Despite a security breach, India's Parliament belongs to its people

Cruel irony came knocking on the Indian Parliament’s door, not once but twice, on Wednesday.

Exactly 22 years to the day since a deadly attack on the old Parliament premises in New Delhi, two people jumped from the visitors’ gallery of the newly inaugurated building right next door into the well of the lower house, and pulled out canisters emitting yellow smoke. Moments after it was established that no one was harmed, and five people were arrested, Speaker Om Birla barred visitors for the foreseeable future.

As if it wasn’t bad enough that there was a security lapse inside the country’s highest legislature on the anniversary of the worst attack against it, this was swiftly followed by the decision made by its custodians to bar the “demos” from accessing the so-called temple of democracy. The ban, it is hoped, will be revoked as soon as possible.

Wednesday’s incident is in no way comparable to the attack that took place on December 13, 2001, which left 14 people dead – eight security personnel, one gardener and the five gunmen who entered the premises with fake passes. After years-long investigations, the Indian state named Pakistan-based terrorist outfits Jaish-e-Mohammed and Lashkar-e-Taiba responsible for the attack and in 2013 hanged an Indian man for his involvement in the operation.

Yet a full two decades after the assault, not enough lessons have been learnt.

The solution to protect government buildings isn’t to shut them off from the citizens

Just as it is the state’s responsibility to keep its citizens safe and secure, so it is to shield public servants and their offices from attacks. This is particularly true for a country like India, which has lost two of its prime ministers to assassinations, including one in harness, and whose state faces sometimes violent troubles from across the length and breadth of the subcontinent.

Throughout the world, from the 19th century onwards, there have been at least 70 assaults reported on national legislatures, the most documented among them being the January 6, 2021 US Capitol riot and the one on the Brazilian Congress on January 8 of this year.

What these incidents, including the one that occurred on Wednesday, remind us is of the need for authorities all over the world to maintain what is a difficult balance – between securing the premises of public servants and bureaucrats so that they can work without worrying about their safety and allowing ordinary people free access to government buildings. This is important, not just so that citizens can get work done where there is the opportunity for it, but also for them to be able to witness for themselves how the government of the day discharges its duties – in theory, the noblest of causes.

It is a fact that any attack on a parliament or any other government building is an attack on the system or the state that runs that country. And often any rioting that takes place inside or outside these hallowed premises stems from this notion that the state somehow isn’t working for the people – and that it needs to be taken over through an insurrection.

The Indian Express newspaper reported some MPs as saying that the intruders were chanting slogans such as: “Tana shahi nahi chalegi [dictatorship won’t be accepted].”

But the solution to protect these buildings and the people inside them isn’t to shut them off from the citizens – for that would only serve to exacerbate whatever perceived distance there might be between the public and its servants.

It is possible for security to be tightened around all of India’s government buildings while at the same time allowing for its citizens – the very people who have voted this government and others to power – to enter their premises so that they can see governance, and indeed democracy, in action.

Wednesday’s incident is unfortunate, and it shouldn’t have been allowed to happen. What it calls for is a thorough investigation into the matter followed by the enforcement of a better system to keep the country’s parliamentarians safe and secure.

And once the dust settles, Mr Birla must be convinced to throw the Parliament’s door open once again for the well-meaning citizens of the country to witness the debates and discussions that, after all, shape their very own lives.

Attacks on Egypt’s long rooted Copts

Egypt’s Copts belong to one of the world’s oldest Christian communities, with Mark the Evangelist credited with founding their church around 300 AD. Orthodox Christians account for the overwhelming majority of Christians in Egypt, with the rest mainly made up of Greek Orthodox, Catholics and Anglicans.

The community accounts for some 10 per cent of Egypt’s 100 million people, with the largest concentrations of Christians found in Cairo, Alexandria and the provinces of Minya and Assiut south of Cairo.

Egypt’s Christians have had a somewhat turbulent history in the Muslim majority Arab nation, with the community occasionally suffering outright persecution but generally living in peace with their Muslim compatriots. But radical Muslims who have first emerged in the 1970s have whipped up anti-Christian sentiments, something that has, in turn, led to an upsurge in attacks against their places of worship, church-linked facilities as well as their businesses and homes.

More recently, ISIS has vowed to go after the Christians, claiming responsibility for a series of attacks against churches packed with worshippers starting December 2016.

The discrimination many Christians complain about and the shift towards religious conservatism by many Egyptian Muslims over the last 50 years have forced hundreds of thousands of Christians to migrate, starting new lives in growing communities in places as far afield as Australia, Canada and the United States.

Here is a look at major attacks against Egypt's Coptic Christians in recent years:

November 2: Masked gunmen riding pickup trucks opened fire on three buses carrying pilgrims to the remote desert monastery of St. Samuel the Confessor south of Cairo, killing 7 and wounding about 20. IS claimed responsibility for the attack.

