August 2015 Archives

Corbyn’s Leadership Bid Threatens Cozy New Labour, Thatcherite Consensus

Whatever the outcome on 12 September, the Labour Party cannot continue in the old, New Labour, way

File photo of Jeremy Corbyn from 2010. Credit: Chris Beckett, CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

It all started as a caller’s off-hand suggestion during a London radio phone-in show and, apparently, as a bit of a joke. Even Jeremy Corbyn, the left-wing MP who has represented the constituency of Islington North in the House of Commons since 1983, viewed his nomination for the Labour leadership contest as a bit of a long shot. The Tories initially greeted a likely Corbyn victory as a gift – but they’re not cheering so loudly now. Corbyn’s campaign meetings and rallies have drawn thousands of people. Like the Scottish National Party’s anti-austerity call north of the border during the referendum, the victory of the Syriza Party in Greece, and the emergence of the self-proclaimed socialist, Bernie Sanders in the US, Corbyn’s movement-like campaign threatens to change the game and place dynamite under the bedrock of the neo-liberal Thatcherite consensus that has prevailed since the 1980s.

The establishment’s terror of a Corbyn victory may be seen in the hysterical media blitz against him – negative attempts to smear him by attacking his wife, digging for dirt on his parliamentary expenses (just £80 last year, as it turned out), digs about his beard, and about the fact that he eats cold baked beans straight from the can. More substantially, he is smeared as ‘anti-American’ for wanting to remove US bases from British soil, ‘anti-Semitic’ for criticising Israel’s relentless war on the Palestinians, ‘pro-Putin’ over Ukraine because he dares criticise NATO’s post-Cold War expansionism, and monstrous for suggesting that Islamic State is the result of the disastrous and illegal war of aggression against Iraq in 2003—which he opposed at the time, unlike his principal New Labour leadership challengers and critics, including the Blairites. Tony Blair should be worried: if elected, Corbyn is planning to apologise to the Iraqi people and has hinted at a war crimes trial for the former premier.

George Orwell would be proud of the double-speak from New Labour’s gurus – Gordon Brown, Tony Blair, Peter Mandelson et al. Their rhetoric is ‘radical’ – the country needs a radical alternative, that attacks poverty and inequality, and delivers public service and social justice. But they all support the austerity policies – i.e., further savage cuts in welfare spending on the most vulnerable – of the Cameron government. This contradiction is helpfully glossed over by the mainstream media.

As a democratic socialist, Corbyn has stood on the left of the Labour party for decades and has hardly changed despite the takeover of the party by ‘New’ Labour. In reality, the party was transformed into a pale imitation of the Conservatives after the Thatcher revolution. Now, he stands accused of encouraging Greens, leftists, and even mischievous Conservatives to join the Labour Party to get elected. His is the authentic voice of a Labour constituency that many had pronounced dead – anti-war, anti-imperial, pro-Palestinian, for nuclear disarmament, and for an end to the privatisation of major utilities.

Corbyn’s policies – to extract more taxes from big corporations by closing loopholes, to reverse Tory spending cuts, to renationalise the railways and energy utilities, to reinstate Clause 4 of the Party’s constitution (to take into public ownership the ‘commanding heights of the economy’), to renegotiate the relationship of the state to the individual, is considered revolutionary within the Labour party but has massive popular appeal across party divides. Corbyn’s appeal chimes with the dramatic victory of the SNP at the May 2015 general election – where Labour lost dozens of seats. He also draws support from traditional Labour and other supporters of the UK Independence Party, which won 5 million votes in the general election. His campaign is a rebuke to the long-lived politics of TINA – ‘there is no alternative’, the clarion call of Margaret Thatcher as she dismantled the welfare state and declared war on the trade unions and working poor.

Jeremy Corbyn speaks to supporters at the Unite the Union building in Coventry, on Sunday 2nd August 2015. Credit: Ciaran Norris, CC BY-NC 2.0

Although ahead in the polls, a Corbyn victory is fraught with problems. Several former and current Labour grandees are warning of a civil war within the party should the democratic socialist win on September 12. Holding together the party will be a major problem for Corbyn’s leadership and could lead to a major split. The last time Labour adopted a left-wing manifesto, back in the early 1980s, with the late Tony Benn at its head, several leading figures on the right of the party—such as Roy Jenkins, David Owen and Shirley Williams— formed the rival Social Democratic Party. And that’s the message the Blairites are driving home – that there will be a replay of the electoral disaster of 1983.

Opposing the Conservative government’s austerity policies will also be challenging given the widespread acceptance of savage public expenditure cuts as an “obvious” strategy. The prevailing consensus is deeply entrenched despite the near-collapse of the financial system in 2007-08.

And the record of Labour in power, even before the Thatcher era, was often seen as evidence, by the Left, of the impossibility of radical reform and redistribution of wealth, income and power to the working class within a capitalist order.

Yet, it is also clear that there is a yearning for change, an alternative to untrammelled free market ideology, largely adopted by New Labour since the 1990s, indeed a hallmark of their takeover of the old Labour party of the trade unions. Corbyn’s apparently unlikely bid for the Labour leadership reflects a deep desire for an overdue debate about the kind of economy, polity—and country—Britain needs to be in the twenty-first century.

Whatever the outcome on 12 September, the Labour Party cannot continue in the old, New Labour, way—Corbyn has torpedoed that project. And the Cameron government will face the prospect of a revitalised opposition, with broad public support, and a party with thousands of new members and supporters who are mobilising for action.

Inderjeet Parmar is a professor of political science at City University, London.

Why the F-91W Keeps Ticking

In the post-9/11 period, if a captured terrorist was found to possess an F-91W, the person was assumed to have been trained in bomb-making.

In the post-9/11 period, if a captured terrorist was found to possess an F-91W, the person was assumed to have been trained in bomb-making

The Casio F-91W. Credit: Wikimedia Commons

If you’re one of the millennials, you’re expected to not know about the Casiotron almost by definition – but you probably do. It was a Casio digital watch first sold in October 1974, and its claim to fame was that it was “computerised”, able to calculate the number of days in a month (but not leap-months). Its functions, revolutionary for the time, became the foundation on which Casio built its future digital watches – leading up to the unlikely hero called F-91W.

A tried and true style great for casual wear. With its daily alarm, hourly time signal and auto calendar, you’ll never need to worry about missing an appointment again.

That’s the exceedingly simple premise with which the F-91W is marketed. There are no frills: the watch shows the time, date, has a stopwatch and an alarm clock. It’s mildly water resistant – it’s okay when water splashes on it but not if you shower with it – sports a resin band, is powered by a CR2016 button cell that lasts for seven years, and weighs 22 grams. It’s hard even to tell if Casio intended on making a statement with the thing when it first came out – in 1991 – any legacies used in its design having been flattened into its unassuming timeface. But make a statement it has.

On August 17, a powerful blast ripped through the popular Erawan Shrine in Bangkok, killing at least 20 and injuring over 120. Investigations into the identities of those responsible led the Thai police to an apartment in the city’s eastern suburbs on August 30. Bangkok Post reported that apart from explosive materials and wiring, four wristwatches were also found. Four Casio F-91W wristwatches.

