Why India-Nepal ties are likely to worsen

The election victory of a coalition of two Communist parties in the recent elections in Nepal signals difficult days for Indo-Nepal relations. The coalition of the Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist Centre) led by Puspa Kamal Dahal (Prachanda) and the Communist Party of Nepal (Unified Marxist Leninist) led by KP Sharma Oli is on track to win the majority of the seats in the 275-member Parliament, six of the seven new provincial assemblies and a majority of the 753 new local councils.

Madhesi factor

The scale of the defeat of Prime Minister Sher Bahadur Deuba’s Nepali Congress is staggering. The Left coalition can end up capturing 70 per cent of the 165 seats allotted in the firstpast the post system. The royalists backed by a section of the Sangh Parivar in India is likely to get just one such seat. By all accounts, the Nepali Congress ran a lacklustre campaign and its efforts to ally with Madhesi parties did not work out.

None of this means that the issues the Madhesi parties had raised — that of discrimination against their region, Dalits, women and other minority groups — have gone away. Or the fact that Nepal has been a poor, misgoverned country whose main export is manpower to India and other destinations.

The outcome is bound to have significant foreign policy implications for Nepal. Oli, who was replaced as Prime Minister by Prachanda in 2016 allegedly through New Delhi’s machinations, is bitterly anti-Indian. He is likely to return as prime minister.

Nepal has seen almost continuous turmoil, physical and political, in the past two decades. First, there was the Maoist insurgency, which led to the deaths of nearly 20,000 people. Then came the prolonged political wrangling that has seen nearly 10 prime ministers in as many years. A devastating series of earthquakes caused a great deal of physical and psychological damage to the nation. There were expectations that after the adoption of Nepal’s Constitution, things would stabilise, but it was not to be.

Madhesi groups living in the Terai region mobilised against what they said was a Constitution which was discriminatory to them and they instituted blockades on key roads connecting India. The Nepali elites, however, blamed New Delhi for the blockade which denied medicines, construction material and fuel to help Nepal’s recovery from the devastation of the earthquakes.

Challenges

The decisive nature of the victory is good news for Nepal which now has a government which cannot be voted out for two years. It also has a comfortable majority which should promote stability. However, its performance will depend, first, on the manner in which the coalition functions, and secondly, the way it deals with its two giant neighbours – India and China.

The new government does confront a major challenge with regard to its internal coherence. They may be Communist parties, but like all such formations, they are strong on ideological issues, and equally tend to get divided on them. Both Oli and Prachanda are powerful and capable leaders, and this could lead to either efficient government by them or a dissonance leading to political instability.

Almost certainly, the new government will reverse Deuba’s decision to cancel an award to a Chinese company to develop a large hydroelectric project, which included the building of a dam on the Budi Gandaki river. In November 2017, the Deuba government said the project which was awarded in the wake of Nepal’s decision to join the One Belt One Road scheme, was being cancelled because of alleged irregularities by the Chinese company Gezhouba Group.

Security concern

We should not get needlessly distracted by the China versus India scenarios that are being put forward. Both Oli and Prachanda are known to be pragmatic and will seek to maximise assistance from India and China. Which is as it should be — Nepal occupies a strategic position and it should exploit it to its own benefit. If the Chinese are willing to invest in Nepal’s infrastructure, India should not be too concerned.

The reason is very simple. No matter how you look at it, Nepal is locked into a close relationship with India through history and culture. More important, no amount of Chinese investment and infrastructure can change the tyranny of geography. The high Himalayan limit, the intercourse that is possible between Tibet and Nepal, whereas through treaty and custom, India allows millions of Nepalis to work and own property in the country without any permit or document.

Given the recent past, security is a major concern for India. The Indo-Nepal border is virtually open and lightly policed. If Kathmandu does not heed Indian concerns, it will have to confront New Delhi’s ire. But this said, India too needs to back off from viewing its relationship with Nepal only through the lenses of security and see how it can further them in terms of economic integration and partnership.

