Daily Hindu Editorials

💥New Delhi and Islamabad must address the tit-for-tat harassment of each other’s envoys Regardless of the provocation or the sequence of events, there is an urgent need for India and Pakistan to address allegations of harassment of each other’s diplomats and interference in High Commission work. While surveillance of diplomats by intelligence agencies in New Delhi and Islamabad is not new, matters have escalated in the past month, and the treatment of diplomatic officials by both sides has dropped to new lows. The spark for this round of ‘tit-for-tat’ actions appears to be an incident in February, when alleged ISI agents roughed up Pakistani construction workers headed for the Indian mission’s new building site in Islamabad. While Pakistan’s foreign office claimed they did not have security clearance to enter the diplomatic zone, India saw it as an attempt to stop the work, adding that power and water connections were tampered with. Then, the Pakistan High Commission in Delhi cl...

💥The presence of plastics in drinking water must compel drastic action Plastics are now widely present in the environment, as visible waste along coastlines, in lakes and rivers, and even in the soil. The recent finding that microplastic particles are found even in ‘safe’ bottled water indicates the magnitude of the crisis. There is little doubt that the global production of plastics, at over 300 million tonnes a year according to the UN Environment Programme, has overwhelmed the capacity of governments to handle what is thrown away as waste. Microplastics are particles of less than 5 mm that enter the environment either as primary industrial products, such as those used in scrubbers and cosmetics, or via urban waste water and broken-down elements of articles discarded by consumers. Washing of clothes releases synthetic microfibres into water bodies and the sea. The health impact of the presence of polypropylene, polyethylene terephthalate and other chemicals in drinking water, ...

💥Voters have sent a loud message in the U.P. by-elections — the Congress has to read it right The results of the recent by-elections in eastern Uttar Pradesh have made it clear that the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) led by Narendra Modi is not invincible. The electors of Gorakhpur and Phulpur have shown his party the door, signalling that they are neither enamoured by what it has to offer by way of politics nor overawed of its grand success in the State Assembly elections of barely a year ago. They have bearded the proverbial lion in his den. It is now no longer inconceivable that the BJP may face the same fate elsewhere in the country in the parliamentary elections in 2019. 👉Secularism question However, for this to happen, the advisers of the main Opposition party, the Congress, must read this verdict. They must realise that it would hardly do to merely “promote secularism without giving the BJP the opportunity to label [it] anti-Hindu,” as a writer put it in this newsp...

💥How it went wrong for the U.S. in Afghanistan When the U.S. sent troops to Afghanistan in October 2001 after the September 11 terrorist attacks, the plan was to retaliate against al-Qaeda, take down the the Taliban regime which provided asylum to the al-Qaeda leadership, and install a friendly government in Kabul. But the war went on. After nearly 17 years, the government in Kabul is shaky, the Taliban controls much of the hinterlands, and al-Qaeda is operating from elsewhere. Much has been written about this war, exploring what went wrong for the Americans. Carlotta Gall’s The Wrong Enemy: America in Afghanistan, 2001-2014, Mark Mazzetti’s The Way of the Knife: The CIA, a Secret Army, and a War at the Ends of the Earth and Jeremy Scahill’s Dirty Wars: The World is a Battlefield are some of the notable books that deal with this topic. Gall, who covered the Afghan war for the New York Times, points a finger at Pakistan for the mess that Afghanistan is in today. Pakis...

💥Varying perceptions of political interests in Andhra Pradesh hastened the TDP-BJP break-up Andhra Pradesh Chief Minister N. Chandrababu Naidu is quite vocal in making it clear that he is among the senior-most politicians in the country, having just completed four decades in public life. As a shrewd politician he has kept his party, the Telugu Desam Party (TDP), afloat and politically relevant through changing times. Yet after he decided to pull out of the Bharatiya Janata Party-led National Democratic Alliance government and move a no-confidence motion against the Narendra Modi government over the Centre’s refusal to grant special category status (SCS) to Andhra Pradesh, he is being ridiculed as one who has waded into competitive politics with his younger political rival and YSR Congress Party (YSRCP) leader, Y.S. Jaganmohan Reddy, whom he considers a greenhorn. That seasoned leaders such as Mr. Naidu are forced to follow this course once again demonstrates that local polit...

💥To attract investment, Darjeeling must be kept free of agitations Having seized the reins of the State on the back of a violent land agitation, West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee has been at pains to shed the anti-industry label tagged to her since the Singur and Nandigram episodes. Little surprise then that the Trinamool Congress chief has been assiduously wooing industry ever since she entered office. The annual business jamborees have become slick, well-orchestrated events, with the occasional large presence of ministers of the Modi government and almost always a sizeable cohort of captains of industry. While projecting a pro-industry image has been an ongoing project for the State government, Ms. Banerjee’s urgency to host an investment summit last week in Darjeeling was quite a unique proposal. The fragile hill economy was badly jolted by last year’s 104-day shutdown due to a separatist agitation launched by the Gorkha Janmukti Morcha (GJM). The shutdown caus...

💥Britain’s politics and diplomacy are in turmoil after the attack on a Russian double agent When asked to defend his response in the U.K. Parliament to Prime Minister Theresa May’s condemnation of the “unlawful use of force” by the Russian state against Britain, Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn told a television channel last week, “What I was asking were questions... That’s what Oppositions are there for.” An appetite for scrutiny appeared to be severely lacking in the British establishment as Mr. Corbyn was excoriated by those within and outside his party for failing to immediately endorse Ms. May’s stance. Instead, he asked whether the government had responded to Russia’s requests for a sample of the nerve agent, and whether there still remained a possibility that Russia had “negligently lost control” of the military-grade nerve agent, which Britain believes was used against former double agent Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia. Tough rhetoric appeared to be the order of ...