The Casio F-91W makes another appearance at a terrorist bomber scene. Hipsters rejoice! #sodangerous https://t.co/MeBOeulago

— Victoria Ho (@vickiho) August 31, 2015

In the post-9/11 period, if a captured terrorist was found to possess an F-91W, the person was assumed to have been trained in bomb-making. At least so went the saying – and it wasn’t hard to believe considering the F-91W was (and is) cheap, easy to find and easy to operate. According to a WikiLeaks dump released in 2011, Al Qaeda gave the watches to trainees in terrorist camps, where they learnt to press the innocuous things into the service of crude detonators, in Afghanistan.

One of the documents in the Gitmo Files dump. The watch’s attributes are described in the footnote. Source: Gizmodo

The F-91W’s association with Al Qaeda was prominently established following the Denbeaux study, which profiled 517 Guantanamo-Bay detainees and published its reports from 2006 through 2009. It found a lot of the detainees charged with working with or setting off explosives also owning, or even having been captured wearing, the F-91W (or its silver-coloured sibling A159W). Before that, the watch is first thought to have made an appearance in connection with terrorist activities with the foiled Bojinka Plot in 1995, aimed at assassinating Pope John Paul II and bombing many Asian and American airports.

The F-91W scores because it’s ubiquitous and the watch doesn’t need serious modifications to play its part as a timing device in a detonator, so when a raid is imminent the terrorists can walk away wearing it and claim it’s just a watch.

Unfortunately, this trait fed the feds’ paranoia after 9/11: they weren’t prepared to believe that it could be just a watch, especially around the wrist of anyone being shifty in the Middle East, and they were prepared to believe that possessing it was enough to all but indict the wearer. Yet, it was and is worn by millions around the world (including this writer). Casio doesn’t publicise the sales numbers of the F-91W but said in 2011 that it remains a “huge seller”.

And it will probably endure, too. The F-91W’s notoriety was hedged on a forgettable application but its mainstream success owes to what that application prized as well: function over form, doing it what it said it would, not doing anything that wasn’t promised, earning it the enviable sobriquet as a “modest masterpiece”.

In a State of Silences, Hardik Patel is a Loud and Brash Speaker

The Patels are privileged, but they are also convinced that their dominance is being thwarted by OBCs

Raising their voice–a rally of Patels in Ahmedabad PTI Photo

In early 2011, I met a young Muslim man in Ahmedabad who was keen to join the Bharatiya Janata Party. The previous year, he had watched the BJP field a Muslim candidate in the city’s municipal elections and he was inspired by the change he noticed in the party. Growing up, he saw his father attempt to scale the ranks of the Congress party only to be told by its leaders that he could not obtain an election ticket because he was not wealthy or well known enough.

A few months later, the young man called to tell me that he was giving up on the BJP too.

“No one cares that I am a Muslim. In fact, the BJP needs Muslims for their image. But when I go to a meeting, it is only Patels, and Patels only respect other Patels. Even a Mehta or a Thacker is not welcome. Forgot about being a Roy or a Lakhani,” he said.

I did not make much of his comment at the time. After all, there are many prominent leaders in the BJP—Amit Shah, for example—who are not Patels. A few weeks later, he asked to meet again.

“Can you make sure that you do not use my name or my school name when you write about what I said about Patels?” he said, trembling.

I experienced this again earlier this year when I interviewed a senior leader in the BJP who was once a close confidant of Prime Minister Narendra Modi. We met several times and on our last meeting, after I turned off my digital recorder and headed to the door, he told me that the reason Modi did not select him to move to the Centre was because he was not a Patel. Perhaps more telling is that he said I could use his name when I quote him on his belief that Modi was complicit in the 2002 riots but I could not use his name when he spoke about Patels.

Both of these individuals may be paranoid (and perhaps prejudiced) and there might be other factors as to why they did not advance in the BJP. But their stories testify to a widespread and unspoken feeling that some castes have been more privileged that others by the BJP government in Gujarat.

Silence on caste

The trouble is that caste is the one issue that we cannot talk about, in the same way that Americans cannot stomach a conversation about race. In a brilliant interview, the Dominican American writer Junot Diaz articulates the reasons why white supremacy endures its lasting power.

“The silence around white supremacy is like the silence around Sauron in The Lord of the Rings, or the Voldemort name which must never be uttered in the Harry Potter novels,” Diaz says. “And yet here’s the rub: if a critique of white supremacy doesn’t first flow through you, doesn’t first implicate you, then you have missed the mark; you have, in fact, almost guaranteed its survival and reproduction.”

It is this type of logic that explains the distressing number of Americans who believe that the US President Barack Obama is the most racist president in US history precisely because he talks about race.

And it is a similar mindset that dominates Gujarat today. The person who is the most casteist is not the one who discriminates based on caste but the person who speaks about caste. Patels enjoy their dominance in Gujarat, in part, because of our refusal to address the structural reasons why some castes advance while others do not.

How then do we make sense of the grievances of Hardik Patel, the 22-year-old clad in army fatigues who wields a gun and suggests that all Gujaratis carry one too?

Two things stand out. In Arjun Appadurai’s moving book Fear of Small Numbers: An Essay on the Geography of Anger, he writes that “Numerical majorities can become predatory and ethnocidal with regard to small numbers precisely when some minorities (and their small numbers) remind these majorities of the small gap which lies between their condition as majorities and the horizon of an unsullied national whole, a pure and untainted national ethos. This sense of incompleteness can drive majorities into paroxysms of violence against minorities.” If a group has 99 out of a possible 100 seats, for example, it may hate and even fear the person occupying the remaining seat because it will feel that it cannot reach its potential unless that one person is removed.

Certainly not all Patels hold this view and many Patels do not gain from the economic benefits that Hardik Patel’s sub-caste of Patels enjoy. We have also seen many Patels come out this week in opposition to Hardik Patel.

But Hardik is a fascinating case study because instead of articulating a nuanced view of the economic policies of Modi, he believes that what is preventing his caste’s rise is because there is one group—the OBCs—that are blocking his and his community’s progress. In short, he feels vulnerable because his group’s dominance is not absolute.

Second, the brashness of Patel’s views should be understood in the context of the suppression of civic discussion in Gujarat.

Achyut Yagnik, the co-author of the outstanding Ahmedabad: From Royal City to Megacity told me in 2013 that one of the consequences of Modi’s style of governance is that it is has made self-reflection almost impossible. “Modi is not just the number one. He is the number one through eleven and if you want to voice your opinion here, then you have to be prepared to be called anti-national,” Yagnik said.

Taking on the government

One of the reasons why Hardik Patel is popular is because he does not care about upsetting the government, a rare quality in Gujarat. In the past few days, he has said that “India is basically for Hindus,” and that “If somebody touches our women, we break their hands. Kitne haath tode maine, maloom?”

His views are unsurprising. Patel is the byproduct of a state that has paralyzed discussion to such an extent and for so long that when the youth voices gets its rare chance to articulate itself, it has to scream to be heard.

