Think tank snub clouds India-Singapore ties
Delhi pulled out of the strategic Shangri-La Dialogue after Minister was ranked lower than Pakistan’s head of Joint Chiefs of Staff committee
•A snub from Singapore’s annual Shangri-La dialogue led to India’s decision to withdraw its delegation led by Minister of State for Defence Subhash Bhamre last week, officials have confirmed to The Hindu .
•According to senior officials privy to the decision, organisers of the prestigious conference informed the government that the Indian Minister did not rank as highly as Pakistan’s Chairman Joint Chiefs of Staff Committee, General Zubair Mahmood Hayat, as “civil military relations in Pakistan are different from those in India.”
Panel presence
•Organisers at the International Institute of Strategic Studies (IISS), which runs the conference for the Government of Singapore, told the Ministry of External Affairs that, as a result, Mr. Bhamre, who was filling in for Defence Minister Arun Jaitley, would only be accommodated at a “plenary session” on the last day of the three-day event (June 2-4), and not on one of the main panels as General Hayat was.
•“Obviously, we were not going to accept this kind of differentiation between India and Pakistan,” an official told The Hindu.
•Accordingly, the Indian High Commission in Singapore then informed the Singapore MFA that “under the circumstances,” the delegation from New Delhi was pulling out as the speaking slot confirmed was “not in line with their expectations.”
•When asked, the IISS “regretted” the Indian decision, and said the MEA had informed them very late, only a week before the start of the conference that they wanted a “speaking role” for Mr. Bhamre. Organisers said they earlier expected Mr. Jaitley to attend the event, since former Defence Minister Manohar Parrikar had addressed the Dialogue in June 2016.
•“Unfortunately, the new Defence Minister — Arun Jaitley, who already held the Finance portfolio — was unable to accept our invitation. We understand that this was because of his deep involvement in preparations for the imposition of GST,” Timothy Huxley, executive director of IISS, said in reply to questions fromThe Hindu.
•Consequently India, which has attended 12 of the 16 Dialogues since 2002, had no speaker at the event this year, although Indian High Commissioner to Singapore Jawed Ashraf did attend all sessions of the conference.
Crucial bilateral talks
•The Shangri-La Dialogue, funded and hosted by the Singapore government, is a unique “track-one” conference that Defence Ministers, officials and military chiefs of 28 Asia-Pacific countries, including China and the United States, attend each year.
GSLV MkIII has given us a big push: ISRO Chairman
‘We need to build capacities in the organisation and the country’
•For space-faring nations, a launch vehicle — such as the all-Indian GSLV-MarkIII that was first flown on June 5 — is a vital tool for placing spacecraft in the sky. For India, the MkIII can lift four-tonne satellites with double the power of the older MkII rocket.
•In a short exchange over the phone, A.S. Kiran Kumar, Chairman, Indian Space Research Organisation, explains what the new big rocket’s success means and what lies next. Edited excerpts:
How important for you has been the maiden success of your new launcher, GSLV MkIII? Could you please explain it beyond its four-tonne-lifting power?
•It is indeed a very significant development in the Indian space programme. It gives us a big push. We were short of this capacity for lifting our communication satellites. We had to go outside for our launches; and because of [the launch schedules of foreign space agencies] the pace at which we did our projects was getting affected. Cost was another deterrent for pushing things aggressively.
•By achieving MkIII, we will be able to push confidently and launch many of our communication satellites faster and indigenously. We will do one more launch within a year and establish it systematically.
The cost benefit ?
•I cannot give you the exact figures as they keep changing. But just to give you the example of last year’s INSAT-3DR, we were able to do both the satellite and launch it here for the cost of an earlier foreign launch.
What would be next in your launcher-related activities? What is their status, schedule and the funds they need?
•First we need to consolidate the developments. Our immediate and main task remains how to streamline the realisation of our three launch vehicles PSLV, GSLV-MkII [two-tonne lifter] and the new GSLV-MkIII, sustain them and ensure the number of launchers we need to put the satellites in orbit. For MkII, our target is to do two launches a year. As it is, building its supply chain, managing it and ensuring the required supplies for it are all an effort. To that we will be adding the requirements for MkIII.
