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THE INDIAN POLITY AND GOVERNANCE

THE JUDICIAL VALIDITY OF THE TALAQ-E-HASAN MODE OF DIVORCE

THE CONTEXT: Recently, public interest litigation (PIL) seeking to invalidate Talaq-e-Hasan, the prescribed Islamic way of a divorce, has been filed in the Supreme Court.

THE EXPLANATION:

BACKGROUND:

Unlike other religions where marriage has been traditionally viewed as a sacrament, under Muslim law, marriage is a civil and social contract.

Talaq-ul-Sunnat of the divorce sanctioned by Prophet is sub-divided into:

• Talaq-e-Ahsan
• Talaq-e-Hasan
• (iii) Talaq-e-Biddat

What is the PIL about?

• The petition filed by a Ghaziabad-based woman, seeks to make the prescribed Islamic way of divorce Talaq-e-Hasan unconstitutional as it is violative of Articles 14, 15, 21 and 25 of the Constitution.
• The petitioner who claimed to have been unilaterally divorced through the Talaq-e-Hasan mode by her husband Yousuf, also prayed that Section 2 of the Muslim Personal Law (Shariat) Application Act, 1937 that permits Muslims to practise unilateral divorce be declared void.
• It was argued that the aggrieved lady and her child would be left without a remedy if no intervention was made.

What is Talaq-e-Hasan ?

Talaq-e-Hasan is a type of extra-judicial divorce mentioned under Islam that only men can practice. In this, a man can divorce his wife by saying the word “Talaq” in three instalments over three months.

• It is a revocable form of divorce. Extra-judicial divorce forms are approved by prophet Mohammad and are valid under all schools of Muslim law.
• The husband has to make sure that the wife is not menstruating when he’ll be pronouncing ‘Talaq’.
• There needs to be a gap of one month between all three pronouncements.
• These three months are also known as a period of abstinence.
• The duration for this ‘Iddat period is 90 days or three menstrual cycles or three lunar months.
• In case, the couple starts cohabitation during the abstinence period, the divorce will be revoked.
• The idea behind this period of abstinence is that the evil of divorce doesn’t become final at once.

Though Triple Talaq Is Banned In 2019, Why Is It Challenged?

• In a landmark Shayara Bano v Union of India judgment in 2017, the Supreme Court declared Talaq-e-Biddat unconstitutional. It was a form of extra-judicial divorce when a man pronounces ‘talaq’ thrice in just one sitting and marriage between the two parties gets dissolved.
• Triple talaq was declared unconstitutional by a five-judge bench on grounds of being arbitrary and against the Quran. These are two different forms of divorce and therefore need to be challenged separately.

Will Banning Talaq-e-Hasan Deprive Men of Their Rights?

• Article 25 of the Indian Constitution allows every citizen the freedom to profess, practice and propagate religion. All personal laws, including the Muslim Personal Laws (Shariat) Application Act of 1937, draw their powers from Article 25. Islamic personal laws have recognised extra-judicial divorce procedures and therefore, Shariat Act allows extra-judicial divorce proceedings legally.
• As Muslim women also have the right to practice extra-judicial divorce, a challenge to the constitutional validity of a man’s right to pronounce extra-judicial divorce on his wife is violative of Article 14 and Article15 becomes questionable.

THE SOCIAL ISSUES AND SOCIAL JUSTICE

THE GLOBAL TRENDS REPORT 2022

THE CONTEXT: The 2022 annual Global Trends Report was published by United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR). June 20 is designated as World Refugee Day by the UN. The theme for World Refugee Day 2022 is whoever, whatever, whenever. Everyone has got a right to seek safety.

THE EXPLANATION:

Who is a refugee?

According to the United Nations 1951 Refugee Convention, A refugee is someone who fled his or her home and country owing to “a well-founded fear of persecution because of his/her race, religion, nationality, membership in a particular social group, or political opinion”.

What are the major findings of this year’s report?

• On Earth, 1 in every 78 people is now displaced.
• There were 7 million new internal displacements worldwide, due to disasters. It is a decrease of 23 percent as compared to the last year (2021).
• The largest displacement occurred in China in 2021 (6 million), the Philippines (5.7 million), and India (4.9 million).
• The number of people who were forced to flee their homes has increased in the past decade. It stands at the highest level since records started. By the end of May 2022, more than 100 million people were forcibly displaced worldwide. The reasons cited are violence, war in Ukraine, food insecurity, human rights abuses, climate crisis, and other emergencies from Africa to Afghanistan.
• By 2021 end, the number of people displaced by war, persecution, violence, and human rights abuses was 3 million. This has increased by 8% and has doubled as compared to the figure 10 years ago.
• Importantly, the Russian invasion of Ukraine has caused the fastest and largest forced displacement crises after World War II from Africa to Afghanistan and beyond.

