The Evening Wrap: Forces use drones, mortar shells during Anantnag encounter

Drones have been pressed into service to pinpoint the location of the terrorists who have taken positions in the forest area on a hilly terrain in Jammu and Kashmir’s Anantnag district, officials said as the operation to flush out the ultras entered the third day on September 15. The terrorists killed four security personnel on Wednesday. “The forces fired mortar shells on the terrain where they believe the terrorists are hiding, based on drone surveillance,” the officials said. The security forces have maintained a tight cordon in the area, they added. Colonel Manpreet Singh, commanding officer of the 19 Rashtriya Rifles unit of the Army, Major Ashish Dhonchak, Deputy Superintendent of Jammu and Kashmir Police Humayun Bhat and a soldier were killed in an encounter with the terrorists at Gadole in the Kokernag area of the south Kashmir district on Wednesday morning. Editors Guild report on Manipur coverage may be right or wrong, but that is what free speech is all about: CJI Chief Justice of India D.Y. Chandrachud on September 15 said the Editors Guild of India (EGI) may be right or wrong in its report about “partisan media coverage” of the Manipur violence, but it has a right to free speech to put forth its views in print. The complaints which led to the registration of FIRs against senior journalists, the members and president of the EGI, did not contain even a “whisper of the offences alleged against them”, the Chief Justice said. The Bench, also comprising Justices J.B. Pardiwala and Manoj Misra, gave the complainants two weeks to give an affidavit providing reasons why the FIRs against EGI president Seema Mustafa and senior journalists Seema Guha, Bharat Bhushan and Sanjay Kapoor should not be quashed by the top court. “Tell us how any of these offences are made out from their report… Show us how Section 153A of the Indian Penal Code [promoting enmity between different groups] is made out. What is happening? They [EGI] are entitled to put forth their views. This is just a report. Where did you get all these offences from? Section 153A? You have said they have offended under Section 200 IPC [giving false declaration to a court]. Where did they give a declaration to a court? How is Section 200 implicated here?” Chief Justice Chandrachud grilled the complainants, represented by senior advocate Guru Krishnakumar. The court, which had initially suggested shifting the FIRs to Delhi, upped the ante when the complainants repeatedly referred to the “damage done by the EGI” in Manipur by its report. “Since you raise that issue, tell us first about how these offences are made out. File an affidavit. Put it on record. Tell us why the complaints and the FIRs should not be quashed… The Army wrote to the EGI saying there was partisan reporting being done in Manipur. The EGI sends a team of senior journalists to the ground to intervene and find out. They submit a report… They may be right or wrong, that is what free speech is all about,” the Chief Justice reacted. Chief Justice Chandrachud said that media reports may go wrong. “Will you charge all journalists under Section 153A then?” he asked. “We are concerned. The moment somebody puts something in print, it may be wrong, you lodge an FIR under Section 153A? Your entire complaint is a counter-narrative of the government. You assume what the EGI said is false. Every paragraph of your complaint says ‘false, false’. Making a false statement in an article is not an offence under Section 153A,” the Chief Justice told the complainants. Krishnakumar, at one point, suggested that his client would withdraw their complaints provided that the EGI withdrew its report. He finally agreed to file an affidavit in response. Senior advocate Shyam Divan, for the EGI and the journalists, said that counter-views to the report have been published on the same web page of the editors’ body along with the report. “People can read both our views and their counter-views and make up their minds,” Divan submitted. The EGI said that it had visited Manipur on the Army’s invitation to make an “objective assessment” of the “unethical and ex parte reporting” by the vernacular media. Divan said that the Manipur High Court had already entertained a public interest petition against the EGI, and sought that the case be transferred to Delhi. “The manner in which the Chief Justice of the Manipur High Court has entertained that PIL… let me not, as the head of the family, say more… Surely there are more pressing matters to be entertained than these kinds of PILs,” Chief Justice Chandrachud observed. The court said that the interim protection from coercive action against the four EGI members would continue. Solicitor-General Tushar Mehta, for the Manipur government, objected to shifting the case to Delhi, but also urged the top court to not