Shashi Tharoor http://www.theweek.in/columns/shashi-tharoor.rss en Wed Nov 02 11:30:14 IST 2022 i-shashi-tharoor-coined-the-term-multi-alignment <a href="http://www.theweek.in/columns/shashi-tharoor/2024/10/11/i-shashi-tharoor-coined-the-term-multi-alignment.html"><img border="0" hspace="10" align="left" style="margin-top:3px;margin-right:5px;" src="http://img.theweek.in/content/dam/week/week/opinion/columns/shashi-tharoor/images/2024/10/11/74-united-nations-new.jpg" /> <p>‘‘May I request you to put the record straight on the patrimony of the phrase multi-alignment?” wrote a friend, a retired ambassador with a distinguished record in the Indian Foreign Service. “We have a little friendly firing on our [IFS retirees’] blog about it. I mentioned that you were the first person to use it. Some of my friends claim otherwise; they insist that [S.] Jaishankar is the father of this idea.”</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p>I could not resist a wry smile at the query. External Affairs Minister Jaishankar is a friend and professional colleague for many years and there is no sense of rivalry between us, at least none of which I am aware. Nonetheless, it amused me that a phrase that had “sunk without trace” when I first attempted to float it, had now not only become fashionable, but even become the object of debate and “friendly fire” among experts over its origins.</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p>“Multi-alignment” as a term first occurred to me when I was living in New York and making the occasional speech about India’s place in the world. In a land where I was being constantly challenged about the continued relevance of “non-alignment”, to which India stubbornly clung well into the first decade of the 21st century, I offered up this alternative to American audiences. At the time, the world was living through what was dubbed its “unipolar moment,” with the end of the Cold War having inaugurated an unquestioned period of American dominance—geopolitically, militarily, economically and technologically.</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p>China, in those early years of the “noughties” (the ‘00s), was still engaged in a “peaceful rise”, concealing its more assertive and less benign intentions. There was no rival to the US, and Francis Fukuyama’s blithely-titled <i>The End of History and the Last Man</i>, asserting the worldwide triumph of liberal democracy and capitalism as the ultimate forms of human organisation, held complacent sway. Americans challenged me on why India continued to call itself non-aligned when there were no longer two contending superpowers to be non-aligned between.</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p>“Multi-alignment” struck me as the answer. I used it extensively, often with a wry smile, and for the first time formally in a speech at the University of California, Berkeley, where I described “the networked world” thus:</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p>“…the metaphor for today’s globalised world is really that of the world wide web. In this increasingly networked world, we are going to have to work through multiple networks, and those networks will sometimes overlap with each other with common memberships, but sometimes they will be distinct; they all serve our interests in different ways and for different purposes. Thus India can play an influential role with both the United Nations, a universal organisation that has 193 member states, and with the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation that has only its seven neighbours. It belongs both to the non-aligned movement, which reflects our experience of colonialism, and the community of democracies, which reflects its decades of experience as a democracy. India is a leading light of the global “trade union” of developing countries, the G-77 (Group of 77), which has some 120 countries, and also of the “management”, the G20 (Group of 20 developed and developing countries in charge of global macro-economic policy). We have the ability to be in all these great institutional networks pursuing different objectives with different allies and partners, and in each finding a valid purpose that suits us. This is why I suggest that India has moved beyond non-alignment to what I call multi-alignment.”</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p>When I tried the same formulation as minister of state for external affairs, however, the phrase didn’t catch on. I was considered a little too daring, talking about India’s “soft power” (then a new idea in our discourse) and when I floated “multi-alignment” at the annual conference of Indian ambassadors in 2009, it received a frosty reception.</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p>One senior ambassador disregarded the deference due to my ministerial status and more or less accused me of sacrilege. So I was amused when Jaishankar began using the term as foreign minister, and at the Raisina Dialogue of 2020, was gracious enough to acknowledge that I had come up with the phrase. Since then it has been associated with him. What matters, after all, is not the word, but who gives it currency!</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p><b>editor@theweek.in</b></p> http://www.theweek.in/columns/shashi-tharoor/2024/10/11/i-shashi-tharoor-coined-the-term-multi-alignment.html http://www.theweek.in/columns/shashi-tharoor/2024/10/11/i-shashi-tharoor-coined-the-term-multi-alignment.html Fri Oct 11 16:21:12 IST 2024 how-i-became-indias-mr-difficult-words <a href="http://www.theweek.in/columns/shashi-tharoor/2024/09/14/how-i-became-indias-mr-difficult-words.html"><img border="0" hspace="10" align="left" style="margin-top:3px;margin-right:5px;" src="http://img.theweek.in/content/dam/week/week/opinion/columns/shashi-tharoor/images/2024/9/14/74-a-wonderland-of-words-shashi-tharoor-new.jpg" /> <p>When my publishers at Aleph invited me to put together a book on words and language, I hesitated for a brief moment. A book on words (following on the heels of the successful <i>Tharoorosaurus</i>) was all very well, but did a serious politician really want to reinforce the image that had grown up of himself as an etymological egghead? As one journalist rather breathlessly asked me, “Your vocabulary has become the subject of memes, comedy shows and now a book! Did you ever think things would take such a turn?”</p> <p>Well, no, I didn’t. I fell in love with language as a child, and used the words I came across quite unselfconsciously, as a beachcomber might blow into the shells he’s picked up on a stroll along the seaside. But in the process, I found I had inadvertently acquired a rather inflated reputation as a vocabularist. Such reputations tend to build gradually, but mine reached escape velocity with a specific tweet. Incensed by a libellous TV programme about me, I had tweeted that it was ‘a farrago of distortions, misrepresentations and outright lies broadcast by an unprincipled showman masquerading as a journalist’.</p> <p>These were all words I had flung about with abandon in my debating days at St Stephen’s College, Delhi, but for some reason this sentence did not just strike a chord but triggered an almighty wave of enthusiastic curiosity on the internet. The Oxford English Dictionary even recorded in some puzzlement an unprecedented spike on its search engines, with over a million people, mostly in India, looking up the meaning of the word ‘farrago’ within the span of a few hours. My notoriety was established: I was India’s Mr Difficult Words.</p> <p>From there it was a short step to being caricatured. Memes rolled off the versatile keyboards of those who seem to spend their creative juices entirely on web parody. Desi wits translated Diwali greetings and descriptions of <i>bhel puri</i> into logorrheic English and attributed them to me. A clever meme-maker put my tweet into the mouth of Captain Haddock, replacing his usual ‘billions of blue blistering barnacles’, while a taken aback Tintin responds, ‘Captain, I told you to stay away from that Shashi Tharoor fella!’</p> <p>Photographs of my meeting the then home minister, Rajnath Singh, were modified to add a speech bubble above his head, saying ‘And I don’t even have a dictionary!’ While many of these were formulaic even if good-natured, the best was probably a rueful meme that stated, ‘I used to think I was poor. Now I’ve met Shashi Tharoor and I realise I’m impecunious.’</p> <p>There are only two things you can do when a tidal wave of caricature descends upon you like this—either sulk crossly and reject any attempt to slot you into the jokers’ stereotypes, or embrace the caricature and try to turn it to your advantage. I preferred the latter course. I accepted an invitation to author a weekly column on words for the Dubai-based <i>Khaleej Times</i>. Many of these found wide circulation online, and the demand arose for a book. So here I am: my new book—<i>A Wonderland of Words</i>—has just been published.</p> <p>Yes, words have always mattered to me. My father, Chandran Tharoor, was an immense influence on my life. After a village and small-town education in rural Malabar, he had moved to the UK in 1948 and relearned English from scratch. He was my teacher, guide, research adviser, imparter of values, my source of faith, energy, and self-belief. My enthusiastic approaches to life and learning are inherited from him; so is my work ethic—and my love for words. His great love of words and language, and the inventive ways my father put it to practise, inevitably rubbed off on his eldest child: me.</p> <p>But it was never just words for their own sake. My father instilled in me the conviction that words are what shape ideas and reflect thought, and the more words you know, the more precisely and effectively are you able to express your thoughts. Hence a book on the wonderland of words, often a source of fascination—and indispensable for communication—seemed not such a bad idea after all. I hope my readers will agree.</p> <p><b>editor@theweek.in</b></p> http://www.theweek.in/columns/shashi-tharoor/2024/09/14/how-i-became-indias-mr-difficult-words.html http://www.theweek.in/columns/shashi-tharoor/2024/09/14/how-i-became-indias-mr-difficult-words.html Sat Sep 14 11:45:31 IST 2024 tax-the-rich-till-they-invest-more <a href="http://www.theweek.in/columns/shashi-tharoor/2024/08/17/tax-the-rich-till-they-invest-more.html"><img border="0" hspace="10" align="left" style="margin-top:3px;margin-right:5px;" src="http://img.theweek.in/content/dam/week/week/opinion/columns/shashi-tharoor/images/2024/8/17/74-tax-new.jpg" /> <p>One of the little-remarked features of this year’s budget is that for the first time the share of individual taxpayers’ contributions to the government treasury exceeded those of the corporates. According to the data released by the Central Board of Direct Taxes, net direct tax collections amounted to Rs5,74,357 crore (as of July 11, 2024), of which personal income tax was Rs3,46,036 crore, while corporate income tax amounted to only Rs2,10,274 crore. Ordinary Indians, especially from the middle class, are actually giving the government more tax money than corporations.</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p>During the UPA years, personal income tax was 21 per cent of total tax collections, while corporate tax was 35 per cent. Today, the share of corporate taxes out of total tax collections has dropped sharply to its lowest level at just 26 per cent, while the share of personal income tax has increased to 28 per cent.</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p>Corporate tax rates were reduced from 2019, with the expectation that it would lead to a surge in private investment. Logical, provided you create the conditions that encourage companies to invest their money. Instead, private investment has nosedived in the Modi era, from a peak of 35 per cent of GDP under Manmohan Singh to below 29 per cent during 2014–24.</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p>The corporate tax rate cuts have meant a considerable revenue loss for the government. Over the last five years, the aggregate revenue foregone is an astronomical Rs8.7 lakh crore. But what jobs have been created in return? Where is the additional capital investment?</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p>The corporate tax cut has put this money in the pockets of billionaires, who have chosen to sit on their piles of cash, failing to spend it to generate productive employment—while the middle class continues to bear the weight of heavy taxation. In contrast, if money were to be put in the hands of ordinary people, they would pump it back into the economy.</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p>It is a cruel joke that individuals subsidise direct tax cuts for corporates. In the US, income tax revenue does exceed corporate tax revenue. But they have a broader tax base: 43 per cent of the population pays taxes, compared to just two per cent in India. The burden of taxation in India rests on a tiny segment of the population—and they’re not the wealthiest Indians.</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p>Taxes are an important source of revenue for governments. If direct taxes worked fairly, the rich—whether corporates or individuals—would pay more. That’s not how it works, though: corporates are paying less, and the rich have found multiple loopholes to minimise their tax obligations. Our billionaires have found myriad ways of filing their tax returns to ensure that they pay next to nothing on personal income. I contested against one in the last elections, whose last three years of declared taxable income, according to his affidavit, were Rs5 lakh, Rs17 lakh and Rs684! He would have paid far less income-tax than the average taxi driver in that time, while owning a fleet of 24 luxury cars, a private jet and a much-admired collection of high-end motorbikes, and living in a 49,000 square foot mansion in the toniest part of Bengaluru. The salaried, on the other hand, have a rougher time, often paying taxes and deductions at source, and without the kind of creative deductions available to them that the affluent enjoy.</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p>And then there’s GST. This is paid by both individuals and companies, but once again the bulk of the burden is borne by ordinary people buying ordinary things: five per cent on tea, 12 per cent on ghee, 18 per cent on toothpaste, 28 per cent on soft-drinks. GST is regressive, since it is applied uniformly irrespective of the income level of individuals. As a result, consumers with higher incomes pay a smaller share of GST, relative to their incomes, than low-income consumers.</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p>A final irony: the government puts people who earn Rs15 lakh in the highest tax slab, but SEBI bans them from options trading on the grounds that they are too poor to invest. Rich enough to tax heavily, poor enough to be barred from trading! It is time to reverse this injustice and tax the rich—until they invest more and create jobs.</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p><b>editor@theweek.in</b></p> http://www.theweek.in/columns/shashi-tharoor/2024/08/17/tax-the-rich-till-they-invest-more.html http://www.theweek.in/columns/shashi-tharoor/2024/08/17/tax-the-rich-till-they-invest-more.html Sat Aug 17 14:26:29 IST 2024 all-indians-dont-understand-how-our-democracy-works <a href="http://www.theweek.in/columns/shashi-tharoor/2024/07/20/all-indians-dont-understand-how-our-democracy-works.html"><img border="0" hspace="10" align="left" style="margin-top:3px;margin-right:5px;" src="http://img.theweek.in/content/dam/week/week/opinion/columns/shashi-tharoor/images/2024/7/20/74-road-new.jpg" /> <p>One of the peculiar frustrations of being an elected representative in India is the widespread ignorance among the electorate of the responsibilities and authority of those they are electing to office. We have three tiers of governance—local, state and federal—to which the same voters elect, at different times, councillors, MLAs and MPs. Yet an overwhelming majority of our citizens have no clue what role they are electing each of these representatives for.</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p>On a recent “thank-you” tour of my constituency, which had just returned me to Parliament for a fourth time, I found myself greeting, from atop my open jeep, voters who in the same breath were pointing to the rutted, potholed stretch of road I was travelling on, making it clear they expected me to repair it now that I had won. But in every case the road was the responsibility of either the city council or the village panchayat and not the MP. Local roads are maintained by local government bodies; state roads by the state government, to which the MLA is accredited and where he or she has some influence; and central roads are those for which the MP can be made accountable. These are the National Highways and those major roads financed by the Union government under the Central Road Fund or the Pradhan Mantri Gram Sadak Yojana—not narrow country roads, vital though these are to those who live near them. But try explaining this to a voter, who assumes that MLAs exist to do what councillors can’t, and MPs to do what MLAs can’t! The confusion is compounded by the expectation that each elected representative must deliver “development” to his constituency.</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p>Just as MLAs have some budgetary allotments available to them—in Kerala, each MLA receives Rs6 crore to be spent on development projects of his or her choice—MPs have the Members of Parliament Local Area Development Scheme funds, which entitles them to spend Rs5 crore a year on projects in their constituencies. But a Lok Sabha MP in Kerala represents seven MLA constituencies, and 25 per cent of the MPLADS total is reserved for expenditure on projects benefitting SC/ST communities, which leaves each MP some Rs50 lakh for each constituency where an MLA is spending Rs6 crore, 12 times as much. Inevitably the scale of the MP’s “development” projects is dwarfed by comparison with the MLA’s, yet voters cannot understand why the “more important” MP cannot do more.</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p>MPs must lobby the Central government, but cannot determine favourable outcomes, and many require state government decisions, too. The question of an All India Institute of Medical Sciences for Kerala is a case in point. I stated during the election campaign that no MP can promise (as my opponent was doing) to set up an AIIMS in a location of his choice—it depends on what the state government proposes. When my party was in power in the state, I had ensured that Thiruvananthapuram was added to the list of possible AIIMS locations submitted by the state government to the Centre—and lobbied the Central government to choose it. But when the left came to power in Kerala, it opted for Kozhikode as the sole choice before the Centre. No MP could have done anything about that—it is, after all, the prerogative of the state to identify the location and provide the land.</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p>But if voters do not always understand the complementary roles of the state and the Centre in decisions affecting their lives, they do not understand the differences either. During the recent election in my constituency, I was amused and mortified to see a viral video put out by the BJP campaign that showed a middle-aged woman voter saying she had voted communist all her life, but was now going to vote for the BJP because the communist government had not paid her pension for the last seven months. The poor lady had no idea that electing a BJP MP would make not a whit of difference to her pension, which is paid by the state government—where the left is in power and the BJP has no role.</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p>Democracy is India’s greatest asset—but that doesn’t mean all Indians understand how our democracy works!</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p><b>editor@theweek.in</b></p> http://www.theweek.in/columns/shashi-tharoor/2024/07/20/all-indians-dont-understand-how-our-democracy-works.html http://www.theweek.in/columns/shashi-tharoor/2024/07/20/all-indians-dont-understand-how-our-democracy-works.html Sat Jul 20 10:59:05 IST 2024 i-played-twice-against-hollywood-cricket-club <a href="http://www.theweek.in/columns/shashi-tharoor/2024/06/24/i-played-twice-against-hollywood-cricket-club.html"><img border="0" hspace="10" align="left" style="margin-top:3px;margin-right:5px;" src="http://img.theweek.in/content/dam/week/week/opinion/columns/shashi-tharoor/images/2024/6/24/82-cricket-new.jpg" /> <p>Despite widespread assumptions to the contrary, the US is no stranger to cricket. It was played in North America by the British colonists in the 18th and 19th centuries, and the very first international cricket match ever recorded took place in 1844 between the US and Canada. But thereafter, the game was supplanted in America by the shorter and simpler attractions of baseball, popularised after the Civil War by veteran Colonel Abner Doubleday. Still, cricket continued to flourish as a minority pursuit for leisured gentlemen, and the Philadelphia all-rounder of the turn of the century, J. Barton King, considered one of the fastest and best pacemen in the world, even led the first-class bowling averages in England in 1908.</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p>In my days of playing club cricket in such far-flung outposts of the cricketing world as Geneva and Singapore in the 1980s, I recall playing twice against a touring team of the Hollywood Cricket Club. I could scarcely believe it existed, but they were very proud of the fact that a former England Test captain had established the club in 1932—Cecil Aubrey Smith, who became a Hollywood star of some distinction, playing “officer and gentleman” roles in the early decades of cinema.</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p>For all this heritage, most Americans have no idea about the greatest sport on earth and the US has, for the most part, been an unlikely location for it to flourish, until an influx of cricket playing migrants (mainly from the Indian subcontinent and the Caribbean) brought a passion for cricket with them. Cricket’s gradual American revival, initially as a weekend sport for expatriates, spawned a sporting subculture that attracted attention—a phenomenon marvellously chronicled in Joseph O’Neill’s 2008 novel, <i>Netherland</i>. In time, the children of some of these cricket-obsessed migrants picked up the sport themselves and some discovered a genuine talent for it. The result is a hybrid US cricket team, dominated inevitably by Indians, some born there and some originally from over here. A US team of eight Indians, joined by a handful of Pakistanis, South Africans and Barbadians, stunned Pakistan in the T20 World Cup this month and gave India a stiff challenge in their next match. The US team even features an enterprising cricketer born in Canada and living in the US, who has played for both countries and switched loyalties four times. Improbably enough, his name is Nitish Kumar!</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p>Their successful performances naturally elicited a great amount of amused comment and admiration in the mother country. One Indian wag observed that Pakistan was beaten not by the Indian A team, not the Indian B team, but by the Indian H1B team! Another cracked that Pakistan lost twice to Indians—first to Indian green-card holders and then to Indian Aadhaar card holders. Another claimed that when India played the US, half the US team was also singing the Indian national anthem!</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p>Cricket undoubtedly has a future in the US. This was not obvious when, in 1975, I went to the US as a graduate student and found it challenging even to access cricket scores, which were of course never reported in the American newspapers. Today, in the era of the internet and satellite television, not only can one get the scores in real time at the click of a mouse, but one can even watch any match by subscribing to a cricket channel called WillowTV. It is very much easier to be an American cricket fan today, and to be inspired not just by weekend cricket, but by a professional Twenty20 cricket league called Major League Cricket, featuring prominent international stars in teams like the San Francisco Unicorns and the Seattle Orcas (owned by no less eminent a New American than Microsoft chief Satya Nadella).</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p>In an attempt to popularise the game even further, the US was invited to co-host this year’s T20 World Cup. It’s a good precursor to the 2028 Los Angeles Olympics, which will feature cricket after over a century. The US cricket team’s performance at the World Cup is an important stepping stone to building a fan-base in the world’s most affluent sports market. Cricket USA could well declaim: “2028, here we come!”</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p><b>editor@theweek.in</b></p> http://www.theweek.in/columns/shashi-tharoor/2024/06/24/i-played-twice-against-hollywood-cricket-club.html http://www.theweek.in/columns/shashi-tharoor/2024/06/24/i-played-twice-against-hollywood-cricket-club.html Mon Jun 24 12:30:15 IST 2024 some-political-vocabulary-with-shashi-tharoor <a href="http://www.theweek.in/columns/shashi-tharoor/2024/05/25/some-political-vocabulary-with-shashi-tharoor.html"><img border="0" hspace="10" align="left" style="margin-top:3px;margin-right:5px;" src="http://img.theweek.in/content/dam/week/week/opinion/columns/shashi-tharoor/images/2024/5/25/74-narendra-modi-new.jpg" /> <p>Since this column is slated to appear ahead of June 4 when the counting of votes takes place, and given my wholly inflated reputation as one excessively fond of obscure words, I thought I would combine the two and share with readers terms that might enhance their political vocabulary in the present climate.</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p>These elections have seen a large number of empleomaniacs—people with a mania for holding public office—contesting at the hustings. Anyone who willingly subjects themselves to the strain of fund-raising, campaigning in the summer heat for 16 to 18 hours a day and making repetitive speeches to voters for weeks on end, may well be considered a maniac anyway. But empleomania (borrowed from a Spanish word, which is a combination of empleo (employment or public office) and mania) is a malady that afflicts only those truly obsessive about holding political power. (We have quite a few of those in India, of course).</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p>Several of these politicians are, though they usually don’t know it, throttlebottoms. The term, which refers to particularly inept and futile persons in public office, comes from the name Alexander Throttlebottom, a character invented by George Kaufman and Morrie Ryskind for the 1931 musical ‘Of Thee I Sing’. It is more popular in the US than elsewhere in the English-speaking world, but has a deliciously apt sound to it.</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p>While throttlebottoms are usually an innocuous lot of inept politicos, worse still are politicasters, petty or contemptible politicians who are unstatesmanlike practitioners of politics. As the suffix -aster indicates, this is even more of an insult; in English use—aster is added to words to describe people who are in some way inferior, worthless, or not genuine, and comes from Latin, in which language it means ‘only having a partial resemblance’. (In addition to politicaster, we find this suffix used to refer to inferior poets (poetaster), doctors (medicaster), and philosophers (philosophaster). India has its own special breed of journalisasters!)</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p>Another American term we could usefully have borrowed in India is highbinder, meaning a corrupt or scheming politician who engages in fraudulent or shady activities. Highbinder was first used in English at the beginning of the 19th century, as the name of a particularly unruly gang. By the 1870s the word was used across the US to refer to members of Chinese gangs and secret societies. Inevitably, it soon began to be used to describe unscrupulous politicians. There is, as we all know, no shortage of highbinders contesting our present elections!</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p>If elected to high office, many might well prove guilty of misprision, defined as misconduct or maladministration by a public official, in particular the neglect or wrong performance of official duty. Just as, in popular folklore, Eskimos (or more correctly, the Inuit and Yupik-speaking people) are purported to have hundreds of words for snow (which in fact they don’t), and the English are believed to have hundreds of words for being drunk (which in fact they do), one could well argue that Indians should have a plethora of words for political malfeasance. Since we don’t have as many as we need, we could make greater use of “misprision”.</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p>And finally, one word to describe the misrule of the last 10 years, which has become all the more evident in the inflammatory rhetoric we have been hearing in this campaign? It is kakistocracy, a form of government in which the least qualified or most unprincipled individuals are in power. I first suggested years ago in print that, in recent years, it has seemed that the world’s largest democracy has in fact degenerated into a kakistocracy, but the term didn’t quite catch on. Derived from ancient Greek—the speakers of which were pioneers of democratic practice and knew a thing or two about good governance, or the lack thereof—a “kakistocracy” is a government by the worst elements in society. The word comes from the Greek “kakistos”, the superlative form of the word “kakos”, meaning “bad”. It hasn’t been used much in India, despite us undergoing the rule of people who declare they want to replace Mahatma Gandhi’s statues with Godse’s, and speak dehumanisingly of our Muslim fellow-citizens. Maybe it is time we began to use the term!</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p><b>editor@theweek.in</b></p> http://www.theweek.in/columns/shashi-tharoor/2024/05/25/some-political-vocabulary-with-shashi-tharoor.html http://www.theweek.in/columns/shashi-tharoor/2024/05/25/some-political-vocabulary-with-shashi-tharoor.html Sun Jun 23 09:47:07 IST 2024 let-us-not-surrender-the-idea-of-india-shashi-tharoor <a href="http://www.theweek.in/columns/shashi-tharoor/2024/04/27/let-us-not-surrender-the-idea-of-india-shashi-tharoor.html"><img border="0" hspace="10" align="left" style="margin-top:3px;margin-right:5px;" src="http://img.theweek.in/content/dam/week/week/opinion/columns/shashi-tharoor/images/2024/4/27/74-india-new.jpg" /> <p>As Indians battle it out in our nation’s 18th general election, it is again time for voters to reflect on the “Idea of India”—or rather, on two duelling ideas of India that are now before us and between which the nation must choose at the ballot box.
