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Congress leader Rahul Gandhi is striving hard to exploit the issue of Pegasus to unite the opposition parties and also use it to revive the Congress which has virtually turned into a moribund organisation during the last five years.

Schools look deserted, barring a few that have been reopened. Liveliness and laughter of the innocent souls, the children, our future, are locked in their homes, while the country will be celebrating 75th Independence Day, on August 15, 2021, and then the whole year as 75th year of Independence. Government of India and many other institutions have great plans for the celebrations even when our children have been out of school for one an half year, suffering great loss of learning and even the essential mental ability.

India is a federation of states, or should it be called a union of states? The Constitution-makers made the Centre more powerful. Tamil Nadu Chief Minister MK Stalin prefers to call it ‘union government’. The Bharatiya Janata Party, which seems to believe that India came into being on May 26, 2014, is using the extra-strong Centre to forward the BJP agenda, the Sangh parivaar’s blueprint, for India, without the states putting spokes in the Centre’s wheel.

India on completion of 74 years of the Independence from the British colonial rule on August 15, 1947 projects a very grim picture with all the public institutions corroded, hollowed out and dashed from within so much so that they cannot stand up to provide theneeded checks and balances on the democratically elected Union Government much less safeguard people’s fundamental rights enshrined in the rule of law based Constitutional democratic governance. Government today is more ruthless and repressive than the pre-Independence era, police mostly corrupt, partisan and oppressive, justicefor general public elusive, unemployment, poverty, hunger, ill-health, mal nutrition, starvation remaining all time high and endemic. Fundamental rights to life, right to privacy of data, right to Internet, right to freedom, right to liberty, democratic rights, human rights are all decimated. Seemingly, government is out to make India a surveillance state.

In these Corona pandemic- plagued hard times, news that fast-paced railway travel between Kolkata and Dhaka megacities — the two biggest growing urban conglomerations in South Asia — may be reduced to four/five hours from 10/11 hours as of now, comes as a pleasant surprise. If ongoing construction work on major infra projects in Bangladesh runs on schedule, this remark able upgrading in bilateral traffic movement would be possible by March 2024, estimate Dhaka-based experts.

To say that Members of Parliament are having a gala time disrupting proceedings of the two houses would be wrong. Climbing atop tables, hurling paper missiles, throwing the rulebook at the Chair! These are not signs of MPs having a good time. These are indications of gross mistakes committed and the reactions they elicit. After all, even politicians are fathers and mothers, brothers and sisters, honest law-abiding citizens with anathema for wrongs.

Any decent individual would feel extremely hurt at the Rajya Sabha Chairman M Venkaiah Naidu breaking down and narrating his battered emotion that he could not sleep because of the sacrilege in the "temple of democracy" by some opposition MPs who had climbed on the table in the House.

Only a few days ago PM Narendra Modi had told business and industry that his government was going ahead with reforms for conviction and not compulsion. On August 11, his government got the General Insurance Bill passed in the Rajya Sabha amidst shocking scenes that paves the way for privatisation public sector insurance companies even as the entire opposition wanted a scrutiny of the wisdom of privatising the insurance sector by sending the legislation to a select committee.

One more year is gone since last August. A mirror image of last several years, with some unprecedented peaks like pandemic deaths, unemployment growth, investment scarcity leading to job loss, wage cut. Revision of labour laws has brought the classic proletariat back as he has nothing except the shackles. The process does not stop here. Proletarisation has usurped even the middle class that could afford at least their meals, educate children, have a house and healthcare. Now all these are luxury items. Except the few corporate houses, among them we could boast names that are on the list of fourteen richest in the world, the rest are lost in the lowest depths. Have we been pushed into the graveyard of humanity? The nine year old girl in the country’s capital, just a few days before the Independence Day, got molested, tortured and murdered. When they went to police, the parents of the child were denied even the opportunity to register an FIR. After the incident was taken up and publicised, only then the system woke up.

On August 15, 1947, India achieved independence, as struggles and sacrifices reached the ultimate. Since then, India has been marching to achieve several milestones in the development of infrastructure, science and technology, exploration of natural resources and creation of national assets including the Public sector enterprises. The contribution of the people, the farmers and workers, the intellectuals, researchers, scientific cadres were immense. From the situation of worst famines in 1942-43 in Bengal, and our dependence on PL 480, India had recovered to self- sufficiency to some extent in the farming sector for our needs, thanks to the trade union achievement of realising bank and insurance nationalisation with support from left and progressive forces, which played important role in these developments. This gave boost also for establishing medium, small and micro enterprises opening opportunities for livelihood for millions. The public sector became fulcrum of development.