The Hindu Editorial

Discussion
 27-May-2021

01 CULTURAL MAPPING PROJECT

02 INDIA’S ACT EAST POLICY

LAKSHADWEEP RESTRICTIONS
03
 Topic

• Write a short note on the evolution of India’s Look East policy.

Discuss the challenges faced by India’s Act east policy. 250 words
Losing the way
with a map

GS PAPER I

Indian culture will cover

the salient aspects of Art
Forms, Literature and
Architecture from ancient
to modern times..
 Losing the way with a map
• A cultural mapping project proposed in 2015 is now all but dead
• The official boasting about India being a cultural powerhouse rapidly
disintegrates when you examine facts.
• An online resource for arts and culture, Sahapedia, recently ran the budget
numbers for the Ministry of Culture (MoC) and the figures are appalling.
• While allocations for culture have been marginal at best over the last decade,
they have declined in the last five years, now standing at a mere 0.07% of the
Budget.
• For 2021-22, the budget for the MoC is just ₹2,688 crore, with another ₹4 crore
accruing from indirect allocations to other ministries.
• If one were to make a vulgar comparison, one Rafale jet costs ₹1,670 crore.
 Losing the way with a map
• So, the annual budget of the MoC — which runs three Akademis, 70-odd
museums, three national galleries, several national libraries and archives,
cultural institutions of the size of the National School of Drama and
Kalakshetra, zonal cultural centres, and more — equals 1.5 Rafales.
 Losing the way with a map
• When the pandemic struck last year, instead of helping beleaguered artists and
artisans, the government slashed culture funding by a further 21%.
• Contrast this to countries like China, Singapore, Australia and the U.K., which
increased allocations, besides announcing billion-dollar relief packages.
• Additionally, the government’s cultural institutions are plagued by vacancies
(ranging from 30% to 70%) and lack of trained manpower.
• This means fund usage has invariably been random and ill-planned.
 What mapping can do
• This chaos was attributed, correctly, to the absence of a comprehensive
cultural map that would chart geographies, artists, resources and institutions,
find the gaps, and ensure optimal fund utilisation.
• Thus was born, in 2015, the National Mission on Cultural Mapping.
• But the Mission, created with an outlay of ₹3,000 crore, was not officially
approved until 2017.
• In 2018-19 and 2019-20, only ₹42.78 crore was allocated, of which ₹1.17 crore
has been utilised.
• The exercise was supposed to begin by identifying artists at the block level, but
this was abandoned as there was no IT infrastructure, ironic when the
government has an app for everything.
 What mapping can do
• What can mapping do? At the least, it can create a database that anybody can
plug into, thus becoming a resource for the media, researchers and funders.
• At its best, it can do so much more.
• It can, for instance, locate a derelict cinema and renovate it as an auditorium in
a town where there are none, or create transport and tourism infrastructure
around a declining crafts village.
• When the European Capitals of Culture programme picked Glasgow, the city
was rife with crime and poverty.
• The programme built and renovated its cultural facilities, created a garden
festival, and constructed a museum.
• Today, Glasgow has among the highest per capita culture budgets in Britain.
 The mission document
• The possibilities are endless.
• But what do we find when we study this project’s mission document?
• After a lot of platitudinous rambling, it finally states that it will identify, collect
and record cultural assets and resources.
• It correlates this to planning and strategising.
• It mentions a portal and a database listing organisations, spaces, facilities,
festivals and events.
• It also states that this database can be used to preserve culture and provide or
ameliorate livelihoods.
 The mission document
• But beyond this, it descends into la-la land. From a childish SWOT analysis to
expecting arts to curb anti-social elements to roping artists into the Swachh
Bharat and Namami Gange schemes, the plan loses its way inside a jungle of
homilies and acronyms.
• There’s a Hamari Sanskriti Hamari Pahchan Abhiyan for “cultural awareness”,
which suggests an ideological slant. There is a project with an indecipherable
title — ‘Design for Desire and Dream’.
• There is hollow jargon such as “Create holistic thinking in artists to make them
job creators rather than job seekers”.
• From pontification, it hops on to talent hunts, to digital literacy, to training
online teachers.
• Why should a mapping exercise organise competitions or train teachers?
• Its job is merely to record and collate.
 The mission document
• This might still be meaningless twaddle, but it becomes harmful when it
proceeds to talk of using art to “preserve family values”; of quizzes and
contests to “revive tribal traditions”; of a “grading process” for artists in which
apparatchiks decide which artist is “good” or “not so good”.
• And, as always, this government displays its obsession with surveillance and
control, proposing yet another Unique Identification Code for every artist/
institution, ostensibly to facilitate schemes.
 The mission document
• Where does hand-holding stop and meddling begin?
• That’s the question the MoC must answer.
• A cultural map could be a vital tool in the bedlam that reigns the space, and
the idea cannot be abandoned because many bureaucrats and ministers don’t
understand its meaning or scope.
• Even this blueprint can help unravel the MoC’s budgetary challenges, provided
its irrelevancies, absurdities and overreach are removed, and the focus kept on
a deeper survey and understanding of the diversity of the cultural base,
without caste, communal and regional hierarchies.
• To be a cultural leader, official India must look at its own face in a clearer
mirror.
What’s going wrong with
India’s Act East policy?

