The Mystery Behind Claims Of India-China Clash At Naku La, Sikkim

There is a mystery of sorts over the claim that the Indian Army and the Chinese PLA clashed at Naku La in northern Sikkim on 20 January. According to the Indian Army spokesman, there was a “minor faceoff” and the issues were resolved “by local commanders as per established protocols.” India has acknowledged that no weapons were used and that there had been injuries on both sides, but they were “insignificant and minor.”

But the Chinese side has flatly denied anything happened. The Global Times has charged that the news put out about the clash by the Indian media is “fake news.” According to them,“There is no record of this incident in the Chinese People’s Liberation Army (PLA) front line patrol logs.” In Beijing, “wolf warrior” foreign ministry spokesman Zhao LIjian told reporters he had “no information to offer” on reports of clashes at Naku La.

Naku La Incident

The fact that the Naku La incident came even as India and China were to have their 9th round of senior commander-level talks at the Moldo meeting point on the Spanggur lake near Pangong Tso is not without significance.

Whatever the Chinese are doing along the Line of Actual Control that marks the border between the two countries has an aim, and it is unlikely that what happened at Naku La was some kind of an accident, especially since it is happening the second time within eight months.

Last year on 9 May when Indian and PLA troops clashed at Naku La, it was claimed that it was an over-reaction of the PLA to Indian efforts to monitor a PLA mechanised infantry exercise in the Gamba county of Tibet. But the timing of the move, associated as it was with what was happening in eastern Ladakh, was suspect.

However, last week’s clash at Naku La suggests that this is not a normal “faceoff” that used to take place along the LAC. They are part of a new exercise of establishing PLA dominance at the Line of Actual Control.

Yet to Demarcate Border

In Sikkim, there is agreement between India and China on aligning the border, which is essentially the watershed between the waters that flow into the Teesta, and those into the Amo Chu and other rivers in Tibet.

But as of now the border has not actually been demarcated on the ground. As it is, there have been issues in the so-called Finger Area to the east of Naku La. The Chinese have been contesting the boundary in the north-eastern arc of Sikkim, because this is in an area where terrain allows India to deploy armoured units that can threaten the roads connecting Tibet to the Chumbi Valley.

9th Round Of Talks

As for the 9th round of border talks in Moldo between Lt General PGK Menon, the 14 Corps Commander, and Maj Gen Liu Lin, chief of the South Xinjiang Military District, they seem to have gone well. This is evidenced by the fact that the two sides issued a joint statement saying that they had been “positive and constructive”. The statement said that both sides remain committed to meet again and “jointly advance disengagement” among the frontline troops.

The statement said that the two sides would “continue their effective efforts in ensuring the restraint of frontline troops, stabilise and control the situation along the LAC in the western sector of the China-India border….”

According to a report, India continues to press China for a “workable and sequential” roadmap for disengagement and de-escalation at all the points of friction in eastern Ladakh along with setting up a joint verification mechanism. India once again reiterated its demand for the restoration of status quo ante along the LAC in Ladakh.

But, there was little word of any significant outcome. Given the hardening of positions on both sides, none can be expected either. The Chinese have been demanding that disengagement begin from the south bank of Pangong Tso where India occupied the heights on its own side of the LAC last August. But India has been arguing that since the Chinese moves in the north bank to establish a blockade at Finger 4 had occurred earlier, they should be the party to de-escalate first. This would restore the situation prior to that when Indian forces could patrol up to Finger 8. The PLA has also been asking for the conversion of all of the area between Finger 1 and Finger 8 into a “no-patrol” zone.

China’s Sustained Efforts to Populate LAC

Notwithstanding the efforts to maintain deployments using special huts and heating systems, significant activity along the Ladakh part of the LAC will only be possible once the snows begin melting in March or April.

In the meantime, there are reports that the PLA has been digging in along the LAC and enhancing its infrastructure even further, especially all along the LAC in eastern Ladakh. Some of this is in the form of additional housing in the Aksai Chin area, suggesting that the PLA intends to be around for a while.  Similar accretions are occurring at Galwan Valley and the Gogra/Hot Spring area.

Across Tibet, the Chinese are also enhancing their air defence infrastructure by establishing new surface-to-air missile system bases.  This is a stop-gap measure till the upgradation of their own air bases is completed.

