📰 Supreme Court wants formula on oxygen supply ahead of third wave
It draws govt attention to reports that children may be affected in next wave
•The Supreme Court on Thursday highlighted the need for the Union government to start preparations for oxygen allocation to the States, its supply and distribution ahead of a third wave of the COVID-19 pandemic. The court drew the attention of the government to reports that children may be affected in the next wave.
•A Bench of Justices D.Y. Chandrachud and M.R. Shah said the government needed to finalise a formula for allocation, supply and distribution of oxygen in a “scientific manner” ahead of the coming wave. It said the “rough-and-ready” formula devised presently on the “oxygen-for-bed” arrangement would hardly work. The current formula of allocating oxygen to Delhi, for example, on the basis of the number of ICU/non-ICU beds grossly underestimated need for oxygen in the National Capital.
•“Also, not everyone who went to a hospital required an oxygen bed and not everyone required ICU or ventilator. There are many who have been asked to stay at home and quarantine,” Justice Chandrachud picked the loopholes in the formula.
•The court said the formula for allocation and distribution of oxygen among the States should be based, among other things, on an “oxygen audit”, that is, to determine the actual need of oxygen in a State.
•“We need to reassess the basis for oxygen allocation. We are in stage two of the pandemic. Stage three might have very different parameters… But, if we prepare today, we will be able to handle stage three. It is about proper allocation of oxygen and working out the modalities, including proper distribution. A buffer stock has also to be created,” Justice Chandrachud pointed out.
Importance of vaccination
•The court underlined the importance of vaccination. “Children are going to be affected. They will be taken into hospitals. They will be accompanied by parents. Vaccination needs to be done,” it stated.
•Solicitor General Tushar Mehta, while informing the court that 730.7 MT (metric tonnes) of oxygen was received in Delhi on Wednesday as directed by the Bench, agreed that a “minimum fault prone formula” for oxygen supply, allocation and distribution was the need of the hour. The government agreed to revisit the formula.
•At one point, the court suggested incentivising young doctors who have completed their courses and young trained nurses to augment the fatigued healthcare professionals who are at the end of their tether. It said that offering them a few 1,000 rupees for their services would not incentivise them to pitch in. The Bench suggested giving them grace marks as a reward for their services in combating the pandemic.
•“Today, you have 1.5 lakh doctors who are waiting for NEET and have completed their courses. If you give them ₹5000, nobody will come serve… Likewise, 2.5 lakh nurses are trained and sitting at home,” the Bench noted.
•During the hearing, Justice Shah asked about the care given in rural areas of the nation.
•“At the moment we are only looking at Delhi. But what about the rural areas where most of the people are suffering? We have to consider a pan-India situation as well as the future situations,” Justice Shah asked the government.
•Justice Chandrachud said there was a rudimentary health infrastructure in rural areas. However, in Maharashtra, a task force of a dozen doctors was formed to communicate and advise hospitals on pandemic care in rural areas.
Supply to Delhi
•Senior advocate Rahul Mehra, for the Delhi government, questioned the Centre’s apprehension that giving 700 MT oxygen to Delhi may short-change the supply to other States. He said the Centre had said there was no no dearth of oxygen supply in Delhi and there was a reserve of 160000 MT. There was an 113% increase in Delhi’s demand for oxygen from 490 MT to 700 MT on April 28. The Centre was again making an attempt to reduce Delhi’s supply to less than 560 MT.
•Mr. Mehta countered, “We have to see that there is an equitable distribution of resources. We cannot start nitpicking and score debating points. I just do not want to see more people suffering”.
•But amicus curiae and senior advocate Jaideep Gupta persisted on the same line of argument, saying if 700 MT requirement of oxygen for Delhi was incorrect and the National Capital could make do with 490 MT, why was there a shortage at all.
•The submissions were referring to Mr. Mehta’s initial statements in the hearing that significant stocks of oxygen were available in Delhi hospitals and continued supply of oxygen to Delhi in excess would affect other States.
What is the Oversight Board?
•The Oversight Board has been set up as an independent body that will help Facebook figure out what content can be allowed on the platform and what ought to be removed. Mr. Zuckerberg first wrote about the idea in 2018, saying in a note that “I’ve increasingly come to believe that Facebook should not make so many important decisions about free expression and safety on our own.” It was said to have emerged out of the tensions around the often conflicting goals of maintaining Facebook as a platform for free speech and effectively filtering out problematic speech.