Mail Today December 18, 2017

In his attempt to win elections, Narendra Modi does not seem bound by propriety – or even dignity

It would take a certain kind of thought process to suggest that the presence of former Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and former vice-president Hamid Ansari at a dinner where the Pakistani High Commissioner to India and a former Pakistan foreign minister were also in attendance, was some kind of a secret gathering related to the ongoing Gujarat Assembly elections. Clearly, Prime Minister Narendra Modi has that kind of a mind.

Modi’s accusations – made during an election rally in Gujarat on Sunday – have a touch of the sinister, and, coming from the Prime Minister of India, are deeply troubling.

He also claimed that a person called Sardar Arshad Rafiq, a retired Pakistani military officer, had called for Ahmed Patel, the political secretary of Congress leader Sonia Gandhi, to become the chief minister of Gujarat. Simultaneously, Modi alleged that it was following this dinner, which was hosted by Mani Shankar Aiyar, that the Congress leader called him “neech” or a low-life.

A professor posted on social media that this is what a spurious correlation is all about. A website hosted by a Harvard student has shown how easy it is to come up with correlations between completely unrelated events. For instance, the website has charts showing that there is a correlation between the number of people who drowned by falling into a pool and the films Hollywood actor Nicholas Cage appeared in, and between the per capita consumption of cheese in the US and the number of people who died by getting tangled in their bedsheets.

The contentious dinner

As the Indian Express has reported, there was indeed a gathering at Aiyar’s house on December 6. But this was a dinner in honour of the former foreign minister of Pakistan, Khurshid Ahmed Kasuri. Present at the occasion were Manmohan Singh, Hamid Ansari, the Pakistan High Commissioner to India, former Army chief Deepak Kapoor, former foreign minister Natwar Singh, senior retired diplomats and former high commissioners of India to Pakistan – Salman Haidar, TCA Raghavan, Sharat Sabharwal and KS Bajpai.

Such a dinner is perfectly normal, especially since Aiyar is involved in the Track-II diplomacy process with Pakistan. These talks, outside the ambit of the official dialogue between New Delhi and Islamabad, have long been a fixture in the landscape of India-Pakistan relations.

Perhaps it will also be useful to recall that on December 25, 2015, Prime Minister Modi dropped in at a party in Lahore thrown by Nawaz Sharif, then Pakistan’s prime minister, and no one accused him of anything else but naiveté.

A new low

If there indeed was a conspiracy to subvert the election process in Gujarat, it is the duty of the government to immediately arrest anyone who is seeking to do so, even if that person is the former prime minister, vice-president or Army chief. As of now, there has been no follow-up action by Indian authorities

Instead, Manmohan Singh issued a sharp statement on Monday, saying that the Gujarat elections were not discussed at the dinner hosted by Aiyar, and that Modi was spreading falsehoods about Pakistan meddling in the Gujarat polls. “I reject the innuendos and falsehoods as I did not discuss Gujarat elections with anyone else at the dinner hosted by Mani Shankar Aiyar as alleged by Modi,” Singh said. “Nor was the Gujarat issue raised by anyone else present at the dinner. The discussion was confined to India-Pakistan relations.”

As for Sardar Arshad Rafiq, his Facebook page is public, and there does not seem to be any trace of his alleged appeal to make Ahmed Patel the Gujarat chief minister. Rafiq, though, does have a post from a friend ribbing him about his new-found fame in India, and another mourning the passing of veteran Indian actor Shashi Kapoor.

One of the downsides of democracy is that during elections the contestants seek to divide the electorate. Ideally, this is done on the basis of the different policy options that the candidates offer, and their qualifications to fulfil their promises. The reality in India, however, is that this division is more often than not sought on the basis of caste, creed and ethnicity.

But even by the standards of electoral rhetoric, Modi’s recent performance in Gujarat is a new low. In these fraught times, perhaps it is necessary to point out that the term “low” does not refer to Modi’s background and origins, but to the personality trait that allows the prime minister not to feel bound by any propriety or dignity when it comes to winning elections. Even though Modi has repeatedly declared that he does not want office for the sake of power, that is precisely what he seems to be seeking.

Election dog whistles

Muslims and Pakistan are Modi’s favourite bugbears. He came to power in Gujarat in the wake of the Godhra train massacre, which had led to widespread violence against Muslims in the state. In the election that took place after these tragedies, Modi berated “Mian Musharraf”. This was not so much a reference to the Pakistani general as it was code for the state’s Muslim population – an attempt to pit the majority of the population against the minority.

