📰 Kartarpur corridor can build bridges: Venkaiah
Punjab CM lashes out at Pakistan for fomenting terror in the State
•The Kartarpur corridor between India and Pakistan will “open new doors” and is a “unifier, building bridges across old chasms”, said Vice-President Venkaiah Naidu here on Monday, even as Punjab Chief Minister Amarinder Singh lashed out at Pakistan for supporting terrorism in his State.
Nov. 2019 deadline
•Mr. Naidu was joined by leaders from all political parties in Punjab to lay the foundation stone for the four-lane “human corridor” to be completed by November 23, 2019, in time for Sikh founding Guru Nanak’s 550th birth anniversary, which was decided on by Prime Minister Narendra Modi at a Cabinet meeting last week.
•Addressing thousands at a public rally organised for the event in the border town of Dera Baba Nanak, just 2 km from the International Border with Pakistan, Mr. Naidu said he hoped the corridor would “pave the way for peace and greater progress of all our people”.
•On Wednesday, Pakistan Prime Minister Imran Khan will lay the stone for construction of the corridor on the Pakistani side, about 4 km from the border.
‘Creating history’
•The corridor will drastically cut down the journey pilgrims have to make from more than 200 km to just 6 km.
•“That is the history we have to create together, a history that will make our two countries and the entire world a more peaceful place for our children and grandchildren to live and grow together,” Mr. Naidu said.
•The Vice-President’s words on rapprochement were in sharp contrast to Capt. Singh, who has declined Mr. Khan’s invitation to be a part of the Kartarpur ceremony in Pakistan.
•He cited continued firing at the LoC, and terrorist strikes, allegedly fomented by the Pakistan Army, including the most recent grenade attack in Amritsar that killed three people, as reasons for rejecting the invite.
•“I want to directly address the Pakistani Army Chief,” Capt. Amarinder said. “I see people saying I should go to Pakistan [for the Kartarpur ceremony]. But I can’t go, because Pakistan’s government doesn’t have control of the situation and the Army is carrying out these attacks. I will not go until there is peace,” he said, adding that he would protect the State until “the last drop of his blood.”
•Capt. Amarinder was referring to social media commentary that has credited his party colleague and minister Navjot Singh Sidhu for the move by Pakistan to build the corridor, a long-standing demand of the Sikh community.
•In August, the Chief Minister had also been critical of Mr. Sidhu for embracing General Bajwa when he had first spoken of the Kartarpur corridor. Mr. Sidhu was not present at the foundation stone ceremony.
•Sikh villagers from surrounding areas said they were eager for the border to open so they could walk to Kartarpur without visa restrictions, and cheered Minister of Road Transport Nitin Gadkari’s promise that the corridor on the Indian side would be ready in just four months. Now, pilgrims stop at the border and try to see the Kartarpur shrine through a pair of binoculars.
•90-year-old Gurdiyal Singh has hardly any teeth left, but smiles broadly at the thought of going back to a shrine he visited when he was just nineteen. “I was young and strong in those days and went to Kartarpur with my family regularly,“ says Singh, who moved over from Pakistan’s Narowal district during partition in 1947. “But I still have the strength to go over now, and look eagerly forward to visiting Guru Nanak’s final resting place again,” he told The Hindu, in Punjabi.
📰 PIL urges Minimum Wages Act for domestic workers
•A petition has been filed in the Supreme Court seeking its intervention to bring dignity to “India’s invisible workforce in the informal sector” — the domestic workers.
•The petition filed by NGO Common Cause along with social activist Aruna Roy and the National Platform for Domestic Workers, said: “Latent classism and lack of education make domestic workers prone to violence and abuse at the hands of their employers and placement agencies”.
•The petition asked the Supreme Court to lay down guidelines to protect the workers’ rights.
•“Worsening their vulnerabilities are the absence of proper documentation, which also increases their reliance on employers to access social security benefits. As employment is largely through word of mouth or personal referrals , employment contracts are rarely negotiated, leaving the terms of employment to the whims of the employer,” Common Cause submitted.
•The petition said Indian homes have witnessed a 120% increase in domestic workers in the decade post liberalisation. “While the figure was 7,40,000 in 1991, it has increased to 16.6 lakh in 2001,” the NGO said.
•The petition sought the recognition of domestic work under the Minimum Wages Act, 1948. Their work hours should be reduced to eight a day and they should be given a mandatory weekly off as a basic right under Article 21.
