Understanding China’s LAC deployment capabilities

Broadening of the India-China standoff into multiple theatres will present formidable challenges for Chinese forcesAll eyes are on the meeting between Indian external affairs minister S Jaishankar and his Chinese counterpart on September 10 in Moscow, nevertheless, it has increasingly become clear over the past few weeks that the two countries are preparing for a...The article was originally published in Deccan Herald.

Vaccinating Indians against Covid? We should be talking days, not years

As the Narendra Modi government’s National Expert Committee on Vaccine Administration deliberates on a vaccination strategy against Covid-19, the single biggest thing it should be wary of is status quo-ism packaged as pragmatism. One thing India is not short of are people who can tell you why something cannot be done. We are now being told that a fast, universal national vaccination campaign is not possible because India does not have the infrastructure, administrative capacity and funds to do so.

A couple of weeks ago, a research report by Sanford Bernstein, a financial brokerage firm estimated that it will take as long as three years to vaccinate 60 per cent of the population at a total cost of $6 billion. The government’s share of this will be $2 billion, which will cover 30 per cent of the population. The remaining 30 per cent will purchase the vaccine privately at a cost of $4 billion (because the government will procure the vaccine at $3 per dose, as opposed to $6 in the private market). The analysis might have calculated timelines based on the public health system’s rate of delivering 60-100 million vaccinations per year. I do not have access to the report, but if the media summary is correct, it would seem that the Indian government will pursue Covid-19 vaccination as if it were any other vaccination project. It takes a lot of cynicism to set such low expectations of the government. Worse, if such low expectations get anchored in public discourse, they might creep into public policy, becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy.

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Xi’s new approach to Tibet will affect India

Chinese President Xi Jinping’s recent remarks at the seventh Central Symposium on Tibet Work indicate that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is doubling down on its hardline approach in the region, which evolved gradually after the 2008 protests.The strategy for the next few years that Xi outlined entails a mix of persuasion, development, connectivity, indoctrination and coercion. This will not only have serious implications for ordinary Tibetans but will also impinge on the Sino-Indian boundary question, particularly in the context of China’s claims on Arunachal Pradesh.Read the full article in Hindustan Times.

Should India have its own social media content moderation rules?

This article was first published in Deccan Chronicle. Views are personal.Earlier this week, Economic Times (ET) broke the story that top officials had begun preliminary discussions on whether India should have its own guidelines on content moderation. What always strikes me when I read news around this subject is that consensus around platform moderation is always negative. No one ever is happy with the current amount of content moderation that platforms are undertaking. Some people think it is too little, while others think it is too much.

Evolving India's Military Strategy

The ongoing situation on the Sino-Indian border offers a unique opportunity for the military leadership. They could impel the political leadership to facilitate the formulation of a military strategy despite the lack of an overarching National Security Strategy. Militarily, let there now be no doubt that countering China should be the primary focus of our military power. Pakistan is the lesser threat. Rebalancing military power towards China from its greater inclination towards Pakistan in the continental and maritime domain will undoubtedly be the prime challenge.The full article can be read here.

The mental health cost of Covid-19

The GDP numbers are out. These refer to the three months from April to June, which were mostly about a harsh  lockdown. More than three-fourths of the economy was shut down at least for a month, and hence output, income, jobs were lost. The contraction in India’s GDP was the most acute among the top 20 countries of the world, i.e. the G20 group.One of the G20 members is called EU, which is actually a collection of 27 countries of Europe. During that same  quarter, China’s GDP went up by 12 per cent. China’s GDP contraction happened in the previous quarter, i.e. from January to March, which also included the Chinese New Year, when almost the entire country is on holiday for two weeks. The remarkable thing is that in just one quarter the Chinese economy has bounced back and is in strongly positive territory. India’s July to September quarter numbers will not be known until after Diwali, and it is unlikely that we will see as smart a bounce back as China. We will be lucky to see mildly positive growth from October, and then sharply higher from January. Much of this will depend on fiscal stimulus 2.0, which is aimed at urban folk (unlike 1.0, which was aimed mainly at rural folk and agriculture), and also the return of consumer and business confidence. Let’s not forget that much of the revival in GDP has to be led by the private sector. The central and state governments can only play an enabling role, and the fiscal stimulus of say 5 or 6 per cent of GDP is a lever which uses the fulcrum of “feel good” factor and business optimism to pole vault the economy into higher and positive growth trajectory.Read More

Drilling Into Indian Twitter's Interest in Sweden's Violent Riots

This article appeared in TheWire.Over last weekend, hashtags such as SwedenRiots, NorwayRiots and WeAreWithSweden were trending on Twitter in India.This may have seemed surprising, but if anyone spent a few minutes looking at the content that was being shared, it became painfully obvious why this was happening.A cursory Twitter search showed that many accounts which typically share India-centric majoritarian content were actively participating in the conversation, with plenty of local references to recent violence in Delhi and Bengaluru.A more extensive examination using a combination of tools like Hoaxy, Twitter’s Advanced Search feature and APIs allowed us to dig in a little bit further.

