January 2016 Archives

A New DBT Strategy Could Be a Big Win for Bioinformatics if Done Right

The National Biotechnology Development Strategy makes a lot of the right noises. However, at this point, it is silent on how its programmes will be implemented.

The NCBS campus in Bengaluru. Source: NCBS

The Department of Biotechnology (DBT) of the Government of India announced a National Biotechnology Development Strategy (NBDS), covering the period 2015-2020, on December 30, 2015. The overarching goal of NBDS is to set in place processes that will result in the growth of the Indian biotechnology sector into a $100 billion industry by the year 2020.

The policy lays substantial emphasis on developing skilled human resource at various levels; a push towards the development of high-end research infrastructure; and funding for collaborative and interdisciplinary research in “basic” as well as “translational” research in certain frontier areas including the study of the human genome and its relevance to genetic diseases, the biology of infectious diseases and antibiotic resistance, stem cell biology, biomaterials, sustainable agriculture and environmental biotechnology.

This comes along at a time when the attitude of the present Government towards basic sciences has – justifiably or otherwise – come under the press’s scanner. The purported intention of the Government to encourage research institutes for the basic sciences to find their own money, and to emphasise on marketable research, has already come under fire. That the NBDS underlines the Government’s commitment to promoting basic research and education at the highest level should allay some of these fears.

While a selection of the features of the NBDS are discussed here, with a focus on interdisciplinary biology, it deserves to be said that the new policy bodes well for bioinformatics – in research as well as education through diplomas and modules in mainstream courses in biotechnology. Key here will be in not comprising the quality of this education.

Biology is, by definition as you’d have it, interdisciplinary. It’s not a pure science in the sense that the processes underlying life are a special case of physical and chemical principles. Though it has become fashionable in recent years to project a supposedly new image of biology as interdisciplinary, following the deployment of novel quantitative approaches, technologies and instrumentation for the study of life, we do appreciate that many of the pioneers of genetics, molecular biology and biochemistry were physicists, chemists and statisticians. The new-age buzzwords, “theoretical biology” and “bioinformatics”, which bring mathematics and computation into the world of biology, are in fact old, and have always gone hand-in-hand with the historical development of molecular biology.

The unprecedented feature of the landscape of interdisciplinary biology today is the scale and sophistication of the interface between the quantitative way of life of the physical and computational scientists and the “stamp-collecting” attitude of the biologists. This is an important development, and in light of increasing specialisation of science, requires that many minds come together, each with a deep understanding of one or a few approaches to the natural sciences.

Big data and bioinformatics: the training problem

An example of interdisciplinary biology deals with next-generation genomics. Technological developments have made sure that generating volumes of data about our genetic material – including sequencing the genomes of hundreds and thousands of humans, plants and disease causing bacteria – is straightforward if not trivial. However, the challenge of using these data to answer important biological questions requires skills in computation and bioinformatics, and importantly an attitude that bridges biology with computation.

It is often the case that this challenge is unmet. This is in part due to many biologists tending to look down upon bioinformaticians as a form of low life, who shy away from doing the hard experimentation. I remember reading an article in a respected journal that referred to bioinformaticians as scavengers of data generated by the hard work of true-breed experimentalists. Bioinformaticians for their part, often with training in the supposedly “higher” sciences of quantitation, have often dismissed experimental biologists as stamp collectors. Thus, experimental biologists have for long been divorced from bioinformaticians.

However, in recent times, the necessity of the generation and analysis of big data in biology have made them seek each other out. However, much of the prevailing training in India emphasises the use of bioinformatic software and less on the understanding of the fundamental principles underlying these software. This has resulted in a significant paucity of high-quality bioinformaticians here, especially those competent in maximally exploiting the explosion of genomic data in answering major biological questions, despite our claim to fame in information technology.

The DBT has always had a task force dedicated to handling grants for bioinformatics. Recently, this has been expanded by a task force in genome engineering, a field of inquiry in which bioinformatics plays a non-negotiable, central role. And so the importance of the new policy in enhancing the quality of education in bioinformatics.

The bench-bedside interface and the challenge of geography

The necessary push towards utilising the fruits of inter-disciplinary research in medicine or agriculture requires the further juxtaposition of new attitudes, including knowledge and aptitude for scaling-up and commercialisation. This becomes effective only in an environment with a critical mass of researchers concentrated within a localised geographical area wherein face-to-face communication is not barriered by distance along congested city roads, or by long-distance travel.

The Indian life science research community, spread across the three million square kilometres of the country’s landmass, is small; probably of a scale comparable to, if not smaller than, the size of the relevant community in a single large university in the US. Therefore, the probability at which compatible minds with distinct domains of expertise come together to pursue a coherent and large piece of impactful research is low in India. Thus, life science research in India has for long been built of small units of work possible within the confines of a single laboratory.

The DBT has in recent years provided what are called glue grants to promote interactions between research laboratories and hospitals. However, the physical distance between collaborative partners remains a hurdle. For example, a cluster of hospitals in Bangalore, including NIMHANS, the Kidwai hospital and the Rajiv Gandhi Institute of Chest Diseases are not physically close to the leading research institutes in the city. And research collaborations between the National Centre for Biological Sciences (NCBS) in North Bangalore and the St. John’s hospital in the other end of town have had to negotiate the dense jungle of road traffic.

This is why geographically localised institutional clusters make sense, a concept which has been explored on the NCBS campus, as well as at the developing cluster of basic science and translational research institute Faridabad in the NCR. Recent developments in the Indian Institute of Science, such as the establishment of new centres of interdisciplinary sciences, are also exciting.

However, a localised cluster of research institutes and hospitals with shared ideologies is still uncommon in India. This is in contrast to centers in the US and in Europe. For example, the Addenbrookes hospital is part of the University of Cambridge, offers joint research and degree programmes with the basic science departments, and is only minutes away from the research departments on foot, bike or bus.

The NBDS envisages setting up centres for regenerative medicine and bioengineering within existing medical schools, which appears to be a step in the direction of physically bringing together research and the clinic. While welcome, it’s not clear whether this move is large enough to be effective across the board. That said, something at this scale should be more than feasible within a five-year timeframe, making the suggestion practical rather than visionary. There is also a push towards the setting up of basic research facilities in medical centres; but facilities are facilities, and how this will be supported by research personnel of the highest standards remains to be seen.

In summary, the NBDS does acknowledge the need to bring together distinct expertise via collaborative ventures, and attempts to address the challenge of geography albeit with a few gaps.

Infrastructure for cutting-edge biology

Having the right core facilities, providing researchers access to cutting-edge, shared infrastructure is crucial in this day and age of “big science”. Leave alone individual labs; even research departments and small companies will find it financially unviable to own and maintain such facilities. The DBT’s Centre for Cellular and Molecular Platforms in Bangalore is a flagship organisation providing academic researchers and industries in India and abroad access to platform technologies. A similar development is underway at Faridabad. The NBDS promises to set up more such facilities, including centres for providing clinical bioinformatics services, across the country.

