Is “Callous” the Same as “Strong”?

Some things currently happening in our world are unbearable. Cuba’s inhabitants, numbering ten million or so, are close to having a ZERO supply of oil and gas, after Trump forced oil-rich Venezuela to cease its aid to the Caribbean island. Cubans will quickly be without electricity too. Their leaders may have committed blunders, but must all the Cuban people face inhuman punishment? 

Again, we’re matter-of-factly told that “nothing” may be left of Iran if its rulers don’t budge. Is the country’s 90-million-plus population factored into this “nothing” pledge? Also promised not so long ago, we might remember, was the vaporization of Iran’s civilization, a piece of humanity’s heritage that is beyond price.

We can agree that rulers need steely hearts. Still, they should not forget that their acts and words produce emotions in people – in Cubans, Iranians, others. Emotions that can lead to devastating future consequences, devastating even for the interests of the rulers’ own people.

While, as you see, I have not resisted a need to notice Trump, my stronger urge is to recognize the depth of our world’s unhappiness, including in places outside our customary focus.

THE CONGO’S SADNESS

The alarming Ebola outbreak in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (Africa’s second largest nation in area, after Algeria) is a reminder of the sadness pervading the DRC, which possesses high-value minerals in quantities that match the country’s size. Let’s not forget either that over the years the Congo has lost large numbers of its people in violent internal conflicts. 

In another part of Africa, a joint military operation by American and Nigerian forces killed Abu-Bilal al-Minuki, a Nigerian national, who was described as the “second-in-command,” globally, of the forces of ISIS or “the Islamic state”. Minuki’s end, apparently occurring somewhere in Nigeria, was announced on May 15 by US President Donald Trump on his “Truth Social” platform. 

Nigeria belongs to Africa’s immensely wide Sahel region, which stretches (south of the Sahara) all the way from Senegal on the continent’s Atlantic coast to Eritrea in the east, where the Red Sea washes the Sahel’s warm and oft-dry land. ISIS is said to have influence in pockets all across the Sahel. Located within the region are spacious countries like Mauritania, Niger, Chad and Sudan, among others.

Minuki’s alleged crimes included the shocking 2014 abduction of over a hundred schoolgirls in northern Nigeria. Nigeria’s 74-year-old president, Bola Ahmed Tinubu, a Muslim, has hailed the joint US-Nigerian operation that Trump announced and said he looks forward to more strikes against terrorist enclaves. 

WHY THE INSURGENCIES 

The world has found confirmation year after year, however, that “taking out” a militant commander is hopelessly insufficient. We don’t know, at least I don’t know, how the political and administrative leaders of Nigeria propose to address the insurgencies that are active in their nation and neighborhood, and the reasons for their emergence.

This column, and this site as a whole, has only occasionally addressed the realities, positive or negative, of the Sahel, or indeed of other parts of Africa. Let us however note that the recently observed divide between the UAE and Saudi Arabia in the Hormuz Strait conflict has been conspicuous for a longer time in the large Sahel nation of Sudan, where the Saudis and the UAE’s chiefs have for some time been backing rival forces in a bitter and protracted civil war. That the UAE and Saudi Arabia are both Muslim countries, and both Arab too, has not prevented the rift. 

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I’ve touched before on Nigeria-India similarities. Large populations, sharp internal diversities, vocal citizens, brilliant writers, proliferating political parties, and center-province arguments are only the start of what these two countries share. 

Moreover, around 50,000 people of Indian origin live in Nigeria today, a vast majority of them in the great city of Lagos. At the other end, perhaps a total of 3,000 to 5,000 students from different parts of Nigeria study today on India’s college campuses. They’re following examples set decades back by Nigerian students and repeated by fresh batches year after year.

There is thus a large potential for Indians and Nigerians to really get to know one another and collaborate for the benefit of the world as a whole! Sadly, the human propensity to merely walk past one another is also powerful. We wait, not endlessly I hope, for pioneering Indians who will use the many opportunities available to study in depth the Nigeria story, and likewise for path-breaking Nigerians who will probe India’s psyche and history. 

FALLING RUPEE 

We don’t yet know how the Trump-Xi conversations in Beijing of May 14-15 will impact the “truce” between US-Israel and Iran that has survived thus far. What everyone knows is that the war which began on February 28 with attacks on Iran by the US and Israel, and which was suspended by all sides on April 7-8, has been followed by an Iran-imposed control on the movement of ships across the Strait of Hormuz and by a US-imposed blockade of Iranian ports. 

The result has been economic difficulties for almost all countries in the world, and grim challenges for some. In India, the rupee has fallen from its 90-to-a-dollar value at the end of February this year to 96 against the dollar on May 17. When I was in my teens, five rupees could buy a dollar. Before long a single dollar may fetch over a hundred Indian rupees. 

