18 Jan 2024 : The Indian Express

Editorial 1 : The new multi-alignment

Context: Modi-Putin meeting, EAM Jaishankar's Iran visit show India has managed to engage diverse partners, often at odds with each other.

Introduction

• The current moment in international affairs is marked by renewed great power rivalry.
• The conflicts in Europe and West Asia – between Russia and Ukraine, Israel and Hamas – and the broader tussle between the US and China on economic, technological and strategic fronts make it tempting to view the global scenario in binaries.

India’s ability to engage with diverse partners

• Two recent events, however, show that New Delhi has managed to engage with diverse partners who are often at odds with each other.
• If India’s non-alignment during the Cold War was — in principle if not practice — defined by its claim of equidistance from the two blocs, its current “multi-alignment” is guided by national interest and the need to forge bilateral relationships.
• On Monday, Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Russian President Vladimir Putin had a phone conversation in which they reportedly discussed the “special and privileged strategic partnership” between the two countries, the Ukraine conflict and a further deepening of bilateral ties.
• Around the same time, External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar was concluding a two-day visit to Iran, where he met his counterpart and other senior officials and finalised cooperation on developing the Chabahar Port.
• Russia and Iran are, in a sense, on the “other side” vis-a-vis India and China.

Pressure from others

• In the early stage of the Ukraine conflict, the US put considerable pressure on Delhi to take a stronger position against Russia’s aggression. Iran, too, is embroiled in a regional cold war with Israel and Saudi Arabia — India has deep partnerships with both nations.
• That it has managed to maintain these bilateral ties even as its partnership with the US and Europe grows is significant. Significantly with both nations, Delhi hasn’t compromised on its core principles: PM Modi reportedly reiterated India’s position to Putin — that war cannot be a solution and Jaishankar communicated zero tolerance for terror and how the Houthi attacks on merchant vessels harm India’s interests.

Conditions that are helping India

• It is equally important to recognise the underlying conditions that have allowed New Delhi room to manoeuvre on the global stage.
• The first of these is India’s continuing economic rise. The size of its market as well as its potential for future growth give Delhi both strategic and diplomatic heft.
• Second, as China has grown more aggressive in Asia, and beyond, many in the US and the West see India as a crucial regional counterbalance.
• Among the many factors that make India an attractive partner is its credentials as a liberal, pluralist democracy.

Conclusion

• As it continues to navigate the choppy waters of geopolitics and geoeconomics to secure its interests, India must ensure it does not slip on either front.

Editorial 2 : Atal Setu is bad for Mumbai — its people and ecology

Context: Planners and urban planning need to start making our urban futures with the urban social and ecological context of the 21st century and not with the dated plans of the past.

Introduction

• Last week, Prime Minister Narendra Modi inaugurated the Mumbai Trans Harbour Link bridge, the Atal Setu. Completed 60 years after its initial design, the bridge has been advertised as a symbol of the city and the country’s development, its world-class status. This might have been true if the bridge was completed in the 1970s.

New mode of City-making

• But today, urban planners around the world have learned from their mistakes of 50 years and moved on to a different mode of city-making — one that is firmly embedded in urban ecology, and which dissuades car transit.
• Seen from contemporary developments in urban and transport planning, the new bridge, like the coastal road, will be read not as a world-class development for the future, but as a dated and problematic mode of city-making from times past.
• This mode of development not only produces traffic, research has shown, but is also key to the local production of the climate crisis.

Sluggish implementation of city plans

• Planners in Mumbai, and Indian cities generally, bemoan the slow pace at which city plans are implemented.
• For instance, at an event hosted by Mumbai CityLab’s on January 13, planners complained about the slow and contentious realisation of development plans in the city. I see promise in that failure.
• It is because city development plans have been so slow to materialise that the city still has available open spaces, wetlands, gardens and playgrounds that perform vital climate mitigation and adaptation services today.
• Until recently, the city’s trees absorbed carbon dioxide and provided shade because they weren’t cut down on account of an infrastructure project. Wetlands remain wetlands because developers haven’t been able to execute their developments in the city.
• The rapid concretisation and infrastructuring of the city with roads, highways and tunnels in recent years, however, has created several environmental problems.
• Planners and engineers alike have simply not accounted for the fact that the city and all its citizens depend on an ecology to live.
• As they rapidly accelerate infrastructure construction today, the toxic air quality levels of the city, or the increasing extent of rainwater runoff in its streets are evidence of their failures to do so.

Reimagining Climate-change resilient infrastructure

• Scholars of planning have shown that these failures are not failures of individual planners but of a certain vision and idea of planning that was ascendant in the 1960s.
• These ideas, however, continue to permeate the work of Mumbai’s planners and its development plans in the 2020s.
• Rather than rush to complete these outdated intentions of the past — of making bigger concretised roads for example, or paving over all open space like the Mahalaxmi Race Course, this is a good time to reimagine infrastructure planning for the climate-changed city of the present and future.
• How might planning address and mitigate the air quality crisis its infrastructures have produced? In what ways are extant open spaces, intertidal regions and mangroves performing critical services the city cannot afford to lose?

Conclusion

• Planners and urban planning need to start making our urban futures with the urban social and ecological context of the 21st century and not with the dated plans of the past. It is not too late to do so in Mumbai. And for that, we have to thank the historically slow pace of infrastructure construction in the city.

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