In parallel, let’s also keep in mind the framework of Dangerous Speech, which can be defined as ‘any form of expression (e.g. speech, text, or images) that can increase the risk that its audience will condone or commit violence against members of another group.’

First, using Hoaxy, I attempted to get a sense of network clusters for these hashtags. Now, Hoaxy samples tweets, so its results should be considered indicative.The size of the circles and density of clusters around it represent the amount of engagement (retweets, mentions, quote) an account receives.The names that the visualisations throw up help corroborate, to an extent, what the Twitter search suggested – that a lot of the activity on these hashtags was being driven by accounts that associate themselves with pro-Hindutva narratives.Where did they come from?Next, I used Twitter’s API to capture around 60,000 tweets across these 3 hashtags on August 29 and 30. Approximately 30,000 unique accounts shared content using at least one of these 3 hashtags. It is not uncommon for accounts not to include location data. For these hashtags, typically 40% did not (For context: I’ve typically seen this number vary between 45 and 60%).In the doughnut charts below – which plot the number of tweets by location for the remaining accounts – the predominance of Indian locations is visible. 

Location of accounts for SwedenRiots

Location of accounts for WeAreWithSweden

Location of accounts for NorwayRiots

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Yes, every generation must debate secularism. School textbooks aren’t enough

Many people were upset last week that NDTV 24×7— even NDTV — decided that secularism ought to be a topic of debate. Amid the prevailing climate of deep political polarisation, prejudice and suspicion, some saw this debate segment, which asked panelists whether “Secularism Is Essential To Democracy”,as a sign that this media house, too, was caving in to the Bharatiya Janata Party’s line of thinking. Others were outraged that there should be a debate on the topic at all — for isn’t the need for secularism self-evident? Isn’t the principle non-negotiable, being part of the basic structure of the Indian republic? It is understandable that the beleaguered advocates of secularism should feel this way. But you don’t have to be a BJP supporter or religious Right-winger to argue that a debate on secularism is not only a good thing, and not only necessary at this time, but something that needs to take place regularly.Read More

Passing GST Buck

The past week has been dominated by Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman’s remark  alluding to an “act of God”. She was referring to the Covid-19 pandemic which is now seen as the main cause of the unprecedented recession in India and the world. Never mind that the slowing of GDP growth, or investment ratio or the stagnation of exports, or the rise in the bad loan ratio in banking, preceded the pandemic. Naturally the fiscal stress was rising, and the  pressure of the inadequacy of tax collection was tangible even before the full fury of the pandemic.The FM referred to “an act of God” as a Force Majeure clause in a commercial contract. The “contract” in this case is actually an Act of Parliament of 2017 which guarantees compensation to the states from the Centre, in case of a  shortfall in tax collection from the Goods and Services Tax. The compensation clause says that any revenue growth  falling below 14 per cent annual growth from year to year will be compensated from the Central treasury fund for a period of five years – i.e., till 2022. Meeting this legal obligation was becoming difficult, thanks to the slowing GDPgrowth even prior to the pandemic.Read More 

The US-China tech war is being fought across a bamboo curtain

It is becoming clear that the ongoing “tech war" between the United States and China is taking place along five fronts: semiconductors, network infrastructure, operating systems, platforms and content. While it was Beijing that first erected a defensive Great Firewall around its internet users over 25 years ago to censor content, it is now Washington that is on the offensive on all fronts. The ostensible reason for this, as cited by officials of the Donald Trump administration, is national security—to prevent espionage, surveillance and influence operations by the Chinese government, as also its corporate proxies and agents.

The deeper and less-articulated reason is strategic: the US wants to increase its relative technological advantage over China. It is doing this by containing China’s progress and by rejuvenating its own high-technology industrial base. Both sides of the partisan divide in Washington have recognized that three decades of globalization resulted in the relocation of high-tech industrial capacity away from its soil, and that even if American firms and investors reaped the benefits of free trade, the strategic consequence has been the empowerment of an economic competitor and political adversary in the form of China. Nation-states are sensitive to changes in relative power, and the US has decided that China is too close for comfort.

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Amazon and Flipkart make lockdowns effective

This article was first published in Deccan Chronicle.One of the most important features of tech policy is the sheer number of disciplines it intersects with. With the pandemic getting worse, in India, we have gone back and forth on locking down areas to stop the spread of the virus. Over the past few weeks, we have seen lockdowns happen in Jharkhand and West Bengal. As you hear how and where lockdowns are being imposed try to keep in mind the role e-commerce plays in making sure such measures are effective.It has also been fascinating to witness how the government’s thinking has evolved in this regard. There has been renewed importance placed on the sector. And that’s not just because of reports of a new draft e-commerce policy, but because of how e-commerce has been seen as a mitigating instrument to manage lockdowns.

