✌✌✌✌ THE HINDU ✌✌✌✌
✌✌ Jayalalithaa, 1948-2016 ✌✌
Adversity brought out the best in Jayalalithaa. As a Chief Minister fighting for the rights of her State, as a politician trying to spring back from electoral defeats, as a woman standing up to sexist taunts in what is still very much a man’s world, she was courageous to the point of being adventurist. In her passing, India has lost a leader who played a vital role in the shaping of Tamil Nadu during a crucial phase of the country’s economic development and social progress. It may be true that Jayalalithaa owed her success in politics in no small measure to her film-world association with M.G. Ramachandran, the founder of the AIADMK. Soon after she joined the party, her mentor, in 1983, made her its propaganda secretary. But all that MGR did was to set her on a political career. He did not anoint her his successor, and after his death Jayalalithaa needed to win the battle for his political legacy. This she did by reuniting the two factions of the party, retrieving its election symbol, reviving the alliance with the Congress and, finally, becoming Chief Minister in 1991. She continued with MGR’s policies, targeting the weaker sections, the rural peasants and the unorganised workers through food subsidies and social welfare schemes, expanding the AIADMK’s reach. Unlike MGR, who lived under the constant shadow of the Centre’s power to dismiss a State government under Article 356, she had the luxury of doing business with a Congress government at the Centre led by P.V. Narasimha Rao, one dependent on outside support from her party for survival. This allowed her to take a strong stand on issues such as Cauvery, forcing the Centre to toe her line, or at least heed her views. However, towards the end of her first term as Chief Minister, her government became enmeshed in a series of corruption scandals. Her association with V.N. Sasikala, who was perceived by some as functioning as an extra-constitutional authority, alienated sections of her support base. Also, she drove away allies she had struggled to win back following MGR’s passing.
Written off after receiving a drubbing in the 1996 Assembly election, losing even her own seat, no one had forecast Jayalalithaa would reinvent her political career so swiftly and effectively. The DMK government, which slapped a slew of corruption cases against her, had possibly thought it was writing her political epitaph, but Jayalalithaa turned the tables by struggling to survive and remain relevant. The haughty aloofness of the years in power was replaced by a refreshingly accommodative nature, enabling her to stitch together a brand new alliance with smaller parties such as the Pattali Makkal Katchi, the Marumalarchi Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam and the Bharatiya Janata Party for the 1998 Lok Sabha election. The sheer arithmetic of the alliance gave it a majority of the seats, pitchforking Jayalalithaa back into a game that she seemed well out of. At the Central level, her comeback bore a resemblance to the Narasimha Rao years: this time it was the BJP-led government that was wholly dependent on her support for survival. However, Jayalalithaa squandered this opportunity by insisting that the Centre dismiss the DMK government in the State. Evidently, she had not factored in the Bommai judgment of the Supreme Court that had made arbitrary use of Article 356 almost impossible. The end result was the premature dissolution of the Lok Sabha in 1999, and the formation of an unlikely alliance between her arch-rival, the DMK, and her closest ideological ally, the BJP, which eventually defeated the AIADMK-led alliance. Once again, the hard-fought gains of the years in the opposition were frittered away. Without power in either New Delhi or Chennai, Jayalalithaa went back to the old familiar way of building a new alliance in 2001. The Congress and its breakaway group, the Tamil Maanila Congress, which owed its nascence to opposition within the Congress to an alliance with the AIADMK, were now roped in, along with the Left parties, which were fighting the Congress in Kerala. Although the DMK did not suffer majorly from any anti-incumbency sentiment, the AIADMK-led alliance won on the strength of electoral arithmetic. Jayalalithaa’s propensity to drive away friends was more than matched by her ability to bring together foes.
Her political successes were challenged by legal setbacks. Jayalalithaa was unseated twice: in 2001 the Supreme Court ruled she could not continue as Chief Minister when she stood disqualified from contesting in an election. But she got her conviction overturned and returned as Chief Minister after winning a by-election. In 2014 she was convicted by a trial court in the disproportionate assets case. But she was back as Chief Minister after winning an appeal in the Karnataka High Court. The case is now awaiting a judgment in the Supreme Court following an appeal. Jayalalithaa took ill after one of her most remarkable wins in the 2016 Assembly election, following up on her 2014 Lok Sabha win, both achieved without the benefit of allies, thanks to a divided opposition.
