Prakash Karat continues his opposition to the nuclear deal in an article called ‘Parliament says no to nuclear deal’. He writes that the argument that “the sense of the House can be taken only after the (nuclear deal) process is completed would mean that Parliament has no say whatsoever except to have an academic debate on the issue.” This, he feels, goes against the tenets of parliamentary democracy. Calm in NandigramThere is a tongue-in-cheek report on Bengal Governor Gopal Gandhi’s recent visit to Nandigram. It says that when Gandhi “took off for Nandigram with a trailing column of cars, jeeps, and SUVs in tow, sirens a-whine. he was perhaps looking forward to a ‘fact-finding’ tour of the ‘recent developments’ about which so much interest has suddenly been generated in circles that are frank in their opposition to the arrival of the homecoming of refugees and perhaps, by extension of the same logic, to the return of normalcy there.”But instead of chaos, the report describes an idyllic scene. Gandhi saw the “Sunday morning” tableau “of the people who had woken up late and were moving around the market places. slightly bleary-eyed from a night of easy slumber.”It was, in fact, Gandhi’s visit that may have introduced a “wrinkle of fear across the weather-beaten faces of the men. Did some of the women choose to hang back into the shadows offered by the deep foliage of the evergreens? Did they recall to hushed memory the convoys that had earlier roared in and out, leaving behind the strong, harsh, achingly painful smell of fear, of terror?”Above the lawAn editorial in People’s Democracy compares Narendra Modi’s recent behaviour at an election rally in Gujarat to that of Adolf Hitler’s at the time of Nazi ascendency in Germany. Modi justified the killing of Sohrabuddin Sheikh and his wife, Kauserbi, even though the alleged encounter stands before the apex court today. Instead of waiting for the judicial process to conclude, “Modi exhorted the audience at an election rally asking them what should be done to a man who stored illegal arms. Some in the crowd chanted that he should be killed. Modi took this as an endorsement and said: ‘Well, that is it’.” In Hitler’s Germany, the Skarlek brothers, alleged criminals, were hanged at the order of the crowd with the justification that the state did not need to waste its time and resources by allowing them to face a trial in the courts.The editorial continues: “Given such trends, these elections in Gujarat will, once again, serve as a barometer measuring the strength of India’s secular democracy.”
