📰 China-Russia ties as a major determinant
A proper analysis of the partnership between Beijing and Moscow is critical to India’s foreign policy calculus
•In June 2019, Chinese President Xi Jinping described Russian President Vladimir Putin, as “my best friend and colleague”. At no time since the founding of the People’s Republic of China in 1949 has such public bonhomie been seen between leaders of Russia and China. It has sparked intense discussion on whether they are moving in the direction of a formal alliance, and what that could mean for the rest of the world.
The key triangle
•The triangular relationship between America, China and Russia has, for the most part, shaped global politics since 1950. For the American Cold Warriors, the road to victory lay through Peking; today, the Kremlin seems to believe that the road to revival of Russian power and prestige similarly runs through it. India is not a part of this triangle; yet they represent our three most consequential relationships. Hence, a proper appraisal of the Sino-Russian relationship will be critical to our foreign policy calculus.
•Even before COVID-19, the dynamics of this strategic triangle were changing. As Ambassador J. Stapleton Roy, an American expert on both Russia and China, put it, for three decades the Americans had occupied the favoured position in terms of its relations with the other two. China seems to have assumed that position. Second, the disintegration of the Soviet Union essentially negated the Russian threat in Chinese eyes. Both these trends will likely continue despite the recent tensions in Sino-U.S. relations.
Columns of the partnership
•The three pillars on which the Sino-Russian partnership currently rests are a peaceful boundary, expanding trade and a shared distrust of American intentions. Western sanctions have tended to push the Russians closer to China. Falling oil prices and fears of new sanctions on Russian gas supplies (Nord Stream 2) are demolishing the core of Russian exports to Europe, thus compelling them to depend to an even greater degree on the Chinese. Ironically, even though it is in neither Russia’s nor the European Union’s interest to hasten a bi-polar world, western actions to punish Russia have served to strengthen China’s position in the strategic triangle.
•It is no coincidence, as Russian experts Alexander Gabuev and Temur Umarov have shown, that after the western sanctions, China-Russia trade has more than doubled to $108 billion, Russia’s central bank has increased its Chinese currency reserves from less than one per cent to over 13%, and China has surpassed Germany as the principal supplier of industrial plant and technology. These economic positives appear to enhance what is seen in Washington and European capitals, as a growing strategic convergence. Coordinated action in multilateral forums, increasingly sophisticated joint military exercises, and including activities with third countries such as Iran, reinforce western beliefs about it morphing into an alliance.
•Lost in this maze of concerns is one simple fact, namely that the growing power-gap is threatening to further reduce Russian influence in their ‘near-abroad’ and to confine Russia to the periphery of global power. Russia still regards itself as a world power and hopes to be at the centre of a Eurasian arrangement that stretches from the Pacific to the Atlantic. It considers U.S.-led hegemony as the primary threat to this vision, and this leads them on to make common cause with China. That does not automatically translate into a formal alliance, nor does it make their concerns about China disappear.
China’s rise, Russia’s unease
•The three pillars on which the relationship stands are not as sturdy as they may seem. Take, for example, the fact of their peaceful border. Mr. Xi’s talk of “rejuvenation of the Chinese Nation” has raised fears about Chinese revanchism. In an essay published by former Vice Foreign Minister Fu Ying in 2016, who is seen as an authoritative voice of influence in China, she frankly acknowledges that China’s rise has produced discomfort among some Russians. Fu Ying notes that some Chinese continue to nurse historical grievances despite the formal resolution of the border issue, and still make critical references to the nearly 600,000 square miles of Chinese territory that Tsarist Russia allegedly annexed in the late 19th century. Add to this the Russian concerns over Chinese migration in the Russian Far East, and it would not be improper to surmise that policymakers in Moscow must be concerned about the possibility of China becoming a threat Russia’s territorial integrity.
Advantage China in trade
•As for the economic pillar, while Russia presently enjoys a nominal trade surplus, going beyond gross trade to value-added trade, China has a clear advantage going forward. Most of its exports to Russia are now at a higher technology level while the share of labour-intensive goods has declined. At the other end of the spectrum, Russian exports have continued to focus on raw materials, especially oil and gas. Despite Chinese promises, the investment relationship remains subdued except where it has suited China’s core energy interests, such as the $400 billion deal over 30 years to supply gas to China along the 1,800 miles long pipeline known as the Power of Siberia.
•Russia remains wary about allowing any dominating role for China in oil and gas. In fact, over the long term, their economic interests are divergent. Russia presumably thinks to control China through its energy dependency, a situation that the Chinese will not accept; and China feels that it can integrate Russia into its economy by re-directing Russian oil and gas eastwards but, while Russia needs financing, it is unlikely to give up its economic independence or sovereignty.