Like MGR before her, Jayalalithaa commanded the unflinching loyalty, even adulation, of her party supporters. From the time she was admitted in hospital, tens of thousands had gathered outside praying for her. The AIADMK enjoys a comfortable majority in the House, and the transition to a government headed by the new leader has been smooth. But Chief Minister O. Panneerselvam now has the unenviable task of holding the party together. Without the political acumen and personal charisma of Jayalalithaa, this will be a tough task.
✌✌ 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 ECONOMIC TIMES ✌✌✌✌
✌✌ When Italians work on a sunny Sunday ✌✌
Italy’s decisive No vote in Sunday’s constitutional referendum, leading to prime minister Matteo Renzi’s resignation, casts a shadow not just on the eurozone but also on India. It adds to the mix of political and economic uncertainty that threatens to pull funds out of emerging markets, depreciate currencies and push up energy prices that will have a ripple effect on inflation. Policy must be prepared to countenance this eventuality.
Strictly speaking, the referendum was on constitutional reform. However, Renzi’s resignation jeopardises the recapitalisation of some weak Italian banks, which have nearly 400 billion euros of bad debt on their books. Renzi’s exit strengthens a populist political movement, Five Star, led by a former clown, that calls for Italy’s exit from the euro. The political instability this prospect creates holds the hand of would-be foreign suppliers of the capital Italian banks need. If banks collapse, the ongoing eurozone recovery would go into reverse. This raises the prospect of increased global risk. Taken together with the prospect of higher interest rates in the US, money would flee back to the safety of the US and Europe. The US dollar will rise, and the rupee, weaken. The price impact of Opec’s production cuts will be made worse by a weaker rupee.
The Italian referendum, coming on the heels of Donald Trump’s election in the US and UK’s Brexit vote, is part of the continuum of the rise of populist anti-globalisation forces in the industrialised countries. If France and Germany, which go to the polls next year, follow suit, it would undermine global trade. The growing strength of the anti-globalisation sentiment vastly reduces the wriggle room for economies like India, and it must factor these shifts into its policies.
✌✌ Jayalalithaa, 1948-2016 ✌✌
Adversity brought out the best in Jayalalithaa. As a Chief Minister fighting for the rights of her State, as a politician trying to spring back from electoral defeats, as a woman standing up to sexist taunts in what is still very much a man’s world, she was courageous to the point of being adventurist. In her passing, India has lost a leader who played a vital role in the shaping of Tamil Nadu during a crucial phase of the country’s economic development and social progress. It may be true that Jayalalithaa owed her success in politics in no small measure to her film-world association with M.G. Ramachandran, the founder of the AIADMK. Soon after she joined the party, her mentor, in 1983, made her its propaganda secretary. But all that MGR did was to set her on a political career. He did not anoint her his successor, and after his death Jayalalithaa needed to win the battle for his political legacy. This she did by reuniting the two factions of the party, retrieving its election symbol, reviving the alliance with the Congress and, finally, becoming Chief Minister in 1991. She continued with MGR’s policies, targeting the weaker sections, the rural peasants and the unorganised workers through food subsidies and social welfare schemes, expanding the AIADMK’s reach. Unlike MGR, who lived under the constant shadow of the Centre’s power to dismiss a State government under Article 356, she had the luxury of doing business with a Congress government at the Centre led by P.V. Narasimha Rao, one dependent on outside support from her party for survival. This allowed her to take a strong stand on issues such as Cauvery, forcing the Centre to toe her line, or at least heed her views. However, towards the end of her first term as Chief Minister, her government became enmeshed in a series of corruption scandals. Her association with V.N. Sasikala, who was perceived by some as functioning as an extra-constitutional authority, alienated sections of her support base. Also, she drove away allies she had struggled to win back following MGR’s passing.
