Scratch pad, Sunday April 7 edition

THE Election Commission of India is an autonomous constitutional authority responsible for administering state and national elections. It says so right there on its website.

The EC has removed the Police Commissioner of Kolkata and other senior officers from their posts, with immediate effect. The EC has transferred the Chief Secretary of Andhra Pradesh for not complying with its orders to remove three police officers. The EC has filed an FIR against Prakash Ambedkar for threatening to send the EC to jail for two days if his government came to power. The EC has objected to the lyrics of the campaign song of the Congress party. All of this happened during the three days I was away from this blog.

That is how you expect the Election Commission to behave: alert and vigilant in the cause of ensuring free and fair elections. Tough. Proactive. No nonsense. Zero tolerance for any violation of the Model Code of Conduct… But then again….

The Vice Chairman of Niti Aayog violates the MCC. The EC “conveys its displeasure” and advises “caution in the future”. Kalyan Singh, Governor of Rajasthan, shills for the BJP. The EC asks for a report. It finds that Singh has violated the MCC, and forwards its report to the President of India. Who in turn forwards it to the Home Ministry for “action” — and that is the last we have heard of that. Adityanath refers to “Modiji ka sena“, a clear violation of the EC’s order that the armed forces cannot be used for poll propaganda. The EC suggests that Adityanath should be “more careful in future“. A BJP MP is caught on candid camera talking of how much it costs to bribe voters. The EC has asked for an explanation. The EC says an earlier Modi program flogging Operation Shakti did not violate the letter of the Model Code of conduct, “but we can’t say it about the spirit of the code.” (Emphasis mine)

So what happens when the EC so blatantly plays favourites? Transgressions multiply. Adityanath says the Congress is infected with the “Muslim virus” — another violation. Varun Gandhi promises voters in Sultanpur that his envelope will reach them, even if he doesn’t — another clear violation. (Besides, the ED and IT authorities who have been raiding opposition leaders from Kanyakumari to Kashmir should be interested in finding out what money this is and where it came from — but don’t hold your breath.) Mukhtar Abbas Naqvi uses the same “Modiji ki sena” trope the EC asked Adityanath to be “careful” about. It doesn’t even cause a ripple. Oh and while on this, a TN anti-corruption crusader filed an affidavit with the EC that he has 1.76 lakh crore in cash — and the affidavit was accepted, proving just how much scrutiny there is, or isn’t.

That is how you do it, folks — just keep piling abuse on abuse, safe in the knowledge that the watchdog body — the “chowkidars” of the election process — will let you get away with murder while doing all it can to target your opponents. And while on the EC, and abuse:

Money was seized from the convoy of the Chief Minister of Arunachal Pradesh, one day before Modi was to campaign in the state. A Business Standard report says that on average, Rs 67 crore is being seized every single day from various parts of the country; a total of Rs 1460 crore worth of money, liquor and drugs has been seized as of April 1, and a bulk of that from the dry state of Gujarat, world famous as the birthplace of the ‘Gujarat Model’.

If demonetisation was intended to rid the country of unaccounted money, where is all this cash coming from? Just one of the many questions that arise from this flood of illicit cash corrupting the election system; another is electoral bonds, but I’ll get to that another day.

HARKING back to Adityanath’s comment about Modi’s army for a moment, MoS for Home Affairs VK Singh had one of those rare moments when the better angels of his nature prompted him to protest the UP CM’s comment.

“Which army are we talking about?” Singh told BBC in an apparent reference to Adityanath’s remarks. “Are we talking about the Indian Army, or the army of political workers [of the BJP]? I do not know the reference here. If somebody says the Indian Army is the army of Modi, he is not only wrong, but a traitor. The Indian Army belongs to India, not to any political party.”

Give the former army man a round of applause. A very brief round of applause, because no sooner were the words out of his mouth than wisdom dawned. In the BJP, you don’t go against the official party line — which is that Modi personally led the Indian strike on Balakot (Modi ne ghar mein ghuske maara, the PM keeps parroting on the stump, pompously referring to himself in the third person). And so Singh backtracked rapidly:

“BBC Hindi has done just that for which I had coined the word ‘presstitute’. I have a record of what I said. It appears the reporter was asleep or he deliberately cut and paste to frame a false statement. Well done, …. (journalist’s name) — how much money did you get??”

