நீறுபூத்த நெருப்பாக, கடந்த ஆறு மாதங்களாகப் புகைந்து கொண்டிருக்கும் எல்லைப் பதற்றத்துக்கு முடிவு காணும் முயற்சியில், இப்போது ஏற்பட்டிருக்கும் சில சமாதான நடவடிக்கைகள் ஆறுதல் அளிப்பவையாக இருக்கின்றன. கிழக்கு லடாக் கோக்ராவிலுள்ள ‘17ஏ’ கண்காணிப்புப் பகுதியில் (பேட்ரோலிங் பாயிண்ட்) இருந்து இந்தியாவும் சீனாவும் தங்களது வீரா்களை முழுமையாக திரும்பப் பெற்றிருக்கின்றன. 2020 ஏப்ரல் மாத நிலவரத்துக்குத் திரும்புவதற்கான முயற்சியின் முதற்கட்டமாக இதைக் கருதலாம்.

கடந்த புதன், வியாழக்கிழமைகளில் இருதரப்பு வீரா்களும் தங்கள் முகாம்களுக்குத் திரும்பினா். அது மட்டுமல்லாமல், எல்லையின் இருபுறங்களிலும் அமைக்கப்பட்டிருந்த இடைக்கால தங்குமிடங்களும், ஆயுதக் கிடங்குகளும் அகற்றப்பட்டிருக்கின்றன.

பாங்காங் ஏரியின் தெற்கு - வடக்கு கரைகளைப்போலவே இனிமேல் கோக்ராவின் ‘17ஏ’ கண்காணிப்புப் பகுதியிலும் ரோந்துகள் செல்வது நிறுத்தப்படும். இந்தப் பகுதியும் ‘பஃபா் ஜோன்’ என்று கருதப்படும். ஜூலை மாதக் கடைசியில் கிழக்கு லடாக்கில் ஷுஷுல் - மோல்டோவில் நடந்த ராணுவ கமாண்டா்களின் 12-ஆவது சுற்று பேச்சுவாா்த்தையில் எட்டப்பட்ட தீா்மானம் இப்போது நடைமுறைக்கு வந்திருக்கிறது.

2020 மே மாதம் கிழக்கு லடாக்கில் இந்திய - சீன ராணுவத்தினருக்கு இடையே கருத்துவேறுபாடும், சா்ச்சையும் ஏற்படத் தொடங்கின. அதைத் தொடா்ந்து ஆறு இடங்களில் இரு நாட்டு வீரா்களும் எல்லையில் நேருக்கு நோ் மோதுவதற்கு தயாா் நிலையில் நிறுத்தப்பட்டனா். அப்போது எல்லை தாண்டி சீன வீரா்கள் ரோந்து போக முற்பட்டதுதான், இரு நாட்டு வீரா்களுக்கும் இடையே கைகலப்பு ஏற்படக் காரணம். அதன் விளைவாக கல்வான் பள்ளத்தாக்கில் 20 இந்திய வீரா்கள் கொல்லப்பட்டனா். சீன வீரா்கள் பலரும் உயிரிழந்தனா்.

கல்வான் பள்ளத்தாக்கு, கோக்ரா, ஹாட்ஸ்பிரிங்ஸ், டெப்ஸாங், பாங்காங் ஏரியின் தெற்கு - வடக்குக் கரைகள் ஆகிய பகுதிகளில் இரு நாட்டு படைகளும் மோதுவதற்குத் தயாரான நிலையில் நிறுத்தப்பட்டன. பதற்றமான சூழல் நிலவியது. எப்போது வேண்டுமானாலும் போா் மூளலாம் என்கிற நிலைமை இருந்தாலும்கூட, இருதரப்பு வீரா்களும் துப்பாக்கிப் பிரயோகத்தில் ஈடுபடலாகாது என்று கடுமையாக எச்சரிக்கப்பட்டிருந்தனா். அதனால், நிலைமை கைமீறிப் போகாமல் காப்பாற்றப்பட்டது.

கடந்த ஆண்டு ஜூலை மாதத்தில் கல்வான் பள்ளத்தாக்கில் ஒப்பந்தம் ஏற்பட்டு, இருதரப்பு ராணுவத்தினரும் பின்வாங்கினா். ஆனால், பாங்காங்கிலிருந்து வீரா்களைத் திரும்பப் பெறுவதற்கு மேலும் ஒரு வருடம் காத்திருக்க வேண்டி வந்தது. பேச்சுவாா்த்தையில் எந்த முடிவும் எட்டப்படவில்லை.

ஜூலை மாதம் துஷான்பேயில் நடந்த ஷாங்காய் கூட்டு நாடுகள் மாநாட்டில் சீனாவின் வெளியுறவுத்துறை அமைச்சா் வாங் யியும், இந்திய வெளியுறவுத் துறை அமைச்சா் எஸ். ஜெய்சங்கரும் நடத்திய பேச்சுவாா்த்தைக்குப் பிறகுதான் கோக்ராவில் வீரா்களைத் திரும்பப் பெறுவதில் முன்னேற்றம் ஏற்பட்டது. போா் கமாண்டா்களின் 11 சுற்று பேச்சுவாா்த்தை வரை, அதிகப்படுத்திய வீரா்களை அகற்றுவதற்குத்தான் சீனா தயாராக இருந்தது. 12-ஆவது சுற்றுப் பேச்சுவாா்த்தையில் இந்தியாவின் பிடிவாதமான நிலைப்பாட்டை அங்கீகரித்து தனது வீரா்களை முற்றிலுமாக எல்லையில் இருந்து அகற்றி பஃபா் ஜோனாக அறிவிக்க ஒப்புக் கொண்டது.

‘க்வாட்’ அமைப்பில் இந்தியா இணைந்திருப்பதால் சீனா தன்னுடைய பிடிவாதத்தை சற்று தளா்த்தி பேச்சுவாா்த்தைக்கும், சமரசத்துக்கும் தயாராகிறது என்று தோன்றுகிறது. சீனா சொந்தம் கொண்டாடும் தென்சீனக் கடலில் ‘க்வாட்’ கூட்டணியின் சாா்பில் நான்கு போா்க் கப்பல்கள் நிறுத்தப்பட்டிருக்கின்றன. அவற்றில் இந்தியாவின் கப்பலும் இருக்கிறது என்பதை சொல்லித் தெரிய வேண்டியதில்லை. இது சீனாவுக்கு அமெரிக்கா விடுக்கும் மறைமுகமான எச்சரிக்கை என்பது ஒருபுறமிருந்தாலும், அதில் இந்தியாவும் இருக்கிறது என்பது சீனாவை நிச்சயமாக எரிச்சலடையச் செய்திருக்கும்.

அமெரிக்கா, ஆஸ்திரேலியா, ஜப்பான், இந்தியா ஆகிய நான்கு நாடுகள் அடங்கிய ‘க்வாட்’ அமைப்பில் இருப்பது மட்டுமல்லாமல், மேற்கு வல்லரசு நாடுகளுடன் இந்தியாவுக்கு இருக்கும் நெருக்கம் தனக்கு எதிரான கூட்டணியை பலப்படுத்தும் என்பது சீனாவுக்கு தெரியாததல்ல. இந்தியாவுடன் மோதல் போக்கில் ஈடுபடுவது தனது கடல் எல்லையில் தேவையில்லாமல் பிரச்னைகளை உருவாக்கக் கூடும் என்பதையும் சீனா உணராமல் இருக்காது. அதுவும்கூட இப்போதைய கோக்ரா சமாதானத்திற்கு காரணமாக இருக்கக் கூடும்.

இதெல்லாம் ஆனாலும், இந்திய - சீன எல்லையில் முற்றிலுமாக அமைதி திரும்பிவிடவில்லை. ஹாட்ஸ்பிரிங்ஸின் கண்காணிப்புப் பகுதியிலும் டெப்ஸாங்கிலும் இருதரப்பு ராணுவ வீரா்களும் மோதலுக்குத் தயாராகத்தான் நின்று கொண்டு இருக்கிறாா்கள். திபெத்துக்கு அருகிலுள்ள பகுதிகள் என்பதால், டெப்ஸாங்கும், ஹாட்ஸ்பிரிங்ஸும் சீனாவுக்கு முக்கியமான பகுதிகள். அக்சாய் சின்னுக்கு அருகிலுள்ள பகுதி என்பதால் இந்தியாவுக்கும் அது முக்கியம். அதனால்தான் இருதரப்பும் அந்தப் பகுதிகளிலிருந்து பின்வாங்க மறுக்கின்றன.

சீனாவின் எந்தவொரு நடவடிக்கையையும், சமாதானத்தையும் நாம் கண்ணை மூடிக் கொண்டு ஏற்றுக்கொள்ளக் கூடாது என்று வரலாறு நம்மை எச்சரிக்கிறது. 1962 ஜூலையில் லடாக்கிலிருந்து பின்வாங்கிய சீனா, அக்டோபரில் இந்தியாவை ஆக்கிரமித்தது என்பதை மறந்துவிடக் கூடாது. அதனால், எந்தவொரு சமாதானமும் நட்புறவும் சீனாவைப் பொருத்தவரை நிரந்தரமல்ல. இப்போதைக்கு நமக்கு ஆறுதல், அவ்வளவே!

அரசு நிர்வாகம் வெளிப்படைத் தன்மையுடன் நடப்பதை உறுதிப்படுத்துவது என்பதைத் தாண்டி, நிலைமை மோசமானதற்குத் தான் காரணமில்லை என்பதையும் அதைச் சீர்ப்படுத்துவது எளிதாக இல்லை என்பதையும் எடுத்துச் சொல்வதற்காகவும் வெள்ளை அறிக்கைகள் பயன்படுகின்றன. தமிழ்நாடு அரசின் அதிகரித்துவரும் கடன் சுமை குறித்து வெளியாகியிருக்கும் தற்போதைய வெள்ளை அறிக்கையும் அத்தகையதே. இருபதாண்டு காலமாகத் தொடர்ந்து தமிழ்நாட்டின் கடன் சுமை அதிகரித்துவருவது இந்த அறிக்கையின் வழியே தெளிவாகிறது. அதே நேரத்தில், பெருந்தொற்று காரணமாக அரசின் வருவாய் குறைந்து சுமையின் அழுத்தம் அதிகரித்துவருகிறது. இதையும் கவனத்தில் கொண்டே, வெள்ளிக்கிழமை தாக்கல் செய்யப்படவிருக்கும் இந்த நிதியாண்டுக்கான வரவு-செலவுத் திட்டத்தின் நிதி ஒதுக்கீடுகளை மதிப்பிட வேண்டும் என்பதுதான் வெள்ளை அறிக்கையின் நோக்கமாக இருக்க வேண்டும்.

வெள்ளை அறிக்கை வெளியிடப்படுவதற்குச் சில மணி நேரங்களுக்கு முன்பாகவே சேலம் கொங்கணாபுரத்தில் நடந்த பத்திரிகையாளர் சந்திப்பில், முன்னாள் முதல்வர் எடப்பாடி பழனிசாமி தனது பக்க நியாயமாகச் சில கருத்துகளைத் தெளிவுபடுத்திவிட்டார். அவற்றில் முக்கியமானது, தமது ஆட்சிக் காலத்தில் மின்கட்டணம் உயர்த்தப்படவில்லை என்பது. மின்னுற்பத்திக்கான செலவு உயர்ந்துவிட்ட நிலையில், மின்கட்டணம் உயர்த்தப்படாததும் வருவாய் இழப்புக்கு முக்கியக் காரணம். இந்தப் பிரச்சினையை மேலும் நீண்ட காலத்துக்குத் தள்ளிவைக்கவும் முடியாது. பழனிசாமி சுட்டிக்காட்டியிருக்கும் மற்றொரு நெடுநாளைய சிக்கல், எரிபொருட்களின் விலை உயர்ந்தாலும் அதற்கேற்ப பொதுப் போக்குவரத்தின் பயணக் கட்டணம் உயர்த்தப்படவில்லை என்பது. இவ்விரண்டு விஷயங்களிலும் திமுக தெளிவான ஒரு முடிவை எடுக்கக் காலத்தால் நிர்ப்பந்திக்கப்பட்டிருக்கிறது.