open its ‘quashing jurisdiction’. At one point, seeing the Bench press the complainants to justify the offences made out by them, Mehta changed tack to say “let the case go to the Delhi High Court… let us not travel that [quashing the FIRs] path”. Mehta said that the State’s worry was “slightly bigger”, claiming that shifting the case to Delhi or quashing the FIRs would give an impetus for “any journalist to now go [to Manipur] and put forth views and counter-views”. “If that happens, we may not be able to control the narrative. There will be other narrative buildings. I am not making any value judgments, but any number of people can go and build a narrative and put out views and counter-views,” he said. The initial complaint against the EGI president and the three EGI three members was filed by Ngangom Sarat Singh, a retired engineer with the State government. The second FIR was lodged by Sorokhaibam Thoudam Sangita of Khurai in the Imphal East district. The Editors Guild, in a report published on September 2, slammed the internet ban in the State as being detrimental to media reportage, criticised what it termed as one-sided reporting by some media outlets, and claimed that there were indications that the State leadership had “turned partisan” during the conflict. On September 4, Manipur Chief Minister N. Biren Singh said that a police case had been filed on the basis of a complaint against the president and three members of the EGI and accused them of trying to “provoke clashes” in the State. The EGI members were booked under various sections of the IPC including Sections 153A, 200, and 298 (deliberate intent to wound religious feelings), and under provisions of the Information Technology Act and Press Council Act. The second FIR added Section 499 (defamation) of the IPC to these charges. Wrong to think only ‘fancy’ cases reach Constitution Benches, says CJI Chief Justice of India D.Y. Chandrachud on Friday told a lawyer to disabuse his mind of the notion that the Supreme Court constitutes Constitution Benches to hear “fancy” matters which have nothing to do with the daily travails of the ordinary people. The Chief Justice said that in cases like the Article 370 abrogation challenge, the court had listened to the “voice of the nation” with stakeholders from the Valley participating in the recently-concluded marathon hearings. Chief Justice Chandrachud pulled up advocate Mathews Nedumpara for his letter to the top court’s Secretary General, saying the court was “wasting time” hearing Constitution Bench cases and should focus on public interest petitions to benefit the common man. “You may think that a Constitution Bench hearing on the abrogation of Article 370 of the Constitution is irrelevant… But that is not what the petitioners in the case and the government think,” the Chief Justice addressed Nedumpara, who wrote the letter. The Chief Justice said not every Constitution Bench case was about the interpretation of the Constitution. “If you had come and sat in our court the day before yesterday you would have seen us in a Constitution Bench dealing with a matter that touches upon the livelihood of hundreds of thousands of drivers across the country… The issue was whether a person who holds a light motor vehicle licence can drive a commercial vehicle… So, please disabuse your mind that the Supreme Court is only dealing with some fancy constitutional matters which have no bearing on the lives of ordinary people,” Chief Justice Chandrachud told the lawyer. Nedumpara said he was not against the court hearing Constitution Bench matters, but his objection was to the court hearing issues of public policy without hearing the public. “The public is not heard,” he said. “Even there you are wrong. In the Article 370 case, we had groups of individual intervenors on both sides who came and addressed us from the Valley. We have been hearing the voice of the nation in that case,” Chief Justice Chandrachud said. Nedumpara is known for his strident and very vocal criticism of the collegium system of judicial appointments. He had earlier alleged nepotism within the judicial institution. Listen to today’s episode of the In Focus podcast What lies behind the Nipah virus outbreak in India? The Nipah virus is back in the news. For the fourth time in five years, Kerala is battling an outbreak of Nipah. The virus, first documented in Malaysia in 1998, is zoonotic, which means it is transmitted to people from animals, in this case the animals are believed to be the fruit bats of the Pteropus species. As of September 15, six people have tested positive for Nipah virus, and two have died. A Central government team is in Kerala at present and a mobile testing lab has been set up. In infected people, the World Health Organisation says, the virus can cause a range of illnesses from asymptomatic (subclinical) infections to acute respiratory illnesses and fatal encephalitis. But despite our many brushes with Nipah, there still remains a lot that is unknown – we still need to know more for instance, about how the virus spills over from bats to humans, and why this is happening. There’s also the growing concern of the surge in zoonotic infections across the country – scrub typhus and leptospirosis for instance, and why this is happening. 