📰 No plan yet to deport Rohingya, says Rijiju
Responding to UN official’s statement, Minister says States have been asked only to identify ‘illegal’ immigrants and act as per procedure
•Union Minister of State for Home Kiren Rijiju said here on Monday that the government had not yet firmed up a plan to deport Rohingya, and had only asked the State governments to identify illegal immigrants and initiate action under established procedure.
•Mr. Rijiju told The Hindu that India gave “utmost importance to humanitarian concerns and has always accepted refugees”.
•He was reacting to United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights Zeid Ra’ad Al Hussein’s statement that “India cannot carry out collective expulsions, or return people to a place where they risk torture or other serious violations”.
‘India most humane’
•Mr. Rijiju, while reacting to Mr. Hussein’s statement, said, “But the United Nations and other international organisations do not understand the internal security or national security problems of India. India has been the most humane nation and we have asked the State governments to initiate action as per the established procedure. They [Rohingya] are still here.”
•In an official communication issued on August 8, the Home Ministry directed the States to conduct surveys and prepare to deport Rohingya in a “continuous manner.”
•Lawyer Prashant Bhushan moved the Supreme Court against the order and appearing on behalf of two Rohingya, Mohammad Salimullah and Mohammad Shaqir, made a plea to “protect their life and liberty”.
•The court will hear the matter on September 18.
•The Minister said he would not like to disclose the communication with Myanmar on taking back Rohingya.
•“The Rohingya are a unique problem. The Home Ministry’s stand in the Supreme Court is on the basis of a legal position and the MHA’s (Ministry of Home Affairs) directions to States to identify Rohingya are on the basis of the legal position,” Mr. Rijiju said.
•Mr. Hussein, while addressing the 36th Session of the Human Rights Council in Geneva, said, “I deplore current measures in India to deport Rohingya at a time of such violence against them in their country. Some 40,000 Rohingya have settled in India and 16,000 of them have received refugee documentation. The Minister of State for Home Affairs has reportedly said that because India is not a signatory to the Refugee Convention, the country can dispense with international law on the matter, together with basic human compassion. However, by virtue of customary law, its ratification of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, the obligations of due process and the universal principle of non-refoulement (a number of international instruments relating to refugees), India cannot carry out collective expulsions, or return people to a place where they risk torture or other serious violations.”
•As reported by The Hindu on Monday, India’s shift in position on the Myanmar issue on Saturday was prompted by a series of requests from the Bangladesh government “at the highest levels”.
On scribe’s murder
•Mr. Hussein also mentioned the murder of journalist Gauri Lankesh in Bangalore last week.
•“The current wave of violent and often lethal mob attacks against people under the pretext of protecting the lives of cows is alarming. People who speak out for fundamental human rights are also threatened. Gauri Lankesh, a journalist who tirelessly addressed the corrosive effect of sectarianism and hatred, was assassinated last week. I have been heartened by the subsequent marches calling for protection of the right to freedom of expression, and by demonstrations in 12 cities to protest the lynchings,” Mr. Hussein said.
📰 India to further aid Afghan troops
•India agreed to enhance existing assistance to Afghan security forces, including in capacity building and training of Afghan soldiers in India, during a Partnership Council meeting on Monday, even as Afghanistan’s Foreign Minister suggested a larger role for India in regional diplomacy.
•“We are glad India will continue to support our security forces in terms of equipment and training Afghan cadets in India,” Afghanistan Foreign Minister Salahuddin Rabbani told The Hindu in an exclusive interview.
•“We hope also that India, as a good friend of other countries in the region like Russia and Iran, can convince those countries to work with the Afghan government to support the peace process in Afghanistan.”
•Addressing journalists along with Mr. Rabbani at the conclusion of the Partnership Council meeting, the second such meeting since the Strategic Partnership Agreement (SPA) was signed in 2011, External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj said the strategic relationship is an “article of faith”.
