Links: How Israel-Gaza is playing in India, caste census fallout and more
Plus, how drug tests emptied out an athletics event.
Just as the India-Canada spat moved away from the front pages – although details continue to turn up, including this latest indication that there was a ‘secret meeting’ between Indian External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar and Canadian Foreign Minister Mélanie Joly in September – the world’s attention has turned to developments in West Asia, as Israel amasses ground troops and rolls out air strikes on the Gaza strip in response to Hamas’ surprise attack last weekend.
Within India, meanwhile, focus has shifted squarely to the state elections that now officially have a timetable: Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh, Telangana and Mizoram will vote over different dates in November, with results expected on December 3.
Links and notes on some of the key storylines are below, but first, a few plugs for my work elsewhere:
India in Transition: ‘Migrants and Machine Politics’
For the Center for the Advanced Study of India’s India in Transition, where I’m Consulting Editor, I interviewed CASI Director Tariq Thachil, on his book, Migrants and Machine Politics: How India's Urban Poor Seek Representation and Responsiveness, co-authored with Adam Auerbach.
Building on a decade of resarch in Indian urban slums, Thachil and Auerbach produce an account that insightfully debunks long-held notions of what political engagement actually looks like in these spaces:
“We were dissatisfied with the popular view in both academic scholarship and Bollywood-eye narratives of Indian cities, which is that basically slum residents are one of two things. They're either the unthinking "vote banks" who just sell their vote cheaply for whichever politician is buying them off with cheap trinkets, or they are actively oppressed by local dons, thugs, kingpins, etc. In either vision, they're passive or coerced…
We basically find that the stylized picture of slum politics is incorrect. In fact, migrants who are moving into Indian cities are often powerful agents of their own political lives and are shaping the political organizations that not only form within their slum communities, but end up connecting them to political parties. And in doing so, they actually shape the nature of local party politics in these cities. In other words, these migrants are actually very deeply connected to the formation of urban politics and not simply peripheral citizens. They're at the heart of urban politics. And that's one of the key arguments we're making in the book.”
CPR: Neelanjan Sircar
CPR Perspectives, my flagship interview series with the faculty of the Centre for Policy Research in Delhi continues.
Last month, I spoke with D Shyam Babu about a career that included journalism, research work on India’s nuclear non-proliferation and pioneering surveys on the effects of economic liberalisation on the Dalit community. Read that interview here.
This month, we have a conversation with Neelanjan Sircar, who helped set up the Politics Initiative at CPR and went on to work across a number of different subjects, including co-editing Colossus; The Anatomy of Delhi. I’ve spoken to Sircar in the past about some of writing on Indian politics, notably his much-discussed idea of Modi’s ‘politics of vishwas.’
In this interview, we took a broader look at Sircar’s overall thinking on the research subjects he focuses on:
“There is a strange problem we have in the study of electoral politics in India. The most fertile time we actually have is the period before the Emergency. A huge number of people were writing about the ‘Congress System,’ about the various ways in which voters make decisions, and about how caste and elections intersect. But partially because of the kind of activism that happened around the Emergency, and partially because some of the scholars became less interested in elections post-Emergency, we have much less of that work now…
The kind of structural elements – when do voters care about their caste? When are voters being strategic? At what point do voters care about an economic benefit? At what point do they care about religion? – these are dry structural questions that have fundamental impacts on electoral outcomes. Once we got the green light to start investigating these sorts of things and we saw that there was a genuine readership for this, we began to realise that there was really an opportunity for what I call this unbiased nonpartisan method of analysing elections.”
West Asian War?
The brutal Hamas attacks and the expected Israeli retaliation on Gaza, which the United Nations has said would likely cause a “humanitarian catastrophe”, has also brought into focus how India’s principal players approach the complex situation in Israel and Palestine.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi underlined his government’s unabashed support for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in the aftermath of the Hamas attacks, an expected departure from India’s traditional position advocating restraint and calling for a two-state solution. Online, Modi supporters and the broader digital Hindutva ecosystem were out in force in support of Israel, amplifying misinformation – and earning notoreity.
A clip also emerged of one reporter having to be shushed by an Israeli soldier for treating the coverage like the breathlessly faux-soldiering that usually turns up on Indian news TV.
A few days after the attacks – with the interim silence leading to some raised eyebrows – it was left to the the Ministry of External Affairs to reiterate India’s long-standing support for the “resumption of direct negotiations towards establishing a sovereign, independent, and viable state of Palestine” as well as mentioning a “universal obligation to observe international humanitarian law”, though it did so in the form of responses to media questions, rather than in a separate statement. The MEA also launched an effort to bring Indians home from Israel.
