📰 India up one rank in UN development index
Norway tops list of 189 countries, India at 129th rank; report flags growing gender inequality
•India ranks 129 out of 189 countries on the 2019 Human Development Index (HDI) — up one slot from the 130th position last year — according to the Human Development Report (HDR) released by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) on Monday.
•The HDI measures average achievement in three basic dimensions of human development — life expectancy, education and per capita income.
•Norway, Switzerland, Ireland occupied the top three positions in that order. Germany is placed fourth along with Hong Kong, and Australia secured the fifth rank on the global ranking.
•Among India's neighbours, Sri Lanka (71) and China (85) are higher up the rank scale while Bhutan (134), Bangladesh (135), Myanmar (145), Nepal (147), Pakistan (152) and Afghanistan (170) were ranked lower on the list.
46% growth in S.Asia
•As per the report, South Asia was the fastest growing region in human development progress witnessing a 46% growth over 1990-2018, followed by East Asia and the Pacific at 43%. India’s HDI value increased by 50% (from 0.431 to 0.647), which places it above the average for other South Asian countries (0.642).
•However, for inequality-adjusted HDI (IHDI), India’s position drops by one position to 130, losing nearly half the progress (.647 to .477) made in the past 30 years. The IHDI indicates percentage loss in HDI due to inequalities.
•The report notes that group-based inequalities persist, especially affecting women and girls and no place in the world has gender equality. In the Gender Inequality Index (GII), India is at 122 out of 162 countries. Neighbours China (39), Sri Lanka (86), Bhutan (99), Myanmar (106) were placed above India.
•The report notes that the world is not on track to achieve gender equality by 2030 as per the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals. It forecasts that it may take 202 years to close the gender gap in economic opportunity — one of the three indicators of the GII.
Increasing bias
•The report presents a new index indicating how prejudices and social beliefs obstruct gender equality, which shows that only 14% of women and 10% of men worldwide have no gender bias.
•The report notes that this indicates a backlash to women’s empowerment as these biases have shown a growth especially in areas where more power is involved, including in India.
•The report also highlights that new forms of inequalities will manifest in future through climate change and technological transformation which have the potential to deepen existing social and economic fault lines.
After over seven-hour-long debate, the Bill was passed with 311 members favouring and 80 voting against it.
•The Lok Sabha on Monday passed the Citizenship Amendment Bill (CAB) that seeks to give citizenship to refugees from the Hindu, Christian, Buddhist, Sikh and Zoroastrian communities fleeing religious persecution from Pakistan, Bangladesh and Afghanistan. The Bill was passed 311-80 with zero abstentions, after the Opposition put up a spirited attack against it.
•Responding to the five-hour debate that saw nearly 48 speakers from various parties participate, Union Home Minister Amit Shah said it was a “historic Bill” that sought to complete what the “Nehru-Liaqat pact could not do.”
•To repeated questions on the National Register for Citizens (NRC), he said it would be done soon.
•According to him, the Bill abided by the Constitution and “there is no violation.” “Under the principle of reasonable classification citizenship can be granted and there is no violation of Article 14,” he said.
•“India can’t be a mute spectator to the religious persecution of minorities happening in our neighbouring countries. We have given refuge to everyone without exception at various points of time in history,” he said.
•Adding that the Muslim population had grown to 14% from 9.8%, he said, “This Bill will not affect Indian Muslims or their rights at all.”
•He said that other neighbouring countries like Nepal and Sri Lanka were not mentioned as those were not theocratic states.
•This is a simple amendment but hits at illegal migrants, noted the Minister. “This will benefit the Bengali refugees the most. There is no need to fear now... anyone who has or does not have document is welcome. Refugees need not fear but those coming here illegally are not welcome,” he said.
•He added that the northeast would not be touched.
•The majority of parties representing the northeastern States supported the Bill, as their concerns had been taken care of.
•The Sikkim Kranti Morcha (SKM) opposed it, however, with MP Indra Hang Subba demanding that the State be given exemptions on the lines of other northeastern States.
•Calling the Bill “heart-breaking” Trinamool MP Abhishek Banerjee said: “It is causing me great anguish and pain. Our India is all about peace. But your idea of India is all about lynchings. Our India is inclusive, your India is divisive.”
