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Asean

Modi’s BJP no longer invincible

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Authors: Purnendra Jain and Peter Mayer, University of Adelaide

The tale of the recent February Delhi assembly elections shows how quickly political fortunes can decline. Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) recorded a landslide victory at the 2014 national elections and won a majority of seats in three subsequent state elections. But his party suffered a crushing defeat in Delhi, winning just three of the 70 seats. The unexpected defeat dents the image of electoral invincibility of both the BJP and Modi.

On the other hand, the Aam Adami Party (AAP or the Common Man Party) under the leadership of Arvind Kejriwal registered a sweeping victory capturing 67 of the 70 seats. The once-dominant Indian National Congress that ruled Delhi for 15 years from 1998–2013 did not even win one seat.

All exit polls had clearly indicated a victory for AAP with the BJP running second. But none of the polls showed the extent of damage that the BJP suffered. At the last Delhi assembly elections, held in December 2013, the BJP had won 31 seats, AAP 28 seats and the Congress eight seats. With no clear majority, AAP formed a minority government with support of the Congress.

But AAP’s leader Kejriwal walked out of office 49 days after he was elected on the grounds that opposition parties did not support his anti-corruption bills. Delhi voters and his many of his supporters criticised Kejriwal and he was harshly dubbed a bhagoda (deserter).

Kejriwal’s position was further weakened by his decision to run against the BJP prime ministerial candidate Narendra Modi for the seat of Varanasi at the 2014 general election. Kejriwal suffered an expected crushing defeat, as the people of Varanasi were unwilling to trust a politician who ran away from his duty in Delhi in the pursuit of greater ambitions at the national level.

Given Kejriwal’s past reputation for neglecting responsibility and Modi’s previous electoral success, even a few months before the Delhi elections no one imagined such a landslide victory for AAP and disastrous results for the BJP.

What changed so soon?

By resigning over an issue of principle, the AAP convincingly distinguished itself from the usual run of politicians who cling to the perks of office at any cost. Kejriwal was honest and upfront with Delhi voters and apologised on numerous occasions for resigning from office after only 49 days. In retrospect, there were positive consequences, which emerged from this much-criticised action. Working class individuals, who often face harassment from the police, experienced a month of welcome relief while the AAPs anti-bribery hotline was in operation. Once Kejriwal resigned, things quickly reverted to the way they had been.

The February election results were clearly a vote for Kejriwal and his policy agenda rather than a vote against the BJP. In 2013 there was a three-way contest between the AAP, the BJP and the Congress Party. In 2015 the BJP share of the vote was virtually unchanged from the earlier election but the Congress’ share of the vote fell to less than 10 per cent. Most Congress voters, particularly the Muslims and minorities, transferred their support to the AAP, giving them a decisive absolute majority of the overall vote. Under India’s ‘first past the post’ electoral system, that ensured an electoral victory for the AAP.

The resounding victory for the AAP poses a serious problem for the BJP, not least because Modi was such a prominent part of the party’s campaign strategy. It also poses a life and death question for the Congress. The desertion of its former supporters and its consequent failure to win a single seat will inevitably raise the most profound consequences for the Gandhi dynasty.

For the BJP there are different issues, some of which may only emerge in the coming years. In his rise to power, Modi has turned the BJP into a highly personalised organisation. Former senior leaders, including L.K. Advani and Jaswant Singh, have been sidelined and their places filled by Modi loyalists. But the traditional power-base of the party has resided in the disciplined cadres of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS or National Volunteer Organisation) and the saffron-clad members of the World Hindu Council.

The latter in particular has been pushing aspects of its ‘hindutva’ (Hinduisation) agenda. This includes campaigns against ‘love jihad’ (marriages between Hindus and Muslims) and in favour of ‘ghar wapsi’ (a code for conversion of Christians and Muslims to Hinduism).

If the BJP is to have any chance of making itself India’s most important political party, Modi will have to find a way to distance himself from his extremist supporters. There is an emerging clash between Modi’s highly centralised personal machine and the desires of the more extreme elements of the party. These elements seek to have him implement policies that could make the BJP un-electable in future elections.

Professor Purnendra Jain is a Professor in the Department of Asian Studies at the University of Adelaide.

Associate Professor Peter Mayer is a Visiting Research Fellow at the University of Adelaide

 

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Modi’s BJP no longer invincible

Asean

ASEAN weathering the COVID-19 typhoon

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Vietnam's Prime Minister Nguyen Xuan Phuc addresses a special video conference with leaders of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), on the coronavirus disease (COVID-19), in Hanoi 14 April, 2020 (Photo:Reuters/Manan Vatsyayana).

