DAILY NEWS ARTICLES/EDITORIALS 25TH JULY 2020 - Shiksha IAS
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Best IAS Coaching in Bangalore Daily News Articles/Editorials 25th July 2020
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DAILY NEWS ARTICLES/EDITORIALS 25TH JULY 2020
Posted on July 26, 2020 by admin
Page: 1Best IAS Coaching in Bangalore Daily News Articles/Editorials 25th July 2020
Shiksha IAS https://iasshiksha.com/daily-news-article/daily-news-articles-editorials-25th-july-2020/
TODAY’S IMPORTANT ARTICLE’S FOR UPSC PREPARATION
1. JUDICIAL INDISCIPLINE.
2. ARMS AND THE WOMEN.
3. THE SPECTRE OF CROWDS IN THE COVID CITY.
JUDICIAL INDISCIPLINE
CONTEXT:
The Rajasthan High Court’s order of directing that status quo(existing affairs)be maintained in
the disqualification proceedings against 19 legislators borders on judicial indiscipline.
It also held a legal challenge to the Rajasthan Assembly Speaker’s notice under the anti-
defection law to be maintainable.
The order does not give any reason for admitting the petition and overruling objections to its
admissibility, except for saying legal questions have arisen, including one on the validity of a
sub-clause in the Tenth Schedule.
It is as if the mere fact that some questions have arisen is enough to disregard the doctrine of
precedent.
SPECIFIC PROVISION:
There is a specific prohibition in a Constitution Bench verdict of the Supreme Court on courts
intervening in disqualification matters at a stage prior to a presiding officer giving a ruling.
Of the 13 questions the Division Bench has framed, purporting to arise from the Speaker C.P.
Joshi’s notices to 19 Congress members in the Sachin Pilot camp, the last one itself shows
it cannot entertain the petition.
The question is whether the Supreme Court’s judgment in Kihoto Hollohan (1992) is a bar on the
High Court examining the issues.
It is illogical that the Bench holds that the petition is maintainable even while proposing to
examine whether a Constitution Bench judgment binds it or not.
In other words, a petition has been declared maintainable on the ground that the court
proposes to examine its maintainability.
PARA 2:
The 1992 judgment upheld the validity of the Tenth Schedule to the Constitution, the anti-
defection law.
The law also declared that Para 2 — a part of which is now under challenge and is the
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ostensible reason for the High Court to entertain the petition — does not violate the freedom of
speech, vote or conscience of elected members.
Para 2(1)(a) deals with disqualifying lawmakers who “voluntarily give up membership” of their
party.
Yet, the High Court is now venturing to find out whether Para 2(1)(a), has been examined by the
apex court from the point of view of “intra-party democracy”.
If at all the provision’s validity is to be tested, it can only be done in a case arising out of it.
When no decision has been rendered by the Speaker, it is beyond comprehension how the
court entertained arguments on the issuance of the notice and on whether dissidents can be
disqualified for questioning the party line.
Para 2(1)(a) has been used by Speakers for years, and many such disqualification orders have
been upheld by the Supreme Court, including as recently as November 2019 in a Karnataka
case.
Admitting a matter without explaining how the law laid down by the Supreme Court does not
bind a High Court raises grave questions of judicial propriety(suitability).
However, even as the political crisis plays out on the lawns of Raj Bhavan, the top court itself
appears to be raising the question whether dissent within a party can attract disqualification
proceedings.
CONCLUSION:
Whatever the circumstances, the SC should not condone(overlook)improper and premature
judicial intervention.
Rajasthan HC has disregarded law laid down by SC while admitting plea by Pilot camp.
ARMS AND THE WOMEN
CONTEXT:
A glass ceiling was shattered on Thursday when the Ministry of Defence issued a formal
letter granting permanent commission to women officers in the Indian Army.
The uphill battle to break a gender stereotype and provide equal opportunities for women in
the Army had to be fought right up to the highest level, in the Supreme Court.
Even so, the MoD’s Government Sanction Letter specifying the grant of permanent commission
to Short Service Commission (SSC)women officers in all the 10 streams in which they presently
serve is a cause for celebration.
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LONG FIGHT:
It will go a long way in ending a prejudice associated with the Army. True, the fight was far from
easy.
It was long and protracted, as the government initially glossed over a Delhi High Court ruling in
the litigants’ favour 10 years ago.
Then in the Supreme Court, just what the litigants were up against became clear from the
views of the government.
A written note to the Court pointed at “physiological limitations” of women officers, saying that
these were great challenges for women officers to meet the exigencies of service.
In February, the Supreme Court read the government the riot act, asking it to abide by its own
policy on granting permanent commission to women in the SSC and giving them command
postings in all services other than combat.
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BUST THAT MYTH:
The misogyny was called out in a 54-page judgment. The Supreme Court noted that women
officers of the Indian Army had brought laurels to the force.
“The time has come for a realisation that women officers in the Army are not adjuncts to a male
dominated establishment whose presence must be ‘tolerated’ within narrow confines,” it said.
The Army is often seen as the preserve of men, but enough women have fought heroic battles
to bust that myth.
Rani of Jhansi in the past to Squadron Leader Minty Agarwal of the Indian Air Force, who last
year “was part of the team that guided Wing Commander Abhinandan Varthaman during the
Balakot airstrike carried out by the IAF”.
The irony is that of the 40,825 officers serving in the Army, a mere 1,653 are women, as the top
court noted.
Elsewhere in the world, in countries such as the United States and Israel, women are allowed in
active combat.
Here, the Supreme Court had to forcefully nudge the government to make women’s role in the
Army more inclusive.
