News and Views

Dear Salman, Hope your 2 days and 2 nights package at the Jodhpur jail was fun.

Audio: The Quint

A sense of alienation has developed between the Hindus and Muslims in Asansol as communal clashes during Ram Navami shook the city.

The Dalits in Nizampura have decided to do something their village has never seen before. They want to depart from the age-old tradition of restricting Dalit wedding processions to the lane that houses their families, and take it across the village and outside homes of Thakurs. This has led to a stand-off between the two communities.

West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee is leading efforts to form a Third Front of regional parties. To that end, she recently met Sonia Gandhi in Delhi and invited Congress to join the proposed ‘grand alliance’.

Mamata has mooted the idea of 'one-to-one' contests, implying that parties which are strong in respective states should contest against BJP in those seats, and other parties of the Front should not put up a candidate and support them wholeheartedly.

The Quint has unearthed the paper trail of an unsecured loan to a firm owned by Seema Goyal, the wife of Union Minister Piyush Goyal, from a loss-making private firm.

News website The Wire, on 3 April, reported on the Rs 650-crore loan default by Mumbai-based Shirdi Industries, which listed Piyush Goyal as its chairman until July 2010\. The Wire report states that the last statutory filing done by Intercon – a company owned by Seema Goyal – for FY 2016 shows an outstanding amount of Rs 1.59 crore to Asis Industries, a company owned by Shirdi promoters. Even as Asis extended a loan to Seema Goyal’s firm, Shirdi also had a Rs 4 crore provident fund default.

However, The Wire report makes no mention of some relevant facts and documents. According to the Registrar of Companies (ROC) documents, as accessed by The Quint, the balance sheet filed by the company owned by Goyal’s wife shows that in the FY 2013-2014, Asis Industries Ltd gave an unsecured loan of Rs 1,37,55,589 crore (over Rs 1.37 crore) at a simple interest rate of 12% per annum, while having reported a loss of Rs 1 crore approximately in the same fiscal year.

The Bharat bandh by the Dalit community came as a shock to me, as much as it did to many others, I am sure. I had expected some picketing and protests in a few cities. What I did not anticipate was the horrific violence. There is news of seven people having died in the violence. On the face of it, the bandh was just over the changes ordered by the Supreme Court in the SC/ST Act, but there was anger over many other issues that had been simmering below the surface.

For his fans, Salman is the sum total of all his screen appearances. And they are mesmerised. They have probably never seen him in real life – but his on-screen persona is their only reality. Which is why the smartest thing that Salman could have done is to actively change it, writes Naomi Datta.

When a nation accepts the need for a large set of armed forces to meet the threats it perceives, it also has to remember that it creates a segment of society which is quite different – servicemen, ex-servicemen and their families; different because they are the only ones who bear the effects of the oath they take – ‘duty unto death.’

“Who is responsible for the leak of Class 10 and 12 CBSE question papers?” Never before have teenagers become stewards of such ugly political debates. While the Opposition found a way to pin the blame on the Prime Minister himself, the government wasted no time in managing headlines about the PM’s very personal concern in the whole crisis.

Holding a non-political institution, an education board, accountable for an accident was not alluring enough.

The formation of the Federal Front has put the regional satraps in the forefront again. A few setbacks suffered by the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) in the bypolls, a decline in Modi’s popularity ratings and desertion of NDA by allies have given a boost to the sulking confidence of the Opposition. The man, who at once was at the forefront in the race to lead any such alliance, Nitish Kumar, must be ruing his decision to go back to the NDA last year.