Prakash Karat continues his opposition to the nuclear deal in an article called ‘Parliament says no to nuclear deal’. He writes that the argument that “the sense of the House can be taken only after the (nuclear deal) process is completed would mean that Parliament has no say whatsoever except to have an academic debate on the issue.” This, he feels, goes against the tenets of parliamentary democracy.

Calm in Nandigram

There is a tongue-in-cheek report on Bengal Governor Gopal Gandhi’s recent visit to Nandigram. It says that when Gandhi “took off for Nandigram with a trailing column of cars, jeeps, and SUVs in tow, sirens a-whine... he was perhaps looking forward to a ‘fact-finding’ tour of the ‘recent developments’ about which so much interest has suddenly been generated in circles that are frank in their opposition to the arrival of the homecoming of refugees and perhaps, by extension of the same logic, to the return of normalcy there.”

But instead of chaos, the report describes an idyllic scene. Gandhi saw the “Sunday morning” tableau “of the people who had woken up late and were moving around the market places... slightly bleary-eyed from a night of easy slumber...”

It was, in fact, Gandhi’s visit that may have introduced a “wrinkle of fear across the weather-beaten faces of the men... Did some of the women choose to hang back into the shadows offered by the deep foliage of the evergreens? Did they recall to hushed memory the convoys that had earlier roared in and out, leaving behind the strong, harsh, achingly painful smell of fear, of terror?”

... contd.