Prime Minister Narendra Modi

The party-spirited cricket World Cup

Sharda Ugra has a sharp piece out in the Wisden Cricketers’ Almanack 2024 laying bare the ways in which the BJP hijacked the 2023 ODI Cricket World Cup via the BCCI, whose secretary Jay Shah is the son of Union home minister Amit Shah. The Reddit thread on the article has a link to a full archival copy.

It was clear to everyone the World Cup had been stage-managed by the BCCI; as I wrote when it concluded, just a few of the symptoms of the BJP’s interference were that Sunday games had been reserved for India, many tickets were vouchsafed for government officials or to bodies with ties to such officials, police personnel were present in the stands for many games, snatching away placards with shows of support for Pakistan; many spectators (but not all, and not everywhere) often chanted “jai shri Ram” — the BJP’s “call to arms”, as Ugra put it — in unison; Air Force jets flew past the Modi stadium named for Prime Minister Narendra (even though he’s alive) on the day of the finals, which only the government has the power to arrange; the man himself elected to bunk the game once it started to become clear India would lose it; and throughout the tournament the game’s broadcaster was fixated on showing visuals of celebrities, including BJP leaders and supporters, in the stands when they weren’t of the game itself.

Together with releasing the tournament schedule late, all-but-accidental delays in clearing visas for Pakistani and Pakistan-affiliated cricketers and journalists, suppressing the sale of merchandise affiliated with the Pakistani and Bangladeshi cricket teams, and DJs playing songs like “Ram Siya Ram” and “India jeetega” during India games, the BJP’s hyper-nationalist hand was in plain sight, especially to those who knew what to look for. Many of these feats had been foreshadowed during the 2022 Asia Cup, when Star Sports and Pepsi had joined in on the fun. To these incursions, Ugra’s essay has added something more in-your-face, and obnoxious for it:

… three independent sources — one each from the team, the ICC and the BCCI — have confirmed the existence of an all-orange uniform, which was presented to the team as an alternative two days before the [India-Pakistan] game. They had already been given a new training kit — an orange shirt and dark trousers — a week before their first fixture. When the all-orange kit arrived in the dressing-room, the players looked nonplussed, according to an insider. Here, the story split into two versions. One, out first, said the uniform was rejected because it “looks like Holland”. The other had the Indian cricketers saying to each other: “This is not on… We won’t do it… It is disrespectful to some of the members of the team” [referring to Mohammed Shami and Mohammed Siraj].

That this was an ICC tournament had become moot by this point, with the BJP-BCCI combine subsuming or just disregarding too many of its rules and tenets for the international body to matter. The BJP sought to have a literal saffron-versus-green contest on the ground, replete with provocative music and police presence — not to mention also packing the stands with people who booed Pakistani players as they walked in/out — and the BCCI obliged. The only reason this doesn’t seem to have succeeded was either an unfavourable comparison to the Dutch circket jersey — which I’m sure the BJP and/or the BCCI would have noticed beforehand — or that the players didn’t want to put it on. According to Ugra, an orange or a blue-orange jersey was on for a UNICEF event called “One Day for Children”, and the corresponding match was to be an India-Sri Lanka fixture three weeks after the match against Pakistan; there, India wore its traditional blue, presumably the BCCI had stopped insisting on the saffron option.

But what rankles more isn’t that the ICC folded so easily (Ugra: “The ICC demonstrated neither the nous nor the spine to resist the takeover”) but that the BCCI, and the BJP behind it, laboured all the time as if there would be no resistance to their actions. Because, clearly, the two things that seemingly didn’t go the BJP’s way were the result of two minimal displays of effective resistance: the first when “Young Indians among the ICC volunteers eventually had [“Ram Siya Ram”] removed from the playlist for the rest of the tournament”, and the second when the Indian men’s team refused to don the saffron tees and trousers.

