'The nominations were not meant to last permanently, but depended on the government of the day.' 'There was no question of revoking it during Congress, Janata Dal or even Vajpayee's NDA rule.' 'But Modi is different.'
'E Ahamed will be sorely missed as a decent and wise man who made the best use of his political career and personal abilities for the good of the nation,' remembers Ambassador T P Sreenivasan.
'It is our aim to capture power and rule in Kerala. We may not be able to achieve our target in one attempt.' 'By just hammering once, you will not be able to break a rock; you need to hammer the rock several times.'
This time however, the poll panel did not share the overall polling percentage at its briefing.
Modi should bluntly ask Chinese President Xi Jinping why he was willing to put his neck in the Pakistani noose, ignoring all that is known of Pakistan's perfidy, says B S Raghavan.
'It is a travesty that I have to prove my commitment to Gandhi and to this country.'
The issue of lynchings resonated in the Rajya Sabha; while in the Lok Sabha, the Opposition accused the government of not being sensitive towards farmers' issues.
In remarks that are likely to stoke a controversy, Congress leader Mani Shankar Aiyar on Friday mocked Narendra Modi's prime ministerial ambitions and said a place will be identified for the Gujarat chief minister to distribute tea in New Delhi.
'Imran Khan might actually get some initial leeway from the generals to pursue better ties with India -- but not beyond a point.'
Veteran Pakistani diplomats Syed Ibne Abbas and Jalil Abbas Jilani would be the new Pakistani envoys to India and the United States respectively as part of a wide-ranging reshuffle of envoys in key capitals around the world.
Rajya Sabha also rejected an opposition sponsored motions to send the bill to a select committee of the House and for making triple talaq a civil offence with 100 votes against it as compared to 84 in favour.
'Until India fully absorbs the fundamentals of international relations, it will continue to get evil for good,' says Brahma Chellaney.
'Till the time we do not remove fear in the minds of Muslims of India, how will we achieve peace?' asks the Bharatiya Janata Party MLA from Gorakhpur, Radha Mohan Das Agarwal, who says he will resign as a member of the Uttar Pradesh assembly if any Indian Muslim of his constituency is evicted from the country during the Citizenship (Amendment) Act exercise.
The Rafale will surely be flying in Indian skies next year. But the way the BJP government has botched this will cast a shadow on defence acquisitions in the years to come.
'The execution has been 100 per cent faulty.' 'The scheme is also a stupid one, a real Tuglaq Darbar scheme.' 'This way of attacking black money is the most ineffective one.'
'This is not a small change, it's a BIG change. People wanted to hear the voice of their PM. They can do so now. This is a big parivartan.'
States spent much more in the first three months of the current financial year compared to the corresponding period last year.
Comparing a state like Kerala with a nation like Somalia shows disconnect unbecoming of a prime minister, says Uttaresh Venkateshwaran.
'It must be rendering Modi, Amit Shah and Adityanath speechless that the Indian diplomat who lifted the Azhar trophy at the UN in New York is also a Muslim. 'Yes, this is the wonder that was India,' says Ambassador M K Bhadrakumar.
The battle against militants fighting for separation of China's volatile Xinjiang province, bordering PoK and Afghanistan, is getting "tougher, fiercer and crueler than ever" due to the revival of pan-Islamic extremist groups, top Chinese leaders from the province said.
Parliament on Thursday cleared the decks for the rollout of the historic Goods and Services Tax from July 1 as it approved four supporting legislations to usher in the one-nation-one-tax regime.
From planning Prime Minister Narendra Modi's foreign trips to playing a key role in the Jammu and Kashmir elections, former RSS spokesperson Ram Madhav is become increasingly important in the BJP
Leader of the Opposition in the Gujarat assembly, Shankarsinh Waghela on Wednesday asked Prime Minister elect Narendra Modi to build a Ram temple at Ayodhya within the constitutional framework now that the Bharatiya Janata Party has got an absolute majority, in a speech that was blended with sarcasm and praise.
'The Modi government has turned the basic fundamentals of its Pakistan policy on its head.' 'It means an admission that its hands-off-Hurriyat policy was flawed and it is ready to engage with Pakistan without minding if the Kashmiri separatists talked to the Pakistani government,' says Rajeev Sharma.
Two suicide bombers rammed into the All Saints Church in the Kohati Gate area of Peshawar, Pakistan, when Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif was on his way to New York to attend the United Nations General Assembly session.
Asaduddin Owaisi opens up to T S Sudhir on his party's plans for the elections in Uttar Pradesh next year and why he thinks both the Bharatiya Janata Party and the Samajwadi Party have vitiated the secular atmosphere in the state.
A group of retired civil servants also called upon the PM to reach out to the families of the victims in Unnao and Kathua and "seek their forgiveness on behalf of all of us".
Council on Foreign Relations Senior Fellow Daniel Markey Tuesday said that the raising of the issue of American intervention in Jammu and Kashmir by visiting Pakistani Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif at the United States Institute of Peace in Washington was not 'especially constructive' and was motivated by political expediency.
'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.
Indian security agencies in possession of telephone bill, passport details that the underworld don lives in a upscale Karachi locality, reports The Hindustan Times
'We should hit Pakistan, continue to prepare for surgical strikes, continue to punish Pakistani posts in the proximity of the LoC and we should start adopting counter terrorist measures.' 'That should be India's action without escalating it to a full-fledged war.'
The Union Health ministry put the number of positive cases at 82, eight more since Thursday night, which includes the woman and a 76-year-old man from Karnataka who became the country's first coronavirus fatality besides 17 foreign nationals, Health Ministry officials said.
Congress President Sonia Gandhi on Tuesday began a stock-taking exercise following the party's debacle in assembly polls in Haryana and Maharashtra even as a clamour for "course correction" grew within its ranks in the wake of the dip in electoral fortunes.
'The talks have to go on because we want to know what Nawaz Sharif has in his mind. We want to see how much he can deliver. We want to see if he can wrest back power from the army,' a senior government official, who deals with Pakistan, tells Sheela Bhatt.
'As India and Pakistan observe the 50th anniversary of the 1965 war, the one lesson that ought to have been learned by Pakistan is how vulnerable its heartland is to a sudden attack. The only alternative to this inherent geographic weakness is to have a policy of peace with India. In an extreme scenario, India can destroy Pakistani strategic targets by just artillery shelling, crossing of the border is not even necessary,' Colonel Anil A Athale (retd)
'Unlike in other states, minorities form a significant number in Kerala. They have money and political power. In such a society, the emergence of a new communal power is not a healthy thing.'
'Kofi Annan will be remembered more for his Nobel Prize and related glory rather than Rwanda and Volcker,' notes Ambassador T P Sreenivasan with whom he worked in the UN.
On her 101st birth anniversary, November 19, four letters that reveal a different side to inarguably India's toughest prime minister.
'The response to terror is not always reciprocal terror, nor is launching a conventional response the best response.' 'The best response is to make the sponsor pay a price he cannot afford,' says former RA&W chief Vikram Sood.
As his party girds its loins for the battle to lead India, Bharatiya Janata Party president Rajnath Singh appears to have the maths worked out in his mind on every possible electoral scenario. But about one thing he is certain: in no circumstances will the party stake claim to form the next government if it doesn't have a clear mandate. Edited excerpts from an interview with Aditi Phadnis
