30 Sep 2020: UPSC Exam Comprehensive News Analysis

B. GS 2 Related

Category: INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS

1. Why are Azerbaijan and Armenia fighting again?

Context:

Fresh clashes have erupted on the Armenia-Azerbaijan border, threatening to push the former Soviet republics back to war 26 years after a ceasefire was reached.

Details:

• Armenia (Christian majority) and Azerbaijan (Muslim majority) are a part of South Caucasia.
• The territorial dispute between Armenia and Azerbaijan is over the Nagorno-Karabakh region.

Nagorno-Karabakh:

• Nagorno-Karabakh is an ethnically Armenian enclave within Azerbaijan that has been out of Azerbaijan’s control since the end of a war in 1994.
  • This region has a 95% ethnically Armenian population.
  • It is internationally recognised as part of Azerbaijan.
• It broke away from Azerbaijan in a conflict that broke out as the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991.
• Though a ceasefire was agreed in 1994, Azerbaijan and Armenia frequently accuse each other of attacks around Nagorno-Karabakh and along the separate Azeri-Armenian frontier.
• Both sides have a heavy military presence along a demilitarized zone separating the region from the rest of Azerbaijan.

Background:

• The conflict can be traced back to the pre-Soviet era when the region was at the meeting point of the Ottoman, Russian and Persian empires.
• Once Azerbaijan and Armenia became Soviet Republics in 1921, Moscow gave Nagorno-Karabakh to Azerbaijan but offered autonomy to the contested region.
• In the 1980s, when the Soviet power was receding, separatist currents picked up in Nagorno-Karabakh.
• In 1988, the national assembly voted to dissolve the region’s autonomous status and join Armenia.
• When Armenia and Azerbaijan became independent after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, the clashes led to an open war in which tens of thousands were killed. The war lasted till 1994 when both sides reached a ceasefire.
• By that time, Armenia had taken control of Nagorno-Karabakh and handed it to Armenian rebels. The rebels have declared independence, but have not won recognition from any country.
• The region is still treated as a part of Azerbaijan by the international community, and it wants to take it back.
• The region was particularly tense because of violent fighting between the two countries in 2016, which came to be known as the four-day war.
• The border between Armenia and Azerbaijan has been tense since 2018.

Concerns:

• The largely mountainous and forested Nagorno-Karabakh which is at the centre of the conflict is home to some 150,000 people. There is a possibility of displacement of the civilian population if a large scale war were to break out.
• The energy-rich Azerbaijan has built several gas and oil pipelines across the Caucasus to Turkey and Europe.
  • It includes the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan oil pipeline, the Western Route Export oil pipeline, the Trans-Anatolian gas pipeline and the South Caucasus gas pipeline.
  • Some of these pipelines pass close to the conflict zone.
  • In an open war between the two countries, the pipelines could be targeted, which would impact energy supplies.
• Military escalation would draw regional powers like Turkey and Russia deeply into the conflict.

Turkey’s role:

• Turkey has historically supported Azerbaijan and has had a troublesome relationship with Armenia.
• In the 1990s, during the war, Turkey closed its border with Armenia and it has no diplomatic relations with the country.
• On the other end, the Azeris and Turks share strong cultural and historical links.
  • Azerbaijanis are a Turkic ethnic group and their language is from the Turkic family.
• After Azerbaijan became independent, Turkey established strong relations with the country, which has been ruled by a dynastic dictatorship.
• Turkey has also held a joint military exercise with Azerbaijan.
• Recently, the Turkish President has blamed Armenia for the most recent clashes and offered support to Azerbaijan.
• This fits well into Turkey’s aggressive foreign policy, which seeks to expand Turkish interests to the former Ottoman territories.

Russia’s stand:

• Russia sees the Caucasus and Central Asian region as its backyard. But the current clashes put the Russian President in a difficult spot as Russia enjoys good ties with both Azerbaijan and Armenia and supplies weapons to both.
• However, Armenia is more dependent on Russia than the energy-rich, ambitious Azerbaijan. Russia also has a military base in Armenia.
• Russia is trying to strike a balance between the two.
• Like in the 1990s, its best interest would be in mediating a ceasefire between the warring sides.

