News and Views

The last few years have seen an increase in verbal attacks on journalists directly by the ruling dispensation and more than directly by its Bhakt Brigade. Prime Minister Narendra Modi has clearly articulated his disdain for a large section of national media on more than one occasion.

If Modi called journalists news traders, his motor mouth minister General VK Singh called them ‘presstitutes’. On social media, we often watch with shock and dismay, the way journalists, women in particular, are hounded by the Bhakt Brigade. Some of them fight back, most of them ignore, while there are some who simply break down.

Even as the government readies a national clean air programme to tackle the air apocalypse that grips over 100 cities and towns across the country every winter, questions are now being raised about the quality of data that is put out in public places by different state agencies.

Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina returned for a third consecutive term with a landslide victory after the election held on 30th December in Bangladesh. In a 300-seat Bangladesh Parliament, Sheikh Hasina’s party Awami League and its allies have won 288 seats while its arch-rival Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP) was decimated as they managed to win only seven seats. Awami League’s victory has given an opportunity to the party to chart a new path for Bangladesh driven by development and strengthening democratic institutions.

BNP, the main opposition that was in power twice (1991-96 and 2001-06), claimed the votes to be rigged and termed the polls as farcical and demanded fresh elections.

I first met His Holiness Ogyen Trinley Dorje in the summer of 2004\. One of two claimants to the title of the Seventeenth Karmapa, he had escaped to India from Tibet in the January of 2000. 

My audience was at the then modest Gyuto Monastery in Sidhbari, a small village near the Central Tibetan Administration’s base in Dharamsala. The soft-spoken and rather shy 19-year-old lama spoke almost exclusively through his interpreter, deflected questions about Tibetan autonomy and his own political role in exile, and modestly asserted that he was presently focused on his studies.

Gods have to abide by the Constitution of a country, even if it is in God’s own country. This is what Kerala Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan has reiterated by ensuring the entry of two women in their early 40s – Bindu and Kanakadurga – into the Sabarimala Ayyappa temple.

Thirty-four years after the ghastly anti-Sikh riots of 1984, former Congress MP Sajjan Kumar has been sentenced to jail for the rest of his life. The now 73-year-old was one of those who orchestrated the riots following Prime Minister Indira Gandhi's assassination by her Sikh bodyguards.

Those who lived to tell the tale wonder if that blood-curdling violence truly played out. Or is it just a recurring nightmare?

Narendra Modi and Donald Trump have both been accused of autocratic behaviour. Since their coming to office—five years and two years ago, respectively—each has attempted sufficient unilateral actions to justify the charge.

But which chief executive has actually succeeded in being domineering? It is ironic that Trump, who is presumed to be running a one-man show, has lost this contest. Modi is more successful at being an autocrat.

The newly-elected third Prime Minister of Bhutan, Lotay Tshering – since multiparty democracy and constitutional monarchy were introduced in 2007 – is on a 3-day visit India from 27 December.