Russian President Vladimir Putin has lost the war by not winning. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has won by not losing. India has neither lost nor won.
The war is not over yet. The U.S. Secretary of State, Antony Blinken, believes that it will likely go on until the end of this year, probably beyond that. Nonetheless, it is possible to arrive at a preliminary balance sheet of the war at this stage.
The Ukrainians and Putin
The biggest losers are the people of Ukraine. They have been extremely brave and resilient, and their leader has done an unbelievable job. Their country is devastated, flattened in large areas. Many lives have been lost. Millions have been uprooted from their homes and familiar surroundings. Children will be in a state of trauma for many years. It will take years and billions of dollars to rebuild their country. The funding will come, though not perhaps in the form of grants. Industries in the West will make billions helping in the reconstruction of Ukraine.
The other big loser is President Putin. This is a many-sided loss for him. He expected his mighty army to occupy Kyiv in quick time and install a friendly regime. The fact that his Foreign Minister has now brought nuclear weapons into the equation is a sure sign of desperation. Mr. Putin has lost face with his own people. We won’t know the number of casualties his army has suffered until much later, if ever, but the body bags have started arriving. His armed forces have under-performed. Perhaps they were not expecting to be pushed into the war all of a sudden. Mr. Putin has, irretrievably, lost the trust and friendship of Ukrainians; they will remain, for a very long time, hostile and bitter towards Russia. His war has produced exactly the result that he did not want and for which he launched the war. Ukraine has got closer to the West. Ukraine will certainly be admitted to the European Union (EU), perhaps not tomorrow but in the near future. Mr. Putin has lost credibility with his peers as well as with nearly everyone else.
The raison d’etre for Mr. Putin to launch the war was to keep the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) from getting closer to Russia’s eastern borders. His distrust for the West is justified, keeping in mind the history of broken commitments and promises by the West to Mr. Putin’s predecessors at the highest level about not extending NATO’s scope “one inch” closer to Russian borders. But his war has produced exactly the opposite result. He has succeeded in ensuring that NATO will come even closer to Russia’s borders. Sweden and Finland will likely join NATO soon. Russia will truly be hemmed in by NATO.
Gains for the West
The biggest winner is the West. President Putin watched with satisfaction the rift in the Trans-Atlantic Alliance which former U.S. President Donald Trump had caused. Mr. Putin thought he would widen that breach. His expectation, a reasonable one, was that countries such as Germany which, given their dependence on Russian energy sources, will refuse to go along with U.S. President Joe Biden’s sanctions on Russia. But once again, Mr. Putin managed to produce the opposite result. Germany and others will no doubt suffer considerably by reducing and eventually cutting off energy supplies from Russia, but they have committed themselves to phase out import of Russian oil by the end of the year. And if Mr. Biden is persuaded to mend fences with the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia, Europe will be able to weather the energy crisis without much pain. In any case, with summer not too far, the demand for energy will decline significantly.
The West also gains economically. Industries in the West will make billions helping in the reconstruction of Ukraine. The billions they are spending on sending critical weapons and other material to Ukraine are all spent in their own countries. Yes, petrol prices have risen, but they seem to have peaked and now are now falling in some places.
Countries with dilemmas
China is facing a more acute dilemma than India. It has an enormous stake in the West in terms of trade and technology. Its two-way trade with the U.S. and EU is many times more than its trade with Russia. Europe and the U.S. have warned China of serious consequences if it helps Russia evade the sanctions by enlarging the scope of yuan-ruble trade. At the same time, China would hate to see President Putin lose or overthrown. President Biden has openly called for regime change in Moscow; subsequent attempts by his officials to explain away his words do not carry conviction. For the Chinese Communist Party, ensuring continued improvement in the living standards of the people is a sine qua non for its survival in power. China’s growth rate has plummeted over the last few years.
Sitting on the fence has not cost India so far. India has certainly displeased the U.S. and other Western countries with its neutral or non-aligned posture on the war. It has not supported a single resolution on the Ukraine situation. However, the U.S. has been restrained in expressing its disappointment with India. India seems to have concluded that the U.S. will continue to be patient with it, given the American strategy to contain China for which India’s participation is vital. The fact that the U.S. has chosen not to penalise India, as it has Turkey, a NATO ally, for purchasing the Russian anti-missile defence system S-400 and that it is turning a blind eye to India buying Russian oil in large quantities, and that too in a rupee-ruble arrangement, shows that India’s position has not cost us anything, at least for the present.
Nor has India gained anything. Yes, Russia has thanked India for its independent stance, but such thank yous do not mean much in international relations. We are getting Russian oil at a discount price, but Russia needs to sell its oil. Even if we had been more forthright in condemning Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, there would have no negative consequences. Like the U.S., Russia also needs India. Now, when Russian weapons have proved to be not so effective, the demand for Russian weaponry will decline globally. If not India, who else will buy Russian hardware in large quantities? India’s failure to deplore Russia’s threat to introduce nuclear weapons into the equation is deeply disappointing.
Chinmaya R. Gharekhan, a former Indian Ambassador to the United Nations, was Special Envoy for West Asia in the Manmohan Singh government
How many people died in India as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic? This question has become the subject of a heated argument after the World Health Organization (WHO) estimated India’s pandemic excess deaths at around 4.7 million. The Government of India issued a strongly worded response, and media houses and editors waded in. It is almost as though life and death themselves are now matters of opinion.
The background
Here are some basic observations. First, we will never know precisely how many excess deaths occurred in India during the novel coronavirus pandemic. Second, all mortality studies, including the latest from WHO, involve choices about what data to include, how to fill gaps, and how to deal with uncertainty; there is always room for debate and disagreement about these choices. Third, uncertainty does not mean total ignorance: even the most optimistic reading of the data puts excess deathsat six or seven times official COVID-19 deaths.
The current dispute has been noisier than usual, but is not new. Several studies, most putting India’s pandemic excess deaths at between three and five million, have been met by strident Government “rebuttals”. These rebuttals have highlighted the uncertainties (which is valid), and then jumped — without justification — to claiming that there are no excess deaths beyond recorded COVID-19 deaths. The rebuttals are also littered with irrelevant, confused and absurd points.
The latest response is well summarised in its title: “India strongly objects to the use of mathematical models for projecting excess mortality estimates in view of the availability of authentic data”. The “authentic data” in question is mortality data from the Civil Registration System (CRS), and there are two implications: that CRS data has been ignored by the researchers; that CRS data does not support estimates of high pandemic mortality.
Both are false. Estimates of pandemic mortality, including those of WHO, are largely data-driven, and the main data-source is — you guessed it — the CRS. This data strongly supports estimates of high pandemic mortality. The “modelling” that the Government objects to is largely simple data analysis and techniques for filling gaps in the data, entirely unavoidable if we are to use CRS data to estimate excess mortality.
Civil registration data
To make sense of all this, we need to consider what data is available and what it shows. In 2021, journalists managed to obtain monthly death registrations at the State or city level; these crucial efforts led to the first hard evidence that official COVID-19 deaths were only the tip of the iceberg. Although valuable, the data is patchy: not all States and regions are covered; it often comes from online systems which do not capture all registrations; and it often misses the latter part of India’s devastating second wave. Nevertheless, a clear picture emerges: there was a gradual surge in deaths during the second half of 2020, which subsided and was followed by a tsunami of deaths during April-June 2021.
Although the data comes from local government records, the Health Ministry objects that it is “non-official”. However, there is no official CRS report for 2021, and only very recently (on May 3, 2022) was the 2020 CRS report made available. This report does not give monthly registrations, so it is hard to cross-check with earlier data. In yearly totals, there are some discrepancies; but, nevertheless, we found that the gross estimates for 2020 were broadly aligned across the States whose data we ourselves had used in our estimates.
With everyone in agreement on the value of CRS data, how does the Government propose to explain away the pandemic surge in deaths? We find the answer in a bizarre assertion: during 2020, the Government claims, 99.9% of all deaths in India were registered. The message is: what appears like a rise in mortality in 2020, actually reflects a sharp improvement in registration. Note that this could never explain the bulk of excess deaths which came later, during 2021. But is the claim of complete death registration in 2020 plausible?
On the contrary, it is absurd. Consider the data from Uttar Pradesh. The government Sample Registration System tells us to expect around 1.5 million deaths in Uttar Pradesh every year. But during 2020 only 0.87 million deaths were registered, around 60% of the expected toll. If registration was complete, then 2020 saw a huge, unexplained, drop in deaths in the State!
Consider, also, Andhra Pradesh, where freely available CRS data tells a startling story: during 15 months from April 2020 to June 2021, over 50% more deaths were registered than expected. Could this reflect an improvement in registration? No. According to the 2019 CRS report, there was no room for improvement as death registration in the State was already complete before the pandemic. This is probably an overstatement; but however we look at it, Andhra Pradesh’s huge mortality surge cannot be explained via increased registration coverage.
It is possible that in some States, registration coverage improved during the pandemic. But, overall, registration probably dropped during 2020. Data from the Government’s latest National Family Health Survey suggests that deaths that occurred in 2020 were less likely to be registered than deaths in 2019. Birth registration data from the CRS points in the same direction: after increasing by 5% during 2017-18 and 7% during 2018-19, birth registrations fell by 2.5% in 2020.
Disruption to registration could have been especially severe in marginalised communities and in States where registration is anyway weak. In Uttar Pradesh, for example, both birth and death registrations fell sharply during 2020. Assuming that registration held steady during the pandemic, as we and many others have done, risks underestimating the mortality surge.
Some conclusions
India was badly hit. A year ago, tragic stories of overflowing hospitals and oxygen shortages filled the news as the virus swept through the country. There is now a weight of evidence — not just from the CRS, but from surveys too — telling us that many millions died. Data is still emerging, and estimating pandemic mortality will be an ongoing effort; but this effort is undermined by the shrill, incoherent response from the Government following each study.
All the estimates come with uncertainty and depend on choices. For example, the WHO estimate drops from 4.7 million to 4.4 million if we consider the pandemic period to span April 2020-July 2021 rather than January 2020-December 2021. Acknowledging the uncertainties and debating the choices is natural, but is very different from dismissing the estimates.
Strengthen the CRS
The tragedy has been huge; but in the global context, India is not an outlier. Parts of the developing world and eastern Europe saw similarly high pandemic mortality. Historical weaknesses and deliberate dishonesty, well-documented by journalists, mean that India recorded only 10%-15% of its pandemic deaths. In this too, India is not alone. India’s all-cause mortality data is imperfect — but in many Asian and African countries, the data is even sparser. The current state of affairs highlights both the value of India’s CRS data, and the need to strengthen the CRS.
What is most troubling — and makes India stand out — is the relentless Government hostility towards every attempt to understand the pandemic. If the objections were made in good faith, the Government could accelerate the release of data, for example from the CRS for 2021 or from the Sample Registration System. Ultimately, the rift is not about science, data or methodology; the basic question is whether we wish to pursue the truth or not.
Aashish Gupta is a David E. Bell Fellow at Harvard University. Murad Banaji is a U.K.-based mathematician who has closely tracked India’s pandemic data
The issue of abortion is in the news again, internationally. This, therefore, appears to be a good time to pen down a summary and analysis of the legal status of abortions in India.
Under the general criminal law of the country, i.e. the Indian Penal Code, voluntarily causing a woman with child to miscarry is an offence attracting a jail term of up to three years or fine or both, unless it was done in good faith where the purpose was to save the life of the pregnant woman. A pregnant woman causing herself to miscarry is also an offender under this provision apart from the person causing the miscarriage, which in most cases would be a medical practitioner.
Amendments and expansion
In 1971, after a lot of deliberation, the Medical Termination of Pregnancy (MTP) Act was enacted. This law is an exception to the IPC provisions above and sets out the rules — of when, who, where, why and by whom — for accessing an MTP. This law has been amended twice since, the most recent set of amendments being in the year 2021 which has, to some extent, expanded the scope of the law. However, the law does not recognise and/or acknowledge the right of a pregnant person to decide on the discontinuation of a pregnancy.
The law provides for a set of reasons based on which an MTP can be accessed: the continuation of the pregnancy would involve a risk to the life of the pregnant woman or result in grave injury to her physical or mental health. The law explains that if the pregnancy is as a result of rape or failure of contraceptive used by the pregnant woman or her partner to limit the number of children or to prevent a pregnancy, the anguish caused by the continuation of such a pregnancy would be considered to be a grave injury to the mental health of the pregnant woman. The other reason for seeking an MTP is the substantial risk that if the child was born, it would suffer from any serious physical or mental abnormality.
The existence of one of these circumstances (at least), along with the medical opinion of the medical practitioner registered under the MTP Act is required. A pregnant person cannot ask for a termination of pregnancy without fitting in one of the reasons set out in the law. The other set of limitations that the law provides is the gestational age of the pregnancy. The pregnancy can be terminated for any of the above reasons, on the opinion of a single registered medical practitioner up to 20 weeks of the gestational age. From 20 weeks up to 24 weeks, the opinion of two registered medical practitioners is required. This extended gestational limit is applicable to certain categories of women which the rules define as either a survivor of sexual assault or rape or incest, minors, change of marital status during the ongoing pregnancy, i.e. either widowhood or divorce, women with major physical disabilities, mentally-ill women including mental retardation, the ground of foetal malformation incompatible with life or if the child is born it would be seriously handicapped, and women with pregnancy in humanitarian settings or disaster or emergency situations as declared by the government.
Any decision for termination of pregnancy beyond 24 weeks gestational age, only on the ground of foetal abnormalities can be taken by a Medical Board as set up in each State, as per the law. No termination of pregnancy can be done in the absence of the consent of the pregnant person, irrespective of age and/or mental health.
The law, as an exception to all that is stated above, also provides that where it is immediately necessary to save the life of the pregnant woman, the pregnancy can be terminated at any time by a single registered medical practitioner. This, as stated, is the exception and is understood to be resorted to only when the likelihood of the pregnant woman dying is immediate.
Seeking judicial permission
While India legalised access to abortion in certain circumstances much before most of the world did the same, unfortunately, even in 2020 we decided to remain in the logic of 1971. This, despite the fact that by the time the amendments to the MTP Act were tabled before the Lok Sabha in 2020, just before the lockdown following the novel coronavirus pandemic, courts across the country (over the preceding four years) had seen close to 500 cases of pregnant women seeking permission to terminate their pregnancy (broadly on reasons of either the pregnancy being as a result of sexual assault or there being foetal anomalies incompatible with life). In a number of these cases, the courts had articulated the right of a pregnant woman to decide on the continuation of her pregnancy as a part of her right to health and right to life, and therefore non-negotiable. Similarly, a number of courts had also viewed the cases at hand in the realm of the facts of the case and decided not to set the interpretation of the law straight.