•On the launch technology side, we will be looking at how to reduce the cost further — by adopting new mechanisms, materials and new capabilities. Including the reusable launch vehicle concept.
You mentioned reusable technology to save costs. Where are we in that?
•Last year, we tried out the RLV-TD experiment [Reusable Launch Vehicle Technology Demonstrator]. We got a small, plane-like model to vertically land on water. Next we will look at landing it on the ground with a landing gear system. We are conceiving systems to work on the air breathing propulsion technology that will use atmospheric oxygen. For the present launch vehicles, we will look at recovering [and reusing] some parts.
What is essential today for ISRO?
•To build capacities within the organisation and the country to meet the demands.
•We have a significant shortage of satellites in space. If we have to roughly double the capacity of the spacecraft, we have to do as many launches and cost effectively. That is the prime driver.
•Also, it is essential for a space agency to build new capabilities, constantly get new skills to do complex jobs and to do routine things better.
A nation is a people in conversation
So anyone stopping this conversation, in the name of managing or resolving conflict, is damaging it
•What is a nation? Above all, it is a people self-consciously bound together by common or overlapping concerns about their past, present and future. This self-conscious awareness of commonality is not genetically encoded. Nor does it drop from the sky. It grows when people talk and listen to one another and, through oral and written communication, understand each other. This is easy among families and in villages concentrated in a small territory where people meet face-to-face, but how do common concerns develop amongst an entire people, virtual strangers to one another, and spread over a large territory?
•The short answer is that without a public culture forged first by print and then an electronic media, there would be no conversation amongst a whole people, no development of common concerns and therefore no nation. So, it is entirely apt to say that a nation exists only as long as there is a continuous conversation among its members about what it was, is, will and should be. A disruption of this conversation is the undoing of a nation.
Matters of common concern
•This conversation is also about what the nation should do. This is an unprecedented achievement of our own age. For conversations now are not just passive and contemplative, mere post-facto reflections, but can yield decisions on which a people may act.
•A modern nation is a collective agent; its members can together strive to realise goals they have set for themselves. For example, India together must discuss and find ways to reduce unemployment, resolve the conflict in Kashmir and alleviate the distress of its farmers. This was impossible in earlier societies where decisions about the future of society were taken by a small band of elites, notably chieftains and kings, largely to protect their own interests and only secondarily for the people.
•To be sure, such conversations and interconnected action could have existed in the past.
•Some elites dispersed across large territories may well have had a conversation about things in common. How else does one explain the spread of Bhakti or Vedantic ideas across large swathes of India? Yet, what is new in our time is that in principle any Indian can begin a conversation on any matter and turn it into an issue of common and pervasive concern. An issue of a particular community, say, ‘triple talaq’ adversely affects only Muslim women and is primarily a matter between Muslim men and women, but can be viewed, at least secondarily, as a matter of common concern. Likewise, the exclusion of Hindu women from some temples may not affect non-Hindus but can be raised by them as a matter of more general concern.
•The philosopher, Jean-Paul Sartre, says somewhere that the distinguishing mark of an intellectual is that he sticks his nose into every other person’s business. However, in the age of democracy and modern nations, this trait is widespread; provided he empathetically understands it in all its complexity and nuance, virtually anyone can make another person’s interest a matter of his and common concern.
•If this is so, an important implication ensues for the ethics of nationhood: No one should be prevented from turning a particular matter into an issue of common concern, excluded from this conversation, not even those with whom one profoundly disagrees. For having a conversation is not the same as agreement. When a very large group begins a conversation, different voices, interests, ideas about the common good participate in it.
•Some of these differences go deep, and surface for the first time only during conversation and cause dissonance. For example, currently, issues pertaining to Kashmir are so fraught that even an academic argument by a professor causes intense heat.
•Not surprisingly, the public arenas where such conversations take place are a frequent site of conflict. Both the expression of conflict and its artful management (ensuring that it does not blow up) are crucial for a productive conversation.
•If a nation is a people in conversation, then anyone stopping this conversation is damaging it. Such ‘conversation-stoppers’ act in two ways. First, under the illusion that they are managing or resolving conflict, they forcibly remove some groups from the public arena, depriving them of means of expressing their particular concerns and arguments.
•Some violent extremists even do so for more pernicious reasons; for instance, it is the avowed aim of terrorists to terminate this conversation. Such suppression of disagreement or conflict undoes a nation.
