Front Page
With bypolls to four Lok Sabha and 10 assembly seats scheduled today, all eyes will be on Kairana in UP, where the BJP goes up against a united opposition. With the death of BJP parliamentarian Hukum Singh, the party has now fielded his daughter Mriganka Singh from the constituency. Opposing her is the Rashtriya Lok Dal’s (RLD’s) Tabassum Hasan, supported by the Congress, the Samajwadi Party and the Bahujan Samaj Party. Hindustan Times and most other leading dailies said the results of this bypoll “could control the tone and tenor for the 2019 general elections”.
PM inaugurates the Eastern Peripheral Expressway: The Prime Minister Sunday inaugurated a nine-km stretch of the 135-km Eastern Peripheral Expressway from Delhi to Meerut (the rest had been inaugurated earlier by former chief ministers Mayawati and Akhilesh Yadav) in Baghpat. At the event, one day before the crucial bypoll in neighbouring Kairana, the PM, couldn’t help raising some major issues faced by farmers in western UP’s sugarcane belt, The Hindu reports front page today. Certainly, it seems as if former Karnataka CM B.S. Yeddyurappa’s farewell speech in the assembly was a teary taste of things to come, as the BJP plans to focus front and centre on the ‘Farmer’s India’ narrative ahead of the 2019 general elections.
At the expressway inauguration, the PM once again attacked the Congress’ dynasty politics, saying a party that has “worshipped only one family cannot worship democracy”, The Indian Express reports. Why waste the opportunity of an audience, he probably thought.
Sting operations seem to be back in fashion. A sting operation by Al Jazeera has allegedly revealed that five international cricketers — two from Australia and three from England — are guilty of conspiring to spot-fix test matches involving India. The Indian Express’ front-page story also tells us that while the Doha-based news channel didn’t identify the five players, it forwarded their names to the ICC, which has launched an inquiry.
India is continuing to bid for a place in the exclusive club for nuclear-armed countries, the Nuclear Suppliers Group. The elite club of 48 countries that deals with nuclear technology is set to meet in June and December this year, and Hindustan Times says a seat on the table would be “a major policy achievement (for Modi) ahead of the next general elections in 2019″.
Karnataka still governed by a two-member army, with no clarity on how long the JD(S)-Congress coalition will take to expand his cabinet. The Hindu says state Congress leaders held meetings with the party high command in New Delhi Saturday and Sunday, but “discussions on cabinet expansion remained inconclusive”.
Amrita Nayak Dutta and Ratnadeep Choudhary of ThePrint tell us that four of the media houses named in the alleged Cobrapost expose have rejected allegations that they had agreed to run campaigns to promote Hindutva ahead of the 2019 election for crores in payouts. To know their stand, read the article here.
News it’s just kinda cool to know
Hilary Clinton for Facebook CEO? On being asked by US attorney general Maura Healey which company she would want to be the CEO of, Clinton didn’t pause before answering, “Facebook”. “It’s the biggest news platform in the world. Most people in our country get their news — true or not — from Facebook,” Clinton was quoted as saying.
Media Watch
NDTV’s Ravish Kumar and his family ‘facing death threats and insults’. Senior journalist Ravish Kumar’s phone was reportedly ambushed for 10 straight days with thousands of calls in April from unknown numbers, often traceable to Malaysia, Latvia, Singapore and other countries. At a time when the debate around intolerance and the suppression of free speech is peaking, watch this video by NDTV to understand the risks of the trade.
On this episode of life after Cobrapost’s ‘sting operation’, it turns out that the undercover Cobrapost journalist who carried it out was arrested in 2009 for allegedly staging fake accidents and extorting money from policemen, The Times of India reports.
The Times Group, one of the companies named in the purported sting, says it was actually conducting its own ‘reverse sting’. “In fact, it was our reverse sting, carried out knowingly with a plan to make him commit a mistake and expose the people behind him,” The Wire quotes Bennett Coleman & Co. Ltd as saying.
Coming up in ThePrint
Yashwant Sinha outlines a nine-point formula that can help the opposition parties topple BJP in 2019. The former union minister and long-time BJP member who quit the party this year advises the opposition that their coming together “should be a programme-based coalition, and not one based entirely on arithmetic”.
Our central universities lack the most basic requirement to impart education: Teachers. Kritika Sharma and Sanya Dhingra report that over a third of the total teaching positions across 40 central universities in India are lying vacant, with Allahabad University and Delhi University among the worst affected.
Point of View
Rising prices of petrol and diesel have triggered heated discussions. The Indian Express, in its editorial, writes that the challenge for the government is to resist the temptation to control prices in the retail market and use the opportunity to bring in some real reforms. “Throw open the market to independent fuel retailers,” it says, adding that it is high time petroleum products are brought under GST.
CBSE Class XII results may have brought cheer to many, but they signal the amount of work that needs to be done in the education sector, says The Times Of India in its editorial. The way forward is to allow the private sector to bridge the gap by loosening the stranglehold of higher education regulators UGC and AICTE, it adds.
Peking University in Beijing celebrated its 120th anniversary in early May. Harvard professor and Trinamool MP Sugata Bose, in his column in The Telegraph, writes that the rise of Chinese universities, both quantitatively and qualitatively, is truly remarkable. He adds, “In addition to massive expansion of university education, China has also launched a determined bid to set up centres of excellence.” China has poured billions of RMB in 37 Chinese universities since 1998 with the purpose of developing centres of excellence.
Ayushman Bharat, the Modi government’s ambitious healthcare initiative, is once again the focus of criticism. Former union health secretary K. Sujatha Rao writes in her column in The Hindu, “In an environment of scarce resources, prioritisation of critical initiatives is vital to realising health goals.”
Archbishop of Delhi Rev Anil Couto’s circular asking the faithful to pray and fast till 2019 polls to ensure a more inclusive government has set off a political storm. Former IPS officer Julio Ribeiro, in his column in The Times Of India, writes that the Modi government, unlike the BJP government led by Vajpayee, doubts the patriotism of minorities. He adds that he has started to prepare himself to live in a Hindu Rashtra. “If that happens this land of mine will be nothing less than a saffron Pakistan! This is what Church leaders like the Archbishop of Delhi are apprehensive about. He should not be faulted for ringing the alarm bell,” says Ribeiro.
Flash back to the 2014 poll campaign, when the BJP, under the leadership of Modi, promised to bring ‘achhe din’ for farmers by evolving “a single national agriculture market (NAM) in the country with a view to enable farmers to get a better price and consumers to pay a lower price for agri-produce”. After four years, agriculture economist Ashok Gulati conducts a reality check in his column in The Indian Express. He writes the government is far away from fulfilling that promise, adding that “an overwhelming majority of farmers still relies on the same broken system of markets under the APMC, which is monopolistic and rent-seeking, with high commissions, especially for perishables”.
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