They both date back to before independence, when our nationalist movement was divided between two sets of ideas, one held by those who saw religious identity as the determinant of their nationhood and the other by those who believed in an inclusive India for everyone, irrespective of faith. The former became the idea of Pakistan, the latter the idea of India. Pakistan was created as a state with a dominant religion, a state that discriminates against its minorities and denies them equal rights. But India never accepted the logic that had partitioned the country: our freedom struggle was for all, and independent India would also be for all.
</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p>This nebulous “Idea of India”—the phrase is Tagore’s—is, in some form or another, arguably as old as antiquity itself. Today, though, it incorporates a certain conception of human rights and citizenship, vigorously backed by due process and equality before law. Despite the mystical influence of Tagore, and the spiritual and moral influences of Gandhiji, the idea of India embedded in our Constitution is a robustly secular construct inspired by the vision and intellect of our founding fathers, notably (in alphabetical order) B.R. Ambedkar, Jawaharlal Nehru and Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel. The preamble itself is the most eloquent enumeration of this vision. In its description of the defining traits of the Indian republic, its conception of justice, liberty, equality and fraternity, it firmly proclaims that the law, and not religion or community, will be the bedrock of the idea of India.
This is the idea of an ever-ever land—emerging from an ancient civilisation, united by a shared history, marked by rich diversity, sustained by pluralist democracy. India’s democracy imposes no narrow conformities on its citizens. The whole point of Indian pluralism is you can be many things and one thing: you can be a good Muslim, a good Keralite and a good Indian all at once.
</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p>The Indian idea, as I have long argued, is that a nation may endure differences of caste, creed, colour, conviction, consonant, culture, cuisine, costume and custom, and still rally around a consensus. And that consensus is around the simple idea that in a democracy you don’t really need to agree—except on the ground rules of how you will disagree.
My idea of India celebrates diversity: if the US is a melting-pot, then to me India is a thali, a selection of sumptuous dishes in different bowls. Each tastes different, and does not necessarily mix with the next, but they belong together on the same plate, and they complement each other in making the meal a satisfying repast.
</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p>Many of us complacently assumed that this idea of India was immutable and universally held. But we were wrong; before Muhammad Ali Jinnah’s Muslim League passed its notorious Pakistan Resolution in 1940 demanding the vivisection of the country, the Hindu Mahasabha had in 1937 advanced the theory that Hindus and Muslims were two nations. Today’s ruling BJP is the political arm of the RSS, which remains committed to the doctrine of hindutva and advocates the establishment in India of a Hindu Rashtra. Such an idea has nothing in common with the constitutional idea of India. It represents a nationalism that is divisive rather than inclusive, embodied in a chauvinism intolerant of diversity and difference. The BJP/RSS idea of a Hindu Rashtra is the mirror image of Pakistan—a state with a dominant majority religion that seeks to put its minorities in a subordinate place. That would be a hindutva Pakistan, and it is not what our freedom movement fought for, nor is it the idea of India enshrined in our Constitution.
</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p>This is a battle for India’s soul. India’s founding fathers wrote a constitution for their dreams; we have given passports to their ideals. Let us not let them down by surrendering our idea of India to the idea of Pakistan.</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p><b>editor@theweek.in</b></p> http://www.theweek.in/columns/shashi-tharoor/2024/04/27/let-us-not-surrender-the-idea-of-india-shashi-tharoor.html http://www.theweek.in/columns/shashi-tharoor/2024/04/27/let-us-not-surrender-the-idea-of-india-shashi-tharoor.html Sun Apr 28 13:49:21 IST 2024 hard-work-a-way-of-life-for-indians <a href="http://www.theweek.in/columns/shashi-tharoor/2024/03/30/hard-work-a-way-of-life-for-indians.html"><img border="0" hspace="10" align="left" style="margin-top:3px;margin-right:5px;" src="http://img.theweek.in/content/dam/week/week/opinion/columns/shashi-tharoor/images/2024/3/30/74-shutterstock-new.jpg" /> <p>The young cricketer Yashasvi Jaiswal articulated an important insight about our country at the end of the third Test against England, where he scored his second double-century at the tender age of 22. “In India, when you grow up, you work really hard for each and every thing,” he said when asked about his approach to batting, after helping India take a 2-1 lead over England. “Even when getting the bus, you have to work really hard to get the bus. You have to work really hard to get to the train and auto [rickshaw] and everything. And I have done that since my childhood. I know how important every innings is—and that’s why I really work hard in my [practice] sessions and every innings counts for me and for my team. That is my biggest motivation to play for my country. And I just make sure that whenever I’m there I need to give my 100 per cent and then enjoy.”</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p>Jaiswal went on to embody his own words, scoring 712 runs in the five matches and winning the man of the series award. But this column is not about cricket; it’s about the hard work young Jaiswal was talking about.</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p>Hard work is a universally acknowledged virtue, but for Indians, at home and abroad, it is often a way of life. As Jaiswal—who slept in a tent on a cricket ground while honing his talent, and sold <i>pani-puri</i> to make ends meet in his formative years—understands only too well, hard work is ingrained in the Indian ethos. It emerges principally from the pressure of population: millions are striving for academic and professional success in a population that exceeds 1.4 billion. So Indians grow up facing intense competition for everything—from getting a place in school or college, to catching a bus or a train, to finding a job, to excelling at a profession. He who doesn’t strive is doomed to fail, because he is up against too many others who are trying very hard indeed.</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p>In India, hard work is not just a characteristic; it is woven into the cultural fabric. From a young age, children are taught the value of perseverance and effort. The Indian education system, known for its rigour, instils in students the necessity of industriousness to outshine their peers. Hard work is indispensable.</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p>When Indians venture abroad, they carry this trait with them, often amplifying it in response to the challenges of navigating a new country. The Indian diaspora is renowned for its work ethic, which has enabled many to achieve significant socioeconomic progress, rising to levels of prestige and affluence their parents could not have dreamed of. This is particularly evident in countries like the US, where Indians hold prominent positions in technology, medicine, academia, and business, and enjoy the highest median income of any ethnic group (even higher than white Americans or Japanese). Indians have excelled in fields that demand not only intellectual acumen but also an enduring work ethic. The success stories of Indian CEOs in multinational corporations, leading scientists in NASA, and entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley are testaments to this fact.</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p>Consider the story of Satya Nadella, the CEO of Microsoft, who came from a middle-class background in Hyderabad and rose through the ranks by virtue of his dedication and diligence. Or Sundar Pichai, head of Alphabet Inc., whose journey from a modest upbringing in Chennai to the pinnacle of the tech world is a narrative of relentless effort. Or the inspiring tale of Nobel laureate Venkatraman Ramakrishnan, whose ground-breaking work in molecular biology was achieved through years of meticulous research. They are innovative thinkers, but they also worked harder than everyone else. Countless Indians across the world have reached formidable heights without any advantages other than their hard work. Their stories are a powerful reminder that while brains and talent are distributed evenly, access to opportunities is not. It is hard work that bridges this gap, turning potential into achievement. As the world becomes increasingly interconnected, the Indian ethos of hard work continues to be a beacon of inspiration, demonstrating that with perseverance, anything is possible.</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p><b>editor@theweek.in</b></p> http://www.theweek.in/columns/shashi-tharoor/2024/03/30/hard-work-a-way-of-life-for-indians.html http://www.theweek.in/columns/shashi-tharoor/2024/03/30/hard-work-a-way-of-life-for-indians.html Sat Mar 30 16:17:28 IST 2024 why-i-have-profound-respect-for-french-democracy <a href="http://www.theweek.in/columns/shashi-tharoor/2024/03/02/why-i-have-profound-respect-for-french-democracy.html"><img border="0" hspace="10" align="left" style="margin-top:3px;margin-right:5px;" src="http://img.theweek.in/content/dam/week/week/opinion/columns/shashi-tharoor/images/2024/3/2/74-france-new.jpg" /> <p>As someone who admires France, its people, their refinement, their language, and their culture—especially their literature and cinema—I was deeply humbled recently to be conferred their highest civilian honour, the Chevalier de la Legion d’Honneur. For me, France is not just its world-renowned cuisine or the enchanting lavender fields of Provence. It is, in the famous expression, “France, mother of arts, arms and laws.”</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p>To my mind, the conferral of this award to an Indian is also an acknowledgement of the deepening of Franco-Indian relations, and the continuity of the warmth that has been a feature of this relationship for a very long time. We have come a long way from the days the French colonisers fought with the British for land and resources in India, and the French lost. During World War I, some 1.3 lakh Indians served in and around the Somme, and nearly 9,000 died, in a combat that was not theirs. One hundred years later, things are much better.</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p>President Emmanuel Macron said during his visit to India in 2018: “The trust we share protects us while our interests are aligned. We want India to be our first strategic partner here, and we want to be India’s first strategic partner in Europe.” As they adjust to the collapse of the post-war order, India and France recognise the urgency of building partnerships that can provide some stability in an increasingly unstable world. France, which had sought strategic autonomy as part of its alliance with the US, and India, which valued an independent foreign policy, are natural partners in building new partnerships for uncertain times.</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p>My relationship with France was forged principally through my United Nations experiences. I enrolled in the UN French classes at the Palais des Nations in Geneva and found I had something of a facility for the language. Living in Geneva, I was a frequent visitor to neighbouring parts of France, and once I had left Europe, returned as a writer, for various literary conferences. I observed with great delight that the French have a remarkable ability to engage with ideas—the very hallmark of a civilised society—and also to put forth their viewpoints in the most civil, intelligent and courteous manner. The art of deliberation and discussion is on daily display in France—you can turn on your television at midnight and find thoughtful people discussing complicated issues with erudition and insight. No wonder it was a French philosopher, Rene Descartes, who said, “I think, therefore I am.” The Frenchman can give stiff competition to the “argumentative Indian”!</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p>Inevitably, I have also nurtured a sense of profound respect for French democracy. It’s not too much to claim that the idea of a nation belonging to the people, the idea of a democratic state, was born in the land of “liberté, égalité, fraternité” where ‘the people’ first replaced ‘the king’ as the nucleus of the nation. I’ve been impressed by the French reverence for the republic’s genesis and its founding principles—which has given me, in turn, a deep-rooted appreciation of French democracy.</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p>My association with France and its people is thus one of my most cherished relationships. And I’m not alone. More than 1,09,000 Indians live in France, including about 10,000 Indian students, and the numbers are steadily increasing.</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p>An episode that encapsulated the beauty of the French spirit came during my trip to France in 2002 with a delegation of eminent Indian writers, including the likes of Mahasweta Devi, Javed Akhtar, M. Mukundan and U.R. Ananthamurthy, the ‘Belles Etrangeres’. Our writers, returning from a reception at the majestic Hotel de Ville, found themselves accidental witnesses to the interment of the nineteenth-century novelist Alexandre Dumas, more than a century after his death, in the magnificently lit Pantheon. The Roman columns of this great Parisian monument were bathed in purple, red and blue light; a military band played outside, while an honour guard escorted the coffin of the author of <i>The Three Musketeers</i> its final resting place. Ananthamurthy, the doyen of our group, put it simply to me. “The French,” he said, “really know how to honour their writers.”</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p>May I now add: I am glad they are honouring ours, too.</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p><b>editor@theweek.in</b></p> http://www.theweek.in/columns/shashi-tharoor/2024/03/02/why-i-have-profound-respect-for-french-democracy.html http://www.theweek.in/columns/shashi-tharoor/2024/03/02/why-i-have-profound-respect-for-french-democracy.html Sat Mar 02 14:42:59 IST 2024 newspeak-seems-to-be-back-in-todays-world <a href="http://www.theweek.in/columns/shashi-tharoor/2024/02/03/newspeak-seems-to-be-back-in-todays-world.html"><img border="0" hspace="10" align="left" style="margin-top:3px;margin-right:5px;" src="http://img.theweek.in/content/dam/week/opinion/columns/shashi-tharoor/images/2024/2/3/74-genocide-new.jpg" /> <p>In his famous 1946 essay ‘Politics and the English Language’, George Orwell wrote about how language was being corrupted in “the defence of the indefensible”. When people were driven out of their homes, he wrote, it was euphemistically called “transfer of population”; the killings of people by totalitarian regimes was described as “elimination of unreliable elements”. Orwell developed this idea further in his dystopian novel <i>1984</i>, when he wrote about how, in his fictional tyranny of the future, Oceania would have a new language called Newspeak, in which the ‘Ministry of Love’ was responsible for brainwashing the citizens, the ‘Ministry of Truth’ rewrote history to suit the Party, and the “Thought Police” arrested those charged with “thoughtcrime”. This brilliant and chilling novel gave the English language several new words, including “doublethink”—simultaneous belief in two contradictory ideas, which, in <i>1984</i>, made critical thinking impossible.Newspeak seems to be back in today’s world.</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p>A recent piece in <i>The Economist</i> deplored Harvard students in October writing about the “unfolding violence” in Israel without blaming Hamas’ October 7 attack and the killings and kidnappings of Israelis. It was equally critical of those using the term “collateral damage” for the innocent civilians, including large numbers of women and children, slaughtered in the Israeli bombing of Gaza. When Israeli soldiers actually shot some of their own citizens fleeing captivity, it was referred to as “friendly fire”—is fire ever friendly to those at the receiving end of the firing?</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p>The issue became even more complicated, however, when South Africa brought a case against Israel at the International Court of Justice (ICJ), accusing Israel of committing a “genocide” in Gaza. Israel vehemently denied committing genocide and accused Hamas of that very crime instead. So is this a case of misusing language? As with all geopolitical conflicts, it rather depends on which side you are on. But first, the basics: the UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide defines it as acts intended “to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group”. The definition amplifies the meaning of genocide as also including, among other things, “Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction, and inflicting serious bodily or mental harm.” So which examples of recent history meet this definition?</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p>There is universal agreement on only two cases—the murder by Hitler’s Nazis of six million Jews in the Holocaust, which led to the adoption of the Genocide Convention, and the wholesale massacre of perhaps a million ethnic Tutsis by Hutu militias in Rwanda in 1994. Indians and Bangladeshis describe the elimination of a million Bengalis by the Pakistani Army in 1971 as a genocide (and Sheikh Mujibur Rahman used the neologism “gonocide”, since “gono” means “people” in his native Bangla), but few others concur. US president Donald Trump described the Chinese oppression of its Muslim Uyghur minority as a genocide, but again found few supporters. Opinion is similarly divided on whether the term “genocide” can be applied to Israel’s attacks on civilians in Gaza. Sympathisers of Israel argue that its actions do not meet the acid test: Israel does not “intend” to destroy an ethnic group (the Palestinians), they say, but only the Hamas. Critics of Israel point to the words “in whole or in part” and stress that Israelis are in fact exterminating all the Palestinian civilians in Gaza, which meets the definition.</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p>It would be hard for Israel to deny that it is “deliberately inflicting… conditions of life” leading to “its physical destruction”, and inflicting “serious bodily or mental harm”—the conditions of life in Gaza are inhuman, and continued bombing clearly does cause serious damage to both bodies and minds. But the ICJ is divided on whether what Israel is doing in Gaza meets the definition of genocide. There is obviously no simple formula to apply. <i>The Economist</i> warned writers to avoid both “the evasions of euphemism” and “the temptations of exaggeration”. “Crimes against language,” it observed, “make it harder to describe crimes against humanity”. Whether you call what is happening a genocide or not hardly makes the suffering of non-combatants any more bearable.</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p><b>editor@theweek.in</b></p> http://www.theweek.in/columns/shashi-tharoor/2024/02/03/newspeak-seems-to-be-back-in-todays-world.html http://www.theweek.in/columns/shashi-tharoor/2024/02/03/newspeak-seems-to-be-back-in-todays-world.html Sat Feb 03 14:32:59 IST 2024 death-or-debt-is-the-question <a href="http://www.theweek.in/columns/shashi-tharoor/2024/01/06/death-or-debt-is-the-question.html"><img border="0" hspace="10" align="left" style="margin-top:3px;margin-right:5px;" src="http://img.theweek.in/content/dam/week/opinion/columns/shashi-tharoor/images/2024/1/6/74-hospital-new.jpg" /> <p>In 2015, I chaired, at the invitation of an international non-governmental organisation, a round table of a dozen members of Parliament, together with other policy-makers and civil society activists, to address a burning question: why wasn’t public health more of a priority for our political class? The discussion was rich and illuminating, but one fact stood out for me: that every single politician present agreed that public health simply wasn’t an issue that any voter bothered to press them on. When they visited their constituencies, MPs were badgered on a number of other issues, but no one told them to vote for, or spend more money on, public health. That’s why it didn’t loom large in their consciousness.</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p>If any one thing has changed in our voters’ minds in the aftermath of the pandemic, it should surely be this: the public is now much more aware of the importance of health, and of the need for adequate governmental and political attention to it. This is true of the medical landscape across the world, where the Brookings Institute suggests that a $4.4 trillion increase in spending on public health care, especially among developing countries, is likely by 2040. Of course, these numbers alone will count for little if we do not leverage the current global momentum to address the principal challenges facing the health care ecosystem in our country. Key among these are the immediate and everyday challenge of the difficulty Indians experience in obtaining access to affordable quality health care. Affordability is the key issue here. Take Kerala: a state with perhaps India’s best health care system, with a doctor to patient ratio of 1:400, far better than the WHO standard of 1:1,000 and the Indian average of 1:2,000 people. Yet, in Kerala, since the 1990s, private health care has vastly surpassed the public health care infrastructure, with one estimate showing that 95.31 per cent of the hospitals and 97.09 per cent of the dispensaries in the state are run by private organisations. Even among poorer households, the majority currently prefer to look to private options for health care given the perception that the quality of treatment and facilities available at these venues are better. But this raises the ominous challenge of ruinous out-of-pocket expenditure to finance medical treatment.</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p>Poverty remains one of the biggest challenges for India. But there is less awareness of the enormous role that health care plays in deciding the fate of India’s poor. The working poor are one economic shock—which, for a daily wage labourer, could mean as little as missing a single day’s work and pay on account of illness—away from slipping below the poverty line. A terminal illness like cancer could mean wiping out a family’s economic security, as land and home are sold to meet the medical expenses of the principal breadwinner when he is no longer able to earn to support his family. About 47 per cent of hospital admissions in rural India and 31 per cent in urban India are financed by loans and sale of assets, among the worst in the world. People often don’t have ill-health because they are poor; they are poor because they have ill-health.</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p>So it is not enough just to give public health care a greater priority in governmental policy-making. Despite all the positive efforts to make quality health care accessible in Kerala, we are home to one of India’s highest levels of out-of-pocket expenditure. A 2020 study, which surveyed the impact of OOP expenditure in rural Kerala, found that 41.6 per cent of the total income of study participants was spent for health care of chronic diseases, which indicates a catastrophic level of health expenditure. This has worrying implications for the ability of our more vulnerable segments to stay afloat after medical expenses, and should be a concern for policymakers. So more resources for government hospitals and primary health facilities, and universal government-backed medical insurance to support continuing costs, are vital. Disease should not mean choosing between death and debt for so many of our compatriots.</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p><b>editor@theweek.in</b></p> http://www.theweek.in/columns/shashi-tharoor/2024/01/06/death-or-debt-is-the-question.html http://www.theweek.in/columns/shashi-tharoor/2024/01/06/death-or-debt-is-the-question.html Sat Jan 06 13:50:25 IST 2024 dont-snub-the-dollar <a href="http://www.theweek.in/columns/shashi-tharoor/2023/12/09/dont-snub-the-dollar.html"><img border="0" hspace="10" align="left" style="margin-top:3px;margin-right:5px;" src="http://img.theweek.in/content/dam/week/opinion/columns/shashi-tharoor/images/2023/12/9/74-dollar-new.jpg" /> <p>One of the lesser-reported sidelights of the recently concluded Argentinian presidential elections was the promise of the victorious candidate, Javier Milei, to replace his country’s currency, the peso, with the US dollar. This, he argued, would end the rampant inflation that has frequently bedevilled Argentina (where inflation is currently running at 130 per cent and rising) and introduce stability to the economy. After his victory his government and its newly appointed finance minister have indicated there would no rush to implement this scheme, though the promise remains on the cards and the US dollar may, before long, become the only legal tender in Argentina.</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p>The issue is all the more interesting because it is the exact opposite of the trend prevailing in the BRICS countries, whose last summit, in South Africa a few months ago, featured a growing clamour around “de-dollarisation” of their global trade. The idea was to reduce the power and influence of the US, through its control of its own currency, and the political clout it gave Washington by, for instance, imposing sanctions on countries it disapproved of by restricting their access to dollar transactions (Iran and Russia have both been sanctioned in this way). Leading up to the Johannesburg summit, there was speculation that, in a move towards de-dollarisation, the BRICS bloc would announce the setting up of a common currency. But they settled for a less ambitious goal of encouraging trade in local currencies. Russia’s 2024 BRICS presidency is set to focus primarily on using local currencies and payment systems, with discussions among finance ministries and central bank governors. There are many factors that have created hostility to the dollar in the developing world. The sanctions against Russia last year by impounding its foreign assets, as punishment for its Ukraine war, ignited fears among emerging economies that the US might capriciously use its outsize power against other countries too, thereby impairing their economic security. Besides, over the last two decades, there have been several instances when emerging markets were held hostage to dollar volatility. America can borrow cheaply in global markets because the rest of the world needs dollar assets and is eager to lend to it. Many countries also mutter grievances that they, in effect, incur an exorbitant cost to allow the US to perpetually live beyond its means, without consequences.</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p>In theory, a BRICS common currency would shield the bloc from the perils of dollar hegemony. But in practice, that project will remain a non-starter because of both politics and economics. It is inconceivable that member countries, not least India, would be willing to give up their monetary policy autonomy and become hostage to a common currency that would be vulnerable to instability anywhere in the bloc. Because of its outsized economic muscle, China would easily dominate BRICS, and its yuan would also dominate the common currency’s fortunes. No matter the rhetoric about a new world order, it would be ironic if, to escape the dollar’s dominance, BRICS members succumb to the alternative of the yuan, issued by an authoritarian regime with a dubious reputation for institutional integrity, transparency and rule of law.</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p>The second-best option chosen by BRICS—trading in local currencies—is a safer way forward, but it is also not an easy one. Local currency trade works best if bilateral trade between countries is roughly balanced. But if bilateral trade is structurally imbalanced, the surplus country would accumulate the trading partner’s currency, which raises the ticklish question of how to settle accounts. If they have to be settled in dollars or another hard currency, the benefits of local-currency trade will be largely neutralised. India has had some experience of this problem, because of our extensive trade with both Iran and Russia. Iran found it had accumulated far more rupees in India (in payment for Iranian oil) than it had any use for; there just weren’t that many Indian items the Iranians wanted to buy, and the rupee wasn’t of much use to them anywhere else. The same problem seems to have arisen with regard to paying for oil imports from Russia in rupees. So de-dollarisation is no panacea. As long as we don’t attract US sanctions, we are better off sticking to the system that works. Let’s stay with the dollar!</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p><b>editor@theweek.in</b></p> http://www.theweek.in/columns/shashi-tharoor/2023/12/09/dont-snub-the-dollar.html http://www.theweek.in/columns/shashi-tharoor/2023/12/09/dont-snub-the-dollar.html Sat Dec 09 15:10:51 IST 2023 why-higher-level-reading-is-important <a href="http://www.theweek.in/columns/shashi-tharoor/2023/11/10/why-higher-level-reading-is-important.html"><img border="0" hspace="10" align="left" style="margin-top:3px;margin-right:5px;" src="http://img.theweek.in/content/dam/week/opinion/columns/shashi-tharoor/images/2023/11/10/74-reading-new.jpg" /> <p>Whenever one stands up to decry the evident decline in reading, the defence comes back: “Oh, the younger generation are reading all the time—it is just that they’re reading on their mobile phones and not in books.” But that’s precisely the problem: many in the younger generation seem to believe that books are only for schoolrooms and homework, and that when you’re not studying them in order to pass examinations, they have no appeal or value in their lives. It is true that they are reading: text messages, WhatsApp forwards and the like, and in that sense, the reading they do digitally may cover as many words and as much text as my generation read in our analogue era. But even if the young are, in that sense, reading more than ever, they are also reading rapidly, carelessly and superficially—and that’s dangerous.</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p>The alarm bells have been sounded in a new scholarly article in a journal called First Monday, titled ‘Why higher-level reading is important’, which laments the global decline in serious reading and of readers interested in and capable of complex interpretative interactions with texts. The short attention span required and perpetuated by the digital era has led, the scholar-authors say, to a significant decline of critical and conscious reading, immersive and slow reading, literary reading, non-strategic or non-goal-oriented reading and long-form reading. Even audio books, the authors point out, are not the equivalent of reading but a poor substitute for it.