📰 Postal ballot facility for NRIs being contemplated: Chief Election Commissioner
CEC holds meet in South Africa, Mauritius
•Chief Election Commissioner Sushil Chandra urged Non-Resident Indians (NRIs) to register as overseas electors and told them about a proposal on postal ballots for NRIs being contemplated during a recent visit to South Africa and Mauritius, the Election Commission (EC) said on Friday.
•An EC delegation led by Mr. Chandra visited South Africa and Mauritius from April 9 to 19 and interacted with groups of NRIs, apart from holding meetings with election management bodies of the countries, the statement said.
•“During the interaction with members of the Indian community, the CEC urged them to register as overseas voters as the present numbers are abysmally low. He also shared with the members that extension of Electronically Transmitted Postal Ballot System (ETPBS) facility to overseas voters is being contemplated,” the EC said.
•In meetings with NRI groups, Mr. Chandra spoke of the experience of conducting elections in India, which has 950 million voters in over 1 million polling stations.
•Mr. Chandra’s visit and interactions with NRIs came after Law Minister Kiren Rijiju informed the Lok Sabha in March that the government was exploring the possibility of allowing online voting for NRIs.
•The EC had written to the Law Ministry in 2020 proposing NRIs be allowed to vote through postal ballots, following which the matter has been under consideration by the government.
•While the EC at present allows NRIs to register as overseas electors as long as they have not acquired the citizenship of another country, they have to reach their respective polling booths to cast their votes in person on voting day.
•According to an EC official, as of now there are only 1.12 lakh registered overseas electors.
India must build ties with all political factions of the Maldives while helping the country meet its needs
•The Maldives government’s decision to ban the ‘India Out’ protests shows how the campaign, which started as an online protest by critics of the Ibrahim Solih administration, has grown into a polarising political issue in the Indian Ocean island nation with which India has deep ties. The campaign, which remained a fringe protest in the initial years, gained currency late last year after former President Abdulla Yameen took it over. Mr. Yameen, who served two years in jail after losing power in 2018, wanted a strong political narrative to make a comeback, particularly as the country heads to its presidential election in 2023. Critics termed the Solih administration “a puppet of New Delhi”, accusing it of allowing an Indian military presence, thereby compromising the country’s sovereignty — an allegation the government has repeatedly denied. Mr. Yameen has organised several political rallies, openly attacking the government’s ties with India. When Mr. Yameen was in power, he was largely seen as a friend of China. His government’s ultimatum to India to withdraw two of its helicopters from two atolls had triggered tensions. But relations between the two countries improved remarkably after Mr. Solih’s Maldivian Democratic Party (MDP) came to power in 2018.
•President Solih adopted an ‘India first’ foreign policy. In the past four years, India has emerged as the Maldives’s main security and economic partner, committing $1.4 billion towards its ‘socio-economic development needs’. In February 2021, it signed the Uthuru Thila Falhu (UTH) harbour development deal with Male to develop the National Defence Force Coast Guard Harbour. The Yameen camp stepped up its attack on the government after this deal. India has historically played an important role in the Maldives as a friendly big neighbour. But China’s rise in the Indian Ocean region has raised the strategic profile of this small, import-dependent island-nation of 5,50,000 people, where both countries vied for influence. Now, while Mr. Yameen is trying to regain his lost support by shoring up Maldivian nationalism and anti-India sentiments, the MDP is trying to counter it with another nationalist narrative. It argues that ties with India, the closest big neighbour of the Maldives, is important for the country’s security, including food security. While these two narratives would clash in the coming election, India, being the centre of the political wrangling, would find itself in a difficult situation. Victory is not guaranteed for the MDP, which faces anti-incumbency problems and differences between Mr. Solih and the powerful former President Mohamed Nasheed. If it loses, India risks losing the influence it has built over the last few years. The challenge before India is to build closer ties with all political factions of the Maldives while helping the country meet its economic and security requirements.
📰 Art museums and the craft of democracy
The current regime must check whether its Raisina Hill project meets the obligation of promoting democratic principles
•Inaugurating the Pradhan Mantri Sangrahalaya on the grounds of Teen Murti House in New Delhi on April 14, Prime Minister Narendra Modi declared that the new museum would help youth value the expansion of constitutional government since Independence. However, on this occasion, he did not offer an update on ongoing efforts to convert the North and South Block buildings which flank Rashtrapati Bhavan and currently house the Prime Minister’s Office and the Ministries of Home Affairs, Defence, Finance, and External Affairs into India’s largest museum.
Projected narrative
•The last communiqué was issued five months ago. It stated that the new museum on Raisina Hill will open by 2026 and will “vividly demonstrate different aspects of India or Bharat that always existed in a cultural and spiritual sense even if historical exigencies have prevented the attainment of nationhood”. Gauging from museum projects that the current administration has financed, it is plausible that this narrative will be primarily conveyed through augmented reality experiences, computerised kinetic sculptures, holograms, and smartphone applications. The current National Museum on Janpath will be dismantled and most of its collections shifted to a storage facility. It is important that the new museum is not haunted by the spectres of a colonial past and is able to meet a basic obligation — the promotion of democratic principles.