•Second, after allowing differing voices to enter the arena, they adopt disruptive tactics — shout down, abuse, and troll them, making participation so unpleasant and fearful that interlocutors are compelled to give it up. This too contributes to the unravelling of a nation.
For the sake of the nation
•One final point: A nation — a people in conversation on common issues —is not the same thing as a state, i.e. public power concentrated in specific institutions such as the parliament, government, judiciary, army, police and bureaucracy.
•Nations may exist without states and states without nations. Moreover, the nation is ethically prior to the state; the state exists for the sake of the nation. At no point must the state hijack the conversation, dictate its agenda or control it. It is a part of the conversation, not its permanent leader. Indeed, it is its duty to rein in those who disrupt or block conversation. The nation expects it.
The Islamic State as an excuse
Too many decent, religious people believe their faith assigns them a position of moral superiority
•Three men drove a van into a crowd in London on June 3, 2017, and then ran about stabbing people until efficiently shot down by British policemen. Immediately, the Islamic State (IS) claimed the attack — though, as yet, there is no proof that the IS was directly involved.
•But of course the IS will claim any monstrous act in ‘the name of Allah’ committed by morons anywhere in the world. It suits the IS. And in some ways, such a claim suits almost everyone else too.
It suits many people
•It suits people like Donald Trump. It enabled him to send out inane tweets, seeking to use this tragedy to further his xenophobic, undemocratic and unlikely-to-be-effective policy options in the U.S.
•The IS claim also enabled British politicians, who (it has to be said to their credit) basically reacted with calm and restraint, to suggest international conspiracies (highly unlikely) and remedies (such as curbing Internet), which are unlikely to work and will probably have more drawbacks than advantages. It is nice to have a Dr. No version of the IS to blame, when you know that your own neo-liberal and post-Brexit actions – such as laying off policemen in London – probably contributed to the casualties.
•Finally, it enabled peaceful religious Muslims — many of whom will be angry at me for saying this — from facing up to their responsibility in the matter. Do not misunderstand me: these religious Muslims hate what the IS stands for: this fact was brought home by the sad but necessary decision by 130 Muslim imams and leaders in U.K. not to perform the compulsory funeral prayers over the bodies of the three London attackers.
•Yes, most religious Muslims have no sympathy for the IS. Such religious Muslims often castigate people like me for describing IS-murderers as Islamists. They are not Islamists because they have nothing to do with Islam, I am consistently told. I agree — but I also point out that the IS and such terrorists think that they have everything to do with Islam. Sheer repudiation does not suffice. It especially does not suffice if you are yourself Muslim.
•The IS enables peaceful, religious Muslims — the vast majority — to shirk their inadvertent complicity in such violence. It is time to face up to this, instead of expressing surprise and horror when some nephew or son mimics the IS and kills innocent people in the name of Islam.
•I have written a lot about the ‘us-them’ binarism that had undergirded colonial Western atrocities against the rest, and still dominates the thinking of people like Mr. Trump. But it has to be added: peaceful, religious Muslims harbour a similar ‘us-them’ binarism.
•Many decent religious Muslims believe that their faith assigns them a position of moral superiority over others. This is a feeling other very religious people — Hindus, Christians, etc. — might tend to have too. However, many religious Muslims also believe that their faith will prevail on Earth in the future and at least assure them (and only them) of paradise after death.
•I have met Christians and Jews with similar beliefs of being a kind of ‘chosen people’, but their ratio is far lower. For every Christian I have met who believed that I would go to hell because I do not believe in Jesus as the son of God, I have met a hundred who would laugh at the notion.
•Unfortunately, I have met too many religious Muslims who believe that they are specially chosen, and anyone who does not share their faith is condemned to an eternity of hellfire.
•Most religious Muslims do not act on this conviction; they do not even utter it in front of non-Muslims. They are decent people. But it lurks in the depths of their minds.
•It can also be flaunted indirectly: for instance, recently a major Indian Muslim leader dismissed another Muslim for not being a ‘true Muslim’ because he read the Bhagavad Gita! Or, during the holy month of Ramzan, many religious Muslims give charity only to the Muslim needy. Us and them. Them and us.