</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p>The scholars identify many psychological processes involved in reading, including motivation and frustration, pleasure and leisure, emotional responses, therapeutic and meditative effects, imagination and mental imagery, creativity and inspiration. In my own asthmatic childhood, reading was my escape, my education and my entertainment. I read essentially for pleasure but grew in the process, widened my mental horizons and enhanced my vocabulary. That sense, of reading being an enjoyable activity which you can still benefit from, is sadly missing among many of today’s young.</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p>Ironically, the higher-level reading skills that are now out of fashion are all the more essential to negotiate the complexities of the 21st century information society. We live in an era of fake news, conspiracy theories, distortions and disinformation, simplifications and outright lies, assiduously spread by our rulers to compromise society’s capacity for informed democratic decision-making. We need all the more to be able to critically interrogate what’s around us, and that comes with experience in engaging with the content and language of texts we read. Those who read very little are the ones vulnerable to manipulation by false and motivated WhatsApp forwards.</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p>The scholar-authors conclude that reading skills and practices are “the foundation for full participation in the economic, political, communal and cultural life of contemporary society”, including “social, cultural and political engagement” as much as “personal liberation, emancipation and empowerment”. A healthy democratic society that requires “the informed consensus of a multi-stakeholder and multi-cultural society” also needs resilient readers, they argue.</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p>They call for “concerted policies” to ensure that future reading education will promote reading habits and “practices to match the pivotal role of reading”. They want policymakers to invest in further reading research. Poetically and rather dramatically, they quote the line: “War is what happens when language fails.”</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p>This scholarly “white paper” has prompted something called the Ljubljana Reading Manifesto, signed by a variety of writers, publishers and readers (including myself). The manifesto is a global appeal to promote reading—something I’ve been doing anyway, by responding to the perennial request to teach audiences a “new word” by replying with an old word: “read!”</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p>It really does matter. I end the same way the manifesto does, with Margaret Atwood’s much quoted warning, “If there are no young readers and writers, there will shortly be no older ones. Literacy will be dead, and democracy will be dead as well.” If you want to save democracy, encourage the next generation to read!</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p><b>editor@theweek.in</b></p> http://www.theweek.in/columns/shashi-tharoor/2023/11/10/why-higher-level-reading-is-important.html http://www.theweek.in/columns/shashi-tharoor/2023/11/10/why-higher-level-reading-is-important.html Fri Nov 10 17:40:59 IST 2023 can-an-indian-succeed-pope-francis <a href="http://www.theweek.in/columns/shashi-tharoor/2023/10/14/can-an-indian-succeed-pope-francis.html"><img border="0" hspace="10" align="left" style="margin-top:3px;margin-right:5px;" src="http://img.theweek.in/content/dam/week/opinion/columns/shashi-tharoor/images/2023/10/14/74-Pope-Francis-new.jpg" /> <p>As Pope Francis celebrates the 10th anniversary of his ascent as the head of the Roman Catholic Church, the Vatican over which he presides appears poised at a crucial juncture of its long and momentous history. In the course of his decade in office, Francis has anointed over a hundred new cardinals. What makes this particularly interesting is that it is the powerful College of Cardinals that constitutes the electorate that chooses the next pope. While there are 241 cardinals, only 136 are cardinal electors, since they have to be under 80 to be eligible to vote. These 136 will decide one day on Pope Francis’s successor, and thereby determine the future direction of the church. Strikingly, it is Francis who has appointed as many as 99 of the future voters. If any more are appointed before the next pope is elected, they will also be chosen by Francis.</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p>In the process, he has dramatically reshaped the College of Cardinals. Traditionally, the red-hatted eminences were white European males, with a customary preponderance of Italians. (There have been 266 popes—217 of them from Italy). When Francis himself, an Argentinian named Jorge Mario Bergoglio, was elected in 2013, Europeans and North Americans together accounted for 64 per cent of the electors, and an even larger percentages of whites chose each of his predecessors. The last time someone from outside Europe led the Roman Catholic Church was 1,282 years ago, in the year 741. That’s when Pope Gregory III, born in Syria, ended his 10-year reign.</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p>Since Francis’s election, and over the last 10 years, European cardinals have dropped to 39 per cent and North Americans to 10 per cent, while Asian cardinals account for 18 per cent of the electoral college, Latin Americans for another 18 per cent and Africans for 13 per cent. The North and the South, to use contemporary terminology, now have about half of the College of Cardinals each. This has created a balance between the traditional strength of the white western cardinals, who for millennia have dominated the church, and cardinals from the developing world, where the church has been growing more impressively and substantially. The regions that were largely non-white and non-western are increasingly regarded as the future of the Catholic Church, while church attendance, and even the recruitment of fresh priests, dwindles in the white western world.</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p>This is quite remarkable, and almost unprecedented. The image of the church as a white-dominated institution is largely justified. Church records tell us there were potentially three black popes in Catholic history: Pope Victor I, who headed the church from 189 to 199 CE, Pope Miltiades (311-314), and Pope Gelasius I, who was pope from 492 to 496. That was 1,527 years ago. Since then, however, the papacy has been an all-white preserve. Laurean Rugambwa (1912-1997) was the first modern native-African cardinal of the Catholic Church, a position to which he was appointed in 1960. It took till 2020 for the first black American, Wilton Gregory, to be appointed a cardinal in the Catholic Church. Asians got there a few years earlier when Peking archbishop Thomas Tien Ken-sin (1890-1967) was elevated to the rank of cardinal in 1946 and an Indian, Valerian Gracias (1900-1978), followed suit in 1953.</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p>This situation opens extraordinary new possibilities, including that of a non-white pope succeeding Francis. Could that be an Indian? Today, of the 241 cardinals, five are from India—Baselios Cleemis, major archbishop-catholicos of Trivandrum; Oswald Gracias, archbishop of Bombay; George Alencherry, major archbishop of Ernakulam-Angamaly; Anthony Poola, archbishop of Hyderabad; and Filipe Neri Ferrao, archbishop of Goa and Daman. The sixth and the oldest cardinal, Ranchi archbishop Telesphore P. Toppo, 83, died on October 4.</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p>Gracias and Alencherry are 78, and will only be eligible to vote for another two years; Ferrao is 70, but has only been a cardinal since August 2022; and Poola, though just 61, has also been cardinal for just a year. But Cleemis, aged 64 and already a cardinal for 11 years, is young and vigorous and has emerged as a formidable figure with a future. He is already a cardinal to reckon with and will be even more powerful in the years to come—and who knows, might emerge, as they say in Italian, as <i>“papabile”</i>: electable to the papacy himself. A man for Indians to keep an eye on!</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p><b>editor@theweek.in</b></p> http://www.theweek.in/columns/shashi-tharoor/2023/10/14/can-an-indian-succeed-pope-francis.html http://www.theweek.in/columns/shashi-tharoor/2023/10/14/can-an-indian-succeed-pope-francis.html Sat Oct 14 15:03:54 IST 2023 china-is-in-distress-many-things-have-gone-wrong <a href="http://www.theweek.in/columns/shashi-tharoor/2023/09/16/china-is-in-distress-many-things-have-gone-wrong.html"><img border="0" hspace="10" align="left" style="margin-top:3px;margin-right:5px;" src="http://img.theweek.in/content/dam/week/opinion/columns/shashi-tharoor/images/2023/9/16/90-china-economy-new.jpg" /> <p>The absence of Chinese President Xi Jinping from the G20 summit in India occasioned much speculation, but one simple reason might well be the current dismal state of the Chinese economy. So many things have gone wrong, and so much of it is blamed on the government’s mismanagement, that the country’s currency, the renminbi, has fallen to its lowest levels since before the pandemic. Experts no longer consider it inevitable that China will become, as long predicted, the largest economy in the world, overtaking the US.</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p>What went wrong? The list is dismaying: a slowdown in property investment, a major driver of growth in the past, following the collapse of two major real estate firms with billions of dollars in debt; rising debt levels (China’s debt-to-GDP ratio is now over 250 per cent, among the highest in the world), limiting the scope for stimulus measures; the ongoing trade war with the US, which has hurt exports; a demographic slowdown, as the working-age population shrinks, putting a strain on economic growth; environmental challenges; and the government’s failure to drastically overhaul its growth strategy.</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p>The result of all this is widespread gloom about China. The much-touted post-Covid recovery proved lacklustre, and the performance of state-owned enterprises, still occupying the commanding heights of the economy, has been hobbled by inefficiency. Xi’s government has contributed to the problems by its autocratic actions, which have seen major capitalists like Alibaba’s Jack Ma cut down to size, others arrested or going into exile, and increased geopolitical tensions as a result of Xi’s international belligerence. The macroeconomic forecasting consultancy TS Lombard predicts that China’s inbound foreign direct investment will slow down in 2023. The <i>Financial Times</i> says foreign investors are openly asking whether “China is investible” any longer.</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p>Ordinary Chinese householders have become cautious about spending, in turn slowing growth. An extraordinary 70 per cent of Chinese household wealth is held in real estate (more than double that of the US), and much of it is imperilled. According to the World Bank, home price-to-income ratios in Beijing, Shanghai, and Shenzhen exceed “a multiple of 40”. Youth unemployment is said to be rising even as the population shrinks, though the government refuses to release data. And there is no real answer to the question: how can China manage the predicted (and necessary) transition to a consumer-based economy when consumers in general have placed so much of their wealth into properties that, thanks to the government’s refusal to bail out property companies, are ending up being worthless? What few measures the government has taken to stimulate the economy have been derided as too little, too piecemeal and devoid of any overarching strategic context. All China knows is to endlessly increase investment, which (since so much of it is unproductive and inefficient) has simply sunk it further into debt.</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p>Xi’s heavy hand on all government policies, particularly after he won himself an indefinite extension of tenure as president, has not helped. An over-centralised government that micro-manages every major initiative cannot be expected to create or even encourage growth engines in the private sector. It is widely believed that Xi does not know what he is doing economically and has failed to empower those who do. Putting political pressure on the economy to hit government GDP targets does not work. Xi’s government is less adept than its predecessors at communicating its plans, doing little to inspire confidence in its prospects. And Xi’s failure to manage the relationship with the US has increased global “decoupling” from the Chinese economy and severely undermined the confidence of foreign portfolio investors.</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p>Overall, the Chinese economy is still expected to continue to grow in 2023, but at a significantly slower pace than in previous years. The key to sustained growth will be for the government to implement reforms that address the underlying challenges facing the economy, but there are few signs of this happening. With experts declaring that China isn’t going to be a powerful driver of global economic growth in the near future, Xi has plenty to do at home.</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p><b>editor@theweek.in</b></p> http://www.theweek.in/columns/shashi-tharoor/2023/09/16/china-is-in-distress-many-things-have-gone-wrong.html http://www.theweek.in/columns/shashi-tharoor/2023/09/16/china-is-in-distress-many-things-have-gone-wrong.html Sat Sep 16 11:39:37 IST 2023 chandrayaan-3-new-horizons-beckon-beyond-the-stars <a href="http://www.theweek.in/columns/shashi-tharoor/2023/08/19/chandrayaan-3-new-horizons-beckon-beyond-the-stars.html"><img border="0" hspace="10" align="left" style="margin-top:3px;margin-right:5px;" src="http://img.theweek.in/content/dam/week/opinion/columns/shashi-tharoor/images/2023/8/19/74-Chandrayaa-new.jpg" /> <p>As I write these words, Chandrayaan-3 is just 1,400km away from the moon. As you receive this issue of THE WEEK, all systems should be ready for the expected safe landing on the moon on August 23. A major space triumph, accomplished by very few countries, should be ours.</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p>India’s space programme is among the oldest and most ambitious on the planet. We have undertaken missions to the Moon (Chandrayaan-1 and Chandrayaan-2) and Mars (Mars Orbiter Mission), created our own launch vehicles and satellites, and now plan to send an Indian citizen into low earth orbit by 2023.</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p>But what does all this mean for India’s standing on the world stage? There is no doubt that India’s space programme bolsters our national development and global influence and showcases our technological prowess. India has been conducting space activities on a shoestring budget: not only was the successful Mars orbit a rare triumph (no other country had succeeded in a Mars orbit on its first attempt), but it was conducted at 11 per cent the cost of NASA’s programme, and slightly under the budget of the Hollywood space movie <i>Gravity</i>.</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p>As a result India can afford to provide low-cost launch services to other nations, demonstrating our innovativeness and capacity. We have entered a new era of participation and influence in international space cooperation and governance, engaging actively with multilateral forums and bilateral partners. India also nurtures a vibrant private space sector, contributing to the global space economy.</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p>A bright future awaits. India’s space programme is set to skyrocket. Experts predict it could make up at least 10 per cent of the global space economy in the next decade, a significant leap from the current two per cent. According to the Indian Space Research Organisation, India has pursued bilateral and multilateral relations with space agencies and space-related bodies with the aim of strengthening existing ties between countries; taking up new scientific and technological challenges; refining space policies and defining international frameworks for exploitation and utilisation of outer space for peaceful purposes.</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p>Among the foreign countries that have used India’s space programme to launch their own satellites and benefit from space co-operation with India are France, a space partner since 1964, which has supported India’s development of launch vehicles, satellites, applications and human spaceflight, and has also launched several satellites using India’s Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle (PSLV) and Geosynchronous Satellite Launch Vehicle (GSLV); Russia, another long-time collaborator on various aspects of space exploration, including launch vehicles, satellites, planetary missions and training four Indian astronauts plus supplying key components for the crew module of Gaganyaan; and the US, with which India has a strategic partnership in space, covering areas such as earth observation, satellite navigation, space science, planetary exploration, launch services and human spaceflight. The US, Israel, Singapore, Canada, Germany, Indonesia, Japan, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, South Korea, the UK and many more have also launched several of their satellites using India’s PSLV and GSLV.</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p>India has cooperated with many of these countries on various aspects of space technology, such as remote sensing, communication, navigation, telemetry, tracking and command, and propulsion. ISRO is planning to launch missions to study the Sun (Aditya-L1) and Venus (Shukrayaan-1) in the near future.</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p>Driven by the vision of Jawaharlal Nehru, and sustained by brilliant home-ßgrown talents like Dr Vikram Sarabhai, India’s space programme is consumed by various factors such as national development, scientific curiosity, strategic interests and international prestige. Those who once scoffed at a poor country aspiring to send rockets into space now concede that India’s space programme has contributed to various socio-economic benefits such as disaster management, education, health care, agriculture, fisheries, urban planning and more.</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p>A classic photograph from the early 1960s shows Indian rocket parts being transported on a cycle. We have come a long way since then. When Chandrayaan lands on the moon—and though things could still go wrong, as they did with Chandrayaan-2, ISRO chief S. Somanath is confident it will get there—the news will confirm India’s global status as a leader in space exploration. As we look up at the skies, we can contemplate an even more glorious future. New horizons beckon beyond the stars.</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p><b>editor@theweek.in</b></p> http://www.theweek.in/columns/shashi-tharoor/2023/08/19/chandrayaan-3-new-horizons-beckon-beyond-the-stars.html http://www.theweek.in/columns/shashi-tharoor/2023/08/19/chandrayaan-3-new-horizons-beckon-beyond-the-stars.html Sat Aug 19 11:16:30 IST 2023 four-observations-i-made-at-a-convocation-in-kerala <a href="http://www.theweek.in/columns/shashi-tharoor/2023/07/21/four-observations-i-made-at-a-convocation-in-kerala.html"><img border="0" hspace="10" align="left" style="margin-top:3px;margin-right:5px;" src="http://img.theweek.in/content/dam/week/opinion/columns/shashi-tharoor/images/2023/7/21/74-education-new.jpg" /> <p>Early this month I was chief guest at the convocation of an impressive new college of engineering in rural Kerala. As I handed out the certificates and awards, I was struck by four observations, which had been building up in my mind over the more than 50 such occasions at which I have officiated over the last decade, and which were reconfirmed for me yet again.</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p>First, it is striking how many young people in our country are burdened with names that begin with the letter “A”. They are the offspring of a hyper-competitive generation of parents who wanted to equip their children with a name that would give them a seat in the first row, be called first on school occasions, and be served first whenever children were lined up alphabetically. Indian educational institutions, unlike western ones, usually go by first names and not surnames (unavoidably, since naming traditions vary so much within our country and even within communities). So a first name beginning with A is assumed to confer a great advantage. The problem is that too many parents had the same idea, so that often 25 per cent of a class consists of children whose names begin with A, thus nullifying some of the advantage. To restore the balance, parents have now started giving their kids names that start with “Aa”, like Aaron, Aashish or Aashiq! The last two, strictly speaking, don’t even need the second “a” and never used to be spelled that way a generation ago. (“Aasha” is no doubt round the corner!) Other parents go further and change names that used to be spelled differently, as names starting with other letters. Thus the Kerala name Ebin is now spelled Abin by many. One day we will probably see Urmila being spelled Armila. Where will this end, and when will parents learn to stop saddling their children with such oddities?</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p>My second observation is that education is increasingly becoming a female preserve. In this college and in many other co-educational institutions where I have conferred degrees, girls were a minority—perhaps 30 per cent. Yet they were, as usual, a distinct majority of the high achievers. This seems to cut across disciplines—science and humanities, engineering and medicine, dental courses and ayurvedic studies, all have a preponderance of women excelling over men. (The one exception seems to be mechanical engineering, which is still largely, if not exclusively, a male field.) The bulk of the students may be men, but the toppers are almost always women. The 21st century is clearly going to belong to women, and we’ll all be much the better for it.</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p>Third, the hunger for education is widespread and is driven mainly by parents who see in a good college degree the best hope for social advancement. It was striking for me to see parents in simple rural attire proudly watching their children, in graduation gowns and mortar-board caps, collecting engineering degrees earned in the English medium. But we are releasing our graduates into an employment ecosystem that may not be able to accommodate them. I was aware, though I did not mention it, that a study by the All-India Professionals Congress had established in Kerala that 66 per cent of engineering graduates ended up in jobs that did not require an engineering degree. It’s all the more essential to ensure that there is a connect between what students are taught and what the market-place needs.</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p>Fourth, those black graduation gowns have to go. They are completely unsuitable for our climate and totally at odds with our colourful culture.</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p>Instead of kids sweating in their gowns in sweltering weather, why not create an India-specific robe that consists of a <i>kurta</i> or <i>jubba</i> and a university-specific <i>angavastram</i>, both in appropriate university colours? As for the mortar-board tasseled caps, surely an Indian cap or turban would fit the bill better? My own preference would be for a gold-bordered Mysuru peta; and as for the tassels, you could replace them with metal pendants of the same provenance. We talk all the time of decolonising our education; why not decolonise our convocations, too?</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p><b>editor@theweek.in</b></p> http://www.theweek.in/columns/shashi-tharoor/2023/07/21/four-observations-i-made-at-a-convocation-in-kerala.html http://www.theweek.in/columns/shashi-tharoor/2023/07/21/four-observations-i-made-at-a-convocation-in-kerala.html Fri Jul 21 16:22:02 IST 2023 how-technology-enabled-and-destroyed-a-sunrise-industry <a href="http://www.theweek.in/columns/shashi-tharoor/2023/06/24/how-technology-enabled-and-destroyed-a-sunrise-industry.html"><img border="0" hspace="10" align="left" style="margin-top:3px;margin-right:5px;" src="http://img.theweek.in/content/dam/week/opinion/columns/shashi-tharoor/images/2023/6/24/74-ai-health-care-new.jpg" /> <p>As the world contemplates the dizzying ascent of Artificial Intelligence and what it will mean for workers everywhere, here’s a cautionary tale of how technology enabled and destroyed a sunrise industry in the 21st century. Medical transcription, the process of converting dictated medical reports into written format, witnessed significant growth in India at the cusp of the millennium. With the fibre-optic cables laid across the globe in the 1990s, a new business became possible. American doctors had to dictate their notes to a secretary, pay her overtime, put up with mistakes, and cope with absences for leave and illness. Dictating to transcribers overseas over the internet was both cheaper and more efficient in generating timely medical documentation.</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p>India boasted a vast pool of educated individuals proficient in English and possessing strong typing skills, as well as a willingness to adapt to technology. Indian transcription companies offered competitive pricing without compromising on quality, making India an attractive option for offshore outsourcing. The cost advantage was linked to Indians’ command of the English language, including medical terminologies, ensuring largely error-free transcription. The time zone difference meant notes could be typed up in India while Americans were asleep. Overnight turnaround times ensured US health care providers received transcribed reports promptly, improving their efficiency and patient care.</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p>Indian transcriptionists possessed more skills than American secretaries, did not disappear on holidays, and did not charge overtime. Seamless IT connectivity facilitated real-time communication between health care providers and transcription companies, ensuring quick feedback and prompt resolution of any clarifications. Indian transcription companies invested in rigorous training programmes to educate their workforce on medical terminologies, American regulations, and data security protocols. All this made India an ideal destination for medical transcription services. Indian companies’ commitment to quality and compliance, and the growth of a skilled workforce to meet the industry’s demands, earned the trust of international clients, further boosting the industry. Both sides thought they had a long-term winner on their hands.</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p>They were wrong. They had not anticipated the advent of AI and voice recognition software, which led to the collapse of the medical transcription business. AI technology, particularly in natural language processing and speech recognition, rapidly advanced, leading to the development of sophisticated voice recognition software. These systems were capable of accurately transcribing spoken words into written text. For the price of one-time purchase of AI-driven voice recognition software, health care providers could reduce expenses by adopting automated transcription systems. The software enabled doctors to speak into their computers and see their words appear on the screen in real-time, eliminating the need for outsourcing to human transcriptionists. Why pay Indian companies for documentation that could be generated almost free in the doctor’s office?</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p>While early iterations of voice recognition software had limitations, subsequent advancements in AI technology led to improved accuracy. Machine-learning algorithms trained themselves on the voice of the doctor, continuously analysing and learning from vast amounts of medical data, reducing errors and enhancing transcription quality. The integration of AI transcription software with electronic health records systems further streamlined operations. Automated transfer of transcribed reports into patient records improved data accessibility and efficiency.</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p>There is a sobering lesson in all this. Those who thought the medical transcription business would play a vital role in the health care industry for several decades underestimated how rapidly technology would render their business model obsolete. The evolution of AI will continue to shape the health care industry. Indian radiologists who used to read MRIs for American hospitals (another seemingly sunrise industry, given the shortage of radiologists in the USA and their high wages) have already been displaced by AI systems.The Oxford Martin School estimates that 30 per cent of the jobs in the world in 2030 will be jobs that don’t exist today. Equally, at least 30 per cent of the jobs today will cease to be necessary or viable by then. We have entered a world in which our businesses will have to constantly focus on adaptation and upskilling if they hope to survive.</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p><b>editor@theweek.in</b></p> http://www.theweek.in/columns/shashi-tharoor/2023/06/24/how-technology-enabled-and-destroyed-a-sunrise-industry.html http://www.theweek.in/columns/shashi-tharoor/2023/06/24/how-technology-enabled-and-destroyed-a-sunrise-industry.html Sat Jun 24 11:32:06 IST 2023 biden-vs-trump-again <a href="http://www.theweek.in/columns/shashi-tharoor/2023/05/26/biden-vs-trump-again.html"><img border="0" hspace="10" align="left" style="margin-top:3px;margin-right:5px;" src="http://img.theweek.in/content/dam/week/opinion/columns/shashi-tharoor/images/2023/5/26/74-donald-trump-joe-biden-new.jpg" /> <p>US President Joe Biden’s announcement in April that he would be a candidate for re-election in 2024, and the continuing popularity of former president Donald Trump among hardcore Republicans, make it increasingly likely that the US is heading for a Trump-Biden rematch in the presidential elections next year. The irony is that a number of polls over the past six months have consistently shown that this is just what a majority of Americans do not want to see.</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p>A discredited ex-president who orchestrated an attack on his own legislature in an attempt to steal an election he had lost, versus an octogenarian serving president whose decency is beyond question but whose mental acuity is not? Most Americans want another choice. Trump and Biden each lead in their party’s standings for very different reasons. Biden, as the incumbent, is almost impossible to dislodge and, in all fairness, has been a reasonably successful president in challenging circumstances. Though many Democrats are not happy to be led by someone so old and forgetful—he struggled, when asked by a child, to remember the name of the last country he had visited, just two weeks earlier (it was Ireland)—it is extremely unusual for any party in America to defenestrate its own incumbent president, as senator Ted Kennedy found out when he tried to unseat Jimmy Carter in 1980. In fact only once has a president who was elected in his own right been denied renomination for another term, and that was in 1856. (Four presidents who had been appointed upon the death of the previous incumbent did not win renomination.)