India's GDP 'shocker', the Adani allegations and more links
On the Political Cycle,
and I spoke to Steven Denny, assistant professor of International Relations and Korean Studies at the Institute for Area Studies, Leiden University, about the extremely short-lived coup in South Korea, democratic backsliding, anti-feminist politics and much more. Listen and subscribe:
On CASI Deep Dives – an interview series I run for the University of Pennsylvania’s Center for the Advanced Study of India – I spoke to Joshua Ehrlich about his book The East India Company and the Politics of Knowledge, which examines differing ideas about how the EIC considered spreading knowledge, and why the company’s past might give us cues on how to hold today’s “knowledge corporations” accountable
Rohan: You draw quite direct connections between the debates of the time about the East India Company and its relationship with knowledge, and the questions we are asking today about companies—particularly Big Tech—and knowledge. Could you tell us about why you see these as similar debates, despite the time and vastly different nature of the entities?
Joshua: It is important to recognize that the East India Company was not the same thing as a modern multinational corporation. It was a company-state, a distinctive early modern entity. Nonetheless, its involvement in politics and in arenas like education and scientific research did raise questions that resonate for us today. Now, too, is a moment of blurred lines between states and companies, with the “knowledge sector” a key site of corporate encroachment. I wouldn’t go so far as to say that the Company was the Google of two centuries ago (as some have said), but I do think its knowledge debates bear lessons for ours. To mention just one, they remind us that companies are not purely economic bodies but also political ones. Their need for legitimacy makes them accountable, at least to some extent, to outside constituencies. Thus, critics were more successful when they tried to hold the Company to its enlightened promises than when they simply denied outright the possibility of it meeting them. However, much as we may distrust companies today, we might do better to expect more rather than less from them.
Go read the whole interview, and if there are authors you think we should feature on the series – which engages with recent books on India from across disciplines – send me suggestions!
10 Links
Following up on the Maharashtra election results from last week, Yamini Aiyar makes an important point:
“The Indian electorate is increasingly expressing a preference for split-ticket voting i.e. voting differently in state and national elections. Consider Uttar Pradesh, Chhattisgarh, Rajasthan, Haryana, Jharkhand, and Maharashtra – states that voted very differently in state and national elections… If current trends prevail, the landscape of political party competition is likely to undergo a structural change and its effects on the terms of India’s federal bargain will be significant.”
Also on last-week’s topic about cash-transfer schemes is this conversation between Kunal Shankar, Reetika Khera and Vikas Rawal:
“Reetika Khera: Not so long ago in the southern States, parties promised mixer-grinders. At that time too, the media labelled these manifesto promises as freebies. I think of cash transfers as a modern avatar of those electoral promises. Labelling them as bribes would be wrong, just as it was wrong to label electoral promises as freebies…
The question arises, do these cash transfers displace spending on health and education? From the point of view of the women who get these cash transfers, they have welcomed it, because they are often vulnerable. But what are cash transfers taking away from, if anything?
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The problem with these cash promises is not that it is a “bribe”, but rather what are they trying to achieve? Where do they fit into our conception of a welfare state?
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The main issue to me is — are cash transfers taking away from welfare spending of other kinds? To give you an example - Karnataka’s cash transfer budget for this financial year is ₹28,000 crore — that’s twice as much as the Union’s budget on mid-day meals.”
Setting aside the question of how Indian institutions grapple with major corruption charges against a ‘national champion’ of India Inc and what the political fallout might be, there are a few more implications of the bribery allegations against the Adani Group. First, Rohit Chandra on India’s ‘green investment’ image:
“Large American investment banks, Canadian pension funds, various Middle Eastern and Singaporean sovereign wealth fund vehicles, and a range of European investors have all been taking bigger bets on India’s renewable energy future.
Naturally, one of the largest business groups leading the charge in both public relations and fundraising, was the Adani Group. If India’s largest business group in this space has such repeated allegations against it for serious forms of business malpractice, what is the credibility of Indian power markets and India’s broader investability?”
Next, M Rajshekhar on how the costs will be borne by Indians:
“Hardwired into the SEC complaint are larger truths about the links between Indian politics and business.
Adani Green, industry analysts told SEC investigators, would earn more than a billion dollars or Rs 8,000 crore in profits. Azure Power was more bullish, anticipating profits over $2 billion or Rs 16,000 crore over 20 years.
Where would this money come from? Discoms pass these costs to their customers…
[But] India’s discoms are cash-strapped. If power rates are high, they will buy less electricity, which means power cuts… The opportunity costs of buying expensive power run deeper yet. When discoms run into losses, they will either be privatised—with Adani amongst the firms buying discoms—or be bailed out, either by union or state governments.
This means India’s tax-payers find their taxes going, not into fresh public expenditure, but into bailing out loss-making discoms.”
And given developments in Sri Lanka, Bangladesh (and indeed Kenya), Nirupama Subramanian writes about the costs of an Indian ‘United Fruit Company’:
“For India, the damage is more than just reputational. Instead of strutting in lockstep with a businessman, Delhi mandarins should have seen the risks of nurturing an Indian ‘United Fruit Company’ to the country’s national interest, especially its strategic objectives in the neighbourhood. Instead, they shrugged their shoulders and called it a win-win. Many in India believe that the Modi government can do a deal with Trump that will let Adani off the hook. Maybe, though what it will cost India is not clear. The reckoning, as it unfolds in the neighbourhood, will be even more difficult.”
