[🇮🇳] Indian Union and State Politics

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Source : https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-68630659

Arvind Kejriwal: Delhi's chief minister arrested over corruption claims


Prominent opposition politician and Delhi chief minister Arvind Kejriwal has been arrested by India's financial crime agency, his party said.

The arrest is in connection with corruption allegations relating to the city's policies over alcohol sales.

Mr Kejriwal and his party, the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP), deny any wrongdoing and say the case is politically motivated.

His arrest comes weeks before voting begins in India's general election.

Police surrounded Mr Kejriwal's home on Thursday as it was searched by members of the Enforcement Directorate agency.

The case is over allegations that an alcohol sale policy implemented by the Delhi government in 2022 - which ended the government monopoly - gave undue advantages to private retailers.

Mr Kejriwal has ignored numerous summonses in the case.

The AAP has accused the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) of playing "dirty politics" and says it will seek an urgent hearing at the Supreme Court to secure Mr Kejriwal's release.

 

[Old School]

What Happened When India Pulled the Plug on TikTok​

The United States is agonizing over the possibility of a ban, but India did it at a stroke. Indians adjusted quickly, and Instagram and YouTube built big audiences.
In India, a country of 1.4 billion, it took TikTok just a few years to build an audience of 200 million users. India was its biggest market. Then, on June 29, 2020, the Indian government banned TikTok, along with 58 other Chinese apps, after a simmering conflict between India and China flared into violence at their border.
A popular form of entertainment, which had not been the subject of political debate, vanished overnight. Now, as politicians are wrangling in Washington over a plan that could shut access for the 170 million Americans using TikTok, the example set by India gives a foretaste of what may come — and how audiences and other social media companies catering to them might respond.
TikTok, owned by ByteDance in Beijing, came to India early, establishing a wide base in 2017 in dozens of the country’s languages. Its content — short videos — tended to be homey and hyperlocal. An endless scroll of homemade productions, many of them shot in small towns or farms and set to popular music, helped while away the hours across the world’s cheapest and fastest-growing mobile-data network. As it has in the United States, TikTok became a platform for entrepreneurial extroverts to build businesses.
Veer Sharma was 26 when the music stopped. He had collected seven million followers on TikTok, where he posted videos of himself and friends lip-syncing and joking around to Hindi film songs. He was the son of a laid-off millworker from the central Indian city of Indore and barely finished formal schooling. His TikTok achievements filled him with pride. He felt “beyond happy” when people recognized him on the street.

They were happy to see him, too. Once, Mr. Sharma said, an “elderly couple met me and said they would watch my show before going to bed, for a laugh.” They told him that his “show was a way out of their daily life’s drudgery.”
With his new stardom, Mr. Sharma was earning 100,000 rupees, about $1,200, a month. He bought a Mercedes. After the ban in 2020, he barely had time to make one last video for his fans. “Our times together will be ending soon, and I don’t know how or when we will be able to meet again,” he told them.
India’s TikTok Ban: What Lessons Does It Hold for the U.S. - The New York Times (nytimes.com)

 

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[H1]India's army of gold refiners face new competition[/H1]

Refining gold has a long history in the family of Satish Pratap Salunke.

Following in the footsteps of his father and grandfather, he and his business collect scrap gold from jewellers, melt it down and sell it back to the jewellers in the form of gold bars.

He has two refineries, one in Kochi in the southern state of Kerala and the other in Tiruchirappalli in Tamil Nadu. Relatives have refineries elsewhere in the south of India.

"Every day my refiners on an average melt two to three kilograms of gold," he says.

Almost every town in India will have at least one small refinery similar to those run by Mr Salunke. It is known as the "unorganised" refining sector, which distinguishes it from big refiners who make gold bars and coins from imported, unrefined gold.


It is estimated that, in total, Indian households hold a massive 25,000 tonnes of gold, and some of that is always available for sale, particularly when the price of gold is high or the economy is bad and people want to raise some cash.

Jewellers may process returned gold themselves but will often use small refiners who will make the gold back into bars.

 

[Old School]

[H1]Behind India's Manipur conflict: A tale of drugs, armed groups and politics[/H1]

(Photo: Homes have been vandalised and burned in the ethnic clashes and rioting that have gripped Manipur in India for nearly a year)

[H2]The war on drugs[/H2]
In 2018, still in his first term as chief minister, Singh announced his war on drugs.

"Thousands of hectares of land are used for poppy cultivation in areas near the international border with Myanmar," he told the media.

Poor economic conditions, lack of job opportunities and easy availability of drugs had led to a high number of drug addicts in the state, he said.

He was not wrong. Manipur sits adjacent to the infamous "Golden Triangle", an area in Southeast Asia covering civil war-torn Myanmar. The UN Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) defines the region as one of the "biggest drug trafficking corridors in the world". Heroin, opium and synthetic drugs like methamphetamine from the region are "feeding the whole of the Asia Pacific [region]", the UN said.

The spillover of the trade into Manipur has an old history.

"The drug trade has caught up in Manipur in the last 15 years. [Recently,] the US, other Western countries and the United Nations [have] started going after Myanmar and the Golden Triangle," Lieutenant General Konsam Himalay Singh, a Meitei, who retired in 2017, told me.

He added, "As a result, the Golden Triangle extended towards the West [into Manipur]. It was accelerated by the armed groups who found easy money."

He was referring to the array of armed rebel groups of different ethnicities, including the Kuki and Meitei fighters, that proliferate in Manipur and are involved in the drug trade across the porous borders with Myanmar.


Behind India's Manipur conflict: A tale of drugs, armed groups and politics | Business and Economy | Al Jazeera