
For instance, India peacefully resolved its border disputes with Bangladesh. China settled border disputes peacefully with Russia and Tajikistan, among other countries. While both India and China recognise the clarification of the LAC as a crucial step in dispute resolution, yet, since 2002, China has been unwilling to continue with exchange of maps with India. New Delhi says that this has been deliberately discontinued by China to occupy more land under the garb of ambiguity.
A major concern in India is trying to understand why China has been so strident in occupying disputed territory. India’s position that the Galwan incident was a premeditated action by the Chinese troops is the reason behind the comprehensive economic consequences on bilateral relations, for example, ban on some mobile applications, restrictions on infrastructure investments and so on.
This demonstrates an opposing official position and this has been at the core of non-resolution of disputes. As a reaction, India has increased its military capabilities to thwart Chinese incursions into its territory and must continue with its preparedness, especially with the change in guard of the Western Theatre Command (WTC) and appointment of General Zhang Xudong.
For India, it is important that the leadership does not give in to the pressures of vertical or horizontal escalation and continues with negotiations at the highest level. It must institutionalise the conflict resolution mechanism in order to settle the dispute once and for all, so that Galwan-like incidents do not recur. If China continues with its expansionist autocratic tendencies vis-à-vis India, New Delhi must go to the International Court of Justice for arbitration of land under dispute.
(The writer is CEO and Editorial Director, IMPRI. The views expressed are personal.)
Realising their inability to address and resolve real problems, politicians opt to present themselves as guardians of other things such as morality
A single theme runs across the movies of the British documentary film-maker, Adam Curtis. He has scripted and directed over a dozen documentaries for the BBC. They are mostly sardonic laments on how, ever since the late 1970s, governments have allowed their roles to recede in addressing various issues.
Curtis often tries to demonstrate that, in the wake of increasing economic, social and political complexities, governments that were once at the forefront of providing leadership and solutions, began to shrink from this responsibility. This happened particularly once the paradigm that they had established in this context began to shift, especially after the 1973 international oil crisis.
According to Curtis, governments began to outsource their responsibilities to large private operators such as banks and big businesses, which had furnished loans and services to them when they had been badly impacted by a series of economic downturns triggered by the crisis.
The role of the State continued to shrink. To Curtis, politicians and civil servants who were once expected to lead and plan their countries’ progress and well-being, simply became nothing more than props. However, from the mid-2000s, all eyes and expectations fell upon the Government again when major financial scandals and economic recessions exposed the dangers of overtly banking on the private sector to provide services which were once the domain and purpose of State institutions.
In the July 24, 2012 issue of The Guardian, the British philosopher Julian Baggini writes that governments struggled to come to terms with the economic and social fallout of the new recessions. What’s more, by then, the public had also lost their trust in the private sector. According to Baggini, unable or feeling helpless to address and resolve the problems, politicians began to look to present themselves as guardians of other things. If they were unable to prevent economic declines, they posed that they were now there to halt moral declines.
Baggini writes that the most fundamental problem with morality is that society still lacks a sense of where it comes from and who is qualified to make claims for it. There is great irony in politicians, a naturally amoral lot, speaking of morality. Baggini is right to observe that most people are highly sceptical of politicians in this regard. And it is also a fact that those whose domain it was to define and judge morality — i.e. priests, clerics, pandits and so on — lost their credibility after the rapid emergence of modernity.
Therefore, according to Baggini, “the danger is that we will either fall back on the old authorities or allow new moral leaders to emerge, who may well base their pronouncements on little more than populist sentiment.” This is exactly what has been happening in various countries since Baggini wrote his essay eight years ago. Unable to control economic declines, various heads of governments in Europe, South and North America and in South and East Asia, have increased their talk about morality, in an attempt to distract the attention of the polity from larger and less-abstract issues.
India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi promised economic miracles but, after being in power for almost six years, there has been more talk of temples, mosques, cows and the Hindutva identity than about the country’s faltering economy. US President Donald Trump, before his defeat in this year’s presidential election, continued to surround himself with animated evangelists, while completely failing to control the spread of Covid-19 and the devastating impact it has had on the country’s economy.
Governments in Brazil, the Philippines, Turkey, Pakistan, Hungary and Poland are adopting similar tactics. For example, in the face of the rising criticism on his regime’s chaotic style of governance and its mishandling of the economy, Pakistan’s Prime Minister Imran Khan constantly reminds everyone how he overcame the dangers of Westernisation and colonialism to become a man of impeccable morals. He says this after milking everything there was to about such ‘immoral’ Westernisation when he was a popular lifestyle liberal, before he turned 40 and “rediscovered his faith.” As Pakistan’s economy continues to nosedive and Opposition parties prepare to oust him after accusing him of incompetence, Khan can often be seen lecturing young people on what Islam is, what the poet-philosopher Iqbal meant, and how to understand Sufism though Turkish soap operas! To most sociologists, the idea of morality largely derives from and attracts the urban middle-classes. It is this class that is most receptive to Khan’s moral posturing. In a 1993 essay for the Wilson Quarterly, the American political scientist and sociologist Allan Wolfe writes that the “old middle class” that experienced some form of economic prosperity in the 1960s because of the developmental economics that was all the rage at the time, was less concerned with morality as an issue. After the 1973 oil crisis, when global economies began to cave in, a new middle class emerged. But this one had to struggle more than the previous one.
