One nation, under gods? India’s divisive temple

Hey, Ryan Reynolds here for Mint Mobile. You know, one of the perks about.

Having four kids that you know about.

Is actually getting a direct line to the big man up north. And this year he wants you to know the best gift that you can give someone is the gift of Mint.

Mobile's unlimited wireless for $15 a month.

Now you don't even need to wrap it. Give it a try@mintmobile.com Switch upfront payment.

Of $45 for a three month plan equivalent to $15 per month. Required new customer offer for first three months only. Speed slow after 35 gigabytes if network's busy, taxes and fees extra. See mintmobile.com hey, Ryan Reynolds here wishing.

You a very happy half off holiday because right now Mint Mobile is offering you the gift of 50% off unlimited. To be clear, that's half price, not half the service. Mint is still premium unlimited wireless for a great price.

So that means half day.

Yeah. Give it a try@mintmobile.com Switch upfront payment.

Of $45 for three month plan equivalent to $15 per month. Required new customer offer for first three months only. Speed slow. 135 gigabytes of network busy taxes and fees extra. Cmintmobile.com.

Hello and welcome to the intelligence on Economist Radio. I'm your host Jason Palmer. Every weekday we provide a fresh perspective on the events shaping your world. The pandemic has been devastating for people with dementia, not least because reduced interaction accelerates it. But research into dementia and Alzheimer's disease continues. We look into some findings that are cause for hope. And sales of electric bikes were booming even before COVID 19 established bicycle brands are competing with plucky startups that hope to become the Tesla of two wheels. Given both the evident demand and the price tags, the stakes are high. First up, though, Today India's Prime Minister, Narendra Modi traveled to the northeastern city of Ayodhya, which was hung with saffron flags and more than 100,000 oil lamps. He came to lay the first stone of a temple to Ram, an incarnation of the Hindu God Vishnu, who it's believed was born in the city. This isn't the standard fare of a politician pressing the flesh for a photo op. It fulfills a promise Mr. Modi made as a young politician to return to Ayodhya only when construction on a new temple began. In a speech at the dedication broadcast to the whole country, he said the temple would be a symbol of unity that the wait of centuries ends today. A symbol of unity. It is not the weight of centuries. As Mr. Modi and his BJP party see, it goes back to the founding of a mosque on the site that was razed to the ground nearly 30 years ago.

When we're talking about Ayodhya today, we're talking about a very specific place, just a couple of acres off the center of the town, where there was a great big mosque built in the 16th century and destroyed by Hindu activists in 1992.

Alex Trevelly is the Economist's India correspondent, based in Delhi.

The site of that former mosque is what's under contention. It's been the most controversial acre in all of India ever since. And the question is whether or not Hindus may build a temple to rom right there.

And so how did things progress since 1992 when the mosque was destroyed? How does that end up as a temple consecration today?

It's been a terribly tortuous story through the courts. After decades of legal stasis and very bizarre argumentation, the Supreme Court last November, few months after Narendra Modi wins his whopping reelection, decides that the most crucial part of the ground ought to be given to the Hindus. Go ahead and build the temple that you've been clamoring for all these decades. The court noted that the demolition of the mosque was illegal, and in a sort of compensation that no one appreciated very much, allocated several acres of idle land outside the town to Muslims. In effect, the court just gave the Hindus what they had wanted, and I mean, the Hindu nationalists, the very groups that had clamored for the destruction of the mosque in the 80s and 90s.

And so what precisely is happening today, then?

So today is the last three days of a ceremony called Bhumi Pujan, in which people, most notably the Prime Minister, are doing various prayers, offering ritual sacrifices and so on around the site itself. Most spectacularly, in the middle of it all, the Prime Minister, Narendra Modi, ritually lifted into place the 40 kilogram silver brick which serves as the temple's foundation stone. Now it's consecrated, and all that's left is to keep on raising money and build the actual structure itself.

