CPI(M) stages protest in Kalaburagi against BJP MLC's Remarks on Deputy Commissioner Fouzia Taranum
The CPI(M) alleged that the BJP is deliberately fostering communal hatred across Karnataka, citing Ravikumar's statement during the party's recent 'Kalaburagi Chalo' rally, in which he reportedly likened the Deputy Commissioner to someone from Pakistan. The party described the comment as both communal and misogynistic, asserting that it targeted a public servant solely based on her identity as a Muslim woman.
'Fouzia Taranum is an officer of merit. She is recognised by the Union government for her effective handling of the electoral process. Labelling such an individual as foreign-born is not only deeply offensive but also an attack on the secular ethos and unity of the nation. The BJP is attempting to provoke public sentiment against the Muslim community by using such inflammatory language,' K. Neela said during the agitation.
The protestors expressed grave concern over the BJP's refusal to condemn or take disciplinary action against those making such statements. 'It is a part of a broader ideological attempt to impose a regressive Manuwadi worldview on society. Such views aim to undermine the values enshrined in the Indian Constitution and revive caste-based social hierarchies through the backdoor,' an agitating activist said.
In another agitation, Congress party's women's wing took out a protest procession from district Congress party office to the Jagat Circle in the city demanding Mr. Ravikumar's resignation from the Legislative Council membership. They also blocked the main road at Jagat Circle for a half-an-hour as a token of their agitation against the BJP MLC.
'N. Ravikumar's remarks should not be brushed aside as a momentary lapse. We demand his expulsion from the Legislative Council. The silence maintained by the BJP leadership in the wake of such divisive statements poses a serious threat to India's democratic and secular framework,' Renuka Singe, district president of Congress party's women's wing said
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Mint
30 minutes ago
- Mint
Wall Street worries as crisis-level deficits become the government's default mode
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Economists, investors and politicians have often warned that the U.S.'s growing debt burden would punish future generations. The market has been willing to tolerate spikes in borrowing during crises such as a war or Covid, seeing it as a logical, and temporary, response to a sharp growth slowdown. What stands out now to those sounding the alarm the loudest is that America is bingeing on debt when there's no such emergency requiring it. The deficit as a share of the economy is already around the levels reached in the era of the 2008 financial crisis and the pandemic. Many investors are concluding that financial profligacy isn't a bug, but rather a feature of U.S. policymaking. 'The government is like a teenager with a credit card that has no limits until it has to be paid," said Bill Gross, founder of Pimco. ''Payment due' comes not with default but with a weak dollar and higher interest rates." Trump and his GOP backers in Congress dismiss those bleak projections and, armed with their own budget math, paint a very different fiscal reality. They say tax cuts will accelerate growth and, along with new tariffs and heavy cuts to social programs such as Medicaid, will actually put the nation on sounder financial footing. The long-term verdict might be rendered in U.S. bond markets. The U.S. borrows money by issuing Treasurys, and an oversupply of those bonds would drive up yields, which rise when prices fall. Because interest rates on other debt are linked to Treasury yields, that would also lift costs on mortgages, car loans and corporate bonds. The market has been calm lately. But it has sent warning flares about the fiscal trajectory, most recently in May when yields on 30-year bonds climbed close to a two-decade high. Some investors, meanwhile, are concerned that massive debt projections are weighing on the dollar, which just posted its biggest first-half decline since 1973. 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The bill's advance, though hardly unexpected on Wall Street, has dimmed budget hawks' already modest hopes that lawmakers would make deficit reduction more of a priority. Ray Dalio, founder of Bridgewater, warns that staying on the current path will ultimately lead to some mix of a bond-market slide, a severe economic contraction or an inflation-fueling intervention by the Federal Reserve. The GOP bill 'reflects a political system that favors indulging voters over prudence," he said. Trump says skyrocketing growth will avert any downsides. 