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An opinion article, last month, in one of India’s main English dailies, summed up the emerging prospects succinctly: ‘A parliamentary majority is being used as a bulldozer to fashion an autocracy, the new India version of a presidential form of governance.
The replacement, at the forthcoming inaugural (of the new Parliament building), of the real president of the Indian republic by the prime minister may symbolise more than the ego of an individual’.
I had, some years ago, read and put away Levitsky and Ziblatt’s book on the fate of democracies, happy in the thought that India did not find a mention in it. Little had I visualised a time when dexterous devices would be used in quest of the desired objective.
Our parliamentary system, crafted with some care, was sought to achieve law-making; accountability of the executive; approval of taxation proposals and control of national finances, and discussion of matters of public interest and concern.
India, it said, ‘shall be a Union of States’ and the provisions of Part XI of the Constitution would govern the relations between the Union and the States.
B.R. Ambedkar had emphasised that the eventual objective of social democracy is a trinity of liberty, equality and fraternity, best achieved through the effective functioning of the legislature, the executive and the judiciary.
These foundational principles were spelt out in the Preamble of the Constitution and were reinforced by the Supreme Court of India in the Basic Structure doctrine.
A global order as technology’s much needed pole star (Page no. 8)
(GS Paper 3, Science and Technology)
Ever since the Dot-com bubble burst in 2000, the rapid scale and pace of development of technology have, radically and disruptively transformed our societies and daily lives.
While there is no denying that this has made life easier, it has also thrown up complex challenges that call for a revisit of some fundamental notions in polity and governance.
First, as defined by political theorists, a nation-state is a territorially-bounded sovereign polity. However, this fundamental notion of a nation-state of a geographical unit in which citizens live is undergoing a massive change because of technology.
While geographical boundaries are still essential to be safeguarded against physical aggression/invasion, there are now several externalities occurring across the borders of nation-states, i.e. cyber-attacks, which have a ripple effect on the physical boundaries to challenge their socio-economic and political existence.
The advent of Web3, massive peer-to-peer networks and blockchains has allowed actors, both state and non-state, to influence areas such as trade, commerce, health and education even while remaining outside of financial and judicial scope.
Second, geography-based rules are no longer easily enforceable simply because of the declining significance of conventional geographical borders in the era of high technology.
Now, any form of “virtual activity” is not confined to the realms of the borders of a country; data travel on the chain of the world wide web and spread across the world at speed hitherto unimaginable.
More importantly, when such activities fall foul of the laws of a particular geographically-determined nation-state, it is extremely difficult in the absence of a globally-accepted norm, to enforce the law in that particular geography and book the recalcitrant actors under the laws of the nation-state.
It is difficult to collect incontrovertible evidence without cooperation from other geographies. So, when the national sovereignty of countries is challenged by activities beyond their physical boundaries, their existing constitutionally set-up institutions comprising the executive, legislature and judiciary will prove inadequate in tackling them.
Opinion
Seeing India’s energy transition through its States (Page no. 9)
(GS Paper 3, Environment)
In the upcoming G20 forum, India is planning to propose a multiple energy pathways approach to accommodate the diverse contexts and development trajectories of countries.
The diversity of India’s States, which necessitates multiple pathways, will determine its own domestic energy transition. India’s global climate pledges — 50% non-fossil electricity generation capacity by 2030 and net-zero emissions by 2070 — are backed by domestic energy targets at the national level.
States are critical actors in India’s energy transition as there is a multi-tier governance of energy production and usage. An effective transition will require bridging the ambitions and implementation gaps between the Centre and the States. Simultaneously, national ambitions need to factor the varying incentive structures, processes, and institutional capacities at the State level.
India’s achievements on its 2022 target for 175 GW renewable energy offer some insights into the complexities. While it achieved a significant portion of the target, only Gujarat, Karnataka, and Rajasthan met their individual targets.
Moreover, about 80% of the current renewable energy capacity is confined to Six states in the west and south of India.
In a federal setting, States matter for four functions critical to energy transition. First, States as spheres of implementation are critical to the realisation of national targets.
