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LUCKNOW: With Priyanka Gandhi Vadra staying away from Uttar Pradesh after worst ever performance in assembly polls, senior leaders and rank and file are in a state of restlessness. It would be worth mentioning here that Congress could manage to win only two seats out of the total of 403 assembly seats in the state with two percent vote share.

If the Congress chief Sonia Gandhi would have refused to listen to the suggestion of Rahul Gandhi to appoint Navjot Singh Sidhu as the Punjab Unit president or if she had initiated action against him once he launched tirade against the Punjab Congress chief minister Charanjit Singh Channi, the Congress would not have lost the game in that state. She had committed big mistake by allowing Sidhu to continue. Once again she has committed mistake by asking the disciplinary action committee to explore action against him for his anti party activities.

To Nartwar Bhai Parmar, 69, son Jingesh Mevani always seemed a bit too idealistic. “He would talk about bringing about a revolution and I would like to say such revolution happened only before 1947.” He would then say, “I am ready to go to jail. In a sense, he prepared us for the worst”, says Parmar, talking about the case that landed Mevani in custody of the Assam police.

Saffron Majoritarian politics has finally succeeded in achieving its mission of forcing the Muslims to withdraw from the mainstream life and go back to ruts. This is clearly manifest in the manner Muslims celebrated their greatest festival Eid this year. Diktat was issued by the BJP governments to perform namaz inside their houses. In one stroke the saffron rulers reduced a collective celebration into an insulated performance. The Muslims showed their perseverance by not making diktat a big issue.

May 4, Wednesday 5 am, the loudspeakers started blaring. One began, and the other followed. The first one with the ‘azaan’, the second one with the ‘Hanuman Chalisa’. It was Raj Thackeray going ahead with the Maharashtra Navnirman Sena’s ‘Hanuman Chalisa’ challenge to the Maha Vikas Aghadi government on its refusal to do a Yogi Adityanath in Maharashtra, i.e., mute or remove loudspeakers perched on the minarets of mosques across Maharashtra.

Press freedom in India is in crisis though there are over one lakh newspapers including 36,000 weeklies and 380 TV news channels. Such an abundance of outlets conceals tendencies toward the concentration of ownership while media in politically partitioned, journalists facing violence and authoritarian pressures, legal framework no more protective, economic context turning adverse, and sociological context carrying deep bias. No wonder, India, fell eight places in the World Press Freedom Index (WPFI) 2022 to be ranked 150 out of 180 countries in the world.

It is not a clamour yet, but there is growing awareness about the need for the judiciary to shed its elitist character. As both Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Supreme Court chief justice NV Ramana pointed out last week at the joint conference of chief ministers and high court chief justices, there is a growing disconnect between the courts and the common people as the former go about their business in a language and system that have remained alien to the common man.

One of the unfortunate recent developments has been that the right-wing Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)-ruled Union Government has been misusing the law much more brazenly than previous governments in general.

Can the judiciary be absolved of responsibility in the pendency of a huge backlog of cases? CJI NV Ramana says if anybody is to blame for the mess, it’s the entire bunch of governments, from the central to the states. The question then boils down to should his word be taken for gospel truth, case closed? Is he giving the judiciary the benefit of doubt, or even a clean chit?

Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) chief Mohan Bhagwat’s assertion that violence does not benefit anybody and the society to which violence is dear is now counting its last days is a jumla like his earlier jumlas. Bhagwat often comes out with some innovative like gimmicks which he himself contradicts later in his other statements.