Buying platform equipment is one thing, easily done with money. But ensuring their effective use is a greater problem requiring highly skilled workforce. There is also a fundamental difference in the nature of human resource that attempts to answer the most important questions about life, and which provides the technological platforms and services that enable such research. Both require the best talents, but different mindsets. Therefore, the well-tested model of recruiting the best young faculty members to research institutes does not apply well to organisations offering platform support. Addressing this has remained a major challenge for Indian institutes, and it remains to be seen how the proposals in NBDS will help fill the gap.

Human resource development for access to technology

The problem of promoting inter-disciplinary science is not merely a problem of institutional systems, but also one of personnel training and attitudes. The NBDS rightly acknowledges this and proposes various schemes for personnel training. Broadly, the NBDS promises to evaluate the feasibility of setting up a “Life Science and Biotechnology Education Council to coordinate, network and implement education, training and skill development activities from school to postdoctoral level”. Such a system, if implemented well and under the aegis of the right people, might be the best outcome of the present policy, in light of the abysmal state of biotechnology education in India.

More specifically, the NBDS lays special emphasis on bioinformatics training. Additionally, there is a promise of new fellowships for postdoctoral researchers. New fellowships for PhD projects under industry-academia collaborations seem to be on the anvil. Programmes for enhancing the skill set of faculty at our universities and institutes are also discussed. Support for various undergraduate and postgraduate programmes in biotechnology and management relevant to the life sciences have been promised. A DBT-funded international conference covering the frontier areas of biology has been promised.

These are exciting proposals. However, the mode of delivery of these programmes remains unclear. New “EMBL-like” centres have been proposed. With EMBL being the flagship pan-European research institute, funded by well over 20 states of the EU, it is unclear what the Indian version of an EMBL will be.

From policy to implementation: the big question

So, the NBDS makes a lot of the right noises. However, at this point, it is silent on how these programmes will be implemented. There is no indication of what the financial outlay will be and how the funds will be channeled in a streamlined manner. These are probably not quite within the scope of the NBDS but are nevertheless important.

We all do know that the road from policy to implementation is riddled with the biggest potholes in India and this is no less true for science policy. I’m not competent to comment on why this should be so and how this might be corrected – but until we see action on the ground, not only on the new schemes of the NBDS but also in cleaning up the numerous teething issues that scientists face with respect to science administration in the country, we can only wait with bated breath.

The full text of the NBDS can be accessed here.

Aswin Sai Narain Seshasayee runs a laboratory researching bacterial biology at the National Centre for Biological Sciences, Bengaluru. Beyond science, his interests are in classical art music and history.

Terrorists Attack IAF Base; 3 Securitymen and 4 Terrorists Killed

Anticipating an attack after some armed men abducted an SP of Punjab Police on Thursday night, a team of NSG commandos had been rushed here on Friday night itself.

Pathankot (Punjab): In a pre-dawn attack, a group of heavily-armed Pakistani terrorists, suspected to belong to the Jaish-e-Mohammed outfit, struck at an Air Force base here in Punjab, leading to a fierce gunbattle in which three security personnel were killed along with four of the attackers.

The terrorists, whose attack comes just a week after Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s unscheduled visit to Lahore, could not however penetrate the defence cordon at the base, which is abut 150 km away from India’s border with Pakistan, as they met with effective response from the security forces, police and security officials said.

The group launched their assault at around 3.30 am and three security personnel, including a Garud commando of the IAF, were killed in it, defence sources said, adding that four terrorists were also killed by the security forces within five hours.

However, more terrorists are suspected to be on the loose as gunshots were heard during the subsequent combing-up operations, defence sources said. The IAF was using its two attack helicopters to assist the joint team of ground troops to neutralise the remaining terrorists. The police added that the technical area, helicopters and other equipment at the Air Force base were safe.

According to the authorities, the terrorists possessed a large quantity of RDX and had made their way to the base from its back side, where there is a jungle. But they could not go beyond the ‘langar’ (eating place) near the outer perimeter of the IAF complex as the security forces were ready to take them on, the sources said, in an operation that was directly supervised by National Security Adviser Ajit Doval.

Anticipating an attack after some armed men abducted an SP of Punjab Police on Thursday night, a team of NSG commandos had been rushed here on Friday night itself after the NSA held a series of meetings with the Army Chief and top IB officials on Friday. An army detachment was also positioned at the Air Force base, the sources said.

‘Censorship in India is Based on the Paternalistic Idea that Citizens are Not Mature’

The way film ratings play out in the United States is not very consistent or debatable. It is a lot more arbitrary and shadowy than people imagine, says William Mazzarella.

The Modi government has announced the formation of a panel headed by Shyam Benegal to review the functioning of the Central Board of Film Certification, including by looking at the film certification models followed by other countries like the United States.

William Mazzarella, Professor of Anthropology and of Social Sciences at the University of California, Berkeley, writes and teaches on the political anthropology of mass publicity, with special reference to India. His books include Shoveling Smoke: Advertising and Globalization in Contemporary India and Censorium: Cinema and the Open Edge of Mass Publicity. He is also the co-editor, with Raminder Kaur, of Censorship in South Asia: Cultural Regulation from Sedition to Seduction. In Mumbai recently, Mazzarella spoke to The Wire about the historic context of censorship in India and how that links up with efforts by the state to censor cinema in recent years.

You have studied and written on the history of cinema censorship in India. What are its origins?

Cinema emerges in the 1890s and comes immediately to Bombay and it is at a time when there was already some regulation of dramatic performances. You have the Dramatic Performances Act of 1876. Around that time, India also got press controls. The British administration’s anxieties about cinema was that it combined elements of theatre and also the press. It was mass produced, like the press and it embodied a performative quality of theatre. What happens then is that the colonial government tries to figure out whether it needs new kinds of regulation or whether the Act would be sufficient. Around the First World War, they decide that cinema would need its own laws.

Was the government worried about cinema sending out messages of freedom and independence or more concerned about moralistic matters?

It was a mixture of things. In the 19th century, there was all this worry about the press, especially in the Indian languages. There was a lot of paranoia about what kind of seditious messages might be circulated in the Indian language press. Cinema brought hyper modern technology at the time, a gesturality and that was what made them so worried, because the colonial authorities saw Indians as a gestural people and felt that they would be particularly vulnerable to a medium such as cinema.

In some ways these anxieties were not limited to India; you had similar worries in the United States at the same time about what cinema would do to the working classes. In the colonial context, what was added to the anxieties was racial differences and the manageability of the subject population.

William Mazzarella. Credit: University of Chicago

In the early days of cinema, Indian film makers were producing either mythologicals or films on reformist subjects; that couldn’t have worried the authorities, or did it?

The British had already been worried about mythological subjects. They felt these themes were being used as covers; there was a perpetual paranoia that under the cover of religion, political messages were being imparted. In the colonial files of the period, you read about some officer thinking, there is something fishy about this film and we should get our Oriental Translator (OT) — which was a designation by the way, at least in the Bombay Presidency — to explain to the officials what was going on and evaluate whether there was a hidden seditious message in the film.

Eventually you get a much more elaborate censoring set up with a representation of communities – one Parsi, one Muslim, one or two Hindus. They would be, usually, men of leisure who did not necessarily know much about cinema, but were there to ensure no one would be offended. By the 1930s, representatives from professional film bodies, citizens groups and other moral watchdogs were brought in. That happened at the same time as the first steps towards Indian self-government, with the Government of India Act of 1935.

