The Hindu Editorial Analysis | 10th June 19 | PDF Download

• On June 8, upon the orders of the Gauhati High Court, Mohammad Sanaullah was released on bail from a detention camp in Assam. He had been detained on May 29, after a Foreigners Tribunal had declared him an illegal immigrant. The Gauhati High Court’s bail order came after a week of sustained public pressure, occasioned by the revelation that Mr. Sanaullah had served for three decades in the Indian Army.
• In the intervening period, a shocking number of irregularities surfaced. In its inquiry report, the Assam border police had written that Mr. Sanaullah was a ‘labourer’. The three men who signed the case report claimed that the investigating officer had fabricated their signatures. The investigating officer himself admitted that it might have been an “administrative mix-up”. Yet, it was on the basis of such shoddy material that the Foreigners Tribunal — a quasi-judicial body expected to follow the rule of law — came to the conclusion that Mr. Sanaullah was a “foreigner”, and packed him off to a detention camp — until the High Court stepped in to set him at liberty.
• But Mr. Sanaullah is among the luckier ones. Investigative journalists have revealed over the last few years that ‘administrative errors’ of this kind are the rule rather than the exception. As Mr. Sanaullah acknowledged in an interview after being released, there were people in the detention camps with similar stories, who had been there for 10 years or more. For these individuals, without the benefit of media scrutiny, there may be no bail — only an endless detention. But by forcing the conversation onto the national stage, Mr. Sanuallah’s case has provided hope that we may yet recognise the unfolding citizenship tragedy in Assam for what it is, and step back from the brink while there is still time.

NRC, Foreigners Tribunals

• According to the Assam Accord, individuals who entered Assam after March 24, 1971 are illegal immigrants. There are two parallel processes to establish citizenship: the Foreigners Tribunals operating under the Foreigners Act, and the National Register of Citizens (NRC), which is under preparation. While nominally and formally independent, in practice, these two systems bleed into each other, with people who have been declared as foreigners by the Foreigners Tribunals, and even their families, dropped from the draft NRC.
• For something as elemental and important as citizenship, one would expect these systems to be implemented as carefully as possible, and with procedural safeguards. This is especially true when we think of the consequences of being declared a noncitizen: disenfranchisement, exclusion from public services, incarceration in detention camps, statelessness, and deportation.
• Before treating an individual — a human being — to such drastic consequences, the very least a humane and civilised society can do is to ensure that the rule of law has been followed to its last degree.
• The reality, however, is the exact opposite. In a vast number of cases, the legally mandated initial inquiry before an individual is dragged before a tribunal as a suspected “foreigner” simply does not happen — indeed, it did not happen for Mr. Sanaullah. The Tribunals themselves are only constrained by a very limited number of procedural safeguards. This has led to situations where Tribunals have issued notices to entire families, instead of just the suspected “foreigner”. Additionally, reports show that Foreigners Tribunals habitually declare individuals to be “foreigners” on the basis of clerical errors in documents, such as a spelling mistake, an inconsistency in age, and so on. Needless to say, the hardest hit by this form of “justice” are the vulnerable and the marginalised, who have limited documentation at the best of time, and who are rarely in a position to correct errors across documents. On occasion, orders determining citizenship have been passed by tribunals without even assigning reasons, a basic sine qua non of the rule of law. In addition, a substantial number of individuals are sent to detention camps without being heard — on the basis of ex parte orders — and the detention centres themselves are little better than concentration camps, where families are separated, and people not allowed to move beyond narrow confined spaces for years on end.
• The process under the NRC is little better. Driven by the Supreme Court, it has been defined by sealed covers and opaque proceedings. For example, in a behind-closed-doors consultation with the NRC Coordinator, the Supreme Court developed a new method of ascertaining citizenship known as the “family tree method”. This method was not debated or scrutinised publicly, and ground reports found that people from the hinterland were not only unaware of the method, but those who were aware had particular difficulties in putting together “family trees” of the kind that were required (the burden fell disproportionately upon women). And recently, it was found that a process by which individuals could file “objections” against people whose names had appeared in the draft NRC — and on the basis of which these people would be forced to once again prove their citizenship — had resulted in thousands of indiscriminate objections being filed, on a seemingly random basis, causing significant hardship and trauma to countless individuals. However, when the people coordinating these “objections” were contacted, they brushed it off by saying that it was mere “collateral damage” in the quest to weed out illegal immigrants.

