#BanTikTok Solves Nothing

This article was first published in Deccan Chronicle.Earlier this month, there was a huge push on Twitter to #BanTikTok. While Twitter is always enraged about most things, there are few apps in India that divide opinion more than TikTok. Earlier last year, Madras High Court placed a ban on the app, only to lift it later.Let us go a level deeper than the Twitter outrage and look at the reasons behind the call to ban the app. When the Madras High Court gave the order to ban TikTok, there was a clear implicit rationale that can broadly be divided into three main points. Firstly, TikTok has problems with content. Media coverage in India and abroad have noted the presence of pornography on the platform. Besides, the platform is a very graphic medium to spread hate speech. WIRED has done some excellent reporting on this and finds that the app has been used as a channel to incite violence between castes, at times leading to murder. 

Not vultures but watchdogs

The Supreme Court of India finally took up the issue of the plight of migrant workers and their families. It took up this issue suo moto. Meaning it was not in response to any public interest litigation. But surely it was affected by the extensive media coverage. And also by that sharp letter written by 20 senior lawyers from Delhi and Mumbai. That letter almost chastised the court for failing to protect the rights of the hapless migrants. It said that the court was showing undue deference to the government, and complete indifference to an enormous humanitarian crisis. Taking care of the migrants was not just a "policy issue" beyond the purview of the court but in fact, a constitutional issue to render justice. Whatever the influence, the court has taken notice, and asked governments, both the centre and states, what they are doing. It has also instructed that whether by bus or train, no fare should be charged to the travellers going home, and arrangements should be made for food and water, especially in this deadly heat.Read more 

China has definitely crossed India’s Lakshman rekha but it won’t lead to 1962 again

Is this going to be another 1962?’ asked my neighbour, an 80-year-old naval veteran. ‘Not at all,’ was my instinctive reply, not because I had any special insight into the ongoing military situation in Ladakh, but because 1962-type wars now linger only in military imagination and tend to get confined largely to the dustbin of history. In reality, due to the shadow of nuclear weapons, the remote possibility of such ‘big fights’ tenant the deterrence space that keeps militaries armed with the state-of-the-art weapons system.You can find the article here

On Trump's Offer to Mediate Between India and China

The Print’s daily roundtable TalkPoint posed a question connected to the US President Donald Trump's offer to mediate between India and China over the “raging border dispute": Does Trump help or harm India’s interests when he offers to mediate with China, Pakistan?My response:

US President Donald Trump’s offer to mediate is a needless distraction in the grand scheme of things.Assessing what the US foreign policy would be like based on Trump’s offer to mediate on Twitter is a risky exercise. Often, there is a considerable gap between the two, like in the case of Afghanistan.Officially, the White House released a report on 20 May that said in no uncertain terms that Beijing “flouts its commitments to its neighbours by engaging in provocative and coercive military and paramilitary activities in the Yellow Sea, the East and South China Seas, the Taiwan Strait, and Sino-Indian border areas.” We can only guess whether Trump’s latest offer to mediate follows as a result of this understanding.Nevertheless, India’s position on such offers has been consistent — it intends to solve such disputes bilaterally and not through third party mediation. China is not likely to accept any such offers of mediation either. Hence, it would help the Indian and American interests both, a lot more if the US and India work together to build capacity to resist Beijing’s coercive and arrogant approach to border disputes.The case with Pakistan is also similar. The border dispute there is just one issue in a consistently strained India-Pakistan relationship. In fact, the US support to the Pakistani military-jihadi complex over the years has made this problem even more difficult. Here again, it would help the Indian and the US interests a lot more if the US adopts an overall strategic stance that sees Pakistan as a part of the problem.

You can read the full conversation on ThePrint. here. 

India Can’t Be Self-Reliant & Prosperous With Price Caps, Quotas

A lot of people around the world will retweet you if you blame the coronavirus pandemic on ‘neoliberal capitalism’. In an excellent article in Boston Review, Alyssa Battistoni outlines the case. “(The) pandemic,” she argues “can hardly be understood as exogenous to capitalism: the virus itself is the outgrowth of the peri-urbanisation that has accompanied rapid development, the commodification of once-wild subsistence foods, new encounters between humans and nonhumans driven by industrial food production, and the global movement of both people and commodities.”Read more

Flashpoints on the Periphery: Understanding China’s Neighborhood Opportunism

How is China taking advantage of the pandemic to pursue its foreign policy goals?

