Podcasts about Babri Masjid

Passing the civil services exam is one of the most esteemed achievements in our country, a true testament to dedication and excellence.This week on The xMonks Drive podcast, we're thrilled to welcome Vivek Srivastava, an IPS officer whose remarkable career spans over two decades of service to the nation.Some stories don't just inspire, they captivate. Vivek's journey is one such tale. From serving under three prime ministers, including Mr. Narendra Modi, to facing life-or-death challenges in the line of duty, his experiences are nothing short of extraordinary.In this riveting episode, Vivek shares his firsthand accounts of pivotal moments in India's history, from navigating the chaos of the Babri Masjid riots to orchestrating the high-stakes arrest of Yaseen Bhatkal. It's a story filled with courage, drama, and an unshakable commitment to justice.Tune in for a conversation that's as inspiring as it is thrilling. Don't miss it, this is a story you'll remember.Follow us on our Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/xmonks.ecosystem/Follow me On YouTube:https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCHsytOG-7i57hrSwB7fNkcwFollow me On LinkedIn:https://www.linkedin.com/in/gauravaroragrv/

Geetanjali Shree's Our City That Year, translated by Daisy Rockwell (Penguin India, August 2024), is a tale of a city under siege, reflecting a society that lies fractured along fault lines of faith and ideology. First published in 1998, Our City That Year is loosely based on the communal riots and violence in the lead-up to the demolition of the Babri Masjid in Ayodhya in 1992 and its aftermath of rising uncertainty and dread. Twenty-six years after its original Hindi publication, the book's call to bear witness to India under the grips of religious nationalism is timelier than ever, speaking to the growing communal divisions in India and across the Subcontinent. Geetanjali Shree is the winner of the 2022 International Booker Prize, and of the Warwick Prize for Women in Translation, for her novel, Tomb of Sand (Ret Samadhi in the Hindi original). The novel was also shortlisted for the Emile Guimet Prize. She has written four other novels, Mai (Mai: Silently Mother), Hamara Shahar Us Baras (Our City That Year), Tirohit (The Roof Beneath Their Feet), and Khali Jagah (Empty Space), and five collections of short stories. She writes essays and gives talks in both Hindi and English. Her work is translated into many Indian and foreign languages. Geetanjali has also worked on theatre scripts in collaboration with a Delhi based group, Vivadi, of which she is a founding member. Daisy Rockwell is a painter and award-winning translator of Hindi and Urdu literature, living in Vermont. She has published numerous translations from Hindi and Urdu, including Ashk's Falling Walls (2015), Bhisham Sahni's Tamas (2016), and Khadija Mastur's The Women's Courtyard. Her translation of Krishna Sobti's final novel, A Gujarat here, a Gujarat there (Penguin, 2019) was awarded the Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for a Translation of a Literary Work in 2019. Her translation of Geetanjali Shree's Tomb of Sand (Tilted Axis Press, 2021; HarperVia, 2022) won the 2022 International Booker Prize and the 2022 Warwick Prize for Women in Translation.

The BJP-led coalition government has lifted the ban on government employees taking part in activities of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, or RSS, an organisation which has been banned three times since India attained independence. The RSS was banned days after Gandhiji's assassination by Nathuram Godse in 1948, during the Emergency by Prime Minister Indira Gandhi and under civil society pressure after the demolition of the Babri Masjid in December 1992. Interestingly, the restriction on central government employees associating with the RSS remained in force during the first two terms of Prime Minister Narendra Modi and under Atal Bihari Vajpayee during his 1998-2004 terms. So, the question that arises is: why now? Is Modi trying to appease the RSS after facing an electoral setback? Didn't RSS chief Mohan Bhagwat indirectly poke fun at Modi saying he wasn't biological during the recent election campaign? Does this decision have anything to do with what appear to be efforts to remove Adityanath as the Chief Minister of Uttar Pradesh? Guest: Nilanjan Mukhopadyay, independent journalist, columnist and author. Host: Amit Baruah, Senior Associate Editor, The Hindu. Edited by Sharmada Venkatasubramanian.

Dr. Akmal & Abdul Moqeet discuss the opening of a temple on the grounds of Babri Masjid and the implications of Hindutva politics for Muslims in the subcontinent. Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4TA5HJrfjSk The post Babri Masjid: Is Hindutva Indian Zionism? – Dr. Akmal & Abdul Moqeet first appeared on Islampodcasts.

Dr. Akmal & Abdul Moqeet discuss the opening of a temple on the grounds of Babri Masjid and the implications of Hindutva politics for Muslims in the subcontinent. Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4TA5HJrfjSk

First, Indian Express' Chief of the National Bureau Ritika Chopra discusses the changes made to the 11th and 12th standard NCERT political science textbooks regarding the Babri Masjid demolition and the 2002 Gujarat riots.Next, Indian Express' Apurva Vishwanath explains why writer and activist Arundhati Roy and Dr. Sheikh Showkat Hussain, a former professor at the Central University of Kashmir, may soon face prosecution under the stringent anti-terror law, UAPA (10:50).And finally, Indian Express' Anonna Dutt talks about a private medical college where not a single batch has graduated in 13 years, the reasons the National Medical Commission has taken action against it, and the harassment she encountered while reporting on this story (19:45).Hosted, produced and written by Shashank BhargavaEdited and mixed by Suresh Pawar

Mughal Ruler Babur Loved Teenage Boys Babri Masjid Mughal History | Aabhas | TJD Podcast

Hello, this is your daily dose of news from Onmanorama. Tune in to get updated about the major news stories of the day.

Hello, this is your daily dose of news from Onmanorama. Tune in to get updated about the major news stories of the day.

"We will pay the price for the sins of our forefathers"In this episode, Michelle speaks with Santanu Bhattacharya, author of 'One Small Voice' - a thought-provoking coming-of-age book about the politics of modern India, whose protagonist witnesses an act of mob violence in the communal riots of 1992 and is haunted by it for the rest of his life.Santanu speaks about watching multiple videos of the riots for research, being a part of the generation of writers who grew up witnessing it, and why he feels like his whole life has been a passive researcher for this book.Tune in!Books and authors mentioned in this episode:The Memoirs of Valmiki Rao - Lindsay PereiraQuarterlife - Devika RegeA Burning - Megha MajumdarThe Association of Small Bombs - Karan MahajanThe Boy in the Striped Pyjamas - John BoyneThe Shadow Lines - Amitav GhoshOliver Twist - Charles Dickens‘Books and Beyond with Bound' is the podcast where Tara Khandelwal and Michelle D'costa uncover how their books reflect the realities of our lives and society today. Find out what drives India's finest authors: from personal experiences to jugaad research methods, insecurities to publishing journeys. Created by Bound, a storytelling company that helps you grow through stories. Follow us @boundindia on all social media platforms.

GAD SAAD caught lying again about MUSLIMS

On January 22nd, India's far-right prime minister Narendra Modi inaugurated the Ram Mandir, a gargantuan new temple dedicated to the Hindu god Ram, in an event that marked the most consequential victory for the Hindu nationalist movement in its 100-year history. The temple has been erected in the exact spot where a centuries-old mosque, the Babri Masjid, stood until Hindutva supporters violently destroyed it in 1992. The attack on the Masjid catalyzed anti-Muslim mass violence across the country, and in the years since, Hindu nationalist, or Hindutva, groups like the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS)—a Nazi-inspired paramilitary of which Modi is a member—have used the campaign to construct a new temple on the site of the demolished mosque as a rallying cry in their efforts to transform India from a secular democracy to a Hindu supremacist nation. That ambition appeared to have been fulfilled at the Ram Mandir opening ceremony, with Modi declaring that “this temple is not just a temple to a god. This is a temple of India's vision . . . Ram is the faith of India.” The temple's inauguration comes months before national elections in which Modi's Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) appears certain to emerge victorious. Over the course of its two terms in office, the BJP has already entrenched India's annexation of the Muslim-majority of Kashmir, presided over anti-minority riots across India, and ratcheted up state-sponsored Islamophobia to such a pitch that experts warn that India's 200 million Muslims are at risk of facing a genocide. With the completion of the Ram Mandir, this anti-minority fervor seems set only to intensify further. On this episode of On the Nose, news editor Aparna Gopalan speaks to writer Siddhartha Deb, scholar Angana Chatterji, and activist Safa Ahmed about the Hindutva movement's epochal win, how it was achieved, and what comes next for India's minorities. Thanks to Jesse Brenneman for producing and to Nathan Salsburg for the use of his song “VIII (All That Were Calculated Have Passed).” Articles Mentioned and Further Reading:“The Idol and the Mosque,” Siddhartha Deb, Tablet “Ayodhya: Once There Was A Mosque,” The Wire“Recasting Ram,” Sagar, The Caravan“Bulldozer Injustice in India,” Amnesty International“How the Hindu Right Triumphed in India,” Isaac Chotiner and Mukul Kesavan, The New Yorker“

The Lok Sabha elections of 2024 are round the corner. The season of defections is also upon us. Party hopping has commenced in earnest. An India Today poll suggested earlier in February that the NDA would win 335 seats in 2024 down from 353 in 2019. The Congress tally was put at 71. A YouGov-Mint-CPR survey, also published in February, said that 51 per cent believed that construction of the Ram Mandir, on the site where the Babri Masjid once stood, was a rectification of historical wrongs while 49 per cent felt that it was an electorally motivated move to win Hindu votes. So, with just about two months to go for Lok Sabha 2024, how does the political chess board look in India? Guest: Gilles Verniers, Senior Fellow at the Centre for Policy Research, and Visiting Fellow at Amherst College in the United States. Host: Amit Baruah, Senior Associate Editor, The Hindu. Edited by Sharmada Venkatasubramanian.

On 22 January 2024, as India's prime minister Narendra Modi inaugurated the new Ram temple in Ayodhya, a 32-year old film was recirculated across India on social media platforms. Many Indians felt the need to watch and share the documentary Ram ke naam made by Anand Parwardhan in 1990. The film captured the mobilisation of hundreds of Hindu activists who were made to believe that Ram was born at the exact spot where the 16th century Babri Masjid stood and, as a result, wanted a temple built there instead of the mosque. The film was released in September 1992 just months before a group of militant Hindu activists illegally tore down the Babri Masjid. In this episode of State of Southasia, our assistant editor Nayantara Narayanan speaks to Patwardhan about the making of Ram ke naam, why India ignored its warnings about religious fundamentalism and what lessons it still holds three decades later. State of Southasia releases with a new interview every four weeks.

What is the history of the Babri Masjid and what happened to it.

This was a very sombre Republic Day, coming in a few days after the inauguration of the Ram Mandir in Ayodhya on January 22, 2024, churning up questions on the secular nature of our country. The inauguration of the Ram Mandir marks a significant chapter in our country's history. The temple's construction replaced the 16th-Century Babri masjid, which was demolished by Hindu mobs in 1992, leading to nationwide riots and the tragic loss of nearly 2,000 lives, after the Supreme court allowed it. This became a national event, even though we have a sizable population of Muslims, Christians, Sikhs, among others.  Suno India's Sneha Richhariya and Menaka Rao took interviews of young persons in their 20s, all of who were born after the Babri Masjid demolition. We attempt to understand what they think about this national event, what it symbolises, and how they understand secularism. See sunoindia.in/privacy-policy for privacy information.

