New Delhi, January 7

The Army troops waded through knee-deep snow in Kupwara district to carry a pregnant woman to a hospital. The woman and her infant boy are doing fine.

It had been snowing for nearly 24 hours, when at 11:30 pm on January 5, the Army’s company-level operating base at Karalpura, Kupwara, received a distress call from Manzoor Ahmed Sheikh, a resident of Pharkian village in the same district. The Army unit is under the Hajipir Brigade. Sheikh informed that his wife Shabnam Begum was undergoing labour pain and needed to be evacuated to a hospital immediately.

However, due to the heavy snowfall and inclement weather neither the community health service vehicle nor any civil transport was available and would be possible only after the snow was cleared from the road. Keeping in mind the advanced stage of pregnancy and the plight of the family, the Army troops at Karalpura along with battlefield nursing assistant and medical needs, reached the spot. The Army men escorted the woman and the family for about 2 km in knee-deep snow to reach the road head, from where she was taken to Karalpura hospital. On reaching the hospital, the woman was immediately attended to by the medical staff. The coordination was carried out beforehand by the Army with the civil administration.The father of the infant came to the Army base to distribute sweets to all troops. — TNS

New Delhi, January 7

Had it not been for the farmers’ protest against the new agri laws that began over a month ago, 22-year-old Navpal Singh would have never planned a trip home at this time from Texas in the US, where he is a student.

“This protest forced me to come here,” said the mechanical engineering student whose father and grandfather are farmers.

“The last time I had come home was less than a year ago…in March, so I had no plans whatsoever to visit again, but the way this protest has taken over this country and also the world, I couldn’t stay away,” he said.

Thousands of farmers, mostly from Punjab and Haryana, have been protesting at multiple Delhi borders against the new agri laws.

Singh arrived in India on Monday and has been travelling between Singhu and his ancestral village in Punjab’s Jalandhar every day since.

Even though he is not a farmer himself, Singh felt the need to be part of the protest because of his farming roots that have provided for his education.

“People might think I have no direct connection with farming…that I am studying in the US, I will also work and get married there, but my father and grandfather are farmers.

“I wouldn’t have been able to have my life in the US without the farmers. And now it is my responsibility to come forward and stand with them in their fight for their rights,” he said. Several rounds of talks with the government have failed to break the deadlock with the government pushing the new legislations as important reforms in the agricultural sector.

The next round of talks is scheduled on Friday.

The farmers on the other hand have maintained that they want the three laws to be repealed. They have also threatened to enter Delhi on January 26 if their demands are not met.

About the stalemate between the government and the farmers, Singh said it was the former’s way of “breaking their spirit”.

“By scheduling talks after talks, the government is trying to simply drag the protest as long as it can, and hoping that it would eventually break our spirits, but they are mistaken.

“A movement like this does not happen every now and then. Today’s rally alone has shown our strength and numbers,” said Singh, who will return to Texas on January 18.

Enacted in September, the three farm laws have been projected by the Centre as major reforms in the agriculture sector that will remove the middlemen and allow farmers to sell their produce anywhere in the country.

However, the protesting farmers have expressed apprehension that the new laws would pave the way for eliminating the safety cushion of the MSP and do away with the “mandi” (wholesale market) system, leaving them at the mercy of big corporates. PTI

Satya Prakash
Tribune News Service
New Delhi, January 7

As hundreds of farmers continue with their protest against the three farm laws in the national capital, the Supreme Court on Thursday expressed concern over the possible spread of COVID-19 and asked the Centre if they were taking precautionary measures against the pandemic.

“You must tell us what is happening? I don’t know if farmers are protected from COVID-19. Same problem may arise in the farmers’ protest too,” a Bench headed by Chief Justice of India SA Bobde said during a hearing of a PIL seeking a CBI probe into Tablighi Jamaat congregation at Nizamuddin Markaz in March last year in violation of restrictions imposed due to COVID19.

The petitioners alleged the congregation led to faster spread of COVID-19 due to “inaction” on the part of the Centre and the Delhi government, putting others’ lives at risk.

