'Maharashtra BJP unit on Tuesday said it will ask the party-led NDA government at the Centre to confer Bharat Ratna, India’s highest civilian award, on Vinayak Damodar Savarkar. In its election manifesto, released by BJP working president J.P. Nadda along with chief minister Devendra Fadnavis, state party president Chandrakant Patil and Mumbai unit head Mangal Prabhat Lodha, the state unit also sought the honour for social reformers Jyotiba Phule and Savitribai Phule, a party leader told PTI...'
'On October 7, Times Now channel’s “India Upfront” programme claimed that the Congress was attempting to present a “counter-narrative to the RSS view of history” by circulating a 128-page booklet among its members. Few should have any objection to the idea of pushing back against the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh’s majoritarian view of history, which, in many instances, involves grave misrepresentations of fact, deliberate distortions and, on occasion, complete fabrications.
'Hindutva groups in Dindigul, Tamil Nadu disrupted the filming of action-comedy Sulthan, starring Karthi and Rashmika Mandanna and directed by Bakkiyaraj Kannan, because they thought it was a biopic of Tipu Sultan. The film was being shot near an Archaeological Survey of India protected site on Tuesday night, when members of the Bharatiya Janata Party and Hindu Munnani arrived and staged protests. A police officer told the Indian Express that while there was no damage, the shooting schedule was disrupted. “They were in the final stage of shooting.
'Union minister Jitendra Singh on Wednesday said those who “do not feel proud” of US President Donald Trump’s comment that Prime Minister Narendra Modi is the “father of India”, do not consider themselves Indians. “India is being respected in a way which was rare in the past,” Singh said on the sidelines of the launch of CPGRAMS reforms in the department of posts. “People who live abroad are proud today of being Indian. This is happening due to the personality and personal outreach of Prime Minister Modi,” said the minister of state for the Prime Minister’s Office...'
'Piyush Goyal, the Union minister for railways, recently asserted – incorrectly – that mathematics did not help Albert Einstein with his “discovery” of gravity. The minister did later correct his supposedly minor mistake in ascribing the discovery of gravitation to Einstein. The other part of his statement, about the importance or otherwise of mathematics, is even more problematic...'
'Last week, papers published in the journals Cell and Science reinforced two well-established but controversial facts of ancient Indian history: first, that the Indus Valley Civilisation was pre-Vedic, and second, that Sanskrit came to India through migrants from the north-west at a time when the Indus Valley Civilisation had declined. Media coverage, however, reported the exact opposite of what the studies found. To understand why newspaper headlines, television and Twitter feeds misrepresented the research so comprehensively, one needs to grasp why the facts are controversial.
'The authors of two scientific papers about Aryan migration endorsed a theory closer to the cultural triumphalism of the political right while the papers had themselves disfavoured it... What is surprising is that, in a press conference held in New Delhi on September 6 to explain their findings from Rakhigarhi soon after the papers were published online, coauthors Vasant Shinde, archeologist and vice-chancellor of Deccan College, Pune, and Niraj Rai, head of the ancient DNA laboratory at the Birbal Sahni Institute of Paleosciences, Lucknow, advanced the contested ‘Out of India’ theory.
'‘When in Rome, do as the Romans do’— a phrase that helps the tourism sector and a condition many would impose on immigrants. But this art of adaptation is not everyone’s forte. Take Union Human Resource Development (HRD) minister Ramesh Pokhriyal, who had gone to IIT Kharagpur for a convocation ceremony. In his speech on August 27, Pokhriyal said Ram Setu between India and Sri Lanka was built by Indian engineers; that Bhagwat Gita is science and that Sanskrit is the first language of the world and should even be the language for computers in the future.
(An open letter to Prof Subhasis Chaudhuri, director of IIT Bombay, following his silence over Union minister Ramesh Pokhriyal's pseudoscientific claims at a recent convocation ceremony.)
'A look at the sequence of events – compiled from news reports and residents' accounts – shows that the riots may well have been pre-planned... Images of arson and destroyed property flooded social media in the aftermath of communal clashes in Saharanpur last week.
