THE HINDU – CURRENT NOTE 10 March
Multi-phase polls are here to stay: Nasim Zaidi
•Chief Election Commissioner of India (CEC) Nasim Zaidi has said that long-drawn-out, multiple-phase elections are here to stay because of the use of Central police forces for the conduct of free and fair polls.
•Speaking to The Hindu, Dr. Zaidi, looking relaxed after the end of polling in five States on Thursday, said it was the “anxiety” over the use of the State police and the preference for Central police forces by political parties, candidates and even voters that had led to this state of affairs.
Reservations over police
•“Our elections have become heavily dependent on Central forces as people have their own reservations about the State police. The Commission, therefore, over the years, has come to depend on Central police forces. Our anxiety and the anxiety of political parties that all polling stations should be covered by Central police has led to this situation. There have been examples in the past that voters too feel that to truly ensure an unafraid exercise of franchise, Central forces are required. Keeping all that in mind, there is no way out but to conduct polls in phases. Our voters have shown unprecedented enthusiasm, so they are, at least, not fatigued by the length of the poll,” he said.
Ancient copper coins found in central Kashmir
•The Jammu and Kashmir State Archaeology Department has discovered over 800 coins dating back to the 11th, 12th Century in Budgam district.
‘Rare discovery’
•Described as a “rare numismatic discovery”, the coins are said to be one of the largest recoveries from the district.
•A team, which was supervised by M.S. Zahid, Director, Archives, Archaeology and Museum, recovered the copper coins from a plateau in Nonar village in Khan Sahab on Wednesday.
•According to the department, the plateau is rich in archaeological nature and had been under the department’s consideration for a while.
•“The coins were exposed during a trial excavation. Archaeologists from the Archives Archaeology and Museums Department are investigating the findings. As per a preliminary report, the coins date back to the 11th and 12th Century when the Yassakara and Lohora dynasties ruled over Kashmir,” said a State Archaeology Department spokesperson.
Undergoing treatment
•The coins are now being given chemical treatment at the Shri Pratap Singh Museum in Lal Mandi, Srinagar.
•After this, they will be identified and deciphered by departmental expert Peer Mohammad Iqbal.
•“Research on these coins will be shared with heritage lovers and archaeologists. It will certainly help fill up gaps in the numismatic collection of our museums,” said the official.
•Dr. Zahid said: “The department has made 11 discoveries in the last 13 years. Of these, four pertained to the numismatic field.”
•The Shri Pratap Singh Museum houses the largest collection of ancient copper, silver and gold coins, estimated at over 70,000.
Committee ticks off govt. on defence allocations
•The Parliamentary Standing Committee on Defence on Thursday pointed out the bizarre reality that this year’s defence budget is not sufficient to meet even the committed liabilities in the case of the Navy.
•Overall the committee observed that the budgetary provisions for 2017-18 as well as the “dismal status of capital procurements” do not reciprocate the “seriousness” required towards meeting defence needs.
•“This year, the allocation is ₹18,000 crore in the capital budget, whereas the committed liabilities itself are to the extent of ₹22,000 crore,” the report noted about the Navy. This means that the allocation would not be sufficient to pay for the deals already contracted.
•These observations were part of Report no. 29 on ‘Demands and Grants’ tabled in the Lok Sabha on Thursday.
•In the case of the Army, the committee observed that the Army is expected to meet the vast responsibilities of ensuring external and internal security and for that, it is “quintessence” that Army personnel be equipped with the latest state-of-the-art equipment, but said the plummeting trend in funding does not reciprocate the huge expectations laid upon the Service.
•“The Committee views this as a dichotomy and feel that the situation merits immediate attention…,” it noted.
•For the Army, against the capital allocation of ₹25,254 crore, the committed liability being carried forward from 2016-17 to 2017-18 itself amounts to ₹ 23,000 crore.
•For the Air Force, the report noted that the budget allocated exclusively for ‘new schemes’ is only ₹4,000 crore, which it noted would “hamper the modernisation drive” of the force as expenses related to the procurement of aircraft and related equipment are high cost in nature.
