अचिन्त्य मिश्रा

Petrol Price in Bangalore today is Rs. 102.99 per litre. Just saying.

In 217 and 218 booths of Bhowanipore assembly,there was an attempt by Mamata Banerjee's goons to jam the booths. Suvendu Adhikari came down from his car and chased them out. Even after being MLA from Bhowanipore for three terms,Mamata Banerjee is feeling scared? Shame.

A goon in uniform

ये देखिए चुनाव आयोग के अफसरों का अंदाज़। ये हैं अजय पाल सिंह, यूपी कैडर के आईपीएस, जिन्हें चुनाव आयोग विशेष रूप से बंगाल लाया है। जिला दक्षिण 24 परगना के फालता विधान सभा क्षेत्र में टीएमसी के उम्मीदवार जहांगीर के परिवार को धमका रहे हैं।

Uttar Pradesh’s notorious “Singham” and Yogi Adityanath’s favourite “encounter specialist”, Ajay Pal, has been appointed as the police observer for South 24 Parganas by the Election Commission. This is the same officer infamous for his trigger-happy “thok do” attitude. His track record is even darker: ❗In January 2020, Ajay Pal was transferred out of Rampur, where he was serving as SP, to the Police Training Centre in Unnao after a damning report named him and five other IPS officers in a cash-for-postings scandal. The BJP government was compelled to constitute an SIT, which recommended a vigilance probe against him. ❗He was also booked for criminal breach of trust, causing disappearance of evidence, and criminal conspiracy. The FIR was filed on the complaint of a 30-year-old woman who alleged that Ajay Pal had married her, concealed his involvement with other women, and later framed her when she approached the DGP and senior officials with her grievances. This is the kind of “impartial” police observer the Election Commission is handpicking for Bengal. Apparently, a corrupt and criminal track record has now become the primary qualification for the job.

This thread matters more than most things being discussed in our country right now. Must read.

Look at this map. Nagpur 45°. Ahmedabad 44°. Prayagraj 43°. Delhi 42°. The entire country is a single dark red mass. This is not a heatwave. This is a country that was told its forests were fine. And this is April. Not May. Not June. The hottest months have not even arrived yet. The past few days have been hell. So I did what I always do when something bothers me. I went looking for answers. What I found was a policy con job that has been running for over two decades. But before I explain what happened, let's clear some definitions. A garden is not a forest. An orchard is not a forest. A plantation is not a forest. A forest is a living system. Soil, water, fungi, insects, birds, mammals, decades of accumulated complexity, specific to its land and climate. It cannot be designed. It cannot be harvested. It regulates water, cools land, shelters hundreds of species. It takes decades to become what it is. You can plant a forest. But it will take decades to become one. In 2001, India's forests were disappearing. The Indian state, led by the Vajpayee government, faced a choice. Protect what remained, or change what the numbers said. It chose the numbers. The Forest Survey of India quietly changed the definition of what a forest means. Any land with 10% tree canopy cover and more than one hectare in area was now a forest. Your mango orchard. A coconut plantation in Tamil Nadu. A tea garden in Assam. Lodhi Garden in Delhi. All forests, on paper. The FSI will tell you that 10% canopy cover follows international norms. The FAO also uses 10% as its threshold. But the FAO's definition comes with a crucial exclusion that India's FSI quietly dropped.  The FAO explicitly states that fruit tree plantations, oil palm plantations, olive orchards, and agroforestry systems are not forests. The World Bank says the same. India adopted the number but discarded the exclusion.  It took the cover of international legitimacy while gutting the standard that gave it meaning. The government will also tell you this was never hidden. That it was publicly stated in every report, disclosed in Parliament. That is technically true. But a disclosure buried in a technical government document is not transparency. It is the appearance of transparency.  I did not know any of this until I went looking. Neither do most Indians whose forests, whose land, whose air this directly concerns. The con is not in what was hidden from experts. It is in what was never explained to the people it was done to. This is not a technicality. This is the con. It was a trick as old as power itself. If you cannot fix the problem, fix the measurement. For ten years after 2001, Congress governed India. Two terms, two environment ministers, including Jairam Ramesh, one of the more serious ones. They saw the numbers. They knew what the numbers meant. They did nothing. Because the lie was convenient. India looked good in international climate negotiations. The fiction of a greening India served everyone in power, so everyone in power kept it. Congress did not create this lie. It simply chose, year after year, to live inside it. The BJP is different. When they returned to power in 2014, they came with something Congress never had. An absolute majority, and no coalition compulsions. They did not merely inherit the lie. They built on it. And in 2023, they legislated it. The Forest Conservation Amendment Act of 2023 removed legal protection from "deemed forests." Forests that existed outside the official definition but were ecologically real.  Forests that Adivasi communities had lived in and depended on for generations. Forests that cooled land, held water, sheltered species. They were not on the right list. Since the amendment, forest destruction on Adivasi land has accelerated.  The people who knew these forests best, who had protected them longest, now watch them being cleared. Legally. CONT++