📰 India’s designation by the USCIRF
What is the USCIRF? Which other countries have been labelled as a ‘Country of particular Concern’?
•The story so far: In its 2022 Annual report, the United States Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF) has recommended that India be designated a ‘Country of Particular Concern’ (CPC), i.e., the category of governments performing most poorly on religious freedom criteria. It has also called for “targeted sanctions” on individuals and entities responsible for severe violations of religious freedom by freezing those individuals’ or entities’ assets and/or barring their entry” into the U.S.
What is the USCIRF and how is it constituted?
•The USCIRF is an independent, bipartisan body created by the International Religious Freedom Act, 1998 (IRFA) with a mandate to monitor religious freedom violations globally and make policy recommendations to the President, the Secretary of State, and the Congress. It is a congressionally created entity and not an NGO or advocacy organisation. It is led by nine part-time commissioners appointed by the President and the leadership of both political parties in the House and the Senate.
•According to the IRFA, commissioners are “selected among distinguished individuals noted for their knowledge and experience in fields relevant to the issue of international religious freedom, including foreign affairs, direct experience abroad, human rights, and international law.”
What does a ‘Country of Particular Concern’ (CPC) designation mean?
•IRFA requires the USCIRF to annually identify countries that merit a CPC designation. As per IRFA, CPCs are countries whose governments either engage in or tolerate “particularly severe violations” of religious freedom, which are defined as “systematic, ongoing, egregious violations of the internationally recognized right to freedom of religion”.
•The other designation, for less serious violations, is Special Watch List (SWL)
Which other countries have been designated as CPCs?
•For 2022, based on religious freedom conditions in 2021, a total of 15 countries have been recommended for the CPC designation. They include India, Pakistan, Burma, China, Eritrea, Iran, North Korea, Pakistan, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Tajikistan, Afghanistan, Nigeria, Syria and Vietnam. Countries recommended for a SWL designation include Algeria, Cuba, Nicaragua, Azerbaijan, Central African Republic, Egypt, Indonesia, Iraq, Kazakhstan, Malaysia, Turkey, and Uzbekistan.
Why does USCIRF want India to be designated as a CPC?
•The USCIRF, in its annual report, states that in 2021, “religious freedom conditions in India significantly worsened.”
•Noting that the “Indian government escalated its promotion and enforcement of policies —including those promoting a Hindu-nationalist agenda — that negatively affect Muslims, Christians, Sikhs, Dalits, and other religious minorities,” the report observed that “the government continued to systemise its ideological vision of a Hindu state at both the national and State levels through the use of both existing and new laws and structural changes hostile to the country’s religious minorities.”
•It highlighted the use of the Unlawful Activities Prevention Act (UAPA) against those documenting religious persecution and violence, detailed the creation of “hurdles against the licensure and receipt of international funding” by religious and charitable NGOs, and observed that “numerous attacks were made on religious minorities, particularly Muslims and Christians, and their neighborhoods, businesses, homes, and houses of worship”. It also criticised the spate of fresh anti-conversion legislations, noting that “national, State and local governments demonised and attacked the conversion of Hindus to Christianity or Islam.”
•Taking into account all these aspects, it concluded that India met the criteria of “systematic, ongoing, egregious” violations of religious freedom and therefore deserved a CPC designation.
Are USCIRF recommendations binding on the U.S. government?
•No, they are not. The USCIRF typically recommends more countries for a CPC label than the State Department will designate. This happens because the USCIRF is concerned solely with the state of religious freedom when it makes a recommendation, but the State Department and its Office of International Freedom (IRF), although mandated by IRFA to factor in religious freedom in the framing of foreign policy, also takes into account other diplomatic, bilateral and strategic concerns before making a decision on a CPC designation.
Is this the first time India is being designated as a CPC by the USCIRF? What has been India’s reaction?
•This is the third year in a row that India has received a CPC recommendation. India has in the past pushed back against the grading, questioning the locus standi of USCIRF. In 2020, External Affairs Minister S. Jaishankar called the Commission an “Organisation of Particular Concern.”
