Tuesday, January 22, 2019
What is ‘wisdom of repugnance’ in Philosophy?
Also known as the yuck factor, this refers to the argument that any intuitive feeling of disgust that a human being might feel towards something is reason enough to consider the thing to be immoral in nature. Supporters of this idea believe that the emotional reaction towards something is simply an involuntary articulation of deeper wisdom within human beings that may not be easily comprehensible through reason. The term was coined by American scientist Leon R. Kass in 1997 to argue against the cloning of human beings. Critics of the idea believe that gut reaction against something can, in fact, lead people to do things that are deeply unethical in nature.
Source: The Hindu, 22/01/2019
Misreading Northeast
BJP’s framing of Citizenship (Amendment) Bill as the unfinished agenda of Partition is misconceived and dangerous
The Northeast has become restive ever since the Centre decided to amend the Citizenship Act. The BJP, which has piloted the amendment in Parliament, has disregarded the objections to the amendment in the Northeast, especially in the Brahmaputra Valley in Assam. It ignored the criticism of Opposition parties and got the Bill passed in the Lok Sabha during the Winter Session.
The Bill is now pending in the Rajya Sabha, where the NDA is in a minority. The BJP has countered the protests against the Bill by claiming that “lies were being told and misinformation spread”. Senior leader and the party’s point person for the Northeast, Ram Madhav, has sought to justify the amendment, which seeks to privilege the claims of non-Muslims from Bangladesh, Pakistan and Afghanistan to Indian citizenship, in the context of the Subcontinent’s Partition — as its unfinished agenda, as it were. This, clearly, is a misreading of history, especially of its several and complex trajectories in the Northeast which will not be subsumed by an imposed Hindu-Muslim binary.
The signs have been ominous from the beginning. Protests were held in the Brahmaputra Valley when the Joint Parliamentary Committee visited Assam against the Bill and mobilisations in the Barak Valley supported it. An old linguistic faultline in Assam had been reopened. When the BJP refused to back down despite the protests and shutdowns in Assam, the Asom Gana Parishad walked out of the NDA and the BJP-led government in Guwahati.
After the Bill was introduced in the Lok Sabha, almost the entire political spectrum in the Northeast spoke out against the legislation. The BJP’s own chief minister in Manipur, N Biren Singh, has said that the state is opposed to the Bill in the present form. Now, at least five MLAs of the Assam BJP have said that they are opposed to the Bill. The BJP should, at the very least, listen to the dissenting voices within its own ranks since it has chosen to shut out the criticism from civil society, Opposition parties and even allies.
Ram Madhav and other BJP leaders seem confident that their (mis)reading of history and historical processes can prevail in the Northeast. In fact, a similar indifference to local sensitivities has already cost the BJP its alliance and government in J&K. The party appears to have embarked on the same journey in the Northeast. However, the BJP’s pursuing of its ideological agendas in these states has troubling implications beyond the party’s own electoral destiny — it could stoke disquiet on India’s frontiers.
Source: Indian Express, 22/01/2019
India must focus on resilience and adaptation
Policy makers must also use traditional knowledge to deal with climate change.
Pointing towards a rise in catastrophic weather events in India, the India Meteorological Department (IMD) has said that the year 2000 was a “tipping point” for the impact of climate change led warming in the country. The IMD’s report — ‘Statement on Climate of India during 2018’— has documented a gradual, significant rise in the annual mean temperature from 2000 and linked this trend to climate change because India’s warming trends are similar to the pattern of global warming.
In India, 11 out of 15 warmest years occurred during the past 15 years (2004-2018). The past decade (2009-2018) was also the warmest decade on record in the country. Reacting to the IMD report, scientists said India is projected to experience a temperature rise of 1.5 degrees Celsius by 2040 if measures are not taken to curb greenhouse gas emissions. This could have devastating impact on agriculture, coastal communities, and cost several animal species their natural habitat.