Anti-India Bill’
•Questioning why the Bill is only looking at three countries, he said: “Sri Lanka is there, Myanmar was part of British India. Why don’t you consider them? Because they don’t serve your political hunger. NRC was a disaster. It failed in one State and now you want to do it all over India. This Bill is anti-India and anti-Bengali also.”
•DMK MP Dayanidhi Maran said: “This is a “half-hearted” Bill which has completely ignored Sri Lankan Tamils. The government is preoccupied with its hatred for Muslims.”
•“You have not done anything so far to win the support of minorities or to give them comfort. Are you the Home Minister only for North India or all of India? There was no mention of Christians in the CAB in the BJP’s election manifesto, so I want to ask why the party is seeking to divide the minorities in the country.
•“You say that Kashmir is part of India, will you give citizenship to Muslims who are fleeing from Pakistan-Occupied Kashmir to India? No, because you have one stand — we don’t want Muslims,” he said.
•Congress MP Manish Tewari noted that “reasonable classification” as mentioned by the Home Minister should mean that equals can’t be treated as unequals.
•Calling the Bill unconstitutional, he said it was not the Congress that was responsible for the partition of the country on the basis of religion. “I want to remind the House that the idea of partition on religious basis was first floated in 1935 by Hindu Mahasabha... by Savarkar.”
•AIMIM chief Asaduddin Owaisi, speaking against the Bill, said: “I want to know why this government is so opposed to Muslims. Why do you hate us? After all we are also citizens of this country. This Bill has been brought in to accommodate Hindus left behind in NRC which will now make many lakh Muslims stateless. This is a historic blunder.”
•He tore up a copy of the Bill, emulating, he said, Mahatma Gandhi’s act of tearing up copies of Race Laws in South Africa in 1910.
•Gaurav Gogoi of the Congress demanded that Mr. Shah apologise to Gorkhas, Rajbonshis and others left out of the NRC despite being Indian citizens.
•“When you couldn’t complete the NRC exercise properly for 30 crore people, how will you do so for 130 crore people?”
•He asked northeastern parties to vote according to their conscience and not political compulsions.
📰 A growing blot on the criminal justice system
While there is reason to be concerned about delays in rape trials, a Hyderabad-like solution is out of the question
•The Indian criminal justice system increasingly reflects the idea of “power” rather than “justice”. Since the promise of criminal law as an instrument of safety is matched only by its power to destroy, guarantees of due process were accordingly incorporated in the criminal procedure so that every accused person gets a fair trial.
•Winston Churchill said: “The mood and temper of the public in regard to the treatment of crime and criminals is one of the most unfailing tests of the civilisation of any country.” We, in India, continue to follow a “culture of control” and a tendency to “govern through crime”. There are instances where the police, of late, have become the judge and the media, especially electronic, has started behaving like a court.
A disturbing norm
•The deaths, in an encounter last Friday, of the four accused in the rape and murder of a young veterinarian in Hyderabad (it happened on Wednesday) has revived the debate on the “right to kill”, or “extra-judicial killings” or “fake encounters”, which is the ugly reality of our country. Earlier, these encounters used to be criticised by the public and media. But in the new and “resurgent” India, we have started celebrating this instant and brutal form of justice. Blood lust has become the norm in preference to due process and constitutional norms. For example, there were many in Hyderabad who were seen showering flower petals on the police officers involved in Friday’s encounter. Even the father of the Unnao rape victim has demanded “Hyderabad-like justice”. Is India moving from rule of law to rule by gun?
•We have reason to be concerned about delays in rape trials. But a Hyderabad-like solution is absolutely out of the question. The new Chief Justice of India has rightly ruled out the instant justice model in a speech recently.
•The right thing to do in rape cases is to appoint senior judges in fast track courts; no adjournments should be permitted, and rape courts should be put under the direct control of High Courts; the district judge should not have any power to interfere, and the trial must be completed within three months.
•The only consolation is that India is not the only country that uses encounters. A UN working group on “Enforced or Involuntary Disappearances” has noted, with anguish, that guilty officials are generally not punished. India is also bound by Resolution 1989/65 of May 24, 1989 which had recommended that the principles on the “Effective Prevention and Investigation of Extra Legal. Arbitrary and Summary Executions” annexed to the Resolution be honoured by all governments. The UN General Assembly subsequently approved the principles. It resolved that the principles, “shall be taken into account and respected by governments within the framework of their national legislation and practices, and shall be brought to the attention of law enforcement and criminal justice officials, military personnel, lawyers, members of the executive and legislative bodies of the government and the public in general”. We have not done much in disseminating these guidelines and norms among our police and security forces.
