Verma, 46, is the first Indian-American to be the US ambassador to India and is expected to be sworn in shortly.
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.
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.
'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.
'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.
'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.
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.
Hari Om Pandey was of the view that a bill pertaining to the matter should soon be introduced in the Parliament.
'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.'
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.
RSS mouthpiece Panchjanya has accused Vice President Hamid of speaking like a "communal Muslim leader".
'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.
'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.'
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.
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.
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.
'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).
'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.
Speaking to the media ahead of the commencement of the 17th Lok Sabha, Modi said he is hopeful that this session will be productive.
Not one joke lands, not one tear is genuine in Sardar Ka Grandson, feels Sukanya Verma.
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.
'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.'
He's the Indian Nobel Prize winner you probably haven't heard of.
'I am very grateful to Rajnathji that he confirmed the fact that Savarkar was a habitual mercy-seeker from the British.'
Mohammad Sajjad salutes the memory of Mushirul Hasan -- historian, thinker, academic, institution builder, -- who passed into the ages this week.
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.
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".
Many anticipate that by the 2021 assembly elections in West Bengal, the BJP may come to power, says Mohammad Sajjad.
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.
Plus there's Javed Akhtar and Shatrughan Sinha.
'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.'
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.
With a saffron-coloured cloth covering his head, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau on Wednesday offered prayers at the Golden Temple in Amritsar, where he was presented with a traditional robe of honour. The Punjab leg of Trudeau's visit comes after he mingled with Bollywood stars in Mumbai and a visit to the Sabarmati Ashram in Ahmedabad and a trip to Taj Mahal in Agra. Here are glimpses from Day 4 of the Trudeau India visit.
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.
A book on the founder of Pakistan, Mohammad Ali Jinnah titled, - "Jinnah: India - Partition - Independence" penned by senior Bharatiya Janata Party leader Jaswant Singh, was released in New Delhi on Monday.
India's clash against England was a lot more than just a clash between the two teams as the result had the potential of changing other teams' fortune in the World Cup