What is the likely impact of the USCIRF’s recommendation?
•The U.S. State Department hasn’t acted on such recommendations so far. But India may come under greater pressure this time, given its divergence from the American position on the Ukraine war and refusal to endorse U.S.-backed resolutions against Russia at the UN.
•While the USCIRF’s suggestion of targeted sanctions may be a non-starter, its other recommendation — that the “U.S. Congress should raise religious freedom issues in the U.S.-India bilateral relationship and highlight concerns through hearings, briefings, letters and congressional delegations” seems more likely to fructify.
📰 India as a democratic superpower
The country is more than capable of providing leadership that the world often needs
•As a Rhodes scholar travelling from Sydney to Oxford, way back in 1981, I didn’t feel that I could fly over nearly a billion Indians without stopping to learn, and to pay my respects. Even then, in the three months I spent back-packing here, it was obvious to me that democratic, free India was going to be one of the world’s leading countries.
•Today, with the world’s third largest economy — at least in purchasing power terms — with a vibrant free market, a booming tech sector, a population that’s eager to learn and to innovate, a gloriously rumbustious press, and an honest judiciary; with a government that’s rapidly closing the infrastructure deficit; and with an openness to the wider world, symbolised by a vast diaspora including 7,00,000 Indian-born Australians, India is no longer the emerging democratic super power that I frequently referenced as Prime Minister.
•India has emerged as a democratic superpower, more than capable of providing leadership that the world often needs and that America cannot always give. These ominous times, that would have seemed almost unthinkable just a few years back, when history had supposedly ended, are India’s chance to step up in support of free countries and free people. Because make no mistake, this newly minted “no limits” partnership, this new Beijing-Moscow axis, these dictators on the march; unless deterred, or somehow touched for the better, will end what until recently have been the best times ever.
‘War of national extermination’
•Russia’s latest war has not been provoked by anything Ukraine has done. It is Ukraine’s existence as a free and independent country that Russia’s ruler objects to. It is a war of national extermination to which no free country can be indifferent. I know this because Vladimir Putin told me himself, when I verbally shirt-fronted him after a Russian missile battery shot down MH17 in 2014, killing 38 Australians among 298 victims, insisting as he did even then, in the first phase of this invasion, that the Ukrainian government was fascist, that Ukrainians were really Russians, and that Ukraine had no right to exist as an independent country.
•He wants to correct what he sees as the greatest geo-political disaster of the last century by restoring Greater Russia. That is his dream, and it means that the Baltic states and Poland are next in the firing line, once Ukraine is pulverised into submission, war crime by war crime, atrocity by atrocity, in a war his pride cannot let him lose, and his ministers are too indoctrinated or intimidated to stop.
•And do not think that China is not watching, nursing grievances of its own over its “century of humiliation”, determined to take Taiwan, and to demonstrate that China is once more the Middle Kingdom, the world’s top country, around which all others must cluster, tremble and obey. Australia knows what a world dominated by China would look like, because of the 14 demands publicly made of us in late 2020, that we accept all Chinese investments, Chinese students, cease all criticism of China, and end our alliance with the United States.
•As a fellow member of the Quad, Australia stands with India in resisting Chinese aggression over the line of control in Ladakh. That’s what Australia has always done: stand with the victims of aggression, from Belgium in the Great War, to Poland in World War II, to the people of East Timor when they sought their independence, to the people of Iraq against Islamic State in my time as PM, and now Ukraine to which Australia was the first country to dispatch heavy armoured vehicles.
Trade as a strategy
•Russia’s attack on Ukraine has caused commodity prices to spike and disrupted vital supply lines, for food quite as much as for energy. With these dictators set on national glory, everything bends to the power of the state; and trade is just a strategy to be turned on and off like a tap. Almost unavoidably, the world will be more disrupted as countries rethink who can be relied on.