Modi’s style was evident from the manner in which he dissed the directives of the Election Commission, then headed by JM Lyngdoh. In his speeches, Modi always referred to the polling official with his full name, James Michael Lyngdoh, thus underscoring his Christian faith.

The 2012 state assembly elections was the first time Modi used the “Ahmed Patel for Chief Minister” card to polarise voters against the Muslims. This time the term “mian” was used as a suffix, as in “Ahmed mian”, almost suggesting that Patel was being supported for the office of chief minister by a former Pakistani general. Ahmed Patel has as much a right to become the chief minister of Gujarat as any other Indian national. It is also clear that Modi’s reference to Patel as “mian” is more of a tactic to scare voters about the possibility of a Muslim chief minister rather than something that has any basis in reality.

Invoking Pakistan

What is really alarming here is the use of Pakistan to marginalise Muslim voters in an Indian state. Even in 2002, Modi projected himself as the man who would save Gujarat from terrorism and “Mian Musharraf”.

In the past two years, notwithstanding claims that the only thing that he seeks is development, Modi has raised the rhetoric against terrorism and Pakistan to a high, even though actual instances of terrorism – attacks on unarmed civilians – have sharply declined since the attack on Mumbai in November 2008.

Modi has used the attacks on security forces in Pathankot in January 2016, and in Uri in September that year, to call for Pakistan to be labelled as a state sponsor of terrorism. The hysteria that was aroused over the so-called surgical strikes against Pakistani positions on the Line of Control at the end of September 2016 was blatantly used to harvest votes in the Uttar Pradesh Assembly elections five months later.

That Modi is playing politics with surgical strikes is evident from the fact that he returned to the theme again at an election rally on Sunday, when he attacked Manmohan Singh for not conducting surgical strikes on Pakistan in the wake of the Mumbai terror attack. Why Singh did not do so is not known, but such issues are hardly things that are debated in public. If every executive action has to be measured by Modi’s macho standards, a question could perhaps be asked as to why the Modi government did not react to last November’s attack on India’s 16 Corps headquarters at Nagrota in Jammu and Kashmir, which took place exactly two months after the surgical strikes. Seven soldiers, including two officers, were killed in that attack. It was a much more serious incident than the one in Uri since Nagrota is a Corps headquarters and quite far from the Line of Control unlike Uri, which is a stone’s throw away.

None of this is a good augury for the country.

The Scroll December 12, 2017

New player in East Asia: Modi must fill the gaps in Trump’s Indo-Pacific vision

In early June 2018, Prime Minister Narendra Modi is scheduled to address the Shangri-La Dialogue in Singapore. High level Indian guests have so far stayed away from Asia’s premier defence related summit promoted by the International Institute for Strategic Studies or IISS of UK.

Given the nature of the meeting and its location, Modi will not miss the opportunity to detail India’s perspectives on the Indo-Pacific region. Our partners in the revitalised Quadrilateral grouping – the US, Australia and Japan – are always a strong presence at the Shangri-La Dialogue, using it as a sounding board for ideas and policies.

At the 2016 Dialogue, US defence secretary Ashton Carter outlined the “principled security networks” that the US was seeking to create in the Asia-Pacific region to promote a “rules based international order”. The mechanisms envisaged were US-led trilateral and bilateral military relationships which would hem in China as it sought to expand its writ in the region.

In recent months, the Trump administration, which walked out of Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), has articulated its nascent strategy. It has taken ownership of the Quad and the Indo-Pacific and thereby stretched the US strategic perspective by pointedly introducing the Indian Ocean into it. When looked at from the former Asia-Pacific formulation, China loomed large; now, in the Indo-Pacific, it looks somewhat smaller since India is in the equation. At present, this is at a conceptual level and it remains to be seen how the new US National Security Strategy, expected to be released soon, will flesh it out.

Some aspects of this have been visible in secretary of state Rex Tillerson’s attack on China for its “predatory economics” and his call for “transparent, high standard regional lending mechanisms” to save smaller regional states from the debt trap of Chinese financing.

