'What really happened at the not-at-all-secret meeting with former Pakistani officials at Mani Shankar Aiyar's house...Here is a list of falsehoods that Modi has been relentlessly propagating. First, as almost everyone who attended the dinner (including this writer) has emphasised, there was nothing secret about the meeting. The invitations were not sent on WhatsApp, Express VPN, Viber or any other encrypted messaging system, but on ordinary Gmail. The first invitations were sent out almost a month earlier and were followed up by Aiyar’s office.
'While the negative impact of demonetisation can still be felt, the gains have been minor and could have been achieved even without the disruptive move... Hundreds of millions of Indians went through toil and trouble for months after the announcement of demonetisation on November 8, 2016. It has got etched in their memory since they lost jobs, their businesses declined and incomes plummeted.
'Demonetisation crippled an economy that ran on cash; it destroyed the livelihoods of millions of farmers, workers, traders, women and the elderly; and it violated the dignity and liberty of law-abiding citizens... ‘Demonetisation’ – the withdrawal of legal tender status of notes of denomination Rs 500 and Rs 1,000 – announced by India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi over a televised address on 8 November 2016 will go down in history as one of the most reactionary and illogical economic policies ever attempted in independent India.
'BJP president Amit Shah’s son, Jay Shah, has seen a dramatic increase in some of his businesses since Narendra Modi became prime minister... The turnover of a company owned by Jay Amitbhai Shah, son of Bharatiya Janata Party leader Amit Shah, increased 16,000 times over in the year following the election of Narendra Modi as prime minister and the elevation of his father to the post of party president, filings with the Registrar of Companies (RoC) show.
'The Congress on Sunday questioned the government for deploying a minister, Piyush Goyal, to address the press on allegations that BJP chief Amit Shah's son, entrepreneur Jay Shah, saw windfall profits after the party was elected in 2014. Now, government lawyer Tushar Mehta has told NDTV that he is likely to represent Jay Shah in the matter. "I have taken permission from the Law Ministry on 6th October for this issue. I am being consulted in this case. I may even appear for the case in court," said Mr Mehta, who is the additional solicitor general, to NDTV...'
'The man the BJP once described as a 'key suspect' in the Louis Berger case is now a senior minister in its own government... Two years ago, on July 21, 2015, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) released a booklet at a meeting of party MPs in New Delhi with the title ‘Water Supply Scam 2010 in Goa and Guwahati’. The meeting was attended by Prime Minister Narendra Modi.
'Accusations and counter-accusations in #TheWireTimesNowRow (we can come up with hashtags too) don’t seem to be ending. Early last week, The Wire and its founding editor and publisher Siddharth Vardarajan issued a cease and desist notice to Times Network stating that, “…Mr Goswami and Times Now had vilified Siddharth Vardarajan and The Wire on air and on social media networks like Twitter.”... For the uninitiated here’s the sequence of events leading up to The Wire’s notice.
'The obviously edited video, shown on TV news as well as spreading over social media, actually has Kanhaiya asking to end social ills such as caste and hunger – not any sort of political secessionism... Wednesday morning had the news channel NewsX and India News run a video which they claimed “exposed” Kanhaiya Kumar, president of the Jawaharlal Nehru student’s union, now in jail charged with sedition. “Kanhaiya’s ‘sedition’ exposed on tape,” ran the blazing headline on NewsX.
'This week we once again heard the prime minister and finance minister speak, at a recent media house event in the capital, about how well the economy is doing. The truth is nothing can improve our economic fundamentals till public investment is sharply increased. Manipulating statistics may help manage global headlines for a while, but cannot strengthen our economic fundamentals.
'Taking advantage of the skewed pricing policy of successive governments both at the Centre and at the state level, rice mill owners across India have been literally milling thousands of crores of rupees for themselves through the sale of paddy by-products left over from the rice they process for the public distribution system (PDS). The by-products of rice milling are bran, husk, broken rice and nooks which enjoy a lucrative market – giving millers high returns on something which they do not have to spend a single rupee to buy. They get them for free...
