Prashant Mavani, is an expert in current affairs analysis and holds a MSc in Management from University of Surrey (U.K.). Above all he is a passionate teacher.

A bit of background

• Excluded from the 135 officially recognised ethnic groups, the Rohingya have been harassed and hounded by the Myanmar authorities for decades.

• Conflict between radical groups of Rohingya vs Military• The Myanmar authorities claim that 400 lives have been lost, advocates cite double this

number.

Present situation

• Two weeks time almost 300,000 Rohingya became refugees.

• This is putting Bangladesh under immense strain.

• Bangladesh, itself one of the world’s most densely populated nations, has hosted more than 600,000 Rohingya compared to 40,000 by India.

• Initially, hesitant to open borders along the Naf river, Bangladesh has now started allowing in refugees

• UNHCR and the World Food Programme are struggling to attend to the large number of refugees arriving each day on foot or by boat.

• World Food Programme (WFP) is the leading humanitarian organization fighting hunger worldwide, delivering food assistance in emergencies and working with communities to improve nutrition and build resilience.

• Under SDGs, the world community is committed to end hunger, achieve food security and improved nutrition by 2030, one in nine people worldwide still do not have enough to eat. Food and food-related assistance lie at the heart of the struggle to break the cycle of hunger and poverty.

• International Committee of the Red Cross:• Established in 1863, the ICRC operates worldwide, helping people affected by conflict

and armed violence and promoting the laws that protect victims of war.• An independent and neutral organization, its mandate stems essentially from the

Geneva Conventions of 1949. • We are based in Geneva, Switzerland, and employ some 16,000 people in more than 80

countries. • The ICRC is funded mainly by voluntary donations from governments and from

National Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies.

• Naf river on the border of Myanmar and Bangladesh.

• Bangladesh, which has been most affected by the crisis, was hopeful that Mr. Modi would express concern about the humanitarian crisis with Myanmar’s State Councillor and Nobel Peace Prize winner Aung San Suu Kyi.

• Instead, he was seen empathising with Myanmar, and the joint statement at the end of the visit said: “India stands with Myanmar over the issue of violence in the Rakhine state which has led to loss of innocent lives.”

a. turned a blind eye to both the untold sufferings caused to the refugees fleeing persecution.b. the resulting difficulties that a resource-constrained country such as Bangladesh has been put to.

• India’s move to dissociate itself from the Bali Declaration adopted at the World Parliamentary Forum on Sustainable Development in Indonesia, and which called “on all parties to contribute to the restoration of stability and security ... respect human rights of all people in Rakhine State regardless of their faith and ethnicity, as well as facilitate safe access for humanitarian assistance”.

• Bangladesh Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina recently said: “It affects a country’s dignity when tens of thousands of its own nationals are fleeing home to take refuge outside.”

• Bangladesh has also urged the world community to put pressure on Myanmar to sort out the issues related with Rohangiyas.

• This puts into question its respect for human rights and the treatment of minorities.

• It weakens India’s moral authority to speak for minorities in other parts of its neighbourhood. Interestingly Nepal, Bhutan and Sri Lanka joined the declaration.

• India, throughout its history, has been generously accommodative towards refugees in the neighbourhood fleeing persecution, which includes Parsis, Tibetans, Afghans, Sri Lankan Tamils, and Bangladeshis during the war of liberation in 1971.

• India has prided itself in its tradition of Atithi Devo Bhava (the guest is equivalent to god).

Creating cracks between India and Bangladesh

• In his 2015 visit to Bangladesh, Mr. Modi used eloquent phrases to describe the India-Bangladesh friendship.

• Since 2009, Bangladesh has emerged as one of India’s most trusted neighbours, with Dhaka addressing almost all of New Delhi’s security concerns.

• This includes cracking down on cross-border terrorism and insurgency conducted against India from Bangladeshi soil.

• The India-Bangladesh border today is one of the safest for India, enabling massive redeployment of its vital border resources for other purposes.

• Despite this, Bangladesh has neither received water from the Teesta or support in times of humanitarian crisis from its biggest neighbour.

• Ironically, when Bangladesh procured two submarines from China, indicating the growing economic and defence ties between the two countries, New Delhi rushed its then Union Defence Minister, Manohar Parrikar, to Dhaka to elevate military cooperation.

• Such promptness is missing when it comes to supporting Bangladesh when it is overcome by helpless refuges persecuted at home and accepted by none.

• The world does not expect Myanmar’s other big neighbour, China, to be vocal about the atrocities being committed, but as the upholder of democratic values, India has a unique opportunity to demonstrate statesmanship and regional leadership by mediating a solution to the Rohingya crisis on the basis of a report of the Advisory Commission on Rakhine State headed by former UN Secretary General Kofi Annan and set up by none other than Ms. Suu Kyi.

