-The Telegraph Ahmedabad, Aug. 25: A chain of farmer suicides in Saurashtra and the Congress’s initiatives to reach out to affected families appear to have put the Narendra Modi regime on the backfoot ahead of the Gujarat elections. Twelve farmers have died in the drought-hit region in the past month. But the government is still in denial mode, claiming the “deaths are not related to crop failure” and that more farmers commit...

-PTI Chief Justice of India S.H. Kapadia on Saturday said judges should not govern the country or evolve policies, and they should apply the enforceability test on some verdicts like making sleep a fundamental right. Doing some frank introspection on the judiciary’s functioning, he wondered what would happen if the executive refused to comply with its directives that might not be enforceable. “Right to life, we have said, includes environmental protection, right to...

-The Indian Express A little over 11 years ago, when the Congress defeated the Asom Gana Parishad and Tarun Gogoi took over as chief minister of Assam, people had their doubts. Would this man who had spent most of his political career since 1971 as a Lok Sabha member be able to run this state? The state, with its unique tangle of ethnicity and politics, has, after all, always been a...

-The Hindu A few thousand representatives of various people’s movements from across the country have gathered at Jantar Mantar in the national capital. They are Dalits, Adiviasis, sections of unprotected working class including farmers and fish-workers but they all form one ‘biradari’ of those who live off land, water, forest. They are the ones who produce, distribute, build, operate, clean, sell, drive and do all that enable society to survive, proceed...

-The Indian Express While the BJP disrupted the functioning of Parliament for the second consecutive day on Wednesday demanding Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s resignation for alleged failure to go for auctioning of coal blocks, at least four states that were ruled by the Opposition at the time had raised the red flag when the Centre proposed the competitive bidding route in 2005. The Centre had cited the lack of “transparency and objectivity”...