Safety net extremely critical

Besides the death and suffering it has wrought, the coronavirus pandemic has sharply uncovered the fault lines in various societies. There are, of course, divides that come with any pandemic—the old and already ill, being more vulnerable than the young and healthy.

But it is also taking us back to a Darwinian age where the rich and powerful survive and the poor fall by the wayside.

In India, the thoughtless decision to impose a lockdown with a few hours notice, revealed the extent to which the economy runs on informal workers who have limited or no access to healthcare or the social safety net. About 90 per cent of India’s working people—some 400 million—are in the informal sector. These are the people who have been the hardest hit. We have already witnessed the scale of their distress as we saw hundreds of thousands of migrant workers trying desperately to get back home because they had neither food nor shelter nor health facilities guaranteed at their workplaces.

They are, in some ways, only the tip of the iceberg of rural distress that compels people to venture hundreds, if not thousands, of kilometres to do jobs at rates that the locals shun. In normal times, the migrants at least have an income to have their daily roti and dal, the ones they leave behind in villages sometimes do not even get this. As for healthcare, it’s virtually non-existent.

But India is not the only country whose weaknesses have been laid bare. The mighty United States of America, whose powerful armies ensure that no adversary can even approach CONUS (Continental United States), is being taken apart from within by a virus. But more than that is what the outbreak has done in bringing out the American giant’s feet of clay.

The most obvious ones visible are the extent of social and economic inequalities of society. In New York, the current epicentre of the virus, the highest concentration of cases has been in the neighbourhood of Queens, which has large immigrant populations with low average incomes. Blacks make 14 per cent of Michigan’s population, but account for 40 per cent of its dead from Covid-19.

The US economic system has already been ensuring that the rich had become exponentially richer, and the poor poorer. The country’s economy has grown 79 per cent since 1980, but where the income of the bottom half of the earners has grown just 20 per cent even as the top 0.01 per cent has seen a wealth increase of 420 per cent.

The New York Times has brought out in a stark series that by the time they reached 30, more than 90 per cent of the Americans born in 1940 were earning more than their parents. But among those born in 1980, only half were earning more than their parents by the age of 30. The Covid lockdown had to reckon with hundreds of thousands of Americans with no homes, or lower income families unable to connect to digital classrooms where lectures are supposed to be delivered. Nearly 30 million Americans had no health insurance and many of their companies were not required to provide them paid sick leave.

The pandemic is not responsible for this, but the deep fault lines in the political economy of the country has made it so much more difficult and painful for the average American in coping with it.

Now the huge economy has come to a grinding halt, with some 17 million people having been suddenly rendered unemployed, and more could join them in the coming months.

The skyrocketing unemployment rate — some 14.7 per cent right now, and the highest since 1940 — has led to long lines at emergency food banks across the US. This comes on top of some 37 million people who were already ‘food insecure’. The worry now is that the food banks, which run through donations that are declining, will run out of supplies.

For both India and the US, the pandemic brings heartbreaks. According to the UNDP, India made staggering progress between 2005-2015 by moving some 271 million out of poverty and halving the incidence of poverty, from 54.7 per cent to 27.5 per cent. Now many of them will find themselves sinking back into poverty again, with its accompanying deprivation.

In the US and India, governments have announced schemes to ameliorate the situation. Unfortunately, the bailout announced by our Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman is simply not enough to cope with the situation. As observers have pointed out, at Rs 1.7 lakh crore ($22 billion), it is just about 1 per cent of India’s GDP, in contrast to the US and Singapore, which are putting up 10 per cent. Further, it does not really address the tens of millions of workers in the unorganised sector or migrant labour. In the US, the measures do provide temporary relief, but they hardly address the structural issues which are making the task of coping difficult and will complicate economic recovery.

Whether it is the US or India, there is a larger message from the pandemic which hit us out of the blue. This is the need for creating societies with strong public healthcare systems, where the poorest and most vulnerable are protected. This, in turn, provides social resilience to weather catastrophic events like the Covid pandemic.

