Chinese Takeaway: Border Paradox

As it looks at the southwestern frontiers with India and its neighbours in the subcontinent, China stares at a paradox. China has ambitious plans to develop mega trans-border projects with Myanmar in the east and Pakistan in the west. China has already built a twin pipeline system running from Myanmar’s Bay of Bengal coast to the Yunnan province. It is now ready to pour massive resources into the development of a Pakistan-China economic corridor. China has long seen Myanmar and Pakistan as gateways to the Indian Ocean.

Beijing has a settled boundary with Myanmar and has no arguments with Pakistan about their frontier. But political turbulence has made China’s borders with Myanmar and Pakistan increasingly insecure. Despite anxieties on frequent incursions across the disputed portions of the Sino-Indian border, there is no violence on the undemarcated Line of Actual Control that separates Indian and Chinese forces in the Himalayas. Yet, there has been no serious effort to change the economic nature of the Sino-Indian frontier.

In India’s east, the ongoing war between Yangon and ethnic Chinese rebels, called the Kokang, in northern Myanmar has spilled over into the bordering Yunnan province in China. Earlier this month, the two sides agreed to jointly investigate an incident in which Myanmarese bombs fell on the Chinese side of the border, killing a few farmers. This has put Beijing in a dilemma. Beijing can’t appear to be soft in the face of presumed violations of its territorial sovereignty. Chinese leaders also can’t be seen as doing nothing when ethnic Chinese groups are a target of state violence. At the same time, a muscular response will inflame nationalism in Myanmar and make matters worse. It will add Myanmar to the list of Asian countries, including Japan, the Philippines and Vietnam, which have deepening border disputes with China. Beijing had tried in the past to mediate between the Myanmar government and the Kokang.

To our west, China is troubled by the deepening turbulence in Afghanistan and Pakistan, and its impact on the stability of the Xinjiang province, where Muslim Uighurs have become increasingly restive. In order to secure its southwestern frontiers, China is expanding its involvement in the Afghan peace process. It is trying to facilitate a dialogue between the Afghan government and the Taliban, and promote reconciliation between Kabul and Rawalpindi.But Myanmar does not see China as a neutral party and believes there is considerable support from across the Chinese border to the Kokang.

Many analysts around the world believe that Beijing is in a much better position than Washington to nudge all parties towards peace in Afghanistan, given its special relationship with Pakistan — often described as “higher than the Himalayas and deeper than the Indian Ocean”. Others are not so certain. They see the Pakistan army using China to promote Rawalpindi’s interests across the Durand Line, rather than China’s. Put simply, China could merely end up replacing America as Rawalpindi’s new sucker in Afghanistan.

Money and Love
Recent developments in Myanmar and Sri Lanka have undermined the proposition that China can buy political love in the subcontinent by simply investing large sums of money in mega infrastructure projects. It has been conventional wisdom for a while that China is the closest external partner to Yangon and Colombo. But internal political change in both countries has put some key Chinese projects on hold. Uncertainty in Beijing’s bilateral political relations with Yangon and Colombo has inevitably followed.

More broadly, China’s cheque-book diplomacy and project-building in distant lands have come under stress as many of its partners — from Ukraine to Venezuela and Ecuador to Argentina — drift into financial straits and find themselves unable to repay loans. Meanwhile, others in Sri Lanka have questioned the terms and viability of Chinese-supported projects.

Massive hard currency reserves and excess industrial capacity at home, it appeared, had put Beijing in a powerful position to take up ambitious infrastructure projects beyond its borders. But politics and economics continue to complicate the translation of Chinese assets into concrete outcomes.

India Option
As New Delhi and Beijing seek a productive economic agenda for Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s visit to China in May, there is no way of missing the fit between China’s capacities and India’s infrastructure needs, both at home and across borders. While China has been seeking India’s support for its Silk Road initiatives, Delhi has been reluctant to get on board. Modi, however, has signalled a more open approach to economic engagement with China.

Unlike many other countries where China is making risky investments, Delhi is a more credible long-term economic partner for Beijing. If China is ready for a genuine consultative approach with India and is willing to facilitate serious tie-ups between companies in both countries, Modi should embrace President Xi Jinping’s Silk Road initiative.

