 "Books")
Halfway through India’s presidency of the G20, the immense opportunities and challenges the country faces in trying to assert itself on the world stage are amply clear.
It is the former that a review in Business Standard this past week dealt with. G20@2023: The Roadmap to Indian Presidency by V Srinivas appears perfectly timed to cash in on the celebration by the Indian government of the G20 presidency — over 200 meetings are being organised across 55 cities. Indeed, the presidency looks like a victory lap showcasing the current government’s prowess in foreign relations in the lead-up to the general elections.
Dammu Ravi, a serving Indian Foreign Service officer who reviewed the book, says its author, a secretary in the Union government, draws “insights from the practical lens of an officer who was witness to diplomatic dynamics at play in multilateral institutions at close quarters as chief staff officer to India’s finance and foreign ministers and later as advisor to the executive director of the International Monetary Fund from 2001 to 2006”.
The book acts as a primer providing historical context about previous presidencies and what was achieved then.
Consensus is the key here, but achieving it is tricky, especially this year amid festering tensions between Russia and China on the one hand and the Western powers on the other, as this paper has reported in the past few months.
In this light, the book appears to be of particular interest because Ravi points out, “It highlights the agonising rounds of negotiations for achieving consensus”.
However, the persistence of some challenges that the grouping hoped to solve in the past is noteworthy. For instance, the issue of sovereign debt burden, which “continues to hang like a Damocles’ sword over much of the developing world”, as Ravi points out.
Another priority for India is the reform of the Bretton Woods institutions, a position reiterated many times, including during Union Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman’s visit to the US to attend the spring meetings of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund.
Talking about primers, MS Sriram, faculty at the Indian Institute of Management, Bangalore, reviewed The Great Bank Robbery: NPAs, Scams, and the Future of Regulation by V Pattabhi Ram and Sabyasachee Dash.
In this case, too, the topic is of great interest, as testified by a successful TV show and a big-budget Bollywood movie on this topic that were produced in the past three years. Besides, history appears to be repeating elsewhere in the world, as this article in the FT highlights a craze for heritage tulip bulbs.
About the book, Sriram says, the foreword by Bibek Debroy may be better than the rest of it. “The book is structured as a series of short insights that could be at best blog posts on the various scandals that have haunted the financial sector. So, it is not exactly a bank robbery, but a scam series,” writes Sriram.
The book is written in the format of a dialogue between three generations of a family, providing an explanation of technical terms, a factual note and a conversation.
But, writes Sriram, “Notwithstanding its purpose, it is an irritating book to engage in largely because it does not define the reader — whether it is a child, a common person, a student of business. This book is certainly not addressed to the decently informed”.
Elsewhere, Rajiv Shirali reviewed Sam Miller’s Migrants: The Story of Us All. It is a book that appears anachronistic, especially at a time when the wounds of earlier episodes of forced migration are yet to heal. For instance, California’s task force for reparations for Black residents is still grappling with the extent of compensation it may have to pay them.
In Migrants, writes Shirali, Miller questions the notion that humans are naturally sedentary. And there are many takers for this view, especially as populations in wealthy countries age, sparking a demand for labour, and in light of the looming climate change crisis.
But, as recent history has shown, such migration is never welcomed in the host country, including in the US. However, Miller points out that not all migration is a result of strife.
But, writes Shirali, “Surely, it requires extraordinary circumstances to persuade humans to abandon home and hearth, and start afresh farther afield”.
And finally, this week, there was also a review by Jayant Tripathi in the pages of BS of a new book on the history of sedition in India.
In A Constitution to Keep: Sedition and Free Speech in Modern India, author Rohan J Alva traces the historical twists surrounding the law of sedition, its relation to the Constitution, “and the eventual emergence of sedition as a reasonable restriction to the fundamental right of free speech and expression in independent India”.
In this, the 75th year of Independence, it is perhaps necessary to engage with the First Amendment introduced by Parliament and the subsequent trajectory of Supreme Court rulings that rolled back “all the good intentions of the founding fathers of our republic”. In this instance, blaming the first prime minister is justified.
Though the Supreme Court has directed the government to not register any new cases under Section 124A till it is reviewed, Tripathi says the author calls it a Pyrrhic victory, “as the even more stringent provisions of the UAPA continue to treat sedition as a crime”.
The book, says Tripathi, is “extremely well-researched...taking the reader through an almost rollercoaster ride, showing that legal history can sometimes be almost a potboiler, with unexpected twists and turns”.
