📰 RS approves Bill empowering Delhi L-G amid Oppn. walkout
Legislation brought only to clear ambiguities: Kishan Reddy
•The Rajya Sabha on Wednesday passed the Government of National Capital Territory of Delhi (Amendment) Bill that seeks to empower the Lieutenant-Governor in Delhi. The Opposition, including the Aam Aadmi Party and the Congress, walked out just before the Bill was put to vote as a mark of protest. Earlier, the Biju Janata Dal, the Samajwadi Party and the YSR Congress had walked out.
•During the division of votes for adopting the motion that the Bill be taken up for consideration, 83 members voted in favour and 45 against. Union Minister of State for Home G. Kishan Reddy said there was no political motive behind the Bill and it was brought only to clear the ambiguities.
•The Bill states that the government in the national capital territory of Delhi means the “Lieutenant-Governor”. The legislation says the L-G is “necessarily granted an opportunity” to give her/his opinion before any decision taken by the Council of Ministers (or the Delhi Cabinet) is implemented.
‘No power taken away’
•“When the Delhi government moved the Delhi Netaji Subhas University of Technology Bill in 2015, it said government means the L-G of Delhi, the Delhi government has already agreed to this… Not a single power of the Delhi government is being taken away. Delhi is a Union Territory, not a full-fledged State,” Mr. Reddy said, responding to the debate. The proceedings saw vociferous protest by the Opposition members with the TMC and AAP accusing the government of “killing democracy”. The House was adjourned twice.
•Sanjay Singh of AAP said the Bill was akin to dismissing an elected government.
•“Will you pass a Bill that gives all powers to the President of India? You are smothering an elected government. This Bill is akin to dismissing the government. We denied you nine stadiums to turn them into jails for farmers. This Bill is a revenge for that... The BJP has lost elections to [Arvind] Kejriwal twice and so it is targeting his government,” Mr. Singh said.
•Abhishek Manu Singhvi of the Congress said the Bill was unconstitutional. He said the Supreme Court judgment had stated that the “L-G of the State has more of an advisory role.” He said the powers of the Delhi Assembly were being diluted systematically.
Andhra CM complaint against judge dismissed, says CJI Bobde.
•Chief Justice of India Sharad A. Bobde has recommended Justice N.V. Ramana, the senior most judge of the Supreme Court, as the next top judge.
•The CJI’s recommendation to the government was followed by the publication of a short statement on Wednesday informing that a complaint sent by Andhra Chief Minister Y.S. Jagan Mohan Reddy against Justice Ramana to the CJI on October 6 last year was dismissed under an in-house procedure after due consideration.
•“A complaint dated October 6, 2020 sent by the Chief Minister of Andhra Pradesh to the Supreme Court was dealt with under the In-House Procedure and the same, on due consideration, stands dismissed. It be noted that all the matters dealt with under the In-House Procedure being strictly confidential in nature, are not liable to be made public,” the statement published in the Supreme Court’s official website said.
•Mr. Reddy had complained that Justice Ramana was influencing the Andhra High Court judiciary to destabilise his government. The complaint was sent shortly after a Bench led by Justice Ramana started hearing and fast-tracking hundreds of criminal cases against Ministers, legislators and politicians pending in trial courts across the country.
•In an affidavit filed with election nomination papers in 2019, Mr. Reddy had declared there were 31 criminal cases pending against him with the CBI, the Directorate of Enforcement and different police stations in Andhra Pradesh and Telangana.
•Justice Ramana is now set to take over as the 48th Chief Justice of India from April 24.
•Chief Justice Bobde handed over a copy of his letter of recommendation to Justice Ramana on Wednesday after sending it to the government.
•The Centre had recently asked Chief Justice Bobde, who is retiring on April 23, to initiate the transition process to the top judicial office.
•Justice Ramana would be the CJI till August 26, 2022. He was elevated to the Supreme Court on February 17, 2014 when he was the Chief Justice of Delhi High Court.