Trigger-happy police?
•In the absence of a proper knowledge of international norms, police in India continue to protest against human rights standards in dealing with criminals. Some years ago, in Extra Judicial Execution Victim Families Association — the Supreme Court of India was dealing with more than 1,500 cases of such killings in Manipur, Justice Madan B. Lokur said: “Scrutiny by the courts in such cases leads to complaints by the state of its having to fight militants, insurgents and terrorists with one hand tied behind its back. This is not a valid criticism since and this is important, in such cases it is not the encounter or the operation that is under scrutiny but the smoking gun that is under scrutiny. There is a qualitative difference between use of force in an operation and use of such deadly force that is akin to using a sledgehammer to kill a fly; one is an act of self-defence while the other is an act of retaliation.”
•The “Hyderabad encounter” does not look like an act of self-defence. It defies common sense and stretches credulity that the police would take accused to the scene of crime at 5.30 a.m. The sun rises a little after 6 a.m. The confession of rape by them to the police is irrelevant under Section 25 in the Indian Evidence Act, 1872. Moreover, our law does permit retraction of confessions by the accused.
•The UN Human Rights Committee, in many reports, has said that “encounters are murders”. Encounter killings are probably the greatest violation of the most precious of all fundamental rights — the right to live with human dignity. Many a time these killings are fake and are so orchestrated that it is difficult to conclusively prove them wrong. These killings always take place with the prior consent of the highest authority, be it either administrative or ministerial. Encounters have indeed become the common phenomenon of our criminal justice system and there are police officers who covet the title “encounter specialists”.
•Our legal system does not permit police officers to kill an accused merely because he is a dreaded criminal, rapist or terrorist. Undoubtedly, the police have to arrest the accused and make them face trial. The Supreme Court has repeatedly admonished trigger-happy police personnel who liquidate criminals and project the incident as an encounter. The court observed in Om Prakash & Ors vs State Of Jharkhand & Anr on September 26, 2012: “Such killings must be deprecated. They are not recognised as legal by our criminal justice administration system. They amount to state terrorism.”
The Punjab ‘model’
•During the Punjab insurgency in the 1980s, a large number of suspected militants were eliminated through the encounter killings. The DGP of the State, the late K.P.S. Gill, even got the Governor of the State transferred on questioning the police. Gill contemptuously termed those who tried to get justice in encounter matters as “litigation guns”. The police tried its best to silence those who wanted due process such as Jaswant Singh Kalra, an activist, who used government crematoria records of just one Punjab district to show that at least 6,000 people were secretly cremated by the police.
•The Government of India itself admitted that as many as 2,097 people had been secretly cremated in Amritsar alone; in spite of the intervention of the National Human Rights Commission (NHRC) and the Supreme Court, just 30 cases were registered by the Central Bureau of Investigation. Punjab’s response to terrorism was appreciated all over as a model to be followed by other States.
•Similarly, in Kashmir about 8,000 people who were apparently in police custody were eliminated in a similar manner though the government contests this figure and says some may have even crossed the border. Even after the so-called end of insurgency, encounters have not come to an end. In 2000 for the massacre of 36 Sikhs in Chittisinghpura, five suspected militants were killed in an encounter. Subsequent forensic tests showed them to be innocent local villagers.
•NHRC data show that of the almost 2,500 killings in 1993, half turned out to be fake; there were at least 440 cases of encounters between 2002 to 2008. From 2009 to 2013, another 550 cases in different States were documented.
In Andhra Pradesh
•Andhra Pradesh too has been notorious as far as encounter killings are concerned. In February 2009, in its judgment on a writ petition filed by the Andhra Pradesh Civil Liberties Committee in the context of 1,800 encounter deaths (1997-2007), the Andhra Pradesh High Court (of united Andhra Pradesh) recognised that encounter deaths are, prima facie, cases of culpable homicide. Thus in all cases of encounter deaths a first information report must be registered, and an independent and impartial investigation ensured. The state’s plea of self-defence has to be established at the stage of trial, and not during the stage of investigation. The Supreme Court gave an ex parte stay on the judgment. The High Court in Hyderabad has shown its displeasure over this killing and will hear the matter on Thursday. It has ordered that the bodies of the Hyderabad encounter be preserved till it hears the matter.
