📰 India was informed of AUKUS: Australian envoy
Canberra responding to challenging strategic environment, he says
•Australia had informed India at the highest levels of the new enhanced trilateral security partnership with the U.S. and the U.K. -- AUKUS -- before it was formally announced, Australian High Commissioner Barry O’Farrell said on Friday.
•The decision for the partnership reflected a much more “challenging strategic environment,” which they shared with India, where “great power competition is intensifying,” and territorial tensions in the South China Sea, Taiwan and elsewhere were becoming “more challenging.”
•Mr. O’Farrell stated in a virtual media briefing, “We want to contribute to strategic reassurance measures that ensure no one country believes they can advance their strategic ambitions through conflict. It’s not about seeking to provoke any particular regional power, rather it’s about ensuring we have the capabilities that contribute along with India and other countries to deterring the types of behaviour that threatens the peace and security in the Indo-Pacific today and in the future.”
•The Australian Prime Minister and the Foreign Affairs and Defence Ministers spoke to their Indian counterparts to inform them about the decision. However, it was not discussed during the inaugural India-Australia 2+2 ministerial dialogue, he noted.
•AUKUS was unveiled on September 16 by Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison, U.S. President Joe Biden and U.K. Prime Minister Boris Johnson to “significantly deepen cooperation on a range of emerging security and defence capabilities.” The first initiative under this is for Australia to acquire at least eight nuclear powered submarines (SSN) with cooperation from the U.S. and the U.K. “The decision has been taken after deep consideration,” Mr. O’Farrell pointed out.
•This decision meant the scrapping of the plan to build 12 conventional submarines in partnership with Naval Group of France estimated at over AUS $50 bn when it was announced in 2016. France reacted sharply to the development, with French Foreign Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian calling it a “stab in the back” and “a huge breach of trust”.
•Indo-Pacific investment in military capability is proceeding in an unprecedented rate and that latter point is being driven by China, which has the largest military modernisation programme underway in the world, Mr. O’Farrell remarked. China too had responded sharply to the announcement.
•Responding to questions, he said AUKUS would help improve Australia’s defence capabilities in line with the country’s 2020 Defence Strategic Update and would not affect the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue, which is more of a diplomatic forum. The Quad comprising India, Australia, Japan and the U.S. is scheduled to hold its first in-person Heads of State meeting on September 24 in the U.S. The four countries also recently held naval war games under Exercise Malabar.
Long-range capabilities
•In addition to the nuclear-powered submarines, Australia has also announced that it would acquire acquire additional long-range strike capabilities for its defence force. These include the Tomahawk cruise missile on destroyers, extended range Joint Air-to-Surface stand-off missiles and long-range anti-ship missiles for fighter jets, continuing collaboration with the U.S. to develop hypersonic missiles and precision strike-guided missiles for land forces.
•India, which has progressively deepened ties with the Quad countries as well as France in recent years in the backdrop of growing Chinese assertiveness in the Indian Ocean Region, has maintained silence on the development.
•With massive expansion underway by the Chinese Navy, India too has embarked on a major military modernisation and is in the process of procuring six new advanced conventional submarines, while a separate indigenous project for the design and construction of six nuclear-powered submarines is underway.
📰 Railways planning major restructuring
Panel recommends private participation; winding up of CORE, COFMOW; merger of RVNL with IRCON.
•The Indian Railways, the country’s largest employer and transporter, is heading for a major restructuring plan that could lead to the closure of major establishments, merger of decades-old organisations and private participation in running of its schools and hospitals.
•The recommendations of the Principal Economic Adviser Sanjeev Sanyal for Rationalisation of Government Bodies and Proposal for the Ministry of Railways calls for winding up the Central Organisation for Railway Electrification (CORE), the Central Organisation for Modernisation Of Workshops (COFMOW), Centre for Railway Information Systems (CRIS) and Indian Railways Organisation for Alternative Fuel (already closed on September 7, 2021).