The ICC is a faraway body, as much undermined by the Indian cricketing body’s considerable wealth and political influence in the country as by the BJP’s now well-known tactic to take advantage of every little administrative loophole, leeway or liberty to get what it wants. The latter alone is reason enough to not expect more from the ICC, at least not without being exposed a few times to the demands of the adversarial posture engaging with the BCCI merits. Instead, the BCCI’s capitulation — completed in 2019, when Jay Shah became its secretary — and its organisational strategies in the Asia Cup and the World Cup cement the conclusion that it cares nothing for rituals and traditions in service of the spirit of the game. There is no public-spiritedness, only party-spiritedness.

And just as the BJP wins its third term to form the national goverbment, the T20 World Cup will begin.

Featured image: A surfeit of India flags among spectators of the India versus South Africa match at the Melbourne Cricket Ground, 2015. Credit: visitmelbourne, CC BY 2.0.

Justice delayed but a ton of bricks await

From ‘SC declines Ramdev, Patanjali apology; expresses concern over FMCGs taking gullible consumers ‘up and down the garden path’’, The Hindu, April 10, 2024:

The Supreme Court has refused to accept the unconditional apology from Patanjali co-founder Baba Ramdev and managing director Acharya Balkrishna for advertising medical products in violation of giving an undertaking in the apex court in November 2023 prohibiting the self-styled yoga guru. … Justices Hima Kohli and Ahsanuddin Amanullah told senior advocate Mukul Rohatgi that Mr. Ramdev has apologised only after being caught on the back foot. His violations of the undertaking to the court was deliberate and willful, they said. The SC recorded its dissatisfaction with the apology tendered by proposed contemnors Patanjali, Mr. Balkrishna and Mr. Ramdev, and posted the contempt of court case on April 16.

… The Bench also turned its ire on the Uttarakhand State Licensing Authority for “twiddling their thumbs” and doing nothing to prevent the publications and advertisements. “Why should we not come down like a ton of bricks on your officers? They have been fillibustering,” Justice Kohli said. The court said the assurances of the State Licensing Authority and the apology of the proposed contemnors are not worth the paper they are written on.

A very emotionally gratifying turn of events, but perhaps not as gratifying as they might have been had they transpired at the government’s hands when Patanjali was issuing its advertisements of pseudoscience-backed COVID-19 cures during the pandemic. Or if the Supreme Court had proceeded to actually hold the men in contempt instead of making a slew of observations and setting a date for another hearing. Still, something to cheer for and occasion to reserve some hope for the April 16 session.

But in matters involving Ramdev and Patanjali Ayurved, many ministers of the current government ought to be pulled up as well, including former Union health minister Harsh Vardhan, Union micro, small, and medium enterprises minister Nitin Gadkari, and Prime Minister Narendra Modi. Modi’s governance and policies both written and unwritten enabled Patanjali’s charlatanry while messrs Vardhan and Gadkari were present at an event in February 2021 when Patanjali launched a product it claimed could cure COVID-19, with Vardhan – who was health minister then – speaking in favour of people buying and using the unproven thing.

I think the Supreme Court’s inclination to hold Ramdev et al. in contempt should extend to Vardhan as well because his presence at the event conferred a sheen of legitimacy on the product but also because of a specific bit of theatrics he pulled in May the same year involving Ramdev and former Prime Minister Manmohan Singh. Ramdev apologising because that’s more politically convenient rather than because he thinks he screwed up isn’t new. In that May, he’d called evidence-based medicine “stupid” and alleged such medicine had killed more people than the virus itself. After some virulent public backlash, Vardhan wrote a really polite letter to Ramdev asking him to apologise, and Ramdev obliged.

But just the previous month, in April 2021, Manmohan Singh had written a letter to Modi suggesting a few courses of action to improve India’s response to the virus’s spread. Its contents were perfectly reasonable, yet Vardhan responded to it accusing Singh of spreading “vaccine hesitancy” and alleging Congress-ruled states were responsible for fanning India’s deadly second wave of COVID-19 infections (in 2021). These were all ridiculous assertions. But equally importantly, his lashing out stood in stark contrast to his letter to Ramdev: respect for the self-styled godman and businessman whose company was attempting to corner the market for COVID-19 cures with untested, pseudo-Ayurvedic froth versus unhinged rhetoric for a well-regarded economist and statesman.

