Editorial

Bulldozer and encounter have been the two most proudly proclaimed symbols of the Yogi Adityanath model of governance in Uttar Pradesh. According to data released by the state government, UP Police have carried out 10,713 encounters since Yogi Adityanath became UP CM and adopted ‘encounter’ as a ‘top strategy’ supposedly to strike fear in criminals. The government celebrates this strategy of extra-judicial killings as its biggest achievement which has apparently turned UP into a crime-free state.

The National Council of Educational Research and Training (NCERT) has removed the chapter on ‘Kings and Chronicles: The Mughal Courts (16th and 17th Centuries) from the history textbook’s ‘Themes of Indian History – Part II’. The removal sent down a few shockwaves since Mughal administrative unification played a key role in shaping the territorial and cultural map of India as we know it.

Once again, the festival of Ram Navami has been marked by targeted anti-Muslim violence and vandalism in state after state. Major incidents of violence have been reported from BJP-ruled Maharashtra, Gujarat, Uttar Pradesh and poll-bound Karnataka as well as non-BJP states like Bihar and West Bengal. Festivals that should be celebrated in an environment of peace, harmony and joy are increasingly being turned into theatres of vandalism and violence targeted predominantly against India's biggest minority community of Muslims.

The Modi government's desperate campaign against the opposition has assumed the proportions of an intensifying war on India's parliamentary democracy. Even as the opposition started demanding the formation of a Joint Parliamentary Committee to probe the Adani scam and Rahul Gandhi questioned the Modi-Adani nexus, a vindictive Modi government went berserk to target the opposition.

The script of the much-trumpeted ‘Gujarat Model’ is getting curiouser and curiouser, and the twists in its trajectory since the beginning of 2023 have been nothing short of sensational. 

Having narrowly retained power in Tripura, the Modi government has launched an all-out offensive against the opposition by using the lethal combination of street power, propaganda and state power that has become the hallmark of this fascist regime. After relatively peaceful elections in Tripura, the Sangh brigade has unleashed a renewed reign of post-poll terror, vendetta and violence in the state, targeting opposition parties, their voters and even the fact-finding team of Left and Congress MPs and MLAs who were on a visit to the terror-stricken state.

Even as the Modi government was grappling with the impact of the two-part BBC documentary on the Modi Question, Modi’s closest corporate ally Gautam Adani found himself in the eye of the Hindenburg hurricane. On 24 January while the world eagerly awaited the second episode of the BBC documentary, the US-based Hindenburg Research came out with its report titled Adani Group: How The World’s 3rd Richest Man Is Pulling The Largest Con In Corporate History.

On 17 January, the BBC aired the first episode of a two-part documentary called ‘India: The Modi Question’ which focused on Modi’s role as the then Chief Minister of Gujarat when Gujarat witnessed a horrific pogrom in the wake of the Godhra train fire. The film was not aired in India and the Modi government promptly asked Twitter to take down tweets and links about the video and YouTube to stop uploads of the video or its clips.

‘Survival of the Richest’ is the title of the Oxfam Global Inequality Report 2022 released on January 16, 2023. The report, coinciding with the annual global jamboree of the rich and the powerful in the World Economic Forum, gives us a revealing picture of the growing income and wealth inequality, inequality that grew alarmingly during the pandemic and is reinforced constantly by the regressive taxation pattern in the neoliberal era where the poor are taxed heavily while the rich get away with paying very little taxes.

Joshimath, the last city on the borders of Uttarakhand is fighting for its existence. New cracks are emerging each day in roads and buildings across the city, making the place totally unsafe and possibly unlivable. A callous administration that has refused to pay attention to every wake-up call and alarming signs all these years is now desperately marking houses and hotels that need to be vacated immediately.