•Justice Ramana was born in an agricultural family on August 27, 1957 in Ponnavaram village in Krishna district.
📰 Tactical abstention: On the U.N. Human Rights Council resolution on Sri Lanka
India was keen not to lose diplomatic space to persuade Sri Lanka on devolution for Tamils
•By abstaining from the vote on the U.N. Human Rights Council resolution on Sri Lanka, India has signalled its unwillingness to upset its neighbour. At the same time, it does not want to be seen as ignoring Sri Lanka’s reluctance to meet the political aspirations of the Tamils or endorsing the country’s stubborn refusal to ensure any sort of accountability for its war-time past. It may be easy for the political opposition to dismiss India’s abstention as showing an intent to shield Sri Lanka from a credible investigation into allegations of war crimes. A more reasonable assessment would be that India seems to have utilised the opportunity to preserve its diplomatic space and to contain the pervasive influence of China over Sri Lanka even while maintaining its support for the Tamil minority to achieve equality, justice, dignity and peace. India has not been comfortable with externally mandated investigative mechanisms. Even when it voted in 2012 in favour of a credible investigation into human rights, India had got the resolution to incorporate the need for Sri Lanka’s ‘concurrence’ to any assistance that the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights may offer in such a probe. In this session and just ahead of the vote, India stressed on both meaningful devolution to meet Tamil aspirations and the unity and integrity of Sri Lanka — aspects that it believes are not an ‘either-or’ choice.
•The resolution comes amidst disturbing signs that Sri Lanka is regressing into the days of democratic deficit seen prior to the 2015 elections. Unfortunately, the present regime withdrew from the commitments made to the UNHRC by its predecessor on constructive engagement with the international community, and the consensual resolution on justice and accountability. The UN High Commissioner’s report raises concern over increasing militarisation, heightened surveillance against rights defenders and NGOs, interference with the few prosecutions in emblematic cases from the past, and the dangerous anti-minority rhetoric. India’s concerns in Sri Lanka have always been different from the rest of the international community, informed by a sense of the long-term well-being of the Tamils, and that power-sharing does foster reconciliation. Hence its emphasis on devolution rather than accountability. It is clear that India has its own limitations in expressing disappointment over the island nation’s move away from reconciliation and devolution. It continues to be weighed down by the Chinese presence in the region. Even the need to be in accord with sentiment in Tamil Nadu in the midst of an election was not motivation enough for India to change its position from tactical neutrality to one of open support for the resolution. When pragmatism and principle were needed in equal measure, the Centre seems to have chosen abstention as an easy way out.
📰 Adding coal to the fire
Adani’s Carmichael coal project will generate jobs but significantly impact health and environment
•If India loses the fight against climate change, new investments in coal will be a decisive factor. India has reaffirmed its commitment to bold plans for switching to renewable energy. Yet, one of the world’s largest new coal investments is Adani’s $16.5 billion dollar Carmichael coal mine project in Queensland. That this project is going ahead despite coal’s declining competitiveness raises valid concerns that the new coal investments are viable only because they are supported by the Australian government’s subsidies or incentives.
Gains and losses
•Coal mining provides incomes for Australia’s local economy, but the health and environmental harm from mining and combustion represents a big net loss for the world. CO2 emissions, the chief cause of climate change, totalled 36 billion metric tonnes globally in 2019, of which nearly 40% came from coal. The Carmichael mine is set to become Australia’s largest coal mine, producing up to 60 million tonnes of coal annually and 2.3 billion tonnes over its 60-year lifespan. Of the nearly 8 billion tonnes of coal produced globally in 2019, a sixth is exported, with the largest share, one third, coming from Australia. In 2020, 16% of Australia’s coal exports were shipped to India.
