Commentary
Find our newspaper columns, blogs, and other commentary pieces in this section. Our research focuses on Advanced Biology, High-Tech Geopolitics, Strategic Studies, Indo-Pacific Studies & Economic Policy
Why did India close Jalalabad consulate?
Northern Sea Route: hopes and challenges
The feasibility of a year-around Arctic transshipment route, a longtime dream of Russia, is still unclear
Media reports and commentaries are hailing the Russian LNG (liquefied natural gas) carrier Christophe de Margerie’s latest voyage along the Northern Sea Route as a watershed. The voyage has brought Moscow’s dream of year-around access to the NSR into the limelight again, and speculation is rife about whether the prospect is closer to reality than previously thought.However, a few less-reported aspects can shed more light on the NSR’s feasibility as a transshipment route.
Sister ship didn’t emerge unscathed
The Nikolay Yevgenov, another LNG carrier and sister ship of the Christophe de Margerie, departed a day later on the same route but suffered damage to its propulsion system. The ship took a detour through the Suez Canal and is in dry dock in France for repairs. The incident has diminished the sensational claims that the Arctic is now open for year-around safe voyages without heavy icebreakers clearing the way.Read the full article on Asia Times
India dives into Quad waters
Vaccine diplomacy post-Covid-19
Vaccine diplomacy is state-led action of leveraging vaccine expertise for furthering foreign policy goals. These goals can range from maintaining ties between nations, burnishing an international reputation, or developing influence within a region. A robust framework can aid in the identification of vaccine diplomacy opportunities and allow India to quickly respond to such need.According to GAVI, the international organisation aimed at improving access to vaccines, “today the potential for diseases to spread is actually increasing,” due to an exponential increase in international travel, an increasing majority of people living in urbanised areas and climate change. (Read more)
DNA Technology Regulation Bill: Will the Standing Committee's concerns about privacy, capacity be addressed by Parliament?
This article first appeared in FirstpostThe DNA Technology (Use and Application) Regulation Bill, 2019 is listed for consideration in the ongoing budget session of the Parliament. The Bill is aiming to create a DNA Regulatory Board to oversee the standardization of DNA profiling – a technique widely employed in forensics, where databanks of DNA from victims, deceased remains, crime scene, suspects and offenders can be compiled. DNA profiling has so far been used for forensic purposes in India, where it has been used to solve individual crimes. The new Bill may go a long way in streamlining the use of DNA profiling, and widen its purpose in identifying the deceased (in case of missing persons or disasters) and track down repeat offenders based on the data available in the DNA data bank. (Read more)
Chinese Communist Party has goals. India needs to have its own, not just respond to aggression
This article was originally published in ThePrintThere are glaring dissimilarities in India’s foreign policy stances towards China post the military disengagement in Doklam 2017 and the ongoing one in Ladakh. The former was followed by a reset that resembled closeness and acquiescence through informal summits in Wuhan and Mamallapuram while the latter seems to have prompted a distancing from China that was exemplified in the elevation of the Quad meeting to the level of political leadership on 12 March 2021 wherein Prime Minister Narendra Modi declared that “members of the Quad will be closer than ever before”. Remarkably, for the first time, a joint statement was issued which was followed up by a joint article by the Quad leaders was also published in The Washington Post and China’s reaction is awaited. Meanwhile, it was not surprising that China was stalling the disengagement process in Ladakh.
While one can endlessly speculate on China’s motives in Doklam and Ladakh, what matters ultimately is the strategic effect of Chinese military aggression on India. Loss of trust cannot be cranked up impetuously. In any case, the Wuhan and Mamallapuram facade has perished and the reality of China’s perennial perfidy should forewarn and prepare us to exercise greater circumspection and watchfulness.
Fukushima's lesson is the need for effective nuclear regulation
Why China is the Kautilya of international politics
This article was first published in ThePrintThe gameplay on the chessboard of global politics continues to cast its shadow on India’s relationships with the United States, China, nations of the sub-continent, and within its own federal units. For the skeptics of Kautilya’s continued relevance, the contemporary geopolitical chessboard underlines the chief tenets of Kautilyan rajamandala, or ‘circle of states’ – a concentric, geopolitical conception of the inter-state realm typifying friend-foe relationships.