Beyond the purely military activity, we are also seeing a sustained Chinese effort to populate their side of the LAC, especially in the east. While the report that the Chinese constructed a village on the Indian side of the LAC in the Migyitun area may not be accurate, it is a fact that along the LAC, the Chinese have been building small townships in the southern part of the Shannan and Nyingchi regions of Tibet bordering India. This is as much part of border management, as an effort to ensure that people do not abandon the border areas which tend to be inhospitable and with few economic prospects.

The challenge for India is to counter this effort and given the demands of manning the LAC in the same manner we do the Line of Control with Pakistan, it is not going to be easy.

The Quint January 26, 2021

https://www.thequint.com/voices/opinion/mystery-behind-claims-of-india-china-clash-at-naku-la-sikkim#read-more

Things fall apart: From JNU to Red Fort, the dangers of abusing processes of criminal law to finish off agitations

In the past year, Delhi has been hit by major riots twice. As James Bond was once told, “once is happenstance, twice is coincidence, third time it’s enemy action.” Many, and some in the government, already believe the enemy action bit. This is evident from the fact that farmer leaders who have been peacefully agitating for four long months have been slapped with criminal cases but those who very visibly carried out the Red Fort rampage on January 26 remain at large.

This is wanton misuse of the law, and part of the continuing trend in the country, unchecked by the judicial authorities, to use draconian laws to rule the country. Agencies like the police, CBI, ED, NIA have developed a Jekyll and Hyde quality. In ordinary circumstances they apply the law fairly, but when “politics” intervenes their approach changes. Now even comment and reportage are being targeted to stifle dissent. Separately, FIRs have been registered against Shashi Tharoor and six prominent journalists including Rajdeep Sardesai, Mrinal Pande and Zafar Agha for misreporting the Red Fort events, inciting violence and spreading communal disharmony.

While the perpetrators of violence in  February 2020 or January 26 should be booked, surely there ought to be some mea culpa on the part of the authorities. We won’t go into the political handling of the issues, but  permitting the tractor march by an emotionally charged group of farmers was always a fraught exercise. There are always agent provocateurs and radicals in the kind of agitations we have witnessed. The IB, which is very good on domestic political intelligence, would have alerted the Delhi authorities of the extremists’ plan, and the Red Fort mob which was not that big could have been handled. What was lacking was good generalship on the part of Delhi police.

This writer has witnessed the functioning of this force for over half a century and can safely say that its management of crowds and situations varies from the over-zealous to the derelict. We are not even recalling the monumental failure of 1984. Take the horrific JNU attack a year ago. A group of marauders rampaged through the peaceful university beating up scores of people, and till now we have no arrests. And everyone knows who the perpetrators are.

Through the decision to target the farmers’ leaders by FIRs the government has once again revealed that it intends to use the process of the criminal law to finish off the agitation. There will be arrests minus bail under UAPA, other states like UP may simply incarcerate people under NSA, cases will drag on.

The Delhi events reveal another more alarming problem: The perception that the legal system is biased against minority communities. In human affairs, we know that perceptions are often more important than the reality. To turn the old phrase around, not only must justice be done, but people must feel that it is being done. Currently many, especially in the Muslim community, feel the law is being used to target them. This could soon spread to other minorities as well. With mainstream media often ignoring such issues, a lot of the amplification of grievances is happening in social media.

Indian laws are as good or as bad as any in the world. The problem is not the laws, but their implementation and enforcement. Responsibility for the proper use of law and due process is spread out between the government, police and judicial system. These demand an attention not only to the letter of the law, but also its spirit.

The rule of law in a democracy rests on the voluntary compliance of citizens. If a section of people begins to think that the law, or its application, fails to give them justice, things begin to fall apart and people begin to use extra-legal methods. Dissent goes underground, where it is preyed upon by extremists. The net loser is the country at large.

The Times of India January 29, 2021

https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/blogs/toi-edit-page/things-fall-apart-from-jnu-to-red-fort-the-dangers-of-abusing-processes-of-criminal-law-to-finish-off-agitations/?

India’s Gains From ‘Vaccine Diplomacy’ – if Any – Will Be Small, Transient and Pyrrhic

New Delhi has launched a virtual global blitz by exporting vaccine candidates made in India, some as a grant, and others commercially. Back home it is being tom-tommed as a major diplomatic coup that will enable New Delhi to make key breakthroughs, especially in its neighbourhood.

