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The other day the National Human Rights Commission issued notice to the Uttar Pradesh DGP for police filing false cases against 10 people who asked a band of cops to settle their restaurant Bill! The NHRC wouldn't have guessed that the United States State Department was about to give India a blackeye for human rights abuses. Yes, China and Myanmar, because of Uyghurs and indiscriminate killings after military coup respectively, are getting the big stick from Uncle Sam. But that doesn't mean India didn't get caned for human rights abuses and for generally being a pain in the @** of its citizens.

It appears that the BJP’s Chanakya, Amit Shah, has lost his skill and has nothing new to offer except some old decadent and outdated rhetoric.

West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee's letter to 14 opposition leaders to unite against the BJP's attacks against the Constitutional norms and the powers of the non-BJP state governments- just three days before her historic battle in Nandigram assembly constituency against her former protege BJP candidate Suvendu Adhikari, has big relevance for the shaping of the national politics in the coming period leading to the 2024 Lok Sabha elections.

The next three years are going to be crucial not only in the Indian life but also to its 72 year old system of governance. I have no substantive facts, events or observations by those who matter for such an alarming observation or even conjecture. It is my instinctive response to behaviour of and negative responses by persons who matter.

Canadian media and politicians claim that the country’s public health care system is “what separates us from the Americans.” Social democrats have baptized Cooperative Commonwealth Federation (CCF)/New Democratic Party (NDP) leader Tommy Douglas as the “Father of Medicare,” the official name for Canada’s health system. Election after election, opinion polls position health care as one of the key public concerns. Yet, for all this attention, the history of the struggle for socialized medicine in Canada remains poorly understood.

On March 23, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva finally and definitively won his ongoing legal battle. After years of judicial harassment, culminating in a six-hundred-day prison sentence, the Supreme Court has finally ruled that former judge Sérgio Moro was biased in his ruling and that Lula’s conviction should be overturned. That means that Lula has been unleashed to take on Jair Bolsonaro in the coming 2022 general elections.

The BJP High Command has, perhaps, been most unkind to former Lok Sabha speaker Sumitra Mahjan. While she was only given Padma Bhushan, lesser mortals were honoured with Padma Vibhushan, the second highest civilian award. She had been an eight term M.P, second woman speaker of Lok Sabha after Meera Kumar and also a Union Minister of state, holding the portfolios of Human Resource Development, Communication and Information Technology and Petroleum and Natural Gas. She represented urban constituency of Indore almost without a break.

Political experts and pollsters are busy deciphering the implication of Mamata Banerjee campaigning at a stretch for five days in her new electoral abode Nandigram. If for some it is the sign of her fighting the battle with her back to the wall, some are also looking at this as the success of the strategy of the BJP to her confined to one constituency. They argue that Mamata could well have used this time frame for going around in the state.

There are two sides to every story. One, that India’s healthcare system is not in great shape, and that there is a dearth of hospital beds, doctors, and paramedic staffs to react to a health emergency like COVID pandemic. But turn to the other side, and one finds that merely spending more on health may not necessarily lead to a desired health outcome.

Maharashtra was going from bad to worse for the last two months. People were violating the advisories of the government, new corona virus strains were being found, and even double mutation were found which were believed to escape immunity of the recovered or vaccinated. However, when the Chief Minister of Maharashtra sought a roadmap for lockdown from his officials, the political parties in the states including the BJP, whose leader had announced lockdown without roadmap of implementation.