Your Daily Wrap: Ghulam Nabi Azad quits Congress; Kejriwal attacks BJP on CBI raids; and more
Veteran Congress leader Ghulam Nabi Azad resigned from the party and launched a blistering no-holds-barred attack on Rahul Gandhi. Singling out Rahul, whom he called a “non-serious individual”, Azad said he had “demolished” the “entire consultative mechanism” in the party. Azad was a member of the Congress Working Committee and a member of the Sonia Gandhi-headed political affairs group. The Congress questioned the timing of the veteran leader’s resignation and said “it is most unfortunate, and most regrettable” that he quit at a time the party “fighting the BJP on public issues of price rise, unemployment and polarisation.”
In his five-page letter, Azad also said that under Rahul, a new “coterie of inexperienced sycophants” started running the party, and citing “one of the most glaring examples of this immaturity”, referred to an incident from 2013 when the then party vice-president tore into an ordinance brought in by his party-led UPA government. Read the full text of Azad’s letter to Sonia Gandhi here.
On his final day as Chief Justice of India before retirement, N V Ramana today delivered key judgments — the PIL seeking a ban on ‘election freebies’, the 2007 Yogi Adityanath hate speech case, and the Karnataka mining case. For the first time, the proceedings of the ceremonial bench in Ramana’s court were live streamed. The outgoing CJI rued that he “could not pay requisite attention to” the vexed issue of the listing of cases.
Rekha Sharma, former judge of the Delhi High Court, and Alok Prasanna Kumar, Senior Resident Fellow, Vidhi Centre for Legal Policy, Bengaluru, write on CJI Ramana’s legacy. Read here:
CJI Ramana’s tenure had some highs, and many belied hopes
Assessing CJI NV Ramana’s legacy through three key numbers: 0, 163 and 71,411
Continuing its attack on the BJP over the CBI raids at Delhi Deputy Chief Minister Manish Sisodia’s residence last week, Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal today said, “There’s a new serial killer in town. The people select the government, they (BJP) topple them.” Sisodia too echoed Kejriwal’s comments. At the one-day special session of the Delhi Assembly called by the AAP, Sisodia called the CBI FIR filed against him “fake and fabricated”.
Goa Police today arrested Sudhir Sangvan and Sukhwinder Singh for alleged involvement in murder of Haryana BJP leader and actor Sonali Phogat, and said the accused “intentionally gave the victim an obnoxious chemical substance in a liquid” hours before she died on the morning of August 23. While Sangvan was Phogat’s personal assistant, Singh was his aide.
Political Pulse
In the power circles, Ahmed Patel was equally well known as the man who had the ear of Congress president Sonia Gandhi through good times and bad, as the keeper of many party secrets, and as the Congress’s most influential Gujarat leader. It’s nearly two years since Patel died from complications arising out of Covid. Months to go for the Gujarat Assembly polls, the Congress seems to be playing catch-up to even newbie AAP. The Patels have mostly kept out of view, till recently, when in the wake of the remission of sentence of 11 convicts for the gangrape of Bilkis Bano and murder of 14 members of her family, Patel’s daughter Mumtaz Patel expressed her disapproval. In an interview to The Indian Express, Mumtaz talks about life after her father, getting used to not having a home in Delhi, the state of the Congress, and Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s help at the time of Patel’s illness. Excerpts here.
Express Explained
Sony this week hiked the retail price of its PlayStation 5 console in several markets, a move many believe signals how inflation coupled with the current economic downturn is making tech products more expensive. Tech products rarely go up in price after they are released, so this rare price increase for a game console that is already in tight supply, hints at how there could be significant increase in prices of gadgets like the iPhone 14 series due to launch September 7. So why are big tech companies increasing the prices of their products ahead of the busy holiday shopping season? We explain.
Nepal has postponed the recruitment rallies which were to be held in that country to recruit Gorkha soldiers for the Indian Army under the Agnipath scheme. We explain the reservations that the Nepalese government has about the new scheme of recruitment, and the current socio-economic impact of the historic military ties between the two countries.
