Today's Headlines

India launched Operation Ajay

GS Paper - 2 (International Relations)

On the sixth day of the Israel-Hamas war, the Indian government launched ‘Operation Ajay‘ to repatriate Indians from Israel and Palestine. Beginning 12 October 2023, the government will bring back its citizens through special chartered flights. The Navy will also be pressed into action if the need arises,

What is Operation Ajay?

1. The Indian government will be sending special chartered flights to repatriate citizens from Israel and Palestine. Indian Navy ships may also be sent if the need arises, the government has said.
2. The Indian Embassy in Israel said it had emailed the first lot of registered Indian citizens for the special flight. Messages to other registered people will follow for subsequent flights.
3. Around 18,000 Indians are currently in Israel. Of these, most of them are caregivers. There are also about 1,000 students, several IT professionals and diamond traders.
4. The Israeli government is doing its utmost to assist the Indian Embassy in Tel Aviv in 'Operation Ajay'."
5. According to the latest update on the Ministry of External Affairs website, there are 20 overseas Indians residing in Palestine.
6. The Representative Office of India to the State of Palestine, Ramallah, shared a dedicated emergency helpline number for Indians in Palestine.

Flashback

1. Last year, as war broke out between Russia and Ukraine, the MEA had launched Operation Ganga to bring back Indians stranded in Ukraine.
2. It also set up 24×7 control centres to assist in the evacuation of Indians through the border crossing points with Hungary, Poland, Romania and Slovak Republic.
3. Around 22,500 Indian nationals were brought back from Ukraine to India between 1 February and 11 March.
4. As many as 90 flights were employed for the task, including 14 Indian Air Force flights.

Petition challenging electoral bonds

GS Paper - 2 (Polity)

The Supreme Court said that it will hear petitions challenging the electoral bonds scheme on 31 October 2023. The 2018 scheme introduced instruments through which money could be donated to political parties in India. However, in April last year, the court had said it would take up the petitions filed by two NGOs — Common Cause and Association for Democratic Reforms (ADR) — challenging the scheme.

What is the electoral bonds scheme?

1. Announced in the 2017 Union Budget, electoral bonds are interest-free bearer instruments used to donate money anonymously to political parties. Simply put, anyone can donate money to political parties through them.
2. Such bonds, which are sold in multiples of Rs 1,000, Rs 10,000, Rs 1 lakh, Rs 10 lakh, and Rs 1 crore, can be bought from authorised branches of the State Bank of India (SBI).
3. As such, a donor is required to pay the amount — say Rs 10 lakh — via a cheque or a digital mechanism (cash is not allowed) to the authorised SBI branch.
4. The political parties can choose to encash such bonds within 15 days of receiving them and fund their electoral expenses.
5. There is no limit on the number of bonds an individual or company can purchase. If a party hasn’t enchased any bonds within 15 days, SBI deposits these into the Prime Minister’s Relief Fund.

What was the rationale behind the electoral bonds scheme?

1. When first announced in then Finance Minister Arun Jaitley’s Budget speech of 2017, he had said, “Even 70 years after Independence, the country has not been able to evolve a transparent method of funding political parties which is vital to the system of free and fair elections…Political parties continue to receive most of their funds through anonymous donations which are shown in cash. An effort, therefore, requires to be made to cleanse the system of political funding in India.”
2. Two main changes were proposed then. One, it reduced the amount of money that a political party could accept in cash from anonymous sources — from Rs 20,000 to Rs 2,000.
3. Two, he announced the introduction of electoral bonds as a way to make such funding more transparent.
4. However, the fine print of the notification has revealed that even individuals, groups of individuals, NGOs, religious and other trusts are permitted to donate via electoral bonds without disclosing their details.

Why is the scheme facing a legal challenge?

1. The petitions have been filed by the Communist Party of India (Marxist), and NGOs Common Cause and ADR. They have challenged the scheme as “an obscure funding system which is unchecked by any authority”.
2. Also, before the electoral bonds scheme was announced, there was a cap on how much a company could donate to a political party: 7.5 per cent of the average net profits of a company in the preceding three years.
3. However, the government amended the Companies Act to remove this limit, opening the doors to unlimited funding by corporate India, critics argue.
4. The petitioners said the amendments to the Companies Act 2013 will lead to “private corporate interests taking precedence over the needs and rights of the people of the State in policy considerations”.
5. In general, critics argue that the anonymity of donors under the scheme further makes the process opaque instead of meeting its aim of bringing about transparency.
6. It has been claimed that because such bonds are sold via a government-owned bank (SBI), it leaves the door open for the government to know exactly who is funding its opponents.
7. This, in turn, allows the possibility for the government of the day to either extort money, especially from the big companies or victimise them for not funding the ruling party — either way providing an unfair advantage to the party in power.