Facing up to a flaw
•This is the germ that runs through much of contemporary religious Muslim thinking, and drives the more confused of our Muslim children into mimicking the monstrosities of the IS. This germ makes Muslim youth vulnerable to extremist ideologies. To think that you are so special can very easily turn into a dismissal of the equivalent humanity of others, as casteist Hindus do with Dalits and as colonial Europeans did with the colonised at times.
•Until more religious Muslims face up to this flaw in their thinking, their children will be vulnerable to such detestable ideologues as those of the IS — and Islam, as a faith, will be the target of hatred from at least some of those who are excluded from the category of being ‘chosen’.
•The IS is not some Hollywood supervillain, an Islamic Dr. No, with highly trained agents present everywhere. It does not have that sort of clout outside the regions it controls and some neighbouring spaces.
•But it is actually more dangerous because it can capitalise on the flaws in our thinking, those cracks in the floor of ordinary family homes, Muslim and non-Muslim. I have written about the cracks in the floors of ordinary European or American homes, with their ‘civilisational’ hubris. But it is time for religious Muslims to face up to the cracks in their own homes too.
In the heat of climatic terror
It’s 45°C at seven in the morning and the ACs give up, much like the Opposition
•This week, dear reader, you must excuse me. It’s the heat. My brain melted into hot fudge about half an hour ago. Luckily, I had the presence of mind to collect it in a non-stick, copper-bottom kadhai and put it in the freezer. But I can no longer remember what I wanted to write about when I began this column.
•It’s so hot in Delhi it’s not funny. I get positively enraged when I hear someone trying to joke about it. It’s no laughing matter when it is 45°C at seven in the morning and all your ACs have given up, much like the Opposition, without even trying. No need to visit Twitter or Facebook for your daily fix of outrage. Just lying in bed and breathing in and out is enough to make your blood boil.
•And breathing, as you may have noticed, involves air. In case you’ve ever wanted to find out what it’s like to have Daenerys Targaryen’s pets flying around, raining fire upon the city, I suggest you take a flight to Delhi. Delhi air is dragon breath. In June, as a famous poet may have written if he weren’t already in cold storage, the Delhi evening is spread out against the sky like a patient dehydrated upon a table.
Leaves you seething
•Last Sunday it was 47°C on my balcony. The clothes I’d put out to dry — including a fire-proof, Pakistan-green silk kurta a friend had got for me from Benaras — burst into flames. When I rushed out with a bucket of water, I burnt my feet so badly the doctor asked me if I’d tried to immolate myself. This is nothing but climatic terrorism. Like traditional terrorism, which makes you angry enough to want to bomb a country — any country —to dust, it leaves you permanently seething. As most of you may have guessed by now, I was born a non-violent person. But if a mob of vigilantes were to call me right now and invite me to a panel discussion followed by lynching, I can’t predict what my response would be. I’m aware that, purely in temperature terms, there are other places in the country that rank above the national capital. Bathinda, I am told, has crossed 48°C. But Delhi is the only place I know where the minimum temperature consistently surpasses the maximum temperature.
•This morning, for instance, I woke up from a nightmare in which I was drowning. Only, it wasn’t just a nightmare. I really was drowning — in a two-feet-deep puddle of my own sweat. I couldn’t help but wonder: how did people in these parts manage in the times gone by? How did Indians in the Vedic era beat the heat? Did they wrap their heads in towels soaked in peacock tears? Or drink chilled cow sweat from terracotta goblets? Do cows even sweat? And if they do, why is their skin so dry?
•A colleague tells me that summers in Delhi may not have been so hot in the Vedic age since it preceded industrialisation. According to him, global warming is caused by fossil-fuel guzzling, industrial societies. The Earth’s temperature rose by one degree in the last century because that’s when the whole world embraced fossil fuels. I don’t buy this argument because it fails to answer some simple questions: if Vedic Indians weren’t using fossil fuels, what did thePushpak Viman run on? If ancient Hindu society wasn’t industrialised, how did they build nuclear power plants and do plastic surgery?
