📰 China constructing bridge on Pangong Tso
It will significantly bring down time for PLA to move troops and equipment between lake’s two banks
•China is constructing a bridge in Eastern Ladakh connecting the North and South Banks of Pangong Tso which would significantly bring down the time for People’s Liberation Army (PLA) to move troops and equipment between the two sectors, two official sources independently confirmed on Monday.
•“On the North Bank there is a PLA garrison at Kurnak fort and on the South Bank at Moldo and the distance between the two is around 200 kms. The new bridge between the closest points on two banks which is around 500m will bring down movement time between the two sectors from around 12 hours to 3-4 hours,” one of the sources said. The bridge is located around 25 kms ahead of the Line of Actual Control (LAC), the source stated.
•Construction has been going on for sometime and it would reduce the overall distance by around 140-150kms, a second official source said.
•Earlier, the PLA had to take a roundabout crossing the Rudok county but now the bridge would provide a direct axis, the first source said adding, the biggest advantage with the new bridge is the inter sector movement as the time comes down significantly. They need to build piers for the bridge which has been underway, the source stated.
•The bridge is in their territory, and the Indian Army will have to now factor this in its operational plans, the source added.
•India holds one third of the 135 km long boomerang shaped lake located at an altitude of over 14,000 feet. The lake, a glacial melt, has mountain spurs of the Chang Chenmo range jetting down referred to as fingers.
•The North bank which has much higher differences in perception of LAC than the South bank, has been the initial site of the clashes in early May 2020 while tensions on South Bank had flared up later in August. Indian Army gained tactical advantage over the PLA on the south bank in end August by occupying several peaks lying vacant since 1962 gaining a dominating view of the Moldo area. On the north bank too, Indian troops set up posts facing PLA positions on the ridgelines of Finger 4.
•In February 2020, as part of the first phase of disengagement both sides agreed for complete disengagement on the North and South Banks of Pangong Lake. Indian Army has a permanent position near Finger 3, the Dhan Singh Thapa post, while the PLA has a base East of Finger 8. The South Bank of Pangong leads to Kailash range and to the Chushul sector.
•Since the August action China has taken up construction of alternate roads away from our line of sight, a defence official stated. As reported by The Hindu last June, China had intensified construction work behind the main confrontation points in Aksai Chin.
•A satellite image of the area put out by an open source intelligence analyst with the Twitter handle @detresfa_ shows a bridge like structure between the closest points of the two banks.
•In a separate incident of a video by Chinese media showing PLA soldiers with Chinese map in Galwan on January 01, an Army source said it is not in the location of the clash last year or the buffer zone set up after the first phase of disengagement. “It appears to be propaganda. The place (clash site) doesn’t have any markings as shown in the video,” an Army source said.
Governments should ensure implementation of safety protocols in the fireworks industry
•The death of four workers on New Year’s Day in a blast at a fireworks unit in Kalathur village of Virudhunagar district, the hub of the firecrackers sector in Tamil Nadu, reiterates the need for relentless vigil to enforce safety protocols in an industry that deals with hazardous processes. The blast was said to have been triggered by friction caused by the mishandling of chemicals. Apparently, the workers had come to the unit for a pooja to usher in 2022. Even though the authorities have suspended the unit’s licence and filed cases under the Indian Penal Code and Indian Explosive Substances Act, they have not cited violations such as the licence holder leasing out the unit to others and manufacturing products unauthorisedly. Over the years, the district has seen numerous blasts and successive State Governments had formed, at times, committees to study the factors that led to the blasts. There have been improvements in the way the firecracker industry has been functioning. For example, the extent of child labour has reduced considerably. But, with regard to adherence to and monitoring of safety protocols, the track record leaves much to be desired.
•There has to be a paradigm shift in the manner an event such as the Kalathur blast is viewed. Generally, any blast is called an accident but such usage unwittingly tends to gloss over the role of those who are responsible for the implementation and the enforcement of safety protocols. There can be no compromise on this count. At the same time, the contribution of the firecracker industry to the country’s economy, especially that of Tamil Nadu, has to be acknowledged. The sector employs eight lakh people, directly and indirectly, in a backward region of the State with no assured irrigation. However, this does not absolve the industry of the responsibility to the life and the health of workers and the larger sections of society. In any investigation of the event, the authorities concerned should seriously consider translating into action some of the suggestions made by an eight-member committee constituted by the National Green Tribunal after a blast in the district that killed over 20 people in February 2021. Headed by former judge of the Punjab and Haryana, and Madras High Courts K. Kannan, the panel had suggested that the Explosives Act be amended to make punishments more stringent than now, employing only certified persons for operations including mixing, filling of chemicals and the making of colour pellets, and using drones for surveillance of various units. There is no dearth of ideas to improve the working of the industry but what is required is that the authorities, both at the levels of Central and State Governments, should ensure the enforcement of safety protocols.
