Tightening grip: on Hungary PM's re-election

Hungarian voters have handed Prime Minister Viktor Orbán a third term in office. In Sunday’s election, his right-wing Fidesz party and its Christian Democrat allies won around half the vote and two-thirds of the seats. This will give Mr. Orbán, who revels in his hyper-nationalist strongman image, the super-majority he needs to further tighten his grip on Hungary. The nationalist Jobbik party came in second with 20% of the vote, making it the principal opposition, with the Socialists getting 12% and the Green Party 7%. Though a high turnout of about 70% was expected to help the Opposition, the electoral process has been questionable. The technical administration of the elections was transparent and there was a wide range of candidates to choose from. But critics say the playing field was not fair, given media bias, a blurry line between party and government resources, and ‘intimidating and xenophobic rhetoric’. Over his previous terms Mr. Orbán had anointed himself as a spokesperson for ‘Christian Europe’, protecting it from what he sees as Islamisation — his campaign included posters of a stop sign superimposed on to an image of migrants walking across Europe. It is therefore not surprising that Fidesz performed strongly in small towns and rural areas, where Mr. Orbán’s anti-migrant message rang out the loudest. Over the last few years, as millions of migrants found their way to Europe, Mr. Orbán did not stop at just rhetoric. He refused to participate in the EU’s migrant resettlement plan and built a fence on Hungary’s boundary with Serbia and Croatia to keep them out.

He has also portrayed Hungary as a country at risk from foreign agents and has been accused of anti-Semitism. In a move seen as a bid to contain Hungarian-born Jewish American philanthropist George Soros’s work, Mr. Orbán introduced new funding laws for NGOs and passed a bill that would impact Mr. Soros’s Central European University. This is in addition to imposing controls on the media and tampering with the judicial system. A third term for Fidesz has implications not just for Hungary but for all of Europe. It is likely to polarise Western and Central European countries, which are wary of Brussels and want to see a directional change for Europe, closing it to migrants. In the European Parliament, the Fidesz is part of the largest party, the European People’s Party, a grouping of mostly centre-right parties that includes Angela Merkel’s Christian Democrats; Mr Orbán’s victory could change the dynamics in this group, pulling some or all within it further right. Brussels has greeted the results with caution. But not all of Europe is worried; far-right leaders in France and Germany were quick to congratulate Mr. Orbán, and see in his victory a shot in the arm for their ideologies.

End to cattle curbs: on withdrawal of sale ban

Good sense appears to have prevailed at last. With a fresh set of draft rules to replace last year’s poorly conceived ones, the Centre has sought to withdraw the ban on sale of cattle for slaughter in animal markets. The draft rules are now open for comments and suggestions. When the Union Ministry for Environment, Forests and Climate Change notified the rules under the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals Act on May 23, 2017, there was concern that in the name of preventing cruelty to animals and regulating livestock markets the government was surreptitiously throttling the cattle trade and furthering the BJP’s cow protection agenda. The rules were criticised for restricting legitimate animal trade and interfering with dietary habits. The new draft makes a welcome departure from the earlier rules, seeking to provide great relief to buyers of animals from cumbersome paperwork and procedural requirements. Some distance-specific conditions to curb inter-State and cross-border movement of animals are to be dropped, as also rules barring animal markets within 25 km of a State border and 50 km of the international boundary. The definition of ‘animal markets’ will no more include any lairage adjoining a slaughter-house, thereby removing curbs on the sale of animals in a resting place in the vicinity of a market. The draft retains good provisions in the earlier notification barring cruelty in the treatment and transport of animals.

The notification had set off a storm last year, with some Chief Ministers stridently opposing it on the ground that regulating livestock trade was essentially a State subject. Even assuming that the Centre had jurisdiction under the law against animal cruelty to notify the rules, it was obvious that only the States could enforce them. With the Supreme Court expanding a stay granted by the Madras High Court into a nation-wide bar on the rules, and some States taking a clear stand that they would not implement the regulations, the notification was a non-starter. There was further concern whether the regulations would adversely impact poor villagers, as animal markets are predominantly in the countryside. There was an impression that under the guise of stiff regulations, the Centre was making it impossible for cattle, a term that covers cows, buffalo, bulls and camels, to be slaughtered even for food, despite the PCA Act recognising explicitly that animals can be food for humans. The meat trade, valued at thousands of crores of rupees, would have suffered a serious setback had the rules been implemented. Any transformation from a tendency to advance pet causes to an approach based on economic and legal considerations would be a welcome change. Good governance is not only about regulating human and economic activities, but also about avoiding perceptions of sectarianism.

Without shifting IPL out, the rights of fans and protesters could have been protected

The shifting of Indian Premier League cricket matches out of Chennaireflects poorly on the Tamil Nadu administration. It is misleading to see the development as a victory for protesters espousing the Cauvery cause or as the inevitable result of the current political mood in Tamil Nadu. By conveying its inability to give adequate police security to the remaining matches to be held in the city, the State government, which had adopted a wishy-washy attitude towards holding the IPL in Chennai, simply capitulated. It is undeniable that there were aggressive protests around the Chepauk stadium just before the season’s first match in the city. Road blockades, frayed tempers and scuffles between the police and protesters suggested it would be a challenge to hold more matches. But governments exist to maintain public order and are expected to stand up to threats made by a fringe, whether it is calling for the ban of a book, a film or a cricket match. If cricket is a victim of such protests, it is because of its very success. It is a soft, high-profile target for those who want to raise their visibility and profile. This is why the sheer irrationality of singling out one tournament – which has no connection whatsoever to the Centre or the State government or the Cauvery crisis for that matter — was lost on those leading the call for a ban.

