Wordsmiths & Newsplumbers

  BY R.K. MISRA   Coincidence is a word best used when levers and pulleys- that levitate, gravitate and manipulate- remain unseen. So words and events need to be strung together to make cogent sense. Let’s try. Ahmedabad in Gujarat hosted the 84 th session of the All India Congress Committee (AICC) on April 8 and 9 for the first time after 64 years. For long the party had avoided taking the bull by the horns. It decided to strike in Narendra Modi and Amit Shah’s heartland. Those who are aware of the regulated retaliation and flexible response that follows any foray into their homeland, did not have to wait for long. Call it corny coincidence, hustled happenstance or persisting pattern. Forty-eight hours later (April 12) the Enforcement Directorate(ED) announced that it has served notices to take possession of immoveable assets worth Rs 661 crores in Delhi, Mumbai and Lucknow- as part of a money laundering probe- belonging to Associated Journals Ltd.(AJL) that owns the Nat...

  BY R.K.MISRA Governments are greedy. Whether it is power, pelf or public wealth. Give them a land to helm and they seek the world to overwhelm.   Turn the gaze yonder, and the most powerful come into view.   Turn it nearer home and watch the executive straining every nerve and sinew!   How else would one have the Supreme Court into sharp focus for the second week going . ”Prayagraj demolitions inhuman, illegal, shock conscience, says SC, orders Rs.10 lakh for each”, screamed national headlines on April 2. And yet there seems no end in sight. On April 7, says the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, “There is a complete breakdown of rule of law in Uttar Pradesh”, after the Supreme Court comes across FIRs filed by the state police in civil cases. At the receiving end of the Supreme Court’s wrath was the Yogi Adityanath government and the Prayagraj civic body. ‘The act of demolition was not only illegal but also violative of the most important fundament...

  BY R.K. MISRA Poisoned percepts betray their own patterns. More so when policing, like poker, degenerates into the continuation of politics by other means. The Supreme Court of India, had harsh words for the Gujarat Police which should reverberate through the uniformed force countrywide. Quashing an FIR filed against Congress MP, Imran Pratapgarhi over his social media post with a poem “ Ae khoon Ke pyase baat suno ”,it ruled that the right of citizens to express themselves could not be trampled upon on” flimsy and fanciful” grounds. ”No offence is attracted” and police must understand the meaning of written and spoken words before registering a case in such matters, it noted.   The Apex Court on March 28 said the fundamental right to free speech through poetry, theatre, stand-up comedy, and satire must be cherished. The cops had charged the Congress MP with inciting discord through his poem on “suffering injustice with love”. The judgment came following an appeal fi...

  BY R.K. MISRA Vanity is the quicksand of reason .It sucks into the muck.   Many a glory seeking political gamble began with fanning dormant ambers only to find the fiery red of the flames descend on their dreams like the blackening haze of falling ashes.   What began as a face-off between the Centre and Tamil Nadu over the non-implementation of the 3- language formula as part of the National Education Policy (NEP) has now engulfed many more issues critical to the Southern states. Barring Chandrababu Naidu’s, Andhra Pradesh, all the others-Kerala, Karnataka, Telangana and Tamil Nadu have come together on a common platform. That the mounting disquiet amongst the Southern states of the country is crossing the bounds to engulf leaders of other opposition states as well as political entities should be cause for concern for the BJP- ruled Centre which is hobbling on the crutches of Naidu and Bihar chief minister Nitish Kumar. Both have been put on notice for their sil...

  18.3.25 BY R.K. MISRA Past pulverizes but future fascinates. If one harks back to bygones, the other is a harbinger of hope. No wonder predictors remain in high demand, from the commoner to the cash rich and street side palmists to gold gilded astrologers, even face and forehead readers.   Knowledge soaked academics and cost conscious corporates are not left behind either. They too fall back on their ‘neural networks’ and ‘decision trees’ for studiedly predictive models. One such study undertaken by a threesome of impeccable academic credentials sizes up three Indian states-Gujarat, Bihar and Tamil Nadu- and predicts their growth trajectory over the next 25 years. The study released in February 2025 and titled “The Challenge of contrasted regional dynamics” focusses on India and has been carried out by Dr. Christophe Jaffrelot, a senior fellow on India at Institut Montaigne, an independent think tank based in Paris. He is also a Senior research Fellow at CRI(Centre d...

  BY R.K. MISRA Does a red rag provoke a bull? No, it does not, for bulls are colour blind. It is the movement of the cloth that irritates them, causing them to charge. The idiom, however, lends itself to political adaptation. When individuals and entities concern themselves with surface political conflicts, they make the mistake of the bull in the ring-of charging the cloth-and hasten their own decimation. Headed for a 30 year long rule in Gujarat and half that time in the country, the BJP finds itself in precisely such a predicament in relation to Congress leader Rahul Gandhi . The worst in language has been used to denigrate a political opponent. The comments range from the fanciful to the farcical and distasteful to derogatory- morkhon ka sardar - mahagyani - pappu to fused tubelight and even hybrid calf- it is a never ending litany that speaks a tale of moral degradation in public life and the mental levels of the ruling guardians of culture, in particular. In stark co...