The role of the judiciary

• In a process riddled with such flaws, and where the consequences are so drastic, one would expect the judiciary, the guardian of fundamental rights and the guarantor of the rule of law, to intervene. Instead, the Supreme Court, led by the present Chief Justice of India, has played the roles of cheerleader, midwife, and overseer. Not only has it driven the NRC process, as outlined above but it has repeatedly attempted to speed up proceedings, pulled up the State government when it has asked to be allowed to release people detained for a long time, and instead of questioning procedural violations and infringement of rights, has instead asked why more people are not in detention centres, and why more people are not being deported. Most egregiously, the Court even used a PIL about the inhumane conditions in detention centres in order to pursue this project.
• However, what the Supreme Court has failed to understand is that in questions of life and death, where the cost of error is so high, it is not “speed” that matters, but the protection of rights. But through its conduct, the Supreme Court has transformed itself from the protector of the rule of law into an enthusiastic abettor of its daily violation. And the Gauhati High Court has been no better, passing a bizarre and unreasoned order stating that it would be a “logical corollary” that the family members of a declared foreigner would also be foreigners, on the basis of which the border police have sent the names of entire families to NRC authorities. This is the very antithesis of how constitutional courts should behave.

Focus the spotlight

• Mohammad Sanuallah is, for now, a free man. But a society in which his case is the exception instead of the rule, where it needs a person to be an ex-Army man, and his case pursued by national media for a full week before interim bail is granted, is a society that has utterly abandoned the rule of law. Yet Mr. Sanaullah’s case can do some good as well: it can prompt some urgent national introspection about a situation where, in the State of Assam, thousands of people languish in detention camps for years, victims of a process that, to use an old adage, would not be sufficient to “hang a dog on”. If anything can trigger an urgent and imperative call for change, surely this will — and must.

St. Petersburg consensus

Russia and China are strengthening ties amid tensions with the U.S.