•The meeting was the first high-level engagement between India and Afghanistan since the announcement of a new ‘South Asia policy for Afghanistan’ by U.S. President Donald Trump, where he vowed to take tough action against Pakistan if it fails to crackdown on terror groups, a policy that was welcomed in both Kabul and New Delhi.
New scholarships
•“We remain united in overcoming the challenges posed by cross-border terrorism and safe havens and sanctuaries to both our countries,” Ms. Swaraj said in a veiled reference to Pakistan, and announced 500 new scholarships for children and kin of the Afghan National Defence and Security Forces (ANDSF) to honour their sacrifices “for the cause of entire humanity” and ensuring the safety of Indians working in Afghanistan.
•Mr. Rabbani made a more pointed reference to Pakistan-based terror groups Jaish-e-Mohammed and Lashkar-e-Taiba, which he said had “been launching attacks against India and killing innocent civilians there”, while also also launching “similar attacks along with D’aesh (ISIS), Al Qaeda and Taliban in Afghanistan and destroying infrastructure.”
📰 Firm signal on bullet train project
However, focus of Japanese PM’s visit is likely to be bilateral talks on security
•Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his Japanese counterpart, Shinzo Abe, will lay the groundwork for the next level of collaboration during the annual summit meeting to be held in Gandhinagar on Wednesday, the External Affairs Ministry said on Monday.
•The Ministry said the high point of the visit was likely to be the joint inauguration of the Mumbai-Ahmedabad high-speed rail project and bilateral security dialogue.
•“The two leaders will review the recent progress in the multifaceted cooperation between India and Japan under the framework of their ‘Special Strategic and Global Partnership’ and will set its future direction,” said a press release issued by the Ministry.
•Mr. Abe begins a two-day visit on September 13 during which he and Mr. Modi will hold wide-ranging bilateral discussions covering bilateral and global issues. This will be the fourth annual summit between them.
•Ministry spokesperson Raveesh Kumar said the leaders would jointly participate in the ground-breaking ceremony for the Mumbai-Ahmedabad high-speed rail project using Japanese Shinkansen technology — also known as the bullet train project — in Gandhinagar.
Training institute
•Through a video-link, they will participate in the ground-breaking ceremony of the High Speed Railway Training Institute to be set up in Vadodara.
•Mr. Abe will visit the memorial dedicated to Mahatma Gandhi at Dandi Kutir. However the focus of Mr.Abe’s visit is likely to be the bilateral discussion on security issues, especially on North Korea and China.
•His visit was preceded by that of his senior adviser, Katsuyuki Kawai, who addressed a public meeting here last week and laid out the immediate security challenges following the test of a hydrogen bomb by North Korea.
•India-Japan ties are at a crucial phase in a range of areas, including defence and security.
•In their annual defence dialogue last week, the two countries had resolved to collaborate closely in defence production, including on dual-use technologies.
•Prime Minister Modi had visited Japan in November last year.
•Both sides had decided to ramp up bilateral defence and security cooperation during the visit.
📰 Reappraising the Raj
Can India continue to ignore Macaulay’s foundational contributions?
•The grand narrative of modern Indian history has come to be dominated by the triumvirate of Gandhi, Nehru and Ambedkar. No doubt, it is a well-deserved recognition. But it also relegates several freedom fighters and national leaders to the status of foot soldiers. Towering leaders like Rajaji, Sree Narayana Guru, Lala Lajpat Rai are no longer part of our collective consciousness. Still worse, they are downgraded to local and ethnic levels. Mahatma Jyotiba Phule is only celebrated by Dalits and most backward class groups.
•Our collective amnesia does more injustice to all those from the British Isles and associated with the Raj. A Lord Lytton or a Reginald O’Dwyer deserves all the opprobrium. What about a William Bentinck or a Lord Ripon? And what about, above all, Lord Thomas Babington Macaulay?
•It is time the country embarked on a new estimation of the pantheon of modern India’s nation builders. Such a process will be fraught with contestation and controversy. And much needed.
