Whatsapp 93125-11015 For Details
Governor Arif Mohammed Khan opened the next battlefront against the State government by threatening to remove Ministers from their posts if they continued to lower the dignity of his office.
In an official tweet, Mr. Khan said: “The CM and Council of Ministers have every right to advise the governor. But statements of individual ministers that lower the dignity of the governor’s office can invite action including withdrawal of pleasure”.
Higher Education Minister R. Bindu’s remark on Mr. Khan’s refusal to sign the University Laws (Amendment) Bill, 2022 into law seemed to have provoked Raj Bhavan.
Dr.Bindu suggested Mr. Khan return the Bill for legislative review instead of withholding assent indefinitely.
The tweet sparked protests from ruling and Opposition party leaders who accused Mr. Khan of overstepping constitutional limits.The BJP emerged as the sole voice of support for the Governor.
The CPI(M) Polit Bureau said the tweet exposed Mr. Khan’s political bias and hostility toward the LDF government. Mr. Khan’s conduct ill-behoved the governor’s constitutional stature. The Constitution did not vest Governors with dictatorial powers. Kerala Raj Bhavan has challenged the very foundation of Indian democracy,” it said.
CPI(M) State secretary M.V. Govindan said Mr. Khan’s tweet indicated brazen ignorance of the Constitution and principles of Parliamentary democracy.
He said Governors were bound by the advice of Chief Minister in matters relating to appointment and dismissal of Ministers.
States
Principles of CAA can apply to Lankan Hindu Tamils, says HC judge (Page no. 4)
(GS Paper 2, Government Policies and Interventions)
One can take judicial notice of the fact that the Hindu Tamils of Sri Lanka were the primary victims of the racial strife,” said Justice G.R. Swaminathan of the Madurai Bench of the Madras High Court while observing that the principles of the recent amendment to the Citizenship Act (CAA) was equally applicable to them.
Parliament has recently amended the Citizenship Act. The persecuted minorities from the immediate neighbouring countries, such as Pakistan, Afghanistan and Bangladesh, now have an opportunity to get Indian citizenship.
Though Sri Lanka does not fall within the said amendment, the very same principle is equally applicable. One can take judicial notice of the fact that the Hindu Tamils of Sri Lanka were the primary victims of the racial strife.
The court was hearing a petition filed by S. Abirami, born in India to Sri Lankan Tamil refugees, and now staying in Tiruchi seeking Indian citizenship. She sought a direction from the Tiruchi Collector to forward her application for citizenship to the State government.
The judge took note of the fact that the parents of the petitioner are Sri Lankan citizens. They came to India as they could not be in Sri Lanka on account of the ethnic strife.
The petitioner was born in 1993 in Tiruchi. She has been in India all these years and did her schooling here. She was issued an Aadhaar Card. However, her efforts to obtain Indian citizenship have been in vain, which led to the filing of the present petition.
The judge observed that in the present case, though the petitioner is a descendant of “migrant parents”, she was born in India. She has never been a Sri Lankan citizen, and therefore, the question of renouncing the same does not arise.
If the petitioner’s request is not granted, that would lead to her Statelessness. That is a situation that has to be avoided.
The judge said though the Central government would take a call on the matter, there should not be any impediment to considering the petitioner’s request.
The State government and the Tiruchi Collector should not have declined to forward the petitioner’s application for eventual consideration by the Central government.
No exception can be taken to the petitioner’s request, the court said and directed the Tiruchi Collector to forward her application to the State government. The State government shall forward the same to the Central government who shall take a call in the matter within 16 weeks.
Editorial
Today’s weapon of choice, its expanding dimensions (Page no. 6)
(GS Paper 3, Cyber Security)
As the 21st century advances, a new danger — the cyber threat — is becoming a hydra-headed monster. It is hardly confined to any one domain though the military is the one most often touted.
Rather, it is the civilian sphere where the cyber threat is becoming more all-pervading today and, in turn, a serious menace.
It is beginning to have a cascading effect with questions being raised on how this would fit in with our belief in, and need for, a well-regulated world order.
What is most unfortunate is that not enough attention is being bestowed on the ‘all-encompassing nature’ of the cyber threat. In the wake of the Russia-Ukraine conflict, the world seems awash with papers on artificial intelligence (AI)-driven military innovations and ‘potential crisis hot zones’, along with stray references to new forms of hybrid warfare.
