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Sunday View: The Best Weekend Opinion Reads, Curated Just For You

Catch the best op-eds across the Sunday morning newspapers, curated just for you.

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Out Of My Mind: Moon Struck, And More Of It

The launch of Chandrayaan 2 marked a historic milestone for India as we entered a club of elite space powers. In his column for The Indian Express this week, Lord Meghnad Desai traces the history of India’s tryst with space with a special look at scientist Vikram Sarabhai’s contributions.

Nehru wanted to industrialise India but without the help of private business. As he said to J R D Tata, he thought profit was a dirty word. Business people were shunned. The government took the view that profits of private business were due to monopoly and restrictive practices. In Japan and South Korea, business and government were partners to make the country prosperous. It was a very costly ideological stance which kept India poor for longer than necessary.The exception was in science and technology. It was the genius of Vikram Sarabhai which launched India on the fast track, which has brought us Chandrayaan.Sarabhai came, of course, from one of the top industrialist families. Amba Lal Sarabhai and his sister Anasuya had been captivated by Gandhiji. Vikram was not an industrialist but a scientist. He saw that India could leapfrog by using the latest technology of television and of space rocketry.  
Lord Meghnad Desai in The Indian Express
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Sheila Showed Us How The ‘Khan Market Gang’ Made Modern India

Former Chief Minister of Delhi and veteran Congress leader Sheila Dikshit passed away in Delhi earlier this week. In her column for The Times Of India, journalist Sagarika Ghose explores the legacy Dikshit left behind as Delhi Chief Minister. Ghose extrapolate s how Dikshit and her likes were the earliest members of today’s ‘Khan Market Gang’.

Her point? The Khan Market Gang, in fact, has a lot to offer to the country.

Sheila Dikshit was a distinctive figure in the group who the saffron dispensation today mocks as the ‘Khan Market gang’. Cut from the Nehruvian cloth, a self-declared admirer of Panditji, she was often spotted in printed handloom saris browsing books at Bahrisons, attending book launches at the IIC or striding in Lodhi Gardens. Yet it was she, westernised and belonging to a wellregarded family, who not only built a modern and dazzling Delhi, but worked to build bridges between Lutyensland and real India.It’s not just Dikshit. She achieved in Delhi what many others like her had achieved across the country. In fact, let’s face it, the much vilified ‘Khan Market gang’ built modern India.  
Sagarika Ghose in The Times Of India

Fifth Column: Bad Tidings From Mumbai

One of the most talked-about aspects in this year’s Budget was Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman declaring a higher surcharge rate on income tax for the ‘super-rich’. The high taxation will affect less than 5,000 rich Indians, the Finance Minister had said. In her column for The Indian Express, Tavleen Singh looks at this specific aspect of the Budget and wonders if this will lead to a flight of capital from the country.

Things have been bad for a while. This is why, according to the Global Wealth Migration Review, 5,000 Indian millionaires fled the country last year. But, there was hope that with the massive mandate that Narendra Modi has just won he would come up with a Budget that would revive private investment. It has been dangerously stagnant for so long that the Economic Survey for 2018-19 said that reviving private investment was critical. The Finance Minister said she wanted ‘animal spirits’ to return, but how can this happen with corporate taxes going up to more than 40 per cent? When the Finance Minister says proudly that high taxes will affect less than 5,000 rich Indians, the signal she sends is that rich Indians deserve to be penalised.
Tavleen Singh in The Indian Express
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Across The Aisle: Unconstitutional And Unrealistic

Like Tavleen Singh’s questions on the budget, P. Chidambaram has strong reservations about the Finance Bill which was passed by the Rajya Sabha this week amidst an opposition walkout. In his column for The Indian Express, the former finance minister explains why he thinks the Bill is problematic.

The government is brazen in its defiance of the law. In Justice Puttaswamy, the Supreme Court ruled that a money Bill must comply strictly with the conditions stipulated in Article 110 of the Constitution. Such a Bill shall contain only provisions dealing with taxes and the payments into or out of the Consolidated Fund of India (CFI) or the public account of India. Yet, the government has included in Finance (No.2) Bill, 2019, clauses that are impermissible under Article 110 of the Constitution. Chapter VI of the Bill, that is titled ‘Miscellaneous’, contains clauses that amend several Acts including the Reserve Bank of India Act, the Insurance Act, the Securities Contracts (Regulation) Act, and so on. I counted at least 10 laws that were amended. Neither the Acts concerned nor the amendments had anything to do with the purposes mentioned in Article 110.
P. Chidambaram in The Indian Express
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The Economist’s Wrong. We Aren’t Shocked That Some People Have To Prove Indianness

In his piece for The Times Of India this week, Aakar Patel talks about an editorial in The Economist that criticised the Assam NRC. While in agreement with most things said in the article, Patel disagrees with one - the fact that the article insinuates that Indians, in general, are shocked by what is happening in Assam. They are not, Patel says. And that’s the problem.