</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p>If it were not for his age, forgetfulness, and occasional rambling, Biden’s record is good enough to sustain the argument that, like all but one of his predecessors, he deserves another term.Meanwhile, roughly four in 10 Republicans do not want Trump (“a sociopath who has incited violent sedition against the government of the US”, as one critic dubbed him) as their party’s nominee.</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p>The Grand Old Party (GOP), as it is known, has descended in recent years into a right-wing rabble sustained by a Trumpist personality cult as rabid as Bolsonaro’s in Brazil was. The party’s institutions, and therefore its presidential nomination process, are controlled by diehard Trumpians, whose zeal, bordering on irrational, gives Trump the votes he needs in the party to prevail. Defeating Trump for the nomination would not be easy for any other candidate, because he would face the fanatic opposition of the Trump devotees, who constitute the GOP’s base voters today.</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p>Barring the risk of the various court cases against Trump making it legally and politically impossible to renominate him—something that at the moment seems unlikely, since the cases have only increased Trump’s popularity among the faithful—the nomination is safely his.Indians should not care unduly, because both Biden and Trump have been pro-Indian in orientation, and hostile to our principal adversary, China.</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p>But what should interest us is the muted reaction Biden received to his announcement that he would continue with Kamala Harris as his running-mate. Harris is faring even more poorly in the polls than Biden, which is hard to imagine since his approval ratings are near record lows for an incumbent. But the vice president’s numbers are among the worst of any incumbent vice-president since such polls began to be done. Harris is widely considered to be a fairly lacklustre vice president, prone to making gaffes when unscripted, and with a history of staffing problems that suggest poor management ability. All this matters because of the fear that as understudy to America’s oldest president, she would have to step into his shoes were anything to happen, and there are widespread doubts of her ability to handle the job.</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p>Many Americans (most prominently former New Jersey governor Chris Christie) have been saying openly that they will not vote if the election is Biden versus Trump again. But abstention is no solution in any democracy: staying away from one’s democratic responsibilities is not a responsible choice. But that it is even being considered is a measure of how unappealing are the alternatives confronting America’s voters next year.</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p><b>editor@theweek.in</b></p> http://www.theweek.in/columns/shashi-tharoor/2023/05/26/biden-vs-trump-again.html http://www.theweek.in/columns/shashi-tharoor/2023/05/26/biden-vs-trump-again.html Fri May 26 17:31:17 IST 2023 china-complicates-indo-russia-bonds <a href="http://www.theweek.in/columns/shashi-tharoor/2023/04/28/china-complicates-indo-russia-bonds.html"><img border="0" hspace="10" align="left" style="margin-top:3px;margin-right:5px;" src="http://img.theweek.in/content/dam/week/opinion/columns/shashi-tharoor/images/2023/4/28/74-china-russia-new.jpg" /> <p>It has become increasingly clear that we are facing a formidable adversary on our northern borders. China’s huge economy, brutally effective and well-equipped armed forces and recent advantages in technology make it a colossus in any case, but its aggression on the disputed Line of Actual Control (LAC) between our countries, its killing of 20 jawans in 2020 and its refusal since then to vacate areas occupied by its army that previously used to be patrolled by both sides, constitute a challenge we simply cannot afford to ignore. An added complication for us is that China’s diplomacy is making impressive headway around the world.</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p>If China were merely a belligerent power, throwing its weight around, pushing its maritime neighbours to the limits of their territorial waters, embarking on a trade war with Australia, cracking down ruthlessly on Hong Kong and Sinkiang and threatening Taiwan, it would be easier to confront. But, instead, it has begun exercising a more subtle influence around the world, recently mediating the Saudi-Iranian agreement for normalisation of relations (which was widely seen as a diplomatic triumph for Beijing).</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p>Together with the billions of dollars spent on worldwide infrastructure projects under its Belt and Road Initiative, this is promoting talk of a newly influential “global China”. Col Zhou Bo, now a strategist at the influential Tsinghua University, was recently quoted as saying: “Global China is definitely real. China is ubiquitous. China’s influence is everywhere.” That “everywhere” notably includes India’s close friend, defence equipment supplier and indispensable source of discounted fuel and fertiliser, Russia. Chinese President Xi Jinping’s recent visit to Russia made headline news around the world, but the media focused on the extremely unlikely outcome of Moscow agreeing to a peace deal to end the Ukraine war. That was always a red herring: it’s clear to everyone, including Beijing, that neither Russia nor Ukraine is ready for peace or even for negotiations at this time, as both believe they can “win” on the battlefield.</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p>China was always unlikely to attempt to pull off peace during Xi’s Moscow visit. The trip was instead intended to burnish China’s international image and to shore up the two countries’ increasingly close relationship. China has long spoken of a “no-limits” friendship with Russia, and it is clear that the relationship continues to expand, with the two leaders agreeing to an important set of economic proposals, including a significant expansion of their natural gas trade. A new planned pipeline, named ‘Power of Siberia 2’, is to supply China with some 50 billion cubic meters of Russian gas annually, reaching at least 98 billion cubic meters of natural gas, in addition to 100 million tons of liquefied natural gas, by 2030. For a Russia unable to exploit its “natural” market in western Europe because of the sanctions imposed on it after the Ukraine invasion, the opportunity to supply China with its vast supplies of gas is of inestimable value. In addition, as Putin himself announced in Moscow, “Russian business is in a position to meet the growing demand from the Chinese economy both within the framework of current projects and those that are now in the process of negotiation.” Put less obliquely, Russia’s dependence on China for its own prosperity is increasing by the day. It’s a classic colonial relationship: Russia will supply resources to the new metropolitan power to the east, while importing more sophisticated Chinese technology than Russia possesses, such as computer super-servers from Huawei, in addition to all the daily consumer items no longer available from the west. There is increasing talk that the yuan [China’s renminbi] will be Russia’s main trade currency.</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p>Where does this leave India? China is unremittingly hostile, refusing to budge an inch from its territorial gains in 2020 and continually thrusting itself into new areas along the LAC, most recently near Tawang. We have looked to Russia as a balancing power, but how useful can a Russia reduced to being a junior partner of China be to us? If our principal friend is helplessly dependent on our principal adversary, what’s the friendship worth? These are major questions to ponder as New Delhi recalibrates its geopolitical options while casting a wary eye on the irresistible rise of global China.</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p><b>editor@theweek.in</b></p> http://www.theweek.in/columns/shashi-tharoor/2023/04/28/china-complicates-indo-russia-bonds.html http://www.theweek.in/columns/shashi-tharoor/2023/04/28/china-complicates-indo-russia-bonds.html Fri Apr 28 15:07:26 IST 2023 how-centre-is-using-money-as-a-weapon-shashi-tharoor <a href="http://www.theweek.in/columns/shashi-tharoor/2023/04/01/how-centre-is-using-money-as-a-weapon-shashi-tharoor.html"><img border="0" hspace="10" align="left" style="margin-top:3px;margin-right:5px;" src="http://img.theweek.in/content/dam/week/opinion/columns/shashi-tharoor/images/2023/4/1/74-Using-money-as-a-weapon-new.jpg" /> <p>The finance bill 2023 was passed amid a din in the Lok Sabha, without discussion, giving the government some 45 lakh crore rupees of our taxpayers’ money without a single question being raised or addressed. This was a crying shame for our parliamentary democracy and an indictment of the state to which our institutions have been reduced.The bill comes at an uncertain time for the economic revival of our country. The economy had been laid low by demonetisation, and then shattered by the pandemic and the resultant lockdown; it is now in turbulent waters thanks to global developments following the invasion of Ukraine.</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p>The former star performers like tourism and service industries are devastated; the backbone of the economy—agriculture and MSMEs—are both in crisis. Inflation and price rise are hurting the aam aadmi severely, with even basic commodities needed for daily sustenance becoming prohibitively expensive for the economically vulnerable. And there is an alarming lack of jobs in our economy, particularly for our unemployed youth, whose futures are at the risk of being derailed. If despite all this, we are growing faster than other major economies, it offers scant consolation.</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p>Both the Union budget and the finance bill reflect a government lacking the necessary vision to find solutions to these grave challenges. Three principal failures were evident in the tepid Union budget. The first is its disastrous assault on the rights-based approach to social justice and economic empowerment, which have been fatally undermined by cutting the budget for social welfare by nearly 20 per cent. The second failure is the complete lack of acknowledgement of the elephant in the room—the need to generate employment. At a time of record levels of joblessness and widespread distress, particularly in the rural economy, the government has slashed several schemes (including MGNREGA by 33 per cent) that have served as ventilators for distressed citizens after disasters like demonetisation, the botched implementation of GST and the mismanagement of the pandemic. And third is the glaring failure to offer concrete support or relief measures for the segments of the Indian economy that are hurting the most—our MSMEs, the tourism and services sector, the middle class, salaried professionals and the economically impoverished.</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p>This trend of underperformance continues. The finance bill reflects three broad narratives: a falsification of reality through misleading announcements that substitute PR for substance, a concerted attempt to centralise power and ride roughshod over the careful balance of federalism at the expense of our states, and a series of misguided financial policy measures that will only hinder the Indian economy. The bill has also raised concerns among philanthropic organisations, whose good work could be actively restrained by new restrictive proposals to limit donations and sharing of grants between charities.</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p>But there is a larger and more worrying trend that the nation is witnessing under this government—the use of financial policy-making and weaponisation of fiduciary institutions as tools for coercion and control. The Union government has deliberately used these instruments to handicap our states financially, but also to clamp down on political opponents of the government—practically anyone who is even remotely critical, whether think tanks, the media or even vocal citizens.</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p>We have seen this take place at a dizzying frequency in a number of ways—the use of the income tax department to go after media houses that have not toed the line of the ruling dispensation; the cancellation or withholding of FCRA licenses of prominent think tanks (like Delhi’s Centre for Policy Research) or even philanthropic bodies (Missionaries of Charity) that have left many with an existential crisis; and the use of the Enforcement Directorate to stifle the voice of the opposition. Of the 121 political leaders probed by the ED since 2014, 115 (95 per cent) as of November 2022 belong to the opposition. Such tendencies not only shame India in the global community but are an affront to our democratic constitutional principles. Sadly, as with legislation, policy making and the appropriation of autonomous institutions, the finance bill, too, only confirms that India is now led by a government that is inclined towards coercion, control and an unprecedented centralisation of power.</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p><b>editor@theweek.in</b></p> http://www.theweek.in/columns/shashi-tharoor/2023/04/01/how-centre-is-using-money-as-a-weapon-shashi-tharoor.html http://www.theweek.in/columns/shashi-tharoor/2023/04/01/how-centre-is-using-money-as-a-weapon-shashi-tharoor.html Sat Apr 01 15:05:21 IST 2023 debunking-deepak-baglas-hype-shashi-tharoor <a href="http://www.theweek.in/columns/shashi-tharoor/2023/03/03/debunking-deepak-baglas-hype-shashi-tharoor.html"><img border="0" hspace="10" align="left" style="margin-top:3px;margin-right:5px;" src="http://img.theweek.in/content/dam/week/opinion/columns/shashi-tharoor/images/2023/3/3/98-india-passport-new.jpg" /> <p>A recent speech by the head of Invest India, Deepak Bagla, has gone viral on social media. It is a wonderful exercise in boosterism, telling the world—especially potential investors—about the wonderful opportunities in India, our demographic advantage, rate of growth, burgeoning FDI and more. As an Indian, I felt a warm glow listening to it, and pride that we had achieved so much and had so much to offer the world. (For the very few who may somehow have missed the WhatsApp forwards, just google Mr Bagla’s name and the words “Treasury” and “2023”.)</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p>All of us want to believe the best about our country. It is a welcome change not to be hearing the relentless negativism of our politics, hate-speech emanating from ruling circles and the deafening silence of the government when minorities are attacked, women are raped, innocent people are lynched and so on. But can we afford to delude ourselves that the rosy picture Mr Bagla paints is the full story of our India, even overlooking political and social issues and just focusing on economics?</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p>A number of simple, uncontested facts and figures Mr Bagla does not mention come to mind: How much of our heady GDP growth can simply be attributed to population increase? In 1960, our population was 445 million, and we had a GDP of $37 billion; in 2020, it was about 1.4 billion, and our GDP was almost $3 trillion. So over 60 years, our population multiplied by three and our GDP by eight. This is no different from the way global GDP grew; exponential growth of this kind is not only not unusual, but typical. Much of our growth, in other words, was due to an expanding population, including a growing labour force.</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p>The government tells us proudly that it distributed free food grain to 80 crore, or 800 million, Indians. If so many Indians required free food grain, does that speak of a glowing economic success story or a painful increase in poverty? Reports suggest that as many as 40 million, or 4 crore, Indians have sunk below the poverty line in the last four years, adding to the numbers of absolute poor.</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p>The claims about FDI flowing into India at a record high rate have been contested—the $532 billion coming into our country in seven-and-a-half years is not borne out by the figures issued by reputable international bodies. But beyond the claims of high FDI, why is it that over the same period, private sector investment in India, as a proportion of GDP, has stagnated? Why are our own businessmen so afraid to invest in India, as Mr Bagla wants the world to do?</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p>Some 8,000 high net worth individuals (that is, people with assets exceeding a million US dollars) have emigrated out of India last year (the third highest such exodus in the whole world). Does this suggest India is a good place to invest and flourish, or rather that many of the rich feel they cannot thrive in the business conditions here?</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p>We can boast about our demographic dividend of a youthful working-age population ready to be the work-engine of the world, but what have we done to train and skill them to seize the opportunities offered by the 21st century? Most of the unemployed are unemployable because they have dropped out of school by the ninth grade, learned very little before then and failed to acquire usable skills thereafter.</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p>Worse still, the numbers of educated unemployed testify to the irrelevance of much Indian college learning. Kerala’s Employment Exchange lists about two lakh professional and technical job seekers as of 2022, including 6,000 medical doctors and 44,000 engineering graduates. Of the rest, some 71 per cent of them are ITI certificate or diploma holders. Highly literate and educated Kerala’s youth unemployment stands at 42 per cent. What hope can we offer them?</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p>And, finally, and perhaps, most damningly, a total of 1,83,741 Indians have renounced their citizenship this past year, as the government officially informed the Lok Sabha. Why would so many do that, if India was shining for them?</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p>It’s wonderful to hear Mr Bagla, and always pleasant to feel good about ourselves. But if it becomes a substitute for thinking seriously about our nation’s challenges, it can only hurt us. India needs hope, not hype.</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p><b>editor@theweek.in</b></p> http://www.theweek.in/columns/shashi-tharoor/2023/03/03/debunking-deepak-baglas-hype-shashi-tharoor.html http://www.theweek.in/columns/shashi-tharoor/2023/03/03/debunking-deepak-baglas-hype-shashi-tharoor.html Sun Mar 05 13:57:29 IST 2023 pride-not-prejudice-is-the-way-forward <a href="http://www.theweek.in/columns/shashi-tharoor/2023/02/03/pride-not-prejudice-is-the-way-forward.html"><img border="0" hspace="10" align="left" style="margin-top:3px;margin-right:5px;" src="http://img.theweek.in/content/dam/week/opinion/columns/shashi-tharoor/images/2023/2/3/74-Pride-not-prejudice-new.jpg" /> <p>On the eve of the budget session of Parliament, the talk about India’s economy is all bullish. At a time when fears of a global recession are mounting, India seems likely to prove an exception to the worldwide tale of woe. Our country is expected to log the best performance in 2023 of any major economy. Estimates vary, but if one examines the World Bank’s numbers, India is estimated to grow at 6.6 per cent, compared with just 0.5 per cent for the US and 4.3 per cent for China (though from a much higher base).</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p>The good news may continue. The prestigious global think-tank, the Centre for Economics and Business Research, issues an annual “world economic league” table.</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p>In its most recent report, the Centre writes: “India is now clearly on its way to becoming the world’s third economic superpower. Revised figures now show that India overtook the UK to become the world’s fifth largest economy in 2021. It has consolidated this position and is forecast to overtake Germany to become the world’s fourth largest economy in 2026 and to overtake Japan to become the world’s third largest economy in 2032. By 2035, India is forecast to become the world’s third $10 trillion dollar economy.”</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p>This is no small matter. India’s economy is nearly $3.5 trillion—short of the $5 trillion that Narendra Modi had confidently predicted a couple of years ago, but a vast improvement on the lowly status we occupied in the first four decades after independence, when India served as a poster-child for third world poverty and destitution. Ever since the historic liberalisation of 1991, when Dr Manmohan Singh had declared in Parliament that “no power on earth can stop an idea whose time has come”, the Indian economic story has been on an upswing.</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p>There have been setbacks and slumps—demonetisation (the single worst disaster to hit India’s economy since the Great Bengal Famine); “Make in India” never really caught on; and the expected outflow from China did not benefit us, with companies preferring to move instead to Vietnam and Malaysia. But, the story is changing for the better, as foreign governments and investors see that the arguments for investing in India are reinforced by geopolitical considerations.</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p>Two new terms of art have come into vogue in the west. The first, “nearshoring”, refers to the need to shorten supply chains to reduce risks, by moving production lines from countries that are vulnerable to disruption. The second is “friendshoring”, the case for boosting economic cooperation with countries that have similar values to the west. In both cases, India’s stability and openness to the west as the world’s biggest democracy makes us a clear alternative to China. But there is work to do yet to make India a totally attractive investment destination—facilitating clearances, speeding up access to land, shaking up our clogged factory-to-port logistics, reducing input costs and providing tax incentives. The reform of the bureaucracy is another urgent task. For all the Modi government’s repeated talk about the ease of doing business, it takes an average of 112 days in India to obtain all the required clearances to start a business. In the US, it takes three days.</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p>If there is one fly in the proverbial ointment, it is the risk posed by our dysfunctional politics to the social harmony that is so indispensable to economic progress. The readiness of our ruling party to stoke communal divisions in the country, fanning flames it first ignited by injecting the toxin of hatred of minorities into political discourse, is dismaying—all the more so since the same party rejoices in any economic good news and seeks credit for it. The government must realise it can either focus single-mindedly on creating the conditions for economic growth or try to reap violence by inciting hatred, but it cannot do both, because the latter undermines the former.</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p>A country riven by resentment, rioting and violence is not likely to attract investors, because investors flee such places. For the India story to continue to glow, the BJP must abandon the politics of minority-bashing and preach the virtues of co-existence. It is time to put economic pride ahead of hindutva prejudice.</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p><b>editor@theweek.in</b></p> http://www.theweek.in/columns/shashi-tharoor/2023/02/03/pride-not-prejudice-is-the-way-forward.html http://www.theweek.in/columns/shashi-tharoor/2023/02/03/pride-not-prejudice-is-the-way-forward.html Fri Feb 03 13:25:17 IST 2023 success-of-indians-in-the-west <a href="http://www.theweek.in/columns/shashi-tharoor/2023/01/07/success-of-indians-in-the-west.html"><img border="0" hspace="10" align="left" style="margin-top:3px;margin-right:5px;" src="http://img.theweek.in/content/dam/week/opinion/columns/shashi-tharoor/images/2023/1/7/76-The-rise-and-rise-of-Indian-diaspora-new.jpg" /> <p>This past year, the ascent of Rishi Sunak—a brown-skinned, cow-worshipping Indian—as prime minister of the UK has been enthusiastically celebrated. More strikingly, it serves as another reminder of the prominence of the Indian diaspora in the western world.</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p>This has been evident in the private sector, where executives born and raised in India have been selected to head major multinational corporations. Indra Nooyi of PepsiCo, Satya Nadella of Microsoft and Sundar Pichai of Alphabet (Google’s parent company) are perhaps the three best-known examples of Indian talent at the top of globe-straddling American companies.</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p>Yet they represent a very partial set of names. According to Standard and Poor’s 500 index, no fewer than 58 companies are headed by CEOs of Indian origin. This is despite the retirement of Nooyi and former Vodafone head Arun Sarin, the sacking of Twitter chief Parag Agrawal and the death of Anshu Jain, formerly of Deutsche Bank and Cantor Fitzgerald. The list of current Indian CEOs ranges from technology powerhouses like Adobe (Shantanu Narayen) and IBM (Arvind Krishna) to coffee giant Starbucks (Laxman Narasimhan), courier service FedEx (Raj Subramaniam) and even French fashion house Chanel (Leena Nair).</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p>The phenomenon has crossed over into politics, too. In recent years, politicians of Indian descent have risen to head governments in Portugal (Antonio Luís Santos da Costa&nbsp; has been prime minister since 2015) and Ireland (Leo Varadkar, prime minister from 2017 to 2020 and again from December 2022). In the US, Vice President Kamala Harris had an Indian mother; a potential Republican contender in 2024, Nikki Haley, has wholly Indian parentage. With Sunak and Varadkar, Europe faces the piquant situation of the thorny post-Brexit issues between England and Ireland being negotiated between two leaders of Indian origin!</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p>What makes Indians succeed when the companies and institutions they head were created in the west, the systems they rose in were devised in the west, and there is no shortage of local talent honed in the west?</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p>Some explain it in terms of Indians’ familiarity with, and education in, English, giving credit to two centuries of British colonial rule. But language alone is hardly a guarantee of success. And in any case, it does not explain Indians’ success in non-Anglophone European countries like Portugal. Others speak of the extra energy and drive that emigrants bring to their new countries. True enough, and Indians seem to outstrip other immigrant populations. In the US, for instance, Indians have the highest per capita income of any ethnic group.</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p>First-generation emigrants from India have grown up without taking affluence for granted; they have experienced or seen enough deprivation to strive to escape it. They have the “fire in the belly” that many in the west may lack, and out-compete others in their aspiration to succeed. They have also overcome adversities in India that their western counterparts have not, including scarce resources, shortages, limited facilities, government over-regulation and bureaucratic inertia.</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p>Indians are also used to living with diversity; our history and India’s pluralist social environment exposes them to working with people of different languages, religions and cultures. Managing working relationships in a multinational corporation comes easily to them. Growing up in India, these young men and women have imbibed the habits and values of individual initiative and original thinking within a framework of polite behaviour, respect for elders and adherence to hierarchy. This Indian combination of attributes makes it easier for them to fit in.</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p>The irony is that in today’s India, diversity is under threat from chauvinist hindutva hyper-nationalism; uniformity and obedience to the new national narrative trump individual freedom of thought and action. It is sobering that the virtues today being hailed as triumphantly Indian around the world may soon be present more in the diaspora than at home.</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p><b>editor@theweek.in</b></p> http://www.theweek.in/columns/shashi-tharoor/2023/01/07/success-of-indians-in-the-west.html http://www.theweek.in/columns/shashi-tharoor/2023/01/07/success-of-indians-in-the-west.html Sat Jan 07 11:21:35 IST 2023 a-new-world-order-is-in-the-making <a href="http://www.theweek.in/columns/shashi-tharoor/2022/12/17/a-new-world-order-is-in-the-making.html"><img border="0" hspace="10" align="left" style="margin-top:3px;margin-right:5px;" src="http://img.theweek.in/content/dam/week/opinion/columns/shashi-tharoor/images/2022/12/17/146-usa-china-new.jpg" /> <p>As we near the end of the year, some geopolitical trends are becoming apparent. One is the growing tension between the US and an increasingly assertive China under President Xi Jinping. Interestingly, the highly polarised US electorate seems largely to concur with the tough policy towards Beijing, promoted by both former president Donald Trump during his time in office and now by President Joe Biden. In 2011, only 36 per cent of Americans viewed China unfavourably; this year, it is a remarkable 82 per cent. This means that the onset of visible and bristling hostility towards the other rising superpower has been welcomed and endorsed by the American public.</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p>A second geopolitical trend that cannot be escaped, and which I had drawn attention to in this space last year, is the accelerating pace of deglobalisation. There is no doubt that the perception of growing economic inequality in western countries has intensified, seriously adding to the unpopularity of what until recently had been the conventional wisdom, that globalisation was both unavoidable and welcome. The world economy had thrived since globalisation began in 1980 on an open system of free trade. That had already been shaken by the financial crash of 2008-09 and the American trade war with China. The pandemic has exacerbated these challenges, with estimates suggesting that nearly a third of global trade fell in 2020, though a gradual recovery trajectory was starting to emerge before the setbacks caused by the Ukraine war. Meanwhile, the pressure to “decouple”from China was increasing in the last two years, even as the sanctions on Russia have severely restricted trade, investment and financial flows into and out of that country.