While the Centre may set goals, and use carrots and sticks to help achieve them, the realisation of these goals often depends on how they are aligned with State priorities and capabilities.
Second, the legacy issues in the electricity sector, such as high losses, unreliable supply and service quality, if left addressed, could be exacerbated by the transition.
These are embedded in the State political economy and must be addressed at the State level. Third, States as laboratories of policy innovations have been instrumental to India’s energy transition.
For example, early initiatives by Gujarat and Rajasthan on solar, and Maharashtra and Tamil Nadu on wind energy technologies, have contributed significantly to renewable energy uptake at the national level.
Explainer
Why is there trouble in Kosovo again? (Page no. 11)
(GS Paper 2, International Relation)
In the aftermath of one of the worst escalation of tensions between Kosovo and Serbia in at least a decade, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) last week sent 700 more of its peacekeeping troops to Kosovo.
Clashes broke out on May 29 between Serbs protesting in North Kosovo and the NATO-led Kosovo Force (KFor), leaving about 30 NATO soldiers and 50 Serbs injured. Since then, the Presidents of Serbia and Kosovo have met once on June 1 under pressure from the European Union (EU) in the presence of French and German leaders. However, a resolution to the long-standing conflict remains uncertain.
Both Kosovo and Serbia lie in the Balkans, a region of Europe made up of countries that were once a part of the erstwhile Republic of Yugoslavia.
Kosovo, a former province of Serbia, unilaterally declared Independence in 2008 and is recognised as a country by about 100 nations including the U.S. and a number of EU-member countries.
Serbia, however, does not recognise Kosovo’s sovereignty and continues to consider it as a part of itself despite having no administrative control over it. Serbia sees historic significance in Kosovo.
The Serbian Empire had gained control of Kosovo in the 12th century, and the latter went on to become the heart of the kingdom with several Serb Orthodox Christian churches and monasteries of significance being built in Kosovo.
Serbia lost Kosovo for 500 years to the Ottoman Empire in the 1389 Battle of Kosovo. During the Ottoman Rule, the ethnic and religious balance shifted in Kosovo, leading it to become a majority ethnic Albanian region with Muslims.
After five centuries of Ottoman rule, Kosovo became part of Serbia in the early 20th century and post the Second World War, it was eventually made a province (with autonomy) of Serbia, which was then one of the six republics of Yugoslavia.
Serbia considered this the rightful return of Kosovo, but the ethnic Albanians, who currently make up 90% of Kosovo’s population considered it unfair. In the 1980s, Kosovo Albanians increasingly mobilised and sought separation from Serbia.
In 1989, Serbia’s autocratic leader Slobodan Milošević leveraged Serbian nationalism to consolidate power and stripped Kosovo of its autonomy.
Text
Deconstruction theory: how it challenges the text and systems of meaning-making (Page no. 11)
(GS Paper 2, Governance)
The common sense understanding of language is that it consists of words (written signs and phonemes), which carry specific meanings, and rules for combining those words into sentences.
We believe that any use of language — a speech or a piece of writing — refers to ‘something’ in the ‘real world’ out there. This ‘something’ is typically what we consider as the ‘meaning’ of a given instance of speech or writing.
This assumption of a text’s meaning being stable, along with the necessary use of binaries (black/white, nature/culture, male/female, etc) underpins the Western philosophical tradition of reason, logic, ethics, and values that together constitute modernity.
This tradition has been challenged by philosophers such as Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) and Martin Heidegger (1889-1976), who questioned categories such as ‘knowledge’, ‘truth’ and ‘identity’.
Algeria-born French philosopher Jacques Derrida (1930-2004) carried this critique to its furthest end with his theory of ‘deconstruction’. In the words of the famous American literary critic M.H.
Abrams, deconstruction is “a theory and practice of reading which questions and claims to ‘subvert’ or ‘undermine’ the assumption that the system of language provides grounds that are adequate to establish the boundaries, the coherence or unity, and the determinate meanings of a literary text.”