•One hopes the top court of the land will now find the time to finally hear this important matter and uphold this progressive High Court judgment.
📰 Unequal, unsecular: On Citizenship Amendment Bill
Citizenship law amendment goes against non-discriminatory norms in the Constitution
•The Citizenship (Amendment) Bill, 2019 (CAB), is brazenly discriminatory and it is only a matter of time before its constitutionality is subjected to severe judicial scrutiny. The government’s obstinacy in going ahead with it, despite opposition in Parliament, as well as from enlightened sections, is unfortunate. In both its intent and wording, the proposed amendment singles out a community for hostile treatment. In short, the Bill chooses to open its citizenship door to non-Muslims from three nations with a Muslim majority — Pakistan, Bangladesh and Afghanistan. The ostensible reason: an opportunity to members of minority communities from these countries who had entered India prior to December 31, 2014, to apply for citizenship through naturalisation. The residential requirement for this category for naturalisation is reduced from 11 years to five. The Bill carefully avoids the words ‘persecuted minorities’, but the Statement of Objects and Reasons says “many persons belonging to Hindu, Sikh, Buddhist, Jain, Parsi and Christian communities have faced persecution on grounds of religions” in these three countries. Further, it refers to Home Ministry notifications in 2015-2016 through which it had exempted these undocumented migrants from the adverse penal consequences under the Passport (Entry into India) Act, 1920, and the Foreigners’ Act, 1946. The CAB creates a category of people on the basis of their religion and renders them eligible for its beneficial effects.
•A key argument against the CAB is that it will not extend to those persecuted in Myanmar and Sri Lanka, from where Rohingya Muslims and Tamils are staying in the country as refugees. Further, it fails to allow Shia and Ahmadiyya Muslims, who also face persecution, to apply for citizenship. The exemption from the application of the CAB’s provisions in tribal areas in Assam, Meghalaya, Mizoram and Tripura, and the Inner Line Permit areas in Arunachal Pradesh, Nagaland and Mizoram, with Manipur to be added soon, is clearly based on political expediency, even if it is in line with the constitutional guarantees given to indigenous populations and statutory protection given to ILP areas. It demonstrates the need for careful and meaningful categorisation, something that the main provisions fail to do. The central feature of the equal protection of the law envisaged in Article 14 is that the basis for classifying a group for a particular kind of treatment should bear a rational nexus with the overall objective. If protecting persecuted neighbourhood minorities is the objective, the classification may fail the test of constitutionality because of the exclusion of some countries and communities using religion. It would be a sad day for the republic if legislation that challenges its founding principles of equality and secularism is allowed to be passed.
📰 Bill on extension of SC, ST quota in LS, Assemblies introduced
It also proposes scrapping of nomination of Anglo-Indians
•A Bill seeking to extend by 10 years reservation to the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes in the Lok Sabha and the Assemblies and remove the provision of nominating two members of the Anglo-Indian community to the Lok Sabha was introduced in the House on Monday.
•The reservation given to SCs, STs and the Anglo-Indian community for the past 70 years is to end on January 25, 2020.
Trinamool opposes
•Trinamool Congress MP Saugata Roy opposed the introduction of the Constitution (126th) Amendment Bill, saying the Anglo-Indian community was being deprived of representation.
•Law Minister Ravi Shankar Prasad said that while the merits of the Bill could be gone into during the debate, the extension of reservation to the SC and ST communities was for representation, while the Anglo-Indian community was nominated.
•“According to the 2011 census, there are 296 members of the Anglo Indian community in the entire country. However, I would still maintain that we have not closed our minds to revisiting the issue,” he said.
•The Bill was then cleared for introduction by voice vote to be taken up for consideration and passing later.
📰 Climate treaty at a tipping point
Alternative strategies led by India and China should now move centrestage
•The annual Climate Summit, with increasing levels of concentration of greenhouse gases, raises questions on global climate policy.
