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Imagine for one moment, what it would be like to be kept in jail for years, deprived of your family, your freedom of speech, your liberty of movement and your right to work, merely on suspicion and conjecture. A terrifying concept for most of us, but a grim reality for the prominent human rights advocates (who include lawyers, professors, research fellows, a poet, and an editor), 5 of whom were arrested on 6th June 2018 and 4 of whom on 28th August 2018, in what is now known as the Bhima Koregaon (the BK) case. On 14th April 2020, two other eminent human rights defenders were arrested by the National Investigative Agency (the NIA) in the same matter.

Chinese aggression against India it seems is unstoppable. What’s more, this incursions dates back to the 1950s. Long before Mao Zedong categorized China's ties with India as “armed co-existence.” The transgressions which came with the ‘salami-slicing’ of India’s territory at the LAC has kept India permanently in flux right from 1962.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi has been trying to build his empire on the foundation of Nehru bashing, he has been outdoing the Emergency of Indira Gandhi by creating a more crude and ruthless Emergency like situation.

Continuous increase in number of COVID 19 cases in the country is a pointer to its community spread. Even though the ICMR does not agree with this, but several Epidemiologists have different opinion. No community transmission of Covid-19 is a falsehood, says Dr Jayaprakash Muliyil, a noted epidemiologist and former Principal, Christian Medical College Vellore.

His party is in disarray. It practises politics only sometimes, as a former M.P. said. It doesn’t have a full-time president, only an interim one. Apparently, the organization is waiting for a sulking former chief to take the reins into his own hands from his mother’s. Yet, there are not a few who believe that this dynasticism is a disastrous recipe in a day and age when the people like to be atma-nirbhar by standing on their own feet, breaking out from the conventions of patriarchy and joint families. From these standpoints, Rahul Gandhi can be said to be on a losing wicket.

China’s fast economic incursion into India looks as portentous as its constant land-grab attempts into Indian territory along the Line of Actual Control. The entire Sino-Indian border (including the western LAC, small undisputed section in the centre, and the McMahon Line in the east) is 4,056-kilometre long and traverses one Indian union territory, Ladakh, and four Indian states: Uttarakhand, Himachal Pradesh, Sikkim, and Arunachal Pradesh. Surprisingly, India has not been able to control China’s expansionist tactics in both the geo-political and economy fronts.

Most Indian media carry these days the news with screaming headlines to expose the evil intents of China to intrude into Indian borders in the remote and barren Himalayan region that does not sustain human habitation. Since the messy and fiercely bloody clash in the Galwan Valley in the Indian attempt to beat back the intrusion in Indian Territory by the Chinese army contingent ended in blood spilling on both sides.

Leading experts of the United Nations have urged upon the Government of India to release the activists who have been arrested in the last few months for their protests against the introduction of the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) in the country. The experts in their statement issued on June 26, have termed the CAA as discriminatory to the Muslim community of India and have called for investigation into instigators of violence.

Between, say December 25, 2019, and June 23, 2020, world crude (brent) oil prices have fallen by nearly 37 per cent. They had fallen by over 60 per cent between end-December and mid-April, but there has been some price-recovery since then; even so, the decline in world prices till June 23 has been quite dramatic. In India however, over this very period, petrol and diesel prices have been going up sharply and are now higher than ever before; in fact diesel prices have increased even more sharply than petrol prices and the difference between the two has largely disappeared.

Nationalist elements have called for a ‘boycott China’ movement in the wake of Chinese border incursions in Ladakh. But it is clear that independence from China would take a bigger struggle than India’s freedom movement for deliverance from the colonialists.