GS PAPER II
Bilateral, regional
and global
groupings and
agreements
involving India.

Written by Sanjaya Baru

 What’s going wrong with India’s Act East policy?
• Indian diplomacy must take a fresh look at its Southeast Asia policy and the
constraints being imposed on it by unsatisfactory economic performance and
sectarian and communal politics at home.
• The reaction in Singapore to Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal’s recent
remarks about a Singapore variant of Covid and his related critical comments
should alert Indian policymakers and foreign policy analysts to a wider and
larger challenge to India’s standing in Southeast Asia as a whole.
• External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar, who has a good understanding of
Singapore and the region and who has maintained good relations with top
leaders in the island republic, was quick to nip the controversy in the bud.
• However, it would be wrong to assume that this was merely a storm in a
Chinese tea cup.
 What’s going wrong with India’s Act East policy?
• The reaction of Singapore’s government and, more importantly, its civil society,
draws attention to a larger problem India faces in what used to be called the
Indo-China region.
• Ever since 1992 when Prime Minister PV Narasimha Rao enunciated a “Look
East Policy” reaching out to Southeast Asia, India has engaged the region on all
fronts — diplomatic and security, economic and people-to-people.
• Prime Ministers Atal Bihari Vajpayee and Manmohan Singh built on Narasimha
Rao’s foundation and constructed a robust relationship with the Association of
Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), so much so that in 2007 Singapore’s
founder-mentor, Lee Kuan Yew, a longstanding India sceptic, went to the extent
of naming China and India as the two engines of Asian economic growth.
 What’s going wrong with India’s Act East policy?
• Continuing this approach, Prime Minister Narendra Modi graduated Look East
into an Act East policy.
• Three developments over the past five years are, however, testing Indian
diplomacy in the region.
1. First, the rising profile of China combined with growing China-India tensions;
2. second, disappointment in the region with India’s economic under-
performance;
3. and, third, rising concern in the region with India’s approach towards its
minorities, especially Muslims and Christians.
 What’s going wrong with India’s Act East policy?
• China’s accelerated rise since the trans-Atlantic financial crisis and the growing
assertiveness of the Xi Jinping regime initially generated a strong pro-India
sentiment in the region with many ASEAN countries wanting India to balance
China’s enhanced power.
• However, India’s economic slowdown and inward orientation, expressed
through the decision to stay out of the Regional Comprehensive Economic
Partnership (RCEP) agreement, disappointed regional business.
• While ASEAN and Indian governments tried to maintain good relations,
Southeast Asia’s powerful business groups, mostly ethnic Chinese, began losing
interest in India.
 What’s going wrong with India’s Act East policy?
• On a parallel track, pride in China’s rise has gained ground among ethnic
Chinese across the region.
• This was first triggered by China’s impressive staging of the Beijing Olympics in
2008, with Southeast Asia’s ethnic Chinese deriving vicarious pride.
• China’s response to the 2008-09 financial crisis and its growing economic role
in the region added to its improved standing among both local business and
civil society.
• However, even as recently as 2017, during the Doklam stand-off between
China and India, many ASEAN governments conveyed their quiet support for
India in the hope that a robust response from India would keep China’s
geopolitical ambitions in the region under check.
• It would seem that between Doklam and Galwan there has been a change in
the Southeast Asian assessment of China and India.
 What’s going wrong with India’s Act East policy?
• How much of this is due to a willingness to accommodate Chinese interests
among the region’s elites or due to a growing admiration for China’s assertion
of power within the ethnic Chinese community in the region or due to a
disappointment with India, is moot.
 What’s going wrong with India’s Act East policy?
• If ethnic Chinese loyalties define one segment of Southeast Asian civil society,
Islamic faith defines another large segment.
• Growing concern about Hindu majoritarianism in India has impacted civil
society attitudes in countries like Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand and Singapore.
• India deployed the soft power of “Buddhist diplomacy” but that too has not
gained much traction as inter-religious tensions in the region grow.
• In most ASEAN countries, ethnic Chinese practise Islam, Buddhism or
Christianity.
• The growing assertion of a Hindu personality by India’s present ruling
dispensation has weakened India’s soft power, globally and in this region.
 What’s going wrong with India’s Act East policy?
• Taken together, all these developments weakened the business-to-business
(B2B) and people-to-people (P2P) connect between India and ASEAN despite
the best efforts of hard-pressed diplomats to maintain good government-to-
government (G2G) relations.
• While a lot of foreign policy analysis focuses on G2G relations and official
policy statements, and a lot of this can be cited to claim that all is well with
India-ASEAN relations, few are paying attention to how trends in civil society
and domestic politics are being shaped.
• The bottom line is that despite the best intentions of an Act East Policy, India’s
standing and image in Southeast Asia have suffered.
 What’s going wrong with India’s Act East policy?
• It is not enough to attribute it all to China’s rising hard power in economic and
security terms.
• India was successful till a few years ago in holding this back with its own hard
and soft power.
• More recently, however, Southeast Asian states and civil society seem less
impressed by Indian hard and soft power even as their fear and/or admiration
of China has gone up.
• Both China’s direct influence and that of ethnic Chinese in the region are on
the rise.
 What’s going wrong with India’s Act East policy?
• On top of these developments the narrative on the origins and handling of the
pandemic has, curiously, generated a pro-China sentiment among the region’s
ethnic Chinese communities and many see China as having handled the
challenge efficiently while India is seen to have bungled.
• Drawing attention to ASEAN’s increasingly accommodative approach towards
China, Sophie Boisseau du Rocher of the French Institute of International
Relations, Paris, recently observed, “The Covid-19 crisis has made this trend
more obvious, highlighting not only the internalisation of this ‘privileged
relationship’ but also a more disturbing — but unspoken — reality: Southeast
Asian countries’ acceptance of China’s soft power and their dependence on it.
• This change of tone is indeed good news for China’s proactive diplomacy.”
(thediplomat.com/2020/04/what-covid-19-reveals-about-china-southeast-
asia-relations/)
 What’s going wrong with India’s Act East policy?
• What these trends suggest is that Indian diplomacy must take a fresh look at
its Act East policy and the constraints being imposed on it by unsatisfactory
economic performance and sectarian and communal politics at home.
• There is only that much that diplomats can do when politicians pursue policies
that diminish the country rather than enhance its global standing.
Lakshadweep
restrictions