I hope not many read The Economist around the world, or at least avoid this story, because it will expose us thoroughly. The Economist makes one error in its report. It claims that “the Indian public has lately been shocked by stories of people, such as a decorated war hero and a 59-year-old widow, who have found themselves jailed for failing to prove their Indian-ness. But the state of Assam is clearly expecting a lot more to come. Ten purpose-built camps are planned.”The error is not in fact, and it is true that we are putting up these concentration camps: it is that the Indian public is shocked by this. Indians are made of stern stuff generally and not troubled by much including mass violence (our propensity is to record street violence on our phone rather than stepping in to stop it). In this instance, it should be admitted that we have been applauding the locking up of people for no crime. The fact that one or two of them come out after a few years because they are a soldier or a Hindu doesn’t mean we have any feelings, much less shock or anguish, for the rest.  
Aakar Patel in The Times Of India
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Is Hindi Going The German Way?

Is Hindi being used the same way German was in World War II? A little extreme, some may say, but is it really?

In his column for The Hindu this week, Ruchir Joshi talks about how a language erodes when it is misused politically, in the context of the HRD ministry’s directive that all official communications will now be made in Hindi.

After World War II, not just Germany and Germans but the German language itself was ostracised for a while. It didn’t matter that this was the beautiful tongue of Goethe and Rilke, of great Jewish writers such as Heine and Kafka. The fact that between 1925 and 1945 the German language had become the vehicle for the most odious ideas of racism and genocide meant that internationally German was labelled as ‘harsh’, ‘guttural’ and ‘ugly’, as a language meant solely for evil military command and to exact the mass massacre of innocents.There is a real danger that this might happen to Hindi or to certain sectors of it in a few years, when it is seen as having been the vehicle for the worst regressive religious majoritarianism, as the alibi language for lies and political lynchings, as the language via which our republic was brought to ruin.
Ruchir Joshi in The Hindu
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To Fight Brexit War, UK Needs A Maverick Like Boris Johnson

There are some who like him, many who dislike him and now, an entire world that can’t ignore him. A lot has been written about the United Kingdom’s newest Prime Minister, Boris Johnson, since he took office. Adding to the list is Swapan Dasgupta in today’s Times Of India who says that in spite of his quirks, Johnson might just be what the UK needs at the moment.

They hate him for his effortless brilliance, for his brinkmanship and, above all, for ability to invariably land on his feet. To have a good word for Boris in some quarters is almost akin to lauding Narendra Modi in the Khan Market bubble.The loathing is confined to a certain ecosystem. Others seem to like what they see. In the leadership election, he won the support of a majority of Conservative Party MPs and, more significantly, the endorsement of nearly two-thirds of the party’s ordinary members. Boris connects — both with the Shires of Middle England and with cosmopolitan London. At a time when both the country and the government are confronted with a profound existential dilemma over fulfilling (or scrapping) the popular mandate of 2016 for Brexit, flamboyant leadership — particularly the ability to take risks — is what Britain needs. It is Britain’s Churchill moment: it can either win the Brexit war in the next 100 days or wilt before Europe’s collective might.  
Swapan Dasgupta in The Times Of India
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Inside Track: ‘Congress’ Heads BJP

The UP BJP’s Congressi links, the Congress’ Haryana problem, former Prime Minister Chandra Shekhar’s reservations on Rajeev Gandhi’s samadhi, a vegetarian Kumaraswamy eating biriyani before the Karnataka trust vote, Shatrughan Sinha not showing his face in Delhi till earlier this month at Yashwant Sinha’s book launch; catch up on all the political gossip of the week in Coomi Kapoor’s column for The Indian Express.

During the discussions before the trust vote in the Karnataka Assembly, someone mentioned that former CM H D Kumaraswamy was seen eating biryani at a particular spot. Kumaraswamy countered that this was impossible since he had turned vegetarian a few years ago, to which Speaker K R Ramesh Kumar responded that in his case it worked the opposite way — that he started out as a vegetarian and ended up eating non- vegetarian food.
Coomi Kapoor in The Indian Express
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The New Indian Fan And Why He Was Angry After The Final

The Men’s Cricket World Cup is over.

Well, at least the matches are.

The discussion over the epic World Cup final, though, is one that our generation will continue to have with our grandchildren. Which bring us to the question- why are Indians so invested in the World Cup results when our team wasn’t even in the final? Suresh Menon discusses just that in his piece for The Hindu.

One Indian fan told me, “I didn’t mind that India lost in the semifinal. It gave us a chance to watch the greatest one-day international ever.” He was the exception, as the majority wanted to do something about that final — from a signature campaign asking the International Cricket Council to alter its playing conditions and letting the teams share the trophy to sacking various officials.Everybody had an opinion, expressed more forcefully and with greater concern than anything articulated on issues such as the country’s water shortage, or fudging in the national budget, which should affect us deeply. An umpiring decision made under pressure in a far away land got even the silent majority raising fists in anger.  
Suresh Menon in The Hindu

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