Event reports
Welcoming all the participants, D. Suba Chandran, Professor and Dean, School of Conflict and Security Studies, NIAS, briefed about four components of IPRI lecture series i.e. basis of previous three lecture series, research work, to gather number of scholars works on Peace and Conflict issues in South Asia by the end of the series and last but not the least the end product of series.
After the welcome remarks also from Mr. Pankaj Madan, KAS, who threw light on KAS activities with in India through political dialogue, the lecture started with initial remarks from Dr. Shailesh Nayak, NIAS. He highlighted the major global challenges such as climate change, political and economic issues, terrorism and so on and said that a mechanism is needed to address all these issues through a government structure where Liberal democracies will play an important role to build such structures.
Dr. Schüler in his lecture presented the key role of voter’s views not only at the time of election campaign but after the formation of government. In his presentation, he firstly introduced the part ‘Rift’ which comprised of causes and results of rapid changes across the world due to globalisation, geostrategic shifts and digitalisation. He further mentioned other rising challenges like ineffectiveness of International Order, societies being less homogenous and more diverse and so on.
At the conclusion of the presentation he said that by sharing the analysis of your own country or the neighbouring countries the way out of the challenges can be found together.
After the NIAS-KAS lecture Dr. Schüler attended PM Modi's first big rally in Bangalore with BJP Karnataka president B S Yeddyurappa and other top leaders of the party from five constituencies of the state being present on the stage. The rally was marked by mammoth crowds chanting his name.
Among these top leaders was Tejasvi Surya, 28, one of the youngest candidates in the 17th Lok Sabha election and representing Bengaluru South, who met Dr. Schüler post rally to discuss the campaign strategies for coming up elections in his constituency.
Then the delegation flew to Mumbai on 14th April 2019 where, at the office of Poonam Mahajan, President of BJYM and Member of Parliament, he first met her election campaign team, headed by Mr. Madhukeshwar Desai to discuss the activities carried on by them. Dr. Schüler advised the team to follow five fundamental steps for the campaign which are Strategy, organisation, communication, motivation and delivery. He then met Mrs. Poonam Mahajan, who shared her two key points on the election i.e. accountability and accessibility, which are the basic demands of people from her constituency. Thereafter he joined a town hall campaign meeting of Mrs. Poonam Mahajan where Shri Suresh Prabhu, Minister of Commerce & Industry and Civil Aviation gave a campaign speech.
Dr. Jürgen Morhard, Consul General in Mumbai and Bernhard Steinrücke, Director of AHK India in the evening briefed Dr. Schüler about economic and political developments in the western region of India from a German perspective.
In the morning of 15th April 2019 he met Sanjay Jha, National Spokesperson, INC, who shared his point of view on Indian democracy and if the citizens of India are exercising it or not and how congress intends to govern India if elected in 2019 elections.
Further the meetings took place in Ahmedabad with Bijal Patel, Mayor of the Ahmedabad Municipal Corporation (AMC), Amul Bhatt as chairman of the standing committee of AMC, Dr. Vijay Chauthaiwale in-Charge, Overseas Friends of BJP (OFBJP) and Foreign Affairs Cell, BJP and other representatives of BJP. At this meeting Dr. Schüler was informed about how the campaign as being conducted in the city considering the main challenges to be dealt with those of pollution, water supply, rising population and improvement in health sector. Talking of pollution Dr. Schüler shared the measures taken by Federal Government of Germany to control pollution levels in Germany like banning of diesel fuel in Stuttgart.
Later he also met Shri Parshottam Khodabhai Rupala, Union Minister of State for Panchayati Raj, Agriculture and Farmers Welfare, GOI, who has 14 years of campaign experience. He informed about social media and door to door campaign being conducted with a core focus on development of farmers as their priority. Dr. Schüler said the in that case India and Germany shares similar focus i.e. the well-being of farmers and targeting them at micro level.
In the evening Mayankbhai Upadhyay, ISCE and Mandaben Parikh, YVT together with KAS organised a round table discussion on ‘Liberal Democracies: Challenges Ahead’ . The participants were political analyst, academia, columnist, social activist, tribal activist, Member of Parliament, lawyers and so on. Dr. Schüler emphasised in his speech on the consequences of big revolutionary changes and global trends leading to polarisation and renationalisation. He also talked about fundamental principles of democracies and said that ‘the democracies of all the countries are same as of India.’