This was also after the landmark right to privacy judgment of the Supreme Court of India in which it was held that the decision making by a pregnant person on whether to continue a pregnancy or not is part of such a person’s right to privacy as well and, therefore, the right to life. The standards set out in this judgment were also not incorporated in the amendments being drafted. The new law is not in sync with other central laws such as the laws on persons with disabilities, on mental health and on transgender persons, to name a few. The amendments also did not make any attempts to iron out the conflations between the MTP Act and the Protection of Children from Sexual Offences (POCSO) Act or the Drugs and Cosmetics Act, to name a few.
While access to abortion has been available under the legal regime in the country, there is a long road ahead before it is recognised as a right of a person having the capacity to become pregnant to decide, unconditionally, whether a pregnancy is to be continued or not.
Anubha Rastogi is a lawyer practising in the courts of Mumbai for the past 19 years and is an active voice on sexual reproductive health and justice issues
‘From Bharat to India’ is an eye-catching title, obverse as it is to prevalent terminology. This is the description that eminent sociologist and former president of the International Sociological Association, T.K. Oommen, has used for part two of his autobiographical essay; the first section, ‘Workography’, was published some years ago. This neat, albeit unusual, bifurcation of life sheds light on his thought process.
A secure society
Over the years, Prof. Oommen has written extensively on the concept of social security. He says the principal challenges to the evolution of a nation lie in minimising disparity, eradicating discrimination, and avoiding alienation. He has listed nine categories of socially and/or politically and/or excluded groups in our society: “Dalits, Adivasis, OBCs, cultural minorities — both religious and linguistic, women, refugees-foreigners-outsiders, people [of] Northeast India, the poor and the disabled”. He has suggested that “the three sources of exclusion in India — stratification, heterogeneity and hierarchy — create intersectionality.” This insecurity manifests itself in genocide, culturocide and ecocide and in its absence, a society may be conceptualised as secure.
The concluding sections of the monograph are on the idea of India, on social formation and the moulding of individual identities. Prof. Oommen dwells on the diversity of our social make-up and makes the telling point that his identity as a Dravidian can be traced to 5,000 years ago, his identity as a Syrian Christian to two millennia and as a Malayalam speaker to six centuries. Each of these coexists with his being an Indian for seven decades and, by the same token, qualifies the latter. The Indian polity, he says, “has the most elaborate set of identities based on class, religion, gender, caste, region, language and their intersectionalities as well as consequent permutations and combinations. To ignore this complex social set up and speak in terms of ‘multiple identities’ is not only simplistic but also misleading. And, given the long history of India and its shifting frontiers, it is not easy even to identify the identity markers of Indian citizens and demarcate the numerous identity groups in India.” A fruitful route forward would be to look at “the major steps in the social formation of India”.
These remarks suggest a re-look at the contours of the current, politically fashionable debate about unity in diversity and social inclusion. This does not seem to be happening; instead, as a reputable journal has put it, ‘bulldozing the idea of India’ seems to have become the preferred option of those associated with the ruling circles. This is neither desirable nor healthy for the polity and while there is endless talk of the Constitution, the principles of liberty, justice, equality and fraternity that are intended to give unity to the nation are being sidestepped.
Recalling these principles compels us to revert to B.R. Ambedkar’s last speech in the Constituent Assembly on November 25, 1949 and to his three warnings to ensure continuance of democracy “not merely in form but also in fact.” These were constitutional procedures, avoidance of hero worship, and social democracy instead of mere political democracy. The latter, Ambedkar emphasised, necessitates equality and fraternity. Why then is the principle of fraternity absent from the pronouncements of leaders? Its absence suggests a disconcerting pattern and leads to the endorsement of differentiations between citizen and citizen. How would such polarisation promote national unity?
The common denominator
Given the diversity and complexity of India, the only constitutionally valid common denominator is citizenship. This is the point at which fraternity can and should be practiced among equals. Prof. Oommen, however, is not content with this and seeks “an isomorphous model for India’s socio-cultural reality”. He opines that it is “only through the conflation of state and nation” can our Republic be considered a nation. Cultural monoism and secularism are insufficient, he says; instead, “the idea of conceptualizing India as a multicultural polity is more amenable than a secular India.” The sheet anchor of this has to be citizenship.
There is a teaser towards the end in relation to Article 351 of the Constitution on the national language. Hindi is to be enriched by ‘Hindustani’ along with other languages in the Eighth Schedule; yet the latter does not figure in the list of the Eighth Schedule. Prof. Oommen instead suggests that “India shall be a multicultural nation and not a nation-state having many identities and that eventually the preferable solution would lie in a confederation – USSA (United States of South Asia).” Could this be one way of giving shape to Bharat?
Hamid Ansari is former Vice-President of India
Last month, the Telangana Rashtra Samithi, the Congress and the BJP went all out to woo the disgruntled farmers of Telangana. Chief Minister K. Chandrasekhar Rao and his Cabinet colleagues led a dharna in New Delhi on April 11 in support of the demand that the Centre procure paddy. The Congress brought in Rahul Gandhi to lead a farmers’ rally on May 6 at Warangal where it announced the ‘Warangal Declaration’. Not to lag behind, the BJP State president Bandi Sanjay’s three week-long padayatra has been devoted to exposing the TRS government’s “anti-farmer policies” and the failure of the former Congress government in completing pending irrigation projects.
The ‘Warangal Declaration’ assures a Rs. 2 lakh farm loan waiver at one go and an increase in paddy support price to Rs. 2,500 per quintal if the Congress is brought to power. It also promises investment support of Rs. 15,000 per acre per annum to both land owners and tenant farmers under the Indiramma Rythu Bharosa scheme. This is to replace the present Rythu Bandhu scheme. The TRS says the Warangal Declaration is nothing but a repeat of the State government’s existing schemes “with some changes here and there”.
Even after the April 11 protest, the Centre stood its ground and the State had no option but to procure the Rabi paddy. It procured 8.63 lakh tonnes of paddy worth Rs. 1,812 crore from 1,28,329 farmers till May 9. Of this, 7.59 lakh tonnes have been shifted to rice mills for custom milling as raw rice. The government has opened 5,299 procurement centres in 30 districts.
Agriculture Minister S. Niranjan Reddy admitted that there has been some delay in implementing crop loan waiver of up to Rs. 1 lakh per farmer in four years as promised in the 2018 Assembly election manifesto. This, he said, was mainly because of the impact of COVID-19 on the State’s revenue. Loan waiver of up to Rs. 1 lakh was implemented after the TRS’s victory in the 2014 polls, he pointed out.
The TRS sought to know from both the Congress and the BJP why no State under their rule is implementing schemes such as Rythu Bandhu and Rythu Bima.
At present, the major problem for Telangana farmers is the snail’s pace at which paddy procurement is progressing even as untimely rains have damaged crop in the farm fields and at procurement centres. The State government blames the Centre (Food Corporation of India) for lack of storage space. It says it is unable to move the custom milled rice from mills to godowns. While mills lack space to hold rice stocks on their own, godowns are filled with the previous season’s stocks.
While political parties are busy wrangling, organisations working for farmers say there is no policy framework to support the sector at the national level although States too have their responsibilities. “It is absurd that the Centre has no Agriculture Advisory Council. As a result, the farm sector suffers from the produce and perish syndrome,” says CIFA chief adviser P. Chengal Reddy. He says the government must make farmers globally competitive so that farming is more lucrative. Every agricultural commodity needs an action plan and a board at the national level to market the produce globally by bringing uniformity in quality, he says. “Problems include low productivity, high input costs and huge wastage. The government has to give incentives for farm exports,” he says.
But parties, especially the Congress and the BJP, appear to have little to offer. The Congress has not implemented these farm promises in any of the States where it is in power. And most of the policies governing the agriculture sector, such as support price and exports, are in the Centre’s court.
ravi.reddy@thehindu.co.in chandrashekar.bhalki@thehindu.co.in
In a substantial blow in favour of free speech, the Supreme Court has effectively suspended the operation of the sedition provision in the country’s penal law. “All pending trials, appeals and proceedings with respect to the charge framed under Section 124A be kept in abeyance”, it has said in an order that will bring some welcome relief to those calling for the abrogation of Section 124A of the IPC, which criminalises any speech, writing or representation that “excites disaffection against the government”. The Court has recorded its hope and expectation that governments at the Centre and the States will refrain from registering any fresh case of sedition under Section 124A of the IPC, or continuing with any investigation or taking any coercive measure under it. The hope and the expectation arise from the Union government’s own submission that it has decided to re-examine and reconsider the provision as part of the Prime Minister’s efforts to scrap outdated laws and compliance burdens. Perhaps, realising that its order may not be enough to deter thin-skinned and vindictive governments and politically pliant police officers from invoking it against detractors and dissenters, the Court has given liberty to the people to approach the jurisdiction courts if any fresh case is registered for sedition and cite in their support the present order, as well as the Union government’s stand.
That the sedition law is being persistently misused has been recognised years ago, and courts have pointed out that the police authorities are not heeding the limitation imposed by a 1962 Constitution Bench of the Supreme Court on what constitutes sedition. The Court had upheld the section only by reading it down to mean that it is applicable only to “acts involving intention or tendency to create disorder, or disturbance of law and order, or incitement to violence”. In practice, the police have been using the broad definition of sedition to book anyone who criticised the Government in strong and strident language. The question now before the Court is whether it ought to overrule a decision rendered by a five-judge Bench 60 years ago. If it chooses to do so, and strikes down Section 124A as an unconstitutional restriction on free speech, it may help the larger cause of preventing misuse of provisions relating to speech-based offences. However, the Government may choose to prevent such a situation by amending it so that the offence is narrowly defined to cover only acts that affect the sovereignty, integrity and security of the state, as reportedly recommended by a panel of experts. When the Government submitted that it was revisiting the provision on its own, it was expecting only an indefinite postponement of the hearing on the constitutional validity of Section 124A, but it must now heed the spirit of the order and take effective steps to prevent its misuse.
The release of a report by WHO that estimates excess deaths during the COVID-19 pandemic to be nearly 10 times the reported COVID-19 death toll of 4.8 lakh in India between January 2020 and December 2021, the highest for any country, is not surprising. The pandemic did not just contribute to a surge in disease-related mortality, especially of the aged and the infirm, but also disrupted health systems that could have resulted in many other avoidable deaths. A robust estimation of the excess deaths was necessary to understand the pandemic effect in India where death registration after occurrence is not universal across States and medical certification of deaths is quite low in number. The Government has strongly denied the numbers and dismissed the methodology by saying that the WHO approach is based on modelled estimates and not actual data. It countered it by finally releasing the Civil Registration System report for 2020 (two days prior to the release of the WHO report) and saying that the cumulative increase in the number of deaths in 2020 was only 4.74 lakh, lower than the corresponding number for 2019. While most deaths — close to two thirds — occurred during the second wave in India from March to June 2021 (and later in some States such as Kerala), and therefore the late release of the CRS 2020 report does not entirely negate the WHO estimates that are based on registered deaths data available from “sub-national” units, there is indeed a discrepancy for 2020 data.
The WHO estimates for States were based on CRS registration data obtained by news organisations — the bulk of them byThe Hindu . For 2020, cumulatively, the excess deaths estimations (close to 5.5 lakh for 12 States) for most such States for which data were obtained, match the CRS 2020 calculations (5.3 lakh). Discrepancies are quite high for those States where CRS data were only partially or not available earlier. A case in point is Uttar Pradesh where death (8.73 lakh in 2020 vs 9.45 lakh in 2019) and birth registrations (48.5 in 2020 vs 51.3 lakh in 2019) fell significantly and therefore skewed the overall country-wide excess deaths numbers. But without the release of the Sample Registration System data, it is difficult to believe that in States such as U.P., there has been an increase in registration levels even while there is a decrease in actual birth and death registration. The NFHS-5 2021 interviews show that death registration in 2020 was lower than previous years as opposed to the Government’s claims based on CRS 2020. The Government must not dismiss the WHO estimates and should instead look at undertaking its own exercise on excess deaths based on registration data in the CRS/SRS. After all, other methods, including surveys, have corroborated the fact that there was a high under-reporting of COVID-19 deaths during the pandemic.
New Delhi, May 11: The Prime Minister, Mrs. Indira Gandhi, told the Rajya Sabha to-day that a group of Union Ministers, which was looking into all aspects of the question of diffusion of newspaper ownership, had now come to the end of its labours. After its recommendations were received, the matter would be considered by the entire Cabinet. Mrs. Gandhi, who was replying to Mr. Bhupesh Gupta and others said she was sorry that there was some delay in taking a decision on this question. The delay was mainly due to the fact that the question was extremely complex and the Government, therefore, wanted to look into all aspects. Earlier, replying to Mr. Gupta, the Minister of State for Information and Broadcasting, Mrs. Nandini Satpathy, denied that the Government had shelved the proposed Bill for delinking the newspapers from the industrial houses and for the diffusion of ownership. She said a group of Ministers was at present examining certain proposals.The group, which had met four times, included Mohan Kumaramangalam, Mr. H.R. Gokhale, Mr. Raj Bahadur, Mr. Uma Shanker Dikshit, Mr. K.V. Raghunatha Reddy and herself. Since the matter was “very serious”, she could not say how long it would take for the Government to arrive at a decision. Mr. Gupta complained that one year had passed since the Government gave an assurance to bring forward a Bill for diffusion of ownership of newspapers. He wanted to know whether the Prime Minister had recently invited some editors of big newspapers to discuss this question and whether Mr. N.K. Nanporia who had suggested to the late Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru that the Press Commission’s recommendation should be implemented, was one of them.
Until that fateful day in 1996, Sukh Ram, who died on Wednesday aged 94, was a politician from Himachal Pradesh in charge of an important central ministry. By the time the CBI sleuths completed their work in his two bungalows in Delhi and Mandi — their operation beamed to homes across the country by TV channels — Ram had become a national sensation. That night, the CBI officers counted currency notes stacked in beds, cushions and pillows worth Rs 3.61 crore. The CBI raids made for a riveting spectacle and turned Ram, then the Union Minister of Communications and IT (with independent charge), into the face of the abstract idea called political corruption. Ram resigned as minister and the Congress expelled him from the party.
