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India has succeeded as a democratic republic because various creeds and different languages have not divided it, but only united the country, President Droupadi Murmu said, in her address on the eve of Republic Day.
In her first such address as President, ahead of the 74th Republic Day, President Murmu also said that those who shaped the modern Indian mind had welcomed progressive ideas from abroad and from all directions, “following the Vedic advice, ‘Let noble thoughts come to us from all directions’.
Freedom fighters led by Mahatma Gandhi had not just secured Independence but also freed the country from “imposed values and narrow-world views”, Murmu said. “Revolutionaries and reformers joined hands with visionaries and idealists to help us learn about our age-old values of peace, brotherhood and equality.”
The President lauded the fact that “the spirit of India” had not been daunted by countless challenges such as high levels of poverty and illiteracy — “among the many ill-effects of long foreign rule” — or by its diversity. “Such a diverse multitude of people coming together as one nation remains unprecedented. We did so with a belief that we are, after all, one; that we are all Indians.”
The first President from the tribal community, who took over in July, Murmu lauded the Central government’s initiatives for the women and marginalised, and said gender equality was no longer a mere slogan.
During my visits to various states, educational institutions and while meeting delegations of various professionals, I am amazed by the confidence of young women.
She urged people to learn from the tribal communities, especially about protecting nature, and said like women, the government is working to empower marginalised communities such as the Scheduled Castes and Tribes.
Padma Awards for 106: Mulayam BV Doshi Zakir Hussain in list (Page no. 5)
(GS Paper 2, Polity and Governance)
Former Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister and Samajwadi Party (SP) patriarch Mulayam Singh Yadav, former Karnataka Chief Minister S M Krishna, Gujarat architect and educationist Balkrishna Doshi, tabla player Zakir Hussain, mathematician S R Srinivasa Vardhan, and ORS treatment pioneer Dilip Mahalanabis have been conferred the Padma Vibhushan this year.
A total of 106 Padma awards have been announced — six Padma Vibhushan, nine Padma Bhushan and 91 Padma Shri.
Among the Padma Bhushan awardees are Sudha Murthy, chairperson of Infosys Foundation and wife of Infosys founder N R Narayana Murthy; industrialist Kumar Mangalam Birla; linguistics scholar Kapil Kapoor; Kannada novelist and screenwriter S L Bhyrappa; yesteryear playback singers Vani Jayaram and Suman Kalyanpur; physicist Deepak Dhar, and Telangana spiritual leaders Swami Chinna Jeeyar and Kamlesh D Patel.
The prominent names among Padma Shri awardees include stockbroker Rakesh Jhunjhunwala, Rasna founder Areez Khabatta, former union minister and Manipur BJP president Thounaojam Chaoba Singh, former Tripura minister and Indigenous Peoples Front of Tripura president Narendra Chandra Debbarma, RRR music composer M M Keeravani; ghazal singers Ahmed Hussain and Mohd Hussain, and Bollywood actor Raveena Tandon.
Editorial
Fighting the dark (Page no. 16)
(GS Paper 2, Polity and Governance)
The Indian Constitution is standing on the precipice. It might be easy to lose sight of this important fact amidst the continuing salience of elections, the complex social and economic churning and the cultural rhythms that mark Indian society.
Almost all the major tendencies that presage a constitutional decline are gaining ascendancy — charismatic populism, communal majoritarianism, partisan degradation, institutional extremism and control of civil society.
Cumulatively, these forces degrade the core meaning of constitutionalism; that no one should be able to exercise power, especially arbitrary power, in the service of oppression, without being held accountable.
But what makes this crisis worse is that it cannot even be fully named. Many of the symptoms of this crisis have appeared in Indian democracy before, not just during the Emergency, but in the conduct of state power in small and big forms.
No political party is entirely immune from the charge of subverting constitutional values. This allows for an easy and complacent whataboutery that takes our mind off the gravity of the current threat.
The political cleverness and the danger of the current moment comes from four sources. First, the encroachments on the Constitution are now represented as directly emerging from the will of people; the process of electoral legitimation is used to bludgeon all other considerations of individual freedom or checks and balances. Second, the erosion appears to be, in terms of its statistical effects, less significant.
This is not quite the age of mass arrests, only a few well-chosen targets. The degradation of some of the fundamental principles of the Constitution is quite compatible with the workings of ordinary law in many areas, and even an odd progressive victory in others.
This duality allows for the charade that nothing of significance is happening. Most people do not feel directly threatened by these changes, and hence, do not construe them as deal breakers.
