Chandigarh Religion holds centre-stage in Punjab’s murky politics, especially in the run-up to important elections, be it assembly or parliamentary polls.

With the general election, scheduled in April-May next year, just months away, the religious issue of sacrilege cases of the Sikh holy Guru Granth Sahib is again at the forefront of Punjab political discourse.

In 2015, less than 18 months before assembly polls in the state, the sacrilege cases mysteriously increased. The incidents led to protests and the government of the day — of the Shiromani Akali Dal-Bharatiya Janata Party (SAD-BJP) alliance, which had been in power since 2007 — reacted to these. The result was violence and police action which left two persons dead and many others injured.

The opposition Congress took full advantage of the simmering situation to nail the Akali Dal. Sikh religious organisations, except for the Shiromani Gurdwara Parbandhak Committee (SGPC) and some other bodies which derive patronage from the SAD, too, were upset with the handling of the situation by the government led by Akali Dal stalwart and five-time Chief Minister Parkash Singh Badal.

The Congress romped home in the assembly polls with 77 seats in the 117-member assembly (the Congress strength now is 78 seats after winning another by-election). Of course, the party also used issues like rampant drug abuse and corruption to nail the SAD-BJP government.

With the general elections just months away, the present Congress government in the state led by Chief Minister Amarinder Singh has timed the inquiry commission reports on the sacrilege cases and the police firing related to it in a way that has forced the SAD to go on the defensive.

The Akali Dal, which has always depended heavily on its “Panthic” (Sikh religious) agenda over the past few decades, has been defending itself following accusations that its government did little to stop the sacrilege of the Sikh holy book and the violent incidents in the aftermath of all this.

Badal, who is over 90 years old, has been forced to defend the action (or inaction) of his then government in the sacrilege incidents.

It is not for the first time that religious matters are dictating electoral politics in the state.

The Akalis are themselves master players in this as their control of Sikh organisations, particularly the cash-rich SGPC, that have control over Sikh religious affairs.

The SAD, in the past, has never lost an opportunity to highlight the “Panth nu khatraa” (threat to the Sikh religion) from the Congress party and others. The SAD has also used the 1984 Operation Bluestar attack of the Army on the Golden Temple complex and the 1984 anti-Sikh riots against the Congress party to serve its political interests.

The Congress has tried several times in the past to break the stranglehold of the Akalis on the SGPC and other organisations but has largely remained unsuccessful.

Even now, the Congress has been accused of covertly playing games against the SAD and SGPC through Sikh religious preachers, who have their own limited following in the state.

With the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP), which is now the main opposition in the Punjab assembly (relegating the SAD to the third slot), also being in the fray in Punjab’s electoral politics, things have changed a lot for the traditional Congress and SAD opponents.

The AAP too has tried its hand at mixing religion with politics in Punjab by aligning itself before the February 2017 assembly polls with radical elements. Of course, the move backfired and the AAP, which at one stage was expecting to win the assembly elections and form the government, had to contend with being in the opposition.

The numerous “deras” (sects) and preachers who have cropped up in Punjab in the last two or three decades have given a new dimension to the mix of religion and politics in the state.

Amidst all this politics of religion, the real issues of lack of development, drug abuse, industry running away, no fresh investments, unemployment and agriculture taking a hit in the agrarian state have been relegated to the background.

(IANS)

Panaji Goa’s much-highlighted opencast iron-ore mining has resulted in significant destruction of tree cover in the iron ore belts, where all vegetation is shaved off to scoop out top soil from hills and access the ore. The destruction left in its wake is well documented.

A report by The Energy and Resources Institute (TERI) in 1997 estimated that 2,500 hectares of forests were lost due to mining between 1988 and 1997. The India State of Forest Report 2017, said “forest cover within the recorded forest area has decreased by nine square km (900 ha) due to mining and other developmental activities” within two years from its 2015 assessment.

“Mining companies wanted to mine even the Western Ghat foothills. I refused permission. Seven of Goa’s rivers originate in the Ghats. Where will the water come from if you mine the hills,” former Goa principal chief conservator of forests Richard D’Souza told Mongabay-India. D’Souza, along with the late Governor of Goa, Lt. Gen. J.F.R. Jacob, notified two additional Western Ghat wildlife sanctuaries, Mhadei and Netravali, during a brief spell of President’s rule in 1999.