கடன் சுமைக்கான பழியிலிருந்து தம்மைக் கவனமாக விடுவித்துக்கொள்ள விரும்பும் அதிமுகவானது, திமுக தனது தேர்தல் வாக்குறுதிகளை இன்னும் நிறைவேற்றவில்லை என்ற குற்றச்சாட்டை முன்வைக்கிறது. இன்றைய நிதிநிலையில், பெட்ரோல் டீசல் விலைக் குறைப்பு சாத்தியமில்லை. புதிய திட்டங்களுக்கும் பெரிதும் வாய்ப்பில்லை, அப்படியே தொடங்கப்பட்டாலும் பெரிய அளவில் நிதி ஒதுக்கீடு செய்யவியலாது என்பது அதிமுகவுக்குத் தெரியாதா என்ன? அரசியலும் நிதியியலும் இணைகோடுகள். இரண்டும் ஒன்றாகச் சேர முடியாது. அரசியலில் கருத்து முரண்பாடுகள் இருக்கலாம். நிதியியலைப் பொறுத்தவரை எந்தக் கட்சி ஆட்சிக்கு வந்தாலும் நிதி நிர்வாகத்தில் பெரும்பாலும் ஒரே மாதிரியான அணுகுமுறையைத்தான் கையாள வேண்டியிருக்கிறது. அரசியல் தலைவர்கள் மட்டுமின்றி, அவர்களுடன் இணைந்து பணியாற்றும் அதிகாரிகளும்கூட இதை நன்றாகவே அறிவார்கள்.

தமிழ்நாட்டின் உடனடித் தேவை கடன் சுமைகளுக்கான பழியை யார் மீது சுமத்துவது என்பது அல்ல, அரசுக்குப் புதிய வருவாய் வாய்ப்புகளை எப்படி உருவாக்குவது என்பதும் அதை எப்படித் திட்டமிட்டுச் செலவிடுவது என்பதும்தான். திமுக அரசு எதிர்கொண்டிருக்கும் இந்தச் சவாலை மக்களும் புரிந்துகொண்டுதான் இருக்கிறார்கள். எனவே, தேர்தல் நேரப் பிரச்சாரங்களைப் போல பரஸ்பரக் குற்றச்சாட்டுகளைத் தவிர்த்துத் தீர்வுகளை நோக்கி தமிழ்நாடு அரசு முதலடியை எடுத்துவைக்கட்டும்.

விவசாயத்தில் உற்பத்தி பெருக வேண்டும், விளைச்சல் வீதமும் அதிகரிக்க வேண்டும். விளைநிலத்தின் பரப்பு கூட வேண்டும், பாசன வசதியும் பெருக வேண்டும். விளைபொருளுக்குச் சந்தை வசதி விரிவாக வேண்டும். இவை எல்லா இடங்களுக்கும் பொதுவானவை. காவிரிப் படுகைக்கு என்று சில பிரச்சினைகள் உண்டு.

‘நஞ்சை திறப்பு’ என்று வயல்களைக் குறிப்பிடுவது காவிரிப் படுகையில் வழக்கம். வேலி போன்ற கட்டுக்கோப்பு இல்லாதது என்று பொருள். எக்கண்டமாகக் கிடக்கும் ஒரு அறுபது வேலி கிராமம் என்றால், விவசாயிகள் வரப்பு வழியாகத்தான் தங்கள் வயல்களுக்குப் போக வர முடியும். வெகு சிலருக்கு மட்டும் சாலையிலிருந்து நேராக வயலுக்குச் செல்ல இயலும். மற்றவர்களுக்கு ஐந்து, பத்து, பதினைந்து வயல் கடப்பில் நிலம் இருக்கும். அங்கெல்லாம் வாய்க்கால்களையும், வாரிகளையும் தாண்டி வரப்பிலேயே நடந்து செல்ல வேண்டும். இப்போதுவரை இந்தப் பிரச்சினை வெளியில் அதிகம் வராமல் இருந்தது. விவசாயத்தில் இயந்திரங்களின் வரவுக்குப் பிறகு பிரச்சினை தீவிரமாகிவிட்டது.

வயலுக்கு வழி

தண்ணீர் காலத்தில் உள்வயல்களுக்கு உழவு இயந்திரம் எப்படிப் போகும்? உரிய நேரத்தில் நடவு செய்ய, அறுவடை செய்ய, வைக்கோல் திரைத்து சாலைக்கு வர, அறுவடையான நெல் வீட்டுக்கு வர இயந்திரங்களை அங்கே எப்படிக் கொண்டுசெல்வது? அந்தந்த நேரத்தில் உரமூட்டைகளும் வரப்பு வழியாகத் தலைச் சுமையாகவே வயலுக்குச் செல்கின்றன. முன்பெல்லாம் குறுவைச் சாகுபடி செய்தவர்கள் கதிர்க் கட்டுகளைப் பத்துப் பதினைந்து வயல் கடந்து தலைச் சுமையாகவே களத்துக்குக் கொண்டுவந்தார்கள். இப்போது அறுவடை இயந்திரம் அங்கு செல்ல இயலாது. காவிரிப் படுகை விவசாயிகளில் 90% சிறு விவசாயிகள் என்றால், அவர்களில் 80% பேராவது இந்த இன்னல்களுக்கு ஆளாகிறார்கள்.

விவசாயிகளின் சுதந்திரம்

ஒருவருக்கு மூன்று ஏக்கர் உள்வாய் நிலம் இருக்கிறது. அவருக்கு நடவுக்குச் சற்று நாளாகிவிட்டால், தனக்கு முன்னால் உள்ள வயல்களைக் கடந்து அவர் உழவு இயந்திரத்தையோ, நடவு இயந்திரத்தையோ தன் வயலுக்குக் கொண்டுசெல்ல முடியாது. எல்லோருக்கும் முந்திக்கொண்டு நடவு செய்துவிட்டார் என்றாலோ தனக்குப் பிந்தி நட்ட மற்றவர்கள் அறுவடை செய்யாமல் அவர் வயலுக்கு அறுவடை இயந்திரம் செல்ல முடியாது. எல்லோரும் ஏக காலத்தில் நடுவதும் அறுவடை செய்வதும் இயலாது. ஒருவர் ஐந்து மாத வயதுள்ள நெல் நடுவார். அடுத்தவர், நான்கு மாத நெல்தான் நடுவேன் என்று தாமதிப்பார். தாங்கள் அறிந்த சாகுபடி விவரத்தைக் கொண்டு, அந்தந்த ஆண்டுக்கு அவரவர் தங்கள் வசதிப்படி ஒரு முடிவு செய்துகொண்டால், மற்றவர்கள் அதற்கு உள்நோக்கம் கற்பிப்பது தவறாகும். சாகுபடியில் இப்படிச் சுதந்திரம் இல்லையென்றால், விவசாயத்தில் எஞ்சியிருக்கும் அந்தச் சிறு கவர்ச்சியும் காணாமல் போகும்.

இந்தப் பிரச்சினை ஆண்டுக்கு ஆண்டு தீவிரப்படும். சில இடங்களில் ஒரு சமூகப் பதற்றமும் இதனால் உருவாவது சாத்தியமே. இயந்திரங்களைப் பயன்படுத்த முடியாத விவசாயத்தில், உழைப்பு என்பது உடம்பைக் கொண்டு வெறுமனே உழல்வதாகப் பொருளற்றுப்போகும்.

இயந்திரங்களைக் கூடுதலாகப் பயன்படுத்தி, விவசாயம் விரைவில் மேலும் நவீனமாக வேண்டும் என்பது பொதுக் கருத்து. காவிரிப் படுகையின் முக்கால் பங்கு வயல்வெளிக்கு அறுவடை இயந்திரங்கள் செல்ல வழி இல்லை என்பது இங்கு விவசாயம் நவீனமாவதற்குப் பெரிய இடைஞ்சல். நெருக்கி பத்து லட்சம் ஏக்கர் நஞ்சைக்கு உரிய நேரத்திலோ நினைத்த நேரத்திலோ இயந்திரங்கள் செல்ல இயலாது. விவசாயம் நவீனமாக வேண்டும் என்ற தீவிர விழைவோடு இந்த நிலவரத்தைப் பொருத்திப் பாருங்கள்!

விவசாயம் லாபகரமாக இல்லை என்பதற்கு இந்த நிலவரமும் ஒரு காரணம். உரிய நேரத்தில் வயலில் அறுவடை இயந்திரத்தை இறக்க முடியாமல் வாரக்கணக்கில் அறுவடை தாமதமாகி, ஏக்கருக்கு மூன்றரை குவிண்டால் வரை சேதாரமாவது இங்கு வாடிக்கை. மூன்று ஏக்கர் சாகுபடி செய்யும் ஒரு விவசாயி, அறுவடையின்போது சேதாரமாகவே பத்து குவிண்டால் இழப்பாரானால் அவருக்கு என்ன மிஞ்சும்?

வயலுக்கு இயந்திரங்கள் செல்ல வழி உண்டானால் அதனால் வரும் உபரி நன்மைகள் எதிர்பார்ப்பதைவிட அதிகமாக இருக்கும். குறுவை சாகுபடிப் பரப்பில் குறைந்தது 40%-வது அப்போது எளிதில் கூடிவிடும். இப்படிக் கூடும் சாகுபடிப் பரப்பும் பெரும்பாலும் சிறு விவசாயிகளின் உடைமை இருபோக நிலமாக மாறுவதால் ஏற்படும். சாகுபடிப் பரப்பையும், பாசனம் பெறும் நிலப் பரப்பையும், உற்பத்தியையும் அதிகரிக்க வேண்டும் என்ற அரசின் நோக்கத்துக்கு இது எந்த அளவுக்கு, எவ்வளவு எளிதாக உதவக் கூடும் என்பதையும் பாருங்கள். இன்றைய குறுவை நெல் உற்பத்தியைப் போல் குறைந்தது ஒன்றேகால் மடங்காவது உற்பத்தி கூடும்.

சாலையான வரப்புகள்

வயலுக்கு இயந்திரங்கள் போக சாலை அமைப்பது சாத்தியமா என்று நீங்கள் கேட்கக்கூடும். நூறு வேலி கிராமமானால் அதற்குக் குறைந்தது மூன்று பாசன வாய்க்காலும் ஒரு வடிகாலுமாவது இருக்கும். இதன் கரைகளை உடைத்துப் பரப்பி, வாய்க்கால்களைத் தூர்வாரும் மண்ணைக் கொண்டே கரைகளை அகலப்படுத்திவிடலாம்.

இது கற்பனை என்று நினைக்காதீர்கள். பல கிராமங்களில் முன்பு குபேட்டா செல்லக்கூடிய அகலத்துக்குக் கரைகளாக இருந்தவை காலப்போக்கில் சிறு வரப்பாகக் குறுகியது பலருக்குத் தெரிந்திருக்கும். அந்த இடங்களில் இவற்றை மீட்டுக்கொண்டாலே போதும். உள்கிராமங்களுக்குச் சாலை அமைக்கும்போதும், பேருந்துக்குச் சாலை அமைத்தபோதும்கூட, வயல் வரப்பை உடைத்துப் பரப்பி சாலை அமைப்பதும் காவிரிப் படுகையில் வழக்கம்தானே! இந்த முறைகளுக்கு வாய்ப்பில்லை என்று இருக்கும் இதர சில கிராமங்களில் ஊர் ஒற்றுமையைக் கொண்டு வழி ஏற்படுத்தலாம். ஒவ்வொரு மாவட்டத்துக்கும் பத்து கிராமங்களில் இதை முன்னோட்டமாகச் செய்து காண்பிக்கலாம். வயலுக்கு இயந்திரங்கள் செல்ல வழி இல்லை என்பதை இன்றைய பிரச்சினையாக அங்கீகரிக்க வேண்டும். அப்படிச் செய்வது மட்டுமேகூட விவசாயிகளுக்கு உதவ முனையும் அரசுக்கு நல்ல அடையாளமாக அமையும்.

- தங்க.ஜெயராமன், ‘காவிரி வெறும் நீரல்ல’ உள்ளிட்ட நூல்களின் ஆசிரியர். தொடர்புக்கு: profjayaraman@gmail.com

இந்தியாவில் உள்ள பெரும்பாலான மாநிலங்களில் மக்கள் தங்கள் பெயருக்குப் பின்னால் சாதியப் பின்னொட்டுடனேயே அறியப்படுவார்கள். தமிழ்நாட்டில் திராவிட இயக்கங்களின் எழுச்சியால் பொதுவெளியில் பெயருக்குப் பின்னால் சாதிப் பெயர் இட்டுக்கொள்வது வெகுவாகக் குறைந்தது. எனினும், பாடப் புத்தகங்களில்கூட அறிஞர்கள், தலைவர்கள் பலரின் பெயர்கள் அவர்களின் சாதிப் பெயரோடு இணைந்தே அறியப்படுகின்றன. பாடப் புத்தகங்களில் அந்த சாதிப் பெயர்களை தமிழ்நாடு அரசு களைய ஆரம்பித்திருக்கிறது. இதன்படி உ.வே.சாமிநாதையர் இனி ‘உ.வே.சாமிநாதர்’ என்றும் ‘நீலகண்ட சாஸ்திரி’ இனி ‘நீலகண்டர்’ என்றும் ‘மாயூரம் வேதநாயகம் பிள்ளை’ இனி ‘மாயூரம் வேதநாயகம்’ என்றும் அழைக்கப்படுவார்கள். இது குறித்துப் பலரின் கருத்துகள் இங்கே கொடுக்கப்பட்டிருக்கின்றன.