Firstly, he didn’t coin the word. Secondly, he uses the pejorative to slur a reporter doing his job, and adds libel to injury by suggesting that the reporter took money to twist the minister’s words.

How easy it was for the Union minister to insult the reporter by claiming that the latter quoted him out of context- a new trend after leaders get caught off guard in cases of verbal diarrhoea on air. Nonetheless, this interview is priceless. Please don't share it widely. 😉 pic.twitter.com/oNDKJHiZwa

— Piyush Rai (@Benarasiyaa) April 6, 2019

How do you say this politely?: The former army officer is a coward, without the courage of even his brief convictions. He is also an idiot who hasn’t figured out that you cannot claim to be “misquoted” in a video interview.

Adding an unnecessary coat of irony, there is this: TimesNow reports that VK Singh, in his capacity as MoS for Home Affairs, has dismissed the EC notice against Adityanath.

THE Enforcement Directorate has asked the CBI Court to issue notice to Republic TV in connection with the alleged leak (Or, to use Republic-speak, “accessed”) of a chargesheet filed in the Augusta Westland case. To what point? Republic is funded by BJP MP Rajeev Chandrasekhar and backed by other BJP worthies; the PM and every member of the Cabinet treats it like their personal mouthpiece. The “leak” is clearly calculated to provide the BJP campaigners something to talk about, another “issue” to flog, a deflection from issues relating to their own governance.

Is there a scam? Most likely. But there is also a scandal: the BJP raises this, and other scams, when campaigning for elections and drags its feet when it comes to investigations and prosecution — clearly because they would rather have the issue, than produce a resolution.

I JUST got back after some fairly intensive travel, and am still catching up, making sense of all that’s been going on while I was on the road. So for now, I’ll leave you with a few links in no particular order, and pick up regular service tomorrow.

• 88 lakh taxpayers did not file returns in the financial year 2016-2017 — the year of demonetisation. It was just 8.56 lakh the previous fiscal. This is the highest increase in almost two decades since 2000-01, tax officials said.
• Various official agencies have come up with grim figures about the employment situation in the country, and these reports have been consistently suppressed by the government (an earlier post goes into details). The government, in a bid to cover up for its failures, said that MUDRA was the preferred source for employment data, and claimed that crores of new jobs had been created under the scheme. Turns out even that does not have good news for the government, so now the MUDRA numbers won’t be released either, at least not until after the polls.
• In Satna, three-time BJP MP Ganesh Singh is questioned about employment. He leaves the venue, rather than answer. Think of this in connection with another fact: Narendra Modi is the only PM in living memory to never address a press conference, or let himself in for the kind of town-hall format where he could face unscripted questions.
• On the stump, Modi claims that because of his chowkidari, there have been no terrorist attacks during the last five years. He is, as always, lying.
• The Allahabad High Court asks the UP government whether it intends to arrest those accused in the Unnao rape case. Props to the court for asking tough questions, but are you kidding me? Elections round the corner, and the UP government — the Adityanath government — is going to arrest a BJP thug? Good luck with that.
• You read stories of how there is a Modi wave, and a Priyanka power surge, and how this politician joining that party has changed the balance in this or that state, and so on. And on. Spare a moment of your time to this: 42% of India is now officially drought-hit; close to 500 million people are affected. Do you suppose these people care a flying fuck for waves and tsunamis and the rubbish the commentariat carries on about endlessly?
• LK Advani recently wrote a blogpost — and sections of the liberals had a collective orgasm. Not because his comments could be seen as a mild rebuke of Modi, but because that is where we are: desperate for any voice to validate our own criticisms of the BJP and its leader, and if these voices belong to the BJP’s senior leaders now turned apostate, so much the better. Not all are so enamoured though — Ruchir Joshi’s comments on ‘leaders who ignited a deadly fire’, and Ramachandra Guha on Advani’s bitter legacy, are worth reading for perspective.
• In Rajasthan, a BJP candidate says he will ensure that there will be no police interference in cases of child marriage. In other words, a BJP candidate promises that there will be no consequences to committing a crime.
• Subramanian Swamy says Rahul Gandhi has four passports; that one of his names is Raul Vinci, and that he has a chapel at home. #justsaying
• Arun Jaitley gets into the debate on the denial of tickets to Advani, MM Joshi, and Speaker of the Lok Sabha Sumitra Mahajan, and justifies it in terms of the party’s policy that no tickets will be given to those over 75. Fair enough. Except that in 2014, when both were given tickets to contest for the BJP, Advani was 87 and Joshi, 80.