Please support us: https://Patreon.com/themadmamluks or via PayPal https://themadmamluks.com/donate 0:00 - Intro 2:30 - Dr. Abdul Wahid Suspended at the NHS 10:30 - Piers Morgan Boycott 14:00 - Is PBD an alternate platform for Muslim voices? 23:43 - Commemoration of Ram temple at Ayodhya 48:45 - Modi led mobs to kill Muslims 1:45:00 - IDF soldiers killed

The Tragedy of Babri Masjid and Some Truth About Hindustan | Shaykh Dr Yasir Qadhi

Tensions escalate in Ayodha | Ram Mandir temple built on demolished Babri Masjid by Radio Islam

pWotD Episode 2456: Ram Mandir Welcome to popular Wiki of the Day where we read the summary of a popular Wikipedia page every day.With 575,427 views on Monday, 22 January 2024 our article of the day is Ram Mandir.The Ram Mandir is a Hindu temple under construction in Ayodhya, Uttar Pradesh, India. It is located at the site of Ram Janmabhoomi, the hypothesized birthplace of Rama, a principal deity of Hinduism. The site is the former location of the Babri Masjid which was built in 16th century CE. The idols of Rama and Sita were placed in the mosque in 1949, before it was attacked and demolished in 1992. In 2019, the Supreme Court of India delivered the verdict to give the disputed land to Hindus for construction of a temple, while Muslims would be given land elsewhere to construct a mosque. The court referenced a report from the Archaeological Survey of India (ASI) as evidence suggesting the presence of a structure beneath the demolished Babri Masjid, that was found to be non-Islamic. On 5 August 2020, the Bhumi Pujan (transl. ground breaking ceremony) for the commencement of the construction of Ram Mandir was performed by Narendra Modi, Prime Minister of India. The temple, currently under construction, is being supervised by the Shri Ram Janmabhoomi Teerth Kshetra Trust. On 22 January 2024, Modi served as the Mukhya Yajman (transl. chief patron) of rituals for the event and performed the Prana Pratishtha (transl. consecration) of Ram Lalla. The Prana Pratishtha ceremony was organised by the Shri Ram Janmabhoomi Teerth Kshetra. The temple has attracted a number of controversies due to alleged misuse of donation, sidelining of its major activists and politicisation of the temple by the Bharatiya Janata Party.This recording reflects the Wikipedia text as of 02:07 UTC on Tuesday, 23 January 2024.For the full current version of the article, see Ram Mandir on Wikipedia.This podcast uses content from Wikipedia under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License.Visit our archives at wikioftheday.com and subscribe to stay updated on new episodes.Follow us on Mastodon at @wikioftheday@masto.ai.Also check out Curmudgeon's Corner, a current events podcast.Until next time, I'm Salli Neural.

On the occasion of the consecration of the Ram Temple in Ayodhya today, we discuss the opinions of young people in Uttar Pradesh (those born after the Babri Masjid demolition) regarding the Ram Temple. Additionally, we also explore the reasons behind the Congress party's decision not to attend the ceremony.Guests: Indian Express' Deeptiman Tiwary and Manoj CGHosted and produced by Shashank BhargavaEdited and mixed by Suresh Pawar

രാമജന്മഭൂമിക്കുചുറ്റും പരസ്പര സൗഹൃദത്തോടെ ജീവിക്കുന്ന ഒരു ജനതയെ ഓർത്തെടുക്കുകയാണ്, അഞ്ചു വർഷം മുമ്പ് അയോധ്യ സന്ദർശിച്ച മാധ്യമപ്രവർത്തക സോഫിയ ബിന്ദ്. ക്ഷേത്രനിർമാണം ഉടൻ എന്ന മുദ്രാവാക്യമുയർത്തി നിറഞ്ഞൊഴുകിയ സംഘ്പരിവാർ ശക്തികൾ ഇവിടുത്തെ പാവപ്പെട്ട മനുഷ്യരെ എങ്ങനെയാണ് ഭയത്തിലേക്കു തള്ളിവിട്ടതെന്നും അവർ പറയുന്നു.

Sadhguru compares the legacy of Rama and Babur, and explains what India needs to do to move beyond the conflict generated by the Ram Mandir & Babri Masjid issue.  Conscious Planet: https://www.consciousplanet.org Sadhguru App (Download): https://onelink.to/sadhguru__app Official Sadhguru Website: https://isha.sadhguru.org Sadhguru Exclusive: https://isha.sadhguru.org/in/en/sadhguru-exclusive Inner Engineering Link: isha.co/ieo-podcast Yogi, mystic and visionary, Sadhguru is a spiritual master with a difference. An arresting blend of profundity and pragmatism, his life and work serves as a reminder that yoga is a contemporary science, vitally relevant to our times. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy informationSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Sadhguru compares the legacy of Rama and Babur, and explains what India needs to do to move beyond the conflict generated by the Ram Mandir & Babri Masjid issue.  Conscious Planet: https://www.consciousplanet.org Sadhguru App (Download): https://onelink.to/sadhguru__app Official Sadhguru Website: https://isha.sadhguru.org Sadhguru Exclusive: https://isha.sadhguru.org/in/en/sadhguru-exclusive Inner Engineering Link: isha.co/ieo-podcast Yogi, mystic and visionary, Sadhguru is a spiritual master with a difference. An arresting blend of profundity and pragmatism, his life and work serves as a reminder that yoga is a contemporary science, vitally relevant to our times. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy informationSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

ബാബരി മസ്ജിദ് പൊളിച്ചാണ് രാമക്ഷേത്രം പണിയുന്നത് എന്ന് ഓർക്കണം | KEN about Babri Masjid by THINK

The Babri Masjid: The Babri Masjid was a mosque that was built in Ayodhya in the 16th century by Mir Baqi, a commander of the Mughal emperor Babur. The mosque was located on a hill known as Ramkot and was considered a significant religious site by both Hindus and Muslims. According to the mosque's inscriptions, it was built in 1528–29 (935 AH). The mosque was attacked and demolished by a Hindu nationalist mob in 1992, which ignited communal violence across the Indian subcontinent. --- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/nilnia/support

The Ayodhya dispute: The Ayodhya dispute is a long-standing legal and political issue in India. It is a political, historical, and socio-religious debate centred on a plot of land in the city of Ayodhya, Uttar Pradesh. The issues revolve around the control of a site traditionally regarded among Hindus to be the birthplace of their deity Rama, the history and location of the Babri Masjid mosque at the site, and whether a previous Hindu temple was demolished or modified to create the mosque. --- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/nilnia/support

In December 1992, Hindu nationalists seize the Babri Masjid mosque and tear it down, proclaiming their wish to build a Hindu temple in its stead. The brazen act of destruction sparks riots throughout the country, particularly in Mumbai, where Muslims and Hindus clash in the streets. An estimated nine hundred people, both Muslim and Hindu, die in the violence. The riots are the backdrop of Lindsay Pereira's latest novel, The Memoirs of Valmiki Rao (Vintage Books, 2023). The titular Rao is a retired postman, living in the slums decades after the riots tore through his community. And he's also a writer, portraying the life of one neighbor in particular: Rama, once a youth leader, beset by tragedy amid the riots. In this interview, Lindsay and I talk about the 1990s, these communities in India, and how his novel parallels one of the classic works of Indian literature, the Ramayana. Lindsay Pereira is a journalist and editor. He was co-editor of Women's Voices: Selections from Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Century Indian Writing in English (Oxford University Press: 2004). His first novel, Gods and Ends (Vintage Books: 2021), was shortlisted for the 2021 JCB Prize for Literature, and Tata Literature Live! First Book Award (Fiction). You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of The Memoirs of Valmiki Rao. Follow on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia. Nicholas Gordon is an editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at @nickrigordon. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/new-books-network

In December 1992, Hindu nationalists seize the Babri Masjid mosque and tear it down, proclaiming their wish to build a Hindu temple in its stead. The brazen act of destruction sparks riots throughout the country, particularly in Mumbai, where Muslims and Hindus clash in the streets. An estimated nine hundred people, both Muslim and Hindu, die in the violence. The riots are the backdrop of Lindsay Pereira's latest novel, The Memoirs of Valmiki Rao (Vintage Books, 2023). The titular Rao is a retired postman, living in the slums decades after the riots tore through his community. And he's also a writer, portraying the life of one neighbor in particular: Rama, once a youth leader, beset by tragedy amid the riots. In this interview, Lindsay and I talk about the 1990s, these communities in India, and how his novel parallels one of the classic works of Indian literature, the Ramayana. Lindsay Pereira is a journalist and editor. He was co-editor of Women's Voices: Selections from Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Century Indian Writing in English (Oxford University Press: 2004). His first novel, Gods and Ends (Vintage Books: 2021), was shortlisted for the 2021 JCB Prize for Literature, and Tata Literature Live! First Book Award (Fiction). You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of The Memoirs of Valmiki Rao. Follow on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia. Nicholas Gordon is an editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at @nickrigordon. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

In December 1992, Hindu nationalists seize the Babri Masjid mosque and tear it down, proclaiming their wish to build a Hindu temple in its stead. The brazen act of destruction sparks riots throughout the country, particularly in Mumbai, where Muslims and Hindus clash in the streets. An estimated nine hundred people, both Muslim and Hindu, die in the violence. The riots are the backdrop of Lindsay Pereira's latest novel, The Memoirs of Valmiki Rao (Vintage Books, 2023). The titular Rao is a retired postman, living in the slums decades after the riots tore through his community. And he's also a writer, portraying the life of one neighbor in particular: Rama, once a youth leader, beset by tragedy amid the riots. In this interview, Lindsay and I talk about the 1990s, these communities in India, and how his novel parallels one of the classic works of Indian literature, the Ramayana. Lindsay Pereira is a journalist and editor. He was co-editor of Women's Voices: Selections from Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Century Indian Writing in English (Oxford University Press: 2004). His first novel, Gods and Ends (Vintage Books: 2021), was shortlisted for the 2021 JCB Prize for Literature, and Tata Literature Live! First Book Award (Fiction). You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of The Memoirs of Valmiki Rao. Follow on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia. Nicholas Gordon is an editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at @nickrigordon. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/south-asian-studies

In December 1992, Hindu nationalists seize the Babri Masjid mosque and tear it down, proclaiming their wish to build a Hindu temple in its stead. The brazen act of destruction sparks riots throughout the country, particularly in Mumbai, where Muslims and Hindus clash in the streets. An estimated nine hundred people, both Muslim and Hindu, die in the violence. The riots are the backdrop of Lindsay Pereira's latest novel, The Memoirs of Valmiki Rao (Vintage Books, 2023). The titular Rao is a retired postman, living in the slums decades after the riots tore through his community. And he's also a writer, portraying the life of one neighbor in particular: Rama, once a youth leader, beset by tragedy amid the riots. In this interview, Lindsay and I talk about the 1990s, these communities in India, and how his novel parallels one of the classic works of Indian literature, the Ramayana. Lindsay Pereira is a journalist and editor. He was co-editor of Women's Voices: Selections from Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Century Indian Writing in English (Oxford University Press: 2004). His first novel, Gods and Ends (Vintage Books: 2021), was shortlisted for the 2021 JCB Prize for Literature, and Tata Literature Live! First Book Award (Fiction). You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of The Memoirs of Valmiki Rao. Follow on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia. Nicholas Gordon is an editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at @nickrigordon. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/asian-review