•While senior railway officials were of the view that the recommendations would be taken up for further discussion, the closure of the IROAF has sent out a signal that the proposal could be implemented partly or wholly in due course of time. Last week, the Cabinet Secretariat, Rashtrapati Bhavan, wrote to the Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, Railway Board, calling for monthly reports to intimate the action taken on the rationalisation plan, official sources told The Hindu on Friday.
•In what could be a major coming together of organisations working on the Information Technology platform, the panel recommended winding up of CRIS, an autonomous society that develops software capacity in the railways that includes passenger ticketing, freight invoicing, passenger train operations, management of train crew and management of fixed/rolling assets, and handing over all its work to the Indian Railway Catering and Tourism Corporation (IRCTC).
•Going by the plan, RailTel, one of the largest telecom infrastructure providers in the country that focuses on modernising operations and safety systems through optic fibre networks that exist along railway tracks, would be merged with IRCTC. It has been proposed for the Rail India Technical and Economic Service (RITES) that exports rolling stock to take over Braithwaite & Co Ltd., (BCL) which turned sick in 1992, the sources said.
•Among other recommendations were the merger of Rail Vikas Nigam Limited (RVNL), which implements projects relating to creation and augmentation of railway infrastructure, with the Indian Railway Construction Limited (IRCON), a specialised infrastructure construction organisation. The panel said both RVNL and IRCON had similar functions and hence could be merged.
Merger of schools
•The Principal Economic Adviser recommended merger of railway schools with Kendriya Vidyalayas or handing them over to the respective State Governments since “operating the railway schools takes up a large amount of time of the railway management whose core competence is in running and maintaining the railway service”.
•Justifying the move, the proposal noted that of the 7.99 lakh children of railway employees in the 4-18 age group, less than 2% were enrolled in railway schools. As of 2019, of the total 33,212 students enrolled in 94 schools, only 15,399 were railway wards.
Factories under CPSE
•Another major reform recommended was to establish Central Public Sector Enterprises to bring eight production units under its fold. This would mean that the assets, infrastructure and employees of three coach factories — Integral Coach Factory, Chennai; Rail Coach Factory, Kapurthala; Modern Coach Factory, Rae-Bareli; three locomotive manufacturing units – Chittaranjan Locomotive Works, Chittaranjan; Diesel Locomotive Works, Varanasi; Diesel Loco Modernisation Works, Patiala and two Rail Wheel Units at Yelahanka (Bengaluru) and Bela (Bihar), would be transferred to the proposed CPSE.
•Merger of Central Training Institutes with the National Rail and Transportation Institute after upgrading the latter into a Central University and an Institute of National Importance, roping in private participation for investments to enhance healthcare facilities open to all in the 125 railway hospitals and 586 health units/polyclinics was also proposed, the sources added.
📰 U.S. President Joe Biden unveils plan to cut methane emissions
Joe Biden launches US-EU-led effort to cut methane emissions by 30% over next decade
•With about a month and a half to go before the 26th Conference of the Parties (COP26), the UN climate conference in Glasgow, U.S. President Joe Biden announced the Global Methane Pledge, a U.S.–EU-led effort to cut methane emissions by a third by the end of this decade. Mr. Biden made the announcement at the Major Economies Forum on Energy and Climate (MEF), hosted virtually by the White House on Friday, in which leaders from several countries and the EU, as well as UN Secretary General António Guterres and (India’s ) Environment Minister Bhupender Yadav, participated.
•“This will not only rapidly reduce the rate of global warming, but it will also produce a very valuable side benefit, like improving public health and agricultural output,” Mr. Biden said about the initiative.
•“We’re mobilising support to help developing countries that join and pledge to do something significant — pledge and seize this virtual [vital] opportunity,” he said.
•Methane, a greenhouse gas, is 80 times more potent than carbon dioxide in terms of its global warming capacity. Approximately 40% of methane emitted is from natural sources and about 60% comes from human-influenced sources, including livestock farming, rice agriculture, biomass burning and so forth.
