9 JULY 2015: India to get SCO membership

Ø  Prime Minister Narendra Modi will meet his Pakistani counterpart, Nawaz Sharif, in Ufa, Russia, on Friday. They are in the town to attend the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation summit beginning Thursday. The sit-down bilateral meeting will be their first in more than a year. The Hindu has learnt that the meeting comes at India’s request, made by Foreign Secretary S. Jaishankar to his Pakistani counterpart, Aizaz Ahmed Chaudhury, through a message conveyed by the Indian High Commissioner to Pakistan, TCA Raghavan. The meeting follows several high-level contacts, including a call made by Mr. Modi to Mr. Sharif on June 16 and a meeting between Mr. Jaishankar and Pakistani High Commissioner Abdul Basit on June 22. Given that Mr. Modi, who is known to push for tangible results from his meetings, has made the request, expectations are that the two leaders will announce some agreement on the course of dialogue. Sources said the two leaders might try to work on what could be announced at this stage: mainly agreeing to promote business-to-business exchanges, ease passage for businessmen, extend visa terms and issue multiple visas for bus travellers.

Ø  India’s membership of the SCO is significant. To begin with, it opens up trade, energy and transit routes between Russia and China that pass through Central Asia, that were hitherto closed to India. Iran’s observer status will ensure the SCO serves as a platform for India to discuss trade through the Iranian ports of Bandar Abbas and Chabahar, and link them to the Russian proposal for a North-South Transport Corridor. This circumvents India’s situation of being hemmed in owing to lack of access to markets through Pakistan. While the SCO charter disallows bilateral issues being taken up, the security grouping provides a platform for India and Pakistan to discuss them, as it will when Mr. Modi and Mr. Sharif meet. With Russia and China taking the lead, the SCO could even prove a guarantor for projects such as the TAPI (Turkmenistan-Afghanistan-Pakistan-India) and IPI (Iran-Pakistan-India) pipelines that India has held off on security concerns. The SCO summit will provide a valuable interface to engage with Afghanistan’s neighbours at a time when so much is changing in its security outlook, between the international troop pullout and talks with the Taliban. Finally, the SCO is an important counter-balance to India’s perceived tilt towards the U.S. and its allies on security issues. In a politically polarised world, with the U.S. and Europe pitted against Russia and China and where all the powers are economically interlinked, India’s best hope to emerge a leader lies in its ability to bridge the two. Speaking at the Nazarbayev University in Astana, Mr. Modi said Central Asia’s importance faded because it became “a new fault-line between great empires to the east, west and south”. In that sense, India’s emergence now depends on striving to be a bridge, not a fault-line, in full balance with the great powers globally.

Ø  The government, according to an exclusive report in this daily titled “Govt. looking for common ground to break impasse over Land Bill”, July 5, 2015, has expressed concern over the impasse that has hit the proceedings of the Joint Parliamentary Committee (JPC) on the Right to Fair Compensation and Transparency in Land Acquisition, Rehabilitation and Resettlement (Amendment) Bill, 2015. The legislation under consideration aims to amend the Act with the same title and popularly known as the LARR 2013. The committee members, of the ruling party and the Opposition, are divided on three issues: the “consent clause”, the social impact assessment (SIA), and food security. Several organisations of farmers and agricultural workers, including those belonging to the Sangh Parivar, have already condemned the provisions in the Bill pertaining to these issues. LARR Act 2013 requires prior consent of 80 per cent of the owners for land acquisition for private projects; in the case of public private partnerships (PPP), the figure is 70 per cent. Besides this, it mandates SIA to assess the costs and benefits of the project, and, therefore, whether land acquisition is in public interest or not. Moreover, the Act restricts the acquisition of irrigated and multi-crop land. In contrast, the Bill proposes to scrap these provisions for defence projects and those belonging to vaguely-defined categories like affordable housing, industrial corridors, and infrastructure including special economic zones, PPPs and urban development projects. The JPC stalemate and a growing anti-farmer image have forced the government to offer a “middle ground”. Reportedly, it plans to create a new category of projects called “essential infrastructure” that will be exempted from the consent clause. The remaining projects would require the consent of only 51 per cent of owners. Moreover, the government has agreed to restore a diluted form of SIA that will separate the land acquisition decision from the rehabilitation and resettlement of the people affected by the projects. We present the findings of a comprehensive fieldwork on the subject, including a factual account of how the nexus of companies and decision-makers has been exploiting hapless farmers under the guise of development projects. The aim is to examine whether the Bill puts a check on the past abuses of the law or will facilitate them further, even if it is amended to incorporate the “middle ground”.