📰 Punjab’s Operation Red Rose unfurls to curb illicit liquor trade
Precise tracking systems and administrative coordination are behind the Excise Department’s successes
•In 2020, Punjab’s Excise Department launched ‘Operation Red Rose’ to curb illicit liquor trading and nail excise-related crimes. A year-and-a-half later, with the use of precise tracking and monitoring systems to check illicit distillation and smuggling of liquor, the results in terms of the number of suspects booked for crimes, as well convictions and a rise in revenues, are encouraging.
•In December 2020, the department busted an illegal bottling plant at Rajpura in Patiala district using Global Positioning System (GPS) technology. It has been made compulsory for transporters of extra neutral alcohol (ENA) and spirits to install GPS systems in their vehicles. A control room at the department’s head office in Mohali keeps a tab on the movement of all vehicles round the clock. On December 12, the control room flagged a tanker carrying 20,000 litres of ENA that had started from a distillery from Patiala but halted near Rajpura for an unusually long period of time. A squad of local officials was rushed to the spot, which found that ENA was being siphoned off from the tanker to an illegal bottling plant. A huge cache of liquor, blends, empty bottles and unused caps were also recovered, and a case was subsequently registered. This is one among several cases that the department has busted by deploying the latest technology.
•“The basic idea behind Operation Red Rose was to ensure that there should not be illicit or illegal movement of liquor in Punjab. We have adopted zero tolerance on this front. Our conviction rate for 2021-22 (till April-August) is 90%, which in 2019-20 was at around 67%; and in 2020-21, the conviction rate was 77%,” Rajat Agarwal, Punjab’s Excise Commissioner, told The Hindu.
•Pointing out that the objective of the project is to keep an effective check on spurious and counterfeit liquor, Mr. Agarwal said: “We wanted to keep strict control over manufacturing units, the wholesale and the retail chain so that the quality of liquor is not compromised at any point. Under this operation, better coordination has been developed among the three wings — the civil administration, the Excise Department and the police — and the results are encouraging. The rise in revenue and increase in the number of FIRs and arrests, besides the rise in conviction rate, is testimony to the success of Operation Red Rose.”
•In 2019-20, the department’s revenue was ₹5,118 crore; in 2020-21, it rose to ₹6,335 crore. The department is expecting the revenue to touch ₹7,000 crore this year.
•In 2019, a total 11,953 FIRs were lodged and 13,243 arrests were made in cases related to illicit alcohol. From May 2020, when the operation was started, till May 2021, as many as 17,541 FIRs were registered and 16,216 people arrested. The number of convictions in excise-related crimes have also gone up.
•“We are ensuring cases are taken to the logical conclusion. Enforcement is a continuous and dynamic activity so, of course, at times, unscrupulous elements will come out with some novel ways to work out their activities, but we have been improvising and efforts are paying off,” Mr. Agarwal said.
•The department has used several technologies — flow meters in bottling plants, QR code-based passes, GPS enabled transport vehicles, and e-transit passes — to curb different modules of excise theft, which include direct supply of liquor from the manufacturing unit without paying excise duty; liquor smuggling from neighbouring States; and preparing liquor in villages, especially in the areas adjacent to rivers.
•Naresh Dubey, Joint Commissioner with the State Excise Department, asserts that human intelligence, along with technology, is being effectively put to use. “I can assure that no liquor is illegally coming out from distilleries in Punjab,” he said, adding that the department has used the latest technologies in a manner that “each and every bottle is accounted for as there is a complete check on the inputs”.
•“The entire manufacturing process of liquor in the State is now online, which is monitored in real-time. The total movement of liquor, consisting of PML (country liquor), Indian Made Foreign Liquor (IMFL) and beer, starting from manufacturing units to wholesalers and then further to retail shops or bars, is being done online. We have a control room, where our team members monitor the quantity, brand, etc., of the liquor being processed at a given manufacturing unit. On the wholesale front, all the permits are now given online. The retail module for online permits to retail licensees has also been implemented. All the passes have been made QR code enabled, which carry details of transactions that can be checked by any authority in transit — this has curbed the practice of duplicate passes. In every distillery, brewery or a bottling plant, the use of flow meters has been made mandatory, which captures the density, volume, etc., of the material and these readings are captured every 30 minutes. The purpose is to capture the inputs because once we now know details of the exact input content, the output can be easily scrutinised,” Mr. Dubey said.
•“To check illegal preparation of liquor, especially in regions along rivers or water bodies, we are using drones. Now, we are working on a proposal to implement a ‘digital-locking’ system soon. The vehicle enabled with this system shall open only when it reaches the destination,” he added.
