Opinion Equal, but not separate
Discrimination against Northeast must be addressed. But not through band-aid, or separate, solutions That the lead players in this election season — Narendra Modi, Rahul Gandhi and Arvind Kejriwal — have trained the spotlight on the Nido Taniam case is heartening. It also gives reason to hope for more considered responses from the government. To […]
Discrimination against Northeast must be addressed. But not through band-aid, or separate, solutions
That the lead players in this election season — Narendra Modi, Rahul Gandhi and Arvind Kejriwal — have trained the spotlight on the Nido Taniam case is heartening. It also gives reason to hope for more considered responses from the government. To this end, the Union Home Ministry has announced the setting up of a committee to “examine the concerns of persons from the Northeast living in other parts of the country”. The political conversation on this issue is welcome but New Delhi’s response comes across as predictable band aid. It seems improbable that a new committee can offer, within two months, a cure to the patent and everyday discrimination faced by persons from the Northeast across India, including in their own states. The terms of reference of the committee include “suggesting measures [and legal remedies] to be taken by the government” to address the causes behind the attacks and discrimination against persons from the Northeast. Rather than proposing fresh and special legislation, however, the committee would do better to push for effective implementation of existing laws. Region-specific “antidotes” would run the risk of getting mired in the complex identity politics of the Northeast, doing little to bring into the mainstream the issue of the harassment of its peoples. In fact, a comprehensive anti-discrimination code — one that addresses the concerns of marginalised communities, including from the Northeast — may help more in tackling the problems of unjust treatment, without lending itself to identity battles and turf wars.
The new committee’s primary mandate is the safety and well-being of people from the Northeast, mostly the youth, who migrate to other parts of the country in search of better economic opportunities. This concern cannot be divorced from the alienation ordinary Northeast citizens feel at home. In the last six decades, the Union government has often pandered to influential groups in the region, bartering “autonomy” for a more meaningful control of its political economy. In states like Manipur, there is the added issue of the persistence of the controversial AFSPA. Whether the committee will broach these fraught issues remains to be seen.
The economic empowerment of the Northeast is intrinsically linked to the dignity of its residents and Modi, for instance, has spoken of making Manipur an “IT hub”. But if promises such as these are not to remain mere election-time rhetoric, Delhi’s political class will have to do some heavy-lifting to facilitate the unhindered flow of commerce to the state. While being sensitive to the unique history and political culture of the Northeast, every attempt should be made to highlight the concerns of discrimination and economic lag at par with those faced by communities across India.
Top of the Game
Top of the game Cricket’s centre of gravity has officially shifted. But with greater power, comes greater responsibility
The International Cricket Council’s plan to restructure the game finally, and expectedly, gained enough votes at its board meeting. Pushed by the “big three” of cricket, India, England and Australia, the new revenue-sharing and policy framework, in effect, gives India the kind of clout in the affairs of the game that it had anyway been asserting for years. So, now when BCCI chief N.
Srinivasan takes over as the ICC chairperson, the ascent is of a different order than the rise of earlier Indian chiefs of the ICC.
Then, the older, colonial-era hierarchies of cricket were being challenged, and Indians made their bids in solidarity with other Asian and African boards. Now India, strengthened further in its proven capacity for unilateralism with the profitable IPL, has accommodated itself at the top of the pile, dissociating itself from the fray — in fact, while it shares the advantage of sanctioned entrenchment with England and Australia in the newly-minted executive committee and finance and commercial affairs committee, by virtue of formal acknowledgement of its claim on maximum revenue, the centre of gravity has officially shifted.
Whether this be to the good or not of the game depends on how this clout is wielded by the big three at the ICC and also how their national boards act upon their enhanced power. The changes include abandonment of the Future Tours Programme, a mandated (though not uniformly heeded) schedule by which each Test-playing country visited and hosted every other. Now the number of Test matches and their schedule will be bilaterally negotiated. To the extent that this change would allow for keenly contested Test series that the five-day format desperately needs, with a fund maintained to aid the other seven (non-big three) Test countries, this is to the game’s good.
The devil lies in how the assertion of individual boards in cricket’s hierarchy will address the problems in its administration. After, for instance, the IPL scandals of 2013 highlighted the mis-management, gross conflicts of interest and after-us-the-deluge mindset in the BCCI, it became clear exactly how effete the ICC was in even stating, leave alone implementing, a proper code. Affairs of cricket have to be addressed domestically. To cleanse the game the BCCI needs to be fixed. That process is nowhere near begun.
Starring Us
Increasingly, we go to the social network to watch ourselves. Thankfully, the images are ephemeral.
If your life were a movie, you would be its star. Well, what do you know, Facebook has cast you in one. Mark Zuckerberg’s social network is 10 years old this month, and for eight of those years — since September 2006 when it was opened to the public — we have watched it monetise the humdrum minutiae of our lives, from the breakfast crumbs we leave on our status messages to the photos of the parties we rocked. If it has persuaded us to not bother about privacy, it’s because it has nudged us — our duckfaces and our opinions — into the centre of a hyperactive online world. The selfie was made for Facebook, wasn’t it?
For its birthday party, the Facebook team left a gift for its users on their timelines — a Look Back film of their time on the social network. It was more like a 62-second slideshow of all the flattering profile pictures they posted, and the ones that sought and found the most likes. For that endangered breed, which believes in low profiles and not in shiny happy pictures — and which, thus, contributes little to the Facebook revenue model — it only had a dry thank-you. There were those discomfited by ex-es and embarrassingly candid moments popping up in their video. The network, which knows the importance of appearances, has a remedy: you can edit your video in the coming days.
The idea has gone viral because it is perfectly possible to be moved by the mundane details of one’s airbrushed life — and watch them again and again. But, more because the internet continues to be the repository of our personal narratives, where we go to find our voice, and have it amplified to a wider world and what seems tantalisingly close to a community. True, the videos are uniformly cheesy and rather dull. But, thankfully, in the spirit of the online ephemeral, they are quickly, if not already, forgotten.
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