📰 The lowdown on Article 35A
What is it?How did it come about?Why does it matter?What next?
•Article 35A is a provision incorporated in the Constitution giving the Jammu and Kashmir Legislature a carte blanche to decide who all are ‘permanent residents’ of the State and confer on them special rights and privileges in public sector jobs, acquisition of property in the State, scholarships and other public aid and welfare. The provision mandates that no act of the legislature coming under it can be challenged for violating the Constitution or any other law of the land.
•Article 35A was incorporated into the Constitution in 1954 by an order of the then President Rajendra Prasad on the advice of the Jawaharlal Nehru Cabinet. The controversial Constitution (Application to Jammu and Kashmir) Order of 1954 followed the 1952 Delhi Agreement entered into between Nehru and the then Prime Minister of Jammu and Kashmir Sheikh Abdullah, which extended Indian citizenship to the ‘State subjects’ of Jammu and Kashmir.
•The Presidential Order was issued under Article 370 (1) (d) of the Constitution. This provision allows the President to make certain “exceptions and modifications” to the Constitution for the benefit of ‘State subjects’ of Jammu and Kashmir.
•So Article 35A was added to the Constitution as a testimony of the special consideration the Indian government accorded to the ‘permanent residents’ of Jammu and Kashmir.
•The parliamentary route of lawmaking was bypassed when the President incorporated Article 35A into the Constitution. Article 368 (i) of the Constitution empowers only Parliament to amend the Constitution. So did the President act outside his jurisdiction? Is Article 35A void because the Nehru government did not place it before Parliament for discussion? A five-judge Bench of the Supreme Court in its March 1961 judgment in Puranlal Lakhanpal vs. The President of India discusses the President’s powers under Article 370 to ‘modify’ the Constitution. Though the court observes that the President may modify an existing provision in the Constitution under Article 370, the judgment is silent as to whether the President can, without the Parliament’s knowledge, introduce a new Article. This question remains open.
•A writ petition filed by NGO We the Citizens challenges the validity of both Article 35A and Article 370. It argues that four representatives from Kashmir were part of the Constituent Assembly involved in the drafting of the Constitution and the State of Jammu and Kashmir was never accorded any special status in the Constitution. Article 370 was only a ‘temporary provision’ to help bring normality in Jammu and Kashmir and strengthen democracy in that State, it contends. The Constitution-makers did not intend Article 370 to be a tool to bring permanent amendments, like Article 35A, in the Constitution.
•The petition said Article 35 A is against the “very spirit of oneness of India” as it creates a “class within a class of Indian citizens”. Restricting citizens from other States from getting employment or buying property within Jammu and Kashmir is a violation of fundamental rights under Articles 14, 19 and 21 of the Constitution.
•A second petition filed by Jammu and Kashmir native Charu Wali Khanna has challenged Article 35A for protecting certain provisions of the Jammu and Kashmir Constitution, which restrict the basic right to property if a native woman marries a man not holding a permanent resident certificate. “Her children are denied a permanent resident certificate, thereby considering them illegitimate,” the petition said.
•Attorney-General K.K. Venugopal has called for a debate in the Supreme Court on the sensitive subject.
•Recently, a Supreme Court Bench, led by Justice Dipak Misra, tagged the Khanna petition with the We the Citizens case, which has been referred to a three-judge Bench. The court has indicated that the validity of Articles 35A and 370 may ultimately be decided by a Constitution Bench.
📰 India, Qatar discuss citizens’ welfare
6 lakh Indians work in the Gulf state; plan to expand cooperation in energy, trade
•India on Saturday discussed with Qatar the welfare of its citizens in the wake of its lingering disputes with Saudi Arabia, Egypt, the UAE and Bahrain.
•In wide-ranging talks between External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj and her Qatari counterpart Sheikh Mohamed bin Abdulrahman Al-Thani, the two sides also discussed ways to deepen co-operation in energy, trade and investment.
