Editorial

A week ahead of the 75th anniversary of Independence, India commemorates the 80th anniversary of the Quit India movement on 9 August, 2022. The Congress leadership had been arrested immediately after giving the Quit India call from the All India Congress Committee session in Mumbai, but the call triggered a popular upsurge in several parts of India and even gave rise to four parallel governments – Ballia in UP, Tamluk in Bengal, Talcher in Odisha and Satara in Maharashtra.

The startling recovery of more than fifty crore rupees in cash and gold from two flats belonging to an actress and reportedly a close aide to the now dropped TMC minister Partha Chatterjee has once again put the Mamata Banerjee government of West Bengal in the dock. The recovery of the cash and the arrest of the minister have happened in the wake of the Calcutta High Court judgement ordering a CBI probe into the massive irregularities and brazen manipulation in the School Service Commission recruitment process in West Bengal.

Fifty years have elapsed since the death of Comrade Charu Mazumdar in Kolkata's Lalbazar police lock-up. Back then, the Indian state must have heaved a huge sigh of relief, expecting his death to mark the end of the revolutionary wave that had spread across India in the wake of Naxalbari. But five decades later, when the Modi regime seeks to suppress every voice of dissent, it has to concoct the term 'urban naxal' to persecute dissent. Clearly, the spectre of Naxalbari and Charu Mazumdar continues to haunt India's rulers even five decades after his death.

An adivasi woman Draupadi Murmu is on the cusp of becoming the President of India. Coinciding with this moment, the Supreme Court of India accepted the Government of India’s recommendation to treat adivasi women seeking justice against a massacre by police and paramilitary forces, as conspirators and criminals. The same BJP which touts its choice of Ms Murmu as President as an act of symbolic inclusion, is criminalising any attempt by adivasi women to seek justice against systemic violence by the state’s armed forces.

July 9, 2022 will go down in Sri Lankan history as the day when the combination of an acute economic crisis and a massive eruption of popular anger forced a tyrant to flee. Photos and videos of the occupation of the President’s Palace by thousands of common people, with the crowd taking control of all the facilities of the palace from the swimming pool to the kitchen, bedrooms to music hall, have gone viral globally as the latest visual of people power. Gotabaya Rajapaksa, the man who tried till the end to save his throne is now reportedly on his way out.

The arrests of activist Teesta Setalvad, Retired IPS officer RB Sreekumar, and Fact-Checker and journalist Mohammed Zubair demonstrate the Modi government’s vengefulness against those who fearlessly held Modi and Shah accountable for communal violence, and exposed hateful propaganda by BJP leaders.

Agnipath literally means trail of fire. When Harivansh Rai Bachchan wrote his short poem with this name in 1973 little did he know that fifty years later this will really unleash a trail of fire and singe the country. The poem can be called an ode to the power of human determination or dedication undeterred by any adversity. The title of the poem inspired a film with the same name in 1990 which was all about a boy growing up to avenge his father's killing. There was a remake of the film in 2012.

Rebuff provocations and maintain peace and harmony!

The storm triggered by the Islamophobic bigotry and derogatory remarks against Prophet Muhammad by well-known BJP national spokesperson Nupur Sharma and the party's Delhi media head Naveen Kumar Jindal is fast turning into a campaign of targeted state-led terror against Indian Muslims and voices of dissent. The remarks had understandably sparked a major international controversy.

Confronted by a flood of condemnations by a wide range of nations, of a piece of Islamophobic hate speech about Prophet Mohammed by a prominent spokesperson of the ruling Bharatiya Janta Party, the Modi Government went into defensive mode. It sought to distance itself from the offender Nupur Sharma by declaring that she was a mere “fringe element” - not someone these foreign governments should take seriously.

Modi Regime’s Continuing War on the Poor

In early March when the BJP managed to retain power in Uttar Pradesh for the second term in a row, the victory was attributed among other things to the delivery of food among the poor to mitigate the extreme economic hardship caused by the cruel lockdown. ‘Labharthi’ or beneficiary of various welfare and assistance schemes became a key talking point for poll analysts. With the elections over, the discourse is fast changing and quite ominously so.