✌✌✌✌ THE HINDU ✌✌✌✌
✌✌ The heart of the problem ✌✌
There are good reasons why the ‘Heart of Asia’ conference, part of a 14-nation process begun in 2011 to facilitate the development and security of Afghanistan, is so named. The obvious one is geographical, as Afghanistan lies at the junction of Central, South and East Asia, and also of the ancient trading routes from China and India to Europe. Today it is also a focal point for the region’s biggest challenge of terrorism; some of the far-reaching battles against al-Qaeda, Islamic State, etc. will be decided on the battlegrounds of Afghanistan. For India, putting terror centre stage at the Heart of Asia declaration in Amritsar was thus timely and necessary. In tandem, Afghan President Ashraf Ghani and Prime Minister Narendra Modi focussed their concerns on cross-border terrorism emanating from Pakistan, something even Pakistan’s traditional allies at the conference, including China, Saudi Arabia, the UAE and Turkey, found difficult to counter. The case Mr. Ghani made was clear: progress and development in Afghanistan are meaningless and unsustainable without peace, and peace is contingent on Pakistan ending support to terror groups such the Haqqani network and Lashkar-e-Taiba. He dared Pakistan to use its proposed development grant to Afghanistan to fight terror on its own soil.
However, if every window for engagement with Pakistan is closed for India and Afghanistan, the two countries must closely consider what their next step will be. A lack of engagement may, in the short term, yield some pressure on Pakistan’s leadership to act, as it did briefly after the Pathankot attack. But in the long run it may deplete the two countries of their limited leverage as Pakistan’s neighbours. It may, for all the affirmations of mutual ties, also succeed in driving more obstacles to trade between India and Afghanistan. In the past year, the cornering of Pakistan by its South Asian neighbours has only yielded deeper ties for Islamabad with Beijing and Moscow, pushed Kabul closer to Central Asia, and moved New Delhi towards multilateral groupings to the east and south. As a result, the measures India and Afghanistan have envisaged in order to avoid Pakistan, such as land trade from the Chabahar port and a dedicated air corridor between Delhi and Kabul, may prove to be insufficient by the time they are put in place, even as Afghanistan is connected more closely via a rail line from China’s Yiwu and Tehran. The Heart of Asia process thus remains critical to forging cooperation to realise Afghanistan’s potential to be a vibrant Asian “hub”.
✌✌ The politics of exaggeration ✌✌
At first look, West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee’s theatrics on the night of December 1 smacked of the politics of paranoia. Spying Army deployment at a toll plaza near the State Secretariat in Kolkata late that night, she drove herself into a sleepless social media frenzy to “guard our democracy”. Where the Army’s Eastern Command clarified that it was conducting a “routine exercise” to test preparedness, Ms. Banerjee insinuated otherwise by resolving to maintain her vigil at the Secretariat till the Army personnel were withdrawn from their task. Not given to being detained by facts, even after the Army cleared the air by clarifying it had duly informed State authorities about the exercise, Ms. Banerjee’s Trinamool Congress galvanised the Opposition in Parliament the next day. It kept up the high pitch from a previous uproar over delay in landing a civil aircraft that had her on board. Ms. Banerjee is too sharp, and well-versed with the procedures of administration, to not see through her own conspiracy theories. This is not paranoia speaking, it is a play-as-things-go plan to amplify her voice in national politics. The Modi government’s demonetisation drive has given her an opportunity to nominate herself as a rallying force. Projecting random occurrences — a queue for landing clearance at an overburdened airport one day, an Army drill the next — as instances of vendetta against her by the biggest powers that be helps her distinguish herself from the rest of the opposition as the leader in direct combat with the Central government.
