Editorial

AFTER days of speculation and intriguing signals, the Modi government suddenly revealed its plans regarding Jammu and Kashmir on 5 August. It is nothing short of a constitutional coup carried out in a very shrewd and conspiratorial manner. Through a Presidential Order invoked under Article 367, the government changed the interpretation of key clauses of Article 370 thereby virtually scrapping it without moving any explicit amendment to that effect.

ON 19 July 2019, a village chief (gram pradhan) in Sonbhadra Yagya Dutta Bhurtiya, eastern Uttar Pradesh led several tractor-loads of gunmen into Umbha village, firing on Gond adivasis who were tilling their own land. 10 adivasis were killed in this massacre.

The Sonbhadra massacre underlines, once again, that Uttar Pradesh under the rule of Yogi Adityanath, has become a graveyard of justice and rights, where Dalits, minorities, adivasis and women are at the mercy of attacks, massacres and extra-judicial killings.

ELECTED representatives of India’s ruling party BJP, and members of Indian PM Modi’s Cabinet observed World Population Day (11 July) by stoking poisonous communal myths about Muslim population in India.

IN its first term, the Modi government had begun its journey on the economic front by dismantling the Planning Commission. The demolition and disruption campaign continued unabated as demonetization happened and took its toll, RBI was stripped of its autonomy, a half-baked and ill-conceived GST was enforced in an arbitrary manner, key economic data were surgically suppressed, maimed and manipulated, and the whims of a surveillance state disrupted and denied welfare benefits to the neediest by indiscriminately linking everything with Aadhaar.

THE Modi government is back in power. The lynch mobs are also back in action. The lynchings, like before, are being videographed so that more people are encouraged to perpetrate such acts and potential victims have a clearer sense of what lies in store for them. The excuses continue to expand – cow-related pretexts and inter-faith love and marriage apart, an allegation, or even doubt or rumour, of theft can also be good enough, as we have just seen in the latest instance of lynching in Jharkhand.

BACK in power for the second successive term, the Modi government seems to be in a hurry to pursue some of its pet ideas. If privatisation and labour reforms seem to be high on the economic agenda, ‘One Nation, One Election’ appears to be the key political obsession at the moment. The Modi government did try to push the idea in its first term itself.

AFTER a week of agitation, protesting junior doctors of Kolkata finally had an opportunity on 17 June to negotiate directly with the Chief Minister. The discussion between the representatives of protesting doctors and the state government was televised live and it ended on a positive note with the doc181tors placing their immediate demands and the government coming up with its set of announcements and assurances. As the protesting doctors go back to work, the government will be under watch as to how seriously it now walks the talk.

THE second innings of the Modi Government have begun. And the first couple of weeks itself are showing us the shape of things to come: social media surveillance, arrests of journalists, communalisation of crimes and demonisation of Muslims, terror against political opponents, a former Army man declared a “foreigner” and lodged in a detention camp based on a fabricated report by the Assam Border Police, death threats to anti-communal intellectuals and activists, and exposure of the last Modi regime’s lies about unemployment data and GDP.

CONTRARY to widespread expectations, the Modi government has come back stronger. The BJP on its own has secured an enhanced majority and a bigger vote share. In the last five years we have seen how the Modi government used its 2014 victory as a license not only to promote corporate loot and aggression but also to wage a sustained war on the Constitution, destroy the autonomy of various institutions of governance and the system of checks and balances to unleash and enforce the agenda of the RSS.

THE outcome of the 2019 Lok Sabha elections has completely defied the ground-level build-up of mass disillusionment, anger and desire for change that had manifested itself so clearly only the other day when traditional BJP strongholds like Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh and Rajasthan went for Assembly elections in late 2018.