Editorial

The viral video of two Kuki women being paraded naked and sexually assaulted by a mob of Meitei men in Manipur has drawn the attention of the whole world to the complete collapse of the rule of law in Manipur. The incident had happened in the presence of the local police on the 4th of May, the day after violence erupted in the state. The FIR about the incident was filed on 18 May, and a complaint was mailed to the National Commission for Women by two women activists and the North American Manipur Tribal Association on 12 June.

Liberty! Equality! Fraternity! Galvanised by this clarion call of democracy, the people of France had risen in triumphant revolt in 1789 against the hated citadel of monarchical repression. The storming of the Parisian Bastille prison heralded the historic advent of the modern era of democratic republics. One hundred and sixty years later it was this spirit of freedom that became the underpinning of the Constitution of republican India when political power was wrested from the control of British colonialism into Indian hands.

Shortly after Prime Minister Narendra Modi raised the pitch of the clamour for the Uniform Civil Code in the course of his address to booth-level BJP activists in Bhopal, a viral video surfaced from the same state that showed a power-drunk BJP youth leader Pravesh Shukla urinating on an Adivasi labourer Dasmat Ravat. The video gave a shocking and graphic portrayal of the kind of (un)civil code that actually prevails on the ground in Madhya Pradesh where the BJP has been in power for nearly two decades.

Exactly a year after engineering defections in the Shiv Sena, the Modi-Shah regime has now targeted the Nationalist Congress Party. Ajit Pawar has once again been sworn in as Deputy Chief Minister in Maharashtra. What made this Sunday coup especially sensational was that it happened within seventy-two hours of PM Modi’s ‘guarantee’ speech in Madhya Pradesh where he had melodramatically announced that if the opposition guaranteed corruption, Modi stood for guarantee of action against the corrupt.

Ahead of the 2024 Lok Sabha elections, Narendra Modi is once again banking on his so-called global image to shore up his fast declining local stocks. Even as Manipur has been burning since early May with more than 100 lives lost, more than 200 churches burnt and more than 50,000 displaced people struggling to survive in relief camps, the PM left the crisis-ridden state in the lurch and flew to America on a state visit. This was his sixth US visit in nine years.

Governance in India today is driven by a relentless aggression of the executive which has reduced the legislature to a loyal instrument of law making. Any corrective measure coming from the judiciary is being disdainfully discarded through executive ordinances. The media, the fabled fourth pillar of democracy, has effectively been refashioned as a willing ally whose job has become to advocate and amplify the agenda of the government and function as an advertisement medium for the supreme leader.

Since 2014 we have often heard the term 'double engine government' in BJP election rallies. It is the most favoured Modi-Shah metaphor used to seek votes in states on the basis of the BJP's control over power at the Centre. The Chief Economic Advisor has now introduced an aviation term to describe the economy. According to CEA V Anantha Nageswaran the Indian economy is now on 'auto-pilot mode' and will grow steadily in the 6.5-7% range till 2030!

An old man hailing from Sugo village of Bhadrak district in Odisha is walking among the hundreds of bodies placed in a school compound. One by one he lifts the cloth over dead bodies to see their faces. Asked who he is looking for,.the weeping man replies in a broken voice, “I am looking for my son who was in Coromandel express, but I can’t find him.” His story is one among hundreds of people who had their family or friends in the two trains that met with a horrific accident on the evening of June 2 in Balasore (Baleswar) district of Odisha.

If there has been one single day in the nine years of Modi government that has most tellingly encapsulated the essential character of the regime and its future game plan, it was May 28, 2023, the day Narendra Modi inaugurated the new Parliament building and India's ace women wrestlers protesting against sexual harassment by a BJP MP were pulled and dragged by the police on Delhi's Parliament Street.

Karnataka has delivered a big blow to the Sangh brigade's fascist project. What we have witnessed in Karnataka is not a routine change of government every five years in this southern state, it is an emphatic rejection of the Sangh brigade's vicious communal politics which has been busy using the state as a laboratory and which wanted to remain in control through a toxic high voltage blitzkrieg led directly by the Modi-Shah duo.