There is only one way to tackle such temperature variability. One must plan proper climate adaptation strategies and do everything possible to implement them without delay. Unfortunately, that is not happening at either the speed or scale required. For example, India may lead the Solar Alliance, but when it comes to the nation’s electric mobility policy, there has hardly been much movement beyond piecemeal strategies.
Or, for that matter, are our cities ready to tackle climate change? No. Most are yet to firm up resilience and adaptation strategies such as climate-resilient infrastructure, proper waste management and water harvesting to tackle this enormous challenge.
There are many reasons for this. Most city governments struggle to deal with other day-to-day development challenges such as education, infrastructure and health, and so climate resilience and adaptation figure low on their list of priorities.
Second, big cities such as Delhi and Mumbai have no city resilience plans because there is a multiplicity of authorities, which tend to work in silos whereas climate change cuts across several departments: public health, water, environment, energy, and social justice to name a few.
In a war as big as this, it’s important to use all knowledge resources available to tackle climate change. But there is a severe lack of interest among policy makers in using India’s wide repository of traditional knowledge in different sectors, such as water and waste management, to deal with the climate-induced disruption that is taking place. This is not just unfortunate but short sighted behaviour on the part of policymakers and citizens.
Source: Hindustan Times, 22/01/2019
Love Helps Comprehend
Q. I am full of hate. Will you please teach me how to love? A. No one can teach you how to love. It is easy to hate, and hate brings people together after a fashion; it creates all kinds of fantasies, it brings about various types of cooperation, as in war. But love is much more difficult. You cannot learn how to love, but what you can do is to observe hate and put it gently aside. Don’t battle hate, don’t say how terrible it is to hate people, but see hate for what it is and let it drop away; brush it aside, it is not important. What is important is not to let hate take root in your mind. Your mind is like rich soil, and if given sufficient time, any problem that comes along takes root like a weed, and then you have the trouble of pulling it out; but if you do not give the problem sufficient time to take root, then it has no place to grow and it will wither away. If you encourage hate, give it time to take root, to grow, to mature, it becomes an enormous problem. But if each time hate arises, you let it go by, then you will find that your mind becomes very sensitive without being sentimental; therefore, it will know love. The mind can pursue sensations, desires, but it cannot pursue love. Love must come to the mind. And, when once love is there, it has no division; it is sensuous and divine: it is love. That is the extraordinary thing about love: it is the only quality that brings a total comprehension of the whole of existence.…
Source: Economic Times, 22/01/2019
Friday, January 18, 2019
Digital India versus Real India
In the run-up to the general election, global tech companies must find ways to live with populism, pandering and paranoia.
As a digital destination, India is red-hot. After all, Prime Minister Narendra Modi, in his maiden appearance at Davos, had declared that he was replacing red tape with a red carpet; his administration had already embraced Digital India, the brand poised to displace the Incredible India of palaces, camels and yoga retreats. While Digital India is a mix of many public sector initiatives as well as private ones — such as a 4G network blanketing the nation with Internet access at throwaway prices — it needs the digital players from the outside. And these outside players have responded. Amazon was so gung-ho that it pledged $5 billion on cracking India. In response, arch-rival, Walmart, raised the bar by putting down $16 billion to secure its own toehold. Nevertheless, Amazon has dug in for the long haul; after “Prime” and “Alexa”, apparently, “India” is the third-most frequently used term in its recent letters to shareholders. Beyond the retail giants, there are the usual Silicon Valley suspects — Google, Facebook, Netflix, etc. — hoping to be the stewards of a digitally-emergent nation. Even Indian startups have felt the love. Ventures, mostly digital ones, have raked in over $10 billion in funding from overseas for two years in a row.
Modi’s “red carpet” call was issued from the Swiss mountains a year ago — in 2018. But, for now, welcome to 2019, notably, an election year. The digital CEOs jetting in expecting that red carpet must recognise that this is a year when “real” India takes precedence. They must also be able to distinguish between the many faces of real India and frame their strategies appropriately.