The Tribune April 15, 2020 https://www.tribuneindia.com/news/comment/safety-net-extremely-critical-71201

Tablighi Jamaat Not a Terrorist Outfit & Indian State Knows That

The spread of the COVID-19 infection from a Tablighi Jamaat ijtema (gathering) in New Delhi has become an occasion for stoking the flames of Islamophobia that have been licking this country for a while. Many TV channels are accusing the Tablighi Jamaat of “endangering India” being “anti-national”, and the head of the BJP IT cell has tweeted that this is part of an “Islamic insurrection”.I

Indians may not be aware of it, but the Tabligh is the largest Islamic movement in the world, and they are headquartered a couple of kilometres away from the Parliament House, in the New Delhi suburb of Nizamuddin. That you have not heard of it is not because it is sinister, but that it is fairly innocuous.

• 
  

Tablighi Jamaat Cannot Evade Responsibility

The Tablighi Jamaat leadership should have displayed better sense in conducting the ijtema itself, given the already deteriorating public health environment around the country. At Prime Minister Modi’s call, Holi 2020 on March 10 was already a remarkably subdued affair and people began to avoid large gatherings. Truth be told, till he ordered a lockdown on the evening of March 24, the seriousness of the situation did not really get through. To blame the Tabligh alone for the chaos that accompanied their ijtema is to willfully ignore the fact that the outbreak caught everyone unawares, witness the large and unorganized movement of migrants across the country under conditions of great hardship.

The Tabligh deserves to be condemned, but it is not as though they deliberately set about spreading the infection, after all, the first to be affected are fellow Tablighis and Muslims.

And they were not the only ones who whose recklessness was born out of ignorance, many other personalities in the country ranging from starlet Kanika Kapoor to Karnataka Chief Minister Yediyurappa and Yogi Adityanath were involved in public gatherings a week after the ijtema. If it comes to blunders in handling the Covid threat, even greater personalities like Xi Jinping and Donald Trump are in line before the Tablighi Jamaat leadership.

Indian State and Tablighi Jamaat

Unlike the Jamaat-e-Islami or the Jamiat ulema-e-Hind, the Tablighi Jamaat (TJ) membership tends to be poor, inward looking and the central message of the Tabligh in India is detachment from worldly affairs. Not many who readily condemn the organisation, not in the least the equally medieval TV anchors, are really familiar with the outfit and the role it has played in this country.

Given its vast influence in the Islamic world, our intelligence services have good links with the outfit, evidenced by NSA Ajit Doval’s involvement in clearing the Markaz off its unwelcome guests last month.

But this is a discreet contact and the Tablighis tend to avoid the limelight to the extent they can.

As for politicians, they have been kept at  distance by the Tablighi Jamaat. Since the outfit has no public interface and does not publish or declare any authoritative statement of its organisation or ideas, it has no way of endorsing or attacking any political party. That is by choice more than anything else.

Also Read

Tablighi Jamaat is Not Like Jamaat-e-Islaami

Authorities in India have not seen the Tablighi Jamaat as an Islamist organisation and it was not, like the Jamaat-e-Islami, banned during the Emergency. The Tabligh has never been accused of encouraging terrorism or violence of any kind. However, Riyaz Bhatkal or Riyaz Shahbandri, and Irfan Bhatkal of the Indian Mujahideen used the Tablighi global network to reach out to Islamists across the world.

An important reason why Indian Muslims were not affected by the kind of violent religious extremism that affected the world in the last forty years is because of organisations like the Tablighi Jamaat which is orthodox, but quietist.

Its leadership has largely been statist, in that they support the government of the day and self-consciously avoid all politics and focus on what orthodox Muslims say is the greater jihad—the struggle within for faith and piety.

The partition of the country and the creation of Pakistan played an important role in shaping the ideology of the outfit. Suddenly Muslims had to come to terms with the fact that they were a minority. And hence, Maulana Yusuf the head of the outfit between 1945-1965, encouraged the inward looking approach. In fact, scholar Yoginder Sikand has said that the  spread of the organization around the world is because it encourages its followers to come to terms with the secular world by personalising Islam and “making a defacto distinction between religion and politics.

Tablighi Jamaat and the Global Jihad

Western intelligence agencies have long accused the Tablighi Jamaat of promoting radicalisation. In its annual report in 2005, the German domestic intelligence organisation BfV claimed that Tablighi Jamaat had played a particularly “important role in the process of radicalisation” of socially and economically disadvantaged Muslims because of their technique of debate and discussion.