Like people in multiple countries, Indians are having to pay more for almost everything they need. The latest hike they’re facing is in the price of milk. In an unusual appeal, Modi has asked the Indian public to travel less, conserve foreign exchange, and not buy gold for a year. 

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It seems that brakes on the economy will not be allowed to slow down India’s political march towards a polity where Hindus are firmly on top, with no questions or complaints allowed from Muslims or Christians, whose percentages are small but who number in millions in many of India’s states. 

In the large province of Madhya Pradesh, in a town called Dhar which lies about 40 miles west of the bigger city of Indore, a special space for worship was hitherto shared pragmatically between Hindus and Muslims. On May 15, Madhya Pradesh’s high court ruled that that arena would now belong exclusively to Hindus. A 2003 arrangement allowing Hindus to worship at the site on Tuesdays, and letting Muslims pray in a section of the complex on Fridays, was knocked down by the court. 

WEAKENED JUDICIARY 

The history of this particular prayer-space in Dhar goes back to medieval times. “Our forebears have prayed here for centuries,” say Dhar’s Muslims. In a widely shared Hindu belief, the idol of a Hindu goddess was once the center of that space. That idol has since been stored in the UK for a considerable time. Hindu groups want the idol brought back from England. Dhar’s Muslims want India’s Supreme Court to permit them to resume praying on their piece of ground. In today’s political climate in India, will the Supreme Court grant the Muslim request? 

According to the Indian Express, “a massive controversy has erupted in [India’s] legal and media landscapes following sharp oral observations by Chief Justice of India Surya Kant.” While hearing, along with another Supreme Court justice, a lawyer’s request to be designated a “senior advocate”, the chief justice evidently used expressions like "cockroaches" and "parasites" for unnamed individuals. Following intense outrage, the chief justice issued a “clarification” in which he claimed that his remarks had been misquoted by a section of the media. 

Every once in a while, a brave magistrate or single judge in India rules in favor of free speech or equal rights, but no one today would use the word “vigorous” for the health of India’s judiciary. 

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As must be true for some other countries as well, in India a sarkari naukri, as it is called in Hindi, i.e. a government job at any level (there are many levels, of course) is highly prized and ardently sought. A sarkari job is permanent. Unless you act atrociously, you can’t be fired. Crucially, a sarkari job fetches a lifelong pension as well, plus health benefits for you and family. Moreover, it puts you inside the ruling class. And it fetches a large dowry. 

Admission to higher rungs in India’s government (at the center or in the states) takes place through specially organized competitive tests. Coaching classes for these tests form an important part of the economy. Such coaching classes are also offered for tests for entering medical and engineering colleges, and for colleges that can confer B Sc degrees in nursing, that Indians take in large numbers. Which they do since doctors, dentists, qualified nurses, and engineers earn decent to high incomes in India. 

LEAKED AND SOLD 

The annual test for entering a medical, dental, or nursing school, the National Eligibility cum Entrance Test, or NEET as it is commonly called, draws more applicants in India than any comparable exam. This year’s NEET exam, set for May 3, had to be canceled at the last minute because its questions had leaked -- and had been widely sold for plenty of money. A fresh NEET exam will now take place on June 21. 

A Pune-based chemistry lecturer has been named by India’s Central Bureau of Investigation as a key figure in the scam. It is alleged that he obtained the exam’s questions and dictated them as also their answers in private coaching sessions. Among others who have been detained are a woman teaching botany in Pune, the head of a coaching institute in Latur, which like Pune lies in Maharashtra state, and a Pune-based beautician who allegedly recruited youngsters for coaching classes where, they were told, NEET’s questions would be revealed to them in advance. 

In the year 2024, according to HW, one of India’s YouTube channels, more than two million young Indians, 2,333,297 to be precise, took the tests for a total of 109,107 seats in med schools across the country. 

Numbers would have been even larger on May 3 this year, but the toil and suspense of these well more than two million young women and men, and the related exertions of family members, amounted to nothing. 

Unwilling to displease the government, the great bulk of India’s print and electronic media – the godi or lapdog media, as courageous YouTubers call it– are not screaming against the enormous scandal. But the YouTubers are on the attack. 

They are focusing on the fact that despite a shameful and prolonged succession of leaks, the National Testing Agency conducting NEET (as well as other career-determining exams) from the year 2017 has not been investigated. Here is a link to the video (made by the brave Ravish Kumar) where Rahul Gandhi, leader of the opposition in the Lok Sabha, can be seen openly charging that organizations of the Hindu Right not only control every public university in India, and the hiring of new lecturers, they also rake in money through fraud in competitive tests.