Till recently there was no monument to the Maratha victory or the great Maratha General Mahadji Shinde. It was a defeat, such as never suffered by the British in India.
'Am I wrong in presuming that UP is being seen as a new laboratory of communal politics like one has seen in Gujarat,' asks Ashutosh.
Four days after a scuffle between intoxicated young men on Diwali night in Trilokpuri's Block 20 spiralled into a diffused communal riot that resulted in scores of injuries, dozens of arrests, and the incineration of at least one Muslim-owned shop, the violence appears to have abated but tension and suspicion persist.
The coastal districts of Udupi and Dakshina Kannada have been reporting cases of cow vigilantism in the last several years.
Nowhere else has caste, power politics, and generational change come together to form a combination so potent that it is combustible.
Beware of fake cow vigilantes, says PM Modi
Without strategising together, Jayalalithaa's successor, Chief Minister Edappadi K Palaniswami, and M Karunanidhi's son-cum-successor, M K Stalin, have used tough-talking on seat-sharing with allies, to replace charisma that they purportedly lacked, during the run-up to the assembly polls scheduled for April 6, says N Sathiya Moorthy.
Almost everyone in Gorakhpur has a story about an Adityanath intervention that helped push through a piece of work that would've been otherwise impossible.
'Fear is not created by those who are defending minorities and Dalits.' 'Fear is being created by the actions of political leaders like Yogi Adityanath and police forces.' 'The kind of hate statements that are being made to which there is silence from the prime minister's side.'
Netas in Uttar Pradesh are using Rajkumar Hirani's film PK to play the politics of polarization.
In further rumblings within the Bharatiya Janata Party over its big loss in Bihar, party MP Hukumdev Narayan Yadav on Monday said the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh chief Mohan Bhagwat's quota comments 'agitated' backward castes who rallied around the grand alliance and asserted that many who voted for the Modi government are not RSS supporters.
A report by IndiaSpend shows that 97 per cent (68 of 70) of such incidents were reported after Prime Minister Narendra Modi's government came to power in May 2014.
'Rather than an outcome of 'pro-incumbency', the exit poll results betray a completely lackadaisical approach of the Opposition parties.' 'While a new kind of politics was on display for the past five years, they were still mired in their old-style methods which will cost them the election,' predicts Utkarsh Mishra.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi, party president Amit Shah and chief ministers of National Democratic Alliance-ruled States are at the ceremony.
'Hindu voters in coastal Karnataka lean more towards Hindutva than Hinduism which explains why the Siddaramaiah government's perception as anti-Hindu worked wonders for the BJP in coastal Karnataka.'
Bharatiya Janata Party on Tuesday night released the first list of 43 candidates for the high-stakes Bihar polls, giving about 60 per cent representation to those from SC and backward castes in an apparent attempt to target the base of rival Janata Dal-United-Rashtriya Janata Dal combine.
Congress candidate Ashok Chavan, BJP's Gopinath Munde, NCP's Padmasinh Patil and All India Youth Congress chief Rajeev Satav cash in on their charisma and image. Sanjay Jog
It looked as if the BJP was hoping to use Rajinikanth to press their seat-bargain with the AIADMK. Now with the Rajini bait gone, the question now is not how much the BJP would settle for, but how much the AIADMK would be ready to offer, notes N Sathiya Moorthy.
Confident of giving a tough fight to Congress and BJP, Mayawati's Bahujan Samaj Party, which surprised many by ranking third in 2008 Assembly elections with a vote share of 14 per cent, is all to set announce its candidates for all the 70 seats in Delhi.
At its heart, the furore over 'love jihad' reveals an anxiety over the increase in inter-religious marriages and women's freedom, says Charu Gupta, associate professor of history at Delhi University, whose areas of research include the colonial history of Uttar Pradesh and issues of gender and sexuality.
Later addressing a public meeting in Varana, Gandhi asked Modi to respond to allegations of manipulative share trading by a firm linked to Gujarat Chief Minister Vijay Rupani.
Government's reforms are too half-hearted. But Rahul Gandhi's Congress is too amateurish and inept to hold it to account.
'The idea of Hindu Rashtra is one of the most inclusive concepts.'
Rajinikanth's visible electoral strength is his constant mouthing of the term, 'aanmiga arasiyal', or 'spiritual politics', without he having to explain what it is. By implication, it is all that what Dravidian politics is not about. It may imply anti-corruption, being against Periyar's forgotten anti-god, anti-Brahmin dictum, but also ends up covering 'Tamil pride', which begins with Tamil language where, as a Maratha from Karnataka, he has more to defend himself. However, in the contemporary national context, aanmiga arasiyal is seen as a front for Rajini to market his brand of 'soft Hindutva' but identified even more with the BJP and Prime Minister Narendra Modi, in political terms, says N Sathiya Moorthy.
'When Arnab Goswami's arrest became a talking point, the case of my husband who was arrested much earlier, was totally ignored.' 'When so many people spoke in support of Goswami, they were silent on a journalist named Siddique Kappan'
HRD Minister Smriti Irani was again in the line of fire in the Lok Sabha with opposition members forcing Speaker Sumitra Mahajan to allow them to speak on their notice for the privilege motion against the minister.
Hindu community was facing a "conspiracy" and it should strengthen itself and "set an example", Union Minister Ram Shankar Katheria said in Agra at a condolence meeting for a dalit VHP leader, who was shot dead on Thursday.
In an apparent backlash to Prime Minister Narendra Modi's comments that cow vigilantes were trying to create tension in the society and that they should be exposed and punished, the Vishwa Hindu Parishad has said that the prime minister will have to pay a price in the 2019 national election.
'We were supposed to be a united nation based on unity and diversity.' 'Now what we are doing is there will be a class called Marathas, Dangars, etc.' 'The 100 per cent of our nation's population will be in classes and you will be allocating the nation's education and service resources in terms of classes.' 'How does it work out in terms of equality? Where is your equal nation?'
Faced with one of the worst showing in the Lok Sabha polls, Bahujan Samaj Party supremo and former Uttar Pradesh chief minister Mayawati on Tuesday dissolved all the committees of the party.
'Emboldened by the BJP victory, the upper castes feel they must assert themselves and regain dominance over the rural power structure.'
Since the temple opened at least 13 women have attempted to enter the shrine, but fallen short despite their valiant attempts.
Senior Congress leader P Chidambaram on Friday rejected criticism that his party practised politics of minorityism but asserted it cannot close its eyes to the discrimination against Muslims and other sections including Dalits.
Bihar Chief Minister Nitish Kumar of the Janata Dal-United and his bete noire Rashtriya Janata Dal chief Lalu Prasad Yadav are not contesting the Lok Sabha polls which has put their 'prestige constituencies' of Nalanda and Patliputra at stake.
'The BJP has lost 5 states and Lok Sabha elections are due in less than 90 days.' 'The reservation bill is a jhunjhuna (lollipop) for the upper castes.'
The man, who once lorded over Bihar, was pushed to the margins after the 2010 assembly elections.
'He is as consummate a politician as anyone else which is evident considering the way in which he has placed his party and weeded out his rivals from within the party.'
The leaders alleged that those who had no contribution in the freedom struggle wanted to spread fear 'in the name of nationalism', suppress the voice of people and were questioning the legacy of Congress.
He launched the "cleanliness is service" exercise to push for greater public participation in one of his government's centrepiece programmes launched on October 2, 2015.
'A class antagonism of rich versus poor took the colouring of a communal confrontation,' says Sunil Sethi.
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