You have also looked at the 1990s in your work.

What my book has done is to juxtapose two moments – the 1910s and 1920s and then the 1990s, the post liberalisation phase. That is when you are getting into cultural wars between the liberals and the conservatives. Remember this is the time when there are controversies about ‘Choli ke peeche’ and Fire and so many more instances.

Have you linked these developments with the economic liberalisation of 1991?

Let’s say that liberalisation provides an opportunity for mobilisation around questions of sexual morality, foreign influence and so on, so that becomes a context for the 1990s for a renewed conservatism. In the public cultural environment, there are these new foreign television programmes, new ads, new fashions which create mobilisation around the idea of tradition. Soon those in the business decided that there was only a small audience for English language soaps and you saw the subsequent rise of Hindi language serials. This is part of my book on advertising, on how liberalisation provided the opportunity for a new invention of Indianness.

We are now in a situation where the censors are trying to beep out things and a certain kind of ultra-conservativeness is being imposed. But is that really possible in this day and age, especially with technology that can make censorship redundant?

Well, the first thing to know is that the censors are not being able to control the public cultural and media space. It is also obvious that the censors know that. So the question is, why do they persist with their censorius ways. Although they do cut this or that, my argument is that censorship is a kind of performative art, an assertion of authority and in a way, censorship depends on the publicity value of the thing being censored. We know that every time something is taken out of a film, it is endlessly repeated in the media – it is not as if it cannot be talked about. In a way, censorship is capitalising on the controversy; authority thrives on attention, and it gets attention. In this public culture of everything that is being circulated, the media, advertising, the political discourse, censorship should be seen as one player of many. One of the things about censorship to also know is that it is unpredictable and arbitrary, despite all the rules they publicise.

Many here are saying we should follow the US model, an industry body that self-regulates, rather than a government-appointed set up.

The US has a ratings authority. There is an interesting documentary called This Film Is Not Yet Rated and it is worth knowing about here. I hear people here say, we want ratings, we don’t want our films to be cut, but in fact, what this documentary shows is that this authority is a very shadowy agency. No one knows who these people are, watching these films, rating them. It is a secret. Yes, they give you ratings but they also say things like if you want this rating, you must cut out this. The way it plays out is not very consistent or debatable. It is a lot more arbitrary and shadowy than people imagine.

There is a tendency to idealise institutions in Europe and the United States. The big difference, if you want to compare India with say, the United States is that the perception of the relationship between the state and the citizen is still premised on the paternalistic, developmental idea; this perception exists that the majority of Indians are immature citizens, they are not quite ready for democracy. Even though there is pride in calling India the largest democracy, many people will also quickly say, those who are illiterate are not mature enough to be full citizens and this enables a very paternalistic, censorious authority in a way that may not be possible in Western Europe.

Featured image credit: Meena Kadri/Flickr, CC BY 2.0.

Covering Science at The Wire: 10 Picks from 2015

The Wire carried articles on a spectrum of issues impacting science, addressing questions on everything from sexism and publishing woes to public policy and particle physics.

Was it a great year for science? Was it a lousy year for science? Beyond its perception as an exotic enterprise – which it can often seem to be – science is, at its roots, human. And like all humans, it had its good times and bad times in 2015. The Wire carried articles on issues across this spectrum, addressing questions on everything from sexism and publishing woes to public policy and particle physics. Here are 10 picks from over 450 that we published, in no particular order.

Colonies of Vibrio cholerae bacteria. (Public domain image)

1. Remembering Sambhu Nath De, the medical man for the blue death

Science had been De’s only passion. He had never cultivated close relations with the establishment as such. Hence, as P. Balaram, one of India’s leading scientists and editor of the journal Current Science, noted in a special issue dedicated to ‘S.N. De and the cholera enterotoxin’ (1990), “… De died in 1985 unhonoured and unsung in India’s scientific circles. That De received no major award in India during his lifetime and that our academies did not see it fit to elect him to their Fellowship, must rank as one of the most glaring omissions of our time.” Indians lament that scientists such as J.C. Bose, Meghnad Saha and S.N. Bose never received a Nobel Prize. But they have at least won the adulation of the common Indian. In contrast – and what is perhaps more tragic – is that De’s heroic tale of intellectual brilliance and perseverance has remained unknown to the layperson.

2. Modi wants the DNA Profiling Bill passed right away. Here’s why it shouldn’t be.

Given the scale of issues with the draft Bill, and its potentially disastrous sidelining of privacy concerns, its scheduled introduction in the monsoon session of the Lok Sabha seems hurried – despite having first been mooted more than a decade ago. Some of the issues may have escaped the drafting committee’s concerns by way of not having received appropriate feedback – such as the issue of hidden costs – but the committee must explain why there is a lack of access to data of the people by the people, why there are no sound anonymisation protocols, and why there are insufficient self-regulation and protection measures.

3. Killing off India’s dogs is not the way to get rid of its rabies problem

The purpose of neutering and vaccination is to ensure that dog populations are small, stable, healthy and safe. Vaccination reduces the incidence of rabies. Neutering – castration in male dogs and ovario-hysterectomies in female dogs – reduces fighting related to reproductive activities and makes dogs more sluggish and docile. This in turn reduces the incidence of dog bites. Moreover, the territorial nature of dogs means that the retention of a neutered and vaccinated population of dogs in a locality prevents new dogs from occupying the area. When street dogs are removed or eradicated, new dogs enter the neighbourhood which heightens the incidence of dog bites due to fear and fighting.

Credit: makelessnoise/Flickr, CC BY 2.0

4. Why the cure for migraines could come from the Parsi community

Migraines – debilitating and agonising, there’s not much that can be done about them. Science is still looking for an effective way to prevent these recurring headaches. The answer to what can help cure migraines may lie in research conducted among the Parsi population. This episode of The Intersection investigates how the homogeneous nature of this community can assist science in finding a solution to migraines.

Abhay Ashtekar. Credit: pitt.edu

5. ‘Good scientists solve problems, but great scientists know what’s worth solving’

“I learnt this from Chandra more than anybody else – many people can solve a problem. I mean, I can solve many problems even more elegantly than Chandra might have solved. But the skill is to come up with a problem – to come up with the right problems. Things that are going to change the direction. Things that are not going to be only incremental progress but really could make a difference. And that, I think, is not easy. That is what distinguishes great scientists from good scientists – the ability to really spot this, what is really worth working on. I don’t mean to trivialise the second ability, which is the ability to solve a given hard problem, because it requires both the arsenal of tools and some brilliance. But it’s not the same as coming up with the right questions to ask. That is, I think, something that students should be aware of.”

Elephants in Nyanza, Kenya. Credit: chadica/Flickr, CC BY 2.0

6. Why don’t elephants get cancer?

In 2012, Carlo Maley, an evolutionary oncologist from Arizona State University, gave a talk about Peto’s Paradox at a conference of evolutionary medicine and epidemiology in Washington, D.C. He had found that elephants had 20 copies of a gene called TP53 that produce p53, a protein crucial for suppressing tumours. This protein is like a fact-checker, examining newly formed cells and verifying if they have correct DNA copies. If any are corrupted, it either attempts to repair or gives the command for the cells to commit suicide. If it didn’t give these instructions, the cells would turn cancerous. The protein is so crucial to our well-being that David Lane, a British cancer biologist and one of the discoverers of p53, called it the ‘guardian of the genome’.

