www.thehindu.com 2017-11-1 Solving the autonomy puzzle Have you noticed how sometimes politicians prefer to quarrel with what their opponents have said — even if in the process they misunderstand and misrepresent — rather than comprehend an important point made by an adversary? The Bharatiya Janata Party’s (BJP) response to former Union Minister and Congress leader P. Chidambaram’s recent comment on Kashmiri demands is a striking example. Both Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Finance Minister Arun Jaitley have claimed Mr. Chidambaram was advocating azaadi and criticised him for it. But he wasn’t. In fact, he said something subtly but significantly different. When Kashmiris call for azaadi, he claimed, they in fact mean autonomy. Perhaps the Prime Minister and the Finance Minister missed the point? In the first instance, Mr. Chidambaram was reading down the cry for azaadi. He was suggesting the word is a rhetorical flourish to attract attention. For most — if not the majority of — Kashmiris, it’s a way of asking for autonomy. He was, therefore, indicating an escape route from the present impasse between the Kashmiri people, who demand azaadi, and a government determined not to concede it. At a deeper level, Mr. Chidambaram was also alluding to the fact that the autonomy Kashmiris want is something they actually had in the early years after accession and which successive governments in Delhi whittled down. This is what he meant when he said, “The demand in the Kashmir Valley is to respect, in letter and spirit, Article 370.” Sadly, last week he didn’t make this point fully clear. However, last year he did. In an interview to me in July 2016 on India Today TV, he said: “We have ignored the grand bargain under which Kashmir acceded to India. I think we broke faith, we broke promises.” This was an explicit reference to the fact that in 1947, Jammu and Kashmir acceded only in terms of defence, foreign affairs and currency/communications and, unlike other States, never merged. It wanted to retain its identity within the Indian sovereignty it accepted, but over the decades that’s been eroded as the jurisdiction of myriad institutions was enlarged to encompass the State. Though last week Mr. Chidambaram did not speak about a solution, in the July interview he spelt one out: “What is necessarycrackIAS.com is to give the assurance that the grand bargain under which Kashmir acceded to India will be fully honoured.” This meant: “Let them frame their own laws as long as it does not conflict with the Constitution. As much as possible we have to assure them that we will respect their identity, history, culture, religion…and [still] allow them to be part of India.” Mr. Chidambaram did not say how this should be taken forward. However, Communist Party of India (Marxist) general secretary Sitaram Yechury, in a separate interview to me in September last year, outlined one possibility. He said we need to sit with Kashmiris and revisit developments since 1947 with a willingness to roll back some. In essence, this is also the position of the National Conference. Its leaders aren’t clear about what needs to be rolled back, though some want a reversal of the nomenclature changed in the 1960s and how the ‘head of state’ is chosen. More importantly, many are confident that institutions like the Supreme Court, the Election Commission and the Comptroller and Auditor General, which are respected in Kashmir, will be retained. The key is to let Kashmiris decide for themselves. The core of the Chidambaram-Yechury proposal is the belief there are many ways of being Indian. If 12 States, including Himachal, Uttarakhand, Gujarat, Maharashtra and in the Northeast, can have special constitutional provisions, why not Jammu & Kashmir? This can only add to the rich texture of being Indian, not strain the national fabric. Indeed, this was the foundation on which the much admired Manmohan Singh-Pervez Musharraf back-channel agreements were built. Now, this is not azaadi. Far from it. But it is a very different concept of India to that of the BJP and the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh. No doubt this is why the Prime Minister and the Finance Minister chose to attack rather than understand and explore it. But, then, what did Mr. Modi mean when he said the solution was to “embrace” Kashmiris? Surely, in practical terms, that means meeting them half-way. Or is he like Humpty Dumpty who famously said, “When I use a word it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less”? Karan Thapar is a television anchor The new U.S. Fed Chairman is unlikely to opt for policies that might upset the President’s plan END Downloaded from crackIAS.com © Zuccess App by crackIAS.com crackIAS.com www.thehindu.com 2017-11-1 Insurgency morphs into drug trade Numbed into submission:Drug addicts