AMIT SHAH’S absence from the Lok Sabha during the entire Monsoon Session was quite bizarre. Even after being present in the Parliament premises, he was consciously but quite obviously staying away from the House. The grotesque attacks on the protesting students and youth at Jantar Mantar during their march to the Parliament, provoked widespread revulsion. In turn, the joint Opposition’s pointed demand for the Home Minister’s specific explanation, put him in a tight...
VERY recently the eloquent reticence of the Chief Election Commissioner of India, Gyanesh Kumar, has given way to an extremely brief observation. He has opined that notwithstanding the ‘little inconvenience’ of some citizens, the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) carried out across the country was necessary to clean up the Electoral Rolls for conducting a ‘fair election’. This could be regarded as the...
LAST week, on 4th September, the United Nations General Assembly adopted an African proposal for a new world map, which shows countries’ true size relative to one another. It is an attempt to correct the view of the world that comes from the widely used world map based on the Mercator Projection, the work of Gerardus Mercator, a 16th-century Flemish cartographer. The problem with the Mercator Map is well known; for example, it...
RSS sarsanghchalak (supremo) Mohan Bhagwat’s periodic attempts to portray the RSS ideology – and its brand of fanatic Hindutva – as mellow, tolerant, and inclusive are becoming more and more pathetic and meaningless. Nobody believes these sermons, not even their own khaki clad cadres. The most recent instance of Bhagwat’s reflections was in New York, USA, where he declared, “If any Hindu thinks that there should be no Muslim in Bharat (India), he will...
THE Allahabad High Court, in a habeas corpus petition disposed of on September 2, has quashed the preventive detention of Akriti Chaudhary, a 24-year-old first-year law student at Delhi University, holding that her continued incarceration under the National Security Act, 1980, was violative of Article 21 of the Constitution. A division bench of Justices Atul Sreedharan and Achal Sachdev ordered her immediate release and...
Climate Change and Disasters: The Polit Bureau expressed its profound grief on the loss of human lives in the recent catastrophic natural calamities, which are a reflection of the climate change process in action. The catastrophic Himalayan glacier-related disaster affecting Nepal and China, highlights the consequences of glacier melt and inadequate early-warning systems. The impact of El Nino is also badly felt. While in states like Assam we have witnessed devastating unseasonal...
ON September 2, fragments from a US missile tore through the roof of a wedding celebration in Kuhestak, in Iran’s southern county of Sirik. Four people were killed, including a child, and 68 were wounded. The United States has made a custom of bombing weddings – in Afghanistan, Iraq, Yemen, and now Iran. When US Vice-President J D Vance was asked about the dead, he shrugged: ‘Things happen’. The sentence should be entered into the record of this war. Imperialism turns other...
All India Democratic Women's Association (AIDWA) National General Secretary Kaninika Ghosh called upon women to organise struggles to protect their rights and freedoms, stressing that the fight for women's rights must transcend caste and religious divisions. She was speaking at a public meeting held at the M B Vignana Kendram in Vijayawada on September 12, as part of the three-...
My Dear Sir, Pray tell, what is the most critically urgent regional, national or international crisis plaguing our land today? Ah, no - forgive me, you’ve asked a hopelessly foolish question! Whether one’s belly is empty or full, whether employment exists or not - those are horribly ancient, terribly outdated fashions. The real question confronting civilisation today is - tonight, will you earn a direct VIP pass to heaven by...
Penguin Random House is one of the largest publishers in the world. An imprint of PRH is publishing Sonia Gandhi’s memoir in the United States, with an initial print run of 100,000 copies. Penguin India, however, has refused to publish the memoir in India. This is extraordinary. The book was going to be a massive commercial success, even if there had been no controversy around it. Penguin’s decision to back out of publishing it made no commercial sense at all. Sonia Gandhi, a...
Polit Bureau StatementsCPI(M) Polit Bureau has issued the following statements
Condemn BJP Government’s Disgraceful Position on Venezuela |