#Reservations, questions

The Supreme Court judgment in Ram Singh and Ors vs Union of India is a welcome check on the arbitrary ways in which caste groups have been included in the #OBC lists. The judgment recognises that the demand for inclusion is driven in some cases by the pure political power of a group. Such inclusions make a mockery of reservations. They deny other backward groups fair opportunity. They muddy the normative objective of reservation policy. By insisting on standards of justification, the judgment will hopefully slow down the tendency to indiscriminately include politically powerful groups under the OBC ambit. The judgment is salutary in its appreciation of changing social realities and the need for more sophistication in thinking about the criteria used to include new groups. But in this judgment, and other recent ones, there are new frameworks struggling to come out. The implications of these frameworks are not clear.

The first is the framework of historical injustice. In one careful formulation, the court says that keeping in mind “only historical injustice would certainly result in under-protection of the most deserving class of backward citizens”. But in a slightly more far-reaching formulation, it says the “attention of the state must be concentrated to discover such [meaning new] groups rather than to enable groups of citizens to recover ‘lost ground’ in claiming preference or benefits on the basis of historical prejudice”. In the context of this case, this is a surprising claim. Historical injustice was never the dominant argument in the case of OBCs. They managed to appropriate a narrative of victimhood and discrimination that, in the fullest measure, belonged to Dalits. That even the Supreme Court manages to conflate them is a measure of the success of that ideological appropriation. The scope of the court’s claim is not clear. Presumably, it does not mean that historical injustice is not sufficient for SCs. If interpreted in the broad way that it is written then the judgment is not just a rationalisation of who gets included in the OBC category; it could be the first judicial step in dismantling the current structure of SC reservation. But the distinction between SCs and OBCs should remain judicially important.

The second issue is the knowledge production framework on caste. One of the issues in contention was whether the government could override the recommendations of the National Commission for Backward Classes (NCBC). Under the NCBC Act, the government can override the recommendations of the commission, provided it has compelling reasons. The court did not find the government’s reasons compelling. Part of the issue at stake is, who is the authoritative producer of knowledge on this subject? There are many entities: professional academic studies, commissioned agencieslike the Indian Council of Social Science Research (ICSSR), previous government reports, the NCBC itself as an arbiter of knowledge, submissions by citizens themselves and, in the final analysis, the court taking a call on whether certain reasons are compelling in light of available knowledge. Part of what seems to be at play is the way in which none of these institutions seems to establish its credibility; each is impugning the other on some ground. The NCBC does not trust some academic surveys, ostensibly because they were biased (in a conflation of reason and identity, if a Jat does a survey on Jats, it appears to be suspicious). The state governments weigh knowledge differently, the ICSSR is non-committal, citizen data has to be mediated and finally the Supreme Court decides, without argument, that 10-year-old data cannot be validly invoked (the court clearly has no sense of just how difficult empirical research is).

But there is a deeper problem. There is a range of criteria for backwardness at play, from economic power to social mores. The question of what weight to allot different criteria depends on your assumptions about social change and normative commitments. The significance of data is not independent of a framework. These are never made explicit in a methodologically rigorous way. The court has decided the government cannot be trusted mediate between different knowledge producing entities. But is there any reason to suppose that the court is in any better position? This point is of wider relevance since the court is now doing so much knowledge mediation, without the tools to do so.

The third area is the framework of categories that capture backwardness. In both Ram Singh and the now notorious K.P. Manu vs Chairman Scrutiny Committee, the court seems to be pushing this thought. There are deprived and discriminated groups that are not captured by our traditional categories of caste, nor are those groups confined to one religion. Transgenders are cited as one example. What conceptual framework, beyond caste and religion, will capture them? Manu, however, was caught in other absurdities, that a “reconvert” can claim their former caste status if the “former” caste accepts them back into their fold. Whether or not you are entitled to reservation in this instance depends, not on discrimination and deprivation, but on whether a community accepts you back into its fold. This is distinctly odd. But along with Ram Singh, it is acknowledging the need for new categories.

