By Sidharth Mishra

So the lockdown, for all practical purposes, is here again; lockdown for the office-going, law-abiding and such other people. The protocols issued by the Delhi Disaster Management Authority (DDMA) has put the shackles and one is back to doing what one does best in such situation – scroll up and down on the screen of the phone.

This being the festive season of polls, the pop-ups on the screen is full of political messages. And it would not be out of place to say that technology–enabled history rewriting is playing the biggest villain of Indian society, including politics.

Howsoever you may not want it, one ends up being members of WhatsApp groups which have the roots in the caste, region and language. And there starts the lessons in Indian history from ancient, to medieval and modern. Given the reporter’s itch, the writer habitually ends up reading these discourses and if nothing else pull own hair with dismay and disgust.

By Sidharth Mishra

While sharing a picture of a family outing from the memory lane on the Facebook, one captioned it as ‘when Delhi was not a gas chamber.’ This had an immediate response from a naysayer friend asking when Delhi was not a gas chamber.

Well if we talk about air quality, I am very sure as per the measurement standards it must never have been good and always rested in the bad, worse, alarming categories. But despite that Delhi in the pre-Covid days was a city to be in. The wide expanses hosting huge fetes and fairs were worth a visit.

Before the onset of Omicron one had thought that Delhi’s winter would be back to normal with ‘mela’ grounds hosting people in large numbers over the weekends. Alas that was not to be. The new strain has put paid to any ideas one had about ‘enjoying the winter.’

By Sidharth Mishra

As we enter into 2022, the residents of the national Capital should remember that it’s going to be the year for the municipal elections in the national Capital. There are two major local elections for Delhi – state assembly and the municipal polls.

Municipal Corporation of Delhi (MCD) prior to 2012 ran an administration which was almost parallel to the Delhi Government in the matter of territorial coverage. In 2012, the Sheila Dikshit government pushed for decentralization and got the monolith municipal body divided into three corporations – North, South and East.

While some say that it was a ploy by Dikshit to wean back the municipal bodies under the Congress fold but she did not succeed and in 2012 it once again went back to the BJP. The same story got repeated in 2017, when despite the rout in the assembly polls at the hands of the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP), BJP managed to bounce back and held control of all the three corporations.

By Sidharth Mishra

As we enter the last week of the year, and as has been the norm in the newspapers it’s the time to look back. For a resident of national Capital region, looking back at the year which is about to end can only give a feeling of déjà vu.

The winter has set in with the chilly winds but one can’t be complaining. Thank the good God for having send those winds to Delhi to clear it of the poisonous air. For about a decade now, the citizens are forced to live in gas chambers and then the Gods send winds which makes breathing somewhat easy.

If the Gods were not there, matters would not have been helped. Despite the huge insertions in the newspapers with a smiling chief minister announcing installation of smog towers, Delhi’ites failed to get fresh air even within the 100 metres radius of these highly publicized devise to clear the air. At least there is no data to reflect towards that.

The farmers have finally lifted the more-than-a-year-long siege of the national Capital after they managed to have their way with the central government. For those commuting between Delhi and its suburb for job, the end of agitation has come with a sense of relief. This ‘jam’ may have ended for good but there are several other ‘jams’ staring the national Capital at its face.

By Sidharth Mishra

A few months back, in the midst of the hullabaloo over those with 100 percent marks being denied admission, one had reported the true health of Delhi University. The statistics of the applications received for admission to the under-graduate courses told a story which was alarming. From 3.53 lakh applications received in 2021, the numbers had come down to 2.90 lakh in 2021, a steep fall of about 18% percent.

The fall in numbers were attributed to many factors including Covid-created lockdowns and shutdowns. But the most alarming was the fact that such scenario was not faced by the other universities in the national Capital like the Guru Gobind Singh Indraprashtha University (GGSIPU) and Ambedkar University of Delhi (AUD).

By Sidharth Mishra

On return from South Africa in 1915, Barrister Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, enjoying an impeccable reputation as a civil rights activist, was advised by his mentor Gopal Krishna Gokhale to visit countryside to know India. Gandhi’s engagement with farmers at Champaran in Bihar in 1917 and at Kheda in Gujarat in 1918, gave a firm direction to Indian freedom struggle and also outlined the role farmers were to play in India’s struggle against imperialism.

It’s important to recall these movements, as the farmers vacate the borders of the national Capital after having waged an agitation for more than a year against the farm laws brought in by Narendra Modi government, which enjoyed overwhelming majority in Lok Sabha. That an absolutely urban region of the national Capital could become centre of a farmer’s agitation was unthinkable till it actually happened.

In that way the agitation of 2020-21 was more widespread than those of Champaran and Kheda and not isolated in nature. It was also an opening for the urban India to came face-to-face with the issues of rural peasantry.

By Sidharth Mishra

The court’s observation once again reiterated the fact that for the Delhi government the easiest thing to do is to shut schools in the name of “concrete steps taken to control pollution.” How can a functioning school add to pollution and a functioning industry will not is something for the Delhi government to explain.

In these columns we had discussed how we are denying the child the opportunity from learning after being kept in cloisters for almost two years on the account of Covid-prevention protocols. The government keeps claiming about us being a software superpower and everybody being digitally connected. Claims aside, the huge fact is that digital divide in our country remains wide and has only increased.

By Sidharth Mishra

NDTF’s presidential candidate AK Bhagi got 52 percent of the valid votes. Abha Dev Habib, the presidential candidate of the CPM-backed Democratic Teachers Front (DTF) came a distant second polling just 32 percent of the valid votes. The Congress-aligned Academics for Action and Development (AAD) managed just 12 percent of the valid votes. In all 7194 votes were polled.