The second edition of ‘The Huddle’, a two-day thought conclave of The Hindu , was inaugurated in Bengaluru on Saturday. In his welcome address to an invited audience at the ITC Gardenia hotel, Mukund Padmanabhan, Editor of The Hindu , described The Huddle as a platform for an exchange of ideas in a congenial and constructive way. He said the event was not curated to posit one extreme view against another, to stir up flaming arguments or to stage debates as if they were a kind of intellectual bloodsport.

R Ravichander, Regional Director, South, YES Bank, the title sponsor of the conclave, said it was all the more relevant today as the India story had become a global buzzword.

Political exiles

The opening session was ‘Exile: The challenges of leading from afar’, in which Mohamed Nasheed, the former President of the Maldives, who has been living in exile since 2016; Farahnaz Ispahani, a Pakistani politician and human rights activist now living in Washington, DC; and SC Chandrahasan, a Sri Lankan human rights activist who worked with Sri Lankan refugees who streamed into India since the anti-Tamil violence of 1983, shared their individual stories of flight and the hopes and interventions that keep a leader in exile going.

Introducing the subject, the moderator, N Ram, Chairman of The Hindu Group, noted that a migrant leaves for a better life, a refugee for safety, and an exile in order to return some day.

‘India should act fast’

Mohamed Nasheed urged India to employ “gunboat diplomacy” to put pressure on the current regime in the island-country to conduct free and fair elections.

“I am not asking India to send troops to the Maldives to fight. I am asking for an envoy backed by muscle so that President [Abdulla] Yameen would listen to India. I am not even asking for a regime change in that sense. What we are looking for is an interim arrangement that will take us to free and fair election,” Nasheed said in an interaction with Suhasini Haider, Diplomatic Affairs Editor, The Hindu .

Sachin’s vision of India

Cricketer Sachin Tendulkar, in his session with Nikhil Naz, NDTV's Consulting Sports Editor, renewed his call for India to go from being a “sports-loving” nation to a “sports-playing” one. “Parents should give their children freedom and encourage them to play sport,” he said. “Not because we want to produce Olympic medallists but because we want to have a healthy and fit India. We love watching sport but very few of us regularly engage in sporting activity.”

The Constitution

Speaking on the panel “Age of anger: the polarisation in public discourse”, Subramanian Swamy, BJP MP, held the Constitution as the point of integration between conflicting ideologies. Today, society was divided into the Hindutva crowd, which did not want to talk to the Left, and a Left-leaning elite, which did not want to hear anything about Hindutva. “But both these crowds have to accept the Constitution,” he said.

In her remarks, Malini Parthasarathy, Co-chairperson of The Hindu Group, illustrated the contours of this debate. “In India, the political forces on the right of our spectrum have been unable to develop a proper world view that does not draw upon bigotry or prejudice. They are unable to gain traction in the political field without a reliance on communal polarisation and the invoking of a majoritarian cultural identity,” she said.

MNCs and India’s diversity

For multinationals in India, manufacturing in the country is a “challenge”. Erich Nesselhauff, MD, Daimler India Commercial Vehicles, had on hand a long list of problems that companies such as his face here.

Nesselhauf was speaking on a panel titled “Cracking the code: challenges and opportunities for MNCs in India”. In introducing the session, moderator Vinita Bali, former Managing Director of Britannia Industries, scoped the size of the potential of India. Foreign Direct Investment in the country was at $4 billion in 2006. This has seen a very sharp growth and now stands at $60 billion.

On his third month in the country, Peter Betzel, CEO, IKEA India, said that while his company would contribute to making the country better, the reverse was going to be equally significant.

In assessing the problems of operating in the country, what Wal-Mart discovered is that it is very similar to several other emerging economies. “But at the same time, the potential that India offers is immense,” said Krish Iyer, CEO, Walmart India.

‘Justice for Andhra’

Andhra Pradesh Chief Minister N Chandrababu Naidu said that his recent differences with the Centre were because he wanted “justice” for the newly formed State. He said this during a session at The Huddle, moderated by Sreenivasan Jain, Managing Editor, NDTV. “Earlier, as the bifurcation was becoming a reality, I asked for justice for both States, but after three years with the NDA at the Centre, I am asking for justice for my State,” he said.

“Ours is an agrarian State, without a big urban centre, and we fall short by ₹30,000 to the average per capita income in the rest of the country. We are demanding what should be given to us.”