ரவிக்குமார், எழுத்தாளர், நாடாளுமன்ற உறுப்பினர்

சாதிப் பின்னொட்டு சாதாரணர்களுக்கு மட்டுமல்ல, சாதனை யாளர்களுக்கும் தேவையில்லை. அவர்களுக்கு சாதனைதான் அடையாளம், சாதி அல்ல! பள்ளிக் கல்வித் துறையின் பாடநூல்களில் சாதிப் பெயர்களை நீக்கிய தமிழ்நாடு அரசைப் பாராட்டுகிறேன்.

பிரபா கல்விமணி, கல்வியாளர்

பாடப் புத்தகங்களில் அறிஞர்கள், தலைவர்கள் பெயரில் உள்ள சாதிப் பின்னொட்டுகளை நீக்குவதை நான் வரவேற்கிறேன். இந்திய அளவில், பல முற்போக்காளர்களின் பெயரில்கூட ராவ், ரெட்டி என்று சாதிப் பெயர்கள் இருப்பதை நான் பார்த்திருக்கிறேன். இந்தப் பின்னணியில் பார்த்தால், சாதிப் பெயர்களை நீக்குவதில் தமிழ்நாடு முன்னோடியாக இருக்கிறது. பெயர்களிலிருந்து சாதியை நீக்கினால் மட்டும் போதாது. சாதிரீதியாக ஒடுக்கப்பட்ட மக்கள் மீது இழைக்கப்படும் தீண்டாமைக் கொடுமையைக் களைவதற்கு முற்போக்காளர்கள் ஒன்றுசேர வேண்டும்.

சோ.தர்மன், எழுத்தாளர்

ஆதிதிராவிடர் ஆரம்பப் பள்ளி, கம்மவார் மேல்நிலைப் பள்ளி, நாடார் மேல்நிலைப் பள்ளி, விஸ்வகர்மா உயர்நிலைப் பள்ளி, ஆயிர வைசிய மேல்நிலைப் பள்ளி, இல்லத்துப் பிள்ளைமார் உயர்நிலைப் பள்ளி, செங்குந்தர் மேல்நிலைப் பள்ளி, சேனைத்தலைவர் ஆரம்பப் பள்ளி இது மாதிரி இன்னும் நிறைய இருக்கலாம். நெற்றியில் எழுதி ஒட்டியது மாதிரி சாதிப் பெயர்களைத் தாங்கி நிற்கும் இவற்றின் பெயர்களை மாற்றுவதில் என்ன சிக்கல். இதுவரை எந்த அரசும் இதுபற்றி யோசிக்கவே இல்லையே. இவை அனைத்துமே அரசு உதவி பெறும் பள்ளிகளே. இந்த மாதிரியான சாதிச் சங்கங்களால் நடத்தப்படும் அரசு உதவி பெறும் பள்ளிகளில் வேலை பார்க்கும் ஆசிரியர்கள், அலுவலகப் பணியாளர்கள் அத்தனை பேரும் அந்த சாதியைச் சேர்ந்த நபர்களாகவே இருப்பார்கள். பெயர்களின் பின் ஒட்டிக்கொண்டிருக்கும் சாதிப் பெயர்களை நீக்குவது மாதிரி, பள்ளிகளின் இந்த சாதிப் பெயர்களையும் மாற்றலாமே.

அஜிதா, வழக்கறிஞர்

அரசின் முடிவை நான் வரவேற்கிறேன். அதே நேரத்தில், சிலருடைய பெயர்கள் வரலாறாக நிலைபெற்றிருந்தால், அதை மாற்ற வேண்டாம் என்று நினைக்கிறேன். நீலகண்ட சாஸ்திரி என்ற பெயர் ஆக்ஸ்போர்டு நூல்கள் பலவற்றிலும் அப்படியே இடம்பெற்றிருக்கும். நீதிக் கட்சியின் பிதாமகர்களுள் ஒருவரான டி.எம்.நாயர் பெயரை ‘நாயர்’ இல்லாமல் எப்படிக் குறிப்பிடுவது? அதேபோல் நீதியரசர் பி.ஆர்.கிருஷ்ணய்யர், நீதியரசர் சின்னப்பா ரெட்டி போன்றோரின் பெயர்களுக்குப் பின் சாதிப் பின்னொட்டுகள் இருந்தாலும், அந்த அடையாளத்தையும் தாண்டி, அமைப்பில் நிறைய காரியங்கள் ஆற்றியவர்கள் அவர்கள். ஆகவே, தங்கள் பெயரின்வழி நிரந்தர அடையாளமாக ஆகிவிட்ட தலைவர்கள், அறிஞர்கள் பெயரைப் பாடப் புத்தகங்களில் குறிப்பிடும்போது ‘உ.வே.சாமிநாதையர் என்று அறியப்படும் உ.வே.சாமிநாதர்’, ‘ஜி.டி. நாயுடு என்று அறியப்படும் ஜி. துரைசாமி’ என்று கொடுக்கலாம். காலப்போக்கில் அதையும் விடுத்து சாதிப் பெயர் இல்லாமலேயே அவர்களின் பெயரைப் பயன்படுத்தலாம். எனினும், தற்காலத்தில் ஒருவர் தனது பெயருக்குப் பின்னால் சாதிப் பின்னொட்டைப் பயன்படுத்துவார் என்றால், அது சாதிய வன்மமே. அதைக் களைவதற்கு எடுத்து வைக்கப்பட்ட சிறு அடியாக அரசின் முடிவை நான் கருதுகிறேன்.

ஷோபாசக்தி, எழுத்தாளர், நடிகர்

உ.வே.சாமிநாதையர் பெயரிலுள்ள சாதிப் பெயரான ஐயரை எப்படி நீக்க முடியும்? அவ்வாறு நீக்கி, உ.வே.சாமிநாதர் என அழைத்தால் யாருக்குப் புரியும் என்றெல்லாம் சொல்லி சில பல இலக்கியவாதிகள் காலத்துக்குக் காலம் ‘ஐயர்' என்ற சாதிப் பெயருக்கு லண்டனிலிருந்து தமிழ்நாடு வரை முட்டுக்கொடுத்தது நவீன இலக்கிய வரலாறு. அவர்கள் எழுதும்போதும் இந்த ‘ஐயா... பையா' போடாமல் எழுதவே மாட்டார்கள். இப்போது தமிழ்நாடு அரசு பாடநூல்களிலிருந்து சாதிப் பெயர்களை நீக்கியிருக்கிறது. ஐயர், பிள்ளை, ரெட்டி... எனச் சாதிப் பின்னொட்டுகள் எல்லாவற்றையும் தூக்கியிருக்கிறார்கள். இலக்கிய நூல்களிலும் தொகுப்புகளிலும் இதழ்களிலும் இடம்பெறும் ஐயர், பிள்ளை, செட்டி, நாயக்கர்களையும் நீக்கிவிடுவது இலக்கியவாதிகளின் கட்டாயக் கடமையாகிறது. இலக்கியத்தைப் படித்துக் குழந்தைகள் கெட்டுப்போய்விடக் கூடாது!

யாழினி ஜோஸ், இதழியல் மாணவி

தமிழ்நாடு அரசின் முடிவை நான் வரவேற்றாலும் இதைக் கண்துடைப்பு போன்றுதான் பார்க்கிறேன். ஒருபக்கம் பாடப் புத்தகங்களிலிருந்து சாதிப் பெயர்களை நீக்கிக்கொண்டு மறுபக்கம் சென்னையின் பூர்வ குடிகளான பட்டியலின மக்களை அவர்கள் விருப்பமின்றி அப்புறப்படுத்துவதும் நடக்கத்தானே செய்கிறது. எனினும், அரசின் முடிவு மாணவர்களிடத்தில் மாற்றத்தை ஏற்படுத்தும் என்று நினைக்கிறேன். அதே நேரத்தில், வாக்கு அரசியலுக்கு சாதியைப் பயன்படுத்துவதையும் கட்சிகள் நிறுத்திக்கொள்ள வேண்டும். பாடப் புத்தகங்களில் செய்யும் மாற்றத்தை சமூகத்திலும் செய்ய வேண்டும் என்பதுதான் நான் எதிர்பார்ப்பது.

விஷ்ணு வரதராஜன், முனைவர் பட்ட மாணவர்

சமூகமயமாக்கம் என்ற சொல் ஒன்று உண்டு. ஒரு தனிமனிதராக இவ்வுலகில் பிறக்கும் நாம், ஒரு சமூகத்தின் அங்கமாக மெதுவாக மாறுகிறோம், வெவ்வேறு சமூக அடையாளங்கள் நம் மீது விழுகின்றன, அதற்கேற்றவாறு சலுகைகளும் இழிவுகளும் வந்துசேர்கின்றன. வீடும் கல்விக்கூடமும் சமூகமயமாக்கத்தின் முக்கிய அமைப்புகள். சாதிப் பெயர்கள் சாதியத்தின் இயக்கத்தை இயல்பாக்குகின்றன. மேலும், அவை சமநிலை அற்றதொரு வரலாற்றைச் சுட்டுகின்றன, சாதிப் படிநிலையின் இருத்தலை நினைவுபடுத்துகின்றன, சமச்சீரான வகுப்பறைகள் அமைவதைத் தடுக்கின்றன. எனவே, இப்போது அச்சில் இருக்கும் பெயர்களில் உள்ள சாதிப் பெயர்களை நீக்குவது சரியான திசையே. சாதிப் பெயர்கள் தெரியாமல் வளரும் தலைமுறையால் சாதி ஒழியாது. ஆனால், அத்தலைமுறையால் சாதியொழிப்பை நோக்கி மேலும் வலுவாக ஒருங்கிணைய முடியும்.

Individuals and human collectives have memories and time spans. The two do not converge but at times overlap. The latter are infrequent yet meaningful. Prudence, if not wisdom, lies in using them. One such occasion betides the Gulf region at this juncture.

The Persian Gulf is a nearly 990 kilometre-long body of water that separates Iran from the Arabian Peninsula. Seven member States of the United Nations lay claim to washing their hands or feet in its waters. At its narrowest point, in the Strait of Hormuz, it is only 54 km wide and the main shipping channels that pass through it are 30km-35 km wide and 8km-12 km wide. They are critical to the transportation of crude oil and LNG to global markets.

For over a century till the early 1970s, the Persian Gulf was a British lake. The imperial withdrawal propelled the United States to step in as the guarantor of the sub-region with its Twin-Pillars (Iran-Saudi Arabia) policy. An abortive effort was also made by Oman through the Muscat Conference in November 1976; it floundered on the obstinacy of Baathist Iraq. Bilateral efforts were also made by King Faisal of Saudi Arabia and the Shah of Iran; King Faisal initiated his Islamic solidarity policy in 1964 and visited Iran in December 1965; in 1966 Saudi Defence Minister Sultan bin Abdulaziz described the Iranian-Saudi friendship as a perfect example of Islamic brotherhood and neighbourly relations; the two States were also active members of the Five Power ‘Safari Club’ for intelligence sharing.

Impact of unrest

The Iranian Revolution of 1978-79 disturbed the strategic balance in the region and put an end to efforts to develop a regional consensus on security issues. Over the next decade, and particularly during the period of the Iraq-Iran war, the effort of the Gulf monarchies and of their western supporters was to destabilise and wish away the revolutionary regime. The formation of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) in 1981 was part of the effort to reassure the Gulf sheikhdoms. The end of the war and the cooling of tensions allowed saner perceptions to emerge. These were spelt out among others by the Saudi Arabian Foreign Minister in the Manama Dialogue in December 2004. In 1996, Iranian President Mohammad Khatami told the Saudi Defence Minister that a defence pact would be mutually beneficial. Crown Prince Abdullah attended the Islamic Summit conference in Tehran in December 9-11, 1997. This was seen in Tehran as ‘a good beginning for removing misunderstandings’. Subsequent developments in the region relating to Syria and the Hezbollah on the one side and the Saudi intervention in the Yemen on the other conflict pushed back, even reversed, the developing perceptions in Riyadh.