📰 India’s rights record, America’s blinkered vision
Washington’s diplomatic embrace is providing New Delhi a certain immunity from international criticism
•Recent Indian foreign policy has a chequered record, the vacillations over the Taliban resuming control in Afghanistan being one instance. But it cannot be denied that Prime Minister Narendra Modi has been remarkably successful in maintaining cordial Indian relations with Washington under United States President Joe Biden despite overt wooing of former President Donald Trump.
Accommodating view
•India is considered a critical ally by the United States, the only designated Major Defence Partner, and Ambassador-Designate to India Eric Garcetti told the Senate, “Few nations are more vital to the future of American security and prosperity than India,.”
•In Delhi last October, U.S. Deputy Secretary of State Wendy Sherman, said of India’s purchase of Russian military equipment, “We’ve been quite public about any country that decides to use the S-400. We think that it is dangerous and not in anybody’s security interest,” but our authorities did not think it necessary to rebuke her for flagrant discourtesy on Indian soil.
•For what American Defence Minister Lloyd James Austin III called “shared values”, Washington takes an accommodating view of widespread Indian downgrades in indices considered credible in assessing democratic norms and human rights. Like Israel, India finds that Washington’s embrace provides a certain immunity from international criticism.
•The U.S. State Department’s Country Report on Human Rights Practices itself last March recorded “significant human rights issues” in India, including extrajudicial killings, torture, arbitrary arrest and detention, violence against minorities, unjustified harassment of journalists, and censorship and blocking of websites. India is rated poorly by the U.S.-based Freedom House which called it ‘partly free’, Sweden’s V-Dem Institute which dubbed it an ‘electoral autocracy’, The Economist’s Democracy Index and the Stockholm Institute for Democracy which India had helped to establish.
•A year ago, India ranked 142 in the World Press Freedom Index of Reporters Without Borders. The U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom has for successive years recommended that India be listed as a ‘country of particular concern’ due to its treatment of Muslims and Christians, and India is ranked in the Open Doors World Watch List for ‘extreme’ Christian persecution below Syria, Iraq and Saudi Arabia. The U.S. government has ignored all these findings to the dismay of non-governmental organisations (NGOs) and activists due to Narendra Modi’s positioning India as an indispensable partner, and his government has no sympathy for NGOs, portraying their conclusions as biased and uninformed.
The world media
•Diplomacy does not proceed according to ethical standards; nor does the global media. Six dying in a gust of wind in Australia and six in an Illinois warehouse collapse make headlines, while reports that every 25 minutes an Indian woman commits suicide, 48 persons dying in a volcanic eruption in Java and 208 in a typhoon in Philippines are not newsworthy. Nor is the current heroic popular demand in Sudan for a democratic government.
•In past times, third world leaders in countries such as India, Malaysia, Indonesia and Nigeria tried to create a rival media platform, and Qatar, China and Russia started 24-hour news channels but cannot match the resources and reach of the entrenched, West-dominated English-medium news ecosystem which includes soft power assets such as music, film and culture. Hence, the Central Intelligence Agency is portrayed as all-knowing, despite its abject failures in the Bay of Pigs Invasion, Iraq’s nuclear weapons and the Afghan army’s capabilities.
•World news is curated by a handful of western capitals, the ‘read outs’ being for the domestic audience, which can enjoy the U.S. and its allies forever fulminating against opponents who meekly submit to the diatribes. Threats of “massive consequences and severe economic cost” against Russia by G7 countries and the European Union are blandly announced without reference to what might be Russia’s concerns for its own security. A boycott of the Winter Olympics in China by irrelevant western officials is heralded, but no boycott is threatened of the Football World Cup at Qatar, an absolute monarchy where there are scant civil and political rights, workers rights are negligible and homosexuality is deemed illegal.
•The West’s instrument of choice for penalising political adversaries is this: unilateral sanctions of dubious legality in international law. No audit has ever been taken of the immense suffering these sanctions inflict on innocent civilians.
•The U.S. Treasury lists 36 groups of multiple sanctions, the latest of which is a typically insensitive measure against seven Bangladeshis, including the police chief, just before the 50th anniversary of that nation’s liberation from American ally Pakistan.
On the U.S.
•For the world’s oldest democracy to arbitrate on fundamental rights of others is ironic for a country where in 12 months ending March 2021, its police murdered 37 African-American people per million against 15 per million whites, when African-Americans comprise only 13% of the population. The Summit For Democracy hosted by U.S. President Joe Biden was predictably confused about its participants because not every democracy is liberal and not every society considered liberal is fully democratic. Meaningful summits should be global in attendance and concentrate on pressing problems such as inequality, climate change and arms control on earth and in space.
