Modi’s model
Well, I landed back in cold and rainy London and as is always the case after a trip to India, cannot get that country out of my head.
So naturally when this piece landed in my inbox, it found an eager reader.
India’s Feet of Clay is an excellent read on the majoritarian model of Prime Minister Narendra Modi written by one of the country’s most prominent writers and modern historians Ramachandra Guha.
What distinguishes this particular piece and why I am strongly recommending it to you, is because it doesn’t presume you know too much or even anything at all about Indian politics or society.
Therefore it sets out the history and context clearly, without over-explaining it either.
Put simply, if you have been wondering what all the fuss/concerns are about Modi and curious about the way he’s transforming India (not always meant as a compliment), this is the piece for you.
Guha argues that the costs of Modi’s political model, while all but guaranteed to deliver the Hindu-nationalist BJP a third term in office, are mounting and the erosion of the country’s once-greatest strength, its plurality, could be the cause of its long-term decline and see it end up like Sri Lanka.
“Hindus impose themselves on Muslims, the central government imposes itself on the provinces, the state further curtails the rights and freedoms of citizens. Meanwhile, the unthinking imitation of Western models of energy-intensive and capital-intensive industrialisation is causing profound and, in many cases, irreversible environmental damage.”
Guha makes the point, which I’ve also made previously at Latika Takes, that Modi’s model largely gets a free pass from the West because a democratic (even if there is some backsliding) and rising India is seen as a better offer and one to encourage compared to an aggressive and dominant superpower in China.
Is China’s Zero-Covid own goal driving American ascendancy?
Two-longish reads feature on my list this week and with good reason.
This essay by Mark Leonard, director of the European Council on Foreign Relations, offers a rare insight into some of the thinking inside China amid external analysis that we’ve reached ‘peak China,’ and the country could be headed for economic decline.
Leonard writes that he has never encountered so much frustration and lack of hope inside China, over two decades of visiting the country.
But what makes this piece so interesting, is that the reasons for the gloom are different to the Western analysis.
While economists outside China look at the country’s ageing population and collapsing foreign investment as key pressures, this piece explores the shift from an economic growth model to the national security state under President Xi Jinping.
Just as China has been decoupling from the Western world, the West is now belatedly catching up and reorienting its economic policies to security ones, albeit to varying degrees depending on which country.
The United States has led this recalibration, as it seeks to ‘confine’ China by starving it of high-end technologies like semiconductors. Overnight, Joe Biden announced an investigation into China’s quest to dominate the electric vehicle market, which the US President described as ‘smart phones on wheels.’
I was also intrigued by the reflection in this piece on China of Xi’s Zero-Covid policy. Many wondered what it was all for given the country’s economic growth has never recovered to its pre-pandemic levels.
Xi has made China ‘uninvestible’
Australian billionaire James Packer says he’s never going back into the casino business or back to China.
That part is not so surprising. Packer exited his Crown Resorts casino interests amid a series of public inquiries — including Royal Commissions — into industrial-scale money laundering linked to criminal enterprises. The company, eventually sold, was targeted by the Chinese in a crackdown on gambling and fined in Australia for allowing illegal transfers of cash by allowing Chinese bank cards.
Packer apologised again for the wrongdoing in an unusually frank interview with journalist Anthony De Ceglie in which he made an interesting set of comments about potentially investing in China again.
At one point, Crown had the largest footprint of any Australian company in China (Macau), Packer said. But he said the line of foreigners wanting to invest large sums of money in China doesn’t exist anymore, in a huge shift from the landscape 15 years ago, partly because the economy isn’t living up to expectations.
“I’m not going to go back to China – no way.
I think (President) Xi Jinping has set China back 20 years.
Fifteen years ago, the Communist Party got their legitimacy from delivering economic growth.
You had people from all around the world looking to invest in China.
I think Xi Jinping has made China uninvestible.”
One billion people are now obese
Given the extreme pandemic measures imposed by some governments (particularly in the Zero-Covid jurisdictions), I have been astonished at the subsequent absence of any discussion about improving our overall healthcare to prepare for next time.
This is especially the case when it comes to obesity, particularly given we know that this condition carries with it a higher risk of developing serious Covid.
While there has been a boom in reporting and focus on drugs to treat obesity, like Ozempic, there has not been a corresponding deluge of stories about preventing the condition in the first place.
To his credit, Boris Johnson, who almost died from Covid during the time he governed the UK did make a brief attempt, but the debate quickly fizzled out.
This is despite the problem worsening, populations ageing and health services creaking in the wake of the pandemic.
And new figures confirm obesity is ballooning with rates quadrupling since 1990, meaning 1 billion people are now obese.
It is a sobering finding from The Lancet. The number of people who are overweight now outnumber those who are underweight, making obesity the most common cause of malnutrition. Yes, you read that right.
‘Regions like Polynesia, Micronesia, the Caribbean, Latin America, and the Middle East and North Africa are witnessing the most significant increases in obesity rates.
The transition towards industrialised lifestyles, coupled with diets rich in processed foods and a decline in physical activity, has propelled this upsurge.
Notably, a sharp rise in obesity rates has also been observed in India, marking a concerning trend in a country previously more focused on combating undernutrition.’
New nudi species discovered in British waters
The scuba diver in me was attracted to this discovery of a ‘mystery sea creature’ in UK waters.
It turns out it is a new species of nudibranch (pron. noo-dee-brank).
Nudis, as they are commonly called, are tiny, beautifully-coloured molluscs that live in the ocean and something I love to spot and try to photograph (with varying degrees of success) when diving tropical reefs.
But this particular nudi was discovered by researchers in Britain’s colder waters.
I am grateful to Peter Barry from The Centre for Fisheries, Environment and Aquaculture Science who talked me through the discovery earlier today and answered some questions I had after reading the below article.
He said that this family of nudis exist in warmer climates but this particular species (or child, to extend the family metaphor further) has just been identified for the first time.
It is not necessarily a new species but a newly discovered one. And it is a reminder that so much of the underwater world remains undocumented.
And that’s my list for this week.
This week I’ve been on Moncole Radio and will be on the BBC weekend radio program on Saturday morning London time.
Please do send me anything that’s caught your eye. And if you like my posts, please consider subscribing and sharing with others who you think might also enjoy this content in their life.
Hey Latika! Great posts. Going to check out that India, article you mentioned first for sure. I’ve been doing a lot of research on the causes of obesity myself. I’ve been reading quite a few medical journals etc. One of the things I’m acutely aware of is the fact that a lot of it comes down to the interplay of metabolic hormones and brain neurotransmitters (managing ghrelin and leptin hormones - hunger and satiety signals) and inflammation which can affect the blood-brain-barrier critical to the interplay of all of this. In addition - the role of the hypothalamus also involved in this. For the life of me, I cannot understand why more research is not being done and has not been done today on how these metabolic hormones are out of whack and I believe a key cause of obesity. Many obese people report constant high levels of hunger (I.e the increased presence of ghrelin). When you think about it, when you are genuinely full the body doesn’t really feel/want more food. Now I’m definitely not an expert (I’m a lawyer not a doctor lol!) but I don’t think it comes down to people’s food choices, activity or the fact we live in an obesogenic environment. I have asked these questions of GPs, obesity specialists, endocrinologists and surgeons and they just seem to shrug their shoulders. It drives me wild! Anyway they are just some thoughts for today!