📰 Parliamentary proceedings | Govt. introduces Bill on insurance firms as Oppn. protests stall LS again
Members allege efforts to privatise insurance sector.
•Amid continuing protests by Opposition members on various issues, Lok Sabha proceedings were disrupted again on Friday.
•Amid the din, the government introduced the Commission for Air Quality Management in National Capital Region and Adjoining Areas Bill and the General Insurance Business (Nationalisation) Amendment Bill. However, a scheduled discussion on the COVID situation could not be held.
•The proceedings had just begun at 11 a.m. when Congress leader Adhir Ranjan Chowdhury said the party had been demanding a discussion on the “Pegasus” issue since the first day of the monsoon session, and then there were also other issues linked to farmers, COVID-19 and price rise. “We want discussion in the House... but the government should change its approach,” he said.
•The Speaker said Mr. Chowdhury could raise the matter after the Question Hour, during which several Opposition members kept shouting slogans.
No discussion on Pegasus
•Parliamentary Affairs Minister Pralhad Joshi later intervened to make an appeal to the protesting members. Stating that the IT Minister, Ashwini Vaishnav, had already given a detailed statement on the “Pegasus” matter in both the Houses, he said they were raising a non-issue, due to which Parliament had not been functioning properly for the past seven to eight days. He said the government did not want to pass any Bills without a discussion.
•“...there are many issues which are directly related to the poor people of India. Let them raise the issue and give suggestions. The government is ready for a discussion, but most unfortunately, they are not allowing the Parliament to run. The Question Hour is the right of the Members. More than 350 members want the Question Hour to run. In spite of that, it is unfortunate if they behave like this...,” he said.
•However, as the sloganeering continued, the House was adjourned till noon.
•Thereafter, Environment Minister Bhupender Yadav and Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman sought the leave of the House to introduce the Commission for Air Quality Management in National Capital Region and Adjoining Areas Bill and the General Insurance Business (Nationalisation) Amendment Bill.
Opposition to the Bill
•Member N.K. Premachandran strongly opposed the Insurance Bill, stating that it would lead to total privatisation of the general insurance companies. He said the bill was vague, indefinite, ambiguous and not in consonance with the original Act. He urged the government to withdraw the bill, defer it as the House was not in order.
•Members Kodikunnil Suresh and Member Santokh Singh Chaudhary also opposed the introduction of Insurance Bill.
•In her reply, Ms. Sitharaman said: “Yes, I also wish that the House is in order. Yes, I also wish that the House discusses this Bill. I also wish that the Members, understanding the importance of a Bill of this nature also participate in the debate... However, I still like to say that the apprehensions mentioned by the Members are not well founded at all.”
•She said through the Bill, the government was bringing in some provisions to enable the common citizens’ participation in the general insurance companies. “Our markets can raise money from the retail participants who are Indian citizens. Through that, we can have greater supply of money, bring in greater inclusion of technology and also enable faster growth of such general insurance companies in India,” she said.
•Following an approval from the House, both the Bills were introduced by the Ministers. Then, around 12-15 p.m., the House was then adjourned for the day.
Study flags lack of editorial guidelines.
•A study on ‘Sexual Violence and the News Media: Issues, Challenges and Guidelines for Journalists in India’ has recommended that, nationally, a charter for news reporting of rape and sexual violence can be established by news industry leaders, which would ensure accountability and commitment to sensitive reporting of the same.
•The UNESCO study, authored by Chindu Sreedharan, Associate Professor of Journalism, Bournemouth University, and Einar Thorsen, Executive Dean, Faculty of Media and Communication, Bournemouth University, was based on content analysis of 10 newspapers over six languages, and semi-structured interviews with 257 journalists across 14 languages. Through this, the study provided insights into routines journalists follow and the challenges they face on the field.
•The study stated that there was a conspicuous lack of formal editorial guidelines in use across newsrooms in the country, and said that only 13% of the respondents had access to written guidelines while 14% had no guidelines at all. The recommendation to have a charter nationally suggested that it be based on a public pledge that newsrooms can adopt, which included a commitment to best practices.