Reading Material:

• A TN Ninan column celebrates the fact that the Congress manifesto comes down clearly in favour of individual liberties.
• Mihir Sharma on how, against the odds, it is the Congress that has come up with thoughtful proposals while the BJP indulges in blatant communal rhetoric, and what this means for Elections 2019.
• I’ve been saying this for ever (or at least since I restarted this blog and began focussing on the elections). Here is Shekhar Gupta on the game board of Elections 2019, making the point that this time, Modi is going up against 20 strong regional leaders. The point Gupta misses out on is that Modi has been doing his damndest to get out of this trap, and failing — and the reason for this desperation is that Modi’s best chance of winning is if he can convert this election into him versus one opponent he can demonise and vilify, rather than get sucked into a series of sapping skirmishes across the length and breadth of the country.
• Remember an earlier post where I had discussed the meaning of the word “scheme”? Here is another one on the same theme — Modi’s grand ‘adopt a village’ scheme for MPs. Announced as a gamechanger, forgotten once it had been milked for publicity.
• And to end where I began, here is Mitali Saran on the role of the EC in this election cycle.

Odds, trends

• IndiaSpend, which has been doing some very good data-driven work around the elections, does a deep dive on voter priorities. The findings are eye-opening in themselves; they are even more of a revelation if you compare the concerns of the voter with what is being discussed on the stump. The top three priorities: Employment opportunities (46.8%), healthcare (34.6%) and drinking water (30.5%). This last is, as far as I can recall, a new entry in the list of voter concerns, and it speaks to the increasing stress, in both urban and rural areas, on water resources. But I’ll revert to the theme of water later — for now, stay with employment, the number one concern today.
• The government knows this. It knows that the concern is widespread, that it spans geographies, and demographics, and it has been trying, as best it can, to defuse the angst. The official message (as in this example) seems to be that the government has created jobs by the millions, but it is just that the data is not available. Modi had previewed this argument earlier, when the job scarcity hit the limelight; he elaborated on that in yesterday’s “interview” with Arnab Goswami, and somehow made it the opposition’s fault.
• The argument is specious. The first question that occurs is: When all these years we have had unemployment data updated annually, how did this big information hole materialise now? And related, what does it say about a government that has done nothing, if you take the no-data argument at face value, to measure such a crucial aspect of the economy, despite admitting that it is aware of the lacuna? (As Raghuram Rajan pointed out recently, jobs data is not only important in itself, but it casts light on the overall health of the economy.)
• The thing though is, it is not a lacuna — the data exists, and has been systematically suppressed, as I’d pointed out in an earlier post. (This Twitter thread is interesting, in context). So this desperation to hide data, and to keep repeating the claim that jobs are available in plenty, merely understands the bind the government is in: It knows this is a crucial issue; it knows that this will resonate (more particularly with the young, with first time voters who in 2014 formed a sizeable chunk of BJP voters); it knows its record on this issue is abysmal — but short of Modi’s theatrics and the talking heads parroting the line about lack of data, it has no idea how to deal with this.
• What is further underlining the BJP’s dilemma is that Rahul Gandhi appears to have shrewdly seized on this as a critical issue. In every interaction, he talks of jobs — starting, as far as I can see, with the townhall in Chennai’s Stella Maris College where he spoke of abolishing the angel tax in order to encourage young entrepreneurs, to as late as yesterday, when he drilled down further into the subject in course of his speeches, and put this out on his Twitter feed. Yogendra Yadav called unemployment a “silent killer” in elections and clearly, its shadow is now beginning to worry the ruling party.
• In passing, a friend and I were discussing politics, and ex-RBI governor Rajan’s name came up. My friend’s argument was that Rajan’s recent vocal interventions were proof positive that he had been inclined towards the Congress all along; that this inclination had coloured his RBI stint and that, therefore, the BJP was right to be wary about him. As proof of his assertion, he pointed me to this story in Scroll, where Rajan says he had consulted with the Congress on the recently announced minimum income guarantee scheme. I guess it depends on how you look at it. If you had to pick between a guy who ignores all advice, doesn’t consult even bodies specifically set up for the purpose, overrides the RBI and announces demonetisation on a whim, or another guy who, according to reports, has been working on this income guarantee scheme for over two months, has consulted widely, and drawn on the expertise of acknowledged experts before deciding on a policy, which would you pick?

