Editorial 1 : The importance of both Quad and BRICS
Context
With India being the only country common to both Quad and BRICS and a founding member of both, it cannot afford to downplay one for the other.
The Quad and BRICS
- The Quad Foreign Ministers’ meeting in Japan end-July, after a long gap of 10 months, comes at a time when the United Nations Security Council (UNSC) is paralysed and its reform nowhere in sight, international law is violated with impunity both in the Ukraine war and in the assault on Gaza by Israel, an axis of Russia, China, North Korea, and Iran is gaining traction, and Chinese influence is growing not just in the Indo-Pacific, but elsewhere too.
- The U.S. has, in turn, realised that it needs not just allies, but also credible partners in its security architecture, including in the Indo-Pacific, and reached “across the aisle” to “non-ally” countries like India to partner with them in smaller pluri-lateral groupings and joint security initiatives.
- Further, ASEAN countries are getting increasingly vulnerable, with South China Sea remaining a flashpoint.
- While India is a member of many pluri-lateral groups on both sides of the geo-strategic “divide”, its engagement in Quad and with BRICS present the country with interesting, and sometimes contrasting, dilemmas.
- India has enthusiastically embraced Quad and its strategic objectives.
- The fact that India, during its presidency of the UNSC in August 2021, held a high-level virtual event on ‘Enhancing Maritime Security’, presided over by Prime Minister Narendra Modi and attended by Russian President Vladimir Putin, among others, indicates the importance India attaches to strengthening maritime security in the Indo-Pacific and beyond.
India’s role in the Quad
- While Quad has always had a geopolitical security objective vis-à-vis China, India’s vision goes beyond this narrow thrust to a much broader redrawing of the security and techno-economic architecture of the Indo-Pacific region.
- With Quad now working on reorientation of global supply chains of critical technologies and on a range of areas of direct strategic relevance to the region, including digital, telecom, health, power, and semi-conductors, it has underlined that development too has a security perspective which cannot be ignored.
- India, in its turn, has benefited through enhanced bilateral relations with Quad partners, especially the U.S.
- On the other hand, the formation of AUKUS with the U.S., Australia, and the U.K., with a view to enhance their military capabilities, especially Australia’s with nuclear submarines, has put securitisation of the Indo-Pacific region and deterrence of China at the centre.
- The Ukraine war and enhanced focus on NATO has made the West look at Asia too through a military lens.
- AUKUS may well suit India’s geo-strategic interests, but India’s reluctance to go the whole nine yards in embracing a purely security vision for Quad is seen as a dampener, in spite of the Indian External Affairs Minister clarifying that Quad is not an Asian NATO and India is not a treaty ally unlike the other three.
- India’s independent policy of close relations with Russia and calling for a diplomatic solution to the Ukraine war, both of which are frowned upon by the West, do not distract India from strengthening the Quad.
- Some Quad members and European countries are themselves enhancing their bilateral engagement with China, underlining their differing bilateral and regional compulsions.
- Against the backdrop of India’s enthusiastic engagement with Quad, its engagement with BRICS presents a different conundrum.
- India was an enthusiastic founder of BRICS. In fact, at the 10th annual summit of the BRICS in 2018 in Johannesburg, South Africa, it was Our Prime Minister, who reminded the leaders that BRICS was founded to reform the multilateral system and proposed for the first time his vision of “reformed multilateralism.”
- However, India’s participation in BRICS has fluctuated from enthusiastic to lukewarm.
- While BRICS’ initiatives such as New Development Bank and the Contingent Reserve Arrangement have been pioneering, the attempt by China to use BRICS to grandstand and push its world view on the Global South and now, to push back the West has made India wary of giving BRICS a higher profile.
Way forward
- India had, consequently, been reluctant to expand BRICS.
- The change of guard in Brazil leaves India as the lone member to push back China. A reluctant India decided to accept BRICS’s expansion than oppose it and now many more countries are reportedly waiting to join.
- Even if India has the best of bilateral relations with all the new members, we need to make sure it all adds up to support for India inside BRICS.
- For this, India cannot afford to be ambivalent about BRICS any more. To counter moves to take BRICS in a direction India does not like, we need to be more engaged, not less.
Editorial 2 : Reasonable accommodations and disability rights
Context
The principle of reasonable accommodations (RA) is foregrounded in the legal framework through the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (RPwD) Act, 2016.
