The Hindu Editorial Analysis | 30th Sep’19 | PDF Download

Home and abroad

• India must take its place in the world by privileging universal rights everywhere
• Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s speech at the UNGA catalogued welfare and development schemes that he had initiated. He sounded like a seer in his call for unity of humanity, but it was his emphasis on Indian diversity that stood out for its remarkable departure from the sort of domestic politics he and his party, the BJP, have come to be associated with lately. India’s achievements in housing, sanitation, health care, banking and education are significant, as the PM noted. His tenacious public campaign on issues such as water conservation, environment and girls’ education has brought these issues to the centre of the development discourse and he deserves full credit for it. Mr. Modi has consistently presented material development as an end in itself, sometimes ignoring that it might be at the cost of other markers of progress such as expansion of freedoms and equity. This idea is also the explanation of his government’s policy on Jammu and Kashmir, as reflected in his own pronouncements and those of other officials, during their diplomatic outreach in the U.S. A Prime Minister’s use of a global pulpit to showcase India’s progress and diversity to a world that is divided, and deliver a message of unity, would have been inspiring for all Indians. But his UNGA speech sits at odds with his campaign speeches at home, and corresponding administrative measures.
• The claim that there can be a neat insulation of internal issues of a country from global concerns is antithetical to the rationale of all global institutions, particularly the UN.
• Populist politics around the world has sought to privilege national sovereignty over universal values and commitments, slacking off efforts to tackle critical challenges that are transnational. Human rights, democracy and liberty are as much global questions as climate change, health and terrorism. Selective globalization is difficult to sustain or defend. India cannot aspire to meet global best practices in governance, infrastructure and investment climate on the one hand and on the other, choose to overlook soft power attributes such as tolerance, pluralism and diversity. Pakistan Prime Minister Imran Khan’s bluster on Kashmir and the implied threat of a nuclear war were irresponsible and over the top, but that is beside the point. India cannot wish away questions regarding Kashmir at international fora.
• The best — and the only way — to keep domestic issues domestic is to resolve them through internal dialogue and accommodation. Tamil poet Kaniyan Pungundranar’s verse Yaadhum Oore Yaavarum Kelir — all places are our own, everyone is our kin — that Mr. Modi cited to underscore India’s ancient faith in universalism is a tenet far from fulfilment, but worth striving for. Deviation from it could be detrimental, and would have consequences at home and abroad.

Trust deficit

• Failures such as PMC Bank’s must be pre-empted to retain public faith in the system
• It has been a nightmare of a week for thousands of customers of the Punjab and Maharashtra Co-operative Bank (PMC), who were told last Tuesday by the Reserve Bank of India that no more than ₹1,000 could be withdrawn from their accounts for a period of six months. The 35-year-old lender may not be the first but is certainly one of the largest urban co-operative banks facing this clampdown. The resultant distress is also more widespread as the bank, with a large footprint in Maharashtra, is also present in Delhi, Goa, Gujarat, and Karnataka. Strikingly there was no ostensible sign of distress to trigger the bank’s virtual collapse, following the regulator’s intervention. Things were going swimmingly as per its latest annual report, with deposits growing nearly 17% year-on-year to ₹11,617 crore by March 2019, with long-tenure savings accounting for the largest chunk. Profits, in a tough year for banks, were flat, and while bad loans more than doubled, their proportion was far lower at PMC than at most public sector banks. Given this backdrop, the bank’s depositors, who ironically include the RBI’s own employees’ co-operative, are understandably perturbed about the fate of their savings. The RBI has said it is acting in depositors’ interests after ‘financial irregularities, failure of internal control and systems of the bank and under-reporting of exposures’ came to its notice and on Thursday, raised the withdrawal limit to ₹10,000 per account, stressing this should allow 60% of its depositors to recover their entire savings. The RBI must still explain what made it increase the withdrawal limit tenfold within 48 hours, lest it be seen as a politically weighted move ahead of the Maharashtra election.
• Questions have been raised on the bank’s large exposure to Housing Development and Infrastructure Limited (HDIL) which is itself undergoing insolvency proceedings. The bank’s chairman had served on the board of the HDIL for ten years between two long stints at the bank, and any irregularities in loans to the firm would be an indictment of the quality of oversight on banks. That the RBI shares regulatory responsibilities over such banks with States’ Registrar of Co-operative Societies further mires the problem. With over 1,500 urban co-operative banks operating in the country, and a few of them already under RBIimposed restrictions, a new road map is essential for their future course. Perhaps the only major gain from demonetisation was the deployment of public savings into the formal financial sector. But failures like PMC Bank can quickly erode that. Timebound, transparent action to fix the PMC mess and a systemic overhaul is necessary to prevent cash from moving back below household mattresses.
• SiloResearchers from the Oxford Internet Institute, a multidisciplinary research and teaching department of the University of Oxford, have been monitoring the digital space over the last three years to study the organized manipulation of social media. Their latest findings, published in a study titled ‘The Global Disinformation Order’, is very disturbing. The study shows evidence of organized social media manipulation campaigns that have taken place in 70 countries, up from 48 countries in 2018 and 28 countries in 2017. In each country, there is at least one political party or government agency using social media to shape public attitudes domestically.
• The findings further state that social media has been co-opted by many authoritarian regimes. In 26 countries, computational propaganda is being used as a tool of information control in three distinct ways:

1. To suppress fundamental human rights,
2. Discredit political opponents, and
3. Drown out dissenting opinions.

• The study explains how a handful of sophisticated state actors use computational propaganda for foreign influence operations. Facebook and Twitter attributed foreign influence operations to seven countries. It is important to remember that India is among the seven countries. The others are China, Iran, Pakistan, Russia, Saudi Arabia and Venezuela. The study is particularly damning of Facebook. It reads: “Despite there being more social networking platforms than ever, Facebook remains the platform of choice for social media manipulation. In 56 countries, we found evidence of formally organized computational propaganda campaigns on Facebook.”
• Good information
• Former editor of The Guardian Alan Rusbridger’s reflection on the current Brexit mess in the U.K. seems not only to endorse the study but also points out a new lurking danger. He wrote: “Most foot soldiers in journalism do the job because they absolutely believe in the role of good information in good democracies. Something is stopping them: and the sooner we can fix that the better.” Rusbridger has a simple proposition: “good democracy relies on good information.” He defines good information as the one “that is not only true but also believed”. His short article, “End front-page falsehoods and regain the public’s trust”, explains how we stopped trusting: “We’re no longer very willing to believe almost anybody. Most surveys of trust find very little faith in what government or politicians tell us. But there are also extraordinarily low levels of trust in most media. Nearly two-thirds of people say they can no longer tell good journalism from rumour or falsehoods.”
• I became a journalist in an era of certainty. Everyone in the profession loved to quote the famous playwright Arthur Miller: “A good newspaper, I suppose, is a nation talking to itself.” Digital disruption has created many silos in our public discourse. Instead of dialogue we have been reduced to becoming recipients of the noise generated by echo chambers. They have become so powerful that they deny the space to even give the other person the benefit of the doubt.
• Initiating dialogue
• The time has come to break out of these silos. There is a need to talk to people outside our comfort zones and initiate dialogues. Prime-time television debates have no dialogue; they may be best termed as concurrent monologues. The Readers’ Editor, as an interlocutor between the newspaper and its readers, has a moral obligation to support initiatives that bring back the sprit of the “nation talking to itself” not just among journalists but also among citizens.
• In the U.S., the Society of Professional Journalists (SPJ) and the SPJ Foundation launched a project in Casper, Wyoming, because it wanted to get “a deep understanding of the reasons so many people distrust news organisations and their reporting.” The SPJ made it clear that its fundamental assumption was that journalism plays an important role in a democracy, so it is of concern when citizens don’t trust the media’s news coverage, particularly reporting that holds elected officials accountable for actions that can impact the public. For six months, a small group of residents in Casper, Wyoming, set aside two hours every few Tuesdays to discuss the press. Though the study was not a scientific one, there was tremendous value in hearing participants honestly and it paved the way for a mutual exchange of ideas.