Earlier this year, I attended a memorial for Arvind Nagani Dharaiy, a 21-year-old cotton farmer from Gujarat who committed suicide by setting himself on fire. Some of his last words, which have been recorded on video, were “Modi is Hitler.”

I interviewed Dharaiy’s former roommate, (who also asked that I not mention his name) who said that weeks before Dharaiy killed himself, he tried to hold a forum in Ahmedabad at his college to discuss the condition of farmers. Dharaiy was ridiculed for his suggestion and told that “this anti-Gujarat talk is not productive.” “In Gujarat, because of the climate here now, you have to do something extreme to be heard,” Dharaiy’s roommate said.

I think of Dharaiy’s roommate when I see Hardik Patel.

The Past Cannot be Righted by Inflicting Wrongs on History

It is colonial history that we propagate today when we view Akbar and Aurangzeb as merely “good” or “bad” Muslims and not as rulers whose actions were guided by complex considerations

The Gyanvapi mosque in Varanasi, built on the site of a temple demolished by Aurangzeb. Credit: Dr. AP Singh

On August 1, a first time MP from Delhi, Maheish Girri, petitioned Prime Minister Narendra Modi to change the name of Aurangzeb Road in Lutyens’ Delhi to Dr APJ Abdul Kalam Road. Within weeks, the job is done, notwithstanding official rules against such renaming—the surest sign of decisive leadership we have seen so far!

What was wrong with Aurangzeb Road? Aurangzeb was—in Girri’s authoritative historical view—oppressive and cruel and had inflicted so many atrocities that commemorating him would send a wrong message to posterity. Changing the name of the road to honour the memory of the benign Kalam would right a “wrong” of history. Just as was done on December 6, 1992 in Ayodhya, presumably.

As a professional historian of medieval India—having spent nearly six decades unraveling and understanding our complex history—I am unfamiliar with Girri’s authority to pronounce judgments on my discipline.

But then, history is everyone’s discipline. Everyone is a born historian with equal entitlement to speak with full confidence. Especially if you have learnt the subject at an RSS shakha. So unlike any other discipline like physics or chemistry or even economics and sociology—where one has to devote to a lifetime to master it.

Colonial prism

James Mill was the first great colonial historian who taught us to study Indian history in terms of the religious identity of its rulers in any epoch prior to British rule; hence his division of this land’s past into Hindu, Muslim and British periods in his influential work, The History of British Rule in India, published in 1817-18.

Mill had contempt for both Hinduism and Islam – a little more for the former – which had apparently kept India in the age of darkness vis-à-vis the march of progress that modern colonial rule had brought. This was indeed the predominant view of India, with some important variations, among front-ranking European thinkers—from Montesquieu to Hegel and Marx during the 18th and 19th centuries.

This image of India’s past was substantially modified post-Independence by leading Indian historians who began to look at history in terms of several variables, of which which religious identity was only one. This was a marked departure from the colonialist historiographical legacy. In this departure, the notion of class—and conflicts arising in society on account of it—played a significant role. From the 1980s onwards, even more facets of the past have come to the fore, facets that the category of class had ignored: culture, family, gender, ecology, visions of time and space and habitat, the gender identity of polities, the history of the constructions of the past, history as it was imagined through the ages, and so forth. The world of history writing has changed in the past five or six decades like never before—in India, as elsewhere.

In the midst of this phenomenal metamorphosis, the popular image of history has remained unaltered—the product of of a great and organised effort to keep it tied to the singular pole of religion. History at this level is simplicity itself, the kind mouthed by Girri or by TV experts who are otherwise surgeons or dentists by profession. Or by the Hon’ble Prime Minister, who publicly declared that Alexander was defeated in Bihar and that the great Taxila University was located in Bihar, probably as he was unable to distinguish between Taxila and Nalanda.

Changing exigencies

Emperor Aurangzeb at the siege of Golconda. Credit: Anne S.K. Brown Military Collection, Brown University Library.

At this level of simplicity, history evolves as something shaped by rulers or great men (rarely women)—a notion not even considered by professional historians any more—and that the religion of the ruler is the single determinant of his political actions, a notion historians discarded decades ago. An equally strong assumption underlying this simplistic understanding is that a ruler’s “policies” remain the same from the beginning of his rule to the end, something demonstrated as untenable many times over. Let us take two examples for illustration: Akbar and Aurangzeb.

The popular image of the two rulers is of Akbar being liberal and Aurangzeb being dogmatic in their “religious policy” (itself a very dubious term). That’s about all that is known about them. As long ago as the 1960s, two “Marxist”, i.e. non-BJP, historians Iqtidar Alam Khan and M Athar Ali, demonstrated that the religious stance of each was guided by—and fluctuated with—the changing demands of political events during their 50-year-long reigns, and that there were “phases” in which each became “liberal” or “orthodox” depending on which crisis they were confronting. This means the religious stance of a ruler was not an independent and unchanging variable but a political resource to be drawn upon as and when required. His personal religious predilections played a role, but were greatly circumscribed by the demands of the situation.

It is thus that Aurangzeb, both as an aspirant to the throne and as Emperor, abandoned any dreams he had of making puritanical Islam the centrepiece of his rule—even as his heart lay in it. In his 1966 book, Mughal Nobility Under Aurangzeb, Athar Ali had tabulated the number of nobles from different groups who sided with the “liberal” Dara Shukoh and the “dogmatic” Aurangzeb (and the two other brothers) during the War of Succession in 1658-59. It turns out 24 Hindus were on Dara’s side and 21 on Aurangzeb’s, including the two highest-ranked Rajputs, Mirza Raja Jai Singh Kachhwaha of Amber and Raja Jaswant Singh Rathore of Jodhpur, who stayed with him till their end. It was Raja Jai Singh who defeated Shivaji and brought him to Aurangzeb’s court seeking peace. It was in 1679, 21 years after his accession to the throne, that Aurangzeb reimposed the jaziya tax on Hindus that Akbar had abolished in 1562—and he did this after the death of Jaswant Singh, when tension began with the Rathores.

Aurangzeb demolished some 15-odd temples—including ones at Mathura and Kashi, where he built mosques. Paradoxically, at the same time he also gave land and cash grants to Hindu temples and maths, including at Kashi, and these are all well documented.

What explains the paradox?

The same paradox that led a democratically elected leader in late 20^th century India, Rajiv Gandhi, to mobilise religious support as a political resource when he had the gates of the disputed Ayodhya structure opened even as he succumbed to the outrageous demands of the Muslim clergy to upturn the Supreme Court judgment on Shah Bano. Rajiv Gandhi imagined he would be able to please both; in fact, he lost out on both fronts. Just like Aurangzeb, who spent the second half of his reign fighting on numerous fronts, both Hindu and Muslim.

