Does Mrs Donald Trump realise that her immediate predecessor, Michelle Obama, is not the only hard act to follow, wonders Kanika Datta.
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It's perverse to rationalise 'controlled' killings or torture -- without going down a slippery moral slope. Once the state stoops to torture, it's liable to sink into tyranny, says Praful Bidwai.
India witnessed religiously motivated killings, arrests, riots and coerced religious conversions and the police in some cases failed to respond effectively to communal violence, according to the US State Department report on International Religious Freedom.
'Your confidence is shaken when the government does what it does these days, but then it is the same confidence that gives you the courage to stand up to the government's high-handedness.' 'There will always be people who will not fear jails or the physical and mental torture that visit citizens protesting against the government's draconian policies and laws.' 'There will always be Indians who will not be afraid to face the consequences of fighting for their Constitutional rights.'
Asserting that chemical weapons were used in Syria by the embattled Assad regime, US Secretary of State John Kerry termed the last week's attack that killed over 300 civilians a "moral obscenity" that should shock the conscience of the world.
'We need uranium to fuel our reactors. Our scientists and engineers have been handling uranium safely since 1967. They must not feel disheartened by the activities of well motivated local or foreign agencies.'
Some believe she should no longer be the face of the struggle to free Myanmar from the new military dictatorship, observes Prakash Bhandari.
'Unlike Trump, who has an isolationist approach, Bolton would like to roam around the world, trampling upon any sign of dissent,' says Ambassador T P Sreenivasan.
The National Commission for Women on Wednesday wrote to the father of the woman, who was allegedly put under illegal surveillance by Gujarat police at the behest of Chief Minister Narendra Modi, asking him to confirm the veracity of the letter.
Bharatiya Janata Party's prime ministerial candidate Narendra Modi on Saturday said Hindu migrants from Bangladesh must be accommodated in the country and detention camps would be done away with once his party comes to power.
The attack is believed to be targeting the Shiite Hazara ethnic minority community.
'Shaheen Bagh is no longer a mere ghetto of lower middle class Muslims.' 'Now, it is a metaphor for resistance, secularism and struggle,' notes Md. Zeeshan Ahmad.
The child, whose parents work as labourers in a factory, was beaten and brutalised with a sharp object. She is critical and on oxygen support, said a senior doctor at the All India Institute of Medical Sciences where she is admitted.
'The answer is no, the entire country's is.' 'So why such obsession with Delhi?' 'But the most powerful people in India live here: The prime minister, civil servants, Supreme Court judges, MPs, diplomats, dadas of the media...' 'If they can't deal with their own problem, what chance does the rest of the country have, with its foul air, dying rivers, frothing lakes, and crumbling mountains?' says Shekhar Gupta.
India and five Central Asian countries on Thursday decided to establish a joint working group on Afghanistan at the senior officials' level, ministry of external affairs secretary (West) Reenat Sandhu said.
'With increasing numbers of juveniles committing heinous crimes, we believe such juveniles must go into the adult system and be punished,' Minister Maneka Gandhi tells Rashme Sehgal.
'Despite Modi's high-flown rhetoric about good-neighbourly relationships in South Asia, he lacks a road map how to proceed -- be it with Bangladesh or with Sri Lanka and Pakistan... But a deeper question arises here: Did he duck on his own accord or under the diktat from the RSS, asks Ambassador M K Bhadrakumar.
Stoking a fresh controversy, Press Council of India chairperson Justice Markandey Katju on Monday alleged that the then Chief Justice of India K G Balakrishnan had pushed for the elevation of a Madras high court judge with "bad reputation" to the Supreme Court.
'The honourable prime minister virtually handpicked me for the Amritsar East seat.' 'Amit Shahji announced that if I am elected, the whole of Punjab will be drugs free.'
Of the 27 named, at least four are workers and functionaries of right-wing organisations, including the Bajrang Dal, officials said.
