Quest for peace in Kashmir

BRP Bhaskar
Gulf Today

The Narendra Modi government took a major initiative when it appointed former Intelligence Bureau chief Dineshwar Sharma last week as interlocutor for dialogue with all stakeholders to restore peace in Jammu and Kashmir. 

Kashmir had witnessed recurrent violence after security forces killed young Hizbul Mujahideen commander Burhan Wani last year. Parliament was told that at least 88 civilians joined militancy in the valley in 2016, the highest number in six years.

The year also saw an increase in exchange of fire across the Line of Control. Truce violations are generally linked to attempts at infiltration by Pakistan-based militants and efforts by Indian forces to foil them. 

The first hint of a softening in the government’s approach came in August when Prime Minister Narendra Modi declared in his Independence Day address that “neither by bullets nor by abuses but by hugging can we solve the problem of Kashmir.”

In September, even as the National Investigation Agency was tracking flow of funds to separatist groups, Home Minister Rajnath Singh spent four days in the valley to assess the ground situation and affirm the government’s readiness to meet anyone willing to help in finding solutions to the state’s problems.

The interlocutor’s appointment was a source of relief to Chief Minister Mehmooda Mufti whose regional People’s Democratic Party rules the state with Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party as a junior partner. She had been watching helplessly as central forces dealt with stone-throwing youths with a heavy hand through most of 2016, one of the bloodiest years for both militants and security personnel.

Official sources put the number of militants killed during the year at 165, the highest in six years, and the number of security personnel killed at 87, the highest in eight years.

The PDP-BJP alliance was dictated by electoral arithmetic. With 28 seats the PDP had emerged as the largest party in the Assembly in the 2014 elections. A near-sweep in the Hindu-majority Jammu region made the BJP a close second with 25 seats. Overlooking ideological differences, the two parties came together to provide the state a stable government. 

Thereafter the BJP stopped talking about abrogation of Article 370 of the Constitution which gives Jammu and Kashmir a special status and the PDP stopped demanding withdrawal of the Armed Forces Special Powers Act which grants impunity to security personnel deployed in the state.

The coalition has an Agenda for Alliance hammered out in talks spread over three months. Mehmooda Mufti has been unhappy over the tardy progress in its implementation.

Developments in Kashmir often have an external dimension too. The current peace effort is taking place as the United States pressures Pakistan to check militants operating from its soil and seeks to draw India into its plans for Afghanistan and the Asia-Pacific region.

Both the PDP and BJP welcomed the appointment of the interlocutor. So did the state’s main opposition party, the Jammu and Kashmir National Conference, whose leader Omar Abdullah viewed it as a sign of recognition of the political nature of the Kashmir issue and a resounding defeat of the idea that it could be solved by use of force. 

The Congress party dismissed the Centre’s action as a publicity move. When P Chidambaram, who was Home Minister in the last Congress-led government, suggested greater autonomy for the state might be a solution to its problems, the party quickly distanced itself from the idea, fearing the BJP would use it against it.

Nevertheless Modi interpreted Chidambaram’s words to mean that the Congress is talking the language of Pakistan, lending support to separatists and insulting India’s brave soldiers.

Dineshwar Sharma has a mandate to talk to all stakeholders. Interest, therefore, centres on the response of the Hurriyat Conference, the umbrella under which those who want merger with Pakistan and those who harbour hopes of an independent Kashmir are gathered.

A spokesman of its hardline faction, led by Syed Ali Shah Geelani, said the organisation’s executive committee would formulate its position. Moulvi Umar Farooq, who is identified with its moderate faction, and Yasin Malik, leader of the pro-independence J and K Liberation Front, offered no comment.

Sharma is embarking upon a project of a kind the state has gone through before with nothing to show on the ground. As a flag-waving Hindu nationalist, Modi is in a better position than anyone around to push for a settlement of both the internal and external aspects of the Kashmir problem. However, his misinterpretation of Chidambaram’s reference to autonomy raises the question whether he can display the level of statesmanship it calls for. Modi’s mind is on the next election, not on the next generation. -- Gulf Today, Sharjah, October 31, 2017.