Derrida never explains in a straight forward fashion what deconstruction is and how it is done. His books are complex and tough to read, and deliberately so. Rather than expound his theory in a linear fashion, his preferred mode of explication was via practice — through a close reading of canonical Western texts or literary works.
World
Frontline dam blown up in Kherson; Russia, Ukraine blame each other (Page no. 15)
(GS Paper 2, International Relation)
The wall of a major dam in southern Ukraine collapsed, triggering floods, endangering Europe’s largest nuclear power plant and threatening drinking water supplies as both sides in the war scrambled to evacuate residents and blamed each other for the destruction.
Ukraine accused Russian forces of blowing up the Kakhovka dam and hydroelectric power station on the Dnipro river in an area that Moscow controls, while Russian officials blamed Ukrainian bombardment in the contested area. It was not possible to verify the claims.
The potentially far-reaching environmental and social consequences of the disaster quickly became clear as homes, streets and businesses flooded downstream and emergency crews began evacuations; officials raced to check cooling systems at the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant; and authorities expressed concern about supplies of drinking water to the south in Crimea, which Russia illegally annexed in 2014.
Both Russian and Ukrainian authorities brought in trains and buses for residents. About 22,000 people live in areas at risk of flooding in Russian-controlled areas, while 16,000 live in the most critical zone in Ukrainian-held territory, according to official tallies. Neither side reported any deaths or injuries.
The dam break added a stunning new dimension to Russia’s war in Ukraine, now in its 16th month. A widely anticipated Ukrainian counter offensive seen to be under way along more than 1,000 km of the front line in the east and south.
It was not immediately clear whether either side benefits from the damage to the dam, since both Russian-controlled and Ukrainian-held lands are at risk.
The damage could also hinder Ukraine’s counteroffensive in the south and distract its government, while Russia depends on the dam to supply water to Crimea.
China, Russia conducts air patrol over Sea of Japan, East China Sea (Page no. 15)
(GS Paper 2, International Relation)
China and Russia conducted joint air force patrols over the Sea of Japan and the East China Sea, as South Korea said it had deployed fighter jets in response to warplanes near its airspace.
Beijing and Moscow “staged the sixth joint aerial patrol in accordance with an annual military cooperation plan between China and Russia”.
The statement gave no further details of the manoeuvres, which took place over waters bordering Japan, the Korean peninsula and Taiwan.
South Korea said four Russian and four Chinese military aircraft had entered its air defence identification zone (ADIZ) around lunchtime, prompting it to scramble fighter planes.
An ADIZ is an area wider than a country’s airspace in which it tries to control aircraft for security reasons, but the concept is not defined in any international treaty.
The South Korean military identified the Chinese and Russian jets before their entry into the air identification zone. We deployed air force fighters to conduct tactical steps in preparation in case of an emergency. The eight foreign jets did not violate Seoul’s airspace.
The incident comes after the Defence Ministers of South Korea, Japan and the U.S. on Saturday agreed to set up real-time data sharing on North Korean missile launches by the end of the year.
Unfazed by sanctions, Iran unveils new ‘hypersonic missile’ that can cover 1,400 km (Page no. 15)
(GS Paper 2, International Relation)
Iran claimed that it had created a hypersonic missile capable of travelling at 15 times the speed of sound, adding a new weapon to its arsenal as tensions remain high with the United States over it nuclear programme.
The new missile — called ‘Fattah,’ or ‘Conqueror’ in Farsi — was unveiled even as Iran said it would reopen its diplomatic posts on Tuesday in Saudi Arabia after reaching a détente with Riyadh following years of conflict.
Today we feel that the deterrent power has been formed,” Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi said at the event. This power is an anchor of lasting security and peace for the regional countries.
Gen. Amir Ali Hajizadeh, the head of the paramilitary Revolutionary Guard’s aerospace programme, unveiled what appeared to be a model of the missile. Mr. Hajizadeh claimed the missile had a range of up to 1,400 km.
That claim, however, depends on how maneuverable the missile is. Ballistic missiles fly on a trajectory in which anti-missile systems like the Patriot can anticipate their path and intercept them.