The Supreme Court of India has dismissed petitions challenging the 1976 amendment to the Constitution that added the terms "socialist", "secular", and "integrity" to the Preamble. The court ruled that the inclusion of these terms, made through amendments, is valid and does not affect the original adoption of the Constitution in 1949.
'They have to prove the credibility of their talk; whether they want to focus on the secular face of India, whether they want to focus on democracy and above all freedom of an individual to practice his or her religion.'
The Delhi High Court dismissed a plea seeking the removal of the graves of terrorists Mohammad Afzal Guru and Mohammad Maqbool Bhatt from Tihar Jail, citing the absence of any law prohibiting burial inside jail premises and the government's decision to maintain law and order.
A bench comprising Justices Sanjiv Khanna and Sanjay Kumar passed the remark while hearing a batch of petitions filed by former Rajya Sabha MP Subramanian Swamy, advocate Vishnu Shankar Jain and others, who have challenged the inclusion of words "socialist" and "secular" in the Preamble of the Constitution.
'Pakistan will also try to turn Bangladesh into a base for terrorist attacks on India.'
It is high time India ends its silence on the human cost of the Gaza war and takes a principled stand without diluting its relations with Israel. A largely friendless Tel Aviv today needs New Delhi more than the other way around. India's failure now may cost it diplomatically in the long run, cautions M R Narayan Swamy.
The PM's speech from the ramparts of the Red Fort today was " stale, hypocritical, insipid, and troubling", the Congress general secretary said.
'They mean business, but business as usual is unacceptable to them'
GST 2.0 may cushion consumers against US tariffs, but like the 2019 corporate tax cut, it risks being another tactical fix rather than a structural growth strategy, expects Debashis Basu.
Nehru, India's longest-serving prime minister (1947-63), addressed the nation 17 times from the Red Fort. India's second prime minister Lal Bahadur Shastri delivered speeches from the Red Fort ramparts for two Independence Days in 1964 and 1965.
Ahead of the Lok Sabha elections, Trinamool Congress chief Mamata Banerjee on Monday received a shot in the arm when Shahi Imam of Delhi's Jama Masjid Syed Ahmed Bukhari on Monday lauded her work for the minorities in West Bengal, and said she would make a better prime minister for secular India than others.
'Earlier, we used to talk about a deficit economy. There is a deficit in democracy' 'If you read superficially Gandhi and Ambedkar and Nehru, some misconceptions and misunderstanding come to mind, as if they were at loggerheads and they differed radically in their views' 'India is one nation. There is only one citizenship. No citizenship for South India and no citizenship for North India and another for the Northeast'
A lot of frauds have been committed on the people of the country, and one of them was a wrong interpretation of secularism, he said addressing an event in Kanyakumari district on Sunday.
A controversy has erupted in Mysuru over the ownership of Chamundi Hill, home to the Chamundeshwari Temple, ahead of the Dasara festival. Pramoda Devi Wadiyar of the erstwhile Mysuru royal family criticized Deputy Chief Minister D K Shivakumar's statement that the hill is not the property of Hindus alone, leading to a heated exchange and raising questions about the nature of the upcoming Dasara celebrations.
The top court was hearing a plea of a Muslim man who has alleged that he was assaulted and abused in the name of religion on July 4, 2021, by a "screwdriver gang" of criminals as he had boarded a car to go to Aligarh from Noida, and that the police has not bothered to register any complaint of hate crime.
Bookstore owners were cautioned against keeping or distributing the books. Police personnel briefed the bookstore owners about the legal consequences of violating the ban.
'It is something like traditional Indian families.' 'The family might be run by younger people, but if the patriarch says that you should consider someone for some task, it is very difficult for the others to ignore it.'
Like his father Karunanidhi and AIADMK rivals MGR and Jayalalithaa, Stalin would like to confine his real political work to Tamil Nadu, and not want to take after the late Congress leader K Kamaraj and take up a national role, even if to create greater political space for son Udhayanidhi, points out N Sathiya Moorthy.