</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p>In a recent survey conducted by research firm Edelman, a majority of respondents across 28 leading economies agreed that “globalisation is taking us in the wrong direction”. In its 2019 survey, only 18 per cent of respondents affirmed that “the system is working for me”, with 34 per cent being unsure and 48 per cent declaring that the globalised system is failing them. As sovereignties are reasserted across the world, and treaties and trade agreements increasingly questioned, multilateralism, the once taken-for-granted mantra of international co-operation, could be the next casualty.</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p>In parallel, support for democracy has weakened, even in America and especially among the young. Political scientists Yascha Mounk and Roberto Stefan Foa reported in 2017 that while 75 per cent of Americans born in the 1930s agreed it is “essential to live in a democracy”, the figure was just 28 per cent among millennials. Similar trends can be seen in many other countries.</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p>Populist leaders like Trump, who rose to the presidency of the United States on slogans of “America First”and “Make America Great Again”, and a host of others—from Jair Bolsonaro of Brazil and Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey to Viktor Orban of Hungary and Narendra Modi of India—successfully persuaded their voters that they were more authentic embodiments of their nations than the allegedly rootless secular cosmopolitans they sought to displace. Others have been rising, from the Alternative für Deutschland in Germany and the Freedom Party of Austria to the Party for Freedom in the Netherlands and Marine Le Pen and Eric Zemmour in France, none of whom have won national elections but who came close enough to shift the national discourse. Of course, it is true that Trump and Bolsonaro have since suffered electoral setbacks, but most recently, Giorgia Meloni, Italy’s most right-wing leader since Mussolini, and Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu have come to power heading extremely right-wing governments. It is useful to realise that, in a survey last year, Italy had the world’s second-highest dissatisfaction rates with democracy (after Greece). But together such parties and leaders, combining nationalist fervour with a determined articulation of popular prejudices, have restored nationalism to its place as the default model of national self-definition.</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p>The auguries are not promising as the world contemplates the New Year.</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p><b>editor@theweek.in</b></p> http://www.theweek.in/columns/shashi-tharoor/2022/12/17/a-new-world-order-is-in-the-making.html http://www.theweek.in/columns/shashi-tharoor/2022/12/17/a-new-world-order-is-in-the-making.html Sat Dec 17 17:19:22 IST 2022 shashi-tharoor-on-the-rise-of-electoral-autocracies <a href="http://www.theweek.in/columns/shashi-tharoor/2022/11/04/shashi-tharoor-on-the-rise-of-electoral-autocracies.html"><img border="0" hspace="10" align="left" style="margin-top:3px;margin-right:5px;" src="http://img.theweek.in/content/dam/week/opinion/columns/shashi-tharoor/images/2022/11/4/140-the-rise-of-electoral-autocracies-new.jpg" /> <p>For some time now pundits and commentators, including myself, have tended to argue that the defining feature of our era was the rise of the strongman—the figure who, by embodying populist nationalism in his country, had risen above the limitations and constraints of his political system to assert one-man rule, or at least dominance, of the land. This phenomenon had affected democracies as well as less democratic countries. While, in the latter case, autocrats like Russia’s Vladimir Putin and China’s Xi Jinping represented a familiar type of leader in their nations’ recent histories, democracies had simply never been headed by figures like the US’s Donald Trump, Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro, Hungary’s Viktor Orban or even India’s Narendra Modi.</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p>The power of these democratically elected strongmen rested on an ability to argue that they were more authentic representatives of their people than the rootless cosmopolitans they had displaced; and by articulating nationalism and cultural values, they dispensed, often ruthlessly, with traditional respect for minority rights, liberalism, dissent and the checks and balances on their power wielded by autonomous institutions in their nations. Their personalised style of governance gave rise to what has been dubbed the “cult of the strongman”—the tough, larger-than-life leader who brought liberal democracy to heel, and saw himself (and it was always a “he”) literally above the law, if not the incarnation of the law himself. Observing such leaders, Freedom House was moved to speak of a deepening “democratic recession”; Sweden’s famous V-Dem (Varieties of Democracy) Institute started describing such countries under strongmen rule as “electoral autocracies” rather than the democracies they had previously been classified as being.</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p>The new strongmen were skilled at manipulating modern technology to wield outsize influence through social media (as well as the conventional press, radio and television) and also to wield the power of surveillance over the actions and beliefs of their citizens. Today’s strongmen are very much a 21st century phenomenon, a marriage of nationalist sentiment born of the insecurities generated by the current backlash against globalisation, with the technological progress made in recent years that can both make life easier for the many and make manipulation and control more feasible for the few.But recent developments in world politics make me wonder whether the fears expressed by the likes of me (and many others), that liberal democracy was now increasingly in peril around the world, wasn’t, after all, overblown.</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p>The defeat this week in Brazil of strongman president Bolsonaro by the familiar leftist labour leader, former president “Lula” da Silva, is the latest manifestation of a seeming turnaround of the earlier trend favouring such autocrats. Just as American voters sent Trump packing in 2020, and the French electorate earlier this year gave Macron resounding support in his efforts to ward off his challengers on the populist-nationalist right, so also the Brazilians seem to be saying that the era of the strongman is, in fact, reversible. Yet—is it too early to breathe comfortably? Orban in Hungary and Erdogan in Turkey still look impregnable, and the less said about Modi in India, perhaps the better. The recent Communist Party Congress in China has consolidated Xi’s power as de-facto president for life, while the military setbacks of the Russian armed forces in Ukraine have barely dented Putin’s absolute invulnerability in Russia. And in the US, Trumpists in the Republican party seem poised to make sweeping gains in the mid-term elections due this coming Tuesday (November 8).</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p>Some strongmen have fallen at their most recent hurdles, but it is possible to argue that there are still enough around the world for optimism to seem unwarranted. In his recent book on the phenomenon, Gideon Rachman identifies four characteristics common to the style of all strongmen rulers: the creation of a cult of personality, contempt for the rule of law, populist claims to represent the “real people” of their countries as opposed to the elites, and a politics driven by fear and nationalism. These are all, sadly, familiar elements in our own country’s recent politics. As long as they exist, alas, any complacency about our democracy, and the eclipse of strongman rule, cannot be justified.</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p><b>editor@theweek.in</b></p> http://www.theweek.in/columns/shashi-tharoor/2022/11/04/shashi-tharoor-on-the-rise-of-electoral-autocracies.html http://www.theweek.in/columns/shashi-tharoor/2022/11/04/shashi-tharoor-on-the-rise-of-electoral-autocracies.html Sun Nov 06 13:11:53 IST 2022 congress-must-truly-become-the-party-of-young-india-shashi-tharoor <a href="http://www.theweek.in/columns/shashi-tharoor/2022/10/08/congress-must-truly-become-the-party-of-young-india-shashi-tharoor.html"><img border="0" hspace="10" align="left" style="margin-top:3px;margin-right:5px;" src="http://img.theweek.in/content/dam/week/opinion/columns/shashi-tharoor/images/2022/10/8/74-Congress-supporters-new.jpg" /> <p>When I entered the race to become president of the Indian National Congress, one of my key campaign themes was to increase our party’s emphasis on youth. As the immortal Rajiv Gandhi once memorably said in his famous address to a joint meeting of the US Congress, “India is an old country but a young nation… I am young and I, too, have a dream, I dream of India strong, independent, self-reliant, and in the front rank of the nations of the world, in the service of mankind”. In the three decades that have passed since his tragic passing, that characterisation of India and our youthful demographic remains truer than ever and must be a core focus area for the Congress party.</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p>Today’s ruling dispensation often speaks about building a new India but any conversation on this topic must begin by looking at the interests of India’s future, our youth. After all, who else are we building this ‘New India’ for if not the young? We have trained world-class scientists and engineers, but 431 million of our compatriots are illiterate, and we have more children who have not seen the inside of a school than any other country in the world does. We have a great demographic advantage with the majority of the population under 25 and a startling 65 per cent under 35. This is potentially a young, dynamic labour force and could deliver to us that demographic ‘dividend’ so often proclaimed across global platforms. China, Japan, and even South Korea (our major East Asian competitors) are facing a serious demographic squeeze, and the rest of the world is ageing. India’s youth should not only be part of India’s development, but drive it.This requires us to provide our young people with both education and employment opportunities on an unprecedented scale. This is not happening.</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p>Young people may be celebrated as bhagyavidhatas by our prime minister, but their current reality is one of shrinking opportunities. Record lows in job creation are compounded by a depressed economy still recovering from the devastation of the pandemic, the negative effect of demonetisation and the rushed implementation of GST, and now the inflationary consequences of the Ukraine war. And recent policy measures, including government promises to create just 12 lakh jobs a year in a country where 5.30 crore are currently unemployed and 47.5 lakh job seekers enter the market each year—suggests that the government is unlikely to turn things around.This grim scenario represents both a cause and an opportunity for the Congress. For the INC to start winning again, we can and should appeal to the large untapped political potential of unemployed youth, youth-heavy workplaces (notably the IT sector) and migrant hotspots. To take back the technocratic leadership of the nation, Congress has a large role to play via job fairs, skilling expos, and developing industry collaborations.</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p>Our youth focused party bodies like the National Student’s Union of India (NSUI) and the Youth Congress must lead the way in these efforts and play a critical role beyond the good work being done by these frontals in organising large nationwide movements and mass protests. To strengthen their capacity, we need to embark on a meaningful revamp to make these and other Congress frontal organisations like Seva Dal our focus of attention for youth issues. Young Indians must believe we understand their aspirations and can be trusted to promote them in government.It has been painful to see the struggles of young India being reduced to rhetoric with little thought for their realisation. When the dust settles, the youth are left on the margins, mere observers to economic growth. Ad hoc policies to improve the opportunities available for India’s youth are clearly insufficient for the size of the problem that we are facing, let alone what it can grow to in the future.</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p>We in the Congress must work to include young people in India’s development by ensuring that their skills are developed, their aspirations understood and their voices protected. We need grown-up economic management, not slogans and sound-bites. The Congress must truly become the party of young India.</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p><b><a href="mailto:editor@theweek.in">editor@theweek.in</a></b></p> http://www.theweek.in/columns/shashi-tharoor/2022/10/08/congress-must-truly-become-the-party-of-young-india-shashi-tharoor.html http://www.theweek.in/columns/shashi-tharoor/2022/10/08/congress-must-truly-become-the-party-of-young-india-shashi-tharoor.html Sat Oct 08 16:52:49 IST 2022 latin-catholics-not-anti-development-they-fear-for-fishing-communitys-existence-tharoor <a href="http://www.theweek.in/columns/shashi-tharoor/2022/09/10/latin-catholics-not-anti-development-they-fear-for-fishing-communitys-existence-tharoor.html"><img border="0" hspace="10" align="left" style="margin-top:3px;margin-right:5px;" src="http://img.theweek.in/content/dam/week/opinion/columns/shashi-tharoor/images/2022/9/10/74-Protest-against-Adani-port-project-at-Vizhinjam-in-Thiruvananthapuram-new.jpg" /> <p>This is a story with a difference. At a time when the Latin Catholic archdiocese of Trivandrum has entered the news for leading an agitation of the fishing community against the development of Vizhinjam port, and thereby incurred the tag of ‘anti-development’, I want to challenge that narrative.</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p>The Church agrees with those who believe that the rampant problem of coastal erosion has been worsened by the port construction. That is grounds for a separate discussion, since many argue that the vexed problem of sea inundation precedes the development of the port. But one thing that I, as MP for Thiruvananthapuram, can vouch for is that the Church is not anti-development.</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p>To explain why, let me go back six decades. When our nation’s scientists, led by the legendary Dr Vikram Sarabhai, began to develop the contours of India’s nascent space programme in the early 1960s, the coastal village of Thumba was identified as an ideal location, given its latitude and natural features, to allow for rocket launches and allied research.</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p>The catch, however, was that the land the community of scientists had identified in Thumba housed the St Mary Magdalene church and bishop Peter Bernard Pereira’s official residence. In any other community or for that matter in any other part of the world, the matter might have been put to rest then and there. After all, the idea of displacing an active spiritual establishment would certainly have evoked outrage and fury, especially in today’s India. But in this then relatively obscure part of Thiruvananthapuram district, when a decision of national importance and scientific progress presented itself, the community chose to make a remarkably patriotic choice—a choice for development and progress.</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p>When initial conversations with local politicians and bureaucrats made little headway, Dr Sarabhai turned to bishop Pereira for his guidance. The bishop, after understanding the proposed mission of the scientists, asked Dr Sarabhai to come to the church on the following Sunday. During the service, bishop Pereira presented the proposition before the congregation. “My children, I have a famous scientist with me who wants our church and the place I live in for the work of space science research,” he explained. “Dear children, science seeks truth by reasoning. In one way, science and spiritualism seek the same divine blessings for doing good for the people. My children, can we give God’s abode for a scientific mission?” The answer—quite literally—was a resounding “Amen”. The church and the bishop’s house as well as other neighbouring inhabited areas were handed over to Dr Sarabhai and his team.</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p>Thus was established, in 1962, the Thumba Equatorial Rocket Launching Station (TERLS, which would be renamed Vikram Sarabhai Space Centre, or VSSC, after the death of the legendary scientist nine years later). A year later India launched its first two-stage rocket from TERLS, marking our first foray into space. As the late president Dr A.P.J. Abdul Kalam, who was part of the original launch team, and who went on to work from the church building himself, wrote later, looking back at this memorable episode:</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p>“Today, among us, Prof Vikram Sarabhai is not there, Rev Dr Peter Bernard Pereira is not there, but those who are responsible for the creation and make the flower and blossom will themselves be a different kind of a flower as described in the Bhagwad Gita: ‘See the flower, how generously it distributes perfume and honey. It gives to all, gives freely of its love. When its work is done, it falls away quietly. Try to be like the flower, unassuming despite all its qualities’.”</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p>Those qualities have been typified by the members of the Latin Catholic Archdiocese of Trivandrum. They are not anti-development. But they fear for the very existence of the Catholic fishing community when they see their homes topple into the sea from fierce inundations. That is a problem that needs attention and resources, to build sea-walls and groynes to save the coast, and to provide compensation and rehabilitation for the devastated fisherfolk. It is not going to be solved by unjustly abusing those who have proved their patriotism time and time again.</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p><b><a href="mailto:editor@theweek.in">editor@theweek.in</a></b></p> http://www.theweek.in/columns/shashi-tharoor/2022/09/10/latin-catholics-not-anti-development-they-fear-for-fishing-communitys-existence-tharoor.html http://www.theweek.in/columns/shashi-tharoor/2022/09/10/latin-catholics-not-anti-development-they-fear-for-fishing-communitys-existence-tharoor.html Sun Sep 11 11:19:00 IST 2022 britain-not-ready-for-brown-pm-says-shashi-tharoor <a href="http://www.theweek.in/columns/shashi-tharoor/2022/08/13/britain-not-ready-for-brown-pm-says-shashi-tharoor.html"><img border="0" hspace="10" align="left" style="margin-top:3px;margin-right:5px;" src="http://img.theweek.in/content/dam/week/opinion/columns/shashi-tharoor/images/2022/8/13/140-Rishi-Sunak-new.jpg" /> <p>Rarely has the Indian public been as interested in a British prime ministerial election as this year. The reason is not hard to find: among the two finalists whose names are being put to a ballot of all the nearly 1.8 lakh members of the Conservative Party is Rishi Sunak, the Indian-origin former chancellor of the exchequer. Sunak, a bright, articulate, England-born and expensively educated multi-millionaire who also happens to be married to Infosys’s Narayana Murthy’s daughter, Akshata, has conducted an impressive, slick campaign that saw him consistently lead the pack throughout many rounds of balloting among Conservative MPs to determine the final shortlist of two. And, yet, he is trailing his rival, Foreign Secretary Liz Truss, in every poll of Conservative members, even though Truss is much less bright and well-spoken and barely squeezed through to the final round (after trailing in third place throughout the balloting).</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p>Many reasons are advanced for why Sunak seems about to lose the race among the Tory members (who are generally more conservative than the MPs): Sunak’s unpopular tax increases, the revelation that his wife was not paying UK taxes on her considerable Indian income by claiming “non-domiciled” status, and the fact that even as a British cabinet minister he retained a US green card, acquired during his years working in that country. (None of these breaches any law, though in politics appearances are often more important than legalities.) All this adds up to a perception of him as the embodiment of cosmopolitanism, competence, and technocracy, qualities reviled by Brexit-loving Tory culture-warriors. Some have even claimed he comes across as arrogant and overbearing, but “Dishy Rishi” is genuinely modest in speech and manner, even though he has much to be immodest about. So why, then, is he trailing in the polls, when his own peers in parliament consider him the most qualified MP?</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p>Very simple. Sunak’s main problem is something that no British commentator is prepared to concede. He is not white. No one likes to admit that such considerations exist, because saying so is seen as politically incorrect in these supposedly enlightened times. But they are fundamental. No one should underestimate the lingering racism of the general British public. As the brown-skinned son of immigrants who is openly and unapologetically Hindu, Sunak, despite his upper-class British accent, cannot hide his foreignness. To many white Britons, he just isn’t one of them—and never will be.</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p>So when results are announced on September 5, Truss will probably be prime minister, and Sunak fobbed off with the consolation prize of a key ministry—perhaps foreign affairs, maybe home (the exchequer, which he relinquished during the political crisis that brought down Boris Johnson, is now with another brown man, the Iraqi-Kurd-origin Nadhim Zahawi). No one will say it, but the unspoken realisation across the country will be that Britain still is not ready for an Indian prime minister. Still, Sunak has brought the Indian community in Britain a long way towards the highest office in the land. It is a journey that began in 1892, when Dadabhai Naoroji, the Indian nationalist who authored the “drain theory” about British colonial exploitation of India, stood as Liberal Party candidate for Central Finsbury and won. Two other Indian Parsis, one the pro-empire Mancherjee Bhownaggree, the other the communist Shapurji Saklatvala, were also elected in the early 20th century. But they remained curiosities, and none of them had a particularly long or illustrious parliamentary career. None ascended to any prestigious positions in government.</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p>Today, the picture is very different: people of Indian origin have, astonishingly enough, held two of the four “great offices of state” (home, finance, foreign affairs and prime minister). The other two posts no longer look out of reach.That is remarkably impressive, as evidence of how far Britain has come from the unabashed racism of its colonial past. Let us not forget the xenophobia with which some Indians reacted to the prospect of Italian-born Sonia Gandhi becoming our prime minister in 2004. We, too, have prejudices to overcome, so even if he loses on September 5, let us applaud Britain for Sunak even having come so close.</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p><b>editor@theweek.in</b></p> http://www.theweek.in/columns/shashi-tharoor/2022/08/13/britain-not-ready-for-brown-pm-says-shashi-tharoor.html http://www.theweek.in/columns/shashi-tharoor/2022/08/13/britain-not-ready-for-brown-pm-says-shashi-tharoor.html Sat Aug 13 12:10:07 IST 2022 shashi-tharoor-on-why-india-will-never-have-its-own-boJo-moment <a href="http://www.theweek.in/columns/shashi-tharoor/2022/07/17/shashi-tharoor-on-why-india-will-never-have-its-own-boJo-moment.html"><img border="0" hspace="10" align="left" style="margin-top:3px;margin-right:5px;" src="http://img.theweek.in/content/dam/week/opinion/columns/shashi-tharoor/images/2022/7/17/boris-johnson.jpg" /> <p>Amid all the drama and sensation of Boris Johnson’s resignation as prime minister of Great Britain, and the catalogue of misjudgments and follies that precipitated it, one aspect no one seems to have raised is staring us in the face—the absolute unlikelihood of anything like this ever happening in our country.</p> <p>Think of it: just two and half years after leading his Conservative Party to a resounding victory in the general elections, and less than two months after surviving a vote of confidence held among his own party MPs, Johnson’s position became untenable when one by one, and then in droves, 60 of his own colleagues, senior and junior, abandoned him by resigning from his council of ministers. When he replaced one of the first to go, his chancellor of the exchequer (or finance minister), Rishi Sunak, with a rising star of Iraqi Kurdish origin named Nadim Zahawi, the latter’s first act was to advise his own boss to resign. A delegation of cabinet ministers and party grandees then called on Johnson, telling him his position was unviable. The prime minister saw the writing on the wall, and quit.</p> <p>Johnson, understandably, blamed the “herd instinct of Westminster” for his exit. Once a herd gathers momentum, he reflected ruefully, it becomes unstoppable. At a time when, as he pointed out, he was working to fulfil the promises that had got him elected in 2019, his party was just marginally behind Labour in the polls and the challenges facing the nation warranted a steady hand at the helm, the herd had voted with its feet.</p> <p>In India, all this would be unthinkable. Every political party in our country is constructed around fealty to its leader—whether an individual, a family, or a cabal. For any Indian MP, let alone a cabinet minister, to resign on grounds of lack of faith in the leader’s integrity, is impossible to imagine. It has never happened, partly because people in positions of power (or even just in office) prefer to cling on to it, and partly because such an act will merely seal the resignee’s political irrelevance, not his boss’s. The leader will always prevail.</p> <p>The Johnson episode is all the more difficult for observers of Indian politics to imagine because he is actually the prime minister of the country. In India it is equally improbable within an opposition party. The preferred Indian way of handling discontent with a party leader is to grumble and complain, and to do so privately, behind closed doors. The grumbling is infused with the awareness that action on the complaints is impossible. The leader just “is”. He cannot be unseated, not least since no party has a mechanism for doing so, and no politician is willing to take the risk of trying. If he is upset enough, he quits and joins another party. He doesn’t challenge the existing one.</p> <p>In Britain and most parliamentary systems derived from it, party leaders are subject to period renewals of their mandate, often at fixed intervals or whenever the party’s processes call for it. In most of them a specified number of members can call for an out-of-turn confidence vote, something Johnson had to undergo recently (ironically, he prevailed). After an election defeat, by convention, the leader resigns, and unless the party unanimously clamours for him or her to stay—which has happened very rarely in western parliamentary democracies—he or she steps aside gracefully and lets someone else try.</p> <p>None of these things happen in India. Indeed, no party other than the two communist parties even has a fixed period for its designated leader to serve. No party has a mechanism to recall a leader, and even if a theoretical exercise were conducted to elect or re-elect one, the electors are handpicked by the existing leadership and are extremely unlikely to vote against its wishes. The famous example in the Congress, in which the charisma-<i>mukt</i> Sitaram Kesri trounced two popular leaders like Sharad Pawar and Rajesh Pilot who challenged him for the presidency of the party, only proves the point.</p> <p>Perhaps, for once, it is time for us to ask ourselves whether there isn’t a lesson or two we can learn from what just happened to Johnson?</p> http://www.theweek.in/columns/shashi-tharoor/2022/07/17/shashi-tharoor-on-why-india-will-never-have-its-own-boJo-moment.html http://www.theweek.in/columns/shashi-tharoor/2022/07/17/shashi-tharoor-on-why-india-will-never-have-its-own-boJo-moment.html Sun Jul 17 14:22:50 IST 2022 the-lessons-we-can-learn-from-history <a href="http://www.theweek.in/columns/shashi-tharoor/2022/06/18/the-lessons-we-can-learn-from-history.html"><img border="0" hspace="10" align="left" style="margin-top:3px;margin-right:5px;" src="http://img.theweek.in/content/dam/week/opinion/columns/shashi-tharoor/images/2022/6/18/114-Lets-learn-from-our-history-new.jpg" /> <p>The question raised by an American journalist on Twitter—“Why is the Indian Prime Minister spending so much time attacking a Mughal monarch who died more than 300 years ago?”—is a reminder of how the past retains a capacity to inflame political sentiments in the present. The role of history in our contemporary politics may seem inexplicable, but it is not without precedent in many other countries where divisive politics is encouraged.</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p>In my years at the UN dealing with the civil war in the former Yugoslavia, I was struck by how often my interlocutors on all sides referred to events from the distant past: there were two battles of Kosovo, in 1389 and 1448, but Serbs spoke of them as if they had happened yesterday, and these justified their resentments today, and their belligerence tomorrow. To take an Indian example, when Vinayak Damodar Savarkar (later the father of ‘Hindutva’) was, in his youthful phase, an advocate for Hindu–Muslim unity, he declared the rebellion of 1857 to have been ‘India’s first war of Independence’, featuring as it did Indians across divides of religion, region, caste, and language, fighting under the flag of the Mughal sovereign. The appeal to a positive historical memory can also play a significant role in constructing the nationalism of the present.</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p>So, of course, can appealing to a negative historical memory—invasions, the destruction of temples, and their replacement by mosques. It is usually accompanied by an evocation of ancient civilisational memories that provides nationals with a sense of rootedness—the sense of belonging to a venerable and even timeless community. This in turn evokes both a sense of belonging to a common endeavour for the majority, and a sense of exclusion and alienness for a disfavoured minority.</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p>Scholars like Benedict Anderson have told us that a nation is an imagined political community that reflects a single national identity, built upon shared social characteristics such as culture, language, religion, ethnicity, and a common history. This constructed national community is linked to a specific territory, resulting in a certain sanctification of geography, in the worship of the ‘motherland’ as the natural home of the nation. And next, this sanctified geography is married to a holy history. The history of a nation is marked by a shared recollection of the nation’s victories and defeats—as well as, quite often, resentment and rejection of other “nations” or communities, especially foreign forces that have conquered or dominated them. In the process nationalism involves an act of purification: purifying the people of religious, social and cultural contaminations that have come in from outside, leaving, in the case of our country, only the “new Indian” as heir to this precious ancient legacy. That new Indian, in today’s politics, must be Hindu, preferably Hindi-speaking, and resent the same past.