James Mill had taught us to treat the rulers of the “Hindu” and the “Muslim” periods not as rulers whose actions are guided by complex considerations but simply by their religious affiliation. It is this colonial lesson that we propagate today when we view Akbar and Aurangzeb (and everyone else) as merely a “good” Muslim or a “bad” Muslim. Of course, all Hindu rulers are invariably “good”, no questions asked. One wonders whether Kalam, the great scientist and even greater human being and nationalist, would have felt honoured to be evaluated through this colonial prism and treated as a “good” Muslim whose claim to a road—that too from some Muslim ‘quota’—comes only as a counterpoint to the “bad” Aurangzeb and not as a product of his enormous accomplishments.

The author is National Fellow, Indian Council of Historical Research

Only the Greeks Can Put a Stop to the Looting of Greece

Voters should dump Tsipras and elect a government of national unity with the mandate of rebuilding Greece with its own abilities and wealth

Alexis Tsipras during his visit to the European Parliament in February 2015. Credit: Martin Schulz/Flickr, CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

The recent resignation of Greek prime minister Alexis Tsipras opens space for a national unity government in the country. Of course, Tsipras quit not because his political failures made life unbearable or because he wants a better future for Greece, but because he wants more power.

This is a man deluded with his own importance. He is young and handsome. His “leftist” ideology has no room for philosophy and strategic thinking. Next to meaningless promises of global brotherhood and eternal peace, the head of Tsipras is full of egoism and the desire to please, especially politicians of the European Union. So he probably sees his resignation as a step to being re-elected with many more Greeks voting for him.

This miscalculation betrays poor judgment. He wants rewards for bad decisions. Tsipras is the product of the last six years of horrible social and political conditions in Greece.

But why did Greece collapse in 2009? Greece, like the rest of the world, was the victim of bad economics in the United States, where giant Wall Street banks wrecked the world economy with their gambling and their misuse of public funds. And while America “recovered” from the shock of financial recession, Greece did not. The American government bailed out its banks because of the fear that they were “too large to fail.” Greece did not have that option. It is linked to the euro, which is under the control of the European Central Bank and European Union, of which it is a member.

To avoid bankruptcy, Greece since 2009 has been under the tutorship and financial dictatorship of its European partners, including partners from North America bearing gifts from the International Monetary Fund. Together, the European Central Bank, the European Commission and the IMF conceived of an extraordinary way of looting and impoverishing the Greek people. They wrote “memoranda of understanding” in which they ordered Greek officials to cut public works, increase taxation, and put up for sale all property belonging to the state.

The pre-Tsipras prime ministers, 2009-2014, all right-wing corporate men, said yes to their European-American bosses and signed on the dotted line. Whether they understood it or not, they signed off their country’s sovereignty and self-respect. The result of the foreign-imposed “austerity” medicine has been as bad as poison. There were reports of Greeks committing suicide. Millions of Greeks lost their jobs, medical care, and social safety net. Suddenly, homeless and hungry people appeared in the streets of Athens.

The other catastrophic effect of the engineered austerity collapse of Greece was decline in national security. Refugees from the upheavals in Afghanistan and the Middle East discovered the unprotected borders of Greece, especially the Greek borders with Turkey. Criminals stepped in this vacuum and they have been bringing thousands of desperate people to the Greek islands of the Aegean.

It was this social deluge in Greece that brought Tsipras to power in January 2015. He and his political agglomeration, Syriza, promised to bring the austerity to an end. In fact, Tsipras promised the anguished Greeks he would tear apart the memoranda of understanding with the hated European and American lenders.

Instead, after blustering propaganda for most of his short tenure, he designed a grand deception. He ordered a referendum and asked Greeks to reject the foreign-imposed austerity. About 62 percent of the Greeks did in fact vote against the continuation of the European Union-IMF austerity.

Tsipras then put his amoral scheme into effect: signing in August 2015 another odious memorandum with the lenders.

The word odious comes from a Greek Parliamentary Committee that investigated the country’s debt. It concluded the debt was “illegal, illegitimate and odious” and should not be paid back. Yet, Tsipras saw things differently.

The memorandum Tsipras signed is a violent blow against Greek sovereignty. In reading it, I was struck about the utter contempt the European-Americans have for the Greeks. They treat them like children: you do this by that date, or else.

The memorandum starts with a rotten pie in the sky: that it was designed for the welfare and economic recovery of Greece. It says the purpose behind the EU-IMF-Greece agreement is to “restore sustainable growth, create jobs, reduce inequalities, and address the risks to… [Greece’s] financial stability and that of the euro area.” In addition: “Success will require the sustainable implementation of agreed policies over many years.”

Yes, even tyranny must be sustainable.

J. Dijsselbloem, president of the Eurogroup, had no problem saying on August 14, 2015, that the memorandum promised the Greek economy to “return to sustainable growth.”

Not a clue that two other memoranda since 2010 with nearly identical verbiage had brought Greece to its knees.

So why is Tsipras betting on being reelected by supporting more austerity, more poverty, and more looting of his country? Is it because corporate media are embracing his corporate socialism? Perhaps. But besides the faults of Tsipras, the EU and IMF are equally guilty for the wounds they have been inflicting on Greece.

The Greeks should dump Tsipras and elect a government of national unity and salvation that will preserve the dignity, national sovereignty, and security of the country.

A government of national unity should be for the rebuilding of Greece with its own abilities and wealth. Go to Russia and China for money. Reject the relentless looting of the EU-IMF. Return to Greece’s own money, the ancient drachma.

Evaggelos Vallianatos is the author, with McKay Jenkins, of Poison Spring (Bloomsbury Press, 2014).

Credit for featured caricature of Alexis Tsipras: Donkey Hotey/Flickr CC 2.0

Modi’s Land Bill U-Turn is Because of Political Expediency

The fear of losing the Bihar elections is such that the government has dropped one of its key pieces of legislation. But will this impress the voters?

Modi at Hunkar Rally (Narendra Modi Flikr)

Is Prime Minister Narendra Modi going through an existential crisis? What else would explain the National Democratic Alliance coming around to accepting, in toto, the land law passed under the UPA regime in 2013, and then making a bizarre claim that this was being done in the interest of the farmers! Of course, this surreal U-turn by Narendra Modi has to be read entirely in the context of the upcoming Bihar elections, which the NDA must win at all costs to retain future legitimacy. For, political legitimacy—in spite of a hefty 282 seats in the Lok Sabha—has a way of eroding rapidly, which even the practitioners of deep politics are unable to fathom. Did anyone anticipate the kind of political mobilisation a 22-year-old Patel community leader managed in the backyard of a “development messiah”?

In a first, Narendra Modi on Sunday decided to overtly talk about politics in his radio program ‘Mann Ki Baat’, announcing that the land ordinance, which the BJP had steadfastly claimed was both pro-industry and pro-farmer, is to be withdrawn. How will the BJP explain this politically? Saying the ordinance is pro-farmer and its withdrawal is also pro farmer doesn’t seem to add up! Narendra Modi will make a huge mistake if he thinks he can pull the wool over the eyes of the Bihari voter on this issue.

The NDA is now making a puerile attempt to claim political brownie points by issuing an executive order which seeks to extend the compensation measures of the 2013 Act to land acquisitions done under 13 independent legislations such as National Highway Act, Electricity Act, Railway Act, Mines Act etc.

