Links: Modi mania in the Indian media, consumption data and more
February/March link round-up on all things India.
Welcome back to India Inside Out, a newsletter on Indian politics, foreign policy, history and more. On today’s edition, we have links to lots of interesting pieces and important stories that we haven’t had a chance to touch upon on the newsletter yet, plus plugs to some of my work elsewhere.
But first, a quick personal note: I’m going to be in Philadelphia (as a Visiting Fellow at the Center for the Advanced Study of India, University of Pennsylvania, where I also help edit and commission for India in Transition) over the months of April and May later this year, with plans to pop out to New York and Washington, DC to meet scholars, analysts and anyone else working on India. If you’ll be around at the time, and might be interested in meeting, please do get in touch – either by replying to this email, writing to rohanvenkat AT gmail.com, or sending me a message with this new Substack feature:
The Election Tricycle
This week on the little podcast I co-host with Emily Tamkin and Tom Hamilton where we track elections in India, the US and the UK (subscribe to the show on Apple, Spotify, other), we discuss how the Israel-Palestine conflict, and the attendant antisemitism and islamophobia are playing out as an electoral issue in each of our countries. Do listen, subscribe and share:
CPR Perspectives
On CPR Perspectives, where I interview faculty members of the renowned Indian think tank Centre for Policy Research, I spoke to Mekhala Krishnamurthy, a Senior Fellow at the centre who also set up the State Capacity Initiative, an interdisciplinary research and practice programme that has carried out pioneering research studies on the Indian administrative state, and worked directly with a number of governments on questions of institutional design and capacity.
I spoke to Mekhala about being an anthropologist in the development policy world, what we don’t understand well enough about Indian agriculture and how she has managed to bridge research and practice.
Some excerpts:
In anthropology, because you study comparatively and you study many different places and you’re constantly defamiliarising and refamiliarising things – it’s very popular in anthropology to say we make the strange familiar and the familiar strange – but we are also constantly looking at human social arrangements and the possibilities that may be there. So you’re not just describing what is, but in the process of describing what is, in one place at a particular point in time and how it changes, you’re also describing what is possible. And I think for policy, one of the biggest things – and I think this is where CPR is so unique as a place – is that it is always about realities and understanding context and also having an imagination. So that imagination of possibility is built into the discipline of anthropology. It is a discipline of the possible, all the different ways in which we might arrange things. So for me that has also been a really wonderful way in which the two come together. And I think I have had a real privilege to be able to bring that sensibility and commitment to the discipline and not have to think in terms of ‘am I an applied person or am I an theoretical person’ and ‘there’s research and there’s practice’. There’s a way for us to bring this together. It’s actually critical to think that we bring both imagination and understanding in the field of policy.
…
What has been really challenging is this extraordinarily persistent understanding that people have, that we have a bloated bureaucracy. I think this has been importantly corrected in the work by Devesh Kapur. It’s also been importantly corrected in a new book on state capacity by two civil servants, Gulzar Natarajan and TV Somanathan. And that was again very important to show that actually by most standards, India is thin bureaucratically. I mean, even the United States, which claims to really not like government and wants to have very small government, has 16% of people employed in government, whereas India it’s a little above 4%. And when you start thinking about the frontline and you’re thinking about a number of different areas, we realise how thin we are and how much we haven’t invested in public institutions. And so this is just such a prevailing notion that we have too much government and I think even the idea of minimum government, maximum governance, pushes that idea. And I think somewhere we have to understand we never really invested in building that coverage, we don’t actually have a good sense of what are the numbers we will need – but we don’t really have enough.”
Go read the whole interview here.
Linking Out
As we come closer to elections – the dates are widely expected to be announced in March (and Prime Minister Narendra Modi is already taking about his plans for a third term) – the Indian media is all Modi, all the time. Newspapers are full of both advertisements and stories about what the prime minister is up to, and TV even more so. Manisha Pande’s Newsance draws out how this coverage is one of many ways that the playing field ends up being tilted:
As another video about India’s democratic backslinding goes viral, historian Ramachandra Guha writes in Foreign Affairs about why he believes “the very nature of Modi’s authority, the aggressive control sought by the prime minister and his party over a staggeringly diverse and complicated country, threatens to scupper India’s great-power ambitions.” On this see also Karan Thapar’s interview with political scientist Christophe Jaffrelot about centralisation under Modi. Plus, as Yashraj Sharma points out on Rest of World, it is YouTube – not Twitter or Facebook – where this election is will be playing out.