•As for their shared dislike of Washington, each still hopes to repair ties and, therefore, neither trusts the other fully with respect to the third leg of the strategic triangle. If they share a current concern over American plans for “regime-change”, it has led them to mind each other’s backs, but that does not necessarily make for a long-term meeting of minds. The supply of the S-400 missile system to China is touted as an example of the budding strategic alliance; but is it not also possible that this sale could well be one of the last chances for Russia to engage in a major sale of military equipment to China before the latter becomes self-sufficient in defence?
•The new reality of Sino-Russian relations is thus one where substantial expansion of bilateral cooperation is accompanied by growing asymmetry and China’s pre-eminence, including in Russian ‘backyards’ such as Central Asia and the Arctic regions. Moscow is in real danger of permanently becoming the ‘junior partner’.
India and Russia ties
•Sumit Ganguly, in his article in Foreign Policy last month, makes out a case for India to re-calculate its relationship with Russia. His contention is that the politically reliable, trustworthy defence supplier with shared misgivings about the Dragon, that was the Soviet Union of yore, has long been replaced by a politically agnostic, commercially motivated Russia that no longer shares our concerns about China. This might be valid if China is the principal factor in our relations with Russia, but that is not the case. It never was even in the 1960s and the 1970s. A strategic partnership with Russia based on the absence of fundamental conflicts of interest and a shared belief that some form of multipolarity is better than any sort of Sino-U.S. condominium, is important for India, and this relationship deserves more attention from both sides. In the words of Prime Minister Indira Gandhi in Moscow on September 20, 1982, “the garden of friendship like all gardens must be consistently tended”.
Public confidence in the judiciary is strengthened not by the resort to contempt powers but by orders and judgments
•Lawyer and social activist Prashant Bhushan’s conviction with god speed for contempt of court has revived the debate on the relevance of contempt law in a modern liberal democracy. The Supreme Court of India has said that his tweets, two of them, have undermined the dignity and the authority of the most powerful court and have the effect of destabilising the very foundation of Indian democracy. This controversial judgment may be technically and legally correct but has it enhanced the stature of the Court? Is it right to punish critics of the judiciary in the name of the people? Should civil contempt be given more importance? And what reforms should be introduced in criminal contempt?
The basis is opinion
•The primary justification of contempt power has been people’s opinions. In the judgment, the word ‘people’ occurs 27 times. Consider this. On June 27, 2017, there were huge protests against mob lynching under the campaign, ‘Not in my name’ in response to film-maker Saba Diwan’s social media call. Today, there are people who are opposed to invoking people’s name to justify contempt law.
•The judgment tells us repeatedly that the object of contempt proceedings is not to afford protection to judges personally from the imputations. Instead, it is to protect people at large and to uphold the rule of law as distrust in the popular mind does impair the confidence of people in courts as such confidence is of huge importance for the protection of the rights and liberties of people. In paragraph 48 of the judgment, the three-judge Bench explicitly observes that ‘when the court exercises this power, it does not do so to vindicate the dignity and honour of the individual judge who is personally attacked or scandalised but to uphold the majesty of the law and of the administration of justice.’ The Bench goes on to say that ‘the foundation of the judiciary is the trust and the confidence of the people’.
Gaps in the system
•Strangely, in paragraph 71, the Bench has proclaimed itself to be the ‘central pillar’ of democracy but has rightly said that the ‘trust, faith and confidence of the citizens of the country in the judicial system is sine qua non for the existence of rule of law’. This confidence is indeed strengthened not by the resort to contempt powers but by the Court’s orders and judgments. Res ipsa loquitur is the old maxim, i.e. the thing speaks for itself. People have observed with an element of frustration not only the Court’s reluctance in promptly hearing habeas corpus petitions, the CAA and 370 petitions, but also the Court’s initial observations on the plight of millions of poor migrant workers and stay of payment of wages order. In an election year, the Court did not consider it urgent enough to examine the validity of controversial electoral bonds but had time for an open court hearing in a review in 2019 of Sabarimala . Though no error in the judgment was pointed out, the review was still accepted. The innovative ‘sealed cover’ jurisprudence and the Court’s over-indulgence in Assam’s National Register of Citizens and then not saying a thing on its completion raised many an eyebrow. There were even four sitting judges of the top court who, on January 12, 2018, held an unprecedented press conference on a working day to ‘discharge their debt to nation’ as democracy, in their view, was under threat with the ‘credibility of [the] court at stake’.
•This is what worries many independent observers of our judiciary that the courts, of late, have been behaving more like the executive courts of erstwhile socialist countries. The only major assertion of judicial independence in the recent past (other than the quashing of President’s Rule in Arunachal Pradesh) was the National Judicial Appointments Commission judgment (2015) where the Court struck down the constitutional amendment and the NJAC Act, 2014. This writer does believe that the independence of the judiciary is indeed the right of people and not of judges. But then the fact remains that the top court in fact demonstrated its real mettle in basically asserting the collegium’s power to select judges. Then why has the Court not shown similar resolve in upholding people’s liberties? The High Courts in the meanwhile, just like in the 1975 Emergency, are widely applauded for passing some good orders though some of these orders eventually got stayed by the Supreme Court.
