Pakistan will be deterred not by any evidence we produce but by the costs that we could impose on it in return, writes Kanwal Sibal
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There was a time when the world caught the flu if the US economy sneezed. That role has now been usurped by China, given that it accounted for 38 per cent of global growth last year, writes Rahul SharmaAs prophecies go, this one seems to be coming true much before the world hoped it would. Last month Ruchir Sharma, head of emerging markets at Morgan Stanley Investment Management who manages more than $25 billion, predicted that the while all global economic recessions in the past five decades were triggered by a slowing of the US economy, the next one will be made in China just like most of the things in the world are today. Rahul SharmaHe was expecting the crisis to arrive over the next couple of years, but it seems to have already made a vicious landfall on the global economic shores if the mayhem in world stock markets ignited by a slowing Chinese economy and a collapse in its equities is any indication. Worse, it could stay around for a while, making it extremely difficult for a country like India – which its finance minister and the central bank governor see as better placed than most other developing economies – to balance its fiscal policies to sustain much-needed economic growth in the face of sputtering financial markets and the currency. China has been the elephant in the room since Lehman Brothers folded up, triggering the last wave of global economic turmoil. It stood out as the biggest contributor to global growth in the past eight years. But now the bubble, long expected to burst due to a mammoth build up of debt, is popping the wrong way. China’s slowdown has been well articulated in recent months. The economic numbers have mostly been fudgy, and nobody really believes any longer that its GDP is growing at 7 per cent. The difficult part is that as the world’s second biggest economy, biggest manufacturer, largest importer of key commodities, and the biggest growth driver, China today holds a much more influential position in the world than it ever did. There was a time when the world caught the flu if the US economy sneezed. That role has now been usurped by China, given that it accounted for 38 per cent of global growth last year. And that is only partly scary. The other part of the story is that investors are beginning to lose confidence in the Chinese government’s ability to control and direct its economy. For long everybody believed that the government in a single party system had the ability to prop up the economy through cash infusion at opportune moments. That happened in the immediate aftermath of the Lehman Brothers debacle in 2008 when the Chinese government opened its monetary tap, pumping in billions of yuans into the economy to keep it stable. However, that meant debt parameters were breached. The headwinds today are largely because of that ill, which built up in the economy silently, but surely. The result: while investors and economists hoped for a soft landing, they heard a huge thud. Yesterday, everything in global financial markets was down as equities went into a free fall and currencies slumped, pushing oil prices to 7-year lows. Wall Street crashed by 1,000 points before recovering. As panic hit the markets, and it usually happens at such times, the global selloff wiped out a staggering $490 billion from emerging markets equity. The only bright spark was gold, which rose, as it reasserted its position as a safe haven. India was not any better off. The rupee breached the 66 to a dollar mark and the stock market dropped by 1,700 points, wiping off a humungous 7 lakh crore rupees in investor wealth and forcing Finance Minister Arun Jaitley and Reserve Bank Governor Raghuram Rajan to tell investors to not fear the global glitch. Jaitley called the phenomenon ”transient” and Rajan assured the markets that the central bank had enough resources at $380 billion in foreign exchange to manage a volatile rupee. The next few days will show how close or far they are from the truth. Meanwhile, the Chinese story seems to have lost much of its sheen. No one is talking of a shift away from a U.S. or Europe-led world to one led by China. And while Beijing has the might to intervene, thanks to its colossus $3.9 trillion reserves and interest rates that are much higher than in developed economies, its hands are tied. Battling between slower growth and high debt, President Xi Jinping has to find a way to arrest the slide in confidence and still retain his power at a time when his fight against corruption is turning friends into foes. Xi needs to tell the world that what was heard was merely a sneeze, not the announcement of the arrival of a long-term disease that will further distress the global economy. He also needs to ensure his power is not diminished in the aftermath of a rout that has hit China’s image of a global power hard. (The columnist is a former newspaper editor. Currently President of Mumbai-based Rediffusion Communications, he also runs www.lookingbeyondborders.com, a foreign policy and global economy blog. Views are personal)