Make in India
•The Committee also pulled up the defence ministry on its ‘Make in India’ initiative. In 2016-17, a total budget of ₹ 22,222,34 crore was actually spent on modernisation by the Air Force, of which the report said only ₹268.10 crore, that is, about1% of the ‘spending’, was signed with Indian vendors.
•“The Committee is perturbed to observe that the statistics do not resonate with the conceptual emphasis of the Government on ‘Make in India’,” it said.
•The Committee also took serious note of the fact that while on one hand, “the Ministry of Finance cites the slow pace of spending as the reason for making lower allocations, on the other, there are some crucial proposals lying with the Ministry and are pending approval.”
Stability in the time of change
•In recent weeks, there has been a flood of commentary lamenting the demise of ‘the liberal rule-based international order’; the system that came into being after World War II and has since been led and shaped by the West under U.S. leadership for the last seven decades. While cracks in this ‘order’ have been showing up in recent years, it is after the election of Donald Trump as U.S. President that a conviction has grown that the seven-decade-old ‘order’ is dead and change is now upon us.
•Yet the lengthening shadows of this change have been visible in other parts of the world for nearly a decade; at least from 2008 with the global financial crisis which presaged the unravelling of the Washington Consensus. History tells us that the wheels of change never stop. Sometimes, when they move slowly, it is only possible to judge the distance travelled by looking in the rear-view mirror, and at other times, like the present, change appears to be rushing at us through the windscreen even as we search for a ‘new stable and normal’ in the age of uncertainty.
Myth of the ‘liberal order’
•But in mourning the passing of the old and familiar, a myth is being generated about this liberal international order. While it is true that there is greater volatility and churning in the world today than before, it is equally true that parts of the world have been going through these changes for much longer. What is new is that the tides of change are now lapping at the shores of the Western world.
•West Asia has been in turmoil at least since the turn of the century when the growth of jihadist extremism seared itself on the global consciousness with 9/11 though its shoots were visible in the region a decade earlier. The reordering of Central Asia and Eastern Europe began with the disintegration of the Soviet Union and has now been unfolding for nearly a quarter century.
•China’s rise started four decades ago and gathered steam after globalisation. It was facilitated by the U.S., initially justified as part of the Cold War logic which saw the USSR as the mortal enemy, and after the Cold War, on the hopeful myth that a prosperous China would gradually move towards a more plural political system, becoming part of the liberal order. As the myth evaporated in recent years, President Barack Obama was placing China in the category of ‘free riders’, while announcing the ‘US pivot to Asia’!
•China’s rise is accompanied by the rise of other emerging economies and a shift in the geopolitical centre of gravity from the Euro-Atlantic to Asia and the Indian and Pacific Oceans. Defining the characteristic of this change is a new report by PricewaterhouseCoopers that predicts that by 2040, the E7 (emerging countries of China, India, Indonesia, Brazil, Russia, Mexico and Turkey) will be twice the economic size of G7, the seven major advanced economies!
Out of sync
•The post-World War II order marked the end of colonialism and was intended to be based on the democratic principle of equality of sovereign states, but this idea quickly fell prey to the realities of the Cold War. The UN became an arena for the power play between the two superpowers. By the time the Cold War ended, the institutional structures of the UN were out of sync with the new political reality. The U.S. became ‘the sole superpower’ but hubris and the decision to invade Iraq soon eroded the authority of its unipolar moment.
•In hindsight, the liberal international order was not ‘global’ and consequently, ‘liberal and rule-based’ only in a small part of the world, the West. It is here today that populism, nationalism and illiberalism have emerged, reflecting a decisive rejection of the status quo. This is only partly due to economic reasons that got aggravated after 2008. The rejection of the status quo is equally a cultural rejection, a rejection of globalisation that enriched Corporate America but not the average worker in Middle America. It has contributed to the creation of a global elite and the backlash against it has taken the form of anti-immigration, nationalism and populism. A tired and ageing Europe, preoccupied with its experiment of a post-sovereignty EU, and Mr. Trump’s victory mark the end of the myth.
A post-West world
•Populism breeds the politics of agitation often exploiting insecurities by distorting facts. In today’s age of information overdose, this has taken the form of making everything into a half-truth. A truth if questioned enough loses its shine and a lie if repeated enough times becomes a half-truth. Doing this in a 24/7 news cycle together with the echo chamber of social media has only become easier than before. This is why at the Munich Security Conference last month, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov aptly described the current change as a shift to a “post-West world”.