But there is very little about the threat posed by cyber attacks. Ignored also is the new reality of the ‘weaponisation of everything’ which has entered the vocabulary of threats.
The latter clearly demands a ‘proto-revolutionary’ outlook on the part of policymakers, which is evidently lacking. Lost in translation is also the nature of today’s weapon of choice, viz., cyber.
This lack of awareness is unfortunate at a time when states clearly lack the necessary resilience to face a variety of multi-vector threats.
‘Grey Zone Operations’ which fall outside traditional concepts of conflicts have become the new battleground, especially in regard to cyber warfare.
‘Grey Zone Operations’ are already beginning to be employed to undermine the vitals of a state’s functioning, a trend likely to grow.
The convergence of emerging technologies alongside new hybrid usages, pose several challenges to nations and institutions.
Cyber space has been described by Lt. Gen. Rajesh Pant (retired), India’s current national cyber security coordinator, as a “superset of interconnected information and communication technology, hardware, software processes, services, data and systems”.
Viewed from this perspective, it constitutes a critical aspect of our national power. Cyber threats are not confined to merely one set of conflicts — such as Ukraine, where no doubt cyber tools are being extensively employed — extending well beyond this and other conflicts of a varied nature.
The cyber threat is in this sense all-pervading,embracing many regions and operating on different planes. Hence, dealing with the cyber threat calls for both versatility and imaginative thinking.
Demands for a cyber command by the Indian military ignore the widely varying nature of the cyber threat. That a group of United Nations government experts have been deliberating endlessly on how to promote responsible behaviour of states in cyber space, without much success is testimony to the difficulties that prevail.
Editorial
Recovery analysis that points out what India got wrong (Page no. 6)
(GS Paper 2, Issues Relating to Poverty & Hunger)
A recent World Bank report, titled “Correcting Course”, captures the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on global poverty.
The number of people living in extreme poverty rose by seven crore million in 2020, as the global poverty rate rose from 8.4% in 2019 to 9.3% in 2020.
This is the first time in two decades that the poverty rate has gone up. Global inequalities have widened, evident in the relative impacts felt on incomes in the richest countries as opposed to the poorest; and, unsurprisingly, economic recovery has been similarly uneven.
The report focuses on fiscal policy as an instrument for governments in dealing with crises such as the pandemic. Poorer countries were unable to use fiscal policy as effectively, and thus unable to offset the impact of the pandemic to a much lesser degree than richer countries.
The report identifies three priorities for fiscal policy for governments to aid with post-pandemic recovery: Targeted subsidies that benefit the poor; public investment to build resilience in the long term; and revenue mobilisation that should rely on progressive direct taxation rather than indirect taxes.
The focus on fiscal policy has merit. A recent ODI paper, “Fiscal policy and income inequality: The role of taxes and social spending”, aggregates evidence on social spending and taxes from across the world and comes to a similar conclusion regarding the importance of fiscal policy in post-pandemic recovery.
So how did India fare? And how does our policy response stack up, given the lessons identified in the reports mentioned above? India’s economy continues to be sluggish in 2022, and one should look back at the policy choices that were made back in 2020.
The World Bank report relies on the Consumer Pyramids Household Survey (CPHS) by the Centre for Monitoring Indian Economy (CMIE), in the absence of official poverty data since 2011.
By their estimate, 5.6 crore people are likely to have slipped into poverty as India’s GDP fell by 7.5% in FY2020-21. The population below poverty line in India stood at 10% in 2020.
Refusal to provide a fiscal stimulus to consumption — the Government announced a fiscal stimulus worth ₹2 lakh crore, or 1% of GDP. However, only a small fraction therein reflected incremental spending.
The minor increase to the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA) wage by ₹20 per day was a long-pending correction and quite inadequate to say the least.
The majority of India’s stimulus package took the form of credit lines and refinancing schemes to private enterprises, which are an inefficient mechanism to realise the goal of putting money in the hands of people to boost household-level consumption.
The only saving grace was the announcement that 80 crore people in India would get food aid through the Pradhan MantriGaribKalyan Ann Yojana (PMGKAY), a scheme that continues mainly because of the undeniable household-level distress.
PMGKAY is currently estimated to cost about ₹3.90 lakh crore. Started in April 2020, it has been extended till the upcoming Assembly elections are over.
