More noticeable than the hue of his shirt was his mast style in the witness box. He seemed to be reinventing the truth every few minutes. He yarned on and on, navigating his testimony further and further away from the facts, but he never lost his aplomb.
'Rahul is only making a pathetic public spectacle of his lack of judgment and good sense by hallucinating that somehow, the Congress, or whatever political combine is cobbled together, will displace the BJP at the coming Lok Sabha election by constantly harping on the Rafale deal,' argues retired civil servant B S Raghavan.
Official celebrations in most states were restricted to unfurling of the national flag and chief ministers and governors addressing the people, with fewer guests in attendance.
Modi seems to have forgotten the solution to rising tomato prices he had in mind in 2014.
Counting of votes in the high-stakes close-to-call Bihar assembly elections, billed as a hot battle between Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Chief Minister Nitish Kumar, will take place on Sunday.
For the AIADMK's cadres, it is much more than an election symbol, they believe the party's electoral chances rest on owning it, says N Sathiya Moorthy.
With months to go for the Karnataka assembly elections, the man in the hot seat, Chief Minister Siddaramaiah says he'll make billionaire jeweller Nirav Modi and the Punjab National Bank scam an issue in the upcoming Karnataka elections . In an interview to CNN-News18's Deepa Balakrishnan, the CM also says that Hindutva is not a campaign issue in the state.
President Pranab Mukherjee expressed condolences over the loss of lives in the stampede and called upon the authorities to provide all assistance and help to the victims.
'As the financier, she controls the party.'
Sasikala's name is doing the rounds for the general secretary's job, but it is one thing for Sasikala to acquire power under Jayalalithaa's wing and quite another when the CM is somebody else, says Aditi Phadnis.
His message contained some defiance: he vowed to fight the ban, insisted he had done no wrong and hit out at those who had questioned his integrity and honesty.
Colonel Sonam Wangchuk was awarded the Maha Vir Chakra, India's second highest honour for courage, for wresting the first victory of the Kargil War. Leading 40 men, his unit evicted 135 Pakistani troops in a three day battle fought in two feet snow and minus 6 degrees.
Proceedings in Parliament were paralysed for the third day running over a number of issues, including Telangana and death of 40 children in Muzaffarnagar relief camps, preventing the notices for a no-confidence motion from being taken up on Wednesday.
Here's the full text of President Ram Nath Kovind's customary address to the joining sitting of Parliament on the first day of the budget session.
While members of Samajwadi Party raised the issue of Kasganj violence, the newly-elected Aam Aadmi Party members protested against the sealing drive in Delhi.
A three-member fact-finding team of the Bharatiya Janata Party, that was going to visit the violence-hit areas of Malda district in West Bengal, was detained at the Malda railway station.
In 1998, the Congress asked her mother to campaign. 'We had a family discussion. We explained to our mother that you will be used, you will be discarded once you are done with the campaign.' 'A few days later I got a call from my mother. She said, "I have decided to campaign".' 'We were stunned. Why was she doing this?' Payal Mohanka listens in.
Rediff.com columnist Yoginder Sikand recounts his near-death experience during a recent trip to Tabo, a small town on the banks of the Spiti river in Himachal Pradesh.
'The Indian Right can afford to be rigid; but as liberals, our position has to be one of constant evolution, or else death awaits us,' argues Sreehari Nair.
'Kerala society is more advanced than any other society in India and everybody is more aware of the laws and how to proceed against the accused. So, you cannot blame Kerala based on the crime records,' says state home minister Ramesh Chennithala.
From the Aadhaar verdict to #MeToo's arrival in the country to the entry into the Sabarimala temple -- India had a newsworthy 2018. As we step into 2019, these are the top moments from the year gone by.
Opposition parties questioned the law and order situation in Uttar Pradesh, where elections are due next year.
Under intense attack, HRD Minister Smriti Irani on Wednesday made a forceful statement in Lok Sabha, saying Kanhaiya Kumar and some other students had been found indulging in anti-national activities by the Jawaharlal Nehru University authorities themselves.
'We spoke of everything but politics.' 'She was well-versed in the Eng. Lit. canon of Dickens and Austen, but had also read Oscar Wilde's famous epistolary tract from jail, De Profundis.' Sunil Sethi recalls his memorable encounters with Jayalalithaa.
'That is what Gauri was, in her essence -- the principle of free, open, forthright words, made flesh.' 'And that is what was gunned down -- her words, and with them our freedom to fashion our own opinions, to frame our own thoughts, to articulate them without fear of reprisal.'
If the people of Tamil Nadu stop deifying their leaders and start evaluating them more objectively, the political masters too may change their wayward behaviour, argues Sudhir Bisht.
'I had to convince myself that I was steely enough to operate on a cold-blooded killer.' 'For all my medical experience, this was something I had never done!' 'If something happened to Charles, I knew my fate was sealed for me.' 'I would be called Doctor Death until I breathed my last.' 'Success was my only hope of escaping that fate.' A fascinating excerpt from heart surgeon Dr Raamesh Koirala's Charles Sobhraj, Inside The Heart Of The Bikini Killer.
A list of monarchs who abdicated after 2000.
Listing out key initiatives, Adityanath said his government would launch a systematic drive to help retrieve 1,000 hectares of land in the grip of land mafia for years.
Quoting a shloka from The Bhagavad Gita, he said, 'this is the compulsion of time'.
'Political parties have appropriated our military victories -- the Kargil war is the BJP's and the Bangladesh war is the Congress's -- what is going on?' As Uttarakhand -- where faujis number nearly 40% of the state's population -- prepares to vote, Rediff.com's Archana Masih discovers what upsets retired soldiers in Uttarakhand the most is a forgotten protest in the heart of Delhi.
The problem for OPS lies in the fact that most party MLAs believe Sasikala's clan was the force behind their obtaining the party nomination as much as it was Jaya's charisma that won them their seats in the May 2016 assembly polls.
'It should be of concern that some youth in Kashmir have started raising Daesh flags along with those of Pakistan.'
'They don't just kill their enemies, they chop off limbs, sever heads.' 'How can anyone kill a teacher in front of small children and a son in front of his parents?'
'If the BJP thinks they can suppress the farmers' movement by opening fire, they are wrong.' 'It will create a boomerang effect which will be very difficult to manage.'
The prime minister should have visited Sri Lanka, armed with a critique of the Rajapakse government based on nuance and fact, says Sreenivasan Jain
In private, AIADMK spokespersons say that the raid on Chief Secretary P Ramamohana Rao might be aimed at weakening the AIADMK, and demotivating the party from selecting/electing Jayalalithaa's confidante, Sasikala Natarajan, as her successor -- first as party head then possibly in the government, says N Sathiya Moorthy.
In a huge embarrassment for the Left Front, a Commission of Inquiry into the police firing on a Youth Congress movement in 1993 killing 13 persons on Monday said that it was worse than the Jallianwala Bagh massacre.
Maharashtra registered over 64 per cent voter turnout while a record 76 pc polling in Haryana, which witnessed stray incidents of violence, in the first eight hours of polling on Wednesday in the riveting contest to elect assemblies in the two states.
West Bengal was the second-most industrialised state in terms of value added and first in terms of number of factories and employment even in the mid-1960s. With a severe and long process of deindustrialisation, it lost its primacy.
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