'India should today tell China to provide proper facilities in Minsar for Indian yatris visiting Mt Kailash,' says Claude Arpi.
'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.'
Mohammad Sajjad salutes the memory of Mushirul Hasan -- historian, thinker, academic, institution builder, -- who passed into the ages this week.
'Embedded with the divisive regime, they administer heavy doses of the opium of religion and nationalism day in and day out,' observes Mohammad Sajjad.
'China held a meeting on the One Belt One Road and India boycotted it.' 'However, all of India's neighbours attended, except for one, Bhutan.' 'India warned those attending that the partnership with the Chinese would come at a heavy price, but almost nobody heard us.' 'The question is: Why not?' asks Aakar Patel.
'India needs to closely monitor the discussions at the UNSC and make counter-measures as this touches its core interests', points out Srikanth Kondapalli.
'One does not understand why you should launch your attack against the Constitution, against Gandhiji, against the Left and Congress regimes at a moment when the Hindutva regime needs such attacks against them.' 'By doing so, don't you think you are playing into the hands of Hindutva forces?', Mohammad Sajjad, who teaches history at Aligarh Muslim University, asks Sharjeel Imam who was arrested on charges of sedition on Tuesday, January 28.
The main culprit in vitiating the inter community/caste/class relations has been the so called 'targeted' approach. This is nothing but discrimination on the basis of faith/caste/class. When an equally poor and deprived child is denied scholarship, despite equal merit, resentment begins to brew, says Colonel (retd) Anil Athale.
In the shock after Nathuram Godse murdered Mahatma Gandhi that January evening 72 years ago today, a young American diplomat rushed to capture the assassin. Vaihayasi Pande Daniel traces the memorable life of Herbert Reiner, who History has sadly relegated to a footnote.
''Even without major reforms, with a business as usual scenario, and with current inflation trends, we should be clocking around 11 to 12 per cent nominal growth.' 'That is not happening and is a source of worry,' Rathin Roy tells Arup Roychoudhury.
'Breaking down silos and ensuring a more integrated governance process is just as important to performance.' 'It has been a major priority in the last six years, especially in national security,' External Affairs Minister Dr Subrahmanyam Jaishankar points out when delivering the Sardar Patel Memorial Lecture-2020: India and the Post-Covid World.
President Pranab Mukherjee on Monday expressed concern over a string of alleged attacks on Africans in the country, saying it would be most unfortunate if the people of India were to "dilute our long tradition of friendship with the people of Africa".
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.
Has New Delhi internalised the truth that it does not matter, asks Saeed Naqvi. Such deafening silence from the government, principal opposition, even the pundits!
Major General Sujan Singh Uban, a legendary veteran of the Second World War, was a natural choice to raise, train and command the Special Frontier Force and mould them into a well oiled fighting machine, recalls his son Inspector General Gurdip Singh Uban (retd), who led SFF troops during the Kargil War.
'The brutal violence of the UP government's first response to the anti-CAA protests suggests that the BJP will test drive the NPR/NRC in UP, where it has both a massive majority in the assembly and a chief minister whose instinct for Hindutva extremism and whose appetite for punitive policing allows a prime minister as darkly majoritarian as Modi to appear statesman-like,' notes Mukul Kesavan.
The future of the Make in India campaign looks bleak with a generation of ill-educated jobseekers -- and especially dark if they are cannon fodder for caste riots or put behind bars for breaking India, says Sunil Sethi.
The charges against JNU PhD scholar Umar Khalid are shrouded in a lot of "fabrications and lies" and the episode has "taken away" all sense of normalcy and sanity from the lives of his family members, his sister said on Friday calling him a "true son" of India.
The global stigma of discrimination will go only when Asians and Africans have the self-confidence to be themselves, says Sunanda K Datta-Ray
'If they succeed in silencing this great university, it will be a tragic day for the nation.'
'In the hands of a majoritarian government, with utter contempt for the cultural plurality and diversity of our great nation, the pipe dream of making Hindi the sole official language takes on nightmarish proportions.'
The RSS realises that with a majority BJP government at the Centre and in several states, now was the best time to undermine and perhaps outdo the Congress-Left 'stranglehold' over campuses and young minds.
Hamid Anasari's was not talking of reservation for the whole religious community to which he too happens to belong. Yet, sections of media chose to put words into his mouth and then subject him to the criticism he never deserved. This does not augur well for our media or democracy, says Mohammad Sajjad.
'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.'
'Constitutional narratives are forged both inside and outside courtrooms,' says Rohit De.
'How can middlemen disappear as long as our political parties are sucking in massive amounts of black money?' 'There is an old political art well practised in New Delhi -- people create artificial problems and then solve it for you to earn your gratitude for a lifetime.'
'Gandhi was ambivalent about the RSS; the Sangh, for their part, actively distrusted him.'
The party's most important electoral challenge lies in whether it can meet the aspirations of the youth who were drawn by the promise of gainful work.
With the Maharashtra government doling out pieces of the lush green Aarey forest to various utilities, the tribals living in it for generations are feeling increasingly insecure. Hepzi Anthony reports.
None of the political parties in UP has any effective plans to create jobs.
'A class antagonism of rich versus poor took the colouring of a communal confrontation,' says Sunil Sethi.
The hounding of former AMU students by some alumni over their 'wining and dining' during Ramzan is deeply disturbing, says AMU Professor Mohammad Sajjad. 'Intolerance, irrationality, bigotry, religious/sectarian hatred, and all such pernicious tendencies must be fought and resisted, more particularly by university campuses, in order to build a better society.' 'Have we, as academics, failed, and that too, quite miserably?' he asks. 'I feel like confessing and saying yes, we have indeed failed.'
Remembering Maulana Azad and Acharya Kriplani on their birth anniversary, Gujarat Chief Minister Narendra Modi on Monday said that there are historical figures who have been erased from public memory just because they did not belong to a particular family.
'The best remedy would be to scrap Section 124-A of the IPC, a colonial vestige, altogether.' 'However, if legislators don't want to do so, they can do two things.' 'They can formally amend Section 124-A to bring it in line with what the Supreme Court has said about sedition.' 'The words which stand on the statute book today were inserted in 1898.' 'The Supreme Court's words are not a part of Section 124-A.'
'The middle class is already alienated.' 'If the stockmarket is destabilised, the BJP is finished; the party will lose in every town.' 'And if the stockmarket crash happens now, the BJP will not cross the 150 mark in 2019.'
'Nobody is killing you in Kerala because you are Hindu unlike in North India where Muslims have been killed only because they are Muslims and were carrying some meat.'
Home Minister Rajnath Singh agreed for an all-party meeting to discuss the issue after the law commission submits its report on the law which has come under focus in the wake of the Jawaharlal Nehru University controversy.
On a visit to India in 2013, writer Ved Mehta -- who passed into the ages on Sunday January 10, 2021 - gave Rediff.com's Vaihayasi Pande Daniel a rare glimpse into his state of mind and what he thinks of the changes he encounters in his motherland.
'The downslide has been rapid leading up to the number one and number two of the organisation flinging against each other horrendous accusations of bribery and tampering with investigations for personal gain, and the latest petition to the Supreme Court by the joint director of the CBI, M K Sinha, opening a veritable Pandora's Box of repulsive skeletons,' notes B S Raghavan, the distinguished civil servant who witnessed the CBI's birth.
With nearly a million identified slums, UP urgently requires housing for the poor