Time for a forgiving gaze
•Fortunately, the constant reappraisal of history is taking place, not at the behest of some government agency but by common people. Consider this. While scholars question the wisdom of ‘colonial hydrology’, Sir Arthur Cotton who built a barrage on river Godavari (and several others) is gratefully remembered by people in coastal Andhra Pradesh. He is called a Modern Bhagirath and his statue is kept in a temple. Newspapers in the State carry special articles on occasion.
•It is natural that a generation remains bitter towards an oppressive regime, foreign or home-grown, that it managed to overthrow. And the subsequent generations would be more forgiving, if not forgetful. It is emblematic of the times that we now witness the reverse in India.
•Generations that lived under British rule had had a more equanimous and sympathetic view of the times though people fought for its end. The self-induced outrage at British rule reflects home-grown jingoism.
•Hardly a generation ago, it would be natural for a history teacher to extol the greatness of this or that Briton who may have happened to be associated with the Raj — and faced no consequences. Nowadays, even the students would drag such a teacher out of the classroom and teach him a lesson.
•In 1982 I could write a newspaper article on Macaulay, using the vignettes my undergraduate history lecturer narrated in the class. It’s another matter that he had disapproved of my temerity to blindly print his memory without any research!
Macaulay’s bequest to India
•Macaulay in 1833 was the first on record among those ruled India to reject caste and communal distinctions in categorical terms: “…the worst of all systems was surely that of having a mild code for the Brahmins… while there was a severe code for the Sudras. India has suffered enough already from the distinction of castes, and from the deeply rooted prejudices which that distinction has engendered. God forbid that we should inflict on her the curse of a new caste, that we should send her a new breed of Brahmins!”
•“It is the genius of this man,” wrote eminent historian K.M. Panikkar in his estimation of Macaulay, “narrow in his Europeanism, self-satisfied in his sense of English greatness, that gives life to modern India as we know it. He was India’s new Manu, the spirit of modern law incarnate.” A generation later historian Ramachandra Guha echoes a similar viewpoint: “The software revolution in India might never have happened had it not been for Macaulay’s Minute. And India might not have still been united had it not been for that Minute either.” (These two quotes are taken from Zareer Masani’s excellent biography, Macaulay: Pioneer of India’s Modernization .)
•Panikkar and Mr. Guha highlight Macaulay’s two gifts to India, the rule of law and English language; they have played — and still play — a critical role in building and keeping India as a functioning democracy. An unintentional side effect of an arrogant and racist coloniser? By no means. For Macaulay, the following ought to be the mission statement of British rule in India: “It would be, on the most selfish view of the case, far better for us that the people of India were well governed and independent of us, than ill governed and subject to us; that they were ruled by their own kings, but wearing our broadcloth, and working with our cutlery, than that they were performing their salams to English collectors and English magistrates, but were too ignorant to value, or too poor to buy, English manufactures. To trade with civilised men is infinitely more profitable than to govern savages.” Patronising? Yes. Lacking in good faith? No.
•No doubt, his detractors dismiss him as an imperialist and a racist, tossing in a few other charges including that of incest. Save the last one, Macaulay left enough ‘evidence’ to sustain the charges against himself. He said things that can still upset several groups: Americans, Indians, Germans, Russians, the French, the Irish, Jews, Bengalis, and, above all, the Catholics. But his omissions and commissions are beside the point.
•The case in point is the recent controversy over Mahatma Gandhi’s quite uncharitable comments on Black Africans and consequent demands in several countries from Ghana to South Africa to pull down his statues. The shortcomings of these two great men are not good enough to deny them of their rightful place in history.
•Can we continue to ignore Macaulay’s foundational contributions towards making modern India? Is it a mere quibble about history? An informed public debate on what it means to celebrate the legacy of Macaulay will help us appreciate the whys and wherefores of much of the current angst in the country.
•The current dispensation is seeking to replace the legacy of the Raj — especially, English education — with a desi version nobody knows anything about. Whatever one knows is the spectre of gau rakshaks (cow vigilantes) performing their dharma of protecting the holy cow and also playing the ancient trick of lynching Dalits as cow-killers. In an India of Macaulay’s vision Dalits would enjoy equal rights and freedoms while gau rakshaks are put behind bars. And India would trade with Britain as an equal.