Ironically, if there is one country that eminently exemplifies the Kautilyan template in international conduct, it is China – who was till the Ladakh episode, the quintessential madhyama (middle king) of the inter-state realm. A middle king is defined as “one with territory immediately proximate to those of the Ari (enemy) and the conqueror (hypothetically Pakistan and India respectively), capable of helping them when they are united or disunited and of suppressing them when they are disunited.” True to this definition, China had skilfully calibrated its dynamics with Pakistan and India. It had entered into a negotiated agreement (samdhi) with India (roughly co-equal then) through the Border Peace and Tranquility Agreement of 1993 and several other agreements of 1996, 2003 and 2012, at a time when a stable neighbourhood was vital for its economic growth.
The number game: Making sense of GDP estimates
This article was first published in Financial ExpressThe second advance estimates of GDP for the current year, along with the third quarter estimates, released by the Ministry of Statistics and Programme Implementation (Mospi) do not come as a surprise. The estimates of 1% GVA and 0.4% growth in GDP mark the end of the recessionary phase.As expected, agriculture continues to perform well. In fact, all the sectors except (i) mining and quarrying, (ii) trade, hotels, transport and communication services and (iii) public administration, defence and other services have recorded positive growth in the third quarter; even in other sectors, the contraction is lower by varying magnitudes. And industry as a whole too has moved into the positive territory. Services, which face higher restrictions due to social distancing norms, continued to shrink, but by just 1%. Significant improvement is seen in the performance of construction, up from -7.2% in Q2 to 6.2% in Q3, and financial and real estate sector (up from -9.5% in Q2 to 6.6% in Q3). The contraction in trade, hotels and transport continues to be high at -7.7% in Q3, though this is a significant improvement from -15.3% in Q2.Public administration, defence and other services performed better than the -9.3% growth recorded in Q2, but continued to contract at -1.5% in Q3. It was hoped that increase in the Centre’s spending after October would take it to positive growth. However, the state governments, which contribute to over 70% of public consumption spending, seem to continue their austerity given the revenue constraints. Sectors like education and healthcare too have not recovered to the pre-Covid levels. The increased GST collections of more than Rs 1 lakh crore and the record collection of Rs 1.2 lakh crore in January also indicated recovery.However, increased collections seem to as much due to an increase in consumption as due to better enforcement. With the technology platform stabilising, the government could use the data to undertake invoice matching to detect taking false input tax credit through fake invoicing. With businesses having turnovers of more than Rs 100 crore required to issue e-invoicing from January 2021, both enforcement and compliance of the tax are likely to show further improvement in the coming months.It is, however, too early to celebrate the news of the economy entering the positive growth phase. It is true that there has been a steady recovery of almost all the sectors, as indicated by the leading indicators. In fact, the median market expectation for the third quarter was a growth of 0.6%. While it is futile to quibble over a few decimal points, it is necessary to note that one reason for the lower than the expected growth is the significant downward revision in the third quarter growth of FY20. The GDP growth in the third quarter of FY20 was revised from 4.1% to 3.3%. There were large revisions in the growth of GVA for several sectors.If the whole year contraction of 8% as against the earlier estimate of 7.7% holds true, then the fourth-quarter estimate of GDP will be negative 1.1%, though the GVA will continue to be positive at 2.5%. The downward revision of GDP in the first quarter from 23.9% to 24.4%, even though there was a marginal upward revision in the second quarter, reduces the overall growth rate for the year as well as for the fourth quarter.Besides, as the GDP at constant prices is now estimated at market prices rather than factor cost, indirect taxes and subsidies also pull down the GDP estimate for the year as well as for the fourth quarter. It must be noted that the revised estimate of subsidies for FY21 is at Rs 5.9 lakh crore as against the budget estimate of Rs 2.5 lakh crore. This seems to be mainly due to the clearing of the off-budget liabilities on food subsidies arising from FCI borrowing from the NSSF.While it is a favourite pastime of economists to quibble on the growth rates on a few decimal point differences from what they had expected, it is important to note for the current year, all these estimates are likely to