Irfan Habib, the Marxist scholar from Aligarh Muslim University, is the subject of Manogna Sastry's essay in the book 'Ten Heads of Ravana.' Habib has the distinction of being amongst the most vocal and unrelenting voices opposing the archaeological results of the excavations at Ayodhya against the backdrop of the dispute for the land demolished at the erstwhile Babri Masjid. Sastry analyzes his notorious role as a witness and ‘expert' in the Ram Janmabhoomi issue at Ayodhya, as well as his and his coterie's hold over the country's premier historical research institutes and universities. Sastry's lucid essay highlights several such points and key observations on a range of issues, drawing from original readings of Habib's works and others. She traces the significant contributions of Irfan Habib to the disfiguring of Indian history and his role in creating a hegemony in academic institutions that perpetuate divisive and false historical accounts. Snakes in the Ganga - http://www.snakesintheganga.com Varna Jati Caste - http://www.varnajaticaste.com The Battle For IIT's - http://www.battleforiits.com Power of future Machines - http://www.poweroffuturemachines.com 10 heads of Ravana - http://www.tenheadsofravana.com To support Infinity Foundation's projects including the continuation of such episodes and the research we do: इनफिनिटी फ़ौंडेशन की परियोजनाओं को अनुदान देने के लिए व इस प्रकार के एपिसोड और हमारे द्वारा किये जाने वाले शोध को जारी रखने के लिए: http://infinityfoundation.com/donate-2/ --- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/rajivmalhotrapodcast/support

None Wiser than the Law is a miniseries of in-depth conversations with Justice MN Venkatachaliah, providing an intimate exploration of the legal realm, his life journey, political insights, and the Indian constitution. The title of this podcast draws inspiration from Aristotle, who said to seek to be wiser than the law is the very thing which is by good laws forbidden. Justice Venkatachaliah, a distinguished figure in the realm of jurisprudence, acknowledges this aphorism in one of his landmark judgments, setting the tone for this series of conversations. Alok Prasanna Kumar, a co-founder of the Vidhi Centre for Legal Policy, spoke to former Chief Justice of India MN Venkatachaliah in August 2023. Their discussion spans an array of topics, encapsulating the Justice's journey from a young lawyer to a Supreme Court judge, his landmark judgments, and his insights on the ever-evolving legal landscape and society. In the second episode of the series, Justice MNV and Alok delve into two pivotal judgments that revolve around two of the most harrowing incidents in independent India's history: the Bhopal Gas disaster in 1984 and the Babri Masjid demolition in 1991. These tragic events spawned a multitude of legal cases, with two of the most significant cases finding their way to the Supreme Court, with Justice Venkatachaliah on the bench. These cases, namely Union Carbide Corporation Ltd v the Union of India (decided in 1991) and Dr Ismail Faruqui v Union of India (decided in 1994), hold paramount importance in the context of these events. The Supreme Court's role in facilitating the settlement between the Union of India and Union Carbide has been a subject of extensive debate, as has its contribution to the eventual resolution of the Babri Masjid dispute. In this episode of BIC Talks, we endeavor to shed light on the motivations and considerations that underpinned the court's decisions, providing insight into why the court took the actions it did in these consequential cases. Subscribe to the BIC Talks Podcast on your favourite podcast app! BIC Talks is available everywhere, including iTunes, Spotify, Google Podcasts, Castbox, Overcast and Stitcher.

Ayodhya Masjid - नाम मिट गया बाबर का - वक़्फ़ बोर्ड ने ही मिटा दिया Babri Masjid - Sanjay Dixit

K. R. Meera is an Indian author and journalist, who writes in Malayalam. She was born in Sasthamkotta, Kollam district in Kerala. She worked as a journalist in Malayala Manorama but later resigned to concentrate more on writing. As the foundations are laid for a temple to rise on the site of Babri Masjid in Ayodhya, voices rise from the ground in a small town in central Kerala. She is a judge in a district court, and he a petitioner in a seemingly banal property dispute. But the very first hearing tosses the judge's life into disarray. The scent of pink Edward roses, the iridescent scales of snakes, the spectre—and science—of vanishing twins. Girls whose feet do not touch the ground. Irascible and comically powerful ancestors. In this illusory landscape are the hard truths about the intertwined histories of Hindus and Muslims in India, as well as the chasms between men and women.A hypnotic novella by K.R. Meera, deftly translated by Nisha Susan, Qabar echoes with the dizzying knowledge that verdicts are not solutions.

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Language of threats in latest issue of al-Qaeda magazine Ghazwa-e-Hind suggests it was written by jihadist familiar with Indian milieu, according to a senior intelligence officer.

Hindu extremists demolished a 16th century mosque in the Indian city of Ayodhya in December 1992 prompting months of communal violence across India. Photojournalist Praveen Jain witnessed rehearsals for the demolition the day before the activists stormed the mosque. He spoke to Iknoor Kaur in 2019. (Photo: Hindu extremists rehearsing the demolition of the Babri Masjid. Credit: Praveen Jain)

While there are millions of hostile rivalries around the world, only a fraction of these erupt into violence. It is easy to overlook the underlying strategic forces of war and to see war mainly as a series of errors and accidents. It is also easy to forget that war shouldn't happen—and most of the time it doesn't. Chris Blattman is a Professor at the University of Chicago in the Harris School of Public Policy. He is an economist and political scientist who studies violence, crime, and underdevelopment. His most recent book is Why We Fight: The Roots of War and the Paths to Peace, which shows that violence is actually not the norm; and that there are only five reasons why conflict wins over compromise. Twitter: @cblatts Host:Professor Dan Banik, University of Oslo, Twitter: @danbanik  @GlobalDevPodApple Google Spotify YouTubehttps://in-pursuit-of-development.simplecast.com/

This is one of a handful of episodes during the recording of which I wept. Bhanwar Meghwanshi, a Dalit, was fanatically devoted to the RSS, ready to go to war for its cause and even die for it. He joined the RSS as a child, eased into it by his school teacher and indoctrinated through games and music. Bhanwarji was jailed for trying to participate in the kar seva at the Babri Masjid site and he worked hard to spread the Sangh's ideology. But, over time, he began to be subtly reminded of his Dalit-ness and was told he couldn't become a pracharak because he was from a lower caste. The food he prepared for RSS members and priests was thrown away because it would “pollute” them. Exposed to its true face, disillusioned and shattered, he attempted suicide. Bhanwarji left the RSS and spent years trying to find himself. Eventually, there was an epiphany and he has since devoted his life to uniting Indians of all religions, castes and sections. He is also a civil liberties activist and works with Dalits, Adivasis and nomadic tribes. He tells his story to All Indians Matter.

 In this episode, film studies scholar Dr. Ranjani Mazumdar joins us for a deep dive into film posters, the anti-hero, travel in celluloid, and the history of Bombay cinema.‘In Perspective' is The Swaddle's podcast series where academics reveal little-known facts about Indian history, society and culture. Notes:00:01:08:17- How did the film poster emerge in 20th century India? How has its artistic value and role in film publicity evolved since then?00:03:05:23- Has the role of the movie poster diminished today? 00:06:56:11- How did the cinema of the 1960s capture globalization in India and the anxieties that came with it?00:12:27:12- What led to the rise of the vamp in Bombay cinema and what led to her merging with the heroine in the 1990s?00:18:35:22- How did the ‘angry young man' of the 1970s evolve into the psychotic anti-hero in the 1990s?00:25:37:13- What do the interiors of consumerist family films of the 1990s tell us about the imagination of urban spaces and cities  at that time and the anxieties surrounding it? 00:32:41:10- What role does cinema play in how we memorialize traumatic events that India has experienced collectively, especially in terms of the way the Babri Masjid demolition has been depicted in Indian cinema?

Welcome to Back In Time, our brand new show hosted by Kunal Kamra. Kunal sits down with writers, filmmakers, journalists, lawyers and economists to, well, go back in time and discuss critical moments in independent India's history. In episode 1, Kunal revisits 1990s India with documentary filmmaker Anand Patwardhan. Anand takes us back to his time shooting Ram Ke Naam, which explored the sociopolitical climate leading up to the Babri Masjid demolition. Hindu fundamentalism drummed up wide support for the demolition, he says, adding specifically about BJP grandee LK Advani's mobilisation campaign, “Wherever the rath yatra went, people were being killed.” They also discuss how patriarchy and caste played into the Ram Janmabhoomi movement.Listen! Our GDPR privacy policy was updated on August 8, 2022. Visit acast.com/privacy for more information.

