Using Ultrafast Laser, ‘Mini’ Particle Accelerator Sets New Energy Record

Smaller accelerators will be more affordable. In the hands of university students, they could democratise biological studies. In hospitals and clinics, they could make diagnostics more affordable.

As particle physicists around the world debate whether humankind needs a $22-billion, 100-km long ‘supercollider’, other physicists are working on shrinking these machines to fit on a tabletop.

The idea for tabletop – or, more accurately, wakefield – accelerators was first birthed in the late 1970s, and then realised technologically in the 2000s by American physicist Chandrashekhar Joshi. Where the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) accelerates protons over thousands of kilometres (round and round in a ring), a wakefield accelerator does the same thing over a few centimetres. The only reason it hasn’t entered mainstream use is because it can barely achieve the same energy the LHC does.

The underlying problem here concerns the acceleration gradient.

Opportunities

A particle accelerator is a machine that drives subatomic particles to very high velocities and energies. These machines typically also make sure that the accelerated particles are kept in a tight, narrow beam.

The acceleration gradient here is the amount of energy imparted to a particle over a given distance. A linear accelerator like at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Centre (SLAC) can manage 0.7-0.8 gigavolt per metre (GV/m). So if it had to energise a particle from zero to 10 GeV, it will need to accelerate the particle across 12-14 metres. Circular accelerators have a gradient of about 0.25 GV/m. To compare, a wakefield accelerator can achieve 10-100 GV/m.

However, it can only sustain this over a very short distance, in the order of a few centimetres. This means it can accelerate the particle only to a few GeV. In a world where higher energies are mandatory for research, this is no good. Machines already exist to push particles to 7,000 GeV.

A section of the LHC showing a module of radio-frequency (RF) cavities. RF cavities are used to accelerate charged particles. Credit: CERN

A section of the LHC showing a module of radio-frequency (RF) cavities. RF cavities are used to accelerate charged particles. Credit: CERN

But physics research isn’t everything, and this problem doesn’t render the accelerators useless. To the contrary, opportunities abound.

In fact, lower energies are more important in some contexts. Most medical instruments operate at the sub-GeV level; it’s physics that requires 1 GeV and above. In the mid-2000s, it was estimated that there were around 10,000 accelerators around the world used in diagnostics and biomedical research, out of 18,000 accelerators in all. By 2014, the total had ballooned to 30,000, with over 15,000 used for medical purposes.

A “third generation” medical linear accelerator energises electrons to about 20 MeV, then smashes them against a heavy-metal plate to produce X-rays. These X-rays are used to look inside the human body. Such machines are about 10 feet tall and, according to a 2013 review, cost $4 million (Rs 28.5 crore) apiece and need to be replaced every five or so years. Their size makes them harder to maintain as well as harder to manoeuvre around a person’s body.

Notwithstanding certain caveats (discussed below), a wakefield machine could potentially reduce this cost by a factor of thousand. In turn, they will become more accessible to doctors, medical researchers and – crucially – university students. When used with an X-ray free-electron laser, one physicist speculates, “a vast number of applications, most notably the determination of the 3D structure of biomolecules, could be carried out by a much broader community of researchers, complementing large-scale facilities where beam time is expensive and scarce”.

With a view to surmounting these challenges, scientists have been hard at work.

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Lasers

In 2014, a group at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL), California, pushed electrons to 4.25 GeV in a wakefield accelerator – a record at the time. In 2015, scientists from the University of Maryland found that certain subtle modifications to the accelerator could help achieve a higher acceleration gradient with lower power consumption. On the back of this, the LBNL group found a way to connect multiple accelerators back-to-back in 2016. And now, they’ve reported another increase, a new record: electrons energised to 7.8 GeV.

This is a big leap but there are problems. One is that wakefield machines that can rival the LHC’s energy will have to be a few hundreds of metres long, and no longer table-sized. But this is still not bad considering the LHC is 26.7 km long. Moreover, wakefield accelerators that can achieve a few thousandths of a GeV are still very small, the size of a shoebox, much smaller than the room-sized machines that accelerate particles to similar energies the ‘conventional’ way.

The LHC deploys powerful magnetic fields to accelerate charged particles through large distances. The SLAC uses instruments that rapidly alternate the voltage between two points and use microwaves to bump particles forward. A wakefield accelerator has fewer components but is more sophisticated than both.

All wakefield accelerators accelerate electrons by exposing them to an electric field – forcing them to jump from a negatively charged side of it to a positively charged one. And all wakefield accelerators choose plasma as the medium in which to conduct this jump because it transfers energy more efficiently.

