Tripura’s Bru people will be resettled by March, says Minister
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The interpretative answer to the hijab row
India’s ‘return’ to Central Asia
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An oasis in the heart of a concrete jungle
Satkosia making fresh attempts to become a suitable tiger habitat
Rare insect sighted in Seshachalam
Understanding Artificial Neural Networks
Tripura’s Bru people will be resettled by March, says Minister
All the internally displaced Bru tribal people who are living in relief camps in Tripura for years will be rehabilitated permanently within the state by March 31, Union Minister of State for Social Empowerment _amp; Justice, Pratima Bhoumik, said on Sunday.
The rehabilitation of these people, who are originally from neighbouring Mizoram, began in April last year and around 43 per cent of the 6,950 Bru families living in six relief camps in North Tripura district have already been resettled, according to government data.
Issue
Thousands of the Bru tribal people have been living in relief camps in Kanchanpur and Panisagar sub-divisions since 1997. They had fled their homeland Mizoram to reach the neighbouring state because of ethnic clashes. By now, their number has risen to over 30,000.
Around 3,000 Bru families have already been resettled and 3,959 are still in the camps, an official said.
Altogether 162 acres of land will be required to resettle all the Bru families, according to an estimate by the Revenue department. The rehabilitation of the Bru community people started on April 20 last year following an agreement signed in January 2020 among representatives of the community, the Centre and the governments of Tripura and Mizoram.
As per the agreement, each rehabilitated Bru family will get a 1200 square feet plot to build a house with an amount of Rs 1.5 lakh provided by the government. The agreement guarantees a fixed deposit of Rs 4 lakh for each family, a monthly sum of Rs 5,000 and free monthly ration for two years and schools in all cluster villages. Once the resettlement is completed, Bru families will become permanent residents of Tripura and will be eligible to vote in the state.
The vexed Bru issue started in September 1997, following demands of a separate autonomous district council for the community by carving out areas of western Mizoram adjoining Bangladesh and Tripura. A large number of Bru people fled from Mizoram to Tripura as ethnic clashes broke out.
The situation was aggravated by the murder of a forest guard in the Dampa Tiger Reserve in western Mizoram by Bru National Liberation Front insurgents on October 21 that year and another round of exodus followed.
The Centre, along with the governments of Tripura and Mizoram, had tried several times to repatriate them to their home state, with little success. The first attempt to repatriate the Brus from Tripura was made in November 2009 and the last one in 2019.
Many Bru families had refused to return to Mizoram, citing security concerns and inadequate rehabilitation package. Some others had also sought a separate autonomous council for the community.
Background
The Bru community is known by different names and its members are spread over at least three north-eastern states — Tripura, Mizoram and parts of southern Assam.
The Brus are ethnically distinct from the Mizos, and the two tribes speak mutually unintelligible languages/dialects, unlike Mizos and Kukis, who share close linguistic and cultural ties and were usually referred to as Kuki-Lushai tribes in colonial times (Lushai or Lusei is the most prominent clan in what is now the Mizo community).
In Tripura, where the Brus are the most populous tribe after the Tripuris, they are known as Reangs, and were almost 2 lakh strong during the 2011 Census. In Mizoram, they are largely referred to by other tribes as ‘Tuikuk’. But in the past two decades or so, they have been increasingly referred to as Bru, a nomenclature of their own choosing.
There are over 40,000 Brus living in four districts of Mizoram, while about 32,000 Brus from Mizoram currently reside in relief camps in northern Tripura.
What made them flee to Tripura?
About half the Bru population in Mizoram fled to Tripura in 1997 following ethnic clashes with the Mizos. That year, Bru leaders had demanded an Autonomous District Council (ADC) for the tribe under the 6th Schedule of the Constitution in the western areas of Mizoram, where they were present in sizable numbers but where Mizos formed the majority.
While there were verbal duels between Mizo and Bru groups, a hitherto unknown Bru militant group, calling itself the Bru National Liberation Front, kidnapped and murdered a Mizo forest department employee in the Dampa Tiger Reserve.
