WORLD ON WEDNESDAY

A 5 min read about all the Matters that Matter

Hey buddy, Glad to see you here! Welcome to Wednesday, 3rd of January 2024’s Matters that Matter. Happy Reading!

1. Rules for CAA, set to be notified before Lok Sabha polls

Rules for the Citizenship (Amendment) Act (CAA), the bill cleared by Parliament in December 2019, will be notified much before the announcement of the Lok Sabha elections. The Bill seeks to fast-track Indian citizenship to Hindus, Sikhs, Buddhists, Jains, Parsis and Christians — but not Muslims — who migrated to India owing to religious persecution in Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Bangladesh.

It has been more than four years since the law received Presidential assent. Its passage led to widespread protests. Eight extensions later, the government is ready with the rules necessary for implementing the Act and that too before the elections.

The applicants must declare the year when they entered India without travel documents. No document will be sought from the applicants. The applicants' requests, who had applied after 2014, will be converted as per the new rules,” the sources said.

Addressing a party gathering in West Bengal last week, Union Home Minister Amit Shah said the BJP was committed to the CAA. “Didi (West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee) often misleads our refugee brothers regarding the CAA. Let me clarify that the CAA is the law of the land, and no one can stop it. Everybody is going to get citizenship. This is our party’s commitment,” he told the gathering.

Multiple reasons have been attributed to the government delaying the implementation of one of the most polarising pieces of legislation brought forth by the Modi government. One of the prime reasons is the vociferous opposition faced by the CAA in several states, including Assam and Tripura.

The protests in Assam were fuelled by fears that the legislation would permanently alter the state's demographics. The CAA is seen in Assam as a violation of the 1985 Assam Accord, which allows foreign migrants who came to Assam after January 1, 1966 but before March 25, 1971, to seek citizenship. The cut-off date for citizenship to be extended under the CAA is December 31, 2014.

The protests didn’t remain confined to the North-East but spread to other parts of the country. A clutch of petitions are before the Supreme Court, challenging the constitutional validity of the CAA. The petitioners have contended that the law caters only to Hindus, Sikhs, Buddhists, Jains, Parsis and Christians from Pakistan, Bangladesh and Afghanistan and is arbitrary as it leaves out the persecuted Rohingya of Myanmar, Tibetan Buddhists from China and Tamils from SriLanka.

In an initial counter-affidavit in response to the petitions, the Centre said:

• The basis of the “reasonable…classification” made by the 2019 Act was not religion but “religious discrimination” in neighboring countries which are“functioning with a state religion”.

• The legislation was “not meant to be an omnibus solution to issues across the world and the Indian Parliament cannot be expected to take note of possible persecutions that may be taking place across various countries in the world”.

2. India, part of world’s largest radio telescope project now

Even as ISRO on Monday launched a unique observatory to study Xrays and black holes in deep space and the stage is being set to construct the third node of the LIGO in Maharashtra, scientists in India will now also be part of the international mega-science project, the Square Kilometre Array Observatory (SKAO), that will function as the world’s largest radio telescope.

The SKAO is not a single telescope but an array of thousands of antennas to be installed in remote radio-quiet locations in South Africa and Australia that will operate as one large unit meant to observe and study celestial phenomena.

The Department of Atomic Energy announced in its 2023 year-ending note, approval for the project, which comes weeks after India gave its go-ahead to construct the third node of the theUS-based Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) in Hingoli district of Maharashtra.

Gravitational wave research is one of the most promising fields for scientific discovery. The first detection of gravitational waves by the two existing LIGO detectors in the US won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2017.

The SKA will also search for gravitational waves but is meant to study a range of phenomena that can peer much deeper into the universe -- more than 3,000 trillion km–to study galaxies and stars in greater detail.

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3. Why are Truckers at a strike

With the truck drivers' nationwide protest against a new penal provision in hit-and-run cases triggering panic buying of fuel and essential items in several states, the Centre on Tuesday stepped in, assuring transporters that a decision on enforcing the stringent provisions in such cases under the Bharatiya Nyay Sanhita will be taken only after consultation with the All India Motor Transport Congress (AIMTC).

Transporters’ associations across the country have been protesting for the past two days against provisions under the new code, as per which any driver who causes the death of a person by rash and negligent driving and flees from the spot will be jailed for up to years and/or fined. There was no specific provision for hit-and-run cases in the Indian Penal Code, and action was taken under sections for causing death due to negligence, with a maximum jail term of two years.

At the press conference ahead of the meeting with Bhalla, the AIMTC demanded the withdrawal of the new penal provision. “We are not demanding that those who drink and drive or drivers who drive rashly should be dealt with kid gloves. But there have been many cases where drivers have got involved in accidents for no fault of theirs and people have gathered in mobs to beat them up. Sometimes the mobs also burn the vehicle and the drivers have to run for their safety,” said AIMTC member Bal Malkit Singh. “A truck costs Rs 50 lakh but often carries material worth crores, no driver would be stupid enough to leave their goods behind. The drivers know that they can be traced and in most cases, drivers go back and surrender on their own,” he said.

Explaining a key provision in the new law, a source said if a driver accidentally hit someone and made a call to inform police in time, they would face a lesser punishment of five years imprisonment. He said the duration of the sentence in hit-and-run case has been increased to 10 years because of observations made by the Supreme Court.

The truck drivers have been protesting since Monday, leading to panic buying and affecting supplies in several states. Many cities such as Delhi, Mumbai, Kolkata and Hyderabad reported long queues of vehicles at fuel stations and depleted supply at the mandis. In Chandigarh, the authorities imposed a cap for sale at fuel stations.

- References and Excerpts from The Indian Express

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