📰 The deafening silence of scientists
Few Indian scientists argue for the freedom of thought and are able to stand up against pseudoscience
•In December 1954, Meghnad Saha, one of India’s foremost astrophysicists and an elected parliamentarian, wrote to Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru, “My request to you is that you do not smother your Desdemonas on the report of men like this particular Iago. I sometimes believe there are too many Iagos about you, as there have been in history about every person of power and prestige”. By referring to the characters in Shakespeare’s Othello, an aggrieved Saha was showing his displeasure at a situation that he perceived to be bad for Indian science wherein the courtship between the state and science was being ruined by the Machiavellian advisers of the then Prime Minister.
A glorious tradition forgotten
•We have come a long way from Nehruvian times when scientists could afford to be directly critical of the Prime Minister and still expect to get a pat on their shoulder in return. Over the past few years, a pernicious political landscape that encourages intolerance and superstition has been developed. This has proved to be non-conducive for the time-tested scientific model and freedom of inquiry. For the creation of knowledge, one should be able to think and express themselves freely. One also needs to have a space for dissent, which is a fundamental requirement for democracies to thrive. Are our scientists vocal enough to argue for the freedom of thought and are they able to stand up against pseudoscience? Their silence has given rise to the perception that they too are complicit in creating an unhealthy atmosphere of ultra-nationalism and jingoism, where the glorious tradition followed by socially committed scientists like Saha is forgotten.
•We have seen this lack of reactivity from Indian scientists and science academies on many occasions in the recent past, starting with the conduct of the 102nd Indian Science Congress in 2015. How did a session suffused with extreme nationalism and promoting junk science find its way into this prestigious meet? How was it vetted and approved by a high-profile committee containing the country’s front-ranking scientists? Completely sidelining the real scientific contributions made in ancient and medieval times, ridiculous claims were made in that forum about ancient ‘Bharat’ being a repository of all modern knowledge. Except a few, like the late Pushpa Bhargava, who always fretted about the lack of scientific temper among Indian scientists, most of our leaders in science chose to ignore something that was patently wrong.
•Pseudo-scientific remarks by responsible political leaders have continued to hog the limelight ever since. Even when a former Union Minister insisted that Darwin’s Theory of Evolution was scientifically wrong, leading scientists remained silent save a few. More recently, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh chief made a misinformed statement that the DNA of all the people in India has been the same for 40,000 years. His message clearly goes against the proven fact that Indians have mixed genetic lineages originating from Africa, the Mediterranean, and Eurasian steppes. As a part of revisionist history-writing, the Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur has now issued a 2022 calendar. The purpose of it is to argue for a Vedic cultural foundation for the Indus Valley Civilisation — a theory that goes against all the available evidence; morphing an Indus Valley single-horned bull seal into a horse will not solve the evidentiary lacuna. A retinue of junk science propagators and new-age ‘gurus’ have been flourishing in this anti-science environment, often marketing questionable concoctions including cow products to cure COVID-19 and even homosexuality, as though it is some sort of disease. Pseudoscience has provided a foundational base for a huge money-making industry that successfully peddles quackery by sustaining and exploiting the people’s ignorance.
•Our social and political life resonates uncannily with the fascist era of the 1930s-40s when Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini argued that the “white race” was locked in a deadly demographic competition with races of “lesser purity” whose numbers were growing much faster. It can be instructive in our current political climate to reflect on how science failed as a bulwark against such regressive viewpoints. The science historian, Massimo Mazzotti, at the University of California, Berkeley, ably showed how the fascist regime in Italy, using various intimidation and surveillance tactics, made academic elites toe the official line. The faculties did so without making an actual anti-fascist choice. Instead, they entered the grey zone of cynical detachment. It was due to cynicism and careerism that the scientists of Italy derided racist policies as foolish in private but did not bother to question them publicly. Like Italy, racism and ‘othering’ was very much a part of the political landscape in Germany under the Nazi regime, which saw a big exodus of high-ranking scientists with Jewish tags.
Reasons for toeing the line
•As discussed by Naresh Dadhich, an Indian theoretical physicist, in an article, one of the reasons for this acquiescence is that scientific research relies almost entirely on funding from the government. So, a fear of retribution acts against the idea of engagement with society. Another equally valid reason is that our contemporary science researchers remain entirely cut off from liberal intellectual discourse, unlike in the initial years after Independence. For most scientists today, the idea of science as a form of argument remains foreign. For many of them, exposure to the social sciences is minimal at university. They also don’t get trained in a broad range of social topics at the school level.