• The bonhomie between China’s and Russia’s leaders at the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum last week was demonstrable. In a sign of the heightened tensions between the U.S. and the two countries, Russia’s annual investment gathering was boycotted by the U.S. Ambassador to Russia, Jon Huntsman. His absence was ascribed to the prevailing environment in Russia for foreign entrepreneurs, typified by the detention of U.S. private equity investor Michael Calvey on allegations of fraud. Conversely, the Chinese telecommunications equipment manufacturer Huawei signed an agreement with Russia’s principal mobile operator to start 5G networks, in a rebuff to Washington’s attempts to isolate the firm internationally. Russian President Vladimir Putin and his Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping made it clear in St. Petersburg that the tensions with the West had only drawn them closer. The rift with Russia began with Moscow’s annexation of Crimea in 2014 and the stand-off in eastern Ukraine that continues. Russia’s tensions with the U.S. and some EU countries stem also from their opposition to the 1,200-kmlong Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline from Russia to Germany. U.S. objections draw in part from its eagerness to export liquefied natural gas to Europe, besides thwarting Moscow’s ambition to dominate the region’s energy market. Far more sensitive has been U.S. Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s inquiry into possible Russian meddling in the 2016 U.S. presidential election. Washington’s blacklisting of Huawei, prohibiting it from selling technology to the U.S. and barring domestic firms from supplying semiconductors to Beijing, falls into a class of its own among international trade disputes.
• Amid these tensions, in St. Petersburg Mr. Xi and Mr. Putin emphasised that bilateral relations were at a historic high, marked by increased diplomatic and strategic cooperation. China participated in Russian military exercises on its eastern border last September, marking a watershed.
• Moscow and Beijing, hostile rivals of the Cold War era, have for a while been adopting common positions at the UN Security Council on critical international issues. Bilateral relations are also guided by pragmatism. Russia appears realistic about the growing Chinese economic clout in Central Asia, once firmly in its sphere of influence, thanks to China’s massive infrastructure investments under the Belt and Road Initiative. Chinese cooperation would moreover prove critical for Russia’s elaborate plans to exploit the Northern Sea Route along the Arctic as an alternative transportation hub. International sanctions have not been very effective in isolating Russia. European states, notably Germany, recognize the importance of engaging with Russia to contain Mr. Putin’s expansionist aims. Equally, President Donald Trump’s “America first” policy is compelling potential rivals to make common cause.
• It was a coincidence straight out of the silver screens in Mumbai or Lagos: the leaders of India and Nigeria both began their respective second terms within a day of each other following their unexpectedly decisive election victories.
• The challenges faced by Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Nigerian President Muhammadu Buhari during their first terms were uncannily similar: security against terror, monetary and fiscal conundrums, a communal and sectarian divide, chronic unemployment, rampant corruption, rural distress and a fragile neighbourhood being the recurrent themes.
• Each of the two leaders is widely acknowledged as an outlier to the system riddled with corruption and nepotism and is admired for his personal probity, hard work and discipline.
• For instance, Mr. Buhari, 76, returned to power in 2015 — 30 years after he ruled Nigeria as a military dictator. The intervening decades were spent variously in detention, farming and as challenger-candidate in three presidential elections.
• Diverse trade
• It may be tempting to both Indians and Nigerians to shrug at these similarities as banal trivia; however, under them lies plenty of substance and potential linking the two countries and aspirations of their people.
• First, Nigeria being Africa’s most populous country (191 million) and economy ($376 billion) as well as the world’s sixth largest oil exporter (about 2 million barrels per day) is evidently important to us. According to the latest Indian Department of Commerce statistics, Nigeria is India’s largest trading partner in Africa (19th overall) with total trade estimated at $13.5 billion in 2018-19. As official Nigerian data show, thanks to our booming oil imports, India is Nigeria’s largest trading partner. For the same reason, Nigeria enjoys 4:1 surplus in bilateral trade. Nevertheless, it is still a sizeable market for India’s manufactured exports, such as (2018-19 figures) miscellaneous machinery ($500 million), vehicles ($495 million), pharmaceutical products ($447 million), textile items ($299 million), iron and steel articles ($152 million) and plastics ($109 million).
• In contrast to the stagnancy in India’s global exports, its exports to Nigeria surged by 27% last year to reach around $2,880 million. Indian investments in Nigeria are estimated at around $15 billion with a further $5 billion in the pipeline. There are at least 180 Indian companies operating in Nigeria with pharmaceuticals, steel, power, retailing, fast-moving consumer goods and skilling as their mainstay. Approximately 50,000 Indians reside in Nigeria, some of them for decades. Most of them are professionals, such as engineers, accountants, bankers, trainers and healthcare experts.

Success despite apathy

• While all these facts go to underline the substantive nature of India-Nigeria ties, they also point to two important contextual factors. First, all these achievements are the outcome of valiant attempts by individual stakeholders with scant official encouragement or support.
• For instance, some simple tweaking in our visa procedure can help thousands of Nigerians avail of our medical and educational facilities, benefiting all sides and creating huge people-to-people goodwill. Despite the encouraging numbers, the two governments have not yet been able to facilitate direct connectivity of air travel, banking and shipping — steps which could have promoted the ease of doing bilateral business.
• Second, enormous potential still waits to be leveraged in such sectors such as upstream hydrocarbons (despite India being the largest buyer of Nigerian crude), agriculture, health care and skilling. Despite their growth, Indian exports to Nigeria are still around a quarter of China’s.