May 26, 2017: Masked militants riding in three all-terrain cars open fire on a bus carrying pilgrims on their way to the Monastery of St. Samuel the Confessor, killing 29 and wounding 22. ISIS claimed responsibility for the attack.

April 2017: Twin attacks by suicide bombers hit churches in the coastal city of Alexandria and the Nile Delta city of Tanta. At least 43 people are killed and scores of worshippers injured in the Palm Sunday attack, which narrowly missed a ceremony presided over by Pope Tawadros II, spiritual leader of Egypt Orthodox Copts, in Alexandria's St. Mark's Cathedral. ISIS claimed responsibility for the attacks.

February 2017: Hundreds of Egyptian Christians flee their homes in the northern part of the Sinai Peninsula, fearing attacks by ISIS. The group's North Sinai affiliate had killed at least seven Coptic Christians in the restive peninsula in less than a month.

December 2016: A bombing at a chapel adjacent to Egypt's main Coptic Christian cathedral in Cairo kills 30 people and wounds dozens during Sunday Mass in one of the deadliest attacks carried out against the religious minority in recent memory. ISIS claimed responsibility.

July 2016: Pope Tawadros II says that since 2013 there were 37 sectarian attacks on Christians in Egypt, nearly one incident a month. A Muslim mob stabs to death a 27-year-old Coptic Christian man, Fam Khalaf, in the central city of Minya over a personal feud.

May 2016: A Muslim mob ransacks and torches seven Christian homes in Minya after rumours spread that a Christian man had an affair with a Muslim woman. The elderly mother of the Christian man was stripped naked and dragged through a street by the mob.

New Year's Eve 2011: A bomb explodes in a Coptic Christian church in Alexandria as worshippers leave after a midnight mass, killing more than 20 people.

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Mercer, the investment consulting arm of US services company Marsh & McLennan, expects its wealth division to at least double its assets under management (AUM) in the Middle East as wealth in the region continues to grow despite economic headwinds, a company official said.

Mercer Wealth, which globally has $160 billion in AUM, plans to boost its AUM in the region to $2-$3bn in the next 2-3 years from the present $1bn, said Yasir AbuShaban, a Dubai-based principal with Mercer Wealth.

“Within the next two to three years, we are looking at reaching $2 to $3 billion as a conservative estimate and we do see an opportunity to do so,” said Mr AbuShaban.

Mercer does not directly make investments, but allocates clients’ money they have discretion to, to professional asset managers. They also provide advice to clients.

“We have buying power. We can negotiate on their (client’s) behalf with asset managers to provide them lower fees than they otherwise would have to get on their own,” he added.

Mercer Wealth’s clients include sovereign wealth funds, family offices, and insurance companies among others.

From its office in Dubai, Mercer also looks after Africa, India and Turkey, where they also see opportunity for growth.

Wealth creation in Middle East and Africa (MEA) grew 8.5 per cent to $8.1 trillion last year from $7.5tn in 2015, higher than last year’s global average of 6 per cent and the second-highest growth in a region after Asia-Pacific which grew 9.9 per cent, according to consultancy Boston Consulting Group (BCG). In the region, where wealth grew just 1.9 per cent in 2015 compared with 2014, a pickup in oil prices has helped in wealth generation.

BCG is forecasting MEA wealth will rise to $12tn by 2021, growing at an annual average of 8 per cent.

Drivers of wealth generation in the region will be split evenly between new wealth creation and growth of performance of existing assets, according to BCG.

Another general trend in the region is clients’ looking for a comprehensive approach to investing, according to Mr AbuShaban.

“Institutional investors or some of the families are seeing a slowdown in the available capital they have to invest and in that sense they are looking at optimizing the way they manage their portfolios and making sure they are not investing haphazardly and different parts of their investment are working together,” said Mr AbuShaban.

Some clients also have a higher appetite for risk, given the low interest-rate environment that does not provide enough yield for some institutional investors. These clients are keen to invest in illiquid assets, such as private equity and infrastructure.

“What we have seen is a desire for higher returns in what has been a low-return environment specifically in various fixed income or bonds,” he said.

“In this environment, we have seen a de facto increase in the risk that clients are taking in things like illiquid investments, private equity investments, infrastructure and private debt, those kind of investments were higher illiquidity results in incrementally higher returns.”

The Abu Dhabi Investment Authority, one of the largest sovereign wealth funds, said in its 2016 report that has gradually increased its exposure in direct private equity and private credit transactions, mainly in Asian markets and especially in China and India. The authority’s private equity department focused on structured equities owing to “their defensive characteristics.”