Daily Hindu Editorials

💥The TMC and the TRS would like a third front, but it can only be a post-poll coalition A third front is, by definition, destined for the third place. In its very formation, such a coalition concedes the dominance of the other two players. When Telangana Chief Minister K. Chandrashekar Rao mooted a non-BJP, non-Congress ‘federal’ front, he was already defining the alliance negatively, in terms of its opponents rather than as a coming together of like-minded parties. No wonder he found ready support from West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee, whose Trinamool Congress is fighting the Left and the Congress on one side, and the BJP on the other. A coalition put together on such a loose foundation may not find much resonance among voters nationally. Indeed, in India’s political history, the only instances when non-Congress, non-BJP coalitions came to power were in the ninth and eleventh Lok Sabhas. In each case, the governments were supported from the outside by either the Congr...

💥Colombia’s parliamentary vote highlights the danger to the truce with the FARC Colombia’s presidential election, due in May 2018, will have a bearing on the fragile peace accord of 2016 that ended one of the longest civil wars in history. The result of the parliamentary election held this month has framed the stiff challenge the pro-peace parties face. The accord between the Colombian security forces and the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) had won President Juan Manuel Santos the Nobel Peace Prize; it is to his credit that the government managed to implement the accord in bits and pieces despite unremitting hostility from the right-wing opposition led by former President Álvaro Uribe. Now, in the March 11 parliamentary vote, Mr. Uribe’s Democratic Centre Party has emerged as the largest bloc in the Senate with 19 seats. Two other right-wing parties, Radical Change and Conservative Party, finished second and third with 16 and 15 seats, respectively. In all, the ant...

💥The general secretary of the CPI(M) on why the party lost in Tripura and the road map for the 2019 Lok Sabha elections Earlier this month, the Communist Party of India (Marxist) lost the Assembly elections in Tripura, where it held power continuously for 25 years, to the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). The result, which leaves the party ruling only in Kerala now, was “unexpected”, says Sitaram Yechury, the general secretary of the CPI(M). Mr. Yechury examines the reasons for the surprise defeat; speaks of the struggles that led to the successful farmers’ rally in Maharashtra that was organised by the All India Kisan Sabha, the party’s peasant wing; and talks about the disagreements within the CPI(M) on what its political line should be for the 2019 Lok Sabha elections. Excerpts: 👉Did the CPI(M) not foresee a shift in its vote base in Tripura? As far as we are concerned, it was an unexpected result. Tripura became the number one literate State [in 2013, ahead of Kerala]. ...

💥Why did the court extend the deadline on linking Aadhaar to various services, but refuse to grant one for welfare plans? Last year, before a nine-judge bench of the Supreme Court in K.S. Puttaswamy v. Union of India, the Central government posited a frightening thesis. The Constitution, it argued, does not recognise a fundamental right to privacy. One of the main planks of this submission revolved around a notion that privacy was a purely elitist concern, that a liberty of this kind, whenever and wherever it can be promised, will always be overridden by the government’s duties in a welfare state. The court, however, decidedly thought otherwise. Indeed, its categorical rejection of the government’s arguments was a cause for much celebration. The court showed us, at least in theory, that it was willing to treat every citizen with equal dignity, care and respect, that the inviolability of rights was not conditional on a person’s position in society. 👉Protecting privacy “T...

💥Business-as-usual approaches to water security are no longer sufficient As World Water Day draws closer (March 22), this year’s World Water Development Report makes it clear that nature-based solutions — which are also aligned with the principles and aims of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development — can offer answers to our most pressing water-related challenges. Business-as-usual approaches to water security are no longer viable. Nature-based solutions hold great promise in areas which also include sustainable food production, improved human settlements, access to drinking water supplies and sanitation, water-related disaster risk reduction, and helping to respond to the impact of climate change on water resources. 👉Water hotspots The water-related challenges we face today are immense. The world’s population is expected to increase from 7.6 billion (2017) to between 9.4 and 10.2 billion people (2050), with two-thirds of them living in cities. UN estimates are ...

👇How to reduce the spread of fake news Fake news, also known as false news, has been a much-discussed phenomenon since the epochal Brexit referendum and the election of Donald Trump as U.S. President, yet has resurfaced in a major way in the past week with news of the Facebook-Cambridge Analytica data crisis. This crisis has raised troubling questions about the harvesting of the personal data of millions, and their use in influencing those two defining political events of 2016. A recent article in Science analyses the prevalence of false news and delves into the reasons for its proliferation. The results of the research, which studied 126,000 stories tweeted by approximately three million people more than 4.5 million times between 2006 and 2017, might leave cynics unsurprised: The MIT researchers found that false news spreads “farther, faster, deeper, and more widely” than true news. Yet what might surprise even cynics is that this difference was not due to bots and automato...

🏥The National Medical Commission Bill seeks to make structural changes in an exploitative health-care system Even as the spotlight shifts to a “maha-panchayat” of doctors under the Indian Medical Association getting ready later this month to challenge the National Medical Commission (NMC) Bill, 2017 (now before a parliamentary standing committee), it is pertinent to look at the Bill’s highlights. Article 47 of the Constitution makes it clear that the state is duty-bound to improve public health, but India continues to face a health crisis, with an absolute shortage of and an inequitable presence of doctors and over-burdened hospitals. Although India has 10 lakh medical doctors, it needs 3,00,000 more in order to meet the World Health Organisation standard of the ideal doctor-population ratio. There is an 81% shortage of specialists in community health centres (CHC), the first point of contact for a patient with a specialist doctor. Those most affected by this are poor and ru...