How much of an impact will the Indian gesture really make? And is it really the right thing to do? It is difficult to make an assessment, since currently, vaccine diplomacy is in a domestic echo chamber where it’s celebrated as yet another ‘masterstroke’. Actually, the Modi government’s public relations target is really domestic opinion, aimed at garnering credit for the government on account of the vaccine rollout – something that is supposed to make people forget its early and disastrous missteps.

But surely, our neighbours will be appropriately thankful? Don’t hold your breath.

In international relations, gratitude is usually a highly overrated commodity. In the 1950s, the Soviets undertook the largest transfers of capital equipment in history by providing China with the wherewithal to set up entire industries, machinery, aircraft, cars, trucks, precision instruments etc. But by the mid-1960s, the Chinese viewed them as enemies.

Likewise, in the 1960s the United States provided India with massive aid to modernise its education, scientific and technical capacity, food aid and biotechnology for the Green Revolution. But by 1971, India and the US almost came to blows.

Today’s generation of Chinese and Indians would be unfamiliar with those events, despite the sheer scale of the assistance.

By that measure the vaccine thrust is relatively modest—some five million free doses to Bhutan, Maldives, Nepal, Bangladesh, Myanmar and Seychelles. There is another category of exports to Saudi Arabia, South Africa, Brazil and Bolivia, which is that they are strictly commercial.

Brazil’s message comparing the delivery of the vaccine to Hanuman bringing the Sanjivini plant played well in the Indian media, but one wonders whether it was a product of the BJP media cell or its counterpart in Brazil.

The delay in the arrival of the AstraZeneca vaccine candidate – called Covishield in India –irritated Brazil President Jair Bolsonaro, who wants to offset the credit being reaped by his centrist rival, the Sao Paulo governor Joao Doria,  who had promoted the vaccine developed by the Chinese lab Sinovac, along with a local partner, and had already begun vaccination.

Note, the vaccine candidates exported are devised by a partnership between Oxford University and the British-Swedish company AstraZeneca,  and are manufactured in India on contract by Serum Institute of India Ltd.

Oxford’s and AstraZeneca’s researchers published data from phase 3 clinical trials of Covishield in The Lancet, in which they wrote that the data indicated the candidate was safe and efficacious.

It’s not clear whether Indians are also exporting the domestically devised Covaxin: this would be unconscionable considering Bharat Biotech, its maker, is yet to report any data from Covaxin’s phase 3 clinical trials. Incidentally, Bharat Biotech has applied for emergency use approval for Covaxin in the Philippines. In India itself, people have to sign consent forms before getting a shot of this vaccine candidate, since the national drug regulator has approved its rollout in “clinical trial mode”.

Data from phase 1 clinical trials was available from a preprint paper uploaded online earlier, and which The Lancet published after peer review on January 21, 2021. The researchers write in this paper that their study doesn’t say anything about Covaxin’s efficacy. Bharat Biotech and the Indian Council of Medical Research are currently conducting Covaxin’s phase 3 trials. The data from this, involving about 25,000 volunteers, is expected to be available around March 2021.

It is difficult to blame South Block for using COVID-19 to promote its diplomacy. In that sense we are only following China, which, from the outset, used the pandemic – which its own carelessness may have helped spread – for diplomatic purposes. To change the COVID-19 narrative and show itself as a benevolent nation, China sent masks, PPE suits, gloves, testing kits and medical aid, as well as sold ventilators and other health equipment to countries like France, Italy and various Central and East European countries. Chinese foundations like the Alibaba Foundation and the Jack Ma Foundation also provided aid to various European countries.

So far, information on Chinese vaccines has been scarce. Researchers have published some data from phase 1 and 2 trials of the Sinovac vaccine. There has been conflicting information about its efficacy, with researchers in Brazil reporting 50.4% versus those in Turkey claiming 91.25%. Another vaccine candidate by Sinopharm has undergone phase 3 trials and has claimed 78% efficacy, while a study in UAE puts it at 86%. The international medical research community doesn’t yet have fixed numbers to work with.

Several Asian countries like Singapore, Malaysia and the Philippines have signed deals with Sinovac, and in January 2021, Indonesia unrolled its vaccination campaign with this vaccine. Turkey has approved Sinovac for emergency use and the company had deals in Brazil and Chile. The UAE and Bahrain have deals for Sinopharm.

