2020

By now all of us have broken our hearts and moved between rage and despair at the merciless way in which our people are walking for miles back to their villages without adequate food, water or shelter. The two year old child pulling the sheet that covers her mother - trying to wake her up – but she does not move, for she is dead; the seven-month pregnant woman trudging down a highway and a young widow with her child who finally arrives ‘home’ but is compelled to live outside her village; (…)

by Prof Gull Mohammad Wani
The draft National Education Policy 2019 (henceforth DNEP) with Dr Kasturirangan as its chairman was placed in public domain for wider discussion by different stakeholders. The Covid-19 has meanwhile thrown new challenges to all spheres of life including education at all levels. The two core issues that have gained visibility in these disturbing times are: one, that everybody is looking towards state for resolution of problems giving rise to the idea of (…)

by L. K. Sharma
Moody’s “spoils Modi’s historic day”, a daily screams. Moody’s pricks the Modi government’s balloon by downgrading India’s foreign currency and local currency long-term issuer ratings from Baa2 to Baa3 — the lowest rung in its investment-grade rating system. It points to “the risks of a sustained period of relatively low growth, significant deterioration in the general government fiscal position and stress in the financial sector.”
The report did not plunge India into (…)

Contents Mainstream Weekly, May 30, 2020
LETTER TO THE READERS - COVID 19 Lockdown Edition no.10 Government’s Package is Not What is Immediately Needed| Arun Kumar PM’s financial package took Indians for a huge ride and committed a statistical fraud Dipankar Bhattacharya Feel a little shame for the lost soul of a nation | Avay Shukla Deconstructing Telinipara Violence in West Bengal | Kumar Sen Celebrating the Goa Statehood Day | Eduardo Faleiro Ready for a (…)

Today is May 30, 2020. A year ago Narendra Modi Government returned to power with a lot of fanfare. Today the PM, and Union Home Minister Amit Shah, have, while recalling the past year, sought to blow their trumpets in two major national dailies in a bid to highlight the ’achievements’ of the Modi 2.0 again bringing into focus the contours of ’self-reliant advance of the country’ under the Modi-Shah dispensation.
In contrast, what the Leader of the Opposition in the Rajya Sabha (…)

Indian Society is in a crisis is an understatement; it is in dire straits. Millions are migrating from cities to their villages in extreme conditions and many have died on the way. The health situation brought about by COVID-19 is not under control with the number of cases detected and numbers dying on the rise. Unemployment is acute and the economy is in a deep depression, something it has not witnessed ever before.
All this requires society, the collective, to pull itself up from the (…)

A monumental fraud was pulled off when PM claimed in his televised address that an extra 10 per cent of the GDP would be spent to overcome the crisis induced by the pandemic and the lockdown
by Dipankar Bhattacharya
While preaching his gospel of treating the COVID-19 pandemic crisis as an opportunity and outlining his latest rhetoric of an Aatmanirbhar Bharat in his televised address on May 12, Prime Minister Narendra Modi dropped some big numbers.
He announced a package worth around (…)

The Lock Down Diaries —VIII
View from [Greater] Kailash, Thursday, 21 May 2020
by Avay Shukla IAS
This is not about the sorry exodus of millions of our more unfortunate brothers and sisters playing out on prime TV these days. It is not a piece about the government, or about politics or economics. It is neither critical nor sacerdotal. It is not about Mr Modi or the Biblical scale suffering he has inflicted, yet again, on those who had put their trust in him. That is a matter between (…)

While the public attention is focused on the spread of the coronavirus, Telinipara, a locality in the Bhadreswar town of Hooghly district in West Bengal, witnessed anti-Muslim communal violence.
Reportedly, a small inter-community squabble broke out on May 10, 2020, in the locality, which was resolved by police intervention. A Ground Report, carried in The Wire stated that “on the afternoon of...May 12, a big mob descended on the locality and large-scale targeted violence followed”. The (…)

On May 30 we celebrate the Goa Statehood Day. Goa was liberated from the colonial rule in December 1961. After Liberation a major controversy arose as to whether it should remain a separate territory or should merge into a neighbouring State, Maharashtra or Mysore. In 1967, an Opinion Poll was held, the only such referendum in independent India. It decided that Goa, Daman and Diu should remain a separate entity with the status of an Union Territory. Thereafter all the three major political (…)