Congress readying for battle

BRP Bhaskar

Gulf Today

When Narendra Modi rode to power on a wave of anger against corruption under the Manmohan Singh government and went on to bring most of the states under his Bharatiya Janata Party, it looked as though the future of the Congress party which had spearheaded the freedom struggle and ruled India for most of the past seven decades was bleak.

Modi had run a vigorous campaign, said to be the largest mass outreach in electoral history. Over a seven-month period, he travelled to 25 of the 28 states (now there are 29 following the bifurcation Andhra Pradesh), logging 300,000 kilometres and addressing more than 5,800 rallies. The BJP’s ideological mentor, the Rashtriya Swayam Sevak Sangh, deployed about 100,000 cadres at booths in selected states to ensure that its votes are delivered.

Though the BJP secured only 31 per cent of the votes polled, it bagged 282 seats which gave it a simple majority in the 543-member Lok Sabha. Its partners in the National Democratic Alliance picked up 54 seats, raising the coalition’s tally to 336. The Congress party’s vote was a low 19 per cent and it got just 44 seats, its lowest tally ever.

Modi’s devout followers declared he was in for a long innings. Congressmen were despondent. The lack of a leader who could match Modi’s campaign skills and the poor state of the organisation at the grassroots appeared to inhibit its ability to stage a comeback. Modi’s dream of a Congress-less India appeared to be realisable.

A vibrant social media campaign played a big role in the BJP’s climb to the top. Its cyber force not only boosted Modi’s image as a superman with a 56-inch chest but also ran down Congress President Sonia Gandhi’s son and presumptive heir Rahul Gandhi as a dimwit named Pappu. The campaign was so successful that even a regional Congress leader publicly referred to Rahul Gandhi by the nickname.

With Modi’s image rising and Rahul’s tumbling, many presumed the BJP will have a walkover in the parliamentary elections due in 2019. The last few weeks have made them sit up and think. The Congress, waking up from stupor, was seen getting ready to take on the BJP.

It all started with Rahul Gandhi flying out of the country for what appeared to be just another of his periodical foreign jaunts, which draw derisive comments from BJP trolls. A few days later reports came in from Berkeley, USA, of a pleasant interaction between Gandhi and a young audience at the University of California campus there.

Gandhi, who answered a wide range of questions, took Narendra Modi head-on, accusing him of operating a machine with 1,000 guys sitting at computers all day abusing him, saying he is stupid and a reluctant politician.

He responded to a question about dynastic succession in the Congress disarmingly. “Most of the country runs like this, so don’t go after me,” he said and reeled out names of a number of other dynasts – in politics, in business and in cinema.

Gandhi, who is now Vice-President of the party, declared he was ready to take over the presidentship from his mother but this had to be done through organisational elections. For decades the organisation has been run with nominated leaders at various levels. An electoral college to choose the President is expected to be formed in a few days.

Rahul Gandhi said good words about Modi’s Make in India initiative. He also gave him credit for his communication skills. “He knows how to give a message to three or four different groups in a crowd,” he said.

As reports of the Berkeley encounter came in, Smriti Irani who has been assigned to cover Gandhi’s tracks since 2014 when she contested against him and lost, Arun Jaitley and other ministers mounted attacks on him. The BJP’s cyber army also went to work. But he also received words of appreciation from many quarters.

There was a consensus among observers that Gandhi had acquitted himself well and was now ready to lead the Congress charge against the Modi establishment. Some Congressmen viewed the spectacular performance of the party’s student body in the Delhi University Students Union elections, in which the BJP affiliate had the upper hand for decades, to the favourable impression he created on young minds through the Berkeley event.

