Editorial

The outcome of the Karnataka Assembly elections has come as a pleasant surprise to even those who were expecting a BJP defeat. The impact of the Karnataka verdict lies in the magnitude of the Congress victory and the BJP’s defeat and the conditions in which this victory was won.

Even as the Union Home Minister Amit Shah was warning the Karnataka electorate that a Congress victory in the state would trigger riots, horrific ethnic violence erupted in BJP-ruled Manipur that had all the signs of an orchestrated riot. The Union government, which uses the term 'double engine government' for BJP-ruled states, invoked Article 355 to take over power in double engine-driven Manipur and issue shoot-at-sight order even as the death toll reportedly crossed fifty and the violence spread from the hills to the valley including the state capital Imphal.

May 1, 2023 marks the centenary of the first May Day celebration in India. Internationally, the observance of May Day had begun in 1886 with widespread protests and strike struggles demanding an eight-hour limit to the work day. Following the Haymarket massacre in Chicago on 4 May 1886, the movement gained further momentum. The execution of a group of key leaders of the May Day movement on 11 November, 1887 only strengthened the resolve of the working class on an international scale.

Ahead of the crucial 2024 Lok Sabha elections, six more Assembly elections are scheduled to be held this year beginning with the elections to the Karnataka Assembly on the 10th of May. Over the last couple of decades, Karnataka has evolved as a key laboratory for the southern expedition of the fascist brigade. Empowered by the ascent of the Modi regime at the Centre in 2014, the fascist forces made their intent clear with the assassination of the renowned rationalist thinker MM Kalburgi and activist journalist Gauri Lankesh.

Bulldozer and encounter have been the two most proudly proclaimed symbols of the Yogi Adityanath model of governance in Uttar Pradesh. According to data released by the state government, UP Police have carried out 10,713 encounters since Yogi Adityanath became UP CM and adopted ‘encounter’ as a ‘top strategy’ supposedly to strike fear in criminals. The government celebrates this strategy of extra-judicial killings as its biggest achievement which has apparently turned UP into a crime-free state.

The National Council of Educational Research and Training (NCERT) has removed the chapter on ‘Kings and Chronicles: The Mughal Courts (16th and 17th Centuries) from the history textbook’s ‘Themes of Indian History – Part II’. The removal sent down a few shockwaves since Mughal administrative unification played a key role in shaping the territorial and cultural map of India as we know it.

Once again, the festival of Ram Navami has been marked by targeted anti-Muslim violence and vandalism in state after state. Major incidents of violence have been reported from BJP-ruled Maharashtra, Gujarat, Uttar Pradesh and poll-bound Karnataka as well as non-BJP states like Bihar and West Bengal. Festivals that should be celebrated in an environment of peace, harmony and joy are increasingly being turned into theatres of vandalism and violence targeted predominantly against India's biggest minority community of Muslims.

The Modi government's desperate campaign against the opposition has assumed the proportions of an intensifying war on India's parliamentary democracy. Even as the opposition started demanding the formation of a Joint Parliamentary Committee to probe the Adani scam and Rahul Gandhi questioned the Modi-Adani nexus, a vindictive Modi government went berserk to target the opposition.

The script of the much-trumpeted ‘Gujarat Model’ is getting curiouser and curiouser, and the twists in its trajectory since the beginning of 2023 have been nothing short of sensational. 

Having narrowly retained power in Tripura, the Modi government has launched an all-out offensive against the opposition by using the lethal combination of street power, propaganda and state power that has become the hallmark of this fascist regime. After relatively peaceful elections in Tripura, the Sangh brigade has unleashed a renewed reign of post-poll terror, vendetta and violence in the state, targeting opposition parties, their voters and even the fact-finding team of Left and Congress MPs and MLAs who were on a visit to the terror-stricken state.