The court hints at a new paradigm of backwardness that, while not ignoring caste, goes beyond it. It does not want backwardness to be based on perception. Backwardness cannot be determined merely on the basis of comparison with existing groups in flawed lists. More intriguingly, it says backwardness cannot be based on “mathematical formulae evolved by taking into account social, economic or educational indicators”. It is not clear what this means. It seems to rule out most current methodologies for identifying backwardness. On one interpretation, the court seems to be saying that in aproper reservation scheme, mere underrepresentation, though relevant, should not be sufficient. There has to be some judgement on the causes. A community that remains backward because misogyny prevents female education requires different remedies from a community actively discriminated against. But how much space is it opening up for new criteria? Rakesh Basant has, for example, proposed that the level of parents’ education is a good predictor of opportunity and is also easy to operationalise as a criteria for who should get benefits. Would that pass these tests?

In its plea to identify new groups rather than historical ones, the court seems to be moving towards the thought that discrimination needs to be part of the judgement of which groups are entitled. But the irony of reservations is that it counted heads, but never tackled the problem of discrimination. The only thing certain about the reservation debate is that every judgment opens more questions than it answers.

The postmodern #leader

It is a measure of Lee Kuan Yew’s stature that he has, to use W.H. Auden’s phrase for Sigmund Freud, become a whole climate of opinion. The achievements are easy to list. Here was a leader who transformed a tiny resource-starved patch of land that was wrecked by race riots into a nation — a prosperous and relatively meritocratic economic powerhouse with a sense of order and purpose. He gave Singapore an unusual degree of civic identity, which allowed it to navigate the triple challenges of multiculturalism, transition to modernity and the treacherous shoals of international politics. Singapore, unlike many other regimes, became a sort of model that many wanted to emulate. It has punched far above its weight. The criticisms are also easy to articulate. Lee was no democrat or defender of liberty. He was impatient with democratic checks and balances, exuberance and unruliness. He often displayed a clever ruthlessness that would have done Machiavelli proud.

For all its economic dynamism and strong civic commitment, Singapore feels like an economic Sparta to many. It has the completeness of a state that has probably eschewed the complexity of human nature. Some, like The Economist, wonder what Lee would have done had fate dealt him a bigger power to lead. But equally, there is the quip, probably apocryphal, attributed to Deng Xiaoping, that Lee would have made a capable mayor of a Chinese city. What one makes of him depends partly on what one makes of the Singapore experience. But also partly on what one makes of the modern democratic experience.

Like all leaders, Lee had an unusual sense of authenticity and purpose. He created that rare thing: a sense of public purpose in the state. Singapore is famous for its economic liberalism. But behind that was the recognition that a competent economy requires a deeply competent state. Unlike our reformers, for whom reform means delegitimising the state, Lee thought that the state needed to establish its authority through sheer achievement. But what makes him an inescapable figure is not just the important achievement of creating modern Singapore. The reason he draws so much attention is that he represents, in many ways, modernity’s unfulfilled subconscious, something that both attracts and repels at the same time.

The elements of this subconscious of modernity are plenty. Lee is often derided for creating a muscular, punitive state: harassing political opponents out of existence, equipped with strong penal traditions and a disciplinarian culture. But in a way, even the most advanced democracies have not escaped the tension between democracy and a strong state. And faced with challenges, many have opted for the latter. In an age where democracies have total surveillance, detention without trial, mass incarceration systems as in the United States, an inability to control civil society violence and deep regulation of public protest, Lee’s repression often benefits by comparison. The West loved to hate him, not because he was repressive, but because he managed to create an attractive version of soft authoritarianism. He stood his ground and, in doing so, questioned the very hypocrisy at the heart of so many established democracies.

The second element of this modernity is this: it requires lowering expectations from politics. The modern democratic project was premised on the idea that if we take controversial subjects like religion off the political agenda, we could create peaceful societies. We will disagree on redemption and all such grand claims, but we could probably agree on more mundane earthly matters like keeping the peace, security and economic wellbeing. In a sense, Singapore was a kind of radicalisation of that model. You could keep the peace by concentrating on some basic ingredients of prosperity — focus on bread and eschew the circus. Of course, just like keeping religion out of politics involves constantly policing the boundaries of what is permissible, keeping controversy and division out of the political arena also required constant policing. It is easy to say, let us focus on basic instrumental goods like prosperity. But it is harder to admit that producing a culture that believes that about itself, that is pragmatic in this sense, also requires a wholescale cultural transformation. That is exactly what Lee grasped and produced.