•“We are rapidly running out of time,”Mr. Guterres said on Friday at the MEF.” The world is on a catastrophic pathway to 2.7 degrees Celsius heating. There is a high risk of failure of COP26.” Countries will meet in Glasgow in November to review progress since the Paris Agreement (2015) on climate, with some countries making commitments to achieve net zero emissions by 2050. The Paris deal seeks to maintain temperature rises to under 2 degrees Celsius (and pursuing the goal of limiting rises to below 1.5 degrees Celsius) above pre-industrial levels by getting countries to commit to emission cuts.
Kerry’s India visit
•U.S. Climate Envoy John Kerry, who also spoke at the MEF, was asked by Mr. Biden to chair a ministerial session with India, China, Russia and Germany, as per the White House. Mr. Kerry has just returned from a visit to New Delhi where he tried, unsuccessfully, to get a commitment from the government on getting to ‘net zero’ by 2050, according to reporting in The Hindu.
•India has announced a renewable energy capacity goal of 450 GW by 2030 and Indian Railways has committed to achieving ‘net zero’ emissions by that year, but India as a whole has not committed to a time frame for reaching that target. Some 130 countries are considering a net zero emissions target by 2050.
📰 GST Council not for inclusion of petroleum products: Finance Minister
Centre turns down States’ plea for compensation beyond June 2022
•The Goods and Services Tax (GST) Council has decided to keep petroleum products out of the GST regime, while consumers will have to keep paying the Compensation Cess levied on products like automobiles till March 2026 instead of July 2022 as originally envisaged at the time of rolling out the indirect tax regime.
•Union Finance and Corporate Affairs Minister Nirmala Sitharaman, who chaired the first physical meeting of the Council in nearly two years, said a discussion on including petroleum products in the GST regime was held purely at the behest of the Kerala High Court, which had suggested that the Council take it up in response to a writ petition.
•“The Council members spoke very clearly that they don’t want petroleum products to be included in GST at this time. We shall report the same to the court that the Council has discussed it as per their desire, and the GST Council felt this wasn’t the time to bring petroleum products into GST,” Ms. Sitharaman said.
•The Minister also indicated that the Union government is not inclined to consider some States’ demand to extend the five-year period for which they have been assured a 14% revenue growth for giving up several taxation powers to pave the way for implementing the GST regime. “Legally, compensation was to be paid for five years till July 2022 with an assured level of revenue for the States,” Ms. Sitharaman said
•While the GST regime had originally been premised on a revenue-neutral tax rate of 15.5%, Ms. Sitharaman said the actual GST revenues had been going down with the effective tax rate slipping to 11.6% due to changes made in the tax rates on various goods and services over the last few years.
📰 Act and friction: On appointments to tribunals
A national commission is essential to make appointments to tribunals
•Recent developments have demonstrated the Union government’s implacable determination to undermine the autonomy of the various tribunals in the country. It recently got Parliament to enact the Tribunals Reforms Act, which contained provisions that had been struck down by the Supreme Court in an ordinance issued earlier. After being sharply questioned by the Supreme Court on the unusual delay in filling up vacancies among judicial and administrative members, it released a set of appointments this week. The Court found that there was cherry-picking among the names chosen by the various Selection Committees. Instead of exhausting the selection list put together by panels of judges and officials, the Government had waded into the waiting list to exercise its choice. In another development, the Government cut short the tenure of the Acting Chairperson of the National Company Law Appellate Tribunal (NCLAT), Justice A.I.S. Cheema, by 10 days. Mr. Cheema was set to deliver in some matters on which the NCLAT had reserved judgment before retiring on September 20. The Government’s justification was that it was going by its latest law, under which the Acting Chairperson’s four-year tenure would end on September 10 and that Justice M. Venugopal had already been appointed in his place. However, a Bench headed by the Chief Justice of India, N.V. Ramana, was of the strong opinion that he should be allowed to complete his tenure, and even remarked that the Court would not hesitate to stay the operation of the Act on its own motion. Fortunately, the matter was resolved quickly, with the Government backing down and agreeing that Justice Venugopal would go on leave until Justice Cheema finished his stint on September 20.