</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p>“The past is the essential element in [nationalistic] ideologies,” the historian Eric Hobsbawm has argued, “If there is no suitable past, it can always be invented…. The past legitimises. The past gives a more glorious background to a present that does not have much to show for itself.” Hobsbawm compares the role of history in nationalism with that of the poppy to the heroin addict. It is the source of the drug that both poisons and empowers the nationalist. Since the project of national unity, which is indispensable to the expression of this kind of nationalism, requires both a shared sense of cohesion and an identifiable territory, all nationalisms seek to create such fraternity. At the same time, to justify nationalistic zeal, both must be constructed on a long history—real or imagined. This is what makes history so important to the very idea of nationalism and so crucial to nation-building. And this is what the BJP has brought into our politics today.</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p>It is not history, but the ways in which historical memories are used by nationalist ideologues, that have led to atrocities. Serbs and Croats lived together, in fact married each other, for decades, until the rise of the likes of Franjo Tudjman and Slobodan Milosevic accentuated their sense of historical difference and drove them apart. The same occurred to India in 1947 with the creation of Pakistan. Can we not learn from history? Or are we, in the famous phrase, doomed to repeat it?</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p><b>editor@theweek.in</b></p> http://www.theweek.in/columns/shashi-tharoor/2022/06/18/the-lessons-we-can-learn-from-history.html http://www.theweek.in/columns/shashi-tharoor/2022/06/18/the-lessons-we-can-learn-from-history.html Sat Jun 18 12:12:06 IST 2022 this-time-muslims-of-india-will-resist-shashi-tharoor-on-varanasi <a href="http://www.theweek.in/columns/shashi-tharoor/2022/05/20/this-time-muslims-of-india-will-resist-shashi-tharoor-on-varanasi.html"><img border="0" hspace="10" align="left" style="margin-top:3px;margin-right:5px;" src="http://img.theweek.in/content/dam/week/opinion/columns/shashi-tharoor/images/2022/5/20/74-Gyanvapi-new.jpg" /> <p>The controversy over a court order authorising a video inspection of the Gyanvapi Mosque in Varanasi is one more reminder that in India debates over history are not confined to the distant past alone. The assumption behind the request is that the mosque was built on a demolished temple; if this is confirmed, demands will inevitably arise for that temple to be restored, as with the Ram Janmabhoomi in Ayodhya. Whereas conservatives, in the famous phrase, are ‘standing athwart history, yelling stop’, our hindutva nationalists are yelling ‘turn back! Reverse!’ Their reinvention of history is not anchored in a reverence for the past, but in their desire to shape the present by resurrecting the past.</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p>History has often been contested terrain in India, but its revival in the context of 21st century politics is a sobering sign that the past continues to have a hold over the hindutva movement in the present. While the Mughals are being demonised as a way of delegitimising Indian Muslims (who are stigmatised as the sons of the invader Babur rather than of the Indian soil), hindutva fanatics want to rebuild the most prominent of the Hindu temples the Mughals allegedly destroyed.</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p>Those who thought that victory in Ayodhya would be enough for the Hindu zealots are realising that they are like the sharks who have drawn first blood, like the taste, and thirst for more. As with the temple that is now being erected on the site of the old Babri Masjid, those who are raking up the Gyanvapi issue want to avenge history by undoing the alleged shame of nearly half a millennium ago.</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p>When will it stop?</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p>India is a land where history, myth, religion and legend often overlap; sometimes we, as a people, cannot tell the difference. The Supreme Court verdict on Ayodhya ruled that a Ram Mandir should be built, and that the religious sentiments of the Hindus had to be respected—implying both that such sentiments were of greater weight than legal provisions, and that the religious sentiments of the minorities were of less consequence than that of the majority, even though the demolition of the Babri Masjid was illegal.</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p>To most Indian Muslims, the Ayodhya dispute was not about a specific mosque. Rather, it was about their place in Indian society. The destruction of the mosque felt like an utter betrayal of the compact that had sustained the Muslim community as a vital part of India’s pluralist democracy. Others, however, felt that the court’s decision restored constitutional processes after the vandalism and violence that had marked the dispute for a generation. Most concurred that it would buy peace for the community. Gyanvapi, now, suggests that hope was misplaced.</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p>In fact, the zealots have been emboldened by the projection of Ayodhya as a triumph for a hindutva reinterpretation of the Indian national idea, and as a building block in the construction of a new hindutva version of India. The ideal of inter-faith co-existence in harmony has been jettisoned; the marginalisation of Muslims from the national narrative marches on. The prime minister conducted the puja at the site; the celebrations at Ayodhya, openly involving state machinery, were a significant step towards declaring an official state religion. “Hindu Rashtra” is being built before our eyes.</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p>This is the process that ominously seems to have begun anew at Gyanvapi.</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p>Let us assume that indeed the mosque was built on the site of a destroyed temple; does that mean we should open a gaping wound now, provoking civil strife today in order to avenge the past? Is there no case for letting old wounds that have long healed stay undisturbed? To destroy the mosque and replace it with a temple would not right an old wrong but perpetrate a new one.</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p>The alarm bells are ringing again in Varanasi. This time the Muslims of India will resist. Once again the violence will resume, spawning new hostages to history, ensuring that future generations would be taught new wrongs to set right. The BJP is happy to use history as cannon fodder; but in their obsession with undoing the past, it is our future they are placing in peril.</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p><b>editor@theweek.in</b></p> http://www.theweek.in/columns/shashi-tharoor/2022/05/20/this-time-muslims-of-india-will-resist-shashi-tharoor-on-varanasi.html http://www.theweek.in/columns/shashi-tharoor/2022/05/20/this-time-muslims-of-india-will-resist-shashi-tharoor-on-varanasi.html Fri May 20 12:00:31 IST 2022 our-globalised-world-is-less-able-to-cope-with-war-shashi-tharoor <a href="http://www.theweek.in/columns/shashi-tharoor/2022/04/22/our-globalised-world-is-less-able-to-cope-with-war-shashi-tharoor.html"><img border="0" hspace="10" align="left" style="margin-top:3px;margin-right:5px;" src="http://img.theweek.in/content/dam/week/opinion/columns/shashi-tharoor/images/2022/4/22/74-Flour-on-fire-new.jpg" /> <p>Whatever you may think about India’s policy stance on the Russian invasion of Ukraine—and I have dissented publicly about some aspects of it—one thing is clear: this is not just a conflict far away to which we can afford to remain indifferent. The war in Ukraine has affected us in India already, and most of the rest of the world besides.</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p>As I pointed out in the Lok Sabha, the rise in oil prices has already hurt us gravely. Whereas the government’s budget had been based on the assumption that global oil prices would average about $75 a barrel, they shot well above $100, touching $130-140 on occasion, and have thrown the finance minister’s numbers completely out of kilter, with immediate and medium-term repercussions for our economy and growth prospects. The war has also brought about a serious rise in commodity prices, since Ukraine and Russia were responsible, in good times, for some 30-40 per cent of global wheat exports. While India is not a wheat importer—and our farmers may even profit in the short term from being able to export some Indian wheat at prices higher than the guaranteed MSP announced by the government—other agricultural commodities have also risen in price. For instance, 70 per cent of the sunflower oil and seeds that India consumes used to come from Ukraine and we now need to look for substitute sources, which will be more expensive.</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p>India’s is perhaps a modest example: we have been weathering the storm so far, including through increasing our imports of Russian oil and fertilisers. But other countries have not been so lucky. Muslim countries observing Ramadan have found the daily iftar becoming more expensive, with items scarce in many countries. Countries like Egypt, Turkey, Bangladesh and Iran buy more than 60 per cent of their wheat from Ukraine and Russia; the former was known as a breadbasket to the world, and bread itself has become unaffordable. Nor will Ukraine be able to plant its usual wheat crop as long as the war endures, prolonging global wheat shortages. The World Food Program estimates that 41 million people in west and central Africa face a food and nutrition crisis, as people are reeling from the highest-ever prices for essential commodities like grain, oil and fertiliser. Yet ironically, the wheat already in Ukraine’s granaries risks rotting uneaten because the war has made it impossible to ship it out.</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p>Ukraine’s European neighbours are the most directly affected, with some five million refugees crossing into neighbouring countries and the tough economic sanctions on Russia biting into their economies too. Rising oil and gas prices have affected every European country severely, as well as many farther afield.</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p>According to the Bank for International Settlements, 60 per cent of the world’s advanced economies are suffering annual inflation rates above 5 per cent; in Britain, consumer price inflation reached its highest levels in three decades. Inflation has hit India, too; our inflation, like most emerging economies, is higher than anytime this century, with most of the developing world seeing inflation rates above 7 per cent. Countries that had just begun to recover from the devastating consequences of the pandemic and associated lockdowns have now been hit with a “double whammy”. In our own neighbourhood, Sri Lanka has been the worst affected, with its economy near collapse, forcing it to default on its debts. The crisis in Pakistan’s economy in turn played a part in the ouster of Imran Khan, by diluting the support he might have enjoyed had he been the steward of good times rather than presiding haplessly over economic failure. Now his successors have to look for means to service Islamabad’s huge external debt. Countries as far apart as Nepal, Tunisia, Sierra Leone and Bolivia are facing a debt crisis attributable directly to the war.</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p>Our globalised world is simply less able to cope with war and the resultant sanctions, supply-chain disruptions and restrictions of currency flows. For a few heady years we enjoyed the fruits of inter-dependence, as trade and currency flowed freely and prosperity transcended borders. Today, we are realising that even a local war in the 21st century can have a global impact. The bombs and bullets recognise no frontiers. The need for peace has never been greater.</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p><b>editor@theweek.in</b></p> http://www.theweek.in/columns/shashi-tharoor/2022/04/22/our-globalised-world-is-less-able-to-cope-with-war-shashi-tharoor.html http://www.theweek.in/columns/shashi-tharoor/2022/04/22/our-globalised-world-is-less-able-to-cope-with-war-shashi-tharoor.html Fri Apr 22 11:17:35 IST 2022 how-about-virtual-museums-asks-shashi-tharoor <a href="http://www.theweek.in/columns/shashi-tharoor/2022/03/27/how-about-virtual-museums-asks-shashi-tharoor.html"><img border="0" hspace="10" align="left" style="margin-top:3px;margin-right:5px;" src="http://img.theweek.in/content/dam/week/opinion/columns/shashi-tharoor/images/2022/3/27/delhi-national-museum.jpg" /> <p>As Covid seems to be ebbing and large parts of the nation have begun to return to normal life, the question arises: will this mean more visitors to our museums? I have my doubts. It is striking that despite our immeasurably rich heritage, our museums have not been able to attract the levels of engagement of any of their western counterparts.</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p>For instance, it is a travesty that in the two years between 2016 and 2018, our National Museum had roughly 5.5 lakh visitors in total, whereas the New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art hosted 70 lakh visitors in 2017 alone.</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p>There are a number of factors responsible for the decline in our country’s museums and their ability to engage audiences, that have nothing to do with Covid. Official apathy is a key reason. Step into an Indian museum today and one is invariably taken aback by the state of affairs—be it exhibits falling apart, or anodyne captions that seldom convey the richness of the artefact one is observing, or even the availability of resources to guide visitors through what the museum has to offer.</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p>Besides lines of restless schoolchildren who are essentially compelled to tour dusty museums and look interested, for most Indians, a visit to the museum is a decidedly dreary proposition: there are artefacts, but do they speak to you? Do they tell you, beyond tedious plaques and cards, of what they represent or what their age witnessed?</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p>Museums are homes to objects—but they must also serve as repositories of legacies, of tales of people and societies, manifesting also ideas and thought. We in India have failed at this. Indians will line up in Rome or London or Paris (or for that matter Abu Dhabi) outside iconic galleries, seeking to glimpse the Mona Lisa or unravel an Egyptian mummy, hoping to educate themselves in the history of distant lands. But they will not bother to queue outside the Indian Museum, Kolkata.</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p>Of course there is much to appreciate around the world. When I launched the British edition of my book on British colonialism, under the blunt title Inglorious Empire, one of my events was at the Victoria and Albert Museum, in dialogue with its director—while on the floor beneath us stood the famous animated tiger of Tipu Sultan, mauling a British redcoat. That is one museum artefact that, even more than the Kohinoor, I would love to see back in India! But even without the treasures the British have looted, there is much in India itself. Yet the challenges facing museums are growing, and have not been helped by significant delays in appointments to key posts or successive budget cuts to the ministry of culture. But there are reasons beyond the government as well.</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p>Access has always been an important barrier in our ability to enjoy the richness of our museums—not just physical access but also access in terms of language and comprehension, although efforts have been made to address this to some extent through audio guides in various Indian languages. This is where online museums come in.</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p>Museums, after all, cannot just be buildings full of attractive things—they must also offer an education, and a live, dynamic space where new art is constantly created, even as the old is respectfully enshrined.</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p>Putting museums online provides the answer. The marriage of art and technology may well hold the key not just for the future survivability of our nation’s museums, but could define the manner in which subsequent generations engage with and explore the cultural heritage that they have inherited. Interactivity, easy access, cultural education, all become easier as the ‘virtual museum’ brings the collections to your home. Art history comes alive with the integration of digital technology.</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p>Conservators are using new age methods like laser technologies and 3D-imaging technologies for improved and accurate conservation and restoration techniques.</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p>Technology like Virtual Reality (VR) and Augmented Reality (AR) makes exhibitions come alive. An NRI family based in the Gulf or the US can raise their children with access to meaningful resources on India’s rich traditions.</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p>Save our museums—take them online!</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p><b>editor@theweek.in</b></p> http://www.theweek.in/columns/shashi-tharoor/2022/03/27/how-about-virtual-museums-asks-shashi-tharoor.html http://www.theweek.in/columns/shashi-tharoor/2022/03/27/how-about-virtual-museums-asks-shashi-tharoor.html Sun Mar 27 11:14:54 IST 2022 shashi-tharoor-on-the-rise-of-mandatory-hyper-nationalism <a href="http://www.theweek.in/columns/shashi-tharoor/2022/02/24/shashi-tharoor-on-the-rise-of-mandatory-hyper-nationalism.html"><img border="0" hspace="10" align="left" style="margin-top:3px;margin-right:5px;" src="http://img.theweek.in/content/dam/week/opinion/columns/shashi-tharoor/images/2022/2/24/74-Narendra-Modi.jpg" /> <p>The global rise of officially mandated nationalism is a surprising phenomenon of our times. The century began with globalisation seeming unstoppable, national boundaries appearing ever-more permeable and states surrendering more and more of their sovereignty to supra-national organisations like the European Union, to regional and global trade pacts refereed by the World Trade Organization and to international legal institutions like the International Criminal Court. Few could have foreseen such an abrupt reversal of this trend in the second decade of the century, spurred by a worldwide backlash against globalisation. An ugly byproduct of this is the rise of mandatory hyper-nationalism.</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p>The backlash has taken on a nativist hue everywhere. In Europe and America, this has involved racist hostility to immigrants and minorities (whether ethnically or religiously defined). Since such negative messaging requires a positive counterpart, nationalism—from Trump’s “Make America Great Again” to Erdogan’s reviving Imperial Turkish glories—has filled the breach. A majoritarian narrative has sought to subsume each country’s diverse political tendencies into an artificial unity masquerading as patriotism. Globalisation had promised a world of dissolving differences and ever-expanding freedoms that would embrace everyone. Instead, today’s reactive nationalism heightens differences, emphasises singular virtues associated with a politically defined “people” and seeks to instil loyalty to the state.</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p>At the level of emblems like the flag, the national anthem, the lapel pin and reverence for the military’s sacrifices, I have no problem with this. But when symbols are used to promote a sense of duty rather than affection for the idea of the nation, and compliance with the prevailing governmental narrative, then I have a problem.</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p>Here “respect” for the anthem and the flag becomes a code for obedience to the state and the ruling party. Today, conformity has become the new badge of allegiance. The wave of rising right-wing populism that is engulfing Europe is illustrative of this trend. Support for anti-system populist parties in Europe, such as the National Front in France, Syriza in Greece and the Five-Star Movement in Italy are only the more extreme examples. The rise of such illiberal nationalisms is occurring when there seems to be the real risk of a power vacuum in Europe.</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p>Today, as President Emmanuel Macron seeks re-election, France offers two principal alternatives to him, each more ultra-nationalist than the other: Marine LePen of the National Front outflanked by the acerbic provocateur Eric Zemmour. The recent performances of Austria’s far-right groups and Germany’s AfD suggest that the trend they exemplify is spreading. These are troubling and potentially dangerous developments. The idea of the nation as an inclusive community of all citizens, one that allows each individual to shelter under the constitutional carapace and to pursue his or her own ideas of happiness and national loyalty, free from the stipulations of rulers, is being tossed aside in the name of a higher patriotic duty to an officially sanctioned version of nationalism.</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p>This is reminiscent of the same slippery slope down which Italy and Germany slid into fascism and Nazism in the 1920s and 1930s. Such fears may be exaggerated in today’s democracies, with modern means of communication and thriving free media. But, as a glance at the toxic vituperation spread on social media confirms, complacency is no longer an option.</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p>India is a country that has gained greatly since 1991 from abandoning its post-colonial autarky and lowering protectionist barriers that restricted foreign investment and reduced trade. Along with this greater openness to the world had come a broader receptivity to prevailing international norms in everything from business culture to permissive sexual behaviour—and to subsuming patriotism within a broader liberal and cosmopolitan internationalism. That is now grinding to a halt under our current dispensation.</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p>Our prime minister tosses constitutional norms aside and performs puja at Ayodhya; his party openly asserts defiant Hindutva and condones the marginalisation of minorities, especially Muslims. Young girls in traditional dress are prevented from pursuing their education by fanatics and political opportunists. India has become illiberal, and in the process, allegedly more truly Indian. In the name of authenticity, we risk losing our decency.</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p><b>editor@theweek.in</b></p> http://www.theweek.in/columns/shashi-tharoor/2022/02/24/shashi-tharoor-on-the-rise-of-mandatory-hyper-nationalism.html http://www.theweek.in/columns/shashi-tharoor/2022/02/24/shashi-tharoor-on-the-rise-of-mandatory-hyper-nationalism.html Sun Feb 27 09:52:00 IST 2022 we-are-seeing-dramatic-technological-progress-in-five-areas-shashi-tharoor <a href="http://www.theweek.in/columns/shashi-tharoor/2022/01/27/we-are-seeing-dramatic-technological-progress-in-five-areas-shashi-tharoor.html"><img border="0" hspace="10" align="left" style="margin-top:3px;margin-right:5px;" src="http://img.theweek.in/content/dam/week/opinion/columns/shashi-tharoor/images/2022/1/27/74-dont-stand-still-new.jpg" /> <p>It may be a cliche, but the speed of change has accelerated remarkably in the lifetimes of most people reading this column.</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p>It was not always this way. The India in which I grew up in the 1960s and 1970s was a largely unchanging place. Change was incremental and evolutionary, which is to say that it took its time to happen and one could barely notice it. People’s homes, means of transportation, the products they consumed, what they read, how they communicated, the equipment and instruments they used at home and at work, what they heard from public service broadcasters, and their social relations and business practices in, say, 1975 were not very different from those of 1950.</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p>But between 1975 and 2000 there was a revolutionary change—and it did not stop. Change came to our country like a bullet train and kept on roaring past, taking us along with it. Though 1991 was the watershed in India, the preceding decade-and-a-half had already seen the expansion of TV and the advent of colour, the introduction of computers in the face of leftist resistance, and the advent of new technologies in the workplace, including word processors and fax machines.</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p>Then, along with liberalisation, came foreign cars and consumer products, PCs and mobile phones, the Internet and email, business process outsourcing and international call centres. Companies were born in fields that most people did not know existed. Young graduates had opportunities unavailable to my generation, of new subjects to master and new professions to pursue.</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p>Then change picked up more speed. New businesses started and collapsed. What was a sunrise industry in 2005—say medical transcription, for instance—became obsolete by 2015 (in the case of medical transcription, it was thanks to the development of cheap and accurate voice-recognition software). Literacy is soaring, but people no longer write letters; they call their loved ones on the phone, or text and email them. Entertainment no longer comes from a government TV channel or a disc, but is delivered to your phone. Books can be read from hand-held screens; libraries are installing computer work-stations in order to stay relevant.</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p>“Work from home” has become not just possible but preferred, thanks to two years in the grip of the pandemic. Work itself has been transformed by video-conferencing, offices are turning increasingly paperless, innovations in telemedicine are soaring, and every week brings rumours of dramatic new breakthroughs in Artificial Intelligence, robotics and other fields that will make our daily lives unrecognisable. It is no longer safe to assume that tomorrow will look like yesterday; indeed, you cannot even be sure that tomorrow will look like today.</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p>The era we are living in is as exciting as the late 19th and early 20th centuries, when the telephone was invented, electricity was tapped and the automobile came of age, all at roughly the same time. Experts tell us that the period of disruption, reinvention and transformation that the world underwent because of the onset of these three technologies may well be mirrored in our own era.</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p>As we gaze towards tomorrow, we are witnessing dramatic technological progress in five areas: robotics and the use of remote-controlled machines, energy (including new and more affordable forms of “green” energy and its storage), artificial intelligence and machine learning, blockchain technology, including the emergence of cryptocurrencies, and genomics and DNA sequencing. Each of these, evolving in parallel, holds the promise of bringing about dramatic transformations in our lives.</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p>As the American inventor and futurist Ray Kurzweil observed, we will not experience 100 years of progress in the 21st century, but 20,000 years of progress. Every company and industry, every business and enterprise, can be certain of one thing: that it will either have to be a disrupter or be disrupted, or both, in the foreseeable future. Adjusting to change must be everyone’s mantra. Standing still will prove the best way of moving backward—and being left behind, as change whirls on.</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p><b>editor@theweek.in</b></p> http://www.theweek.in/columns/shashi-tharoor/2022/01/27/we-are-seeing-dramatic-technological-progress-in-five-areas-shashi-tharoor.html http://www.theweek.in/columns/shashi-tharoor/2022/01/27/we-are-seeing-dramatic-technological-progress-in-five-areas-shashi-tharoor.html Thu Jan 27 15:42:53 IST 2022 high-time-for-a-global-pandemic-treaty-writes-shashi-tharoor <a href="http://www.theweek.in/columns/shashi-tharoor/2022/01/01/high-time-for-a-global-pandemic-treaty-writes-shashi-tharoor.html"><img border="0" hspace="10" align="left" style="margin-top:3px;margin-right:5px;" src="http://img.theweek.in/content/dam/week/opinion/columns/shashi-tharoor/images/2022/1/1/74-The-world-needs-a-pandemic-treaty-new.jpg" /> <p>The global spread of the Omicron variant of the coronavirus has everyone reacting with varying degrees of alarm. Is it, as a hopeful study from South Africa suggests, more transmissible but less lethal? Might it even mark the beginning of the end of the Covid pandemic, a sign that the dreaded virus is mutating into something no more harmful than the regular flu?</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p>No one really knows—at least not yet. But the rise of Omicron has added renewed urgency to worldwide concerns about vaccine inequality and the global pandemic response. Soon after the new variant was reported to the World Health Organization by South Africa, leaders began discussing what to do if renewed pandemic outbreaks become a recurrent feature of human life. Is it not time, some asked, to prepare a new international agreement to better deal with these, in what one might call a “pandemic treaty”? In November, the issue has been debated at a special session of the World Health Assembly (WHA), the WHO’s governing body, where 32 health ministers supported a treaty.</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p>The fact that Omicron was first discovered in South Africa itself confirms why such a treaty is required. The arrival of a fast-spreading virus variant from an under-vaccinated country underscores the slogan we have heard ever since the pandemic first emerged: “no one is safe until everyone is safe”. We need an international legal instrument to establish a global structure that would identify threats of pandemics early on and help ensure the production of vaccines or other drugs at adequate levels and in a timely manner. That is what poorer countries want.</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p>The reaction of rich and powerful governments to the idea, though, does not augur well for such a treaty. All governments prefer to look after their own people first.</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p>A year ago, I argued in this space that Covid may well have heralded the dawn of a new age of de-globalisation. Even the outbreak of Omicron has confirmed the absence of any global spirit among nations. Immediately, governments responded with restrictions and even outright bans on entry into their countries of travellers coming from lands with confirmed cases.