Terror after Baghdadi: Was he Islamic State’s end run, or is a sequel in the offing?
Sreeram Chaulia | Dean, Jindal School of International Affairs
The Times of India
Chaulia commends the “daring raid” by the US special forces in northwestern Syria to “take out” the leader of the Islamic State, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi as a “phenomenal military achievement”, which was made possible by “crucial multilateral cooperation”.
For a “unilateralist” president like Donald Trump, the fact that he acknowledged that the operation was “accomplished through certain support” underlines the “salience of unity,” he writes.
What happens next is a crucial question because Baghdadi “was a symptom of the malaise and not the malaise per se”, he argues. The “fears of an IS resurgence” in northwestern Syria “due to Trump’s troop withdrawal” and “Turkey’s invasion are well founded”. Chaulia calls for an “urgent” need to regulate the internet and social media-based communications “wherever purposeless youths are at risk of gravitating into radical traps”.
Prince and the PM
Raja Mohan | Director, Institute of South Asian Studies, National University of Singapore
The Indian Express
“The first order of business for Prime Minister Narendra Modi in Saudi Arabia this week is business,” writes Mohan. However, the PM should “also be interested in the wide-ranging social and religious reform” that the Crown Prince, Mohammed Bin Salman has initiated, such as granting more rights to women, lifting bans on cinema halls, etc. Mohan notes that India has a “huge stake in the successful economic and social modernisation of Saudi Arabia”. This is because a “modern and moderate Arabia” will “reinforce similar trends in the subcontinent”.
The Prince aims to “diversify the Saudi economy from its historical reliance on the oil business” and “develop manufacturing and service sectors through liberalisation at home and deeper integration with the world,” writes Mohan. He notes that Saudi Arabia is strategically placed on three accounts – the Kingdom’s “special status” in the Islamic world, its “strategic location at the trijunction of Africa, Europe and Asia”, and finally its “expansive investment capability”.
He adds that Saudi Aramco’s decision to “take a large stake” in Reliance “could be the beginning of a new economic era in bilateral relations”.
Settling the Ayodhya case once and for all
K. Kannan | Former judge of the High Court of Punjab and Haryana
The Hindu
Kannan argues that the Ayodhya issue is “tantalisingly poised” and that “there are only guesses about how the case could pan out”. He observes that “the court was unwilling to stop the hearing but also reluctant to let go of the possibility of a compromise” during proceedings.
He notes that there are some “significant parties” in the case that are in favour of a “settlement” and that “any person on whose behalf, or for whose benefit a suit is instituted or defended may apply to the court” for a settlement. The only restriction to this is that “no suit [can] be withdrawn or compromise made, without the leave of court”. The Supreme Court also has the “overarching power”, under Article 142 “to do complete justice in cases before it” and “gives preference to equity over law”. Thus, the court could “come out with a humble offering on a platter of how the collective wisdom of all parties yielded to a denouement that douses mutual bickering among the communities” in order to “cement a lasting peace that will do India proud”.
Nobel Arrow in the Quiver
Omkar Goswami | Chairman, CERG Advisory
The Economic Times
Goswami provides insight into randomised control trials (RCTs), a method for alleviating poverty that won Abhijit Banerjee, Esther Duflo and Michael Kremer the Nobel Prize for Economics this year. He traces the history of RCTs to 1948, when it was first employed in medicine to test the use of streptomycin to treat pulmonary tuberculosis. RCTs have been “standard tools to evaluate whether a drug works or not”, he writes.
Duflo, Kremer and another economist, Pascaline Dupas have also used RCTs in testing primary education in Kenya. They compared government employed teachers to contract teachers, locally hired by parent teacher associations (PTAs), and found that hiring the latter was less expensive and more effective in the classroom, since they had “better incentives to teach”, explains Goswami.
Goswami credits RCTs as a way to find “clues about design and workability” of policy interventions but doesn’t see it as the only tool. “Banerjee and Duflo speak persuasively of the tool and, in doing so, may have evangelised it more than a bit,” he adds.
A policy agenda to meet India’s steep employment challenges
Anantha Nageswaran and Gulzar Natarajan | Co-authors of The Rise of Finance: Causes, Consequences and Cures
Mint
Nageswaran and Natarajan discuss ways India’s youth can “become job providers rather than swell the ranks of job-seekers”. They point out the “disproportionate importance of startups in job creation” and suggest that job creation comes primarily from small, formal firms and MSMEs. Therefore, government policies aimed at such enterprises must be more “nuanced”, be it subsidising industrial public goods or educating future generations to pull “single-person enterprises out of survival mode”.
However, to truly foster “dynamic entrepreneurship”, the government’s support should be contingent on the enterprise’s job creation and productive growth, write the authors. Above all, the government should follow the policy of “if you cannot help, at least do not hurt” since governments are more likely to “impede economic activity than to foster it”, write Nageswaran and Natarajan. Take a look at their inability to contain the current “economic slide”, they add.
Improving the investment climate
Rajiv Kumar | Vice-chairman, NITI Aayog
Business Standard
If India wishes to enter the top 50 in the Global Ease of Doing Business Index, there must be greater focus on state governments to improve ease of doing business “in their jurisdiction” and “buoy investor sentiment” across the whole country, writes Kumar. He argues that “investment climate in individual states is the principal driver of investment activity”.
Kumar calls for an objective ‘Ease of Doing Business’ ranking based on investor perception across all states in the country. This can boost competition among states, regularly improve their business climate and help monitor the progress “on a real-time basis”. He suggests that India’s poor performance in the aspect of starting a business could be improved if the right to property is made a fundamental right. Improving its performance in the “getting credit” aspect, however, depends on the current banking crisis, he writes.