The killing led to an upheaval, and Bru thatched huts in several villages in Mizoram’s western periphery were burnt by enraged Mizo villagers. The Brus, egged on by their leaders, fled to Tripura over several months, despite exhortations from political leaders and officials not to.
Why are they being repatriated?
Tripura is keen that the Brus return to Mizoram, since they add to the sizeable tribal population, and because the land occupied by the relief camps is owned by domicile tribals.
The MHA foots the bill and oversees the task of repatriation, while the Tripura and Mizoram governments handle the exercise on the ground.
The current repatriation is the ninth attempt to bring back Brus to Mizoram, the first having taken place as long ago as 2000. The eight previous attempts have been less than successful, with just over 9,000 Brus returning. The Centre has labelled this the final attempt at repatriation, but then again, each attempt since 2013 has been called that.
As early as 2010, the Centre had concurred with both the Mizoram and the Tripura governments that “unscrupulous elements of the relief camps of Tripura” were attempting to derail the repatriation attempt. In 2013, the ministry began to state it would stop doling out rations to relief camp inmates who did not take part in the repatriation, and presume “they are no more refugees”.
The current attempt too is likely to be unsuccessful, as some relief camp Bru groups have reportedly rekindled demands for an ADC. Most recently, a consortium of groups this week marched 15 km in protest from the relief camps to a northern Tripura town, and demanded Mizoram cease sending vehicles to transport them as part of the repatriation attempt. The vehicles have largely returned empty, as only 125 families have been repatriated in this attempt
The interpretative answer to the hijab row
A number of Muslim girl students in my home town of Udupi, Karnataka, have been refused entry into their college. The administration objects to them covering their heads with a hijab.
The girls invoke the protection of the Indian Constitution, whose preceptor Dr. B.R. Ambedkar once wrote, “the world owes much to rebels who would dare to argue in the face of the pontiff and insist that he is not infallible”.
A focal point
Thus, it was only historically apt that one of the first great religious cases interpreted by the new Supreme Court, under the new Constitution, came from Udupi. In the Commissioner, Hindu Religious Endowments, Madras vs Sri Lakshmindra Thirtha Swamiar of Sri Shirur Mutt case, or Shirur Mutt, of 1954, the Court ruled, “….what constitutes the essential part of a religion is primarily to be ascertained with reference to the doctrines of that religion itself.”
Ever thereafter, the judgment in Shirur Mutt has remained the focal point of constitutional discussion on religious freedoms. The “essential religious practices” test appeased traditionalists by ‘assuring them that the Court would be sympathetic to their respective religious faiths. It also supported state-sponsored reform by leaving one agency of the state — the judiciary — with the power to determine and pronounce upon (perhaps, transform) religious practice and belief’.
‘Religious practice’
Since it was first propounded, the “essential religious practice” test has been problematic. How is the Court to determine what an ‘essential practice’ is? Should it ‘rely on religious leaders’? Should it ‘call for evidence’? Should judges ‘pursue these questions on the basis of their own research’? Justice D.Y. Chandrachud in the Sabarimala case, bemoaned, “... compulsions nonetheless have led the court to don a theological mantle. The enquiry has moved from deciding what is essentially religious to what is an essential religious practice. Donning such a role is not an easy task when the Court is called upon to decide whether a practice does nor does not form an essential part of a religious belief. Scriptures and customs merge with bewildering complexity into superstition and dogma. Separating the grain from the chaff involves a complex adjudicatory function. Decisions of the Court have attempted to bring in a measure of objectivity by holding that the Court has been called upon to decide on the basis of the tenets of the religion itself. But even that is not a consistent norm.”
In the case of the hijab, there is no doubt that an observant Muslim woman might insist that the following verses from the Koran mandate her to keep her head covered. Chapter 33, Verse 59 says “ O Prophet! Enjoin your wives, your daughters, and the wives of true believers that they should cast their outer garments over their persons (when abroad): That is most convenient, that they may be distinguished and not be harassed.” Chapter 24, verse 31 is more explicit in decreeing, “And say to the believing women that they should lower their gaze...; that they should not display their beauty and ornaments except what (must ordinarily) appear thereof; that they should draw their khim?r ... and not display their beauty except to their husband, their fathers, their husband’s fathers, their sons, their husbands’ sons, their brothers or their brothers’ sons, or their sisters’ sons, or their women....”
