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The Composition of Rajya Sabha will soon mirror Lok Sabha giving an advantage to the ruling BJP. Though it might reach double digits, it will not gain the majority yet. Stakes are high for the BJP and the opposition parties because of the upcoming Presidential and vice-presidential polls in June – July. Obviously, any changes in the composition of state assemblies will impact the Rajya Sabha, called the House of Elders.

Navjot Singh Sidhu has been sent to the Patiala Central Jail to serve a year-long sentence in a case of road rage, registered in 1988. It took more than three decades for the Indian judicial system to convict and sentence a person whose felony was never in doubt; even the accused had accepted it all along. The argument that Sidhu had been making was that he didn’t intend to kill the person. The victim got killed by a mild blow of his fist that he never thought could kill someone.

The #MeToo movement was also about correcting the ‘wrongs of history’ in which powerful men got to get their comeuppance for bad deeds done decades ago. Those out of the ambit of #MeToo cheered and clapped, and the #MeToo survivors a sense of justice, and closure— happy ending to a lingering chapter.

A Hindi couplet by an unknown writer has been going viral on social media recently. Its English translation goes thus, “Birds feed on grains at the temple, and drink water at the mosque/I have heard that Radha’s stole is sewn by one Salma Begum/One Rafi used to sing ‘Raghupati Raghav’ at all gatherings/One Premchand used to recite ‘Idgah’ to children/…Where others would see Hindu or Muslim, I see the human in them…” This aptly describes the idea of a secular India.

Why may one study Rammohun Roy (1772-1833), a contemporary of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770-1831) while studying Karl Marx (1818-1883) today? Some of the burning issues addressed by Rammohun Roy have remained with us since his time and, some others that had seemed to have been overcome, have come back with a renewed vengeance. Rammohun Roy was one of the makers of that Victorian England (Zastoupil 2010), in which Karl Marx lived and worked.

Sitting abroad and lashing out at the government, is not going to help the Opposition win the people at home over to its side. The ploy will boomerang even before the opposition leader tightens his seat belt on the return flight. Similarly, a pair of journalists writing anti-Modi pieces in the New York Times, and the Washington Post, isn’t going to win elections for the Congress.

COVID-19 crisis triggered school closure in India has induced learning poverty to such an extent that the country is set to suffer the worst in South Asia in absolute terms both in respect to jobs loss and decline in GDP, which in turn may accelerate each other creating together a vicious circle of shrinkage in both.

The one significant outcome of the Congress’s recent Chintan Shivir in Rajasthan was Rahul Gandhi’s acknowledgement that the party has lost touch with the people. Nothing demonstrated this disconnect more than the steep fall in the party’s Lok Sabha tally to 44 in 2014 and 53 five years later.

The decision by the Supreme Court this week that the powers of the Centre and the States to legislate on GST-related issues are equal debunks the idea that the Centre can ride roughshod over the states, as it has been happening to a large extent. The court’s judgment also strengthens the cause of the states, which have been complaining about the Centre’s unfair practices.

As India observes the 250th birth anniversary of Rammohan Roy, one of the earliest and greatest campaigners for modern India, on May 22, 2022, we are faced with one of history’s cruel ironies. The incumbent regime is pushing 21st century India into revenge-fuelled mass violence by distorting history and using the perceived wrongs committed by the Mughal dynasty that ruled India some three centuries ago. This paradoxical backdrop should help us appreciate the true significance of the battle that Rammohan and his contemporary reformers had to wage in the early nineteenth century to popularise the vision of a modern India in the face of aggressive colonial rule on one hand and fierce social and ideological resistance from within India on the other.