Written off after receiving a drubbing in the 1996 Assembly election, losing even her own seat, no one had forecast Jayalalithaa would reinvent her political career so swiftly and effectively. The DMK government, which slapped a slew of corruption cases against her, had possibly thought it was writing her political epitaph, but Jayalalithaa turned the tables by struggling to survive and remain relevant. The haughty aloofness of the years in power was replaced by a refreshingly accommodative nature, enabling her to stitch together a brand new alliance with smaller parties such as the Pattali Makkal Katchi, the Marumalarchi Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam and the Bharatiya Janata Party for the 1998 Lok Sabha election. The sheer arithmetic of the alliance gave it a majority of the seats, pitchforking Jayalalithaa back into a game that she seemed well out of. At the Central level, her comeback bore a resemblance to the Narasimha Rao years: this time it was the BJP-led government that was wholly dependent on her support for survival. However, Jayalalithaa squandered this opportunity by insisting that the Centre dismiss the DMK government in the State. Evidently, she had not factored in the Bommai judgment of the Supreme Court that had made arbitrary use of Article 356 almost impossible. The end result was the premature dissolution of the Lok Sabha in 1999, and the formation of an unlikely alliance between her arch-rival, the DMK, and her closest ideological ally, the BJP, which eventually defeated the AIADMK-led alliance. Once again, the hard-fought gains of the years in the opposition were frittered away. Without power in either New Delhi or Chennai, Jayalalithaa went back to the old familiar way of building a new alliance in 2001. The Congress and its breakaway group, the Tamil Maanila Congress, which owed its nascence to opposition within the Congress to an alliance with the AIADMK, were now roped in, along with the Left parties, which were fighting the Congress in Kerala. Although the DMK did not suffer majorly from any anti-incumbency sentiment, the AIADMK-led alliance won on the strength of electoral arithmetic. Jayalalithaa’s propensity to drive away friends was more than matched by her ability to bring together foes.
Her political successes were challenged by legal setbacks. Jayalalithaa was unseated twice: in 2001 the Supreme Court ruled she could not continue as Chief Minister when she stood disqualified from contesting in an election. But she got her conviction overturned and returned as Chief Minister after winning a by-election. In 2014 she was convicted by a trial court in the disproportionate assets case. But she was back as Chief Minister after winning an appeal in the Karnataka High Court. The case is now awaiting a judgment in the Supreme Court following an appeal. Jayalalithaa took ill after one of her most remarkable wins in the 2016 Assembly election, following up on her 2014 Lok Sabha win, both achieved without the benefit of allies, thanks to a divided opposition.
Like MGR before her, Jayalalithaa commanded the unflinching loyalty, even adulation, of her party supporters. From the time she was admitted in hospital, tens of thousands had gathered outside praying for her. The AIADMK enjoys a comfortable majority in the House, and the transition to a government headed by the new leader has been smooth. But Chief Minister O. Panneerselvam now has the unenviable task of holding the party together. Without the political acumen and personal charisma of Jayalalithaa, this will be a tough task.
✌✌ 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 ECONOMIC TIMES ✌✌✌✌
✌✌ When Italians work on a sunny Sunday ✌✌
Italy’s decisive No vote in Sunday’s constitutional referendum, leading to prime minister Matteo Renzi’s resignation, casts a shadow not just on the eurozone but also on India. It adds to the mix of political and economic uncertainty that threatens to pull funds out of emerging markets, depreciate currencies and push up energy prices that will have a ripple effect on inflation. Policy must be prepared to countenance this eventuality.
Strictly speaking, the referendum was on constitutional reform. However, Renzi’s resignation jeopardises the recapitalisation of some weak Italian banks, which have nearly 400 billion euros of bad debt on their books. Renzi’s exit strengthens a populist political movement, Five Star, led by a former clown, that calls for Italy’s exit from the euro. The political instability this prospect creates holds the hand of would-be foreign suppliers of the capital Italian banks need. If banks collapse, the ongoing eurozone recovery would go into reverse. This raises the prospect of increased global risk. Taken together with the prospect of higher interest rates in the US, money would flee back to the safety of the US and Europe. The US dollar will rise, and the rupee, weaken. The price impact of Opec’s production cuts will be made worse by a weaker rupee.
The Italian referendum, coming on the heels of Donald Trump’s election in the US and UK’s Brexit vote, is part of the continuum of the rise of populist anti-globalisation forces in the industrialised countries. If France and Germany, which go to the polls next year, follow suit, it would undermine global trade. The growing strength of the anti-globalisation sentiment vastly reduces the wriggle room for economies like India, and it must factor these shifts into its policies.
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