•Prime Minister Narendra Modi grasped this when he withdrew India from the China-led Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership deal. These times have turned fraught; demanding a re-think of the China-centred globalisation of the past couple of decades — notwithstanding a world that, until very recently, was more free, safer, and richer than ever before. As long as China has brutal and hegemonic ambitions, businesses in countries like mine have a patriotic duty not to be dependent on a country that could threaten us. But that’s also an opportunity for India, trustworthy trade partner, to substitute for China in fellow democracies’ supply chains requiring manufacturing at scale, quality and price.
•India’s trade minister Piyush Goyal was right when he said that the new Australia-India trade deal’s ambition just to double trade within a decade was too modest. Why shouldn’t PM Modi’s “make in India” campaign extend to all the consumer lines and the intermediate goods currently made in China?
India’s standing in the world
•Especially now that it is clearer that trade can only be free and fair if it is based on the values that democracies largely have in common. For obvious reasons, independent India sometimes kept the West at a distance. But now, 75 exemplary years on, with its democracy entrenched, there is no reason for mutual wariness, or for India to be anyone’s junior partner. If the free world is to have a leader 50 years hence, that’s likely to be India.
•As a country that earned its freedom, most honourably, largely through moral suasion and peaceful protest, through satyagraha, India would know the love and passion that is now moving millions of Ukrainians to risk everything they hold dear for that which they hold dearest of all, freedom itself.
•If there’s one country whose traditional friendship with Russia, and whose historic aloofness from power plays, and whose palpable goodwill to all might just get through to the Kremlin and to the ordinary Russians whose lives are also being blighted by this war, it is India.
•To the extent the Russian leader still has a conscience, India is uniquely placed to appeal to it, should it have a go at summoning the better angels of Russia’s nature to a new beginning; so that what’s now being torn down in spite may yet be rebuilt in spirit of generosity and goodwill.
•Why not exercise the moral leadership, of which India might be more capable than any other country, to urge Russia to give up the territory it has seized? If Russia listens, untold further bloodshed would be averted.
•Even unheeded, being the great power, most ready to put principle before calculation would only enhance India’s standing in the world.
📰 ‘Mission Antyodaya’ should not fall by the wayside
With the right momentum, the project can help transform rural India — in terms of development and social justice
•The Indian Constitution mandates local governments to prepare and implement plans for ‘economic development and social justice’ (Articles 243G and 243W). Several complementary institutions and measures such as the gram sabha to facilitate people’s participation, the District Planning committee (DPC) to prepare bottom up and spatial development plans, the State Finance Commission (SFC) to ensure vertical and horizontal equity, one-third reservation for women (in most States, now 50%), population-based representation to Scheduled Caste/Scheduled Tribe communities, and so on were introduced to promote this goal. Even so, India’s decentralisation reforms (with no parallel in federal history) have failed to take the decentralisation process forward in delivering social justice and progress in rural India.
•This article argues that given the right momentum, the ‘Mission Antyodaya’ project of the Government of India launched in 2017-18 (and cast in a convergence framework avowedly to eradicate poverty in its multiple dimensions among rural households) bears great promise to revive the objectives of these great democratic reforms. The Ministry of Panchayati Raj and the Ministry of Rural Development act as the nodal agents to take the mission forward.
•The Bharatiya Janata Party government which came to power in 2014 had several reasons to reimagine rural development. The traditional poverty line linked to the calorie-income measure, religiously pursued by the former Planning Commission with great academic support proved inane and failed to serve as a purposive policy tool.
•Moreover, the revealing statistics brought into the public domain by the SocioEconomic and Caste Census (SECC) 2011 were ‘demanding’ remedial intervention. That 90% of rural households have no salaried jobs, 53.7 million households are landless, 6.89 million female-headed households have no adult member to support, 49% suffer from multiple deprivations, 51.4% derive sustenance from manual casual labour, 23.73 million are with no room or only one room to live, and so on cannot be easily dismissed by any democratic government. Paradoxically, this happened in a country that spends more than ₹3 trillion every year for the rural poor from the Central and State Budgets and bank-credit linked self-help programmes. Indeed, the ‘Mission Antyodaya’ project was a needed intervention.
