Four Chinese soldiers were killed in the fierce clash with the Indian Army in the Galwan Valley in eastern Ladakh in June last year, the People's Liberation Army (PLA) acknowledged for the first time on Friday.
This was a difficult election to win, but the Modi card, the caste divide and the division in the Opposition vote bank helped overcome many challenges.
In line with exit poll predictions, the Bharatiya Janata Party has taken an early lead in Uttar Pradesh, after one hour of counting.
By clinging to the past misdeeds of some Islamic rulers, present day Muslims are making reconciliation of communities an impossibility, says Colonel Anil A Athale (retd).
Indian jewellery is widely prized for intricacy and craftsmanship.
'Pakistan's security establishment, despite its appallingly immoral approach to conflict, has worked with limited resources to maximise its national defence resources to continue bleeding India,' says Ajai Shukla.
The politicisation of ethnic sentiments in the state has coincided with the ascent of the BJP and increased activities of far right Hindu outfits, which organised rallies and other events on religious occasions such as Ram Navami a festival not very popular in West Bengal- unlike states in north India.
On December 26, the probe agency busted a suspected IS-inspired terror group and arrested 10 men, including a 'mufti' from Amroha in Uttar Pradesh, who it said were planning suicide attacks and serial blasts targeting politicians and government installations in Delhi and other parts of north India.
'We have nothing to gain by helping any other country to become a threat to India,' former Sri Lanka president Mahinda Rajapaksa, who is on the comeback trail, tells Rediff.com in an exclusive interview.
Police personnel in adequate strength were deployed across the state to maintain law and order, officials said.
'It is absolutely important for us to continue to message to people that they must wear masks, keep physical distancing, as much as is practically possible, at work or at home.'
Harish Kapadia is the only Indian to win mountaineering's most prestigious award.
Commuters stage rail roko, disrupt train traffic
SEWA International, a leading Indian-American non-profit organisation, has so far raised more than $250,000 for its COVID-19 relief efforts. It is using the money to buy personal protective equipment's, in particular facial masks and surgical masks, to donate free to the local law enforcement officials and hospitals in some of the hot spot areas like New York, who have run out of these essential items.
The manner in which a large proportion of common people have mortgaged their rationality and questioning spirit to let hatred, prejudice, and bigotry take over their minds is a cause of worry, observes Mohammad Sajjad.
'China might soon have to seriously consider whether it prefers an Indo-US hyphenation to a Sino-Indian one.'
The relative ranking of castes can vary across regions and localities and depends on a number of factors including control over land, wealth, and political power. Castes have often tried to 'upgrade' themselves (a process sociologists refer to as Sanskritization), and sometimes get 'downgraded'. A revealing excerpt from Upinder Singh's Ancient India: Culture Of Contradictions.
Deficient rains in west, flooding in north play havoc with crop cycles.
'Why did your generals try to grab a few square kilometres of Indian territory in Ladakh?' 'And what happened to the hard work that you and Prime Minister Modi put into the Wuhan and Mamallapuram meets?' Claude Arpi writes a letter to Xi Jinping, China's self-styled supreme leader, who turns 68 today, June 15.
The Goa chief minister said, "The surgical strikes against militants in PoK was planned 15 months in advance."
India, China and the Middle East, with their fast-growing economies and expanding industry, have seen growing air pollution, according to NASA.
With the farmers' protest against the three new laws and in support of legalising the minimum support price (MSP) going strong, state governments have announced a slew of measures in their annual Budgets to placate farmers. The Centre kicked things off in the Union Budget by assuring farmers that the MSP would continue and coming out with a report card to demonstrate its commitment. However, these efforts don't seem to have yielded tangible results. In their respective Budgets, states chose to go a step further by announcing a variety of measures.
Beyond the barbed wire and watchtowers, though, lies a story that casts more than a little doubt on whether this dream will ever be realised. Praveen Swami reports.
With the unanticipated floods across Tamil Nadu catching the unprepared administration unawares, Stalin finds that some of the early positives that had rubbed on his initiatives have been lost, observes N Sathiya Moorthy.
The Chinese have just one commander for all the forces confronting India. Commanders of all these forces answer to one man, and one headquarter. India, on the other hand, offers a diversity of options that is a military embarrassment in the 21st century. In Arunachal and Sikkim-Bhutan, the Eastern Army Commander is in charge. In the Uttarakhand (central) sector, it will be the Central Army Commander. The Himachal-Tibet border is the domain of the Western Army Commander. And all of Kashmir and Ladakh further on, the Northern Army's. Effectively, an array of at least eight 'three-star' commanders will be arrayed against one Chinese, says Shekhar Gupta.
Bajirao, an unorthodox leader, faced much opposition during his lifetime from the Brahmins of Pune. In the last hundred years or so, he has been ignored due to caste politics in Maharashtra where he has become a 'non person' for having been born a Brahmin, says Colonel Anil A Athale (retd).
Till June 30, the southwest monsoon was 33 per cent lower than normal, which is among the worst in the last five years, with 28 of the 36 meteorological divisions recording deficient rain.
The first solar eclipse of the current year would occur on January 15 and will be visible partially in major parts of the country, a city-based Space Sciences organisation said on Friday.
Cyclonic storm Ashobaa is expected to intensify further into a severe cyclonic storm and then move northwestwards during next 24 hours.
PSU bank shares were the top gainers on hopes of a rate by the RBI on easing consumer inflation
A 58-year-old man died after a power transformer fell on him in Raigad district. 2 people died and 3 were injured in two separate cyclone-related incidents in Pune.
Indian farming was transformed after the mid-60s.
IBM started using Watson last year in India in two of its key divisions, services and infrastructure, for the bulk of its 150,000 employees as part of its "predictive retention" programme.
'Having tied himself in knots, he just might take a decision which is dangerous, one that could take his nation to war.'
Beginning with the bird's eye view of itself -- a narrow state of hills, rivers and high population density, in a tapering part of the Indian subcontinent. It can be a beautiful place shaped by aesthetic founded in appropriate lifestyle and progressive views, or a junkyard shaped by money and what money buys. The choice is Kerala's, notes Shyam G Menon.
Colonel Anil Athale (retd) recalls how the Battle of Panipat, 258 years ago, changed the history of India for the next century and half.
Army Spokesperson Colonel Aman Anand said troops from China's People's Liberation Army (PLA) 'violated' the consensus arrived at during military and diplomatic engagements on the ongoing standoff in eastern Ladakh, and carried out provocative military movements to change the status quo.
Traders said the current demand is backed by government-funded projects which usually come up in the months before the election and the pace may slow down after the election, pushing the growth back to the previous levels.
'The training started with guns, knife fights...'
'Art Deco was the last of the truly international styles.'
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