Much potential

• Although bilateral ties have had to face strong headwinds during the past five years, more could have been accomplished. Mr. Buhari, who was trained in India as a military officer and holds this country in high esteem, attended the third India-Africa Forum Summit held in October 2015 and met Mr. Modi for bilateral talks. Then Vice President Hamid Ansari’s bilateral visit in September 2016 broke the hiatus in top-level contact since Manmohan Singh’s Nigeria visit, as Prime Minister, in 2007.
• Though some ministerial-level visits took place in the past five years, these were mostly for multilateral events in India. The last session of the Joint Commission Meeting was in 2011 and the Foreign Office Consultations were held in 2003. Bilateral ties have not drawn commensurate proportion of the resources offered by India to its African partners largely due to some systemic issues. Defence cooperation has been mostly episodic and training oriented.
• As the two leaders begin their respective second innings, they need to give a push to India-Nigerian ties sooner rather than later. Actions along few force-multiplier axes suggest themselves. With oil and other commodities becoming a seller’s market, an early summit between the two leaders is an obvious imperative. It could evolve a multi-pronged strategy to leverage evident economic complementarities in sectors such as hydrocarbons, infrastructure, institution-building, defence and agriculture. A purposive follow-up session of the joint economic commission soon thereafter could provide an incremental and sustainable road map empowering the relevant bilateral stakeholders. If handled deftly and with political will, it could usher in an India-Nigeria economic synergy that has been untapped for some decades.
• The Narendra Modi government has its plate full. It needs to increase employment and incomes; revive investments and growth; untangle the financial sector; navigate muddied-up international trade; solve the perennial problems of poor education and health, and the growing problems of environmental pollution and water scarcity. Even though statistical confusion was created in the run-up to the election to deny that problems of unemployment and growth were serious, high-powered Cabinet committees have been formed to tackle them.
• Regardless of whether or not India has the fastest growing GDP, it has a long way to go to achieve economic and social inclusion, and restore environmental sustainability.
• India’s problems are complex because they are all interrelated. Fixing one part of the system alone can make matters worse. For example, providing skills to millions of youth before there are enough employment opportunities is a bold fix that can backfire. The complexity of the task demands a good plan and a good strategy.

Under scrutiny

• Does the Indian government have the capability to make good plans and strategies to address its complex challenges? Since India has not done as well as it should have to produce faster growth with more inclusion and sustainability, one would have to surmise that it has not developed the requisite capabilities. Mr. Modi has known this. Indeed, the first major reform he announced in his first term was to abolish the Planning Commission. He replaced it with the loftily titled ‘National Institution for Transforming India’ (NITI Aayog).
• Now, when the country’s economy has not performed to the high expectations Mr. Modi had created, and citizens’ aspirations for ‘acche din’ have not been realised, the performance of the NITI Aayog is under scrutiny, as it should be. Many people are even nostalgically recalling the Planning Commission, including some who were very critical of it and wanted it overhauled.
• Mr. Modi’s predecessors, Manmohan Singh and Atal Bihari Vajpayee, had faced similar, large, economic, social, political and global challenges. When Vajpayee was presented a nine-point plan by a global think-tank to increase the economy’s growth to 9%, he famously retorted, “We know all that. The question is, how will it all be done?” He highlighted that many stakeholders must be involved in the implementation of a plan in a large, diversified and democratic country — the States, the private sector, civil society and even the political Opposition. Therefore, it is not good enough to have a plan, there must also be a strategy for its cooperative implementation too.
• Dr. Singh declared that reform of the Planning Commission was long overdue. An intensive exercise was undertaken. Many stakeholders were consulted. International practices were examined. An outline was drawn of a substantially reformed institution which would, in Dr. Singh’s words, have a capability for “systems reform” rather than making of Five-Year Plans, and which would have the “power of persuasion” without providing budgets.
• A commission chaired by C. Rangarajan, then Chairman of the Prime Minister’s Economic Advisory Council, examined budgetary processes, divisions of responsibilities between the Finance Ministry and the Planning Commission, and distinctions between ‘plan’ and ‘non-plan’ expenditures. It concluded that budgetary responsibility must be concentrated in the Finance Ministry, and it was no longer desirable for the Planning Commission to have powers for financial provisions.
• Some in the Planning Commission were worried that it would lose its teeth if it did not have any financial power. How else would it persuade the States to do what it wanted them to do?
• Chief Ministers retorted that the Planning Commission must improve its ability to understand their needs and to develop ideas that they would want to adopt because they accepted the ideas as good for them, not because they would have to if they wanted the money. Mr. Modi, as a powerful Chief Minister, understood well the limitations in the Planning Commission’s capabilities and what it needed to do to reform itself, which the investigations commissioned by Dr. Singh had also revealed. It is not surprising, therefore, that the bold charter of NITI Aayog that Mr. Modi announced in 2015 was consistent with Dr. Singh’s and Vajpayee’s insights. He was implementing an idea whose time had come.