According to Wolfe, there are, therefore, two competing ideas of middle-class morality. Coming of age in uncertain times, the middle class that appeared from the turmoil of the 1970s tries to save moral capital rather than economic capital. Wolfe writes that it is a lot more conservative than the older middle class and wants morality to take centre stage in political and social discourses. But he also writes that this may include those who would rather exhibit morality in public while largely ignoring it in private, creating cognitive dissonance.
A report published in the April 2, 1977 issue of the now-defunct Pakistani eveninger Leader, quotes a young shopkeeper in Karachi who was taking part in the movement against the Zulfikar Ali Bhutto regime. He tells the reporter that “Bhutto (with his socialist policies) had usurped the dignity of the country’s middle classes.”
He also adds that the regime was doing this by spreading immorality and obscenity, even though he was interviewed while coming out from a cinema after enjoying a Hollywood film. Post-1970s generations of the urban middle classes in Pakistan, too, are examples of cognitive dissonance in this context.
But this is how they address it. Khan tries to rationalise this dissonance by suggesting that it is actually a mandate of the country’s majority faith that morality be highlighted in public and episodes of immorality be kept private and not spoken about.
This idea of middle-class morality thus absolves him of hypocrisy, comforting him to go on lecturing without having to bother about the irony attached to it and, without addressing more tangible issues, such as a depressed economy and political polarisation.
(Courtesy: Dawn)
No revival or turnaround can take place unless some people believe that it can happen. The WEF’s report is a nudge in the right direction
Finally the commentaries in the printed and the audio-visual media have begun to change from what it is today, to what a year it has been and how things will be in the year to come. Whereas nothing on the ground has substantially, changed (and indeed many territories of the world are still passing through very demanding times even for the Covid-era,) there is a growing realisation that hope is a no choice situation. Of the many basic truths of life, the biggest is that one gets tired even of despair. Fantasy is born in many seedbeds and one of them is excessive despair.
The global havoc caused by Covid-19 will someday be assessed. As of now, some are still trying to swim underwater and there are others trying to build a fortune by fishing in troubled waters. They are doing remarkably well as they understand that people pay and pay disproportionately high (if they can afford to) when the going gets tough. This cannot be an occasion for pontificating. One can only say: To each his own! Meanwhile, strained relationships in families, misconstruction and misunderstanding of otherwise simple activities are taking a toll. This is bound to happen if there is refraction of meaning through an overstrained mental capacity. Be that as it may, one of the brighter signs on the horizon is the strong mind of some people who still make sense through their sheer capacity of mindfulness. The first defining characteristic of mindfulness is recognition that one cannot project one’s insecurities on others. No matter how wonderful or strong the foundations of the relationship, no one can carry anybody else’s burden endlessly. Especially of those people who do not know how to control themselves.
This has nothing to do with the uniqueness of the Covid-era. It is a common human feeling which behavioural scientists have not offered many solutions to, perhaps because the indicators are weak and defences which people put up are formidable. Along with that comes the propensity to hold on to one’s frameworks of reference and plans. The reality perception of many can be weak. An amalgamation of such propensities creates a devastating cocktail.
Perhaps, the problem could be handled by an approach which travels from outside-in rather than inside-out. Plus, we need to grant that humans are complex beings and there is real difficulty in even understanding oneself, let alone others. Any attempt at “understanding” should be the end of a process rather than the beginning. The thought of travelling the route of understanding from outside-in creates a hierarchy of efforts which helps to make it progressively more effective and capable of handling increasingly more complex situations. Applying that frame of reference to the present situation of human reaction to the pandemic (and often intractable complexity and anxiety) leads to some possible conclusions. One of them is to start understanding possible responses of the economy to material conditions and then gradually move to inner layers.
Mercifully, that process seems to have begun. The World Economic Forum (WEF) has come out with a special edition of its Global Competitiveness Report: 2020. It ostensibly talks of how countries are performing on the road to recovery. It will be read and reread over its 90 plus pages as indeed it deserves.
In the limitations of space of this column it is not possible to provide a substantive critique. In India the partner to this effort was an institution which is not so widely-known and yet seems to have collaborated with competence. Territories from Albania to Uruguay have contributed through some institution and that itself is a commendable canvas. The partner institutes helped to administer “the executive opinion survey and advance the competitiveness agenda in their respective economies.” There were other institutions which pitched in with different competencies including what goes into composing the WEF’s index. From collecting the data to analysis and more, was a huge organisational exercise. That itself deserves high praise. More substantially, the contents while not being revolutionary, have helped to redefine the meaning of competitiveness in a changed world context. It was pleasing to see that disruption and resilience were treated in the same section. The concept of the pandemic has made its mark on the literature on economics. More efforts in the genre will surely come. For the present it may suffice to mention that it is a great attempt of analysis of the past decade and of future trends. The pleasing thing in the WEF’s report is the focus on the idea of the “road to recovery.” Obviously, for any meaningful journey, it must begin somewhere. No revival or turnaround can take place unless some people believe that it can happen. The WEF’s report is a nudge in the right direction. The scientific method would require some instruments of measurement. All that would involve a cushioning crucible of faith and belief in it being possible. This should be not only an interesting but a worthwhile journey.
