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An observer on Abdul Kalam Island may have seen a missile launch on March 11, which may have appeared similar to previous launches. If the observer had paid closer attention, she would have noticed it was actually the tenth test of the Agni V missile, India's first intercontinental ballistic missile capable of reaching the heart of China. The true significance of the launch was concealed within the nose cone of the missile and spectators wouldn’t have guessed it.

Three developments in one week – one positive and the other two, negative. The first was the Supreme Court order directing the State Bank of India to submit to the Election Commission by March 12 the details of electoral bonds for the Election Commission to put up on their website by March 15. This order came in the wake of the SBI’s appeal for time until June 30 to submit the details about the electoral bonds.

The worst fears of quid pro quo between purchasers of electoral bonds and beneficiary political parties in power, which the Supreme Court expressed elaborately in its judgment on the electoral bond scheme, have come true. It turns out that some of the largest bond purchases had been preceded by coercive action from enforcement agencies answering to the Modi government.

By announcing candidates for all 29 Lok Sabha seats in Madhya Pradesh, the BJP has taken the lead over the INDIA bloc, which is yet to declare all its candidates. The BJP leadership is taking advantage of the situation and is creating a hype over what it calls “winnability”. The two latest opinion polls – IndiaTV-CNX and News18 – have projected the BJP to win 29 and 28 seats respectively out of the total of 29 seats. The ground reality, however, indicates not an easy sweep but closer contests on all the seats.

India’s “biggest such survey”, unrolled on March 14, gave the Bharatiya Janata Party-led NDA ‘411’ seats, keeping Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s “400 paar" in mind. The “mega opinion poll” says the BJP alone will bag 350, 20 short of Modi’s ‘370’ brag. And, just so that the INDIA Block does not scream blue murder, it has given the combined opposition ‘105’, with the Congress alone predicted to win a handsome “just 49”.

During the 17th Lok Sabha elections held in 2019 from April 11 to May 19, there were 27 Muslim MPs in Parliament, slightly more than the 23 Muslim MPs in the previous 16th Lok Sabha elections. This proportion is still ranked as the second-lowest in India’s parliamentary history in relation to the country’s population.

There is a paradox at the core of the efflorescence of science that has occurred over the last millennium. In essence this efflorescence has the potential to increase human freedom immensely. It increases the capacity of man within the Man-Nature dialectic; scientific practice aims to go beyond the “given” not just in a once-for-all sense but as a perpetual movement through incessant self-questioning, so that this practice is potentially a collective act of liberation. But this promise of freedom remains significantly unfulfilled; and while its potential has not been realised, this efflorescence of science has been utilised to a great extent for domination by some over other human beings and other societies. The paradox lies in the fact that scientific practice that has the potential to increase human freedom has been utilised to increase domination, that is, to attenuate human freedom.

When politics on the ground is changing faster than a survey can comprehend, changing perhaps on a weekly basis, the opinion polls conducted a fortnight or a month ago lose their validity in the present time, even if we presume that they have been conducted in impartial manner. Therefore, the India TV-CNX opinion poll projecting NDA winning 78 out of 80 Lok Sabha seats from Uttar Pradesh, and the News18 opinion poll projecting that NDA will win 77 seats, cease to have any real value, since both were conducted in February 2024. The first fortnight of March has considerably changed the political scenario, which has the NDA and the BJP on tenterhooks, with the possibility of a much closer contest than it had to face in 2019. The Bahujan Samaj Party going solo has strengthened the INDIA bloc, which will be the sole challenger to the BJP and the NDA in Uttar Pradesh.

Was Union Home Minister Amit Shah keeping tabs on BJP Lok Sabha Members of Parliament all these gone five years? How about our vaunted Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who has been working 17-18 hours every 24/7, did he also put sniffer canines behind BJP MPs and Union ministers who had been the chosen candidates for the 2019 general elections? Now, five years hence, the Modi-Shah duo is culling sitting MPs from the 2024 list and finding replacements for them. Prime Minister Modi is confident his dream tally of ‘370’ will be met with a mixture of new and old names.

Law can be an instrument for good. It can also be a tool to undertake ‘warfare’ or ‘lawfare’, including by a government against its ‘own’ citizens in a democracy because democracy is not always about consent, it is as much about coercion. Kashmir stands as a starkly poignant example of a coercive democracy brought about by lawfare.