Friday Links: Catching up on India-China, India-Pakistan... and India-Rihanna

Plus links to pieces on Puducherry and Gujarat local body elections.

Welcome to The Political Fix by Rohan Venkataramakrishnan, a newsletter on Indian politics and policy. To get it in your inbox every week, sign up here.

We’re back after a three-week break, with links today and regular programming from Monday. Hope you enjoyed the work of my Scroll.in colleagues in the interim.

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Linking Out

• RESOURCE: Ananth Krishnan, whom we interviewed on the Friday Q&A a little while ago, has a newsletter dedicated to looking at India-China developments that offers useful summaries and analysis of all that is in the news – of which there is a lot. His recent pieces looking at the disengagement in Pangong and talks between the two countries over the Ladakh standoff offer incisive insights into ties between the two big neighbours.

• Anumeha Yadav reports on why the government ditched due process in arresting two young labour activists in Haryana, including Dalit labour leader Shiv Kumar whom government doctors had placed on record evidence that he had been tortured and left with multiple fractures and torn toe nails.

• After the Congress-led government fell in Puducherry, where elections are due in April, Liz Mathew looks at the Bharatiya Janata Party’s gameplan in the Union Territory abutting Tamil Nadu.

• “The Congress leadership is still confident of preventing the BJP, Rangasamy and AIADMK from coming to power in the May 2021 polls [in Puducherry], but a sense of demoralisation has set in after the loss of another Congress-ruled state. Would Jaipur be the next venue where informal promises have reportedly not been fulfilled?” asks Rasheed Kidwai.

• “Without debating the effectiveness of [the government’s welfare] schemes, there is no doubt they played an important role in the 2019 elections, and were emblematic of the central government’s approach. Since the start of the pandemic, this welfarist-focussed politics has taken a backseat. The government’s stubborn refusal to loosen its purse strings and provide direct fiscal support – and instead rely on monetary policy levers – is evidence of this shift.” Yamini Aiyar takes a look at the political economy of India’s 2021 Budget.

  Avinash Paliwal @PaliwalAvi

  Final Cut: My article on India's role in the making of Ghana's external intelligence agency (1958-61) has found a home in 'The International History Review'. I learnt a lot about India's intelligence history & R&AW's institutional moorings in researching & writing this piece 1/n

  

  Avinash Paliwal @PaliwalAvi

  First Draft: Been working on this one-off intelligence history piece about India's creation of Ghana's secret service at the peak of the Cold War. R.N. Kao and S. Nair were the first unofficial (but acknowledged) chiefs of Accra's Foreign Service Research Bureau (FSRB). 1/n https://t.co/qAqFRF7Dgz

• The Aam Aadmi Party made a small entry in the Gujarat local body polls, even as the BJP continued to dominate. Aditya Menon examined what the results might mean.

• “New Delhi says it’s prioritizing its own population. But India’s ability to manufacture vaccines was always going to outstrip the nation’s ability to inoculate all of its own citizens. And the country’s leaders can now deploy those millions of surplus vaccines to win friends and influence abroad,” report Iain Marlow, Archana Chaudhary and Kari Soo Lindberg.

• Praveen Swami analyses the sudden India-Pakistan joint statement reasserting both countries’ commitment to a ceasefire, after two years of tensions, shelling and attacks in 2019 that brought both close to war.

Shrabonti Bagchi @Shrabonti

What are the ethics of white antique hunters taking a functional, everyday object from an Indian city and making it inaccessible and expensive, erasing the contribution of Indians to the design? I spoke to a group of historians who are calling it out.

lifestyle.livemint.comThe complex, ‘constructed’ history of Chandigarh ChairsA group of design historians contend that an artificial luxury narrative has been created around Pierre Jeanneret’s functional, modernist furniture made for Chandigarh in the 1950s

• “No regime can govern a vast and diverse country such as India without taking social, political, and economic elites on board,” writes Rahul Verma. “This is not to suggest that the State serves elite interests, but as these elites represent divergent views, a political settlement becomes necessary for governance. India needs a new elite compact and Prime Minister Narendra Modi must create the space for the emergence of its new order.”

• “How should we feel if the BCCI’s cosiness with the BJP warms further, if India’s cricketers become longer-term conscripts in their governments’s creepy online claque, and if its Muslim players are further singled out for victimisation? To quote Rihanna: “Why aren’t we talking about this?” writes Gideon Haigh.

Thanks for reading. The Political Fix will be back with more analysis and links on Monday.