•As India is the primary buyer of the Carmichael coal, the project will significantly add to its emissions. Australia’s coal mining and coal exports generate incomes and jobs, but when the destruction from pollution, soil erosion, and biodiversity loss is included, the net contribution for India is negative. In south-western China, the environmental and social damage from burning coal exceeds the price of coal by four times. The health damages from coal-fired power stations in the U.S. are estimated at 1-6 times the value of the power output. In India, coal contributes to 1,00,000 premature deaths annually: the poor are hit hardest. With declining coal prices, the mine may be unable to generate sufficient revenue to get a return on investment. That the project might not be viable even financially — and this without considering the environmental, social and health impacts — is damning. It supports the worry that government subsidies underlie Adani’s decision to proceed with the project. It bears mentioning that 17 international banks declined to fund the Carmichael mine based on its weak financials and environmental danger; State Bank of India’s plan to provide financing is under scrutiny. A report by the Australia Institute points out that the spillover harm from extracting and burning coal is not included in the true cost of coal projects. One estimate puts the damage to health alone in Australia at $2.6 billion annually. The mining of coal emits massive amounts of particle pollution, contributing to heart disease, lung disease and lung cancer. With exports of coal, India will be hurt too from burning coal, and the global harm is a multiple of Australia’s.
Leave coal underground
•Then there is the environmental and climate impact. Annual emissions of 79 million tonnes of carbon equivalent from the Carmichael mine is higher than Malaysia’s 75 million tonnes and Austria’s 76 million tonnes. The mine will also lead to the Galilee Basin being opened up to nine additional coal mines, which would cumulatively emit an estimated 705 million tonnes of CO2 every year, more than 1.3 times Australia’s current emissions. After facing heat waves, bushfires, and intense rainfall that are linked to climate change, Australia should be deeply concerned — and so should India. The Government of India is drawing up plans for carbon neutrality, following several others that have announced 2050 as their target date for this. Achieving a zero-carbon target will require vast investments in the production, storage, and distribution of renewable energy. But the approval for Adani to mine and export coal to India makes reaching those targets much harder. It is time for India and Australia to leave coal underground.
📰 Assessing India’s counter to ‘diminishing democracy’
New Delhi has engaged its international critics not on facts but on values, and must now make its position clear
•The first three weeks of March saw major developments in the ongoing drama over international assessment of how New Delhi has overseen the functioning of Indian democracy in the recent past. There were the annual reports of the United States-based Freedom House and the Sweden-based V-Dem Institute, which downgraded and redesignated Indian democracy. And farmers’ safety and curbs to press freedom in the context of the ongoing protests by farmers were debated in the British Parliament.
•New Delhi has hit back. But how do we assess its response? Consider three elements.
Aggressive, fine-tuned
•First, there is decidedly a new approach. Something more layered is replacing the reliance on hard sovereignty. While the establishment continues to underline the internal nature of the issues raised, it is also beginning to counter the criticisms aggressively. The strongest evidence of this yet came from a discussion in the Rajya Sabha, on March 15, 2021, on racism in the United Kingdom. It appeared to implicate everyone, from the royals to society at large, in systemic racism. India’s External Affairs Minister S. Jaishankar noted the concern on behalf of the government and made the assurance that it would be taken up with the U.K. even as India would ‘monitor these developments very, very closely’.
•Earlier, on March 9, 2021, in response to the debate in the U.K. Parliament on the ‘safety of farmers’ and ‘press freedom’ in India, the Indian High Commission in London had noted the ‘need to set the record straight’ regardless of claims of ‘friendship and love for India’ professed by anyone. The statement was brash, while the location from which it was released was symbolically significant.
•The response is also becoming fine-tuned. The London statement called India ‘the largest functioning democracy in the world’. The key word here was ‘functioning’. The emphasis had moved from the size of Indian democracy to its quality. What it was insinuating at became clear with Mr. Jaishankar’s remark made in Chennai on March 13, 2021: ‘Look at the politics of these places… whatever you might say… in this country [India] nobody questions an election. Can you say that in those countries?’The reference obviously was to the United States. Further, the London statement mentioned India’s ‘well-established independent democratic institutions’. This formulation sought to counter the allegations that authority has become increasingly personalised in India. It asserted the apparent autonomy of Indian institutions.
