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Economy, elections, business & healthcare — what needs to be fixed for a modern South Asia

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The South Asia Conclave, conducted by the Oxford University Press, attempted to find ways for nations of the region to better understand their roles in a changed world.

New Delhi: With the global spotlight increasingly shifting to countries in South and Southeast Asia, in search for cues to navigate the world’s changing political, physical, and social landscape, the need for nations of this region to better understand their role and responsibility is more pressing than ever before.

It is with this aim — to create a platform for eminent policymakers, bureaucrats, academicians and senior editors to engage in solution-oriented dialogue with the public — that the South Asia Conclave was envisioned by the Oxford University Press last year.

Its second edition, which took place in New Delhi Wednesday, saw a wide array of panel discussions on subjects ranging from ideology and identity to the cost of financing an electoral democracy.

The theme of the conclave was ‘Exploring contemporary research and ideas on modern South Asia,’ and ThePrint was the digital partner.

Ashutosh Varshney, professor from Brown University, opened the conference with a moderated session on the upcoming book, Ideology and Identity: The Changing Party Systems of India, co-written by Pradeep Chhibber, director of the Institute of International Studies at the University of California Berkeley, and PhD candidate in political science Rahul Verma.

Chhibber and Verma proposed that “unlike the West, the ideological universe of Indian politics stabilised around two central pillars — statism, and the politics of recognition”.

Using data to substantiate their claims, Verma argued that people who favoured increased state intervention and political recognition of marginalised groups tended to vote for the Congress, while the reverse was true for the BJP.

This claim formed the bedrock of the healthy disagreement that followed, with Congress MP Jairam Ramesh going as far as to say that “their conclusions, based on data, fail in the face of everyday reality”.

“The BJP is as statist as the Congress, which is as statist as the Samajwadi party. To argue that the BJP won the 2014 elections on the plank of less state completely boggles my mind,” said Ramesh.

The panellists also largely agreed that while ideology is increasingly shaping Indian politics today, bracketing it into rigid binaries is reductive and does not apply to a dynamic Indian context.

‘Military effectiveness hampered by civilian-Army communication gap’

The second session centred on the book The Absent Dialogue: Civil-Military Relations in India, which was written by assistant professor, RSIS, Anit Mukherjee.

Mukherjee argued that a wide communication gap between the armed forces and the government has compromised military effectiveness within the country. The balance, he said, “lies between maintaining civilian control over the forces to prevent a coup and strengthening them enough to combat external threats”.

Retired chief of army staff, Gen (retd) Ved Prakash Malik, said the armed forces remained largely without guidance from the government during peacetime, and that “civilian authorities don’t know the functioning of the armed forces on the ground”.

Srinath Raghavan, the senior fellow at the Centre for Policy research, and Col Ajai Shukla (retd), consulting editor, strategic affairs, at Business Standard, countered with the fact that the military was equally ill-equipped to comprehend civilian policy decisions.

“Military colleges only teach Indians how to be staff officers. What about teaching them about the logic that informs top-down decisions, even the nature of war itself,” Raghavan asked.

Eventually, while it was clear that the government and military need to talk more, no one was quite sure about who would break the ice first, and how.

‘Parliament finds debates on health boring’

The third session, moderated by Amrita Tripathi, founder of the health collection, on the state on healthcare in India, addressed the utter lack of medical discourse in not only the mainstream public but even in political spaces.

“We have never seen a debate on health in Parliament because they find it too boring,” said Amir Ullah Khan, a prominent development economist and member of the panel. The state of healthcare, the panel found, was much like the debate itself — unsatisfactory and with a long way to develop.

Leena Menghaney, South-Asia head for Doctors without Borders’ Access Campaign, brought the discussion into the realm of access politics, stating that healthcare should be a basic human right and that she doesn’t believe in the insurance system but wants greater accountability from elected representatives.

“I don’t want coverage. I want a basic public healthcare system for everyone,” she said, receiving a rare mid-discussion round of applause from the audience.

Aparna Jaswal, additional director at Fortis Escorts Heart Institute, New Delhi, and Karan Thakur, general manager, communications & PR, Apollo Hospitals, rounded up the panel. While Jaswal focused on the perspective of doctors within the system, Thakur dissected the problem through the macroeconomic lens of demand and supply.

Democracy and its shortcomings in India

The Costs of Democracy: Political Finance in India, was the fourth session of the day, and had a panel moderated by Siddharth Varadarajan, editor of The Wire, in conversation with former election commission officer S.Y Quraishi, social affairs editor at The Hindu G. Sampath, Congress Rajya Sabha MP Rajeev Gowda, and author of the book in discussion Devesh Kapur.

“We cannot think of a democracy without election and we also cannot think of election without money,” said Kapur, opening the debate on the increasing role of money power in determining the outcome of Indian elections.

With exorbitant amounts of money circulating in the economy during election time, largely under the table due to ineffective regulations and controls, the panel agreed that ensuring transparency and equal opportunity in an electoral democracy was still an unsolved problem in India.

Quraishi suggested the need to keep a cap on the expenditure of political parties, not the political leaders, and public rather than private funding of elections was also considered as a viable alternative.

The day ended with a discussion on the relationship between business and politics in India. Business Standard chairman T.N. Ninan said that “business today is deeply disillusioned with the Modi government”.

ThePrint founder and editor-in-chief Shekhar Gupta agreed, adding that since 1991, Indian businessmen consider this to be the most anti-business government.

Talking about the book Business and Politics in India co-edited by Christophe Jaffrelot, Atul Kohli and Kanta Murali, the panel also included Carleton University Professor Vivek Dehejia along with Murali.

The panellists felt that Murali’s book failed to bridge the gap between the rhetoric of Narendra Modi’s promises before the 2014 election and the realities of the contemporary Indian business environment.

Commenting on the reality on-ground, Dehejia said, “I don’t know many businessmen who are happy with demonetisation and GST. When you probe, there isn’t really much substance, rather rhetoric”. Poised at the intersection of economy, politics, policy, business, and healthcare , the conclave was an attempt to introduce new ideas on modern South Asia to the larger public.

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