And what's the reaction been from Muslims about this contentious building?

You know, in a way, Muslims and everyone who cares about civil rights and the secular foundation of India knows what to say. No one's happy about it. Firebrand Muslim leader in Parliament, Assaduddin Oaisi, has criticized the Prime Minister for going to a religious event. And it's indeed striking that the prime minister should be there on the temple grounds with a bunch of priests and politicos all mixed in as if they were a single class. It's shocking if you've been sleeping under a rock as India's changed in recent years. And in fact, I was struck that there have been no mass protests by Muslim groups either after the Supreme Court's decision last November, nor today. It doesn't mean they're happy about it, but at this point it's not the thing to protest.

We've talked a lot about Narendra Modi's brand of Hindu nationalism. I guess this is a kind of a pinnacle then for his aims. I mean, what does this mean for him and his party?

It is a pinnacle of sorts. But I think it's more important to look at this as the end of a long first stage of Hindu nationalism's movement in India. We're looking at something more like a capstone than a foundation stone. And at the same time, this date, August 5th, was chosen for quite obvious reason. It's the first anniversary of this government's very bold move to strip the state of Jammu and Kashmir, India's only Muslim state a year ago, of its status as a state, and rule it directly from Delhi. That was one of the main three goals that the Hindu nationalist movement had till now. Now the third of those goals, creating a uniform civil code that would bind Muslim family law into line with Hindu and secular family law that governs most of the rest of India, is a less inspiring goal and it's been half accomplished already. What Mr. Modi is going to need in future is another or another series of rallying cries like build the temple. And where he's going to find them is just not obvious at this point.

So today's ceremony is not a cause for great triumph. This is not the end of this long road for the BJP's Hindu nationalist goals and therefore mission accomplished, this is a triumph.

Yes, by all rights, Mr. Modi is a good one to be taking the victory lap for his party, for his ideological movement. But that's also very backwards looking. Mr. Modi was elected with a, with a terrific share of the parliamentary seats in 2014 in the first place. Not because of these Hindu nationalist goals which attracted the devotion of his base, but because Indians were eager for change, for economic development and good technocratic governance of a sort that he seemed specially poised to offer. There are various reforms for which he and his government can claim credit over the past six years, but there are many, many more disappointments. And in particular over the past two years, say before the COVID 19 pandemic, and then much, much worse. Since it's begun, India is facing an economic crisis. It's every indicator is worse than they've been in a generation. So there's going to be a very strongly felt need, however weak the opposition, to come up with some way of rallying the country, some nationalistic theme or series of themes to distract from the sort of impasse that India finds itself at economically. This Hindu nationalist ideology offers no guidance towards what India's trade policy ought to be, say, or how environmental law ought to be fixed or scrapped. They've got a steady ideology, but it's not tacked on to any particular policies at this point. And I think that the government we have in place right now, strong government, but in China, dark and turbulent times, is going to be almost desperate to find something to replace this impetus with.

Altogether though, these changes that have already gone through, do you think it chips away at the basis of modern India's government, the idea that religion shouldn't be a part of it?

Yeah, I think that India as we know it, maybe as an idea we almost ought to retire. Mahatma Gandhi is still on every currency note, but this is not Gandhi's India anymore. You might almost say that the anti secularists have won. It's now very ordinary to see symbols of state power mixed with symbols of sectarian dominance of the Hindu majority, expressing itself often in revanchist terms, which is what this temple at Ayodhya really does.

Alex, thanks very much for joining us.

Jason, thanks very much.

For a lot more analysis from our international network of correspondence, subscribe to the Economist. To find the best introductory offer wherever you are, just go to economist.com intelligenceoffer. One of the most common pre existing conditions of people who die from COVID 19 is dementia. Today an estimated 50 million people have the condition. By 2050, it's estimated three times that many will have it. The pandemic has drawn attention away from care for those with dementia and its most common cause, Alzheimer's disease. But research into them has haltingly continued and some new reports offer glimmers of long term hope.

