The Evening Wrap Welcome to The Evening Wrap, your guide to the day’s major news developments with concise analysis from The Hindu. Fresh cases of COVID-19 have been reported in India, and that’s our major story. But there’s plenty more you need to know about: Hitting Home The global death toll linked to the deadly COVID-19 disease has crossed 3,000. India had remained largely unaffected save for three cases reported from Kerala. This changed today. The Union Health Ministry has confirmed that one positive case of COVID-19 has been detected in New Delhi, and one more has been detected in Telangana. The person from Delhi has a travel history from Italy, while the one from Telangana has a travel history from Dubai. This news could have potentially devastating consequences. Last Friday, the Sensex logged its second biggest one day fall as fears of a global recession caused by the unabated spread of COVID-19 sparked a manic stock sell off. It was accompanied by the news that India’s economy had registered sluggish growth for yet another quarter. A fresh COVID-19 scare in the country could be even more damaging to the economy. A couple of weeks ago, The Hindu’s In Focus Podcast featured a conversation with Dr G Arunkumar, one of the people instrumental in detecting and halting the spread of the Nipah outbreak in Kerala in 2018. We discussed the fact that all three reported cases of COVID-19 being from Kerala was no coincidence -- the state has in place a more rigorous system of surveillance, detection and response. Worryingly, that might not be the case for other states, and they have much to learn about how the virus may spread and the infrastructure needed to deal with it. Listen to that episode here. Quick Adjournment The Budget session of Parliament resumed today and, coming as it does amid the blame game over the Delhi riots, both houses were adjourned following protests by MPs. Parliament will resume tomorrow morning at 11 am when we can presumably expect to see more of the same. Today’s proceedings were largely dominated by protests led by Congress MPs demanding the resignation of Home Minister Amit Shah. A few other bits and pieces of business were also discussed. Keep track of parliamentary developments today, and throughout the session with our live page. Mercy Plea The hanging of the four death row convicts in the Nirbhaya gang rape and murder case will not happen tomorrow morning as scheduled. A sessions court in Delhi has deferred the hanging till further orders as one of the convicts, Pawan Kumar Gupta, has filed a mercy plea, which is pending with the President of India. Earlier in the day, the Supreme Court had dismissed the curative petition filed by Gupta. He was the last of the convicts to seek recourse to that legal remedy and the last to file a mercy plea with the President. Court Corner Several other developments have taken place in the courts today and we will sum them up in points here: A five-judge Constitution Bench led by Justice N.V. Ramana declined a plea to refer to a larger Bench petitions challenging the abrogation of special status of Jammu and Kashmir under Article 370 of the Constitution. The Bench said it would continue to hear the case on merits. The Supreme Court has taken up a petition filed by victims of the Delhi violence who have sought FIRs against BJP leaders Kapil Mishra, Anurag Thakur and others who gave hate speeches that may have incited violence in Delhi. The case will be heard on Wednesday. A Delhi High Court bench had earlier given the Delhi police six weeks to respond on the question of filing FIRs against the BJP politicians. While hearing the plea, which asked for the Court to issue directions so that officers from outside Delhi probe the riots and Army is deployed to maintain law and order, Chief Justice of India SA Bobde said the Court cannot give preventive relief. He said, “We cannot stop such incidents from taking place. We cannot give preventive reliefs. There is a kind of pressure on us… We cannot handle that. It is like the courts are responsible for what happened.” The Supreme Court agreed that a petition filed by Sara Abdullah Pilot against the continued detention of former Jammu and Kashmir Chief Minister Omar Abdullah under the Public Safety Act (PSA) needs to be heard quickly as it concerns his personal liberty. The case will be heard on March 5. The Delhi High Court asked the police to file a status report on measures taken by it for medical treatment and rehabilitation of violence-affected people in north-east Delhi. In Brief: The death toll in the recent Delhi violence has risen to 46, with four more bodies being recovered. The BJP-led Jammu Municipal Corporation on Sunday decided to rename the City Square in Jammu the “Bharat Mata Chowk”. Likening the U.S.-Taliban agreement in Doha to the long-awaited release of a film, External Affairs Minister S. Jaishankar said India was “watching the space” closely to see that the gains of the last two decades were not lost. The National Register of Citizens (NRC) in India will not affect Bangladesh, Foreign Secretary Harsh Vardhan Shringla has said while addressing a seminar in Dhaka. That’s it for this edition of The Evening Wrap. We’ll see you tomorrow. | 
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