Editorial

AMIDST reports of rapidly rising cases of Corona infection and death India has now entered the second week of the 21-day-long countrywide lockdown announced by the Prime Minister on 24 March evening.

YET another bank has collapsed in the Modi regime. Yes Bank, the latest Indian bank to have been declared sick and unviable by the RBI, is India’s fifth largest private bank after HDFC, ICICI, Axis Bank and Kotak Mahindra. While the Finance Minister assures depositors that their money is safe, the RBI has placed a cap on withdrawal of money from the bank causing immense hardship to all depositors in need of immediate cash.

EVIDENCE is pouring in about the complicity of the Delhi Police in the mob violence targeting Muslim minorities in North East Delhi.

Call logs show that the police stations in NE Delhi received thousands of calls for help from the victims of the violence – and did not respond. The strategic disappearance of the police force is squarely responsible not only for the targeted anti-Muslim terror, but also for the instances where Hindus were attacked by Muslims.

EVEN as the Modi-Shah regime was busy hosting US President Donald Trump, Delhi was ablaze in the fire of targeted anti-Muslim pogrom lit and stoked by a bunch of BJP leaders with the Delhi Police silently standing by, if not openly participating in the pogrom. Four days on, the pogrom has already claimed more than thirty lives while many more remain critically injured and hundreds displaced with their homes burnt and livelihoods destroyed. The list of those killed includes a few Hindu names, including a police constable and an intelligence officer.

AFTER a vicious BJP campaign to conquer Delhi we now have the results of Delhi 2020 Assembly elections, and it is almost a repeat of the 2015 elections. AAP has by and large retained its 2015 vote share of more than 50% even though its seat tally has dropped marginally from 67 to 62. The seats lost by AAP have all gone to the BJP raising its tally to 8. The Congress once again could not open its account and if AAP managed to retain its 2015 vote share it was at the cost of the Congress.

DELHI is India's capital, the seat of power where the men in power have launched a war on the Constitution through the discriminatory, divisive and disastrous CAA-NRC-NPR project. Delhi is where the country's apex court is located where there is an ongoing appeal against this ominous design.

ON Republic Day five years ago, on the eve of the last Delhi Assembly elections, PM Narendra Modi bragged of US President Barack Obama as his guest and friend, and flaunted a Rs 10 lakh suit with his name embroidered all over it.

REPUBLIC Day 2020 marks the 70th anniversary of the Republic and the Constitution which proclaimed it. Never before in these seventy years has the Republic faced the kind of grave internal challenge it is facing today from the very executive which is entrusted with the power and responsibility of administering the rule of law in accordance with the Constitution. The basic character of the Constitution is today under attack.

JANUARY 12 is the birth anniversary of Swami Vivekananda. Since 1984, the day is also observed as the National Youth Day in India. This year the day was sought to be hijacked by a desperate Narendra Modi, who went to the Ramakrishna Math and Mission headquarters at Belur near Kolkata to deliver a speech in defence of the thoroughly unconstitutional and divisive amendment to India’s Citizenship Act. His address had all the customary theatrics and demagogy of a Modi election rally, if on a slightly subdued scale.

IMAGES of brutal attacks on JNU students and teachers by a group of masked young men and women armed with sticks, iron rods and sledgehammers have once again brought the whole world face to face with the growing fascist violence in India. More than the intensity of the violence, it is the pattern of this whole operation which should be an eye-opener for anyone still believing in the ‘all is well’ Modispeak.