The biggest reason so many people with dementia have died from COVID 19 is very simple. It's old age.

Simon Long is the Economist's deputy digital editor.

The older people are, the more likely they are to have dementia and we know the more dangerous the virus will be to them. Also, a lot of people with dementia are in care homes which in many countries have suffered large numbers of infections. And also dementia is a condition that often makes it very hard for people to remember or to follow social distancing and hygiene precautions. So that makes them more vulnerable, too.

And what about people with dementia, aside from the effects of COVID 19 well.

Clearly, this has been an enormously difficult time for them. In many cases, the progression of dementia has been hastened by the lack of social contact, the loss of routine. It does appear that social interaction is one way of slowing the advance of dementia. And, of course, many people have lost that. Perhaps also they're suffering because dementia has fallen down the list of global priorities, as it were, during the pandemic, because so many resources are being devoted to caring with people with COVID that even though many of the people with dementia are precisely the same people as those most at risk of COVID 19 their plight is not at the top of people's lists.

But you've been looking into some new research into the condition. What's the upshot of that?

The annual Alzheimer's Association International Conference, which is quite a big event in this world, where it gathers together a lot of new research, has brought attention to some new findings which are potentially quite hopeful. The most significant, I suppose, is that there is the hope of a new blood test for giving early warning of the likelihood of developing Alzheimer's, which is the disease which is the most common cause of the syndrome known as dementia. Up till now, most diagnosis of dementia has been done by cognitive testing. That is when people start forgetting things, when they start having problems with their mental agility, they go to a doctor, they get a diagnosis. In other words, the symptom is picked up quite late. Alzheimer's is a disease of the brain which is characterized by the buildup of two proteins in it. Up till now, the only way of measuring those proteins has been quite intrusive. It has involved a lumbar puncture to get the cerebrospinal fluid, or it has involved very expensive brain scans, PET scans or MRI scans to look at the actual state of the brain itself. Now, there's a hope that a blood test could give quite an accurate reading of one of those proteins, tau, and perhaps years in advance, give an indication of whether people are going to develop Alzheimer's. So that is one sign of hope. Though I should say that such signs of hope have been seen before and that there are other blood tests, but none of them has yet been found to be accurate enough to be clinically useful as a diagnostic tool.

So that's a matter of diagnosing it. But any new research on the matter of preventing it, well, it's long been.

Known that some of the risk of Alzheimer's, in particular of dementia generally, is a function of lifestyle, that there are a lot of risks that people have, and in many cases these are the very same risks that make people vulnerable to COVID 19. So things like obesity, diabetes, hypertension, high blood pressure, all of these can increase the risk of developing dementia. Smoking, for example. A new study that appeared at this conference expanded the list of known factors from 9 to 12, adding three new ones, that being exposure to air pollution in later life, excessive alcohol intake in midlife, and less surprisingly, perhaps, head injuries in middle age. And also it's said that the percentage of cases of dementia that could be delayed or perhaps even prevented by addressing these other modifiable risk factors was higher than has been thought previously. That is, as many as 40% of cases could be prevented or delayed.

So taken together, what do these developments mean, do you think, for people who have Alzheimer's and dementia?

Well, in the short term, very little. Even if this test is developed, it's not going to be available for months at the very least. There's an American firm called Biogen that's applied to the Food and Drug Administration in the US for approval of a drug called Aducanumab, which it says has been showing hopeful results in trials among Alzheimer's patients. That is, it's helped improve or slow the deterioration of cognitive function of memory and language and so on, and just basically help people live a more normal life. But people involved in this field point out that Alzheimer's been identified for over a century, during which research has gone on into looking for a cure and ideally to finding a vaccine and tests. And so far nothing clinically useful has really emerged. So there's a sort of ingrained skepticism about whether any of this will lead to something. The points about lifestyle, the so called modifiable risk factors, are in a way more hopeful, however, because that does suggest that when this virus is finally under control and governments are leading new health awareness campaigns to try and reduce the risk of it coming back. Those health awareness campaigns could also reduce the risk of Alzheimer's quite significantly because after all, they'll be tackling many of the very same risk factors.