The third feature of modernity that he radicalised was an instrumentalism about culture itself. He used to be described as an Englishman; then he became the stand-in for Confucian values. He was probably neither. Lee was ruthlessly functional and instrumental in the elements of culture he appropriated. If English could give Singapore a common lingua franca and open it to the world, so be it. If Confucian discipline was a good brand to sell, bring it on. If Indian unruliness could be re-coded as a sign of inventiveness, why not? All of Asia has undergone a deep transition to modernity. But it is hard to think of many places that have both appropriated cultures and denuded them of any deep historical significance. More than a harbinger of Asian values, Lee was a quintessential postmodern figure. Culture was an instrument to be used, not a weight to be carried. It is perhaps not an accident that Singapore is one of the few places in Asia that is still not burdened, at least in self-conception, by the weight of its historical past. It is also perhaps not an accident that this very virtue strikes many as its weakness. The lack of historical resentment, unusual in Asia, has made it pragmatically open. On the other hand, it also projects a sense of culture that has too few layers that can be articulated, even if the individual biographies are interesting.

Lee, opinionated, clever, insightful, frank and deeply pragmatic, was a significant figurebecause he had the power of an idea behind him. That idea holds a mirror to modern civilisation. At one level, a polity that is pragmatic, eschews historical depth, focuses on material wellbeing and individual physical security, is driven by an acute knowledge of a modern economy and keeps out debilitating dissent is a deeply attractive one. For societies burdened by too much history, too much otherworldly stuff, physical insecurity, a tendency to dissolve economics into metaphysics, and where the line between dissent and sheer rancour is never clear, such a vision is indeed attractive. Lee’s greatest achievement was to make such a vision workable and attractive. But how much of that vision will still remain attractive will depend on how Singapore endures its next, and more deepening, round of political challenges.

Reservations are not just about quotas

We need to question the equation of reservation with the redressal of caste inequality not because reservation is no longer needed but because it is no longer enough

The learned judges of the Supreme Court who quashed the Central government’s notification granting Other Backward Classes (OBC) status to the Jat community in nine States seem to have had an easy job. The court reached the obvious conclusion given that the impugned notification was passed the day before the announcement of the 2014 general election, that it was opposed by the National Commission for Backward Classes (NCBC), and that the government’s legally dubious overruling of the NCBC was not backed by compelling evidence. But while the operative part of the judgment is beyond reproach, its comments on caste and reservations are cause for concern.

Prejudice against reservation

Though they are neither quite obiter dicta nor simply wrong, the court’s opinions reinforce, rather than question, the misleading half-truths of common sense. Towards the end of their judgment, Justices Ranjan Gogoi and Rohinton F. Nariman expand on their ratio to make two assertions. In paragraph 53, they argue that while “caste may be a prominent and distinguishing factor for easy determination of backwardness of a social group”, such determination must not be made “solely on the basis of caste”, and that identifying the “most deserving” groups “must necessarily be a matter of continuous evolution,” requiring the state to look beyond caste. This is followed in paragraph 54 with the declaration that backwardness cannot be a matter of perception, and then the baffling assertion that it cannot be determined by “social, economic and educational indicators” either. Taken in conjunction with the striking example of transgenders as a group deserving special consideration (paragraph 53), these assertions are likely to fuel the dominant prejudice against reservation.

The powerful upper caste prejudice against reservations that pervades the public sphere is based on three equations or conflations, all of which are encouraged by this court judgment.

The first is the equation of a specific case such as that of reservation for Jats — which the court has rightly rejected — with the case for reservation as such. The second is the equation of the larger issue of redressal of caste inequalities with a single policy — that of reservation. The third is the equation of reservation with a welfare programme, and it is the most pernicious and complicated of the three.

Perception and social contract

In the upper caste imagination, reservation is indelibly branded as a welfare programme giving handouts to a set of caste-marked “beneficiaries”. From this perspective, those who receive this benefit — the “reserved category” — are deviant exceptions who fall outside the normal or ‘general category’ of caste-less citizens which constitutes the nation. It is this caste-less nation that gives reservation to certain castes to compensate for the “historical wrongs” done to them in the distant past, and to help them overcome their backwardness. Only when reservation is understood in this way can we make sense of objections such as: How long will reservations continue? Why is caste and not economic need the criterion? And of forms of protest, such as a symbolic polishing of shoes and sweeping of streets by youth wearing stethoscopes or lab coats that reservation provokes from the upper castes.