Happy Independence Day!- Pranay Kotasthane and RSJThis newsletter can often seem pessimistic about India. That isn’t true, though. Every year, on Independence Day, we remind ourselves and our readers why we write this newsletter. This is how we ended the Independence Day edition of 2020:“What we have achieved so far is precious. That’s worth reminding ourselves today. We will go back to writing future editions lamenting our state of affairs.We will do so because we know it’s worth it.”  This year we thought it would be fun (?) to run through every year since 1947 and ask ourselves what happened in the year that had long-term repercussions for our nation. This kind of thing runs a serious risk. It can get tedious and all too familiar. Most of us know the landmark events of recent history and what they meant for the nation. Maybe. Maybe not. We’ve given an honest try (of over 8000 words) to see if there’s a different way of looking at these familiar events and their impact on us. Here we go.1947 - 1960: Sense Of A Beginning 1947Perhaps the most significant “What, if?” question for independent India surfaced on 17th August 1947 when the Radcliffe Line was announced. The partition of the Indian subcontinent has cast a long shadow. What if it had never happened? What if Nehru-Jinnah-Gandhi were able to strike a modus vivendi within a one-federation framework? These questions surface every year around independence.The indelible human tragedy of the partition aside, would an Akhand Bharat have served its citizens better? We don’t think so. We agree with Ambedkar’s assessment of this question. In Pakistan or the Partition of India, he approaches the question with detachment and realism, concluding that the forces of “communal malaise” had progressed to such an extent that resisting a political division would have led to a civil war, making everyone worse off. The partition must have been handled better without the accompanying humanitarian disaster. But on the whole, the partition was inevitable by 1947.“That the Muslim case for Pakistan is founded on sentiment is far from being a matter of weakness; it is really its strong point. It does not need deep understanding of politics to know that the workability of a constitution is not a matter of theory. It is a matter of sentiment. A constitution, like clothes, must suit as well as please. If a constitution does not please, then however perfect it may be, it will not work. To have a constitution which runs counter to the strong sentiments of a determined section is to court disaster if not to invite rebellion.” [Read the entire book here]1948What if Mahatma Gandhi wasn’t killed that year? How would the course of our history change? Gandhi spoke like an idealist and worked like a realist. He was possibly the most aware of the gap between the lofty ideals of our constitution and the reality of the Indian minds then. He knew the adoption of the constitution was only half the work done. He’d likely have devoted the rest of his life to building a liberal India at the grassroots level. His death pushed a particular stream of right-wing Hindu consciousness underground. We still carry the burden of that unfinished work.1949The Constituent Assembly met for the first time in December 1946. By November 26th 1949, this assembly adopted a constitution for India. Even a half-constructed flyover in Koramangala has taken us five years. For more context, Pakistan’s Constituent Assembly began work on 10th August 1947, and their first constitution came into force in March 1956, only to be abrogated two years later. India’s founding fathers and mothers were acutely aware that they were elite, unelected, and unrepresentative of the median Indian. They dared to imagine a new nation-state while grappling with that period's harsh economic, social, and political realities. Their work should inspire us to strengthen, improve, and rebuild—but never to give up on—the Republic of India.For more, check out the miracle that is India’s Constitution in our Republic Day 2021 special edition.1950We have written about our Constitution a number of times. It is an inspiring and audacious document in its ambition to shape a modern nation. It has its flaws. Some consider it too liberal; others think it makes the State overbearing. Some find it too long; others feel it comes up short. This may all be true. However, there is no doubt our constitution has strengthened our democracy, protected the weak and continues to act as a tool for social change. It is our North Star. And a damn good one at that. 1951Few post-independence institutions have stood the test of time as the Finance Commission (FC), first established in 1951. In federal systems, horizontal and vertical imbalances in revenue generation and expenditure functions are commonplace. Closing the gap requires an impartial institution that is well-regarded by various levels of government and the people. The Finance Commission is that institution.It’s not as if it didn’t face any challenges. As a constitutional body established under article 280 of the Constitution, it was sidelined by an extra-constitutional and powerful Planning Commission until 2014. But we have had 15 FCs in total, and each key tax revenue-sharing recommendation has become government policy.1952Our Constitution adopted a universal adult franchise as the basis for elections. Every citizen was to be part of the democratic project. There was to be no bar on age, sex, caste or education. And this was to be done in one of the most unequal societies in the world. The ambition was breathtaking. To put this in context, women were allowed to vote in Switzerland only in 1971. Not only did we aim for this, but we also moved heaven and earth to achieve it in 1952. In his book India After Gandhi, Ram Guha describes the efforts of the government officials led by the first Election Commissioner, Sukumar Sen, to reach the last man or woman for their ballot. The elites may lament vote bank politics or cash for votes scams and question the wisdom of universal franchise. But we shouldn’t have had it any other way. And, for the record, our people have voted with remarkable sophistication in our short independent history. 1953 For a new nation-state, the Republic of India punched above its weight in bringing hostilities on the Korean peninsula to an end. Not only did the Indian government’s work shape the Armistice Agreement, but it also chaired a Neutral Nations Repatriation Commission (NNRC) that was set up to decide the future of nearly 20,000 prisoners of war from both sides. This experience during the Cold War strengthened India’s advocacy of the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM).  1954Article 25 guaranteed the freedom of conscience and the freedom to profess, practice, and propagate religion to all citizens. But how does one define a religious practice? And can a practice under the garb of religion breach the boundary of individual rights or public morality? This is a familiar conflict zone in secular States and would inevitably show up in India because everything in India can be construed as a religious practice. Like Ambedkar said during the constituent assembly debates:“The religious conceptions in this country are so vast that they cover every aspect of life from birth to death…there is nothing extraordinary in saying that we ought to strive hereafter to limit the definition of religion in such a manner that we shall not extend it beyond beliefs and such rituals as may be connected with ceremonials which are essentially religious..."In 1954, the Supreme Court gave a landmark judgment on what constitutes a religious practice in what’s known as the Shirur Math case. It held that the term religion would cover all practices integral to that religion. Further, the Court will determine what practice will be deemed essential with reference to doctrines within that religion itself.This test of ‘essentiality’ in religion has kept the public, the legislature and the courts busy since (entry of women in Sabarimala, headscarf in Islam, to name two). The outcome has bent towards individual liberty in most contexts, but the ambiguity in the definition of essential means it could go the other way too.1955Another wild "What, if” moment that we like to recall relates to Milton Friedman’s visit to the Indian finance ministry in 1955. What shape would India’s economy have taken had his seminal document “A Memorandum to the Government of India 1955” been heeded?In this note, Friedman gets to the root of India’s macroeconomic problems—an overburdened investment policy, restrictive policies towards the private sector, erratic monetary policy, and a counterproductive exchange control regime. Being bullish about India’s prospects was courageous when most observers wrote epitaphs about the grand Indian experiment. But Friedman was hopeful and critical both.The Indian government, for its part, was humble enough to seek the advice of foreigners from opposing schools of thought. At the same time, it was too enamoured by the Soviet command and control model. In fact, many items from Friedman’s note can be repurposed as economic reforms even today.Here’re our points from Friedman’s note.1956The idea of One Nation, One ‘X’ (language, election, song, tax, choose any other) is both powerful and seductive. It is not new, however. Back in the 50s, there was a view that we must not strengthen any identity that divides us. So when the question of reorganisation of the colonial provinces into new states came up, an argument was made that it must be done on factors other than language. Nehru, ever the modernist, thought the creation of language-based states would lead us down the path of ethnic strife. The example of nation-states in Europe built on language in the 19th century and the two devastating world wars thereafter were too recent then. So, he demurred.Agitation, hunger strikes and deaths followed before we chose language as the primary basis for reorganising the states. It was perhaps the best decision taken by us in the 50s. As the years since have shown, only a polity assured of its heritage and identity will voluntarily accept diversity. The melding of our diversity into a single identity cannot be a top-down imposition. We should never forget this.1957India’s economic strategy of state-led industrialisation through deficit financing in pursuit of import substitution took off with the Second Five-Year Plan. Heavy industries needed imported machinery, inflating India’s import bill. Since the exchange rate was pegged to the British pound, it meant that Indian exports became pricier. This imbalance between rising imports and flagging exports was financed by running down the foreign exchange reserves. By 1957, India witnessed its first foreign exchange crisis. This event had a significant effect on India’s economy. Instead of devaluing the rupee, the government opted for foreign exchange budgeting - every investment in a project needed government approval for the foreign exchange required to buy foreign inputs. The immediate crisis in 1957 led to controls that worsened India’s economic prospects over the next 35 years.1958The government nationalised all insurance companies a couple of years earlier. India hadn’t gotten into a socialist hell yet, so this was a bit of a surprise. The proximate cause was a fraud that few private life insurers had committed by misusing the policyholders’ funds to help their industrialist friends. A run-of-the-mill white-collar crime that should have been dealt with by the criminal justice system. But the government viewed it as a market failure and moved to nationalise the entire industry. It would take another 45 years for private players to come back to insurance. Insurance penetration in India meanwhile remained among the lowest in the world.  Also, in 1958, Feroze Gandhi took to the floor of Lok Sabha to expose how LIC, the state insurer, had diverted its funds to help Haridas Mundhra, a Calcutta-based businessman. The same crime that private insurers had done.The government would repeat this pattern of getting involved where there was no market failure. The outcomes would inevitably turn out to be worse. Seven decades later, we remain instinctively socialist and wary of capital. Our first reaction to something as trifling as a surge price by Ola or a service charge levied by restaurants is to ask the State to interfere.1959“The longest guest of the Indian government”, the 14th Dalai Lama pre-empted the Chinese government’s plans for his arrest and escaped to India. Not only did India provide asylum, but it also became home to more than a hundred thousand Tibetans. Because of the bold move by the Indian government in 1959, the Central Tibetan Administration continues its struggle as a Nation and a State in search of regaining control over their Country to this day. This event also changed India-China relations for the decades to come.1960Search as hard as we might; we hardly got anything worth discussing for this year. Maybe we were all sitting smugly waiting for an avalanche of crisis to come our way. Steel plants, dams and other heavy industries were being opened. The budget outlay for agriculture was reduced. We were talking big on the international stage about peace and non-alignment. But if you had looked closer, things were turning pear-shaped. The many dreams of our independence were turning sour.The 60s: Souring Of The Dream1961The Indian Army marched into Goa in December 1961. The 450-year Portuguese colonial rule ended, and the last colonial vestige in India was eliminated. It took this long because Portugal’s dictator Antonio Salazar stuck to his guns on controlling Portuguese colonies in the subcontinent, unlike the British and the French. Portugal’s membership in NATO further made it difficult for the Indian government to repeat the operations in Hyderabad and Junagadh. Nevertheless, that moment eventually arrived in 1961. This was also the year when India’s first indigenous aircraft, the HAL HF-24 Marut, took its first flight. Made in Bengaluru by German designer Kurt Tank, the aircraft was one of the first fighter jets made outside the developed world. The aircraft served well in the war that came a decade later. It never lived up to its promises, but it became a matter of immense pride and confidence for a young nation-state.1962Among the lowest points in the history of independent India. We’ve written about our relationship with China many times in the past editions. The 1962 war left a deep impact on our psyche. We didn’t recover for the rest of the decade. The only good thing out of it was the tempering of idealism in our approach to international relations. That we take a more realist stance these days owes its origins to the ‘betrayal’ of 1962.1963ISRO launched the first sounding rocket in November 1963. Over the years, this modest beginning blossomed into a programme with multiple launch vehicles. The satellite programmes also took off a few years later, making India a mighty player in the space sector. 1964If you told anyone alive in 1964 that less than 60 years later, Nehru would be blamed for all that was wrong with India by a substantial segment of its population, they would have laughed you out of the room. But here we are in 2022, and there’s never a day that passes without a WhatsApp forward that talks about Nehru’s faults. It seems inevitable that by the time we celebrate the centenary of our independence, he would be a borderline reviled figure in our history. But that would be an aberration. In the long arc of history, he will find his due as a flawed idealist who laid the foundation of modern India. 1964 was the end of an era.1965As the day when Hindi would become the sole official language of the Indian Union approached, the anti-Hindi agitation in the Madras presidency morphed into riots. Many people died in the protests, and it led to the current equilibrium on language policy. The “one State, one language” project moved to the back burner, even as Hindi became an important link language across the country. The lesson was the same as in the case of the 1956 states reorganisation: melding our diversity into a single identity cannot be a top-down imposition.1966The two wars in the decade's first half, the inefficient allocation of capital driven by the second and third five-year plans, and the consecutive monsoon failure meant India was on the brink in 1966. The overnight devaluation of the Rupee by over 50 per cent, the timely help with food grains from the US and some providence pulled us back from it. The green revolution followed, and we have remained self-sufficient in food since.The experience of being on the brink taught us nothing. We still believe in the Pigouvian theory of market failure, where government policies are expected to deliver optimality.  