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The day after, and the day before’s anger hadn’t ebbed. Everybody had something to comment about Congress leader Rahul Gandhi’s disqualification. And none of them had full knowledge of the law that resulted in Rahul Gandhi‘s disqualification. American politicians, like Ro Khanna, who tweeted his anger, could be excused, but what about Indian Members of Parliament like Shashi Tharoor, who endorsed the ignorance of foreigners and gloated at the foreign criticism directed at the Modi government?

Overshadowed by the news of Rahul Gandhi’s disqualification from parliament, March 24 witnessed another unique parliamentary episode.

If not people, BJP will make Rahul Gandhi a leader by persecuting him. History has shown whenever a leader is persecuted as Rahul Gandhi is being done, he gets people’s sympathy. Wayanad MP Rahul has lost his Lok Sabha seat after being convicted of a criminal defamation by a Surat court. What happens now— the best—and worst-scenarios for him will be of interest.

Incumbent ruling dispensations disfranchising former rulers and banning them for life from contesting elections is something that one often associates with countries with fragile democracies. Indians are used to news about politicians losing their seats in parliament and being debarred from contesting elections on account of corruption and other offences from across the border rather than in their own country, where such instances are rare if not non-existent. Rahul Gandhi losing his parliament seat and being disqualified from contesting elections for six years in view of his conviction in the defamation case has in the eyes of the world lowered India’s prestige as the world’s largest democracy.

Now that the Federal Reserve, European Central Bank and Bank of England have all raised their policy interest rates to fight inflation, there might be further flutters in the financial sector and several other banks might be nervous about the future.

The Union Ministry of Finance in its Monthly Economic Review of February 2023 has not only defended again the highly debatable criterion of ‘one hour per week’ engagement of a workers in an economic activity being classified as employed by the Periodic Labour Force Survey (PLFS) conducted by the Union Minister of Labour and Employment, but also claimed that job market in India has been improving. However, the criterion misleads about the actual number of employments on the one hand, and the decelerating economic growth makes the claim of ‘improving labour market’ a suspect apart from on account of rising unemployment in the country from January 2023.

The grand old organization of Indian People’s Theatre Association (IPTA) concluded its three- day 15th national conference successfully in Daltonganj in Jharkhand deciding to preserve communal harmony, unity in diversity and peace throughout the country. The conference also highlighted that it is the need of the hour to speak out the truth so that the nation’s composite social fabrics and constitutional values would remain intact through intensifying art and cultural activities of IPTA at district, state and national levels.

There is nothing mysterious about the reasons for the collapse of the Silicon Valley Bank and the Signature Bank in the United States. There is also nothing mysterious about why the entire banking system of the capitalist world has come under a cloud: once some part of the system collapses, the other parts of it get saddled with “toxic” assets, which are nothing else but the liabilities of the collapsed part of the system, and hence become subject to a “domino effect”. The real issue is: how did US capitalism get into a situation where its banking system came under such severe strain? Since the collapse of these banks, especially of the SVB, is not an internal phenomenon but is reflective of a systemic contradiction, what exactly is this contradiction?

Barely thirteen months before the 2024 Lok Sabha elections, Bihar and Uttar Pradesh, which together contribute 120 seats out of the total of 543 seats in the Lok Sabha, the political campaigning and organizational activities are most manifest in the BJP camp while the Bihar Mahagathbandhan parties as also Samajwadi Party in Uttar Pradesh are still not equally active.

What is ‘understanding’ an utterance and what is ‘misunderstanding’? The answer is obvious – if someone understands exactly the same as to what was uttered is ‘understanding’ and if someone derives any other meaning is ‘misunderstanding’. Congress MP Rahul Gandhi’s conviction for two years of imprisonment with a fine of Rs 15,000 is clearly a case of ‘misunderstanding’ his utterance which was in fact targeted against Prime Minister Narendra Modi as a public servant who love to be called himself Pradhan Sevak of the Country, but not understood as such by one complainant BJP MLA and former minister of Gujarat Purnesh Modi and Chief Judicial Magistrate of Surat H H Varma.