For this alone, Vardhan deserves the “ton of bricks” the Supreme Court is waiting with.

The missile test before the polls

On March 27, 2019, the Defence Research and Development Organisation (DRDO) conducted ‘Mission Shakti’: India’s first anti-satellite (ASAT) missile test. After the event, the national broadcaster broadcast an hour-long speech by Prime Minister Narendra Modi. Since the Election Commission’s restrictions on poll candidates’ screen time was in effect ahead of the Lok Sabha polls that year, some of us surmised the test had been timed to allow Modi a reason to get on TV without explicitly violating the rules.

Yesterday, on March 11, the DRDO conducted a test of its new Agni 5 missile in its MIRV – short for ‘multiple independently targetable reentry vehicles’ – configuration, a powerful defence technology that allows a single suborbital missile to deliver multiple warheads (possibly nuclear) to strike different targets. This time, however, the Commission’s restrictions are not yet in effect nor has Modi tried to deliver a speech ostensibly about the test, although he has been in Pokhran today talking about ‘Bharat Shakti’, which I believe is the name of India’s programme for self-sufficiency in defence.

Surely this is some kind of pre-election muscle-flexing bluster? After the first Agni V test in April 2012, DRDO’s then chief controller of missiles Avinash Chander told Business Standard: “The primary modules of MIRV are in an advanced stage of development. Realisation and integration of them into a weapon is just a question of threat perceptions and the need as it arises.” This ‘need’ seems to be signalling to both agam and puram actors just before the national elections. It holds for the ASAT in March 2019 as well, when there was reason to believe India was ready with ASAT capability during Manmohan Singh’s tenure as prime minister, if not earlier.

In the broader view, China tested both MIRV and ASAT missiles before India, most recently in 2017 (DF-41 missile) and in 2007, respectively, notwithstanding some claims in 2008 that it was modifying its submarine-launched JL-2 MIRV to have ASAT capabilities as well. The post-test bluster by BJP leaders on both occasions was directed at China. What will India test come March 2029, I wonder.

Lookout duty

When a user asked, “Is modi a fascist”, Gemini AI responded that Mr. Modi had “been accused of implementing policies that some experts have characterized as fascist”.

“These are direct violations of Rule 3(1)(b) of [the IT Rules, 2021] and violations of several provisions of the Criminal code,” Mr. Chandrasekhar said on X, formerly Twitter. His sharp reaction reveals a fault line between the Indian government’s hands-off approach to AI research, and tech giants’ AI platforms which are keen to train their models quickly with the general public, opening them up to embarrassing confrontations with political leaders.

Google did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
‘Gemini AI’s reply to query, ‘is Modi a fascist’, violates IT Rules: Union Minister Rajeev Chandrasekhar’, The Hindu, February 23, 2024

We all understand why this is an asinine statement by the IT minister, motivated possibly by having to fuel a news cycle to distract from something else. Importantly, the people who demonstrated and popularised the habit of twisting statements out of context — e.g. reacting to “experts have called his policies fascist” as if it meant “he is fascist” — are now seemingly duty-bound to keep track of and react to each one of these opportunities in the appropriate way. Woe betide them if they slip: their own foot-soldiers might turn on them!

Schrödinger’s temple

On January 22, in a ceremony led by Prime Minister and now high-priest Narendra Modi, priests and officials allegedly consecrated the idol of Lord Ram at the new temple in Ayodhya, with many celebrities in attendance. (‘Alleged’ because I don’t know if it’s a legitimate consecration, given the disagreement between some spiritual leaders over its rituals.) TV news channels on both sides of the spectrum were outwardly revelling in the temple’s festivities, bothering not at all with covering the ceremony in a dispassionate way. Their programming was unwatchable.