•The issue of tribunals has been a source of considerable friction between the Government and the Court. They have often disagreed on the eligibility criteria and conditions of service and a series of judgments have gone against the Government. Clauses introducing changes to the conditions of service of members of the various Tribunals have often been subjected to judicial view. Courts want to ensure that a reasonable tenure was available to the appointees, and do not allow criteria related to age and experience to be used to undermine their independence. Tribunals have always been seen as institutions that were a rung lower in independence as regular courts, even though there is wide agreement that administrative tribunals are required for quicker and more focused adjudication of cases that required specialisation and domain expertise. As several laws now provide for such adjudicative bodies, the executive does have an interest in retaining some leverage over their members. The Supreme Court has repeatedly called for the establishment of a national tribunals commission to make suitable appointments and evaluate the functioning of tribunals. If the Government has been dragging its feet on this, it is only because there is a method to its mulishness.
📰 Picking up the threads from the Afghan rubble
Of all the countries involved in Afghanistan, India possibly has the best credentials to enable Kabul’s neutrality
•The Taliban does appear to have established control, by and large, over Afghanistan, with the last remaining holdout at Panjshir having fallen. Nevertheless, many more questions than answers exist. One significant question is whether the ‘Global War on Terror’ has been consigned to the detritus of history or not.
Much turmoil, terror shoots
•The latest episode in Afghanistan’s tragic history has resulted in several thousands being displaced, and many thousands being forced to flee the country. The overweening threat, however, remains including the presence of many newer terrorist outfits, such as Daesh, ISIS-K, al Qaeda, Jaish-e-Mohammad (JeM), Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT), ETIM-K (a militant group from China’s Xinjiang), the Fidayeen mahas, all of which are the enduring legacies of 20 years of foreign occupation.
•The Taliban have in the meantime, announced the setting up of a 33-member interim government, headed by Mullah Mohammad Hasan Akhund as the acting Prime Minister. Prominent appointees include Abdul Ghani Baradar as acting Deputy Prime Minister, Sirajuddin Haqqani as acting Interior Minister, Mullah Mohammad Yaqoob as acting Defence Minister, and Amir Khan Muttaqi as acting Foreign Minister. Notwithstanding earlier pronouncements by the Taliban, the government is, for the present, solely a Taliban construct, and overwhelmingly Pashtun in character. Pakistan holds certain key cards given the prominent role assigned to its protégés, Sirajuddin Haqqani and Mohammad Yaqoob, the son of Mullah Omar. The new government is unlikely to be fazed by the fact that quite a few members of the interim government are on various terror lists, including that of the United Nations and the United States.
•A great deal of wringing of hands about the choices made may exist, but on a deeper reflection, it would be apparent that the original sin was the U.S. Agreement with the Taliban last year, which conferred on the group a degree of international recognition. Many more aftershocks can also be expected. Hopes of a pragmatic Afghanistan behind the religious garb may thus prove highly evanescent.
•What was achieved in Afghanistan, despite two decades of U.S. and North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) occupation, can be summed up in three words: an unmitigated disaster. Destruction of the terror network — essentially of the al Qaeda network – was an objective which was far from achieved. Terror networks were driven underground for a time, but many new variants such as the Islamic State and many offshoots of the same thrive not only in Afghanistan but also in many different regions of the globe.
India’s engagement
•The facade of seeking to impose democracy in Afghanistan currently stands exposed, but the real damage possibly done is to the idea of democracy itself. Spending trillions of dollars cannot cloak this flawed effort. India’s efforts regarding the economic development of Afghanistan have been rendered infructuous, and its reputation has suffered lasting damage. More serious is the fact that India’s relations with the new Taliban leadership remain strained due to its association, earlier with the Northern Alliance, and subsequently with the Hamid Karzai and Ashraf Ghani administrations. This has put India in a different category, compared to many of Afghanistan’s other neighbours such as China and Russia. Pakistan clearly falls into a different category as the ‘patron saint’ of the new regime.
