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With the Modi government increasingly citing ‘policy’ to justify what it is doing, the Supreme Court has felt compelled to deprecate this tendency.

Is anything changing in Kashmir? The merchant selling bronze items in narrow streets of Lal Chowk was surprised by the question. He had no idea who I (this columnist) was. Seeing his discomfort, I introduced myself and asked him to speak freely. His reply was straight, “I have been coming since 1980, you can see the difference for yourself. My shop has plenty of inventory now. In front of you, two tourists have gone shopping. The road ahead is jammed. Even this time of the year, there are a lots of tourists. Who visits mountains in such large numbers during this rainy season”.

The Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme, popularly known as MGNREGA scheme is systematically being sabotaged. It is being financially throttled by the Centre in many ways – by reducing budgetary provisions, not releasing funds in time, and resorting to political expediency by alleging the states for corruption in the scheme while taking little or no appropriate action against the culprits who are violating even the fundamental rights to life, liberty, and equality before the law apart from violating the statutory provisions of the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (NREGA) 2005.

Over the last two weeks, the Opposition is disrupting the Lok Sabha on the grounds of high LPG price and GST on pre-packaged food items as factors behind inflation. And on August 5, Reserve Bank of India (RBI) increased the repo rate by 50 basis points to 5.4%.However, my take on current bout of inflation is different; contribution of LPG and GST to inflation (read, CPI number) are minimal and the hike in repo rate will be less consequential in taming inflation.

While Narendra Modi’s buddies and his Andha Bhakts have been striving hard to project him as one of the most visionary political leader India has ever produced, his actions portray a different picture that strengthen the impression of his being a leader who does not possess the basic element of political dogmas and also lacks the honest insight of vision.

Men and women in black. The women outdoing the men in scaling police barricades. Especially Priyanka Gandhi Vadra. The nationwide protests were against price rise; unemployment, and GST on “dahi and dhood” and other food items. Not surprisingly, the presser earlier in the morning made no mention of price rise, unemployment or GST. Wayanad MP Rahul Gandhi dwelt on ‘darr’ and how the Congress was not afraid of Modi’s ‘darr’.

The way police are running berserk against innocent citizens, arresting them, framing them, implicating them under dreaded laws, incarcerating them, extorting them to make money, abusing their power of arrest, in violation of their service conduct rules, in defiance of the Constitution of India that assures fundamental rights to life, personal liberty, dignity, justice, equality, with malicious prosecution of innocents, all exemplify that democracy is dead in the country and there is no rule of law based system of constitutional democratic governance. There is no accountability of police to the people for misconduct, misdemeanor, partisan, unfair and malicious prosecution of innocents. In this context, checks and balances provided for in the institutions set up in the scheme of the Constitution are all non-functional as they are working, if at all, to serve the fascist union government’s design, where only anti-people and anti-poor decisions are taken.

New Delhi: In an edge of the seat match, India went down fighting to Australia 0-3 in penalty shootout after playing 1-1 draw in at the end of the regulation period in the semifinal of the Women's Hockey tournament at the Commonwealth Games in Birmingham.

Mamallapuram: Tania Sachdev and R,Vaishali chalked out hard fought victories to enable Indian women's A team beat sixth seed Azerbaijan with a 2.5-1.5 for their seventh successive win to maintain their sole lead in 14 points at the 44th Chess Olympiad here on Friday.

New Delhi: IAs freestyle Wrestling made its debut at the Games, Olympic medallists Sakshi Malik (women’s 62kg) and Bajrang Punia (men’s 65kg) as well as Anshu Malik (women’s 57kg) and Deepak Punia (men’s 86kg) made it through to the finals thereby assuring the country of medals.