(The writer is a well-known management consultant of international repute. The views expressed are personal)
Away from the raging storm in Delhi-NCR is a small group of women farmers from Satara who are managing a farmer producer company to help alleviate the woes of others like them
There is a tempest in India’s farmlands even as their tillers wage an extraordinary crusade for alleviating age-old distresses. Away from the bustle of the raging storm in the Delhi-National Capital Region is a small semi-literate group of women farmers in a remote hinterland who are assiduously managing a farmer producer company (FPC) to help alleviate the woes of other women growers in Satara.
The Mann Deshi Farmer Producer Company (MDFPC) plans to organise 12,000 small and marginal growers (70 per cent of whom are women) to secure better prices for their agricultural produce. The MDFPC was founded by Chetna Gala Sinha, the well-known social entrepreneur who is shepherding a rural revolution in western Maharashtra. The epicenter of this movement is Mhaswad, a large village that nestles in Satara district, on the placid banks of the Manganga River, some 300 km south-east of Mumbai. A 45-year-old woman farmer Vanita Pise is the co-founder of the MDFPC. However, she does not let the fact that she is semi-literate stop her from trying to better the lot of growers like her.
On account of adversities at home, Vanita couldn’t study beyond class IX. She married a farmer in Mhaswad when she was 17. Within a week she was required to take charge of the family poultry. She had never entered a poultry shed before. With persistence and tenacity, she was able to grasp the entire operations. When the poultry business had to be wound up after an outbreak of bird flu, she became a daily wage labourer. The failed business left the family with a debt of `55,000. It was at this time that Vanita came to know of Mann Deshi Bank and its work with rural women. She approached them and secured a loan for a buffalo. Luckily for Vanita, within a week the buffalo delivered a calf. The enterprising woman started selling the milk. With her earnings, she repaid the loan in six months. Vanita took another loan and bought a machine for manufacturing paper cups. Six months later 10 women of her village, impressed by Vanita’s success, approached her to help them set up similar units.
Sadly, their ventures could not succeed and she had to face a backlash from them. Undeterred by this setback, Vanita went back to the Mann Deshi, and took a course in financial management from their business school. Her experience in business, farming and grassroots community mobilisation came in handy when the group decided to set up the MDFPC. It was clear to Vanita that the future of small farmers lay in collectivising themselves. In this model, scattered small farms are systematically aggregated and provided centralised production, post-harvest and marketing services. This helps reduce the transaction costs of the farms for accessing the value chains and makes it easier for small farmers to access inputs, technology and the market.
The task was not easy. Vanita and her team faced several challenges, most of them related to the contentious issue of categorisation of women as farmers. In the registration process, they were told by the officials concerned that since women did not own farms they could not be classified as farmers. Similar hiccups continued but now that they have been able to make this venture a success. Vanita now wants to spread the word so that other women farmers like her can replicate her success. “Women have come a long way in several fields. They are also the mainstay of farming, doing much of the primary work in the fields. Ironically they cannot claim themselves to be farmers because they don’t own the land they till. It is in the name of their husbands. This makes a huge difference to their economic and social status and disqualifies them from several official development benefits,” avers Vanita.
The FPC was finally registered when the husbands certified that their wives were coparceners in their land parcels. Since then the MDFPC has been trying to make women farmers coparceners in their husband’s property and registering these women as members in the FPC. Vanita’s work as the team leader is very challenging. She has to oversee all major operations at the company. She has to supervise aggregation of the farm produce and the entire intermediate operations leading to despatch of consignments to the market. This includes sorting and grading and organising the logistics in the supply chain. Vanita explains her business model: “Our model of procurement is different and is done through weekly farm bazaars. Women farmers are contacted and we send vehicles to their homes to procure the agricultural produce. In addition to vegetables and grains we also deal in processing and manufacturing products including hard toffee, syrups, flaxseed chutneys, amla candy, pickles among other products.”
Though the FPC was formed two years ago, it has been operating informally for the last couple of years. The company deals in both perishables and non-perishables. About four truckloads of vegetables are sent to Mumbai daily and these are supplied to 5-star hotels and local retail outfits. The MDFPC’s formal journey began in September 2018 with onions, a highly uncertain and volatile crop. The reason for severe and frequent price shocks for onions is the production fluctuations and changes in the nature of demand. The FPC helped the farmers grow high quality onions so that they could get a better price. “We struggled a great deal but succeeded in our efforts albeit partially. Getting a market was difficult because Mhaswad is geographically not well-connected and we face several logistical impediments”, admits Vanita.
“Bringing women farmers on a common platform, designing appropriate crop patterns, aggregating and marketing the produce requires rigorous planning and execution. Some enterprising women have been able to sell their produce in Mumbai markets and got good value for it, too. But it is important to get more women farmers enrolled in the collective and make them align their crop pattern with the market”, says Vanita.
Meanwhile, the FPC inked an agreement with a leading company that wanted to export okra. The members were excited with the opportunity and 16 women joined the project. Unfortunately, things didn’t work as per the plans. The agreement, which was worded in technical English, stipulated that agronomists would visit the farmers and guide them on quality control, which actually didn’t happen. The FPC had to compensate the counter party because they couldn’t fulfil the contractual commitments. However, the women learnt an important lesson: When you want to survive and prosper despite the competition, you have to maintain quality and honour every term of the contract. In addition, timely delivery is important.