Under these pre-existing legislations, land was historically acquired by the state in accordance with its own compensation mechanism. The 2013 UPA land bill had specifically stated these 13 legislations would also become subject to the same compensation framework as provided for in the main land acquisition Act. This process was to be completed by December 2014 as per law. This did not happen as the NDA had embarked on a different track altogether by promulgating an ordinance which sought to overhaul the 2013 Act.

Now the BJP is claiming exclusive credit for extending, through a hurried executive order, the compensation mechanism of the 2013 land law to these 13 separate laws under which land is to be acquired. The Congress has raised a technical point that this cannot be done unless all the 13 laws are separately amended by Parliament so that the compensation mechanism of the 2013 land acquisition Act can be extended to them.

Confusing the issue

The BJP is clearly trying to confuse issues by telling farmers that it has extended the scope of compensation to land acquired for national highways, railways, electricity infrastructure. While it is well known that the 2013 land law had a provision for extending the scope of compensation to these areas, the real issue the BJP is diverting attention from is how the NDA’s original ordinance had sought to dilute crucial provisions relating to mandatory consent from 70% of farmers, and the social impact assessment.

Indeed, these were the most contentious issues plaguing the ordinance which underwent several changes as it got re-promulgated twice. In the end, the BJP’s own members voted in favour of both the critical clauses in the select committee of Parliament last month. This was indeed a big defeat for Narendra Modi’s original stance that the 2013 land bill was both anti-industry and anti-farmer. This position was articulated on several occasions by finance minister Arun Jaitley who said the 2013 law would make it impossible to build rural roads and provide rural electricity and irrigation infrastructure. This position seems so hollow now, as the NDA embraces the 2013 land legislation.

While the BJP may come up with several reasons to explain its loss of legitimacy on the land ordinance, the fact is Prime Minister Modi is no more the political strongman he projected himself to be until sometime ago.

To explain away his retreat as tactical is to misread the situation. The land ordinance was built as a “make or break” issue by Modi and Jaitley. There was a reason for this. The global finance capital community, with its gushing admiration for the PM, always wanted three major reform items to be pushed through – easy and less costly land acquisition for industry, labour reforms with a smooth hire and fire mechanism, and the Goods and Services Tax. Of these, the first two seem unlikely in the near future. The third, though possible, is caught in a bitter political stand-off between the BJP and Congress.

Moody’s downgrade

The international rating agencies reflect the collective sentiment of finance capital. Recall how global rating agency Moody’s had upgraded India one notch—from stable to positive—a few months after Modi came to power. The NDA ministers tom-tommed this as a big achievement. Now the same Moody’s is not so big on Modi. It has indicated that it might review its decision of last year after watching the fate of the land bill, labour reforms etc. Moody’s has also downgraded India’s GDP growth forecast for 2015-16 to about 7%, which is actually about 5% going by the old GDP series (very few international analysts totally believe India’s new GDP series which is under review).

So Narendra Modi is caught between the unenviable task of reconciling the basic aspirations of the Bihar electorate and the pressures of global capital upon which rest some of his key slogans like “Make in India”, “Start up India” and so on. The bigger question, of course, is one of legitimacy. Winning Bihar is important for Modi because it will help him recover some of the confidence and legitimacy he might have lost in the past six months. So he will do anything to recover it, even if this means standing NDA’s stated policies on their head.

India May Not Like It, But Sri Lanka Can’t Move Completely Away from China

Despite the final defeat of Rajapaksa—prime mover of closer ties with Beijing—Colombo is buried under billions of dollars of Chinese debt and has little option but to go along, albeit at a pace slower than earlier.

Photo of marine sand being pumped by a ship at the commencement of "Colombo Port City” at the Colombo, September 2014. Credit: Flickr/Mahinda Rajapaksa CC 2.0

Photo of marine sand being pumped by a ship at the commencement of “Colombo Port City” at Colombo, September 2014. Credit: Flickr/Mahinda Rajapaksa CC 2.0

The two cannons on the famous Galle Face promenade in Sri Lanka’s capital once overlooked the lapping waves of the Indian Ocean. Now they stare at sand and rubble, as a Chinese-funded project aimed at creating a new $1.4 billion city is gobbling up the sea and adding acres of new land to erect high-rise buildings.

Earlier this month, Sri Lankan voters gave a final thumbs down to the man who introduced his country to a raft of such expensive, ambitious projects ostensibly aimed at rebuilding the country after a long, bloody civil war against Tamil rebels.

Mahinda Rajapaksa, the once powerful president, lost his bid to become prime minister in a parliamentary election after refusing to learn hard lessons from his loss in January’s presidential bid. The once seemingly invincible, almost God-like Rajapaksa who delivered peace and hope to the war-battered nation was seen as divisive and close to China at the cost of Sri Lanka’s giant neighbour India.

His loss in the presidential election was seen in part as a victory for a geo-politically nervous India, a second chance for New Delhi to re-establish its influence in a backyard which was threatened by Rajapaksa’s increasing closeness to Beijing.

Chinese investments in the big-ticket infrastructure projects, which also included a sea port and an airport in Sri Lanka’s south and other developments, were only one concern for India. President Maithripala Sirisena, who defeated Rajapaksa in January and cobbled together a rainbow coalition under Prime Minister Ranil Wickremasinghe, was quick to put a halt to the projects and launch investigations against the former head of state and his family.

The other was Rajapaksa’s clear intention to play the two Asian giants against each other for his benefit. The view that his return as prime minister — he contested despite opposition from a section of his party — would encourage the Chinese to pop the champagne was also mostly correct.

While the cork may not have popped, let us not forget that Sri Lanka’s hands are now tied when it comes to its dealings with Beijing.

Buried under billions of dollars of Chinese debt, Colombo has little option but to go along, albeit at a pace slower than earlier.After all, Chinese money did prop up the war-battered economy, create jobs and help the government end the war against the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam. The Chinese know that while the wicket might be sticky at this point, the pitch will eventually help the ball turn their way.

A commentary in the state-owned Global Times after Wickremasinghe’s return as premier for the fourth time last week was self-explanatory. “Although partisan politics may have a certain effect on bilateral ties, it’s inappropriate to exaggerate the influence. To consolidate high-level strategic cooperation with China has gained bipartisan backing in Sri Lanka’s parliament. No matter which party takes power, it will maintain a good relationship with China,” it said.

Indeed, Wickremasinghe himself is on record saying that he would deepen investment ties with China. And while Sirisena made India his first destination after becoming president, his second stop was Beijing.

Mahinda Rajapaksa briefing President Xi Jinping of China about the graphical illustrations of the “Colombo Port City” project at the official commissioning ceremony in September 2014. The port city project is the largest foreign-funded investment in Sri Lanka’s history. Credit: Flickr/Mahinda Rajapaksa CC 2.0

Rajapaksa’s proximity to China increased only because India dragged its feet over sensitive political issues due to coalition pressure on the previous government in New Delhi led by Manmohan Singh. Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government doesn’t need to crumble under pressure from parties in Tamil Nadu as it has a comfortable majority in parliament.