The three winners of the Nobel Prize for physiology or medicine, 2015. Source: nobelprize.org

7. How an ancient Chinese text fought malaria and won a Nobel, while India lags behind

The difference in the investigative traditions employed by Tu and Indian phytotherapists shows in many ways. For one, a Chinese herbal preparation named Dansheng has entered phase 3 clinical trials to verify its curative effects in people with diabetic retinopathy – no Ayurvedic recipe has come as far. Second, the Chinese government’s more-meaningful support was reflected in a greater visibility of the country’s traditional medicines in databases of scientific literature, even in 2013, but not so much of Indian medicines. Third, as Youyou Tu’s example illustrates, the success of the Chinese has been in recognising the limits of ancient knowledge.

Women at a conference. Credit: womendeliver/Flickr, CC BY 2.0.

8. Women in science and a tale of two hunters

Of course, this parable applies only to Shikaris whose daring (unlike their science) is commensurate with their national standing; it certainly does not apply to male scientists who are too decent and/or scared to live their caveman fantasies. I hope that this parable will sound dated in years to come, not just because we are seeing the last of the repressed old hands and social misfits who have imposed their misogyny and attempted seductions on unwilling women in every profession, but because younger male professionals don’t usually see women as over-the-shoulder carcasses for later consumption.

Pollution. Photo by Billy Wilson, CC 2.0

9. Sleepwalking towards disaster

Across the subcontinent the media have allowed the meta-crisis to be largely obscured by the noise and dust of ‘breaking news’. When crops fail the focus is usually on political and human stories, not on changes in climate; that erratic rainfall may have been a factor in the Maoist insurgency in Nepal is rarely reported; when factory buildings collapse in Dhaka, killing hundreds of workers, it passes almost without notice that many of those workers are ecological refugees from districts where formerly productive land is being gradually invaded by saline water. Climate change may also be a factor in the insurgencies of central and eastern India – but to what degree we do not know, for one of the failures of global knowledge systems is that they have yet to provide us with a means of gauging the effects of climate change on human conflicts.

Lesser Woolly Horseshoe bat (Rhinolophus sedulus). Credit: Bernard Dupont/ Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 2.0.

10. Even bats need to wake up and smell the coffee

The study, published in the August 2015 issue of the journal Biological Conservation, shows that bats respond negatively to tea plantations that are extensively modified by humans. But they do quite well in shaded coffee plantations and forest patches. Clair Wordley, a biologist at Leeds University and lead author of the study, told The Wire that traditional coffee growing in India, with native coffee varieties that support bats growth, are giving way to uniform plantations of Coffea robusta that is more popular for the instant coffee market. “Keeping coffee grown in the traditional way with lots of different native trees is great for bat conservation – and they’ll probably thank you by eating some of those insect pests,” she said.

What China’s Rise Means for the World

In the second of a three-part article, India’s former National Security Adviser looks at the implications of a China that will be increasingly assertive in the Asia-Pacific.

In the second of a three-part article, India’s former National Security Adviser looks at the implications of a China that will be increasingly assertive in the Asia-Pacific

In 1990, Deng Xiaoping had urged a 24-character strategy on China: “observe calmly; secure our position; cope with affairs calmly; hide our capacities and bide our time; be good at maintaining a low profile; and never claim leadership”. In 2009 President Hu Jintao amended the last eight characters to “uphold (jianchi) keeping a low profile and actively (jiji) achieve something (taoguang yanghui, yousuo zuowei)”. Since then China has dropped these modest and humble references and speaks of playing her role and assuming her responsibilities. It is clear that since 2008, Deng’s humility (whether mock Confucian or not) is no longer the declared guiding principle for China’s external behaviour. Instead, China now seeks to “display her prowess” and “assume her responsibilities”. We now have Chinese scholars like Yan Xuetong speaking of the need for China to start building a series of alliances in her neighbourhood to countervail the US alliance system and challenge its credibility.

Externally, China’s economic growth has given her the means to support double digit increases in defence spending for over 25 years, building a military force which can give pause to the sole superpower in China’s immediate vicinity, and can certainly ensure dominance against all but three of her largest neighbours – Russia, India and Japan. Since 2008, she has reignited her maritime disputes in the seas near China – the East China Sea with Japan and the South China Sea with Vietnam and other ASEAN members – and has begun a much more muscular defence of an expanded definition of her core interests.

What does this presage for China’s future behaviour as a power? The world has been so fascinated by the rise of China that reactions, even from scholars, have been extreme, predicting China’s imminent collapse or, at the other extreme, ‘When China Rules the World’, as one recent book was called. Logic, Chinese history, geography, and China’s present condition tell us that the truth is somewhere in between and much more complex.

Past is not present

There is today a cottage industry of scholarship explaining China’s behaviour by referring to its history, to the so-called tributary system, to ancient Chinese barbarian-handling manuals, and so on. It is true that, like India, China has a well-developed tradition of statecraft, stretching back at least two and a half thousand years. But, unlike India, China’s is essentially a history of statecraft within a closed system of ideologically and ethnically homogenous states or entities. Those who were not of the same ethnicity, or not Han, were sought to be assimilated or Sinicised through a process of acculturation, starting with the Chinese language and philosophy which acknowledged no equal. The Chinese saw no alternative or other manner of statecraft until the contact with India and Buddhism in the Tang. For a proud people who had no real experience of coping with diversity or a world of equals (except under “barbarian” dynasties like the Mongols), the shock of contact with military and economic superiority of the West in the 19th century was thus much more for China than for Japan or India.

History has left China with a fear of barbarian encirclement, and a strong drive to status/‘face’ and power after what they regard as “a century of humiliation” and colonial degradation – a fate that Sun Yat Sen described as worse than India’s because, he said, ‘India was the favoured wife of Britain while China was the common prostitute of all the powers’. The goals that China pursues in the international system today, of status/‘face’, of the China Dream, are a direct result of this narrative of Chinese history, which the CPC has appropriated to argue that only the Communist Party can realise and restore China’s pride. As Mao declared on October 1, 1949 at Tiananmen Square, “China has stood up … Without the CPC there is no new China!”

Taken together, history and the trauma of the long 19th century left China self-centred, lonely, seeking respect, and touchy.

These emotions are heightened by the effects of geography, and China’s present condition.

In any case, historical patterns and strategic culture only partly explain China’s behaviour today. If they did, there would be clear consensus among historians and they would be able to predict China’s behaviour, which they are notoriously bad at.

Location also counts

Unlike the US, which is protected by two of the worlds largest oceans, China is in a crowded neighbourhood, has land boundaries with 13 countries, has only two allies — Pakistan and North Korea – and some of her neighbours with whom she has difficult relations have also been accumulating hard and soft power and working with each other, such as Japan, India and Vietnam.

Despite the considerable strides that China has made in acquiring power, she still lacks the capability to manage, devise or impose a political or security order in her immediate neighbourhood, the Asia-Pacific.