•Globally, STEM students downplay altruism and arguably demonstrate less social concern than students from other streams. The blame squarely lies with the pedagogy followed in our science education system. The leading science and technology institutes recruit students right after school and largely host one or two perfunctory social science courses. Students, thus, mostly remain oblivious to the general liberal intellectual discourse. This issue is of major concern, as the 21st century is witnessing a new rise of illiberal democracy with fascist tendencies that generate intolerance and exclusion in various parts of the world, including India. We are also living at a time when scientific advice is marginalised in public policy debates ranging from natural resource use to environmental impacts.
•In the early 20th century, many leading scientists were deeply engaged with philosophy and had developed a distinctive way of thinking about the implications of science on society. They were much more proactive about societal issues. The continuity of that legacy appears to have broken. A cowed-down scientific enterprise is not helpful in retaining the secular autonomy of academic pursuits. To regain this cultural space among younger practitioners, science education must include pedagogical inputs that help learners take a deliberative stand against false theories that could undermine civil society and democratic structures.
📰 Aiding in governance
The synergy of NGOs, Government and corporates is the holy grail of development
•It is well known that the collaborative effort of markets and the Government leads to development of a country. We also know that engaging with communities and non-state informal institutions is as important as working with the Government machinery.
•Section 135 of the Companies Act mandates corporates who are beyond a certain level of profits and turnover to pay at least 2% of their net profits before tax to the development space. This law gives corporates the necessary impetus to collaborate with non-state actors like Non-Governmental Organisations (NGOs) and Civil Society Organisations (CSOs). This strengthening of citizenry-private partnerships is a major component of development activities. Non-state actors, because of their depth of engagement with communities, bring patient capital to corporate board rooms and help the state, too, by engaging in welfare activities. This is a classic case of state-driven governance mechanism promoting collaboration among non-state actors.
•A key pillar of democratic governance is citizens’ power to question the state. NGOs and voluntary groups/organisations have played a significant role in building capacities of citizens to hold governments accountable. With the Government taking the stand that any action by an NGO which is critical of the government is ‘anti-national’, more so when funded from abroad, the space for foreign grants has shrunk. Hence, Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) grants, which wouldn’t necessarily have flowed had it not been for the CSR law, have assumed importance to provide the much-needed sustenance to NGOs and CSOs as key players in non-state governance.
Essential cogs in the wheel
•State governance should be evolving in nature. However, the Indian bureaucratic elite have little appetite for risk-taking and innovation because of the constant changing goalposts of their politician-bosses or because the quantum of work is more than what they can efficiently handle. Bureaucrats, therefore, often take recourse to the status quo even if it is to at least get some work done and not stall everything by campaigning for change, especially in the realm of governance. There is also the fear of failure, with its deep-rooted consequence of non-risk-takers smoothly sailing to the top posts. In such contexts, it is the non-state actor who innovates and creates breakthrough models of community engagement. They also become the vehicle to carry the demands of people to formal institutions. We saw this in the case of the Right to Information (RTI) campaign, which became a law after decades-long efforts by NGOs. The law has brought a dramatic change in the degree of transparency in India, with most Government ministries falling under its ambit.
•Corporate houses, when implementing their CSR activities, and governments, when executing their flagship projects, especially in the years preceding elections, are aggressive in their targets. But that doesn’t necessarily work in the development sector where change happens at a glacial pace. It is the non-state actors, who know the lay of the land, who bridge the gap between people and firms/state.
•It is common knowledge that the District Collector calls on vetted NGOs/CSOs to implement various schemes during the normal course of the day or to step in at short notice when calamities strike. NGOs and CSOs sometimes do the heavy lift and ensure that schemes reach the last person even in the face of disaster. When non-state actors take a large load off the state’s shoulder, the state can focus more on governance.
•Research shows that it is the synergy of NGOs, Government and corporates which is the holy grail of development. I have learnt from being on the field that NGOs and CSOs with their penetration are best suited for last-mile delivery of government schemes or implementation of a corporate house’s CSR work, thus nudging one another in the path to a developmental state.
•The tension between the tenets of liberty and equality is balanced by fraternity provided by the empathetic NGOs and CSOs in the journey towards a development state. The CSR law has made the corporate world not only clean its own mess but has also created a legal framework for corporates to work with NGOs and CSOs. NGOs and CSOs in India, irrespective of the open hostility of the current dispensation, will play a major role in mobilising citizen action to right various wrongs. They can help contribute to better polity as well as better governance. Most importantly, they have the legitimacy to operate not just as actors who must ride into the sunset after their job is done but to be as integral cogs in the wheel of good governance.