All this action, however, had little impact on Ram’s apparent connect with the voters in his home turf. In 1998, two years after he was expelled from the Congress, the party he represented for three terms in Parliament, he was elected to the Himachal Pradesh legislative assembly from Mandi Sadar constituency with a majority of 22,000 votes. His absence reportedly cost the Congress that election. Post election, the Himachal Vikas Congress, the party he floated, forged an alliance with the BJP, which formed the government. A Delhi court found him guilty in 2009, but both BJP and Congress kept wooing him and he kept changing sides close to elections. Mandi preferred to remember the work he did as a legislator and minister — he is credited with ushering in the telecom revolution in Himachal Pradesh — rather than the currency notes unearthed by the CBI.
Sukh Ram’s story reveals the electorate’s complex relationship with corruption. In 1996, raids at J Jayalalithaa’s residence in Chennai yielded large amounts of gold, silver, saris, shoes, watches etc. She became the chief minister of Tamil Nadu three more times thereafter. A special court convicted her in 2014, the Supreme Court upheld the verdict in 2017, but Amma’s memory reigns supreme in Tamil Nadu.
This editorial first appeared in the print edition on May 12, 2022 under the title ‘Man of the people’.
On Monday, the Indian rupee fell to an all-time low of 77.6 against the dollar during intraday. While it has pulled back marginally since then, the rupee has, of late, been exhibiting signs of weakness. However, the Indian currency is not an outlier. Currencies of most other emerging economies have also exhibited weakness against the dollar. In fact, of late, the Turkish lira, Malaysian ringgit and Thai bhat have declined more sharply than the rupee according to analysts at Bank of Baroda. Notwithstanding these day-to-day fluctuations, the outlook for the Indian rupee continues to be weighed down by tighter global monetary policy, a strengthening of the US dollar and risk aversion, and higher current account deficits.
With the US Federal Reserve hiking rates by 50 basis points, there has been a sell-off in global markets as investors have rushed to the dollar. In India, foreign portfolio investors have pulled out around $5.8 billion since the beginning of this financial year as per data from Kotak, exerting downward pressure on the currency. The DXY index — which measures the US dollar against six major currencies, namely the euro, pound, Canadian dollar, yen, Swedish kroner and Swiss franc — has been rising. This strengthening of the dollar is unlikely to be reversed in the near term. As the US Fed embarks on an aggressive tightening of rates — some analysts are factoring in a terminal rate of more than 3 per cent — asset classes across the world will witness further adjustments. There is also the pressure owing to the rising trade deficit — in April the deficit stood at $20 billion, up from $18.7 billion in March. In fact, according to analysts, the current account deficit is likely to be at its highest level since the crisis of 2013.
During this period, the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) has been intervening to soften the currency’s slide — the fall in its foreign exchange reserves suggests that is the case. However, considering that the rupee is overvalued, the central bank should allow the currency to slide, allowing it to find its own level, intervening only to smoothen excess volatility. Currency depreciation will act as an automatic stabiliser. It will help ease current account pressures by curbing imports, but more importantly, it will help boost exports — a critical driver of the country’s economy at the current juncture.
This editorial first appeared in the print edition on May 12, 2022 under the title ‘Let rupee fall’.
A British warship fired on an Argentine surface vessel in Falkland sound, separating the two main islands in the disputed South Atlantic colony and a loud explosion occurred, according to the British Defence Office. Ministry spokesperson Ian Mcdonald said that there was no evidence of the vessel being but he said, “the incident and its location show how tight our grip is on the Falkland Islands”. The shelling which occurred in the darkness just off Bold Cove was the closest naval arrangement since the islands were invaded on April 2. He did not identify the British ship involved.
Prime Minister Indira Gandhi has called upon the people of Kerala to elect a government that works. A state government that is hell bent on confrontation with the Centre cannot solve the problems of the state or do any good to the people, she said. Mrs Gandhi denied the charge that the Centre was discriminating against the states and said that the Centre always took in the problems of states in the broader national context.
Prince Phillip has expressed the fear that the British naval forces in Falkland might be shooting whales for vessels, mistaking their echoes for sirens.
Pakistan may soon acquire nuclear weapons and when it does, any Indian attack on its arsenal is unlikely according to the International Institute for Strategic Studies. It noted that the half-finished French re-processing plant at Chasma was apparently still under construction but the hot cell facility at the Institute for Nuclear Science and Technology might have expanded, and yielded a small amount of plutonium.
The Supreme Court’s interim order on Wednesday, effectively putting on hold Section 124A of the Indian Penal Code that defines and penalises sedition, is a very welcome intervention. This provision has been on the statute books for over 130 years, pre-dates the Constitution and has been invoked more in its misuse. A three-judge bench led by Chief Justice of India NV Ramana has crucially moved the needle in the right direction on the controversial law with its “prima facie view that the rigor of Section 124A of IPC is not in tune with the current social milieu, and was intended for a time when this country was under the colonial regime.” Significantly, the Centre which had initially defended the law, changed its stand, told the Court that the provision will be reviewed and sought more time. The Court has taken on board this change in the government’s position to put the provision in abeyance till the review process is complete.
While the final decision on the issue is yet to come, whether through the court’s final ruling or the process of Parliament, the SC has decidedly put the onus on the government to prevent the misuse of the law. The Court has adopted a conservative but practical approach by ordering a formal pause of all pending proceedings involving the sedition law even as it has raised the bar for registration of fresh cases. Underlining the concerns of rampant wrongful use of the provision, which even the Attorney General for India KK Venugopal raised, the bench said it “expect(s)” that till the re-examination is complete, “it will be appropriate not to continue the usage of the aforesaid provision of law by the governments.” It would “hope and expect” that the state and central governments will restrain from registering any FIR, continuing any investigation or taking any coercive measures by invoking Section 124A of IPC while the aforesaid provision of law is under consideration, the court said. And that it was doing so while remaining “cognisant of security interests and integrity of the State on one hand, and the civil liberties of citizens on the other hand”.
Having made a strong pitch for reviewing the law on its own, the Centre must now prioritise the issue. Union Minister for Law and Justice Kiren Rijiju’s comments in the immediate aftermath of the interim order, on a “laxman rekha” between the judiciary and the executive, and the government’s imperative to respect not just the Constitution but also other laws, signal a discomfort with the Court’s directives. This is perhaps the first time that a criminal law has been put on hold, and effectively stayed, pending a test of constitutionality. The Court’s calibrated approach applies much-needed pressure on the government to ensure that its final decision is time-bound and not a means to stall a more comprehensive reckoning with the law. On sedition, the government attempted to mount the high ground, invoking the occasion of the 75th year of the independence and the Prime Minister’s intent. The court has now put it to the test.
This editorial first appeared in the print edition on May 12, 2022 under the title ‘A hopeful pause’.
A question in an undergraduate examination of political science comparing two ideologies appeared to have alarmed the powers that be. The University Grants Commission (UGC) has reprimanded the Sharda University, claiming that the question goes against our national ethos and asked it to ensure this does not happen again. Some students protested against the question and disallowed their fellow students from answering it as well. Such reactions suggest that now requiring students to think is an objectionable revolt against the “staid” objective of imbibing information passively. The headlines of the reports and articles in The Indian Express regarding this incident sum up a whole host of issues relating to higher education in India.
One, in the new education regime, college and university administrators have been given unrestricted freedom to rule like despots as long as they do not ask the government for funds. The only requirement is the enforcement of intellectual obedience – now demanded in unconcealed communications by the UGC and Ministry of Education. This is implemented on ground with the “able assistance” of student groups aligned with the Bharatiya Janata Party. The extent to which this is normalised on campuses should be gauged from the blocking of invitations even by progressive students groups. It feels tiring to repeat again and again that this regrettable trend undermines the very function of a university.
Two, the more recent incidents show a proclivity for disciplining private universities as well. Satisfied with how the subordination of intellectual thought at public universities has progressed, it appears that the “competent authorities” are now diverting their attention to private universities where, in an environment of little to no state regulation, there was a danger that free thought might flourish.
Three, the way in which the university in question referred to an ad-hoc teacher is a rude reminder of the precarity and powerlessness built into the system, which is only intensifying. Teaching is also a livelihood of teachers. Teachers who can be hired and fired at the will of administrators, and teachers who can get promoted only as a reward for their consent to keep quiet or take pride in colluding with the intimidation of their own colleagues, can never teach students critical thinking.
Education can be liberating, but education is also a form of social control. Everyone knows that under Fascism, freedom of speech remains limited. However, not many realise that Fascism discourages thinking and exchange of ideas because thinking can lead to political, scientific and even economic advancement. This is the reason why Fascism, no matter how populist, can never be in the interest of the poor and depressed classes. Throughout history, Fascists have instigated people to conflict, and have glorified those who wage war against intellect, primarily because they are interested in obedient subordination of all to the “will and guidance” of the state instead of social justice and peace. It is easy to recognise that this is totalitarianism.
The term “totalitarianism” was coined by a professor of philosophy, Giovanni Gentile, who described himself as a “philosopher of Fascism”. Fascism being in power in Italy at the time, both the terms – “fascism” and “totalitarianism” — did not carry the negative connotations of our times. Gentile had immense influence not only on public education as Benito Mussolini’s education minister but went on to define the very idea of a “fascist intellectual”. He believed that truth can be “revealed” to mind and should be in aid of the Fascist state. This idea has been useful for rulers with totalitarian tendencies of all shades and has received a fresh lease of life in the post-truth era. Although the present day proponents of filling students up to the brim with nationalistic jingoism would like everyone to forget the historical roots of their ideas, their attempts at blocking not only expression but also thought are nothing new. Co-option of sections of youth to unleashing machismo on university and college campuses gives away their genealogy.
In their specifics, Hindutva and Fascism may not be exactly identical. But suspension of a teacher, who asked students to compare the two, shows that they certainly share some important traits. Among these is a determination to control the thoughts of masses through a tight grip over media and the expressions of those whose primary task is to think and make others reflect.
Even if we do not speak up every time on everything that morally requires us to raise our voices, the thinking citizens of this country ought to wonder about the answers of the students if they had been allowed to attempt the exam question. Why couldn’t the students who thought that the two ideologies in question are not alike, write an answer and give arguments supporting their position? Perhaps this question should continue to echo in all our minds.
The writer is an academic and MP, Rashtriya Janata Dal
The unfortunate incident at Sharda University over the setting of a question paper is problematic at multiple levels. Linking Hindutva to Fascism has been one of the tried, tested and failed textbook methods of the left-leaning intellectual establishment of our country. Justice MC Chagla in his autobiography, Roses in December, described himself as a Muslim by birth, Christian by education and Hindu by culture. Hindutva is essentially Hindu-ness and it is the ideological manifestation of a cultural idea that is rooted in our ethos and civilisational consciousness. Sarve bhavantu sukinah, sarve santu niramaya, that is, “Let all be healthy and happy” is the elementary definition of Hindutva.
However, there is a profound existential crisis being faced today by those who are at the fringes of Indian politics. These forces are vehemently against those who do not subscribe to their “idea of India”. There is not one “idea of India”; there are multiple ideas of India. Adi Shankaracharya in Shankar Bhashya said, “Even if the Vedas suggest that fire is inherently cold and it does not emit light, then I will vehemently disagree with it”. This is Hindutva, where one text is not considered the fountainhead. Every individual is not only allowed but is encouraged to aptly use his or her mental faculties and apply the test of rationality, instead of having blind faith in any particular idea.
Therefore any effort to put Hindutva and Fascism in the same bracket is nothing but a design intended to insult the civilisational wisdom of our nation. From Swami Vivekananda to Mahatma Gandhi, every saint and social reformer has taken inspiration from Hindutva to bring generational reforms to society. Fascism is a concept alien to our land.
The fact that the Bharatiya Janata Party is able to receive the people’s mandate repeatedly in elections is itself an assertion of the faith of the Indian public in the idea of Hindutva. Hindutva alone is capable of being comprehensive and inclusive at the same time. It was only the prevailing atmosphere of Hindutva that made it possible for a non-upper caste person to become one of the most popular prime ministers of the country.
Diana L Eck, scholar and professor of Comparative Religion and Indian Studies at Harvard University has, on multiple occasions, observed that secularism is endemic to Indian culture. There are many practices in Islam today that are inspired by Hindu customs. For example, in Darbhanga, a district in north Bihar, some Muslim communities follow the 13-day death rituals.
Against this background, the setting of the controversial question paper raises an old but disturbing point. When the political expression of Hindutva is increasingly becoming globally acceptable, there are forces within and outside that are inimical to the unity and integrity of our country. What would have happened if this question paper had surfaced in any other country, targeting the faith that the majority community professes in that country? The liberty to even think and articulate to such an extent is also only possible in a nation that believes in Hindutva. The University Grants Commission has rightly initiated action in this regard. In the world where we live today, various forces are envious of India’s growing stature as a rising global power. We must not be complacent and let those forces create fissures and instability in our society.
The writer is assistant professor, Patna University and national spokesperson, BJP
“Do not drink and drive” is a general dictum in most nations. But state governments in India would rather have their citizens drink more and drive more, albeit not together. Facetious as this may sound, it is only half in jest.
After the introduction of the Goods and Services Tax (GST) in 2017, state governments lost their independent taxation powers. The only two significant avenues for states to generate their own tax revenues, without having to seek approval from the Union government, are liquor and fuel since they are outside the GST’s ambit. Alcohol and fuel combined account for over a third of states’ own tax revenues, up from a quarter before GST. Specifically, alcohol’s share in overall state taxes has increased by 50 per cent from the pre-GST years.
When the entire country was under a Covid lockdown in 2020, state governments of all political hues were forced to keep liquor shops open, since they had no other independent means to raise resources and the Union government reneged on its GST commitments. The tragic irony of state governments relying on people’s alcohol habits to manage a health crisis was an unintended consequence of the GST.
Both the Union and state governments levy high fuel taxes to garner revenues that they do not have to seek permission for or share with each other. This fiscal confrontation is punishing the common Indian with the highest fuel tax rates in the world. To put it cheekily, for the fiscal independence of state governments, GST has induced a perverse dependence on people’s driving and drinking indulgences.
