Daily Hindu Editorials

👉Protecting constitutional values requires an independent judiciary. For this, three issues need attention👈 The Supreme Court, this past month, provided us with a useful reminder about its worth to our constitutional democracy. Its intervention in the imbroglio over government formation in Karnataka was flawless. The hearings conducted in the early hours of the morning may have been theatrical, but the court’s ultimate decision certainly helped avert a subversion of the Constitution. Yet, much as its decision here deserves appreciation, we must be careful not to allow any ascription of credit to veil the deeper wounds that afflict it, for a litany of problems continues to strike at the court’s independence. Three of these are especially salient. The first involves the rejection by the government of the collegium’s recommendation of K.M. Joseph, currently Chief Justice of the Uttarakhand High Court, for elevation to the Supreme Court. The second concerns the need for a syste...

👉The Central government must build politically on the cease-ops initiative in J&K👈 Home Minister Rajnath Singh’s statement offering talks to the Hurriyat and Pakistan puts a seal on a series of moves by the Centre that signal a softer Jammu and Kashmir policy after two particularly violent years. His offer came a week into the Centre’s suspension of operations, with the condition that terror must end. Just a day earlier, Army Chief General Bipin Rawat had suggested the ‘cease-ops’ plan could be extended. This in itself was significant, as he had earlier taken a very tough line. Last year, launching what he called “Operation All-Out”, General Rawat had said the Army would look “helter-skelter” everywhere for terrorists and anyone sympathising with them. Statistically, the hardline policy saw successes, as more than 200 militants were killed in the period after the death of Hizbul Mujahideen commander Burhan Wani in July 2016, which had set off a wave of violence in the Valley....

👉CSK may have been IPL’s oldest squad, but it was also its most formidable👈 At the end of the Indian Premier League, the victory of Chennai Super Kings has an air of familiar inevitability about it. The most consistent franchise since the IPL’s inception in 2008, CSK has played seven finals, including Sunday’s at Mumbai’s Wankhede Stadium. In those pivotal clashes, M.S. Dhoni’s men triumphed in three. Despite being suspended for two seasons — 2016, 2017 — following a betting scandal involving a team official, the new team wore a familiar look. All credit to skipper Dhoni who sported his signature unflappable cool as his team coasted to an easy victory, after some nail-biting finishes in earlier rounds. Right through the season the cameras trained on the CSK dugout showed a Dhoni who was undemonstrative even as he let his players display a gamut of emotions. The captain’s icy demeanour was an antidote to the frenzied twists of Twenty20 cricket. CSK was disadvantaged inasmuch as it...

👉In the case of non-violent women offenders, community service should be the default punishment👈 Much of the discourse on prison conditions stops short of a practical agenda for major reforms. While one reason cited is a paucity of resources, the other is about a mindset that those in jail do not deserve better. Except for a few studies done outside India, most of the material on the subject is superficial, to put it mildly. In prisons across the world, overcrowding, brutality, a lack of sanitation and unacceptable standards of health care are standard. There is also no liberal mindset anywhere to set the ball rolling on how we can introduce clemency in incarceration. This is cause for concern given the growing aggressive nature of public discourse on treatment of offenders. How can one ignore strident demands for harsher criminal penalties and a higher rate of incarceration? We see this happen in India where there appears to be blind public frenzy without a thought being...

👉Indebtedness shows no signs of abating as a result of the government’s flagship schem👈 The Pradhan Mantri Jan-Dhan Yojana (PMJDY), one of the flagship schemes of the present government, was launched in August 2014. The ‘J’ in JDY is the ‘J’ in ‘JAM’ (Jan Dhan-Aadhaar-Mobile) through which the Economic Survey of 2015 claimed that “every tear from every eye” could be wiped. As the Narendra Modi government enters its fifth year, a critical evaluation of the scheme is in order, especially since this is one of the schemes through which the government is trying to battle its anti-poor image. The recently released World Bank Global Findex data show that 80% of Indian adults now have a bank account, which is being celebrated as the success of the JDY. While the increase in the proportion of adults having bank accounts is indeed impressive (80% in 2017 from 53% in 2014), 48% of those who have an account in a financial institution made no withdrawal or deposit in the past one year. ...

👉An arms race consumes resources that could have been used in welfare👈 Earlier this month, India marked the 20th anniversary of the nuclear tests at Pokhran, which signalled its de facto status as the sixth nuclear power nation of the world. On May 28, 1998, just a fortnight after India’s tests, Pakistan responded with a similar nuclear test, marking its emergence as a rival nuclear power to India. On the occasion of this anniversary, while the development of South Asian nuclear capability has been analysed through the lens of India’s quest for nuclear power, it is also important to consider how the balance of strategic nuclear power has evolved over the past two decades. First, it is clear that Pakistan’s assertion of nuclear parity and India’s ‘no first use policy’ for its nuclear weapons provided Islamabad with the power of deterrence. ‘Deterrence’ in this context implies one side discouraging the other from undertaking an action by instilling a fear of disproportionat...

His interest in politics was driven by Periyar and Annadurai’s oratory and their fight for justice Karunanidhi: A Life in Politics, a new biography of the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam leader, tracks his political rise and years as Chief Minister of Tamil Nadu. The book talks of the people who influenced Mr. Karunanidhi, his literary bent of mind, and his complex relationship with supporter-turned-political rival M.G. Ramachandran and the impact that it had on the State’s politics. An excerpt from the book on his formative years: It was a 50-page book in Tamil, part of the syllabus, titled Panagal Arasar that caught the teenager’s fancy. Karunanidhi remembers that only he in the entire class knew that book by heart. This was his introduction to politics and political thought. Panagal Arasar was one of the founders of the Justice Party, which many see as the precursor to the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (DMK). With Periyar’s launch of the Self-Respect Movement in 1926, students acr...

Parties out of purview of RTI Act ( Polity) The Election Commission has said in an order that political parties are out of the purview of the Right to Information Act. This is contrary to the directive of the Central Information Commission (CIC) to bring six national parties under the law. Details:   The order came on the appeal of an RTI applicant seeking to know the donations collected by the six national parties which were brought under the ambit of the law by the CIC in June 2013. The Election Commission said that this is related to political parties and they are out of the purview of the RTI Act. They may submit information on donation/amount collected through electoral bonds in their contribution report for 2017-18 in the ECI, for which the due date is September 30. Six of the seven parties — the BJP, the Congress, the BSP, the NCP, the CPI and the CPI (M) — for which information was sought were brought under the RTI Act by a full Bench of the CIC on June 3, 201...