An event like an unfolding global crisis, especially one with a fog of uncertainty surrounding it, lends itself to analysis not just from experts with domain specific knowledge but even from intelligentsia with no immersion in the subject matter who generate elaborate commentary largely furthering their own preconceived notions and biases by employing both the real and imagined consequences of the catastrophe. Last week, the Financial Times carried an article on the ongoing pandemic written by novelist and commentator, Arundhati Roy, within its prestigious pink sheets. Having held no administrative role or public office in her lifetime, Ms. Roy tears into the Indian administration’s response to the pandemic by throwing nuance to the wind with such certitude and confidence that would probably embarrass an actual expert.

In her article, which she probably wrote within the confines of her Delhi’s urban elite circles,Ms. Roy stops short of exhibiting glee at the prospect of the virus bringing the “engines of capitalism to a juddering halt” and that of the virus making the “mighty kneel…like nothing else could”. It doesn’t require much effort on the part of an alert reader to further lift the layers of literary embellishments revealing the logical fallacies and contradictory inconsistencies within the arguments she presents.

Ms. Roy suggests that the response to the pandemic would have been better had countries diverted the spend on defence to building adequate stocks of medical supplies beforehand. The obvious hindsight bias notwithstanding, the real logical problem visible in her argument relates to her blindness to the understanding of ‘tail risks’. While states can (and should) certainly be criticised for failing to maintain buffer stocks of medical supplies to combat the increased tail risk of epidemics and pandemics in a hyper-connected world, it is fallacious to suggest that this can be done at the cost of building adequate defence capabilities to combat another ‘tail risk’, that of a war, especially for a nation like India which faces a hostile and bellicose neighbour to its north-west making the region equivalent of a strategic tinder-box. Seen in this light, her facetious suggestion to the Prime Minister to renege on the Rafale deal and use the proceeds on emergency measures seems little more than an imprudent rhetorical remark.

Just as a chef modifies his dishes to suit the palette of his patrons, so does Ms. Roy, while writing in a newspaper almost exclusively read by the world’s elite. She uses hyperbole to cement the frame of a poor, filthy, unhygienic India within the minds of her readers when she characteristically claims that most Indians would not have known about the existence of a ‘hand sanitiser’ but for the advent of this crisis. Complementing this distortion with another, Ms. Roy performs the role of a judge, jury and executioner (of a kangaroo court perhaps) when she crafts an elaborate narrative pinning the blame of the Delhi riots on the city’s majority Hindu population with its Muslim residents acting as submissive victims. She does not let the fact that the investigations of the tragedy which unfolded are still ongoing come in the way of her storytelling.

Announcement of the lockdown was followed by the moving pictures of migrant workers fleeing the prospect of possible starvation in India’s cities. Ms. Roy mentions in her article that she used her press pass that day to drive to the border between Delhi and Uttar Pradesh to witness the exodus first hand and gather testimonies of the people returning to their villages. The reader cannot help but wonder if Ms. Roy used the facility of her air conditioned four-wheeler to ferry to the safety of the nearest government shelter at least some of the children and the weak among those walking in the scorching heat or if she took the effort to inform those walking of the arrangements the government was making for them in Delhi’s night shelters. The reader earnestly hopes that Ms. Roy did not let her concern for the state of the returning migrants be limited to the collection of sound bites for her article.

Ms. Roy makes a reference to the TablighiJamaat event in Delhi which has jeopardised India’s fight against the pandemic. However, the reader finds that her concern is not so much about the fallout of the carelessness of its organisers but for the prospect that the scenario would be exploited to “stigmatise and demonise Muslims.” Even if one overlooks the obvious ideological undertone behind her concerns, one cannot help but overlook yet another example of a lack of understanding of the risk of ruin on the author’s part. If the reader opens a newspaper a month later and finds that India has witnessed the unfortunate prospect of thousands of deaths then which of the two causes would be the most likely ones: the event itself or the prospect that it was used to “stigmatise and demonise Muslims?”