This Ram temple is a physical manifestation of the contemporary Indian nation – a superposition of state and sanctum sanctorum at once, collapsing like Schrödinger’s hypothetical cat to one or the other depending on political expedience. The temple, like many others around the country now, is both kovil and katchi office (Tamil for ‘temple’ and ‘party office’).

(I’m hardly unique in these views but I also suspect I’m in a minority, with few others to reinforce their legitimacy, so I’m writing them down so they’re easier for me to recall.)

After the consecration ceremony, Prime Minister Modi delivered a speech, as is his wont, further remixing the aspirations of the Indian state and its people with a majoritarian religious identity. (The mic then passed to the treasurer of the temple trust, who spoke in praise of Modi, and RSS chief Mohan Bhagwat, who spoke in praise of Modi’s ostensible ideals.) For now, the results of the Lok Sabha elections later this year seem like a foregone conclusion, with Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party widely expected to begin a third term in May. The temple’s opening was effectively a show of strength by Modi, that he delivers on his promises no matter the obstacles in his way, even if any of them are legitimate.

Before the 2019 Lok Sabha elections, in another show of strength, the Modi government signed off on the anti-satellite (ASAT) missile test in March, in which a missile launched from the ground flew 300 km up and destroyed a dummy satellite in earth orbit. The operation was called ‘Mission Shakti’ (Hindi for ‘strength’). A statement from the Ministry of External Affairs said, “The test was done to verify that India has the capability to safeguard our space assets”. Oddly, however, the Defence R&D Organisation, which conducted the test, had had ASAT capabilities for a decade by then under its Ballistic Missile Defence programme, rendering the timing suspect.

Considering Prime Minister Modi delivered another hour-long speech after the test, I’ve been inclined to side with the theory that it was conducted to give him airtime that was otherwise unavailable due to the Election Commission’s restrictions on election candidates coming on air in a short period before polling. In 2024, of course, it’s an open secret that the Election Commission determines polling schedules based on the BJP’s convenience.

A stage-managed World Cup

I’m glad the ICC Cricket World Cup ended the way it did, with good cricket on show. I’m disappointed that India lost but, to echo Sunil Gavaskar at the post-match show, I’m glad it was only to a better team. But during the World Cup itself, there were many signs that it was stage-managed in ways that left an off-putting aftertaste, like a mix of jingoism, political interference, and flashiness. The following is a short list of examples.

1. Sundays for India: Sundays were reserved for India versus X games, whereas other teams’ games happened on the other days. The BCCI did this presumably to ensure the stadiums for the India games were full, at the expense of half or mostly empty stadiums for games featuring other teams. This is not a good look. In fact, if the BCCI wanted to maximise revenue, it could have scheduled the India games on weekdays, since people will have been willing to plan around the occasion and come to the stadium anyway, and use the Sunday games to showcase teams that won’t tour India in the foreseeable future, like Pakistan, Afghanistan, and the Netherlands. That could have been a win-win.

2. Tickets hard to get: Even before the tournament began, fans were neither able to access nor buy tickets for various matches: the former because of glitches in the booking system, including showing a stadium as being full when it actually wasn’t and outright server crashes, and the latter because the BCCI vouchsafed a significant chunk of tickets at stadiums for “sponsors, commercial partners, guests of both the ICC and the Indian board” and also “requested that states release as many tickets as possible meant otherwise for the member clubs, affiliated units, sponsors, former cricketers, life members, police, local government officials, which usually consumes a significant chunk of tickets for both international and IPL matches,” per ESPN Cricinfo.

3. Police presence: On Twitter, many of those who visited stadiums around the country reported police presence in the seating area, with some personnel taking away posters and placards supporting Pakistan (when the team was playing). Such acts of nationalism pushing the cricket back annulls the principal joy of sport and defeats the purpose of cricket being played in front of such large crowds. The spectating experience was also probably diminished by unreasonable restrictions on what people could take with them (including water bottles).