From such a vantage point, it is impossible to see that the true origins of reservation lie in a promise of good faith that forms the core of the social contract on which our nation is founded. Reservation is a pre-Independence policy inaugurated by the Government of India Act of 1935, which created the schedules listing so-called Scheduled Castes (SC) and Scheduled Tribes (ST). The policy itself is the outcome of the Poona Pact between Gandhi and Ambedkar, in which the latter was forced to withdraw the claim by untouchable castes to a separate electorate in return for guaranteed representation in the legislature and the broad assurance that the nation, represented by Gandhi and the Congress, would do everything in its power to end untouchability and caste discrimination. Thus, reservation is a fundamentally political promise made in acknowledgement of the fact that caste literally excludes sizeable communities from Indian society. Since independence is demanded in the name of the Indian nation, and since the modern nation is supposed to be an egalitarian form of community, the Poona Pact is a compromise whereby the untouchables agree to forego their demand for a nation (electorate) of their own and be part of the larger nation in spite of their caste exclusion. In short, reservation is intended to be the response, from a nationalist movement led by the upper castes, to the bitter truth in Ambedkar’s poignant statement: “Gandhiji, I have no homeland.”

Beyond welfare

From this perspective, reservation cannot be equated to this or that welfare benefit, since it is intended to be something incomparably larger — the promise of full citizenship. The degree to which this promise is fulfilled automatically decides the duration of the policy. Reservation should cease to exist from the day that discrimination, oppression and gross inequalities based on caste cease to exist, because all castes would then have full citizenship. Note that such a policy is not about “historical wrongs” in the dim past, but about contemporary forms of caste inequality, and that replacing caste with economic criteria misses the whole point of caste discrimination that exists in varied forms across all classes. Wider acceptance of this interpretation of reservation is blocked not only by the natural antipathy of the upper castes, but also by two other difficulties.

The first stems from the need to convert the abstract promise of full citizenship into concrete reality, a conversion that inevitably requires specific entitlements to be created for specific castes. This in turn encourages already prejudiced observers to equate the policy with material benefits unjustly awarded to an undeserving interest group freeriding on the populist compulsions of electoral politics. The second difficulty has to do with the deep intermeshing of the social and economic dimensions of caste discrimination and the related conundrum of evaluating the empirical and legal similarities and differences among the SCs, the STs and the OBCs.

For a rethink

To cut a long and complex story short, the key issue here is that of framing and contextualisation. It is certainly true that the reservation policy as it exists today is deeply flawed and in need of radical rethinking. But this rethinking needs to be framed against the vital need — more urgent today than ever before — to confront the ugly reality of continuing caste discrimination, oppression and exclusion all along the hierarchy. We need to question the equation of reservation with the redressal of caste inequality not because reservation is no longer needed but because it is no longer enough — we need to do much more to tackle the resilient mutations of caste prejudice. And we must react to the misuse of reservation (as in the Jat case) as we would to malpractice in any other vital area of public policy. For example, the proper response to corruption in defence procurement cannot be to dismantle the defence sector itself.

Two days after it reported the Jat judgment, this daily had a report (March 19, 2015) with the heading, “Caste determines spending on food, choice of work: NSSO,” but few readers would have made the connection. The problem with caste today is that most of the people who matter don’t get it because they think they don’t have it.

Ecologist #MadhavGadgil wins Tyler Prize

Renowned ecologist Madhav Gadgil has been chosen for the prestigious 2015 Tyler Prize for Environmental Achievement.

The prize, instituted in 1973, is awarded by the international Tyler Prize Executive Committee with the administrative support of the University of Southern California.

Prof. Gadgil, who was Chairman of the Western Ghats Ecology Expert Panel (WGEEP), will share the $200,000 cash prize with noted American marine ecologist Dr. Jane Lubchenco for their work in changing policy and specifically for their “leadership and engagement in the development of conservation and sustainability policies in the United States, India and internationally”, said a release issued by the University of Southern California on Monday.

