Nobel Peace Prize for Press Freedom; SC Scolds UP as Minister’s Son Does a Runner
Kashmir killings about Afghanistan, by proxy; India leads in multidimensional poverty; general index of science hosted in JNU; UK-India vaccination row ends; stubble burning down 83% ― so far
A newsletter from The Wire & Galileo Ideas | Contributors: MK Venu, Seema Chishti, Siddharth Varadarajan, Sidharth Bhatia, Sushant Singh and Tanweer Alam | Editor: Pratik Kanjilal
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Snapshot of the day
October 8, 2021
Pratik Kanjilal
In a blow for journalists fighting for freedom of the press everywhere, including in India, the Nobel Peace Prize for 2021 has gone to Maria Ressa of the Philippines and Dmitry Muratov for their “courageous fight for freedom of expression”.
Ressa edits the independent news website, Rappler, while Muratov’s newspaper, Novaya Gazeta, is described as the only independent media in Russia with national reach. Here’s an interview Ressa gave in May this year.
This year’s peace Nobel is the first time journalists have been selected since 1935, when Carl von Ossietzky won the prize. As editor of Die Weltbuhne, he had published stories which revealed Germany’s secret post-war rearmament programme. That was before the Nazis came to power; he ended up in prison when Hitler seized power in 1933 and died in jail in 1938.
The 2021 literature Nobel Prize winner, Tanzanian-born novelist Abdulrazak Gurnah, is the first black awardee after 1993, and is also editor of the Cambridge Companion to Salman Rushdie. The prize was instituted in 1901 but has gone to writers from Africa (5), Asia (7) or Latin America (6) and the Caribbean (2) only 20 times.
“Just as George Floyd’s killing by a Minneapolis police officer reflected America’s deep-rooted problems of racial inequality and police violence, the barbarity in Assam is a window into India’s growing culture of hatred, violence and impunity,” the Financial Times writes. “India never fully recovered from the 1947 Partition along religious lines, and communal prejudices run deep. In the past, political leaders sought to dampen animosities with public campaigns stressing communal harmony and unity in diversity. But the ruling BJP — and the rightwing Hindu nationalist organisations at its base — are fanning old hatreds,” the newspaper reports. The Organisation of Islamic Cooperation has also spoken on the issue.
Facebook is on the back foot after a whistleblower testified to the US Senate about how, for a few dollars more, the platform permitted divisive material in India ― also, because it did not have people scanning Hindi and Bangla content. Frances Haugen told the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), “RSS users, groups and pages promote fear-mongering, anti-Muslim narratives targeted pro-Hindu populations with V&I (violence and inciting) intent.”
Kashmirwallah reports that the CRPF shot dead a civilian in Anantnag yesterday evening when a vehicle driver “failed to stop”. Former chief minister Mehbooba Mufti termed it “the start of a knee jerk reaction to what has transpired during the last two days. Disproportionate force has been used by CRPF which has resulted in this innocent civilian’s death.” Meanwhile, the government continues to acquire land and property by invoking the obsolete J&K Land Acquisition Act, which was repealed following the abrogation of Article 370. And it is still hard to assess what is driving the recent spate of civilian killings in Kashmir.
The unseemly India-UK vaccination row is over. From Monday, the UK will admit Indians fully vaccinated with Covishield or any other UK-recognised shot. India joins 36 new countries and territories, whose fully vaccinated citizens will also be treated the same as returning fully vaccinated UK residents.
Rajiv Nath, CMD of market leader Hindustan Syringes & Medical Devices, warns of a shortage of auto-disable syringes for Covid-19 vaccinations. Nath said the government had failed to order syringes in advance, despite reminders from the Association of Indian Medical Device Industry since April 2020.
Pakistan ISI chief Lt Gen Faiz Hameed, who was leading the back channel talks with India for nearly 12 months, has been made Peshawar Corps Commander. He was the only one of the four senior-most Lt Generals who could replace Army Chief General Qamar Javed Bajwa in November 2022, who had not commanded a corps.
The Indian Home Ministry will begin granting fresh tourist visas to visitors on chartered flights from October 15. Visas for regular flights will be available from November 15. The ban on foriegn tourists is being lifted after 18 months.
Hindu Sena activists overwrote the Akbar Road signboard in Delhi with ‘Samrat Hemu Road’. They spoke freely to a persistent reporter, but scooted when the police arrived.