Many critics say that the differences between the Obama-era ‘pivot to Asia’ and the ‘Indo-Pacific’ formulation are minor from the military point of view. By walking out of TPP, the US has actually kicked away the trade, finance and investment leg of any Indo-Pacific strategy.

Militarily, the US-led Quad is way ahead of China. What are needed are alternative financing mechanisms to add muscle to the principled security networks. Here Japan and the US have to play a key role. Tokyo already has a big Official Development Assistance programme. It is the US that needs to come up with new ideas. Perhaps, to reinvent the World Bank and its old instrumentalities like the Overseas Private Investment Corporation and the ExIm Bank to leverage its huge private sector resources.

Just how will Modi play these issues? Clearly, the time has come for India to bat. For too long India has been the tea boy in the match. By his temperament, Modi is a front-foot player who changed the nomenclature of India’s old policy towards the region from Look East to Act East. But there is a question as to what India can bring to the game.

India has long aspired to play the role of a big power and hasn’t done too badly, considering it didn’t have much but ideas and rhetoric to offer. For the past decade, New Delhi has been free-riding on Uncle Sam’s back, but the Trump administration is not quite built that way and will want New Delhi to play a tangible role in its policy.

But perhaps we should not worry too much. Look carefully and you will see that ideas championed by Indians form a significant component of the new American policy. It was foreign secretary S Jaishankar who first raised the warning signals on the nature of China’s Belt and Road Initiative’s financing. New Delhi’s boycott of the BRI Forum underscored this. Though it is the Japanese who have pushed the Indo-Pacific concept, strategic analyst C Raja Mohan has been fleshing it out since 2007.

No doubt, by the time Modi takes the bat, he will be well coached. Hopefully, he will fill the large gaps that remain in the Indo-Pacific vision envisaged by the Trump team and keep his focus on this country’s interests which also need to ensure that the ‘Indo’ part of the formulation does not get ignored, as it is currently.

Times of India, December 9, 2017

On Jerusalem, Modi Government is Putting Ideology Over National Interest

Bandwagoning with the US cannot be a substitute for a working foreign policy in our own region and near abroad.

Protests break out in Palestine after President Trump’s announcement of moving the US embassy in Israel to Jerusalem. Credit: Reuters/Mohammed Salem

To say that the Indian response to the unilateral American declaration recognising Jerusalem as the capital of Israel was pusillanimous is to be polite. What the spokesperson of the Ministry of External Affairs said was a non sequitur: “India’s position on Palestine is independent and consistent. It is shaped by our views and interests, and not determined by any third country.”

But just what this position is was not spelt out, nor the fact that howsoever independent and consistent one’s position may be, it most certainly is affected by a third country – especially when that country happens to be the mighty United States.

Most countries, even friends and allies of the US and Israel, have issued more categorical statements. Singapore, for example, made it clear that any unilateral action would impede progress for a peaceful resolution of the Middle East and Palestinian problem. It reiterated its support for the two-state solution and added that “the future of Jerusalem should be decided through direct negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians.”

As for the European Union, it said its position remained unchanged: “The aspirations of both parties must be fulfilled and a way must be found through negotiations to resolve the status of Jerusalem as the future capital of both states.”

The Chinese spokesman bluntly outlined Beijing’s support for a negotiated settlement of the Israel-Palestine dispute which would benefit regional peace and stability and be based on a “full sovereignty” Palestinian state “with East Jerusalem as its capital.” This was in line with what President Xi Jinping declared in a major speech to the Arab League in Cairo in January 2016.

There was a time in the 1950s when India played a larger than life role in world affairs. It was not a matter of our military power; it had none. Nor of its economic clout, since we were among the poorest countries in the world. It was about leadership and ideas and that somewhat undefinable thing called integrity. Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru’s advocacy of non-alignment gave the developing world an alternative to the binary of the US-Soviet contest and ensured that we did not get involved in their proxy bush wars. Its ultimate success was in the near-universal adherence it gained from most developing countries in the world. Nehruvian non-alignment was also pragmatic –India secured massive quantities of US economic aid to assist its development, even while equipping its military with weaponry from the Eastern Bloc obtained at “friendship prices.” It also required courage, such as in developing nuclear capacity and refusing to be herded into regimes like the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty in the face of multiple sanctions by the US.