As Solicitor General Tushar Mehta replied in the negative and said he will find out the status and file a report in two weeks, the Bench said it could give rise to a situation like Tablighi Jamaat event at Nizamuddin.

“We are trying to ensure that COVID-19 doesn’t spread. Ensure guidelines issued are followed,” the CJI said.

The top court was hearing petitions challenging the validity of the three farm laws passed by Parliament last year.

One of the advocates said Tablighi Jamaat leader Maulana Saad was not traceable and his whereabouts were not known.

Granting time to the petitioners to file a rejoinder, the Bench said the matter will be taken up on Monday along with other petitions on the issue.

Noting that there was no improvement in talks between agitating farmers and the government, the top court had on Wednesday said it would take up petitions against farm laws and those against farmers’ protests on January 11.

“There is absolutely no improvement in the situation,” CJI Bobde had said during the hearing of a PIL by advocate ML Sharma on the issue.

Attorney General KK Venugopal had told the Bench, “There is a good chance that the parties may come to some conclusion in near future.”

The CJI – who had on December 17 indicated constituting a committee of independent and impartial persons, including agriculture experts, to end the stalemate between protesting farmers and the Centre – had said, “We understand the situation. We want to encourage the talks. We will keep the matter on Monday and will adjourn if you say so.”

Solicitor General Tushar Mehta had pointed out that since healthy talks were going on between farmers and the Centre, it would not be advisable to take up the matter immediately.

Vibha Sharma

Tribune News Service

New Delhi, January 6

While unions/ ‘jathebandis’ and government are working hard to keep alive the communication channels, after the January 4 meeting it is more or less clear the government has ceded all it intends to persuade farmers to end the agitation.

As farmers, braving adverse weather conditions, draw elaborate plans for the month for Lohri, January 23—Netaji Subhas Chander Bose’s birth anniversary—and Janaury 26, it seems the government, too, is prepared for a long haul.

Ahead of the January 8 talks with farmers (eighth if the meeting with Home Minister Amit Shah is discounted), top sources say the government has already relented on the proposed Power Act, the Ordinance on stubble pollution and offered amendments to the three Acts and this is about as far it is willing to go on the issue.

“Otherwise, they (farmers) should tell us something new, we are ready to discuss the three Acts threadbare, clause by clause,” they say.

Given the kind of support/traction the agitation has received from common people, the matter has moved out of the hands of union’ leaders for any resolution on a middle path now, this too farmer and government negotiators know well.

“It is now a people’s movement,” says a union leader.

Besides, as Agriculture Minister Narendra Singh Tomar has pointed on many occasions, it is the matter of the entire country and not just Punjab and Haryana.

“Politically it is the question of 23 seats in the 545-member Lok Sabha (of Punjab and Haryana),” they say.

The small and marginal farmers comprise close to 85 per cent in the country. Moreover, if the government relents any further, it will only end up opening prospects of more such protests.

The government, “which has visibly toned down/softened on agitators and the agitation”, seems to have offered a “joint committee on MSP”, which unions rejected, sticking to their demand for a legal framework to ensure minimum support price.

It is not just the three laws, farmers have also junked Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s claim of implementing recommendations of the Swaminathan Commission and are demanding a guaranteed MSP on 23 crops so that they can “diversify” from paddy and wheat.

Maroof Raza

Strategic Affairs Analyst

THE just-released year-end review for 2020 by the Ministry of Defence (MoD) states that even though Indian troops countered every Chinese move along the LAC in Ladakh, maintaining “all protocols and agreements between the countries”, the PLA “escalated the situation by utilisation of unorthodox weapons” to further their ‘expansionist designs’. This is in keeping with the strategy outlined by the Chinese authors of Unrestricted Warfare, who have suggested that all means, armed and unarmed, with lethality, should be used to compel an enemy to submit to your interests. No wonder the Chinese troops of the PLA had used nail-studded clubs and other means to get the better of the Indian soldiers, though unsuccessfully so. But the challenges that China could pose may go well beyond the Himalayan frontiers, since the Indian army, with the IAF’s assistance, has “mobilised troops, including accretionary forces”, as per the MoD report. It leaves China little room for intrusions now.