Author: Sandra Seno-Alday, Sydney University

The roughly 20 typhoons that hit Southeast Asia each year pale in comparison to the impact on the region of COVID-19 — a storm of a very different sort striking not just Southeast Asia but the world.

 

Just how badly is the COVID-19 typhoon thrashing the region? And what might the post-crisis recovery and reconstruction look like? To answer these questions, it is necessary to investigate the strengths and vulnerabilities of Southeast Asia’s pre-COVID-19 economic infrastructure.

Understanding the structure of the region’s economic house requires going back to 1967, when Southeast Asian countries decided to pledge friendship to one another under the ASEAN framework. While other integrated regions such as NAFTA and the European Union have aggressively broken down trade barriers and significantly boosted intra-regional trade, ASEAN regional economic integration has chugged along slower.

Southeast Asian countries have not viewed trade between each other as a top priority. The trade agreements in the region have been forged around suggestions for ASEAN countries to lower tariffs on intra-regional trade to within a certain range and across limited industries. This has lowered but not eliminated barriers to intra-regional trade. Consequently, a relatively significant share of Southeast Asian trade is with countries outside the region. This active extra-regional engagement has resulted in ASEAN countries’ successful integration into global value chain networks.

A historically outward-facing region, in 2010 around 75 per cent of Southeast Asian commodity imports and exports came from countries outside of ASEAN. This share of extra-regional trade nudged closer to 80 per cent in 2018. This indicates that ASEAN’s global value chain network embeddedness has deepened over time.

Around 40 per cent of ASEAN’s extra-regional trade is with the rest of Asia. From 2010 to 2018 Southeast Asian countries forged major trade relationships with four Asian countries: China, Japan, South Korea and India. Outside Asia, the United States is the region’s major trading partner. ASEAN’s trade focus on Asia’s largest markets is not surprising. Countries tend to establish trade relationships with large, geographically close, and culturally similar markets.

Fostering deep relationships with a few large markets, however, is a double-edged sword. While it has allowed ASEAN to benefit from integration in global value chains, it has also resulted in increased vulnerability to the shocks affecting its network connections.

ASEAN’s participation in global value chains has allowed it to transition from a net regional importer in 1990 to a net regional exporter in 2018. But the region’s deep embeddedness in a small and tightly-coupled network cluster of extra-regional global value chain partners has exposed it to disruption to any and all of its external partners. By contrast, ASEAN’s intra-regional trade network structure is much more loosely-coupled: a consequence of persistent intra-regional trade barriers and thus lower intra-regional trade intensity.

In the pre-COVID-19 period, ASEAN built for itself an economic house held up by just five extra-regional markets, while doing less to expand and diversify its intra-regional trade network. The data shows that ASEAN trade became increasingly concentrated in these few external markets between 2010 and 2018.

This dependence on a handful of markets does not bode well for risk and crisis management. All of the region’s major trading partners have been significantly affected by COVID-19 and this in turn is blowing the ASEAN economic house down.

What are the ways forward? The immediate task at hand is to get a better picture of the region’s position in global value chain networks and to get on top of managing its network risk exposure. Already there are red flags around the region’s food security arising from its position in food value chains. It is critical to look for ways to introduce flexibility into existing supply chains for greater agility in responding to crises.

It is also an opportune time for ASEAN to harness the technology transfer gains of global value chain participation and invest in innovation-driven diversification of products and markets. The region’s embeddedness in global value chain networks certainly places it in a strong position to readily access large export markets not just in Asia but also Europe and the Americas.

Over the longer term, ASEAN is faced with the question of whether it should seriously look…

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Tiger Trade Launches SGX Trading, Meeting Demand from Asian Investors

Access to the Singapore Exchange (SGX) adds to Tiger Brokers’ current menu of stock exchanges, such as the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) and the Nasdaq Stock Market (NASDAQ), the world’s two largest stock exchanges, as well as the Hong Kong Stock Exchange (HKEX).

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SINGAPORE (ACN Newswire) – Tiger Trade, a one-stop mobile and online trading application by Tiger Brokers, has launched access to the Singapore Exchange (SGX).

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Asean

Can Asia maintain growth with an ever ageing population ?

To boost productivity in the future, Asian governments will have to implement well-targeted structural reforms today.

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Asia has been the world champion of economic growth for decades, and this year will be no exception. According to the latest International Monetary Fund Regional Economic Outlook(REO), the Asia-Pacific region’s GDP is projected to increase by 5.5% in 2017 and 5.4% in 2018. (more…)

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