Tuesday, May 30, 2023

The Central government recently issued an advisory warning individuals about a dangerous malware known as ‘Daam’ that specifically targets Android phones. This advisory highlights the severity of the threat and provides crucial information on how to safeguard personal data and devices from potential attacks.

Understanding Daam Malware

Daam is a malicious software that possesses the capability to infiltrate Android devices and gain unauthorized access to various sensitive components, including call records, contacts, history, and even the device’s camera.

Distribution and Modus Operandi

The Daam malware primarily spreads through third-party websites or applications obtained from untrusted or unknown sources. By luring users into downloading and installing infected files, the malware manages to bypass security checks implemented on Android devices.

Once the Daam malware successfully bypasses the security check, it starts its nefarious activities. Its primary objective is to compromise sensitive data stored on the targeted device, such as call records and history. Additionally, Daam can modify device passwords, leaving users vulnerable to unauthorized access and control.

Encryption Algorithm and File Manipulation

Daam utilizes the AES (advanced encryption standard) encryption algorithm to encode files present on the victim’s device. This encryption process results in the deletion of non-encrypted files, leaving only the encrypted ones with the “.enc” extension. Victims also receive a ransom note, typically named “readme_now.txt,” which serves as a demand for payment in exchange for restoring access to the compromised files.

Precautions and Best Practices

In light of this advisory, several precautions are recommended to protect oneself against the Daam malware and similar threats. Firstly, it is crucial to avoid visiting untrusted websites and refraining from clicking on unverified links. These measures significantly reduce the risk of inadvertently downloading infected files or accessing malicious content.

Furthermore, keeping antivirus software up to date is essential. Regularly updating your antivirus program ensures that it remains equipped with the latest security patches and can effectively detect and neutralize potential threats like Daam.

Identifying Suspicious Numbers and Exercising Caution with Shortened URLs

Users should exercise caution when encountering suspicious numbers that do not appear to be genuine mobile phone numbers. Scammers often use email-to-text services to mask their true identities, making it crucial to remain vigilant and skeptical of such communication.

Shortened URLs, particularly those utilizing ‘bitly’ and ‘tinyurl’ hyperlinks (e.g., “https://bit.ly/” or “bit.ly” and “tinyurl.com/”), should also be approached with caution. These URLs may redirect users to potentially harmful websites or initiate malicious downloads.

Current Affairs- May 29, 2023

INDIA

ISRO launches its next-generation navigational satellite – NVS-1 from Sriharikota.
Praveen Kumar Srivastava was sworn in as Central Vigilance Commissioner.
Prime Minister Modi to flag off Guwahati-New Jalpaiguri Vande Bharat Express in Assam.
India shows a reduction in stunting and recorded 1.6 crore fewer stunted children under five years in 2022 than in 2012.
Delhi Police files FIR against protesting wrestlers after detaining Vinesh Phogat, Sakshi Malik and Bajrang Punia.

ECONOMY & CORPORATE

UPI to account for 90% of retail digital payments by 2026-27: PwC India report.
CBIC issues SoP for scrutiny of GST returns for FY’20 onwards; DGARM to identify cases.
Report: Microfinance loans grow 21.3% YoY to Rs 3.5 trillion in FY23.

WORLD

75th UN Peacekeepers Day is observed today. “Peace begins with me” is the theme of the 75th anniversary of Peacekeepers Day.
Turkiye President Recep Tayyip Erdogan wins Presidential election in runoff vote.
Justine Triet becomes only the third woman to win Palme d’Or at Cannes.
Somalia to introduce direct universal suffrage in 2024

SPORTS

Men’s Junior Asia Cup Hockey: Defending champions India defeats Thailand 17-0 in final Pool A match in Oman.
Hockey: India beat Japan 3-1 in Men’s Junior Asia Cup at Salalah in Oman.
IPL 2023: Final match between Chennai Super Kings and Gujarat Titans to be played in Ahmedabad
H.S. Prannoy, won his maiden BWF World Tour title as he clinched the Malaysian Open.