Ms. Roy ends her article expressing the hope that the pandemic would convince us to imagine a new world order. But this rhetorical statement is not followed by any specifications as to what this new world would look like and how different would it be in the author’s view. Perhaps this ambiguity is intentionally maintained for any specificity would have brought the author’s prescriptions under closer scrutiny by her sophisticated readers.

As this crisis generates a tsunami of opinions from experts and intellectuals across the world, it is essential to develop a filtering mechanism to focus only on views worthy of our limited time and attention. I suggest a simple heuristic to enable this filter. Would the reader of an opinion piece be comfortable with the hypothetical prospect that the author of the piece was leading the war on this deadly virus? If the immediate answer from the reader is in the affirmative only then is the view worthy of any attention from the reader. Unfortunately, Arundhati Roy’s article fails to pass this litmus test.

*The author is a Young India Fellow from the batch of 2019 and is currently working as a Finance Professional.

While the COVID-19 pandemic ravages away across 190+ countries in the world, the problems that the pandemic presents for India multiply exponentially, not only because of its large population and high population density, but also because the only effective pandemic control law that India has, is an archaic, 123-year old law that traces back to the British colonial era and was originally drafted to control the fallout of the Bubonic plague epidemic that raged throughout Mumbai in the late 1890s and was later on used for the selfish political motives of the British who used it against freedom fighters and incarcerated them.

The Epidemic Diseases Act, 1897, a vestige of English law, is one of the shortest acts to exist in Indian legal system and spans merely four sections. Section 2 of the aforementioned act provides the states with special powers to issues health advisories to the public if the state authorities have sufficient reasons to believe that the state is marred with an epidemic.^[i] Continuing, Section 2A bestows the state with the right to seal off the sea ports and detain any ship that is suspected to have been contaminated and this extends to any person intending to sail on the aforementioned contaminated ship or arriving thereby.^[ii]

There is no denying the fact that the lack of new legislations regarding pandemic control and the usage of a century old law was just a deadly concoction, boiling in a pressure cooker, waiting to go off and the COVID-19 pandemic provided it with a fertile ground. The technological developments that have taken place in the past century basically mean that the law serves no purpose because it doesn’t take into consideration the vast usage of air travel rather than sea travel, large scale migration of people to urban areas, thanks to urbanisation, drastic changes in climatic conditions and other important factors such as public health policy formation and breach of biohazard measures.

The innate problem of the Act is that is doesn’t define “dangerous epidemic disease” in clear terms. Who gets to decide what kind of an epidemic indeed is “dangerous” and whether the term “dangerous” is set by the magnitude of havoc the pandemic can wreck or by the virulent nature of the pathogen itself? The Act portrays the inferior technological standards of those times when compared to that of today, in ways such as, the Act pays more impetus on the forced quarantine, isolation and lockdown of affected populations but goes lenient over the extent of testing, surveillance and other ethical issues that concern the public-health sector.^[iii]

The problem in controlling the pandemic in India isn’t however, only limited to the Act. Health being a state list subject, the Union barely has a say in what measures individual states take up to fight the pandemic. It can only issues advisories and appeal to the states to follow a route that shall end up serving the common good of the nation. Times like this call for centralised measures for the entire country rather than decentralised, state specific ones because that causes great political chaos.

The effects of the pandemic are manifold as they trickle down onto the question of fulfilment of contractual obligations of corporates and individuals. While some companies might want to delay or avoid the performance of their contractual obligations for genuine causes like non-performance on the part of their suppliers or because of changes in the cost of exporting and importing materials from or into affected areas while most places go under lockdown, some firms might just want to misuse the situation to evade their contractual obligations. The fallout isn’t limited to the performance of contractual obligations only; it extends to the legal responsibility of corporates to ensure the safety of their workers during the pandemic, creating and sustaining a healthy work-place while navigating around the travel restrictions and imposing strict surveillance measures.^[iv]

While the pandemic presents a multitude of questions ranging from the ethics of pandemic control to the actual procedure of going about with the containment of the pandemic, it can only be hoped that the Indian legal system doesn’t get overwhelmed with the problems, given the lack of a holistic and robust law to address the spread of epidemic diseases in India.

