AS the prime minister was labouring to deliver his one and half hour long speech at the end of the no-confidence motion debate on Friday, June 20, Rakbar alias Akbar Khan was being lynched to death in Alwar district of Rajasthan over allegations of cow smuggling.Till now, the prime minister has not once paid even lip service of expressing concern over the spate of lives lost due to lynching by private armies that have mushroomed under the rule of the BJP governments.

A DELEGATION of CPI(M) led by Nilotpal Basu, Polit Bureau member and ex MP and Haryana secretary Surender Singh visited Firozpur Jhirka and village Kolgaon on July 22 to meet the family of lynching victim Akbar Khan alias Rakbar Khan by a vigilante group on the intervening night of July 20-21 in Ramgarh (Alwar) Rajasthan.The delegation noted that this lynching is particularly shocking as it comes within days of the stinging Supreme Court judgment over vigilante crimes and such groups taking upon themselves the functions of law enforcement, based on self-declared allegations.Anger and anguis

THE no-confidence motion discussed and voted upon in the Lok Sabha on July 20 became an occasion for exposure of the four-year record of the Modi government.Though the motion was in the name of a Telugu Desam MP, whose purpose was to highlight the betrayal by the Modi government of the commitment made to Andhra Pradesh to declare it as a special category state, the opposition was able to focus on a range of issues concerning the many failures of the Modi government.

NEWSPAPER headlines over the last few days have highlighted three facts which point to the current abysmal state of the Indian economy. The first relates to inflation, where the June 2018 wholesale price index was 5.77 percent above that of June last year; this is the highest inflation rate witnessed since December 2013. The second is a burgeoning trade deficit: the trade deficit in June, at $ 16.6 billion, was again the highest for any month in the last five years.

IT is now about ten months after Hurricane Maria hit the US territory of Puerto Rico in the Caribbean in September 2017. The hurricane destroyed hundreds of thousands of homes, brought down electricity and drinking water systems, and communications networks. It also wreaked havoc on health facilities, roads and other infrastructure, much of which has not yet been restored. Estimates have put the total damage caused at over $100 billion (Rs 6,80,000 crores), making it the third highest economic loss due to tropical cyclones in the US since 1900.