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LUCKNOW: Bahujan Samaj Party is the only opposition party which held the review meeting with all the 403 candidates contesting last assembly elections in Uttar Pradesh and started preparations for 2024 Lok Sabha polls. There is a great demoralisation in BSP leadership and workers after worst ever performance of Party in UP Assembly polls concluded in March when Party could win only one seat with total votes share of 12 per cent.

The Delhi police’s initial reluctance to book saffron activists for their hate speech against Muslims, and the centre’s certificate to the sedition laws before the Supreme Court, are typical signs of authoritarianism. Left unchecked, such an official attitude is bound to pave the way for an intolerant, pro-Hindu state.

THIRUVANANTHAPURAM: Kerala will pull out all the stops to frustrate any attempt to rip the fabric of communal amity and effect religious polarization. That is the unmistakable message emanating from the arrest and subsequent release of Kerala Janapaksham leader P C George for making vicious comments against the Muslim community at the Ananthapuri Mahasammelanam recently.

The declaration by the World Health Organisation (WHO) of 4.7 million as ‘excess’ Covid deaths over and above the officially acknowledged figure in India and the response of the Modi government to the report are both shocking, but not surprising. The WHO has resisted persistent opposition from the Indian government to finally release the report.

Now that the dust has settled, it is time to take cool look at why so many analysts keep getting elections predictions wrong. The key reason in my view is that they remain stuck in the past and continue to rely on the politics of caste, community and religion and region to reach their conclusions. But these factors lost their predictive power long back.

Malaysia has emerged as a potential external operations base for Hamas, the Islamist group that controls the Gaza Strip if Turkey expels or restricts the group’s movements as a part of its rapprochement with Israel.

Wikimedia Foundation (WMF), the organization that runs the free online encyclopedia Wikipedia, has stopped accepting cryptocurrency donations, the no-profit with a mission to bring free knowledge to all, said on May 1.

Random arrests of illegal Rohingya settlers from different Indian states remain a cause for concern among Indian security analysts. Mostly the detection of illegal aliens is more a matter of chance rather than the outcome of real time intelligence inputs.

The whole idea and ideal of secularism came decades later, but the day India decided to be a pluralistic society, with Hindu-Muslim-Sikh-Isai, all living under the same sky, that day India ensured it would be a communal cauldron for all times to come. Dr. BR Ambedkar was practical. He wanted to make a clean slate of the Partition—transfer of every Muslim ‘here’ to swap for every Hindu ‘there’, but other sense prevailed and the repercussions are being felt to this day.

Youth (age group 15-24) are almost five times more likely to be unemployed than adults across the Asia and the Pacific, and when they secure a work it is often in the informal economy with low wages and poor working conditions. After the COVID-19 pandemic, they are now facing additional labour market barriers with long-term repercussion for their earnings and life chances.