However, India ranked 107th out of 121 countries in the 2022 Global Hunger Index, demonstrating that food aid is not a long-term solution, and certainly does not solve the problem of chronic malnutrition.
Gone girls (Page no. 6)
(GS Paper 1, Women related issues)
Reported violence against women is the proverbial tip of the iceberg; it conceals more than it reveals. But what it reveals can sometimes shock the collective conscience of a nation, especially a heinous crime that plays out in broad daylight as an assault on a young woman.
Last week’s incident of violence in Chennai, where college student Sathyapriyawas decapitated as a young man pursuing her romantically pushed her in the path of an oncoming train did no less tug at the heartstrings of the public.
The incidents of violence against women in train stations in Chennai are following a nearly copycat pattern after Swathi, a young techie was murdered in 2016, in broad daylight by a man, who was again stalking her, in a railway station.
In 2021, Swetha, a young college goer was murdered near a suburban train station by a man in a ‘troubled relationship’ with her.
In each of these cases, the inability of the stalker to accept the fact that his overtures were turned down by the girl directly led to the violence.
Earlier this month, an eight-year-old girl in Delhi was kidnapped, sexually assaulted and murdered. In September, the bodies of two teenaged girls were found in LakhimpurKheri in Uttar Pradesh. Police said they had been strangled with a scarf and hung from a tree after they were raped.
Only a few cases hit the headlines or make an impact on social media. Many more go unreported, the massive unseen underbelly of the iceberg.
In the chequered history of handling the many forms of violence against women in India, the horrific Nirbhaya rape of 2012 is a definitive milestone.
It rocked the nation with such force that lawmakers rushed to strengthen laws, and put in place systems and infrastructure that were meant to ensure such dreadful incidents are never repeated.
However, according to National Crime Records Bureau statistics, a whopping 4,28,278 lakh crimes against women happened in 2021.
These included rape, rape and murder, dowry harassment, kidnapping, forced marriage, trafficking, and online harassment. At this juncture, a decade later, it is pertinent to ask if the Government has rolled out all the strategies conceived of and fuelled by the Nirbhaya Fund.
Speedy process of trial and resolution resulting in conviction of the accused is a casualty in courts that are flooded with pending cases. The Sustainable Development Goals underline the importance of building safe, resilient and inclusive cities from a gender lens. No slackening on the part of authorities is acceptable when it comes to dealing with violence against women; zero tolerance alone is acceptable.
Explainer
Hindi imposition and its discontents (Page no. 8)
(GS Paper 2, Government Policies and Interventions)
The reported recommendation of the Parliamentary Committee on Official Language to use Hindi as the medium of instruction in Central institutions of higher education in Hindi-speaking States and regional languages in other States has once again ignited a controversy over, what is called by critics of the BJP, an attempt to impose Hindi on non-Hindi speaking people. Chief Ministers of Tamil Nadu and Kerala, M. K. Stalin and PinarayiVijayan have voiced their concerns over the recommendation.
The origin of the linguistic row goes back to the debate on official languages. In the Constituent Assembly, Hindi was voted as the official language by a single vote.
However, it added that English would continue to be used as an associate official language for 15 years. The Official Languages Act came into effect on the expiry of this 15-year period in 1965.
This was the background in which the anti-Hindi agitation took place. However, as early as in 1959, Jawaharlal Nehru had given an assurance in Parliament that English would continue to be in use as long as non-Hindi speaking people wanted it.
Tamil Nadu has had a long history of agitations against “Hindi imposition”. In August 1937, in the then Presidency of Madras, the regime headed by C. Rajagopalachari, also known as Rajaji or CR, decided to make Hindi compulsory in secondary schools. E.V. Ramasamy, or Periyar as he was known, who was still in the Justice Party at that time, had spearheaded an agitation against the move, marking the first such stir.
A few months after CR’s resignation, the British government, in February 1940, made Hindi optional. In January 1965, the second round of agitations erupted in the wake of Hindi becoming the official language of the Union government coupled with the approach adopted by the Central government towards the whole issue.
At different points in time, leaders, starting from Jawaharlal Nehru in the mid-1950s, assured the people of Tamil Nadu that there would be no “imposition” of Hindi.
However, in recent years, be it the National Education Policy or reports of English signage on National Highways in the State getting replaced with Hindi signage, the political class of the State had overwhelmingly expressed its reservations. The reiteration of the age-old assurance by the Central government coupled with the promise of the promotion of other Indian languages have barely mollified the protesters.
