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India today stands at a dangerous place with the founding values of our secular, democratic and republican Constitution coming under flagrant assault from prejudiced ideas, acts of prejudice, discrimination and violent incidents, all planned and orchestrated as part of anti-constitutional political project of RSS Pariwar governments at the Centre and States. Today seeking justice is a sin, facts are crimes, and democracy is best served by judicial arbitrariness, judicial inconsistency and judicial anarchy. Higher judiciary, High Courts and the Supreme Court, largely function as Executive Courts. Some recent judgments of the Supreme Court have overturned the oft held time tested criminal jurisprudence to uphold and protect civil liberty and fundamental right to life of citizens that an accused continues to be innocent till proven guilty on its face, putting the burden of proof on the accused that he/she is innocent. This could happen only in autocracy and not in the rule of law based system of constitutional democracy.According to a retired apex court judge, Justice Madan B. Lokur, “the Supreme Court seems to be accepting what the executive wants it to accept”.

As the country is celebrating the 75th anniversary of independence, it’s an irony of history that the RSS, which remained loyal to the British, is now trying to appropriate the legacy of our secular and inclusive struggle for independence. Seventy-five years ago, our country reached an important milestone, when people of the country got liberated from the clutches of British colonialism. Our independence was the result of a century-long sustained mass struggle, with many streams of political thoughts and ideologies merging in opposition to British rule and liberated the masses from British oppression.

Mario Fiorentini, the last surviving partisan of the anti-fascist battalion in Italy died on August 8 at the ripe age of 104..He was born in 1918 in the last days of World War 1 and fought his most important battles after the Wehrmacht invaded his native Rome on September 8, 1943. He had early in life shown the spirit of rebellion; his father was a nonreligious Jew, and when, in 1938, Benito Mussolini’s regime proclaimed the antisemitic Racial Laws banning “mixed-race” marriages and the employment of Jews in public functions, the young Mario went to a rabbi saying he wanted to convert to Judaism; the cleric warned him against it.

During the one year under the Talibanrule in Afghanistan, girls are more isolated, hungry and sad- often go to bed without food, 46 percentof whomsay they’re not attending school compared with 20 percentof boys, according to a study, ‘Breaking Point: Life for Children One Year Since the Taliban Takeover’, by an NGO, Save the Children International. The Taliban had captured power in Kabul on 15 August 2021. The research study finds that 97 percent of families have been struggling to provide enough food for their children while girls are eating less than boys. Almost 80 per cent of children go to bed hungry in the past 30 days (study period). ‘Chill penury’ and economic distress are emblematic in the troubled Afghanistan.

Some may disagree but India has failed to cash in on its spirited struggle for freedom from over-a-100-year-old British Raj to convert the country into an abode of peace and prosperity for its citizens in the last 75 years. Official claims apart, India continues to be a poor country with almost 280 million people or 20 percent of its population living in poverty. The country’s demographic failure far overtakes its economic success in select areas.

Bihar Chief Minister Nitish Kumar had once told a national daily that if a man was true to himself and to his country, he can become Prime Minister in his 70s! Kumar, born in 1951, is now in his 70s. Also, seldom does one man raise the spirits of more than half the nation, which the “then” Bihar Chief Minister did when he snapped JD(U) ties with the BJP, and the “now” Bihar Chief Minister is fully ready to challenge Prime Minister Narendra Modi for the PM’s post come 2024.

On August 7, 2022, Progressive International Council member Gustavo Petro became the first left-wing president in the history of Colombia. In an address to the nation that was marked by his sense of history and vision for a new Latin America, Petro elaborated on his personal struggles and how it became a part of Columbia’s long battle for a fair society, doing away with the decades of domination by the US companies, drug mafia and oligarchs.

One liner puzzling remark from Nitish Kumar, after being sworn in chief minister, “the person who came to power in 2014 will not come back in 2024” while has brought about a major shift overnight in the political culture and dynamics of the country, his divorcing the alliance in Bihar has put the Modi government in a vulnerable situation about the functioning of the Rajya Sabha.

The post-colonial state in India had two primary tasks before it: one was to overcome the hegemony of metropolitan capital, so that a development strategy in relative autonomy from imperialism could be pursued; the second was to attack landlordism both to free the agrarian population from its clutches, and to increase agricultural output for rapid industrialisation based on a growing home market. These two tasks were interlinked: unless agricultural growth was stepped up considerably by attacking landlordism, the inflationary and balance of payments pressures associated with a relatively autonomous development strategy would keep overall growth constrained, generating social contradictions that would force an eventual capitulation before imperialism.

Indian democracy presently suffers from its lack of a strong Opposition. Some feel that the secret weapon of Prime Minister Narendra Modi's success is the divided Opposition.