The FBI was more cautious when its chief Robert Mueller told a Senate Committee on Intelligence in February 2005  that “individual members of legitimate organizations such as Jama’at Tabligh, may be targeted by al-Qa’ida in an effort to exploit their networks and contacts here in the United States.”

Actually, as a Stratfor analysis put it in 2008, there is an indirect connect between the Tablighi Jamaat and the world of global jihad. This is the one that arises “when Tablighis disgruntled with the group’s apolitical program could break orbit and join militant organisations.” Certainly, given its very nature, it provides a large pool of the pious who can further the lesser jihad machine.

Like the Deobandi organisations, dissatisfied Tablighis in Pakistan have taken a more radical approach and chosen the path of violence while also influencing radicals in Europe.

Zia ul Haq encouraged the Tablighi Jamaat hoping it would keep the influence of the Jamaat-e-Islami at bay. But over time, like the Deobandis, the Tablighis, too, became militant in the country. One of them, Lt Gen Javid Nasir became the chief of the ISI and another Rafiq Tarrar was the President of Pakistan who Musharraf displaced in his coup.

The Quint April 2, 2020

Training guns at China

Reports that the death toll in Wuhan may have been many, many times higher than the 2,535 revealed, will feed into the narrative demanding accountability from China on account of the Covid-19 spread.

As a Chinese diplomat in India has put it, ‘China neither created the virus nor intentionally transmitted it.’ Also, the Chinese instituted an unprecedented lockdown of an entire province and took what the diplomat said were ‘most comprehensive, rigorous and thorough measures’. True, but early action could have checked its spread dramatically. The authorities in the city were aware of the virus by around mid-December, but orders for a lockdown were only issued on January 23. Timely action was sacrificed to what the Chinese Communist Party (CPC) calls ‘social stability’, and the early whistle-blowers were punished for broadcasting information on it.

But from here to raise the demand for compensation or reparations is another thing. When it comes to reparations, maybe some others would also be on the list. In the 1960s, the US used Agent Orange, a chemical that destroyed nearly 5 million acres of forest and exposed millions of Vietnamese to its effects. And then, there is the Iraq War of 2003, based on fictitious premises, that devastated an entire nation and led to tens of thousands of deaths.

Yes, the Chinese must be held to account in a manner that will encourage them to change their systems and protocols and provide a learning experience to the rest of the world. We have yet to hear the final word on Covid-19.

Chinese culpability is bound to play out strongly in the US. As of Monday, the US led in the number of Covid-positive cases at nearly 1.5 lakh (about 2,500 deaths). The helplessness of the world’s leading military and economic power will become even more manifest in the coming weeks as the virus peaks and takes an even greater toll.

Even if the US was not in an election year, there would have been a great deal of finger-pointing going on. Given the upcoming presidential elections, it could take on a nastier edge. The Trump administration knew about the virus as of January this year, but failed to act with dispatch. Given the Trump style, he will focus the blame on everyone but himself, and China will be a big target indeed.

Whatever may have been the bitterness over the usage of the terms ‘Chinese virus’ and ‘Wuhan virus’ across the world, the most popular nomenclature has already taken root and it is ‘coronavirus’. People will not forget where it originated, but are unlikely to think beyond that.

Journalist and author Praveen Swami has brought out in a recent article in Firstpost that unknown viruses arising from the animal-human interaction lurk in half a dozen places in India. Any of them could be a candidate for reaching the stage of highly contagious human-to-human interaction. So, a little bit of humility would suggest that the world needs to focus on mitigating the physical and economic consequences of such viruses, rather than play the blame game.

But for the US and China, this is not merely about scoring debating points, but part of a more ruthless geopolitical competition. Covid-19 is merely the latest episode in a narrative that is emerging from the US, which feels it has been cheated by China. The Americans went into China as part of a legitimate and successful strategy of outflanking the erstwhile Soviet Union. Then, US scholars began to suggest that as it became more prosperous, it would, as per their modernisation theories, become more democratic. That has not happened, at least till now, instead, the CPC has been able to maintain its authoritarian hold over the people through co-option and coercion and the country has continued to grow economically and militarily in the past decades.