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We need to re-imagine our criminal law to address the wounds of the victims of crimes, not the outrage of the bystander, says Ranjeev C DubeyThere comes a time in everyone’s life when they must stop to radically rethink their priorities. For nations, we call them inflection points, sometimes cultural transformations. For mature managers, we call them midlife crises! In every case, it’s about testing basic ideological assumptions about what we believe we want, or should. India has many institutions that deserve this kind of critical scrutiny. I believe our much respected but deeply troubled legal system is one of them. The problem of course is that like many epic stories, you never quite know where to start, or how far back you should go. Let’s pick just one piece of it: plea bargaining. Plea bargaining is a central part of American jurisprudence. It takes too much time and costs too much money to convict a guy and walk him through the many appeals till he reaches jail: why not make a deal with him and ask him to admit to a lesser crime? That’s what the Americans do, but we Indians frown on this practice because we see it as letting someone off the hook. We just don’t trust the bargainers. We suspect our famously corrupt processes will allow killer drivers to plea bargain convictions for jumping red lights and for politicians siphoning money in Cattle Fodder Scams to plea bargain convictions for inflicting cruelty on animals! Ranjeev C DubeyWhat we get for our upright zero tolerance stance is criminal courts clogged with cases they aren’t going to decide for 20 years. In these twenty years, jailed accused will be rotated through hearings every month in rickety old armoured buses accompanied by dozens of policemen tasked to prevent them from escaping. It’s a huge investment of manpower, automobiles and diesel, with little to show for it. It makes no difference if the accused is on bail. He still goes to court every month, spending one day every four weeks pointless kicking the dust outside the court. Given this well know reality, when the Madras High Court took the initiative to encouraged a ‘compromise’ between rapist and victim in the case of V Mohan v State (Crl.A.No.402 of 2014), it seemed reasonable for us to stop and say: “okay, here a new thought on how to deal with law’s arrears”. Instead, we had twitterati terrorists frothing at the mouth and feminist activists bursting arteries in their anger. The Supreme Court’s reaction a week later echoed the outrage. Justice Deepak Mishra observed that it would be a “spectacular error” to adopt “any kind of liberal approach” in sexual assault cases. Why did everyone find the Madras High Court’s approach so outrageous? Let’s briefly revisit the facts as we know them. The victim is an unwed mother of a baby girl. The accused claims she consented to the relationship. Her consent was irrelevant because she was a minor at the time and the law deemed it a rape anyway. The accused was convicted to a jail term of seven years and ordered to pay compensation of Rs. 2 lakhs as well. The girl is an orphan who lives with an adoptive mother. She faces a very uncertain financial future. I suspect that sending her violator to jail will not materially alter her existential realities. So in a maverick moment of original thinking, the court referred the matter to the mediation centre. It ordered the convict to deposit Rs. 1 lakh in the bank, the interest of which would be paid to the victim. It released the convict on conditional bail and asked him to join the mediation effort. What happened next depended exclusively on the girl because if no solution was found, the convict would be back in jail with little to show for the money he put in the bank. If it worked out, the girl would be financially secure and the guy would be out of jail working hard somewhere to secure the future of his baby daughter. It seemed like a reasonable deal for the girl to make, but ultimately, it was her call. Clearly, what you think of these steps comes down to the narrative you buy into. If you think a violent man brutalized a young virgin deserves whatever the law has in store for him, then its jail or nothing. Ditto if you think this is a nasty Casanova who seduced a mere child. It’s a crime for a man to seduce an impressionable minor but I do think it isn’t quite the same thing as sexually assaulting a girl. This should be relevant to how we think of the crime. Besides, these are cultural constructs, inspiring legal ones. My grandmother married at 16, as did my paternal aunt. Conversely, if you think they were two young people in puppy love who became victims of the law and were then brutalized by the inevitable coercive police process, your response may well be very different. This is why many societies still favour compromise and satisfaction for the victim over state sponsored retribution. In Denmark, Venezuela, Indonesia, Camaroon and Chad, the Legislations provide that if the perpetrator enters into or continues a marriage or registered partnership with the victim after a rape, it gives grounds for reducing or remitting punishment. To my mind, marriage is not germane to the issue, effective solution to the post rape financial issues is. Everyone understands that victims of all crime need help. Sending the perpetrator to jail is not help enough, not by a long shot. State support for victims is gaining in popularity worldwide. India has such measures too but they don’t work well. A study of the Manodhairya Scheme launched in 2013 after the Mumbai Shakti Mills rape case shows that only a handful of victims have been compensated. The State’s Women and Child Development Department disburses the funds to district level committees which receive all the applications and scrutinise them. Rarely do the districts receive adequate funds. In the Pune district for instance, 174 cases of rape and child sexual abuse were registered out of which 122 cases were sanctioned for a total payment of Rs. 3.26 Crores. However, the state paid out only Rs. 1.92 Crores so the district committee decided to compensate only 73 victims, keeping the remaining 49 on the waiting list. At the time of the publication of the report in June 2015, only 17 of 73 victims had actually been compensated. The victims either had no bank accounts or were allegedly untraceable! You could argue that the state is not best structured to provide succour to misfortune or you could argue that there are too many kickbacks blowing in the wind. Either ways, the