4. Cauldrons of nationalism: Australia captain Pat Cummins said before the final that he was looking forward to silencing a crowd of 100,000 people – but the adrenaline it invoked slowly but surely settled into shame. Why would a stadium of 100,000 people who claim to be there to watch a game of cricket fall silent? Australia and India are both great ODI teams and their clash could only produce great cricket, which is always worthy of cheer. But the Narendra Modi Stadium did fall silent, as if the spectators were there only to watch India win. There wasn’t a peep when Travis Head reached his century. Such silence befell many other stadiums through the tournament, especially when “jai shree Ram”s weren’t also ringing out.

5. Symbols and glam: The World Cup was, on screens, occupied with glam. The broadcaster’s cameras in all games, but especially during the final, kept focusing on the faces of film stars in the stands when they weren’t trained on the cricketers. It became kind of toxic together with – in this order – the Air Force jets’ fly past (reminiscent of nationalism’s foundational ties with sports as well as military might), the stadium-wide silence, Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s promised presence that turned into an absence around the same time India’s defence started to go downhill, and, beyond the field, many being unaware of knowing how to lose with grace.

NYT’s ISRO coverage continues assault on sense

The New York Times refuses to learn, perpetuating views of ISRO that are equal parts blurry and illiterate, and often missing points that become clearer with just a little bit of closer reading. The launch and subsequent success of Chandrayaan 3 brought its annoying gaze the way of India and its space programme, about which it published at least one article whose interpretation was at odds with reality. But for the newspaper’s stubbornness, and unmindful of the impact it has on the minds of its large audience in India, pushback is important, even just a little, when and where possible. This is another such attempt. On August 24, the day after the Chandrayaan 3 lander module descended on the moon’s surface in the south polar region, The New York Times published an article trying to tie the mission’s success with India’s ascendancy aspirations. Annotated excerpts follow:

Meet frugality porn – when this style of administration and work is exalted without acknowledging the restrictions it imposes. We see more of it in the coming paragraphs.

It’s amusing how this question – once rightly derided as superficial – has of late come to be legitimised in articles by the BBC and now The New York Times.

Just one ISRO success and this is the crap we need to deal with. What “deeply rooted tradition”? What “pillar” of India’s rise? Name one field of research and I will point you to articles discussing deep-seated problems in it, ranging from paucity of funds for research to academic freedom, from shortcomings in research infrastructure and environments that are overcome almost entirely by enterprising researchers going out of their way to help others to bureaucratic and government interference that vitiates the uptake of research findings in the public sphere. If anything, the article suggests that the blueprint India is offering other nations is: “Get one pretty important moon mission right and the world’s most read newspaper will pretend that you have arisen, to the ignorance of very real, very bad problems.”

a) The governments of India and the US have allocated to ISRO and NASA similar fractions of their national budgets. b) Scientists are paid much better in the US than in India, at all levels, after adjusting for differences in purchasing power. c) NASA operates one of the world’s best public outreach efforts for a state-run entity while ISRO has no such department. The “potent message” that The New York Times is tooting is, in sum, hard to understand and potentially dangerous.

This is the same Modi who thought it best to plaster his portrait on all vaccination certificates (instead of photos of the respective vaccinees) but refused to investigate the Adani Group after Hindenburg’s allegations, who didn’t utter a peep about the incidents of brutal violence in Delhi, Hathras, Manipur or Nuh but whose giant face appeared on the screen about to show the last few – and most important – seconds of the Chandrayaan 3 lander’s descent on the moon’s surface, sending almost every viewer nationwide into paroxysms of rage. I’m not sure of the purpose of describing him in such positive terms vis-à-vis his communication.

