Whatsapp 93125-11015 For Details
A day after Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s veiled attack on China and Pakistan for “supporting terrorism”, Home Minister Amit Shah reiterated his views, saying that some countries have made terrorism their “state policy” and calling for a “strict economic crackdown” in such “terror havens”.
Saying that terrorism has no international boundaries, Shah urged all countries to “rise above their geo-political interests”, and fight “shoulder-to-shoulder” against the threat.
Addressing the concluding session of the third ‘No Money for Terror’ conference here, Shah proposed to set up a permanent secretariat in India to sustain the focus on countering terror financing.
In similar remarks, External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar, who also addressed the conference, pointed out the “use (of) terrorism as a tool of statecraft” by some, and said the world needs to rise above political divides to address the peril. The challenge, however, is that while the bad guys think global and lateral, the good guys still think national and vertical.
In his speech, Shah also proposed a five-pronged strategy to deal with terror financing, including a “monitoring framework” for cooperation between intelligence agencies.
Calling for “beyond-border cooperation”, he emphasised the need for “complete transparency” among countries in sharing intelligence.
India proposes permanent secretariat to coordinate bid to fight terror funding (Page no. 1)
(GS Paper 3, Internal Security)
Home minister Amit Shah put forward a proposal to set up a permanent ‘No Money For Terror’ (NMFT) Secretariat in India that would be expected to coordinate global efforts against terror funding more efficiently.
Announcing this at the NMFT conference, Shah said the “time is ripe” for a permanent secretariat. Sources in the security establishment said the proposal was still at an initial stage.
During the deliberations, India has sensed the need for permanency of this unique initiative of NMFT, in order to sustain the continued global focus on countering the financing of terrorism.
Time is ripe for a permanent secretariat to be established. In order to take this thought forward, the chair statement includes the offer to establish a permanent secretariat in the country.
India is positioning itself as a global player in the anti-terrorism fight since we have experience in handling Islamic terrorism, Khalistani terrorism, and Northeast insurgency.
Such experience is crucial to provide this kind of leadership to the global counter-terrorism fight. India is keen to establish a secretariat to deal with money laundering as well as combating the financing of terrorism issues.
The official said that while the Financial Action Task Force (FATF) was coordinating efforts to choke terror financing through sanctions and capacity building in many states, many facets of terror financing and certain geographical areas need more focused attention.
Express Network
If we bring down India’s emissions, then that will be good for us globally (Page no. 9)
(GS Paper 3, Environment)
Arriving in New Delhi from COP27, held at Sharm el-Sheikh in Egypt, Rachel Kyte, Dean, The Fletcher School Tufts University; member of the UN Secretary-General’s High-Level Advisory Group on Climate Action; and adviser to the UK government for UN climate negotiations.
At COP27, India has been pushing very hard for language that calls for “phase down” of all fossil fuels. There was a big push before COP26 to “phase out” coal, and “phase down” other fossil fuels.
What you see this year is a slight nuance, in that the agreement needs to say phase down of all fossil fuels. Because of the changed situation this year, people are airbrushing the difference between coal, gas, etc.
The big issue is, who is going to finance and help countries build up the renewable energy they need to make their transitions and break down their dependency on fossil fuels.
If resources weren’t an issue, I don’t think you would have this kind of an argument over down or out, [or] who does what and in what order. We all accept the science. The biggest bone of contention in the negotiations is the question of finance.
The West now has its own recessions and its own energy crisis, trying to ensure that people on low income have access to energy and the war in Ukraine, and then its reconstruction.
Then you have climate impacts around the world, such as the extraordinary bill that needs to be paid to Pakistan for the floods…this of course is not to excuse the West.
Opinion
Life, legend of tribal icon Birsa Munda (Page no. 13)
(GS Paper 1, History)
“BirBirsa ne baaghmara (The brave Birsa killed a tiger)”. This passing reference is all I could recollect on tribal icon Birsa Munda during my early years of education.
