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

We sifted through the papers to find the best opinion reads so you wouldn't have to.

Magic (Black) With Numbers

P Chidambaram, in his column for The Indian Express, points at the discrepancy between the capital expenditure estimates presented in the Union Budget and the expected numbers for the forthcoming financial year.

Labelling the scheme of capital-expenditure led growth as “hyperbole,” the former Finance Minister denies any and all expectations of private sector investments in the absence of a “lack of demand and incomplete capacity utilisation.”

Chidambram notes:

The Railways invited bids to privatise 151 passenger trains on 109 routes — and got no bids! It was no surprise that against a disinvestment revenue target of Rs 1,75,000 crore in 2021-22 BE, the government hopes to achieve Rs 78,000 crore — that is if the LIC IPO goes through before March 2022! There are good reasons why the private sector is shying away from investment. The foremost reason is lack of demand. The capacity utilisation in many industries is around 50 per cent. Why would any one invest more when there is idle capacity? Besides, the business environment has become more difficult, not easier, and is filled with cronyism, suspicion and fear.

P Chidambaram in The Indian Express

Look Behind The Hijab

Tavleen Singh, in her column for The Indian Express, alleges that the purportedly extremist Islamic organisation Popular Front of India (PFI) has a role in shoring-up the protests in favour of Hijab in Karnataka and other parts of the nation.

Stressing that the “protest is no longer about Muslim girls being denied access to education but Muslim girls becoming unwitting pawns of political forces whose ideology and ideas are the opposite of the ideas that define India in our Constitution,” Singh asks for measures to investigate and defuse the protests at the earliest.

Tavleen Singh writes:

When the Prophet of Islam urged women to dress modestly, he may not have realised that what modesty meant exactly would be determined by men. This is what has happened, and there is no point in pretending that wearing a hijab is a matter of choice. It is not. This is why the sight of young women demanding the ‘right’ to wear a hijab is distressing and to see liberal ladies with powerful voices back them up even more so. Islam has given the world some fine ideas about equality and brotherhood, but the treatment of women is not one of them. Since India is not an Islamic country, Muslim women should be encouraged to rid themselves of their robes and headgear instead of being encouraged to fight for their ‘right’ to wear a hijab.

Tavleen Singh in The Indian Express

Crime and Replenishment

Upala Sen, in her piece for The Telegraph, hints at a correlation between the proliferation of cybercrime post the pandemic and the dwindling economy, where both incomes and jobs have dried up.

“Through the pandemic and the increased dependence on the Internet,” Sen underlines, “online crimes have increased. The Norton Cyber Safety Insights report, 2021, has to say that 59 per cent of adult Indians have been victims of cybercrime in 2020.”

Sen contends:

Historian and cultural theorist Sumanta Banerjee has written about crime in colonial Calcutta...And while stating that the principal item of trade of British merchants in the 18th century was textiles, Banerjee cites the theory that these robbers were most likely the outraged traditional weavers of Bengal. Not all dacoity has to do with need. Many are about greed, some are about artistry. Police have to say that our OTP man from North 24-Parganas worked as a sales manager at a telecom company. He lost his job during the pandemic. To unsee the economy story and focus on the crime would be a shame and greater crime.

Upala Sen in The Telegraph

In A Double Bind, Facing Conservatism And Politics

In her article for The Hindu, Azania Imtiaz Khatri-Patel talks about how Muslim women in India today are subject to the double whammy of regressive religious practices and the missing political agency.

Khatri-Patel claims that the percentage of Muslim women in public arenas remains disproportionately low till day, and that the Hijab row in Karnataka is the latest in the attempt “to propagate a malicious narrative that on the one hand pretends to save Muslim women and on the other denies them the tools to craft their own narrative.”

She notes:

The lack of a middle path here means that Muslim women are forced to occupy spaces on two ends of the spectrum — one that requires a compromise of political agency and the second that requires accepting an exclusion from one’s own community. This sorry state of affairs bodes poorly for Indian democracy and its political axis as a whole. In a country with as many intersecting identities as ours, no issues or circumstances exist in silos. To be included is an obligation erga omnes (an obligation to all), and damage to it is erosive to a secular democracy.

Azania Imtiaz Khatri-Patel in The Hindu

Game, Set, Match

Sania Mirza’s fearlessness and courage, both on and off the court, prove how in order to become “a successful sportsperson, it’s not necessary to bury one’s conscience,” Devdan Mitra emphasises in his article for The Telegraph.