Yemen in particular has been critical to Saudi perceptions of national security. The clash of viewpoints dates back to the 1930s when King Abdulaziz ibn Saud was expanding the boundaries of the Kingdom of Najd to incorporate the western and southern parts of the Arabian Peninsula. Conflict developed over the southern region of Najran and resulted in a Saudi military victory and the Treaty of 1934. This maintained peace till the Egyptian Revolution and Gamal Abdel Nasser’s ‘intoxicating blend of nationalism and radicalism’ that set the region alight. It led to the Yemeni coup of 1962, the Egyptian military intervention in Yemen and the souring of Saudi-Egyptian relations that lasted till the Arab-Israeli war of 1967. This suited the interests of the United States; military assistance programmes and the stationing of U.S. troops during the Kuwait war of 1990 followed. The Trump era and the jettisoning of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action witnessed a qualitative strengthening of ties between them.

The key issues

The last few years have witnessed geopolitical tensions in the Gulf littoral. Most States have been affected adversely by the historically low oil prices and by COVID-19. The GCC has become inoperative with the focus on the boycott of Qatar that is now being reversed. There are new tensions between the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and Saudi Arabia. Riyadh’s access to the Oval Office in Washington is now not what it was in the Donald Trump era. The Abraham Accords between Israel, the UAE and Bahrain have qualitatively influenced the Arab-Israeli calculus in the Persian Gulf States and in the wider Arab world.

More recently, the U.S.’s decision to withdraw forces from Afghanistan and reduce commitments in Iraq has been the subject of discussions on policy options among knowledgeable observers in Washington. One expert has observed that “on balance, the American ground-force base in Kuwait, the Fifth Fleet naval base in Bahrain, [the] Al Udeid Air Base in Qatar, Al Dhafra Air Base in the UAE and the access arrangements in Oman provide the U.S. with a politically and financially sustainable military presence” in the region. Another view is that “the post-COVID-19 environment is going to be unfriendly to Saudi Arabia perhaps more than to any other leading power in the Gulf”. The Saudi failure to subdue the Houthis and to close the Yemen conflict on their terms has become a source of concern. The U.S.’s inability to subdue Iran on its terms has also become evident. Others have drawn attention to the Saudi Crown Prince’s remark in April that his country wants good relations with Iran and to the Iranian reaction of welcoming it. It is evident that policy options are being explored.

Security is the concern

The impact of these recent developments on Saudi Arabia-Iran relations needs to be assessed in this context. The effort to impart a sectarian orientation to the divide does not seem to hold. Their primary concern is security in the Gulf littoral and the security of the waterway for the transportation of their hydrocarbon exports.

In January 1987, the then U.S. Secretary of State said the Gulf has become ‘critical to the economic health of the West.’ A good part of the rest of the world can with justice be added to it.

For this to be given practical shape, its essential ingredients would need to be: freedom of access to, and outlet from, Gulf waters through the Strait of Hormuz; freedom of commercial shipping in international waters in the Persian Gulf; prevention of conflict that may impinge on the freedom of trade and shipping; freedom to all States of the Gulf littoral to exploit their hydrocarbons and other natural resources and export them; ensure conditions of peace and stability in the individual littoral States, and ensure that regional or extra-regional conditions do not impinge on any of these considerations.

Could the achievement of such an arrangement, or a part of it, be the beginning of a much desired and reassuring development? Overtime, it may address itself to bring forth answers to questions such as security for whom, by whom, against whom.

The recent pronouncements from Riyadh and Tehran do tend to suggest an inclination to be supportive of some of these suggestions. This is to be welcomed since from an Indian viewpoint the requirement is and will continue to be stability in the littoral States, freedom of navigation and safety of sea lanes.

Hamid Ansari is the former Vice President of India, 2007-2017

The online world amplifies the social norms of the physical world. Women face aggressive and offensive trolling on the Internet, designed to undermine and discredit them professionally and shame them into silence. A perfect example is the ‘Sulli Deals’ app recently created on GitHub that auctioned Muslim women. The active participation of vocal women, especially from minority communities, is resisted by those who do not wish the social order to be disrupted. This isn’t to say that men are not targeted online, but the attacks faced by both sexes are vastly different. Misinformation/disinformation also targets men and women differently and unsurprisingly so, especially in India where gender disparity among Internet users is high.

Gendering misinformation

Take, for instance, the type of misinformation used against Congress leaders Sonia Gandhi and Rahul Gandhi who come from the same socio-economic and political background. Mr. Gandhi is referred to as ‘Pappu’ by his critics. The usual misinformation targeting him questions his intellect. But the same cannot be said for his mother. Whether it’s Hollywood actresses sporting bikinis misidentified as Ms. Gandhi or a morphed photo that shows her sitting on a man’s lap, she is portrayed to be an ‘indecent’ woman to undercut her politics. Ms. Gandhi’s position of power does not shield her from vulgar misinformation.

A report by Amnesty International last year said that 95 female politicians out of 724 received nearly one million hateful mentions on Twitter between March and May, one in five of which was sexist or misogynistic.

But misinformation like other forms of abuse has inter-sectional challenges. While actor Swara Bhaskar receives some of the most sexist troll attacks, activist Safoora Zargar is targeted for being a woman as well as a Muslim. After her arrest for participating in protests against the Citizenship (Amendment) Act, pornographic videos were shared in Ms. Zargar’s name on social media. Organised disinformation and sexism intersect with Islamophobia, castetism, religious bigotry and other forms of discrimination to threaten vocal women from minority communities.

The harassment is so rampant that more often than not, women are asked to either ignore the abusers or block such handles. As always, women are expected to take precautionary measures instead of men being asked to behave. We also seldom question Twitter on its failure to stop the spread of pornographic content. The women of Shaheen Bagh were targeted in a similar fashion. Surely a social media giant has the ability to detect and purge nudity, especially when shared with hateful captions?

Gendering misinformation should be a part of the feminist discourse. The world has drastically changed after the advent of the Internet and the digital space has the power to impact democracies. But women do not get an equal opportunity to make themselves heard because they are shut down with sexism or, worse, the threat of sexual violence. Former Jawaharlal Nehru University Students’ Union leader Shehla Rashid was forced to delete her Facebook account after receiving rape threats for speaking in favour of interfaith marriage. Journalist Rana Ayyub has also complained several times of rape threats making their way into her Twitter messages. A report that I wrote in 2018 revealed how thousands of men on a closed Facebook group, ‘Sharing is Caring’, sold Instagram and Facebook pages featuring young women. Many of these metamorphosed into political pages after gaining a substantial following. I was targeted with sexist attacks after the workings of the group were made public. Its members shared my pictures while commenting ‘sharing is caring’, a sexist pun on the group’s name.

But while on the one hand women are targeted with sexist attacks, on the other, their sexuality is used to further misinformation. Some men hide behind female pseudonyms to get attention. Last year, the Chhattisgarh Police arrested a 31-year-old man for running multiple fake Facebook accounts posing as a woman and “posting provocative comments that could hurt social harmony”.

Men are at the centre of the disinformation ecosystem in India — an ecosystem created by them and for them. While women also share false news, the number of men disseminating misinformation is higher for the simple reason that they are greater in number on the Internet (almost double the female population). Men manufacture false news and also fall for such news. They are proof that ‘women gossip more’ is a gender stereotype. Even if we look at this phenomenon from a greater perspective, there are more men in politics and they rely on disinformation to keep propaganda alive. A recent report by UNESCO on online harassment faced by women journalists says that political actors instigate and fuel online violence campaigns against women journalists. India is privy to such abuse — women journalists and activists are targeted not only by troll armies but also by office-bearers of political parties.

One of the most recent incidents that exposes gendered disinformation in India is the Rhea Chakraborty saga. Actor Sushant Singh Rajput was hailed as a self-made man without faults but Ms. Chakraborty was trashed on television and on social media — both spaces dominated by men — as a ‘gold-digging seductress’. The whole episode was a reminder of deep-rooted internalised misogyny in the country. Women also participated in propagating Ms. Chakraborty as the ‘culprit’ and rejoiced when she was arrested. Why did they not show solidarity? Because patriarchal norms, while subordinating women, also give them the power to oppress women more vulnerable than them.

A symbiotic relationship

Misinformation and sexism have a symbiotic relationship. Misinformation piggybacks on sexism to discredit vocal women and sexism uses misinformation to reinforce patriarchal norms. While organised misinformation and trolling affect women on a personal level, the issue that is often ignored is the effect they have on democracy. A healthy democracy is participatory and promotes gender inclusiveness. Sexism and misinformation intimidate women from taking vocal stands and are antithetical to a progressive society.

Historically, feminist movements have led to democratisation. Women empowerment cannot be separated from a modern society. Savitribai Phule could reform modern education in the 1800s because her husband Jotirao Phule, a ‘Shudra’ himself, equipped her with knowledge restricted for the Brahmin community. Jotirao was also fortunate to receive education in the first place because of the foresight of his widowed aunt. Menaka Guruswamy and Arundhati Katju, the only openly gay women lawyers in India, reformed the LGBTQ movement in the country by winning the landmark case in 2018 that decriminalised gay sex. These women went against the social norms of their time to make India more democratically sound. There is no extent to the reforms that women are capable of bringing and progress can happen faster with solidarity. But women who don’t conform to social norms are almost never supported and the intersection of sexism and misinformation justifies their abuse. While social media gives a platform for women to raise issues, repeated abuse takes away that freedom. Social media, the place that bolstered the #MeToo movement, is the same place used to shut women down.

Pooja Chaudhuri is Senior Editor at Alt News

The National Democratic Alliance government enacted the Code on Wages (https://bit.ly/3fMraIj) in August 2019 and the other three Codes,viz.,the Industrial Relations Code, the Occupational Safety, Health and Working Conditions Code and Code on Social Security (CSS) in September 2020. Later, it had framed the draft rules albeit incompletely under all the codes — incompletely because the rules have not covered some aspects of the Codes, e.g. rules regarding recognition of central trade unions have not been framed so far.

A rushed exercise

Controversies surround the processes of the enactment of codes and the framing of rules. The Government has held only symbolic and partial consultation with the central trade unions. The three codes were passed in Parliament even as the Opposition parties, otherwise insignificant, boycotted the proceedings. The tearing hurry in which the Government carried out the reforms even during the COVID-19 period gave tremendous hope to employers and potential investors. It announced its intentions of implementing the Codes from April 1, 2021 even as State governments were completely unprepared with the rules. Further, the major political parties reallocated their energies to regional elections rather than the implementation of codes. Symbolically, labour law reforms have been affected and the government can boast of it. Since the Government has not shown serious intent to implement the codes, the NDA government effected reforms to boast that it has executed the long-pending reforms; simply put, it is more symbolic rather than a meaningful act.

Court directives

The central government has deferred the possible date of implementation to October 1, 2021, again tentatively. In the meanwhile, the Supreme Court of India has exerted pressure on both the central and the State governments to implement a ‘one nation, one ration card’ (ONOR) scheme and register all the unorganised workers under the National Database for Unorganized Workers (NDUW), which was to have been done by July 31, 2021. Government agencies are rushing to comply with both the directives. In ONOR, Aadhaar seeding and the universal availability of an electronic point of sale (EPOS) system are necessary. And for the NDUW, it has to register each of the approximately 400 million workers, a conservative figure.

Perhaps, the Supreme Court passed such an extraordinary perhaps impracticable order following the hesitancy in early 2020 to provide relief to suffering migrant workers following the national lockdown. The governments did not honour the Supreme Court’s orders relating to the registration of construction workers for many years. So, it has a bad track record. One is not sure when governments would comply fully and well with the Supreme Court’s orders. Unorganised workers including migrant workers will continue to be deprived of their promised and extended entitlements.

Government’s line vs reality

The Government said the codes would extend universal minimum wages and social security, enable enhanced industrial safety and the provision of social security to gig workers, among other things. The Industrial Relations Code provides for recognition of trade union(s) by employers, a labour right that eluded workers for seven decades. On the other hand, employers celebrated the extension of tremendous flexibility to them, even those unasked, such as relief from framing standing orders for most firms. But do they enjoy these benefits?