'For all cost cutting Republicans, of which I am one, REMEMBER, you still have to get reelected," he wrote in a social-media post shortly before senators began voting on the bill earlier this week. 'Don't go too crazy! We will make it all up, times 10, with GROWTH, more than ever before." Members of Congress during the House vote on Thursday. The U.S. government borrows money to pay for the shortfall between what it collects in taxes and what it spends on programs, such as defense and Social Security, by issuing Treasury securities that mature over varying periods of time. Buyers of this debt range from foreign banks to hedge funds to everyday investors. In principle, Treasurys are subject to the forces of supply and demand, like any other item. If the government issues more Treasurys than investors want or need, it will need to win them over with higher interest rates. If investors are worried about that happening in the future, they will likely sell bonds now, causing an immediate jump in yields. Treasurys, though, have long been viewed as the ultimate safe investment, especially in rocky economic times, because they are backed by the world's richest country and are effectively guaranteed to be repaid at maturity. That has historically kept America's borrowing rates in check, even as the volume of debt grew. Yet deficit worries still go back a long way, in government and on Wall Street. Peter Peterson, the late co-founder of the Blackstone Group who also served as President Richard Nixon's secretary of commerce, became concerned when planning for a talk on President Ronald Reagan's budget in 1981. Its big increase in defense spending and substantial tax cuts didn't make sense to him, and he was especially worried about the looming costs of Social Security and other entitlement programs. 'To put the matter bluntly, Social Security is heading for a crash," he wrote in a 1982 essay so long that the New York Review of Books split it into two parts. That same year, Salomon Brothers chief economist Henry Kaufman, known as Dr. Doom for his pessimistic forecasts, warned that proposed tax cuts and the resulting deficits would effectively block recovery from an ongoing recession. Worries about the deficit flared up regularly in the decades that followed—taking a break in the 1990s when the Clinton administration briefly engineered a surplus. But the concerns were little more than minor impediments to a long bull market in bonds that dragged Treasury yields steadily lower. Rogoff, the Harvard professor, who with Carmen Reinhart wrote the 2009 book 'This Time Is Different: Eight Centuries of Financial Folly," has long argued that high levels of debt can weigh on growth. A 2012 paper he wrote with Reinhart and her husband, Vincent Reinhart, found that for advanced economies since 1800, debt levels above 90% of GDP corresponded to significantly lower levels of growth. The U.S. shot past that 90% threshold when the government spent massively in its efforts to bolster the economy during the pandemic. The overall level of America's GDP is significantly higher than what forecasters on the eve of the pandemic expected it would be in 2025, but Rogoff still thinks that at some level deficits matter. 'The appetite for U.S. debt may be very large, but it's clearly not infinite," he said. The Department of Treasury building in Washington. Nearly a third of publicly held U.S. debt is owned by foreigners, including foreign central banks. If they start worrying more about America's large debt load, they could become less willing holders. A wholesale dumping of U.S. debt by foreigners—a doomsday scenario—is extremely unlikely, according to Jeremy Stein, a Harvard economist who was a Fed governor from 2012 to 2014. 'But I wouldn't be surprised if, over the next couple of years, as their portfolios roll off and they have to reinvest, they start shifting that reinvestment more towards, say, Europe or German bonds," he said. Stein also worries that as the supply of Treasurys increases, hedge funds will become even bigger players in the market for U.S. debt. That could raise the odds of market disruptions, because fast-money traders occasionally run into problems that force them to sell. A mix of factors has created the current fiscal imbalance, including recessions, an aging population and rising federal assistance to households. Those spending policies were largely championed by Democrats. Republicans, meanwhile, have led the charge in cutting taxes. This year's budget negotiations revealed fissures among Republicans, with some expressing more concern about deficits than others. With the 2017 tax cuts set to expire at the end of the year, many in the party argued that an extension shouldn't count as a deficit increase because it was merely a continuation of current policy. Others, though, opposed that approach, citing concerns about national debt. House conservatives, led by Reps. Jodey Arrington (R., Texas) and Lloyd Smucker (R., Pa.), along with others such as Rep. Chip Roy (R., Texas), forced the House's budget framework to link tax cuts and spending cuts, with no more than a $2.5 trillion gap between them. By that approach, if the House could find $2 trillion in spending cuts, it could have $4.5 trillion in tax cuts. If it could only find $1.5 trillion, the tax cuts would have to shrink, too. 