The essence of the Official Languages Act, 1963, is to provide something to each of the differing groups to meet its objections and safeguard its position. Whenever the parties in the State see any attempt to disturb this status quo, their reaction is always uniform — a virulent opposition.
Commodity fetishism: How products of labour attain mystical features (Page no. 9)
(GS Paper 1, Society)
Introduced in the first chapter of Karl Marx’s most ambitious project, Das Kapital, or Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Marx applied his analysis of commodities in capitalism to society as a whole through the concept of commodity fetishism.
The term describes how the social relationships of production and exchange among people take the form of relationships between things (money and commodities) under capitalism.
The term fetishism in anthropology refers to the belief among indigenous cultures of inanimate objects (such as totems) possessing godly or mystical powers.
Marx separates the religious connotation of the term and uses it to understand how commodities possess mystical powers once in the market as it severs ties with the production process.
The concept explains that a commodity has different values. In its physical state, an object has a purpose or utility which Marx describes as the use value.
Since the production of an object requires the labour of producers, the value of the labour adds to the value of the object. Finally, when the object reaches the market, it has an exchange value which is the monetary value attached to the product.
As long as an object is attached to its use-value, it remains an ordinary thing. But when it comes to the market as a commodity, it attains fantastical powers and mystical features.
Marx explains that the production and distribution of an object build or renew social relations — the relation between an employer who hires employees who work to create the object, the distributor who supplies raw materials for the production, the transport facility that takes raw materials to the factories and brings the finished product to the market and finally the relation between the consumer and the seller of the product.
Under capitalism, these social relations and the production process become invisible to the consumer as it is a private process.
And though an object’s potential is only realised when it is exchanged as a commodity in the market (a place where it becomes social), the interaction between individuals is replaced by the interaction between commodity and money, (which is also a product of sold labour) which is the universal equivalent for exchange. Thus, the commodity is devoid of any signs of labour put into its creation. This is unique to capitalism.
According to Marx, such a system did not exist before as the foundation of a feudal society was based on the relations of personal dependence.
He explains that the serfs and the lords, the laymen and the clerics, were all dependent on each other and this was visible in the exchange between them. It was labour and not an abstract universal equivalent that was transacted.
Individuals with various roles confronted each other and the performance of their labour were visible in all events and not disguised as social relations between things, which were the products of labour.
So, if not the labour and time put into its production, what exactly does the consumer or the potential buyer equate the commodity to?
News
Interpol has no role in curbing state sponsored terrorism, says official (Page no. 11)
(GS Paper 2, International Institutions)
Interpol Secretary-General Jürgen Stock on October 17 said the international criminal police organisation was not playing any role in curbing state-sponsored terrorism and that it focussed primarily on ordinary law crimes.
“We are playing no role to be very specific and concrete. If there is any state activity, Interpol is not conducting any activity.
We are focussing primarily on...,according to our Constitution, ordinary law crime. We are going against child abusers, rapists, murderers, drug dealers, cyber criminals who want to make billions of money...that is the majority of crime that occurs around the world.
That is why Interpol exists,” said Mr. Stock at a press conference ahead of the four-day Interpol general assembly to start on October 18.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi will address the 90 th general assembly on Tuesday, while Union Home Minister Amit Shah will give the valedictory address.
On the issue of terrorism, Mr. Stock said the Interpol had been developing — in close cooperation with member-countries, the United Nations, European Union and many others — a global early warning system for collection and sharing of terrorism-related inputs. The organisation had done so successfully as part of the global coalition to defeat Daesh.
He said the Interpol had one of the biggest repositories on information related to the foreign terrorist hideouts and tools for helping the member-countries identify, target and arrest terrorists.
On the illicit financial flows, the Secretary-General said less than 1% of the funds could be intercepted and recovered by enforcement agencies, terming it a major cause for concern.
Criminal gangs also used cryptocurrencies to move proceeds of crime and evade detection. “Combined with estimates of the global cost of cybercrime, which is expected to reach $10.5 trillion by 2025, brings us to the basics of policing — follow the money.
He said the Interpol’s global stop-payment mechanism, an anti-money laundering rapid response protocol, had helped the member-countries recover more than $60 million in the past 10 months.