The third is that this erosion uses the inner conflicts of constitutionalism, its silences and anomalies, against the idea of constitutionalism itself. Take, for instance, the tussle between the executive and the judiciary.
In our constitutional scheme, no branch of government can unilaterally claim to be either the unique locus of popular sovereignty or the final custodian of the Constitution.
The co-trusteeship of all branches of government is necessary to its working. There is some truth to the argument that the judiciary crafted a solution to the question of judges’ appointments that had a very flimsy constitutional basis.
Ideas Page
Delhi’s outreach to Cairo (Page no. 17)
(GS Paper 2, International Relation)
The visit of Egypt’s president, Abdel Fattah El-Sisi, to Delhi this week is not just about India rebuilding ties with an old friend that had been on the margins of Delhi’s diplomacy for too long.
India’s decision to elevate bilateral ties to the strategic level is rooted in a recognition of the enduring salience of Egypt as a pivotal state sitting at the crossroads of the Middle East, Africa and Europe, with the capacity to influence political outcomes on multiple fronts.
Beyond bilateral ties, the renewed engagement with Egypt is also about expanding and consolidating India’s new coalition with moderate Sunni states in the Middle East, including Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, which are eager to counter violent religious extremism.
Stabilising the shared neighbourhood through political and security cooperation has unsurprisingly figured at the top of India’s new strategic partnership with Egypt.
The current Indian strategy of working with a coalition of moderate Sunni states is very different from Delhi’s past discourse on the Middle East and is in tune with the shifting regional realities.
India’s renewed engagement with Egypt should take us beyond the banal claim that Delhi enjoys “good relations” with all the major countries in the Middle East. What we see in Delhi today is an effort to align India’s regional diplomatic priorities closer to India’s core interests.
Delhi’s strategic partnership with Cairo also opens the door for a larger Indian role in the region which is trying to diversify its partnerships, as the US begins to turn its attention to the Pacific after prolonged and costly military interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan. Meanwhile, China is rapidly raising its regional profile in the Middle East.
At the peak of earlier India-Egypt bonhomie in the 1950s and 1960s, the regional context was vastly different than what it is today.
Explained
Changes in living will guidelines (Page no. 29)
(GS Paper 2, Judiciary)
A five-judge Bench of the Supreme Court headed by Justice K M Joseph agreed to significantly ease the procedure for passive euthanasia in the country by altering the existing guidelines for ‘living wills’, as laid down in its 2018 judgment in Common Cause vs. Union of India & Anr, which allowed passive euthanasia. What is the legal history of this matter, and the issues involved?
Euthanasia refers to the practice of an individual deliberately ending their life, oftentimes to get relief from an incurable condition, or intolerable pain and suffering. Euthanasia, which can be administered only by a physician, can be either ‘active’ or ‘passive’.
Active euthanasia involves an active intervention to end a person’s life with substances or external force, such as administering a lethal injection. Passive euthanasia refers to withdrawing life support or treatment that is essential to keep a terminally ill person alive.
Passive euthanasia was legalised in India by the Supreme Court in 2018, contingent upon the person having a ‘living will’ or a written document that specifies what actions should be taken if the person is unable to make their own medical decisions in the future.
In case a person does not have a living will, members of their family can make a plea before the High Court to seek permission for passive euthanasia.
The Supreme Court allowed passive euthanasia while recognising the living wills of terminally-ill patients who could go into a permanent vegetative state, and issued guidelines regulating this procedure.
A five-judge Constitution Bench headed by then Chief Justice of India (CJI) Dipak Misra said that the guidelines would be in force until Parliament passed legislation on this.
However, this has not happened, and the absence of a law on this subject has rendered the 2018 judgment the last conclusive set of directions on euthanasia.
The guidelines pertained to questions such as who would execute the living will, and the process by which approval could be granted by the medical board.
We declare that an adult human being having mental capacity to take an informed decision has right to refuse medical treatment including withdrawal from life-saving devices,” the court said in the 2018 ruling.
In 1994, in a case challenging the constitutional validity of Section 309 of the IPC — which mandates up to one year in prison for attempt to suicide — the Supreme Court deemed the section to be a “cruel and irrational provision” that deserved to be removed from the statute book to “humanise our penal laws”.