A possible fallout
Questions of uniforms never troubled my five years of college in Udupi in the early 1980s. There was no requirement of uniforms. Subsequent administrators, in the 1990s, may have decreed uniforms to prevent competition amongst fashion-conscious teenagers. Today, there is no one uniform code which is mandated throughout the State. Individual colleges do decree uniforms, but not necessarily the manner of wearing them. An unfortunate side-effect of the current controversy may well be a State administrative order decreeing uniforms for all college students throughout the State of Karnataka. That to my mind would be a killjoy response of an administration that prioritises uniformity over diversity.
In the absence of a statutory uniform code, a court may well ask whether a head covering mandated by some religions, when worn in addition to the uniform, violates any legal tenet. Would the same standards that banish a female hijab apply to a turban worn by a male Sikh student? Can government colleges deny education to students who are seen to be violating a uniform code? Is the hijab or even a full covering in any manner violative of the process of imparting education? Can a government committed to female education deny education to those it deems improperly dressed? Should implementation of a dress code be prioritised over imparting education to all that seek it? These and other like questions will probably soon engage the attention of a constitutional court. That court may do well to heed Justice R.F. Nariman’s dictum in the Sabarimala review which says, “... After all, in India’s tryst with destiny, we have chosen to be wedded to the rule of law as laid down by the Constitution of India. Let every person remember that the “holy book” is the Constitution of India,... ”
Competing rights The interpretative answer to the hijab row, from the “holy book”, might lie in another case from Udupi district. Three years after Shirur Math, in 1957, the Supreme Court, in Sri Venkataramana Devaru vs State of Mysore, had to examine whether the exclusion of a person from entering into a temple for worship is a matter of religion according to Hindu ceremonial law. The Court held “... that the right of a denomination to wholly exclude members of the public from worshipping in the temple, though comprised in Art. 26(b), must yield to the overriding right declared by Art. 25(2)(b) in favour of the public to enter into a temple for worship. But where the right claimed is not one of general and total exclusion of the public from worship in the temple at all times but of exclusion from certain religious services, they being limited by the rules of the foundation to the members of the denomination, then the question is not whether Art. 25(2)(b) overrides that right so as to extinguish it, but whether it is possible-so to regulate the rights of the persons protected by Art. 25(2)(b) as to give effect to both the rights” Venkataramana Devaru points to the Court’s endeavour to harmonise competing rights in a way that both were given effect to. In the hijab case, the courts will be called upon to protect an essential religious practice, in a manner consistent with imparting education in an orderly fashion.
Note: Just explore different related cases and articles, avoid political perspectives + Communal perspectives etc, wait for court verdict
India’s ‘return’ to Central Asia
The inaugural India-Central Asia Summit, the India-Central Asia Dialogue, and the Regional Security Dialogue on Afghanistan in New Delhi — all held over the past four months — collectively indicate a renewed enthusiasm in New Delhi to engage the Central Asian region. India has limited economic and other stakes in the region, primarily due to lack of physical access. And yet, the region appears to have gained a great deal of significance in India’s strategic thinking over the years, particularly in the recent past. India’s mission Central Asia today reflects, and is responsive to, the new geopolitical, if not the geo-economic, realities in the region. More so, India’s renewed engagement of Central Asia is in the right direction for the simple reason that while the gains from an engagement of Central Asia may be minimal, the disadvantages of non-engagement could be costly in the longer run.
Great power dynamics
One of the factors driving this engagement and shaping it is the great power dynamics there. The decline of American presence and power in the broader region (due primarily to the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan) has led to a reassertion by China and Russia seeking to fill the power vacuum. While China dominates the geo-economic landscape, Russia is the dominant politico-military power in the region. But in the end, geo-economics might gain more traction. A somewhat anxious Moscow considers India to be a useful partner in the region: it helps it to not only win back New Delhi, which is moving towards the U.S., but also to subtly checkmate the rising Chinese influence in its backyard.