This learning came handy in a recent contract. The FPC received an order for 11,000 kg of pulses. The grain was to be supplied in 22,000 packets of 500 grams each. The FPC approached the women farmers in Latur, who grabbed the opportunity. In just eight days, the women coordinated the entire chain consisting of harvesting, aggregating, packaging and other logistics. At the last moment, the team found a bug in one of the cartons. They decided to recheck the entire consignment. It took the women an entire day but it made them understand the importance of quality and the credibility of the seller that hinges on the consignment.
“During this project, I found that many women farmers store pulses at home and not in warehouses because of the logistical and transport issues. These women would prefer warehouses if they could be assured of a loan against the pledge of warehouse receipts”, adds Vanita.
She believes that the best gift for farmers would be to initiate practical solutions for their basic problems. The Government has introduced three new farm laws. And there has been a mixed reaction to them. Vanita feels this can work only if proper infrastructure is created through warehouses, cold storages and other support systems. Farmers are capable of producing good quality crops if they get the required extension services, such as soil-testing, advisory in agro-economics and so on. Instead of grandiose reforms, the farmers need solutions to their fundamental problems. This cannot be done by NGOs alone. The Government will have to actively invest in it. It is also important to build the capacity of FPCs. In the Budget last year the Finance Minister had announced a plan to form 10,000 Farmer Producer Organisations (FPOs) over a period of five years. This will require extensive Government support.
(The writer is a well-known development professional of international repute. The views expressed are personal)
Third day’s play at Adelaide saw the scores of Indian batsmen reading like a telephone number: 4, 9, 2, 0, 4, 0, 8, 4, 0, 4, 1
At the end of the day, there was shock, disbelief, disappointment. Having had the better of the exchange with hosts Australia during the first couple of days of the Adelaide day-night Test, suddenly, it seemed, the knees of the Indian batting line-up crumbled and the entire team collapsed in the course of amassing a miniscule total of 36 runs. The team, however, did manage to create a dubious record: Its lowest ever total in Test matches. India started its quest to repeat the 2018-19 historic feat against Australia in their own backyard in the worst possible manner when the pace attack led by Josh Hazlewood demolished Indian batting within 15.2 overs on the third morning of the game. Before the game, there was a lot of hype around Indians’ handling of the Oz pace troika of Mitchell Starc, Pat Cummins and Josh Hazlewood under lights with Kookabura pink ball and, for the first two days, India was 53 runs ahead after the first essay but what happened on Saturday was completely unbelievable. No one could have imagined India getting out in just one session; that too from the position where it looked like dominating the proceedings. What India was supposed to do on the third day was to just keep the scoreboard ticking, bat the entire day and build on the lead. But before anything of that sort could happen, Australia showed why they are a team to fear. Hazlewood, who has often drawn comparisons with Aus legend Glenn McGrath for his on-the-spot bowling, produced the most iconic spell of modern times which forced Indian batsman to commit same mistakes repeatedly and it was quite visible on the scoreboard as well, with four of his five scalps coming in an identical fashion (caught behind by Tim Paine, in what looked like an action replay of the previous wicket). And to complement him, there was Pat Cummins, who got rid of two best batsmen — Virat Kohli and Cheteshwar Pujara — to set the stage. The way Indian batsmen failed to answer any of the questions posed by the Aussie bowlers will certainly create a moment of panic in the Indian dressing room as now they have to do it without skipper Virat Kohli, who is returning to India, and this makes the task a lot more complicated.
With Kohli not available for the rest of the series and an injured Shami ruled out, India has plenty of questions to answer and the biggest of all is who’ll take the initiative to not just lift the team’s mood but also show the intent to take on the feisty Kangaroos. A morale-boosting win of this stature will not only give Australians the belief to take revenge of the last series’ humiliation but will also cause more insecurity in the Indian team’s dressing room as there was not one particular batsman to be blamed but it was a collective failure, yet again. Save the 2018 series in Australia, the Indian team has had way too many batting collapses including six on the trot, starting with New Zealand early this year, when it suffered a 0-2 whitewash. The score of 36 is not something that is expected from the Indian batting line-up but when Indian skipper during the post-match conference urged people not to “make a mountain out of a molehill”, it certainly raised a lot of eyebrows. The last time India toured Oz and won the first series Down Under in 71 years, the Indian skipper himself rated it as “bigger than a World Cup win for us”. So now that the team has done something which no other team of the past did, why this attitude?
