It is going to be a rough and brutal 2020 for India as its government pushes on with its ideological agenda, and the citizens do whatever they can to protect themselves, notes Aakar Patel.
According to the latest status report filed by the Delhi Police, Kanhaiya 'actively' participated in the 'unlawful' assembly in which 'anti-national' slogans were raised.
Unlike the regimes of Jayalalitha, Palaniswami and Karunanidhi, ministers are actually getting to make decisions on their own, with the unmentioned rider that they would be held responsible and accountable, observes N Sathiya Moorthy.
'The police are warning students to go, to leave their own campus.' 'This is a university and the police are coming from outside and dictating to students what to do and what not to do.'
The victim, who belonged to the Maratha community, was found murdered after being raped on July 13, 2016 at Kopardi village in Ahmednagar district.
'There is no discipline here -- only autocracy. The state is not governed by any democratic ideology. Democracy has ceased to exist here.'
He may have been in the news for all the wrong reasons but the greater irony is that Muslim stand-up comic Munawar Faruqui's best jokes ridicule Muslims, and are wolfed down by Muslims, who form the majority of his 177,000 Instagram followers, notes Jyoti Punwani.
India's majoritarian regime is now making a dangerously fast-paced move towards theocracy, like its western counterpart did a few decades ago, warns Mohammad Sajjad.
Deepti Priya Mehrotra, who documented Irom Sharmila's struggle for peace in Manipur in the book Burning Bright, puts the icon's electoral loss in perspective.
Count among The Light of Asia's many, many admirers over 132 years: Gandhi, Tagore, Vivekananda, Nehru and Ambedkar, Tolstoy and Kipling, Yeats and Eliot, Alfred Nobel, Dmitri Mendeleev and C V Raman. Jairam Ramesh reveals why he decided to write a book on Edwin Arnold, who wrote The Light of Asia.
Here's the full text of President Ram Nath Kovind's address to the nation on the eve of 72nd Republic Day.
'There are thousand ways to pressure Pakistan to make it behave.' 'Going to the ICJ was the worst possible option,' says Colonel Anil A Athale.
Mayawati has accused 'Ravan' of being a BJP agent who is dividing the scheduled castes.
Maharashtra police on Tuesday raided the homes of prominent Left-wing activists in several states and arrested at least five of them for suspected Maoist links. Near simultaneous searches were carried out at the residences of prominent Telugu poet Varavara Rao in Hyderabad, activists Vernon Gonzalves and Arun Farreira in Mumbai, trade union activist Sudha Bhardwaj in Faridabad, and civil liberties activist Gautam Navalakha in New Delhi. Subsequently, Rao, Bhardwaj and Farreira were arrested. Although Navalakha was also arrested, the Delhi high court ordered police not to take him out of the national capital at least until Wednesday. According to unconfirmed reports, others whose residences were raided are Susan Abraham, Kranthi Tekula, Father Stan Swamy in Ranchi and Anand Teltumbde in Goa. The raids were carried out as part of a probe into the violence between Dalits and the upper caste Peshwas at Koregaon-Bhima village near Pune after an event called Elgar Parishad, or conclave, on December 31 last year. Here are their brief profiles:
West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee's convoy was on Monday blocked by angry protesters for nearly an hour.
Known for his witty one-liners, Naidu said "after all, the culture of India is agriculture."
'Local support is very important, without it the terror attack couldn't have taken place.' 'Explosives were secured, the IED was manufactured, the boy was brainwashed and converted into a suicide bomber... it takes a lot of planning and hard work.'
Calling people of the northeastern region by "derogatory" names will soon become a non-bailable offence and land you in jail for up to five years.
The BJP knows the CAA, combined with a fresh nationwide NRC process, is an idea that's dead on arrival. Where it lives on is as a divisive, polarising instrument as its rivals have to take a position against it and thereby be exposed to the charge of 'Muslim appeasement' again, points out Shekhar Gupta.
Chennai-born Pramila Jayapal makes history in Washington state; she is also the first person of colour in the Washington State Democratic delegation.
'The problem here is not that one community's deity has suddenly become another community's meal.' 'Hindus and Muslims have been peacefully coexisting with their cows for centuries now.' 'The problem here is that a section of Indians has been suddenly made to realise that it makes great political sense to degrade each one of the 170 million Muslims to a potential cow-killer, lynch a few of them to keep the heat on, polarise and win elections.'
The Congress chief reiterated that Rs 30,000 crore was "wrongfully" given to Anil Ambani in the purchase of Rafale fighter planes.
The fact remains that in the present-day Tamil Nadu, GenX and GenY voters, born and/or growing up after the end of 'Kamaraj rule' in the '60s and 'MGR rule', respectively, constitute an absolute majority of the electorate. If they still vote for a Rajini or Kamal, in preference to the established 'Dravidian voters', it is despite the MGR imagery, not because of it, says N Sathiya Moorthy.
The verdict said that the aggravating circumstances outweigh the mitigating ones and hence, the convicts did not deserve any leniency.
It is important to approach the belief of people in ancient India's achievements with a sense of proportion, balance and empathy, argues B S Raghavan, the distinguished civil servant.
'Societies like the Nagas have gone through so many decades of armed conflict. Conditions which are not 'normal' for others are 'normal' for them!' 'In such societies, there is always bound to be so much pent-up feeling waiting to just come out. It just requires a little spark! And once the mob takes over, reason flies out the window.'
Villagers have been protesting against the Sterlite factory since February 12, with an effigy of Vedanta Chairman Anil Agarwal as the backdrop. More than 75 days hence, the dharna continues, the summer vacation seeing children joining the protest.
Mohammad Sajjad profiles Professor Riazur Rahman Sherwani, 94, versatile mind, intrepid intellectual.
Protester Sasi Perumal's death has given a new fillip to the pro-prohibition movement, which was beginning to draw attention across Tamil Nadu after different political parties began to make it a part of their poll manifesto for next year, says N Sathiya Moorthy.
He was attending a panel discussion on how to end violence against women.
DMK Working President MK Stalin is worried about divisions in the ruling All India Anna Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam after the death of Jayalalithaa and keen that it should not affect the functioning of the administration.
'We want to make sure that we are certainly targeting the entire Indian American community.'
What if we made X-Men here in India?
'If you look through the optics of BJP leader Kapil Mishra, he was standing with a deputy commissioner of police while giving a hate speech.' 'Immediately, the message goes down that the police is 'with us' so let's start rioting.'
Here's a list of the full first-time ministers in the second term of the Narendra Modi government.
The Hindutva brigade's silence on the rape may possibly be explained that this incident is an intra-Hindu affair for them. What is even more intriguing is that vocal gender activists have preferred to almost ignore the incident. Why? Is it because homosexual rape does not involve the woman either as victim or as aggressor, asks Mohammad Sajjad.
Interview with head, Blogger and Online Activists Network.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Friday dedicated birth anniversary of Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel as National Unity Day, saying a nation that disregards its history cannot create one and made a veiled reference to anti-Sikh riots that followed then Prime Minister Indira Gandhi's assassination this day 30 years ago.
Muslim community members came in large numbers to support the Dalit community in their campaign.