seen at a park in Lashkar Gah, Helmand Province, Afghanistan.NYTADAM FERGUSON The labs themselves are simple, tucked into nondescript huts or caves: a couple-dozen empty barrels for mixing, sacks or gallon jugs of precursor chemicals, piles of firewood, a press machine, a generator and a water pump with a long hose to draw from a nearby well. They are heroin refining operations, and the Afghan police and U.S. Special Forces keep running into them all over Afghanistan this year. Officials and diplomats are increasingly worried that the labs’ proliferation is one of the most troubling turns yet in the long struggle to end the Taliban insurgency. That the country has consistently produced about 85% of the world’s opium, despite more than $8 billion spent by the United States alone to fight it over the years, is accepted with a sense of helplessness among counternarcotics officials. The refining makes the drug much easier to smuggle out into the supply lines to the West. And it is vastly increasing the profits for the Taliban, for whom the drug trade makes up at least 60% of their income, according to Afghan and Western officials. The opium economy in Afghanistan grew to about $3 billion in 2016, almost doubling the previous year’s total and amounting to about 16% of the country’s gross domestic product, according to the UN Office on Drugs and Crime. High demand The increase in processing means the Taliban have been able to take a greater share of the $60 billion that the global trade in the Afghan opium crop is estimated to be worth. Demand remains high in Europe and North America: Ninety percent of the heroin on the streets of Canada, and about 85% in Britain, can be traced to Afghanistan, the U.S. State Department has said.NY Times END crackIAS.com Downloaded from crackIAS.com © Zuccess App by crackIAS.com www.thehindu.com 2017-11-1 China to block UN bid to ban Azhar Citing a lack of “consensus,” China said on Monday that it is once again not designating Masood Azhar, head of the Pakistan-based militant group Jaish-e-Mohammad, as an international terrorist. The Chinese position, expressed by its Foreign Ministry spokesperson Hua Chunying, came ahead of Thursday’s meeting of the 1267 committee of the United Nations Security Council, where the status of Azhar would be discussed. In September, hopes had been raised of a shift in China’s position but they were belied. This followed an “excellent” meeting on the sidelines of the BRICS summit in Xiamen between Chinese President Xi Jinping and Prime Minister Modi. “We have made our position clear many times from this podium. The relevant resolutions of the Security Council have clear stipulations as to the mandate to the 1267 committee and also clear stipulations when it comes to listing of relevant organisations and individuals,” said Ms. Hua. “As for listing the application by the relevant country, there are disagreements. China raised the technical hold to allow for morecrackIAS.com time for all parties to deliberate. To our regret the committee so far has yet to reach a consensus.” END Downloaded from crackIAS.com © Zuccess App by crackIAS.com crackIAS.com www.thehindu.com 2017-11-02 Nirmala flags Indian Ocean issues Defence Minister Nirmala Sitharaman with Navy chief Admiral Sunil Lanba and others at Dabolim on Wednesday.PTIPTI Defence Minister Nirmala Sitharaman on Wednesday expressed concern at the increased militarisation in the Indian Ocean and the extra-regional nations setting up a “near permanent presence” in the region, in an apparent reference to the expanding Chinese presence in the region. “We have also witnessed extra-regional nations maintain near permanent presence within the region on one pretext or the other. In order to sustain such a presence through operational turn around, these countries which are extra-regional are creating naval outposts as well as dual-use infrastructure in the region,” Ms. Sitharaman said. She was addressing the first Goa Maritime Conclave of Navy Chiefs of Indian Ocean littoral states hosted by the Indian Navy at the Naval War College in Goa. Stating that there is an “incremental yet steady” increase in numbers of warships operating in the region, Ms. Sitharaman said this militarisation “increases the complexities for the countries of this region.” The GMC is intended to be held every year and aims to “bring together like-minded countries to evolve collective responses to challenges in the maritime domain.” Maritime challenges Ms. Sitharaman said that land-based disputes and riparian issues which are predominantly a legacy of colonial rule are a key cause for conflict. “As international behaviour in the maritime domain is influenced considerably by land-based imperatives, cordiality or latent hostility prevalent among nations on land tends to get reflected in the seas too,” she stated.