It looks like the reconciliation with dissenters is intended as a tradeoff for supporting Rahul as party president
The Congress, battered as it is as a non-performing party externally and a non-transformative one internally, stopped short of just teetering over the edge by agreeing to give a listen to senior dissenters who have been insisting on an “active and visible leadership”. Even the normally intransigent Rahul Gandhi, who has been steadfastly refusing to lead the party given the growing clamour for an elected chief and organisational overhaul, softened somewhat, saying that he was willing to “work for the party as all desire”. Read it against senior party spokesperson Randeep Singh Surjewala’s remark that “99.9 per cent” of the Congress men wanted Rahul as their leader. Also, considering the role of the party’s first family loyalist Kamal Nath in setting up a meeting with the dissenters, one wonders whether the meeting was indeed called to resolve issues or cut a deal. One where both sides agreed to hold elections to the Congress Working Committee (CWC), giving a semblance of inner party democracy, and then have the elected office-bearers endorse Rahul without him going through the process of voting; or even if an election is held for public perception, to ensure that Rahul is the unanimous choice of the elders. It is no secret that incumbent Congress chief Sonia Gandhi has been holding on to justify the continuity of the Gandhi legacy at the helm. In fact, it was her unwillingness to hand over the leadership to a non-Gandhian that had stagnated decision-making within the party for a long, long time, causing much damage to the party’s electoral prospects as it lost State after State and fortune-hunting members to the ruling BJP. In fact, after the party’s disastrous performance in Bihar, well-meaning party leaders took the decisive step of writing a letter and then publicising it enough to build a case for organisational elections, widening the representational berth from the grassroots, ending the status quo and coterie raj and rewarding talent. So the meeting among Sonia, Rahul, Priyanka Gandhi-Vadra and the so-called “rebels” was meant to assuage the latter — considering all 23 of them have political weight and have built the party. And, by promising to address their grievances, she may have bought their support for Rahul.
The rapprochement became necessary as the Gandhis realised that they were being seen as despots, where their one-time courtiers had even lost their right to constructive criticism. Worse, Sonia even sidelined them within the party. And for all the cadres’ hopes on Priyanka, who is much more active in field campaigns than Rahul, the party is still fumbling around in Uttar Pradesh. Without political manifestation, her best efforts have made the Congress a largely non-profit organisation. How much sense will hardselling the Gandhi tag make now? That, too, at a time when senior leaders like Jitin Prasada and Raj Babbar, who had signed the dissent note, had been dropped from the State election panels despite working the ground for years. Senior loyalist Salman Khurshid will lead the team, which also includes Nirmal Khatri and Naseeb Pathan, to formulate the Congress manifesto. While Khurshid has the experience, both Khatri and Pathan have been clearly rewarded for opposing the “dissenters” who had written to party president Sonia Gandhi. Even if a compromise is reached, there is a deliberateness with which the leadership is conveying a strict message — “Stand with us or else face doom.” And should Rahul be re-anointed in much the same manner as earlier, it will legitimise the family’s priorities as the party’s own, never mind the impact it has on electoral prospects. If last year was difficult, the run-up to 2022 will be even more difficult, given the BJP’s propaganda machinery and the RSS’ rapid network. Besides, Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath has scored quite a bit on perception value post-pandemic, UP being the first State to facilitate movement of migrants, providing jobs and now climbing the charts steadily on the ease of doing business. If he manages an economic recovery and meet public health challenges, the Congress would find it difficult to play issue-based politics and cannot draw on dynastic sustenance. The day the UP poll panels were set up, nine expelled party leaders wrote to Sonia and asked that the party “rise above the affinity for the family”. Rahul has to self-correct, rise above ego, value honest counsel and appear selfless in the interests of a larger political legacy.
The results of the three-phase local body elections in Kerala prove that the Congress-led UDF’s base has eroded significantly since the Lok Sabha polls
What’s common among the Great Indian Hornbill, Indian Laburnum Cassia that blooms on the Golden Shower Tree, Coconut Tree, Elephant and Pearlspot? These are all designated as the State bird, State flower, State tree, State animal and State fish, respectively, of Kerala. Another important common factor is that all of them are facing the threat of extinction due to widespread environmental destruction and massive deforestation.
Also, there has been no major industrialisation drive in the State as entrepreneurs think many a time before investing in the State. Kerala may be the only State in the country where industrialists and entrepreneurs commit suicide because of the indifferent attitude of the babus and their political masters. The State which claimed that it has eradicated the pandemic on the 100th day of the reporting of the first incident is all set to face the third wave, with Health Minister KK Shailaja asking the people to get ready for self-lockdown. This is the situation in the State a day after the results of the local body elections were announced.
One is reminded of a cartoon drawn by the legendary RK Laxman in the early 1980s when K Karunakaran was the Chief Minister. In a wordy duel between two Cabinet Ministers, one is seen shouting at the other: “I am more honest than you are. There are eight corruption charges against you and only six against me!”
The situation is no different in 2020 as the Ministers in the CPI(M)-led Government face charges of corruption, impropriety and scams. Legislative Assembly Speaker P Sreeramakrishnan had to convene a Press meet and threaten the Opposition that he would initiate legal action against all who linked his name to Swapna Suresh, the gold smuggling kingpin. Tourism Minister Kadakampally Surendran, who visited the UAE Consulate General’s office in Thiruvananthapuram, claims that he had called on the Consul General to discuss the traffic congestion problem in front of the consulate! Much has already been written about KT Jaleel, the Higher Education Minister and a former leader of the banned Students Islamic Movement of India (SIMI).
As I write this article, news channels flash the news that CM Raveendran, the additional private secretary to Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan, is being interrogated by the Enforcement Directorate officials about the disproportionate assets amassed by him and his wife during the past 20 years.
M Sivasankar, former principal secretary to the Chief Minister, has been sent to jail and he is yet to secure bail. Sivasankar, described as the ‘conscience keeper of the Chief Minister’, was arrested by the Customs and ED for his alleged links with Swapna Suresh, Sarit and Sandeep Nair, the kingpins of the gold smuggling racket through diplomatic channels. If the pattern of investigation by the Central agencies continues like this, Pinarayi too is likely to be grilled.
