Editorial

THIS year's Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel, popularly known as Nobel prize in Economics, has evoked considerable media and popular interest in India. The reason is one of the three recipients is Abhijit Vinayak Banerjee, an American economist of Indian origin, who had done his graduation from Kolkata's iconic Presidency College (now University) and masters from New Delhi's Jawaharlal Nehru University. After Amartya Sen, this is the second instance of a Presidency College alumni getting this premier international award.

REMEMBER Tabrez Ansari, the young worker from Jharkhand who used to earn his livelihood in Pune and had returned home and got married even as Narendra Modi was returning to power with an emphatic majority? His marriage was of course not meant to be a newsworthy event, but a few weeks after his wedding he became a household name. Just like Mohammad Akhlaque of Dadri, Pehlu Khan of Mewat and Alimuddin Ansari of Ramgarh. Tabrez had been tied to an electricity pole, and beaten up by a mob for hours together and forced to chant ‘Jai Shri Ram’ and ‘Jai Hanuman’.

US President Trump’s presence at Prime Minister Modi’s rally in Houston during the latter’s US visit, underlined the ideological closeness of both the far-right, fascist politicians.

THE Sangh-BJP assault on universities, students and academic communities continues unabated. Having failed to stop the JNU students from giving yet another emphatic mandate to the Left in the recent JNUSU election, the Sangh brigade has once again turned their attention on the Jadavpur University in Kolkata, another prominent Left campus in the country. But in the process, it has once again exposed its anti-student anti-education fascist face.

ON 14 September (which the Government of India marks as ‘Hindi Day’), the Home Minister Amit Shah said, “Diversity of languages and dialects is strength of our nation. But there is need for our nation to have one language, so that foreign languages don’t find a place.

THE first 100 days of Modi 2.0 are over. Propagandists of the regime are busy enumerating the amazing ‘achievements’ of the Modi-Shah order – triple talaq, Kashmir, moon mission. They are talking about everything except the one thing the whole country is discussing – the economic slowdown. They thought they would be able to brush it off as a temporary, cyclical affair, but now comparative figures for every quarter and for every parameter indicate a clear and alarming decline.

PEOPLE in Assam on all sides of historical debates and divisions, had hoped that the publication of the final list of the National Register of Citizens in Assam would finally put their anxieties at rest and bring a sense of closure and relief. Instead, the fact is that publication has given a new lease of life to divisive politics in the state, and has not eased anxieties for any section of Assam.  

AS the Modi-Shah government completes the first three months of its second term, the cat is out of the bag. However much the government may want people to cheer for its Triple Talaq and Kashmir moves and forget all else, more and more people across India are now actually talking about the devastating impact of economic slowdown. The belated admission by the finance minister and the massive diversion of more than Rs 176,000 crore of RBI surplus to the central exchequer have only corroborated the growing public perception of acute economic crisis.

Narendra Modi’s speech on Independence Day indicated the Sangh’s communal fascist agenda for the BJP Government’s second tenure. The most significant of these is a ‘population control’ campaign projecting small families as ‘patriotic’. The PM also tried to project privatisation of public sector assets as a move to “free” people from Government interference, and to project labour and environmental protection laws as “redundant”.

WITH the revocation of Article 370 and the annihilation of the erstwhile Jammu and Kashmir state, the Modi-Shah government has given us a substantive glimpse of its Mission Kashmir game plan. Abrogation of Article 370 has been a long-standing item on the RSS agenda and the BJP claims that the people of Jammu and Kashmir are happy with the abrogation. If the people are really happy, why did the government clamp down curfew, cut off all communications and put all opposition leaders in the state under house arrest?