There are different kinds of wakefield accelerators. A typical setup involves first creating a plasma. Second, a laser is fired into the plasma, ‘driving’ the particles forward. Because the ions are much heavier than the electrons, they separate out into two groups as they move.

As they push forward, a trailing electric field develops behind them – the so-called wakefield. Accelerators differ on how they transfer the energy in this wakefield to electrons moving inside it.

A supercomputer simulation showing a rendering of plasma waves (blue) excited by a petawatt laser pulse (red) at Berkeley Lab’s BELLA Center as it propagates in a plasma channel. Caption and credit: Carlo Benedetti/Berkeley Lab

The simplest way is to ‘drop’ an electron into this setup and let it speed along the wakefield, becoming energised as a result. But there’s a problem. As the electron accelerates, it moves faster – but as the driving laser moves through the plasma, it slows down.

So eventually, the electron could break out of the accelerating part of the wakefield and bring the experiment to a premature close. This leads to the accelerating gradient problem.

One workaround is to connect multiple wakefield accelerators end-to-end, as the LBNL group did in 2016. But this isn’t so straightforward because successive accelerators achieve lower accelerating gradients.

Another is to use multiple carefully tuned laser pulses. The LBNL group used this method, together with some technological interventions, to improve the acceleration gradient.

First, physicists created the plasma and moved it into a very narrow tube of glass. They applied a voltage across its ends to separate the electrons and ions. Second, they fired an 850-trillion watt laser into the plasma, in pulses each 35 femtoseconds long, to generate the wakefield. Third, they used another laser to heat the plasma such that it was cooler along the glass and hotter towards the centre. Such a density gradient ensured that the plasma could sustain the acceleration over almost 20 cm, and along a tightly focused beam.

The result: 7.8 GeV.

The technological sophistication at work here is best illustrated by the following factoid: it took physicists 13 years to go from accelerating electrons in a wakefield to 1 GeV to nearly 8 GeV. In the pioneering 2006 experiment, also conducted at LBNL, physicists used a 40-trillion watt laser and a 3.3-cm-long tube. When the 4.25 GeV record was set, Georg Korn, technology manager at the Extreme Light Infrastructure Beamlines facility, Prague, wrote:

Laser plasma acceleration has … been driven by technological advances that boosted laser peak and average power, together with stability, repetition rate (pulses emitted per second), and electrical efficiency.

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Awake

A third workaround involves using a different kind of driver altogether – as physicists at CERN did last year. They worked on an experiment called AWAKE, which stands for ‘Advanced proton-driven plasma Wakefield Acceleration Experiment’.

AWAKE's 10-metre-long plasma cell in place in the experiment tunnel. Credit: Maximilien Brice/CERN

AWAKE’s 10-metre-long plasma cell in place in the experiment tunnel. Credit: Maximilien Brice/CERN

The physicists first created a plasma. Then, instead of a high-power laser, they accelerated a bunch of protons in the Super Proton Synchrotron, a smaller particle accelerator at CERN, to 400 GeV and fired them into the plasma as the ‘driver’. Next, they fired a relatively weaker laser focused on the middle of the bunch. This had the effect of breaking up the back half of the proton bunch into a series of ‘microbunches’ while pushing on the front half.

The trailing microbunches then created a wakefield for electrons to surf in. As a result, they were able to achieve an acceleration gradient of “hundreds” of MV/m across 10 cm.

Two studies released by the AWAKE collaboration (this and this) show that the proton-driven technique can work with a lower plasma density than the laser-driven one. It is also easier to conduct because it doesn’t require as much optical, mechanical and electronic coordination between different components of the experiment as a laser accelerator does. But on the flip side, it does require pre-accelerated protons, which may not always be available.

Then, again a laser-driven accelerator requires high-power, short-duration lasers that are just as hard to find. In fact, a fourth workaround has a similar issue. In 2013, physicists from Stanford were able to accelerate electrons at 300 MV/m simply by shining infrared light over a specifically engineered series of ridges. But the technique only worked if a pre-accelerator was used.

So although neither the LBNL nor the AWAKE machines are ready for primetime, they have demonstrated important advancements that can help scientists build better ‘small accelerators’ in the future. One way they have done this is by highlighting the problems we need to focus on depending on who is going to use them: biomedical students or particle physicists.

Thanks to the people working on wakefield acceleration, we also have a clearer picture of the opportunities these machines present, and what we need to do to get there. Now is the time to explore – to find out what is possible and what isn’t. Doing them better comes later.