•The biggest challenge of coping with this shift is absence of credible multilateral institutions. Greater normative damage is done when the gap between myth and reality becomes unmanageable. A classic example is NATO, a creation of the Cold War but even today described in the West as a central pillar of Western, liberal order!
•In such times of change, is the idea of stability an oxymoron? Much depends on how it is defined. Clearly, in times of change stability cannot be a defence of the status quo. However, breaking it up into crisis stability, deterrence stability and arms race stability makes the objectives relatively discrete and modest.
•The nuclear dimension cast a dark shadow over the Cold War but the equation in a bipolar world was relatively simpler. In today’s world, with the focus on Asia and the Indian and Pacific Oceans, the dyad has been replaced by nuclear chains with variable linkages. New competitions are underway even as the firebreak between nuclear and conventional is getting blurred. Conventional precision-strike weapons can be as destructive and nuclear weapons can be designed for variable yields depending on the intended targets. Under such circumstances, arms race stability is hardly feasible.
•Therefore deterrence stability and crisis stability assume greater significance. Shifting from single-warhead missiles to MIRVed missiles and missile defence technologies impact deterrence stability which rests on mutual vulnerability. Today, more and more countries are exploring both areas. Soon, this will lead to doctrinal and deployment changes. Developments in North Korea provide easy justification for the U.S. (and South Korea) to consider deploying missile defences in East Asia but these can easily trigger concerns in Beijing. Unless addressed, China will find ways, both symmetric and asymmetric, to ensure that its deterrent credibility is maintained.
Ensuring crisis stability
•In addition to deterrence stability, it is vital to ensure crisis stability. This requires communication links and risk reduction mechanisms which need to be designed and made operational sooner rather than later. This is not a question of legality, of claiming that the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty recognises five nuclear weapon states, as China has been doing during the Nuclear Suppliers Group debates last year on the question of India joining; it is a question of acknowledging ground reality that demands that all states with nuclear weapons share an imperative to move towards establishing crisis stability mechanisms.
•The Cuban missile crisis in 1962 helped drive home the realisation to the U.S. and Soviet leaderships that nuclear weapons were qualitatively different. It began the process of the search for strategic stability, arms control and crisis management.
•The stability mechanisms put in place, together with a bit of luck, helped to ensure that nuclear weapons were not used during the last seven decades. But today’s world is an age neither of hegemons nor of prescriptive norms; it is an age of uncertainty and change which increases the likelihood of crisis escalation. A new initiative for a modest degree of stability is needed if the nuclear taboo has to hold. Given the growing convergence between the leaders of India and Japan, these two countries are well placed to launch such an initiative.
The right to fish
•Every time an Indian fisherman is injured or killed in Sri Lankan waters, the endless squabbles of the political parties are set aside and a noisy wall of solidarity immediately goes up against Sri Lankan trigger-happiness. On the other hand, when a Bangladeshi cattle smuggler is killed, it hardly gets even a squeak out of mainstream media.
•But here is what happens at the beginning of every month and something that is not publicised. The Sri Lankan Navy Headquarters sends out a consolidated report on Indian fishing craft in Sri Lankan waters. The report for February this year was sent on March 2. It went to, among others, the Director Naval Operations (Indian) as well as the Director Operations, Indian Coast Guard. It is also usually marked to the High Commission of India in Colombo and the Sri Lankan High Commissioner in India, who no doubt forwards it to the people he deals with.
•The information is quite extensive. In February, the Sri Lankans noticed approximately 835 fishing trawlers/dhows they said were engaged in bottom trawling/poaching. They were sighted in 29 locations well within Sri Lankan territorial waters, closer to the shores of Mullaitivu, Point Pedro, Talaimannar, Vetthlaikeni, Kakerathivu as well as the Delft Islands. In the annexures, in four columns, there are details such as the time when the trawlers were noticed ingressing. On February 6, off Delft there were 50 trawlers. On some days the Sri Lankans detect hundreds.