13,000 workers from Detroit’s three automakers go on strike seeking better wages About 13,000 U.S. auto workers stopped making vehicles and went on strike Friday, September 15, 2023, after their leaders couldn’t bridge a giant gap between union demands in contract talks and what Detroit’s three automakers are willing to pay. Members of the United Auto Workers union began picketing at a General Motors assembly plant in Wentzville, Missouri, a Ford factory in Wayne, Michigan, near Detroit, and a Stellantis Jeep plant in Toledo, Ohio. It was the first time in the union’s 88-year history that it walked out on all three companies simultaneously as four-year contracts with the companies expired at 11:59 p.m. Thursday. The strike will likely chart the future of the union and of America’s homegrown auto industry at a time when U.S. labour is flexing its might and the companies face a historic transition from building internal combustion automobiles to making electric vehicles. If the strikes last a long time, they could cause dealers to run short of vehicles and prices could rise. The walkout could even be a factor in next year’s presidential election by testing Joe Biden’s proud claim to be the most union-friendly president in American history. “Workers all over the world are watching this,” said Liz Shuler, president of the AFL-CIO, a federation of 60 unions with 12.5 million members. The strike is far different from those during previous UAW negotiations. Instead of going after one company, the union, led by its pugnacious new president, Shawn Fain, is striking at all three. But not all of the 146,000 UAW members at company plants are walking picket lines, at least not yet. Instead, the UAW targeted a handful of factories to prod company negotiators to raise their offers, which were far lower than union demands of 36% wage increases over four years. GM and Ford offered 20% and Stellantis, formerly Fiat Chrysler, offered 17.5%. Even Fain has called the union’s demands audacious, but he maintains the automakers are raking in billions and can afford them. He scoffed at company statements that costly settlements would force them to raise vehicle prices, saying that labour accounts for only 4% to 5% of vehicle costs. “They could double our raises and not raise car prices and still make millions of dollars in profits,” Fain said. “We’re not the problem. Corporate greed is the problem.” In addition to general wage increases, the union is seeking restoration of cost-of-living pay raises, an end to varying tiers of wages for factory jobs, a 32-hour week with 40 hours of pay, the restoration of traditional defined-benefit pensions for new hires who now receive only 401(k)-style retirement plans, pension increases for retirees and other items. Starting in 2007, workers gave up cost-of-living raises, defined benefit pensions for new hires, and wage tiers were created as the UAW tried to help the companies avoid financial trouble ahead of and during the Great Recession. Even so, only Ford avoided government-funded bankruptcy protection. Many say it’s time to get the concessions back because the companies are making huge profits and CEOs are raking in millions. They also want to make sure the union represents workers at joint-venture electric vehicle battery factories that the companies are building so workers have jobs making vehicles of the future. Top-scale assembly plant workers make about $32 per hour, plus large annual profit-sharing checks. Ford said average annual pay including overtime and bonuses was $78,000 last year. In Brief: India’s goods exports shrank for the seventh successive month in August, but the pace of decline eased to 6.86% from double digit contractions in recent months, with shipments worth $34.5 billion in the month. The merchandise Import bill for August dropped 5.23% year-on-year to $58.64 billion, but was 10.85% higher than July’s $52.9 billion import tally. Officials said that nearly half of the decline in exports so far this year was driven by the decline in petroleum prices, noting that though export volumes of petroleum products were up 6%, prices were 27% lower than a year ago. The trade deficit for August dropped 2.8% from last year to $24.16 billion, but was almost 17% over July’s $20.67 billion gap between goods imports and exports. Evening Wrap will return tomorrow. [logo] The Evening Wrap 15 September 2023 [The Hindu logo] Welcome to the Evening Wrap newsletter, your guide to the day’s biggest stories with