News and Views

The last series of suicide attacks that occurred in Sri Lanka were by six Sea Tiger suicide boats across the Nandikadal lagoon on 17 May 2009. Two days later, the Sri Lankan Army’s 53 Infantry Division killed in the last single operation of the war, the LTTE’s dreaded and ‘invincible’ leader, Velupillai Prabhakaran.

With his end, Sri Lanka went delirious, celebrating through singing, dancing and feasting on traditional milk-rice (kiri bhath), the termination of three decades of terrorism. 

In his book, Road to Nandikadal: True Story of Defeating Tamil Tigers, Maj Gen Kamal Gunaratne, Commander, 53 Infantry Division writes, “it is now the duty of our leaders, countrymen and future generations to protect this freedom, and (hopefully) it will not be taken for granted and squandered away”.

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Though there has been some waffling about it lately, most pollsters have predicted that the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) will end up with around 230 parliamentary seats on 23 May.

This is also pretty much what most armchair psephologists have been predicting for the party. It may not be the poll winds alone that have led to this prediction. For, some had predicted a similar number for the BJP before the 2014 polls, a poll in which the electoral mood was clearly far more in favour of the party than it is now.

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The Election Commission of India (EC) is using Voter Verifiable Paper Audit Trail (VVPAT) in polling booths to counter the controversy over the tampering of Electronic Voting Machines (EVM). On the Supreme Court’s order, the EC has been randomly verifying 5 VVPATs per constituency in the Lok Sabha elections.

This was being done to restore voter confidence, but the petitions filed in the Telangana High Court have raised further concerns. The petitions say that during the Telangana Assembly elections in December 2018, the vote count of a few VVPATs did not tally with that of the EVMs.

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Sitting beside Iranian President Hassan Rouhani at a joint press conference in Tehran on 22 April, Pakistani Prime Minister Imran Khan admitted that “Iran has suffered from terrorism, from groups operating within Pakistan”.

He was on his first official visit to Iran and his primary publicly-stated objective was to address the issue of terrorism which was, he confessed, becoming a “divisive” factor in Iran-Pakistan bilateral ties. Significantly, Khan specifically mentioned that Pakistan’s security chief was part of his delegation. This was obviously a reference to General Asim Munir, Director-General of the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI).

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