Strangely, the idea that we reform only in crisis has only strengthened. There cannot be worse ways to change oneself than under the shadow of a crisis. But we have made a virtue out of it.1967This was the year when the Green Revolution took baby steps, and the Ehlrichian prediction about India’s impending doom was put to rest. But it was also the year when the Indian government made a self-goal by adopting a policy called items reserved for manufacture exclusively by the small-scale sector. By reserving whole product lines for manufacturing by small industries, this policy kept Indian firms small and uncompetitive. And like all bad ideas, it had a long life. The last 20 items on this list were removed only in April 2015. We wrote about this policy here. 1968In the past 75 years, we have reserved some of our worst public policies for the education sector. We have an inverted pyramid. A handful of tertiary educational institutions produce world-class graduates at the top. On the other end, we have a total failure to provide quality primary education to the masses. It is not because of a lack of intent. The National Education Policy (NEP) that first came up in 1968 is full of ideas, philosophy and a desire to take a long-term view about education in India. But it was unmoored from the economic or social reality of the nation. We often say here that we shouldn’t judge a policy based on its intentions. That there’s no such thing as a good policy but bad implementation because thinking about what can work is part of policy itself. NEP is Exhibit A in favour of this argument.1969 The nationalisation of 14 private-sector banks was a terrible assault on economic freedom under the garb of serving the public interest. The sudden announcement of a change in ownership of these banks was challenged in the courts, but the government managed to thwart it with an ordinance. Fifty years later, we still have low credit uptake even as governments continue to recapitalise loss-making banks with taxpayer money.1970The dominant economic thinking at the beginning of the 70s in India placed the State at the centre of everything. But that wasn’t how the world was moving. There was a serious re-examination of the relationship between the State and the market happening elsewhere. The eventual shift to a deregulated, small government economic model would happen by the decade's end. This shift mostly passed India by. But there were a few voices who questioned the state orthodoxy and, in some ways, sowed the intellectual seeds for liberalisation in future. In 1970, Jagdish Bhagwati and Padma Desai published their monograph, India: Planning for Industrialisation, which argued that our economic policies since independence had crippled us. It showed with data how central planning, import substitution, public sector-led industrial policy and license raj have failed. But it found no takers. In fact, we doubled down on these failed policies for the rest of the decade. It was a tragedy foretold. What if someone had gone against the consensus and paid attention to that paper? That dissent could perhaps have been the greatest service to the nation. It is useful to remember this today when any scepticism about government policies is met with scorn. Dissent is good. The feeblest of the voice might just be right.The 70s: Losing The Plot1971Kissinger visited China in July 1971 via Pakistan. Responding to the changing world order, India and the USSR signed an Indo–Soviet Treaty of Peace, Friendship and Cooperation in August of that year. India had become an ally of the USSR. Four months later, the India-Pakistan war pitted India and the USSR against Pakistan, China, and the US. The Indian strategic community came to internalise USSR as a super-reliable partner and the West as a supporter of India’s foes. It took another three decades, and the collapse of the USSR, for a change in this thinking. Even today, Russia finds massive support in the Indian strategic establishment. We had problematised this love for Russia here. 1972India won the 1972 war with Pakistan and liberated Bangladesh. India’s unilateral action stopped a humanitarian disaster. The victory was decisive, and the two parties met in Simla to agree on the way forward. This should have been a slam dunk for India in resolving festering issues on the international boundary, Kashmir and the role of the third parties. But international diplomacy is a two-level game, and Bhutto played that to his advantage. We explained this in edition 30. We paid a high price for giving away that win to Bhutto.1973The Kesavananda Bharti verdict of the Supreme Court rescued the Republic of India from a rampaging authoritarian. The basic structure doctrine found a nice balance to resolve the tension between constitutional immutability and legislative authority to amend the constitution. Bibhu Pani discussed this case in more detail here. 1974You are the State. Here are your crimes. You force import substitution, you regulate the currency, you misallocate capital, you let the public sector and a handful of licensed private players produce inferior quality products at a high cost, you raise the marginal tax rate at the highest level to 97 per cent, you run a large current account deficit, and you cannot control Rupee depreciation.Result?People find illegal ways to bring in foreign goods, currency and gold. And so was born the villain of every urban Bollywood film of the 70s. And a career option for a capitalist-minded kid like me. The Smuggler.But the State isn’t the criminal here. The smuggler is. And the State responded with a draconian law to beat all others. An act the knowledge of whose expanded form would serve kids well in those school quizzes of the 80s. COFEPOSA — The Conservation of Foreign Exchange and Prevention of Smuggling Act. A predatory state's defining feature is how it forces ordinary citizens to do unlawful activities. COFEPOSA was the mother of such laws. It has spawned many children. 1975This blank editorial by the Indian Express says it all. 1976We view our population as a core problem. The politicians, the public servants and the ordinary citizens share this view. We don’t want to acknowledge our governance deficit. Calling population a problem allows us to shirk the responsibility of running a functioning State. We have written about the flaw in thinking about the population as a problem on many occasions.How far could we go to control the population? Well, in 1976, during the peak of the Emergency, the State decided to sterilise male citizens against their wishes. This madness ended when the Emergency was lifted. But even today calls for population control keep coming back. 1977The first non-Congress union government was an important milestone for the Indian Republic. While Morarji Desai’s government did reverse the worst excesses of the Emergency rule, its economic policies were less successful. This period went on to witness a demonetisation in search of black money (2016 from the future says Hi!), and the same old counter-productive policies in search of self-reliance.1978Despite all available evidence that statist socialism was an abject failure, the Janata government that came to power decided to double down on it. One of the great ideas of the time was to force MNCs to reduce their stake in their Indian subsidiaries to below 40 per cent. A handful agreed, but the large corporations quit India. One of those who left was IBM in 1978. The many existing installations of IBM computers needed services and maintenance. In a delightful case of unintended consequences, this led to the nationalisation of IBM’s services division (later called CMC). Domestic companies started to serve this niche. Soon there were the likes of Infosys, Wipro and HCL building a business on this. CMC provided a good training ground for young engineers. And so, the Indian IT services industry got underway. It would change the lives of educated Indians forever.1979In a classic case of violating the Tinbergen rule, the Mandal Commission recommended that the reservation policy should be used to address relative deprivation. While the earlier reservations for oppressed castes stood on firm ground as a means for addressing unconscionable historical wrongs, the Mandal Commission stretched the logic too far. Its recommendation would eventually make reservation policy the go-to solution for any group that could flex its political muscles. We wrote about it here. 1980After ditching the Janata experiment and running out of ideas to keep Jan Sangh going, the BJP was formed. It wasn’t a momentous political occasion of any sort then. A party constitution that aimed for Gandhian socialism and offered vague promises of a uniform civil code and nationalism didn’t excite many. Everything else that would propel the party in later years was to be opportunistic add-ons to the ideology. The founding leaders, Advani and Vajpayee, would have been shocked if you told them what the party would be like, four decades later.The 80s: A Million Mutinies Now1981This year witnessed a gradual shift away from doctrinaire socialism in economic policymaking. “The Indira Gandhi government lifted restrictions on the expansion of production, permitted new private borrowing abroad, and continued the liberalisation of import controls,” wrote Walter Anderson. The government also “allowed” some price rises, leading to increased production of key input materials. The government also permitted foreign companies to compete in drilling rights in India. All in all, a year that witnessed changes for the better. 1982The great textile strike of Bombay in 1982 was inevitable. The trade unions had gotten so powerful that there was a competitive race to the bottom on who could be more militant. Datta Samant emerged intent on breaking the monopoly of RMMS on the city's workers. And he did this with ever spiralling demands from mill owners in a sector that was already bloated with overheads and facing competition from far eastern economies. There was no way to meet these demands. The owners locked the mills and left. Never to come back. The old, abandoned mills remained. The workers remained. Without jobs, without prospects and with kids who grew up angry and unemployed. The rise of Shiv Sena, political goondaism and a malevolent form of underworld followed. Bombay changed forever. It was all inevitable.1983The Nellie massacre in Assam and the Dhilwan bus massacre in Punjab represent the year 1983. Things seemed really dark back then. It seemed that the doomsayers would be proved right about India. Eventually, though, the Indian Republic prevailed. 1984Her Sikh bodyguards assassinated India Gandhi. The botched Punjab policy of the previous five years came a full circle with it. An unforgivable backlash against innocent Sikhs followed. A month later, deadly gas leaked out of a Union Carbide factory in Bhopal, killing and paralysing thousands. 1984 will rank among the worst years of our republic. There were two silver linings in retrospect. One, we would learn to manage secessionist movements better from the harrowing Punjab experience. Two, had Indira continued, would we have had 1991? Our guess is no.1985This was an eventful year in retrospect. Texas Instruments set up shop in Bangalore. It was to begin one of modern India’s true success stories on the world stage. This was also the year when the Anti-defection law transformed the relationship between the voter and her representative. Political parties became all-powerful, and people’s representatives were reduced to political party agents. We have written about this changing dynamic here. This was also the year when the then commerce minister, VP Singh, visited Malaysia. The visit was significant for India because it served as a reference point for Singh when he visited that country again in 1990, now as the Prime minister. Surprised by Malaysia’s transformation in five years, he asked his team to prepare a strategy paper for economic reforms. This culminated in the “M” document, which became a blueprint for reforms when the time for the idea eventually came in 1991.1986Who is a citizen of India?  This vexing question roiled Assam in the early 80s. The student union protests against the widespread immigration of Bangladeshis turned violent, and things had turned ugly by 1985. The Assam accord of 1985 sought to settle the state's outstanding issues,, including deporting those who arrived after 1971 and a promise to amend the Citizenship Act. The amended Citizenship Act of 1986 restricted the citizenship of India to those born before 1987 only if either of their parents were born in India. That meant children of couples who were illegal immigrants couldn’t be citizens of India simply by virtue of their birth in India. That was that, or so we thought.But once you’ve amended the definition of who can be a citizen of India, you have let the genie out. The events of 2019 will attest to that.1987Rajiv Gandhi’s ill-fated attempt to replicate Indira Gandhi’s success through military intervention in another country began in 1987. In contrast to the 1971 involvement, where Indian forces had the mass support of the local populace, the Indian Peacekeeping Force (IPKF) got itself embroiled in a bitter Sri Lankan civil war. Not only did this involvement end in a failure, it eventually led to Rajiv Gandhi’s brutal murder in a terrorist attack. The policy lesson internalised by the strategic community was that India must stay far away from developing and deploying forces overseas.1988Most government communication is propaganda in disguise. However, there are those rare occasions when government messaging transcends the ordinary. In 1988, we saw that rare bird during the peak era of a single government channel running on millions of black and white TV sets across India. A government ad that meant something to all of us and that would remain with us forever. Mile Sur Mera Tumhara got everything right - the song, the singers, the storyline and that ineffable thing called the idea of India. No jingoism, no chest beating about being the best country in the world and no soppy sentimentalism. Just a simple message - we might all sing our own tunes, but we are better together. This is a timeless truth. No nation in history has become better by muting the voice of a section of their own people. Mile Sur Mera Tumhara, Toh Sur Bane Hamara, indeed.  19891989 will be remembered as the year when the Indian government capitulated to the demands of Kashmiri terrorists in the Rubaiya Sayeed abduction case. It would spark off a series of kidnappings and act as a shot in the arm of radicals. 1990VP Singh dusted off the decade-long copy of the Mandal Commission report and decided to implement it. This wasn’t an ideological revolution. It was naked political opportunism. However, three decades later, the dual impact of economic reforms and social engineering has increased social mobility than ever before. Merit is still a matter of debate in India. But two generations of affirmative action in many of the progressive states have shown the fears of merit being compromised were overblown. The task is far from finished, but Mandal showed that sometimes you need a big bang to get things going, even if your intentions were flawed.1990 also saw the exodus of Kashmiri Pandits (KPs) from the valley. A tragedy that would bookend a decade of strife and violence in India. The only lesson one should draw from the sad plight of KPs is that the State and the people must protect minority rights. We’re not sure that’s what we have taken away from it. And that’s sad.The 90s: Correcting The Course1991With the benefit of hindsight, the 1991 economic reforms seem inevitable. But things could well have been different. In the minority government, powerful voices advocated in favour of debt restructuring instead of wholesale reforms. In the end, the narrative that these changes were merely a continuation—and not abandonment—of Nehru and Indira Gandhi’s vision for India carried the day. This political chicanery deserves some credit for transforming the life of a billion Indians. 