Daily Hindu Editorials

India is one of the great repositories of languages — we need a notion of heritage to save them One of the tragedies of modern culture is that while all societies mourn the dead, few have mourning rituals for the death of a species, or the disappearance of a language. Modernity needs a mourning wall to bemoan the death of a language or the missingness of a seed. In fact, the collective death of cultures as genocide, extermination and extinction have few rituals of memory, few moments of commemoration. Death of a culture The death of a language in particular has a particular poignancy. When a language dies, a way of life dies, a way of thinking disappears, a connection between word and world is lost. Often, today, we mourn the death of the last speaker, treating him as a vestige of an entire past. Newspapers often report the death of a last tribal speaker, scarcely mentioning the death of a culture that preceded it. There is a hypocrisy and ambivalence which captures modernity’s a...

It’s not the syllabus that burdens children, but our cramming-driven examination system There’s a scene in the film Amadeus where Austrian Emperor Joseph II, looking to stall a promotion for Wolfgang Mozart, commends him on the beautiful music he’d composed for a play. The piece was “brilliant and strikingly original”, except that there were “too many notes” and therefore needed to be cut, according to the emperor. “Which ones, your Majesty?” Mozart demanded to know leaving the emperor fumbling. Hopefully Human Resource Development Minister Prakash Javadekar will have planned out portions of the curriculum that need surgical strikes when he implements his plan of “halving” the school syllabus and know precisely what parts of the history, mathematics, science, Hindi syllabi need to be done away with. The magic wand? In a television interview last week, he claimed that the syllabus needed trimming as it had become as weighty as that for an undergraduate arts or commerce degree, an...

The Constitution Bench in the land acquisition case must show us that the court still respects rules of precedent Entrenched in our commitment to a rule of law is what lawyers describe as stare decisis. That is, in plain English, a promise to stand by things decided, to respect and honour precedent. Today, with the Supreme Court seized by a maelstrom of crises, this principle stands deeply undermined. At first, the latest clash between judges on the court might strike us as a simple contretemps over theories of legal interpretation. But the consequences here are enormous and are already being felt across the country. The Chief Justice of India, Dipak Misra, has now established a bench of five judges, which he will head, and which will commence hearing arguments on March 6, to resolve the conflict. At stake is the court’s integrity. Provision in Land Act The issue itself emanates out of a divisive provision in the Right to Fair Compensation and Transparency in Land Acquisition, R...

The group of ministers assessing technology issues related to the Goods and Services Tax regime has proposed rolling out on April 1 the e-way bill system to track inter-State movement of goods above the value of ₹50,000. A final decision on the launch of the system will now be taken by the GST Council at its next meeting. A plan to start it on February 1 had to be abandoned after the IT network to create the bills crashed in its first few hours after generating about five lakh bills. The government decided to defer its roll-out till the technical glitches, like those businesses faced while filing online returns on the GST Network initially after its July 1 roll-out last year, were removed. For intra-State goods movement, the government had said all States must launch their own e-way bill systems by June 1. Now the ministerial group headed by Bihar Finance Minister Sushil Modi has proposed that instead of bringing all States and Union Territories on board together, introducing intra-St...

Whether the arrest of Karti Chidambaram, son of former Union Minister P. Chidambaram, will result in some forward movement in a criminal investigation that has been going on for a long time remains to be seen. The action by the Central Bureau of Investigation comes as many as nine months after it registered an FIR, which raises the question about why it was necessary to seek his remand now. In its FIR of May 2017, the CBI accused Mr. Karti of being part of a conspiracy with the promoters of a media company to help them get around legal issues related to foreign direct investment. Details available suggest that the primary violations of FDI norms were allegedly committed by the companies involved, INX Media (P) Ltd. and INX News (P) Ltd. The Foreign Investment Promotion Board had cleared the inflow of ₹4.62 crore to INX Media. However, the company made a downstream investment in another company, INX News, which received ₹300 crore by allocating shares at a premium to investors. The FIP...

Will being put on the watch list force Pakistan to withdraw state support to terror groups? The Financial Action Task Force (FATF) that monitors countries on action taken against terror-financing and money-laundering has decided to place Pakistan back on its watch list, or “greylist”, from June. The decision is both appropriate and overdue, given Pakistan’s blatant violation of its obligations to crack down on groups banned by the Security Council 1267 sanctions committee that monitors groups affiliated to the Taliban (which originally included al-Qaeda affiliated groups), such as the Lashkar-e-Taiba, Jaish-e-Mohammed and the Haqqani network. Their leaders like Hafiz Saeed and Masood Azhar continue to hold public rallies and freely garner support and donations. In the process, both the LeT and JeM, which continue to praise and claim credit for terror attacks in India, have grown their bases in Pakistan, with fortress-like headquarters in Muridke and Bahawalpur that th...

Last November on the sidelines of the East Asia Summit in Manila, the Quadrilateral arrangement involving Australia, India, Japan and the U.S. saw a revival as officials exchanged notes on regional and global security. It has been a remarkable turnaround in the prospects of an arrangement which had collapsed a decade ago under the weight of Chinese démarches. In 2017 it was an assertive Beijing that brought the four Indo-Pacific powers together to manage the externalities arising out of the scale and scope of China’s rise. 🔹Challenging China Despite an initial meeting, there has been a range of questions on the viability of the Quad arrangement, and specifically on its agenda given that the grouping has often been wary of explicitly annoying the Chinese. But there are signs of emerging priority areas. Last week it was revealed that the four countries are working to establish a joint regional infrastructure scheme as an alternative to China’s Belt and Road Ini...

Insurance law must be revisited to remove unreasonable exclusions in health policies The Delhi High Court’s order striking down a discriminatory exclusion clause in a health insurance policy, and upholding the claim of a patient, should have the broader effect of eliminating similar exclusions. The case involved a rare heart condition based on which United India Insurance Company rejected the claim, viewing it as a manifestation of a genetic disorder. By its very nature, such exclusion defeats the purpose of the health policy. But then, policies sold to individuals invariably contain a plethora of exclusions in the fine print, diminishing their practical value. They are heavily weighted in favour of the insurer. The court has struck a blow for the rights of the individual by holding that exclusion of the kind invoked does not just involve a contractual issue between the two sides, but the basic right to health flowing from Article 21 of the Constitution. It has gone further to in...