•External Affairs Ministry spokesperson Raveesh Kumar said bilateral issues, including welfare of the more than six lakh workers, were discussed. Official sources said expanding co-operation in energy, trade and investment were also discussed.
•In June, the four nations had announced cutting diplomatic ties and closing all connectivity links with Qatar, alleging that it supported terrorism. Qatar had rejected the charges.
•India had asked countries in the region to resolve the crisis through constructive dialogue and well-established international principles of mutual respect.
•India’s ties with Qatar have intensified in the last few years. Qatari Prime Minister Sheikh Abdullah bin Nasser bin Khalifa Al-Thani visited New Delhi in December during which India had expressed keenness in investing in hydrocarbon projects in the Gulf nation.
•Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his Qatari counterpart had also discussed enhancing cooperation in defence and security and agreed on joint action to tackle money laundering and terrorist financing.
📰 N. Korea fires missiles into sea in latest test
South conducts war games with U.S.
•North Korea fired several rockets into the sea on Saturday in the continuation of its rapid nuclear and missile expansion, prompting South Korea to press ahead with military drills involving U.S. troops that have angered Pyongyang.
•The U.S. Pacific Command revised its initial assessment that the first and third short-range missiles failed during flight to say they flew about 250 km. It said the second missile appeared to have blown up immediately and that none posed threat to the U.S. territory of Guam, which the North had previously warned it would fire missiles toward.
•South Korea’s presidential office and military said North Korea fired “several” projectiles in what was presumed as a test of its 300-mm rocket artillery system.
•The presidential office in Seoul said the U.S. and South Korean militaries would proceed with their ongoing war games “even more thoroughly” in response to the launch.
•The White House said President Donald Trump, who had warned that he would unleash “fire and fury” if the North continued its threats, was briefed on the latest North Korean activity.
📰 In the grip of a fever
Maharashtra and Gujarat are the worst affected States in terms of mortality and cases of swine flu
•In India this year, 41% of the total number of H1N1 deaths have been reported from Maharashtra. Of the 1,094 deaths from across India, as many as 455 have been from the western State. The State also tops in the number of positive patients — 4,385 cases this year.
•So what makes Maharashtra, the epicentre, particularly vulnerable? State health officials point to three main reasons — poor hygiene, overcrowding, and the presence of a good surveillance system to track cases.
‘Cover mouth, nose’
•Dr. Satish Pawar, head of the Directorate of Health Services (DHS), Maharashtra, says that the disease has also spread rapidly because the general population fails to follow proper cough-and-sneeze etiquette. “To break the chain of transmission, one has to follow basic manners of using a handkerchief to cover one’s mouth and nose while coughing or sneezing. If not that, one has to at least cover the mouth and nose with the hands and wash them before touching anything anywhere. But this is rarely followed,” he says, adding that posters on preventive steps have been put up in all hospitals and primary health centres.
•H1N1 is now endemic and a majority of people infected show extremely mild or no symptoms at all. “For example, if 1,000 people are infected with the virus, 950 will have mild or no symptoms. But these 1,000 people still have the potential to spread the disease,” he says, adding that the challenge becomes greater because of urbanisation and overcrowding.
•H1N1, an airborne virus, spreads through airborne droplets from a sick person’s sneeze or cough. Timely treatment and immediate isolation at home is the best way to tackle it, say experts. In Maharashtra this year, 14.15 lakh people were screened of whom 33,789 patients were given Oseltamivir, the drug that works against H1N1.
•“Our surveillance system is extremely well developed due to which all cases are recorded thoroughly. A good surveillance system is also a reflection of the increased number of cases that we detect,” says epidemiologist Dr. Pradeep Awate.
Strain combination link
•Dr. A.C. Dhariwal, director of the National Centre for Disease Control (NCDC), agrees with Dr. Awate. An antigenic shift, a process in which two or more strains of a virus combine to form a new subtype, is observed at regular intervals which is mainly why there has been a spurt in cases.
•“We cannot simply look at the number of deaths. One has to look at the deaths in context with the increasing number of cases,” he says.
