News and Views

Rohit Sharma-led India will be aiming to reassert their continental supremacy while an injury-hit Bangladesh will hope to shrug off stage fright when the two sides square off in the grand finale of the Asia Cup in Dubai on Friday.

As claims and counterclaims over the financial terms of India’s deal to buy 36 Rafale fighter aircrafts from France continue relentlessly, the Indian Airforce (IAF) continues to be in desperate need of new fighter jets. The asymmetric inequalities between the IAF and the PLA Air Force (PLAAF) are set to widen.

For the IAF to attain the combat capability to counter and fight any future war or conflict vis-à-vis the PLAAF, the acquisition of aircrafts like the Rafale will be crucial to expanding its air combat capability.

Of all the seasons, Fall plays a unique role. Fall starts revealing the true character of denuded trees. This year, Fall in Europe has shown its colours in Delhi – 12,000 kms away from France.

Former President of France Francois Hollande has rocked the boat which already had several gaping holes. From the conflicting versions of India’s Raksha Mantri and Finance Minister, it was clear that not only was the Modi government concealing facts, it also did not know how to escape its own web of lies.

The Catholic Church traces its origins to that day, approximately 2,000 years ago, when Jesus appointed a leader among his Apostles with these words cited in the Bible, “Simon, you are Peter (meaning, rock), and upon this rock I shall build my Church.”

You would expect a two-millennia-old organisation to have its act together in the area of legal procedures and communication. Yet, since news broke in end-June of a nun’s rape allegation against the (now arrested) Bishop of Jalandhar, Franco Mulakkal, the Catholic Church in India has appeared to be a floundering, leaderless mess, falling short of basic humanity in its response to a woman’s grave grievance.

1970s onwards, there was the advent of arms deals which were major sources of slush funds for buyers, sellers, middlemen and everyone else in between. The first major deal that went this way was the Anglo-French SEPECAT Jaguar deep-penetration strike aircraft in 1978, when Jagjivan Ram was the Defence Minister.

Even if the Rafale was bought in 2014 as it was cleared by the MMRCA tender for far less, i.e. $10.5 billion for 126 aircrafts, it would have involved under-the-table payments.

A trial that should have ended in two months, stretched for years. Here's how courts and kin failed 5 Muslim rape survivors in Muzaffarnagar.

On 28 January 2018, a regular Sunday morning, one mother came home from work to the worst fathomable sight – her 8-month-old baby lying in a pool of her own blood and stool.

She had been raped by her 28-year-old cousin Suraj.

That mother's baby quickly became immortalised in newsprint as the "8-month-old rape survivor".

American historian and lecturer on media and consumer culture, Stuart Ewen, said: “The history of PR is a history of a battle for what is reality and how people will see and understand reality.”

Having lived a shadowy existence for most of its 92 years, partly of their own volition and episodically because of the actions of their supporters, leaders of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) would like to believe that their problems have been compounded by the inability to communicate the true intent and purpose of their organisation. Mohan Bhagwat's three-day lecture series must be seen in this context, and seems to be a ploy to increase the RSS’s social acceptability.

In the context of Muharram, almost everyone knows who Husain is, but not many know the name of Zainab, or the fact that had it not been for her, Husain wouldn’t have been known.

Without Zainab’s speeches and sermons, Husain would have been dismissed as a mere rebel fighting against the ruler of the time. Husain, his male relatives and companions had been martyred in Karbala, Iraq on the 10th Muharram in 61 Hijri /680 AD.