THE HINDU EDITORIAL - MAY 24, 2022

 

THE HINDU EDITORIAL – MAY 24, 2022

 

All hands on deck After Centre’s duty cut, States must do the same with their taxes The Union government’s decision on Saturday to cut the excise duty on petrol and diesel by 8 rupees and 6 rupees, respectively, is a belated acknowledgement that April’s multi-year highs in inflation were spurred in significant measure by high fuel prices. Coming more than six months after its last duty reduction – on Deepavali eve – the latest cut is a welcome step to ease the burgeoning cost burden on producers and consumers. With the price of the Indian basket of crude oil having risen by more than 33% since November, and with a bulk of the surge coming in the wake of the Ukraine war in February, state-run oil marketing companies had raised retail fuel prices sharply over a 16-day period starting March 22. Largely as a result of the higher fuel prices and quickening food costs, inflation based on the Consumer Price Index accelerated to a 95-month high of 7.8% last month, while wholesale price gains soared to a multi-decade high of 15.1%. S&P Global’s April PMI surveys showed that both services and manufacturing companies had in fact flagged the surging input costs as a potential dampener of demand. A desperate RBI decided to stop waiting for Government intervention to cool the supply-side factors fanning inflation and opted instead to raise interest rates earlier this month.    The extent of concern about the inaction on the part of the Government was reflected at the Monetary Policy Committee’s two-day meeting earlier this month where a member observed: “Government supply-side action can also reduce future rate rises, output sacrifice and borrowing costs. Both central and State taxes are buoyant… giving them space to cut taxes on fuels.” Now that the Centre has acted to ease some of the inflationary pressure emanating from the high excise duty component in fuel prices, the onus is on the States to sink their political differences over the Government’s past approach to taxing fuels and help reduce the burden on the common man by paring their respective State taxes as well. With the war in Europe showing no immediate signs of easing, the economic fallout, particularly on global energy and food costs, remains highly uncertain and continues to point to the rising risks of faster inflation coupled with slower growth. In such a volatile scenario, fiscal measures that help cool price pressures and leave an extra rupee or two in the consumer’s pocket can only aid to undergird vital consumption demand in the economy. Ultimately, all States must realise that the best way to safeguard their revenue interests would be to ensure that the growth momentum in the economy as a whole remains well supported. This is a moment that calls for all hands on deck. The sooner policy-makers at the different levels of government, and of all political hues, realise this and act in concert, the better.   Grand slam ATP and WTA did the right thing by stripping Wimbledon of ranking points Moves by the ATP and WTA – governing bodies of men’s and women’s tennis tours – to strip Wimbledon of its primary currency, the all-important ranking points, for the 2022 edition represent the harshest rebuke to the autonomous overreach by the oldest Grand Slam event in declining entries from Russian and Belarusian players. The ATP, on Friday, said the move was to protect the “integrity of the sport”, which was built upon “merit-based tournament entry” (through rankings) and a level playing field. The WTA concurred, basing its decision on its foundational principle of equal opportunity, championed by the legendary Billie Jean King. The International Tennis Federation (ITF) followed suit by removing points from the Junior and wheelchair competitions. As a result, the most coveted tennis tournament in the world is set to be reduced to an exhibition event, barring a rethink from the feuding parties. A large-scale player drop-out may not materialize, for Wimbledon holds too much allure, both in terms of prestige and prize money. But the saga is sure to upend the sport’s pecking orders. Tennis rankings work over a rolling 52-week period, updated by adding points earned in the previous week and subtracting those from the equivalent week in the previous year. Now, World No.1 Novak Djokovic’s 2000 points for winning the 2021 edition will be removed without any addition this year, causing severe disruptions in the upper echelons of men’s tennis.    More broadly, the fiasco is likely to end up leaving everyone bruised. Wimbledon has rightly been penalized for triggering the controversy by unfairly targeting Russians and Belarusians for the actions of their political leaders, despite the likes of World No.2 Daniil Medvedev and World No.7 Andrey Rublev publicly calling for peace. But the pushback by the ATP, WTA and ITF will unfortunately inflict collateral damage on scores of players, especially those in the lower rungs, otherwise eligible to earn points. While the ATP has correctly stressed that an acceptable solution could have been found if Wimbledon had not chosen to act unilaterally based on “informal guidance” from the British government, it is a fact that tennis’s seven governing bodies – ATP, WTA, ITF and the four Majors – mostly work at cross-purposes and act in self-interest. The ATP itself has not walked and talk, continuing to hand out a disproportionately high number of ranking points to its flagship multi-nation team competition ATP Cup despite the tournament being a closed-door event. Wimbledon has, for now, stopped at expressing its disappointment and reserved its position, with the ongoing French Open providing fans with a welcome distraction. But any attempt to further this powerplay by driving another wedge, instead of charting out a progressive path, will only splinter the sport more.   