*The author is a First Year law student at National Law University, Patiala

^[i] The Epidemic Disease Act of 1897, Act No 3 of 1897.

^[ii] Id.

^[iii] Rakesh PS, The Epidemic Diseases Act of 1897: public health relevance in the current scenario, Vol. 1, IJME (2016).

^[iv] Cyril AmarchandMangaldas, Coronavirus: Key Legal Issues For India Inc. With Covid-19, Bloomberg Quint Opinion (March 17 2020, 7:57 PM), https://www.bloombergquint.com/opinion/coronavirus-key-legal-issues-for-india-inc-with-covid-19.

 

 

Stakeholders in the 19-year old US-Taliban war in Afghanistan exude happiness over the signing of the peace deal on Saturday in Doha, the capital of Qatar.  It is more than a year that the sides were pursuing the deal but hurdles cropped up unexpectedly only to defer the clenching of the peace. The last time peace talks were suspended by President Trump when, in retaliation to the killing of an American soldier by the Taliban in Afghanistan, he had broken negotiations unilaterally. However, it took a great deal of effort on the part of peaceniks on both sides to put things back on the rails and resume talks.

The highlights of the deal are that the US has agreed that the US and NATO troops would be withdrawn fully from Afghanistan in a phased manner in 14 months. Taliban leadership agreed to initiate talks with the government of President Ashraf Ghani for a negotiated settlement that would give Afghanistan a popular government. The Taliban would be partners in the new government. Prisoners of war will be released on both sides and the negotiated settlement would take up the question of reconstruction of Afghanistan and resumption of its normal trade and diplomatic relations.

This peace deal has come after the seven days no fighting pre-requisite was met on both sides so that the signing of the deal would not run into more trouble. Now that the deal is signed and both sides, after having felt the exhaustion of fighting a protracted war, would like to focus on rebuilding the war-ravaged Afghanistan.

A few lessons have to be learned from this long-awaited event. In the first place, it has become clear to the world that Afghans have maintained their age-old tradition of not allowing any foreign power to rule over it through force of arms. Some critics feel that the Doha deal is the second defeat of the US after Vietnam and that probably Washington will take a lesson from it while conducting its policy of belligerence. For the Afghan dissidents called Taliban, there is a lesson that they are not invincible if they mean to be obstinate and unrealistic. Whatever tall claims the Taliban may make, the US did manage to install a pro-US government in Kabul and make it sustain the bloody war imposed on it by the Taliban.

Pakistan has succeeded in establishing its importance in finding a solution to the Afghan crisis. Pakistan’s closeness to the Taliban or some of the prominent factions of the Taliban like the Haqqani group gives her leverage in the affairs of Afghanistan.  Duringhis recent Indian trip, President Trump had acknowledged that Pakistan’s support to peace talks in Afghanistan was of immense importance. Hence Pakistan has made its position strong in influencing the future events and politics of the Kabul regime.

India will welcome the peace deal no doubt because it will have an impact on the regional ground situation. But there are some concerns which India will have to take note of. Though Indian Ambassador in Qatar was invited and did attend the signing ceremony in Doha on Saturday, yet in his address, the Taliban main negotiator Mulla Baradar did not take the name of India while expressing thanks to the countries that lent their support for the success of the Doha agreement. He made a specific mention of Pakistan, Uzbekistan, and Russia but ignored India. This is quite significant and one may infer that at some point during a discussion on the preliminaries, Pakistan must have put its foot down and demanded that India be excluded from the negotiating process. It was only on the behest of the US that the Indian representative was among the invited visitors.