Tensions in China’s periphery have increased dramatically over the past few months as Beijing stepped up the use of military and diplomatic tools within its neighborhood. The frequency of the events involving Chinese actors, especially in the second half of March, increased as normalcy started returning to the mainland after the COVID-19 pandemic’s outbreak.This raises a few questions. First, is this evidence of China’s opportunism at a time when the United States is struggling to maintain its presence in the East and Southeast Asian regions? Second, has Beijing adopted a more aggressive approach for the post-pandemic period? Third, would the recent spike in activities impact the regional order?Read more

This article was originally published in The Diplomat.

How India can end Chinese transgressions: Take conflict to a place Beijing is worried about

How should India respond to another surge in Chinese transgressions at several places along our Himalayan frontiers? Over the past 15 years or so, strategic analysts have recommended two diametrically opposite approaches.

The first, advocated by sober defence traditionalists and by hawks, is that we should hold the line along the Himalayas and escalate the conflict if we have to. They point out that Indian troops enjoy favourable positions in many places, and our strength has been bolstered over the past 10 years with more mountain forces and better infrastructure and equipment. The objective of this approach, they contend, is to make the Chinese realise that they can’t ‘win’ this game.

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What 300 Days of Internet Winter in Kashmir Tell Us About Erecting a Digital Wall

This is an extract from the full article published on The Wire.....What is the cost of this protracted disruption?There is no shortage of real-life stories about the economic impact this prolonged Internet disruption has had in the union territory. Media reports are replete with such examples.Given that we are still in the midst of these events, an academic exercise to estimate the economic costs has not been published.Still, using available numbers regarding internet subscribers (38% from TRAI for the service area of Jammu and Kashmir) and a rough estimate of time connected drawn out from reports on patterns of internet usage by people in India (different sources peg the ‘active consumption’ time between 90 minutes and 150 minutes. Let’s use the higher end of that range. Note that there is no measure of passive consumption impacted), it is possible to arrive at a back-of-the-envelope ‘estimate’ of how many hours of Internet access have potentially been disrupted since August 4, 2019.

Between August 4 and January 14, when there was a complete shutdown, this number amounted to ~1.9 billion hours. In the period from January 14 to March 4, when there was whitelisted access another ~600 million hours were added. And the 87 days between then and May 30, will have accounted for another ~1 billion hours. That adds up to around 3.5 billion hours of disrupted internet access for approximately 12.25 million people. Let that sink in.

Advertising a tax on the poor, pandemic going to exacerbate it

Supply of endless addictive content is a feature and a bug of the attention economy. However, much like its traditional counterpart, the attention economy is harsher on the poor than on the rich. And the pandemic is likely going to make it worse. Your attention has a monetary value for streaming platforms. Given by the current monthly prices, Netflix values your time at ₹26.2/day, Prime Video at ₹4.2/day, Hotstar at ₹9.8 a day, and YouTube (Premium) at ₹4.2/day. Roughly the per capita income of an Indian is ₹1,35,048. A yearly subscription to Netflix would cost 7.1% of that figure; Prime Video would be 1.1%, Hotstar at 2.65%, and YouTube at 1.14%.Read more.