concise analysis from The Hindu. [[Arrow]Open in browser]( [[Mail icon]More newsletters]( Anantnag encounter | Forces use drones, fire mortar shells [Drones have been pressed into service to pinpoint the location of the terrorists who have taken positions in the forest area on a hilly terrain in Jammu and Kashmir’s Anantnag district]( officials said as the operation to flush out the ultras entered the third day on September 15. The terrorists killed four security personnel on Wednesday. “The forces fired mortar shells on the terrain where they believe the terrorists are hiding, based on drone surveillance,” the officials said. The security forces have maintained a tight cordon in the area, they added. Colonel Manpreet Singh, commanding officer of the 19 Rashtriya Rifles unit of the Army, Major Ashish Dhonchak, Deputy Superintendent of Jammu and Kashmir Police Humayun Bhat and a soldier were killed in an encounter with the terrorists at Gadole in the Kokernag area of the south Kashmir district on Wednesday morning. Editors Guild report on Manipur coverage may be right or wrong, but that is what free speech is all about: CJI [Chief Justice of India D.Y. Chandrachud on September 15 said the Editors Guild of India (EGI) may be right or wrong in its report about “partisan media coverage” of the Manipur violence, but it has a right to free speech]( to put forth its views in print. The complaints which led to the registration of FIRs against senior journalists, the members and president of the EGI, did not contain even a “whisper of the offences alleged against them”, the Chief Justice said. The Bench, also comprising Justices J.B. Pardiwala and Manoj Misra, gave the complainants two weeks to give an affidavit providing reasons why the FIRs against EGI president Seema Mustafa and senior journalists Seema Guha, Bharat Bhushan and Sanjay Kapoor should not be quashed by the top court. “Tell us how any of these offences are made out from their report… Show us how Section 153A of the Indian Penal Code [promoting enmity between different groups] is made out. What is happening? They [EGI] are entitled to put forth their views. This is just a report. Where did you get all these offences from? Section 153A? You have said they have offended under Section 200 IPC [giving false declaration to a court]. Where did they give a declaration to a court? How is Section 200 implicated here?” Chief Justice Chandrachud grilled the complainants, represented by senior advocate Guru Krishnakumar. The court, which had initially suggested shifting the FIRs to Delhi, upped the ante when the complainants repeatedly referred to the “damage done by the EGI” in Manipur by its report. “Since you raise that issue, tell us first about how these offences are made out. File an affidavit. Put it on record. Tell us why the complaints and the FIRs should not be quashed… The Army wrote to the EGI saying there was partisan reporting being done in Manipur. The EGI sends a team of senior journalists to the ground to intervene and find out. They submit a report… They may be right or wrong, that is what free speech is all about,” the Chief Justice reacted. Chief Justice Chandrachud said that media reports may go wrong. “Will you charge all journalists under Section 153A then?” he asked. “We are concerned. The moment somebody puts something in print, it may be wrong, you lodge an FIR under Section 153A? Your entire complaint is a counter-narrative of the government. You assume what the EGI said is false. Every paragraph of your complaint says ‘false, false’. Making a false statement in an article is not an offence under Section 153A,” the Chief Justice told the complainants. Krishnakumar, at one point, suggested that his client would withdraw their complaints provided that the EGI withdrew its report. He finally agreed to file an affidavit in response. Senior advocate Shyam Divan, for the EGI and the journalists, said that counter-views to the report have been published on the same web page of the editors’ body along with the report. “People can read both our views and their counter-views and make up their minds,” Divan submitted. The EGI said that it had visited Manipur on the Army’s invitation to make an “objective assessment” of the “unethical and ex parte reporting” by the vernacular media. Divan said that the Manipur High Court had already entertained a public interest petition against the EGI, and sought that the case be transferred to Delhi. “The manner in which the Chief Justice of the Manipur High Court has entertained that PIL… let me not, as the head of the family, say more… Surely there are more pressing matters to be entertained than these kinds of PILs,” Chief Justice Chandrachud observed. The court said that the interim protection from coercive action against the four EGI members would continue. Solicitor-General Tushar Mehta, for the Manipur