•Indian judges make excessive use of contempt powers. As in the Indian Judiciary Report (2016-17) published by the Supreme Court, High Courts had 96,310 civil contempt cases, i.e. wilful disobedience of court judgments and orders on June 30, 2017. Thus, civil contempt is far more serious generally committed by the government than so-called ‘scandalising of court’ by mere statement. Even the number of criminal contempt cases is also quite impressive with 586 cases. In A.K. Gopalan (1950), the majority took the positivistic view of Article 21 and expressed their helplessness as preventive detention law satisfied the requirement of ‘procedure established by law’. In ADM Jabalpur (1976), a majority, like in the Prashant Bhushan case, took the highly legalistic view and held that since Article 21 is under suspension due to Emergency, the writ of habeas corpus cannot be claimed. Subsequent decades proved that in both the cases, majority decisions did disservice to the Court’s reputation and it were dissenting judges such as Justice Fazl Ali and Justice H.R. Khanna who had really enhanced people’s faith in the judiciary. The Court itself overruled these two judgments in Maneka Gandhi (1978) and K.S. Puttaswamy (2018).
•In all contempt judgments, the Court has been using its powers in the name of the people and Justice Arun Mishra’s Bench merely relied on them. It cited the Brahma Prakash Sharma (1953) judgment, wherein the Supreme Court had justified contempt powers by observing that ‘it is intended to be a protection to the public whose interests would be very much affected if by the act or conduct of any party, the authority of the court is lowered and the sense of confidence which people have in the administration of justice by it is weakened’, and that contempt powers are to be invoked to restore this confidence. The top court had further elaborated that ‘such conduct is punished as contempt for this reason that it tends to create distrust in the popular mind and impair the confidence of the people in the courts which are of prime importance to the litigants in the protection of their rights and liberties’. Similarly, in Hira Lal Dixit (1955), the top court again referred to the ‘confidence of the people in the integrity of the judges’.
•The Bench also quoted Justice V.R. Krishna Iyer judgment in S. Mulgaokar (1978) but preferred to overlook the learned judge’s real message.
•Justice Krishna Iyer had observed that the normative guideline for judges to observe in contempt jurisdiction is not to be hypersensitive even where distortions and criticisms overstep the limits, but to ‘deflate vulgar denunciation by dignified bearing, condescending indifference and repudiation by judicial rectitude’.
•The Justice Arun Mishra-led Bench itself admitted that critics are the instruments of reform, but not those actuated by malice; instead by those inspired by public weal. Is Mr. Bhushan’s long career as as a public interest litigation lawyer not the testimony of ‘public weal’ and an absence of ‘malice’? Is it right to determine ‘good faith’ on the basis of mere extent of publication? In a country of 1,312.2 million people (estimated in 2019), Twitter users constitute an insignificant minority of an estimated number of over 34 million (2019), and Mr. Bhushan just has 1.6 million followers. In fact tweets are not taken seriously by the people. One hopes the Court will consider these in determining the sentence.
For a liberalism
•Just like the Supreme Court’s judgment on sedition in Kedar Nath Singh (1962), a mere scurrilous attack against the courts/judges should not be punished if it does not lead to an actual obstruction of the judicial process. In Shiv Shankar (1988) and Rachapudi Subba Rao (2004), the Supreme Court itself had held that criticism of the court that does not impair and hamper the administration of justice cannot be punished as contempt.
•Ideally, the Bench should have given little more weightage to Justice Krishna Iyer’s observation that ‘the court is willing to ignore, by a majestic liberalism, trifling and venial offences — the dog may bark, the caravan will pass.’
📰 Privatisation via graded autonomy
The National Education Policy will have an adverse impact in terms of accessibility and equity
•The Indian Cabinet approved the National Education Policy (NEP) 2020, despite vehement opposition to several of its provisions that were earlier circulated as a draft policy document. Among these provisions is the phasing out of the system of affiliated colleges and the grant of greater autonomy in academic, administrative and financial matters to premium colleges, and essentially, to the top ranked universities of the country.
•This measure has drawn on the long-standing anxieties about the perils of politico-bureaucratic interference in the internal functioning of universities, and concerns about the substantial burden on universities which have to regulate admissions, set curricula and conduct examinations for a large number of undergraduate colleges. Likewise, concerns have long existed about over-centralisation, namely, the constraints imposed on the potential for premium affiliated colleges to innovate and evolve. Notably, drawing on such concerns, the earliest inclinations towards autonomy were reflected in the recommendations of different education committees from the 1960s onwards. In its report, the Mahajani Committee on Colleges (1964), for example, took the position that one way of improving the standard of higher education in India was by selecting a few colleges “on the basis of past work, influence, traditions, maturity and academic standards and give them what might be called for want of a better phrase an ‘autonomous’ status”.