This is a function not just of the balance of power and the presence of the United States, but also of her inability to offer a normative framework, and, because of the nature of China’s relations with significant countries like India, Japan, Vietnam, Indonesia, Russia and others. If China cannot, and the US will not continue to, provide security in the commons through alliances and bases, we should expect continued instability in the Asia-Pacific. Optimists – and those who want to change the status quo, like China – call this outcome multipolarity and welcome it, since instability offers space to pursue one’s interests and opens up the possibility of improving one’s position.

Can the world economy recover and prosper amidst such political and security instability, and in the economic fragmentation that the TPP, RCEP and other regional free trade agreements represent? My own sense is that it cannot. Also, the natural reaction to prolonged insecurity and strategic competition between states in the region would be to form coalitions and alliances, formal or informal.

Just as her professed dedication to freedom or democracy has never been an accurate predictor of US behaviour, China’s professions of win-win diplomacy, Confucian benevolence, and economic priorities are unlikely to serve as an indicator for future Chinese behaviour. Instead, as I have said, the drivers of Chinese foreign policy are likely to remain the quest for status and the acquisition of power – political, military and economic. The only consideration that might override them, in some hard to conceive and unlikely circumstances, is regime continuity in China. If rule by the CPC elite is threatened by the consequences of the drive for status and power, that push will be limited or modified. But for the present, the world should expect more of the “assertive” China. Her own ambitious goals make it so.

Superpower, not supermen

At the same time, it is important to make a realistic assessment of Chinese statecraft. People around the world usually assume China is better at the application of power than others. This may not be true, particularly when one looks at the consequences of their recent policies, which have united their neighbours against them, or when you look at their limited ability to shape the environment around them and in the world. We tend to see Chinese under every bed around the world, but in fact, China often creates the impression of power by not actually exercising it. Instead it is the informal spread of her people and economic influence — as in Laos, Myanmar, etc — that is working for her.

Where China is better at the application of power is in her unique willingness to take risks. The Great Leap Forward was a gamble that failed (and led to over 30 million dead in the subsequent famine), while Reform and Opening Up was a gamble that succeeded spectacularly. Objectively, there was no real reason to expect one to fail and the other to succeed when they were initiated. Both were policy gambles. Both relied on external support, from the Soviet Union and the US, respectively. What made Reform’s success possible was the willingness to pragmatically experiment and change as they went along — “feeling the stones underfoot while crossing the river” as Deng said.

The third aspect of the application of force in which China is different is in the use of force short of war, in small doses, and in the use of the threat of force rather than force itself. Chinese history and novels like San Guo are replete with instances of such uses of force, not of epic wars like the Mahabharata and Ramayana. In 1962, India was ready to fight WWII while the Chinese fought a very different small war to a political plan.

However, none of these — understanding the limits of power, risk-taking, and the use of force short of war— guarantee success in all situations as the Chinese war on Vietnam in 1979, and the effects of her post-2008 assertiveness show. Nor have they arrested the steady decline in the legitimacy of the CPC internally or its shrinking ability to control Chinese society and thought.

In institutional terms, Ian Johnson makes the valid point that the effective shelf life of a Chinese leader today is no more than that of a politician elected for five years. While he knows that he will be the leader five years before his appointment when he is brought into the Politbureau Standing Committee, his period of effective power is the first three or four years of his first term. So, for instance, the jockeying for the next Party Congress in 2019 will start by 2017 at the latest, and Xi Jinping’s successor will join the PBSC at that Congress. Since the iron rule of age and two term limits was imposed, this in itself limits the freedom of manoeuvre of a Chinese leader, just as the prospect of re-election distracts a democratic leader from governance in his/her last two years in office. Nor can one argue that the Chinese bureaucracy is more efficient than others — just ask any ordinary Chinese or try living as one.

The inability to make fundamental changes in the nature of one party rule and to actually change the role and influence of the state owned enterprises of the present regime in China which came in with such grand promises suggests that the rigidities in the Chinese system should not be underestimated.

In other words, the world must prepare itself for a more assertive China but should get past the myth of the superhuman and farsighted Chinese leadership and the hyper-efficient Chinese state which is intrinsically superior. China’s leaders are human and, like the rest of us, do great things occasionally but also make mistakes.

Shivshankar Menon was India’s National Security Adviser from January 2010 to May 2014.

The Chhattisgarh By-election Scam is a Wake Up Call

One hopes the Election Commission, the police and the high court live up to expectations and seize the initiative in this matter. Public trust in constitutional institutions is too precious to be dissipated.

One hopes the Election Commission, the police and the high court live up to expectations and seize the initiative in this matter. Public trust in constitutional institutions is too precious to be dissipated.

File photo of Chhattisgarh chief minister Raman Singh and Prime Minister Narendra Modi. Credit: PMO

The sad saga of corrupt practices in elections has played out in its ugliest form in the Antagarh (Chhattisgarh) bye-election held in September 2014, as exposed by the Indian Express. The tapes of purported conversations among the key players including the incumbent chief minister, Raman Singh’s family and a former CM, Ajit Jogi, and his son show the depth to which our electoral politics has fallen.

The role of money in elections has assumed alarming proportions. Though the problem is not confined to India, the ingenuity of our politicians in devising new ways is becoming legendary. In my book, An Undocumented Wonder: The Making of the Great Indian Election, I had listed 40 different ways in which the abuse of money power takes place in elections but that now seems to be just the tip of the iceberg.

Election time corruption is not an isolated phenomenon but is the root cause of all corruption in the country. In our increasingly competitive, no-holds-barred elections, candidates and political parties spend crores of rupees to ensure victory by hook or crook. When they spend millions, they must collect millions. The ‘recovery’ begins soon after. No donor gives money without the hope of some return. The quid pro quo is obvious – the promise of lucrative government contracts, licenses and favours of all kinds. Money from drug lords and crime mafia, perhaps even foreign money, finds its way into the election process as an investment. The result: the cancer of corruption is eating into the vitals of our society and polity. For the citizens, nothing gets done without money.

The role of money power

Besides overspending and bribing voters, there are many other forms in which money plays its abusive role in elections. We have seen many candidates who have made it a profession to stand for election only to subsequently withdraw for money from a rival, who would not want anyone to cut into his or her votes.

Putting up bogus or dummy candidates to cut into rivals’ votes (or to confuse the voters) is common. Sometimes, dummy candidates are put up to circumvent the expenditure ceiling. The expenditure ceiling available to such candidates is used by the sponsoring candidate. The EC has often caught dummy candidates carrying another party’s election materials.

Now that these explosive tapes have surfaced, what can the EC do? Actually, not very much, at least directly. After the announcement of the results, the EC becomes functus officio. Having fulfilled its function and accomplished its purpose, it holds no further force or authority. The power shifts instead to the high court, which only can entertain a complaint in the form of an election petition. Fortunately, in this case, the petition of the losing candidate, Rupdhar Pudo, is still pending in the Bilaspur High Court. He has come out in the media that he had filed a complaint at that time itself making the same allegations.

Significantly, Rupdhar Pudo was the only candidate left in the fray when 11 of 13 candidates, including the Congress candidate, Manturam Pawar, withdrew their nominations. Pudo has alleged that the personal secretary of the chief minister repeatedly tried to pressurise him to withdraw his nomination for any consideration. He had requested the high court to issue directions to set aside the election. The case is listed for January 21 for recording of evidence.

