THE battle for the Maharashtra Vidhan Sabha is now in full swing. The one-day voting will be on November 20, 2024, and the counting for the Maharashtra and Jharkhand State Assembly elections as well as the several by-elections across the country will be on November 23.We can start by looking at the results of the Lok Sabha elections in Maharashtra six months ago. Compared to a one-sided election in 2019 in which the BJP-NDA won 42 of the 48 Lok Sabha seats, the UPA won only five, and the AIMIM won one, the 2024 elections saw a sea change.

TILL the time of writing these lines, in the first phase of Jharkhand Assembly elections, voting has been done on 43 seats out of total 81 seats on November 13. For the second phase, elections will be held on 38 seats on November 20. BJP is trying to give a complete communal colour to this election.Efforts are being made to increase communal polarisation by organising frequent visits of Prime Minister Modi, Home Minister Amit Shah, half a dozen chief ministers and dozens of union ministers of BJP ruled states.

COP 29, the UN Climate Change Conference, started on November 11 in Baku, Azerbaijan, and is slated to finish on the 22nd. It is taking place under the shadow of significant temperature rises this summer across the globe, and the clear warning of what it means for us. It is also taking place at a time in which the US has elected a president, Donald Trump, who, among other things, is also a climate change denier and unlikely to accept any global consensus in COP 29.Global warming, even for the countries in the freezing north, is no longer in the realm of scientific debates.

A LARGE number of critical appraisals and commentaries have been written on the occasion of the retirement of Chief Justice of India (CJI), D Y Chandrachud.  This is but natural as Justice Chandrachud is considered to be one of the most consequential chief justices of the Supreme Court in recent years.

THE Kazan summit of the BRICS countries was a historic one for several reasons: first, it created a new category called “partner nations” as a step towards full membership, and accepted 13 such new “partner” countries, among whom were Cuba and Bolivia. Second, it came out against unilateral economic sanctions that the US-led imperialist powers have been imposing on countries that dare to assert their independence from imperialist hegemony. Third, it suggested a programme of reform for the International Monetary and Financial System.