Understand the nuances of The news that made headlines today #TheHindu #Editorial

1. 26 February 2020
The Hindu Decoded

3. Rights, Duties & Constitution
• Gist- It is only after a guarantee of the sum of all promised by the
Constitution that citizens can be asked to do their duty
• Context?
• At an International Judicial Conference 2020 this weekend, the Chief
Justice of India, S.A. Bobde, drew attention to the Constitution’s
Fundamental Duties chapter.
• He then went further, and citing Gandhi’s Hind Swaraj, observed that
“real rights are a result of [the] performance of duty”
• Despite its plausibility, the conflation of rights and duties ought to be
resisted due to following arguments-
1. Webs of duties
• There exists a wide range of duties that bind us in everyday life.
• We have a legal duty to pay our taxes, to refrain from committing
violence against our fellow-citizens, and to follow other laws that
Parliament has enacted.

4. • Breach of these legal duties triggers financial consequences (fines), or
even time in jail.
• At any given time, therefore, we are already following a host of duties,
which guide and constrain how we may behave.
• Our duties and the consequences we bear for failing to keep them
therefore exist as a self-contained whole.
• Duties follow the logic that peaceful co-existence requires a degree of
self-sacrifice, and that if necessary, this must be enforced through the
set of sanctions.
2- The logic of rights-
• This logic of rights is best understood through history.
• At the time of the framing of the Indian Constitution and its chapter on
Fundamental Rights, there were two important concerns animating the
Constituent Assembly :-
a) Colonial Regime & Contemporary Global events-
• Indians had been treated as subjects.

5. • Interests of Indians did not count, their voices were unheard, and in some cases
— for example, the “Criminal Tribes” — they were treated as less than human.
• Apart from the long and brutal history of colonialism, the framers also had
before them the recent example of the Holocaust, where the dignity of more than
six million people had been stripped before their eventual genocide.
• The first role of the fundamental rights chapter, therefore, was to stand as a
bulwark against dehumanisation
• Every human being no matter who they were or what they did had a claim to
basic dignity and equality that no state could take away
• One did not have to successfully perform any duty, or meet a threshold of
worthiness, to qualify as a rights bearer.
• It was simply what it meant to be human.
• B) Caste riven society-
• The axes of gender, caste and religion had all served to keep masses of
individuals in permanent conditions of subordination and degradation.
• The second role of rights, thus, was to stand against hierarchy.

6. • Through guarantees against forced labour, against “untouchability”, against
discriminatory access to public spaces, and others, fundamental rights were
meant to play an equalising and democratising role throughout society
• They were made to protect individuals against the depredations visited on
them by their fellow human-beings
• The twin principles of anti-dehumanisation and anti-hierarchy reveal the
transformative purpose of the fundamental rights chapter which is- the
recognition that true democracy could not exist without ensuring that at a basic
level, the dignity and equality of individuals was protected, both from the state
as well as from social majorities.
• Only with these guarantees(rights), could an individual rise from the status of
subject to that of citizen.
• In a society where those who possess or benefit from entrenched structural and
institutional power (starting with the state, and going downwards) certainly have
a “duty” not to use that power to the detriment of those upon whom they wield
it.
• That is precisely what the guarantees against “untouchability”in the Constitution
seek to accomplish.

7. 3- Issue lies in conflation-
• “The rhetoric of duties has often been deployed euphemistically by
those whose true purpose is a return to tradition won by limiting the
rights of others”- Samuel Moyn
• Traditions & duties often seek to subordinate individual to the society.
• It is always critical to remember Dr. B.R. Ambedkar’s words in the
Constituent Assembly, that the fundamental unit of the Constitution
remains the individual.
• Without the moral compass of rights and their place in the
transformative Constitutional scheme the language of duties can
lead to unpleasant consequences
• It is for this reason that, at the end of the day, the Constitution, a
charter of liberation, is fundamentally about rights.
• It is only after guarantee to all the full sum of humanity, dignity,
equality, and freedom promised by the Constitution, that we can ask of
them to do their duty.

9. More psychological than an empowering
voter option
• Gist - The meagre share of NOTA votes, and NOTA in its current form,
are pointers to it being a toothless option
• Context?
• Roughly one in 200 voters of Delhi opted for NOTA in the last six to
seven years, with relatively larger support for NOTA in reserved
constituencies.
• Interestingly, in the 2017 Gujarat Assembly elections, despite being
1.8%, NOTA got more votes than any political party other than the
Indian National Congress and the Bharatiya Janata Party (except the
Independents).
• Again, in the 2019 Maharashtra Assembly election, NOTA became a
runner-up in two constituencies — Latur (Rural) and Palus-Kadegaon.

10. • Essence of NOTA
• In 2013, India became the 14th country to institute negative voting through
NOTA.
• However, it is not a “right to reject”. NOTA in India is a toothless option
• “Even if there are 99 NOTA votes out of a total of 100, and candidate X gets just
one vote, X is the winner, having obtained the only valid vote. The rest will be
treated as invalid or ‘no votes’.” S.Y.Qureshi- Former CEC
• NOTA enfeebles the electorate as it does not empower to “select” either.
• NOTA provides democratic means to express resentment anonymously rather
than boycotting the polls outright.
• Pleas to Extend Scope of NOTA
a) In 2018, a former CEC, T.S. Krishnamurthy, has recommended holding
elections again in those constituencies where the victory margin is less than
the total numbers of NOTA.
b) A PIL has been filed in Madras High Court seeking the full right to reject in
place of NOTA.
c) Maharashtra State Election Commission (SEC) – Hold a fresh election if
NOTA has received highest number of votes
d) Under SEC of Haryana - NOTA is treated like a “fictional candidate” in
municipal polls from December 2018.