India-Pak Standoff: All Signs Suggest That New Delhi Wants To De-Escalate

Despite confirming that the Pakistani Air Force targeted Indian military establishments, India has not called it an act of war.

New Delhi: With tensions boiling over the past two days, India is now clearly signalling that it won’t take any further military steps for now.

India handing over a dossier on Jaish-e-Mohammad JeM to Pakistan on Wednesday night and the refusal to brand an attack on military targets as an ‘act of war’ are important markers that New Delhi wants to de-escalate the situation.

The dossier was handed over to the Pakistani deputy high commissioner along with the demarche on Pakistan incursions through airstrikes on Wednesday. As per the MEA’s press note handed out on Wednesday, the dossier contained “specific details of JeM’s complicity in Pulwama terror attack and the presence of JeM terror camps and its leadership in Pakistan”.

A day later, Indian sources explained that the dossier was provided in response to Pakistani Prime Minister Imran Khan’s repeated claims since February 14 that Islamabad is ready to conduct an investigation, if given evidence. The Pakistani leader also emphasised in his last address to the nation that India did not provide any information so far, despite several offers.

Also Read: Pakistan to Release IAF Wing Commander Abhinandan Varthaman Tomorrow

Sources asserted after India handed over the dossier, the ball was in Pakistan’s court.

As India earlier refused to share any information regarding the Pulwama attack with Pakistan, the move to hand over the dossier is a clear indicator that it does not want to escalate.

Before, India stated that sharing any “actionable intelligence” with Pakistan is futile, given the history of Islamabad’s lack of action after 26/11 and Pathankot attack. In a series of diplomatic briefing both in Delhi and in world capitals, foreign countries were also told the same line.

Sources said after Imran Khan’s speech on Wednesday, it is now time for him to walk the talk.

However, after handing over the dossier means, India will have to wait before checking if Pakistan will take any action – even if it considers that to be a futile wait.

Sources noted that India’s demand was for immediate, credible and verifiable action against terrorists, their proxies and dismantling of cross-border terror infrastructure. On Pakistan’s claim that Imran Khan wants to speak over the phone with Narendra Modi, sources said the onus is on Pakistan to create a conducive atmosphere.

Given Pakistan’s history, would India would accept any Pakistan action as credible? Sources said this discussion will only happen later.

Narendra Modi and Imran Khan. Illustration: The Wire

International resonance

India’s position seems to have some resonance internationally. German foreign minister Heiko Maas on Thursday called on both countries to exercise “utmost circumspection”. However, he also told Pakistan that “once evidence is furnished, that those responsible for the terrible attack in Kashmir are held to account and do not walk free”.

The press conference by the three armed forces at Raisina hill was also essentially another signboard that India will “not escalate”.

The Indian government’s first confirmation of the Pakistani airstrike – through a media statement by foreign secretary Vijay Gokhale on Wednesday afternoon – said Pakistan had targeted military installations. Today’s press briefing again underlined that military installations had been targeted, essentially to put a question mark on Pakistani claims.

Air Vice Marshall R.G.K. Kapoor said that at around 10 am on February 27, military radars detected a “large package” of Pakistani aircraft was approaching Indian territory at Jhangar. “They breached the Indian airspace at Rajauri in Sunderbani area,” he said. The Pakistani aircraft numbered over 20.

The senior Air Force officer said the Pakistani planes were intercepted by Indian fighter aircraft “which thwarted their plans”. “Although PAF bombs have fallen in Indian Army Formation compounds, however, they were unable to cause any damage to our Military Installations”.

He claimed that in the aerial combat, one F16 of the PAF was shot down by a MiG21 Bison. This Pakistani plane fell across the Line of Control in Pakistan-occupied Kashmir. According to sources, there is visual evidence of the plane falling down from the sky, but not of the debris on the ground.

Meanwhile, one MiG21 of the Indian Air Force was hit. The pilot, Wing Commander Abhinandan Varthaman, ejected safely, but his parachute drifted into POK. He was taken into custody by the Pakistani army.

The demarche, after the airstrikes, stated that Pakistan acted with aggression against India.

However, at the press conference, when asked if Pakistan’s targeting of Indian military installations amounted to an act of war, the senior air force officer side-stepped the question.

“There is no doubt that Pakistan has attempted to target our military installation. We thwarted them… That is the task of the Indian Air Force, which we have done swiftly and efficiently,” he said.

New Delhi’s message to the international community was that Pakistan is responsible for the escalation, not India. At the joint press conference, Indian army’s Major General Surinder Singh Bahal said there were numerous ceasefire violations at the border.