On August 3, 2021, I browsed the Simpliance website (a law portal) to assess the record of State governments regarding rules under the codes. It was a revelation to find that major States such as Tamil Nadu, Kerala, West Bengal, Maharashtra, Haryana and Delhi have not issued the draft rules under any codes. Karnataka, Gujarat and Jharkhand have framed Rules for the Code on Wages and the Industrial Relations Code. Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh, Uttar Pradesh, Uttarakhand and Punjab have framed rules for all the codes. Even though the Code on Wages was enacted in August 2019, it was only in March 2021 that the central government notified the constitution of an advisory committee. On June 3, 2021 it also announced an expert committee with a tenure of three years to advise it on minimum wages. Then, on July 12, 2021, it announced that the wage index’s base year would be shifted from 1965 to 2019 to use the revised wage index to determine minimum wages. The Government seems to be clueless regarding the implementation of minimum wages.

Poor safety record

The incidence of major industrial accidents has remained undiminished even during the COVID-19 period. For instance, IndustriAll reported that between May to June, 32 major industrial accidents occurred in India, killing 75 workers (https://bit.ly/3ApxvRV). The media reported four accidents in Vizag during 2020. Safe in India’s annual reports, CRUSHED, for 2019 and 2020, provide a disturbing picture of industrial accidents in the automobile industry in the Gurgaon region (https://bit.ly/3CxPfwv). Industrial safety continues to be a grave concern even after the enactment of the Occupational Safety, Health and Working Conditions Code.

According to several research reports, COVID-19 intensified informality, led to the withdrawal of workers from the labour market, reduced earnings, increased unemployment and widened inequality. The non-statutory floor level minimum wage remains a meagre Rs. 178 still even as Wholesale Price Index-inflation rates have galloped to 12% in June 2021. The Government’s relief measures to workers, especially unorganised and migrant workers and even to the so-called organised sector workers, are too meagre to make any difference. It did not implement the widely endorsed measure of direct benefit transfer at least for low-income families.

In perspective

Thus, we see two aspects concerning labour market governance in India. One, the Government has failed to provide legal visibility to millions of unorganised and migrant workers, even after decades, and despite direction by the highest court in the land. Two, despite the gazetting of four Codes, age-old laws are in force. Thus, they reflect poorly not only on the governance abilities of the governments but also on the countervailing power of the Opposition parties. Were the labour law reforms rushed with little or no debate and consultation whatsoever, only to remain in the gazette books? Employers and workers cannot enjoy the so-called benefits extended by the codes.

Given the facts mentioned above, the legislative impasse continues; one does not know how long it would be. However, India would score impressively on the ease of doing business exercise by any agency including the World Bank by the mere execution of labour reforms without them being implemented: what else then is needed!

K.R. Shyam Sundar is Professor, HRM Area, XLRI – Xavier School of Management, Jamshedpur, Jharkhand. The views expressed are personal

The space of discussion on electoral politics was disproportionately occupied by West Bengal before the Assembly elections and continues to be the case after Mamata Banerjee took oath as Chief Minister. While the Trinamool Congress won with a massive mandate, Ms. Banerjee lost to Suvendu Adhikari in Nandigram. Going by the provisions of the Constitution and in a normal situation, it should have been possible for the Election Commission of India (ECI) to hold by-elections to the seven vacant Assembly seats in West Bengal by now. But there is also a provision by which by-elections can be deferred for six months. If by-elections are held on time, Ms. Banerjee may find it quite easy to get elected from one of the seven seats, but if that does not happen, she will have to resign from the post of Chief Minister. This will cause her major embarrassment even if the State does not face a political crisis.

What the law says

Section 151A of the Representation of the People Act, 1951, mandates the ECI to fill the casual vacancies in the Houses of Parliament and State Legislatures through bye-elections within six months from the date of occurrence of the vacancy, provided that the remainder of the term of a member in relation to a vacancy is one year or more. While the ECI cannot cancel a national or State election, it can cancel an election to a seat in case of a death or an offence as this generally does not impact Assembly formation in the Centre or the State. Under Section 153 of the Act, read with Article 324 of the Constitution, the ECI can extend the time for completing any election, but such extension should not go beyond the six months. Article 172(1) states that in case of a state of Emergency, an election can be postponed for one year at a time in addition to a period of six months after the Emergency is lifted. It is important to note that Emergency here refers to a threat to the security and sovereignty of the nation, not a pandemic.

The Kolkata municipal elections, which were to be held before the Assembly elections, have also not been held yet. Given the strictures passed by the Madras High Court on the ECI at the time of the West Bengal Assembly election, the ECI would like to play it safe. If by-elections are not held within six months of the stipulated time, Ms. Banerjee will have to resign from her post. This is because Article 164(4) the Constitution states that “a Minister who for any period of six consecutive months is not a member of the Legislature of the State shall at the expiration of that period cease to be a Minister”. The Supreme Court reaffirmed this in a 2001 ruling in the case pertaining to the re-appointment of Tej Prakash Singh notifying that if a non-MLA has served as minister for six months without getting elected to the Assembly, he cannot be reappointed as minister during the same term of the House. The son of the assassinated Punjab Chief Minister Beant Singh became a minister without being elected to the Assembly for six months and then resigned and again became a minister in 1995-96. The case brought the spotlight back on Jayalalithaa as she had managed to pull off another term as the Chief Minister of Tamil Nadu despite having been disqualified to contest elections. Ms. Banerjee, thus, has three more months to get elected as an MLA to continue in the Chief Minister’s chair.

No Upper House in West Bengal

If Ms. Banerjee is forced to resign, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) will likely take the moral high ground by remarking that the Trinamool appointed a leader who didn’t win the election as Chief Minister when the BJP itself has faced similar situations. In 2017, the BJP appointed Manohar Parrikar as the Chief Minister of Goa, who was then the Union Defence Minister, when Laxmikant Parsekar lost his Assembly seat. In 2014, the BJP’s Chief Minister front-runner, Arjun Munda, lost the election while his party won in the State. The party appointed Raghubar Das as the Chief Minister of Jharkhand. When Yogi Adityanath became the Chief Minister of Uttar Pradesh in 2017, he was not a member of the U.P. Assembly. He was elected an MLC within six months of taking oath as Chief Minister. Both his deputies, Dinesh Sharma and Keshav Prasad Maurya, entered the political foray through the Upper House along with him within six months. Uddhav Thackeray opted for the same route in 2019 in Maharashtra. But this route is not available to Ms. Banerjee as West Bengal has no Upper House. Though the Trinamool has passed a resolution for the Upper House to be reinstated in West Bengal, this seems unlikely to fructify because it also requires the approval of both Houses of Parliament. Both Rajasthan and Assam also passed resolutions in their Assemblies, in 2012 and 2010, respectively, for the same, but these resolutions are pending in the Rajya Sabha. West Bengal faces uncertainty and possibly a political crisis.

Sanjay Kumar is Professor at the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies (CSDS) and Aastha is a Researcher with Lokniti, a research programme of CSDS. Views are personal

The Confederation of Indian Industry (CII) has long been at the forefront of addressing issues challenging the well-being of society. Of the many sustainability challenges that impact societies, climate change and plastic waste have a special significance. A 2019 report by the Center for International Environmental Law suggests that by 2050, greenhouse gas emissions from plastic could reach over 56 gigatonnes, 10-13% of the remaining carbon budget. However, viewed from the angle of livelihoods, post-consumer segregation, collection and disposal of plastics make up about half of the income of 1.5- 4 million waste-pickers in India.

A 2021 report commissioned by Google, Closing the Plastics Circularity Gap, suggests that unless large-scale global interventions are made, “we should expect to mismanage more than 7.7 billion metric tonnes of plastic waste globally over the next 20 years... [which is] equivalent to 16-times the weight of the human population...” Among the many applications of plastic, plastic packaging is the largest.

The solution

For India, the solution must be multi-pronged, systemic, and large scale, to create a visible impact. The Plastics Pacts model offers such a solution and is active in a number of countries including the U.K., South Africa, and Australia. It is now being brought to India by CII and WWF India.

The Plastics Pacts are business-led initiatives and transform the plastics packaging value chain for all formats and products. The Pacts bring together everyone from across the plastics value chain to implement practical solutions. All Pacts unite behind four targets: to eliminate unnecessary and problematic plastic packaging through redesign and innovation; to ensure all plastic packaging is reusable or recyclable; to increase the reuse, collection, and recycling of plastic packaging; and to increase recycled content in plastic packaging.

The India Plastics Pact, the first in Asia, will be launched in September at the CII Annual Sustainability Summit. It can be expected to boost demand for recycled content, investments in recycling infrastructure, jobs in the waste sector, and beyond. The first Plastics Pact was launched in the U.K. in 2018, by WRAP, a global NGO based in the U.K., in partnership with the Ellen MacArthur Foundation. The U.K. Pact helped channel over £120 million worth of investments in recycling infrastructure resulting in 300,000 tonnes of new recycling capacity. The Pact will support the Extended Producer Responsibility framework of the government and improve solid waste management as envisioned in the Swachh Bharat Abhiyan. Integral to the Pact’s framework is the involvement of the informal waste sector crucial to post-consumer segregation, collection and processing of plastic waste. The India Plastics Pact is supported by WRAP, which supports many Pacts globally. This association will ensure access to expertise and knowledge from different Pacts worldwide.

The India Plastics Pact

The India Plastics Pact focuses on solutions and innovation. Members’ accountability is ensured through ambitious targets and annual data reporting. The Pact will develop a road map for guidance, form action groups composed of members, and initiate innovation projects. While the India Plastics Pact will be active in India, it will link globally with other Plastics Pacts. Many Indian businesses and organisations have expressed an interest in signing up to the Pact. Deeper and long-lasting benefits will be felt across the supply chains of these businesses, most of which comprise MSMEs. The Pact will encourage development and maturing of the entire plastics production and management ecosystem. Apart from benefits to society and economy, delivering the targets will drive circularity of plastics and help tackle pollution. They will lead to significant reduction in greenhouse gas emissions.

Jamshyd N. Godrej is past President, CII

After the talks on July 31, India and China have taken one more step towards restoring peace and normalcy on the LAC by disengaging at Gogra. It is, however, only one step, and the road ahead towards returning to the status quo of April 2020, before the tensions of last summer upended years of a carefully managed even if uneasy peace along the LAC, remains uncertain. It has taken 12 rounds of military-level talks to see both sides disengage and put in place buffer zones in the Galwan Valley, the site of the June 2020 clash that marked the worst violence since 1967, Pangong Lake, and now Patrolling Point 17 in Gogra. The disengagement process at PP17 took place on August 4 and 5, with a return to permanent bases. The next round of talks will discuss PP15 in Hot Springs. Demchok, where China has transgressed in relatively smaller numbers than the deployments seen in Pangong Lake, also remains unresolved. Beijing has appeared unwilling to discuss the strategically significant Depsang plains, where the Chinese side has been blocking Indian patrols. The buffer zone model, where both sides temporarily cease patrolling in disputed areas, has appeared to work so far in keeping the peace. It is, however, only a temporary measure, and one that India should not accept as permanent as it would prevent India from enforcing its territorial claims and favour the PLA, which can deploy faster in larger numbers owing to more favourable terrain and better logistics.

The next step will be full de-escalation, and a withdrawal of some of the new forward deployments that have come up close to the LAC. India has signalled that it is prepared for the long haul; its message: relations cannot return to normal without a full restoration of normalcy on the borders. While the strategic motivations of China’s border deployments last year are not clear, the tactical objectives are not difficult to ascertain. Since the 2017 Doklam crisis, China has consistently stepped up building new permanent airbases and air defence units closer to the LAC, with at least 13 new positions coming up since then, according to an analysis of satellite images from Stratfor. India has been moving to rapidly upgrade its own infrastructure to close the gap. The result is an entirely changed security dynamic along the LAC. There is a need to come up urgently with new protocols and confidence-building measures, as both sides gradually resume patrolling in the buffer zones. The multiple transgressions by China and the violence of last year have set back years of efforts to carefully manage the borders and thrown into doubt whether the four agreements regulating the behaviour of both sides still remain valid. While the recent moves towards restoring the peace are certainly welcome, finding a more long-lasting solution to ensure peace along the LAC will present a taller challenge.

The IPCC has issued arguably its strongest warning yet on impending catastrophe from unmitigated global warming caused by human activity, lending scientific credence to the argument that rising wildfires, heatwaves, extreme rainfall and floods witnessed in recent times are all strongly influenced by a changing climate. In a stark report on the physical science basis of climate change contributed for a broader Assessment Report of the UN, the IPCC’s Working Group I has called for deep cuts to carbon dioxide emissions and other greenhouse gases and a move to net zero emissions, as the world would otherwise exceed 1.5°C and 2°C of warming during the 21st century with permanent consequences. Climate change is described by many as a far greater threat to humanity than COVID-19, because of its irreversible impacts. The latest report is bound to strengthen the criticism that leaders in many countries have stonewalled and avoided moving away from coal and other fossil fuels, while even those who promised to act, failed to influence the multilateral system. The new report attributes catastrophic events to sustained global warming, particularly the frequency and intensity of hot extremes, marine heatwaves, heavy precipitation, agricultural and ecological droughts, proportion of intense tropical cyclones, reductions in Arctic Sea ice, snow cover and permafrost. A phenomenon such as heavy rainfall over land, for instance, could be 10.5% wetter in a world warmer by 1.5°C, and occur 1.5 times more often, compared to the 1850-1900 period.