For the U.S., while growing India-Russia relations is not a welcome development, it recognises the utility of Moscow-New Delhi relations in Central Asia to offset Beijing’s ever-growing influence there.
As for China, India’s engagement of the region and the growing warmth in India-Russia relations are not a cause for concern yet, but they could be eventually.
For New Delhi, it’s about breaking out of a continental nutcracker situation it finds itself in. In the wake of the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan, New Delhi faces a major dilemma in the wider region, not just in the pre-existing theatres like the Line of Control and the Line of Actual Control. There are growing and legitimate concerns within the Indian strategic community that India in the region might get further hemmed in due to the combined efforts by China, Pakistan and Taliban-led Afghanistan. If so, it must ensure that there is no China-led strategic gang up with Pakistan and the Taliban against India in the region, which, if it becomes a reality, would severely damage Indian interests.
Focus on Afghanistan
India’s engagement of Central Asia would also help it to consolidate its post-American Afghan policy. U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan has landed India in a major dilemma – it has very limited space to engage Taliban 2.0 despite the current relationship whose future depends on a number of variables.
During the Hamid Karzai and Ashraf Ghani governments, given their proximity to India and the presence of the U.S. forces in Afghanistan, India was able to engage Kabul without too much hardship, despite Pakistani resistance.
Now that the Taliban have returned to Kabul, New Delhi is forced to devise new ways of engaging Afghanistan. That’s where the Central Asian Republics (CARs) and Russia could be helpful. For instance, given its location bordering Afghanistan as well as its close geographical proximity to Pakistan-occupied Kashmir, Tajikistan holds immense geopolitical significance for India (incidentally, India helps maintain an airbase in the country). One has to wait and see how far India will innovate to engage CARs in pursuit of its interests in Afghanistan. The announcement of a Joint Working Group on Afghanistan during the summit between India and the CARs is surely indicative of such interest.
In India’s current vision for a regional security architecture, Russia appears prominent. President Vladimir Putin’s meeting with Prime Minister Narendra Modi and the earlier meeting between Russian National Security Adviser General Nikolai Patrushev and Mr. Modi are indications of the growing relationship. A cursory glance at the various issues being discussed between the two sides also indicates a new joint thinking on regional security. Of course, New Delhi expects the U.S. to understand that in the wake of the latter’s withdrawal from the region leaving India in the lurch, New Delhi has no choice but to work with the Russians.
By courting Russia — its traditional partner, also close to China and getting closer to Pakistan — to help it re-establish its presence in the Central Asian region, India is seeking to work with one of the region’s strongest powers and also potentially create a rift between China and Russia, to the extent possible. The two countries recently exchanged a ‘non-paper’ on how to increase their joint engagement in Central Asia.
Both India and the CARs use Russian defence equipment, and the non-paper has reportedly explored the possibility of joint Indo-Russian defence production in some of the existing Soviet-era defence facilities in the CARs to meet local and Indian demands. The non-paper also reportedly discusses potential trilateral defence exercises among India, Russia and the CARs. In any case, joint defence production by India and Russia has been on the rise and the CARs could play a key role in it. This growing India-Russia partnership also explains India’s non-critical stance on the developments in Ukraine and Kazakhstan.
Challenges
That said, India’s ‘return’ to Central Asia is not going to be easy. For one, China, which shares a land border with the region, is already a major investor there. China is the region’s most important economic partner, a reality that worries Russia and sharpens India’s relative irrelevance in the region.
An even bigger challenge for India may be Iran. India’s best shot at reaching the CARs is by using a hybrid model – via sea to Chabahar and then by road/rail through Iran (and Afghanistan) to the CARs. So, for New Delhi, the ongoing re-negotiations on the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (or the Iran nuclear deal) are of crucial importance. If there is a deal, it would bring Tehran back into the Western fold and away from China (and Russia), which will be favourable to India.
While Iran getting close to the West is not preferred by Russia (but preferred by India), if and when it becomes a reality, India would be able to use it to its advantage and join Russia in engaging the CARs. India’s ongoing outreach to Iran and the now-postponed visit of the Iranian foreign minister to New Delhi help repair some of the damage done to the relationship over the years.
