Editorial

Nitish Kumar has switched sides yet again. An arrogant BJP which was claiming to have shut its doors for ever for Nitish Kumar has again embraced him as Chief Minister of NDA. Nitish Kumar, who had vowed to prefer death to again joining hands with the BJP, has reneged on his vow to return to the BJP's fold. Ahead of the forthcoming Lok Sabha elections, the BJP was desperate to grab power back in Bihar and Nitish Kumar has offered himself to be used as a pawn for this BJP operation.

India had got a rude shock three decades ago when the historic Babri Masjid was demolished by the Sangh brigade in broad daylight. But despite the violence of this act and the hundreds of lives lost as a result, many Indians continued to view it in terms of a mosque versus temple dispute. Till recently the Supreme Court held the demolition as a crime, an egregious violation of the rule of law, but strangely awarded the perpetrators of the crime the title of the land while a plot was allotted elsewhere in the town for relocation of the mosque.

On the last day of 2023, India received the news of the three young men accused of gang-raping the 20-year-old woman B Tech student of IIT-BHU at gunpoint two months earlier, being finally arrested. The three men were Kunal Pandey, Saksham Patel and Anand Chauhan, all associated with the BJP’s Varanasi IT cell – the first two, in fact the convenor and co-convenor of the IT cell.

BJP governments across India and the dominant media, especially the Hindi newspapers and TV channels, have unleashed a veritable publicity blitzkrieg ahead of the inauguration or consecration of the Ram Mandir in Ayodhya on 22 January. The Sangh brigade too has announced a major mass outreach programme to generate a countrywide frenzy. Seldom in a non-theocratic country has the world witnessed such calculated and orchestrated political utilisation of the religious sentiments of the majority community, that too just ahead of a general election.

It was the month of December thirty-one years ago. The BJP was yet to win power in Delhi, but it had found its way to power in Lucknow. In broad daylight on December 6 it demonstrated before the whole world what it could do with a slice of state power. The BJP government in Uttar Pradesh empowered a mob led by veteran leaders of the Sangh Parivar to demolish the Babri Masjid even as the dispute was being heard by the Supreme Court. The BJP even provided a ‘logical’ justification for this brazen act of vandalism.

On the twenty-second anniversary of the December 13, 2001 terror strike on India's Parliament, the new parliament building witnessed a stunning smoke scare. A young man, identified as Sagar Sharma from Lucknow, suddenly jumped from the visitor's gallery and opened a yellow smoke canister leaping across tables before being overpowered and handed over to the police by parliamentarians even as the zero hour was underway. Sagar had a companion, D Manoranjan from Mysuru, who too opened another smoke canister spraying yellow smoke remaining seated on the visitor's gallery.

The expulsion of Mahua Moitra, the fiesty TMC MP from Krishnanagar, West Bengal, known for her powerful speeches exposing and challenging the Modi government and the Sangh Brigade, from the Lok Sabha, is the latest example of a brazen fascist strike on India's parliamentary democracy.

The outcome of the five Assembly elections held in November has proved almost all opinion polls and ground reports wrong. Even the few exit polls that predicted a thumping BJP victory in Madhya Pradesh gave the Congress a comfortable majority in neighbouring Chhattisgarh.

Forty-one construction workers who remained trapped in a partially collapsed tunnel in Uttarakhand since 12 November, 2023, were finally rescued on the seventeenth day. After machines broke down it was ‘rathole miners’ (skilled manual earth diggers) who ultimately came to the rescue at great risk to their own lives. In recent times we have seen organised state-sanctioned violence to expel Muslims from Uttarakhand, yet Muslim rathole miners came to Uttarakhand to join this rescue mission. The media and the state and central governments initially paid little attention to the mishap.

For the dominant Indian media, the first three weeks of November 2023 have been all about two campaigns: elections to Chhattisgarh, Madhya Pradesh and Rajasthan State Assemblies and the 46-day-long ODI Cricket World Cup which started on 5 October and ended on 19 November, both matches played in Ahmedabad at the erstwhile Sardar Patel Stadium which the Modi government renamed after Narendra Modi The continuing genocide of children, women and other unarmed Palestinians in Gaza of course never really became news in the