More than five years after the Paris Agreement was concluded, there is no consensus on raising ambition to reduce emissions, making access to low carbon technologies easier, and adequately funding mitigation and adaptation. COVID-19 had the unexpected effect of marginally and temporarily depressing emissions. The IPCC’s analysis presents scenarios of large-scale collapse of climate systems that future leaders would find virtually impossible to manage. Heatwaves and heavy rainfall events experienced with increasing frequency and intensity are just two of these, while disruptions to the global water cycle pose a more unpredictable threat. Also, if emissions continue to rise, oceans and land, two important sinks and the latter a key part of India’s climate action plan, would be greatly weakened in their ability to absorb atmospheric carbon dioxide. The new report sets the stage for the CoP26 conference in November. The only one course to adopt there is for developed countries with legacy emissions to effect deep cuts, transfer technology without strings to emerging economies and heavily fund mitigation and adaptation. Developing nations should then have no hesitation in committing themselves to steeper emissions cuts.

India and the Soviet Union to-day [New Delhi, August 9] signed a 20-year treaty of peace, friendship and co-operation which offers credible assurances to India of Soviet assistance in the event of an attack by China or Pakistan. The historic treaty provides that if either country is attacked — or threatened with an attack — the two contracting parties will immediately enter into mutual consultations to take “appropriate effective measures” to remove such threat and ensure their peace and security. The treaty does not specifically mention China or Pakistan but the wording of the mutual assistance provisions and the context in which it has been signed make it abundantly clear that it is directed against them. And it has been made equally clear to the United States that this virtual Indo-Soviet alliance is the direct consequence of its overtures to China and support to Pakistan. India and the Soviet Union have an understanding under this treaty to abstain from providing any assistance to any third country that engages in armed conflict with either of them. They will not also enter into or participate in any military alliance directed against each other.

It is hoped that the suspension of patrolling is only a temporary measure — the Indian officials have said it is — until a larger resolution of the differences on the border question takes place between India and China.

On the face of it, the disengagement by the Indian Army and the Chinese People’s Liberation Army at Patrolling Point 17A at Gogra Post in Eastern Ladakh is a positive development, but amid the continuing tensions in the larger theatre of the western sector of the LAC, it is hard to see it as a breakthrough of any kind. The disengagement took place after the 12th round of military commander-level talks and, according to the Indian side, was carried out on August 4 and 5. Disengagement means that troops of the two armies deployed at the point will no longer be eyeballing each other, a situation that could quickly go out of control as it did in the Galwan Valley last year. However, the situation in the Gogra Post area, that involved perhaps less than 50 soldiers on each side, was not as dire as it was on the northern bank of Pangong Lake, where a similar disengagement took place in February this year from an almost war-like posturing by both sides with tanks and troops facing each other over a distance of a few hundred metres.

Both armies are said to have removed all their temporary structures from near PP17A. As at Galwan and Pangong, a mutually agreed no-patrolling zone has been created, and the troops have fallen back to their respective bases. From the Indian point of view, this means that the extent of patrolling of the troops has shifted further inward from PP17A. It is hoped that the suspension of patrolling is only a temporary measure — the Indian officials have said it is — until a larger resolution of the differences on the border question takes place between India and China.

Further rounds of talks may yield similar disengagement at PP15 in the Hot Springs area, which has been another friction point. That will still leave the Depsang area, where Indian troops were patrolling upto the extent of PP 10, 11, 11A, 12 and 13 until February 2020, but are now being prevented from proceeding beyond a point that is about 18 kms inside Indian territory. There have also been reports of a massive build up of military infrastructure by China in the area, on its side of the LAC. Considering that the relatively flat terrain of Depsang makes it vulnerable to an offensive, and the Chinese posturing in this area poses a threat to the strategically important Darbuk-Shyok-Daulat Beg Oldie Road, resolving differences in this area is what actually matters now. Unless that happens, de-escalation — the reduction of the total number of troops deployed, around 50,000 on the Indian side — in eastern Ladakh, and a breakthrough towards the overall reduction in India-China tensions, will remain elusive goals.

This editorial first appeared in the print edition on August 10, 2021 under the title ‘Slow and steady’.

And perhaps most important of all, while it took three months to frame the list of words elected men and women cannot utter, the Monsoon Session of the MP assembly will meet for only four days.

Ullu ka patha certainly qualifies as “unparliamentary language”, and calling someone a “chaar sau bees” on the floor of the state legislature may well be stretching the bounds of rhetorical flourish. But the list of 1,560 words forbidden in the state assembly, compiled by officials in Madhya Pradesh over three months, also seems to be more pointed in some of its exclusions. After all, accusing the Treasury of “corruption”, “lying”, “murdering democracy” and “deceit” is much of what the Opposition does.

The directions issued to the MLAs by the MP assembly is the first of its kind, but is unlikely to be the last. After all, which political party in power wouldn’t want to stifle the most catchy criticisms of itself under the guise of maintaining decorum? The special status enjoyed by legislators across democracies — parliamentary privilege — can be among the peskiest forms of free speech. And like most forms of robust debate, it can turn unruly. In fact, Chief Minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan, while justifying the legislative assembly’s move, likened the House in session to a “fish market”.

Most people in India will be familiar with the “fish market” simile from their schooldays. Teachers have often employed the term to describe and control an over-excited bunch of kids. But MLAs, elected representatives of all kinds really, are not children and the House ought not to be run like a classroom, where obedience is more important than questions, mannerisms more important than criticism. And perhaps most important of all, while it took three months to frame the list of words elected men and women cannot utter, the Monsoon Session of the MP assembly will meet for only four days. It seems that in trying to create a minefield of rules to allow the House to function with “decorum”, the powers that be in MP forgot to slot time for it to meet.

This editorial first appeared in the print edition on August 10, 2021 under the title ‘Classroom assembly’.

Studies are already underway to ascertain the most potent gap between doses in a combination approach. ICMR needs to upscale its endeavour in these directions.

In the initial months of the pandemic, when the quest for vaccines had just begun, a section of epidemiologists suggested the possibility of using mixed immunisation as one strategy against the unpredictable pathogen. Using a pair of two different vaccines was also advocated as a panacea to supply shortages. Now an ICMR study on 18 people, who were administered Covaxin as their second shot after having received Covishield as the first jab, has yielded encouraging results. The inadvertent mixing of shots triggered a superior immunogenicity profile — including against the virus’s more infectious variants — as compared to that produced by two doses of the same vaccine. However, the researchers have rightly cautioned that more detailed analysis is required before the mix-and-match approach becomes an accepted part of the anti-Covid strategy.

For at least two decades, researchers have been trying to find potent immune response combinations against several viral diseases, including HIV. In recent years, the endeavour seems to have met with some success with respect to the Ebola vaccine. The Moscow-based Gamaleya Research Institute that has been at the forefront of this research used the approach to develop its anti-Covid vaccine, Sputnik V. The vaccine uses two different vectors for its two shots — the first dose has the same adenovirus as in the Ebola virus, Ad5, while the second shot uses Ad 26. In the past three months, a slew of studies has suggested broadening the frontiers of the combination approach — pairing shots that use fundamentally different technologies. Preliminary studies show that adenovirus-based vaccines induce strong T-cell response — cells critical to early recognition and management of viral infections — whereas messenger RNA vaccines generate a high number of antibodies. Training the immune cells by a viral vector followed by an antibody boost could, therefore, lead to a potentially stronger defence against a SARS Cov-2 attack. A similar quest is reportedly behind a joint initiative by Gamaleya and AstraZeneca that explores the possibility of combining vaccines developed in the two laboratories. The ICMR study indicates the possibility of Covaxin, which relies on chemically inactivated viruses, becoming part of another potent pair.

Mix-and-match trials have not reported significant side-effects so far. But experts say these trials need to have several times more participants to pick up rare events. Caution is also imperative because the endeavour combines shots that have different adverse event profiles. Studies are already underway to ascertain the most potent gap between doses in a combination approach. ICMR needs to upscale its endeavour in these directions.

This editorial first appeared in the print edition on August 10, 2021 under the title ‘Mix and match’.

Prime Minister Indira Gandhi has carried out a major reshuffle of secretaries in her government. At least three senior secretaries have been reverted to other states. Twelve other ministries will have new secretaries.

Prime Minister Indira Gandhi has carried out a major reshuffle of secretaries in her government. At least three senior secretaries have been reverted to other states. Twelve other ministries will have new secretaries. The government has decided to appoint T N Chaturvedi as Home Secretary. He will succeed S M H Burney who will take over as Governor of Nagaland and Manipur. Chaturvedi is Education secretary at present. The new commerce secretary will be Abid Hussain now with the Asian Development Bank. The government will have IAS officers as secretaries for the first time. They will be Anna George Malhotra who will be education secretary and Sarla Grewal, the social welfare secretary.

World Bank Report

While praising India for making progress on food and some other fronts, the latest World Development Report of the World Bank is severely critical of India’s performance in infrastructure areas and its continued lag in exports compared to its potential. Figures given in the publication show India in a poor light with regard to overall growth rates as well. Perhaps for a country moving towards socialism, the strongest criticism is in the statistics. The top 10 per cent households have 33.6 per cent of household income.

Reagan approves bomb

The US President Ronald Reagan has authorised the building of the neutron bomb which kills with radiation but does not destroy property. Key US allies like France, West Germany and the UK have been apprised of the US decision. The plan according to the White House is to keep the bomb in the US and not deploy it elsewhere. The decision can lead to building stockpiles in six months. Meanwhile, the Soviet Union has said that the US decision smacks of “cannibalistic instincts” and Moscow has right to respond.

Badri Narayan writes: With weakening of Bahujan movement, there’s greater assertion of separate caste identity.

Who wants to be called a Dalit? A young student from an Uttar Pradesh village, who belongs to a Scheduled Caste, asked me this question. He said, please don’t call us “Dalit”. He explained that it is an insulting term that produces an inferiority complex and that they prefer to be called by their “caste names”. These have a glorious history as the communities have produced kings and seers.

The student further said that one of their main struggles is to acquire an identity that may give them social confidence. This is the post-Bahujan social truth that one observes in a state like UP. There are many Twitter handles and Facebook pages run by youngsters from various marginalised communities arguing for, describing and asserting their caste identity as a form of social glory. They are engaged in inventing their caste heroes, histories and icons and creating various social groups to disseminate this information and forge a caste-centred public sphere. In another conversation, a few educated youngsters from these communities explained that those who see them from the outside, such as people from non-SC social groups, politicians, academics, media and many civil society organisations, call them “Dalit”. On the other hand, many people from SC communities who are mainstream Ambedkarites also call themselves Dalits and, while using this term, they seek to project themselves as an assertive community struggling for social empowerment.

The term Dalit is not so popular in states like Punjab, Rajasthan and Madhya Pradesh. Among a sizeable section of the marginal communities in Punjab, asserting oneself as “chamar da puttr” (son of a leather worker) is preferred. The verdicts of various high courts and Supreme Court commissions also discourage the use of the term “Dalit” in official communication.

In the villages of UP, very few people from the marginalised communities use “Dalit” to define their social and political identities. Most of them use their caste names or the governmental term, “SC”. However, some politicians frequently use “Dalit” in their political discourse, thus showing the gap between political language and the people’s language. Many social activists, civil society groups and NGOs use the term “Dalit” without understanding the ongoing reconfiguration of the communities’ sense of identity.

Kanshi Ram may have recognised the problem in using “Dalit” while addressing the rural marginalised communities of UP, which is why he preferred to use “Bahujan” in his political discourse. Mayawati also preferred to use “Bahujan”. Kanshi Ram’s project of invoking caste identities among the marginalised and their conversion to a broader Bahujan identity is almost non-functional in UP now. When the Bahujan movement was stronger in the state, the emphasis on separate caste identity-based glory and pride was almost invisible. Now, when Bahujan assertion seems to be weaker, the assertion of caste pride and dependence on caste glories appears among marginalised communities. They claim their own icons and are reshaping Dalit public discourse in urban and rural north India. Where the sense of caste glory once worked as a socio-psychological resource for the production of the Bahujan public, it is now also working to facilitate the formation of the Hindutva public.

