BJP & Ambedkar, India's demand deficiency, 'sarkari cinema' and more links

• On the final Political Cycle episode of the year,

  Emily Tamkin
  ,
  Tom Hamilton
  and I discussed our big takeaways from this year, both domestic and global. For me, it was how the BJP maneuvered after its disappointing showing in India’s general elections, and, on the global front, the fact that AI in election misinformation was less of a problem than age-old ‘cheapfakes.’ We also took the opportunity to thank listeners for sticking with us over the year. If you are a listener, do tell us what you want us to differently next year. And if you read this, but haven’t yet added us to your podcast feeds… what’s stopping you?

• On India in Transition, Jasoon Chelat considers the occupational safety element of India’s push to become a major player in semiconductor manufacturing. As always, if you are an academic working in the social sciences on India, and want to pitch to write on IiT, a publication from the Center for the Advanced Study of India at the University of Pennsylvania (where I am now Managing Editor), get in touch by writing to rohan.venkat AT gmail.com.

• If you haven’t already, go support the important work being done by Scroll.in.

10 Links

• Parliament has been consumed by protests ever since Home Minister Amit Shah said that it was now a “fashion” for politicians to take the name of BR Ambedkar, suggesting that if they had taken the name of god as often, they would have been in heaven by now. Though Shah made the reference in a speech attempting to prove how the Congress and Opposition parties have disrespected Ambedkar and the Constitution over the years, the comment was immediately picked up by the Opposition because it seemed to confirm the notion that the BJP’s appropriation of Ambedkar is little more than lip service.
  
  On this, see Shyamlal Yadav’s explainer, Shoaib Daniyal examining the issue in 2016 and this debate from 1991 sparked by a Gopal Guru piece in EPW. Ajoy Ashirwad Mahaprashasta makes a different point: Shah also misrepresented Ambedkar’s stance on Article 370 and Kashmir.
  
  Meanwhile, the Aam Aadmi Party posted an AI-generated video of its leader Arvind Kejriwal being blessed by Ambedkar, which naturally prompted others to create less kind videos.

• Pulapre Balakrishnan takes issue with the government’s pressure on the Reserve Bank of India over interest rates:

“If what the economy is experiencing in the medium term is actually a slow growth of demand, then a reduction in the interest rate is not going to help even if the RBI will heed the pressure from the government. Firms expand production in response to expanding sales, and are unlikely to borrow more solely because the rate of interest is lower if their anticipation of sales remains unchanged. By pressurising the RBI to lower the rate of interest, the government is proposing a supply-side solution to a demand-side problem.”

See also a column by Himanshu calling for Indian economic policymaking to shift its focus to addressing the demand deficiency.

• Adani may have been in the news, but Chiranjivi Chakraborty reports on the challenges facing Mukesh Ambani’s Reliance:

“While analysts have turned more bullish on the Mukesh Ambani-led company recently, institutional investors are expressing concerns over increasing debt and the conglomerate’s ability to generate positive cash flows. Reliance’s stock is down 1.5% in 2024, lagging the Nifty 50 Index’s 14% gain.

The difference in outlooks is worth a staggering 4.4 trillion rupees ($52 billion), based on the stock’s average analyst price target compiled by Bloomberg and its current price. The divide between the two metrics is near the highest since June 2020.

That makes 2025 a pivotal year for Ambani, Asia’s richest man, as a lot rests on his ability to assuage investor concerns and fend off competition while continuing to groom his three children for the eventual succession.”

• Shreegireesh Jalihal reports on the Indian government’s efforts to downplay and discredit global indices that reflect badly on India, while also creating its own:

“Documents reviewed by The Collective show at least 19 Union ministries and departments have been tasked to closely monitor what these global indices are saying about India – from the level of hunger in the country, health and education, press freedom to the state of democracy.

The Indian missions abroad too, have been roped in to speak to the publishers of the indices and report back to the government.

The Modi government aims to ultimately create its own indices. It is the easiest way for the government to run down these global indices with which it often has had a problem over the methodology employed.

To achieve all this, the government roped in a Gujarat-based IT firm, which previously made news for offering “online reputation management services” to the BJP, to create a full-fledged indices tracking software. The company had come under fire from Facebook in 2019 for “coordinated efforts to manipulate public debate” in favour of the BJP.”

• Nandini Ramnath argues that ‘sarkari cinema’, i.e. majoritarian state propaganda (in its current avatar) is here to stay, and that the films are “likely to become even more sophisticated – and less boring.” Earlier in the year, Ramnath published a ‘dummy’s guide to propaganda films in Bollywood.’

• An intriguing report – citing ‘people familiar with the matter’ – from Keshav Padmanabhan claims that Azerbaijan made a request for Indian weapons through a “friendly country” but was shot down:

“The request, which came through a very friendly country, was ignored by India.

