‘Chura liya hai tumne jo pul ko, nahar nahi churana sanam (Now that you have stolen the bridge, please do not steal the canal)’. Ever since news broke on April 6 that an iron bridge in Bihar had been stolen, leaving everyone bemused, this play on the famous Hindi film song,Chura Liya Hai Tumne Jo Dil Ko , from the 1970s has been widely shared on social media. The most bewildered, however, are not the readers and viewers but the residents of Amiyawar village in Bihar’s Rohtas district where this astonishing heist was pulled off.
The residents of Amiyawar did not suddenly wake up one fine morning to find the bridge missing, as was the picture painted by some sections of the media. Over three days — April 2, 3 and 4 — the villagers happily watched the bridge being dismantled and carted off. They counted their blessings, as they had finally got rid of a defunct eyesore. Only later were they informed that what they had witnessed was, in fact, a crime taking place in broad daylight. The villagers were stunned to learn that what they had assumed to be officially sanctioned work had been an elaborate subterfuge which thrust the village, and Bihar, into the spotlight of the national and international media.
A defunct bridge
The 60-ft-long iron bridge was located on the bank of the river Sone in Amiyawar village, which is about 180 km south of Patna, the capital of Bihar. Amiyawar is nearly 40 km from the Rohtas district headquarters, Sasaram, famous for the magnificent tomb of Sher Shah Suri. Starting from Indrapuri barrage in the district, the Sone river flows about 110 km till Ara in Bhojpur. The place from where the bridge was stolen is nearly 29 km from Indrapuri barrage. The stolen bridge was built on the Ara-Sone canal and came under the Sone canal division of the Irrigation Department.
The iron bridge was built more than four decades ago, between 1972 and ’75. The villagers say the Ara-Sone canal was built by the British to provide proper irrigation in their agricultural fields. In 2002, the villagers stopped using the bridge when a new concrete bridge was constructed, parallel to and just a few feet away from the iron bridge. Since the concrete bridge was smooth and new, the villagers stopped using the iron bridge and urged the village head and department officials to remove it.
Rohtas is known as the ‘rice bowl’ of Bihar, and the economic profile of Amiyawar village is immediately obvious to the visitor. A majority of the villagers are agriculturists and farm owners, while some of them, mostly belonging to the backward castes, are farm labourers. Over 80% of the villagers have agricultural land on the northern side of the bridge where they get a good yield of wheat and rice crop every year.
“About 300 men from the village are in government service in different parts of the country as well. The villagers here are not very poor as the agricultural land in this region is quite fertile,” says Munshi Prasad, a villager.
In 2014, the village of 15,000 people was declared an‘adarsh gram ’ (ideal village) by the then Union Minister of State for Human Resource Development, Upendra Kushwaha. Most of the houses in the village have concrete structures. Amiyawar has both government and private schools and hospitals. “We have everything we require on a daily basis in the village, but this stolen bridge incident has really brought us shame, both nationally and internationally,” says Jitendra Singh, a resident.
Khusru Pravej, a resident of Amiyawar village, who claims to have broken the bridge story in the daily he works for, agrees. “The moment I came to know from the villagers that thieves stole the bridge, I knew it was a big story. I called up the local police and officials of the Irrigation Department, who confirmed the incident,” Pravej says.
The demolition
It is April 15, a scorching summer day. There are only wild grass bushes near the area where the old bridge was located. The smell of cattle and human excreta fills the air. Far away, a thick cloud of smoke can be seen rising up to the sky: someone has burned stubble in dry wheat farmland. Tractors in the distance look like centipedes and villagers are rushing to save their bundled wheat crop from the raging fire. Not many are interested in talking about the stolen iron bridge. “It is not a big issue for us as it is for the media,” one villager sporting a towel bandana says before riding across the concrete bridge.
But Singh, who lives just 200 metres away from the stolen bridge in his newly constructed pucca house, is happy to talk. Singh and a group of villagers have been taking a stroll by the side of the bridge on a levee every morning for the past several years. On April 2, at 6 a.m., Singh was on his routine morning stroll with the group. The men spotted two SUVs, a JCB machine (earth excavator), gas cutting torches and cylinders. A pick-up van was parked on the northern side of the iron bridge. The sight pleased them. On their request earlier, the village head ormukhia , Ram Dulari Devi, had petitioned the government for the removal of the bridge, but no action had been taken. The villagers were exasperated: during the monsoon, dead bodies of humans and cattle floated in the canal from upstream and got stuck between the iron pillars of the bridge. The stench was unbearable. They wanted the bridge to go.
Singh and his friends assumed that the local Irrigation Department was finally taking action on the petition. They did not think of questioning the six-seven people who were working on bringing down the bridge as they also spotted the localmeth (the person who looks after canal maintenance at the local level and who is paid on a contract basis) of the Irrigation Department, Arvind Kumar, with them. “As we saw heavy machines like JCBs, gas cutting cylinders, torches and the pick-up van, none of us doubted their credentials or their action. We paused briefly at the spot, watched them and moved on. They continued their work,” says Singh.
Singh says there was no reason to doubt the credentials of the workers, for who steals a bridge? He has a point. This is a rare occurrence not just in India but across the world. In October 2011, a 50-ft-long bridge was stolen in New Castel of Pennsylvania in the U.S. In Ohio in November 2021, thieves disassembled a 58-ft-long iron bridge and took it away. “We found these facts when we googled ‘stolen bridges’ after our village bridge got stolen,” Singh laughs.
On April 3, the morning walkers and the workers waved at each other. One-third of the bridge had been dismantled by then. One villager who did not want to be named says he noticed while returning from his farmland for lunch from the southern side of the bridge that the people dismantling the bridge were eating lunch but the vehicles had disappeared. He speculates that they were daily-wage workers who had been hired to dismantle the bridge while the main thieves had gone to have lunch elsewhere in their vehicle. He says no one seemed to be in any hurry. By 6 p.m., more than half the bridge had been dismantled. Only the northern part remained intact. At dusk, the villagers recall seeing the SUVs move on the levee, leaving behind a thick haze of dust.
On April 4, the residents of the village say everyone was in a tearing hurry. More workers had been brought in and were seen chipping at the remains of the bridge, cutting the iron bars and pillars with gas torches, and using the JCB machine to loosen the earth. The pick-up van, owned by a villager, Chandan Kumar, was moving back and forth with scraps. “Even then none of us suspected that this was a heist,” says Rajnikant, a local resident. By 4 p.m., everything was gone except three iron pillars of a few feet high that seemed to go deep into the ground and were probably hard to remove. The villagers say they were thankful to the department officials for honouring their petition for its removal. “We were happy that we would no longer have to bear the stench of rotting carcasses during the rainy season. But the next day we woke up to a phone call from a resident of a neighbouring village, which startled us. He told us that the bridge had not been removed by the government; it had been stolen,” Singh says.
Pawan Kumar, who lives in a neighbouring village, Nasriganj Dhus, came to know that day that the rusty old bridge had been removed by some people claiming to be Irrigation Department officials and scrap dealers. Kumar first tried to phone the Sub-Divisional Officer (SDO) of the department, Radhe Shyam Singh, but when the SDO did not answer his call, he rang up another official. He asked why the department had not followed the procedure of issuing a tender for dismantling the bridge. For any defunct public infrastructure to be removed, the villagers have to first petition themukhia , who then writes to the local office of the concerned department with the request. The local officials, in turn, request their district in-charge, who finally seeks permission from the department headquarters to act on the villagers’ request. In this case too, the residents of the village had requested Devi for the removal of the abandoned bridge. She had petitioned the local office of the Irrigation Department at Nasriganj, which comes under the State Water Resources Department, which is responsible for maintaining river canals and bridges.
The official was amazed. He said the department was unaware that the bridge had been dismantled and taken away. On April 6, some officials of the department visited the bridge site and, in the evening, they lodged a complaint with the Nasriganj police station. A case was lodged against unknown persons under Section 379 of the Indian Penal Code (theft with imprisonment of up to three years). A Special Investigative Team of the police under a Deputy Superintendent of Police was formed to crack the case and nab the thieves.
“It was unbelievable, just unheard of. How could a whole iron bridge be stolen before our eyes? We didn’t smell anything foul. The sheer audacity of the thieves and the negligence on our part not only surprised us but left us quite ashamed,” a resident of the village says.
The investigation
Acting on the inputs of the villagers, the investigative team of the police first picked up themeth , Arvind Kumar. He promptly spilled the beans and said the ‘workers’ had been working at the behest of the department SDO, Radhe Shyam Singh, who is to retire from service next year. Interestingly, it was Radhe Shyam Singh who had directed his junior official to lodge a police complaint in the theft case. Even after arrest, Radhe Shyam Singh seemed aloof and imperious, the Nasriganj police say. “He was not at all transparent,” they say. “During the three days of our intense investigation and raids, we arrested eight people involved in the bridge theft case, including the SDO, and sent them to jail,” says Nasriganj police station officer-in-charge Subhas Kumar. The others who were arrested are Chandan Kumar (a resident of the village), Shivkalyan Bhardwaj (a local politician), Manish Kumar (a scrap dealer), and Sacchidanand Singh, Gopal Kumar and Chandan Kumar of Chand Bigha village. “Two-three persons are still absconding and will soon be arrested and more sections of the IPC will probably be slapped on them,” Kumar says.
