Dispatch #28: Weekend Linkfest
Here is a curated list of a few good articles from the world of policy, politics and development.
1) Rise of Hindutva has enabled a counter-revolution against Mandal’s gains:
Christophe Jaffrelot writes, “Hindu nationalism is generally defined as an ethno-religious movement. But it may have as much to do with social factors as with identity markers, as its last phase of expansion has been primarily a reaction to Mandal. Soon after the then prime minister, V P Singh, announced the implementation of the Mandal Commission report, Organiser wrote of “an urgent need to build up moral and spiritual forces to counter any fallout from an expected Shudra revolution”. And when Mandal II happened, the same newspaper argued that the “Congress-led-UPA government at the Centre is bent upon destroying the last bastion of merit…”. After the BJP was defeated in 2004, and again in 2009, it became urgent to hone a strategy that would enable it to come to power and prevent the deepening of policies that went against its Hindu nationalist ideology and the interests of its base.”
2) Fifty years ago- How pro-poor politics became an integral part of Indian democracy?
Political scientist Ranabir Samaddar has written a beautiful piece on the year 1971. A year that changed the politics of India. It was in 1971 when Indira Gandhi coined the slogan ‘garibi hatao’. It marked the inclusion of the poor into the policy making discourse in India.
Samaddar explains, “1971 with all these gruesome events marked also the moment of garibi hatao – a slogan that indicated that reforms would be henceforth initiated from the top. Agrarian struggles for land, justice and peasant power were suppressed, to be replaced now with stabilisation and developmental programmes of the government. This was thus the classic moment of passive revolution. The entry of the people as “poor” in institutional politics that henceforth characterised all successive governments armed with national power and glory would not have been possible without the decimation of popular insurgent formations. Yet, the programme of passive revolution indicated that the issues raised by radical politics would have a long standing bearing on the political decisions of successive governments in the future. This included land reforms, howsoever limited – including reform of the system of sharecroppers – as well as the stabilisation of marginal farmers. There was also the expansion of nationalised banks towards sustaining petty trade and business as well as an expansion of the rural credit market. There was an attempt to create a national market of food grains through the formation of the Agricultural Prices Commission in the mid-sixties. The panchayati raj system was introduced in some parts of the country and modern urban reforms were done by forming separate non-elected developmental bodies like the Calcutta Metropolitan Development Authority or the Delhi Development Authority along with bustee improvement programmes. All these were occasioned or fuelled further by the conjunction of the revolution and the counter-revolution.”
3) The Hindu Rashtra wasn't built in a day:
Reviewing Aakar Patel’s book, journalist and author Nilanjan Mukhopadhyay, explains that the Hindutva project is not something that started from 2014, but it was in the making since independence and subsequent governments have just contributed fueling it further.
Nilanjan writes, “The book takes on a life of its own, making the reader sit up, with the chapter Keep The Faith (Or Else). With anti-conversion laws being enacted in recent days by one state after another, the subject of religious freedom is at the centre of much political contestation. This chapter establishes how the basic safeguards of citizens under Article 25, on the right to freedom of religion, began being undermined immediately after the adoption of the Constitution. This well-researched chapter lists how states followed one another in enacting laws preventing right to propagation of religions as guaranteed by our statutes. Patel also details how these laws were “cleared” by the judiciary whenever challenged.”
4) Rich farmers, global plots, local stupidity:
P Sainath, in this article, bursts the myth around the fact that the current farmers’ protests have been led mainly by rich farmers from Punjab and Haryana. Sainath writes, “Those once-articulate voices also told us – and still do in more hushed tones – that these were all “rich farmers” resisting reforms. Fascinating. The average monthly income of a farm household in Punjab, according to the last NSS survey, was Rs. 18,059. The average number of persons per agricultural household was 5.24. So monthly per capita income was about Rs. 3,450. Lower than the lowest paid employee in the organised sector. Gee! Such wealth. The half was not told unto us. The corresponding figures for Haryana (farm household size 5.9 persons) was Rs. 14,434 average monthly income and roughly Rs. 2,450 per capita. Sure, these abysmal numbers still place them ahead of other Indian farmers. Such as those, for example, from Gujarat where the average monthly income of the agricultural household was Rs. 7,926. With an average of 5.2 persons per agricultural household, that’s a monthly per capita of Rs. 1,524.
