The construction of the Dera Baba Nanak-Kartarpur Sahib corridor across the India-Pakistan border has been likened to the fall of the Berlin Wall by Prime Minister Narendra Modi. Here's why the corridor is important.
'Given this dissonance between India's age-old multicultural tenets and the anti-minority temper of the present times, it cannot be easy for the BJP to maintain its balancing act to convince the world that all is well,' observes Amulya Ganguli.
Bharat is nothing more than a reflection of the times we are living in: where we expect our heroes to be flawless, virtuous fellas -- it is our current national disease.
Chuni Goswami needs insulin daily and due to the 21-day nationwide lockdown his medical supervisor is not able to attend him but his wife Basanti is 'managing' it somehow. Former India hockey captain Gurbux Singh remembers the World War II and also the partition but said he never witnessed anything like the current crisis.
Modi flagged off the first batch of pilgrims led by Akal Takhat Jathedar Giani Harpreet Singh to Gurdwara Darbar Sahib through the corridor, which was thrown open days ahead of the 550th birth anniversary of Guru Nanak Dev on November 12.
'Bangladeshi Muslims want to increase their population in India.' 'They have made colonies in India.' 'Rohingyas are doing the same.' 'This has to stop.'
'We have had 27 years of liberalisation and in the same period Korea and Japan and China transformed themselves forever,' says Aakar Patel.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi has done the seemingly impossible by finalising the long-pending Land Boundary Agreement ahead of his Bangladesh visit, writes Prakash Bhandari.
'Indian nationhood is indeed at the cusp of alarming redefinition -- hate-filled, and exclusionary.' 'Nations are not built this way, instead these are the ways of liquidating nations.' 'We must pre-empt it.' 'Can we?' asks Mohammad Sajjad.
India's first female photojournalist gave this interview to Rediff.com a year before she died.
Jayanta Roy Chowdhury reports on how the West Bengal elections are being fought by the BJP and Trinalool Congress amid COVID challenges, 'Bangaliana', and campaigns based on religion, region, and caste.
To him running was both his God and beloved as he created his own little fairytale out of what what could have easily been a tale of horrors.
'He destroyed many of our tanks, and finally, it was just the two of us left facing each other with our tanks just 200 m apart.' A tale of valour excerpted from Rachna Bisht Rawat's 1971: Charge Of The Gorkhas And Other Stories.
From the many large communal riots across decades to the six-hour mass cull of Muslims in Nellie, 1983; Sikhs in Delhi and elsewhere, 1984; Kashmiri Pandits, 1990; selective massacres of Hindus in Punjab, 1983-93; and Gujarat, 2002, we have failed to bring perpetrators of our biggest tragedies to account, asserts Shekhar Gupta.
There is a great danger of the government getting stampeded into actions in Kashmir that could result in long lasting damage, warns Colonel Anil A Athale (retd).
Polling started in Pakistan's National Assembly and four other provincial centres on Tuesday to elect a new president who will replace incumbent Asif Ali Zardari in September.
Balraj Bahri Malhotra and Ram Advani's passing signals the sunset of the era of the many booksellers across India who came over after Partition.
'Any conventional conflict could trigger a nuclear war with results that neither India nor Pakistan could survive easily.' >A revealing excerpt from Shuja Nawaz's The Battle For Pakistan: The Bitter US Friendship And A Tough Neighbourhood.
'It was the Mughals who first established standard units of measurement and maintained offices of meticulous record keepers and auditors, departing from the more haphazard methods of earlier regimes.' 'By the end of the 16th century, their revenue and judicial administrations exhibited an obsessive preoccupation with order, the efficient management of time, and a spirit of rational self-control -- all of them characteristics of early modernity,' point out Sheldon Pollock and Benjamin Ellman.
Verma, 46, is the first Indian-American to be the US ambassador to India and is expected to be sworn in shortly.
Hari Om Pandey was of the view that a bill pertaining to the matter should soon be introduced in the Parliament.
'Besides electoral opportunism, a sustained vilification of AMU on one or the other pretext helps them sustain their 'everyday communalism', the new strategy of the BJP of the Narendra Damodardas Modi-Amit Anilchandra Shah era,' says Mohammad Sajjad.
India's majoritarian regime is now making a dangerously fast-paced move towards theocracy, like its western counterpart did a few decades ago, warns Mohammad Sajjad.
'The loose use of words like foreigner or Bangladeshis obscures the fact that the post-Partition migration to Assam has been of both Hindus and Muslims.'
Retorting to Pakistan Prime Minister Imran Khan's minority remark, former Indian cricketer Mohammad Kaif said that Pakistan is the last country that should be lecturing any country on how to treat minorities."
'The origins of the model of planned economic development adopted by independent India was a direct consequence of the war.' 'The war provided an opportunity for groups at the margins of Indian society to find new avenues for mobility.' 'The war also led to the emergence of India as a major Asian power and set the stage for it to play a wider role in international politics.'
Let us see the problem for what it actually is: Illegal Immigration plain and simple, confined to the northeast with a definite communal slant that poses a national security risk and one that needs to be dealt with firmly and promptly by stringent identification (and deportation), says Vivek Gumaste.
RSS mouthpiece Panchjanya has accused Vice President Hamid of speaking like a "communal Muslim leader".
Not one joke lands, not one tear is genuine in Sardar Ka Grandson, feels Sukanya Verma.
With corruption rankings, the White-Anglo-Saxon-White Caucasian countries have succeeded in discovering a replacement for the old form of imperialistically deracinating the rest of the world, argues Sudarshan Madabushi.
'I am very grateful to Rajnathji that he confirmed the fact that Savarkar was a habitual mercy-seeker from the British.'
'Inequality has been growing in the world. The virus has only amplified it.'
'This is what Hindu Rashtra looks like, which has been enabled by conditions of democracy.'
'Offensive operations to capture objectives across the LoC to eliminate terrorist launch pads and deny the use of the most dangerous routes of infiltration, are likely to be limited to brigade-level attacks.' 'These limited operations are unlikely to escalate to war across the international boundary,' says Brigadier Gurmeet Kanwal (retd).
Speaking to the media ahead of the commencement of the 17th Lok Sabha, Modi said he is hopeful that this session will be productive.
Pro-Pakistan leader Syed Ali Shah Geelani's death has brought to an end a chapter of anti-India and separatist politics in Kashmir.
Only the government has the capacity to collate all death data across all facilities and count corpses dumped in rivers. And the government is patently not interested in finding out, observes Devangshu Datta.
Where does one find a man who shows no bitterness or animosity towards Hindus, even after a frenzied Hindu mob burnt his house down?, Jyoti Punwani asks in this tribute to a truly extraordinary Indian.
'The government is going to introduce legislation that would make it easy for Hindus, Buddhists, Christians, Zoroastrians, Sikhs and Jains to migrate legally to India.' 'But looking at that list, my entire well-meaning question, as may be obvious, is: What about Muslims? They seem to have been specifically left out of this formulation,' says Aakar Patel.
Apparently referring to the recent incidents of communal attacks, Sayeed said that it was not in the interests of the country which had a history of composite civilisation.
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