November 2024 Archives

Who Has the Most to Lose in the Three Senas’ Race for the Marathi Vote?

This is the first time that there has been a split in the Shiv Sena. Then came Raj Thackeray.

The traditional Marathi vote looks to be split three ways for the first time ever, with three parties championing the cause from several constituencies in the upcoming Maharashtra assembly polls.

Raj Thackeray’s Maharashtra Navnirman Sena has thrown its hat in the ring in several key constituencies in and around Mumbai where Shiv Sena’s Shinde faction and the Uddhav Thackeray faction are already battling it out.

After having been virtually out in the cold for a while – largely thanks to supporting the wrong party or simply not paying enough attention to the polls – Raj Thackeray appears to be taking electoral politics seriously this time. He is also keen to introduce his son Amit to electoral politics.

Raj is famously the cousin of former chief minister Uddhav Thackeray. His arrival in earnest could upset the calculations of Uddhav’s Sena, which is a part of the opposition Maha Vikas Aghadi. The Bharatiya Janata Party-dominated Mahayuti’s hopes will also have to tackle with a new reality.

In the 2009 Lok Sabha elections, Raj’s party had entered in the electoral fray in Mumbai, Thane, and Nashik regions, and the
development had hit the Shiv Sena-BJP alliance hard in several seats there. This had led to a bonanza for Congress as Raj’s party could not win a single seat but played a role in reducing votes for the BJP and the then undivided Shiv Sena.

Observers believe that this time will see a tighter race in key seats in the assembly polls, with Congress and BJP’s back-of-the-envelope calculations going haywire.

A split in the Marathi votes helps the BJP more than any party in the state. This is because it was the main hurdle in its expansion plans as a pan-Maharashtra party.

Also read: Ally Hopping, Assuaging Leaders: Maharashtra’s Seat-Sharing Troubles Reflect Changing Politics

Raj’s entry could affect the plans of Uddhav – as well as incumbent Eknath Shinde – to become the next chief minister. Uddhav’s
party believes that he is the rightful claimant for chief ministership of the MVA, but others in the alliance are not too keen.

BJP has risen in Maharashtra by riding pillion behind Bal Thackeray and his legacy more than three decades. The late BJP leader Pramod Mahajan had rightly realised that such a strategy would alone take the party on the fast lane. Till then, the BJP was known as a “shetji–bhatji” party for Brahmins and the business class and had not spread much to the Maharashtrian countryside. BJP’s conscious attempts at social engineering also helped its spread in the then-Congress-dominated state.

An epicentre for the triangular race among the three Senas is best seen in Mahim, where Amit Thackeray is the candidate of MNS, which has the railway engine as its symbol. Sada Sarvankar of the Shinde Sena is the sitting MLA, who has been renominated. It also has Mahesh Sawant as the Shiv Sena (UBT) candidate.

Similarly, in nearby Worli, Aditya Thackeray, son of Uddhav, has been renominated and is being opposed by Sandeep Deshpande, a senior MNS leader. Shinde Sena has sprang a surprise by announcing plans to field former Union minister Milind Deora against Aditya.

Some believe that whatever might be their public posture, both Sena led by Uddhav and the MNS led by Raj would ensure that the two
Thackerays in the fray – Aditya and Amit – romp home comfortably, as it is a question of the prestige of the Thackeray family.

Bala Nandgaonkar, a close associate of Raj, spoke recently on the prospects of Uddhav and Raj eventually coming together.

All three Senas vouch for the betterment of the Marathi manoos and all of them have been or projected themselves as staunch champions of Hindutva in order to widen their regional appeal. For all the three Senas, Bal Thackeray, who founded the Shiv Sena over six decades ago, is a venerable figure.

While Uddhav and Raj Thackeray still prioritise the Marathi vote, the Congress believes in Maratha more than Marathi in elections, and the BJP has nothing to do with either Marathi or Maratha because it fails to attract both.

Ironically, Raj Thackeray’s party is friendly with the BJP, which has not given up its demand of a separate Vidarbha state, to which the
Sena is fiercely opposed. Shinde’s Shiv Sena is forced to focus more on ‘Hindu’ Maratha than Marathi manoos to please ‘elder brother’ BJP.

