Good morning and welcome to the BS Views newsletter!
Our Opinion Page today ranges over a variety of topics, somewhat akin to a well-laid out buffet table, wherein you can take your pick of what you like. Our edits and columns are laid out in terms of national security issues, some suggestions for the Budget tomorrow, the imperatives of good journalism, and the emergence of middlebrow writing in Hindi publishing. Let’s dig in.
Our lead editorial today lauds the launch of the National Critical Minerals Mission as a response to concerns about the reliability of supply chains in this century. With China leading the production of most minerals essential for new technologies, making India self-reliant is even more urgent. Perhaps it is time the Indian private sector also steps up to invest in these areas, not just for profit but also for the sake of India’s growth and energy security
In a welcome move, India and China have once again embarked on a path of rapprochement, a move that could well be seen as a united front in the face of looming US tariffs. However, the relationship is fraught with historical mistrust. Even now, China’s territorial claims and its building of a dam on the Tsang-po, or upper Brahmaputra, remains points of concern. Likewise, China is apprehensive about India’s growing involvement in the Quad security grouping.
In our first column, R Kavita Rao offers three short-term solutions that tomorrow’s Union Budget could look at. The easy choice is lower tax rates, which would put more money in consumers’ pockets. But she also points out that reducing the cess on diesel could ease inflationary pressures at a time when a fall in the rupee will inevitably lead to higher energy import prices. She also calls for a reduction in the central component of the GST, which could provide relief to a much larger pool of consumers without tinkering with SGST rates.
In a world where Elon Musk declares everyone a journalist, what does it really mean for the profession? Suveen Sinha argues that good practices ensure that journalists can continue to be the watchmen of fact-based information for readers, despite the shuttering of fact-checking units by social media giants like Meta. The rise of social, and by default, digital media is not the end of journalism; on the contrary, it makes it all the more important.
For our final piece, Akankshya Abismruta takes us through the evolution of both the Hindi language as well as its growth arc via magazines and a readership that was primarily female. In her review of Aakriti Mandhwani’s ‘Everyday Reading: Hindi Middlebrow and the North Indian Middle class’, she finds that, post-Independence, Hindi publications reached out to a new generation of Hindi-reading women. The democratisation of the language and the active engagement with readers through subscription libraries and back-and-forth letters to editors ensured the growth of a new middlebrow genre of Hindi magazines.