•Finally, it has sought to narrow down the scope of the issue and belittle its opponents. A statement by the Ministry of External Affairs on February 3, 2021, arguably put out in response to the celebrity tweets, claimed that a ‘very small section of farmers in parts of India’ had ‘some’ reservations about the farm reforms. It also referred to international critics as ‘fringe elements’ and linked them to desecration of Gandhi statues. This was built upon in the London statement. It referred to the discussion as involving ‘a small group’ of parliamentarians in ‘a limited quorum’.
A favourable global situation
•Second, the assertiveness in the establishment’s response is partly because India currently enjoys a favourable international constellation. Relatively speaking, the novel coronavirus pandemic has spared India and allowed the world’s largest vaccine manufacturer (by number of doses produced and sold globally) to engage in vaccine diplomacy and position itself as an ‘internationalist’ actor. Here, New Delhi has attempted a transference of latitude, leveraging the goodwill generated by ‘Vaccine Maitri’ to counter the criticisms. Thus, in Chennai, Mr. Jaishankar asked what the (presumably western) critics of the Delhi regime had done in comparison with India’s critical health aid to 70 countries. The fact that the western countries have struggled to cope effectively with the pandemic and remain inconsistent as well as, as in Europe, divided in their governmental and medical responses, also makes India look coherent and ‘functional’.
•Further, the contemporary crisis within western democracies is deep rooted. While it eludes resolution, the fact is that it has robbed western governments of the reputational privilege and the moral right to criticise what they view as assaults on liberal democratic values. We see governments quiet but streets and legislators vocal. This factor, coupled with their need for India for economic, environmental, and geopolitical reasons, offers New Delhi considerable space for an aggressive response.
•Finally, the conservative allies in western countries that New Delhi has likely cultivated have also helped it undercut international criticism. Recall the October 2019 visit to Kashmir of about two dozen largely right-wing Members of European Parliament. Further, a quick review of the remarks of Conservative UK MPs Bob Blackman and Theresa Villiers on contentious issues concerning India over the past nearly two years will be revealing. In fact, Ms. Villiers’ statement during the U.K. parliamentary discussion in early March was remarkably understanding of New Delhi’s position.
Key question unanswered
•Third, the question of the effectiveness of its response. How substantive is New Delhi’s counter? In part, as Mr. Jaishankar’s remarks in Chennai showed, it has met facts with rhetoric. In addition, it has questioned the practice of western institutions and civil society of judging and criticising those political processes in non-western democracies that do not match up to western standards. The objection is useful insofar as it checks sorry remnants of western cultural arrogance as well as ‘knowledge imperialism’. But it does not address the fundamental point of the critics, which is that human dignity and freedoms are universal and an assault on them anywhere is an assault on them everywhere.
•New Delhi was well within its rights to offer the sovereignty shrug and say it did not care. But it has engaged the critics, not on facts but on values. And now it must make its position clear. If it does not believe that these values apply to all human beings everywhere, regardless of the society and culture in which they find themselves, then it can state it unambiguously. This would deprive its critics of the moral basis for their criticism.
•At the Munich Security Conference in February last year, Mr. Jaishankar argued that democracy and the West should not be equated, implying that there are different types of democracies. Fair point. But the Minister did not pursue the thought fully. His South Korean counterpart did. Speaking after him, Minister of Foreign Affairs, Republic of Korea Kang Kyung-wha said: ‘South Korea is West if you are going by values… Instead of talking about the West let’s talk about the values that we are trying to prove.’ This is an approach worth considering. For in order to effectively counter its critics, the establishment must first confront itself.