government, objected to shifting the case to Delhi, but also urged the top court to not open its ‘quashing jurisdiction’. At one point, seeing the Bench press the complainants to justify the offences made out by them, Mehta changed tack to say “let the case go to the Delhi High Court… let us not travel that [quashing the FIRs] path”. Mehta said that the State’s worry was “slightly bigger”, claiming that shifting the case to Delhi or quashing the FIRs would give an impetus for “any journalist to now go [to Manipur] and put forth views and counter-views”. “If that happens, we may not be able to control the narrative. There will be other narrative buildings. I am not making any value judgments, but any number of people can go and build a narrative and put out views and counter-views,” he said. The initial complaint against the EGI president and the three EGI three members was filed by Ngangom Sarat Singh, a retired engineer with the State government. The second FIR was lodged by Sorokhaibam Thoudam Sangita of Khurai in the Imphal East district. The Editors Guild, in a report published on September 2, slammed the internet ban in the State as being detrimental to media reportage, criticised what it termed as one-sided reporting by some media outlets, and claimed that there were indications that the State leadership had “turned partisan” during the conflict. On September 4, Manipur Chief Minister N. Biren Singh said that a police case had been filed on the basis of a complaint against the president and three members of the EGI and accused them of trying to “provoke clashes” in the State. The EGI members were booked under various sections of the IPC including Sections 153A, 200, and 298 (deliberate intent to wound religious feelings), and under provisions of the Information Technology Act and Press Council Act. The second FIR added Section 499 (defamation) of the IPC to these charges. Wrong to think only ‘fancy’ cases reach Constitution Benches, says CJI [Chief Justice of India D.Y. Chandrachud on Friday told a lawyer to disabuse his mind of the notion that the Supreme Court constitutes Constitution Benches to hear “fancy” matters]( which have nothing to do with the daily travails of the ordinary people. The Chief Justice said that in cases like the Article 370 abrogation challenge, the court had listened to the “voice of the nation” with stakeholders from the Valley participating in the recently-concluded marathon hearings. Chief Justice Chandrachud pulled up advocate Mathews Nedumpara for his letter to the top court’s Secretary General, saying the court was “wasting time” hearing Constitution Bench cases and should focus on public interest petitions to benefit the common man. “You may think that a Constitution Bench hearing on the abrogation of Article 370 of the Constitution is irrelevant… But that is not what the petitioners in the case and the government think,” the Chief Justice addressed Nedumpara, who wrote the letter. The Chief Justice said not every Constitution Bench case was about the interpretation of the Constitution. “If you had come and sat in our court the day before yesterday you would have seen us in a Constitution Bench dealing with a matter that touches upon the livelihood of hundreds of thousands of drivers across the country… The issue was whether a person who holds a light motor vehicle licence can drive a commercial vehicle… So, please disabuse your mind that the Supreme Court is only dealing with some fancy constitutional matters which have no bearing on the lives of ordinary people,” Chief Justice Chandrachud told the lawyer. Nedumpara said he was not against the court hearing Constitution Bench matters, but his objection was to the court hearing issues of public policy without hearing the public. “The public is not heard,” he said. “Even there you are wrong. In the Article 370 case, we had groups of individual intervenors on both sides who came and addressed us from the Valley. We have been hearing the voice of the nation in that case,” Chief Justice Chandrachud said. Nedumpara is known for his strident and very vocal criticism of the collegium system of judicial appointments. He had earlier alleged nepotism within the judicial institution. Listen to today’s episode of the In Focus podcast What lies behind the Nipah virus outbreak in India? The Nipah virus is back in the news. [For the fourth time in five years, Kerala is battling an outbreak of Nipah](. The virus, first documented in Malaysia in 1998, is zoonotic, which means it is transmitted to people from animals, in this case the animals are believed to be the fruit bats of the Pteropus species. As of September 15, six people have tested positive for Nipah virus, and two have died. A Central government team is in Kerala at present and a mobile testing lab has been set up. In infected people, the World Health Organisation says, the virus can cause a range of illnesses from asymptomatic (subclinical) infections to acute respiratory illnesses and fatal encephalitis. But despite our many brushes with Nipah, there still remains a lot that is unknown – we still need to know more for instance, about how the virus spills over from bats to humans, and why this is happening. There’s also the growing concern of the surge in zoonotic infections across the country – scrub typhus and leptospirosis for instance, and why this is happening. 