Daily News Compilation (HINDU) for 3rd April

The endless calamity in West Asia

Article is about Israel Palestine issue.

2014 - U.N.’s Year of Solidarity with the Palestinian People.

Why solidarity ? ---  Israel’s routine violation of international law and U.N. resolutions regarding Israel Palestine issue. Matters are so grave indeed that the Palestinians are no longer sure that they will retain the 22 per cent of historical Palestine that had been promised to them by the 1993 Oslo Accords.

Whats the reason behind Israel's routine violation of U.N. resolutions - US backing

The U.N. Special Rapporteur on Human Rights in the Palestinian Territories, Richard Falk

• Israeli policy amounts to “segregation and apartheid,” including “continuing excessive use of force by Israeli security forces,” extra-judicial killings that “are part of acts carried out in order to maintain dominance over Palestinians” and a blockade of the Palestinian economy by the use of checkpoints and walls. 
• The most striking part of Mr. Falk’s report is his assertion that Israel is conducting “ethnic cleansing” in the region. 

This report was put forward in UN and 5 resolutions were brought out for debate. But Israeli diplomats were absent because of labour strike and Israel's PM avoided all talk of Israeli policy and U.N. resolution.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu - all critics of Israel are anti-Semites. Israel is the only Jewish state.

U.N. agency, the Economic and Social Commission for Western Asia (ESCWA) in its new report, “Arab Integration: A 21st Century Development Imperative (2014),” the Commission notes, “Israel insists on being recognized by the world and the Arabs as an exclusively Jewish State. It imposes this recognition as a condition for reaching a settlement with the Palestinians. This policy is based on the concept of the religious or ethnic purity of States, which brought to humanity the worst crimes and atrocities of the twentieth century.” It is this idea of the Jewish State that fuels the toxic right-wing in Israel — they will not tolerate the return of Palestinian refugees or deliver full rights to Arab Israelis largely because they fear that this would demographically challenge their ability to create a Jewish democracy.

Reminding Israel that its definition of statehood has immense racial connotations has been a salutary task of the U.N. — it has also led to a backlash from the Netanyahu government, unwilling as it is to allow any criticism.

India and Israeli commerce

• Currently, according to Israeli Defense Ministry data, India imports more than $1.5 billion of the $7 billion of weaponry that Israel exports. It is Israel’s most important customer.
• India is currently looking at a bid from the Israeli firm Rafael for its Spike anti-tank guided missile. This contract will alone be worth $1 billion.

Ever since India and Israel established full diplomatic ties in 1992, India has cooled its political support for the Palestinians and heated up its imports of Israeli arms.

The arms deals themselves are not always advantageous to India:

• A list of corruption scandals litters the court records in both Israel and India. 
• India has exchanged its dependency on Russian military technology for a new dependency on U.S. and Israeli arms.

In March 2013, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh told the Shura Council in Saudi Arabia, “There is no issue more important for peace and stability in the region than the question of Palestine. Far too long the brave people of Palestine have been denied their just, legitimate and inalienable rights, including most of all the establishment of a sovereign, independent and viable Palestinian state.”

We purchase arms form Israel on one side and then say that Palestine issue is important and we support Palestinian people. This is due to two forces at work:

1. India needs arms from Israel.

2.  India’s reliance upon the Gulf Arabs(Palestinian supporter) for its oil.

To stem doubt about the relevance of the Palestinian cause that the U.N. has declared this the Year of Solidarity. 

There are two reasons why the current U.N. attempt is already more promising than earlier attempts. 

• For one, the U.N. agencies themselves are much more aggressive about Israeli violations of U.N. resolutions and international law than previously. The tone of the reports and the statements by people like the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights, Navi Pillay suggest that U.S. protection notwithstanding, Israel is no longer to get preferential treatment. 
• Second, a new public awareness of Israeli policies fuels the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement, whose Indian branch has begun to protest the participation of Indian artists in Israeli cultural fairs and Indo-Israeli business deals. 

Public purpose of architecture

Pritzker Architecture Prize

* most distinguished and celebrated award in architecture

* given to a professional in the field who has contributed substantially to humanity and displayed excellence in built work.

Awarded this year to Shigeru Ban

* built inexpensive, easily transportable and recyclable disaster relief structures across the world for two decades.

* His ingenious designs have converted cardboard, paper and other relatively inexpensive materials into useful and reliable building components. He has utilised them in challenging situations ranging from earthquake-disaster relief work in Bhuj to refugee structures in Rwanda. 

This year’s Pritzker Prize raises a key question for Indian architects and policymakers to reflect on: if good design brings in innovation and adds value, why are they not increasingly deployed to serve the public good?

In contrast, State departments in India pay hardly any attention to design. As a result, low-income housing projects impose unliveable environments on the poor, and cities are yet to see well-designed bus stops, easily maintainable public toilets and user-friendly civic buildings. Even the National Design Policy, announced in 2007, has not sufficiently focussed on socially useful products. 