Our Global Crime Trend Report also highlighted the massive increase in online child sexual exploitation and abuse, figures which are only set to increase.
The Interpol’s International Child Sexual Exploitation database helped investigators around the world identify an average of seven child abuse victims every day. So far, 30,000 victims had been identified worldwide.
About 41.5 crore Indians out of multi-dimensional poverty since 2005-06 (Page no. 12)
(GS Paper 2, Issues Relating to Poverty & Hunger)
As many as 41.5 crore people exited poverty in India during the 15-year period between 2005-06 and 2019-21, out of which two-thirds exited in the first 10 years, and one-third in the next five years, according to the global Multidimensional Poverty Index (MPI.
The report produced by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) and the Oxford Poverty and Human Development Initiative (OPHI) shows that the incidence of poverty fell from 55.1% in 2005/06 to 16.4% in 2019/21 in the country and that deprivations in all 10 MPI indicators saw significant reductions as a result of which the MPI value and incidence of poverty more than halved.
Improvement in MPI for India has significantly contributed to the decline in poverty in South Asia and it is for the first time that it is not the region with the highest number of poor people, at 38.5 crore, compared with 57.9 crore in Sub-Saharan Africa.
Globally, of the total 610 crore people across 111 developing countries, 19.1% or 120 crore live in multidimensional poverty. Nearly half of them live in severe poverty.
The report doesn’t fully assess the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on poverty in India as 71% of the data from the National Family Health Survey-5 (2019-2021) relied upon for MPI were collected before the pandemic.
The global MPI constructs a deprivation profile of each household and person through 10 indicators spanning health, education and standard of living.
All indicators are equally weighted within each dimension. The global MPI identifies people as multidimensionally poor if their deprivation score is 1/3 or higher.
The MPI is calculated by multiplying the incidence of poverty and the average intensity of poverty. The MPI ranges from 0 to 1, and higher values imply higher poverty.
By identifying who is poor, the nature of their poverty (their deprivation profile) and how poor they are (deprivation score), the global MPI complements the international $1.90 a day poverty rate, which was revised by the World Bank last month to $2.15 per day.
Bihar, the poorest State in 2015/2016, saw the fastest reduction in MPI value in absolute terms. The incidence of poverty there fell from 77.4% in 2005/2006 to 52.4% in 2015/2016 to 34.7% in 2019/2021.
However, in relative terms, the poorest States have not caught up. Of the 10 poorest States in 2015/2016, only one (West Bengal) was not among the 10 poorest in 2019/2021. The rest— Bihar, Jharkhand, Meghalaya, Madhya Pradesh, Uttar Pradesh, Assam, Odisha, Chhattisgarh and Rajasthan —remain among the 10 poorest.
Despite the strides made, the report notes that the ongoing task of ending poverty remains daunting. India has by far the largest number of poor people worldwide at 22.8 crore, followed by Nigeria at 9.6 crore.
Two-thirds of these people live in a household in which at least one person is deprived in nutrition. There were also 9.7 crore poor children in India in 2019/2021- more than the total number of poor people, children and adults combined, in any other country covered by the global MPI.
PM Modi inaugurates ‘One Nation, One Fertilizer’ scheme (Page no. 12)
(GS Paper 3, Agriculture)
Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Monday inaugurated 600 KisanSamridhiKendras and ‘One Nation, One Fertilizer’ scheme and said that these steps were being taken to modernise agriculture.The KisanSamridhiKendras would function as helping centres for farmers in this process.
The PM was speaking at a conclave of farmers and 1,500 start-ups in the agriculture sector, where he also released the 12th instalment of the PM KisanSammanNidhi. Under the scheme, Rs. 16,000 crore will be credited into the bank accounts of over 8.5 crore farmers. Over Rs. 2 lakh crore has been transferred to farmers, helping them manage costs, he said.
The amount under the scheme would be credited directly into the accounts of farmers. “There will be no mediators for this.
He said that earlier urea factories in the country were closed down to benefit importers and added that after 2014, the government took several steps and now the country was marching towards self sustenancein liquid nano urea production. Nano urea will help farmers to address the issue of scarcity.
He said fertilizers would be rebranded as “Bharat” to help farmers and it would reduce the prices of major fertilizers as transportation cost would be regulated.
He added that as part of observing the Millets Year in 2023, the Centre would promote cultivation of millets. New varieties of seeds were also being produced to meet the challenges of climate change.