Current Affairs: National - Major Issues 25 Aug to 25 Sept 2010

CAG Weekly
(Current Affairs & GK)
By Om Prakash (Goldy sir)

AFPSA related

• AFSPA dilution postponed
• The Cabinet Committee on Security (CCS) put off plans to partially revoke the Armed Forced Special Powers Act (AFSPA), following fresh violence in the Kashmir Valley over alleged desecration of Koran in the US.
• It was of the view that larger consensus was required on the ‘way forward’ and the government announced convening of an all-party meeting in the Capital on Wednesday.
• The proposal for a makeover for AFSPA still looks a tough task as the Army continues to maintain that “special laws are needed to tackle a special situation.” With paramilitary forces and the police failing to contain the situation that seems to be going worse, a section of the CCS was of the view that the government should not do anything that would sap the morale of the Army. “The Army is needed to maintain some semblance of order in the chaos-ridden Valley,” said a leader during the meeting.
• AFSPA, criticism & need
• The Armed Forces (Special Powers) Act has come in for widespread criticism in Jammu and Kashmir, Manipur and other parts of the northeast because of the human rights abuses that have come to be associated with its operation.
•  So strong is the sentiment against AFSPA in Kashmir that in recent months Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, Union Home Minister P. Chidambaram and Jammu and Kashmir Chief Minister Omar Abdullah have all spoken of the need to re-examine the law. The Army, on the other hand, says this is unnecessary.
• The Army Chief, General V.K. Singh, has gone so far as to say that the demand for the dilution of AFSPA is being made for “narrow political gains.”
• On paper, AFSPA is a deceptively simple law. First passed in 1958, it comes into play when the government declares a particular part of the northeast (or Jammu and Kashmir under a parallel 1990 law) a “disturbed area.” Within that area, an officer of the armed forces has the power to “fire upon or otherwise use force, even to the causing of death, against any person who is acting in contravention of any law or order for the time being in force in the disturbed area prohibiting the assembly of five or more persons or the carrying of weapons or of things capable of being used as weapons or of fire-arms, ammunition or explosive substances.”
• Criticism- giving soldiers the “right to kill” , support- AFSPA's principal flaw. After all, if a ‘law and order' situation has arisen which compels the government to deploy the Army, soldiers have to be allowed to use deadly force. Even a private citizen has the right to kill someone in self-defence, though the final word on the legality of her or his action belongs to the courts. Similarly, a civilised society expects that the use of deadly force by the Army must at all times be lawful, necessary and proportionate.
• Here, the Act suffers from two infirmities: the requirement of prior sanction for prosecution contained in Section 6 often comes in the way when questions arise about the lawfulness of particular actions. Second, AFSPA does not distinguish between a peaceful gathering of five or more persons (even if held in contravention of Section 144 of the Criminal Procedure Code) and a violent mob. Firing upon the latter may sometimes be justified by necessity; shooting into a peaceful assembly would surely fail any test of reasonableness.
• Leaving this issue aside, however, it is important to recognise that AFSPA does not give an officer the unqualified right to fire upon and cause the death of any person in a Disturbed Area.
• At a minimum, that person should have been carrying weapons or explosives. The shooting of an unarmed individual, and the killing of a person in custody, are not acts that are permissible under AFSPA. Force is allowed in order to arrest a suspect but the fact that the Act authorises the use of “necessary” rather than “deadly” force in such a circumstance means the tests of necessity and proportionality must be met.
• Over the years that AFSPA has been in operation, the Army has opened fire countless times and killed hundreds, if not thousands, of people. Whenever those killed have been armed insurgents or terrorists, there has been little or no public clamour against the Act. It is only when the armed forces violate the provisions of the law and indulge in the unlawful killing of persons — especially unarmed civilians — that voices get raised against AFSPA. The protests in Manipur in 2004 reached a crescendo because of the death in custody of Th. Manorama and scores of others like her. In Kashmir, sentiments against the Armed Forces Act got inflamed because of fake encounter incidents like Pathribal and Macchhil.

Caste census
1. Caste census next year

• The Centre proposes to conduct caste census as a stand-alone exercise between June and September 2011, three months after completion of Census 2011.
• A recommendation for conducting a full caste census was made by the group of ministers constituted to look into the question of including caste as one of the parameters for Census 2011. It will come up for clearance at the Cabinet meeting on Thursday.
• As per the GoM’s recommendations, the caste census form will enlist the name, age and other personal details of the respondent, besides the caste he/she quotes. The caste will be entered purely as per the claims of the respondents, and no verification will be done at the enumerator’s level.
• The data will then be tabulated to arrive at the caste composition of the country on the basis on individual claims. The Census Commission will then publish these results of the caste census in a report. 

