- Modi government has failed on all fronts, it has no option but play the communal card
Sanjukta Basu, in an article for DailyO writes that Modi’s speech at Azamgarh was not just another normal campaign speech. It was a frantic display of sheer panic. He came across as a ruthless autocrat enraged and crippled with fear of losing power. He trembled with rage, his voice shrill, eyes popping out, wrinkles on the forehead, eyebrows twitched.
Modi continues to stoop lower and lower even as the entire country calls out his bluffs and condemns his actions which are unbecoming of the office he holds. Not only are the content of his speeches in bad taste and full of blatant lies and misinformation, even his body language and mannerism have become bizarrely threatening and provocative.
BJP’s 2014 election campaign was a refreshing change. They mainly fought on development agenda. But the pretence was dropped soon after coming to power. Initially, it was the fringe elements, which started giving out the message that nothing has changed in the BJP camp, a theocratic homogenous Hindu Rashtra was still their main agenda.
The line between fringe and core has now been fully wiped out.
- #Everywhere – Decoding the hashtag
In his column for The Times of India, Santosh Desai says that in the digital world, perhaps none is as ubiquitous as the hashtag. In a short time, the # has become part of our vocabulary, framing our exertions on the internet with its inventive functionality. We hashtag words to infuse them with a new powerful meaning, and convert them from mere words to potential junctions teeming with life.
In the leaderless world of social media, particularly Twitter and Instagram, who gets the right to start a conversation and how do others get to participate? The hashtag creates opportunities for structures to form organically. People gravitate to hashtags, crowds build. The hashtag is a way of creating order in a torrent of chaos that is social media.
One can think of the hashtag as a gathering spot that allows the otherwise commonplace to become attention-getting. The hashtag helps compress complex subjects into something graspable and help create circulation. While the hyperlink transports us somewhere else, the hashtag connects us all back to the same place, the mothership, so to speak.
When we think of innovations, we usually think in terms of technology or processes, not that often of language or in this case, a tiny symbol. Give me a fulcrum, and I will move the world, Archimedes is rumoured to have said. Probably talking about a hashtag.
- Towards Hatistan
Commenting on Union defence minister, Nirmala Sitharaman’s statement during a press conference on Friday, Minni Chatterjee writes in her column for The Telegraph that what the minister said had nothing to do with her weighty portfolio but was a declaration of war, all right. The ostensible target was Rahul Gandhi but it was also a thinly veiled warning to India’s minorities and secular liberals to brace for vicious attacks in the run-up to the 2019 general elections.
She came out with a dire warning. “I would also like to say that it will be the Congress’s responsibility if we see incidents of communal disharmony between now and 2019.” Coming from one of the senior-most ministers in the cabinet, that was an astounding remark. A fundamental responsibility of any government is to ensure law and order, and safeguard social harmony.
And the Bharatiya Janata Party today rules not just at the Centre but in a majority of the states. Yet, here was a minister meting out a bald threat to minorities, and making it clear that communal polarization was on the anvil. The Congress was just a stand-in for all minorities and liberals; its so-called “appeasement” just a ruse to send a message to the troll armies and Hindutva cadres to go for the kill.
The alacrity with which the defence minister and the prime minister seized upon a fallacious news report to dub the Congress a “Muslim party” makes the BJP’s game plan obvious. For all the talk of “development”, the party has clearly decided to bank on communal polarization as the leitmotif of its general election campaign.
- India’s adultery laws violate the right to privacy. Tradition cannot justify them
Adultery laws fall foul of two crucial constitutional parameters, writes Sruthisagar Yamunan in his article for Scroll.in. One, it is settled that any legal provision, whether enacted before or after the adoption of the Constitution, must satisfy the values of the Constitution. Tradition and popular morality cannot trump constitutional morality.
Two, criminalising adultery denies an individual bodily autonomy by placing a penal restriction on choosing a sexual partner, which is considered the most intimate of decisions a person can make. It, thus, violates a fundamental right by undermining the concept of consensual sex, which is not a criminal offence otherwise.
Do India’s adultery laws pass the test of the right to privacy as articulated by the Supreme Court? Decisional autonomy and, by extension, bodily and sexual autonomy are integral to the right to privacy. This being so, restricting two consenting individuals, married or not, from exercising this right runs counter to the Constitution. To invoke tradition to justify such restrictions also falls foul of the fundamental tenets of constitutional interpretation, under which constitutional morality supersedes popular morality.
In India, given last year’s authoritative judgement on the right to privacy, it is imperative that adultery be decriminalised.
- Becoming Pakistan?
Mahommed Ayoob writes in his column for The Hindu that the response to Congress leader and Lok Sabha MP Shashi Tharoor’s recent reference to the danger of India being turned into a “Hindu Pakistan” has been a concerted attempt at misinterpreting it as maligning Hindus. What Mr. Tharoor was warning about is that if the current political dispensation continues beyond 2019, it will turn India into an intolerant majoritarian state just like Pakistan.
Mr. Tharoor was pointing out the grave danger that this ideal faced with the continuation of the expressly Hindu nationalist BJP in power. The wave of lynchings of Muslims and Dalits on the suspicion that they were eating beef is one symptom of this malaise.
What is worse is the governing elite’s condoning of such acts as the recent action of Union Minister Jayant Sinha has demonstrated. The feeling of insecurity and discrimination among the minorities, especially Muslims, is now palpable.
To construe such a warning as an act of treachery is an indication of how low Indian politicians can stoop in their partisan assaults. This was to be expected of the BJP as it was the target of Mr. Tharoor’s criticism.