📰 India showcases A-SAT missile prowess
Chinook heavy lift and Apache attack helicopters make their debut during the Republic Day flypast
•India on Sunday showcased its anti-satellite (A-SAT) missile capability to the world as the weapon, Mission Shakti, developed by the Defence Research and Development Organisation (DRDO), rolled out on the Rajpath during the 71st Republic Day parade.
•In addition, the Indian Air Force’s (IAF) newest inductions, Chinook heavy lift helicopters and Apache attack helicopters, also made their debut during the flypast.
•A DRDO marching contingent displayed the A-SAT missile along with a second equipment, the Air Defence Tactical Control Radar (ADTCR), as President and Supreme Commander of the armed forces Ram Nath Kovind reviewed the parade with Chief Guest Brazilian President Jair Messias Bolsonaro in attendance.
•There were 16 marching contingents this year, including six from the Army, and 22 tableaux from various States and departments in the 90-minute parade. The flypast consisted of 41 aircraft of the IAF and four helicopters of the Army Aviation.
Pinpoint accuracy
•On March 27, 2019 the DRDO shot down a live satellite in Low Earth Orbit (LEO) of 300 km using a modified interceptor of the Ballistic Missile Defence (BMD) system in ‘hit to kill’ mode with 10-cm accuracy.
•The Defence Ministry in a statement last week termed the test a major breakthrough in demonstrating the A-SAT technology and said that the A-SAT weapons “play a critical role in providing the necessary strategic deterrence”.
•“The covert technology of ‘hit to kill’ developed for the first time in India for such applications enables it to destroy an enemy satellite by directly colliding with it with pinpoint accuracy,” a brochure issued by the Defence Ministry at the parade said.
•The ADTCR is used for volumetric surveillance, detection, tracking and friend/foe identification of aerial targets of different types and transmission of prioritised target data to multiple command posts and weapon systems.
•Three CH-47F(I) Chinook helicopters flew in a ‘vic’ formation followed by five AH-64E Apache helicopters, which flew in an ‘arrowhead’ formation.
•Both these helicopters were inducted into service last year. India has contracted 22 Apache helicopters and 15 Chinook helicopters from Boeing.
•In a change of tradition, before commencement of the parade, Prime Minister Narendra Modi paid homage to fallen soldiers by laying a wreath at the flame of the immortal warrior at the National War Memorial (NWM), instead of the Amar Jawan Jyoti (AJJ) at the India Gate.
•The NWM, inaugurated in February last year, is located at the ‘C’ Hexagon near the India Gate and was built in memory of about 22,500 Indian soldiers who laid down their lives in the post-independence period. The AJJ will now be used only for regimental events and visiting dignitaries.
Six resolutions coming up this week
•Close on the heels of a number of critical international statements and parliamentary resolutions, the government is bracing for six scathing resolutions on both Jammu and Kashmir and the Citizenship (Amendment) Act (CAA), 2019, that have been filed by an overwhelming majority of members in the European Parliament.
•These will be taken up for discussion and voting this week. The Ministry of External Affairs (MEA) declined an official comment on the resolutions, which could have a deep impact on ties between India and the European Union.
•“We are informed that some members of the EU Parliament intend to move a draft resolution on the CAA. The CAA is a matter that is entirely internal to India. Moreover, this legislation has been adopted by due process and through democratic means after a public debate in both Houses of Parliament,” sources in the government said.
•They added that the government hoped that the sponsors of the draft would engage with New Delhi for an “accurate assessment of the facts before they proceed”.
•The draft resolutions (numbering from B9-0077/2020 to B9-0082/2020) are due to be taken up during the plenary session of the European Parliament in Brussels on January 29 for discussion (around 6 p.m. local time) and January 30 for a vote.
•The European Commission Vice-President /High Representative of the Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy (HR/VP) Josep Borell will first deliver a statement on “India's Citizenship (Amendment) Act 2019”, the published plenary agenda says.
•The EU parliament had discussed developments in Jammu and Kashmir in September 2019, but had not ended in a vote.
EU MEPs’ visit
•In October 2019 the government had even facilitated a visit by 22 EU MEPs to Delhi and Srinagar, but the effort doesn’t appear to have had the desired effect on the European Parliament.
•The current resolutions, each of which is worded slightly differently and focuses mainly on the CAA, will be introduced by six different political groups representing a total of 626 of the total 751 members of the European Parliament (MEPs).