For personal reasons, this blog is on a break till Sunday. Have a nice weekend, folks. Meanwhile, go back to that IndiaSpend deep dive I began this post with — there is much in there that is of interest. And here is a telling cartoon to end this post with:

ha! pic.twitter.com/OzaBagl54W

— Karnika (@KarnikaKohli) March 29, 2019

Chinese Checkers and other stories

AP photo by Xie Huanchi/Xinhua via Outlook magazine

THE most important item of news to come out of the last 24 hours is this: China, yet again, stalled India’s move to get the UN Security Council to list Masood Azhar and his terrorist outfit.

“We are disappointed by this outcome,” an MEA statement said. “This has prevented action by the international community to designate the leader of Jaish-e-Mohammed, a proscribed and active terrorist organization which has claimed responsibility for the terrorist attack in Jammu and Kashmir on 14 February 2019.”

Disappointed, perhaps, but the MEA could hardly be surprised. Despite at least four meetings between Xi and Modi in 2018 including the “agenda-less” meeting in Wuhan in April last year (puffed up by the PM, much ballyhooed in India as a masterstroke of diplomacy, and almost entirely ignored in China whose press did not even bother to showcase the visit on its front pages), China has consistently taken Pakistan’s side on the issue of terrorism in general, and the Pulwama attacks and the Balakot retaliation in particular.

What merits focus — by those with bone-deep understanding of how foreign policy ramifies, in which group I don’t belong — is how the hunger for photo-ops and propaganda wins has led to a situation where India’s diplomatic relations are a shambles. Two tweets by Shekhar Gupta and Sonali Ranade throw some light on the basic problem; I’m hoping that foreign policy wonks with cred and expertise will weigh in soon with more detailed analysis, for the issue is simply too important, and its ramifications extend well beyond the question of Masood Azhar’s status.

In passing, a note: Chest-thumping rhetoric works on the campaign trail, particularly with easily-aroused believers. Governance, however, is a whole other ball game. Just one instance among many:

Here's fake Mr 56 thumping his chest with hollow bluster on China

Now, a disastrous #WeakPM who does not have the courage to follow his own advice on showing Laal Aankh to China, but going meekly for "no agenda" visits while selling out the nation.pic.twitter.com/m4qiyAjM8s

— Geet V (@geetv79) March 14, 2019

Deja view: Modi the tub-thumping campaigner

In this context, a thread by journalist/commentator Kanchan Gupta is worth reading. Also, related, what is India’s current policy vis a vis Pakistan? No contact at all? Contact limited to maintaining pressure on Pakistan to act against terrorism? Total contact (with the exception of cricket and Bollywood)? Asking, because delegations from the two countries are currently meeting to discuss modalities related to the opening of the Kartarpur Corridor. We’ve seen this kind of thing before, across various governments: We kick up a fuss about Pakistan and terrorism, declaim before all sorts of international bodies, and then Pakistan turns around and says what tensions is India talking about, everything is normal, see, we are even discussing whatever-it-is.

TODAY, the Supreme Court resumes consideration of a petition to review its own ruling that no probe was required in the Rafale scam. Very briefly, the SC ruling was based on papers the government submitted in a sealed cover; subsequent to the judgment, it was found that key portions of the government submission were false.

