"Yoga teacher Ramdev's company will soon market herbal supplements and food products developed by India's defence research organisation DRDO. The DRDO or Defence Research and Development Organisation yesterday finalized agreements with the yoga teacher's "Patanjali Yogpeeth", for the transfer of technology involving products made from Seabuckthorn at its high altitude research lab in Leh...
"On paper, the total comes to a mindboggling Rs 4,500 crore. But investigators say the worth of Asaram's shady empire will cross the Rs 10,000-crore mark if the land and real estate are valued at market rates instead of the old circle rates used by the police to value them... A murky money-lending nexus, shady land deals and clandestine conspiracies to buy police officers. Transactions in a range of financial instruments worth hundreds of crores. Investments in little-known American companies. Suspect foreign currency transactions worth hundreds of thousands of dollars.
"In New Jersey, where Rajiv Malhotra, an Indian-American public intellectual, and I live as near neighbours in the town of Princeton, all vehicles—from clunkers to limos—have to undergo a periodic diagnostic test of their roadworthiness. Electrodes are attached to the vehicle’s engine, some sort of hose stuck into its tailpipe, and a sticker slapped onto the driver-side window if it passes. Drive without one and you could get pulled over and fined. The test has relatively little to do with the octane, high or low, of the gas you buy at the pump.
"Days after he lodged a complaint with CBI against senior BJP leader and former Union minister Vikram Verma, Vyapam scam whistleblower and government doctor Anand Rai has been transferred from Indore to Dhar district. ..."
'...As the monsoons finally reached the capital last week, leading to cooler climes but also traffic snarls, a cloud also burst on the heads of the BJP and the Narendra Modi government. It has been raining scams for over a month now, but the darkest clouds have surely built around India’s most lethal one, Vyapam. This involves more than financial swindles, something the nation may be a little immune to. With Vyapam, there is a human connect in the pile of corpses, all such ordinary people, and some so young.
"A mining baron arrested on charges of being a prime player in the Vyapam or jobs scandal in Madhya Pradesh paid for the air tickets and other undefined expenses of top leaders of the BJP and its ideological parent, the RSS, according to an income tax report from 2013. That report was not pursued by state police investigators who were handling the Vyapam inquiry till this week, when the CBI took over. "We are not shielding anyone. But let's not go by one odd report... let's wait for the CBI investigation," said the BJP's Shaina NC to NDTV.
'Senior BJP leader Kailash Vijayvargiya on Monday stroked a controversy when he termed the ‘Vyapam’ scam as a “small scandal” even as the CBI took over the probe into the massive admission and recruitment scandal which has rocked Madhya Pradesh. “For us it (Vyapam) is a chutput (small) scam. It may be big for you,” Vijayvargiya, the national general secretary of BJP, told reporters in Bhopal. He was interacting with the media on the BJP’s “Maha-jansampark campaign” or mega membership drive.
"In a major embarrassment for the government in the FTII controversy, a Right to Information (RTI) query has revealed that only Gajendra Chauhan was approached for the post of the chairman of the institute. The government had earlier claimed that other film personalities were also offered the position, but they refused.
'I am the author of Unifying Hinduism: Philosophy and Identity in Indian Intellectual History (Columbia University Press, 2010, and Permanent Black, 2011), a work that was extensively plagiarised in Rajiv Malhotra’s Indra’s Net. I had planned to stay silent, as I usually avoid comment on heated, politicised issues such as this. However, when Rajiv Malhotra described me as an “ally” of his on his Twitter feed, I knew that the time had come to speak out to clarify the differences between his views and my own.
'Nobody knows exactly when or why the witnesses and small-time crooks caught up in one of India’s biggest-ever corruption scandals began dying under mysterious circumstances. But in the past two years, that’s what’s happened to more than two dozen people implicated in a $1 billion test-rigging scheme. Even by standards in India, where corruption is routine, the scale of the scam in the central state of Madhya Pradesh is mind-boggling.