Also Read: Editorial: India and Pakistan Should De-Escalate Now

However, there were no further details on the damage or casualties caused by India’s airstrikes at Balakot in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa. The Indian Air Force officer said the “desired damage” had been achieved.

That initially both the Pakistani army spokesperson and Imran Khan claimed that two Indian jets were downed is being cited by India as an example of Islamabad’s ‘disinformation game’.

Sources said this deliberate ‘disinformation’ has been brought to the attention of the international community, which should discredit Pakistani statements during the ongoing crisis.

During the press conference, the Indian Air Force displayed an advance medium-range air-to-air missile (AMRAAM) missile, which AVM Kapoor said is only carried by an F-16 jet. He added that parts of this missile “were recovered east of Rajouri”. The Pakistan army spokesperson had denied on Wednesday that any F-16 were involved in the airstrikes.

New Delhi’s insistence on demonstrating that an F-16 jet was involved maybe directed at Washington, since F-16 sales to Pakistan are made on the condition that they should be used only in counter-terror operation and not against India.

Military officials display an advance medium-range air-to-air missile (AMRAAM) missile. Credit: PTI

“War hysteria”

Sources claimed that Pakistan has been trying to create “war hysteria”, with statements that Indian missiles were ready to launch on Wednesday night and that the Indian navy was moving towards Karachi.

India’s message to the international community that it was not the party trying to escalate the situation was conveyed in the context of a slew of concerned statements. Countries around the world asked the South Asian neighbours to exercise restraint.

Earlier today, US president Donald Trump said in Vietnam there will be “reasonably attractive news” soon on the India-Pakistan front, indicating that Washington was involved in managing the crisis. Indian sources, however, stated that they were not aware of what Trump was specifically referring too.

The move by three permanent members, the US, UK and France, to list JeM chief Masood Azhar as a UNSC-designated global terrorist, has pleased India. Sources were, however, unaware if China will remove its three-year-old technical hold on the listing.

Sources also added that India was not taking any steps to stop people-to-people contacts, like closing airspace, pausing the Samjhauta Express or suspending talks on the Kartarpur pilgrim corridor initiative.

On Friday, Indian external affairs minister Sushma Swaraj has been invited for the first time to address the OIC plenary session as a ‘guest of honour’. Pakistan objected to India’s presence following the February 26 airstrikes.

The Indian external affairs minister is also scheduled to have a bilateral meeting with the UAE foreign minister Sheikh Abdullah bin Zayed Al Nahyan. Earlier today, UAE crown prince Sheikh Mohamed bin Zayed bin Sultan Al-Nahyan spoke with the Indian and Pakistani prime ministers, urging them to prioritise dialogue and communication.

Facebook Content Reviewers in India Complain of Low Pay and High Pressure

While rejecting the Hyderabad employees’ assertions about low pay, Facebook has said it had begun drafting a code of conduct for outsourcing partners.

Hyderabad/San Francisco: On a busy day, contract employees in India monitoring nudity and pornography on Facebook and Instagram will each view 2,000 posts in an eight-hour shift, or almost four a minute.

They are part of a 1,600-member team at Genpact, an outsourcing firm with offices in Hyderabad that is contracted to review Facebook content.

Seven content reviewers at Genpact said in interviews late last year and early in 2019 that their work was underpaid, stressful and sometimes traumatic. The reviewers, all in their 20s, declined to be identified for fear of losing their jobs or violating non-disclosure agreements. Three of the seven have left Genpact in recent months.

“I have seen women employees breaking down on the floor, reliving the trauma of watching suicides real-time,” one former employee said. He said he had seen this happen at least three times.

Reuters was unable to independently verify the incidents or determine how often they may have occurred. Genpact declined to comment.

The working conditions described by the employees offers a window into the moderator operations at Facebook and the challenges faced by the company as it seeks to police what its 2 billion users post. Their account contrasts in several aspects with the image presented by three Facebook executives in interviews and statements to Reuters of a carefully selected, skilled workforce that is paid well and has the tools to handle a difficult job.

Ellen Silver, Facebook’s vice president of operations, acknowledged to Reuters that content moderation “at this size is uncharted territory”.

“We care deeply about getting this right,” she said in January. “This includes the training reviewers receive, our hiring practices, the wellness resources that we provide to each and every person reviewing content, and our overall engagement with partners.”

While rejecting the Hyderabad employees’ assertions about low pay, Facebook has said it had begun drafting a code of conduct for outsourcing partners but declined to give details.