Mains Question

• Despite many international arguments about Sri Lanka being in a debt trap of china, their relation has only improved with the time. Discuss the comparison of Indian and Chinese engagements with Sri Lanka.
• Comment on the positivities and challenges for India in Sri Lanka (350 W)
• The imposing Lotus Tower in Colombo, which was opened to the public recently, is considered to be the latest symbol of Sri Lanka-China ties. An agreement to build this structure, which is to serve as a multi-functional telecommunication tower, was signed by the two countries in 2012.
• It may look ironical that much of the project’s execution took place under a regime which came into office at a time when there was a “strong antiChina mood”. In the run-up to the 2015 presidential election, Ranil Wickremesinghe, who was backing Maithripala Sirisena, had assured people that another Chinese project, the $1.4 billion Colombo Port City, would be scrapped. Soon after Mr. Sirisena became the President, work on the Port City came to a grinding halt. Then, there was also uncertainty over the fate of the Hambantota port, the development of which was originally offered to India by Mahinda Rajapaksa on becoming Sri Lankan President in November 2005. (India was said to have examined Hambantota purely from the point of view of economics, overlooking the strategic angle.)
• Two different records
• However, all of this is now history, as Colombo-Beijing ties have stood the test of time. China has been able to resolve all the controversies over these projects. The Port City’s execution is underway without any major hitch. When it becomes a reality, it will stand beside the Colombo port, which serves as a major transshipment hub for India. A Chinese company has got Hambantota on lease for 99 years along with associated land of 15,000 acres. More importantly, Sri Lanka is a member-country of the Belt and Road Initiative.
• Notwithstanding an argument by some international experts that economic ties with China are driving Sri Lanka into a “debt trap”, the bilateral relationship on the economic front is only becoming stronger. According to the 2018 annual report of the Central Bank of Sri Lanka, imports from China accounted for 18.5%, just a little less than the 19% from India.
• On the other hand, India cannot claim to have accomplished much in the Sirisena years, despite its “neighbourhood first” policy since May 2014. Apart from clinching a joint venture deal in May with Japan and Sri Lanka to develop the East Container Terminal at the Colombo Port, India cannot boast of having taken up any major infrastructure project in Sri Lanka.
• Not much is known about the status of a project to renovate the Kankesanthurai harbour in the Northern Province, for which India provided over $45 million in early 2018.
• There seems to be little progress in India’s proposals to develop the Palaly airport in the North, (where commercial flight services in a limited way are expected to be launched shortly) and acquire a controlling stake in the Mattala Rajapaksa International Airport. And for all practical purposes, the Economic and Technical Cooperation Agreement, an improved version of the existing bilateral Free Trade Agreement, has been shelved.
• In recent years, only a couple of social sector projects of the Indian government — building 60,000 homes for Tamils of the civil war-torn Northern and Eastern Provinces as well as those in the hill country region, and the provision of ambulance services all over the island — gathered momentum. Both these are being carried out using grants of the Indian government.
• In July, an agreement was signed to upgrade a key railway segment, connecting the north and the south, at $91 million.
• However, given its potential and willingness to do more in development cooperation, India cannot remain satisfied with such a modest track record. When Mr. Wickremesinghe visited New Delhi about a year ago, Prime Minister Narendra Modi expressed concern over delays in projects proposed by India.
• The joint development of an oil storage facility in Trincomalee is one such project which has been discussed for years. What can be a matter of consolation for New Delhi is that Colombo, about a year ago, reversed a decision to award a $300-million housing project, meant for the North, to Beijing.
• Stronger ties
• China-funded infrastructure projects in Sri Lanka may look great, but India-Sri Lanka ties are deeper and more complex. As Mr. Modi said, “In good times and bad, India has been and will always be the first responder for Sri Lanka.” India’s assistance during the 2004 tsunami and Mr. Modi’s visit to Colombo in June (the first foreign dignitary to do so) in the aftermath of the Easter Sunday attacks show India’s sincerity of approach.
• Despite these deep ties, it is true that India and Sri Lanka have seen some unpleasantness in bilateral relations in contemporary times. The anti-Tamil pogrom of 1983 dragged India into the Sri Lankan Tamil question. Events such as the withdrawal of the Indian Peace Keeping Force in March 1990 and the assassination of former Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi in May 1991 made New Delhi adopt a “hands-off approach” towards Colombo till the final phase of the civil war. In the last five months of the war that ended in May 2009, India repeatedly conveyed to Sri Lanka that the rights and welfare of the civilian population should not get enmeshed in hostilities against the LTTE. But this was not considered sufficient by protagonists of the proscribed organization and some others who have been accusing the Indian government of having played a role in the LTTE’s defeat.
• However, with all their shortcomings, the Rajiv Gandhi-Jayawardene Accord of 1987 and the 13th Amendment to the Sri Lankan Constitution, envisaging devolution of powers for provinces, still provide a solid framework to address the ethnic question. Apart from a political settlement, the Northern and Eastern provinces, which account for less than 10% of Sri Lanka’s GDP, require economic development as there are signs of the youth there getting distracted from the pursuit of greener pastures. The Indian government is willing to walk the extra mile in this area, but what is wanting is a proper response from the Tamil political leadership.
• When Sri Lanka gets a new President in two months, India must sit with that leader not just to get expeditious approvals for all the pending infrastructure projects but also contribute to a holistic development of Sri Lanka’s youth.
• Also, New Delhi should sustain its interest on developmental issues concerning the hill country Tamils, regarded as the most backward in Sri Lanka.
• It will also be worth making one more attempt to encourage the voluntary repatriation of nearly 95,000 refugees who live in Tamil Nadu back to Sri Lanka. As a step towards this direction, the authorities should resume ferry services between Talaimannar and Rameswaram at the earliest.
• As once stated by the High Commissioner of India to Sri Lanka, Taranjit Singh Sandhu, “Our aid is not to raid or invade”. A benign and comprehensive approach, backed by the sincerity of purpose, will not only earn India greater respect of Sri Lankans, but also send a message to other international players about the strength of its ties with Sri Lanka.

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