The Free Press Journal | Analysis: Vivek Ramaswamy’s VP auditions have begun

Let’s get one thing out of the way before we unpack what happened in the US this Monday and Tuesday: Vivek Ramaswamy is more ‘White’ than ‘Brown’. He is indeed proud of his Indian heritage (his parents are Tam-Brahms from Palakkad, Kerala), and has never shied away from flaunting it, but if he is to be at the centre of American politics in some way, it is not his religiosity at the family dinner table that matters, it is his social and political views. In that context, it is his childhood piano teacher who has had a greater influence on him than his parents. Read the full article here.

ThePrint | Army promotions must be based on capabilities, not lineage. Turf protection is main mischief

Caste is likely to be a dominant plot in the upcoming Lok Sabha election. But let’s interrogate how this hierarchical and discriminatory structure endures in the promotion system of the Indian Army. There is seemingly a system of reservation in Army promotions. Discrimination based on identity derived from lineage is the hardened core of the caste system. In the Indian Army, the enduring marker for the selection of its senior leadership is the lineage or ‘inherited identity’, particularly the professional segment one is initially inducted into. Read the full article here.

Mint | Eating together could strengthen our national consciousness

You might not have noticed it, but it is extremely difficult to find a restaurant in India that can seat a dozen people around a single round table. If you have more than six diners, you have to ask the restaurant to join two or more tables to create a long rectangle. While this allows several colleagues or family members to technically sit at the same table, conversation and sharing of food is limited to groups of four or five people sitting next to each other. Compared to many East Asian countries where big round tables are commonplace in restaurants, communal dining in India mostly caters to rather small groups. Read the full article here.

Deccan Herald | Is India on course to address maritime threats?

India’s foreign minister, S Jaishankar, is due to visit Tehran today, and he could probably confront Iran with evidence of its involvement in the drone attack on the commercial ship MV Chem Pluto about 200 nautical miles from the Indian coast with with cargo heading to Mangaluru. Read the full article here.

The Quint | Taiwan Polls 2024: Amid Cross-Strait Jigsaw, the Impact of US-China Tensions

Amidst a host of elections around the world in 2024, the island of Taiwan is all geared up for its own presidential election and for members of its parliament, the legislative yuan. As the popular vote takes place today, on 13 January, it has – Lai Ching-Te, the current Vice-President of Taiwan and the candidate for the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP), Hou Yu-ih, incumbent mayor of New Taipei and candidate of the Kuomintang Party (KMT), and Ko Wen-Je, former mayor of Taipei and candidate of the Taiwan People’s Party (TPP) as contenders. Read the full article here.

Moneycontrol | Maldives: Is Muizzu’s pro-China tilt just a balancing act?

Recently, the Maldives government decided to terminate a hydrography agreement with India, committing to conduct hydrographic activities independently after June next year. Separately, New Delhi has raised its objections with Malé that the Chinese survey vessel, Shi Yan 6, not be allowed to dock and pursue scientific exploration, such as deep water exploration, next year. New Delhi is concerned that a “pro-China” government in Malé may deepen China’s influence in the Indian Ocean Region (IOR). How concerned should India be with Maldives’ relationship with China, and Chinese activities in the IOR? Read the full article here.

The Free Press Journal | Analysis: Trump and the art of electoral endurance

In the 2007 hit Shah Rukh Khan movie Chak De! India, women’s hockey coach Kabir Khan has to deal with a bunch of soloists in the team, athletes who refuse to blend in as a team and would rather make single-player runs into the opponent’s side, only to be defeated in their pursuit, because, well, the guys on the other side are smarter. The Americans have a word for this: Heroball, a derogatory term for a style of play where a single player tries to be the team's hero by taking and missing many low percentage shots. Read the full article here.

ThePrint | Poonch incident should encourage military justice review. Bring one law for three Services

The frequency of terrorist violence in the Rajouri-Poonch districts in the Jammu division of Jammu & Kashmir has remained a cause for concern for over two years. This is in contrast to the decline of terrorism in the Kashmir valley during the same period. A combination of mountainous terrain, jungles and contiguity with the Line of Control makes the area suitable for hit and run attacks. Pakistan’s hand is obvious and the time period also overlaps with the thinning out of the Rashtriya Rifles, a counter-terrorism force, post China’s aggressive manoeuvres in Ladakh in 2020. Read the full article here.