A far more dangerous moment now than in 1992 The opening up of Gyanvapi is not about history; it is about reclamation and is central to a larger supremacist project SEEMA CHISHTI Exactly 30 years after the demolition of the Babri Masjid in Ayodhya, the Gyanvapi mosque dispute offers less déjà vu and more striking contrasts in the two scenarios. Like architecture distinguishes clearly between rubble and ruin, we must look clearly at the differences between the Ayodhya matter then and the dispute over Varanasi’s Gyanvapi mosque in 2022 now. The differences are stark. There is an Act now The first dissimilarity is the Places of Worship (Special Provisions) Act, 1991 which did not exist when the political movement for Ayodhya caught steam. Also, Ayodhya was out of its ambit. The Supreme Court verdict in 2019 went on to underline the importance of the 1991 Act in 10 pages (pages 116-125) and how it “protects and secures the fundamental values of the Constitution”. Agreeing with the rationale of the law, the five-judge Bench said; “The Places of Worship Act imposes a non-derogable obligation towards enforcing our commitment to secularism under the Indian Constitution.”    In not framing the matter in the latter and spirit of its own order just three years ago, and instead, trying to ‘balance’, the law and its interpreters are enabling a significant and worrying change in India. It is not a Babri moment, as Babri was to be an exception with the law applicable to all other such matters. If this goes on, it will open a Pandora’s box. Similar and multiple cases are bound to begin mushrooming; the plea to remove Mathura’s shahi Idgah and dig around the Qutub Minar have reached the courts.  As Sarvepalli Gopal writes in the introduction to Anatomy of a Confrontation, such conflicts bring into “sharp focus since 1947, a sickness which free India has not been able to shake off”. If the idea of the 1991 Act was to insulate the Republic from the implications of Babri, allowing the Varanasi issue gain momentum suggests exacerbating the “sickness”. The intention was to draw a line under 1947 and bring quietus after the Ayodhya dispute. Thirst years on, despite witnessing the ruptures that Babri led to, if Gyanvapi is allowed to fester, it would signal that India is re-opening issues that the Constitution had settled. That can only signal more upheaval. An institutional collapse What also distinguishes the present moment from Ayodhya is the State of India’s institutions. What separates democracy from a mobocracy is the presence of modern institutions. It is only through their independent functioning that the promise of the Constitution is honored. The job of independent institutions in a democracy is to keep asking question of the executive and ensure that it acts in accordance with the Constitution it has sworn by. But India has seen a dramatic decline in institutional independence. This decline underlies India’s sharp democratic backslide. India is classified as an ‘electoral autocracy’ (V-Dem Institute), ‘partly free’ (Freedom House), scores ‘at the level of 1975’ when a formal emergency was in place (International IDEA) and it is now among the 30 worst countries of 180, as for as freedom of the press goes (RSF). The World Values Survey and the Pew Research Centre tell us that it is India that support for civil rights as a feature of democracy and even democracy has fallen the most, since 2015. In such times, if Gyanvapi was to be a start of something else, then there would not even be counter-pressures from institutions like 30 years ago. The Justice J.S. Verma report, (when he was National Human Rights Commission chairman) about violence in 2002 is unimaginable today.    Another difference from 1992 is that economic liberalization had yet to play itself out then. It was an ‘old India’ if fans of liberalization are to be believed. There was a view that altered economics would help destroy India’s regressive social mores. This was touted as the big change – post the Berlin Wall and post the Soviet Union – that general economic uplift would deal a death blow to old identity issues and liberate its people. But 30 years on, the promise of quick economic progress has not been able to fell identity politics. Considerable academic research would nudge us in the opposite direction. A hardened and narrower understanding of identity politics has gripped the world. Today, well after liberalization has resulted in more economic inequality and record levels of concentration of wealth and cronyism, India finds itself asking fraught questions with ferocity. The economic crisis facing India today, apart from steep and widening inequalities, also has grim unemployment figures to reckon with. None of the expectations that the 1990s held for India – whether imagined or real – are now in the air. Gyanvapi being fanned now would do so in a world where the hopes of economic liberalization as a panacea re behind it and the fortuitous global conditions of the early 1990s are not there. Ideological, not just political There was a strong political incentive behind the mass movement and the Rath yatra that propelled the Ayodhya issue onto centre stage in the late 1980s. It yielded durable benefits to the political party which led it. Currently, to see it as mere instrumentalism would be missing the significance of what 2022 is about. With two successive electoral majorities, this is not about distracting the voter from the state of the economy or noise to garner support for elections. This is part of a core ideological belief of the ruling dispensation. Ideally, it would want courts to just award it to majoritarian mobs, minus a mass movement or mobilization. For the ruling regime, this path is not seen as a crisis but as apart of a desired end. So it is unlikely that the government in office will feel compelled to tell off mobs and people who are raising issues, long thought settled.    