The villagers think Radhe Shyam Singh had hoped to get away with his elaborate plan before retiring this year. He has now been suspended from service.
‘Anything is possible’
It is 45°C and even stray dogs, cattle and crows seem to be looking for shade. Subhas Kumar orders a chilled soft-drink. Sipping it, he says, “This one case has got me phone calls from the national and even international media which I have not received in my career of 13 years of policing.”
Less than a kilometre away, the Irrigation Department local office is locked from the outside. “It has been locked ever since the head of the office was arrested,” says Pravej. After the story made headlines, the State Water Resources Department, the parent body of the Irrigation Department, suspended two engineers, Radhe Shyam Singh and Arshal Kamal Shamsi, for dereliction of duty, and served show cause notice to the chief and the superintending engineers. The department has also asked all district chiefs to identify old and abandoned bridges so that they can be dismantled.
For all the attention the incident has caused, a question that many are asking is: how much was this bridge actually worth? Kumar says it is in fact not worth as much as claimed or calculated by some in the media. Scrap iron sells at Rs. 40-50 per kg these days. “The bridge weighed 5 tonnes. Sections of the media reported that the bridge weighed 500 tonnes. I don’t know where they got this figure from,” the police officer says. The police, he says, have seized 245 kg of iron scrap of the stolen bridge from an arrested scrap dealer.
In Pravej’s view, the incident has proved that anything is possible. “One day we might even wake up to hear that Sher Shah Suri’s tomb in Sasaram has been stolen,” he says laughing. “You see, anything can happen in Bihar.”
It was unbelievable. How could a whole iron bridge be stolen before our eyes? We didn’t smell anything foul. The sheer audacity of the thieves and the negligence on our part not only surprised us but left us quite ashamed.
Resident
Amiyawar village
More asphalt-melting heatwaves driven by runaway climate change are on the way. The consequences for health and livelihoods are catastrophic, as a third of South Asia’s population depends on outdoor work. To get to grips with this predicament, India must initiate safety nets — a combination of targeted transfers and insurance schemes — to improve the resilience of outdoor workers. Transfers are best linked to the beneficiaries’ own efforts to build resilience, for example, adapting agricultural practices to the uptick in heatwaves. Disaster insurance schemes, far too few in India, should enable workers to transfer some of the losses from debilitating heat to public and private insurance providers.
A hotter future in South Asia
The intensity and frequency of heatwaves have soared in South Asia and they are set to worsen in the years ahead. Extreme heat conditions have hit swathes of India, not only in the northern States of Rajasthan, Uttar Pradesh, Gujarat, and New Delhi, but now increasingly also in the south. Following the India Meteorological Department’s (IMD) April forecast that maximum temperatures in some parts of Tamil Nadu would rise by 2°-3° Celsius, recorded temperatures hit 41°C in Vellore, Karur, Tiruchi and Tiruttani. Delhi this month suffered its second warmest April in 72 years, temperatures averaging 40.2°C, and Gurgaon in neighbouring Haryana crossed 45°C for the first time. Labour-intensive agriculture and construction have become near impossible during afternoons.
Over the last 100 years, global temperatures have risen by 1.5°C and, at the current rate, could reach 4°C by 2100 — an unthinkable scenario. So far in the year, 2022 has been the fifth-warmest year on record. The prevalence of extreme temperatures around the world suggests that India’s warming is the result not only of local factors but also global warming. In fact, scientists have made clear how greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions exacerbate temperatures in the oceans, leading to soaring temperatures. The culprit in the current plight from intense weather is not Mother Nature but anthropogenic GHG emissions. Crucially, heatwaves and wildfires are ‘unimaginable’ without human-caused climate change, according to a study done by World Weather Attribution in July 2021.
High economic losses
The impacts are dire across the world. Heatwaves are proving to be Europe’s deadliest climate disaster. India faces the largest heat exposure impacts in South Asia. One study finds that 1,41,308 lives were claimed by acute weather in India during 1971-2019, of which the loss of 17,362 lives was due to unrelenting heat, with mortality rates rising by two-thirds during the time period. Worldwide economic losses, by one estimate, could reach U.S.$1.6 trillion (Rs. 1.6 lakh crore) annually if global warming exceeds 2°C. India, China, Pakistan, and Indonesia, where large numbers of people work outdoors, are among the most vulnerable.
India’s outdoor workers, reeling under daily temperatures more than 40°C, are on the frontlines of the climate catastrophe. The well-being of outdoor workers will be fundamentally determined by the ability to keep the temperature rise to well below 2°C. Reversing climate change is predicated on leading emitters, including India, moving away from carbon-emitting fossil fuels, and replacing them with cleaner, renewable fuels. But such climate mitigation in India and elsewhere is painfully slow, because of a lack of political will in the major emitting countries for decisive action.
Adaptation is essential
In the meantime, hotter temperatures are making outdoor work unbearable, in addition to other dire consequences. Climate mitigation or decarbonisation of economies on the part especially of the big emitters, such as the United States, the European Union, China, and India remains an imperative. But temperatures are set to rise regardless of mitigation, based on the emission damage already done. That means climate adaptation, or coping with the predicament, is as big a priority as mitigation.
A crucial aspect of adaptation is better environmental care that can contribute to cooling. Heatwaves are rooted in degraded land and relentless deforestation, which exacerbate wildfires. Agriculture, being water-intensive, does not do well in heat wave-prone areas. A solution is to promote better agricultural practices which are not water-intensive, and to support afforestation that has a salutary effect on warming.
Response to the current plight of outdoor workers can be linked to climate adaptation. Financial transfers can be targeted to help farmers plant trees and buy equipment better suited for the extreme weather. For example, support for drip irrigation can reduce heavy water usage. Averting slash and burn agriculture and stubble burning is not only key to cutting air pollution but also cooling temperatures. Urban green such as street trees, urban forests and green roofs can help cool urban areas. Workers in cities and villages can benefit from early warning systems and better preparedness as well as community outreach programmes during an episode.
Collaboration for insurance
Insurance schemes can help transfer some of the risks of severe heat faced by industrial, construction and agricultural workers to insurers. Insurance against natural hazards is minimal not only in India but also Asia where less than 10% of the losses are typically covered. Government and insurers need to collaborate in providing greater coverage of losses from extreme weather events, including for calamities from brutal heat.
For greater effectiveness, transfers and insurance payments can be tied to investments in resilience made at the local levels, such as restoring the urban environment that has a cooling effect. Delhi’s Aravali Biodiversity Park is a stand-out example that transformed a barren landscape into forest communities protecting greenery and biodiversity. Transfers could also be linked with mapping of the incidence of heatwaves across locations. The most severely affected areas are also likely to be the most poverty-prone and need stronger insurance packages, including guarantees for crop losses. Incentive schemes could also be tailored to annual changes in the intensity of the hazard.
Studies warn of heat-stress inequalities where the poorer segments of the populations are especially battered by heatwaves. The projections of the IMD can guide future scenarios, which the Central government can use to develop subsidies and insurance schemes linked to State and district-level actions for building resilience to climate change. Insurance schemes require public and private sectors to jointly set out risk-sharing mechanisms that outdoor workers can avail of.
Targeted transfers and insurance schemes can cushion financial hardships, for example, by improving crop resilience to heatwaves. Making them part of the Government’s economic programmes is one way to make these safety net policies sustainable and hard to reverse, as international experience with cash transfer programmes shows.
A priority
India offers a range of food and fuel subsidies, but most of them are poorly targeted. For example, kerosene subsidies provide modest financial benefit to disadvantaged rural households, with only 26% of the subsidy value estimated to reach the poor directly. As the efficiency and the equity of existing subsidies are re-examined, the provision of transfers and insurance linked to building climate resilience should become a priority.
Heatwaves, exacerbated by climate change, are embroiling regions of India in a downward spiral, and the situation is projected to get worse. Outdoor labourers are especially hammered by the relentless heat. Tying cash transfers and insurance schemes to State and local green investments will not only provide some financial cover for outdoor workers but also motivate small-scale investments in much-needed resilience to heatwaves.
Vinod Thomas and Mehtab Ahmed Jagil are, respectively, Visiting Professor, and Candidate for Master’s in Public Policy, Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy, National University of Singapore
A recent trend in the evolution of jurisprudence around the death penalty in India may reset judicial thinking around sentencing and have long-term ramifications in the awarding of capital punishment. Over the last six months or so, while dealing with appeals against confirmation of the death sentence, the Supreme Court of India has examined sentencing methodology from the perspective of mitigating circumstances more closely. The Court has also initiated asuo motu writ petition (criminal) to delve deep into these issues on key aspects surrounding our understanding of death penalty sentencing. As such, it is clear that the present trajectory of judicial thinking will not only reaffirm the fundamentals of the rarest of rare principle but also lead a new wave of thinking in the jurisprudence around capital punishment.