The outcome of the Chandrayaan 3 mission created something that has become extremely rare in India since 2014: a success that could be celebrated sans any reservations. But it didn’t prove a way to overcome the “fiercely fractious politics”; in fact, it became yet another point – among the extant thousands – over which to deepen divisions and render impotent the effects of public debate on governance. In fact, absolutely every major national success since 2014 has been used to fuel the fire that is the “fiercely fractious politics”. And again, I fail to see these resources that India “is finally getting”.

Get a historian of science and technology in India since independence – i.e. someone who studies these things closely, going beyond appearances to examine the effects of scientific and/or technological development and practices on all classes of society – to say the same thing, and then we’ll talk. Until then, spare me the superficial and status-quoist reading of the place of science in India. Some suggested reading here, here, and here.

Finally, an acknowledgment of the problem with “frugality” and “shoestring” budgets, yet not nearly in the same context. And the second highlighted line is either a bald-faced fabrication or a reluctance to acknowledge reality: that scientists have been discouraged, silenced and/or harassed when their work is something a) that the state doesn’t know how to integrate into its nationalist narratives, b) that disputes, negates or complicates something whose public understanding the state would like to control but isn’t able to, or c) that the state simply cares little for.

The highlighted portion? True everywhere, all the time. Commendable, but not special.

You’ve got to be kidding me. Here we have The New York Times reviving the desiccated corpse of the beast that so many laboured to kill and bury: the comparison of ISRO’s Mars Orbiter Mission (MOM) with the 2013 film Gravity and, by implication, NASA’s MAVEN mission. MOM was a technology demonstrator that cost Rs 454 crore (around $57 million), and whose scientific results did little to advance humankind’s understanding of Mars. Its principal accomplishment is that it got into orbit around Mars. MAVEN cost $582.5 million, or Rs 3,410.53 crore (assuming a conversion rate of Rs 58.55 to a dollar in 2013). For that its scientific output was orders of magnitude more notable than that from MOM.

As for Gravity: I’ve never understood this comparison. The film cost $80-130 million to make, according to Wikipedia; that’s 468.40-761.15 crore rupees. So what? Gattaca cost $36 million and Interstellar cost $165 million. Moon cost $5 million and Into Darkness cost $185 million. Can someone explain the comparison to me and actually have it make sense?

This is the note on which the article ends, which matters because what goes here has the privilege of delivering a psychologically impactful blow, and the writer (and/or editor) has to be careful to choose something for this portion whose blow will line up with the whole article’s overarching message. I’m disappointed that The New York Times picked this because it’s of a piece with the same casteist and classist politics and policies that, for India’s non-elite hundreds-of-millions, have disconnected “working hard” from financial, educational, biomedical, and social success even while keeping up the myth of the wholesomely gainful productivity.

A lotus for Modi, with love from Manipur

This bit of news is so chock full of metaphors that I’m almost laughing out loud. Annotated excerpts from ‘CSIR’s new lotus variety ‘Namoh 108’ a ‘grand gift’ to PM Modi: Science Minister‘, The Hindu, August 19, 2023:

It’s a triviality today that the Indian government ministers’ relentless exaltation of Prime Minister Narendra Modi is not spontaneity so much as an orchestrated thing to keep his name in the news without him having to interact with the press, and to constantly reinforce the impression that Modi is doing great work. And this “Namoh 108” drives home how the political leadership of the scientific enterprise has been pressed to this task.

Also, Jitendra Singh hasn’t been much of a science minister: almost since the day he took charge of this ministry, he has been praising his master in almost every public utterance and speech. Meanwhile, the expenditure on science and research by the government he’s part of has fallen, pseudoscience is occupying more space in several spheres (including at the IITs), and research scholars continue to have a tough time doing their work.

As likely as the flower’s discovery many years ago in Manipur is a coincidence vis-à-vis the violence underway in the northeastern state, it’s just as hard to believe government officials are not speaking up about it now to catapult it into the news – to highlight something else more benign about Manipur and to give it a BJP connection as well: the lotus has 108 petals and the party symbol is a lotus.