The opening up of gyanvapi is not about history. Indian history is too complex to be reduced to a two-dimensional Hindu versus Muslim framing. For thousands of years, India has been witness to a spectrum of stories of both coexistence and conflict; Shaivites facing off with Vaishnavites, Brahmins making a case against Shramans, Buddhists and Jains versus everyone else and disputes across many more lines. Events here were not very different from how medieval Christianity and Islam played out. The Gyanvapi dispute is about reclamation and is central to the larger supremacist project. This cannot be divorced from frenetic name-changing, the anti-conversion and cattle laws lynchings, changes in official history, amped up hate on mass media and other bids to scrub out Muslims and distort India’s rich past.    Well before Islam found its way to Kodungallue (Kerala) or came across the Hindukush, India was a place with complex inter-community ties between various sects and people who called it home. It is an established historical fact that multiple migrations made India. As Firaq Gorakhpuri (also known as Prof. Raghupati Sahay) said: “Sar zamin-e-Hind par aqwam-e-aalam ke, Firaq, Kafile aate rahe aur Hindustan banta gaya (Many caravans came into these parts and went onto constitute India)”. The year 1950, with Indian composite nationalism at the centre, was a far-sighted attempt at drawing a line under a million mutinies, especially after 1947.    India’s Constitution offered everyone emancipation. Ideological predecessors of the present regime made no bones about not sharing those values and believed in India as a nation-for-Hindus only, in the mirror image of what Muslim separatists managed to secure with Pakistan. Eight years after 2014, It has been hard for the Government to claim brownie points globally for being ‘exceptional’, as bad news of events on the ground have been hard to keep hidden. As ‘exceptionalism’ gets sucked out and India unspools into being known as another South Asian ethnic supremacist venture, it can only shrink the India story, and certainly not help it achieve ‘greatness’. A road versus alley It is possible that because we now have the benefit of hindsight from 1992, we choose differently. But that would mean for the ruling party and followers, to jettison Golwalkar’s objective for non-Hindu; “claiming nothing, deserving no privileges, far less any preferential treatment, not even citizen’s rights” (Golwalkar, We, or Our Nationhood Defined, 1939: page 62). Mahatma Gandhi’s assassin, Godse’s hate and violence, must be loudly denounced again by those who have political power. The path of the Taliban in Afghanistan, Sunni Muslim nationalism in Pakistan, Sinhalese supremacism or Myanmar’s journey must serve as a warning and not a manual for India. Gyanvapi, which means the ‘found of knowledge’ or wisdom, offers a choice now. We could pull back and take a long sip. Thirty years after Babri Masjid, we know the dark alley the other option leads to. It may be far too narrow a path for India to quickly reverse out of.   A Harvard branch in India, prospects and challenges It will be worthwhile for policymakers to look at the experience of other countries for positive and negative lessons PHILIP G. ALTBACH & ELDHO MATHEWS India, after half a century of keeping its higher education doors closed to foreigners, is on the cusp of opening itself to the world. The traditional orientation to swadeshi that has characterized much of Indian thinking, at least in higher education, is changing. The wide-ranging National Education Policy (NEP) 2020 promises higher education reforms in many areas, and internationalization is prominent among them. Among the underlying ideas and institutions from abroad to stimulate reform and show “best practice”, and in general to ensure that Indian higher education, for the first time, is a global player. New thinking An example of the new thinking was part of British Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s April 2022 visit to India, which featured a visit to the innovative Gujarat Biotechnology University and strengthening the United Kingdom-India academic collaboration. The Gujarat Biotechnology University is an example for new models of international academic partnerships emerging in India. It was established by the Department of Science and Technology of the Government of Gujarat in partnership with the University of Edinburgh, which assists the Gujarat Biotechnology University in developing strategies with regard to teaching, learning, research and innovation, and quality assurance, among others. This is a unique model in the present Indian academic context as there are many regulatory hurdles that still exist in the country with regard to international academic partnerships, which includes the operation of international branch campuses.    Currently, India does not allow the entry and the operation of foreign university branch campuses The NEP 2020 was a turning point for the entry of foreign universities as it recommended allowing foreign universities ranked in the “top 100” category to operate in India – under somewhat unrealistic conditions. In February 2022, Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman, in her Budget speech, announced that “world-class foreign universities and institutions would be allowed in the planned business district in Gujarat’s GIFT City” (or the Gujarat International finance Tec-City) and they would be free from domestic regulations to facilitate availability of high-end human resources.    