The letter, to maintain the current policy of denying Narendra Modi a visa to the United States, was released just as the BJP president arrived in Washington DC for a round of meetings with US lawmakers. Aziz Haniffa reports
The Congress and the Bharatiya Janata Party-led National Democratic Alliance were ranged against each other both inside and outside the Parliament on the opening day of the budget session on Monday.
There are unprecedented political implications of identification based on 'biological attributes of an individual', such as employed by Aadhaar, warns Gopal Krishna.
In the 2009 election, P Chindambaram the Sivaganga seat by a narrow margin. Then the Congress was in alliance with the ruling DMK. This time his son Karti is battling the seat with the alliance. India abstention at the UNHRC on an anti-Lanka resolution will further fuel Tamil anger against the Congress party. This leaves the finance minster sulking and his son facing an uphill political debut, says N Sathiya Moorthy.
The US is not going to be able to mount a concerted 'Western strategy' against China or Russia in the present international milieu, predicts Ambassador M K Bhadrakumar.
'This issue is related to national security because they were compromising the entire capital markets's core infrastructure by leaking confidential information.' 'What would have happened if the servers had come down?' 'Or some confidential information leaked to terrorists who could have knocked out our capital market?'
Thursday's savage murder of writer Avijit Roy in Dhaka raises troubling questions about religion-inspired terror in Bangladesh.
Asaduddin Owaisi opens up to T S Sudhir on his party's plans for the elections in Uttar Pradesh next year and why he thinks both the Bharatiya Janata Party and the Samajwadi Party have vitiated the secular atmosphere in the state.
The man's Indian citizenship was denied on the ground of discrepancy in the name of his grandfather.
Whether the third wave will ravage us depends on the pace of vaccinations, careful and calibrated opening up of establishments, and a strategy to contain the spread in specific states or pockets.
'The CEA suggested that could be as high as 19 per cent.'
Pragmatism and flexibility is a virtue. An untethered and short-term approach to policymaking is a flaw, argues Mihir S Sharma.
Congress president Sonia Gandhi led the delegation. She said Modi government was 'shutting down' people's voices and bringing legislations which are not acceptable to them.
'Respect the pledges you have made to the people of Kashmir.' 'Jammu and Kashmir is not like any other state of the country.'
'If Rao had, in fact, given a word to President Clinton in 1994 that India would not test, he would not have encouraged Vajpayee to test. The note, said to have been handed over to Vajpayee by Rao with the words, 'Now is the time to accomplish my unfinished task' may not have been a reference to nuclear tests at all,' says T P Sreenivasan.
Will Indian democracy benefit from the potential that Shashi Tharoor stores in his mind, spirit and intellect? Or will it be the saga of another leader who promised much but delivered too little, asks Dr Sudhir Bisht.
Chadha got 120 votes, the highest in the Asia Pacific group
Iranian Ambassador to India Ali Chegeni said his country is 'not for war'. "We are looking for peace and prosperity for everybody in this region," he said.
'No one talks about the Mumbai riots anymore, though like Delhi 1984, the guilty have not been punished. In Gujarat, many powerful leaders of the state's ruling party are in jail for their role in the riots... In Mumbai, only one politician of the Shiv Sena, a former MP, was convicted of hate speech, along with two other Shiv Sainiks, one of whom was a corporator and the other a junior functionary... So why the apathy? Could it be because despite these statistics and the widely-publicised findings of the Srikrishna Commission, what remained in public consciousness was the violence by the Muslims, thanks to a highly efficient Sena propaganda machine? There's no demand for it, but would an SIT probe into the closed cases of the Mumbai riots help today?' The fadeout of Mumbai's riots from public debate can be called a triumph of the communal State, argues Jyoti Punwani.
Stepping up its campaign against Narendra Modi, the Congress on Tuesday released video clips of alleged "hate speeches" of several Bharatiya Janata Party, Sangh Parivar and Shiv Sena leaders and demanded their arrest for "trading in the politics of poison" by committing the "sin" of "stoking communal fire".
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