The historic farmers’ movement will complete one year on 26 November, 2021. In its nearly yearlong existence the movement has demonstrated the amazing potential of people’s power in an extremely adverse situation. Hundreds of farmers’ organisations representing a wide social and ideological spectrum have stuck together with unprecedented unity, indomitable spirit and collective discipline in the face of continuing provocations, demonising propaganda and orchestrated violent attacks.

The Modi government is known for its penchant for springing periodic shocks and desperate measures. In economics we have been familiar with the demonetisation disaster and GST, in politics with the sudden stripping of Jammu and Kashmir of its constitutional status and statehood or the passage of the Citizenship Amendment Act or more recently the farms laws. The latest shock inflicted by the government has a strange name – National Monetisation Pipeline or NMP.

The Delhi High Court judgments ordering the release on bail of three of the anti-CAA student activists charged under UAPA is a long-awaited breath of oxygen. It offers some relief from the Delhi Police witch-hunt that since last year has been been choking off democracy’s life-breath: protests against unjust, discriminatory and fascist laws like the CAA, NRC and NPR have inspired courage and hope in the struggle for democracy.

PM Modi’s televised tears have come far too late to convey empathy for those killed by Covid-19 or regret for his regime’s callousness that led to those deaths. It is clear that he does not weep out of sorrow for us and the loved ones we have lost, nor out of regret for his own role in those deaths - but because he would like us to feel sorry for him and spare him the criticism he has earned. But Modi cannot play a victim to the calamity he himself has brought upon the country.

In lieu of Editorial