In contrast to China, India doesn’t have an image issue in pursuing COVID-19 diplomacy. But it has another problem: it has few equities to influence neighbourhood opinion, such as loans, grants and military equipment. China is way ahead there. So if New Delhi is riding on the back of a COVID-19 vaccine to gain friends and influence people in the region, we can’t grudge that. You have to work with the instruments you have.

There is, however, one problem. Hundreds of millions of people have yet to be vaccinated. So has the government done the right thing in exporting 5 million doses? Surely those doses could have been used to inoculate vulnerable Indians at a greater speed?

A small group of rich countries, comprising just 16% of the world’s population, have locked up 60% of the global vaccine supply, according to Duke University’s Global Health Institute. Canada has enough to vaccinate its population six times over.

Generosity is fine when you have the wherewithal to be generous. But when your own population is deprived, it is nothing but foolhardiness. We must, of course, understand the commercial compulsions of  Serum Institute, which must deliver on its contract. But it is difficult to celebrate South Block’s vaccine diplomacy, if necessary protection to vulnerable Indians is being delayed – because that delay means so much more illness and death.

The Wire January 24, 2021

https://thewire.in/diplomacy/india-vaccine-exports-diplomacy-brazil-china

The shift to ‘rule by law’

Some years ago, an interesting debate arose over the subject of a plenary session of the Communist Party of China. The issue was whether the theme was the promotion of ‘the rule of law’ or ‘the rule by law’.

‘Rule by law’ is when laws are used as an instrument to establish political and social control over people. Not unusually, it claims that the rights and interests of a larger society, cause or nation are above that of the individual.

A recent trend in India has seen laws and ordinances whose very basis goes against the first tenet of justice — equality of all before the law.

‘Rule by law’ is not concerned about what law is all about — delivery of justice. In 1935, the German Parliament passed the Nuremberg Laws that banned inter-marriage between Jews and Germans, denied them citizenship and eventually led to their massacre. In 1948, the South African government passed laws to segregate housing, public transport and public premises for whites and blacks. Till the mid-20th century, several US states denied blacks the right to vote and enforced racial segregation in housing, public education, urban transport. Everything was legal, but it was horribly unjust.

‘Rule of law’ lies at the very root of democratic society because it upholds individual liberty and rights by ensuring justice, which is fair, transparent, applicable equally to all. In China, where the CPC is supreme and all the courts, the police and prosecutors belong to the party, the only concept that will fly is the ‘rule by law’.

Most laws in India are reasonable, after all who wants to encourage theft, cheating, money laundering, or tax evasion? But it is their application that’s becoming the problem. Various police services, the NIA, ED, and CBI, are meant to effectively apply the law of the land. But they are being used as instruments of political coercion rather than upholding the law. The most recent victims of this are activists and supporters involved in the farmers’ stir who are being hounded by notices of the NIA.

A recent trend in India has seen laws and ordinances whose very basis goes against the first tenet of justice — equality of all before the law. In UP and MP, rules passed through an ordinance are used to harass inter-faith couples. Another law banning cow slaughter has been used to outlaw the eating preferences of a particular set of people.

Parts of the law are now being used to harass a particular community. A comedian is in jail in Madhya Pradesh, despite the lack of evidence of the crime he was accused of. A 19-year-old girl is charged with sedition for shouting ‘Pakistan zindabad’. In Punjab, the police booked several farmers under the IPC’s Section 307 (attempt to murder) for dumping cow dung in front of an ex-minister’s house, though the charge was later dropped. The instances of malicious and trivial prosecution are far too many to recount. Each outdoes the other in its blatant idiocy and malevolence.

One of the big surprises is modern India’s use of the sedition statute used by the British in the mid-19th century to exercise political control. Efforts to do away with the statute in this part of the 21st century have been opposed, most vehemently by the Union Home Ministry, which recently told Parliament that ‘there is no proposal to scrap the sedition law. There is a need to retain the provision to effectively combat anti-national, secessionist and terrorist elements’. Just who is ‘anti-national’ or ‘terrorist’ is something the government often decides without bothering with judicial due process. Data shows very few convictions because it runs four-square against the freedom of expression guaranteed to us in the Constitution. In the name of terrorism, the police has been involved in extra-judicial executions, and in many instances, framing innocent people for terrorist acts.

To deal with this, the government has taken recourse to the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act in 1967 which has been amended several times since to make it increasingly draconian. In other words, as India has grown as a nation, it has become more insecure.

