-The Indian Express Highest court does well to underline what it should do. Hopefully, it listens to itself — and stands up for a stand-up comedian. Granting interim bail within a day to Arnab Goswami in a 2018 suicide abetment case, Supreme Court Justice DY Chandrachud correctly described the responsibility of the apex court: “Forget Arnab Goswami for a moment, we are a constitutional court… If we as a constitutional court do...

-The Hindu It can be made workable if there is political will and fiscal resources As economies around the world struggle to recover from the double whammy of a pandemic and a lockdown, unemployment is soaring. In India, the land of the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA), the promise of jobs and the politics of unemployment have a long history. Can a citizen demand work as a right, and...

-The Indian Express A collective of NREGA women activists discovers its political voice. As Jean Dreze recently observed, one of the key ideas behind NREGA was that it would serve as a platform for increasing the overall political capacities of workers. It was hoped that people would organise themselves to collectively demand work and, in the process, learn about other legal and constitutional provisions. While learning about the latter has been patchy,...

-PTI/ The Hindu BJP, in its manifesto for Bihar elections, had promised free COVID-19 vaccine once it is cleared by the ICMR. The BJP’s promise of providing free coronavirus vaccine in its manifesto for the Bihar assembly polls is not violative of the provisions of the model code, the Election Commission has held. Responding to a complaint by RTI activist Saket Gokhale, the commission said it has found no violation of the provisions...

-The Indian Express Countries more successful in curbing COVID-19 are welfare states, ruled by left-of-centre parties. There is a lesson here. A plea has been filed before the Supreme Court, seeking to remove the words “socialist” and “secular” from the Preamble of the Constitution. But despite a persistent erosion over the last couple of decades, both principles were central to the type of republic our political forefathers had imagined. With the embrace...