“That has saved Goa’s soil and water,” D’Souza claimed. Local legislators and the Goa government attempted to undo the notification, but never succeeded. Thanks to that move, the state now has one national park and six wildlife sanctuaries, covering over 755 square km (20.4 percent of its geographical area). Together with Dodamarg in Maharashtra and Anshi in Karnataka, they create a contiguous protected green corridor along the entire eastern section of Goa.

The process of carving out a core tiger reserve from four Goa sanctuaries is currently underway. This is expected to be further bad news for iron ore miners. A tiger reserve will increase the ecologically sensitive buffer zone to 10 kilometres from the reserve edge and put a question mark over 18 more leases. For similar reasons, mining lobbies stalled notification of an ESZ for years. A one-kilometre eco-sensitive zone (ESZ) was finally notified in 2015. Seventeen mines have to be phased out over a 10-year period due to this.

Goa’s export-based iron ore mining has been temporarily contained, largely due to the projected requirements of the domestic steel industry and the backing of the central government and administration towards the latter. The leases held by Goa-based exporters stand cancelled since February 2018. The exporters, who have the backing of the Goa government, have thus far been unable to get the Centre to intervene in their favour to restart mining and permit extensions of the current leases.

But while the spotlight has been on Goa’s miners, Goa’s eastern forests and state-wide green cover, in its coastal and middle regions, the state faces new and bigger threats. Big infrastructure under the central government’s Bharatmala and Sagarmala projects are speedily taking their toll on Goa’s green areas. Centrally-funded big infrastructure projects like eight-lane highways, a new airport, coal rail lines and a resultant real estate and construction boom, has seen large-scale tree-felling.

Road and rail projects are set to divert nearly 218 ha of protected and reserve forests in the Western Ghats, including in national park and wildlife sanctuary areas of the forests. The proposed forest diversion has remained under the media and NGO radar. The detailed project reports for the NH66, NH4A, NH17B and NH 17 six/eight laning projects are not accessible. Work execution has been split and sub-contracted to several construction engineering firms to ensure simultaneous and speedy completion with the National Highway Authority of India (NHAI), Ministry of Road Transport and Highways (MoRTH) and Goa Public Works Department (PWD) overseeing projects.

“Some infrastructure development may be necessary. But when governments are in a tearing hurry, they don’t want to wait and search for less damaging alternatives that would save forests and tree cover. These are five-year governments and they want to sign the contracts and tenders in a hurry before their own term ends. That’s the problem,” said Claude Alvares, director of the environmental action group Goa Foundation.

Infrastructure under the Sagarmala projects to move coal and other products through Goa, also connects the upcoming controversial Mopa greenfield airport and links Mormugao harbour to the steel mills of Karnataka for their coal import supply. As part of this infrastructure, the South Western Railway is laying a second track from Madgaon to Kulem and Kulem to Castlerock. It has sought permissions for forest clearance in this thickly-forested protected area, where an existing track was built in colonial times.

In 15 months from April 2017 to June 2018, the Forests Department granted permission to fell 28,910 trees for government projects, including 21,703 trees at the Mopa airport site. One of Goa’s busiest corporations, the Goa State Infrastructure Development Corporation, plans to cut 250 trees for beautification of a Freedom Fighters Memorial.

After the recent Kerala flood devastation, environmentalist Madhav Gadgil, author of the 2011 Western Ghats Ecology Expert Panel (WGEEP) report, argued for caution in the Western Ghats regions of Goa and Maharashtra, warning of flood risks if indiscriminate development continued to disturb natural flows in the region. Forest conservationists point out that development over the years in the Western Ghats have brought down the area under indigenous original evergreen forests canopy. The percentage of evergreen forest canopy indicates the real health of any forest.

“I hope there will be some caution. In Kerala, we have seen that a week of intense rain in fragile environments can undo all the development and investment and highways that governments have built over two decades,” commented Alvares.

(IANS/Mongabay)

New Delhi The prevalence of child marriage in India is the highest amongst Scheduled Tribe girls (15 per cent) followed by Scheduled Castes (13 per cent), according to a report released by the National Commission for Protection of Child Rights (NCPCR).