The solution to the problem of states’ growing reliance on liquor and fuel taxes is not to bring these sin goods within the GST ambit, as experts suggest. The roots of GST’s current woes lie not in economics but in politics. A technical approach to resolving GST’s issues through expanded coverage or rationalisation of tax rates would be myopic and futile.
Government technocrats from the Vajpayee government onwards have peddled the GST as a panacea that would untangle disparate taxation structures across various states, reduce transportation costs and create a unified market that would boost economic growth and yield buoyant tax revenues for everyone to share. They forgot that we do not live in an economy but in a society governed by politics.
The 2015 GST report by the expert committee chaired by the then chief economic adviser proudly proclaimed that the GST would help in “making one India” and waxed eloquent about the economic efficiency benefits of a centralised GST, achieved through curtailing states’ fiscal powers. This naïve technocratic endorsement of centralisation was exploited adroitly by the ruling political class to an expanded “one nation, one language”, “one nation, one religion”, “one nation, one election” flurry of anti-federalist and anti-pluralistic ideas of “one India”. It is not far-fetched to hold the view that GST may have inadvertently paved the path for the over-arching centralisation project by the Modi government in many other areas, under the garb of efficiency and uniformity.
Five years after GST, the promised economic gains are elusive. Tax buoyancy has actually declined post-GST. The Union and state governments started to fight as the money got tight. Fiscal federalism woes spilt over to other areas with state governors quarrelling with elected chief ministers, non-BJP states complaining of unfavourable treatment by the Union government during Covid, the prime minister and chief ministers bickering over protocols in government events and so on. Fuel cesses, Hindi impositions, disputes over the NEET exam and a governor rejecting a duly approved state legislation are not disparate events. They are interconnected issues involving the same political leaders and institutions. The GST has ruptured India’s larger federal structure and destroyed trust between the Union government and states. Cooperative federalism cannot just be an economic compact but a broader ethic.
India’s GST is precariously held together by the loose thread of “compensation guarantee”, under which states surrendered their fiscal powers in return for guaranteed revenues. This thread is about to snap in June. The euphoria over record GST collections in the last few months is not enough to tide over the trust deficit that plagues GST.
Fixing GST requires a fundamental reset of the Union-states relationship and nurturing it back to a state of mutual trust and respect. Given the staggering economic, social and political diversity of India’s states, GST was always going to be a tough proposition for any government or prime minister. Implicit bargains such as revenue guarantee agreements between the Union and states are necessary but not sufficient to make GST tenable. Now that India is committed down the GST path, the onus lies with the Modi government to deftly balance all stakeholders and win back their confidence, rather than thrust GST further down the states’ throats such as bringing alcohol and fuel within its ambit. This would only constrain the fiscal sovereignty of states even more and exacerbate mistrust.
The GST brouhaha is no longer just an economic issue but a larger political issue of state rights with public opinion in states like Tamil Nadu, Kerala and Punjab stacked against the idea. Merely extolling its economic benefits is not enough to convince people in these states to embrace a retooled GST.
Perhaps there is a lesson to learn from another democracy, Britain, where public opposition to losing some sovereign freedom in return for economic gains of a common European market, was capitalised by politics, eventually leading to Brexit. If the Union-states relationship and the federal structure are not rebuilt with trust and faith soon, India may have to confront its own “GSTExit”.
This column first appeared in the print edition on May 12, 2022 under the title ‘Heading for GSTExit’. Chakravarty is a political economist and chairman of Data Analytics of the Congress Party
“The station-house officer will sometimes bush up a case on payment of his terms; he will receive presents from parties and their witnesses… Suspects and innocent persons are bullied and threatened into giving information they are supposed to possess. The police officer, owing to want of detective ability or to indolence, directs his efforts to procure confessions by improper inducement, by threats and by moral pressure.” No, this is not a quote from yet another committee on police reforms — from a belated follow-up to the Supreme Court’s Prakash Singh judgment of 2006. The quote is from the report of the 1902-03 Indian Police Commission, which was also not the first of its kind. There were committees in states as well as the 1860 Police Commission that led to the Police Act of 1861. Since then, down the years, there have been several Committees/Commissions — some directly on the police (the National Police Commission and the Ribeiro and Padmanabhaiah committees), others alluding to police reforms indirectly (the Malimath Committee and the Second Administrative Reforms Commission). Obviously, matters weren’t satisfactory. Otherwise, we wouldn’t have had the Supreme Court’s 2006 judgment.
The court’s directives covered seven domains: State security commissions; the appointment and tenure of DGPs; the tenure of other police officers; the separation of investigation from law and order; police establishment boards for transfers, postings and promotions; police complaints authorities; and the National Security Commission.
Subsequently, in 2006, a draft Model Police Act was framed. In July 2015, we were told, “As per information available, so far 15 States — Assam, Bihar, Chhattisgarh, Haryana, Himachal Pradesh, Kerala, Maharashtra, Meghalaya, Mizoram, Punjab, Rajasthan, Sikkim, Tamil Nadu, Tripura and Uttarakhand — have formulated their State Police Act and another two states — Gujarat and Karnataka — have amended their Police Acts. Thus, a total of 17 state governments have either formulated their state police acts or amended the existing one.” In January 2019, we were told, “The Government has reviewed the Model Police Act, 2006 and accordingly, a draft Model Police Bill, 2015 has been prepared and placed on the website of BPR&D. Further, as ‘police’ is a state subject, falling in List II of the Seventh Schedule of the Constitution of India, it is primarily the responsibility of the state governments to formulate a new Police Act or amend their existing Act on the lines of the draft Model Police Bill prepared by the Central Government.” Thereafter, the pandemic got in the way.
Police is, indeed, in the State List — largely so. The Union List mentions the armed forces of the Union, CBI and some reasons for preventive detention. The State List has public order and police. The Concurrent List has criminal law and procedure and some reasons for preventive detention. Because of this dichotomy, the home ministry has two police divisions — Police-I and Police-II. The latter has, under its ambit, central armed police forces. In 2016, the Niti Aayog published a paper on building smart police. Taking stock of what the states had done on the 2006 judgment, among other things, it suggested moving police to the Concurrent List. Since that July 2015 statement and Niti Aayog’s paper, all states have complied with the seven directives, ostensibly. Compliance can mean the letter of the law, or the spirit. For instance, the mere setting up of a State Security Commission is compliance. But the more pertinent questions are about the composition of such a Commission, its powers and the extent to which its recommendations are binding. Once one does this sifting, compliance is less convincing. The story is similar with respect to the other six directives as well. The states do not comply and do not wish to comply. Only a handful are keen to even initiate partial reform. Broadly, those directives are about transparency and reducing discretion. That may be desirable for improving police efficiency. But who wants to give up discretion voluntarily? This should be interpreted as contempt of court. Indeed, there is such a petition by Harish Salve. As far as I know, it is still pending. Perhaps the Supreme Court feels that there will be reform in the future.
Meanwhile, the structure varies across states. Differences between provinces were actually among the concerns of the Police Commissions of 1860 and 1902-03. In terms of that variation, we haven’t progressed much in 2022. Perhaps because of the resultant inefficiency, states often readily request the central armed police forces whenever there is a problem. A few years ago, the Vidhi Centre for Legal Policy did an analysis of the Seventh Schedule and recommended the retention of police in the State List. The State List versus Concurrent List idea is a red herring. Any isolated movement of an entry from the State List to the Concurrent List will be perceived as hampering rights of States and interpreted as greater centralisation. A complete overhaul of the Seventh Schedule is a big-ticket idea, into which, public order and police also fit. This doesn’t mean there is no way out of the impasse other than action by the Supreme Court. If two or more states so desire, Article 252(1), does allow Parliament to legislate.
In tracking compliance across states, while it is true there is no state which is fully compliant with the seven directives, it isn’t difficult to think of at least two states that are largely compliant. At the risk of some subjectivity, one can think of Andhra Pradesh, Arunachal Pradesh, Karnataka, Kerala, Manipur, Mizoram, MP, Nagaland, Tamil Nadu and Uttarakhand. If one follows the 252(1) route, the prospects don’t seem that dismal. Now that the pandemic is out of the way, it is necessary to bring police reforms back on the agenda. The country deserves to move on from 1861.
This column first appeared in the print edition on May 12, 2022 under the title ‘The good cop’. The writer is chairman, Economic Advisory Council to the PM. Views are personal
The iPod nano came into my life in the spring of 2006, five years after Steve Jobs’ iconic music device had changed the music industry forever and a year into a long-distance relationship that was now poised on the brink of a resolution. The hazy outlines of a life together were beginning to take shape, but, as an inconvertible introvert, deficient forever in articulating my emotions in words, I turned to music to take the relationship ashore. Every night after work, in my twin-sharing paying-guest apartment, on my roommate’s battered Philips portable twin-player stereo, from music albums borrowed and scrounged from friends and colleagues and from late-night radio shows, I would record the songs that seemed to speak for me —Tagore and Leonard Cohen, Beatles and Joan Baez, Alanis Morissette and Joni Mitchell, Bob Dylan and Ace of Base — a playlist that was both the old tentative me and a new person thrilling in the headiness of adulthood. We were to meet that summer and decide on the future. Perhaps, the music would be my voice, when words (invariably) failed me.
In his deeply personal collection of essays, 31 Songs (2002), English writer and lyricist Nick Hornby wrote about the high fidelity between music and one’s emotional life — the deep resonance some songs have with a particular stage in our life, no matter the cultural distance between the musician and the listener. “I love the relationship that anyone has with music … because there’s something in us that is beyond the reach of words, something that eludes and defies our best attempts to spit it out. … It’s the best part of us probably …,” he writes.
Looking back, music had always been the soundtrack of my life, and the changing musical interfaces, a record of the passage of time. The AIR years of my childhood in Kolkata, listening to Ameen Sayani on Geetmala read out letters written by the audience to their loved ones in faraway places; my mother recording songs from the radio on “blank” Sony audio cassettes that my NRI aunt always brought for her; the angst of my teenage soothed by the late-night FM radio shows — RJ Jimmy Tangree speaking of love and relationship on programmes such as Direct Dil Se – my cousin and I saving up pocket money to buy the latest Bollywood chartbuster secretly after our parents had resolutely refused to buy the album for us (to be fair to them, both of us had dubious taste in Bollywood music, a trait that continues to this day); the liberation of the Sony Walkman, a high-school gift from my father, that moved music away from a shared mode of entertainment to a personal one, and, finally, the iPod, that little miracle worker that made the sharing of the personal with the one you chose, an act of faith.
But the ownership of the iPod was still in the future. In that spring of 2006, I was consumed by the thought of which eight, or 10 if I was lucky, songs to keep and what to record over in the hour-long duration of the blank cassette. Did the lyrics of Mitchell’s “You’re my thrill” seem too forward? Could I squeeze in another Cohen besides “Bird on a wire”? By the time the summer of decisions rolled in, I had given up trying to choose, and racked by self-doubt, abandoned the idea of the personalised gift.
When we meet eventually, it’s not a difficult decision to make. The conversation flows easily and my crippling social anxiety dissipates even before I am aware of it. We don’t discuss the future, but we feel more certain of it. The day after I see him off, a tiny package arrives at my apartment. Inside, there’s a sleek box with a gleaming pocket-sized rectangle in burnished silver grey and a pair of headphones. It’s an iPod Nano, that holds up to 1,000 songs. “So you don’t have to choose,” reads the handwritten note with it.
Reading about Apple’s decision to phase out the iPod Touch, which would bring to close the 21-year-old run of a product that had revolutionised not just how we listen to music but also how we communicate, I am reminded of the old Nano. In the nearly two decades since, it has long been discarded as we discovered newer forms of streaming music. But its promise of abandon and the connections it established linger on like a half-forgotten lyric you can’t get out of your head.
Write to the author at paromita.chakrabarti@expressindia.com.
With the Congress mulling a one-family one-ticket norm ahead of its brainstorming session in Jaipur, the big question is whether the idea is feasible at all for the party despite the attacks on this score from the BJP. At its very top, there is the three-member Gandhi family, forming the high command and two of whom are Lok Sabha MPs. A number of other leaders have also initiated their sons and daughters into politics and expect these scions to inherit their top billing in the party.
BS Hooda and his son Deepender, Kamal Nath and his son Nakul, Digivijaya Singh and his son Jaivardhan, P Chidambaram and his son Karti, Siddaramaiah and his son Yathindra, Mallikarjun Kharge and his son Priyank, Pratibha Singh and son Vikramaditya, Harish Rawat and daughter Anupama, Ashok Gehlot and son Vaibhav have been some of the big multiple ticket aspirants from the same family. It is unlikely that any of the senior netas or their children will call time on their legislative careers to subscribe to the party’s whims.
But Congress cannot ignore the damage that the principle of dynastic succession has done to the party. Leaders without pedigree are often overlooked as the scions appear to enjoy easier access to plum positions in the family. Not just youngsters aspiring for a career in politics, young voters are also tuned off by parties that personify dynasty. Recognising these realities, Akhilesh Yadav made it a point to keep his extended Yadav family out of his campaign in the recent UP assembly polls.
Beholden to its influential netas, most of whom practise “parivarvaad”, Congress’s one-family one-ticket norm is likely to be defeated by vested interests unless the Gandhis show the way.
There’s never been a better moment than now for consigning to history a law that goes back to the 19th century and that free India should have never had on its statutes for so long. GoI has agreed that sedition law provisions need re-examination, and the Supreme Court has strongly restrained all authorities from filing cases under IPC Section 124A till the review is complete. The court has also rightly asked that bail be expedited for those already charged under these provisions. We should also note that Narendra Modi has added the considerable weight of his personality and office to these efforts. But all of this will amount to little if the review ends in merely “reforming” the law – sedition provisions must go.
These columns have long argued that a sedition law, in any form, is an ever-present threat to civil liberties, an invitation to authorities to misuse it, and a perfect opportunity for politicians in office to settle scores. Therefore, no matter how finely-grained a review is, and however sincere the intent of both SC and GoI to guard against misuse of a reformed law, there’s little doubt it will be misused. The problem lies in the dangerously vague concept of ‘sedition’. State and local authorities will always find a way to use it as a blunt instrument. And local courts, as is well-established, very rarely question FIRs based on such laws. Remember that quite a few attempts were made to fine-tune the law to prevent its brute-force application.
