Editorial

Ahead of the 2024 Lok Sabha elections, Narendra Modi is once again banking on his so-called global image to shore up his fast declining local stocks. Even as Manipur has been burning since early May with more than 100 lives lost, more than 200 churches burnt and more than 50,000 displaced people struggling to survive in relief camps, the PM left the crisis-ridden state in the lurch and flew to America on a state visit. This was his sixth US visit in nine years.

Governance in India today is driven by a relentless aggression of the executive which has reduced the legislature to a loyal instrument of law making. Any corrective measure coming from the judiciary is being disdainfully discarded through executive ordinances. The media, the fabled fourth pillar of democracy, has effectively been refashioned as a willing ally whose job has become to advocate and amplify the agenda of the government and function as an advertisement medium for the supreme leader.

Since 2014 we have often heard the term 'double engine government' in BJP election rallies. It is the most favoured Modi-Shah metaphor used to seek votes in states on the basis of the BJP's control over power at the Centre. The Chief Economic Advisor has now introduced an aviation term to describe the economy. According to CEA V Anantha Nageswaran the Indian economy is now on 'auto-pilot mode' and will grow steadily in the 6.5-7% range till 2030!

An old man hailing from Sugo village of Bhadrak district in Odisha is walking among the hundreds of bodies placed in a school compound. One by one he lifts the cloth over dead bodies to see their faces. Asked who he is looking for,.the weeping man replies in a broken voice, “I am looking for my son who was in Coromandel express, but I can’t find him.” His story is one among hundreds of people who had their family or friends in the two trains that met with a horrific accident on the evening of June 2 in Balasore (Baleswar) district of Odisha.

If there has been one single day in the nine years of Modi government that has most tellingly encapsulated the essential character of the regime and its future game plan, it was May 28, 2023, the day Narendra Modi inaugurated the new Parliament building and India's ace women wrestlers protesting against sexual harassment by a BJP MP were pulled and dragged by the police on Delhi's Parliament Street.

Karnataka has delivered a big blow to the Sangh brigade's fascist project. What we have witnessed in Karnataka is not a routine change of government every five years in this southern state, it is an emphatic rejection of the Sangh brigade's vicious communal politics which has been busy using the state as a laboratory and which wanted to remain in control through a toxic high voltage blitzkrieg led directly by the Modi-Shah duo.

The outcome of the Karnataka Assembly elections has come as a pleasant surprise to even those who were expecting a BJP defeat. The impact of the Karnataka verdict lies in the magnitude of the Congress victory and the BJP’s defeat and the conditions in which this victory was won.

Even as the Union Home Minister Amit Shah was warning the Karnataka electorate that a Congress victory in the state would trigger riots, horrific ethnic violence erupted in BJP-ruled Manipur that had all the signs of an orchestrated riot. The Union government, which uses the term 'double engine government' for BJP-ruled states, invoked Article 355 to take over power in double engine-driven Manipur and issue shoot-at-sight order even as the death toll reportedly crossed fifty and the violence spread from the hills to the valley including the state capital Imphal.

May 1, 2023 marks the centenary of the first May Day celebration in India. Internationally, the observance of May Day had begun in 1886 with widespread protests and strike struggles demanding an eight-hour limit to the work day. Following the Haymarket massacre in Chicago on 4 May 1886, the movement gained further momentum. The execution of a group of key leaders of the May Day movement on 11 November, 1887 only strengthened the resolve of the working class on an international scale.

Ahead of the crucial 2024 Lok Sabha elections, six more Assembly elections are scheduled to be held this year beginning with the elections to the Karnataka Assembly on the 10th of May. Over the last couple of decades, Karnataka has evolved as a key laboratory for the southern expedition of the fascist brigade. Empowered by the ascent of the Modi regime at the Centre in 2014, the fascist forces made their intent clear with the assassination of the renowned rationalist thinker MM Kalburgi and activist journalist Gauri Lankesh.