📰 Preventing another scuffle
Smooth civil-military relations require delicate oversight through statesmanship
•In a disturbing incident in Bomdila, Arunachal Pradesh recently, two soldiers of the Indian Army were arrested by the local police and reportedly beaten up for alleged incorrect behaviour during a festival, which was then followed by alleged retaliatory high-handedness by their Army compatriots. This is an apt example of the leadership on both sides not using their superior skills to prevent the unsavoury happenings and living up to the requirement of statecraft. In aviation, for example, there is a maxim, ‘a superior pilot is one who uses his superior judgment to avoid situations which require the use of his superior skills’. The term ‘statecraft’ is important because the leadership at every level of the government is a vital cog in maintaining a harmonious relationship with other arms, all the while respecting the other’s domain specialisation.
•The Bomdila incident is not the first instance of the civil administration and the military having locked horns. It is just that earlier incidents did not get publicity in the absence of fast communication. Though the issues were “resolved”, tensions have continued to simmer. Social media and near instantaneous communications now amplify the damage, as seen at Bomdila.
•Here is another example. Last month, a spokesperson of the Ministry of Defence was sent on leave after a tweet from the spokesperson’s official Twitter handle was viewed as an insult by veterans. The controversial tweet, which was in response to a remark made by a former Indian Navy chief, is another example of the attitude of some in the civil administration towards the uniformed forces. The fallout in both cases has been unsavoury to say the least, highlighting the vital intangible called ‘civil-military’ relations.
•There is a delicate thread that links the uniformed and non-uniformed sections. Pride in one’s job should not translate to contempt for another’s job. The civil administration has challenges that no uniformed person ever faces, such as the pressures from social strife, economic hardships, and law and order. The uniformed services, on the other hand, see themselves as protectors of the nation even at the cost of their own lives. This requires implicit faith of the soldier, the sailor and the airman in their leadership. A commander’s order is sacrosanct and a soldier on the front line follows it unflinchingly despite knowing that he could lose his life the next moment. It is this implicit faith that permeates the psyche of a uniformed person based on the belief that his commander is supreme and will always look after his interests as well as those of his family. This is how the military works, by laying emphasis on the point that military effectiveness requires a military culture that is different from that of a civilian’s. This is the heart of the ‘chip on the shoulder’ feeling that drives a soldier to sacrifice his life at his superior’s command.
Core issues
•So, just as a uniformed force must acknowledge the expertise of the civil administration, so too should the latter respect and ensure that a soldier does feel a bit special. ‘Feeling special’ is not the customary platitudes on television, political rallies and slogans in times of conflict, but in finding solutions to the everyday pressures that a soldier and his family face, such as issues of pay and allowances, precedence with civilian counterparts, a lack of good schooling on account of frequent postings, housing issues, land litigation and the like. This results in healthy civil-military relations.
•At the heart of civil-military relations are two questions that Professor Mackubin Owens of the Institute of World Politics, poses in an essay. First, who controls the military and how? Is there civilian control or has it degenerated into civilian bureaucratic control? Second, what degree of military influence is appropriate for a given society? While direct intervention in domestic affairs is a big no, on the other extreme is the utilisation of the armed forces in happenings that should logically come under the civilian domain.
•Here is another example. Worrisome air pollution levels in Delhi have been in the news and a Twitter post focussed attention on the lack of faith in the civil bureaucracy in tackling the issue. ‘Bring in the army,’ said the poster. Not good, I would say, but one can explain this as a follow-up to the Army being called in to construct railway foot overbridges in Mumbai and even clear up litter left behind by tourists in the hills of north India. There are pitfalls when lionising translates to deification.
Do not deify the military
•Deification of the military could lead to resentment among certain sections of society. And here is where the politician comes in: using the armed forces very often as a bulwark to sort out civil issues is detrimental to military philosophy. So also is the absence of oversight to prevent civilian bureaucratic control and delays in resolving the problems service personnel face. The trick is to anticipate and prevent a Bomdila type incident so that ‘superior judgment is not required to firefight something that could have been prevented had those superior skills been used at the right time’.
•An unequal civil-military dialogue, wherein a soldier begins to doubt his ‘uniqueness’ (not deification) in society does not bode well for good civil-military relations. Similarly, the important role played by the civilian bureaucracy in governance should be acknowledged. Civil-military relations is an art that require delicate nursing through statesmanship. Good leadership from both sides is the key to preventing new Bomdilas.
📰 Legacies crucial for the commons
Why Gandhi and Marx are more relevant now than ever before
•The 150th birth anniversary year of Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi and the 200th birth anniversary of Karl Marx went by this year. Such anniversaries can become occasions of tokenism — for instance, the Indian government has set up a committee with more than 100 members to coordinate celebrations of Gandhi’s anniversary, crammed with political bigwigs from various parties, a few academics and Gandhian workers. I am sceptical it has achieved much more than a significantly heightened scale of the hypocritical display that October 2 brings around every year. Hopefully I’m mistaken, but since any meaningful homage to Gandhi would call into question the very fundamentals of today’s political and economic power, and point a sharply critical gaze at the rampant abuse of religion and nationalism, I think I’m pretty safe in being sceptical. And so too perhaps for Marx, at least where the celebrations are being led by so-called revolutionary governments in those parts of the world where Leftist parties still hold power.