The Opposition Congress party appeared to tie itself in knots in reconciling its approach to the situation, with its top political panel first putting out a statement reaffirming its support for the Palestinian cause – with no condemnation or even mention of the Hamas attacks. Faced with internal and external criticism, it then sought to backtrack. Neerja Chowdhury has a useful recap of how this played out.
As events play out on the ground, and frantic negotiations take place in capitals around the region – including here in Cairo – and beyond, we’ll undoubtedly be returning to this topic.
Counting Caste
I wrote earlier this year about the demands for a ‘caste census’ and what was behind this policy platform that has now been adopted by ‘INDIA’, the Opposition Alliance grouping.
Bihar Chief Minister Nitish Kumar thrust himself back into the spotlight last week, releasing the preliminary results of his governmment’s ‘caste survey’, which found that the Other Backward Class population – referring to a large collection of communities and caste groupings sitting between the most-backward SCs & STs and the upper castes – collectively form 63% of the state’s population.
The development has a number of crucial implications, that will play out over the next few months.
For one, it buttresses the demand from social justice groups for the state to do away with the 50% cap on affirmative action quotas that meant OBCs only get 27% reservation in state jobs and educational institutions (with the rest already kept aside for Scheduled Castes and Schedule Tribes – see my earlier piece for background).
Two, it may put wind in the sails of the Opposition, which has sought to mobilise over the issue, with the Congress using ‘jitni aabadi, utna haq’ (rights in proportion with population) as its slogan. The Congress has announced a similar exercise in Rajasthan, and has been pushing for a nationwide caste census.
Modi has already sought to attack the Congress on this front, making the convoluted claim – at least coming from his government – that it would promote majoritarianism and undermine minority rights.
Per Liz Mathew, Bharatiya Janata Party leaders have admitted that the Special Parliamentary Session which saw the passing of a women’s reservation bill – keeping aside 33% of seats in the lower house of Parliament and state assemblies for women – has not had the impact it hoped to, in part because of the Opposition’s championing of a caste census. Mathew writes,
“BJP leaders now suggest there could be another “dhamaakedaar (explosive)” move before next polls. Several Opposition leaders continue to believe that the special session was not meant for the passage of the women’s Bill alone, and that the BJP leadership had to drop its “real plans” due to some reasons.”
Against that backdrop, the focus now turns to elections taking place over the month of November.
I’ll have more links and writing on the caste census, and the elections in upcoming issues.
On to this week’s links:
10 Links
“Our nation is not just passing through a transitory emergency; it is going through a transformational phase of digital authoritarianism,” writes Apar Gupta following the actions against Indian news organisation NewsClick and journalists connected to it earlier this month.
Can Ashok Gehlot lead the Congress to a historic comeback in Rajasthan? Read Supriya Sharma’s report from the field, ahead of elections in the state.
“Two major leaps are underway in India’s services sector that could define the trajectory of the country’s growth. One has to do with fast-evolving services exports to the rest of the world. The other is the rapid transformation of domestic services. They are both changing in shape and form as they modernise. And it doesn’t end there. We are also seeing signs of these new services rising up the value chain and crossing over into manufacturing. This is where we think it starts to get very exciting,” writes Pranjul Bhandari.
The State of Working India 2023 report is chock full of fascinating details on employment in India. Aggam Walia has seven insightful charts from the report.
“Indian households are saving less than they have for half a century. According to the Reserve Bank of India, net household savings in 2022-23 — the Indian financial year runs from April to March — were only 5.1 per cent of gross domestic product. That’s down from 8 per cent of GDP in 2019-20 and 11.5 per cent in the year the pandemic hit,” writes Mihir Sharma. “What the data suggests, however, is that India’s [growth] numbers are unsustainable. They’re driven by debt-fueled household consumption and government investment. Neither can form the basis of a long-term growth strategy for India.”
Annie Gowen, Niko Kommenda, Simon Ducroquet, Anant Gupta and Atul Loke put together a special report depicting the inequality of heat by looking at how different life can be in Kolkata depending on your social and economic standing.
Two readings on India, the G20 and the Global South. Karthik Nachiappan on what the summit revealed about India’s multilateral persona and behaviour. And Atul Mishra on the importance of not overreading the Global South.
Rahul Karmakar reports on the the floods in Sikkim, which saw 14 bridges swept away and caused one dam to burst, leading to 94 dead and thousands displaced.
“A problem with the Make in India initiative, as with many others in India, has been the lack of transparency about the intellectualism that went into designing them,” writes Suyash Rai. “it is important to remember that it is very difficult to get industrial policy right, especially in a moderate-capacity state like India. This calls for care and caution.”
Can’t Make This Up
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