The COP can at best incentivise adaptation that aids a transition towards clean energy
•In a week, heads of state from at least 120 countries are expected to convene in Glasgow for the 26th meeting of the United Nations Conference of the Parties (COP). The annual two-week-long exercise was disrupted last year due to COVID-19. The year 2020 was to have been an important year in the COP calendar as most of the major economies were expected to review the actions undertaken so far in meeting voluntary targets to reduce greenhouse gas emissions in line with the Paris Agreement of 2015. However, the disruption has meant that these discussions will now move to Glasgow. Following the exit by former U.S. President Donald Trump from the Paris Agreement, the Biden administration is making a concerted effort to commemorate the country's return. To this end, it has sent emissaries and multiple delegations to several countries to coax them into committing to some sort of a deadline or a 'net zero’ timeline by when their emissions would peak and eventually abate.
•To limit global warming to 1.5°C, net zero emissions would have to be achieved by 2050 and emissions would need to be drastically cut by at least 45% from 2010 levels by 2030. India and China are the major emitters of the world that haven’t committed to any 2050 deadline. Their argument, which has been consistent for many years, is that the climate crisis exists because of excess emissions by the developed West for more than a century. Any attempt at solving the crisis would involve the western countries doing much more than what they have committed to and, at the very least, making good on promises already enshrined in previous editions of the COP. As years of COP negotiations have shown, progress is glacial and the effort is more on delivering a headline announcement rather than genuine operationalisation of the steps that need to be taken. In real terms, for developed countries, complying with the demand by developing countries to pay reparations means shelling out sums of money unlikely to pass domestic political muster. And for developing countries, yielding to calls for ‘net zero’ means that governments such as India will appear as having caved into international bullying. The COP, despite all the media interest it generates, can at best incentivise adaptation that aids a transition to clean energy. But even without immediately retiring fossil fuel assets, the world needs to frame a meaningful response to a warming globe.
📰 Transcending borders and boundaries
Kamla Bhasin’s genius lay in her ability to work past different fault lines and build diverse coalitions
•The domains of peacebuilding and protest are ordinarily seen as occupying separate and discrete worlds. Yet in the women’s movements in South Asia, beginning with the 1980s but more visibly in the 1990s, these became increasingly intertwined as scholars and activists forged synergies and cross-border solidarities.
•Feminist icon Kamla Bhasin, who passed away in September, contributed to this denouement. She invested her unique energy towards transcending borders and boundaries, past monocultures of the mind that reinforce stereotypes, mistrust and militarism, and reflect the cartographic anxieties of nation states.
•Bhasin famously said, “ Main sarhad par khadi deewar nahi, us deewar par padi daraar hoon [I am not the wall that stands at the border, I am the crack in that wall]” . This captured the spirit with which women conflict “resolutionaries” in South Asia, often in the face of stiff opposition, bricolaged around cordons of territoriality to join forces and mobilise across fault lines of country, caste, religion, class and gender.
•The recognition that women across South Asia face a continuum of violence — both structural and overt — as they confront the patriarchies of the family, the community and the state, and “the complicities between them”, sustained networks unfettered by national identities.
•Bhasin’s book with Ritu Menon, Borders and Boundaries , and Urvashi Butalia’s The Other Side of Silence , both published in the 1990s, were path-breaking in their accounts of the narratives of pain, loss, displacement and violence that the Partition of India had wrought on women on both sides of the border and the similarity of their experiences. These works revealed how community and even national honour were inscribed on the bodies of women and the gendered nature of citizenship. It triggered explorations around what country, religious identity or even nation really meant for women. It also opened the space for research and activism that interrogated the “sanctity of borders”.
Singular experiences
•Several ethnographic narratives that gave voice to the singular experiences of women in situations of conflict — in Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Nepal, Afghanistan and Pakistan — added to the repertoire, enabling civil society transversal engagements across South Asia around the issues of justice, rights, patriarchy, militarisation and nuclearisation. Through periods of adversarial face-offs between different Governments and their neighbours — especially between India and Pakistan — feminists like Bhasin were hard at work to ensure that people-to-people contact and a form of public diplomacy sustained dialogue and nurtured synergies.
•With women in the lead, initiatives like the Women’s Action Forum (WAF) in Pakistan that reached out to their sisters in Bangladesh to apologise for the atrocities of the Pakistan army in 1971; the Women’s Peace Bus undertaken by the Women’s Initiative for Peace in South Asia (WIPSA) from Delhi to Lahore in 2000 to demand a war-free South Asia; Women in Security Conflict Management and Peace (WISCOMP) bringing young South Asians together in workshops on conflict transformation; and Sangat with its innovative regional gender training conclaves, to name a few, persevered with the mission to expand constituencies for peace.