•The world’s major emitter has rejected multilateralism, premised on burden sharing. The European Union’s ambition of ‘net’ zero emissions by 2050 obfuscates needed societal change by ignoring the embedded carbon in imports — a third of their emissions of carbon dioxide. Both are shifting the burden to India and China.
•The policy problem is that the Climate Treaty considers symptoms (emissions of greenhouse gases), rather than the causes (use of natural resources). India, which is responsible for just 3% of cumulative emissions, is the most carbon efficient and sustainable major economy.
Divergent resource use
•Excessive resource use by a fifth of the world population in a small part of the planet in the West is still responsible for half of global material use and the cause of climate change. Asia with half the world’s population is responsible for less than half of material use, and living in harmony with nature.
•Three shifts in natural resource use have taken place in the last 400 years: from agriculture to industry; rural to urban; and, livelihood to well-being. Colonialism and its aftermath of multinational corporations was the driver of the first shift, infrastructure of the second, and societal notions of progress of the third. Only the first two global trends show limited convergence and stabilisation. The third diverges sharply between material abundance in the West and societal well-being in India and China. Consumption patterns of primary material use for the provision of major services are driven by diverse values that include both global trends transforming human societies — for example, urbanisation, economic globalisation and digitisation, as well as national pathways to achieve prosperity. At the national-level, resource use is primarily construction material and energy use in buildings, mobility and manufacturing as well as food, which together lead to human well-being. More than half of natural resource use and global emissions occurred after 1950, driven by the gradual shift of three-quarters of the global population to cities.
•National natural resource-use accelerated in two distinct phases with very different origins and impacts. In North America and Europe, resource use accelerated after 1950, not with industrial resource use from 1850. By 1970, three-quarters of their population had moved to cities, characterised as “unprecedented prosperity”, leading to the trajectory towards climate change.
•China’s acceleration of natural resource use from 2000, also driven by urbanisation, is characterised as “unprecedented growth”. Different values and the objective of increasing well-being, rather than wealth, led to China, in 2016, having the same per-capita emissions of carbon dioxide as the West had in 1885.
•The shares of material use of the different activities in cities in China have remained constant since 1995 as increase in wealth does not modify the structural, economic and social changes, energy and material uses in civilisational states. Clearly, there will be no convergence in global material use as values, along with digital service economies in cities, will continue to shape the future. The pathway adopted by China can now be compared and contrasted with the West, as it has come up to that level of urbanisation and well-being. The contribution of the United States to resource use, or cumulative emissions of carbon dioxide, peaked at 40% in 1950, with rapid infrastructure development in Europe, declined to 26% and is likely to remain at this level, reflecting its direction and intensity. By 2015, global population had doubled when emissions in China began to stabilise and accounted for 12% of total cumulative emissions. Asia and Africa will peak at per-capita levels that are a third of those of the West.
Different views of prosperity
•India and China, civilisational states with a population nearly eight times that of the U.S., have re-defined progress. In China, electricity consumption per-capita is a third of the European Union (EU) and a sixth of the U.S. Residential energy consumption has increased at a rate less than half the increase in GDP, and corresponds to the increase in urban population, showing limited increase with more disposable household income. China also has less than a sixth of the number of cars with respect to population than the EU, while the U.S. has nearly two times that number. In China, nearly 40% of the distance travelled is by public transport, which is two times that of the EU. While the number of cars in China is projected to double by 2040, half the new cars are expected to be electric vehicles. China has the world’s most extensive electric high-speed rail system. In Beijing, three-quarters of public transport buses are already electric. Asian household savings as a percent of GDP are two times that of the U.S.
•Measures for global sustainability should draw lessons from India and China. For example, transport emissions are the fastest growing emissions worldwide, projected to become half of global emissions, and in the future more polluting than coal use. India and China are global leaders in sustainability not only because of their low per-capita resource use but also because of their contribution to peak oil around 2035 as they adopt electric vehicles supported by solar and wind renewable energy. By then, India and China are expected to have half the global renewable capacity and electric vehicles.
•By 2040 more than half of global wealth is again going to be in Asia; the low carbon social development model adopted by India and China will become the world system, ensuring global sustainability. Then the pattern of natural resource use adopted by western civilisation will more clearly be seen as a short-term anomaly rather than collective transformation or unified evolution of civilisation. Much before that, alternative strategies led by India and China should replace the ineffective Climate Treaty.
