Congress vice-president Rahul Gandhi on Friday offered prayers at Sikh shrine Takht Damdama Sahib at Talwandi Sabo. The Takht Sri Darbar Sahib Damdama Sahib, one of the five seats of temporal authority of Sikhism, is the place where Guru Gobind Singh, the tenth Sikh Guru, prepared the full version of the Sikh scriptures called Sri Guru Granth Sahib in 1705. Rahul is currently on a two-day visit to the state and on Thursday in Faridkot…

A Karnataka minister is in the centre of a controversy after a ‘sting operation’ by a TV channel on Thursday showed his wife allegedly accepting a bribe of Rs. 7 lakh. The video aired by a channel showed a man keeping currency notes on a table before Minister for Social Welfare Anjaneya’s wife in the minister’s house. The channel claims the money was a bribe for passing a tender worth Rs. 7 crore in a…

60 per cent of the electorate on Thursday exercised their franchise in the final round of five-phased polling in Bihar Assembly elections, helping the state register an overall figure of 56.80 per cent–the highest in assembly election in the state’s history. Deputy Election Commisioner Umesh Sinha told reporters here that the entire poll process in the state in all the 243 seats was conducted in a peaceful manner without any major untoward incident. “While the…

When Prime Minister Narendra Modi accused Nitish Kumar and Lalu Prasad of having sought a review of caste-based reservation to make room for a religion-based quota, Nitish denied it. A video clipping from 10 years ago, when Nitish and Lalu were rivals, shows Lalu calling for a quota for Muslims and Nitish challenging him to take it up. Although Modi has accused them of scheming to take away 5% from the quota of Dalits and…

Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Thursday said linking development to politics has hampered India’s growth as he stressed on overall development to make people self-reliant. Addressing a public gathering after laying foundation stone for three highways in Haryana, the Prime Minister said for far too long, governments have remained in “dilemma” thinking whether infrastructure developments done by them would be converted into votes. “This practice has been going on in our country for last so…

A day after two Bharatiya Janata Party leaders were gunned down in Gujarat’s Bharuch city, a massive manhunt has been launched to arrest the assailants, police said on Tuesday. The police were trying to ascertain the identities of the shooters who gunned down from close quarters BJP’s former Bharuch district president Shirish Bengali and the party’s youth wing district general secretary Pragnesh Mistry late on Monday. Bengali was shot dead by two motorcycle-borne assailants, soon…

India on Friday stressed that Nepal needs to resolve the political unrest over its new constitution as it is impeding the movement of fuel and other supplies from India. Commenting on reports of Nepal striking a deal with China for fuel imports on Thursday, Indian foreign ministry spokesman Vikas Swarup expressed doubts about energy supplies from China aiding a long-term solution to the discontent over the Nepalese constitution. Supplies to Nepal have stopped because “sections…

Assistant Commissioner of Police (Retd) (ACP) Shamsher Pathan on Tuesday downplayed underworld don Chhota Rajan’s claim that some Mumbai cops are linked to Dawood Ibrahim and said that there might be some conspiracy behind such an assertion. “There seems to be a conspiracy in this statement by him. Maybe he doesn’t want to come to the Mumbai Police or he is being saved from the Mumbai Police,” he told ANI. Pathan said the government should…

To what degree are tolerance and freedom of expression in India endangered? Not a day passes without reports in newspapers about protests of concerned Indians who worry about the state of human rights and the secular order in the world’s biggest democracy. At the forefront of the protest movement are members of the country’s vast intellectual elite. Anxiety about a sneaking erosion of civil liberties is the unifying call of this movement, which thus far…

India ranked 99 out of 142 countries on a prosperity index, climbing three places from last year, but falling behind one spot in a sub-category that measures personal freedom. The rankings, produced by a London-based think tank, the Legatum Institute, gauge the prosperity of a nation by combining economic indicators, including gross domestic product, with dozens of other measures of wellbeing, from access to education and health to the living environment for ethnic minorities. The…