Non-alignment meandered away from relevance in the 1980s and lost its raison d’etre the moment the Soviet Union collapsed, but it provided India with a framework policy which served us well.

The framework of the Modi-era foreign policy is not very clear. There is certainly great energy in the prime minister who has toured most of the world. But just what India, which looms far larger in terms of its economic and military standing, represents today is not clear. The BJP may have an ideological preference for Israel, but that should not trump national interests. Who will deny that peace and stability in the Middle East is, perhaps, the most important imperative of Indian foreign policy, and that it will be adversely affected by the dynamics that Trump’s policies will unleash?

Some 70% of our oil comes from the region, seven million of our citizens work there. Four times in recent history, India has had to evacuate its nationals from the region; in 1990 from Kuwait, Lebanon in 2006, Libya in 2011 and Yemen in 2015. The US decision, against international consensus, could well stoke off further instability in the volatile region and lead to yet another bout of Islamist radicalism – all matters of direct concern for India.

Elsewhere too, the drift is evident

That Indian policy is faltering because of the lack of a coherent structure is evident also from the happenings in Myanmar. We are of course, familiar with our waffling on the Rohingya issue. Again, something that concerns us directly because it has the ability to destabilise our neighbourhood via Bangladesh. As Suhasini Haidar wrote in the Hindu, India has dithered on the issue even while the US, European Union and Singapore have sought to find a way out of the crisis. Once again, the BJP’s ideological position viz. its attitude towards Muslims, seems to have dictated its policy, rather than national interests which would demand an active role by New Delhi to reverse the flow of refugees who could affect India and undermine the stability of our neighbour.

Ironically, as Haidar points out, the Chinese have taken the lead in trying to resolve the crisis. Following a visit by Chinese foreign minister Wang Yi to Naypidaw and Dhaka, Myanmar and Bangladesh reached an agreement to repatriate refugees back to the Rakhine state. Of course, China has also defended the Myanmar government and helped in watering down UN pressure. China is working along its national interests. It has substantial economic interests in the Rakhine State where it has developed the Kyaukpyu port and from where it transports gas and oil to its Yunan province. It is set to enhance its investments in the region and so, it is seeking stability there. Whether China’s activism works or not, only time will show, but what is clear is that India is marked by its absence in a crisis which can have direct effects on its security.

In line with the perspective of stabilising a neighbouring region, in the past year, China has sought to play a mediatory role in Myanmar to resolve conflicts between the state and its ethnic minorities. In March 2017, its representatives set up meetings with the United Wa State Army, the largest armed ethnic group in Myanmar, as well as with the Northern Alliance comprising of a slew of groups like the Arakan Army, the Myanmar National Democratic Alliance Army, the Ta’ang National Liberation Army and the Kachin Independence Army.

The decision to play a mediatory role is a new phase in Chinese policy which otherwise famously avoids getting involved in internal issues of its interlocutor countries. But with its new Belt and Road Initiative, China has realised that non-involvement is a luxury it may not be able to afford for too long. If there were important economic and strategic interests in a region, Beijing no longer has the option of standing by as a crisis develops.

To come back to the Modi era. The prime minister began with a strong commitment to anchor India’s foreign policy to strong ties with our neighbours in South Asia. Today as we do the sums we find that the Pakistan and China parts of the ledger are in the red. We are missing in action in Myanmar and Bangladesh and neither here nor there in Sri Lanka. As for Maldives, the recent Chinese free trade agreement points to India’s impotence. That leaves Nepal. The victory of the alliance led by the Communist Party of Nepal (Unified Marxist Leninist) is a major setback which will have serious implications for India-Nepal relations.

All this is an ironical consequence of a government in New Delhi that sought to move away from the past and promised a new era in foreign policy. In part this is a result of pursuing ideological goals, rather than national interests, and in part because Modi simply lacks a strategic framework upon which to build policy. Bandwagoning with the US is no substitute for a working policy in our own region and near abroad.

The Wire December 10, 2017

Trump’s 'social insecurity' Bill

On Saturday, the Republican Party passed a tax bill which critics say will make the rich richer and the poor poorer. 

