Firstpost Editor's Picks: Congress' 10 year challenge in UP, Oxfam survey on income, Soni in time of Simmba; today's must-read stories

#10YearChallenge for Congress in UP: Mayawati and caste math barriers for party to repeat 2009 show in 2019 In 2009, the Congress won 21 seats, SP 23, BSP 20, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) 10 and the Rashtriya Lok Dal (RLD) five. But India’s grand old party is unlikely to repeat this performance as Uttar Pradesh’s extant social reality is very different today from what it was in 2009, which the what-if narrative does not take into account. Oxfam study: Everyone knows why income gap is widening, but politicos wouldn’t mind having a few super-rich friends Now, these trends are nothing new. The 2018 Oxfam survey and the one year before too had revealed a more or less similar trend. The last survey showed that the richest one percent in India holding 73 percent of the total wealth and 67 percent Indians representing the poorest half witnessing their wealth rising by 1 percent. Globally, too the situation is not any better than what India faces. In the time of _Simmba_, Netflix's _Soni_ brings much-needed empathy to the genre of toxic cop dramas Empathy is a quality that evades the Rohit Shetty film. While he could pass off Simmba’s quest for avenging his sister’s rape as a product of empathy for the survivor, Soni establishes that empathy does not discriminate between victims and criminals. It cuts across boundaries and is applicable to all humans. Kapil Sibal lends London 'hackathon' undeserved gravitas, gives BJP opportunity to corner Congress on EVMs An embarrassed Congress claimed Sibal was there in his “personal capacity” and did not represent the party. It is too convenient an argument, much like the one the Congress made when a youth party leader appeared for extradited arms dealer Christian Michel in a CBI court. Such plausible deniability of “personal capacity” doesn’t really work when the issue involves Congress and Indian politics. Does BJP's cancellation of Modi's Kolkata rally betray party's lack of preparedness for showdown with TMC? The largest spanner in the BJP’s works is, of course, the TMC-run West Bengal government and the BJP could well have foreseen the administrative hurdles that the state government would have thrown at the party ahead of Modi’s visit. If the debate over the landing of BJP national president Amit Shah’s helicopter is any indication, then the saffron party is not only wary of faltering in a show of popularity, but also in putting together the infrastructure of a rally in an environment fraught with alleged lack of cooperation from the Mamata Banerjee government.