'We can't continue to have quote, a free lunch, by just saying that every single tax cut pays for itself," Roy said in an April interview. The House, on May 22, passed a version of the tax bill that adhered to those demands. CBO estimated that it would cost $2.4 trillion over a decade. In June, 38 Republicans led by Smucker signed a letter saying they wouldn't support legislation coming back from the Senate that violated their framework. Doing so, they wrote, 'would invite higher borrowing costs and undermine the economic growth that Americans need." 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If demand is stronger for shorter-term bonds, it makes sense to 'just give the investors what they want," said Blake Gwinn, head of U.S. rates strategy at RBC Capital Markets. Write to Sam Goldfarb at and Justin Lahart at
Indian Express
33 minutes ago
- Indian Express
Draw a moral line
On July 6, this coming Sunday, His Holiness Tenzin Gyatso, the 14th Dalai Lama, will turn 90. The world must pause, not just to offer a birthday greeting, but to ask a question that strikes at the heart of Asia's spiritual and strategic future: Who gets to decide who leads Tibetan Buddhism after him? His Holiness has now made that answer emphatically clear. The Gaden Phodrang Trust, which he established and imbued with his moral authority, will oversee the identification of his reincarnation. It is a spiritual masterstroke and a political gauntlet thrown before Beijing's long-standing ambition to manufacture a successor. Make no mistake: This is not just a Buddhist matter. This is a battle between a sacred civilisational legacy and the crude apparatus of authoritarian control. This is Tibet versus totalitarianism. Dharma versus dictatorship. I have met His Holiness many times over the years. Each encounter has left me transformed. There is an aura that envelops him, yes, but more than that, a deeply disarming presence. A man of boundless humour and unshakeable calm, he carries within him the accumulated wisdom of centuries and the clarity of a physicist. And yet, he has never been just a relic of the past. He has been a visionary of the present. In every one of my offices over the decades, I have kept thangkas, gifted and signed by His Holiness, not as ornamentation, but as quiet testimony to the spiritual and civilisational power he embodies. They remind me, daily, that moral authority still walks this earth in human form. That moral authority has now been exercised with profound foresight. China's obsession with the Dalai Lama is as irrational as it is revealing. Having crushed the 1959 Tibetan uprising, desecrated monasteries during the Cultural Revolution, and abducted the legitimate Panchen Lama in 1995, replacing him with a compliant imposter, Beijing now wants to write the final chapter: To appoint the next Dalai Lama. The absurdity is almost comic. A Marxist-Maoist-Leninist Xi-led regime claiming the right to anoint a reincarnated lama? It would be laughable if it weren't so dangerous. This isn't religion. It's control. It is the erasure of a people by capturing their soul. And the method is predictable: Fabricate legitimacy through an ancient-sounding ritual ('Golden Urn'), prop up a state-approved child, and use diplomatic muscle to coerce acceptance. But Beijing has made a fatal miscalculation. Legitimacy cannot be forged in a Party committee. Faith cannot be coerced at gunpoint. A child selected by the CCP will not be the Dalai Lama. He will be a spiritual mannequin in a gilded cage. What China fears is not just the man, but the institution. Since the 17th century, the Dalai Lamas have represented a rare synthesis of spiritual depth and civilisational authority. Their reincarnation is not hereditary but karmic, recognised through dreams, signs, and devotion. It is an institution rooted in introspection, not imposition. By pre-empting Beijing with the Gaden Phodrang Trust, His Holiness has ensured that no foreign power can hijack this sacred lineage. In one quiet, resolute move, he has reminded us all: You may occupy a land, but you cannot colonise the soul of a people. India has a historic, civilisational stake in this unfolding drama. We gave refuge to His Holiness in 1959. Dharamshala became the new Lhasa. We offered hospitality but too often fell silent when moral clarity was needed. In 1954, we conceded Chinese sovereignty