“Enjoy the little things, for one day you may look back and realize they were the big things.”
Robert Brault
“छोटी छोटी बातों का आनंद उठाइए, क्योंकि हो सकता है कि किसी दिन आप मुड़ कर देखें तो आपको अनुभव हो कि ये तो बड़ी बातें थीं।”
रॉबर्ट ब्राल्ट
Tuesday, July 02, 2024
Quote of the Day July 2, 2024
What is Teesta Treaty?
In June 2023, when Sheikh Hasina, the Prime Minister of Bangladesh, paid a state visit to India, Prime Minister Narendra Modi said that a technical team would go to Bangladesh to talk about how to protect and control the Teesta River. The Teesta water-sharing pact has been a point of contention between India and Bangladesh for over a decade. This brought it back to the public’s attention.
India’s Stand on Teesta Water Sharing
After Modi’s speech, India’s Foreign Secretary Vinay Kwatra made it clear that the talks were more about controlling the flow of water in the Teesta than making deals to share water. While the central government agreed with this position, West Bengal’s Chief Minister, Mamata Banerjee, disagreed. She said that talks about the Teesta waters should not continue without the state’s participation. She was worried that sharing Teesta’s water would have bad effects on the people in north Bengal.
Background of the Teesta Dispute
The Teesta River is a big river that starts in Sikkim and flows into Bangladesh. It is important for farming and the environment. As part of the planned treaty from 2011, which was almost agreed upon by India’s UPA-II government, India would get 42.5% of the water and Bangladesh would get 37.5%. But the deal didn’t go through because Mamata Banerjee was against it, saying that it could be bad for West Bengal.
Political and Environmental Considerations
There are also political and environmental issues at play in the argument over the Teesta water-sharing plan. India’s hydroelectric projects and barrages in the river’s top catchment areas are thought to have slowed it down, which has hurt the environment and the people in Bangladesh who depend on it for their livelihoods. There are pressures on Bangladesh’s Awami League government to complete the treaty from within the country as well as from outside, such as China’s plans for large-scale dredging and infrastructure projects along the Teesta River.
Broader Implications and Future Perspectives
Managing and sharing Teesta’s waters is connected to problems of sustainability and working together in the region as a whole. Environmentalists and political leaders in India and Bangladesh are still trying to figure out how to handle resources, follow international law (The Helsinki Rules), and deal with the unique social and economic situations in their countries. The current talks, along with the need to renew the Ganga water sharing treaty, show how difficult it is to manage transboundary rivers in a way that is fair, long-lasting, and takes into account everyone’s needs.
Assam Witness Protection Scheme, 2024
The Assam Cabinet started the Assam Witness Protection Scheme, 2024 because witnesses in court cases are being threatened more and more. This action is in line with Section 398 of the Bharatiya Nagarik Suraksha Sanhita, 2023, and is meant to make evidence in court cases safer and more trusting.
Implementation of the Witness Protection Scheme
The plan lets witnesses ask for safety through a Competent Authority that is set up in each district. There is a District and Sessions Judge in charge of this authority, as well as the Head of Prosecution, an officer chosen by the District Magistrate, and the District Police Head. The method sorts witnesses into three groups, called A, B, and C, based on how dangerous they think the situation is.
Protection Measures and Funding
Protection tactics include trials that are recorded, putting in security systems at witnesses’ homes, and maybe even moving them temporarily. A State Witness Protection Authority will also create and oversee a special fund to help with these steps, making sure there are enough resources to protect witnesses.
Revisions in Transportation Penalties
Also, the Assam Cabinet has made important changes to the rules for transportation. To make things easier on people’s budgets, fines for riding a two-wheeler without the right paperwork have been removed. However, helmet laws are still in effect. The other way around, three-wheeled cars will get up to four warnings before they are fined for breaking the rules.
About Assam Witness Protection Scheme
The Assam government set up rules for the Assam Witness Protection Scheme in 2020 to keep witnesses in criminal cases safe from threats or harassment. As part of the plan, witnesses are kept anonymous, moved, given police protection, and given money if they need it. Based on risk levels, it tells the difference between the three types of threats and adjusts the security details accordingly. It also stresses that witness names should be kept secret, gives police agencies a few rules to follow, and includes monitoring and evaluation tools to see how well protection measures are working and make changes as needed.
