View Articles

“What the hell's going on?” That’s the kind of rhetorical question that marks time these days. Everybody’s railing against the guy/gal opposite. External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj loses her Facebook profile after she corrects passport officer Vikas Mishra's discretion to deny a passport to the ‘wife’ in an interfaith couple. Swaraj's swaraj in her ministry gets trampled and her “bought kidney” gets called "Islamic" and gored on Social media.

Some of us who lived through the Emergency declared on June 25, 1975 are still around, I am one of them.

Bihar Chief Minister Nitish Kumar has toughened his stand against the BJP and taking a cue from his master, his JD(U) has dared the BJP to pull out of the alliance in the state. However undeterred of his threat and issuing of caution by his party, the BJP leadership is moving unilaterally towards its goal. This is for the first time in his political career Nitish has been feeling secluded. This is clearly manifest in his call to his betanoireLalu Prasad. After his breaking off the mahagathbandhan and jumping into the lap of the BJP, he even did not think proper to interact with him. But with the political situation turning frightening he chose to mend his relations with Lalu.

On 22nd June, 2018, Justice J. Chelameswar retired from Supreme Court, after a tenure of almost 7 years at the Apex Court of the country. After his retirement, he gave interviews to various media platforms, including print and electronic media, which seemed to have upset the Bar Council of India (BCI), the statutory body established to regulate the conduct of Advocates in the legal profession. In a press release replete with half truths and information, and even misspelling the Judge’s name wrong (!), BCI stated that Justice Chelameswar’s statements “cannot be tolerated, accepted or digested by the Advocates, including the rest of the countrymen.” The press release also wrongly accuses the Judge of using phrases like ‘bench-fixing’, which he never did in his interviews and also refers to the historic press conference conducted by the four seniormost judges of the Supreme Court, including Justice Chelameswar, on 12th January, 2018 in a dispraging manner. The whole tone and tenor of the press release is to malign the Judge’s impeccable integrity and credibility, and to insinuate political motives to his actions.

The series of by-election defeats suffered by the BJP in Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh, Uttar Pradesh and Bihar along with its failure to form a government in Karnataka and the party’s uncertain prospects in the three assembly elections this winter cannot but have made the saffron dispensation nervous about the next general election.

Union Government has been issuing National Advisories through the Ministry of Home Affairs (MHA) to the States and Union Territories from time to time that are broadly designed to help strengthen institutional mechanism across the country to protect human rights of the people in order to end any type of coercive violation of their sacred rights and dignity in our system of rule of law based democratic governance.

Ajay Singh Bisht says the Dalit should get reservation in Aligarh Muslim University and Jamia Millia Islamia. A Thakur calling for reservation for the Dalit is laudable. But Ajay Singh Bisht happens to be chief minister of Uttar Pradesh. So, it smacks politics.

The problem is June 25 falls every year. There is no avoiding the date. And nobody wants a repeat of June 25, 1975. It rhymes, rolls off the tongue like ball-bearings released from their slot. The Congress wants to forget but the BJP keeps reminding the Congress of Indira Gandhi’s ‘Emergency’ like a broken record.

We are passing through an interesting time. There is a likelihood that trade war between two of the world’s biggest economies – China and USA – may blow out of proportion. The consequence may be another economic downturn in the offing. During an economic crisis, consumers spend less, and investors do not invest (or postpone their investment decisions). There is a general sense of pessimism about future earning prospects, leading to higher unemployment and lower productivity growth.

LUCKNOW: Shocked by the loss of three Lok Sabha and one assembly seats in the by-elections, BJP is invoking both Kamandal and Mandal to retain the 73 seats it won in 2014 in the coming Lok Sabha elections.