Mint | America is not yet declining but appears willing to let itself down

I spent the mid-2000s arguing why Indian foreign policy must make a decisive shift towards the United States. The shadow of the Cold War had not yet dissolved and memories of US support for Pakistan’s proxy war were still alive in the minds of the country’s strategic establishment. The Vajpayee government had initiated a shift in thinking after the 1998 nuclear tests and prime minister Manmohan Singh was pushing for a major breakthrough in the form of a nuclear deal. Read the full article here.

Ambedkar said protests were unconstitutional. But what about protests to restore Constitution?

Let’s first parse what Ambedkar had warned against in his final speech to the Constituent Assembly in November 1949: “We must…hold fast to constitutional methods of achieving our social and economic objectives. It means we must abandon the bloody methods of revolution. It means that we must abandon the method of civil disobedience, non-cooperation, and satyagraha. When there was no way left for constitutional methods for achieving economic and social objectives, there was a great deal of justification for unconstitutional methods. But where constitutional methods are open, there can be no justification for these unconstitutional methods. These methods are nothing but the Grammar of Anarchy and the sooner they are abandoned, the better for us.” (Emphasis mine.)The key sentence in this important paragraph is the one where he points out that when there is no way left for constitutional methods, public protests are justified. After the Supreme Court repeatedly failed to uphold basic fundamental rights and balance the Narendra Modi government’s overreach, there is a question mark on whether there is any way left for constitutional methods. The religion-based criteria in the CAA is unconstitutional. When citizens wanted to protest against the bill, many state governments imposed prohibitory orders under Section 144 of the IPC and arrested protesters. Internet access was shut down in many places across the country. In some places, police action was blatantly unconstitutional.Read more

Empowerment and Fragility

Zeynep Tufecki’s book, Twitter and Tear Gas, is an insightful analysis of the impact of social media on protests and social movements in today’s radically networked societies.

Most of the commentary about the role of social media in creating political communities either glorifies these media platforms (think Arab Spring) or vilifies them for their propensity to spread fake news and to create echo chambers (think Trump’s election campaign). Zeynep Tufecki’s book, Twitter and Tear Gas, however, provides a much-needed nuanced analysis on how digital platforms have altered the way in which a social movement’s dynamics play out. With the aim of understanding the challenges and strengths of digital activism, Tufecki tells a fascinating story of how social media empowers protests while simultaneously also exacerbating the fragilities of these movements.It is well known by now that the primary strength of networked public protests is the speed with which a large number of people and resources can be mobilised. This is because social media makes it easy to find people who share your political viewpoints even across geographical boundaries. What is not obvious, however, is that the speed and ease of participation also become a weakness of the networked movements. This is because ad hoc planning doesn’t allow for building capacities among protesters, which is needed to sustain a movement in the long-term. Often this results in the networked movements facing a tactical freeze in the face of changing circumstances.Read more here>