'Himanta Biswa Sarma has put a lot of effort in demonising Muslims this time.'
Baldev Sharma, the former editor of Panchajanya, has been appointed as the new chairman.
Their demands will be met of course, and this government will move on to the next great idea, without an apology or an explanation, predicts Aakar Patel.
Tamil film actor Kamal Haasan said, "Mersal was certified. Don't re-censor it. Counter criticism with logical response. Don't silence critics. India will shine when it speaks."
He is not good at thinking through laws and policies. His lockdown produced chaos and misery and didn't stop Covid. His GST finished off thousands of companies and reduced the amount of tax government collects to such an extent that he cannot pay state governments any more, observes Aakar Patel.
The annual earnings of a non-executive chairman of a PSB is capped at Rs 10 lakh, inclusive of fees for attending board meetings. This is way below the compensation of the chairman of any private bank, reveals Tamal Bandyopadhyay.
Whenever the history of India's National Law Schools is written, N R Madhava Menon's name will be deeply inscribed in it, says Mohammad Zeeshan Ahmad.
The prime minister says he will bring real change to Bengal. Perhaps he will. The interesting thing is that his party has never defined what this change is, observes Aakar Patel.
'India is the only large nation along with Argentina whose numbers have continuously and without a break risen from March,' observes Aakar Patel.
That is what you will hear again after Nirmala Sitharaman presents a speech that will prove to be meaningless and numbers that will show themselves to be wildly off the mark, observes Aakar Patel.
Saloni Dhumne and Atreya Raghavan speak to young India to find out who their LGBTQ heroes are.
The politics of hate does not pay. The people are too sensible to fall for such a ruse, says Amulya Ganguli.
As their parties are locked in a fierce battle for Bengal, Tathagata and Saugata Roy, siblings who belong to the BJP and the TMC respectively, answer the same questions put to them about the assembly election.
Eminent scientists and writers from across the world, including renowned thinker Noam Chomsky and Nobel laureate Orhan Pamuk, have joined the chorus of protest against the arrest of JNU students' union president Kanhaiya Kumar in a sedition case.
'Behind the BJP's anti-Congress crusade is an attempt to divert attention from the Ladakh standoff,' explains Amulya Ganguli.
;The world paid a heavy price for the megalomania of the Third Reich's fuehrer.' 'Will it pay a similar price for the ambitions of China's leader-for-life?' asks Amulya Ganguli.
But why should India be talking to the Taliban in the first place? There is no love lost there. India will never forget or forgive the humiliation to which the Taliban subjected it in the IC-814 hijack, notes Shekhar Gupta.
'Is Modi failing is the question which the BJP will begin to ask itself,' says Amulya Ganguli.
It is going to be a rough and brutal 2020 for India as its government pushes on with its ideological agenda, and the citizens do whatever they can to protect themselves, notes Aakar Patel.
Public intellectuals who frame the ideological antipathy between the RSS & Co and Jawaharlal Nehru in the light of Mahatma Gandhi's assassination and Hindu Raj alone, miss the point by a yard, argues Shaan Kashyap.
'We can make all the noise we want to about being a tolerant society, but the reality is in front of us.'
'If the virulence of COVID-19 has muted the toxicity of the BJP's communalism, it will be an example of good coming out of the pandemic,' notes Amulya Ganguli.
Farming and agriculture are crying out for a business model innovation, says R Gopalakrishnan.
The term, 'pro-Pakistani', is helpful for the BJP to depict its opponents as anti-nationals while the sedition law is handy for locking up or harassing the government's critics, points out Amulya Ganguli.
The poet and professor's 'life breath is now in the hands of those sworn to uphold his Constitutional right to life.' 'Will they be true to their oath?', asks Jyoti Punwani.
The resolution said the state will be called Bangla in three languages -- Bengali, English and Hindi.
'There is perhaps a need to pay heed to L K Advani's belief about an Emergency re-run,' says Amulya Ganguli.
The "24" star feels intolerance always existed in the country and is not happening for the first time.
'In enacting the citizenship law, the BJP's focus has been so much on consolidating its Hindu vote bank all over the country to divert attention from the economic downturn that the party forgot that there are Hindus and Hindus and that one group of Hindus may not always be warmly embraced by another,' notes Amulya Ganguli.
'There are around 400 Lok Sabha constituencies where Dalits and Muslims combined constitute 30% of the electorate.' 'Also, 90% to 95% of Dalits and Muslims go out and vote.' 'So, if they are come together, they become significant electorally.'
'The BJP's all-India plans can be expected to become clearer around 2022-2023, particularly if -- as some anticipate -- the senior Congress leadership cracks, broadly as between the Nehru-Gandhi loyalists and those who may be termed 'pro-changers',' observes Arun Bhatnagar, a retired IAS officer.
When word got around in the ministry of external affairs that Siddhartha and Malavika were going to New York and would be with SM Krishna, protocol officers went to Delhi airport to see off the couple. Siddhartha chided them for doing so and when the officials said a government vehicle would be picking them up at John F Kennedy airport on arrival, he told them that he would take a taxi to reach the New York Palace hotel where his father-in-law was staying. K P Nayar reports.
'You may be an MP or an MLA; when we go to Bengal, we go as cadre.'
'I suggest Rahul Bajaj come out in the open and give us his own white paper on the perceived sense of fear that he thinks haunts corporate India,' says Dr Sudhir Bisht.
The NDA leadership is set to meet on Wednesday to discuss a Parliament floor strategy for what is expected to be a difficult winter session for the government.
Sardar Udham sets a great standard which, Utkarsh Mishra believes, would be emulated by other film-makers who want to make movies of this genre.
Rao was a Congress MP from Andhra Pradesh and served as the Union minister of state for coal.
'For the Hindutva lobby, there is cause for worry.'
'No more than 43 per cent of the people who were asked by Sushma Swaraj to say whom they supported stood by the trolls.' 'As many as 57 per cent do not approve of the minister's traducers,' says Amulya Ganguli.
Maharashtra police on Tuesday raided the homes of prominent Left-wing activists in several states and arrested at least five of them for suspected Maoist links. Near simultaneous searches were carried out at the residences of prominent Telugu poet Varavara Rao in Hyderabad, activists Vernon Gonzalves and Arun Farreira in Mumbai, trade union activist Sudha Bhardwaj in Faridabad, and civil liberties activist Gautam Navalakha in New Delhi. Subsequently, Rao, Bhardwaj and Farreira were arrested. Although Navalakha was also arrested, the Delhi high court ordered police not to take him out of the national capital at least until Wednesday. According to unconfirmed reports, others whose residences were raided are Susan Abraham, Kranthi Tekula, Father Stan Swamy in Ranchi and Anand Teltumbde in Goa. The raids were carried out as part of a probe into the violence between Dalits and the upper caste Peshwas at Koregaon-Bhima village near Pune after an event called Elgar Parishad, or conclave, on December 31 last year. Here are their brief profiles:
'"Life-changing" clearly denotes an exceptionally high level of regard for Narendra D Modi.' 'One has to find out if the UGC used such an adulatory term for any other speaker, whether from politics or from academe,' says Amulya Ganguli.