GS PAPER II

Government policies and

interventions for
development in various
sectors and issues arising
out of their design and
implementation.
 Lakshadweep restrictions
• The Centre should recall the Lakshadweep Administrator and drop his ill-
conceived plans
• Lakshadweep, an archipelago of 36 islands totalling 32 square kilometres in
the Arabian Sea, has had an idyllic existence as a Union Territory.
• But no longer, it seems, as the long arm of Delhi is rummaging around the
islands these days.
• Praful K. Patel, a BJP politician from Gujarat, who arrived as Administrator in
December, appears determined to upend the landscape and recast the lives of
the islanders, around 70,000 of them, all according to his authoritarian
imagination.
• The draft Lakshadweep Development Authority Regulation 2021 gives
sweeping powers to the Administrator to take over land and forcibly relocate
people, and proposes harsh punishment to those who resist.
 Lakshadweep restrictions
• In other measures, proposed or implemented, the consumption or sale of beef,
a part of the food habits of many, could be an offence punishable by seven
years in prison; those who have more than two children cannot contest
panchayat elections.
• Anyone could be held in prison without reason up to a year, under a new
Goonda Act, in a place that has a very low crime rate.
• The traditional livelihood of fishing communities has been impeded by
mindless regulations that deny them access to coastlines.
• Their sheds on the coastal areas have been demolished, saying they violated
the Coast Guard Act.
• Dairy farms run by the administration have been shut.
 Lakshadweep restrictions
• Development, as it is coming, is not a promise, but a serious threat to the
people of Lakshadweep and the fragile ecosystem.
• Mr. Patel is no stranger to controversies. In March, the Mumbai Police named
him as an accused in a case related to the death by suicide of seven-time Dadra
and Nagar Haveli MP Mohan Delkar. Mr. Patel was named in the suicide note.
• He is the first politician to become the Administrator.
• In the last five months, he has demonstrated a unique disregard for the
people’s concerns and priorities. In the absence of any administrative rationale
or public good in these blatantly arbitrary measures, there are fears of other
motivations.
• Commercial interests could be at play, and the land that inhabitants are forced
to part with could be transferred to buyers from outside.
• There could also be ill-advised political plans to change the demography of the
islands.
 Lakshadweep restrictions
• People have risen in protest, but far from listening to them, the Administrator
seems insistent on his plans.
• Rajya Sabha Members from Kerala, K.C. Venugopal of the Congress and
Elamaram Kareem of the CPI(M) have in separate letters urged the President to
recall the Administrator.
• The rationale for carving out Union Territories as an administrative unit is to
protect the unique cultural and historical situations of their inhabitants.
• The Centre is inverting its responsibility to protect into a licence to interfere.
• It must recall the Administrator and reassure the islanders.