idea that the state must compensate victims of certain crimes is grounded in the idea that the state is responsible for citizens and must pay because it failed to protect its citizens. Why this should mean that the convict should not pay for the injury he has caused, but cool his heals in jail instead, is less than clear. We hear it argued that allowing convicts to compensate victims of their crimes encourages rich criminals to engage in them knowing they could ‘buy their way’ out of jail. This may well be true but whose choice is this to make: the state, or the victim? Whose injury is it anyway? That takes us to the profile of rape cases now hitting cop stations. How many of them are of strangers befriended on Facebook, followed up by meetings in hotels culminating in allegations of rape? How many others are accusations of rape because consent was obtained on a false promise of marriage? A false promise of marriage is established by the victim’s statement alone and it is marriage she wants. Why not let her have her marriage? Once the accusation is made, the case takes a life of its own where the lady has no more control over what happens next. Events now serve principally to quench the fire in the souls of drum beating women’s activists. If the accused does marry her, what does jail time do for either of them? In many jails across India, especially Delhi’s Tihar Jail, the usual welcome accorded to a rape accused is to be gang raped by hardened criminals within the jail. As I see it, those who demand that rapists be compulsorily sent to jail are really saying they want the rapist to be gang raped in jail. I understand the idea of an eye for an eye, but that still doesn’t help the victim of a crime to heal all wounds. So any which way I look at it, we need to re-imagine our criminal law to address the wounds of the victims of crimes, not the outrage of the bystander. In many circumstances, money for the victim may well be the most appropriate solution. Forcing the perpetrator of a crime to compensate the victim strikes me as the most logical solution. In any case, if the victim is happy to receive a sum of money for the injury suffered, why should a third party (like the law) have any opinion on the subject? (The author is managing partner of the Gurgaon-based corporate law firm N South. He is the author of “Winning Legal Wars” and “Bullshit Quotient: Decoding India’s corporate, social and legal Fine Print”. He can be contacted at rcd@nsouthlaw.com or ranjeevdubey@hotmail.com).
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BW Hotelier F&B Conclave & Expo 2015 brought together the who’s who of the Indian hospitality industry. The event was held at Le Meridien, New Delhi on 24 July 2015. The event witnessed food and beverage professionals sharing their experiences and giving valuable insights on F&B operations. They also discussed issues pertaining to the F&B business, role of technology and innovation, food safety and future of this segment.(This story was published in BW | Businessworld Issue Dated 07-09-2015)
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The second edition of HR Strategy Forum, organised by BW Businessworld, was held on 29 July 2015 at Leela Ambience (Gurgaon), where over 200 HR professionals attended it. The summit themed ‘Future HR: Engaging and Leading in Transient Times’, explored how the HR function — that strives to help people and organisations to be more effective and efficient — will evolve in the near future, in the light of pressing business, technology, societal and macroeconomic trends.To facilitate an all-emcompassing discourse BW Businessworld brought together all relevant stakeholders and partners and included ideas and opinion from the government, industry, domain experts and citizens alike.(This story was published in BW | Businessworld Issue Dated 07-09-2015)
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The last leg of BW businessworld Marketing Whitebook 2015-16's launch came to an end with the unveiling of the book in Mumbai on 30 July 2015. The discussions at the launch event saw participation from several industry leaders and stakeholders who presented their views on the theme ‘Connected Consumer’, and what #iammarketer meant in the communication and marketing business in India.The general consensus at the event was that even though marketers are gearing up for a future where advertising and transaction will converge, a lot more has to be achieved. The marketers investing in the new vision are waiting for a better tomorrow.(This story was published in BW | Businessworld Issue Dated 07-09-2015)
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Capabilities once seen only on unaffordable devices are making their way to budget phones, Mala Bhargava writes Recently when a reader told me she had Rs 30,000 to Rs 40,000 to spend on a phone and asked me to recommend one, I found myself more than a bit stumped. I couldn’t think of a strong reason to recommend one of the flagships, which would stretch her budget a little actually, over everything else that was available. And nor could I encourage her to pick up something in the price category she specified that would be really worthwhile. Where once I would have said — increase your budget a bit — I actually told her to consider a smartphone less than half the price. Not long ago, one could have been fairly certain of getting something special when paying a premium for a top-end smartphone. A great camera, a unique metallic design, an unbeatable stylus, stock Android, etc. But over the past year, both attractive design and sought-after specifications have crept down to budget phones. The Android phones around me right now, in fact, all have features and capabilities you would have had to pay through your nose for, a little over a year ago. The just-launched OnePlus 2 runs on the Snapdragon 810 processor