The BJP has been crediting Modi for a reduction in left-wing extremism. Incidents have indeed fallen, finds a fact check, but declined far more in Manmohan Singh’s tenure.
Ashish Mishra absconding, father tutors jailers
The UP Police, shaken by the Supreme Court taking up the Lakhimpur Kheri killings, and seeing a groundswell of resentment building in the region, arrested two persons last night but only issued a “summons” for questioning to Ashish Mishra – such is the apparent clout of Union Minister of State for Home Affairs Ajay Mishra, whose son he is. Predictably, ‘munna’ has done a runner. He did not appear, and the police have tracked his phone to the Nepal border, and then to Uttarakhand.
“Do you normally just issue a summons when a person is wanted for murder?” the Supreme Court asked Harish Salve, counsel for Uttar Pradesh, during a hearing on Friday. In an extraordinary admission, Salve said that what "they (UP Police) have done is a hash" and should have done better. The court have given UP a long length of rope. The next date of hearing is October 20.
Yesterday, Mishra, who is Amit Shah’s deputy in the Union Home Ministry, inaugurated a national conference on prisons organised by the BPRD, a department of the Home Ministry. Media were excluded at the last minute. The irony of Mishra addressing 75 senior prison officers and saying that “the main challenge for reintegrating inmates into the mainstream of society is providing a safe environment to them,” was not lost on anybody.
Bharatiya Kisan Union spokesperson Rakesh Tikait, who had brokered peace between the administration and angry farmers, said that “officers are trying to bully the victims’ families”. “I want the officers to give us their bank account numbers and we will return the money they have given to the families of the slain farmers and the journalist,” he said. He stressed that he had “an agreement with the government that Ashish Mishra would be arrested, the minister would be suspended and the inquiry would be completed within a few days.”
The Samyukt Kisan Morcha platform of protesting farm unions will hold its general body meeting at Delhi’s Singhu border on October 8. The final rites for the dead will be performed that day, and a movement to “ensure justice” for them may follow.
India leads in multidimensional poverty
Five out of six multidimensionally poor people in India are from tribes or lower castes, according to UNDP’s Multidimensional Poverty Index and the Oxford Poverty and Human Development Initiative. The Scheduled Tribe group accounts for 9.4% of the population and is the poorest, with 65 million out of 129 million living in multidimensional poverty. Scheduled Castes account for 33.3%, and 94 million of 283 million live in multidimensional poverty.
Further, 27.2% of the Other Backward Class group ― 160 million of 588 million people ― live in multidimensional poverty, “showing a lower incidence but a similar intensity” compared with Scheduled Castes. The top five nations with people in multidimensional poverty are India (2015/16 data), with 381 millions, Nigeria (2018) with 93 million, Pakistan (2017/18) with 83 million, Ethiopia (2019) with 77 million and the Democratic Republic of Congo (2017/18) with 56 million.
The Long Cable
Kashmir killings are about Afghanistan ― But by proxy
Manoj Joshi
Five civilians have been killed in the Kashmir Valley in the past five days. Earlier in the week, a prominent Kashmiri Pandit businessman who had stuck it out through the worst decades of militancy was gunned down, along with a Bihari street food vendor and a taxi stand association president. On Thursday, two schoolteachers — a Kashmiri Sikh woman and a Hindu Jammu resident — were shot dead in Srinagar.
The killings are aimed at using the Taliban victory in Afghanistan to give new impetus to the separatist movement. They seek to undermine the government’s claim that the scrapping of Article 370 and removal of statehood have brought normalcy, and ensure the (half-hearted) official initiatives to resettle Kashmiri Pandits in the Valley and encourage external investment come to nought. But ultimately, they seek to terrorise the ordinary Kashmiri, suggesting that the perpetrators are working on behalf of Pakistan’s Inter Services Intelligence. Such killings have in the past been associated with the ISI’s style of operations in the Valley.
To say the attacks are terrorism may sound like stating the obvious, but it is not. For a variety of reasons, the government has found it convenient to label all militancy in Kashmir as “terrorism.” But this makes an eventual return to normalcy more difficult, because you should not negotiate with terrorists who kill unarmed civilians. Separatism and militancy, on the other hand, may require police action, but they must eventually be handled politically.