Sentencing lapses
Capital punishment once delivered by the court of sessions (“sentencing court”) is required under law, specifically Chapter 28 of the Code of Criminal Procedure, to be confirmed by the jurisdictional High Court (“confirming court”). The development of case laws on the point of sentencing has emphasised that sentencing cannot be a formality and that the sentencing court must make a genuine effort to hear the accused on the question of sentence.Bachan Singh vs State of Punjab (1980), the leading case on this point, calls for mitigating and aggravating circumstances to be balanced against each other and laid down the principle that the death penalty ought not to be awarded unless the alternative of life imprisonment is “unquestionably foreclosed”. Subsequent cases have developed this position to that of the state (which is the prosecuting agency) having the onus to lead evidence to establish that there is no possibility of reformation of the accused for the sentencing court to impose capital punishment. It is also an equally well-established legal principle that in a sentencing hearing, the accused must necessarily be provided with sufficient opportunity to produce any material that may have bearing on the sentencing exercise. When read in conjunction with theratio decidendi of the Bachan Singh case, it is incumbent upon the sentencing court and the confirming court to ensure that the question of reform and rehabilitation of a convicted person has been examined in detail for these courts to come to a definitive conclusion that all such options are unquestionably foreclosed.
In spite of such judicial guidance developed over four decades, studies have shown that when a group of former judges was asked what it considered as a rarest of rare case, the judges gave personalised, subjective and divergent explanations. A report by the National Law University Delhi’s Project 39A (earlier known as the “Centre on the Death Penalty”) titled ‘Matters of Judgment’ found that there is no judicial uniformity or consistency when it comes to awarding the death sentence. In the report titled ‘Death Penalty Sentencing in Trial Courts’ (also authored by Project 39A), findings reported from a study of cases involving death sentencing between 2000 and 2015 in Delhi, Maharashtra and Madhya Pradesh have showed that courts have been lax in assessing the aspect of reformation while undertaking the sentencing exercise.
Mitigation investigation
On the back of such studies, the Supreme Court has begun to inquire into sentencing methodology with great interest. InRajendra Pralhadrao Wasnik vs The State of Maharashtra (2018), the Court was open to bringing on record material pertaining to the convict “about his conduct in jail, his conduct outside jail if he has been on bail for some time, medical evidence about his mental make-up, contact with his family and so on”. Building on this, the Court, inMofil Khan vs State of Jharkhand (2021), held that the “the State is under a duty to procure evidence to establish that there is no possibility of reformation and rehabilitation of the accused” and that “the Court will have to highlight clear evidence as to why the convict is not fit for any kind of reformatory and rehabilitation scheme.”
Undoubtedly, the onus has been placed on the State to lead evidence to show that no reformation is possible and for the sentencing courts to be satisfied that a thorough mitigation analysis was done before the death sentence is awarded. For a complete mitigation investigation, professionals trained in psychology, sociology and criminology are required in addition to legal professionals. Taking cognisance of the value of a holistic approach to mitigation investigation, the Court inManoj & Ors vs State of Madhya Pradesh (2022) issued directions to the State to place before the court all “report(s) of all the probation officer(s)” relating to the accused and reports “about their conduct and nature of the work done by them” while in prison. More importantly, the order also directs that a trained psychiatrist and a local professor of psychology conduct a psychiatric and psychological evaluation of the convict.
Suo motu writ petition
On March 29, 2022, a Bench of the Supreme Court led by Justice U.U. Lalit (along with Justices S. Ravindra Bhat and P.S. Narasimha) was hearing an interlocutory application filed on behalf of a death sentence convict seeking permission for a mitigation investigator from Project 39A be provided permission to conduct interviews and access material pertaining to the prisoner. While doing so, the Court recorded a set of observations around the questions of what may constitute mitigating circumstances, the role of a probation officer in assisting the Court and the potential value addition of a mitigation investigator to the sentencing exercise. These observations now form the basis of asuo motu writ petition (criminal) which will be heard separately and comprehensively on these aspects. The views of the Attorney General representing the Union of India as well as those of the National Legal Services Authority have been sought in this matter; and this is now listed for hearing on May 10, 2022 for consideration of arguments. At this hearing, or soon thereafter, it is hoped that guidelines around best practices in death penalty sentencing will be framed.
Onus on courts
Nevertheless, it is undeniable that there is a new wave of thinking in this hitherto underexplored domain of sentencing, which forms a key pillar of judicial work. The intervention of the Supreme Court of India in, hopefully, framing guidelines around incorporation of a mitigation analysis and consideration of psycho-social reports of the prisoner at the time of sentencing is timely and necessary. As a result, the responsibility of the sentencing and confirming courts will now be greater in ensuring that no death sentence is manually awarded or routinely confirmed. The entire judicial exercise that has culminated in the institution of thesuo motu writ petition will only go to strengthening the doctrine of the rarest of rare, as laid down in the Bachan Singh case and, thereby, reinstating fairness in the death penalty sentencing exercise.
Manuraj Shunmugasundaram is Advocate, Madras High Court, and Spokesperson, Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam
Prime Minister Narendra Modi ended his tour to Europe this week by dropping in on French President Emmanuel Macron, who was re-elected recently. What was billed a simple “tete-a tete” during a “working visit” turned out to be a comprehensive discussion on bilateral, regional and international issues, with a 30 paragraph-long joint statement. As with his other stops in Germany and Denmark for the Nordic Summit, as well as the visit to India by European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen the week before, the Ukraine war remained at the top of the agenda. The joint statement records their differences on the issue. However, they also discussed mitigating the war’s “knock-on” effects, and Mr. Macron invited India to cooperate with the Food and Agriculture Resilience Mission (FARM) initiative for food security in the most vulnerable countries, particularly in terms of wheat exports. However, as the severe heatwave has damaged India’s crops, the Government will have to do some hard thinking on its promises of wheat supply to the rest of the world at a time when fears of shortages are sending wheat prices soaring. Climate change was another key issue during the stopovers in Berlin and Copenhagen. France and India, that worked closely for the success of the Paris climate accord, and co-founded the International Solar Alliance in 2015, are ready to take it to the next level — setting up industrial partnerships to build integrated supply chains in solar energy production for markets in Europe and Asia. There was also a bilateral strategic dialogue on space issues, which will build on their six-decade-long partnership in the field of space — a contested area now with China, Russia and the U.S. stepping up hostilities in this frontier.
India and France have decades of an unusually productive partnership given that neither has allowed other relationships to play a role in the bilateral. This has been the basis of their strong defence partnership. In 1998, France stood out as a western country that did not judge or impose sanctions on India for its nuclear tests; in 2008, it was the first country to conclude a civil nuclear deal with India after the NSG passed a waiver allowing India to access nuclear fuel and technology. It would be a fitting tribute to the consistency of the relationship if the French bid for six nuclear power plants in Maharashtra’s Jaitapur makes some headway now, more than 12 years after the original MoU was signed and a year after the French company, EDF, last year submitted an offer to the Nuclear Power Corporation of India Ltd. It is however disappointing that Mr. Modi’s visit did not give as much fillip to talks on the India-EU FTA (suspended since 2013) as seen in India’s other FTA talks. This was the second such tour where Mr. Modi travelled to Germany and France on the same visit — a significant gesture that he recognises the importance of both in India’s new push for stronger ties with Europe.
In yet another disturbing and dastardly act that is now part of a pattern in much of North India, two tribal men were beaten to death by alleged activists of the Bajrang Dal in Seoni, Madhya Pradesh, on the suspicion that they were slaughtering cows. Apart from tribal people, Muslims and Dalits in particular have borne the brunt of these senseless acts of mob violence and murders. Reminiscent of the murder of a dairy farmer, Pehlu Khan, after he and his sons were attacked by self-described “cow vigilantes” in April 2017 in Rajasthan, the two men, Sampatlal Vatti and Dhansai Invati, were attacked by nearly 20 men; both died of injuries. The police have arrested 13 people for their alleged involvement; at least six of them were members of the Bajrang Dal, according to the family members. An insinuation by the police that one of the dead men was involved in a “cow slaughter” case has shown yet again where the priorities of law enforcement lie in such cases. In another pattern, there has been a certain acuity in the implementation of cattle slaughter laws which is missing in trying and bringing those involved in lynch mobs to justice. Stricter cattle slaughter laws have been implemented with a fervour that has less to do with animal preservation and more to do with appeasement of majoritarian impulses to garner political support.
In 2005, the Supreme Court had justified the total ban on cattle slaughter by an expansive interpretation of the directive principles of state policy, and relying on Articles 48, 48A, and 51(A) of the Constitution, that seeks to preserve breeds used in agriculture and animal husbandry, explicitly prohibiting the slaughter of cows and calves and other milch and draught cattle, besides promoting compassion to animals. The judgment had overturned an earlier ruling in 1958 which had limited the ban only to “useful” cattle which are still engaged in agriculture and husbandry. This interpretation only laid the grounds for State governments — especially those led by the BJP and its alliance partners — to come up with stringent laws on cow slaughter, and in the public sphere, a stigmatisation of communities such as Dalits, Muslims and tribals for their dietary habits and their dependence on cattle products for a livelihood. Four States (Rajasthan, Jharkhand, West Bengal and Manipur) had passed laws against lynching after many such incidents but they were under various stages of implementation with the Union government taking the view that lynching is not a crime under the Indian Penal Code. While civil society in Madhya Pradesh must demand justice for the injured and dead tribal men and a return to the rule of law in which such murderous acts do not go unpunished, it is time for a judicial rethink on legislation around cattle slaughter.
After being made to perform open-heart surgery, assemble cars, build houses, steer traffic, clean up messes and mind babies and pets, robots will now be made to taste food. The scientists at Cambridge University who are developing a robot chef claim that the machine is being given the ability to “taste” so that it can determine whether or not the food it has prepared is “enjoyable”. But considering that human beings can rarely agree on what tastes good and what doesn’t — one man’s delicious Lakhavi biryani is another’s bland mess — what objective standards are there for a robot to perform this task?
