The Allahabad high court on Monday dismissed a petition filed against the allotment of land in Ayodhya's Dhannipur village for the construction of a mosque, following the Supreme Court verdict in the Ram Janmabhoomi-Babri Masjid dispute.
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.
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.
'We are losing the battle of secularism, but we have not lost.'
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.
'The reason why we have reached such depths is because of the breakdown of the rule of law, and not the political atmosphere.' 'Yes, the political atmosphere has aggravated the situation.'
'A climate of impunity is created when the fascistic hate-mongers reckon they can get away with anything because 'this is our regime' and this is going to be a 'Hindu Rashtra'.'
"There was absolutely no need or necessity to mount a visceral attack on the religious beliefs of the Hindus. It was unwarranted and utterly unrelated to the occasion. That is what makes it deliberate and malicious," Justice G R Swaminathan of Madras High Court said.
'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.
'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.
By sacrificing an important component of the right to free speech, we have strengthened the hands of the fundamentalists, the bigots and the publicity-seeking goondas. And of the hate-filled political establishment, points out Vir Sanghvi.
'I'm 79 + now, and I've been doing all this since my late 20s.' 'Sometimes the ideological war extends to the home as well.' 'Many nights I couldn't sleep when someone close to me uttered the smallest insult.' 'It would cause me a lot of pain. But one has to be honest to oneself.'
'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.
'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.'
RSS mouthpiece Panchjanya has accused Vice President Hamid of speaking like a "communal Muslim leader".
Hari Om Pandey was of the view that a bill pertaining to the matter should soon be introduced in the Parliament.
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.
'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.
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.
'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.'
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.
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."
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.
'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.
'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.
'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).
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.
Speaking to the media ahead of the commencement of the 17th Lok Sabha, Modi said he is hopeful that this session will be productive.
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.
He's the Indian Nobel Prize winner you probably haven't heard of.
Not one joke lands, not one tear is genuine in Sardar Ka Grandson, feels Sukanya Verma.
'This is what Hindu Rashtra looks like, which has been enabled by conditions of democracy.'
'Inequality has been growing in the world. The virus has only amplified it.'
Warning India of "unbearable damage" in case of a war, Pakistan's army chief General Raheel Sharif has said his troops are ready to tackle any long or short misadventure by the "enemy".
A historic Hindu temple in Pakistan's garrison city of Rawalpindi is facing demolition to make way for barracks for soldiers, outraging the minority community in the country.
Mohammad Sajjad salutes the memory of Mushirul Hasan -- historian, thinker, academic, institution builder, -- who passed into the ages this week.
The Gujarat government on Wednesday banned expelled BJP leader Jaswant Singh's controversial book on Pakistan founder Mohammed Ali Jinnah which allegedly defamed the image of Vallabbbhai Patel, officials in the Chief Minister's Office said.
'Modi is the first BJP leader to try to include Dalits in its fold.' 'But the rank and file of his party is backward and want to bash up Muslims and Dalits whenever they have a chance.'
Many anticipate that by the 2021 assembly elections in West Bengal, the BJP may come to power, says Mohammad Sajjad.
Plus there's Javed Akhtar and Shatrughan Sinha.