13,000 workers from Detroit’s three automakers go on strike seeking better wages [About 13,000 U.S. auto workers stopped making vehicles and went on strike]( Friday, September 15, 2023, after their leaders couldn’t bridge a giant gap between union demands in contract talks and what Detroit’s three automakers are willing to pay. Members of the United Auto Workers union began picketing at a General Motors assembly plant in Wentzville, Missouri, a Ford factory in Wayne, Michigan, near Detroit, and a Stellantis Jeep plant in Toledo, Ohio. It was the first time in the union’s 88-year history that it walked out on all three companies simultaneously as four-year contracts with the companies expired at 11:59 p.m. Thursday. The strike will likely chart the future of the union and of America’s homegrown auto industry at a time when U.S. labour is flexing its might and the companies face a historic transition from building internal combustion automobiles to making electric vehicles. If the strikes last a long time, they could cause dealers to run short of vehicles and prices could rise. The walkout could even be a factor in next year’s presidential election by testing Joe Biden’s proud claim to be the most union-friendly president in American history. “Workers all over the world are watching this,” said Liz Shuler, president of the AFL-CIO, a federation of 60 unions with 12.5 million members. The strike is far different from those during previous UAW negotiations. Instead of going after one company, the union, led by its pugnacious new president, Shawn Fain, is striking at all three. But not all of the 146,000 UAW members at company plants are walking picket lines, at least not yet. Instead, the UAW targeted a handful of factories to prod company negotiators to raise their offers, which were far lower than union demands of 36% wage increases over four years. GM and Ford offered 20% and Stellantis, formerly Fiat Chrysler, offered 17.5%. Even Fain has called the union’s demands audacious, but he maintains the automakers are raking in billions and can afford them. He scoffed at company statements that costly settlements would force them to raise vehicle prices, saying that labour accounts for only 4% to 5% of vehicle costs. “They could double our raises and not raise car prices and still make millions of dollars in profits,” Fain said. “We’re not the problem. Corporate greed is the problem.” In addition to general wage increases, the union is seeking restoration of cost-of-living pay raises, an end to varying tiers of wages for factory jobs, a 32-hour week with 40 hours of pay, the restoration of traditional defined-benefit pensions for new hires who now receive only 401(k)-style retirement plans, pension increases for retirees and other items. Starting in 2007, workers gave up cost-of-living raises, defined benefit pensions for new hires, and wage tiers were created as the UAW tried to help the companies avoid financial trouble ahead of and during the Great Recession. Even so, only Ford avoided government-funded bankruptcy protection. Many say it’s time to get the concessions back because the companies are making huge profits and CEOs are raking in millions. They also want to make sure the union represents workers at joint-venture electric vehicle battery factories that the companies are building so workers have jobs making vehicles of the future. Top-scale assembly plant workers make about $32 per hour, plus large annual profit-sharing checks. Ford said average annual pay including overtime and bonuses was $78,000 last year. In Brief: [India’s goods exports shrank for the seventh successive month in August]( but the pace of decline eased to 6.86% from double digit contractions in recent months, with shipments worth $34.5 billion in the month. The merchandise Import bill for August dropped 5.23% year-on-year to $58.64 billion, but was 10.85% higher than July’s $52.9 billion import tally. Officials said that nearly half of the decline in exports so far this year was driven by the decline in petroleum prices, noting that though export volumes of petroleum products were up 6%, prices were 27% lower than a year ago. The trade deficit for August dropped 2.8% from last year to $24.16 billion, but was almost 17% over July’s $20.67 billion gap between goods imports and exports. Evening Wrap will return tomorrow. 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