| | | Good morning! | | The changes in the Bharatiya Janata Party’s parliamentary board and central election committee are more interesting from the perspective of exits and omissions, rather than inclusions, with Nitin Gadkari and Shivraj Singh Chouhan not retained. The BJP isn’t given to frequent changes of its apex decision-making body. The last one was in 2014 (excluding the 2019 change when Ramlal retired as organisation secretary and was replaced by BL Santosh). There is unlikely to be another change before 2024 (when the next national elections are scheduled). There are no vacant slots in the parliamentary board; the central election committee has four vacancies. The changes announced earlier this week are downright insignificant when compared to those in 2013 (when Narendra Modi was inducted onto the board) and 2014 (when the board saw a wholesale generational change). That is understandable. This is still a party dominated by the big two — Modi and home minister Amit Shah, and the passing of several BJP stalwarts over the past few years, the retirement of some, and the exits of others, have made it even more so.  Perhaps the thinking is that a generational change is either not warranted or is premature. And so, analysts looking forward to reading the larger message in Uttar Pradesh chief minister Yogi Adityanath’s ascent to the parliamentary board will have to wait for a few more years. To be sure, there are a bunch of smaller messages in the appointment — of people being rewarded, regional considerations with an eye on the coming election season, and a focus on certain constituencies — but this was not the Big Bang people were expecting. And that is very much in keeping with how the BJP functions. The reconstitution of the BJP’s parliamentary board — it comes even as there is uncertainty over the Congress’s next president; elections are to be held between August 21 and September 20 and there are no candidates yet — is a clear sign of the onset of the next election season, an almost continuous wave that starts towards the end of this year and ends with the parliamentary elections in the first half of 2024. | | THINK It is likely that elections to the Union territory of Jammu & Kashmir will be held before then. The Union government has said that this will be a precursor to the restoration of the region’s statehood. With Article 370, which gave Jammu & Kashmir special status, gone, so-called ordinary residents (and not just those born in the state) will now have an opportunity to vote in the assembly elections — they are allowed to vote in the parliamentary elections but the difficulties involved in enrolling in electoral rolls in Jammu & Kashmir meant that only around 32,000 did in 2019 — and the special summary revision of electoral rolls, part of the preparation for the election (delimitation was another; and that exercise has been completed), reflects this. The addition of around 2.5 million people to the state’s electoral roll — it increases the electoral base by around a third — has created a controversy, with mainstream political parties in the region alleging that it will favour the BJP. It may, but given that the same laws and procedures that apply in India now apply in J&K, that’s not enough reason to prevent ordinary residents from voting. After all, if an ordinary resident of Tamil Nadu (who is originally from Assam) can vote in the state, what prevents an ordinary resident of J&K (who is originally from Tamil Nadu) from voting in the UT? | | THINK MORE Now for competition of an entirely different kind. The performance of Indian athletes in track & field events has made the news; and an analysis shows that Indian athletes may well have crossed one of those invisible tipping points. In 30 of 51 athletics disciplines, across genders, Indian athletes have set new national records in the past five years; 14 of these records were set in 2021 alone. Seen in the context of that data, the performance of Indian athletes in international sporting events is not surprising. | | KNOW Much of middle India has been in a holiday mood over the past two weeks — thanks to a bunch of religious festivals, and Independence Day — and may have likely missed some of the India@75 specials put out by the Hindustan Times newsroom. For starters, there’s 1947: The Road to Indian Independence, a 14-part podcast series conceptualised and anchored by my colleague Prashant Jha and featuring William Dalrymple, Dinyar Patel, Bhaswati Mukherjee, Mridula Mukherjee, Rajmohan Gandhi, Durba Ghosh, Aditya Mukherjee, Tridip Suhrud, Arvind Elangovan, Srinath Raghavan, Sugata Bose, and Pramod Kapoor. The podcast captures 12 key moments in India’s freedom movement, across 90 years between 1857 and 1947. Then there’s Gossamer Dreams: Bollywood, the first of our online specials, capturing the growth of mainstream Hindi cinema across 75 years and five periods. Anchored by Zara Murao, this is a rich retelling, replete with great essays, interesting playlists, and some engaging interactives. Similar online specials on politics and cricket (the two other Indian obsessions) will follow. Finally, there’s 75 years in 100 turns, our listing of 100 events across these 75 years that shaped the country. | | LEARN This week’s Scientifically Speaking column by Anirban Mahapatra asked a question that few of us would have asked before the pandemic, but which, at least some of us are begging to ask now: Why is it that India has never had a major outbreak of yellow fever? | | | | READ MORE As the virus evolves, so should vaccines. Politics gets a festive twist in Mumbai. Four charts on inflation and its economic impact. The release of Bilkis Bano’s rapists is not right. | | OUTSIDE The US is still seeing around 500 deaths a day, on average, on account of Covid-19. The UK is seeing around 150. (In India, the number is around 50). Last week, the US CDC issued new Covid-19 guidelines that seemed to suggest that the pandemic is, for all practical purposes, over. Katherine J Wu wrote about it in The Atlantic, in an article titled The Pandemic’s Soft Closing, and argued that CDC’s new guidelines may actually be a bad idea. “CDC’s main impetuses for change appears to have been nudging its guidance closer to what the public has felt the status quo should be — a seemingly backward position to adopt.” I agree. It doesn’t seem right to pretend there’s no pandemic when, at current rates, around over 150,000 people could die in the US on account of Covid-19 this year. | | WHAT I'M READING Credits: Penguin India Like most journalists of my vintage and specialisation, I am fascinated by family businesses. It’s generally accepted that most family businesses do not last beyond three generations — with splits and a decline in fortunes usually being caused by conflicts (only natural as the number of family members increase). This week, I have been reading Untangling Conflict: An Introspective Guide for Families in Business, by Janmejaya Sinha and his colleagues at the Boston Consulting Group, Carol Liao, Ryoji Kimora, and Brittany Montgomery. This is a sharply focused book that looks at the nature of conflicts in family run businesses, the underlying issues (both hard and soft), and possible ways of resolution. | | WHAT I’M LISTENING TO A member of a WhatsApp group I am part of — I am a member of very few, but this one is exclusively about music — posted a photograph of a young Jean-Luc Ponty from his King Kong days (most of us couldn’t recognise him), and it gave me enough motivation to pull out my Ponty discs and give them a spin. King Kong, an album that features Ponty playing the music of Frank Zappa, was the violinist’s breakthrough album, and while I like it, I am partial to an earlier album, Sunday Walk, which sees Ponty performing as part of a quartet, and playing much more old-fashioned jazz — the influence of both Coltrane and bebop is evident in his playing — especially when compared to jazz-fusion, which became popular in the 1970s and 1980s. | Please share your feedback with us What do you think about this newsletter? | | Were you forwarded this email? Did you stumble upon it online? Sign up here. | | | | | | Get the Hindustan Times app and read premium stories | | | | | | View in Browser | Privacy Policy | Contact us You received this email because you signed up for HT Newsletters or because it is included in your subscription. Copyright © HT Digital Streams. All Rights Reserved | | | | |
