A Pawar lunge
The bombshell that Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) leader Ajit Pawar dropped recently by stepping down as Maharashtra deputy chief minister was, on hindsight, a smart move. Not only did the surprise political salvo fox everyone, it also helped him derive more mileage than anyone had bargained for.
Soldiers of a lesser god
The myopic and step-motherly attitude of policy makers has pushed India’s paramilitary forces to the brink of a complete shambles. Mayank Singh analyses reports to this effect by several leading research teams
'We are ready for a debate on coal'
Reservations are a long-pending demand but the opposition is against it. We have said many times in the Parliament that the government is willing for a discussion.
Grand Outreach
BJP leader LK Advani's recent statement calling the UPA-II's return to power in 2009 "a mere default", drew a lot of fire from the Congress benches.
Flames over the valley
Kashmir has been rocked by more than two decades of bloodshed. While that wave of violence has been contained to a certain extent, the Muslims of the Valley are now staring another crisis in the face: an alarming sectarian divide fanned by aggressive clerics of different schools of Islamic thought.
Thrust and parry
When Congress president Sonia Gandhi was celebrating the victory of Pranab Mukerjee and Hamid Ansari as president and vice–president respectively, BJP chief Nitin Gadkari was in the midst of chalking out a rearguard action plan to pull the party out of the presidential dumps at his 13 Teen Murti Lane bungalow in central Delhi.
Divide and rule
For a country rocked by the Gujarat communal violence of 2002, it has been a decade of relative tranquillity. Now suddenly, that peace threatens to dissipate in a series of communal fires being stoked across the land, literally from India's eastern fringes to its western coast, in a chain of related incidents which have the potential to derail the India story.
Bizarre elevations
What are the similarities between November 2008 and August 2012? In the former, a full-blown terrorist outrage in Mumbai blew away the then Home Minister Shivraj Patil, who was found changing his fifth dress of the day even as the country was under attack.
Special courts needed
Though the Union Government has maintained discreet silence on whether it favours decriminalisation of sex between same gender persons, which could be termed as gay and lesbian sex, it has opened up its mind in the matter of amending the criminal laws that pertain to rape.
Don Quixote of Kerala
A middle aged man, dressed in the rags of a beggar, stands barefoot in the heart of Thiruvananthapuram in front of the state secretariat. All alone, he stages a one-act play underlining the steep rise in petrol prices which is greeted by thunderous applause from onlookers. Meet Babil Perunna – a one-man army who has represented more than a hundred social issues in his own novel way – staging one-act street plays throughout the city.
Farmers Pick Up Cudgels
The protest against power major Adani in villages near Chausra and surrounding villages of Chhindwara in Madhya Pradesh is showing no signs of abating. At the centre of the storm is the company's proposed 1320-mega-watt power plant and a dam coming up on Pench River near a village here. Farmers and villagers have been up in arms for years against the forcible takeover of the land for the Adani project and allege a corporate-government nexus to deprive them of their farmlands and livelihoods.
Indecent? Not in Punjab
Punjab is now home to a unique agitation. The women here are saying a loud no to lewd and objectionable lyrics used in modern Punjabi songs. The Istri Jagriti Manch, an organisation comprising concerned women in the state, protests by staging dharnas in front of the houses of the "lewd and vulgar" singers.
Pride & Prejudice
Recently, a 16-year-old girl got molested by a gang of 20 in the heart of Guwahati and the police reached 45 minutes late. Similar mass molestations have happened much too frequently in the country, most notably in Mumbai on the 2008 New Years' eve.
In the Firing Range
Protests have been quietly simmering in the Khag block of Kashmir's Budgam district for the last six to seven years. The bone of contention is a piece of land that has been leased out to an amy training camp since 1965. Locals have been demanding that the training camp be shifted as many people have been killed and injured over the last few decades due to the stray bullets and unexploded shells.
Thanda gets Toxic?
This agitation is now entering its 11th year, but the protestors are in no mood to give up the fight for their treasured ecosystem. The villain in their story is the multinational beverage major Coca Cola which through its Indian subsidiary had set up a bottling plant in the little village of Plachimada in Kerala's Palakkad district over 12 years ago. The tribals claim that within two years of the plant coming up, all water sources in the area dried up, the wells turned toxic and those who used the water became seriously ill.
Issue Dated: Feb 5, 2017