Yet one more concern for India is that once inter-Afghan talks proceed and as a result a coalition government is established in Kabul to replace the present regime, the Taliban component on the behest of Pakistan will come out against India in respect of Kashmir issue. Taliban may not encourage its mujahids to comply with the wishes of Pakistani hawks of infiltrating into the Indian part of Kashmir but on a political level, the Taliban will certainly try to put their weight behind the stand of Pakistan on Kashmir. However, this fear could be discounted only if Indian policy planners had been shrewd enough to have established liaison with the Taliban leadership in past years that India is interested in maintaining a traditional friendship with the Afghans and has never tried to play one Afghan group against the other. If there have been sporadic attacks on Indian interests in Afghanistan, these were spearheaded by Pakistani agencies.

Much depends on the outlines along which the Ashraf Ghani regime in Kabul conducts talks with the Taliban leadership. But before we can anticipate the outcome of those negotiations, there is another issue that has cropped up lately. Differences between President Ashraf Ghani and his rival Abdullah Abdullah have deepened so much so that the latter had threatened to declare a parallel government. Though New Delhi will meticulously keep itself aloof of this rivalry among the top Afghan leadership, it has to be remembered that Abdullah Abdullah comes from the Panjsheer Valley in Northern Afghanistan and was a close ally of Ahmad Shah Masud who, in turn, had very cordial relations with New Delhi. Even Abdullah Abdullah has completed his education in an Indian Engineering Institute and has very `cordial relations with India.  New Delhi would very much like to see the rivalry between the two Afghan contestants being resolved amicably to the satisfaction of all stakeholders. India has often tried to assure the Afghans that she is interested in the development and prosperity fo Afghanistan and has no other motive in cultivating the friendship of Afghan regimes.

The US has said that it will keep close track of the negotiations conducted in Kabul between the regime and Taliban to ensure that there is no breakdown and the story of post- Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan is not repeated. In the same vein, India would not want that Kabul should turn into a hotbed of rivalry between the two sub-continental nuclear powers. As such, all eyes will be focused on the Taliban leadership how it conducts itself at negotiating a peace deal with the regime of Ashraf Ghani. Before that, a breakthrough in the stalemate existing between the two Afghan leaders claiming the high office of the presidency has to happen. Once that hurdle is overcome, chances for a feeling of lasting peace will brighten in Afghanistan. Such a scenario will have a positive impact on the political atmosphere of the sub-continent.

*The writer is the former Director of the Centre of Central Asian Studies, Kashmir University

 

For one reason or the other, Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) has been making much news in recent years, most of it being non-flattering. A flashpoint was reached in February 2016, when virulent anti-India protests by certain ultra-leftist groups took place in the campus. Since then such protests have continued sporadically till date. More recently, we have seen protests which began against the hike in hostel fees and which have now disfigured into political stand-offs. Over the last few years, campus politics in JNU have been on the boil, causing serious disruptions to academic work and research, and also to the routine functioning of the university administration.

Campus disruptions are causing a serious negative impact on the students in JNU, with complete violation of academic calendar through disruption of semester examinations, stoppage of the registration process and shutting of classes. As a former JNU alumnus, I remain concerned and pained by the deteriorating academic environment in the campus, which have caused serious security threats for the students, faculty and other staff in JNU.

The gravity of the situation has elicited condemnation and requests to restore peace even from two senior members of the Union Cabinet under the Modi government, who have been alumni of the university in the past. A similar plea has been made by other distinguished people including the Nobel Laureate Abhijit Mukherjee. Analyzing the issue of violence in the JNU campus and other university spaces, around 200 academicians have recently written a letter to Prime Minister Narendra Modi, expressing their anguish and concern at the deteriorating academic ambience in the country led by a ‘small coterie of left-wing activism’. (ToI, 13 Jan 2020)

The bigger question, however, remains. Why has the JNU campus become the nucleus of such antagonism? A campus, which once was nationally acclaimed as a seat of ‘debate and discussion’ is today making it to the news only for the consistent violent protests against its administration defying the spirit of student activism and politics?