E. Editorials

Category: SOCIAL JUSTICE

1. Going beyond the ‘Me Too’ movement

This topic has been covered on 12^th January 2019 and 8^th March 2019 Comprehensive News Analysis.

Also read about the #MeToo Movement.

Category: INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS

1. Managing the global commons

Global Commons:

• ‘Global Commons’ refers to resource domains or areas that lie outside of the political reach of any one nation State.
• They are shared resources that cannot be managed within national jurisdictions.
• It is a term typically used to describe international, supranational, and global resource domains in which common-pool resources are found.
• Global commons include the earth’s shared natural resources, such as the high oceans, the atmosphere and outer space and the Antarctic in particular.
• Cyberspace may also meet the definition of a global commons.

Read more on this topic covered in 13^th February 2020 Comprehensive News Analysis.

Context:

• Various events that have occurred in 2020 so far such as the pandemic, record-breaking forest fires, floods and droughts in various places, and the rapid melting of Arctic ice are majorly due to the disruption of the environment.
• These events point towards the need to increase efforts in managing interactions with the environment on a global scale.

Governing shared resources:

• For the management of shared resources, there is a need to balance both private and public interests.
• For example: Each individual farmer may benefit from turning on the pump to irrigate his/her land, but on a larger scale, it contributes to declining groundwater levels and electricity blackouts.
• The spread of zoonotic diseases like COVID-19; greenhouse gas emissions; biodiversity reduction; overfishing; and the accumulation of plastic waste are some of the problems within the scope of global commons.
• Garrett Hardin, a biologist popularised the notion of the tragedy of the commons, which implies that communities cannot manage their shared resources and require governmental interventions to regulate resource use or privatise the resource.
• A political scientist Elinor Ostrom in her book on governing the commons demonstrated that communities can govern on their own their shared resources, often better than imposed, well-intended solutions from outside. Ostrom was recognised in 2009 for her work by the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences.

Challenges:

• The insights of what kind of governance might be successful at the local community level do not directly address the challenges we face on a global scale.
• The consequences of human activities on a global scale are only being recognised in recent times.
• The appropriate scale of governance of global commons is a highly debated topic.
  • Some argue that top-down governance with binding agreements is the only effective solution for problems of a global scale.
    • Multilateral negotiations on climate change and other global commons over decades have had limited success.
  • Others have emphasised a more decentralised multi-level or polycentric approach that builds on the observed successes of local solutions.
• Empirical research demonstrates that well-intended solutions imposed on community members are typically short-lived.

Way forward:

• There is no panacea to solve this problem. Coordinated activities at different scales are needed to address the challenges in managing the global commons.
• To manage our global commons, there is a need to facilitate and accommodate the self-governance of local commons, but provide safeguards at different levels to avoid exploitation and manage risks.
• When rural and urban communities are allowed to self-govern their shared resources, there could be risks involved for which cities and nations need to accept responsibilities.
• At the local levels, initiatives and solutions could be developed that fit the local context.
• When expertise is not available, higher-level organisations could facilitate learning from peers in similar conditions.
• Failures will be inevitable when local-level experimentation is simulated, and higher-level authorities need to provide insurance for those cases.
• If local initiatives are successful, higher-level authorities need to ensure that the outcomes of those successes will not be grabbed by outsiders.

Category: GOVERNANCE

1. A demarcation in the interest of public order

The editorial throws light upon the need for the role of the District Magistrate to be clearly differentiated from the role of the Police Commissioner.

Issue:

• Riots essentially result from failure to maintain public order.
• The sequence of related events, the instance of blockading roads or deliberately creating traffic jams as a form of protests and police action in restricting or ceding space are a case study of how a few public figures intervene to incite violence changing the nature of a peaceful protest; absence of immediate arrests leads to a riot and dithering on ordering firing results in its spread.
• The Police Commissioner of Delhi, responding to criticism of partisanship, pointed out that the criminal justice system, with its inherent checks and balances, should be allowed to work.
• The other perspective is that community-wide protest is not itself a crime and Delhi Police, having magisterial powers under the Criminal Procedure Code to take preventive action, failed to maintain public order.
• The public policy issue is that such delegation confuses powers with roles.
  • First, the distinction between independent actions, for which no political clearance is needed, by the District Magistrate to maintain public order and by the police to investigate crime and make arrests, was ignored.
  • Second, maintaining public order requires the District Magistrate to make hard choices between life and property to check violence. Though any death opens the door to an inquiry, there is no justification for lack of effective police action.
  • Third, the District Magistrate is expected to consider protest as legitimate, leveraging governmental action to prevent others from exploiting the grievance. (In Delhi, the police did not distinguish between wider political support and violence caused by a few.)