A quick tour of social media will make clear the near impossibility of the robot’s task: Take, for instance, the Great Indian Mango Debate that breaks out on Twitter every summer without fail. What should the AI chef do in the face of such polarised opinions? Should it use an Alphonso to make the mango cheesecake, and risk alienating Dassehri and Langda fanatics? It could even be argued that chasing this dream of a perfectly enjoyable meal cooked by AI will end up depriving human beings of that most cherished of conversational topics: Complaining about food. Put food-tasting robots in charge of meals and no longer will there be opportunities to sling an over-seasoned soup back to the kitchen.
Then there is the larger question of whether or not every meal even needs to be “enjoyable”. After all, there is something to be said for a bland or milky chai — to take one example — that ends up sharpening one’s appreciation of a cup that has just the right ratio of tea, sugar and milk. Indeed, a robot chef might serve plate after plate of “enjoyable” food, but if there’s nothing against which to measure the joy it gives the human who eats it, everything would be mere bland perfection.
This column first appeared in the print edition on May 7, 2022, under the title ‘Underdone idea’.
The final award of the Jammu and Kashmir Delimitation Commission has not laid to rest the concerns that dogged its work. The J&K Reorganisation Act 2019, which is itself sub judice, provides new parameters for delimitation that do not apply elsewhere in the country — “physical features, existing boundaries of administrative units, facilities of communication and convenience to the public”. Not surprisingly, it has led to the conclusion that had population alone been the criterion as in the rest of India, Kashmir, with its higher population (according to the 2011 census, which the Commission used) would have got more than just one additional seat, and Jammu less than its six additional seats. But even going by the unique parameters, it is not clear why, for instance, Poonch and Rajouri districts, earlier part of the Jammu parliamentary constituency, have been joined with Anantnag parliamentary seat in Kashmir. They are separated not just by language, but a mountain range, and the road connecting them is inaccessible in winter due to snowfall. Indeed, the final report ends up giving credence to fears of gerrymandering along political and communal lines.
Political parties, including the National Conference which was represented in the Commission, had flagged these and other concerns to the panel, chaired by retired Supreme Court justice Ranjana Prakash Desai. By not addressing them, it has done itself a disservice. Its assertion that it has treated Jammu & Kashmir as one unit is unpersuasive. It is no secret that the two have long been polarised along religious lines. And that as the last Assembly elections in 2014 showed, the BJP’s best chance of coming to power is in alliance with a Valley-based regional party, with Jammu’s seats crucial to deciding which partner gets to play the lead role. However, it is also true that the Hindus of Jammu are not a monolithic voting bloc.
Now, Jammu and Kashmir await the next step in restoring the political process. J&K has not had elected representatives since 2018. Governed by unaccountable bureaucrats, police and security forces, the real J&K is a far cry from the picture postcards of tourists at Dal Lake. Targeted killings, a jump in militancy in the first four months of this year over the same period in 2021, with more foreign militants now, have been ringing alarm bells for over a year. With the region simmering since the Taliban takeover in Afghanistan last year, and Pakistan politically unstable, only an elected government in J&K can effectively address the challenges while reaching out to the people.
This column first appeared in the print edition on May 7, 2022, under the title ‘No picture postcard’.
Britain and Argentina have accepted a six-point proposal United Nations Peace proposal as a framework for renewed negotiations to end the battle for the Falkland Islands. The peace plans calls for the withdrawal of both Argentine troops and the British fleet and put the islands under UN administration, a highly-placed diplomatic source said. But the plan avoids the crucial issue of sovereignty over the South Atlantic islands seized on April 2, a highly-placed diplomatic source said. UN Secretary General Javier Perez De Cueller in a letter to both governments proposed a series of provisional measures in order to avoid immediate discussion of sovereignty and suggested six points which should be immediately observed in order to be acceptable to both sides.
India is not going to abide by the Indo-Bangladesh Farakka agreement of 1977 signed by Janata Party government, Irrigation Minister Kedar Pandey said. He contended that the agreement, a definite loss to India. It gave government 80 per cent advantage whereas the Calcutta port did not even 40,000 cusecs of water. The minister said in the next meeting scheduled to be held in June, the Centre was going to be firm on its proposal that the Brahmaputra Ganga link be implemented bilaterally. Pande said that the review meeting of the Joint River Commission will be held in June.
Prime Minister Indira Gandhi lashed out against the Bharatiya Janata Party branding it as communally minded and said that it was creating problems. Mrs Gandhi who was mostly attacking the CPM during her Kerala visit turned her attention to BJP at Perumbavoor, a Christian stronghold 59 km from Cochin.
India is sinking deeper by the day in the quicksand of communal hate and violence. The prime minister has not uttered a word so far on these developments nor appealed for peace amongst the warring groups, which raises questions about his party and the government. Moreover, the economic situation is grim, especially on the employment front, and what better way can there be to divert the attention of the unemployed and frustrated youth than to get them involved in religious strife?
Let me explain. According to a report published by the Centre for Monitoring Indian Economy (CMIE), in a five-year period from 2017 to 2022 the labour participation rate has dropped from 46 per cent to 40 per cent. What does this mean? It means that more than 450 million people have disappeared from the workforce. In other words, they are not even looking for a job now out of sheer frustration. The government has naturally challenged the report. But while the CMIE report is based on research, the government’s denial is based on surmises. According to economist Mahesh Vyas, the real GDP growth at constant prices in 2021-22 was no more than 1.7 per cent compared to the period before Covid. But employment in 2021-22 was actually nearly 2 per cent lower than the pre-pandemic year of 2019-20. It means that India will not only not reap the advantage of demographic dividend but the absence of employment opportunities will drive the youth to frustration and lawlessness.
The rising inflation is only making matters worse. Imagine the plight of a young person who has spent many years looking for a job and has found none. He has now given up completely and sits at home. His parents and other elders in the family curse him for being useless and resent his being a financial burden on the family. Then this young man goes out, hangs around with others like himself and they all suddenly discover an opportunity. There is a “shobha” or some other “yatra” being planned by people in his area. All that he has to do is to join it, carry a saffron flag or a stick or a sword, and shout slogans if passing in front of a place of worship of the other community. He will either get paid for it or at least have alcoholic drinks to his heart’s content. He will also get a peculiar sense of power as part of the mob. The young man in the other community is briefed by his elders at the same time and incited to “defend the faith” by assembling in the place of worship and facing the other community’s mob when it approaches. The situation thus created is ready to explode and, in fact, on several occasions, it has exploded. In many cases, the administration is either inept or even complicit under instructions from the powers-that-be and would actually allow violence to take place.
Many people get hurt or even lose their life when communal riots take place. Property is destroyed, livelihoods are lost and the bitterness created lasts for years. In many cases, a transfer of population also takes place when people shift from one “mohalla” to another for safety. The damage to people’s psyche is incalculable. The reasons for the current atmosphere of hate and violence that we are witnessing are directly ascribable to the prevailing economic situation.
My advice to the people of my country, therefore, is that whatever the provocation, they should keep their cool. Even if some members of one community provoke the other community, they should try to restrain themselves and not fall in the trap. Soon this strategy of pitching one community against the other will begin to come apart. I am saying all this on the basis of personal experience. My former Lok Sabha constituency (Hazaribag) in Jharkhand is a communally sensitive district. The long years that I spent in Parliament representing this place were marked by a continuous effort to maintain peace between the two communities. Hazaribag’s Ram Navami is unique. It extends for at least two days after Navami, to Dashami and Ekadashi as more than a hundred trucks carrying “jhankis” (depiction of gods) traverse a route which includes a mosque on the way. The situation is readymade for a communal clash and one did indeed take place in 1988, and reportedly propelled a BJP candidate to the Lok Sabha seat in 1989. It was the first victory for the party from that seat.
When I became an MP from there in 1998, it became my full-time job to prevent communal riots from taking place, especially in view of the fact that some elements in the BJP, including the former MP, were ever ready and keen to ignite the communal fire. On one occasion when I learnt that the mobs of the two communities were confronting each other in a certain part of the town, I rushed there with my wife. Brickbats were flying all around and the mobs of the two communities were facing each other with whatever weapons they could lay their hands on. We stood between the two sides, reasoned with them and persuaded them to disperse before the police arrived, late as usual.
The moral of the story is that communal peace will remain a distant dream until all hands are on the deck and the administration is determined to put down communal violence firmly and yet fairly. The state has no religion. The local administration, too, has none. A fair, even-handed and just approach is needed to stem the present tide. The politician will not do it unless it pays him electoral dividends. Will the civil and police administration fill the gap, stand up and be counted?
This column first appeared in the print edition on May 7, 2022, under the title ‘Don’t take communal bait’. The writer, a former Union minister, is vice-president, All-India Trinamool Congress
The Ukrainian crisis has fractured the world into separate blocs. On one side, we have autocrats ruling their countries with complete control of the state, economy, and media. On the other side, we have democratic nations that guarantee freedom and liberty to their people. During the Ukrainian conflict, India has struck a balance across these two blocs to protect its national interests. However, make no mistake: India’s democracy has deep civilisational roots. We have developed our own unique dharmic democracy. We cherish our freedoms and will always oppose autocracy.