At the heart of the problem is the failure of the judiciary. Where the lower judiciary generally tended to toe the line of the executive earlier, today, the problem goes right up to the top. The result is that the checks that an independent judiciary should have imposed on the misuse of laws are few and far between.

A major failure of the justice system is in allowing the judicial process to be used as punishment by incarcerating people without bail, and putting through lengthy trials. Political accusations about ‘urban Naxals’, ‘jihadis’ and ‘anti-nationals’ are considered by a section of the judiciary that hesitates to intervene in blatant cases of unjust arrest and incarceration.

‘Rule by law’ is an instrument to establish political hegemony. But its overuse is drawing attention both within India and abroad. By using officers of the law for political coercion and insisting on laws that discriminate between Indians, the government is playing with fire.

Citizens look to the legal system as a recourse against arbitrary or illegal actions, particularly of the state. The key to its efficacy is voluntary compliance, but that can only happen when laws and their application are deemed applicable to all.

Though India has had a record of selective enforcement of laws based on the status, caste and gender, people retained their faith in it because there was a slow, but steady improvement. But that process has been cast aside. The law and its officers have become instruments of repression and division, aided by a largely indifferent judiciary.

Tribune January 19, 2021

https://www.tribuneindia.com/news/comment/the-shift-to-rule-by-law-200335

Deepening crisis in US

The political crisis in the US is deepening by the day. On Saturday, in an extraordinary intervention, President Trump was caught on tape trying to bully the Secretary of State of Georgia to ‘find’ enough votes to overturn his defeat in the state. On the same day, Vice President Mike Pence said he “shares the concerns of millions of Americans about voter fraud and irregularities in the last election.”

These actions are incredible because as of now, the electors of various states have certified that Joe Biden is the President-elect. None of the state elections are disputed. Trump’s allies have lost nearly 50 law suits challenging the election results, and he has lost twice in the US Supreme Court. The Trump team may be desperate, but to some ears, this is sounding like an attempted constitutional coup.

Besides election officials in various states, both Republican and Democratic, government agencies, too, have found no problems with the elections. A joint statement issued by the Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency has said the election “was the most secure in American history.” On December 1, Attorney General William Barr noted that the Department of Justice “has not seen fraud on a scale that could have affected a different outcome in the election.” He paid the price for this in being forced out of office.

On January 6, Pence is to preside over what is a ceremonial event to declare the results. But he has indicated he will allow a group of a dozen or so Republican Senators and members of the lower House of Representatives to challenge Biden’s election. The move is not likely to succeed, but will certainly add to the poison already coursing through the American political system.

The actual problem is deeper and more insidious. The notion of electoral fraud has now gripped the minds of many Americans and the deceitful claims made by Trump have taken on a life of their own. An Economist-YouGov poll in the third week of December found that as many as 60 per cent of the respondents believe that there was enough fraud in the election process to change the outcome of the election. In this sample, 86 per cent Republicans believed this to be the fact. Yet, not an iota of evidence has surfaced to prove any fraud.

The developments in the US have wider implications. Till now, the US was the leader among democracies, often holding other countries to account for their flawed elections and now a majority of Americans believe that the US elections themselves are flawed.

Legitimacy of the election process has a direct correlation to the legitimacy of the government elected. People accept that winners of a fair election have the legal right to govern. The moment there are question marks over the election, not only is the government weakened, but also the very system it runs.

The problem seems to stem from the fact that the Republican Party has become a minority party, with its adherents resorting to increasingly undemocratic means to retain their hold on power. The root of problem is that the institutions and processes of US political system are outdated. The biggest example is the electoral college which is essentially a ‘winner-take-all’ system which creates an anomaly, under which Republican Presidents like George W Bush (in 2000) and Trump in 2016, lost the popular vote, but were elected by the electoral college. Then, there is the problem of the conduct of elections which varies from state to state and in some states there have been restrictions on voting, the discarding of legitimate ballots, mostly aimed at denying the minorities their right to vote.

Democracy is not just about the rule that the majority wins and the minority loses. It is also about norms, process and procedure. What Trump and his acolytes are doing is to upset the well-established norms that buttress the American system. It needs to be pointed out that as of now, the electoral machinery, comprising both Democrats and Republicans, and the US judiciary, which has political appointees, have stood firm. The danger to the US system is not immediate, but the extent to which Trump will weaken the foundations of liberal democracy and enable its further erosion is cause of concern.