Last week Rahul Gandhi toured Modi’s home state of Gujarat where the BJP is making a bid for an unprecedented sixth consecutive victory in the Assembly elections. When Modi campaigned in the state subsequently his tone was decidedly defensive and he whipped up parochial feelings.

It will be wrong to see a pro-Congress swing in the changing national mood, which is essentially the result of the growing feeling that Modi has failed to deliver on the promise of 2014. He still has a year and a half to set things right. --Gulf Today, Sharjah, October 24, 2017.

Budget cuts hit war on hunger

BRP Bhaskar
Gulf Today

The Global Hunger Index report, released last week, came as a shock to India as it indicated a steep fall in its rank during the past three years.

The GHI rank had improved continuously under the Manmohan Singh government. From 67 in 2011 it moved up to 66 in 2012, to 63 in 2013 and to 55 in 2014, the year Narendra Modi came to power. Then it fell –to 80 in 2015, to 97 in 2016 and to 100 this year.

GHI is a multidimensional statistical tool developed by the International Food Policy Research Institute, based in Washington, and has been in use since 2006 to measure the extent of progress in the fight against hunger.

The IFPRI figures led to a storm of criticism in the social media against the Modi administration. The government’s supporters questioned the claim that there had been a steep fall in India’s rank.

Pratik Sinha of Alt News, which specialises in fact-checking of media reports, found substance in their arguments. Until a few years ago, IFPRI had prepared the global chart after dropping from the list countries whose GHI was less than five. When these countries are also included, India’s rank during the last six years was as follows: 2012 – 106 out of 120; 2013 – 105 out of 120; 2014 – 99 out of 120; 2015 – 93 out of 117; 2016 – 97 out of 118; and 2017 – 100 out of 119.

While these figures dispel the impression of a huge setback in the fight against hunger, they confirm that there has been a reversal in the trend since Modi came to power, promising the people achche din (good days).

What’s more, India’s GHI rank is worse than that of North Korea (93) and Iraq (78). Its GHI score of 31.4 puts it at the top of the countries with a “serious” hunger situation.

India’s poor record has made South Asia, where all countries with the exception of Pakistan (106) rank higher than it, the worst performing region.

Ironically, India, which is the world’s second largest producer of food, also has the world’s second highest undernourished population. “A high GDP growth rate alone is no guarantee of food and nutrition security for India’s vast majority,” Nivedita Varshneya, a co-author of the GHI report said.

The Oxford Poverty and Human Development Initiative’s 2017 report also showed India in a poor light. It said 1.45 billion people in the 103 countries it surveyed are multidimensionally poor, and of them 689 million (48 per cent) are children. India accounted for 31 per cent of these children.

The reason why India, which was making slow gains in the fight against hunger, started losing two years ago is easy to explain. For a long time, spending on health has hovered around one per cent of the GDP. In its 2014 election manifesto, the BJP promised to raise spending to three per cent. But allocation for health shrank under the Modi regime.

In 2015, in his first full budget, Finance Minister Arun Jaitley reduced the Health Ministry’s allocation by about Rs 59 billion. Spending on public health was cut by eight per cent and the outlay on the National Health Mission slashed by 20 per cent.

The following year the Economic Survey called for increased investment on child nutrition programmes in order to capitalise on the demographic advantage offered by the young population. Yet in the 2016 budget Jaitley cut the provision for child health intervention from Rs 154.8 billion to Rs 140 billion. The allocation for the mid-day meal scheme for school children was also reduced.

Jaitley has defended the lower allocations on health and education, saying the states lack the capacity to spend and the funds provided in the past were not fully utilised.

Some states have found money from their own revenues to make up for the shortfall in Central allocations. This is not an option open to the poor states.

In March, the government placed before Parliament a national health policy, which Health Minister JP Nadda described as a milestone. It sets 2025 as target date for increasing state expenditure on health to 2.5 per cent of the GDP and reducing the number of households facing “catastrophic health expenditure” which now stands at 25 per cent.