An act of suicide “cannot be said to be against religion, morality, or public policy, and an act of attempted suicide has no baneful effect on society”, the court said. (P Rathinam vs Union Of India)
Why does India celebrate republic day on Jan 26 (Page no. 29)
(GS Paper 2, Polity and Governance)
Since 1950, January 26 has marked the day India’s Constitution came into effect. However, the Constitution was prepared way before the chosen date, adopted officially by the Constituent Assembly on November 26, 1949.
Why do we celebrate our Republic Day on January 26, then? The answer lies in the history of the Indian freedom struggle during which the date held significance since 1930.
On January 26,1930, the historic “Poorna Swaraj” declaration was officially promulgated, beginning the final phase of India’s freedom struggle where the goal would be complete independence from British rule.
The Non Cooperation Movement ended unceremoniously in February 1922 after the Chauri Chaura incident. Mahatma Gandhi, at the time, felt that the country was “not yet ready” for his non-violent methods of protest.
Thus, the 1920s did not see further mobilisation at the scale that was seen during the Non Cooperation Movement and the anti-Rowlatt Satyagraha.
The 1920s however were far from insignificant. From the rise of revolutionaries like Bhagat Singh and Chandrashekhar Azad to the coming of age of a new generation of Indian National Congress (INC) leaders such as Jawaharlal Nehru, Subhash Chandra Bose, Vallabhai Patel and C Rajagopalachari, the 1920s laid the ground for the future course of India’s freedom struggle.
Notably, in 1927, British Authorities appointed the Simon Commission – a seven-man, all European team under Sir John Simon – to deliberate on political reforms in India.
This sent a wave of outrage and discontentment across the country. For the first time since 1922, protests against the Simon Commission spread nationwide, with chants of “Simon Go Back” echoing across the country.
In response, the INC appointed its own commission under Motilal Nehru. The Nehru Report demanded that India be granted dominion status within the Empire.
In the Balfour Declaration of 1926, dominions were defined as “autonomous communities within the British Empire, equal in status, in no way subordinate one to another in any aspect of their domestic or external affairs, though united by a common allegiance to the Crown and freely associated as members of the British Commonwealth of Nations.” In 1926, countries like Canada, Australia and New Zealand were granted dominion status.
Crucially, even within the Congress, the Nehru Report did not enjoy universal support. Young leaders such as Bose and Jawaharlal Nehru, Motilal’s own son, wanted India to break all ties with the British Empire.
They argued that under dominion status, while India would enjoy a certain level of autonomy, the British Parliament and Crown would still have the ability to meddle in Indian affairs.
Economy
RBIs green bonds issuance oversubscribed on debut (Page no. 31)
(GS Paper 3, Economy)
The maiden sovereign green bond (SGrB) auction of Rs 8,000 crore held on Wednesday got oversubscribed owing to robust demand from various market participants, primarily banks.
The 5-year and 10-year green bonds were issued at a premium compared to the similar existing maturity sovereign regular bonds.
For the 10-year green bond – New GOI SGrB 2028 – the RBI received 170 competitive bids worth Rs 19,367 crore – nearly five times the notified amount of Rs 4,000 crore. Of this, the RBI accepted 57 bids worth Rs 3,948.646 crore.
For the 5-year green bond, 96 competitive bids worth Rs 13,525 crore were received, while the number of bids accepted were 32 worth Rs 3,993.124 crore, the RBI said.
The RBI issued the five-year green bond at a cut-off yield of 7.10 per cent and the 10-year green bond at 7.29 per cent.
The 10-year sovereign green bond was sold at a green premium, or greenium, of 6 basis points (bps) compared to the 10-year benchmark bond yield.
The five-year green bond was sold at a premium of 5 bps when compared to the yield on the similar maturity sovereign bond.
In the secondary market, the 10-year benchmark bond ended at around 7.35 per cent and 5-year sovereign bond at 7.15 per cent.
It was expected that the green bonds will be issued at a premium. The bet was only about the kind of premium it will get.
Green premium, or greenium refers to the negative difference in spreads between green and nongreen bonds with the same financial characteristics (currency, tenor) issued by the same issuer, according to the World Bank.
The green premium suggests that green bonds have a pricing advantage to the issuer over conventional bonds.
Today’s auction is the part of the Rs 16,000 crore sovereign bond auction to be conducted by the Reserve Bank in the current fiscal. The next green bond auction will be held on February 9.
The proceeds from the sale of the sovereign green bonds will be used to finance or refinance expenditure (in parts or whole) for various green projects, including in renewable energy, clean transportation, energy efficiency, climate change adaptation, sustainable water and waste management, pollution and prevention control and green buildings.