One would like to hope that court will take up this case with extraordinary seriousness now that it has come into national focus. It is pertinent to mention that the Representation of the People Act, 1951 stipulates disposal of an election petition within six months. It’s a pity that this is one law that remains on paper. It’s ironical that our otherwise brilliant judiciary falls short in these cases. Instead of upholding this law, it itself becomes a defaulter.

Let us consider here what section 86 (6) of the RP Act actually says:

“The trial of an election petition shall, so far as is practicable consistently with the interests of justice in respect of the trial, be continued from day to day until its conclusion, unless the High Court finds the adjournment of the trial beyond the following day to be necessary for reasons to be recorded. Section 86 (7) goes on to reinforce the urgency thus: “Every election petition shall be tried as expeditiously as possible and endeavour shall be made to conclude the trial within six months from the date on which the election petition is presented to the High Court for trial.” ( emphasis added).

Pudo also complained about the lack of action by the Election Commission on his complaint. The EC finally seems to have written on December 31, 2015 to the chief secretary of Chhattisgarh and to its own chief electoral officer to get an inquiry conducted and take the necessary action. Both can ask the police to file an FIR under various subsections of Section 171 of the Indian Penal Code.

The case amply attracts various provisions of Section 171 of IPC.

Section 171 A (b) defines the right of a person to stand or withdraw as a candidate as an “electoral right”.
Sec 171B (i) and (ii) deal with any offer or receiving of gratification in the exercise of an electoral right as an offence of bribery.
The punishment for bribery is prescribed by Sec 171E : imprisonment of up to one year with or without fine.
Sec 171 C (1) defines an attempt to interfere with the free exercise of any electoral right as undue influence at elections. This also carries similar imprisonment (sec 171 F).
Sec 171 H makes any illegal payment by any one (over ten rupees) punishable by fine.
Sec 171 I makes the failure to keep election accounts as an offence (punishable with fine).

The scam is a wake-up call for the various parties to take the case to its logical conclusion: the Election Commission of India, the state government, the police and the high court. One hopes they live up to expectations and seize the initiative. Public trust in constitutional institutions is too precious to be dissipated.

India’s election system is highly regarded across the globe. It is ironical that only a fortnight ago, a regional conference of South Asian countries, represented by respective election commissions, political leaders, academics and civil society, passed what was proudly termed as the New Delhi Declaration of Guiding Principles for Regulating Political Finance in South Asia, 2015. Ugly incidents like the Chhattisgarh election scandal cast a shadow on the fair name that Indian elections have achieved worldwide. We must collectively protect that image. The country’s political leadership has the greatest responsibility to adopt, without further delay, electoral reforms that clean up of the electoral system. These reforms have been pending for over two decades now.

SY Quraishi is a former Chief Election Commissioner of India

China Has Risen, and It is Time We Got Used to It

In the first of a three-part article, India’s former National Security Adviser looks at the reality of China’s rise and what it means for the world and India

Tiananmen, Beijing. Credit: Lei Han/Flickr CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

I often come across articles on China that use the word ‘dragon’ in its title – when rational people are no longer supposed to believe in the existence of dragons. As if the word’s association with fire, emotion and drama were not enough, speaking about the dragon’s rise also suggests the rest of the world, and we in India, should be fearful.

The consequences of China’s dramatic rise – thanks to three decades of 10%-plus GDP growth – are known to everyone. This includes the accumulation of hard power in all its forms, the emergence of China as the world’s manufacturing workshop, its trillion dollar foreign exchange surpluses, its ability to determine commodity prices in world markets, its presence in most global value and production chains, and so on. In a little over 30 years, China has made herself the largest economy in the world in PPP terms, the world’s largest trading nation, and the engine of global economic growth. The world watches in awe at the speed and scale of this transformation.

Why the West is wary

The West sees China’s rise as a challenge to its hegemony, just as it saw Japan’s rise in the first half of the 20th century. For the Chinese, however, this is merely the restoration of the natural order of things – in which China is the world’s largest economy and the centre of the world, as she was for all the centuries before the industrial revolution in the 19th century.

What arouses Western disquiet is the fact that while reprising her historical role, China has shattered two misconceptions that drove US and Western efforts – since Nixon’s 1972 visit – to facilitate its rise and integrate her into the Western world order. The two misconceptions were the idea that as China modernised, she would increasingly become like the Western powers, and that single party rule by the Communist Party of China (CPC) would inevitably give way to demands for western style democracy from a new Chinese middle class produced by economic development. As a result, China was expected to be integrated into the Western economic and political order just as Japan was after World War Two – to the point where the Japanese were treated as “honorary whites” in Apartheid South Africa.

Here, one must admire in passing the skill of Chinese diplomacy in the period after 1989. It was relatively easy for China to convince the West and the US of China’s utility when the Soviet Union existed as their adversary. With the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Chinese leadership fully expected – as the sole remaining large Communist country – the West to seek to change the nature of the regime in China. Instead, China got the US and the West to facilitate its rise in the decades after 1989.

Today, both Western hopes have been belied by developments in China. China’s polity and society remain stubbornly Chinese – as any scholar of Chinese history could have predicted. If anything, the CPC’s grip on power is stronger than it has ever been. And China has made it clear that while she, like India, is a major beneficiary of the US-led era of open markets and free trade and investment flows in the two decades before 2008, she is also determined to have an independent say in the economic, political and security order around her and in the world. Her goal is the China Dream, defined as the “Two 100s” – China becoming a “moderately well off society” by 2021, the 100th anniversary of the CPC; and becoming a fully developed nation by 2049, the 100th anniversary of the People’s Republic of China.

China sees an opportunity, and takes it

The attempt to shape the environment in her periphery, and to use her economic strength to build connectivity and institutions consolidating the Eurasian landmass and tying her neighbours to herself became more evident after the 2008 global economic crisis, which China probably saw as a moment of opportunity since the US and the West were preoccupied with reviving their own economies and were entangled in Iraq, Afghanistan, and, later, in North Africa and Eastern Europe.

Ten years ago, all except one of China’s neighbours traded more with the US than China. Today, China is the largest trading partner of all her neighbours, including US allies like the Philippines and Japan. Faced with Western sanctions, Russia looks to China to buy the energy and commodity exports on which her economy depends for survival. Even the US, China’s main strategic competitor, is economically tied to China in deep and fundamental ways that were never true of her previous great rival, the Soviet Union.

China has now taken the next steps. The One-Belt-One-Road proposal, the creation of the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, the BRICS New Development Bank, the negotiation of the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership, (as opposed to the US-sponsored Trans-Pacific Partnership with 12 Asia-Pacific nations), promoting the use of the RMB as an international currency, and other initiatives are all aimed at building a new economic order in the Asia-Pacific. This will have a global impact. Increasingly, the Asia-Pacific is the centre of gravity of the global economy and politics, the major source of global economic growth and activity, and the locus of political contention between the old Western order and the new one that is forming.