The curious case of Neiphiu Rio

Neiphiu Rio: Nagaland Chief Minister to contest the coming Lok Sabha poll from the lone seat in Nagaland

Due to coalition politics becoming a norm of Indian political system, regional parties assume an important and decisive role in national politics. They became king-makers or prime minister-makers, which is why one sees so many leaders at the Centre plotting their return to their States and not the other way round.

So Rio’s decision to contest Lok Sabha election is a rare case and may be attributed to Naga national politics.

The tech edge to Africa’s first Islamic insurance for herders

In Kenya’s arid north pastoralists rely on livestock herds surviving boom and bust cycles of drought.

Takaful Insurance of Africa:  Africa’s first livestock insurance scheme to make payouts compliant with Islamic law, by bringing together Muslim scholars and number-crunching agricultural experts using NASA weather satellites.

 Unlike ordinary insurance schemes prohibited by Islam, takes only a management fee from clients.

Payments are assessed not according to the deaths of individual animals as it would be impossible to provide proof, but according to an index drawn up by experts at the Nairobi-based International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI), using satellites to measure vegetation coverage and thus the severity of drought.

Any surplus money after payments made is distributed equally among remaining policyholders.

Gyaan:

Such schemes can be recommended for India also.

The flexible working debate

Gateway Women: Started by Jody Day and gives voice to women who would like to have been mothers, but aren’t.

Now a survey of women aged between 28 and 40 confirms that a significant number — 54 per cent of a big sample — feel that childless women have to work longer hours than mothers.

There is also a pull-out quote from one respondent complaining that a “women friendly” workplace means just a mother-friendly one. 

The survey found that nearly half the women questioned agreed that women who worked flexibly were resented.

Voting while in the Army

A new vote bank of Armed Forces personnel is now looking a step closer to reality with the Supreme Court directing the Election Commission (EC) to allow defence personnel to vote as general voters in peace stations. 

The Representation of the People Act, 1950 defines the term ‘ordinarily resident’ in Section 20, a qualification required to get registered as a voter. Armed forces personnel are among the few categories of people defined as persons with ‘service qualification’ in Section 20(8) and are given a special dispensation in Section 20(3) and Section 20(5). This category can declare while living at a place ‘ordinarily resident’ status at another place where they would have normally lived, if it were not for the exigencies of service. Implicit faith was to be placed on their declaration and they would be registered at the place they indicated as their place of ordinary residence, most likely their native place, and as a corollary the place of their posting could not be their ordinary place of residence.

In a matter arising from the Nagaland Assembly Election in 1969, the court did not accept the argument that for service personnel, the place of posting cannot ipso facto be the place of residence.

The law gave a special dispensation to a service voter in that his declaration designating a place as his place of ordinary residence and certified by his organisation was not to be questioned by the Electoral Registration Officer (ERO) but simply accepted. It was intended to avoid the delay in registration if an enquiry were to be done independently by the ERO as in the case of ordinary voters.

Interpreting that judgment as mandating the registration of a service voter at the place of his posting and by cleverly using the provision u/s 20(5), a campaign was mounted in the run-up to the Punjab Assembly election in 2007 by Brig. H.S. Ghuman (retd.) and his All India Veteran’s Core Group (AIVCG) to have service personnel posted in several cantonment towns in Punjab to register as ordinary voters there.

Since then, retired service officers and others including a Member of Parliament have lent their support to this campaign culminating in the latest verdict of the Supreme Court. But as a note of caution that was sounded in many border States — that the local voter population may be small and can be outnumbered by the service personnel — the Court restricted the applicability of the order only to peace stations. In other words, only in peace stations can service persons claim they are ordinary residents and vote locally. 

If peace stations are defined in a location-specific manner, this can lead to anomalies. If Itanagar or Leh are defined as peace stations but not Tawang or Nubra, it may be kosher for vote bank politics but it will create disaffection among the local population in both places, given the small-sized constituencies and the thin margins of victory. Distinctions based on unit-specific roles in the same station will entitle men of the non-operational unit to register as voters and of the operational unit ineligible. So States have to be in either category to avoid anomalies.

As a larger number of service personnel would be in the many cantonments in Haryana and Punjab, competitive canvassing by politicians there can bring in its wake other problems.

A normal movement of a unit can be questioned by rival politicians as favouring one or the other candidate or party.

The formation commanders can be accused of favouritism as happened in the Punjab Assembly election in 2007. 

Since the new dispensation would not extend to all the defence personnel and since many service personnel may still remain registered in their native towns and villages by choice, the postal ballot system or its alternative — the proxy voting facility — would still be relevant.

Transmission time can be cut down if blank ballot papers are sent electronically, providing more time for their return. Better still would be to develop online voting and what better way than to provide it to the group that deserves it the most? We certainly owe it to our Armed forces personnel to do all that is possible to enable them to exercise their franchise.

IDFC, Bandhan get ‘in-principle’ nod to set up banks

The Reserve Bank of India (RBI), on Wednesday, granted ‘in-principle’ approval to two applicants, IDFC Limited and Kolkata-based Bandhan Financial Services Private Limited, to set up banks.

The RBI has also accepted the recommendation of the High-Level Advisory Committee (HLAC), set up by the RBI, to consider the application of the Department of Posts, separately in consultation with the Central Government.