What is CriticGPT?
CriticGPT is a powerful AI tool made using OpenAI’s GPT-4 model. It was made to make it easier for AI judges to find mistakes in ChatGPT code. One of the most important things this tool does to improve the accuracy and stability of code is to find bugs that human reviewers might miss.
Research and Development
A study paper called “LLM Critics Help Catch LLM Bugs” went into great detail about how CriticGPT was made. To improve the AI’s ability to find mistakes, researchers taught it with a dataset that only included purposefully wrong code. Because of this training, CriticGPT could find and report code errors more accurately. The study found that human annotators liked CriticGCOs given by CriticGPT more than notes made by human judges 63% of the time, especially when it came to finding mistakes related to LLM. This shows that the programming community is very open to AI-generated critical comments.
Innovations in Review Techniques
A new technique called “Force Sampling Beam Search” is used by CriticGPT to help human critics write better and more detailed reviews. This method also lowers the chance of “hallucinations,” which happen when AI makes or suggests mistakes that don’t exist or aren’t important. In CriticGPT, one of the most important benefits is that users can change how thoroughly errors are found. This gives you the freedom to find the right mix between finding real bugs and avoiding “error” flags that aren’t needed.
Limitations
CriticGPT has some problems, even though it has some good points. It mostly has trouble with long and complicated coding jobs because it was trained on ChatGPT responses that were pretty short. Another problem is that the AI doesn’t always find errors that are spread across multiple sections of code. This is a regular problem in software development. To sum up, CriticGPT is a big step forward in AI-assisted code review. It improves the code review process by mixing GPT-4’s features with advanced training and new methods. As with any tool, though, it has some flaws that make it less useful in more complicated code situations.
Economic & Political Weekly: Table of Contents
Why is Pride Month celebrated in June?
As the curtains fall on Pride Month this year, we reflect on its origins and evolution from a 1969 protest led by members of the LGBTQ community.
For more than 55 years, a major event in the United States has been credited for galvanising the LGBTQ+ (Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender and Queer) community as a collective, to demand political recognition and legal rights. Fast forward to 1999, when US President Bill Clinton officially gave June the status of “Gay and Lesbian Pride Month” to commemorate that event. Clinton had said, “Thirty years ago this month, at the Stonewall Inn in New York City, a courageous group of citizens resisted harassment and mistreatment, setting in motion a chain of events that would become known as the Stonewall Uprising and the birth of the modern gay and lesbian civil rights movement.” In 2009, President Barack Obama declared June as LGBT Pride Month and on June 1, 2021, President Joe Biden declared June LGBTQ Pride Month. As the curtains fall on Pride Month this year, we reflect on its origins and evolution from a 1969 protest.
What were the Stonewall riots?
Homosexuality was illegal in the 1960s and its solicitation was a criminally punishable offence in the US. Young LGBTQ people, often marginalised from society and rejected by their families, looked to gay bars and gathering spaces for a sense of acceptance and community. One such place was the Stonewall Inn in Greenwich Village, New York. It was regarded as a place of refuge for the homeless and frequented by gay men, lesbians, transgender people and drag queens alike. On June 28, 1969, New York police raided the bar and arrested employees for allegedly selling alcohol without a liquor license. Such instances were common and helped the cops secure bribes. This marked the third such raid within a brief period and stirred rage among the larger community gathered outside Stonewall. As the police loaded the patrons into a van, the crowd jeered and pushed back, throwing bottles and other objects towards it. The police barricaded themselves in the bar and sought reinforcements, but the barricades were repeatedly breached and the riots ensued for six days. This is now regarded as a turning point for the community.
The role of Marsha P. Johnson
One of the activists at the forefront of the riots was the transgender sex worker and drag queen Marsha P. Johnson, who by some accounts threw the “first brick” at the police. But even beyond the riots, she is today regarded as a pivotal figure among the LGBTQ community. Along with Sylvia Rivera, Johnson co-founded the Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries (STAR), which provided housing for homeless LGBTQ youth and advocated for gay and transgender rights. She was also a staunch advocate for AIDS awareness during the epidemic in the 1980s and until her demise in 1992.