The growing trend of asserting caste identity among the marginalised is a replication of the “graded inequality” of the caste system diagnosed by B R Ambedkar. It may cause the production of a new set of multiple inequalities. This emerging phenomenon may also hurt the Ambedkar-initiated project of the annihilation of caste in Indian society but it needs to be documented and discussed to understand the mobilisation of marginalised communities of north Indian society. We also need to understand what Michel Foucault meant when he opined that identity is not fixed but, rather, is a discourse mediated by our interactions with others. “Dalit”, which was once an empowering term for a section of the marginalised, is now considered insulting by other sections.

In fact, changes in identity also denote changes in aspirations. Managing this new sense of identity requires the crafting of new electoral and mobilisational politics and political diction. Let’s see which political group comes up with a new craft to mobilise the support of various castes and communities under the Dalit-Bahujan-marginalised categories.

This column first appeared in the print edition on August 10, 2021 under the title ‘Not just a Dalit’. The writer is professor, Govind Ballabh Pant Social Science Institute, Allahabad

Mishi Choudhary writes: All the victims should approach courts, police and ask for their rights to be enforced.

The past few days have once again provided extensive evidence of a cyberattack on Indian citizens. Barring the evasive statements issued by various ministers of the Government of India, we are yet to hear any substantive explanation of why phone numbers of several Indian politicians, including Rahul Gandhi, activists and lawyers were found to be amongst the 50,000 other phone numbers believed to be potential surveillance targets by governments around the world. It is correct that for a variety of reasons, forensic testing that might have revealed infection by NSO’s Pegasus was not possible in each of these cases. But the presence of these numbers does call for a thorough investigation, instead of another word salad being offered by the government. The French and Israeli governments have already ordered an investigation.

Most followers of this controversy will remember that this is not the first time the current government has been accused of snooping on civilians. In 2019, it was alleged that NSO’s software was used by GoI to exploit a vulnerability in WhatsApp to illegally spy on 24 citizens, and hack as many as121 Indians. All that resulted in was bombastic denials by ministers, and blocking of any action by the ruling party. The Parliamentary Standing Committee on Information Technology chaired by Shashi Tharoor had held some hearings but no substantive outcome resulted or at least no information was made public. Such inaction across board leaves us citizens to wonder whether the surveillance structure is one where all parties are complicit and the inaction is deliberate after some obligatory public outrage.

In 2019, WhatsApp, in order to avoid any conflict with GoI, decided to sue NSO in California. The documents filed in that lawsuit tell us that Pegasus could “remotely and covertly extract valuable intelligence from virtually any mobile device”. Pegasus was designed, in part, to intercept communications sent to and from a device, including communications over iMessage, Skype, Telegram, WeChat, Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, and others. Pegasus was modular malware, which meant that it could be customised for different purposes, including to intercept communications, capture screenshots and exfiltrate browser history and contacts from the device. That case is now on the discovery stage, in which both sides can request documents and records that may reveal more.

This is only a part of the surveillance structure that operates unbridled in India. On March 11, the Indian government casually announced the adoption of facial recognition technology enabled surveillance. We were told that using photographic and other information from government “databases”, 1,100 individual participants in the Delhi riots had been identified. The number was later raised to 1,900. When other advanced democracies, including the European Union and several states in the US, have been slowing down or stopping use of facial recognition in the public sphere altogether, here in India, we seem to be not only traveling at top speed in the other direction, but the actions of the government indicate that rule of law is no more than a small bump on the way.

There are at least three other projects that are building a 360-degree surveillance mechanism by the government. These projects, namely CMS, NATGRID and NETRA, operate under complete secrecy without any publicly available information. CMS and NETRA are demonstrably among the most invasive in the world — all the more so, considering how a patchwork of broadly worded laws with questionable compliance rates allows them to tap into virtually any network, often without the knowledge of the service providers themselves. NATGRID was built with an intent to enable government agencies to get information such as bank account details and transaction details, in violation of the principles which were laid down in the Supreme Court’s Puttaswamy judgment.

There seems to be a concerted effort to create a surveillance state, monitor free flow of information and use technology to control instead of empowering citizens. Where the government reads every face, political dissent is under permanent intimidation. We cannot live our lives outside the range of others’ cameras anymore.

What should happen now?

First, we should not allow this to be yet another scandal that captures our attention for a few weeks before some other thing erupts. We all must keep the pressure on.

Second, an independent inquiry commission must be set up. This commission should not be headed by one or two Supreme Court judges but by a panel consisting of members of judiciary, civil society and technical experts. We must also ensure that the matter is not sent to the CBI, who the Supreme Court itself has called a caged parrot.

Third, in the absence of an independent judicial inquiry ordered by the Supreme Court, states should order the kind of investigations the state of West Bengal headed by Mamata Banerjee has ordered.

Fourth, all the victims should approach courts, police and ask for their rights to be enforced. Courts should stop buying the catchall argument of national security and allow governments to use the market to create an infrastructure of surveillance. Government’s right to have continuous access to our data, without adequate safeguards, should also be held a violation of constitutional human rights.

Fifth, information about the three surveillance projects, namely CMS, NATGRID and NETRA, should be publicly available and they must be subject to the principles laid down in the Puttaswamy case.

Sixth, we must use this opportunity to force Parliament to make by statute a strong personal privacy charter protecting the right to be free from forms of behaviour collection and mass data analysis that are demonstrably harmful. Such an Act should not have any exceptions. It should subject all government surveillance — and government use of private surveillance technologies — to the rule of law.

Without the freedom to think freely, there are no rights that can be exercised by anyone. If we leave this discussion only to politicians and don’t hold them accountable this time, we are doomed to live through the death of freedom.

This column first appeared in the print edition on August 10, 2021 under the title ‘Government vs citizen’. The writer is Legal Director at Software Freedom Law Center

Uma Mahadevan-Dasgupta writes: It’s a long road from Rukhmabai to Savita Punia, with many obstacles along the way.

Girish Karnad’s memoir begins with his mother’s life. At the age of 84, Kuttabai Mankikar wrote her story. Not in a fresh clean notebook, but in an old diary kept by her husband. She scribbled her sentences into the empty spaces after he had written his daily accounts. This could be a metaphor for the way most women of that generation had to live their lives — curling and fitting themselves like side characters around their husbands’ central narratives.

Kuttabai’s life story was 30 pages long. She yearned to study medicine and become a doctor. She never got that far. Married as a child, she became first a teenage mother, and then a child widow. After great struggle, she managed to train as a nurse. But when she remarried, she had to roll up her nursing certificates and put them away in a dusty trunk. She had children to raise.

Every sentence in Kuttabai’s life story is a punch to the gut. As a young girl, she was not allowed to study in a hostel. She was unmarried when she came of age, a matter of shame for her parents. Shortly after, her husband died of malaria. The young widow had to go live in her brother-in-law’s house. When the time came to remarry, her second husband hesitated. He was already married, but bigamy was not what worried him. What would society say if he married a widow?

Education — how they hungered for it, the girls and women of those times. Karnad notes how his mother recalled with wonder, 75 years later: “One Sarlabai Nayak even got an MA.”

In her new book Lady Doctors, Kavitha Rao writes about the lives of India’s first women in medicine. Even just typing in the names of these trailblazers is exhilarating. Anandibai Joshi, Kadambini Ganguly, Rukhmabai Raut, Muthulakshmi Reddy, Haimabati Sen, Mary Poonen Lukose — pioneers who, from the 1860s to the 1930s, made so much possible for women who came after them.

“Society has a right to our work as individuals,” said Anandibai, the first Indian woman to get a western medical degree. As a girl, Rukhmabai fought child marriage, not only through legal challenge but also by writing two powerful letters in a national newspaper which brought the issue into public consciousness. After a long court battle, the judge finally ruled that she must join her husband within a month, or face six months’ imprisonment. She said she would rather go to prison.

At school, Muthulakshmi sat behind a curtain in a classroom because she was a girl and the daughter of a devadasi. Later in life, she would introduce legislation against the exploitative devadasi system and child marriage; set up a shelter where girls could stay, acquire skills and earn a livelihood; and also set up the Adyar Cancer Institute. Today, Tamil Nadu’s celebrated maternity benefit scheme, acknowledged for its impact, is named after Muthulakshmi Reddy.

At the age of nine, Haimabati was married to a widower five times her age. When she was 12, her husband died. As a child widow, she faced the fury of society and even her own mother for bringing “misfortune”. At medical college, although Haimabati stood first, the boys threatened to go on strike if the gold medal was given to a girl. She was given a silver medal for “standing first in class.”

This week, watching the Indian women at the Olympics, I thought of Rukhmabai, Haimabati and the others. Typing these names, too, is exhilarating. Rani Rampal, whose mother would wake her up for training after looking out at the sky, because there was no clock at home. Vandana Katariya, who practised alone, with tree branches, to avoid the disapproving stares of village elders. Savita Punia, who had to endure long bus rides with conductors kicking her hockey kits. Salima Tete from Simdega, who used a bamboo stick to learn the game.

Girls who were told not to run around in skirts; who were told not to play; who were told not to. Girls who survived the worst sex ratios; who pushed back against regressive social norms; who made a noise instead of staying silent; who ran around, even though the world asked them not to take up space.

It’s a long road from Rukhmabai to Savita Punia, with many obstacles along the way. In some places the road doesn’t even exist — the approach to Lovlina Borgohain’s house was built only after her Olympic medal. Even where there is a path, there is a need for allies, like the truckers who dropped Saikhom Mirabai Chanu to her training centre.

When I thought about the Rukhmabais and Kadambinis, Ranis and Salimas and Mirabais, I thought of the tangled threads that connect the lives of Indian women. I thought of my grandmothers, who never even finished school — wise women who kept their families together with a watchful eye and tough love. I thought about the anganwadi supervisor who went to check on a malnourished toddler and, finding a home where the fire hadn’t been lit for days, cooked a meal and showed the mother how to bathe her child.

I thought about the ASHAs who have worked indefatigably through this year and a half of the pandemic, walking from house to house to convey reassuring, science-based information about Covid and vaccination.

And finally, I thought of the child marriages we still fight against. Little girls as young as nine, 10, 12, who send messages for help through their school friends, begging to be rescued from forced marriage. Kadambini and Anandibai may have crossed the kaala paani over a 100 years ago, but for many girls in India even today, the road to empowerment is long and arduous.

This column first appeared in the print edition on August 10, 2021 under the title ‘From Rukhmabai to Savita Punia’. The writer is in the IAS. Views are personal

Satendra Singh writes: While steps are being taken around the world to protect vulnerable populations, disability rights activists were pleading with Indian government to provide reasonable accommodations to people with disabilities in prison – G N Saibaba, the late Father Stan Swamy, Shiv Kumar.

Twenty years ago at the crack of dawn on August 6 in Erwadi in Tamil Nadu’s Ramanathapuram, a fire broke out in a thatched shelter, engulfing 43 chained people who had psychosocial disabilities. Their heart-breaking screams for aid were promptly disregarded as the habitual nuisance of the “mentally ill”. Twenty-five chained human beings with psychosocial disabilities burned to death and three more succumbed to their wounds later.

According to People’s Watch Tamil Nadu, the National Human Rights Commission (NHRC) was notified of the inhuman conditions at the Badhusa Mental Health Home, a private mental institution run by one Mohaideen Basha in September 2000. Such private asylums survive because of their close proximity to faith-based healing centres — Erwadi dargah in this case. Because mental health conditions carry a high stigma, caregivers flock to these faith-based facilities in the hopes of finding a cure. Private players take advantage of their vulnerabilities, forcing such persons with psychosocial issues to be grouped together and chained in these shelters. Had the government and NHRC acted in time, the Erwadi tragedy could have been prevented.

Despite ratifying the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD) in 2007, the enactment of the Rights of Persons with Disabilities Act in 2016 as well as the Mental Healthcare Act (MHCA) in 2017, states have failed to uphold the human rights of people with disabilities in general and those with psychosocial and intellectual disabilities in particular. On the 70th anniversary of Independence in 2016, I was forced to tweet about the plight of mentally ill people who were stripped of their dignity and kept naked at the government-run Behrampore mental hospital in West Bengal. No one bothered to look into the plight of chained mentally ill people in another faith-based asylum in Badaun in Uttar Pradesh, where the police force had been asked to search for missing buffaloes and dogs of political leaders. Chaining in any way or form is outlawed under Section 95 of the MHCA. But a lawyer had to plead the case in the Supreme Court to secure the release of those detained in Badaun. In March this year, when the World Federation for Mental Health was deciding on the theme for the 2021 World Mental Health Day campaign, the media highlighted the shocking story of a 45-year-old man in Pokhran, Jaisalmer, who had been chained in a cattle shelter under the open sky for the last 18 years. It is ironic that the theme for 2021 is “Mental Health in an Unequal World”.