•A man with such a vision must be an Indian and if he happens to be the first to have that vision, he must be a Mahatma!
📰 The resilience of our liberalism
The historic verdict on privacy is a sublime oration on human dignity
•Anchored in constitutional scholarship, history and international law, the celebrated privacy judgment ( K.S. Puttaswamy , 2017) attests to the resilience of our dignitarian liberalism. The unanimous judgment of nine distinguished judges, who held that privacy is integral to human dignity and not a constitutional largesse to be withdrawn at will by the state, elevates privacy to the pinnacle in the hierarchy of human rights.
•“Privacy”, said the court, “ensures the fulfillment of dignity and is a core value which the protection of life and liberty is intended to achieve”. The court explained that “privacy with its attendant values assures dignity to the individual, and it is only when life can be enjoyed with dignity can liberty be of true substance” (per Justice Chandrachud). In reaffirming the coalescence of fundamental rights to life and liberty guaranteed under Articles 14, 19 and 21 following the Constitution Bench judgments in Cooper (1970) and Maneka Gandhi (1978), the court echoed the philosophical wisdom of Justice Krishna Iyer articulated years ago that “cardinal rights in an organic Constitution which makes man ‘human’, have a synthesis”.
•While finding its earlier decision in ADM Jabalpur a constitutional aberration, the judges emphasised that “the interpretation of the Constitution cannot be frozen by its original understanding”, reminiscent of Judge Cardozo’s celebrated statement long ago that the Constitution does not embody “rules for the passing hour but principles for an expanding future”. Expounding the philosophy of constitutionalism as a bulwark against the impulses of transient majorities, the court ruled that constitutional rights owed no apology to majoritarian opinion and thus fettered the legislative and executive infraction of these rights.
Shaping privacy rights
•Will the compelling logic of the judgment spur meaningful executive and legislative action to redeem its promise, is the question. In particular, the state’s response to queer rights, the right of choice in matters relating to food, health, reproduction and data disclosure, etc. will define the contours of privacy rights. Hopefully, citizens will not be driven to fight endless judicial battles to take what is inherently theirs. As part of meaningful follow-up measures, the government should move forward on the report of the Group of Experts under the chairmanship of Justice A.P. Shah (2012) suggesting a model privacy law referred to by Justice S.K. Kaul in his concurring judgment. The report, which recommended nine fundamental principles as the basis of the proposed privacy law, could be reviewed in the framework of the Puttaswamy decision and can provide credible basis for a comprehensive legal architecture to secure privacy rights. The unsung hero in the battle for privacy is the late Rama Jois, a former judge of Karnataka High Court and member of Rajya Sabha who persistently raised the issue of privacy in relation to Aadhaar. As the then Minister of State for Planning, this writer had to deal with the issue. A resultant offshoot was the constitution by the Planning Commission of an expert group headed by Justice Shah to propose a model privacy law.
•In the context of privacy debate, it is necessary to ask whether it was at all necessary to convert the legal challenge to Aadhaar into a privacy or an Aadhaar debate when post Cooper (1970), Maneka Gandhi (1978) and a series of subsequent Supreme Court judgments, the right to privacy stood entrenched in our constitutional jurisprudence as part of the fundamental right to dignity. What is disappointing is that even after the judgment, the Union Law Minister, himself a distinguished lawyer, has chosen to argue in public rather inelegantly that the judgment does not reject the government’s argument on privacy, even as the then Attorney General, who originally argued on behalf of the government that privacy was not a fundamental right, has rightly conceded that the government lost its case in court.