The Chief Minister has alleged that the Centre is misusing agencies like the ED and DRI to tarnish his Government’s “good image” by spreading falsehoods. Besides gold smuggling, the agencies are investigating hawala and reverse hawala transactions, the LIFE Mission kickbacks (one of the flagship programmes of the CPI(M)-led LDF Government) and K-Fone (Kerala Fibre Optic Network) project. Sadly, all the development schemes declared by the Government are enmeshed in scams and graft.
Kodiyeri Balakrishnan had to step down as the party’s secretary in-charge of Kerala following the arrest of his younger son Binish Kodiyeri by the ED and NCB on the charges of drug trafficking, hawala transactions and money laundering.
It is in this background that the local body polls were held in three phases. The CPI(M) was literally fighting with its back to the wall because at no point in its history, the party has faced so many corruption charges. The Chief Minister himself asked New Delhi to depute Central agencies to probe the allegations. He would not have expected the intensity of the probe and now everything associated with the CPI(M) is being seen as illegal by the State’s people. Sadly, the Uralunkal Labour Credit Cooperative Society (ULCCS) — an NGO launched in 1925 with the blessings of Malabar’s great social reformer Vaghbhatananda to uplift the lives of the suppressed and oppressed classes — was hijacked by the CPI(M) and degenerated as a money laundering centre for the party. The ED is grilling Raveendran, popularly known as Kerala’s super Chief Minister, for his alleged role in the illegal dealings of ULCCS.
A close scrutiny of the local body election results throws up some interesting facts. Though the CPI(M)-led LDF won five of the six municipal corporations, it would be able to wrest control in two only through horse trading or with the support of the Congress. The Grand Old Party, which had more than 30 seats in the Thiruvananthapuram Municipal Corporation, has been decimated and had to be content with just 10 seats.
In most of the seats won by the CPI(M), the BJP-led NDA is the runner-up. The BJP has failed to win any district panchayat as the LDF walked away with 10, leaving four for the UDF. The Congress and its allies won 45 of the 86 municipal councils while the LDF ended up with 35. The NDA retained the Palakkadu Municipal Council while it wrested the Pandhalam municipality from the CPI(M). Of the 941 village panchayats, the LDF won 514, the UDF 375 and the NDA 23. Twenty 20, a political entity promoted by entrepreneur Sabu M Jacob in 2015, not only retained its home turf of Kizhakkambalam but won three more village panchayats, shocking the established political parties.
But the talking point is the debacle suffered by the Congress-led UDF. The front which literally swept the Lok Sabha election in May 2019 by winning 19 of the 20 seats from the State has lost heavily in this election. “It is a reflection of the Congress high command’s weakness. It is true that Congress is at the crossroads. The UDF won the 2019 election because of the consolidation of the minority vote. You may want to remember the Assembly poll results in Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh in November 2018, which were all won by the Congress. The minorities in Kerala were under the impression that this would be replicated in the 2019 Lok Sabha elections but that turned out to be incorrect. So the minorities, especially the Christians, have started moving away from the Congress,” said P Rajan, a renowned political commentator and author. He said the Church, especially the bishops, doubt the soft approach of the Congress towards Islamic terrorism and Love Jihad.
Sreejith Panickar, a cyber security specialist who is a keen follower of the voting pattern in Kerala, says that the UDF’s base has been eroded over the past year. “In most places, the BJP has finished the runner-up. This is a change which signals the beginning of a political process that would result in the formation of a Third Alternative in Kerala. What has happened is that traditional UDF votes have gone to the NDA. The Congress should have a rethink on its approach towards Islamic extremist parties like the Welfare Party of India and SDPI. The secularism propagated by the Congress and the UDF should be thoroughly discussed as the Christian minorities in the State have started doubting their intentions. It’s for the national leadership of the Congress to initiate this discussion,” said Panickar. He also said that the Kerala Congress is facing a leadership crisis. “There is not a face other than Oommen Chandy’s who is acceptable to all sections but Chandy is plagued by ill health,” he added.
Though the BJP has reached a position from where it could play a crucial role in the State’s politics but Kerala’s wait for a Third alternative would not end soon. “It may materialise after the 2021 Assembly elections, provided the BJP plays its cards smartly,” said Rajan. Till then, Keralites may have to wait like the Great Indian Hornbill for the occasional rain with which it quenches its thirst.
PS: The BJP too is not free from factionalism and groupism. The truth is that there are no capable leaders in the party to guide it at this crucial hour. Moreover, the party has its own share of Saritha Nairs and Swapna Sureshs.
(The writer is a senior journalist. The views expressed are personal.)
Joe Biden has to prove his political and diplomatic skills to stand tall as the President of the world's sole superpower. A mere Trump bashing will only leave the high pedestal of the White House pulpit tarred and marred. Authenticity in leadership and political discourse in the aftermath of the Trumpism is what Biden will be tested and tried for
Joe Biden has emerged as the new President-elect in the electoral firmament of the United States and unarguably will take a star and striped avatar in the larger international ecosystem and the political sphere of the American homeland as the most powerful man on the Earth. We are not biding for a superhero but in a way we are referring to the tumult and the histrionics which accompany quintessential American Presidential elections. The million dollar question is that how deftly and quickly New Delhi can change its loyalties as a true blue ally from the heady days of President Donald Trump to a much sombre looking Joe Biden, whose creditworthiness is further augmented as he supported the Indo-US Nuclear deal in 2008 during the times of President George Bush Jr.