The 1962 Kedar Nath Singh judgment by SC attempted to narrow sedition’s application to instances betraying an “intention” and “tendency” to cause public disorder or endanger the security of the state. But words like “hatred”, “contempt”, “disaffection”, which were in the colonial era law and are still present in provisions, and words like “intention” and “tendency”, lend themselves to broad and subjective interpretations. Such subjectivity simply cannot be removed by tweaking the law. There was also the 1995 Balwant Singh judgment by SC that said mere sloganeering doesn’t amount to sedition. That, too, has had little effect. Slogans and now tweets and chants are seen as enough for slapping a sedition case. Therefore, the process underway now must end in erasing this blot on India’s democracy.
Sedition is of course not the only law that threatens civil liberties and is misused against critics of those in office. UAPA is a prime example of another law that needs a relook. Higher courts, and even some lower courts, have already made caustic observations on police use of UAPA as a tool of repression and harassment. Terrorism is cited as a justification for UAPA, but even granting that, the law needs to be pared down.
Delhi high court’s split verdict on criminalising marital rape is a setback for the legal battle to rid IPC Section 375 of the exception clause, which stipulates that “sexual intercourse or sexual acts by a man with his own wife” isn’t rape. Justice Rajiv Shakdher ruled the exception unconstitutional, terming it violative of Article 14, Article 15, Article 19(1) and Article 21. Justice C Hari Shankar upheld the provision noting that the exception carved for marital relationships was based on intelligible differentia and was reasonable.
The UK in 1991 and several post-colonial nations have criminalised marital rape leaving India in a strange club with the likes of Bangladesh, Nigeria, Iran, Saudi Arabia etc. GoI must change tack. Its affidavit that the issue shouldn’t be “treated merely as a question concerning constitutional validity of a statutory provision” because of “far-reaching socio-legal implications for the country” was unfortunate. Such arguments reduce constitutionally guaranteed rights to abstractions. The reality is that fundamental rights have helped citizens discover agency, dignity and self-preservation.
Making consent immaterial in a marital relationship has the effect of reducing Article 14, which guarantees to every citizen equality before law and the equal protection of all laws, to a high-sounding principle without substance for an assaulted woman. It puts those wives on a weaker footing against husbands who repeatedly “rape” them knowing fully well that the law shields them. Seen in this light, arguments that marital rape cases will damage the institution of marriage are particularly tone-deaf. During the Supreme Court’s hearings to decriminalise adultery, GoI had termed it a threat to the sanctity of marriage. Given such arch-conservative posturing, neither executive nor legislature is likely to address marital rape. This makes the judiciary the best hope for gender justice. It must fast-track appeals against this verdict.
Inflation based on the consumer price index (CPI) accelerated to 7.79% in April from 6.95% in March, driven by expensive food and a fuel price pass-through. The consumer food price index climbed to 8.38% in April from 7.68% a month ago, with edible oils and vegetables rising the fastest. These two groups have a combined weight of 11.67% in the CPI, and although vegetable prices fluctuate seasonally, edible oils are likely to face inflationary pressure till domestic production rises in response to the import disruption caused by the Russia-Ukraine conflict. Inflation in the rest of the food basket, which constitutes slightly over half of the CPI, is within manageable limits.
Fuel and transport, which make up 15.54% of the index, saw inflation in excess of 10% during April. This was the month that oil refiners started increasing prices of transport and cooking fuel after a four-month hiatus since November 2021. Retail fuel prices have not captured the full extent of crude oil and natural gas price escalation since hostilities threatened supplies from Russia, among the world's top exporters of both. Rising input and transportation costs are also showing up in manufactured items used by households, with inflation rates outrunning the CPI. But their effect is dampened by the low weights ascribed to these in the household consumption basket. This impact will be seen in wholesale inflation.
The other data set released on Thursday shows industrial output growing by 1.9% in March from the same month a year ago. This was a blip against the 11.3% growth in 2021-22. The industrial machine stalled with the outbreak of war in Europe as commodity prices and cargo haulage rates surged. Manufacturing output grew by less than 1% during March, which will be an area of concern for making credit more expensive for industry. But with retail inflation above the Reserve Bank of India's (RBI) tolerance band for four months running, and with no immediate respite in sight, the central bank may have to press the pedal on rate hikes.
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The Supreme Court's directions to the Allahabad High Court to grant bail to 1,500-odd first-time offenders who have been languishing in jail for 10 years is the right decision. It turns the spotlight on a malaise that afflicts India's justice system. Courts need to conduct a thorough audit to identify reasons for high pendency rates and put in place measures to ensure resolution of cases in a time-bound manner. Granting bail for crimes where bail is applicable must become a default, not the first recourse.
The high court is hearing cases filed in the 1980s. It is not unlikely that another decade could be spent before the cases of these undertrials languishing in jail are taken up. The Allahabad High Court tops the pendency charts even as it works steadily to reduce its backlog. But it is not the only one, with pendency afflicting the entire judicial system. Pendency rates are rapidly rising in some high courts like Andhra Pradesh, Telangana and Karnataka. There are 5.6 million cases stuck in high courts across India, with 41% cases pending for five years or more, and 21% for 10 years or more. Vacancies on the bench, hearing of frivolous cases, litigants bypassing subordinate courts and endless continuances by lawyers are among the factors that result in cases persisting for years, even decades, on end. Ignorance of the law and lack of access to legal services means a large number of those charged being unable to seek bail, let alone get proper advice.
The apex court move is humane. But it is a band-aid that it has applied before. It is time for a systemic response that does away with a triage method. Justice should be fair and speedy. A slow-moving justice system institutionalises inequity by victimising those without resources.
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A seven-year-long legal battle to criminalise marital rape in India hit a roadblock this week after the Delhi high court delivered a split verdict on a batch of petitions asking for the removal of an exception in India’s rape laws exempting husbands from prosecution for non-consensual sex with their wives.
In their written judgments, the two judges – justices Rajiv Shakdher and C Hari Shankar – presented diametrically opposing views on two important questions: Whether the question of a woman’s consent was paramount even within the institution of marriage and whether the architecture of reciprocal rights within a marriage could triumph a woman’s right to seek redressal in criminal rape laws. Justice Shakdher held that the firewall created around non-consensual sex for married men was not constitutional and any expectation of sex in a marriage couldn’t triumph a woman’s right to bodily autonomy and morph into a “unfettered right to sex”. Justice Shankar, on the other hand, held that the institution of marriage was different from all others and carried a “legitimate expectation of sex” and bringing the possibility of the husband being convicted as the wife’s rapist would be “antithetical” to that institution.
These differences appear irreconcilable and it is now up to the Supreme Court to adjudicate the matter. This is significant because judgments from some high courts on the issue have been contradictory – the Karnataka high court this year denied a husband protection from prosecution, the Kerala high court ruled last year that marital rape is valid grounds for divorce, but the Chhattisgarh high court held last year that non-consensual sex with the husband was not rape.
It is important to clear the air on this issue because the right of women to bodily integrity and autonomy is both a cherished constitutional right and at the core of a progressive and just society. It is untenable that violence against women be condoned on a technicality arising from colonial logic and puritanical norms, and it urgently needs to be deliberated by the highest court in the land. Judges must note that India is among a handful of countries that continue to hold on to the marital rape exception and that the United Kingdom, from where it originated, scrapped it decades ago. They must also see government data that says a third of married women experience physical and sexual violence at the hands of their spouses. To say these women should have no legal recourse because of outdated notions about preservation of marriage is antithetical to constitutional protections and a modern society. The top court must affirm their rights.
India has featured in the UNCCD assessment as one of the severely drought-impacted countries. Nearly two-thirds of the country suffered drought from 2020 to 2022. Investing in land will build resilience in communities, fight poverty, and also, crucially, help in carbon sequestration.
In yet another reminder that there needs to be a much greater focus on the planet’s health, a new report has warned that humanity is “at a crossroads” when it comes to managing droughts. The United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD)’s Drought In Numbers, 2022, released on May 11, points towards a rise in the duration of droughts and the severity of impacts on human societies and ecological systems. According to UNCCD, since 2000, the number and duration of droughts has risen 29%; droughts represent 15% of natural disasters, but took the largest human toll, approximately 650,000 deaths from 1970-2019; and in 2022, more than 2.3 billion people face water stress with almost 160 million children exposed to severe and prolonged droughts. Last year, UN reports said droughts are on the verge of becoming the next pandemic and that the climate crisis is going to further the occurrence of droughts.
Alarmingly, scientists at Ghent University, who analysed 40 droughts, also found that like wildfires, they can be self-propagating. While fires propagate downwind by igniting more and more “fuel” in their surroundings, droughts do so by reducing their rainfall supply by drying the land surface. The self-propagating character of droughts may lead to even more significant and more rapidly evolving events in the future and further exacerbate water scarcity and associated socioeconomic and environmental consequences.
India has featured in the UNCCD assessment as one of the severely drought-impacted countries. Nearly two-thirds of the country suffered drought from 2020 to 2022. Studies have also shown the country’s drought-prone area has increased by 57% since 1997. If drought is a problem, sustainable land management is the solution. This must be done on a war-footing for ecological reasons and the co-benefits: Investing in land will build resilience in communities, fight poverty, and also, crucially, help in carbon sequestration.
Protesting a nuclear plant in Tamil Nadu? Attending the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) dharna in Delhi’s Shaheen Bagh? Holding up a “Free Kashmir” poster? Enjoying a game of cricket in which Pakistan defeats India? Calling out corruption in a cartoon? Any of these was enough for the State to slap a case of sedition and label hundreds as ‘’anti-national”. Over decades, the law became a powerful political weapon to silent dissent.
The Supreme Court on Thursday put a hold on Section 124A, till the controversial law is reviewed by the Centre. But scores have been singed and have ended up spending a part of their life in jail. The incarceration has taken a psychological toll on victims and their families.
According to Kapil Sabil, Congress leader and lawyer representing the petitioners, there were 800 sedition cases across India and 13,000 people are in jail. The law – largely used to quell protests and criticisms of the government – has been used by successive political governments. During Manmohan Singh’s time, it was invoked after civilians protested outside the site of a nuclear plant in Kudankulam and slapped on alleged “Maoist sympathisers.” The Narendra Modi government and various Bharatiya Janata Party-led state governments have used sedition – particularly in Uttar Pradesh – against CAA protesters.
HT spoke with four individuals, to trace their personal journeys. They are relieved by the SC stay on the controversial law, even though their cases are still pending in courts of law.
Khaja Peer
The 25-year-old freelance photographer was sitting in his studio at Hosepete in Karnataka when the police knocked on his door on December 25, 2015, and asked him to accompany them. His crime: He had allegedly distributed a pamphlet, asking for Hindus to be taught a lesson for atrocities against Muslims.
The pamphlet – which had Peer’s name on it – led to tension in the town. Before he knew it, stone pelting started and a curfew was imposed.
“Before I opened my studio, I worked as a local journalist and had contacts in the police, but no one was willing to listen to me,” he says. He claims he had no knowledge of the pamphlet or its contents but an FIR was filed against him, initially under sections 153A and 120B.
The tension continued in Hosepete for two days and Peer’s studio was burnt down. His parents, wife and children had to flee their home.
Peer spent 62 days in judicial custody and was granted bail after the police failed to produce a charge sheet within the stipulated 60-day period.
Two years later – when the charge sheet was filed – he was shocked to find that he had also been accused of sedition.
“There are no eye witnesses. Nothing was found from my home or studio to link me to the pamphlet. The charge sheet does not even answer the question of where the pamphlet was printed. No link has been established and I have lost seven years of my life,” he says.
His cameras and computer were destroyed when his studio was burnt down and he had clients screaming for photos they had commissioned.
“I had to start from scratch. My father was a flower seller and we had no savings.” He is slowly rebuilding his life and puts aside money every month for his lawyer. He will now seek legal opinion of what the Supreme Court’s decision means for him.
Tahir Madni
Tahir Madni, an Islamic scholar, runs a madrasa in Uttar Pradesh’s Azamgarh. He is also the general secretary of Rashtriya Ulema Council, and contested the assembly elections in 2012 but lost.
The Ulema Council has a single-point agenda. He says: “Justice for all. Hindus and Muslims are all victims of injustice at the hands of the powerful. The Constitution is the foundation of our country and our unity and strength depends on it”.
He was caught in the crosshairs on February 4, 2020, when he was called by the administration to help break up a Citizenship (Amendment) Act, 2019, protest by a group of women in Azamgarh’s Bilariyaganj. “I spoke to them and they said they will leave after the morning namaaz, but the police did not want the protest to continue overnight.”
The Maulana, who was called in to defuse the protest, ended up being booked for sedition, along with 39 others. They had to all spend the next four months in jail. “We were all kept in one barrack and many were daily wage earners,” he says.
Madni, a 62-year-old, heart patient, was 15 kms away from the protest site when he got a call from the administration seeking his help. He says he tried speaking to the women, but couldn’t force them because, after all, they were only exercising their democratic right by protesting. The women had assured him they would leave after morning prayers but the police intervened at 3 am.
According to the FIR filed the next morning, Madni led the protest and “put up women and kids at the forefront.” The FIR also accused him and the others of chanting anti-national slogans and saying “unspeakable things about Hindu religion and the PM and UP chief minister…They created an atmosphere of terror and chaos.”
The police claimed Madni was leading the protests but videos viewed by HT confirm that the Maulana was appealing to the protesters while standing next to the police.
Madni finally got bail from the Allahabad high court, four months later. He proved, through his lawyer, that he had in fact, planned to organise protests against the CAA, but postponed the plan, not once, but twice – on December 23, 2019, and January 4, 2020, – because the administration told him that the atmosphere was sensitive.
Madni is clear. He will not instigate protests. “It is against my beliefs,” he says, welcoming the apex court’s decision.
Aseem Trivedi
A cartoonist by profession, Aseem Trivedi, has travelled a long distance. From being booked under the controversial law in 2012 in Mumbai, where the Congress was in power in the state and the Centre, he became a co-petitioner with the Editors Guild of India, to appeal the law -- that snatched his freedom of expression – in the Supreme Court.
Trivedi was 25 when he was dubbed an “anti-national” by the Mumbai Police in January 2012. His cartoons had been displayed at the Bandra-Kurla Complex where thousands had gathered to support Anna Hazare’s India Against Corruption Movement.