The petitions now being heard were filed by BJP apostates and former ministers Yashwant Sinha and Arun Shourie and advocate/activist Prashant Bhushan, who contend that the government lied when it said details of the Rafale pricing had been submitted to MP Sanjay Singh – contend that the court should to re-consider its judgment, which relies on a “non-existent” CAG report to uphold the Rafale deal.

A story dating back to December 2018, a Wire round-up of the main issues, the full text of the review petition that sets out the central issues, and this piece in the Deccan Herald today provide most of the background you need to follow the play in the Supreme Court today. And it is an important hearing, because the government has been claiming a “clean chit” on the Rafale issue — if the SC now takes issue with the government for misleading it, and reverses its earlier judgment in part or in full, the chowkidar chor hai war-cry will resume, and the Rafale issue will become front and centre of the Opposition campaign.

UPDATE 5.15 PM: The SC has reserved judgment on the objections raised by the government about the maintainability of the review petition. This is a good resource for a snapshot view of what happened in court today.

WHAT happens south of the Vindhyas remains south of the Vindhyas, at least as far as mainstream media is concerned. The Pollachi, Tamil Nadu, sexual abuse case is the latest instance in point. While the case is still unravelling, even preliminary investigations confirm that four men, over a period of two years, abused in excess of 50 women — including teachers and students from schools and colleges, as also housewives — who they befriended through social media. These are the bare bones details. More women have been coming forward in the wake of the abuse coming to light.

What followed was almost predictable: Area students took to the streets in protest, and the police responded with force. Protests snowballed, with schools and colleges across the state joining in; civil society joined in as well and last evening, Chennai saw a large turnout of people demanding justice.

Amidst rumours that the four alleged perpetrators had ties to the ruling AIADMK, the political opposition entered the fray, with DMK leaders MK Stalin and M Kanimozhi at the forefront.

Slamming the Superintendent of Police Pandiarajan for revealing the name of the survivor in the case during a press-meet, Kanimozhi said that the law strictly prohibits revealing the identity of the affected child or woman. “The name of the survivor in this case was revealed only to silence the other women and prevent them from coming out in the open and complaining,” she said.

The rally organised by the district DMK unit in Pollachi, saw massive participation from DMK cadres from in and around the town and also from cadres of its allies like the Marumalarchi Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (MDMK), Communist Party of India (CPI), Viduthalai Chiruthaigal Katchi (VCK), Congress etc.

The already beleaguered police, facing ire for dragging their feet on the investigation, faced an additional problem caused by the identity of the officers leading the probe:

Her references were about an incident during a protest against TASMAC a few years ago, when SP Pandiarajan had slapped a women protester and the photos of the act went viral. The DSP in this case, R Jeyaram was also caught on camera, touching a woman colleague in uniform, during a NEET-related protest in Coimbatore.

With the protests escalating and the lead officers under fire, the TN government has transferred the case to the CBI. Meanwhile here is the bit that should give you pause:

The Madurai bench of the Madras High Court on Tuesday slammed the mainstream media for not covering the Pollachi sex scandal as they did with the case of Nirbhaya, who was brutally raped by a group of men on the streets of Delhi in 2012.

The judges said that national media houses do not pay enough attention to grievous crimes in rural areas. They also opined that the mainstream media “deliberately avoids”  Tamil Nadu. 

DATA is a theme I touched on in a post yesterday, am returning to now, and will likely be a constant theme over the next few weeks. For why? Because it is what informs — or should inform — our understanding of governmental functioning, of the state of the economy, of the wellbeing of the state. The more authentic the data we have, the more informed our decisions; the more opaque data becomes, the less informed we are. (And that is me stating the obvious.)

So adding on to yesterday, a few more stories worth your attention: 1.76 lakh employees of BSNL have not been paid salaries for the month of February. In January HAL, another state-run enterprise, had to borrow Rs 1000 crore to pay salaries. Air India, also state-owned, has been defaulting on salary payments in successive months. Security personnel, gardeners, cleaning staff, lift operators, ticket vendors and others working at the much-hyped Statue of Unity are on strike, protesting that their wages have not been paid for over three months.