•Those who do not heed the lessons of history, it is said, are doomed to perdition. Afghanistan has been the graveyard of the ambitions of many nations in the past, notably Great Britain and Russia. Ever since the days of the Great Game between Russia and Great Britain, and right through the Cold War between the U.S. and the Soviet Union, Afghanistan had been viewed as strategically important. Its strategic value has only increased subsequently. The hasty withdrawal of the U.S. from Afghanistan is not merely a setback for the U.S., but for all those who sided with it.
•Beginning with the decision of the Donald Trump Administration to institute talks with the Taliban — and not with the government headed by Mr. Ghani — for the withdrawal of U.S. troops which not only legitimised the Taliban and acknowledged their premier role in the affairs of Afghanistan, the U.S. has committed one error after another.
Duplicitous roles
•Its unfailing trust in the creator of the Taliban, the Pakistani Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), which, while pretending to be an ally, outsmarted the U.S. is another. The Taliban are beholden to the ISI and it was hardly a surprise that the ISI Chief, Faiz Hameed was there to greet Mullah Baradar when he flew into Kandahar. Safe havens of the Taliban for the past two decades have been in Pakistan and these were not only well known to the ISI, but also nurtured by it. Even the U.S. knew that the Taliban’s Shura Council was located in Quetta (Balochistan).
•The near duplicitous role of Qatar, another important U.S. ally, which has nurtured the Taliban leadership in recent years, also bears scrutiny. In a bid to outflank Saudi Arabia (and emerge as the new fulcrum of West Asian politics), Qatar is known to play both sides. While being perceived as a U.S. ally, it pursues its own brand of politics — including that of acting as a shoulder for the Taliban to lean on. Not one, but at least three U.S. Administrations should, hence, share the blame for the catastrophic retreat from Afghanistan.
The eyes on the pie
•The collapse of U.S. involvement in Afghanistan, and the simultaneous rise of the Taliban with their outreach to Pakistan, China, Russia, and to an extent even Iran, are likely to set in train developments that could alter the geo-politics of the region. Russia, though no longer the power it once was, is currently seeking to enlarge its influence in Eurasia, and the Afghan imbroglio gives it an opportunity. China, which envisages domination of Asia as the first step in its bid to become the world’s number one power, sees Afghanistan as a prize both from a geo-economic and geo-political standpoint. Eyeing the mineral wealth of Afghanistan is only one aspect; a key objective is to make its Belt and Road Initiative a truly viable entity, and further extend its reach to the Indian Ocean, without being totally dependent on Pakistan.
•Many West Asian countries are, meanwhile, assessing the situation in Afghanistan to see how best to take advantage of the fluid situation. The United Arab Emirates and Qatar have already shown their hand. Saudi Arabia is anxious to become involved, more so to prevent Iran from extending its influence into Afghanistan. Iran is anxious to secure a hold in Afghanistan to ensure its own security. Uzbekistan and Tajikistan, which have a rather troubled relationship with Afghanistan, are not unwilling to maintain peace with a Talibanised Afghanistan. The U.S.’s plans to enhance regional security/connectivity through a new Quadrilateral diplomatic platform, meanwhile, may well prove stillborn, even before it takes off.
The path for New Delhi
•India’s concerns regarding Afghanistan have as much to do with geo-political positioning, as to prevent Afghanistan from becoming a crucible for pro-terror forces that could impact India’s security. Hence, it must think hard on how to overcome the adverse constellation of forces that have emerged. One possibility is for India to take on a mediating role among the different nations anxious to involve themselves in Afghanistan, and produce a formula that would help maintain Afghanistan’s neutrality and ensure that it becomes a buffer zone to prevent further Chinese expansionism towards South Asia.
•Seven decades ago, India had performed such a mediating role in bringing tentative peace to what was then Indo-China, now Vietnam. It is critically important for India to ensure the unity and the integrity of Afghanistan, and in turn achieve an agreement in principle to maintain Afghanistan’s neutrality.
•Of all the countries currently involved in Afghanistan, India possibly has the best credentials to act as an honest broker; India should choose someone who can act like a ‘Zelig-like figure’ to ensure that the final decision is something that would ensure peace in the region and prevent any major turmoil in South Asia, checkmating both Pakistan and China.
