'...but from those who control the narrative.' Powerful nations have mastered this art of narrative building. Those nations who aspire to become global powers must do so, observes Shanthie Mariet D'Souza.
'We have been one of the most frequent countries to be on the Council. We have contributed so much to the maintenance of international peace and security,' India's Permanent Representative to the UN Asoke Mukerji tells Rediff.com's Suman Guha Mozumder.
'RSS leaders have now accepted that Muslims are part of this country. Muslims and Hindus are brothers. It is a good sign,' Jamiat leader Maulana Abdul Hameed Nomani on the talks with the RSS.
Let India rise on the prowess of development, honest money and a non-religionist political discourse. That will secure our future and also make an impact on the theologically run sham democracies in our neighbourhood, says Tarun Vijay.
Count among The Light of Asia's many, many admirers over 132 years: Gandhi, Tagore, Vivekananda, Nehru and Ambedkar, Tolstoy and Kipling, Yeats and Eliot, Alfred Nobel, Dmitri Mendeleev and C V Raman. Jairam Ramesh reveals why he decided to write a book on Edwin Arnold, who wrote The Light of Asia.
'...It won't help the party run a peaceful and equitable India,' warns Vir Sanghvi.
In a year of the Yogi Adityanath regime in Uttar Pradesh, the state has witnessed 1,500 police encounter in which 58 criminals have been killed. On July 2, the Supreme Court sought a reply from the UP government on the issue of police encounter killings after advocate Sanjay Parekh appearing for the People's Union for Civil Liberties pointed out that gross human rights violations were being carried out through these killings under the Adityanath rule. Speaking to Syed Firdaus Ashraf/Rediff.com, PUCL's advocate Sanjay Parekh said that police encounters are not permissible in a democracy.
'Who are these people on the streets?' 'They are youth and students who were hoodwinked, bluffed by Modi for the last seven years, with a promise of 2 crore jobs every year.' 'And Mamata sings the same tune.' 'But the youth can see that as long as there is Mamata or Modi, there is no hope.'
The EU is likely to intensify sanctions if the situation remains tense.
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.
'Gandhi was ambivalent about the RSS; the Sangh, for their part, actively distrusted him.'
At an online book release event, former vice president Hamid Ansari lays to rest the controversies surrounding his tenure.
'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).
'Should the new ISIS leadership opt for a consolidation, the Afghan-Pakistan border would be an attractive place,' warns Brigadier S K Chatterji (retd).
'Nobody is killing you in Kerala because you are Hindu unlike in North India where Muslims have been killed only because they are Muslims and were carrying some meat.'
'The real significance of the visit lies in the extent of the receptivity in Myanmar of the account of Chinese perfidy given by India's military and civilian top brass and how they assess the danger to themselves of dancing with the dragon,' notes Ambassador T P Sreenivasan.
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.
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.
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.
'We have to find a way out of this confrontational politics.'
'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.'
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.
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.
'The Union government does not have much of a governance function other than to send orders.' 'But even the sending down of orders it cannot do properly,' observes Aakar Patel.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
'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.
'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).
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
Authorities across states have identified more than 6,000 people who attended the Nizamuddin Tablighi Jamaat congregation, the biggest COVID-19 hotspot in India.