Moneycontrol | Global Economy 2024: Positives in macro outlook outweighing uncertainties, India in a position to dream big

Macroeconomists were created to make weather forecasters gain credibility” goes one joke. “Economists have successfully predicted 9 out of the last 5 recessions” is another dig at the predictive ability of the macroeconomics discipline. Beyond the humour, it points to the obvious complexity of interaction between hundreds of related variables in a complicated geopolitical scenario. Despite the obvious risks involved in speculating about the future in the economic domain, many brave economists undertake foolhardy tasks of making year-end projections and this is one such attempt. Read the full article here.

The New Indian Express | India’s National Geospatial Policy: Analysing progress and charting the future

As 2023 draws to a close, it is important to reflect on India’s strides in implementing its National Geospatial Policy, introduced on December 28, 2022. The National Geospatial Policy, 2022, is a pivotal initiative designed to advance the geospatial sector in support of national development, economic growth and the evolution of an information-rich economy. Geospatial technology is an advanced tool for analysing location-based data. It helps us monitor natural resources, plan development and respond to disasters. This technology provides a comprehensive view of Earth through satellite imagery, Global Positioning System (GPS), remote sensing, and Geographic Information System (GIS). It promotes spatial thinking to solve real-world problems and enables informed decisions and actions. Read the full article here.

The Hindu | What does China’s 2024 economic policy look like?

The 2023 Chinese Central Economic Work Conference (CEWC), an annual meeting mechanism of the Communist Party where the economic direction of the nation for the upcoming year is deliberated and agreed upon by key stakeholders, recently concluded on December 12, and the readout from the meeting stresses a stability-oriented pathway for the Chinese economy in 2024. Overall, the line of action seems pretty clear, at least from the CEWC deliberations - moving away from export-led to domestic demand-led growth, expanding high-quality production process, achieving self-reliance in critical tech but collaborating with trade partners as necessary, and ensuring financial discipline alongside stability of funds and liquidity. Needless to say, many of these goals have been repeated in the past few years, but some of them require intense structural reform, including by means of abandoning long-held beliefs and practices of the Chinese party-state. Read the full article here.

Spacepreneur | India's Space and Geospatial Policies: Unlocking New Horizons

ISRO has made moderate-resolution satellite remote sensing data up to 5m spatial resolution available for free to Indian citizens, which is even more than what NASA and ESA offer. This is in line with India's new Space Policy, approved in
April 2023, which aims to expand India's space capabilities, open remote sensing data, and create international partnerships. The policy encourages private businesses to participate in the space economy. Another part of this development is the National Geospatial Policy, which focuses on spatial technologies and aims to achieve significant progress by 2035. This includes conducting a comprehensive survey of India's land and water resources. Many government departments are involved in this policy, and it emphasizes the link between Space and Spatial Sciences, which plays a crucial role in resource management and national development. Both policies are intended to drive India's progress in space and geospatial sectors. Read the full article here.

Takshashila Blog | A Potential Strategy to Navigate Fractured RISC-V Ecosystem

In the rapidly evolving world of semiconductor geopolitics, a new fault line is emerging, one that could have far-reaching implications for countries like India. The United States, in its strategic tussle with China, could be contemplating imposing export controls on (Reduced Instruction Set Computer or RISC-V technology.

Developed at the University of California, Berkeley, RISC-V is an open-source instruction set architecture (ISA), a set of basic instructions and functions that allows companies to develop microprocessors based on this specification.  Read the full blog here.

Time of India | Pannun case: Time to reimagine spy agency for Information Age

A US district court indictment accusing an Indian official of ordering an assassination on American soil continues to remain in the news cycle. The Union government has constituted a high-level inquiry committee to look into the inputs shared by the US. There have been plenty of articles on its impact on India-US ties, and the usual partisan sniping as well. But there’s one underrated angle to this discussion: this fiasco opens the Overton window (a window of possibility) for India to reform its external intelligence agency. Read the full article here.