How Stonewall led to gay pride
A year after Stonewall, activists floated a march to commemorate its anniversary with the theme “gay pride”, to refer to the sense of pride and oneness members of the community felt in their sexual and gender identities. The procession, which came to be known as the Christopher Street Liberation Day March to mark the street at the heart of the protests, grew from a few hundred to thousands of members and allies.
Lasting impact of the riots
Sociologists and historians characterise the riots as a movement against police brutality, harassment and the discriminatory practices suffered by queer people for decades. At the cusp of completing half a century to the riots, the police commissioner of the New York Police Department released a formal apology, saying, “The actions taken by the NYPD were wrong — plain and simple.” While impulses that identified beyond the conventional gender binaries and heterosexuality had been at work long before Stonewall, even beyond the US, the riots helped give it a public face. Against the societal attempts to make queer people feel ashamed, Pride Month has come to embody the sense of fearless identity and proud unity shown at Stonewall.
Source: Indian Express, 30/06/24
Why the Santal Hul has been ignored in public memory
In Jharkhand, June 30 is observed as Hul Diwas, marking the anniversary of the 1855 Santal rebellion, led by Sido and Kanhu Murmu. Unfortunately, the Hul and its heroes have fallen in the “blindspot of historiography”, especially when compared to the Munda uprising, some 45 years later, which got its due recognition.
On June 30, 1855 brothers Sido and Kanhu Murmu, along with brothers Channd-Bhairav and sisters Phulo-Jhano, led an uprising in the forested hills of Damin-i-koh (present-day eastern Jharkhand). The Santal uprising, remembered simply as Hul (‘rebellion’ in Santali), was against exploitative moneylenders (mahajans)and landowners (zamindars), and their colonial masters. Unfortunately, the Hul has been rather ignored in public history, not only compared to uprisings elsewhere in India, but also compared to the Munda rebellion, some 45 years later.
The legendary surrealist Salvador Dalí’s The Persistence of Memory represents the fluidity and the mutability of dreams, where time is a malleable and social construct. Dreams provided the underlying inspiration for two rebellions, separated by a period of four decades, in Jharkhand (at the time a part of Bengal) to free its people from the shackles of colonialism in Jharkhand.
These dreams, both metaphorically and physically, were informed by religiosity, and underpinned the moral legitimacy of the rebels to undo prevailing wrongs — Santal leaders Sido and Kanhu Murmu, and later, another tribal icon, Birsa Munda, received divine command of the Thacoor (God) to fight against injustice, and for independence. So powerful were their clarion calls that both the Santal Hul and the Munda Ulgulan (the ‘Great Tumult’) ushered in large-scale changes in the revenue administration and justice system.
The records of Kanhu’s interrogation establish that it was Thacoor’s call that inspired Sido and Kanhu to take up arms against oppressive zamindars, rapacious mahajans, and negligent administrators, and strive for self-rule or Santal Raj. Being “possessed” by Bonga (Santali deities) was not uncommon among the Santals, and resulted in swift action by the community as per the deity’s wishes. Likewise, in the case of Birsa Munda, God’s message for liberation provided course-changing vigour, and helped raise a platform of last resort to the oppressed. The ethical and moral courage of Birsa in standing against the mighty Empire, and his “vision”, have been duly recognised.
However, a careful examination of the literature on these tribal rebellions reveals that while Sido-Kanhu and Birsa were united by the same dream of freedom, the former has suffered from relative neglect.
Unlike the Ulgulan, which is framed as a rebellion against the Raj, discussions of the Hul ignore the role of the British as oppressors. They also discount the condign retribution which followed the Hul’s suppression. The paternalistic narrations of the Raj cavil about the ways and means of the rebels.
Yet the widespread changes to the administrative system following the Hul stands as a testimony to both its merits and necessity. These changes, in a way, vindicated the cause of Sido and Kanhu. That being said, even though the British attempted to disguise these changes as “reforms”, their actions helped “the same dikus (outsiders) against whom [the Santals] had taken up arms”. In pretending to give attention to the Santals, the British stripped them of the memory of their leaders and rebellion.