Lockdown Is Choking The Economy

When the national lockdown was imposed, with four hours notice, the country had less than 200 positive cases and a two percent fatality rate. The world marvelled at India’s determination in imposing such a strict control on a billion people.  Two months later, the number of virus positive cases is nearing 1.5 lakh and the fatality rate has inched up to 3 percent. Now the world is not so sure whether the strict lockdown has achieved what it set out to do.The stated goal was to “flatten the curve”, that is decrease the upward slope of the spread of the virus. Since the virus mainly spreads from people to people contact, the method was to isolate people in their own homes, observe social distancing, restrict movement.Three fourth of the economy was shut down. It was as if collectively the nation was holding its breath. But after holding our breath for two months, we are feeling breathless, the economy is choking, having run out of its oxygen. The four-hour notice given on March 24, also meant that people did not have any time to plan their own lockdown. Many families suddenly found themselves separated, since one or two members were stuck in a different city due to office duty.Read more

India should prepare itself for realpolitik over a covid vaccine

The first country to have full immunity to the coronavirus will enjoy a tremendous economic and geopolitical advantage, a once-in-a-century window of opportunity till other countries catch up. As much as the covid-19 pandemic is accepted as a challenge for all humanity, realism— that dismal but unfortunately accurate way of reading international relations—suggests that countries which acquire the vaccine first will be tempted to use this relative advantage to promote their national interests.

So it matters who gets to the vaccine first. India cannot afford to be a have-not, both for reasons of public health and to safeguard its strategic interests.If there was ever a clear and present danger that confronted the human species as a whole, it is now. It should follow then that the world should set aside political differences and work together to defeat the virus. Vaccines and drugs should be made universally available as soon as they are invented. Yet, there is no sign that this would be the case.Read more

Will We Really Find Out Where the Novel Coronavirus Came From?

This article first appeared in Science The Wire.The origin of the SARS-CoV-2 virus remains mired in controversy. The virus was initially thought to have originated in a wet market in China’s Wuhan. But as it spread around the world, it fuelled many conspiracy theories in its wake. In the public imagination, the virus has often transformed (baselessly) into a bioweapon, a scientific experiment leaked from a laboratory and spread through the 5G network. Scientists have downplayed these ideas, quoting genomic analyses that clearly show the virus is of natural origin and jumped from some animal species to humans.Yet its origin remains unsettled and this ambiguity needs to be resolved soon – not to settle political agendas or conspiracy theories but simply and importantly in the larger interest of public health. Settling the question of the virus’s origins once and for all is key to take appropriate measures to prevent it from happening again, and to focus our efforts on the right things.This said, who can comprehensively investigate the origin of SARS-CoV-2?Read the full op-ed here.

Cities, both paradise and hell for migrants

Till the end of March, the world was marvelling at the success of Singapore for having controlled the spread of the pandemic. Its lockdown was not as severe as India, and yet with a combination of sanitising, social distancing, movement restrictions, testing and tracing protocols, it had managed to keep its numbers relatively low. It was flattening the curve. Even its schools and colleges were running.Then over the month of April, its numbers went up from around 1,000 to 15,000 and by the third week of May it has doubled further to 30,000. Singapore's population is about 5.6 million, so if the same infection rate would have happened in India, we would have 70 lakh virus positive patients. Today we barely have 1.2 lakh.But this is not about trumpeting our record. India needs to scale up its testing in any case. What is remarkable that even with relatively strict protocols, Singapore numbers have skyrocketed. Unlike countries of the West, Singaporeans do not mind strict controls, and curtailment of their personal liberties, if it is for their own safety, health or national interest. It is also one of the world's richest countries in terms of per capita income, and has a world class health care system and infrastructure. And yet the infection numbers have risen so dramatically? Why?Read more

Direct cash transfer best way to help poor in Covid crisis. If Modi govt can’t do it, let us

During as deep and as unprecedented a crisis as the coronavirus pandemic, the best way to help the largest number of people is to put money in their pockets. In most cases, cash allows people to purchase what they want: whether it is food grain, oil, medicine, a recharge on the mobile phone or a railway ticket home. Cash in hand also gives vulnerable people a little more confidence to deal with the many uncertainties of life during a crisis. Yes, in a country as large as India, there will be instances where cash won’t help, but for hundreds of millions of people, money is the single-most important helpful thing today.

And thanks to Unified Payments Interface (UPI) and Jan Dhan, Aadhaar and Mobile (JAM), India today can process direct cash transfers to hundreds of millions quickly and efficiently.