Democratic systems have emerged after thousands of years of experimentation with different governance arrangements across the world. Well-functioning democratic systems reflect four core principles: A wide variety of inalienable human rights; rule of law, including equality for all before the law; separation of powers across the legislature, executive, and judiciary creating a system of checks and balances; and accountability to the public. Each of these principles is vitally important, but it is the interlocking nature of these principles that assures justice, liberty, equality, and fraternity.
India’s democratic system is founded not on Western Enlightenment thought, but on our own ancient beliefs. As Bhishma tells Yudhishthira in the Shanti Parva of the Mahabharata, which was repeated by Chanakya in the Arthashastra: “The happiness of the ruler lies in the happiness of his subjects. It is not what the ruler likes that matters, but only what people like.” This thinking is further elaborated in the Ram Rajya concept, as articulated by Mahatma Gandhi: “The ancient ideal of Ram Rajya is undoubtedly one of true democracy in which the meanest citizen could be sure of swift justice without an elaborate and costly procedure.” Moreover, B R Ambedkar declared: “Let no one, however, say that I have borrowed my philosophy from the French Revolution. I have not. My philosophy has roots in religion and not in political science. I have derived them from the teachings of my Master, the Buddha.”
The first democratic principle of inalienable human rights flows directly from the most important moral virtue in Indic civilisation: Ahimsa or strict non-violence. Respecting living beings leads inevitably to human rights because by practising ahimsa we give everyone the freedom to live and worship as they want. Thus ahimsa is directly linked to the foundational Western concept of liberty. Following ahimsa gives everyone liberty since we cannot coerce anyone. Taking away someone’s freedom is a violent act and therefore against the ahimsa principle. Interestingly, in the original copy of the Constitution, Part III, which deals with the Fundamental Rights, opens with an illustration of Lord Ram with Sita and Lakshman — a clear allusion to the Ram Rajya ideal of true democracy.
Moreover, among global civilisations, the Indic civilisation is unique because it is fundamentally based on freedom of thought and belief systems. One of the most famous lines in the Rig Veda says: ekam sat vipra bahudha vadanti — there is one truth, sages call it by many names. Each individual is free to pursue the eternal truth in their own way – in fact, these choices shape their karma and lead to their moksha; every person has to seek their own salvation or liberation. The Bhagavad Gita exemplifies how individuals must interrogate their rights and duties, exercise their own free will, and then decide on their conduct. Accordingly, we have always celebrated pluralism and abhorred fanaticism.
Similarly, our dharmic traditions, in particular our commitment to Raj Dharma, have defined our unyielding commitment to the second democratic principle of the rule of law. No matter how rich or poor, weak or powerful, we are all enjoined to follow dharma. The Arthashastra states: “It is power and power alone which, only when exercised by the king with impartiality and in proportion to guilt either over his son or his enemy, maintains both this world and the next. The just and victorious king administers justice in accordance with dharma (established law), sanstha (customary law), nyaya (announced law), and vyavahara (evidence, conduct).” Our constitution, various laws and regulations, and settled case law define Raj Dharma.
Indian society has always believed in the separation of powers, the third democratic principle. While ancient Indian states were usually kingdoms ruled by monarchs, these rulers relied on assemblies of nobles to validate and approve their decisions. Historical research suggests that most of northern India had republican states for the entire Buddhist period. Priests have also had significant influence on the conduct and decisions of monarchs throughout Indian history. Thus, feudal power was circumscribed not just through Raj Dharma, but also through the checks and balances introduced through assemblies and priestly power. Judicial systems were also well-established in Indian society both during the ancient period as well as in medieval and modern periods. Chanakya devotes Books 3 and 4 of the Arthashastra to the judicial system, laying out in great detail how civil and criminal law should be maintained through magistrates and judges.
Finally, transparency and accountability are hallmarks of democratic systems. In our constitutional system, this is enforced through legislatures, periodic elections, and a watchdog media. Our ancient wisdom, as laid out in the Mundaka Upanishad, has always emphasised the importance of truth-telling: “Satyameva Jayate – truth alone triumphs.” Those who wield executive power have to tell the truth about their actions. They have to truly serve the needs of the people and not use disinformation to perpetuate their rule. Dharma requires the truth, not propaganda.
India has always followed the eternal values of ahimsa and dharma. The two are also interlinked through the Bhagavad Gita phrase: ahimsa paramo dharma. Thus our civilisational heritage inexorably guides us to a humanitarian ethos and a dharmic democracy. As the world is torn asunder into opposing blocs, ahimsa and dharma inspire India to be a beacon of pluralism and democracy.
This column first appeared in the print edition on May 7, 2022, under the title ‘We are a dharmic democracy’. Jayant Sinha is the chairman of the Standing Committee on Finance in Parliament and a Lok Sabha MP from Hazaribagh, Jharkhand. Views are personal
Written by Manjeet Kripalani and John Seaman
Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s visit to France on May 4 is his fifth since 2015, and the 10th such high-level bilateral visit.
This time, the exchange between the French and Indian leaders was especially significant. France, for instance, represented the European Union’s (EU) case on the potential India-EU Free Trade Agreement, and on the EU’s position on the Russia-Ukraine crisis. The strength and trust in the bilateral were evident in the difficult discussions on these two multilateral subjects, which were nonetheless addressed. Far easier was the bilateral-level exchange, as Paris and Delhi have a wide range of complementary and converging interests. Indeed, they have long been reliable partners, and friends in need – as recently as 2019 when the first French-built Rafale aircraft arrived in India.
In the immediate, there is geopolitics to navigate. Beyond the turbulence brought on by the Ukraine crisis, India and France both believe in maintaining strategic autonomy and have a shared understanding of global risks across geographies and domains. There is already a high-quality India-France political dialogue on defence, counter-terrorism, and the Indo-Pacific. The two countries are now forging ahead with cooperation on 21st-century issues like digital, cyber, green energy, blue economy and ocean sciences and space. Both countries possess advance skills and have similar thinking in these areas and can enhance trade, and investment and together rebuild disrupted supply chains.
They comprehend their respective dependencies well, especially in relation to China, Russia and the US. Here, India can play a significant diplomatic role to soften the tendency toward confrontation that is becoming ever more prevalent in the international system. Both can work to insulate the Indo-Pacific from the worst consequences of current conflicts.
Two areas of cooperation are particularly bright — energy and digital technology. France is a significant global power with expertise in both fields.
In digital technology, French companies have long been active in India, which is an important hub for their day-to-day activities as well as R&D and innovation. The French tech services multinational Atos, for instance, provides India with supercomputing hardware and quantum computing simulation software. A recent Track 1.5 Dialogue hosted jointly by think tanks — Gateway House in Mumbai and Ifri in Paris — revealed the importance of Bangalore for the French economy, noting the large number of tech engineers from France who are located in the southern city. France also has a special tech visa for Indian engineers, enabling robust exchanges.
Digital cooperation is being stepped up in several ways. Macron and Modi agreed to join hands on cyber security and on building standards for public digital infrastructure. But more can be done in the area of digital sovereignty where India is a potential model for France with its use of open platforms and open-source public goods like India Stack and MOSIP; regulation, especially personal data empowerment and protection; health data and health tech.
France and India must now invest in preventing digital platforms from being weaponised and avert threats to critical infrastructure. They must use their unique strengths — India in conceptualising and deploying large-scale open-source platforms, foundational IDs, IT services and fintech, and France in AI, cyber, quantum technologies, data empowerment and protection, to create the next-gen solutions for the world.
This can also be done multilaterally, particularly in Francophone Africa and the Indo-Pacific, which are struggling to be independent of economically and politically costly Chinese and US proprietary tech systems.
On energy, the case for green energy is growing stronger as soaring costs undermine purchasing power and industry competitiveness. Long years of underinvestment in traditional energy sources, specifically petroleum, is responsible for this. The current crisis is forcing Europe to reconsider or even reinvent its economic model and accelerate investment in low carbon alternatives like wind, solar PV, biomethane, heat pumps, nuclear and clean hydrogen.
India and France have shown they can work together in developing renewable energies, for instance through the International Solar Alliance. Both also recognise hydrogen as a serious alternative. More than energy, hydrogen matters for food security as it is used to make urea fertiliser. It can also be used as fuel for heavy trucks, which account for 40 per cent of India’s oil consumption. But India needs $1 trillion for green hydrogen infrastructure and the ecosystem, which includes massive investments in grids, where France has proven expertise, having developed part of the EU grid.
India has the market, France has the technology and capital, and the EU has the political will and incentives to drive the transition to green hydrogen. Major French multinationals such as Air Liquide, Engie and TotalEnergies are already pursuing hydrogen energy, and pilot projects with Indian partners can be planned. Modi and Macron have agreed to set up industrial partnerships to expand capacity. Active corporate intent is needed to explore further development. There are many takers for green energy in India if the cost of capital is lowered.
A progressive meeting between Modi and Macron has taken place. The strategic importance of the two countries to each other, and to the world, will soon be visible.
This column first appeared in the print edition on May 7, 2022, under the title ‘Delhi to Paris’. Kripalani is co-founder and executive director, Gateway House, Mumbai. Seaman is Research Fellow, Center for Asian Studies, Ifri, Paris
There is a raging debate on the underreporting of Covid deaths. This so-called underreporting is gauged through approximations of excess deaths, either from past trends or by modelling enhanced mortality risks due to the pandemic. In either case, it is difficult to provide an accurate count of Covid-related deaths in an environment where death registration varies and the cause-specific description remains fluid. Hence, an estimate of excess deaths requires checks for robustness.
