‘n“You can’t make plans for the poor,” says a young cop in this tense and painful pandemic drama from India. Filmed in black and white, it is set at the start of a government-imposed lockdown in May 2020 that has resulted in an exodus of 10 million migrant workers from India’s cities. A police officer has been placed in charge of a roadblock in the countryside to prevent poor workers from returning to their families and villages and prevent the spread of the virus. But realizing that help is not coming, the crowd, feeling hungry and abandoned, gets angry. The results are explosive, laying bare the fault lines of caste prejudice and class conflict.

Officer Surya (Rajkummar Rao) is himself from a low-caste family, but he climbs a ladder; he is a competent, decent cop who refuses kickbacks or bribes (just what modern police need). However, his boss never lets him forget his place and we see how Surya has also internalized prejudices. The whole society is at its checkpoint. A wealthy upper-caste woman (Dia Mirza) waltzes, accompanied by her charioteer, fully expecting to sail by. A young woman who worked as a maid in the city risks her life to bring her alcoholic father home to their village. An elderly security guard is on the bus; then a film crew from a news channel arrives.

Taking a scalpel to the caste system, director Anubhav Sinha shows how podcasts and other divisions stifle solidarity. Everyone at this checkpoint is blaming each other. A Hindu rants about a Muslim, accusing Muslims of spreading the virus. The situation is similar to a gasoline spill – waiting for a match to be struck, although, unfortunately, when it happens, after such a complicated and tough drama, everything ends up more like a hiss than an explosion.

A clash over climate protection measures threatens to unravel Germany’s three-party ruling alliance after the Green Party accused its liberal coalition partners of risking the country’s reputation by blocking an EU-wide phase-out of internal combustion engines in cars.

“There cannot be a coalition of progress in which only one party is responsible for progress, while others try to stop it,” Vice Chancellor and Economy Minister Robert Habek said at a meeting of the Green Party parliamentary faction. group in Weimar on Tuesday.

Last-minute opposition by Free Democratic Party (FDP) business supporters to EU plans to ban the sale of new combustion-engine cars from 2035, which European leaders hope to resolve at the Brussels summit on Thursday and Friday, has hurt Germany. standing in the block, Habek said. “We are losing the debate, our projects are getting too little support.”

The sudden rethinking of German liberals has sparked disappointment not only in the ranks of its coalition partners, but also in other European capitals, where there are fears that the continent’s largest economy, violating earlier agreements, will push other states to the same disorderly actions.

FDP politicians argue that the phase-out in its current form risks destroying the German manufacturing industry, which in the future could offer viable environmentally neutral fuels as an alternative to purely battery-powered electric vehicles.

“We in Germany are mastering combustion engine technology better than anyone else in the world,” FDP Transport Minister Volker Wissing said on German television Wednesday evening. “And it makes sense to keep this technology in our hands while some questions regarding climate-neutral mobility remain unanswered.”

In a proposed compromise, the European Commission reportedly proposed criteria for a new CO category.₂– fuel-neutral vehicles that may remain on European roads after 2035. The Wissing Ministry of Transport has not yet officially responded to the proposal.

To the surprise of its members, the German Green Party has remained relatively low-key in the internal combustion engine debate — until this week, when Habeck’s intervention raised the temperature in Berlin’s power centers.

In a TV interview on Tuesday evening, the Minister for Economy and Climate Action also accused the FDP and its senior coalition partner, Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s Social Democratic Party (SPD), of deliberately leaking an early draft law banning new fossils. fuel heaters in Germany from 2025.

In a December 2021 coalition agreement, the three parties agreed to ban the installation of new fossil-fuel heaters from 2024, with only devices powered by 65% ​​renewable energy being allowed thereafter. Since the war in Ukraine led to the collapse of gas supplies, this goal was supposed to be shifted to the beginning of 2024.

However, ever since the Habek ministry attempted to turn the policy into law, there has been a furious backlash over its cost to ordinary households, led by a massive tabloid picture.

Habek said the bill was leaked “in order to undermine the government’s credibility,” leading him to question the other parties’ willingness to reach a compromise at their scheduled meeting this Sunday.

The FDP and the Greens are struggling in the polls, with the Eco-Party currently close to the worse-than-expected 15% it won in the September 2021 federal election. Meanwhile, the Liberals hover just above the 5% threshold to enter parliament and have lost votes in a number of regional and state elections.