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The Election Commission of India allotted the name ‘Shiv Sena’ and the party’s bow and arrow symbol to the Eknath Shinde faction, in effect recognising it as the original party founded by Balasaheb Thackeray.
The commission said that it had based its decision on a “test on majority” as the group of MLAs supporting the Shinde faction had got nearly 76% of the total votes polled by the 55 winning Shiv Sena candidates in the 2019 Maharashtra Assembly election, while the Uddhav Thackeray faction secured only 23.5% votes.
Editorial
Social security and the story of two Budgets (Page no. 6)
(GS Paper 2, Welfare Schemes)
Presenting the Union Budget 2023-24 on February 1, the Finance Minister, Nirmala Sitharaman, asserted that ‘since 2014, the central government has ensured a better quality of life, and a life of dignity’ for all its citizens.
But Budget figures help distinguish rhetoric from the truth. This year, severe cuts in various social security and welfare schemes such as food security and the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA), have undermined the already precarious lives of large numbers of poor people in India.
A segment that has been sidelined is the crores of the elderly and other social security pensioners who are being callously pushed towards destitution. Since 2007, social security pensions being given by the central government under the centrally sponsored National Social Assistance Programme (NSAP), have remained frozen at an appallingly low sum of ₹200 for the elderly and ₹300 per month for widows and persons with disabilities.
In addition, only those who appear on the obsolete and discredited Below Poverty Line (BPL) lists prepared as in Census 2001 are given pensions.
As a result, the budget for the NSAP has remained constant, at approximately ₹9,000 crore, and steadily reducing in real terms.
This year, the NSAP saw a reduction of ₹16 crore, decreasing from ₹9,652.31 crore in FY2022-23 (BE) to ₹9,636.32 crore for FY 2023-24 (BE), making a mockery of a so-called model of “inclusive growth”.
Nine days after the Union Budget, on February 10, the Rajasthan Chief Minister, Ashok Gehlot, presented the Rajasthan Budget, which was a lesson in contrasts.
Brushing aside the Bharatiya Janata Party’s criticism of the rights-based approach to development, Mr. Gehlot announced a landmark, and pioneering, Minimum Income Guarantee and Pension law to be enacted in the State, providing 125 days of work through the rural or urban employment guarantee, and a minimum social security pension of ₹1,000 per month, with an automatic increase of 15% per annum.
The theology behind the Taliban’s misogyny (Page no. 6)
(GS Paper 2, International Relations)
After the United States completed its withdrawal from Afghanistan in August 2021, one of the assurances the triumphalist Taliban gave to the world was that they would respect women’s rights.
For a short period, women were allowed to return to work and school on the condition that they wore Islamic headscarves and agreed to gender segregation. But it was just a charade.
The dehumanisation of Afghan women in all its brazenness began in March 2022 when girls’ high schools were shut down on the day they reopened.
Two months later, the supreme leader, HaibatullahAkhunzada, warned that a woman’s father or closest male relative would be imprisoned or fired from government service if she did not cover her face in public.
In November 2022, women were banned from visiting parks and gymnasiums. The very next month, 27 Afghans, including women, were flogged in public for offences ranging from sodomy, deception, forgery and debauchery; the first public execution by the Taliban was carried out the same month.
The most unconscionable decision, however, was in the same month, on December 20 when women were completely banned from accessing any educational institution, ironically, in the name of “women’s honour”.
The so-called Minister for Higher Education Neda Mohammad Nadeem, justified this on the grounds that girls were opting to study “areas that go against Islam and Afghan honour” such as agriculture and engineering.
A natural response to this vicious misogyny would be to condemn or dismiss it as being a part of the incorrigibly violent credo of the Taliban — which it is without a doubt.
But insofar as prejudice against women is concerned, the Taliban are not unique. Their patriarchy is informed by the ideological conservatism of post-Prophetic schools of Muslim thought.
For instance, the Deobandi maulvi, Ashraf Ali Thanvi (1863-1943), had set the tone for the sexism of the Talibani kind when he warned that girls should not be taught geography because it would only help them run away from home by teaching them the location of and routes to different towns (Al Tableegh).