The Borowitz Report, a satirical column in The New Yorker, said Kim Jong-un was concerned that his plan for destroying the US had been “made totally irrelevant by the Republican tax bill moving through the Senate”. 

The Republicans, he believed, would upstage his plan to destroy America.

Debt plunge  

The plan would add $1.4 trillion (`90 lakh crore) to the federal deficit over the next decade, a debt that could lead to future cuts in medical and social security programmes. The display on the National Debt Clock mounted on Times Square in New York is around $20.5 trillion (`1,320 lakh crore) and rising. It is the highest as a proportion of the economy since 1950. 

The solipsistic Trump “revolution” is unfolding on fantasies about economic growth. Just how the President expects to embark on his proposed $1 trillion (`65 lakh crore) plan of revitalising the crumbling infrastructure of his nation is difficult to fathom. The tax cuts will, if anything, reduce the capacity of the state and local governments to fund new projects and maintain older ones.

Earlier this year, the American Society of Civil Engineers gave a failing grade to American infrastructure, saying that even to reach passing grade, the country would have to spend $4.59 trillion (`300 lakh crore). Infrastructure investment was a major theme of the Trump campaign, but as of now the only thing that is being built is the Great Wall to keep out Mexican migrants. 

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 A triumphant President Trump was quick to announce the new measures

 But despite his boorish behavior, Trump is very much in command. Just who was responsible for the identical items carried in the Washington Post  and New York Times last week that he was about to replace secretary of state Rex Tillerson is not clear. But Trump took the opportunity to not only deny the story, but to emphasise that even though the two of them have differences, “I call the final shots.” 

The US remains the most important economic and military power in the world. The Narendra Modi government has put all its foreign policy eggs in the American basket. If the US is determined to commit harakiri, it has implications for India, if not the world.

China Factor

New Delhi has been moving rapidly to embrace the Trump administration’s new Indo-Pacific policy articulated by Trump and Tillerson. In essence, it seeks to bring India into the American military calculations in the power balance against China. 

New Delhi, too, needs the US because the state of its own economy and military reveal an increasing gap in the relative power between India and China. India has quickly embraced the Quadrilateral idea has played an active role in the meetings at the ministerial and official levels in 2017. 

Last week, it  was announced that Indian Navy ships would be able to refuel and restock in Singapore’s Changi Naval base. Significantly, in mid 2018, Prime Minister Narendra Modi is likely to be the star guest at the Shangrila Dialogue, organised by the IISS, London and blessed by the government of Singapore.  

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Tump spoke again of the victory at a Republican fundraising breakfast at Cipriani's in New York later

As of now, the Trump vision for the Indo-Pacific has been articulated through speeches. But it is waiting to be fleshed out to offer a credible and sustainable response to the rise of china

India’s presence at this Track 1 security summit has so far been fitful. Modi is likely to use the occasion to further cement India’s commitment to Trump’s Indo-Pacific vision. How does all this connect up with the state of the US ? The credibility of any leader or nation is based on its domestic and international profile. 

Alternative

The combined military might of the US, Japan, India and Australia is much greater than that of China, but smaller Asia Pacific states are awaiting an economic and investment policy that will offset the gravitational pull of Beijing’s Belt and Road initiative. 

In his speech at the CSIS earlier this year, Tillerson had said that a “quiet conversation” had begun between various countries to come up with alternative financing institutions, while warning that it would not be easy to compete with Chinese conditions anyway. 

For his part, Trump did not even bother to speak of this issue in his Asian tour, having gutted the TPP, all he had on offer were bilateral trade deals for which there have been no takers. India needs all the money it has to build its own infrastructure. Japan by itself cannot be the sole provider of foreign assistance. 

But with the American elite focused on itself, there is little chance that it will cough up resources to power the Indo-Pacific alternative Tillerson has spoken off. This is what America First looks like, anyway.

Mail Today December 3, 2017

The Upside Down World of America the Turbulent

Trump’s rise symbolises the US’s polarised polity, but he is only the manifestation of the disease, not its cause.

