Editorial analysis: Legal norms for workplaces, BJP outsmarts Opposition with Murmu

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In the daily editorial analysis, except for Sundays, The Raisina Hills critically reviews the comments of the top five English newspapers of India.

The prospects of the weakening of the economy while the global inflation knocks down growth are shedding lights on jobs. But people in judiciary have the most protected jobs, and they can take liberty to look far into future, and ideate.

Justice DY Chandrachud, the Supreme Court Judge, has pedigree and credentials to deep-dive in the world of idealism, even if being disconnected from reality.

The Indian Express (IE) has put out an Edit ‘Good Jobs First’, tracking two lectures of Chandrachud given in the UK this week, wherein he talks of legal framework against discrimination at work places, which is already protected legally for government jobs, arguing for a comprehensive anti-discrimination law to cover the whole spectrum of employment.

The IE showed the mirror, commenting that only 21 per cent of the workforce earns a regular salary, and 16.6 million in 2019-20 were employed where laws are followed out of the total 400 million workforce.

The IE too lives in a fairy tale world, eating out of the government’s data factory, while turning blind eye to the blatant abuse of all labour laws even by companies claiming to be obeying the rules in the neighbourhood of its Noida office. The judiciary too has hardly been helping the employees who have been victims of the abuse of the labour laws by the private companies.

This commentary is at best hypocritical.

Deccan Herald (DH) takes a sharp view of the employment situations in the country, contrasting the government and the private data to raise the concerns that the policies based on questionable figures could be fallacious.

DH gives out the data from the annual periodic labour force survey and the CMIE, a private entity, to show the contrasting unemployment picture.

DH is right because even the government’s think-tank NITI Aayog falls back to the alibi that there’s no authentic data on employment in the country, and its promise to institutionalise the practice remains forgotten as has been the case with many of its claims.

After missing out to comment on the Presidential candidates of the NDA and the Opposition, The Hindu, The IE and DH have gone into analysing the two candidates, with concurrence that there’s no contest.

The Hindu’s ‘High Office’ Edit rightly singles out the Opposition for failing to counter the BJP’s narrative. It hails the BJP’s decision, saying that a tribal taking the high office in the 75^th year of India’s Independence is ‘a remarkable testimony to the deepening of Indian democracy’.

The Hindu, however, misses out to pinpoint reasons for the Opposition’s failure by not delving into the deep divide in its ranks.

The Opposition as a block is a non-existent concept.

There are self-serving entities in the Opposition ranks who sometimes come together to project a semblance of unity.

The IE Edit ‘No Contest’ too goes on the same line, as if both the dailies sourced their contents from the same source.

This is again a sad commentary that the Editorial talent in the newspapers is sharply dipping, as revealed in lack of diversity and depth of the commentaries.

Even DH’s ‘Many pointers in Presidential battle’ takes the similar analysis and arguments, and they’re not worth repeating here.

The Economic Times in its lead Edit ‘Fret Not, Flight of FPI Capital Could Slow’ noted that USD 39 billion of the foreign portfolio investment from the stock market has exited India in the last nine months.

The rising interest rate and the energy crisis-induced global inflation are driving out the FPIs from the emerging economies.

The ET hopes that the FPI outflow will slow down when the US Federal Reserves eases the rate hikes, while noting that the Indian retail investors have given cushion to the stock market.

But the ET stops short in further probing that the retail investors have been exposed to the wild swings of the stock market after the government has made the small savings less attractive which if adjusted with inflation are giving negative returns.