Political Diary
New Delhi, 29 December 2020
2020: Year The
World Shut Down
TOUGH, BUMPY
ROAD AHEAD
By Poonam I
Kaushish
How does one
begin an epitaph of the year gone by? Uncork the champagne and roll out the
drums? By welcoming 2021 on the wings of new hopes, dreams and promises? Or
twelve months of steady downhill with no barrier to stop the slide? Clearly, 2020 will go down in history as a tumultuous
year. Yet, hope smiles from the threshold of the year gone by, whispering, it
will be happier. Will it?
We live in
unprecedented times as people globally try to make sense of how Covid 19 has shut
down and changed the world like no other. It has held humankind hostage in its
vicious tentacles, made us realize how frail we are, need to change our
lifestyles and habits when faced with stark and brutal statistics: Those dead from
this pandemic is creeping towards the two million mark and has nations fighting the crisis on a war footing.
Countries worldwide
enter lockdown again with bustling cities eerily quiet as people adapt to new
social distancing norms. The closure of everything: all non-essential
businesses, education institutions barring basic essentials and words like lockdown,
WFM (work from home), SOP (standard operating procedure), PPE (personal
protective equipment), zoom meetings et al are the novelle idiom.
Certainly, progress
has been made in record time by scientists developing new effective vaccines
against Covid 19 and today people in developed countries are being inoculated
even as the virus constantly mutates resulting in more infections and deaths. A
race against time, on who emerges victorious as countries work overtime to stop
the spread by rolling out more vaccines.
Indians love
protest wherein the year began and ended with the new and old grammar of
sit-in. From demonstrations over the
Citizenship Amendment Act, National Register of Citizens, National Population
Register metamorphed into larger than life two month long ‘sit-in’ at
Union Capital’s Shaheen Bagh by Muslims
caused massive inconvenience to the public with traffic jams, shut local shops,
interspersed with violence being the new black in UP, West Bengal, Bihar,
Karnataka, Andhra, Tamil Nadu and Kerala
by ‘desh bhakts-turned-desh
drohis.
Culminating in a
caravan of thousands
of tractors, trucks and trolleys of farmers digging-in ready to survive the
chill of winter out in the open encircling the Union Capital for over three
weeks till the Government repeals the three contentious farm laws. Both operating
across a wide chasm of belief and trust. The
protesting farmers are apprehensive that they will no longer get paid
the Minimum Support Price, Government will scrap
mandis, commission agents will not get their commission thereby leaving them at the mercy of big corporates and
States tax.
Victorious
warriors win first and then go to war, while defeated warriors go to war first
and then seek to win said Sun Tzu in The Art of War. In the more than
three-week-old one-upmanship grudge match between the Government and farmers
the moment to call a truce and explore the possibility of a mutually agreed
package of reforms has arrived as neither side stands to gain from a prolonged
and highly disruptive siege of the Union Capital.
True, farmers may
have genuine grouses and till date the Government has shown good faith by holding six rounds of
talks with 40 farmer union leaders totaling 20 hours of negotiations offering many
amendments. Prime
Minister Modi has again taken the initiative and asked farmers to come for
talks as the Government is firm in wanting to find a “logical solution”. In a
democracy, laws may be flawed as the Government is not God but to continue an andolan is not the way to make the Government
see reason. The ball was now in the farmers' court.
Alas, the pandemic
exposed India’s economic distress. It posted its steepest ever economic growth
slump to register a sharp quarterly growth slump of 15-25%, just years after it earned the tag of the fastest-growing
economy in the world. Even if pent-up demand leads to a recovery after the
pandemic eases, deep structural issues like high public debt are expected to
constrain India's GDP growth for years to come.
The country is in the throes of a economic divide, bottomless
potholes and subterranean fissures in the rotting fabric of our cities, the Central and State Governments’ apathy and
incompetence towards its 80% workforce. Millions have
lost their jobs, many small and medium-sized companies went bankrupt add
to this hunger, desolation and depression, the perfect recipe for disaster.
Worse is the situation on the country’s borders. The brutal
assault in
Galwan Valley, Pangong Tso Lake,
Trig Heights, Burtse and Doletango area by China in June has increased unease as India faces
its biggest confrontation between the two militaries after their 1967 clashes
in Nathu La. It has brought India
and China to the brink of a shooting war. Predictably, both accuse each other of
violations, yet so far avoided situations that could lead to an armed conflict.
Clearly,
even as Beijing wants to create a ‘new normal’ New Delhi’s new assertiveness and
tough responses to Chinese provocations will
need maturity and restraint to ensure that it remains in control of the
Indo-China script. Certainly, the muscle-flexing will continue till trust is
built. In the long-term India-China relations will be determined by India’s
strategic goals and objectives vis-à-vis
the evolving regional and global security environment.
When it comes to
women safety nothing seems to have changed. From the 16 December 2012 Nirbhaya
gang-rape case which ‘shocked the conscience of the nation’ and took eight long
years for the culprits to pay for their crime to the Hathras case where a 19 year old Dalit teen was gang raped by four upper caste men, stripped and
strangulated, her spinal cord damaged paralyzing her and tongue cut resulting
in death 29 September nothing seems to have changed.
According to the National
Crimes Records Bureau, 39,000 sexual assaults occur every year, five
rapes occur every minute
and one woman is killed every hour. In
a UN survey India ranked 85 out of 121 countries unsafe for women. Shockingly,
6.26 rapes take place for every 10,000 women. A time to ponder and introspect
--- Balatkar akhir
kab tak?
India is once
again caught up in a battle royale between the Gods, in a new age avatar: Love Jihad (LJ), a convenient political
tool and de rigueur fallaciously wrapped
in development that helped bring the BJP to power at the Centre and several
States and get it Hindu votes.Whereby, ishq-mohabat-shaadi
cutting across caste and religious boundaries inter-meshed with forced
conversions churned the political cauldron resulting in an unholy clash between
the ‘holier than thou’ with five Saffron States: UP, MP, Haryana, Karnataka and
Assam enacting strict law against ‘LJ’.
As the world
enters 2021 with the pandemic still raging the years of innocence are now
irrevocably dead. Covid 19 has exacerbated a number of challenges which have
been building over the decade. The turbulence of 2020 underscores the
transition from adolescence to adulthood. Whereby,
the principles of ‘Jus Ad Bellum’:
right authority, right intention and reasonable hope dictate our responses.
When and how it
will end nobody knows with everyone scared of even fathoming. Of course, our
lives will never be the same again but we need to focus on what we are going to do to make the new
normal a good one. It’s not going to be easy but we have no choice. Perhaps
the existing global order will be able to manage its challenges. Time to get
back to basics and reignite the magic of simplicity and minimalism, become more
humane and see the world through new lens of hope. ---- INFA
(Copyright,
India News and Feature Alliance)
|