1992Harshad Mehta scammed the stock markets. It wasn’t a huge scam. Nor did it hurt the ordinary Indians. Fewer than 1% invested in markets back then. Yet, the scam did something important. It set in motion a series of reforms that made our capital markets stronger and safer for ordinary investors. Notably, over the years, Mehta came to be seen as some kind of robber baron figure. Capitalism needed an anti-hero to catch the imagination of people. Someone who could reprise in the 90s the Bachchan-esque angry young man roles of the 70s. Mehta might not have been that figure exactly, but he helped a generation transition to the idea that greed could indeed be good.Also, Babri Masjid was brought down by a mob of kar sevaks in 1992. It will remain a watershed moment in our history. The Supreme Court judgement of 2019 might be the final judicial word on it. But we will carry the scars for a long time.1993The tremors of the demolition of the Babri Masjid were felt in 1993. Twelve bombs went off in Bombay on one fateful day. The involvement of the city’s mafia groups was established. The tragic event finally led to the government rescuing the city from the underworld. Not to forget, the Bombay underworld directly resulted from government policies such as prohibition and gold controls. 1994One of the great acts of perversion in our democracy was the blatant abuse of Section 356 of the constitution that allowed the union to dismiss a state government at the slightest pretext. Indira Gandhi turned this into an art form. S. R. Bommai, whose government in Karnataka was dismissed in this manner in 1988, took his case up to the Supreme Court. In 1994, the court delivered a verdict that laid out the guidelines to prevent the abuse of Section 356. It is one of the landmark judgments of the court and restored some parity in Union and state relationship.Article 356 has been used sparingly since. We are a better democracy because of it.1995India joined the WTO, and the first-ever mobile phone call was made this year. But 1995 will forever be remembered as the year when Ganesha idols started drinking milk. This event was a precursor to the many memes, information cascades, and social proofs that have become routine in the information age. 1996Union budgets in India are occasions for dramatic policy announcements. It is a mystery why a regular exercise of presenting the government's accounts should become a policy event. But that’s the way we roll. In 1996 and 1997, P. Chidambaram presented them as the FM of a weak ragtag coalition called the United Front. But he presented two budgets for the ages. The rationalisation of income tax slabs and the deregulation of interest rates created a credit culture that led to the eventual consumption boom in the next decade. We still carry that consumption momentum.1997The creation of the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) is an important public policy milestone for India. By no means perfect, the setting up of TRAI helped overturn a norm where government departments were both players and umpires. TRAI made the separation of “steering” and “rowing” functions a new normal. That template has been copied in several sectors thereafter, most recently in the liberalisation of the space sector. 1998India did Pokhran 2, which gave it the capability to build thermonuclear weapons. We faced sanctions and global condemnation. But the growing economy and a sizeable middle class meant those were soon forgotten. Economic might can let you get away with a lot. We have seen it happen to us, but it is a lesson we don’t understand fully.Also, in 1998, Sonia Gandhi jumped into active politics. The Congress that was ambling towards some sort of internal democracy decided to jettison it all and threw its weight behind the dynasty. It worked out for them for a decade or so. But where are they now? Here’s a question. What if Sonia didn’t join politics then? Congress might have split. But who knows, maybe those splinters might have coalesced in the future with a leader chosen by the workers. And we would have had a proper opposition today with a credible leader.1999This was a landmark year for public policy. For the first time, a union government-run company was privatised wholly. We wrote about the three narratives of disinvestment here. 2000We have a weak, extended and over-centralised state. And to go with it, we have large, unwieldy states and districts that make the devolution of power difficult. In 2000, we created three new states to facilitate administrative convenience. On balance, it has worked well. Despite the evidence, we have managed to create only one more state since. The formation of Telangana was such a political disaster that it will take a long time before we make the right policy move of having smaller states. It is a pity.The 2000s: The Best Of Times2001Not only was the Agra Summit between Musharraf and Vajpayee a dud, but it was followed by a terrorist attack on the Indian parliament. It confirmed a pattern: PM-level bilateral meetings made the Pakistani military-jihadi complex jittery, and it invariably managed to spike such moves with terrorist attacks. 2002There was Godhra and the riots that followed. What else is there to say?2003The Fiscal Responsibility and Budget Management (FRBM) Act and the Civil Services Pension Reform are two policy successes with many lessons for future policymakers. We have discussed these on many occasions. 2004The NDA government called for an early election, confident about its prospects. India Shining, its campaign about how good things were, wasn’t too far from the truth. It is how many of us felt during that time. The NDA government had sustained the reform momentum of the 90s with some of the best minds running the key departments. Its loss was unexpected. Chandrababu Naidu, a politician who fashioned himself like a CEO, was taken to the cleaners in Andhra Pradesh. Apparently, economic reforms didn’t get you votes. The real India living in villages was angry at being left out. That was the lesson for politicians from 2004. Or, so we were told.Such broad narratives with minimal factual analysis backing them have flourished in the public policy space. There is no basis for them. The loss of NDA in 2004 came down to two states. Anti-incumbency in Andhra Pradesh where a resurgent Congress under YS Reddy beat TDP, a constituent of NDA. TDP lost by similar margins (in vote share %) across the state in all demographics in both rural and urban areas. There was no rural uprising against Naidu because of his tech-savvy, urban reformist image. Naidu lost because the other party ran a better campaign. Nothing else. The other mistake of the NDA was in choosing to partner with the ruling AIADMK in Tamil Nadu (TN) over DMK. TN was famous for not giving split verdicts. It swung to extremes between these two parties in every election. And that’s what happened as AIADMK drew a blank.Yet, the false lesson of 2004 has played on the minds of politicians since. We haven’t gotten back on track on reforms in the true sense. 2005The Right to Information Act and the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act came into force in 2005. The “right to X” model of governance took root.2006In March 2006, George W Bush visited India and signed the Civil Nuclear Cooperation Agreement with Manmohan Singh. From facing sanctions in 1998 for Pokhran 2 to the 123 Agreement, this was a victory for Indian diplomacy and its rising status in the world. You would think this would have had bipartisan support among the political class in India. Well, the Left that was part of UPA and the BJP that worked on the deal when it was in power, opposed it. Many shenanigans later, the deal was passed in the parliament in 2008. It is often said there’s no real ideological divide among parties in India. This view can be contested on various grounds. But events like the opposition to the nuclear deal make you wonder if there are genuine ideological positions on key policy issues in India. Many sound policy decisions are opposed merely for the sake of it. Ideology doesn’t figure anywhere. 2007It was the year when the Left parties were out-lefted. In Singur and Nandigram, protests erupted over land acquisition for industrial projects. The crucible of the resulting violence created a new political force. As for the investment, the capital took a flight to other places. The tax on capital ended up being a tax on labour. Businesses stayed away from West Bengal. The citadel of Left turned into its mausoleum.2008Puja Mehra in her book The Lost Decade traces the origin of India losing its way following the global financial crisis to the Mumbai terror attack of 2008. Shivraj Patil, the home minister, quit following the attack and Chidambaram was shifted from finance to fill in. For reasons unknown, Pranab Mukherjee, a politician steeped in the 70s-style-Indira-Gandhi socialism, was made the FM. Mehra makes a compelling case of how that one decision stalled reforms, increased deficit and led to runaway inflation over the next three years. Till Chidambaram was brought back to get the house in order, it was too late, and we were halfway into a lost decade. It is remarkable how bad policies always seem easy to implement while good policies take ages to get off the blocks.2009The Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI) was established in January 2009 to architect a unique digital identity for persons in a country where low rates of death and birth registrations made fake and duplicate identities a means for corruption and denial of service. Under the Modi government, the digital identity — Aadhaar — became the fulcrum of several government services. This project also set the stage for later projects such as the Unified Payments Interface (UPI) and Abha (Health ID).2010There’s petty corruption everywhere in India. It is pervasive. Not surprisingly, it is one political issue leading to mass movements in India. The anti-corruption mood gripped India in 2010 on the back of the 2G spectrum scam, where the chief accountant of the government claimed a notional loss of about Rs. 1.8 trillion to the exchequer. Auctioning of natural resources wasn’t exactly a transparent process then. It was evident there was a scam in the allotment of the 2G spectrum. But the 1.8 trillion number was a wild exaggeration that anyone with a semblance of business understanding could see through. It didn’t matter. That number caught the imagination. UPA 2 never recovered from it. More importantly, the auction policy for resources was distorted forever. We still suffer the consequences.The 2010s: Missed Opportunity2011India’s last case of wild poliovirus was detected in 2011. Until about the early 1990s, an average of 500 to 1000 children got paralysed daily in India. The original target for eradication was the year 2000. Nevertheless, we got there eleven years later. India’s pulse polio campaign has since become a source of confidence for public policy execution in India. We internalised the lesson that the Indian government can sometimes deliver through mission mode projects. 2012If you cannot solve a vexing public policy issue, turn it into a Right. It won’t work, but it will seem like you’ve done everything. After years of trying to get the national education policy right, the government decided it was best to make education a fundamental right in the Constitution. Maybe that will make the problem go away. A decade later, nothing has changed, but we have an additional right to feel good about.2013This year saw the emergence of AAP as a political force via the anti-corruption movement. AAP combines the classic elements of what makes a political party successful in India - statist instincts, focus on aam aadmi issues, populism and ideological flexibility. Importantly, it is good at telling its own version of some future utopia rather than questioning the utopia of others. 2014The BJP came to power with many promises; the most alluring of them was ‘minimum government, maximum governance’. Over the past eight years it has claimed success in meeting many of its promises, but even its ardent supporters won’t claim any success on minimum government. In fact, it has gone the other way. That a party with an immensely popular PM, election machinery that rivals the best in the world, and virtually no opposition cannot shake us off our instinctive belief in the State's power never ceases to surprise us.2015The murder of a person by a mob on the charges of eating beef was the first clear indication of the upsurge of a new violent, majoritarian polity. It was also one of the early incidents in India of radically networked communities using social media for self-organisation. Meanwhile, 2015 also witnessed the signing of a landmark boundary agreement between India and Bangladesh, which ended the abomination called the third-order enclave. The two States exchanged land peacefully, upholding the principle that citizen well-being trumps hardline interpretations of territorial integrity. 2016There will be many case studies written in future about demonetisation. Each one of them will end with a single conclusion. Public policy requires discussion and consensus, not stealth and surprise. We hope we have learnt our lesson from it.2017Until 2017, many in India still held the hope of a modus vivendi with China. Some others were enamoured by the Chinese model of governance. However, the Doklam crisis in 2017, and the Galwan clashes in 2020, changed all that. Through this miscalculation, China alienated a full generation of Indians, led to better India-US relations, and energised India to shift focus away from merely managing a weak Pakistan, and toward raising its game for competing with a stronger adversary. For this reason, we wrote a thank you note to Xi Jinping here. 2018It took years of efforts by the LGBTQ community to get Section 377 scrapped. In 2018, they partially won when the Supreme Court diluted Section 377 to exclude all kinds of adult consensual sexual behaviour. The community could now claim equal constitutional status as others. There’s still some distance to go for the State to acknowledge non-heterosexual unions and provide for other civil rights to the community. But the gradual acceptance of the community because of decriminalisation is a sign that our society doesn’t need moral policing or lectures to judge what’s good for it.2019The J&K Reorganisation Act changed the long-standing political status quo in Kashmir. Three years on, the return to political normalcy and full statehood still awaits. While a response by Pakistan was expected, it was China that fomented trouble in Ladakh, leading to the border clashes in 2020. 2020We have written multiple pieces on farm laws in the past year. The repeal of these laws, which were fundamentally sound because of a vocal minority, is the story of public policy in India. Good policies are scuttled because of the absence of consultation, an unclear narrative, opportunistic politicking or plain old hubris. We write this newsletter in the hope of changing this. 2021The second wave of the COVID-19 pandemic left behind many bereaved families. People are still trying to pick up the pieces. The sadness was also interrupted by frustration because of the delays in getting the vaccination programme going. India benefited immensely from domestic vaccine manufacturing capability in the private sector. Despite many twists and turns in vaccine pricing and procurements, the year ended with over 1 billion administered doses. In challenging times, the Indian State, markets, and society did come together to fight the pandemic. So, here we are. In the 75th independent year of this beautiful, fascinating and often exasperating nation. We are a work in progress. We might walk slowly, but we must not walk backwards. May we all live in a happy, prosperous and equal society. Thanks for reading Anticipating the Unintended! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support our work. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit publicpolicy.substack.com

