The Calcutta High Court has adjourned the Durga Puja immersion schedule. West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee had decided to fix timings for immersion to facilitate Tazia procession. The petitions on Durga Puja immersion schedule are in protest of that! Well, it is for the High Court to decide on that schedule but it surely raises some key questions on how we interpret secularism in this country. By granting the […]
Both demonetisation and GST have affected India’s gross domestic product (GDP) growth adversely, former Prime Minister Manmohan Singh said on Monday. “Both demonetisation and GST have had some impact on GDP,” Manmohan Singh, who has earlier said the Indian economy has been running on only “one engine” of public spending, told CNBC-TV18 channel. “Both would affect the informal sector, the small scale sector that are responsible for 40% of GDP… […]
Hoping that the United Nations would soon designate Masood Azhar as a terrorist, a top Indian diplomat has said that New Delhi will not sit idle till the Pakistan-based Jaish-e-Mohammed leader is brought to justice. India has identified Azhar as the mastermind of the Pathankot terror attack on January 2, 2016. It has also blamed his brother Rauf and five others for carrying out the attack in which seven Indian […]
Reacting sharply to Japan’s plans to step up investment in India’s North-eastern states, China on Friday said that it was opposed to any foreign investment in the “disputed areas” in that region. Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his Japanese counterpart Shinzo Abe had discussed the possibility of boosting investment from Japan in India’s North East when they met for annual summit-level talks in Gujarat a couple of days ago. Reacting […]
None of the steps the Narendra Modi government has taken so far to check black money are convincing enough unless the rock bed of black money generation is destroyed — opaque political funding. This is what helps the idea of illicit money to take birth and flourish. Political parties need money to operate and netas need it to make their family fortunes. For ages, tax cheats have been feeding politicians […]
Senior journalist Gauri Lankesh was on Tuesday shot dead at her residence in Rajarajeshwari Nagar in Bengaluru. She edited Kannada tabloid ‘Lankesh Patrike’ besides owning some other publications. Gauri, aged 55, had returned home in her car and was opening the gate when motorcycle-borne assailants fired at her indiscriminately with two bullets hitting her in the chest and one on her forehead. She died instantaneously. Four bullets hit the compound […]
UN Security Council members called for further sanctions against North Korea on Monday after a powerful nuclear test explosion added another layer of urgency for diplomats wrestling with what to do about the North’s persistent weapons programs. Scheduled after North Korea said it detonated a hydrogen bomb underground Sunday, the emergency session comes six days after the council strongly condemned Pyongyang’s ‘outrageous’ launch of a ballistic missile over Japan. Less […]
Let’s begin with two questions. One, if Raghuram Rajan didn’t approve of demonetisation “at any point during his term”, how did the government claim it got the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) on board some six months before the launch to start preparations for the massively disruptive exercise in the economy? Rajan left the RBI on 4 September 2016 and demonetisation was announced just two months later, on 8 November […]
The headline is screaming aloud, Nirmala Sitharaman is India’s first full-time Defence Minister. In a surprise move, Prime Minister Narendra Modi named this soft spoken JNU alumnus as the next Defence Minister. She replaced Arun Jaitley, who will continue with the Finance Portfolio. Though there are some political experts who believe that a formal defence general would have better suited the post, it is nevertheless interesting to track Sitharaman’s political […]
Set to take charge as India’s first full-fledged woman Defence Minister, Nirmala Sitharaman on Sunday said she would look into the issue of women in combat roles with an open mind and not as a matter of patronage. Asked if she would look into the case of combat roles in the armed forces, she said: “This is the matter where I definitely look into all the things before me with […]