•According to a recent article in The New Yorker magazine, the idea “for the Oversight Board came from Noah Feldman, a fifty-year-old professor at Harvard Law School, who has written a biography of James Madison and helped draft the interim Iraqi constitution.” Mr. Feldman, a friend of Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg, felt “Facebook needs a Supreme Court” to decide on difficult questions around freedom of speech.
•The members who make the Oversight Board came on board a year ago. Facebook’s welcome note at that time said, “We expect them to make some decisions that we, at Facebook, will not always agree with - but that’s the point: they are truly autonomous in their exercise of independent judgment.” It started taking up cases last October. The website of the Oversight Board lists 20 members, including the former editor--in-chief of The Guardian newspaper Alan Rusbridger, Vice Chancellor of the National Law School of India University Sudhir Krishnaswamy, and former Prime Minister of Denmark Helle Thorning-Schmidt. Facebook as well as its users can refer cases to the board. The decisions of the board are binding on Facebook.
•Just days before this case, the Oversight Board overturned Facebook’s decision to remove a post that had alleged that the RSS and Prime Minister Narendra Modi were threatening to kill Sikhs in India.
What exactly did the board rule in this case involving Mr. Trump?
•The board did uphold Facebook’s decision to block Mr. Trump but also said “it was not appropriate for Facebook to impose the indeterminate and standardless penalty of indefinite suspension.”
•Its point was that Facebook usually responded to violations by either removing such content, or suspending the user for a specific time-period, or effecting a permanent ban. Indefinite suspensions aren’t part of its response mix, which is what has been flagged. The Board has now given Facebook six months to come up with a “proportionate response that is consistent with the rules that are applied to other users of its platform.”
What else did it find out about Mr. Trump’s posts?
•The investigation showed that prior to January 6, five of Mr. Trump’s posts had been found violating Facebook’s community standards. They were therefore removed. One of these posts, in August 2020, violated Facebook’s COVID-19 misinformation policy. Mr. Trump’s Facebook page received a ‘strike’ for this (a Facebook page is removed after a certain number of strikes). The Board said Facebook didn’t explain “why other violating content it had removed did not result in strikes.”
•Twenty other pieces of Mr. Trump’s content were marked as potential violations by the review system but were later found to be okay. Sometimes Facebook allows violating content to be on its platform if it considers it to be newsworthy and in public interest. The Board revealed Facebook asserted that it “has never applied the newsworthiness allowance to content posted by the Trump Facebook page or Instagram account.”
What are its recommendations?
•The Board wants Facebook to act quickly when it comes to content of a political nature coming from influential users. Its idea is to escalate such content to specialised staff as also assess potential harms from such accounts. It also wants Facebook to be more transparent about its policies regarding assistance to investigations as well as its penalty rules.
•It also wants Facebook to comprehensively review its “potential contribution to the narrative of electoral fraud and the exacerbated tensions that culminated in the violence in the United States on January 6. This should be an open reflection on the design and policy choices that Facebook has made that may allow its platform to be abused.”
📰 Social murder and the missing state
The defence that the government is not responsible for the present crisis has consequences for India’s democracy
•When people are placed under conditions which appeal to the brute only, said Friedrich Engels, what remains to them but to rebel or to succumb to utter brutality?
•The scenes that are being witnessed in India now are apocalyptic in tone. When a citizen attacks hospital personnel because a life was lost due to the absence of medical care, or a citizen struggles to breathe with an oxygen cylinder on the pavement, it is a crisis at multiple levels.
Appalling discourse
•But what is concerning, more than the “collapse of the system” or the failure of the state, is the shocking discourse among the supporters of the government that it is not responsible for the present crisis, arguably, India’s gravest hour.
•This defence has consequences for India’s democracy.
•Engels had argued that the English ruling class and the state had created such horrendous working and living conditions for the workers, without the “necessaries of life”, that they suffer not only ill health but meet early deaths. Engels calls this social murder, the same as murder by an individual; the only difference is that this murder is “disguised”, for “no man sees the murderer” and the death appears to be a “natural one”.
•What we are seeing around, in our inability to make the state accountable, is social murder. The only difference between Engels’ England in the 1840s, when it was the working class which was devastated by pandemics, and India now, is that the pandemic in this wave is not just preying on the most vulnerable populations. Therefore, it is also not invisible any longer.