(Also, this is the second connection in recent times between northeast India and India as a whole in terms of the state seeing value in a botanical resource, and proceeding to extract and exploit it. In 2007, researchers found the then-spiciest chilli variety in India’s northeast. By 2010, DRDO had found a way to pack it into grenades. In 2016, a Centre-appointed committee considered these grenades as alternatives to the use of pellet guns in the Kashmir Valley.)

It seems we’re sequencing the genomes of and conducting more detailed study of only those flowers that have a Hindu number of petals. Woe betide those that have 107, 109 or even a dozen, no matter that – short of the 108 petals conferring a specific benefit to the lotus plant (apparently not the case) – this is an accident of nature. Against the backdrop of the Nagoya Protocol, the Kunming-Montreal pact, the Convention on Biological Diversity, and issues of access and benefit sharing, India – and all other countries – should be striving to study (genetically and otherwise) and index all the different biological resources available within their borders. But we’re not. We’re only interested in flowers with 108 petals.

Good luck to children who will be expected to draw this in classrooms. Good luck also to other lotuses.

I’m quite certain that someone in that meeting would have coughed, sneezed, burped, farted or sniffed before that individual said “Om Namaha Vasudeva” out loud. I’m also sure that, en route to the meeting, and aware of its agenda, the attendees would have heard someone retching, hacking or spitting. “Kkrkrkrkrkrhrhrhrhrhrhrthphoooo 108” is more memorable, no?

So there was a naming committee! I’ll bet 10 rupees that after this committee came up with “Namoh”, it handed the note to Singh, added the footnote about its imperfect resemblance to “Namo”, and asked for brownie points.

COP talks as ambition police

Part of what makes Greta Thunberg such a powerful voice in climate activism is her no-nonsense communication.

Yesterday, for example, she called the impending COP27 climate talks, to be held in Egypt on November 6-18, an opportunity for “people in power” to “greenwash”, “lie” and “cheat”. Her words are presumably referring to the world’s wealthiest nations resisting efforts by the less, and in fact the least, wealthy nations to secure more funds to adapt to the climate crisis, research and implement new technologies, resettle vulnerable people and safeguard threatened livelihoods and geographies.

In the past, wealthier countries – as well as the institutions that sustain their wealthy status – have also been reluctant to take responsibility for historical emissions and for the role of their colonialist or imperialist policies, as the came may be, in perpetrating inequity.

At the COP21 in Paris six years ago, the famous Paris Agreement was signed after intense day/night negotiations, only to come to a weak agreement on the 1.5º C threshold, and even without any legal bindings. Last year’s COP26 in Glasgow ended as a disappointment, with negotiators’ focus squarely on climate finance. At the upcoming COP27 in Egypt, the talks will take off on this point.

At this juncture, and in fact against the backdrop of the UK having defaulted on a $288 million commitment to the Green Climate Fund, Thunberg’s comments must be welcome for all the less-than-rich countries. However, the unqualified nature of her statement – painting COP27 in toto as something resembling a sham – should be unwelcome for the same group for a few reasons.

Apart from providing an arena in which nations on the roughly two sides of the climate finance crisis can meet, these climate talks, organised under the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, also provide a stage on which countries forge alliances and where – with the advantage of uninterrupted media attention – lesser known voices from remote parts of the world can make themselves heard.

But perhaps most importantly, here, less-than-wealthy countries can cooperate and squeeze just a little more commitment from the wealthier ones – because outside of these forums, negotiations are one-to-one, ad hoc and scattered, and often combine political considerations with climate-related ones in a way that could be detrimental to the latter.

For example, at COP26 last year, Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced India’s intention to become ‘net-zero’ by 2070 as well as called on wealthy countries to step up their financial support for climate mitigation activities worldwide, joining a chorus of voices making the same demand as well as responding to international pressure to declare such a target.