• It reflects inadequate moral leadership and an inability to rise to the occasion as expected from a regional power vying to enhance its influence in the neighbourhood.

• One of the reasons why India, despite its enviable soft power and formidable hard power, fails to generate confidence in the region, including with friends such as Bangladesh, is its complex geopolitics based more on political opportunism and economic interests as opposed to principles and values, practised consistently.

• India has had a long history of political and ideological murders and assassinations; the way we lost Mahatma Gandhi is a prominent example.

• Journalists and activists at the grass-root level are always under the threat of physical intimidation or annihilation.

• Data from the National Crime Records Bureau show that there have been over 140 attacks — this includes over 70 murders — against journalists, since 2015.

• Unlike Lankesh, Pansare, Dabholkar and Kalburgi, several social activists have perished in anonymity.

• Following the murder of journalist-activist Gauri Lankesh outside her Bengaluru home, 18 writers and activists in Karnataka have been given police protection to address fears that others may be on her killers’ radar.

• Such swiftness has not been in evidence in joining the dots, at the investigative level, between the killing of Lankesh and three other prominent rationalists and critics of Hindutva and campaigners against superstition and orthodoxy: Narendra Dabholkar (killed in August 2013), Govind Pansare(February 2015) and M.M. Kalburgi (August 2015).

• There is still no closure in these cases.

• All four intellectuals had challenged the core of social beliefs and customs that divisive political ideologies are built on and political parties claim to represent.

A larger conspiracy?

• Forensic analysis in Maharashtra of the cartridges used in the Dabholkar, Pansareand Kalburgi cases has shown that the weapons used could be the same, the key word being same and not similar.

Who is doing what?

• The Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) is probing the Dabholkar case while a Maharashtra special investigation team (SIT) is inquiring into the Pansare murder.

• They have arrested one activist each linked to a Goa-based radical Hindu organisation, the Sanatan Sanstha.

• With the arrest of Virendra Tawde, the organisation is under the scanner for links in both cases.

• The criminal investigation department of the Karnataka police is probing the Kalburgi case.

• While an SIT of the State police has been formed to look into the Lankesh murder.

Why these investigations have not been clubbed together?

• Even the Bombay High Court observed recently that there appeared to be a “clear nexus” between the “well planned” murders of Dabholkar and Pansare.

• Despite these facts, the prime intent of the individual probes has been to lookat them as individual murder cases.

• There has been no dedicated probe into the probability of a larger conspiracy.

• The four cases need to be seen in tandem by investigators as there is a suspicion of a common thread, and that is what makes them seem far more serious than a murder.

• But which agency can be trusted to carry out such a probe?• CBI? It was referred as Caged Parrot by the Supreme Court.

• It is incumbent on the Central and State governments to come up with a solution.

• This could be in the form of an inter-State task force or a judicial commission, or even an investigation monitored by the Supreme Court, but one that seeks to probe the probability of a larger conspiracy in a dedicated way.

• This underlines the need for the state to send out a clear message that there will be “zero tolerance” of such acts. This starts by beginning a genuine search for the guilty.

• Journalist and activist Gauri Lankesh, who was shot dead at point-blank range, was a critic of the establishment.• Questioned the orthodoxy of caste hierarchy

• Strove to expose the unholy nexus of religious conservatism

• Political Hindutva

• Crony capitalism

• The rationalist, Narendra Nayak, rightly pointed out that “the elimination of voices of reason by silencing them through murder was the hallmark of those cowardly dunces who have no arguments to counter those put forward by us.”

What differentiates rationalists from other liberals?

• Rationalists, unlike liberals and other modernists, go a step further in exposing the roots of conservatism and fundamentalism — they take on uncomfortable issues that bother not just collective subjects in a political project (such as voters) but individuals in “deep society”.

• Their work is the forerunner of social change rather than just political or economic change; it is an outcome that threatens the forces of conservatism the most.

• While liberals argue for modern values and abstract freedoms, their work does not touch “deep society” the way the work by rationalists does.

• Rationalists question core beliefs and take on sacred cows; they strike right at the edifice of legitimacy accorded to the status quoists and religious conservatives.

• This is exactly why they are seen as the greater and most immediate enemy by the enemies of ‘progress’, and so the attacks on Kalburgi, Dabholkar, Pansare, and Lankesh.

• Historian Romila Thapar recently pointed out that today’s diminished pool of public intellectuals continues a tradition of unorthodoxy and critical dissent championed by the adherents of the Lokayata philosophy and Buddhists in ancient India.