These stories demonstrate the devaluation of the lives of the disabled. Countries like Switzerland and Spain have moved out disabled people living in institutions during the Covid pandemic. The United States and Chile framed specific guidelines for the homeless with disabilities. The UK government released prisoners with disabilities who had less than two months to complete their sentence. While such practices were being undertaken around the world to protect vulnerable populations, activists and advocates of the rights of disabled people were pleading with the government in India to provide reasonable accommodations to people with disabilities in prison – G N Saibaba, the late Father Stan Swamy, Shiv Kumar. An elderly tribal rights activist, a central university professor, and a youth with disability were only asking for a sipper, medication and spectacles – perfectly reasonable requests under the law of the land. Eleanor Roosevelt, one of the architects of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights had famously said “Where, after all, do universal human rights begin? In small places, close to home — so close and so small that they cannot be seen on any maps of the world. Unless these rights have meaning there, they have little meaning anywhere.”

Last week — 20 years after the Erwadi tragedy — the Minister of State, Ministry of Health and Family Welfare, told the Rajya Sabha that only eight states/UTs — Karnataka, Andhra Pradesh, Uttar Pradesh, Jammu & Kashmir, Maharashtra, Odisha, Kerala, and West Bengal — have framed rules for implementation of MHCA.

The Erwadi Memorial Day is a day of remembrance and reflection. A day to ponder on the lessons acquired from the Erwadi catastrophe. Unless we implement the law in letter and spirit, the Global Mental Health Movement will remain a mere buzzword and the CRPD-reliant MHCA will remain a law only on paper. There is something seriously wrong with our system if it takes the Supreme Court’s intervention to provide dignity to people with psychosocial disabilities, or if, despite repeated appeals by a centenarian woman with age-related disabilities, the government in India’s capital is unable to comply with her request for home vaccination. Protecting the human rights of every person would be the best homage to the memory of the chained human beings at Erwadi who were burnt to death. No life is worthless, and we, as health professionals, educators, and policymakers, must work to ensure that the human rights approach to disability is integrated into mental health systems, education, law, and bureaucracy and that we move away from pathologisation, segregation, and a charity-based approach.

This column first appeared in the print edition on August 10, 2021 under the title ‘Lest we forget Erwadi’. The writer teaches at University College of Medical Sciences, Delhi, and is a disability rights activist. Views are personal

C Raja Mohan writes: A decade later, it is quite clear, Qatar’s “peace project” in Afghanistan was about legitimising the Taliban at expense of the current political order in Afghanistan.

The meetings of the “extended troika” this week in Doha, Qatar, are apparently aimed at reversing the current dangerous turn towards anarchy in Afghanistan. The US-Russia-China troika was set up in 2019 at Moscow’s initiative to support the negotiations for a peace settlement between the Afghan government and the Taliban. It has taken an “extended” form with the inclusion of Pakistan this year.

Not everyone is sure if the “extended troika” has the political will to arrest the current military momentum in favour of the Taliban and Pakistan in Afghanistan. China and Russia are supporting Pakistan’s plans to reinstall the Taliban. Washington was indeed aware of the prospects of the Taliban regaining control of Afghanistan after it ended two decades of military presence in Afghanistan.

But President Joe Biden was as keen as his predecessor Donald Trump on ending America’s prolonged and costly military intervention in Afghanistan. But as the ugly consequences of the US retreat have come quickly into view, there is growing domestic criticism, across the political aisle, of Biden’s decision.

The foreign policy establishment is offering a critique of its own. In a statement issued last Friday, five former US envoys to Afghanistan warned of a “catastrophic outcome” triggered by US withdrawal and urged the White House to “reconsider the decision”.

They pointed to a truth about the Taliban that has been staring at the world for a while: “In consistently failing to engage the Afghan government in good-faith negotiations, the Taliban has signalled that it is going for all-out victory.”

They also called for the appointment of a new US representative for the Afghan talks — in a polite way asking for the replacement of current envoy, Zalmay Khalilzad, who is accused by some in Washington as giving away the store to the Taliban. The next few days could reveal if the domestic pressure is strong enough to persuade the Biden administration to take a fresh look at its Afghan policy.

But the Afghan story is not just about the great power rivalries. Any discussion of Afghanistan invokes two common metaphors — the “great game” or the “graveyard of empires”. These common tropes, however, tend to mask the significant role of the regional actors in Afghanistan’s evolution.

That Doha, the capital of the tiny state of Qatar, is now the main venue for the so-called peace talks on Afghanistan is a useful reminder of the regional role. Doha’s activism also underscores the importance of the Gulf in shaping the geopolitics of Afghanistan.

Over the decades, different nations from the Gulf have sought to influence the outcomes in Afghanistan. For now, it is Doha’s moment in the Afghan sun. Since 2011, it has formally hosted the Taliban delegation in Doha and taken the lead in promoting the so-called peace process in Afghanistan.

A decade later, it is quite clear, Qatar’s “peace project” in Afghanistan was about legitimising the Taliban at the expense of the current political order in Afghanistan. For Qatar, this is not a whimsical decision. It is very much part of its promotion of political Islam in the Greater Middle East and the subcontinent. It has also aligned with Turkey president Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s similar objectives in the region.

Qatar and Turkey are also locked in a regional rivalry with Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. Doha and Ankara’s support for political Islam is seen in Riyadh and Abu Dhabi as a deliberate effort to undermine their governments. That also brings us to the fact that before Qatar, it was Saudi Arabia and the UAE that played an important role in Afghanistan.

After the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan at the end of 1979, Saudi Arabia poured in significant resources to support the US-Pak mobilisation of a jihad in the 1980s against the godless communists in Kabul. And when the Taliban took charge of Afghanistan in 1996, Saudi and UAE were the only countries, other than Pakistan, to recognise the new political dispensation.

Saudi Arabia and the UAE have taken a back seat in the current regional diplomacy on Afghanistan. In recent years, Saudi Arabia and the UAE had sought to promote political reconciliation in Afghanistan but had little success in nudging the Taliban towards moderation. But there was a world before the Gulf Arabs became prominent in Afghanistan.

That world belonged to the Shah of Iran, whose close ties with the United States, growing oil revenues, and expansive ambition had made him the main regional actor in South West Asia. Well before the oil boom, the Shah sought to build a federation of Iran, Afghanistan and Pakistan, promote regional connectivity, and lead the economic modernisation of South West Asia.

The Shah’s efforts to draw Afghanistan into Tehran’s orbit in the 1970s triggered the 1978 coup in Kabul by Afghan communists, Moscow’s support for them, and the eventual Soviet military occupation. The tumultuous developments in Iran — ouster of the Shah and the founding of the Islamic Republic in 1979 — and the Iran-Iraq war of 1980-88 marginalised Iran from the Afghan geopolitics in the 1980s.

But not for long. Iran was back in the game during the 1990s as it worked with Russia and India to back the anti-Taliban coalition. Tehran also extended support for Washington’s efforts to oust the Taliban from power after the 9/11 attacks. But once the US declared Iran as part of the “axis of evil” in 2002, Tehran and Washington have been at odds in Afghanistan.

Although the monarchy and the Islamic republic are of a very different political colour, their regional ambitions in Afghanistan are quite similar and express the logic of Iran’s geography as well as Tehran’s enduring religious, cultural, and political interests.

Russia had invited Iran to join the extended troika meeting in Doha this week, but Tehran was unwilling. According to Zamir Kabulov, the Russian special envoy on Afghanistan, Iran did not want to sit at the same table with the US. It is entirely possible that Tehran does not want to be complicit in the political marketing of the Taliban.

Kabulov also explained Moscow’s decision not to invite India to the Doha talks this week. Kabulov said the extended troika meetings involve only those countries that have “unequivocal influence on both sides” of the Afghan divide, Russian news agency Tass reported.

Besides India’s lack of a Taliban connection, Kabulov said, Delhi’s presence will bring in the baggage of Indo-Pak rivalry into the Afghan talks. “A plague on both your houses”, Kabulov concluded. Kabulov suggested India could be invited to the troika talks when they arrive at the stage of post-conflict economic reconstruction.

But the idea that great powers can shepherd the regional actors towards pre-defined goals in Afghanistan is an illusion. American abandonment of Afghanistan and the promotion of the Taliban by Russia and China will inevitably set off a chain of regional reactions that are not amenable to the troika’s control.

There are too many independent actors in the region with high stakes in Afghanistan. They will figure out ways and means to cope with the new Afghan dynamic. India’s intensifying consultations with Iran is one example. Saudi Arabia and the UAE, whose interests are threatened by Taliban’s religious extremism, are not going to sit back forever. Integration of the Gulf into India’s regional security calculus is now likely to be a permanent feature.

This column first appeared in the print edition on August 10, 2021 under the title ‘The Gulf in Afghanistan’. The writer is director, Institute of South Asian Studies, National University of Singapore and contributing editor on international affairs for The Indian Express

With emergency use authorisation for J&J’s single-dose vaccine, the next step is to speed up its domestic production. As with reserving 30 crore doses of the under-trial Corbevax with Biological E, which is also reportedly J&J’s India partner, GoI must consider a similar advance for the J&J shot to expedite local manufacturing scale-up. A one-dose jab will be more helpful in meeting the increasingly-tough December 31 target of fully inoculating all adults, neatly halving the effort now centred around two-shot vaccines. The asking rate for daily vaccinations to meet the December target is inching towards the one-crore mark.

That’s why it’s critical there are no delays when other vaccines, in final stages of seeking emergency use authorisation, come up for official greenlighting. These include Zydus Cadila’s three-dose shot, Covovax licensed by SII from Novavax, and Corbevax. News reports indicate October appears to be the most realistic timeframe when these vaccines could come online. However, neither Covovax or Corbevax are part of the vaccination programmes of the US, UK or EU. So greater due diligence is needed, unlike J&J or Moderna that were excluded from local bridging trials on the strength of their global deployment.

Despite EUA, India’s attempts to import foreign vaccines have yielded underwhelming results. An exclusive licence for the first 250 million Sputnik V doses notwithstanding, DRL has struggled to complete an import order for 3 million second doses. Given a strict 21-day gap between two doses, DRL had wisely decided to await the full delivery of second doses, before commencing a mass drive for the first shot.

GoI’s bulk order of 66 crore doses of Covishield and Covaxin in mid-July appears to have factored in such contingencies. The fire at SII’s Pune campus and homegrown Covaxin’s continuing production struggles serve warning that much can still go wrong. Over 28 crore partially vaccinated individuals need second shots too, which could drag down further progress on first dosing a wider population, unless production rises significantly. A silver lining is that daily vaccinations averaged 50 lakh last week, from 40 lakh the previous fortnight. With full vaccination becoming a passport for accessing public places, the unvaccinated are, in effect, being discriminated against. Bulk pre-orders of newer vaccines are needed immediately.

India’s armed services are in the midst of a far-reaching change. To adapt to emerging challenges, the 17 single service commands under the army, air force and navy are to be merged into four theatre commands, each under a single operational commander. The process is expected to take another two years. In this backdrop, there are other changes in the making to bring these organisations in sync with the overarching goal of theatre commands.

A proposal to put greater emphasis on merit and, thereby, not emphasising seniority, at the level of selection for commands is in the works. To be sure, armed forces’ promotions are based on merit as the organisational pyramid narrows sharply. Moreover, chiefs of service are not necessarily selected on seniority. At least two chiefs in the last five years have superseded their colleagues as GoI felt they were the best fit. That seniority need not be the primary criterion to select a chief is not under debate here. The core issue is the selection at the penultimate stage, that of commanders-in-chief.

There are two issues at stake. One, the lack of uniformity in selection criteria between the three armed services. Since the plan is theatre commands under a single operational commander, differences in selection criteria between services need to be removed during the transition. Two, and more serious, is the apprehension that the drive towards a greater emphasis on meritocracy may end up undermining professional ethos of services – in other words, politicisation of senior ranks should not be the unintended consequence.

There can be no argument against a greater emphasis on merit. That’s what underpins promotions in most admired militaries. The way forward is to design a set of criteria that are transparent and geared towards rewarding professional competence. It should be obvious that a professional military cannot afford politicisation. And neither can it ignore a relentless pursuit of merit.