Daily Hindu Editorials

💥The RBI’s omnibus ban on a legitimate financing instrument is not the solution A month after the ₹12,800-crore letters of undertaking (LoUs) fraud at Punjab National Bank came to light, the Reserve Bank of India has decided to ban such instruments as well as letters of comfort issued by bankers to businesses for international transactions. While the government has been in firefighting mode, unleashing all investigative agencies to probe the fraud, this is the first major step by the central bank on the issue, apart from asking banks to ensure there are no slip-ups between their core banking systems and the SWIFT mechanism used for international money transfers. LoUs are among the most popular instruments to secure overseas credit by importers — known as buyers’ credit in banking parlance — because of their attractive pricing. It is estimated that overall, bank finance for imports into India is around $140 billion, of which over 60% is funded through such buyers’ credit. Natural...

💥More proof that propriety, protocol, punditry no longer hold sway in the U.S. administration Even by his standards for unexpected diktats, U.S. President Donald Trump’s decision to fire his Secretary of State, Rex Tillerson, and replace him with CIA Director Mike Pompeo, came out of the blue. Mr. Tillerson, who was the CEO of ExxonMobil Corporation before taking up the role, did not agree with Mr. Trump on fundamental policy matters, the President said. This is widely seen as an allusion to Mr. Tillerson’s preference, contra-Trump, for diplomacy as a means of defusing the North Korean crisis. Also implied was a widening chasm between the two men on the merits of the Iran nuclear deal. With Mr. Tillerson’s departure, the number of senior officials exiting the Trump administration after a little more than a year has reached at least 24. Less than a week before the long-rumoured “Rexit”, White House Chief Economic Adviser Gary Cohn, formerly a Wall Street banker, quit his post ove...

💥India must work towards some understanding with Pakistan before the situation on the border spins out of control A little over two months into 2018, the violence on the Jammu and Kashmir (J&K) stretch of the India-Pakistan border has reached a new high: more than 633 ceasefire violations (CFVs) by Pakistan have been reported by New Delhi which have claimed the lives of 12 civilians and 10 soldiers. Many more have been injured and several civilian habitats along the border destroyed. Till the first week of March, Pakistan reported 415 CFVs by India which have claimed 20 civilian lives (there is no data on Pakistani military casualties). The calibre of weapons used on the border have also graduated from short-range personal weapons to 105 mm mortars, 130 and 155 mm artillery guns and anti-tank guided missiles. With the rising violence, casualties and upcoming elections in both countries, we may have a perfect recipe for escalation on our hands. The question we must ...

💢Finance Minister Arun Jaitley announces at a press conference on Thursday, March 1 that the Cabinet had approved the Fugitive Economic Offenders Bill, 2017. 👉Taking on fugitive economic offenders The Fugitive Economic Offenders Bill, 2018, which was introduced in the Lok Sabha this week, aims to provide for measures to deter fugitive economic offenders from evading the process of law in India. It is a deterrent for those offenders who continue to stay outside the jurisdiction of Indian courts. The larger objective of the proposed legislation is to “preserve the sanctity of the rule of law”. In its statement of objectives and reasons, the government refers to the “several instances of economic offenders fleeing the jurisdiction of Indian courts anticipating the commencement of criminal proceedings or sometimes during the pendency of such proceedings”. Fugitive businesspersons Vijay Mallya and Nirav Modi have resisted the jurisdiction of Indian courts. The absence of...

💥India needs to re-engage with its ally Russia, which is getting closer to China and Pakistan Through the vicissitudes of the past 70 years since Independence, Russia has been a time-tested ally of India. Since the Soviet era, both countries have shared such amicable relations that the U.S. and its allies often registered their suspicions about India being a part of the Soviet camp during the Cold War, despite New Delhi’s affirmations that it was a leader of the Non-Aligned Movement. Although India has traditionally sought to maintain a delicate balance between superpowers and refrained from groupism for its own advantage, in recent years this position appears to have shifted in favour of finding new allies, based on India’s self-perception as an emerging power in the global system, and its calculations about the changing alignments of power across the world. This change has, to an extent, fuelled India’s interest in joining the Quad. In parallel to these creeping chan...

👍Yes,👎 No, It's Complicated 👍 YES | 💭SUSHILA RAO 👉The right declared in ‘Common Cause’ extends to active euthanasia in circumscribed circumstances Yes, the operative term in the question being “is”, and not “should... be”. If passive euthanasia is a guaranteed fundamental right, a rigid “active” versus “passive” euthanasia distinction (APD) is analytically unsustainable. In Common Cause v. Union of India, the Supreme Court expounded the basis of its 2011 ruling in Aruna Shanbaug v. Union of India, which permitted “passive” euthanasia, including “involuntary” passive euthanasia for mentally incompetent patients, in certain terminal cases. Ruling that Article 21 of the Constitution guaranteed the “right to die with dignity”, the court also issued interim guidelines to enforce individuals’ living wills in case of future incompetence. 👉Active and passive Aruna and Common Cause have incorporated the judicial APD evolved primarily by U.K. courts. In popular di...

💥Will the Opposition now come together to field joint candidates against the BJP? The bypoll results in Uttar Pradesh and Bihar, taken together with those last month in Rajasthan and Madhya Pradesh, are suggestive of a pattern that the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) cannot afford to ignore. The party will not just have to reassess its ground game — and the impact of policies followed by its governments in the States and at the Centre — it will also have to seriously consider the criticism from its parent organisation, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, that those in power cannot afford to be arrogant. 👉Message in the numbers In 2014, 93 of the BJP’s 282 Lok Sabha seats came from U.P. and Bihar. This was a key reason why the BJP swung into action after it lost the Bihar Assembly elections in 2015 to ‘persuade’ Bihar Chief Minister Nitish Kumar’s Janata Dal (United), or JD(U), to return to the NDA fold. It cannot therefore afford any setbacks here if it hopes to return to pow...