•Large art museums emerged in Europe in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries alongside the rise of nations, colonial empires, and industrialisation. Consider the case of the Louvre Museum in Paris. Among the world’s largest and most-visited museums today, it was founded during the French Revolution as rebels forced open vast collections of painting and statuary held privately until then by France’s absolute monarchs to Parisians. For the next 150 years, the Louvre inspired a new national consciousness by using its palatial halls to showcase the aesthetic, social, and scientific achievements of the French people. Its exhibitions compared these with the ‘slow progress’ of other civilisations. In time, this model spread to other emergent countries to empower their publics. After decolonisation, museums along western lines were built in newly independent countries to bolster their national narratives.
•Thus, the current regime’s plan to showcase a bold new India by developing a sprawling museum on Raisina Hill, perhaps largely bereft of historical artifacts, is a paradoxical return to an older era where the primary purpose of a museum was to nurture patriotism and showcase triumph. In the tumultuous times that we live in, is it possible to imagine that the new museum will acknowledge India’s continuing diversity including its many conflicts, view cultural heritage as a process requiring museum goers to actively engage with a past that is both inspiring and despairing, and serve as a space to promote democracy?
Usher in transparency
•One strategy that the new museum may adopt to aspire toward these goals is to display the entire collection of the National Museum. Or, at least as much of the collection as can be safely displayed — ensuring that irreplicable antiquities are not subjected to excess heat, cold drafts, humidity, and harsh light. This is a challenging task. If it is executed carefully, then it can allow the institution to begin dismantling hierarchies that have privileged certain objects as masterpieces and relegated others as lesser works and copies. Such a strategy can also establish that the meanings of artworks are not fixed but change at different moments of their lives, including the contexts in which they are exhibited. It may also promote accountability and make the difficult work of administering a premier cultural institution transparent to a broad public. Alongside, the new museum may emulate Charles Correa’s commitment to create accessible contrapuntal spaces in public buildings. Auditoria, courtyards, concert halls, and cafes can foster quietude and spark conversation.
•Alternatively, by forming alliances with other institutions and showcasing the connected history of India and the world, the new museum may aspire to help visitors become better informed citizens. One gallery might exhibit seals to highlight contacts among and between ancient civilisations of Mesopotamia and the Indus Valley. Rhytons and statuary explaining entanglements between Achaemenid Persepolis and Mauryan Pataliputra can be placed in a second gallery. A third gallery can house coins and portraits to exhibit how the Kushans who ruled over Mathura in the early centuries CE maintained ties with their nomadic clansmen in the Central Asian steppe. A fourth group of rooms can bring together textiles and wood carvings to narrate histories of traders moving between east Africa and Gujarat. A fifth gallery might showcase microarchitectural ensembles and leather puppets to reconstruct flows across the Bay of Bengal, and along pathways extending in an arc from the Deccan to the Arakan. A sixth suite of rooms might focus on albums of calligraphy and miniature painting to unravel forces that cleaved peoples of the Mughal, Safavid and Ottoman Empires. And so on.
Laboratory for the future
•A third strategy would be to think of the new museum as a laboratory ̥for the future, that is, as a sustainable and multi-purpose building dedicated to quarrying new histories and fostering fresh deliberations. In it, one suite of galleries featuring diverse everyday artifacts — sickles, pitchers, and phulkaris — may provoke a reflection of how a mosaic of villages and their farmlands were acquired by colonial authorities to build Lutyens’ Delhi. Another set of galleries exhibiting artifacts pointing to how minorities have attempted to negotiate their positions vis-à-vis majoritarian regimes may stimulate artists, researchers, and young people to gather, question assumptions, and develop new works.
•These are only a few tactics. Certainly, they need to be refined or even rejected. However, it is clear that the question of how the North and South Block buildings will be quickly remodelled into the country’s largest museum that aspires to tell the story of India is too significant to assign to a few individuals.
Essential ponderings
•Contemporary artists in collaboration with forward-looking museums in the country are already debating this question. Jitish Kallat’s minuscule painted-clay models of street violence safely housed in British-era vitrines in the Mumbai’s Bhau Daji Lad Museum draw attention to historical narratives sanctified in public institutions and those that remain untold. Watercolours, oils, and mixed media works in Atul Dodiya’s 7000 Museums series exhibited in the same museum, give form to what a host of cultural institutions across India could look like and types of artifacts they may house. Following Kallat and Dodiya, let us contemplate and articulate what the past means to us and ask what of the past is worth saving and why. In the classroom, on the street, on the stage and screen. Such ponderings will also help us imagine how we might eventually gather responsibly at the new art museum on Raisina Hill to continue to craft a culture of democracy.