At the same time, India is one of Asia’s fastest-growing oil markets, and whose government has projected oil and gas demand in the country to grow 8-11% through this decade despite a lack of clarity on what these fuels will be used for. As a result, several international energy corporations are expanding their foothold in India, capitalising on the country as one of the world’s last major markets for fossil fuels. The government is encouraging this trend for the investments it brings.

At the Conference of the Parties (i.e. COP), thus, we can expect a check against our own government’s ambitions – as well as where the clout of individual governments fructifies as part of a collective bargaining enterprise. (Why not take advantage of the fact that the current Indian government is sensitive to how it’s perceived in the Western press?)

So dismissing the talks as a whole – as Thunberg has done on more than one occasion – and expecting the world’s wealthiest nations to step up is, for better or worse, not going to get us anywhere. That said, recasting the talks as a forum that works in favour of the world’s economically developing and least developed nations, by allowing them to function as a single bloc, may serve us all better. The governments of these countries also need to be held accountable after all.

Featured image: Greta Thunberg in Montreal in September 2019. Credit: Lëa-Kim Châteauneuf/Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0.

A question about India’s new science prizes

really deserving candidates

In a meeting chaired by Union home secretary Ajay Bhalla on September 16 and attended by senior members of the various science departments of the national government (DST, DBT, etc.), the Union government eliminated hundreds of awards given to the country’s scientists for achievements on various fronts and fields. Governing a country the size of India is bound to result in bloat, so it wouldn’t be possible to dismiss this move by the government out of hand. However, the three words above make an appearance among Bhalla’s many utterances in the meeting and they are worthy of suspicion.

The Indian government under Narendra Modi has regularly used vague adjectives to accommodate a diversity of possibilities instead of committing to one course of action over another. Perhaps the best known example is its use of the “national security” excuse to refuse answers to questions under the RTI Act, such as what the scientific payloads of the Chandrayaan 2 and 3 missions were or why the FCR Act was amended. Other examples include any assurance made by Prime Minister Modi, such as on the occasion he was forced to repeal the regrettable farm laws.

In December 2019, physicist Brian Skinner uploaded a preprint paper to the arXiV server in which he quantified the effect of a “prestige bias” on the professional trajectories of scientists who are subjected to multiple rounds of evaluation. I’ve had occasion to return to this analysis on multiple occasions because, to me, it arrives at an essential, irreducible truth of the world: that keeping the conditions of entry to some space vague doesn’t just allow for arbitrary decision-making but inevitably causes such decision-making. As Skinner wrote:

For example, two applicants for graduate school may have similar grades and exam scores, but if one candidate comes from a more prestigious university then their application will, in general, be evaluated more highly. This ‘prestige bias’ arises naturally, since metrics like grades and exam scores are imprecise measures of a student’s ability, and thus the evaluator looks for any other information available to help with their decision. Belonging to a prestigious group suggests that the candidate was ranked highly by some other evaluator in the past, and this provides a prior expectation (like a second opinion) that biases the decision in their favor.

Vagueness when the stakes are high can’t be innocent, especially once it has been identified, because the more powerful can and will use the resulting uncertainty to their advantage. Here as well, when Bhalla has determined that a small number of new prizes should replace the plethora of the now-extinct prizes and that they ought to be given to “really deserving candidates”, it brings to mind the “really deserving” corporations that are winning contracts for mines, ports and defence manufacturing, the “really deserving” businessmen whose wealth has increased disproportionately to that of their peers, and the “really deserving” ministries and departments that are receiving an increasing fraction of the Union government’s budgetary allocations.

Granted, drafting and holding a fixed definition of the term ‘deserving’ can only be bad for the people and the government both. But when any doubts or uncertainties about its ambit are likely to be abused by the government – awarding India’s top honour for scientific work to, say, Appa Rao Podile or M. Jagadesh Kumar over Gagandeep Kang or Rakesh Mishra – our options are limited to a meaningless science prize that represents, above all else, the BJP’s successful subversion of another science-related space (after the IITs) for the nationalist project versus a prize that is much more meaningful but whose terms are rigid and unresponsive to the times.