But finally, perhaps most importantly, will India walk the talk on its commitments to Central Asia? Does it have the political will, material capability and diplomatic wherewithal to stay the course in the region?
An oasis in the heart of a concrete jungle
More than an address for fancy high-rise apartments, Sector 101 of Gurugram is a place of ecological importance. It is for the residents — and the authorities — to fathom the critical role the Basai wetlands here plays for nature and for people.
At a stone’s throw from the glitzy malls of the Millennium City, the 250-acre shallow wetland has shrunk to a quarter of its original size over the years. Home to 300-plus species of rare, common and migratory birds, Basai is recognised as a key biodiversity area by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), the Wildlife Institute of India and the BirdLife International, a global network of NGOs that work to protect bird habitats.
But for the town planners, urbanisation is out of sync with environment and the Haryana government is yet to declare the site a protected refuge for birds.
Given the accelerated expansion of the city of the future, the wetland continues to disappear under newly laid roads, modern housing constructions and other infrastructure development. An upcoming expressway, cutting through the terrain here, has majorly impacted the flyway of thousands of migratory birds from Europe and Central Asia.
Till a decade ago, the Basai wetlands was a top birdwatching destination where the Bombay Natural History Society (BNHS) had documented 281 species of avian population. But the number of species has steadily declined with each passing year, according to Pankaj Gupta of Delhi Bird Foundation.
He led a few citizens the legal way to the National Green Tribunal when the installation of a construction and demolition waste processing and recycling plant added to the mess. But it continues to spew cement dust and gradually choke the area.
Satkosia making fresh attempts to become a suitable tiger habitat
Fifteen years after declaration as a tiger reserve and failure of revival of big cat population through India’s first inter-State tiger relocation programme, the Satkosia Tiger Reserve (STR) in Odisha has started making efforts afresh to reestablish it as a tiger habitat.
The State and Forest department are attempting to relocate inhabitants of three villages from its core area to create 500 sq km area of inviolate zone for tigers.
“At present, the STR has about 200 sq km area, which does not have any human presence. We need to expand the inviolate zone so that the reserve becomes suitable for tigers,” said Akshaya Patnaik, Regional Chief Conservator of Forest, Angul.
Mr. Patnaik said, “We are persuading villagers of Rataranga, Asanbahal and Tulka so that they move out from the core area and make way for the tigers. The compensation is attractive and villagers will get a better life outside forest.”
There were six villages in the STR core area and one of these falls under the administrative jurisdiction of Angul Wildlife Division while rest comes under Mahanadi Division. Raiguda comprising close to 200 villagers, which was under Angul, had already been shifted out of Satkosia’s core area.
The STR was declared as tiger reserve in 2007. In 2017, the National Board for Wildlife (NBWL) tried to rationalise STR boundary by excluding 104 villages from its STR’s jurisdiction. The STR had 963.87 sq km where it was declared as a tiger reserve. Later, forest patches of 172 sq km were proposed to be added to the STR.
To revive tiger population in the STR, India’s first inter-State tiger relocation programme was launched by way of import of a pair of tiger and tigress from Kanha Tiger Reserve and Bandhavgarh Tiger Reserve in 2018. But, the programme had failed primarily due to hostility of local communities and their intensive use of the tiger reserve resources for livelihoods. While the tiger died in a poacher’s trap, villagers opposed tigress’ presence after it strayed into human habitation. The tigress was finally sent back to Madhya Pradesh.
According to the National Tiger Conservation Authority, a total of 24 species of ungulates, carnivores, domestic animals, omnivores and galliformes were photo-captured in Satkosia.
Rare insect sighted in Seshachalam
Black Percher or Black Ground Skimmer (Diplacodes lefebvrii), a species of dragon fly, was sighted for the first time in the Seshachalam Hill ranges recently. It belongs to the phylum arthropoda, class insecta and order odonata.
According to the International Union for Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources (IUCN) Red List of threatened species, Black Ground Skimmer was labelled in 2016 as of ‘least concern’ in view of its wide prevalence in Southern Eurasia and the whole of Africa.