The subaltern speaks

Late resurgence of Lohiate politics being driven by a changed political economy stifling the economic prospects of both the dominant as well as the non-dominant backward and marginalised castes

V.D. Savarkar is unquestionably the most influential political thinker of the Hindu Right. If Rousseau is considered to be the philosophical founder of post-revolution France, Savarkar now occupies that status for the republic of ‘New India’, guiding the spirit of the new Parliament which is set to be inaugurated on his birthday.

But who is the most influential political ideologue from the side of the Opposition? Arguably, that space increasingly belongs to Ram Manohar Lohia or, more precisely, Lohiate socialist politics. We mean Lohiate politics in a broad, substantive way, in terms of the increasing political viability of a congealed backward caste-class alliance against the upper caste-led and middle class formulated hegemony of the Bharatiya Janata Party. The difference from 50 years back is that Nehruvian “vested socialism” (in Lohia’s words) has given way to Hindu nationalist ‘crony capitalism’ as the dominant pole pushing disparate political actors into this emerging counter-alliance of the excluded.

The Congress’s victory in the Karnataka polls is, after all, what one would call in the Hindi belt a classic Lohiate alliance. There is a remarkably neat caste-class overlap in the Congress’s electoral mandate: an interlocked polarisation of the backward Ahinda communities and poor, less educated voters.

Of course, the Congress’s mandate under P.C. Siddaramaiah builds on the progressive roots of state politics, more specifically, the political legacy of D. Devaraj Urs. Surely, such a progressive coalition seems inconceivable in the Hindi belt where Hindu nationalism enjoys a ‘common-sensical’ dominance of the public sphere.

Admittedly, such scepticism is well-founded. The force of Lohiate socialism as a comprehensive framework had already started to wane in the Hindi belt by the early 1970s. A receding socialist camp was either subordinated or got merged in the mid-1970s into the potent stream of farmer politics represented by the Lok Dal party helmed by leaders such as Charan Singh in Uttar Pradesh and Devi Lal in Haryana. This caste-agnostic farmer politics was the politics of the challenger elite castes of Jats and Yadavs wherein upwardly mobile farmers merely sought to assume the dominance of the old upper caste elite. The socialist space further shrivelled into the narrow Yadav-Kurmi-led caste coalitions of the 1990s in the post-Mandal phase.

Why did Lohia’s aggregative backward class politics fail in UP while broad coalitions of the backward classes succeeded in Kerala and Tamil Nadu in not just capturing power but also transforming the political economy in favour of their constituents?

Firstly, there was a cultural constraint. The political scientist, Prerna Singh, located the answer in subnationalism in a book, which partly argued that a progressive, vernacular sphere allowed challenger elites (such as Nairs and Ezhavas in Kerala, and Chettiars and Vellalars in Tamil Nadu) to forge wider networks of solidarity of the marginalised against the ‘outsider’ Brahmin elite. Although Lohia sought to articulate a similar opposition between subaltern ‘Hindi’ and elite ‘English’, it hardly made a similar impact because of the historical evolution of the Hindi public sphere as a vessel for upper caste-led Hindu nationalism.

Second, there was a constraint of political economy. The challenger elites of South India — the middle peasant castes — had acquired a measure of economic capital by the time of Independence. Therefore, the challenger elites sought to forge broad, pro-development coalitions with the upper segments of middle castes, filling up the urban professional and entrepreneurial base, while the poor mobilised through social welfare. In northern India, the urban professional/entrepreneurial base was monopolised by the (numerically larger) upper castes. The newly rich middle castes of Jats and Yadavs found it more beneficial to establish dominance over the impoverished lower castes than to mount a frontal challenge to the dominance of the upper castes.