It has also said it would be introducing an annual compliance audit of its vendor policies this year to review the work at contractor facilities. The company is organising a first-ever summit in April to bring together its outsourcing vendors from around the world, with the aim of sharing best practices and bringing more consistency to how moderators are treated.

These efforts were announced in a blog post on Monday by Justin Osofsky, Facebook’s vice-president of global operations.

Facebook works with at least five outsourcing vendors in at least eight countries on content review, a Reuters tally shows. Silver said about 15,000 people, a mix of contractors and employees, were working on content review at Facebook as of December. Facebook had over 20 content review sites around the world, she said.

Over a dozen moderators in other parts of the world have talked of similar traumatic experiences.

A former Facebook contract employee, Selena Scola, filed a lawsuit in California in September, alleging that content moderators who face mental trauma after reviewing distressing images on the platform are not being properly protected by the social networking company.

Facebook in a court filing has denied all of Scola’s allegations and called for a dismissal, contending that Scola has insufficient grounds to sue.

Some examples of traumatic experiences among Facebook content moderators in the United States were described this week by The Verge, a technology news website.

Pressure and lack of experience

The Genpact unit in Hyderabad reviews posts in Indian languages, Arabic, English and some Afghan and Asian tribal dialects, according to Facebook.

On one team, employees spend their days reviewing nudity and explicit pornography. The “counter-terrorism” team, meanwhile, watches videos that include beheadings, car bombings and electric shock torture sessions, the employees said.

Those on the “self-harm” unit regularly watch live videos of suicide attempts – and do not always succeed in alerting authorities in time, two of the employees said. They told Reuters they had no experience with suicide or trauma.

Facebook said its policies called for moderators to alert a “specially trained team” to review situations where there was “potential imminent risk or harm.”

The moderators who spoke to Reuters said in the instances they knew of, the trained team was called in when there was a possibility of a suicide, but the reviewers continued to monitor the feed even after the team had been alerted.

Job postings and salary pay-slips seen by Reuters showed annual compensation at Genpact for an entry-level Facebook Arabic language content reviewer was 100,000 Indian rupees ($1,404) annually, or just over $6 a day. Facebook contended that benefits made the real pay much higher.

The workers said they did receive transport to and from work, a common non-cash benefit in India.

Moderators in Hyderabad employed by another IT outsourcing firm, Accenture, monitor Arabic content on YouTube on behalf of Google for a minimum of 350,000 rupees annually, according to two of its workers and pay slips seen by Reuters. Accenture declined to comment, citing client confidentiality.

Facebook disputed the pay analysis, saying Genpact is required to pay above industry averages. The outsourcer, while declining to comment on its work for Facebook, said in a statement that its wages are “significantly higher than the standard in the industry or the minimum wage set by law.”

‘Massive Targets’

The Genpact moderators in Hyderabad said Facebook sets performance targets, which are reassessed from time to time, that are called Average Review Time or Average Handling Time.

“We have to meet an accuracy rate of 98% on massive targets,” one of the moderators told Reuters. “It is just not easy when you are consistently bombarded with stuff that is mostly mind-numbing.”

They said they often took work home on their laptops to keep up.

Silver said handling time was tracked to assess whether Facebook needs more reviewers and whether its policies are clear enough. But she acknowledged some older procedures may have led moderators to feel pressured.

The company also said it was increasing restrictions on workers’ remote access to its tools.

(Reuters)

Watch | Wide Angle: Ceasefire Violations and India Pakistan Escalation Dynamics

In this episode of Wide Angle, Maya Mirchandani discusses the standoff between India and Pakistan.

New Delhi: Maya Mirchandani talks to Dr Happymon Jacob and Lt Gen (Retd) Syed Ata Hasnain about escalation dynamics between India and Pakistan.

The recent Pulwama attack saw India’s response in the form of air strikes on non-military targets inside Pakistani territory. On Wednesday, Pakistan carried out similar strikes along the LoC resulting in the capture of one Indian Air Force pilot.

Dr Jacob discusses where things will go from here, using his research on escalation dynamics, presented in his recently published book, Line On Fire: Ceasefire Violations and India Pakistan Escalation Dynamics.

Watch | Masterclass: Who Gains From This War-Like Situation?

In this episode of Masterclass, Apoorvanand discuss who will be gaining from a potential war between India and Pakistan.

New Delhi: Apoorvanand says that after the escalation of tensions between India and Pakistan in the aftermath of the IAf’s airstrikes in Balakot, Pakistan, a war-like situation has developed. He says that such a situation should call for concern, not celebration.