The state’s actions
•But in the first wave of the pandemic in India, the tragic plight of millions of inter-State migrant labour walking thousands of kilometres, remained invisible. That was a classic case of social murder. And it was justified then as well in narratives which argued that, after all, it was the responsibility of the workers themselves for “voluntarily” undertaking such a journey. Just as it is the responsibility of the people themselves for causing the second wave. Yet, ironically, when the successful defeat of COVID-19 was celebrated in February by an official resolution of the Bharatiya Janata Party, it was the leadership of Prime Minister Narendra Modi that was given credit, not the people.
•When ordinary people, without access to expert advice, are asked to own up to their mistakes, powerful actors such as the Election Commission of India holding an eight-phase election in Bengal, the Uttarakhand Chief Minister justifying the Kumbh mela and the Prime Minister exulting about the size of an election rally crowd in West Bengal on a day when over 2,00,000 Indians were newly infected by the novel coronavirus, are all unassailable actions of the state.
•By participating in the state’s abdication of responsibility, one is fostering conditions of social murder. The argument that cremations cannot be shown by the media because they are “sacred” to Hindus is a part of this act. Other than the obvious fallacy that Hindu cremations are not televised or recorded, here, the more critical questions such as how many deaths could have been prevented by a simple provision of oxygen, why people are forced to cremate their loved ones in parking lots or pavements, and if that is any less dignified than telling the story to the world remain unanswered.
•As epidemiologists assert, obfuscating the real gravity of a pandemic is the dangerous path to a bigger disaster. If the Chinese state had not hidden the pandemic in its initial stages, the world probably would have not been at this juncture. That is why there has been such a sustained focus by the world media on hotspots where death tolls mounted: Italy, Iran, the United States, the United Kingdom, Brazil, Peru, etc,. But the tragedy in India is sought to be portrayed as a cultural exceptionalism that cannot be televised.
A different patrimonialism
•In the last seven years, the Indian state has acquired distinct tendencies of what sociologist Max Weber has called patrimonialism in which the ruler exercises a traditional form of authority which rests on the “sanctity of immemorial traditions”, in contrast to a rule based on a rational-legal bureaucracy or impersonal rules. But unlike in ideal typical patrimonialism, this highly personalised and centralised form of rule is not based on heredity, kinship ties or personal allegiances, rather on the ideology of religious majoritarianism as well as nationalism, and legitimised by election wins. Duty, patriotism, etc., become keywords here as was tellingly witnessed during the misery unleashed by demonetisation.
•Ironically, this patrimonial government, which prided itself as a ‘mai-baap sarkar’, the dispenser of benevolence towards subjects, overnight transforms itself into one which asks citizens to fend for themselves, whether it is by procuring oxygen cylinders or arranging ambulances. This has resulted in a Social Darwinism in which only the most powerful have some chance of survival.
•From the assertions of the Union Health Minister that there never was any shortage of oxygen, the Uttar Pradesh government charging people with First Information Reports (FIRs) for requesting oxygen, to the Haryana Chief Minister’s comment that the dead cannot return and, therefore, it was pointless to discuss many unaccounted deaths, all depict a state that has shed its professed benevolence during the novel coronavirus pandemic.
•As scholars identify, one of the fundamental problems in patrimonialism is ensuring accountability, something that becomes stark during a pandemic when the patrimonial state goes missing. On the one hand, we have the belated act of sanctioning oxygen plants by the Prime Minister, which, keeping in line with governance as benevolence, is met with cabinet Ministers expressing their gratitude in unison. On the other, the Prime Minister has not addressed a single press conference on COVID-19, quite a stunning fact globally for the head of a democracy.
Become citizens, not subjects
•While the Swedish Prime Minister was recently subject to questioning by a constitutional committee on COVID-19 handling, the present Indian state has no means of ensuring a critical scrutiny of the chronology of government decisions that led to the current crisis. For the moment, we will have to be content with scathing observations like those of the Allahabad High Court that deaths due to lack of oxygen are no “less than a genocide”.
•Engels had argued that the English ruling class’ “class prejudice and preconceived opinions” had enveloped it in a “mad blindness” about the social murder that was happening in its midst, which, in any case, did not affect it. India, under the pandemic, is seeing a different kind of prejudice, preconceived opinions and mad blindness in sanctioning social murder. Unless people become citizens and not subjects under a patrimonial rule, the calamitous clouds of the pandemic portend a bleak future for Indian democracy as well.
