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Year-round eat, drink and then for a month lay down fork and spoon. That is the month of Ramadan or Ramzan. Of course, ‘prayer’ and ‘fasting’ and the peace that comes with both are also Ramadan. But Jammu & Kashmir Chief Minister Mehbooba Mufti wants the formula applied to the unrest in the Kashmir Valley. Year-round foreign and Kashmiri terrorists go on a killing spree in J&K and Mehbooba Mufti wants to give them the Ramadan month off to rest their guns and limbs. She wants the Indian army to ‘cease fire’ for the duration of Ramadan, which is right round the calendar.

LUCKNOW: The success of Samajwadi Party national president Akhilesh Yadav’s efforts to consolidate Opposition unity by roping in Rashtriya Lok Dal of Ch. Ajit Singh to the SP-BSP combination has further added to the BJP fears of having to face a combined opposition in the 2019 elections.

BJP’s divisive politics in Assam is ripping open old wounds and creating new fissures – between Hindus and Muslims, between Assamese and Bengalis, between the Brahmaputra and the Barak Valleys.

Just a couple of days ahead of the Karnataka assembly polls the BJP and RSS leadership is keeping fingers crossed. Though publicly the leaders are exuding confidence of a clean sweep, getting around 110 seats, in private they seem to lack conviction.

The demonetization done by the Prime Minister Narendra Modi on November 8, 2016, is still having its crippling impact on the informal sector of the Indian economy while the officials and economists close to the PM, are busy inflating the job generation figures in the last four years of the NDA regime and minimizing the impact of the demonetization on the unorganized sectors.

LUCKNOW: Whatever Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath may claim during the election campaign in Karnataka, the Gram Swaraj Yojna for Dalit outreach in Uttar Pradesh has created a major embarrassment for BJP and the government.

While President Donald Trump has pulled out of Iran nuke deal, a leader of the secular left in Iran says Trump is stepping up plans for an attack on that country which could trigger a devastating regional war with horrific implications for world peace.

The cat (Rahul Gandhi) is among the pigeons (BJP). The day after Rahul said he is ready to become “Prime Minister”, sitting PM Narendra Modi spoke of the “impudence of the immature”, of the “naamdar with the temerity to betray his own alliance”. Is the BJP rattled? Did Rahul unleash a masterstroke on Modi? For, once again, after taking the lead in setting the agenda from the day (May 1) Modi addressed his first election rally in Karnataka, the BJP is not setting the terms of rhetoric.

In the scheme of the Constitution of India, prison is State subject, governed by the Prison Act, 1894 and Prison Manuals of States and Union Territories. It is, therefore, the primary responsibility of the States and Union Territories. Despite several steps taken by the Union of India, prisons across India continue to be mired in overcrowding, shortages of funds, unhygienic conditions, sub-human state, various types of malpractices, leakages of revenue and so on, violating with impunity the human rights of the inmates in flagrant disregard of the Constitutional postulates. A look at the state of prisons indicates that Indian prisons rile in oppressive regime with no semblance of rule of law based system of democratic governance where human rights should be reigning supreme.

The stakes are so high for Prime Minister Narendra Modi to deny the Congress, his arch-enemy, a second successive term in Karnataka – the only Southern state within the saffron grasp, if Kannadigas fall for his tantrums all the way.