The report which was released on the NCPCR website on Wednesday, is based on a comparative analysis of data on child marriage in the 15-19 age group from the third and fourth rounds of the National Family Health Survey (NHFS) conducted in 2005-2006 and 2015-16. The report has been prepared by Young Lives India, a research centre, in collaboration with the NCPCR.

According to the report, this phenomenon is evident among the top 10 states with the highest prevalence of child marriage.

West Bengal has the highest rate of child marriage amongst SC girls, while in Arunachal Pradesh it is highest among Scheduled Tribes. In other castes, Maharashtra has the highest percentage of girl child marriage.

Furthermore, Bihar, Gujarat and Telangana report very high prevalence of child marriages amongst OBC girls below the age of 18.

However, according to the report, a comparative analysis of child marriage for 15-19 year old girls as reported in NFHS-3 (2005-06) and NFHS-4 (2015-16) reveals that the overall prevalence of child marriage has reduced to a large extent in the last 10 years in a large number of states.

Substantial reduction of child marriage (more than 20 percentage points) is observed in the states of Bihar, Jharkhand, Rajasthan and Uttar Pradesh in the age group of 15-19.

The findings also reveal that prevalence of girl child marriage in the age-group 15-19 years is significant in rural areas as well as certain states and UTs which have large pockets of child marriage within urban areas such as Haryana, Tamil Nadu, Maharashtra and Manipur.

According to the release, some factors like economic status and women’s educational level are associated with child marriage. It is observed that child marriage is more prevalent amongst women from bottom wealth tercile households.

In 13 states and one UT, more than 40 per cent of the child marriages took place amongst the bottom wealth tercile households.

The findings also show that completion rate of secondary schooling is considerably higher amongst unmarried girls aged 15-19 years in almost all states.

(IANS)

New Delhi The Delhi High Court on Thursday granted bail to Kashmiri businessman Zahoor Ahmad Shah Watali in a terror funding case.

A bench of Justice S. Muralidhar and Justice Vinod Goel asked him to furnish a personal bond of Rs two lakh with two sureties of like amount.

Watali had challenged the trial court’s June 8 order rejecting his bail plea.

He was arrested on August 17, 2017, and was charge-sheeted by the National Investigation Agency (NIA) on January 18 along with Pakistan-based terrorist leaders Hafiz Saeed, Syed Salahuddin, seven Kashmiri separatist leaders and others in the case of alleged terror funding in the Kashmir Valley.

They were charge-sheeted under stringent anti-terror laws for hatching a conspiracy with Saeed and Salahuddin to wage a war against India to secede Jammu and Kashmir.

The separatists, who were arrested on July 24, 2017, are Aftab Hilali Shah alias Shahid-ul-Islam, Ayaz Akbar Khandey, Farooq Ahmad Dar alias Bitta Karate, Nayeem Khan, Altaf Ahmad Shah, Raja Mehrajuddin Kalwal and Bashir Ahmad Bhat alias Peer Saifullah.

Altaf Ahmad Shah is the son-in-law of hardline Hurriyat leader Syed Ali Shah Geelani, who advocates Jammu and Kashmir’s merger with Pakistan. Islam is an aide of moderate Hurriyat leader Mirwaiz Umar Farooq, and Khandey is the spokesperson for the Geelani-led Hurriyat.

(IANS)

Varanasi Prime Minister Narendra Modi will celebrate his 68th birthday on September 17 in Varanasi, his parliamentary constituency, a district official in Uttar Pradesh said on Thursday.

The Prime Minister’s Office (PMO) has sent a tentative schedule to the district authorities, following which preparations for the visit is underway in the temple town.

Modi will pay obeisance to Lord Shiva at the Kashi Vishwanath temple and later watch a film “Chalo Jeete Hain” inspired by his life along with a few school children, the official said.

The venue for this event has not yet been fixed, he added.

The Prime Minister is also likely to launch some developmental projects, including the four-laning of the Babatpur-Shivpur road, Ring Road phase I and some projects at the Banaras Hindu University (BHU) during his stay.

Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath who was in Varanasi on Wednesday reviewed the preparations for Modi’s visit.

(IANS)