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Last Thursday was a painful day. That day saw deaths of two of very different Muslims. In the Nagpur jail at seven in the morning a man named Yakub Abdul Razak Memon was hanged. A few hours later, in Rameswaram, another man named Abul Pakir Jainulabdeen Abdul Kalam, a great son of India, was buried with fanfare and ritual ceremony of full state honours. No camera was allowed to record hanging of Memon, a Bombay serial blast convict. The burial of the former President Kalam, also known as missile man, took place in full glare of day light.

International concern is growing over increasing illegal trafficking in men, women and children in South Asia, particularly in Bangladesh and West Bengal.

LUCKNOW: Uttar Pradesh Kisan Sabha has decided to launch state-wide agitation and create public awareness programme to press for demands related to farmers suffering due to apathy of Akhilesh Yadav government.

THIRUVANANTHAPURAM: The Congress leaders in Kerala never tire of proclaiming their ‘utmost respect’ for the judiciary. But the hollowness of their claims was exposed when they went ballistic against a High Court judge who strongly criticised the functioning of the office of the Advocate General.

The Gurdaspur terror attack on Monday has brought to the focus once again India’s internal security and also external threat. The fact that terrorists from across the border entered in broad daylight and killed innocent civilians and police personnel is a wake up call to strengthen intelligence network as well as the police force.

Gold is back in the news for the fall in its price both within the country and globally in recent days. Once derided by the celebrated economist John Maynard Keynes as “the relic of a barbaric age’, the charm this inert metal exercises in the minds of millions is mesmeric even in a country where cutting across status people hold on to gold and get it associated with their daily life in one form or another or in one function or another. As the demand for the yellow metal has over the years been quite out of proportion to the capacity to produce within the country, the yellow metal import has been the bane of India’s balance of payments position particularly more recently in the year 2013-14 when import of gold shot up astronomically. So any decline in the price of gold is construed as a breather for the managers of the economy as they could husband resources for productive investment in place of expending on costly and wasteful import of the yellow metal that is a sure-fire road to economic disaster.

Why is the BJP-led NDA government pursuing so keenly an unfinished Sonia Gandhi-Manmohan Singh agenda to have a free trade agreement (FTA) with the European Union (EU), which has been trying to have a free access into India’s burgeoning consumer market since 2007? India stands to gain little from such an arrangement. With its limited and mostly low-cost, low-technology small-value-added export basket, India can at best make only a tiny inroad into the EU market known for its preference to high quality products at competitive prices. On the contrary, EU, a hub of global high-technology products from automobile, transport and power equipment to wine and hi-fashion, can flood the Indian market with its world class wares and unsettle the current trade balance between the two markets.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s appeal to the people of Bihar to vote the BJP for bringing about a parivartan (change) at his July 25 rally in Muzaffarpur reminded similar promise of change made by the TMC chief Mamata Banerjee in 2010 for ouster of the CPI(M). There was a similarity in the tone of the two appeals but Modi’s appeal was different in one way as he asked for an opportunity to serve Bihar. This simply reinforces the impression that his seeking a chance was not merely admission of his failure to keep his promise made during the Lok Sabha elections but more than that the lingering threat perception of losing his grip on the party.

What is going right with the Modi Government, and what has gone wrong with its rule now into the second year? It took only one year not only to frustrate voter expectations but also raise apprehensions of its divisive approaches worsening the state of polity overall, reflected in some social upheavals, saffronisation of educational and cultural institutions, and an authoritarian style of governance for all to see.

The infamous BJP leader Subramanian Swamy again captures the headline for all the wrong reasons. The unapologetic ultra-right wing leader was accused of delivering a “hate-speech” in Kaziranga University in the province of Assam leading to issuance of a non-bailable warrant against him by the local court. Swamy, with his characteristic swagger and lime-light hogging gestures did not appear to the local court. Instead he directly appealed to Supreme Court “challenging” the very notion of hate speech as unconstitutional. Though Swamy is not the first person to have argued that Indian Penal Codes regarding hate speech goes against the constitutional guarantee of free speech, his current political stature with regards to the nation’s own political equations makes this case a high profile one bringing the query regarding validity of hate speech laws in the fore-front.