It is learnt that New Delhi has made it clear to the friendly country that India will decide its bilateral relations and priorities, and does not want any other country to be a middleman.

People familiar with the matter told ThePrint that Baku never directly broached the subject with New Delhi, neither officially nor unofficially.

Instead, a third country approached India, saying that if the South Asian country wanted to export its indigenous weaponry and was looking for a long-term partner, it could look towards Azerbaijan.

People familiar with the matter told ThePrint that Azerbaijan was open to matching the current deals signed by its rival Armenia with India….

For India, Armenia has not only been a consistent defence partner, it is also viewed as a political partner in the region and has close ties with France.”

• Diaa Hadid and Omkar Khandekar on a new cookbook about Dalit culinary traditions from Marathwada:

“Pork rinds. Dried squirrel. Spicy fish eggs. Dalit Kitchens of Marathwada is part anthology, part cookbook and part rebuke to readers, who may presume Indian food is largely vegetarian.”

The piece also sent me to a review essay by Krishnendu Ray that calls it “arguably the most important cookbook to come out of South Asia.”

• Anuja Patna reports on how global heating is making kiln workers’ lives unbearable, in a piece that features photos by Ishan Tankha.

• Taushif Kara on what an exhibition focused on the ‘Global. Mughals’ at the V&A tells us:

“A new exhibition at London’s Victoria & Albert (V&A) Museum offers a similar claim: if a visitor from Mars landed in India in the 16th or 17th centuries, they may well have thought they were at the centre of the world. ‘The Great Mughals: Art, Architecture, and Opulence’ at the V&A highlights “the great age of Mughal art” through the successive reigns of three of its most important emperors: Akbar, Jahangir and Shah Jahan. We learn that the art and design that flourished under them — not unlike their political culture — drew from a range of disparate contexts and traditions, absorbing and transforming not only the aesthetic landscape of the subcontinent, but that of Europe and Asia as well…

The Great Mughals’ rightfully puts the Mughals at the centre of their world, showing that while they may not have been a maritime power like the British or indeed the Portuguese before them, they were nevertheless global in every sense of the term. The tragic irony of this historical corrective is that it has occurred alongside a simultaneous disavowing of the Mughals in the present by the three nation-states in which they left a material legacy: India, Pakistan and Bangladesh. In recent years, the Mughal inheritance has either been repressed or actively denied, no doubt because it cuts across the borders of the subcontinent and reminds its citizens of a shared past violently cleaved apart in 1947. This, of course, was not always the case: the Mughals once provided an important point of departure for many nationalists and political thinkers, and for some even embodied the subcontinent’s chief contribution to world heritage itself.”

• Vineet Thakur recounts the story of A South African Scandal, in India’s World (a new IR-focused magazine):

“The stately Carlton Hotel in downtown Johannesburg organised a lavish reception on 18 January 1936. The mining magnate and South Africa’s richest man, Ernst Oppenheimer and his wife, Caroline hosted nearly 800 guests, mostly whites, to celebrate the wedding of Syed Raza Ali and Ponnoo Veloo Sammy. Earlier that day, the widower in his 50s and his nine-year younger bride had exchanged vows in a civil ceremony, where the Oppenheimers had acted as chief witnesses.

This wedding stirred a scandal that for South Africa’s Indians, according to historian Uma Dhupelia-Mesthrie, was comparable to events then taking place in England where King Edward was resolved to marry Wallis Simpson. The ensuing constitutional crisis in England had ended with the abdication of the King.

Syed Raza Ali was no king, but as India’s chief diplomat – officially designated as ‘Agent’, or ‘Agent General’ from January 1936 – in South Africa, his wedding roused public feelings. A late middle-aged widower diplomat falling in love with a much younger woman became more than just a thing of social ridicule and popular gossip. It raised questions about the social role of an Indian diplomat in a racially segregated society. Furthermore, the fact that Raza Ali was a Muslim and Sammy a Hindu exposed deep communal rifts within the local community.”

Miscellany

• If you’re applying for the New India Foundation’s Book Fellowship, Sohini Chattopadhyay has made her successful proposal public for all to read.

Can’t Make This Up

• An unexpected record high for India’s trade deficit ($37.8 billion instead of the $23 billion forecast) pushed the rupee to all-time low, with gold imports being blamed. Now, Bloomberg reports this:

“A surge in gold imports that widened India’s trade deficit to a record last month and pushed the rupee to an all-time low was due to an error in calculation, according to people with knowledge of the matter.

Officials double-counted gold shipments in warehouses following a change in methodology in July, the people said, asking not to be identified ahead of an expected formal clarification. Attempts are on to reconcile the data, which could have been over-estimated by as much as 50 tons in November or almost 30% of total imports of the precious metal that month, some of the people said.”