•The resolutions list more than a dozen different counts of actions by the government that are allegedly in violation of international norms and India’s international commitments on Human Rights and at the UN Security Council, including actions in Jammu and Kashmir after the dilution of Article 370, police firing on protestors against the CAA in Uttar Pradesh, reports of “torture during detention” and the potential for creating what it calls the “largest statelessness crisis in the world and cause immense human suffering” through the National Register of Citizens (NRC).
Issues discussed
•Sources said the issues had been discussed when Mr. Borrell met with Prime Minister Narendra Modi and External Affairs Minister S. Jaishankar on the sidelines of the Raisina Dialogue conference earlier this month.
•The sources indicated that a visit by European Union envoys to Jammu and Kashmir, that has been discussed for several weeks, has now been put off until March this year, after the EU-India summit is held on March 13, but didn’t specify reasons for the delay.
•In their recommendations to the European Council and to Mr. Borell, the MEP groups have condemned state actions that have resulted in the loss of life of anti-CAA protesters, and called on the government to lift restrictions in Jammu and Kashmir, reconsider the Citizenship Act, “in the spirit of equality and non-discrimination and in the light of its international obligations”, and to “engage with the protestors”.
•At present, the CAA grants a fast track for naturalising only persecuted Hindus, Christians, Sikhs, Jains, Buddhists and Parsis from Pakistan, Afghanistan and Bangladesh, to the exclusion of Muslims, Jews and other minority sects.
Centre’s response
•“As fellow democracies, the EU Parliament should not take actions that call into question the rights and authority of democratically elected legislatures in other regions of the world. Every society that fashions a pathway to naturalisation, contemplates both a context and criteria. This is not discrimination. In fact, European societies have followed the same approach,” government sources said in response to the resolutions.
•The groups filing the resolutions include the largest group in the European Parliament, the Group of the European People's Party (Christian Democrats) (PPE) with 182 members, the Group of the Progressive Alliance of Socialists and Democrats in the European Parliament (S&D) with 154 members, the Renew Group with 108 members, as well as slightly smaller groups like the Greens/European Free Alliance (75), European Conservatives and Reformists (ECR) (66), and the European United Left-Nordic Green Left (GUE/NGL) (41).
📰 Fund crunch hits MGNREGA scheme
96% of annual allocation exhausted
•The Centre is on the verge of running out of funds for the crucial Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA) scheme.
•More than 96% of the allocated money has already been spent or is needed to pay pending dues, with less than ₹2,500 crore left to sustain the scheme for the next two months.
•Fifteen States are already in the red. According to the scheme’s financial statement as on January 26, Rajasthan has the highest negative net balance of ₹620 crore, followed by ₹323 crore in Uttar Pradesh.
•In fact, the situation on the ground may be worse as States do not always enter pending payments into the information system. “January, February and March are months with little agricultural activity, when rural workers desperately need employment. However, the scheme is running out of money, and will enter next year with pending liabilities,” said Rakshita Swamy of the People’s Action for Employment Guarantee movement.
•A number of economists have recommended that putting money into the hands of rural consumers via MGNREGA is key to kickstarting the economy. However, this year’s budget allocation was ₹60,000 crore, lower than the amount spent in the previous year.
•In Rajasthan, for example, workers wages have not been paid since the end of the October. Last week, Chief Minister Ashok Gehlot wrote to Prime Minister Narendra Modi, demanding that the Centre immediately release pending dues of ₹1,950 crore.
•“There is an outstanding liability of ₹848 crore for payment of wages and ₹1102 crore for materials,” Mr Gehlot said in the letter, a copy of which has been seen by The Hindu.
•“Rajasthan has been able to generate Fund Transfer Orders for payment of wages within 15 days for 99.57% of workers and within 8 days for 90.31% of workers, which is an unprecedented achievement.” But wages have not been paid to workers since October 11, 2019 as the Centre has not released funds. This is contrary to the spirit of the Act and violates the principle of rights-based implementation of the MGNREGA scheme.”
•After the letter was sent, the Centre released about ₹200 crore and cleared dues until the end of October, said a senior Rajasthan official who did not wish to be named.
•“There is a high demand for work this year as the rural economy is in distress and informal employment has also collapsed. Our original labour budget was for 23 crore person-days, but that was revised to 30 crore person days and we will definitely exceed that by the end of the year,” said the official.