This has, of course, been the way with Ms. Banerjee’s politics. In the years of Left Front rule, this is how she separated herself from older, established Congress colleagues. She, for instance, kept alive the memory of wounds sustained in a police crackdown. Once she struck out and formed her own party, she switched allegiance freely in national coalitions in the search for her big chance against the Left. It came in 2011, when Left rule ended in West Bengal; her pre-eminence in State politics was sealed in Assembly elections this year when she stared down the combined challenge of the Congress and the Left parties. Now, with the Congress still struggling to get a grip on the political narrative, and no other party able to provide the glue for opposition unity, she has seized the opportunity. Her tactics of exaggeration, of personalising the argument, are clearly aimed at securing herself as the face of the anti-BJP opposition, even as she goes about seeking old friends and foes alike to rally behind her. Today it is demonetisation. Tomorrow it may be something else. But the tenor of her politics is likely to hold.
✌✌✌✌ THE ECONOMIC TIMES ✌✌✌✌
✌✌ Tamil Nadu must not let Jayalalithaa down ✌✌
The leadership of the All India Anna Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (AIADMK) and the civil administration of Tamil Nadu have the responsibility to maintain order, if not tranquillity, in the state, in the wake of developments on the health front of the state’s chief minister Jayaraman Jayalalithaa. Popular, many leaders around the country are, but the fervour with which her followers adore Jayalalithaa is unique. Emotionally charged people respond to emotion and authority, not to reason.
The people will express their concern and anxiety as they like and as they have the freedom to. It is up to the authorities —the political leadership that holds the fort in the absence of the chief minister, and the state’ administrative machinery — to ensure that things remain peaceful. There is nothing else that Puratchi Thalaivi (revolutionary leader), as Jayalalithaa is called, would have wished for, had she been in a position to supervise things. Tamil Nadu is one of India’s most economically advanced states. Tamil Nadu, under the administration of the AIADMK and its older rival Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (DMK), has seen social and economic progress unseen in most Indian states.
After Maharashtra, it is India’s wealthiest state in terms of gross state domestic product. The average Tamil is the eighthrichest person in the country, after Maharashtrians and people of small states like Goa, Delhi, Puducherry, Sikkim, Chandigarh and so on. It was one of the pioneering states to use social policy to break the mould of traditional caste hierarchy and lay the ground for large-scale social mobility, with reasonably good education and healthcare that is both widely available and affordable. Now, the state’s leadership must allow its citizens to give vent to their feelings with dignity and security. That is what Jayalalithaa would wish for.
✌✌ The heart of the problem ✌✌
There are good reasons why the ‘Heart of Asia’ conference, part of a 14-nation process begun in 2011 to facilitate the development and security of Afghanistan, is so named. The obvious one is geographical, as Afghanistan lies at the junction of Central, South and East Asia, and also of the ancient trading routes from China and India to Europe. Today it is also a focal point for the region’s biggest challenge of terrorism; some of the far-reaching battles against al-Qaeda, Islamic State, etc. will be decided on the battlegrounds of Afghanistan. For India, putting terror centre stage at the Heart of Asia declaration in Amritsar was thus timely and necessary. In tandem, Afghan President Ashraf Ghani and Prime Minister Narendra Modi focussed their concerns on cross-border terrorism emanating from Pakistan, something even Pakistan’s traditional allies at the conference, including China, Saudi Arabia, the UAE and Turkey, found difficult to counter. The case Mr. Ghani made was clear: progress and development in Afghanistan are meaningless and unsustainable without peace, and peace is contingent on Pakistan ending support to terror groups such the Haqqani network and Lashkar-e-Taiba. He dared Pakistan to use its proposed development grant to Afghanistan to fight terror on its own soil.
However, if every window for engagement with Pakistan is closed for India and Afghanistan, the two countries must closely consider what their next step will be. A lack of engagement may, in the short term, yield some pressure on Pakistan’s leadership to act, as it did briefly after the Pathankot attack. But in the long run it may deplete the two countries of their limited leverage as Pakistan’s neighbours. It may, for all the affirmations of mutual ties, also succeed in driving more obstacles to trade between India and Afghanistan. In the past year, the cornering of Pakistan by its South Asian neighbours has only yielded deeper ties for Islamabad with Beijing and Moscow, pushed Kabul closer to Central Asia, and moved New Delhi towards multilateral groupings to the east and south. As a result, the measures India and Afghanistan have envisaged in order to avoid Pakistan, such as land trade from the Chabahar port and a dedicated air corridor between Delhi and Kabul, may prove to be insufficient by the time they are put in place, even as Afghanistan is connected more closely via a rail line from China’s Yiwu and Tehran. The Heart of Asia process thus remains critical to forging cooperation to realise Afghanistan’s potential to be a vibrant Asian “hub”.