11. • While introducing NOTA, the Supreme Court anticipated that “there will be a
systemic change and the political parties will be forced to accept the will of
the people and field candidates who are known for their integrity.”
• Its percentage should either increase to enforce the political parties to field
candidates with “integrity”, or NOTA percentage should consistently
decrease if the electorates feel that the system has achieved the desired
level of cleansing.
• In contrast, the share of NOTA votes in India remained around a meagre
level of 1% on an average; 1.11% in the 2014 Lok Sabha, and 1.08% in
2019, if we consider constituency-wise averages.
• Another ‘option’
• Delbert A. Taebel in a seminal article in the American Journal of Political
Science in 1975, and Jonathan G.S. Koppell and Jennifer A. Steen, in their
2004 article in The Journal of Politics, have discussed the possible
advantage of the first position in the ballot
• Perhaps using NOTB (‘none of the below’) instead of NOTA — with such an
option as the first on the electronic voting machine — might produce a
significantly different outcome

15. Counting Birds Together
• The State of India’s Birds Report has two distinctive features that
define a new approach
• The State of India’s Birds Report 2020 represents the first collective
attempt in India to understand and assess how the avifauna are
doing.
• The results of this exercise are broadly sobering.
• While there are several species, including globally threatened ones,
whose populations are doing reasonably, more bird species are
showing declines in population than are showing population stability
or increases
• Over half the species assessed have decline during past decade

16. • And these declines are particularly acute for certain groups of
birds of prey , migrant shorebirds , birds of forests and grasslands
,and endemic birds of the Western Ghats.
• The report further suggests that more bird species deserve
immediate conservation attention than previously thought.
• To the list of 67 globally threatened Indian bird species previously
identified by the IUCN ( as critically endangered, endangered or
vulnerable),the report adds 34 more species.
• The number of species of high conservation concern in India is now
101.
• A collaborative effort
• But the news is not all bad.
• The report also provides strong reasons for hope that we can
further strengthen the understanding and conservation of our avian
heritage.

17. • In particular, the report has two distinctive features that define a new
approach:
i) the information it builds on comes from citizens like us all
ii) the report’s data and analysis are in the public domain, inviting critique
and further refinement.
Challenges to assess status of birds-
• While some are loud, colourful or diurnal, and hence relatively easier to
detect, others are quiet, shy, or nocturnal.
• Finding them also means having to look in a wide variety of habitats: in
forests, wetlands, farmlands, cities, mountains and even open oceans
• Hundreds of species migrate into and out of our country at different times of
the year.
Only through the efforts of over 15,500 birdwatchers, it became
possible to assemble a dataset of over 10 million records, with data
points going as far back as the 1970s.

18. • What next?
• Developing conservation action that address these changes, are logical
follow-up actions that are inconceivable without focused and sustained
collective efforts
• Just as we have collectively collected, curated, compiled and analysed bird
data, we must remain engaged with the results, and continue to further not
only an understanding of our avifauna but also actions to conserve them.
• Open Access
• The data that has gone into this report are not only collected by thousands of
citizens, but are open for any researcher to use.
• The analyses (and the code) that form the basis of this report are in the
public domain
• The report and its results too are entirely open
• A better public and scientific understanding of our biodiversity can grow only
from wider and open access to data
We need to continue building and strengthening models by which citizens,
scientists, conservationists and managers collaborate not only to understand our
birds, but also to enable them to fare better on our fast-changing planet.

20. Learn something new today- Clause 6
of Assam Accord
• What is it?
• It is one of the promises in the Assam Accord, a memorandum of settlement
inked between the representatives of the All Assam Students Union, the
Assam state government and the government of India. The accord brought
to an end, six years of the Assam movement, an agitation in the state
against undocumented immigrants.
• “Constitutional, legislative and administrative safeguards, as may be
appropriate, shall be provided to protect, preserve and promote the cultural,
social, linguistic identity and heritage of the Assamese people,” Clause 6
reads.
• It seeks to establish the elements that constitute Assamese identity
• It also seeks to ascertain who fits into the definition of an Assamese
• Why in news?
• Refer to the attached article

23. What Happened to Indo-US Deal?

26. What & Why of Pandemics?
• What is Pandemic?
• A Pandemic is an epidemic of disease that has spread across a
large regions; for instance multiple continents or worldwide
• A widespread disease that is stable in terms of how many people
are getting sick from it is not pandemic
• Further, flu pandemics generally exclude seasonal flu

27. • Why should Pandemics be bothered about?
• Commission on a Global Health Risk Framework for the Future
estimated that pandemic event would cost the global economy over
$6 trillion in 21st century
• It imposes severe human resource cost, economic cost of containing
the pandemic and has the potential to spiral down the faltering global
economy.