Editorial

AS 2019 draws to a close, India today truly finds itself at a crossroads where one road leads towards the RSS dream of a Hindu Rashtra and the other must take us to a higher level of secular democracy. Having been re-elected for a second term, the Modi government has rapidly unleashed the whole artillery of the long-term RSS agenda with a now-or-never kind of desperate aggression and virulence.

IT took the Modi-Shah government less than three days to turn the Citizenship Amendment Bill 2019 into an Act. It has the numbers in Lok Sabha and in Rajya Sabha where the NDA does not have the numbers, it managed to cobble majority thanks to the positions taken by non-NDA parties like BJD, YSRCP, TDP.

ON the eve of International Human Rights Day, the Lok Sabha passed the Citizenship Amendment Bill (CAB) 2019, one of the most arbitrary and discriminatory legislations in the history of Independent India that changes the basic terms of Indian Citizenship and hence violates the core structure and spirit of India's Constitution and the character of the Indian Republic, only falling short of explicitly dropping the secular epithet from the Preamble to the Constitution.

TWENTY seven years ago modern India had witnessed a shocking spectacle of vandalism. Cheered by senior BJP leaders LK Advani, Murli Manohar Joshi and Uma Bharati, and empowered by the patronage provided by the BJP government of Uttar Pradesh led by Kalyan Singh, an organised mob of vandals demolished a sixteenth century mosque in Ayodhya in broad daylight. The demolition was watched live on television by the whole country even as the police looked away.

ON the 70th anniversary of the adoption of India’s Constitution, all eyes were focused on the Supreme Court. For the two preceding days, the apex court was dealing with the writ petition filed against the Maharashtra Governor’s shocking decision to swear in Devendra Fadnavis in a most conspiratorial fashion soon after the NCP, Shiv Sena and Congress had formally announced the formation of a post-poll coalition which clearly had the required majority to form government.

THE spirited struggle of Jawaharlal Nehru University students has brought the issue of the right to education to the political centre-stage.

THE politics of the early 1990s was framed by the stealthy 1949 act of placing a “Ram Lalla” (baby Ram) idol inside the Babri Masjid, followed by a violent campaign which culminated in the demolition of the Babri Masjid by a fascist mob led by top BJP leaders. During this campaign, and immediately after the demolition of the mosque, Muslims were massacred by communal mobs all over North India. The Ayodhya ‘dispute’ was ostensibly about whether or not Babar demolished a Hindu temple marking Ram’s birthplace, to build the Babri Masjid.

RECENTLY, WhatsApp (a company owned by Facebook) has made an explosive revelation. It has reached out to several journalists, lawyers, human rights activists, and Opposition politicians in India, to inform them that a software sold by an Israeli company to Governments has been used to spy on them. Not only have their WhatsApp messages and calls been hacked; the software has used a loophole in WhatsApp’s encryption software to turn their phones and computers into spying devices.

ELECTIONS to the Maharashtra and Haryana State Assemblies were widely expected to be cakewalks for the BJP. The exit polls by and large reflected this prevalent political estimation of the corporate media. In Haryana, the BJP was predicted to win a sweeping majority, with one exit poll putting the number as high as 83 in Haryana’s 90-member Assembly. In Maharashtra, the prediction was for an independent majority for the BJP alone. The final results have turned out to be a pleasantly surprising reality check.

THE deepening crisis of the Indian economy and the absolute collapse of governance are now an undeniable everyday reality. Examples abound on every front, evidences mount in every sphere. Economic crisis is no longer a subject of academic debates that the government can deny with the help of statistical jugglery. From IMF to RBI, every international or Indian institution is daily pointing to India’s declining overall growth rate. But the most damning blow has been India’s continuing fall in the Global Hunger Index ranking.