Pairokar

For the last few weeks almost every day, we find one or the other charge is being traded between Maharashtra Minister Nawab Malik and an officer of the Narcotics Control Bureau (NCB) Samir Wankhede. Nawab Malik says that Wankhede’s name also contains the middle name of Dawood, which he has deliberately deleted. Nawab Malik is insistent on saying that Wankhede is a Muslim as his father had converted to Islam after marrying a Muslim woman. He says that even Sameer Wankhede‘s previous marriage was also with a Muslim woman, which ended in divorce, but later he married, Kranti Redkar, a Hindu woman. The allegation is that Sameer Wankhede has fraudulently obtained a certificate of the Hindu Scheduled Caste, to which his father originally belonged before converting to Islam, to get the job from the reserved quota. Thus, he is said to be guilty of grabbing the job by depriving it to a rightful backward candidate. But can Nawab Malik pass a judgment that Wankhede is a Muslim, while he and his...

It is really an enigma shrouded in surprising mystery that why the prime minister has decided to suddenly withdraw three Farm Laws, that too, at a time when the farmers’ agitation has almost died down. It was practically gasping for breath for the last many months. There was no support coming for it from any corner. Some political parties were, albeit, extending only their lip service to the agitation. Even Supreme Court has come down very harshly on the agitators and has asked them to vacate the roads surrounding Delhi that they have forcibly kept in their control for the last some months. The Prime Minister had said that those supporting the agitations were like ‘Andolanjeevis’. What is even more intriguing is that these Farm Laws were already kept on hold for two years, then why were they withdrawn suddenly? The Expert Committee appointed by theSupreme Court has also unambiguously spoken in favour of the Farm Laws. Moreover, there has been a continuous demand for reforms in the agri...

 One will have to admire the honesty of the Chief Justice of India for his confession of being a non-sophisticated speaker in the English language. In fact, what he has said about himself is truer about most of the lawyers and judges of the country. Only a minuscule minority having had the privilege of getting an education from the top schools can boast of fairly good command over the English language.  Regrettably, those lawyers who possess proficiency in the English language, get undue importance in the Supreme Court even by those judges, who have had their schoolings through their mother tongues. Most of us have started learning English as one of the subjects when we were admitted to the sixth standard. Most of the students in village schools used to bid farewell to the English after somehow passing the eighth standard. In most Law Colleges the medium of instruction is either Hindi or regional languages. There is nothing wrong with it, rather it should be appreciated...

Parmanand Pandey There are some path-breaking books that open the eyes of the readers. The two-volume biography of Vinayak Damodar Savarkar by Vikram Sampath is certainly one of them. The first volume titled ‘Savarkar: Echoes from a Forgotten Past’ covered his life from 1883 to 2023. It was published in 2019 and talks about his daring escape and capture from the ship S. S. Morea at Marseilles (France) and the long and harrowing incarceration in the Cellular Jail of Andaman, more known as Kaala Paani. The second part is the sequel of the first one, which is named’Savarkar: A Contested Legacy’ and covers his life from 1923 till his death in 1966. It deals with his activities of social reforms, political activities from the platform of Hindu Mahasabha, elucidation of the concept of the Hindutva, opposition to the idea of Gandhi’s non-violence and the two-nation theory of MA Jinnah. The book provides a vivid description of the red fort trial of Mahatma Gandhi’s assassination case. Savarkar...