•In recent decades, South Asia has been witness to collectives of “disobedient women” articulating peace and defying state-centric notions of security and order. They have been visible in the mother’s movements in Sri Lanka, the Thappa Force in the “ Malki ya Maut [ownership or death]” farmers struggle in Pakistan, and in the Chipko, Narmada, Bhopal and Kudankulam movements in India. Demonstrations like the Meira Paibis (women with torches) in Manipur, and the congregation of women at Shaheen Bagh and at the farmers’ protests are also part of these traditions of dissent.
•Drawing from the experience of activists like Bhasin of making a woman’s place “in the resistance”, these movements have largely entered the peacebuilding arena through the corridors of human security — voicing democracy and reclaiming citizenship.
Core of their engagement
•Highlighting the tensions between people’s security and what often passes as national security, opposition to war and the cultures of militarism have been at the core of their engagement. Foregrounded is also the need to link issues of peace and security to development in order to address the structural causes of conflict. Feminist scholars have often made the connections between the formal security discourse and certain types of hegemonic masculinity, and how policy priorities and (techno) strategic discourse are skewed to preserve power hierarchies nationally, within the international system and the world economic order.
•Women’s movements have interrogated the conventional peace metaphor of the figure in white, passively holy or wholly passive. To “wage conflict non-violently”, transgressing received notions of security, in their everyday resistances against injustice and oppressive socio-political institutions in order to build structural peace, has been their clarion call.
•The feminist “weapons” they bring to their engagement blend the cerebral, the celebratory and the performative. Bhasin herself, with her extraordinary communication skills, drew in large numbers of young enthusiasts, “deploying” slogans and art, music and humour, making her succinct, accessible primers on gender, patriarchy and peace resonate across groups, while unpacking the most complex of feminist concepts. These forms of protest and peace praxis draw from the global palimpsest of feminist activism chiselled by women the world over.
•Feminist peace activists today recognise that the search for common ground involves acknowledging differences, while building on commonalities. Women’s experiences of conflict and violence are mediated by their “location” and the intersectionality of caste, class, region, religion and gender. Bhasin’s genius lay in her ability to work past these different fault lines and build diverse coalitions and communities of practice.
•Since the mid-1980s, South Asian women activists have sought to “engender” peace by drawing in larger numbers even from perceived “hostile” neighbourhoods into safe “disarmed”, empathic spaces of trust.
•This was well before the landmark United Nations Security Council Resolution (UNSCR) 1325 in 2000 had set the global normative template of the Women Peace and Security (WPS) Agenda. Did South Asian feminist peace activism then offer crucial conceptual alphabets for the international template on positive peace (peace with justice) as an inclusive public process, and not just “brokered” in closed negotiations only by men? The story of their seminal contributions to the WPS discourse needs to become more visible.
•A people’s peace is a perpetual work-in-progress. It also an invitation to civil society to continuously fine-tune the song of democracy. Nurturing a South Asian identity was Bhasin’s labour of love. With love, she strove to inscribe it into the lives of others. And she did it, as we all must, with “passion, compassion, humour and style”.
📰 India’s Central Asian outreach
Afghanistan’s situation has thrown up challenges for New Delhi
•The dramatic developments in Afghanistan have catalysed new geostrategic and geoeconomic concerns for the region. The evolving situation has also thrown up renewed challenges for India’s regional and bilateral ties with Central Asia and the Caucasus, prompting India to recalibrate its rules of engagement with the region.
•External Affairs Minister S. Jaishankar was in the region earlier this month — his third within a span of four months. In Kyrgyzstan, Mr. Jaishankar extended a credit line of $200 million for the support of development projects and signed an memorandum of understanding (MoU) on High-Impact Community Development Projects (HICDP). His next stop was the Kazakhstan capital, Nur Sultan, where he attended the 6th Foreign Ministers’ Conference on Interaction and Confidence-Building Measures in Asia (CICA).
•At CICA, Mr. Jaishankar targeted China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). Admonishing China’s methods in promoting the BRI, he said while greater connectivity was essential for the promotion of regional stability, it must not be pursued for parochial interests. He also confronted Pakistan for its support towards cross-border terrorism. Before reaching Armenia on October 13, Mr. Jaishankar met his counterparts from Russia, Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan to discuss regional cooperation.
India-Armenia ties
•Mr. Jaishankar has become the first Indian External Affairs Minister to visit Armenia. The Minister and his Armenian counterpart, Ararat Mirzoyan, agreed to enhance trade and cultural exchanges to boost bilateral relations. During the visit, Mr. Jaishankar also supported efforts for a peaceful solution of the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict between Azerbaijan and Armenia under the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe’s (OSCE) Minsk group.