Why did Prime Minister Narendra Modi announce this not through official government sources but at a political rally? Who stands to gain from a war-like situation?

Watch the video for more details.

Jet Airways Founder Naresh Goyal Agrees to Step Down as Chairman

The cash-strapped Indian carrier is inching closer to securing a rescue deal.

New Delhi: Jet Airways’s founder Naresh Goyal has agreed to step down as chairman of the airline’s board, a source with direct knowledge of the matter told Reuters on Thursday, as the cash-strapped Indian carrier inches closer to securing a rescue deal.

Eithad, which owns a 24% stake in Jet Airways, is however reticent to provide interim funding of about Rs 7 billion ($99 million) to Jet Airways, the source said. Jet did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Saddled with a billion dollars in debt, Jet has defaulted on loans and has not paid pilots, leasing firms and suppliers for months. Lessors have grounded more than a dozen of its planes pending payment of dues.

Our New Love for the Geneva Conventions Should Extend to All Situations

It could have a salutary effect on those who didn’t believe in human rights until now, but seem to have changed their mind for good.

Pakistan Prime Minister Imran Khan announced on Thursday that captured Indian Air Force Wing Commander Abhinandan Varthaman would be released on Friday as a “peace gesture”.

The quest for peace between the two countries is of course paramount, but there is another excellent reason for the Pakistanis to free the captured Indian pilot. Their gesture could have far-reaching beneficial spin-offs for the strife-torn Kashmir.

By sending the pilot to India hale and hearty, the Pakistanis would have fulfilled an unusually odd demand from India’s ultra-nationalist TV channels and their sullen military analysts who have asked Pakistan to abide by the Geneva Conventions in dealing with the Indian captive. The Indian government has also cited international conventions in their communique on the incident.

There are benefits for both sides, but that Pakistan is heeding international humanitarian laws should hearten the Kashmiris most.

Also Read: Pakistan to Release IAF Wing Commander Abhinandan Varthaman Tomorrow

A brief background

A brief background is required here. There was a time when ethnic violence in Karachi would draw criticism from Amnesty International and the Indian spokesman would cite it to slam Pakistan. The latter would trash it as western propaganda. When Amnesty described the use of torture in Jammu and Kashmir, the boot would be on the other foot. Pakistan flagged it and India trashed it.

For all the care Pakistan may be taking in treating the captured Indian Air Force pilot with the professional courtesy he deserves, it was still remiss. According to the Geneva Conventions, to allow video clips of him being quizzed to slip into the irresponsible hands of the social media is not permissible. The clip many of us received in India did disservice to his captors and it was bad form to release it.

On the flip side, Pakistan should smile that the perennially callous Indian anchors have requisitioned the International Committee of the Red Cross’s (ICRC) involvement in the captured pilot’s treatment in Pakistan. There is a sudden clamour for the Geneva Conventions to be applied, which allow international humanitarian laws to kick in.

Why should Pakistan be happy to send the IAF pilot back promptly? Because the Kashmiri people would take heart from the fact that ultra-nationalist Indians are finally putting their faith in the professional neutrality of an international organisation they shunned in Kashmir, the northeast and elsewhere.

The involvement with the pilot’s rights in Pakistan should help the ICRC and the international community in pushing for greater access to prisons in Kashmir and other Indian detention centres to observe the state of incarcerated militants and civilians.

Could the Indian pilot’s unlucky sortie become a catalyst for greater respect for human rights of soldiers and civilians caught in domestic or cross border conflict in India and Pakistan?

The ICRC doesn’t usually share its findings publicly, and it takes up issues of concern primarily with the host government. It was through the Wikileaks revelations published in The Guardian in 2010 that the world learnt of US cables from Delhi that were based on the ICRC’s secret briefings about the criminal disregard for human rights in India.

The US embassy reported that the ICRC had concluded that India “condones torture” and that the torture victims were civilians, as militants were routinely killed, according to The Guardian report.

The ICRC staff told the US diplomats they had made 177 visits to detention centres in Jammu and Kashmir and elsewhere in India between 2002 and 2004, and had met 1,491 detainees. They interviewed 1,296 of these privately. In 852 cases, the detainees reported ill-treatment. A total of 171 described being beaten and 681 said they had been subjected to one or more of six forms of torture.

In 2017, the pictures and video of a Kashmiri civilian, Farooq Ahmad Dar, tied as a human shield to the front of a vehicle driven by Major Nitin Leetul Gogoi, became viral on internet, stirring a major controversy. It was claimed that such an action violated the Geneva Conventions.