CONCLUSION:
A gender barrier may have fallen, but the war against inequity is far from over.
After a long battle, women officers overcome the gender barrier in the Indian Army.
THE SPECTRE OF CROWDS IN THE COVID CITY
CONTEXT:
Distancing, isolation and the thinning out of public spaces in Indian cities have offered up new
pastoral landscapes of delight for urban dwellers, with clean air, summer blooms, and assorted
wildlife crossing streets.
The quiet that overtook our cities during the lockdown was celebrated as a gift of the
pandemic.
Fuel-saving work-from-home arrangements, cost-saving virtual meetings, and spare social
gatherings are seen as offering new, mellower possibilities of urban inhabitation that may save
us from both COVID-19 and the ongoing climate crisis.
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KEY ATTRIBUTES:
Before we celebrate this oncoming new normal, it is important to recognise what it puts at
stake.
Agglomeration(collection), density and crowds have long been definitional attributes of the
urban.
Urbanisation is premised on the scale economies that urban agglomeration affords.
But the transformative social effects of urban density have also been long acknowledged.
Cities, as close-knit, dynamic constellations of human and non-human bodies, offer ideal
grounds for the spread of a virus, but also facilitate other diffusions.
Urban mixings have helped dissolve or remake categories of caste and gender.
They have enabled socio-economic mobility, widened horizons of possibility, and allowed
historically discriminated groups to forge new identities, claim public resources, take risks and
assert rights.
The unpredictability and possibility contained in motley(diverse)urban communions make for
the “cityness” of crowds.
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The pandemic has stigmatised social density, recalling Dickensian spectres of overcrowding,
contagion and disorder.
Social distancing has been readily embraced by India’s caste society, which was always
uncomfortable with the mingling fostered by cities.
Crowding in markets, mosques or transport hubs were repeatedly highlighted as irresponsible
and threatening to the health of the national body.
MATRIX OF RELATIONSHIPS:
As infection numbers rose steeply in Mumbai, Chennai, and Delhi by late April, COVID-19
hotspots mapped onto thickly populated zones of these cities, and congestion was singled out
as a major culprit in disease spread.
Slums, the problem zones of pandemic management, had drones hovering overhead to
monitor compliance with stay-at-home orders.
But in their congested lanes, with 150-square-feet houses, everyday activities of cooking,
washing, and sleeping occur in spillover spaces outside the home.
In these liminal spaces, exchanges of information, food, labour, contacts, build a scaffolding of
survival for marginalised urban residents.
Daily arbitrations with unfriendly and friendly bodies — strangers, migrants, stray dogs, and
landlords — create a matrix of relationships that transform a housing colony into a
neighbourhood.
The months-long nationwide lockdown of Indian cities has seen spontaneous and repeated
outbreaks of crowds, large and small, sparked by panic, hunger, anger, and by orchestrated
celebrations of national unity.
These suggest an irrepressibility to the crowd in the city.
EXPLAINING CROWDING IN INDIA:
Three conditions stand out as common catalysts of crowding in the Indian city. First, scarcity.
Chronic scarcity, often induced by lopsided resource distributions, induces a repertoire of
techniques such as the jostle, the push, the rush to reach the counter before rations or tickets
run out.
Second, protest. The city is the staging ground for protesting crowds bringing diverse
discontents from far afield, as in the jallikattu protests of January 2017 when throngs of agrarian
protesters congregated on Chennai’s Marina Beach.
Third, ritual or celebratory gatherings such as funerals and temple festivals regularly take over
city streets, sidelining traffic for a public assertion of communal emotions.
If scarcity, protest and celebration are catalysing conditions for crowds, India’s pandemic
governance powerfully triggered each through its long and stringent lockdown.
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City authorities had failed to anticipate and provide for the inevitable congregations at a large
metropolitan market that generates livelihoods for a far-flung catchment of cultivators, traders
and manual workers.
Propensities for public celebration also surfaced repeatedly, from the clanging of utensils on
streets during the Prime Minister’s Janata curfew in March to the masses of devotees gathering
around Odisha’s Jagannath temple in June.
MIGRANT DISTRESS:
Protesting crowds repeatedly broke through city curfews.
The most pronounced legacy of India’s lockdown is the explosion into public visibility of lakhs
of inter-State migrant workers, hitherto hidden inside the urban machinery.
Within days of the unplanned lockdown which had entirely ignored their existence,
these workers were spilling into the streets of every city— hungry, jobless, abandoned by
employers and contractors, desperate to return to their families.
By late May, as their appeals for transport to their homes went unheeded, the fierce yearning
of urban workers for their rural homes sparked crowds everywhere.
They protested at industrial campuses, converged at train stations, and walked in hundreds
and thousands on highways in the searing summer heat.
Peaceful walkers were turned into agitated crowds by the stunning ineptitude, mal-
coordination and opacity of police, district authorities, shelter administrators and railway
officials, who rounded them up on their journey and returned them to the city with no clear
idea of what to do with them.
The Indian urban story is indelibly marked by the tragic conditions of these workers’ mass
exodus, stranded at State borders, dying of hunger and exhaustion, run over by trains and
trucks on the highway.
These crowds index a fundamental breakdown, not only of the lockdown solution but of the
urban promise of material and social mobility toward a better future.
CONCLUSION:
The pandemic has sharply exposed the faultlines of urban labour value chains.
As cities slowly open up, a perverted normal is unfolding, wherein private vehicles and taxis
with limited occupancy are permitted, but safe mass transport arrangements, the economic
and social lifeline of cities, are still a far cry.
Our focus on urban agglomeration urges an imagination of post-pandemic cities that resists
retiring into a closeted isolation that only the privileged can afford.
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