over Tibet in a moment of strategic naïveté. In the decades since, we have tiptoed around the Dalai Lama question, wary of provoking Beijing. That era of ambiguity must end. India must now unequivocally support the Tibetan people's right to determine their spiritual future. Not just privately, not just symbolically, but publicly and forcefully. Anything less would be a betrayal, not only of the trust reposed in us by Tibetans, but of our own dharmic foundations. This is not merely an ethical imperative. It is also cold, hard realpolitik. A Chinese-appointed Dalai Lama will bring Beijing's writ closer to our borders, destabilise Himalayan communities, and weaponise religion in the service of authoritarian geopolitics. At 90, His Holiness has done more than most statesmen, philosophers, and warriors put together. He has carried the weight of a nation in exile, resisted hatred with humour, and stared down a superpower with serenity. In a world bereft of heroes, he stands tall, a monk in exile, a prophet of compassion. The least we can do is ensure that his legacy is not buried under the rubble of silence. We must say, clearly and collectively: The Dalai Lama's reincarnation will not be decided in Zhongnanhai. It will not be decided by Politburos or Party cadres. It will be decided by Tibetans, through Tibetan tradition, in Tibetan time. This is the moral line. This is the civilisational frontier. India must stand on the right side of it. So must the world. As His Holiness once told me, with that unmistakable twinkle in his eye, 'We are all just visitors on this planet, for 90, maybe 100 years… we must use our time meaningfully.' He has. Now it's our turn. The writer is dean and professor at the School of International Studies, JNU. He is honorary professor at the University of Melbourne and a former member of India's National Security Advisory Board
Indian Express
33 minutes ago
- Indian Express
Slap in Mumbai's face
The assault oN a sweetshop owner in Mumbai's Mira Road, allegedly by hooligans affiliated with the Maharashtra Navnirman Sena (MNS), for not speaking in Marathi, is not an isolated incident. It is a deeply troubling brand of politics rearing its head again. Coming in the wake of an agitation against the state government's ill-conceived resolutions on the three-language policy — first making Hindi mandatory at the primary school level, then making it optional — it is a warning that must be heeded. Both Raj Thackeray's MNS and Uddhav Thackeray's Shiv Sena (UBT) accused the BJP-led Mahayuti government of seeking to impose Hindi on the state, the estranged Thackeray cousins coming together after two decades on the plank of 'Marathi pride'. Maharashtra's Devendra Fadnavis government did well to withdraw its Hindi language mandate to schools. But that the incident of assault in Mumbai came as MNS workers celebrated the revocation and days before the protest-turned-victory rally called by the Thackerays on July 5, should ring alarm bells — a parochial politics cannot be allowed to change the subject and tip over into violence in India's most industrialised state. Ever since it was founded in 2006, the MNS has periodically stoked the 'Marathi pride' issue, employing divisive, even violent, tactics. At a Gudi Padwa rally earlier this year, Raj Thackeray said that his party would not hesitate to slap residents in the state should they refuse to speak Marathi — following this, MNS workers attacked officials at banks for not offering services in the language. However, it is also apparent that such belligerence resonates less and less among the people in a state where non-Marathi speakers make up a significant chunk of the population, and whose capital, Mumbai, attracts workers from across the country. The MNS's stark and growing disconnect from the ground is evident in its electoral record: From 13 seats in the 2009 Assembly elections to one each in 2014 and 2019 to none at all in 2024. The Shiv Sena (UBT) is also currently engaged in a fight for relevance following the drubbing of the Maha Vikas Aghadi in the 2024 Assembly election — that may explain its regression to the lumpenism that long characterised the undivided Shiv Sena. In doing so, however, it risks stripping away the sheen that Uddhav Thackeray's chief ministership, seen to be steadying and sober during the pandemic, had earned for the party. The hooliganism in Mira Road must be condemned and the perpetrators must face the consequences of taking the law into their own hands. The Mahayuti government, which came to power with a sweeping mandate, needs to deliver on promises of enhancing economic opportunity, ease of doing business and carving out wider avenues of development for Maharashtra's youth. This cannot happen if a narrowing political project is allowed to cock a snook at the rule of law.