So, it is disappointing that direct cash transfers do not form a significant part of the Narendra Modi government’s economic package announced last week. Towards the end of March, it re-assigned around Rs 62,000 crore for transfers to women Jan Dhan account holders, farmers and construction workers, but did not widen cash transfers after that. It is unclear if the PM CARES Fund will be used for the purpose either.Read more

Why India needs to be the centre for content moderation reform

You could put a price tag on what it costs to keep platforms clean of harmful content. $52 million is a good starting point (and an underestimation). But the learnings that come out of this experience have the potential to be priceless. Not just in terms of how much money they can potentially save in counselling costs, but in terms of preventing the mental harm that content moderation causes people who undertake it.The article was first published in Deccan Chronicle. Read more. 

India’s Bargaining Power with China and US will Grow in Post Covid World

Covid-19 is likely to accelerate the competition and confrontation between the US and China, and simultaneously reduce the global authority of both by eroding their absolute power and legitimacy. The relative power scale can tilt in either direction. India and other middle powers are likely to enjoy greater bargaining capabilities with both US and China. Smaller powers are likely to fall in line with any side that provides them with the required capital. India’s geopolitical stance depends on actioning key domestic reforms, failing which India’s leverage will reduce and it will be forced to ally with a major power on less favourable terms. If India’s relative power vis-a-vis China and the US improves, India can become a swing power for both the US and China led groupings. If India’s relative power declines, India will have to align itself more closely with the US. Read the full op-ed on The Print here.

What the Modi Govt Could Learn From Kautilya and His Take on the Role of Experts

The decisions that the Narendra Modi government makes in the coming months could save the lives of thousands and also whether the economy holds up.The stakes have never been this high. The initial decision of a complete lockdown garnered popular support in the wake of confusion and fear of the unknown.But as the panic eases and fatigue sets in, every decision of the political leadership will be judged minutely. Kautilya’s Arthashastra offers a ready guide to sound decision making based on knowledge; an aspect of power which the political realist rates higher than armed might and raw energy.You can find the article here

Don’t let your dislike of Yogi Adityanath get in the way. Labour reform is a good idea

Unless you belong to the ideological Left — and even if you do — it is impossible to argue that India’s complex web of labour regulations serve the public interest.

Simply put, they are part of the reason why 90 per cent of India’s labour force is “informal”, without the basic protections that law ought to have given them. Our labour laws are part of the reason why we have failed our migrant workers, millions of whom have not been paid their wages, have been prevented from going home, were killed on the rails and are trying to walk the long distance home. Over the past few decades, both employers and workers have found a working optimum outside the Kafkaesque labour regime, which more or less worked during normal times, but showed its failings during the coronavirus pandemic-triggered lockdown.

Consider the counterfactual — if a greater proportion of our workforce had enjoyed the basic protections of employment, the migrant crisis might have been less acute.So, when Uttar Pradesh and Madhya Pradesh, two Indian states that acutely need new economic engines, surprisingly announce that they intend to do away with a substantial chunk of their labour laws, they deserve the right kind of support.Read More

Will Facebook’s ‘Supreme Court’ make the internet a safer place?

An intended and anticipated consequence of this board is that it will instil more transparency into the process of what stays up and why. By reporting on what the board discussed and did not discuss, it will help bring more clarity around the most prevalent problems on the platform. It may help tell us whether bullying is a bigger problem than hate speech or how (or where) harassment and racism manifest themselves. Read more. This article was first published in Deccan Chronicle. Views are personal.

Crowds at booze stores reveal an addled approach to policy

The long queues outside liquor stores last week attracted a lot of attention, commentary and government reaction. Many people were dismayed that among the first things their compatriots did after the relaxation of the lockdown was to make a beeline for the liquor store. In an unusual demonstration of alacrity, the Delhi government immediately imposed an additional 70% tax on retail liquor sales, ostensibly to put some brakes on demand and reduce coronavirus outbreak risks. The sense of moral outrage was compounded after a Bangalorean customer triumphantly shared a ₹52,000 liquor store receipt on social media. This too caused the Karnataka excise department to rapidly rise to the occasion and come down hard on the retailer concerned for exceeding the maximum quantity that can be sold to a person at a time.

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