📰 In Ireland’s complex troubles, lessons for India
A functioning democracy must commit to addressing communal issues with vigilance, tolerance and compromise
•The communal clashes of April in Northern Ireland caught the media attention of many countries, but not in India, though the events carry relevant lessons and warnings for this country. Those riots, that left 74 policemen injured, threaten to undermine the fragile peace between Protestant pro-British loyalist unionists who want to remain part of the United Kingdom forever, and Catholic pro-Irish nationalists who wish Northern Ireland to become part of the Republic of Ireland.
•The riots are the culmination of a complex mix of change, resistance to change, and ingrained political and social inertia. Northern Ireland altered enormously for the better after the signing of the Anglo-Irish Good Friday Agreement in 1998, and for the accord to have received strong support across the divided island was a remarkable achievement. This Agreement began the process of dismantling border controls between the North and the Republic of Ireland, but subsequent developments showed that social issues remained unaddressed: both religious communities ‘experienced little or no peace dividend after the Agreement, and poverty and deprivation linked to educational under-achievement and high unemployment affects both nationalist and loyalist areas alike’ in Northern Ireland. There is an obvious lack of social and economic opportunities; 120,000 children are living in poverty, and more than 40,000 people remain on the social housing waiting list. Between 1998 and 2014, an abnormal number of suicides was registered, and that gloomy statistic keeps growing. The localities most deprived during the pre-Agreement communal riots remain the most deprived areas within Northern Ireland today.
Brexit, a stress test
•Britain’s break from the European Union (Brexit) was always going to prove a major stress test for Northern Ireland because 56% of its electorate voted to remain in the European Union. Much of the present anger relates to the specific protocol concerning Northern Ireland, which ‘provided for the territory to remain in the customs union and single market of the European Union while protecting its status as part of the United Kingdom’. Nevertheless, the Irish Protestant loyalists argue that the deal puts the union at risk. The unionist party ‘campaigned for Brexit on the basis that a United Kingdom outside the European Union would make a future united Ireland much more difficult to achieve, but the opposite has actually turned out to be true, and a united Irish island is now being discussed in a way that scarcely seemed possible prior’ to the Brexit referendum of 2016.
•Accordingly, as a recent opinion article says, the Irish Catholic nationalists are talking up the prospects of achieving an early united Ireland and demanding a vote on it, which instils acute anxiety among the union loyalists. In short, ‘Brexit has encouraged a strong revival of identity polarisation, and a possible Irish Language Act, that would give the Irish tongue equal status to English in Northern Ireland’, is feared by unionists as yet another nail in the United Kingdom’s coffin. Demography has changed since the Good Friday Agreement; no longer do unionist parties have the majority, but political inertia prefers a vacuum, so progress toward an equable and liveable peace has stalled. The article adds, ‘past traumas continue to weigh heavily on current politics in Northern Ireland and that is unlikely to change as the twin challenges of managing the Protocol and preventing communal violence occupy the attention in that territory, Dublin and London in the years to come’.
Scheduled events
•Elections scheduled next year to the ‘Northern Ireland Assembly will be followed in 2024 by an important vote on the Northern Ireland Protocol because under the terms of the Brexit agreement, the Assembly will have to vote on whether or not to accept the continuing operation of the Protocol. Should unionists decide to boycott this vote, the legitimacy of the Protocol will be thrown open to question. The timing of any potential Scottish referendum on independence — also likely to be held around 2024 — may well further destabilise Northern Ireland’s fragile politics’, says the opinion article.
•All things considered, there is no person more like a Northern Irish Catholic than a Northern Irish Protestant and vice versa, although obscurantists are loath to accept that basic reality. The fact that the people are just one, with parity in mutual fear, esteem and consent, is never addressed and artificial differences are played up by political elements wishing to stoke communal sentiments and keep both communities at the mercy of irresponsible and divisive forces. While the British, Irish and American governments have condemned the violence, there is a lack of local political leadership to stabilise this volatile situation.
•Peace is an extraordinarily brittle entity, and any functioning democracy must ensure a daily commitment to addressing communal issues with vigilance, tolerance and compromise. These are lessons to be drawn in India. The recent violence in Northern Ireland shows that every country needs leadership that takes responsibility for peoples’ social and economic problems and steers prejudices away from entrenched phobias. The ruling party in India needs to be aware that creating religious tensions between communities has incalculable deep-seated negative consequences that will severely damage every section of society and all our established political and national institutions.