•This does not mean that these two figures are of no relevance now. On the contrary, they are even more so than before. Their legacy is crucial for the majority of the world’s population, marginalised by capitalism, statism, patriarchy and other structures of oppression. As it is for the rest of nature, so badly abused by humanity. And it is a legacy that is still alive and thriving, not so much in the orthodox Gandhian and Marxist organisations and in academic circles where the tussle between the two ‘ideologies’ is more dominant than the urge to make them relevant to the struggles of the marginalised, as in these struggles themselves.
Resistance and construction
•And so we must turn for hope to the many movements of sangharsh (resistance) and nirman (construction) throughout the world. These movements realise that the injustices they are facing, and the choices they must make, are not bound by the divides that ideologues play games with.
•Let’s take sangharsh. At any given time in India, there are dozens of sites where Adivasis, farmers, fisherpersons, pastoralists and others are refusing to part with their land or forest or water to make way for so-called development projects. One thousand farmers have filed objections to their lands being taken up by the Prime Minister’s pet project, the bullet train. News that is both inspiring and depressing keeps coming from Latin America, of indigenous people standing up for their territorial rights against mining and oil extraction, and all too frequently paying the price when state or corporate forces kill their leaders. Nationwide rallies were organised by the National Alliance of People’s Movements and the Ekta Parishad in October. They involved movements for land and forest rights, communal harmony, workers’ security and other causes that are not so easy to place in any ideological camp.
•The same goes for nirman, or the construction of alternatives. Across the world there are incredible examples of sustainable and holistic agriculture, community-led water/energy/food sovereignty, worker takeover of production facilities, resource/knowledge commons, local governance, community health and alternative learning, inter-community peace-building, reassertion of cultural diversity, gender and sexual pluralism, and much else.
•It is in many of these alternative movements that I find inspiration for building on the legacies of Gandhi and Marx (and Ambedkar, Rabindranath Tagore, Rosa Luxemburg and various luminaries) and, equally important, on the many indigenous and Adivasi, Dalit, peasant and other ‘folk’ revolutionaries through history. There are many examples that dot the Indian landscape: the few thousand Dalit women farmers who have achieved anna swaraj (food sovereignty) in Telangana while also transforming their gender and caste status; the several dozen Gond Adivasi villages in Gadchiroli that have formed a Maha Gram Sabha to stop mining, and work on their own vision of governance and livelihood security; a Dalit sarpanch near Chennai who combines both Marxist and Gandhian principles in his attempt to transform the village he lives in. Similarly, there are others across the world: a thousand people have experimented with anarchic community life in the ‘freetown’ of Christiania in Copenhagen for four decades; indigenous peoples in Peru, Canada and Australia have gained territorial autonomy; small peasants in Africa and Latin America have sustained or gone back to organic farming; fisherpersons in the South Pacific have their own network of sustainably managed marine sites.
•What I find of significance in many resistance and alternative movements is the exploration of autonomy, self-reliance, people’s governance of politics and the economy, freedom with responsibility for the freedom of others, and respect for the rest of nature. While these movements do often call for policy interventions from a more accountable state, there is also an underlying antipathy to the centralised state, as there is in both Gandhian swaraj and in Marxist communism and in many versions of anarchy. Private property is also challenged. In 2013, the Gond village Mendha-Lekha in Maharashtra converted all its agricultural land into the commons. Note that commons here does not mean state-owned, a distorted form of ‘communism’ that has prevailed in orthodox Leftist state regimes.
Bridging gaps
•And while Gandhi was weak on challenging capital, and Marx on stressing the fundamental spiritual or ethical connections amongst humans, these movements often tend to bridge these gaps. Insofar as many of them integrate the need to re-establish ecological resilience and wisdom, some even arguing for extending equal respect to other species, they also encompass Marx’s vision of a society that bridges humanity’s ‘metabolic rift’ with nature, and Gandhi’s repeated emphasis on living lightly on earth. With this they also challenge the very fundamentals of ‘development’, especially its mad fixation on economic growth, reliance on ever-increasing production and consumption, and its utter disregard for inequality.
•This is not to suggest that Gandhi and Marx can be happily married; there are points of tension (for instance, on the issue of non-violence as a principle). There are points of ambiguity in recognising that indigenous peoples have already lived many elements of their dreams. But I have found enough in grassroots movements to be convinced that there is critical common ground amongst them, if our ultimate goals are well-being, justice, and equity, based on ecological wisdom. We would do well to honour their legacy by identifying such common ground and building on the struggles and creativity of ‘ordinary’ people in communities across the world.