The Minister’s statement was a marked departure from the NEP 2020 recommendations that allow only the “top 100” category to operate in India. A similar accommodating stance could be observed in the (written) reply given by the Minister of State for Education, Dr. Subhas Sarkar, in the Lok Sabha in March. He noted that two foreign institutions, from France and Italy, had expressed interest in setting up campuses in India. However, the Italian institute “Istituto Marangoni”, is not a university. It was reported that in April 2022, the University Grants commission (UGC) formed a committee to draft regulations to allow foreign institutions in the “top 500” category to establish campuses in India – realizing that more flexibility was needed.    Establishing branch campuses of top foreign universities is a good idea as this will bring much-needed global experience to India. But is this practical? And will overseas universities be interested? Globaly, branch campuses, of which there are around 300 now, provide a mixed picture. Many are aimed at making money for the sponsoring university – and this is not what India wants. And some have proved to be unstable. A recent example in this regard is the ending of the decade-long partnership between Yale University and the National University of Singapore in running the Yale-NUS College in Singapore. Current initiatives There has been modest growth of various forms of partnerships between Indian and foreign institutions. The joint PhD programmes offered by the Indian Institute of Technology Bombay-Monash Research Academy and the University of Queensland-Indian Institute of Technology Delhi Academy of Research (UQIDAR), both with Australian partners, are some examples. Another example is the Melbourne-India Postgraduate Academy (MIPA). It is a joint initiative of the Indian Institute of Science Bangalore, the Indian Institute of Technology Madras, the Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur and the Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur with the University of Melbourne. MIPA provides students with an opportunity to earn a joint degree accredited both in India and Australia: from the University of Melbourne and one of the partnering Indian institutions. These partnerships suggest that India could offer opportunities for international branch campuses as well.    International branch campuses, if allowed, could function as a structurally different variant of Indian’s private university sector. The establishment of foreign university branch campuses would encourage competition mainly between existing private universities and foreign branch institutions, but would have less impact on the public universities. Branch campuses, if effectively managed, could bring much needed new ideas about curriculum, pedagogy, and governance to Indian higher education – they could be a kind of educational laboratory. Practical challenges On the positive side, India is seen around the world as an important country and an emerging higher education power. It is the World’s second largest “exporter” of students, with 4,61,792 students studying abroad (according to the UNESCO Institute for Statistics). And Indian has the world’s second largest higher education system. Foreign countries and universities will be eager to establish a “beach head” in India and interested in providing opportunities for home campus students to learn about Indian business, society, and culture to participate in growing trade and other relations.    Still, it will not be easy to attract foreign universities to India and even more difficult to create the conditions for them to flourish. Many of those top universities are already fully engaged overseas and would likely require incentives to set up in India. Further, there are smaller but highly regarded universities outside the ‘top 500’ category that might be more interested. Universities around the world that have academic specializations focusing on India, that already have research or faculty ties in the country, or that have Non-Resident Indian (NRI) in senior management positions may be easier to attract. What is most important is to prevent profit-seekers from entering the Indian market and to encourage foreign institutions with innovative educational ideas and a long-term commitment. Many host countries have provided significant incentives, including building facilities and providing necessary infrastructure. Foreign universities are highly unlikely to invest significant funds up front. More hurdles to cross A big challenge will be India’s “well-known” bureaucracy, especially the multiple regulations. If bureaucratic hurdles cannot be drastically cut, there will be no success in attracting branch campuses. In addition, a recent study underlined the fact that apart from allowing home institutions to repatriate surplus funds after tax clearance, a new accreditation mechanism, flexible visa rules for foreign students and faculty, financial incentives to offer programmes is priority areas should also be considered.    Branch campuses would be helpful in addressing skill requirements and providing examples of different approaches to higher education. It will be worthwhile to look at the experience of other countries for both positive and negative lessons. After examining national experiences elsewhere, clear policies can be implemented that may be attractive to foreign universities. Once policies are in place, the key to success will be relationships among universities – and not grandiose government schemes.