📰 Water, the looming frontier
There are only two unpolluted fresh water sources left in the country, which we must conserve and use
•While we are still in the grip of the COVID-19 pandemic, which is airborne, we have forgotten that another such blight could well come from contaminated water. NITI Ayog and WaterAid, amongst others, have found that over 70% of India’s surface and groundwater is contaminated by human and other waste and is likely to carry viruses. Indiscriminate human activity is often the reason for environmental degradation and pandemics. The practice of keeping animals locked together for mass production of meat produces an artificial environment that can birth mutations in erstwhile dormant viruses. Earlier, in the wild, animals were far away from human habitats. The viruses they harboured remained isolated. But today’s practices can spawn viruses that can easily transfer to the human population.
A source of virus
•Once the virus has found its way into the human population, it is bound to proliferate in wastewater. For example, in England, Wales and Scotland, several wastewater samples were tested and were found to carry traces of SARS-CoV-2. Remnants of the virus have also been detected in raw sewage across Sydney. Research at the University of Stirling in Scotland indicates that the SARS-CoV-2 virus can spread through sewage water.
•But such water is often discharged into water bodies in India. This is an alarming prospect for us as river water or lake water, which carries human waste, sewage, and toxic waste, can be a very generous host for viruses of different kinds and we do not know where and how they can mutate and strike. Some water-transmitted viral pathogens are astrovirus, hepatitis A and norovirus. Unlike in the developed world, a huge section of the population in India uses polluted water from sources like rivers, lakes, or groundwater for drinking.
•Are we prepared for this? Certainly not. Can we be prepared? Very unlikely, even if we understood the viruses, and we are not there yet. Can we decontaminate our water bodies and groundwater? This could take several decades. The Rhine river in Germany, after 50 years of cleaning and stopping the inflow of pollutants and human waste, is still not fit for drinking. But despite the poor quality of water in India, the government has announced a ₹3 lakh crore ‘Nal se Jal’ scheme to provide drinking water connections to every rural household by 2024. Since most of the water sources are contaminated, the only way to purify water is through reverse osmosis (RO). But though RO removes contaminants, it also takes out all the healthy minerals and nutrients required by the human body. This is an unhealthy and exorbitantly priced proposition. To neutralise the virus, we would need at least an ultraviolet aquaguard treatment. While this won’t take out chemical contaminants, it is also costly.
•So, what is the solution? The simple answer is that there is no technological substitute for living natural resources like pristine natural water and soil. This means that we must conserve and use our natural living resources. The water beneath our forests is as good as natural spring water. We must safeguard it for our own lives and for future generations. We have destroyed our natural living resources in our rush for development. Our development model is always focused on artificial infrastrusture, building highways, industrial plants, high-rise structures. In doing this, we kill our natural resources. As a result, we are running out of natural infrastructure at an alarming pace. Let’s not forget that developed countries have stable landscapes and populations whereas India has a growing population, which means there will be growing consumption.
Freshwater sources
•There are two unpolluted fresh water sources left in the country. The first is the water lying below our forests; the second is the aquifers that lie below the floodplains of rivers. Both these sources provide natural underground storage and are renewable – the rains provide natural recharge year after year and it is this recharge which can be used to water our cities and towns. There is one sacred conservation condition: we should use only a fraction of the annual recharge.
•The aquifers underlying forests can provide healthy mineral water purely for drinking purposes. Since a person drinks only 2-3 litres of water a day, the mineral water requirement is modest. Such a scheme can provide quality natural mineral water, comparable to Himalyan mineral water at ₹2 a litre, 20 times less than the market price. The river floodplains are a great source of water for cities. The Yamuna floodplains in Delhi already use such a scheme to provide water to a million people each year. Forests and floodplains must be declared as water sanctuaries. Such schemes work with nature rather than against it. They can be used around the globe. It is important to remember that these evolutionary resources, once lost, will be lost forever. It is time we understood this is natural infrastructure bequeathed to us by nature. If we don’t realise this, it will only be our loss.
