INDIA SUMMARIZED

Arvind Kejriwal will take oath as the Chief Minister of Delhi on December 28.  Incidentally, it happens to be the foundation day of the Indian National Congress (estd. 1885). Interestingly Kejriwal has hijacked several planks of the Congress. He popularised the Gandhi cap that Congress had junked long ago. Anna Hazare and he experimented with fast-unto-death – a Gandhian technique of which contemporary Congress is oblivious. He also (mis)appropriated the appellation ‘aam admi’ from a slogan coined by Jairam Ramesh- “Congress Ka Haath, Aam Admi ke Saath”. He spoke about ‘purity of means’ – or the Gandhian concept of political morality that is perceived as outmoded everywhere. Most of the issues espoused by Kejriwal are ‘municipal’ issues. But his electoral harvest, I dare say, could not be fully attributed to his poll promises. But he was able to strike a chord with the common masses with his behavioural politics. It remains to be seen whether he can keep the tempo up when in ...

Ahmedabad Metropolitan magistrate BJ Ganatra on December 26 pronounced verdict on Zakia Jafri’s plea against the closure report of the Supreme Court-appointed Special Investigation Team (SIT) giving a clean chit to the Gujarat Chief Minister and others in the alleged conspiracy behind the 2002 riots, and gave the nation the much awaited closure in this painful chapter. It is, of course, too soon to say if the activists who have hounded Narendra Modi so doggedly this past decade will accept the verdict with grace, or launch a new spiral of accusations. No evidence that Modi incited rioters or pressured police: SIT The news comes close on the heels of the Central Bureau of Investigation’s inability to find any prosecutable (read real) evidence against the former Minister of State for Home, Amit Shah, in the Ishrat Jahan alleged fake encounter case, which has ended in a whimper. Experts say that the probe into the hyperventilated allegations known as snoop-gate, in which Narendra ...

As soon as the Congress-led UPA Government came to power in 2004, it took up a slew of half-baked information about arms deals during the NDA regime and wanted as many cases as possible filed against the Ministers of Atal Bihari Vajpayee’s Cabinet, which had proven to the nation that the time for coalition Governments had arrived in India. It may be recalled that a CAG report on the Kargil coffins deal had drawn much media attention. It stated that the aluminum coffins purchased for martyred Indian soldiers were bought from an American company  Buitron and Baiza  were steeply priced and purchase procedures had been overruled. However while this was true, it was bought at a time when Indian Army had run out of their coffin supplies as more and more soldiers were falling at the world’s highest battlefield. The Government had indeed purchased 500 caskets worth $2500 each — presumed to be thirteen times the original cost. Later, Ambassado...

It is highly unlikely that Narendra Modi’s die-hard opponents will let things rest even though an Ahmedabad metropolitan magistrate decided today (26 December) to treat the Special Investigation Team’s (SIT’s) closure report in the Gulbarg Society massacre as final. The magistrate decided to accept the SIT report, which found no prosecutable evidence against Modi and 61 others in the Gulbarg case, and reject the report of the Supreme Court’s amicus curiae, Raju Ramachandran, who suggested there was enough evidence to charge him. Narendra Modi.  AFP Former Congress MP Ehsan Jafri and several others were burnt alive when a communal mob attacked the society in the wake of the Sabarmati train attack in 2002, and Jafri’s wife Zakia was the prime mover of the petition to dump the closure report and have Modi named as an accused in the case. However, as always, the magistrate’s rejection of Jafri’s petition is surely not going to end the matter, and one can be sure that there will be ...

AHMEDABAD: A metropolitan court headed by Magistrate BJ Ganatra today rejected Zakia Jafri's petition challenging Supreme Court appointed SIT's clean chit to Gujarat chief minister Narendra Modi in the Godhra riots in 2002. Jafri is the wife of former Congress MP Ehsan Jafri, who was among 69 people killed in the Gulbarg Society massacre here during the 2002 riots. SIT had submitted its report on February 8 last year, clearing Modi's name in any conspiracy. She had filed a petition against the SIT report in April seeking its rejection and an order to file chargesheet against Modi and others during the 2002 riots.

New York, Dec 25 (IANS) Did the office of Manhattan's India-born prosecutor Preet Bharara goof up in the paperwork for the arrest of Indian diplomat Devyani Khobragade to spark a major India-US diplomatic row? Khobragade's lawyer Daniel Arschack claims so, suggesting that India's then deputy consul general in New York was only arrested because a federal agent "erroneously and disastrously" misread a visa application form for her housekeeper and babysitter. The US federal agent in the case "simply made an error in reading the form which supported the visa application for the domestic worker", Arschack was quoted as saying by New York Daily News. Arshack, according to the daily, believes the agent mistakenly thought the $4,500 a month salary entered on the form was what Khobragade intended to pay her nanny Sangeeta Richard. It was instead the base salary expected by Khobragade at her job, and included in the form to show the employer made enough ...