The remarkable was the incumbent President’s resentment, “I had such a big lead in all of these states late into election night, only to see the leads miraculously disappear as the days went by. Perhaps these leads will return as our legal proceedings move forward!” over losing Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and Philadelphia, after a surprising victory in Florida and North Carolina. As the voting lead of 37,000 votes from the electoral hustings and buntings from Pennsylvania began filtering in, the American Vice President-elect, Kamala Harris, gleefully posted on her Facebook wall, “Congratulations, Joe, we have done it, You are going to be the 46th President of the US.”
Biden has attempted to move away from the quintessential American Dream dreamt of by American historian John Truslow Adams as he reiterated in his acknowledgement speech in Delaware that the pained American soul would be reinstated during his term as the American President in January 2021 as he stressed upon the context of the United States of America requiring a re-building and reorientation in a larger international system which reeks with reformed multilateralism.
Joe Biden has been anointed as the 47th President-elect of the most powerful nation-state in the broader international system. Subsequently, the incumbent President, Donald Trump, declaring to cooperate with the transition process despite his misgivings about the “rigged elections,” the road to the White House looks clear for Biden and his Vice Presidential mate, Kamala Harris.
Antony Blinken is the new Secretary of State designate, who boasts of a diplomatic family background and has been a Deputy National Security Adviser to the President years back. He has gone on record with the official verbiage that the Joe Biden ameliorative measure to “Bring America Back” is all slated to repudiate the Trump myth and lore of “America First and Make America Great Again (MAGA).” This can serve as a stately change which the nomenclature which the context of US policy will receive under the suzerainty of Biden.
The seat of the Secretary of Defense might go to Michelle Foulrony, who, along with Antony Blinken, worked at a consultancy firm called West exec. Thus, the masterminds and experts of the previous democrat’s tenure under Presidents Bill Clinton and Barack Obama will be leveraged in the Biden cabinet. Also, still, one aspect is a certainty that the left-centre leaders of the order of Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren are not being considered for the Biden cabinet as the chiefly centrist orientation of the White House has been strengthened. To place the Biden Presidency in an early days’ dilemma, Bernie Sanders, who was also a strong candidate for the position of Democrat’s nomination for the Presidential elections, has railed against the President-elect’s nomination decisions.
Biden has decided to go stealthy on China, but the cooperative idiom rolled into the administration’s policy towards the taloned dragon appears to be inclined towards engagement than containment. Biden had declared in his informal acceptance speech that on the first day of his Presidency, he would reverse the Trumpism of a proposed withdrawal from the World Trade Organization, World Health Organization and the Paris Climate Change Pact, and strengthen the ties with European allies. Biden has emphasised that “American Global outreach” will receive a fillip, and the grandiloquent American retreat, as a policy, will witness a sea change. The President-elect has contended that the partnership between India and the United States would definitely sail through as one of the most valuable bilateral trysts in the times to come. Thus, India is all set to gain diplomatically but the human rights conundrum which is often associated with the Democratic posturing can cause a flutter as far as the internal security issues are concerned. The question that will soon be answered is whether we are going all the way back to the Bill Clinton and Barrack Obama days.
Biden has had to match up to the myriad challenges as have been posed by the legal challenges unleashed by the Republican machinery led by the grudgingly outgoing President. The US District Judge, Linda Parker, has contended that she rejects the legal challenge launched by President Trump as a matter of questioning the fungibility of the electoral process being part of the quintessential Democratic process and such imagined barbs at the system do not behove well for the tradition and the seat of power at the White House. President Trump has lost nearly all the legal challenges at the states while he gloats over the victory in Florida and Ohio. The decisions of the State assemblies are deemed to be full and replete with finality and the Democrats are raising the theme that outgoing President is not conceding defeat at the hustings and is attempting a situation, where in, he is not relinquishing power with grace and honour.
Anyway, it seems to be the fact that India soon needs to mend its ways and Prime Minister Narendra Modi needs to initiate quick bridge-building with Biden. Maybe, Modi would be well placed to activate the phalanx of diplomatists to the Capitol Hill and the White House in a full throttled PR exercise which they had done so diligently during the Trump era. The manner in which success was achieved at the Nuclear Supplier Groups and the momentum generated during the global debate to usher in a new definition of terrorism at the United Nations need to be replicated with the utmost zeal as India is partnering with the United States to solve the “troubles” of the twilight zone that Afghanistan is since the initiation of the great game two in South and Central Asia.
The advent of Biden augurs as advantageous to the larger international system, still a forecasted soft policy vis a vis the recalcitrant People’s Republic of China tethered on the brink of being labelled as a rogue state. Biden has ounces of political and diplomatic quantum to prove as the American President and a mere Trump bashing will only leave the high pedestal of the White House pulpit tarred and marred. Authenticity in leadership and political discourse in the aftermath of the Trumpism is what Biden will be tested and tried for!
