The Political Fix: 1 year of Modi 2.0, India crosses 200,000 Covid-19 cases and more Friday links
All the links you need on Indian politics and policy.
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Modi 2.0
How much of the first year of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s second tenure are we going to remember? The Coronavirus Crisis may end up overshadowing everything in posterity, but it was a momentous year.
It lurched from the government’s move to strip Jammu and Kashmir of its autonomy to the Supreme Court’s confounding-but-decisive verdict on the Ram Mandir in Ayodhya to the Bharatiya Janata Party pushing the discriminatory Citizenship Amendment Act and National Register of Citizens, which led to a remarkable nation-wide protest movement.
In the middle of all of this, the BJP – despite its massive Lok Sabha victory – delivered middling state election results, tooted its horn as it drove the economy off a cliff and focused on a divisive, communal election campaign that ultimately led to the first riots in Delhi in four decades.
The Times of India, which like many newspapers carried a government article on its editorial pages to mark the anniversary, offered a perfect Rorschach Test of a headline:
Depending on your political persuasion or opinion of Modi’s tenure, you can read that headline whichever way you want to. (Don’t ask about the bizarre Pink Floyd-ian illustration that has Modi refracting a rainbow into the Coronavirus though).
You can read the prime minister’s letter to citizens – on a BJP, rather than Government of India letterhead – on the anniversary here.
Amid the BJP’s celebrations, The Wire’s Siddharth Varadarajan reminded us: “Not since the emergency of Indira Gandhi have so many people across India spent so much time in custody for political reasons than in the past year.”
Hotspots
India crossed the 200,000 mark of Covid-19 cases this week, making it the seventh-most affected country in the world, and one where the new cases are still rising.
On Monday we told you about how the Covid-19 crisis is playing out in Assam, Telangana and Uttar Pradesh, three places that haven’t necessarily gotten the most attention.
Today, a quick update on three better-covered parts of India:
Kerala, the state that got plaudits from observers around the world for its adept handling of the virus, has seen its numbers rise quickly over the last week or so, prompting calls for doctors to treat every patient as a potential carrier of Covid-19.
For long, India has claimed that there is no need to ramp up testing – despite a relatively low rate – because its positivity rate, the percentage of positive cases found across all tests, is low. This number, however, has been rising. And last week, one in four samples tested in Delhi turned out to be Covid-19 positive, an alarming figure.
This week we learnt that Maharashtra, which accounts for a third of all of India’s Covid-19 cases, has seen its growth rate slow for two weeks now and even fall below the national average. However, Mumbai – which has 20% of the national case load – kept its testing numbers stagnant through the month of May, prompting fears about the city not having a clear understanding of the disease spread.
More from other states and cities in coming weeks. Is there one you think we should focus on?
Linking out
Resources: If you don’t already follow NIPFP Professor Ajay Shah’s The Leap Blog, which carries work on law, economics and policy, you should. You can also get updates via Shah’s Substack newsletter.
In 2014, Indian policy wonks found themselves caught up in a debate between economists Amartya Sen and Jagdish Bhagwati over whether welfare was more important than growth, or vice versa. Manas Chakravarty asks now: Was Sen right after all?
“Women who were employed in the pre-lockdown phase were 23.5 percentage points less likely to be employed in the post-lockdown phase, compared to men,” finds Ashwini Deshpande in a discussion paper.
“In a survey of nearly 5,000 self-employed, casual, and regular wage workers across 12 states of India, conducted between 13 April and 23 May in collaboration with civil society organisations, we have found a massive increase in unemployment and an equally dramatic fall in earnings,” writes a team from the Azim Premji Centre for Sustainable Employment.
Roshan Kishore looks back at the massive corporate tax cuts India put in place last year and asks – echoing the Finance Minister – did the country get anything from the move?
Ajai Shukla likened what has happened on the Ladakh border, which we wrote about on last week’s Friday links, to the 1991 Kargil incursions by Pakistan. Talks between the two countries’ militaries are expected on Saturday, though hopes that there will be a breakthrough are minimal.
Former Foreign Secretary Shyam Saran says China’s behaviour suggests “that the ambiguity over the precise alignment of LAC gives it the opportunity to trigger incidents at points of choice in order to make both local, tactical gains but to also convey a larger message that it has a stronger hand when dealing with India.”
Suhasini Haidar meanwhile, gives us the background on India’s difficulties with Nepal Prime Minister KP Sharma Oli.
Mukesh Ambani won the world’s most expensive sibling rivalry, write Ari Altstedter and PR Sanjai, offering a useful recap of the Ambani family soap opera.
That’s it for this Friday links edition of the Political Fix.
As always, if you have feedback, other links or just funny GIFs to send in, write to rohan@scroll.in. And, if you find it useful, please do share this newsletter!