The Act
- The Act, in 2.(y), describes RAs as those adjustments which ensure that Persons with Disabilities (PwD) are able to exercise their rights equally with others.
- These RAs may range from building ramps or providing assistive technologies to restructuring job requirements and modifying workplace policies.
- However, public and private institutions are exempt from implementing these RAs if they can prove that such an exercise would cause them disproportionate or “undue burden”.
The reluctance of Indian institutions
- The Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD) charts out an illustrative set of factors which should aid an institution in objectively determining its undue burden.
- However, from a financial standpoint, Indian institutions are still reluctant to bear the costs of complying with such anti-discrimination legislation. The reason is not far to see.
- When institutions are made the sole cost-bearers of RAs, they adopt efficiency-enhancing, utilitarian approaches rather than a welfare-based approach towards PwDs.
- Informed by prejudices that PwDs are inherently less productive, or that providing RAs is always expensive, institutions tend to use the defence of undue burden for reasons of expediency more than for reasons of actual hardship.
- This directly compromises the rights of PwDs and makes them the subject of a cost-benefit analysis.
- Thus, setting a uniform legal standard to determine undue burden becomes imperative in order to prevent misuse.
- The Constitution of India puts the state under a positive obligation to create conditions wherein individuals can effectively exercise their right to equality.
- Since the rights of PwDs directly depend on how accessible institutions are to them, the state is bound to create positive ecosystems which not only mandate but also encourage institutions to accommodate PwDs.
A model that can be implemented
- First, a state can do so by sensitising institutions about the fact that a majority of the requested RAs can be procured at inexpensive prices.
- Second, by giving targeted incentives to such institutions for providing RAs such as deductions, subsidies or tax credits.
- And, third, by sharing the costs of RAs with those remaining institutions that demonstrate actual hardship in providing RAs due to a true shortfall in their resources.
- This incentive and cost-sharing model will not only redress disadvantage and stigma against PwDs but also develop a policy response that increases PwD participation in institutional ecosystems and also accommodates their differences.
- Section 86 of the Act highlights the creation of a National Fund for PwDs.
- Its corpus, inter alia, includes substantial contributions from banks and financial institutions in pursuance of the judgment of the Supreme Court of India in Indian Banks’ Association, Bombay vs M/s Devkala Consultancy Service.
- Rule 42 of the RPwD Rules, 2017, supplements this provision by mandating that the corpus should be used to implement the objectives of the RPwD Act.
- However, despite these provisions, the corpus of the National Fund still remains underutilised.
- Further, its scope remains severely restricted and its coverage remains capped at dismally low amounts.
- This roadblock can be addressed by ensuring a continuous flow of funds towards the National Fund while also optimally utilising the funds already available therein.
- The state can do so by designating the National Fund as a separate line item in every annual budget and framing the following rules for the disbursement of its corpus.
Ensuring a welfare approach
- Whenever RAs are requested, institutions should first assess their resource deficit which precludes them from procuring the said RAs.
- This inquiry should be undertaken in light of the incentives such as tax credits or expense deductions that may have already been provided to them.
- Institutions can then submit a request to the National Fund’s governing body to compensate them for the shortfall.
- Borrowing from the standards under the Americans with Disabilities Act, 1990, the National Fund’s governing body can also require them to state in their request, their overall financial resources, access to external funding and the lack of alternative and efficacious RAs in the market which could be procured at a lesser cost.
- This can eliminate any deliberate cost avoidance by institutions. Upon receiving such a request, the designated authority under the National Fund can conduct a fact-finding inquiry to assess the veracity of the resource-deficit claims.
- Subsequently, the National Fund’s governing body can consult the Office of Chief Commissioner for Persons with Disabilities to assess the proportionality of the requested RAs as contemplated under the CRPD before sanctioning funds to make up for the shortfall.
- This safeguard will ensure that any proportionality analysis of an RA is guided by a welfare rather than a utilitarian approach.
Conclusion
With these approaches, the Incentive and Cost-Sharing Model can achieve a three-fold objective. It can diminish the reluctance of erring institutions to accommodate PwDs; provide the prospects of positive market outcomes to new and upcoming institutions and, concurrently, ensure that institutions satisfy a uniform legal threshold of ‘undue burden’ before they can be allowed to avoid the costs of providing RAs.