The insect has been sighted in forest locations of Karnataka and coastal Andhra Pradesh, but this appears to be its maiden appearance in the Seshachalam ranges. It is known to move near forest streams.
Understanding Artificial Neural Networks
Does the term “neuron” ring a bell in your mind? It is the building block of the brain and it inspired computer scientists from the 1950s— how to make a computer perform tasks like a brain does? It is not a simple problem and the clue to its complexity is in the brain structure.
We need billions of artificial neurons if we were to build an artificial brain. With the increase in computing power, mimicking billions of neurons is now possible. The concept behind an Artificial Neural Network is to define inputs and outputs, feed pieces of inputs to computer programs that function like neurons and make inferences or calculations, then forward those results to another layer of computer programs and so on, until a result is obtained. As part of this neural network, a feedback or difference between intended output and the input is computed at each layer and this difference is used to tune the parameters to each program. This method is called backpropagation and it is an essential component to the Neural Network.
The popularity of ANNs
A few more technical phrases will clear up our understanding of this space. Data Science, used interchangeably with Machine Learning, is the computer technology that uses data to detect patterns. Hand-written digit recognition is a good example of machine learning. However, in order for the computer to do this task, large amounts of sample data need to be manually labelled as examples of images of digits. Manual sampling at this scale is not going to be enough. Can there be a technology that can avoid human involvement to label data but can automatically detect patterns in sample data and tune its parameters to an algorithm so that the algorithm is ready to perform automatic tasks? The Artificial Neural Networks (ANN) mentioned above with its backpropagation does exactly this. This is why ANNs have become hugely popular in the past decade. This approach of using neural networks of many layers to automatically detect patterns and parameters is called Deep Learning.
A couple of key developments in the past two decades helped ANNs mature. Cloud computing provided enormous computing resources that are needed for ANNs to “work through” massive volumes of data. Along with this, it was observed that instead of the CPU in a computer, Graphic Processing Unit (GPU) which is good at performing massive parallel tasks can be used for setting up ANNs. In the last two decades, the software for neural networks matured and backpropagation techniques became robust. Combining these concepts, if thousands of GPUs are available that can take up chunks of data and can execute programs on those chunks, then ANNs can be made available for a variety of tasks. Many commercial and free software have become available which use GPUs and Cloud and offer readily available ANNs. A few popular free neural network frameworks are TensorFlow, Keras, PyTorch and Theano.
Free neural networks
TensorFlow was developed by Google. It uses a specific hardware that is optimised to work with GPU and divides the neural network operations and the corresponding data into units called Tensors. It has an architecture that sets up neural network and uses it on our input data to make it “flow” from one state to another and gives options to choose and operate states that are relevant to us. Keras is a software that can be used on top of TensorFlow so that software developers can interact with just the relevant parameters instead of lower-level details that need to be provided to TensorFlow. Popular implementations of TensorFlow are Google’s search algorithm RankBrain and Twitter’s tweet ranking.
The ANN frameworks or software mentioned above can be used for both normal Machine Learning tasks like classification or clustering and for Deep Learning/ANN tasks. Are there tasks that cannot be done with good accuracy by normal Machine Learning and hence need Deep Learning? The answer is yes. Automatic Image Recognition of rich images (instead of only simple hand-written digits) and Speech Recognition are two popular uses of Deep Learning. Convolution Neural Network (CNN), a special type of ANN, is good at Image Recognition. It connects a neuron in a layer to all neurons in the next layer but uses optimisation techniques to weed out unwanted signals from neurons. For Speech Recognition, Recurrent Neural Network (RNN) is used because it is good at handling inputs of variable length like speech.
Deep Learning has progressed to the next level and instead of only working on input data and detections, it can now actually generate creative output like music or paintings. A special type of ANN called Generative Adversarial Network achieves this.
Deep Learning made news in 2016 when an ANN-based product called AlphaGo defeated a player in a game of “Go”.
ANNs are present in many smartphone applications that we use, like voice to type, Siri and Alexa.
If you want to play with neural networks, you can hop on to one of the free frameworks and build a software program. The Cambrian explosion of artificial intelligence is here!
