Democratic subversion
Ashutosh Varshney | Professor, Brown University
The Indian Express
Varshney notes that until recently “few democratic polities moved from inclusion to exclusion in their citizenship practises and laws”. He writes that Delhi is taking “two of the darkest steps in the history of democratic citizenship since the European excesses of the 1940s” with the Citizenship Act. The first is “excluding Muslim immigrants as citizens while accepting all other communities from Pakistan, Afghanistan and Bangladesh on grounds of persecution”, and the second is “promising to introduce a national register of citizens”.
Varshney argues that the “voluminous literature on citizenship” suggests that “a community based on ideals is more inclusive — and harder to build — than one based on bloodlines.” He states that the “recent exclusionary steps can only bring India’s international image down”. Moreover, “a fusion of law and an exclusivist political ideology is in the making”, writes Varshney.
The government’s claim “that the citizenship amendment is not anti-Muslim — for it will give refugee status not only to Hindus, but also to Christians and Parsis — is also political sophistry,” he writes. Democracy “now urgently requires the judiciary and the streets”. He suggests that the “Supreme Court may, or may not, act in a resolute manner — hence, protests are also necessary”.
The distinct cry of an imperiled frontier
Pradip Phanjoubam | Senior journalist and author
The Hindu
Phanjoubam claims that the “outburst against” the Citizenship Act in the Northeast “has left many outside the region confounded”. He writes that the “inability of those outside the Northeast to see what the Northeast sees betrays to an extent an ignorance and an insensitivity to a stark reality small marginalised communities there face”.
He writes that according to UNESCO’s definition of endangered languages “all of the 200 and more languages spoken in the Northeast, with the exception of Assamese and Bengali, are in the vulnerable category”. Phanjoubam maintains that “if a language is vulnerable because of the small size of the number of speakers, it becomes more so if the language is spoken only in certain domains — for instance at home, but not at schools and offices, etc.”
Moreover, “the response of the Northeast to the CAA, is not merely tribal xenophobia as many have portrayed it to be with patronising condescension, but a desperate survival throe”. The “current migration issue is also a consequence of this bitter politics of antagonism” that the northeast has faced in the past, writes Phanjoubam. He argues that “nobody is perfectly innocent or guilty in this sordid drama, and the way forward has to be on the path of truth and reconciliation that Nelson Mandela showed”.
The draft Personal Data Protection Bill is flawed
Anirudh Burman | Associate fellow, Carnegie India
Hindustan Times
The Personal Data Protection Bill “introduces significant compliance requirements, dilutes property rights in data and strengthens State power — without actually protecting privacy” writes Burman. He argues that the “primary issue is that it relies on the idea of user consent and disclosure about data practices by businesses”.
Furthermore, the bill also “places reliance on the concept of ‘harm’” and proposes that “regulatory requirements take into account the harm that may be caused from the use of personal data”. Burman writes that the bill also “gives the government the power to mandate any business to share anonymised non-personal data with the government”.
He argues that when one “combines the power to mandate handing over non-personal data with the creation of a regulator that will oversee this large regulatory framework” and “add the power given to the government to exempt its agencies from the requirements of this bill”, one is “left with the disturbing conclusion that this bill doesn’t only increase compliance costs to the detriment of innovation, it dilutes privacy more than it strengthens it”.
Don’t get spooked by the inflation
Ajay Shah | Professor, National Institute of Public Finance and Policy, New Delhi
Business Standard
The recent rise in inflation should not be a concern as “monetary policy today is on the right track,” writes Shah. It is set to deliver 4 per cent year-on-year Consumer Price Index (CPI) inflation “which is the most that it can do”, he adds.
Inflation grew with the help of a “sharp rise in vegetable prices”, explains Shah. However, he writes, that high values of vegetable inflation last month “should not significantly alter our forecast for CPI inflation in late 2020”. As past instances have shown, high vegetable inflation will kick off a supply response and within a few months, “vegetable inflation will be back down to modest values”, he observes.
Shah suggests that the 4 per cent target for CPI inflation will be accompanied by “fluctuations …within the specified range from 2% to 6%”. He points out that CPI inflation below 2 per cent or above 6 per cent is telling of “mistakes … made a year or two earlier” and adds that “we should undertake a post-mortem to better understand what went wrong, and how the processes can be improved”.
Furthermore, bringing the nominal gross domestic product growth assumptions down to lower values “will help significantly”, writes Shah.
Faster, Higher, Stronger
Arvind Panagariya | Professor of economics, Columbia University, US
Rajeev Mantri | Managing director, Navam Capital
Economic Times
Given the current slowdown, Panagariya and Mantri call for India’s Insolvency and Bankruptcy Code (IBC) to be “speedier, more transparent and hazard-free.” Now that the Cabinet has approved an amendment to the IBC for “protecting buyers of assets against … liabilities”, Parliament must “swiftly pass the amendment” too, they write.
Panagariya and Mantri trace the history of IBC, which came along in 2016. The authors write that before this the “ever greening of loans”, which happens when restructured loans with little prospect of full recovery start to pile up, was a major issue and was common among PSBs. In 2015, the RBI changed the regulation, forcing banks to “reclassify restructured loans as non-performing assets”, explain the authors and the IBC helped smoothen the exit process of defaulting firms and “empowered creditors to pursue defaulting promoters”.
Today, the government “should not subvert competition by intervening on behalf of ailing corporations” but rather focus on making bankruptcy swift to “allow a more efficient buyer to acquire them at [profitable] prices”, they write.
Why you don’t love immigrants as much as you claim
Manu Joseph | Journalist and novelist
Mint
Joseph discusses the prejudices against immigrants in the context of NRC and the recently passed Citizenship Act (CAA). “Compassion for poor immigrants is a high virtue” but across the world, the poor and the lower middle classes perceive poor migrants as competition, he explains and writes that “this is what politicians know”.
Joseph argues that the BJP knows a significant section of voters are wary of India’s Muslim population. That fear is often under a “cloak” — the humanitarian concern of “explosive population growth”, he writes. Even protesters in Assam “are screaming that they do not want any immigrants”, he adds. CAA strategically grants citizenship to those who have fled religious persecution in neighbouring countries but “not so many that they will alter Indian politics or exert a strain on the nation’s resources”, he explains. Notably, the CAA does not wear the aforementioned “cloak”, he writes and argues that India is using “faith in Islam as a criterion to deny immigrants as citizens” and thus, “the optics are very bad”.
Global trade slugfest
C. Gopinath | Professor at Suffolk University, Boston
Hindu Business Line
Gopinath explains that a rules-based order (RBO), in defence and strategic terms, refers to a set of rules that are meant to guide international engagement. He writes that our rules-based system needs fixing and the US-France face off is the latest example of how these rules are “hazy” and may only work “when they assist the rich and powerful”, he writes.
Concerned that digitisation is a “source of tax avoidance”, France recently announced a 3 per cent tax on 30 large companies engaged in “digital activities”, writes Gopinath. The US, which felt the move targeted the likes of Alphabet, Apple, Amazon and Facebook, “retaliated” with a 100 per cent tariff on champagne, handbags and other French imports, he explains.
The US has tried to pressurise the WTO through similar unilateral action but this “cannot work for those who do not have the leverage” to back it up, he adds. Chinese telecom giant Huawei is a good example — it has already started filing defamation lawsuits in France and the US against “those who have harmed its reputation and ability to do business”, he explains. In conclusion, he states that in a rules-based system, one needs to “think about what rules and for whom”.