✌✌ The politics of exaggeration ✌✌
At first look, West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee’s theatrics on the night of December 1 smacked of the politics of paranoia. Spying Army deployment at a toll plaza near the State Secretariat in Kolkata late that night, she drove herself into a sleepless social media frenzy to “guard our democracy”. Where the Army’s Eastern Command clarified that it was conducting a “routine exercise” to test preparedness, Ms. Banerjee insinuated otherwise by resolving to maintain her vigil at the Secretariat till the Army personnel were withdrawn from their task. Not given to being detained by facts, even after the Army cleared the air by clarifying it had duly informed State authorities about the exercise, Ms. Banerjee’s Trinamool Congress galvanised the Opposition in Parliament the next day. It kept up the high pitch from a previous uproar over delay in landing a civil aircraft that had her on board. Ms. Banerjee is too sharp, and well-versed with the procedures of administration, to not see through her own conspiracy theories. This is not paranoia speaking, it is a play-as-things-go plan to amplify her voice in national politics. The Modi government’s demonetisation drive has given her an opportunity to nominate herself as a rallying force. Projecting random occurrences — a queue for landing clearance at an overburdened airport one day, an Army drill the next — as instances of vendetta against her by the biggest powers that be helps her distinguish herself from the rest of the opposition as the leader in direct combat with the Central government.
This has, of course, been the way with Ms. Banerjee’s politics. In the years of Left Front rule, this is how she separated herself from older, established Congress colleagues. She, for instance, kept alive the memory of wounds sustained in a police crackdown. Once she struck out and formed her own party, she switched allegiance freely in national coalitions in the search for her big chance against the Left. It came in 2011, when Left rule ended in West Bengal; her pre-eminence in State politics was sealed in Assembly elections this year when she stared down the combined challenge of the Congress and the Left parties. Now, with the Congress still struggling to get a grip on the political narrative, and no other party able to provide the glue for opposition unity, she has seized the opportunity. Her tactics of exaggeration, of personalising the argument, are clearly aimed at securing herself as the face of the anti-BJP opposition, even as she goes about seeking old friends and foes alike to rally behind her. Today it is demonetisation. Tomorrow it may be something else. But the tenor of her politics is likely to hold.
✌✌✌✌ THE ECONOMIC TIMES ✌✌✌✌
✌✌ Tamil Nadu must not let Jayalalithaa down ✌✌
The leadership of the All India Anna Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (AIADMK) and the civil administration of Tamil Nadu have the responsibility to maintain order, if not tranquillity, in the state, in the wake of developments on the health front of the state’s chief minister Jayaraman Jayalalithaa. Popular, many leaders around the country are, but the fervour with which her followers adore Jayalalithaa is unique. Emotionally charged people respond to emotion and authority, not to reason.
The people will express their concern and anxiety as they like and as they have the freedom to. It is up to the authorities —the political leadership that holds the fort in the absence of the chief minister, and the state’ administrative machinery — to ensure that things remain peaceful. There is nothing else that Puratchi Thalaivi (revolutionary leader), as Jayalalithaa is called, would have wished for, had she been in a position to supervise things. Tamil Nadu is one of India’s most economically advanced states. Tamil Nadu, under the administration of the AIADMK and its older rival Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (DMK), has seen social and economic progress unseen in most Indian states.
After Maharashtra, it is India’s wealthiest state in terms of gross state domestic product. The average Tamil is the eighthrichest person in the country, after Maharashtrians and people of small states like Goa, Delhi, Puducherry, Sikkim, Chandigarh and so on. It was one of the pioneering states to use social policy to break the mould of traditional caste hierarchy and lay the ground for large-scale social mobility, with reasonably good education and healthcare that is both widely available and affordable. Now, the state’s leadership must allow its citizens to give vent to their feelings with dignity and security. That is what Jayalalithaa would wish for.
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