First, there is the India of small towns and villages that makes for riveting case studies in business school classrooms. This is the India where the nawabs of the Net go native: Finely calibrated products and processes are re-calibrated to suit the uniquely Indian context. Websites and apps are stripped-down to work with low-end phones. Local shopkeepers, whose businesses will be eviscerated by global e-commerce, are re-deployed to become the distribution agents of those e-commerce giants by taking to bicycles and two-wheelers to navigate the unpaved roads and unmarked addresses that Google Maps cannot locate. This is the India where digital players put aside their allergy to the analogue world and accept cold hard cash. This is the India where the Googles and Amazons must invest in translation to multiple language to ensure they are truly making inroads. Suffice it to say, any digital player serious about the Indian consumer has been working hard to figure out how to crack this facet of Indian reality.
Then, there is a second face of real — mostly urban — India attempting to grapple with the same struggles as their counterparts in the rest of the world: Balancing the conveniences and the sheer thrill of digital connectivity with concerns about violation of privacy and manipulation by nefarious groups. WhatsApp, India’s prime conduit for digital rumour-mongering, has taken several steps, ranging from public service advertisements and appointing a grievance officer (albeit one who is still based in California) and limiting forwarding of messages. It is unclear how effective these measures will be, particularly in advance of an election season. If the recent experience prior to the elections in Brazil — marked by an “unprecedented industrial use of disinformation” (according to the fact-checking organisation, Aos Fatos) — is any indicator, the Indian voters should brace themselves for a whirlwind ahead. The digital players are still fumbling in their attempts to address these concerns and will continue to grope around in the dark looking for a solution.
This brings us to a third face of real India that shows up prior to election season: A reality that is a perfect storm of populism, pandering and paranoia. For populism, one needs to look no further than the world’s digitally most connected politician. Prime Minister Modi continues to brand himself as a champion of the aspirational middle-class and has seized the political narrative using digital tools, such as the NaMo app. This is just fine, except that when the NaMo app comes pre-installed in 40 million Reliance Jio phones, the branding begins to feel a tad Orwellian. When Modi’s image is, in turn, used in advertisements for “Jio Digital Life”, the Orwellian circle is complete.
Then there is the pandering. Apart from the cozy connections with certain large businesses as evidenced above, pandering takes place in the form of protectionism on behalf of local businesses, both large and small. Recent draft government rules suggest a plan to require that Indian users’ data be stored locally. Since international digital players typically store data in servers around the world, this would drive up their storage costs disproportionately. This would, obviously, please local businesses and work in the current administration’s favour in an election. To pile on the munificence to local businesses, the Modi administration recently tightened rules on international e-commerce players, effectively preventing them from selling products from affiliated vendors or selling proprietary products at discounted prices. This, too, builds much-needed goodwill prior to elections. One can only hope that there is no demonetisation 2.0 that is sprung on the country given how well that worked in pandering to the “ordinary man”.
Finally, to see paranoia in action consider the home ministry’s recent authorisation extended to 10 government agencies with rights to access user data “for the purposes of interception, monitoring and decryption of any information generated, transmitted, received, or stored in any computer resource”. All of this, of course, runs counter to the Supreme Court’s determination of citizens having a fundamental right to privacy. Even though government surveillance can, in theory, be carried out on anyone, it is fair to assume that it could have a chilling effect on the administration’s critics and political opponents.
Each of these pre-election moves can be confounding to the uninitiated international CEO and it is unclear if they are in the best interests of the users. I am afraid, even the world’s most sophisticated digital players haven’t figured out how to deal with this face of real India, that is, the politically charged India of the election season where the red tape abruptly returns and replaces the red carpet.
The lesson is clear: Digital India can never out-run the real India; the two must share the same road. Much like on the very real roads of India, digital players must learn how to swerve, speed up and hit the brakes at any time. They must constantly “blow horn” to make a noise and ensure their presence is felt. If it doesn’t figure out how to do the swerve-speed up-brake and blow horn routine, digital India will be on a collision course with real India — and there is little doubt which India will win.