📰 SC seeks govt reply on petition challenging amendments to Prevention of Corruption Act
Petitioner challenges two changes in the Prevention of Corruption Act
•The Supreme Court on Monday ordered the government to respond to a petition challenging two amendments to the Prevention of Corruption Act.
•The amendments were the introduction of S. 17 A (1) by which prior permission for investigation of corruption offences was required from the government and the removal of S. 13 (1) (d) (ii) (criminal misconduct) from the Act. The latter provision had earlier made it an offence for a public servant to abuse his position to give pecuniary or other advantage to a third party.
•A Bench led by Chief Justice (CJI) Ranjan Gogoi asked the government to file a response in six weeks.
•“We think you are entitled to a hearing,” Chief Justice Gogoi addressed advocate Prashant Bhushan, who appeared for the petitioner NGO, Centre for Public Interest Litigation (CPIL).
‘Gives time for lobbying’
•Mr. Bhushan said the removed provision of ‘criminal misconduct’ was used in most prosecutions of public servants under the Act in cases where there might not be a charge of directly accepting bribes. In this context, he referred to the prosecution of officials in the coal scam where officials gave leases to companies who they knew were not eligible. As for the new provision of Section 17(A), CPIL said that seeking sanction before commencement of investigation in a corruption case “not only takes away the element of secrecy and surprise but introduces a period of delay during which vital evidences can be manipulated or destroyed”.
•“It gives time to the accused to lobby by employing various means for denial of permission. The seeking of permission in itself becomes a cause for corruption as it introduces yet another discretion, at the crucial stage of commencement of investigation,” the petition said.
📰 RBI eases ECB hedging norms for companies
Raising foreign funds to turn cheaper
•The Reserve Bank of India (RBI) has eased hedging norms for companies that raise funds through external commercial borrowings (ECB), a move that will lower the cost of hedging.
•A notification issued by the central bank said mandatory hedge coverage has been reduced from 100% to 70% under Track I of the ECB framework.
Roll-over
•The RBI also clarified that the ECBs raised prior to this circular would be required to mandatorily roll over their existing hedge only to the extent of 70% of outstanding ECB exposure.
•According to the RBI, Track I refers to medium-term foreign currency-denominated ECBs with a minimum average maturity of 3-5 years. The move will help reduce costs for companies that raise foreign funds.
•“The cost of hedging has gone up in the last six months with the strengthening of the dollar. As a result, the ECB route was becoming unattractive to firms,” said a banker.
📰 Magnificent Mary: on making history at World Boxing Championships
With a sixth World Championship gold, Kom affirms her place as one the greatest boxers
•M.C. Mary Kom enhanced her already legendary status when she defeated Ukraine’s Hanna Okhota in the 48 kg segment of the Women’s World Boxing Championship in Delhi on Saturday. It was her sixth gold across World Championships, drawing her level with Félix Savón, the Cuban great who ruled amateur boxing in the 1980s and 1990s. Kom has always defied the odds. She has busted gender stereotypes, and overcome the odds posed by the lack of resources and poor infrastructure that hold back so much athletic talent in India. In doing so, she firmed up Manipur’s place on India’s talent map, brought India on the world boxing landscape, and reinforced women’s sport by winning consistently with exceptional determination and grace. Kom, who is now 35 and a mother of three, has had a good 2018, winning her maiden Commonwealth Games gold medal earlier this year. She extended that form in Delhi and cemented her place in the history of the World Championships with an overall haul of seven medals, including a silver on debut in 2001. A bronze medallist at the 2012 London Olympics, Kom said that the latest of her six world titles, secured after a gap of eight years, was the toughest of them all. It has come at a time when the competition has risen manifold following the inclusion of women’s boxing as an event in the Olympics in 2012. Kom, who got past other strong opponents before clinching the bout against Okhota, also had to bear the additional pressure of the expectations of home crowds.
•In the event, the victory has fuelled further expectations from this late-career burst. Kom will switch to the 51 kg weight class in the pursuit of a medal at the 2020 Tokyo Olympics. As a Rajya Sabha member of Parliament and idol for many upcoming women boxers, she has a full schedule, and will be aware that it will take all she has to fight with younger and stronger rivals in a higher weight category. Hailed as ‘Magnificent Mary’ by the International Boxing Association, which has chosen her as its representative in the International Olympic Committee athletes’ forum, Kom has been an inspiration globally. Her rise from a humble background to be an international role model has inspired a book and a Hindi movie chronicling her life. Raffaele Bergamasco, the India coach, sums up Kom’s legend with these words, “Mary in boxing is like Maradona in football.” The gender comparison is crucial too — at a time when the women’s competition at diverse levels and different sporting events is being sought to be placed on a par with the men’s, in terms of infrastructural support and remuneration, Mary Kom’s record will indeed give heart to all women athletes.