If Lohiate politics is seeing a late resurgence, it is being driven by a changed political economy which is stifling the economic prospects of both the dominant as well as the non-dominant backward as well as the marginalised castes, leading to a shared resentment, if not yet a shared agenda.

In fact, the Congress of today seems to have revamped into a neo-Lohiate formation. Three out of four Congress chief ministers belong to OBC castes, the fourth started out as a poor milkman. The Congress stands upfront with the Mandal parties in demanding the caste census and endorses the principle of a fair division of economic resources among communities in line with the share of the population. Mallikarjun Kharge leads the Congress as the third Dalit president of the party. The Bharat Jodo Yatra emphasised the economic anguish of those left-behind from the ‘Adani-Modi’ model of economic development.

But can this socio-economic message work nationally? This week’s CSDS-Lokniti national survey provides some preliminary straws in the wind: 41% of the people claim to like Rahul Gandhi, of which 15% claim to have developed this affinity because of the Bharat Jodo Yatra. Rahul Gandhi has also clearly emerged as the leader of the Opposition with 34% opting for him as the principal national challenger to Modi. The survey also found that the Congress has climbed to 29% of the vote share (an additional 10% from 2014), while the vote share of the BJP remains stable at around 39%, indicating that the Congress is eating into the Opposition space. Some of these votes are probably leached from declining parties such as the Bahujan Samaj Party and the Janata Dal (Secular); this is a rare recovery of the Congress’ space.

The massive farmers’ movement of 2021-2022 had first signalled a shift by forging “new solidarities across class, caste, gender, religion and regions” as the sociologist, Satendra Kumar, observed, discursively moving beyond middle-caste farmers and including the concerns of Dalit labourers. After all, the dominant peasant castes of the Hindi belt have been mired in an economic crisis for close to a decade. As Christophe Jaffrelot has shown using Indian Human Development Survey data (2012), the income of the bottom 60% of Jats, Patels and Marathas stood much lower than the average income of the non-dominant OBCs in their respective three states and substantially less than the Dalits (except for Jats of Haryana). Worse, the OBCs and Dalits had made rapid gains in education and salaried jobs as compared to them. The crisis only became worse in the Modi years, seen in both new reservation demands and the dominant caste backlash to the BJP in the assembly elections of Haryana and Maharashtra. Meanwhile the rural wage growth boom of the United Progressive Alliance years has virtually stagnated. As Jean Drèze has documented, the growth rate of real wages between 2014-15 and 2021-22 was below 1% per year for both farm and non-farm workers. Therefore, the class interests of different OBC groups might slowly be coalescing, witnessed in both the Samajwadi Party-Rashtriya Lok Dal coalition in UP as well as in the Grand Alliance in Bihar.

The CSDS poll indicates that the 2024 election is still pretty close, with 43% favouring a third chance for the Modi government as opposed to 38% who oppose it. But who are these 38% and what kind of platform can potentially unite these disgruntled voters?

Consider a few more statistics from the same poll. One, only 35% respondents claimed improvement in their economic condition over the last four years. Two, contrary to the aspirational neo-middle class voter captured by the Lokniti survey in 2014 favouring growth over redistribution, today 57% people support subsidies as essential for the poor. Third, 46% believe that the government has failed on farmer issues, 45% on corruption, 57% on price rise, while 36% believe that government policies have only favoured the wealthy.

The Lohiate spectre of bottoms-up subaltern discontent hangs over the Modi regime. This cannot be wished away with the rarefied bluster of vishwaguru or New India.

Asim Ali is a political researcher and columnist based in Delhi

Source: The Telegraph, 27/05/23

Code of conduct for civil servants: A review

While the being a civil servant comes with many perks and benefits, it also brings with it its own limitations and various rules surrounding an officer's conduct.

Since 2018, over 10 lakh candidates have applied each year to sit in the Civil Service Aptitude Test (C-SAT). This year, 11.52 lakh candidates applied, and after three rounds of examinations, 933 were finally selected.