To understand this situation, it is imperative to look back to 2014, when the Indian general election results brought the Modi government to power at the Centre and then in subsequent states as well, to the larger unease and disapproval of left-wing forces in JNU. Having thrived on the narrative of ‘secular versus-communal’ left-leaning intelligentsia has always shown a kind of ‘political untouchability’ to other ideological forces and schools of thought in the country. As the ‘nationalist school’ occupied a central space in the mainstream politics and started commanding its new role in the academic discourse and intelligentsia, the leftist forces in JNU were confronted with a new challenge, which today they are trying to counter through force.

In the last few years, the academic discourse in the country has been seen a shift towards ‘Indic ideas and values’, which for long have been ignored by the leftist intellectual stalwarts. As this ‘ideological contest’ became sharpened and assertive post-2014, it has completely changed the Indian political landscape over the past few years, making it polarised between the Right and the Left. JNU being the ‘nerve centre’ of left-wing ideas and politics has formed a flashpoint for this contest. The successive electoral victories of the BJP, to the clear dissatisfaction of leftist forces, who in their ignorance and conceit, considered themselves the intellectual vanguards of liberalism in India, has furthered this dissatisfaction. The on-going JNU protests are a mere extension of the same in the name and pretext of fee hike, which already has been rolled back and revised, as per the genuine demands of the students.

Moreover, under the present Vice-Chancellor of JNU, the fundamental character of the institution, which for long was dominated by the Left, has witnessed many changes. On the level of social and academic activities, the narrative has shifted from politics of appeasement, secession and divisiveness to an increase in talks on a range of issues like national security, border management, Indian Diaspora, Act East policy, inclusive growth and economy, global governance reforms and counter-terrorism. Along with the above, ideas from the Indic schools of thought like integral humanism, decolonizing of Indian minds, cultural nationalism, Indian spiritualism, universal peace and brotherhood are at the forefront of discussions in JNU.

Besides, at the level of student politics also, the so-called principle of left unity has failed to survive the rising nationalist forces at JNU, making ABVP the ‘single largest student force’ in the last two JNU student elections. Around this transformation, the VC and his team have bravely faced up to the worst forms of student abuse and agitation. He also introduced new courses in engineering and management, along with many new student-friendly initiatives on the campus.

Interestingly, given this wave of transformation within JNU, and in order to protect what some call as the last citadel of the Left in India, student politics in JNU is being misguided and disoriented towards continuous disruption and resistance against the establishment by some radical groups. These are the same ultra-leftist organisations that have built an unwarranted narrative and protest politics in the name of events that celebrate attacks on CRPF camps that killed 72 Indian soldiers, mourn the deaths of Afzal Guru and Yakub Memon, support demands of secessionists in northeast India andorganise ‘Mahishasur Diwas’ and ‘beef festival’ just to flare up campus politics based on the most dreadful of ideas.

The same happened in 2017 at Ramjas College, DU, when in the name of the right to debate these groups had a clash with ABVP activists. The manhandling of Mr Rajiv Malhotra by Leftist forces in TISS, Mumbai, greeting the then PM Dr Manmohan Singh with black flags and criticising (late) APJ Abdul Kalam’s visit to JNU campus are some examples of their politics. The list is long and exposes the utter hypocrisy of radical Left student groups.

In the diagnosis of JNU protests, one can sense the greatest challenges facing liberalism today. As argued in The Cultural Defence of Nations (Oxford, 2016) rights activists and scholars fail to recognise and celebrate the unique cultural identity of the majority, the same they argue for the minorities at large. Also, taking note from the late Prafull Bidwai’s work The Phoenix Movement (Harper Collins, 2015), the Left till date has failed to come up with a political vision that is home-crafted. If they keep peddling “meta-narratives,” and fail to acknowledge the change in the winds, then little can be done to address their concerns.

It is no doubt that ‘free spaces’ within our universities cater to a critical requirement in society. Their objective is to raise discussion and dialogue and celebrate ideas within the campuses. However, if the genuineness of issue is lost, and it largely becomes part of confrontational politics, just to create sensationalism in the name of student protests, then it is nothing but playing into politics.

– Dr Abhishek Pratap Singh holds a PhD from JNU and teaches at the Delhi University