(The writer teaches at International Relations and International Organisations, IIPA, New Delhi)
Article 24 of the New Security Bill has given impetus to already fierce debate, within France and outside, on its relations with Islam and Muslims, particularly after the brutal beheading of French schoolteacher Samuel Paty, who was accused of committing the sin of showing to his students the Charlie Hebdo’s 2012 cartoons depicting Prophet Muhammad
The New Security Bill (NSB) proposed and passed by the Lower House of the French Parliament is creating a big controversy across the country. In totality the Bill has 32 articles dealing with a broad range of issues such as road security to drones to how municipal police are to be organised. Out of all, the Article 24 which is included in Chapter 4 of the NSB is drawing maximum controversy from across the world starting from rights groups to UN Human Rights agencies. Article 24 of the new Bill would now prevent people to publish images of police officers in action.
This has moved thousands to the street demanding its immediate repeal. And people say this violates basic freedoms guaranteed under the French Constitution. The NSB has started a long debate on secularism or what in French language called “laicite”.
The UN Human Rights head, Michelle Bachelet, called on the French Government to withdraw the new law, particularly Article 24 which may curb freedom to share images identifying police. She says the law should be discussed by the French people and the Article 24 should be withdrawn.
In response to this, the Emmanuel Macron administration stated that it would rewrite that article that curbs rights to circulate images of police officers.
If we unearth the background to the NSB, we can easily say it has emerged after the brutal murder of French schoolteacher Samuel Paty on October 16, 2020, in a suburb of Paris city.
He was beheaded by Islamic terrorist named Abdoullakh Abouyedovich Anzorov, an ethnic Chechen refugee staying in France. According to the terrorist-murderer, Paty committed the crime of showing his students the Charlie Hebdo’s 2012 cartoons depicting Prophet Muhammad. And it was done in a class to impart the students the very sense of freedom of expression. This gruesome murder of the teacher had forced thousands to descend on the roads demanding immediate action from the Government against the growing incidents of Islamic terror across the country.
France remains traumatised by a series of Islamic terror strikes that killed many in 2015. As much as the Charlie Hebdo killings, the brutal beheading of Paty has demonstrated a direct assault on one of the main pillars of the French Republic i.e. the secular public school system and the very right to freedom of speech.
Meanwhile, the far-right leader and tipped to be the principal challenger for Macron in 2022 presidential poll, Marine le Pen has said, “This situation calls for a strategy of reconquest. Islamism is a bellicose ideology whose means of conquest is terrorism.” In fact her party has been targeting the Muslims and migrants for the last nearly half a century.
President Macron has already started a campaign against what he calls Islamic separatism. Besides, by vowing to fight the Islamic terror and recognising Paty’s act as a freedom of expression, Macron is highlighting the importance of national security and the very importance of the basic values established by the Constitution of France. But many say Macron is eyeing a large vote base belonging to the right-wing which could help him win the presidency again in 2022. Therefore his speech after the murder of Paty clearly reinforced the idea to the French people that a large group of violent Muslim contingent is there in the suburbs, waiting for an opportunity to tear down the basic ethos of French society.
He also describes Islamic separatism as a deviation of Islam which is “a conscious, theorised, politico-religious project which is materialised by repeated discrepancies with the values of the republic, which often results in the creation of a counter society and whose manifestations are the dropping out of schoolchildren, development of sports, cultural and communal practices which are the pretext for the teaching of the principles which do not conform to the laws of the republic’’.
This was more than sufficient for Macron to invite the ire of the Muslim nations, including Turkey. Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has described Macron as mentally ill.
The French Constitution of 1958 clearly says “all citizens regardless of their origin, race or religion are treated as equals before the law and respecting all religious beliefs”. And now it seems the NSB is violating the principles laid down by the Constitution of 1958.
That’s why the critics say the way the French President is using the state security apparatus to pound on civic and human rights organisations indicate entirely a unique behaviour of the state under Macron. Besides, his attitude towards the minority exposes the underlying malaise that delves deep into the French political institutions of today.
The French constitutional principle “liacite’’ imposes strict religious neutrality on both the state and all types of public services. This principle indeed symbolises a pillar of the very secular identity of the French Republic. The NSB is all set to change this foundation in the name of protecting the state from terror. But many say it is new form of political coercion launched by the Macron administration just in the name of national security.
The people who oppose the NSB say it is a unilateral assault on Muslims and Islam. They all accuse him of not showing wisdom and moral leadership at this moment of crisis in French society. But They say Macron has put forward an agenda to malign Islam by closing down major mosques, banning Muslim and human rights organisations. These latest measures to tighten the security around the country have simply stirred hatred against the Muslims across France.
Further this has emboldened the far rights groups and violent extremists to mobilise the French to counter and prevent refugee movements around the country. However, a group of 23 organisations that mobilise young Europeans has called out to President Macron to stop the raging hatred. They all urged Macron to embrace France’s revered principles of “egalite, liberte and fraternite’’. In their open letter to him they highlighted that “it is within your capacity to nurture understanding between people and to counter dangerous forms of polarisation within France and globally’’.
To them he must pander to the bigots and aptly demonstrate his moral leadership so as to survive France’s long-held ethos of multiculturalism.
France has already launched a massive campaign against “the enemy within’’ as its hardline Interior Minister Gerald Darmanin has directly pointed the finger at the country’s radicalised Muslims.
Now the moot question is whether France is going to compromise with its national security. It’s a clear choice between security and liberty. It’s the utmost responsibility of the freedom loving French citizens to decide over it. But precisely, its people, it seems, are offering a helping hand to Macron to counter the fast-growing Islamic jehad in the country.
(The writer is an expert on international affairs)
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