Both winners will receive the prize and a gold medallion at a private ceremony in Beverly Hills, Los Angeles on April 24. The day before, Dr. Lubchenco and Dr. Gadgil will deliver public lectures on their work at The Forum at the University of Southern California.

“Both of these laureates have bridged science with cultural and economic realities - like the impact on indigenous peoples in India or fishing communities in the United States - to advance the best possible conservation policies,” said the release.

Prof. Gadgil’s landmark report on the preservation of the unique ecosystem of the Western Ghats and the inclusion of local committees was especially noted as the reason behind his award that recognised his engagement with the public and other academic fields to “position him as a leading voice on environmental issues in India.”

Also noted were Dr. Gadgil’s contributions behind the crafting of India’s National Biodiversity Act, 2002.

Dr. Lubchenco, who was recently named first-ever U.S. Science Envoy for the Ocean by the United States Department of State, gets the award for her dedication to raising awareness of the importance of the ocean and the need to protect ocean ecosystems, notably during her tenure from 2009 to 2013 as administrator of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).

The award commended her drive and passion in restoring fisheries and improving ocean health, which culminated in the unique “catch share” model – an alternative rights-based approach to fisheries attempting to change the economic incentives for fishermen that has been adopted by a number of regional fishery management councils in Alaska, along the Pacific Coast, the Gulf of Mexico and other regions across the American seaboard.

PM Narendra Modi launches #PRAGATI platform for redressal of grievances

Prime Minister Narendra Modi on 25 March 2015 launched Pro-Active Governance and Timely Implementation (PRAGATI) platform. PRAGATI is a multi-purpose and multi-modal platform aimed at addressing grievances of common man. It also aims at simultaneously monitoring and reviewing important Union government programmes and projects as well as projects flagged by State Governments. It is an innovative project in e-governance and good governance and accountability with real-time presence and information exchange among the key stakeholders.

 Key features of PRAGATI 

Designed in-house by the Prime Minister’s Office (PMO) team with the help of National Informatics Center (NIC). Uniquely bundles three latest technologies including Digital data management, geo-spatial technology and video-conferencing. Three-tier system that brings PMO, Union Government Secretaries, and Chief Secretaries of the States at one stage. Thus, offers a unique combination in the direction of cooperative federalism. Prime Minister can directly discuss the issues with the concerned Central and State officials with full information and latest visuals of the ground level situation. The system will work on strengthen and re-engineer the data bases of Centralized Public Grievance Redress And Monitoring System (CPGRAMS) along with Project Monitoring Group (PMG) and the Ministry of Statistics and Programme Implementation. On a monthly basis, Prime Minister will interact with bureaucrats i.e. on fourth Wednesday of every month at 3.30 PM- called as PRAGATI Day.

#RuthPorat has been appointed as Chief Financial Officer (CFO) of world’s largest search engine giant #Google

.She will succeed Patrick Pichette who had announced his retirement on 10 March 2015 and assume charge on 26 May 2015. As CFO of Google she will directly report to Larry Page, CEO and Co-Founder of Google. Prior to this appointment Ruth was working as CFO at Morgan Stanley. She joined Morgan Stanley in 1987. Since then she had severed at various posts and had played several key roles at the company. She has served as Global Head of the Financial Institutions Group, co-Head of Technology Investment Banking and Vice Chairman of Investment Banking. Porat also was the lead banker on numerous technology financing rounds, including for Amazon, eBay, Netscape, Priceline and Verisign as well as for The Blackstone Group, General Electric (GE) and the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE)



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Indian-American novelist #AkhilSharma’s novel #FamilyLife has won the prestigious Folio Prize 2015. His novel was among the eight shortlisted books from 80 fictional works and was chosen as the best fiction novel published in the United Kingdom in 2014. Family Life is Sharma’s second novel and took him 13 years to write. About Akhil Sharma Sharma was born in Delhi and later in 1979 immigrated to US along with his family. His first novel was An Obedient Father published in 2000. It has won the prestigious PEN/Hemingway Foundation Award in 2001. His stories also have been published in The New Yorker and in Atlantic Monthly. These stories have been included in The Best American Short Stories and also in O. Henry Prize Collections. In 2007, he was named as one of Granta magazine’s Best of Young American Novelists.