But it still needs to remember that while Rajapksa re-calibrated Sri Lanka’s foreign policy—with a shift away from India in the past decade—Colombo’s ties with China didn’t start with him. No doubt they deepened dramatically during Rajapaksa’s time but the relationship between the two countries goes back a long way.

China is also capable of arm-twisting Sri Lanka if it falls too much out of line and Beijing feels its interests are not being balanced with that of India, or its investments are under threat. The Global Times commentary warns that in the Sirisena government’s efforts to recalibrate its foreign policy and seek a balanced approach in handling relations with big powers, China cannot be ignored.

“It’s only the outsider’s wishful thinking that partisan politics will stagnate or even turn back China-Sri Lanka relations. China will not depend on any single party to maintain the bilateral relationship,” it said, adding that Colombo was expected to gradually resume the suspended foreign-invested projects for the needs of economic development.

While India needs to look after its interests and ensure it remains engaged with Colombo to keep control over what it considers its sphere of influence, there is little it can do to wean Sri Lanka completely away from China.

The chances that the two cannons on Galle Face green will see more of sand and rubble instead of waves from the ocean are, therefore, pretty high.

Rahul Sharma, a former newspaper editor, is President, Rediffusion Communications and Vice President of Public Affairs Forum of India. He runs lookingbeyondborders.com, a foreign policy blog. Views are personal.

Credit for featured image of Galle Face cannon: Kesara Rathnayake, Flickr CC 2.0

Social Octopus Enjoys Intimate Sex and Surprises Shrimp

Octopuses are solitary creatures. Even when mating, they don’t canoodle. That’s because octopuses are cannibals.

Animals do the most amazing things. Read about them here in this series by Janaki Lenin.

A larger Pacific striped octopus presenting a dark leaf display. Credit: Roy Caldwell

Octopuses are solitary creatures. Even when mating, they don’t canoodle. That’s because octopuses are cannibals.

Males keep females at arm’s length and shove little packets of sperm into oviducts located inside females’ round mantles. Should females show any sign of aggression or hunger, males flee. One species is so petrified of being eaten, the males detach their sperm-laden arms and offer them to females.

In 1975, Panamanian marine biologist Arcadio Rodaniche was surprised that larger Pacific striped octopus didn’t behave like other octopuses. He watched in amazement as mating pairs snuggled up together into the same den for a few days like honeymooners, and had intimate sex by locking mouths and linking their sucker-lined arms. They even shared food mouth to mouth like lovey-dovey humans. That would be a suicidal move for males of other octopus species. Females didn’t immediately die after laying eggs, but survived for months afterward.

Rodaniche told The Wire, “I started working with them by accident. In the late 1970s, a friend kept picking up larger Pacific striped octopus in his shrimp trawler. He asked me if I was interested. He was making short trawls so the animals arrived in very good health.” He studied the species in a large saltwater swimming pool at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Panama.

However, the scientific world turned its back on his work. Larger Pacific striped octopus’ behaviour upended everything known about octopuses. “I presented the original paper on the larger Pacific striped octopus at a symposium at Woods Hole in 1990,” says Rodaniche. “Although some found the data intriguing, it was clear that there were others who flatly refused to accept it. In December that year, I learned that the paper had been given a very unfavourable review by the only person who reviewed it. They [the editors] gave me the opportunity to revise it, but because they required me to make many substantive changes in a very short period of time, I declined. I retired from the Smithsonian three years later.” No one paid any further attention to these radically different animals.

The larger Pacific striped octopus is found in sandy soil at river mouths along the Pacific coast of Nicaragua, where it lives in colonies of up to 40 at depths of 40 to 50 metres.

In 2012, Richard Ross of California Academy of Sciences and Professor Roy Caldwell of University of California, Berkeley, U.S., procured 24 specimens from a pet trader, who collected the animals off the Nicaraguan coast. Prof. Caldwell told The Wire he suspected Rodaniche was right when he heard from the collector that all the animals came from a congregation of octopuses.

The biologists observed the octopuses at the Steinhart Aquarium at the California Academy and at the university’s Berkeley campus lab.

Despite its name, the larger Pacific striped octopus is not big. Females are the size of a sapota (or chikoo) while males are lemon-sized. They grab crabs, pry mussels and clams apart, and drill holes into snail shells to extract the soft flesh, like any other octopus. But they add a bit of drama when hunting shrimp.

When a larger Pacific striped octopus spots shrimp in the distance, it creeps up behind it, arches an arm over it slowly, and taps it on the far side. The startled shrimp jerks backward into the waiting arms of the octopus. Caldwell says the reason for this unusual hunting strategy could be shrimps’ ability to swim fast. The octopus cannot hope to catch it by chasing after it, and hence the subterfuge.

Larger Pacific striped octopus mate like squids and cuttlefish. The pair grasps each other’s arms sucker-to-sucker, and the animals mate beak-to-beak as if kissing. The pale-coloured female envelopes the darker male, and he responds by jetting ink. No other octopus behaves so sensuously. In the lab, only once did one female turn aggressive when a male attempted to mate with her. Her excuse may have been she was brooding, but other brooding females offered no resistance to amorous males.

Female octopuses have two oviducts, so they can mate with two males simultaneously. The scientists speculate that larger Pacific striped octopus may have evolved this unique manner of beak-to-beak mating so the male can monopolise the female and prevent her from mating with another.

The researchers speculate that females lay an egg a day for up to six months. The mothers stick them in pairs to walls of the den. Throughout incubation, they tend the eggs by running their arm tips through them.

When researchers entered the room, wandering females immediately returned to their cache of eggs until the humans left.

Three months later, hatching begins. While other octopuses starve to death after producing a single brood, female striped octopuses continue to eat, mate, and lay hundreds more eggs.

“Only by observing the context in which these behaviours occur in the wild can we begin to piece together how this octopus has evolved behaviours so radically different from what occurs in most other species of octopus,” Caldwell said in a press release.

The octopuses in California died naturally after reproducing. After they abruptly stopped eating, males died within two weeks. Once females entered senescence, they ate a little bit, less frequently, and gradually retreated to a corner of the aquarium. If they still had eggs, they continued to care for them. They died between two and four months later.

Caldwell told The Wire the biggest problem the research team faced in studying the species was getting specimens. “They are extremely difficult to collect due to depth and visibility.” He hopes to continue studying the species by filming it in the wild.

“I feel vindicated knowing that my data was finally corroborated by other scientists,” says Rodaniche, who is one of the authors of the paper. “Because the octopuses’ behaviours were so unusual for what was then known about octopus, and because the animals are not easy to locate, I decided that it would only be a matter of time until someone else found them and recognised how unique they are.”

Despite its unusual behaviour, the octopus has not been scientifically described and named. We know this unique creature only by its insipid name: larger Pacific striped octopus.

The study was published in the journal PLoS ONE on August 12. 2015.

Janaki Lenin is the author of My Husband and Other Animals. She lives in a forest with snake-man Rom Whitaker and tweets at @janakilenin.