On the court’s role
•A less noticed but significant feature of the privacy ruling is a disclaimer of judicial power to introduce new constitutional rights in the exercise of the court’s judicial review jurisdiction. Some constitutional scholars have hastened to view the verdict as making the Supreme Court a “co-governor” of the nation (Upendra Baxi, Indian Express, August 30) . Unambiguously dispelling such a notion, the court held that “the exercise has been one of interpreting existing rights guaranteed by the Constitution” and “while understanding the core of those rights to determine the ambit of what the right comprehends”. It has thus adopted a vocabulary of constitutional discourse that navigates the extremes through self-restraint and has earned a general acceptance of its role as an independent custodian of the constitutional principle. In choosing to remain “within the banks”, judges, wiser by experience and disciplined by law, have guarded against encroaching beyond judicial bounds, thereby ensuring a diffusion of constitutional power “in a system of inter-branch equality”. The historic verdict which affirms that the idea of human dignity includes the right to be let alone, the equality of human beings and the freedom to will is a sublime oration on human dignity and a vindication of the nation’s liberal conscience. It is up to us to live the judgment, to keep faith with the spirit of our age in which the idea of human rights and their preservation as the raison d’etre of the state has received universal acceptance.
📰 ‘India needs a thousand more prefab factories’
‘Prefabricated construction can solve housing shortage’
•Faisal E. Kottikollon , 53, founder and chairman of the Dubai-based KEF Holdings, ranks 41 in the Forbes’ Middle-East’s ‘Top 100 Indian Business Owners in the Arab World 2017’. Last year, KEF Holdings’ subsidiary, KEF Infra, opened a Rs. 440-crore offsite prefabrication construction factory at Krishnagiri in Tamil Nadu, which he claims is the first in India and ‘one of the most advanced in the world’. Prefab construction, driven by cutting-edge technology, could help solve the housing shortage in the country, he said. Excerpts:
What spurred you to move out of valve manufacturing in the UAE to the untested prefab industry in India?
•By the time I exited in 2012, the Emirates Techno Casting company I set up in Ajman in 1997 had emerged as one of the top three such foundries in the world. Technologically, it was among the most advanced foundries in the world. I had progressively disinvested in the company and in 2012, I sold my stake for a premium. I wanted to start something new and challenging. KEF Holdings is an investing company. KEF Infra is the infrastructure arm of the company.
•Initially, I had wanted to set up a high-tech foundry in India as I was keen on chipping in for the infrastructure development in India. I have all along been a fan of the former President Abdul Kalam, who told me when he was in Dubai long back that he had started his career in the ISRO’s foundry. (A plant in Krishnagiri is named after Kalam). But, then I got interested in offsite prefabricated construction which was almost non-existent in India. Meanwhile, my family and I were building this Rs. 450-crore multi-speciality hospital at Kozhikode, so the prefab materials from the KEF Infra One Industrial Park at Krishnagiri came in handy.
But, is there a large market for prefab in India?
•There is a huge opportunity for prefab construction industry right now in the country. In my view, India will need a thousand more plants soon. I guess the central Urban Ministry is likely to give a big push for the prefab industry shortly for promoting affordable housing. I believe prefab is the way to go to solve the housing shortage in the country. It’s cheap and fast. For instance, we can build a house in just two hours, with our plug-and-play products. And we can build a school in 30 to 60 days. Meitra Hospital is the first fully prefabricated hospital in India. This is going to be the norm in the future.
What are some of your other prefab projects?
•We built 101 Indira Canteens in Karnataka in 45 days. Now, we are building the Rs. 650-crore, 2-million-sq.ft. Lulu Mall in Lucknow. We will complete it in 21 months. The prefab contract is for about Rs. 100 crore.
•You are reputed to be a fan of technology…
•I am a great believer in technology. Technology can revolutionise manufacturing, economy, society, people’s lives. It can cut costs, drastically reduce time, and bring down price. When I entered the foundry industry, it used to take four months for a casting. Now, it is just eight days. In our Krishnagiri plant, we use the latest robotics and automation.
•The plant is a one-of-its-kind facility in the world. It’s the world’s largest integrated facility dedicated to offsite construction where buildings are produced in a factory environment.
What next for you as an entrepreneur?
•I am now into social entrepreneurship. I would like to be called a social entrepreneur. My 30 years’ experience is going to be used in healthcare and education.