📰 Fishing for workable solutions in the Palk Bay
A pragmatic approach is the first of options available to resolve the festering India-Sri Lanka fisheries issue
•After a gap of 15 months, the India-Sri Lanka Joint Working Group (JWG) on fisheries held its much-awaited deliberations (in virtual format) on March 25. But between the two meetings of the JWG, a number of events — some of them unfortunate — have occurred in the Palk Bay region that encompasses India’s Tamil Nadu and Sri Lanka’s Northern Province. For instance, seven fishermen — five from Tamil Nadu and two from Sri Lanka — have died in “mid-sea clashes”. Just as sections of fishermen from the Palk Bay bordering districts of Tamil Nadu continue to transgress the International Maritime Boundary Line (IMBL), cases of many of them getting arrested and their boats being impounded by the Sri Lankan authorities continue. What has precipitated matters is that in early February, the impounded boats, around 140 in number, were auctioned despite a bilateral understanding on the matter.
Trawling as an issue
•Apart from poaching in the territorial waters of Sri Lanka, the use of mechanised bottom trawlers is another issue that has become a bone of contention between the fishermen of the two countries; the dispute is not just between the two states. This method of fishing, which was once promoted by the authorities in India, is now seen as being extremely adverse to the marine ecology, and has been acknowledged so by India. The actions of the Tamil Nadu fishermen adversely affect their counterparts in the Northern Province who are also struggling to come to terms with life after the civil war. The ongoing economic crisis in the island nation has only worsened their plight.
•At the same time, the fishermen of Tamil Nadu experience a genuine problem — the lack of fishing areas consequent to the demarcation of the IMBL in June 1974. If they confine themselves to Indian waters, they find the area available for fishing full of rocks and coral reefs besides being shallow. The distance between Dhanushkodi (Tamil Nadu) and the IMBL is nine nautical miles (NM) while the maximum distance — Devipattinam and the IMBL — is 34 NM. Under the Tamil Nadu Marine Fishing Regulation Act 1983, mechanised fishing boats can fish only beyond 3 NM from the coast. This explains the trend of the fishermen having to cross the IMBL frequently. Another factor is that the people of the two countries in general and fisherfolk in particular have common threads of language, culture and religion, all of which can be used purposefully to resolve any dispute.
•It is because of this factor as well as the plight of the fishermen of the Northern Province that the two governments have been repeatedly saying that the whole problem has to be looked at from humanitarian and livelihood angles.
Fisher-level talks
•With the problem having been discussed by the JWG, and earlier during the visit of India’s External Affairs Minister S. Jaishankar to Sri Lanka, in March as well, it is time steps are taken to take the process forward. The present situation, which is otherwise very stressful for Sri Lanka in view of the economic crisis, can be utilised to bring the fishermen of the two countries to the negotiating table. This is because the Indian government’s two-month ban on fishing on the east coast of the country began on April 15. It is up to Sri Lanka now to ensure that the talks take place as the Indian side is keen on resuming fisherfolk-level deliberations. As several substantive issues were discussed threadbare in the previous rounds of such meetings — the last one was in New Delhi in November 2016 — only some fine-tuning of the respective positions had to be done.
•While Indian fishermen can present a road map for their transition to deep sea fishing or alternative methods of fishing, the Sri Lankan side has to take a pragmatic view that the transition cannot happen abruptly. To elicit a favourable response from the fishermen of the Northern Province, the Tamil Nadu fishermen have to commit themselves to a short and swift transition for which the governments in India ( Central and State) have to come forward to perform the role of guarantors. Also, whenever there is a genuine complaint about Tamil Nadu fishermen having damaged the properties of the Northern Province’s fishermen, the Indian government can compensate this through the proper channels of Sri Lanka.
Deep sea fishing
•In the meantime, India will have to modify its scheme on deep sea fishing to accommodate the concerns of its fishermen, especially those from Ramanathapuram district, so that they take to deep sea fishing without any reservation. The revised scheme has to absorb satisfactorily not only the unit cost of long liners but also the running cost. Also, there is a compelling need for the Central and State governments to implement in Tamil Nadu the Pradhan Mantri Matsya Sampada Yojana in a proactive manner. The scheme, which was flagged off two years ago, covers alternative livelihood measures too including seaweed cultivation, open sea cage cultivation, and sea/ocean ranching.
•During Mr. Jaishankar’s visit, India had signed a memorandum of understanding with Sri Lanka for the development of fisheries harbours. This can be modified to include a scheme for deep sea fishing to the fishermen of the North. It is a welcome development that the JWG has agreed to have joint research on fisheries, which should be commissioned at the earliest. Such a study should cover the extent of the adverse impact of bottom trawling in the Palk Bay region.
•Simultaneously, the two countries should explore the possibility of establishing a permanent multi-stakeholder institutional mechanism to regulate fishing activity in the region. At the same time, Sri Lanka should take a lenient view of the situation and refrain from adopting a rigid and narrow legal view of matters concerning the release of 16 fishermen or impounded fishing boats (around 90 in number). Any delay in this will only increase the bitterness between the two countries at a time when the economic crisis of Sri Lanka is generating empathy in India. What everyone needs to remember is that the fisheries dispute is not an insurmountable problem. A number of options are available to make the Palk Bay not only free of troubles but also a model for collaborative endeavours in fishing.
