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Prakash Karat might have been feeling ecstatic at his victory. The Central Committee members endorsed his political line of ‘no alliance, no understanding with the Congress’. But the BJP is celebrating his triumph.Karat and his comrades have made the task of making a clean sweep of the 2019 Lok Sabha elections easy for the BJP.It has been claimed that a 26-party front has already been floated, but no one knows more about it. This is nothing but a bunch of paper tigers nursing regional aspirations devoid of a national perspective.

The irony is Sanjay Leela Bhansali caters to the same base instincts that the media accuses the “fringe” of. Bhansali’s Allauddin Khilji is pictured a violent sultan who wears his vices on his sleeve. He is a womanizer who rapes his wife. A glutton who gorges on mounds of mutton and beef, fingers oozing blood. He kills with a leer and a laugh. He makes love like a maniac. He is the barbarian on the loose. Deepika Padukone’s ‘Padmavati’ and Shahid Kapoor’s ‘Raja Ratan Singh’ are there to prop up centre-piece Ranveer Singh’s Allauddin Khilji. Don’t be surprised if Muslim fanatics jumped into the boiling set. AIMIM fanatic and Lok Sabha MP Assauddin Owaisi spoke of the “gandi galeech filum” the other day.

The second most important slogan around which Narendra Modi has been reaping political dividend since the general elections in 2014 is ‘Sabka Saath, Sabka Vikas’ (support for all, development for all), but the data released by various organizations ahead of the World Economic Forum gathering in Davos speaks differently. The majority of the poor and middle class who voted for Modi in the elections have barely benefited under his rule, while the super rich one percent bagged 73 per cent of the wealth as of 2017. Six in ten persons in the country are somehow surviving on an income of less than $3.20 a day. The well-off are ten times richer now than in 1980, but those earning $2 a day now earn about $3. It is clear that wealth and money generated in this country is mostly for the super rich, with the rest getting mere assurances and slogans.

India in 2018 confronts mounting challenges of crisis proportions. Such challenges are products of the divide and misrule of the BJP-led NDA regime over a period of three years. Never ever in post Independent India the country faced such intense and devious polarisation in society, the magnitude of which was seen at the time of Partition of India following our Independence. The NDA regime is recreating such situation in a calculated manner for political gains and with an understanding that such a strategy brought them to power and yielded handsome electoral dividends. Twenty first century India getting tuned to the mediaeval era in terms of mobilisation of people on religious lines spells the worst danger to the secular fabric of our society, Constitution and nation.

You think you know the man – his cold efficiency and his investigative mind, a one-time no-nonsense top-cop of a metropolis of hard-cases and white collar criminals with a yen for a dollar and a date. Then suddenly, when he is off-guard, or rather when you are off-guard, the man flips and leaves you stunned with the classic “Since the man is seen on Earth he has always been a man” quote!

BHOPAL: Strange things are happening in Madhya Pradesh. Women generally are against liquor shops, bars and other such outlets. But in Madhya Pradesh just the opposite is happening.

Come January, all sorts of rent-seeking and lobbies start, demanding tax sops and other concessions in the General Budget. But the voice of underprivileged and poor, particularly farmers, who have been hit by an unprecedented crisis, is hardly heard as it is very feeble.

State Assembly elections to three north-eastern States – Tripura, Meghalaya and Nagaland – will be held next month. Tripura goes to polls on February 18, while Meghalaya and Nagaland on February 27. The results will be out on March 3. In the last five years the political scenario in the north-east has changed a lot, with the Congress declining and the BJP emerging as a major political player. In Arunachal Pradesh and Manipur, the BJP is in power while in Nagaland it was, until recently, a coalition partner of the ruling Naga People’s Front (NPF), The Congress is in power only in tiny Mizoram where the old warhorse, Lalthanhawla, still holds his flock together.

Even as the gau rakshaks have yielded place in the media headlines to the Karni Sena, the latter’s crusade against the screening of the Sanjay Leela Bhansali film, Padmavat, is giving a foretaste of what can be expected if and when India’s present constitutional order is replaced – God forbid! – by Hindu Rashtra.

Media persons witnessed 114 attacks against them across the country during the last three calendar years of 2014, 2015 and 2016 by the vested interests for fear of being exposed of their nexus with political-bureaucratic-builder class in power, corporate, bigots, extremists, militants and others by their reporting as watchdog of public interests, according to the latest data available in the National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB) in the Union Ministry of Home Affairs (MHA). During the period, cases registered against such attacks were under Sections 325, 326, 326A and 326B of the Indian Penal Code (IPC). However, no separate data is available on journalists killed, as is learnt from the MHA.