Instead of going weak and ambivalent on assurances of safety, the State government and the police should have worked out a solution under which scheduled matches and the right of the protesters to voice their grievanceswere both protected. As for the IPL management, it may have felt there was sufficient reason to drop Chepauk as a venue because of the State government’s attitude. While cricket stadiums are now securely protected, there was no mechanism to screen ticket-buyers and — as the last match in Chepauk revealed — very little that can be done to stop protesters from flinging shoes and other objects on to the ground. There is legitimate and widespread concern in Tamil Nadu over the Centre’s inexplicable delay in framing a scheme to resolve the Cauvery problem, over which there has been more than one protest over the last few days. But the fact that the Chennai Super Kings’ ‘home’ matches will now be played in Pune is a blow to the game’s fans in Chennai. That the IPL is a commercially driven extravaganza bordering on entertainment does not justify it being fair game for protesters. It may be true that sport cannot remain completely divorced from politics and there is no denying the dominant political mood on the Cauvery issue. However, rarely has this principle been extended to threaten a sporting event that has no link whatsoever to the political cause — in this case a water-sharing crisis that principally involves two States.

Attempts to undermine the investigation into a little girl’s rape and murder must be resisted

The 15-page chargesheet filed by the Jammu and Kashmir Police’s Crime Branch on the abduction, rape and murder of an eight-year-old girl in Kathua district is chilling. An unspeakably horrific crime has been overlain with an ugly form of communal politics, which has heightened the feeling of vulnerability among the Bakherwal nomadic community. Asifa Bano had been missing in Rasana village since January 10. On January 17, her mutilated body was found, bearing the marks of gang rape. This week, local lawyers tried to prevent the police from filing the chargesheet, and the Jammu High Court Bar Association called for a bandh on Wednesday demanding that the investigation be handed over to the Central Bureau of Investigation. By all accounts, the demand owes less to any faith in CBI impartiality, and more to the ongoing attempt to influence the police’s investigation that has led to the arrest of eight men, including some policemen charged with destroying evidence. The chargesheet lists as the main conspirator the caretaker of the temple in Rasana where Asifa was allegedly held, and threads together the sequence of events. The insinuation that a local police force that reflects the multi-religious composition of the State cannot be entrusted with a case in which the victim is a Muslim and the alleged accused are Hindus must be strongly resisted.

It is a shame that the State government, a coalition of the J&K Peoples Democratic Party and the BJP, has been so feeble in criticising the sectarian undercurrents. Protests in Kathua have been going on for months, amidst allegations that innocent people are being framed and demands that one of the arrested police officers be released. An organisation called the Hindu Ekta Manch too populated the protests and two BJP ministers from the State government were present at a rally in support of the accused. The Gujjar-Bakherwal community’s sense of isolation, as the dead eight-year-old is sought to be defined by her ethnic and religious identity, is especially heightened given the backdrop of drives to evict them from what they say are their traditional camping sites in forests. One line of inquiry is that the motive for her abduction and assault was to instil fear among the nomads in pressing for their rights to the forests and commons. But while it is understandable that the nomads are feeling the brunt of the intimidation and it is vital to address their larger anxieties, to superimpose the crime on the tussle over forest rights would be to diminish the brutality brought upon the little girl. The investigation must be pursued for the hate crime it is. It does not just tie in with her community’s rights — along with the Unnao rape case in U.P., in which the victim’s father died in police custody this week, it shows how loaded the system is against those seeking justice.

This great man took physics to the people, and changed the way we think about disabilityThis great man took physics to the people, and changed the way we think about disabilityThis great man took physics to the people, and changed the way we think about disabilityThis great man took physics to the people, and changed the way we think about disability

Few scientists manage to break down the walls of the so-called ivory tower of academia and touch and inspire people who may not otherwise be interested in science. Stephen Hawking was one of these few. Judging by the odds he faced as a young graduate student of physics at Cambridge University, nothing could have been a more remote possibility. When he was about 20 years old, he got the shattering news that he could not work with the great Fred Hoyle for his PhD, as he had aspired to. Around this time he was diagnosed with Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis, an incurable motor neurone disease, and given two years to live. Not many would have survived this, let alone excelled in the manner he did. Luckily, the type of ALS he had progressed slowly, and over time he made many discoveries that marked him among the great physicists of his time. His first breakthrough was in the work he did for his PhD thesis. The expanding universe and the unstoppable collapse of a black hole under its own gravity present two extreme spectacles for the physicist to grapple with. Inspired by Roger Penrose’s ideas on the latter, Hawking came up with a singularity theorem for the universe. This work and its extensions, known as the Hawking-Penrose singularity theorems, brought him international acclaim. Later, along with others he formulated the laws of black hole mechanics, which resemble the laws of thermodynamics. Thinking along these lines led him to a contradiction — that this theory predicted that black holes would exude radiation, whereas in a purely classical picture nothing could escape the black hole, not even light. He resolved this contradiction by invoking quantum mechanics. The radiation of the black hole was named Hawking radiation.

There is no doubt that with Hawking’s death the world has lost an outstanding scientist. But he was not only a pathbreaker in the world of science. He came to be known to millions with the publication of A Brief History of Time, his best-selling book describing in non-technical terms the structure, development and fate of the universe. He ranks with Isaac Newton and Albert Einstein as that rare physicist who fired the popular imagination. However, while Newton and Einstein worked on broad canvases, Hawking was focussed on cosmology and gravitation. His was a life that carried to the public not only the secrets of the cosmos but also the promise of hope and human endeavour; he showed that disability need not hold a person back in the pursuit of his dreams. He leaves behind a wealth of knowledge, and also the conviction that the will to survive can overcome all odds.

The great scientific invention