•“Apart from pending dues which the CM has mentioned, we will need another ₹600 to 700 crore,” he added.
•Other States still have funds remaining, but activists say this is only because they are actively suppressing demand and turning workers away. In Karnataka, where many districts have been declared drought-hit, people are eligible for 150 days of work. However, they are not even able to get work for 100 days, says Abhay Kumar, State coordinator of the Grameen Coolie Karmikara Sangathan (GCKS), a registered union for rural workers.
•“Wages have not been paid since October. When there are huge pending dues, the State government does not want to be liable to pay interest for delayed wages, so they suppress demand. Workers are being turned away from panchayat offices saying there is no available work, or they are being discouraged from demanding work by being told there will be a four month delay in wage payment,” said Mr. Kumar.
•He is also a member of the Central Employment Guarantee Council, a forum that has not met in two years despite it being mandatory to hold a meeting every six months. The GCKS is planning to file a Public Interest Litigation petition in the State High Court, demanding immediate payment of wages, as well as compensation for delays beyond the minimal interest.
•This year’s budget allocation for the scheme was only ₹60,000 crore, lower than the amount spent in the previous year.
•“January, February and March are months with little agricultural activity, when rural workers desperately need employment and MGNREGA sees huge demand. However, the scheme is already running out of money, and will enter next year with pending liabilities yet again,” said Rakshita Swamy of the People’s Action for Employment Guarantee movement, expressing the hope that Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman will announce a more generous allocation for the scheme in the upcoming Budget.
•A number of economists have recommended that putting money into the hands of rural consumers via MGNREGA is key to kickstarting the economy.
📰 Palestinians threaten to quit Oslo Accords
They slam U.S. President’s West Asia plan
•Palestinian officials threatened on Sunday to withdraw from key provisions of the Oslo Accords, which define relations with Israel, if U.S. President Donald Trump announces his West Asia peace plan next week.
•Chief Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erekat told AFP that the Palestine Liberation Organisation reserved the right “to withdraw from the interim agreement” if Mr. Trump unveils his plan.
•Mr. Trump’s initiative will turn Israel’s “temporary occupation (of Palestinian territory) into a permanent occupation”, Mr. Erekat said.
•The Israeli-Palestinian Interim Agreement, signed in Washington in 1995, sought to put into practice the first Oslo peace deal agreed two years earlier.
•Sometimes called Oslo II, the interim agreement set out the scope of Palestinian autonomy in the West Bank and Gaza.
•The interim pact was only supposed to last five years while a permanent agreement was finalised but it has tacitly been rolled over for more than two decades.
Netanyahu-Trump meet
•Mr. Erekat’s comment came as Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was headed to Washington, where he will meet Mr. Trump at the White House on Monday and Tuesday to discuss the project.
•“It's a great plan. It's a plan that really would work,” Mr. Trump had said.
•The Palestinian leadership was not invited and has already rejected Mr. Trump’s initiative amid tense relations with the U.S. President over his recognition of Jerusalem as Israel’s undivided capital.
Jerusalem’s fate
•The Palestinians see east Jerusalem as the capital of their future state and believe Mr. Trump’s plan buries the two-state solution that has been for decades the cornerstone of international West Asia diplomacy.
•World powers have long agreed that Jerusalem’s fate should be settled through negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians.
•“Trump’s plan is the plot of the century to liquidate the Palestinian cause,” the Palestinian Foreign Ministry said.
📰 The four phases of constitutional interpretation
The judiciary is beginning to interpret the Constitution in line with its revolutionary and transformative potential
•The Constitution of India came into force 70 years ago, on January 26, 1950. The enactment of the Constitution was an ambitious political experiment — with universal adult franchise, federalism in a region consisting of over 550 princely States, and social revolution in a deeply unequal society. However, it was equally a unique achievement in terms of constitutional design. Republic Day, especially this year, therefore provides us an opportunity to take a step back from political contestations about the Constitution and consider how the text has been interpreted by the courts over the last seven decades.
