Friday Links: What does a TikTok ban actually mean? + Shankkar Aiyar on Indian state capacity
All the links you need on Indian politics & policy, plus an author Q&A.
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“The Kerala public healthcare model has been around for decades but other states have not been persuaded to adopt the best practices. Tamil Nadu has crafted its own model of welfare politics. Himachal Pradesh has a very successful community engagement model. Yet these are not shared practices.
The pandemic could be a wake-up call – for the Centre to create the incentives to make change happen – but whether it will be a wake-up call depends on public opinion and pressure. Think about it. Will healthcare be an issue in the forthcoming assembly polls Bihar – which has less than 50000 doctors for a population of 110 million!”
That’s Shankkar Aiyar, author of The Gated Republic: India's Public Policy Failures and Private Solutions, which examines how despite the successes of India’s government in sending crafts to Mars and conducting elections for hundreds of millions of people, it has sent it citizens to the private sector for vital goods like water, education and security.
Every Friday on the Political Fix, we bring you a Q&A with an expert, scholar or author of a recent book on a topic that is currently in the news in India – and recommendations from them on what you should be reading, watching or listening to next.
If you have suggestions for who you would like to hear from on the TPF Q&A, write to rohan@scroll.in.
Before we get to this week’s Q&A, here are your Friday links:
TikTok, on the Clock
The India-China news is unrelenting, so let us quickly catch you up on everything else before coming to the apps.
A top unnamed official told the Indian Express that India is willing to take on the Chinese, even militarily. When asked about the risks, he said “The view in the Government is that if you start thinking of consequences, you will not be able to move forward.”
Corps Commander-level talks between Indian and Chinese troops at Chushul – the third such meeting – went late into the night, with low expectations from observers all around.
Union Minister Nitin Gadkari said Chinese companies will not be allowed to take part in road construction projects in India.
Shipments are not moving:
Now, the apps:
On Monday, India’s Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology ordered a ban on 59 apps, all from Chinese companies, saying they were “engaged in activities prejudicial to sovereignty and integrity of India, defence of India, security of state and public order.”
We had an explainer on the ban, its legal backing and what India is attempting to do here.
The move prompted some trite commentary, such as asking whether banning apps are a sufficient response to the killing of Indian soldiers on the disputed border. But those who have been paying attention to the massive success of Chinese apps in India over the last five years recognised that this was not a frivolous move.
India counted for more than 600 million lifetime installs for TikTok, the immensely popular short-video app that offered a great way for many outside the Delhi-Mumbai-Bengaluru bubble to garner internet fame and even income.
But it is also a Chinese social media app with serious concerns about its data collection policies and also an algorithm with no transparency and Chinese interests that could easily be used in a dangerous way.
Of course, any Indian response would need to be legally justifiable and on that front, there are several questions about how the government took action and whether this needs Parliamentary debate and legislative backing, instead of just a press release from Meity, as Apar Gupta writes:
“Forsaking our democratic values is too high a price to pay if the goal is to neuter the designs of an aggressive single-party state. To protect individual liberty and national interests, India must proceed with caution and remember the age-old adage, of being careful of whom we hate, for we may end up just like them.”
The other confounding part is how many have seen India’s ban of the apps as a great boost to local apps, which might thrive in the absence of Chinese competition. Except India is not installing a Great Indian Firewall (or, as I called it, a Line of Actual Censorship) to keep out all non-Indian companies or fundamentally altering the underlying factors of the market.
Harveen Ahluwalia tackled this:
“A founder at an Indian social network once said to me that the marketing budget of a TikTok can be more than the valuation of a home-grown social media startup…
Making decent revenue on the back of a social network is a tall task here. You need deep pockets and a long-term play, and for the most part, investors haven’t been too keen on taking that bet. Chinese companies such as ByteDance, which owns TikTok as well as apps such as Helo and Vigo that target Indian language users, stepped in with money to spend and monetisation a distant worry…
Assuming that the local apps are able to gain and sustain a substantial user base, the ban still won’t ease the economics of the Indian market.”
Meanwhile, the reliably excellent Anticipating the Unitended newsletter folds in the app ban and other moves to raise a good big-picture question: What will it mean for India if China becomes a true adversary?
Linking Out
RESOURCE: Rohan Mukherjee and Khushi Singh Rathore have a great list of women in Indian international relations and foreign policy.
RESOURCE: The legendary Indian media watch blog Churumri is now accessible via newsletter: The Net Paper.
Sheela Bhatt has a two-part interview with former Foreign Secretary Shivshankar Menon in which he points to situations in which status quo ante has been restored in the past on the LAC as a sign that India also has tools it can use against China.
“Since 2017, a rising number of fossil fuel producers, mostly from Russia, America and the middle-east, have begun entering India, seeing the country as one of the last big markets for fossil fuels.” Read M Rajshkehar’s two-part look at this undercovered phenomenon.
Dipankar Ghose is spending the month in Bhagalpur, Bihar to report on how it emerges from the lockdown (with elections around the corner). Read his dispatches here.
“The core [Muslim-Yadav] support base would place [the Rashtriya Janata Dal] as the prime opposition, but the perception of its parochial association with the same will prevent the party from putting up a spirited fight. Hence, the ensuing election in Bihar is going to be a one-way affair,” write Sajjan Kumar and Rajan pandey.
My colleague Shoaib Daniyal tells you why Rahul Gandhi is the only Opposition leader calling out the Modi government on Ladakh.