•This has been going on for years. On February 19, 2011, for instance, they detected 700. A copy of this, with the registration of the trawlers, finds its way to the Fisheries Department of Tamil Nadu. They probably maintain the list of registered boats. What happens to this list when it gets there? An educated guess is that it is thrown into the dustbin as Sri Lanka does not get to hear of what we do with the information.
An easy crossing
•You could cross the Palk Straits in less than three hours. Though there are no markers, it is easy enough to know when you are in their waters: every mobile phone comes with a GPS.
•At the beginning of the decade, there were 60,000 fishing vessels for 591 fishing villages strung out along Tamil Nadu’s 1,076 km coastline. It is not clear how many of them have GPS. According to Sri Lankan estimates, a significant portion of this number has been regularly detected in Sri Lankan waters. Some are seized and the fishermen arrested.
•In This year, in these three months, the figures are 14 boats and 85 fishermen arrested. While the fishermen will be eventually released, the boats will be held back. If they release the boats, they are likely to be found fishing again.
•Since the civil war ended, some of the dynamics have changed. Sri Lankan fishermen want to assert the right over their territorial waters. If New Delhi can erect fences many hundred kilometres long on both the eastern and western borders and institute shooting as a deterrent policy, why apply another yardstick when it comes to a much smaller neighbour?
India sees options in U.S. energy policy
•President Donald Trump and Republican lawmakers have already set in motion a series of measures that will deregulate American oil, gas and coal sectors and India sees an opportunity to enhance bilateral cooperation in these areas in the coming years.
•Thirty percent of all increase in world’s energy demand from now to 2040 will be from India, and energy cooperation will be an increasingly key component of bilateral relations, Petroleum Minister Dharmendra Pradhan said after a meeting with U.S. Energy Secretary Rick Perry.
•This was the first ministerial level interaction between India and U.S. under the new administration. India will start importing Liquefied Natural Gas from the U.S. in 2018 under contracts signed during the previous Obama administration. Right pricing will enable India to ramp up imports from the U.S., Mr. Pradhan said.
•The Trump administration’s focus is on making American oil and gas sector competitive in the world market and it does not want environmental concerns holding back the sector. By deregulating oil and gas, and rolling back incentives available to non–conventional energy industry, the Trump administration is hoping to create a boom in the U.S. oil and gas market.
•Three Indian public sector companies, GAIL, Oil India and IOC and Reliance have invested in U.S. shale gas production. The Obama administration’s focus was on pushing renewable energy cooperation with India, but Trump administration’s focus is different said an Indian official.
•Mr. Pradhan said Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s commitment to increase the share of non-conventional sources in India’s energy mix is independent of what the American administration thinks or does. “The PM is clear that India will go ahead with its COP 21 commitments,” the minister said.
‘Texas visit’
•He said Mr. Perry has asked him to request Mr. Modi to visit his home state of Texas, which is the centre of American petroleum industry. Mr. Modi is expected to visit the U.S. in the next two months. While it appears certain that Mr. Trump will disrupt the U.S. energy sector, its implications for the global market are unclear.
•Mr. Pradhan said cooperation could be in the areas of clean coal technology, and in converting coal to synthetic gas. “American technology and investment could be of great help in coal sector. U.S technology will also be helpful in building smart grids and reducing transmission losses,” said Mr. Pradhan, who attended the CERA Week in Houston, an annual conference of energy executives and policy makers.
Centre issues draft rules on e-wallet payments
•The Centre has issued draft rules to ensure integrity, security and confidentiality of electronic payments made through prepaid payment instruments (PPIs), popularly called e-wallets. The draft rules, on which the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology has sought public comments, make it mandatory for e-PPI (electronic pre-payment instrument) issuers to develop an information security policy that ensures that the systems operated by them are secure.
•The Information Technology (Security of Prepaid Instruments) Rules, 2017, define an e-PPI issuer as a “person operating a payment system issuing prepaid payment instruments to individuals/organisations” under the aegis of Reserve Bank of India. The rules make it compulsory for e-PPIs to publish on their websites and mobile applications both their ‘privacy policy’ and terms for use of their payment systems. The draft also details the requirements of a privacy policy. The rules mandate that e-PPIs should carry out risk assessment to spot security risks and also ensure adequate due diligence is done before issuing PPIs.