undergo substantial revisions. The revision in the first quarter estimate from 23.9% to 24.4% is not surprising. Even in normal years, significant revisions are made, as was seen in the case of Q3 in FY20, and in this abnormal year, as more information on the urban informal sectors become available, there would be further revisions. In the meantime, we will continue to characterise growth in terms of alphabets we choose—“V”, “K”, or “W”.The sector-wise estimate for the fourth quarter, deciphered from the estimates for the three quarters and the second advance estimate for the whole year, does not make much sense. Agriculture and allied sectors are estimated to grow just at about 1.9% in Q4, it has already registered an average growth of 3.4% in the three quarters, and the whole year growth of the sector is pegged at 3%! The mining sector is estimated to contract by 9.2% during the year and having progressively reduced the contraction from 18% in Q1 to 5.3% in Q3, it is estimated to contract by 16.3% in the fourth quarter!In contrast, the construction sector is estimated to show a negative growth of 10.3% during the year, and that would require it to register a positive growth of 12.5% in Q4. Even a sector like trade, hotels, transport and communication is estimated to register positive growth in Q4 at 1.8%. For the optimists, the good news is that in Q4, both agriculture, industry and services will see positive growth. It is difficult to make much sense of these estimates, but let us keep our fingers crossed.Perhaps we should wait for the provisional estimates of GDP, which are supposed to be released in May, to get a better sense of the recovery.
We should not forget the equity dimension of PSU privatization
Making State Finance Commissions work
Killing the Slow Brain
This article was originally published in OPEN magazine.The proliferation of social media presents a clear danger to liberal democracy, free markets, political order and, indeed, to human civilisation. The threat is greater and more urgent than that presented by climate change, Artificial Intelligence, nuclear war, pandemics and terrorism. While we recognise many of the latter as constituting global threats and are aware of how to address them (even if we find it difficult to do so in practice), public opinion around the world is yet to fully recognise that not only is social media a threat to society, but also that the threat is existential in nature.To be sure, the rose-tinted view of the internet and social media that we entertained in the mid-2000s has given way to greater skepticism as the downsides of global interpersonal connectivity have come to fore. Techno-pessimism has grown as societies deal with diverse problems ranging from cyberbullying to surveillance capitalism, from internet-enabled terrorism to foreign interference in electoral politics. If the threat from social media and transnational technology platforms over which they run were limited to problems such as these, it would have been relatively easier for the world’s governments and societies to manage. The problem, unfortunately, is of a vastly different nature.For now, let us set aside the economic challenges, such as taxing digital transactions in a multi-crossborder setting and controversial business models employed by global tech platforms. Let us focus on the sociopolitical ones as they are more important.We confront these challenges at three levels. First, while popular attention is mostly focused on controversies around free speech and privacy, these are actually superficial in nature. More serious is the underlying second level, involving political power that technology platforms have come to wield through their ability to shape international and national narratives, to micro-target and influence human behaviour. But most serious of all is the third, deepest level concerning the effect of social media on how we process information, how we think and how we make judgements.Today, we are intensely caught up at the first level, amid passionate debates concerning online free speech. The debate here is about who should govern what is expressed on the platform; private corporations, national governments or civil societies. In the US, this debate centres around whether social media companies are publications that exercise editorial choice or platforms that do not. The companies have long enjoyed the protections of the latter and escaped legal responsibility for the content that is expressed on their networks. After all, unlike newspapers or television companies, they do not have editors deciding what gets published or broadcast. Yet, their claims to being mere platforms are questionable because even if they do not have human editors making decisions, they do employ computer algorithms that determine what users see. What you see on a Google search, Facebook feed or Twitter stream is neither random nor reverse-chronological. It is algorithmic. So if lawmakers in the US want to