11 Jan 2023 : The Hindu Editorial Analysis

Editorial 1: The beginning of India’s cultural renaissance

Context:

• The month-long Kashi Tamil Sangamam, which showcased Tamil culture, heralded a new era where ancient Indian traditions intermingle with one another and are revitalised with the help of modern practices so that they contribute to cultural and economic growth. It gave a rich cultural context to India’s mission to become a developed country by 2047. The event carried forward our tradition of Ek Bharat Shreshtha Bharat.

Ancient links

• Kashi, one of the oldest living cities of the world, and Tamil Nadu, where people proudly speak the world’s oldest language, are towering pillars of ancient Indian civilisation. Both have rich, old traditions of arts, music, craftsmanship, philosophy, spirituality and literature.
• Yet, for decades after independence, few people in north India knew about the Tamil saints who lived in Kashi and intensified its spiritual aura, or the tradition of taking holy Ganga jal (water) to the Rameshwaram temple, or the Kashi Yatra ritual in some Tamil weddings. Likewise, many in Tamil Nadu were not fully familiar with the ancient links between the two cultures.
• The event saw people from all walks of life from Tamil Nadu visiting Kashi. They experienced the city’s traditions and its iconic landmarks such as the Kashi Vishwanath temple. They approached the temple through the new corridor, which has transformed and beautified the sacred area.
• The landmark Kashi Vishwanath corridor, which connects the Jyotirling with the Ganga, embellishes traditions with a touch of modernity for the benefit of residents and visitors.
• Similarly, the Sangamam created a unique platform to rediscover and integrate our heritage and ancient knowledge with modern thought, philosophy, technology and craftsmanship. This creates a new body of knowledge and fosters innovations that will help our artisans, weavers, entrepreneurs and traders.
• For instance, Varanasi is well known for Banarasi silk saris, and Kancheepuram, for its shimmering silk saris. Weavers and entrepreneurs from both regions have a lot to gain from interacting with each other and from their exposure to modern practices of branding, quality control, marketing, product consistency, the use of modern machinery and value addition.

The focus on textiles

• The government organised a ‘textiles conclave’ during the Sangamam. Several eminent personalities of different segments of the textile industry from Tamil Nadu and Kashi shared their experiences and exchanged ideas at a session on Amrit Kaal Vision 2047. They were excited and confident about the government’s vision of raising textiles exports to $100 billion by 2030 and creating new opportunities in the sector.
• The textiles sector, which has great job-creating potential, is a key part of our mission to become a developed country by 2047. India’s textiles market is expected to grow at a CAGR of 12-13% to nearly $2 trillion by 2047, while exports from the sector are expected to grow at double digits.
• The Sangamam ended on December 16. About 2 lakh people visited the campus of the Banaras Hindu University which hosted cultural shows and a popular exhibition that highlighted Tamil products and cuisine. The Sangamam has ignited a new cultural zeal in India and whetted the country’s appetite for more. The textiles sector is planning a similar event in Tamil Nadu.

New initiatives:

• The 5F formula (farm, fibre, fabric, fashion, foreign) will accelerate growth in the sector and transform the lives of farmers and weavers. Kashi and Tamil Nadu have a key role to play to achieve this vision. The government is also encouraging technical textiles, which have phenomenal potential. These products include functional textiles that are used in vehicles, protective clothing, bulletproof vests and construction. Man-made fibre, also an area of focus, has great potential for growth and exports.
• The Sangamam was in step with the entire spectrum of this government’s policies. These policies accord top priority to accelerating development with a focus on welfare of the poorest of the poor, love for Indian culture, and promoting local industries and handicrafts.
• The union government is also strongly promoting the One District One Product (ODOP) scheme that will take Indian products to the world market. Apart from saris, the textiles conclave also dwelled on wooden toys. Traditional wooden toys of Varanasi are getting more export enquiries and are being showcased in international business exhibitions.
• Traditional products will also get a big boost from other government initiatives such as the Open Network for Digital Commerce (ONDC) and the Government e-Marketplace (GeM).

Conclusion:

• As the Home Minister recently said, the Sangamam is the beginning of India’s cultural renaissance that is not limited to the bonding of Tamil Nadu and Kashi. It will extend to all cultures of this great country.

