Clad in a yellow kurta with a saffron gamcha around his neck, atop an open saffron coloured vehicle, he was greeted by loud chants of "Modi! Modi! Modi Zindabad! 400 Paar Is Baar" all along the roadshow's route.
In the Interim Budget, Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman announced that a high power committee would be set up to consider the challenges arising from 'fast population grown and demographic changes.' 'But who wants data? It pays to feed people's fears, insecurities and apprehensions. If such fears don't exist, they must be created,' her husband Parakala Prabhakar says in this fascinating excerpt from his book, The Crooked Timber of New India: Essays on a Republic in Crisis.
Holidays on Ram Navami and Janmashtami, associated with the most popular of Hindu deities Lord Rama and Lord Krishna respectively, have been done away with and on the other hand, the number of days requiring schools to remain shut for Muslim festivals has been increased, Modi alleged.
Muslims need to get out of their Isolation Syndrome, argues Mohammad Sajjad.
As the Congress batted for a national caste census with an assertion that rights should be proportionate to population, its senior leader Abhishek Singhvi on Tuesday created a flutter by saying "it will eventually culminate into majoritarianism", a remark he later withdrew from social media and blaming it on his staff.
'For the women of a community whose seclusion has been a byword of their lifestyle to take to the streets as a means of protest is an unprecedented event,' notes Amulya Ganguli.
'If we want real democracy, the economy itself will need to be democratised.'
Terming a separate quota for Muslims unsustainable, the Andhra Pradesh high court on Monday quashed the state government's decision to give reservations to the minority community.Under the Reservation in Favour of Socially and Educational Backward Classes of Muslims Act, passed on July 23, 2007, the Congress government had extended 4 per cent reservations in education and government jobs to the 15 backward groups of Muslims in Andhra Pradesh.
After the Centre implemented the CAA on Monday, notifying the rules four years after the contentious law was passed, police in Delhi's northeast district identified 43 hotspots and conducted patrols there.
The high-level committee on 'one nation, one election' approached 62 parties out which 47 responded -- 32 in support of holding elections simultaneously, 15 against it.
Her husband Swaraj Kaushal tweeted a screenshot of a post by a Twitter user who asked him to 'teach' the minister 'not to do Muslim appeasement'.
The fundamental construct of India's neighbourhood policy still needs to be what Vajpayee postulated, Manmohan Singh embraced, and Modi energised. It's just that we need to junk domestic politics and excessive religiosity, while acquiring much humility and a renewed respectfulness towards our neighbours, recommends Shekhar Gupta.
Even as the two parties appeared confident that they have reached out to every voter and publicised their new symbols, experts suggested varying impact of the split and the symbols on the vote bank.
'Social networking is a scientific tool that was not used so much in intelligence until recently,' the national security adviser added, 'We are now using it fairly extensively.'
The row broke out after a private television news agency attributed the excerpts of the article shared by the NC leader to him.
In the coming days, unless Modi tones down the communal spiel, it will be clear that anxiety continues to drive his mind and clouds his judgment, observes Modi biographer Nilanjan Mukhopadhyay.
Madhyamam has ambitious plans for the future, says Abdur Rahman. These include a daily English newspaper, with simultaneous editions from Delhi, Mumbai, Calcutta, Hyderabad, Bangalore and Chennai and a regular television channel.
Right actions might help reduce this trust deficit. But what we have today is over- enthusiastic vigilante groups targeting minorities over beef or 'love jihad', against whom the government does little apart from meek condemnation, says Utkarsh Misgra.
A Chicago-based man, Joseph M Czuba, aged 71, has been arrested and charged with murder and hate crimes after allegedly stabbing and killing a 6-year-old boy and seriously wounding his mother.
The top court appointed the Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai to suggest the mode and manner of counselling of the child and his classmates involved in the incident.
The Muslims side said that they have received the letter and it will be deliberated upon in a meeting.
The man and the woman turned out to be both Muslims and adults. Kushinagar Superintendent of Police Vinod Kumar Singh said someone from Gurnia village had informed them on Tuesday that a couple was getting 'quietly' married there, and suspected it to be a case of 'love jihad'.
Action has been taken against 8,275 posts including 4,563 posts on Sunday, it said, adding these had been posted on Facebook, Twitter and YouTube.
Even those who are the supporters of India's 'cultural nationalism' seems to be unaware of the footprint of Shri Ram in South East Asia, observes Colonel Anil A Athale (retd).
'What social justice is Tejashwi talking about?' 'Muslims in Bihar are asking we are 18%, and you are giving us 2 seats.'
While the Congress is not willing to campaign in Muslim areas, the BJP encourages Muslims to attend its public meetings, reports Archis Mohan.
'The Congress is trying to reinvent itself -- the caste census demand, OBC emphasis, the anti-corporate thrust, especially on Adani etc -- all this is not standard Congress strategy.'
Hemmed in by barricades and police and paramilitary swarming all over the place, the troubled Jahangirpuri on Friday showed signs of returning to normalcy, with the local peace committee calling for communal harmony and members of the warring communities embracing each other, agreeing to let bygones be bygones.
Communal violence broke out in Nuh district on Monday as a mob tried to stop a Vishva Hindu Parishad procession by pelting stones and setting cars on fire. The violence spilled over into neighbouring Gurugram on Tuesday with mobs killing a Muslim cleric, torching an eatery, and vandalising shops.
Will he take Modi's 'sab ka saath, sab ka vikas' route? Or will he turn UP into Egypt under Morsi, asks Syed Firdaus Ashraf.
'It is an existential crisis. We cannot recover lost ground through social media. We need to forge alliances and reshape our ideological contours.'
'Compared to other social groups, managing the Muslim constituency has always been easier for the secularists.' 'Just some symbolic measures and window-dressing would keep the Muslim flock together.' 'Having been betrayed by all the supposedly 'secular' political parties, Muslims should turn into citizens without any ascriptive identity marks,'says Mohammad Sajjad.
The Bihar CM has made a sagacious attempt to consolidate his extremely backward castes (EBC) support base while trying to make a dent into RJD's Muslim-Yadav combine.
A new entrant, whether a popular actor or not, has not been able to sweep the polls, as their fans had hoped for. Given a proven pattern, it should hold true for Vijay as well. Or, something drastically has to happen between now and 2026, asserts N Sathiya Moorthy.
The Supreme Court said on Friday the developments that followed the unsavoury incident of slapping of a Muslim schoolboy by his classmates at the behest of their teacher in Uttar Pradesh were the result of the State not doing what was expected of it after the offence was committed.
Newly elected Samajwadi Party MP RK Chaudhary, one of the founders of the Bahujan Samaj Party, has claimed BSP chief Mayawati has been ignoring the Bahujan movement which has led to her party's rout in these Lok Sabha polls.
The Imam has convened a National Conference of Muslims in New Delhi on Saturday, which is being attended by over 300 top Muslim clerics, scholars and religious heads.
'I declared myself a Sikh. We want freedom from caste discrimination.'
'This is not about Hindu-Muslim. Why should I go to vandals?'
A sessions court had recently rejected her discharge plea in the case, even as the Supreme Court granted her bail after the Gujarat high court denied her relief.