The election, scheduled for November 20, will decide which of the Shiv Senas is the real Sena. Uddhav insists that he is the real inheritor of his father’s legacy and no one else has the right to lay claim to it. Shinde, on the other hand, claims that he is following the brand of Hindutva propounded by Bal Thackeray, who was a staunch opponent of the Congress. Thackeray, by joining hands with the grand old party, has compromised on the ideals and ideology of his late father, Shinde says.

This is the first time that there has been a split in the Shiv Sena, unlike in the past few decades, which saw Chhagan Bhujbal, Narayan Rane, and Raj Thackeray leaving with their supporters. Raj did not cause a split in the party but set up his own MNS.

The MNS’s best electoral performance came in 2009, when it won 13 of 143 contested seats. However, in the next two elections, the party could only manage a single seat each time. In 2019, the MNS secured just one seat but finished as the runner-up in 10 constituencies, signalling its potential relevance in close races this time around.

The assembly seats where MNS came in second are Kothrud, Shivadi, Mahim, Ghatkopar East, Bhandup West, Mulund, Magathane, Thane, Dombivali, and Bhiwandi Rural (Scheduled Tribe reserved).

It would be trouble either for Uddhav or Shinde depending upon who takes the lead among the two Senas in the most fiercely fought
electoral battle in Maharashtra so far.

The Power of Writing

Ta-Nehisi Coates in his new book, ‘The Message’, would like us to believe that stories can offer us serious redemption in these unsettling times.

Ta-Nehisi Coates in his new book of essays, The Message, offers us an eloquent defence of why writing matters most as a political gesture. It is a compelling read, structured around four beautifully crafted essays on diverse themes – the true calling of journalism, the place of Africa in the world, the challenges of censorship and the Israeli state’s ‘apartheid’ vis-à-vis the Palestinians.

Coates breaks fresh ground on each of these counts in his own persuasive idiom. The essays demonstrate empathy, nuance and attention to facts in equal measure. Although the themes are substantive, the style is accessible and a pleasure to engage with.

Ta-Nehisi Coates,
The Message,
Published by One World (October 2024).

The opening essay is titled ‘Journalism is not a luxury’. It advances a number of thoughtful propositions but I shall confine myself to three. The first is an admission by Coates that for writers emerging from a particular historical and intellectual crucible ‘…there can be no real distance between writing and politics’. Coates tells us something about his debt to Afro-American traditions of thinking. It was Howard University in particular that instilled in him the urgency and value of working towards an ‘emancipatory mandate’. The challenges and trajectories of these emancipatory projects could transform over time, but Coates recognises that there is always work to be done. The dismantling of ‘easy bromides’ and ‘national fictions’ remains an incessant task that journalists must dedicate themselves to. The Message needs to ring home in contemporary India.

Second, Coates argues that ‘…what must be cultivated and cared for must first be seen’. The task of the writer here is to render palpable what has oftentimes been hidden from view. Illustratively, ‘…it should do the work of illuminating, of confronting and undoing, the violence…’ witnessed from close quarters. Coates embarks on an interesting distinction between two kinds of writers. The first who can conjure worlds from ‘imagination’, the second who have to rely much more on tangible ‘knowledge’ to advance their claims. He lets us know that he belongs to the latter category and is keen to secure knowledge to excavate a truth. In other words, The Message here is not to hesitate to dig deep and get into the trenches whenever and wherever warranted.

Third, Coates also identifies another stellar quality of good journalistic writing, namely the capacity to ‘haunt’ the reader. Readers must feel an irrepressible urge to ‘…think about your words before bed, see them manifest in their dreams, tell their partner about them the next morning, to have them grab random people on the street, shake them and say, “Have you read this yet?”’. This is a high bar for most writers, but when it does meet the criterion, it elevates your being. The best of journalistic prose embodies a visceral dimension.