The Hul and their heroes fell in the “blindspot of historiography”. To the subaltern historian Ranajit Guha, “their [Santals’] will and reason, often ignored by the historiographers, constituted the praxis of rebellion”. This neglect is not restricted to the lack of literature alone.
There was also a lesser acceptance of Sido and Kanhu as political revolutionaries by their contemporary intelligentsia, primarily on account of the violence associated with the Hul. This is despite the fact that working communities like blacksmiths and agriculturalists were supportive of the Hul. As pointed out by historian Peter Stanley: “Santal metal tools and weapons… were made by Bengali smiths living in their villages” (Hul! Hul!: The Suppression of the Santal Rebellion in Bengal, 1855).
This demotion of Sidu-Kanho’s revolutionary status is due to the social position of those who wrote their history — British administrators, or wealthy upper caste Indians in service of the Empire.
As Guha explained in his highly influential “The Prose of Counter-Insurgency”, historians who have written about subaltern movements in India have seldom accounted for the rebels’ own consciousness, and in fact projected their own consciousness onto the subject they are investigating. Thus, “blind spots” mark different kinds of historical discourse.
In case of the Hul, ‘primary discourses’ comprise official and unofficial communications of soldiers and magistrates, which refer to Sido and Kanhu in fairly adversarial terms. ‘Secondary discourses’, largely from British missionaries and administrators cast them into deliberate oblivion, glorifying instead the British efforts to mainstream or ‘domesticate’ the ‘savage’ Santals.
None of these discourses could reconcile the personal positions of their authors to the violent methods of the Hul. This had a cascading effect on the subsequent historiography.
Sido and Kanhu have not been adequately represented in the secondary discourses of colonial administrators like E G Mann (author of Sonthalia and the Sonthals), W W Hunter (renowned for his Imperial Gazetteer of India and other works), R Carstairs, and the missionaries.
For example, Mann wrote a chapter on the rebellion in his book without naming Sido and Kanhu, and Carstairs wrote a 404-page book, Little World of an Indian District Officer, without taking a meaningful view of thThe selectiveness and ‘presumed neutrality’ of colonial historiography is also demonstrated in their dichotomous view of Santal rebels. On one hand, the Santals are painted as simpletons, simply “incapable of lying”. At the same time, primary sources also refer to the so-called “Santal dodge” — an attempt by the rebels to deceive the army by acting loyal in their presence, and plundering in their absence. This only further shows that actors of the Hul were deliberately invisibilised to mask the colonial powers’ failure in containing the rebellion.
Another reason for the Hul being relegated in public memory may be the relative positions of the actors of Hul and Ulgulan.
The Santals were migrants in modern-day Jharkhand, who were pushed westwards from Birbhum (in present-day West Bengal) by particularly bad famines in the late 18th century. In comparison, the Munda tribes already had prior tenancy rights on their land, where they were settled for ages. This area, just south of Ranchi, was also more centrally located than the Santal Pargana, which lay in the periphery. Moreover, Sido-Kanhu’s rebellion was also short-lived when compared to Birsa’s wider social movement, which lasted years until he died in prison in 1900.
Crucially, Birsa also found local champions to build his narrative, with his legend rightly benefitting from the writings of the historian-administrator Kumar Suresh Singh, and noted author Mahasweta Devi. All these factors, put together, distinguished, although artificially, Birsa Munda as ‘Adivasi leader’ and Sido-Kanhu as ‘Santal leaders’, relegating the latter to relative obscurity.e Hul. The void becomes glaring when compared with the material available on the Ulgulan. To return to Dali, the ‘interior world’ of Sido-Kanhu’s dream resonates in the ideas of liberty, justice, equality, fraternity, and socialism manifested in the preamble to the Constitution of India.
However, one must not lose sight of the present-day ‘the exterior world’ too where their fellow tribes still continue to labour in various infrastructural projects and other public and private works, often in inaccessible and inhospitable situations.
Written by Ravi Shankar Shukla
Source: Indian Express, 30/06/24
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