Key goal
•The main objective of ‘Mission Antyodaya’ is to ensure optimum use of resources through the convergence of various schemes that address multiple deprivations of poverty, making gram panchayat the hub of a development plan. This planning process (whose intellectual heritage is traced to the people’s plan of Kerala) is supported by an annual survey that helps to assess the various development gaps at the gram panchayat level, by collecting data regarding the 29 subjects assigned to panchayats by the Eleventh Schedule of the Constitution.
•These subjects are broken down into 112 parameters for data collection using detailed questionnaires. Also, data regarding health and nutrition, social security, good governance, water management and so on are also collected. The idea of the Ministry of Panchayati Raj to identify the gaps in basic needs at the local level, and integrating resources of various schemes, self-help groups, voluntary organisations and so on to finance them needs coordination and capacity-building of a high order. If pursued in a genuine manner, this can foster economic development and inter-jurisdictional equity. Although two major reports, one on infrastructure and service gaps and the other on a composite index, have been in the public domain, they do not seem to have attracted public discussion.
Gaps in gram panchayats
•The ‘Mission Antyodaya’ survey in 2019-20 for the first time collected data that shed light on the infrastructural gaps from 2.67 lakh gram panchayats, comprising 6.48 lakh villages with 1.03 billion population. The data set updated annually enables development planning sectorally and spatially, from the village level to the State and the country as a whole. For an insight into the gap report, we may use the State-wise break-up of the score-values. The maximum score values assigned will add up to 100 and are presented in class intervals of 10. While no State in India falls in the top score bracket of 90 to 100, 1,484 gram panchayats fall in the bottom bracket. Even in the score range of 80 to 90, 10 States and all Union Territories do not appear. The total number of gram panchayats for all the 18 States that have reported adds up only to 260, constituting only 0.10% of the total 2,67,466 gram panchayats in the country. If we consider a score range of 70-80 as a respectable attainment level, Kerala tops but accounts for only 34.69% of gram panchayats of the State, the corresponding all-India average is as low as 1.09%. Even for Gujarat which comes next to Kerala, gram panchayats in this bracket are only 11.28%.
Social justice still distant
•The composite index data, a sort of surrogate for human development, are also not encouraging. Although only 15 gram panchayats in the country fall in the bottom range below 10 scores, more than a fifth of gram panchayats in India are below the 40 range. All the gram panchayats in Kerala are above this and stand out in contrast to the rest of the States. While in the country as a whole only 7.37% have a composite index in the 70-100 bracket, Gujarat (which tops the list) has 20.5% in the range, followed by Kerala (19.77%) and Karnataka (17.68%). The gap report and the composite index show in unmistakable terms that building ‘economic development and social justice’ remains a distant goal even after 30 years of the decentralisation reforms and nearly 75 years into Independence.
•Nearly four years have passed since the former Finance Minister, Arun Jaitley, announced the Mission Project in his Budget speech of 2017-18 with the specific target “to make 50,000 gram panchayats poverty free by 2019, the 150th birth anniversary of Gandhiji”. Nothing happened but the goal posts have been moved to 2022, to coincide with the 75th anniversary of Independence, on August 15. Removing goal posts is a poor game.
Rectify these lapses
•The scope to reduce the growing rural-urban disparities is tremendous. Given the ‘saturation approach’ (100% targets on select items) of the Ministry of Panchayati Raj, the possibilities of realising universal primary health care, literacy, drinking water supply and the like are also immense. But there is no serious effort to converge resources (the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act, the National Rural Livelihood Mission, National Social Assistance Programme, Pradhan Mantri Awas Yojana, etc.) and save administrative expenses.
•Another lapse is the failure to deploy the data to India’s fiscal federalism, particularly to improve the transfer system and horizontal equity in the delivery of public goods in India at the sub-State level. Evidently the Fifteenth Finance Commission has missed it. The constitutional goal of planning and implementing economic development and social justice can be achieved only through strong policy interventions. The policy history of India has been witness to the phenomenon of announcing big projects and failing to take them to their logical consequence. ‘Mission Antyodaya’ is a striking case in recent times.
