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A probe after prodding: On Lakhimpur Kheri violence

The arrest of Ashish Mishra, son of Union Minister of State for Home, Ajay Mishra, appears to be a course of action impelled mainly by the intervention of the Supreme Court, which voiced its dissatisfaction with the way the Uttar Pradesh police were handling the killing of four farmers and four others during a protest. By taking cognisance of the incidents that took place during a farmers’ protest at Tikonia in Lakhimpur-Kheri district, the Court may have helped infuse some much-needed impetus to the investigation. The Bench gave enough time until its next hearing on October 20 to the police to pursue the probe diligently, but not without thinking aloud on whether any other agency ought to take it over and asking the State police chief to preserve the evidence. The arrest of the Minister’s son, coming after he had skipped an earlier summons and was questioned for long hours once he appeared, is largely in response to the Court’s criticism. The Bench, headed by the Chief Justice of

A homecoming: On Air India and the Tatas

Air India, the airline started by J.R.D. Tata in the 1930s, is all set to return to the Tata fold after a 68-year-long journey as India’s state-owned flag carrier. The Centre’s announcement on Friday that Tata Sons’ subsidiary Talace Pvt. Ltd. was the winning bidder for the 100% stake in the debt-laden airline rings the curtain on the government’s multi-year effort to privatise the loss-making carrier. Talace emerged winner in the two-horse race by bidding to take over ₹15,300 crore of Air India’s more than ₹60,000 crore of accumulated debt and offering an additional ₹2,700 crore in cash for the Government’s equity stake. For the Tatas, who have retained an abiding interest in the country’s airline industry and currently majority own both a budget carrier, AirAsia India, and a full-service airline, Vistara, the Air India acquisition brings opportunities to gain scale and synergies at a significant level. With Air India and its low-cost unit, Air India Express, together serving 55

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Editorial

Grim turn: on Srinagar civilian killings

The killings of seven civilians in Srinagar in six days mark a grim turn in the situation in the Kashmir Valley. This vicious, mindless violence against commoners, owned up by a group that calls itself the Resistance Front — believed to be a shadow organisation of the Pakistan-based LeT — is yet another reminder of the pathological hatred transnational radical Islamism inspires. The victims include local Muslims who were branded traitors, but the targeting of the Hindu Pandit and Sikh minority communities is unmistakable. Srinagar’s prominent Kashmiri Pandit chemist, Makhan Lal Bindroo, whose decision to stay on through the violent 1990s was seen as a positive omen by the displaced community, was gunned down. The killers used epithets such as ‘RSS stooge’, ‘police informer’ and ‘traitor’ for the victims. Majid Ahmad Gojri and Mohammad Shafi Dar were killed on October 2. On October 7, a Sikh principal and a Kashmir Pandit who had returned to the Valley after taking up a job under the

Editorial

Simple, but brilliant: on Nobel Prize for Chemistry

This year’s Nobel Prize for Chemistry is for an efficient, “precise, cheap, fast and environmentally friendly” way to develop new molecules using a simple yet novel concept of catalysis — asymmetric organocatalysis. It was awarded to German scientist Benjamin List of the Max Planck Institute and Scotland-born scientist David W.C. MacMillan of Princeton University who independently developed the new way of catalysis in 2000. They came up with “a truly elegant tool for making molecules — simpler than one could ever imagine”. Since then, the process they evolved has led to a “gold rush” in the catalysis field. The multitudes of new organocatalysts developed have helped drive a variety of chemical reactions, in turn accelerating pharmaceutical drug research. The asymmetric organocatalysts have allowed researchers to efficiently produce new molecules with complete certainty of the 3-D orientation or handedness. Molecules naturally present and those synthesised can exist in two forms —

Editorial

Killing the chills: On the malaria vaccine

The triumphs of science are best appreciated when they make human lives easier or safer, or simply, offer hope. The first ever World Health Organization (WHO)-approved anti-malaria vaccine must count among those triumphs. The approval marks a milestone in a timeline that records a long and laborious process to grapple with malaria, and somehow make it less of a killer. The vaccine that WHO has approved — RTS,S — has been used in pilot programme participants (children and infants) in Africa from 2015 after it got a nod for this specific use from the European Medicines Agency. This triumph comes at a time of great scientific endeavour, yes, but also notably at a time when it was feared that the progress against malaria was flagging. With this vaccine, which will significantly reduce the severity of cases and prevent deaths, hope has sprung anew that humankind might retard in its tracks a pathogen that has stalked sub-Saharan Africa and several other parts of the world for years now. WHO

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