</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p>All this raises the obvious question: will the world once again descend into “every government for itself”? We have already seen countries hoarding vaccines, protecting manufacturing technology and reneging on contracts and commitments to supply vaccines to others. The rich nations have prioritised their own people, imposed the most severe travel restrictions and ignored the desperate calls of poor nations (and the WHO itself) for global cooperation to stem the pandemic.</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p>Ironically, one of the casualties was the cancellation of a ministerial meeting of the World Trade Organization’s TRIPS Council which was supposed to discuss a temporary waiver of intellectual property rights for coronavirus vaccines. A waiver could have allowed manufacturers to make cheaper, generic versions of highly efficient coronavirus vaccines and medicines. Rich countries, notably in Europe, have opposed the proposal.</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p>If a mere waiver could not get off the ground, is there any hope for a pandemic treaty? Its champions seek an international agreement that could commit governments to produce a certain number of vaccines, maintain a level of manufacturing infrastructure that would serve the world and not just their own people, and participate in global surveillance efforts to help identify new viruses.</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p>These all seem obvious priorities for a world reeling from the onslaught of Covid, but the response of governments has been disappointingly tepid. If we do not achieve a treaty, the next virus outbreak could see the world making the same mistakes all over again.</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p><b>editor@theweek.in</b></p> http://www.theweek.in/columns/shashi-tharoor/2022/01/01/high-time-for-a-global-pandemic-treaty-writes-shashi-tharoor.html http://www.theweek.in/columns/shashi-tharoor/2022/01/01/high-time-for-a-global-pandemic-treaty-writes-shashi-tharoor.html Sat Jan 01 11:38:47 IST 2022 assault-on-our-institutions-will-weaken-the-very-pillars-of-democracy-shashi-tharoor <a href="http://www.theweek.in/columns/shashi-tharoor/2021/12/04/assault-on-our-institutions-will-weaken-the-very-pillars-of-democracy-shashi-tharoor.html"><img border="0" hspace="10" align="left" style="margin-top:3px;margin-right:5px;" src="http://img.theweek.in/content/dam/week/opinion/columns/shashi-tharoor/images/2021/12/4/74-Parliament-new.jpg" /> <p>As Constitution Day on November 26 was marked by a boycott of Parliament by opposition parties, it is worth asking what has become of the free institutions whose existence underpins our constitutional democracy.</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p>They have atrophied. Financial regulators like the RBI; the judiciary, headed by the Supreme Court; the investigative agencies (notably the Central Bureau of Investigation); the Election Commission, which organises, conducts the country’s general and state elections; the armed forces; institutions of accountability like the Central Information Commission; the elected legislatures; and the free press have all come under a shadow.</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p>Part of the reason behind this systemic onslaught stems from the Moditva doctrine of the ruling party and its inherently autocratic concentration of power. Moditva articulates a cultural nationalism anchored in the RSS political doctrine of Hindutva, on top of which it builds the idea of a strong leader, a man with a 56-inch chest, powerful and decisive, who embodies the nation and will lead it to triumph.</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p>‘Moditva’ depicts a fiery and articulate ideologue, projected as all-knowing and infallible, the hero on a white stallion who will gallop at the head of the nation’s massed forces with sword upraised, knowing all the answers, ready to cut the Gordian knots of the nation’s problems.</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p>Autonomous public institutions threaten the dominance of the Moditva doctrine because they are independent institutions with specialised mandates that consequently challenge this oversized cult of personality. Naturally, the government has systematically sought to interfere with the independence that is a defining feature of these bodies.</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p>India’s Election Commission has enjoyed a proud record of independence and boasts decades-long experience of conducting free and fair elections, despite its members usually being retired civil servants appointed by the government of the day for fixed tenures. While in the past, election commissioners have largely enjoyed a reputation for integrity, this has taken a severe blow as the result of a number of decisions in recent years.</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p>The judicial system, traditionally above the cut-and-thrust of the political fray, has come under withering scrutiny, as has the repeated politicisation of the armed forces under the present government. The list goes on, from the Central Information Commission (which suffers a record number of unfilled vacancies, remains intentionally understaffed and whose salaries and terms of service can be altered by the government—a blow to the independence of the body), to the Central Statistical Organisation (which has been accused of manipulating data to make the government’s economic management appear less disastrous). A slew of governors have cast aside their constitutional mandate to sing to the tune of the ruling dispensation.</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p>As for the ‘temple of democracy’, our Parliament, it has declined considerably from the deliberative forum it is supposed to be, to a combination of rubber-stamp for government bills, notice-board for official pronouncements, and theatrical stage for dramatic disruptions. Serious work still goes on in the committees, but these have also been undermined by the government’s disinclination to refer most bills to committee scrutiny.</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p>A process combining intimidation and co-optation has weakened the press, ensuring that very few critical voices in the so-called ‘mainstream’ media are raised against such behaviour. Instead, the press largely serves as a weapon of mass distraction, purveying sensationalist and voyeuristic stories to take attention away from the government’s failures.</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p>This does not bode well for the future of our Indian democracy. Political parties and ruling powers will come and go, but these institutions are the enduring pillars of democracy, whose independence, integrity and professionalism are meant to inure them from political pressures. If the assault on our institutions persists, the confidence that people have in these bodies will erode steadily and, in doing so, weaken the very pillars of the democracy that we take for granted today.</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p><b>editor@theweek.in</b></p> http://www.theweek.in/columns/shashi-tharoor/2021/12/04/assault-on-our-institutions-will-weaken-the-very-pillars-of-democracy-shashi-tharoor.html http://www.theweek.in/columns/shashi-tharoor/2021/12/04/assault-on-our-institutions-will-weaken-the-very-pillars-of-democracy-shashi-tharoor.html Sat Dec 04 15:53:33 IST 2021 why-a-new-parliament-when-modi-does-not-respect-the-house-asks-shashi-tharoor <a href="http://www.theweek.in/columns/shashi-tharoor/2021/11/06/why-a-new-parliament-when-modi-does-not-respect-the-house-asks-shashi-tharoor.html"><img border="0" hspace="10" align="left" style="margin-top:3px;margin-right:5px;" src="http://img.theweek.in/content/dam/week/opinion/columns/shashi-tharoor/images/2021/11/6/164-New-Central-Vista-no-central-vision-new.jpg" /> <p>Prime Minister Narendra Modi recently launched a full-frontal assault on critics of his Central Vista scheme, accusing them of spreading “lies” and “misinformation” and being opposed to India’s progress. The Vista’s redevelopment, he argues, will represent New India after 75 years of independence, and cast off the colonial Lutyens “face” of New Delhi. “India is the mother of democracy. Therefore, the capital of India should be such that its central focus should be people,” he said.</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p>This is a curious argument since the imperial legacy of Lutyens Delhi was transformed decades ago by a new, democratic India. The area between India Gate and Rashtrapati Bhavan, which the government seeks to remake, has indeed been focused on the people. It is at present a grassy, pleasant place where, on any given day, families can be seen enjoying the lawns, eating ice cream, and strolling. It is a truly democratic space, freely accessible to the people.</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p>That will all change: a leading architectural magazine called the prime minister’s dream project “a retrograde and anti-ecological urban plan” which could “turn an entire stretch of the Rajpath, once so free and easy, into a surveyed security zone”. The government’s decision to push ahead with the construction of this project during the mismanaged Covid pandemic is an act of staggering arrogance, exposing its indifference to the interests of ordinary Indians. The project costs 020 lakh crore at a time when adequate oxygen supplies were unavailable during the nightmarish Covid “second wave” earlier this year, migrant labourers walked hundreds of kilometres after a disastrously implemented lockdown last year, and the people of India, reeling from the economic crisis, received the most meagre fiscal stimulus of any major economy.</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p>Changing the physical face of Lutyens’s Delhi is essentially a show of power, a desire to stamp the national capital with the seal of Moditva. The “edifice complex” of this government’s fantasies reeks of a Mussolinian air, a taste for the grandiose that has nothing to do with democracy in either substance or process. The BJP’s governance style is one of unilateral top-down decision-making, with not even the pretence of consulting the public, the opposition, or indeed even architects, environmentalists, or parliamentarians. The wholesale destruction of many much-admired buildings, including the National Museum and the recently completed Jawahar Bhawan, in favour of banal and repetitive cookie-cutter government offices, is deplorably wasteful. It is one more shameful attempt to dismantle the idea of democratic India itself.</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p>The government also contends that a new Parliament building is needed as the old one is no longer fit for purpose. I myself had argued that the Parliament building was in desperate need of upgradation, but I had called for a renovation of the present structure, not its replacement. Replacing an iconic Parliament building is bad enough. But the irony of conducting a ground-breaking ceremony for the new Parliament while suspending the work that should have been taking place in the old—two of the regular parliamentary sessions were abandoned or truncated—was lost on the government.</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p>Instead of focusing its energies on building a new Parliament, perhaps the government should take stock of its shameful behaviour in the one we already have. When you have reduced Parliament to a notice-board for your unilateral decisions, disembowelled the standing committees by refusing to discuss legislation in them, and got your pliant majority to rubber-stamp all the bills you want to shovel through without debate, what difference will a new building make?</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p><b>editor@theweek.in</b></p> http://www.theweek.in/columns/shashi-tharoor/2021/11/06/why-a-new-parliament-when-modi-does-not-respect-the-house-asks-shashi-tharoor.html http://www.theweek.in/columns/shashi-tharoor/2021/11/06/why-a-new-parliament-when-modi-does-not-respect-the-house-asks-shashi-tharoor.html Sat Nov 06 11:17:49 IST 2021 pluralism-is-in-very-nature-of-india-bjp-is-challenging-it-shashi-tharoor <a href="http://www.theweek.in/columns/shashi-tharoor/2021/10/07/pluralism-is-in-very-nature-of-india-bjp-is-challenging-it-shashi-tharoor.html"><img border="0" hspace="10" align="left" style="margin-top:3px;margin-right:5px;" src="http://img.theweek.in/content/dam/week/opinion/columns/shashi-tharoor/images/2021/10/7/74-pluralism-new.jpg" /> <p>The mounting unpleasantness of communal bigotry in our country prompts me to look back at the founding of the Indian Republic. Our nationalist movement did not divide over ideology or geography; it divided on the simple issue of whether religion should be the determinant of nationhood. Those who argued that their religion made them a nation left India and established Pakistan; the rest created a nation which, like the freedom struggle itself, sought to embrace all Indians.</p> <p>There was also a practical consideration here. In dealing with the vast and complex realities of a subcontinent of 330 million people, and in devising systems and rules to embrace all of them, the founders had to acknowledge the need to produce political unity out of ethnic, religious, cultural, linguistic, and communal diversity.</p> <p>They realised that in the India they would rule, there was no single standard, no fixed stereotype, no “one way” of doing things. In an era when most developing countries chose authoritarian models of government, claiming these were needed to promote nation-building and steer economic development, India chose to be a multi-party democracy—flawed, but flourishing. India’s pluralism was acknowledged in its constitutional and political arrangements, which encouraged a bewildering variety of social groups, religious communities, sectional interests and far-fetched ideologies to flourish and contend. This approach—called, with some inexactitude, “secularism”—is now bitterly challenged by the ruling party.</p> <p>Many observers abroad have been astonished by India’s survival as a pluralist state. But pluralism is a reality that emerges from the very nature of the country; it is a choice made inevitable by India’s geography and reaffirmed by its history. India’s is a civilisation that, over millennia, has offered refuge and, more importantly, religious and cultural freedom, to Jews, Parsis, several denominations of Christians, and, of course, Muslims. Jews came to Kerala centuries before Christ, with the destruction by the Babylonians of their First Temple, and they knew no persecution on Indian soil until the Portuguese arrived in the sixteenth century to inflict it. Christianity arrived on Indian soil with St Thomas the Apostle, who came to the Kerala coast sometime before 52 CE and was welcomed on shore, if the legend is to be believed, by a flute-playing Jewish girl.</p> <p>Islam is portrayed by some in the north as a religion of invaders who pillaged and conquered, but in Kerala, where Islam came through traders, travellers and missionaries rather than by the sword, a south Indian king was so impressed by the message of the prophet that he travelled to Arabia to meet the great teacher himself. The king, Cheraman Perumal, perished in the attempt, but the coconuts he took with him have sprouted trees that flourish to this day on the southern coast of Oman.</p> <p>India’s heritage of diversity means that in the Kolkata neighbourhood where I lived during my high school years, the wail of the muezzin calling the Islamic faithful to prayer routinely blended with the chant of mantras and the tinkling of bells at the local Shiva temple, accompanied by the Sikh gurdwara’s reading of verses from the Guru Granth Sahib, with St Paul’s Cathedral just around the corner. Today, in my constituency, Thiruvananthapuram, the gleaming white dome of the Palayam Juma Masjid stands diagonally across from the lofty spires of St Joseph’s Cathedral, and just around the corner from both, abutting the mosque, is one of the city’s oldest temples, consecrated to Lord Ganesh. My experiences in Thiruvananthapuram remind me daily that India is home to more Christians than Australia and nearly as many Muslims as Pakistan.</p> <p>That is the India I lay claim to.</p> <p><b>editor@theweek.in</b></p> <p>&nbsp;</p> http://www.theweek.in/columns/shashi-tharoor/2021/10/07/pluralism-is-in-very-nature-of-india-bjp-is-challenging-it-shashi-tharoor.html http://www.theweek.in/columns/shashi-tharoor/2021/10/07/pluralism-is-in-very-nature-of-india-bjp-is-challenging-it-shashi-tharoor.html Thu Oct 07 14:36:35 IST 2021 education-policy-makers-should-not-forget-digital-divide-shashi-tharoor <a href="http://www.theweek.in/columns/shashi-tharoor/2021/09/09/education-policy-makers-should-not-forget-digital-divide-shashi-tharoor.html"><img border="0" hspace="10" align="left" style="margin-top:3px;margin-right:5px;" src="http://img.theweek.in/content/dam/week/opinion/columns/shashi-tharoor/images/2021/9/9/74-divide-new.jpg" /> <p>Some readers may recall a story from last year’s lockdown that is seared into my consciousness. A Class 10 student in Kerala, hailing from a dalit family, a young girl who was a class topper and under any other circumstances would have been set for a bright future, instead committed suicide. Why? Because as classes leapt online, her family, where the sole breadwinner was her father, a daily-wage worker now unemployed thanks to the lockdown, was unable to afford a smartphone or a data package which would have allowed this girl to follow the classes necessary to continue her education. Then the state government, in a great show of solidarity with the poor, announced that classes would also be telecast on Victers TV—a public broadcasting channel for those children who could not afford online facilities. But the family’s sole television set was broken and her father, barely able to feed his family, could not afford to repair it. Excluded and marginalised from the very field in which she had excelled, this bright student preferred not to live. She killed herself.</p> <p>This sobering and tragic event calls for a serious commitment on the part of education policy-makers to take stock of the barriers to access and inclusion that permeate all levels of our society. As classes rapidly go online in the Covid-19 era, we as a country have not sufficiently addressed a deep and pervasive digital divide that many families have to contend with. According to UNESCO, globally, only just over half of households (55 per cent) have an internet connection. In the developed world, 87 per cent are connected compared with 47 per cent in developing nations, and just 19 per cent in the least developed countries. These stark realities, along with other basic barriers like infrastructure deficiencies, have resulted in insuperable barriers for our weak and marginalised sections. This is the reality of the India we live in, reality that educationists cannot afford to forget while they sit protected by privilege and discuss the future of the New Education Policy. That is why I (and other MPs) have been organising digital-divide bridging donations of smartphones to poor students.</p> <p>And what about universities? Some have argued that, after the initial arduous period of adaptation, online education will become the new norm, and the university campus as we know it has become obsolete. I do not agree. Yes, poverty-stricken students can be equipped for online education. But that is not enough. Our current resort to online education overlooks the great value of campus interactions for students across social classes and regional or religious divides, and the comradeship that arises from shared experience and mutual learning.</p> <p>Above all, the university campus can be a place where people can be brought together, where the social barriers of class, religion and caste are left behind and young Indians are given the tools to lead an empowered life; a space that is confident enough to look at its wealth of differences as a strength and not so insecure as to look at diversity as a weakness that must be rooted out; a space where the administration is attuned to the aspirations of the students, the next generation of India’s leaders, and where these young minds, the engines of our democratic and pluralist society, are not subsumed only by personal ambition or the commercial rat-race, but are invested in the success of those around them. If we manage to create such spaces on our campuses, we can develop a new Indian university that remains open, inclusive and representative offline—an old idea reimagined for a new India.</p> <p><b>editor@theweek.in</b></p> http://www.theweek.in/columns/shashi-tharoor/2021/09/09/education-policy-makers-should-not-forget-digital-divide-shashi-tharoor.html http://www.theweek.in/columns/shashi-tharoor/2021/09/09/education-policy-makers-should-not-forget-digital-divide-shashi-tharoor.html Thu Sep 09 16:13:36 IST 2021 everyone-must-follow-international-rules-even-the-us-says-shashi-tharoor <a href="http://www.theweek.in/columns/shashi-tharoor/2021/08/12/everyone-must-follow-international-rules-even-the-us-says-shashi-tharoor.html"><img border="0" hspace="10" align="left" style="margin-top:3px;margin-right:5px;" src="http://img.theweek.in/content/dam/week/opinion/columns/shashi-tharoor/images/2021/8/12/uinted-nations.jpg" /> <p>On June 24, the United Nations General Assembly voted for the 29th time in a row to censure US sanctions on Cuba. A staggering 184 countries supported the resolution condemning the US economic embargo on the Communist-run Caribbean island-state, three abstained, and four did not vote at all; just two states voted against the resolution—the US and Israel. The US promptly made it clear that it will, yet again, disregard the overwhelming opinion of the “international community”. The sanctions will continue. So what makes the US the self-proclaimed defender of a “rules-based international order”?</p> <p>The question is increasingly relevant as the world seems to be dividing along a new binary—between an ominously resurgent China, bent on asserting itself through “wolf warrior diplomacy” as the new gorilla on the global beach, and a group of beleaguered democracies, led by the US, who seek, they claim, to uphold the rules-based liberal international order established since 1945.</p> <p>The idea of a rules-based system goes back to the founding of the UN 76 years ago. In 1945, the UN’s far-sighted founders—determined to make the second half of the twentieth century different from the much-troubled first—drew up rules to govern international behaviour, and founded institutions in which different nations could cooperate for the common good.</p> <p>Their idea—now called “global governance”—was to create an architecture that could foster international cooperation, elaborate consensual global norms and establish predictable, universally applicable rules, to the benefit of all. After 50 years in which the world had suffered two world wars, countless civil wars, brutal dictatorships, mass expulsions of populations, and the horrors of the Holocaust and Hiroshima, the world would be governed by international law. Everyone would follow the same rules.</p> <p>The new UN would stand for a world in which people of different nations and cultures would look on each other, not as subjects of fear and suspicion, but as potential partners, able to exchange goods and ideas to their mutual benefit. A place where small states and big would be able to work as sovereign equals, pursuing common objectives in a universal forum, observing common rules of engagement.</p> <p>As US President Harry Truman, addressing the San Francisco Conference that founded the UN, observed: “We all have to recognise, no matter how great our strength, that we must deny ourselves the license to do always as we please. No one nation... can or should expect any special privilege which harms any other nation.... Unless we are all willing to pay that price, no organisation for world peace can accomplish its purpose. And what a reasonable price that is!”</p> <p>But in the decades since, the biggest defenders of the established world order have let it down the most. USA’s behaviour in sanctioning Cuba, despite the disapproval of the rest of the world, is often seen as a typical example of its attitude. If the rest of the world disagrees, the US, instead of abiding by the rules and heeding the majority, does its own thing anyway.</p> <p>Examples like these abound. The US condemns China for its expansionist behaviour in the South China Sea, and asserts the principle of freedom of navigation—but it refuses to sign or ratify the very Law of the Sea that it excoriates the Chinese for violating. Washington waxes indignant, often selectively, about human rights violations in an assortment of countries—but it not only has not ratified the establishment of the International Criminal Court, but also passed a law authorising its armed forces to use violence to extricate any American citizens who might one day be arraigned by the Court.</p> <p>In other words, critics of the US assert, its advocacy of a “rules-based international order” is not about the rules, or the order, that the rest of the world wants, supports and votes for. It only stands up for the rules that suit it.</p> <p>When Truman waxed eloquent about the importance of international law that would bind big and small, strong and weak, equally, he was making a simple point that is essential to any democracy. If you want to uphold a rules-based system, everyone must follow the same rules. Even the world’s biggest superpower.</p> http://www.theweek.in/columns/shashi-tharoor/2021/08/12/everyone-must-follow-international-rules-even-the-us-says-shashi-tharoor.html http://www.theweek.in/columns/shashi-tharoor/2021/08/12/everyone-must-follow-international-rules-even-the-us-says-shashi-tharoor.html Thu Aug 12 15:23:51 IST 2021 free-our-universities-shashi-tharoor <a href="http://www.theweek.in/columns/shashi-tharoor/2021/07/17/free-our-universities-shashi-tharoor.html"><img border="0" hspace="10" align="left" style="margin-top:3px;margin-right:5px;" src="http://img.theweek.in/content/dam/week/opinion/columns/shashi-tharoor/images/2021/7/17/Students-protest-at-JNU---PTI.jpg" /> <p>The recent suspension of a professor at the Central University of Kerala for mentioning the RSS while talking about proto-fascism in his classes, highlights the ongoing persecution of India’s more liberal universities and academicians. The government seems entirely unconscious of the classic prescription that the supreme purpose of a university in any democracy is to create well-formed minds who can participate in our system, whose future depends on citizens’ capacity to scrutinise their elected officials.</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p>One purpose of the university is to help us expand our minds in service of our democracy. In a deliberative democracy, universities are meant to be hotbeds of argument, debate and dissent rather than centres of conformity. Universities are where young people find themselves in causes larger than their own academic careers. Many—perhaps most—students grow up in the process and outgrow the more extreme views they adopted out of youthful zeal. Two of my extreme-leftist classmates at St Stephen’s College, Delhi, for instance, are now conservative pundits associated (in one case, till recently) with the BJP. They would undoubtedly be embarrassed to be reminded of the fervour with which they espoused positions that they dismiss with scorn today.</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p>Perhaps more important, the Indian state is not so feeble that a few irresponsible slogans shouted by misguided students can destroy it. By branding dissent as “anti-national”, our BJP rulers are betraying the founding idea of an India “where the mind”, in Tagore’s immortal phrase, “is without fear”.</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p>The BJP’s attack on universities is planned, deliberate, and dangerous to India’s democracy. The slapping of sedition charges on Jawaharlal Nehru University student leader Kanhaiya Kumar and the suicide in January 2016, as a result of harassment, by a dalit student in Hyderabad, Rohit Vemula, are evidence that we have failed to protect our students and scholars from political interference by individuals and organisations that used arbitrary processes to uproot academic freedom. From Dinanath Batra’s RSS-supported curriculum in Haryana and Gujarat on “moral science” to the politically driven harassment of Vemula and the sacking of social activist and Magsaysay awardee professor Sandeep Pandey for his dissenting views at Banaras Hindu University, a deeply disturbing pattern emerges that points to an ominous political project, to exact conformity by striking at the intellectual fount of challenges to it, the universities.</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p>The filing of an FIR in October 2019 under Section 124A (the sedition law) against 49 intellectuals who wrote a letter to the prime minister deploring mob-lynching, though since dropped, remains an egregious example of the misuse of this law against freedom of speech. It is essential to clarify and restrict its application to instances in which there is a direct and immediate incitement to violence, as has been interpreted by the Supreme Court of India. This will free students as well.</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p>It should not need saying, but in today’s India, it does: One can criticise the government of the day and be loyal to the nation. We must celebrate a robust and pluralistic Indian democracy, not the fearful brand of governance espoused by the current government, which sees treason in every tweet and a traitor under every desk.</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p>The BJP seems to believe that India’s freedom is so frail that it will collapse in the face of dissent—which characterises the spirit of the nation in the first place. They have parked a tank on the JNU campus. But the flag that our soldiers have died for, even as the JNU disturbances were going on, stands for a larger idea of freedom than the intolerance of our present authorities. It is time for the government to live up to the ideals embodied in our flag.</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p><b>editor@theweek.in</b></p> http://www.theweek.in/columns/shashi-tharoor/2021/07/17/free-our-universities-shashi-tharoor.html http://www.theweek.in/columns/shashi-tharoor/2021/07/17/free-our-universities-shashi-tharoor.html Sat Jul 17 21:00:28 IST 2021 indo-pacific-will-remain-hub-for-maritime-economic-cooperation-shashi-tharoor <a href="http://www.theweek.in/columns/shashi-tharoor/2021/06/17/indo-pacific-will-remain-hub-for-maritime-economic-cooperation-shashi-tharoor.html"><img border="0" hspace="10" align="left" style="margin-top:3px;margin-right:5px;" src="http://img.theweek.in/content/dam/week/opinion/columns/shashi-tharoor/images/2021/6/17/malabar-new.jpg" /> <p>It is fascinating for old hands of global diplomacy when new terms of art emerge and find widespread acceptance. This has happened to the “Indo-Pacific”, an expression that comes up often in my conversations with foreigners—sometimes self-consciously, sometimes automatically, and sometimes with the slight tone of deference that is used by those who are striving to be politically correct.