A man holds a flag of US President Donald Trump as a monument of Jefferson Davis is removed in New Orleans, Louisiana, U.S., May 11, 2017. Credit: Reuters

Washington DC: The Black Friday sales were good; $20 billion of business transacted over one weekend (Thanksgiving) signifies an economy is doing well, with unemployment is down to 4.1%, the lowest in 17 years.

But beneath the surface there is considerable turmoil in the US. Wages have remained stagnant since the 1970s, a major factor in the shift of many Democratic manufacturing states like Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania towards Donald Trump in last year’s election. Larger and more worrying trends show that many parts of the country are being left behind by the current economy according to a county-by-county report of the Economic Innovation Group.

According the group’s Distressed Communities Index, some 52.3 million Americans live in economically distressed communities that are spread across the nation, while 84.8 million live in prosperous communities. While prosperity is widespread in a country like the US, it is the persisting pockets of poverty and deprivation that add fuel to its toxic politics of today.

And all this overlays what has been called the “opioid crisis” where the misuse of that class of drugs has led to the deaths of some 64,000 persons last year, more than those killed by guns or the HIV epidemic at its peak. In October, Trump declared the opioid problem to be a “public health emergency”.

But little has been done to curb it.

In the shorter term, in a highly charged partisan atmosphere, the US Congress confronts a crowded agenda of legislation that could also lead to a shut down of government as the funding for the budget ends on December 8. A lot depends on how Trump leads and this poses its own questions because of his erratic record. The Republican leaders are keen to pass their tax overhaul measure, but there are other issues demanding attention like the immigration reform, which will decide the fate of 7 lakh young immigrants, and the fate of the Obama healthcare legislation.

The US has a polarised polity, with intense divisions that affect communities, families and even in some instances, spouses. The rise of Trump, of course, symbolises the toxic trends in the US, but he is only the manifestation of the disease, not its cause. Sadly, instead of using the presidential bully pulpit to calm the situation, Trump draws his political sustenance from it. Whatever the world may think of him, Trump remains wildly popular with the Republicans and his base of white Americans.

He is careful to play to this base, regardless of what the “liberal establishment” may say. One example is his support for the embattled Roy Moore, the Republican candidate for an off-year election to the US Senate from Alabama who has been accused of sexual harassment and assault. Of course, Trump himself faced similar charges in the run up to the election.

The media, too, is badly divided and instead of objectivity what we see is a partisan media where the channel you watch speaks about your politics and in turn your politics determines your media preferences.

Politics in the country has become more personal and confrontational. A major factor here is the role played by Facebook and Twitter in making anger and argument a routine social phenomenon. The leader of the pack is the president of the US whose Twitter broadsides pass off for presidential leadership these days in the land of Washington and Lincoln.

In this upside down world, despite an ongoing investigation of Russian efforts to manipulate the 2016 US presidential elections, the erstwhile hawkish Republicans have gone soft on the Russians. This was a country where hostility to Russia was once the hallmark of patriotism.

Guns, of course, mark the big divide. So where huge majorities of Republicans support the idea of allowing concealed weapons in most places, even in schools, equally strong majorities of Democrats oppose it. Because of this, Americans have no answer to the terrible havoc created by the repeated attacks by gunmen who have wreaked havoc in local communities. Interestingly, the big item that sold on Black Friday sales were guns. According to USA Today, the FBI received 203,086 requests for instant gun background checks on Friday, a new record for such requests. By themselves they are not a measure of firearm sales, because a buyer could buy more than one weapon. Such checks are just about the least the US is doing to deal with the terrible scourge of gun deaths.

We can expect more turmoil in the coming period as the Trump administration readies to adopt policies that could lead to trade war with China and the scrapping of NAFTA. Trump’s attack on free trade and his promise to bring back jobs naturally has an appeal in the so-called Rust Belt. But while he has loudly declared what he is against, he has not been so clear as to what alternatives he has on offer.

Not everything is negative. The Weinstein effect has revealed the major issue of sexual harassment and exploitation that stalks the country. By bringing out the issue into the open and naming and shaming powerful predators, the country would become a better place for women. The fact that the process is working top down from members of the Congress and celebrities is a mark of its impact, which will not be confined to just one party but across the political spectrum. Though whether it will have a lasting effect and also percolate to the lives of ordinary folk remains to be seen.

The Wire November 28, 2017