Pandemic and exam stress

Sometimes it feels as if the Supreme Court is running the country. Otherwise why does everything escalate all the way? The SC’s main job is to examine constitutional issues, but it is often and increasingly embroiled in commercial disputes. For instance, an engineering company in Chennai had registered the trademark ‘Coronil’ back in 1993, as an industrial cleaning product. When Patanjali started using the same name for its Covid-19 product, the Chennai firm said you are infringing on my trademark.Patanjali subsequently toned down its claim, and said it was an immunity boosting product. But this infringement case went all the way to the Supreme Court wherein it ruled the commercial dispute in favour of Patanjali. “In these pandemic times it would be terrible if we restrict the use of the word Coronil,” said the court. Technically the apex court has asked the parties to abide by the decision of the Madras High Court, which is in favour of Patanjali. Of course, there was another issue of the misleading claim in the earlier advertisements of Coronil being a ‘cure’. That too was looked into by the apex court.Read More

India must treat the oil spill near Mauritius as SoS. Lockdown has left seafarers exhausted

he Indian Ocean island nation of Mauritius is facing one of its most serious crises in its modern history. On 21 July, around a week into its voyage from Singapore to the Brazilian port of Tubarao, the MV Wakashio, a 300-metre long bulk carrier, owned and operated by Japanese companies, deviated from its course and headed towards Mauritius instead of the regular shipping lanes several nautical miles south of it. A few days later, it struck a reef just over a kilometre from the shore, ran aground, spilled around a 1,000 tons of oil into the sea, before splitting into two. A major portion of the front part of the massive ship (or the “bow”) has been towed some distance to the south where it has been allowed to sink. The remaining parts lie on the reef, as weather and sea conditions do not permit its disposal. The ship’s 20-member crew has been arrested by the Mauritius authorities, and its captain, Sunil Kumar Nandeshwar, an Indian national, has been charged with endangering safe navigation.

Even without accounting for the Covid-19 pandemic, Mauritius is under-equipped to deal with environmental and economic disasters the marine accident has brought upon the nation. Over the past month, French and Indian marine disaster management personnel have joined their local counterparts in containing the damage, and Japanese and other international experts are to follow in the coming days.

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The UPI payments space is in for its biggest shift yet

This article was first published in Deccan Chronicle. Views are personal.Around 10 years ago, back when the Blackberry Messenger (BBM) was still prevalent, I remember trying to persuade a friend of mine to get himself a Blackberry phone so that we could chat on BBM. He countered me saying that WhatsApp (emerging at the time) would overtake BBM soon enough. It was free, worked across multiple platforms and did not require people to be on Blackberry. At the time, I could not take him seriously. BBM was here to stay. I have never been more wrong.Earlier this week, the Competition Commission of India (CCI) dismissed an anti-trust case against WhatsApp Pay. WhatsApp has been trying to launch a payments feature for a while now, and it is currently in beta, shared with a small share of users. The order by CCI is forty-one pages long, but the basis for the dismissal is that UPI payments apps are an evolving market. Currently, when the feature is in beta, it is implausible to assume that “WhatsApp Pay will automatically get a considerable market share based on pre-installation”.

Reining in platforms like Facebook

In December 2015 the founder and Chief Executive of Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg, wrote passionately in The Times of India why it was important to give free access to internet. He was promoting the idea of ‘Free Basics’ launched by Facebook. It would give free access to basic internet services to all Indians. No charge would be applied for data use by the telecom company to access Facebook and a few other sites. Facebook would pay directly to the telecom company for the data. It was what he called a bridge to full internet access. It would close the digital divide. It would lead to digital equality. He claimed that full internet access would lift millions out of poverty. He compared this free service to provision of free basic health or education. It was a persuasive pitch.Unfortunately for him, the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) turned it down. Why would TRAI turn down a free service being offered by the social media giant? The answer is subtle but very important. While some free access to internet is better than no access, the Facebook free offer was giving access to only certain websites. Thus the poor who opted for Free Basics would be able to roam only where Facebook allowed them to roam. This curtails a more basic kind of freedom, i.e. freedom to roam the internet. And all other smaller websites would have to pay Facebook to enter this “walled garden”. This is opposite to the principle of net neutrality. A profitmaking organisation like Facebook was offering “free services” because it hoped to make those free customers become sticky and paying customers, in the future. It was like a “foot in the door” policy, giving freebies in the beginning, that any monopoly uses to oust competitors. Once it has hundreds of millions of users inside the “walled garden”, it would charge monopoly pricing to those who wanted to access those customers. It would become a gatekeeper to a privately owned corner of the internet. Thanks to a nationwide people’s campaign for net neutrality, the Facebook plan for Free Basics failed. Read More

India is good in the Arab world now. But Delhi must quickly move to contain Turkey’s Erdogan

It came as a surprise but it is not surprising. When the United Arab Emirates and Israel announced that they would establish normal relations with each other, in a US-brokered agreement last week, they publicly accepted what has been obvious for several years now — that the national interests of the Emirates along with those of Saudi Arabia and many other Arab states were converging with those of Israel.