Ever the wordsmith, Prime Minister Modi had remarked in an early trip to Japan: “We used to play with snakes, now we play with the mouse. When we move a mouse, the whole world moves.” My one piece of advice to Amazon, Walmart, Google and all others of their ilk: Don’t get too comfortable with that mouse. We still play with snakes.
Source: Indian Express, 18/01/2019
The view from the outside
As a democracy, India must have a better record of upholding human rights
The role that India can and should play on the world stage is a topic that elicits much excitement and, of late, hyper-nationalism. It is often stated that it is time for India, as the world’s largest democracy, to take on an increasingly significant mantle in the international realm. Aspects such as economic and military power have been the usual focus of this debate. However, an important component of this enhanced stature necessarily relates to the safeguarding and protecting of human rights. In India, there is a blind spot in relation to rights and the intersection with foreign relations and policy discussions, and ignoring this has its perils.
Track record on human rights
Recently, India’s Deputy Permanent Representative to the United Nations expressed concern over the “politicisation of human rights as a foreign policy tool”, while addressing the work of the UN and the Human Rights Council. If part of the argument that India seeks to make is that it is a torchbearer of democracy and should therefore have a greater say, including on issues such as UN reform, an integral part of the case to be made relates to upholding international laws and standards pertaining to human rights. So, how does this stand up to scrutiny?
Within the country, many lawyers, activists, academics and human rights organisations have pointed to the deteriorating climate in relation to human rights. But how is the track record on human rights perceived outside the country, particularly by international law and human rights experts appointed as part of the UN human rights machinery? It is instructive to assess the record of UN independent experts towards India. For clarity, this assessment excludes the Human Rights Council, made of a group of states which can run the risk of allegations of partisanship based on membership. Instead, only statements of UN Independent Experts or Special Rapporteurs are examined, being thematic or subject matter experts on specific aspects of law (such as freedom of expression, extrajudicial executions, human rights defenders, etc.).
Negative statements
On January 11, four UN Special Rapporteurs — on summary executions, torture, freedom of religion, and the situation of human rights defenders — issued a statement drawing attention to “extrajudicial” killings in Uttar Pradesh. In a strongly worded call, the UN experts expressed concern about the “patterns of events”, including arrest, detention and torture prior to summary executions of 59 individuals since March 2017. This enhanced and negative scrutiny by Independent Experts follows on the heels of the first ever UN report on human rights violations in Kashmir, conducted by the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights — an indicator of how far the situation has deteriorated, as well as the inevitable enhanced scrutiny. A review of the press releases by the UN human rights office from 2010 to date shows that there have been 26 critical statements (mostly by UN experts, with some by the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights). Nine were issued in 2018, which was the year that saw the highest number of negative statements on India in the period examined. The statements have dealt with a number of issues, including the Assam National Register of Citizens process (in photo), online hate speech, the killing of journalist Gauri Lankesh, jailing of human rights defenders, deportation of Rohingya refugees, and excessive police response to protests.
These statements indicate a few things. First, there has been enhanced scrutiny by international experts of the deteriorating human rights environment in India, particularly in 2018. Second, the magnification of domestic rights violations in the international sphere is inevitable. Third, the metric of human rights and compliance with international law cannot be dismissed.
Inevitably, there will be the counterarguments, many of which can be addressed. Yes, this is not a comparison to other countries, but based on self-made claims of enhanced stature in the international arena — so how we fare in the eyes of international experts is important. No, this is not a question of external interference which can be dismissed out of hand — these statements are extremely serious, not issued lightly and are an integral part of the machinery of accountability for human rights violations in the international realm and will be a part of India’s human rights record for posterity.
India’s record of upholding human rights is abysmal; it must do better. The primary consideration should be the welfare and rights of individuals within the purview of the state. The secondary consideration should be perception and the place that India wants for itself in terms of stature and prestige. From both perspectives, the respect of the rights of individuals must be non-negotiable.
Priya Pillai is an international lawyer, with expertise in human rights
Source: The Hindu, 18/01/2019
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