Internally, China’s rapid economic growth gave the CPC legitimacy – originally provided by its Maoist revolutionary ideology, since abandoned – and the means to maintain its social and political control. The only real challenge it has faced since reform began was in 1989 when the leadership was itself divided and reform had not yet delivered prosperity. That crisis culminated in the Tiananmen Square killings. But the success of Deng’s strategy of accelerated reform has made a repetition of such events unlikely, even when, like 1989, there are clear divisions within the leadership as Bo Xilai and Zhou Yongkang’s fall demonstrate.

In many ways, the CPC today is a victim of its own success. With an $11.21 trillion economy in nominal GDP as per April 2015, and per capita income over $8,000 (nominal)/$13,992 (PPP), China cannot sustain high growth rates for ever. She also needs to readjust her economy from a reliance on exports and government-led investment, to internal demand and consumption-led growth. In 2014, exports were a negative contributor to GDP. Estimates of whether she would be able to make this adjustment without a major internal economic crisis or collapse vary widely. My own sense is that a command economy like China, where the government has fiscal and other tools not available in market economies, should find it possible to transition relatively smoothly to a lower growth path of about 3-5% GDP growth each year, even though this will not be easy and will cause social pain. But even 5% growth in China’s economy now means that she is adding India’s GDP every couple of years or so.

As economic growth slows, however, the CPC is turning increasingly to nationalism to provide legitimacy in the eyes of its own people. Hence some of the recent shrillness in Chinese responses to external events.

This, then, is the reality of China’s rise that the world needs to contend with: An economy that will continue to far outpace the rest of the world, and a polity that will increasingly be marked, for domestic reasons, by nationalistic impulses.

Shivshankar Menon was India’s National Security Adviser from January 2010 to May 2014.

For ‘Make in India’ to Work, the Banking Sector Needs a Massive Cleanup

When the Modi government came into power in May 2014, it found itself inheriting a host of legacy issues resulting from the after-effects of global recession and UPA II’s financial misadventures. There was a deep macroeconomic instability brought about by the high fiscal and current account deficits, raging inflation, tapering of GDP growth rates and the unravelling of the infrastructure sector. The state electricity discoms were in financial turmoil and power companies were not able to access the abundant coal reserves due to insufficient coal linkages. The banking sector was also battling a systemic problem of highly stressed assets.

Now, as 2016 begins, the macroeconomic indicators have seen a turn for the better. Inflation, the current account deficit and fiscal deficit have been brought under control. The fiscal deficit which stood at 5.8% in FY12 was brought down to a more manageable 4% in FY15. GDP is also growing steadily on the back of higher infrastructure spending by the government and improving urban consumption.

While there has been a significant improvement in macroeconomic stability, the economy is still not out of the woods completely.

The legacy issues are still festering and need to be removed surgically for the economy to be on a stronger footing. The non-performing assets (NPA) crisis is only getting worse for banks as time is progressing. According to the Financial Stability Report issued by RBI in December, the stressed assets of Public Sector Banks (PSBs) stood at 14.1% for September 2015. This number is extremely worrying and needs to be looked into immediately. The government estimates that around Rs. 1,80,000 crore is required over the course of the next three years to clean up the public banking system. Out of this, the government has set aside Rs. 70,000 crore as recapitalisation amount through its Indradhanush program and expects the PSBs to mop up the remaining amount from domestic and foreign investors by tapping the equity markets.

The recapitalisation of banks is a welcome step but the amount that has been aside is not enough to root out the problem completely.

Expecting investors to perform the heavy lifting required to bail out the banks is leaving too much to chance. The government will have to step up its efforts and allocate more resources to recapitalisation as it is extremely crucial for reinvigorating the economy. This allocation has to be frontloaded as soon as possible to avoid further festering of the NPA crisis. For instance, an extra Rs. 40,000 crore over and above the Indradhanush allocation can be provided in the upcoming budget for FY 17 itself. In this case, outside investors will be more than happy to pitch in with the rest of amount as this move would significantly improve the viability of PSBs. As long as the banks are in distress, it would be difficult for investors to lend support to banks other than marquee ones like State Bank of India and Bank of Baroda.

It can be argued that increasing allocation towards recapitalisation will create further pressure on fiscal deficit targets. But unless the banking sector is unshackled from the burden of its bad loans, it will not be able to contribute as much to growth in GDP. The mid-year economic review states that private investments and exports are lagging behind in driving the economic growth engine. Not much can be done about exports as it is a function of global demand but private investments can be kickstarted if banks have an increased capacity to lend to the corporate sector. An increase in private investments will be able to more than offset the pressures created on the fiscal side as it will provide a boost to GDP growth.

Piecemeal approach won’t help

A slow and steady approach towards cleaning up the banking mess will prove to be counter-productive in the long run even on the fiscal front. If private investments are stalled, the lion’s share of the responsibility of infrastructure building will fall on the shoulders of the government. This will entail further borrowing, which will not help the cause of fiscal consolidation. On the other hand, if growth in credit off-take restarts, then private investments will share the burden of investing in infrastructure sectors like power, roads, ports and non-renewable energy sources. Right now, since the hands of the domestic corporate sector are tied, the government is relying heavily on FDI to fill the gaps in infrastructure funding. But a more holistic and sustainable approach would be to involve private investments to also contribute towards financially viable infrastructure projects.

The funding tap for these projects has been left dry for too long. Hence it becomes all the more essential for banks to start with a clean slate. Bailouts are never a pleasant outcome. But once it becomes necessary, it needs to be undertaken quickly and unflinchingly. If the problem is left untreated for too long it spreads rapidly across the system, like an untreated cancer.

The high NPAs are a grave cause for concern and there is good reason to believe that even the current level of high NPAs may be understated. The kitchen sink cleaning efforts by Bank of Baroda in the previous quarter is a case in point. In such a scenario, banks will be in no mood to lend extensively due to the scarcity of capital. Only a comprehensive bailout package will enable the banks to rekindle the lending spirit.

The electorate provided a decisive mandate to the Modi government in May 2014. The prime minister can ill afford to fritter away this mandate on dealing with legacy issues throughout his five year term. It is time to do away with band aid efforts which may linger for years and instead clinically remove the infestation that is plaguing the banking sector. This is especially important given that the ‘Make in India’ initiative and infrastructure development holds such a prominent place in the NDA’s economic policy.

Limited access to capital will definitely stifle these initiatives. Structural reforms should also be reinforced in the banking sector to ensure that such bailout efforts do not take place in the future. But for now, it is imperative that there be a comprehensive cleanup of stressed banking assets at the earliest.

Smiran Bhandari is the Co-Founder and Managing Partner of Moneyville Financials, a boutique investment banking firm. He tweets at @smiranb

Prohibition Has Never Worked and Never Will

The courts have upheld a ban on liquor in Kerala, but the State should regulate, not prohibit consumption

A file photo of a liquor shop. Credit: PTI

By its judgment in Kerala Bar Hotels Association vs. State of Kerala, delivered on December 29, 2015, a two-Judge bench of the Supreme Court upheld the ban on consumption of liquor in public places in Kerala except in five star Hotels.

Section 15C of the Kerala Abkari Act states : “Consumption in public places. – No person shall consume liquor in any public place unless consumption of liquor in any such place is permitted under a license granted by the Commissioner.

