Mending Macaulay; Stringing Selections; Colonial Cartels
Opinion Watch
Mending Macaulay
The Tribune and The Times of India have opined in their respective Editorials on three bills moved by Union Minister for Home Affairs Amit Shah in the Lok Sabha to replace the IPC, CrPC, and Evidences Act that beyond changing names wider discussions be held for the extent of consequences, while also lamenting opaqueness so far in drafting of the legislative proposals. The Tribune expressed positive surprise at axing of sedition law, but ToI said that it has changed form with wider net in new avatar. The Chandigarh-based daily recalled that the bills have come two decades after Justice VS Malimath Committee on Reforms of Criminal Justice System submitted its report to the Home Ministry, calling for caution in redrafting the substantive criminal law.
Thomas Babington Macaulay’s codes survived 76 years of India’s Independence. Yet, the bills suggest that his influence is overwhelming in the minds of the managers of the laws. The bills must be exhaustively debated by the concerned parliamentary standing committee with wide-ranging discussions with stakeholders before they are enacted as laws.
Stringing Selections
Quoting Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin that “it’s not the people who vote that count, it’s the people who count the votes”, The Asian Age in its Editorial has lamented: “…the idea of an autonomous election commission, presided over in its history by a few dedicated bureaucrats, who withstood all kinds of pressures from ruling dispensations in states and at the Centre, to bring fairness into the poll process, is being upended by a total takeover of the system of appointments. It added that “the present rulers are opening a Pandora’s Box and may let loose forces that may come back to bite” on the bill to drop the Chief Justice of India from the selection panel of the members and chief of the Election Commission.
Institutions are the lampposts of democracy. But political class has always been wary of the strength of the Election Commission.
Colonial Cartels
The Hindu in its Editorial has given an account of the assassination of Fernando Villavicencio, a former journalist and lawmaker, who was against narco-politics, ahead of elections in Ecuador in which he was a candidate. The Chennai-based daily opined that Ecuador is now one of the most dangerous countries in Latin America amid spurt in violent crimes with drug cartels shifting their focus there to get drugs shipped to North America and Europe.
Transnational drugs cartels now hold sway in several countries from Latin America to the Asian axis of Afghanistan, Pakistan and Myanmar.
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