Congress leaders and workers took to the streets on Monday in Delhi and various state capitals as Rahul Gandhi appeared before the Enforcement Directorate (ED) in the national capital for questioning in the National Herald case, with the opposition party accusing the BJP government of “trampling on democracy”.

Who’s who

• Hundreds were detained for violating prohibitory orders in Delhi, where several top leaders had converged, and other cities as they tried to march to ED offices despite heavy barricading by the police.
• Prominent among those detained in the national capital were Rajasthan CM Ashok Gehlot, Chhattisgarh CM Bhupesh Baghel, Congress leaders Mallikarjun Kharge, Randeep Surjewala, K C Venugopal, Adhir Ranjan Chowdhury, Digvijaya Singh, Mukul Wasnik, Jairam Ramesh and many others.
• The party claimed it was starting Mahatma Gandhi’s ‘Satyagraha’, peaceful resistance, again with the march against the BJP government and vowed not to bow down.

BJP hits back

• The ruling BJP alleged that the “show of strength” by the Congress is aimed at putting pressure on the ED and its leaders were celebrating corruption.

The case

• The ED is probing alleged financial irregularities in the Congress party-promoted Young Indian that owns the National Herald newspaper.

Jain in judicial custody

• A Delhi court has sent AAP leader and Delhi’s health minister Satyendar Jain to 14-day judicial custody in a money laundering case.

• China on Monday waded into the furore over the controversial remarks by two now-suspended BJP functionaries against Prophet Mohammad, expressing the hope that the incident can be properly managed.
• Beijing, which faces serious allegations of a mass crackdown on Uyghur Muslims in the volatile Xinjiang province, said it “believes that different civilisations, different religions should respect each other and co-exist on an equal footing”.

Kuwait’s tough stand

• On the other hand, the Kuwaiti government has decided to arrest and deport an unspecified number of expats who participated in a protest over the Prophet controversy, according to local newspapers.
• Kuwaiti laws prohibit sit-ins and demonstrations by expatriates in the Gulf nation. The reports, however, did not mention the nationalities of the expats who took part in Friday’s demonstration.
• According to latest statistics, the number of Indian nationals legally residing in Kuwait has crossed the 10-lakh mark in 2019.

And Dhaka says…

• Terming the whole controversy as India’s “internal issue”, information and broadcasting minister Hasan Mahmud said it is not an attention-grabbing matter in Bangladesh unlike in some other Muslim nations. More details here

A controversy

• A Sri Lankan official, Ceylon Electricity Board’s chairman MMC Ferdinando, made a controversial claim that Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi pressured his country’s President Gotabaya Rajapaksa for awarding an energy project to industrialist Gautam Adani’s group in November last year.
• Ferdinando claimed that President Gotabaya told him about the pressure from PM Modi. Rajapaksa, battling an unprecedented financial crisis and public anger, denied the official’s claim. Soon, the official retracted his claim saying he took PM Modi’s name due to “unexpected pressures and emotions”.
• Now, he has resigned from his position three days after making the sensational claim at an open hearing of the Committee on Public Enterprises (COPE), a parliamentary panel in Sri Lanka.

The project

• The allegation involves a 500-Megawatt renewable energy project in Mannar district in northern Sri Lanka.
• The Adani Group is said to have won contracts to develop two wind power projects – in Mannar and in Pooneryn – in Sri Lanka in December, two months after Adani tweeted about meeting Rajapaksa.
• Additionally, the Adani Group signed a $700-million deal with the Sri Lanka Ports Authority (SLPA) to develop and run the Colombo Port’s West International Container Terminal.

Politics in Lanka

• The controversy broke out a day after Sri Lanka amended its laws to remove competitive bidding for energy projects. During the parliamentary debate, some Opposition members alleged that the government was pushing through the amendment to help the Adani Group.
• In his defence, Rajapaksa’s office issued a statement saying, “Sri Lanka is currently in an acute shortage of power and the President desires to expedite implementation of mega power projects as early as possible. However, no undue influence will be used in awarding such projects.”

While Reliance Industries’ Viacom 18 was declared the winner for the digital media rights for the telecast of Indian Premier League (IPL) for five years from 2023-2027, Disney-Star was the winner of the TV rights.

The monies so far

• After two days of auction, the Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI) earned Rs 23,575 crore for the TV telecast rights — Package A — in the Indian subcontinent for 410 IPL matches from 2023 to 2027. This gives the BCCI Rs 57.5 crore per match.
• Package B, which is the digital telecast rights for the Indian subcontinent, earned the cricket body Rs 20,500 crore — giving it Rs 50 crore per match. Cumulatively, the first two days of media rights auction have brought in Rs 44,075 crore, which is close to three times the money raked in — Rs 16,347 crore — through the 2018 media rights auction.

The rounds left

• The auction will continue today, for Package C and D — the former being for non-exclusive media rights for 98 matches for five years. It’s expected that whoever is the winner for the digital media rights, or Package B, will aggressively bid for Package C to maintain exclusivity over telecast rights on digital platforms.
• Package D will see bidding for overseas TV and digital rights, with a reserve price of Rs 3 crore. Other than Disney Star and Viacom 18, the other two contenders in the fray are Zee and Sony Pictures.