The triangular contest in the Middle East — with Iran, Turkey and Saudi Arabia vying for regional dominance — is a modern replay of older rivalries between the Persians, Ottomans and Arabs. With Israel perceiving an existential threat from Iran and being wary of once-friendly but increasingly threatening Turkey, realist logic would expect Tel Aviv to gravitate towards the Arab nations. The thorny Palestinian question long prevented an alliance between Israel and the Arab powers. Set that aside and Israel and the Arab nations become co-travellers on the road to prevent Iranian and Turkish hegemony over the Middle East.Read More.

A retreat from global trade will hurt India’s geopolitical stature

Almost a year ago, this column had warned that the economic slowdown that India was experiencing would have a negative impact on India’s geopolitical standing, because it is “presumptuous to expect countries and companies to be sympathetic to India’s political interests if they do not see an economic upside". “Sheer momentum will allow Indian foreign policy to tide over a mild, short slowdown. If, however, we go into a deep, prolonged slump, we should expect a tough time in international relations." This was before the COVID pandemic began. Events and India’s own policy choices since then have worsened the prognosis.

With an economic recovery distant, rising trade restrictions, and a reluctance to participate in a wider geopolitical contest against China, India risks undermining its relevance as a world power. For its part, Beijing is unlikely to miss any opportunity to push its hegemonic agenda further and box New Delhi into a sub-subcontinental role. The international environment that was so conducive to India’s developmental and political interests over the past three decades might turn against us within the next couple of years. One has only to recollect the experience of the 1970s and 80s—when import and foreign exchange restrictions, international sanctions and foreign sympathy for domestic insurgencies kept us on the back foot and dissipated our strategic establishment’s energies—to conclude that the government should do everything possible to avoid a similar plight.Read More

Forget TikTok, what India must focus on is semiconductors

This article was first published in Deccan Chronicle. Views are personal.In case you have been following the news, developments around TikTok are hard to look away from. The app has been associated with Twitter, Apple, and Microsoft. Closer home, reports have surfaced claiming that ByteDance is in talks with Reliance for investment in the short video app. While news around TikTok’s future is catchy, it takes away from the more significant shifts that are currently occurring in the global technology landscape.I am specifically talking about semiconductors.

The most important freedom we cherish

It is our 74th Independence Day. What is the uppermost thought on this day? It is of freedom. What kind of freedom? It is freedom to speak, to think, to express an opinion, to assemble as a group (without arms), to roam the country, to earn a living. After we gained independence from our colonial rulers, we gave ourselves a constitution as a democratic republic. That constitution is our sacred document, which protects our freedoms. It enshrines them as fundamental rights. There are both positive and negative rights. The right to free speech and expression, to dissent, to move freely and reside anywhere in the country, are all examples of positive freedoms.The negative freedoms are the right not to be harassed, coerced and illegally detained or incarcerated by the state, or the government. We also have the right to a clean environment, right to food, education and rural employment (NREGA). Soon we may have the right to internet interpreted as a basic right.Read More 

When will the coronavirus pandemic come to an ‘end’? February 2021

When will the coronavirus pandemic come to an end? The question is on everyone’s mind, and while astrologers and politicians have answers, few scientists want to be drawn into hazarding a prediction.

According to Union Health Minister Harsh Vardhan’s recent remarks, the spread of coronavirus has already been contained in India because “half the total cases are from three states only and another 30 percent from seven others.” But India has crossed two million Covid-19 positive cases and the graph continues to rise.

The endings

As Gina Kolata wrote in The New York Times earlier this year, medical historians recognise two types of endings. The medical ending, when the disease stops spreading; and the social ending, when people overcome their anxieties and move on. It would be appropriate to add a third type of ending: the political, when the government decides that as far as it is concerned, the pandemic is over. Any of these three endings could occur first, as political leaders and society can decide to move on regardless of whether the cases have peaked. If we look at the world today, it would not be overly cynical to conclude that politicians would rather move on, and that societies are distracted to such dysfunctional levels by social media-driven outrage cycles that they often ignore the extant pandemic. Maybe India is already at this point.Read More