'Twenty-three years after it was banned following the demolition of the Babri Masjid in Ayodhya, the Bajrang Dal on December 6 this year renewed its pledge for a Ram temple at the mosque site. The anniversary of the demolition is technically a day of “valour” (Shaurya Diwas) for the Hindutva outfit. This year, however, Shaurya Diwas wasn’t subdued as in many past years. There were elaborate press releases and there was heightened activity on right-wing Twitter handles in support of a grand Ram temple in Ayodhya.
'...Modi's emphatic victory in the 2014 elections was widely attributed to his having focused on the agenda of economic modernization - that is to say, the need to nourish technological innovation, to make manufacturing viable again, to create better infrastructure, and to improve transparency and efficiency in government. Those loyal to the BJP and Hindutva had, of course, voted for him.
'Forensic analysis of bullet cartridges found at the scene of murder of Kannada scholar M M Kalburgi in Dharwad in August this year and comparison with cartridges recovered from the spots where communist leader Govind Pansare was killed in Kolhapur earlier this year, and rationalist Narendra Dabholkar in Pune in 2013, has provided evidence of the probable involvement of a common set of killers.
'Welcoming RSS chief Mohan Bhagwat’s remarks on construction of a Ram temple during his lifetime, the Shiv Sena Saturday said he should announce a date for its commencement, reported Press Trust of India. “We welcome the stand taken by Mohan Bhagwat on the issue. He should now announce a date for the commencement of the Ram Temple in Ayodhya to give an impetus to the issue….
'A day after Mohan Bhagwat said he was confident of seeing the Ram Temple built in his lifetime, the RSS chief, in a series of tweets on Thursday, urged society to prepare the ground for it. “The temple will be built within my lifetime… We need to plan it carefully… (we need) a good mix of ‘josh’ and ‘hosh’,” Bhagwat had said in Kolkata on Wednesday. While he said that the Ram Temple could be built anywhere, Bhagwat added that Ayodhya was the birthplace of Ram. “Just as terrorists attacked the twin towers of World Trade Centre in the US because it was their economic centre.
;Forget cuss words, now even the images of Indian goddesses have failed to make the cut in front of the Indian censor board. In the soon-to-be-released film Angry Indian Goddesses, amongst the 17 cuts that the Indian censor board wanted filmmakers to make, was the blurring of the images of two Indian goddesses -- a picture of Lakshmi in the credits, and later in the movie, a picture of Kali. Movie producer Gaurav Dhingra said that he had failed to make the cut in front of the revising committee.
'Shaista, daughter of Mohammad Akhlaq, who was lynched by a violen mob in Dadri village over rumours of eating beef in September, on Wednesday named six more people as being part of the mob. Local police officials are investigating their involvement in the case. According to sources in the local police, the six persons are close to Sanjay Rana, the local BJP leader, whose son Vishal and nephew Shivam are accused of creating the rumours and gathering the mob which lynched Akhlaq...'
'T Raja Singh Lodh, the BJP's party whip for Telangana and MLA from Goshamal, has said that he is ready to 'kill or get killed' to protect the 'Gau Mata' (cow). His outrage is in response to a planned beef festival at Osmania University, Hyderabad... Issuing a chilling threat to the festival organisers, Singh said, "We warn them against a Dadri-like incident in Telangana. We can both give our lives and take life for the sake of protecting the cow".
Over the years, every so-called spontaneous attack on free expression has had the support of political groups... Violence is the weapon of choice of all self-styled defenders of faiths and ideas in India. This week’s example comes from Maharashtra, where offices of the Marathi newspaper Lokmat in Akola and Jalgaon were vandalised. The attackers, it seems, were upset by an illustration for an article in the newspaper’s Sunday edition about how the ISIS is funded.
'On Saturday, senior Congress leader and former Finance Minister P Chidambaram admitted that the ban on Salman Rushdie’s novel The Satanic Verses was unjust. “I have no hesitation in saying that the ban on Salman Rushdie’s book was wrong,” he said. The proscription was imposed 27 years back, in 1988, when Chidambaram was the Minister of State Home Affairs in Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi’s cabinet. The novel had outraged conservative Muslim opinion when it was published.