Services of urban local bodies have to be integrated with the ICCC for improving amenities for people
•Networked infrastructure in cities of the global South seems to be a chimera that everyone wants to ride. It is mostly the people, however, who occupy networks that make infrastructure work for our cities. Take, for example, the water supply distribution lines in most Indian cities. In its current form, no sensor may ever replace the “linemen” who work the valves spread across the city, often with a simple rod, to regulate the supply of water. And yet, a different logic of governing infrastructure is in the making.
•The Union Minister for Housing and Urban Affairs Hardeep Singh Puri recently announced that Integrated Command and Control Centres (ICCCs) have been established in 80 cities selected as part of the Smart Cities Mission, a Centrally Sponsored Scheme. The ICCC projects being executed may be seen as part of the “pan city” component of the mission which envisages “application of selected Smart Solutions to the existing [emphasis added] city-wide infrastructure”.
Five pillars of ICCC
•The overbearing images of a hall with giant video walls notwithstanding, an ICCC has five basic pillars: first is bandwidth; second, the sensors and edge devices which record and generate real-time data; third, various analytics which are software that draw on data captured by end devices to generate “intelligence”; fourth is data storage; fifth, the ICCC software which may be described as, in MoHUA’s words, “a system of systems” — the anchor for all other application specific components and has been described as the “brain and nervous system” of the city.
•Central to the promise of ICCC is the idea of “predictive modelling” which uses data to generate inputs on not just how the city is but also how it can be. It could tell which direction the city is growing in; it could predict future real estate hot spots; it could identify and predict all accident-prone spots in the city, and it could predict the bus routes prone to crowding. This is in sharp contrast to how things actually work on the ground: our frames of response are retrospective and we are constantly retrofitting our cities as the primary mode of transformation.
•The ICCC may be seen in sync with the functions of an urban local body (ULB) under the 74th Constitutional Amendment, towards improving services for people. Several contradictions may arise in this context.
•First, the project is being executed under the aegis of the Special Purpose Vehicles (SPVs) constituted under the Companies Act, 2013, in the selected cities. Projects of the SPV that overlap with core ULB areas have been a source of tension between the two, one that the cities are still learning to resolve. Unless the core staff of ULB working across departments such as health, town planning, water supply, etc., adopt the ICCC systems, it risks being a splintered “nerve centre”.
•One solution is to build a team in the SPV that can act as a bridge, inspire more users, and develop capacities; however, as “contract employees” they may be subject to the mercurial aspects of administration. Second, there is the risk of permanent underutilisation of the system. With poor integration with ULB services, and not just software integration but also in terms of workflows and SOPs, the functional capability may continue to be titled towards video surveillance. Even with the latter, configuration of video surveillance analytics and its application has been less than perfect and the police department operators often use the systems manually to screen the footage in the wake of an incident which defeats the purpose of ICCC.
•Third, the sizeable investments required create contradictions in some cities which are otherwise struggling for funds to upgrade their basic infrastructure and services. One of the key questions to gauge the success of ICCC in future, maybe to ask, if cities are choosing to build and sustain these systems out of their own revenue or untied devolution funds. If not, ICCCs may struggle to outlive the exhaustion of mission grants. And finally, despite the efforts to keep procurement vendor-agnostic, some segments of ICCC are still dominated by select industry players who may dictate terms to the city or engage in arm-twisting for payments.
‘War rooms’
•The ICCCs in some cities served as a “war room” during the COVID-19 pandemic, and its application is cited as a success. Despite its usefulness, the success of such “war rooms” lay in the fact that the municipal, district and the police administration were bound together by the compulsions of the pandemic, which may not be normally forthcoming. Unless the services of the ULB and the people taking them to the residents of a city are “integrated” into ICCCs, they may turn out to be as the images show: a hall with giant video walls, a rather expensive one.