Raising nutrition level does not figure among the priority areas identified in the policy document. This betrays lack of appreciation of the role of a healthy citizenry in achieving the nation’s development goals. --Gulf Today, Sharjah, October 17, 2017.

Self-perpetuating judiciary

BRP Bhaskar
Gulf Today

The Supreme Court last week opened the door a wee bit to make known to the public how judges are appointed and transferred but the basic weakness of the process remains unaddressed.

The Constitution which came into force in 1950 empowered the President to appoint the Chief Justices and judges of the superior courts after consultations with such judges as he may deem necessary. Since he is required to act on the advice of the Council of Ministers, the Executive had primacy in the process.

In 1982, the Supreme Court ruled that the recommendation of the Chief Justice of India to the President will have primacy but conceded it could be refused for “cogent reasons”.

Through a 1993 judgment it brought into being institutions called collegiums of judges, comprising the Chief Justice and the seniormost judges, to formulate recommendations with regard to appointments and transfers of judges.

In 1998 AB Vajpayee’s government, through a presidential reference, sought reconsideration of the matter by the court. If it expected the court to moderate its position, that didn’t happen.

The three Court decisions upset the constitutional system of mutual checks and balances and made India’s Judiciary the only one in the world with the authority to choose its personnel. The Executive’s role in the appointment of judges was reduced to that of a postman through whom the CJI conveyed the collegium’s decisions to the President.

The changes came about when the Executive was patently weak.

The issue was debated in public forums and a political consensus emerged over the creation of a National Judicial Appointments Commission in which both the Executive and Judiciary will be represented. The Manmohan Singh government drafted a bill to set up the NJAC but was voted out before it could be taken up in Parliament.

Within three months of assumption of office Prime Minister Narendra Modi pushed through both houses of Parliament a constitutional amendment as well as a regular law. They provided for a six-member NJAC, comprising the CJI and his two seniormost colleagues, the Union Law Minister and two eminent persons to be nominated by a committee comprising the CJI, the Prime Minister and the Leader of the Opposition.

Although the Judiciary had an edge over the Executive in the NJAC the CJI blocked its formation by declining to serve on it as also to join the PM and the Opposition leader in the selection of its two independent members. A five-judge bench presided over by the CJI struck down the new enactments as unconstitutional and restored the collegium system.

It soon came to light that the collegium was not working the way it was supposed to work. Justice J Chelameswar, a member of the Supreme Court collegium, said successive CJIs had treated collegium members as supplicants and judges had been selected on personal requests of collegium members. He refused to attend collegium meetings and limited his participation in the process of selection of judges to submitting written comments on circulated minutes of its meetings.

Fresh questions about the working of the collegium arose last month when High Court judge Jayant Patel resigned after he was transferred twice, denying him the opportunity of becoming the Chief Justice. While at the Gujarat High Court he had ordered the Central Bureau of Investigation to probe the encounter killing of a teenage girl Ishrat Jahan and three others.

It was against this background that the collegium headed by Dipak Misra, who became the CJI last August, decided to go public with its decisions. Accordingly a statement was uploaded on the court’s website outlining the reasons why the collegium rejected three names and deferred decision on one while selecting six new judges for the Madras High Court.

The post indicated that there were adverse Intelligence Bureau reports on the professional and personal image of two candidates and that the third was facing an inquiry. All three are members of the subordinate judiciary and the published information raises the question whether they are fit to hold their present jobs. It is not known if those rejected on the basis of intelligence reports were given the opportunity to counter them.

The legal fraternity welcomed the development but some of them felt it did not go far enough. “What is the transparency here?” asked former Law Commission Chairman Justice AP Shah. He wanted the names of prospective judges to be revealed before the collegium took decisions.

The collegium system suffers from weaknesses which cosmetic measures cannot cure. If it is not democratic for a bunch of ministers or parliamentarians to pick the next lot to be entrusted with their responsibilities, how can it be democratic for a bunch of judges to do so? A closed system cannot ensure diversity and democratic accountability. --Gulf Today, Sharjah, October 10, 2017.