Scroll.in | A new book examines how India can set up new and world-class semiconductor facilities

India only has a few fabrication facilities owned and operated by the government for critical infrastructure needs in space and defence. Prior attempts to attract private investments in these fields have failed due to cost disadvantages and uncertainty of the investment climate. These challenges remain. Combining these barriers with the fact that nearly every major chip-producing country when the chips are down is aggressively trying to localise leading-edge fabrication facilities, India is on a weak wicket. Read the full article here.

ThePrint | Ex-service chiefs have no place at Ram Temple inauguration. They must guard military values

The Shri Ram Janmabhoomi Teerth Kshetra is supposedly inviting about 8,000 people for the Ram Mandir opening ceremony on 22 January 2024. From Prime Minister Narendra Modi to Reliance chairman Mukesh Ambani, the list includes prominent figures from varied fields as well as families of 50 ‘Kar Sevaks’ and a representative each from 50 countries. The invitation has also gone out to former chiefs of the armed forces, a step worth recounting in the broader framework of civil-military relations. It is verified that a flag rank veteran called up the former chiefs, seeking to ascertain their inclination to attend the function. It is understood that most of them declined. Those who indicated their willingness or did not directly turn down the invite have received a formal invitation. In terms of civil-military relations, the question that arises is an ethical one: How will the attendance of former chiefs at the 22 January event impact the secular and apolitical foundations of India’s military institution? Read the full article here.

CASI | Chandrayaan and Chips: Space Lessons for India’s Semiconductor Program?

From a technology policy lens, the success of the Chandrayaan-3 mission in 2023—which saw India become the fourth country to land a rover on the moon and the first to do so near the Lunar south pole—brings up a pertinent question: If largely government-run efforts could make India a bonafide space power, can some of those learnings help India become a semiconductor power? Geopolitical competition between the US and China, as well as a perceived overreliance on a seemingly vulnerable Taiwan for the vast majority of advanced chips, has made the semiconductor manufacturing sector the focus of intense industrial policy efforts over the last few years, after decades of it being the poster child of globalization. Read the full article here.

Mint | Social capital can help close a wide MSME gap

In his inaugural address to the first Industrial Conference in Pune in 1890, Mahadev Govind Ranade noted that “the industry of the country is parched up for want of Capital" because after land revenue, a considerable portion of gross savings was used to hoard bullion. The lack of institutional arrangements for industrial finance meant that capital was locked up in unproductive assets and not available to India’s entrepreneurs. A century later, the German economic historian Dietmar Rothermund came to a similar conclusion. Lacking financial institutions, Indian surpluses in the second half of the 19th century went into gold and land. Meiji Japan, in contrast, was able to “gather small savings and to channel them into the mainstream of the national economy," enabling the country’s industrialization. Read the full article here.

Bharat Shakti | Drones Unleashed: China’s PLA Masters Swarming Techniques For Military Dominance

Technological reforms in the Chinese People’s Liberation Army (PLA) have ushered in an era of integration of weapons systems with new technologies and modular capabilities. Doctrinally, too, the PLA is adapting to new, collaborative and multi-domain techniques for fighting wars. One of the techniques that the PLA is now increasingly working with is drone swarming, which encompasses synchronisation and coordinated operation of multiple drones for the purpose of achieving a single objective. Read the full article here.

The Free Press Journal | Realpolitik Will Define Indo-US Ties, Not Pannun

The US Department of Justice’s week-old indictment of Indian national Nikhil Gupta in the alleged attempt to kill New York-based Khalistani separatist Gurpatwant Singh Pannun cannot be a barometer to measure New Delhi’s deep strategic ties with Washington, something both countries have worked on intensely for the last two decades. The Americans have not only been discreet in their investigation, they have been judicious in their approach by doing everything by the book in their detention and deportation of Gupta, an alleged drug trafficker and weapons dealer who is accused of trying to kill Pannun, an American-Canadian citizen. Read the full article here.