Global Policy Watch #1: The Man Who Broke Capitalism?Global policy issues relevant for India- RSJOver the last couple of years, I have run through a list of books in what I call the ‘crisis in liberalism’ genre. There is a template that most of these books follow – begin with the fall of the Berlin wall, remind readers about Fukuyama’s ‘The End of History’ paper, run through the mistakes that a triumphal liberal order made through the next two decades, talk about capitalism running amok leading to the global financial crisis and then build a grand theory for the populist backlash we saw in the last few years.I wrote about these books on these pages. The list is long – The Globalisation Paradox, Radical Uncertainty, Radical Markets, The Light That Failed, The Code of Capital and maybe you could add the various Piketty books in here too. There’s a cottage industry that’s built up here and you can say I’m a huge patron of their artisanal products. Well, the good news is there’s a new addition to this genre this week. “The Man Who Broke Capitalism: How Jack Welch Gutted the Heartland and Crushed the Soul of Corporate America--And How to Undo His Legacy” by David Gelles. The title is a mouthful, but it is also convenient. It says everything it has to say in its unwieldy length. There’s not a lot more in the book except trying to retrofit all kinds of ills of capitalism seen today by the author back to Jack Welch. Gelles is all over the media this week (here, here) talking up the book and making the same points over and over again. And it got me thinking on two counts. One, why business management research and literature is almost always garbage? And two, why do we get public policy on managing business and capital wrong so often?On the book itself, I will try and summarise (in deliberate broad strokes) the three key arguments Gelles makes:There was some kind of a ‘golden age of capitalism’ in the thirty years after WW2. Companies took care of their people, distributed wealth equally, happily paid the taxes and employed people for life. Businesses saw themselves as more than profit maximising engines. There was a feeling of loyalty to the country, a fraternal sense of belonging to a community and a wider obligation to the supporting the government. All quite nice.Then in the early 70s, Friedman wrote that shareholder value maximisation paper (“The Social Responsibility Of Business Is to Increase Its Profits”) and the world was never the same again. Businesses focused more on their profits and soon lobbied for lower taxes and greater freedom in conducting their affairs. Reagan and the conservative revolution of small government followed. Into this mix came in Jack Welch as the CEO of GE, the iconic American institution. Welch singlehandedly destroyed capitalism as we knew it. He laid off people, shut factories, offshored jobs, built a shadow bank called GE Capital that reaped the benefits of financialisation, obsessed over meeting quarterly EPS numbers, stack ranked the employees in a bell curve, created the cult of CEO worship and initiated everything that you find wrong today in business. Quite an extraordinary feat in doing bad things at work. In Gelles’ words: “He's on the Mount Rushmore of men who screwed up this country.” The book then goes onto show how Welch’s long shadow still haunts corporate America despite obvious evidence that he got it all wrong. GE is among the worst-performing stock in the last two decades. It announced last year it plans to split itself into three different businesses to unlock shareholder value. GE Capital, the engine that Welch built, is defunct. Yet, business leaders worship at the altar of quarterly earnings, force ranking employees, financial engineering, building personal brands and negotiating ever increase compensation packages for themselves.  So, what’s the solution? I’m not sure if I understood it from the book. Gelles isn’t advocating for socialism surely. But he does throw around words like stakeholder capitalism and praises the current CEO of Unilever and the founder of WEF that holds an annual event at Davos for their efforts to build compassionate capitalism. Some kind of a future where we don’t measure companies on shareholder value but another set of metrics involving all stakeholders that rein in the single-minded pursuit of profits is his solution. All quite fuzzy because he seems to run out of steam by the end of the book. All that Welch bashing is tiring.Let me digress a bit here.When I started my career, the ‘GE way’ was a rage in corporate India. I remember picking up a pirated version of Welch’s autobiography from a streetside vendor at Kala Ghoda. Everyone I knew was reading it. Except for the parts about his growing up that were written with some honesty, the book was terrible. All the stories followed the same pattern. Welch gets a call and goes down to a factory floor or to a customer site. There he hears or notices something small that gets him thinking. Then he finds someone young who reminds him of his younger self – direct, analytical and abrasive. Welch decides either on shutting down or buying a new business based on his gut. He gives this young man (almost always a man) the mandate to do it. Young man does the magic and Welch basks in his foresightedness.Interspersed between these familiar stories, I got Welch’s views on lifelong employability (not employment), how to be tough but fair, his views on the future of business and, of course, six sigma.Ah, Six Sigma.You couldn’t ignore Six Sigma in India during those days. Welch had elevated it into some kind of a religion at GE. Everyone had to follow it. There were weekly Yellow belt and Green belt training programmes in every company where employees would be taught some basic statistics, and something called the DMAIC model. If you did well, you would then go on to a rigorous Black belt certification programme. The ultimate big daddy of them all was the Master Black belt - a Shaolin master with scores of Black belts in his stable who could be unleashed on any problem. All Master Black Belts came from GE and for them, the answer to every single problem was a Six Sigma project. Complaints about canteen food in the office? Run a Six Sigma project. Spending too much on office stationery? Why, Six Sigma can help. People quitting because the work is drudgery? No problem, Six Sigma will solve it. I even remember a training programme where a Six Sigma expert told us he could solve the Israel-Palestine problem using Six Sigma if only they invited him. To me the whole thing, as it was run in India, was a charade. There was no new idea or insight that came out following it. It was just bureaucracy with some babus lording over us because they were certified in this nonsense. Japan was always shown as a shining example of the success of such techniques. I guess no one had heard about Japan’s lost decade.Anyway, reading the book and seeing the success GE had then under Welch, I was convinced of two things. One, he foresaw the two trends of globalisation and financialisation way earlier than others. He figured both the threats and opportunities they presented and moulded GE to take advantage of them. He did this better than anyone else who was running a large business then. Two, he realised that running a diversified, globally distributed enterprise requires a certain ‘way’. So, he codified it - bell curve for ranking employees, global training centres for creating a kind of manager, Six Sigma as the common language to solve everyday problems and a common scorecard to rate business performance. In his scheme of things, process and order were more important than individual enterprise and innovation. GE probably didn’t produce a single world-beating product during his time but they did make truckloads of money for shareholders by being more efficient and faster to market than their competitors. And that didn’t happen by just mindless shutting down of plants or fudging the books as Gelles seems to allege.    Coming back to the book, I have three problems with it.First, there’s no pause to consider the counterfactual turn of events. Had Welch not done what he did at GE, what would have been the alternative history? It was clear by the early 80s that cheaper, and often better, consumer durables and industrial products were coming into America from Japan and the Tiger economies of the far east. American labour was getting more expensive, especially the retirement funds of workers that were run often on a defined benefit programme. Remember the great American motor companies had to be bailed out after the GFC in 2009 because they couldn’t fund the pension benefits of their ex-employees anymore. Welch was realistic enough to understand there wasn’t going to be any breakthrough technology that could change the businesses that were cash cows of GE. A refrigerator is a refrigerator. They had become commodities. Welch took a hard look at it and asked why couldn’t GE take the battle to the challengers? Why couldn’t GE outdo them in being more efficient, using the same sources of labour as them and getting into newer businesses? The breakup of the USSR and the opening up of economies around the world helped him to go overseas. So did the steep fall in telecom rates that powered the BPO revolution. He also figured he could use the large cash flows his core businesses generate to build a financial institution. And he created a behemoth in GE Capital.These two decisions extended the lifespan of GE and, perhaps, saved a lot of jobs. GE might be thinking of splitting itself into three today but these are still reasonably profitable businesses employing thousands of workers. The graveyard of corporate America is packed with companies who once competed with GE in sectors as varied as electricals (Westinghouse, Whirlpool), packaging and plastics (Tyco), and household goods (Xerox, Kodak)…the list is long. They died because they didn’t do what GE did then. You can accuse Welch of being just a manager who got a couple of trends right and rode them but who didn’t innovate and build genre-defining products. That’s fine. Not being a gifted innovator isn’t really a moral failure. But Welch ran a management template that worked for its time. A lot that was good in that has helped other enterprises manage scale and complexity. He overdid things for sure and that toxic legacy of being obsessed over quarterly EPS targets, financial re-engineering to meet them and treating people as expenses is uniquely his too. But, on balance, he was responding to the incentives that he and GE had during that time.The problem with a lot of business management books is that they use the hindsight of success or failure to go back and find reasons for it. This is a useful exercise in history. And it should be only read as history. As one version or interpretation of events. The trouble is many of these books start peddling these as some kind of deeply researched scientific material. It is not science because every single one of them will fail the falsification principle of Popper to demarcate science from non-science. Pick any book that teaches the Toyota way or the Netflix method of managing people and apply them in another context. The success rate of any such application, however generously you may use the term, is still quite low. In fact, the moment I see a book written on the unique way a company does something, I realise the company has jumped the shark. Gelles’ argument about Welch being the one man responsible for breaking capitalism is as flawed as the many books urging companies to follow the GE way a couple of decades back. There’s no science or verifiable truth here.Second, the book has an America centric view of how Welch made things worse. Sure, Welch shut down plants and shipped jobs offshore. And you could argue that made lives of American workers worse. But that trend was already inevitable. I don’t know about you but I don’t think the pre-Welch era, say of the 70s, was some kind of golden age for capitalism. People were still protesting against inequality, wars and seeking global brotherhood. Inflation was high. Diversity in corporates was low. Politicians were being voted out of power because of how they fared on economy. Doesn’t sound like a golden age to me.Gelles blames Welch for hollowing out the industrial belt and increasing inequality in the American society. Maybe it is true. But what about the countries where Welch set up new shops? Without Welch, there wouldn’t have been millions of jobs created in places like India, China, the Philippines and Eastern Europe. In the mid-90s, GE was the biggest customer of the then-fledgling Indian IT companies. The likes of TCS, Wipro and Infosys scaled on back of GE business that at various times accounted for about a third of their revenues. By the late 90s, GE began the BPO boom in India and other companies followed. Almost every company would visit the GECIS centre in Gurgaon to see what’s possible to outsource in India. You could claim with some confidence that he created the most jobs in the history of independent India. I witnessed this first hand. An entire generation made a good living and gained global experience because of the platform GE created in India. There is a good argument then that he might have actually reduced global inequality because of his actions. GE was a global enterprise. Why should only American workers and equality in American society matter in judging his legacy?Lastly, it is easy to diss Friedman and his famous paper on maximising shareholder value without understanding him fully. Friedman didn’t advocate some kind of cut-throat capitalism where nothing else except profits mattered. He was a better thinker than that. I wrote about this a couple of years ago on the 50th anniversary of that Friedman paper and Raghuram Rajan’s assessment of it:Over the years it has been attacked and its central message discredited in the light of the global financial crisis. Even businesses are reluctant these days to invoke shareholder value maximisation as their goal. There have been calls for societal value maximisation, stakeholder wealth creation and conscious capitalism to replace the Friedman doctrine. All good intentions aside, nothing has truly replaced it in how businesses operate. What explains its enduring appeal? Three reasons:A simple and measurable metric: The shareholder value maximisation goal is easy to set and monitor. It helps that there is a common understanding of the metric. The alternatives are amorphous. It is difficult to understand what does maximising societal value entail, for instance. Who will define what society wants? Are societal objectives of India and the US similar?Rewarding the risk-takers: The shareholders invest risk capital in an enterprise. This willingness to take risks is what leads entrepreneurs to build new products, satisfy the consumers and create new jobs. The shareholders deserve the pursuit of maximum return by the firms for this risk they undertake. It is up to them what they do with these returns. They can invest it in newer enterprises or use it to improve the society as they deem fit. The management or anyone else should have no claim on how to invest the returns that belong to the shareholders.Shareholders are the residual claimants: Everyone who contributes to the value creation of an enterprise – the employees, the management and the customers – get their fixed claim on the value through compensation for their efforts, stock options and the value derived from the products or services offered by the enterprise. Only when these fixed claimants are served well, the value for the residual claimant (the shareholder) is maximised. So, the pursuit of shareholder value will by itself serve the other stakeholders well.Any kind of over-indexing on input metrics (like environment or society) instead of a residual metric like shareholder value runs the risk of the measure becoming a target and ceasing to be a good measure (Goodhart’s Law). The recent events around ESG investing and greenwashing are examples of this. See the Deutsche Bank story on this. More will follow.And to quote Friedman from his original article:“But the doctrine of “social responsibility” taken seriously would extend the scope of the political mechanism to every human activity. It does not differ in philosophy from the most explicitly collectivist doctrine. It differs only by professing to believe that collectivist ends can be attained without collectivist means. That is why, in my book “Capitalism and Freedom,” I have called it a “fundamentally subversive doctrine” in a free society, and have said that in such a society, there is one and only one social responsibility of business—to use its resources and engage in activities designed to increase its profits so long as it stays within the rules of the game, which is to say, engages in open and free competition without deception fraud.”   There is always a desire to ‘manage’ the economic system in a way that it allocates resources and rewards most efficiently. As we have seen over a few centuries now, this is a noble but flawed pursuit. It generates worse outcomes than a system that builds itself on fundamentals of human enterprise, behaviour and its response to incentives. There are many economic concepts that sound evil or counter-intuitive: efficient market mechanism, free trade, comparative advantage or Ricardian equivalence. But they work. There are reasons for market failures and there are extended periods of time when these failures are allowed to persist. But the beauty of spontaneous order is that the correction to its excesses is also built in. The correction is the time to learn from past mistakes and improve it. Not to call for discarding the system itself in favour of some kind of ‘planned design’. Welch was a remarkable manager – both a product of his times and someone who shaped his time. He pushed the boundaries in ways good and bad. That which was bad is already interred with his bones. The good must survive. India Policy Watch: Missing Pieces in the Jigsaw PuzzleInsights on burning policy issues in India— Pranay KotasthaneA popular way to think about strengthening the Indian Republic is to ponder on improving its institutions. However, this route often ends up in mere despondence over our many underperforming institutions. While confronting these demons is an absolute necessity, here’s another way to think about this issue: what are the meta-institutions that the Indian Republic is missing altogether?We aren’t talking here about institutions that don’t work, but institutions that don’t exist at all. And I’m not talking about the likes of a new sectoral regulator for cryptocurrencies, but about more important institutions, ones that could improve decision-making in governments across spheres.I don’t have a comprehensive list yet. However, there are at least three that I’ve heard many experts talk about.1. Parliament’s own think tankOf all the roles parliamentarians end up donning, our current structure equips them the least for the very function they exist: making well-designed laws in their constituents' interests. India’s MPs are not assigned any research budget or research personnel. Combine this congenital defect with the curse of the anti-defection law, and you get a structure that’s subservient to political party interests. Of course, some MPs do stand out despite these constraints, but it does appear that the odds are heavily stacked against them.Thankfully, a solution has emerged from civil society to fill this gaping hole: PRS Legislative Research — a 17-year old non-profit organisation that aims to provide independent and non-partisan research to the parliamentarians.However, just one such institution is not sufficient for an India-scale entity. What we need, in addition, is another much bigger research think tank of the Parliament, that’s paid from the Consolidated Fund of India and has researchers who develop deep expertise in specific areas over the years. Consider, for instance, the Congressional Research Service in the US. This federally-funded agency has over 600 employees who are specialists in a variety of policy domains.As the size of the Parliament increases after delimitation, and as policy issues keep getting more specialised, it’s imperative for India to invest in this missing institution.2. An independent fiscal councilThis institutional gap has been highlighted by the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Finance Commissions. While India has an institution (the Comptroller and Accountant General) to audit policies that are already in action, there is no institution that makes an independent financial evaluation of government policies before they receive the final approval.The result is that tall promises of handouts in electoral manifestos of parties often become government policies swiftly, without any regard to the fiscal sustainability or opportunity cost assessments. A recent example is the One Rank One Pension (OROP) scheme which was implemented in 2015 after appearing in the 2014 election manifestos of both the major national parties.An independent fiscal council then is an institution that is supposed to do three things. One, evaluate the quality of budget forecasts given how there is a wide gap between budgeted estimates and actual expenditures. Two, develop cost estimates of budgetary proposals ex-ante. Ang three, monitor if fiscal rules are being adhered to.Dr Govinda Rao writes in The Hindu that the global experience with such institutions has been largely positive:A study by the IMF (“The Functions and Impact of Fiscal Councils”, July 2013), documents that the existence of IFIs is associated with stronger primary balances; countries with IFIs tend to have more accurate macroeconomic and budgetary forecasts; IFIs are likely to raise public awareness and raise the level of public debate on fiscal policy. Case studies in Belgium, Chile and the United Kingdom show that IFIs have significantly contributed to improved fiscal performances.In Belgium, the government is legally required to adopt the macroeconomic forecasts of the Federal Planning Bureau and this has significantly helped to reduce bias in these estimates. In Chile, the existence of two independent bodies on Trend GDP and Reference Copper Price has greatly helped to improve Budget forecasts. In the U.K., the Office for Budget Responsibility has been important in restoring fiscal sustainability. Cross-country evidence shows that fiscal councils exert a strong influence on fiscal performances, particularly when they have formal guarantees of independence.Clearly a meta-institution we are missing.3. An institution for vertical and horizontal bargainingThis idea again comes from Dr Govinda Rao. He writes in his recent book Studies of Indian Public Finance that India lacks an institution that can act as a credible umpire between various states, and between the states as a whole on one side and the union government on the other. The National Development Council created for this purpose is defunct, the Inter-State Council is a part of the union government, the Rajya Sabha is no longer the council of states in reality, and finance commissions are dissolved after making their recommendations. The result is that there is no institution that can truly champion cooperative federalism. The GST Council perhaps performs acts as a bargaining and negotiation platform in the limited area of indirect taxation. To manage India’s heterogeneity, a meta-institution that is dedicated to horizontal and vertical balance is imperative.Another big lesson here is that the view that India’s government is oversized is inaccurate. The Indian State is quite anaemic when it comes to staffing for its core functions. We need more institutions, not fewer.What are some more missing meta-institutions in the Indian Republic? Leave a comment.India Policy Watch: The Paradiplomacy OpportunityInsights on burning policy issues in India— Pranay KotasthaneNote these two developments over the last few weeks: Tamil Nadu was first off the blocks to send a relief consignment to the crisis-stricken Sri Lanka. And as many as three Chief Ministers—besides the sons of two other CMs—made their presence felt at the World Economic Forum in Davos.Moreover, chief ministerial visits to business capitals of the world are now commonplace. Virtually every Indian state now has its own global investor summit. And yes, two states (Punjab and Kerala) already have departments for non-resident Indians.Put all these developments together and it becomes clear that Indian states are also geopolitical and geoeconomic entities. In the past, I’ve written how Australia gets around its low diplomatic corps strength by allowing its states to have their own trade and investment offices in other countries. India too should take this path, and encourage state governments to have permanent trade and investment desks in important business centres of the world.This view is not a popular one. The policy orthodoxy believes that since foreign affairs is under the Union List of the Seventh Schedule in the constitution, states have no role to play. Besides, state governments having their own foreign policy is at odds with the popular “one nation, one X” idea.But in my view, economic diplomacy by Indian states can be beneficial to all relevant stakeholders. It is in the states’ interest because they understand their comparative advantages, needs and challenges far better than the union government. Thus, they can choose to invest in external economic relations that are suited to their conditions.Economic paradiplomacy can also benefit the investors as they get to directly engage with the entity that controls crucial variables for running businesses, such as land, labour, electricity, and law and order.And finally, this strategy can benefit the union government as well. It frees up the already strained capacity of the external affairs and commerce ministries for broader issues. The role of states in the India-Israel relationship demonstrates that there is also a political utility:“Full diplomatic ties were established between India and Israel in 1992. Even after this move, collaboration with Israel was seen as a hot potato issue in India. The domestic implications of taking sides in what was essentially a religious conflict was a significant impediment to the ties taking off. A few Members of Parliament criticised this step on humanitarian grounds, arguing that New Delhi should have waited until an independent Palestinian state came into being. Some members of the ruling Indian National Congress feared that this step would be detrimental to their electoral appeal to the Indian Muslim community. The Babri Masjid riots further thickened the plot and the Indian government slowed down the pace of the partnership.It was under these circumstances that the Indian states were allowed to expand Indian collaboration with Israel. Traditionally, Indian states were kept out of India’s foreign policy debates. Even the Constitution assigned all matters of legislation related to foreign policy exclusively to the Union government. Consequently, the proliferation of collaboration between Indian states with Israel was a bold and unique experiment by the PV Narasimha Rao government. While this allowed relations to prosper, it also avoided the politico-religious undertones that would have been hard to suppress had this engagement been anchored by the Union government alone.”And so, economic diplomacy by the states is a win-win-win. For an India with global interests, its states have to come to the party. Should they be invited?HomeWorkReading and listening recommendations on public policy matters[Book] Dr Govinda Rao’s Studies in Indian Public Finance is a must-read for policy enthusiasts. I really hope OUP prices it such that the common Public can Finance the book purchase. Nevertheless, the book links to some classics in public finance. Here’s the compilation: Public Principles of Public Debt by James Buchanan, Public Finance and Public Choice: Two Contrasting Visions of the State by James Buchanan and Richard Musgrave, The Logic of Collective Action: Public Goods and the Theory of Groups by Mancur Olson, Public Finance in Theory and Practice by Richard and Peggy Musgrave, The Power to Tax: Analytic Foundations of a Fiscal Constitution by Brennan and Buchanan, The Calculus of Consent by James Buchanan, The Road to Serfdom by Hayek, and Democracy, Dictatorship, and Development by Mancur Olson.[Prediction Market] We’ve written previously about the utility of prediction markets in foreign policy. Check out this US-government project that is explicitly meant to ‘build a collective foresight capability that can provide U.S. Government policymakers with an accurate and nuanced rendering of the future’.[Report] Putting the Periphery at the Center by Happymon Jacob makes some excellent recommendations on Indian Paradiplomacy. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit publicpolicy.substack.com