2. Caste census will encourage reservation politics'

• Activists spearheading a campaign against the caste-based census here on Sunday opposed the Union Government's decision to collect the caste data in a separate exercise in June next year fearing that it would encourage “reservation politics” and give rise to renewed demands for splitting the quota for sub-castes.
• Academicians, former judges and social activists deliberating on the issue at a symposium organised by Nagrik Parishad here received support from veteran Hindi journalist Ved Pratap Vedik, who has launched “Sabal Bharat” and “Meri Jati Hindustani” (my caste is Indian) campaigns against the caste-based census.
• What's the sense of it?
• The central argument in favour of caste enumeration has a plausible ring to it. Given the strong, if complex, correlation between caste and socio-economic status, the exercise seems to offer the promise of yielding relevant data so that social and economic disparities can be more accurately targeted by policy.
• On closer analysis, the advantage turns out to be largely illusory. In fact, the political demand for reviving the colonial practice of caste enumeration — given up by independent India except for the Scheduled Castes and the Scheduled Tribes — has been driven less by ameliorative ideals than by expediency and self-serving, divisive political agendas.
• At best, fresh caste enumeration can provide only marginal benefits because, as sociologist Nandini Sundar points out, it holds out only an “illusory promise of formal employment.” The long-term societal benefits of reservation — in terms of making a constitutionally sanctioned statement against social inequality and actually providing educational and economic opportunity to historically and socially disadvantaged or oppressed communities — are there for everyone to see.
• But with the majority of India's workforce languishing in the informal sector and the state's role in providing jobs declining over the past two decades, it is clear that reservation is becoming less and less potent as a countervailing force.
• But the objections to the Cabinet's nod for a “focussed,” standalone house-to-house caste headcount between June and September 2011 are not only political-ideological.

Constitution Bench to hear petitions against RTE Act

• A five-judge Constitution Bench of the Supreme Court will hear a batch of petitions filed by several private unaided and minority schools challenging the government's new Right to Education Act, 2009, which guarantees free and compulsory education for all children between 6 and 14 years of age in the country.
• Under this law, every child aged 6 to 14 shall have the right to free and compulsory education in a neighbourhood school till elementary education.
• The petitioners — the Society for Unaided Private School of Rajasthan, the Forum of Minority Schools and others — contended that the Act had included all sorts of schools within its ambit in violation of the law. “The Act is violative of the fundamental right of private unaided schools enshrined under Article 19(1)(g) of the Constitution and the minority schools enshrined under Articles 29 and 30 of the Constitution.”
• Every unaided and minority school will now have to admit without any choice any child who comes from its neighbourhood. This would compel poor children to study in bad schools in their locality. The Act did not confer any such right on children aged below six. They said the Act “directing schools to provide free and compulsory education to 25 per cent students violated the petitioners' fundamental right to establish and administer the educational institution under Article 30 (1).

Rajya Sabha passes bill for voting rights to NRIs

• The Rajya Sabha on Monday passed a bill that seeks to amend the Representation of the People Act to provide special provisions for citizens of India residing outside the country. The Representation of the People (Amendment) Bill, 2010, seeks to provide that every citizen of India whose name is not included in the electoral roll and who has not acquired the citizenship of any other country and who is absenting from his place of ordinary residence in India owing to his conditions such as employment, education, shall be entitled to have his name registered in the electoral roll in the constituency in which his place of residence is mentioned in his passport. The bill says that the central government, after consulting the Election Commission of India, will specify the time within which nonresident Indians shall be registered in the electoral rolls and the procedure to do so.

The troubles and travails of the differently abled

• Take a look at this news report which shows how the differently abled are getting a raw deal at every stage, starting with the way they are counted.
• The differently-abled account for 5-7% of India’s population in the age group of 6-14 years, but they make up only 0.4% of its workforce.  The point is that the figures relating to their census are suspect.  An advanced country like Australia has reportedly about 14% of its children identified as disabled, while that number for us in India is a paltry 2.1%.  A World Bank study done in 1999 had estimated that 6-10% of children in India are born disabled.
• Civil society activists say various attempts by the government to identify and enumerate the differently-abled in the 6-14 years bracket have all been exercises in under-reporting — in the region of 55-70% — because of their restrictive definition of ‘disability’.
• India included disability in the census for the first time in 2001, based on the seven disabilities listed in the Persons with Disabilities Act, 1995. According to the 2001 count, the latest available, there were 4.3 million differently-abled children in the age group of 6-14 years.
• The last documented employment survey of the differently-abled in India Inc was done by the National Centre for Promotion of Employment for Disabled People in 1999. The survey, which looked at the workforce composition of the top 100 companies by size at the time, paints a dismal picture. The differently-abled made up just 0.4% of the workforce; 0.28% in the private sector and 0.54% in the public sector.
• Recently, as part of the Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan (SSA), the government programme that aims to give primary education to all, the human resource development (HRD) ministry asked the states to count the number of differentlyabled (education is a state subject). The ministry broadened the definition of disability to include four more conditions stated under the National Trust Act, 1999, notably autism and cerebral palsy.
• Yet, last month, when a parliamentary committee revealed the ministry’s findings, the 4.3 million figure had shrunk to 3 million. Each state had its own definition of disability. In addition, parents, especially in rural India, underreported disability in their household in the census. “There is a social stigma,” says Renu Addlakha, a senior fellow with the Centre for Women’s Development Studies.
• If they are not counted as differently-abled, they are not recognised as differently-abled. If they are not recognised as differently-abled, they either do not go to mainstream schools or the schools don’t adjust their learning methods to help them blend in. If they are unable to blend in, they are not job-ready. If they are not job-ready, organisations are reluctant to employ them. It all starts from counting right, which, experts say, the government is getting wrong time and again.