• In India’s case, the report points out that around five million people were internally displaced. The reason cited is due to disasters and climate change in 2021.
• Low and middle-income countries hosted 83% of the world’s refugees. Turkey hosted nearly 3.8 million refugees, the largest population worldwide.
• The number of new individual asylum applications registered globally in 2021 increased by 25% to 1.4 million from 1.1 million. Important to note that it is less than pre-pandemic levels. Also, Unaccompanied or separated children (UASC) accounted for two per cent of new asylum claims. The S. was the most popular choice among refugees to seek asylum, followed by Germany, Mexico, Costa Rica, and France.

VALUE ADDITION:

United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR):

• It is a UN Refugee Agency and a global organization dedicated to saving lives, protecting their rights and building a better future for refugees, forcibly displaced communities and stateless people.
• It was created in 1950 to help millions of Europeans who had fled or lost their homes.
• It is headquartered at Geneva, Switzerland.

THE ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT

INDIA’S EMERGING TWIN DEFICIT PROBLEM

THE CONTEXT: According to the latest ‘Monthly Economic Review’, the Ministry of Finance has painted an overall optimistic picture of the state of the domestic economy. “The World is looking at a distinct possibility of widespread stagflation. India, however, is at low risk of stagflation, owing to its prudent stabilization policies”.

THE EXPLANATION:

• According to the Finance Ministry report, the economic growth outlook is likely to be affected by several factors owing to the trade disruptions, export bans and the resulting surge in global commodity prices —all of which will continue to stoke inflation — as long as the Russia-Ukraine conflict persists and global supply chains remain unrepaired.
• “Also, it stated that the momentum of economic activities sustained in the first two months of the current financial year augurs well for India continuing to be the quickest growing economy among major countries in 2022-23”. But, given the uncertainties, the report highlights two key areas of concern for the Indian economy: the fiscal deficit and the current account deficit (or CAD).

Fiscal deficit

• The report states that “as government revenues take a hit following cuts in excise duties on diesel and petrol, an upside risk to the budgeted level of gross fiscal deficit has emerged”.
• The fiscal deficit is essentially the amount of money that the government has to borrow in any year to fill the gap between its expenditures and revenues. Higher levels of fiscal deficit typically imply the government eats into the pool of investible funds in the market which could have been used by the private sector for its own investment needs.
• At a time when the government is trying its best to kick-start and sustain a private sector investment cycle, borrowing more than what it budgeted will be
• The report underscores the need to trim revenue expenditure (or the money government spends just to meet its daily needs). “Rationalizing non-capex expenditure has thus become critical, not only for protecting growth supportive capex but also for avoiding fiscal slippages”. The “Capex” or capital expenditure essentially refers to money spent towards creating productive assets such as roads, buildings, ports etc. Capex has a much bigger multiplier effect on the overall GDP growth than revenue expenditure.

Current account deficit

The current account essentially refers to two specific sub-parts:

• Import and Export of goods — this is the “trade account”.
• Import and export of services — this is called the “invisibles account”.

If a country imports more goods (everything from cars to phones to machinery to food grains etc) than it exports, it is said to have a trade account deficit. A deficit implies that more money is going out of the country than coming in via the trade of physical goods. Similarly, the same country could be earning a surplus on the invisibles account — that is, it could be exporting more services than importing.

If, however, the net effect of a trade account and the invisibles account is a deficit, then it is called a current account deficit or CAD. A widening CAD tends to weaken the domestic currency because a CAD implies more dollars (or foreign currencies) are being demanded than rupees.

THE SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY

THE COSMIC CANNIBALISM

THE CONTEXT: Astronomers have observed for the first time a phenomenon, called, “cosmic cannibalism,” a dead star is ripping apart its planetary system. A star is ending its life so violently that the dead star left behind, called a white dwarf, is disrupting an entire planetary system by sucking in debris from both its inner and outer reaches.

THE EXPLANATION:

What is a white dwarf?

• A White Dwarf is the final evolutionary stage of a star. White Dwarf Stars are called so because they were first discovered in that particular colour.
• Their characteristics include having a mass as that of the Sun, a radius comparable to the Earth and low luminosity.
• Scientists believe that White dwarfs are the end-stage of those states whose mass is insufficient to become a neutron star or a black hole. It is believed that 97% of stars of the Milky Way galaxy are white dwarfs.
• Compared to our sun, a white dwarf has a similar carbon and oxygen mass though it is much smaller in size — similar to Earth. According to NASA, the White dwarf temperatures can exceed 100,000 Kelvin. Despite having too high a temperature, white dwarfs have a low luminosity as they’re so small in size.
• Where a star ends up at the end of its life depends on the mass it was born with. Stars that have a lot of mass may end their lives as black holes or neutron stars. A low or medium mass star (with a mass less than about 8 times the mass of our Sun) will become a white dwarf. A typical white dwarf is about as massive as the Sun, yet only slightly bigger than the Earth. This makes white dwarfs one of the densest forms of matter, surpassed only by neutron stars and black holes.
• This case of cosmic cannibalism was diagnosed with the help of archival data from the Hubble Space Telescope and other NASA observatories.

