Pronouncing the verdict, the special Maharashtra Control of Organised Crime Act (MCOCA) court judge Yatin Shinde sentenced to death Faisal Sheikh, Asif Khan, Kamal Ansari, Ehtesham Sidduqui and Naveed Khan who planted the bombs in various trains.
'We have to find a way out of this confrontational politics.'
The United States has been successful in engaging with India on tracking money used by radical groups to penetrate into the country, the Barack Obama administration has said as it praised Indian Muslims for demonstrating a great deal of "resilience" against overtures by terrorist groups.
'We have leaders who would rather that we cohabit with the Indian Mujahedeen than fight terror, as long as the payoffs are there in the next polls... Obviously, we are not headed down the best route to keep terror at bay,' says Brigadier S K Chatterji (retd).
Indian Mujahideen co-founder Yasin Bhatkal and his close aide were sent to custody of the Delhi police for 15 days after a court allowed the plea of the probe agency to arrest them in a case lodged in 2011 for allegedly setting up an illegal arms factory.
'Media reports have highlighted that hawala money is coming from Arab countries. And this money is used to create disturbances in Jammu and Kashmir.'
'In the name of cultural nationalism, Modi wants to impose another ideology on Muslims.' 'His agenda, we feel, is saffronisation of Indian culture.'
As Melania Trump arrives in Ahmedabad, Sheela Bhatt offers the First Lady Of The United States a primer on one of India's oldest, and historic, cities.
Indian Mujahideen co-founder Yasin Bhatkal and his close associate Asadullah Akhtar were on Friday remanded to 12-day police custody by a Delhi court after the National Investigation Agency said their custodial interrogation was required to unearth larger conspiracy of terror attacks.
Modi has debunked the uncontested wisdom of foreign and strategic policy remaining unchanged and running on a broad national consensus. This is clearly seen in his unhesitating embrace of the US and the clear hardening shift in India's stance on Pakistan, says Shekhar Gupta.
Although conventional political wisdom would decree that the construction of a 'magnificent' Ram temple at his 'birth-place' would bring the BJP a big yield of votes in the prospective elections, its leaders know by now that the mandir must not exist in isolation in its game plan, reports Radhika Ramaseshan.
According to sources in Gandhinagar, Gujarat Chief Minister Narendra Modi met a range of Muslim leaders including the Deobandis in the last week of Ramazan. In an off-the-record conversation, a Muslim community leader from Ahmedabad said that an important Islamic scholar and a member of the All India Muslim Personal Law Board had a 90-minute discussion with Modi during Ramzan.
In any institution that has a passionate ideology, the moderate is always vulnerable to the person who is more extreme, because that is what the supporters want.
Authorities across states have identified more than 6,000 people who attended the Nizamuddin Tablighi Jamaat congregation, the biggest COVID-19 hotspot in India.
It is time the current leaders who swear by 'cultural nationalism', that is religion neutral, assert that Bharatiyata is at the core of our nationalism and India was never a 'Hindu Rashtra', argues Colonel Anil A Athale (retd).
'The fact that a rural Kashmiri boy was brainwashed into killing himself and others means there is an active programme that exists which does such recruiting and there will potentially be other such individuals out there,' warns Aakar Patel.
A disparate global network of violent fundamentalist Islamic groups threatens India's eastern flank as much as the north and west with a real possibility of these spilling over into our borders, says Shyam Saran.
In the light of the efforts being made to forge electoral unity between scheduled castes and Muslims, Mohammad Sajjad examines what the architect of our Constitution, B R Ambedkar, had to say about the Muslim community.
A Delhi court on Tuesday extended till September 17 the National Investigation Agency custody of Indian Mujahideen co-founder Yasin Bhatkal and his close associate Asadullah Akhtar after the agency claimed they were involved in a deep rooted conspiracy and had executed various blasts in India.
Threats from IS militants, the Syrian conflict and the migrant crisis in Europe are some of the recent risks that have companies worried, says M Saraswathy.
'It is time to not merely assert that Kashmir is an internal problem, but begin to act on it,' argues Colonel Anil A Athale (retd).
'History will repeat itself after a decade or so and historians will point to the folly of May 2017 as the event that sowed the seeds of another 9/11,' warns Colonel Anil A Athale (retd).
Air Commodore Nitin Sathe discovers how the IAF trained Pakistani air force pilots, during the 1971 War, which led to the birth of the Bangladesh air force.
The ordinary life lived in Pakistan is rarely a part of Indian imagination. This is this gap that Pakistani television serials have succeeded in bridging, says Mohammad Asim Siddiqui.
Soniya Yadav, slain policeman Ramashankar Yadav's daughter, reveals to Rediff.com's Prasanna D Zore that her father was not supposed to be on duty that fateful night when he was killed in the Bhopal Central Jail.
Pakistan-based terror outfit Lashkar-e-Tayiba was responsible for the terror attack at the Indian Consulate in Afghanistan's Herat province last month, the US said on Wednesday.
Meraj Khalid Noor, who is popularly known as Bihar's Osama bin Laden for his uncanny resemblance with slain most-wanted Al Qaeda chief Osama Bin Laden, has said that he will contest the Lok Sabha polls against the Bharatiya Janata Party's prime ministerial candidate Narendra Modi from Varanasi.
'The existence of Section 295A on the Indian statute books sits uneasily with India's ambitions to be seen as a progressive democracy,' says Kanika Datta.
Jamaat-ud-Dawah chief Hafiz Saeed's detention may help ease India-Pakistan tension, media reports in Islamabad said on Tuesday even as supporters of the Mumbai attack mastermind launched protests across major cities against the government's decision which they say was taken under pressure from the US and India.
'The Hindu quest for political power in terms of a Hindu identity can pose a problem for tolerance, as the alignment of religion with power often does.'
There have been no major blasts in the state, but most terror operatives are trained in camps in the state. Extremely volatile, Kerala has been declared a Red Zone by the NIA.
The time is nigh for India to ensure that investment by its former citizens is encouraged by protecting their rights, says C B Patel.
A new West Asia is emerging and India must engage at the highest level and help shape this change, says Saeed Naqvi
Six Kashmiri Muslim students belonging to Sarhad, an organisation which brings semi-orphans from strife-torn regions to live and study at their school and college in Pune, share their hopes for their state and their experiences outside it. Jyoti Punwani reports.
'While we may aspire to be a democratic if smaller version of China, we may only manage to become a larger, more accomplished Indonesia,' says T N Ninan.
'Must every believing Hindu automatically be assumed to subscribe to the Hindutva project?' asks Shashi Tharoor.
With 2016 officially behind us, let's look forward and speculate about the events, people and issues that will shape 2017.
'We have seen in India that radical ideology has by and large not been successful in taking root.'
Has New Delhi internalised the truth that it does not matter, asks Saeed Naqvi. Such deafening silence from the government, principal opposition, even the pundits!
The All India Muslim Personal Law Board said that it would ask Qazis to tell bridegroom at the time of execution of 'nikahnama' that they would not resort to "three divorces in one sitting" as it was an "undesirable practice in Shariat".
© 2026 Rediff.com - Advertise with us - Disclaimer - Privacy Policy - Sitemap - Feedback - About us - Terms of use - Grievances