| | | Good morning! | | The world is not enough The most important news of the week — some may say it isn’t really news — is that 2025 is going to be the worst year for the global economy since 2008, according to the World Bank, if one were to exclude the recession of 2020 caused by the pandemic. The global economy is expected to expand by just 2.3% this year (the bank has essentially shaved half a percentage point off its earlier estimate). There is no doubt that the disruption and uncertainty caused by the US’ retaliatory tariffs have contributed to this; but as the World Bank explained in its Global Economic Prospects release, the downtrend predates Donald Trump. The good news for India is that it will continue to be the fastest growing major economy in the world. But China will continue to dominate manufacturing and grow its global footprint in the sector; the Global South (minus India and China) seems to have given up the race to catch up with high-income countries . The World Bank’s prescription is “underwhelming”, HT pointed out in an editorial : “The core of the economic problem facing the world at the moment is whether or not the advanced countries have the political appetite to absorb large exports from the emerging market and developing economies. Solving this problem requires a rebalancing of not just the international division of labour and income, but also the balance within developed economies.” | | (No) strength in numbers The 2029 national election — I am aware we are still some way from it — promises to be interesting. As does the 2034 one. It emerges that the government, which announced the National Census only last week, is confident enough of completing the exercise in time for the delimitation commission to not just redraw Lok Sabha constituencies based on the new population — fair from the perspective of ensuring every Indian’s vote is worth the same; unfair to the southern states which will effectively be penalised for their success in controlling population, the national agenda through the 1970s and the 1980s — but also reserve 33% of the expanded number of constituencies for women. I have previously written about the controversy over delimitation referencing an article by Milan Vaishnav and Jamie Hinton in 2019, part of “India Elects 2019”, a collaboration between the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and Hindustan Times . “One of the analytical charts accompanying the essay used the projected population for 2026 to estimate the number of representatives each province would send to the Lok Sabha. Based on these projections, it estimated that the house would have 848 members, with Uttar Pradesh electing 143, Bihar 79, Maharashtra 76, West Bengal 60, Madhya Pradesh 50, Rajasthan 50, Tamil Nadu 49, and Karnataka 41. Kerala would elect 20, as it does now. That means Kerala’s proportional representation reduces from 3.68% currently to 2.35%; Tamil Nadu’s from 7.18% to 5.77%; and Karnataka’s from 5.15% to 4.83%. In contrast, Uttar Pradesh’s proportional representation would increase from 14.73% to 16.86%, Bihar’s from 7.36% to 9.31%, and Rajasthan’s from 4.6% to 5.89%”. As for 2034 — that may well be the election that sees the implementation of the One Nation One Election plan of simultaneous state and Lok Sabha elections. | | Quis custodiet ipsos custodes On Monday, my colleague Utkarsh Anand reported that the Supreme Court decided not to pursue action against justice Shekhar Yadav of the Allahabad high court after the Rajya Sabha secretariat sent it a missive that disciplinary action against a judge was strictly the purview of the House. He reported that “then Chief Justice of India (CJI) Sanjiv Khanna had set the process in motion to assess whether the judge’s conduct warranted scrutiny in the wake of an adverse report from the Allahabad high court chief justice. However, the move was halted after the Rajya Sabha secretariat’s letter in March underlined that the constitutional mandate for any such proceeding lies solely with the chairman of the Rajya Sabha, and ultimately with Parliament and the President.” The following day, Kapil Sibal, a member of the Rajya Sabha and one of the 55 opposition MPs who gave a notice in the Rajya Sabha seeking justice Yadav’s impeachment for “grave violation of judicial ethics” said there has been no progress in the matter. Interestingly, justice Yadav is believed to have regretted his comments and assured the Supreme Court collegium that he would publicly apologise for his remarks that bordered on hate speech targetting Muslims — and then not done so. It is not clear that the government will push for any action against him in Parliament, though — just as it is very likely that it will do so in the case of justice Yashwant Varma, the former Delhi high court judge at whose residence a large amount of currency was allegedly seen following a fire. As Hindustan Times remarked in an editorial , “The Rajya Sabha chairperson, who has been vocal about judicial integrity and institutional probity, should ensure that the complaint against the judge is now processed in a transparent manner and concluded before the judicial officer retires in April next year.” | | Masters of the Universe There are several things that Mountainhead , which I watched last weekend, gets right. One, tech moguls see themselves as invincible, and everything (including mortality) as a problem that technology can solve. Two, many of them are sociopaths whose own emotional status atrophied sometime in their late adolescence. Three, they either do not understand the consequences, or do not care about them. They are boys in men’s bodies and as rich as countries. And so, as the world burns, four of the breed lock themselves up in an icy fortress and see how else they can benefit. They are extremely intelligent, extremely greedy, and also extremely shallow (correct that; perhaps not as shallow as some of our real-life tech moguls). That the fire — violence, arson, collapsing markets and countries — has been caused by content creation tools launched by the company founded by one of the four, also the richest, that allow the production and dissemination of fake news that’s indistinguishable from real news is only apt. If Jesse Armstrong’s tale of the times appears tame in parts, it is because today’s reality is so much wilder. Had it been a morality play such as Edgar Allan Poe’s The Masque of Red Death (written in 1842; two years later, Poe would perpetrate The Great Balloon Hoax, making him an early pioneer in fake news), the fire would have burned down Mountainhead — and towards the end of the movie, the prospect of this does arise, but it doesn’t come to be — but there are no morality plays in 2025. The last line of Poe’s short story is: “And darkness and decay and the read death held illimitable dominion over all.” The last spoken words of Mountainhead have a meditation app going: “Inhale… and exhale…; inhale…, and exhale….” | | Masters of the court The results of the French Open have clearly answered the big question regarding men’s tennis: who will replace the Big Three? The answer: the two young men (23 and 22) who have, between them, won seven of the last eight Grand Slams. The rivalry between Carlos Alcaraz and Jannik Sinner suggests that men’s tennis may not really miss the three men who, over the past two decades, won 66 Grand Slams titles, my colleague Ashish Magotra wrote. But the women’s game is still struggling to find a superstar , he added in a follow-up article. After all, six women have won the last eight Grand Slams. | | | | 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 | | | | |