•In fact, there is now overwhelming evidence, documented in multiple WhatsApp forwards, that even the word ‘industry’ came from the root ‘ind’ of India. So to claim that Vedic India was cooler than modern India because it wasn’t industrialised and didn’t use fossil fuels is nothing but pure cow dung. I’ll be honest. I confess that on most days of the year I’m too busy leaving carbon footprints all over the floor to worry about climate change. But the extreme rage generated by Delhi’s extreme heat needs a scapegoat, if not an explanation.
•So let me try and collect some thoughts before they evaporate. Here’s one: the Paris Climate Agreement. I know it’s got something to do with what an idiot cricketer recently referred to as ‘global warning’. And that an idiot politician has sabotaged it by pulling his continent-size country out of it. Now the stage is set for an idiot species to wreck the planet and commit mass murder on millions of life forms whose only mistake was to not kill off this terroristic species before it began to threaten their and their planet’s existence. And here’s my second and final thought: it better rain, or else…
Centre tells pharma to pass GST benefits to customers
It warns companies to comply with anti-profiteering clause
•The Centre has warned pharmaceutical companies to comply with the anti-profiteering clause in the Goods and Services Tax rules and pass on to consumers any benefit arising out of lower tax rates under the indirect tax regime.
•The notification by the Department of Pharmaceuticals also said that, for scheduled drug formulations on which excise duty is levied on the maximum retail price, the revised price ceiling exclusive of GST would be 95% of the current price ceiling.
•“In case of savings due to lower rate of tax, the benefit may be passed on to the consumers as per the anti-profiteering clause in GST rules,” according to the notification.
•“In case of scheduled formulations, where presently excise duty is levied on MRP, the revised ceiling price exclusive of applicable GST rates would be calculated by applying a factor of 0.95905 to the existing notified ceiling price,” the notification added.
Price rules
•The Centre also specified the price rules for non-scheduled drugs under the GST regime, saying that pharmaceutical companies would have to absorb any burden that may arise from higher taxes which would increase the price of the drug more than the permissible 10% increase over their levels in the previous 12 months. “In case of non-scheduled formulations … DPCO 2023 needs to be followed irrespective of any change in the tax structure or tax rates,” according to the notification.
•“The companies will have no option but to absorb the net increase, if any, in the incidence of tax on implementation of GST within the permissible limit of 10% for increase of maximum retail price compared to the MRP of preceding 12 months.”
•“Under the present system, medicines not under price control are allowed an annual 10% price increase in line with WPI (Wholesale Price Index),” TR Gopalakrishnan, Deputy Secretary General of the Indian Drug Manufacturers’ Association (IDMA) said.
Novel compound inhibits lung cancer growth in lab studies
The effect of the compound was studied on lung and pancreatic cancer cells
•A novel organic compound synthesised by a group of scientists from University of Madras, IIT Madras and Sri Ramachandra University, Chennai, has shown it can inhibit the growth of cancer cells by inducing programmed cell death. The alkaline compound (glycopyrrolidine) derivative was tested using various assays and found to be toxic only to the cancer cells and not healthy cells. The results were published in the journal Cancer Investigation.
•More than 40 compounds were created using simple starting chemicals such as glucose and proline (an amino acid) and their activity were tested against cancer cells. The compound that exhibited maximum activity at minimal concentration was selected and named RP-RR-210.
•The effect of the compound was studied on lung and pancreatic cancer cells. “The incidence of pancreatic cancer is increasing in India, and there is a need for new drugs as the available drugs are highly toxic to normal cells and do more damage to the body than killing the cancer cells. Our study focussed on killing tumour cells effectively without damaging the healthy cells,” says Dr. Ganesh Venkatraman, professor at the Department of Human Genetics, Sri Ramachandra University, and co-author of the paper.
•The compound showed prominent growth inhibition on cancer cells but only 10-20% growth inhibition in normal cells. Cancer cells treated with this compound shrank in size, while no morphological changes were seen in healthy cells. The researchers identified the mechanism of cell death, which was brought about by arresting the cell cycle.
Prevents spread
•“Another interesting and important finding from our study is that the compound inhibited spread of cancer cell to other organs. This becomes significant as the compound not only killed pancreatic and lung cancer cells at low drug concentrations but also inhibited their migration or movement,” Dr. Venkatraman says.
•Further confirmatory tests were carried out by checking the level of proteins causing cell death. The compound-treated cells showed increased level of proteins that cause cell death and reduced level of proteins that prevented cell death.