On the topic of political funding in India, which we discussed a couple of weeks ago, Newslaundry and the Newsminute have an important investigation finding that in at last 30 cases, companies that donated money to the BJP had earlier faced action by investigative agencies. Also read: Milan Vaishnav’s comment following the electoral bonds decision from the Supreme Court, which, while striking down a patently opaque tool, only takes us back to square one on political funding in India.
India’s GDP in the Oct-Dec quarter grew at 8.4%, massively overshooting the 6.6% expected by economists and the 7.6% growth of the previous quarter, according to government data. GVA mostly stayed at the expected level though – do increased tax collections then explain this surprising jump? See also: AK Bhattacharya, from earlier in February, on ‘Modinomics’ vs ‘Manmohanomics.’
The government also released the first official data on consumption since 2011-12 (after initially saying that the numbers would only be out post-elections), prompting the NITI Aayog to claim that less than 5% of Indians are now below the poverty line, even though the report itself cautions against comparing its results with previous data because of a marked change in methodology.
Ravi Dutta Misra and Anil Sasi report that sections of the government “have started to red-flag the Centre’s moves to progressively hike customs duties, especially the more recent offensive targeted at imports of Chinese components and inputs", arguing that “there is a possibility of the gains of India’s manufacturing-focused thrust that include schemes such as Production-Linked Incentive (PLI) being squandered away.”
The Uniform Civil Code – the idea of doing away with separate personal laws for religious communities in India – is the last of the three long-standing BJP demands/promises (the other being the striking down of Article 370/autonomy for Jammu & Kashmir, and the building of a Ram Temple in Ayodhya on the site of the demolished mosque). Although demand for a UCC initially came from progressive corners, the BJP has since the 1980s seen in it the opportunity to do away with laws that it claims allow for Muslim appeasement, while getting a chance to law down a ‘universal code’ that draws from Hindu conventions. An experiment in the North Indian state of Uttarakhand does just that, writes Vineet Bhalla. Most of the coverage of the UCC has focused on the fact that it incredibly requires “live-in relationships” – i.e. unmarried consenting adults who live together – to register their relationships with a registrar or face jail time or a fine.
Remarkably – and presumably as a reflection of how a pliant media makes things easier for the BJP – the ethnic conflict in the Northeast Indian state of Manipur continues to simmer. Angshuman Choudhury explains why.
One of the most interesting questions about this era of BJP dominance is how the party operates at the federal level, and what its state-level leaders can tell us about its politics at large. DK Singh checks in with the BJP’s various chief ministers, by way of examining Assam CM Himanta Biswa Sarma’s broader approach to politics. Meanwhile, Rasheed Kidwai points out that a whopping fifteen former chief ministers have quite the Congress over the last decade.
And finally, a few more bits and bobs: Why the Opposition INDIA alliance is losing steam. Byju’s fall and the failure of fast-food education. The holes in India’s stock market premiumisation story. Why India's High Commissioner to Sri Lanka performed a pooja on a sandbar in the sea. Are geopolitical pressures fuelling India’s gas import deals? Greece charts a course in the Indo-Pacific. Why FDI in India is lowest in 16 years.
Can’t Make This Up
The bogus right-wing conspiracy theory of love jihad – the idea that virile Muslim men are conspiring en masse to seduce Hindu women and convert them – has gone to obscure, tragicomic lengths: A court case by the Hindu Nationalist VHP demanded a name change for two lions sharing an enclosure because they are currently named Akbar (like the Mughal emperor) and Sita (a Hindu goddess, wife to Ram) because that would be blasphemy. Remarkably, the Calcutta High Court agreed. And now the forest officer responsible has been suspended.
Ipsita Chakravarty has the piece to read on this farce.