Iberian peninsula andStrait of Gibraltar

Bit of background before we analyse the editorial

• The Catalan region has long been the industrial heartland of Spain – first for its maritime power and trade in goods such as textiles, but recently for finance, services and hi-tech companies.

• It is one of the wealthiest regions of Spain - it accounts for 18.8pc of Spanish GDP, compared to 17.6pc from Madrid. Madrid, however, has a higher per capita GDP.

• Secession would therefore cost Spain almost 20 per cent of its economic output, and trigger a row about how to carve up the sovereign’s 836 billion euros of debt.

• It would have a gross domestic product of $314 billion (£195bn), according to calculations by the OECD, which would make it the 34th largest economy in the world. That would make it bigger than Portugal or Hong Kong.

• Its GDP per capita would be $35,000, which would make it wealthier than South Korea, Israel or Italy.

• And Catalonia's contribution to the Spanish economy is twice that of Scotland’s to the UK.

• The long-standing conflict in Spain over independence for Catalonia has escalated into a full-blown political crisis.

• The legislature of Spain’s north-eastern region last week passed a law to back the October 1 vote for secession, consistent with the narrow electoral mandate it received on a promise of self-determination.

• Under its terms, a declaration of independence would follow within hours of the announcement of a ‘yes’ vote, no matter how low the turnout.

• In turn, the Spanish constitutional court, which had until now cautioned that a plebiscite would be unconstitutional, has swiftly declared the law illegal.

• A political confrontation is thus imminent.

• The conservative government of Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy had so far merely threatened to invoke Article 155, which confers extraordinary powers on Madrid, with a view to preventing the referendum.

• It is now gearing itself to suspend self-governance in the province.

• This could raise awkward questions in a European democracy.• Ancient Greek

• French Revolution

• In June, Mr. Rajoy had warned of dire consequences if authorities in Catalonia utilised regional development funding for expenditure connected with the plebiscite.

• But the separatists hope that Madrid’s hardline stance will further stoke a defiant sentiment against the national government.

• What triggered it?

a. The roots of the separatist conflict in this relatively affluent area are linked to a tribunal’s overturning of a statute for greater regional autonomy

b. As well as an effort to apportion the blame for the austerity of the eurozonedebt crisis to Madrid.

• The Union Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change as well as all State Forest Departments are guided by the National Forest Policy, 1988.

• National Forest Policy, 1988, states: “The basic objectives that should govern the National Forest Policy are the following: Maintenance of environmental stability through preservation and, where necessary, restoration of the ecological balance that has been adversely disturbed by serious depletion of the forests of the country.”

Is there really anything like ‘ecological balance’?

• The term originated as ‘the balance of nature’ in ancient Greece and was quoted off and on through the Middle Ages.

• However, with a better understanding of the functioning of natural systems, the concept was completely rejected by the beginning of the last century and does not find mention in textbooks of ecology.

Is there really anything like ‘environmental stability’?

• the concept of ‘environmental stability’ is questionable because it is evident that natural processes are never stable or stagnant but are always in the process of change and succession.

• Therefore, environmental stability is a myth.

Defining a forest

• It is interesting that there is no official definition for the term ‘forest’ yet, despite ministries and government departments being named after it.

• Definition of ‘forest’: It is a self-sown and self-regenerating community of plants that supports a community of creatures dependent on those plants, and on each other, for food and shelter.

• The ‘self-sown’ bit is important in the Indian context, since vast amounts of public money have been spent on ‘planting forests’, which is an oxymoron.

• Naturally there are no results to show for these ‘planted forests’, and Haryana has recently shown the way by practically stopping ‘forest plantation’ in favour of protecting and permitting existing vegetation to grow.

• The second point of the policy states: “Conserving the natural heritage of the country by preserving the remaining natural forests with the vast variety of flora and fauna, which represent the remarkable biological diversity and genetic resources of the country.”

• Writer redefines the second point and adds argue that this should include grasslands, wetlands, and other ecosystems

• This would suggest that degraded lands be protected so that original ecosystems can re-establish themselves on those lands.

• When land has been thoroughly degraded, the usual succession is grasses, shrubs, bushes and, finally, trees.

• By planting trees directly in such areas, we try to jump the gun, but the build-up of top soil and soil microorganisms that proceeds from a succession is missing, hence the large-scale failure of such plantations.

The third point needs some modification, too. It states: “Checking soil erosion and denudation in the catchment areas of rivers, lakes, reservoirs in the interest of soil and water conservation, for mitigating floods and droughts and for the retardation of siltation of reservoirs.”

• Writer redefines: “Protecting the catchment areas of rivers, lakes, reservoirs to enable natural vegetation to grow back unhindered to conserve soil, help groundwater recharge, for mitigating floods and droughts and for retardation of siltation of reservoirs.”