•Even if it is said to be a seasonal flu, the H1N1 virus is lethal when compared to other seasonal viruses, which explains the high rate of mortality.
•“There is no denial that this virus is deadlier than others. But the main reason is that patients and doctors often fail to pick it up on time,” says Mumbai-based infectious disease specialist Dr. Om Shrivastav. Symptoms such as fever, a runny nose and a sore throat are often ignored and self-treated. “By the time patients see a doctor, two or three days have been wasted. For patients with co-morbid conditions, the virus attacks much badly,” he adds.
Immune response
•In July, analysis by the civic body in Mumbai supported this trend. It showed that the median time between the onset of symptoms and starting a course of Oseltamivir was 4-5 days. According to Dr. Shrivastav, the spurt in cases could also be because the effect of vaccination had faded. “In 2015, when there were more cases, people got vaccinated. But the vaccine gives immunity for about 8-9 months. This could be the reason why we did not have many cases in 2016 but are now seeing a rise,” he says.
📰 The confederacy of conspiracy theorists
Under Trump, white supremacists, the Ku Klux Klan, and self-declared neo-Nazis have moved from the margins to the centre
•Little noticed amidst all the political punditry that followed Donald Trump’s improbable rise to power was the daily diet of conspiracy theories that he had engorged himself on and had thrown around for his base as red meat.
March of the neo-Nazis
•Since January 2017, when Trump became President, many conspiracy theorists have emerged as amplified voices in the American public arena — including white supremacists, the Ku Klux Klan, and self-declared neo-Nazis — all of whom rely on a steady dose of conspiracies and enemies to sustain their movements. Nowhere was this seen more vividly than in Charlottesville, Virginia, a couple of weeks back when American neo-Nazis, their allies, and intellectual godfathers marched openly in a show of force.
•Armed with 19th century social science claims about race, cultural uniqueness, biological superiority of the whites, and 21st century technology to spread their word, the neo-Nazis chanted (“Jews will not replace us”) and stormed into the national conversation. Notwithstanding the irony that many of the 21st century white nationalists (with ancestries from the Balkans and Southern Europe) would have had difficulty being identified as “white” in 19th century America, the present-day Nazis announced their intentions to build an apartheid-style ethno-state. Much of this rhetoric is intended as a public show of commitment for their base. But for now they did the next best thing: they went in front of cameras. They denounced with fervour any and all who didn’t agree with them as globalists, cosmopolitans, Jew-lovers, and cucks (“cuckolds” — sexual anxiety about race mixing is a persistent theme).
•Later when asked to comment on (and hopefully condemn) the neo-Nazi march, Trump, instead of providing moral clarity and leadership, went down a rhetorical rabbit hole that was indistinguishable from the kind of mealy mouthed justifications that self-respecting adulterers deploy when caught. More telling, however, was Trump’s extraordinary reluctance to condemn these supremacists groups except when he was later forced to read out a written statement (a “hostage note”, as a wag described it).
•In parts, Trump’s instinctive demurral is understandable. He and these groups consume the same media sources — sources where conspiracy theories grow faster than mushrooms after monsoons — to shape the worlds they inhabit. Together, they bathe in a wellspring of reactionary anger that sees the wreckage of their idealised past float by, thanks to the patient chipping away (by law and demographics) of the monolith of historically experienced white privileges. Trump’s instinctive willingness to offer up equivocations for fellow reactionary minds is a form of a bully’s empathy for those losing their monopoly of historically accrued power and social capital which is often mistaken for even-handedness. To expect Trump to ask whether monopolies of power in society are good in the first place is, by all accounts, to ask too much of him.
•All this said, last week’s events in Charlottesville aren’t new in American history per se. Neither for its organised efforts to intimidate on racial lines nor the underlying sense of panic that marks white nationalist movements. In 1964, the political scientist, Richard Hofstadter, described American politics as marked by a “paranoid style”. From anti-Catholic movements in the 19th century, the “Red” scares of the mid-20th century, to the rise of Barack Obama, shifts in demographics of culture and power bases have periodically fuelled mass anxiety and exclusionary rhetoric. What follows is an extreme form of suspicion towards any discourse about society that emanates from ‘elites’ (universities, media, businesses). This suspicion is operationalised by counter-theories that seek to explain less but feed into, what Auden wrote elsewhere, “a climate of opinion”.