How We Should Rethink the Role of Technical Expertise in GMO Regulation

The regulation of GMOs represents a good opportunity to rethink the role of public participation and non-technical knowledge in environmental regulatory discourse in general.

Cotton ready to be harvested. Credit: jayphagan/Flickr, CC BY 2.0

On August 24, it was reported that the former Union Agriculture Minister, Sharad Pawar, had written to the Prime Minister recommending that he intervene to remove an existing rule that requires a no-objection certificate (NOC) from the relevant state government before field trials for genetically modified (GM) crops may be permitted. Pawar argued that the requirement of obtaining consent from state governments had become a “socio-political process rather than an objective, science-based process of rigorous evaluation at the state level” (emphasis added).

Whether or not one sides with Pawar’s view that the regulatory regime on GM crops ought to be eased, there are two fundamental problems with the statement that he offers in justification. The first assumes that the influence of social and political factors on a decision-making process that will have an impact on thousands of livelihoods and the natural environment is somehow inappropriate and undesirable. The second, which is a corollary of the first, is an unshakeable belief in the ability of science to be neutral and to guide us to the ‘correct’ decision.

Pawar is not the first to call for a strictly technocratic approach to the regulation of GM crops. Given the vocal opposition of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh and its affiliates to GM crops, the present Government has had to fend off allegations that it was bowing to political pressure by putting field trials of GM crops on hold; instead, it has taken pains to emphasise that scientific expertise remains the dominant consideration in the decisions it makes about GM crops.

Even the Supreme Court SC, which does not usually shy away from intervening in complex, technical matters (especially those relating to the environment), characterised the issue as a ‘scientific question’ and one that it did not have the technical expertise to resolve. This was in the context of public interest litigation where the SC was asked to impose a ban on the release of genetically modified organisms GMOs at least until a more well-developed regulatory framework was in place.

The Parliamentary Standing Committee on Agriculture (PSC) as well as the Technical Expert Committee (TEC) appointed by the SC in this case both depart from this science-only approach. In its 37th report published in August 2012, the PSC emphasises the need to take into account the socio-economic impacts of GM crops on farmers; similarly, the TEC, while recommending a moratorium on field trials until a more robust regulatory system is put in place, suggests that socio-economic considerations explicitly be made a part of the risk assessment process.

The grant of an effective veto to state governments by the UPA Government in the wake of the Bt Brinjal controversy is in some sense, recognition of the fact that scientific assessments of biosafety cannot trump all other considerations. However, the lack of an appropriate framework under which this NOC may be granted leaves it open to the charge of politicisation. There are no guidelines or restrictions on the basis of which States may make their decisions—although some have cited concerns about farmers’ rights to seeds while refusing trials, Madhya Pradesh denied permission in November 2014 on the grounds of its own assessment that there was no conclusive evidence to rule out the adverse impact that GM crops might have on human health and the environment. In effect, this rendered the risk assessment conducted by the Genetic Engineering Appraisal Committee within the Union Ministry of Environment, Forests and Climate Change redundant.

Overestimating costs, underestimating benefits

The decision-making process of the state governments becomes even more suspect because of their failure to put in place formal procedures for public participation as well as consultation with relevant statutory bodies, such as the State Biodiversity Boards set up under the Biological Diversity Act, 2002. This failure has been criticised by the Union Ministry of Agriculture in its action taken report submitted in March 2014 in response to the PSC report. Returning to the preoccupation with science and rationality, the Ministry criticises the use of ‘ad-hoc and reactive mechanisms guided by emotions and impulses’ as the basis for the exercise of the state governments’ decisions.

This compulsion to eliminate arbitrariness in decision-making inevitably comes up uncomfortably against the need to provide appropriate weight to non-scientific and non-technical factors. Regulators the world over struggle to find common metrics through which scientific, economic and social considerations can be set off against one another. In the United States of America, this has taken the form of a particularly narrow kind of cost-benefit analysis to which all environmental, health and safety regulations must be subjected before they can be passed.

This form of cost-benefit analysis reduces the benefits anticipated from cleaner air, safer roads or greater biodiversity to monetary terms in order to determine whether these benefits justify the costs of imposing more stringent environmental and public health standards. Although this kind of analysis is undertaken under the guise of technical objectivity, it has come under attack for the problematic assumptions that it makes about the manner in which people place an economic value on fundamentally unquantifiable goods like human life and the environment.

US scholars Frank Ackerman and Lisa Heinzerling in their book, Pricing the Priceless: Cost-Benefit Analysis of Environmental Protection, carefully describe some of the absurdities caused by this kind of economic reductionism. For example, they point to an instance where the value of children’s lives saved by car seats was calculated by estimating the time required to fasten the seats and then multiplying this by the actual or notional hourly wage of their mothers! Although this tool is touted as a precise and neutral way to determine how much regulation we need, the ease of capturing ‘costs’ and discounting ‘benefits’ (especially those that are anticipated only in the future) has made it the tool of choice of free-market advocates in the US who argue for an ever-shrinking regulatory role for the government.

Europe has perhaps been more successful at acknowledging that decisions about health and the environment are as much choices that societies make on the basis of cultural factors as they are choices about economic costs and benefits. In fact, Sheila Jasanoff, Pforzheimer Professor of Science and Technology Studies at the Harvard Kennedy School skilfully explains, in Designs on Nature: Science and Democracy in Europe and the United States, how different societies receive, understand and construct scientific knowledge in markedly different ways. The same scientific risk assessment about the same GM crop may elicit completely opposite responses in different societies.

Recognising this, the European Commission announced in April this year that the Member States of the EU would have greater flexibility in prohibiting or restricting the use of GMOs within their territories, despite the GMOs having received authorisation at the EU level. This power (which had already been granted to Member States regarding the cultivation of GMOs) has to be exercised on legitimate grounds, other than a risk to human or animal health or the environment, since this would already have been rigorously analysed by EU bodies. Some of these might include environmental or agricultural policy objectives, town and country planning, land use, socio-economic impacts, and that wonderfully catch-all provision, public policy.

Science + economics

However, the perception of science as a neutral arbiter remains. In 2008, the EU invited contributions from its Member States on the socio-economic implications of GMOs in order to develop a set of scientific and technical indicators that would represent these implications more precisely, and therefore permit a science-based assessment. This compulsion to pigeonhole socio-economic factors into scientific categories is an indication of how keen the EU is to avoid the charge of a politicised regulatory process.

The debate in India on regulatory tools and techniques is not as evolved (and perhaps consequently, not as contentious) as it is in the US and EU. The regulation of GMOs represents a good opportunity to rethink the role of public participation and non-technical knowledge in environmental regulatory discourse in general. This is especially crucial given that there are doubts about the integrity of the production of technical knowledge itself. Environmental Impact Assessment reports, prepared by consultants hired by project proponents themselves, are notoriously biased. Even the credibility of supposedly ‘expert’ committees may be called into question, as demonstrated by the recent rejection of the High-Level Committee report on environmental laws by the Rajya Sabha Parliamentary Standing Committee on Science, Technology, Environment and Forests.

