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THIRUVANANTHAPURAM: These are troubled days for the Kerala unit of the Communist Party of India (Marxist).

While the Prime Minister Narendra Modi in his second avatar is projecting himself as a new mascot of tolerance and reconciliation, his government agencies have been taking up one by one the institutions which represent the dissenting voices in both media and legal profession. In the three week period, since Modi took the oath as the PM for the second time on May 30, two prominent independent voices of the country NDTV Ltd among the television media and Lawyers Collective, have been targeted by the government agencies for actions which are old and which have already been dealt with by the concerned institutions.

Narendra Modi never ceases to surprise. He surprised everyone, probably including himself, by sweeping the 2019 elections. The brutal victory evoked fears of an Armageddon and critics saw Modi 2.0 as confirmation of the proclamation of a Hindu Rashtra. But these have since been found to be grossly exaggerated. The massive victory seems to have done some magic as Modi in his second term has behaved more like a statesman than anything else that has been conjured up of him.

Meeting in Chicago, in the city where May Day was born, members of the Communist Party USA will celebrate a century in the struggle for workers’ rights and socialism at their organization’s 31st National Convention later this month.

Though Nigel Farage is currently playing hard to get with Conservative donors looking for an electoral pact with the Brexit Party, an alliance between the two is a real threat. Farage’s new outfit is a force that cannot be ignored. Its first place in the European elections reflects a single-issue vote in which people’s attitudes to Brexit trumped all other considerations, and Labour’s Peterborough victory showed the left can still overcome that division.

This is not for first time that violence has taken place against the doctors. Maximum of such incidents have occurred in Maharashtra. The violent incidents in Bengal got so much highlighted because the political atmosphere was already surcharged and the approach of the Chief Minster to the whole incident was rather precarious. A few words of sympathy and an assurance of inquiry into the whole incident were needed. No one can work in the atmosphere of uncertainty, particularly so when it comes to treating a person which requires lot of concentration, care and empathy. Persistent resistance by the medical fraternity and the support of senior doctors to the junior colleagues made the chief Minister realize that she was on wrong path. Situation is now defused and doctors are back to work. But this has left several questions which need deep introspection.

The utter lack of therapeutic proficiency of the doctors in Bihar has been primarily responsible for death of over 125 kids due to AES in the district of Muzaffarpur alone. In Muzaffarpur 125 kids died during last fortnight due to inept and careless handling of the patients, no parent even raised his voice to protest doctors’ apathy. Their fraternal bondage has been so strong that even in this situation the doctors in Bihar did not forget to respond to one day strike call given by the IMA. Undeniably this is the highest order of lack of sensibility and responsibility.

LUCKNOW: With the spectre of the grand disaster that the Lok Sabha 2019 election turned out for the grand old party, the Congress has finally woken up from the shock-induced stupor and has already started working on “Mission 22” to prepare for the upcoming assembly polls in Uttar Pradesh.

KOLKATA: A clash between junior doctors and relatives and friends of a patient who died in the government-run NRS Medical College and Hospital in Kolkata on June 10 night has brought the entire public health care system in West Bengal to a grinding halt. Doctors in all government hospitals in the State have gone on strike demanding adequate police protection for their safety. The strike has brought the medical fraternity all over the country in support of their West Bengal brethren.

On Wednesday morning, Bernie Sanders tweeted his support for former Brazilian president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, imprisoned since April of last year on flimsy corruption charges. Sanders was responding to bombshell exposés published by the Intercept last Sunday documenting collusion between the chief prosecutor and the presiding judge in Lula’s case. That judge, Sergio Moro, consistently maintained that his handling of Lula’s case was entirely apolitical — even after he was appointed minister of justice by Lula’s opponent, the far-right president Jair Bolsonaro. That pretense has now been discredited by the Intercept’s reporting.