•The more opaque a society’s institutions become, the more conspiracy theories become a mythology-from-below on how those institutions truly operate and who wields the real power. Conspiracy theories thus become a form of open-sourced cultural production of communicable paranoia that subgroups consume and reinterpret when faced with their own increasing sense of irrelevancy to historical forces at work. To such a view, as Hofstadter describes, “history [itself] is a conspiracy, set in motion by demonic forces of almost transcendent power”.
•Typically, this theatre of suspicion is played out at the margins, with the centres of power protected by the praetorian guards of the establishment. With Trump’s victory, however, a conspiracist and his retinue are now at the centre. Predictably, Trump’s only response has been to launch counter-conspiracies in the hope of annulling the effects of the imagined original conspiracy. Like some malevolent Quixote, he charges every day up against the American media, often accusing them of treason for disagreeing with him. This, even as he feeds real dragons of white nationalism with his blather.
A moral paralysis
•The irony, however, is that power in the abstract — the currency in which conspiracy theorists transact — rarely resembles power in the concrete. A conspiracist in power is often defeated by the mismatch between reality and the claims of his pet ideas. What follows is a moral paralysis and rhetorical glibness. Predictably, after much criticism, when asked yet again about the neo-Nazi marches and accompanying violence, Trump’s answers were absurd: he blamed the media for being unfair to him by reporting his words accurately.
📰 Walking down many memory lanes
Cities such as Berlin have valuable lessons on how multiple histories can coexist in a single place
•Spending time in one of northern Europe’s big cities can be instructive in many ways. Once you get over the effects of long-lasting wealth on a society, the smooth, extensive transport systems, the latest technology in daily use, the plethora of goods, the wide choice of cuisines, the relative safety which women and children enjoy, the palpable good health of most of the people you see on the street and so on and so forth, other stuff comes to the fore.
Change and continuity
•Having been in Berlin for the last few weeks, I’m once again struck by the continuity the urban landscape has with previous centuries. Standing at this or that U-Bahn or S-Bahn station on the metro network, one sees on the walls not only advertising imagery but huge black-and-white photographs of what the area around the station looked like earlier, in the 19th century, in the early years of the 20th century, mid-century, and more recently. It’s startling to see the huge church you’ve just walked past looking the same in black and white, except dotted around it are horse-carriages or cars from the 1930s. “Chalo”, you think subconsciously, “obviously a church or a monument would be preserved and kept protected from developers.” But then you see a street-scape and you recognise quite ordinary but beautiful buildings, a corner of a park or even a kiosk, and you find yourself thinking, “No, that would not have survived back home; someone would have tampered with it, erased it.”
•Places like Venice or Paris are obvious outliers in a sense. For centuries, these cities have ingrained in their DNA the understanding that their USP is their glorious past, that they are what they are because tourists from all over the world come there to see and admire various ‘golden eras’ that adorn the city in the shape of the buildings, the squares, or the waterfronts. Berlin has also attracted people over the decades, starting from the latter part of the 19th century, but unlike Paris and Venice it took serious damage in the Second World War as the Allied bombers retaliated for the ravages the Nazi air force had visited on their cities. Unlike any other European city, Berlin was cut up after the war, first into four sectors and then into two. During the Cold War, for nearly half a century, the city was made schizophrenic by the Soviets and the Western powers, with West Berlin an outpost surrounded on all sides like an isolated rook on a chessboard. From 1961 the siege effect was intensified by the huge, ugly wall that sawed the city into two with a wide, barren no man’s land running through the middle like a dead river. And yet, all that has been absorbed as Berlin continues to transform.