review the statute that treats them as platforms, they have a case. Meanwhile, Europe has long had rules prohibiting hate speech, which it seeks to impose more strongly on big tech companies that conveniently happen to be mostly American. In India, governments have long taken an elastic view of the constitutional restrictions on free speech, succumbing either to competitive intolerance or political partisanship. Indeed, one of the grounds for demanding that content be taken down under the Information Technology Act, 2000 is the bewildering offence of ‘blasphemy’ which is absurd in a secular state and ought to be unconstitutional. Yet, it remains on the books. In other words, whether it is in the US, Europe or India, governments are attempting to seize greater control over gatekeeping content from technology platforms. This is a battle that governments will eventually win. They will also win the battle over privacy norms.The world’s more deliberative political systems are paying greater attention to the second level issue: how to deal with the political power that tech platforms have come to acquire. Even if their ability to make or break political careers is overestimated, their extraordinary ability to shape the public narrative is no longer in doubt. The world’s nation-states, shaped as they were by the Industrial Age, lack effective mechanisms to deal with this new power centre. The old formula of separating legislative, judiciary, executive, monetary and religious authorities, and ensuring that the media is free and there is competition in the economy, does not work satisfactorily in the Information Age. Lacking suitable instruments, the world’s lawmakers are using what they have—anti-trust laws—to literally cut big technology firms down to size. A far more effective way would be to curb the narrative dominance of tech companies by compelling them to open up their platforms to competing algorithm providers. Even so, the broader task of accommodating information power centres and rebalancing power among social institutions is a task that all countries face.IT IS AT the third and deepest level that we confront the most serious threat from social media, because it hijacks our ability to think. Addictive and relentless, social media interferes with our ability to use the reflective, rational part of the mind—what psychologist Daniel Kahneman calls the ‘slow brain’—and instead makes us leap from one instinctive reaction to the other. Instead of making our own judgements, we rely on social proof, ‘what others say’, even if it contradicts our own lived experience. We do not reflect. Indeed, we cannot reflect because the feed has refreshed and we must respond quickly. There is no time to reason. Yet, liberal democracy and free markets are based on the human capacity for reason. Take that away and the edifice of society stands on much weaker legs. It is not a coincidence that liberal democracies around the world have seen a weakening of liberal norms, the rise of demagogues and ceaseless moral panics over the past decade. The Right is currently not too concerned about this—and often celebrates it—as it is reaping the political benefits of the phenomenon. This is myopic. Nationalists, conservatives and traditionalists must be concerned too, for the whirlwind of unreason will not spare any political or social order. Liberal democratic order is merely the first victim. Social media undermines order itself and will not distinguish one form from the other. It is rapidly eating away at the cognitive machinery of humankind, at our capacity to think and use our better judgement. This is a path that leads to anarchy, authoritarianism or both. So even authoritarians cannot rest easy.We have no idea how to stop this slide. The world is getting more connected, data is getting cheaper, video is replacing text and literacy is no longer a hurdle. But we do not know how to get off the smartphone, nor, indeed, how to get our kids off it.The world’s governments will find that it is easier to sort out who gets to control free speech on the internet, and even to accommodate tech platforms into democratic power structures, than it is to unlock the stranglehold social media has over the human mind. As individuals, we can start acting now.
The problem with China’s new coastguard law
Private sector can be govt’s useful ally in Covid vaccination, not an adversary
Despite being the second-fastest country to vaccinate over 10 million people and currently having the third-highest number of people vaccinated against Covid-19, it is fair to say that India’s vaccination programme has gotten off to a slow start. At around 300,000 per day, the current vaccination rate is only a quarter of the 1.3 million per day that was estimated by the government in January. As Naushad Forbes, co-chairman of Forbes Marshall, pointed out in Business Standard a few days ago, at this rate it could take up to 17 years to administer two doses to 800 million adults.