Shubhajit Roy and Divya A have a good rundown of the statement External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar delivered in Parliament about the recent India-China disengagement. But for full context, read also Sushant Singh’s annotation of the statement:
Menaka Doshi has a useful summary of reactions to the surprisingly low GDP numbers for India’s second quarter (July-September) which came in at 5.4%, compared to projections of 6.5% to 7% from economists and the central bank.
We will probably return to the GDP question in a future edition, but among the many problems is one of capacity to conduct more capital expenditure (“Undershooting of capex by most departments means the discretionary kitty of Rs 62,602 crore parked with the department of economic affairs would be unutilised”) as well as urban wages falling for the first time since the pandemic, ringing even more alarm bells for India’s consumption story.
Christophe Jaffrelot writes about the Ajmer Dargah coming in the crosshairs of Hindutva outfits and how taking on Sufism would break new ground:
“Mu’in al-din Chishti has been revered for centuries as a saintly figure endowed with baraka by Muslims and non-Muslims alike – including Sangh Parivar leaders. Nizamuddin and other luminaries of the Chishti order were and are almost equally popular. A few weeks ago, Indresh Kumar, an RSS senior ideologue and the chief of Muslim Rashtriya Manch, an RSS-backed Muslim group, visited the iconic Hazrat Nizamuddin Aulia’s Dargah in Delhi on the occasion of Diwali.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi himself pays homage to Mu’in al-din Chishti, like his predecessors in New Delhi since the Mughal Empire, by sending a chadar to Ajmer every year on the occasion of Urs. More generally speaking, he has engaged with the Sajjadanishin of Ajmer Dargah, known as the Diwan – a rapprochement well in tune with his appreciation of Sufism…
The Ajmer blast shows that for some Hindu nationalists, the dargah was targeted as a symbol of Hindu-Muslim amity that had to lose its attractiveness as well as prestige over Hindus – and to suffer because of its Islamic identity. Whether this school of thought will prevail over those who, in the Sangh Parivar, recognise the quality of sufism remains to be seen. There is much at stake here and, in fact, the fate of Ajmer Dargah Sharif matters even more than that of the Babri Masjid because the site epitomises the interactions between Hindus and Muslims at shared sacred sites.”
Kiran Kumbhar reviews William Dalrymple’s The Golden Road:
“My 1990s self would have found Dalrymple’s aims of focusing fully on the Indian story, and enlightening a still largely Euro-America-centric world about the arts, cultures, and sciences of people from the subcontinent, highly exciting.
But in 2024, I am a child no more, and having read the book now as a scholar, I feel ambivalent about the ways in which Dalrymple has chosen to narrate the “Indian” story…
The glowing Eurocentric accounts of past historians are replaced in this book by a modest but nevertheless definitive Indocentrism: “India […] set the template for the way much of the world would think and express itself, and would significantly alter the trajectory of the history of a great swathe of mankind. For more than a thousand years it was a garden that issued the seeds that, once planted elsewhere, flowered in new, rich and unexpected ways.” There are few layers of nuance in the book’s luscious servings of arguments, particularly when it comes to interactions of South Asians with people from Southeast Asia and the Arabic world. Even though Dalrymple on occasion alludes to the presence of multi-way exchanges, even disinterest in some South Asian ideas, the evidence is eventually left out of his main thesis of Indocentrism. He notes that casteism and “ideas of ritual impurity and elaborate bans on eating with members of different castes” were rejected by the communities in Southeast Asia, and specifically in Cambodia, women remained owners and disposers of property, “something from which the wider Indian Brahmanical tradition excluded them.” But these ideas are not followed through, and The Golden Road remains largely about a one-way traffic of ideas and materials out of “India”.
If we take the Indocentrism with a fistful of salt, The Golden Road is a great, eminently readable book. My hope is that it will be the last of the great books in its genre.”
Jonathan Liew takes us all the way to Guyana, where a T20 cricket league that ‘nobody really asked for’ manages to encapsulate a lot:
“You’re a tiny oil-rich state of less than a million people, with a huge Kremlin-backed dictator at your border rattling pots and pans. You need friends, fast. And above all you need to make a noise for yourself, get seen and heard in the corridors of power, give the investors of the world something they want. Enter cricket…
The real jackpot – as ever in this sport – is India, and of course there is a natural synergy here. Nearly half the Guyanese population is of Indian origin. India wants a sustainable, reliable source of oil for its growing population. Guyana wants visibility and foreign investment. What better vehicle for this beautiful friendship than T20 cricket?
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The whole idea is basically a test run, a prototype of a new Guyana-based T20 asset that might one day even attract the best Indian Premier League franchises, many of whom are already embedded in the Caribbean anyway. Border security and soft power, expressed through cricket. And this is an actual, serious prospect: last month the Indian prime minister, Narendra Modi, visited Guyana, where he unveiled the new Global Super League trophy and met Guyanese cricketing luminaries. “It’s obvious he’s doing a good job,” said Clive Lloyd. “We would like more prime ministers like him.”"
Side-note, for the Gulf-India watchers: The auction for the Indian Premier League took place in Jeddah in November, with more talk of Saudi Arabia dipping its toes into the cricketing world.