•The Taliban re-establishing its supremacy over Afghanistan has also exposed the weaknesses of coalitions such as the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), created in response to the threats of terrorism that sprang from Afghanistan. However, the SCO has been used by most member countries for their own regional geostrategic and security interests, increasing the trust-deficit and divergence within the forum.
•As the SCO failed to collectively respond to the Afghan crisis, the Central Asian leaders met in Turkmenistan in August to voice their concerns over the Afghan situation, and also discussed the presence of Central Asian terror groups within Afghanistan and along their borders.
•After the breakup of the Soviet Union and the formation of the independent republics in Central Asia, India reset its ties with the strategically critical region. India provided financial aid to the region and established diplomatic relations. New Delhi signed the Strategic Partnership Agreements (SPA) with Kazakhstan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan to stimulate defence cooperation and deepen trade relations. In 2012, New Delhi’s ‘Connect Central Asia’ policy aimed at furthering India’s political, economic, historical and cultural connections with the region. However, India’s efforts were stonewalled by Pakistan’s lack of willingness to allow India passage through its territory. China took advantage of the situation and unveiled the much-hyped BRI in Kazakhstan.
•The growing geostrategic and security concerns regarding the BRI’s China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) and its violation of India’s sovereignty forced New Delhi to fix its lethargic strategy. Soon after assuming office, Prime Minister Narendra Modi visited all the Central Asian countries in July 2015. Eventually, Central Asia became the link that placed Eurasia in New Delhi’s zone of interest. India signed MoUs with Iran in 2015 to develop the Chabahar port in the Sistan-Baluchistan province that was in the doldrums from 2003. Most of the Central Asian leaders view India’s Chabahar port as an opportunity to diversify their export markets and control China’s ambitions. China’s assertive approach led to rising social discontent on the ill-treatment of their ethnic brethren in neighbouring Xinjiang.
•Central Asian countries have been keen to have India as a partner as they have sought to diversify their strategic ties. They have admitted New Delhi into the Ashgabat Agreement, allowing India access to connectivity networks to facilitate trade and commercial interactions with both Central Asia and Eurasia, and also access the natural resources of the region. Rising anti-Chinese sentiments within the region and security threats from the Taliban allow New Delhi and Central Asia to reimagine their engagement. India cannot afford to lose any time in recalibrating its regional engagements.
📰 In Glasgow, all eyes on 2030
COP26 must focus sharply on reducing emissions till 2030, rather than on net zero 2050, which is too distant a goal
•The stage is set for the 26th UN Climate Change Conference of the Parties (COP26) in Glasgow, starting October 31. Major preparatory conferences and bilateral meetings have been held to persuade countries to raise their emission reduction commitments from the Nationally Determined Contributions (NDC) under the Paris Agreement. Some positive outcomes have been achieved. Yet, many high-emitter countries are woefully short of the emissions reductions required by 2030 to restrict global temperature rise to “well below 2°C” or the now de facto goal of 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels. The loudest buzz now, however, is around net zero emissions by 2050 i.e., greenhouse gases (GHG) emissions equalling absorption by sinks such as forests, even though the substance is much less than the slogan suggests.
Net zero mirage
•Media reports and commentary in India and abroad greeted the Sixth Assessment Report (AR6) of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change released in August 2021 with shock and awe, but the revealing scientific data were glossed over. Far from emphasising net zero alone, AR6 emphasised that to keep temperature rise within 1.5°C, global emissions should be reduced by 45% from 2010 levels by 2030, on the way to net zero 2050.
•Importantly, in the net zero drumbeats spurred on by the U.S. and the UN Secretary General, the foundational principle of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), which is common but differentiated responsibilities (CBDR), has been forgotten. Developed countries, responsible for over 75% of accumulated atmospheric GHGs causing climate change, should shoulder most of the burden for reducing emissions, while developing countries should do what they can, with technological and financial assistance from the former. So, if the goal is global net zero emissions by 2050, all countries cannot be obliged to reach that goal by the same year. CBDR would imply that developed countries should reach net zero by, say, 2035-40, while developing countries can get there later.
•Net zero 2050, as currently posed, is at best a distracting message and at worst deliberately diverts attention away from the urgent 2030 target that COP26 should focus on. The net zero 2050 target is also no proverbial silver bullet, as clearly shown by numbers put out in the UNFCCC Synthesis Report on the updated NDCs, released in September 2021.