‘Sweat’ dripping down an idol at one of Nepal’s Hindu temples has caused a flutter in the Himalayan nation, as it is believed to be an ill-omen. On Thursday, special prayers seeking forgiveness were offered to the idol of Bhim on behalf of President Ram Baran Yadav and former king Gyanendra Shah at the Bhimeshwor Temple in central Nepal’s Dolakha district. Scientists, of course, say the “perspiring” idol had more rational, scientific reasons to do so. “It is likely that the sweating took place due to a sudden variation between the temperature outside and that of the idol inside the temple,” said Deependra Mulmi, a scientist at Nepal Academy of Science and Technology. The idol of Bhim – second of the five Pandava brothers in the Mahabharata – seemingly perspired for a few hours on Sunday, after a gap of six years. It is said the idol first sweated before the great earthquake of 1934, and since then the king had been offering prayers to propitiate the idol. When it sweated ...

Margashirsha Krushnapaksha 5, Kaliyug Varsha 5115 Mangalore (Karnataka)  : Mangalore city police on Saturday December 21 arrested eight persons in connection to the kidnapping and blackmail of two students of a private college at Deralakatte. The gang had forced the boy and the girl to engage in a sexual act and videographed them for blackmail. Addressing a press meet here on Saturday at his office, police commissioner R Hitendra said that the eight were arrested at Katipalla circle in a house. They were produced in court on Saturday evening and remanded in police custody for three days. Though the commissioner did not disclose the names of the accused, informed police sources told daijiworld that the eight are Shamsuddin (23) of Suratkal, Shameer (21) of Deralakatte, Iqbal (23) of Deralakatte, Rauf (22) of Deralakatte, Nawaz (28) of Mudipu, Nisar (18) of Manjanady, Harshad (28) of Deralakatte, and Sharfan Hussain (21) of Deralakatte. Sources said that three of them ...

What, oh what, is this animal called AAP? Before its stunning debut in the Delhi elections, the Aam Aadmi party was a bit of a curiosity, a welcome break from the jaded Congress-BJP politics as usual. But AAP decimated the Congress and it caused the BJP vote share to drop by 2 percentage points. As Arvind Kejriwal gets ready to take power in Delhi with a humbled Congress behind it, pundits across the country are trying desperately to categorize and label his party. It feels a bit like a political version of that famous John Godfrey Saxe poem about six blind men of Indostan trying to describe an elephant. One felt its side and thought it was like a wall.  The second felt its tusk and thought it was like a spear. The third felt its trunk and decided an elephant was like a snake. And so on. AFP Ashutosh Varshney writes in the Indian Express that there are only three comparable instances in post-Independence history. Janata Party in 1977. TDP in Andhra Pradesh and AGP in Assam in the...

Shanti Bhushan    |    MAIL TODAY   |   New Delhi, December 13, 2013 | UPDATED 10:04 IST l Arvind Kejriwal might prove to be a spoiler for the BJP bandwagon in 2014. During the Delhi assembly elections, Kejriwal and party made it quite clear that they were opposed to the BJP more than the Congress. Kejriwal very cleverly targeted BJP using the corruption plank, equating BJP and Congress on one hand and on the other hand meeting Muslim leaders to acquire Muslim support on a secular plank knowing that Muslims, who were notionally against the BJP, are now were fed up of the Congress and seeking a new platform to stand against the BJP. Anna Kejriwal and his party are the product of 'Anna' Hazare's movement, which erupted against the Congress's colossal corruption and patronage to corruption. Later on, however, the movement, which was essentially against the misdeeds of Manmohan Singh's government, took a different turn ...

From Sonia Gandhi to Sushma Swaraj, from Mayawati to Rajnath Singh, top leaders of all six national political parties have hugely undervalued their land and immovable assets in sworn affidavits they are required to file before every election they contest. While the Supreme Court-orered declaration of assets and liabilities was supposed to have helped voters form an opinion on possible misuse of power for personal gains, an analysis by The Indian Express has found that while the affidavits are now dutifully filed by thousands of candidates contesting elections across India, there appears to be a tendency to understate their real assets or the real value of their assets.  The Express report included an analysis of the declarations of presidents of the Congress, BJP, CPI, CPM, BSP and NCP, their leaders in Parliament, 48 chiefs of state units as well as the chief ministers of the five states where Assembly polls are being held. Sonia, Sheila are among those mentioned in the rep...