In ‘On Pharaohs’, Coates embarks on a journey to discover his ancestry and the story behind his name. He travels to Dakar in Senegal and laments the many misplaced claims of western commentators with deep racial biases, who are bent on portraying Africa in unpalatable terms. Coates spends some time examining the anxieties of these racists in conceding that there is a Black Egypt or a Black civilisation. They cannot come to terms with Senegalese physical beauty. Nor can they extricate themselves from their unexamined premises of colonialism, enslavement, racial stereotyping and most sadly, the denial of humanity to the people of Africa. White supremacy, we learn from Coates, is not without ‘…its syllabus, its corpus, its canon’.

The Message also carries a riveting account of what transpired in Chapin, South Carolina when it comes to a book ban. A school teacher who is keen to expose students to Ta-Nehisi Coates’ book Between the World and Me invites attention and flak for transgressing her ‘Advanced Placement English’ teaching brief. Coates offers us an alternate account of American history through the work of Nikole Hannah-Jones, author of The 1619 Project, which traces the origin story of the United States to slavery. Coates focuses on pieces of legislation like Executive Order 13950 which takes censorship to draconian proportions. The murder of George Floyd, the hostility towards critical race theory and the attempt to coral our future through regressive legal and political decisions, all secure the attention they merit in this narrative arc. For some readers, Coates’ own struggles with ADHD in school and the acknowledgment that ‘…all readers do not come to a text equally’ may indeed be liberating on a more fundamental plane.

The best is always saved for the last. Coates’ final essay, ‘The Gigantic Dream’, takes us on a journey from Yad Vashem through a variety of checkpoints in Gaza, the West Bank and Tel Aviv. What is fascinating in this account is the recognition of a common cause among Palestinian freedom fighters and radical Black activists in their evaluation of layers of oppression and their struggles to combat it. Imperialism authored by the United States with local chapters (Israel) is a running thread in this essay. It weaves its way through stories of Confederate flags, slavery, settler colonialism, the nakba, communal intimacy and the deliberate ‘erasures’ of Palestinians in a ‘Jewish democracy’ (Israel) and Blacks in another democracy (the United States). This is an invitation to take a leaf out and ask how Dalits, religious and sexual minorities fare in Indian democracy. Sceptical of the smokescreen of ‘objectivity’ in journalism, Coates reminds us of the vital need to recount ‘other stories’ that only writers with deeper political convictions can bring to bear from the margins of the world. These stories count and good writers, Coates would like us to believe, can offer us serious redemption in these unsettling times.

A final nugget from the book that is worth sharing. Coates claims that ‘…you can see the world and still not see the people in it’. This is a genuine possibility. If you listen to a more boisterous slice of the Indian middle class, it is not hard to discern that many have precisely accomplished this. They have learnt little from their travels and lapse into their ethnocentric habits of mind without self-reflexivity. The challenge is not to replicate this blindness in our classrooms. It is to ensure that a new generation of Indians learn to ‘see’ better than this and appreciate the nuances of political writing and its possible afterlives. The Message provides us an excellent vantage point for this self-reflection.

Siddharth Mallavarapu is Professor of International Relations and Governance Studies at the Shiv Nadar Institution of Eminence. Views are personal.

Is the FSSAI’s Hands-Off Approach Poisoning our Food this Diwali?

In many parameters from ghee to spices to edible oils, the FSSAI has failed to be effective and work in the interest of consumers. The price of FSSAI’s inefficacy is paid by all of us.

The alleged mixing of animal fats in ghee used at Tirupati Temple shocked the nation. No one asked a simple question: If ghee was being contaminated on such a scale, what was the national food safety regulator, FSSAI, doing?

The entire mandate of the Food Safety & Standards Authority of India is to prevent food adulteration. But it seems they are way behind the curve in preventing food contamination of any kind. Forget street food, FSSAI has repeatedly failed to curb adulteration at all levels including big corporates.

This fact is recognised by state governments too, hence Uttar Pradesh brought a special law against contamination of food with human waste. One would imagine if a state government has had to bring a special law in 2024 just to enforce food hygiene 101 this clearly indicates that the FSSAI has failed to curb food adulteration in practice and principle.