He traces Mirza’s journey against a series of odds, noting how she made a name for herself in a sport that was traditionally a male bastion, while simultaneously defending the right to choice of female sportspersons.

Mitra notes:

Then a couple of months away from her nineteenth birthday, Sania was en route to Calcutta for a tennis meet (Sunfeast Open) in September 2005 when news broke that a little-known group of radical clerics had threatened to stop her from playing unless she traded her ‘indecent’ clothes — read T-shirt and skirt — on the tennis court for long tunics and headscarves, like many Muslim women athletes wear. A security blanket was thrown around Sania and the tournament passed without a hitch, but for the first time, Sania decided to make a statement of choice — she played in shorts.

Devdan Mitra in The Telegraph

Feminism, That Dare Not Speak Its Name

In her article for The Indian Express, author Manjula Lal reflects on the relevance of the feminist ideals in the household, drawing from her personal experiences during and prior to the lockdown.

Lal attempts to decode the many puzzling definitions of feminism, while also inscribing the challenges in exercising them in the face of practicality.

She writes:

One thing expected of feminists is that they will teach their boys to treat girls as equals. Any illusions I might have had on this front crumbled when my son said soon after his marriage, blatantly, “Cooking is the girl’s job.” His wife succumbed, just as I had done, for perhaps the same reasons. It’s difficult to stand on principle when marital bliss is at stake. Friends to whom this family secret is revealed are right to ask, “Didn’t you teach your son anything?”

Manjula Lal in The Indian Express

Lal concludes by pinning the necessity of feminism to become a part of the school agenda for it to be recognised behind closed doors. “Harried housewives and working women cannot set a feminist agenda when the foundation is chauvinistic,” she contends.

Stifling The States

Ramachandra Guha, in his commentary on the status-quo of the federal structure of the Indian Union in The Telegraph, points how “with the Bharatiya Janata Party achieving a majority in the general elections of 2014 and 2019, Indian federalism has, once again, come under threat.”

Guha enlists and details multiple reasons for the same, from unilateral decision making to promotion of the ‘personality-cult’ of the Prime Minister.

Guha remarks,

Along with the lockdown, the National Disaster Management Act was invoked, again without any consultation with the states. Almost two years later, and despite all the boasts about the government’s conquest of the virus, the Act remains in place. Since it gives the Centre extraordinary powers to monitor the movement of people and goods, the Act may be in place for some time yet. Designed to handle specific disasters in a time-bound fashion, the NDMA has become in this government’s hands merely another tool to increase its powers over the states.

Ramachandra Guha in The Telegraph

Inside Track: Shah Takes Charge

Coomi Kapoor, in her column Inside Track for The Indian Express, puts into perspective the steering of Bharatiya Janta Party’s (BJP) election campaign in Uttar Pradesh (UP) by Amit Shah, pointing how Shah foresaw the challenges that lay for the party and took charge accordingly.

She also discusses the possibilities for the Trinamool Congress (TMC) and the tensions within the BJP state unit in Goa, along with a reading of the body-language of the political leaders in Punjab.

Coomi Kapoor notes:

Amit Shah realised early on that the real hurdle for the BJP in the Uttar Pradesh polls was not so much the farmer vote in western UP but that Samajwadi Party chief Akhilesh Yadav would mobilise his campaign on a backward vs forward projector. He knew that Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath’s Thakur caste was a disadvantage with some sections. It was Narendra Modi, not Shah, who decided that Adityanath be declared the BJP’s CM candidate. By early January, after the exit of Swami Prasad Maurya and a few other OBC MLAs dealt a blow, Shah stepped in to take complete charge of the UP campaign.

Coomi Kapoor in The Indian Express

A Brief History Of Caste In India And The British Role

Nanditha Krishna, in her opinion piece for The New Indian Express chalks an account of the practice of caste system during the British rule, and its role in segregating society into different groups.

Krishna argues that “the definitions of religion and caste as we know them now were developed during the British period, in the 19th century,” questioning why has the country been unable to outgrow them in the past 75 years.

She observes:

The construction of social identities was done to serve the British government’s desire to create a single Hindu identity with a common law for easy governance. Thus a complex, diverse and flexible society was reduced to a single identity, separated by “castes”, a part of the British government’s divide-and-rule policy. Caste has permeated into Islam and Christianity. I once went to the funeral of a Christian friend in a Chennai church. The priest came and asked me my caste. I said that I was not a Christian but would like to attend the funeral service. He said that I must sit in the pew meant for my caste. What does my caste have to do with death and mourning?

Nandhita Krishna in The New Indian Express

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