In other words, the current pace of India’s vaccination programme is, paradoxically, both impressive and inadequate. To be effective, it must be ramped up 10-20 times, so that 80 per cent of the population can be protected by the end of the year. Speed is important for many reasons: the faster the population is immunised, the quicker the economic recovery, the smaller the risk of new strains, and lower the human cost.Read the full article on ThePrint
STIP2020: A wish-list, not a policy
This article first appeared in IndiaTogetherThe COVID-19 experience has brought attention to the importance of science, technology and innovation. Researchers facilitated the rapid understanding of a new virus. Technology underpinned efforts for curbing the spread of the disease. Entrepreneurship led to quick production of diagnostics, treatment and vaccines. But within this global picture, there are vast differences between countries. Only some nations have been able to marshal the science and the resources to respond to the pandemic.What about India? The country has significant manufacturing capacity, but the lack of homegrown vaccines as well as a generally weak public health system are major obstacles, and reaching vaccines and treatment to our large population will not be swift. We simply haven't invested enough in the past - in science as well as in healthcare - to be able to do what is needed today. [Read more]
LAC Row: Strategic options, post-Ladakh
The disengagement process in Ladakh is hopefully the concluding scene of another military episode in India-China relations. Political and strategic relationships, especially those involving neighbours with whom we have disputes, are in reality an unending mind game, with the parties concerned competing for advantages aimed to protect, preserve and promote their vital interests. In this episode, China threatened India’s territorial integrity, India reacted firmly, and if the disengagement goes according to plan, India would seem to have quite successfully defended its interests for the time being.A deepened military mind game can be expected to endure in the form of military preparations. The scene now shifts to where it finally matters the most – in the minds of the opposing political leaderships, which will be reflected in the future politico-diplomatic manoeuvres.China’s military aggressiveness in the Himalayas must be viewed as part of the big picture of the larger global geopolitical contestation. A rising China that is economically buoyant, politically authoritarian, assertive and aggressive, is being increasingly opposed by the US, which is slipping from its status as the lone Superpower.Read the full article in ThePrint
Unless China changes thinking, any border agreement is a perishable good
It should not come as a surprise that the Narendra Modi government and some in the media and strategic community have projected the military agreement to disengage on both banks of the Pangong Tso in Ladakh as a triumph. The footage of Chinese forces dismantling their forward stations and retreating behind the agreed positions supports this contention.
It should also not come as a surprise that the Opposition has criticised the agreement as a defeat, with Congress’ Rahul Gandhi accusing the prime minister of “ceding” territory to the Chinese. The fact that Indian troops can no longer patrol the areas between Fingers 4 and 8 — that the Chinese previously recognised as outside their claim, and that the Indian Army used to regularly patrol before the 2020 standoff — lends credence to this criticism.
In its centenary year, the CCP’s revisionist history
In July, the Communist Party of China (CCP) will celebrate its centenary. This is the most important event in the CCP’s political calendar. It presents an opportunity for the leadership to highlight developmental achievements, which are seen as critical to its legitimacy. Economic development, however, is one of many factors that feed the algorithm of legitimacy. Viewing the question of legitimacy simply from a transactional prism of the party ensuring developmental outcomes in exchange for obedience is reductive, resulting in a misunderstanding of what sustains CCP rule in China. History, or more precisely, building and guiding a supportive historical narrative is crucial too.Read the full article in Hindustan Times here.
House defence panel must ask 4 key questions — from lower expenditure to pension bill
When the Parliamentary Standing Committee on Defence meets this week to discuss the Budget allocations made by Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman, we hope to get some clarity on the provisions made towards India’s national security. That’s because on defence, the Union Budget for FY2021-22 hides more than it reveals. Not only was ‘defence’ conspicuous by its absence in the finance minister’s Budget speech for the second consecutive year, the component-wise budgetary allocation also raises more questions than answers.
As the Committee examines the Demand for Grants of the defence ministry, we believe there are at least four important questions that the panel should ask.Read the full article on ThePrint
Responding to Southeast Asian concerns will raise our influence
An annual survey of Southeast Asia’s policy elite throws up three striking findings. First, despite being both the most influential power in Southeast Asia and providing the most help to ASEAN countries during the covid pandemic, China is increasingly distrusted in the region. Second, despite its insignificant political, strategic and economic influence in the region and posing little threat to any country, most respondents do not have confidence that India will “do the right thing" to contribute to peace, security, prosperity and governance. Third, a mere change of guard in Washington has turned around the region’s view of the United States, which is now looked towards with greater confidence and positivity.Read the full article on The Mint