Editorial 2: Barking up the wrong tree

Introduction:

• Election Commission of India (EC) has announced its intention of introducing remote voting across the country — a facility to enable voters who are residents elsewhere to vote in their home constituencies.

Remote voting machines (RVMs):

• Remote voting may take place in person somewhere other than an assigned polling station or at another time, or votes may be sent by post or cast by an appointed proxy.
• There have been demands from various political parties that the EC should ensure that migrant workers, NRIs (Non-Resident Indians) who miss out on voting, as they cannot afford to go home during elections to exercise their franchise, should be allowed to vote for their constituency from the city they are working in.
• Considering that India has a significant fraction of migrant population, this provision is much required. The EC proposes using isolated remote voting machines (RVMs), which are multi-constituency extensions of the extant EVMs, to enable voting from remote locations. The commission has announced that it will demonstrate the prototype RVMs to representatives of all political parties on January 16.
• However, the EC’s overemphasis on the RVMs appears to be misplaced. There is much more to remote voting than voting electronics, and the commission’s proposal appears to be sketchy and grossly inadequate. Several crucial questions arise.

Pressing queries

• First, how will it be ensured that all those who wish to apply for remote voting are able to do so without let or hindrance, and that all applications are processed fairly without inadvertent or selective exclusions? Under what conditions will remote voting be denied?
• It is not sufficient just to define a protocol as it needs to be ensured that all applications — and the decisions on them — are publicly verifiable, from both remote and home locations. This can only be done with verifiable zero-trust technology that is crucially linked to digitisation of the electoral rolls, which, by itself, requires a thorough examination.
• Second, how will it be ensured that a person allowed to vote remotely is invalidated for local voting and also that nobody is incorrectly invalidated? Since the two lists will be at different locations, the correctness will not be easy to demonstrate in a publicly verifiable way.
• Third, how will the votes — both the electronic votes and the VVPAT slips — be consolidated and counted? Will the counting and the VVPAT audit happen at the remote location, or at the home constituency after consolidation?
• Fourth, who will be the polling agents at the remote locations? How will it be ensured that in a different political environment at the remote site, a remote voter will not be coerced?
• The above problems are not insurmountable, but they will require considerably more due diligence. They will also require a significant shift of emphasis from designing electronics to ensuring verifiability. After all, the effectiveness of a remote voting procedure cannot be ascertained merely from a demonstration of voting hardware. Neither is the design of a voting protocol an electronic system design problem.
• Unfortunately, this misplaced emphasis on unverifiable voting machines has been a long-standing, ostrich-like problem with the EC. That the correctness of a machine with the essential properties of an EVM is unverifiable is a well-known theoretical result.
• This is not to say that software cannot be used in electronic voting, but that an undetected change or error in the software should not cause an undetectable change or error in an election outcome. It is well known that a standalone EVM, whichever way its components are internally connected, cannot be software-independent, which is a necessary condition for verifiability.

Examples from other countries

• It is this understanding — and the requirement of public verifiability of elections — that led the German Constitutional Court to pronounce against EVM use in 2009, an exhortation that is honoured not only in Germany but also in many other jurisdictions across Europe and America, and Pakistan.
• It has also led the U.S. National Academy of Sciences to recommend against pure electronic voting in a public report in 2018.
• One way out — as an approximation to software-independence — is to audit the electronic results with a count of the VVPATs, either with a complete count or that of a statistically significant sample. The procedure for doing this, called risk limiting audit, is well established in voting literature.
• Unfortunately, it appears that election results are declared in India without any VVPAT audits at all. Even the Supreme Court’s stipulation of auditing five randomly selected EVMs in every Assembly constituency against VVPAT counts appears to be without any sound statistical basis.

Conclusion:

• While usability demonstrations are essential for public acceptability, they do not ensure safety or security. Modern computer and digital security is not established by demonstrations or forceful proclamations, but by publicly articulating rigorous threat models and proving verifiable robustness against them. Cryptography may help in doing so. After all, one cannot bring digitisation to public life but leave the rigours of computer science behind.