Today, Thanvi’s alma mater, the Darul Uloom Deoband, believes that “the co-education system of colleges and universities is having a number of evils” and therefore, “undoubtedly unlawful”.
News
India-Japan Army exercise gets under way in Shiga (Page no. 8)
(GS Paper 3, Defence)
The fourth edition of India-Japan bilateral Army exercise ‘Dharma Guardian’ began at Camp Imazu in Shiga province, Japan on Friday and will go on till March 2.
Separately, two Japanese Navy ships Uraga and Awaji made port call in Kochi from February 14 to 16. Last month, the two Air Forces had held the maiden air exercise ‘Veer Guardian’.
“Notably, in the series of military training exercises undertaken by India with various countries, ‘Exercise Dharma Guardian’, an annual training event with Japan, is crucial and significant in terms of security challenges faced by both nations in the backdrop of current global situation,” the Army said in a statement.
The scope of this exercise covers platoon-level joint training on operations in jungle and semi-urban/urban terrain.
Over 1,000 pangolins poached and trafficked in India in past five years (Page no. 10)
(GS Paper 3, Species in News)
On the eve of World Pangolin Day observed on February 18, a not-for-profit organisation working on the international trade of animals and plants, has brought out a fact sheet reporting that 1,203 pangolins have been found in illegal wildlife trade in India from 2018 to 2022.
Up to 24 States and one Union Territory saw seizures of pangolins and their derivates. Odisha reported the maximum number of incidents, with 154 pangolins in 74 seizures. It was followed by Maharashtra with 135 pangolins in 47 seizure incidents.
The publication, titled ‘India’s Pangolins Buried in Illegal Wildlife Trade’, has tracked 342 total incidents during this time period.
Merwyn Fernandes, coordinator of TRAFFIC’s India office, said in the organisation’s fact sheet that up to 50% of seizures included live pangolins and 40% involved pangolin scales.
India reports a significant number of pangolin trafficking incidents reflected by seizures across the country. They are poached mainly for international markets in China and southeast Asia for their scales, which are used as an ingredient in traditional medicines.
India is home to two species: the Indian Pangolin, found across the subcontinent; and the Chinese Pangolin, found across a larger area in south Asia. Bihar, West Bengal, and Assam see the presence of both.
Both species are included under India’s Schedule I of the Wildlife Protection Act that could result in a jail term for those hunting animals listed here.
An analysis of illegal pangolin trade in India by TRAFFIC in 2018 reported poaching of 6,000 pangolins between 2009 and 2017.
MHA designates two outfits as terrorist organisations (Page no. 10)
(GS Paper 3, Internal Security)
The Ministry of Home Affairs on Friday designated the Khalistan Tiger Force and the Jammu and Kashmir Ghaznavi Force as terrorist organisations under the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act, 1967.
A Punjab resident, Harwinder Singh Sandhu alias Rinda, who is presently based in Pakistan’s Lahore, was also designated as an “individual terrorist” under the anti-terror law.
The Ministry’s notification said that the Jammu and Kashmir Ghaznavi Force (JKGF) surfaced in the year 2020 as a terrorist outfit.
It draws its cadre from various proscribed terrorist organisations, such as the Lashker-E-Taiba, Jaish-E-Mohammed, Tehreek-ul-Mujahideen and Harkat-ul-Jehad-E-Islami, and is involved in infiltration bids, narcotics and weapon smuggling, and carrying out terror attacks in Jammu and Kashmir.
The Khalistan Tiger Force (KTF) came into existence in 2011 as an offshoot of the Babbar Khalsa International (BKI), a banned terrorist organisation, the notification said.
It added that the KTF was a militant outfit that aimed to revive terrorism in Punjab with a view to achieving its agenda of forming a separate State — Khalistan — and thus challenged the territorial integrity, unity, national security and sovereignty of India.
The Ministry said that Harwinder Singh Sandhu, a resident of Sarhali village in Punjab’s Tarn Taran district, is associated with the BKI and is presently based in Lahore, Pakistan under the patronage of cross border agencies.