A good starting point

• Implementation of radical change is never easy. If things don’t go well soon, nostalgia will rise for the old order — even though there was dissatisfaction with it. And the change-maker will be blamed for the disruption. The NITI Aayog charter is a good starting point for a new journey in transforming the governance of the Indian economy. The NITI Aayog and the government would do well to conduct an open-minded review of what NITI Aayog has achieved so far to adopt the new role described in its charter — that of a catalyst of change in a complex, federal, socioeconomic system. And assess whether it has transformed its capabilities sufficiently to become an effective systems reformer and persuader of stakeholders, rather than merely be an announcer of lofty multi-year goals and manager of projects, which many suspect it is.
• There is deep concern that NITI Aayog has lost its integrity as an independent institution to guide the government; that it has become a mouthpiece of the government and an implementer of the government’s projects. Many insist that NITI Aayog must have the ability to independently evaluate the government’s programmes at the Centre and in the States. Some recall that an Independent Evaluation Office set up in the last days of the UPA-II government was swiftly closed by the NDA government. Others counter that the Planning Commission had a Programme Evaluation Organisation all along and which continues. They miss the need for fundamental transformation in the approach to planning and change.
• The traditional approach of after-the-fact evaluation sits in the old paradigm of numbers, budgets and controls. The transformational approach to planning and implementation that 21st century India needs, which is alluded to in NITI’s charter, requires evaluations and course-corrections in the midst of action. It requires new methods to speed up ‘organisational learning’ among stakeholders in the system who must make plans together and implement them together. The NITI Aayog’s charter has provided a new bottle. It points to the need for new methods of cooperative learning and cooperative implementation by stakeholders who are not controlled by any central body of technical experts with political and/or budgetary authority over them. Merely filling this new bottle with old ideas of budgets, controls and expert solutions from above will not transform India. The debate about NITI Aayog’s efficacy must focus on whether or not it is performing the new role it must, and what progress it has made in acquiring capabilities to perform this role, rather than slipping back into the ruts of yesterday’s debates about the need for a Planning Commission. Mains answer writing India is an aspiring Superpower and posed with multiple challenges as social, economical, infrastructural and proper planning issues. As a replacement of Planning commission how NITI Aayog has performed in last 4 years and what kind of changes it needs for contributing in the country’s all around success and becoming a true National institute for transforming India. (300 words)
• officially the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region of the People’s Republic of China (HKSAR), is a special administrative region on the eastern side of the Pearl River estuary in southern China. With over 7.4 million people of various nationalitiesin a 1,104-squarekilometre (426 sq mi) territory, Hong Kong is the world’s fourth-most densely populated region.
• Hong Kong became a colony of the British Empire after Qing China ceded Hong Kong Island at the end of the First Opium War in 1842.
• The colony expanded to the Kowloon Peninsula in 1860 after the Second Opium War, and was further extended when Britain obtained a 99-year lease of the New Territories in 1898.The territory was returned to China when the lease expired in 1997.
• As a special administrative region, Hong Kong maintains separate governing and economic systems from that of mainland China, and its people overwhelmingly identify as Hongkongers rather than Chinese
• Virgin Plastic, is the resin produced directly from the petrochemical feed-stock, such as natural gas or crude oil, which has never been used or processed before.
• The raw materials for plastic recycling plants are nothing but the used plastics from the consumers, basically which are also the virgin plastics.
• Depending on how the materials are re-processed, recycled materials can never achieve 100% of mechanical properties of virgin materials. The degradation of these properties has a direct effect on safety factors and long term performance measure such as fatigue.
• Polyethylene terephthalate (sometimes written poly(ethylene terephthalate)), commonly abbreviated PET, PETE, or the obsolete PETP or PET-P, is the most common thermoplastic polymer resin of the polyester family and is used in fibres for clothing, containers for liquids and foods, thermoforming for manufacturing, and in combination with glass fibre for engineering resins.
• It may also be referred to by the brand names Terylene in the UK, Lavsan in Russia and the former Soviet Union, and Dacron in the US.
• The majority of the world’s PET production is for synthetic fibres (in excess of 60%), with bottle production accounting for about 30% of global demand.
• In the context of textile applications, PET is referred to by its common name, polyester, whereas the acronym PET is generally used in relation to packaging. Polyester makes up about 18% of world polymer production and is the fourth-most-produced polymer after polyethylene (PE), polypropylene (PP) and polyvinyl chloride (PVC).

 

 
 

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