•Absorbed, digested, but somehow not erased . Over the last 150 years and more, Berlin has had huge ups and downs: the capital of the newly unified German state was established here; there was the pomp of the Kaisers; the radical scientists and the subversive, subterranean strata of artists and bohemians who worked here before the first World War; there was the humiliation of defeat in that first huge conflict and then the great flowering of the arts that followed in the ’20s and early ’30s; there was the ugly triumphalism of the Nazi era and its destruction, followed by the Cold War years and the three decades that have followed. Today, you can see traces of all these times.
Cookie-cutter homogeneity
•What this brings home to an Indian born and bred in our major metros is that we, as a nation and society, have no value for anything but our ancient or medieval structures and even that is highly tenuous. As for our colonial past, the formative years of the Republic, and the first layers of our modern cities, we are happy to throw them into the dustbin and replace them with cookie-cutter, real-estate developer homogeneity. Now, it’s as if each generation is the first one, with nothing having come before except a fake, twisted notion of an ‘ancient culture’. Not only are we poor economically or in terms of health, we have also managed to impoverish ourselves in terms of memory: devastating large swathes of our heritage, wiping out the topographies that trace how we got from the past to where we are now.
•It’s true there is only so much we can learn from the wealthy countries. Just as what has happened to the Indian urban landscape is complex, with each major metro and smaller town having its own struggles between preservation and real-estate depredation, between the need to protect ‘heritage’ and provide for the needs of a burgeoning population. But in all this, the tendency across every political party, municipal regime, State and central administration has been to avoid difficult decisions, jettison history, and allow the nexus of politicians and builders a criminally free hand. Even as we feel outrage at every precious ancient monument the Islamic State destroys in West Asia, perhaps one of the lessons we could learn from the multiple histories that coexist in cities like Berlin is that we ourselves must find feasible and sustainable ways to cease the carpet-bombing of our own history.
📰 Not too young for colon cancer
•When researchers reported earlier this year that colorectal cancer rates were rising in adults as young as in their 20s and 30s, some scientists were sceptical. The spike in figures, they suggested, might not reflect a real increase in disease incidence but earlier detection, which can be a good thing. Now a sobering new study has found that younger Americans aren’t just getting cancer diagnoses earlier. They are dying of colorectal cancer at slightly higher rates than in previous decades, and no one really knows why.
•“This is real,” said Rebecca L. Siegel, an epidemiologist with the American Cancer Society and the lead author of the current study, published as a research letter in JAMA , as well as of the earlier report. “It’s a small increase, and it is a trend that emerged only in the past decade, but I don’t think it’s a blip. The burden of disease is shifting to younger people.”
•The study found that even though the risk of dying from colon and rectal cancers has been declining in the population overall, death rates among adults from ages 20 to 54 had increased slightly, to 4.3 deaths per 100,000 people in 2014, up from 3.9 per 100,000 in 2004. No one knows what underlying lifestyle, environmental or genetic factors may be driving the rise in cases.
Diet, antibiotics possible factors
•Obesity, a diet high in red or processed meats and lack of physical activity are among the factors tied to increased risk, but new research is looking at other possible causes. One recent study found, for example, that prolonged use of antibiotics during adulthood was associated with a greater risk of developing precancerous polyps, possibly because antibiotics can alter the make-up of the gut microbiome.
•Scientists are also exploring whether the colorectal cancers emerging in younger adults are different from those seen in older people — and whether they can be detected and treated with the same tools. There is some evidence that young people are more likely to have precancerous polyps that are harder to see and remove during a colonoscopy because of their location in the colon or because they are flat rather than tubular, according to Dr. Otis Brawley, who is chief medical officer for the American Cancer Society.
•While some organisations specifically state that colonoscopy is the preferred screening method, the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force endorses a variety of screening tests, including some that are less expensive or non-invasive, though they may not be as effective in finding and preventing cancers. Stool tests that examine faecal samples for microscopic amounts of blood and DNA changes, for example, can indicate the presence of a tumour or polyp, but such tests need to be done more frequently and may have to be followed up with a colonoscopy if the result is positive.
•But Dr. Brawley said there is good scientific data to show that stool sample tests save lives.
