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Pictures and videos of Americans slugging it out in the streets with each other and with the police and National Guard over the Floyd death are full of reckless abandon, of people flouting every anti-coronavirus rule in the book; from social distancing thrown to the winds to facemasks missing from most mugs on show.

LUCKNOW: The Samajwadi Party national president Akhilesh Yadav has made it clear that it would not enter into alliance with any party for the 2022 assembly elections.

The Covid-19 has changed the dynamics of almost everything including politics in the world. Today, it poses challenges for all walks of life and also all kinds of institutions. This is true of democracy practitioners, civil liberties and political parties and democracy itself, as Trinamool Congress leader Dinesh Bhai Trivedi says!

The Indians lived for 68 days in the dread of death driven by the authority in the guise of combat with the pandemics of the corona virus. Many of dictations and orders by authorities in various states, districts as well as emotions and responses, actions and reactions in various sections leave a doubt whether authorities were combating the pandemics or exercising the authority acquired from the lockdown directive for their personal whims and fancies. Several directives restrictive in nature and outside the need and utility for the combating the disease was beyond comprehension.

Donald Trump’s announcement that the United States is terminating its relationship with the World Health Organisation (WHO) came as protests raged over the police killing of George Floyd.

Electoral compulsions and the impulse to keep the rightist forces in good humour have witnessed fundamental transformation of the UK’s Labour Party. The party has decided to divorce the left ideas and policy notwithstanding the ground realities favouring Labour Party embracing the socialist ideas for espousing the cause of the poor people who have significant number in the country.

The Financial Times of London is one of the most “respectable” bourgeois newspapers in the world. Even this newspaper has now come to recognise something which the Left has been saying for quite some time. In an editorial on April 3, 2020, it wrote: “Radical reforms in reversing the prevailing policy direction of the last four decades will need to be put on the table. Governments will have to accept a more active role in the economy. They must see public services as investment rather than as liabilities and look for ways to make the labour market less insecure. Redistribution will again be on the agenda… Policies until recently considered eccentric such as basic income and wealth taxes will have to be in the mix.”

In the years to come, which will be the defining image of the great Indian labour migration of 2020? Will it be the video of a toddler lifting the shroud over his dead mother’s body on a railway platform? Or of the child half-asleep on a suitcase on wheels as it was being pulled by his mother along a highway?

The Covid-19 pandemic has affected more than 200 countries in the world, with United States, United Kingdom, Russia, Brazil and India being particularly affected. But no country has had a humanitarian crisis as in India in the form of 80 million migrant workers stranded in different parts of the country, with no jobs, or food security for over two months. In India, we are battling two crises: Covid-19, and a humanitarian one. Activists have recorded more than 700 deaths of people that can be traced to lockdown, owing to hunger, starvation, exhaustion and suicide, amongst others, and the number is ever growing.

The corona virus pandemic is the first fearsome disease to leave immeasurable deep scar on humanity. Many pandemic have come left unrecoverable damage on human numbers but none was able to push humanity to its back foot. But the dread of corona virus forced humanity to go back to ancient times and style of existence. Fear of becoming prey of wild animals had forced humans to live alone in safety of their caves. Social distancing was imperative of times. They had no back up of medical sciences or advantages of more organized social life depending on cooperation of others.