Major political players in Palestine

GS Paper - 2 (International Relations)

The Recent attack on Israel has brought not just Hamas under the spotlight, but also other significant players in Palestine such as Fatah, Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ), Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO), and Palestinian Authority (PA).

Fatah

1. Fatah — the word means to conquer — was formed in Kuwait in the late 1950s after the displacement and dispossession of more than 70,000 Palestinian Arabs during the 1948 Israeli-Arab War.
2. The secular nationalist organisation was established by numerous people, but the key founders were Yasser Arafat (he went on to become the president of the Palestinian Authority) and his fellow activists, including Mahmoud Abbas (the current president of the Palestinian Authority).
3. Fatah’s objective was quite clear from the beginning: an armed struggle against Israel to liberate Palestine.
4. Its military operations began in 1965 and most of them were carried out from Jordan and Lebanon.
5. Three years later, the organisation became part of the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) — an umbrella political organisation of numerous Arab groups that aimed to help Palestine attain statehood through armed resistance.
6. The armed struggle of Fatah soon came to an end after both Jordan and Lebanon pushed out its military wing from their territories in the 1970s.
7. In the 1990s, Fatah-led PLO officially announced they would renounce their armed resistance and later signed the Oslo Accords that established the Palestinian National Authority (PNA), or Palestinian Authority (PA), an interim self-governing body meant to lead to an independent Palestinian State.
8. Currently, Fatah heads the PA, which governs about 40% of the occupied West Bank. In 2006, it lost control of the Gaza Strip after losing to the political wing of the Palestinian militant group Hamas in the democratic elections for the Palestinian Legislative Council (PLC).

Hamas

1. Hamas is another major political party in Palestine but it’s best known for its ongoing armed struggle against Israel.
2. The group was founded in the late 1980s, after the beginning of the first Palestinian intifada, or uprising, against Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip — the Jewish state had captured the two Palestinian territories after winning the 1967 Israeli-Arab War.
3. Like Fatah, Hamas also aims to create a Palestinian state on the borders of 1967 (the group updated its goal after the release of a new 2017 political document). However, unlike Fatah, Hamas hasn’t recognised the statehood of Israel.
4. As mentioned before, the militant organisation has been ruling the Gaza Strip, which consists of more than two million people, since 2006.

Palestine Islamic Jihad (PIJ)

1. The PIJ is the second largest militant group in Palestine that aims to destroy Israel and establish a fully Islamic Palestinian state in its place by using force and military means.
2. It was established in 1981 by members of Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood. International media reports suggest that the group is financially supported by Iran (the Shiite nation is suspected of funding Hamas also) and has long-standing ties with that country — PIJ is said to have taken inspiration from the 1979 Islamic Revolution.
3. While Hamas and PIJ are allies, both groups have separate identities and some differences.
4. PIJ is a smaller, more elite, often secretive militia devoted to armed struggle, while Hamas is a far larger, community-based organisation that takes on full governmental responsibilities in Gaza.
5. Although PIJ has remained away from politics, it has long participated in student politics, fielding candidates in Palestinian university elections since the 1980s. It also took part in the 1996 legislative elections.

Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO)

1. PLO was conceived in 1964 at an Arab League summit in Cairo, Egypt, with the sole aim of liberating Palestine with the help of an armed struggle to achieve its goals.
2. The organisation is essentially a coalition of smaller Arab groups (except Hamas and Islamic Jihad), but Fatah remains the dominant one — Fatah’s founder Yasser Arafat became PLO’s chairman in 1969 and remained in office till his death in 2004. He was succeeded by Arafat’s aid Mahmoud Abbas, who still is the head of the organisation.
3. While PLO continued its armed struggle into the 1990s, it was officially recognised by the Arab League and the United Nations General Assembly as the “sole legitimate representative of the Palestinian people”, and was invited to participate in all UN activities under observer status.
4. A big turning point for PLO came in the early 1990s, when it not only gave up its armed struggle against Israel but also recognised the statehood of the Jewish state. This was a huge setback for the Palestinian nationalist movement and gave rise to Hamas.

Palestinian Authority (PA)

1. The PA was founded in July 1994 by the Oslo Accords as an interim body to govern parts of Gaza and the West Bank (except East Jerusalem) till an agreed solution to the Israel-Palestine conflict.
2. The PA “functions as an agency of the PLO, which represents Palestinians at international bodies. It is led by a directly-elected president, who appoints a prime minister and government which must have the support of the elected Legislative Council.
3. In 2006, the governing body was ousted from the Gaza Strip after Hamas won the PLC elections and since then the militant group has continued to control the territory.
4. Currently, the PA controls parts of the West Bank and is headed by Mahmoud Abbas, who is also the chief of PLO and Fatah.