•20% of the respondents, more women than men, said that they experienced distress, and 55% of women journalists said that they had directly experienced or witnessed workplace sexual harassment. The study also highlighted patterns in daily news about sexual violence and said that news outlets often tended to disproportionately publish unusual cases which led to a misleading picture of how sexual violence manifests in the country. While 78% of journalists said they felt responsible for effecting change in relation to sexual violence, below 7% of stories focused on solutions. Sources, and news gathering challenges too, while covering sexual violence, were examined.
•The recommendations offered based on the study, called for the establishment of peer support networks for journalists experiencing trauma, training in law enforcement procedures through a national initiative which covers both rural and urban journalists and more material on responsible reporting for media and journalism students in their curriculum.
•For news organisations, the use of institutional style guides, which would establish what language is to be used with regard to reporting rape and sexual violence, the need to establish a routine for fact checking and verifying FIRs, as well as an institutional process to ensure the safety of journalists who were reporting, were suggested. News organisations were also asked to regularly promote and report on programmes and policies which focus on rape and sexual violence.
•For individual journalists and newsrooms, the study also stated guidelines which can be put into practice on a day-to-day basis for routine news work focusing on interviewing survivors, depiction and news framing, sources, setting a context, and offering solutions.
📰 Law and lawmakers: On criminal acts and legislative privilege
SC is right in saying legislative privilege cannot be a cover for crimes in the House
•The Supreme Court ruling that legislative privilege cannot be extended to provide legal immunity to criminal acts committed by lawmakers ought to be welcomed for two reasons. It lays down that legislators charged with unruly behaviour that results in offences under penal laws cannot be protected either by their privilege or their free speech rights. Second, the decision revivifies the law relating to a prosecutor’s role in withdrawing an ongoing criminal case. The LDF government in Kerala has suffered a setback as it strongly favoured the withdrawal of cases against six members sought to be prosecuted for creating a ruckus in the Assembly on March 13, 2015, when they boisterously tried to interrupt the presentation of the Budget presented by the erstwhile UDF regime. Their action resulted in destruction or damage to some items, amounting to a loss of ₹2.20 lakh. Based on the Assembly Secretary’s complaint, the police registered a case and later filed a charge sheet against them for committing mischief and trespass under the IPC and destroying public property under the Prevention of Damage to Public Property Act, 1984. This year, the Chief Judicial Magistrate, Thiruvananthapuram, had rejected the application by the public prosecutor for withdrawal from prosecution, an order that was later affirmed by the Kerala HC. It is not surprising that the apex court concurred with these decisions, as it is indeed an unacceptable argument that the alleged vandalism took place as part of the legislators’ right to protest on the floor of the House.
•Kerala CM Pinarayi Vijayan, who has rejected calls for asking his General Education Minister, V. Sivankutty, one of the accused, to resign and face trial, maintains that the matter ought to have been seen as a political protest and something that should not have been taken into the domain of criminal prosecution. He is indeed right when he says that courts ought not to re-appraise a prosecutor’s decision to withdraw a case, and that they should only examine whether the prosecutor had applied his mind independently. However, there is equal force in the proposition that it is the court’s duty to decide whether the withdrawal is in good faith, is in the interest of public policy, and is not aimed at thwarting the process of law. Legislative privilege and parliamentary free speech are necessary elements of a lawmaker’s freedom to function, but it is difficult to disagree with the Court’s conclusion that an alleged act of destroying public property within the House cannot be considered “essential” for their legislative functions. It is indeed quite legal for Mr. Sivankutty to remain in office, as he is yet to be convicted. However, he will be well-advised to take a cue from several recent precedents of those in ministerial positions stepping down until their names are cleared by due process.
📰 Patchwork progress: On insured bank deposits repayment
Move to hasten insured bank deposits’ repayment need not have taken this long
•The Government hopes to ring in fresh changes to the 1961 Deposit Insurance and Credit Guarantee Corporation law in the monsoon session, after the Cabinet nod this week. From savers’ perspective, the most significant modification on the anvil is a 90-day deadline for the Corporation (DICGC) to remit the insured deposits of customers in troubled banks. As per the plan, once the RBI imposes curbs on a bank, the clock will start ticking and by the 91st day or thereabouts, account holders will get their outstanding balance back with a cap of ₹5 lakh. While Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman said this will not apply retrospectively, she did indicate that this would apply to cases of lenders already under a moratorium. In the last two years, Yes Bank, Lakshmi Vilas Bank and the PMC Bank, have faced such a bar on depositors seeking to withdraw. PMC Bank accounts still face such curbs, even as savings parked in other co-operative lenders that have gone under continue to elude their rightful owners. The Minister said it normally takes eight to 10 years for insured deposits to be forked out, from the time a bank hits a hurdle and myriad conditions are imposed on withdrawals. But these delays were well-known last year too, when the insured deposit amount was raised to ₹5 lakh from ₹1 lakh laid down in 1993.