Worrisome economic portents

BRP Bhaskar
Gulf Today

Prime Minister Narendra Modi has lifted the Indian economy up, making it more competitive than it has ever been, the World Economic Forum said in a report last week. Ironically, the testimonial came as he was coping with the adverse effects of demonetisation of high-value currency notes and introduction of goods and service tax (GST).

Cheer leaders at home, aided by the quiescent media, were working overtime to create the impression that all was hunky-dory. A senior leader of Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party, Yashwant Sinha, pricked the bubble. “The economy is on the downward spiral, is poised for a hard landing,” he said. “Many in the BJP know it but do not say it out of fear.”

In a long, clumsy sentence, Sinha gave a worrisome picture of the economy: “Private investment has shrunk as never before in two decades, industrial production has all but collapsed, agriculture is in distress, construction, a big employer of the work force, is in the doldrums, the rest of the service is also in the slow lane, exports have dwindled, sector after sector is in distress, demonetisation has proved to be an unmitigated disaster, a badly conceived and poorly implemented GST has played havoc with businesses and sunk many of them and countless millions have lost their jobs with hardly any new opportunities coming the way of the new entrants to the labour market.”

Sinha, who had resigned from the Indian Administrative Service and entered politics in 1984, was Finance Minister in Janata Dal leader Chandra Shekhar’s government. Later he joined the BJP and served in AB Vajpayee’s government first as Finance Minister and then as External Affairs Minister.

Modi did not respond to Sinha’s criticism. He assigned the task to Sinha’s son and Minister of State for Civil Aviation, Jayant Sinha, who claimed the government had created a robust new economy which would power long-term growth and job creation.

Sensing that the son’s defence was weak, three senior members of the government, Finance Minister Arun Jaitley, Home Minister Rajnath Singh and Railway Minister Piyush Goyal joined the fray. Jaitley insinuated that Yashwant Sinha, who is 80, was wangling for his job.

Before Sinha, two other BJP leaders, Subramanian Swamy and Arun Shourie, had criticised the government’s handling of the economy but few took them seriously as they are disgruntled elements.

More often than not, an economic decline is the result of factors beyond the government’s control like a bad monsoon which ruins agriculture or external developments which push up oil prices. There has been no such development in the recent past.

What has brought about the present situation is Modi’s attempt to replicate the reforms with which he had supposedly transformed Gujarat’s economy as its chief minister. Within three months of assumption of office he wound up the Planning Commission and brought into being a think tank named National Institution for Transforming India (NITI) Ayog, modelled after China’s National Development and Reforms Commission. He also abolished the Prime Minister’s Economic Advisory Council, a body of experts which had helped his predecessors by providing independent advice.

Under the new dispensation, sectors like education and health suffered. Much of the money allocated for these sectors went into institution building, resulting in a shortfall in the funds available for improving the lot of the people, especially the poor.

In an insightful analysis, Professor Maitresh Ghatak of the London School of Economics said Modi did not have on Gujarat’s economy the transformative effect he was touted to have. His centralised style of governance might have worked in Gujarat but was unsuited for running the economy of a country as large and diverse as India.

Ghatak welcomed the revival of the Prime Minister’s Economic Advisory Council. “We do need experts,” he said, adding: “We also need a government that listens to them.”

Making a pointed reference to the exit of Raghuram Rajan, who was Governor of the Reserve Bank of India, and Arvind Panagariya, who was Vice-Chairman of NITI Ayog, he wished the new group of experts would have a long tenure and freedom to pursue policies that would lead to course correction.

The immediate challenge before Modi, who has to face the electorate in 2019, is to create jobs to absorb the one million people entering the workforce each month. According to government figures, currently job creation stands at just over 10,000 a month. -Gulf Today, October 3, 2017