The competition now has two pressing aspects. One is in the realm of technology, where the US is determined to ensure its superiority. While China may take the lead in a few areas like 5G, there is nothing to indicate that the US can be bested in its overall superiority in the realm of science and technology in the next decade and more.

The other aspect is the military competition in East Asia. Since 1950, the US maintained a deployment close to China, buttressed by its alliances with South Korea, Japan, Taiwan and the Philippines. Despite US complaints about being taken for a ride by its allies, nothing really has changed here, indeed, it now also has the advantage of having a friendly Vietnam as well.

The increasingly powerful Chinese military may be able to keep the US some distance from its shores, but beyond that the US remains, and will remain, the dominant power for the foreseeable future.

China is the only country today which is able to pose some kind of a challenge to the US, be it in technology or economy or diplomacy. The US seems to have reached a point of insecurity, where it views every challenge as life-threatening. It is unable or unwilling to concede any ground to a country which is a growing power and which has its own needs and aspirations.

Political change in China, which many await, is not something that can be imposed by others; it must come from within. In the meantime, the task for the US and the global community is to be able to shape the circumstances through which this change can come.

Tribune March 31, 2020

Thucydides trap: China-US rivalry has made international governance difficult – even as they fight a common threat

The US and China had just about declared truce in their trade war through a phase I deal in January when the coronavirus hit. Now, even as they fight a common threat, the ‘war’ has shifted to the realm of propaganda: China is aggressively touting its success in containing the virus, while the US seeks to name and shame Beijing on its origin.

This should have been a time for a concerted international response; instead we are witnessing national fightbacks, many of them flailing, with no sign of a concerted global response. Presidents Xi Jinping and Donald Trump had their first phone conversation yesterday, over 10 weeks after the gravity of the situation was revealed and the conversation was general, rather than on the specifics of a concerted response using the vast S&T resources of the two nations.

The G7 meeting this week failed to come up with a customary joint statement because the US insisted on reference to the “Wuhan virus”. The G20 meeting that followed did mention the importance of world trade but in passing, and pledged $5 trillion to spur economic recovery. In the words of a former IMF economist, its statement was “long on generalities, short on specifics”. A report says that the US insistence on explicitly stating that the virus originated in Wuhan has stalled a joint declaration at the UN Security Council.

The US and China are in a Thucydides trap and the Covid-19 pandemic has worsened the situation. The geopolitical contest and the pandemic, if prolonged, could upend the world that we have known.
The two countries have moved from being trade partners and collaborators to strategic competitors, a situation that has made international governance more difficult. Their conflict is around technology, the most visible being 5G. The US is moving to restrict export of a range of “foundational technologies” with dual civil and military applications – such as biotechnology, advanced surveillance, 3D printing, artificial intelligence and robotics.

The aim is to constrain the Chinese challenge to US technological supremacy, but this could impede US innovation because of the level of interconnectedness between the two countries.

There has been a lot of talk of decoupling, but that’s a lot of hype. What we could be seeing is a derisking strategy by countries and companies who think they have become too dependent on China. The Covid crisis will add new industries like pharmaceuticals to the list. And what we may see is the building up of redundancies to make our systems more resilient.

A cooperative approach could make that process benign, a combative one will plunge us into deeper waters. The US and Europe are still struggling to meet the twin challenge of containing the virus and keeping their huge economies afloat. Beijing may have controlled the epidemic and gotten its economy going again, but the reality is that China alone cannot pull the global economic engine. With 38% of its exports destined for the US and Europe, China knows that the economic health of both regions is vital for its own well-being. In turn these regions cannot be unaware of the importance of China to their own economies.

The responses of various countries to the economic challenge of the virus have been national. The US’s $2.2 trillion stimulus will just about prevent a social welfare disaster, not revive its economy. India’s modest Rs 1.7 trillion package is unlikely to even address the social distress resulting from the outbreak. As for the G20’s $5 trillion, well, that’s all it is, a promise.

But first things first. Addressing the economic challenge of Covid-19 is important, but it is first essential to extinguish and control the virus itself.  Be it smallpox, tuberculosis, or polio, only concerted international action succeeded in checking a contagion. With a pandemic whose full course has yet to be run, and whose properties are yet to be revealed in full, cooperation across national boundaries  ought to be the order of the day, and it isn’t, yet.