This draws attention to death registration and its cause-specific details. While there is apprehension regarding the Covid death count, it is not at all realistic to associate all the deaths during the pandemic with Covid alone. There are three major concerns related to Covid mortality – the enhanced risk of Covid mortality with base clinical conditions, the age-specific differential vulnerability to the severity of the disease, and pinpointing the cause of death to the virus and not other related complications.
Apart from these issues, the pandemic resulted in constrained and inadequate access to critical health care, giving rise to avoidable mortality. While keeping these complexities in mind, there is every reason to be conservative in subscribing to the magnitude of Covid deaths suggested by the international community – these estimations harp on our insufficient health infrastructure and the vulnerabilities to widespread infections owing to compromised living conditions. In fact, the undercounting of Covid deaths should only be corrected in recognition of the heightened risk of mortality during the pandemic.
The challenge of arriving at a near accurate number for Covid mortality rests on having a reasonably accurate death count due to all diseases during the pandemic. Clearly, a large number of people were treated for Covid during the past two years but the fatalities among them need not necessarily be due to the virus but from other complications as well. Therefore, the criteria for associating the cause of death to Covid needs proper clarity. Attributing all the excess deaths during the pandemic to Covid will be an overestimation. Similarly, obtaining a real count of deaths associated with Covid requires an adjustment for underreporting of deaths by institutions on the one hand and the non-recognition of deaths from Covid that occurred without being treated for the disease.
On the whole, the excess-deaths approach is merely an approximation of additional deaths that occurred during the pandemic based on a secular extrapolation of mortality trends under normal circumstances. A meticulous effort is needed to estimate the real magnitude of Covid deaths. It calls for the characterisation of excess deaths with their age-sex attributes and carving out a subset of such deaths that can be ascribed to Covid. Undoubtedly, such an exercise will list Covid deaths as a subset of the derived excess deaths. A robustness check of the same can be carried out in relation to other information available like enumerating households that experienced deaths during the pandemic or number of orphans across regions.
It is not unusual to undercount deaths during a pandemic. But the international community’s current obsession with the accuracy of the Covid mortality count raises questions. It seems akin to attempts in the past to reaffirm the superiority of the health system of the developed world over the developing one through an exhibition of the “mortality advantage”. The Covid death count may well be revised, but certainly not in terms of adopting an excess death approach.
The estimates of the death count offered by epidemiological modelling as well as the calculations made based on counting funerals at crematoriums are not a replacement for the demographic extrapolation of excess deaths and a subset of such deaths being adjudged as due to Covid.
This column first appeared in the print edition on May 7, 2022, under the title ‘The right Covid count’. The writer is professor, Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics, International Institute for Population Sciences. Views are personal
The fifth Delimitation Commission, chaired by Justice Ranjana Desai, has many distinctions, albeit dubious ones, to its credit.
First, it was constituted during a statutory freeze on the increase or decrease of the parliamentary and legislative assembly seats – this freeze will be applicable till the population Census of 2026. Second, this is the only Delimitation Commission that has not redrawn the constituencies in accordance with the Delimitation Act of 2002, under which it was set up. Instead of invoking clause 8(b) of the Act to decide the total number of seats and their distribution based on the Census, it has followed Section 63 of the J&K Reorganisation Act, 2019, which decided the number of electors by stipulating the use of the 2011 Census, as well as the increase in the number of seats from 83 to 90. Ironically, by doing so, J&K continues to be the exception to the norm even after its constitutional and legislative homogenisation in 2019.
Third, while the Commission started off with the mandate for five states, the five northeastern states were withdrawn from its purview on March 21, 2020, effectively making it the only Commission confined to delimiting just one Union Territory. This has made the uniformity in the principles of delimitation across states a casualty. Finally, it will be the first delimitation award in the country’s legislative history that will not be placed before the legislative assembly of the UT that has been delimited.
The recommendation of delimitation commissions — they are in the nature of a fiat — cannot be modified or changed by Parliament or the concerned legislative assembly, but tabling the award gives it democratic sanction. But in the case of J&K, the elected legislators of J&K will not have the opportunity to approve the rules for their representation.
With these infirmities in its constitution, and a truncated mandate, the Commission award has been open to criticism ab initio. The devil, so to say, in this case, lies not only in the details of seat allocation, but also in the design of its award.
Despite claiming to have treated the Union Territory of J&K as one entity (the stated rationale for the absurd clubbing of Poonch and Rajouri in Jammu division with Anantnag in the Kashmir division), in its press release, the Delimitation Commission announced that it has allocated 47 seats to Kashmir and 43 seats to Jammu. In doing so, the Commission has ensured that the political binary of Jammu vis a vis Kashmir now becomes a divisive bipolarity.
Kashmir division, which has a 56 per cent share of the population, will now have only a 52 per cent seat share in the legislative assembly. Jammu, on the other hand, with a 44 per cent share in the population gets a 48 per cent share in the legislative representation. As a consequence, while in Jammu 1.25 lakh people will elect an MLA, in the Valley 1.46 lakh people will do so. What this effectively means is that for the same population, for every six constituencies, Jammu has got an additional seat. In the process, the cardinal principle of “one man, one vote” has been bid adieu in J&K.
In order to contextualise what the Commission has done, it is useful to recap the distribution of seats that existed in the state prior to the award. In the last legislative assembly of J&K (including Ladakh), Kashmir Valley with a 55 per cent share of the population, had 53 per cent of the seats. Jammu with a share of 43 per cent of the population, elected 42.5 per cent of the seats in the legislative assembly. More importantly, on the cardinal “one person one vote” principle, Kashmir had 1,49,749 voters per constituency while there were 1,45,366 people per constituency in Jammu. Far from redressing a non-existent bias and perceived discrimination, this Commission has introduced an obvious bias in favour of Jammu.
While the two administrative divisions of the UT, Jammu and Kashmir, may be relevant for developmental policy planning, these are not so for democratic representation purposes. A more meaningful disaggregation for assessing the implications of the award is to look at how the “communities of interest” — common physical features, ethnicity, religion, and language, as reiterated in Section 60(2) (b) of the J&K Reorganisation Act 2019 — have fared.
On these principles, the J&K of today comprises four distinct regions: The Jhelum Valley (which includes South Kashmir, Central Kashmir and North Kashmir), Chenab Valley (comprising Kisthwar, Doda, Ramban and Reasi), Pir Panjal (Rajouri and Poonch), and the Tawi basin or the plains (of Jammu, Kathua and Udhampur).
The seats allocated across these sub-regions are unacceptably distortionary — 1.12 lakh people will elect their legislators in Chenab, while 1.40 lakh do so in the Pir Panjal belt. Similarly, while 1.25 lakh people in the Tawi basin elect a representative, it will take 1.5 lakh people to do so in Central Kashmir; both urban agglomerations. A vote cast in central Kashmir, in terms of its electoral value, is 0.8 of the vote in the Jammu plains.
Even the one good thing that the Commission has done – making constituencies coterminous with the district boundaries — has been marred by the illogical principle of ensuring 18 assembly constituencies for every parliamentary constituency. By applying an arithmetic formula of dividing the number of assembly seats by the number of parliamentary seats, the Commission has distorted the entire system of democratic representation across areas. Right across the country, the number of assembly seats for their respective parliamentary constituencies ranges from as low as four in Andhra Pradesh to as high as 30 in Arunachal Pradesh. Should the “principle of 18” be applied in other states, the electoral structure of the country will be in chaos.
By juxtaposing the Delimitation Commission’s award on the fragile and fragmented polity in J&K, it is obvious that it has, wittingly or unwittingly, designed a framework of legislative representation that will prevent the formation of a stable elected government in J&K in the near future. As and when elections are held, they will at best result in a fractious patchwork coalition and at worst a perpetually hung assembly. Between the two, it is not only the Valley that will lose. Jammu will fare no better. And the country at large could bear the consequences should the award become a precedent for other Commissions across other states.
Postscript: The Commission seems to have played a cruel joke on the Kashmiri Pandit community by recommending “at least” two seats on a nomination basis for them. This recommendation is not a part of the gazette notification and hence is not binding on the government, like the other recommendations of the Commission. It is essentially an obiter dictum, which is as powerless as it is meaningless. It seems to have been added just for the optics.
This column first appeared in the print edition on May 7, 2022, under the title ‘1 person, 0.8 vote’. The writer is the former finance minister of J&K
WHO on May 5 put out its 2022 global update of the excess deaths linked with Covid. This statistical estimate, which was first published a year ago, covers the period between January 2020 and December 2021. The estimate is that global excess mortality on account of Covid is 14.9 million, more than twice the reported deaths. In India’s case, WHO estimates the excess mortality to be 4.7 million, almost 10 times the reported deaths. GoI has disputed the findings as it disagrees with the methodology underpinning WHO’s statistical model.
There are two important technical points here. Excess mortality is the difference between the deaths that have occurred and the number that would be expected in the absence of Covid. As all countries did not have the relevant data for the two-year period studied, alternative data sources were used for such countries, including India. The WHO estimate, therefore, isn’t final. There will be an update in 2023. One of the findings so far is that even developed Western countries didn’t fare well when excess mortality is adjusted according to population size. Separately, the debate over WHO’s statistical model is not bad as it may catalyse refinements.