Oh, those rich farmers at Delhi’s borders, who sleep in metal trolleys in temperatures of 2 degrees Celsius or less, who bathe in the open in 5-6 degrees – they’ve certainly improved my appreciation of the Indian rich. They’re a hardier lot than we thought.”
5) India needs to look beyond the 137% spending hike to fix its public healthcare:
“Historically, India’s priority on health spending has been modest. Nearly a third of it comes from the Centre, but the ministry of health and family welfare got just around 0.3% of gross domestic product (GDP) for much of the last decade. Even including states’ health budgets, this goes up only to around 4% of GDP, shows World Health Organization (WHO) data for 2018. This was more than regional neighbours Pakistan and Bangladesh, but lagged China (5%) and developed countries such as the UK (10%) and the US (17%). This puts India at 179 out of 189 countries in terms of the priority given to health in public spending, said the government's recent Economic Survey, in a chapter titled ‘Healthcare takes centrestage, finally!’ The chapter said this put India in the league of donor-dependent countries such as Haiti and Sudan, and well short of peers.But, three days after the Survey was released, this does not reflect in the government budget. The health ministry’s allocation as a share of total spending in the next fiscal is set to be lower than even the pre-pandemic level of 2019-20. As a share of GDP, it will be nearly the same.”
6) Why India's Founders Championed a State-Dominated Healthcare System?
Kiran Kumbhar writes, “Why did Bhore et al, together with Jawaharlal Nehru and his government, want the government to assume full responsibility for the health of the nation? Why were they skeptical of the idea of devolving that responsibility to private actors?The historian Sunil Amrith explains in his book Decolonising International Health (2006) that for decades, the British government tended to devote paltry sums of money and resources towards the health of native people, instead depending on voluntary actors (NGOs in today’s parlance) like missionary organisations or on donations from wealthy Indian merchants.Such a superficial approach to healthcare was anathema to the leaders of the Indian independence movement, who believed that abysmal health outcomes in the country were a result of the low priority accorded to health by the British. The only way to improve India’s health, they believed, was for Indians to oust foreign administrators and their methods of governance, and for the new Indian government to work steadfastly towards the welfare of all. Many other national governments like those in Australia, Canada, even Britain, were taking up increasingly wider health-related responsibilities. Why should India not?”
7) Digging for dirt- Rent seeking among elected politicians in India’s mineral belt:
In this brilliant article, which is based on their paper, Sam Asher and Paul Novosad have explained the correlation of rent seeking in mining areas of India and politicians getting elected from the same regions. They have established a correlation between mining related corruption, nexus between the local politicians and rent seeking and the same politicians entering offices after being elected.
The authors write, “We mapped changes in mineral rents (proxied by changes in ‘exogenous’ global prices, which are independent of local political and economic trends) to political constituencies. When the global prices of the minerals extracted in a constituency rise, we infer that local mineral rents are likely to be rising – and with them, the returns to illegal mining and corruption. We examine the effect of these mining rent booms on the characteristics and behaviour of elected politicians. Since 2003, all politicians contesting elections in India must submit affidavits which record their education, assets, and any open criminal charges that they are facing – about a third face at least one criminal charge, and about a tenth face at least one charge for a violent crime. We drew our study outcomes (for the period 2003–2018) from these affidavits. We found substantial effects of mineral rents on the likelihood of criminally-charged politicians entering office. A doubling in the value of local mineral wealth (not uncommon in the 2000s commodity booms) increased the likelihood of a criminal politician entering office by 10 percentage points (a 30% increase). The effect was particularly strong for politicians charged with violent crimes – reflecting the thuggish nature of legislative politics in India’s mining constituencies.”