Also read: UP to Bring in New Stringent Law Against Contamination of Food With Spit, Human Waste

Let us look at some other instances. Reportedly the UP state food inspection team caught 400 kgs of stone powder being mixed in flour in Aligarh. Stone powder is a waste product from mines and stone processing factories and often times contains highly toxic substances which may cause stomach trouble and even cancer. This was one such instance. Imagine how many more greedy mill owners are working round the clock to poison our rotis.

But its not only stone powder, our food is adulterated with urea and paint for many years now and governments have pushed the issue under the carpet. When we look at the case of milk adulteration, the trends have only gone up. From ghee to sweets, India uses a lot of milk. But if the milk is contaminated can we expect the ghee and other products to be safe?

Inflation, scarcity and greed have prompted farmers and traders to use chemicals like urea to dilute milk. Whether we look at Punjab, Gujarat, Odisha, Maharashtra, etc. it is clear that milk there is highly adulterated and governments have failed to prevent this. The hormone overload in milk products is another major problem in India.

Adulteration of milk sweets during Diwali and other festivals has become a local trend each year. Experts have pointed out improper enforcement lies at the heart of this problem. There are many examples from Modi’s Gujarat where, in the last 15 days alone, contaminated food worth Rs 6.3 crore was seized. It is difficult to estimate how much more contaminated food is floating around the country.

Now moving from the unorganised sector to big corporates. The biggest name of course is Nestle, that was reportedly selling Maggi with excessive lead in it. What penalties were imposed on them? Were millions of Indians who are Maggi during this period ever compensated? The issue is very serious as children are big consumers of Maggi and lead poisoning during childhood could seriously hamper their neurological health. But like most corporates, the polluter here escaped fair punishment.

More recently, about 800 kgs of spurious tomato sauce were seized. The fake sauce has formalin, synthetic colouring agents, arrowroot powder, etc. Keep in mind that most tomato sauce is made by big and medium scale factories, which are all regulated under FSSAI, yet due to gaps in enforcement they are being allowed to contaminate the food they produce.

When we look at FSSAI’s performance in checking adulteration in spices, it is safe to say FSSAI fails all tests. Common household spices like chilli powder, turmeric, coriander powder, etc are heavily contaminated with cancerous materials like ethylene oxide. The EU has has also raised serious concerns about chilli powder and peppercorn from India. Even big brands like MDH and Everest are under scrutiny for mixing carcinogenic substances. Many Indian spice consignments are rejected each year from the USA, EU and other developed countries due to their toxicity.

Still, the FSSAI and the government are shying away from punishing the culprits and saving the health of Indians. Spices are an everyday item of consumption and many ailments are also treated with these household spices. If manufacturers are allowed to sell adulterated spices, public health will be a major casualty.

The last instance of FSSAI’s questionable scientific position I will talk about is the cottonseed oil. Contrary to scientific studies, the FSSAI allows for free blending of GM cottonseed oil in all our food and vegetable oils. They treat GM cottonseed oil the same as natural cottonseed oil. This is wrong on many fronts. First, it is allowing for GMOs to enter our bodies through oil even though India doesn’t allow GM food crops. Second, instead of insisting on true labelling, FSSAI is duping the consumer. It is taking away our right to know if our food has GM ingredients or not. In most EU countries and other developed nations, cottonseed oil will either not be allowed to enter their food systems or will carry a clear warning or label indicating that a particular food item has GMOs. The FSSAI brushes the issue in a haughty manner, playing to the GM lobbyists’ tune. If one analyses the biosafety documents for BT cotton at the Ministry of Environment and Climate Change, we find they are based on Monsanto data and the safety data is also provided by Monsanto and FSSAI has not conducted any tests to verify biosafety independently.

So, in many parameters from ghee to spices to edible oils, the FSSAI has failed to be effective and work in the interest of consumers. The price of FSSAI’s inefficacy is paid by all of us. It is time FSSAI takes its mandate seriously.

Indra Shekhar Singh is an independent agri-policy analyst and writer. He was the former director for policy and outreach at NSAI. He also hosts The Wire’s agriculture talk show, Krishi ki Baat/Farm Talks. He tweets at @indrassingh.

This piece was first published on The India Cable – a premium newsletter from The Wire & Galileo Ideas – and has been updated and republished here. To subscribe to The India Cable, click here.