'Communalism and communal riots happened in India only during and due to colonialism. Pre-colonial India didn't have this problem of communal conflicts and religious strife.'
In an unprecedented move, the Rajiv Gandhi Khel Ratna, the country's highest sporting award, will be conferred on four athletes this year. The Sports Ministry announced on Monday that Olympic medalists P V Sindhu and Sakshi Malik will be honoured alongside trail-blazing gymnast Dipa Karmakar and ace shooter Jitu Rai.
Stating that providing reservation was no solution to development concerns of Muslims, Najma Heptulla, who took charge as Minister for Minority Affairs, said the new government will ensure progress of all communities, with special stress on education facilities for minorities.
AMU has once again been pulled into a crossfire of crass political opportunism. In these post-truth times, that the university also had political stirrings not subscribing to the Muslim League is chosen to be forgotten, says Mohammad Sajjad.
'Most Indians know very little about Patel which is a great shame.'
This was due to the fact that they had already won the Khel Ratna, the country's highest sporting honour.
B R Ambedkar's fears about personality cults in politics and money power in elections seem to be coming true, says Nitin Desai
While Rajnath Singh said secularism was the most misused word in politics, Sonia alleged that ideals and principles of the Constitution were under threat and being attacked deliberately
'Although Narendra Modi had no direct participation in the Ayodhya agitation, he would not have been in the dominant position he is now had it not been for the Ram Janambhoomi agitation.'
'Besides electoral opportunism, a sustained vilification of AMU on one or the other pretext helps them sustain their 'everyday communalism', the new strategy of the BJP of the Narendra Damodardas Modi-Amit Anilchandra Shah era,' says Mohammad Sajjad.
'The obsession of the Pakistan army with India leads to several destabilising things. Support for the Taliban in Afghanistan. Support for groups like the Lashkar-e-Tayiba, that have attacked India. Every time you get an attack like that there is a possibility of a war. And then the build up of the their nuclear arsenals. Chances of a nuclear weapon landing in the hands of a terrorist group, or a nuclear war breaking out, are tiny. But they are higher here than anywhere else in the world.'
The BJP's panicky return to basic-instinct majoritarianism in Bihar has pushed Muslims back into the 'secular' basement, says Shekhar Gupta.
'The sadhus and sanyasis of UP are not for any economics.' 'They only know the religious agenda and the RSS will support them.' 'Modi does not have full control of the party at the ground level like Indira Gandhi had.'
The perpetrators of the 2008 Mumbai attack, who shot dead 166 people, had confessed to details that should have been enough to hang him, but Pakistan enjoyed his anti-India rhetoric and let him spread his tentacles. A revealing excerpt from Khaled Ahmed's Pakistan's Terror Conundrum.
'I have stopped going to college and instead come here to protest.' 'What is the point of going to college when you are unsure about your citizenship?' 'I am here to protest and save my future.'
How has Raj Thackeray, who is as much a businessman as politician, been able to pull it off, when most Opposition politicians live in fear of IT and ED and CBI, asks Krishna Prasad after attending a Raj rally in Nashik.
'Gujaratis, among all Indians, are supposed to be born businessmen, but if more than 80% of them do not have the ability to do basic arithmetic, the future is grim.' 'The big issues are in society and they cannot be changed by an HRD minister no matter how brilliant she may be or think of herself as being,' says Aakar Patel.
'This is the first time a majority ruling government is nominating a Dalit for President.' 'So, the moral credibility definitely will go with the BJP, particularly Narendra Modi.'
'The osmosis between Hinduism and Islam that really gave birth to the Hindustani or Indo-Islamic civilisation was due to the conversation between Muslim mystics and yogis.'
Former Union minister Farooq Abdullah on Thursday said India will not be able to keep Kashmir if the forces who see Muslims of the country with suspicion and pit the minority community against the majority are not reined in.
'If you are a slave, nobody has any problem. The conflict starts when you question and ask for equal rights.'
"Telling the story of the birth of a nation is never easy. Especially if that nation is as big and diverse as India," said Shyam Benegal about 'Samvidhaan -- The Making of the Constitution of India'.
Indians in countries like the United States, China, Australia, Japan, Singapore, Egypt, Israel and South Africa celebrated the day with hoisting of the national flag and singing of patriotic songs.
While the row over allowing women into the AMU library has been wrongly portrayed, it does not mean gender biases are non-existent in AMU. The campus does have its own shares of all kinds of cultural and ideological prejudices prevalent in the world outside. The AMU campus is not a segregated island, says Mohammad Sajjad.
Taking exception to Health Minister Harsh Vardhan not mentioning the death of healthcare workers due to Covid-19 in his statement in Parliament, the Indian Medical Association has published a list of 382 doctors who died due to the viral disease and demanded that they be treated as "martyrs".
Incisive Editor, brilliant scholar on Islam, and now BJP leader, M J Akbar is at his intellectual best when he dissects the Muslim world and its problems, and offers up a solution from his unique perspective, as he did in this recent speech at the 10th R N Kao Memorial Lecture in New Delhi.
What is the road ahead for Rahul Gandhi? Shehzad Poonawalla offers a blueprint.
Rahul would know that fealty can be a fickle thing, and that if the Congress bucks the trend and actually wins the next national election, selfies with him would find their way from phones to walls, replacing those taken with Modi.
Saluting Tom Alter, who passed into the ages on September 29.
'See my actions in the last 25 years, the kind of films I have done. I have been doing Satyamev Jayate for the past four years. Why am I doing that? It's because I love my country. I am taking time out my busy schedule to do it. And I am happy about doing it because that is my contribution in nation building.'
The great Indian election is over and now the wait for the results is shrinking with every passing moment. Though exit polls hint at a cakewalk for Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his National Democratic Alliance, there are some battles which will be keenly observed on the result day.
'One can understand this prejudice in the minds of policemen against Muslims, without accepting it. But what tilts the balance disproportionately is the police's blind eye to offences committed in the name of the majority.' says Jyoti Punwani.
'To love all Indians is to love India in reality.' 'To love the lines on a map is to love a symbol,' says Aakar Patel.
'Why isn't the BJP ready to give reservations to Muslims despite the high court telling it to do so?' 'A K Antony said the Congress lost the 2014 election because of Muslim appeasement. Antony should have gone to the jails of Maharashtra and found out how many Muslims were arrested during Congress rule. I don't know what kind of appeasement this is.' 'We reposed faith in so-called great secular leaders and they deceived us.'
Both the parties had been banking heavily on the internal feud in the first family of the state
'Godse is no more, but the mindset which gave birth to such distorted philosophy is unfortunately still with us.'
'Muslims are depressed and disillusioned.' 'The safety valve is that we still have a multicultural mosaic in West Bengal, Tamil Nadu, Karnataka and Kerala.'
Glimpses of I-Day celebrations across India.
'The creation of Pakistan was integral to Britain's grand strategy.' 'If they were to ever leave India, Britain's military planners had made it clear that they needed to retain a foothold in the NWFP and Baluchistan because that would provide the means to retain control of Iran, Iraq, Kuwait, the UAE, Bahrain and Qatar.'
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