Daily Briefing: Latest on Manipur clashes; Kerala, Tamil Nadu top performers in Covid years, shows NITI Aayog’s health index; and more

🔴Taking note of the crisis in Manipur, United Nations Commissioner for Human Rights Volker Turk said that the violence revealed the “underlying tensions between different ethnic and indigenous groups”. He urged authorities to respond to the situation quickly by investigation and addressing the root cause of the violence.

⚡Only in the Express 

Kerala, Tamil Nadu and Telangana emerged as top performers among the ‘larger states’, while Delhi ranked at the bottom of the Union territories’ list, according to the NITI Aayog’s annual ‘health index’ for the Covid-19 year of 2020-21, The Indian Express has learnt. The report, which was to be out by December 2022, has not been made public yet.

📰 From the Front Page 

👉🏽A day after 20 Opposition parties decided to boycott the inauguration of the new Parliament building by PM Modi on May 28, non-NDA parties- including the BSP, TDP and JD(S), have decided to attend the event.  While Home Minister Amit Shah accused the Opposition of indulging in “petty politics”, the Congress said that the “one man’s ego and desire for self-promotion” denied President Droupadi Murmu her Constitutional privilege to inaugurate the building. 

👉🏽In a fresh regional milk war post the Amul vs Nandini row during the Karnataka elections, Tamil Nadu CM MK Stalin wrote to Union Home Minister Amit Shah asking him to “direct” Gujarat-based Amul to “desist from milk procurement” from state-owned Aavin’s milk shed area”, with immediate effect. 

👉🏽A local court in Rajasthan’s Alwar sentenced four men to seven years’ imprisonment and acquitted one person in the 2018 Rakbar Khan lynching case. This marks the state’s first convictions in a lynching on suspicion of cattle smuggling.

👩🏽‍💻 Must Read

👉🏽In our opinion section today, Distinguished University Professor, Sonalde Desai writes on how India is under pressure to alter its definition of unemployment to an international benchmark while its  once-vaunted statistical system is at a low ebb.

👉🏽 Prime Minister Narendra Modi has recently concluded his three-nation visit –  to Japan, Papua New Guinea and Australia – and returned to India on Thursday. So, what are the key takeaways from the PM’s visit to the region where China is a powerful diplomatic presence and rival? Read our explainer

👉🏽 Pakistan national Zubair Derakshshandeh, 29, supplied drugs to several countries as a member of the infamous Haji Salim drug cartel for five years. His trips to India, Africa, Indonesia, the Maldives and Sri Lanka lasted nearly 20 days each and Rs 5 lakh per visit. On May 13, it was on one such trip to India that he was arrested in a joint operation by the Narcotics Control Bureau (NCB) and the Indian Navy in the international waters, off the coast of Kochi.

⏱️And Finally 

It was India’s day at the 76th Cannes film festival. Or, shall say, night. While Anurag Kashyap’s set-during-the-pandemic cop-crime drama ‘Kennedy’ got a long standing ovation,so did Kanu Behl’s ‘Agra’, a study of sexual repression in small-town India. Shubhra Gupta reports from Cannes

🤫Delhi Confidential: South Korea’s Ambassador to India, Chang Jae-bok, remained the star attraction at the just-concluded G20 Tourism Working Group meeting in Srinagar. On the inaugural day, he shook a leg with actor Ram Charan on the Oscar-winning Naatu Naatu, and on the concluding day, he was quite vocal in supporting India’s presidency of G20.

🔊In today’s 3 things podcast, we discuss Indian Express investigation reports on children in West Bengal being the victims of crude bombs amid the state’s rising political violence, and Uttar Pradesh witnessing 186 police encounters under Yogi Adityanath’s rule since 2017. We also give you a quick update about opposition parties boycotting the inauguration of the new parliament building.

Until tomorrow,

Varsha Sriram and Anamni Gupta