The Political Fix: India-China standoff, labour law rollbacks and more Friday links
All the links you need on Indian politics and policy.
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Just like last week, I’m intruding on your inbox on a Friday to give you a bunch of links on Indian politics and policy. Most of you seemed to be happy with the Friday link email, though a few said they preferred the old format.
(If you missed Monday’s newsletter, we asked: What has India’s stringent lockdown achieved?)
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On to the links:
Line of Actual… Perceptions?
The Indian and Chinese armies are once again facing-off against each other, at several spots along what is known as the Line of Actual Control, since the borders between the two countries are neither defined nor demarcated. Both sides have their own “perceptions” of where the LAC actually lies, which is the explanation given for why they end up facing-off against each other.
This calls to mind the 73-day standoff at Doklam in 2017, though this time around the incidents have taken place at various points along the LAC, including in Ladakh and Sikkim, thousands of kilometres away from each other.
I wrote a short explainer on what’s going on, for the uninitiated.
But there is much more going on beneath the surface, not least because it is always hard to figure out what Beijing’s aims are and challenging to understand the ground situation considering the remoteness of these locations.
That doesn’t mean there hasn’t been useful analysis on offer:
Dhruva Jaishankar has a good Twitter thread for anyone planning to dive into the issue.
Nitin Gokhale offers some context for developments in the Ladkah region, where most of the action has taken place, and where one of the explanations for the stand-off has been Beijing’s discomfort at improved Indian infrastructure.
“From China’s standpoint, the reactivation of landing grounds and completion last year of the DSDBO [Durbuk-Shyok-Daulet Beg Oldi] road that runs more or less parallel to the LAC in this area significantly improves India’s position in the local balance of forces and India’s capabilities across the LAC,” says M Taylor Fravel in an interview to Ananth Krishnan, who also points out that this time Beijing has been a lot less bellicose.
“We made a fundamental military mistake of not securing the area in strength before we attempted to improve our border infrastructure in sensitive areas,” writes Lt Gen HS Panag. “The PLA preempted us.”
“These actions may be in the nature of a warning to India not to join the US-led chorus of condemnation of China’s handling of the Covid-19 virus, refrain from supporting the restoration of observer status to Taiwan in WHO and avoid taking actions against Chinese economic interests such as the recent closing of the automatic route for Chinese investment in India,” says Shyam Saran to Himanshi Dawan.
Both Major General M Vinaya Chandran and Colonel S Dinny think the chances of outright conflict are unlikely. And P. Stobdan got into the nitty gritties of the territory. Still, the Indian Express reports on towed artillery and mechanised elements on the Chinese side.
In the middle of al of this, Riya Sinha and Niara Sareen have a policy brief that finds China massively increasing its trade with South Asian countries, even as India’s numbers are the same.
Tanvi Madan has been tracking the tone of statements on either side, not just the governments but also in the media. Which brings us to this:
Labour roll-back
A few weeks ago on the Political Fix, we wrote about Uttar Pradesh’s decision to suspend nearly all labour laws for a period of three years as a “reform” to attract companies. We asked if this could even be called a reform.
Now the Union Government apparently has an answer: no.
After the potential for legal challenges, as well as criticism from unions and the International Labour Organisation, a number of states have rolled back their proposed changes.
Here is Union Labour Minister Santosh Kumar Gangwar speaking to Somesh Jha:
India is a signatory to the International Labour Organisation (ILO) conventions and one of them says 60 hours of weekly work is allowed in India…
Two states have already reversed this decision. We were thinking of calling a meeting of all state labour ministers but it couldn’t take place due to the pandemic. We wanted to suggest them steps that they could take, keeping in mind the needs of the ILO conventions.
States like Uttar Pradesh have proposed doing away with labour laws temporarily. What’s your view?
There is no question of removing labour laws. A proposal to do away with labour laws is not feasible in my view. That’s why we wanted to have a dialogue with the states earlier. We will hold a meeting with them soon.
Linking out
Resources: Since we’re talking international affairs this week, Ananth Krishnan of the Hindu has a newsletter called The View from India, and check out Ravi Agarwal’s South Asia Brief for Foreign Policy.
Sreenivasan Jain asks the chairman of BCG India what his organisation is doing embedded with India’s government, including doing epidemic modeling – an odd task to give to a management consulting firm.
Carnegie India has a compendium of essays, put together by Srinath Raghavan, taking stock of how South Asian nations have taken on the Coronavirus.
“After a decade of zealous brainwashing by technocrats, most have forgotten that a middle path between technocratic evangelism and clunky bureaucratic control can be found,” writes Reetika Khera. “Some states had managed to achieve a reasonable balance between worker-centric implementation and the smart use of technology. The pandemic is a good opportunity to strive for regaining that balance again.”
Devesh Kapur, Milan Vaishnav and Dawson Verley re-iterate a call made earlier by a clutch of star economists insisting that India’s safety net gap appears to be huge, and that “at a time of such an unprecedented national crisis, errors of inclusion are far less consequential than errors of exclusion.”
“While migration data for Census 2011 was partly released in 2019, important details, such as the sectors where migrant workers work, are yet to be released,” write Kanhu Charan Pradhan and Shamindra Nath Roy, arguing that this information could have helped policymakers.
“The politics of vishwas: political mobilization in the 2019 national election,” a new paper from Neelanjan Sircar, in Contemporary South Asia, which also has papers by Gilles Verniers, Christophe Jaffrelot, Carole Spary and more.
That’s it for this Friday 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 share this newsletter with anyone who you think would be interested.