Bill on gender equality in guardianship gets assent

• President Pratibha Patil has given assent to the Personal Laws (Amendment) Bill, which aims at bringing about gender equality in guardianship under the Guardian and Wards Act and in the matter of adoption under the Hindu Adoptions and Maintenance Act.
• Under the Guardians and Wards Act, the new legislation would amend clause (b) of Section 19.
• Till now, under its clause, courts could appoint someone as a guardian for a minor if the father is unfit to be a guardian, even if the mother is fit to take the role. The amendment changes this. Now the mother will also be able to be the guardian, if the father is unfit.
• In the Hindu Adoptions and Maintenance Act, the law amends Sections 8 and 9.
• Till now, only a man can adopt a child or give a child in adoption, with the consent of his wife. The amendment allows a woman also to adopt a child or give a child in adoption with the consent of her husband. The amendment would be of benefit particularly to those women, who are separated from their husbands or are in the midst of a lengthy battle for divorce to adopt a child.

EVMs dispute
1. Why are EVMs good?

• EVMs not only have reduced the time to declare results but also have dramatically improved the overall conduct of elections in the country.
• EVMs have eased the voting process, simplified the election logistics, brought down the cost of transportation — as compared to that for paper ballots, reduced the count of invalid votes and put a check on bogus voting.
• Further, randomised assignment of EVMs to polling stations, customised arrangement of party/candidates on the EVM in order of their filing of valid nominations, a limit on votes that an EVM can capture per minute and on number of votes that it can hold — all have made the EVM-based elections healthier and far more reliable than polls using paper ballots.

       2. All-party meet to debate EVMs, money power, paid news

• The Election Commission will soon convene an all-party meeting to discuss among other things, the use of money power during polls, paid news and the functioning of electronic voting machines (EVMs).
• Chief Election Commissioner S.Y. Quraishi, who announced this here while briefing journalists on the Bihar Assembly poll dates, made it clear that EVMs were functioning “satisfactorily.”
• On the demands of some Opposition parties that the EVMs could have a “paper trail” to further make it fool-proof, he said for this a change in the basic design of the machine was required. Anyway the subject would be on the agenda of the political parties during the all-party meeting, he said.
• A set of guidelines will be followed to eradicate the menace of paid news and this will be enforced during the Bihar polls.
• Mr. Quraishi said the commission had issued a new set of instructions regarding the first level check of EVMs in Bihar. A two-stage randomisation of EVMs will be made. In the first, all the EVMs stored in the district storage centre will be randomised by the District Election Officer in the presence of the representatives of the recognised political parties for constituency-wise allocation.
• After the EVMs in a constituency are prepared for polling by the Returning Officer and the ballot units are fitted with papers, the EVMs will again be randomised to decide the actual polling stations in which they will be ultimately used. The second stage randomisation will be done in the presence of observers and candidates or their election agents.
• To a question, the Commission's legal counsel S.K. Mendiratta said as per the new legislation enacted recently, the publication/telecasting/broadcasting of opinion and exit polls would be banned from closure of campaign hours for the first phase of Bihar poll (ie. 3 p.m. from October 19) to closure of polling hours in the last phase (November 20).

3.Congress Core Group split on withdrawal of Armed Forces Act

• The meeting took cognisance of Chief Minister Omar Abdullah's repeated requests that the AFSPA be either amended or partially withdrawn, a position that has backing in the Union government only from Home Minister P. Chidambaram.
• Defence Minister A.K. Antony, on the other hand, strongly opposed its withdrawal. Sources added that the majority view at the meeting was that the government could not afford to antagonise the Army.
• To Mr. Abdullah's request that the AFSPA should be withdrawn from four districts, it was pointed out that the Army was not present in the districts of Srinagar, Jammu, Samba and Ganderbal.
• However, these sources added, the government is considering some other measures including compensation for the families of the 69 civilians killed by security forces in the last three months, jobs and rehabilitation for surrendered militants and release of arrested youth and withdrawal of stone throwing cases.