Explanation I—For the purpose of this section, “public place” means any street, Court, Police Station [or other public office or any club] or any place of public amusement or resort or on board any passenger boat or vessel or any [“public passenger or goods vehicle”] or dining or refreshment room in a restaurant, hotel, rest-house, travellers bungalow or tourist bungalow where different individuals or groups of persons consume food but shall not include any private residential room.”

Rule 13(3) of the Abkari Rules framed on August 22, 2014, which exempt five star hotels from the ban, is an exception to Section 15C, and was ostensibly for the purpose of not harming tourism.

The bench referred to the Constitution Bench decision of the Supreme Court in Khoday Distilleries vs. State of Karnataka (1995) 1 S.C.C. 574 which held that there is no fundamental right to trade or do business in liquor, and the state can totally prohibit it in view of Article 47 of the Constitution which states: “The State shall regard the improvement of public health as among its primary duties, and in particular, the State shall endeavour to bring about prohibition of the consumption except for medicinal purposes of intoxicating drinks and of drugs which are injurious to health.”

With all respect, I am against such bans, and am of the opinion that the matter requires reconsideration of the decision in Khoday’s case (supra) and other decisions, by a larger bench of the Supreme Court. In this particular case, of course, the ban was only against drinking in a public place, and not at one’s residence, but the matter has to be examined from a larger perspective.

Lessons of history

Those who support alcohol prohibition point at the dangers of drinking, the lives it has destroyed and the misery it has caused. They no doubt have a point, but that only indicates that alcohol consumption should be regulated in the public interest, not that it be totally prohibited. Historical experience has shown that liquor bans are ineffective and even counter-productive, and only give rise to crime and deaths by consumers drinking illicit liquor. The Mafia arose in America in the 1920s and 1930s because of such a ban there.

Experience has shown that bans seldom work. They just push the alcohol consumption underground which then brings the criminal element into the picture. In the US alcohol was prohibited by the Volstead Act from 1920 to 1933, an era known as Prohibition, which showed why the banning was never a solution. Instead of drinking legally, people started drinking illegally.

There was the added issue of people drinking contraband alcohol which led to deaths sometimes from methyl alcohol poisoning and the law-enforcement system was stretched thin trying to catch the people who sold contraband liquor.

The Prohibition in USA accelerated the rise of the Italian Mafia (romanticised by the novel The Godfather by Mario Puzo and the subsequent Hollywood film, which made supplying contraband liquor its business and once alcohol was legalised, moved on to a host of other avenues. In Bombay it gave rise to the Bombay underworld, and eventually figures like Haji Mastan and Karim Lala, and later Dawood Ibrahim. It also bred corruption among the police, excise officials and politicians.

Ban hurts the poor

The ban on alcohol usually hurts the lowest strata of society the most. In the last decade, over a thousand people have died due to hooch-related issues in West Bengal (156 people in 2011), Gujarat (136 people in 2009), Karnataka and Tamil Nadu (180 dead in 2008), Odisha ( 200 dead in 1992) and the worst in Karnataka in 1981, when over 300 people died due to methyl alcohol poisoning.

As we can see from the Gujarat example, a state which has had prohibition since its inception, the idea has never worked.

Consider Rahi Gaikwad’s description of the situation in the state:

“Gujarat was the first state to implement total prohibition in 1958, but alcohol consumption has been rampant ever since. So is the thriving business of supplying illicit liquor. Gujarat is surrounded by Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh, Maharashtra and Daman and Diu, where there is no prohibition.

“Over the years, “thekas,” or roadside shops, in the neighbouring states have developed strong networks with bootleggers who routinely smuggle liquor from these states bypassing the check-posts at their own risk or in connivance with officials. The bootlegging modus operandi has improved in sophistication and creativity. Liquor crates are usually concealed in milk tankers and trucks and under all kinds of cargo. For distribution, they are transferred to smaller vehicles, which keep changing their number plates. Small local suppliers or assistants of bootleggers, also called “folders,” routinely change their cellphone numbers.”

Rajasthan, Haryana, Chandigarh and Daman are the major sources of illicit liquor coming into Gujarat. Prohibition is a populist measure for the middle classes, but for for the Koli population in the coastal districts of Gujarat, liquor is a staple and they brew it locally.

The smuggling cannot take place without the connivance of politicians and the police. The well-oiled system of “haftas” is the cornerstone of bootlegging. Those in the know say every three to six months, the police orchestrate a raid and intimate the supplier, who keeps nearly 500 bottles ready and puts his small-time staff on duty, who later get bail.” In 2009, the State was rocked by one of its worst hooch tragedies, which claimed 136 lives in Ahmedabad. Now, following in the footsteps of Gujarat and Kerala, Bihar is planning total prohibition.

The judgments upholding liquor ban invariably rely on Article 47 of the Constitution. But Article 47 is not enforceable, as expressly stated in Article 37. Moreover, Article 47 states that the state shall ‘endeavour to bring about prohibition’, and not that it must actually prohibit. Interpretations by the Supreme Court of several provisions in the Constitution, e.g. Articles 14 and 21, have changed from time to time, and we should now adopt a new interpretation of Article 47.

My own interpretation of Article 47 is that it means that the state should regulate drinking, and educate people about the dangers of drinking, and not that it should actually prohibit drinking, as that has proved to be counter productive according to historical experience. The word “prohibition” in Article 47 should therefore receive a purposive and not literal interpretation.

Drinking culture

Drinking has a culture. One must know when to drink, how much to drink, where to drink, and with whom to drink. If one drinks and goes to his workplace in an inebriated condition, that is of course objectionable But if after a day’s hard work one wishes to relax at home in the evening, has a peg or two, then has dinner and goes to bed, I see nothing wrong in that.

To those who object I would like to say, as Sir Toby Belch said to the puritan Malvolio in Shakespeare’s ‘Twelfth Night : “Dost thou think that because thou art virtuous there shall be no more cakes and ale ? “, or as the Urdu poet Akbar Allahabadi said “Hungama kyon hai barpa, thodi si jo pee li hai ? Daaka to nahin daala, chori to nahin ki hai.”

In my opinion what one eats and drinks is part of one’s right to privacy, which has been held to be a fundamental right by our Supreme Court in R.Rajagopal vs. State of Tamilnadu, AIR 1995 S.C. 264. In paragraph 26 of that decision the Court observed: “The right to privacy is implicit in the right to life and liberty guaranteed to the citizens of this country by Article 21. It is a “right to be let alone”. A citizen has a right to safeguard the privacy of his own, his family, marriage, procreation, motherhood, child-bearing and education among other matters.”

It may be noted that the liquor ban laws were only challenged before the Supreme Court on the ground that they violated Articles 14 (equality) and 19(1)(g) (freedom of trade) of the Constitution, but never on the ground of violation of Article 21, probably because that Article had not been earlier expanded by the Court. But now that it has, the ban needs to be tested on this ground. Accordingly, I submit that drinking in moderation even at a public place, but without disturbing public order, is one’s fundamental right, being part of one’s right to privacy.

Justice Markandey Katju is a former judge of the Supreme Court

Note: In an earlier version of this article, the paragraphs quoting Rahi Gaikwad were not attributed.