VALUE ADDITION:

ABOUT HUBBLE SPACE TELESCOPE:

• The Hubble Space Telescope is a large telescope in space. NASA launched Hubble in 1990.
• It was built by the United States space agency NASA, with contributions from the European Space Agency.
• Hubble is the only telescope designed to be serviced in space by astronauts.
• Expanding the frontiers of the visible Universe, the Hubble Space Telescope looks deep into space with cameras that can see across the entire optical spectrum from infrared to ultraviolet.
• The Hubble Space Telescope makes one orbit around Earth every 95 minutes.

THE EMERGENCE OF DRUG-RESISTANT TYPHOID STRAINS

THE CONTEXT: According to a study published in the Lancet Microbe, the effectiveness of antibiotics for typhoid fever is threatened by the emergence of resistant strains, as per the large genome sequencing study of the bacteria Salmonella Typhi.

THE EXPLANATION:

• The study sequenced 3,489 S Typhi isolates from 2014-19 from people in Bangladesh, India, Nepal, and Pakistan, and 4,169 samples isolated from over 70 countries during 1905-2018. Strains were classified as MDR if they had genes giving resistance to antibiotics ampicillin, chloramphenicol, and trimethoprim/ sulfamethoxazole.
• According to the researchers, “In recent years, they have seen increasingly resistant strains that are threatening to leave us without effective antibiotics against this bacterium. The strain for which there is only a single oral antibiotic remaining is termed XDR typhoid. Strains resistant to the antibiotic (azithromycin) have been seen in India, Bangladesh, Nepal and Pakistan.
• Evidence to date suggests that much of the drug resistance in typhoid has evolved within India, so certainly need to be concerned about the appearance of drug resistance in the country.
• Typhoid fever causes 11 million infections and more than 100,000 deaths per year. South Asia accounts for 70% of the global disease burden.
• India’s Health Ministry is considering introducing new typhoid conjugate vaccines into the national immunisation program. Two WHO-prequalified vaccines have been developed in India (by Bharat Biotech (Typbar TCV) and Biological E).

VALUE ADDITION:

• Typhoid fever is a bacterial infection that can spread throughout the body, affecting many organs. Without prompt treatment, it can cause serious complications and can be fatal.
• It’s caused by a bacterium called Salmonella typhi, which is related to the bacteria that cause salmonella food poisoning.
• Typhoid fever is highly contagious. An infected person can pass the bacteria out of their body in their poo or, less commonly, in their pee.

THE PRELIMS PERSPECTIVE

THIS WORD MEANS: BOYFRIEND LOOPHOLE

THE CONTEXT: Recently, US senators reached a bipartisan deal on gun safety measures. The reform outline includes a significant provision to address the ‘boyfriend loophole’.

THE EXPLANATION:

What is the boyfriend loophole?

• It refers to a gap in American federal and some state gun laws that allow access to guns by dating abusers.
• It would prohibit dating partners- not just spouses- from owning guns if they had been convicted of domestic violence.
• The framework says that convicted domestic violence abusers and individuals subject to domestic violence restraining orders would be included in criminal background checks

THE DUTCH DISEASE

• Dutch Disease in economics refers to a phenomenon wherein a country witnesses uneven growth across sectors due to the discovery of natural resources, especially large oil reserves.
• According to the concept, when a country discovers natural resources and starts exporting them to the rest of the world, it causes the exchange rate of the currency to appreciate significantly and this, in turn, discourages the exports from other sectors while encouraging the import of cheaper alternatives.
• While the idea was first proposed by economists Peter Neary and Max Corden in 1982, the term ‘Dutch disease’ was first coined by The Economist in 1977 to describe the decline of the manufacturing industry in the Netherlands.

THE PRELIMS PRACTICE QUESTIONS

QUESTION FOR 22^ND JUNE 2022

Q1. The term “Boyfriend Loophole” is recently seen in the news related to?

a) A new dwarf planet found by NASA

b) It is a small object, passing close to the Sun

c) It is US federal framework for Gun safety measures

d) None

ANSWER FOR 21ST JUNE 2022

Answer: D

Explanation:

• Dutch Disease in economics refers to a phenomenon wherein a country witnesses uneven growth across sectors due to the discovery of natural resources, especially large oil reserves.
• The idea was first proposed by economists Peter Neary and Max Corden in 1982, the term ‘Dutch disease’ was first coined by The Economist in 1977 to describe the decline of the manufacturing industry in the Netherlands.
• In the 1960s, the Netherlands discovered gas reserves in the North Sea. The subsequent ex- port of oil and the appreciation of the Dutch currency made Dutch exports of all non-oil products less competitive on the world market. Unemployment rose from 1.1% to 5.1% and capital investment in the country dropped.

Answer: D

Explanation:

Please refer to the given map-