Personal View

Govt’s response to the movement has been insecure and ham-handed Alok Tiwari By now nobody in India needs a primer on start of cockroach movement. A seemingly casual but biting remark by the chief justice Surya Kant Sharma about country’s youths being cockroaches touched a raw nerve and set off an online backlash with few parallels. This forced the CJI to walk back on his remarks by stating he had people in law profession with fake degrees in mind. It convinced no one. The video of the remarks in the court room made it amply clear that his lordship had in mind anybody who protests about anything, specifically those using media, social media, and even RTI activists. The damage had been done. The protests crystallised further when a US-based student and a former activist started Cockroach Janta Party handle on X. Within hours it got traction that would be the envy of every influencer in the world. In two days, it garnered more followers than the handle of BJP that proclaims itself ...

Judiciary must do more than express concern over loss of liberty Alok Tiwari Supreme Court judges questioning the judgment of peers is rare. They doing so through a written verdict as opposed to mere observation during proceedings is rarer still. One such occasion came earlier this week when a bench consisting of Justices B V Nagarathna and Ujjal Bhuyan raised serious questions about another verdict of a division bench that denied bail to JNU student and activist Umar Khalid and Sharjeel Imam, both accused in Delhi riots case. The bench was concerned that the Umar judgment had seriously diluted the spirit of an earlier three-judge bench that had held that bail should be granted in cases of prolonged incarceration where trial has been delayed and where there is no likelihood of it being completed in a reasonable time. This judgment had offered a ray of hope to numerous accused who have been rotting in Indian jails with the state dragging its feet on their trial. The best known of ...

EC’s actions are taking away power of everybody’s vote Alok Tiwari After the Bengal elections and charges of large-scale irregularities in electoral roll revision, the reaction has been predictable and along the now familiar fault lines. While many felt that the Bengal elections were stolen for BJP by the Election Commission through an opaque and incomplete SIR process, others pointed to anger at Mamata Banerjee’s misrule. The latter were also at pains to point out that SIR was also conducted in Kerala and Tamil Nadu, the other states that went to polls along with West Bengal, and that BJP would have won in WB even without SIR deletions. There is a kernel of truth in all this. Obviously, Mamata’s misrule was a real problem. She had faced and fought against the thuggish government of CPI(M) for years. But when she finally wrested power from them, she incorporated some of the same practices as her predecessors. Many times, it was the same set of people too. This meant much less atten...

Crooked manner of SIR has cast a long shadow on Bengal elections Alok Tiwari Despite the stunning rise of film star Vijay’s TVK party in Tamil Nadu and Congress’s return to power in Kerala, the just concluded round of state elections were mostly about West Bengal. This was the election with highest stakes and where BJP applied its full might to remove the three-term incumbent Mamata Banerjee. In the end it crushed Mamata’s TMC, winning over 200 of the 294 seats and confining TMC to two digits. The Left and the Congress remained on the sidelines. What made the Bengal polls different was the long and bitter fight not just over promises, policies, and performance but also on the process. TMC challenged the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of electoral rolls launched by the Election Commission months before the elections at every step. Mamata herself appeared before the Supreme Court. Nothing new in this. There were many challenges to SIR from several states in its new avatar that se...