Moving beyond Covid data, we need to acknowledge that India’s statistical system needs much improvement. Policy-making today heavily depends on the production of timely and reliable data – including CRS and SRS records. India hasn’t fared well in this respect. For example, the household consumption data which forms the basis for many other statistical estimates hasn’t been updated in a decade. A key test for the relevance of any regularly disseminated data is the ability to stick to schedules. On the whole, India’s data collection exercise has to improve. Once that happens, GoI will be able to put its point across more convincingly. That said, WHO’s estimate is work in progress.
The gruesome murder of a 25-year-old man on a busy Hyderabad street by his wife’s kin even as she pleaded fruitlessly with bystanders to intervene is a heart-wrenching reminder of the difficulties Indian women face in living life on their own terms. Married for just three months, interfaith couple Ashrin Sultana and B Nagaraju knew each other through school and college and had been in a relationship for a long time against the wishes of her family. Religion and caste – Nagaraju was a Dalit – came in the way of her family accepting their adult daughter’s choice.
Too much of India still remains governed by medieval notions of family dishonour. Modernity ushered in by the Constitution that guarantees all consenting adults the freedom to choose their partners has struggled against entrenched religious and caste endogamy. The idea that the woman is a property of the family, when forcefully enforced by community networks, has not found a proportionate response from lethargic institutions of the state, despite their progressive mandate.
The assailants in many dishonour killings are young men with the benefit of many years of school education behind them. Unfortunately, curriculums, textbooks and teachers are behind the curve in instilling gender equality and questioning gender stereotypes. They need to be far more persuasive in this project. Where families are steadfast in their conservatism, public institutions inculcating gender sensitivity need to provide the counterbalance. Make a start for Nagaraju and Sultana.
On Rigor in Science is a one-paragraph short story written by the blind seer Jorge Luis Borges, which he credited to a fictional writer, Suarez Miranda. It is a story beloved of anthologists, for it describes with some empathy and a great deal of precision the anthologist’s lonesome dilemma. The story, in its entirety, goes something like this:
“…In that empire, the art of cartography attained such exactitude that the map of a single province occupied the entirety of a city, and the map of the empire occupied the entirety of a province. In time, those early maps were deemed unsatisfactory, and the cartographers created a map of the empire that was the size of the empire…Succeeding generations, however, thought that vast map unusable. They left it untended, open to the elements of sun and rain. Even today, in the deserts of the west, tattered fragments of the map are still to be found, sheltering an occasional beast or beggar.”
As to the cartographer, so to the anthologist.
I am the editor of The Penguin Book of Indian Poets, a title whose vast purview may well extend to a map of the known world. This enormous volume expands the notion of what makes an “Indian” poet, and includes writers from all over the world. This is the fourth and final version of a project I began in 2003, with an anthology for Fulcrum, a poetry annual edited by my friend, Philip Nikolayev. Titled Give the Sea Change and it Shall Change: Fifty-Six Indian Poets, it was followed, some years later, by two expanded versions, The Bloodaxe Book of Contemporary Indian Poets (Bloodaxe) and 60 Indian Poets (Penguin India). In other words, The Penguin Book of Indian Poets is the culmination of a 20-year project. I hope and pray it will be the last anthology I edit.
Why such a hope? Because, as you have no doubt guessed by now, the anthologist does not work for money. Neither does the anthologist work for renown. (There is very little renown in poetry, and it rarely descends to editors.) So why do it? I am loathe to mention such intangibles as “love”. Instead I’ll say it felt to me like a duty, and a way to manage the enforced solitude of a pandemic: To create a map that would be definitive in its way, at least for a decade or two. In that sense, the toil was a gift.
I took as my starting point, the poetry written after Independence. More accurately, the year 1952, when Nissim Ezekiel published his first collection, A Time to Change, with the Fortune Press in London. Until Ezekiel, Indian poetry in English was a 19th-century product that had survived well into the 20th. A backward glance over the 150 years before Ezekiel turns up only four figures of note, three of them Bengali, all of them Calcutta-based: Tagore, Toru Dutt, Michael Madhusudan Dutt (no relation), and Henry Louis Derozio. In the decades that followed there was a flowering, a burst, unexpected bouquets of shit and roses, to quote Rimbaud.
For Indian poets writing in English, modernism arrived at roughly the same time as Independence, which is to say after it had already established itself as the new orthodoxy in other parts of the world. It came to regional Indian languages long before it came to English. In Marathi, to take one instance, the modernist movement attempted to recast seemingly immovable social divisions, including those of caste, in a literature that was nothing if not indigenous. These writers were in a hurry to overthrow the conventions of the Indian bourgeoisie as well as those of their former colonial masters. Later Marathi modernists (such as Dilip Chitre and Arun Kolatkar) owed their allegiance not to British but to European and American poetry, particularly to the Surrealists and the Beats.
Indian poetry in English took longer to emerge from the influence of “English” poetry — by no means a situation peculiar to verse. The most prominent Indian modernists of the fifties, Ezekiel and Dom Moraes, shaped the canon and cleared the way, but the sounds they made were British and they confined even their experimentation to the essential iamb. It wasn’t until the seventies that internationalism established itself on the English page in India, with the Clearing House editions of Eunice de Souza, Adil Jussawalla, Jayanta Mahapatra, Arvind Krishna Mehrotra and Kolatkar, and with the psychic weather poets such as AK Ramanujan, Kamala Das and R Parthasarathy brought to their lines. The next generation of Indian poets, the poets of the eighties and nineties in erstwhile Bombay and other cities, were more conservative in some ways than their immediate forebears, and there was a return to the canonical influence of mid-20th century British poetry. But by the second decade of the 21st century there had been a flowering, an uprising, and a new generation of poets who cared little about the usual poetry presses, who published poems on the internet and rewrote the canon in their own performative or spoken or gender-fluid image.
While most anthologies of Indian poetry tend to choose depth over breadth, I wanted this one to be different. Like shabby clubs that share membership and furniture, the same poems by a dozen or so poets have been printed and reprinted over the decades, central figures have been left out, and the perpetual reappearance of poets and poems leaves the reader with a sense of claustrophobia, of a narrow world defined by its own obsessions. Indian poetry, wherever its writers are based, should really be seen as one body of work. Towards that ambition, my anthology includes poets who live in Fiji, France, Canada, Australia, the United States, the United Kingdom — and India; 94 poets separated by the sea, presented not chronologically but with a view to verticality.
Another element that separates this anthology from the ones that have come before and the ones that will follow is a suite of extraordinary photographs taken by the reclusive and visionary Madhu Kapparath, whose brave and lonely project it was to photograph Indian poets and writers, at his own expense, over some 30 years. This has resulted in an archive of breath-taking historical scope. Many of his subjects are now dead; and the intimacy of the portraits will never be equalled. Madhu’s practice is simply to befriend the figures who interest him, and to spend time with them. When eventually he takes out his camera, it is to make the kind of portrait no parachutist-photographer could hope to emulate.
Jeet Thayil is an author and a poet
The views expressed are personal
Adesh Gupta, president of the Delhi unit of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), has written to chief minister Arvind Kejriwal, asking for the names of 40 Mughal-era villages to be changed, but I trust his missive will not be received as an “adesh” (command) that must be obeyed. What Gupta wants is neither logical nor conscionable. It’s certainly not desirable. So, the best response is not one that’s “gupt” (secret). It ought to be loud, clear, firm, and pretty dismissive.
Gupta says, “Delhi is no longer Mughlon Ki Sarai, it is the country’s Capital. There should be no symbol of slavery in the city, especially when we are celebrating 75 years of Independence”. The list of villages whose names irk him includes Jia Sarai, Zamroodpur, Tajpur, Najafgarh, Neb Sarai, Lado Sarai and Hauz Khas. But are they symbols of slavery?
They’re not. Historian Narayani Gupta tells me, “Settlements called pur indicate land given as grants by rulers and named for the recipient. [So] Babarpur, Timarpur and Humayunpur would have referred to some beneficiary, not to the emperors”. This means Gupta’s claim these names refer to the Mughals — or their predecessors, in some cases — is incorrect.
Swapna Liddle, whose books on Delhi, such as the one on Chandni Chowk, are highly regarded, asks what problem does Gupta have with sarais. Or is it that it’s an Urdu word? As for Najafgarh, it’s named after a Mughal general who commanded Mir Qasim’s army against the East India Company. Najafgarh is where Najaf Khan built a fort to protect Delhi against the British. In BJP terminology, that makes him a freedom fighter.
Let me, however, make a wider, albeit rhetorical, point. If Gupta objects to places named after Mughal rulers because he alleges they ill-treated or killed Hindus, then, by that logic, shouldn’t the name Ashok, which adorns roads and hotels, be removed because, by his own admission, he killed over 100,000 people at Kalinga? At the time, it was tyranny. Today it might be called genocide.
There’s something else Gupta doesn’t realise. You can’t undo or re-write history by changing the name of a city or a road. Let me cite an example from London. One of the best-known parts of the British capital is Hanover Square. It’s named after the German dynasty that ruled from 1714 to 1901. But even after fighting two World Wars with Germany, when thousands died at German hands, this name has not been changed. That’s because the Hanoverians are an ineradicable part of British history just as the Mughals — or the Sultanate — are an inseparable part of ours.
Now Gupta wants these 40 villages named after people such as Rafi, Lata, Milkha Singh, Yashpal Sharma, and Valmiki. But what connection do they have with Delhi? If something should be named after them, shouldn’t it be where they were born or lived?