• Low & behold: The Indian rupee touched an all-time low against US dollar, closing for the first time below 78 at 78.04 against the US greenback, even as retail inflation for the month of May came in at 7.04%, which was lower than the 7.79% retail inflation in April due to cooling off of food prices last month. That, coupled with a 40-year high US inflation of 8.6% led to a second consecutive session of a bloodbath on the Indian bourses, with nearly Rs 10 lakh crore of investor wealth wiped off in two days, of which over Rs 6 lakh crore was lost in Monday’s mayhem.
• No cheer yet: However those looking for a silver lining in the relative decline in May’s retail inflation vis-a-vis April’s need to factor in the cut in the excise duties on petrol and diesel, which led to the decline in last month’s inflation numbers, compared to the month prior to it. This is the fifth consecutive month when retail inflation has stayed above the Reserve Bank of India’s (RBI) tolerance range of 2% to 6%.
• Bleeding bulls: While India’s inflation data came after close of market hours, the indices had already started haemorrhaging in reaction to US inflation data which came on Friday evening after the Indian stock markets had downed shutters. The BSE Sensex on Monday collapsed 1,456.74 points to end at 52,846.70 while the NSE Nifty ended down by 427.40 points to close at 15,774.80.
• Some hope? The only silver lining that emerged was the domestic institutional investors’ (DII) inflows into the stock markets, which crossed the Rs 2 lakh crore mark in the current calendar year, with still more than half the year to go. This is already the highest ever amount of DII inflows into the Indian equity markets in a single calendar year and overshadows the Rs 1.86 lakh crore that foreign institutional investors (FII) have pulled out from the Indian bourses this year so far.

Upholding the order of the Competition Commission of India (CCI), the National Companies Law Appellate Tribunal (NCLAT) directed ecommerce major Amazon to deposit its penalty of Rs 200 crore and that too within 45 days, rejecting Amazon’s plea challenging the CCI’s order.

What the tribunal said

• Noting that “Amazon has not made full, whole, forthright and frank disclosures of relevant materials” and that “it had furnished only limited disclosures pertaining to acquiring its strategic rights and interest in FRL (Future Retail Ltd)”, the NCLAT said it “is in complete agreement with the view arrived at by the first respondent (CCI).”
• The CCI, had in December last year, not only suspended the approval given to the Amazon-Future deal but also imposed a Rs 202 crore penalty — which included Rs 200 crore for Amazon’s failure to notify the terms of the merger and acquisition while a penalty of Rs 1 crore each was imposed for hiding the actual scope and purpose of the acquisition.
• However, the NLCAT disagreed with the CCI’s imposition of Rs 2 crore penalty as “slightly on the higher side” and reduced it by 50% in each case, bringing it down to Rs 1 crore total.

What the CCI had observed

• Citing an email from Amazon to Future Retail (FRL) dated April 4, 2019, the CCI observed that Amazon’s acquisition of the FRL shareholders agreement (FRL SHA) — with Amazon paying a premium of 25% over FRL’s regulatory share price — was done with the intent of gaining a “foot in the door” of the Indian retail sector, which is off limits to foreign companies.

After 35 years of decline, the number of nuclear weapons in the world is set to rise in the coming decade as global tensions flare amid Russia’s war in Ukraine, according to Stockholm International Peace Research Institute’s (SIPRI) estimates.

Figure it out

• The nine nuclear powers — Britain, China, France, India, Israel, North Korea, Pakistan, the United States and Russia — had 12,705 nuclear warheads in early 2022, or 375 fewer than in early 2021.
• The number has come down from a high of more than 70,000 in 1986, as the US and Russia have gradually reduced their massive arsenals built up during the Cold War.

Nuke escalation

• But the risk of a nuclear escalation is now at its highest point in the post-Cold War period, SIPRI researchers told AFP.
• Russian President Vladimir Putin has on several occasions made reference to the use of nuclear weapons since he ordered invasion of Ukraine in February.
• Besides, several countries, including China and Britain, are either officially or unofficially modernising or ramping up their arsenals, SIPRI said.
• Iran’s nuclear programme and the development of increasingly advanced hypersonic missiles have, among other things, raised concern.

Superpowers

• Russia remains the biggest nuclear power, with 5,977 warheads in early 2022. Of this, over 1,600 are believed to be immediately operational.
• The US has 5,428 warheads, but the number of operational nukes is more than that of Russia — 1,750. China comes third with 350. More details here

• What: Alphabet Inc, which controls Google, has sent its software engineer Blake Lemoine, working with the artificial intelligence development team, on paid leave for allegedly sharing confidential information with third parties. Lemoine’s claim that Google’s new chatbot was sentient has blown into a global talking point.
• Why: In a blogpost, Blake claimed that Google’s ambitious chatbot program called LaMDA (Language Model for Dialogue Applications) – announced in 2021 – was a “person” citing his conversations with the AI bot on subjects like religion, consciousness and robotics.
• Also: Blake apparently shared an internal document with Google employees titled, “Is LaMDA sentient?”
• Interview: He has now gone public with his claim. In an interview with the Washington Post, Lemoine said the Google AI he interacted with was a person, “in his capacity as a priest, not a scientist”.
• Defence: Google spokesperson Brian Gabriel dismissed the claims saying, “Some in the broader AI community are considering the long-term possibility of sentient or general AI, but it doesn’t make sense to do so by anthropomorphizing today’s conversational models, which are not sentient…Our team – including ethicists and technologists – has reviewed Blake’s concerns per our AI Principles and have informed him that the evidence does not support his claims.”
• Action predicted: Before Google suspended Lemoine, he claimed in the blogpost that he “may be fired soon for doing AI ethics work” drawing a connection to prior members of Google’s AI ethics group, such as Margaret Mitchell, whom Google eventually dismissed after they raised concerns.
• The problem: Lemoine said he tried to conduct experiments to prove his conclusion, but was rebuffed by senior executives at Google when he raised the matter internally. More here