That was because while mainstream historians recognised the contribution of leaders such as Chandragupta Maurya right up to socialist politician Jayaprakash Narayan, very few acknowledged the role Birsa Munda played in India’s tribal rights movement and freedom struggle.
It wasn’t until J C Jha, professor of history at Patna University, published his seminal work on the ‘Kol revolt’ — the mutiny of the tribal people against economic exploitation in 1831-1832 – in the 60s and his student, Kumar Suresh Singh, took his work forward that Birsa Munda began to be recognised as an important historical figure. Singh went on to become an IAS officer and served in Khunti, the epicentre of the Birsa Munda rebellion.
Born in the late 19th Century, around 1874, in a poor, peasant family, Munda grew up at his aunt’s home in Chlakad, away from his father’s birthplace in Khunti. There are stories of the crippling poverty that surrounded him and of days spent without food.
Munda converted to Christianity in 1886 and a ceremony was performed on this occasion. At the root of such conversions lay the community’s struggle for survival: the promise that their land, which they had been deprived of due to the rise of the feudal system and the resultant economic exploitation, would be returned to them.
Though Munda trusted the missionaries, he fell out with them and quit his missionary school. This was to be the turning point of his life, resulting in him coining the catchphrase: “SahebSahebektopi (The British and missionaries wear the same hat).” It laid the seeds of anti-missionary and anti-British ideas in his mind.
World
COP 27 set to deliver on loss and damage fund but little else until now as talks go on (Page no. 14)
(GS Paper 3, Environment)
The COP27 meeting here was all set to deliver on a key demand of developing countries to create a new fund for loss and damage, but there was little else in the draft agreement to trigger greater and more urgent climate action.
Negotiators were still at work on Saturday night, in a last attempt to inject some stronger provisions on emissions reductions, but these have the potential to run into trouble because of the additional burden being put on the developing countries.
One of the most contentious of these calls every country to update their climate action plans, formally called nationally-determined contributions or NDCs, every year with progressively stronger actions. As of now, countries have to submit their NDCs in five-year cycles, with the next submission due in 2025.
A proposal to urge all countries to phase-down the use of fossil fuels, originally raised by India, is also expected to make a last-minute comeback.
Several developing countries, including China and oil-producing nations like Saudi Arabia, have been opposing this. The developed countries, and the small island states, also want a more explicit acknowledgement of the need to restrict the temperature rise to within 1.5 degree Celsius, and a commitment to let the global emissions of greenhouse gases peak no later than 2025.
As a result, the final rounds of negotiations, later on Saturday night and possibly on Sunday morning, are unlikely to be very smooth.
But more than anything else, Sharm el-Sheikh conference would be remembered for the progress made on the loss and damage finance.
Economy
After effects of covid war global policy tightening still unfloding: Das (Page no. 14)
(GS Paper 3, Economy)
Reserve Bank of India (RBI) Governor Shaktikanta Das Saturday said the after effects of Covid-19 pandemic, Russia-Ukraine war and global monetary tightening are still unfolding and need constant monitoring.
He said the research function of RBI must remain prepared to respond to these multiple possibilities as it has done in the past.
Since March 2020, three major shocks – the COVID-19 pandemic, the war in Europe and the aggressive tightening of monetary policy across countries – have posed very different set of challenges for economic research
The after effects of the three shocks are still unfolding and would warrant constant vigil,” Das said while speaking at the annual research conference of its Department of Economic and Policy Research (DEPR).
According to him, the economics profession today faces one of its toughest times as the global economy has been hit by multiple shocks one after the other.
These shocks have led to globalisation of inflation, with advanced economies (AEs) facing multi-decadal high inflation and sustained slowdown in economic growth and trade, together with rising concerns about a possible global recession.
They have also resulted in deteriorating global food and energy security situation, realignment of global supply chains and policy-induced deglobalisation and weakening influence of multinational institutions in providing coordinated solutions to address global problems.
The governor said synchronised tightening of monetary policy globally has progressively increased the risk of a hard landing, i.e., a recession to tame inflation.