The Big Story: Greased lightning

Despite two drought years in a row and a still sketchy economic recovery, India has managed to keep inflation much lower over the past two years than it was able to for the previous half-decade. This was primarily because India got very lucky: various international factors coincided to send oil prices plummeting to tremendous lows, and, as a major importer, the smaller bills made life much easier for the Indian state. Now that is in danger of ending.

Broader experts don't expect oil prices to spike too much anytime soon. Certainly, no one would predict a return to the highs of $110 a barrel seen just two years ago – it's currently at around $47 a barrel. But India can't proceed under the presumption that prices will remain low forever.

Advertisement

Prices spiked over the last day and a half after Russia and Saudi Arabia pledged to cooperate to stabilise global markets, although they failed to mention how exactly they would boost prices. Still, the two countries are the world's top two crude oil produces and the rest of OPEC, the oil producers' cartel, would presumably fall in line. Representatives of Russia and Saudi Arabia are set to meet again every few weeks as part of this effort.

Observers aren't terribly worried, pointing out that cartel efforts to force price rises in the past have not been successful. But the potential for a production freeze, and the fact that Russia – a close ally of Iran, which is just bringing its oil back onto the international market – is taking the lead on the negotiations suggest oil-importing nations like India have good cause to be concerned, or at least prepare themselves.

Political Pickings

  1. President Pranab Mukherjee on Monday backed Prime Minister Narendra Modi's push for general and state elections in India to be held simultaneously. 
  2. Home Minister Rajnath Singh said that the team of Members of Parliament that attempted to meet separatists in Kashmir was neither given permission nor asked not to go, and also claimed that because the MPs came back without a meeting the separatists hadn't displayed kashmiriyat, insaniyat or jamhooriyat.
  3. A Supreme Court bench of Justices Dipak Misra and UU Lalit said that sedition cases cannot be slapped on people simply for criticising the government.
  4. Now 80% of office-bearers of the Aam Aadmi Party in Amritsar have quit, citing "dictatorial behaviour" by observers from outside Punjab.
  5. UP Urban Development Minister Azam Khan's statements about BR Ambedkar have raised eyebrows: "The statue (of Ambedkar) pointing its finger into the distance seems to say that not only does it own the plot of land on which it stands, but also the one towards which it points its finger."

Punditry

  1. The triple talaq debate is not about majority vs minority, but the protection of individual rights, no matter the community writes Pratap Bhanu Mehta in the Indian Express.
  2. Delhi must do all it can to protect its most vulnerable – children – writes Shivani Singh in the Hindustan Times. 
  3. Amina Hassan in Pakistan Today writes about the growing international isolation of Pakistan. 

Don't Miss

Menaka Rao reports on a village in Chhattisgarh where drug shortage, and not HIV, is killing children.

Chhattisgarh was not on the radar when the National Aids Control Programme started in 1992. At that time, the states with large numbers of HIV positive people were Andhra Pradesh (now Telangana too), Maharashtra, Tamil Nadu and Karnataka, and the focus of the National Aids Control Programme was largely centred on these states. In about 10 years, when high endemic states managed to reduce the rate of new infections substantially, Chhattisgarh and a few other states registered a rise in the number of HIV cases.

In the past two or three years, there have been a series of stock-outs of anti-HIV drugs in India, mostly related to drugs given to children. In the past nine months alone, there were three stock-outs of the zidovudine-lamivudine combination – November-December, in April (briefly) and in June-July – in Chhattisgarh.