Thus, the Chinese could well be preparing to use electronic warfare means instead of focusing on just the use of conventional military platforms, despite the Chinese having deployed their air assets to the optimum, as the IAF Chief had recently indicated, and India’s navy keeping a close watch on Chinese ships and submarines in the high seas. The recent conflict between Armenia and Azerbaijan gives us one major takeaway: the nation that has more advanced electronic warfare capabilities will win battles in future. The use of drones, sensors and micro chips could be more lethal than the armada of air and naval power that had until now dominated military planning. The jamming of radars could make military users blind, and many of your systems could be rendered useless. The Chinese are working to get to the top of it, based on their 10-year Made in China plan for 2025, announced in 2015. Thus, Chinese companies, as part of a deep civil-military engagement, provide the Chinese armed forces technologies — stolen or reverse-engineered — to enhance the PLA’s space and cyber capabilities as also in artificial intelligence.

Here is an example of what the Chinese have been capable of. In November 2016, the US navy’s extremely high-tech guided missile destroyer, the USS Zumwalt — that was commissioned at a cost of $4.4 billion and billed as a force multiplier — suffered a propulsion failure on the Panama Canal. This had shocked the US defence establishment. A thorough investigation led the US to identify ‘Chinese Chips’ — microchips that were manufactured by the PLA — which the Americans had to buy in tens of thousands to cut manufacturing costs. Two days after the embarrassing failure of the US navy’s destroyer, a British hi-tech naval destroyer, HMS Duncan, suffered a similar propulsion failure. This apparently also had Chinese Chips in it! Therefore, electronic warfare is the next big challenge for militaries worldwide and China is focusing on that more than conventional military platforms. India should therefore create ‘geek brigades’ for our armed forces.

Furthermore, as articulated in Unrestricted Warfare — even though its focus is on how China could get the better of the US — it has a military and economic message that India would be foolish to ignore. While the US strategic community continues to focus on retaining its military edge with newer technologies, the Chinese have for some years quietly built up their reach within the American elites and have by now long-standing financial links even within Democrats and Joe Biden’s party members. If this requires money, so be it. And thus the Chinese plan to buy out politicians, stifle the media, steal resources and even technology, seems predictably par for the course. It is a pattern that is steadily emerging even in India, which offers both opportunities and challenges for China.

Beyond the newsmakers, China also targets the local population. Thus, it has flooded the Indian market with products and apps, since India offered one of the largest markets — with reportedly 560 million cellphone and their e-application users — with investments from Alibaba and Tencent reportedly in the likes of Paytm, MxPlayer and Gaana. These pose a big security challenge, which hasn’t been explained to Indian users. With Indians known to give out information more easily than most other people, your data can easily take away our data, especially that is privileged information of companies, allowing for their use to even reverse-engineer products. Also, the information on the Internet is controlled by two camps; the ‘open’ or the traditional camp dominated by Western companies like Google, Facebook and Amazon and the ‘closed’ one of the companies controlled by China such as Alibaba and Baidu. It’s anybody’s guess where the greater dangers lie.

It is well known that cyber and biological threats are hard to counter. Despite around 50 organisations of the US government having been recently hacked — and this includes the US Treasury, State and Homeland Security departments — their cyber security experts are clueless of the thefts for nearly nine months! And as India has ranked poorly on the cyber power index computed internationally, it wouldn’t be an exaggeration to say that while our critical national assets are reasonably secure against the repeated cyber attacks they face, the security of our banking and business entities needs to be further enhanced. And if the pandemic has alerted us to one thing, it is the crippling effect that a biological attack may have on any society. And though most major countries are signatories to international conventions against the use of biological weapons, (while still maintaining their stocks of germs) and if and when they do decide to use it, this could have a devastating impact — for which we aren’t quite prepared.