'It was disappointing on two counts. One is on the leadership issue and second is how the Congress must win elections.'
The well-known satirist, who has issued a statement saying his comments weren't intended to insult the country, found backing from Trinamool Congress member Mahua Moitra as well as Congress leaders Kapil Sibal and Shashi Tharoor.
'There were a lot of offers, but I wanted to be with a party that is working for the people and making them happy, not just by words, but also by action.'
'Does a thousand-year-old sculpture worshipped in a thriving religion belong to a foreign museum or the temple from which it was extracted?' Congress MP Shashi Tharoor asked angrily. 'They legitimately belonged to India and people of past, present and future generations are interested in re-possessing them,' a central information commissioner declared last month.
A day after Prime Minister Narendra Modi reiterated that social distancing and staying indoors were the only ways to deal with the fast-spreading coronavirus, pictures and videos of people standing in circles and squares to buy essential items like groceries and milk in many states went viral.
While several opposition parties criticised the move, Union minister Prakash Javadekar said the Parliament session is being held under special and extraordinary circumstances.
'In the long term, the party that is going to be irrelevant is the Left.' 'It seems absurd that the people of Kerala are the last ones to wake up to the reality that this kind of discredited dogmatic ideological politics has no place in the modern world.'
Vellore is one of the two seats that the DMK alliance won by the narrowest of margins in 2019. For the DMK's vote-score to be so low in a constituency with a substantial Muslim population has not missed the BJP strategists' eyes, observes N Sathiya Moorthy.
'What The Kerala Story is trying to do is take the fake hate propaganda which we saw earlier only on WhatsApp to the big screen now.'
Air India and IndiGo have already suspended Kamra from flying until further notice and six months, respectively.
Kamra allegedly heckled Goswami, the editor of Republic TV, on IndiGo's Mumbai-Lucknow (6E5317) flight on Tuesday.
'... while leaving the dirty work he orders to his subordinates.'
'Since Modi is walking a tightrope between two worlds -- one of the saffron brotherhood and the other of the proposed smart cities and bullet trains -- it is understandable why he is averse to scrutiny lest he loses his balance by tilting too heavily on one side or the other. But, why has Sonia Gandhi acquired the reputation of a sphinx,' asks Amulya Ganguli.
Former Finance Minister P Chidambaram on Tuesday said letters written to British authorities on Lalit Modi case during UPA rule should be released as they will answer the former IPL Commissioner's accusations against him and Congress.
'...because we are truer to the spirit of the Hindu faith.' 'There is absolutely no question that the Hinduism of the mob lynchers, the people who have killed others because of what they are eating or how they are worshipping or the faith they belong to or what they're doing professionally, those are, to my mind, not Hindus at all.'
Senior Congress leader Jairam Ramesh puts it succinctly: "Arun Jaitley was every non-BJP person's favourite BJP-ite."
A majority of Congress leaders said the party will face desertions if Rahul Gandhi does not remain the leader.
Cutting across party lines, all MPs slammed Pakistan for awarding death sentence to Kulbhushan Jadhav.
"The fact is that after 106 days of pre-trial incarceration there is not a single charge framed against me as I speak now," said Chidambaram, who is expected to attend the Rajya Sabha proceedings on Thursday.
The year threw up quite a few shockers, some rather rude one. Below are Rediff.com's 12 picks that made us sit back and think, 'Did that really happen?'
Counting's underway and the fate of the candidates is awaited. As we wait for the results with bated breath, here's how your heavyweights are faring for now.
The bill seeks to ensure health-care, treatment and rehabilitation of persons with mental illness "in a manner that does not intrude on their rights and dignity."
The ultimate consequences of Rahul Gandhi's yatra may be known only in 2024, points out Dr Sudhir Bisht.
'Kerala is probably the only state, where (with regard to) the clinical management and the overall protocols, we have an infectious disease team heading the whole containment plan.'
'Anybody and everybody who opposes this government for whatever reasons will be branded a terrorist and charged in such a manner that all human rights will be taken away.'
The finance minister's Budget presentation is a sombre affair, yes, but it wasn't as if the Lok Sabha was all serious through the speech.
The Aam Aadmi Party on Saturday declared their third list of candidates for 20 Lok Sabha seats with prominent names being Savita Bhatti, wife of late comedian Jaspal Bhatti's, who has been given a ticket from Chandigarh, and Anand Kumar, a professor from JNU, from Delhi.
"I am free... Hope others political leaders would be released soon. Thank all parliamentarians who fought for my freedom. Will be able to take decision on future only after other leaders are released," Abdullah, the Lok Sabha member from Srinagar, told reporters from the terrace of his residence in Srinagar.
'If the Congress is to challenge the NDA government, Rahul Gandhi will have to shed his indifference to Parliament, become more visible and vocal and, essentially, lead from the front,' says Rediff.com contributor Anita Katyal.
'Given that 95 per cent of rapes are committed by adults and only 5 per cent by juveniles, these 95 per cent of rapes will continue to take place, so what women's safety are we talking about?'
'They call us Punjabis as nashedi (drug addicts). So I also asked him with a smile, 'aaj aap kaunsa kar ke aaye hain (what did you take today). He failed to realise my gesture but only saw me smiling,' Akali leader and Union minister Harsimrat Kaur said.
Complaints of electronic voting machine malfunctioning poured in from several booths on Tuesday during the third and largest phase of Lok Sabha polls which saw voters turning out in large numbers to cast their vote in 116 seats, including all constituencies of Gujarat and Kerala.
'My joining the BJP will definitely result in a landslide migration of votes to the BJP.'
Not all change is good, but this one is, applauds Shekhar Gupta.
It's been 13 days that the Winter Session commenced, but no work has taken place as MPs continue to spar over the note ban.
A major slugfest erupted on Thursday over Bharatiya Janata Party MP Chandan Mitra's demand for stripping Nobel laureate Amartya Sen of the Bharat Ratna award and the economist offering to return it if Atal Bihari Vajpayee asks him to do so.
Ambassador Venu Rajamony, who served as press secretary to President Pranab Mukherjee during his tenure, salutes the statesman and political legend, who passed into the ages on Monday.
The Haryana 'incident is a manifestation of a far greater malady -- mobocracy -- that continues to afflict our society,' says Vivek Gumaste.
'Rightly or wrongly, 1962 got ascribed to Krishna Menon and him alone. That's unfair.' 'Certainly, he was one of the guilty men, but he was not the only guilty man. Mistakes were made all around.'
The success story of Adani's Mundra Port in Gujarat, in terms of efficiency, technology and management, should be replicated at Vizhinjam to ensure that this ambitious project does not fail, say Shehzad Poonawalla and Riya Sinha.
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