ON October 17, 2026, at short notice, more than a hundred women belonging to various women’s organisations like AIDWA, NFIW, AIPWA, AIMSS, All India Feminist Alliance (ALIFA), AICCWW, Pragatisheel M S, Purogami M S, PMEK, ICWM, Collective, Saheli, SFI, KYS, CSW and Anhad assembled near the Bangla Sahib Gurudwara and marched to the Delhi Police Headquarters condemning the police brutality and sexual violence against women and transgenders during the ongoing protests against the Election Commission of India (ECI).

THE AIKS-organised Jharkhand Land Rights Convention was held on October 1, 2026 at the Assembly Hall in Ranchi, under the chairmanship of Asim Sarkar, state president of the Kisan Sabha. Addressing the convention, Ashok Dhawale, national president of the All India Kisan Sabha (AIKS), said that this convention, organised on the birth anniversary of A K Gopalan and the anniversary of the Chinese Revolution, marked the beginning of a decisive movement against the plunder of land above the ground and minerals beneath it in Jharkhand.

THE political crisis of the current government -- originating out of a legitimacy deficit due to the exposure of the hijacking of the electoral process through its cronies -- is likely to be followed by a simmering economic crisis. The fact that the cost of living is going to rise in the coming days has also been indicated by the people in power. The central government, while facing numerous challenges to retaining power with its authority being deeply eroded, seems to be ringing the alarm bell of potential inflationary pressures.

DEFENCE Minister Shri Rajnath Singh recently wrote an article in TOI which began with the line that truth is the first casualty of war. Singh’s thesis, as I read it, is that criticism of the Election Commission is manufactured, that the Supreme Court has blessed the Commission’s conduct, and that street protest against it is a step towards anarchy. His article on “post-truth politics” does not even mention the one document that has made post-truth an inadequate word for what is happening inside the Election Commission of India.

ON October 6, 2026, OpenAI put out a document announcing new solutions to longstanding mathematical problems proved by an Artificial Intelligence (AI) model. In itself, this was not surprising, since the last few months have witnessed a series of new and exciting results in mathematics proved by some AI model or the other. Yet, the October 6 announcement turned out to be a different category altogether: some would describe it as a bombshell, some would call it a major disruptive event in the history of science.