1 As India’s Modi nears a year, reform doubts grow
(Khaleej Times) Narendra Modi marks the
first anniversary of his landslide election win in a bullish mood about his
mission to transform India into a great power, despite doubts about the
delivery of economic reforms. A year on from his victory, the prime minister’s
domestic opponents are in disarray while the one-time pariah has won the
respect of international peers.
But while the economy is purring along, siren voices
say the delay in implementing key reforms points to trouble ahead while
murmurings about his intolerance of dissent grow louder. Hartosh Singh Bal,
political editor of current affairs magazine Caravan, told AFP “the mood
certainly remains upbeat on the economy”. But he added: “We’ve heard slogans...
we have yet to see how that will translate on the ground.”
After winning the first outright majority by any
leader in three decades on May 16, 2014, Modi vowed “to make the 21st century
India’s century” and turn it into a driver of the global economy. Figures show
India’s economy growing faster than China’s with the IMF predicting expansion
of 7.5 per cent this year. Even if smaller firms are more circumspect, big
business has glowed over Modi’s pledges to slash bureaucracy, streamline the
tax regime and make it easier to acquire farm land.
Sceptics, however, say the growth rate and a fall in
inflation owe more to a recalculation of data and a fall in oil prices than
government policy. They also point out that the land bill and a national goods
and service tax aimed at unifying myriad levies are struggling to get through
parliament.
Few would accuse the prime minister of lacking
energy in his first year. Tales abound of civil servants, fearful of getting on
Modi’s wrong side, sleeping overnight in their offices and working weekends. “The
nation’s mood and confidence has been restored,” said Mukhtar Abbas Naqvi, a
long-time confidant who is now a minister.
2 Early men and women ‘were equal’ (Hannah Devlin in
The Guardian) Our prehistoric forebears are often portrayed as spear-wielding
savages, but the earliest human societies are likely to have been founded on
enlightened egalitarian principles, according to scientists.
A study has shown that in contemporary
hunter-gatherer tribes, men and women tend to have equal influence on where
their group lives and who they live with. The findings challenge the idea that
sexual equality is a recent invention, suggesting that it has been the norm for
humans for most of our evolutionary history.
Mark Dyble, an anthropologist who led the study at
University College London, said: “There is still this wider perception that
hunter-gatherers are more macho or male-dominated. We’d argue it was only with
the emergence of agriculture, when people could start to accumulate resources,
that inequality emerged.”
The authors argue that sexual equality may have
proved an evolutionary advantage for early human societies, as it would have
fostered wider-ranging social networks and closer cooperation between unrelated
individuals. “It gives you a far more expansive social network with a wider
choice of mates, so inbreeding would be less of an issue,” said Dyble. “And you
come into contact with more people and you can share innovations, which is
something that humans do par excellence.”
Dyble said that egalitarianism may even have been
one of the important factors that distinguished our ancestors from our primate
cousins. “Chimpanzees live in quite aggressive, male-dominated societies with
clear hierarchies,” he said. “As a result, they just don’t see enough adults in
their lifetime for technologies to be sustained.”
3 Myanmar and the Rohingya crisis (BBC) The plight
of several thousand Myanmar migrants who are believed to be stranded off the
coasts of Thailand and Malaysia with dwindling supplies of food and water has
caused international concern. Indonesia, Malaysia and Thailand have been
turning away migrant boats mostly carrying members of the minority Muslim
Rohingya community.
The migrants say that they cannot go back to
Myanmar, also known as Burma, because they are not recognised as citizens of
the country and are regularly persecuted. Why has this crisis blown up? "There
is only one reason," Bangkok-based Rohingya expert Chris Lewa said.
"Muslims in Burma's in westernmost state of Rakhine face such extreme
oppression that they feel they have no option but to leave - in many cases by
any means necessary."
The discrimination goes back to Burma's independence
from Britain, but is especially pervasive in Rakhine where about one million
Rohingyas say they have faced intense hostility from the Buddhist majority. They
say that they are victims of an official policy of segregation which has forced
them to the margins of an already poor region.
Successive Myanmar governments - including the more
reform-minded ones of recent years - argue that Rohingyas are not a genuine
ethnic group and in reality are Bengali migrants who are a divisive leftover
from colonial times. In the last three years, more than 120,000 Rohingyas have
boarded ships to flee to other countries, according to the UN refugee agency. In
Myanmar, they are subjected to forced labour, have no land rights, and are
heavily restricted.
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