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As the year 2026 approaches, the issue of the delimitation of parliamentary and assembly constituencies is drawing public attention and controversy. This is the year when the freeze on the number of seats will end, and the next round of delimitation must be undertaken following the first census conducted after 2026. The 42nd Constitutional Amendment, enacted during the Emergency in 1976, initially froze delimitation. Later, under the Vajpayee government, this freeze was extended until 2026.

Just after the seventh round of talks between agitating farmers representatives of Punjab and the central delegation ended inconclusively on March 19, 2025, the Punjab Police came into action, arrested hundreds of protesting farmers from various places including from the protest sites at Shambu and Khanauri borders. Police from both the states Punjab and Haryana, are now bulldozing the structures that were created to prevent the farmers to march ahead to Delhi to press on their demands, chiefly a legal guarantee for Minimum Support Price for their crops.

NEW YORK: Can India follow the Chinese model with retaliatory tariffs against the US duties on Indian goods as US president Donald Trump, despite his bonhomie with Indian premier Narendra Modi, publicly declared that Indian tariffs on US products were among the highest and so why not increase the tariffs on Indian products.

A section of the former and current workers of Maruti Suzuki India Ltd. (MSIL) has been agitating against the carmaker’s alleged illegal and unethical labour practices for the last five months. Rallying under the aegis of the Maruti Suzuki Struggle Committee, the workers had been protesting peacefully in Haryana’s Manesar sitting on an indefinite dharna near Manesar DC office since September 18 last year, under the banner of their own collective titled Maruti Suzuki Struggle Committee (‘MSSC’). One of their main demands is equal pay for equal work.

The announcements of Musk's SpaceX-Starlink's tie-up with Jio Reliance (Jio is a trademark of Reliance Industries) and Bharti Airtel, the two dominant players, raise a number of questions. The two key questions are: i) Will it mean a greater monopolization in telecom services? ii) Will satellite spectrum be given to Starlink without auction? It also raises questions about whether such satellite spectrum, a country's critical resource, should be given out for commercial operations in this way.

“Sangh Saranam Gachchami”. Yes, after a long eleven years’ of insolence, Prime Minister Narendra Modi will be visiting the RSS headquarters at Nagpur on March 30 for meeting the RSS chief Mohan Bhagwat and paying his obeisance. In recent months Modi has been trying to send the message across the country and especially to the saffron ecosystem that he was a committed karyakarta (cadres) of RSS and had enormous respect for Bhagwat, but his authoritarian style of governance failed to make RSS leadership change their perception towards him.

The Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh is confused. Confusing 'glorification' with 'irrelevant' and vice versa, leaving everybody in the Sangh Parivar confused. RSS' top spokesperson Sunil Ambedkar couldn't clearly enunciate who are the glorifiers of Mughal Emperor Aurangzeb or why "glorification of Aurangzeb" is "irrelevant" to present times?

NEW YORK: The U.S. government is at war with Cuban doctors working in other countries. Currently, 24,180 Cuban healthcare providers, mostly doctors, perform duties in 56 countries. On Feb. 17, U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced sanctions directed at people associated with Cuba’s medical missions and declared none of them will be eligible for visas to enter the U.S.

LONDON: “The centrists in Labour are worried that an authentically left-wing rival party could emerge.”Thus the usually interesting Telegraph columnist Sherelle Jacobs, apparently channelling the apprehensions of Downing Street. Have the centrists — generous term by now — anything to be worried about? “Yes” would be the simple answer, not necessarily the longer one. As previously argued here, the Starmer government has exposed more of Labour’s left flank faster than any Labour government in history.

Narendra Modi has been heading the Indian government as the Prime Minister since 2014. He has made so far many observations about the delicate India-China relations in the last nearly eleven years, but his observations on this issue made to the American journalist cum researcher Lex Fridman in his podcast released on Sunday stand out as the most mature statement made by the Prime Minister till now on how to improve relations with China.