•“The biggest advantage of the compound is that it is made with easily available starting materials. The compound is non-toxic with no side effects, as it acts like bait for the cancer cells alone. It is readily soluble in water and can be easily absorbed by the body,” says Dr. Ragavachary Raghunathan, professor at the Department of Organic Chemistry, University of Madras, and co-author of the paper.
•The researchers propose to carry out further studies to fully understand the anti-tumour properties of the compound and carry out preclinical trials on mice models.
Increased probability of deaths from heat waves
In India, deaths increased by 78% during 1960-2009
•The mean temperature across India has risen by 0.5 degree C during the period 1960 and 2009, and this has led to a significant increase in heat waves in the country. Based on modelling studies, researchers from IIT Bombay, IIT Delhi and the University of California, Irvine have found that when the summer mean temperature during this period increased from 27 degrees C to 27.5 degree C, the probability of a heat wave killing in excess of 100 people shot up from 13% to 32% — an increase of 146%.
•For instance, there were only 43 and 34 heat-related fatalities in 1975 and 1976, respectively, when the mean summer temperature was about 27.4 degrees C. But in 1998, at least 1,600 people died due to heat wave when the mean summer temperature was more than 28 degrees C.
•Similarly, when the average number of heat-wave days in the country increased from six to eight, the probability of heat-wave-related deaths increased from 46% to 82% — a 78% increase. The average number of heat wave days between 1960 and 2009 was 7.3 per year.
•“When there is a 0.5 degree C increase in mean temperature, the extreme temperature will increase at a much higher rate,” says Prof. Subimal Ghosh from the Department of Civil Engineering, IIT Bombay, one of the authors of the paper.
Worsening climate
•As the Earth gets even warmer, there can be substantial increase in such deaths and heat waves will become more frequent in the country, and northern, central and western India will witness increased spatial warming, says a study published a few days ago in the journal Science Advances.
•“The temperature in these regions is already high and so the chances of the mean temperature crossing the threshold are higher,” says Prof. Ghosh. Between 1960 and 2009, the intensity, number of heat-wave events taking place each year and the duration in days have increased across the country, particularly, in the northern, southern and western parts of India.
•Between 1985 and 2009, southern and western India experienced 50% more heat-wave events compared with the period 1960 to 1984. But in most parts of the country, the number of heat-wave days and mean duration of heat waves have increased by 25%, the study says.
•Heat waves killed more than 1,300 people in Ahmedabad in 2010 and in 2013 the number of people who died due to heat wave shot up to 1,500. It reached a new peak in 2015 when more than 2,500 people died. Last year witnessed the most intense heat wave sweeping the country in the month of May; the mercury touched 52.4 degree C in Jaisalmer.
•“The IMD is doing extremely well in forecasting a heat wave. The only problem is that people are not aware of the adverse impact of heat waves,” says Prof. Ghosh.
Marine reserves can mitigate climate change
It will do so by sequestering carbon
•Evaluating 145 peer-reviewed studies, a research team has concluded that “highly protected” marine reserves can help mitigate the effects of climate change.
•“Marine reserves cannot halt or completely offset the growing impacts of climate change,” said Jane Lubchenco, a professor in the College of Science at Oregon State University (OSU) and co-author of the study published recently inProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. “But they can make marine ecosystems more resilient to changes and, in some cases, help slow down the rate of climate change.”
•Around the world, coastal nations have committed to protecting 10% of their waters by 2020, but so far, only 3.5% of the ocean has been set aside for protection, and 1.6%, or less than half of that, is strongly protected from exploitation, Xinhua reported.
•“Protecting a portion of our oceans and coastal wetlands will help sequester carbon, limit the consequences of poor management, protect habitats and biodiversity that are key to healthy oceans of the future, and buffer coastal populations from extreme events,” Lubchenco, who previously worked as National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) Administrator, was quoted as saying in a news release.
•The study also notes that ocean surface waters have become on average 26% more acidic since pre-industrial times. By the year 2100, under a “business-as-usual” scenario, they will be 150% more acidic, while coastal wetlands, including mangroves, seagrasses and salt marshes have demonstrated a capacity for reducing local carbon dioxide concentrations because many contain plants with high rates of photosynthesis.