"Sometimes police action during riots is cramped because of the complicity of people who are ruling or those who want to rule - that is the politicians. They would like the situation to develop in a certain manner so it is not unusual to find politicians playing a very dirty game" - Aloke Lal, author of 'Murder in the Bylanes', a memoir of his stint as Deputy Inspector General, Kanpur, in the aftermath of the Babri Masjid demolition when it was one of the most volatile cities in north India, talks to Hindustan Times' Manjula Narayan on the Books & Authors podcast

Nearly three decades after the 1992 Babri Masjid demolition, journalist and author Nilanjan Mukhopadhay explains how the event shaped the BJP's politics and why the building of the Ram temple won't alter its course.

Sadhguru compares the legacy of Rama and Babur, and explains what India needs to do to move beyond the conflict generated by the Ram Mandir & Babri Masjid issue.Editor's Note: Connect with Sadhguru! Download the Sadhguru App and get access to Sadhguru's articles, videos, daily quotes, program info and much more. Available on Android and iOS. Conscious Planet: https://www.consciousplanet.org Sadhguru App (Download): http://onelink.to/sadhguru__appOfficial Sadhguru Website: http://isha.sadhguru.orgSadhguru Exclusive: https://isha.sadhguru.org/in/en/sadhguru-exclusiveSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

#SeemaChishti, former #BBC broadcaster and #IndianExpress journalist, who was an eye witness to the demolition of the #BabriMasjid in #Ayodhya in 1992, on what it took to cover the story before the days of satellite TV and the internet---and how the event changed India's course.