This leads me to a further point. Places are not just identified by, but also emotionally associated with, their names. It’s as much a part of a place’s character as any other feature. When you abruptly change a name you also forcibly alter its character. Names are associations people have grown familiar with. It’s how they think of their cities or places of residence. This is why Connaught Place may be affectionately called CP, but never Rajiv Chowk. Indeed, I doubt if Gupta uses the official name!
Let me give you a telling example. It’s not as far-fetched as first, it may seem. Tens of thousands of Indian men must be called Nathuram. Now, in 1948, when Nathuram Godse killed Gandhi, if parents had decided to change the names of sons called Nathuram, it would have been heart-wrenching. Why is it any different when a centuries-old name of a city is changed? Remember a city is a living entity. Not a ghost town or an excavated ruin. Let me end by quoting Narayani Gupta. She says, “We are descending into collective cretinism”.
Karan Thapar is author of Devil’s Advocate: The Untold Story
The views expressed are personal
A prominent businessman, who also represents the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)’s point of view, said to me recently, “If there’s one place I would never like to be in, it’s a court, because I know I will never get justice there.” I was reminded of the brilliant Indian Civil Services officer Penderel Moon who never liked sitting as a magistrate in court because he knew he would be told streams of lies and all he could do was record them.
Then I also remembered the Delhi magistrate who asked the public prosecutor, “I know perfectly well that you are bringing paid witnesses before me every day, but why do you have to bring the same witnesses every day?”
Last weekend, Prime Minister (PM) Narendra Modi had to hear what the Chief Justice of India (CJI) thought about courts and the trials that take place there, and it was a story that once again reminded me that, to modernise India’s governance, just digitalising is not enough. There are fundamental faults in the administration of justice and other institutions connected with it and they need fundamental reforms.
Speaking at the joint conference of chief ministers and chief justices of high courts last weekend, the PM said, “The government has taken various initiatives for improving infrastructure and integration of digital technology in e-courts proceedings. The e-courts project is being implemented today in mission mode.” This may well be so. When the CJI spoke, he indicated that a lot still needed to change. For instance, he blamed the government for its addiction to the courts, pointing out that their litigation, often department-versus-department, accounted for half the cases awaiting the attention of the Supreme Court (SC).
Much of this litigation would be saved, according to the CJI, if Parliament debated bills clause by clause. That it is not doing, when bills are passed in a matter of minutes. Many of the farmers who protested against the three farm bills have said the distress they suffered could have been avoided if the bills had been debated, and amendments were accepted.
I was particularly interested in the CJI’s complaint about the rising pile of petitions his court faces. They are often cases in which the court has ordered governments to take action and they have failed to do so.
This seems to be a classic example of the malfunctioning governance, the laxity, evident in almost all Indian governance. If the SC can’t enforce its orders, what hope does a rural divisional court have?
The enforcement of court orders is often handed to the police to enforce and they must surely be one of the institutions most in need of radical reform in India. One of the achievements of Morarji Desai’s Janata government was the appointment of the police commission. They produced much-praised reports, which were shelved by Indira Gandhi. The latest parliamentary report on policing published this February doesn’t indicate that there have been effective changes or reforms under consequent PMs. The report “notes with anguish that the public image of the police throughout the country is more on a negative side.” It suggests that “inculcating soft skills in police personnel should always be the priority and focal point of their training modules.”
The call for inculcating soft skills is further evidence of this fundamental fault in Indian governance. When India became independent, members of the Constituent Assembly wrote the longest Constitution of that time, but they left the governance of the democracy to institutions they inherited from the Raj. That is why India still has a Raj-era police dedicated to the hard task of maintaining order, with no time for the softer skills that parliamentarians have called for. The dark shadows of the colonial past hang over the proceedings of the SC too. E-courts alone won’t clear those shadows away.
The views expressed are personal
The leaked draft majority opinion of the Supreme Court of the United States (SCOTUS) has caused a global controversy. The draft opinion confirmed that SCOTUS intends to reverse the judgment of Roe v. Wade, which recognised the right to abortion. Although the draft opinion does not formally represent the court’s opinion until published, the immediate implication of such a judgment will restrict abortion in many parts of the United States. The draft decision is likely to have global implications on abortion rights.
Abortion is either criminalised or a qualified right in most countries. However, recent international jurisprudence increasingly shows a liberalising trend, especially in the Global South.
The overturning of Roe will not have a major impact around Indian abortion laws, as India has a legislative framework granting a qualified right to abortion. The Medical Terminal of Pregnancy (MTP) Act, passed in 1971, permitted women to have abortions up to 20 weeks, at the discretion of a Registered Medical Practitioner, if extending the pregnancy puts their physical or mental health at danger, if there is a possibility of foetal “abnormalities”, alleged rape or failure of contraception for married women. A 2002 amendment legalised medical abortion, using the combined mifepristone-misoprostol regimen for the termination of early pregnancies.
In 2021, the government passed the MTP (Amendment) Act and introduced a few significant but inadequate changes, including the extension of abortion rights to unmarried woman and conditional increase in gestational limit. Arguably, the Indian law does not have an upper gestational limit for pregnancies with foetal anomalies. However, the amendments are not framed through a gender justice lens, but preserve the doctor-centric approach of the 1971 law. Removing the gestational limit for pregnant women whose foetuses have been diagnosed with “abnormalities” indicates eugenic underpinnings and furthers an ableist rationale that ascribes less “value” to foetuses with potential disabilities. Further, the delineation of specific categories of women who are eligible for abortions between 20 and 24 weeks creates a framework of “graded victimhood” — the perceived victimhood of certain women is used to justify an extension of the permissible gestation period for abortion, rather than their agency, circumstances or desire to get an abortion.
The setting up of medical boards to decide cases of foetal “abnormalities” after 24 weeks of gestation period is likely to cause severe delays in granting abortions. A study by the Centre for Justice, Law and Society at Jindal Global Law School found that on average, states reported an 80% shortfall in obstetricians and gynaecologists — thereby making functional medical boards largely unfeasible.
Finally, the amended law continues to be an exception within the criminalisation of abortion under sections 312-318 of the Indian Penal Code, which significantly impact access to abortion services and exacerbates abortion stigma.
The amendments are carried out in isolation of other laws and policies — such as the Protection of Children from Sexual Offences Act, 2012, (POCSO). The mandatory reporting provision of POCSO conflicts with section 5A of the MTP Act, which guarantees confidentiality for the pregnant person obtaining abortion services. Adolescents, therefore, face a barrier as consensual sexual relations are construed as sexual assault under POCSO, which triggers the mandatory reporting clause. The legal ambiguities in multiple legislation make it difficult for adolescents to access sexual and reproductive health care services. Moreover, medical practitioners also face the threat of persecution while providing adolescents with abortion services. It is imperative that abortion in decriminalised and the legal reforms are rights based, holistic and intersectional that centre the pregnant person.
The multiple barriers to abortion, when compounded with caste discrimination, bureaucracy and poverty, hurt access to safe abortions for marginalised pregnant persons. Abortion is allowed only for women, excluding transgender and gender variant persons who require reproductive health services.
Finally, legal reforms alone cannot produce structural changes to improve access, which require holistic advancements that will allow pregnant people from all backgrounds to exercise their bodily autonomy while making reproductive decisions. Despite limited legal reforms, access to abortion rights will continue to be challenging considering structural inequalities in seeking reproductive health services. A framework of reproductive justice that acknowledges the multiple axes of oppression persons from marginalised communities face is important to ensure inclusive and intersectional access to abortion services for all marginalised persons.
Dipika Jain is a professor of law, vice-dean and director, Centre for Justice, Law and Society, Jindal Global Law School
The views expressed are personal
In the geopolitical landscape that has shifted thanks to the war raging in Ukraine, India appears to have explained its stance of strategic neutrality better to European countries than it has to the US. It might appear contradictory that India — more deeply committed to its ties with the US now than ever before in history — is more in sync with European leaders at the moment, which is the impression gained from Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s whistle-stop trip to European capitals.
There was an inevitability to Ukraine being the key word in all bilateral talks since the countries Mr Modi visited have reasons to feel more threatened by the Russian invasion than the US. India’s stand vis-a-vis the war and Russia may reflect the wisdom of having no eternal allies or perpetual enemies but only serving interests that are eternal and perpetual. There may have been some explaining to do and India’s success lies in having achieved that satisfactorily.
It might have helped that many EU nations share a somewhat similar ambivalent outlook though their dependence has more to do with Russian gas and oil than India’s defence preparedness, which is so reliant on Russian military hardware and regardless of how efficient that may appear post the events since February 24 and the aggression against Ukraine. India’s position as a key player in any emerging India-Pacific scenario seems to have given it the heft in Germany, Denmark and France.
What may be of greater significance are the discussions on trade and actions to be taken regarding climate change in which Germany’s commitment to an additional 10 bn euro for India to enhance its green and sustainable role in the Indo-German partnership was particularly important. India’s trade with the EU may be less than its trade with its three leading trade partners in the US, UAE and China but things may be changing with the strengthening of bilateral ties to encourage more trade so as to lessen everyone’s dependence on China in a post-Covid world.
The Prime Minister’s high-profile engagements at a sensitive time in world affairs and his meetings with at least seven leaders of countries may have helped enhance ongoing and emerging areas of trade, technology, defence and strategic cooperation.