Wing Commander Abhinandan’s early return to India in accordance with the same convention should have a salutary effect on those who didn’t believe in human rights or humanitarian law until now, but seem to have changed their mind for good.

Jawed Naqvi is a Delhi-based journalist.

Watch | Give Peace a Chance: Imran Khan

The Wire’s founding editor M.K. Venu in conversation with Retired General Ashok Mehta about Pakistan’s “peaceful gesture” of releasing the captive pilot.

Activists Criticise Rahul’s Defence of Parties Not Complying With RTI

Activists said Gandhi’s statement that other public institutions should be brought under the Act’s purview is “half-hearted and ill-informed”.

New Delhi: Last week, speaking to some university students, Congress president Rahul Gandhi defended his party’s exclusion from the purview of the Right to Information Act. He insisted that he was “all for transparency” but if the Act is applied to just political parties and not institutions like the judiciary, industry, media and bureaucracy, it “will weaken the political parties”.

During the meeting with university students, Gandhi described every political party as “Janata ka institution” and added that “transparency should increase 100%”.

But he questioned why other institutions were not covered by it. “If you talk about political parties, then why not RTI in judiciary, why not RTI in press, why not RTI in bureaucracy for individual bureaucrats?” He also took credit on behalf of his party for bringing in the transparency law.

This argument has not gone down well with leading RTI and transparency activists. They say Gandhi should have declared that the Congress would commit itself to the Act and thereby mount pressure on other national parties – including the ruling BJP – to follow suit.’

Also Read: RTI Question on Deaths Due to Demonetisation ‘Hypothetical’: PMO

Venkatesh Nayak of Commonwealth Human Rights Initiative termed Gandhi’s statement “half-hearted and ill-informed”.

“I think as the president of the party which was in power when the RTI Act was enacted in parliament, his statement, is not only ill-informed in some parts but also indicative of inadequate understanding of the RTI as a fundamental right,” he said.

Nayak said the Right to Information was declared as a fundamental right in 1975 and RTI Act was recognised as a law in 2005. “Six national political parties have already been declared as public authorities by the Central Information Commission and that order has not been challenged anywhere till date. But the Congress and the other five national parties – BJP, BSP, NCP, CPI and CPI(M) – have been stubbornly non-compliant.”

The rights activist said Gandhi should understand that compliance with a fundamental right by his party, which is a duty-holder, in this matter cannot be contingent on conditionalities.

“If the law says you are covered, as it does right now, irrespective of who else is covered or not, you have to comply with it,” he explained.

RTI already covers judiciary and bureaucracy

Further, Nayak said, the RTI already covers the judiciary and the bureaucracy. “The Supreme Court and the high courts have recognised this. As far as bureaucracy is concerned, the bureaucrats are adequately covered with the exception of the 26 of the exempt organisations. But there too, they are partially covered for allegations of human rights violation and corruption. So there is no exception there.”

As for the industrialists and media houses, he said “They too can certainly be covered if they meet any of the criteria which brings them under the definition of public authority. Otherwise the RTI law would have to be amended to bring them in, which is desirable.”

Nayak said because Gandhi termed political parties as “Janata ka institution”, it was incumbent for people to know everything that can be fairly disclosed about their operations.

Anjali Bhardwaj of the National Campaign for Peoples’ Right to Information said the judiciary, the executive and the legislature are already classified as public authorities under the Act’s definition. “However, there may be a problem with implementation. So in the judiciary, information about the judges, their assets and their appointment process is often denied.”

She also reiterated that the CIC order of June 2013 had declared all national parties as public authorities. “No court has stayed or struck down that order,” Bhardwaj said.

So, she said, the non-compliance of the parties was “disobedience”.

The CIC has already declared all national parties as public authorities. Illustration: The Wire

‘Political parties have much to hide’

Bhardwaj said the RTI law covers any authority that is owned or controlled by the government like ministries, departments and public sector undertakings. It also covers any institution or undertaking that is substantially financed by the government. “Political parties fall under this category. They get tax exemption, land to build their offices, etc.”

Also Read: A (Failed) Quest to Obtain India’s Missing Jobs Data

She said the political parties do not share information on their funding, which is one of the major causes of corruption. “The fountainhead of corruption in India is political party funding. There is no transparency in it. The income tax law and other laws that govern political parties state they do not have to disclose the source of donations up to Rs 2,000. So many of them show large number of donations of smaller value to avoid disclosure.”

