News and Views

Despite a court order, Delhi government has been unable to curb easy availability of junk foods outside schools.

As Narendra Modi begins campaigning on 1 May, in Karnataka, the BJP’s hopes are pinned on his charisma in a tough contest which has no clear winner yet.

The Tripura Chief Minister is today the connoisseur of Freudian slips. Having arrived at the top address in the Tripura Secretariat must have tickled him no end. Kudos to those that elected a comedian for a chief minister. And guess what? The national media has suddenly learnt to spell T-R-I-P-U-R-A.

As in all structured events, the Wuhan summit between Prime Minister Narendra Modi and China’s President Xi Jinping has gone off well. It has highlighted what was seen as a major lacuna in the relationship — the need for the two sides to communicate more effectively with each other.

As for the other outcomes, they are more or less predictable because they contain elements of various decisions and confidence-building measures going back 30 years.

On the morning of 27 April, my Facebook newsfeed was awash with a doctored image of The Times of India (TOI) headline – ‘Modi, Xi to mate 6 times in 24 hours.’ In an age where people wake up to WhatsApp and Facebook notifications before their morning newspapers, the doctored headline immediately went viral – eliciting ROFL emojis, adult jokes, and faux concern for the ‘poor’ desk editor who misspelt ‘meet’ as ‘mate’.

Low cost and flexible curriculum are among some of the reasons why more Indian students are going to Germany.

Remember The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets' Nest triggering an avalanche of best-selling thrillers? Well, it wasn’t a patch on Prof Audrey Truschke. Prof Truschke specialises in driving the bigoted intolerant members of the Hindutva brigade to hysterical frenzy and murderous trolling.

Not that all this spewing of hate hurts her. She claims that she has been pilloried on account of her gender, race, religion, ideology and a lot of other things just because she, as a historian, has made it the mission of her life to ‘set the record straight’ – removing once and for all the many misconstrued interpretations of Indian history that are controversial and divisive.

Legal Correspondent Vakasha Sachdev gives law-abiding citizen Malavika Balasubramanian some shocking news about the government.

In February 2017, the government quietly made four crucial amendments to four different Acts in the Finance Bill, 2017 before introducing electoral bonds. The Quint has found out that the Election Commission (EC) had sharply criticised the amendments, calling it a “retrograde step” which also opens up the possibility of setting up of shell companies and routing black money.

However, the government ignored these objections and we, the people, got to know nothing about it.

The government had stated that the objective of the electoral bond was to keep the donor anonymous. The Quint revealed on 12 April that there were hidden unique alphanumeric sequences on electoral bonds which may be used to secretly track donors.

Indian politics for far too long has been dominated by pragmatists more interested in patronage than in ideology. Also, political leaders have long focused on political expansion and tokenism than on good governance. A few examples should suffice –

Prasenjit Bose heading the research unit of the Communist Party of India (Marxist) (CPI (M)) was expelled from the party for questioning its decision to support the United Progressive Alliance’s (UPA’s) Presidential candidate Pranab Mukherjee. Support for Mukherjee, while opposing his neoliberal regime, left many in the party anguished and depressed.

Trinamool Congress (TMC) chief Mamata Banerjee sought the removal of its railway minister Dinesh Trivedi hours after he proposed a hike in railway passenger fares. It was a strange situation in the country’s parliamentary history, as the discussion on the Railway Budget presented by the minister was still to take place. Trivedi resigned.