The problem is that the Modi government has decided not to negotiate with any shade of political opinion in Jammu and Kashmir, be it nationalist or ‘soft’ separatist. So it is easy to classify everyone as “terrorist” or “separatist”, kill some of them, clap others in jail and refuse to undertake political initiatives.
Are these developments related to events in Afghanistan? Yes and no. Militancy in J&K has its own trajectory, with no special relationship to Afghanistan. But there is another factor at play here — Pakistan. Then, as now, Islamabad sees developments in Afghanistan as something that could provide geopolitical wind to the sails of their Kashmir venture. In the 1990s, some Afghan mujahideen were sent in to stiffen up the Kashmiri insurgency, but they were not successful and were quickly eliminated.
But mayhem was created by Pakistani jihadis of the Lashkar-e-Tayyeba and Jaish-e-Muhammad, some trained in camps in Afghanistan. They were tough and brutal fighters directed by ISI, and executed horrific massacres of Hindus and Sikhs in J&K.
However, after the ceasefire of 2003, their numbers came down while India fenced the border and made it much more lethal to cross. This has paradoxically given new life to the separatist movement in the Valley, with local recruitment rising. However, many of them lack weapons, and ammunition is short.
Like it or not, the way out in Kashmir is political negotiation. The Modi government seems to have some realisation of this. But its handling of the situation is tangled with an ideological position which has given them, at best, a blinkered view of the Kashmir situation ― which continues to fester.
(Joshi is Distinguished Fellow, Observer Research Foundation)
Reportedly
Rajya Sabha MP Subramanian Swamy, Maneka Gandhi, Varun Gandhi and former central minister Chaudhary Birender Singh have been dropped from the BJP’s national executive. Union ministers Rao Inderjit Singh and Prahlad Patel, Suresh Prabhu, Dushyant Singh (son of former Rajasthan chief minister Vasundhara Raje), Vijay Goel, Vinay Katiyar and SS Ahluwalia are not on the new list while Union minister VK Singh is reduced to special invitee. Union Ministers Smriti Irani and Jyotiraditya Scindia were among those inducted. Swamy has removed references to the BJP from his Twitter bio. His campaign on the 2G scam and pervasive corruption had helped to bring the BJP to power. Now, being discarded could have equally interesting consequences. Yesterday, the Supreme Court asked the Reserve Bank of India to consider his petition on revamping guidelines on soaring NPAs of banks.
HC seeks affidavit on Darrang tragedy
The Gauhati High Court has directed the Assam government to file a detailed affidavit on the September 23 eviction drive in Darrang, where two people were killed in police firing. Two PILs were heard – one filed by leader of the Opposition Debabrata Saikia of the Congress, and another created by the court taking suo motu cognizance of the incident. Chief Justice Sudhanshu Dhulia and Justice Soumitra Saikia said, “It is a tragedy. Lives were lost. Khun jameen par gir gaya (blood spilled on the ground).” The court asked the state if it believes the National Rehabilitation Policy is not applicable in Assam.
Prime number: 83%
That’s the percentage drop in incidents of paddy stubble burning between September 15 and October 5 across India, with Punjab and Haryana seeing a considerable slump, compared to last year. How far this trend will hold is uncertain, since excessive rains in September have delayed the paddy harvest in several states.
Forces open up to women
Days after the induction of women in the NDA, the Supreme Court permitted women candidates to appear in the examination for the Rashtriya Indian Military College, Dehradun. The examination will be held on December 18. The court said that the Centre had walked a mile, but now must walk a step ahead. Sainik School Amaravathinagar inducted its first batch of girl cadets into Class VI as boarders for the academic year 2021-22.
Deep Dive
The ‘General Index’ was released yesterday. California nonprofit Public Resource has created this master index to scientific journals ― 4.7 terabytes of compressed data. The searchable list of research and other papers hosted at JNU is free to mine and reuse. In 2019, Nature had reported on “a giant data store quietly being built in India” that could make vast swathes of science available for computer analysis.” Vinton Cerf, co-originator of the TCI/IP protocol on which the Internet runs, heads the list of supporters.
Decibels in the public interest
The Delhi government yesterday permitted organisers of Ramlila, Durga Puja, Dussehra and other religious functions to use loudspeakers between 10 pm and midnight up to October 16 “in the public interest”.