•Making incremental changes in quick succession suggests a piecemeal approach to governance rather than a system-wide view, even though the government stressed it has been working ‘overtime’ to resolve the PMC Bank crisis. Nevertheless, given the rising distress in households and the downward momentum in savings levels due to the pandemic, this change must be allowed to make it through the din in Parliament. As per RBI data, ₹76.21 lakh crore or almost 51% of deposits are now insured, but 98.3% of all accounts have balances of ₹5 lakh or less so they are fully insured. This can be a source of renewed comfort for people in the banking system, grappling with bad loans, dwindling deposits and a still-fledgling insolvency framework. It is important for financial stability that people feel it is safer to park their money in a bank than stashing it under a mattress. For several people with limited financial literacy and access to retirement savings instruments, with lifetime earnings (possibly over ₹5 lakh) parked in a neighbourhood co-operative bank, this would still be a less than perfect outcome. The RBI needs to up its oversight game, and the Centre, which has recently made the Department of Cooperation a full-scale ministry, needs to allow it to do so. Moreover, just as the latest amendments have an enabling provision to raise the premium paid by banks to the DICGC in future, there should have been one to raise the insured deposit limit in line with inflation and per capita income trends.
📰 Visualising the Himalaya with other coordinates
Looking at it only through the prism of geopolitics and security concerns ignores its other crucial frameworks
•A conceptual audit of questions related to geopolitics and security concerns while talking or thinking about the Himalaya is perhaps long overdue. There is no gainsaying the truth that we have been examining the Himalaya mainly through the coordinates of geopolitics and security while relegating others as either irrelevant or incompatible. In a certain sense, our intellectual concerns over the Himalaya have been largely shaped by the assumption of fear, suspicion, rivalry, invasion, encroachment and pugnacity. If during colonial times it was Russophobia, then now it is Sinophobia or Pakistan phobia that in fact determines our concerns over the Himalaya. Within the domain of geopolitics and security, conceived by that which lies outside the Himalaya, a process that decolonial scholars such as Pauline Hountondji refers to as extroversion. Ironically it is the Delhi-Beijing-Islamabad triad, and not the mountain per se, that defines our concerns about the Himalaya. Are we not really leading Himalayan studies towards the dead end of violent intellectual pursuits?
A national Himalaya
•If extroversion in the field of knowledge production has resulted in academic dependency, in the case of Himalayan studies it has given birth to the political compulsion of territorialising the Himalaya on a par with the imperatives of nationalism. Thus the attempt to create a national Himalaya by each of the five nations (Nepal, Bhutan, India, Pakistan, and Tibet/China)that fall within this transnational landmass called the Himalaya. The National Mission on Himalayan Studies, for example, under the Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change, Government of India, is a classic case in point that provides funds for research and technological innovations, but creating policies only for the Indian Himalayan Region (IHR). The Mission document avowedly claims: “The Government of India has come-up with this Mission in recognition of the fact that the Himalayan Ecosystem is important for ecological security of India.” Thus, comes the Indian Himalaya. It reminds us of that ancient parable where a few blind men were trying to fathom how huge an elephant was by touching only the different parts of its body.
•By considering cartographic fixations as the natural limit of scholarship, we have overburdened Himalayan studies with the concerns of States in place of people, culture, market or ecology. India’s understanding of the Himalaya is informed by a certain kind of realism, as the Himalaya continues to remain as a space largely defined in terms of sovereign territoriality, in contrast to alternative imaginations such as community, ecology or market. It may be perceived that such an alternative conceptualisation of Himalaya is not only possible but also necessary. But can we really work out such an alternative imagination especially when we find territorialisation and securitisation to be the two dominant modes through which the Himalaya is imagined both in the official context, and, by extension, in popular discourses.