The police had received a complaint from a private individual, Amit Katanavare, asking them to register an FIR. The letter was forwarded to the directorate of prosecution for legal opinion and what followed was a freezing of Trivedi’s liberties.
The Mumbai Police sent a team to his house in Kanpur, but since he was away in Delhi, the police took his father to the police station for questioning.
Trivedi says he couldn’t believe that cartoons could invoke the stringent provisions under 124 A. He decided to go to Mumbai and surrender. “I acknowledged that I had drawn the cartoons and decided that I would neither hire a lawyer, nor apply for bail.”
An independent lawyer filed a PIL in the Bombay High Court and Trivedi was released after spending four days in custody. The division bench which heard his case observed that while his cartoons were full of anger and disgust – and lacked wit and sarcasm – the same could not be used to encroach upon his freedom of speech and expression.
The stigma, however, remains, says Trivedi. He has not drawn cartoons since them and is shunned by publications. He has now joined an NGO that works in the field of human rights. “I have to keep the kitchen fires burning,” he says.
The charges of sedition were dropped but in 2017, the Mumbai Police filed a second charge sheet under the National Emblem Act. The hearings are ongoing and if found guilty, Trivedi could spend three years in jail.
For now, he is relieved with the apex court’s order stalling the sedition law. “It has never happened before. Such criminal laws have never been stayed.”
SP Udayakumar
Environmental activist SP Udayakumar, who spearheaded the protests against the setting up of a nuclear plant in Kudankulam in Tamil Nadu in 2011, is mentioned in 300 FIRs and charged under several sections including for sedition. The Tamil Nadu government headed by J Jayalalithaa swooped down on villages are filed FIRs against 9,000 people at the time.
Ten years later, the cases have still not been charge sheeted. “Twenty of us were booked under sedition and my passport was impounded,” says Udayakumar, who also had a lookout notice issued against him.
“What is wrong with peaceful protests? How can a sedition case be made out against us? The charge is serious but governments have made a joke out of it,” he says.
He has got used to living under surveillance but the sedition sword hangs on his head. “What do I do about the stigma?” he asks. The answer may lie in the review process the Central government has promised.
According to the Supreme Court, the states should desist filing fresh sedition cases till the law is reviewed. The Centre, after supporting the law, said a day later that it was willing to review it. The questions which remain now are: Will the law be defanged, or will it be scrapped altogether?
In 1993 and 1997, the red carpets of the Uttar Pradesh (UP) Legislative Assembly were stained with blood. The lawmakers had fought ugly battles using mics, glass shards, glasses, paper weights and chairs as missiles, leaving several ministers, the leader of opposition and Members of the Legislative Assembly (MLAs) from all parties — the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP), the Samajwadi Party (SP) and the Congress — grievously injured. Doctors were called in to give first-aid.
Senior journalists covering the proceedings said, “Now, we will send crime reporters to cover the House,” as they saw senior police officials walk into the assembly, a rare sight in any Vidhan Sabha where the writ of the Speaker runs large and where only assembly guards are deployed to maintain decorum and remove irate members. Dharnas and demonstrations in the Well of the House are a common sight across the country, but near-bloodbath is not.
The UP Vidhan Sabha, the largest in the country with 403 members, was built in 1922 after the capital was moved from Allahabad to Lucknow. About five years were spent on the construction of the building, an example of Indo-European architectural craftsmanship, costing about ₹21 lakh.
To quote from the official website of the UP Legislative Assembly, “The front part of this crescent shaped two-storeyed structure is built with carved light brown sandstone blocks from Mirzapur (Chunar). At the centre of the crescent is a large Gothic dome with an attractive “Chhatry” or sky light. Figures sculpted from stone blocks surround the facade of the dome. Above the tri-arched front of the portico is placed the State emblem (crest) carved in marble. Many of the inside halls, galleries and verandahs are built of Agra and Jaipur marble. Beautiful circular marble staircases run on both sides of the entrance hall. The walls of these staircases have now been embellished with beautiful paintings.”
However, the Vidhan Sabha made more news for the speeches that leaders delivered and there was a time when new MLAs used to browse the proceedings in the library to learn from speeches of stalwarts like Charan Singh, Govind Ballabh Pant, Kamlapati Tripathi, Narayan Datt Tiwari and Kalyan Singh to name a few. Few now turn the pages of the thick volumes containing records of the proceedings to learn from the past.
In today’s environment of intolerance and provocations, pandemonium has become the order of the day in many assemblies, so much so that paper missiles are thrown in Parliament.
Once again, a new-look House is all set to greet the newly elected members of the 18th UP Vidhan Sabha on May 23, and they will find tablets on their desks. However, all tablets will be fixed on their desks as a precaution, leaving no scope for their misuse. However, UP assembly speaker Satish Mahana quips lightly, “I am not going to get broken tablets repaired.”
The members of the House have come a long way from the days when they depended on their children to operate it. The first time when MLAs were given laptops, one of them asked, “Yeh laptop kya cheese hai?” Now, the machine plays a crucial role in contesting elections.
Satish Mahana, an MLA, says, “Today, we have to be tech savvy to keep pace with the development of the country.”
However, the biggest challenge before the Speaker, an eight-time MLA, is to ensure decorum and discussions in the House. His long experience may come in handy though he is still struggling with a plan to ensure bonhomie instead of brawls in the House.
So, one step is to expose the public representatives before their voters and supporters by live-streaming the proceedings through social media platforms such as Facebook Live and YouTube. People in even the remotest village can watch their MLA’s conduct and contribution in developing the area.
“Once House proceedings are live-streamed to people through Facebook Live, YouTube and other social media platforms, the MLAs will be more cautious about their conduct in the House and will be under psychological pressure to attend the House more frequently and ask questions pertaining to the problems in their constituencies,” he says.
Mahana hopes that this will help increase the MLAs’ participation in debates and discussions in the House. Barring the zero hour, when members raise public or personal issues, the seats remain vacant most of the day.
But will the public prefer discussion to dabang behaviour? I recall an MLA from Chunar in Mirzapur, who used to play pranks to draw the speaker’s attention. Once confronted by newspapers about his conduct, he said: “That’s what my constituents want. After all they want to see fire in their MLA’s belly.”
So, while the Speaker believes that the live-streaming of the proceedings will make the MLAs more cautious about their conduct, there may be some who would use the platforms to build their “dabang” image.
There was a time when the country’s first Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru, mesmerised by Atal Bihari Vajpayee’s speech in Parliament, had even said that this young man would be the country’s prime minister one day. Vajpayee’s speeches in Parliament were masterpieces as he always emphasised parliamentary democracy. He had once said that the growing wedge between the ruling and opposition parties was dangerous for democracy.
However, over the year, the budget sessions have got curtailed as even the budgetary grants of several departments are passed in a jiffy amid pandemonium. The opposition, which now uses social media extensively to expose the government, somehow fails to make their submissions on the floor of the House. I sometimes wonder about the legacy they will leave behind for the members who will find little to read in the libraries except for disruptions.
From her perch in Lucknow, HT’s resident editor Sunita Aron highlights important issues related to Uttar Pradesh
The views expressed are personal
In the Preamble to the Constitution, “We the people of India” promise to secure for all citizens liberty of thought, expression, belief, faith and worship. Article 19 guarantees the right of free speech and expression to every citizen. There cannot be any democratic polity where citizens do not have the right to think as they like, express their thoughts, have their own beliefs and faith, and worship in a manner they feel like.
The right to freedom of opinion and freedom of conscience, by themselves, include the extremely important right to disagree. No doubt, the State has the power to impose reasonable restrictions on such rights in the interest of the sovereignty and integrity of the country, the security of the State, friendly relations with foreign States, public order, decency or morality.
Dissent is an essential part of democracy and no citizen should have to fear the government. They should be able to freely express views which may not be liked by those in power. Criticism must be expressed in a civilised manner without inciting violence, but the mere expression of such views cannot be a crime.
According to Section 124A of the Indian Penal Code, a person is guilty of sedition if he or she brings into hatred or contempt, or excites or attempts to excite disaffection against the government. This provision was introduced when the country was ruled by a foreign, imperialist colonising power that brooked no dissent. Mahatma Gandhi, when charged with sedition, said: “Affection cannot be manufactured or regulated by law. If one has no affection for a person or system, one should be free to give the fullest expression to his disaffection, so long as he does not contemplate, promote or incite to violence.”
The constitutional validity of the provisions of Section 124A was challenged before a Constitution Bench of the Supreme Court (SC) in Kedar Nath Singh’s case, on the grounds that it was inconsistent with Article 19(1)(a) of the Constitution. The SC held that no offence of sedition is made out unless the words – spoken or written – have the tendency to create disorder or disturbance of public peace by resorting to violence.
The SC in the 1995 Balwant Singh case held that raising slogans such as “Khalistan Zindabad”, “Raj Karega Khalsa”, by themselves did not amount to an offence of sedition because there was no material or record to show any violence had taken place. There can be no doubt that advocating any cause, however unpopular or uncomfortable it may be, must be permitted. Majoritarianism cannot be the law. Even the minority has the right to express its view peacefully.
The law of sedition is more often abused and misused. Citizens who criticise those in power are arrested by police officials at the drop of a hat. Even if the person gets bail, he has suffered the ignominy of being sent to jail. Criticism can be a crime only when there is incitement to violence or public disorder. Sadly, day in and out, we read of people being arrested for making not so complementary references about those in power. The police always claim to be short of forces when questioned about the adverse law and order situation in various parts of the country.
In many countries, recognising the right of freedom of speech, the laws of sedition stand repealed. In England, the crime of sedition was abolished in 2009 on the ground that sedition and seditious and defamatory libel are archaic offences – from a bygone era when freedom of expression wasn’t seen as the right it is today.
Our country, Constitution and national emblems are strong enough to stand on their own feet without the aid of the law of sedition. Respect, affection and love is earned and can never be commanded. India is loved by all its citizens. We are proud to be Indians. We, however, have the right to criticise the government when we feel things are not moving in the right direction. In a country governed by the rule of law and which guarantees freedom of speech, expression and belief to its citizens, the misuse of the law of sedition and other similar laws goes against the very spirit of freedom for which the freedom fighters fought and gave up their lives.
The shoulders of those in power should be broad enough to accept criticism. Their thinking should be wide enough to accept the fact that there can be another point of view. Everybody may not use temperate or civilised language. If intemperate, uncivilised and defamatory language is used, then the remedy is to file proceedings for defamation but not prosecute the person for sedition
Criticism of the legislature, the executive, the judiciary, the bureaucracy or the armed forces cannot be termed sedition. If we attempt to stifle criticism of such institutions, we shall become a police State instead of a democracy and this the Founding Fathers never expected this country to become. If India has to progress not only in the field of commerce and industry, but become a world leader, it must also progress in the field of human rights and be a shining example of an effective, vibrant democracy. Then the voice of the people can never be stifled and there can be no place for the law of sedition in a true democracy “where the mind is without fear and the head is held high”.
Deepak Gupta is a former judge of the Supreme Court
The views expressed are personal
Discussion on the recent power shortage in some states has confounded understanding on this critical issue and generated three myths: One, this is only a supply side crisis; two, that increased electricity consumption is a perennial phenomenon; and three, that the remedy lies with the central government. To bust these misconceptions, it is important to revisit the fundamentals of the power sector in India before any causal analysis.
India has the world’s third largest electricity installed capacity, about 400 GW, after China and the United States (US). This is 60% more than the installed capacity of the country in 2014. On April 19, the highest demand was 207 GW with 8 GW of peak shortage. So, why could a capacity of 400 GW not meet the demand? Because unlike other goods, electricity is a flow (non-storable) commodity, not a stock commodity. It has to be pre-scheduled for the next day both by generators (gencos) and consumers (discoms). Hence, the composition of both supply and demand sides needs to be analysed.
Fuel-wise, 53% of the capacity in India is coal-based, 27% is renewable, 6% is gas-based, 12 % is hydro and 2% is nuclear. Hence, besides coal, the availability of solar, wind, gas, water and nuclear power plants is also crucial. To understand the supply scenario, let us compare a day’s supply this year to one last year. On May 2, 2021, coal, renewable, hydro, nuclear and gas power plants supplied 2949 MU, 314 MU, 299 MU, 113MU and 113 MU, respectively. On May 2, 2022, these figures were 3418 MU, 624 MU, 388 MU, 104 MU and 88 MU respectively. Thus, coal-based generation went up 16%, renewable generation almost doubled, hydel and nuclear generation remained the same but gas-based power generation shrank by 28%. Overall, 22% more electricity is available this year, compared to last year. So, the popular “short-supply” argument is not tenable.
Let us look at the demand side. With economic recovery, India’s electricity demand also picked up. For the week ending April 24, the states facing the peak power demand were Uttar Pradesh (867 MW), Haryana (445 MW), Rajasthan (404MW), Andhra Pradesh (300MW) and Jammu & Kashmir (131MW). It is not a coincidence that these five states have either the maximum aggregate technical and commercial losses (Uday portal) or the maximum outstanding discom dues (PRAAPTI portal). Thus, states where the power sector is financially in the red face peak power shortage. This translates into power outages and hardships faced by the people and businesses of that state.
Another aspect of the story is that most of the demand comes from the northern region of the national grid, whereas most industrialised states are connected to the western and southern region. It is highly likely that most of this electricity demand is coming from air-conditioning plugged in to deal with the scorching summer heat. Thus, contrary to popular belief, the increased demand is not perennial. Real time granular data would help policymakers ascertain if the spurt in electricity demand is coming from the high-contribution sector of the economy (manufacturing, services) or from the low contribution sectors (personal air-conditioners).
Power shortage is more a demand side problem aggravated by poor distribution infrastructure in the states. It is unrealistic to expect the remedy from the central government alone. Out of 400 GW, only about 100 GW is in the central sector and the rest is in the private sector (200 GW) and state sector (100 GW). States can take three short-term measures to ensure uninterrupted power supply: One, clear the dues of gencos so that load dispatch centres are able to schedule power supply, two, improve demand management by accurately forecasting demand and prioritising the sectors, and third, invest in distribution infrastructure such as transformers and cables so that failures and losses during peak summer are minimised.
Rajesh Gupta is director, NITI Aayog
The views expressed are personal
The Ukraine war has entered its third month with no diplomatic resolution in sight. Despite this, some have argued that while the war will have an impact on Russia, its neighbours, and the rest of Europe, it will have little consequence for Asia or the global order. This is wishful thinking at best, and shortsightedness at worst. The Ukraine crisis is not simply about the European security order. It has huge ramifications for the future of order in Asia. And by extension, given that Asia comprises nearly 60% of the world’s population and 32% of the world’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP), it also has enormous ramifications for the future of global security and the economy.