Perils of autonomy
•Even while solutions to apprehensions about over-centralisation were being discussed by stakeholders, these came to be used by successive governments to build a case for the model of graded autonomy. This model has adverse ramifications for accessibility, equity and quality for the higher education sector.
•In recent decades, a form of policy discourse has clearly developed in which the dominant opinion holds that the state cannot be expected to pay for the education of all. Correspondingly, there has been a serious lack of development of educational infrastructure to meet the rapidly increasing demand for higher education. In response to the widening gap between the demand and supply for education, successive governments have pushed through measures that have largely allowed for greater penetration of private capital in higher education, and its corollary, the persistent decline in per-capita government allocation of funds towards education. Consequently, private colleges and universities have grown in number, and there has been a rapid expansion of the open and distance learning (ODL) education.
•In line with these developments, recommendations of recent education commissions have promoted the already existing unequal structure of funding for higher education, and perpetuated the prevailing hierarchy in higher education along the lines of “centres of excellence” or metropolitan Central government-funded universities, provincial Central government-funded universities, regional universities and colleges funded by State governments, etc. The National Knowledge Commission (2005) stated that “undergraduate colleges are constrained by their affiliated status… the problem is particularly acute for undergraduate colleges that are good, for both teachers and students are subjected to the ‘convoy problem’ insofar as they are forced to move at the speed of the slowest... In fact the design of courses and examinations needs to be flexible”.
•Rather than bringing lower-grade affiliated colleges at par with premium colleges, recent commissions and high-powered committees have taken to projecting the relatively equitable funding from the Central/State government, common syllabi and evaluation systems, standardised teacher recruitment rules, etc. as fetters. In turn, the dominant policy discourse vocally propagates “graded autonomy” for better performing Higher Educational Institutions (HEIs), in which academic excellence can be supported through grant of special funds whilst allowing greater power to such institutions to grant degrees, start new self-financed courses, decide on fee structure, hire and fix the pay of non-tenured teachers independent of the regulatory authority, etc. This paradigm has been gradually enforced with the UGC in 2018 granting public-funded universities the right to apply for autonomy based on whether they are ranked among top 500 of reputed world rankings or have National Assessment and Accreditation (NAAC) scores above 3.26.
Strengthening hierarchies
•In its current form, NEP 2020 as introduced by the NDA government is a curious combination of enhanced centralising features and specific features of autonomy. The thrust towards deeper centralisation is indicative in the constitution of the government nominated umbrella institution, Higher Education Council of India (HECI); corporate-style Board of Governors with powers hitherto assigned to governing bodies of colleges and to other statutory bodies of HEIs; as well as the new apex body, the National Education Commission, that is responsible for “developing”, “implementing” and “evaluating” the “educational vision of the country”. Meanwhile, the power extended to premier educational establishments to design new courses, award degrees, among other features, represent the so-called prized features of autonomy.
•The issue of autonomy is the key to unravelling the inherent problem with NEP 2020 in matters of higher education. By engaging with the multi-fold ramifications of this provision, a lot can be gleaned on the heavy cost that the common masses will pay in terms of growing inaccessibility of higher education. Importantly, the model of graded autonomy is not based on universalisation of educational resources and equal access to quality higher education, but on furthering the prevailing hierarchy that exists between different colleges within a public-funded university, and between different universities across the country. While the best colleges gain the autonomy to bring in their own rules and regulations, and graduate to a privileged status whereby they enjoy the benefits of special funds from the newly proposed funding agencies, it is estimated that affiliated colleges with lower rankings and less than 3,000 students face the threat of mergers and even closure. Such collateral damage contradicts targets set for higher gross enrolment ratios. A shrinking of the number of public-funded colleges will only further push out marginalised sections and relegate them to low-grade private colleges and/or to informal education in the ODL and online modes.
•The possibility of enhanced inaccessibility of quality higher education looms large when we also consider that the independent rules and regulations of autonomous colleges and universities shall curtail transparent admission procedures, which guarantee underprivileged students a share of seats in prestigious institutions. Similarly, graded autonomy can be expected to trigger a massive spurt in expensive self-financed courses as premium colleges, as well as struggling affiliated colleges, strive to chalk out their financial self-sufficiency. This will expectedly lead to significant expenditure by the individual learner, and, under the new proposed four-year undergraduate programme, the exclusion will simply manifest itself in the pushing out of disadvantaged sections. More than deliverance, autonomy represents the via media for greater privatisation and enhanced hierarchization in higher education.