•Warning signs of colorectal cancer include rectal bleeding, bloody stools, unexplained weight loss, fatigue and digestive complaints, or persistent changes in bathroom behaviour. Anaemia in men is also a warning sign and should be explored further, and while many doctors typically attribute anaemia in a premenopausal woman to menstruation, experts say that if a woman is experiencing any other symptoms, doctors should assess her for colon cancer.NYT
📰 A snappy kidney function test
Biosensor developed by IIT team detects disorders in a few minutes
•The Indian Institutes of Technology, Bombay and Indore, have jointly developed a biosensor that makes it possible to detect kidney disorders in less than eight minutes.
•The biosensor can accurately measure both the pH and urea concentration with a single drop of urine. The researchers who developed it say that it will help make a point-of-care test to determine whether the kidneys are functioning normally.
•For a kidney function test, doctors need an estimate of pH and urea as most kidney disorders result in reduced pH and higher concentration of urea. Available methods to detect urea require patients to undergo two tests for accuracy. In addition, there is the problem of contaminating components in urine such as calcium, chloride, ascorbic acid, sodium and potassium.
How it works
•The biosensor, developed by Rashmi Chaudhari, Abhijeet Joshi, and Rohit Srivastava, can detect both and is made by encapsulating an enzyme urease and a molecule FITC-dextran in alginate microspheres. The combination glows in response to a chemical reaction with urea and changes in pH when urine is added. The fluorescence reduces when the pH is acidic and increases when it is alkaline. The changes in fluorescence intensity are measured, which helps to calculate the values of pH and urea.
•“It is made using alginate which is safe and non-toxic to handle. It can work in the ideal pH range of 4-8, and is able detect even low concentrations of urea up to 50 millimolar,” Ms. Chaudhari told India Science Wire.
•Abhijeet Joshi, a coauthor and on the faculty at IIT-Indore said, “We tested the biosensor on samples of patients suffering from chronic kidney disease procured from KEM Hospital and Apex Kidney Care [both] in Mumbai and it showed an accuracy of more than 97%.”
•Rohit Srivastava, professor, Department of Biosciences and Bioengineering, IIT-Bombay, who led the study, added that “the biosensor is stable for up to a month in a refrigerator and gives results that are unaffected by other components in urine samples”. It will help make a rapid and accurate point-of-care diagnostic test for kidney disorders.
•However, Bansi D. Malhotra, professor, Department of Biotechnology at the Delhi Technological University, who is not connected to the study, said that while the biosensor uses fluorescence-based technique to detect urea in urine sample, “it is not user-friendly and as cost-effective when compared to other (electrochemical) techniques, which are routinely used for this purpose”. — India Science Wire
📰 ‘New solar power bid norms will reduce risk’
•The Ministry of New & Renewable Energy (MNRE) has said its guidelines for tariff-based bidding for procuring solar power will reduce risk, enhance transparency and increase affordability.
•The MNRE had issued the new guidelines for tariff based competitive bidding process on August 3.
•The guidelines have been issued under the provisions of Section 63 of the Electricity Act, 2003 for long term procurement from grid-connected Solar PV Power Projects of 5 MW and above, through competitive bidding.
•“New Guidelines for Tariff Based Competitive Bidding Process to reduce risk, enhance transparency and increase affordability of Solar Power,” the ministry said in a statement on Saturday.
•Besides, it said, the move would help protect consumer interests through affordable power.
•It will also provide standardisation and uniformity in processes and a risk-sharing framework between various stakeholders involved in the solar PV power procurement, it said.
•This will also help reduce off-taker risk and encourage investments, enhance bankability of the Projects and improve profitability for the investors.
•Some of the salient features of the the new norms include generation compensation for off-take constraints for reducing off-take risks.
•The ‘must-run’ status for solar projects has been stressed upon.
•Besides, to ensure lower tariffs, minimum PPA (power purchase agreement) tenure has been kept at 25 years. Moreover, unilateral termination or amendment of PPA is not allowed.