There is little doubt that the Ukraine war will, and already has, changed the nature of politics in Europe. Most notably, Germany has reversed decades of post-World War II foreign policy. It has announced that it will build up its military (jettisoning its reluctance to invest in its military), look for alternative energy supplies (mitigating dependence on Russian oil and gas), and most recently, even supply heavy weaponry to Ukraine (an act it had resisted until this month).
But the impact of Ukraine will not be confined to Europe. If this war drags on, economically, politically, and diplomatically, Asia and the Asian political order will change. Some of these changes have already taken place.
The most obvious short-term impact is on the economy. Oil, wheat, and corn prices have skyrocketed. Many Southeast Asian countries dependent on these imports, such as Thailand, Vietnam, and Singapore have seen shortages and felt the impact on basic services such as transport, electricity, and fuel. Indeed, in Vietnam, some gas stations have run out of gas. The Association of Southeast Asian Nations (Asean) countries have considered boosting relations with West Asian countries and Venezuela to secure alternative supplies of oil. Rising commodity prices threaten to hinder Southeast Asian countries’ recovery from the pandemic, leading to an increased risk of political and economic instability.
Moreover, more than 600 multinational companies (MNCs) have divested from Russia resulting in “de-globalisation,” proving that it is apparently possible to economically decouple as the West has done from Russia. This means it could, in the long-term, as the New York Timesrecently put it, fracture the world into economic blocs. This would have profound and isolating consequences for Asian countries seeking to do business with the United States (US), China, and Russia.
Politically, the Ukraine war has already resulted in divisions in Asia. Japan and Korea are worried about China and territorial sovereignty, and, as perhaps expected, joined the US in condemning Russia. However, the Asean bloc is divided. On one end, the Myanmar junta, which is close to the Russian government, has praised Moscow’s actions. On the other, Singapore, which has long worried about balancing China and the US in the Asia Pacific, has condemned Moscow. But there are some countries in the middle — Vietnam which, like India, is highly dependent on Russian arms and defence exports, and also has a comprehensive partnership with Ukraine, has abstained from condemning Russia in the United Nations.
Finally, there are the diplomatic ramifications of the Ukraine war, which have the potential to restructure order in Asia. The current international order is based ultimately on the Westphalian system. The 1648 Peace of Westphalia created the inviolable principle of territorial sovereignty and integrity that later international orders drew on.
The US, the European Union, and Asian countries such as Japan, Korea, and Singapore worry that if Russia succeeds in violating Ukraine’s sovereignty and faces little consequences, it will embolden China vis-à-vis Taiwan, as well as other areas in the Pacific that China lays claim to. Beijing is acutely conscious of this worry — Chinese ambassador to the US, Qin Gang, recently wrote in the Washington Post, declaring that China supports the concept of territorial sovereignty but that (directly contradicting President Vladimir Putin’s claims), unlike Ukraine, Taiwan is an internal affair. India may think that Taiwan’s territorial integrity matters less for its security interests than for the US, but it should certainly think about the future implications for its own border territories which China also lays claim to as inviolable territory.
The Ukraine war is currently confined geographically to Europe. Even if it does not spill over into Asia, it is crucial to understand that the longer it persists without resolution, the greater the chance that it will have important ramifications for Asia.
Manjari Chatterjee Miller is Senior Fellow, Council on Foreign Relations, and Associate Professor at Boston University The views expressed are personal
It is of secondary importance that 25-year-old B. Nagaraju, who was brutally hacked to death in Hyderabad’s Saroornagar area, was a Hindu or that his alleged murderers were Muslim. In another tragic episode many years ago, a Muslim, a 30-year-old computer graphics trainer called Rizwanur Rahman was driven to suicide in Kolkata, apparently by his Hindu in-laws. The disturbing communal angle only compounds the wider ominous implications of institutional hypocrisy and what it says about India and Indians.
Clearly, such barbarities would never have taken place if violence had not always simmered just beneath the surface in the land of Gautama Buddha, the post-Kalinga War Emperor Ashoka and Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi. The party in power at any particular time might aggravate things but the violence exists irrespective of it, erupting in the killings of Mahatma Gandhi, Pratap Singh Kairon, Indira Gandhi, Rajiv Gandhi and others, as well as the communal bloodbaths like the Muslim League’s Direct Action Day in 1946. Outright brutality, as among some Afghan tribes for whom feuding is a way of life, might have evoked less revulsion than targeted murders reflecting ancient prejudice or a stubborn refusal to rise above sectarian fanaticism. The recent lynching in Madhya Pradesh’s Seoni district of two tribal men accused of killing a cow was reportedly the handiwork of some Bajrang Dal activists. It bore too close a resemblance to similar atrocities in Jharkhand and Haryana not to prompt suspicions of an emerging pattern and official connivance. That the traditional lifestyle of the victims in these cases — Muslims, dalits or adivasis — is markedly different from the classic Hindu pattern indicates an intolerant insistence on uniformity.
Since the authorities claim no responsibility for other controversies over wearing the hijab, blaring loudspeakers or the so-called “love jihad” to which the Hyderabad and Kolkata outrages may well be attributed, one cannot say if there is a long-term official strategy to reserve India only for Hindus. I am told that the play, The Muslim Vanishes, by my one-time colleague, Saeed Naqvi, attempts with wit and perspicacity to answer the question of what India would be like without its more than 200 million followers of the Prophet. I am more curious about how a country can be purged of so many people, if that is indeed the grim aim. European precedents — the events of St. Bartholomew’s Day in France in 1572 when Catholics were advised to wear a distinguishing white scarf, or the yellow star identifying Jews in German-controlled territory before and during the Second World War — are surely too extreme for the India that we know. But no student of history can ever commit the reckless folly of uttering those fateful words: “It can’t happen here!”
Drifting towards bigotry and blinkers, we must bear in mind that there is a domestic as well as an international dimension to these trends. Domestically, it indicates the gradual withering of the universalism that was always a feature of the Sanatan Dharma, so that even while urban Indians are giddily wallowing in the cosmopolitan pleasures of rampant capitalism, their mental horizons and cultural vision might be shrinking to those of their medieval ancestors. So far as the international dimension is concerned, of course India, warts and all, will always be courted because it promises a huge market as well as abundant raw materials and because 1.3 crore Indians living abroad (to say nothing of a vast ethnic Indian diaspora) occupy positions of importance in the countries they live in. But whether we like it or not, Karel van Oosterom, Dutch ambassador to the United Nations, recently provided a glimpse of foreign distaste for certain Indian foreign policy positions. India’s permanent representative at the UN, T.S. Tirumurti, shot him down, but the distaste itself goes back to Jawaharlal Nehru’s non-alignment.
Many eulogised India’s first Prime Minister as the “apostle of peace”; many others viewed him (although less openly) as a calculating opportunist. His disapproval of military solutions did not extend to Kashmir, Hyderabad, Junagadh, Nagaland, Mizoram and other trouble spots where the national interest was affected, yet he sent only an Army medical unit to the Korean War which enjoyed the UN’s blessings. That legacy persists. Successive Indian governments since then have taken a saintly stand on international disputes, urging contestants to abjure force and rely only on “dialogue and diplomacy”. Only Chandra Shekhar, in the hot seat for a mere four months and another four as a caretaker Prime Minister, was honest enough to spurn cant, and declare that Desert Storm was not a UN enterprise like the Korean War, and frankly admit: “We can’t protect our own borders, why should we go to protect other people’s borders?”
Casuistry hasn’t improved the national image. India’s human rights record is held against it. So is the media’s declining independence. The recent shenanigans over arresting the Delhi BJP spokesman, Tajinder Singh Bagga, for allegedly delivering “hate speeches” cannot but prompt questions about police methods and the quality of justice. Yet, only governments that replace sanctimonious rhetoric with constructive action can hope to counter the endemic violence that explodes every so often in some form of communal antagonism. It was common in old-style American Western movies to plant a baddie in the sheriff’s office so that he, too, could claim the power of “legal guns” to wreak his lawless mischief. The same purpose is achieved today by changing the rules and placing cronies in key positions. That blurring of roles in real life accounts for many of today’s troubles. As even Singapore’s affable and well-disposed Lee Hsien Loong felt constrained to point out, with nearly half the members of the Lok Sabha facing criminal charges, India can hardly sustain the brave new world Nehru had promised.
Wanton arrests, refusal to grant bail, draconian laws, frivolous sedition charges, harsh sentences and — above all — what looks like the persecution of selected groups by the establishment’s unofficial foot soldiers can also only encourage further contempt for the law.
That means more lynchings in the cause of faith and more gruesome killings. Nagaraju may not have been murdered, nor Rizwanur Rahman driven to take his own life, in a civilised law-abiding society that regards all men as equal, as the Constitution enjoins. A ruling party that isn’t directly to blame for this inherent violence is all the better placed to take steps to curb it.
“Bad” data is all around. Even as the Centre is vigorously questioning the WHO’s Covid death figures in India during the pandemic, it also has issues with information supplied by the states to the finance ministry for the release of funds under centrally sponsored schemes. Apparently, the problem has grown alarmingly so that finance secretary T.V. Somanathan had to step in.
Sources have informed DKB that Mr Somanathan recently fired off a stern missive to all chief secretaries warning that providing false information for borrowing purposes will lead to stringent action against those responsible.
Apparently, there have been several instances in which the ministry was provided wrong information, either deliberately or negligently, by states. In one case, this led to over-borrowing by a state during the tenure of one government and, therefore, deduction of that amount during the tenure of its successor, which created a big problem for the Centre.
In his missive, Mr Somanathan has warned that if a state is found to have submitted false or wrong information, the concerned IAS or IPS officers will face action which can affect their empanelment, central or inter-cadre deputation, and even foreign training and assignments. That’s tough talk.
Babus may do well to remember that during the Modi sarkar, senior IAS, IPS and IFS officers have been dismissed from service for misconduct, disproportionate assets and inefficiency.
Modi strengthens PMO team
The appointment of former petroleum secretary Tarun Kapoor as advisor to Prime Minister Narendra Modi comes as no surprise to most babu-watchers, though there may have been some who expected to see the return of Bhaskar Khulbe to the PMO after his term ended in February. For now, at least.
Mr Kapoor is known to be close to Mr Modi and played a key role during the pandemic, and earlier as the one who worked hard to implement one of Mr Modi’s pet projects, the development of city gas distribution networks, among other assignments. He may be one of the very few IAS officers to have served the Manmohan Singh government as well as the Modi sarkar. He may be seen as “old school” and “low profile”, but there is a teeny whisper that his appointment to the PMO may also have something to do with him being from Himachal Pradesh, which is due for elections later this year.
But apart from Mr Kapoor, Mr Modi has fortified the PMO by inducting two additional secretaries Atish Chandra and Hari Ranjan Rao, raising the number of additional secretaries to five as against four joint secretaries. This imbalance, some say, will be rectified with the possible induction of some joint secretary-level officers shortly.
Change of guard at DoPT
The appointment of a new secretary to the department of personnel and training (DoPT) in the secretary-level reshuffle came as a surprise to some babus, especially those from the Central Secretariat Service (CSS) cadre. The incoming secretary, Ms S Radha Chauhan, replaces Pradip Kumar Tripathi who has been shifted out as secretary (coordination) in the Cabinet Secretariat.
The view emerging from the CSS cadre babus is that Mr Tripathi’s transfer is related to the long-pending promotion-related issues of CSS officers, which have not been resolved by DoPT even after clear instructions from above. Also, since 2014, at least, secretaries in DoPT have usually served until their superannuation and not changed midway through their tenure. Mr Tripathi was slated to continue in the post until June 2024.
But the more plausible reason has nothing to do with this viewpoint. Sources have informed DKB that the timing of Mr Tripathi’s transfer to the Cabinet Secretariat should be seen in the context of the Cabinet secretary Rajiv Gauba whose term is ending in August this year. The CSS version, sources say, is more likely aimed at pushing the DoPT and its new secretary to fast-track action on their demands. What’s your take?
The split verdict of the Delhi high court on the question of criminalisation of marital rape points to the reality that India, an aspiring democratic republic with modern values, is facing.
The legal question before the court was whether Exception 2 in Section 375 of the Indian Penal Code, which defines rape, is against the Constitution. Exception 2 says sexual intercourse or sexual acts by a man with his wife are not rape.
One of the two judges on the bench thought it fit to strike it down holding it contravenes some of the fundamental rights guaranteed, under Article 14 (right to equality), Article 19 (freedom of speech and expression) and Article 21 (life with dignity), of the Constitution. He felt that the exception protected men who have forced non-consensual intercourse with their wives from criminal prosecution.
The other judge held that the exception “was based on marriage as an intelligible criteria” and it was not “unconstitutional and was based on an intelligible differentia”.
Those who wanted the exception to be removed contended that it discriminated against one category of rape victims – the wives. They also refused to subscribe to the logic behind holding domestic violence as a crime but not marital rape. That a woman has got married by no extension of logic would strip her of her rights on her own body and that her consent would be of no value, they contend.
Those who backed the exception, which included the Central government, said criminalising marital rape “may destabilise the institution of marriage, apart from being an easy tool for harassing the husbands”. They also cited the instances of misuse of Section 498A IPC, which deals with cruelty by husband or husband’s relatives against a woman to buttress their argument.
It is interesting to note that even the backers of the exception do not claim that marital rape does not happen in this country, nor that it is not an offence. They are worried about the impact the absence of the exception can create in society and the potential misuse of the resultant legal position.
This takes the ball from the judiciary’s court and puts it firmly in the court of the political establishment. The affidavit the Union government submitted before the Supreme Court makes it clear that it knows what is happening is not right but stopping it could have some repercussions. In short, the government was fighting shy of doing what was right, fearing the response of the prevailing social realities.
No country can be ruled by decrees which have no popular support; it’s the job of the executive branch of the government to persuade society to improve itself, own a better sense of justice and create laws which reflect and firm up such a sense. The government has as of now shown no spine to do the job; the court had to make a tough talk to solicit an opinion of the government which sought endless time to make up its mind.