'India is a very strategic geography. The business is growing over 37-38 per cent year-on-year.'
AIMIM's Bihar state president Akhtarul Iman, the party's lone MLA in the state, has written to RJD president Lalu Prasad, formally requesting inclusion in the grand alliance.
'When I undertook a study of temple desecration in precolonial India, it was not enough simply to document what temples were desecrated, by whom, when, and where.' 'It was also important to explore the total historical context of such incidents, with a view to discovering patterns, which in turn could reveal the reasons why they occurred.'
'The nuns were subjected to abusive language and all types of mental torture.'
'They should be given a strong message that they are not the ones who decide the rule of the land, and they are not the ones who decide what justice is.'
'At Keeladi, we have not come across any evidence for organised religion.'
Observing secularism means to 'live and let live', the Supreme Court on Tuesday said regulating madrasas was in the national interest as several hundred years of the nation's composite culture could not be wished away by creating silos for minorities.
Karnataka Chief Minister Siddaramaiah on Thursday alleged that the Congress party's setback in the recent Lok Sabha polls in the state was the result of 'illegal manipulation' of the electoral process by the Bharatiya Janata Party, accusing it of 'misusing' the Election Commission.
BJP and RSS leaders are once again pushing to remove the words 'secular' and 'socialist' from the Constitution's Preamble, showing a deeper effort to change India's identity from a diverse, multi-religious republic to a Hindu-first nation, even though they don't have the numbers in Parliament to officially change the Constitution, observes N Sathiya Moorthy.
For Malegaon's Muslims, Rahul Gandhi's remarks were simply one more indication that the party they once supported no longer cares for them, notes Jyoti Punwani.
The Supreme Court on Monday said citizens must know the value of the right of freedom of speech and expression, and exercise self restraint as it mulled guidelines to regulate offensive social media posts.
A year after the RG Kar rape-murder Swarupa Dutt/Rediff look at the city where it happened, Kolkata -- its study in dichotomy, at once the self-proclaimed cultural capital of India as also a petri dish for a peculiar rage that breeds crimes against women.
The current situation in Kerala politics is perhaps best described as a case of the state's traditional two front politics now seeing a third front (the BJP) muscling in with the potential outcome being either a messy three front affair or a renewed endorsement of the two front pattern but with one of the old fronts compromised or quashed, observes Shyam G Menon.
By getting Jagdeep Dhankhar to resign at short notice, Narendra Modi has sent a message to his own ideological clan that he brooks no one trying to get too big for their boots, observes Modi biographer Nilanjan Mukhopadhyay.
The 21-month-long Emergency also saw the government amend the Constitution several times, including to keep the elections to the offices of President, Vice President, Prime Minister and Speaker beyond the scrutiny of courts and insert the words 'socialist', 'secular' and 'integrity' in the Preamble.
The editorial came amidst the ongoing tussle between Arlekar and the Marxist party-led Left Democratic Front government over the usage of 'Bharat Mata portrait' during official functions being held in Raj Bhavan.
The Bharat Mata controversy in Kerala shows how political and symbolic fights between the state and the Centre have taken attention away from education, throwing the state's oldest university into confusion and disorder, observes Shyam G Menon.
There is no guarantee that if we speak in only Indian languages, all our faults will be washed away and India will shine. Why then do they bully and belittle the English-speaking? asks Shyam G Menon.
The incident has brought back into focus the controversy that erupted last year when BJP-led governments in Uttar Pradesh and Uttarakhand directed food outlets along the Kanwar route to display the names of their owners and staff.
With the interest rate cut cycle nearing its end, several debt fund managers are shifting their focus towards interest income rather than betting on duration in anticipation of capital gains.
'The government is actively engaging with EU to ensure that concerns of Indian companies and hard-to-abate sectors are adequately addressed under CBAM'
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