'Amit Malviya, head of the Bharatiya Janata Party's (BJP) information and technology operations, tweeted a cropped video on Tuesday of former Prime Minister Manmohan Singh purporting to say the BJP-ruled state 'governments of Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh were very good'. However, a longer clip revealed that the Singh said his relationship with those state governments were very good...'
'Sunil Arora will be appointed as the next Chief Election Commissioner (CEC) by President Ram Nath Kovind. He is picked for the job despite his controversial past. In the notorious “Radia Tapes” — telephonic conversations between political lobbyist Niira Radia and several senior journalists, politicians, bureaucrats and businessmen, taped by the Indian Income Tax Department in 2008-09 — Arora appears thrice.
'Exactly thirteen years ago to the day, Gujarat police shot dead a man called Sohrabuddin Sheikh. Like many similar “encounter” killings in the state at the time, this death, too, would have gone unnoticed in the rest of the country. But a series of developments after the murder on November 26, 2005 linked Sohrabuddin’s name indelibly with that of another man — Amit Shah. Strenuous efforts have been made over the last four and a half years to obliterate that link from public memory.
'"Keep your Ali, Bajrang Bali is enough for us," Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath has said, in response to senior Congress leader Kamal Nath's recent assertion that he wanted as much as 90 per cent votes from the Muslim community for his party...'
'In explosive testimony before the special Central Bureau of Investigation court here on Wednesday, Sandeep Tamgadge, chief investigating officer in the 2006 Tulsiram Prajapati fake encounter case, has said that Bharatiya Janata Party president Amit Shah and IPS officers D.G. Vanzara, Dinesh M.N. and Rajkumar Pandiyan were the “principal conspirators” in the controversial killing.
'Saddled with new school textbooks introduced in July 2016 that educationists criticised as narrow, sectarian and unscientific, some teachers in Rajasthan made an effort to limit the damage. Vakil Singh, former principal of Government Senior Secondary School in Kaliyan in Sri Ganganagar district, for instance, stocked the school library with magazines and other reading material for even the junior classes. He made weekly library visits mandatory for all children.
'Few politicians in history have attracted admiration and loathing to the degree that Jawaharlal Nehru has. More than five decades after his death, India’s first Prime Minister remains a supreme political figure and a prime target of disinformation, particularly on social media. While Prime Minister Narendra Modi has publicly expressed his view about his party’s respect for Nehru, many of his party’s supporters including some who the PM himself follows, have been at the forefront of spreading misinformation about him.
'On the morning of July 20, 2015, Rajasthan’s education minister Vasudev Devnani held a meeting with education officials in Jaipur and laid out a roadmap: he wanted new textbooks for Classes 1 to 8 within three months. And by the same evening, he wanted a list of experts who could write them. The rewriting took longer than what the minister wanted – the new textbooks were introduced in schools in July 2016. But all other objectives laid down in the meeting were achieved.
'...Educationists in Rajasthan say these changes are in keeping with the larger trend of textbook revisions made under the Bharatiya Janata Party government. Not only do the new textbooks reinforce the Hindu majoritarian worldview, they all but erase minority identities. Science is explained through stories from Indian mythology and every maths textbook from Class 3 to 8 has a chapter on Vedic maths. The banned practice of sati is described in glowing terms, as are government schemes and initiatives.
'Demonetisation and the Goods and Services Tax (GST) are the two major headwinds that held back India’s economic growth last year, former RBI governor Raghuram Rajan has said, asserting that the current 7% growth rate is not enough to meet the country’s needs. Addressing an audience at the University of California in Berkley on Friday, Rajan said for four years – 2012 to 2016 – India was growing at a faster pace before it was hit by two major headwinds... “What happened in 2017 is that even as the world picked up, India went down.
