Left, Right & Centre

With just a day to go for Delhi to vote in a high decibel civic election - a three-way contest and one that has been very bitterly fought as BJP, AAP and Congress have traded charges and accusations, pulled out their big guns - is the election a referendum on AAP? With so many big exits, is the Congress imploding? Will the Modi magic work for BJP in civic polls as well? We debate on Left, Right and Centre.

Two videos had brought out the horror of the Alwar lynching: 55-year-old dairy owner Pehlu Khan yanked by his neck, thrown to the ground, kicked by cow vigilantes in Rajasthan early this month. A fortnight later, a third video has emerged. This shows one of the five men arrested for Khan's murder being applauded and eulogised by the leader of the cow vigilante group; all this and more while the 19-year-old was in the custody of the police.

More trouble for builders as Yamuna Expressway Authority scraps 17 Housing Projects in Greater Noida. The Jaypee Group and five other builders have been hit. With rising number of realty project delays, anxious home buyers ask what now?

Senior counsel and former solicitor general Harish Salve, who also petitioned the Supreme Court against the use of red beacons, tells NDTV, the lal batti ban is a remarkable move by the Modi government, change has to start at the top and PM Modi has shown the way.

LK Advani and other top leaders of the BJP including union minister Uma Bharti will be tried for criminal conspiracy in the demolition of the 16th-century Babri Masjid in Ayodhya, the Supreme Court ruled today. Judges have also ordered daily hearings to ensure a verdict is delivered within two years which means we may have a verdict by April 2019 as the country will be in the middle of election fever.

The founder whose arrest created a stir among India's entrepreneurs, says despite his 28 day jail time, he is an entrepreneur forever. Yogendra Vasupal or Yogi as he is known, is the Chennai-based entrepreneur who set up the home stay booking platform Stayzilla in 2010 along with co-founder Sachit Singhi, on the lines of Airbnb. It raised $34 million before hitting turbulence and eventually announcing a halt in operations, a 'reboot' as he called it, and laying off 600 people in February this year. He went to jail on charges of fraud and criminal embezzlement among other things for allegedly failing to pay a vendor 1.69 crores and arrest that saw 1,000 entrepreneurs including Paytm's Vijay Shekhar Sharma and OLA's Bhavish Agarwal write to the home minister in protest.

Vijay Mallya, accused of defaulting on loans worth crores, was arrested in London today in what the government counted as a major win in its attempts to bring the business tycoon to India to face trial. But sources close to Mr Mallya asserted that it was a voluntary arrest and he was let off on bail within three hours. Mr Mallya later tweeted to say the attention was 'usual Indian media hype.'

Just a week after Australian Prime Minister Malcom Turnbull's visit to India, in an unexpected announcement today he said government will replace its popular 457 visas that brings temporary foreign workers to the country with a new version that will recruit only the "best and the brightest in the national interest". The move to abolish the visa will affect thousands of Indians. This announcement comes as Donald Trump is all set to sign the executive order cracking down on the H-1B visa programme that takes thousands of skilled workers to the US every year.

Why are we so quick to outrage? Users are angry at Snapchat CEO, who allegedly said he didn't want to invest in India since the app is a high-end product and India is a poor country. This generated a lot of anger. Outraged customers decided to delete the Snapchat app, but instead deleted Snapdeal - the e-commerce company's app, from their phones. Now Mr Speigel's fiancee is being trolled and debate on nationalism is playing out on her timeline.

All dignitaries and ministers in India, who can read and speak, must deliver their speeches in Hindi. President Pranab Mukherjee has accepted the parliamentary committee's recommendation on official languages advocating the same. The President's notification has been sent to all ministries, states and the Prime Minister's Office for compliance. Not surprisingly, many are questioning the move, saying it goes against India's principles of plurality and linguistic diversity.