RTI would empower people question funding and expenditure

Under the RTI Act, she said, “Citizens have the right to ask these parties the source of these donations and seek copies of receipts. They will also have to disclose where they spent the money.”

Bhardwaj said the BJP has received a lot of money in electoral bonds and insists this is white money. But, she said, “Using the RTI, people can ask them where they would be spending it or have spent it.”

Also, she said, compliance with the RTI Act would empower people to question the parties about their decision making processes, including ticket-distribution.

“While funding is the most important thing, other things like policies could also be questioned. So if a party says that it is for women empowerment but gives a lot of tickets to men accused of sexual violence, people would be able to extract this information and question it,” she said.

Only India and Pakistan Can Solve the Current Crisis

Tensions between India and Pakistan have reached their worst level in nearly two decades. It is time for both sides to show restraint.

For the first time since both countries became nuclear-weapons states, India has launched an airstrike within mainland Pakistan. The target was a terror camp of the Jaish-e-Mohammad (JeM) in Pakistan’s Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province, beyond Pakistan occupied Kashmir. On the morning of February 26, 12 Indian Mirage 2000 fighter aircraft reportedly crossed the Line of Control (LoC) dividing Kashmir between India and Pakistan, and launched multiple 1,000 kg precision-guided Spice 2000 missiles, destroying the camp.

While this was stated to be a pre-emptive strike in self-defence against a prospective JeM terror attack against India, it served as retaliation for the worst attack in three decades in Jammu and Kashmir that took place less than a fortnight earlier, killing 40 Indian paramilitary personnel in Pulwama. The Pakistan-based JeM claimed responsibility for the attack.

New Lows

Although Pakistan denied the full extent of India’s airstrike, it declared that it had the right to respond ‘at a time and place of its choosing’. That response came swiftly. Early in the morning of February 27, it stated that it had launched airstrikes across the LoC from within its airspace. This resulted in an aerial engagement between Pakistani F-16s and Indian MiG-21 Bisons, marking the first aerial engagement between their air forces in nearly 50 years.

Also read: Pakistan to Release IAF Wing Commander Abhinandan Varthaman Tomorrow

According to Pakistan, its air force shot down two Indian combat aircraft within Pakistani air space; by contrast, the Indian government stated that one Pakistani fighter aircraft had been shot down. During the Kargil conflict of 1999, for example, no kinetic action took place between the two air forces in a show of mutual restraint. Until now, India’s responses to Pakistan’s actions have been limited to ground-based artillery or special-forces operations across the LoC.

As a result of the aerial engagement, an Indian air force pilot has officially been listed as ‘missing in action’ by the Indian government. The Pakistani army has stated that it has him in its custody. Importantly, there have been no military personnel held by either country during combat operations for nearly 50 years, since the 1971 India–Pakistan war.

Update: Pakistan Prime Minister Imran Khan said the pilot would be released on March 1.

The public debate, meanwhile, is very heated on both sides, fuelled by social media and the looming prospect of general elections in India in April and May.

Now is the time for restraint

In 2001–02, a border confrontation between the two countries had led to fears of escalation to a nuclear level. A key difference this time is that both sides are still stressing the ‘non-military’ nature of their targets.

India said that its target was a terror camp, not civilians or the Pakistani state. At the same time, Pakistan stated that it had targeted ‘non-military’ sites ‘avoiding human loss and collateral damage’ for the purposes of self-defence. However, the Indian foreign ministry has stated that Pakistani fighters violated Indian airspace and targeted Indian military posts. There has also been no military mobilisation by either side.

Also read: From Close Quarters: How Abhinandan Varthaman Survived Across the LoC

Neither New Delhi nor Islamabad has any desire to engage in a war with its nuclear-armed neighbour. But this sudden escalation of tensions over Kashmir does take place at a time when bilateral lines of communication are limited. Both high commissioners were withdrawn in the aftermath of the Pulwama attack, and there is no official bilateral dialogue, making mutual de-escalation difficult. In this environment, there is increased scope for misunderstanding and miscalculation.

During the 2001–02 confrontation, the US and UK made strenuous efforts to diffuse tensions. Given the many distractions pre-occupying the international community today – not least developments in Northeast Asia, the peace process with the Afghan Taliban and Brexit – there is little reason to believe that external actors can bring about a meaningful improvement in bilateral relations. The resolve to handle this situation with restraint must, therefore, come from within India and Pakistan.

Rahul Roy-Chaudhury is the Senior Fellow for South Asia at the International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS), London, and is the author of two books on India’s maritime security.

This article was originally published at the International Institute for Strategic Studies, and has been re-published here with the author’s permission.