The government must now stop playing the coy patriarch and start the process of scrapping a patently unjust legal provision which is an affront to civilisation instead. None will fault it if it wants a piece of legislation that criminalises marital rape to have a soft landing. But land it must.
From April 20-24, 2022, Ilham Omar, US Democratic Congresswoman from Minnesota, made a surprise visit to Pakistan, where she had multiple meetings and photo ops in Islamabad with new Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif, and newly ousted PM Imran Khan, toured Lahore, took a helicopter ride to Pakistan-occupied Kashmir (PoK), posted a Twitter video selfie peering over the bridge at the Line of Control, and held a press conference in Muzaffarabad, PoK’s capital, saying: “I don’t believe that it (Kashmir) is being talked about to the extent it needs to in the US Congress but also with the administration.”
This instantly became one of the biggest news stories in South Asia, but the US corporate media has remained totally silent. The US embassy in Islamabad posted no photos or press releases on Ms Omar’s provocative actions, statements and high-level meetings, Ms Omar’s office refused to speak to journalists, and US state department spokesman Ned Price said the Congresswoman had gone to Pakistan on a “private trip”.
But after the spokesman of India’s external affairs ministry Arindam Bagchi described Ms Omar’s statements about India as “condemnable”, the story blew up on the social media. Now many people are asking: who exactly funded US Rep. Omar’s “private trip” in which she blatantly attacked India, a vital US ally? Is her fealty really to the United States, where she immigrated at age nine from war-torn Somalia? Or is she yet another Democrat among the many identified in the superb writings of Prof. Mahadev Nalapat, who states: “Democrats are beholden to the Sino-Wahhabi lobby”. Nalapat told a television channel: “Kashmir is a target for the Sino-Wahhabi network. Who is funding Omar? Numerous blog posts suggest that her trip was funded by the Pakistani government. And this is OK with the White House?”
Apparently so. At a Seattle fundraiser in April 2022, President Joe Biden accused India of “human rights abuses”, but said nothing about the horrific human rights abuses of the Taliban, or the Communist Party of China’s Uyghur genocide, or the naked fascism on display in Shanghai, Beijing and across the People’s Republic of China under Xi Jinping’s “Zero Covid Policy”. Since coming to office in January 2021, the Biden administration has stripped Communist China of tariffs and sanctions, which 80 per cent of American support, and has done nothing to hold the CPC to account for releasing hell with Covid-19, but consistently attacks India with blacklists and sanctions as well as official statements, totally unbefitting conduct towards an ally and strategic partner.
Ilhan Omar most certainly advances the agenda of the CPC-Wahhabi lobby. During US congressional testimony in 2019, Ms Omar maligned Aarti Tikoo Singh, an Indian journalist who has documented three decades of the jihadist campaign waged against Kashmiri Pandits in their ancestral land. Despite her feminist posturing with the hard-left Democratic “squad”, Ms Omar has said nothing about the reform of Sharia law, which has angered a number of Muslim women intellectuals and bloggers, nor has she ever spoken of the gangrapes and forced sterilisations of Uyghur Muslim women, and the extermination of the Uyghur and Kazakh peoples in CPC’s huge concentration camps.
It is implausible to suggest that Ilhan Omar was the first US politician to fly to Pakistan to meet the new government and have a military escort to the Line of Control to post a Twitter video provoking the Kashmir question, without the knowledge and approval of the US embassy in Islamabad. Since President Biden’s catastrophic retreat from Kabul in August 2021, Pakistan has been deluged with terror attacks, inflation, food and petrol shortages, and stability is fast collapsing. Every week the US consulates in Lahore and Karachi post security alerts for US citizens and officials. But Rep. Omar’s trip to the LoC of PoK doesn’t even get a mention on the US state department’s website?
Ms Omar drew a lot of ire from Pakistani officials and journalists for her glowing posts about discussions with Imran Khan on “combatting Islamophobia” while Mr Khan was publicly blaming the US government for his ouster. On April 21, 2022, Dawn reported: “There have been several explanations about her trip, even though she has in the past never shown any interest in Pakistan… Omar’s meeting with Mr Khan had been directly scheduled by her office through a US-based Pakistani businessman, a PTI leader said.”
The US media is also infiltrated by the CPC-Wahhabi network, pushing false narratives about India, while covering up the crimes of Chinese Communists. The American media is largely not reporting on Sri Lanka, Nepal and Pakistan, all CCP Belt & Road Initiative partners, now sinking into debt and economic collapse, or that India faces armed conflict on its eastern front from Chinese-occupied Tibet, and on its western front from Afghanistan’s Taliban government, newly armed with $85 billion in US weaponry. Last week PLA generals and Chinese Air Force jets were filmed at the Bagram airbase, 400 km from China’s Xinjiang province.
India is awakening to the dangers of the Sino-Wahhabi lobby. American friends of India are alarmed by the conduct of the Democrats who insult India while condoning the crimes of the Chinese Reds and the jihadists. Now they are coming for Kashmir. Ilhan Omar, who is a darling of the liberal media and late-night talk shows, idolised by “Woke” progressives, has made it clear which side she is on.
Since India evacuated its mission in Afghanistan once the Taliban retook Kabul in August 2021, practically under American aegis, after what came to be called the Taliban’s Doha “negotiations” with the United States, New Delhi is evidently doing a rethink. It seems likely that an Indian representation will soon be restored in Kabul, even if this will be small and not at the level of ambassador.
This is reflective of realistic thinking. Of course, there can be no question at present of according recognition to the Taliban regime. That is likely to happen when a broad consensus amongst the leading powers emerges. Currently, the Taliban government is not helping its own cause of gaining world recognition — which will help it access overseas funds at a time when the country is in dire straits — by imposing severe restrictions on women and girls in serious violation of human rights.
More basic is the issue that the Taliban regime is not considered representative at the domestic level within Afghanistan. If it were to accommodate into the government all Afghan factions and ethnic and political interests, as well as women, the world may view the regime in Kabul differently.
Since the Taliban rode to power militarily and not through an election process, the only plausible way to gain domestic legitimacy is through the holding of a Loya Jirga, the traditional Afghan national assembly that embraces the various ethnic and other political interests and operates on the basis of a negotiated consensus. As recently as last week, Moscow — which carries influence in Afghanistan — counselled the Taliban exactly on these lines. Former President Hamid Karzai, who chose not to leave the country after the Taliban takeover and is practically under house arrest, has advocated this course for months in media interviews.
It’s an open question if the Taliban will heed this well-intended advice. However, Taliban interlocutors have reportedly hinted to the three high-profile hostages — besides Mr Karzai, Dr Abdullah Abdullah, virtually the Prime Minister in the erstwhile Ashraf Ghani government, and former Loya Jirga speaker Fazl Hadi Muslimyar — that a Loya Jirga is on the cards, and the convention could materialise before the summer is out.
If this is not without basis, it would appear that the strong likelihood of India resurrecting its presence in Afghanistan’s capital in a matter of weeks — as suggested in New Delhi — may not be wholly without linkage to the timing of the Taliban holding the Afghan grand assembly. Indeed, in recent months New Delhi and the Taliban authorities are believed to have been in touch at the level of senior security officials. Not long ago, an Indian team was in Kabul. Earlier, India had hosted the Taliban.
There could be other signs that might suggest a loosening up in Kabul. Dr Abdullah was permitted by the Taliban government to quietly visit his family in New Delhi recently on the occasion of Id-ul-Fitr. It was strictly a private visit. Earlier, Mr Muslimyar was allowed to meet his family in the UAE at the urging of Mr Karzai, who remains a central figure.
Interestingly, the former President, who stayed on in Kabul with his family when the Taliban took over, is himself yet to reach an agreement with the authorities to travel abroad for conferences or medical reasons.
Observers believe that when any of the “republican” trio travels out of the country, the other two are his guarantors, effectively speaking. If Mr Karzai too is permitted foreign travel, a message of opening up by the regime is apt to be conveyed. The three Taliban leaders who are said to be interlocutors with the “hostages” are mines minister Shahabuddin Delawar, intelligence chief Abdul Haq Wasiq, and young Anas Haqqani, brother of the powerful Siraj Haqqani, who heads what is now deemed the most influential Taliban faction. These important Taliban figures evidently bear a huge burden of public relations.
When the nearly 200-strong Indian mission in Kabul was being evacuated in a hurry following the re-capture of Afghanistan by the Taliban on August 15 last year, India’s ambassador, Rudrendra Tandon, was on record as saying that the situation in Afghanistan was complex and “quite fluid”.
In the event, the Indians pulled out in toto. In light of terrorist attacks on the Indian embassy in Kabul and Indian consulates in Heart, Jalalabad and Mazar-e-Sharif at the behest of our western neighbour, there was legitimate concern that Pakistani death squads in newly “liberated” Kabul could target Indians and Indian interests. Ambassador Tandon had reportedly adopted a nuanced stance, however, which would have meant retaining a very limited diplomatic presence alive in Kabul.
In conspicuous contrast with India’s stand, the other powers that had a direct bearing on regional geopolitics — China, Russia, Iran, the UAE and of course Pakistan, did not withdraw their presence from Kabul when the Taliban returned. As for the US, it operated through Qatar’s embassy in Afghanistan. Of course, none of these countries attract visceral Pakistani governmental hostility, as India does.
Evidently, the Indian position is now undergoing a measure of quiet re-calibration. It is likely that India rushing wheat to Afghanistan, where roughly half the population stands on the brink of starvation since the Taliban takeover, made an impression in Kabul even if the food aid was routed via the World Food Programme as Pakistan was dragging its foot on providing road access to Indian aid consignments.
Over the years, before the Taliban reoccupied Kabul, India had been accused by Pakistan of fomenting terrorist trouble against it by using the then Afghan government which was friendly towards New Delhi. Recent events have shown this allegation to be false. Of late, the Pakistan Air Force has been dropping bombs in the eastern Afghanistan provinces of Khost and Kunar to destroy the camps of the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan, which have sought shelter with the government of the (Afghan) Taliban in Kabul in order to escape Pakistani retribution.
When American influence was all-pervasive in Afghanistan before the return of the Taliban, as a fighting politico-military force the Taliban were given sanctuary by Pakistan. This was a conscious policy aimed at eventually dominating Afghanistan if the Taliban returned to rule Kabul. This has now come to pass but Kabul, as before, continues to remain at odds with Islamabad in the security sphere.
In such a complex situation, and with some probability that domestic politics in Kabul may perforce require the Taliban to accommodate other political and ethnic interests in the country, India cannot remain glued to its position of August 2021.
Unlike the bell bottom trousers, the digital watch or the iPod, political dynasties tend to never go out of fashion and, even if they do, they still have a way of coming back. The present may, however, seem terrible for one of the overwhelming political dynasties of Sri Lanka, where the Rajapaksas hide in fear from the very people they had lorded over for decades.
History shows Mahinda, the man who made his brother Gotabaya the President, may not be the only one to be displaced as democracies are known to be fertile fields for political families to sow the seeds to reap power in time to come, be it the Bushes of Texas in the United States or the Bhuttos and Sharifs of Pakistan.
Given the history of political comebacks of dynasties, it shouldn’t have come as a terrible shock that a double dynasty was voted in with the dictator Marcos’ namesake Ferdinand Marcos Jr, and his running mate and vice-president to be in Sara Duterte, daughter of the Philippines “strongman” President Rodrigo Duterte, proving to be the recipients of the popular vote.
It is moot whether a section of voters is dissatisfied with the vote or the US is pleased with the result as the young Marcos - whose father was hounded out of office 36 years ago after a despotic rule of well-recorded human rights abuses and greed, as symbolised by the acquisitiveness of his 92-year-old mother Imelda Marcos - could turn out to be distinctly pro-China.
Change is also subject to the swing of the pendulum of time which can pave the way for a change of taste, too, as younger generations, seeking answers to what they see as continuous misrule, tend to fall back on familiar names.
Disinformation fed on social media projecting the rule of Marcos as a golden era for Filipinos is among reasons, along with reports of malfunctioning voting machines, being given for this huge swing in one of Asia’s oldest democracies.
“Judge me not by my ancestors, but by my actions,” “Bongbong” Marcos declared, using an interesting line disassociating the candidate from his parents. Only time will tell if it’s just a clever ploy or a true desire to bring change to society.
The Supreme Court’s order on Wednesday that paused the operation of the sedition law, or Section 124A of the Indian Penal Code, is historic and welcome for more than one reason.
The 1962 judgment of the Supreme Court in the Kedar Nath Singh case had found the law -- which states that whoever brings or attempts to bring into hatred or contempt, or excites or attempts to excite disaffection towards the government established by law in India can be held to have committed sedition, and attracts a jail term of up to three years -- to be constitutionally valid though it had imposed certain conditions for convicting a person under it. The order that has come 60 years hence makes it very plain that the law is untenable. This left the court with two options. One, to form a bench larger than the one that had decided the Kedar Nath Singh case to consider the case again, and two, to ask the government, the constitutional body with the mandate to make and unmake laws, to review it. It has chosen the second.
It is for the first time in the 150-year history of the law that its operation is being held in abeyance. During this period, India gained independence from the British colonial rule and became a democratic republic with governments responsible to elected legislatures in place. Yet the law continued to be in force. Nothing shorter than its repeal squares with the demands of a modern democracy; at least a review is happening now.
There are several petitions before the Supreme Court of India challenging the constitutional validity of the law. Scores of persons have been booked under the law since the 1962 judgment for voicing their opposition to the policies and practices of the government of the day. This no longer works as the apex court has asked the Union and state governments not to file new cases or go ahead with the older ones until the review happens.
The course of events that led to the development has some curious elements in it as well. The National Democratic Alliance which runs the government at the Centre and in several states has been accused of indiscriminately using the law to target its political opponents. However, the government, in its affidavit to the Supreme Court has quoted Prime Minister Narendra Modi being in favour of “protection of civil liberties, respect for human rights and giving meaning to the constitutionally cherished freedoms by the people of the country” and that he “has repeatedly said that one of India’s strengths is the diverse thought streams that beautifully flourish in our country”.
This means either the government has read the mind of the judiciary, which has recently castigated governments on several occasions for the misuse of the law, and has decided to make virtue out of necessity and claim credit for the progressive stand or it has come around to the view that India, as a democracy, cannot put down the thoughts of its people, however unpalatable they may be for the government in power. Whichever be the case, the net result will be the strengthening of democracy and its practices in this country. Something to cheer for, indeed.