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“Of course, you were not spreading rumours, the charge is you were spreading facts.” That’s the blurb on an RK Laxman cartoon of 1962, 60 years ago. Today’s cartoonists should take a kerchief out of Laxman’s pocket-cartoons. Lampooning is serious business. It should tickle the cerebral cells. The sarcasm should be biting, and the honest truth should not be lost in the caricaturing.

After three decades of political success across the length and breadth of the country from the west to the north to the centre to the north-east, the Hindutva juggernaut led by the BJP has run into heavy weather.

There is nothing to be surprised about the continuous exit from the Indian stock market by foreign portfolio investors (FPIs). It has been going on for the last several months. The market is overheated. It has been out of sync with the country’s economic growth since 2017 and corporate performance in general. On paper, India’s stock market is very large, probably the world’s largest. Yet, the daily stock trading covers barely five to six percent of the listed stocks. The FPIs, the biggest speculators in the Indian market, have suddenly become cautious about their investments in stocks due to uncertain conditions in the local as well as global markets.

Surging food costs in South Asia, a region populated by more than one-third of the global poor and where one-fifth of calories come from wheat products, pose significant challenges to poverty alleviation and food security. The World Bank’s projection of downside risks to the economic outlook of the region presents even more alarming situation which includes adverse geopolitical developments, the possibility of even-higher inflation, tighter financing conditions, the re-emergence of stress in the financial sector, and the resurgence of the COVID-19 pandemic, all in an environment of high debt levels and worsening current account positions of the countries.

How the President of India is elected? The Election Commission has notified the election of India’s next President 0n July 18. A look at the voting procedure, how the votes of MLAs and MPs are weighted, and how, previous elections have played out?

One Saturday morning in November 2020, Dimitris Choulis, a human rights lawyer native to the Greek island of Samos, woke to a message informing him that twenty-four asylum seekers had landed on the beach.

Two judgments of great significance delivered by the Bombay High Court in the last three years indicate a trend of understanding the Code of Criminal Procedure (‘CrPC’) as per the Constitutional framework of “due process of law” in Article 21 of the Constitution. This is a welcome trend, since the right to life is one of the most precious of all rights granted by the Constitution, which ought to inform the interpretation of all laws in India.

The spate of violence that erupted across the country, in which two persons lost their lives in Ranchi on Friday is an ugly blot on the fabric of inclusive India. It ought to not have occurred in the first place. This has provided wide space of manoeuvring by the Hindutva forces who were forced to bite dust in the wake of Muslim world rising in protest against the insinuation to Prophet by the BJP spokesperson Nupur Sharma.

Lopping off anybody’s head in the best of Islamist traditions isn’t for India. And no amount of rioting can change that. But frustration has to spill. And so it did. High up in the sky, above Bengaluru, a grotesquely strung up Nupur Sharma effigy, hanging from an overhead cable, pointing an accusing finger at Prime Minister Narendra Modi, and the Government of India.

The alterations taking place in the natural world are becoming patently obvious to all of us. Erratic weather patterns, rising sea levels and melting glaciers due to climate change are reshaping societies across the globe, and this holds true for India too. Global warming induced by human activity is predicted to be around 1.0°C over pre-industrial levels, with a likely range of 0.8°C to 1.2°C. If current trends continue, global warming will likely hit 1.5°C between 2030 and 2052.