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Chennai: KY Ahamed led a 1-2 finish for Petronas TVS Racing while Rajiv Sethu recorded his first win of the season and Sarvesh Balappa his fifth in a row in their respective categories after the third round of the Indian National Motorcycle Racing Championship at the Madras International Circuit, here on Saturday.

New Delhi: After a break of two years, the Premier Badminton League (PBL) is back and will kick start from 17th December.

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.