and while that’s had some history of getting too hot, is still something you’d have seen first maybe on a Samsung flagship costing Rs 45,000 and above, not a Rs 24,000 device as it is now. A while ago, it was the USP of Sony top-end devices that they were waterproof. And now, the third gen Moto G, one of the most popular budget phones of recent times, can be submerged in three feet of water for half an hour. At one point, 2GB RAM on a smartphone was a big achievement that you had to pay for, but I have next to me the Zenfone 2 from Asus, a company we never really associated with smart phones until recently, and it has a 4GB RAM (more than my Rs 58,000 Samsung Note 4) as well as a rather nice stylised design at Rs 19,999. One of its variants has a pretty good camera, as does the Rs 9,999 Lenovo K3 Note and quite a few others. The cameras still don’t surpass the ones on the Samsung flagship, but it may not be long before we see that too. Both Apple and Samsung are being squeezed by Chinese and local players. Despite the Galaxy S6 being an excellent phone, it isn’t selling as well as it should and may see a price drop. Samsung’s profits have been plummeting for the past several quarters. But Samsung has said that its smartphone market share in India was over 40 per cent in June, up from 35 per cent in January. The claim was based on data from market research firm GfK. Samsung remains the world’s biggest smartphone maker but it is Apple that is raking in most of the rewards. All the same, even the mighty Apple can’t take continued dominance for granted — in China, Xiaomi has just unseated it to become the number one player there. There is also the idea being put forward that iPhone’s sales may take a hit in the near future because the droves who bought the iPhone 6 will not upgrade to the iPhone 6a as readily. This may give the budget players a window of opportunity to grab some more market share. An unfazed CEO Tim Cook is confident his company will retain its dominance. mala@businessworld.in,@malabhargava (This story was published in BW | Businessworld Issue Dated 07-09-2015)
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The big story that burnt the pages in every newspaper and the studios of every major TV channel last week was the debate on the banning of porn. The government of the day felt that this is bad for all of us, based on a PIL filed by an Indore-based lawyer, and decided to block 857 websites that were identified as defiling and corrupting Indian society (we were a pure and pious nation before these websites, of course). Fortunately, unlike in the case of other such protective decisions that they have taken on our behalf so far, the government quickly retracted the decision and limited the ban to websites indulging in child pornography. Of course, the ban had its very strong proponents. One amazing counter to the government’s reversal came from a panelist on a recent TV debate. She claimed that the label of child pornography should not necessarily be limited to content that uses children as actors. She felt that the definition must include the access that children get to adult content. There are interesting extensions to that logic if you think about it. So you will now have ‘child beer’ (along with chilled beer) and ‘child tobacco’, as new labels for the stuff that gets into the hands of children. I was left wondering why we don’t ban those war games that children play on their handheld devices. This should then prevent the potential proliferation of children growing up to be terrorists! The fact is that each of us can come up with tenuous cause and effect relationships for any number of activities that lead to adverse effects on children, society, the environment, peace between nations and whatever else. One US-returned academic quotes a clear link that she established between pornography and violence against women after having interviewed 300 people! It is understandable that as individuals with backgrounds and experiences each of us will have a view of what is acceptable. And so be it. The bigger issue in all this is with the state deciding what is good or bad for us. There is little evidence available to demonstrate that getting rid of anything is beneficial to society. Including deathrow inmates. Even before the Internet nailed the availability obstacle 20 years ago, it was fairly evident that most things that were officially banned would any way find their way through other access points, provided people really wanted them. Take alcohol. You put an official stop to it and the bootlegging industry takes over in full swing. So what is the mechanism that decides what I can and cannot do? Particularly within the confines of a private citizen’s private life? Shouldn’t it be decided by the freedom of choice of the individual? As much as I have the right to avoid restaurants that serve beef or exposure to adults copulating, my neighbour should have the right to indulge in both. And as much as my neighbour exercised the free choice of voting for the party that came to rule, I needn’t have. Isn’t that the mechanism which brings governments to power? This is ultimately what a free society is built on, if indeed that is what we define ourselves as (everyday we make free choices about what airline we should fly and which soap works best for our skin).And most well-governed free societies have enough checks and balances to ensure that the abuse of such choices are stringently blocked by law. We must keep in mind that democratically elected governments are the biggest beneficiaries of free choice. Why would they want to take away that right from the very people who exercised that freedom to bring them to power? The author is president and CKO, EQUiTOR Value Advisory (This story was published in BW | Businessworld Issue Dated 07-09-2015)
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