'If I am not there, the RSS would do that job. They are obviously in power, they can do anything.'
The West Bengal CM launched her campaign for the 2016 assembly polls saying the TMC would fight the election alone... and win.
The governments at the Centre and in the state were unprepared to handle the massive response to the large numbers of people, as they were not aware of the groundswell of public admonition that was against the Establishment, says N Sathiyamoorthy.
'The message the government is sending out is you are not safe if your dare oppose this regime.' 'The entire incident gives you an understanding of what happened in Germany during the Third Reich.' 'This is jingoism and this is not nationalism of any kind.'
'I cannot conceive of any reason than my unsparing criticism of government policies that the government picked me to send a message to many who dare to take it on.'
Defying prohibitory orders, protests were held in Delhi, Bengaluru, Hyderabad and several other cities. Protesters, mostly students and activists, were detained on a large scale in national capital and other places.
'The prime minister has merely paid lip service condemning these crimes instead of launching a massive crackdown against such brutalities,' argues Professor Mohammad Sajjad.
Accusing striking students of Film and Television Institute of India of insulting behaviour, using cruel interrogation and causing mental torture, its director Prashant Pathrabe on Wednesday said he approached the police as a deterrent step and rejected suggestion that action was taken under pressure from the information and broadcasting ministry.
It is a sight that both warms and breaks the heart. The women of Shaheen Bagh seem oblivious of the cold, these women and their children, the latter ranging in age from 19 days to early teens, who have been occupying the road for over two weeks now. Some of them have not gone home for days, but their faces are clear, unlined by fatigue, their eyes bright and fierce as those of the falcon, shaheen, the area is named for.
'By ruffling dignified feathers, and by polarising its audience, Kabir Singh has put movies and art back into our public discourse,' says Sreehari Nair.
"You can't meddle with patriotism. Everything is alright but patriotism can never be compromised," says retired Supreme Court judge N Santosh Hegde.
'The BJP should avoid escalating every local issue and minor provocation into a national crisis and claiming a 'holier than thou' monopoly on patriotism.' 'And the Opposition should avoid paying the government back in the same coin by crying wolf about intolerance at the slightest provocation.'
Does India's first majoritarian government that is hard-focused on economic development have it in it to provide the Muslim community the healing touch? On evidence available so far, I am not hopeful at all. Yet, like the besieged community, I too find it impossible to abandon hope in the land's millennia-old syncretic traditions, says Saisuresh Sivaswamy.
Why Dalit leaders cross over to the BJP
'It is not just a loss for India or UC Berkeley, it is a loss for the world.'
'Our countrymen should be made aware of the need to be polite and friendly to our African guests.' 'They should know the dictum, athithi devo bhava, whether they are black or white,' says Ambassador T P Sreenivasan, who once served as India's high commissioner to Kenya.
AMU has once again been pulled into a crossfire of crass political opportunism. In these post-truth times, that the university also had political stirrings not subscribing to the Muslim League is chosen to be forgotten, says Mohammad Sajjad.
2016 saw the worst unrest in the Kashmir valley in 26 years.
Mohammad Sajjad profiles Professor Riazur Rahman Sherwani, 94, versatile mind, intrepid intellectual.
Using the Jinnah portrait as an issue, and by demonising AMU and consequently Indian Muslims, the politics of communal polarisation is sought to be played out ahead of the Kairana Lok Sabha by-poll and to sustain it till the next Lok Sabha election, says Mohammad Sajjad.
'When you come to Delhi, you see that there are many Kashmirs here -- the Dalits, Muslims, women, bonded labourers.'
Guru Pourina examines human relationships with greater honesty and with a better hold on reality than its big budget Bollywood counterparts, feels Paloma Sharma.
The JNU student leader said, "There is an atmosphere of fear in the country and anybody who speaks against the government is threatened."
'#MeToo is not to be dismissed as a 'shoot and scoot' but seen as the uncovering of dark truths about seemingly sophisticated and powerful personalities, or at least as one providing catharsis to a survivor,' notes Utkarsh Mishra.
'Think about how he would have handled Hyderabad, and JNU. He would have been very cross if he found two of his Cabinet ministers weighing in on the side of the ABVP.' 'And if Rohith Vemula still killed himself, he would have been the first to speak out in anguish and empathy rather than deny he was a Dalit.' 'And JNU, he would have simply said something like, 'let the boys speak, then they will grow up and join the IAS).' 'A good idea, when in crisis, is to apply the 'Vajpayee test' to your actions,' says Shekhar Gupta.
'It is very hard to get the police to file a report against someone from an upper caste.' 'Things are so bad that sometimes we have to sit on a dharna with the body of a Dalit victim to get the police to file a complaint.'
'...because the party is based on the Constitution.'
"I can't believe I'm saying a candidate for president of the United States has bragged about sexually assaulting women," Obama said.
'There are so many dimensions to history that we need to attend to: We need more space for local and regional histories; we need to delve into the histories of particular communities; we need to emphasise gender history and environmental history.' 'We need to think about India's history beyond India's current borders.'
The prime minister sees himself as the "vikas purush". But realising his government's agenda for development requires not just a more efficient administration but also a credible implementation plan, says Nitin Desai.
The Forbes 30 Under 30 list is harder to get into than Stanford or Harvard University. Meet the desis who made the cut this year.
'There is no discipline here -- only autocracy. The state is not governed by any democratic ideology. Democracy has ceased to exist here.'
Be it Oscars, Kareena Kapoor or Karan Johar, Sukanya Verma's super-filmi week is a study in grace for both the right and wrong reasons.
'All their idealism, intensity of emotions, acute sense of right and wrong, and burning passion for public causes can never serve as justifiable grounds to be touted by students of any country, let alone of India, with all its fragility and vulnerability, to question its unity in the name of freedom of expression,' says B S Raghavan.
'He has not done any harm to anyone. Yet you give him life imprisonment.' 'We were told to respect the Constitution. That is what Sai is doing; he is not doing anything beyond the Constitution.'
'In order to restore things to even keel, the government would be very well advised to cut its current political losses and work towards healing wounds across the nation. It still has its work cut out. It will have to work very hard to repair the political damage among Dalit and tribal communities,' says David Devadas.
'Bandaru Dattatreya shouldn't have blindly accepted what the ABVP told him.'
A former US military lieutenant travels to India to fight a battle of another kind. Archana Masih/Rediff.com met Robin Chaurasiya and the girls whose lives she is changing -- one day at a time.
'The BJP politics of appropriating icons from its ideological adversaries could only be a desperate attempt to extend the Jat-Muslim divide in Uttar Pradesh. Why this desperation when it can comfortably get votes on the plank of economic development?'
Here are the big takeaways from the debate.
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