Mamata paints her dissent against CAA, urges people to carry on protest

Mamata's brush with CAA, NRC

 

West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee (pictured) took up the brush on Tuesday, this time to express dissent on the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) and the proposed National Register of Citizens (NRC). She was part of a group that had organised a protest near the Mahatma Gandhi statue on Mayo Road, Kolkata. She had other artists for company and urged the gathering to carry out protests against the citizenship law peacefully and reiterated that she would never allow its implementation in the state. She said the paintings would be a tool to spread awareness about the CAA and NRC and would be exhibited in various galleries of the country.

 

Listening to conscience, again?

 

Only Narayan Tripathi knows what is on his mind. The rebel Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) MLA first voted in favour of the Kamal Nath government during the voting on the Criminal Law (Amendment) Bill in the Madhya Pradesh Assembly. He did so, he said, because his conscience told him to. When people thought he had switched sides, he, along with former minister and senior BJP leader Narottam Mishra, appeared (in October last year) in the Bhopal BJP party office to announce he never left the party in the first place. He defied the party line once again on Tuesday and opposed the Citizenship (Amendment) Act, 2019, saying, s“We speak of vasudhaiva kutumbakam (the world is one family) but if we divide people on the basis of religion, the country will break up.” Is his conscience speaking again?

 

Samvidhaan gets its due

 

Oxford University Press (OUP) on Tuesday said “Samvidhaan” (Constitution) had been chosen the Oxford Hindi Word of 2019. According to OUP, Samvidhaan is a body of fundamental principles or established precedents in accordance with which a state or other organisation is acknowledged to be governed. An Oxford Hindi Word of the Year is chosen if it attracts a lot of attention. The Oxford dictionaries team invited entries for the Oxford Hindi Word of the Year through its Facebook page and received several hundreds of entries. The word of the year was chosen by a team in India with the help of an advisory panel of language experts. OUP said the word Samvidhaan was chosen as 2019 saw the values of democracy, secularism, justice, liberty, equality, and fraternity being tested on the touchstone of the Constitution or Samvidhaan.