Simon, thanks very much for joining us.

Thanks so much for having me, Jason.

In a commercial for a Dutch company called Van Moaf, a luxury car melts to become one of their high concept electrically assisted bicycles, or E bikes. It's a provocative depiction of something of a real life trend. E bikes are getting more high performance, better designed and much greater in number.

E bikes are booming all over the world, but especially in Europe.

Matt Steinglass is our Europe correspondent and is based in Amsterdam.

In Germany, they have roughly doubled between 2017 and 2019. And a study by Deloitte estimated that There are about 200 million E bikes or around the world at the end of 2019. And that will hit 300 million by.

2023, where the pandemic is expected to drive these numbers up even further.

Yes, COVID 19 has accelerated demand partly because a lot of commuters have stopped taking public transit. Some governments have offered subsidies for buying E bikes because they're trying to provide alternatives for people who are worried about public transit. And a lot of cities have used the emptiness Created by. By covid19 to start expanding cycling lanes.

Well, I mean, how do E bikes fit into the broader industry? Is every E bike sold a regular push bike? That's not.

No.

If you compare selling E bikes to selling regular bicycles, obviously E bikes are significantly more expensive. They start a little bit under $1,000 each and run up to $4,000 or so for a really fancy city bike. And they tend to be more profitable. But also in some markets, like the, specifically the Netherlands, that was thought to be a saturated market because the average person in the Netherlands already owns 1.3 bicycles. E bikes has turned that story around because all of a sudden, there's a whole new item for people to buy.

And so is this primarily manufacturers that made regular bikes now getting into E.

Bikes, most of the big names in E bikes were also big names in push bikes. There are a few interesting newcomers. But one thing that's quite similar about the E bike market and the regular push bike market is that it's a very fragmented industry. There are lot and lots of manufacturers. There's no single, even conglomerate of the big names that accounts for more than 20% of the market. And the parts for these bikes come from usually the same sorts of suppliers, mostly in East Asia, and then reassembled into different bikes with different snazzy frames to give them a different look.

So you say it's still a very fragmented market. Is that to say that there's not sort of a runaway champion of these.

Things at the moment? There is definitely no runaway champion of E bikes. Even within the market for the cool, minimalist design bike, Venmo faces competition from an Elgin company called Cowboy. One segment where there might be a clear leader is in electronic folding bikes. Brompton, the British folding bike manufacturer, started out as the recognized global leader in folding bikes. And they are probably going to continue that lead in E bikes. At this moment, they're making about 10% of their revenues from E bikes. They're hoping eventually to raise that to 40%. But there's a bit of a question about just how much people want folding E bikes. Of course, an E bike is a bit heavier than a regular folding bike, so it's kind of a trade off.

So if this was an industry that was on the up even before a global crisis, that is driving the industry even further, I mean, how much does this threaten the rest of the wheeled transportation industry at this point?

It feels a bit like we're in the early days of the personal computer, where all of these different firms are putting together different combinations of things and seeing what works and and what works for different segments. And at some point, the most efficient producers are probably going to drive the less successful ones out of the market. It seems like other traditional segments of the transportation industry might be a little bit over sensitive, though. The French auto industry seems to have been so worried about expansion of E bikes that the French advertising authority actually banned the Van Moef commercial, implying that cars were bad, saying that it discredited the automobile sector. It seems unlikely that E bikes are going to entirely replace automobiles in the future, but they're definitely going to keep growing very fast.

Matt, thanks very much for your time.

Thank you, Jason.

That's all for this episode of the Intelligence. If you like us, give us a rating on Apple Podcasts and see you back here tomorrow.