Times of India March 28, 2020 

China pulls itself together

Even as the Covid-19 pandemic rages, it is also impacting and shaping wider economic and political trends. The 2008 crisis pushed China several notches higher in the global power order. The current crisis, which comes in the wake of an increasingly belligerent US-China relationship, could lead to an intensification of the strategic competition between the two countries and have similar consequences.

Both the US and China will be hit hard. The question is: Who will be damaged less, and who will have the will to apply the lessons of the experience better?

The pandemic has already led to mass casualties and economic damage to China, which has now kick-started its recovery. The situation in the US is only now developing and things could get worse before they get better. Though it had time, the US mismanaged its early response. Its political system, where authority is divided between federal, state and local governments was not able to provide the coordinated response that authoritarian and centralised China could.

The 

The Covid outbreak was centred in Wuhan and brought China’s huge industrial machine to a standstill. Global supply chains were disrupted and markets crashed as China locked down to deal with the situation. The over-centralised Chinese political system was responsible for the delays in alerting the world to the virus, resulting in its spread. But that same system also undertook an unprecedented quarantine of an entire province and, in a sense, brought the world time to cope with it. The new propaganda narrative in China is already emphasising this and the ‘victory’ of the Communist Party of China (CPC) and Xi in countering the spread of the virus.

The peak has passed in China and the epicentre of the virus is moving westwards from Iran, Italy to Spain. All of Europe, including the phlegmatic Scandinavians, are in a panic. Like Italy and Spain, the US fumbled in its initial response. Now, the pandemic is expected to accelerate and, if it follows the pattern of China, Iran and Europe, the US healthcare system could be overwhelmed at places.

There are some already forecasting recession in the US — two successive quarters of negative growth. The sudden stop of economic activity through quarantines and social distancing will come with attendant loss of jobs and income. The Trump administration reacted last week by declaring the pandemic a national emergency and the Congress has passed a sweeping coronavirus relief package.

Meanwhile, Bloomberg has reported that the Chinese economy is on its way to recovery, operating at 80 per cent of its normal capacity as of last week. Though, a deeper collapse of demand in the US could hit China once again, given that 19 per cent of Chinese exports go to the US.

Both the US and China will be hit hard, but the question is: Who will be damaged less, and who will have the will to apply the lessons of the experience better? The initial US responses have not been heartening and the Trump administration seems to be out of step with the evolving situation. The Covid outbreak has brought out the holes in the US system — the working conditions of many who do not get paid sick leave, the large number of uninsured people or the undocumented immigrants who are unable or unwilling to seek treatment, thus endangering efforts to deal with a contagious pandemic.

Conventional wisdom has it that Covid hit China’s already slowing economy, and that the CPC’s approach will be to put off further reform and focus on a short-term economic stimulus. In fact, the opposite could happen. Shocked by the outbreak, the CPC could actually be pushed to take the economic and political steps it has been dithering on for the past five years. This could mean Beijing doubling down on the economic and financial liberalisation it has undertaken since the 19th Party Congress, enforcing steps to provide a level playing field to its private sector in relation to the State Owned Enterprises (SOEs), removing barriers to the functioning of foreign firms in the country, especially those relating to transfer of technology and regulation. Having already expanded the role of the party in private businesses in the past two years, the CPC may be less leery of going down that path.

The outbreak will accelerate trends towards deglobalisation and technological decoupling between the US and China. And, indeed, to go by the Chinese experience, push the trend towards using AI, Big Data and facial recognition, as well as the use of robots in healthcare and industry. Businesses are likely to reassess the consequences of maintaining long global supply chains and look for more proximate options, as well as build a degree of redundancy in sourcing their critical supplies.

Meanwhile, even as the outbreak still rages across the country, Beijing has ensured that it continues to look outward even as Europe and the US have turned inward. China has already seized the initiative in public health leadership by sending aid to the affected countries. Besides Iran and Iraq, China sent experts, ventilators and masks to Italy and offered to provide help to all those that needed it. Last Thursday, Xi spoke to the UN Secretary General, calling for the international community to take action to fight the epidemic. China has been holding teleconferences with experts and officials from Azerbaijan, Belarus, Georgia, Moldova, Armenia, Turkmenistan, Italy and several Pacific Island countries. In the coming days it is likely to intensify this effort, which, not surprisingly, follow the tracks of the Belt and Road Initiative.

