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CPI(M)'s West Bengal unit secretary Md. Salim’s assertion that the CPM will not campaign for INDIA bloc candidates in the 2024 general elections in West Bengal has landed state Congress leaders in more than a spot of bother for good reason.

For the last few years, the Narendra Modi-led Government has been empowering itself through changes in various laws relating to crime and evidence to such an extent that it can arbitrarily apply certain laws to raid, arrest, seize, detain, prosecute – even pardon anyone it may like to. The passage of three Bills – the Bharatiya Sakshya (Second) Sanhita, the Bharatiya Nagarik Suraksha (Second) Sanhita, and the Bharatiya Nyaya (Second) Sanhita – in the Lok Sabha on December 20, 2023 is the latest in the series, and which were summarily cleared through a voice vote.

Khela Hobe! That is West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee taking a direct hit at the opponent’s goal post at the fourth INDIA meet in Delhi on December 19. Mamata pitted Congress President Mallikarjun Kharge against BJP’s public face Narendra Modi. With that, the 2024 Lok Sabha elections would be a one-on-one one act play between the "unbeaten" and the "invincible".

Governors in Opposition-ruled states are becoming tools for the ruling party at the Centre to advance its political agenda and to create difficulties for the concerned state government for implementing its welfare programmes and development schemes.

Our democracy has lost each of its basics. From the recent crisis that proved to be an assault on not only federalism, but also its most relevant constitutional principles. The Supreme Court judgment on the abrogation of Article 370 of the Constitution and the dismantling of the state of Jammu and Kashmir into two union territories was itself a case of a constitutional court condoning the misuse of powers by the executive. Four years after the event, the three concurrent judgments of the five-judge Constitution bench, headed by the Chief Justice of India, have larger and long-lasting implications that strike at the roots of federalism and states’ rights.

No sooner than the Opposition found itself an opening, and the moral high-ground, after the suspension of 143 MPs of the Lok Sabha and Rajya Sabha, and on the threshold of gaining voter-sympathy, it found itself down by a self-goal. This by a three-time Trinamool Congress MP from Serampore, who also happens to be the Chief Whip of the Trinamool Congress Parliamentary Party in the Lok Sabha.

AAP Convener and Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal’s assertion in the December 19 INDIA Block Meet in Delhi about the need of either a Convener or PM face, and his impromptu support for TMC chief Mamata Banerjee’s proposal to make Congress President Mallikarjun Kharge’s name as Prime Minister face for the opposition alliance is significant, since it reflects the willingness of Kejriwal to go ahead with the alliance in right earnest.

If you have a political bent opposed to the Prime Minister you might just as well sniff a sort of complicity between the Narendra Modi government and the International Monetary Fund (IMF).

The Narendra Modi Government’s decision to freeze the accounts of the news portal NewsClick through the actions of the Income Tax Department is nothing but the continuation of the organized attack by the central agencies on this leading news portal to make it dysfunctional before the Lok Sabha elections in 2024.The latest IT action has led to the blocking of the payments made by the NC leading to acute embarrassment to this organization which is known for its prompt payments to its consultants and contributors.

In early 1980s, a sixth semester mechanical engineering student at the Thangal Kunju Musaliar College of Engineering in Kerala’s Kollam district, made an unusual request to his Head of Department, F.V. Albin. He wanted the department to introduce an elective in population engineering. Such a course was then rare, if not non-existent, in the state and nobody in Albin’s department had the expertise to teach it.