Here’s the bit I don’t get: In the last week of each month, my wife lists the salaries we have to make (driver, the boy who maintains our home, the other gent who comes to cook, our contribution to the wages of the building’s security staff) and has me draw out the money from the bank. She provides for these payments when drawing up the monthly budget — it not as if she wakes up one morning and goes uh oh, we forgot we have payments to make; these are recurring, foreseeable expenses. So what beats me is this: how does the government repeatedly miss such bills? Aren’t such recurring payments provided for in budgets? If not, why not? If yes, what happened to all that money? As they say in the world of social media, #genuinequestion

UNEMPLOYMENT emerged as a critical election issue in several recent surveys. So: In January PC Mohanan, acting chairman of the National Statistical Commission, resigned in protest after the government suppressed the release of the latest unemployment survey conducted by the National Sample Survey Office.

Business Standard scooped the blocked report, which showed that the unemployment rate of 6.1% was the highest in the last four decades. The Centre for Monitoring Indian Economy rang the alarm bells even louder: the unemployment rate had risen to 7.2% in February, CMIE reported, following on from a report it had released in January which said that an estimated 11 million people had lost their jobs in 2018 as a result of the continued fallout of the November 8, 2016 demonetisation and the launch of the GST regime in 2017.

Government ministers, party spokespersons and friendly media outlets either ignored these reports, or dismissed them as unapproved “drafts”. In March, the Confederation of Indian Industry produced its own report, which claimed that the Micro, Small and Medium Enterprises sector created between 13.5 to 14.9 million new jobs over a four year period, and that the sector had registered a jobs growth rate of 13.9%.

Ministers, spokespersons and sections of the media used the report to claim that India was “surging”. Only, says this detailed report, maybe not.

To further compound the confusion, the government first instructed its spokespersons to confine all employment-related discussions to the Labour Ministry statistics collected under the Micro Units Development and Refinance Agency (MUDRA) scheme and now, in an abrupt u-turn, has announced that these figures will only be released after the elections as “anomalies” had been discovered. Which makes it the third employment-related report to be deep-sixed in this election year. What a tangled web we weave, Shakespeare once lamented…

Related, Indian Express reports that at 3.8% year on year, the rural wage growth is the lowest ever for the month of December. Further:

The country’s farm sector output may have grown by just 2.7 per cent year-on-year in October-December 2018, the lowest in 11 quarters. But what should worry the NDA government more than the low increase in “real” terms (i.e. at constant prices) is the growth in “nominal” terms (at current prices unadjusted for inflation).

The latter number, at 2.04 per cent, is the lowest for any quarter as per the Central Statistics Office’s new 2011-12 base year series and also the worst since the minus 1.1 per cent rate recorded way back in October-December 2004 (based on the then 1999-2000 GDP series).

PS: This is a post being updated through the day, so come on back.

News clips: Feb 13 edition

With the model code of conduct kicking in, attention turns to enforcement-related questions: Does the EC have the manpower to monitor the various parties and their proxies and detect violations? If it does detect something that is not kosher, what can it do about it if anything? On that note, the EC advised all political parties to desist from using images of serving army personnel in propaganda material; a day later, it has asked Facebook to delete two posts bearing images of Wing Commander Abhinandan posted by a BJP MLA from Delhi.

In order to make the process of spotting violations easier, the EC has launched a cVigil app that enables the lay citizen to report violations. ToI has a list of 15 types of violations that the citizen can report, and how; more details via The Hindu. So, since this service is now available, a hypothetical for you: Would you report this?

The Index of Industrial Production has bad news for the government just as it was beginning to talk up productivity and employment as major achievements of the last five years: Manufacturing plummeted from 8.7 in January 2018 to 1.3 in January 2019. The Telegraph story details those areas that are doing well, and those that are showing signs of being on life support.

The government’s attempts to suppress, or obfuscate, data that does not fit with its narrative will form the subject for a larger essay later. But for now, a few recent pieces are worth reading/re-visiting in context of the IIP figures: RTI Venkatesh Nayak, in HuffPost, talks of his efforts to use RTI to get behind the scenes of the key RBI board meeting where the demonetisation decision was supposedly taken (Hint: It wasn’t). The article links profusely to the actual minutes of the board meeting, and related stories.