2030 targets critical
•One hundred and thirteen parties out of 194 submitted updated NDCs by end-July 2021. The UN NDC report tells us that even accounting for these, global emissions in 2030 are expected to be 16.3% above the 2010 level, whereas the IPCC has called for 2030 emissions to be 45% less from 2010 levels for the 1.5°C goal. The report therefore calls for “a significant increase in the level of ambition of NDCs” till 2030.
•Several large emitters have announced deeper emission cuts than in the Paris Agreement. The U.K. and the European Union have raised their targets to a significant 68% and 55%, respectively, compared with 1990 levels by 2030. The U.S. is still lagging behind, even as U.S. Special Presidential Envoy for Climate John Kerry tours the world pushing other countries for deeper emission cuts. The U.S. has now promised net zero emissions by 2050 compared to the 80% reduction that it had promised earlier. The Biden administration has also promised to reduce emissions by 50–52% below 2005 levels by 2030. This is grossly insufficient as the U.S. is the world’s second largest emitter, and the 2005 baseline makes its commitment considerably lower than those of the EU, the U.K. and others using the Kyoto 1990 baseline. Others standing in the way of rapid reductions are Russia, Brazil under Jair Bolsonaro ravaging the Amazon forests, and China, the world’s largest emitter, whose relentless push to add maximum infrastructure, industrial and power-generation capacities before peaking in 2030, may use up much of the cumulative global emissions available for 1.5°C.
•The gravity of the situation may be better appreciated through the more scientific metric of carbon budgets, as highlighted in AR6 and AR5. Carbon budgets represent the quantum of CO2 the atmosphere can hold for a given global temperature, best assessed through cumulative emissions and not annual flows. The report of updated NDCs states that “the cumulative CO2 emissions in 2020–2030 based on the latest NDCs would likely use up 89% of the remaining carbon budget, leaving a post-2030 carbon budget of around 55 Gt CO2, which is equivalent to the average annual CO2 emissions in 2020–2030.” Although negotiators and analysts are steeped in using annual flows, estimates based on carbon budgets should be used at Glasgow, if only to assess flows-based arrangements arrived at. As the NDC report says, reaching net zero is necessary to stabilise global temperature rise at a particular level, “but limiting global temperature increase to a specific level would imply limiting cumulative CO2 emissions to within a carbon budget.”
Whither Glasgow COP26?
•To reiterate, COP26 must focus sharply on reducing emissions till 2030, rather than on net zero 2050, which is too distant and with possibilities of gaming the system. If COP26 does not focus on achieving the 45% emission cuts from 2010 levels required by 2030 for limiting temperature rise to 1.5°C, and continues with geopolitics as usual, then the world may well have squandered away one of its last chances to avert disastrous climate impacts. Pressure will undoubtedly come from Africa, Least Developed Countries (LDCs), Small Island States and others, but will that tilt the scales against the powerful status quo? It was suggested some years ago that the COP ensures that Parties iteratively raise their commitments till they add up to the requisite 45% reduction by 2030. But who will hold their feet to the fire? Or will the U.S. and others succeed in focusing on the false net zero 2050 solution, escaping their own obligations for 2030 and dangerously kicking the can down the road?
•As usual, India is in its own double-edged position. The country emits 7% of global emissions, has extremely low per-capita emissions that are far below the global average and yet ranks as the world’s third largest emitter. It is a G20 member and reputed economic and industrial power. India has so far resisted pressures to raise its Paris Agreement emission reduction commitments. But it has not yet submitted its updated NDC as required and may face difficulties at Glasgow, especially from LDCs and most vulnerable countries feeling existentially threatened even as powerful nations wheel and deal. The well-known website Climate Tracker has now placed India in its second- worst performing category of countries regarding conformity with global 1.5°C goals, down from the top category for 2°C just after the Paris Agreement. India can, without much difficulty, raise its NDC pledge of reducing Emissions Intensity (ratio of emissions to GDP) by 33-35% from 2005 levels by 2030 to 38-40%. This is quite achievable since India has been averaging around 2% p.a. reduction in EI as per its own NDC. Given the net zero chorus, India could also offer to achieve that by 2070-75, invoking CBDR and comparing well with China’s 2060 pledge. If pressed on a peaking year, a 2040-45 guesstimate may not be far off the mark, especially if increasing forest and tree cover are stepped up instead of undermined. For India to convert its ambitions of installing 450GW of renewable power by 2030, adding green hydrogen or increasing electric vehicles into commitments may require more homework than done so far. Will India have the gumption to leverage these offers to push the U.S. and other developed country laggards to step up their commitments and actions towards the 2030 goal, without trade-offs on promises of financial assistance? Only time, of which the world has little left, will tell.