Click here to know more about the Difference between the District Collector and District Magistrate.

Court’s distinction of concepts:

• The Supreme Court (SC) has made a distinction between:
  • Law and order, relating to individual crime and
  • Public order, pertaining to a community at large.
• The SC has also emphasised that the two terms are not interchangeable. The two concepts have different objectives and legal standards.
  • Law and order consists of the analysis made by police of the situation in an area and their commitment to firm action and penalties under criminal law.
  • Public order is a duty imposed on the District Magistrate to assess whether it is necessary to rush to the spot where law and order has been breached to prevent violence spreading and ease tension.
• The District Magistrate’s role is important in exceptional situations — for example, to prevent a breach of peace at a particular place; and also for grievance redress. If an official is allotted a dual role, to both keep in place law and order and maintain public order, this could lead to the displacement of one goal in favour of the other.
• The Supreme Court has formulated certain guidelines and rules when it comes to these distinct duties.
• The first, concerns the degree and extent of the reach of an act on society.
  • In Ram Manohar Lohia vs. State of Bihar, the SC held that in the case of public order, the community or the public at large have to be affected by a particular action as it embraces more of the community than ‘law and order’, which affects only a few individuals.
  • Agitated people deliberately destroying public/ private property affect public order only when they affect a particular community as a whole.
• Second, in the Madhu Limaye case, the Bench reiterated that “the emergency must be sudden and the consequences must be sufficiently grave for an imposition of restrictions.
  • Extension of a restriction over a larger territorial area or for a longer duration requires a relatively higher justification and carefully assessed response.
• Third, in Anuradha Bhasin vs. Union of India, the Supreme Court held that prohibitive orders should not prevent legitimate expression of opinion, or grievance or exercise of democratic rights. Specific restrictions have to be tailored to the goal, nature and stage of the emergency, requiring the adoption of the least restrictive measure.

Measures being taken:

• In Aldanish Rein vs State of NCT of Delhi, the High Court directed the setting up of an oversight mechanism to periodically review the exercise of magisterial powers by Delhi Police.
• The Supreme Court, in a PIL, is examining whether police officers can act as magistrates in certain cases.
• The Supreme Court has also specifically recognised the importance of the assessment of the role of the District Magistrate, distinct from that of the police.

Way forward:

• The Seventh Schedule of the Constitution distinguishes between ‘police’ and ‘public order’.
• Judicial review of roles and proportionality of decisions for maintaining public order, to check whether they are the least intrusive measure, requires a policy rethink if such duties need to be delegated to the police.
• The National Police Commission also recognises the coordinating role of the District Magistrate, having more leverage than the police.
  • Kerala has both a District Magistrate responsible for public order and a senior police officer as city Police Commissioner focusing on crime.

Prevention through grievance redress and reliance on the least blunt instruments are critical for legitimacy, giving up a conflicting view.
Category: ECONOMY

1. The perils of state overreach

This topic has been covered in the 28^th September 2020 Comprehensive News Analysis.

Q1. Consider the following statements with respect to Mizoram:

Q2. Consider the following statements with respect to Cat Que virus:

Q3. Consider the following statements with respect to RBI guidelines on Priority Sector 
Lending (PSL):

Q4. Consider the following statements with respect to the Malabar Exercise:

I. UPSC Mains Practice Questions

1. Investor-State Dispute Settlement (ISDS) plays an important role in fostering international rule of law. Critically examine. Also analyse the impact that multiple international arbitrations could have on India’s reputation as an investment destination. (15 Marks, 250 Words) (GS 3 Economy).
2. What do you understand by “Global commons”? Discuss how governing the global commons is the defining challenge for current and future generations. (15 Marks, 250 Words) (GS 2 International Relations).

Read the previous CNA here.