While on demonetisation, here’s a link from the past: Modi’s smoke and mirrors act

Economic growth for the period October-December 2018 fell to its lowest mark across the last six quarters, and early indications are that the first quarter of 2019 continues to see decline. Author and commentator Vivek Kaul explains, via four charts, the key indicators that point at this slowdown. Elsewhere Scroll, also through charts, has more bad news: GDP is down, the government is unable to rein in the fiscal deficit, there is decline in investments in new projects, foreign investors are leaving the country and inevitably, as corollary to all of the above, the unemployment rate continues to climb. And to round it all off (for now), there’s this from HuffPost:

Desperate to show progress in the poorly defined, but much-ballyhooed, Digital India initiative, Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party-led government inflated e-governance data by designating previously uncategorized services such as railway bookings, debit card and credit card transactions, NEFT, RTGS bank transfers, Aadhar authentication and e-KYC transactions with private vendors as “e-governance”.
 
The government also massively ramped up the weather and crop updates delivered over SMS to millions of farmers in a bid to show rural Indians were embracing so-called digital services.

In political news the AGP, which had earlier cut ties with the NDA over the issue of the Citizenship (Amendment) Bill 2016, has returned to the government fold. In Kerala, the Left Front has announced candidates for all 20 Lok Sabha seats, while the Congress and the BJP are still sharpening their pencils.

Arvind Kejriwal, meanwhile, wants an alliance with the Congress in Haryana. The commentariat was all sneer-y when the Congress “contemptuously” turned down an alliance with AAP in Delhi — and I am not sure I get why. AAP came into being on the wings of the Anna Hazare/Kejriwal-led agitation against Congress corruption; that agitation in turn provided the BJP the talking points, and the oxygen, for the 2014 campaign. Why would the Congress go out of its way to ally with the AAP now? If it did, both parties would have their previous accusations about each other hanging around their neck. (Not that such considerations have stopped various parties allying with erstwhile enemies, but still.)

The LDF has named only two women, however, with its spokespersons arguing that the focus was on winnability rather than gender. The Front has made a big punt with CPM state executive member C Divakaran named for the Thiruvananthapuram seat against, in all likelihood, Shashi Tharoor for the Congress and whoever the BJP choses to name. Equally, it has named film actor and sitting MP Innocent to the Chalakudy  seat – which, as Scroll points out, is problematic.

NB: As elections kick into high gear, the clips will become more comprehensive and be updated more frequently. Meanwhile, readers, help: Ping links to interesting news stories/analysis via comments, please?

Addendum: One reason I like to collate links whenever I blog is that over time, isolated stories begin to add up, linkages become visible and bigger pictures emerge.

On that note, a story that caught my eye during a surf-break just now:

On March 8, the government approved a Bulk Data Sharing policy, enabling it to monetise a database of vehicle registration certificates, citing benefits to the “transport and automobile industry”, even as the issue of privacy and data protection looms large over such sharing.

Basically, the government here finds another way of making money off of your personal data, never mind consent.

The data shared will be the vehicle’s registration number and other details (including financing and insurance), and will not have the owner’s name. In all, 28 fields of data for each vehicle will be shared.

That’s all right, then — your name, and therefore details linked to your name, is not being sold. But then again:

However, the policy itself admits that “there is a possibility of triangulation” or matching the data with other publicly available databases to identify. That’s because the Vahan app, also run by the ministry, maps registration details against names.

I’ll leave this here for now and link it up in a subsequent post.

Elsewhere, the Times of India confidently says Twitter executives could face jail time, forcing the government to scramble to clarify.

The report, as published, appears to be exaggerated, stemming from a misunderstanding of the established legal procedure.

It’s Brazil

So you can wait 22 days, and follow World Cup soccer excitement here [our colleagues in the US are providing us a World Cup site for the Yahoo India portal, will link as soon as it is live] — or you can skip right ahead to the final result [spoiler alert], and get on with your life. You chose.