PLUG: After India’s national broadcaster said that interviewing the Chinese ambassador was “anti-national”, I asked, do Prasar Bharati and BJP want India to copy the Chinese Communist Party’s approach to information?
Chitranshu Tewari, whose newsletter Stop Press covers the Indian media, this week looked at Indian newsletters, including this one.
WILD CARD: Your non-political link of the week is this wonderful piece on trying to track down how exactly the fabled pigment ‘Indian Yellow’ was produced.
TPF Q&A
Shankkar Aiyar is a senior Indian journalist and author of Accidental India: A History of the Nation's Passage Through Crisis and Change and, most recently, The Gated Republic: India's Public Policy Failures and Private Solutions.
Gated Republic looks at how despite the tremendous successes of the Indian state, it has also failed to deliver on a number of fronts – water, health, security – that many see as fundamental to the very idea of a government. The book offers an important glimpse into the gap between intention and outcome and lays bare some of the truly disturbing failures of independent India.
I spoke to Aiyar about state capacity during the crisis and what this might mean for policy going forward.
Q: Would you say the Covid-19 crisis and its effects (the migrant crisis, the economic crash) have only heightened the 'Gated Republic' trend, with well-off citizens retreating into their safe, comfortable enclaves while others have had to take to the roads or grapple with hunger?
It has indeed. The pandemic has widened the faultlines of India’s political economy. Covid-19 has aggravated risks to life as both access to health care and affordability is constrained. Covid-19 has impacted livelihoods. The quest to flatten the curve, which essentially is about shifting it to the right to buy time and build capacity, has bludgeoned the economics of those most vulnerable.
Q: One of the points of the book, in some ways, is the gap between what India thinks it can do, as discussed in commissions and panels and five-year-plans, and what it can actually accomplish. Do you see a parallel with how the lockdown played out, with an assumption of higher state capacity than the Centre could actually offer?
The capacity of the state to shut down or lockdown is not in doubt. It has a parade of colonial laws for just this. The capacity of the state to deliver on essentials though is severely incapacitated – both in the Centre and in the states. For decades, states have chosen to invest in electorally profitable expenditure and neglected health, water, education and other public services as investigated and illustrated in The Gated Republic.
The many tragedies witnessed are about incapacity and insufficiency of institutional thinking. NT Rama Rao used to say the Centre is a conceptual myth. Beyond the hyperbole fact is every square kilometre is ruled by states and therefore the design of the lockdown would have been better designed at the state level as is being done now. Ideally Kerala with its robust system and experience in dealing with epidemics should have led the ideation and draft of policy.
Q: The Covid-19 crisis has brought into even starker focus the perils of a private sector-led healthcare system, which you cover in one of the book's chapters, with the government taking the lead despite much more capacity in private hospitals. Ajay Shah has argued that policymaking needs to do a better job of incentivising private healthcare to play a role (witness the battles over private testing). What do you make of how this has played out?
The perils brought into focus by the pandemic illuminate the failure of regulation as much as the profiteering tendency of private enterprise. At a macro-level if we look around the world we know the countries which have done well are those with public healthcare systems such as Germany, Canada, Taiwan and New Zealand.
Investment in preventive and primary healthcare is both a moral and economic imperative. This does not mean there is no role for private providers. A public healthcare system can be paid for by the government and serviced by the private service providers under a transparent PPP model with built-in incentives allowing government to harness private sector efficiencies.
Q: Do you have any hope that this moment might prompt states or the Centre to alter their approaches towards providing services that ought to be delivered by the government – say if more seek to learn and emulate the Kerala model – or do you expect things to simply revert to the norm as the pandemic passes?
The Kerala public healthcare model has been around for decades but other states have not been persuaded to adopt the best practices. Tamil Nadu has crafted its own model of welfare politics. Himachal Pradesh has a very successful community engagement model. Yet these are not shared practices.
The pandemic could be a wake-up call – for the Centre to create the incentives to make change happen – but whether it will be a wake-up call depends on public opinion and pressure. Think about it. Will healthcare be an issue in the forthcoming assembly polls Bihar – which has less than 50000 doctors for a population of 110 million!
Q: What does everyone – the media, the public, even other experts – get wrong about the idea of Indian state capacity and India's ability to deliver public goods?
Transformation is a process not an event and demands consistent commitment and needs champions for the cause. India’s success stories are all driven by champions. For instance, the milk revolution needed a Verghese Kurien, the green revolution needed a C Subramaniam, and the space programme needed a Vikram Sarabhai.
In India electoral expediency has riveted a strong political consensus for weak reforms enshrined by weak public pressure for accountability. Every year a million people die of air pollution related ailments, malnutrition kills a hundred children every hour, nearly eight crore children don’t go to school. The situation persists because the politicos do not find it electorally profitable to attend to these issues. Worse they don’t see it as politically damaging either.
Q: What was one thing you didn't know before or surprised you during the research for 'Gated Republic'?
The fact that a system would collect data on schools without teachers – there were 6000 of them in 2003 – and not do anything about it for decades was blood curdling.
Q: What 3 books/podcasts/papers/articles should we read on the current moment or on the subject in general?
I would recommend Albert Hirschman, Lant Pritchett and for the current context Michael Osterholm.
You can hear more from Shankkar Aiyar in his interviews on Grand Tamasha as well as with the Print.
That’s all for this Friday Links edition of the Political Fix. Please send feedback or suggestions for who we should talk to next by writing to rohan@scroll.in.