Tribune March 17, 2020

The high road to growth

Trade equals prosperity, this is the simple lesson delivered at the inaugural Asia Economic Dialogue in Pune over the last weekend whose theme was Asia and the Emerging International Trading System. The conference, run in partnership between the Ministry of External Affairs and the Pune International Centre, is an effort by the government to go beyond the narrow confines of the New Delhi on such issues.

The tone was set by Kishore Mahbubani, an academic and former diplomat from Singapore, who bluntly argued in his special address that not only was trade a major factor in enriching the world, but was also responsible for the large-scale elimination of poverty that we have seen in the opening decades of this century. Take the experience of the two Koreas. The South Korean GDP was twice that of the North in 1980, but by 2000, it had become 20 times larger. The GDP of India and China was roughly the same in 1980, but in 2018, the latter was five times higher, even though India actually had more trade than China in 1980.

Thailand had never been a colony, had not experienced war and its GDP in 1990 was 14 times that of Vietnam, which had known nothing but war for the previous half century. But by 2018, it had used trade to reach a point where the Thai GDP was only twice as large as that of Vietnam. Trade was not just about trade, but a matrix of economics, poverty, geopolitics, peace and cultural confidence.

Mahbubani’s bottom line was that India with its huge pool of managerial talent (more visible abroad than in India), its strong government and its geopolitical sweet spot vis-à-vis the US, was well positioned to move fast on the growth track.

But things are no longer simple. Unlike China, which got a huge free ride with the US, India has come into the limelight just when the US President believes that trade is bad, and trade deficits worse. The record shows that far from giving concessions to this huge and poor country, the US is trying to extract them from India.

Other presentations at the meeting brought out that while the opportunities existed, there were many factors that were hindering India’s ability to exploit the situation. As a senior government economic adviser pointed out, the issue was not just the US, but internal issues that were pulling India back. India’s share of manufacturing had been flat for several years. India needed to do things in terms of better infrastructure, roads, taxation regime, availability of credit and so on to be able to exploit its sweet spot.

India’s poor performance was underscored by the fact that of the $300 billion plus of apparel export trade, India’s share is just $15 billion as compared to $36 billion from Bangladesh. Another expert pointed out that in terms of economic growth and quality of life, Bangladesh was doing far better than India at present.

In his presentation, former World Bank economist Jayanta Roy pointed out that India has always been the hesitant globaliser in pursuing trade reform. To emerge as a global hub, India needs to make its industry competitive, bring down tariffs, and build upon steps it has taken on the ease of doing business and improving its logistics performance. It needed to move away from protectionism and pursue the reform of multilateralism.

The main thrust of his remarks was on the importance of getting small and medium enterprises to participate in global value chains, something that India had failed to do because of its poor understanding of how these work. In fact, the key to increasing India’s stagnant manufacturing exports is to integrate manufacturing into global production networks.

As it is, things are getting complicated here, with the West seeking to close the door for developing countries that want to replicate the success of China. The US steps, which have led to the appellate body of the World Trade Organisation (WTO) coming to a grinding halt, are only part of a series of measures aimed at not only containing China, but also countries like India, Brazil, Indonesia and South Africa.

There does not seem to be much of a meeting ground between the developed and developing countries. The latter want to preserve and refine the core values of the WTO that led to huge prosperity across the world. Among these are the special and differential treatment of developing countries. Among the noted specialists who spoke were trade consultant Harsha V Singh, JS Deepak, India’s ambassador to the WTO, and his Chinese counterpart Zhang Xiangchen.

As the other sessions of the conference indicated, there is no shortage of ideas on ways India can move ahead and, indeed, ‘pole-vault’ into the ranks of leading nations. But the bottom line remains that India cannot escape from the systematic challenge of large-scale reforms in investment policy, labour, tariff and non-tariff measures, connectivity, and above all, on the need to promote political stability.

Tribune March 3, 2020