While the craze to enter the civil services was slightly tempered post-liberalisation, over the past decade it is well and truly back. Candidates often spend years and lakhs of rupees in coaching, attempting to crack the extremely competitive exam. Of late, several successful candidates have even appeared for the exams after a few years in the private sector.

Today, CSE results attract serious media scrutiny, with toppers even making national news. However, getting selected is just the beginning of one’s life in service – a life which will have several limitations as per law.

We list here some basic rules a civil servant needs to follow, and the limitations they are placed under.

First, some details about the civil services.

Successful applicants can join a number of services depending on their rank and personal preferences.

There are three All India Services – the Indian Administrative Service, the Indian Police Service and the Indian Forest Service – which are selected by the central government with officers allotted to various state cadres. The Centre then gets a certain percentage of officers from each state on central deputation. These bureaucrats work directly for the Centre. All India Services are governed by Article 312 of the Constitution of India.

Other services are called Central Civil Services. These services are under the central government itself with no state cadre system. They include services such as the Indian Foreign Service, the Indian Revenue Service, Customs and Central Excise Service and several others.

Two sets of largely overlapping rules.

There are two sets of rules for civil servants – one for All India Services and the other for Central Civil Services. Specially designed Conduct Rules govern an officer’s behaviour and conduct.

The AIS Conduct Rules, 1968 and CCS Conduct Rules, 1964 are mostly similar. These were framed based on recommendations from a committee constituted by then Minister of Home Affairs Lal Bahadur Shashtri in 1962. This Committee on Prevention of Corruption was headed by K Santhanam, Member of Rajya Sabha (who also happenned to be a former editor of The Indian Express).

Some rules are vague, some more specific.

The Conduct Rules cover a wide range of issues, from the ambiguous idea of personal integrity to more specific actions.

For instance, Rule 3(1) states that “Every member of the Service shall at all times maintain absolute integrity and devotion to duty and shall do nothing which is unbecoming of a member of the Service.” This rule is purposefully vague and can be applied to individuals in cases of any kind of wrongdoing, even if the allegations are not covered under any more specific rules. For example, while promotion of casteism is not covered under any specific Conduct Rules, casteist behaviour can be interpreted as “unbecoming of a member of the Service” under Rule 3(1).

On the other hand, Rule 4(1) of the AIS Conduct Rules is more specific. It states, “No member of the Service shall use his position or influence directly or indirectly to secure employment for any member of his family with any private undertaking or Non- Government Organisation.”

Members not allowed to be part of, assist political parties.

Rule 5(1) states, “No member of the Service shall be a member of, or be otherwise associated with, any political party or any organization which takes part in politics, nor shall he take part in, or subscribe in aid of, or assist in any other manner, any political movement or political activity.”

5(4) states, “No member of the Service shall canvas or otherwise interfere with, or use his influence in connection with, or take part in, an election to any legislature or local authority.”

While members can hold personal political beliefs, these rules restrict the degree to which they can act on them.

Similar restrictions also there on expressing personal opinion.

Rule 7 of AIS Rules states, “No member of the Service shall, in any radio broadcast or communication over any public media or in any document published anonymously, pseudonymously or in his own name or in the name of any other person or in any communication to the press or in any public utterance, make any statement of fact or opinion,— Which has the effect of an adverse criticism of any current or recent policy or action of the Central Government or a State Government; or which is capable of embarrassing the relations between the Central Government and any State Government; or which is capable of embarrassing the relations between the Central Government and the Government of any Foreign State.”

However, civil servants are allowed to express their opinion on official files and other official documents and can even talk to the media during field postings. What they can tell the media, though, is restricted to their job or some specific event/issue. Personal beliefs on wider issues are not to be aired.

Taking dowry is banned but seemingly common.

Dowry is an evil which afflicts all of society. Civil servants are no exception.