The political health of the US is important not just for the country itself, but the world, given its outsize influence as the foremost economic and military power. This is an important juncture where there are expectations that Biden will repair the rules-based international order damaged by Trump. He may rejoin the Paris climate change agreement and the JCPOA with Iran, but he faced major problems. The US is grievously wounded by the Covid pandemic and the term of Trump, who has deepened America’s divisions for electoral purposes.

For countries like India who are confronting a rampant China, the economic, social and political health of the US is important because it is the only country which can help with a pushback.

But, we should not ignore reality, Biden’s plate is already full. A quarter million Americans have died of Covid, which has yet to recede. The American society has gone through dramatic protests against racial inequality, and now on top of that there is this challenge to the very legitimacy of the electoral process that brought him to power. The road ahead, both for the US and the world, is going to remain rocky.

The Tribune January 5, 2021

https://www.blogger.com/blog/post/edit/15741297/1381243492984293752

Even with Biden: Trend against globalisation is dampening India’s prospects, headwinds will only increase

It is now conventional wisdom to say that 2021 will be better than the year gone by. Don’t bet on it. The pandemic rages around the world and its aspect remains ferocious. Vaccinations have begun, somewhat fitfully though, in the country that is suffering its worst ravages – the United States. Just when vaccinations will actually alter the global trajectory of the pandemic is not clear, not only because it will take time to vaccinate enough people to create herd immunity, but because of  the malevolence of this particular virus whose effects are even now not fully understood.

Beyond the course of the pandemic is the challenge of dealing with its consequences, as much social-psychological, economic and geopolitical. The global economy has been grievously hurt and the trendline of the future  remains blurred. The immediate preoccupation of the incoming US President Joe Biden will not be China, Russia, climate change or the Indo-Pacific, but to heal the consequences of the pandemic in his own divided country.

For New Delhi, which has to bear, in addition to the pandemic, a political and military confrontation with Beijing, the United States is an irreplaceable element. No other country has the heft, and the ability, to intervene in the South Asia-Indian Ocean Region. Whether POTUS would be inclined to do so in light of the domestic problems he confronts, is another matter. Even though the gap between India and China’s comprehensive national power has widened, India doesn’t seek US military intervention. What it and many other countries want, is a greater clarity and sense of purpose from Washington in dealing with Beijing’s wayward ways.

New Delhi needs to note, however, China’s estrangement from the US is not as serious as the one with India. This is despite the tariffs and technology restrictions imposed in the Trump years, and the more active South China Sea stance of the US. In contrast to what India is seemingly attempting, decoupling is not an option for the US. The Biden administration is likely to retain the tariffs and technology restrictions and the forward posture in the South China Sea and then negotiate a rollback of tariffs in exchange for Chinese cooperation in a range of areas like climate change, pandemics and international trade. Don’t underestimate, either, the attraction of the Chinese market for US corporates who are thirsting for revenues in the post-Covid world, and who have strong political equity in the incoming administration.

Despite turning on the screws on domestic dissent and alienating a large part of the world, China is positioned to enter 2021 in better shape than its putative adversaries. It became a post-Covid economy in mid 2020 itself. Though there are signs of weakness in certain sectors of its economy, it cannot but gain from the creation of RCEP and its recent trade pact with the largest economy and trading bloc in the world, the EU. Its own outreach, the BRI may have lost a bit of lustre, but for many countries it remains the only game in town. Even without new crises intervening, the Biden administration will have its hands full in slowing down the geopolitical consequences of these developments.

As for India, headwinds will only increase in the coming years. The chance of becoming a $5 trillion economy by 2024  had receded before Covid hit. No amount of statistical jugglery or brave exhortations will change things.  India has many things going for it – primarily, in the current context, being the “non-China”. But it is still some way from demonstrating that it has figured out its path to sustainable high economic growth. Changes in the farm laws and the relaxation of labour regulations could have made the difference, but the trend against globalisation is dampening India prospects. Meanwhile there are bigger questions about a polity that wants to go back socially to the medieval age, even while claiming that it wants to advance forward to build a modern economy.

Times of India  January 1, 2021

https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/blogs/toi-edit-page/even-with-biden-trend-against-globalisation-is-dampening-indias-prospects-headwinds-will-only-increase/