• The justification for this wording is that the natural vegetation of an area has evolved over millennia to adjust to the rainfall regime, soil conditions, and the subsurface water systems of an area.

• In places where catchment areas have untouched natural vegetation, rainfall percolates into the soil and is released over a period of months, resulting in perennial streams and rivers.

• Where this has been damaged, the streams, rivulets and rivers have become seasonal, as in peninsular India.

• What should be the real aim of Forest Policy?• “The principal aim of Forest Policy must be to ensure a healthy natural environment

and the maintenance and healthy functioning of life-support systems, including the water cycle and nutrient cycle, by protecting natural forest and other ecosystems native to the area. The derivation of direct economic benefit must be subordinated to this principal aim since the indirect economic benefit of healthy life-support systems is incalculable.”

• What is worrisome, however, is that in the 30 years since it was formulated, no officer of the Indian Forest Service has pointed out these shortcomings. There is clearly an urgent need to review the curriculum of the Indian Forest Service since it seems to rely on concepts that have been discarded more than a century ago.

Will turn J&K into heaven: Rajnath

• Union Home Minister Rajnath Singh continued his four-day “outreach” visit to Jammu and Kashmir on Sunday, vowing to “turn Kashmir into a heaven(jannat).

• Mr. Rajnath Singh, who visited Anantnag in south Kashmir on Sunday, praised the role of the Jammu and Kashmir police as well as paramilitary forces for their “unassailable and unmatched courage.”

• He promised more bullet-proof vehicles, bullet-proof vests and a trauma centre for the police, as well as helicopter services for security forces in J&K.

• National Conference working president Omar Abdullah led a party delegation to meet Mr. Rajnath Singh and raised the issue of J&K’s special status.

• The high-level Congress group, headed by Dr. Manmohan Singh, met a number of delegations in Jammu, which included groups representing women, minorities, migrants from Pakistan-occupied Kashmir, besides prominent civil society member

Dhaka plea made MEA shift stand

• India’s shift in position on the Myanmar issue on Saturday, where it expressed concerns about the outflow of Rohingya refugees for the first time in recent months, was prompted by a series of requests from the Bangladesh government “at the highest levels”, officials in New Delhi and Dhaka told The Hindu .

• “There was some disappointment in our government when we saw that the India-Myanmar joint statement during Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s visit didn’t include any reference to the refugee situation,” a senior Bangladeshi official said.

• He confirmed that the government had raised the issue with India at several levels, and was equally concerned by India’s decision to reject the Bali declaration at the World Parliamentary Forum on human rights concerns with Myanmar that had been backed by Bangladesh.

Rohingya militants declare ceasefire

• Rohingya militants in Myanmar, whose raids sparked an Army crackdown that has seen nearly 300,000 Muslim Rohingya flee to Bangladesh, on Sunday declared a unilateral ceasefire.

• But the government declared it would not negotiate with “terrorists”.

• “The Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army (ARSA) hereby declares a temporary cessation of offensive military operations,” the group said in a statement on its Twitter account. It urged “all humanitarian actors” to resume aid delivery to “all victims of humanitarian crisis irrespective of ethnic or religious background” during the one-month ceasefire until October 9.

• In addition to Rohingya, some 27,000 ethnic Rakhine Buddhists as well as Hindus have also fled violence in the northern part of Rakhine state. ARSA called on Myanmar to “reciprocate this humanitarian pause” in fighting.

• In the United States, hurricane Irma lashed the Florida mainland. Three persons have been killed in Florida after the landfall by the storm due to which at least 30 deaths are attributable so far.

• With its high winds and rains now impacting all of south Florida, the storm is currently moving up along Florida's western Gulf coast from Naples to Fort Myers and the densely populated Tampa Bay peninsula.

• Six million people, one third of the state's population, have been ordered to flee the path of the hurricane, which weakened to a Category Two storm as it churned past the Keys yesterday, packing top winds of 177 kilometers per hour.

• The storm made its second Florida landfall, hitting Marco Island near the popular shopping and golf destination of Naples, hours after striking the Keys island chain.

• After a cabinet briefing from Homeland Security and emergency officials, President Donald Trump said he would travel to the state "very soon."

Fierce Irma slams into Florida

India-Afghanistan

• Foreign Minister of Afghanistan Salahuddin Rabbani will meet External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj in New Delhi today and hold delegation level talks.

• Mr Rabbani has arrived yesterday on a three day visit to India. He will co-chair the Indo-Afghan strategic partnership council meeting with SushmaSwaraj and will discuss key bilateral and regional issues.

The End

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