Firstpost Editor's Picks: Rahul's Wayanad candidacy, BJP manifesto, Singapore Open 2019; today's must-read stories

Rahul's Wayanad candidacy puts CPM in tough spot; party may lose national tag if performs poorly in Kerala Rahul Gandhi’s candidature in Wayanad has turned the poll plan of BJP and CPM upside down. For the BJP, this election is a matter of prestige in Kerala, more precisely for Narendra Modi and Amit Shah. It is high time the party opened a Lok Sabha account from the state, which is still an unfriendly terrain to the saffron squad. The CPM, on the other hand, is fighting the election for its survival. Unless it wins two  percent of Lok Sabha seats from at least three states or gets six percent of the total polled votes from six states, the CPM will lose national party tag. Modi: Journey of a Common Man review — Dramatic performances, selective re-telling of political events Modi: Journey of a Common Man — a webseries streaming on Eros Now — has been helmed by OMG! director Umesh Shukla, who has attempted to unravel the prime minister’s unconventional and adventurous journey into politics in ten episodes. The makers have clearly nailed the timing of the release, but strangely, we can access only the first five episodes for now. The series is based on Kishore Makwana’s book Common Man’s PM – Narendra Modi, and according to the disclaimer, is a “hybrid of fact and fiction”. Those who cared to read the disclaimer were told, right at the onset, that “all characters have been fictionalised for dramatisation”. **BJP manifesto 2019: Promise to keep inflation under control and double farmers' income by 2022 is paradoxical** As Prannoy Roy and Dorab Sopariwala write in The Verdict—Decoding India’s Elections: “The farmer’s income goes up when the price of foodgrains rises. It is a simple contradiction of output versus input. Much of the output of rural areas is input in the budgets of urban voters and vice versa: products, the output of factories in urban constituencies, are inputs in the budgets of rural voters’ households.” Between the end of 2015-16 and the end of 2018-19, the income of farmers has gone up by around 24 percent (not adjusted for inflation). For the income of farmers to double by 2021-2022, it needs to go up by 17.4 percent per year on an average between now and then. Anything like this would only be possible if food prices go up at a dramatic rate. Singapore Open 2019 preview: PV Sindhu, Sameer Verma get favourable draws The fourth Indian in the men’s singles draw, Sameer Verma, has been given the kind of draw that should have him licking his lips in anticipation. A qualifier bars his path to the second round, in which he would meet the winner of the match between eighth-seeded Indonesian Tommy Sugiarto and China’s redoubtable Lu Guangzu. Verma boasts a 2-1 record against the Indonesian, having beaten him in the BWF World Tour grand finals in Guangzhou in December 2018. **Understanding mental illness: When insurance and psychiatry meet, what language do they speak?** Section 21 of the progressive Mental Healthcare Act of 2017, states that “any other health services provided to persons with physical illness shall be provided in same manner, extent and quality to persons with mental illness,” and “Every insurer shall make provision for medical insurance for treatment of mental illness on the same basis as is available for treatment of physical illness.” A year after the Act was passed, the IRDAI directed all insurance companies to comply with the provisions of the Act with immediate effect. This resulted in a bunch of news stories that explored what the implications of this would be. However, the insurance companies are yet to revise policies to include mental illness.