Often, once selected to the services, officers receive numerous marriage offers. Influential families, including big political ones, covet civil servants as husbands for their daughters and are willing to pay a big price to win their hand in marriage. A civil servant’s job security, status and perks received plays a major role in inflating dowry demands. Officials from the Department of Personnel and Training (DoPT) even receive queries to provide contact details of candidates selected.

At the same time, civil servants and their families too are willing to receive a big dowry.

But as far as rules are concerned, both giving and receiving dowry is strictly prohibited. Rule 11 (1-A) of the AIS Rules on “Giving or taking of dowry” states, “No member of the Service shall— (i) give or take or abet the giving or taking of dowry; or (ii) demand, directly or indirectly, from the parents or guardian of a bride or bridegroom, as the case may be, any dowry.”

In fact, any “big” gift a civil servant receives needs to be reported.

Rule 11(1) states, “A member of the service may accept gifts from his near relatives or from his personal friends having no official dealings with them, on occasions such as wedding, anniversaries, funerals and religious functions when the making of gifts is in conformity with the prevailing religious and social practice, but he shall make a report to the Government if the value of such gift exceeds Rs.25,000.”

The threshold of Rs 25,000 was last fixed in 2015.

Rules amended and added from time to time.

While Conduct Rules penned in the 1960s are still being followed, these are never static, with updates made from time to time.

For instance, with regard to Rule 5(1), the government, from time to time, determines whether a particular organisation is political or not. Interestingly, such clarifications have been repeatedly made about the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) with rules stating that its activities are political in nature. Notably, while the RSS itself claims to be non-political, even BJP governments at the Centre have not changed its categorisation.

The Narendra Modi government added a few sub-rules in August 2014. For instance, the following was added to the Conduct Rules: “Every member of the Service shall maintain:- high ethical standards, integrity and honesty; political neutrality; accountability and transparency; responsiveness to the public, particularly to the weaker section; courtesy and good behavior with the public” among other things.

The Modi government also added that “Every member of the Service shall maintain integrity in public service; take decisions solely in public interest and use or cause to use public resources efficiently, effectively and economically; declare any private interests relating to his public duties and take steps to resolve any conflicts in a way that protects the public interest; not place himself under any financial or other obligations to any individual or organisation which may influence him in the performance of his official duties; not misuse his position as civil servant and not take decisions in order to derive financial or material benefits for himself, his family or his friends; act with fairness and impartiality and not discriminate against anyone, particularly the poor and the under-privileged sections of society; perform and discharge his duties with the highest degree of professionalism and dedication to the best of his abilities”.

Similarly, when allegations were made that only orally orders were being issued to subordinate officials, in 1979, the Janata Party government added that, “The direction of the official superior shall ordinarily be in writing. Where the issue of oral direction becomes unavoidable, the official superior shall confirm it in writing immediately thereafter.”

In 1998, the United Front government added that “No member of the Service shall employ to work any child below the age of 14 years.”

Officers are covered under the rules as soon they join training.

As soon as candidates are allotted a particular service and join training which is part of their probation period, they become members of that service and are thus covered by these rules. There are also certain rules which continue to apply post retirement as well.

Provisions for heavy penalties there, but difficult to police.

Transgressions can attract two kinds of penalties — major and minor. Major penalties can include “dismissal” from the service as well.

Besides these conduct rules, there is also the Prevention of Corruption Act (POCA). However, action on corruption in India is based less on intelligence and more on complaints. While anonymous complaints are not entertained, complaints with name and details of complainants too hardly ever reach the proper forum. Fora where such complaints can be made include the Central Vigilance Commission, Lokpal and other investigation agencies.

Written by Shyamlal Yadav

Source: Indian Express, 26/05/23

Friday, May 26, 2023

Quote of the Day May 26, 2023

“It doesn't hurt to be optimistic. You can always cry later.”
Lucimar Santos de Lima

“आशावादी होने में क्या कष्ट है? रो तो कभी भी सकते हैं।”
लूसिमार सांतोस द लीमा

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