A historical logjam
•The Himalaya’s territorialisation bears a colonial legacy which also sets up its post-colonial destiny as played out within the dynamics of nation states. The arbitration of relationships between and among the five nation states falling within the Himalayan landmass has failed to transcend the approach derived from the given categories of territoriality, sovereignty and difference. As such, the fact that the lines of peoplehood and the national border, especially within the context of the Himalaya, never coincided, is bound to give birth to tensions while working out projects predicated upon national sovereignty. Given this historical logjam, what we can only expect is the escalation of territorial disputes as the immediate fallout when infrastructure development projects in the border areas are adopted by constituting nation states to secure their respective territories falling within the Himalayan landmass.
Borders and their differences
•It needs to be recognised that political borders and cultural borders are not the same thing. Political borders are to be considered as space-making strategies of modern nation-states that do not necessarily coincide with cultural borders. In other words, while a statist imagination has a telling effect on the way a border is understood in political terms, culture in that sense defies the (political) idea of border or at best considers it as permeable, penetrable, connective, heterogeneous and one that can be accounted for mainly through dreams, passions, flows and livelihoods. The singular statist conception of a political border would then appear to become a ‘polysemic’ or even ‘rhizomatic’ when viewed in cultural terms, and, by extension, in terms of trade and ecology or the environment.
•It needs to be realised that human security cannot be effectively appreciated through the paradigm of sovereign territoriality, although state systems operating within the Himalaya have failed to devise any other framework to grapple with the issue of security. More often than not, the state has dominated the agenda of defining the domain of non-traditional security (such as human rights, cases of ecological devastation, climate change, human trafficking, migration, forced exodus of people, transnational crime, resource scarcity, and even pandemics) besides setting the tone of an approach to handling traditional security threats (such as military, political and diplomatic conflicts that were considered as threats against the essential values of the state, territorial integrity, and political sovereignty). Interestingly enough, it has often appeared as a fact that the measures to deal with traditional security threats from outside have in fact triggered non-traditional insecurities on several fronts on the inside.
Understanding the Himalaya
•Keeping these arguments in order, it is proposed that there could be several alternate ways of reading the geopolitical and the security concerns of the Himalaya and if the statist meaning (territoriality, sovereignty and difference) is privileged over and above those of the anthropological, historical, cultural, and ecological ones, it would continue to reflect a set of mental processes predicated on a certain conception of spatial imagination that could be anything but ‘unHimalayan’ or, for that matter, antithetical to the very idea of the Himalaya itself. How long should one go on referring to the Himalaya as the one of the largest biodiversity hotspots? Or as the largest water tower of Asia? Or as a zone that is culturally and linguistically diverse, sharing a common historical pool of resources, communities, cultures, civilisations and memories, and susceptible to climate change and ecological vulnerabilities? When would these terms of references be predicated in our scholarly, and, by extension, pedestrian, attempts to understand the Himalaya and produce impactful policy research on the Himalaya?
•The argument is simple. The Himalaya being a naturally evolved phenomenon should be understood through frameworks that have grown from within the Himalaya. The Himalaya needs to be visualised with an open eye and taken in as a whole instead of in parts unlike the ancient parable of the efforts of the blind men in trying to understand the elephant in parts. The Himalaya is a space whose history defines its geography rather than the other way round. Since histories are always made rather than given, we need to be careful about what kind of Himalayan history we are trying to inject or project in the way we imagine the Himalaya. Viewing the Himalaya as a space of political power and, by extension, through the coordinates of nation states epitomising differential national histories is a violent choice, which actually enriched ultra-sensitivity towards territorial claims and border management.
A road map of other routes
•In contrast to this, if we are ready to consider the Himalaya as a space that is deeply embedded in human subjectivities, we can possibly come out of the grip of a national absolute space, which is actually necessary if we are to address the concerns of trade, commerce, community, ecology and environment — issues which are no less important when we are to think of securing livelihoods, cultures and the environment in the Himalaya. In fact, the road map of all these alternative routes — trade, community, environment — are located beyond the absolutist statist position. The need is that these alternative imaginations of security should be given the required space in the way policy making, state-building strategies and diplomatic relations are worked out in relation to the Himalaya. The time has come when we need to take position between the Himalaya as a national space and as a space of dwelling instead of avoiding our encounter with this ambivalence.