This is not to discount the vital role that both science and economics ought to play in environmental regulation. India’s command-and-control style laws are in urgent need of an empirical analysis of their effectiveness. An evidence-based approach is essential to design flexible regulatory instruments that encourage technological innovation. Nevertheless, we need to learn from the experience of the US and the EU, where socio-cultural considerations are often drowned out because of their inability to speak the unemotional language of technocracy.

In the context of GMOs, there are at least three ways in which to ensure that socio-economic factors are incorporated without paralysing the regulatory process in the manner that Pawar complains of and without waiting for Parliament to revive the Biotechnology Regulatory Authority Bill. First, extensive consultative mechanisms ought to be institutionalised as an integral part of the risk assessment process and not after scientific opinions have already been submitted. Second, the Biological Diversity Act ought to be amended to allow State Biodiversity Boards a greater say in the consent granted by state governments. Finally, judicial review of decisions releasing or restricting GMOs can provide valuable initial guidance on balancing competing considerations. Courts ought to take this opportunity to articulate the scope of the precautionary principle which is triggered when there is precisely the lack of scientific certainty that the regulation of GMOs presents.

The Human DNA Profiling Bill 2015 is a good example of the attempted use of science as a shield against accusations about the infringement of privacy and liberty. As a society, we need to play a more active role in interpreting science and challenge its ownership by government and technocratic elites.

Dhvani Mehta and Yashaswini Mittal are Senior Resident Fellow and Research Fellow respectively at the Vidhi Centre for Legal Policy, New Delhi, an independent think tank doing legal research and assisting government in making better laws. Views expressed are the authors’ alone.

Get Wired 30/8: Baloch Airport Attacked, Land Acq. Ordinance Lapses, Protests in KL, and More

Get up to speed on the day’s top news.

No negotiations, says Hardik Patel

Even though leader of Patidar Anamat Andolan Samiti, Hardik Patel threatened to intensify the agitation for reservations, curfew was lifted form parts of Gujarat on Friday. Officials said that curfew was lifted from the Bapunagar area of Ahmedabad, where a protestor died after being allegedly beaten up by police forces in the area. Nearly 95 FIRs have been filed and over 100 arrests have ben made during the agitations. Hardik Patel has declared that he is uninterested in negotiations and that his protests are likely to spread to other parts of the country. At a press conference in Delhi on Sunday, August 30, he stated that there was a plan for agitations to spread across the country.

Attack on airport in Pakistan leaves two killed

An attack on a small airport in southwest Pakistan early Sunday morning left two engineers dead and destroyed the airport’s radar system. No militant group immediately claimed responsibility for the attack, which on the Jewani airport in Balochistan province. The area has recently come under attack by separatist insurgents as well as other militant groups.

Captured terrorist met Hafeez Sayeed twice

Abu Ubaidullah, the second Pakistani militant captured in Jammu and Kashmir this month, met with Lashkar-e-Taiba founder Hafeez Saeed at least twice, investigators said on Friday. The officials said that Ubaidullah had gone through at least three rounds of training with the militant group and was sent to North Kashmir to set up a base in the Rafiabad region. Ubaidullah’s capture comes after security forces captured another militant, Mohammed Naveed, after he and another group of fighters ambushed a Border Security Force convoy in the Udhampur district of Kashmir.

India and US to share terror database

Officials on Friday said that India and the United States are set to reach an agreement on sharing a terrorism-related database for the exchange of information. The officials said that the database would be shared between the US Terrorist Screening Centre and India’s Intelligence Bureau.

AAP suspends two Punjab MPs for attending parallel rally

On August 29, the Aam Admi Party suspended two MPs, Dharamvira Gandhi and Harinder Singh Khalsa, from Patiala and Fategarh Sahib respectively, for “anti-party” activities. The decision was taken after they attended a rally organised by former disciplinary committee chief Daljit Singh at the Rakhar Puniya fair in Baba Bakala in Amritsar district earlier in the day. The AAP had organised its own rally at the fair led by Punjab affairs in-charge Sanjay Singh and state convenor Sucha Singh Chottepur.

Land Ordinance allowed to lapse

On Friday, the NDA government’s Land Acquisition ordinance was allowed to lapse. The government issued executive orders to extend the provisions of compensation, rehabilitation and resettlement as mentioned in the 2013 version of the Act to 13 Central Acts like the National Highways Act and the Railways Act. This will allow the government the alternative of not promulgating the land ordinance for the fourth time, allowing State governments to acquire land under their own laws. The ruling BJP was uncomfortable with the political messaging of the ordinance, which both Rahul and Sonia Gandhi have called anti-farmer. This move could be linked to the fact that the negative publicity would have done the NDA no good, especially in the run up to the elections in Bihar.

Lalu offers SP five seats

Rashtriya Janata Dal leader Lalu Prasad Yadav on Saturday said that he had offered the Mulayam Singh Yadav-led Samajwadi Party five seats to contest the assembly elections in Bihar. Lalu held a late-night meeting on Friday with SP National-Secretary Kiranmay Nanda, who later said that he had called a meeting of the party’s parliamentary board to discuss the proposal on Sunday. The RJD leader’s offer came after it was reported that the SP was planning to announce its exit from the alliance the RJD and the Nitish Kumar-led Janata Dal (United).

Bharatiya Mazdoor Sangh pulls out of September 2nd strike

The RSS-affiliated union called the Bharatiya Mazdoor Sangh has decided to pull out of protests organised by 10 trade unions to oppose the NDA’s anti-people policies. The strike was originally called by 11 central trade unions including BMS. In a meeting called on Friday, it suggested calling off the planned strike following the government’s assurances plus a six-month implementation window.

Rajan hints at rate cut

Reserve Bank of India Governor Raghuram Rajan said inflation has come down to the comfort zone quicker than expected. He added that he is keeping a watch on data to see how much room there is for further easing of the monetary policy. He added that he has cut interest rates three times already this year and that he was “still on an accommodative setting”.

Protests on Kuala Lampur streets as citizens call for PM’s resignation

Malaysian protesters turned out in the streets of Kuala Lumpur on Saturday to call for the resignation of Prime Minister Najib Razak. An internal probe uncovered more than $700 million that had been deposited into Razak’s accounts from entities linked with the state investment fund 1Malaysia Development Berhad (1MDB). “Stop treating us like fools, Mr. Prime Minister,” businessman Tony Wong said at the protests.

Gehlot says government is trying to divert attention

On Saturday, former Rajasthan Chief Minister Ashok Gehlot accused the Vasundhara Raje-led state government of levying false charges against the opposition with its accusations of embezzlement worth Rs.2.5 crore in an ambulance scam. Gehlot said that the government had made up the charges against him to divert the attention of the media from the scams allegedly involving Raje and her family. Gehlot and other Congress leaders have been accused of irregularities in allotting a contract to operate the 108-ambulance service in Rajasthan.

18 soldiers wounded in accidental blast at army camp

Eighteen soldiers were wounded after an accidental explosion took place at an army school in the Pulwama district of Jammu and Kashmir on Saturday. The explosion took place during a regular training exercise at around 8.45 am.