</p> <p>Whatever the case may be, the idea of the Indo-Pacific breaks down the separation of East Asia conceptually from South Asia and links the two geopolitically. At the same time, the term reflects three interrelated developments. The first is China’s declared intention of developing a blue water navy and becoming a transcontinental economic giant. The second is India’s emergence as a regional power and a possible counterbalance to China. And the third is the role which the US will play in shaping the contours of the seemingly irresistible shift in power from west to east, and from the Atlantic to the Indian and Pacific Oceans. Taken together, the ideation of the ‘Indo-Pacific region’ captures the growing might, geopolitical interests, and normative visions of these powers in a dynamic region.</p> <p>Within the confluence of these complex developments, India’s vision of the Indo-Pacific is one that strives to ensure a free, open and rules-based maritime space that respects each nation’s strategic autonomy and where no individual player or alliance seeks to undermine this in the quest for greater influence in this region.</p> <p>But Beijing and Moscow object to the conceptualisation of the Indo-Pacific as a strategy to contain China, which remains Russia’s largest trading partner, and with whose geo-strategic interests Moscow is increasingly aligned. India cannot afford to completely disregard consistent criticism from Russia, which continues to provide the majority of our defence imports.</p> <p>And, yet, Russia’s objections point to how far Russia and India have travelled from each other in recent years. So far, India has been equidistant from the US and China, a position Russia prefers us to maintain. But it is difficult to be equidistant between a country that has killed 20 of your soldiers and transgressed your border, and another that you have no quarrel with and that tries to be supportive.</p> <p>Our foreign policy is not determined by one violent standoff and the violation of our territorial sovereignty alone, but such incidents cannot be lightly brushed aside. Beyond its belligerence on the LAC, China has increased its support for Pakistan, spending more than $90 billion on a highway to the Chinese-run port of Gwadar. The importance of Pakistan to China’s Belt and Road Initiative binds the two countries closer together than before.</p> <p>So India has deliberately embraced the US concept of a “free and open Indo-Pacific”, and is gradually abandoning its reluctance to participate in the US-led “Quad”, focused on countering China’s regional ambitions. The last Quad summit called for the Indo-Pacific to remain ‘free and open … anchored by democratic values and unconstrained by coercion’.&nbsp;</p> <p>But whether these lofty ideals will translate to mutually agreeable outcomes remains to be seen. For instance, the recent military exercise by the US navy in India’s backyard, without prior notification too, let alone an official nod, has not gone down well in New Delhi. Similarly, while the joint statement talked about greater cooperation on vaccine production and distribution, in recent weeks Indian media has placed a growing spotlight on the US embargo on certain vital raw material that is required for vaccine manufacturing by Indian producers.&nbsp;</p> <p>The Quad is therefore not an incipient Indo-Pacific NATO. The Indo-Pacific will remain a centre for maritime and economic cooperation and a facilitator of the huge volume of global trade that flows through this region. Our ultimate objective in the region has to remain the peace, security and development of all. At a time when all of us are threatened by a deadly virus, climate change and rising levels of poverty and income inequality, that is all that geopolitics ought to be about. Even in the Indo-Pacific.</p> http://www.theweek.in/columns/shashi-tharoor/2021/06/17/indo-pacific-will-remain-hub-for-maritime-economic-cooperation-shashi-tharoor.html http://www.theweek.in/columns/shashi-tharoor/2021/06/17/indo-pacific-will-remain-hub-for-maritime-economic-cooperation-shashi-tharoor.html Thu Jun 17 15:33:47 IST 2021 moditva-doctrine-is-all-about-autocratic-concentration-of-power-shashi-tharoor <a href="http://www.theweek.in/columns/shashi-tharoor/2021/05/20/moditva-doctrine-is-all-about-autocratic-concentration-of-power-shashi-tharoor.html"><img border="0" hspace="10" align="left" style="margin-top:3px;margin-right:5px;" src="http://img.theweek.in/content/dam/week/opinion/columns/shashi-tharoor/images/2021/5/20/narendra-modi-new.jpg" /> <p>Is democracy under threat in India? Indeed, has India already ceased to be democratic?</p> <p>This may seem an odd question to ask in the aftermath of five successful state elections, conducted largely freely and fairly and only one of which the BJP won. Yet, if one were to read the annual reports of Freedom House, the American think-tank, which downgraded India this year from “free” to only “partly free”, or the prestigious V-Dem Institute in Sweden, which described India as an “electoral autocracy”, then we have indeed slipped out of the ranks of the world’s democracies. Elections can be democratic, but true democracy is about what happens between elections.</p> <p>It has not helped that since this government came to office in 2014, we have witnessed a striking dilution of independence at the highest levels of our autonomous institutions, from financial regulators like the Reserve Bank to institutions of accountability like the Central Information Commission; that questions have been raised about even hitherto sacrosanct bodies like the Election Commission and the upper echelons of the armed forces; and that Parliament, the judiciary and even the free press are widely perceived as insufficiently free of the government’s influence.</p> <p>Part of the reason behind this systemic crumbling stems from the Moditva doctrine and its inherently autocratic concentration of power. Moditva articulates a cultural nationalism anchored in the RSS political doctrine of hindutva, but building upon it the idea of a strong leader, powerful and decisive, who embodies the nation. Autonomous public institutions threaten the Moditva doctrine because, by design, they are independent. This is why their authority must be undermined, and the “nationalist” argument advanced that opposition and dissent are by definition anti-national. The fear is that ethno-nationalism is taking India towards a peculiar hybrid, a ‘dictatocracy’ which preserves the forms of democracy while brooking no dissent against its dictates.</p> <p>If the de-institutionalisation of Indian governance proceeds like this, the greatest danger facing India will be that of the public losing faith in the system altogether. This is already taking place in many other parts of the world. In a widely discussed paper, Harvard scholars Yascha Mounk and Roberto Foa argue that the health of liberal democracies across the world is degenerating (the term of art being ‘democratic deconsolidation’). Drawing on global data, they show that there has been a considerable dilution of support for democracy and a growing impatience with the democratic process, especially among the so-called ‘millennial’ generations (those born after the 1980s), and that we can no longer assume that the future of democracy is secure.</p> <p>Indeed, support for non-democratic or authoritarian models of governance is rising in many democracies. India is among the worst in the Mounk–Foa data. More than 70 per cent of Indian respondents felt that “a strong leader who does not have to bother with parliament and elections is a ‘good’ way to run this country”, higher than even Pakistan, with 62 per cent. In a recent CSDS–Azim Premji University survey, over 50 per cent of respondents in four large states expressed a preference for an authoritarian alternative to our existing democracy.</p> <p>While for many apologists of India’s government, the mere conduct of reasonably free and fair elections is defence enough, democracy can only flourish if the system maintains checks and balances, promotes consensus, and ensures institutional autonomy. Otherwise we become another “illiberal democracy”.</p> <p>The immortal JP argued that democracy should not be reduced to a crowd of sheep electing their shepherd every five years. The confidence that the people of India have in our system rests in the belief that it will work fairly. If their faith erodes, it will weaken the very foundations of the democracy that we take for granted. Political parties and the ruling powers of the day will come and go, but free institutions are the enduring pillars of any democracy. Their independence, integrity and professionalism are meant to inure them from the political pressures of the day. We must not let Moditva destroy them.</p> http://www.theweek.in/columns/shashi-tharoor/2021/05/20/moditva-doctrine-is-all-about-autocratic-concentration-of-power-shashi-tharoor.html http://www.theweek.in/columns/shashi-tharoor/2021/05/20/moditva-doctrine-is-all-about-autocratic-concentration-of-power-shashi-tharoor.html Thu May 20 16:19:49 IST 2021 shashi-tharoor-on-the-need-to-avoid-a-cold-war-between-us-and-china <a href="http://www.theweek.in/columns/shashi-tharoor/2021/04/22/shashi-tharoor-on-the-need-to-avoid-a-cold-war-between-us-and-china.html"><img border="0" hspace="10" align="left" style="margin-top:3px;margin-right:5px;" src="http://img.theweek.in/content/dam/week/opinion/columns/shashi-tharoor/images/2021/4/22/bidern-jnping-new.jpg" /> <p>Even as the world continues to grapple with the ravages of the Covid pandemic, strategists with an eye on the long term are contemplating a potentially equally crippling prospect: the onset of a “new Cold War”, this time between the US and China.</p> <p>US Secretary of State Antony Blinken has dubbed Beijing a “threat to global stability” and denounced its record on human rights and trade. China has been equally harsh in its condemnation of US “imperialism” and domestic problems, including racism. Beijing has made no secret of its disdainful view that the US is a country in terminal decline.</p> <p>The Biden administration appears to be embarking on establishing a network of alliances against China. Likely areas of competition with China go beyond the conventional geopolitical issues to challenges in cyberspace and the risks of technological conflict. American thinkers have called for policymakers to evolve a comprehensive strategy to counter China, much as George Kennan’s famous “Long Telegram” from Moscow in 1946 led to the birth of the “containment strategy” that hemmed in the Soviet Union.</p> <p>Ideology is seen as key to the division of the world into duelling camps. President Biden wants to forge an “alliance of democracies” against the world’s “autocracies”. The Quad is seen by some as the nucleus of a future such alliance. Democracy and liberal values are essential to keeping such an alliance together and to demonstrate that this is not just another amoral contest for military or geopolitical supremacy. This is why Washington prefers to couch its vision as being about principles, democratic governance and the maintenance of international order.</p> <p>But “Cold War 2.0” is not inevitable. The Biden administration does seem to be more nuanced than its predecessor in its approach to China. Blinken has acknowledged that the relationship with China has adversarial, competitive and cooperative aspects. This was not true of the US-Soviet Cold War, where there was simply no economic interpenetration between the two blocs and almost no examples of cooperation, let alone investment or significant trade.</p> <p>The countries that the US might hope to rope into its project also have complex concerns. Countries in southeast Asia would welcome the US or the Quad offering a counterweight to Chinese hegemony, but they are too conscious of their economic dependence on Beijing to espouse any overt hostility.</p> <p>Even the Quad countries have too much at stake in their economic relations with China to simply write off the relationship. China is not known for its ideological zeal to convert the world to communism; it is far more interested in finding itself a dominant place in the current world order than to overthrow the international system.</p> <p>Nor are there any proxy wars littering the landscape as in the original Cold War, nor much of an appetite for any in either Beijing or Washington. Positing another Cold War, therefore, overstates both the current situation and the risk of any threat from China to the global order.</p> <p>It is also inescapable today that current global crises like the coronavirus pandemic and environmental disasters oblige the US and China to confront the same problems, face the same threats and seize the same opportunities. What we used to call, in my UN days, “problems without passports”, require blueprints beyond borders to resolve. Global cooperation would serve the world better than intensified rivalry.</p> <p>As the Indian writer Pankaj Mishra put it recently in a piece for Bloomberg: “The urgent question today is not whether there will be a new cold war. It is whether modes of thought developed during the previous one… will again dominate political and intellectual life…. The crude division between democracy and autocracy won’t help us grasp such a topsy-turvy world. Though comfortingly simple, such cold war ideologies can never truly replace our messy reality.”</p> <p>The ideological battle lines are not yet joined. Perhaps, with enough imagination, they will not need to be.</p> http://www.theweek.in/columns/shashi-tharoor/2021/04/22/shashi-tharoor-on-the-need-to-avoid-a-cold-war-between-us-and-china.html http://www.theweek.in/columns/shashi-tharoor/2021/04/22/shashi-tharoor-on-the-need-to-avoid-a-cold-war-between-us-and-china.html Thu Apr 22 15:11:07 IST 2021 kerala-should-end-over-dependence-on-remittances-shashi-tharoor <a href="http://www.theweek.in/columns/shashi-tharoor/2021/03/25/kerala-should-end-over-dependence-on-remittances-shashi-tharoor.html"><img border="0" hspace="10" align="left" style="margin-top:3px;margin-right:5px;" src="http://img.theweek.in/content/dam/week/opinion/columns/shashi-tharoor/images/2021/3/25/74-kerala-new.jpg" /> <p>As I write these words, my state is riven in a bitter election campaign, with harsh words being flung at and by the ruling party. And yet, though much criticism of the government is justified, the ‘Kerala Model’ itself cannot be disputed.</p> <p>The phrase was revived last year to praise the state’s success in initially suppressing the spread of Covid-19 and ‘flattening the curve’ till October, when cases re-escalated. But the government’s failures to maintain its performance do not discredit the Kerala model itself. For its Covid-19 response has emerged from a template that long preceded the current crisis. Among Indian states, it is unique for having allocated significant resources to public health, devolved power and funding to village-level bodies, and established a system that promotes community participation and public cooperation.</p> <p>In addition to having the highest literacy rate in India (94 per cent), Kerala also boasts a declining birth rate, higher life expectancy, more empowered women, and stronger welfare support for the marginalised. People do not beg or starve in Kerala.</p> <p>The state offers universal access to health care, and respects all residents as rights-bearing citizens. Throughout the current crisis, Kerala’s educated populace has behaved responsibly, limiting community transmission, cooperating with authorities, and seeking prompt treatment. This institutional and political culture is not the result of some one-off policy. Kerala has spent generations creating the infrastructure to support social development, placing it far ahead of the rest of India on many key indicators.</p> <p>Kerala has a vibrant civil society, free media, and a competitive political system. Its robust form of social democracy reflects the contributions of alternating coalitions of communist and Congress-led governments over time.</p> <p>Kerala has built on its tradition of decentralised governance, transparency, public trust and governmental accountability. While these must not be seen as a reason to underplay the current challenges the state faces, it offers a timely reminder that with greater sensitivity to the crisis at hand, more public willingness to continue to adopt counter measures like social distancing, wearing of masks and sanitisation measures, we can bounce back.</p> <p>Malayalis are a people of incredible resilience and fortitude. Whether it was during Cyclone Ockhi, the devastating floods in 2018 and 2019 or even in the face of similar virus outbreaks like Nipah, the people of the state have found a way to face these serious challenges head on.</p> <p>When sources for conflict have arisen, the people have found a way to remind the rest of the country that we are proud flagbearers of a phenomenon I call the ‘Malayali miracle’. No politician can claim credit for this, the “real Kerala model”—a community that has practised openness and tolerance from time immemorial; which has made religious and ethnic diversity a part of its daily life rather than a source of division; which has overcome caste discrimination and class oppression through education, land reforms, and political democracy; which has given its working men and women greater rights and a higher minimum wage than anywhere else in India; and which has honoured its women and enabled them to lead productive, fulfilling and empowered lives.</p> <p>And, yet, this election has again confirmed the need to update the Kerala model while preserving it. We must sustain our human development not by borrowings but by attracting investment. Instead of exporting our unemployment, we must generate jobs and support entrepreneurs. Instead of relying on remittances we must develop our home-grown strengths. The red-flag culture of repeated hartals must end with an acceptance of social responsibility for the common good.</p> <p>As a Malayali and an Indian, I look forward to the day when Kerala will no longer be the exception in tales of Indian development, but again the trailblazer.</p> http://www.theweek.in/columns/shashi-tharoor/2021/03/25/kerala-should-end-over-dependence-on-remittances-shashi-tharoor.html http://www.theweek.in/columns/shashi-tharoor/2021/03/25/kerala-should-end-over-dependence-on-remittances-shashi-tharoor.html Thu Mar 25 13:57:08 IST 2021 hate-machinerys-new-target <a href="http://www.theweek.in/columns/shashi-tharoor/2021/02/25/hate-machinerys-new-target.html"><img border="0" hspace="10" align="left" style="margin-top:3px;margin-right:5px;" src="http://img.theweek.in/content/dam/week/opinion/columns/shashi-tharoor/images/2021/2/25/74-hate-new.jpg" /> <p>During the unpleasantness surrounding the arrest of 22-year-old activist Disha Ravi, the most unsavoury of the many disagreeable elements in the controversy was the attempt of hindutva social media warriors to disparage her by claiming she is Christian. She is not, but what if she were? In the BJP’s “New India”, is merely being Christian enough to qualify for the epithet “anti-national”?</p> <p>The irony is that Christians have long been among the builders of modern India, and many are the BJP leaders who, like L.K. Advani, had their intellect first shaped by Christian education. My first substantial interaction with Christian teachers took place when, as a rather nervous young boy, not yet six years old, I was admitted to the Montfort Boys’ Boarding School in Yercaud, Tamil Nadu. A year later I joined the prestigious Campion School, Bombay, where a majority of the teaching staff was Christian, and finished high school at the St Xavier’s Collegiate School in Calcutta, where I encountered a few more teachers of that persuasion.</p> <p>I should mention that the three schools I went to from ages six to 16 had an interesting detail in common: they were all Catholic schools, two of them Jesuit. It is remarkable how much this one order has done to educate and train millions of Indian children to make successes in their lives.</p> <p>A number of the priests at these schools were remarkably well-trained. At St Xavier’s I remember several brilliant young Jesuit fathers. The late Father Remedios, a superb guide to Shakespeare as well as “Values of Life” (Biblical ethics without the Bible!), was an excellent class teacher who, after instilling in us his profound knowledge of Julius Caesar, cycled regularly to jail, visiting prisoners to minister to their moral and spiritual needs.</p> <p>The now-eminent theologian Cyril Desbruslais, then in his 20s, took my class through an epistemological argument for the existence of God, which certainly impressed my fourteen-year-old imagination at a time when I was beginning to flirt with the idea of atheism. When you discover rationality, the idea of religion does not seem so appealing, until you discover the limits of rationalism in a world whose wonders surpass the explanations of reason. But in between I benefited from a very rational, structured philosophical argument from this Jesuit priest who lectured teenagers on why God existed, citing Kant and Thomas Aquinas in the process.</p> <p>I remember playing during the recess in our wonderful ‘big field’ with some of the outstanding Anglo-Indian students of the school, who consistently excelled at hockey in particular, and won every possible song and music competition. My debate and speech teacher at St Xavier’s, who also directed the high school’s annual play, was another sparklingly gifted exemplar of the cultural strengths of the Christian community.</p> <p>It was particularly striking to me that in our interactions with these teachers, we were absolutely free to express our beliefs and views. Elsewhere, you learn to answer the questions. The teachers I was privileged to have taught me to question the answers—and later I went on to question the questions, too.</p> <p>Thanks to them, at an impressionable age, I was given an education that combined a well-rounded tutelage with a pan-Indian outlook that made me deeply appreciative of eclectic social interests, the importance of a questioning spirit, and, above all, humanitarian regard for the well-being of others.</p> <p>The next time a hindutvavadi tries to turn “Christian” into a term of abuse, I urge my fellow citizens of that faith to wear the badge with pride. There is much that millions of Indians should remain grateful to Christians for.</p> http://www.theweek.in/columns/shashi-tharoor/2021/02/25/hate-machinerys-new-target.html http://www.theweek.in/columns/shashi-tharoor/2021/02/25/hate-machinerys-new-target.html Thu Feb 25 13:52:48 IST 2021 the-battle-to-belong <a href="http://www.theweek.in/columns/shashi-tharoor/2021/01/28/the-battle-to-belong.html"><img border="0" hspace="10" align="left" style="margin-top:3px;margin-right:5px;" src="http://img.theweek.in/content/dam/week/opinion/columns/shashi-tharoor/images/2021/1/28/battle-of-belonging-new.jpg" /> <p>When these words appear, our 71st Republic Day will just be behind us. Our national celebrations of this anniversary of the entry into force of our Constitution have been tempered by the raging coronavirus pandemic, which already claimed the event’s chief guest, British Prime Minister Boris Johnson, who cancelled his visit because of the emergence of a new mutant strain of Covid-19 in his country. But for many of us, the mood of celebration was also dampened by the realisation that never before has the Constitution we are celebrating seemed under such threat, with some scholars even writing of the dawn of a second republic that may have already supplanted the one established on January 26, 1950.</p> <p>I have tried to deal with this challenge in my new non-fiction magnum opus, <i>The Battle of Belonging: On Nationalism, Patriotism and What It Means to Be Indian</i>, which seeks to expand our current political mudslinging into a serious debate on the concept of nationalism and Indian nationhood. These are themes that have increasingly become relevant around the world and are contested in contemporary India today, since some have been promoting a version of nationalism that foments division and fragmentation within our society.</p> <p>My book seeks, first, to outline the evolution of nationalism across the world, its manifestations globally and the various kinds of nationalism that have shaped the concept. This serves as a framework through which I introduce the contemporary challenges of nationalism and nationhood across the world and in India, particularly the clash we are witnessing today between ethno-religious nationalism (based on immutable identities) and civic nationalism (based on constitutions and institutions).</p> <p>The second theme is the evolution of Indian nationalism from the anti-colonial days to the civic nationalism enshrined in the Constitution. The nationalism that inspired the long struggle for independence was rooted in India’s time-honoured civilisational traditions of inclusivity, social justice, religious tolerance, and the desire to forge a society that allowed individuals to flourish, irrespective of their religion, caste, language or place of birth. This constitutional idea of India is being challenged by a new dominant narrative that thrives on an exclusionary, aggressive, communal nationalism based on cultural identity and the notion that India is a Hindu Rashtra.</p> <p>In the process, as I explain in the final third of the book, the idea of “patriotism” has been redefined by the majoritarians. In my view, “patriotism” is about loving your country because it is yours, because you belong to it and it belongs to you. It excludes no Indian. Whereas the nationalism being promoted in India today is a totalising vision that omits those who do not subscribe to it.</p> <p>In today’s India, the question of what it means to be Indian has attained paramount importance. Our liberal constitutionalism and democratic traditions are fundamentally questioned by rising intolerance, in which the forces unleashed by our rulers tell Indians what they cannot eat, who they cannot love, what thoughts they cannot hold, what words they must not say (and jokes they must not crack). Their political attack on opponents as “anti-national” conceals authoritarian instincts.</p> <p>In the concluding section of the book, I share my vision for India’s future, of reclaiming a nationalism that reaffirms the Constitution’s liberal and inclusive idea of India and proudly proclaims that our patriotism celebrates pluralism.</p> <p>Though I have written a lot in the past on the havoc wreaked on the social, cultural, and political values of India by intolerant and nativist forces, this Republic Day is the time to re-examine the issues revolving around the idea of India, nationalism, patriotism, and the struggle between those who believe in the ideals bequeathed to the nation by the founding fathers and those who would destroy everything valuable about our country. My book is my contribution to this vital national conversation.</p> <p><b>editor@theweek.in</b></p> http://www.theweek.in/columns/shashi-tharoor/2021/01/28/the-battle-to-belong.html http://www.theweek.in/columns/shashi-tharoor/2021/01/28/the-battle-to-belong.html Thu Jan 28 14:11:25 IST 2021 the-karunakaran-guide <a href="http://www.theweek.in/columns/shashi-tharoor/2020/12/31/the-karunakaran-guide.html"><img border="0" hspace="10" align="left" style="margin-top:3px;margin-right:5px;" src="http://img.theweek.in/content/dam/week/opinion/columns/shashi-tharoor/images/2020/12/31/karunakaran-new.jpg" /> <p>The 10th death anniversary of eminent Kerala politician K. Karunakaran offered a sobering reminder of a different kind of politics. We live in an era where politics is at its lowest ebb; where identity trumps performance; and where temples, pilgrimage sites, mosques and love marriages are the battlegrounds for political contestation. What we need is a refocus on what matters to people, and this is why it is essential to recall Karunakaran. At a time when development is Kerala’s crying need―when its young and unemployed are clamouring for political leadership to fulfil their aspirations―his life reminds us of an era of innovative change.</p> <p>Karunakaran was instrumental in conceiving, initiating and implementing several infrastructure projects in Kerala―notably the Jawaharlal Nehru Stadium and the Cochin International Airport, the latter being India’s first public-private partnership airport―that most conventional politicians had considered unfeasible. He overcame political resistance and got them done.</p> <p>The much-touted ‘Kerala Model’ of advanced human development has led to a certain degree of political complacency. Disillusionment is growing among the public with conventional politics. Kerala has to move beyond the basic issues, boldly tackle ‘second generation’ problems such as creation of infrastructure, move to a manufacturing, if not heavily industrial, economy, develop itself as a knowledge economy, improve the quality of higher education and vocational training to meet the requirements of a modern workforce, and build on its existing successes in tourism and hospitality services. All this will create meaningful employment opportunities and an increase in income levels.</p> <p>The story of the Titanic from the early years of the last century is instructive. For almost a hundred years, it was believed that its sinking on its maiden voyage from Southampton to New York was caused by the ship moving too fast and the crew failing to see the iceberg before it was too late. But a book by a descendant of one of the officers of the ship revealed that the accident was caused not by speed, but by a steering blunder. It seems that the ship had plenty of time to miss the iceberg but the helmsman actually panicked and turned the ship the wrong way, and by the time the error was corrected, it was too late and the ship’s side was fatally holed by the iceberg. The error occurred because at the time, seafaring was undergoing an enormous upheaval as a result of the conversion from sail to steam ships. The change meant there were two different steering systems and different commands attached to them. When the first officer spotted the iceberg two miles away, his order was misinterpreted by the quartermaster, who turned the ship left instead of right.</p> <p>In a sense, Kerala’s development failure has been like the story of the Titanic. Today, the ruling left appears unsettled by the global changes which have moved the economic system far beyond their old paradigms and theories.</p> <p>As with the Titanic, there is nothing wrong with the ship―Kerala, its people, its resources or its potential. But the state has to move with the times and not be left behind. Reliance on NRI remittances will not solve the basic problem, since these are essentially personal savings and spent on conspicuous consumption, including purchasing land and constructing dwellings. Kerala has to attract productive investment funds, which can produce goods and services. This will only happen if Kerala is hospitable to investors, who are terrified that if they set foot in Kerala they will be greeted by red flags.</p> <p>This does not mean betraying our workers, but finding them work. It does not mean giving up our values, but adding value to our economy. It does not mean placing profit above people, but rather, using profits to benefit the people.</p> <p>“Leader” Karunakaran won public trust for his vision of development and made a remarkable success of it. He left us 10 years ago, but there is no excuse for forgetting the lessons he taught us. We must rededicate ourselves to creating once again a developed Kerala that he always believed was possible.&nbsp;</p> http://www.theweek.in/columns/shashi-tharoor/2020/12/31/the-karunakaran-guide.html http://www.theweek.in/columns/shashi-tharoor/2020/12/31/the-karunakaran-guide.html Thu Dec 31 11:15:01 IST 2020