Editorial

The just concluded monsoon session of Parliament shows a mirror to the farce to which the Modi regime has reduced parliamentary democracy.

Question Hour was arbitrarily cancelled - thus doing away even with the formal notion that the Government and executive is answerable to the legislature, to Parliament and by extension to the people.

It took India quite some time to decode Narendra Modi’s ‘Achchhe Din’ rhetoric, but his latest ‘Atmanirbhar Bharat’ jumla (empty phrase) is unravelling much faster. For the Modi government, ‘Atmanirbhar Bharat’ has only one meaning – turning the whole of Indian economy into an Adani-Ambani enterprise!

Ever since the naming of Left political leaders in chargesheets followed by the arrest of student activist Umar Khalid, criticisms and condemnations of the Delhi Police’s “riots probe” have intensified. In addition to students, intellectuals, activists, citizens across India, even former senior police officers wrote to the Delhi Police Commissioner expressing distress at the biased manner in which the police was conducting its “probe”.

We now have the official economic report card for the first quarter of FY 2020-21. The GDP has crashed by 23.9 per cent, by far the worst global performance for any country comparable to India. Never before in the last four decades did the Indian economy record a negative growth rate. These are early estimates and economists believe the final actual figures may well be much worse.

ACT in haste, repent at leisure! The haste with which the Supreme Court had termed two tweets by Prashant Bhushan guilty of contempt of court now reminds us of this famous English aphorism. Even after two hearings the court has now failed to find the suitable punishment for those two guilty tweets!

After the economy and environment, the Modi government has chosen the lockdown period for making yet another major policy pronouncement: New Education Policy 2020. A draft running into 484 pages was submitted on 31 May 2019 soon after the beginning of Modi 2.0. The 484-page draft has now been compressed into a 60-page policy document which was approved by the Union Cabinet on 29 July, 2020.

August is India’s month of independence. This year as India celebrates the seventy third anniversary of the country’s independence, the celebrations are however bound to be unprecedentedly muted. Not just because of the mandatory restriction on assemblies of people and the physical distance that citizens are expected to maintain as part of the Covid19 preventive protocols, but more because of the dark clouds of gloom and uncertainty on our everyday sky.