Cauvery polluted by drugs, metals
A team of researchers from IIT-Madras have found that the Cauvery and its tributaries are polluted by a range of contaminants including pharmaceutically active compounds, personal care products, plastics, flame retardants, heavy metals and pesticides. The findings, which the team said are “alarming”, was published in the August issue of Science of the Total Environment.
Pharmaceutical contaminants included anti-inflammatories such as ibuprofen and diclofenac, anti-hypertensives (atenolol and isoprenaline), stimulants like caffeine, antidepressants such as carbamazepine, and antibiotics such as ciprofloxacin. There was significant contamination by the metalloid arsenic, and the metals zinc, chromium, lead and nickel. Freshwater intake points were loaded with pharmaceutical contaminants.
Op-Eds you don’t want to miss
All-weather frenemy Pakistan is too important ― and dangerous ― to ignore for the West. Talking to Pakistan may not be easy or pleasant, but it is necessary, says The Economist leader.
Rana Mitter writes that India need not simply rely on the confrontation of the Quad, or the desire to replace China as a market partner for other Asian countries. It also has the opportunity to take a cooperative diplomatic lead.
If a government employee installs a private fund that people subscribe to because he holds high public office, it would reek of corruption. But the highest public servant has done just that, and the people are supposed to trust him, writes Julio Ribeiro.
Himanshu writes that the farmer protest today has less to do with a demand for the laws’ withdrawal than broader concerns about the sustainability of farming and farm livelihoods. It has emerged as a larger protest.
India is sitting on a ticking bomb of non-communicable diseases due to consumption of ultra-processed foods, finds the Comprehensive National Nutrition Survey. It reveals that 56% of children aged 5-19 years run cardio-metabolic risks, writes Arun Gupta.
The Congress’s strategic shift indicates an attempt to regain ideological coherence and reconfigure its traditional social base, writes Zoya Hasan. The party which once claimed to represent all seems to have lost the support of most groups.
The Supreme Court’s assault on the right to protest is fundamentally undemocratic because the popular legitimacy of a law is not exclusively dependent on its constitutionality, writes Rangin Pallav Tripathy.
C Uday Bhaskar writes that a reality check about the quantity and quality of India’s air power ― the combat strength of the IAF will decline to 27 squadrons in five years and 19 in 10 years ― and the roles it can undertake should precede its disaggregation to theatre commands in the run-up to India@75.
How the British trade in opium remade the world: Ajai Sreevatsan writes that Thomas Manuel’s new book surveys the historical costs of mass opium addiction, and its troubling legacy in the 21st century.
Befuddled by the choices on offer and what they mean, Shoba Narayan writes on unpacking the diverse, emotive world of emojis.
Did Radhanath Sikdar Measure the Height of Mount Everest First? Rajesh Kochhar analyses the role played by the chief Indian computer at the Great Trigonometrical Survey in the 19th century and how he was likely diddled out of the credit by his English bosses
Listen Up
In this podcast, Salman Rushdie argues that the breakdown in old agreements about reality is now the most significant reality. “Look, we are in a tough time. I never thought that there would be a time when important things are being trivialised and trivial things have been made important, and when truth and lies are confused with each other, and when all of that has been weaponised,” he said. “[But] I think one of the characteristics of a free society is that we’re able to have the argument. Because in societies which are not free, it’s very hard to have the argument.”
Watch Out
A conversation with Anjum Altaf and Amit Basole, co-authors of Thinking With Ghalib: Poetry for a New Generation, which focuses “not on what Ghalib means but on what Ghalib makes us think of contemporary issues. It puts Ghalib to work and brings Ghalib to life.”
Over and Out
Chennai Super Kings pacer Deepak Chahar caused quite a stir when he proposed to his girlfriend Jaya Bhardwaj in the stands after the IPL 2021 match against Punjab Kings in Dubai yesterday. Chennai Super Kings reports that she said yes.
Meet Annie Varghese, the woman behind Kerala’s college of Olympians. Athletes Rosa Kutty, Jincy Philip, Manjima Kuriakose, Anju Bobby George and Bobby Alosyius are Olympians from Vimala College, which has also produced outstanding sportspersons in other disciplines.
As news gets around about the bid to change the name of Corbett park to Ramganga Park, some people are doing their best to draw more attention to who Jim Corbett was.
The reality of diminishing coin sizes tells its own story.
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