Text as phase one
•In its early years, the Supreme Court adopted a textualist approach, focusing on the plain meaning of the words used in the Constitution. A.K. Gopalan v. State of Madras (1950) was one of the early decisions in which the Court was called upon to interpret the fundamental rights under Part III. The leader of the Communist Party of India claimed that preventive detention legislation under which he was detained was inconsistent with Articles 19 (the right to freedom), 21 (the right to life) and 22 (the protection against arbitrary arrest and detention). The Supreme Court decided that each of those articles covered entirely different subject matter, and were to be read as separate codes rather than being read together.
•Amongst the most controversial questions in Indian constitutional law has been whether there are any limitations on Parliament’s power to amend the Constitution, especially fundamental rights. In its early years, the Court read the Constitution literally, concluding that there were no such limitations.
Phase two, the structure
•In the second phase, the Supreme Court began exploring other methods of interpretation. Appeals to the text of the Constitution were gradually overtaken by appeals to the Constitution’s overall structure and coherence. In the leading case of Kesavananda Bharati v. State of Kerala (1973), the Court concluded that Parliament’s power to amend the Constitution did not extend to altering its “basic structure” — an open-ended catalogue of features that lies within the exclusive control of the Court. When Parliament attempted to overturn this decision by amending the Constitution yet again, the Court, relying on structuralist justifications, decisively rejected that attempt.
•In this phase, the Court also categorically rejected the Gopalan approach in favour of a structuralist one in Maneka Gandhi v. Union of India (1978). Through this decision, the Court conceived of the fundamental rights as a cohesive bill of rights rather than a miscellaneous grouping of constitutional guarantees. The right to life was incrementally interpreted to include a wide range of rights such as clean air, speedy trial, and free legal aid. This paved the way for the Supreme Court to play an unprecedented role in the governance of the nation.
•What was common between the first two phases of the interpretive story was that significant decisions involving the interpretation of the Constitution were entrusted to Constitution Benches (comprising five or more judges of court) and were carefully (even if incorrectly) reasoned. There was limited scope for precedential confusion, since matters which had been decided by Constitution Benches and which demanded reconsideration were referred to larger Constitution Benches.
Eclecticism as phase three
•In the third phase, the Supreme Court’s interpretive philosophy turned far more result-oriented than it had ever been. The Court often surrendered its responsibility of engaging in a thorough rights reasoning of the issues before it. Two factors underpinned this institutional failure. First, the changing structure of the Court, which at its inception began with eight judges, grew to a sanctioned strength of 31; it is currently 34. It began to sit in panels of two or three judges, effectively transforming it into a “polyvocal” group of about a dozen sub-Supreme Courts. Second, the Court began deciding cases based on a certain conception of its own role — whether as sentinel of democracy or protector of the market economy. This unique decision-making process sidelined reason-giving in preference to arriving at outcomes that match the Court’s perception.
•The failure to give reasons contributed not only to methodological incoherence but also to serious doctrinal incoherence and inconsistency across the law. This can be best described as panchayati eclecticism, with different Benches adopting inconsistent interpretive approaches based on their conception of the Court’s role, and arriving at conclusions that were often in tension with one another. The imagery that panchayati eclecticism is meant to invoke is that of a group of wise men and women (applying the analogy, sub-Supreme Courts), taking decisions based on notions of fairness that are detached from precedent, doctrine and established interpretive methods.
Phase four, purpose
•We are currently in the midst of transitioning from the third phase of constitutional interpretation to the fourth. In the fourth phase, the Court has acknowledged as critical to its interpretive exercise the purpose for which the Constitution has been enacted. Many Constitutions attempt the task of entrenching a political compromise between the incumbents and challengers of the day. India’s Constitution, at its very inception, was different. In enacting the Constitution, the founders of our Republic expressed a sense of unease with the status quo and raised expectations of root-and-branch social revolution and transformation. The Court is now beginning to interpret the Constitution in accordance with its revolutionary and transformative potential.
•With about a dozen significant Constitution Bench decisions from the Supreme Court since September 2018, there has been a renaissance in decision-making by Constitution Benches. This includes the Court’s decisions striking down Section 377 and the criminal offence of adultery, and including the office of the Chief Justice of India within the scope of the Right to Information Act.
•However, facets of phase 3 continue to linger on in the courts. Cases that involve substantial questions of interpretation of the Constitution — such as the cases concerning the National Register of Citizens and the electoral bonds scheme — are still being adjudicated upon by benches of two or three judges. There remains a latent risk, therefore, that the gains made in the early days of phase four could be lost, and we could slide back to panchayati adjudication once again.
